I mean, I seem to recall that originally and still DoA was intended to be the story of a homeschooled naive Joyce and her atheist best friend. This may not be the story you want, but there are people going “waah why are the main characters in the spotlight again” and that is just silly.
I hear you. Considering the track record of our esteemed author, I am quite certain that some other shoes will be dropping shortly. (But I also dig the saccharine bits so please dread lord Willis not just yet!)
It sounds like you’re referring to the wide brim ranger hat’s Dina, and not the dinosaur beanie’s Dina, and yeah absolutely that was such a devastating moment. I was in denial, surely no way that she’s actually…. But alas….
I mean, the back of the first print of the very first book says:
“Joyce was homeschooled, and college is her first foray into public education. can Dorothy, her unlikely new friend (she’s an atheist! gaspi) help her navigate this diverse social environment, or is everyone here similarly out of their depth?”
That’s true and no one expects them to disappear entirely, but there’s usually also been other stuff going on. The amount of focus those two have received these last couple chapters isn’t normal for the comic – especially with almost all the cuts away to other characters being their reactions to the new couple or to the protest they hooked up at.
There used to be plot arcs that weren’t focused around Joyce, even if she was the main character. Hopefully we get back to that.
I think it’s a set-up for a lot of things that will probably happen. The sweetness lets our guard down. There’s a lot of loose threads rn and we’re extra not gonna be prepared for them tying up now
Right? How can people be bringing the pitchforks because the comic strip is about the two main characters who have been the main characters since the first strip?
There are times this comic really needs an SMBC-style bonus pop-up panel.
I’d kill to see Sarah’s expression as she unwillingly hears this Care Bear’s-level of sweetness at five in the morning. Her gaze could pickle beets at fifty paces right now.
i do mean this genuinely. If you aren’t enjoying a piece of media (and/or feel like you’re not able to appreciate it or get anything out of it), you should move on to something else. I have all sorts of novel suggestions. I got plenty of stuff that isn’t saccharine at all
The thing is this comic has *many* concurrent storylines, generally, and just because you dont like one doesn’t mean you hate all the rest
Making the “just stop reading” advive less helpful for some of us, because. There is still shit there, very eagerly being enjoyed. Just not 100% of it.
Also, I kind of empathize with the idea of being frustrated by the feeling that an artist is mocking you, specifically, on purpose, with their work. I’ve never felt that way, but like, it sounds sucky.
I do think people take this waaaay too personally tho. Its a comic about college kids. Like; outside of the (horribly handled) not-Gaza stuff, or religious fundamentalism stuff, the whole romantic subplots of the cast feel very sitcom-y.
Imagine coming into Willis’s space every day for months just to tell them that you hate their comic. Nothing new. Nothing constructive. Just “I hate this! This comic is shit now!” And then getting offended because Willis said something in the alt text that kinda looks like it might be about those complaints.
I mean, yeah, I’m just saying I don’t believe one has to read it as a “joking around”. Willis is absolutely allowed to take swings back at the section of the commentariat who’s dissatisfied with this chapter, and I think Fuzzy (and others) are allowed in turn to read it AS “a swing back” and not “joking”.
I don’t think it’s aimed at everyone who’s dissatisfied, is the only thing. I think it’s aimed at the folks who are saying he sucks and he’s bad at writing and the comic is shitty now.
Look, if I say, “Damn, I’m really not enjoying this thing” and someone says “Sorry not sorry, this is what’s happening forever now”, that “sorry not sorry” is clearly applicable to me, a person who is dissatisfied.
In fact, that exact same response is pretty toothless and lame in response to “You suck and are bad at writing and this comic is shitty”. It is MORE aimed at someone who is dissatisfied than it is aimed at someone who’s actively being toxic.
I don’t think they literally meant to antagonize me, Fuzzy, the specific person who has written comments here. And perhaps they did not predict any of this dissatisfaction and it was indeed not written with any thought of people who might not want this ultra-cuteness. Given the other mildly antagonistic things they’ve written, though, I’m less inclined to think this comment is entirely divorced from the idea that people might be unhappy with this storyline.
Yeah, that’s fair, but frankly I think they’re entitled to what they said.
Willis is literally just a person, and they have to come on here and see vitriol (the same boring vitriol without a single new point being made) over and over every single day. If you had to come to work every day and half the people at your work just made the same points over and over about how shit they thought you were at your job (in a subjective way) would you not occasionally say something back to them?
Like, Willis is writing the story they want to write. That’s what’s happening here. It’s very much time to decide you’re along for the ride or get the fuck off the train. And if you decide to stick around and continue reading despite hating what’s on screen, you’re totally entitled to comment about it ~but so is Willis~. Even if it’s you being antagonized this time, and not Willis.
Also, as far as antagonism goes, that’s a milquetoast-mild level of clap back. Even without comparing it to the kind of things that get leveled in Willis’ direction on the daily.
This made me realize something – writers that are writing things just because they feel like their audience wants it even though they don’t, they called soulless or pandering. And then artists who write what they want get called selfish and yelled at by their audience. Creators literally can’t win
Don’t forget the third complaint (which is, IMHO, what’s driving a fair portion of the griping around here): “I perceive your latest work as being a genre change! How DARE you not keep producing approximately the same kind of thing you always have been!”
If you had to come to work every day and half the people at your work just made the same points over and over about how shit they thought you were at your job (in a subjective way) would you not occasionally say something back to them?
Ah, my experience working in retail in a small town, although I didn’t say anything back to them because (working for my parents) I got fired once for being perfectly polite in the face of a stupid as hell customer request and then complaining about it after I got home, on the grounds of “they pay the bills, you aren’t ever allowed to say anything bad about a customer even privately to your mom”.
(I got fired more than once by my mom. My dad would routinely hire me back 1-2 weeks later on the next truck/stocking day. Small business owning parents: do not do this.)
This is indeed the typical customer service experience in the States, but my understanding is that in countries with better working conditions, “take abuse during your shift without complaint” isn’t actually a part of job descriptions.
(Not that I’m calling all the comments made around here abuse!)
And for that matter, the Dumbing of Age comments section isn’t a retail store with employees and customers and a chain of management. The same standards can’t be reasonably applied here.
Absolutely true. The majority of us, and I would bet the vast majority of the most vocally dissatisfied, aren’t paying Willis anything, yet we’re still behaving like high-value clients.
I bought ten books and some yuri five years ago, and on the rare occasions I have a little extra, I’ll subscribe to Willis’s Patreon for a month or two. Some folks buy every single book as it comes out, back every Kickstarter, and have been on Patreon continuously for way longer. I still don’t think any of us have earned any special privileges or expectation that our opinion should weigh more than somebody who discovered the comic a couple days ago and reads with an ad blocker on. Basically, even if we stoop to treating any reader as a customer, there’s no more expectation of privileges and influence than if we use the self checkout to buy a Monster Energy at Walmart.
(I bought the first idk 12 books and I’ve also been a subscriber periodically to their Patreon! Things are financially rough right now so I’m not doing that right now though.)
@Li In all honestly, and I implied this yesterday, I wouldn’t DARE to complain on the comments of a webcomic where I didn’t also own all the print editions.
I beg to defer, your Emperorness, rightful ruler of California and adjacent territories. Although I can’t produce them off the top of my head, there seems to be a fair amount of evidence that the alt-texts are written much closer to now-time than the strips themselves.
Many, many years ago, I had a semi-successful webcomic. Not anywhere near DoA levels of popularity, but successful in its sphere. I’m not going to name the comic; it’s not online anymore and I’d like to think that I’m a different person now than I was back then.
There was a fanbase, there was shipping, there were pornographic side projects of my characters. And, like Willis, I also had adopted a snarky online persona as the author, calling out stupid comments from the peanut gallery in my newsposts. The fans commenting on these callouts laughed along with me, and I felt justified.
There were multiple IRC channels for readers of my comic. I frequented some of them to bask in the admiration from my fans, which came in despite my “snarky and irreverent” online persona. At one point, I learned about another such channel and I did something stupid: I joined under an alias that didn’t identify me as the author. Still, I adopted the same online persona.
People hated me. Called me toxic. I was warned by the mods to knock it off.
I was pissy about it at first, but the experience stuck with me. Eventually, after some introspection, I realized that there would always be some people who would support my actions as the author simply because they liked my creations. I had a pass for bad behavior with my fans. Long-term exposure to the illusion of peer consensus had dulled my ability to see when my own behavior was unacceptable. In short, I had become an asshole.
I know that’s a big wall of text there, but it all comes down to this:
Phil, if you’re still reading this, I see Willis has turned a spotlight to your comment in Bluesky. That sucks and I’m sorry. Try not to hold it against the people that seem to agree with him; they’re fans and they’ve got a blind spot.
And Willis, if you’re reading this, I hope that someday you’ll learn to let people disagree with you without taking it as a threat to your position. Even if you think the things they say are stupid and wrong and obviously deserving of ridicule, that’s okay. You can let those things pass by. “Calling out the haters” only seems like a demonstration of self-confidence to you and the people already predisposed to agree with you. To everyone else, it seems thin-skinned.
“Don’t be so predictable that I can make fun of you by accident” is apparently taking a comment as a threat to their position.
The actual comment that got spotlighted in any real way (screenshot) is someone else complaining about reverse racism, and it doesn’t even include a screen name.
I mean JFC they let people say much worse than what Phil said all the time, they’ve been manually restoring the hater containment thread every morning even though a fair bit of it has been people just calling them a bad writer every day, but the occasional mild snark is proof that they’re too thin-skinned, I guess.
Oh and it should completely go without saying that your choice to join a fan-run, private IRC channel not meant for you as the author incognito and then be confrontational and rude to fans is nothing like Willis responding to comments that fans are making in the comment section directly below their comic where they should know Willis will see it???? What a weird comparison, Dr. Sharks.
“[…] like Willis, I also had adopted a snarky online persona as the author, calling out stupid comments from the peanut gallery in my newsposts. […] At one point, I learned about another such channel and I did something stupid: I joined under an alias that didn’t identify me as the author. Still, I adopted the same online persona. People hated me. Called me toxic. I was warned by the mods to knock it off.”
I mean it sure sounds like Dr. Sharks did, indeed, enter into a fan-run space not meant for them incognito and then proceed to be rude and confrontational to their fans. I’m not sure what else “the same online persona” could possibly mean, that they’d even think it was relevant to tell this long story.
And I maintain that it’s very different. If Willis joined the Reddit, whether under their own name OR a pseudonym, and then started being rude and confrontational in that Reddit, I’d think that was shitty behavior.
It’s very different when Willis just reacts to comments made directly in their own comment section, especially comments like “fuck this shit I’m done”, which frankly just. Do not merit a polite response???
The difference, if it were unclear, is that we’re essentially having a boisterous party on Willis’s front yard, yelling about how bad their lawn decor is, and getting mad at them when they occasionally retort…
…and Dr. Sharks went clear across town to a party they weren’t even invited to, discovered someone complaining about their lawn ornaments, and started a fight over it.
I understand not enjoying this particular storyline. But the racism present in many comments bothers me. Can you imagine people saying “enough with the black couple” after a storyline focusing on Lucy and Jacob?
Shut the fuck up lol a person of color complaining about the saturation of the white girls is not racist and it is not equivalent to a white person complaining about a black couple. Grow the fuck up, it’s 2025.
It feels a bit of a stretch to call the fundie girl who was raised in a religious cult who has just managed to break away from that, attempt to deal with years of racist, homophobic programming, be partially disowned by her “loving” mother, discover she is autistic and then have her first same-sex relationship all in the space of her first year at college “plain, bland, uninteresting”.
Like, at this point there is nothing that is objectively more interesting about Asma than there is about Joyce. It’s all potential. Which can be intresting too! I’m curious to learn more about her. But I can’t see how “Joyce=boring, Asma=exciting” in any way other than “new, non-white character”.
But it doesn’t have to be “objectively” more interesting. Interest is subjective. Lumino is perfectly capable of finding something “plain, bland, uninteresting” even if you find it interesting as hell.
Some people watch golf, I personally will never understand it. Because it’s not interesting.
Also, yeah, I find Joyce to be an interesting character; big part of why I got into this comic. I find these two to be a boring couple. Been disappointed about it.
Not in a white-majority culture where we’ve got the overwhelming bulk of societal power, at the very least. If we were in like, a white-oppressing version of China or something, I could maybe see an argument for it, but we’re not. It’s a comic about mainly white teens in one of the whitest parts of the USA, written by a white person. I think the cartoon white kids will survive if we admit they’re white.
This is an accurate statement. Racism is structural; if a given ethnic group lacks power to alter the structure, they can’t be “racist”. Bigoted, sure, that one has nothing to do with relative power, but not racist. In the US, that defaults to pretty much only us white folks having the power to be racist. I’d love to reco struct the power dynamic to make this no longer a true statement, but success is gonna take a whole lot of people agreeing with me on this.
Oh hey, I get to post this again:
“Like this little chestnut that gets way more credit than it deserves: “Privledge +Power =Racism”. Critical Theory approaching this equation for the first time, would find a significant number of flaws. What sort of prejudice? What sort of power? It is somewhat clarified when using Patricia Bidol-Padva’s original use of the phrase in her 1972 education handbook Developing New Perspectives on Race: An Innovative Multi-Media Social Studies Curriculum in Racism Awareness for the Secondary Level. Quite a mouthful, which is because it was never really designed for the public at large it was meant as a teacher training manual. It was only 50 pages long, and it’s so obscure WorldCat doesn’t even have a graphic for it. The reason it got any attention at all is it was picked up by Joseph Barndt for his 1991 text “Dismantling Racism”. Since Bidol-Padva has degrees in Organizational and Educational Psychology, her original definition contextualized her argument, but in a very particular way. What she proposed was “Prejudice in addition to institutional power”, it is a way of understanding the dynamics of a system where authority is already established. The Church, The Courts, The Family… When people try to deploy this equation on twitter at a specific person there are two conflicting types of racism at play: one type is individual, on a one-to-one basis. The one the equation is actually discussing, is huge social complexes. Instead, most people look at it and say, “Well my people have no power therefore I can’t be racist” and we’re off. They dissolve into a shouting match over who’s more marginalized as a group and therefore empowered to speak as an individual. A Black judge who regularly over-punishes white defendants, is doing a racism. Any institutional power plus prejudice equals racism. “Judge” is the key word. The very concepts of “Blue Lives” and “ACAB”, depends on a Black police officer being capable of allowing their badge to override their individual character.
This also nothing new. It’s so commonly understood it’s literally a running joke in Black sit-coms. Youtuber Renegade Cut made precisely this point in his video “90s Black Sitcoms Warned Us”. He notices when Black officers are depicted as having an overt dispute with their fellow police officers, the nod is toward the uniform, not the skin. And by far Renegade is not the only one who’s noticed how selectively a lot of people are choosing to interpret the word “racism” on Facebook. T1J has several videos on it including “Black People Can’t Be Racist??” and “The EVIDENCE of Anti-Black Police Bias (with sources)”. Or we can all just look at this photo for a minute. The badge wins. Inter-minority racism can also go in some seriously wacky directions. For example, this was a post from rapper Ice Cube back in June of 2020. For most people simply looking at it as a stand-alone tweet it’s kinda funny, especially since the Ethiopian statue has, in the shot, the plaque saying it was a gift from Mexico not an original work. But there’s something significantly more insidious here, notice the watermark on the photos. It’s a little blurry but that’s the logo of the Negus Network. It is a reference to a loose affiliation of historical revisionists who assert all the major historical figures including Jesus, Buddha, and all of the historic cultures of Central America, were founded by Africans. A core tenant of their argument is some Africans and the carved heads of the Olmec look alike therefore they must be related. A method of racial classification called phenotyping which was invented by European phrenologists to categorize the races by their skull-type. Designed by white Europeans to demonstrate their superiority, appropriated by Pan-African Nationalists to assert all other cultures on earth are a lie. In one fell swoop Hoteps erase tens of thousands of years of history and culture on three continents. Just in case it seems I’m exaggerating, here’s one of the videos they posted to their Facebook page. They also really hate vaccines and cow’s milk, which is really odd given the number of cow-based pastoral tribes in Africa, but everybody has their thing.
The claim minorities cannot be racist, even against their own members, is not intrinsic to Critical Race Theory. It is a product of CRT as performed by specific researchers with a very particular agenda. All CRT cares about is who is in power, who is not in power, and what underlying assumptions and narratives reinforce those dynamics. Returning to our equation, does it refer to any form of prejudice, or a particular type of prejudice? [Affected Dramatic Voice] I hate lemons! I hate ‘em! They’re awful disgusting fruits and they should never be where respectable fruits are. See, when I was three I saw a lemon but I thought it was an orange and I bit into it and on top of being sour and terrible it was rotten and I’ve never gotten over and that is why I hate all lemons and lemon-based products and that’s why I called the police on that little Mexican girl or whatever she is down the street yesterday your honor. The fact I was taken seriously by the cop who showed up and arrested a 10-year-old brown girl means there are other people who either share my exact prejudice against lemons and lemon-based products, or the lemonade isn’t the important detail of the story.
Which is when the equation goes entirely off the rails. If institutional racism is the product of institutional prejudices enacted and maintained by institutional power, literally no one is responsible for racist behaviors, it’s all auto-pilot. Or, if we assume institutional power when combined with individual prejudices then any act of an individual which may be based on racial prejudices, but where the individual has no power, is not actually racist. It’s someone being mean in a way that if they had power we could call it racist but they don’t so we can’t [picture of KKK member being treated by a team of black surgeons with the caption “Magically not racist anymore”]. Before I get too far in the semantic and semiotic weeds here: the point is this definition has a particular target, secondary-level school children. It is not meant as an accurate reflection of the complexities and nuances of deep social theory, it’s a bird-eye view of racialization, as explained to a room of 15-year-olds. Not a complete rewrite of the fundamental nature of all forms of bigotry.”
Also relevant: “None of us is free from the responsibility to uproot racialized thought and practice-within ourselves and wherever we encounter it. As I see it, a “racist” is anyone holding the belief that the human species is divided into a plurality of “races”, some of which are superior to others. If you employ a racialized binary (e.g. “black” and “”white” or “sun people” and “snow people”) to categorize people, you’re a “racist” and you practice racism—at a minimum, you mistake the shadow for the body, and you’re wasting energy.” James Yaki Sayles, Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s wretched of the earth
nameless samurai, I want you to understand that I got two sentences into reading your reply before deciding it was not worth my time. And then I saw you’d written some kind of manic screed that went on forever and regretted even reading that much
I gleaned enough in the time it took to scroll past that I feel quite confident that regardless of whatever point you were hoping to make, you’ve long since climbed much too far up your own ass to have any hope of communicating it, much less of persuading anyone of anything.
I was posting something from one my teachers about how awesome Critical Race theory is and how people misuse and misunderstand it. So I do find it kind of funny you took it as a manic screed when I was taking the time to transcribe 3 minutes of an hour and 40 minute, deeply researched video about how awesome critical race theory is and how opens in the first two minutes with “I prefer empowerment and information rather than rambling polemics based on what something thinks Critical Race Theory is, based on the 3 words in the title”.
