Oh god. That *is* why Sarah looks so sad. And now her pessimism is confirmed. So . . . it will be Becky who has to convince them both that one can still find joy in a broken world?
Dudes, this world is full of dinosaur girlfriends and butthole dads going to prison and not having their brains ka-spewed and giblet touching. It’s a beautiful, bright world out there!
Cerberus, now when the story ark is finished, let me take the opportunity to thank you so much. You have shared a lot of personal stuff, you have given us a lot of very insightsful perspective and we have geeked out a lot together.
This has been a heavy ark, we have seen our beloved characters put to the tests as never before and we have had to face some of our own preconceptions (well, I have). It has been an honor to share the experience with you.
Speak for yourself. I paid for college by myself, or at least I can say that when I make my final student loan installment with my social security. Good oogly moogly, I will be in debt forever.
He did say “considerably.” I, also, will make the final installment with my SS (or have it discharged when I die), but I was at school with plenty of kids riding on their parents’ money. One of them rode on her parents’ money right into rehab and had to drop out of school. The current flare up about whether or not campuses should be “safe spaces” wouldn’t be happening if said campuses weren’t worried about parents’ money drying up.
As Sarah said on the saga about the rape incident: “called it” is funny when there’s pain involved there’s a limit of pain past wich saying “called it” becomes unfunny again.
I was afraid to click that. Stared at the link for like 10 seconds thinking “It’s Youtube. What’s the worst it could be? Maybe a 10% chance of Astley, sure, but…”
I don’t know about Jason of course, but I reckon that a lot of people with red-green colourblindness would find it hard to distinguish the dark brown links from the black text: they differ only by a little red.
I assumed the call continued with Carroll maintaining a well meaning soliloquy punctuated by monosyllabic responses by Joyce until Carroll came to the conclusion that her daughter was appropriately comforted. This strip being after Joyce has had a moment to stew.
You know, I actually quoted that, but misspelled “sad” for “said” and thought Sarah originally said “it” instead of “this world.” Sarah was right. She is sad.
No, you aren’t. And if you ask about not considering reflections of her ignorant, narrowminded, compassionless, bigotted upbringing to be a beautiful brilliant light: you wouldn’t be alone in that, either.
Joyce’s upbringing was ugly. Being comfortable and smug and self-congratulatory didn’t make it beautiful.
Actually, the world is healing itself remarkably. The rate of deaths from infectious disease is down by 90% since a century ago, life expectancies are way up; having peaked in the middle of last century, the rate of death in wars, civil wars, rebellions, and genocides is way, way down; the rate of abject poverty is down from 50% in the early 1960s to 10% now. All around the world mothers and babies are surviving childbirth, children are surviving infancy, and little girls are going to school and learning to calculate and to read at unprecedented rates. In the wealthy countries crime rates, especially violent crime rates, are a third or less of what they were thirty years ago, and the status of women and of disadvantaged minorities much better and tending to improve.
There’s still a lot to do, but every indication is that sustained and well-informed efforts bear fruit, and that the betterment of the lot of humanity is within the powers of our hands and minds, does not depend on holy-holy-holy-saying and the grace of the Most on High. Every decade, in every way, things are getting better and better*.
Joyce is going through an agonising experience, but it’s hopefully a metamorphosis; it certainly isn’t the breaking of the world. With any luck she is now close enough to have it by merely grasping: a world and a view of the world and an apprehension of the world that is by far richer and more detailed, more rewarding, more beautiful, more filled with opportunity, more thrilling, and more inspiring than the blinkered, biased, bibliolatrical vision of glory that she had before, all scorn, smugness, prejudice, and condemnation.
Yes, it’s good for wars. See Stephen Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. Wars, civil wars, and murderous atrocities are less frequent and much less deadly now than they were, having peaked about seventy-five years ago.
Stephen Pinker at greater length and with more detail and citations: 1 hr 16-minute lecture on YouTube. Pinker actually takes the podium at 3:30 after some tedious introductory remarks by someone else.
Nah, I actually interpret her statement different as well. She’s not broken. She’s not curling up into a ball and quitting and in fact, she’s maintaining a pretty intense death glare at that ceiling. But her sunniness and optimism are broken or rather her unquestionable faith in the culture of her raising.
She’s saying everything is broken because everything from her culture and in how she was raised is broken and she’s seen that in the most direct way possible. Not hearing second-hand from queer fellow-travelers who’ve told her, but seen with her own eyes with someone she loves as strongly as she is able to.
She’s filled with strength and drive, but the comfort and certainty are gone and maybe even her bubbly optimism that every group can be reached out to. She’s got scars. She’s got rage. She’s been exposed to the cruelty and hate of the world and that’s broken an aspect of her, but it’s also strengthened her core.
Which is that she stands up for what is right even when it is hard and that she tries to do right by people and see their good even when her religion is telling her to stop.
And what will be reborn from that will be beautiful but it necessitates seeing her old worldview crack and blow away.
Sarah is awesome, but Dina bit Toedad’s face. I can’t not vote for somebody who was willing to bite that nasty face for her girlfriend. (Although the whole “saving Amazigirl from getting hit by a truck” thing puts Sal and Joyce at a close second for me.)
ChurchMOUSE Joyce punched Toedad in the face, then called her mother to defend her gay friend and condemn “Christian” Toedad’s actions. Since the beginning of the comic, her worldview has been slowly (and gaining speed) falling apart. Yet she continuously finds the inner strength to keep going, and to figure out what /she/ believes, and defend her beliefs against those who have spent her entire life telling her there is only one right way to think — their way. She isn’t letting herself be pulled around on a leash anymore, but she also ins’t just giving up and throwing her beliefs and morals to the wind, either. Making a stand, when your whole life you’ve been trained to automatically believe whatever you’re told (or in cases where you can’t, like Jocelyne, to just keep your mouth shut and play along anyway)… That is incredibly badass. That takes more strength than just deciding the world sucks, so f*ck them all.
Oh, I’m not saying she should win. (I would put Joyce – Becky – Sarah – Amazigirl – Sal… but when I commented she was way down the list. She was getting beat by Carla, Ruth, and Malaya.
I don’t think it is a downer note. I think Joyce has just grown up, fast maybe but its a good thing. She was a narrow minded bigoted religious nut. She is now discovering that is what she was and not liking it.
That’s a good thing.
She started growing ever since the beginning of schoolyear.
Most of her new friends beliefs or life choices go against her parents beliefs but she held on to them and faced her parents.
This event though just atomized/bombed/shattered/nuked whatever was left of the protective shell her family had imposed on her.
I think she will get back up on her feet soon and she just need some time to process. Her friends will surely help.
Indeed, and I think this was what she needed to really start critically considering her faith. Becky critically rehoned her faith based on her own life experiences and her idea of a God character based on those experiences, but Joyce needed to see how the toxicity of the worldview of her raising interplayed with real people.
How it urged her to blame herself for Ryan or abandon her atheist friend were one piece of the puzzle, but seeing what the rhetoric about gay people actually translates as in her culture, the vileness and hate it supports, and the people it hurts on the bottom is having her look at her words and her unquestioned beliefs in a deep way.
It’s a beautiful moment of learning in a way, being able to see the toxicity that has surrounded and consumed you, but it is rough because it means acknowledging complicity in such a system. But Joyce is strong and will be a better person for this journey even if it’ll hurt like hell in the going through it.
Well looks like you can’t send her home Sarah what now ? Now your going to haft to get involved if you want to help your adopted little sister there is no other way around it.
Sara didn’t send home her roommate to keep from getting involved. She was smart enough to know she couldn’t help a doper by heself. The roomates friends did not have a clue what was going on. Sarah called her parents, not the office so she didn’t get kicked out of school.
As for Joyce: Sarah took a baseball bat to a guy that tried to rape her -how much more figgin’ involved do you want her to get?
Ya I know she cares and what she did the last time was without a doubt the best choice to make. All I’m saying is she can’t avoid Drama for the rest of her life and since she said that if things got so bad to a point Joyce couldn’t handle being out there any longer should would tell her family everything she’s been through something she can go home where it’s safe.
But now it seems like it isn’t the best choice this time around so I’m asking what’s her plan B?
I hate to say, but I think today might be Sarah finding herself with plan A gone and no plan B. (Though I’m reading Sarah as someone in the avoiding-problems-that-don’t-have-a-direct-impact-on-her camp rather than the avoiding-drama one.)
Sarah in full baseball-bat-big-sister mode I think is someone who might’ve answered Joyce by pointing out that Becky’s not broken, Joyce + Becky isn’t broken, and that the only broken things are Toedad and maybe Carol. (And carefully not addressing Joyce’s building crisis of faith directly.)
Seeing Sarah move into shadow in the last panel (like Joyce yesterday) is almost as heartbreaking as her answer.
I’d say it’s not the people who are broken (Ross excepted), but the relationships. When Joyce stood up to her parents about Dorothy, it built up her relationship with them into a new dimension. But this… does not do that.
In my personal experience, burning away the lies and self deception leaves a rock solid foundation to build upon. Joyce will be better for this in the long run. Not that it doesn’t suck monkey balls at the moment.
Tumblr’s actually pretty diverse, but like-minded people still congregate in insular groups, like the SJWs that earn the site so much ire. Equating SJWs with tumblr is like equating /b/ with 4chan, if not worse. The distinctions are just less obvious than when a site is divided into interest-focused boards.
Tumblr’s weird because I see people on tumblr complaining about how toxic people/communities on tumblr are, while describing things that as someone involved in a lot of tumblr communities, I’ve never seen go down, yet they don’t just, you know, remove themselves from that drama. And it’s not that I don’t believe them, because yeah, shitty stuff happens, but if seemingly without effort I can not participate in drama, other people should be able to do so with effort. It’s a lot like a lot of people I know IRL, but I mean, it’s a lot easier to remove yourself from an online shit community than a real life one.
