Chandra is a 12-year-old accidental time traveler with a reluctant new dad, who happens to be a member of a feared galactic crime syndicate.
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The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
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This comic is about a robot powered by bees, but it's also about the kind of people who think filling a robot with bees is a good idea, and why they're wrong.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
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After a case of mistaken identity, will awkward Daisuke find help from excitable Mamo, or will his love life be thrown completely off track?
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Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Fantomestein
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Desperate for companionship, Frankenstein's Monster pretends to be the Opera Ghost. A grave mistake.
Paint the Town Red
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Slightly Damned
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Countdown to Countdown
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Iris Black is a self-proclaimed inventor with the curious ability to bring his drawings to life, and yearns to find a space where he can use his powers freely.
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Dorothy sowing: Temporary fun-time no-frills relationship go! It’s got to be this way, I gotta fix this broken country. Everything will be fine! No regrets!
Dorothy reaping: This fucking sucks. What the fuck.
Taking kickboxing lessons/channeling it into something physical/sporty-ness might be more appealing to some future voters overall as opposed to “some white nerd who went to an ivy league school”
Bad advice, but not on purpose. She’s not in the headspace to think about this rationally. She wants to tell him to breakup, for selfish reasons, so she extrapolated that the selfless thing would be to tell him to do the opposite.
There is no good advice here. She hasn’t learned that the only thing you can do in relationship questions is to let them make their own decisions. But it took me 3 years of college to come to that realization.
And that blows up and they break up and you get blamed. It might have been right for them to break up or it might not have been. But it should never be for you to decide, only them.
Or it could turn out well, but again it’s best if that’s what they decide to do.
I got much better at asking questions and getting them to think out the possible futures with experience. Though people who came to me for advice always chose me because they wanted a sure answer and not just a listener because I was the “fixer” in our friend group. So they left maybe more unsatisfied than if I just gave them bad advice. But not angry at me when my advice went wrong.
It probably helps that I’m just weighing in, so that they can have courage to express themselves, I’m not giving legally binding arbitration. it ultimately was indeed their choice whether to ask each other, or whether to sit on their feelings and stress out and waste their time wondering… when they could literally ask the person and find out what was up.
If they had to break up to get what they really wanted, okay. More likely they could work through it, though, as long as they didn’t let it fester for months until it exploded.
The most common reason I gave this advice was that both S.O.’s were coming to me with the exact same issue, because my 2nd Most Indirect Person I’d Ever Met was dating my #1 Most Indirect Person I’d Ever Met… in which case, oh my gosh those two should really just talk to each other already.
Like it or not, there’s no real good options here for Walky. It’s impossible to tell someone you’re dating, “I don’t love you” after they believe you do, that isn’t going to blow up the relationship–which is clearly a bridge Walky isn’t willing to cross.
Dorothy’s advice here is about as good as anything else he could do. If he does develop feelings for Lucy, it’s no harm, no foul; if he doesn’t, then the relationship will come to a close in due course.
Mind you, personally I think that about 90% of the cast should be on a dating moratorium, as none of them are really as ready for it as they think they are. But it’s called Dumbing of Age, not Spontaneous Maturation, so we really should cut just about all of them some slack.
That’s not true at all. They’ve been dating about a week maybe two weeks at max. Lucy said she loved him too early. Saying he doesn’t love her should not destroy a relationship this young. If it does, than Lucy is not the right person for Walky. Frankly I would be very wary of dating Lucy in general if she expected a emotional commitment like that after a week. She misinterpreted what Walky said and deserves to be corrected on that. It might even be good for her since she’s so inexperienced with romance to learn you can put too much pressure on your partner by being so invested so early.
People seem to think Lucy is some mentally fragile girl who will be devastated her boyfriend doesn’t love her after dating for less time than it takes to get a driver’s listener. I say she’s a big girl who can take a bit of rejection. Things just moved a bit too fast, Walky’s not leaving her at the alter her.
I don’t think a dating moratorium would actually help with that. Behaving in a healthy manner in a relationship is a skill, and like any skill you need to screw up a bunch to get good at it. Also, speaking from experience, the older you get the harder it is to find people willing to put up with being your first relationship. People expect you to make most of the early mistakes in high school and college, so it can be hard to find someone patient enough to try things if you have little to no experience after that point. It also gets harder to meet people in general, which sucks.
Speaking as someone who didn’t date at all until 23 and hasn’t managed to date anyone since, I would never recommend waiting to anybody. Like, don’t rush into things and be prepared to get hurt, but also relationships will come when they come, so waiting until you’re ready doesn’t really help. Just treat people with as much respect as possible and don’t tolerate being disrespected in a relationship and you’ll be fine, whether you’re emotionally mature or not. Make mistakes, improve, find what works and what doesn’t, discover what you actually want, etc.
If compensated dating were legal where I live, I’d consider putting up with it. Otherwise I just feel exploited by that dynamic and exhausted from explaining how relationships work all the time.
I don’t think people should wait for the sake of waiting (or because there’s some idea that you need to improve yourself before/that “you can’t love someone until you love yourself” shit). A lot of our learning and growth happens in relationships. But by that, I don’t mean “romantic relationships,” but relationships in general, of which romantic relationships are a subset.
I don’t think you need to have been in romantic relationships previously to develop your relationship skills.
I do agree that is is often harder to meet new people as you get older, though.
I would say Leorale has the right of it. Your feelings are valid; tell the other person. He doesn’t have to say “I don’t love you”, but rather “I’m not actually ready to call this love yet. I do care about you a lot and want this to continue, but I don’t want to use that word lightly and I’m not there yet.”
Y’know, being honest and emotionally available to your partner. Weird, right?
Is it possible this will still hurt Lucy? Yep. But she is a big girl and she gets to decide if this is a dealbreaker for her or not.
There’s a long distance between giving advice and making decisions for people. You can help them figure out what they want, think about how to approach it and warn about potential consequences.
“You’ll be at that point eventually anyway” is awful advice – there’s no teleology to relationships – but it’s not sabotage. *Of course* Dorothy genuinely believes you can just graph out how a relationship is going to progress in advance; she puts her interpersonal relationships into thoroughly annotated spreadsheets.
(Also, she’s a college freshman; ambitious and driven though she may be, she still hasn’t had the kinds of experiences that would teach her why it’s bad advice. Or, at least, the distance needed to reflect on those experiences.)
That’s an aspect I hadn’t considered. Though not even quite that she can graph it out in advance, but a reaction to her feelings for Walky, where she’d intended to keep it casual but fell in love with him. If she couldn’t stop it, how can he?
And while I’m sure it’s not intentional sabotage, her feelings for him are certainly messing with her objectivity here.
Can someone please explain this to me like I’m five because I literally don’t understand why this is bad advice. It honestly seems logical to me, and way better than “haw haw I don’t actually love you”
Lack of honesty. Dorothy is proposing that since Walky does at least care about Lucy’s feelings that even though he doesn’t love her or feel as strongly for her as she does him, he should just wait and eventually he will reciprocate her feelings. The problem is that’s not guaranteed, and letting Lucy believe he loves her in the meantime is a dishonest misrepresentation of his emotions. Lucy deserves to know what Walky feels about her, because she deserves to move forward in the relationship based on truth. Even Walky recognizes this. Dorothy’s advice is well meaning in intent, but it feels almost naive like wishful thinking.
Dorothy’s advice essentially boils down to “ignore it, it’ll be fine” when ignoring an issue rather than communicating with one’s partner is categorically not good, especially when it’s banking on stronger feelings eventually developing when a) they might not and b) stronger feelings already exist but for another person
It’s bad advice because a) it’s dishonest, lying by omission about his feelings, thereby making Lucy believe something that isn’t true. This would be fine if he was certainly going to fall in love for real with her shortly, however b) it’s likely to backfire, because it’s not guaranteed at all, and if he doesn’t end up reciprocating her feelings the end result would be all the worse for lying to her about it, however unintentionally.
The better course of action would be to have an honest discussion, and tell her “Hey, I don’t actually love you… yet. But I do like you and want to see if those feelings develop.” Then both of them could make an informed decision about the realities of the relationship and go forward with it honestly, if they so chose.
I’d like to add that I think the framing of “Walky loving her is the important part” doesn’t especially help. Regardless of whether he does, doesn’t, wants to wait and see, whatever, the inciting thing behind all this was Lucy thinking he said he did. That’s the misunderstanding that needs cleared up first and foremost, in my own opinion, and any conversation of “does he or doesn’t he” ought to come afterward.
I don’t see why. She isn’t wrong, from where I’m sitting. Walky hasn’t said he doesn’t love Lucy, only that it’s a little premature and she misunderstood him. But enough people seem weirded out that I think I’ve gotta be missing something on this. Help?
Thanks! At least I’m not alone, lol. My partner of fifteen years doesn’t get it, either. Honestly the only way I see this leading to drama is if Walky is later like “I love you! Haha, and I even mean it this time :)” But…that’s actions. Emotionally, this advice makes sense to me. *shrugs back, fistbumps*
The way I see it there is almost no way to explain to Lucy that he didn’t mean to say he loved her without hurting her some, whereas in reality the chance that Walky not saying anything now would change the course of the relationship is pretty slim. Of course sitcom logic would be that this will 100% come back to bite Walky in the butt, but the characters don’t know that they are characters in a comic strip and Dorothy in particular shouldn’t be using sitcom logic to try to solve real problems.
To me, it feels like she’s telling walky to ignore the issue and to bank on developing deeper feelings later down the line, which just doesn’t strike me as something that will set him up for success in the end. If he doesn’t end up developing those feelings (and tbh I don’t think he’s going to), especially when the smartest and most perfect girl in the world to him (that he TOTALLY doesn’t still have feelings for /s) said he would, I suspect he’ll eventually internalize it as him being unfair to Lucy or a categorically bad boyfriend or whatever internal dialogue his self-loathing will concoct to justify itself.
Or, optimistically, he’ll come to the realization himself that he needs to be honest with his feelings and fumble his way through an awkward conversation.
Ah, that’s fair. I would actually take this conversation as evidence that he is already developing romantic feelings for Lucy, simply because of how much he seems to want to handle this in a way that is not stomping on her feelings (it seems he prioritizes/values her feelings more than his own discomfort; that seems significant). But the comic overall seems like it could end up going either way, so it’s entirely likely that I’m misreading that. It could also simply be Walky having grown enough to realize that he should be sensitive to other people’s feelings? It’d be the first sign of him acting on that awareness, though. I guess we’ll find out!