That said, I borrowed my teachers’ words because I am not good with communicating my own ideas, as people constantly tell me. So, sincerely thank you for telling you telling me that I am pretentious and up my own ass. I will change how I try to communicate.
I don’t like statements like this less cuz I disagree with the sentiment and more cuz it feels like a way to justify bigotry. Has anyone ever said “you can’t be racist to white people” for any reason other than to justify their treatment or behavior towards white people?
Well, yeah. Like when responding to a white person talking about they “would face racism” if they went into a majority black city. Or how it’s racist that they “can’t say the n-word.” And sometimes the actions or feelings being “justified” aren’t hateful or bigoted but get labeled as “racism against white people” anyway.
Fair point. Those are all justifiable times to say that. But yeah I dunno I’ve just experienced enough people using it to hardwave their own bad behavior that its soured the statement for me.
Joyce has had one foot on a Joe-shaped landmine and the other on a banana ever since the newspaper reveal so if anything three months feels pretty generous
Heck, I even sympathize with the desire to see a lovely, uncomplicated relationship in fiction, especially if it’s a non-cishetwhite couple+ getting representation that’s been historically lacking in Western media.
I’m not going to be particularly INTERESTED, but I understand why some people want it.
It can work, as long as it’s basically background for them doing other interesting stuff, you just can’t have the relationship be uncomplicated and the plot focus.
Ellipticals are for real so much better for you than treadmills. Personally I did my best elliptical work when I did it first thing in the morning, before my brain was awake enough to make excuses to not do it pff.
American football is just grown up tag mixed with Halo style Oddball (assuming you’re just playing with friends or non-competitively or on the Cleveland Browns or something), so yeah American football is way more fun than just aimless running lol. Pretty sure most sports should be.
Yeah, I played defensive linebacker, I got the worst of both worlds because I had to run into you guys and get all pushy, and then was expected to run anyway.
If we’re gonna talk about pressuring kids into doing things that damage their bodies permanently, by the way, we should drop “imaginary trans cabals” on account of them being imaginary and instead talk about the extremely predatory way football is pushed on young people, and how seriously we absolutely do not take the permanent brain damage done to high school and college athletes before they even “go pro”.
I played American football. I stopped so much as WATCHING American football years ago, for exactly this issue — the sport is set up top to bottom to downplay the injury risks, to everyone’s detriment except for the NFL and college budgets.
The outcry from the fanbase every time a rule change to reduce TBI or even “injuries in general” happens is disgusting — I truly believe a portion of the fanbase is actually there for the bloodsport and not the actual sport, and I KNOW a portion of the fanbase considers injury reduction to be anti-masculine.
Which is a shame, because divorced from the injury potential, American Football is a sport that provides a unique level of weird strategic interest that’s not really available in any other sport I’m aware of specifically BECAUSE it’s a series of set-piece plays rather than continuous.
Maybe if we made it all touch football, but. I can’t even imagine the outcry that suggestion would bring about.
(Football isn’t completely unique in this respect or anything, it’s just that kids aren’t as aggressively pressured to join hockey teams — at least not in the US.)
Same thing as army recruiters being allowed on high school campuses. It’s a type of predation that primarily targets the poor, and because of systemic racism, that’s primarily people of color.
@Yumi Actually relevant, my final “I’m never watching this sport again until they fix things” was that guy who retired early in his prime and released an interview about why that boiled down to “Look, I got my Masters in math and after that hit I took where I got concussed, it took me SIX MONTHS before I could understand my own damn thesis again.”
@Li As someone who’s still a hockey fan, that sport seems to have made some significant strides in reducing TBIs since the 1990s, at least — the most notoriously violent players tend to find their careers abruptly ending instead of just racking up fines like NFL players have tended to.
I used to fucking love running, in elementary and high school. My little autistic ass heard a simple clear instruction with easily intuited parameters and took the fuck off like a rocket. The only one faster than me was a guy on the track team, and he had at least a 6-inch height advantage on me. I was kind of an ass about it though, all makin’ rude comments about the clusters of girls who just walked and chatted the whole time, but in my very slight defense they also complained they were getting bad grades in Phys Ed.
I stopped running after failing PE, not because I didn’t exercise, but because I didn’t wear the right shoes. Killed 100% of my motivation to actually try because the girls who did just walk or hide under the bleachers made a better grade than me.
Like, I get why they didn’t want little girls running in heeled shoes, but I could run in heels and can still run in them (don’t really have a choice now, nobody explained to me that heels as your primary shoe literally changes your foot orientation permanently, they acted like tennis shoes were a moral priority thing.)
I digress though, I think the regular formatting of PE in the US is actually massively detrimental to kids developing lasting healthy habits. Things that should be “do until failure” (running laps) are instead “do until you’re slower than a bell” and things that should be “reach arbitrary amount” (push ups, sit-ups) are do until failure for some reason.
I was party to a conversation among friends about the runners high, and I was literally the meme kid with “You guys get endorphins???”. None of that, no thanks, doesn’t work for me at all.
Agreed. Last time I ran for exercise I got to a point where I literally wanted to die, and then I realized I could just stop and never do it again. So I haven’t.
I’m trying to think of any other ships in this comic that have been cutesy, or if this is truly unique to Joyrothy.
– Billie and Ruth had several earnest romantic panels. Though it was almost always tagged with something either foreboding or self-destructive.
– Danny and Sal have had some extremely cute moments. Is it cut by Sal feeling self-conscious? Maybe, but I still think it counts.
– Joyce and Joe have definitely had incredibly sweet/sincere lovey-dovey strips together, before this current storyline.
– Dina and Becky were, at one time, the MOST “into each other” of any couple, but I’ve never really felt they were saccharine. Maybe the one strip in the elevator with Dina saying “pants euphoria” but that was more “weird” to me than actual “cutesy.”
VERDICT: Doyce is not unique in its cutesy-ness, but it is probably the MOST cutesy of the comic’s run. Even if I didn’t have other issues with it, my poor shriveled heart can’t handle these characters saying genuinely nice and undramatic things to their partners.
Very much this. Sal and Danny had some very cute moments last time they had a storyline, but it was in between Sal figuring out what she wanted from her parents and Walky realising his mum sucks and trying to do something about it.
Meanwhile Dorothy and Joyce aren’t doing much but be cute.
Also when they first got together it was a lot of sal learning to let herself be happy and not be so hyper vigilant all the time. They had their cute lil bike date, kissed, had a few more pages dedicated to the establishment of their relationship and then disappeared until the arc with the walkerton parents. And then disappeared again.
Sal and Danny are adorable when they’re allowed screentime. And if feels more earned bc of how much of a struggle we know it is for sal to be soft and vulnerable with someone
Like Dot, I read the self-aware hover text. I hope this is setting something up. These cutesy panels don’t add anything for me at this point. What happens next?
I think I have whiplash. Yesterday, I was thinking “Asma’s been wedged in a bit awkwardly,” today I’m thinking “Nooo, show us where Asma’s conversation was going!”
Correct. They’re a Los Vegas sportsball team, but I don’t pay enough attention to tell you which sport. I’d guess basketball, but I could easily be wrong.
Whenever the main couple get together on a sitcom, the sitcom goes downhill (Moonlighting is the best example) and off the top of my head only Cheers kept going but only because Diane left
I hope this is different because I’ve invested a lot of time in this strip
It was supposed to be a spinoff, but the network didn’t believe in spinoffs anymore after a couple failed in the prior TV year, so they forced Bill Lawrence to relabel it as Season 9 and rewrite the half of the season that hadn’t been filmed yet to get more JD scenes in there (who was only supposed to cameo originally)
It’s Walky pulled out some of its best storytelling after Joyce and Walky finally got together. Shortpacked had two different main relationships cruise through the latter half of its run without losing the sauce. I tentatively choose to trust Willis’ vision when it comes to this kind of development.
It’s because too much conflict was focused on “will they won’t they” and then afterwards they don’t know how to write a normal story outside of that, so the couple either needs to get written out or have a lot of arbitrary drama injected into the relationship which sucks.
There’s a lot of interesting drama couples can get into, and a lot of ways saccharine can be interesting and investing. Show writers/executives just tend to be really, really bad at execution. If DOA were a TV show, I’d probably like Doyce lol.
Yeah it’s really only the case if writers are hacks that can’t write a compelling ongoing romance or maintain tension outside of shipteasing. Not saying that’s the case here, I know the tension will come back once we leave this fuwa fuwa love bubble. The Good Place had a main and side couple that got together and maintained the stakes. Abbott elementary teased out Gregory and Janine a little too long imo but they did get there eventually and the shows still going strong. Anime example but Love is War let Kaguya and Miyuki actually get together and explore the intricacies of starting a new relationship, boundaries, sex, long distance (tho this is in the manga, the anime ended on them getting together. Boo.) I mean a lot of people hate the Princess Kaguya Rescue arc so ig if you want you can call that going down hill, imo it jumped the shark but i liked ot.
Any good sitcom writer should be able to put the main couple together and make new stakes out of it.
I think that someone who just got dumped is allowed to wallow and be in their feelings for a while, especially if the person who dumped them said they’d be back to talk more once an emergency was dealt with. If you were in his shoes, wouldn’t you be pretty sad and anxious? I know from experience that I would be.
Sorry Dorothy, the science shows that laying next to your girlfriend does not have the same cardiovascular benefits as running a mile. Now begins her slow decline into poor health as she gradually neglects the fuck out of herself Illinois-style. Filthy state, both of America and of existence.
Joyce’s affections seem to be on a weird toggle. Two weeks ago (in DoA continuum), she was all about getting all up in Joe’s business. So, I don’t know that I trust the sincerity of her loving embrace.
I think you’re forgetting polyamory exists. She hasn’t toggled off Joe. (I don’t think she gets to have both or deserves both but she’s certainly capable of genuinely having affection for both)
I just finished playing the game dispatch, it is awesome, make me think. If all the characters were superheroes (or villains if you prefer) what would be their name.
Even if that correlation can be proven, I would be VERY surprised if that increased risk in any way outweighed all the endless benefits of consistent running/other exercise
Especially running. Humans are practically evolved to run a lot. (Yeah yeah, evolution doesn’t make conscious choices, yadda yadda)
IIRC Running in moderation is generally good for you, as long as there isn’t a specific reason one’s joints can’t take the repeated impact; but, long-distance running, in general, actually isn’t good for anybody. Like, marathons are actually not good for you, even though getting in shape to run one will logically have health benefits. Running = good, except for specific people with specific issues. Long-Distance Running = not something the body is actually meant to do, and is primarily for the challenge of completing it.
People who run almost always have healthier joints than those who don’t. As you say, it’s the people who overrun who gets the joint issues, but there’s a huge difference between “does a twenty minute run a couple of times a week” and “runs ultra-marathons”.
Marathons always confused me. I mean, the idea is that we’re inspired by the tale of the guy who ran all 26 miles from Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory, and then immediately died of exhaustion. But we commemorate this by… not dying? Is all this just flexing on poor Pheidippides?
yeah it’s a myth that early humans were excellent hunters — they’d subsist on stuff like insects, berries, greens, easy shellfish, and would only get large meat meat by competing with scavengers for previously killed animals
they didn’t go after large game until they were Homo sapien, and if that not until they had the necessary armor, weapons, numbers and communication skills to do so
That’s controversial among paleoanthropologists; it seems to be prevalent only among those who want to claim some sort of unique relationship for H. sapiens and H. neandertalensis, leaving out H. longi (Denisovans), another species with which both sapiens and Neanderthals interbred. The majority of scientists seem more comfortable with there having been, at one time, at least five species of human on the planet (sapiens, neandertalensis, longi, floresiensis, and naledi). Most of them seem to have succumbed to over-specialization for their environments – Neanderthals, for instance, were ill-suited to a Europe not dominated by glaciers. Sapiens was apparently the most adaptable of the humans.
I haven’t really seen much H.s.s/H.s.n in recent years. I think it was more prevalent back before we knew about Denisovans and when people were arguing “We interbred with Neanderthals, thus we must be subspecies rather than distinct species.” It’s now generally accepted that things are messier than that.
Persistence hunting seems to have developed with H. erectus. Neanderthals definitely hunted large game like mammoths and they developed well before sapiens.
Our very early relatives like the australopithecines and probably H. habilis do seem to have mostly lived as you suggest – small game, various veggies and scavenging other’s kills.
Reminder to everyone: Look things up for yourself! Don’t just take the information offered to you by random internet people either for or against any particular ideas.
Yeah them theramin are dangerous. All that hand waving can induce elliptic shock and/or convulsions that are difficult to distinguish from normal operation, particuarly along the semi-minor axis.
Philosophy Tube did an excellent video pretty recently about the problem of video essays in particular versus written persuasive essays. We’re just less likely to pause a video when it makes a claim than we are to do the same with the written word, the mental pause button is automatic whereas the YouTube pause button is an action.
I mean, I didn’t say “early” humans, I was just pointing out that in terms of chasing prey, we aren’t like big cats. We don’t run at full tilt and AFAIK we never have… when we pursue prey, we outlast it with our superior endurance.
But also that’s never been the majority of how we get our calories! And while we’re debunking myths, it was never “man type humans hunt, woman type humans gather”. We’ve got fossil remains that clearly suggest all types of human participated in both.
Michael Myers in “Halloween” is basically the best example I can think of in film for how prehistoric humans hunted. Slow stalking, relentless, camouflage, etc.
Michael Meyers, traditional [western*] zombies, Pepe Le Pew… all master persistence hunters,
(* god how to even express this, I am attempting to acknowledge the 20th century appropriation of zombies from Haiti, and the way we reversed the horror — from being about “the existential horror of being raised from the dead yourself and forced to serve an evil master” to “the immediate horror of being pursued by evil mindless monsters”.)
One wishes George Romero had decided on a different name for his undead cannibal monsters that were fundamentally an allegory for the unthinking American public.
You know, the first movie didn’t call them zombies… I’d have to look up exactly when they got the label. Romero certainly popularized the monster, but who started calling them zombies, I wonder? 🤔
and just so you know, I learned what I did about this stuff in my university world history course
don’t trust random YouTube videos, take a minute or two to read sources if there even are any
ACK who am I kidding the algorithm these days is basically “oops all provocative clickbait”, it’s clear that between AI garbage and shit, among modern corporate internet sites, traffic (and thus profit) is not just their top priority, but their ONLY priority (-_-)
Yes, please give me all the saccharine shit, all the time!
It’s great that Joyce loves Dorothy enough to offer to run with her, and great that Dorothy realizes that lying in bed with your girlfriend is way better than running.
Why does this keep getting brought up like the primary issue with Doyce is them being bi instead of the actual problem being that the comic’s pace gets ground to a halt because them being cute is cute, but it’s also the exact same type of being cute over and over with nothing new happening? Asma is also sapphic, we already know this, I just want to see something, anything actually happen that changes the status quo lol. Let these kids go to class damn. They can be annoyingly cute on the walk to class. They can be annoyingly cute in class. So many of the snuggling and kissing strips are cute but could be removed entirely and changes nothing. Bowling with Asma has to be in like four months time because that has to happen after class (and God I hope we get to see class), so it’s only natural people would want to actually learn what Asma does in her daily routine outside of “mans a front desk.”
If today is Monday, Dorothy has PoliSci. Unless she decides to skip and fuck Joyce again some more (a very real possibility since literally nothing actually matters to either character anymore except NAKED TIME with the other) she’ll have to either face Becky or wonder why Becky is skipping.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – for me a lot of the ‘Lon thing exists but alleged cuteness’ would be entirely redeemed for me if things ARE still happening, just without J&D such that they have SO MUCH catching up and work to do once they decide that ‘WE ARE IN LOVE’ is not their whole entire personality.
Probably because the comment they’re replying to says “Be gay later, girls! we have new interesting Asma stuff to discover!!!” so, contextually, it’s reasonable to point out that the new Asma stuff is more being gay?
I’m actually not seeing any accusation that “the primary issue with Doyce is them being bi”, just a discussion about the Asma stuff we’re going to find out.
(Hit enter too early) (I’m tired) if it wasn’t pretty much everything we’ve seen from these two this would be an awesome line. Like it fully works when Jen & Ruth have had moments like this because there’s a contrast to enjoy… And it’s fine with other couples we see less like Lucy & Jacob where I can genuinely go aww at him picking her up & spinning her around & saying the mushiest shit. And I largely think Danny & Sal are a little boring but I still love to see her her happy about flowers or whatever because she isn’t usually like that.
To be fair, we did see a lot of other stuff with them in the last storyline – yesterday in comic. They dealt with Hank and with Becky. They tried to talk with Joe & Walky, more or less successfully. They even had the kind of pointless visit to Daisy.
It was all interspersed with or occasionally derailed by cutesy moments, but there was serious stuff going on too.
Oh, I guess it’s not particularly clear, but I sort of meant them in the context of their relationship, not the general plot (though it’s also been a main driving force behind a lot of plot, so it’s not easy to separate). So the parts where they talk to other people about how much they love each other isn’t really that much of a contrast.
You also mention the short timespan in the comic, which makes sense – this is perfectly reasonable behavior! New relationship lovey-dovey! It’s also been months though (I genuinely think the pacing last arc was a little iffy, and not only because of the inserted strips, though that probably didn’t help), and this part of a relationship isn’t really doing it for me in the quantity it’s been featured. Would love a little disagreement as a treat. A little strife.
This phase of their relationship started less than 48 hours ago (exactly how long depends on what time of day the protest was broken up by cops escalating to violence). That seems a little early for trouble in paradise.
I wouldn’t classify things like the part with Hank as “they talk to other people about how much they love each other”. Sure, it was about the relationship, but it wasn’t stupid corny bullshit. They tried to hide it and were pretty successful (if awkward) until Joyce decided to distract from Jocelyne.
Ah, I’m sorry I didn’t add a big IN MY OPINION in front to make clear that the comment I personally made was, in fact, about my own feelings and not yours or plenty other peoples here. Like I was going to cut you some slack because I was typing sorta off the cuff this morning but I really don’t know why you would assume I was talking about anything else other than what I thought…? Into which, sorry, you or plenty other people don’t really factor in, due to how it is my own opinion.
(I also think that in this case, saying “you can just not be into it, that doesn’t make it bad” is as pointless as saying “you can just be into it, that doesn’t make it good”. At the core we just don’t agree. That’s literally fine!)
I typed response to you but yeah i just don’t fell like getting into any argument that i don’t really understand what you mean with most of what you said. Sorry i guess for whatbi say? IDon’t relaly get what was bad about it but yeah sorry for that.
I felt you were assuming something I wasn’t saying, aswell as making a sort of useless comment. I guess you probably weren’t assuming anything, or actually engaging with what I said at all? Sorry on my part for misreading, too.
I don’t know what would be engaging in this situation. I just responded to what you say with what i thought, not really much beyond that. I don’t really agree that ot was pointless because, then wouldn’t any comment be pointless? But guess we can disagree on that too. Have a good one?