(I’m not including people who get harassed personally, since that’s not really something they can just remove themselves from)
Tumblr *can* be great. It just depends on who you follow. I see a lot of SJ stuff, but not that much of the too-far over-reactions of it. I do see some people protesting the things that go to far. But I could cut out most of the SJ too if I wanted to, and just be on the fandom side of things. There are a ton of different parts to tumblr; just like any of the large social sites there are a great many communities within it.
I dunno, I guess I’m not tumblr enough to really feel the tumblr hate. When i was growing up, a lot of the internet communities were ultra tech bro and a lot of kids fell with things like the chans and got a really toxic education in how to react to other people including those who were different and where practiced faux-apathy was king.
For my students today, they love the tumblr and the ones who do love it because they can be queer or trans or proud of their race and genuinely excited about fandoms without being shat on. They’re encouraged in their geekiness and their identities and finding communities that can support them and give them at least a basic education about stuff that never got talked about in school (I mean, my kids are generally up on things like ace stuff and trans stuff and when I was growing up those terms were basically foreign and unknown). And they seem to be lacking quite the toxicity of the online cultures I had growing up.
So, it seems to be a marked improvement on that score. Though I would gather that it is not perfect, because at the end of the day it’s still just people and often a bunch of kids just learning for the first time how to interact with others from other kids. But in general, I can’t help feeling grateful that my students are tumblr-ing rather than chan-ing.
However heartwrenching this is, Carol is the same as she has been Joyce’s entire life. She has not changed. The world has not changed. But Joyce has changed. That’s why she’s reacting to what she once took for granted.
Joyce has changed to the better.
Not broken. Fixed.
Never let yourself think anything different, Joyce.
dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/lob
Agree.
Joyce is no longer a narrow minded, bigoted, fundie, religious nut with a Holier than thou attitude.
And she now she knows what she was, and it hurts.
She will be a much better person for this lesson, in the long run.
Not broken, I think. In pain, but whole — and better than she was when she got up this morning. Her past world-view was not a strength or a protection: it was crippling, and she is better off without it. Her upbringing was made of blinkers and chains, it was a restraint and a burden. To have it shattered is not a maiming but a liberation.
Actually, the idea that “everything’s really broken” is a standard part of Protestant theology. But often it just comes out as “humans are sinful” and attention is mostly directed at other people’s sinfulness rather than the failings of one’s own in-group. So what Joyce is experiencing here is a much deeper realization of something that she has probably been taught in a mostly superficial way.
Becky was facing a future where had everything she is is taken from her, but she was rescued and now she no longer has to hide from anyone. I can totally understand Becky handling this better than Joyce.
She no longer has to hide from anyone until she remembers that she’s still not actually a resident in the dorm and it’s still Ruth’s duty to eject her if it’s discovered that she’s living there against the rules.
Becky may have been the one that was kidnapped, but it doesn’t mean that Joyce won’t feel concern and/or empathy (even if Becky seems to be handling it.)
Plus, remember that at once point Ross did have a gun pointed at Joyce. That’s a pretty big stressor right there, even if Joyce wasn’t the one who was ultimately kidnapped.
There’s this and the fact that Becky had her crisis of faith off-panel. And sadly, probably alone. Realizing what was happening in her heart and in her pants with her roommate. What that meant in her feelings for Joyce. What that meant in the faith of her raising.
Alone she faced that horrifying reality and she made it out the other side believing that the deity she wants to believe in did not make her gay as a mistake or a sick test. Believed that her deity was not some hateful monster and rearranged her faith around that to one who celebrated sexuality and love and who would answer lesbian prayers just as much as straight ones.
She’s lost her faith. Joyce is only just starting to lose it.
And that’s not to say that Becky’s path was easy. We’ve seen the pain of it all in the few points where Becky drops the wackiness and gets darkly serious and hurt. And those have consistently followed where the faith of her raising has gotten used against her or in question of how she is. When Joyce brought up hanky-panky or needed to check that God was ok with the queer, when her dad tried to use faith to demand her submission. She doesn’t hold it, but can’t help feel the pain of how much that faith she was raised in took from her.
Becky comforting Joyce who is having a meltdown kicking the shit out of Beckys father, while Becky is recovering from a gun in face kidnapping and car crash and abusive fathers slap etc…and Joyce is just discovering she dosnt like the way she was raised.
The difference is largely that Joyce was comfortable and content in her tiny isolated “entire” world, whereas Becky was threatened in it, because of her sexuality.
Because Joyce has to face the fact of just how fucked up what she was taught was. Becky on the other hand, already dealt with that. And the events of today have taught her that God does answer lesbian prayers.
(In addition, I think Becky and Joyce probably had a different view of authority growing up due to their differing personalities. Joyce is more trusting so this is a bigger betrayal.)
In addition to everything that everyone else said, Becky’s had more time to process the conflict. At the most recent, she’s realized that she’s a lesbian and that everything she’s been taught was wrong for several weeks now, whereas Joyce has had, what, a couple days to process the collapse of her world view?
Joyce had the toxicity of her faith revealed in the starkest possible terms and she say her complicity and revelry in that system. The cost of what how she was raises says about gay people starkly revealed and the celebration of that horribleness by her fellow travelers. She’s learned that the faith she was taught is the arbiter of ALL morality (like without it, you are inherently a demonic being of pure sin) is in fact poisonous and hateful.
Becky has been through hell and her journey and her situation will have marks on her story, but her position right now is that she has been living in intense anxiety and fear that her dad at any moment will kidnap and abuse and rob her of a future for a good couple of days. She lost everything and her crush didn’t even love her back. But then, she got the support of an entire new network of friends, who went out of their way to help out where they could. She got a community that doesn’t react in fear and hatred when she comes out. She got a girlfriend who tells her awesome science facts and bites abusive dad faces. She got a friend who swore and rode on a motorcycle and came after her and brought her out of the worst hell she could possibly be in. She got a superhero literally saving her from abuse and then death. She got an ending to the anxiety that all this was a bubble of a fart of a dream.
And most importantly, she got a future. A hard future. A future with nothing and no safety net. A future shaky and tenuous and full of long hard work and more hardship than her friends will face. But one that exists. One that isn’t being raped every evening by a husband whose ministrations are supposed to fix you while you teach and raise his children for no pay. One that isn’t being told you are inherently sick and wrong and what makes the Baby Jesus cry.
Becky’s life is harder and the impact of this story hits Becky the most because at the end of the day it’s her story. But this moment is a celebratory one before the back-breaking work begins. This moment is one where God answered the most important lesbian prayer of all. This moment is one where she loves being Becky with all her heart for one beautiful pride-filled moment.
So yeah, tonight, Joyce is going through a rougher patch than Becky. Because Becky is on the other side of said rough patch, waving her forward and telling her it’ll be okay.
The caterpillar is emerging from it’s cocoon and becoming a butterfly. The scales have fallen from her eyes and the light is momentarily blinding. Joyce will be okay, she just needs time to adjust to her new perspective of the world.
Figures that the one part of a character that I liked the most turns out to be the ‘thrown out with the bathwater’ trait which gets clumped into naivete. I get that trying to find the good in everyone can lead to willful ignorance, but can’t there be an enlightened ideal to aim for where we know that people are fundamentally flawed without having to write anyone off as “evil; case closed, move along, nothing to see here”? Ross is not redeemable and Carol probably won’t become better in the future. That’s bad, and sad, but please don’t let Joyce have to grow to hate her parents as part of her maturing process.
I don’t know if Joyce is capable of hate. I think, like how Becky felt about Ross in the hospital, at most it might make her just feel very sad, to think of the way they look at things.
When Joyce was calling on God to damn butthole dad, I don’t think that was just a figure of speech. She was appealing to her God to condemn the guy she had punched out and was literally curbstomping to burn in Hell forever.
Don’t let the big blue eyes and triangle grin fool you. There’s a core of white-hot rage down inside Joyce. It’s deep, deep down, and it takes a lot to get her to let it out, but when she does, she can hate.
Is calling on God to damn someone who has done things deserving damning hate, though?
That’s just rhetoric, I’m not sure of my opinion. Joyce may hate Ross, or the idea of Ross (but once we get into different kinds of hate that gets too confusing, I’m pretty sure that she hates sour cream and onion after all), and I wouldn’t deny that it’s plausible. I still don’t think that so far, this will/could translate to parental hate for Joyce (although I don’t at all deny that Joyce can rage).
The Red Eyes Of Death suggest that, in that moment, she hated him.
She’s certainly capable of intense rage in the moment, especially at deceit and injustice – see Ryan, and “hanky-panky you, church” as well as Ross – but real, long-term hatred? …I don’t know. We haven’t seen that from her as yet, and I’m not sure it’s in her nature, but she may well snap to the other side of the line for a while before grounding. We’ll have to wait and see.
I’m not sure she’s losing her desire to see good in people. In fact, it’s her search for the good that has placed her here. All her life she’s been told to abandon all to save her soul. To shun the atheist lest she rob your faith. To shun the drunk lest their immorality taint you. To condemn the queer, lest their love confuse you. To hate the secular and cocoon herself to protect her faith against a fallen doomed world that just wants to see you burn alongside it.
And she just can’t. She can’t hate her friends and her loved ones. She can’t hate the people who were there for her when everything was scary and hard. She can’t abandon those who needed just one person to believe in them and give a small amount of help so they could stabilize themselves.
She cares too much about people to hold true to her faith. And so her faith must break. And she must learn rage to learn how the people she has learned to care about have suffered. And that’s a transformation of the expression of that core quality, but it is not an elimination of it. She cares, deeply, but that means she no longer is sunny and happy and ignorant of the harm that is happening to those she cares about.
in all honesty, i was expecting you specifically to give me a firm talking to about this post. i wrote it at a time when i am usually asleep, and i know that failing to frame this topic correctly could’ve made me come across as someone who missed the point of this arc and is overly-empathic with ross.
and you are right. at the height of her faith she chose not to shun those who were outside of her usual circle of ‘the righteous’. between her interaction with mary and what she said to sarah before the “i’ll be sad when this world breaks you” line, i had really truly hoped that she could represent what i’ve always wanted to believe:
a truly wise and enlightened individual doesn’t have to choose between faith and reason. so long as what you believe isn’t scripted for you, you can spend your life chiseling away to understand your own faith in the same way that leslie encouraged them to try and understand truth.
