I enjoy these little protest photos you put up. It is interesting to learn about various world events that I was too young to recall and would not otherwise have known about.
You just got me to stare way too long trying to figure out what kind of place serves coffee cups sliced in half vertically. Pretty sure that’s folded up paper. Regardless, she is definitely NOT pleased.
… yeah, two college kids acting like college kids at a *checks notes* student protest specifically about a plan that made it easier to fire recent graduates from their first job.
Somewhat different circumstances than “two white girls who weren’t even there for the actual protest kissing after the tear gas started at a protest about Bulmeria”.
It’s almost like not every protest is the same. You would think Asma essentially handholding DoJo through explaining why the kiss was a bad idea at that venue might illuminate some things for certain people, but alas, we are not so lucky.
I mean. Dorothy and Joyce were also college students acting like college students, and you don’t know why the two people in the linked photo are there.
It’s still a good example of people kissing at protests that aren’t specifically for LGBTQIA+ rights, which was a frequent counterpoint (“it’s different to kiss at a protest where the kissing is part of the protest”).
To your points, at least part of the problem is that we KNOW why DoJo were there (i.e, not for the protest because they were protestors) — it might well be reasonable to assume a random person in a protest picture was there for a good reason, and equally while we know little for certain about the kissers in the linked image, they absolutely do NOT stand out as obviously different from either “the mass of protestors” or “the people on whose behalf the protest is”.
(I’d go so far as to say that WE the commentariat is more entitled to be judgy of DoJo than the average DoA character, who may well believe that DoJo are the protesting types.)
Also metatextually I’m less upset about two real people kissing at a protest than I am a writer putting two people at a protest explicitly so they can kiss.
And Im kinda getting annoyed by the sarcastic “let me post protest photos and then dip” posts. It’s annoying.
Given that several of the people they initially starting arguing about this with — and postiposting to spite — are people of color who were critisizingbthe *metatextual context*. It’s. Frustrating.
I mean wasn’t it also to kick off Dorothy’s newer political direction, which makes the protest setting quite apt, with her expressly wanting to join in? (I know we haven’t got to that side of things quite yet as she’s had other developments, but given the whole thing about her disillusionment with Yale and becoming president, it’s unlikely that it’s gonna be forgotten about.)
Also, this is just a random photo from Getty Images, not the headline photo of a news article regarding the 2006 French youth protests – a major complaint in-universe is specifically that the kiss is being used as the face of the protest, which obfuscates the more important details such as the genocide it was organized against, or the disproportionate police response.
In reality, most of the news coverage of the 2006 protests in France focused on three main things: images of solidarity between protesters (i.e. holding hands under the Eiffel Tower), masses of crowds with signs, and the brutality of the police against protesters. Here are a few contemporary news pieces as examples:
(which also ties back to my thought that we as readers who know DoJo’s motivations have significantly more cause to judge them than characters in-universe who do not)
Yup, we know it was entirely Daisy’s fucked-up call, but people in-universe have no way of knowing that Joyce and Dorothy DIDNT do it for attention – and the circumstances make them look very guilty of it to anyone who doesn’t know them!
Swerve kvetch: While I am, on paper, fully here for my girl Sarah getting some action with a guy who really likes her for who she is (as she has FIRMLY supplanted the competition as Best Girl), Tony as a character is just not doing it for me, at least not yet. Ever since him and Sarah hit it off, he hasn’t displayed any character traits that don’t seem like they were handpicked to make him as convenient a boyfriend for Sarah as possible, and that’s just not interesting to me. I like romantic relationships between Characters, not between A Character And Their Love Interest.
Maybe we’ll see more of his deep layers now that he’s been promoted to main cast, but right now he just feels like boyfriend-shaped Play-Dough.
can agree; he’s white bread for Sarah, and she is eating it up. But I do wonder what they’re relationship is gonna be like if she wants to go further, but he’s a “no x until y goal” kinda guy.
Or as I was chatting with other below, the possible drama of the whole dean’s son thing and relationship with this protest plot stuff.
In that way I feel like he’s like a male version of Charlie, who I also feel like is a bit shallow in the characterization department. But maybe that’s because one of my favorite parts of getting together is seeing them get together.
They’ve had some cute moments that make me believe in it a bit more. They bounce off each other well, have shared apathy for others (without it seeming like they’re feeding each other’s worst traits), there’s some differences between them so it’s not syrupy.
I can understand feeling like Tony is “too perfect”, but you could have said that about Dina too.
Yeah, I genuinely haven’t trusted Tony since his first appearance. He’s too judgy about other people, and while Sarah shares that quality she also has a LOT of friends she’s protective of. I think it’s a matter of time before he starts judging (more harshly than he already has) her for keeping these people around or judging these people in a way she has to defend them about.
On the subject of friends, Beef is a bully at minimum and Tony is happy having him around which says enough about his own personal choices that he shouldn’t be judging other people at all. Furthermore, it makes me suspicious that he might be friends with that whole group which, I believe, includes Ryan (someone who wants revenge on this group already).
I never trust people who enter a relationship with someone and immediately start nitpicking their life and laying down clear but unspoken ‘rules’ for behavior they expect. It’s an intimidation tactic, and it feels (to me) like the first line pushed in a long list of lines until he has Sarah isolated and reliant on him in a way that makes her easy to abuse.
Yes, I know a lot of this is based on vibe sand worst-case supposition, but that’s where I’m at with him. He gives me the fucking ick and makes me worried for how he’ll hurt Sarah.
Decided to take a dive on Beef’s previous appearances
So Beef was with Paul and Other Football Bully Guy Who Doesn’t Have His Own Tag (henceforth OFBG). Beef himself didn’t appear to actually do anything besides an apparently affirmative grunt while smiling in response to Paul, and ran after Amazi-Girl hit OFBG and Paul. This could mean he is every bit the bully himself, or could mean he’s just a follower who goes along with his football crew, or somewhere in between. If more toward the latter, it is for the better that he has fallen in more with Tony who seems to have little tolerance for Paul’s shit
Beef was also at the party where Ryan got gashed, as were Paul and OFBG. There is no particular indication that any of them were there with or interacted with Ryan at that time. Paul is seen getting into a fight and then taken out by Amazi-Girl again in the background while Joyce is meeting Ryan (a detail I don’t think I noticed at the time, see https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/thessalonians/ and the two following strips). Beef is only seen with Roz, so whether he came with Paul and OFBG, or was just generally there is unclear (the host of the party, Ron, appeared to be a football player as well).
Notably, Beef is *not* there when Paul and two other guys get in a fight with Sal and Amazi-Girl in defense of Ryan, nor is he with Paul and OFBG among the kidnapper lackeys. He is in the crowd at the DeSantos rally where Amazi-Girl spots Ryan again, but there’s no indication that he interacts with Ryan and he isn’t wearing a volunteer shirt.
So if we want to give benefit of the doubt, we could say Beef went along with Paul and OFBG early in the schoolyear when they were just guys from the football team, because that’s his social group, but cut away from them as they started getting into the more extreme incel shit. In a real generous interpretation, perhaps Tony even saw that Beef was getting pulled along down a bad path and helped him course-correct.
Or he could be a piece of shit, also totally possible.
I agree that his past associations don’t confirm the assumed negative about him, and I get the same feeling about “pulled down a bad path”.
One thing that’s not clear about Beef is how literal the comic is about his only communicating by grunting. Could just be a trope.
If we take it literally, Beef doesn’t talk around new people (I haven’t seen him conversing alone with non-main-characters). Less literally, it could still be representative of very minimal socializing. Either could indicate some lack of social ability, whether it be social anxiety, talking and smalltalk not coming naturally to him, or even being non-verbal, and those often relate to difficulty learning to navigate various social environments.
So I read one possibility as: Beef is someone who significantly lacks social or interpersonal skills and as a result fell in with a crowd of bullies (who may even have used his social weakness to bully him into running with them). Getting Paul off the team created an opportunity for Tony to step in and try to take him under his wing and keep him out of any more unhealthy situations.
As fair as Tony’s motivations, it’s of course not clear they are perfect. Maybe Tony was put up to it by Dean Pops, because they need Beef on the team. Maybe it’s another way Tony is displaying sensitivity to potential scrutiny (see panel 2 today) and/or worrying about “right living”. Maybe his ideas for how to help Beef include guiding him into some unhealthy pre-conceived notions of “how a person should be”, which Tony might have gotten a lot of himself in his childhood. Or worse – so I’m not trying to say Tony is automatically a saint for it, just that that’s what he might be doing here.
…
On another note I thought panel 2 today was a nice glimpse at Tony’s motivations in life, even though it doesn’t clear up exactly what they are. He may be driven by scrutiny or values or arbitrary rules or worry about potentially screwing up a good thing with a simple mistake or whatever, but he clearly cares or is anxious about doing things the “right” way. I’m curious if that will become a sticking point. Perhaps this ends up getting in the way of his connecting to Sarah or makes her suspicious of him.
So the group he’s friends with does still include Ryan via Paul.
I’m just not as keen to give any of them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t trust Tony (or Beef) and until the story gives me a reason to, I’m going to keep thinking they’re shitty people underneath.
I also just generally don’t like Tony even apart from his friends. He judges a LOT and in ways that sound like the subtle snipes of a controlling partner. I just think he’s not a good guy.
I’m willing to give Tony the benefit of the doubt just given what I know about him from the Walkyverse. He’s responsible to a fault and extremely fixated on duty and propriety, but in the end he’s a good guy. He had anger issues, but everyone in the Walkyverse had anger issues.
I’ve never read Walkyverse, and people here have been a bit different from the way they were seemingly portrayed in Walkyverse. I don’t trust him and I’m just not going to until he does something other than pass weird and unasked for judgements on everyone around him for not being Grown Up Enough. While being buddies with a guy who hangs around a seriously bad crowd.
I’m fine if other people give him the benefit of the doubt, but I definitely will not be doing that.
I don’t mind too much Sarah just getting a little bit of wish fulfillment, as a treat. She’s had a fairly miserable go of it, much self inflicted, but still it’s kinda nice for her to just get to enjoy herself.
It’s also fun for her to be in a new relationship at the same time as Joyce and Dorothy.
But yeah, I agree. Tony is a little flat right now. I’m intrigued about whether this new development will give him a chance to expand!
https://strawpoll.com/eNg6vJXN8gA
It’s been about 24 hours since I posted this and so far the results seem to show that the largest sticking points for people are….
3rd Place.
