Joyce is the cutest beard ever! Sadly, this is a realistic fate for someone of her background. I’ve known so many “good Christian girls” who had highly respectful gay boyfriends…
Hello my name is Joyce
I’m thinking thoughts with my voice
I wanted to meet compatible boys
And in church while I began to rejoice
I suddenly started thinking very…nauuuuuughhhhhhtyyyyyyyy
Alongside the current chain of references to a specific cartoon, I’m also reminded of “Pink’s Hot Dogs,” which gives a disturbing image of of Joyce being into pink fleshy… Appendages…
Mostly sarcasm. Even the best in-universe solution of Ethan actually truly falling for Joyce would draw hurt feelings from some readers.
“Gay guy instantly cured by cute devout girl” generally doesn’t go over too well with gay audiences, myself included.
Ethan hopping aboard the Extreme Denial Express for a few weeks would be more believable, more interesting to see unfold, and be a better story to tell.
I literally cannot believe that Willis would do a “cure your gays” storyline. This is not his first gay character here. (Um, er, or is it? Blast these alternate continuities.) And while he’s done plenty of mean things to his gay characters, the closest he’s come to curing one is Malaya, which was actually a bait-and-switch (in universe, even).
Of course, on the other hand this is Willis, and the “Damn you!” temptation may be tough for him to resist, but still…no.
I didn’t mean to imply that I thought he would, but looking back, I can see how that might come across. I don’t think he’d pull a “damn you Willis” with something like this. At least, not in that way.
I feel the same way! i remembered reading the Season 8 Buffy comic of this one particular plotline, and it got me so mad!! it was impossible for it to happen unless she was a little bi this whole time. But obviously she shown no interest to women in the previous 7 seasons.
…Though actually, this doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger to me; I could totally end a week on this. Presumably because he’s saving the bomb for tomorrow.
I actually think it would be really interesting if it turned out Ethan was actually bi and he and Joyce ended up together. Ethan as straight/bi actually is a concept that really interests me, because we could really screw with his character.
IT’S AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE, WE CAN DO WHATEVER WE WANT
Well, it’s kinda like squares and rectangles. Every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square. Every bi person is gay, but not every gay person is bi. Willis could have just been screwing with us a little. Or he’s secretly Michael Bay and constantly lying to us.
You could be right, though. And then THAT could go 3 ways:
1. Joyce understands.
2. Joyce is devastated and becomes a bit depressing for a while, which would be interesting.
3. Joyce realizes she has no luck with men and becomes a lesbian, which would be interesting and hawt.
Bisexuality is not a subset of homosexuality(or heterosexuality, for that matter), as squares are to rectangles. Bisexuals are not gay when they are with a same-sex partner, and straight when they are with an opposite sex partner. They are bisexual. That’s why we have the term. They are (presumably) attracted to both genders (to varying degrees) at all times.
Unless of course, you are dealing with someone whose sexuality is fluid, as is the case with more than a few people. Because people are complicated like that. If that’s the case, you go by whatever label they are giving themselves(which is generally just a good rule of thumb).
This has been your lesson on sexuality and labels for the day.
If Ethan was bi, that would only make the soul-crushing break up with Amber and the sequential summer of damage control and strain of their relationship with each other all the more biting for Amber.
It would be a hell of a story. Ethan and Joyce fall for each other, Amber finds out, is crushed. Ethan is crushed as a result, confesses to Joyce that he also likes boys, Ethan is double-crushed. Joyce can’t handle the information, breaks it off, everyone lives miserablly ever after.
*sighs*
This idea of Ethan being bi is overthinking this. Willis has already had at least one person in his two continuities who found someone who was an exception to their preferred gender, there is no reason for Ethan to be bi for him to end up having a thing for Joyce.
Personally I’m holding out hope for Joyce/Danny to have a shot eventually. Back in Roomies they were actually not a bad match, personality wise, except for Joyce’s overbearing stalkerish thing which isn’t on display here and time spent with Ethan is likely good for her to have some interests in common with Danny. Amber, meanwhile, seems to have moved on from Ethan and the nature of the Danny/Amazigirl thing leaves the door open when Danny realizes he wants more than her secret identity is willing to give him considering how that cliche typically works.
Anything can be taken as a double-entendre; (Thank God you typed that, otherwise the spelling would be all over the damn place) I mean, look at this sentence: “I’m going to sodomize you with a mason jar.” I don’t know how anyone could take that in a sexual way.
Back in high school I knew a guy who was dating a gal who could do that with a mayo jar. Granted the location was different but still it is apparently possible.
