I mean yes, Anna is being particularly abrasive. Calling people idiots and saying “you should be sorry” for blocking a line by looking at your phone. I would be stressed if I was in the supermarket, mostly because negative public social situations is just social anxiety kryptonite for me.
Bad first impression to be sure. But she may have her good parts, hard to judge a character by only two strips.
Ah, but FIRST IMPRESSIONS are lasting impressions of a person, and very difficult to overcome later. Even more true in life than in comics. The saying, “you can judge a person by how they treat strangers & Wait Staff” is very true. If they’re jerks for no reason to those people, DO NOT DATE THEM.
Some people are nice to their friends and mean to strangers and some people are the opposite. Like some people try to be nice by default to people they don’t know but are okay being kind of blunt and sassy and sarcastic to friends who like them and won’t turn their nose up for it.
To Clif– I like Sarah, because I was actually given a view into why she is how she is. People are more inclined to be decently understanding of cranky people if they get to know that cranky person.
I dislike the person here because she’s not just cranky, she’s outright rude to both a stranger and her partner in the span of a few strips and while we’re not given any sort of backstory for her, I’m not going to like her.
Additionally, Sarah doesn’t have a partner right now, so she can’t be rude to one she doesn’t have. That’s only one generally cranky strike against her, instead of the two strikes I’m seeing here.
As we see more of this character I will determine if I like her more or less, but as it stands bad first impressions tend to stick around for me IRL.
I like that. I feel like it still fits relatively well. Replace “servants” with “service industry staff” and it’s- well, it’s less catchy but the point works I feel.
Definitely like the bit about animals being in there, personally.
Especially because there are no lines for the deli in any of the several grocery stores near me. They either have the little pull tab to take a number, or people just stand at the counter and rely on courtesy to let the person who was there the longest be served next. And I’ve never seen it be a problem. I mean, I’ve been asked by the counter person if they could help me when what they should have said “Who is next, please?” instead, but I just said something like “This lady was here before me” and that worked just fine.
But yeah, if there is an actual line then standing in it obliviously while working your phone is a bit discourteous.
My girlfriend’s family [well, mostly one sister] gave me a lot of stink-eye, tried to set the dog on me, expressed a wish for my plane to crash when I was on vacation, deliberately burned me with a hair dryer when I was being a model for them in cosmetology school…
Then she started dating a guy who was 26 to her 17. Suddenly they wanted to know why I never came around anymore.
I think it’s premature to say she’s horrible. She has a bad attitude but some people like that. Such as myself. It’s people who are sunshiny and happy who scare and repulse my dark pseudo-Goth soul.
I think most people’s solution is to, y’know… not take their significant other to meet their parents if their parents are judgy about it.
My standard for “when to introduce her to mom” is “no more than three weeks after the wedding license is signed and filed”. And this is as someone who _likes_ his parents and trusts their judgement even over his own at times. At some point there’s value in having boundaries just to have them.
Trickier when you’re in high school. Or even still living at home.
Then it’s more like “hiding them from your parents”, rather than just not meeting them. Never having them visit, or visiting them, if they have the same issue, etc.
Although Anna certainly is abrasive like Mike, I think she’s more like Faye (or Renee) from QC. Perhaps they fused together when crossing into the Dumbiverse.
Faye from a while back, for sure, I can see it. Less so nowadays. She seems much less prickly, in a good, less-defensive way.
Renee… harder for me to say, we’ve not seen her interact all that much with strangers as I recall.
I based that mostly on the short punk-y hairdo similarities, but I suppose in an “evil twin” sense Anna could just be Becky’s bluntness combined with an upbringing of entitlement and over-indulgence.
honestly I’m being a little bratty cause all the people saying Mindy was flirting gave me a dang panic attack so since they’re wrong I’m gonna act all smug and mean for a lil bit.
Mary Mindy Anna Mary Mindy Anna Mary Mindy Anna let me tell you once again….
Mary Mindy Anna Mary Mindy Anna Mary Mindy Anna them’s the girls who knew me when….