It’s taking focus from story elements I’m more interested in.
2nd Place.
I really liked Joe/Joyce and am saddened to see them broken up.
1st Place.
I’ve found the two characters uncharacteristically unlikable during this storyline.
Personally I’m a strong Joe/Joyce shipper so the 2nd place answer is probably my most common gripe, but this seems to be the general consensus. As always let me know if you don’t feel represented by the poll, I can always add in an option for ya.
I actually do like Doyce and support women’s wrongs in general but I answered too. Mostly because there’s some stuff around how Dorothy has handled this relationship that I’m hoping gets addressed.
I mean, I do agree with all three of those (and several others I voted for). In general, this storyline needs to end with one of the girls waking up in bed and Bobby Ewing’s in the shower (ngl, I hate that I know about the Dallas season 9 “it was all a dream” twist but here we are).
Yeah, Joyce continues in this strip the habit of gleefully proclaiming any and all sexual escapades to whoever will listen. With a veneer of “I’m being BAD and I’m having FUN with it”. Which can be cute in a vacuum but she’s just been doing it at literally every opportunity.
I want to believe that it’s building to something — Joyce’s whole speech about going to hell, in for a penny (RIP) in for a pound, etc — but to be honest, even if it’s building to a conflict for Joyce, it’s still obnoxious as hell.
I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to call what Joyce is doing in this strip “proclaiming sexual escapades.” All she’s really saying is “Dorothy and I are going to be spending most nights together and we kissed.” That’s pretty innocent, especially in comparison to what she laid on poor Lucy a few strips ago.
Man, Joyce and Dorothy are so much less charming (not that they were very enjoyable before) after doing a reread and seeing Dorothy crashout on Joe because she didn’t think he deserved Joyce over her. The moment Joyce dumped Joe he became a minor character and it’s getting boring when there’s a lot more that could be done here than the two of them being sickeningly sweet together.
Maybe this is going somewhere, but its not like yesterdays strip had an immediate payoff and I’m getting tired of waiting.
Yeah, Dorothy comes across horribly in that confrontation with Joe. Constantly judgmental, calling *him* a cheater when no, actually, that’s something he has never done and never will do (due to family stuff).
At the time I thought it was all part of Dorothy having a major crisis and maybe doing a big messy mistake. And that’s what happened, but the comic just suddenly went “whoops all this mess was actually (mostly) a good thing. Doyce are perfect and they’re married now.”
And then the consequences and the fallout, instead of being the focus, are instead an afterthought. It all just feels so weird and out of place.
Right? I LOVED Joe’s clap back in that comic. “Actually, I’m in my first real relationship and I’ve never cheated, so that actually makes me BETTER than you.”
Because Joe would never have said that if Dorothy hadn’t drawn first blood with the “I’m as bad as you” line. She had it coming and I loved to see it.
He might have read the “I’m as bad as you” line that way, but I think Dorothy meant it as “My cheating is as bad as the way old Joe treated women”, not that it was the same thing.
Good point. Her reflexive lying and trying to hide the evidence is making me dislike her even more than her behaviour towards Joe and Walky already had.
It’s generally good opsec to deny being at a protest that was made illegal and dismantled with police force to the loin-spawn of campus administration.
I’d give that approach more credit if either of these dorks had shown any interest in the protest qua protest.
It might make things actually interesting if Dorothy is 100% not ready to be open/out of the closet and Joyce 100% is ready to scream the L-word (obviously, “lesbians”) from the rooftops Becky-style.
No-prize answer would be that their talk with Asma has Dorothy taking the protest itself more seriously, and giving the correct answer when asked if one was at it -“no,” however overwhelming the evidence otherwise is.
Oof, that hadn’t even occurred to me. That would really suck. (Though his viewpoint on that either way would be interesting, since it’s kind of the same situation Carla’s in.)
I suppose it would be interesting to see this straight-lace football kid have to wrestle with the whole moral dilemma of his dad aiding a genocide. Would give him and Carla something to bond over at least lol
Eh, I don’t see the Dean as giving Tony a huge amount of automatic sway over what the college does. More likely Tony thinks it’s bad but can’t change his dad’s mind — or, he hasn’t thought about it at all because he’s focused on his other serious studies, serious footballs, serious Sarah, etc. I’d certainly prefer those options, myself.
Rather famously infamously, William Randolph Hearst got the Spanish-American War going by using his papers to blame Spain for the USS Maine exploding in Havana’s harbour.
I think it’d be interesting if the Dean wants to make an example of the pair for painting the university as Pro-Genocide when really anyone who is at the protest is Anti-North Bulmerian bigots.
I’d make a joke about deporting both of the women and stripping them of their US citizenship but sadly there’s nothing exaggerated about this situation. They probably would deport Sal or Asma if they could (and yes, Sal wasn’t involved in the slightest).
Or, depending, that he has dirt (unseemly behaviour on campus!!!) on the two that maybe got national attention through the paper to the anti-genocide protest.
Forcing Dorothy to leave, but she goes to Yale. Joyce wants to join her, but on a fateful highway…
The state/university cracked down on the protest that there is now hard evidence that they were present at post the time they had to leave without negative impact.
That’s Anthony “Tony” McHenry, Jr., son of Dean Anthony “Big Boss” McHenry, Sr. He’s the sportsball quarterback. He’s into Sarah. He’s not going to buy Billie booze. He has a bunch of very dubious friend/teammates. He’s only been in 22 strips, so that’s pretty much it.
“Unlike you all, I actually LIKE my parents” no wait that was Carla
(for seriously tho, I really think a lot is going to come down to whether or not Tony actually gets along with his parents, and we do have some evidence that Tony )
Apparently he thinks people are garbage, but the question is, does he think his parents are garbage? Does he think protesters are garbage? Who is more garbage than whom?
Also, he’s concerned with being “unseemly”. A concern with social affairs, behavior, and status, both in others (he doesn’t tolerate “buffoonery”) and himself (not wanting to be seen as spending ‘too much’ time with Sarah).
Oh that’s an easy riddle. Ask one of them if they like to movie The Mummy starring Brenden Frasier and Rachel Weisz. If the one you ask says Yes, that one is telling the truth and the other one is lying, if they say “No” then that one is lying and the other one always tells the truth.
That sort of test works as long as you’re allowed more than one question, but the usual setup is that you can only ask one question, so you don’t need to figure out which one is lying, so much as another piece of information (like which way to go in a labyrinth).
Either way, if you ask about who stars in The Mummy you’re in trouble unless that’s what you needed answered.
This is why the answer in The Labyrinth was “which door would the OTHER guy tell me to open”, and then whatever they say you do the opposite.
The logic is that if A is the liar and you ask A what B would say, A will lie about B’s truthful response, and if you ask B, B will honestly report A’s lying response. So you do the opposite of whatever they say.
(Admittedly, this relies on a setup where it’s a binary question with only two possible answers, bc otherwise you’re not guaranteed that the lying answer will be useful. Also requires that The Liar can’t, for example, lie in more complicated ways, such as by claiming B would simply say nothing….)
To be fair if the riddle is that they must answer the question then you could still parse that A is lying since based on the rules of the riddle, B is inclined to answer. B would not say nothing if asked because they would be required to answer the question. Meaning A is the correct door.
But in the classic version the two guards aren’t directly tied to the doors. The liar doesn’t stand in front of the bad door and the truth teller in front of the correct one.
The liar being able to say “B wouldn’t answer” tells you who the liar is, but not which door to use. It’s an interesting way to break the puzzle that I don’t think I’ve heard before.
Yeah, it occurred to me when we were reading a variant on it in Japanese.
In the variant, there’s an island where half the people always lie and half the people always tell the truth, and you come across a group of three people. You ask which one of them is the liar, and Person 1 answers but you can’t hear him. You then ask Person 2 what Person 1 said, and Person 2 says that Person 1 said that there was only one truth-teller among them. Person 3 then tells you not to listen to Person 1. How many liars are they in the group and who are they?
(The answer is that there’s one liar and it’s Person 1. You know this because if Person 1 were honestly repeating what Person 2 said, then that would necessitate two truth-tellers in the group… which makes the thing Person 2 “repeats” still a lie.)
My classmate tried to suggest that there might be other solutions and I had to point out that the liars aren’t also schemers. The liar isn’t actively trying to trick you, he’s just compelled to lie when asked a question, the same way the other two are compelled to tell the truth.
If the liars WERE also schemers, then Person 2 might have picked a more convincing lie, and if the liar in the riddle were allowed to be more creative instead of being compelled to always say basically the direct opposite of the truth, it would be a lot more challenging to solve.
Unfortunately I do not have any ability to enforce the containment thread, but I do endorse using it instead of commenting stuff like this under people expressing simple appreciation of DoJo
Taffy isn’t talking about Tony though. He’s talking about this guy who never appeared. For [some number of total strips I’m too lazy to calculate] strips he’s never appeared.
@Taffy: The clean type are definitely hoping that if they keep making it super clear to everyone that they’re clean and not dirty (unlike those other, bad they/thems), they’ll evade the death wishes! Fools.
Sorry, I’m getting my bitterness at the folks who’re trying to throw us all under the bus get in the way of perfectly good wordplay.
That might be the eventual goal, tbh.
You’ve also considered using second person pronouns for yourself, but you’re worried it might cause some really avoidable confusing during conversations.
No one has more hard-line rules about correct behaviour in relationships then people in college. I’d think that was a weird red flag if it wasn’t kind of just part of being 17 (18?19??)
I suspect, also, that Tony ‘He’s The Son Of The Dean’ ‘Football Star’ McHenry might be very exceptionally aware of what kinds of things people (jerks and assorted ill-wishers) could use to tear him apart and makes an effort to deny them the opportunity.
Football players are some of the most infamously badly-behaved people on the planet, so he actually has a ton to gain from maintaining a sterling and serious reputation.
In my own college experience, there were two kinds of college football players I knew — the kind who are exactly what you’d expect from the news about college football player behavior, and the kind like Tony is acting who were dead-set on NOT being any of those things and living a life where they couldn’t even be reasonably suspected of any kind of malfeasance.
You only have one chance to nail a good first impression, which means you should definitely fumble telling an easily verifiable lie for seemingly no reason (from Tony’s POV)
“I think it is unseemly to spend every night with one’s new girlfriend” is kind of an odd thing to say. The sentiment itself is a bit unusual, but valid; perhaps more understandable since he may have been raised to believe his every action reflects on the university and his family. But the archaic wording stands out.