‘breaking’ and ‘raging’ are useful for affecting difficult personal changes, but i would like to believe that the person who comes out the other end can be sad that the world is imperfect without expending any energy on hating it.
i don’t think that it takes anything like objective evil to make a person believe and do sad, hurtful things. even kind, lovely people can be unfortunate enough to believe things that hurt others. this doesn’t necessarily mean that everything should be forgiven, i just think that we should feel more sadness than disgust when passing sentence.
joyce is not mary or roz (both of whom i think are wrong about different things in very similar ways). basically, if those two could be forced to sit in a room for a million years until they could actually understand each other and come to some kind of agreement, then i think an ideal understanding of humanity would be the result.
Seeing Joyce hurt like this makes me sad, but unfortunately it’s moments like this that make you find the tiny pieces of good in this world and become a better person in order to keep those little things safe. Even if it means pushing away the people you thought understood you the most in the past.
Sarah did tell Joyce that a long time ago, that she was a good kid and the world would break her.
Sarah was wrong in that, Joyce is not broken.
She’s just recovering from discovering she is a bigoted, narrow minded, fundie religious nut, with a holier than thou attitude, who has kept her eyes shut to the way her church really treats people and to her best friends ‘real life’.
Not a nice image of yourself to have stuffed in your face. And Carole reinforced that image with the phone call. Not actively evil, just eyes closed to the way the world really is, and refusal to do anything about it. A worse sort of evil.
I’m surprised that Sarah backed down, even though she thought about it. But then, Sarah really does think everything is broken and Sarah is honest. So…
Joyce is not broken. She is on the mend now. She saw herself and her beliefs and didn’t like it based on what was going on around her. And now she has to face it. And she is. She is angry at being betrayed by the people whom she trusted, and her church the center of her life. Angry at herself too.
She will no longer be the innocent and mindlessy hurtfull little light bulb she has been. She will be an adult, or at least a much more thoughtful young adult.
The price of caring. Of thinking. Of living is that you find things that frustrate and infuriate you. Injustices, ill treatment, abuse. Things that don’t sit right. And Joyce is seeing those aspects in how she was raised and learning that anger of empathy and that will make her a better person even if it doesn’t necessarily make her a happier person.
joyce was always different from her mom and ross and a lot of other people in her community. i agree with you on most of what you’ve said, but i think that how quickly she forced herself to adjust when she found out that dorothy was an atheist and that becky was a lesbian shows that she never really held many of the more hurtful beliefs which would naturally have come with the territory.
joyce defended dorothy to mary and to her parents, and she defended the heck out of becky. she wasn’t quite sure what she believed in, but she knew that it couldn’t be hate. to quote 2 wise people:
“I think we should give everybody a chance before we write them off. Even the bad people. I admit sometimes I’m not very good at it, but I feel I at least need to try. I want to find the good in people. If I don’t, I’ll just wall myself off and eventually be all alone” – joyce
“She was not bad ever. Just living in a bubble.” – you
Joyce had her good points, I don’t want to skip them. She loved her friends and would do anything she could for them. She was usually cheerful and helpful. She was not bad ever. Just living in a bubble.
Sarah has bad luck with roommates man. Here’s another girl who’s world has just shattered (or sustained serious damage). Is this another girl who will spiral down until Sarah has to make calls, get her taken out of school, and alienate a new friend group?
probably not even that easy, because where will Joyce have to go back to
There’s a big difference in that if she tells Joyce’s circle something is wrong, Joyce’s friends will listen. And if she has to take extreme measures they’ll understand.
Broken lines, broken strings
Broken threads, broken springs
Broken idols, broken heads
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain’t no use jiving, ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken
–Bob Dylan, “Everything Is Broken,” Oh Mercy, 1989
I wonder if it was intentional or accidental that Willis ended this storyline on the day before Thanksgiving. I would say, “this is a great time for a Thanksgiving break”, but I know there won’t be a break.
Joyce still has a lot of things to be thankful for…most of them are in this dorm.
Sarah, for all her faults she has, retains one thing. Sense of duty and care. She looks up, looks and cares about Joyce, her roomate. She has been there, and now. Ross acted upon, basically, fear and ego (losing his remnant of a proyect of fundie family life), but Sarah acted upon a perceived sense of danger (Joyce al. raped, unsafe) even when there weren´t real ties between her and Joyce. Joyce is lucky, but she still doesn´t know. Hope she can spring up from that dark alley of the mind, where broken “realities” lie.
Everything is broken, the best things in life are dead
Turn around my love, you can look inside my head
The graves are breathing dust and we rust inside these bones
We’re on the cusp of nothing and never going home.
Well I thought I’d be able to find a little motivation for Joyce from her State Motto. In South Carolina, our motto is Dum Spiro Spero (“While I Breathe I Hope”) which seems perfect for this occasion. Unfortunately, Indiana’s is the highly un-motivating “The Crossroads of America.” But I guess Joyce is at a crossroads right now…
The poll needs a ‘none of the above’ option. I have been thinking for a while and all of the characters listed have some useful and unique role to play in either their or some other character’s arc. The exception is Carla but I have a feeling, based on recent spoilers that there is a big ‘wait and see’ appended to her.
I can see that. And yeah, my suspicions is that there’s a lot to Carla’s backstory and her interactions with Sal and Amber that will be huge and impactful. I mean, at the end of the day, she’s an 18 year old out trans girl in Indiana who doesn’t shy away from a short short or an in-your-face persona. That’s badass in and of itself.
The first step to growing up is realizing that everything you thought you knew is wrong. It’s not easy, especially not for those who have to realize it about everything all at once, but necessary to become a complete person.
Interesting comment about subverting physics in there too. God does answer lesbian prayers. 🙂
More generally, that’s what I really love about this comic: It’s got occasional cool, if unrealistic, action sequences, but the payoff is the emotional climaxes. It’s the lasting effects on the characters.
I’ve really been enjoying Joy’s transformation from a blind zealot to a normal human being. She was my least favorite character at first, and I took pleasure every time one her little delusions was being shattered.
I really like Joyce. Always have. She’s becoming her own person and she’ll form her own “faith” as a result of her experiences. You can have a faith without being a religious zealot. I hope that’s where she is headed. Because despite the pain, it’s still a good way to live life when you: “think we should give everybody a chance before you write them off. Even the bad people. I admit sometimes I’m not very good at it, but I feel I at least need to try. I want to find the good in people.”
I really like Joyce too, she’s always been so optimistic and cheerful and innocent, that’s why it hurts a lot to see her crushed like this with her innocence destroyed.
The worst thing is knowing that Sarah’s jaded comment about how inevitable it was that she would be broken, IE, like she was, came to pass.
And that’s… thank you. Thank you so much for taking the care and focus to do this storyline right. To make the roughness of queer homelessness and threats of reparative therapy and abuse not just an ancillary moment of Joyce’s growth, but a proper Becky focused tale that put her center stage as the main one affected. To show how it affected those around her, but letting it be her tale first. And that it was told accurate to life to so many who have been so unfortunate to have been there like Becky in a similar sort of car or life.
That it wasn’t just a sad “oh look how hard this sits on our straight main character who matters more” and nothing else and wasn’t just some “issue of the week” throwaway, but an earnest look at how abuses like this affect everyone around you.
I know I’ve said a lot about how healing this whole arc has been for me. How it has made me feel less alone and less prone to blame myself for all I lost when what happened to me happened, but seeing it on a page has been incredible and I thank you for taking the care in crafting to allow that pathos even though it cost you in endless “Toedad is unfairly maligned and Becky is wrong for reasons totally not about how queer she is (but man is Becky “in your face” and “inappropriate” in this scene where she is expressing her queerness)” posts.
So yeah, blubbering over. Hope you enjoy your holidays.
This is a good place to also thank you for your posts! Making your day always makes mine. I’m not very good at sentimentality that isn’t nested in sequential art, so, uh, imagine me being additionally flowery here.
One can only hope that the network of friends around Joyce will help her through this. Sarah’s problem was, and still is in some ways, she didn’t have that kind of a network around her after things went south with her.
Joyce has, which will probably make the difference now that she’s hit rock bottom.
I was re-reading some of the early strips, where Joyce was just moving in, and put a picture of her and Becky up on her wall. Note, this was September 2010, more than five years ago.
The picture… had a rollercoaster behind them. THEY WERE AT SIX FLAGS, WHERE ROSS HAD DRIVEN THEM.
Willis had all the pieces of this tragedy in place, even back then.
Joyce also talks about how it was her parents who don’t let her have a phone.
I see it as those decisions also including Beckymom, and that’s why Joyce said that. Both of her parents decided on what Becky is supposed to do with her life.
And that’s what I was referring to a couple days ago in my “you only get one mother” post. I would find it very hard to believe that no matter how toxic your parent(s) may have been that they were like that 100% of the time. The bad may definitely outweigh the good, but like Ross there is still some good to find if you seek for it hard enough.
“Physics is bruised a bit, but that’s the point. That’s the subversion. Becky’s not going down. The universe will melt in the face of her.”
This was so much my take on the rescue scene, and I wanted to say so in the comments several times, but I never knew how to put it, and then the scene shifted and… now is a good time.
Only I didn’t see it as just a subversion of stories, but of reality. This story gave us a happy ending (albeit with a bitter aftertaste) at the price of some suspending of disbelief.
The lesson, to me, is that while this kind of situation sometimes does have a happy ending in reality, far too often it doesn’t. Real children are driven to suicide by parents who think they’re saving their kids from hell, when they are in fact putting them through it.
To tell that story effectively, you can’t just have Toedad be reasonable and see the error of his ways before any harm is done. That would downplay the issue.