Actually, I was more wondering how actually supportive they were, with the phrasing “they even stood by me.” I suppose she may have gone to a religious school or a school in a very conservative area where there was push back about her taking a girl. That also explains “tried,” which was the other thing I found odd.
Also, I guess we still don’t know the characters’ ages, which could play into it as well.
Indiana isn’t known for being particularly liberal, and a lot – I’d even swing *most* LGBTQ kids are scared to come out. It can feel like we have to be eternally grateful just for people not being assholes to us for our orientation or gender. When leaving my last job, I literally thanked my coworkers for being cool about my transness.
Seems clear that her parents were fully supportive – the word “tried” implies that the school was not supportive and in fact prevented it, and her parents went against the school – which deserves the “even.”
Before you get all excited, remember that in DoA the general opinion of most of Joyce’s home community is that _Toedad_ was being “supportive” with the whole gunpoint-kidnapping thing.
Second-hand attestation of supportiveness leaves plenty of room for the usual shenanigans.
(Or, alternately… we’ll just never see the parents in the comic 🙂 )
Carol thinking Ross’s heart was in the right place is an entirely different animal. There was never any indication that he was ACTUALLY supportive, because he wasn’t, and Becky didn’t have any illusions about that.
I think we can trust Mindy when she says her parents were supportive.
Opposites attract I guess…or Mindy has apparently been with this person since senior year of high school at least and it’s really hard to just walk away from that.
Potentially. I mean we might just be seeing Anna in a bad mood but I’m not getting the impression Anna likes Mindy much if this is how she talks to her in front of strangers.
I don’t think that’s it. If they were BOTH grouchy, they’d be unlikely to get to know each other well enough so see past it to anything else.
Patient, excessively friendly people on the other hand, can pair up with just about anyone, because they tend to get to know people better. Anna probably has positive qualities once you get past the crabbiness
Yeah probably but I’m just imagining if Anna were a dude talking to their (assumed) girlfriend in public like this and it just comes off as rude as fuck and also emblematic of some much worse qualities.
I think Anna is pressed for time here. Becky has not only been slowing down the Deli line but also her partner in grocery shopping. I suppose Game of Thrones is on later tonight!
To translate from the language of the crabby and crass? Sure. Anna is commenting on Mindy’s tendency to stand around chatting, instead of getting groceries (butter, specifically) as quickly as possible so they can leave (the “get out of my ass” line is akin to “get out of my hair”, or “leave me alone”/”stop doing the thing that is bothering me”). Two different perspectives on the grocery store; Mindy seems pretty social, and Anna seems to hate the place regardless of the purpose it serves. Anna seems similar personality-wise to Sarah. They probably wouldn’t get along.
Anna may also have things she wants to get done quickly so she can do other things. Like, say, get the groceries done to make food so she can eat or perhaps later watch television, have sex, play video games that requires her to rush through grocery shopping. I feel this way about every trip to Kroger’s.
hey i’m seeing a fairly unpleasant pattern going on in these here comments so I’mma just remind ya’ll doofuses that abrasive people exist and they can still find love and they don’t gotta, yknow, not be abrasive to people they don’t know. You feel me.
I mean I tried to write a thing down but my dang webpage keeps rebooting on me, so let’s just say I got bad anxiety and I don’t pick up on social cues and call it a day
I’m slightly surprised that people are talking about Anna’s comment, but no one seems to have mentioned Mindy’s line in the last panel. That doesn’t seem like a very nice thing to say about one’s (presumed) girlfriend either.
Yeah, I don’t read it as them being together. I once dated a friend of mine; we both realized in less than three weeks that it was a bad idea, but we’re still close. In fact, we live together. I’m reading this as a similar situation: friends/roommates, not dating.
hey hey hey here’s an idea. wild idea. crazy idea. the wacky tobaccy of ideas right here.
What if, see, what if instead of doing this thing where we scrutinize everything about this interaction of these two characters we’ve just met, these two gay characters in a relationship yea, and instead of trying to figure out which one of them is Secretly Evil or that they’ve actually got Relationship Issues.