Tony’s been such a perfect match for Sarah so far that even a potential red flag really stands out, I suppose.
People have weird rules.
No penetration on the first date, but everything else is fine.
Don’t date who you f*ck and don’t f*ck who you date (and don’t tell the people you date that you have people you f*ck).
Wants head, but won’t be serious with anyone who gives head.
Each of those rules belongs to someone I’ve met in my life (I was involved with the first two), and none of those rules made sense to me.
And I probably have rules about sex and/or relationships that others find to be nonsense.
Possibly it’s just an extremely weird way to phrase “I don’t think you should get super clingy with someone you’ve just started a relationship with right away. That seems a little dependent and could lead to bad behaviour later on.”
It really makes him sound like he’s got a big hardbound book of Victorian relationship etiquette in his room though.
The use of “unseemly” make him sound like one of those college dude who’s really in to being a “gentleman”. Wears a waistcoat al the time, fob watch, thinks using old fashioned language is the same as having class.
Which is odd given he’s never out of his..sports…jacket? (I don’t know, university sports is not a “thing” in Australia)
I took it as a dryily humorous tone to the effect that couples should come up for air occasionally. Tony hasn’t seemed concerned about immediately spending the night with Sarah, he probably just needs to go home and get things (other than Sarah) done occasionally.
There’s a (small) subset of college football players, quarterbacks and other on-field-leader positions in particular, who really go out of their way to never have anything that might even slightly be a scandal attach to them because a reputation for good decisionmaking is a slight edge when competing for limited pro team slots.
She’s acting exactly how she did with Ethan (pre gay reveal) and Joe, it’s just that this was a pair of relationships that she got in the middle of and destroyed, and she’s acting exactly the same, minus some guilt and confusion. The fact that she’s like “I’m gay! I need to tell everyone!” is massively overstepping on other issues she’s living entirely in the dark of.
Such as, say, Becky. Who is making me physically wince every time I look at the new comic every day and she’s not in it.
OK here’s an good fix, Sarah and temporarily switch Dorm rooms with Dorothy…temporarily, just until things blow over and people are back on speaking terms.
Nah, switch Sarah and Amber. And also Dorothy’s bed and the sex dinosaur. Sarah and Dina get along well, Amber could certainly not possibly have any objections to rooming with the couple that she went to such lengths to get together, and Dina gets something to sleep on, while Becky gets to sit alone in her room with the reminder of what she threw away over Joyce being gay for someone else.
I can see Sarah wanting to help spare Becky further interactions with Dorothy, though.
I keep seeing comments that are treating this situation as one where Dorothy wants to avoid Becky, but Becky doesn’t want to avoid Dororthy, which therefore makes Dorothy’s conflict-avoidance 100% selfish. I think the truth is that both of them want space right now, so Dorothy’s conflict-avoidance is, fortunately for her, only 50% selfish.
I could see that in the abstract, but I don’t think Sarah’s close enough to Becky to want to jeopardize her own academics for it, and any kind of room swap would definitely be disruptive in that vein.
As an aside, I just remembered that Dina is one of the few people that Sarah genuinely seems to like. Joe and Dina reached some level of cute friendship. And now Sarah seems to like Joe.
I’d be down for seeing more of them together, maybe adding in Danny and Sal to boot.
If we ever progress beyond this day, I’m reaaally curious how the next Biology class is going to look like, considering they’re not allowed to switch lab partners (or at least that’s what I’m remembering?)
I feel like last time we saw him everybody was mooning over Tony being a perfect match for Sarah because of how “serious” he is. But while they’re both “no distractions” serious, Tony is also “uptight insufferable priss” serious in a way that I don’t think Sarah is at all. Like I think he’d be as scandalized as Joyce once was to find out that Sarah has a vibrator.
I don’t think that’s an entirely fair assessment quite yet. We don’t really know much about Tony yet. He’s only really made on thing clear and it’s that he doesn’t play games except for American football. I don’t think this “spending too much time with a new girlfriend is unseemly” rule is so much about being a prude as much as he’s probably just trying to show Sarah he’s serious and doesn’t just want her for sex. I’m just assuming myself but he hasn’t really shown enough of himself for us to know either.
Feels more like he’d be disapproving to find out she left it somewhere Joyce could find if anything, but from memory that was because of Joyce going through Sarah’s stuff so he’d probably disapprove of Joyce’s actions.
The truth is Tony’s opinion on vibrators has nothing to do with whether you have one, but if the one you do use is buffoonish in nature. I don’t remember the strip with vibe in it, any pleasure toy experts have an opinion on how ridiculous Sarah’s was? This could make or break her relationship!
Eh maybe. Hes hasn’t been on screen enough to have that much information. So alot of sentiment is filled in based on assumptions about an archetype that may or may not apply
I wonder if Dorothy is contemplating the fact that blowing up her life to have freedom is what’s annoying her about Joyce’s behavior. Because it’s one thing to SAY you want to ditch Yale and get arrested to never be a politician but it’s another to do it–and maybe she sees too many similarities in Joyce’s “I am now defiled forever, let the sexy times begin!”
I think it may be more that Dorothy is, with her post-nut clarity, rapidly recognizing all the signs that she’d been ignoring, that Joyce seems to think that being an defiled atheist means that she should just completely ignore any prospect of feeling any guilt for anything, anymore.
Partly because, she really needs to understand that guilt is still normal from a secular perspective, and Dorothy would actually be the best person to have that conversation with her, because they both have the exact same complex about being morally pure and perfect.
Partly because, Dorothy knows Joyce well enough to know that there’s no way that a woman this obsessed with constant guilt about everything, suddenly had all that guilt suddenly disappear; so, Dorothy can only conclude, that Joyce must actually be coping with some guilt about something, because it’s the only explanation for Joyce trying to constantly force and externalize that she is completely unwilling to feel any guilt about her current choices.
I do not experience it myself, but my understanding is that many people get so overwhelmed with feelings of sexual desire that it impairs their rational judgement. “Post-nut clarity” is the state of having rational thought return in the aftermath of the sexual desire being released. It is perhaps similar to how being hungry makes some people be impatient and irritable, but their mood improves as soon as they have eaten, thus attaining “post-food clarity”. I experience neither phenomenon, the closest being that too much indulgence in food or sex makes me feel disgust towards the prospect of consuming more. Not out of shame, just sensory overload.
More or less, you are just REALLY excited about sex and it affects your thinking. Once you get a release you might suddenly get hit with “Did I really fap to that?” or similar things.
What amuses me is that, before this became a thing, the long-running joke/stereotype was that the most common change of mental state or level of consciousness – at least for the more male-coded partner – was a nearly irresistible desire to roll over and go to sleep.
“ah… that’s better… my thoughts… so much clearer now… ZZZ“
I am legitimately shocked that we seem to actually be addressing that the school was the one that called the cops on the protestors. I did not expect that to come up or even be acknowledged.
They changed the law to make the protestors criminals so the university is absolutely a bunch of scumbags. I kind of hope that Puddinghead shows up and tells them that due to the fact they’re both survivors of a kidnapping and attempted school shooting, they get a pass.
But maybe they might want to throw Amazi-Girl under the bus in exchange for not being expelled in the future. They have a credible witness after all that it’s the brown girl with the funny accent.
(I literally believe that Jennifer will tell the University her theory and they will believe it because Amazi-Girl has now attacked cops and they want to arrest her)
She’s got the “Future Mrs. Keener” blinders on right now. In Joyce’s mind, Joe doesn’t exist anymore. She lost her virginity to Dorothy, and by her weird reasoning she’s no doubt set up for that MRS degree she wanted at the start of the comic. All she needs to do now is speedrun everything so she can be that beautiful Springtime Bride. Who needs minor inconvenient details that she’s TECHNICALLY cheating on Dorothy by not telling Joe that the relationship is over. Springtime Bride, baby!
If that’s all it is and it’s just the technicality, then it’s not a big deal. It’s only if she’s actually interested in Joe’s suggestion that I think she should have talked to Dorothy about it earlier.
She didn’t though. She said “You can see that I cheated on you and therefore need to break up with you.” and he asked “Why?” and they talked about the idea of being poly for a bit, then Joyce realized Becky is going to see this, promised Joe they’d talk about this, and left. Then like three strips later, she called Joe her boyfriend and had “uh yeah about that” dissonance with Dorothy when the latter corrected to her with “ex-boyfriend.”
but when Dorothy corrected Joyce infront of Daisy about Joe being an ex boyfriend Joyce’s hesitation very much made it clear to her mind she was hiding something when she responded yeesss.
Maybe they should move that big stack of newspapers away from that spot right next to the door. That’s assuming Joyce and Dorothy care about people knowing they kissed at the genocide protest, which I’m not sure if they still do at this point.
Joyce wants to lay it on real thick that she’s gay now and is having sex with the woman she’s going to marry by springtime and SHE DESERVES A MEDAL FOR IT, DAMMIT!
Dorothy’s denial of being one of the participants in the front page kiss that Joyce proudly displayed (once her dad was cool with it) is a tell that she miiiight not be as gung ho into this speedrun romance as Joyce is… even though Dotty was the one who set the ball in motion because she was obsessing over losing Joyce to Joe the Unworthy Pervert.
Or maybe she’s trying to adhere to the common sense of “Don’t tell the authorities or people who are connected to the authorities that you were at the protest”
Hey Joyce, sweetheart, I am petting your head and feeding you sweet treats and keeping you wrapped in a bundle of the finest most soft blankets as I tell you this you wonderfully stupid little creature.
First rule of protesting
if you were there. you weren’t there.
if people saw you there. you weren’t there.
and even if people took photos of you. you weren’t there.
especially when talking to the son of the dean, given that the school made the protest an illegal gathering.
A very odd thought, and almost trolling to bring up, but given the relationship red flags between Joyce and Dorothy, does Dorothy eventually become a unicorn?
You’d have to explain more for this to make sense to me. Where’s the through line between “Joyce and Dorothy’s relationship has red flags” and “Dorothy decides to become a person interested in being a third in already established relationships”?
Between this strip and the preview of the bonus strip, I think the degree to which Dorothy just seems embarrassed by Joyce and/or has trouble admitting their relationship is going to be a problem.
Like don’t get me wrong, Joyce is in a pretty insufferable phase right now. Downright obnoxious. But that just makes it obvious they’re not on the same page yet.