So we get the happy ending, but only because of four badass women bending the laws of physics. That’s what it took. And that’s the point.
Joyces arc has always been the most compelling thing about DOA. But, take Becky. She realized her father was a zealot and she doubled down on doing what was right/what she loved. Joyce is changing but, her transformation is so much more painful and ripe for pathos. Her’s is a long road ahead of her full of pain and discovery…
I think that another appropriate quote for this one is “You can’t go home again.”
I’m curious as to who Joyce will end up leaning on for help to get through this. I’m suspecting it will be Dorothy, and that will make for very interesting times indeed.
It’s almost unfair to Joyce, really – at least Becky has Dina, whose parents seem supportive of Dina’s choice.
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CAN WE FIX IT
No its fucked.
This made me laugh. And then cry.
Even hearing it in Bob the Builder’s voice couldn’t stop the tears.
am I the only one who thought of this comichttp://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/break/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/break/
I did immediately. It practically feels like a callback to me.
Pretty sure it is.
Another thing this reminds me of is when she said “Nothing more can hurt me.”
She was wrong 🙁
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/holdon/
Sarah’s thinking of it.
The title makes it feel like this was planned all along…
Honestly, would not surprise me.
Scroll down and you’ll see that you aren’t. I thought of it about 2.7 seconds after seeing Sarah’s face in panel 3, as the gravity of it all sank in.
Oh god. That *is* why Sarah looks so sad. And now her pessimism is confirmed. So . . . it will be Becky who has to convince them both that one can still find joy in a broken world?
Dudes, this world is full of dinosaur girlfriends and butthole dads going to prison and not having their brains ka-spewed and giblet touching. It’s a beautiful, bright world out there!
Cerberus, now when the story ark is finished, let me take the opportunity to thank you so much. You have shared a lot of personal stuff, you have given us a lot of very insightsful perspective and we have geeked out a lot together.
This has been a heavy ark, we have seen our beloved characters put to the tests as never before and we have had to face some of our own preconceptions (well, I have). It has been an honor to share the experience with you.
Oh, and Becky is the bestest character EVER!
@Bagge & Cerberus
Last panel seems so fitting…
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/hug-2/
@Bagge
Aw, thanks.
Becky+++
And make it better then before it will be the 6 Billion $$ It!
And if you believe that I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
And I have one in Alaska, for sale.
This comment made me think of today’s Gunnerkrigg court page. Funny when multiple comics parallel like that.
The downside is we don’t have the incredible awesomeness of PazKat to counter all the sadness over here.
hm, that’s monday’s page, today’s won’t be up for another bit ^^;
Funny, or part of the Great Cartoonist Conspiracy?
if it gets us more PazKat, I really don’t mind.
Today’s GC is up BTW.
Best. Day. Ever!
College would be pretty great if it weren’t for all the parents.
College would be considerably emptier if it weren’t for parents’ money
…in the US, sure.
that really hurt darko, in the heart and the wallet
sorry~
You have given me an uncertain future.
But no seriously, you’re right.
It really hurt my feelings.
Fortunately, I’m Canadian, so I can go get them checked for free.
Speak for yourself. I paid for college by myself, or at least I can say that when I make my final student loan installment with my social security. Good oogly moogly, I will be in debt forever.
Truth.
He did say “considerably.” I, also, will make the final installment with my SS (or have it discharged when I die), but I was at school with plenty of kids riding on their parents’ money. One of them rode on her parents’ money right into rehab and had to drop out of school. The current flare up about whether or not campuses should be “safe spaces” wouldn’t be happening if said campuses weren’t worried about parents’ money drying up.
I vote bail. Just make sure to wear a mustache, and speak in an accent. If cartoons have taught me anything it’s that this will fool anyone forever.
Eh, my college courses are all being paid with grants so neither me or my family have to pay out of pocket.
That sounds less like an “eh”and more like a “hallelujah” to me.
It’s only a proper hallelujah to someone who had to pay the bill at least once.
Or see it.
Not even a “called it”.
As Sarah said on the saga about the rape incident: “called it” is funny when there’s pain involved there’s a limit of pain past wich saying “called it” becomes unfunny again.
NOoooooo Joyce
Be careful what you wish for, Sarah…
She didn’t wish for Joyce to be broken. She said “I’ll be said when [this world] breaks you.”
I think. I could be flubbing the quote.
*sad
Heh. he did.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/break/
Now they can be grumble bums together.
That gravatar is fucking awesome.
Joyce: “Welp, time to suck like a billion dicks.”
Sarah: “Yup.”
“That’s like four 250 million dicks and that’s terrible”.
Yeah, jerking off a billion dicks by doing four at once 250 million times is much more efficient.
I was afraid to click that. Stared at the link for like 10 seconds thinking “It’s Youtube. What’s the worst it could be? Maybe a 10% chance of Astley, sure, but…”
Actually pretty funny.
While we’re on the subject of following YouTube links with trepidation, I try to click on links only after running a Flash-blocking extension.
Youtubes mostly tag based now though, it doesn’t need flash for playback unless your on a really old browser.
I still use Firefox occasionally, mostly for ripping YT videos.
Man how could you even tell a link was there?? I can never see any links in these comment pages.
Are you using a smartphone to view this? That might be why.
I don’t know about Jason of course, but I reckon that a lot of people with red-green colourblindness would find it hard to distinguish the dark brown links from the black text: they differ only by a little red.
I do not have a smartphone, nor am I color-blind! (Windows XP)
What even IS that show?! X’D
Yeah why do I not know about this show. It looks awesome. Of course it is not on Netflix. Not in Canada anyway….
ZenMate extension for Chrome. Fixes that for you.
I mean that show will probably still won’t be on there, but you can use it to watch Netflix for different regions.
Yeah already have a few tricks for regions.
Not seeing it either way.
I think Silicon Valley’s only available on HBO Now (or Go) and Amazon Instant Video UK.
It’s Silicon Valley, Mike Judge’s show about Internet startups.
IN A ROW?!
Like a seal playing horns.
“ALL OF THEM?!”
Ow… my heart.
It broked.
People always act like when shit is broken that it isn’t fixable.
We have gorilla glue for a reason god dammit!
Besides as long as the shit is fresh, it can stick together.
Blame those smug jerks in tomorrowland.
(hey, I liked that movie!)
duct tape can fix anything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRx823XjjpE
If you can stand them sounding like Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.
Seen that episode before. It was somewhat funny and educational.
And their voice are not THAT bad. It is like a couple tones up compared to a billion tones up for the chipmunks 😛
Duct tape is the Force, you know?
It has a dark side and a light side and it binds the universe together. 😉
Gorilla Glue makes duct tape now. That shit can patch a tear in the space time continuum.
Always wondered who would need to glue a gorilla, let alone duct tape one?
Another gorilla perhaps?
I’m sorry to be the one who breaks this to you, but it’s called “gorilla glue” because it’s made out of gorillas.
So that is what happens to football players when they get cut.
The universe lied to me again! Damnit! I need to stop listening to that guy.
The Dina and Faz version of gorillas.
Gorilla tape held the nose onto my car for over a year. I didn’t remove the tape, I sold the car after it was totaled in a wreck.
it is always hard to have a bubble burst on you like that.
Yeah, it is. Joyce is one of my least favorite characters in the strip and I’m even hoping someone gives her a hug…
You know seeing Roz’s o face really ruins the mood.
I got the ad with the hands, but point taken.
I prefer that one.
Depression Comics TM
How fortuitous.
http://www.depressioncomix.com/
Oh, I was expecting more Carol.
Everything’s broken including the Cutie
Everything is ruined forever!
I’m imagining you having sex with a purple elephant now!
Did Joyce just hang up on her mother? Just hang up right after that? hopefully, it sends a message, but… somehow I doubt it will be that easy.
I’m guessing she gave her an “um ok bye” and hung up? I don’t think Joyce would be rude enough, even now, to straight up hang up.
Although your question is now making me want to see another panel of Joyce’s mom just going “Honey? I’m still here. Are you talking to your roommate?”
I assumed the call continued with Carroll maintaining a well meaning soliloquy punctuated by monosyllabic responses by Joyce until Carroll came to the conclusion that her daughter was appropriately comforted. This strip being after Joyce has had a moment to stew.
Yup. I’m thinking that if there’d been further Carol drama on the phone (either words drama or hanging up drama) we’d be seeing it.
And c’mon, if Willis didn’t elide non-story stuff we’d still be in everyone’s first week…
Welp, Cutie officially Broken.
(Cutie is a bone in the lower arm right? near the Funny)
Not everyone has it, or is even aware of it.
Remember this?
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/break/
“You’re a good kid, Joyce. I’ll be sad when this world breaks you.” 🙁
Only took a few weeks.
You know, I actually quoted that, but misspelled “sad” for “said” and thought Sarah originally said “it” instead of “this world.” Sarah was right. She is sad.
Sarah gets to enjoy being right a lot. This time, she gets to regret being right
She’s gotten to regret it a lot, like when she was right about Joyce going to the party.
She may have called it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to see a beautiful, brilliant light like Joyce’s start to fizzle out…
Am I the only one who doesn’t consider Joyce remotely broken? She’s becoming a bad ass!
No, you aren’t. And if you ask about not considering reflections of her ignorant, narrowminded, compassionless, bigotted upbringing to be a beautiful brilliant light: you wouldn’t be alone in that, either.
Joyce’s upbringing was ugly. Being comfortable and smug and self-congratulatory didn’t make it beautiful.
No Leorale. I don’t think Joyce is broken. I think she is growing up.
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
Joyce is fixed. It’s the world that’s broken.
Actually, the world is healing itself remarkably. The rate of deaths from infectious disease is down by 90% since a century ago, life expectancies are way up; having peaked in the middle of last century, the rate of death in wars, civil wars, rebellions, and genocides is way, way down; the rate of abject poverty is down from 50% in the early 1960s to 10% now. All around the world mothers and babies are surviving childbirth, children are surviving infancy, and little girls are going to school and learning to calculate and to read at unprecedented rates. In the wealthy countries crime rates, especially violent crime rates, are a third or less of what they were thirty years ago, and the status of women and of disadvantaged minorities much better and tending to improve.