Ah yes, the world famous camp full to the brim with people who specifically joke about one character getting exploded so that a real person doesn’t get to see the resolution of something that’s been left dangling in the story. Absolutely chocka with participants who aren’t me, this camp you allege.
Well, it’s possible, but it might get accusations of ripping off the Saban Entertainment cartoon Camp Candy, starring that one fuckin’ guy from that movie I probably didn’t watch.
Yeah, ~wild~ to make a comment about a group of people making the same complaints every single day instead of the singular person who made a unique comment literally just once.
We are now (I think) going into day two of Joyce not talking to Joe despite promising the two would have a serious talk later. I guess there’s now heavy emphasis on the “later” part.
I mean id be pretty pissed to be left hanging the rest of the day but everyone’s different ig. If i was in Joes shoes I’d be in the worst doomspiral rn
If that would be false, I suggest trying to find some other way to engage positively.
As a certain Doctor said, “always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind”.
I choose not to be a slave to the chemicals in my brain. I didn’t put them there, and I can’t always choose to stop them from being produced, but I can decide they don’t have the final say in what I enjoy. Do not, my friends, become addicted to serotonin.
A controversial opinion I came up with all by me lonesome: if you are awake at 5am, whether by staying up that late at night or waking up that early in the morning z something has gone wrong with your life. No one should be awake at 5am. (Barring like, EMTs and others whose absence would herald death.)
Hey as someone with insomnia who used to go to bed between 6-10 am (not by choice most of the time), that is a *crazy* definition to have of night owl. I consider myself a night owl. The line between night owl and having a problem is 4 am and/or sunrise
I mean, most people have to leave for work around 6 am, so 5 am is a normal time to be awake.
4 am, however, is a sign that something has gone sideways. I was a night owl before I got old and 3:45 was about the latest I could be up before tapping out. 4 am is just a dead hour.
I have to be at work at 7:30am, and that’s definitely seen as early for most people. Basically the only nice thing is that even with the school traffic, rush hour hasn’t started by that time.
Here, I’d say rush hour probably starts at 7:30. It does depend how you’d define it, but if I’m thinking of when it’s distinct from just general traffic… yeah, taking the expressway toward a major city wasn’t bad until at least a little later than I’d be doing it.
Yeah, that’s…why employees need to actually be at work, an hour or two earlier than that. There’s stuff to do that can only be done when you aren’t actually serving customers.
Some people have different hours, my mother had to leave for work at 5 am. Although people will call work ‘9 to 5’s, there honestly isn’t that many jobs that are only 9 to 5 shifts.
I used to get up for school at 5:30. School started at 8:40…? I think? I’d reach around 8 something. We lived like 40 minutes away and school morning traffic is hell and my parents had to get to work.
I always appreciated living somewhere where my schools weren’t far growing up. Could walk to elementary school, then the bus for middle and high school would take longer because bus, but they were a short direct drive. I had a friend who had an hour and a half ride to school each morning– it meant she got to go to a better school than she would have otherwise, but I would not be a fan.
Where I am, bars have to close at 3. When I was a bartender, 4 was when I’d be getting home, assuming cleanup didn’t take long, which it sometimes did.
Back then, me not being awake at 4 would have been very unusual. I’d typically be asleep before sunrise, even if I’d brought somebody home with me.
These days it’s weird for me to be awake before 8, woke up at 8:30 today. It’s about 9 now, so it’s time to check email and make a few work calls.
I wake up at 3:30am to be at work at 5am, and this has been the case since 2001. I have a good life which is arranged exactly how I want it, nothing has gone wrong regardless of how many people think I’m an inhuman freak.
I’d rather have time to do the things I value most in the mornings before work when I actually have energy, rather than after when I’m too tired to really focus on them.
I go to bed at 3 AM most of the time, purely because that’s my thinking gets fuzzy. But it’s easier to get things done after the world has gone to bed.
I’ve heard many artists are nocturnal because many of us have day jobs and also the night is the only time that is truly theirs. I tend to nap between 7 and 11 and then stay up from 12-4 which sometimes involves me staying awake in bed until 5am
Okay I like joyrothy as much as the next guy, but this relationship is entirely to cute and functional to be the primary focus of a soap opera comic, they need to either get more dysfunctional and chaotic or give the screentime to someone more toxic stat
Like don’t get me wrong there adorable together but I want more DRAMA! show us the Becky and dina hopefully not permanent breakup arc, show us more of amber and walkys wierd situationship, hell joes probably in a poor enough mental state right now to do something intresting , for as much as this relationship was billed as being more “messy” then previous ones due to the cheating it really does feel like the two have basically no fundamental disagreements or incompatibilities as a couple, even a lot of Dorothy’s interesting character flaws have kind of been quietly sanded away since starting her relationship with Joyce, idk there cute but cute can’t sustain a whole comic
Cute, yes. Functional, hard to say with their level of “address nothing yet, just spend all time joined at the hip” yet. Chaotic – their getting together hurt Joe, Becky, Dina, and the way in which it happened, though not their intention, harmed the message of an entire anti-genocide protest. Don’t worry, there is trouble brewing.
I would hope so but the alt-text is not giving me hope that this trouble will be simmering anytime soon, and in the meanwhile I just find all of this sugary sweetness utterly cloying.
I actually suspect there’s at least a shred of buried truth in Dorothy’s statement here, in that a certain portion of her activities recently have been designed as an abnegation or mortification to distract her from Joyce; and that she was, in fact, running away from Joyce as much as from her previously perfect future when she ran back into the protest (only to have Joyce catch her)
You can just accept that they have broken up, till they meet and have a talk about it and maaaaaaybe a new kind of relationship may happen (I doubt it, just more drama for us to have fun with).
This is what truly gets me about people saying “NO, Joyce absolutely definitively broke up with Joe and you’re nuts if you think otherwise,” because like, the alternative is that Willis set up a plot point without any intention whatsoever of actually exploring it, which is… like… that’s just bad writing? Do these people want bad writing?
For me, the hardest thing about talking about this strip, is when a character or story-line is naturally inextricable from a complicated, real-world concept or controversy, but my opinion on why a character or situation or story arc is playing out how it is, has zero to do with the premise of the real controversy, and everything to do with me coming at analyzing the story from a literary perspective.
I get really interested in talking about the second thing, but while I understand that not everybody has the same privilege to easily ignore or compartmentalize the first thing, it can be exhausting to be talking about the latter, while being held directly accountable by people who think my opinion is representative of my feelings on the former.
tl;dr I actually think that the people who think that it would be reasonable to write the situation off as Joyce having broken it off with Joe, if it were real life, are the ones closest to the truth. But, like you said, I also know that because this is a story, there’s no way that the following plot will be treating it as such. Yes, Joyce should be better to Joe; however, 18 hours have passed in comic time, maybe those aggrieved about it, should accept that the story will continue after this strip, instead of suddenly ending on a cliff-hanger, and that something will logically come of this plot thread in due time.
It also would feel like poly-baiting. Is that a thing?
If it wasn’t for that, I guess it could pay off in Joe’s personal arc in terms of showing how desperate he is, but without actually leading to even an attempt at a poly relationship.
I do think that in real terms, Joyce waiting this long to talk to Joe about it isn’t a big deal even if it feels like we’ve been waiting forever. I’d argue more that she should have talked to Dorothy about it rather than let her think she’s done with Joe – unless she actually has rejected the idea.
Regardless, this is going to come back up and it’s not going to be as simple as Joyce telling Joe, “Thanks for the offer, but not interested.”
Joyce doesn’t owe Joe anything at this point except a conversation, and that could be today, tomorrow, or next week. She has absolutely no obligation to drop everything and go tend to Joe’s feelings.
Since the girls literally did not cheat that first night when they found out their feelings,
and since both of their boyfriends were okish with the breakups mere 8-10 hours after,
and since Becky learned it real quick,
and since the earth-shattering kiss that ended up in the newspapers wasn’t their fault like at all (and even if protest/riot kisses are a usual form of photo to be used in newspapers and news outlets… the horror!!!)
and since Joyce saved her sister from outing herself (something she didn’t want to happen yet).
Now these commenters MUST find something to clench their hatred around with all their might… and that is that… Joe is waiting for an answer (that he already got).
So they keep that new fantasy goalpost, so that they can claim then their own moral superiority over these characters and their dump whiteness, who dared to attend/pass through a protest across a college campus, while police were trying to maim them…
RE: the alt-text… is it *actually* all saccharine shit like this from now on? Like Amber, I am a trash goblin who craves mess, and I want to see some of that delicious DoA drama I’ve enjoyed so much over the years!
I think we can pretty confidently say that knowing Willis, we will very much continue to have the drama they excel at so much, just interspersed with more of this cuteness now that Joyce and Dorothy are done telling themselves they’re totally straight and not in love or anything. I’m pretty sure we’ll barrel back into the drama as soon as the characters are awake enough to start actually having the day that just started.
(I’m a great enjoyer of the saccharine, personally, and a trash goblin who’s greatly looking forward to more of the drama and the other juicy storylines, so I feel you!)
It would be really funny if, years from now, when this relationship has stabilized and the discourse has died down, Willis just comes out and says “I set this up because I think cheating is cool and 100% ethical when it leads to yuri.” If nothing else I would respect the audacity.
On the 10 year anniversary of Operation Shoujo Tear Gas, Willis will have two different white girls do the exact same thing at a completely different Bulmeria protest.
Wait, hold up, I was joking when I wrote this, but this could be peak in an alternate future timeline of the comic, where Joyce and Dorothy actually become involved in human rights advocacy, and then at a protest where they bear witness to this and suddenly go “ugh, is *that* how we came across that day?!”
I hope the shots the author has taken in this alt text (and a few other places) are intended in good humor and/or are at least aimed at those who have been loudly recalcitrant about hating these two no matter what. Esp. since the backlog rework shows that the author is aware that having such an engaged and enthusiastic fanbase can at least sometimes be a helpful thing.
Because I don’t think it’s unfair, or unsupportive of the author, to have opinions such as “I’d be able to enjoy moments like these if Dorothy weren’t still in the dark about Joe, so I hope we’re pretty close to that getting addressed” and “it seems counter to Walky & Sal’s progress as supportive siblings (e.g. standing up to the racist parents) that Sal shrugged off Dorothy & Joyce kissing” and “Billie showing up for Walky has been by far my favorite moment since, at least, the beginning of the protest”.
Sorrynotsorry that I refused to put this opinion in a “containment thread”.
To be fair, people seemed emboldened by the alt text to start fights with people in the containment thread today, so I haven’t stayed in my designated spot either. Not that I’m good at not replying to things the moment I think of a response anyways (a delete or edit comment button would be so helpful lol)
I always appreciated the thread and your intentions for starting it. It was a place to vent my story frustration in (relative) safety.
I also really appreciate Willis actually going in and un-reporting the thread all the time. Essentially “defending” their own comic’s critics (at least the ones critiquing in good faith). I dunno if I’d be willing to sift through negative reactions to my work nearly every day like that.
I assumed the place higher up in the thread where the haters were congregating was the hater containment thread. I generally scroll through the comments fairly quickly.
“I scroll through too quickly to have read/noticed things” or “I read the comments frequently and thoroughly enough to have noticed a change in general behavior today that I can attribute to the alt text”
Once again, I wish I could find these moments with Joyce and Dorothy cute. And I would, if they hadn’t gotten together by cheating and then treated almost everyone else around them like shit afterwards.
OK I read this in the morning while making tea still waking up and my vision wasn’t clear yet and these two look a little bit alike and thought it was Dorothy speaking and she said “Walky, Walky, what time is it” and kind of bolted awake but it was a misreading
A cascade of consequences still await. They’ve gone through the rapids but the waterfall (Becky) is still ahead. Dorothy can’t bunk in Sarah’s room forever.
Plus it’s canon that Joyce and Sarah have an inverse relationship regarding happiness. Joyce can’t be this happy unless Sarah is equally miserable.
This sweetness is nice but I don’t expect it to remain at this level. New relationship energy fades. The carnage of their recent past is still there to deal with.
In all seriousness, if this ends up taking at all a realistic course, the track record of “college relationships that go to ‘I love you’ on what’s basically day two” (even ones that spawn out of friendships) are not great.
Frankly, those three little words are more foreboding than anything that happened last chapter.
I’m not convinced that the kind of subliminated-into-being-just-the-best-gal-pals kind of love can turn on a dime like that.
At least, not without a lot of drama while they unpack what the hell that change might even mean to each of them — and they’ve already been “not on the same page” about several things in the last 24 hours, after all.
In real life, I strongly disagree. I’ve seen PLENTY of lesbians and wlw fall in love on a dime with a bestie they’ve been sublimating attraction to and it doesn’t seem to fail any more frequently than any other relationship start. Anec-data so ymmv.
In a story, I desperately want more drama and I’m hoping it’s on the way for suuuure. It’s still not as simple as “basically day two” imo.
yeah as somebody who’s extended friend group is majority queer women, this feels…not all that out of the ordinary from my experience. This isn’t “we just met and went on one date” lovebombing, it’s “our ‘platonic’ relationship that people have been calling out as romantic forever finally acknowledged what everybody else has been telling us”
One of these days, I’m gonna put in the effort to go back and find wherever the literal first strip of Joyce and Dorothy being Obviously Sapphic is, just to be able to say exactly how many years, months, and days they’ve been slowly building up to official dating. “Joyce and Dorothy are secret lesbians and everybody knows but them” might actually be the #1 most common strip punchline in the first 10 years of the strip, it’s wild to me that people genuinely didn’t believe it was a possibility.
But I also think that the mental scaffolding that you have to build up around “no, we’re best friends and neither of us are bisexual at all I’m a Kinsey 0” might end up being an impediment to “actually dating now”.
Joyce and Walky comparable freakouts about dorothy (and certainly the first big sign of her worship of her, considering I don’t think she’d freak out quite the same or so extremely if it was someone she didn’t care about). Also, Dorothy finding Joyce adorable https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/04-the-bechdel-test/hics/
Starting a relationship and “falling in love” are two different things. LOTS of people pine for months and months before they start dating. That’s not like…unique.
Didn’t say it was unique. I just think saying “I love you” on day 2 of a relationship if you’re a couple who has been falling in love for months is different than saying “I love you” on day 2 of being with someone you barely know yet.
Especially if it’s been a mutual falling– like just to Yoto’s point, I think the mutual yearning for months before starting a relationship is less common than one person yearning* and then a relationship starting. And in that case, two days in would still be an early “I love you.”
(*I don’t know this for sure, I’ve mainly just yearned.)
It is, however, a reasonable inference – there appears to be a small contingent of people (possibly just one person, in fact) who strongly objects to anyone complaining about this ship for any reasons whatsoever. (I have my disagreements with the haters, but also acknowledge that not everyone has the same tastes. That’s why I like the containment threads – I can just skip past all of that and everyone’s better off, including the hater(s) of haters.)
Nah, there’s been equal complaints from self-described haters about how they “shouldn’t have to be” or “refuse to be” contained, or otherwise resent the “implication” of such a thread.
I don’t think it’s either group, I think it’s a single dedicated troll who’s enjoying all the finger-pointing they’re causing, and I think we should all deny them the pleasure.
Especially since I experimentally verified the other day (on a post of my own) that a single dedicated person can report a post multiple times by themselves on a single device by clearing cookies enough times.
Some of y’all aren’t actually sick of “white girls”, you’re sick of Joyce and Dorothy specifically and you would gladly trade them for more strips about white characters you prefer.
Which is allowed, by the way. You can just be sick of strips about these two, it doesn’t also have to be good social justice praxis.
Also, “wow can’t believe you singled them out for the color of their skin” people, you’re not allowed to quote MLK anymore until you’ve at least read the Letter from Birmingham Jail (and by all means, don’t stop there).
personally, as somebody who always wants more slides about Walky and Dina and Sal, because they’re my favorites, I agree with your comment. I feel like hating on white girls when it comes from other white people feels so performative.
I am sick of this specific arc, but it can just be because i’m bored and want a plot that doesn’t feel resolved, not some in depth analysis. (that and as somebody who grew up an atheist, Joyce is my *favorite* Christian to atheist arc, but that arc just generally bores me)
Like, white readers can be as sick of oversaturation of white characters as anyone else, we might be less likely to notice it but we can be genuinely sick of it!
However, when I see folks specifically hoping we’ll get more of [other white characters] while in the same breath complaining about “too much of these white girls”, my eyebrow twitches upward.
Like yall do know they Jocelyne and Becky and Ruth and Danny are also white, right. Right…….?
And they’ve all got things going on that make TOTAL sense to want to see more of!
And you can just admit you want to see more of them instead of hijacking the extremely legit complaints of other fans who actually do want to see more of characters like Dina and Asma and Raidah and Sarah and Asher and… etc.
While I don’t necessarily disagree – and joking aside, the extent to which I am fed up with Joyce and Dorothy is purely down to my own preferences – I think it’s absolutely fair for people, especially people of color, to be irritated with these two on the grounds that they are statistically the whitest main couple I the strip, and their whiteness has been affecting the plot in ways that range from the unfortunate to the deeply uncomfortable – their entire conduct at the protest up to and including the kiss, the way they went about talking with Asma, and especially Joyce’s truly tone-deaf outburst at Raidah.
Right, but I very explicitly wasn’t talking at all about that. I am talking about my fellow white people, who are claiming to be sick of “these white girls” and even claiming solidarity with commenters like NGPZ, while at the same time saying stuff like, literally, “where’s Carla”.
Like is Joyce/Dorothy really “whiter”, whereby we mean more problematic, specifically with respect to the protest, than Carla, who has so far only exhibited the barest stirrings of discomfort with her parents’ complicity in the genocide the protest was against?
Child of billionaires abetting the genocide who hasn’t yet called them out on it or even directly acknowledged that Charlie had a good point about them versus “two girls who kissed inappropriately in the middle of the protest”.
It just. At the very least it seems quite rude to ride the coattails of NGPZ’s calls for more appearances of characters of color to say “yeah! I agree with this comment! Boo to more white girls, where’s my white fave”.
Bleh, but first: one last attempt to address what I think your complaint with my comment was?
The idea that one can be sick of the specific type of “whiteness” Joyce and Dorothy represent while still wanting more of other white characters.
Okay? Sure? But I still don’t think those comments are the same type of complaint as calls for more appearances by characters of color, and shouldn’t be presented as the same thing, or tacked on to threads that are actually calling for the former. Folks should be upvoting NGPZ with their replies, not derailing their thread for different complaints that happen to share the end goal of “less Joyce/Dorothy screen time”.
They’re not whiter tha Carla but also we’re not seeing much of Carla. Carla is passively benefiting from a genocide by the simple nature of existing as a person who comes from wealth while Dorothy and joyce keep going out of their way to deal with racial issues that they are completely out of their depth with. It wouldn’t be quite so pronounced if they weren’t being such active participants.
