Dorothy, it may be time to purchase Joyce an “Other Dorothy”. With a heavy duty rechargeable battery. You already sent her a sexy selfie to use it with, so that step’s taken care of.
And maybe some noise-canceling headphones for Sarah would be a nice gesture as well.
I mean, a sapphic couple’s first trip to a sex shop is always a hilarious embarrassing experience – or it was when I first did it. Sex shops, at least some of them, have gotten a lot more woman-inclusive and generally comfortable since then.
Oh no. She’s getting stuck in something hard to hide, isn’t she. Do they still do those like “joke” animal sex dolls in those stores?
Okay, do NOT Google that to find out. The answer is no and that’s all anyone needs to see. Anyone got any of that uh bleach. I need to wash my eyes out.
Tactical switch outs like you’re playing competitive pokemon. Dorothy sets up barriers and Joe uses status moves. Then they just baton pass buffs back and forth.
Thinking more professional-wrestling-style, one of them trying desperately to writhe their way to the corner to reach out for the tag while Joyce continues relentlessly.
You know, it’s been bothering me that Joyce hasn’t explained what her situation with Joe is, yet, with Dorothy. The three of them really need to be in the same room and have a conversation about this.
That’s what humans need. Cartoon characters need drama and Joyce is providing it! Joe is in denial. When he finally breaks, Dorothy will be the only one to care. (Between the two of them.) Eventually even Dorothy will get tired of Joyce’s selfishness.
“…you see child, when you only see one set of footprints in the sand…that was, uh…that was you, hovering next to me, held aloft by the sheer vibrations of your out-of-control libido…like, I beheld all the sins of man, and all, but holy shit ma’am, I never saw anything quite like this.”
I have two and they’re kind of annoying because the stupid flexible stick part doesn’t effing stay where you put it. It’s actually a fight to make it stay in place.
I mean yeah when I’m with someone I make crass sexual jokes and passes at them all the time, but my life doesn’t have to worry about things like pacing and “belaboring the point”
I agree with Dot’s answer, but I want add the caveat “not to such a degree that we’re too busy being horny to tell our girlfriend about important news like the fact that our ex recently offered us An Arrangement(tm) that she may not be okay with”.
Not usually with someone else in the room unless you’re really open. This is definitely the kind of thing you’d say to someone you’re in a sexual relationship with when you’re in private (and nothing else is going on) though.
For most allosexuals, this’d be representative of a NRE (new relationship energy) phase or horny teenager phase. We usually calm down some after a while, it takes a lot of energy to maintain that level of hornt.
Eh. When I’m with someone I too make crass jokes and sexual passes at them all the time, but most of the time it’s intended to be (and read as) just flirting. I’m not constantly trying to actually initiate sex for real the way Joyce seems to be here.
…That said, I *am* demisexual. But when attraction does hit, it hits *hard.*
It can be, but not with nonconsenting folks in the room, and usually I can remember to do the things I’m supposed to be doing like “not leaving two of my three best friends hanging in various ways” and “not trying to have sex in front of my roommate”.
At this point, like them…hate them…I just don’t *care* anymore at this point. We’ve been reading the same “Joyce/Dorothy being “cute” together” on the same day since AUGUST.
I’ll gladly take ANYONE else at this point. Give me a week of Faz hanging out with Mary and Raidah. It’d just be nice for this day to finally be over and actually get to see the rest of the cast I come here to read about and have them interact with one another instead of yet *another* bed shot of…this
I get that they’re main characters, but it’s still also a somewhat ensemble cast!
If I were a fan of seeing Lisa and Bart on The Simpsons, having the latest season consist of almost all Homer episodes (with maybe a scene or two per episode for the others) would drive me nuts. Especially if they consist of “Homer does something stupid yet AGAIN” episodes.
I’m just so damned tired of Dorothy/Joyce “being cute” strips (all taking place on the SAME DAY) since fucking August. I was so excited when it looked like we were finally moving on with Carla and potential family drama, only to still come back to this -_-
honestly ngl faz & raidah & mary is kind of interesting. terrible horndog teen with family issues, woman who has both Principles she is loud about while also being kind of manipulative/status focused, & The Worst Person In The World. i think raidah might tear mary a new one, for one. she’d almost certainly hate faz, but idk if any indication of exactly how bad things are for him would mitigate that. (mary might well be irked by him, although she’d probably try to recruit him to the manosphere or some shit.) also i’m just v interested in raidah ever since the protest strips.
Sorry, hit the report button instead of reply. There really needs to be more space between the two…
I didn’t think about the combination til I saw your reply, I was just trying to think of a combination that would cause an entire meltdown in the posts. But I like that breakdown, I guess another to add to the list of “please anyone besides Dorothy/Joyce”!
It’s been a great run, maintaining a slice of life strip for this long is impressive so it had to happen sooner or later but its clear the author has run out of ideas
It’s a shame but it was good, very good at times, while it lasted
“I like this comic a lot, and I have liked pretty much everything the author has been putting out for decades, but this particular storyline seems to be not great.” is not anything like a reason to stop reading a serial story, especially because most of the folks in this thread have openly expressed their desire for us to switch to one of a number of actually-in-progress storylines we DO like.
I’m getting tired of whiners who can’t cope with people doing the equivalent of saying “Shut up, Wesley” every time he’s on screen while enjoying the entire rest of the damn voyage of the Enterprise. (to remind you that this is not even a new phenomenon in media consumption, it’s as old as Usenet).
I mean, “this particular storyline is not great” isn’t what Harry Brownhole said, though? You are replying to a reply to Harry Brownhole, who said the comic’s had a good run but it’s over now because the author has run out of ideas, and “it was good while it lasted”.
(Fully support you nudging people out of this thread! But miscommunications make my scalp itch, haha.)
It feels way more inconsiderate when you already locked the other person out of the room earlier that day AND the other person strongly disapproves of your shameless cheating/abandonment of your last partner.
I mean, meh to the last part. It’s not inconsiderate to bang your partner just because someone else disapproves of them. Definitely is to sexile someone twice in one day, that’s so rude.
The way you phrased it, sure. But Sarah was making an active effort to get over her prior judgement of Joe for Joyce’s sake, and it was working. Joyce’s new relationship comes at the expense of cheating on and casually discarding someone Sarah does now care about. That’s a lot more than just banging a partner your roommate doesn’t approve of.
I stand by my previous opinion. I don’t think other people get to weigh in on whether you bang your partner frequently or not if they aren’t in the relationship. Their opinions just don’t matter.
I actually don’t even think Joyce owes Sarah an apology, tbh. For the crime of… creating a situation where Sarah grew close to someone she might not have otherwise? She owes Joe about seventy apologies, but not Sarah imo.
I’m personally in a weird state where I agree Joyce hasn’t done anything specifically to Sarah to merit NEEDING to deliver an apology, but I still feel like Sarah’d be justified in being really unhappy with Joyce’s behavior anyway.
If you share a living space with someone no amount of black mail or magic is going to keep them from having an opinion on who you’re banging in the shared space. And Sarah isn’t going to be afraid to share it.
Yeah, I should clarify — Joyce openly propositioning Dorothy while Sarah is (as far as we can tell) still in the room IS in fact doing something that she owes Sarah an apology for.
I never said Joyce owes Sarah an apology. I just said she’s being inconsiderate, because she is. If you don’t think it’s inconsiderate for someone caught between friends to witness one friend shamelessly flaunting the relationship she cheated on the other friend for, especially when it’s not only not the first time that day AND Sarah is now trying to sleep, I don’t know what to tell you.
When I was that age, I was merely uncomfortable enough with two people hooking up in the room to leave and spend a couple hours wandering town at midnight. And then again at 3 AM when they did it again. And that was without any cheating or drama involved. That was inconsiderate all on its own, but the extra shit going on here makes this scenario much worse.
Pouring one out for Sarah right now; poor gal has to deal with these two being insufferable all night. Least the rest of us only have to deal with a few minutes a day of Repetitive Twee Bullshit(tm).
When my freshman year roommate started pulling these kind of shenanigans, I broke him of it by just making popcorn anytime he and his girl of the moment started.
I’m now just deeply invested in what it’s actually going to take to brute-force upload the concept of personal boundaries into Joyce. Like, I’m genuinely curious how Willis is going to deal with the wanton sex-beast he’s unleashed on the rest of the cast, lmao.
Part of me gets it. Joyce becoming a horny idiot once she had sex for the first time was prophesied long ago. But man am I having a tough time BUYING it. I know dating Joe broke down a lot of her walls but man, I really wish we got to see more of that buildup in terms of her physical relationship with Dorothy. Again, like with Lucy, it feels like someone who had a really slow buildup to physical intimacy just flips a switch and starts having sex a whole bunch and I just find that less interesting than that slow buildup stuff?
Joyce awkwardly asking where she can touch Dorothy or Dorothy feeling Joyce out through her insecurities. Maybe they just cuddle for a while. Maybe joyce is fine groping/being groped under her shirt. Maybe she likes kissing without tongue at first and slowly advances. Maybe Joyce actually explores what she finds attractive about women in contrast to what she finds attractive about men.
I dunno. The switch up feels so sudden and fast it’s basically lost me in the dust. Which…like…is even weirder cuz DOROTHY is also only very recently opening herself up to her attraction to women. Like Dorothy declared herself a Kinsey 0 and now she’s super flustered by the idea of taking Joyce’s top off. Does Dorothy like boobs? Or is it more the teasing that revs her up? I feel like we just speedrun right into the fuck phase.
Even with Dina and Becky we had a lotta buildup to them pushing each other’s buttons and finding out what they liked about the other. And becky made it pretty well known she likes everything about women. And even then I feel like once they hopped into sex it felt a little sudden.
speakin of Becky and Dina, at least we saw Joyce and Dorothy clean the sheets after boinkin. We still don’t know if that dinosaur has been cleaned off, or has been stewin in sapphic musk for the past couple months.
Weren’t her sheets cleaned recently. I remember Walky waking up Ethan and Asher because they fell asleep in Amber’s bed. “Hey Hot dudes. Can you get up so we can wash Amber’s sheets.” Or something like that?
I was a bit angry at Joe and Joyce at first, seeing it as a wasted non-romantic friendship potential. Then I was like “okay, nevermind, they are cute”. Then it all went south (or east, wherever it is Bulmeria is supposed to lie
And worse, Joe/Joyce both had more potential to be interesting and was ACTUALLY more interesting. These dorks have yet to even have any SIGN that they’re going to learn anything from or about each other, every time there’s even a hint of any interesting growth or change or conflict or even disagreement they gloss right over it
On this point, I actually disagree. We’re literally seeing Dorothy picking up more details about Joyce that she hadn’t fully internalized from their platonic friendship, in real time; and, like, literally every detail is consistently giving her pause.
It’s giving her pause for like a panel or two, though, and then we have no reaction, no pushback, no nothin’.
Now, granted, I also commented that one of Dorothy’s problems in her relationship with Danny was that her idea of hinting how the relationship would go is so subtle you need a neutrino detector to spot it, so maybe in a month they’ll have a big breakup when Joyce finally says something Dorothy can’t just pause over, but I don’t have any reason to suspect that yet.
Yeah, it’s totally correct that Dorothy needs to collect a preponderance of evidence to actually act on anything, and I heavily suspect that that’s the reason it’s gonna take her so long to even think about setting some boundaries with Joyce. Joyce is truly more Danny than Danny ever was, so maybe, Dorothy can get to that place faster?
It was so much betterrrrr blehhhh! I hate how comfortable these dorks already are with each other. No tension, no friction, it’s like they’ve been married for years. And that’s not interesting! Where’s the conflict??? Becky and Dina got accused to being too sacharine but they have internal conflict. Dina had a hard time deprogramming Becky from her cult upbringing. Becky was insecure about Diana’s asexuality. And now, y’know. The obvious. Even Danny and Sal have some internal conflict stemming from her issues being comfortable with others. most of it was before they got together, which makes the level of comfort they have now feel earned. But there’s even still stuff like sal feeling a way about her parents liking Danny cuz he’s white, and that rebellious instinct to mistrust anything they want for her. She loves and trusts him enough to be able to work through it after just getting the idea out of her system but it’s still SOMETHING. .
These two might as well be a background character couple for how little they actually have going on. Sure there’s conflict; the cheating and how it’ll affect their other relationships with people, the newspaper, homophobia as a general concept. But that’s all external. That’s dojo vs the world. I wanna see them stumbling to figure it out, stepping on each other’s toes, getting nervous and insecure about something. Will dotty start feeling some type of way about Joyce boldly proclaiming how much she loves kissing and fucking her everywhere they go? Will Joyce be bothered by Dotty doing things like denying the newspaper cover was them? Will dotty lean more on the inappropriateness of how they behaved at the protest? Will her white guilt start kicking her ass, will she get upset about Joyce’s callous nature when she speaks to Muslim women about this stuff? Will Joyce conflate that with shame or embarrassment over the kiss? Gimme misunderstandings people! Where the drama????
When haters start specifically seeking you out to snark on your positive threads, you will think back on this day where you were all over the hater thread being unwanted and understand why.
Yeah, both of them just being so fully into it right out of the gate is so unbelievable it really contributes to the feeling that this is just the OTP being railroaded down our throats.
Also this is a joke observation but between asma, lucy, and now dorothy, joycjoyce won’t let anyone just *fuckin’ read in peace*
Damn can’t believe joyce is anti-literacy, smh
Yeah, this. I did read another comment that Biology is on Tuesday, not Monday, which I’ll believe because I have no clue about any of the schedules myself. And any interaction with the larger friend group should be at least somewhat interesting!
I’m sure Willis wants us to think this is cute or whatever, but I just find Joyce and Dorothy grating and annoying in every strip where they’re the main focus. Mainly because of their shitty behavior towards other characters in most previous strips of this storyline so far.
Well, to be fair, they have been called out on it repeatedly in the comic. Maybe something will actually come of that someday. If I’d been holding my breath for it, though, I wouldn’t be alive to type this.
This is literally it. Joyce only understands life in terms of Drastic Situations and Huge Gestures, and he pseudo-sense of ethics used to be tethered to the Drastic Situation of getting pilloried in Hell for eternity, and so she persistently expressed constant moral panic to everybody around her, to try to assuage that fear.
She’s gotta actually transfer that fear of upsetting God, into some kind of actual conscious process where she cares about other peoples’ feelings. She never had to care about any peoples’ feelings up until now; she was only ever concerned with how God felt about her actions, and now God isn’t Real, so she’s transferred that same obsessive energy to impulsively fixating on exclusively her feelings, and how her desires inform her actions.
The grim reality is, she’s going to be a relentless vehicle for hurting everybody around her, for quite some time in this strip. She’s gonna hurt Joe, she’s gonna hurt Dorothy, she’s gonna hurt Sarah, and Becky, and Dina, and probably five more people. Something drastic actually will need to happen, to cause direct consequences to her, personally, before she can evolve into an actual worldly and caring person, because at the end of the day, she just does not fucking get what it means to be secular, and only understands it in terms of her past religious baggage.
I didn’t think initially that Willis would want to go there, but I’m starting to agree with the people doomsaying about something really bad happening to Becky. That’s the degree of shit it’s gonna take, to constitute a wake-up call for Joyce. She’s going to alienate most of her friend group, with the way she’s acting.
Unless the “Willis is just trolling us for his OTP” doomsayers are actually the ones who are correct, and this comic no longer operates off of any other internal logic besides “make my self-insert have hot lesbian sex and never be wrong,” and I really, really hope y’all are wrong, but I’m beginning to see why you’ve come to that conclusion.
Except that characterization ignores a lot of things – like her entire behavior towards Becky after Becky came out. Or Dorothy for being an atheist. She was even worried about Joe and Becky at first with this new relationship before the story abruptly swerved away from both of them so she could go OwO mode. Hell, it even ignores the way she came to the realization of her feelings for Dorothy. She made a big gesture out of it, but there wasn’t one before that.