What if we say, yknow, maybe they’re used to each other? maybe because they’ve been in a relationship since, yknow, high school, maybe they’ve gotten a good notion of who the other person is and that these little interactions they’ve gotten aren’t, yknow, emblematic of being a dick but just, yknow, their personalities and how they operate in a public and how they’re overall dynamic is like. And how maybe Mindy making a joke about her parents and how Anna can be, and Anna giving Mindy a little shit about her tendency to be friendly can be, yknow, little jabs that they can make with each other because having been in the relationship they know their faults as human beings, and it doesn’t diminish their relationship? Because people can just do? that?
And maybe people can have, yknow a little fun. a schmidgen of joy. a pinch of good clean content. Without this nonsense. And we can all just. Enjoy. It.
I was more expressing my surprise that people were applying that level of scrutiny to Anna but not (at the point when I commented) generally applying the same level of scrutiny to Mindy, which struck my as inconsistent.
I see I was unclear in my statement of such, and apologise.
I suspect it’s partly just that nearly everything we’ve heard from Anna so far has been at least somewhat obnoxious, while this is the first insulting thing Mindy’s said. She had a chance to make a good impression, so we cut her more slack. She’s also saying about someone who’s made a bad impression on us and who’s just said something obnoxious to her.
I just wanna say, I kind off understand Anna’s frustration right now. In a different comment below I list reasons as to why going to the grocery store can suck and why someone would want to get out as quickly as possible. I mean, I can understand why she’s coming off as jerkish but I don’t know why she’s getting so much crap today and two days ago.
i mean like finding a place where you’re not in line or blocking anything important is…kind of important if you’re going to be on your phone. spatial awareness + consideration for others. i could see how that would be annoying. and for someone with a low verbal filter for the stuff that comes out of their mouth, i could see them doing what Anna did.
i mean like it’s mutual rudeness but not The Worst Thing Ever. i personally would rather someone communicate when i’m annoying them or in their way than spend unnecessary time continuing to be in their way/annoy them. that kind of straightforwardness is kind of its own gift
Like many teenagers with phones, I imagine Becky really thinks of her Twitter as important businessTM (and it is but she’s the only one) so it’s not something she’s too concerned about in relationship to herself.
I’m a WOC and I absolutely understand anxiety in public places. I usually try to move quickly, making myself as small as possible and avoiding eye contact, sometimes taking a different route so I won’t have to move past people. Because I’m afraid of pissing off the wrong stranger and having them get disproportionately hostile over a minor slight.
I also have some experience with trying really hard to be attentive to everything around me, failing, and being treated like an “idiot” who is obviously inconveniencing people on purpose.
I’m glad people are making an effort to see things from Anna’s side, because prickly people deserve empathy too and she might be a decent person underneath the unnecessary meanness, but I just do not sympathize with this behavior. I’m sorry.
Why would a delightful nice person date such a jerk? I know Willis loves writing acerbic characters, but I’m just not a fan. She should go date Malaya off-panel and leave everyone else alone.
Which could be anything from around 6 months (depending on when prom was) to maybe 5 or 6 years, right? They don’t look much older than mid-20s. I’d guess they’re students, probably not freshmen, though they could be.
Heh. I’m amused by this because people on the comment threads insist on calling me nice (which, you are all terribly terribly wrong) and my fiancee is basically Anna on steroids and has actually publicly blown up at transphobes and tends to be super spiky in any space that involves more than a handful of people.
Sometimes there’s a lot of value in someone who is passionate and fights for themselves and what they believe in, that carry that inner fire from the injustices they face. It can be a very attractive feature.
But there’s a difference between taking no shit from people trying to start trouble and berating random strangers in the grocery store for unintentionally mildly inconveniencing you. One is standing up for yourself/others and the other is being a super unpleasant person who needs to work on their social skills.
Sure, but we have known Anna for less than two full strips, and people were already dismissing her completely as an obvious asshole from the first one, just for being a bit rude to Becky while in line.
A lot of people have zero patience when in lines. A lot of people are rude because they’ve had shitty days. It doesn’t make that rudeness any more pleasant for the people who experience it, but neither does it mean they’re completely irredeemable people to everyone in their lives all the time, which is currently what the comments are en masse assuming.