Lets MOVE people! We are going to need lifeboats! Someone get that girl a straight boyfriend and get that man a Manuel. Mike, we need you on isle despair to pick up the broken pieces and make people eat them. Lets get cracking.
Guess we can’t post comic copy gravitars anymore. Dang, had a good one too..and it’s morphed into beefcake guy. Okay, back to my kitty and behave myself.
Master Willis, your ability to take these characters in completely unexpected (but entirely believable) directions never ceases to amaze. Knowing the previous continuity only makes it sweeter. It’ll be a pleasure and privilege to read for another decade.
I think I’m the resident Satanist around here (I mean, aside from completely not being one), so let’s see if I can muster something up here. Let’s see, we have two people talking, no religion being discussed at all, but all the sad cute is -wait, don’t get distracted! Okay, maybe if I focus on that singing in the background, there’s probably something in there that – aw, the cute! The painful cute!
Try to hold it together people! Try to, try to, try DAWWWWWWWW
Of course. This is why he was here in the first place, clearly. Why else would he decide to go to church on this particular day if he didn’t sense an opportunity to use his powers for dubious good.
I feel bad. She’s giving an honest to goodness attempt for coupling, but his face has ‘innocent smile’ written all over it. Sans the gray sideburns since this is DoA, not SP.
Remember Joyce, hand holding will get you pregnant. So repeat after me. “Hey I just met you, and this is craaazy, bit I think I’m pregnant, and its your baby!”
I really hope you’re not going to turn Joyuce into Michelle Bachman and have her try to “Pray the Gay Away.” But then again, if you’re going to redeem her afterward and show how ridiculous that is might not be such a bad idea at all…
Just don’t think about the Slender Woman. The more you think about her, the more likely she’ll show up behind yo—::COMPUTER SCREEN GOES BLACK, STATIC & DISTORTION::
Did anyone hear about Joshua Weed, the gay mormon guy who came out and said he is super happy in his heterosexual marriage, enjoys his sex life with his wife, and says that living according to his spiritual principles is more important to him than his sexual orientation? (Sad really, but his choice) I could see something similar happening here with Joyce deciding she would be willing to love and marry him even if he is gay, and Ethan going along with it because he is so desperate for that sort of love and support.
And then Amber implodes, generating a black hole that destroys the entire universe.
I think you really have to understand mormon culture to understand Josh weed. His story is not unusual. i was raised mormon. Though being gay isn’t considered wrong or having as they call it same gender attration, the acting on the feelings is. The justifications are many, but all stupid. but you haev to remember we are rasied to belive that the family is the most important thing you can ever have… to not be able to have that family.. would be heartbreaking. that said he was so brave to come out of the closet, stupidity can run deep in some comunities… social suicide by mormons and the lgbt community
I think what Joshua did takes a serious amount of determination and time (as I recall it took him years to find a woman that worked on any level for him, and time still hasn’t told us if, even after all that effort, the marriage will stick. Good luck to him though, so long as he’s doing it for his own reasons/beliefs and not someone else’s…)
Anyway, I have serious doubts Ethan is in that sort of stat of mind. Would he like a relationship? Sure. Is he psychologically dominated by a theological conception that eternal happiness can only be found through heterosexual marriage? …uh, I’m going with “not so much”. I doubt Ethan feels terribly motivated to overcome something he doesn’t really see as a problem (or hasn’t seen as a problem in SP.)
Personally, I don’t think this can work. Ethan has never shown himself to be even remotely bi… Yeah, I agree with most everyone here, this can only end in tears.
Choice must be respected, yes, but when examples like that are championed as a way of saying “See, you CAN deny your true self and live a kind-of-happy life by sticking to the principles you were raised into instead of your sexuality” it makes me want to punch people.
Denying who you are in favor of pleasing a small-minded community should be something that makes said community wonder what the hell it is doing wrong, not celebrated.
Hey, now it sounds like you guys are type casting Ethan. Just because he is supposed to be gay, doesn’t mean he has to come out and be gay the way you guys think he is supposed to. If he wants to hold on to this sense of normalcy he has right now, dont think he has to completely drop who he is and automatically start humping all the guys.
But then THAT was god’s plan! No matter what you do, it was God’s plan.
