It’s way off topic for the current comment, but on the subject of autism or not… there are some interesting musings under the strip at https://www.forwardcomic.com/archive.php?num=408 which speculate that both autism and allism are both on the same spectrum, and “”hyperautistic” or “hyperallistic” individuals are simply those who are far enough to one side or the other that it impacts their lives – they exhibit these traits so strongly that it is reasonable that accommodations be made for their unique style of neural processing.”
A caveat, though: as that’s a comic about neurodivergent people in an imagined future, the author had extrapolate to how understanding of such things might progress over time. What’s written there is presumably accurate for the setting of his comic, but not necessarily outside it. Even so… seems plausible to me. Then again, I’m no neuroscientist.
In the interest of furthering the tangent: I predict that we’ll eventually move past the ‘spectrum’ model too. Human experience is so multifaceted that even if there are statistical trends about which things tend to correlate together, almost everyone will be ‘non-typical’ in at least some ways.
Honestly, much the same as discussions of “intelligence”, anytime I see any human behavior placed on a two-dimensional spectrum, I assume the truth of the matter is going to eventually end up as a multivariable web in some kind of hyperspace-looking graph.
Interesting musings, but someone might need to tell the author that fidget spinners /are/ in fact a disability aid- for some people. If someone has ADHD, i.e. their brain either doesn’t produce or doesn’t retain enough dopamine (because that is at its core what ADHD is), they might struggle to focus properly in certain situations, and/or they might find understimulation to be almost physically painful. Dopamine is the “you’re doing activities that help you survive” reward chemical, and our brains understand a lack of it as us wasting our time and effort on things that won’t help us survive. ADHD, essentially, makes our hindbrains think we’re spending most of our time dooming ourselves for lack of productivity. All those instincts can’t understand that being understimulated in, say, a classroom isn’t actually dangerous- those bits of the brain understand that understimulating classroom as something that will eventually get us killed. Which is why the brain latches onto any bit of dopamine it can get, because it can’t differentiate between dopamine from doing an actual survival thing and dopamine from a fun spinny device, and the dopamine-starved brain is desperate for anything that feels like it’s helping with survival.
Fidget spinners (and other stim toys) were “touted as a disability aid” because they ARE. They can help to fill in that dopamine absence and convince the brain that we aren’t going to starve. They just happen to also be fun dealies that kids can play with, ADHD or no, and did get really hyped up for a bit there.
(this concludes my rant on a condition which is very much misunderstood or not fully understood by a lot of people, and which is actually very bad for us on multiple levels, given the amount of stress it puts the brain and body under to be literally convinced that we’re slowly getting ourselves killed.)
Okay… thank you for this. I recently got diagnosed with that stuff and this explanation was actually really helpful. Honestly, a lot of this journey has been constant “oh, so that’s what that was” moments. This was short, sweet, and to the point in a way that most explanations of this stuff hasn’t been.
They were literally invented for ADHD kids and only got popular after the NT kids decided they wanted them. Then a whole bunch of kids in some places had to deal with all fidget toys being banned because “that looks distracting and I don’t believe your problems are real”.
In the back of her mind Dorothy is cheering to have another thing she can put on her plate to put off dealing with the reality of having gotten what she wanted
Yeah because real things continue to happen even when you’re in the throws of fresh sapphic love……..Don’t trust fresh sapphic love. It needs to ripen a little first.
Another thing is I kinda like the Becky+Mary dynamic. It’s like they’re not exactly friends but Becky is willing to interact with her on her level without much judgment and it lets Mary talk back to her earnestly in ways Becky immediately undercuts without insulting her. It’s entertaining.
Yeah, but is that worse than forcing your ex to date somebody, then immediately trying to get them to drop them in the midst of a weird break down brought on by her inability to let people in(which you bore the brunt of) after already going through a weird up and down relationship with her after she’s tells you she needs space, but then immediately drops the love you bomb afterward. Then even after you give it another go around, she proceeds to cheat on you with the gal who has been antagonizing your relationship with her the whole time?
Dorothy is definitely up there in the bad GF conversation.
How would you have put it? It’s not like she’s Satan or anything, but this are just the things that happened and she’s kinda been a bad girlfriend to Walky.
Jennifer definitely takes the number one spot though.
I think stuff like saying she forced Walky to date Lucy is extreme, but I would note that I am making a reference to another webcomic where that sentence was immediately responded to with “Oh, I really don’t like how that wasn’t a firm no”
Well, “Och, I really dinnae like how much tha were na a firm, Na” to be precise but that’s not relevant, the point is it’s not a statement that comes from someone who can muster a strong defense
Those are a hyperbolic parody of “just the things that happened”, but it’s far from an accurate retelling of events.
First: the love bomb. Dorothy first dropped that in “Relieved” back in 2014. Needing space wasn’t until 2018, and Walky started that one in the strip “Carry” (Dorothy reciprocates the sentiment and then asks for a pause in the next few strips).
The other ups and downs, especially the lack of respect for the pause are valid criticisms.
After formally breaking up, she encouraged Walky to date someone he had a close connection to and some chemistry with. While it may not have worked out, I don’t think there was anything particularly wrong with it. Plus, on a technicality, Dorothy was not his girlfriend at the time so even if this was bad I’m not sure it counts against her “girlfriend score”.
She absolutely didn’t try to get back with him immediately. She waited a couple weeks until after Walky had broken up with Lucy. Mostly. Maybe jumped the gun a little, if you want to complain about that it’s fair.
Finally yeah, the cheating, which is absolutely happening and would probably put her in the bad girlfriend running all on its own.
Like, you got some points in there, but also some straight-up falsehoods.
I actually think Paul broke up with her. He’s been very absent from her presence lately. I guess if true that wouldn’t take away that she was a girlfriend if that’s all it takes to rank as the worst. Still I’d say an active girlfriend has more potential to suck if my Mary and Paul broke up theory is true.
That would also partially explain Mary’s comment about predatory men. I mean, Religious Extremists don’t really need a reason to obsess over the people they hate. But still.
That was an intentional misgendering of Carla. Transphobes often see trans folk as inherently “dangerous” and “deviant.” That’s the “rationale” behind a lot of those asinine Bathroom Bills.
The assumption is “they must be perverts, they’re DIFFERENT!” Thing is, bigots aren’t even creative, they just recycle this horseshit on a different group depending on the decade. This same baseless accusation has, and still is, leveled against gay men, lesbian women, and African-Americans.
That was one of Jim Crow law’s “justifications” for separate bathrooms. Racists genuinely thought of them as inhuman predatory animals who just lived to attack people. It’s how they paint every out-group they don’t understand and/or just don’t like. Anything that is “not like us” is a threat, and guilty until… well, just guilty. Full stop.
That whole bit was Mary going out of her way to dehumanize Carla… because Mary is a Euclid-class bongo.
I just checked and I totally forgot his name. It isn’t even Paul, it’s “Peter”. He also hasn’t been seen since Halloween. Between that and Mary saying “Halloween happened.” Like the holiday is some notorious relationship test I really think they broke up.
Dorothy has a worse history of screwing with Danny and Walky, but it’s unintentional and she feels regret for hurting them. Joyce has no prior history, but her complete lack of giving a shit about Joe is something else. So, debatable
First time around she certainly did fall in love with someone else and cheat on him. The issue was more that she got more serious about him than she planned.
Imo Joyce’s history of not respecting people’s monogamous relationship boundaries (re: Jacob) is more of a relevant history than Dorothy’s.
I don’t feel any particular way about it, but I do have to remind myself of it sometimes
I think Joyce is getting grace because while cheating is a big nail in the coffin, other than that she has been a pretty good girlfriend to Joe. Dorothy even outside of the cheating really gave Walky the run around in their relationship.
Same. The Joyce stuff with Jacob could be explained away as “a caper that went too far”, but this is both “worse than that” and “did you learn nothing?”
I agree, I was way angrier with Joyce than I was with Dorothy and it took me a while to reconcile with it because my initial reaction was to think she was acting wildly out of character because I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
That’s been my reaction. At least annoyance and kind of bewilderment, because it seems so out of character and she’s one of the most morally rigid characters, like the autistic justice kind. Dorothy has been self-destructing and has been in the exact kind of state for this kind of bad choice. Joyce, I have to really intellectualise her behaviour to make it make sense.
Probably holding her breaking up with Danny against her, which I disagree with.
Sure, she should have communicated that she wasn’t vibing with the relationship anymore, but it’s not really her fault that Danny followed her to a college with no plans for his future except following his HS GF around like a puppy.
Idk, I feel like since she already knew she was gonna break up with him at college or over the summer, she should’ve ripped the bandaid off at graduation. Boyfriends and girlfriends often plan to go to college together, that’s completely normal. It just feels like a courtesy thing since she didn’t care for him all that much anyways.
IMO they both were bongos, as teens are. Danny planning out their whole lives together without asking, likely making her feel like an animal caught in a trap, and Dorothy being indecisive, or hoping she could passively escape without needing to chew that limb off. She probably soured on their relationship very slowly over time, not realizing it’d crossed a threshold until long past when it should have ended.
Danny has grown a lot since then and I like him now, but Dorothy being put off by him at the start of the comic was pretty relatable.
I got theories about Danny and Dorothy’s relationship. I kinda don’t think she really loved him that deeply if at all. It seems more like they were friends and he was a safe guy to be around and in high school that’s all you really need. They were each other’s firsts likely in a relationship ever so I think Dorothy kind of expected the whole moving to college thing to be a natural breakup which can happen to a lot of high school romances. She was probably she could avoid the awkward breaking up part but Danny following her ruined that. So yeah if she were better she’d have ended things at graduation. But Dorothy’s only 18 so what should we expect.
I think the real fault with Dorothy’s breakup with Danny isn’t even how she did it or when. It’s just overtime Danny has proven to be right about the stuff he said. He was being a pissy little dweeb back then, but truth is really that Dorothy didn’t like hearing the bad stuff about herself. A trait she still has today. As Danny has still been very right about some of her faults.
Apparently she was dropping hints according to Li and the links they provided. Not sure how I feel about that instead of just facing the awkward conversation and breaking up with him, but I get not wanting your first relationship to end badly. I don’t think it’s fair to totally blame Dorothy for that. It kind of worked out for both of them. I will say it shows Dorothy has a habit of trying to avoid bad outcomes. We’ll have to see how that effects the Walky situation she’s now in.
What? No, I don’t hold it against her that she broke up with him. Some people mentioned previously that she waited to break up with him until he followed her to college, rather than breaking up with him earlier when it would have given him the opportunity to choose a different college path
Well, for the record, I don’t think she says anything that indicates she waited to break up with him on purpose, and many hints that she’d tried to tell him following her to college was a bad idea. He responded by lying to her that he’d be going to IU even if he didn’t want to continue their relationship:
Which makes me think it must have been very difficult for Dorothy to bring up.
Bonus: you can already tell here that JOE knows what Dorothy is going to say, but he’ll be explicit about it later, and I’ll link that in a follow-up to avoid getting put in mod jail.
Ugh, you can see my copypaste error where I tried to stitch two different versions of this comment together and failed. I only meant to point out Danny’s lie that he wasn’t going to IU because of Dorothy the one time.
Everything Joe, Dorothy, and frankly Danny himself say about this indicates that Dorothy had been dropping hints for a while, and Joe had been dropping hints for a while, but Danny was determined to ignore both of them and pretend that his relationship with Dorothy was not only not ending, but going to, like, end in marriage.
He’s a romantic guy, and these days he’s super likable, but Willis wrote him early on as clingy and codependent, and I would go as far as saying no one was supposed to be on his side when Dorothy dumped him, especially after his condescending dismissal of her attempt to tell him she was going to leave for Yale.
But gosh were lots of people on his side anyway, heh.
I didn’t say no reader has ever been mean to Danny, or that Willis never meant him to be sympathetic. I said I don’t think Willis meant for anyone to be on his side when Dorothy dumped him. Two completely different statements!
I was on Danny’s side because Dorothy was embodying two of my pet peeves.
1. The ‘hurting someone for their own good’ routine. I really hate that, and I especially hate it when people pull it in relationships. Let people decide for themselves what’s good for them. I hated it when Ruth pulled it on Billie too.
2. The ‘everyone must have career ambitions and that has to be the most important thing in your life’ routine. Now, it’s perfectly fine that for Dorothy, her career ambitions were more than her love life. But she was arguing that this had to be the case for Danny, too, and that if it wasn’t, it was a major failing in him. It’s perfectly okay for someone not to care about their job, or to prioritize their love life first, just as much as the opposite is true. But no one gives you any grace for that these days.
OTOH, I’d call it a flaw if you haven’t broken up with someone, but you’re going to and basically everyone but them knows it. For how long had this been going on?
Seems like she was just hanging in hoping he’d go away on his own. Which isn’t really great.
(Of course, it’s partly also because Willis wanted to show the break up on screen rather than just have it be backstory, but still.)
Yeah there was no reason Dorothy shouldn’t have dumped him over the summer at minimum. Just expecting him to pick up on her hints isn’t fair to him, and it’s not a mature way to end a relationship.
Some of y’all seem to think I said “Dorothy did nothing wrong” instead of “I don’t think Dorothy was screwing with Danny, and I don’t think the text supports the idea that she waited to break up with him until they were both at IU on purpose.”
@Astariel: I don’t think she thought she was hurting him for his own good? I think she specifically said that hurting him now was better than continuing to date him and hurting him more later. She also admitted that she should have done it months ago.
As for “everyone must have career ambitions” — I don’t think that’s what she or Willis was trying to say, either? I think she said, “I worry you only followed me here rather than because it makes sense with what you have planned in your life.” And Danny insisted it wasn’t true, and then a few scenes later grumbled bitterly because it had, in fact, been true.
Yeah, but that’s usually something you communicate with your significant other, Danny just did it of his own accord and only let Dorothy know when he showed up. That’s an insane life decision to make on a lark for a high school romance.
Definitely should have let him know, but I can’t say she’s anymore at fault than Danny was.
We saw her try to broach the topic more than once, Danny deflected and lied to her, insisting he would still have chosen to go to IU even if they weren’t dating.
There’s no way Dorothy didn’t know where he was going to college until move-in day. Those decisions get made in the spring. It would have had to not come up for literally months, and that’s just no believeable.
I think at this point we’re applying too much blame on either side. Dorothy and Danny were both kids acting selfishly in that situation. Danny ignoring the signs it was over and Dorothy avoiding the confrontation.
honestly i read danny as not telling her he was coming to IU as it “would be a romantic surprise” that would “get dorothy to like him more” if he should up as a surprise. just like a dumbass in highschool would
I think we’re all just kinda assuming things based on the context of what the strips show. Do we know for sure he lied? Not really and it’s a detail we may never know and or need hard answers on cause it’s unimportant, but the strips show Danny in denial of him motivations for choosing IU initially and that Dorothy didn’t want him to follow her. Everything else is speculation. People will see what they want in it depending on who they relate more to.
But this strip, idk. It makes me think they actually did talk about breaking up, and Danny just fully misinterpreted what Dorothy was trying to tell him.
A lot of people seem to *really* hate Dorothy. They talk about how much they hate her at every opportunity, and root loudly for terrible things to happen to her and for her to be punished. There’s, like, endless threads on the reddit just really drilling deep into people’s hatred and bile for her.
It’s been incredibly uncomfortable and offputting to read about, to be honest.
Which is weird, because honestly she reads more like Walter to me then Skylar.
She’s prideful, introverted, thinks the work should be the only thing that counts, is willing to break her personal codes to get what she wants, refuses to accept any outside help, and will take the worst possible option over the one that causes her to bend *or* admit someone else is more right then her.
But she’s a main character, so all of that gets pushed aside, and the audience gets angry at anyone who points that out.