OTOH, first impressions matter. They matter even more in fiction when the author is deliberately choosing that first impression to emphasize an aspect of the character. Even if it happens with real people, it’s very rare to choose to give a misleading impression for a character’s first appearance.
It can work, but it really needs to be linked to something major about the character – otherwise it just feels like the character isn’t consistent. If someone’s uncharacteristically obnoxious in their first appearance, that first appearance should probably lead into why.
I imagine this is going to? Other readers have noted that Anna seems VERY pressed for time. She wasn’t just rude to Becky in a random way; she seems to consistently be upset about being here for too long.
There’s a great excerpt from How Not To Write A Novel where you generally don’t want to introduce a character taking a poo, because no matter how you characterize them going forward they will always be The Character Who Poos.
i feel like a lot of people feel like much older lesbians are hitting on becky. like, this was a thing with leslie, too.
i kind of wonder how much of it has to do with the predatory lesbian trope? and how much of it has to do with just, like, wanting these characters to be in warm supportive relationships. AND I MEAN LIKE when you have a dearth of lesbians, you kind of have to go for what you can get and not worry too much about age gaps, i think.
but idk like interactions are weird and easy to read either a lot or a little into – like, in the context of this strip, it’s easy to read last strip as mindy being “oh good another gay person who is, in fact, adorable, and who we can hang out with and maybe protect from some of the stuff we had to go through”. which. i mean. the one of us sentiment is real close to the kindred spirit sentiment which is real close to the i like you sentiment which is real close to the attraction sentiment.
I think it also probably depends on how old people saw Mindy as. Like you, I saw her as older (late 20s or 30s), but people in the comments section yesterday were putting her at 23, which is older but a substantially less sketch age relative to Becky than what I had imagined.
Yeah, by first glance I thought she was student around Joyce’s age – MAYBE a sophomore or junior. Same with Anna, because of the Indiana shirt. If indeed they’re substantially older, that would make it creepy.
that is an excellent point. idk, she read as a little older to me because she’s got that “put-together adult” look. i am 25, personally, and i have not mastered that “put-together adult” look IN THE SLIGHTEST. especially not to the degree of wearing a button-down to the grocery store.
being able to wear a button-down with a nice collar reads Adult to me. choosing, of your own will, to wear a button-down with a nice collar reads Put Together Adult to me.
but then again i’ve struggled to find button-downs that actually fit me, so this level of Adulting may well be beyond me
(personally, i can't wear most button-downs because they don't fit over my boobage. and so this personal signifier of adulthood is forever denied to me, so it's just…never really lost that tinge to me of being More Dressed Up than you may or not actually be. like. it just feels more like office wear than any day-to-day thing.)
In college, my parents were upset because I was dating a Catholic boy, so I was like “fine, next time I’ll bring home a nice Jewish girl” and they were like “see, that would be fine!!”
Everyone has different priorities.
u know what Anna’s deal is? she speaks her mind and gives no fucks. bless her. i bet she says all the shit Mindy’s too polite to say, and Mindy gets them out of confrontations with her social skills. but they’re both still metaphorically at stonewall, raising hell
The trope is everywhere, “Nice + friendly but too-push-over-y x Jerk with heart of gold.” BFFs (Leslie Knope / Ron Swanson, Nanny Ogg / Granny Weatherwax) and romantic pairings (Andy Dwyer / April Ludgate, Boothe / Bones, Asami / Korra to an extent). Heck, even the foil dynamic in a five man band often has these types play off each other and become close friends or lovers (Aang and Toph come to mind, as do Joyce and Sal in this very comic).
The Nice One is usually extroverted while the Tough One is introverted. The Nice One is often more emotionally intelligent, while the Tough One generally is more book smart OR is a better fighter (depending on the genre). Often, the Nice One’s emotional intelligence lets them not take the Tough One’s aggression personally, usually finding them funny, and they have a very “water off a duck” ability when it comes to snarky remarks and such. The Tough One never lets anyone hurt the Nice One and can protect them from truly villainous people, whom the Nice One gives benefit of the doubt to when she shouldn’t.