It kind of has to be. Because let’s say that somebody subvert’s God’s plan and does the opposite of what he wanted. You don’t live in a vacuum. Your choices affect other people. And so your subversion of God’s plan will inevitably cause havoc with God’s plans for other people. It can’t possibly be that God’s plan for other people won’t be an option for those people because another person made a wayward decision that removed it from possibility, so it must have always been God’s plan for …
…
Or, God intervenes as necessary to ensure his plan is not thrown off course by people going against his plan. Small things and such, rather than spectacular miracles. Making sure you remember something you forgot, causing you to change your course before disaster strikes, good ol’ fasioned poetic justice for those fighting his plan, etc. Much simpler than your idea. 😛
If by that you meant that people still have the option to ignore the ‘opportunity’ and continue to be a monkey wrench in the plan, then the plan has been buried by a mountainous pile of monkey wrenches by now.
I mean, the word ‘plan’ implies that there’s a sequence of events that is supposed to happen. If one of these events doesn’t happen, then the plan is off the rails. And as Willis pointed out, this will tend to have a snowball effect – the rogue element will knock other elements off track, which will themselves then be off-plan, whether they like it or not. The butterfly effect applies here; the smallest changes will have escalating effects as often as they don’t. Hitler decides to be a painter instead, and *piles* of history is noticeably different.
Additional vulnerability is introduced by the fact that people say that *everything* is part of God’s plan, and that his plan is supposedly having deliberate specific effects on billions of places in trillions upon trillions of moments in continuous succession. This is a plan that deals in minutia – if I decide to go buy chips and get in a wreck, the survivors will be telling themselves that the event and it’s aftermath was part of god’s plan. Does this mean that I don’t even choose whether or not I feel like a snack is God manipulating me? Did he force me to be in that place at that time? According to the bereaved, yes. So, bye-bye free will.
Though frankly, free will is a fleeting commodity when you’ve got a God around. If you want to obliterate it even faster, have a god that can predict the future with certainty, without having to resort to intervention to force his predictions to come true. True precognition disproves free will* absolutely, without even having bringing a plan into it.
* Libertarian free will, that is. Which is to say, the kind of free will everyone means when they say “free will”.
I think God does very little in our lives, but wishes the best for us. He probably put the ‘Big Bang’ into action and let evolution and such run its course. Kind of why I find it ironic when some Atheist call the religious people ignorant, while it’s just as ignorant to believe with no shadow of a doubt that there was absolutely no higher power. With this unending universe and such, anything is possible, and to put the idea of God out of any realm of possibility in their minds is ridiculous. I myself probably border Agnosticism and Christianity; believing in the religion, but also understanding that there is no true way to know for certain. Guess I’m done with this rant, if you can call it that.
People are atheistic about all kinds of stuff. I’m an atheist about unicorns. I’m pretty sure they don’t exist and never did. I’m an atheist about an invisible puma who is said to be hiding behind my chair, growling at a frequency humans can’t hear. Would you tell someone who said they were 100% sure that there wasn’t an invisible puma behind them that they’re ignorant? Or are they just being pragmatic?
Besides, a god who does so little that we can’t tell that he exists may as well be a god who doesn’t exist at all. He is irrelevant to existence, which is basically the same thing.
….and why does your gravatar include the Confederate flag…?
Hollywood tells us that atheists are 100% certain that there’s nothing that could be called a god, but that’s actually not how it works. Atheism is a strange hybrid of simplicity and complexity: it’s simple in that we just don’t believe in anything that could reasonably called a god; it’s complex because (whether we like it or not) it’s a reactionary belief system; it’s always defined in contrast to existing religions, because they are the source of the definitions of the gods we don’t believe in – and there are a lot of different definitions. Some we are more certain of than others.
For example, a lot of Christianity speaks of a god that is claimed to have done lots of things that simply didn’t happen: creationism; a worldwide flood, something with Jews enslaved in egypt and a drowned pharoah, and so on. A god who is defined as having done that, never existed. We can be 100% certain – or at least as certain as we are that all of history and all of science isn’t a total lie. Same as we know there aren’t herds of unicorns roaming Africa leaving bones and stool and photo ops everywhere.
Now, Deist gods like the one you speak of, they’re harder to disprove; impossible actually. But on the other hand, why should we care about them? They do nothing for us, and as best we can tell, never did. Humanity gets as much benefit from Frodo and Harry Potter. They’re all the same to me – though personally the protagonists of those stories strike me as much, much nicer people than the biblical god. (Debatably including ring-possessed Frodo.) And if I’m not going to believe in them, why waste time on some nebulous, poorly defined Mary-Sue fantasy?
Yep. Another one is “You’ll have to date a lot of frogs before you find your prince.”
Joyce is on her way to learning what the second one is all about. First date was a horn dog. This one here is in the closet because Christopher Robin isn’t around anymore, so he now has to learn how to get his own damn head out of the honey pot. This is LIFE, Joyce Brown, and like the song says, you can’t hurry love.