Comparing Dorothy to Walter is…weird. I don’t think it fits at all.
Walter’s entire thing is how wrapped up he is in his own fragile ego. Plus how frighteningly nasty he can be when that ego is provoked. Dorothy doesn’t have that at all, IMO.
I mean, if we NEED to compare her to someone from the universe, I think Jimmy McGill from better call Saul would be way more apt. She’s not an inherently malicious person, she just gets carried away. She winds up hurting people in the act of trying to help, or at least accomplish mostly-sympathetic goals.
I can see her as Slippn’ Jimmy too. But she went full Walt for me when she was trying to tear into Joe and threw a bunch of lies at him in an attempt to cover for her jealously.
Also, I read Dorothy as being wrapped up in her own fragile ego, is the issue. The time skip with her falling apart because she realized she’s not all that special was interesting, but jorothy always rang weird to me, because Dotty screamed “Mom replacement” for Joyce.
From her terrible take on autism, to her making appointments and everything else, to the point that even Joyce was asking her to calm it the hell down right before she followed her into the laundry room, Dorothy’s been mother hen’ing Joyce since they met. While I’m trying to not yuck anyone’s yum, not a personal fan of that power dynamic.
…are you talking about the breakdown she had when she was confronted with here attraction to Joyce? I kinda don’t know what else you’d be talking about with “trying to tear into Joe”, but even that one’s a stretch. She barely talks about Joe – wait okay nvm I finished reading your comment I don’t think it’s worth enganging if you genuinely think “mom friend” is a power dynamic. That’s weird but have a good one
“Follow her into the laundry room” she invited Joyce to the laundry to which dhe processed to gollow he to on her own volition. Fuck off with this revisionist dhit.
Oh god yes, that’s a very good point. It’s that same kind of hate, and the same kind of twisting the narrative in knots to ensure everything wraps back around to being Dorothy’s fault.
For what it’s worth: I really really don’t like the Dorothy/Joyce ship and I haven’t liked most of its execution so far (feels like it’s getting better now though). But you can EASILY dislike this ship and still not hate Dorothy as a character. She’s in the middle of a breakdown character-wise and that’s made her really fun to watch. All of her quasi-selfish or -destructive actions have made sense to me, as we go along. It’s a fun arc.
Most of my complaints actually come from Joyce’s side, where I think she’s become a totally different person since the protest. But that’s a different conversation.
Hell, I’ll cop to disliking Dorothy and thinking her and Joyce have a pretty toxic dynamic, and even I think the hate is a bit much (like, where the hell is this “Dorothy is actually responsible for AG’s injury” stuff coming from?)
Dorothy’s grandstanding return to the protest and refusal to leave left AG with more people to rescue, delaying her own escape and thus leading to her injury.
It’s a bit of a stretch, but not entirely off base. I’d actually see it as something Dorothy would think herself, more than something others should blame her for.
Sure, that last sentence is the actual truth here — it seems clear to me that AG was going to keep going back in until everyone was out regardless, and Dorothy was not the last one out.
At best she gets some very, very indirect “well, you did encourage AG to keep being AG a while back”, but even then I think everyone including Dorothy assumed that meant mostly “beating the shit out of incels and dumbasses”.
There’s no accounting for the amount of idiocy that shows up in these comments, occasionally from people who are otherwise worthwhile and fun contributors who just picked up the idiot ball about some issue or another.
Saying outfront since it was an issue on the Patreon comments: Is not Joyce and Dorothy fault that AG/Amber got hurt, it wasn’t said she cane to the protest specifically to help them, she choose to stay behind to help other people not so they could get away. Also Dorothy last night searched for mentions of AG getting hurt and didn’t got anything so she thought she was ok
Partially disagree… Amazigirl was there regardless, but it does need to be noted that Amazigirl was forced to kick a cop in the face to save Joyce as a direct consequence of Dorothy’s actions. If Dorothy hadn’t decided to be a complete dipshit both she and Joyce would have been safely gone before things escalated to that point.
Now, does that mean Amazigirl would never have clashed with the riot police without Dorothy and Joyce being there? Probably not, it’s definitely possible that AG might have attacked an officer for the sake of somebody else. But as it stands there is a serious escalation in violence between AG and the riot police as a direct result of what Dorothy did. Dorothy is not fully responsible for what happened, obviously the whole political mess is the primary reason for everything, but enough bad shit occurred due to her stupidity that some reflection is warranted.
No, there was a serious escalation in violence between AG and the riot police because the riot police chose to engage in police brutality and she jumped in to stop them. Let’s put the blame on the people who actually started the violence in the first place rather than Dorothy’s non-violent actions that they decided meant they should start assaulting people.
On that subject: the moment in question was https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/cuffed/
While Joyce was indeed worried about Dorothy having gone back inside in the previous strip, it was only two strips later that she herself went back in.
She’d just been standing there and the very first thing the cop said was “On the ground!” – didn’t even warn her to back away or anything. While she probably wouldn’t have evacuated as she claimed she was doing, there was no way for the over-armored police goon to know that while he was shoving her face into the dirt (as Jocelyn phrased it earlier).
It’s possible that this was the triggering incident that set everything off, but it was just one girl yelling worriedly at another. If that’s all it takes, violence was practically inevitable.
To be honest, lots of people are upset that Willis upstaged the protest itself with the romance, but I think mixing the super-hero in was really more of an issue. As Asma pointed out in a bonus strip.
Sure, the cops started it, but that was expected. For someone not familiar with these kinds of protests, the tear gas canisters flying and people being shoved to the ground and arrested seems like a massive escalation. And it is, but it’s the kind of thing protest organizers expect (and presumably discussed with those planning to camp out, like Jocelyne and Asma). Cops at some protests do escalate farther, but with organizers telling everyone to evacuate, that kind of confrontation wasn’t likely.
Some arrests, overwhelmingly on minor charges. Tear gas. Some police violence and people getting a bit roughed up. Minor injuries. Like what actually happened at the Dunn Meadow protest this was inspired by.
Someone in a mask jumping in to “rescue” people is a wild card. Once cops are actually being beaten up by an apparent protester, a lot more violence is easier to justify. And not just the excuse here of a confrontation on a protest line or someone flailing as they’re taken down. This is someone taking on cops and they can’t stop her.
I’m surprised things didn’t escalate far more than they did. But it’s still portrayed – and mostly seen by the audience here – as heroic and maybe even necessary.
And that’s the problem of mixing even low-end superheroes like AG into a real-life headline story.
Okay, I fully agree that the Riot Police are definitely the ones most responsible for escalating the situation, and I’m sorry for not communicating that properly. But that doesn’t change the fact that Dorothy was being a reckless self-destructive moron, and that Amazi-girl and Joyce both got into a lot of trouble as a result. Just because the cops were the clear bad guys in the situation does not mean Dorothy’s actions were justified. Nothing about what Dorothy did at that protest was smart or justifiable or good in any way. And that’s why I’m saying she needs to step back and actually think.
I would say that they didn’t necessarily cause Amazigirl to be hurt directly, however the fact that both Amazigirl and Amber have complex history with them definitely contributed to decision-making. Dorothy was reckless and endangered other protestors as well as herself, but the escalation definitely wasn’t her fault.
Amazi-Girl is also an adult making her own decisions, it’s true. Dorothy didn’t grab her by the arm and keep her at the protest.
Also, what we saw of the protest at least + the report that Amazi-Girl got away would seem to indicate that the injury she sustained happened later, but we’ll know for sure eventually.
Possible. Or just that she was wounded but got away. She did in fact get away, so the report wasn’t wrong, even if she was already hurt. Then collapsed when the adrenaline wore off.
And Amazi-Girl probably does not blame either of them, so… yeah. I do not really fault them for anything that happened at the protest, I blame the cops 100%. I am not particularly happy with Joyce/Dorothy at the moment, and while I do think they could make a very cute couple, I wish it happened without the cheating.
We also saw AG escort out a group alongside Dotty and Joyce, so I don’t think the two of them made any significant difference to when and where AG was.
It’s possible AG was simply the last out and got snagged on the fencing, without someone else to hold it open. That stuff is pretty nasty. Or came across some counter protestors or just some asshole on her regular patrol later, there’s a lot of possibilities.
I kinda want to elaborate: “Paladins” were originally “people who didn’t want to see Joyce and Dorothy cheat on Joe and Walky”. They mostly morphed into “people who wanted Joyce and Dorothy to face realistic social consequences for their cheating”.
That doesn’t necessarily imply (but nor does it preclude) “hating Dorothy for no reason”.
Both “tents” are pretty big, and just like there are gonna be “sickos” who just dislike Joe as a character and root for bad things to happen to him, so there are gonna be “paladins” who just dislike Dorothy as a character and are against everything she does.
And that’s assuming these folks even picked a side to begin with!
I expect there are photos of the two women kissing in the middle of the protest while tear gas was being fired around and a vigilante was jump kicking cops in riot gear.
I’m still waiting to see if somebody took a picture if them kissing for the school newspaper, because if so Daisy has likely made it the front page story already.
Both in encouraging Amazi-Girl to start being a superhero again and because part of the reason she got shot is that she was saving Dorothy from her own futile and stupid gesture.
Which took much longer than it had to because of Let’s Stop To Make Out And Make Impassioned Speeches While Riot Cops Are Attacking. There is, I think, a case to be made that if Amazi-girl hadn’t had to rescue a few people twice at length, she could have cleared out faster.
Yeah, in an emergency every second counts. Not saying Dorothy should like fall on the sword over it, but it’s definitely a mistake that put her friend at risk.
I don’t think we know HOW AG was injured, but unless Willis is taking the cartoony unrealism of AG to a new extreme she definitely wasn’t shot, based on the fact she’s walking around less than a day after the injury and being stitched up by a kitchen doctor.
Somehow, I think Dorothy probably meant that she should continue fighting off creeps trying to attack women or dumbasses in roller skates, not fighting LEOs with itchy trigger fingers.
It was always self-destructive behavior. Last semester, AG was fighting on moving cars. It doesn’t matter if that’s not what Dorothy meant. Dorothy’s self-interested and shitty judgment played a part because she encouraged a junkie to restart her self-destructive habit.
Dorothy and Joyce both asked AmaziGirl to leave with them. She explicitly refused, saying “There are probably other people who need help,” or something similar, and then she left them both to return to the protest.
Whatever happened to her, happened AFTER Joyce and Dorothy called for her to leave, and she refused. It’s really upsetting and kind of gross to me that people have turned this into “AmaziGirl got hurt because of Joyce and Dorothy, and it’s somehow Dorothy’s fault in specific that this happened. Stupid selfish girls, look how they got someone hurt because they fell in love. I hope Dina rips Dorothy to shreds!”
I forgot about that strip, but yeah Dorothy definitely encouraged Amber/AG to get back into doing superhero stuff again. And of course Dorothy decided to stay at the protest, despite not really being there for the anti-genocide cause, after Jocelyne and others there told her to leave. AG wouldn’t have had to come back to help Dorothy and Joyce escape the cops if they had left when the other protesters told them to.
Eh, Dotty and Joyce weren’t the only people trapped at the protest, AG escorted out a group with them. I think the others tried to leave when the word was given, but we saw the pigs close off the fencing before the gals even found Jocelyne. I don’t think they made any significant difference to when and where AG was.
“Dorothy is responsible for Amazi-Girl getting hurt” is the worst take I have read in the comments in the last month. And that’s really saying something given the last month.
Oh hey, it’s time for Dorothy to remember that the stupid way she inserted herself into the protest has in real meaningful ways endangered other people around her.
Alright thinking back on it it’s very possible that Amazi-Girl would have still stayed around and gotten hurt anyway without Dorothy. I do feel like Dorothy’s clumsy entrance into the situation and getting distracted by smooches while the cops attacked probably made things harder for Amazi-Girl defending them though.
Considering she was hurt after Dorothy and Joyce left because she went back to help other people I really think people are overestimating Dorothy’s role in this.
It is extremely significant that none of the people AG defended asked her to defend them. AG chose to do it.
Plus it doesn’t seem very likely that AG was injured at the protest at all.
Lots of people blaming Dorothy for something Amber/Amazi-Girl were gonna do anyways. Yes, Dorothy did encourage her, buuuuuuuuuuuut I kinda think that fighting riot police at a protest goes beyond “this one person enabled me”.
Yeah, I wonder how the girl who was single-handedly fighting a bunch of heavily-armored cops got hurt. That’s such a surprise and there’s no way Dorothy could’ve seen this coming.
Why does it feel like some folks have an inexplicable hate boner for this or that character? Granted, the target of the mass hateboner seems to be decided by roulette wheel half the time.
Sal, Amber, Dorothy, Joyce and sometimes Ruth, Carla and Jennifer got a lot of people being REAL weird about them at various points in this comic’s history
I think the hate for Booster is that they’re a toxic-ass troll. Mike pretended he didn’t care when he really gave too much of a shit and used the mean comments and pretend disinterest as a shield (unhealthy shield) to avoid getting hurt.
Booster is more like someone who sometimes pretends to care, but the more you watch the more you realize they just like feeling superior and don’t really give a shit.
That’s a very uncharitable read of the character that isn’t really supported by the text. Check out their conversation with Ethan, consider Charlie, and ask yourself again if it’s really true that Booster pretends to care about other people, or that their interest in psychology isn’t obviously a defense mechanism.
This is like asking who hates Sal. It’s been a while since the last public meeting in the comments of “Sal needs to shut the fuck up about her mom’s racism, she’s obviously just sexist and Sal is too stupid to know the difference,” but they happened loudly and regularly.
Similarly, how dare Becky spend $20 on a haircut instead of ??? investing it in a savings account where it could someday be used to pay rent so that she was no longer “forcing” Joyce to let her live with her. Also it’s just a coincidence that the people complaining about this also thought her new haircut was ugly. They definitely weren’t specifically mad that a fictional woman had chosen to do something that “ruined” her attractiveness, that would be silly!
Wait, people hate/hated Sal?! My brain is broken… in what universe does “Sal needs to get over her mom’s neglect and emotional abuse” make any kind of sense? Especially since it’s ONGOING.
People who complain about other peoples’ haircuts IRL are exhausting and gross enough… like, it’s not your hair. Let ’em do what they want with their body. Y’all don’t get a say in how someone else chooses to dress and style themselves. The fuck is next? Actual fashion police who haul you to jail for wearing white after Labor Day?
Complaining about a fictional character’s haircut takes all that creepy possessive weirdness and adds a level of pathetic that even the phrase “go and touch grass” doesn’t feel sufficient for.
Don’t worry, they explained how Sal had actually never been neglected and even if she was, she probably deserved it for being a criminal.
Some folks cannot let go of the Walkyverse versions of the characters. They’re very sure that Willis is going to reveal the true extent of Sal and Dorothy’s evil eventually.
It’s also become increasingly clear these last few days that, in the absence of cites or re-reads, some folks have a HIGHLY idiosyncratic memory of what events happened in-strip — there’s the one person who misremembered Dorothy paying for her protest sign, so who knows what people are incorrect about regarding events that happened years ago.
Feels like anytime I worry that my paste-white male cishet ass is unforgivably (if unintentionally) problematic or not sensitive enough to others, I’m reminded of just how abysmally low the bar is.
No one who worries about these things is unforgivably problematic or insensitive.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean we’ll always be forgiven. Forgiveness is an action people either take or don’t take, and that’s up to them, and doesn’t have that much to do with us. Focus on being better than you were yesterday: that’s always a good thing, worth doing, whether or not other people want to forgive you for what you’ve done in the past. 🙂
I used to dislike Becky a fair bit because I felt like 3/4 of her early personality was based on pushing Joyce’s boundaries for fun, and then I got kinda sour when she got so pissed at Joyce randomly insulting believers in a way not directed at her. I wouldn’t call that “hate” but boy did I get accused of hating a whole lot of things.