Ever since the kiss happened, the consistent pattern is that Dorothy wants to exercise restraint and take things relatively slow, while Joyce is bound and determined to barrel on through. I don’t know to what extent it’s caused by embarrassment on Dorothy’s part, that’s not really my read – I see it more as Dorothy being more conscious of the fact that they’ve really thrown a hand grenade into their social circle and the implications that brings. You’re right, though – they’re not on the same page, and not just about the Joe thing. It’s a ticking time bomb on their relationship, and eventually it’s going to blow.
I want this more intimate relationship to force these two to deal with each other’s worst qualities. Their previous partners always put them on a pedestal (especially Dorothy) to me that was always a bit unhealthy. Now instead they have to cope with their girlfriend’s filth. Maybe nothing changes? Maybe it’s not as cute when you’re committed to that person now?
Yeah, Sarah’s described him as her “football star boyfriend” to Joe when she went to work out! There might’ve been another time too but that’s the one I remember.
My nesting partner and I have been together more than 20 years, although we’re not married. We spend most nights together. Gee Tony, how unseemly of us, huh?
I maintain that a fair bit of the controversy is the combination of “this is both a cheating story and a coming-out story, both of which are going to have people invested in a way that makes them want to downplay the other into insignificance” and “the amount of free-floating homophobia/misogyny in the comment spaces about this comic cause a LOT of bleed where people expressing disapproval of a wlw relationship in any context are sometimes assumed to be just another bigot”. and that’s even before you get into the competing-ship wars.
Tony wouldn’t have to be told. He’s conservative not in the political sense but in the sense that he is well aware that as a college football star and son of the dean everything he does is scrutinized and reflects on his career prospects and the health of his father’s career, so he considers every decision he makes carefully and doesn’t do things, including dating, frivolously. He would not get involved in a controversial political movement that had media eyes on it.
I’ve somehow been reading this comic since it debuted and have really been enjoying this arc in all its messiness. I know people feel all kinds of ways
about the characters and the story, but watching Joyce and Dorothy finally get together while being a bit of a disaster is perfect.
I feel for all these kids and also I enjoy watching them make all the dumb mistakes kids make.
Anyway, I have never before been moved to comment, but it seemed like a moment to express my appreciation for this comic, some 15 years in.
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Joyce and Dorothy and their kiss!??
Oh my!!!
Oh and would you look at that, more Protest – Riot Kisses – Vol. 08737291
https://www.gettyimages.at/detail/nachrichtenfoto/two-people-kiss-as-students-demonstrate-through-the-nachrichtenfoto/57107063
Viva la Revolution! 🫣
I enjoy these little protest photos you put up. It is interesting to learn about various world events that I was too young to recall and would not otherwise have known about.
Oh, man. I love the lady just to the left of the couple giving them the “Ugh, in front of my coffee?” stank eye.
You just got me to stare way too long trying to figure out what kind of place serves coffee cups sliced in half vertically. Pretty sure that’s folded up paper. Regardless, she is definitely NOT pleased.
Oh man. I hope they were appropriately lectured and shamed for ruining the protest with their self-centeredness. /s
yall are so unserious. the world is not a comic strip nor your photoshoot. solidarity to the woman on the left in that photo lmao.
+1
… yeah, two college kids acting like college kids at a *checks notes* student protest specifically about a plan that made it easier to fire recent graduates from their first job.
Somewhat different circumstances than “two white girls who weren’t even there for the actual protest kissing after the tear gas started at a protest about Bulmeria”.
In other words: Oh no, context matters!
It’s almost like not every protest is the same. You would think Asma essentially handholding DoJo through explaining why the kiss was a bad idea at that venue might illuminate some things for certain people, but alas, we are not so lucky.
I mean. Dorothy and Joyce were also college students acting like college students, and you don’t know why the two people in the linked photo are there.
It’s still a good example of people kissing at protests that aren’t specifically for LGBTQIA+ rights, which was a frequent counterpoint (“it’s different to kiss at a protest where the kissing is part of the protest”).
Like I think there are at least two different conversations happening.
Is kissing at protests where that’s not necessarily appropriate still a thing that happens? Yes. Emotions run high.
Does the fact that it happens mean it’s above criticism, especially in terms of how Willis framed the specific kiss? No.
As usual, you’re the voice of reason.
To your points, at least part of the problem is that we KNOW why DoJo were there (i.e, not for the protest because they were protestors) — it might well be reasonable to assume a random person in a protest picture was there for a good reason, and equally while we know little for certain about the kissers in the linked image, they absolutely do NOT stand out as obviously different from either “the mass of protestors” or “the people on whose behalf the protest is”.
(I’d go so far as to say that WE the commentariat is more entitled to be judgy of DoJo than the average DoA character, who may well believe that DoJo are the protesting types.)
Also metatextually I’m less upset about two real people kissing at a protest than I am a writer putting two people at a protest explicitly so they can kiss.
And Im kinda getting annoyed by the sarcastic “let me post protest photos and then dip” posts. It’s annoying.
It’s a really obnoxious bit.
Given that several of the people they initially starting arguing about this with — and postiposting to spite — are people of color who were critisizingbthe *metatextual context*. It’s. Frustrating.
I mean wasn’t it also to kick off Dorothy’s newer political direction, which makes the protest setting quite apt, with her expressly wanting to join in? (I know we haven’t got to that side of things quite yet as she’s had other developments, but given the whole thing about her disillusionment with Yale and becoming president, it’s unlikely that it’s gonna be forgotten about.)
Also, this is just a random photo from Getty Images, not the headline photo of a news article regarding the 2006 French youth protests – a major complaint in-universe is specifically that the kiss is being used as the face of the protest, which obfuscates the more important details such as the genocide it was organized against, or the disproportionate police response.
In reality, most of the news coverage of the 2006 protests in France focused on three main things: images of solidarity between protesters (i.e. holding hands under the Eiffel Tower), masses of crowds with signs, and the brutality of the police against protesters. Here are a few contemporary news pieces as examples:
https://www.rferl.org/a/1067177.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna11866627
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/28/france
In kind of a counterpoint, THAT particular thing we should be judging DAISY for (and we, for the most part, do) — that wasn’t really DoJo’s choice.
(which also ties back to my thought that we as readers who know DoJo’s motivations have significantly more cause to judge them than characters in-universe who do not)
Yup, we know it was entirely Daisy’s fucked-up call, but people in-universe have no way of knowing that Joyce and Dorothy DIDNT do it for attention – and the circumstances make them look very guilty of it to anyone who doesn’t know them!
The point being, though, that the photo in OP and the photo in-universe are not comparable because of the difference in coverage.
Uh oh. The buffoonery is kicking in.
the chicanery, so unseemly.
The buffoon watch is just over to the left, it says there’s ten months of buffoonery
Nonsense. Tony has no tolerance for buffoonery.
Run, Tony. Run away!!!
*quickly hides the inflated sheep’s bladders*
If they’re not careful, it might snowball into a full-blown shenanigan!
girlfailure duo
Very convincing, you two!
Listen, Tony is just trying to find out of they’re gay communist Bulmerian terrorists out to institute theocracy (of the wrong kind)!
Sarah’s expression in panel 2 is so dang adorable. I’m glad she got a guy whose willing to be patient and honest with her 😭
That’s the opposite of what I got out of that. I think she was hoping for some unseemly behavior.
That’s my impression too.
Same. Sarah would like some unseemly. Just a little bit.
Sarah can have little a unseemliness, as a treat.
Absolutely. I think Sarah was in the mood for some unseemly behaviour.
And Sarah has no intention of staying with Joe, in case she’s asked. Why do you mention it?
Well, now you’ve jinxed it.
Hater containment thread, you know the drill, kvetch here ⬇️
You said it, Sarah
sounding like she was hoping for some unseemly behavior. lol
I feel Tony might be seeing the cracks in Jorothy’s floundering relationship already
I believe Joyce and Dorothy are buffoons.
Swerve kvetch: While I am, on paper, fully here for my girl Sarah getting some action with a guy who really likes her for who she is (as she has FIRMLY supplanted the competition as Best Girl), Tony as a character is just not doing it for me, at least not yet. Ever since him and Sarah hit it off, he hasn’t displayed any character traits that don’t seem like they were handpicked to make him as convenient a boyfriend for Sarah as possible, and that’s just not interesting to me. I like romantic relationships between Characters, not between A Character And Their Love Interest.
Maybe we’ll see more of his deep layers now that he’s been promoted to main cast, but right now he just feels like boyfriend-shaped Play-Dough.
He’s very serious and…uh…athletic and…hang on, that’s Qui-gon Jin
Hear me out — sarah and joe
Sarah/joe/dina polycule
I’m a fucking unappreciated-in-my-time genius
can agree; he’s white bread for Sarah, and she is eating it up. But I do wonder what they’re relationship is gonna be like if she wants to go further, but he’s a “no x until y goal” kinda guy.
Or as I was chatting with other below, the possible drama of the whole dean’s son thing and relationship with this protest plot stuff.
In that way I feel like he’s like a male version of Charlie, who I also feel like is a bit shallow in the characterization department. But maybe that’s because one of my favorite parts of getting together is seeing them get together.
They’ve had some cute moments that make me believe in it a bit more. They bounce off each other well, have shared apathy for others (without it seeming like they’re feeding each other’s worst traits), there’s some differences between them so it’s not syrupy.
I can understand feeling like Tony is “too perfect”, but you could have said that about Dina too.
Nonsense. Dina is just the right amount of perfect.
To be fair it’s not like I’ve had an extended run.
What are you running for?
Touchdown I’d guess
Yeah, I genuinely haven’t trusted Tony since his first appearance. He’s too judgy about other people, and while Sarah shares that quality she also has a LOT of friends she’s protective of. I think it’s a matter of time before he starts judging (more harshly than he already has) her for keeping these people around or judging these people in a way she has to defend them about.
On the subject of friends, Beef is a bully at minimum and Tony is happy having him around which says enough about his own personal choices that he shouldn’t be judging other people at all. Furthermore, it makes me suspicious that he might be friends with that whole group which, I believe, includes Ryan (someone who wants revenge on this group already).
I never trust people who enter a relationship with someone and immediately start nitpicking their life and laying down clear but unspoken ‘rules’ for behavior they expect. It’s an intimidation tactic, and it feels (to me) like the first line pushed in a long list of lines until he has Sarah isolated and reliant on him in a way that makes her easy to abuse.
Yes, I know a lot of this is based on vibe sand worst-case supposition, but that’s where I’m at with him. He gives me the fucking ick and makes me worried for how he’ll hurt Sarah.