And I like this trope! It’s a bit exaggerated than in real life, sure. But, honestly, everyone ready to hate Anna, do you also hate Toph, April Ludgate, Ron Swanson, and Granny Weatherwax? Because honestly I think I just named my favorite characters from my favorite series in that list right there.
i was thinking kind of like rumple and belle from ouat s1, although post that….is not a good example…
but it’s very much that hufflepuff/slytherin dynamic. although i suspect that the grumpy one is the hufflepuff and the nice one is the slytherin in this dynamic
Agree with most of that, but calling Nanny Ogg a pushover… Nope, not even remotely. She saves face (to be clear: Granny Weatherwax’s, not her own), but she’s the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove. Don’t mess with her ^^
@Silly Goose — fair; Nanny Ogg doesn’t fit the trope to a T because, as you say, she’s not a pushover. Sometimes I suspect, in her youth, maybe she *was* a pushover, but then some of Granny Weatherwax’s headstrong-ness rubbed off on her. But that’s headcannon, not canon-canon.
This is me and my boyfriend, sometimes…
(And I’m not trying to be funny with my name, I really am Anna and I’ve commented a few times before, a very long time ago.)
I don’t think being rude to everyone and your girlfriend is a good thing. If she is like this all the time, that’s gotta be honestly hard to deal with. But I don’t like the “Grump & Pushover” trope either.
we’ve had like all of two strips with her. i mean, it does seem to be her general personality, but it’s definitely a way to interact with the world. she could be like this and then also be, like, a solid brick of perseverance and kindness besides. people are complicated.
i wouldn’t stylize it as “grump and pushover” so much. it’s just…i could see how the interplay between Mindy and Anna’s very different styles of peopling could be something they value. -shrug-
you don’t have to like Anna!! but i personally am intrigued and a little amused by her so far. she seems to me like an asshole who is an asshole because they don’t choose to use tact, and…not everybody has to.
Anna is kind of an insufferable jerkass from what we’ve seen so far. You don’t have to be super bright and friendly but there’s no reason to be a complete asshole to random strangers for such horrible crimes as “not realizing they were blocking the line at the deli counter.” Like Jesus the hoops people are jumping through to pretend this is appropriate behaviour are a thing to behold.
Dunno. It’s probably better to be an insufferable jerkass, if that’s what you are in your heart, than to put on the cloak of civility and pretend to be something you’re not. As long as you don’t object to being treated like an insufferable jerkass.
It’s absolutely not. Making other people feel bad doesn’t become magically less shitty because you’re being authentic you’re actually more of an asshole than someone who recognizes that’s not appropriate and tries to at least pretend to care about how they affect the people around them.
Well maybe Becky is super gassy today, and Anna is cranky because she was standing “downwind” for the past five minutes and didn’t even need to be. I’d be a bit cheesed about that if it happened to me
i guess i interpreted the other strip differently from you! because what i saw was Becky making both Anna and Deli Lady uncomfortable because she was zoned out in line for too long. That’s pretty rude on Becky’s part. Not that Anna wasn’t equivalently rude, but, I mean. it’s not the worst thing in the world to be straightforward about the things you think are problems. It’s very much a “no, you move” approach.
Seriously. There is nothing indirect about “hey, you’re next in line.” It certainly takes less time than “GET OFF YOUR PHONE. SORRY? YOU SHOULD BE. YOU ARE IN LINE AT THE DELI COUNTER. WHAT IS SO IMPORTANT ABOUT BEING ON YOUR PHONE ANYWAY?”
Today I learned that straight camp apparently involves electric shocks. Man, that puts those brochures my co-worker showed us in an entirely different light.
Oh yeah, you didn’t know that? Gay conversion therapy. Not ALL those camps use shock treatment, but many do. And our dear Vice President is notoriously in favor of the zappy camps.
@Khyrin: yes, that was the Milgrim Experiment, and it used actors. Although at least one participant had a stroke from the stress of being socially pressured into zapping people. Somehow, I think that the people who run these camps might not have the same problem.
(Then again, I am of the opinion that anyone who has been involved in those camps, as well as any “parent” who ever sent their child to one, should be charged with attempted murder. But that’s just me.)