But we have such a VARIETY of haters! For so many different reasons!
And in addition to the shipping wars and people over-exaggerating character’s negative traits to make them justify hatred, now we also have this increasingly stupid sickos vs paladins to sort people into pseudo-tribes to performatively hate on each other’s favorites.
you know, I’ve wondered what that raptor is stuffed with since it was introduced. common sense and logic would dictate that it’s stuffed with those horriblel styrofoam packing peanuts that those cheaaap carnival prizes toys have. they have an awful texture, so I cannot imagine they are comfortable to sleep on
is it actually filled with high quality plush stuffing? or even mattress stuffing? if it’s the latter that thing would have been expensive just based on the volume required to fill it
plus Becky did not plan for it to replace Dina’s bed, so I get the feeling she would have gone with the cheaper option
speaking Dina’s bed, where is it? did she disassemble it and throw it in the dumpster? she also deprived herself of a work table?
Given that Becky bought it with her first “political consultant” paycheck, and went so far as to get “DeSanto 201X” embroidered on its butt… I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume she went all-out on it. That’s my headcanon at least.
if she went all out then she custom ordered it, but that would take months to finish and I think she got this within days of her deal with Robin.
maybe this raptor was made for something else and Becky happened to come across it on ebay for $459 and realized what a good deal it was and the other person was happy because they got rid of the bulky item
There’s the distinct possibility that Robin, apropos of nothing, was having giant dinosaur plushes manufactured with her campaign funds. In her defense, it’s a rad idea.
At times like this, I’m glad I use DuckDuckGo. Don’t want “triangle sex pillow” in my search history, even though it’s more innocuous than it could’ve been.
Frankly, the logical conclusion seems to be that it’s stuffed with those tiny memory-foam-ish balls that modern beanbag chairs are usually stuffed with.
A scenario which also solves the mystery of how Becky got it into the building and room: It’s a cover, and it’s stuffed with chunks of foam (like memory foam, not styrofoam) which came in multiple bags.
Alternate theory… Becky brought Dina every copy of creationist textbooks she still had on her from home, and Dina gleefully shredded them to make stuffing for her magnificent and glorious idol to dinosaur science.
See, I was about to whine again about derailing the soap opera but reading the comments shows that this might be more satisfying in a darker way.
Yes… Dorothy, let this realization hit you. Let it put a damper on your selfish joy. Let me watch it wither.
Because if I know you, you’re gonna insist on taking ownership of this in some fashion. So do go ahead and ask yourself if it was all worth it in the end…
Don’t forget cloning, resurrection magic, Darkseid Doom Beams, reincarnation, the list goes on and on for capes. Amber’s choice of career has given her the “revolving door” experience of afterlife.
as much as I would have loved to see how the Bulmeria conflict affects cast members, this is ultimately a romcom comic about college students in the United States, in which Willis has to juggle a billion fucking plates
I hope tho at the very least we see Mary suffer an Asma attack, or better yet a sleep paralysis demon.
That’d be a satisfying way to balance this out to say the very least >:D
News sources would have been worthless for checking anything beyond whether Amazi-Girl was arrested/killed. Dorothy was a bit too distracted to really think about that though.
As I recall, the only information they had prior to this was: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/safely/
“All reports are that Amazi-Girl successfully escaped. No sniper shots were fired.” leaves a lot of room for injuries that weren’t inflicted by sniper shots and that didn’t prevent her escape.
When Sal found Amber, she was in Dunn Woods, not in a cell, chained to a hospital bed, or in a drawer at the morgue, so she escaped fine, for certain values of “fine”.
It was only a few hours at best after a chaotic situation that Dorothy was looking. The news is often wrong about what happens in chaotic moments and then needs to revise as more or more accurate info becomes available. That’s why it’s important to WAIT on what the news says when you’re looking at a story about an emergency, because sometimes the info the news is working from is simply wrong when the story is developing or just breaking. For example, there is very rarely a second shooter in a shooting story.
And that’s before even getting to times the news outright lies about things. They’ll tend to be truthful if it doesn’t hurt their interests, of course, but sometimes their interests lie with keeping friendly with the enforcers of the status quo.
It’s also entirely possible it wasn’t the police who injured her. We still don’t know anything other than that she contacted Sal who found her injured and took her to Doctor Kitchen Doctor. There have been theories about Incelerator encountering her after she escaped the police and stabbing her.
Like someone said in the Patreon: It’s honestly amazing how often the comments say things about Dorothy that are pretty much the bullshit her anxiety/PTSD ridden brain tell her completely unironically. Like now with the ones putting blame on her for Ag getting hurt, which is exactly what she gonna think despite not actually being the case.
she has some degree of blame for Amber’s situation. She’s the one who blatantly stormed into the protest in spite of being told by Jocelyn to stay out because at that time the cops were already stomping in, forcing Amber to put out extra time helping her get out.
Now obviously there is the fact that there was a 95% chance that the situation would have been the same regardless. However this scenario is the one likely going through Dorothy’s head and it’s going to eat at her.
The commentors on this comic are legit insane. Not all of them, but enough it’s developed a stench. I think I might just start treating this like Twitter or Reddit, like “read at your own risk”.
Stupid does not even begin to describe half the shit here. As I’ve said, I’m keeping my sanity by assuming half these people are 15 or under (way under in a few cases).
As one person recently said at a con, Social media is a plague on our society said the woman who uses it every day. But feeling that your sanity is assaulted by random people on the Internet isn’t the healthiest thing. If you are serious, maybe you should think about limiting your exposure.
You’re a very rude person, and there’s not really a call for the insults. Maybe it would be best if you didn’t say much, of this is the level of civility you’re bringing to the table. “You’re insane, what you say is stupid, you have to be 15 or under”, like whatever helps you cope with your own insecurities I guess, but really those should be inside thoughts.
Dorothy should have telepathically controlled Amazi-Girl’s body and puppeted her out of the protest area, otherwise it makes no sense that she’s not 100% to blame for the actions of a fully separate autonomous adult. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
My take on the situation:
-Cops are 100% at fault for assaulting Amazigirl
-Dorothy DOES care about Bulmeria, she has a very strong moral code (well…sometimes) but is still breaking out of the Presidency Perfect Girl
-Wanting to support Jocelyne is also a valid reason to go to a protest
-Wanting to NOT do NOTHING is also a valid reason to go to a protest
-Gatekeeping activism because someone ”doesn’t care enough” or ”wants to feel like a good person” is weird, bad weird
-Dotty is a poopyhead for cheating on Walky
Seems legit. Cops definitely started it and not because of Amazigirl or anyone else. They went to check on Jocelyne for real reasons and weren’t expecting the whole affair to turn into a cuisinart. It’s mostly Asma’s fault.
Yes, but what did she call them? Considering all that time Asma’s undoubtedly spent bored at the front desk, she may have some up with some pretty clever insults.
I don’t think anyone’s gonna get on Dorothy’s case about just attending a protest, but electing to turn that protest into a grand statement about how unfair your life is because you can’t have the girl you like while the other activists beg you to just leave is a choice which merits criticism
sorry i will never be able to see that as the truth of what happenned let alone be whet was in ditties head. upon rereading the last 35 strips or so, if those were the consious reasons dotty ran back onto the protest, she isnt human or even a character, she is a 2 dimensional cardboard cutout of a comic villain frommthe 80s. dorothy goes back in out of guilt over realizong that the morals she professes to have means she should be in the protest, that she needs to be there, to be abused by the cops, be seen as the type of person she actually wants to be. that joyce followed her back in was never even a thought that occurred to her in that moment, you can see it in her face, you can read it in her words in that moment. her brain is “broken” (she is in an extreme hightened overly emotional state that has been bubbling under the surface for months, and nothing she is doing is done with true consious control or actual thought. she is not john cusacking under a window with a boombox, trying to get joyce to love her back, she is seeking to reclaim her purpose and control over her life, while it was dangerous and stupid, it was not “because she was “electing to turn that protest into a grand statement about how unfair your life is because you can’t have the girl you like”. she made a bad decision and that deserces critisism 100% but unless Willis himself comes out and explicitly says she went back in there for that reason i cannot and will never be able to see that in her behavior.
I mean until joyce comes in and kisses her she isnt even fully aware of how deep her romantic feelings towards joyce go.
i am sorry it is breaking my 42year old brain with how many people think a girl with severe ptsd, is overflowing with mind altering hormones and in the middle of an identity crisis can think on a supervillian level of planning and narcissism just go get the girl she has realized only 48 hours ago she has romantic feelings towards to kiss her.
that is precisely what some are saying though, that dotty planned all this to get joyce to kiss her, all throughout the last month of comments people have been calling dotty out saying this is what she planned, that she only went back into the protest to get joyce to comeback in an kiss her.
also i said supervillain levels of planning not that it was an evil plan.
i have a suspision that some of the comments i read this morning got nuked cause i cannot find the specific ones i had seen, but there has been a lot of comments lately that dotty was plannig to make a grand gesture at the protest to get further into joyce’s heart. to make the protest about her had her feelings and emotions.
really a big thing i’ve been getting as a vibe from a lot of the comments of late is that there are a lot of people who do not want to give dotty or joyce any credit towards them doing things for any reason that isnt to satisfy their narcissism, that there is no way that either of them could have had good intentions going into the protest, that dorothy especially isnt allowed to do something altruistically, that her actions are by desigbn being done to hurt walky or joe. that she only accompannied joyce to tha protest cause it would allow her to make a grand gesture to break joyce away from joe so she wouldnt have to share her (that was one form a few days ago not today)
I’m such a fool to write like 6 paragraphs on yesterday’s comic that no one will read. I feel a compulsion to end thar sentence with a lol because I am uncomfortable with the idea that people might not pick up tone but I also don’t like saying lol in comments. So.
Okay I read it anyway. My response is, Joyce is a complex, changing character, and attempts to pigeonhole her into one trait such as loyalty is doing her a disservice. However, your interpretation as a reader and how it makes you feel is valid, certainly nothing outside the realm of understanding.
Haha, I appreciate everyone reading it. Thanks y’all.
Yeah, like, it’s not impossible that a person who did the previous things and also this thing would exist in real life. People are very complicated. It’s not, like, THAT level of unrealistic where it’s completely unbelievable. It just doesn’t FEEL realistic to me. It pulls me out of the story, you know?
While all this romance and cheating and stuff is alien to me (I’m aroace), I just want to respond to one part of that comment: “But THIS part, the weeks afterward of her continuously making the wrong choice over and over while having plenty of time to think about it?” It hasn’t been weeks in-comic. The kiss was yesterday (although I won’t deny it feels a lot longer).
…actually, on second thought, maybe I can offer some speculation from personal experience. I know Joyce doesn’t have the same flavour of autism I do, so this might not be relevant, but… I personally need time alone to think about things because social interaction uses up so much of my focus (I don’t have those handy cognitive shortcuts allistic people do), and that’s without the intense emotions Joyce’s experiencing lately. She’d essentially been with Dorothy almost non-stop since realising her attraction, with the exception of when she went to talk to Joe, so she mightn’t’ve had the free mental capacity to really think through this… until now. And this after Sarah dropped that truth-bomb earlier…
Obviously, I’m only speculating, but I do hope that Joyce’ll be doing some heavy introspection now she’s away from both of the people she’s in love with.
Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but there’s still a chance (well, except that the strips are already written, so we can only wait and hope for the fickle mercy of Willis).
Hmm, that’s an interesting take on it. I can see someone acting like this because they haven’t really been able to think yet. I’d be…well, not exactly happy, but I’d be happier if that ends up being what’s happening. Here’s hoping.
Also yeah I know it’s only been a day in-universe, but DoA usually compresses the emotional experiences more than real life does. I was referring to it dragging out for out-of-universe weeks in the comment, though I didn’t make that clear at all.
I went back to read it Fuzzy, and I agree with your take. That’s why this is just annoying to me. Joyce is not behaving like herself, but as she’s performing a role in the new narrative. It’s breaking my suspension of disbelief.
You are definitely OK, really, whether or not anyone read your comments. But looking back – it appears several people did! Thoughtfully contributing to a discussion about literature is a good thing.
And to that, Joyce sometimes does crummy things because she is discovering things about herself – not abstract fact but long-repressed feelings that are a little overwhelming – faster than she can work out what they mean. And because she has absorbed a lot of crummy ideas in her life. Cleaning out that attic is dusty.
I agree mostly. When Joyce and Dorothy almost kissed listen to music, and Dorothy said they couldn’t because of Walky and Joe, and hurting Joe didn’t register with Joyce for like a whole day, that was too much for me.
It’s not the first time I had a major disconnect with Joyce’s character. Right before “laundry”, Joyce’s insecurity is about other people thinking about her sexuality and judging her, and Dorothy makes a joke at her expense effectively saying she’d been judging her about it the whole time she’s known her, and it just didn’t register for Joyce at all. That was upsetting to me. Now I’m just disinterested in Joyce as a character.
I was at one a few weeks ago where organizers had scrupulously focused on nonviolence, including protocol for what to do if anyone became violent. Sure enough, someone strutted across the street to counter-protesters and stole a Confederate flag, exchanging words with the owner of the truck.
We all definitely noted him but it happened too fast for the yellow vests to get there. Suffice to say Confederate-boy didn’t take it well.
The point isn’t that we should care about Confederate boy, the point is that if the organizers are focused on nonviolence, protestors need to work with that, not start shit.
Exactly right. Confederate Boy has been spotted harassing people he thinks were protesters. Escalating violence. I hope he cools off before somebody gets hurt.
I doubt it since she had her big outburst while the whole thing was already turning violent and she didn’t actually do anything to provoke the cops except refuse to leave.
Nah. It’s Amazi-Girl. Though they’ll probably think something more like black bloc than paid provocateur. (Mind you the black bloc have their uses. There are times and places for street fighting, but I doubt the organizers here thought this was one of them.)
it is incredibly easy, they are trying to get out with out getting arrested or assaulted, someone came up and gave them money making it even less likely they get harmed. maybe a day or 2 later they might have suspisions, but the oppressors were already oppressing, and if as we all are clamouring for their kiss is the front page of the newspaper then they have even less reason to.
Just speculating here, actually… so much of the body is somewhat “use it or lose it” (no sense spending calories maintaining something that’s not needed, after all (our bodies haven’t evolved to take into account the excessive calories we have access to lately)), which is why people in microgravity need to exercise to keep from losing the basic muscles we use just standing in our gravity well… so… it’s not impossible that reading in the dark actually helps retain your ability to do so? I know I’ve better nightvision than my less nerdy family members.
She is, but people and especially teenagers be like that sometimes. Extra especially during mental health crisis. I think she will realize it and course correct.
Are you seriously talking about miss “I want to fix the world for everyone” Dotty?
Of course she is being self-centred right now. She has a massive secret and a crisis on her hands, of course she is fixating on that.
This like saying people with anxiety are narcissists because they “think everyone is always looking at them”, it’s a stretch and ridiculously uncharitable.
Even if we accept your framing that she thinks she alone can fix everything, delusions of grandeur are not generally a symptom of narcissism, which is characterized by “expecting others to treat you as though you are amazing” rather than “actually believing in an inflated version of your own capabilities”.
In any case, it’s clear that Dorothy is almost the opposite! Quite often when she comes close to achieving something she’s claimed to have wanted or worked for, she finds a reason to sabotage herself–most notably in her acceptance to Yale.
Arguably her inept dancing around the issue of “talking to the boyfriends”, which she herself keeps setting as a prerequisite for continuing to engage romantically with Joyce, is another manifestation of this.