“Joyce, I’ve never felt this way about a girl before. I feel we have so much in common. I know you’re looking for a good man…”
“Oh, Ethan….”
“…and so am I! SO much in common!”
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Daww she’s so cute and blushing. I’m gonna feel so bad when she realises her boy is into dudes.
She prefers dudes too so at least they have something in common.
That and if they combined, they might turn into David Willis.
“And I’ll form the head!”
“Which head?” 😀
AIEEEEEE!
for shadowing XD
They could cruise for dudes together.
… and bang them together by sharing a nickel.
Nickels are only for Parents my friend, the will become Father- and possibly Uncle, Fuckers.
Joyce is the cutest beard ever! Sadly, this is a realistic fate for someone of her background. I’ve known so many “good Christian girls” who had highly respectful gay boyfriends…
Last panel Joyce’s face looks so coy yet naughty.
Hello my name is Joyce
I’m thinking thoughts with my voice
I wanted to meet compatible boys
And in church while I began to rejoice
I suddenly started thinking very…nauuuuuughhhhhhtyyyyyyyy
Next thing you know, Joyce suddenly have a thing for hair.
And gerbils.
And pink dogs.
Alongside the current chain of references to a specific cartoon, I’m also reminded of “Pink’s Hot Dogs,” which gives a disturbing image of of Joyce being into pink fleshy… Appendages…
That voice was very happy in my head until I heard Freaky Fred.
second
Good poem, but I think your scanning rhythm is off. It’s too “broken” for me to even fix it easily. Good try, though!
I’m about 90% sure that it’s a reference to a cartoon called Courage the Cowardly Dog.
Let me give you your missing 10%.
This’ll end well for everyone and there will be no hurt feelings.
And there’ll be yummy cakes and delicious tea. And then Mr. Darcy will walk around the corner topless.
Those cakes are an… absolute delight! But everything else is a lie.
Drat, I really wanted some tea.
I never expected Joe to say that.
I smell sarcasm. Or someone who’s never read a Willis comic.
But this is the internet, so I’m going with sarcasm.
Mostly sarcasm. Even the best in-universe solution of Ethan actually truly falling for Joyce would draw hurt feelings from some readers.
“Gay guy instantly cured by cute devout girl” generally doesn’t go over too well with gay audiences, myself included.
Ethan hopping aboard the Extreme Denial Express for a few weeks would be more believable, more interesting to see unfold, and be a better story to tell.
I literally cannot believe that Willis would do a “cure your gays” storyline. This is not his first gay character here. (Um, er, or is it? Blast these alternate continuities.) And while he’s done plenty of mean things to his gay characters, the closest he’s come to curing one is Malaya, which was actually a bait-and-switch (in universe, even).
Of course, on the other hand this is Willis, and the “Damn you!” temptation may be tough for him to resist, but still…no.
And even if Willis could do it well, Amber’s feelings would almost certainly be hurt.
I didn’t mean to imply that I thought he would, but looking back, I can see how that might come across. I don’t think he’d pull a “damn you Willis” with something like this. At least, not in that way.
Ya know, these things DO happen. I’m not saying they should happen or that they’re frequent, just that they happen, like the reverse.
I feel the same way! i remembered reading the Season 8 Buffy comic of this one particular plotline, and it got me so mad!! it was impossible for it to happen unless she was a little bi this whole time. But obviously she shown no interest to women in the previous 7 seasons.
So sweet and so sad when you know that this is inevitably going to fail. No wonder Mike is present.
You call it sweet and sad. I call it tasty tasty schadenfreude.
Best make sure you come early, Mike gorges himself on the stuff.
Turns out it’s great for weight loss.
Ah, so that’s why he showed up.
This is going to result in prom night all over again.
Thank God this isn’t a Friday strip!
Seconded. I dont think my heart could take another cliffhanger after the shortpacked one last week. ;o;
you’re going to jinx us all!!!!
And tomorrow is DoA!’s first random Batman strip!
…Though actually, this doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger to me; I could totally end a week on this. Presumably because he’s saving the bomb for tomorrow.
Only means tomorrow’s gonna be worse.
I actually think it would be really interesting if it turned out Ethan was actually bi and he and Joyce ended up together. Ethan as straight/bi actually is a concept that really interests me, because we could really screw with his character.
IT’S AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE, WE CAN DO WHATEVER WE WANT
Bow chicka bow wow.
Willis has said like a million times that Ethan is still gay in DoA, though.
yeah but it’s not like Willis makes these characters.
RIGHT?!