Whatever this is, it’s something else entirely. It’s hard not to see it as bad, rushed writing – and considering that there are apparently posts about how a lot of this wasn’t the original plan…
Again: that last point just isn’t true. The only thing that wasn’t “part of the original plan” was it happening now. Willis showed us strips from 2023 and 2024 both showing Joe talking to Dorothy earlier, as well as a bunch of strips they wrote to specifically foreshadow this.
You can still find it rushed or think it’s bad writing, but it was not literally rushed, Willis took their time with this. They at one point thought it wouldn’t start for another 5 years, but they also at one point thought it would start 2 years ago.
This is why Joe and Joyce couldn’t happen. If they’d actually went fully through an entire round of sex then they would have both been locked in a room until they fucked each other to death. I kinda wish I’d seen that outcome.
Hm… since sex is binary for her, I don’t suppose the newly horny Joyce is gonna ever start to wonder what it would have been like if she’d been with a man… right?
Thats not happening until Joe actually talks to Joyce wirh Dorothy present. Joyce is actively trying to avoid as much confrontation as possible to maintain her bliss bubble.
I mean, she has not at all indicated nor indulged Joe’s polyamory request, she basically did the real world version of leaving him on read. As such, regardless of where she stands with Joe she certainly isn’t obligated to immediately or even in short time frames discuss how the break up with Joe went with Dorothy, she made her intention to break up with him clear, he said he wanted her to have what she wants, she ran off to address newspaper then Becky then Hank then Joss potentially outing herself to Hank then months of pent up feelings for Dorothy finally being able to be realized. Frankly neither Joe nor Dorothy could ever hear more about the poly proposition and that would still be a fairly clear answer in and of itself, which is what the strip between Joe and Sarah seemed to be meant to convey.
It does suck, Joe cared a lot about Joyce, but it’s still incredibly real – imbalanced relationship interest happens just about all the time, and ultimately taken as a whole there’s little more to say.
There have been a few hints – like the reference to Joe as her boyfriend and how Joyce looked when Dorothy corrected that to ex-.
But yeah, if she’s really not interested, then it doesn’t really matter. If she is still considering it, then it gets awkward that she hasn’t told Dorothy.
And honestly, I’d be surprised if Willis openly teased poly like that and then just shut it down with no further drama.
I mean, as I’ve kinda hinted at before — I could probably enjoy an entire webcomic of these two being cute and sexy and never really encountering any trouble or pushback that takes longer than two strips to resolve.
It’s just that strip wouldn’t be Dumbing of Age, it’d be something else, and I really don’t want Dumbing of Age to turn into that instead of being what it already has been.
I want horrible things to happen to Dorothy and Joyce. Not because I don’t love them but because I am an awful monster who wants to see his favorite characters in horrible melodrama.
Dorothy’s real parents turn out to be MAGA Republicans! Come on!
The Dean believes she’s Amazi-Girl!
Dorothy gets put on a Terrorist Watch List for her radical activism!
Likewise! I love Dorothy. She’s my absolute favourite character, she’s loads of fun in the strip and I’d probably also really dig her in real life. I also really love the current story arc and cannot get enough of her and Joyce.
But I also want Dorothy to hurt. I want her to crash so horribly. I want her to cry, to realise the hurt she’s caused Walky (because that was all her, really). I want her decisions to be bad and cause disasters.
o3o
Apropos of nothing, I still really really ship Walky and Amber. And since I am blessed with artistic skill I decided to draw a couple pictures. https://imgchest.com/p/qe4gmbz2q4j
He’s sitting lower than her on the bed so he can rest his head on her shoulder/nape area.
At leas that was my intention! They’re the same height but Amber probably comes across larger cuz she’s BUFF.
Is her comment about not remembering how it happened referring to the abdominal scar?
Nice drawing.
Amber seemed to be feeling a little helpless and sad saying that; I even wondered if it was only her that couldn’t remember or if AG also couldn’t say.
Yeah. I dunno what they’ll do with that storyline but I like (or at least find it interesting) the idea that because she was Amazi-girl when the stabbing/gunshot/whatever wound happened she has no recollection outside of getting patched up.
I dunno there’s just an amount of Drama of waking up with a new injury you don’t recall the source of.
Also scars are kinda cool and I like drawing it. Making it a bit jaggy cuz it was a rush job.
I love these, but if it’s now then I think Amber’s hair is Longer now? Past her shoulders at least. I also think that, since the time skip, Amber and amazigirl have kind of reconciled and a result of that seems to be fewer memory gaps when switching? Though it’s true that I think Amber fully ceded control to Amazigirl since the party so may have literally no awareness of happenings since then.
I think you’re right on both accounts. Though yeah I think there’s probably still blackouts between Amazi-girl and Amber. I’m also going off of the state she seemed to be in when she woke up with Sal (which could very well have been cuz of blood loss or drugs) but I just…think it’s kinda interesting drama!
As for the hair I just drew her from memory and didn’t use a reference 😛
Not sure I understand that first one; are they trading pokémon to help fill each other’s pokédexes, and Amber sent Walky a shiny when a normal one would’ve worked just as well (dex-wise)?
Yep. You nailed it. I just consider that a form of nerdy flirting. And walky is teasing her by calling her down bad cuz clearly she’s buttering him up.
Damn I might actually come around to amber and walky, just by virtue of contrast. I thought it was chemistryless and lame but…damn at least it had SOMETHING going on
While I’ve personally been finding their more generically cute moments kinda bland, Joyce’s tendency to so often say or do something entertainingly dumb more than makes up for it, as far as I’m concerned.
Don’t worry about offending haters! It’s good to see people sharing positive feelings.
I like the moments we’ve seen of their friendship dynamic reemerging after the chaos of starting this relationship, because it shows how well they’ll do once the dust settles.
Listen, that’s pretty true these days, but when it all kicked off there were a solid 2months or so of EVERY positive comment about them getting piled on with moral outrage or snarky takes on how you shouldn’t like them. It was very “so you hate waffles” but replace that with “so you love cheating!”
This strip is kind of nothing but I’m not hating on Joyce that much here since look if it was Joyce/Joe or Becky/Dina many of us would be just rolling our eyes and going, ‘oh, you silly horned-up ex-fundie… but it’s kinda cute’.
We always knew she was gonna snap into a hypersexual drive once the dam broke loose. Just depends on if her partner would be into it.
I ~will~ say that if it was Joyce and Joe people would be raging about something similar but different just as hard. Every time Joyce indicated sexual interest in Joe there was a section of the comments saying she was making him uncomfortable, or pushing things on him, or ignoring his needs, etcetc.
Implying that, because he was trying to be chill and wait and not just jump her bones that he somehow also didn’t want his girlfriend telling him she thought he was hot or that she was excited by him, didn’t want her kissing him or letting him know where her head was at re: sex.
If Joe was sitting there trying to read they’d be losing it that Joyce won’t just let him exist without being a sex object.
Largely a different group of people but very true.
(I was sort of one of them, I didn’t think Joyce was doing it on purpose but I did worry that she wasn’t really paying attention to his nervous signals. That part turned out okay, thankfully!)
I don’t think I’ve actually seen anyone ask for high-paced action, just more drama or focus on characters they like, but this is good advice either way. Watch a movie! It WILL be more interesting.
I don’t know what you mean. That’s Joyce jamming out, not a 28th shot of them in bed together. No one’s asking for action dude we’re asking for drama. Cuz y’know. It’s not an action comic. It’s a DRAMA.
It’s not like I think this is fun or interesting but what you’re saying is just factually untrue & you have to know it. Joyce making a raunchy joke or innuendo every other strip is and could not be more horny that impromptu aging up the twin kid characters (who mostly commented on how much their parents fucked or whatever) to be able to also pair them up with men and talk about how hot they are. It’s just not.
no I love being literal but now that I do know you’re joking I also don’t think it’s that funny. That’s a me issue though so I’m sorry for the stray comment!
Her alternate reality version laid down like that with Walky too after they officially became a couple in “It’s Walky.” I guess it’s just a Joyce thing.
Then again, DoA Joyce does like her romantic bed partners touching her at all times (as seen with her constantly putting Joe’s hands on her boobs during their nap together) so maybe she’s just being respectful of Dotty’s “alone time” with her book since the two of them have had constant physical contact since they got Hank’s “blessing.”
True story — I used to have a roommate who slept exactly like that.
We, of course, teased him mercilessly about it, especially because his loft was too tall on top of him being 6’4″ anyway, so his nose was about a foot from the ceiling at the best of times.
It was somehow even funnier when one of the guys said something to finally make him snap (I think it was some kind of over the top King Tut riff) and it turns out he’d done enough martial arts and gymnastics to kinda instantly jackknife himself in half and pommel-horse off the corner post of the loft in one motion, from that position, to get in the guy’s face to grump that he was TRYING to SLEEP.
Also Joe is not in control of, nor owed anything from, Joyce by default. They were in a two week relationship in which he was far more invested than she was and he almost immediately sabotaged it by pushing Dorothy to understand her actual feelings for Joyce, on multiple occasions if I recall correctly. I’m open to wing wrong but I don’t think this “Joe waiting for an answer on poly” will come home to roost the way people seem to be waiting for.
That’s a better use of the word “owed” than we usually see in these discussions. It’s not an obligation that she’s legally or morally required to follow through on, but it would help build and maintain social relations.
He’s owed an answer since Joyce explicitly said she would give him an answer and would continue the conversation later, which to most people means “later this day” if it’s not specified “at a later date.”
Esp since literally nothing happens on this page at all. Like, them lying in bed together cutely should’ve been in the midnight chapter end montage thing. Unless next strip is Sarah kicking them out of the room, this page does nothing for characterization, plot, anything. I feel like the day should’ve ended six times by now lol
I’m not sure that he’s owed an answer today – it’s a big question and a big step. Taking time to think it over and discuss it with your other partner doesn’t seem out of line. Of course, Joyce doesn’t really seem to have been thinking it about and she certainly hasn’t brought it up to Dorothy.
I mean when someone says “I’ll get back to you later okay? I promise. Later.” Very emphatically, they do in fact owe it to you to get back to you later. It’s way later now.
Honestly, for all that this is easy to take as plain horniness (and let it never be said that Joyce isn’t horny), for some reason it reads to me far more as a desire for intimacy than sex per se. Could be projecting. Who knows.
I think while we’re in this zone of “Dorothy gives Joyce a safe release valve for all her repressed feelings” those two are gonna be awfully hard to crowbar apart
At least until Dorothy feels like getting the crowbar herself. It’s been interesting to see how much more permissive her boundaries are with Joyce vs. her previous relationships.
I just hope that at some point we get to see the reactions of Sal and Danny to this mess. Not only are they my favorite couple, so I’d be happy to see them for that reason alone, but surely they’d have some opinions on the stuff that went down? What with Danny being Joe’s best friend and Sal being Walky’s brother?
As discussed in previous threads, I don’t think Sal would get heated but she probably would hit Dorothy with “Yo, I get that my brother is a mess, but that was fucked up how you strung him along a second time.” The vibe would be harshed for at least a while.
I could see this giving Danny the unconscious green light to unload every bad thought he’s ever had about Dorothy. I’m curious how he’d behave at full tilt.
The reason I don’t think this would necessarily come to pass is because of how Danny and sal tend to vibe in general. Sal tries not to get involved in All That Mess, and she is likely more concerned about Amazigirl and having had to go to Asher.
Danny has generally had a negative opinion of Joe’s behaviour and without the full facts may assume this was Joe’s will somehow, and even with full facts will know this was Joe’s will actually. Either way, Danny has not been keeping tabs nor being a dedicated friend in the past few months with his focus on Sal, as far as we’ve seen. Add to this that he generally doesn’t seem to like to dwell on the negative or gossip, I think he is probably fine.
It’s good to note that Ethan legitimately and directly stole Asher from Jennifer before this, and Sal and Danny either don’t know that yet or don’t care, despite Sal growing up with Jennifer and Asher, and Danny having had a huge crush and sticking his foot in it with Ethan. The Ethan/Asher thing was way worse in terms of cheating, even if Ethan needed something like that and Jennifer was being a world class knob.
OTOH, Danny did just have a talk with Dorothy about bisexuals accidentally cheating that he didn’t seem to happy with, so that’s set up to come back around.
And I don’t think anyone knows the details of Ethan and Asher hooking up and I disagree it was “way worse”. Ethan kissed him, he pulled back and then went and told Jennifer about it. Later, she said he wasn’t her boyfriend and he took that as a breakup.
Yeah, Jennifer didn’t think Asher was her boyfriend, so I’m not sure how Ethan stole anyone (a phrasing which I dislike in the first place because it implies ownership and not agency for the person who did the actual cheating).
I also don’t think Asher cheated. One kiss then an immediate confession and getting told your partner doesn’t think you’re in a relationship would be incredibly thin evidence of anything like that.
I don’t think it’s really the responsibility of people external to the relationship to keep the rules and boundaries of a relationship they aren’t in. There weren’t any lines for Ethan to cross other than Asher’s consent, and he didn’t cross that line.
Can we just replace these two with sal and Danny actually? I’ll take all these nothing strips if it’s Sal and Danny. They have better chemistry and it feels way better seeing them just chill knowing what an uphill battle it was for them to reach that point, Sal getting comfortable around Danny and Danny having infinite patience for her issues.
I think Sal mostly won’t care. She’d care a little bit, on her brother’s behalf, but she’d very much be a “let everyone involved make their own choices” type.
Danny is probably gonna have stronger opinions. Even if he’s over dotty, he’s still shown a slight bit of possessiveness with his attitude toward walky, and the fact that dotty has *another* partner- one that factored into her decision not to go to yale, no less- will probably sting a bit given her reasons for breaking up with him. Similar to Becky with the whole “oh it was just me, not any of those other factors i thought it was” though not anywhere near as intense. He probably also already grappled with that a bit when she got with Walky. He probably would also judge dotty a bit for the messiness of the break-up, and he’d definitely be mad at joyce for hurting his best friend
Well, Sal already saw them kissing and just said they were being less gay than usual, so I agree that she probably won’t care much. I can see Danny being pissed on Joe’s behalf. I’m not sure how he’d feel about Dorothy. On the one hand, she cheated, but on the other hand, she cheated on Walky, who he hates. Not sure what he’d make of that.
Oh so it is night time. It’s felt impossible to track when thing shave been happening for the last day of comic time, I thought at first Dorothy and Joyce were going down to talk to Asma at like 2 am.
I think this is a good opportunity to sum up the days events. Starting in the morning:
-We open with Amber and Sal. Amber’s getting patched up after probably nearly dying. Nothing really happens here except Asher possibly getting closer to discovering she’s Amazi-Girl
-Joyce and Dorothy woke up, got chewed out by Sarah for being shameless, cheating hussies
-Joyce and Dorothy go to take showers. Dorothy checks on a wounded Amber and finds a way to feel guilty about it.
-Booster reads Joyce’s mind and immediately understood everything going on with her
-They went to break up with their respective boyfriends and discovered they were outed by the school paper. Joe calls Joyce a hussy. Based.
-Raidah is also pissed about the paper for different reasons and the same reason but for different reasons, she chats with Alice and Asma about this. They all agree to be best friends from now on
-Joyce and Dorothy tried collecting every newspaper in their hall before running off to confront Daisy for outing them
-They briefly meet and talk with Jennifer where Dorothy admits she only saw Walky as a disposable sex toy and she enjoyed tossing him aside for any arbitrary reason and that she’ll do it again
-Joyce and Dorothy head back to Joyce’s room assumedly to fuck only to run into Becky who was lurking in the shadows like a true creep
-As soon as they finish stabbing Becky in the chest with their love Hank shows up
-It’s probably early to midday as all 3 girls try to distract Hank from discovering both his children are super gay
-Becky bails and Hank only discovers one of his daughters is gay they go get pizza for lunch and possibly talk about the evils of communism and why voting for Trump in 2016 wasn’t that bad actually
-During lunch time Raidah also confronts Daisy about her being a generally irresponsible lesbian and editor mostly that later though
-Alice finds time to talk to Ruth and angst about how horny she is for Jennifer still
-Depending on how long that lunch was it could be early afternoon when Becky decides god isn’t real because she can’t fuck her childhood crush
-Jennifer being Walky’s only friend does what any true friend would when their pal is going through a breakup and kicks him off his bed. Based.