Decided to take a dive on Beef’s previous appearances
So Beef was with Paul and Other Football Bully Guy Who Doesn’t Have His Own Tag (henceforth OFBG). Beef himself didn’t appear to actually do anything besides an apparently affirmative grunt while smiling in response to Paul, and ran after Amazi-Girl hit OFBG and Paul. This could mean he is every bit the bully himself, or could mean he’s just a follower who goes along with his football crew, or somewhere in between. If more toward the latter, it is for the better that he has fallen in more with Tony who seems to have little tolerance for Paul’s shit
Beef was also at the party where Ryan got gashed, as were Paul and OFBG. There is no particular indication that any of them were there with or interacted with Ryan at that time. Paul is seen getting into a fight and then taken out by Amazi-Girl again in the background while Joyce is meeting Ryan (a detail I don’t think I noticed at the time, see https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/thessalonians/ and the two following strips). Beef is only seen with Roz, so whether he came with Paul and OFBG, or was just generally there is unclear (the host of the party, Ron, appeared to be a football player as well).
Notably, Beef is *not* there when Paul and two other guys get in a fight with Sal and Amazi-Girl in defense of Ryan, nor is he with Paul and OFBG among the kidnapper lackeys. He is in the crowd at the DeSantos rally where Amazi-Girl spots Ryan again, but there’s no indication that he interacts with Ryan and he isn’t wearing a volunteer shirt.
So if we want to give benefit of the doubt, we could say Beef went along with Paul and OFBG early in the schoolyear when they were just guys from the football team, because that’s his social group, but cut away from them as they started getting into the more extreme incel shit. In a real generous interpretation, perhaps Tony even saw that Beef was getting pulled along down a bad path and helped him course-correct.
Or he could be a piece of shit, also totally possible.
I agree that his past associations don’t confirm the assumed negative about him, and I get the same feeling about “pulled down a bad path”.
One thing that’s not clear about Beef is how literal the comic is about his only communicating by grunting. Could just be a trope.
If we take it literally, Beef doesn’t talk around new people (I haven’t seen him conversing alone with non-main-characters). Less literally, it could still be representative of very minimal socializing. Either could indicate some lack of social ability, whether it be social anxiety, talking and smalltalk not coming naturally to him, or even being non-verbal, and those often relate to difficulty learning to navigate various social environments.
So I read one possibility as: Beef is someone who significantly lacks social or interpersonal skills and as a result fell in with a crowd of bullies (who may even have used his social weakness to bully him into running with them). Getting Paul off the team created an opportunity for Tony to step in and try to take him under his wing and keep him out of any more unhealthy situations.
As fair as Tony’s motivations, it’s of course not clear they are perfect. Maybe Tony was put up to it by Dean Pops, because they need Beef on the team. Maybe it’s another way Tony is displaying sensitivity to potential scrutiny (see panel 2 today) and/or worrying about “right living”. Maybe his ideas for how to help Beef include guiding him into some unhealthy pre-conceived notions of “how a person should be”, which Tony might have gotten a lot of himself in his childhood. Or worse – so I’m not trying to say Tony is automatically a saint for it, just that that’s what he might be doing here.
…
On another note I thought panel 2 today was a nice glimpse at Tony’s motivations in life, even though it doesn’t clear up exactly what they are. He may be driven by scrutiny or values or arbitrary rules or worry about potentially screwing up a good thing with a simple mistake or whatever, but he clearly cares or is anxious about doing things the “right” way. I’m curious if that will become a sticking point. Perhaps this ends up getting in the way of his connecting to Sarah or makes her suspicious of him.
Italicization fail, it was just supposed to be the words “need” and “what”
So the group he’s friends with does still include Ryan via Paul.
I’m just not as keen to give any of them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t trust Tony (or Beef) and until the story gives me a reason to, I’m going to keep thinking they’re shitty people underneath.
I also just generally don’t like Tony even apart from his friends. He judges a LOT and in ways that sound like the subtle snipes of a controlling partner. I just think he’s not a good guy.
I’m willing to give Tony the benefit of the doubt just given what I know about him from the Walkyverse. He’s responsible to a fault and extremely fixated on duty and propriety, but in the end he’s a good guy. He had anger issues, but everyone in the Walkyverse had anger issues.
I’ve never read Walkyverse, and people here have been a bit different from the way they were seemingly portrayed in Walkyverse. I don’t trust him and I’m just not going to until he does something other than pass weird and unasked for judgements on everyone around him for not being Grown Up Enough. While being buddies with a guy who hangs around a seriously bad crowd.
I’m fine if other people give him the benefit of the doubt, but I definitely will not be doing that.
I think that’s totally a fair perspective!
I don’t mind too much Sarah just getting a little bit of wish fulfillment, as a treat. She’s had a fairly miserable go of it, much self inflicted, but still it’s kinda nice for her to just get to enjoy herself.
It’s also fun for her to be in a new relationship at the same time as Joyce and Dorothy.
But yeah, I agree. Tony is a little flat right now. I’m intrigued about whether this new development will give him a chance to expand!
https://strawpoll.com/eNg6vJXN8gA
It’s been about 24 hours since I posted this and so far the results seem to show that the largest sticking points for people are….
3rd Place.
It’s taking focus from story elements I’m more interested in.
2nd Place.
I really liked Joe/Joyce and am saddened to see them broken up.
1st Place.
I’ve found the two characters uncharacteristically unlikable during this storyline.
Personally I’m a strong Joe/Joyce shipper so the 2nd place answer is probably my most common gripe, but this seems to be the general consensus. As always let me know if you don’t feel represented by the poll, I can always add in an option for ya.
I actually do like Doyce and support women’s wrongs in general but I answered too. Mostly because there’s some stuff around how Dorothy has handled this relationship that I’m hoping gets addressed.
I mean, I do agree with all three of those (and several others I voted for). In general, this storyline needs to end with one of the girls waking up in bed and Bobby Ewing’s in the shower (ngl, I hate that I know about the Dallas season 9 “it was all a dream” twist but here we are).
That 1st place issue is definitely my top one. Joyce especially has swerved into previously unseen levels of selfish obnoxiousness.
Yeah, Joyce continues in this strip the habit of gleefully proclaiming any and all sexual escapades to whoever will listen. With a veneer of “I’m being BAD and I’m having FUN with it”. Which can be cute in a vacuum but she’s just been doing it at literally every opportunity.
I want to believe that it’s building to something — Joyce’s whole speech about going to hell, in for a penny (RIP) in for a pound, etc — but to be honest, even if it’s building to a conflict for Joyce, it’s still obnoxious as hell.
I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to call what Joyce is doing in this strip “proclaiming sexual escapades.” All she’s really saying is “Dorothy and I are going to be spending most nights together and we kissed.” That’s pretty innocent, especially in comparison to what she laid on poor Lucy a few strips ago.
Joyce is in for a penny, in for a pounding. And she really liked the pounding she got from Dorothy.
came here just to say that “in for a penny, in for a pounding” is pure poetry. 🤌
Man, Joyce and Dorothy are so much less charming (not that they were very enjoyable before) after doing a reread and seeing Dorothy crashout on Joe because she didn’t think he deserved Joyce over her. The moment Joyce dumped Joe he became a minor character and it’s getting boring when there’s a lot more that could be done here than the two of them being sickeningly sweet together.
Maybe this is going somewhere, but its not like yesterdays strip had an immediate payoff and I’m getting tired of waiting.
Yeah, Dorothy comes across horribly in that confrontation with Joe. Constantly judgmental, calling *him* a cheater when no, actually, that’s something he has never done and never will do (due to family stuff).
At the time I thought it was all part of Dorothy having a major crisis and maybe doing a big messy mistake. And that’s what happened, but the comic just suddenly went “whoops all this mess was actually (mostly) a good thing. Doyce are perfect and they’re married now.”
And then the consequences and the fallout, instead of being the focus, are instead an afterthought. It all just feels so weird and out of place.
Right? I LOVED Joe’s clap back in that comic. “Actually, I’m in my first real relationship and I’ve never cheated, so that actually makes me BETTER than you.”
Because Joe would never have said that if Dorothy hadn’t drawn first blood with the “I’m as bad as you” line. She had it coming and I loved to see it.
I don’t think Dorothy called him a cheater.
He might have read the “I’m as bad as you” line that way, but I think Dorothy meant it as “My cheating is as bad as the way old Joe treated women”, not that it was the same thing.
Based on Joe’s response, her accusing him of being a cheater seems to be how HE took it as well.
As I said, he might have read it that way, but that’s because of his perspective of cheating as the worst thing
Well, given the reflexive lying, I see that Dorothy’s back on the “future politician” track.
Also interesting how Joyce goes from “I cannot be shamed” to Raidah to IMMEDIATELY following Dorothy’s “deny!” lead here.
Good point. Her reflexive lying and trying to hide the evidence is making me dislike her even more than her behaviour towards Joe and Walky already had.
It’s generally good opsec to deny being at a protest that was made illegal and dismantled with police force to the loin-spawn of campus administration.
opsec’s kind of out the window when you’re on the front page of the paper though.
I’d give that approach more credit if either of these dorks had shown any interest in the protest qua protest.
It might make things actually interesting if Dorothy is 100% not ready to be open/out of the closet and Joyce 100% is ready to scream the L-word (obviously, “lesbians”) from the rooftops Becky-style.
No-prize answer would be that their talk with Asma has Dorothy taking the protest itself more seriously, and giving the correct answer when asked if one was at it -“no,” however overwhelming the evidence otherwise is.
I look very much forward to figuring out what amazing new rumors accidentally get started because of this.
Tony isn’t the type to spread runors
i wonder if Tony is the type to probably tell his dean father that the college newspaper head is outing people on front page for kicks.
aw crap I just remembered his father is the DEAN. which means this might be a Tony might agree with the protest crack downs thing, FUCK.
Oof, that hadn’t even occurred to me. That would really suck. (Though his viewpoint on that either way would be interesting, since it’s kind of the same situation Carla’s in.)
I suppose it would be interesting to see this straight-lace football kid have to wrestle with the whole moral dilemma of his dad aiding a genocide. Would give him and Carla something to bond over at least lol
Tony is friends with Beef. He has a high degree of tolerance.
Except of course for buffoonery.
Buffoonery as defined by him because obviously he’s the least buffoony guy in town. According to him.
Eh, I don’t see the Dean as giving Tony a huge amount of automatic sway over what the college does. More likely Tony thinks it’s bad but can’t change his dad’s mind — or, he hasn’t thought about it at all because he’s focused on his other serious studies, serious footballs, serious Sarah, etc. I’d certainly prefer those options, myself.