Perfect combination of Gravatar and comment.
Well, it’s kinda like squares and rectangles. Every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square. Every bi person is gay, but not every gay person is bi. Willis could have just been screwing with us a little. Or he’s secretly Michael Bay and constantly lying to us.
You could be right, though. And then THAT could go 3 ways:
1. Joyce understands.
2. Joyce is devastated and becomes a bit depressing for a while, which would be interesting.
3. Joyce realizes she has no luck with men and becomes a lesbian, which would be interesting and hawt.
You’re mistaken.
Bisexuality is not a subset of homosexuality(or heterosexuality, for that matter), as squares are to rectangles. Bisexuals are not gay when they are with a same-sex partner, and straight when they are with an opposite sex partner. They are bisexual. That’s why we have the term. They are (presumably) attracted to both genders (to varying degrees) at all times.
Unless of course, you are dealing with someone whose sexuality is fluid, as is the case with more than a few people. Because people are complicated like that. If that’s the case, you go by whatever label they are giving themselves(which is generally just a good rule of thumb).
This has been your lesson on sexuality and labels for the day.
That makes zero sense. Gay and “into males” aren’t interchangeable.
If Ethan was bi, that would only make the soul-crushing break up with Amber and the sequential summer of damage control and strain of their relationship with each other all the more biting for Amber.
And, that’s the way I like it. Soul-crushing.
It would be a hell of a story. Ethan and Joyce fall for each other, Amber finds out, is crushed. Ethan is crushed as a result, confesses to Joyce that he also likes boys, Ethan is double-crushed. Joyce can’t handle the information, breaks it off, everyone lives miserablly ever after.
Turns out it was Mike’s plan all along.
Your avatar: PERFECT. Also, Joyce goes lesbian herself, deciding she can’t handle boys.
Stop barking up the lesbian tree. It’s not that simple.
*sighs*
This idea of Ethan being bi is overthinking this. Willis has already had at least one person in his two continuities who found someone who was an exception to their preferred gender, there is no reason for Ethan to be bi for him to end up having a thing for Joyce.
Personally I’m holding out hope for Joyce/Danny to have a shot eventually. Back in Roomies they were actually not a bad match, personality wise, except for Joyce’s overbearing stalkerish thing which isn’t on display here and time spent with Ethan is likely good for her to have some interests in common with Danny. Amber, meanwhile, seems to have moved on from Ethan and the nature of the Danny/Amazigirl thing leaves the door open when Danny realizes he wants more than her secret identity is willing to give him considering how that cliche typically works.
Ethan, why are you smiling?
he’s dumb
Because holding hands with girls is totally a gay guy thing to do.
Because he’s been trying to pretend he’s not gay and it’s working.
For now.
And then it won’t.
And I think my grabatar is too happy about that fact
It could be that he saw it as a friendly encouragement and not flirting. He might not be able to see the blushing thing as well as we do.
Dum dum dum dum…….dum. Too bad.
What an adorable, innocent Joyce. Too bad her crush prefers eclairs to donuts.
That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that metaphor, and I swear I’m going to find some occasion to use it in the future.
Feel free to do so. You would not believe how long in took to figure out how to spell fuggin’ eclair. Damn French Twinkies.
CHOCOLATE-COATED French twinkies.
…although now I suddenly see where someone could take that as a double-entendre.
Anything can be taken as a double-entendre; (Thank God you typed that, otherwise the spelling would be all over the damn place) I mean, look at this sentence: “I’m going to sodomize you with a mason jar.” I don’t know how anyone could take that in a sexual way.
Back in high school I knew a guy who was dating a gal who could do that with a mayo jar. Granted the location was different but still it is apparently possible.
Joyce – “Peace be with you, and an EXTRA piece for you.”
… I miss Jim Gaffigan.
Holy moses don’t scare me like that. lol
*Tilts head inquisitively* Scary? Me? Never.
*Huddles in the corner*…. He gonna take my pale man….
*Grins* Don’t be afraid, little von, I von’t hurt you.
I NEED SEVERAL ADULTS!
Awww snap
THE TAGS THO
8( watch out joyce
God, if you love Joyce, PLEASE TELL HER he’s gay!!!!
I think this may end up being her “trapped in light and forced to watch porn videos”.
She loses her memory and then joined the MIB?
She loses her memory and things get much, much darker.
“Do you know how I got these scars?”
Her father was a drinker and a fiend?
Abondon ship, abondon ship!! Drama-burg ahead!!
Lets MOVE people! We are going to need lifeboats! Someone get that girl a straight boyfriend and get that man a Manuel. Mike, we need you on isle despair to pick up the broken pieces and make people eat them. Lets get cracking.