But also subjectively I’m gonna say then being blonde doesn’t help. Blondes just subconsciously read as WHITER than other white people. Not really their fault but I definitely recognize that bias in myself.
But no for real: it’s fine to want less of these two and more of some other white character, I just dislike seeing it phrased as if it’s taking a political stand in defense of #representation.
It’s no different or less annoying than people who are really just happy right now to see more of their favorite ship but are posturing like their shipping preference is a brave stance they’re taking in defense of like, gay rights.
I was gonna make a post reply to the the whole thread but this is an excellent jumping off point for the point I wanna make.
I see a lot of comments about people assuming people who don’t like this ship being homophobic or belittling people who are concerned about Joe by boiling down his entire character to just being “a man”. And its frustrating because obviously you as a commenter know there is a societal bias against lesbians in and out of fiction that makes them the underdogs. By evoking the idea that people only vehemently don’t like this ship because its two women it causes people to get defensive. And you can’t just say “that’s not true and its rude to say that” over and over cuz people won’t believe you. So the easiest avenue is just to point out “hey maybe Joyce and Dorothy aren’t actually the most oppressed people in the world.”
It’s ok to hate someone for being white
Or being a man
Or being straight.
After all they’re the privelages class who gets everything handed to them. And anyone who wants these characters centered is fighting in favor of the status quo and not against it.
Which I find pretty dang reductive to the human experience. I don’t find Joe and Joyce’s love and less substantial because he’s a man. I don’t find Dorothy and Joyce’s love any less substantial cuz they’re white. But it seems like the only thing people ever want to listen to is attacks on their character and attacks on their privelage. And so those are the weapons we use.
I mean, which “people” do you mean when you say “the only thing people ever want to listen to is attacks on their character or attacks on their privilege”? And how are we defining “listen”?
If the goal is to make a shipper or anti-shipper shut up and go away, sure, these might be effective lines of attack, but I think they’re not any more likely to be shutting up because you gave them food for thought than they are to be shutting up because they’ve decided you’re an asshole who’s trying to use social justice to manipulate their ship opinions, either for or against.
Like the personal is political, I’m not saying shipping opinions are never informed by our politics. If you notice yourself being quicker to criticize the f/f couples than the m/f couples, that’s probably subconscious bias happening.
If you notice yourself being more protective of white f/f couples than other couples — or being more angry about how Dorothy treated Danny than about how she treated Walky, for example — that too is probably subconscious bias.
But trying to guilt-trip people into changing how they feel about a given ship is an absolute crapshoot, and you’re more likely to succeed in making them reluctant to admit to still liking / disliking the ship in front of you than you are to actually change their mind.0
I wanna point out I’m not arguing or disagreeing with you. I think its dumb. Moreso pointing out how and why we got here.
People argue with virtue rather than actually reading people’s opinions and so they take the easy way out and call people who disagree homophobic or mock the characters for their whiteness because they feel like their real arguments are being ignored.
I’m not saying it’s healthy or working. It’s just why they do it. It’s a defense mechanism.
Fair enough, but personally I was less confused by it than annoyed by the derailing of NGPZ’s thread today with people theoretically agreeing with them but explicitly calling for more appearances by white characters. It shone a spotlight on the particular hypocrisy in a crappier way than usual.
I’d be just as annoyed if someone started a thread to point out that we need more queer men in this strip, and a bunch of pro-Joyce/Dorothy commenters jumped in to reply with “hear hear! I’m also displeased by the lack of queer representation, which is why there should be MORE Joyce/Dorothy!”
Like. You’re not slick AND you’re actively distracting from someone else’s real and legit #representation complaint to center yourself and your ship war, just take a breath pls.
@NGPZ: as A Sapphic Bi, I actually love that the gamut runs so wide and that they aren’t all squeaky clean bis! I respect people who feel differently, of course, but I’m happy to have messy #representation. It makes me feel more like I’m being seen as a full human being, capable of all that mess.
It’s also a nice respite from the kids’ cartoons where most of the good bi #rep has been coming for the last decade — stories where characters AREN’T all meant to be object lessons in good and bad behavior are nice too sometimes.
and like, queer rep in general in the comic is still overall good
well, good-ish
either way when I get to making fan games again I’m probably gonna give little focus as possible to Doyce,
not only out of good conscious b/c of the circumstances under which they got together would come up one way or another, but to compensate for the disproportionate attention they gonna continue get in the strips for the time being XD
I feel like Willis has been consistently setting up that Joyce and Dorothy are making each other worse and are going to have to break it off. I’m sad about that and hope they can work through it. But all this happiness they’re feeling is coming at the cost of letting the best parts of themselves decline and amplifying their weaknesses.
I am hoping against hope that they are being written as being intentionally insulated in the bubble of new love and the weekend and that it’s about to pop.
I’d say T-minus 2 storylines until Dorothy starts to really struggle with being embarrassed by Joyce’s current coping mechanism of “vibing with being transgressive.” Dorothy likes the idea of being transgressive right now, when it’s associated with her “actually getting what she really wants” for once; but, in practice, her partner being transgressive, as a rule, has traditionally bothered her.
At some point, Dorothy is going to start pushing back at Joyce “being heroically gay” in every situation, regardless of context, because she actually does have an underlying need to make everybody see her in a positive light, and does like to feel in control of how she is perceived. This is the woman who broke up with a guy for wearing pyjamas.
this is genuinely sweet i am just. more worried about becky & eventually that starts to take the shine off things. & yes, i know she is not legally or morally entitled to joyce’s time/energy, oh my god.
DR: Lord, these sugar level in your blood… It’s a surge of glicose, literal sweet bomb. What happened? I told you to follow your diet.
Me: It would be funny if I try to explain. I will sent you a link of the today strip…
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now back to your regularly scheduled white girls :p
Huh. Something wrong with white girls?
guess all this saccharine whitebread is nice,
but what i be longin for some is some substance and some actual SPICE :p
in other words, a proper sandwich
fuckin dammit im hungry :/
well, they probably gonna get some good lunch with Asma at the bowling alley
At this point the inserted Asma strips are a TEASE
I’m guessing that once we catch up to the point where the buffer was at before the Great Insertion, things will probably flow a lot more smoothly.
The spice must flow 🙂
We could go back to Carla.
Ah yes. The cure for white girls. More white girl.
(/s don’t attack)
Some Nutella in your white bread sandwich perhaps?
how bout some actual MEAT
oh and some mustard too
thaz wassup
What’s right with white girls?
Nothing at all, but I like to see more other people, you know?
(This is not a critic to Willis, it’s more for all other media, like cinema, TV, etc…)
I miss Dan-
Actually that wouldn’t be any better in this context
I mean, he might come paired with Sal, that’d make it better in this context.
I mean, I seem to recall that originally and still DoA was intended to be the story of a homeschooled naive Joyce and her atheist best friend. This may not be the story you want, but there are people going “waah why are the main characters in the spotlight again” and that is just silly.
i don’t even mind that they’re on screen,
i just want it to be, you know, INTERESTING somehow
and i still got hope that it gonna be,
cuz like, after moving THIS fast with their honeymoon and shit, they gonna run into a rough patch almost immediately, believe me
I hear you. Considering the track record of our esteemed author, I am quite certain that some other shoes will be dropping shortly. (But I also dig the saccharine bits so please dread lord Willis not just yet!)
dread? hardly.
the dude made a DINA PLUSH, can’t stay mad at him forever ;-;
Some of us remember the moment Dina took off her hat… ;_;
It sounds like you’re referring to the wide brim ranger hat’s Dina, and not the dinosaur beanie’s Dina, and yeah absolutely that was such a devastating moment. I was in denial, surely no way that she’s actually…. But alas….
Actually if I remember Sarah was originally billed as the second main character next to Joyce (being her roommate and all).
I mean, the back of the first print of the very first book says:
“Joyce was homeschooled, and college is her first foray into public education. can Dorothy, her unlikely new friend (she’s an atheist! gaspi) help her navigate this diverse social environment, or is everyone here similarly out of their depth?”
https://i.imgur.com/oqRGCRi.jpeg
https://www.ebay.com/itm/177471324155
eBay listing for said book. (My own copy is a third edition and also at home, where I am currently not.)
*Can
*gasp!
Copied the text from the photo directly on my phone, which usually works pretty well but today lol.
That’s true and no one expects them to disappear entirely, but there’s usually also been other stuff going on. The amount of focus those two have received these last couple chapters isn’t normal for the comic – especially with almost all the cuts away to other characters being their reactions to the new couple or to the protest they hooked up at.
There used to be plot arcs that weren’t focused around Joyce, even if she was the main character. Hopefully we get back to that.
I think it’s a set-up for a lot of things that will probably happen. The sweetness lets our guard down. There’s a lot of loose threads rn and we’re extra not gonna be prepared for them tying up now
It’s the story of an ensemble cast dude, the “main” characters aren’t that main
Right? How can people be bringing the pitchforks because the comic strip is about the two main characters who have been the main characters since the first strip?
Joyce and Becky?
….<..>
<.<
woooOOOOOOOOOOoooooowwwww
What?
Well, they are.
INJECT THE SACCHARINE INTO MY VEINS! NEVER STOP POSTING THEOCRACY!!!
damn, early mornin smooth talk lol
do you at least want some tea or coffee with your saccharides? :p
Don’t care, I’m just DAWWW!!
Same.
Sorry (not sorry) haters, but this is my shit, and I waited fourteen fucking IRL YEARS to get it.
Inject it into my veins and never stop indeed.
Aspartame has less of an aftertaste.
Hear hear!
Heck yeah
There are times this comic really needs an SMBC-style bonus pop-up panel.
I’d kill to see Sarah’s expression as she unwillingly hears this Care Bear’s-level of sweetness at five in the morning. Her gaze could pickle beets at fifty paces right now.
Oooh, good suggestion! We’ll just have to kidnap Zach and force him to draw the “votey panels” each day.
Well, I hadn’t planned on committing crimes today (that I’m admitting to), but I’m in on this one.
Sarah is me
Just being within a 10 ft radius of Joyce and Dorothy has forced Sarah into a diabetic coma.
The next strip should be the exact same dialogue from this one but one bunk below with Sarah’s reactions
Mandatory “It’s not a bunk, it’s a loft”-comment
Dumbing of Age: All Sugar, All the Time now.
This is EARNED saccharine.
For real! 😀
Is it tho?
Checks clock. Lets see. 15 years of prep. I’d say yes.
Roomies/It’sWalky: runs for about 7 years
Dumbing of Age: runs for 15 years and still going
me: still thinks of DoA as “the new spinoff from long-running webcomic It’s Walky”
Three strips in and we’ve got another Doyce ‘cute’ moment? Guess we gotta boot up the threads again this storyline.
gotta love an alt-text that actively makes fun of a large portion of its readers
I’m fucking done with this shit
i do mean this genuinely. If you aren’t enjoying a piece of media (and/or feel like you’re not able to appreciate it or get anything out of it), you should move on to something else. I have all sorts of novel suggestions. I got plenty of stuff that isn’t saccharine at all
The thing is this comic has *many* concurrent storylines, generally, and just because you dont like one doesn’t mean you hate all the rest
Making the “just stop reading” advive less helpful for some of us, because. There is still shit there, very eagerly being enjoyed. Just not 100% of it.
Phil said “I’m fucking done with this shit”. That’s not just “I dislike this storyline but I still like the comic overall.”
I’ll be real i straight up didn’t see phil’s post and thought it was a response to Nono
Also, I kind of empathize with the idea of being frustrated by the feeling that an artist is mocking you, specifically, on purpose, with their work. I’ve never felt that way, but like, it sounds sucky.
I do think people take this waaaay too personally tho. Its a comic about college kids. Like; outside of the (horribly handled) not-Gaza stuff, or religious fundamentalism stuff, the whole romantic subplots of the cast feel very sitcom-y.
But cute. Enjoy the cute while it lasts. The alt-text lies.
I’m a hater of this ship and I’m still not feeling made fun of. It’s possible you might be reading into things a little?
No, no. It’s clear. Willis was making fun of Phil in particular.
Unless he was generally being snarky and what are the odds of that?
I don’t feel made fun of, but I do feel slightly…antagonized, if that makes sense. “sorry not sorry” is a lil antagonistic.
Or, you know, it could be someone joking around. But who would ever do that, here on this comedic webcomic site?
It’s can be both joking around and making fun of a segment of the audience at the same time. They’re not exclusive.
If I actually thought it would just be “saccharine shit like this from now on”, I’d be out of here too.
Given the brief rant Willis dropped yesterday about the haters, I think people are probably entitled to take it as a bit less of a jokey clapback.
Imagine coming into Willis’s space every day for months just to tell them that you hate their comic. Nothing new. Nothing constructive. Just “I hate this! This comic is shit now!” And then getting offended because Willis said something in the alt text that kinda looks like it might be about those complaints.
I mean, yeah, I’m just saying I don’t believe one has to read it as a “joking around”. Willis is absolutely allowed to take swings back at the section of the commentariat who’s dissatisfied with this chapter, and I think Fuzzy (and others) are allowed in turn to read it AS “a swing back” and not “joking”.
I don’t think it’s aimed at everyone who’s dissatisfied, is the only thing. I think it’s aimed at the folks who are saying he sucks and he’s bad at writing and the comic is shitty now.
Ah, and now we have confirmation it was written a year ago and isn’t actually aimed at anyone here!
Look, if I say, “Damn, I’m really not enjoying this thing” and someone says “Sorry not sorry, this is what’s happening forever now”, that “sorry not sorry” is clearly applicable to me, a person who is dissatisfied.
In fact, that exact same response is pretty toothless and lame in response to “You suck and are bad at writing and this comic is shitty”. It is MORE aimed at someone who is dissatisfied than it is aimed at someone who’s actively being toxic.
I don’t think they literally meant to antagonize me, Fuzzy, the specific person who has written comments here. And perhaps they did not predict any of this dissatisfaction and it was indeed not written with any thought of people who might not want this ultra-cuteness. Given the other mildly antagonistic things they’ve written, though, I’m less inclined to think this comment is entirely divorced from the idea that people might be unhappy with this storyline.
And no one can stop you from interpreting it that way!
Yeah, that’s fair, but frankly I think they’re entitled to what they said.
Willis is literally just a person, and they have to come on here and see vitriol (the same boring vitriol without a single new point being made) over and over every single day. If you had to come to work every day and half the people at your work just made the same points over and over about how shit they thought you were at your job (in a subjective way) would you not occasionally say something back to them?
Like, Willis is writing the story they want to write. That’s what’s happening here. It’s very much time to decide you’re along for the ride or get the fuck off the train. And if you decide to stick around and continue reading despite hating what’s on screen, you’re totally entitled to comment about it ~but so is Willis~. Even if it’s you being antagonized this time, and not Willis.
Also, as far as antagonism goes, that’s a milquetoast-mild level of clap back. Even without comparing it to the kind of things that get leveled in Willis’ direction on the daily.
This made me realize something – writers that are writing things just because they feel like their audience wants it even though they don’t, they called soulless or pandering. And then artists who write what they want get called selfish and yelled at by their audience. Creators literally can’t win
Yep, this is absolutely the case.
Don’t forget the third complaint (which is, IMHO, what’s driving a fair portion of the griping around here): “I perceive your latest work as being a genre change! How DARE you not keep producing approximately the same kind of thing you always have been!”
Ah, my experience working in retail in a small town, although I didn’t say anything back to them because (working for my parents) I got fired once for being perfectly polite in the face of a stupid as hell customer request and then complaining about it after I got home, on the grounds of “they pay the bills, you aren’t ever allowed to say anything bad about a customer even privately to your mom”.
(I got fired more than once by my mom. My dad would routinely hire me back 1-2 weeks later on the next truck/stocking day. Small business owning parents: do not do this.)
This is indeed the typical customer service experience in the States, but my understanding is that in countries with better working conditions, “take abuse during your shift without complaint” isn’t actually a part of job descriptions.
(Not that I’m calling all the comments made around here abuse!)
And for that matter, the Dumbing of Age comments section isn’t a retail store with employees and customers and a chain of management. The same standards can’t be reasonably applied here.
Absolutely true. The majority of us, and I would bet the vast majority of the most vocally dissatisfied, aren’t paying Willis anything, yet we’re still behaving like high-value clients.
I bought ten books and some yuri five years ago, and on the rare occasions I have a little extra, I’ll subscribe to Willis’s Patreon for a month or two. Some folks buy every single book as it comes out, back every Kickstarter, and have been on Patreon continuously for way longer. I still don’t think any of us have earned any special privileges or expectation that our opinion should weigh more than somebody who discovered the comic a couple days ago and reads with an ad blocker on. Basically, even if we stoop to treating any reader as a customer, there’s no more expectation of privileges and influence than if we use the self checkout to buy a Monster Energy at Walmart.
For sure, it’s just even sillier when we mostly aren’t even paying customers.
(I bought the first idk 12 books and I’ve also been a subscriber periodically to their Patreon! Things are financially rough right now so I’m not doing that right now though.)
@Li In all honestly, and I implied this yesterday, I wouldn’t DARE to complain on the comments of a webcomic where I didn’t also own all the print editions.
*large*
hehehe
ye right.
The alt-text, like the strip, was written last year.
I beg to defer, your Emperorness, rightful ruler of California and adjacent territories. Although I can’t produce them off the top of my head, there seems to be a fair amount of evidence that the alt-texts are written much closer to now-time than the strips themselves.
Per word of Willis, this one specifically was written in 2024. https://bsky.app/profile/damnyouwillis.bsky.social/post/3m5ylibiuls23
Many, many years ago, I had a semi-successful webcomic. Not anywhere near DoA levels of popularity, but successful in its sphere. I’m not going to name the comic; it’s not online anymore and I’d like to think that I’m a different person now than I was back then.
There was a fanbase, there was shipping, there were pornographic side projects of my characters. And, like Willis, I also had adopted a snarky online persona as the author, calling out stupid comments from the peanut gallery in my newsposts. The fans commenting on these callouts laughed along with me, and I felt justified.
There were multiple IRC channels for readers of my comic. I frequented some of them to bask in the admiration from my fans, which came in despite my “snarky and irreverent” online persona. At one point, I learned about another such channel and I did something stupid: I joined under an alias that didn’t identify me as the author. Still, I adopted the same online persona.
People hated me. Called me toxic. I was warned by the mods to knock it off.
I was pissy about it at first, but the experience stuck with me. Eventually, after some introspection, I realized that there would always be some people who would support my actions as the author simply because they liked my creations. I had a pass for bad behavior with my fans. Long-term exposure to the illusion of peer consensus had dulled my ability to see when my own behavior was unacceptable. In short, I had become an asshole.
I know that’s a big wall of text there, but it all comes down to this:
Phil, if you’re still reading this, I see Willis has turned a spotlight to your comment in Bluesky. That sucks and I’m sorry. Try not to hold it against the people that seem to agree with him; they’re fans and they’ve got a blind spot.