Narcissistic grandiosity is thought to arise from a combination of the antagonistic core with temperamental boldness—defined by positive emotionality, social dominance, reward-seeking and risk-taking. Grandiosity is defined—in addition to antagonism—by a confident, exhibitionistic and manipulative self-regulatory style:[29]
High self-esteem and a clear sense of uniqueness and superiority, with fantasies of success and power, and lofty ambitions.
Social potency, marked by exhibitionistic, authoritative, charismatic and self-promoting interpersonal behaviors.
Exploitative, self-serving relational dynamics; short-term relationship transactions defined by manipulation and privileging of personal gain over other benefits of socialization.
it is absolutely a simptom of narcissism to believe only you can solve everybodies problems, cause only “you” are good enough/are right enough to fix it
@embe you know using “narcissist” as just a way one describe a egoistical person without knowing about the condition is fine i think. What you doing here though? Really fucking weird.
@Embe13, as I said, it’s not GENERALLY a symptom of classical narcissism, per the DSM-V, and furthermore literally everything else about Dorothy pretty much rules it out. I mean, hell, “high self-esteem” is not a thing Dorothy has EVER suffered from — at her BEST she thought President Dorothy might be POSSIBLE if she busted her ass to get into Yale, correctly attributing the chances to a hell of a lot of work rather than native ability.
all good that you have those in your llives that are good folk. the above is pulled strainght from wiki. and unfortunately i have been the victim of Multiple narcicists through out my life. and please i get that it is used as a catch all for people you dont like stereotyping, but these are realizations made through therapy, where therapist stated the bhavoir was narcisistic.
Therapists should know better than to diagnose people they’re not treating.
In my experience they often don’t, but they should.
Abusers don’t tend to have personality disorders, or any other type of mental illness. They tend to be very adept at controlling all of their behavior, and they reserve their poor treatment for their victims.
An abuser who truly had a personality disorder that made the behavior seem responsible would be doing it to everyone all the time, to everyone, not only to the vulnerable.
Signed: I have also been abused. I had a therapist try to tell me it sounded like she had BPD, because that was the trendy “bad person” diagnosis of the time. I pushed back on it. She didn’t have BPD or NPD, she was just an abusive asshole.
I mean, I’ve even had some sympathy to people using the term since the colloquial use of “narcissist” to describe “destructively self-centered/self-aggrandizing” has been around centuries longer than the formal diagnosis of NPD.
That said, now that it IS a diagnosis, I highly recommend being clear about whether you’re being colloquial or psychiatric, or better yet just using “abusively self-centered” etc.
Gods, Dorothy can’t win either way, can she? Either she sucks because it’s her fault Amazi-Girl got hurt, or she sucks for making Amazi-Girl getting hurt about herself. *shakes head*
It’s honestly driving me up the wall — I have never much liked Dorothy as a character, and yet I’m defending her half the places I mention her in this thread because the hate is so unhinged.
“Once I wept for I had no shoes. Then I met a man with no feet, so I took his shoes. I mean, it wasn’t as if he was going to need them.” Attributed to Stephen Hawking, but I can’t confirm that.
Please forgive the bad joke. Lots of people being too serious around here.
Wait until the man with no feet meets a man with no legs. Remember kids, only the one person in the world who has it the worst is ever allowed to feel bad about it! That’s what the trauma Olympics is all about!
I see we’re having another normal one here. Sheesh, I used to think I was pretty high up on the scale of Dorothy-dislike, and even *I* don’t think she has anything to do with Amazi-Girl’s protest injuries.
I bet SHE thinks she does, but her particular traumas and need for therapy are like that.
Quit stalling and go tell Joe and Walky, you’ll feel better if you rip the band-aid off, damnit.
This is why I think she’s one of the characters who gets it the worst, yeah.
Everyone’s got their dedicated haters! Walky has a couple. And it’s been a while since the last big anti-Sal or anti-Becky incident.
Booster is higher up the list, tho, in terms of “characters who can turn the comment section into a dumpster fire just by appearing for a couple of days”.
Trying and failing to think of a good example among the male characters. Maybe early Danny.
To be fair, there’s only three straight cis male white characters in the cast page, and the other two are Tony (who has barely shown up) and Jason, who got plenty of hate himself.
Which is really weird, because I can’t think of any good reasons off the top of my head to even dislike her particularly. She’s just kinda an ordinary non-white non-male person who is willing to stand up for herself … ah.
He was! I added a note about “early Danny maybe” at one point. I think it was largely a reaction to his Walkyverse self for a long time. But yeah, coming out as bi was part of a general era of him coming more into his own, and it’s been great.
We’ve also got our one or two quixotic Joe-haters running around since this storyline turned into a Coen-style farce about not quite telling him and Walky.
The Dorothy Is A Pefect Angel cops like to pretend anyone who thinks Dorothy has flaws is a Dorothy hater, when her flaws and fuckups are what make her such a great character.
Guess I should say something about the comic since it’s why we’re all here. Uhhh, I do actually legit wonder how much Dina knows? Her expression reads as being confused or off put by the question but I have to assume it’s because it seemed tactless rather it having anything to do with Dorothy being at the protest. This moment seems ripe for misunderstandings but man we have enough of those.
I’m not autistic myself but have an autistic friend, and this take that Dina could just just be exasperated by Dorothy not getting to the point really resonates. From both sides.
now this may be a controversial veiw, but having just reread the the protest, I have reinforced my opinion that the main thought going through dotties head when she goes back in is to be an irritant so others can get out, so others can get away.
whatever may have been going on subconsciously may be there, but we are only ever aware of.001% of what our subconsious thinks and does, we the reader can specualte and infer based on how we have experienced life ourselves but if anyone here claims tobe aware of everything thir subconsious thinks, they are unfortunately wrong, 99.9999999999999999999999999999% of what goes on in our subconcious is the operation of our meatsac, breathing pumping our heart, operating the various valves throughout our organs, but to say we are able and in realtime to monitor and be aware of our subconsious is false and creates a falsehood where some feel insulted or unfairly judged for not being able to.
sorry, any escaping her feels to me is very buried in the subconsious, you can see her deciding that she needs to go back, and do something, she is feeling that she should have been there from the getgo and that for her moral compass she needs to grab a sign and try to help others the she feels joyce does when she gets angry. its written across her face for me. any thoughts that are about running from her feelings to me are so buried in her subconsious it would take a diamond tipped drill 25 years of nonstop drilling to get to them
I was wondering if she knows, or at least strongly suspects… Dina was definitely on my shortlist of people I thought would be upset specifically on Joe’s behalf, rather than just like “generic dislike of cheating”.
Dot checking on all her gay thoughts before she can get her thoughts straight
(yes i stole this from my girlfriend, i said it first anyways she’s just better at english than i am, im actively typing this while she’s racing to find this strip to type it first the bastard)
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aside from that heavy news Dorothy about to get,
Dina strip appreciated as always *T^T* <3
Dina is easily in the S Tier of characters. Possibly the top. That’s just science (and she has the empirical evidence to back it up.)
“S” stands for “Science”!
(or maybe “Science!”)
((unsure))
S also stands for Saruyama.
It is both of these things at the same time… Schrodinger’s Tier!
Super Saruyama?
I thought it was ‘stience’.
She’s the OP char, definitely
Subtle, Dotty. You’re handling all of this exactly right.
Perfect gravatar is perfect.
Dorothy getting a much needed reality check
fingers crossed Dina also somehow someway gets Dorothy to embrace being autistic ;-;
Probably a bit much for a morning interaction. Maybe eventually.
like at the very least she may well be led to the start of that rabbit hole by either Dina or Charlie. hell even Joyce
but yeah I’m not expecting any immediate breakthroughs :(
It’s way off topic for the current comment, but on the subject of autism or not… there are some interesting musings under the strip at https://www.forwardcomic.com/archive.php?num=408 which speculate that both autism and allism are both on the same spectrum, and “”hyperautistic” or “hyperallistic” individuals are simply those who are far enough to one side or the other that it impacts their lives – they exhibit these traits so strongly that it is reasonable that accommodations be made for their unique style of neural processing.”
A caveat, though: as that’s a comic about neurodivergent people in an imagined future, the author had extrapolate to how understanding of such things might progress over time. What’s written there is presumably accurate for the setting of his comic, but not necessarily outside it. Even so… seems plausible to me. Then again, I’m no neuroscientist.
In the interest of furthering the tangent: I predict that we’ll eventually move past the ‘spectrum’ model too. Human experience is so multifaceted that even if there are statistical trends about which things tend to correlate together, almost everyone will be ‘non-typical’ in at least some ways.
Honestly, much the same as discussions of “intelligence”, anytime I see any human behavior placed on a two-dimensional spectrum, I assume the truth of the matter is going to eventually end up as a multivariable web in some kind of hyperspace-looking graph.
Interesting musings, but someone might need to tell the author that fidget spinners /are/ in fact a disability aid- for some people. If someone has ADHD, i.e. their brain either doesn’t produce or doesn’t retain enough dopamine (because that is at its core what ADHD is), they might struggle to focus properly in certain situations, and/or they might find understimulation to be almost physically painful. Dopamine is the “you’re doing activities that help you survive” reward chemical, and our brains understand a lack of it as us wasting our time and effort on things that won’t help us survive. ADHD, essentially, makes our hindbrains think we’re spending most of our time dooming ourselves for lack of productivity. All those instincts can’t understand that being understimulated in, say, a classroom isn’t actually dangerous- those bits of the brain understand that understimulating classroom as something that will eventually get us killed. Which is why the brain latches onto any bit of dopamine it can get, because it can’t differentiate between dopamine from doing an actual survival thing and dopamine from a fun spinny device, and the dopamine-starved brain is desperate for anything that feels like it’s helping with survival.
Fidget spinners (and other stim toys) were “touted as a disability aid” because they ARE. They can help to fill in that dopamine absence and convince the brain that we aren’t going to starve. They just happen to also be fun dealies that kids can play with, ADHD or no, and did get really hyped up for a bit there.
(this concludes my rant on a condition which is very much misunderstood or not fully understood by a lot of people, and which is actually very bad for us on multiple levels, given the amount of stress it puts the brain and body under to be literally convinced that we’re slowly getting ourselves killed.)
Okay… thank you for this. I recently got diagnosed with that stuff and this explanation was actually really helpful. Honestly, a lot of this journey has been constant “oh, so that’s what that was” moments. This was short, sweet, and to the point in a way that most explanations of this stuff hasn’t been.
They were literally invented for ADHD kids and only got popular after the NT kids decided they wanted them. Then a whole bunch of kids in some places had to deal with all fidget toys being banned because “that looks distracting and I don’t believe your problems are real”.
Haaaaet.
Yeah, I don’t know how well she’s going to take this.
In the back of her mind Dorothy is cheering to have another thing she can put on her plate to put off dealing with the reality of having gotten what she wanted
I was thinking along those same lines.
seems kinda harsh. I think she’s probably just pretty upset about her friend
She is, but she is also a chronic self-sabotager who does not deal well with success.
And then Dorothy blurts out, “ACAB!”
Is that preaching to the choir or yelling at them?
Yeah because real things continue to happen even when you’re in the throws of fresh sapphic love……..Don’t trust fresh sapphic love. It needs to ripen a little first.
I believe you mean throes… unless our two new little sapphic sisters were tossing each other around the room like sumo wrestlers last night? ^^
No, like professional wrestlers.
Professional sumo wrestlers, then.
You say that like sumo wrestlers aren’t professional? xD
Please Let Dina rip her to pieces. Please. I need the best GF to obliterate the worst one.
Mary is a girlfriend so that competition is already won.
Mary is the worst person but she’s probably a great girlfriend to her horrible person of a boyfriend
We see during Halloween that’s very much not the case, she makes him embarrass himself for her hell house.
Link? (Not cuz I doubt you I just would like to see it again)
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/05-this-was-halloween/journey/
starts there 💕
This is specifically why I think they broke up. Dude did not have fun that night.
I dunno maybe he wanted to show his penis to people?
Another thing is I kinda like the Becky+Mary dynamic. It’s like they’re not exactly friends but Becky is willing to interact with her on her level without much judgment and it lets Mary talk back to her earnestly in ways Becky immediately undercuts without insulting her. It’s entertaining.
Becky is the only person who seems completely unphased by Mary which allows her to actually have conversations with her and I do think it’s great
Yeah, but he sticks around, so he must be getting something out of it.
He’s awful in a lot of the same ways that she is, and he doesn’t seem like he has much of a spine.
Yeah, like a year in prison and a fine of up to $5,000.
Pardon but… huh? Is that a reference to the way he exposed himself in Mary’s half-arsed Hell House? Or something else that I’m forgetting?
That’s apparently the penalty in Indiana for indecent exposure, yeah.
Was it half-arsed? I think they might have seen his whole arse
Yeah, but is that worse than forcing your ex to date somebody, then immediately trying to get them to drop them in the midst of a weird break down brought on by her inability to let people in(which you bore the brunt of) after already going through a weird up and down relationship with her after she’s tells you she needs space, but then immediately drops the love you bomb afterward. Then even after you give it another go around, she proceeds to cheat on you with the gal who has been antagonizing your relationship with her the whole time?
Dorothy is definitely up there in the bad GF conversation.
I take issu”Force to date somebody” part, because that didn’t happen
Fair enough, she did not put a gun to his head so forced is a harsh word.
There’s no arguing that she is the major catalyst in even existing at all.
Wow, that is the single least charitable way to describe it.
Get ready for a lot of that, unfortunately, I think.
How would you have put it? It’s not like she’s Satan or anything, but this are just the things that happened and she’s kinda been a bad girlfriend to Walky.
Jennifer definitely takes the number one spot though.
I think stuff like saying she forced Walky to date Lucy is extreme, but I would note that I am making a reference to another webcomic where that sentence was immediately responded to with “Oh, I really don’t like how that wasn’t a firm no”
Well, “Och, I really dinnae like how much tha were na a firm, Na” to be precise but that’s not relevant, the point is it’s not a statement that comes from someone who can muster a strong defense
Those are a hyperbolic parody of “just the things that happened”, but it’s far from an accurate retelling of events.
First: the love bomb. Dorothy first dropped that in “Relieved” back in 2014. Needing space wasn’t until 2018, and Walky started that one in the strip “Carry” (Dorothy reciprocates the sentiment and then asks for a pause in the next few strips).
The other ups and downs, especially the lack of respect for the pause are valid criticisms.
After formally breaking up, she encouraged Walky to date someone he had a close connection to and some chemistry with. While it may not have worked out, I don’t think there was anything particularly wrong with it. Plus, on a technicality, Dorothy was not his girlfriend at the time so even if this was bad I’m not sure it counts against her “girlfriend score”.
She absolutely didn’t try to get back with him immediately. She waited a couple weeks until after Walky had broken up with Lucy. Mostly. Maybe jumped the gun a little, if you want to complain about that it’s fair.
Finally yeah, the cheating, which is absolutely happening and would probably put her in the bad girlfriend running all on its own.
Like, you got some points in there, but also some straight-up falsehoods.
I know that’s spoken by Durkon from OOTS, but i can’t remember which story arc that was in
It’s from early in the yet unfinished Book 7
And is THAT an Order of the Stick reference??
Yeah, one of a couple sentences from OOTS that live rent free in my head.
Good comics, would highly recommend for anyone who isn’t familiar and who has a tolerance for kind of rocky early chapters.
OotS is a gem through and through.
She very demonstrably is not.
I actually think Paul broke up with her. He’s been very absent from her presence lately. I guess if true that wouldn’t take away that she was a girlfriend if that’s all it takes to rank as the worst. Still I’d say an active girlfriend has more potential to suck if my Mary and Paul broke up theory is true.
That would also partially explain Mary’s comment about predatory men. I mean, Religious Extremists don’t really need a reason to obsess over the people they hate. But still.
That was an intentional misgendering of Carla. Transphobes often see trans folk as inherently “dangerous” and “deviant.” That’s the “rationale” behind a lot of those asinine Bathroom Bills.