-Having sacrificed the faith of a lesbian Joyce and Dorothy finally consummate their love as prophesied in the forbidden texts thus dooming their friend group to burn in the precursor fires of creation!…..They fuck
-Becky maybe breaks up with her girlfriend while Joyce and Dorothy fuck
-Sarah tells Joe that Joyce definitely ain’t coming back as Joyce and Dorothy fuck. Quite literally while they fuck, like in the same strip.
-Dorothy and Joyce fuck for at least an hour. It’s probably late afternoon by now. They make a mess.
-Deciding it’s wise not to sleep in the aftermath of their lust they decide to do laundry
-Joyce and Dorothy decide to annoy Asma on their way to do laundry, Joyce specifically decides to annoy Lucy
-Walky tries to slide into Amber’s DMs, it doesn’t work
-Raidah makes Joyce feel bad. It’s gets over a thousand comments and comments turned off the day after. Good work girl!
-Carla is a chicken. Bwak! Bwak! I mean she very understandably fails to confront her incredibly supportive billionaire parents about their responsibility and profiting from a genocide and that maybe they could divest in some way.
-Sarah returns assumedly from fucking her boyfriend. She angsty because getting good d from her short king bf might also mean caring about him.
-And here we are. I guess Joyce is still horny. It’s probably evening now. Broken down like this it does read like a day’s worth of shit happened. My guess this storyline is close to ending.
Did ya’ll like this? Was this too long? Did I miss anything? Did I accidentally make this a reply? Maybe someone should do an end of arc breakdown every story? Maybe we do this again?
This was my general read on how the day’s events progressed as well, it was helpful, I’m assuming any weird or incorrect assumptions or presentations are for comedic value in which case also good work, they made me chuckle!
I mean he less so called her a hussy as pointes out she was acting like one indirect contradiction of her own self analysis, but I was trying to make a joke there. I guess it didn’t land. I’ll note that and work on it.
Thank you so much for this, there are some things I completely forgot, like Becky really did pull a jumpscares there lol. And I forgot Raidah and Asma talked at all, I just remembered Asma and Alice because I hope they get together hehe
I can’t help but note the tragic irony that Joyce is actually Becky’s ideal sexual partner in almost all terms. Someone so extremely horny it both validates and enables Becky’s sexuality and desires.
All this has been during the weekend, right? So the next day should be a school day?
Do they have biology class tomorrow? If so, I hope Joyce and Dotty have all the sex they could possibly want right now, because there’s gonna be one hell of a reckoning once Dotty finds out Joyce never OFFICIALLY broke up with Joe and has been too blinded by lust to bring it up….
Joe didn’t officially break up with Joyce, but that’s actually meaningless unless Joyce decides it has some meaning, which she has given no indication of so far.
She did, however, promise him a conversation. For all your ‘she owes him nothing’ talk, you conveniently forget that she DID in fact promise a conversation. Which she now does in fact owe.
She said that today, FWIW (while running out the door at emergency speed because of the newspaper — she might not even remember saying anything in her rush to leave). This very morning. It’s only now the end of the same day.
It would be pretty weird, honestly, for her to have squeezed a follow-up conversation into her schedule so far.
So, yeah, if she even remembers it, she should talk to Joe at some point; but in the meantime we are seriously in “No answer is an answer” territory here.
Anyway it’d be pretty fucked up for her to forget she promised to get back to him on this very important conversation but that’s probably what happened, Fionna and Cake style. I’m betting she’ll remember in class tomorrow. Anyway when you say “I’ll get back to you later” that tends to imply “later today.” She spent most of the day fucking around, doing nothing, harassing brown women. Plenty of time to get back to that very important conversation but I’m guessing she fully compartmentalized Joe away, aside from mentioning once in the slipshine that she’s constantly horny around him and dotty.
She said she cheated on him and he should break up with her, he said “why can’t I just be a side piece and you can have Dorothy as your main dish.” Joyce COULD have said “No, it’s over. Goodbye,” but instead said they’d talk about it later… and she hasn’t seen him since. Contrast that with how fast she was with Walky by telling him cruelly that Dorothy is hers and she “won,” then laughing in his face.
She also never confirmed that she dumped Joe when Dorothy said they BOTH broke up with their boyfriends so they could be together, so no, the breakup hasn’t officially happened, Joyce is just too much into her honeymoon phase to realize that she still left Joe hanging in the polyamory proposal. A simple “No, goodbye,” was ALL she needed to end things conclusively… and I just know this lack of clarity is going to bite Joyce and Dotty HARD.
> unless Joyce decides it has some meaning, which she has given no indication of so far
This is flatly untrue. Joyce has given several indications that she does not believe she has broken up with Joe, most notably panel 4 here: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/splash/ where she says “My boyfriend,” Dorothy corrects her to “Ex-boyfriend,” and Joyce makes a face, looks aside, and has the tiniest-font “Yyehh?” response. That is not the reaction of someone who believes she has officially broken up with someone.
I think it’s been shown that they each have a high bed so that they can have a little office area below, I’m not totally sure how they’re positioned, either end to end or on different walls of the room.
I’m not sure how everyone else’s sexual awakenings went, but after spending so long holding on to a bunch of church rules, and whatever else, after I had sex the first time that s like literally all I wanted to do. Even more than when I hadn’t had it before.
This is where Joyce is now. She’s WAAAAAY more repressed than I ever was.
Also also, when I realized I was queer and finally able to be queer that started a point where I just had sex to have sex because it was new and interesting again. So Joyce is getting a little double whammied here, and Dorothy is getting it too.
Like I know everyone is tired of seeing them be horny at each other, but (speaking from someone with similar repressions) particularly very realistic.
As a data point, I went from church-repressed to “fuck it, I’m having sex because depression and probably atheist” and while I was pretty focused on having more sex after that, I still managed to not piss off my roommate about it.
Like, there’s horny, there’s too horny to function, and there’s too horny to be allowed to exist in polite company, and I suspect MOST of us stayed in the middle there but Joyce keep edging over towards the far side of the spectrum.
Which means Sarah is at eyelevel. Especially bad, because I think I remember that the loft beds are situated foot-to-foot so she’ll be pretty close to the “action”.
On a more serious note, I feel like Dorothy is desperately grasping for a sense of peace and control in this situation. She is not able to keep her mind just on requited feelings for Joyce, it seems like she feels the repercussions of their union much more heavily and is mainly just trying to restore a sense of moral character in herself again.
Joyce is happy and free for the first time in her life with someone she’s wanted but never thought she could actually have and is riding horny euphoria, possibly to intentionally block out everything else. And you know what? Good for her. She keeps getting locked in misery and mindfucking, some escape from that constant background radiation of the world being scary and wrong is needed.
Eh, I think Joyce has swung from one extreme to the other. She’s running on pure id now that she was given the green light from her father, and the fact that she gets so defensive when people tell her she can’t grope and kiss Dotty every second of every day is a big tell that she’s acting reckless. Dorothy is at least catching on that there are consequences coming, but Joyce is too much in her own lesbian marriage fantasy that she doesn’t care.
It’s possible, although in my own marriage I found the Gomez Addams strategy does actually work really well. (“What you do is this: you find someone you really like and who likes you, and then you just treat them like they want to be treated all the time and make sure they’re the center of your world, you just gotta totally simp out with no chill but without making them uncomfortable or smothered.”)
“Oh, NO, this shirt is SO uncomfortable for sleeping! If only SOMEONE would take it OFF of me!”
“You know, you could just ask me to take it off you. Like, directly.”
Unrelated to the comic, but does anyone know how I can receive notifications when someone replies to my comments? I have definitely typed my email right and there’s nothing in my spam.
She mainly broke up with Danny because he was casually dismissive of her ambitions to leave Indiana and attend Yale, although she’d clearly been building up to it for a while. Fair cop to her, her priorities have since shifted, in large part because of Joyce. I think there are other problems likely to arise between these two.
She broke up with Danny because she didn’t want to date him anymore.
It was not a punishment she administered for being whatever “a healthy amount of clingy” means, it was not a reaction to any one thing Danny had done.
Dorothy as much as directly said that she’d been hoping the breakup could just happen organically as a result of the two of them having different career aspirations, and she was caught off-guard when, instead of going to a university with a better computer science program, Danny followed her to IU. That she wanted to break up with him was apparently obvious to JOE, who then began dropping hints to Danny, but Danny himself remained cheerfully, romantically oblivious. Even when she told him they “needed to talk about their relationship”, Danny was psyched.
I still think the thing Danny most obviously did wrong in that conversation that we can assume had been going on for a while was not listening to Dorothy: she was trying to let him down gently (even though she’d waited too long for it to really be gentle), but he just kept happily papering over everything she was saying with what he wanted to hear. Finally, when she told him she was going to Yale and he wouldn’t be able to follow her, he said “or you could change your mind 🙂” and she exploded.
The way she wound up telling Danny they were through was a negative reaction to him ignoring her and being really dismissive of her ambitions, but the actual breakup was not something done out of anger.
Worth noting: after the breakup, Danny did briefly angrily regret having come to IU, but for the people who wanna blame Dorothy for not breaking up with Danny before he applied to IU, he had previously been steadfastly lying to her that IU was a great school and exactly where he would’ve gone even if they weren’t a couple. She suspected otherwise, but I really dislike the narrative that Danny being at IU is entirely her fault.
I concur that Danny being at IU is not her fault at all, except in the weirdly tangent sense that she probably shoulda broke up with him when she wanted to originally instead of trying to let “going to different schools” solve the problem for her.
Where I think we might disagree is that I don’t think Danny wasn’t listening, because I don’t think Dorothy was dropping hints in any kind of way that was detectable unless you had the relationship equivalent of one of those huge underground neutrino finders — if she was capable of making it a clean break with who she was at that time, she’d’ve done it before they graduated high school.
Again: absolutely she should have had this conversation months ago, before Danny enrolled at IU. It was definitely cowardly on her part to avoid doing so.
But it also seems to have been her first serious relationship and she’s socially awkward, so I think “she hoped he’d get the hint and that the breakup could be a mutual thing” is an understandable dumb teenager move.
This also feels like an area where people put Dorothy up on the exact same “worldly and super mature” pedestal that Joyce puts her up on, and then get extra mad when she does stupid, immature things, blaming Dorothy for failing to live up to claims of maturity she’s never actually made.
^^^^ all of this with Danny was really easily avoided by being more direct with him before he sent in his college application, but he also seems to have been her first serious boyfriend. Dorothy is as naive as many of the other freshman characters, and she thought “everyone knows high school romances usually don’t work out, right?” — a silly assumption, but an understandable one for a 17-year-old to make.
(They would’ve been younger than they are now when they first started sending out college applications.)
There’s also a bit of a thought here where Dorothy kinda HAS implicitly made a lot of those worldly/super-mature claims, early on, with her open political ambitions and her “no, boyfriends and cartoons are distracting, studying is the only thing!” statements (that are, of course, almost always immediately belied by her actual actions, because she IS just a normal college kid when it comes down to it).
Aside, kinda parallel Frankly, her most interesting conflict has ALWAYS been the one between her ambitions/presentation and the things she actually wants (and the figuring out of same).
I mean, she said it was cute that Joyce thought she knew more than Joyce about college parties. She suggested going to the police after Joyce was roofied and then did basic Google research to realize it wasn’t true. She was surprised and displeased to hear that a Twilight movie could pass the Bechdel test. And, as folks keep pointing out, some of them in-universe, her idea of a career goal hadn’t evolved since she was like six years old.
Did she try to be no-nonsense about focusing on school? Sure. But the idea that the way to do college is to deny yourself any and all “distractions” is in itself naive.
I think this is a case of how we as a society tend to assume that “quiet and bookish” is synonymous with “mature”, especially for girls.
Honestly I think the only area where Dorothy has made an actual claim to maturity is “not being a virgin”, and that plus “she’s book-smart” really does seem to be enough to make her forever not just as naive as Joyce is, even while she does things like “go sit on a dryer instead of masturbating” (I’m talking about when she went back to the laundry room alone here).
I actually have a hypothesis that most of Dorothy’s ardent opposition in this comments, are simply guilty of expecting more from her than every other character, because they actually fell for Dorothy’s own bullshit vis a vis how mature she made herself out to be. The expectations are just higher for her, because, well, Dorothy set those expectations at the place she wanted to be…and that place was incredibly unrealistic, and she could never actually measure up to it in the timeframe of this comic.
I don’t even think it’s Dorothy’s “own” bullshit. I think she’s only ever actually claimed to be worldly in the sense of not being a virgin. She PRESENTS as mature. Former Gifted Kid energy. It’s not the same thing as actually thinking or trying to sell herself to other people as super mature and worldly.
Like, she doesn’t want to call body parts “capoodle” and she objected to pajama jeans (which she then regretted doing and stopped doing). Are there any other examples, though?
I don’t think she regretted. Joycr just kinda told walky that Dorothy is too good for him and then Dorothy asked him to strip in her doorway so she could “forget what the fight was about”. I don’t recall anything to the tune of “sorry you can wear what you want” or “I might not like it but your feelings matter so I’ll let it slide.”
And like you could argue she’s showing that by not getting mad about it in the future but like…not everything has to be implicit, Dorothy. Especially since their reconciliation came in the form of shaming walky for having a sense of principles and self worth.
I agree that the form of “actually making up” was really silly and kind of uncool. But I also think part of the problem was that Dorothy wasn’t really meant to be “mad at Walky for wearing clothes he likes”, just “embarrassed to be seen with a guy in pajama pants”. So Willis gave us a resolution more appropriate for the latter — where Dorothy feels bad for having been embarrassed and reminds herself that it doesn’t matter what Walky wears, rather than a resolution for “Dorothy was judgmental and made Walky feel bad about his fashion choices”.
Like the latter is a valid interpretation of events but I think the reason why Dorothy didn’t apologize for doing that is because it didn’t occur to Willis as what was happening. There’s a bit of a sitcommy “Walky’s desire to wear pajama pants as clothing isn’t a choice worthy of respect, so Dorothy didn’t do anything wrong by specifically not respecting it” logic there.
Finally, I… don’t know what you’re referring to in your last paragraph, though? Who shamed Walky for having principles and a sense of self-worth?
The scene you posted was before the Pajama Jeans breakup https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/leisure/
And anyway here’s Joyce shaming walky for having principles (ie. Breaking up with Dorothy for not being willing to change his fashion just cuz she will withhold affection from him for doing it) and self worth (belittling him, calling him stupid and making him the bad guy for breaking up with Dorothy for her refusal to let him dress how he likes.)
Like…it’s SO disrespectful. And dorothy doesn’t chastise Joyce for any of this or even reassure Walky that he’s not stupid? Like someone just talked to her boyfriend like this and she just lets it slide? haha. Silly Joyce.
And a few strips before the one you linked, Dorothy is visibly remorseful and even specifically says she’s “done enough wardrobe judging for today” when Joyce asks for an opinion on her clothes…
I’m sorry, I think calling this Walky being shamed for having principles is really really strong.
I think if your girlfriend judges your clothes and gives you an ultimatum on whether you keep clothes you like or have her affection then breaking up with her is a decision to to avoid dealing with that treatment. Im calling that decision “having principles”. If you don’t agree that’s fine. That’s not at all the point I’m making.
Again: valid reading. Not one I can agree with, I think it just isolates the events too much from the tone of the comic and I have trouble taking the more Looney-Tunes-y strips that seriously, but the things you’re saying are true!
I only feel the need to push back a little on that last bit, because there are also many many examples of Walky treating Joyce “like shit” in front of not only Dorothy but their whole friend group, and only rarely getting talked to about it for even a single panel of a single strip. They really do have a very mutually antagonistic dynamic where they treat each other pretty badly.