And Willis, if you’re reading this, I hope that someday you’ll learn to let people disagree with you without taking it as a threat to your position. Even if you think the things they say are stupid and wrong and obviously deserving of ridicule, that’s okay. You can let those things pass by. “Calling out the haters” only seems like a demonstration of self-confidence to you and the people already predisposed to agree with you. To everyone else, it seems thin-skinned.
“Don’t be so predictable that I can make fun of you by accident” is apparently taking a comment as a threat to their position.
The actual comment that got spotlighted in any real way (screenshot) is someone else complaining about reverse racism, and it doesn’t even include a screen name.
I mean JFC they let people say much worse than what Phil said all the time, they’ve been manually restoring the hater containment thread every morning even though a fair bit of it has been people just calling them a bad writer every day, but the occasional mild snark is proof that they’re too thin-skinned, I guess.
Oh and it should completely go without saying that your choice to join a fan-run, private IRC channel not meant for you as the author incognito and then be confrontational and rude to fans is nothing like Willis responding to comments that fans are making in the comment section directly below their comic where they should know Willis will see it???? What a weird comparison, Dr. Sharks.
I don’t think that’s the comparison they were making.
“[…] like Willis, I also had adopted a snarky online persona as the author, calling out stupid comments from the peanut gallery in my newsposts. […] At one point, I learned about another such channel and I did something stupid: I joined under an alias that didn’t identify me as the author. Still, I adopted the same online persona. People hated me. Called me toxic. I was warned by the mods to knock it off.”
I mean it sure sounds like Dr. Sharks did, indeed, enter into a fan-run space not meant for them incognito and then proceed to be rude and confrontational to their fans. I’m not sure what else “the same online persona” could possibly mean, that they’d even think it was relevant to tell this long story.
And I maintain that it’s very different. If Willis joined the Reddit, whether under their own name OR a pseudonym, and then started being rude and confrontational in that Reddit, I’d think that was shitty behavior.
It’s very different when Willis just reacts to comments made directly in their own comment section, especially comments like “fuck this shit I’m done”, which frankly just. Do not merit a polite response???
The difference, if it were unclear, is that we’re essentially having a boisterous party on Willis’s front yard, yelling about how bad their lawn decor is, and getting mad at them when they occasionally retort…
…and Dr. Sharks went clear across town to a party they weren’t even invited to, discovered someone complaining about their lawn ornaments, and started a fight over it.
Yes, Phil, Willis was actively mocking you in particular when he wrote this… (checks notes) …about a year ago.
Pretty sure “two strips of not Doyce” was the general limit for the last few months, so this checks out.
God we just CANNOT get away from this white bread crap.
I feel that they would be just as cute if they were any other color of bread.
two slices of white bread be nice but iz just a wish sandwich :(
Yeah it’s almost like they’re the main characters or something
I think you’ll find the previous saturation level of these two main characters was lower.
I legit didn’t know Joyce was meant to be the “main character” for my first 5 years of reading the comic.
The audacity!!!!!!!
There are other main characters dawg I wanna see THEM 😭 does ensemble mean nothing to you????
For real! They were never this main before!
Right? I feel like I’ve been reading a wildly different strip from everyone who keeps calling “Joyce and Dorothy” the “main characters”.
I understand not enjoying this particular storyline. But the racism present in many comments bothers me. Can you imagine people saying “enough with the black couple” after a storyline focusing on Lucy and Jacob?
Shut the fuck up lol a person of color complaining about the saturation of the white girls is not racist and it is not equivalent to a white person complaining about a black couple. Grow the fuck up, it’s 2025.
For reference, I am not a person of color. I’m a cis, white guy. Just happened to get this Gravitar.
Also “White Bread” wasn’t intended to mean “Whit couple”. It was intended to mean “Plain, bland, uninteresting.”
It feels a bit of a stretch to call the fundie girl who was raised in a religious cult who has just managed to break away from that, attempt to deal with years of racist, homophobic programming, be partially disowned by her “loving” mother, discover she is autistic and then have her first same-sex relationship all in the space of her first year at college “plain, bland, uninteresting”.
Like, at this point there is nothing that is objectively more interesting about Asma than there is about Joyce. It’s all potential. Which can be intresting too! I’m curious to learn more about her. But I can’t see how “Joyce=boring, Asma=exciting” in any way other than “new, non-white character”.
But it doesn’t have to be “objectively” more interesting. Interest is subjective. Lumino is perfectly capable of finding something “plain, bland, uninteresting” even if you find it interesting as hell.
Some people watch golf, I personally will never understand it. Because it’s not interesting.
Also, yeah, I find Joyce to be an interesting character; big part of why I got into this comic. I find these two to be a boring couple. Been disappointed about it.
Nailed it.
Joyce is an interesting character, usually.
I don’t particularly care for Dorothy, but she’s narratively useful as a foil.
Together, they are the comic equivalent of watching paint dry.
> Grow the fuck up, it’s 2025
Yes, I understand that the kind of racism that’s socially acceptable varies from year to year.
It is not possible to be racist against white people.
not with that attitude
Touché!
Not in a white-majority culture where we’ve got the overwhelming bulk of societal power, at the very least. If we were in like, a white-oppressing version of China or something, I could maybe see an argument for it, but we’re not. It’s a comic about mainly white teens in one of the whitest parts of the USA, written by a white person. I think the cartoon white kids will survive if we admit they’re white.
This is an accurate statement. Racism is structural; if a given ethnic group lacks power to alter the structure, they can’t be “racist”. Bigoted, sure, that one has nothing to do with relative power, but not racist. In the US, that defaults to pretty much only us white folks having the power to be racist. I’d love to reco struct the power dynamic to make this no longer a true statement, but success is gonna take a whole lot of people agreeing with me on this.
Oh hey, I get to post this again:
“Like this little chestnut that gets way more credit than it deserves: “Privledge +Power =Racism”. Critical Theory approaching this equation for the first time, would find a significant number of flaws. What sort of prejudice? What sort of power? It is somewhat clarified when using Patricia Bidol-Padva’s original use of the phrase in her 1972 education handbook Developing New Perspectives on Race: An Innovative Multi-Media Social Studies Curriculum in Racism Awareness for the Secondary Level. Quite a mouthful, which is because it was never really designed for the public at large it was meant as a teacher training manual. It was only 50 pages long, and it’s so obscure WorldCat doesn’t even have a graphic for it. The reason it got any attention at all is it was picked up by Joseph Barndt for his 1991 text “Dismantling Racism”. Since Bidol-Padva has degrees in Organizational and Educational Psychology, her original definition contextualized her argument, but in a very particular way. What she proposed was “Prejudice in addition to institutional power”, it is a way of understanding the dynamics of a system where authority is already established. The Church, The Courts, The Family… When people try to deploy this equation on twitter at a specific person there are two conflicting types of racism at play: one type is individual, on a one-to-one basis. The one the equation is actually discussing, is huge social complexes. Instead, most people look at it and say, “Well my people have no power therefore I can’t be racist” and we’re off. They dissolve into a shouting match over who’s more marginalized as a group and therefore empowered to speak as an individual. A Black judge who regularly over-punishes white defendants, is doing a racism. Any institutional power plus prejudice equals racism. “Judge” is the key word. The very concepts of “Blue Lives” and “ACAB”, depends on a Black police officer being capable of allowing their badge to override their individual character.
This also nothing new. It’s so commonly understood it’s literally a running joke in Black sit-coms. Youtuber Renegade Cut made precisely this point in his video “90s Black Sitcoms Warned Us”. He notices when Black officers are depicted as having an overt dispute with their fellow police officers, the nod is toward the uniform, not the skin. And by far Renegade is not the only one who’s noticed how selectively a lot of people are choosing to interpret the word “racism” on Facebook. T1J has several videos on it including “Black People Can’t Be Racist??” and “The EVIDENCE of Anti-Black Police Bias (with sources)”. Or we can all just look at this photo for a minute. The badge wins. Inter-minority racism can also go in some seriously wacky directions. For example, this was a post from rapper Ice Cube back in June of 2020. For most people simply looking at it as a stand-alone tweet it’s kinda funny, especially since the Ethiopian statue has, in the shot, the plaque saying it was a gift from Mexico not an original work. But there’s something significantly more insidious here, notice the watermark on the photos. It’s a little blurry but that’s the logo of the Negus Network. It is a reference to a loose affiliation of historical revisionists who assert all the major historical figures including Jesus, Buddha, and all of the historic cultures of Central America, were founded by Africans. A core tenant of their argument is some Africans and the carved heads of the Olmec look alike therefore they must be related. A method of racial classification called phenotyping which was invented by European phrenologists to categorize the races by their skull-type. Designed by white Europeans to demonstrate their superiority, appropriated by Pan-African Nationalists to assert all other cultures on earth are a lie. In one fell swoop Hoteps erase tens of thousands of years of history and culture on three continents. Just in case it seems I’m exaggerating, here’s one of the videos they posted to their Facebook page. They also really hate vaccines and cow’s milk, which is really odd given the number of cow-based pastoral tribes in Africa, but everybody has their thing.
The claim minorities cannot be racist, even against their own members, is not intrinsic to Critical Race Theory. It is a product of CRT as performed by specific researchers with a very particular agenda. All CRT cares about is who is in power, who is not in power, and what underlying assumptions and narratives reinforce those dynamics. Returning to our equation, does it refer to any form of prejudice, or a particular type of prejudice? [Affected Dramatic Voice] I hate lemons! I hate ‘em! They’re awful disgusting fruits and they should never be where respectable fruits are. See, when I was three I saw a lemon but I thought it was an orange and I bit into it and on top of being sour and terrible it was rotten and I’ve never gotten over and that is why I hate all lemons and lemon-based products and that’s why I called the police on that little Mexican girl or whatever she is down the street yesterday your honor. The fact I was taken seriously by the cop who showed up and arrested a 10-year-old brown girl means there are other people who either share my exact prejudice against lemons and lemon-based products, or the lemonade isn’t the important detail of the story.
Which is when the equation goes entirely off the rails. If institutional racism is the product of institutional prejudices enacted and maintained by institutional power, literally no one is responsible for racist behaviors, it’s all auto-pilot. Or, if we assume institutional power when combined with individual prejudices then any act of an individual which may be based on racial prejudices, but where the individual has no power, is not actually racist. It’s someone being mean in a way that if they had power we could call it racist but they don’t so we can’t [picture of KKK member being treated by a team of black surgeons with the caption “Magically not racist anymore”]. Before I get too far in the semantic and semiotic weeds here: the point is this definition has a particular target, secondary-level school children. It is not meant as an accurate reflection of the complexities and nuances of deep social theory, it’s a bird-eye view of racialization, as explained to a room of 15-year-olds. Not a complete rewrite of the fundamental nature of all forms of bigotry.”
Source cited: Critical Race Is Awesome and Here’s Why | TwinRabbit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq0sbm6dA1w
Also relevant: “None of us is free from the responsibility to uproot racialized thought and practice-within ourselves and wherever we encounter it. As I see it, a “racist” is anyone holding the belief that the human species is divided into a plurality of “races”, some of which are superior to others. If you employ a racialized binary (e.g. “black” and “”white” or “sun people” and “snow people”) to categorize people, you’re a “racist” and you practice racism—at a minimum, you mistake the shadow for the body, and you’re wasting energy.” James Yaki Sayles, Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s wretched of the earth
I just think you should know, literally nobody is reading that.
nameless samurai, I want you to understand that I got two sentences into reading your reply before deciding it was not worth my time. And then I saw you’d written some kind of manic screed that went on forever and regretted even reading that much
I gleaned enough in the time it took to scroll past that I feel quite confident that regardless of whatever point you were hoping to make, you’ve long since climbed much too far up your own ass to have any hope of communicating it, much less of persuading anyone of anything.
Fart Captor,
I was posting something from one my teachers about how awesome Critical Race theory is and how people misuse and misunderstand it. So I do find it kind of funny you took it as a manic screed when I was taking the time to transcribe 3 minutes of an hour and 40 minute, deeply researched video about how awesome critical race theory is and how opens in the first two minutes with “I prefer empowerment and information rather than rambling polemics based on what something thinks Critical Race Theory is, based on the 3 words in the title”.
That said, I borrowed my teachers’ words because I am not good with communicating my own ideas, as people constantly tell me. So, sincerely thank you for telling you telling me that I am pretentious and up my own ass. I will change how I try to communicate.
Also, my teacher is literal, card-carrying member of the Kalingo nation, so it’s not just some random dumb snow roach.
I don’t like statements like this less cuz I disagree with the sentiment and more cuz it feels like a way to justify bigotry. Has anyone ever said “you can’t be racist to white people” for any reason other than to justify their treatment or behavior towards white people?
Well, yeah. Like when responding to a white person talking about they “would face racism” if they went into a majority black city. Or how it’s racist that they “can’t say the n-word.” And sometimes the actions or feelings being “justified” aren’t hateful or bigoted but get labeled as “racism against white people” anyway.
Fair point. Those are all justifiable times to say that. But yeah I dunno I’ve just experienced enough people using it to hardwave their own bad behavior that its soured the statement for me.
Yeah, I, a white person, did in this very thread
Cute. I gave it 3 months at most.
so like 10 years?
Bye bye, Miss Valentines Day
Drive to the blowjob cat, but we all got splat …
HA!
i give em a week, two tops
so, at the current pace, it’s a mere…three to four years.
At the current pace. 3 to 4 months
Didn’t it just take a full year to get from Thursday to Monday morning?
2 weeks? In comic time. ?
The only time that really matters is Willis being bored.
Joyce has had one foot on a Joe-shaped landmine and the other on a banana ever since the newspaper reveal so if anything three months feels pretty generous
No, they’re forever! Just ignore all the underlying points of conflict between them, like they are!
Personally, I like underlying points of conflict in forever relationships in my media. Otherwise wtf am I even reading for?
I hope people IRL have lovely, uncomplicated, openly loving and perfect relationships. But I’mma tune out of a story about that.
This right here.
Heck, I even sympathize with the desire to see a lovely, uncomplicated relationship in fiction, especially if it’s a non-cishetwhite couple+ getting representation that’s been historically lacking in Western media.
I’m not going to be particularly INTERESTED, but I understand why some people want it.
It can work, as long as it’s basically background for them doing other interesting stuff, you just can’t have the relationship be uncomplicated and the plot focus.
They are forever.
But forever is just a feeling.
And valentines day is for 💔
I can’t wait for this to crash and burn.
Same. Recently got cheated on in real life, and she left me for the other guy, so this hits a lot harder than it did earlier in the storyline.
Yeesh. Sorry to hear that. Hope you’re doing ok.
getting by, but it sucks.
Well, that’s not very kind.
BECAUSE RUNNING IS FUN, DOROTHY. That runner’s high is better than sex. Probably.
the runner’s high makes sex more fun, actually ^-^
Honestly, jog instead of running. And if you can, do an elliptical instead of either!
(This is just about your joints.)
Real! Huh, should probably use the elliptical again that I literally own at some point… Home gyms are a lie.
Ellipticals are for real so much better for you than treadmills. Personally I did my best elliptical work when I did it first thing in the morning, before my brain was awake enough to make excuses to not do it pff.
(I left it behind in my last move, sadly.)
Running sucks, worst exercise by far, I would honestly rather play American Football, and that’s saying something.
I’m pretty sure that American Football contains a good deal of running.
I guess if you’re strong enough you could theoretically just walk to the endzone but that would require a LOTTA strength.
American football is just grown up tag mixed with Halo style Oddball (assuming you’re just playing with friends or non-competitively or on the Cleveland Browns or something), so yeah American football is way more fun than just aimless running lol. Pretty sure most sports should be.
If you choose to play football in order to avoid running, you’re in for a surprise.
When I played in middle school I was an offensive lineman.
Everyone only ever thinks about the point scorers and yeah, they run and catch and do fun juke maneuvers. Even defense gets to chase and tackle.
Offensive line? Tedious fussy blocking and nothing else.
Yeah, I played defensive linebacker, I got the worst of both worlds because I had to run into you guys and get all pushy, and then was expected to run anyway.
If we’re gonna talk about pressuring kids into doing things that damage their bodies permanently, by the way, we should drop “imaginary trans cabals” on account of them being imaginary and instead talk about the extremely predatory way football is pushed on young people, and how seriously we absolutely do not take the permanent brain damage done to high school and college athletes before they even “go pro”.
I played American football. I stopped so much as WATCHING American football years ago, for exactly this issue — the sport is set up top to bottom to downplay the injury risks, to everyone’s detriment except for the NFL and college budgets.
The outcry from the fanbase every time a rule change to reduce TBI or even “injuries in general” happens is disgusting — I truly believe a portion of the fanbase is actually there for the bloodsport and not the actual sport, and I KNOW a portion of the fanbase considers injury reduction to be anti-masculine.
Which is a shame, because divorced from the injury potential, American Football is a sport that provides a unique level of weird strategic interest that’s not really available in any other sport I’m aware of specifically BECAUSE it’s a series of set-piece plays rather than continuous.
Yep.
Maybe if we made it all touch football, but. I can’t even imagine the outcry that suggestion would bring about.
(Football isn’t completely unique in this respect or anything, it’s just that kids aren’t as aggressively pressured to join hockey teams — at least not in the US.)
This is why my favorite NFL play is one who quit to focus on math.
(Also tossing in that the predatory-ness is worse for Black kids and kids from lower-income families.)
Oh absolutely.
Same thing as army recruiters being allowed on high school campuses. It’s a type of predation that primarily targets the poor, and because of systemic racism, that’s primarily people of color.
It’s high impact chess. I do really find all the play setting to be pretty dang neat.
@Yumi Actually relevant, my final “I’m never watching this sport again until they fix things” was that guy who retired early in his prime and released an interview about why that boiled down to “Look, I got my Masters in math and after that hit I took where I got concussed, it took me SIX MONTHS before I could understand my own damn thesis again.”
@Li As someone who’s still a hockey fan, that sport seems to have made some significant strides in reducing TBIs since the 1990s, at least — the most notoriously violent players tend to find their careers abruptly ending instead of just racking up fines like NFL players have tended to.
@Big Z: Hey, yeah! John Urschel. He has a PhD now.
I’ve always hated running. And I’m athletic!
But dang I gotta go fast on a bike <3
I can’t walk atm because arthritis inflammation but dammit do i love walkin
I’m the kind of person who walks for hours on end in the nearby suburb and city just for it’s own sake, sometimes I even get streetfood, real good
I”m with you. There’s a lot to be said for simply walking. Like to find new places to walk and explore.
Talking like someone who didn’t have to run laps in gym class.
I used to fucking love running, in elementary and high school. My little autistic ass heard a simple clear instruction with easily intuited parameters and took the fuck off like a rocket. The only one faster than me was a guy on the track team, and he had at least a 6-inch height advantage on me. I was kind of an ass about it though, all makin’ rude comments about the clusters of girls who just walked and chatted the whole time, but in my very slight defense they also complained they were getting bad grades in Phys Ed.
I stopped running after failing PE, not because I didn’t exercise, but because I didn’t wear the right shoes. Killed 100% of my motivation to actually try because the girls who did just walk or hide under the bleachers made a better grade than me.