The assumption is “they must be perverts, they’re DIFFERENT!” Thing is, bigots aren’t even creative, they just recycle this horseshit on a different group depending on the decade. This same baseless accusation has, and still is, leveled against gay men, lesbian women, and African-Americans.
That was one of Jim Crow law’s “justifications” for separate bathrooms. Racists genuinely thought of them as inhuman predatory animals who just lived to attack people. It’s how they paint every out-group they don’t understand and/or just don’t like. Anything that is “not like us” is a threat, and guilty until… well, just guilty. Full stop.
That whole bit was Mary going out of her way to dehumanize Carla… because Mary is a Euclid-class bongo.
I just checked and I totally forgot his name. It isn’t even Paul, it’s “Peter”. He also hasn’t been seen since Halloween. Between that and Mary saying “Halloween happened.” Like the holiday is some notorious relationship test I really think they broke up.
I don’t think his surname has ever been revealed in DoA, but in the Walkyverse, he was Peter Paul. Because Peter Paul and Mary, gitit?
Peter Paul and Mary probably got to ya brain…
Damn, you’re probably right. Mary loved flaunting their relationship as obnoxiously as possible, and that seems to have stopped.
yeah, dorothy has been a bit of a fuckup of a girlfriend to walky but mary was outright awful on purpose
Slightly confused by this comment. Is Dorothy really being a significantly worse girlfriend than Joyce is in this scenario?
Dorothy has a worse history of screwing with Danny and Walky, but it’s unintentional and she feels regret for hurting them. Joyce has no prior history, but her complete lack of giving a shit about Joe is something else. So, debatable
I don’t know how much feeling regret matters if she keeps repeatedly hurting Walky in the exact same way.
This is hardly the “exact same way”.
First time around she certainly did fall in love with someone else and cheat on him. The issue was more that she got more serious about him than she planned.
Fair enough, I guess I meant more broadly that she keeps casually throwing him aside when the relationship feels inconvenient to her.
Except she didn’t do that at all the first time.
The problem was more that she set a boundary she though she needed “this is just a casual thing” and then couldn’t keep it.
Imo Joyce’s history of not respecting people’s monogamous relationship boundaries (re: Jacob) is more of a relevant history than Dorothy’s.
I don’t feel any particular way about it, but I do have to remind myself of it sometimes
I think Joyce is getting grace because while cheating is a big nail in the coffin, other than that she has been a pretty good girlfriend to Joe. Dorothy even outside of the cheating really gave Walky the run around in their relationship.
Interestingly that’s exactly why I’m more upset with Joyce
Same. The Joyce stuff with Jacob could be explained away as “a caper that went too far”, but this is both “worse than that” and “did you learn nothing?”
I agree, I was way angrier with Joyce than I was with Dorothy and it took me a while to reconcile with it because my initial reaction was to think she was acting wildly out of character because I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
That’s been my reaction. At least annoyance and kind of bewilderment, because it seems so out of character and she’s one of the most morally rigid characters, like the autistic justice kind. Dorothy has been self-destructing and has been in the exact kind of state for this kind of bad choice. Joyce, I have to really intellectualise her behaviour to make it make sense.
What is her history of screwing with Danny?
Probably holding her breaking up with Danny against her, which I disagree with.
Sure, she should have communicated that she wasn’t vibing with the relationship anymore, but it’s not really her fault that Danny followed her to a college with no plans for his future except following his HS GF around like a puppy.
Idk, I feel like since she already knew she was gonna break up with him at college or over the summer, she should’ve ripped the bandaid off at graduation. Boyfriends and girlfriends often plan to go to college together, that’s completely normal. It just feels like a courtesy thing since she didn’t care for him all that much anyways.
IMO they both were bongos, as teens are. Danny planning out their whole lives together without asking, likely making her feel like an animal caught in a trap, and Dorothy being indecisive, or hoping she could passively escape without needing to chew that limb off. She probably soured on their relationship very slowly over time, not realizing it’d crossed a threshold until long past when it should have ended.
Danny has grown a lot since then and I like him now, but Dorothy being put off by him at the start of the comic was pretty relatable.
I got theories about Danny and Dorothy’s relationship. I kinda don’t think she really loved him that deeply if at all. It seems more like they were friends and he was a safe guy to be around and in high school that’s all you really need. They were each other’s firsts likely in a relationship ever so I think Dorothy kind of expected the whole moving to college thing to be a natural breakup which can happen to a lot of high school romances. She was probably she could avoid the awkward breaking up part but Danny following her ruined that. So yeah if she were better she’d have ended things at graduation. But Dorothy’s only 18 so what should we expect.
I think the real fault with Dorothy’s breakup with Danny isn’t even how she did it or when. It’s just overtime Danny has proven to be right about the stuff he said. He was being a pissy little dweeb back then, but truth is really that Dorothy didn’t like hearing the bad stuff about herself. A trait she still has today. As Danny has still been very right about some of her faults.
At graduation seems a bit harsh, but they had a whole summer. Did she ghost him the whole time?
Apparently she was dropping hints according to Li and the links they provided. Not sure how I feel about that instead of just facing the awkward conversation and breaking up with him, but I get not wanting your first relationship to end badly. I don’t think it’s fair to totally blame Dorothy for that. It kind of worked out for both of them. I will say it shows Dorothy has a habit of trying to avoid bad outcomes. We’ll have to see how that effects the Walky situation she’s now in.
What? No, I don’t hold it against her that she broke up with him. Some people mentioned previously that she waited to break up with him until he followed her to college, rather than breaking up with him earlier when it would have given him the opportunity to choose a different college path
Well, for the record, I don’t think she says anything that indicates she waited to break up with him on purpose, and many hints that she’d tried to tell him following her to college was a bad idea. He responded by lying to her that he’d be going to IU even if he didn’t want to continue their relationship:
Also, when Dorothy tried to broach the subject of being worried Danny had only followed her to college to continue their relationship, he lied and insisted he would have gone to IU regardless:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/together/
We also saw him be completely impervious to all hints that this conversation was coming:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/alone/
Which makes me think it must have been very difficult for Dorothy to bring up.
Bonus: you can already tell here that JOE knows what Dorothy is going to say, but he’ll be explicit about it later, and I’ll link that in a follow-up to avoid getting put in mod jail.
Ugh, you can see my copypaste error where I tried to stitch two different versions of this comment together and failed. I only meant to point out Danny’s lie that he wasn’t going to IU because of Dorothy the one time.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/02-uphill-from-here/codependent/
Everything Joe, Dorothy, and frankly Danny himself say about this indicates that Dorothy had been dropping hints for a while, and Joe had been dropping hints for a while, but Danny was determined to ignore both of them and pretend that his relationship with Dorothy was not only not ending, but going to, like, end in marriage.
He’s a romantic guy, and these days he’s super likable, but Willis wrote him early on as clingy and codependent, and I would go as far as saying no one was supposed to be on his side when Dorothy dumped him, especially after his condescending dismissal of her attempt to tell him she was going to leave for Yale.
But gosh were lots of people on his side anyway, heh.
While he was dating Amazigirl he got a lot of flack for stuff that he didn’t know.
@Clif: okay?
I didn’t say no reader has ever been mean to Danny, or that Willis never meant him to be sympathetic. I said I don’t think Willis meant for anyone to be on his side when Dorothy dumped him. Two completely different statements!
I was on Danny’s side because Dorothy was embodying two of my pet peeves.
1. The ‘hurting someone for their own good’ routine. I really hate that, and I especially hate it when people pull it in relationships. Let people decide for themselves what’s good for them. I hated it when Ruth pulled it on Billie too.
2. The ‘everyone must have career ambitions and that has to be the most important thing in your life’ routine. Now, it’s perfectly fine that for Dorothy, her career ambitions were more than her love life. But she was arguing that this had to be the case for Danny, too, and that if it wasn’t, it was a major failing in him. It’s perfectly okay for someone not to care about their job, or to prioritize their love life first, just as much as the opposite is true. But no one gives you any grace for that these days.
OTOH, I’d call it a flaw if you haven’t broken up with someone, but you’re going to and basically everyone but them knows it. For how long had this been going on?
Seems like she was just hanging in hoping he’d go away on his own. Which isn’t really great.
(Of course, it’s partly also because Willis wanted to show the break up on screen rather than just have it be backstory, but still.)
Yeah there was no reason Dorothy shouldn’t have dumped him over the summer at minimum. Just expecting him to pick up on her hints isn’t fair to him, and it’s not a mature way to end a relationship.
Some of y’all seem to think I said “Dorothy did nothing wrong” instead of “I don’t think Dorothy was screwing with Danny, and I don’t think the text supports the idea that she waited to break up with him until they were both at IU on purpose.”
@Astariel: I don’t think she thought she was hurting him for his own good? I think she specifically said that hurting him now was better than continuing to date him and hurting him more later. She also admitted that she should have done it months ago.
As for “everyone must have career ambitions” — I don’t think that’s what she or Willis was trying to say, either? I think she said, “I worry you only followed me here rather than because it makes sense with what you have planned in your life.” And Danny insisted it wasn’t true, and then a few scenes later grumbled bitterly because it had, in fact, been true.
I mean it’s Joe, so I get it. More still surprised she gave a shit about him in the first place
No but Dorothy is the one op has more issues with
Yeah, but that’s usually something you communicate with your significant other, Danny just did it of his own accord and only let Dorothy know when he showed up. That’s an insane life decision to make on a lark for a high school romance.
Definitely should have let him know, but I can’t say she’s anymore at fault than Danny was.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/together/
We saw her try to broach the topic more than once, Danny deflected and lied to her, insisting he would still have chosen to go to IU even if they weren’t dating.
There’s no way Dorothy didn’t know where he was going to college until move-in day. Those decisions get made in the spring. It would have had to not come up for literally months, and that’s just no believeable.
I think at this point we’re applying too much blame on either side. Dorothy and Danny were both kids acting selfishly in that situation. Danny ignoring the signs it was over and Dorothy avoiding the confrontation.
honestly i read danny as not telling her he was coming to IU as it “would be a romantic surprise” that would “get dorothy to like him more” if he should up as a surprise. just like a dumbass in highschool would
Is there anywhere it’s actually said she didn’t know? They first show up together hand in hand and there’s no indication of surprise.
I think we’re all just kinda assuming things based on the context of what the strips show. Do we know for sure he lied? Not really and it’s a detail we may never know and or need hard answers on cause it’s unimportant, but the strips show Danny in denial of him motivations for choosing IU initially and that Dorothy didn’t want him to follow her. Everything else is speculation. People will see what they want in it depending on who they relate more to.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/answer/
I would guess it’s based on this strip? “I didn’t really expect him to follow me here.” But I didn’t assume it was a surprise.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/available/
But this strip, idk. It makes me think they actually did talk about breaking up, and Danny just fully misinterpreted what Dorothy was trying to tell him.
A lot of people seem to *really* hate Dorothy. They talk about how much they hate her at every opportunity, and root loudly for terrible things to happen to her and for her to be punished. There’s, like, endless threads on the reddit just really drilling deep into people’s hatred and bile for her.
It’s been incredibly uncomfortable and offputting to read about, to be honest.
It’s big Skylar White energy, tbh
Oh my god, you’re right, that’s EXACTLY what it reminds me of.
Which is weird, because honestly she reads more like Walter to me then Skylar.
She’s prideful, introverted, thinks the work should be the only thing that counts, is willing to break her personal codes to get what she wants, refuses to accept any outside help, and will take the worst possible option over the one that causes her to bend *or* admit someone else is more right then her.
But she’s a main character, so all of that gets pushed aside, and the audience gets angry at anyone who points that out.
Comparing Dorothy to Walter is…weird. I don’t think it fits at all.
Walter’s entire thing is how wrapped up he is in his own fragile ego. Plus how frighteningly nasty he can be when that ego is provoked. Dorothy doesn’t have that at all, IMO.
I mean, if we NEED to compare her to someone from the universe, I think Jimmy McGill from better call Saul would be way more apt. She’s not an inherently malicious person, she just gets carried away. She winds up hurting people in the act of trying to help, or at least accomplish mostly-sympathetic goals.
I can see her as Slippn’ Jimmy too. But she went full Walt for me when she was trying to tear into Joe and threw a bunch of lies at him in an attempt to cover for her jealously.
Also, I read Dorothy as being wrapped up in her own fragile ego, is the issue. The time skip with her falling apart because she realized she’s not all that special was interesting, but jorothy always rang weird to me, because Dotty screamed “Mom replacement” for Joyce.
From her terrible take on autism, to her making appointments and everything else, to the point that even Joyce was asking her to calm it the hell down right before she followed her into the laundry room, Dorothy’s been mother hen’ing Joyce since they met. While I’m trying to not yuck anyone’s yum, not a personal fan of that power dynamic.
…are you talking about the breakdown she had when she was confronted with here attraction to Joyce? I kinda don’t know what else you’d be talking about with “trying to tear into Joe”, but even that one’s a stretch. She barely talks about Joe – wait okay nvm I finished reading your comment I don’t think it’s worth enganging if you genuinely think “mom friend” is a power dynamic. That’s weird but have a good one
“Follow her into the laundry room” she invited Joyce to the laundry to which dhe processed to gollow he to on her own volition. Fuck off with this revisionist dhit.
Oh god yes, that’s a very good point. It’s that same kind of hate, and the same kind of twisting the narrative in knots to ensure everything wraps back around to being Dorothy’s fault.
For what it’s worth: I really really don’t like the Dorothy/Joyce ship and I haven’t liked most of its execution so far (feels like it’s getting better now though). But you can EASILY dislike this ship and still not hate Dorothy as a character. She’s in the middle of a breakdown character-wise and that’s made her really fun to watch. All of her quasi-selfish or -destructive actions have made sense to me, as we go along. It’s a fun arc.
Most of my complaints actually come from Joyce’s side, where I think she’s become a totally different person since the protest. But that’s a different conversation.
Skyler, I believe
Hell, I’ll cop to disliking Dorothy and thinking her and Joyce have a pretty toxic dynamic, and even I think the hate is a bit much (like, where the hell is this “Dorothy is actually responsible for AG’s injury” stuff coming from?)
Same. Dorothy has enough shit she’s ACTUALLY responsible for, we don’t need to make up more.
Dorothy’s grandstanding return to the protest and refusal to leave left AG with more people to rescue, delaying her own escape and thus leading to her injury.
It’s a bit of a stretch, but not entirely off base. I’d actually see it as something Dorothy would think herself, more than something others should blame her for.
Sure, that last sentence is the actual truth here — it seems clear to me that AG was going to keep going back in until everyone was out regardless, and Dorothy was not the last one out.
At best she gets some very, very indirect “well, you did encourage AG to keep being AG a while back”, but even then I think everyone including Dorothy assumed that meant mostly “beating the shit out of incels and dumbasses”.
And yet down the comments there is someone that does blsme Dorothy for doing that
There’s no accounting for the amount of idiocy that shows up in these comments, occasionally from people who are otherwise worthwhile and fun contributors who just picked up the idiot ball about some issue or another.
People really hate ambitious women.
They hate any kind of complicated woman who isn’t 100% pire goodness or 100% pure evil.
Saying outfront since it was an issue on the Patreon comments: Is not Joyce and Dorothy fault that AG/Amber got hurt, it wasn’t said she cane to the protest specifically to help them, she choose to stay behind to help other people not so they could get away. Also Dorothy last night searched for mentions of AG getting hurt and didn’t got anything so she thought she was ok
Partially disagree… Amazigirl was there regardless, but it does need to be noted that Amazigirl was forced to kick a cop in the face to save Joyce as a direct consequence of Dorothy’s actions. If Dorothy hadn’t decided to be a complete dipshit both she and Joyce would have been safely gone before things escalated to that point.