Like there were a TON of rather dark fics back in the ’90s for Ranma 1/2 exploring the idea of Akane as an abusive partner. Some of those fics were really well-written. I won’t even say I fully disagreed with the core conceit.
At the same time, I couldn’t really read the manga or watch the show with that lens in place because if taken seriously, it turned a lighthearted romantic comedy with slapstick elements into a horror story.
Which, to be clear, doesn’t make the lens invalid, just…
Watching or reading Ranma 1/2 and expecting Takahashi to ever have Akane answer for being an abusive partner is a recipe for a truly miserable time, and I think reading Dumbing of Age with the lens that Dorothy was an abusive girlfriend to Walky is the same.
I mean, tone aside, the scenario is
-Walky gets pajama jeans
-Dorothy says she can decide to not find him attractive if he wears them
-Walky decides to break up with her
-Dorothy grabs walky calls him stupid and tells him to take her back because he doesn’t deserve better.
-Dorothy tells him to strip naked to make herself feel better.
Like yes. It’s a silly wacky comic but like does that just mean the events taking place don’t matter or didn’t happen? Everyone loves to use old comics as evidence of how long Dorothy and Joyce were set up to be a THING but golly I use an example of Dorothy being a bad girlfriend and it’s “don’t take it so seriously”.
Personally, reading this in real time back then I still thought Dorothy was solidly in the wrong and HATED that walky and her got together. She didn’t apologize and if she was remorseful she didn’t make it known. The most she said is she’s used to being the spine and not used to being stood up to. Whelp good news. Going forward nobody she dates has enough of a spine to say “no” to call her out again.
Like I didn’t mean to go on a rant about Dorothy being toxic but that strip has literally always rubbed me the wrong way and it doesn’t really help that it’s a “joke”. It feels mean spirited and not necessarily in a funny way? “You’re a worthless piece of poop I have ever met, so you don’t GET to dump someone who is thirty million times greater than you OVER A PAIR OF UGLY PANTS.” is a fucking insane sentence. I don’t know if Walky has ever told Joyce she’s worthless and that she doesn’t GET to dump anyone or anything equivalent. It’s…cruel.
She did look remorseful and she said more in that strip than just “I’m used to being the spine in the relationship”, but it’s completely fine that it upset you. You’re allowed to be upset. I didn’t say you had to take those strips as jokes.
I’m also not “everybody”, I am just one person, trying and apparently failing to explain why I don’t interpret those strips the way that you do.
And I am going to gently disengage now. I hope that’s all right. I understand and respect that these particular strips are emotional for you, there is genuinely nothing wrong with that, but.
I think we are at an impasse, and I also feel like I’m upsetting you by continuing to argue, because regardless of how I interpret those comics, it’s coming across like I think Walky deserves to be treated badly. Which I do not think! Or like I think you’re silly for feeling so strongly, which I also do not think.
Re: Dorothy and attempting to be worldly to the best of her knowledge-
We’ve seen her completely rethink her beliefs several times when challenged, which I think is pretty interesting about her. She’s typically more likely to be accused of being bossy than a doormat. Everyone remembers how Raidah’s critique of the presidency affected her, but Roz’s sex positivity isn’t brought up too often.
Dorothy wasn’t raised fundie, but still had absorbed some conservative views on sex from the surrounding culture. She initially looked down on Roz when she was assigned to cover the sex tape story. Roz of course was out to make a point, and Dorothy immediately adopted it, and tried to swallow any judgmental impulses she’d had toward people (besides Joe.) She even started gently correcting others’ comments that she might’ve bandwagoned the day before.
I’m starting to think that Joyce was actually fully self-aware how fucking horny she was for her whole young life, and that’s where she got all the obsessive energy for Christ. Being God’s Perfect Child was just the thing she doubled down on, every time she felt the impulse to “sin.” She just needs something in her life to direct her latent anxious obsessive energy at, at all times, but the problem with this new paradigm is that none of her friends have the infinite patience of Jesus Christ, where her emerging sexcapades are concerned.
Like, when Ruth forewarned Joyce she was gonna “pratfall into her first orgasm and bang half the town,” Joyce didn’t push back on the idea…she said “oh, so I guess you’re saying I should preemptively marry half the town?”
Joyce knew. Joyce always knew. She just also knew, in the past, that she had to hide her “impure” desires. She always knew that all of the people who called her self-destructively horny, were dead-centre on the bullseye, which is exactly why it always scared her.
Except now, she’s lived herself into a paradigm where she’s abandoned her previous coping mechanism for shedding all of her anxious energy through religious obsession, and all that’s left is using sex as a constant outlet for every time she feels the slightest modicum of stress or shame about anything…which is, of course, literally every waking moment of her day, because of who she is as a person.
That’s why she needs to constantly exclaim that she will never apologize for being in lesbians with Dorothy, and refuses to acknowledge there’s ever a wrong time to kiss Dorothy; it’s her new scripture, which she deploys to reinforce her sense of a moral self who is safe from judgement. It’s no different than where she started in this comic, saying ten hail marys every time she felt shamed or transgressive about literally anything.
She has to enshrine her coping behaviors as morally-constructive absolutes, to maintain any sense of comfort from them, because accepting any possibility that somebody judging her for her choices might have a point, undermines the very function of those coping mechanisms – and means, of course, that an outside force could take away her ability to cope.
She spent her whole life fighting back as hard as possible, against the prospect that any outside force could force her to actually feel shame, because she’s actually more afraid of that feeling than anything, up to and including eternal damnation. She’s being defensive of her cope, because she’s scared of sliding into a place where she’s actually forced to sit with her own bad feelings, and shame.
But, unlike plaintive appeals to Christ, sex is something where you actually have to regularly consider the feelings of others, every time you do it, and in every place; so, using actual sex as a cope for her existing emotional and sexual repression, is just not as bulletproof, nor as reliable, as her previous coping mechanism, and she’s doing everything she can do to blind herself to that fact, because to her, the alternative is to wallow in the ocean of her perpetual omni-shame, without any life raft.
So, yeah, I’m guessing this is gonna start biting her in the ass, pretty soon. And she’s gonna be annoying, dismissive, and avoidant about it, the entire time.
“preemptively marry half the town” -> Joyce saying she’s into poly?
More seriously, taking this as her new coping mechanism comes off as regression not compared to her very early reliance on Jesus for everything but her beginning of the second semester “I’ve learned I’m wrong about most things” approach.
In particular it’s hard to square this Joyce with the one from this strip, without the word “regression” being used.
Which does go both ways, because in context it’s arguably both about Joyce regretting getting caught up in the Jacob+cheating plot and about Joyce’s horniness overcoming her good sense.
Very good analysis, I think. One nitpick, Joyce would never say hail marys as penance. That’s a Catholic thing, and to right-wing fundies like Joyce was, Catholics are somewhere between pagans and devil-worshippers.
I think that frankly undermines Joyce as an intelligent analyst of theology, reduces her to a walking hormone, and bluntly assumes that there’s no reason to be actually be interested in Christianity other than sexual redirection versus philosophy/history or ideology.
I am still considering my full feelings regarding her stupid grind in the last panel and will revisit the matter at a later date
– signed, with best of regards, jay.
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let’s do
the time warp
agaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiin
XD 9-9
Dorothy, it may be time to purchase Joyce an “Other Dorothy”. With a heavy duty rechargeable battery. You already sent her a sexy selfie to use it with, so that step’s taken care of.
And maybe some noise-canceling headphones for Sarah would be a nice gesture as well.
“Joyce and Dorothy go to a sex store (to purchase Joyce an Other Dorothy)” is an all-timer premise for one of their stupid little adventures
BTW appropos of nothing, I LOVE the bunnysuit edits you been doin recently on tumblr ^^
aww, thank you! i’m currently beating my head against the wall trying to make a danny+joe edit happen lol
A special collaboration for Oh Joy Sex Toy.
How do I help make this happen?!
At whom do I shout “Shut up and take my money”?!
I mean, a sapphic couple’s first trip to a sex shop is always a hilarious embarrassing experience – or it was when I first did it. Sex shops, at least some of them, have gotten a lot more woman-inclusive and generally comfortable since then.
Oh no. She’s getting stuck in something hard to hide, isn’t she. Do they still do those like “joke” animal sex dolls in those stores?
Okay, do NOT Google that to find out. The answer is no and that’s all anyone needs to see. Anyone got any of that uh bleach. I need to wash my eyes out.
see, this is why the poly ship would’ve been good. Joe and Dorothy could’ve tagged out to avoid being devoured by Joyce lol
Tactical switch outs like you’re playing competitive pokemon. Dorothy sets up barriers and Joe uses status moves. Then they just baton pass buffs back and forth.
Thinking more professional-wrestling-style, one of them trying desperately to writhe their way to the corner to reach out for the tag while Joyce continues relentlessly.
Always barely breaking out of the pin.
You know, it’s been bothering me that Joyce hasn’t explained what her situation with Joe is, yet, with Dorothy. The three of them really need to be in the same room and have a conversation about this.
She hasn’t even finished the conversation with him alone that she promised him they would.
That’s what humans need. Cartoon characters need drama and Joyce is providing it! Joe is in denial. When he finally breaks, Dorothy will be the only one to care. (Between the two of them.) Eventually even Dorothy will get tired of Joyce’s selfishness.
Zounds that girl is hornt.
They should go to “Oh, Wow”, Dora’s favorite toy store:
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1379
Anything Faye bought there was retired shortly after she met Bubbles.
Bubbles knows how to handle power tools. Who says the collection is gathering dust?
Why wouldn’t they keep using sex toys? That’s just silly.
Good lord, that page is ancient, how long did it take you to find it?
Dorothy turns to polyamory out of sheer exhaustion.
😂
Stop being adorkable right this minute, young lady!
Jesus repressed sex drive
“…you see child, when you only see one set of footprints in the sand…that was, uh…that was you, hovering next to me, held aloft by the sheer vibrations of your out-of-control libido…like, I beheld all the sins of man, and all, but holy shit ma’am, I never saw anything quite like this.”
Daaaammmnnn! Joyce is getting smooooth!
Is the Smooth Joyce in the room with us now?
That face expression. Those hands! Subtle Joyce is subtle. 😀
Dorothy is not ready for her horny! Dorothy is not ready for her horny! Dorothy is not ready for it! Her body is too hornilicious for ya babe!
I love Joyce’s face in the last panel. She’s such a goon. I also like Dorothy’s booklight. I used to have one like that.
And now I need one.
I have two and they’re kind of annoying because the stupid flexible stick part doesn’t effing stay where you put it. It’s actually a fight to make it stay in place.
Or maybe I just have bad ones idk.
That’s the book light experience. At some point you kind of have to upgrade to a lamp on your bedside table.
Nahh, get a neck light. Its got two bendy ends so the one laying flat can hold up the one pointing at the page.
Sarah, 3 feet away from the foot of Joyce’s bed:
👁️👄👁️
Hater containment thread, kvetch here ⬇️
WE GET IT
Is this what allosexuality is like???
I mean yeah when I’m with someone I make crass sexual jokes and passes at them all the time, but my life doesn’t have to worry about things like pacing and “belaboring the point”
WILD (non-judgemental, just foreign)
Any point worth making is worth belaboring.
I agree with Dot’s answer, but I want add the caveat “not to such a degree that we’re too busy being horny to tell our girlfriend about important news like the fact that our ex recently offered us An Arrangement(tm) that she may not be okay with”.
(*nodding and writing this on my clipboard like a diligent researcher*) I see.
Not usually with someone else in the room unless you’re really open. This is definitely the kind of thing you’d say to someone you’re in a sexual relationship with when you’re in private (and nothing else is going on) though.
For most allosexuals, this’d be representative of a NRE (new relationship energy) phase or horny teenager phase. We usually calm down some after a while, it takes a lot of energy to maintain that level of hornt.
Eh. When I’m with someone I too make crass jokes and sexual passes at them all the time, but most of the time it’s intended to be (and read as) just flirting. I’m not constantly trying to actually initiate sex for real the way Joyce seems to be here.
…That said, I *am* demisexual. But when attraction does hit, it hits *hard.*
It can be, but not with nonconsenting folks in the room, and usually I can remember to do the things I’m supposed to be doing like “not leaving two of my three best friends hanging in various ways” and “not trying to have sex in front of my roommate”.
At this point, like them…hate them…I just don’t *care* anymore at this point. We’ve been reading the same “Joyce/Dorothy being “cute” together” on the same day since AUGUST.
I’ll gladly take ANYONE else at this point. Give me a week of Faz hanging out with Mary and Raidah. It’d just be nice for this day to finally be over and actually get to see the rest of the cast I come here to read about and have them interact with one another instead of yet *another* bed shot of…this
I cannot wait for the inevitable time skip or whatever the fuck so this can finally stop being the main plot
I get that they’re main characters, but it’s still also a somewhat ensemble cast!
If I were a fan of seeing Lisa and Bart on The Simpsons, having the latest season consist of almost all Homer episodes (with maybe a scene or two per episode for the others) would drive me nuts. Especially if they consist of “Homer does something stupid yet AGAIN” episodes.
I’m just so damned tired of Dorothy/Joyce “being cute” strips (all taking place on the SAME DAY) since fucking August. I was so excited when it looked like we were finally moving on with Carla and potential family drama, only to still come back to this -_-
honestly ngl faz & raidah & mary is kind of interesting. terrible horndog teen with family issues, woman who has both Principles she is loud about while also being kind of manipulative/status focused, & The Worst Person In The World. i think raidah might tear mary a new one, for one. she’d almost certainly hate faz, but idk if any indication of exactly how bad things are for him would mitigate that. (mary might well be irked by him, although she’d probably try to recruit him to the manosphere or some shit.) also i’m just v interested in raidah ever since the protest strips.
Sorry, hit the report button instead of reply. There really needs to be more space between the two…
I didn’t think about the combination til I saw your reply, I was just trying to think of a combination that would cause an entire meltdown in the posts. But I like that breakdown, I guess another to add to the list of “please anyone besides Dorothy/Joyce”!
I hope Sarah throws a pillow at Joyce.
see that actually would be very cute
I’m not hating; I just wanted to show love for that Nicola Scott Wonder Woman gravatar.
Several of Dot’s recent gravatars have had pretty nice art. Even if I’m a hater when it comes to some of her comments, I can admit she has good taste.
My haters are forced to admit that I have an eye for comic art, yet another cultural victory for the Dot Agenda
My apologies, I posted in the wrong place:
It’s been a great run, maintaining a slice of life strip for this long is impressive so it had to happen sooner or later but its clear the author has run out of ideas
It’s a shame but it was good, very good at times, while it lasted
k bye
I’m getting tired of hate threads. There are other things you could be doing if you don’t like it here.
*gently escorts you out of the hater thread with a pushbroom*
Also, more directly:
“I like this comic a lot, and I have liked pretty much everything the author has been putting out for decades, but this particular storyline seems to be not great.” is not anything like a reason to stop reading a serial story, especially because most of the folks in this thread have openly expressed their desire for us to switch to one of a number of actually-in-progress storylines we DO like.
I’m getting tired of whiners who can’t cope with people doing the equivalent of saying “Shut up, Wesley” every time he’s on screen while enjoying the entire rest of the damn voyage of the Enterprise. (to remind you that this is not even a new phenomenon in media consumption, it’s as old as Usenet).
I mean, “this particular storyline is not great” isn’t what Harry Brownhole said, though? You are replying to a reply to Harry Brownhole, who said the comic’s had a good run but it’s over now because the author has run out of ideas, and “it was good while it lasted”.
(Fully support you nudging people out of this thread! But miscommunications make my scalp itch, haha.)
Yeah, but BarerMender’s response was “I’m getting tired of hate threads”, not any specific response to Harry.
There’s this thing called scrolling, you can do it real fast when you see a thread you don’t like. You should try it out!
This is not an Airport, Departures don’t have to be announced
You too. Shoo, shoo, outta the hater thread. *Gestures with broom*
Technically Liara is being a hater. Just a hater-hater.