Walky doesn’t know what to do and he trusts Dorothy’s judgment AND this gets him out of having a difficult conversation. That doesn’t mean it supports this being good advice.
It seems like incredibly short-sighted advice to me. All it does is give Walky a chance to kick it down the road. But what happens the next time Lucy says “I love you” out of the blue? As you do in a relationship where you love your companion? He’s instantly faced with a choice again that puts him right back in the position of responding in kind (a/k/a lying) or avoiding it somehow. He might get away with that once or twice but she’s going to catch on eventually and it’s likely going to go much worse than having an awkward conversation now.
Plus right after the “I love you too” conversation, she strongly suggested having sex. While she’s at least been tempted by the idea before, it’s very likely the idea that they’re now officially “in love” played a role in being willing to go that far.
Going ahead with that under false pretenses seems a bad idea. Not doing so will also raise questions.
Hopefully the questions raised by not wanting to bang yet won’t be anything more serious than “Oh, are you not ready? Will you let me know when you are, so we can report to the ship?”.
i guess some ppl might be blinded by love/it isn’t always realistic but even if she’s rly into walky i’m surprised she hasn’t watched enough romcom/drama movies/series to where saying those words within the week of a relationship (unless you’ve been close friends for years prior dating) would be a ‘red flag’
I suppose maybe less so at their age tho if i were dating like a 40 year old and they said after two dates that i’d prolly run
So best case scenario, Walky does end up loving her and this doesn’t have to come up again. It’s still not great because he was not honest with his partner about a point of confusion, nor did he feel entirely comfortable talking with her about it openly. Not a bad result, but ignoring something that makes you uncomfortable isn’t a real W either.
But what happens next time Lucy tells Walky that she loves him? Especially if he hasn’t fully sorted out his feelings for her yet? Does he just say that he loves her to make her happy?
This is only good advice if everything works out. If Walky doesn’t decide he loves her by the next time she says it, or ends up feeling like this relationship isn’t for him, then it’s a whole situation that could have been ameliorated by honest communication.
Agreed. I feel like he always liked Lucy well enough, and they do have common interests and all, but that’s about the extent of it. He was pleasant to her because he’s generally a pleasant person, if sometimes a bit thoughtless in his speech. He seemed shocked when Dorothy pointed out Lucy’s feelings, and then every interaction since then has seemed like Walky showing up and deciding this is going well enough. I don’t think he has strong feelings for Lucy, and I don’t think it’s a good gamble to assume he’ll get there, especially on a timetable that seems likely to work for someone as intense as Lucy.
i mean, slightly better than walky saying “i actually don’t love you” or so/blurting it out in a not so coherent way, or maybe there can be a diff convo down the line, or him avoid saying it, or maybe even trying to take things slower if lucy wants to sleep with him, though who knows maybe walky will get a second opinion
She did, yeah, and who else can he ask? Jennifer is definitely not the person to talk to about this since it may get back to Lucy, and he doesn’t really know a lot of people that would have input on this. Besides, Dorothy knows Walky better than anyone else at school does outside of Sal or Jennifer, and I dunno if he is at a comfort level to talk to Sal about this kind of thing with yet. Their relationship is improving, but that’s still a lot of vulnerability.
He could ask… Uh…. Well, um… *looks over the cast page* No, dear god no, no, hilarious but no, no, no, no…. Hnn…… Booster? I guess Booster? Next best I got is Jason and then it goes even more downhill.
(Actually I low-key would like to see him go to Danny about this. “I’ve walked a mile in your shoes, I’ve boinked both your ex-girlfriends, and you’re dating my twin sister. This makes us bros. Give me relationship advice.”)
I think it depends on how that relationship with said ex ended. I used to talk with my first ex about some of my relationship issues and got some great advice as she knew me very well. We didn’t end on a bad note though and remained friends afterwards.
Pretty sure Dorothy is the one who told him to kick rocks, so if anything Walky has no reason to think she’d be more broken up about this than he is. Plus they seem to be on friendly enough terms. It seems pretty reasonable to ask someone you’ve been romantically involved with about romance stuff.
While I don’t disagree that going to a romantic-partner-turned-friend is as good an idea as any, I think the implication that the person doing the breaking up is unlikely to be upset is pretty unrealistic.
A relationship falling apart can hurt everyone involved. Just because one person has to be the one to initiate the break-up doesn’t mean they don’t have hurt feelings, lingering love, or grief over the loss of what could have been. It also doesn’t mean that the person who got broken up with should be treating them as if they don’t have those feelings.
Especially when the break up was over practical things (I don’t have time) rather than not wanting the relationship any more. I don’t think Walky has any clue that Dorothy’s still hung up on him though.
I told you once, I told you twi~ice
But you never listen to my advi~ice
You don’t try very hard to please me
With what you know it should be easy
Well, this could be The Last Time
This could be The Last Time
Maybe The Last Time–I don’t kno~ow…oh no, oh no
Does any one know how to get the account we use for this comment board to work on another computer or browser? All the hive work websites are keeping breaking for me on my main computer’s chrome browser for some reason. I tried putting in the Name and email using Microsoft Edge but it just thought I was a new account.
Dorothy really put the “dumb” in Dumbing of Age, with this one. It was dumb to breakup with Walky when she didn’t want to and even dumber to literally serve him up to another woman to take him off the table. Dorothy’s gotta hold this L
I think she thinks so, because in the last panel she only shit talks herself for wanting to punch a wall (rather than “Pragmatic and cool-headed people don’t punch walls… or lie out of jealousy” or something)
Dorothy once again reminding us she’s as young and fallible as any of these yahoos. That is terrible advice! You’re only giving it because you assume that doing the difficult thing must be the correct thing! You poor dear.
I dunno. “You’ll learn to love him over time.” “You’ll grow to love each other.” That’s advice that elders have dispensed to the younger generation since civilizations began. Sure, the advice refers to a totally different social context (arranged marriage) than these two are in (casual dating), but sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. So I’m putting that firmly in the “Eh.” (Shrug) “Meh.” category.
About as good a piece of advice as telling him to flip a coin.
…I’m just trying to remember what it felt like to be young and in love. From what I can recall, it was all intensely painful and full of drama. If I could have skipped all that and skipped straight to a “comfy armchair” type of long-term love, perhaps short on passion but long on affection and care, anyway, I think I probably would have. Infatuation is overrated.
I’ve always been fond of the philosophy that it’s not too much to ask for both. It’s delightful that my partner still wants to woo me long after I’ve successfully been wooed. We’re well into the comfy stage, but even after a decade I still get butterflies when she walks into the room.
(of course other kinds of relationships are valid too, I only mean to share my own experience)
It’s bad advice because it’s explicitly saying “Even if you’re not there yet, it’s not worth it to tell her that”. It’s cutting off any chance at mature communication.
I suppose that makes sense? I dunno. If you see yourself getting there in the near future, though, it may not be worth it to tell her that; it’d depend on the couple. It’s literally just “another week and I’d be cool with it? sure, I can roll with this. not worth hurting/worrying the partner I care about until I’m sure I need to.” If he’s going to an outside party, then he isn’t sure he needs to worry Lucy about it. I would not say it’s cutting off any chance at mature communication, to me it’s just…..”hey does this categorically Need To Be A Thing? No? cool, I’ll go with it for now.”
I think we as the audience think it’s bad advice because we’ve seen a lot of Walky/Lucy and he has given no indication of wanting a serious romantic relationship with her. So there’s not really any reason to think he’s ever gonna be in love with her.
It wasn’t the point at all. Not for Walky; not for Dorothy.
I disagree that it’s cutting off cutting off any chance at mature communication. There was zero chance Walky was going to have a mature communication about feelings to start with.
Walky successfully reminded Dorothy that she cares about him. It almost certainly wasn’t what he meant to do, but he was successful anyway.
Oh Dorothy, you need to think of yourself sometimes and put some of the anxiety behind you. Which is something Walky seemed to but her with, until she panicked.
I’m not saying she should try and win Walky back or anything. However, she could take time to do something for her mental health. As long as it doesn’t involve networking, politics, or school.
Additionally while it is not necessary to have a relationship to be happy, it can help. If you find a partner you can vent to, get advice/help from, seek comfort and do the same for them, then you can build a beautiful relationship together.
And if you are asexual or simply not interested in dating someone, try to find a friend who can help with some of it.
Anyone have anything to add to this and/or correct me?
Not sure if my initial comment went through due to general confusion over how links work in Akismet, but yeah I have a theory that Dorothy’s current therapist might not be a good fit for her at the moment, considering that the only piece of in-story advice we’ve seen Dotty apply in her everyday life was to “Reconstrue upsetting tragedies (being kidnapped and watching her close friend get taken away by a van by a violent criminal) as victories in personal growth”
Dorothy’s advice is good from her point of view. If Walky stays the course, that means Dororthy can’t have him anymore. …So yeah this is bad for everyone long term.
It’s a wash for Lucy, because she was eventually going to have her heart broken anyway. Either Walky winds up back with Dorothy or he meets someone else he actually has chemistry with.
Her motiviation qas honestly much more respectful than that. She was in a position to sexually use him but when she realized that there was the chance of him getting into an actual relationship with someone who cared for him, she chose to help him realize that instead of going to pound town.
I understand that feelings are complex things and all… but Dorothy broke up with him. She chose to be rid of that relationship, and NOW that he’s taken with someone else, she’s feeling frustration and loss? That just don’t sit right with me… but that’s just my projection.
As I said above in more detail – Choosing to break up with someone doesn’t mean you don’t have feelings about it. The person who breaks up with someone is allowed grief, hurt, and frustration because they lost the possibility of a good relationship with someone they cared about.
There are far too many people in the comments of this comic who don’t grasp the idea that two things can be true. Here: Dorothy misses Walky, but also Dorothy does not want to be in a relationship with Walky for her own reasons.
Exactly. She made a hard choice to prioritize her academia over a relationship at this point in time. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t a sacrifice. And she’s not doing anything inappropriate in interacting with him (except perhaps giving bad advice, but she seems to think it is good advice).
Having goals is good. Having long term goals is good. There is nothing wrong with having ambitious long term goals that are difficult and have low odds of success, as long as there is a back-up plan. But the thing is, you actually have to have a worthwhile life while your pursuing those goals.
Dorothy runs the risk of spending her life pursuing those goals, sacrificing everything to reach them but never quite completely reaching them, and then wondering what it was all for. Or even worse, reaching her goals and then wondering what it was all for.