There’s still a lot to do, but every indication is that sustained and well-informed efforts bear fruit, and that the betterment of the lot of humanity is within the powers of our hands and minds, does not depend on holy-holy-holy-saying and the grace of the Most on High. Every decade, in every way, things are getting better and better*.
Joyce is going through an agonising experience, but it’s hopefully a metamorphosis; it certainly isn’t the breaking of the world. With any luck she is now close enough to have it by merely grasping: a world and a view of the world and an apprehension of the world that is by far richer and more detailed, more rewarding, more beautiful, more filled with opportunity, more thrilling, and more inspiring than the blinkered, biased, bibliolatrical vision of glory that she had before, all scorn, smugness, prejudice, and condemnation.
* Offer not good for extinctions and climate change.
Or wars.
Yes, it’s good for wars. See Stephen Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. Wars, civil wars, and murderous atrocities are less frequent and much less deadly now than they were, having peaked about seventy-five years ago.
Stephen Pinker on the surprising decline in violence: 20-minute TED talk on YouTube.
Stephen Pinker at greater length and with more detail and citations: 1 hr 16-minute lecture on YouTube. Pinker actually takes the podium at 3:30 after some tedious introductory remarks by someone else.
Yes, but he hasn’t counted nuclear war I yet. Like it’s never going to happen with more and more countries getting their hands on the means.
Of course Pinker hasn’t included Nuclear War II*. He is reporting real stuff: what is happening and not what we imagine must be happening, or happen.
* Nuclear War I was in 1945; it is included in Pinker’s figures.
Reminds me of the xkcd degree-off
https://xkcd.com/1520/
Joyce should major in medicine or biology imo.
Or civil engineering. My father used to say that a typical plumber saved more lives in his career than a typical doctor.
Well said. I enjoy studying history, but I have no desire to live in it.
This is my fight song!
Take back my life song!
Nah, I actually interpret her statement different as well. She’s not broken. She’s not curling up into a ball and quitting and in fact, she’s maintaining a pretty intense death glare at that ceiling. But her sunniness and optimism are broken or rather her unquestionable faith in the culture of her raising.
She’s saying everything is broken because everything from her culture and in how she was raised is broken and she’s seen that in the most direct way possible. Not hearing second-hand from queer fellow-travelers who’ve told her, but seen with her own eyes with someone she loves as strongly as she is able to.
She’s filled with strength and drive, but the comfort and certainty are gone and maybe even her bubbly optimism that every group can be reached out to. She’s got scars. She’s got rage. She’s been exposed to the cruelty and hate of the world and that’s broken an aspect of her, but it’s also strengthened her core.
Which is that she stands up for what is right even when it is hard and that she tries to do right by people and see their good even when her religion is telling her to stop.
And what will be reborn from that will be beautiful but it necessitates seeing her old worldview crack and blow away.
Yup
This… this makes me feel things I didn’t want to feel.
On a side note, I’m dissapointed in how poorly Sarah is doing in the badass poll. Has everyone forgotten Old Testament God Sarah so quickly?
Sarah is awesome, but Dina bit Toedad’s face. I can’t not vote for somebody who was willing to bite that nasty face for her girlfriend. (Although the whole “saving Amazigirl from getting hit by a truck” thing puts Sal and Joyce at a close second for me.)
Sarah has a fine ass.
ChurchMOUSE Joyce punched Toedad in the face, then called her mother to defend her gay friend and condemn “Christian” Toedad’s actions. Since the beginning of the comic, her worldview has been slowly (and gaining speed) falling apart. Yet she continuously finds the inner strength to keep going, and to figure out what /she/ believes, and defend her beliefs against those who have spent her entire life telling her there is only one right way to think — their way. She isn’t letting herself be pulled around on a leash anymore, but she also ins’t just giving up and throwing her beliefs and morals to the wind, either. Making a stand, when your whole life you’ve been trained to automatically believe whatever you’re told (or in cases where you can’t, like Jocelyne, to just keep your mouth shut and play along anyway)… That is incredibly badass. That takes more strength than just deciding the world sucks, so f*ck them all.
Oh, I’m not saying she should win. (I would put Joyce – Becky – Sarah – Amazigirl – Sal… but when I commented she was way down the list. She was getting beat by Carla, Ruth, and Malaya.
“parents frighten me, sarah. it’s time my enemies shared my dread.”
“Why do we fall? To learn how to pick ourselves up again.”
That is the worst cover story for teenage pregnancy ever. It is not a super power, Mary. You just messed up.
“WHO ARE YOU??”
“I’m YourParentsMan!”
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”
*YourParentsMan tosses felon off bridge*
“Don’t throw me off this bridge!” “Why not? All your criminal friends got thrown off this bridge!” *toss* “Nooooo…”
“Yes, father, I shall become a father.”
“That’s what happens when two worlds collide.” Jim Reeves
Had to end it on a Downer Note, didn’t you?
It’s not over yet.
I expected to see this clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7vtWB4owdE
I don’t think it is a downer note. I think Joyce has just grown up, fast maybe but its a good thing. She was a narrow minded bigoted religious nut. She is now discovering that is what she was and not liking it.
That’s a good thing.
She started growing ever since the beginning of schoolyear.
Most of her new friends beliefs or life choices go against her parents beliefs but she held on to them and faced her parents.
This event though just atomized/bombed/shattered/nuked whatever was left of the protective shell her family had imposed on her.
I think she will get back up on her feet soon and she just need some time to process. Her friends will surely help.
Indeed, and I think this was what she needed to really start critically considering her faith. Becky critically rehoned her faith based on her own life experiences and her idea of a God character based on those experiences, but Joyce needed to see how the toxicity of the worldview of her raising interplayed with real people.
How it urged her to blame herself for Ryan or abandon her atheist friend were one piece of the puzzle, but seeing what the rhetoric about gay people actually translates as in her culture, the vileness and hate it supports, and the people it hurts on the bottom is having her look at her words and her unquestioned beliefs in a deep way.
It’s a beautiful moment of learning in a way, being able to see the toxicity that has surrounded and consumed you, but it is rough because it means acknowledging complicity in such a system. But Joyce is strong and will be a better person for this journey even if it’ll hurt like hell in the going through it.
Those angry eyebrows. Ugh, poor Joyce.
I think Sarah is like “Welcome to my world”.
If they adapted Dumbing of Age into an anime. This would be the point where the theme song changes and becomes super depressing.
All it needs now is its own version of NICE BOAT.
sad_trombone.wav
I’ve totally been thinking of doing a fanime with a bunch of my friends for this.
DO IT!
So, does anyone else think Sarah might be the one to tell off Joyce’s mom if she shows up?
Sarah avoids dramatic distractions as much as she can. She seems way more likely to go ‘Wellp, I’m out” and hole up in her studies.
(unless, of course, she thinks that Joyce is in legit physical danger. Then she will be THERE, with a baseball bat as needed.)
What you said. Both times.
Well looks like you can’t send her home Sarah what now ? Now your going to haft to get involved if you want to help your adopted little sister there is no other way around it.
Sara didn’t send home her roommate to keep from getting involved. She was smart enough to know she couldn’t help a doper by heself. The roomates friends did not have a clue what was going on. Sarah called her parents, not the office so she didn’t get kicked out of school.
As for Joyce: Sarah took a baseball bat to a guy that tried to rape her -how much more figgin’ involved do you want her to get?
Ya I know she cares and what she did the last time was without a doubt the best choice to make. All I’m saying is she can’t avoid Drama for the rest of her life and since she said that if things got so bad to a point Joyce couldn’t handle being out there any longer should would tell her family everything she’s been through something she can go home where it’s safe.
But now it seems like it isn’t the best choice this time around so I’m asking what’s her plan B?
I hate to say, but I think today might be Sarah finding herself with plan A gone and no plan B. (Though I’m reading Sarah as someone in the avoiding-problems-that-don’t-have-a-direct-impact-on-her camp rather than the avoiding-drama one.)
Sarah in full baseball-bat-big-sister mode I think is someone who might’ve answered Joyce by pointing out that Becky’s not broken, Joyce + Becky isn’t broken, and that the only broken things are Toedad and maybe Carol. (And carefully not addressing Joyce’s building crisis of faith directly.)
Seeing Sarah move into shadow in the last panel (like Joyce yesterday) is almost as heartbreaking as her answer.
I’d say it’s not the people who are broken (Ross excepted), but the relationships. When Joyce stood up to her parents about Dorothy, it built up her relationship with them into a new dimension. But this… does not do that.
Sarah’s really not the person to go to for comfort. “Smiting the evildoer” is more her wheelhouse.
Sometimes the greatest comfort is the plain, unvarnished truth.
Especially when everything else in your life is a lie.
In my personal experience, burning away the lies and self deception leaves a rock solid foundation to build upon. Joyce will be better for this in the long run. Not that it doesn’t suck monkey balls at the moment.
Depends on the temperature you’re burning at and the structural integrity of the foundation. Sometimes the result is magma, or cinders.
link the flame.
Joyce shows every sign of being made of bedrock granite. She will survive this and become a better person for it.
I’m not sure that Joyce was going to Sarah for comfort. She was simply expressing herself.
I agree. I think she wanted Sarah’s brutal honesty.
She’s more of an “Old Testament” big sister.
Or classes.
Monday Monday/Just can’t trust that day…
http://41.media.tumblr.com/46bea979b54fcee5e51d8ea7697c0d69/tumblr_nyazu4SsrW1romh4yo1_1280.png
On the other hand, though, I think I’ve found out where Joe will intern once he comes to that phase.
Shit, That actually made me tear up a little… Damn :/
Well for once I can’t drop a “fuck this”.
Honesty in pessimism is something I can’t really argue.