Like, I get why they didn’t want little girls running in heeled shoes, but I could run in heels and can still run in them (don’t really have a choice now, nobody explained to me that heels as your primary shoe literally changes your foot orientation permanently, they acted like tennis shoes were a moral priority thing.)
I digress though, I think the regular formatting of PE in the US is actually massively detrimental to kids developing lasting healthy habits. Things that should be “do until failure” (running laps) are instead “do until you’re slower than a bell” and things that should be “reach arbitrary amount” (push ups, sit-ups) are do until failure for some reason.
Yeah no that’s a massive lie. Sex’s like, actually awesome. Running just sucks the entire time as well as some time afterwards
I know some people get the runner’s high endorphins. I never have.
Yeah, I absolutely don’t. Be nice if I did but NOPE
I was party to a conversation among friends about the runners high, and I was literally the meme kid with “You guys get endorphins???”. None of that, no thanks, doesn’t work for me at all.
Agreed. Last time I ran for exercise I got to a point where I literally wanted to die, and then I realized I could just stop and never do it again. So I haven’t.
I wish I could run. I can do a speedy walk though and not need an inhaler afterwards.
As my partner’s bumper sticker says, “I love running except when I’m doing it.”
Yeah, I hate running, I love HAVING RUN.
Okay, but hear me out…
Sex…_while_ running.
Now THAT’S a workout!
*Sarah rolls eyes some more*
Genuinely love this strip. Cute faces, adorable dialogue, aaaa.
Look man I’m already prediabetic
I’m trying to think of any other ships in this comic that have been cutesy, or if this is truly unique to Joyrothy.
– Billie and Ruth had several earnest romantic panels. Though it was almost always tagged with something either foreboding or self-destructive.
– Danny and Sal have had some extremely cute moments. Is it cut by Sal feeling self-conscious? Maybe, but I still think it counts.
– Joyce and Joe have definitely had incredibly sweet/sincere lovey-dovey strips together, before this current storyline.
– Dina and Becky were, at one time, the MOST “into each other” of any couple, but I’ve never really felt they were saccharine. Maybe the one strip in the elevator with Dina saying “pants euphoria” but that was more “weird” to me than actual “cutesy.”
VERDICT: Doyce is not unique in its cutesy-ness, but it is probably the MOST cutesy of the comic’s run. Even if I didn’t have other issues with it, my poor shriveled heart can’t handle these characters saying genuinely nice and undramatic things to their partners.
TL;DR – I crave mess
I do think, if you ran the numbers, Doyce is an outlier in regards to the volume and concentration of saccharine moments.
Very much this. Sal and Danny had some very cute moments last time they had a storyline, but it was in between Sal figuring out what she wanted from her parents and Walky realising his mum sucks and trying to do something about it.
Meanwhile Dorothy and Joyce aren’t doing much but be cute.
Also when they first got together it was a lot of sal learning to let herself be happy and not be so hyper vigilant all the time. They had their cute lil bike date, kissed, had a few more pages dedicated to the establishment of their relationship and then disappeared until the arc with the walkerton parents. And then disappeared again.
always do love a mathematical summation of cute moments.
Sal and Danny are adorable when they’re allowed screentime. And if feels more earned bc of how much of a struggle we know it is for sal to be soft and vulnerable with someone
Like Dot, I read the self-aware hover text. I hope this is setting something up. These cutesy panels don’t add anything for me at this point. What happens next?
I think I have whiplash. Yesterday, I was thinking “Asma’s been wedged in a bit awkwardly,” today I’m thinking “Nooo, show us where Asma’s conversation was going!”
put Asma back on the screen! We want Asma!
#replacethewhitegirlswithmoreasma
As in more instances of the actual Asma, so there are several of her occurring simultaneously.
If Asma simply replaces every other sapphic in the strip, her chances of sapphing start to increase exponentially! This is a brilliant development!
“Now neither of us will be virgins!*
If Asma sapphs with another of her selves, is that still sapph or is that Asmurbation
(chanting)
AS-MA
AS-MA
AS-MA
did people already forget that Asma agreed to go bowling with Dorothy and Joyce? lol
That doesn’t put her on the screen right now though, does it? Willis is intentionally depriving us of Asma, possibly as a form of punishment.
Literally worse than Satan by doing this to us.
Whenever Asma isn’t on screen, every character needs to ask “where’s Asma?”
She deserves it, it took 15 years for any character to learn her name.
I’m teasin (mostly, some of the stuff up top is a lil more nasty) but I am here for more Asma. Hell, this arc really needs to be HER arc.
more Asma and Dina or we RIOT >:(
More Asma X Dina, and we riot, just for the love of the game.
so basically the aftermath of a Raider’s game XD
From context, I assume that’s a sports team.
Correct. They’re a Los Vegas sportsball team, but I don’t pay enough attention to tell you which sport. I’d guess basketball, but I could easily be wrong.
American football. Until fairly recently, they were the Oakland Raiders.
awwwwwwwwww
Yes indeed!!! Someone who gets it.
To repeat…
*inhuman screeching*
Awww cute
“Wakeyeth-wakeyeth”
Willis trying to stretch a unique comic title? A secret summoning chant? A wordplay portmanteau I don’t understand?
The world may never know.
Whenever the main couple get together on a sitcom, the sitcom goes downhill (Moonlighting is the best example) and off the top of my head only Cheers kept going but only because Diane left
I hope this is different because I’ve invested a lot of time in this strip
Ted/Robin were fine, I think it got worse after they broke up instead.
To be fair the show went to great lengths to try to convince us Ted/Robin weren’t the main couple (and none of their attempts were convincing)
I truly want to defend JD and Elliot but yeah…scrubs did kinda go downlhill.
What was up with the last season?
It was supposed to be a spinoff, but the network didn’t believe in spinoffs anymore after a couple failed in the prior TV year, so they forced Bill Lawrence to relabel it as Season 9 and rewrite the half of the season that hadn’t been filmed yet to get more JD scenes in there (who was only supposed to cameo originally)
I don’t think Parks and Recreation goes downhill after Andy and April get together. I love those two adorable chaos gremlins <3.
Andy and April weren’t the main leads
Now if Leslie and Ann had got together…
It’s Walky pulled out some of its best storytelling after Joyce and Walky finally got together. Shortpacked had two different main relationships cruise through the latter half of its run without losing the sauce. I tentatively choose to trust Willis’ vision when it comes to this kind of development.
It’s because too much conflict was focused on “will they won’t they” and then afterwards they don’t know how to write a normal story outside of that, so the couple either needs to get written out or have a lot of arbitrary drama injected into the relationship which sucks.
There’s a lot of interesting drama couples can get into, and a lot of ways saccharine can be interesting and investing. Show writers/executives just tend to be really, really bad at execution. If DOA were a TV show, I’d probably like Doyce lol.
Yeah it’s really only the case if writers are hacks that can’t write a compelling ongoing romance or maintain tension outside of shipteasing. Not saying that’s the case here, I know the tension will come back once we leave this fuwa fuwa love bubble. The Good Place had a main and side couple that got together and maintained the stakes. Abbott elementary teased out Gregory and Janine a little too long imo but they did get there eventually and the shows still going strong. Anime example but Love is War let Kaguya and Miyuki actually get together and explore the intricacies of starting a new relationship, boundaries, sex, long distance (tho this is in the manga, the anime ended on them getting together. Boo.) I mean a lot of people hate the Princess Kaguya Rescue arc so ig if you want you can call that going down hill, imo it jumped the shark but i liked ot.
Any good sitcom writer should be able to put the main couple together and make new stakes out of it.
Joe is still awkwardly standing in his room waiting for Joyce to follow up on their conversation
Yeesh, what a simp.
Yeah, until that happens it’s going to taint any strip I see of these two.
Joe should get a life.
I think that someone who just got dumped is allowed to wallow and be in their feelings for a while, especially if the person who dumped them said they’d be back to talk more once an emergency was dealt with. If you were in his shoes, wouldn’t you be pretty sad and anxious? I know from experience that I would be.
I would be sad and anxious, but I wouldn’t be T-posing in the corner all day and night. That’s weakness.
Its only weakness if you don’t have the body endurance to maintain that stance so long
Right? If you can manage to maintain a T-Pose that long, that’s actually pretty impressive.
I love them <3
…d’aw
Sorry Dorothy, the science shows that laying next to your girlfriend does not have the same cardiovascular benefits as running a mile. Now begins her slow decline into poor health as she gradually neglects the fuck out of herself Illinois-style. Filthy state, both of America and of existence.
oh if there’s one thing she’s not neglecting, it’s the fuck
Why are both of your avatars pictures of the same cat
What are you, cat-racist? My cat’s face is rounder and chubbier, and she has slightly shorter ears.
I actually have cat face-blindness
That’s what they all say.
it definitely shouldn’t be the same cat https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Korat.jpg
Cat fight
Lyning next to her doesn’t but there’s other things you can do in a bed that MIGHT be.
Like a 24-hour sex marathon, maybe. Or constant thrashing and flopping, just for the hell of it.
µSuddenly I wonder whether Sal still wakes up with her self-defense reflex.
Joyce’s affections seem to be on a weird toggle. Two weeks ago (in DoA continuum), she was all about getting all up in Joe’s business. So, I don’t know that I trust the sincerity of her loving embrace.
FYI, I’m an old bi-guy. I’ve had multi-year relationships with men and women. It’s not her preferences I find disturbing.
I think you’re forgetting polyamory exists. She hasn’t toggled off Joe. (I don’t think she gets to have both or deserves both but she’s certainly capable of genuinely having affection for both)
At no point in the entirety of this story has Joyce ever not been all about getting all up in Dorothy’s business
I just finished playing the game dispatch, it is awesome, make me think. If all the characters were superheroes (or villains if you prefer) what would be their name.
It’s for the best. There’s an odd correlation they found recently between colon cancer rates and distance/endurance runners.
Even if that correlation can be proven, I would be VERY surprised if that increased risk in any way outweighed all the endless benefits of consistent running/other exercise
Especially running. Humans are practically evolved to run a lot. (Yeah yeah, evolution doesn’t make conscious choices, yadda yadda)
Well that last bit definitely isn’t true. Running is murder on your joints and we get better health outcomes from just walking.
Which is what humans are actually best at! We are persistence hunters, not sprinters.
IIRC Running in moderation is generally good for you, as long as there isn’t a specific reason one’s joints can’t take the repeated impact; but, long-distance running, in general, actually isn’t good for anybody. Like, marathons are actually not good for you, even though getting in shape to run one will logically have health benefits. Running = good, except for specific people with specific issues. Long-Distance Running = not something the body is actually meant to do, and is primarily for the challenge of completing it.
People who run almost always have healthier joints than those who don’t. As you say, it’s the people who overrun who gets the joint issues, but there’s a huge difference between “does a twenty minute run a couple of times a week” and “runs ultra-marathons”.
I mean. What you’ve essentially just said is that people with good joints are more capable of and therefore likely to run than people with bad joints.
But feel free to pull up some longitudinal studies showing that running specifically improves joint health!
Marathons always confused me. I mean, the idea is that we’re inspired by the tale of the guy who ran all 26 miles from Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory, and then immediately died of exhaustion. But we commemorate this by… not dying? Is all this just flexing on poor Pheidippides?
Did he even get a PB out of it?
100%, all marathons should have “fuck you, Pheidippides” written on their banners in a small font.
To be honest, spite is about 90% of my motivation for exercise so this checks out.
yeah it’s a myth that early humans were excellent hunters — they’d subsist on stuff like insects, berries, greens, easy shellfish, and would only get large meat meat by competing with scavengers for previously killed animals
they didn’t go after large game until they were Homo sapien, and if that not until they had the necessary armor, weapons, numbers and communication skills to do so
Huh, well. TIL, I guess.
Weren’t early humans not, y’know, humans until they were Homo sapiens? They would’ve been a different species prior to that.
homo sapiens are not the only species of humans. The entire genus Homo are humans.
And iirc we’re homo sapiens sapiens, not homo sapiens full stop, for whatever that’s worth.
That’s controversial among paleoanthropologists; it seems to be prevalent only among those who want to claim some sort of unique relationship for H. sapiens and H. neandertalensis, leaving out H. longi (Denisovans), another species with which both sapiens and Neanderthals interbred. The majority of scientists seem more comfortable with there having been, at one time, at least five species of human on the planet (sapiens, neandertalensis, longi, floresiensis, and naledi). Most of them seem to have succumbed to over-specialization for their environments – Neanderthals, for instance, were ill-suited to a Europe not dominated by glaciers. Sapiens was apparently the most adaptable of the humans.
Neanderthals didn’t even have PlayStation, of course they died out first.
I haven’t really seen much H.s.s/H.s.n in recent years. I think it was more prevalent back before we knew about Denisovans and when people were arguing “We interbred with Neanderthals, thus we must be subspecies rather than distinct species.” It’s now generally accepted that things are messier than that.
Lol we’re all a buncha homos
Persistence hunting seems to have developed with H. erectus. Neanderthals definitely hunted large game like mammoths and they developed well before sapiens.
Our very early relatives like the australopithecines and probably H. habilis do seem to have mostly lived as you suggest – small game, various veggies and scavenging other’s kills.
Reminder to everyone: Look things up for yourself! Don’t just take the information offered to you by random internet people either for or against any particular ideas.
That’s true. Over 92% of facts delivered by “random person on social media/comments thread” comtain dangerous levels of theramin.
Hey can you like not joke about theramin? My uncle Caleb died of theramin last month.
Yeah them theramin are dangerous. All that hand waving can induce elliptic shock and/or convulsions that are difficult to distinguish from normal operation, particuarly along the semi-minor axis.
George W Bush fought a war against the semi-minor axis of evil, I believe.
And I am sorry about Caleb. If it makes you feel better, my uncle Caleb was killed by an internet statistic.
And occasional contaminations of thiotimoline!
And a solid 79% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
The only exception to Nymph’s advice is when the Internet stranger is me. Then you can depend on it 100%.
I mean, you shouldn’t, but you *can*.
Philosophy Tube did an excellent video pretty recently about the problem of video essays in particular versus written persuasive essays. We’re just less likely to pause a video when it makes a claim than we are to do the same with the written word, the mental pause button is automatic whereas the YouTube pause button is an action.
It’s also much easier to be persuaded by a confident tone and appearance in video than in writing.
I mean, I didn’t say “early” humans, I was just pointing out that in terms of chasing prey, we aren’t like big cats. We don’t run at full tilt and AFAIK we never have… when we pursue prey, we outlast it with our superior endurance.
But also that’s never been the majority of how we get our calories! And while we’re debunking myths, it was never “man type humans hunt, woman type humans gather”. We’ve got fossil remains that clearly suggest all types of human participated in both.
Michael Myers in “Halloween” is basically the best example I can think of in film for how prehistoric humans hunted. Slow stalking, relentless, camouflage, etc.
Michael Meyers, traditional [western*] zombies, Pepe Le Pew… all master persistence hunters,
(* god how to even express this, I am attempting to acknowledge the 20th century appropriation of zombies from Haiti, and the way we reversed the horror — from being about “the existential horror of being raised from the dead yourself and forced to serve an evil master” to “the immediate horror of being pursued by evil mindless monsters”.)
One wishes George Romero had decided on a different name for his undead cannibal monsters that were fundamentally an allegory for the unthinking American public.
You know, the first movie didn’t call them zombies… I’d have to look up exactly when they got the label. Romero certainly popularized the monster, but who started calling them zombies, I wonder? 🤔
and just so you know, I learned what I did about this stuff in my university world history course
don’t trust random YouTube videos, take a minute or two to read sources if there even are any
ACK who am I kidding the algorithm these days is basically “oops all provocative clickbait”, it’s clear that between AI garbage and shit, among modern corporate internet sites, traffic (and thus profit) is not just their top priority, but their ONLY priority (-_-)
Yes, please give me all the saccharine shit, all the time!
It’s great that Joyce loves Dorothy enough to offer to run with her, and great that Dorothy realizes that lying in bed with your girlfriend is way better than running.
Now for something horrible to happen to them both! BWHAHAHAHAHAHA
I miss Cerberus. I hope they’re okay. 🙁
Like from Greek?
No. Someone who used to post here, years ago. Always good comments and perspective, IMO.
I miss them too.
Yeah they were good people. Hope wherever they’re at stuff is going well for them.
My understanding is they still comment on the Patreon version of strips.
That’s probably smart of them.
If that’s so, I mourn the loss but respect their choice, and would hope my best wishes (in all things) somehow reach them.
I thought someone had told me that they don’t post there anymore. I’m glad to hear it isn’t true.
That’s motivation to upgrade my Patreon. 🙂
I haven’t seen them on the Patreon since I joined about a year ago, unless they’re using a different name these days.
I love this ship and I love this strip. But ngl I agree, BRING BACK ASMA
Be gay later, girls! we have new interesting Asma stuff to discover!!!
They have to gather the girl with the jacket first.
I hope you’re prepared to discover the Asma stuff is Asma being gay.
Why does this keep getting brought up like the primary issue with Doyce is them being bi instead of the actual problem being that the comic’s pace gets ground to a halt because them being cute is cute, but it’s also the exact same type of being cute over and over with nothing new happening? Asma is also sapphic, we already know this, I just want to see something, anything actually happen that changes the status quo lol. Let these kids go to class damn. They can be annoyingly cute on the walk to class. They can be annoyingly cute in class. So many of the snuggling and kissing strips are cute but could be removed entirely and changes nothing. Bowling with Asma has to be in like four months time because that has to happen after class (and God I hope we get to see class), so it’s only natural people would want to actually learn what Asma does in her daily routine outside of “mans a front desk.”
If today is Monday, Dorothy has PoliSci. Unless she decides to skip and fuck Joyce again some more (a very real possibility since literally nothing actually matters to either character anymore except NAKED TIME with the other) she’ll have to either face Becky or wonder why Becky is skipping.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – for me a lot of the ‘Lon thing exists but alleged cuteness’ would be entirely redeemed for me if things ARE still happening, just without J&D such that they have SO MUCH catching up and work to do once they decide that ‘WE ARE IN LOVE’ is not their whole entire personality.
Yep, Asma’s gay.
Probably because the comment they’re replying to says “Be gay later, girls! we have new interesting Asma stuff to discover!!!” so, contextually, it’s reasonable to point out that the new Asma stuff is more being gay?
I’m actually not seeing any accusation that “the primary issue with Doyce is them being bi”, just a discussion about the Asma stuff we’re going to find out.
They can be gay later and Asma can be gay now. These two had their turn.
Couldn’t agree more.
*manifesting*
Now back to our regularly schedule slow motion train wreck.
This shit could be so good, truly
I LIKE stupid corny bullshit. You can usually get me with it at least a little bit
(Hit enter too early) (I’m tired) if it wasn’t pretty much everything we’ve seen from these two this would be an awesome line. Like it fully works when Jen & Ruth have had moments like this because there’s a contrast to enjoy… And it’s fine with other couples we see less like Lucy & Jacob where I can genuinely go aww at him picking her up & spinning her around & saying the mushiest shit. And I largely think Danny & Sal are a little boring but I still love to see her her happy about flowers or whatever because she isn’t usually like that.