The idea that Dorothy is somehow wrong for prioritizing her goals over a relationship is wild to me.
She’s in the phase of her life where the most opportunities and the most tumultuous change takes place. She has LOFTY goals, and if you want something like that then sacrifices are a necessary part of it. I’m not saying the lady couldn’t use a hobby, but the idea that she might achieve her goals and not be living a worthwhile life is nonsense.
If she achieves her goals, she will literally be the President of the US. She’ll be in a position to affect real world changes on a huge scale, and you’re suggesting she might get there and be sad because she didn’t more heavily prioritize banging?
It’s a weird take that seems based in the assumption that regret is exclusive to those who take one path. I do agree that one should seek to have a good present as well as a good future, but that doesn’t have to look like a romantic relationship.
I dislike it because it’s such a common trope. “Ambitious women have to give up everything else.”
In reality, the idea that romance is a distraction from real important goals is bullshit. Good partners support you and help you, they don’t hold you back. Powerful women (and men) in politics are very likely to be married and even have children.
I think the thing here that made it not a great relationship was that she viewed Walky as a fixer upper. That never ends well IRL. I do think she could have a relationship that’s compatible with her goals but it would have to be a more equal relationship.
I guess that’s a trope, but how I see it more is that “Ambitious women gives up other things for ambitions (prioritizes what she feels is important), and that’s bad, and the lesson is don’t do that.”
I stand by my point that sacrificing everything for a far from certain tomorrow which you may well not like should it arrive is generally not a good move. This is not to denigrate having goals and ambitions. While Dorothy is undeniably a woman, the comment is general. The point is to maybe be cautious about sacrificing things that are important to you for ambition.
In this specific case, was Walky all that important to her? I’m not sure that Dorothy knows. He wasn’t supposed to be, but here we are threatening innocent walls.
I do think Walky was important to her; I do not think he was “everything.” Questioning it as part of a pattern is valid, and also it’s not wrong to give up one thing that’s important to you for another thing you deem more important.
I don’t think all of this was really directed at you, Clif, by the way. The gender stuff was brought up by thejeff, and this conversation in general is ongoing. I do think it’s possible to both regret singularly focusing on a long-term goal and to regret not doing more to work toward your goal.
That is how the trope often plays out, but I don’t think the lesson of “therefore giving up everything else for those ambitions is good” is a good one either. It still plays to the idea that women do have to give up everything to achieve.
I don’t think Dorothy’s approach so far is supposed to be the right one. I don’t think the clues in the comic point that way. I’m actually glad we’ve been revisiting Dorothy’s feelings about Walky. I’d felt that for quite a while that seemed to have been resolved as “She broke up with Walky. Easily caught up on her work. Everything’s better now.”
It would be one thing if Walky hadn’t been supportive or had been trying to get her to drop her ambitions for him in one way or another. Very different case. But he wasn’t. It was just a time management thing.
I don’t see that it’s a risk at all for Dorothy; she has never seemed to me self serving in her desires. The character I’ve seen doesn’t desire the presidency arbitrarily, but because she wants to improve the systems that govern the others’ lives, and whatever regrets may litter the way to her goals, I can’t see realizing the ability to actually improve those systems being one of them. What she wants really is worthwhile, and for some individuals, striving for worthwhile, let alone accomplishing it, truly is fulfilling.
Beyond that, if I’m not misremembering, she isn’t transferring schools despite an acceptance elsewhere, implying that she’s found bonds here which matter to her. In conjunction with her running, the therapy she undertakes, I’m inclined to believe that she’s searching for balance.
For me the point isn’t whether she might have regrets in the future, I was responding to the idea of whether she is “allowed” to have feelings about a break up even if she made the call to end the relationship. And my stance is of course she is. It doesn’t really matter if her choice leads her to happiness or not – no one can predict the future, and she’s making what she thinks is the right choice at this point in her life.
Also, if it were the ex-boyfriend using this type of logic on her (“You are going to regret breaking up with me when you’re lonely and haven’t achieved any of your goals some day”) …we would call that very unhealthy and manipulative.
Dorothy dearest, you have only yourself to blame for this. You decided that there could be nothing in your life other than schoolwork, so you broke up with a boy you lived when you didn’t want to.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t think she’s in the right frame of mind, but even if she wasn’t, she also seems to be really be suffering from this in general right now. Consider how much she is avoiding telling anyone about the Yale stuff right now.
Sure, but we should acknowledge that untangling this situation without making things worse is probably beyond everyone involved.
Yes, Walky should probably find a way to sit down with Lucy and talk with her about how she misheard him and jumped the gun and kinda freaked him out a little.
And if he tried, that relationship would turn into a horrid inferno because he’d make it sound like he didn’t love Lucy at all and was outright offended by the notion that she might love him…
Yeah, I don’t get why so many people are immediately labeling this “bad advice.” There’s not a good way to handle this situation. Dorothy doesn’t know Lucy well enough to know how she’d react either way, and even if she gave Walky the magic words to be honest WITHOUT hurting Lucy more than silence might, it’s a huge gamble on Walky actually saying it in a way where that works. We know he is prone to saying the wrong thing at the wrong time or with the wrong tone.
Also, from Dorothy’s perspective, like 3-4 months ago Walky was completely comfortable with saying “I love you” when he didn’t necessarily mean it if it prevented relationship drama (…and incidentally his explanation of that to Dorothy was another example of Walky’s habit of saying the wrong thing).
There’s no good, easy way to handle the situation, and she’s said there is, that’s why it’s bad advice. She could say, “I don’t know” instead of “This is simple”.
But this is almost certainly going to blow up worse. He’ll be put in positions where he’s going to have to respond to it again and he’ll either have to lie or let it blow up then.
Right. A solution to this issue that has maximum transparency along with minimum harmed feelings would be a bit like loading all of your groceries into one bag and not having that bag be heavy. It’s not really that feasible.
you mean you haven’t heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV with an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime?
This, also. The context is basically that your character and their friends get isekai’d to a different dimension where some asshole forgot to turn the lights off before they went on vacation and it’s really messing with everyone’s sleep schedule, so you’ve gotta “bring the shadows back”, as it were. Also there’s a really hot enby fairy.
Jennifer deserves to not get yelled at anymore. I’m so fucking glad she and Ruth are split. (Ruth deserves recovery and kindness and hugs but she was… Predatory??? Towards Jennifer??)
I swear, Dorothy needs to mind her own business and stop trying to help everyone in eyesight, right about now. I know, I know, people are asking, but being asked for help isn’t actually a qualification to give it with any competence. A quick “I’m not sure I’m the one to ask about this, please go to someone else” would probably suffice.
I mean, Walky walked up to her room and asked her about his business. Her eyes were on her own stuff. Seems like it should be on other people to stop asking her, rather than her having to be doubly more responsible than others.
Yeah, she could spare to be a little more self interested. She has been a kind, smart person with a happy past amongst people struggling with death, abuse, homelessness, mental illness, etc. I figure, alongside her natural desire to help people, she also feels obligated to because if she doesn’t things will probably be worse for them. But she is also a teenager dealing with her own crap and has shown resentment towards Joyce recently for not appreciating her (asked for) help. I feel things might be building towards a Dorothy outburst.
You’ve reminded me of a running joke of my brother’s. We’ll all be sitting at a table or chatting on PSN, someone will say something mildly disappointing or troublesome, and he’ll chime in with something like “You come to me with such terrible news, on this, the day my daughter has a job interview at Wendy’s?”. I think it’s a reference to a movie people with performatively scold me for not watching, some quote about a wedding, but he replaced the wedding with weirdly specific, super mundane circumstances.
I think this is bad advice and is going to backfire. He’s going to feel like this is hanging over his head. Unless he can actually make peace with waiting until he feels like saying “I love you”…while Lucy meanwhile thinks it is now their normal.
Okay, I wasn’t gonna question the Josh thing, but now two people have brought it up and I feel like I need to question it.
Can we really call what Walky did “cheating”, when he and Dorothy had explicitly established that they wanted to experiment with an open relationship, and she was the one who encouraged him to hook up with Josh in the first place?
Can we retire this “who’s Josh” meme already? Like, I get it, he’s kinda bland, but we’re well past beating a dead horse at this point. The horse was dead when we found it, and now we’re just whacking a slightly damp bit of soil with the busted remains of a stick. We all know who Josh is, and I’m tired of people pretending we don’t, when he’s been vital to at least half a dozen storylines despite his minor role.
Dorothy was pushing herself too far with all sorts of activities and studies and so on and where stressing herself out, and her grades were slipping a bit. She felt that she didn’t have the mental energy to handle everything and she and Walky agreed to break up so that she could focus on her studies and future (and various other responsibilities).
This was after they tried merely going on a “break” but Dorothy didn’t feel she could handle doing that in a way that was also fair to Walky (or which achieved the purpose of the break) so they broke up for real.
See, normally I resent characters who *think* they’ve got it together but are secretly messy, but I just find Dorothy really sympathetic, for some reason. Maybe it’s because she’s so young.
Probably because most of those characters are written to try and convince the audience that they’re good and perfect and have everything together. It’s not just secret, it’s often that the author doesn’t know what having things together actually looks like and tries to portray a dysfunctional thing as ideal.
I’m not sure we’re reading the same comic…? I’m reading the comic where the author picked a title that calls all the characters young and foolish, and suggests that they’ll hopefully grow *by doing things wrong,* over and over again. Nobody has their stuff together, dysfunctional mistakes ahoy, style of thing.
Not one single character? Did you think they were talking about this comic exclusively, or do you really think no one has ever written a character like that?
It was the second. I was trying to draw a contrast between the way Willis handles characters and the traits that can make them obnoxious with lesser writers.
Walky: hey Smart Ex, plz help me unfuck this situation? I really wanna let it fester, but also you taught me that communication is mature and cool, sooo
Dorothy: nope! festering is fine actually! This will not go wrong!
Walky: hey, convenient advice! Thanks Smart Ex, later! (exit)
Dorothy: aaah yes truly, the festering of unspoken feelings is excellent. (Deep breath.) This is great.
Even if Walky may (MAY) get there eventually…it’s very likely to come up again in their relationship before then. Lucy could start throwing out more frequent “I love you”s with the expectation he’ll say it back. He could be on his way back to Lucy now, where she could start up a conversation about how great it is that they were able to say they love each other. How is Walky going to feel when this happens?
“It’s just going to hurt her more to tell her the truth” is convenient in the moment. In addition to discouraging real communication when issues arise, it’s not guaranteed that convenience would even last.