I think Sarah’s referring to one everything in particular.
Sorry, Joyce, turns out your home life was really just an echo chamber for toxic fundamentalism.
‘Sucks.
Sort of like Tumblr.
Tumblr’s actually pretty diverse, but like-minded people still congregate in insular groups, like the SJWs that earn the site so much ire. Equating SJWs with tumblr is like equating /b/ with 4chan, if not worse. The distinctions are just less obvious than when a site is divided into interest-focused boards.
i’m going to assume that’s some sort of string replacement.
It is.
Wait, so bongo becomes bongo AND SJW becomes glistening phallus?
God I love these comment threads…
oh my, that’s hilarious.
Tumblr’s weird because I see people on tumblr complaining about how toxic people/communities on tumblr are, while describing things that as someone involved in a lot of tumblr communities, I’ve never seen go down, yet they don’t just, you know, remove themselves from that drama. And it’s not that I don’t believe them, because yeah, shitty stuff happens, but if seemingly without effort I can not participate in drama, other people should be able to do so with effort. It’s a lot like a lot of people I know IRL, but I mean, it’s a lot easier to remove yourself from an online shit community than a real life one.
(I’m not including people who get harassed personally, since that’s not really something they can just remove themselves from)
Tumblr *can* be great. It just depends on who you follow. I see a lot of SJ stuff, but not that much of the too-far over-reactions of it. I do see some people protesting the things that go to far. But I could cut out most of the SJ too if I wanted to, and just be on the fandom side of things. There are a ton of different parts to tumblr; just like any of the large social sites there are a great many communities within it.
I dunno, I guess I’m not tumblr enough to really feel the tumblr hate. When i was growing up, a lot of the internet communities were ultra tech bro and a lot of kids fell with things like the chans and got a really toxic education in how to react to other people including those who were different and where practiced faux-apathy was king.
For my students today, they love the tumblr and the ones who do love it because they can be queer or trans or proud of their race and genuinely excited about fandoms without being shat on. They’re encouraged in their geekiness and their identities and finding communities that can support them and give them at least a basic education about stuff that never got talked about in school (I mean, my kids are generally up on things like ace stuff and trans stuff and when I was growing up those terms were basically foreign and unknown). And they seem to be lacking quite the toxicity of the online cultures I had growing up.
So, it seems to be a marked improvement on that score. Though I would gather that it is not perfect, because at the end of the day it’s still just people and often a bunch of kids just learning for the first time how to interact with others from other kids. But in general, I can’t help feeling grateful that my students are tumblr-ing rather than chan-ing.
Not broken. Fixed.
However heartwrenching this is, Carol is the same as she has been Joyce’s entire life. She has not changed. The world has not changed. But Joyce has changed. That’s why she’s reacting to what she once took for granted.
Joyce has changed to the better.
Not broken. Fixed.
Never let yourself think anything different, Joyce.
dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/lob
I like this.
Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better…?
But because she knew Becky. She has been changed for good.
Agree.
Joyce is no longer a narrow minded, bigoted, fundie, religious nut with a Holier than thou attitude.
And she now she knows what she was, and it hurts.
She will be a much better person for this lesson, in the long run.
No, she is broken.
Having your entire worldview shattered isn’t getting fixed.
Picking up the pieces, afterwards, and reshaping them into something new – that’s getting fixed.
Broken doesn’t mean irreparable.
Sometimes you need to break and melt the sword to reforge it.
Not broken, I think. In pain, but whole — and better than she was when she got up this morning. Her past world-view was not a strength or a protection: it was crippling, and she is better off without it. Her upbringing was made of blinkers and chains, it was a restraint and a burden. To have it shattered is not a maiming but a liberation.
At least Sarah took the time to try and think about it. Even if the thought really disturbed her.
I don’t like this new Joyce face. :/
Those serious eyebrows are gonna be around for a while.
Being perfectly honest, I think they look really good on her face.
(gets shot)
That’s what you get for having Be-
Damnit, I’m sorry.
They are almost Capaldi-level ‘brows, aren’t they?
Not until they secede from the rest of her face and set up their own independent state of Eyebrows.
(Shamelessly stolen, but it’s one of my favorite lines in the whole show, so I plug it wherever I can.)
Tell it like it is, Sarah !
Well that’s depressing but the sooner you accept that something is really fucked up or broken, the more time you’ll have to change or rebuild.
OK now it’s time for her to build herself back up.
Avert thine eyes and think on the Oldest One, who waits in his House in the City of R’lyeh to correct the errors of this sphere.
Huh. Now that I think about I can remember that exact moment.
Don’t get old kids, it’s overrated.
Actually, the idea that “everything’s really broken” is a standard part of Protestant theology. But often it just comes out as “humans are sinful” and attention is mostly directed at other people’s sinfulness rather than the failings of one’s own in-group. So what Joyce is experiencing here is a much deeper realization of something that she has probably been taught in a mostly superficial way.
Thank you.
this is a cool point
Dammit, world, you broke Joyce!
Joyce, you have fallen. Time to rise.
Arise from the ashes! Dragon arise, arise Dragon! Phoenix burn brightly!
…did I not capture the tone correctly?
Everything and everyone, Joyce. Especially everyone.
…well it DOES ends up with someone on a bed.
That’s our Sarah! *Ba-dum-tish*
How the hell does Joyce become the broken miserable one when Becky was the one kidnapped at gunpoint and she couldn’t be happier?!
I really miss the days of transformers and Batman jokes…
Joyce wears her heart on her sleeve, Becky is just as hurt as Joyce is she just hides it.
Becky was facing a future where had everything she is is taken from her, but she was rescued and now she no longer has to hide from anyone. I can totally understand Becky handling this better than Joyce.
She no longer has to hide from anyone until she remembers that she’s still not actually a resident in the dorm and it’s still Ruth’s duty to eject her if it’s discovered that she’s living there against the rules.
Becky may have been the one that was kidnapped, but it doesn’t mean that Joyce won’t feel concern and/or empathy (even if Becky seems to be handling it.)
Plus, remember that at once point Ross did have a gun pointed at Joyce. That’s a pretty big stressor right there, even if Joyce wasn’t the one who was ultimately kidnapped.
Becky had fewer illusions.
You and Tacos below nail it.
Becky already had some idea that her upbringing wasn’t good. Joyce is only now starting to realize how bad her upbringing was.
There’s this and the fact that Becky had her crisis of faith off-panel. And sadly, probably alone. Realizing what was happening in her heart and in her pants with her roommate. What that meant in her feelings for Joyce. What that meant in the faith of her raising.
Alone she faced that horrifying reality and she made it out the other side believing that the deity she wants to believe in did not make her gay as a mistake or a sick test. Believed that her deity was not some hateful monster and rearranged her faith around that to one who celebrated sexuality and love and who would answer lesbian prayers just as much as straight ones.
She’s lost her faith. Joyce is only just starting to lose it.
And that’s not to say that Becky’s path was easy. We’ve seen the pain of it all in the few points where Becky drops the wackiness and gets darkly serious and hurt. And those have consistently followed where the faith of her raising has gotten used against her or in question of how she is. When Joyce brought up hanky-panky or needed to check that God was ok with the queer, when her dad tried to use faith to demand her submission. She doesn’t hold it, but can’t help feel the pain of how much that faith she was raised in took from her.
Becky just got the good ending, Joyce just got the Bad Beginning.
Also because Becky’s situation being worse doesn’t make Joyce’s magically go away.
Joyce didn’t get a bad ending so much as a new beginning.
this is true, more, Joyce just got a world-shattering beginning (and Becky just had a world-affirming ending)
yeah, a question I’ve asked myself.
Becky comforting Joyce who is having a meltdown kicking the shit out of Beckys father, while Becky is recovering from a gun in face kidnapping and car crash and abusive fathers slap etc…and Joyce is just discovering she dosnt like the way she was raised.
Joyce has had her entire world destroyed.
Becky has been given a whole new world of freedom.
The difference is largely that Joyce was comfortable and content in her tiny isolated “entire” world, whereas Becky was threatened in it, because of her sexuality.
Because Joyce has to face the fact of just how fucked up what she was taught was. Becky on the other hand, already dealt with that. And the events of today have taught her that God does answer lesbian prayers.
(In addition, I think Becky and Joyce probably had a different view of authority growing up due to their differing personalities. Joyce is more trusting so this is a bigger betrayal.)
Also, weren’t batman jokes and transformers mostly a Shortpacked thing? DOA has had its drama right from the beginning.
Not to mention it’s a completely different universe from Shortpacked! and therefore should be assessed on its own terms.
Batman is still Batman and transformers are still just as much of a joke as they ever were.
Ducks and runs for cover.
In addition to everything that everyone else said, Becky’s had more time to process the conflict. At the most recent, she’s realized that she’s a lesbian and that everything she’s been taught was wrong for several weeks now, whereas Joyce has had, what, a couple days to process the collapse of her world view?
Joyce had the toxicity of her faith revealed in the starkest possible terms and she say her complicity and revelry in that system. The cost of what how she was raises says about gay people starkly revealed and the celebration of that horribleness by her fellow travelers. She’s learned that the faith she was taught is the arbiter of ALL morality (like without it, you are inherently a demonic being of pure sin) is in fact poisonous and hateful.
Becky has been through hell and her journey and her situation will have marks on her story, but her position right now is that she has been living in intense anxiety and fear that her dad at any moment will kidnap and abuse and rob her of a future for a good couple of days. She lost everything and her crush didn’t even love her back. But then, she got the support of an entire new network of friends, who went out of their way to help out where they could. She got a community that doesn’t react in fear and hatred when she comes out. She got a girlfriend who tells her awesome science facts and bites abusive dad faces. She got a friend who swore and rode on a motorcycle and came after her and brought her out of the worst hell she could possibly be in. She got a superhero literally saving her from abuse and then death. She got an ending to the anxiety that all this was a bubble of a fart of a dream.