Now, does that mean Amazigirl would never have clashed with the riot police without Dorothy and Joyce being there? Probably not, it’s definitely possible that AG might have attacked an officer for the sake of somebody else. But as it stands there is a serious escalation in violence between AG and the riot police as a direct result of what Dorothy did. Dorothy is not fully responsible for what happened, obviously the whole political mess is the primary reason for everything, but enough bad shit occurred due to her stupidity that some reflection is warranted.
Amazon girl took down another cop to save Asma. Does that make Asma a horrible person who’s responsible for Amber being injured?
Amazi-Girl, not Amazon. Phone died, and I haven’t figured out how to shut autocarrot off on this stupid tablet yet.
At least Asma was there to actually stand for something instead of just for the sake of being a self-destructive dipshit.
Asma wasn’t actually happy about AG’s intervention.
No, there was a serious escalation in violence between AG and the riot police because the riot police chose to engage in police brutality and she jumped in to stop them. Let’s put the blame on the people who actually started the violence in the first place rather than Dorothy’s non-violent actions that they decided meant they should start assaulting people.
On that subject: the moment in question was https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/cuffed/
While Joyce was indeed worried about Dorothy having gone back inside in the previous strip, it was only two strips later that she herself went back in.
She’d just been standing there and the very first thing the cop said was “On the ground!” – didn’t even warn her to back away or anything. While she probably wouldn’t have evacuated as she claimed she was doing, there was no way for the over-armored police goon to know that while he was shoving her face into the dirt (as Jocelyn phrased it earlier).
It’s possible that this was the triggering incident that set everything off, but it was just one girl yelling worriedly at another. If that’s all it takes, violence was practically inevitable.
To be honest, lots of people are upset that Willis upstaged the protest itself with the romance, but I think mixing the super-hero in was really more of an issue. As Asma pointed out in a bonus strip.
Sure, the cops started it, but that was expected. For someone not familiar with these kinds of protests, the tear gas canisters flying and people being shoved to the ground and arrested seems like a massive escalation. And it is, but it’s the kind of thing protest organizers expect (and presumably discussed with those planning to camp out, like Jocelyne and Asma). Cops at some protests do escalate farther, but with organizers telling everyone to evacuate, that kind of confrontation wasn’t likely.
Some arrests, overwhelmingly on minor charges. Tear gas. Some police violence and people getting a bit roughed up. Minor injuries. Like what actually happened at the Dunn Meadow protest this was inspired by.
Someone in a mask jumping in to “rescue” people is a wild card. Once cops are actually being beaten up by an apparent protester, a lot more violence is easier to justify. And not just the excuse here of a confrontation on a protest line or someone flailing as they’re taken down. This is someone taking on cops and they can’t stop her.
I’m surprised things didn’t escalate far more than they did. But it’s still portrayed – and mostly seen by the audience here – as heroic and maybe even necessary.
And that’s the problem of mixing even low-end superheroes like AG into a real-life headline story.
Yeah, if this happened in real life the cops probably would have started killing people. Kinda terrifying to think about.
Okay, I fully agree that the Riot Police are definitely the ones most responsible for escalating the situation, and I’m sorry for not communicating that properly. But that doesn’t change the fact that Dorothy was being a reckless self-destructive moron, and that Amazi-girl and Joyce both got into a lot of trouble as a result. Just because the cops were the clear bad guys in the situation does not mean Dorothy’s actions were justified. Nothing about what Dorothy did at that protest was smart or justifiable or good in any way. And that’s why I’m saying she needs to step back and actually think.
I would say that they didn’t necessarily cause Amazigirl to be hurt directly, however the fact that both Amazigirl and Amber have complex history with them definitely contributed to decision-making. Dorothy was reckless and endangered other protestors as well as herself, but the escalation definitely wasn’t her fault.
Amazi-Girl is also an adult making her own decisions, it’s true. Dorothy didn’t grab her by the arm and keep her at the protest.
Also, what we saw of the protest at least + the report that Amazi-Girl got away would seem to indicate that the injury she sustained happened later, but we’ll know for sure eventually.
+100
Possible. Or just that she was wounded but got away. She did in fact get away, so the report wasn’t wrong, even if she was already hurt. Then collapsed when the adrenaline wore off.
Right. I’m a major Dorothy/Joyce ship hater but I think blaming, like, ALL the consequences of the entire protest on them is a bit much lol
Amazi-Girl made her own choices, the way I see it.
And Amazi-Girl probably does not blame either of them, so… yeah. I do not really fault them for anything that happened at the protest, I blame the cops 100%. I am not particularly happy with Joyce/Dorothy at the moment, and while I do think they could make a very cute couple, I wish it happened without the cheating.
We also saw AG escort out a group alongside Dotty and Joyce, so I don’t think the two of them made any significant difference to when and where AG was.
It’s possible AG was simply the last out and got snagged on the fencing, without someone else to hold it open. That stuff is pretty nasty. Or came across some counter protestors or just some asshole on her regular patrol later, there’s a lot of possibilities.
Here’s AG going back in.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/scatter/
So much truth.
Amazi-Girl getting hurt had nothing to do with Joyce/Dorothy.
Weirly, already seeing “paladin’s” comments trying to blame them. rofl
Speaking as an OG paladin, this isn’t a “paladins” thing, and it’s weird that you’d think it is.
Agreed, I’m also a “paladin” I guess, and blaming Doyce for any of the protest stuff is just silly.
I kinda want to elaborate: “Paladins” were originally “people who didn’t want to see Joyce and Dorothy cheat on Joe and Walky”. They mostly morphed into “people who wanted Joyce and Dorothy to face realistic social consequences for their cheating”.
That doesn’t necessarily imply (but nor does it preclude) “hating Dorothy for no reason”.
As a sicko, definitely not a paladins thing.
Both “tents” are pretty big, and just like there are gonna be “sickos” who just dislike Joe as a character and root for bad things to happen to him, so there are gonna be “paladins” who just dislike Dorothy as a character and are against everything she does.
And that’s assuming these folks even picked a side to begin with!
“Amber”?
if any character reads the comic, it would obliterate the 4th wall
I don’t get it
That’s tautological.
So Dina knows, right? But if Amber didn’t the her, how? Dina sense, or is she just suspicious cuz Dorothy is being weird?
Dina sense.
Probably just Dorothy being weird.
I think she’s wondering if Dorothy’s a fed.
Hadn’t considered that.
I guess they don’t really have much of a connection besides having mutual friends
“dorothy, you do sort of have cop vibes”
“oh c’mon, STILL? have you not seen the news???”
“you really do not want the answer to that question”
Hrm, yeah. Amber may have given Dina instructions to tell no one about her Amazi-girl escapade yesterday.
I expect there are photos of the two women kissing in the middle of the protest while tear gas was being fired around and a vigilante was jump kicking cops in riot gear.
I really hope that’s the case and we get this reveal soon
I’m hoping this is how Joe tells them he knows. Just shows Joyce his phone after her messing around for in-comic days.
I’m still waiting to see if somebody took a picture if them kissing for the school newspaper, because if so Daisy has likely made it the front page story already.
Dina doesn’t have to know anything.
Amber coming in wounded and then Dorothy coming in to check on her and asking “what she saw” rather than “how is she”, is enough to get a weird look.
Dorothy’s going to blame herself for this, like she blames herself for other traumatic events. The difference is that this time she’ll be right.
No.
Yes.
Both no and yes.
I don’t think the comic was all that relevant, but I do appreciate the opportunity to read it again.
I agree. Hence my smartass “both no and yes” response.
troll someone else. or nobody.
Not trolling, just don’t think it’s line of argument is worth giving any more answer than that.
your opinion doesn’t matter to me, Jeremiah. you trolled too many people too much and didn’t stop when you changed your handle.
What a coincidence, your opinion doesn’t matter to me either! Have a good time in that imaginary world you have going on.
Claiming that Dorothy is responsible for AG getting hurt sounds far more like trolling than someone saying no she isn’t.
Yeah, but they seem to call everyone a troll, for nothing more serious than disagreeing with them. Seems like deflection.
Both in encouraging Amazi-Girl to start being a superhero again and because part of the reason she got shot is that she was saving Dorothy from her own futile and stupid gesture.
She got shot after she returned to help more people after Dorothy, Joyce, Asma and Jocelyn were all out
Which took much longer than it had to because of Let’s Stop To Make Out And Make Impassioned Speeches While Riot Cops Are Attacking. There is, I think, a case to be made that if Amazi-girl hadn’t had to rescue a few people twice at length, she could have cleared out faster.
Yeah, in an emergency every second counts. Not saying Dorothy should like fall on the sword over it, but it’s definitely a mistake that put her friend at risk.
What on earth makes either of you think that her injuries were caused by being “shot”?
I was wondering that. Being shot generally requires more than stitches or super glue.
I don’t think we know HOW AG was injured, but unless Willis is taking the cartoony unrealism of AG to a new extreme she definitely wasn’t shot, based on the fact she’s walking around less than a day after the injury and being stitched up by a kitchen doctor.
Somehow, I think Dorothy probably meant that she should continue fighting off creeps trying to attack women or dumbasses in roller skates, not fighting LEOs with itchy trigger fingers.
It was always self-destructive behavior. Last semester, AG was fighting on moving cars. It doesn’t matter if that’s not what Dorothy meant. Dorothy’s self-interested and shitty judgment played a part because she encouraged a junkie to restart her self-destructive habit.
Dorothy and Joyce both asked AmaziGirl to leave with them. She explicitly refused, saying “There are probably other people who need help,” or something similar, and then she left them both to return to the protest.
Whatever happened to her, happened AFTER Joyce and Dorothy called for her to leave, and she refused. It’s really upsetting and kind of gross to me that people have turned this into “AmaziGirl got hurt because of Joyce and Dorothy, and it’s somehow Dorothy’s fault in specific that this happened. Stupid selfish girls, look how they got someone hurt because they fell in love. I hope Dina rips Dorothy to shreds!”
I forgot about that strip, but yeah Dorothy definitely encouraged Amber/AG to get back into doing superhero stuff again. And of course Dorothy decided to stay at the protest, despite not really being there for the anti-genocide cause, after Jocelyne and others there told her to leave. AG wouldn’t have had to come back to help Dorothy and Joyce escape the cops if they had left when the other protesters told them to.
Eh, Dotty and Joyce weren’t the only people trapped at the protest, AG escorted out a group with them. I think the others tried to leave when the word was given, but we saw the pigs close off the fencing before the gals even found Jocelyne. I don’t think they made any significant difference to when and where AG was.
We also saw a bunch of people actually getting out through the opening in the fence before Dorothy decided to run back in.
“Dorothy is responsible for Amazi-Girl getting hurt” is the worst take I have read in the comments in the last month. And that’s really saying something given the last month.
lotta Andy Dick fans I see
Dorothy_chain_of_thought.gguf has encountered record_scratch.mp4.
huh, an extension I don’t know, let’s look that up…
… thanks, I hate it. 😐
Oh, there’re lots of new ones with all this LLM stuff. 😛
Ooo. A new game. Which of us is most likely to be an LLM?
Sorry for late reply. Context window too full.
And a sense of perspective has arrived
One has already spoken and left, muscles aching.
Another now sits before her, watching and judging.
Oh hey, it’s time for Dorothy to remember that the stupid way she inserted herself into the protest has in real meaningful ways endangered other people around her.
Alright thinking back on it it’s very possible that Amazi-Girl would have still stayed around and gotten hurt anyway without Dorothy. I do feel like Dorothy’s clumsy entrance into the situation and getting distracted by smooches while the cops attacked probably made things harder for Amazi-Girl defending them though.
Considering she was hurt after Dorothy and Joyce left because she went back to help other people I really think people are overestimating Dorothy’s role in this.
It is extremely significant that none of the people AG defended asked her to defend them. AG chose to do it.
Plus it doesn’t seem very likely that AG was injured at the protest at all.
In a bonus strip, Asma specifically told her not to escalate and “don’t dropkick knee anyone in the face”
Lots of people blaming Dorothy for something Amber/Amazi-Girl were gonna do anyways. Yes, Dorothy did encourage her, buuuuuuuuuuuut I kinda think that fighting riot police at a protest goes beyond “this one person enabled me”.
I already they were gonna start with that shit because of the Patreon doesn’t make it any less annoying
brain just assumed the word “Amber” meant “Becky”.
lemme tell ya, this strip really hits hard like that
Yeah, I wonder how the girl who was single-handedly fighting a bunch of heavily-armored cops got hurt. That’s such a surprise and there’s no way Dorothy could’ve seen this coming.
Already mentioned this, Dorothy specifically looked up for news of ag getting hurt and didn’t find anything so she thought she managed to ge away fine
Why does it feel like some folks have an inexplicable hate boner for this or that character? Granted, the target of the mass hateboner seems to be decided by roulette wheel half the time.
Because they do, and it’s been creepy as hell.
Because they do. Other characters this happens to includes Becky, Booster and Danny at the beginning.
Sal, Amber, Dorothy, Joyce and sometimes Ruth, Carla and Jennifer got a lot of people being REAL weird about them at various points in this comic’s history
I think the hate for Booster is that they’re a toxic-ass troll. Mike pretended he didn’t care when he really gave too much of a shit and used the mean comments and pretend disinterest as a shield (unhealthy shield) to avoid getting hurt.
Booster is more like someone who sometimes pretends to care, but the more you watch the more you realize they just like feeling superior and don’t really give a shit.
That’s a very uncharitable read of the character that isn’t really supported by the text. Check out their conversation with Ethan, consider Charlie, and ask yourself again if it’s really true that Booster pretends to care about other people, or that their interest in psychology isn’t obviously a defense mechanism.
Who the hell hates Becky?!
SO MANY PEOPLE.
This is like asking who hates Sal. It’s been a while since the last public meeting in the comments of “Sal needs to shut the fuck up about her mom’s racism, she’s obviously just sexist and Sal is too stupid to know the difference,” but they happened loudly and regularly.
Similarly, how dare Becky spend $20 on a haircut instead of ??? investing it in a savings account where it could someday be used to pay rent so that she was no longer “forcing” Joyce to let her live with her. Also it’s just a coincidence that the people complaining about this also thought her new haircut was ugly. They definitely weren’t specifically mad that a fictional woman had chosen to do something that “ruined” her attractiveness, that would be silly!
Wait, people hate/hated Sal?! My brain is broken… in what universe does “Sal needs to get over her mom’s neglect and emotional abuse” make any kind of sense? Especially since it’s ONGOING.
People who complain about other peoples’ haircuts IRL are exhausting and gross enough… like, it’s not your hair. Let ’em do what they want with their body. Y’all don’t get a say in how someone else chooses to dress and style themselves. The fuck is next? Actual fashion police who haul you to jail for wearing white after Labor Day?
Complaining about a fictional character’s haircut takes all that creepy possessive weirdness and adds a level of pathetic that even the phrase “go and touch grass” doesn’t feel sufficient for.
Yes and also yes.
Don’t worry, they explained how Sal had actually never been neglected and even if she was, she probably deserved it for being a criminal.
Some folks cannot let go of the Walkyverse versions of the characters. They’re very sure that Willis is going to reveal the true extent of Sal and Dorothy’s evil eventually.
It’s also become increasingly clear these last few days that, in the absence of cites or re-reads, some folks have a HIGHLY idiosyncratic memory of what events happened in-strip — there’s the one person who misremembered Dorothy paying for her protest sign, so who knows what people are incorrect about regarding events that happened years ago.
Feels like anytime I worry that my paste-white male cishet ass is unforgivably (if unintentionally) problematic or not sensitive enough to others, I’m reminded of just how abysmally low the bar is.