Nowadays, it feels like a red flag/dog whistle to say “Sometimes the truth hurts”, but goddamn does it need to come out sometimes. Not all hurt is permanent, and while it’s nice to avoid as much of it as possible, sometimes that only helps it build up to a point where somebody gets way more hurt than they ever would have been if they’d gotten the much smaller one out of the way.
I think is a good advice and Walky was hoping to hear something like that. He likes And care for Lucy, why risk to ruin that relationship for some mixed feelings that will probably disappear with the time? Waiting is the best solution in this case.
I don’t really get why people are saying this is bad advice.
I can understand the virtue of being honest and that asking Lucy to take things slowly would be nice but I can’t see what tradegy Dorothy’s advice would lead to.
It’s not like it’s a promise of future action. You can love someone and the actions associated with that are arbitrary depending on the person.
I hope I’m wrong, but I start to fear that anything Dorothy would have said, would have triggered the same reactions. Even if it had been exactly the opposite.
I don’t think so. Can’t speak for everyone but I will always take the advice to communicate over the advice not to (though I might still have some ideas that I think have more finesse than this potential opposite answer). Plus, I honestly didn’t think Dorothy was going to say this- I read yesterday’s strip thinking ‘well at least she can give some decent advice to Walky, even if she’s questioning him weirdly,’ especially since I know one can be making terrible decisions for themself and still have the clarity to give others good advice
Speaking from experience, it can convince people you’re more serious than you actually are. I do think it implies some kind of future commitment, even if that is different from person to person.
Better advice: think deeply about whether you’re already at, or near that point – which she was trying to get him to do in canon – and if you *are*, maybe express “I love you” fully to her when ready alongside a simple explanation that the previous time was more of an accident and he wants to make it more significant and sincere from now on. It doesn’t have to be one of “never tell her” or “break her heart now”, and for me, Dorothy’s trending a little too close to the former. But kudos given the circumstances.
This right here. I mean, look what Amber did, she started taking all her frustrations and rage issues out on nonsentient things like punching bags, walls, and rapists, and now she’s able to fight like a dozen dudes off on her own. Dorothy could learn a lesson or two.
Pragmatic and cool-headed people punch pillows behind closed doors off-camera whenever they need to in order to stay pragmatic and cool-headed. Don’t worry about it, just take care of your needs.
Your name has been duely entered into the Big Book of People To Point and Laugh At Should Things Go Exactly as Dorothy Predicted, with all advantages, privileges, and secret discounts* thereby pertaining thereto.
* We can’t tell you what they are because they’re secret.
Oh the pragmatic and coolheaded are the ones that actually punch MORE things out of frustration, and also as a means to recover some of their seemlingly unlimited patience, they just mastered the ability to do it when there’s nobody around.
For the people wondering how this might backfire, imagine what happens emotionally for Walky when he sees Lucy tonight and she says “I love you” at the end of the night, or worse, if she starts talking about how excited she is that they’ve said it, or asks him what he loves about her, or how long he’s loved her. These situations happen all the time, especially in young relationships where one person is really invested/excited and obsessively thinking about their interactions. For Walky, he’s not just going to have to make the choice to omit or lie once; he’s going to have to make it every day, and every time it comes up in conversation, and live with how that feels. My experience with repressing, omitting, or lying has always been that it churns my insides every time I think about the falseness; Walky’s panic here implies to me that he’d struggle pretty badly with maintaining or reinforcing the misunderstanding through lying or omission.
Saying cusses has been shown to increase pain tolerance. It is entirely pragmatic to shout FUCK FUCK FUCK at the top of your lungs for three hours straight.
I understand peoples reasoning that this may be bad advice but i feel its mainly because people are assuming Walky is leaning into “not in love”. However, i think its good advice becauae Walky needs to figure out what he meamt first
Its obvious he cares, quite deeply, about Lucy. He thinks very highly of her, shares interests, and wants to make sure they have a good lasting relationship. To me, in a relationship, this is perfectly fine “i love you” territory but I understand others view that as equating to “marriage talk” in the extreme and various other takes. Walky still seems unclear on whether he actually meant it or not, hes just worried Lucy positively thinks he did. I think he did, but maybe not in the way she meant, and he needs to figure that out before he can relate this to her.
Someone is citing the MA constitutional provision explicitly allowing the state to impede federal marshals enforcing the fugitive slave act, DAMN the average citizen is radicalized
you’re laughing. the largest antebellum plantation house burned down & there are brides who will not get to spiritually absorb the poisoned spectral energy of the land for their big day, & you’re laughing.
Me if I ever see Tony Hawk: Hey you’re Tony Hawk the famous skateboarder. That’s right I recognise you. Won’t be able to get any content out of this will you, you piece of shit
How to read all 28 issues of my Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane run on Marvel Unlimited:
1: The first four issues were published as the miniseries "Mary Jane."
www.marvel.com/comics/serie...
today in #9chickweedlane i learned we have to be shown children learning and relearning what sex is, for Reasons, even though they already clearly know and have prepared nuanced questions about it!
also that Gran must hate, if she's still alive, how Old Juliette is the same but with gray hair
one of my favorite things is when a commenter explodes WHEN DO THESE CHARACTERS GET THERAPY but directed towards a character who canonically has a regular therapist
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btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 2d
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
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“so nobody beyond that fourth wall watch as I totally don’t punch things out of frustration and loss”
Dorothy sowing: Temporary fun-time no-frills relationship go! It’s got to be this way, I gotta fix this broken country. Everything will be fine! No regrets!
Dorothy reaping: This fucking sucks. What the fuck.
“I want things to be light and casual.”
*smashy smashy*
“oh no”
Think Dorothy in a boxing montage would be apt right now.
Taking kickboxing lessons/channeling it into something physical/sporty-ness might be more appealing to some future voters overall as opposed to “some white nerd who went to an ivy league school”
I was gonna say, wasn’t Dorothy the one that broke off the relationship?
Uh oh! That’s bad advice if you ask me. Dorothy’s sabotaging the Walkman!
No, she seems to think it was genuinely good advice. She just has way worse social skills than she thinks she does.
Unconscious sabotage or just being absolute garbage at this? Could go either way!
Bad advice, but not on purpose. She’s not in the headspace to think about this rationally. She wants to tell him to breakup, for selfish reasons, so she extrapolated that the selfless thing would be to tell him to do the opposite.
*high-five to a fellow Sarah avatar for this excellent take*
There is no good advice here. She hasn’t learned that the only thing you can do in relationship questions is to let them make their own decisions. But it took me 3 years of college to come to that realization.
My college advice was always “your feelings are valid, tell the person in question” and I stand by it.
And that blows up and they break up and you get blamed. It might have been right for them to break up or it might not have been. But it should never be for you to decide, only them.
Or it could turn out well, but again it’s best if that’s what they decide to do.
I got much better at asking questions and getting them to think out the possible futures with experience. Though people who came to me for advice always chose me because they wanted a sure answer and not just a listener because I was the “fixer” in our friend group. So they left maybe more unsatisfied than if I just gave them bad advice. But not angry at me when my advice went wrong.
So far I haven’t been blamed.
It probably helps that I’m just weighing in, so that they can have courage to express themselves, I’m not giving legally binding arbitration. it ultimately was indeed their choice whether to ask each other, or whether to sit on their feelings and stress out and waste their time wondering… when they could literally ask the person and find out what was up.
If they had to break up to get what they really wanted, okay. More likely they could work through it, though, as long as they didn’t let it fester for months until it exploded.
The most common reason I gave this advice was that both S.O.’s were coming to me with the exact same issue, because my 2nd Most Indirect Person I’d Ever Met was dating my #1 Most Indirect Person I’d Ever Met… in which case, oh my gosh those two should really just talk to each other already.
Like it or not, there’s no real good options here for Walky. It’s impossible to tell someone you’re dating, “I don’t love you” after they believe you do, that isn’t going to blow up the relationship–which is clearly a bridge Walky isn’t willing to cross.
Dorothy’s advice here is about as good as anything else he could do. If he does develop feelings for Lucy, it’s no harm, no foul; if he doesn’t, then the relationship will come to a close in due course.
Mind you, personally I think that about 90% of the cast should be on a dating moratorium, as none of them are really as ready for it as they think they are. But it’s called Dumbing of Age, not Spontaneous Maturation, so we really should cut just about all of them some slack.
That’s not true at all. They’ve been dating about a week maybe two weeks at max. Lucy said she loved him too early. Saying he doesn’t love her should not destroy a relationship this young. If it does, than Lucy is not the right person for Walky. Frankly I would be very wary of dating Lucy in general if she expected a emotional commitment like that after a week. She misinterpreted what Walky said and deserves to be corrected on that. It might even be good for her since she’s so inexperienced with romance to learn you can put too much pressure on your partner by being so invested so early.
People seem to think Lucy is some mentally fragile girl who will be devastated her boyfriend doesn’t love her after dating for less time than it takes to get a driver’s listener. I say she’s a big girl who can take a bit of rejection. Things just moved a bit too fast, Walky’s not leaving her at the alter her.
I don’t think a dating moratorium would actually help with that. Behaving in a healthy manner in a relationship is a skill, and like any skill you need to screw up a bunch to get good at it. Also, speaking from experience, the older you get the harder it is to find people willing to put up with being your first relationship. People expect you to make most of the early mistakes in high school and college, so it can be hard to find someone patient enough to try things if you have little to no experience after that point. It also gets harder to meet people in general, which sucks.
Speaking as someone who didn’t date at all until 23 and hasn’t managed to date anyone since, I would never recommend waiting to anybody. Like, don’t rush into things and be prepared to get hurt, but also relationships will come when they come, so waiting until you’re ready doesn’t really help. Just treat people with as much respect as possible and don’t tolerate being disrespected in a relationship and you’ll be fine, whether you’re emotionally mature or not. Make mistakes, improve, find what works and what doesn’t, discover what you actually want, etc.
If compensated dating were legal where I live, I’d consider putting up with it. Otherwise I just feel exploited by that dynamic and exhausted from explaining how relationships work all the time.
I don’t think people should wait for the sake of waiting (or because there’s some idea that you need to improve yourself before/that “you can’t love someone until you love yourself” shit). A lot of our learning and growth happens in relationships. But by that, I don’t mean “romantic relationships,” but relationships in general, of which romantic relationships are a subset.
I don’t think you need to have been in romantic relationships previously to develop your relationship skills.
I do agree that is is often harder to meet new people as you get older, though.