NOOOOOOO! Not the Drama Tag! Anything but that! Must be fixed!
Some people go to bars to hit on the opposite sex.
Joyce goes to church.
Well, they say love can happen anywhere. Even during a funeral.
This was set at a funeral? Suddenly Mike’s presence makes so much more sense.
Naw, it couldn’t be. Mike would have a bag of popcorn and his phone on it’s loudest ring setting.
So did a huge number of people living in a christian majority… and I think some still do XD
Well, I wouldn’t say that I hit on them, but that is where I try to find them.
Mike is going to have a field day after this.
Last-panel Joyce is soooo cute! 😀
And last-panel Ethan is soooo sadly self-deluding. 🙁
JOYCE, wrong tree, you are barking up it.
Learning things the hard way: Life’s way of telling you “I enjoy seeing you suffer”.
Haha, tragic.
I am hilarious and you will quote everything I say.
TWELVE MONTHS HAVE PASSED, let’s go fight Saiyans.
DESTRUCTO DISK
LAME!
WHY DON’T YOU DOOOOOOOOOOOODGE?
Tragically hilarious.
You now fully understand Dramedy
Exactly.
ethan you can’t possibly be this oblivious…. ETHAN. >:[
Ethan knows what he’s doing. Dude is toying with hardcore denial as a life strategy.
Knowingly and with malice aforethought! Denial that requires active denial of the fact you’re actively in denial is the best kind of denial.
This is been a pretty rough two weeks for you eh Joyce…
HOOKING UP IN A CHURCH
YES?
Better yet, in Confessional.
So.COTDAMN. hot
Oh this cannot end well.
Actually, it could. It’s just that the in-between parts are going to suck like Robo-Vac.
Hoo boy, is this gonna end up in disappointment!
Guess we can’t post comic copy gravitars anymore. Dang, had a good one too..and it’s morphed into beefcake guy. Okay, back to my kitty and behave myself.
BAD ETHAN! BAD BAD BAD!
Now go to the corner and think about what you have done.
Am I going to have to rub your nose in it?
I can’t see anything bad coming from this at ALL
Master Willis, your ability to take these characters in completely unexpected (but entirely believable) directions never ceases to amaze. Knowing the previous continuity only makes it sweeter. It’ll be a pleasure and privilege to read for another decade.
So, what’s this alternate universe I keep thinking about, where’s the original universe?
I like this storyline. I hope it NEVER ENDS.
Err, alternate universe I keep “hearing” about, not thinking.
Finally! I little something something for Joyce. 😉
Still waiting on the incredibly Accepting and friendly Satanist iot writes itslef i swear!
The spelling, it hurts!
I think I’m the resident Satanist around here (I mean, aside from completely not being one), so let’s see if I can muster something up here. Let’s see, we have two people talking, no religion being discussed at all, but all the sad cute is -wait, don’t get distracted! Okay, maybe if I focus on that singing in the background, there’s probably something in there that – aw, the cute! The painful cute!
Try to hold it together people! Try to, try to, try DAWWWWWWWW
GASP!
In a church, Joyce?
For shame.
OH GODS YOU AVATAR!
ARGH
OUR GOOOOD IS AN AWESOME GOD HE REEEEIGNS OVER HEAVEN AND EARTH…
You’re all so, so welcome.
From heaven above. Whatever dudes.
Is Mike still here? I see asshole potential here.
Of course. This is why he was here in the first place, clearly. Why else would he decide to go to church on this particular day if he didn’t sense an opportunity to use his powers for dubious good.
I feel bad. She’s giving an honest to goodness attempt for coupling, but his face has ‘innocent smile’ written all over it. Sans the gray sideburns since this is DoA, not SP.
Joyce: HEY! I just met you and this is crazy, but LOVE ME! LOVE ME! LOVE ME! LOVE ME! LOVE ME! LOVE ME! LOVE ME!
Remember Joyce, hand holding will get you pregnant. So repeat after me. “Hey I just met you, and this is craaazy, bit I think I’m pregnant, and its your baby!”
Oh no…
That boy needs an intervention.
That last panel makes me want to grab Joyce and go commit some sins in a confession box. … Oh wait, wrong religion. XD
Joyce gonna get so crushed in a couple strips when she finds out the truth about Ethan…
Joyce. Stop that. I ship you and Sal and you are making that difficult right now.
THIS will not end well.
Ethan, NOOOOOOOOO!
This can only end in tears.