I don’t think Sarah wants or needs to hear Joyce’s orgasmic squeals, and I’m bothered by the idea that Joyce isn’t considering that.
Unless she plans to kick out Sarah or she doesn’t plan to go that far.
But I don’t get the impression that Joyce is planning anything at the moment that doesn’t lead to orgasmic squeals.
Sarah could join the Sexile Couch Gathering where Danny used to go.
Sad part is that if you’re rooming with someone in college, SOMEONE is likely going to get sexiled at some point.
It feels way more inconsiderate when you already locked the other person out of the room earlier that day AND the other person strongly disapproves of your shameless cheating/abandonment of your last partner.
I mean, meh to the last part. It’s not inconsiderate to bang your partner just because someone else disapproves of them. Definitely is to sexile someone twice in one day, that’s so rude.
The way you phrased it, sure. But Sarah was making an active effort to get over her prior judgement of Joe for Joyce’s sake, and it was working. Joyce’s new relationship comes at the expense of cheating on and casually discarding someone Sarah does now care about. That’s a lot more than just banging a partner your roommate doesn’t approve of.
I stand by my previous opinion. I don’t think other people get to weigh in on whether you bang your partner frequently or not if they aren’t in the relationship. Their opinions just don’t matter.
I actually don’t even think Joyce owes Sarah an apology, tbh. For the crime of… creating a situation where Sarah grew close to someone she might not have otherwise? She owes Joe about seventy apologies, but not Sarah imo.
I’m personally in a weird state where I agree Joyce hasn’t done anything specifically to Sarah to merit NEEDING to deliver an apology, but I still feel like Sarah’d be justified in being really unhappy with Joyce’s behavior anyway.
If you share a living space with someone no amount of black mail or magic is going to keep them from having an opinion on who you’re banging in the shared space. And Sarah isn’t going to be afraid to share it.
Yeah, I should clarify — Joyce openly propositioning Dorothy while Sarah is (as far as we can tell) still in the room IS in fact doing something that she owes Sarah an apology for.
I never said Joyce owes Sarah an apology. I just said she’s being inconsiderate, because she is. If you don’t think it’s inconsiderate for someone caught between friends to witness one friend shamelessly flaunting the relationship she cheated on the other friend for, especially when it’s not only not the first time that day AND Sarah is now trying to sleep, I don’t know what to tell you.
When I was that age, I was merely uncomfortable enough with two people hooking up in the room to leave and spend a couple hours wandering town at midnight. And then again at 3 AM when they did it again. And that was without any cheating or drama involved. That was inconsiderate all on its own, but the extra shit going on here makes this scenario much worse.
Yes. I was adding the apology thing to extend my explanation of my viewpoint, not to imply you said anything of the sort.
As for the rest, you don’t have to know what to tell me. We just disagree lmao.
It’s also more inconsiderate when you wake them up after you’ve already all gone to bed.
more Dina strips or we RIOT
):<
✊
Pouring one out for Sarah right now; poor gal has to deal with these two being insufferable all night. Least the rest of us only have to deal with a few minutes a day of Repetitive Twee Bullshit(tm).
Sarah is so much stronger than I could ever be
When my freshman year roommate started pulling these kind of shenanigans, I broke him of it by just making popcorn anytime he and his girl of the moment started.
All night, every night, for the foreseeable future
Given Sarah’s issues with Dana (lack of any sleep ruining her grades & jeopardising her scholarship), gotta wonder how she’ll react to that…
I’m now just deeply invested in what it’s actually going to take to brute-force upload the concept of personal boundaries into Joyce. Like, I’m genuinely curious how Willis is going to deal with the wanton sex-beast he’s unleashed on the rest of the cast, lmao.
Okay, another cute Dorothy/Joyce moment, fine, but WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH BECKY???
Part of me gets it. Joyce becoming a horny idiot once she had sex for the first time was prophesied long ago. But man am I having a tough time BUYING it. I know dating Joe broke down a lot of her walls but man, I really wish we got to see more of that buildup in terms of her physical relationship with Dorothy. Again, like with Lucy, it feels like someone who had a really slow buildup to physical intimacy just flips a switch and starts having sex a whole bunch and I just find that less interesting than that slow buildup stuff?
Joyce awkwardly asking where she can touch Dorothy or Dorothy feeling Joyce out through her insecurities. Maybe they just cuddle for a while. Maybe joyce is fine groping/being groped under her shirt. Maybe she likes kissing without tongue at first and slowly advances. Maybe Joyce actually explores what she finds attractive about women in contrast to what she finds attractive about men.
I dunno. The switch up feels so sudden and fast it’s basically lost me in the dust. Which…like…is even weirder cuz DOROTHY is also only very recently opening herself up to her attraction to women. Like Dorothy declared herself a Kinsey 0 and now she’s super flustered by the idea of taking Joyce’s top off. Does Dorothy like boobs? Or is it more the teasing that revs her up? I feel like we just speedrun right into the fuck phase.
Even with Dina and Becky we had a lotta buildup to them pushing each other’s buttons and finding out what they liked about the other. And becky made it pretty well known she likes everything about women. And even then I feel like once they hopped into sex it felt a little sudden.
speakin of Becky and Dina, at least we saw Joyce and Dorothy clean the sheets after boinkin. We still don’t know if that dinosaur has been cleaned off, or has been stewin in sapphic musk for the past couple months.
It’s odor has become so pungent they’ve become nose blind to it.
Between the sex dinosaur and Amber implying she doesn’t clean her sheets after her own sessions that room must really stink.
that room HAS to be a biohazard at this point, with the fresh wounds and everything lol
There’s a WALL of Odor you have to penetrate as you enter their room.
Weren’t her sheets cleaned recently. I remember Walky waking up Ethan and Asher because they fell asleep in Amber’s bed. “Hey Hot dudes. Can you get up so we can wash Amber’s sheets.” Or something like that?
Yes they were cleaned recently which is what lead to an opening for AG to reveal way too much information on Amber’s bedtime self pleasure habits.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-15/01-love-dares-you-to-change/headmate/
And as if solely to deny the implication Amber has AG wash her sheets she reveals she likes wallowing.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-15/01-love-dares-you-to-change/enjoyed/
I guess some people are nesters.
i wonder if AG has secretly been cleaning the dinosaur then. The deep lore of the funk of this room.
We’ve been building up to this for years. I’ve been waiting for years. I’m happy it’s finally here.
That’s great! But this isn’t the thread for that.
o3o I mean We were also building up to Joe and Joyce for years. I had also been waiting for years. I’m unhappy it’s unlikely to happen.
Yep. I LIKED Joe and Joyce. The bonus of it being a doomed ship in the Walkyverse was a nice addition as well.
And that’s not to say it couldn’t end, but talk about getting shot down before it could even get out of the harbor. God damn.
I was a bit angry at Joe and Joyce at first, seeing it as a wasted non-romantic friendship potential. Then I was like “okay, nevermind, they are cute”. Then it all went south (or east, wherever it is Bulmeria is supposed to lie
)
And worse, Joe/Joyce both had more potential to be interesting and was ACTUALLY more interesting. These dorks have yet to even have any SIGN that they’re going to learn anything from or about each other, every time there’s even a hint of any interesting growth or change or conflict or even disagreement they gloss right over it
On this point, I actually disagree. We’re literally seeing Dorothy picking up more details about Joyce that she hadn’t fully internalized from their platonic friendship, in real time; and, like, literally every detail is consistently giving her pause.
It’s giving her pause for like a panel or two, though, and then we have no reaction, no pushback, no nothin’.
Now, granted, I also commented that one of Dorothy’s problems in her relationship with Danny was that her idea of hinting how the relationship would go is so subtle you need a neutrino detector to spot it, so maybe in a month they’ll have a big breakup when Joyce finally says something Dorothy can’t just pause over, but I don’t have any reason to suspect that yet.
Yeah, it’s totally correct that Dorothy needs to collect a preponderance of evidence to actually act on anything, and I heavily suspect that that’s the reason it’s gonna take her so long to even think about setting some boundaries with Joyce. Joyce is truly more Danny than Danny ever was, so maybe, Dorothy can get to that place faster?
It was so much betterrrrr blehhhh! I hate how comfortable these dorks already are with each other. No tension, no friction, it’s like they’ve been married for years. And that’s not interesting! Where’s the conflict??? Becky and Dina got accused to being too sacharine but they have internal conflict. Dina had a hard time deprogramming Becky from her cult upbringing. Becky was insecure about Diana’s asexuality. And now, y’know. The obvious. Even Danny and Sal have some internal conflict stemming from her issues being comfortable with others. most of it was before they got together, which makes the level of comfort they have now feel earned. But there’s even still stuff like sal feeling a way about her parents liking Danny cuz he’s white, and that rebellious instinct to mistrust anything they want for her. She loves and trusts him enough to be able to work through it after just getting the idea out of her system but it’s still SOMETHING. .
These two might as well be a background character couple for how little they actually have going on. Sure there’s conflict; the cheating and how it’ll affect their other relationships with people, the newspaper, homophobia as a general concept. But that’s all external. That’s dojo vs the world. I wanna see them stumbling to figure it out, stepping on each other’s toes, getting nervous and insecure about something. Will dotty start feeling some type of way about Joyce boldly proclaiming how much she loves kissing and fucking her everywhere they go? Will Joyce be bothered by Dotty doing things like denying the newspaper cover was them? Will dotty lean more on the inappropriateness of how they behaved at the protest? Will her white guilt start kicking her ass, will she get upset about Joyce’s callous nature when she speaks to Muslim women about this stuff? Will Joyce conflate that with shame or embarrassment over the kiss? Gimme misunderstandings people! Where the drama????
No one asked you, make an original comment about it. This isn’t the “awww I’m ho happy they’re finally together :)” thread
When haters start specifically seeking you out to snark on your positive threads, you will think back on this day where you were all over the hater thread being unwanted and understand why.
Yeah, both of them just being so fully into it right out of the gate is so unbelievable it really contributes to the feeling that this is just the OTP being railroaded down our throats.
We did indeed miss all of the interesting character development on the ”I guess I’m queer, what does it mean exactly?” front.
Also this is a joke observation but between asma, lucy, and now dorothy, joycjoyce won’t let anyone just *fuckin’ read in peace*
Damn can’t believe joyce is anti-literacy, smh
Well, Joyce used to base her life around a book, but she’s rejected that now. Maybe she no longer trusts any text longer than an SMS message.
eagerly awaiting the ‘joyce becomes an anarchy-primitivist’ arc
*anarcho
How many times can we see the exact same strip be played out again and again and again before Willis gets bored of drawing it?
Yeah, we already did this kind of thing at least once that I remember. I’m not sure why Dorothy keeps reacting to this like she’s Walky.
9CL has been in papers for over 30 years and shows no sign of stopping, so…
Biology class can’t come too soon
I’m confused what this means?
Joyce and Joe, and Becky and Dina, are permanent lab partners in biology class. It’s gonna be a drama tinderbox.
Yeah, this. I did read another comment that Biology is on Tuesday, not Monday, which I’ll believe because I have no clue about any of the schedules myself. And any interaction with the larger friend group should be at least somewhat interesting!
IIRC, Walky and Joyce have Math together Mondays, which might be interesting enough.
Ohhhh!!! That makes sense, ty for explaining (and you too perpetual summer)!
I’m sure Willis wants us to think this is cute or whatever, but I just find Joyce and Dorothy grating and annoying in every strip where they’re the main focus. Mainly because of their shitty behavior towards other characters in most previous strips of this storyline so far.
Yup. The shitty behaviour is glossed over, and we get repeats of ”aren’t they just the cutest!”
Well, to be fair, they have been called out on it repeatedly in the comic. Maybe something will actually come of that someday. If I’d been holding my breath for it, though, I wouldn’t be alive to type this.
At this point I’m convinced something drastic has to happen to remind Joyce that other people exist and their feelings matter just as much as hers
This is literally it. Joyce only understands life in terms of Drastic Situations and Huge Gestures, and he pseudo-sense of ethics used to be tethered to the Drastic Situation of getting pilloried in Hell for eternity, and so she persistently expressed constant moral panic to everybody around her, to try to assuage that fear.
She’s gotta actually transfer that fear of upsetting God, into some kind of actual conscious process where she cares about other peoples’ feelings. She never had to care about any peoples’ feelings up until now; she was only ever concerned with how God felt about her actions, and now God isn’t Real, so she’s transferred that same obsessive energy to impulsively fixating on exclusively her feelings, and how her desires inform her actions.
The grim reality is, she’s going to be a relentless vehicle for hurting everybody around her, for quite some time in this strip. She’s gonna hurt Joe, she’s gonna hurt Dorothy, she’s gonna hurt Sarah, and Becky, and Dina, and probably five more people. Something drastic actually will need to happen, to cause direct consequences to her, personally, before she can evolve into an actual worldly and caring person, because at the end of the day, she just does not fucking get what it means to be secular, and only understands it in terms of her past religious baggage.
I didn’t think initially that Willis would want to go there, but I’m starting to agree with the people doomsaying about something really bad happening to Becky. That’s the degree of shit it’s gonna take, to constitute a wake-up call for Joyce. She’s going to alienate most of her friend group, with the way she’s acting.
Unless the “Willis is just trolling us for his OTP” doomsayers are actually the ones who are correct, and this comic no longer operates off of any other internal logic besides “make my self-insert have hot lesbian sex and never be wrong,” and I really, really hope y’all are wrong, but I’m beginning to see why you’ve come to that conclusion.
Except that characterization ignores a lot of things – like her entire behavior towards Becky after Becky came out. Or Dorothy for being an atheist. She was even worried about Joe and Becky at first with this new relationship before the story abruptly swerved away from both of them so she could go OwO mode. Hell, it even ignores the way she came to the realization of her feelings for Dorothy. She made a big gesture out of it, but there wasn’t one before that.
Whatever this is, it’s something else entirely. It’s hard not to see it as bad, rushed writing – and considering that there are apparently posts about how a lot of this wasn’t the original plan…
It also ignores her explicitly talking about it back after the Jacob thing.
Again: that last point just isn’t true. The only thing that wasn’t “part of the original plan” was it happening now. Willis showed us strips from 2023 and 2024 both showing Joe talking to Dorothy earlier, as well as a bunch of strips they wrote to specifically foreshadow this.
You can still find it rushed or think it’s bad writing, but it was not literally rushed, Willis took their time with this. They at one point thought it wouldn’t start for another 5 years, but they also at one point thought it would start 2 years ago.
She’s asking to be stripped in this strip
gpmma be real awkward if sarah is underneath unless she went out again
they aren’t bunk beds, fortunately – they’re elevated so that their study cubicle desks can fit underneath.
it’s easy to forget that tho’ lol
This is why Joe and Joyce couldn’t happen. If they’d actually went fully through an entire round of sex then they would have both been locked in a room until they fucked each other to death. I kinda wish I’d seen that outcome.
It’d be a hell of a way to write out the main character
Out with a bang, if you will—
“See ya, space cowgirl…”
Out with a metric fuckload of bangs, even.
Yeah. Can’t believe Joe’s dead.
It would be Joe too, right? It would be a heart attack or dehydration trying to slay the monster he created.
Crushed Pelvis.
Death by Snu-snu.
HA! That’s a hilarious thought.
Hm… since sex is binary for her, I don’t suppose the newly horny Joyce is gonna ever start to wonder what it would have been like if she’d been with a man… right?
She wouldn’t have such thoughts… would she?
We don’t know Joe’s stamina for what Joyce seems to be on. He may not been able to survive this arc if they went all the way lol
That’s why Joyce needs both Dorothy and Joe in her ‘cule. She got enough hornt for those two.
Add in one more member and they can take 8-hour shifts.
I like the cut of your jib!
I’m gonna make it so ratty, it’s gonna look like Fievel wore it
way too ez
I’m gonna make the shirt so ratty, it’ll look like Remy wore it for cooking.