I would say Leorale has the right of it. Your feelings are valid; tell the other person. He doesn’t have to say “I don’t love you”, but rather “I’m not actually ready to call this love yet. I do care about you a lot and want this to continue, but I don’t want to use that word lightly and I’m not there yet.”
Y’know, being honest and emotionally available to your partner. Weird, right?
Is it possible this will still hurt Lucy? Yep. But she is a big girl and she gets to decide if this is a dealbreaker for her or not.
Yes that. That would be a Smarting Of Age thing to say.
Oh well, sucks to be Walky and Lucy instead.
There’s a long distance between giving advice and making decisions for people. You can help them figure out what they want, think about how to approach it and warn about potential consequences.
“You’ll be at that point eventually anyway” is awful advice – there’s no teleology to relationships – but it’s not sabotage. *Of course* Dorothy genuinely believes you can just graph out how a relationship is going to progress in advance; she puts her interpersonal relationships into thoroughly annotated spreadsheets.
(Also, she’s a college freshman; ambitious and driven though she may be, she still hasn’t had the kinds of experiences that would teach her why it’s bad advice. Or, at least, the distance needed to reflect on those experiences.)
That’s an aspect I hadn’t considered. Though not even quite that she can graph it out in advance, but a reaction to her feelings for Walky, where she’d intended to keep it casual but fell in love with him. If she couldn’t stop it, how can he?
And while I’m sure it’s not intentional sabotage, her feelings for him are certainly messing with her objectivity here.
Ironic you call him a Walkman cuz I don’t think Dorothy’s doing a good job listening to him
I see what you did there
Can someone please explain this to me like I’m five because I literally don’t understand why this is bad advice. It honestly seems logical to me, and way better than “haw haw I don’t actually love you”
Lack of honesty. Dorothy is proposing that since Walky does at least care about Lucy’s feelings that even though he doesn’t love her or feel as strongly for her as she does him, he should just wait and eventually he will reciprocate her feelings. The problem is that’s not guaranteed, and letting Lucy believe he loves her in the meantime is a dishonest misrepresentation of his emotions. Lucy deserves to know what Walky feels about her, because she deserves to move forward in the relationship based on truth. Even Walky recognizes this. Dorothy’s advice is well meaning in intent, but it feels almost naive like wishful thinking.
Dorothy’s advice essentially boils down to “ignore it, it’ll be fine” when ignoring an issue rather than communicating with one’s partner is categorically not good, especially when it’s banking on stronger feelings eventually developing when a) they might not and b) stronger feelings already exist but for another person
It’s bad advice because a) it’s dishonest, lying by omission about his feelings, thereby making Lucy believe something that isn’t true. This would be fine if he was certainly going to fall in love for real with her shortly, however b) it’s likely to backfire, because it’s not guaranteed at all, and if he doesn’t end up reciprocating her feelings the end result would be all the worse for lying to her about it, however unintentionally.
The better course of action would be to have an honest discussion, and tell her “Hey, I don’t actually love you… yet. But I do like you and want to see if those feelings develop.” Then both of them could make an informed decision about the realities of the relationship and go forward with it honestly, if they so chose.
I’d like to add that I think the framing of “Walky loving her is the important part” doesn’t especially help. Regardless of whether he does, doesn’t, wants to wait and see, whatever, the inciting thing behind all this was Lucy thinking he said he did. That’s the misunderstanding that needs cleared up first and foremost, in my own opinion, and any conversation of “does he or doesn’t he” ought to come afterward.
Time to log on to Punchipedia
just add it to the ball of stuff you’re already repressing!
Absolutely terrible advice.
I don’t see why. She isn’t wrong, from where I’m sitting. Walky hasn’t said he doesn’t love Lucy, only that it’s a little premature and she misunderstood him. But enough people seem weirded out that I think I’ve gotta be missing something on this. Help?
Im with you on this. Everyone saying its terrible advise doesnt make sense to me either and Walky agrees with Dorothy so… *shrugs*
Thanks! At least I’m not alone, lol. My partner of fifteen years doesn’t get it, either. Honestly the only way I see this leading to drama is if Walky is later like “I love you! Haha, and I even mean it this time :)” But…that’s actions. Emotionally, this advice makes sense to me. *shrugs back, fistbumps*
The way I see it there is almost no way to explain to Lucy that he didn’t mean to say he loved her without hurting her some, whereas in reality the chance that Walky not saying anything now would change the course of the relationship is pretty slim. Of course sitcom logic would be that this will 100% come back to bite Walky in the butt, but the characters don’t know that they are characters in a comic strip and Dorothy in particular shouldn’t be using sitcom logic to try to solve real problems.
To me, it feels like she’s telling walky to ignore the issue and to bank on developing deeper feelings later down the line, which just doesn’t strike me as something that will set him up for success in the end. If he doesn’t end up developing those feelings (and tbh I don’t think he’s going to), especially when the smartest and most perfect girl in the world to him (that he TOTALLY doesn’t still have feelings for /s) said he would, I suspect he’ll eventually internalize it as him being unfair to Lucy or a categorically bad boyfriend or whatever internal dialogue his self-loathing will concoct to justify itself.
Or, optimistically, he’ll come to the realization himself that he needs to be honest with his feelings and fumble his way through an awkward conversation.
Ah, that’s fair. I would actually take this conversation as evidence that he is already developing romantic feelings for Lucy, simply because of how much he seems to want to handle this in a way that is not stomping on her feelings (it seems he prioritizes/values her feelings more than his own discomfort; that seems significant). But the comic overall seems like it could end up going either way, so it’s entirely likely that I’m misreading that. It could also simply be Walky having grown enough to realize that he should be sensitive to other people’s feelings? It’d be the first sign of him acting on that awareness, though. I guess we’ll find out!
Walky doesn’t know what to do and he trusts Dorothy’s judgment AND this gets him out of having a difficult conversation. That doesn’t mean it supports this being good advice.
It seems like incredibly short-sighted advice to me. All it does is give Walky a chance to kick it down the road. But what happens the next time Lucy says “I love you” out of the blue? As you do in a relationship where you love your companion? He’s instantly faced with a choice again that puts him right back in the position of responding in kind (a/k/a lying) or avoiding it somehow. He might get away with that once or twice but she’s going to catch on eventually and it’s likely going to go much worse than having an awkward conversation now.
Plus right after the “I love you too” conversation, she strongly suggested having sex. While she’s at least been tempted by the idea before, it’s very likely the idea that they’re now officially “in love” played a role in being willing to go that far.
Going ahead with that under false pretenses seems a bad idea. Not doing so will also raise questions.
Hopefully the questions raised by not wanting to bang yet won’t be anything more serious than “Oh, are you not ready? Will you let me know when you are, so we can report to the ship?”.
i guess some ppl might be blinded by love/it isn’t always realistic but even if she’s rly into walky i’m surprised she hasn’t watched enough romcom/drama movies/series to where saying those words within the week of a relationship (unless you’ve been close friends for years prior dating) would be a ‘red flag’
I suppose maybe less so at their age tho if i were dating like a 40 year old and they said after two dates that i’d prolly run
If she doesn’t know already, it’s not a secret that Walky fucks.
Being a person who’ll have sex doesn’t mean you always want to, though.
So best case scenario, Walky does end up loving her and this doesn’t have to come up again. It’s still not great because he was not honest with his partner about a point of confusion, nor did he feel entirely comfortable talking with her about it openly. Not a bad result, but ignoring something that makes you uncomfortable isn’t a real W either.
But what happens next time Lucy tells Walky that she loves him? Especially if he hasn’t fully sorted out his feelings for her yet? Does he just say that he loves her to make her happy?
This is only good advice if everything works out. If Walky doesn’t decide he loves her by the next time she says it, or ends up feeling like this relationship isn’t for him, then it’s a whole situation that could have been ameliorated by honest communication.
goddammit dorothy
Hey. No one actually sane would want to be president, so we’re starting from there.
DOES he have strong feelings, though, Dorothy?
And what are those strong feelings? Disgust can be a pretty strong feeling.
He has strong feelings. And they’re mostly for Dorothy.
I think from her perspective it’s a reasonable assumption.
Agreed. I feel like he always liked Lucy well enough, and they do have common interests and all, but that’s about the extent of it. He was pleasant to her because he’s generally a pleasant person, if sometimes a bit thoughtless in his speech. He seemed shocked when Dorothy pointed out Lucy’s feelings, and then every interaction since then has seemed like Walky showing up and deciding this is going well enough. I don’t think he has strong feelings for Lucy, and I don’t think it’s a good gamble to assume he’ll get there, especially on a timetable that seems likely to work for someone as intense as Lucy.
Dorothy, that advice is fucking terrible. “Don’t clear up the misunderstanding”? Really?
The most cliche’d of romcoms all start like this. Though it’s usually the main characters douchey roommates/slovenly best friend.
i mean, slightly better than walky saying “i actually don’t love you” or so/blurting it out in a not so coherent way, or maybe there can be a diff convo down the line, or him avoid saying it, or maybe even trying to take things slower if lucy wants to sleep with him, though who knows maybe walky will get a second opinion
Being on fire near a swimming pool (but being unable to swim) is slightly better than just being on fire, I suppose.
You can always jump in the shallow end.
Alright, so then I get made fun of for drowning in the shallow end because I was panicking from being in fire.
aw dotty
yeah walky was a dick for this.
i’m sorry but do not go to your ex about relationship advice for the person you’re currently with.
I cut him slack because 1) He barely has anyone to turn to, and 2) She’s literally the one who set them up, if I recall correctly.
She did, yeah, and who else can he ask? Jennifer is definitely not the person to talk to about this since it may get back to Lucy, and he doesn’t really know a lot of people that would have input on this. Besides, Dorothy knows Walky better than anyone else at school does outside of Sal or Jennifer, and I dunno if he is at a comfort level to talk to Sal about this kind of thing with yet. Their relationship is improving, but that’s still a lot of vulnerability.
He could ask… Uh…. Well, um… *looks over the cast page* No, dear god no, no, hilarious but no, no, no, no…. Hnn…… Booster? I guess Booster? Next best I got is Jason and then it goes even more downhill.
Booster honestly wouldn’t be terrible to ask, but I assume they are elsewhere with Ethan right now, anyhow.
i’m not sure if booster would give the best advice ,or at least not be biased as they’ve told lucy before “you can do better”
(Actually I low-key would like to see him go to Danny about this. “I’ve walked a mile in your shoes, I’ve boinked both your ex-girlfriends, and you’re dating my twin sister. This makes us bros. Give me relationship advice.”)