I really hope you’re not going to turn Joyuce into Michelle Bachman and have her try to “Pray the Gay Away.” But then again, if you’re going to redeem her afterward and show how ridiculous that is might not be such a bad idea at all…
Don’t hold hands! The slender woman with no eyes feeds on couples!
Just don’t think about the Slender Woman. The more you think about her, the more likely she’ll show up behind yo—::COMPUTER SCREEN GOES BLACK, STATIC & DISTORTION::
So, we have established that Joyce has no Gaydar…or Jewdar
Did anyone hear about Joshua Weed, the gay mormon guy who came out and said he is super happy in his heterosexual marriage, enjoys his sex life with his wife, and says that living according to his spiritual principles is more important to him than his sexual orientation? (Sad really, but his choice) I could see something similar happening here with Joyce deciding she would be willing to love and marry him even if he is gay, and Ethan going along with it because he is so desperate for that sort of love and support.
And then Amber implodes, generating a black hole that destroys the entire universe.
I think you really have to understand mormon culture to understand Josh weed. His story is not unusual. i was raised mormon. Though being gay isn’t considered wrong or having as they call it same gender attration, the acting on the feelings is. The justifications are many, but all stupid. but you haev to remember we are rasied to belive that the family is the most important thing you can ever have… to not be able to have that family.. would be heartbreaking. that said he was so brave to come out of the closet, stupidity can run deep in some comunities… social suicide by mormons and the lgbt community
I think what Joshua did takes a serious amount of determination and time (as I recall it took him years to find a woman that worked on any level for him, and time still hasn’t told us if, even after all that effort, the marriage will stick. Good luck to him though, so long as he’s doing it for his own reasons/beliefs and not someone else’s…)
Anyway, I have serious doubts Ethan is in that sort of stat of mind. Would he like a relationship? Sure. Is he psychologically dominated by a theological conception that eternal happiness can only be found through heterosexual marriage? …uh, I’m going with “not so much”. I doubt Ethan feels terribly motivated to overcome something he doesn’t really see as a problem (or hasn’t seen as a problem in SP.)
Personally, I don’t think this can work. Ethan has never shown himself to be even remotely bi… Yeah, I agree with most everyone here, this can only end in tears.
Choice must be respected, yes, but when examples like that are championed as a way of saying “See, you CAN deny your true self and live a kind-of-happy life by sticking to the principles you were raised into instead of your sexuality” it makes me want to punch people.
Denying who you are in favor of pleasing a small-minded community should be something that makes said community wonder what the hell it is doing wrong, not celebrated.
Also: NO, ETHAN, NO
The person is also the community, as the community are the individuals.
Oh, honey.
Hey, now it sounds like you guys are type casting Ethan. Just because he is supposed to be gay, doesn’t mean he has to come out and be gay the way you guys think he is supposed to. If he wants to hold on to this sense of normalcy he has right now, dont think he has to completely drop who he is and automatically start humping all the guys.
It dont work like that.
If god has a plan for all of us, then how, in essence, can we have free will?
We can choose not to follow it, for starters.
But then THAT was god’s plan! No matter what you do, it was God’s plan.
It kind of has to be. Because let’s say that somebody subvert’s God’s plan and does the opposite of what he wanted. You don’t live in a vacuum. Your choices affect other people. And so your subversion of God’s plan will inevitably cause havoc with God’s plans for other people. It can’t possibly be that God’s plan for other people won’t be an option for those people because another person made a wayward decision that removed it from possibility, so it must have always been God’s plan for …
…
…and I’ve gone crosseyed
lol, that reminds me of when I first heard of Calvinism. My brain never quite recovered from the attempt to understand those beliefs. :psyduck:
Neither have theirs.
Or, God intervenes as necessary to ensure his plan is not thrown off course by people going against his plan. Small things and such, rather than spectacular miracles. Making sure you remember something you forgot, causing you to change your course before disaster strikes, good ol’ fasioned poetic justice for those fighting his plan, etc. Much simpler than your idea. 😛
Oh, I’m the atheist today? Irony instead of Poetic Justice, got it.
“Causing you to change your course”? Whoops; there goes free will. (Free will when your ability to choose otherwise is removed is not free will.)
Giving you the opportunity to change your course, however, is.
If by that you meant that people still have the option to ignore the ‘opportunity’ and continue to be a monkey wrench in the plan, then the plan has been buried by a mountainous pile of monkey wrenches by now.