No one who worries about these things is unforgivably problematic or insensitive.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean we’ll always be forgiven. Forgiveness is an action people either take or don’t take, and that’s up to them, and doesn’t have that much to do with us. Focus on being better than you were yesterday: that’s always a good thing, worth doing, whether or not other people want to forgive you for what you’ve done in the past. 🙂
I used to dislike Becky a fair bit because I felt like 3/4 of her early personality was based on pushing Joyce’s boundaries for fun, and then I got kinda sour when she got so pissed at Joyce randomly insulting believers in a way not directed at her. I wouldn’t call that “hate” but boy did I get accused of hating a whole lot of things.
But we have such a VARIETY of haters! For so many different reasons!
And in addition to the shipping wars and people over-exaggerating character’s negative traits to make them justify hatred, now we also have this increasingly stupid sickos vs paladins to sort people into pseudo-tribes to performatively hate on each other’s favorites.
you know, I’ve wondered what that raptor is stuffed with since it was introduced. common sense and logic would dictate that it’s stuffed with those horriblel styrofoam packing peanuts that those cheaaap carnival prizes toys have. they have an awful texture, so I cannot imagine they are comfortable to sleep on
is it actually filled with high quality plush stuffing? or even mattress stuffing? if it’s the latter that thing would have been expensive just based on the volume required to fill it
plus Becky did not plan for it to replace Dina’s bed, so I get the feeling she would have gone with the cheaper option
speaking Dina’s bed, where is it? did she disassemble it and throw it in the dumpster? she also deprived herself of a work table?
“horriblel” blegh
Given that Becky bought it with her first “political consultant” paycheck, and went so far as to get “DeSanto 201X” embroidered on its butt… I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume she went all-out on it. That’s my headcanon at least.
if she went all out then she custom ordered it, but that would take months to finish and I think she got this within days of her deal with Robin.
maybe this raptor was made for something else and Becky happened to come across it on ebay for $459 and realized what a good deal it was and the other person was happy because they got rid of the bulky item
Well, she was able to write it off as a business expense because it had the Desanto campaign logo stitched on. So it couldn’t have been ebay.
There’s the distinct possibility that Robin, apropos of nothing, was having giant dinosaur plushes manufactured with her campaign funds. In her defense, it’s a rad idea.
This had not occurred to me, but it is a fantastic idea.
I was going to go, “It’s a comic.” But I like this. Let’s go with this instead.
so agreed, now headcannon that desanto was mfging xxxxl dino plushes as campian materials to capitolize on which ever jrrasic park movie ws coming out
Dina had it re-stuffed with whatever they fill those triangle sex pillows with. those things are comfy as hell and keep their shape like a champ.
At times like this, I’m glad I use DuckDuckGo. Don’t want “triangle sex pillow” in my search history, even though it’s more innocuous than it could’ve been.
Frankly, the logical conclusion seems to be that it’s stuffed with those tiny memory-foam-ish balls that modern beanbag chairs are usually stuffed with.
Dina’s original bed? It was in the way of her happiness.
A scenario which also solves the mystery of how Becky got it into the building and room: It’s a cover, and it’s stuffed with chunks of foam (like memory foam, not styrofoam) which came in multiple bags.
Alternate theory… Becky brought Dina every copy of creationist textbooks she still had on her from home, and Dina gleefully shredded them to make stuffing for her magnificent and glorious idol to dinosaur science.
See, I was about to whine again about derailing the soap opera but reading the comments shows that this might be more satisfying in a darker way.
Yes… Dorothy, let this realization hit you. Let it put a damper on your selfish joy. Let me watch it wither.
Because if I know you, you’re gonna insist on taking ownership of this in some fashion. So do go ahead and ask yourself if it was all worth it in the end…
Gonna pull another speech out of her ass about those who fell for their freedom for gay make outs.
What the fuck are youe even talking about now
The Mike speech.
Damn, that’s creepy.
Don’t you have a la-bor-atory to get out of?
Dorothy: Oh thank God… wait, WHAT?
Superheroes don’t die. Instead, they
– Take a flesh wound,
– Walk it off,
– Take a nap ( they don’t ’pass out’ or ‘faint’, comas are for wimps), and then
– Wake up at full HP.
Don’t forget cloning, resurrection magic, Darkseid Doom Beams, reincarnation, the list goes on and on for capes. Amber’s choice of career has given her the “revolving door” experience of afterlife.
All of which were pivotal in It’s Walky so… willisian.
Now we can move away from the romances and focus squarely on Bulmeria!
-Absolutely not what will happen.
Good. Fuck Bulmeria. Fake-ass country.
Eh, it’s as fake as Dorothy and Joyce.
That’s a cop-out. If Bulmeria got nuked and reduced to a radioactive ash field, nothing about the comic would need to change.
you’re… not wrong
as much as I would have loved to see how the Bulmeria conflict affects cast members, this is ultimately a romcom comic about college students in the United States, in which Willis has to juggle a billion fucking plates
I hope tho at the very least we see Mary suffer an Asma attack, or better yet a sleep paralysis demon.
That’d be a satisfying way to balance this out to say the very least >:D
Exactly. Dorothy & Joyce matter to this universe. Bulmeria doesn’t.
That’s not what the comic says it is about. And it is unlikely that any comic about Bulmeria could be… comic.
read Mouse…………..it a comic………..it has comic drawings…… its not about human misery at all
I wonder what sources Dorothy checked that told her Amazi-Girl got out of the protest fine, because clearly they were wrong.
News sources would have been worthless for checking anything beyond whether Amazi-Girl was arrested/killed. Dorothy was a bit too distracted to really think about that though.
As I recall, the only information they had prior to this was:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/safely/
“All reports are that Amazi-Girl successfully escaped. No sniper shots were fired.” leaves a lot of room for injuries that weren’t inflicted by sniper shots and that didn’t prevent her escape.
Yup. Someone just got a lesson on how “successfully escaped” doesn’t imply “unharmed”.
When Sal found Amber, she was in Dunn Woods, not in a cell, chained to a hospital bed, or in a drawer at the morgue, so she escaped fine, for certain values of “fine”.
It was only a few hours at best after a chaotic situation that Dorothy was looking. The news is often wrong about what happens in chaotic moments and then needs to revise as more or more accurate info becomes available. That’s why it’s important to WAIT on what the news says when you’re looking at a story about an emergency, because sometimes the info the news is working from is simply wrong when the story is developing or just breaking. For example, there is very rarely a second shooter in a shooting story.
And that’s before even getting to times the news outright lies about things. They’ll tend to be truthful if it doesn’t hurt their interests, of course, but sometimes their interests lie with keeping friendly with the enforcers of the status quo.
Though in this case, it’s quite likely even the police didn’t know in the chaos that they’d managed to injure AG or how badly.
All they knew was she’d gotten away. Unless they catch up with her, subsequent stories probably won’t have much more info.
It’s also entirely possible it wasn’t the police who injured her. We still don’t know anything other than that she contacted Sal who found her injured and took her to Doctor Kitchen Doctor. There have been theories about Incelerator encountering her after she escaped the police and stabbing her.
I mean, it’s possible, but there’s nothing really to indicate it.
She was last seen in a fight with police. Next time we see her she’s injured. The conclusion seems obvious.
And frankly, if she wasn’t already hurt, she would have just laid the Incelerator out cold without risk to herself.
Like someone said in the Patreon: It’s honestly amazing how often the comments say things about Dorothy that are pretty much the bullshit her anxiety/PTSD ridden brain tell her completely unironically. Like now with the ones putting blame on her for Ag getting hurt, which is exactly what she gonna think despite not actually being the case.
she has some degree of blame for Amber’s situation. She’s the one who blatantly stormed into the protest in spite of being told by Jocelyn to stay out because at that time the cops were already stomping in, forcing Amber to put out extra time helping her get out.
Now obviously there is the fact that there was a 95% chance that the situation would have been the same regardless. However this scenario is the one likely going through Dorothy’s head and it’s going to eat at her.
The commentors on this comic are legit insane. Not all of them, but enough it’s developed a stench. I think I might just start treating this like Twitter or Reddit, like “read at your own risk”.
Stupid does not even begin to describe half the shit here. As I’ve said, I’m keeping my sanity by assuming half these people are 15 or under (way under in a few cases).
I”m 75 and legit insane all on my own, thank you.
As one person recently said at a con, Social media is a plague on our society said the woman who uses it every day. But feeling that your sanity is assaulted by random people on the Internet isn’t the healthiest thing. If you are serious, maybe you should think about limiting your exposure.
You’re a very rude person, and there’s not really a call for the insults. Maybe it would be best if you didn’t say much, of this is the level of civility you’re bringing to the table. “You’re insane, what you say is stupid, you have to be 15 or under”, like whatever helps you cope with your own insecurities I guess, but really those should be inside thoughts.
Dorothy has zero degree of blame for what happened to Amazi-Girl. The idea that she has any beyond ridiculous.
And yet here we are
Dorothy should have telepathically controlled Amazi-Girl’s body and puppeted her out of the protest area, otherwise it makes no sense that she’s not 100% to blame for the actions of a fully separate autonomous adult. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
‘Ohhhh, right… the world exists outside of me and my issues… shit….’
My take on the situation:
-Cops are 100% at fault for assaulting Amazigirl
-Dorothy DOES care about Bulmeria, she has a very strong moral code (well…sometimes) but is still breaking out of the Presidency Perfect Girl
-Wanting to support Jocelyne is also a valid reason to go to a protest
-Wanting to NOT do NOTHING is also a valid reason to go to a protest
-Gatekeeping activism because someone ”doesn’t care enough” or ”wants to feel like a good person” is weird, bad weird
-Dotty is a poopyhead for cheating on Walky
Those are my feelings, please be gentle
Seems legit. Cops definitely started it and not because of Amazigirl or anyone else. They went to check on Jocelyne for real reasons and weren’t expecting the whole affair to turn into a cuisinart. It’s mostly Asma’s fault.
Asma called the cops.
Yes, but what did she call them? Considering all that time Asma’s undoubtedly spent bored at the front desk, she may have some up with some pretty clever insults.
She called them late for dinner.
I don’t think anyone’s gonna get on Dorothy’s case about just attending a protest, but electing to turn that protest into a grand statement about how unfair your life is because you can’t have the girl you like while the other activists beg you to just leave is a choice which merits criticism
sorry i will never be able to see that as the truth of what happenned let alone be whet was in ditties head. upon rereading the last 35 strips or so, if those were the consious reasons dotty ran back onto the protest, she isnt human or even a character, she is a 2 dimensional cardboard cutout of a comic villain frommthe 80s. dorothy goes back in out of guilt over realizong that the morals she professes to have means she should be in the protest, that she needs to be there, to be abused by the cops, be seen as the type of person she actually wants to be. that joyce followed her back in was never even a thought that occurred to her in that moment, you can see it in her face, you can read it in her words in that moment. her brain is “broken” (she is in an extreme hightened overly emotional state that has been bubbling under the surface for months, and nothing she is doing is done with true consious control or actual thought. she is not john cusacking under a window with a boombox, trying to get joyce to love her back, she is seeking to reclaim her purpose and control over her life, while it was dangerous and stupid, it was not “because she was “electing to turn that protest into a grand statement about how unfair your life is because you can’t have the girl you like”. she made a bad decision and that deserces critisism 100% but unless Willis himself comes out and explicitly says she went back in there for that reason i cannot and will never be able to see that in her behavior.
I mean until joyce comes in and kisses her she isnt even fully aware of how deep her romantic feelings towards joyce go.
i am sorry it is breaking my 42year old brain with how many people think a girl with severe ptsd, is overflowing with mind altering hormones and in the middle of an identity crisis can think on a supervillian level of planning and narcissism just go get the girl she has realized only 48 hours ago she has romantic feelings towards to kiss her.
I’m not saying it was some kind of evil fucking plan lmao what
that is precisely what some are saying though, that dotty planned all this to get joyce to kiss her, all throughout the last month of comments people have been calling dotty out saying this is what she planned, that she only went back into the protest to get joyce to comeback in an kiss her.
also i said supervillain levels of planning not that it was an evil plan.
Supervillains are evil though, so the read makes sense.
That’s not what I’m fucking saying though. Jesus Christ.
i have a suspision that some of the comments i read this morning got nuked cause i cannot find the specific ones i had seen, but there has been a lot of comments lately that dotty was plannig to make a grand gesture at the protest to get further into joyce’s heart. to make the protest about her had her feelings and emotions.
really a big thing i’ve been getting as a vibe from a lot of the comments of late is that there are a lot of people who do not want to give dotty or joyce any credit towards them doing things for any reason that isnt to satisfy their narcissism, that there is no way that either of them could have had good intentions going into the protest, that dorothy especially isnt allowed to do something altruistically, that her actions are by desigbn being done to hurt walky or joe. that she only accompannied joyce to tha protest cause it would allow her to make a grand gesture to break joyce away from joe so she wouldnt have to share her (that was one form a few days ago not today)
Nobody thinks that, no matter how badly you need them to.
Yeah, that’s absolutely not what happened.
That is not at all a thing that happened in the comic.
I’m such a fool to write like 6 paragraphs on yesterday’s comic that no one will read. I feel a compulsion to end thar sentence with a lol because I am uncomfortable with the idea that people might not pick up tone but I also don’t like saying lol in comments. So.
tl:dr;
Okay I read it anyway. My response is, Joyce is a complex, changing character, and attempts to pigeonhole her into one trait such as loyalty is doing her a disservice. However, your interpretation as a reader and how it makes you feel is valid, certainly nothing outside the realm of understanding.
Haha, I appreciate everyone reading it. Thanks y’all.
Yeah, like, it’s not impossible that a person who did the previous things and also this thing would exist in real life. People are very complicated. It’s not, like, THAT level of unrealistic where it’s completely unbelievable. It just doesn’t FEEL realistic to me. It pulls me out of the story, you know?
They’re very short paragraphs. Much longer comments occur here every week.
I miss Cerberus’s comments.
Same. I frequently disagreed, but they always gave me something to think about.
While all this romance and cheating and stuff is alien to me (I’m aroace), I just want to respond to one part of that comment: “But THIS part, the weeks afterward of her continuously making the wrong choice over and over while having plenty of time to think about it?” It hasn’t been weeks in-comic. The kiss was yesterday (although I won’t deny it feels a lot longer).
…actually, on second thought, maybe I can offer some speculation from personal experience. I know Joyce doesn’t have the same flavour of autism I do, so this might not be relevant, but… I personally need time alone to think about things because social interaction uses up so much of my focus (I don’t have those handy cognitive shortcuts allistic people do), and that’s without the intense emotions Joyce’s experiencing lately. She’d essentially been with Dorothy almost non-stop since realising her attraction, with the exception of when she went to talk to Joe, so she mightn’t’ve had the free mental capacity to really think through this… until now. And this after Sarah dropped that truth-bomb earlier…
Obviously, I’m only speculating, but I do hope that Joyce’ll be doing some heavy introspection now she’s away from both of the people she’s in love with.
Just to add: I went back and checked before posting this. The one strip in which she wasn’t with either Dorothy or Joe (or travelling between them) was https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/bigsister/ and she was distracted anyway.
Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but there’s still a chance (well, except that the strips are already written, so we can only wait and hope for the fickle mercy of Willis).
Hmm, that’s an interesting take on it. I can see someone acting like this because they haven’t really been able to think yet. I’d be…well, not exactly happy, but I’d be happier if that ends up being what’s happening. Here’s hoping.
Also yeah I know it’s only been a day in-universe, but DoA usually compresses the emotional experiences more than real life does. I was referring to it dragging out for out-of-universe weeks in the comment, though I didn’t make that clear at all.
I went back to read it Fuzzy, and I agree with your take. That’s why this is just annoying to me. Joyce is not behaving like herself, but as she’s performing a role in the new narrative. It’s breaking my suspension of disbelief.