Yet another strip of Joyce not telling Dorothy about Joe.
Thats not happening until Joe actually talks to Joyce wirh Dorothy present. Joyce is actively trying to avoid as much confrontation as possible to maintain her bliss bubble.
I mean, she has not at all indicated nor indulged Joe’s polyamory request, she basically did the real world version of leaving him on read. As such, regardless of where she stands with Joe she certainly isn’t obligated to immediately or even in short time frames discuss how the break up with Joe went with Dorothy, she made her intention to break up with him clear, he said he wanted her to have what she wants, she ran off to address newspaper then Becky then Hank then Joss potentially outing herself to Hank then months of pent up feelings for Dorothy finally being able to be realized. Frankly neither Joe nor Dorothy could ever hear more about the poly proposition and that would still be a fairly clear answer in and of itself, which is what the strip between Joe and Sarah seemed to be meant to convey.
It does suck, Joe cared a lot about Joyce, but it’s still incredibly real – imbalanced relationship interest happens just about all the time, and ultimately taken as a whole there’s little more to say.
There have been a few hints – like the reference to Joe as her boyfriend and how Joyce looked when Dorothy corrected that to ex-.
But yeah, if she’s really not interested, then it doesn’t really matter. If she is still considering it, then it gets awkward that she hasn’t told Dorothy.
And honestly, I’d be surprised if Willis openly teased poly like that and then just shut it down with no further drama.
Relationships are built in the quiet moments.
Not just the passionate ones.
If Willis will only draw these two being gay for an entire strip, I’ll read it.
I mean I feel like that’s what this strip is, so… congrats on getting what you asked for?
I think Amos means for an entire webcomic, not just a single strip.
Thanks. It’s hard to write clearly at 2AM
I mean, as I’ve kinda hinted at before — I could probably enjoy an entire webcomic of these two being cute and sexy and never really encountering any trouble or pushback that takes longer than two strips to resolve.
It’s just that strip wouldn’t be Dumbing of Age, it’d be something else, and I really don’t want Dumbing of Age to turn into that instead of being what it already has been.
Just trying to dispel another misunderstanding 🙂 for the sake of the itchy!
I second this.
I want horrible things to happen to Dorothy and Joyce. Not because I don’t love them but because I am an awful monster who wants to see his favorite characters in horrible melodrama.
Dorothy’s real parents turn out to be MAGA Republicans! Come on!
The Dean believes she’s Amazi-Girl!
Dorothy gets put on a Terrorist Watch List for her radical activism!
Likewise! I love Dorothy. She’s my absolute favourite character, she’s loads of fun in the strip and I’d probably also really dig her in real life. I also really love the current story arc and cannot get enough of her and Joyce.
But I also want Dorothy to hurt. I want her to crash so horribly. I want her to cry, to realise the hurt she’s caused Walky (because that was all her, really). I want her decisions to be bad and cause disasters.
I, too, am a horrible monster.
o3o
Apropos of nothing, I still really really ship Walky and Amber. And since I am blessed with artistic skill I decided to draw a couple pictures.
https://imgchest.com/p/qe4gmbz2q4j
Is Amber taller than Walky? I mean they’re both short stacks, butt I kinda dig Amber being bigger. Buff gf and her small, twink, boyfriend.
I don’t know why my phone autocorrected “but” to “butt” I know I didn’t type that extra “t”.
sign of Butts disease
He’s sitting lower than her on the bed so he can rest his head on her shoulder/nape area.
At leas that was my intention! They’re the same height but Amber probably comes across larger cuz she’s BUFF.
Is her comment about not remembering how it happened referring to the abdominal scar?
Nice drawing.
Amber seemed to be feeling a little helpless and sad saying that; I even wondered if it was only her that couldn’t remember or if AG also couldn’t say.
Yeah. I dunno what they’ll do with that storyline but I like (or at least find it interesting) the idea that because she was Amazi-girl when the stabbing/gunshot/whatever wound happened she has no recollection outside of getting patched up.
I dunno there’s just an amount of Drama of waking up with a new injury you don’t recall the source of.
Also scars are kinda cool and I like drawing it. Making it a bit jaggy cuz it was a rush job.
Wait, curvy girls with scars? Now tell us how you feel about Faye from QC.
I recall really really liking faye.
But I haven’t reread that comic in YEARS and remember almost nothing about it.
A LOT more Robots. more than half the cast.
Faye is banging an even more angry, more curvy and busty robot then she.
I expect they will get married.
The main character moved to Robot Island in Canada with his transgender gf. they will break up soon.
I love these, but if it’s now then I think Amber’s hair is Longer now? Past her shoulders at least. I also think that, since the time skip, Amber and amazigirl have kind of reconciled and a result of that seems to be fewer memory gaps when switching? Though it’s true that I think Amber fully ceded control to Amazigirl since the party so may have literally no awareness of happenings since then.
I think you’re right on both accounts. Though yeah I think there’s probably still blackouts between Amazi-girl and Amber. I’m also going off of the state she seemed to be in when she woke up with Sal (which could very well have been cuz of blood loss or drugs) but I just…think it’s kinda interesting drama!
As for the hair I just drew her from memory and didn’t use a reference 😛
If I could “heart” your post, I would. You do wonderful art.
phenomenal fan art as usual homie! <3
love how busty ya drew Amber heehee ^-^
I really like who each of these are poignant little stories (almost vignettes) and very well drawn.
Yoto, you are AMAZING.
Not sure I understand that first one; are they trading pokémon to help fill each other’s pokédexes, and Amber sent Walky a shiny when a normal one would’ve worked just as well (dex-wise)?
Yep. You nailed it. I just consider that a form of nerdy flirting. And walky is teasing her by calling her down bad cuz clearly she’s buttering him up.
Excellent fanfics again Yotomoe. Thank you.
Thank you for blessing the shippers with your skills.
I get the impression you’re getting better. This drawing is clear, more dramatic, realistic, even being only a sketch.
Damn I might actually come around to amber and walky, just by virtue of contrast. I thought it was chemistryless and lame but…damn at least it had SOMETHING going on
These two ARE adorable! I just wish everyone got to be together with all the people that they have chemistry with.
No offense to the haters but I just can’t not like these two dorks, dammit.
have to agree, but the hate does also kinda make it funnier when a silly or sweet moment does happen.
It’s not bad, but I liked Joe/Joyce too, would have been nice to have at least let it play out before Willis abruptly ended it for no good reason.
While I’ve personally been finding their more generically cute moments kinda bland, Joyce’s tendency to so often say or do something entertainingly dumb more than makes up for it, as far as I’m concerned.
It isn’t hard, just look at how Joyce has regressed in the last three-ish months of strips.
*in your opinion
Don’t worry about offending haters! It’s good to see people sharing positive feelings.
I like the moments we’ve seen of their friendship dynamic reemerging after the chaos of starting this relationship, because it shows how well they’ll do once the dust settles.
As a dedicated hater, no one said you had to not like them. I personally just don’t get it
Listen, that’s pretty true these days, but when it all kicked off there were a solid 2months or so of EVERY positive comment about them getting piled on with moral outrage or snarky takes on how you shouldn’t like them. It was very “so you hate waffles” but replace that with “so you love cheating!”
Mmhmm.
This too was an impetus for the containment thread
You said it. They are adorable.
This strip is kind of nothing but I’m not hating on Joyce that much here since look if it was Joyce/Joe or Becky/Dina many of us would be just rolling our eyes and going, ‘oh, you silly horned-up ex-fundie… but it’s kinda cute’.
We always knew she was gonna snap into a hypersexual drive once the dam broke loose. Just depends on if her partner would be into it.
I ~will~ say that if it was Joyce and Joe people would be raging about something similar but different just as hard. Every time Joyce indicated sexual interest in Joe there was a section of the comments saying she was making him uncomfortable, or pushing things on him, or ignoring his needs, etcetc.
Implying that, because he was trying to be chill and wait and not just jump her bones that he somehow also didn’t want his girlfriend telling him she thought he was hot or that she was excited by him, didn’t want her kissing him or letting him know where her head was at re: sex.
If Joe was sitting there trying to read they’d be losing it that Joyce won’t just let him exist without being a sex object.
This is true.
Largely a different group of people but very true.
(I was sort of one of them, I didn’t think Joyce was doing it on purpose but I did worry that she wasn’t really paying attention to his nervous signals. That part turned out okay, thankfully!)
If you don’t like this you are going to hate Sept 20th, 2006.
I like this. People here for high-paced action should instead read an action comic, or reread an action chapter. Or watch a movie.
I meant 2026. And the other parts I was wrong about, I meant something else.
I think that is my cousin’s birthday.
How about a comic when anything happens?
I don’t think I’ve actually seen anyone ask for high-paced action, just more drama or focus on characters they like, but this is good advice either way. Watch a movie! It WILL be more interesting.
I think there’s a difference between “fast-paced action” and “been on the *same day* watching Dorothy & Joyce hinjinx since *August*”
I don’t know what you mean. That’s Joyce jamming out, not a 28th shot of them in bed together. No one’s asking for action dude we’re asking for drama. Cuz y’know. It’s not an action comic. It’s a DRAMA.
Who asked for high-paced action? Personally, those are some of my least favorite parts of the comic.
HORNIER THAN 9 CHICKWEED LANE
[marge voice] It’s true, but you shouldn’t say it [/marge voice]
but fortunately, it doesn’t involve anyone’s twins, much less anyone of questionable age or any of the other many wtferies of the hellstrip.
I’m just grateful it’s not set in a featureless void.
It does still have backgrounds, this is true.
And the characters actually change outfits now and then.
And the human characters actually resemble humans!
It’s not like I think this is fun or interesting but what you’re saying is just factually untrue & you have to know it. Joyce making a raunchy joke or innuendo every other strip is and could not be more horny that impromptu aging up the twin kid characters (who mostly commented on how much their parents fucked or whatever) to be able to also pair them up with men and talk about how hot they are. It’s just not.
I mean, hyperbole is a thing. It’s fun.
No. Only flat-minded deadpan hyper-literalism at all times.
I think it’s the worst thing ever actually
did the all-caps not tip you off
no I love being literal but now that I do know you’re joking I also don’t think it’s that funny. That’s a me issue though so I’m sorry for the stray comment!
Okay aside from the obvious- Joyce, who the fuck lies in bed like that? Are you practicing for your casket??
Her alternate reality version laid down like that with Walky too after they officially became a couple in “It’s Walky.” I guess it’s just a Joyce thing.
Then again, DoA Joyce does like her romantic bed partners touching her at all times (as seen with her constantly putting Joe’s hands on her boobs during their nap together) so maybe she’s just being respectful of Dotty’s “alone time” with her book since the two of them have had constant physical contact since they got Hank’s “blessing.”
True story — I used to have a roommate who slept exactly like that.
We, of course, teased him mercilessly about it, especially because his loft was too tall on top of him being 6’4″ anyway, so his nose was about a foot from the ceiling at the best of times.
It was somehow even funnier when one of the guys said something to finally make him snap (I think it was some kind of over the top King Tut riff) and it turns out he’d done enough martial arts and gymnastics to kinda instantly jackknife himself in half and pommel-horse off the corner post of the loft in one motion, from that position, to get in the guy’s face to grump that he was TRYING to SLEEP.
Sarah on the other side of the room like BUSINESS HOURS ARE CLOSED JOYCE
Okay. So like I know Joe gave her the green light, but it’s now been 24 hours since checking in with him.
It’s been about 16 hours. Joyce and Joe talked Sunday morning, it is now Sunday evening. It will be 24 hours on Monday morning after they wake up.
Also Joe is not in control of, nor owed anything from, Joyce by default. They were in a two week relationship in which he was far more invested than she was and he almost immediately sabotaged it by pushing Dorothy to understand her actual feelings for Joyce, on multiple occasions if I recall correctly. I’m open to wing wrong but I don’t think this “Joe waiting for an answer on poly” will come home to roost the way people seem to be waiting for.
He’s owed an end to their conversation if Joyce wants to keep him as a friend or anything, but her priorities here are very clear.
That’s a better use of the word “owed” than we usually see in these discussions. It’s not an obligation that she’s legally or morally required to follow through on, but it would help build and maintain social relations.
He’s owed a damn answer at the very least, even if it’s a simple and concise “No.”
He’s owed an answer since Joyce explicitly said she would give him an answer and would continue the conversation later, which to most people means “later this day” if it’s not specified “at a later date.”
Esp since literally nothing happens on this page at all. Like, them lying in bed together cutely should’ve been in the midnight chapter end montage thing. Unless next strip is Sarah kicking them out of the room, this page does nothing for characterization, plot, anything. I feel like the day should’ve ended six times by now lol
I’m not sure that he’s owed an answer today – it’s a big question and a big step. Taking time to think it over and discuss it with your other partner doesn’t seem out of line. Of course, Joyce doesn’t really seem to have been thinking it about and she certainly hasn’t brought it up to Dorothy.
Yeah, the “discuss it with your other partner” is really the sticking point.
I mean when someone says “I’ll get back to you later okay? I promise. Later.” Very emphatically, they do in fact owe it to you to get back to you later. It’s way later now.
Honestly, for all that this is easy to take as plain horniness (and let it never be said that Joyce isn’t horny), for some reason it reads to me far more as a desire for intimacy than sex per se. Could be projecting. Who knows.
I think while we’re in this zone of “Dorothy gives Joyce a safe release valve for all her repressed feelings” those two are gonna be awfully hard to crowbar apart
At least until Dorothy feels like getting the crowbar herself. It’s been interesting to see how much more permissive her boundaries are with Joyce vs. her previous relationships.
Yeah, they were codependent before coitus, that situation rarely gets less intense after you have sex.
This strip is so heckin’ cute. Love their expressions.
She’s too sexy for her shirt?
I just hope that at some point we get to see the reactions of Sal and Danny to this mess. Not only are they my favorite couple, so I’d be happy to see them for that reason alone, but surely they’d have some opinions on the stuff that went down? What with Danny being Joe’s best friend and Sal being Walky’s brother?
As discussed in previous threads, I don’t think Sal would get heated but she probably would hit Dorothy with “Yo, I get that my brother is a mess, but that was fucked up how you strung him along a second time.” The vibe would be harshed for at least a while.
I could see this giving Danny the unconscious green light to unload every bad thought he’s ever had about Dorothy. I’m curious how he’d behave at full tilt.
The reason I don’t think this would necessarily come to pass is because of how Danny and sal tend to vibe in general. Sal tries not to get involved in All That Mess, and she is likely more concerned about Amazigirl and having had to go to Asher.
Danny has generally had a negative opinion of Joe’s behaviour and without the full facts may assume this was Joe’s will somehow, and even with full facts will know this was Joe’s will actually. Either way, Danny has not been keeping tabs nor being a dedicated friend in the past few months with his focus on Sal, as far as we’ve seen. Add to this that he generally doesn’t seem to like to dwell on the negative or gossip, I think he is probably fine.
It’s good to note that Ethan legitimately and directly stole Asher from Jennifer before this, and Sal and Danny either don’t know that yet or don’t care, despite Sal growing up with Jennifer and Asher, and Danny having had a huge crush and sticking his foot in it with Ethan. The Ethan/Asher thing was way worse in terms of cheating, even if Ethan needed something like that and Jennifer was being a world class knob.
OTOH, Danny did just have a talk with Dorothy about bisexuals accidentally cheating that he didn’t seem to happy with, so that’s set up to come back around.
And I don’t think anyone knows the details of Ethan and Asher hooking up and I disagree it was “way worse”. Ethan kissed him, he pulled back and then went and told Jennifer about it. Later, she said he wasn’t her boyfriend and he took that as a breakup.
Yeah, Jennifer didn’t think Asher was her boyfriend, so I’m not sure how Ethan stole anyone (a phrasing which I dislike in the first place because it implies ownership and not agency for the person who did the actual cheating).
I also don’t think Asher cheated. One kiss then an immediate confession and getting told your partner doesn’t think you’re in a relationship would be incredibly thin evidence of anything like that.