I mean, the word ‘plan’ implies that there’s a sequence of events that is supposed to happen. If one of these events doesn’t happen, then the plan is off the rails. And as Willis pointed out, this will tend to have a snowball effect – the rogue element will knock other elements off track, which will themselves then be off-plan, whether they like it or not. The butterfly effect applies here; the smallest changes will have escalating effects as often as they don’t. Hitler decides to be a painter instead, and *piles* of history is noticeably different.
Additional vulnerability is introduced by the fact that people say that *everything* is part of God’s plan, and that his plan is supposedly having deliberate specific effects on billions of places in trillions upon trillions of moments in continuous succession. This is a plan that deals in minutia – if I decide to go buy chips and get in a wreck, the survivors will be telling themselves that the event and it’s aftermath was part of god’s plan. Does this mean that I don’t even choose whether or not I feel like a snack is God manipulating me? Did he force me to be in that place at that time? According to the bereaved, yes. So, bye-bye free will.
Though frankly, free will is a fleeting commodity when you’ve got a God around. If you want to obliterate it even faster, have a god that can predict the future with certainty, without having to resort to intervention to force his predictions to come true. True precognition disproves free will* absolutely, without even having bringing a plan into it.
* Libertarian free will, that is. Which is to say, the kind of free will everyone means when they say “free will”.
I think God does very little in our lives, but wishes the best for us. He probably put the ‘Big Bang’ into action and let evolution and such run its course. Kind of why I find it ironic when some Atheist call the religious people ignorant, while it’s just as ignorant to believe with no shadow of a doubt that there was absolutely no higher power. With this unending universe and such, anything is possible, and to put the idea of God out of any realm of possibility in their minds is ridiculous. I myself probably border Agnosticism and Christianity; believing in the religion, but also understanding that there is no true way to know for certain. Guess I’m done with this rant, if you can call it that.
People are atheistic about all kinds of stuff. I’m an atheist about unicorns. I’m pretty sure they don’t exist and never did. I’m an atheist about an invisible puma who is said to be hiding behind my chair, growling at a frequency humans can’t hear. Would you tell someone who said they were 100% sure that there wasn’t an invisible puma behind them that they’re ignorant? Or are they just being pragmatic?
Besides, a god who does so little that we can’t tell that he exists may as well be a god who doesn’t exist at all. He is irrelevant to existence, which is basically the same thing.
….and why does your gravatar include the Confederate flag…?
Hollywood tells us that atheists are 100% certain that there’s nothing that could be called a god, but that’s actually not how it works. Atheism is a strange hybrid of simplicity and complexity: it’s simple in that we just don’t believe in anything that could reasonably called a god; it’s complex because (whether we like it or not) it’s a reactionary belief system; it’s always defined in contrast to existing religions, because they are the source of the definitions of the gods we don’t believe in – and there are a lot of different definitions. Some we are more certain of than others.
For example, a lot of Christianity speaks of a god that is claimed to have done lots of things that simply didn’t happen: creationism; a worldwide flood, something with Jews enslaved in egypt and a drowned pharoah, and so on. A god who is defined as having done that, never existed. We can be 100% certain – or at least as certain as we are that all of history and all of science isn’t a total lie. Same as we know there aren’t herds of unicorns roaming Africa leaving bones and stool and photo ops everywhere.
Now, Deist gods like the one you speak of, they’re harder to disprove; impossible actually. But on the other hand, why should we care about them? They do nothing for us, and as best we can tell, never did. Humanity gets as much benefit from Frodo and Harry Potter. They’re all the same to me – though personally the protagonists of those stories strike me as much, much nicer people than the biblical god. (Debatably including ring-possessed Frodo.) And if I’m not going to believe in them, why waste time on some nebulous, poorly defined Mary-Sue fantasy?
Just because something didn’t happen doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.
(Checks dictionary) Yes it does.
It’s fun seeing people try and rationalize a paradox.
What’s the old saying? All the good men are taken or gay?
Yep. Another one is “You’ll have to date a lot of frogs before you find your prince.”
Joyce is on her way to learning what the second one is all about. First date was a horn dog. This one here is in the closet because Christopher Robin isn’t around anymore, so he now has to learn how to get his own damn head out of the honey pot. This is LIFE, Joyce Brown, and like the song says, you can’t hurry love.
You skipped #2, the rapist.
Will somebody please lend that girl their gaydar? I’d lend mine but I think it’s broken. All it shows is where Kirk Cameron is at any given moment.
hahaha
Probably filming another Left Behind movie
“Joyce, I’ve never felt this way about a girl before. I feel we have so much in common. I know you’re looking for a good man…”
“Oh, Ethan….”
“…and so am I! SO much in common!”
I can safely say, Joyce is going to get quite the shock soon…
It’ll be soooo fun to see.