And most importantly, she got a future. A hard future. A future with nothing and no safety net. A future shaky and tenuous and full of long hard work and more hardship than her friends will face. But one that exists. One that isn’t being raped every evening by a husband whose ministrations are supposed to fix you while you teach and raise his children for no pay. One that isn’t being told you are inherently sick and wrong and what makes the Baby Jesus cry.
Becky’s life is harder and the impact of this story hits Becky the most because at the end of the day it’s her story. But this moment is a celebratory one before the back-breaking work begins. This moment is one where God answered the most important lesbian prayer of all. This moment is one where she loves being Becky with all her heart for one beautiful pride-filled moment.
So yeah, tonight, Joyce is going through a rougher patch than Becky. Because Becky is on the other side of said rough patch, waving her forward and telling her it’ll be okay.
No it’s not broken, seriously, please don’t go down this path Joyce.
Its not a bug, its a feature!
When God closes a door…
… You keep ringing the bell until he damn well opens it again?
Blast through the wall with an RPG.
There is no problem that cannot be solved by the judicious application of high explosives.
At least that’s what the Army thought me.
Joyce sure needs a hug now.
Or at least sympathy via light physical contact. :s
Sarah is a little behind on that lesson
True. She only does old-testament justice via heavy baseball bat.
You’re a good kid, Joyce.
Jeb! can fix it!
Sorry. I’m not good at humour when everything is depressing.
Crossing over from innocence to experience is always sad, and sweet, and true. And once you arrive, eventually you’ll be okay.
The good news Joyce, is you get to be a good person. Seriously, the kid is basically turning into a paladin….
“That sounds unbearable; why would anyone want to become a Paladin?”
“So others don’t have to.”
Finally found the source, in case anyone wonders/ed what I was quoting.
I knew that one! 😀
no, not EVERYTHING, just humanity
The caterpillar is emerging from it’s cocoon and becoming a butterfly. The scales have fallen from her eyes and the light is momentarily blinding. Joyce will be okay, she just needs time to adjust to her new perspective of the world.
snakes dont emerge from cocoons, usually.
Damascus road reference.
(Unless I’m misreading you and you know that.)
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/break/
well… you can’t accuse Willis of not following up on things…
Figures that the one part of a character that I liked the most turns out to be the ‘thrown out with the bathwater’ trait which gets clumped into naivete. I get that trying to find the good in everyone can lead to willful ignorance, but can’t there be an enlightened ideal to aim for where we know that people are fundamentally flawed without having to write anyone off as “evil; case closed, move along, nothing to see here”? Ross is not redeemable and Carol probably won’t become better in the future. That’s bad, and sad, but please don’t let Joyce have to grow to hate her parents as part of her maturing process.
I don’t know if Joyce is capable of hate. I think, like how Becky felt about Ross in the hospital, at most it might make her just feel very sad, to think of the way they look at things.
When Joyce was calling on God to damn butthole dad, I don’t think that was just a figure of speech. She was appealing to her God to condemn the guy she had punched out and was literally curbstomping to burn in Hell forever.
Don’t let the big blue eyes and triangle grin fool you. There’s a core of white-hot rage down inside Joyce. It’s deep, deep down, and it takes a lot to get her to let it out, but when she does, she can hate.
Is calling on God to damn someone who has done things deserving damning hate, though?
That’s just rhetoric, I’m not sure of my opinion. Joyce may hate Ross, or the idea of Ross (but once we get into different kinds of hate that gets too confusing, I’m pretty sure that she hates sour cream and onion after all), and I wouldn’t deny that it’s plausible. I still don’t think that so far, this will/could translate to parental hate for Joyce (although I don’t at all deny that Joyce can rage).
The Red Eyes Of Death suggest that, in that moment, she hated him.
She’s certainly capable of intense rage in the moment, especially at deceit and injustice – see Ryan, and “hanky-panky you, church” as well as Ross – but real, long-term hatred? …I don’t know. We haven’t seen that from her as yet, and I’m not sure it’s in her nature, but she may well snap to the other side of the line for a while before grounding. We’ll have to wait and see.
…Ross doesn’t deserve eternal punishment.
I’m not sure she’s losing her desire to see good in people. In fact, it’s her search for the good that has placed her here. All her life she’s been told to abandon all to save her soul. To shun the atheist lest she rob your faith. To shun the drunk lest their immorality taint you. To condemn the queer, lest their love confuse you. To hate the secular and cocoon herself to protect her faith against a fallen doomed world that just wants to see you burn alongside it.
And she just can’t. She can’t hate her friends and her loved ones. She can’t hate the people who were there for her when everything was scary and hard. She can’t abandon those who needed just one person to believe in them and give a small amount of help so they could stabilize themselves.
She cares too much about people to hold true to her faith. And so her faith must break. And she must learn rage to learn how the people she has learned to care about have suffered. And that’s a transformation of the expression of that core quality, but it is not an elimination of it. She cares, deeply, but that means she no longer is sunny and happy and ignorant of the harm that is happening to those she cares about.
in all honesty, i was expecting you specifically to give me a firm talking to about this post. i wrote it at a time when i am usually asleep, and i know that failing to frame this topic correctly could’ve made me come across as someone who missed the point of this arc and is overly-empathic with ross.
and you are right. at the height of her faith she chose not to shun those who were outside of her usual circle of ‘the righteous’. between her interaction with mary and what she said to sarah before the “i’ll be sad when this world breaks you” line, i had really truly hoped that she could represent what i’ve always wanted to believe:
a truly wise and enlightened individual doesn’t have to choose between faith and reason. so long as what you believe isn’t scripted for you, you can spend your life chiseling away to understand your own faith in the same way that leslie encouraged them to try and understand truth.
‘breaking’ and ‘raging’ are useful for affecting difficult personal changes, but i would like to believe that the person who comes out the other end can be sad that the world is imperfect without expending any energy on hating it.
i don’t think that it takes anything like objective evil to make a person believe and do sad, hurtful things. even kind, lovely people can be unfortunate enough to believe things that hurt others. this doesn’t necessarily mean that everything should be forgiven, i just think that we should feel more sadness than disgust when passing sentence.
joyce is not mary or roz (both of whom i think are wrong about different things in very similar ways). basically, if those two could be forced to sit in a room for a million years until they could actually understand each other and come to some kind of agreement, then i think an ideal understanding of humanity would be the result.
Seeing Joyce hurt like this makes me sad, but unfortunately it’s moments like this that make you find the tiny pieces of good in this world and become a better person in order to keep those little things safe. Even if it means pushing away the people you thought understood you the most in the past.
Having Joe’s icon only emphasizes this in both a good and bad way.
Joyce? I think that Sarah could have told you that a long time ago.
And sarah’s nightmare comes true. The world broke Joyce
Sarah did tell Joyce that a long time ago, that she was a good kid and the world would break her.
Sarah was wrong in that, Joyce is not broken.
She’s just recovering from discovering she is a bigoted, narrow minded, fundie religious nut, with a holier than thou attitude, who has kept her eyes shut to the way her church really treats people and to her best friends ‘real life’.
Not a nice image of yourself to have stuffed in your face. And Carole reinforced that image with the phone call. Not actively evil, just eyes closed to the way the world really is, and refusal to do anything about it. A worse sort of evil.
I’m surprised that Sarah backed down, even though she thought about it. But then, Sarah really does think everything is broken and Sarah is honest. So…
Joyce is not broken. She is on the mend now. She saw herself and her beliefs and didn’t like it based on what was going on around her. And now she has to face it. And she is. She is angry at being betrayed by the people whom she trusted, and her church the center of her life. Angry at herself too.
She will no longer be the innocent and mindlessy hurtfull little light bulb she has been. She will be an adult, or at least a much more thoughtful young adult.
Joyce is broken in the same way that a bone can be – she’s going to heal back stronger.
This.
The price of caring. Of thinking. Of living is that you find things that frustrate and infuriate you. Injustices, ill treatment, abuse. Things that don’t sit right. And Joyce is seeing those aspects in how she was raised and learning that anger of empathy and that will make her a better person even if it doesn’t necessarily make her a happier person.
please don’t be roz.
joyce was always different from her mom and ross and a lot of other people in her community. i agree with you on most of what you’ve said, but i think that how quickly she forced herself to adjust when she found out that dorothy was an atheist and that becky was a lesbian shows that she never really held many of the more hurtful beliefs which would naturally have come with the territory.
joyce defended dorothy to mary and to her parents, and she defended the heck out of becky. she wasn’t quite sure what she believed in, but she knew that it couldn’t be hate. to quote 2 wise people:
“I think we should give everybody a chance before we write them off. Even the bad people. I admit sometimes I’m not very good at it, but I feel I at least need to try. I want to find the good in people. If I don’t, I’ll just wall myself off and eventually be all alone” – joyce
“She was not bad ever. Just living in a bubble.” – you
Joyce had her good points, I don’t want to skip them. She loved her friends and would do anything she could for them. She was usually cheerful and helpful. She was not bad ever. Just living in a bubble.
Sarah has bad luck with roommates man. Here’s another girl who’s world has just shattered (or sustained serious damage). Is this another girl who will spiral down until Sarah has to make calls, get her taken out of school, and alienate a new friend group?
probably not even that easy, because where will Joyce have to go back to
There’s a big difference in that if she tells Joyce’s circle something is wrong, Joyce’s friends will listen. And if she has to take extreme measures they’ll understand.
Broken lines, broken strings
Broken threads, broken springs
Broken idols, broken heads
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain’t no use jiving, ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken
–Bob Dylan, “Everything Is Broken,” Oh Mercy, 1989
There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light get in. Leonard Cohen.
Also used by Louise Penny as a book title and theme, for those of us who read using recycled trees.
Oh I get it. It’s another double entendre. Her family would have grounded her , both in punishment and in emotional stability. But they don’t anymore.
That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
First thing that came to my mind.
Girl Goth band coming up?
“Stay tuned for this hot new show! The Cynic Sisters, starring Sarah and Joyce!”