As a lot of us have opined over the months — cheating is solely defined by the people in the relationship and what boundaries they’ve set.
Jennifer didn’t think it was cheating, and in fact didn’t even think it was a relationship, therefore what Asher did wasn’t cheating.
To be fair here, Ethan was definitely trying to get him to cheat in that kiss scene, so while Asher’s cool, I think Ethan crossed some lines.
I don’t think it’s really the responsibility of people external to the relationship to keep the rules and boundaries of a relationship they aren’t in. There weren’t any lines for Ethan to cross other than Asher’s consent, and he didn’t cross that line.
Sal: “How tf did you screw up with Joe before he screwed up with you?”
Her and Danny both knew Joe/Joyce were doomed, they were just wrong about why.
Can we just replace these two with sal and Danny actually? I’ll take all these nothing strips if it’s Sal and Danny. They have better chemistry and it feels way better seeing them just chill knowing what an uphill battle it was for them to reach that point, Sal getting comfortable around Danny and Danny having infinite patience for her issues.
I think Sal mostly won’t care. She’d care a little bit, on her brother’s behalf, but she’d very much be a “let everyone involved make their own choices” type.
Danny is probably gonna have stronger opinions. Even if he’s over dotty, he’s still shown a slight bit of possessiveness with his attitude toward walky, and the fact that dotty has *another* partner- one that factored into her decision not to go to yale, no less- will probably sting a bit given her reasons for breaking up with him. Similar to Becky with the whole “oh it was just me, not any of those other factors i thought it was” though not anywhere near as intense. He probably also already grappled with that a bit when she got with Walky. He probably would also judge dotty a bit for the messiness of the break-up, and he’d definitely be mad at joyce for hurting his best friend
Ew I hope Danny doesn’t get weird about Dorothy having a new partner. It’s literally zero business of his.
I think it’s more likely Danny gets irritated in a “we JUST had a discussion about cheating bisexuals and how you aren’t supposed to be one” way.
Yeah that would be absolutely justified.
Well, Sal already saw them kissing and just said they were being less gay than usual, so I agree that she probably won’t care much. I can see Danny being pissed on Joe’s behalf. I’m not sure how he’d feel about Dorothy. On the one hand, she cheated, but on the other hand, she cheated on Walky, who he hates. Not sure what he’d make of that.
Oh so it is night time. It’s felt impossible to track when thing shave been happening for the last day of comic time, I thought at first Dorothy and Joyce were going down to talk to Asma at like 2 am.
I think this is a good opportunity to sum up the days events. Starting in the morning:
-We open with Amber and Sal. Amber’s getting patched up after probably nearly dying. Nothing really happens here except Asher possibly getting closer to discovering she’s Amazi-Girl
-Joyce and Dorothy woke up, got chewed out by Sarah for being shameless, cheating hussies
-Joyce and Dorothy go to take showers. Dorothy checks on a wounded Amber and finds a way to feel guilty about it.
-Booster reads Joyce’s mind and immediately understood everything going on with her
-They went to break up with their respective boyfriends and discovered they were outed by the school paper. Joe calls Joyce a hussy. Based.
-Raidah is also pissed about the paper for different reasons and the same reason but for different reasons, she chats with Alice and Asma about this. They all agree to be best friends from now on
-Joyce and Dorothy tried collecting every newspaper in their hall before running off to confront Daisy for outing them
-They briefly meet and talk with Jennifer where Dorothy admits she only saw Walky as a disposable sex toy and she enjoyed tossing him aside for any arbitrary reason and that she’ll do it again
-Joyce and Dorothy head back to Joyce’s room assumedly to fuck only to run into Becky who was lurking in the shadows like a true creep
-As soon as they finish stabbing Becky in the chest with their love Hank shows up
-It’s probably early to midday as all 3 girls try to distract Hank from discovering both his children are super gay
-Becky bails and Hank only discovers one of his daughters is gay they go get pizza for lunch and possibly talk about the evils of communism and why voting for Trump in 2016 wasn’t that bad actually
-During lunch time Raidah also confronts Daisy about her being a generally irresponsible lesbian and editor mostly that later though
-Alice finds time to talk to Ruth and angst about how horny she is for Jennifer still
-Depending on how long that lunch was it could be early afternoon when Becky decides god isn’t real because she can’t fuck her childhood crush
-Jennifer being Walky’s only friend does what any true friend would when their pal is going through a breakup and kicks him off his bed. Based.
-Having sacrificed the faith of a lesbian Joyce and Dorothy finally consummate their love as prophesied in the forbidden texts thus dooming their friend group to burn in the precursor fires of creation!…..They fuck
-Becky maybe breaks up with her girlfriend while Joyce and Dorothy fuck
-Sarah tells Joe that Joyce definitely ain’t coming back as Joyce and Dorothy fuck. Quite literally while they fuck, like in the same strip.
-Dorothy and Joyce fuck for at least an hour. It’s probably late afternoon by now. They make a mess.
-Deciding it’s wise not to sleep in the aftermath of their lust they decide to do laundry
-Joyce and Dorothy decide to annoy Asma on their way to do laundry, Joyce specifically decides to annoy Lucy
-Walky tries to slide into Amber’s DMs, it doesn’t work
-Raidah makes Joyce feel bad. It’s gets over a thousand comments and comments turned off the day after. Good work girl!
-Carla is a chicken. Bwak! Bwak! I mean she very understandably fails to confront her incredibly supportive billionaire parents about their responsibility and profiting from a genocide and that maybe they could divest in some way.
-Sarah returns assumedly from fucking her boyfriend. She angsty because getting good d from her short king bf might also mean caring about him.
-And here we are. I guess Joyce is still horny. It’s probably evening now. Broken down like this it does read like a day’s worth of shit happened. My guess this storyline is close to ending.
Did ya’ll like this? Was this too long? Did I miss anything? Did I accidentally make this a reply? Maybe someone should do an end of arc breakdown every story? Maybe we do this again?
EXTREMELY helpful! Thank you!
This was my general read on how the day’s events progressed as well, it was helpful, I’m assuming any weird or incorrect assumptions or presentations are for comedic value in which case also good work, they made me chuckle!
Thank you, this helped m,e figure out how and where I went wrong – I remembered pizza with Hank as dinner, not lunch.
This is an excellent summary. Thank you very much for the effort!
I think the only thing I really would point out is that Joe didn’t call Joyce a Hussy, Joyce called herself a Hussy and Joe didn’t correct her.
I mean he less so called her a hussy as pointes out she was acting like one indirect contradiction of her own self analysis, but I was trying to make a joke there. I guess it didn’t land. I’ll note that and work on it.
Nah it did, it was funny. Sometimes people just don’t recognize jokes
perfect summary, no notes
Thank you so much for this, there are some things I completely forgot, like Becky really did pull a jumpscares there lol. And I forgot Raidah and Asma talked at all, I just remembered Asma and Alice because I hope they get together hehe
You left out the part where Joyce calls HERSELF a hussy, to which Joe agrees.
Ngl. I have actually used this line before. Successfully. My ex cared a lot about the structural integrity of her clothing.
Man, once the dam broke, Joyce got *ridiculously* horny for Dorothy huh?
It is was foretold by the Prophet of Ruthlessness:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/need-2/
I can’t help but note the tragic irony that Joyce is actually Becky’s ideal sexual partner in almost all terms. Someone so extremely horny it both validates and enables Becky’s sexuality and desires.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/ladylust/
Becky truly taking the worst L of her life.
Glassesless joyce looks strange now
All this has been during the weekend, right? So the next day should be a school day?
Do they have biology class tomorrow? If so, I hope Joyce and Dotty have all the sex they could possibly want right now, because there’s gonna be one hell of a reckoning once Dotty finds out Joyce never OFFICIALLY broke up with Joe and has been too blinded by lust to bring it up….
Joyce, Walky, Sal, and Lucy have math class; and Dorothy, Joyce, Becky, and Sarah have Robin’s poli-sci class.
Biology will be the day after.
Still those classes should be interesting tomorrow.
Joyce did officially break up with Joe.
Joe didn’t officially break up with Joyce, but that’s actually meaningless unless Joyce decides it has some meaning, which she has given no indication of so far.
She did, however, promise him a conversation. For all your ‘she owes him nothing’ talk, you conveniently forget that she DID in fact promise a conversation. Which she now does in fact owe.
She said that today, FWIW (while running out the door at emergency speed because of the newspaper — she might not even remember saying anything in her rush to leave). This very morning. It’s only now the end of the same day.
It would be pretty weird, honestly, for her to have squeezed a follow-up conversation into her schedule so far.
So, yeah, if she even remembers it, she should talk to Joe at some point; but in the meantime we are seriously in “No answer is an answer” territory here.
Oh you’re still doing the bolding thing…
Anyway it’d be pretty fucked up for her to forget she promised to get back to him on this very important conversation but that’s probably what happened, Fionna and Cake style. I’m betting she’ll remember in class tomorrow. Anyway when you say “I’ll get back to you later” that tends to imply “later today.” She spent most of the day fucking around, doing nothing, harassing brown women. Plenty of time to get back to that very important conversation but I’m guessing she fully compartmentalized Joe away, aside from mentioning once in the slipshine that she’s constantly horny around him and dotty.
Would you be as annoyed if they were italics instead?
Because some people find italics hard to read.
She said she cheated on him and he should break up with her, he said “why can’t I just be a side piece and you can have Dorothy as your main dish.” Joyce COULD have said “No, it’s over. Goodbye,” but instead said they’d talk about it later… and she hasn’t seen him since. Contrast that with how fast she was with Walky by telling him cruelly that Dorothy is hers and she “won,” then laughing in his face.
She also never confirmed that she dumped Joe when Dorothy said they BOTH broke up with their boyfriends so they could be together, so no, the breakup hasn’t officially happened, Joyce is just too much into her honeymoon phase to realize that she still left Joe hanging in the polyamory proposal. A simple “No, goodbye,” was ALL she needed to end things conclusively… and I just know this lack of clarity is going to bite Joyce and Dotty HARD.
> unless Joyce decides it has some meaning, which she has given no indication of so far
This is flatly untrue. Joyce has given several indications that she does not believe she has broken up with Joe, most notably panel 4 here: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/splash/ where she says “My boyfriend,” Dorothy corrects her to “Ex-boyfriend,” and Joyce makes a face, looks aside, and has the tiniest-font “Yyehh?” response. That is not the reaction of someone who believes she has officially broken up with someone.
…is Sarah in the bottom bed, or did she flee… but where ? to Dorothy’s room’s vacant bed ? …which has Becky
I think it’s been shown that they each have a high bed so that they can have a little office area below, I’m not totally sure how they’re positioned, either end to end or on different walls of the room.
oh rightr. Still much without sound range, in any case 😀
They’re end to end, which really makes things worse for Sarah.
I’m not sure how everyone else’s sexual awakenings went, but after spending so long holding on to a bunch of church rules, and whatever else, after I had sex the first time that s like literally all I wanted to do. Even more than when I hadn’t had it before.
This is where Joyce is now. She’s WAAAAAY more repressed than I ever was.
Also also, when I realized I was queer and finally able to be queer that started a point where I just had sex to have sex because it was new and interesting again. So Joyce is getting a little double whammied here, and Dorothy is getting it too.
Like I know everyone is tired of seeing them be horny at each other, but (speaking from someone with similar repressions) particularly very realistic.
I had long ago stopped caring about church by the time I had sex for the first time, and my experience was very similar. I think it’s pretty normal.
As a data point, I went from church-repressed to “fuck it, I’m having sex because depression and probably atheist” and while I was pretty focused on having more sex after that, I still managed to not piss off my roommate about it.
Like, there’s horny, there’s too horny to function, and there’s too horny to be allowed to exist in polite company, and I suspect MOST of us stayed in the middle there but Joyce keep edging over towards the far side of the spectrum.
Sarah’s gonna need to invest in a broom to bang on the top bunk’s mattress to get those two to cut it out while she’s trying to sleep.
They’re not bunks, thankfully. They’re lofts, and Sarah has her own.
Sarah’s probably gonna lose sleep regardless from Joyce and Dorothy’s thumpasprunging.
Which means Sarah is at eyelevel. Especially bad, because I think I remember that the loft beds are situated foot-to-foot so she’ll be pretty close to the “action”.
Fortunately, that means a broom will still work, she’ll just have to use a swatting motion.
On a more serious note, I feel like Dorothy is desperately grasping for a sense of peace and control in this situation. She is not able to keep her mind just on requited feelings for Joyce, it seems like she feels the repercussions of their union much more heavily and is mainly just trying to restore a sense of moral character in herself again.
Joyce is happy and free for the first time in her life with someone she’s wanted but never thought she could actually have and is riding horny euphoria, possibly to intentionally block out everything else. And you know what? Good for her. She keeps getting locked in misery and mindfucking, some escape from that constant background radiation of the world being scary and wrong is needed.
Eh, I think Joyce has swung from one extreme to the other. She’s running on pure id now that she was given the green light from her father, and the fact that she gets so defensive when people tell her she can’t grope and kiss Dotty every second of every day is a big tell that she’s acting reckless. Dorothy is at least catching on that there are consequences coming, but Joyce is too much in her own lesbian marriage fantasy that she doesn’t care.
slip shine sequel
‘Sarah experiences being forced to watch’
If this keeps going these two will single handedly double the amount of slip shines
Man, I wish I had someone who’s as obsessed with me as Joyce is.
For real.
It’s possible, although in my own marriage I found the Gomez Addams strategy does actually work really well. (“What you do is this: you find someone you really like and who likes you, and then you just treat them like they want to be treated all the time and make sure they’re the center of your world, you just gotta totally simp out with no chill but without making them uncomfortable or smothered.”)
“Oh, NO, this shirt is SO uncomfortable for sleeping! If only SOMEONE would take it OFF of me!”
“You know, you could just ask me to take it off you. Like, directly.”
possibly some lingering “if someone else takes the initiative then you’re not responsible for what happens next” thought/programming.
Unrelated to the comic, but does anyone know how I can receive notifications when someone replies to my comments? I have definitely typed my email right and there’s nothing in my spam.
AFAIK there aren’t notications here by default? You might check if creation of a gravatar account would offer any sort of settings for that.
This is a very basic comment section — pretty sure the ONLY thing e-mail is for is to link your Gravatar.
You can’t, you just have to obsessively reload the page all day or forget it even exists till tomorrow
Whelp, guess I’ll just continue to forget about half my comments and ignore people I get into conversations with
Dorothy broke up with Danny for being a healthy amount of clingy.
Is this the infamous #damnyouwillis foreshadowing I sense?
IIRC that wasn’t the only reason Dorothy broke up with Danny. But yeah, I think she’s only now beginning to realize what she has unleashed.
Either Dorothy’s boundaries are significantly lowered for Joyce, or the audience should be keeping their popcorn well stocked.
She mainly broke up with Danny because he was casually dismissive of her ambitions to leave Indiana and attend Yale, although she’d clearly been building up to it for a while. Fair cop to her, her priorities have since shifted, in large part because of Joyce. I think there are other problems likely to arise between these two.
She broke up with Danny because she didn’t want to date him anymore.
It was not a punishment she administered for being whatever “a healthy amount of clingy” means, it was not a reaction to any one thing Danny had done.
Dorothy as much as directly said that she’d been hoping the breakup could just happen organically as a result of the two of them having different career aspirations, and she was caught off-guard when, instead of going to a university with a better computer science program, Danny followed her to IU. That she wanted to break up with him was apparently obvious to JOE, who then began dropping hints to Danny, but Danny himself remained cheerfully, romantically oblivious. Even when she told him they “needed to talk about their relationship”, Danny was psyched.
I still think the thing Danny most obviously did wrong in that conversation that we can assume had been going on for a while was not listening to Dorothy: she was trying to let him down gently (even though she’d waited too long for it to really be gentle), but he just kept happily papering over everything she was saying with what he wanted to hear. Finally, when she told him she was going to Yale and he wouldn’t be able to follow her, he said “or you could change your mind 🙂” and she exploded.