I’d actually kinda love to see Walky and Danny interact more.
I think it depends on how that relationship with said ex ended. I used to talk with my first ex about some of my relationship issues and got some great advice as she knew me very well. We didn’t end on a bad note though and remained friends afterwards.
Pretty sure Dorothy is the one who told him to kick rocks, so if anything Walky has no reason to think she’d be more broken up about this than he is. Plus they seem to be on friendly enough terms. It seems pretty reasonable to ask someone you’ve been romantically involved with about romance stuff.
While I don’t disagree that going to a romantic-partner-turned-friend is as good an idea as any, I think the implication that the person doing the breaking up is unlikely to be upset is pretty unrealistic.
A relationship falling apart can hurt everyone involved. Just because one person has to be the one to initiate the break-up doesn’t mean they don’t have hurt feelings, lingering love, or grief over the loss of what could have been. It also doesn’t mean that the person who got broken up with should be treating them as if they don’t have those feelings.
Especially when the break up was over practical things (I don’t have time) rather than not wanting the relationship any more. I don’t think Walky has any clue that Dorothy’s still hung up on him though.
Yeah, if she’s feeling anger and loss she did it to herself.
Sabotage Walky’s love life by telling him to stay with his girlfriend. That’s next level sinister!
Thus begins Dorothy’s villain arc. Becky warned us of this eventuality.
The bad advice is the part where she recommends the “stick your head in the sand until the problem goes away” school of conflict resolution.
I told you once, I told you twi~ice
But you never listen to my advi~ice
You don’t try very hard to please me
With what you know it should be easy
Well, this could be The Last Time
This could be The Last Time
Maybe The Last Time–I don’t kno~ow…oh no, oh no
You rock those power shoulder pads, (Walky’s platonic non-)girl friend.
Yeah, that makes sense. Was dumbfounded about how Dotty has been able to keep that smile up. I sure as hell wouldn’t be.
Does any one know how to get the account we use for this comment board to work on another computer or browser? All the hive work websites are keeping breaking for me on my main computer’s chrome browser for some reason. I tried putting in the Name and email using Microsoft Edge but it just thought I was a new account.
I wish I knew. I logged in after factory resetting my phone and it thought I was a new account as well
I use it on two different computers, (firefox browser) and using the same name/email works fine.
Dorothy really put the “dumb” in Dumbing of Age, with this one. It was dumb to breakup with Walky when she didn’t want to and even dumber to literally serve him up to another woman to take him off the table. Dorothy’s gotta hold this L
Walky was going to break up with her anyway due to his fear that he was sabotaging her.
That would not have stuck. He was only entertaining that cause Dorothy proposed the “break” in the first place. They were both dumb.
Horrible advice. Why wouldn’t they resolve a misunderstanding before it gets too big to handle?
I’m sure she’d be heartbroken but hopefully not too traumatize but better to make these kinda ‘mistakes’
No, opposite!
…I can’t tell if Dorothy thinks she’s giving him good advice, but she definitely isn’t giving him good advice.
I think she thinks so, because in the last panel she only shit talks herself for wanting to punch a wall (rather than “Pragmatic and cool-headed people don’t punch walls… or lie out of jealousy” or something)
Dorothy once again reminding us she’s as young and fallible as any of these yahoos. That is terrible advice! You’re only giving it because you assume that doing the difficult thing must be the correct thing! You poor dear.
I dunno. “You’ll learn to love him over time.” “You’ll grow to love each other.” That’s advice that elders have dispensed to the younger generation since civilizations began. Sure, the advice refers to a totally different social context (arranged marriage) than these two are in (casual dating), but sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. So I’m putting that firmly in the “Eh.” (Shrug) “Meh.” category.
About as good a piece of advice as telling him to flip a coin.
…I’m just trying to remember what it felt like to be young and in love. From what I can recall, it was all intensely painful and full of drama. If I could have skipped all that and skipped straight to a “comfy armchair” type of long-term love, perhaps short on passion but long on affection and care, anyway, I think I probably would have. Infatuation is overrated.
I was thinking about this just last night!
So much cringe.
I’ve always been fond of the philosophy that it’s not too much to ask for both. It’s delightful that my partner still wants to woo me long after I’ve successfully been wooed. We’re well into the comfy stage, but even after a decade I still get butterflies when she walks into the room.
(of course other kinds of relationships are valid too, I only mean to share my own experience)
That’s kinda where I am with it. I genuinely do not see what’s wrong with this advice.
It’s bad advice because it’s explicitly saying “Even if you’re not there yet, it’s not worth it to tell her that”. It’s cutting off any chance at mature communication.
I suppose that makes sense? I dunno. If you see yourself getting there in the near future, though, it may not be worth it to tell her that; it’d depend on the couple. It’s literally just “another week and I’d be cool with it? sure, I can roll with this. not worth hurting/worrying the partner I care about until I’m sure I need to.” If he’s going to an outside party, then he isn’t sure he needs to worry Lucy about it. I would not say it’s cutting off any chance at mature communication, to me it’s just…..”hey does this categorically Need To Be A Thing? No? cool, I’ll go with it for now.”
I think we as the audience think it’s bad advice because we’ve seen a lot of Walky/Lucy and he has given no indication of wanting a serious romantic relationship with her. So there’s not really any reason to think he’s ever gonna be in love with her.
I still don’t think “Is Walky currently In Love with Lucy? Y/N?” is remotely the point of this encounter.
It wasn’t the point at all. Not for Walky; not for Dorothy.
I disagree that it’s cutting off cutting off any chance at mature communication. There was zero chance Walky was going to have a mature communication about feelings to start with.
Walky successfully reminded Dorothy that she cares about him. It almost certainly wasn’t what he meant to do, but he was successful anyway.
Ah, that makes sense.
He spells it out very well in the last comic. He cares about her, and he doesn’t want to build what they have on a lie.
amazing birthday strip: you can scrub the text from the last panel, and the last two panels become a beautiful template
Happiest of birthdays!
Happy birthday to you!
The world is a zoo!
You got a comic that’s funny!
And a meme template too!
🥳🪅
happy birthday.
I was hoping the panel would open to reveal a craterous hole in the wall of their dorm.
Oh Dorothy, you need to think of yourself sometimes and put some of the anxiety behind you. Which is something Walky seemed to but her with, until she panicked.
I’m not saying she should try and win Walky back or anything. However, she could take time to do something for her mental health. As long as it doesn’t involve networking, politics, or school.
Additionally while it is not necessary to have a relationship to be happy, it can help. If you find a partner you can vent to, get advice/help from, seek comfort and do the same for them, then you can build a beautiful relationship together.
And if you are asexual or simply not interested in dating someone, try to find a friend who can help with some of it.
Anyone have anything to add to this and/or correct me?
she actually does have a therapist but idk if she’s gone to them again since teh last time it was mentioned tho
Not sure if my initial comment went through due to general confusion over how links work in Akismet, but yeah I have a theory that Dorothy’s current therapist might not be a good fit for her at the moment, considering that the only piece of in-story advice we’ve seen Dotty apply in her everyday life was to “Reconstrue upsetting tragedies (being kidnapped and watching her close friend get taken away by a van by a violent criminal) as victories in personal growth”
Yeah… Her therapist might be fucking with her head a little bit to put it bluntly. “CBT, rinse, repeat” etc
Dorothy’s advice is good from her point of view. If Walky stays the course, that means Dororthy can’t have him anymore. …So yeah this is bad for everyone long term.
It’s a wash for Lucy, because she was eventually going to have her heart broken anyway. Either Walky winds up back with Dorothy or he meets someone else he actually has chemistry with.
Maybe. But it’s not like Lucy is an unlovable person. Sometimes there’s love at first sight, & sometimes a person just grows on you.
Her motiviation qas honestly much more respectful than that. She was in a position to sexually use him but when she realized that there was the chance of him getting into an actual relationship with someone who cared for him, she chose to help him realize that instead of going to pound town.
Dorothy is consistent. I don’t always agree with her choices but–
Oh can I just say: I like that the writing is good enough that I can disagree with the characters choices instead of , saay, the writing choices.
I understand that feelings are complex things and all… but Dorothy broke up with him. She chose to be rid of that relationship, and NOW that he’s taken with someone else, she’s feeling frustration and loss? That just don’t sit right with me… but that’s just my projection.
As I said above in more detail – Choosing to break up with someone doesn’t mean you don’t have feelings about it. The person who breaks up with someone is allowed grief, hurt, and frustration because they lost the possibility of a good relationship with someone they cared about.
There are far too many people in the comments of this comic who don’t grasp the idea that two things can be true. Here: Dorothy misses Walky, but also Dorothy does not want to be in a relationship with Walky for her own reasons.
Exactly. She made a hard choice to prioritize her academia over a relationship at this point in time. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t a sacrifice. And she’s not doing anything inappropriate in interacting with him (except perhaps giving bad advice, but she seems to think it is good advice).
Having goals is good. Having long term goals is good. There is nothing wrong with having ambitious long term goals that are difficult and have low odds of success, as long as there is a back-up plan. But the thing is, you actually have to have a worthwhile life while your pursuing those goals.
Dorothy runs the risk of spending her life pursuing those goals, sacrificing everything to reach them but never quite completely reaching them, and then wondering what it was all for. Or even worse, reaching her goals and then wondering what it was all for.
The idea that Dorothy is somehow wrong for prioritizing her goals over a relationship is wild to me.
She’s in the phase of her life where the most opportunities and the most tumultuous change takes place. She has LOFTY goals, and if you want something like that then sacrifices are a necessary part of it. I’m not saying the lady couldn’t use a hobby, but the idea that she might achieve her goals and not be living a worthwhile life is nonsense.
If she achieves her goals, she will literally be the President of the US. She’ll be in a position to affect real world changes on a huge scale, and you’re suggesting she might get there and be sad because she didn’t more heavily prioritize banging?
Mind-blowing.
It’s a weird take that seems based in the assumption that regret is exclusive to those who take one path. I do agree that one should seek to have a good present as well as a good future, but that doesn’t have to look like a romantic relationship.
Indeed. It certainly doesn’t have to look like a romantic relationship. The question is, is it part of a pattern?
I dislike it because it’s such a common trope. “Ambitious women have to give up everything else.”
In reality, the idea that romance is a distraction from real important goals is bullshit. Good partners support you and help you, they don’t hold you back. Powerful women (and men) in politics are very likely to be married and even have children.