You are definitely OK, really, whether or not anyone read your comments. But looking back – it appears several people did! Thoughtfully contributing to a discussion about literature is a good thing.
And to that, Joyce sometimes does crummy things because she is discovering things about herself – not abstract fact but long-repressed feelings that are a little overwhelming – faster than she can work out what they mean. And because she has absorbed a lot of crummy ideas in her life. Cleaning out that attic is dusty.
I appreciate everyone going back to read it. <3 Made me smile when I checked back just now!
I agree mostly. When Joyce and Dorothy almost kissed listen to music, and Dorothy said they couldn’t because of Walky and Joe, and hurting Joe didn’t register with Joyce for like a whole day, that was too much for me.
It’s not the first time I had a major disconnect with Joyce’s character. Right before “laundry”, Joyce’s insecurity is about other people thinking about her sexuality and judging her, and Dorothy makes a joke at her expense effectively saying she’d been judging her about it the whole time she’s known her, and it just didn’t register for Joyce at all. That was upsetting to me. Now I’m just disinterested in Joyce as a character.
Yes. This. Joyce has been revealed to be too solipsistic and shallow to be interesting.
Omg the whole laundry thing was soooo wildly uncomfortable to me. Both characters acted nothing like I thought they would during that.
Oh, shit, that’s right, Dorothy didn’t know that yet! Welp, have fun with that Dottie. You can actually SEE mom friend activate.
Oh Now we are getting into some Real Drama.
Prediction: All the protestors think Dorothy was a paid agent provocateur meant to turn the protest violent and justify a crackdown.
Prediction – the odds of any one person being noted at a protest are pretty low.
I was at one a few weeks ago where organizers had scrupulously focused on nonviolence, including protocol for what to do if anyone became violent. Sure enough, someone strutted across the street to counter-protesters and stole a Confederate flag, exchanging words with the owner of the truck.
We all definitely noted him but it happened too fast for the yellow vests to get there. Suffice to say Confederate-boy didn’t take it well.
My heart does NOT bleed for Confederate boy. Welcome to the Second Civil War.
The point isn’t that we should care about Confederate boy, the point is that if the organizers are focused on nonviolence, protestors need to work with that, not start shit.
Exactly right. Confederate Boy has been spotted harassing people he thinks were protesters. Escalating violence. I hope he cools off before somebody gets hurt.
I doubt it since she had her big outburst while the whole thing was already turning violent and she didn’t actually do anything to provoke the cops except refuse to leave.
Nah. It’s Amazi-Girl. Though they’ll probably think something more like black bloc than paid provocateur. (Mind you the black bloc have their uses. There are times and places for street fighting, but I doubt the organizers here thought this was one of them.)
someone selling her their sign during the evacuation was fucking weird. how did that person not have any of those suspicions about her.
it is incredibly easy, they are trying to get out with out getting arrested or assaulted, someone came up and gave them money making it even less likely they get harmed. maybe a day or 2 later they might have suspisions, but the oppressors were already oppressing, and if as we all are clamouring for their kiss is the front page of the newspaper then they have even less reason to.
Probably because that’s not a thing that happened.
gotcha, misremembered. tent, not sign. Even weirder tbh.
Not sure why anyone would think that since the only people who did anything to turn the protest violent were the police.
….Dina, reading stuff in the dark is bad for your eyes
Presumably the phone screen is bright.
How? How is that supposed to work?
It makes your brain work harder at interpreting what you see. But the eyes?
Reading _off_paper_ in dim light causes eye strain. It’s a bit different with an illuminated screen.
My mother used to tell me this so many times, so I looked it up. Turns out it’s not true.
Searched again just now to get a source, and here’s just one of many:
https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/2021/11/can-reading-low-light-harm-your-eyes-top-10-eye-health-myths-debunked
Apparently, it can cause temporary eyestrain due to the increased difficulty, but this doesn’t result in lasting harm.
https://www.neivision.com/blog/can-you-read-in-the-dark.html
Just speculating here, actually… so much of the body is somewhat “use it or lose it” (no sense spending calories maintaining something that’s not needed, after all (our bodies haven’t evolved to take into account the excessive calories we have access to lately)), which is why people in microgravity need to exercise to keep from losing the basic muscles we use just standing in our gravity well… so… it’s not impossible that reading in the dark actually helps retain your ability to do so? I know I’ve better nightvision than my less nerdy family members.
Dear God… the Ninja Turtles Easter Special lied to me! (Yes, that really is the first time I heard this claim.)
Not everything is about you, Dorothy.
She is being very tiresome and self centred.
She is, but people and especially teenagers be like that sometimes. Extra especially during mental health crisis. I think she will realize it and course correct.
Yup. Part of growing up is realizing and internalizing that not everyone is constantly (positively or negatively) thinking about YOU.
Are you seriously talking about miss “I want to fix the world for everyone” Dotty?
Of course she is being self-centred right now. She has a massive secret and a crisis on her hands, of course she is fixating on that.
Yes I am. Her ”fix the world” shtick was a form of narcissism. She thought she alone can fix everything.
This like saying people with anxiety are narcissists because they “think everyone is always looking at them”, it’s a stretch and ridiculously uncharitable.
Even if we accept your framing that she thinks she alone can fix everything, delusions of grandeur are not generally a symptom of narcissism, which is characterized by “expecting others to treat you as though you are amazing” rather than “actually believing in an inflated version of your own capabilities”.
In any case, it’s clear that Dorothy is almost the opposite! Quite often when she comes close to achieving something she’s claimed to have wanted or worked for, she finds a reason to sabotage herself–most notably in her acceptance to Yale.
Arguably her inept dancing around the issue of “talking to the boyfriends”, which she herself keeps setting as a prerequisite for continuing to engage romantically with Joyce, is another manifestation of this.
Regardless, she’s no narcissist.
Grandiose narcissism
Narcissistic grandiosity is thought to arise from a combination of the antagonistic core with temperamental boldness—defined by positive emotionality, social dominance, reward-seeking and risk-taking. Grandiosity is defined—in addition to antagonism—by a confident, exhibitionistic and manipulative self-regulatory style:[29]
High self-esteem and a clear sense of uniqueness and superiority, with fantasies of success and power, and lofty ambitions.
Social potency, marked by exhibitionistic, authoritative, charismatic and self-promoting interpersonal behaviors.
Exploitative, self-serving relational dynamics; short-term relationship transactions defined by manipulation and privileging of personal gain over other benefits of socialization.
it is absolutely a simptom of narcissism to believe only you can solve everybodies problems, cause only “you” are good enough/are right enough to fix it
Hey, folks, I have friends with NPD, it is not “character I don’t like disease”.
@embe you know using “narcissist” as just a way one describe a egoistical person without knowing about the condition is fine i think. What you doing here though? Really fucking weird.
@Li, same!
@Embe13, as I said, it’s not GENERALLY a symptom of classical narcissism, per the DSM-V, and furthermore literally everything else about Dorothy pretty much rules it out. I mean, hell, “high self-esteem” is not a thing Dorothy has EVER suffered from — at her BEST she thought President Dorothy might be POSSIBLE if she busted her ass to get into Yale, correctly attributing the chances to a hell of a lot of work rather than native ability.
@Big Z: high-five. Also, agreed. Dorothy just plain does not like herself very much at all.
all good that you have those in your llives that are good folk. the above is pulled strainght from wiki. and unfortunately i have been the victim of Multiple narcicists through out my life. and please i get that it is used as a catch all for people you dont like stereotyping, but these are realizations made through therapy, where therapist stated the bhavoir was narcisistic.
Therapists should know better than to diagnose people they’re not treating.
In my experience they often don’t, but they should.
Abusers don’t tend to have personality disorders, or any other type of mental illness. They tend to be very adept at controlling all of their behavior, and they reserve their poor treatment for their victims.
An abuser who truly had a personality disorder that made the behavior seem responsible would be doing it to everyone all the time, to everyone, not only to the vulnerable.
Signed: I have also been abused. I had a therapist try to tell me it sounded like she had BPD, because that was the trendy “bad person” diagnosis of the time. I pushed back on it. She didn’t have BPD or NPD, she was just an abusive asshole.
I mean, I’ve even had some sympathy to people using the term since the colloquial use of “narcissist” to describe “destructively self-centered/self-aggrandizing” has been around centuries longer than the formal diagnosis of NPD.
That said, now that it IS a diagnosis, I highly recommend being clear about whether you’re being colloquial or psychiatric, or better yet just using “abusively self-centered” etc.
In her defense, last time she heard Amazi-Girl seemed to have gotten away fine.
Gods, Dorothy can’t win either way, can she? Either she sucks because it’s her fault Amazi-Girl got hurt, or she sucks for making Amazi-Girl getting hurt about herself. *shakes head*
It’s honestly just sounds like wanting to justify what they already think about her, making sounds more rational that it actually is.
It’s honestly driving me up the wall — I have never much liked Dorothy as a character, and yet I’m defending her half the places I mention her in this thread because the hate is so unhinged.
Sometimes you ended defending something you don’t care for because those who haye it are off their fucking minds.
Internet weirdos make strange bedfellows??? In this case, you + “defending Dorothy”.
Hello Dorothy, World calling.
Humbling moment. Has “I worried that I had no shoes till I met a man with no feet,” vibes.
“Once I wept for I had no shoes. Then I met a man with no feet, so I took his shoes. I mean, it wasn’t as if he was going to need them.” Attributed to Stephen Hawking, but I can’t confirm that.
Please forgive the bad joke. Lots of people being too serious around here.
🙂
Wait until the man with no feet meets a man with no legs. Remember kids, only the one person in the world who has it the worst is ever allowed to feel bad about it! That’s what the trauma Olympics is all about!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/04-is-a-song-forever/opaque/
Best time to attempt the murder of a loose end is during a riot, but don’t use your service revolver.
the tone pivots
I see we’re having another normal one here. Sheesh, I used to think I was pretty high up on the scale of Dorothy-dislike, and even *I* don’t think she has anything to do with Amazi-Girl’s protest injuries.
I bet SHE thinks she does, but her particular traumas and need for therapy are like that.
Quit stalling and go tell Joe and Walky, you’ll feel better if you rip the band-aid off, damnit.
Dorothy having another Toedad abduction flashback
This is why I think she’s one of the characters who gets it the worst, yeah.
Everyone’s got their dedicated haters! Walky has a couple. And it’s been a while since the last big anti-Sal or anti-Becky incident.
Booster is higher up the list, tho, in terms of “characters who can turn the comment section into a dumpster fire just by appearing for a couple of days”.
Trying and failing to think of a good example among the male characters. Maybe early Danny.
Ruth and Billie in general were a pretty volatile topic for a long while as I recall
Oh for sure! Plenty of folks I didn’t mention. Like Lucy. No one’s gotten as much hate for doing as little as Lucy.
But I was trying to think of guys specifically. 🤔
Mike, maybe?
It would be extremely on-brand for straight cis male white etc characters if they had to be as bad as Mike in order to get as much hate as Lucy.
truuue
To be fair, there’s only three straight cis male white characters in the cast page, and the other two are Tony (who has barely shown up) and Jason, who got plenty of hate himself.
I see you aren’t counting Joe! That’s fair, but most commenters forget he’s Jewish, so I don’t think that’s really a factor in how they treat him.
It’s so weird to think anyone could hate Lucy, when she’s just generally nice, if a little desperate.
Ah but you see the niceness is all a ploy! She’s hiding her true evil.
No really at least one person was earnestly arguing that she’s extremely manipulative.
You know that yoi mention it i haven’t seen black Adam in here for a while, which is a really good thinh.
Which is really weird, because I can’t think of any good reasons off the top of my head to even dislike her particularly. She’s just kinda an ordinary non-white non-male person who is willing to stand up for herself … ah.
Yep.
Danny was definitely a hatesink early on, basically until he realized he was bi.
He was! I added a note about “early Danny maybe” at one point. I think it was largely a reaction to his Walkyverse self for a long time. But yeah, coming out as bi was part of a general era of him coming more into his own, and it’s been great.
He and Sal are super wholesome together.
We’ve also got our one or two quixotic Joe-haters running around since this storyline turned into a Coen-style farce about not quite telling him and Walky.
Fair!
The Dorothy Is A Pefect Angel cops like to pretend anyone who thinks Dorothy has flaws is a Dorothy hater, when her flaws and fuckups are what make her such a great character.
Don’t you hate it when you realize you’re not the protagonist of the story?
If I wasn’t the actual protagonist of the Universe, I imagine I would hate it, but thankfully I don’t have to worry about that.
Cool. Can you tell us bit part players what it’s like? What genre are we in?
Just spoke with the writers, their response was “pitch-black comedy with surrealist and tragic elements.”
Sounds about right.
But…she is the protagonist? Or at least one of them? I mean, she’s listed second on the cast page.
Joyce is the protagonist, everyone else is ensemble.
It is kind of sobering to see so many strong opinions, makes my bullshit seem less aggregious. 🤗
Guess I should say something about the comic since it’s why we’re all here. Uhhh, I do actually legit wonder how much Dina knows? Her expression reads as being confused or off put by the question but I have to assume it’s because it seemed tactless rather it having anything to do with Dorothy being at the protest. This moment seems ripe for misunderstandings but man we have enough of those.
I was thinking it was Dina strongly preferring directness and Dorothy’s beating around the bush.
Yeah Dina just doesn’t have time for Dorothy’s weird cagey bullshit.
I’m not autistic myself but have an autistic friend, and this take that Dina could just just be exasperated by Dorothy not getting to the point really resonates. From both sides.
now this may be a controversial veiw, but having just reread the the protest, I have reinforced my opinion that the main thought going through dotties head when she goes back in is to be an irritant so others can get out, so others can get away.
whatever may have been going on subconsciously may be there, but we are only ever aware of.001% of what our subconsious thinks and does, we the reader can specualte and infer based on how we have experienced life ourselves but if anyone here claims tobe aware of everything thir subconsious thinks, they are unfortunately wrong, 99.9999999999999999999999999999% of what goes on in our subconcious is the operation of our meatsac, breathing pumping our heart, operating the various valves throughout our organs, but to say we are able and in realtime to monitor and be aware of our subconsious is false and creates a falsehood where some feel insulted or unfairly judged for not being able to.
I think the protestors getting away was not on her mind. Instead, it was about getting away from her feels for Dorothy.
sorry, any escaping her feels to me is very buried in the subconsious, you can see her deciding that she needs to go back, and do something, she is feeling that she should have been there from the getgo and that for her moral compass she needs to grab a sign and try to help others the she feels joyce does when she gets angry. its written across her face for me. any thoughts that are about running from her feelings to me are so buried in her subconsious it would take a diamond tipped drill 25 years of nonstop drilling to get to them
A thing that’s not been commented on: Dina reacts to Dorothy with annoyance and disdain. Something that she rarely reacts to people with.
She does NOT like Dorothy.
Interesting.
Someone above mentioned Dina’s preference for directness not meshing well with Dorothy’s beating-around-the-bush, which explains today at least.
I was wondering if she knows, or at least strongly suspects… Dina was definitely on my shortlist of people I thought would be upset specifically on Joe’s behalf, rather than just like “generic dislike of cheating”.
“Yes, while you were experiencing wholesome yuri, she was experiencing violent yuri.”
Do we know if Joyce’s sis made it out okay? A transwoman is doubly a target at a protest, tragically.
Yes, Her local friend reported her safe.
David is getting very good at lighting
Dot checking on all her gay thoughts before she can get her thoughts straight
(yes i stole this from my girlfriend, i said it first anyways she’s just better at english than i am, im actively typing this while she’s racing to find this strip to type it first the bastard)
Actually I was just racing to tell people you’re a filthy plagiarist, but good to see you admitted to the crime yourself
bastard