The way she wound up telling Danny they were through was a negative reaction to him ignoring her and being really dismissive of her ambitions, but the actual breakup was not something done out of anger.
Worth noting: after the breakup, Danny did briefly angrily regret having come to IU, but for the people who wanna blame Dorothy for not breaking up with Danny before he applied to IU, he had previously been steadfastly lying to her that IU was a great school and exactly where he would’ve gone even if they weren’t a couple. She suspected otherwise, but I really dislike the narrative that Danny being at IU is entirely her fault.
I concur that Danny being at IU is not her fault at all, except in the weirdly tangent sense that she probably shoulda broke up with him when she wanted to originally instead of trying to let “going to different schools” solve the problem for her.
Where I think we might disagree is that I don’t think Danny wasn’t listening, because I don’t think Dorothy was dropping hints in any kind of way that was detectable unless you had the relationship equivalent of one of those huge underground neutrino finders — if she was capable of making it a clean break with who she was at that time, she’d’ve done it before they graduated high school.
Some of your points I did actually mention in my second comment that I was too slow to add, haha.
But when I say “Danny wasn’t listening”, I mean he wasn’t listening to her during the actual breakup conversation.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/alone/
(He says “in your face” to Joe because of this: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/available/ ) (And after Dorothy breaks up with Joe, Joe tells her he’d been trying to drop hints to Danny for a while.)
Again: absolutely she should have had this conversation months ago, before Danny enrolled at IU. It was definitely cowardly on her part to avoid doing so.
But it also seems to have been her first serious relationship and she’s socially awkward, so I think “she hoped he’d get the hint and that the breakup could be a mutual thing” is an understandable dumb teenager move.
This also feels like an area where people put Dorothy up on the exact same “worldly and super mature” pedestal that Joyce puts her up on, and then get extra mad when she does stupid, immature things, blaming Dorothy for failing to live up to claims of maturity she’s never actually made.
^^^^ all of this with Danny was really easily avoided by being more direct with him before he sent in his college application, but he also seems to have been her first serious boyfriend. Dorothy is as naive as many of the other freshman characters, and she thought “everyone knows high school romances usually don’t work out, right?” — a silly assumption, but an understandable one for a 17-year-old to make.
(They would’ve been younger than they are now when they first started sending out college applications.)
There’s also a bit of a thought here where Dorothy kinda HAS implicitly made a lot of those worldly/super-mature claims, early on, with her open political ambitions and her “no, boyfriends and cartoons are distracting, studying is the only thing!” statements (that are, of course, almost always immediately belied by her actual actions, because she IS just a normal college kid when it comes down to it).
Aside, kinda parallel Frankly, her most interesting conflict has ALWAYS been the one between her ambitions/presentation and the things she actually wants (and the figuring out of same).
I mean, she said it was cute that Joyce thought she knew more than Joyce about college parties. She suggested going to the police after Joyce was roofied and then did basic Google research to realize it wasn’t true. She was surprised and displeased to hear that a Twilight movie could pass the Bechdel test. And, as folks keep pointing out, some of them in-universe, her idea of a career goal hadn’t evolved since she was like six years old.
Did she try to be no-nonsense about focusing on school? Sure. But the idea that the way to do college is to deny yourself any and all “distractions” is in itself naive.
I think this is a case of how we as a society tend to assume that “quiet and bookish” is synonymous with “mature”, especially for girls.
Honestly I think the only area where Dorothy has made an actual claim to maturity is “not being a virgin”, and that plus “she’s book-smart” really does seem to be enough to make her forever not just as naive as Joyce is, even while she does things like “go sit on a dryer instead of masturbating” (I’m talking about when she went back to the laundry room alone here).
I actually have a hypothesis that most of Dorothy’s ardent opposition in this comments, are simply guilty of expecting more from her than every other character, because they actually fell for Dorothy’s own bullshit vis a vis how mature she made herself out to be. The expectations are just higher for her, because, well, Dorothy set those expectations at the place she wanted to be…and that place was incredibly unrealistic, and she could never actually measure up to it in the timeframe of this comic.
I don’t even think it’s Dorothy’s “own” bullshit. I think she’s only ever actually claimed to be worldly in the sense of not being a virgin. She PRESENTS as mature. Former Gifted Kid energy. It’s not the same thing as actually thinking or trying to sell herself to other people as super mature and worldly.
Like, she doesn’t want to call body parts “capoodle” and she objected to pajama jeans (which she then regretted doing and stopped doing). Are there any other examples, though?
I don’t think she regretted. Joycr just kinda told walky that Dorothy is too good for him and then Dorothy asked him to strip in her doorway so she could “forget what the fight was about”. I don’t recall anything to the tune of “sorry you can wear what you want” or “I might not like it but your feelings matter so I’ll let it slide.”
And like you could argue she’s showing that by not getting mad about it in the future but like…not everything has to be implicit, Dorothy. Especially since their reconciliation came in the form of shaming walky for having a sense of principles and self worth.
I think she visibly felt horrible after Mike drove home what he was doing and she saw the look on Walky’s face.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/03-the-first-step-towards-recovery/target/
I agree that the form of “actually making up” was really silly and kind of uncool. But I also think part of the problem was that Dorothy wasn’t really meant to be “mad at Walky for wearing clothes he likes”, just “embarrassed to be seen with a guy in pajama pants”. So Willis gave us a resolution more appropriate for the latter — where Dorothy feels bad for having been embarrassed and reminds herself that it doesn’t matter what Walky wears, rather than a resolution for “Dorothy was judgmental and made Walky feel bad about his fashion choices”.
Like the latter is a valid interpretation of events but I think the reason why Dorothy didn’t apologize for doing that is because it didn’t occur to Willis as what was happening. There’s a bit of a sitcommy “Walky’s desire to wear pajama pants as clothing isn’t a choice worthy of respect, so Dorothy didn’t do anything wrong by specifically not respecting it” logic there.
Finally, I… don’t know what you’re referring to in your last paragraph, though? Who shamed Walky for having principles and a sense of self-worth?
The scene you posted was before the Pajama Jeans breakup
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/leisure/
And anyway here’s Joyce shaming walky for having principles (ie. Breaking up with Dorothy for not being willing to change his fashion just cuz she will withhold affection from him for doing it) and self worth (belittling him, calling him stupid and making him the bad guy for breaking up with Dorothy for her refusal to let him dress how he likes.)
Like…it’s SO disrespectful. And dorothy doesn’t chastise Joyce for any of this or even reassure Walky that he’s not stupid? Like someone just talked to her boyfriend like this and she just lets it slide? haha. Silly Joyce.
This is a bad relationship.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/no/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/moms/
I mean, no, THIS is the breakup.
And a few strips before the one you linked, Dorothy is visibly remorseful and even specifically says she’s “done enough wardrobe judging for today” when Joyce asks for an opinion on her clothes…
I’m sorry, I think calling this Walky being shamed for having principles is really really strong.
I think if your girlfriend judges your clothes and gives you an ultimatum on whether you keep clothes you like or have her affection then breaking up with her is a decision to to avoid dealing with that treatment. Im calling that decision “having principles”. If you don’t agree that’s fine. That’s not at all the point I’m making.
Look at the dates Li
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/03-the-first-step-towards-recovery/target/
Is April
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/no/
Is July
And the link i posted was merely an example of Joyce treating walky like shit in front of Dorothy and Dorothy doing nothing to defend him.
Again: valid reading. Not one I can agree with, I think it just isolates the events too much from the tone of the comic and I have trouble taking the more Looney-Tunes-y strips that seriously, but the things you’re saying are true!
I only feel the need to push back a little on that last bit, because there are also many many examples of Walky treating Joyce “like shit” in front of not only Dorothy but their whole friend group, and only rarely getting talked to about it for even a single panel of a single strip. They really do have a very mutually antagonistic dynamic where they treat each other pretty badly.
Like there were a TON of rather dark fics back in the ’90s for Ranma 1/2 exploring the idea of Akane as an abusive partner. Some of those fics were really well-written. I won’t even say I fully disagreed with the core conceit.
At the same time, I couldn’t really read the manga or watch the show with that lens in place because if taken seriously, it turned a lighthearted romantic comedy with slapstick elements into a horror story.
Which, to be clear, doesn’t make the lens invalid, just…
Watching or reading Ranma 1/2 and expecting Takahashi to ever have Akane answer for being an abusive partner is a recipe for a truly miserable time, and I think reading Dumbing of Age with the lens that Dorothy was an abusive girlfriend to Walky is the same.
I mean, tone aside, the scenario is
-Walky gets pajama jeans
-Dorothy says she can decide to not find him attractive if he wears them
-Walky decides to break up with her
-Dorothy grabs walky calls him stupid and tells him to take her back because he doesn’t deserve better.
-Dorothy tells him to strip naked to make herself feel better.
Like yes. It’s a silly wacky comic but like does that just mean the events taking place don’t matter or didn’t happen? Everyone loves to use old comics as evidence of how long Dorothy and Joyce were set up to be a THING but golly I use an example of Dorothy being a bad girlfriend and it’s “don’t take it so seriously”.
Personally, reading this in real time back then I still thought Dorothy was solidly in the wrong and HATED that walky and her got together. She didn’t apologize and if she was remorseful she didn’t make it known. The most she said is she’s used to being the spine and not used to being stood up to. Whelp good news. Going forward nobody she dates has enough of a spine to say “no” to call her out again.
Like I didn’t mean to go on a rant about Dorothy being toxic but that strip has literally always rubbed me the wrong way and it doesn’t really help that it’s a “joke”. It feels mean spirited and not necessarily in a funny way? “You’re a worthless piece of poop I have ever met, so you don’t GET to dump someone who is thirty million times greater than you OVER A PAIR OF UGLY PANTS.” is a fucking insane sentence. I don’t know if Walky has ever told Joyce she’s worthless and that she doesn’t GET to dump anyone or anything equivalent. It’s…cruel.
She did look remorseful and she said more in that strip than just “I’m used to being the spine in the relationship”, but it’s completely fine that it upset you. You’re allowed to be upset. I didn’t say you had to take those strips as jokes.
I’m also not “everybody”, I am just one person, trying and apparently failing to explain why I don’t interpret those strips the way that you do.
And I am going to gently disengage now. I hope that’s all right. I understand and respect that these particular strips are emotional for you, there is genuinely nothing wrong with that, but.
I think we are at an impasse, and I also feel like I’m upsetting you by continuing to argue, because regardless of how I interpret those comics, it’s coming across like I think Walky deserves to be treated badly. Which I do not think! Or like I think you’re silly for feeling so strongly, which I also do not think.
Re: Dorothy and attempting to be worldly to the best of her knowledge-
We’ve seen her completely rethink her beliefs several times when challenged, which I think is pretty interesting about her. She’s typically more likely to be accused of being bossy than a doormat. Everyone remembers how Raidah’s critique of the presidency affected her, but Roz’s sex positivity isn’t brought up too often.
Dorothy wasn’t raised fundie, but still had absorbed some conservative views on sex from the surrounding culture. She initially looked down on Roz when she was assigned to cover the sex tape story. Roz of course was out to make a point, and Dorothy immediately adopted it, and tried to swallow any judgmental impulses she’d had toward people (besides Joe.) She even started gently correcting others’ comments that she might’ve bandwagoned the day before.
I’m starting to think that Joyce was actually fully self-aware how fucking horny she was for her whole young life, and that’s where she got all the obsessive energy for Christ. Being God’s Perfect Child was just the thing she doubled down on, every time she felt the impulse to “sin.” She just needs something in her life to direct her latent anxious obsessive energy at, at all times, but the problem with this new paradigm is that none of her friends have the infinite patience of Jesus Christ, where her emerging sexcapades are concerned.
Like, when Ruth forewarned Joyce she was gonna “pratfall into her first orgasm and bang half the town,” Joyce didn’t push back on the idea…she said “oh, so I guess you’re saying I should preemptively marry half the town?”
Joyce knew. Joyce always knew. She just also knew, in the past, that she had to hide her “impure” desires. She always knew that all of the people who called her self-destructively horny, were dead-centre on the bullseye, which is exactly why it always scared her.
Except now, she’s lived herself into a paradigm where she’s abandoned her previous coping mechanism for shedding all of her anxious energy through religious obsession, and all that’s left is using sex as a constant outlet for every time she feels the slightest modicum of stress or shame about anything…which is, of course, literally every waking moment of her day, because of who she is as a person.
That’s why she needs to constantly exclaim that she will never apologize for being in lesbians with Dorothy, and refuses to acknowledge there’s ever a wrong time to kiss Dorothy; it’s her new scripture, which she deploys to reinforce her sense of a moral self who is safe from judgement. It’s no different than where she started in this comic, saying ten hail marys every time she felt shamed or transgressive about literally anything.
She has to enshrine her coping behaviors as morally-constructive absolutes, to maintain any sense of comfort from them, because accepting any possibility that somebody judging her for her choices might have a point, undermines the very function of those coping mechanisms – and means, of course, that an outside force could take away her ability to cope.
She spent her whole life fighting back as hard as possible, against the prospect that any outside force could force her to actually feel shame, because she’s actually more afraid of that feeling than anything, up to and including eternal damnation. She’s being defensive of her cope, because she’s scared of sliding into a place where she’s actually forced to sit with her own bad feelings, and shame.
But, unlike plaintive appeals to Christ, sex is something where you actually have to regularly consider the feelings of others, every time you do it, and in every place; so, using actual sex as a cope for her existing emotional and sexual repression, is just not as bulletproof, nor as reliable, as her previous coping mechanism, and she’s doing everything she can do to blind herself to that fact, because to her, the alternative is to wallow in the ocean of her perpetual omni-shame, without any life raft.
So, yeah, I’m guessing this is gonna start biting her in the ass, pretty soon. And she’s gonna be annoying, dismissive, and avoidant about it, the entire time.
“preemptively marry half the town” -> Joyce saying she’s into poly?
More seriously, taking this as her new coping mechanism comes off as regression not compared to her very early reliance on Jesus for everything but her beginning of the second semester “I’ve learned I’m wrong about most things” approach.
In particular it’s hard to square this Joyce with the one from this strip, without the word “regression” being used.
Which does go both ways, because in context it’s arguably both about Joyce regretting getting caught up in the Jacob+cheating plot and about Joyce’s horniness overcoming her good sense.
Very good analysis, I think. One nitpick, Joyce would never say hail marys as penance. That’s a Catholic thing, and to right-wing fundies like Joyce was, Catholics are somewhere between pagans and devil-worshippers.
I think that frankly undermines Joyce as an intelligent analyst of theology, reduces her to a walking hormone, and bluntly assumes that there’s no reason to be actually be interested in Christianity other than sexual redirection versus philosophy/history or ideology.
I love her stupid grin in the last panel
It’s wonderful, isn’t it?
I hate her stupid fucking grin in the last panel
(I don’t, I just thought it’d be really funny to see after Stormtide Leviathans comment)
I’m fully neutral about her stupid grin in the last panel.
I don’t know why everybody is so focused on her stupid grin. The glimmer in her eyes is obviously more notable.
As well as the heightened tension of the fingers. 😀
My feelings regarding her stupid grin are too complex to be reduced to a pithy soundbite.
Don’t trust the stupid grin.
Hang on did the bootleg containment thread get reported away this time
Seems like it.
OMG Decoy containment thread!
Clearly the solution is to make several hater containment threads each day, all wearing different hats.
Actually hilarious. (but kinda not, since 90% of the hate in there seemed to be people hating on RANDOM things instead of DoJo/the storyline/etc.)
oh my god spare poor sarah this i beg you
Love Joyce’s anticipatory hands. Without the art, this would be nothing.
I am still considering my full feelings regarding her stupid grind in the last panel and will revisit the matter at a later date
– signed, with best of regards, jay.
I hope the book Dorothy is reading is TWILIGHT.
She never gave the books a chance and I bet she’d really enjoy them.