Yeah! Exactly right, thejeff!
I think the thing here that made it not a great relationship was that she viewed Walky as a fixer upper. That never ends well IRL. I do think she could have a relationship that’s compatible with her goals but it would have to be a more equal relationship.
I guess that’s a trope, but how I see it more is that “Ambitious women gives up other things for ambitions (prioritizes what she feels is important), and that’s bad, and the lesson is don’t do that.”
Yeah, that’s not a good lesson.
Just to be clear: yes, that’s exactly my point. That is how the trope often plays out, and that’s an issue.
The lesson, should there actually be one, has nothing to do with gender.
I stand by my point that sacrificing everything for a far from certain tomorrow which you may well not like should it arrive is generally not a good move. This is not to denigrate having goals and ambitions. While Dorothy is undeniably a woman, the comment is general. The point is to maybe be cautious about sacrificing things that are important to you for ambition.
In this specific case, was Walky all that important to her? I’m not sure that Dorothy knows. He wasn’t supposed to be, but here we are threatening innocent walls.
I do think Walky was important to her; I do not think he was “everything.” Questioning it as part of a pattern is valid, and also it’s not wrong to give up one thing that’s important to you for another thing you deem more important.
I don’t think all of this was really directed at you, Clif, by the way. The gender stuff was brought up by thejeff, and this conversation in general is ongoing. I do think it’s possible to both regret singularly focusing on a long-term goal and to regret not doing more to work toward your goal.
That is how the trope often plays out, but I don’t think the lesson of “therefore giving up everything else for those ambitions is good” is a good one either. It still plays to the idea that women do have to give up everything to achieve.
I don’t think Dorothy’s approach so far is supposed to be the right one. I don’t think the clues in the comic point that way. I’m actually glad we’ve been revisiting Dorothy’s feelings about Walky. I’d felt that for quite a while that seemed to have been resolved as “She broke up with Walky. Easily caught up on her work. Everything’s better now.”
It would be one thing if Walky hadn’t been supportive or had been trying to get her to drop her ambitions for him in one way or another. Very different case. But he wasn’t. It was just a time management thing.
I’m remembering a line from some movie: “I got everything I ever wanted…and it stinks!”
For a split second up there i thought Clif was arguing that having goats was good, especially long-term goats
And i was like, “so true”
Having long term goals is good only if you have the space.
I do not recommend them for apartments.
Goats! Long term GOATS. I swear I typed Goats.
If you are going to have long term GOATS you should read your lease carefully.
I don’t see that it’s a risk at all for Dorothy; she has never seemed to me self serving in her desires. The character I’ve seen doesn’t desire the presidency arbitrarily, but because she wants to improve the systems that govern the others’ lives, and whatever regrets may litter the way to her goals, I can’t see realizing the ability to actually improve those systems being one of them. What she wants really is worthwhile, and for some individuals, striving for worthwhile, let alone accomplishing it, truly is fulfilling.
Beyond that, if I’m not misremembering, she isn’t transferring schools despite an acceptance elsewhere, implying that she’s found bonds here which matter to her. In conjunction with her running, the therapy she undertakes, I’m inclined to believe that she’s searching for balance.
For me the point isn’t whether she might have regrets in the future, I was responding to the idea of whether she is “allowed” to have feelings about a break up even if she made the call to end the relationship. And my stance is of course she is. It doesn’t really matter if her choice leads her to happiness or not – no one can predict the future, and she’s making what she thinks is the right choice at this point in her life.
Also, if it were the ex-boyfriend using this type of logic on her (“You are going to regret breaking up with me when you’re lonely and haven’t achieved any of your goals some day”) …we would call that very unhealthy and manipulative.
Oh, I fully get all that. I *did* say it was my own projection in there.
I think what also is getting me… is that Dorothy wasn’t doing much grieving or loss until Walky suddenly got mysteriously “hot” to everyone.
People have all sorts of irrational feelings. We can only control our actions.
Dorothy dearest, you have only yourself to blame for this. You decided that there could be nothing in your life other than schoolwork, so you broke up with a boy you lived when you didn’t want to.
The fact that you have only yourself to blame for something has never helped anything.
In the slightest.
It builds character!
…A word which here means “misery”?
No fair making me laugh.
Dorothy, that is some fucking AMAZING projection in panel one.
Dotty that’s bad advice you just basically said ignore and it will sort itself out…
Kind of like how she didn’t break up with Danny before he followed her to college.
Yeah, I was just remembering that too.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t think she’s in the right frame of mind, but even if she wasn’t, she also seems to be really be suffering from this in general right now. Consider how much she is avoiding telling anyone about the Yale stuff right now.
Sure, but we should acknowledge that untangling this situation without making things worse is probably beyond everyone involved.
Yes, Walky should probably find a way to sit down with Lucy and talk with her about how she misheard him and jumped the gun and kinda freaked him out a little.
And if he tried, that relationship would turn into a horrid inferno because he’d make it sound like he didn’t love Lucy at all and was outright offended by the notion that she might love him…
And even if he didn’t make it sound that way, that’s what she’d hear.
Then again, maybe she’d be fine, and understanding, and chill, and could maybe even see the humour in the situation, and
someone_or_other_raising_one_eyebrow.gif
…yyyyeah she’d be devastated.
Yeah, I don’t get why so many people are immediately labeling this “bad advice.” There’s not a good way to handle this situation. Dorothy doesn’t know Lucy well enough to know how she’d react either way, and even if she gave Walky the magic words to be honest WITHOUT hurting Lucy more than silence might, it’s a huge gamble on Walky actually saying it in a way where that works. We know he is prone to saying the wrong thing at the wrong time or with the wrong tone.
Also, from Dorothy’s perspective, like 3-4 months ago Walky was completely comfortable with saying “I love you” when he didn’t necessarily mean it if it prevented relationship drama (…and incidentally his explanation of that to Dorothy was another example of Walky’s habit of saying the wrong thing).
There’s no good, easy way to handle the situation, and she’s said there is, that’s why it’s bad advice. She could say, “I don’t know” instead of “This is simple”.
But this is almost certainly going to blow up worse. He’ll be put in positions where he’s going to have to respond to it again and he’ll either have to lie or let it blow up then.
Right. A solution to this issue that has maximum transparency along with minimum harmed feelings would be a bit like loading all of your groceries into one bag and not having that bag be heavy. It’s not really that feasible.
dorothy no
Getting the feeling Dorothy’s the one who feels she fumbled.
YEEEEEEEEEEEEES DOROTHY
BECOME THAT WHICH YOU MUST
THROW WIDE THE GATES THAT WE MAY PASS
LET EXPANSE CONTRACT…EON BECOME INSTANT…
BECOME…THE FRESHMAN OF DARKNESS
WE FAAAAAAALLL
ONE BRINGS SHADOW
ONE BRINGS THE LIGHT
TWO-TONED ECHOES TUMBLING THROUGH TIME
Is all this from something?
you mean you haven’t heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV with an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime?
See, I wasn’t gonna do the copypasta meme, but-
It comes from the main theme of/trailer for Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers. The music is, as the kids (probably) say, a certified banger.
Something something Namazu faaaaaaaace
The full quote is “Become what you must. Become the Warrior of Darkness.”
I mixed it with a later quote “Let expanse contract…eon become instant…Throw wide the gates that we may pass”.
The rest is from the theme song as Taffy explained.
This, also. The context is basically that your character and their friends get isekai’d to a different dimension where some asshole forgot to turn the lights off before they went on vacation and it’s really messing with everyone’s sleep schedule, so you’ve gotta “bring the shadows back”, as it were. Also there’s a really hot enby fairy.
Yeah, culture is passing me by. Thanks everyone who answered.
If you like good stories, I do recommend at least checking out a summary of FF14’s decade of it.
man dorothy is actually not okay right now =(
Poor girl. If only she COULD punch something or have some sort of outlet!!! Maybe she could go yell at Billie again?
Jennifer deserves to not get yelled at anymore. I’m so fucking glad she and Ruth are split. (Ruth deserves recovery and kindness and hugs but she was… Predatory??? Towards Jennifer??)
It hasn’t been her day, her week, her month, or even her year.
I swear, Dorothy needs to mind her own business and stop trying to help everyone in eyesight, right about now. I know, I know, people are asking, but being asked for help isn’t actually a qualification to give it with any competence. A quick “I’m not sure I’m the one to ask about this, please go to someone else” would probably suffice.
bets?
I mean, Walky walked up to her room and asked her about his business. Her eyes were on her own stuff. Seems like it should be on other people to stop asking her, rather than her having to be doubly more responsible than others.
That’s also fair. I’m mostly trying to say that her “Person asked for help, now I must help” impulse is working against her super hard.
Yeah, she could spare to be a little more self interested. She has been a kind, smart person with a happy past amongst people struggling with death, abuse, homelessness, mental illness, etc. I figure, alongside her natural desire to help people, she also feels obligated to because if she doesn’t things will probably be worse for them. But she is also a teenager dealing with her own crap and has shown resentment towards Joyce recently for not appreciating her (asked for) help. I feel things might be building towards a Dorothy outburst.
Are you suggesting that The Dorothy Margot Keener admit that she is… limited??? Incapable even???? A preposterous notion on such a day as this /j
You’ve reminded me of a running joke of my brother’s. We’ll all be sitting at a table or chatting on PSN, someone will say something mildly disappointing or troublesome, and he’ll chime in with something like “You come to me with such terrible news, on this, the day my daughter has a job interview at Wendy’s?”. I think it’s a reference to a movie people with performatively scold me for not watching, some quote about a wedding, but he replaced the wedding with weirdly specific, super mundane circumstances.
…it’s funnier in action.
I had this slow giggle and started convulsing with laughter as a gradual change. Like, from imagining it.
You come to me with giggling? On this, the day my daughter has received a prepaid VISA card in the mail?
So, “don’t be suspicious”. What are you losing, anyhow?
*plays Advice For The Young At Heart every time the wall is punched*
I think this is bad advice and is going to backfire. He’s going to feel like this is hanging over his head. Unless he can actually make peace with waiting until he feels like saying “I love you”…while Lucy meanwhile thinks it is now their normal.
I forget, why did they break up?
Walky cheated on her with Josh.
They broke up because she fell in love with Walky.
He was supposed to be a boy toy, but because she loved him, she had to improve him.
And it was working, but it was taking the time she needed to be an academic superwoman and accumulate the credentials she needed to get into Yale.
And so Walky had to be sacrificed.
Walky was okay with this because he grew up with Jennifer.