Serious Series: Normal Consecutive Sarahs
Sarah’s face in that second panel leads to believe she would, in fact, like some consecutives.
like, it wouldn’t be unlikely for a straight white cis male nepo baby to be completely checked out of anything that doesn’t personally affect them
FWIW I don’t think Daisy did it for kicks, she did it for the clicks. Marking her as a true Editor of the modern age.
I hate the modern age so so very much.
It’s kinda funny how like…I’d be MORE ok if Daisy did it for kicks or being horny than if she did it cynically to get more views.
I think it’s both and I think that makes it worse. Daisy did a bad thing and has a convenient justification to cover for her selfish behavior. Bleh.
It can be both. Not so much a conflict of interests, but a confluence of interests.
As if editors and publishers haven’t done stunts like this to sell papers since back when they were still printing stories on paper.
I can hate them too!
Rather famously infamously, William Randolph Hearst got the Spanish-American War going by using his papers to blame Spain for the USS Maine exploding in Havana’s harbour.
Kicks, clicks, and opposite of dicks.
i’m so sorry
Nah she did it for flicks. Of her bean.
Always for the chicks.
I think it’d be interesting if the Dean wants to make an example of the pair for painting the university as Pro-Genocide when really anyone who is at the protest is Anti-North Bulmerian bigots.
I’d make a joke about deporting both of the women and stripping them of their US citizenship but sadly there’s nothing exaggerated about this situation. They probably would deport Sal or Asma if they could (and yes, Sal wasn’t involved in the slightest).
Her known alter-ego was filmed punching cops.
Or, depending, that he has dirt (unseemly behaviour on campus!!!) on the two that maybe got national attention through the paper to the anti-genocide protest.
Forcing Dorothy to leave, but she goes to Yale. Joyce wants to join her, but on a fateful highway…
I doubt he would, but he easily might get into a situation where he does it by accident because narrative, and that would amuse me.
What’s the deal with the dean (son)?
The state/university cracked down on the protest that there is now hard evidence that they were present at post the time they had to leave without negative impact.
That’s Anthony “Tony” McHenry, Jr., son of Dean Anthony “Big Boss” McHenry, Sr. He’s the sportsball quarterback. He’s into Sarah. He’s not going to buy Billie booze. He has a bunch of very dubious friend/teammates. He’s only been in 22 strips, so that’s pretty much it.
Wasn’t his father once married to Walky and Sal’s mother?
Yes
An intimate bond by mutual father’s dick in mom association as described by one David “Walky” Walkerton.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/03-faz-is-great/plebs/
“Unlike you all, I actually LIKE my parents” no wait that was Carla
(for seriously tho, I really think a lot is going to come down to whether or not Tony actually gets along with his parents, and we do have some evidence that Tony )
we do have some evidence that I don’t know how to html, let’s try that again
… evidence that Tony suffers no fools
Apparently he thinks people are garbage, but the question is, does he think his parents are garbage? Does he think protesters are garbage? Who is more garbage than whom?
Also, he’s concerned with being “unseemly”. A concern with social affairs, behavior, and status, both in others (he doesn’t tolerate “buffoonery”) and himself (not wanting to be seen as spending ‘too much’ time with Sarah).
…first of his name…
Bane of the Duras family, slayer of Gowron…
In front of you are two bisexuals. One always lies, and one always tells the truth…
They didn’t have time to prepare a riddle because they were too busy fucking each other.
I was about to joke “I want this version of the Two Guards trope”
but then I remembered that Undertale beat me to it
omg
😂 I snorted
Oh that’s an easy riddle. Ask one of them if they like to movie The Mummy starring Brenden Frasier and Rachel Weisz. If the one you ask says Yes, that one is telling the truth and the other one is lying, if they say “No” then that one is lying and the other one always tells the truth.
That test works for me
That sort of test works as long as you’re allowed more than one question, but the usual setup is that you can only ask one question, so you don’t need to figure out which one is lying, so much as another piece of information (like which way to go in a labyrinth).
I always thought the riddle is you can ask one question but both have to answer it.
Either way, if you ask about who stars in The Mummy you’re in trouble unless that’s what you needed answered.
This is why the answer in The Labyrinth was “which door would the OTHER guy tell me to open”, and then whatever they say you do the opposite.
The logic is that if A is the liar and you ask A what B would say, A will lie about B’s truthful response, and if you ask B, B will honestly report A’s lying response. So you do the opposite of whatever they say.
(Admittedly, this relies on a setup where it’s a binary question with only two possible answers, bc otherwise you’re not guaranteed that the lying answer will be useful. Also requires that The Liar can’t, for example, lie in more complicated ways, such as by claiming B would simply say nothing….)
To be fair if the riddle is that they must answer the question then you could still parse that A is lying since based on the rules of the riddle, B is inclined to answer. B would not say nothing if asked because they would be required to answer the question. Meaning A is the correct door.
But in the classic version the two guards aren’t directly tied to the doors. The liar doesn’t stand in front of the bad door and the truth teller in front of the correct one.
The liar being able to say “B wouldn’t answer” tells you who the liar is, but not which door to use. It’s an interesting way to break the puzzle that I don’t think I’ve heard before.
Yeah, it occurred to me when we were reading a variant on it in Japanese.
In the variant, there’s an island where half the people always lie and half the people always tell the truth, and you come across a group of three people. You ask which one of them is the liar, and Person 1 answers but you can’t hear him. You then ask Person 2 what Person 1 said, and Person 2 says that Person 1 said that there was only one truth-teller among them. Person 3 then tells you not to listen to Person 1. How many liars are they in the group and who are they?
(The answer is that there’s one liar and it’s Person 1. You know this because if Person 1 were honestly repeating what Person 2 said, then that would necessitate two truth-tellers in the group… which makes the thing Person 2 “repeats” still a lie.)
My classmate tried to suggest that there might be other solutions and I had to point out that the liars aren’t also schemers. The liar isn’t actively trying to trick you, he’s just compelled to lie when asked a question, the same way the other two are compelled to tell the truth.
If the liars WERE also schemers, then Person 2 might have picked a more convincing lie, and if the liar in the riddle were allowed to be more creative instead of being compelled to always say basically the direct opposite of the truth, it would be a lot more challenging to solve.
*and its person 2!!! If person 2 were honestly repeating what person 1 said… orz
There a bunch of variants of these logical problems. And apparently a region somewhere that has lots of such rigidly rule-following people.
(The anime here is “Kino’s Journey.”)
“He’d tell you there’s a secret third option.”
“…Is there a secret third option?”
“No.” “Yes.”
“Goddammit.”
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
Well played!
Or per GameChanger, one of them always lies and the other one is always wrong.
But it comes from a really honest place.
<3
One always tells the truth and the other always lies and the first one also always lies
I like the way your brain worked.
You are assuming a fact not in evidence…
Joyce is adorable here.
Joyce hasn’t been adorable since she cheated on Joe, left him hanging, mocked Walky and sexually harrased Lucy.
She’s been adorable a good chunk of the time since actually 🙂
Hard disagree. If anything, she’s regressed and become more annoying than ever before.
Come on now. This is what the containment thread is for. If you can’t enjoy those adorable moments, okay. But let the rest of us enjoy.
It will be ok
Given the hater thread has been blinking in and out of existence like an Infinity War Speedrun lately…
Unfortunately I do not have any ability to enforce the containment thread, but I do endorse using it instead of commenting stuff like this under people expressing simple appreciation of DoJo
Any time the hater containment thread gets deleted, the hating will spread to other threads.
She was adorable before, after, and during every single one of those instances.
Cheating it adorable now? Weird take, but okay.
Is*
Holy bad faith reading, Batman.
Live Jocelyne Reaction is the most adorable strip to happen in the comic’s entire 15 year history, yes.
It is possible to do bad things and still be adorable. That is not a weakness, that is life.
I think the last of those accusations is a stretch.
To you.
Other people disagree, and that’s actually fine.
Appropriate gravatar is appropriate.
It will be ok
Well, yeah. That’s normally the case, so I’m not sure it’s significant though.
As she always is.
Ah, the real adults are here at last
Mmm.
Who the hell is this guy? He’s never appeared before.
Oh, you know. It’s him. The guy. You know the one.
Don’t trust Taffy, Taffy’s never appeared before
Taffy isn’t talking about Tony though. He’s talking about this guy who never appeared. For [some number of total strips I’m too lazy to calculate] strips he’s never appeared.
He’s consistent.
As a heads up, Taffy doesn’t use he/him pronouns afaik!
This is correct, I’m one of those dirty They/Them types.
so what’s the distinction between a clean they/them and a dirty they/them?
There are no clean they/thems, and anyone who claims otherwise is trying to sell you on respectability politics.
The clean type don’t get death wishes for clearing up misunderstandings I guess, idk.
@Li I’ll have you know my they/them nesting partner is pure as the driven snow.
Wait, no, I meant they’re as pure as snow that’s been driven on.
@Taffy: The clean type are definitely hoping that if they keep making it super clear to everyone that they’re clean and not dirty (unlike those other, bad they/thems), they’ll evade the death wishes! Fools.
Sorry, I’m getting my bitterness at the folks who’re trying to throw us all under the bus get in the way of perfectly good wordplay.
@Big Z: your reply did make me smile tho
I thought I remembered you being a they/themmer <3 I'm one of those no good, two-timin', low down, handsome "any pronoun will do" sorts.
That might be the eventual goal, tbh.
You’ve also considered using second person pronouns for yourself, but you’re worried it might cause some really avoidable confusing during conversations.
Messy in practice, but hysterical in concept.
Sorry about that Taffy. Thanks, Nymph.
What? Who? What are you talking about? Donovan is answering to a conspicuously blank space above his name.
…it occurs to me that carol’s been awfully quiet lately. I wouldn’t put acts of toedadery past her
I worry about that too. Same mindset, same triggers, maybe same resources
please no, the cast has enough problems without the return of toedad and toedad accessories. give my poor 2-dimensional babies some breathing room!
have you forgotten where we are. have you forgotten what kind of ship Dave “Damn You” Willis runs
No one has more hard-line rules about correct behaviour in relationships then people in college. I’d think that was a weird red flag if it wasn’t kind of just part of being 17 (18?19??)