To be fair, we did see a lot of other stuff with them in the last storyline – yesterday in comic. They dealt with Hank and with Becky. They tried to talk with Joe & Walky, more or less successfully. They even had the kind of pointless visit to Daisy.
It was all interspersed with or occasionally derailed by cutesy moments, but there was serious stuff going on too.
Oh, I guess it’s not particularly clear, but I sort of meant them in the context of their relationship, not the general plot (though it’s also been a main driving force behind a lot of plot, so it’s not easy to separate). So the parts where they talk to other people about how much they love each other isn’t really that much of a contrast.
You also mention the short timespan in the comic, which makes sense – this is perfectly reasonable behavior! New relationship lovey-dovey! It’s also been months though (I genuinely think the pacing last arc was a little iffy, and not only because of the inserted strips, though that probably didn’t help), and this part of a relationship isn’t really doing it for me in the quantity it’s been featured. Would love a little disagreement as a treat. A little strife.
This phase of their relationship started less than 48 hours ago (exactly how long depends on what time of day the protest was broken up by cops escalating to violence). That seems a little early for trouble in paradise.
I wouldn’t classify things like the part with Hank as “they talk to other people about how much they love each other”. Sure, it was about the relationship, but it wasn’t stupid corny bullshit. They tried to hide it and were pretty successful (if awkward) until Joyce decided to distract from Jocelyne.
I mean it is to me, and plenty of other people here. You can just not be into it, that doesn’t make it bad.
Ah, I’m sorry I didn’t add a big IN MY OPINION in front to make clear that the comment I personally made was, in fact, about my own feelings and not yours or plenty other peoples here. Like I was going to cut you some slack because I was typing sorta off the cuff this morning but I really don’t know why you would assume I was talking about anything else other than what I thought…? Into which, sorry, you or plenty other people don’t really factor in, due to how it is my own opinion.
(I also think that in this case, saying “you can just not be into it, that doesn’t make it bad” is as pointless as saying “you can just be into it, that doesn’t make it good”. At the core we just don’t agree. That’s literally fine!)
See this is why I was doing the containment thread
I typed response to you but yeah i just don’t fell like getting into any argument that i don’t really understand what you mean with most of what you said. Sorry i guess for whatbi say? IDon’t relaly get what was bad about it but yeah sorry for that.
I felt you were assuming something I wasn’t saying, aswell as making a sort of useless comment. I guess you probably weren’t assuming anything, or actually engaging with what I said at all? Sorry on my part for misreading, too.
I don’t know what would be engaging in this situation. I just responded to what you say with what i thought, not really much beyond that. I don’t really agree that ot was pointless because, then wouldn’t any comment be pointless? But guess we can disagree on that too. Have a good one?
Another strip, another moment Joyce fails to tell Dorothy about Joe, or at least give Joe an answer.
I hope Joe gets shot in the head with a rocket launcher first, just so you never get to see that happen.
Wild that between these two takes/camps, Miroku’s is the one the author is taking shots at in the alt-text.
Ah yes, the world famous camp full to the brim with people who specifically joke about one character getting exploded so that a real person doesn’t get to see the resolution of something that’s been left dangling in the story. Absolutely chocka with participants who aren’t me, this camp you allege.
I think Camp Taffy has a certain ring to it.
Well, it’s possible, but it might get accusations of ripping off the Saban Entertainment cartoon Camp Candy, starring that one fuckin’ guy from that movie I probably didn’t watch.
Lee, I think Willis is lamp-shading the story moments, but if he’s taking shots at a particular group, it’s very much a self selected group.
Yeah, ~wild~ to make a comment about a group of people making the same complaints every single day instead of the singular person who made a unique comment literally just once.
I’m shocked, are you shocked?
Ah, the Kycilia Zabi treatment.
I had to look that up, and from what little I know about Gundam, of course Char was involved.
*Joe died on his way back to his planet.*
*Somehow, Joe returned*
We are now (I think) going into day two of Joyce not talking to Joe despite promising the two would have a serious talk later. I guess there’s now heavy emphasis on the “later” part.
It’s like 5am o’clock in the morning and she hasn’t even gotten dressed in the clothes that aren’t in her bed that she’s still in yet.
And yet she’s had more than enough time for multiple makeout sessions with Dorothy.
Yep, which is fine since she said “later” not “at the earliest convenience”.
It’s been less than 24 hours. It’s very early in the morning of the day after Joyce talked to Joe last.
I mean id be pretty pissed to be left hanging the rest of the day but everyone’s different ig. If i was in Joes shoes I’d be in the worst doomspiral rn
It’s been not quite 24 hours. Joe and Joyce last talked Sunday morning, and it’s now early Monday morning.
Are you aware that the word later does not mean ‘at the soonest possible moment?’
I do love the narrative contrast between this strip and the last two strips, showcasing the two opposite sentiments being embraced.
I genuinely think this is sweet.
I really wanna like this.
Choose to enjoy it. Make the active decision to like this. You have the power.
Eh, if they don’t like it they don’t, trying to force it just ginna make ot less likely.
Beep beep, wrong, through the Force all things are possible.
*writing this down in my inspo journal*
If that would be false, I suggest trying to find some other way to engage positively.
As a certain Doctor said, “always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind”.
Oh, if only, if only. Having the power to magically make myself like a thing I have problems with? God, I wish that was how it works.
In my experience, it’s possible*, but it’s a lot of effort, so I save it for things that really matter.
*It’s probably not possible for all things.
I’ve had success with doing it for *habits.*
Doing it for art or media is almost impossible for me.
Sorry, brain chemicals don’t work like that. This does not give me serotonin, rejected
I choose not to be a slave to the chemicals in my brain. I didn’t put them there, and I can’t always choose to stop them from being produced, but I can decide they don’t have the final say in what I enjoy. Do not, my friends, become addicted to serotonin.
Cute girls cuddling, yay!
^-^
Bring back Asma tho! I want to get to know her!
Combine the two. Have Asma cuddle a cute girl
I would have no problems with this development.
A controversial opinion I came up with all by me lonesome: if you are awake at 5am, whether by staying up that late at night or waking up that early in the morning z something has gone wrong with your life. No one should be awake at 5am. (Barring like, EMTs and others whose absence would herald death.)
I will also make an exception for the bakers who make tasty treats.
This is a worldview for 12 year olds. Some people are just naturally night owls.
5am is not night it is early morning
That ENTIRELY depends on whether you’re waking up to see it or you stayed up to see it.
This!!!
Hey as someone with insomnia who used to go to bed between 6-10 am (not by choice most of the time), that is a *crazy* definition to have of night owl. I consider myself a night owl. The line between night owl and having a problem is 4 am and/or sunrise
I mean, most people have to leave for work around 6 am, so 5 am is a normal time to be awake.
4 am, however, is a sign that something has gone sideways. I was a night owl before I got old and 3:45 was about the latest I could be up before tapping out. 4 am is just a dead hour.
”most people” have to leave for work at six? Where? What dystopia do you live in?
Being at work at 7AM is pretty normal. that’s why there is rush hour traffic then. have you not ever lived in a city?
I have to be at work at 7:30am, and that’s definitely seen as early for most people. Basically the only nice thing is that even with the school traffic, rush hour hasn’t started by that time.
Lucky! Rush hour where I live starts around 6am and doesn’t end until almost 10am. (And then afternoon traffic starts stacking up around 1pm.)
Here, I’d say rush hour probably starts at 7:30. It does depend how you’d define it, but if I’m thinking of when it’s distinct from just general traffic… yeah, taking the expressway toward a major city wasn’t bad until at least a little later than I’d be doing it.
I have lived in cities for most of my life. I’m also used to business hours starting at 8:00 for most people.
Yeah, that’s…why employees need to actually be at work, an hour or two earlier than that. There’s stuff to do that can only be done when you aren’t actually serving customers.
Some people have different hours, my mother had to leave for work at 5 am. Although people will call work ‘9 to 5’s, there honestly isn’t that many jobs that are only 9 to 5 shifts.
I used to get up for school at 5:30. School started at 8:40…? I think? I’d reach around 8 something. We lived like 40 minutes away and school morning traffic is hell and my parents had to get to work.
I always appreciated living somewhere where my schools weren’t far growing up. Could walk to elementary school, then the bus for middle and high school would take longer because bus, but they were a short direct drive. I had a friend who had an hour and a half ride to school each morning– it meant she got to go to a better school than she would have otherwise, but I would not be a fan.
Where I am, bars have to close at 3. When I was a bartender, 4 was when I’d be getting home, assuming cleanup didn’t take long, which it sometimes did.
Back then, me not being awake at 4 would have been very unusual. I’d typically be asleep before sunrise, even if I’d brought somebody home with me.
These days it’s weird for me to be awake before 8, woke up at 8:30 today. It’s about 9 now, so it’s time to check email and make a few work calls.
I wake up at 3:30am to be at work at 5am, and this has been the case since 2001. I have a good life which is arranged exactly how I want it, nothing has gone wrong regardless of how many people think I’m an inhuman freak.
I’d rather have time to do the things I value most in the mornings before work when I actually have energy, rather than after when I’m too tired to really focus on them.
I wake up at 3 am purely out of choice. I like the dark, chill, and quiet of early morning.
I go to bed at 3 AM most of the time, purely because that’s my thinking gets fuzzy. But it’s easier to get things done after the world has gone to bed.
I’ve heard many artists are nocturnal because many of us have day jobs and also the night is the only time that is truly theirs. I tend to nap between 7 and 11 and then stay up from 12-4 which sometimes involves me staying awake in bed until 5am
the siren song of after-dark hours, where you can exist without anybody fucking bothering you XD
I roil with seething fury every day a strip is not Billie & Ruth being a happy couple but I can’t be bothered writing it out every day.
I stand by you, my sibling in the Church of Sexy Lesbian
SuicidePact.Also, Bring Back Mike.
No zombies on the yuritrain please.
I’M COMING OUT THE GRAVE ON A YURI TRAAAIIIN ♪♫
I want him to just walk back on screen like nothing happened like Kenny from south park.
Yes!
SERIOUSLY GET A ROOM Y- oh wait they’ve already spent a significant portion of time in bed together nevermind
apropos of nothing, I used the panels of her last strip to make an animated GIF hehehe ^-^
https://bsky.app/profile/ngpz.bsky.social/post/3m5xpjvq27c2o
* of Angie
nice
Okay I like joyrothy as much as the next guy, but this relationship is entirely to cute and functional to be the primary focus of a soap opera comic, they need to either get more dysfunctional and chaotic or give the screentime to someone more toxic stat
I keep saying, they should start killing people.
They SHOULD
JoyRothy will bring Joy to all the people on the campus.
Triangle smiles for all… with a machete!
Like don’t get me wrong there adorable together but I want more DRAMA! show us the Becky and dina hopefully not permanent breakup arc, show us more of amber and walkys wierd situationship, hell joes probably in a poor enough mental state right now to do something intresting , for as much as this relationship was billed as being more “messy” then previous ones due to the cheating it really does feel like the two have basically no fundamental disagreements or incompatibilities as a couple, even a lot of Dorothy’s interesting character flaws have kind of been quietly sanded away since starting her relationship with Joyce, idk there cute but cute can’t sustain a whole comic
Cute, yes. Functional, hard to say with their level of “address nothing yet, just spend all time joined at the hip” yet. Chaotic – their getting together hurt Joe, Becky, Dina, and the way in which it happened, though not their intention, harmed the message of an entire anti-genocide protest. Don’t worry, there is trouble brewing.
I would hope so but the alt-text is not giving me hope that this trouble will be simmering anytime soon, and in the meanwhile I just find all of this sugary sweetness utterly cloying.
I assume the alt-text is a lie. Or a joke really. If I actually believed it, I would be done here.
There is still enough trouble brewing some of it’s got to blow up, even between these two.
I actually suspect there’s at least a shred of buried truth in Dorothy’s statement here, in that a certain portion of her activities recently have been designed as an abnegation or mortification to distract her from Joyce; and that she was, in fact, running away from Joyce as much as from her previously perfect future when she ran back into the protest (only to have Joyce catch her)
That’s spot on I think.
Certainly her jumping back into bed with Walky was an attempt to sublimate her desire for Joyce. (Which is another way she’s treated him badly btw!)
Dang. Was hoping for a reprieve from how boring these two are.
Until Joyce figures shit out with Joe I just get a shot of disgust and disappointment every time I see her and Dorothy being loving.
You can just accept that they have broken up, till they meet and have a talk about it and maaaaaaybe a new kind of relationship may happen (I doubt it, just more drama for us to have fun with).
Joyce is not a hushy 😛
Idk why you’d doubt it, chekovs polyamory is right there on table. Be pretty anticlimactic to turn it down
This is what truly gets me about people saying “NO, Joyce absolutely definitively broke up with Joe and you’re nuts if you think otherwise,” because like, the alternative is that Willis set up a plot point without any intention whatsoever of actually exploring it, which is… like… that’s just bad writing? Do these people want bad writing?
For me, the hardest thing about talking about this strip, is when a character or story-line is naturally inextricable from a complicated, real-world concept or controversy, but my opinion on why a character or situation or story arc is playing out how it is, has zero to do with the premise of the real controversy, and everything to do with me coming at analyzing the story from a literary perspective.
I get really interested in talking about the second thing, but while I understand that not everybody has the same privilege to easily ignore or compartmentalize the first thing, it can be exhausting to be talking about the latter, while being held directly accountable by people who think my opinion is representative of my feelings on the former.
tl;dr I actually think that the people who think that it would be reasonable to write the situation off as Joyce having broken it off with Joe, if it were real life, are the ones closest to the truth. But, like you said, I also know that because this is a story, there’s no way that the following plot will be treating it as such. Yes, Joyce should be better to Joe; however, 18 hours have passed in comic time, maybe those aggrieved about it, should accept that the story will continue after this strip, instead of suddenly ending on a cliff-hanger, and that something will logically come of this plot thread in due time.
It also would feel like poly-baiting. Is that a thing?
If it wasn’t for that, I guess it could pay off in Joe’s personal arc in terms of showing how desperate he is, but without actually leading to even an attempt at a poly relationship.
I do think that in real terms, Joyce waiting this long to talk to Joe about it isn’t a big deal even if it feels like we’ve been waiting forever. I’d argue more that she should have talked to Dorothy about it rather than let her think she’s done with Joe – unless she actually has rejected the idea.
Regardless, this is going to come back up and it’s not going to be as simple as Joyce telling Joe, “Thanks for the offer, but not interested.”
Well some people have all the patience of a random thing with no patience.
It may be explored, but in it’s own pace at it’s own time. Willis has left some shoes dangling for years.
Given the chapter title, that is almost certain what we’re setting up.
Joyce doesn’t owe Joe anything at this point except a conversation, and that could be today, tomorrow, or next week. She has absolutely no obligation to drop everything and go tend to Joe’s feelings.
@astariel
Nononono, you don’t understand.
Since the girls literally did not cheat that first night when they found out their feelings,
and since both of their boyfriends were okish with the breakups mere 8-10 hours after,
and since Becky learned it real quick,
and since the earth-shattering kiss that ended up in the newspapers wasn’t their fault like at all (and even if protest/riot kisses are a usual form of photo to be used in newspapers and news outlets… the horror!!!)
and since Joyce saved her sister from outing herself (something she didn’t want to happen yet).
Now these commenters MUST find something to clench their hatred around with all their might… and that is that… Joe is waiting for an answer (that he already got).
So they keep that new fantasy goalpost, so that they can claim then their own moral superiority over these characters and their dump whiteness, who dared to attend/pass through a protest across a college campus, while police were trying to maim them…
or something. 😛
Sorry to the haters this is really very sweet
How do they keep coming up with these one-liners??
RE: the alt-text… is it *actually* all saccharine shit like this from now on? Like Amber, I am a trash goblin who craves mess, and I want to see some of that delicious DoA drama I’ve enjoyed so much over the years!
I think we can pretty confidently say that knowing Willis, we will very much continue to have the drama they excel at so much, just interspersed with more of this cuteness now that Joyce and Dorothy are done telling themselves they’re totally straight and not in love or anything. I’m pretty sure we’ll barrel back into the drama as soon as the characters are awake enough to start actually having the day that just started.
(I’m a great enjoyer of the saccharine, personally, and a trash goblin who’s greatly looking forward to more of the drama and the other juicy storylines, so I feel you!)
I mean, saccharine is a fake sweetness that saturates and becomes bitter the more you take it.
I love these two…
OMG!!!
This is just the sweetest ever! Such a great response. 😀
SO cute!!!! I adore this update! *looooooooooove*
Sugar and spice, and everything nice
It would be really funny if, years from now, when this relationship has stabilized and the discourse has died down, Willis just comes out and says “I set this up because I think cheating is cool and 100% ethical when it leads to yuri.” If nothing else I would respect the audacity.
On the 10 year anniversary of Operation Shoujo Tear Gas, Willis will have two different white girls do the exact same thing at a completely different Bulmeria protest.
Wait, hold up, I was joking when I wrote this, but this could be peak in an alternate future timeline of the comic, where Joyce and Dorothy actually become involved in human rights advocacy, and then at a protest where they bear witness to this and suddenly go “ugh, is *that* how we came across that day?!”
“Catch These Hands!”
I hope the shots the author has taken in this alt text (and a few other places) are intended in good humor and/or are at least aimed at those who have been loudly recalcitrant about hating these two no matter what. Esp. since the backlog rework shows that the author is aware that having such an engaged and enthusiastic fanbase can at least sometimes be a helpful thing.
Because I don’t think it’s unfair, or unsupportive of the author, to have opinions such as “I’d be able to enjoy moments like these if Dorothy weren’t still in the dark about Joe, so I hope we’re pretty close to that getting addressed” and “it seems counter to Walky & Sal’s progress as supportive siblings (e.g. standing up to the racist parents) that Sal shrugged off Dorothy & Joyce kissing” and “Billie showing up for Walky has been by far my favorite moment since, at least, the beginning of the protest”.
Sorrynotsorry that I refused to put this opinion in a “containment thread”.
To be fair, people seemed emboldened by the alt text to start fights with people in the containment thread today, so I haven’t stayed in my designated spot either. Not that I’m good at not replying to things the moment I think of a response anyways (a delete or edit comment button would be so helpful lol)
Like more often and way sooner than usual, anyways
There was no containment thread today. Willis expressed frustration about it yesterday, so I’m taking a break from doing them to save him some stress.
Ah. I guess that means I can barf all over the floor then.
Go for it, I’m on a mental health day, ain’t gonna be me that has to clean it up
Good job looking after yourself!
I always appreciated the thread and your intentions for starting it. It was a place to vent my story frustration in (relative) safety.
I also really appreciate Willis actually going in and un-reporting the thread all the time. Essentially “defending” their own comic’s critics (at least the ones critiquing in good faith). I dunno if I’d be willing to sift through negative reactions to my work nearly every day like that.