I wonder if it was intentional or accidental that Willis ended this storyline on the day before Thanksgiving. I would say, “this is a great time for a Thanksgiving break”, but I know there won’t be a break.
Joyce still has a lot of things to be thankful for…most of them are in this dorm.
The loss of innocence is always a terrible thing. Yet pray that you never reach a stage where you become indifferent to that loss.
I’m not sure it’s a loss of innocence per se. She knew there were daemons out there, she hadn’t realised they lurked within the comforts of her home.
Sarah, for all her faults she has, retains one thing. Sense of duty and care. She looks up, looks and cares about Joyce, her roomate. She has been there, and now. Ross acted upon, basically, fear and ego (losing his remnant of a proyect of fundie family life), but Sarah acted upon a perceived sense of danger (Joyce al. raped, unsafe) even when there weren´t real ties between her and Joyce. Joyce is lucky, but she still doesn´t know. Hope she can spring up from that dark alley of the mind, where broken “realities” lie.
This would make the most depressing page to end the comic on, but a better finish than most comics.
Shit, this really is feeling like a series finale, isn’t it?
Everything is broken, the best things in life are dead
Turn around my love, you can look inside my head
The graves are breathing dust and we rust inside these bones
We’re on the cusp of nothing and never going home.
Is that original? ‘Cause Google’s coming up with nothing for a reference.
If so, that’s awesome.
It is, hot off the presses this morning. Still not happy with the second line.
Might make it into a song.
Nice!
And thankyou.
Well I thought I’d be able to find a little motivation for Joyce from her State Motto. In South Carolina, our motto is Dum Spiro Spero (“While I Breathe I Hope”) which seems perfect for this occasion. Unfortunately, Indiana’s is the highly un-motivating “The Crossroads of America.” But I guess Joyce is at a crossroads right now…
As George Carlin pointed out, state mottos range from “Live Free or Die” to “Famous Potatoes”
The poll needs a ‘none of the above’ option. I have been thinking for a while and all of the characters listed have some useful and unique role to play in either their or some other character’s arc. The exception is Carla but I have a feeling, based on recent spoilers that there is a big ‘wait and see’ appended to her.
I see what you did there.
I can see that. And yeah, my suspicions is that there’s a lot to Carla’s backstory and her interactions with Sal and Amber that will be huge and impactful. I mean, at the end of the day, she’s an 18 year old out trans girl in Indiana who doesn’t shy away from a short short or an in-your-face persona. That’s badass in and of itself.
The first step to growing up is realizing that everything you thought you knew is wrong. It’s not easy, especially not for those who have to realize it about everything all at once, but necessary to become a complete person.
Your green place is gone, Furiosa.
Thw ends of storylines always have to be depressing.
…
…
If Joyce doesn’t start being a complete badass in the next month, you are fired, Willis.
And then he realized that Joyce had been a badass all along.
Thaaat’s life!
(Sam, Sam! Play me off, Sam!)
You know what we need? We need a drunk Walky to lighten things up. That couldn’t possibly go wrong.
Nothing broken can’t be fixed.
What about the world itself? What about humanity?
Wrists, Hearts, Minds… Yep, it’s truly broken.
Idk about everything, but my heart certainly is
Lovely piece on der Willis’s Tumblr about Becky and Joyce.
The Dead Lesbian trope has been well and truly subverted by this arc.
Thank you.
Interesting comment about subverting physics in there too. God does answer lesbian prayers. 🙂
More generally, that’s what I really love about this comic: It’s got occasional cool, if unrealistic, action sequences, but the payoff is the emotional climaxes. It’s the lasting effects on the characters.
Link please.
Never mind. Link is below.
“It’s the end of the World as we know it.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY
I’ve really been enjoying Joy’s transformation from a blind zealot to a normal human being. She was my least favorite character at first, and I took pleasure every time one her little delusions was being shattered.
She’s finally becoming someone I can appreciate.
I really like Joyce. Always have. She’s becoming her own person and she’ll form her own “faith” as a result of her experiences. You can have a faith without being a religious zealot. I hope that’s where she is headed. Because despite the pain, it’s still a good way to live life when you: “think we should give everybody a chance before you write them off. Even the bad people. I admit sometimes I’m not very good at it, but I feel I at least need to try. I want to find the good in people.”
I really like Joyce too, she’s always been so optimistic and cheerful and innocent, that’s why it hurts a lot to see her crushed like this with her innocence destroyed.
The worst thing is knowing that Sarah’s jaded comment about how inevitable it was that she would be broken, IE, like she was, came to pass.
anti joyce storyline begins~?
Oh, Joyce. I’m hoping you get a second opinion on that.
And since I don’t have tumblr, I wanted to use this to say a little something in response to Willis’s post here:
http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/133911326532/the-storylines-over-and-now-that-it-is-i-wanted
And that’s… thank you. Thank you so much for taking the care and focus to do this storyline right. To make the roughness of queer homelessness and threats of reparative therapy and abuse not just an ancillary moment of Joyce’s growth, but a proper Becky focused tale that put her center stage as the main one affected. To show how it affected those around her, but letting it be her tale first. And that it was told accurate to life to so many who have been so unfortunate to have been there like Becky in a similar sort of car or life.
That it wasn’t just a sad “oh look how hard this sits on our straight main character who matters more” and nothing else and wasn’t just some “issue of the week” throwaway, but an earnest look at how abuses like this affect everyone around you.
I know I’ve said a lot about how healing this whole arc has been for me. How it has made me feel less alone and less prone to blame myself for all I lost when what happened to me happened, but seeing it on a page has been incredible and I thank you for taking the care in crafting to allow that pathos even though it cost you in endless “Toedad is unfairly maligned and Becky is wrong for reasons totally not about how queer she is (but man is Becky “in your face” and “inappropriate” in this scene where she is expressing her queerness)” posts.
So yeah, blubbering over. Hope you enjoy your holidays.
This is a good place to also thank you for your posts! Making your day always makes mine. I’m not very good at sentimentality that isn’t nested in sequential art, so, uh, imagine me being additionally flowery here.
All in favour of nominating Cerberus as Best Poster of DoA, say aye.
Yeah: aye.
Aye.
Aye.
And now I’m back to blubbering again… but thanks. Everyone.
Aye/
And thank you both for being excellent people and creating this moment of heartwarming.
One can only hope that the network of friends around Joyce will help her through this. Sarah’s problem was, and still is in some ways, she didn’t have that kind of a network around her after things went south with her.
Joyce has, which will probably make the difference now that she’s hit rock bottom.
The eyebrows are grounded tonight.
I was re-reading some of the early strips, where Joyce was just moving in, and put a picture of her and Becky up on her wall. Note, this was September 2010, more than five years ago.
The picture… had a rollercoaster behind them. THEY WERE AT SIX FLAGS, WHERE ROSS HAD DRIVEN THEM.
Willis had all the pieces of this tragedy in place, even back then.
Well-played, Willis.
Notice that Joyce refers to Becky’s parents in the plural number and present tense: “her parents are making her go to Anderson”.
Joyce also talks about how it was her parents who don’t let her have a phone.
I see it as those decisions also including Beckymom, and that’s why Joyce said that. Both of her parents decided on what Becky is supposed to do with her life.
And that’s what I was referring to a couple days ago in my “you only get one mother” post. I would find it very hard to believe that no matter how toxic your parent(s) may have been that they were like that 100% of the time. The bad may definitely outweigh the good, but like Ross there is still some good to find if you seek for it hard enough.
On being “broken”: I’ll Put You Together Again, by Hot Chocolate. ℗1978
When you can’t take any more
When you feel your life is over
Put down your tablets and pick up your pen
And I’ll put you together again.
If your faith withers away
If God can’t bring you your answer
Write me a letter, I’ll read it and then
I’ll put you together again.
If there’s no light anywhere
And you’ve got no one to turn to
I’ll lead you out of the darkness and then
I’ll put you together again.
When things look hopeless, just write me, my friend
And I’ll put you together again.
— Donald Black & Geoffrey Stephens, 1978
Takes me back…
You could have done something
But you didn’t try
You didn’t do nothing
You let her walk by
(Geoff Stephens, a decade earlier)
From the aforementioned post on Willis’ Tumblr:
“Physics is bruised a bit, but that’s the point. That’s the subversion. Becky’s not going down. The universe will melt in the face of her.”
This was so much my take on the rescue scene, and I wanted to say so in the comments several times, but I never knew how to put it, and then the scene shifted and… now is a good time.
Only I didn’t see it as just a subversion of stories, but of reality. This story gave us a happy ending (albeit with a bitter aftertaste) at the price of some suspending of disbelief.
The lesson, to me, is that while this kind of situation sometimes does have a happy ending in reality, far too often it doesn’t. Real children are driven to suicide by parents who think they’re saving their kids from hell, when they are in fact putting them through it.
To tell that story effectively, you can’t just have Toedad be reasonable and see the error of his ways before any harm is done. That would downplay the issue.
So we get the happy ending, but only because of four badass women bending the laws of physics. That’s what it took. And that’s the point.
Is this a reference to that “Break” comic from early in the series?
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/break/
This is art: If Joyce has a roommate who is good with hugs, this scene loses much of its power. Joyce isn’t the only one in pain.
This strip breaks my heart. Oh, Joyce…
Joyces arc has always been the most compelling thing about DOA. But, take Becky. She realized her father was a zealot and she doubled down on doing what was right/what she loved. Joyce is changing but, her transformation is so much more painful and ripe for pathos. Her’s is a long road ahead of her full of pain and discovery…
Fuck… bravo Willis.
I think that another appropriate quote for this one is “You can’t go home again.”
I’m curious as to who Joyce will end up leaning on for help to get through this. I’m suspecting it will be Dorothy, and that will make for very interesting times indeed.
It’s almost unfair to Joyce, really – at least Becky has Dina, whose parents seem supportive of Dina’s choice.
dammit you made me sad.
i hate when that happens.