I suspect, also, that Tony ‘He’s The Son Of The Dean’ ‘Football Star’ McHenry might be very exceptionally aware of what kinds of things people (jerks and assorted ill-wishers) could use to tear him apart and makes an effort to deny them the opportunity.
Football players are some of the most infamously badly-behaved people on the planet, so he actually has a ton to gain from maintaining a sterling and serious reputation.
Here’s hoping “unseemly” behaviour also includes doing a bunch of coke
In my own college experience, there were two kinds of college football players I knew — the kind who are exactly what you’d expect from the news about college football player behavior, and the kind like Tony is acting who were dead-set on NOT being any of those things and living a life where they couldn’t even be reasonably suspected of any kind of malfeasance.
Those guys were, granted, in about a 10-1 ratio.
(Quarterbacks in particular benefit during the college->pro transition from having a reputation for being level-headed and good decisionmakers)
You’re not suggesting that a relationship is not very serious if…
yeah, which front page?
You only have one chance to nail a good first impression, which means you should definitely fumble telling an easily verifiable lie for seemingly no reason (from Tony’s POV)
Nope, Joyce just forgot the rule. If anyone asks if you were there, you say no. Even if there’s evidence.
Joyce already met Tony.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/03-me-and-who-you-say-i-was-yesterday/knowwho/
Oh that’s right! And Dorothy has not.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/03-me-and-who-you-say-i-was-yesterday/releaseyou/
I feel like Tony might cause trouble for Joyce and Dorothy. Something is making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
I feel like Joyce is generally the one causing trouble for her and Dorothy, honestly.
I feel like that any time Tony is on-screen. He feels like an unexploded hand grenade Sarah is carrying around.
I’m honestly just trying to figure out if he has an angle and if so what it’s going to be. We know almost nothing about his possible motivations.
“I think it is unseemly to spend every night with one’s new girlfriend” is kind of an odd thing to say. The sentiment itself is a bit unusual, but valid; perhaps more understandable since he may have been raised to believe his every action reflects on the university and his family. But the archaic wording stands out.
Tony’s been such a perfect match for Sarah so far that even a potential red flag really stands out, I suppose.
People have weird rules.
No penetration on the first date, but everything else is fine.
Don’t date who you f*ck and don’t f*ck who you date (and don’t tell the people you date that you have people you f*ck).
Wants head, but won’t be serious with anyone who gives head.
Each of those rules belongs to someone I’ve met in my life (I was involved with the first two), and none of those rules made sense to me.
And I probably have rules about sex and/or relationships that others find to be nonsense.
I don’t know. Tell us what your rules are about sex and relationships. You know, so we can make fun of them.
I don’t think I’ve so much had rules as observations that led to guidelines. Maybe I started out with rules, but they were fairly short lived.
But to get back to the original topic, I’m going to assume that after the third date she’s no longer a new girlfriend.
I’d say he’s just acutely aware there’s a lot of attention on himself.
Possibly it’s just an extremely weird way to phrase “I don’t think you should get super clingy with someone you’ve just started a relationship with right away. That seems a little dependent and could lead to bad behaviour later on.”
It really makes him sound like he’s got a big hardbound book of Victorian relationship etiquette in his room though.
“But the archaic wording stands out.”
The use of “unseemly” make him sound like one of those college dude who’s really in to being a “gentleman”. Wears a waistcoat al the time, fob watch, thinks using old fashioned language is the same as having class.
Which is odd given he’s never out of his..sports…jacket? (I don’t know, university sports is not a “thing” in Australia)
It makes me think of Tommy Lee Jones as Agent K, Harvey Dent, and some of his other roles.
Or, like some of us, he reads voraciously and have absorbed some archaic (?) vocabulary and phrasing.
I took it as a dryily humorous tone to the effect that couples should come up for air occasionally. Tony hasn’t seemed concerned about immediately spending the night with Sarah, he probably just needs to go home and get things (other than Sarah) done occasionally.
There’s a (small) subset of college football players, quarterbacks and other on-field-leader positions in particular, who really go out of their way to never have anything that might even slightly be a scandal attach to them because a reputation for good decisionmaking is a slight edge when competing for limited pro team slots.
And one hand, Joyce is being very… unclassy… about this.
On the other, I do remember how I felt when I first got laid in college. I was also a bit lacking in class.
yeah getting laid could make you miss a lot of classes
oh i was INCREDIBLY lacking.
She’s acting exactly how she did with Ethan (pre gay reveal) and Joe, it’s just that this was a pair of relationships that she got in the middle of and destroyed, and she’s acting exactly the same, minus some guilt and confusion. The fact that she’s like “I’m gay! I need to tell everyone!” is massively overstepping on other issues she’s living entirely in the dark of.
Such as, say, Becky. Who is making me physically wince every time I look at the new comic every day and she’s not in it.
Sarah is doing a great job at keeping it in her pants because it looks like she wants to jump him and I’m proud of her
OK here’s an good fix, Sarah and temporarily switch Dorm rooms with Dorothy…temporarily, just until things blow over and people are back on speaking terms.
Yes. Though I’m not real clear on the reason Sarah would be willing to do this.
I wonder how the dorm agreement between Sarah and Joyce reads.
Nah, switch Sarah and Amber. And also Dorothy’s bed and the sex dinosaur. Sarah and Dina get along well, Amber could certainly not possibly have any objections to rooming with the couple that she went to such lengths to get together, and Dina gets something to sleep on, while Becky gets to sit alone in her room with the reminder of what she threw away over Joyce being gay for someone else.
Yeah, I just don’t see why this should affect Sarah.
Frankly, knowing Sarah disapproves, I can’t imagine her doing anything to facilitate anyone’s good feelings about this.
(I’d go so far as to imagine Sarah will consider getting the RAs involved if Doyce’s antics cause her any sleep or studying disruptions.)
Good for her
I can see Sarah wanting to help spare Becky further interactions with Dorothy, though.
I keep seeing comments that are treating this situation as one where Dorothy wants to avoid Becky, but Becky doesn’t want to avoid Dororthy, which therefore makes Dorothy’s conflict-avoidance 100% selfish. I think the truth is that both of them want space right now, so Dorothy’s conflict-avoidance is, fortunately for her, only 50% selfish.
I could see that in the abstract, but I don’t think Sarah’s close enough to Becky to want to jeopardize her own academics for it, and any kind of room swap would definitely be disruptive in that vein.
Unfortunately, Tony thinks it’s unseemly to spend every night together, so Sarah’s dorm options are both bad for her concentration right now.
But yeah, my point was just: I don’t think getting Dorothy out of Becky’s dorm room is JUST a favor for Dorothy.
As an aside, I just remembered that Dina is one of the few people that Sarah genuinely seems to like. Joe and Dina reached some level of cute friendship. And now Sarah seems to like Joe.
That could be a very cute friendship trio.
I’d be down for seeing more of them together, maybe adding in Danny and Sal to boot.
If we ever progress beyond this day, I’m reaaally curious how the next Biology class is going to look like, considering they’re not allowed to switch lab partners (or at least that’s what I’m remembering?)
Real
oh god tony. tony save me. save me tony. i love you tony
I feel like last time we saw him everybody was mooning over Tony being a perfect match for Sarah because of how “serious” he is. But while they’re both “no distractions” serious, Tony is also “uptight insufferable priss” serious in a way that I don’t think Sarah is at all. Like I think he’d be as scandalized as Joyce once was to find out that Sarah has a vibrator.
I don’t think that’s an entirely fair assessment quite yet. We don’t really know much about Tony yet. He’s only really made on thing clear and it’s that he doesn’t play games except for American football. I don’t think this “spending too much time with a new girlfriend is unseemly” rule is so much about being a prude as much as he’s probably just trying to show Sarah he’s serious and doesn’t just want her for sex. I’m just assuming myself but he hasn’t really shown enough of himself for us to know either.
He also won’t buy beer for freshmen.
I see no reason so far why he’d be scandalised to learn an adult knows how to take care of her own needs.
It reads to me like he’s acutely aware that everything he does gets scrutinised.
Feels more like he’d be disapproving to find out she left it somewhere Joyce could find if anything, but from memory that was because of Joyce going through Sarah’s stuff so he’d probably disapprove of Joyce’s actions.
The truth is Tony’s opinion on vibrators has nothing to do with whether you have one, but if the one you do use is buffoonish in nature. I don’t remember the strip with vibe in it, any pleasure toy experts have an opinion on how ridiculous Sarah’s was? This could make or break her relationship!
It was pretty bog-standard.
‘No nubbly bits, no writhing, no flashing lights’
The buffoonery isn’t in the vibrator but in what you do with it. Pretend it’s a light saber? Very buffoonish.
Eh maybe. Hes hasn’t been on screen enough to have that much information. So alot of sentiment is filled in based on assumptions about an archetype that may or may not apply
I wonder if Dorothy is contemplating the fact that blowing up her life to have freedom is what’s annoying her about Joyce’s behavior. Because it’s one thing to SAY you want to ditch Yale and get arrested to never be a politician but it’s another to do it–and maybe she sees too many similarities in Joyce’s “I am now defiled forever, let the sexy times begin!”
I think it may be more that Dorothy is, with her post-nut clarity, rapidly recognizing all the signs that she’d been ignoring, that Joyce seems to think that being an defiled atheist means that she should just completely ignore any prospect of feeling any guilt for anything, anymore.
Partly because, she really needs to understand that guilt is still normal from a secular perspective, and Dorothy would actually be the best person to have that conversation with her, because they both have the exact same complex about being morally pure and perfect.
Partly because, Dorothy knows Joyce well enough to know that there’s no way that a woman this obsessed with constant guilt about everything, suddenly had all that guilt suddenly disappear; so, Dorothy can only conclude, that Joyce must actually be coping with some guilt about something, because it’s the only explanation for Joyce trying to constantly force and externalize that she is completely unwilling to feel any guilt about her current choices.
wow i’m sorry for what a slog that post is to read, i am not in my best mind today and should have edited better
What is this post-nut clarity people keep talking about. It’s something I’ve never experienced, so I kind of skeptical it’s a thing.
I do not experience it myself, but my understanding is that many people get so overwhelmed with feelings of sexual desire that it impairs their rational judgement. “Post-nut clarity” is the state of having rational thought return in the aftermath of the sexual desire being released. It is perhaps similar to how being hungry makes some people be impatient and irritable, but their mood improves as soon as they have eaten, thus attaining “post-food clarity”. I experience neither phenomenon, the closest being that too much indulgence in food or sex makes me feel disgust towards the prospect of consuming more. Not out of shame, just sensory overload.