Also he cheated on her with Josh.
Okay, I wasn’t gonna question the Josh thing, but now two people have brought it up and I feel like I need to question it.
Can we really call what Walky did “cheating”, when he and Dorothy had explicitly established that they wanted to experiment with an open relationship, and she was the one who encouraged him to hook up with Josh in the first place?
Who the heck is Josh? He’s not showing up in the tags.
Can we retire this “who’s Josh” meme already? Like, I get it, he’s kinda bland, but we’re well past beating a dead horse at this point. The horse was dead when we found it, and now we’re just whacking a slightly damp bit of soil with the busted remains of a stick. We all know who Josh is, and I’m tired of people pretending we don’t, when he’s been vital to at least half a dozen storylines despite his minor role.
Huh?
Some of us are compelled to beat a dead horse whenever we see one lying around, and may be safely ignored.
I repeat. Huh?
Taffy, how dare you exclude those of us who, like Becky, cannot acknowledge Josh’s existence for religious reasons.
Well, if it doesn’t teach you about Josh, it’s not much of a religion, is it.
I briefly debated whether that sentence should end in a question mark instead of a period, but then decided I was grammer agnostic.
Being in a relationship where you feel like you have to improve your significant other is also not great. I learned that in high school!
Maybe, but there’s no indication that was bothering her.
It was the time problem.
And if she hadn’t let him go the time problem would have led to resentment.
Dorothy was pushing herself too far with all sorts of activities and studies and so on and where stressing herself out, and her grades were slipping a bit. She felt that she didn’t have the mental energy to handle everything and she and Walky agreed to break up so that she could focus on her studies and future (and various other responsibilities).
This was after they tried merely going on a “break” but Dorothy didn’t feel she could handle doing that in a way that was also fair to Walky (or which achieved the purpose of the break) so they broke up for real.
Self-care is setting boundaries and letting people know that sometimes, you cannot be there for them (emotionally.)
I mean, it’s not terrible advice.
It’s far better than what Walky would be capable of doing in his… usual hijinks.
For me the most important thing is, did Dorothy ever punch a wall?
The wall was metaphorical and the damage to it was horrific.
See, normally I resent characters who *think* they’ve got it together but are secretly messy, but I just find Dorothy really sympathetic, for some reason. Maybe it’s because she’s so young.
Probably because most of those characters are written to try and convince the audience that they’re good and perfect and have everything together. It’s not just secret, it’s often that the author doesn’t know what having things together actually looks like and tries to portray a dysfunctional thing as ideal.
I’m not sure we’re reading the same comic…? I’m reading the comic where the author picked a title that calls all the characters young and foolish, and suggests that they’ll hopefully grow *by doing things wrong,* over and over again. Nobody has their stuff together, dysfunctional mistakes ahoy, style of thing.
I think that was why those kinds of characters are usually annoying, but aren’t in this comic.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about? Literally not one single character is written the way you’re claiming. You don’t have to lie like this.
Not one single character? Did you think they were talking about this comic exclusively, or do you really think no one has ever written a character like that?
The first one.
It was the second. I was trying to draw a contrast between the way Willis handles characters and the traits that can make them obnoxious with lesser writers.
In that case, I apologise for the abrasive nature of my response.
Walky: hey Smart Ex, plz help me unfuck this situation? I really wanna let it fester, but also you taught me that communication is mature and cool, sooo
Dorothy: nope! festering is fine actually! This will not go wrong!
Walky: hey, convenient advice! Thanks Smart Ex, later! (exit)
Dorothy: aaah yes truly, the festering of unspoken feelings is excellent. (Deep breath.) This is great.
This is such a good summary!
Agreed!
Hahaha yes
There are nuances, but yeah, that accurately captures the situation.
i should write more comments when barely awake, i didn’t even remember writing this haha
Amazing milu confirmed.
I’m still estranged to love
I don’t know the rules and don’t want to
A fear of commitment’s what I’m thinking of
You’d get this from any insecure guy
I don’t wanna tell you how I’m feeling
I don’t myself understand
Never gonna take you up
Never gonna settle down
Regrets? I’ve had a few.
But then again too few to mention.
If there’s one thing a relationship doesn’t need, it’s definitely honest communication about how you feel about each other
Even if Walky may (MAY) get there eventually…it’s very likely to come up again in their relationship before then. Lucy could start throwing out more frequent “I love you”s with the expectation he’ll say it back. He could be on his way back to Lucy now, where she could start up a conversation about how great it is that they were able to say they love each other. How is Walky going to feel when this happens?
“It’s just going to hurt her more to tell her the truth” is convenient in the moment. In addition to discouraging real communication when issues arise, it’s not guaranteed that convenience would even last.
Nowadays, it feels like a red flag/dog whistle to say “Sometimes the truth hurts”, but goddamn does it need to come out sometimes. Not all hurt is permanent, and while it’s nice to avoid as much of it as possible, sometimes that only helps it build up to a point where somebody gets way more hurt than they ever would have been if they’d gotten the much smaller one out of the way.
“Sometimes the truth hurts” only sounds like a red flag to me when someone uses it to AVOID taking responsibility for hurting feelings…!
I agree that it’s convenient in the moment but likely to blow up sooner rather than later.
I think is a good advice and Walky was hoping to hear something like that. He likes And care for Lucy, why risk to ruin that relationship for some mixed feelings that will probably disappear with the time? Waiting is the best solution in this case.
Goddamn it, Dorothy, literally the only thing you had going for you was that you gave good advice and now THIS?
Dorothy im disappointed, you are not fit to lead horde
Now I’m imagining former presidents giving relationship advice…
I take relation advice only from Benjamin Franklin, the only American president that was never actually president.
If that doesn’t show wisdom, I don’t know what does.
Man, I just want Dorothy to be okay…
Just make sure it’s not your writing hand
I don’t really get why people are saying this is bad advice.
I can understand the virtue of being honest and that asking Lucy to take things slowly would be nice but I can’t see what tradegy Dorothy’s advice would lead to.
It’s not like it’s a promise of future action. You can love someone and the actions associated with that are arbitrary depending on the person.
If you wanna get why people think it’s bad advice, you could try reading our actual reasons.
I hope I’m wrong, but I start to fear that anything Dorothy would have said, would have triggered the same reactions. Even if it had been exactly the opposite.
I don’t think so. Can’t speak for everyone but I will always take the advice to communicate over the advice not to (though I might still have some ideas that I think have more finesse than this potential opposite answer). Plus, I honestly didn’t think Dorothy was going to say this- I read yesterday’s strip thinking ‘well at least she can give some decent advice to Walky, even if she’s questioning him weirdly,’ especially since I know one can be making terrible decisions for themself and still have the clarity to give others good advice
Walky in previous strip just said why this is bad idea. Something with uncle Fester and his balls
Speaking from experience, it can convince people you’re more serious than you actually are. I do think it implies some kind of future commitment, even if that is different from person to person.
Becky returns to her dorm room, only to find fist-sized holes, in the walls.
“You have your pile of Lesbos.
I have my loner craters.”
Better advice: think deeply about whether you’re already at, or near that point – which she was trying to get him to do in canon – and if you *are*, maybe express “I love you” fully to her when ready alongside a simple explanation that the previous time was more of an accident and he wants to make it more significant and sincere from now on. It doesn’t have to be one of “never tell her” or “break her heart now”, and for me, Dorothy’s trending a little too close to the former. But kudos given the circumstances.
But, unless he gets to the “love” stage pretty damn fast, it’s likely to come up again before that and he’ll have to respond.
How long can he avoid saying “I love you” back when she says it, without it blowing up in his face?
Thats what punching bags are for. Designated punching areas!
This right here. I mean, look what Amber did, she started taking all her frustrations and rage issues out on nonsentient things like punching bags, walls, and rapists, and now she’s able to fight like a dozen dudes off on her own. Dorothy could learn a lesson or two.
The trouble is that this works only if you are Amazing. Now Dorothy is clearly amazing, but she isn’t Amazing.
Pragmatic and cool-headed people punch pillows behind closed doors off-camera whenever they need to in order to stay pragmatic and cool-headed. Don’t worry about it, just take care of your needs.
I agree with the people who disagree with Dorothy here.
Noted.
Your name has been duely entered into the Big Book of People To Point and Laugh At Should Things Go Exactly as Dorothy Predicted, with all advantages, privileges, and secret discounts* thereby pertaining thereto.
* We can’t tell you what they are because they’re secret.
You’re also, what? 18 or 19? Definitely an age known for being cool-headed and pragmatic… /s
Allow yourself some emotions and punch something already!
But maybe not Becky.
Oh the pragmatic and coolheaded are the ones that actually punch MORE things out of frustration, and also as a means to recover some of their seemlingly unlimited patience, they just mastered the ability to do it when there’s nobody around.
For the people wondering how this might backfire, imagine what happens emotionally for Walky when he sees Lucy tonight and she says “I love you” at the end of the night, or worse, if she starts talking about how excited she is that they’ve said it, or asks him what he loves about her, or how long he’s loved her. These situations happen all the time, especially in young relationships where one person is really invested/excited and obsessively thinking about their interactions. For Walky, he’s not just going to have to make the choice to omit or lie once; he’s going to have to make it every day, and every time it comes up in conversation, and live with how that feels. My experience with repressing, omitting, or lying has always been that it churns my insides every time I think about the falseness; Walky’s panic here implies to me that he’d struggle pretty badly with maintaining or reinforcing the misunderstanding through lying or omission.
That is some dumbass advice.
Saying cusses has been shown to increase pain tolerance. It is entirely pragmatic to shout FUCK FUCK FUCK at the top of your lungs for three hours straight.
Fortunately for her, she gave really bad advice
I understand peoples reasoning that this may be bad advice but i feel its mainly because people are assuming Walky is leaning into “not in love”. However, i think its good advice becauae Walky needs to figure out what he meamt first
Its obvious he cares, quite deeply, about Lucy. He thinks very highly of her, shares interests, and wants to make sure they have a good lasting relationship. To me, in a relationship, this is perfectly fine “i love you” territory but I understand others view that as equating to “marriage talk” in the extreme and various other takes. Walky still seems unclear on whether he actually meant it or not, hes just worried Lucy positively thinks he did. I think he did, but maybe not in the way she meant, and he needs to figure that out before he can relate this to her.
They can do it a bit, as a treat.
Dorothy being thanked for being pragmatic when she’s regretting being pragmatic and dumping Walky is a special kind of sting. Poor Dorothy.