“people seemed emboldened by the alt text to start fights with people in the containment thread today”
And other things that didn’t happen (since, as Dot said, there wasn’t a containment thread today). Mmm I love unfounded accusations. 💕
I assumed the place higher up in the thread where the haters were congregating was the hater containment thread. I generally scroll through the comments fairly quickly.
“I scroll through too quickly to have read/noticed things” or “I read the comments frequently and thoroughly enough to have noticed a change in general behavior today that I can attribute to the alt text”
It’s kinda one or the other.
What containment thread? Oh did it get nuked again?
Just FYI, the alt-text was written fully a year ago and hasn’t been changed.
Do we actually know this for a fact?
We know this is usually the case.
TIL!
Usually, but not always.
It is not directed at anyone he wrote a year ago.
As a proxy you can just play the Run flash game, Dorothy
Shooby shooby? Ah, shooby wooby shoobs
Holy shit! I was only kidding yesterday when the next page would be a Dorothy/Joyce strip.
Once again, I wish I could find these moments with Joyce and Dorothy cute. And I would, if they hadn’t gotten together by cheating and then treated almost everyone else around them like shit afterwards.
The more we underline the sweetness of the lesbians the more I’m just pushing myself deeper into my chair how it’s all going to blow up.
“If it gets any more saccharine in there I’m going to put a finger down my throat.”- Anton Sevarius(Tim Curry) ,Gargoyles.
*checks my bloodsugar level
😀
Ow, my cavities!
OK I read this in the morning while making tea still waking up and my vision wasn’t clear yet and these two look a little bit alike and thought it was Dorothy speaking and she said “Walky, Walky, what time is it” and kind of bolted awake but it was a misreading
Okay FINE, I’ll admit they’re cute. Damn you Willis
You can do that for the both of us babe cuz I getting 0 from this
Joyce and Dorothy disputing who is more gay.
Of course it’s a lost game for both, because
JenniferBecky is gayer.alt text: the beatings will continue until morale improves
Put Asma back on screen you coward!
A cascade of consequences still await. They’ve gone through the rapids but the waterfall (Becky) is still ahead. Dorothy can’t bunk in Sarah’s room forever.
Plus it’s canon that Joyce and Sarah have an inverse relationship regarding happiness. Joyce can’t be this happy unless Sarah is equally miserable.
This sweetness is nice but I don’t expect it to remain at this level. New relationship energy fades. The carnage of their recent past is still there to deal with.
Eventually, Joyce is gonna realize that Dorothy poops.
… too soon? (Maybe it’s a matter for married couples)
In all seriousness, if this ends up taking at all a realistic course, the track record of “college relationships that go to ‘I love you’ on what’s basically day two” (even ones that spawn out of friendships) are not great.
Frankly, those three little words are more foreboding than anything that happened last chapter.
But it isn’t Day Two, they’ve been falling in love all year.
I’m not convinced that the kind of subliminated-into-being-just-the-best-gal-pals kind of love can turn on a dime like that.
At least, not without a lot of drama while they unpack what the hell that change might even mean to each of them — and they’ve already been “not on the same page” about several things in the last 24 hours, after all.
In real life, I strongly disagree. I’ve seen PLENTY of lesbians and wlw fall in love on a dime with a bestie they’ve been sublimating attraction to and it doesn’t seem to fail any more frequently than any other relationship start. Anec-data so ymmv.
In a story, I desperately want more drama and I’m hoping it’s on the way for suuuure. It’s still not as simple as “basically day two” imo.
yeah as somebody who’s extended friend group is majority queer women, this feels…not all that out of the ordinary from my experience. This isn’t “we just met and went on one date” lovebombing, it’s “our ‘platonic’ relationship that people have been calling out as romantic forever finally acknowledged what everybody else has been telling us”
One of these days, I’m gonna put in the effort to go back and find wherever the literal first strip of Joyce and Dorothy being Obviously Sapphic is, just to be able to say exactly how many years, months, and days they’ve been slowly building up to official dating. “Joyce and Dorothy are secret lesbians and everybody knows but them” might actually be the #1 most common strip punchline in the first 10 years of the strip, it’s wild to me that people genuinely didn’t believe it was a possibility.
I mean, yeah, this has been building up forever.
But I also think that the mental scaffolding that you have to build up around “no, we’re best friends and neither of us are bisexual at all I’m a Kinsey 0” might end up being an impediment to “actually dating now”.
Here are some possibilities:
“We’re all lesbians here” https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/02-uphill-from-here/why/
Joyce and Walky comparable freakouts about dorothy (and certainly the first big sign of her worship of her, considering I don’t think she’d freak out quite the same or so extremely if it was someone she didn’t care about). Also, Dorothy finding Joyce adorable https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/04-the-bechdel-test/hics/
Joyce asking Dorothy on a date https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/boo/
And similar to above, really wanting to go to a party with her in a way easily readable as a crush https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/condition/
Joyce doe eyes at Dorothy: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/diversion/
Joyce throwing a toy at dorothy, a classic: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/studying/
They also very early start getting very touchy-feely with each other
Also worth noting: This was something that started being commented on in-universe as early as book 3: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-3/01-if-the-shoes-split/nemesis/
Here’s a broad collection
https://www.tumblr.com/dumbingofage/791042978426880000?source=share
Your friend group’s queer contingent has a better track record than mine, I guess. 😀 It’s ALL anec’data.
Yeah true. I’m definitely reading DoJo as closer to the baby gays I knew in college whose relationships didn’t live to see the end of the school year.
Starting a relationship and “falling in love” are two different things. LOTS of people pine for months and months before they start dating. That’s not like…unique.
Didn’t say it was unique. I just think saying “I love you” on day 2 of a relationship if you’re a couple who has been falling in love for months is different than saying “I love you” on day 2 of being with someone you barely know yet.
Especially if it’s been a mutual falling– like just to Yoto’s point, I think the mutual yearning for months before starting a relationship is less common than one person yearning* and then a relationship starting. And in that case, two days in would still be an early “I love you.”
(*I don’t know this for sure, I’ve mainly just yearned.)
Im a pro at yearning. It’s basically all I do.
See: Joe literally doing this for like 6-9 months in comic time, before they actually started dating.
The timespan of the whole comic so far is less than six months, but he was pining for a while, and I respect the inclusion of “6-9.”
People getting mad at Dot’s containment threads then getting mad at there not being one is wild.
You have no evidence that the people or person deleting the thread are the same people complaining about its absence.
It is, however, a reasonable inference – there appears to be a small contingent of people (possibly just one person, in fact) who strongly objects to anyone complaining about this ship for any reasons whatsoever. (I have my disagreements with the haters, but also acknowledge that not everyone has the same tastes. That’s why I like the containment threads – I can just skip past all of that and everyone’s better off, including the hater(s) of haters.)
Nah, there’s been equal complaints from self-described haters about how they “shouldn’t have to be” or “refuse to be” contained, or otherwise resent the “implication” of such a thread.
I don’t think it’s either group, I think it’s a single dedicated troll who’s enjoying all the finger-pointing they’re causing, and I think we should all deny them the pleasure.
Especially since I experimentally verified the other day (on a post of my own) that a single dedicated person can report a post multiple times by themselves on a single device by clearing cookies enough times.
Please don’t continue to spread this information.
Some of y’all aren’t actually sick of “white girls”, you’re sick of Joyce and Dorothy specifically and you would gladly trade them for more strips about white characters you prefer.
Which is allowed, by the way. You can just be sick of strips about these two, it doesn’t also have to be good social justice praxis.
Also, “wow can’t believe you singled them out for the color of their skin” people, you’re not allowed to quote MLK anymore until you’ve at least read the Letter from Birmingham Jail (and by all means, don’t stop there).
personally, as somebody who always wants more slides about Walky and Dina and Sal, because they’re my favorites, I agree with your comment. I feel like hating on white girls when it comes from other white people feels so performative.
I am sick of this specific arc, but it can just be because i’m bored and want a plot that doesn’t feel resolved, not some in depth analysis. (that and as somebody who grew up an atheist, Joyce is my *favorite* Christian to atheist arc, but that arc just generally bores me)
Exactly this.
Like, white readers can be as sick of oversaturation of white characters as anyone else, we might be less likely to notice it but we can be genuinely sick of it!
However, when I see folks specifically hoping we’ll get more of [other white characters] while in the same breath complaining about “too much of these white girls”, my eyebrow twitches upward.
Like yall do know they Jocelyne and Becky and Ruth and Danny are also white, right. Right…….?
And they’ve all got things going on that make TOTAL sense to want to see more of!
And you can just admit you want to see more of them instead of hijacking the extremely legit complaints of other fans who actually do want to see more of characters like Dina and Asma and Raidah and Sarah and Asher and… etc.
While I don’t necessarily disagree – and joking aside, the extent to which I am fed up with Joyce and Dorothy is purely down to my own preferences – I think it’s absolutely fair for people, especially people of color, to be irritated with these two on the grounds that they are statistically the whitest main couple I the strip, and their whiteness has been affecting the plot in ways that range from the unfortunate to the deeply uncomfortable – their entire conduct at the protest up to and including the kiss, the way they went about talking with Asma, and especially Joyce’s truly tone-deaf outburst at Raidah.
Right, but I very explicitly wasn’t talking at all about that. I am talking about my fellow white people, who are claiming to be sick of “these white girls” and even claiming solidarity with commenters like NGPZ, while at the same time saying stuff like, literally, “where’s Carla”.
Well yeah sure. Especially since we just saw Carla! At least with Danny we haven’t seen him since like February.
Like is Joyce/Dorothy really “whiter”, whereby we mean more problematic, specifically with respect to the protest, than Carla, who has so far only exhibited the barest stirrings of discomfort with her parents’ complicity in the genocide the protest was against?
Child of billionaires abetting the genocide who hasn’t yet called them out on it or even directly acknowledged that Charlie had a good point about them versus “two girls who kissed inappropriately in the middle of the protest”.
It just. At the very least it seems quite rude to ride the coattails of NGPZ’s calls for more appearances of characters of color to say “yeah! I agree with this comment! Boo to more white girls, where’s my white fave”.
As I said, I don’t think we’re in disagreement on this point.
Bleh, but first: one last attempt to address what I think your complaint with my comment was?
The idea that one can be sick of the specific type of “whiteness” Joyce and Dorothy represent while still wanting more of other white characters.
Okay? Sure? But I still don’t think those comments are the same type of complaint as calls for more appearances by characters of color, and shouldn’t be presented as the same thing, or tacked on to threads that are actually calling for the former. Folks should be upvoting NGPZ with their replies, not derailing their thread for different complaints that happen to share the end goal of “less Joyce/Dorothy screen time”.
It was more a “yes but” than anything else. I don’t think you really said anything incorrect.
👍 in that case
Ugh, I am GRUMPY. Imma sign off for a bit.
They’re not whiter tha Carla but also we’re not seeing much of Carla. Carla is passively benefiting from a genocide by the simple nature of existing as a person who comes from wealth while Dorothy and joyce keep going out of their way to deal with racial issues that they are completely out of their depth with. It wouldn’t be quite so pronounced if they weren’t being such active participants.
But also subjectively I’m gonna say then being blonde doesn’t help. Blondes just subconsciously read as WHITER than other white people. Not really their fault but I definitely recognize that bias in myself.
It’s funny bc Carla is also white.
But no for real: it’s fine to want less of these two and more of some other white character, I just dislike seeing it phrased as if it’s taking a political stand in defense of #representation.
It’s no different or less annoying than people who are really just happy right now to see more of their favorite ship but are posturing like their shipping preference is a brave stance they’re taking in defense of like, gay rights.
*IS ALSO BLOND, god. Carla is also blond, just like her parents. She canonically dyes her hair.
I was gonna make a post reply to the the whole thread but this is an excellent jumping off point for the point I wanna make.
I see a lot of comments about people assuming people who don’t like this ship being homophobic or belittling people who are concerned about Joe by boiling down his entire character to just being “a man”. And its frustrating because obviously you as a commenter know there is a societal bias against lesbians in and out of fiction that makes them the underdogs. By evoking the idea that people only vehemently don’t like this ship because its two women it causes people to get defensive. And you can’t just say “that’s not true and its rude to say that” over and over cuz people won’t believe you. So the easiest avenue is just to point out “hey maybe Joyce and Dorothy aren’t actually the most oppressed people in the world.”
It’s ok to hate someone for being white
Or being a man
Or being straight.
After all they’re the privelages class who gets everything handed to them. And anyone who wants these characters centered is fighting in favor of the status quo and not against it.
Which I find pretty dang reductive to the human experience. I don’t find Joe and Joyce’s love and less substantial because he’s a man. I don’t find Dorothy and Joyce’s love any less substantial cuz they’re white. But it seems like the only thing people ever want to listen to is attacks on their character and attacks on their privelage. And so those are the weapons we use.
I mean, which “people” do you mean when you say “the only thing people ever want to listen to is attacks on their character or attacks on their privilege”? And how are we defining “listen”?
If the goal is to make a shipper or anti-shipper shut up and go away, sure, these might be effective lines of attack, but I think they’re not any more likely to be shutting up because you gave them food for thought than they are to be shutting up because they’ve decided you’re an asshole who’s trying to use social justice to manipulate their ship opinions, either for or against.
Like the personal is political, I’m not saying shipping opinions are never informed by our politics. If you notice yourself being quicker to criticize the f/f couples than the m/f couples, that’s probably subconscious bias happening.
If you notice yourself being more protective of white f/f couples than other couples — or being more angry about how Dorothy treated Danny than about how she treated Walky, for example — that too is probably subconscious bias.
But trying to guilt-trip people into changing how they feel about a given ship is an absolute crapshoot, and you’re more likely to succeed in making them reluctant to admit to still liking / disliking the ship in front of you than you are to actually change their mind.0
I wanna point out I’m not arguing or disagreeing with you. I think its dumb. Moreso pointing out how and why we got here.
People argue with virtue rather than actually reading people’s opinions and so they take the easy way out and call people who disagree homophobic or mock the characters for their whiteness because they feel like their real arguments are being ignored.
I’m not saying it’s healthy or working. It’s just why they do it. It’s a defense mechanism.
Fair enough, but personally I was less confused by it than annoyed by the derailing of NGPZ’s thread today with people theoretically agreeing with them but explicitly calling for more appearances by white characters. It shone a spotlight on the particular hypocrisy in a crappier way than usual.
I’d be just as annoyed if someone started a thread to point out that we need more queer men in this strip, and a bunch of pro-Joyce/Dorothy commenters jumped in to reply with “hear hear! I’m also displeased by the lack of queer representation, which is why there should be MORE Joyce/Dorothy!”
Like. You’re not slick AND you’re actively distracting from someone else’s real and legit #representation complaint to center yourself and your ship war, just take a breath pls.
like
I want to get behind this new pairing
I really do
but it just ain’t good rep
like
what DOES a major chunk of bi rep look like in the comic, as of now?
– two freshmen who not only cheat on their partners, but COME OUT by cheating on their partners (AKA the single most harmful stereotype to bi folk)
– a manipulative, formerly alcoholic bully who is still heavily in the closet and in denial
– a right wing politician who denies it happening
– and then there’s Ruth, who only fairly recently became good nuanced bi rep, but only after she became, you know, not-an-abuser
like, I know this is Dumbing of Age and all the cast have their flaws, but COME ON XD
like, if Joyce X Dorothy are still popular regardless among the general fanbase? Oh well I guess…
basically reminds me of how in the original Naruto manga run, Sakura was especially under-ranked in the character popularity polls
what ya gonna do? in the end, a popularity contest is three wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner (9-9)
@NGPZ: as A Sapphic Bi, I actually love that the gamut runs so wide and that they aren’t all squeaky clean bis! I respect people who feel differently, of course, but I’m happy to have messy #representation. It makes me feel more like I’m being seen as a full human being, capable of all that mess.
It’s also a nice respite from the kids’ cartoons where most of the good bi #rep has been coming for the last decade — stories where characters AREN’T all meant to be object lessons in good and bad behavior are nice too sometimes.
hey, valid!
and like, queer rep in general in the comic is still overall good
well, good-ish
either way when I get to making fan games again I’m probably gonna give little focus as possible to Doyce,
not only out of good conscious b/c of the circumstances under which they got together would come up one way or another, but to compensate for the disproportionate attention they gonna continue get in the strips for the time being XD
OOOOOOO!!!
I feel like Willis has been consistently setting up that Joyce and Dorothy are making each other worse and are going to have to break it off. I’m sad about that and hope they can work through it. But all this happiness they’re feeling is coming at the cost of letting the best parts of themselves decline and amplifying their weaknesses.
I am hoping against hope that they are being written as being intentionally insulated in the bubble of new love and the weekend and that it’s about to pop.
…or maybe they’re just being annoying af because they’re in their honeymoon phase, like so many other couples ^^
ahhhh, I love these two, they’re so heartmeltingly sweet. no need to run anymore 🥺🥺🥺
This comic is kind of like watching a kid eat nothing but Halloween candy and feel bad with a tummy ache.
Then eat something with a little more to it than just “sweet” and start to feel better.
And then decide to immediately switch back to nothing but saccharine sweet candy
All you critics shut you’re mouths if you don’t want to eat this saccharine delight with a spoon like me
No thanks
No i like kvetching its fun
I checked, I actually looked all over the place, and I can’t find where you were made a mod or put in charge of anything so like…
…no?
do I have your permission to have my sugar with some tea or coffee at least? (-_-)
Why of course you do NGPZ. What better combination to start your day?
enjoy the sugar while it lasts,
cuz after this honeymoon is over, gonna be a rough patch between these horny idiots almost immediately, believe me 👀
I’d say T-minus 2 storylines until Dorothy starts to really struggle with being embarrassed by Joyce’s current coping mechanism of “vibing with being transgressive.” Dorothy likes the idea of being transgressive right now, when it’s associated with her “actually getting what she really wants” for once; but, in practice, her partner being transgressive, as a rule, has traditionally bothered her.
At some point, Dorothy is going to start pushing back at Joyce “being heroically gay” in every situation, regardless of context, because she actually does have an underlying need to make everybody see her in a positive light, and does like to feel in control of how she is perceived. This is the woman who broke up with a guy for wearing pyjamas.
If this is sarcasm, you’ve missed the mark by a wide mile.
agreed <3 i'm sending every panel to my gf and saying "us" :3c
Good lord, soooo much sweetness. I am surprised they haven’t summoned the ghost of Wilfred Brimley already.
Y’know, I have diabeetus.
won’t ever find me complaining about saccharine sapphics
this is genuinely sweet i am just. more worried about becky & eventually that starts to take the shine off things. & yes, i know she is not legally or morally entitled to joyce’s time/energy, oh my god.
DR: Lord, these sugar level in your blood… It’s a surge of glicose, literal sweet bomb. What happened? I told you to follow your diet.
Me: It would be funny if I try to explain. I will sent you a link of the today strip…
These two are cute ❤️