More or less, you are just REALLY excited about sex and it affects your thinking. Once you get a release you might suddenly get hit with “Did I really fap to that?” or similar things.
What amuses me is that, before this became a thing, the long-running joke/stereotype was that the most common change of mental state or level of consciousness – at least for the more male-coded partner – was a nearly irresistible desire to roll over and go to sleep.
“ah… that’s better… my thoughts… so much clearer now… ZZZ“
(“Everybody’s cute! Even me. But in purple I’m stunning!”
*thump*
“Ahh, he has become one with his inner self!”
“He’s passed out.”
“That too.”)
It’s when you eat a really good almond and can suddenly see through walls.
I am legitimately shocked that we seem to actually be addressing that the school was the one that called the cops on the protestors. I did not expect that to come up or even be acknowledged.
They changed the law to make the protestors criminals so the university is absolutely a bunch of scumbags. I kind of hope that Puddinghead shows up and tells them that due to the fact they’re both survivors of a kidnapping and attempted school shooting, they get a pass.
But maybe they might want to throw Amazi-Girl under the bus in exchange for not being expelled in the future. They have a credible witness after all that it’s the brown girl with the funny accent.
(I literally believe that Jennifer will tell the University her theory and they will believe it because Amazi-Girl has now attacked cops and they want to arrest her)
Maybe a future story arc will be the two privileged heirs of DoA having to confront their parents with hard conversations.
I predict that will go well.
Jennifer: Dad, are you behind the Bulmerian genocide?
“Yes.”
Jennifer can’t confront her parents if she can never get a hold of them.
I feel called out by the alt text.
Oh right. Son of the dean
Not-so-smooth there, criminals
Another strip, another moment where Joyce doesn’t tell Dorothy about Joe.
She’s got the “Future Mrs. Keener” blinders on right now. In Joyce’s mind, Joe doesn’t exist anymore. She lost her virginity to Dorothy, and by her weird reasoning she’s no doubt set up for that MRS degree she wanted at the start of the comic. All she needs to do now is speedrun everything so she can be that beautiful Springtime Bride. Who needs minor inconvenient details that she’s TECHNICALLY cheating on Dorothy by not telling Joe that the relationship is over. Springtime Bride, baby!
If that’s all it is and it’s just the technicality, then it’s not a big deal. It’s only if she’s actually interested in Joe’s suggestion that I think she should have talked to Dorothy about it earlier.
Except for the part where she very much told Joe the relationship is over.
She didn’t though. She said “You can see that I cheated on you and therefore need to break up with you.” and he asked “Why?” and they talked about the idea of being poly for a bit, then Joyce realized Becky is going to see this, promised Joe they’d talk about this, and left. Then like three strips later, she called Joe her boyfriend and had “uh yeah about that” dissonance with Dorothy when the latter corrected to her with “ex-boyfriend.”
but when Dorothy corrected Joyce infront of Daisy about Joe being an ex boyfriend Joyce’s hesitation very much made it clear to her mind she was hiding something when she responded yeesss.
Yep. And she’s not even in the middle of a different conversation where it’d be super fucking weird to suddenly drop that or anything!
Joe is not in front of her, therefore to Joyce Joe does not exist.
She’s kind of like an infant in that way
My sentiments exactly, Sarah.
Perfect. No notes.
It’s incredible, how not-in-the-closet Joyce is with all this. Once she was out, she was OUT.
Like Becky, she took off and nuked the closet from orbit, it was the only way to be sure.
Maybe they should move that big stack of newspapers away from that spot right next to the door. That’s assuming Joyce and Dorothy care about people knowing they kissed at the genocide protest, which I’m not sure if they still do at this point.
If you recall, they did use one of those papers in place of a sock for all in the hallway to see
it took the hovertext for me to notice the stack just sitting there so conspicuously
like c’mon girls XD
Joyce wants to lay it on real thick that she’s gay now and is having sex with the woman she’s going to marry by springtime and SHE DESERVES A MEDAL FOR IT, DAMMIT!
Dorothy’s denial of being one of the participants in the front page kiss that Joyce proudly displayed (once her dad was cool with it) is a tell that she miiiight not be as gung ho into this speedrun romance as Joyce is… even though Dotty was the one who set the ball in motion because she was obsessing over losing Joyce to Joe the Unworthy Pervert.
Or maybe she’s trying to adhere to the common sense of “Don’t tell the authorities or people who are connected to the authorities that you were at the protest”
Hey Joyce, sweetheart, I am petting your head and feeding you sweet treats and keeping you wrapped in a bundle of the finest most soft blankets as I tell you this you wonderfully stupid little creature.
First rule of protesting
if you were there. you weren’t there.
if people saw you there. you weren’t there.
and even if people took photos of you. you weren’t there.
especially when talking to the son of the dean, given that the school made the protest an illegal gathering.
Excuse her for not knowing something nobody ever tokd her.
Interested to see Tony’s reaction and Sarah’s reaction to Tony’s reaction.
A very odd thought, and almost trolling to bring up, but given the relationship red flags between Joyce and Dorothy, does Dorothy eventually become a unicorn?
You’d have to explain more for this to make sense to me. Where’s the through line between “Joyce and Dorothy’s relationship has red flags” and “Dorothy decides to become a person interested in being a third in already established relationships”?
Between this strip and the preview of the bonus strip, I think the degree to which Dorothy just seems embarrassed by Joyce and/or has trouble admitting their relationship is going to be a problem.
Like don’t get me wrong, Joyce is in a pretty insufferable phase right now. Downright obnoxious. But that just makes it obvious they’re not on the same page yet.
Ever since the kiss happened, the consistent pattern is that Dorothy wants to exercise restraint and take things relatively slow, while Joyce is bound and determined to barrel on through. I don’t know to what extent it’s caused by embarrassment on Dorothy’s part, that’s not really my read – I see it more as Dorothy being more conscious of the fact that they’ve really thrown a hand grenade into their social circle and the implications that brings. You’re right, though – they’re not on the same page, and not just about the Joe thing. It’s a ticking time bomb on their relationship, and eventually it’s going to blow.
I want this more intimate relationship to force these two to deal with each other’s worst qualities. Their previous partners always put them on a pedestal (especially Dorothy) to me that was always a bit unhealthy. Now instead they have to cope with their girlfriend’s filth. Maybe nothing changes? Maybe it’s not as cute when you’re committed to that person now?
“Yes, I love Italian. And so do you.”
“Yes.”
*claps for the reference*
We would expect no less from someone named “Vulcanodon”.
Panel 2 Sarah: “Let me have just little bit of unseemly.”
Have we heard anyone drop the words “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” before?
Yes, definitely.
For Tony and Sarah (which I shoulda mentioned)? I’ll have to spleunk in the archives.
Ohhh idk probably not!
Yeah, Sarah’s described him as her “football star boyfriend” to Joe when she went to work out! There might’ve been another time too but that’s the one I remember.
Neat! Tx.
Sarah’s face is proof she went from “never date someone under X feet tall” to “long live the short king” and I love that for her.
Tony feels very “lawful good”. Or at least “I desperately need to make sure everyone is on the same page.”
I recognise, and appreciate.
Dorothy kinda agrees that new couples can have short breaks from each other. Joyce and Sarah want it non-stop.
My nesting partner and I have been together more than 20 years, although we’re not married. We spend most nights together. Gee Tony, how unseemly of us, huh?
The “New” in “New Girlfriend” seems to be the operative word
What Brendan said.
Tony says he’s taking the relationship seriously. He doesn’t want it to be casual and likely not just about sex.
Means he wants it to go somewhere majorly official. I’m just not sure about Sarah’s pace. We’ll see how that goes.
Tony’s kind of a loser.
Tony is just surprised because he also knows those sheets were white at one point.
oh god, why would they be orange?! The obsessive-compulsive in me just recoiled in horror at the thought. Well played, fellow internet denizen.
Data point: Containment thread was nuked with in the last five minutes.
Yeah, because we can’t even have a small corner in which to have controversial opinions.
It’s insane that a negative reaction to characters cheating and ignoring the harm done to the people they care about is “controversial” to begin with.
I maintain that a fair bit of the controversy is the combination of “this is both a cheating story and a coming-out story, both of which are going to have people invested in a way that makes them want to downplay the other into insignificance” and “the amount of free-floating homophobia/misogyny in the comment spaces about this comic cause a LOT of bleed where people expressing disapproval of a wlw relationship in any context are sometimes assumed to be just another bigot”. and that’s even before you get into the competing-ship wars.
Mx. Willis can you give my thread back please
My opinions about Tony being a secret jerk got reported to oblivion too.
Someone is a little mad with power and trying to delete opinions they don’t like.
Thank you Mx. Willis.
Just wanna +1 for the existence of the hater containment thread, long may it reign.
Joyce and Dorothy need to get their story straight. Pun not intended!
Tony has a single room, so wouldn’t it be weird for Tony to ever spend the night over in Sarah’s double room anyway?
Tony seems so serious all the time. It would be interesting to see another side of him. Maybe in a future Slipshine.
okay yay never mind sarah is here i get to see the other characters
Dorothy: I didn’t mean to interrupt the protest against genocide.
Joyce: Kissing Dorothy is more important than a country no one has ever even heard of.
Dorothy: Asma is Bulmerian.
Joyce: Who?
Really appreciating the detail of Joyce not acknowledging Sarah’s presence, or her judgy remark. I’m rooting for More Roommate Drama 😀
LOL i wonder howinvolved tony will be as the dean’s son, idk if he cares but i imagine his father would tell him not to protest i imagine
Tony wouldn’t have to be told. He’s conservative not in the political sense but in the sense that he is well aware that as a college football star and son of the dean everything he does is scrutinized and reflects on his career prospects and the health of his father’s career, so he considers every decision he makes carefully and doesn’t do things, including dating, frivolously. He would not get involved in a controversial political movement that had media eyes on it.
hi Tony
so uh if the couple decide to stay here, would Sarah go sleep at the other roommate’s bed instead ? it’s a bit… but… sure why the heck not.
I’ve somehow been reading this comic since it debuted and have really been enjoying this arc in all its messiness. I know people feel all kinds of ways
about the characters and the story, but watching Joyce and Dorothy finally get together while being a bit of a disaster is perfect.
I feel for all these kids and also I enjoy watching them make all the dumb mistakes kids make.
Anyway, I have never before been moved to comment, but it seemed like a moment to express my appreciation for this comic, some 15 years in.