Let’s not pretend religion actually has anything to do with it. The Bible barely mentions “gay bad”, in mistranslated passages; while meanwhile there are at least two actual gay marriages in it. And even the mistranslated passages don’t say ANYTHING about torturing people into changing.
People use religion as an excuse to be violently queerphobic.
Priests are also people, capable of using religion as an excuse to be queerphobic.
If religious beliefs were the issue, all or most religious people would be queerphobic. They’re not. It is a choice to read that into the religion, and people make it because they want to be queerphobic.
And atheists are every bit as capable of being queerphobic — also misogynistic, etc. Atheists trying to say that shitty, ignorant beliefs are solely the domain of religious people is exactly where bigoted asshole atheists who excuse themselves from needing to do any self-reflection because “I’m not religious so I’m smart and enlightened” come from.
You see, even if you claim that religion is not fault or that it was mis-translated the fact remains that those sentences Are there and people know and remember them. When you start to re-interpret them you get fractures in the religion and… well pushed to the extreme you get US with it’s mountain of sects who see everyone else as a heretic…
Religion is not some weird, floating, amorphous thing with a will of its own.
I don’t understand why this is such a contentious thing, that I want to not let people off the hook for choosing to be queerphobic by blaming it on “religion”.
because in the process, you’re letting *religion* off the hook for making lots of kids queerphobic.
like, Joyce did not choose to be queerphobic. She was raised that way, then figured out it was wrong, and changed.
There are people that use religion to excuse their bigotry, and there are people who are unintentionally bigoted because they were raised in a religion (or other cultural whatsit) that taught them it was right. These things are not mutually exclusive.
saying religion isn’t an independent force is like saying a tidal wave isn’t an independent force, just a bunch of water molecules. From that perspective, it can be argued that People are just a collection of cells, cells are just a bunch of molecules, which are just a bunch of atoms… protons, electrons… quarks…
Different concepts are useful in different situations; people really like to think we’re special and different, but we’re not.
@Li
Religion is a concept, an entity. With it’s own set of rules, knowledge and prejudice. It’s like not “blaming” religion for Muslims not wanting to eat pork or praying five times a day. It’s park of the religion and everyone who practises it is Expected to follow the religion in it’s entirety. Queerphobia is Expected.
Queerphobia is an Integral part of Christianity (and quite a few of other religions too). Christians who chose not be queerphobic are a minority. The mainstream religion has within it the foundation for making people queerphobic.
@Eldritch Gentleman
I was gonna leave this, but just one thing. Christianity isn’t a religion. Christianity is lots of religions with very different ideas on everything, including homosexuality. Some denominations are horrific. Others happily hold gay weddings and ordain gay clergy.
It’s true in the US that the majority of organized opposition to gay rights comes from various Christian groups, but given the swing in public opinion over the last decade or so and the overwhelmingly Christian nature of the US, I’d be shocked if it’s still even a majority of Christians.
A large, loud and dangerous minority, certainly.
Queerphobia is an Integral part of some strains of Christianity. People in those versions are expected to be publicly queerphobic. They’re taught it. In others it isn’t and they’re not.
@thejeff
Well it might be a case of cultural difference. I’m from Poland and over here Christianity is almost synonymous with Catholicism. So my experience with queerphobic Christianity comes from the monolithic, centralized religion that is Catholic Christianity.
“Religion” isn’t just “the Bible”, even Christian religion. It’s everything that’s grown up around it, whether in textual form – like Catholic catechism or Jewish Talmud & commentaries, or just in teachings, tradition and practice.
People do not just use religion to be queerphobic – people are taught by their religion, as part of their religion, to be violently queerphobic.
Except of course for all those religions (or sects of religions, if you prefer) that don’t.
I’m making an explicit distinction between people deciding to be shitty and using books they don’t otherwise even take literally, and homophobia being actually part of the religion.
You can’t tell me that you don’t know perfectly well that LOTS of religious people are not queerphobic. It is a choice to interpret the text that way.
Not all religious people are queerphobic. Not all religious people are Christians. Nor are all Christians queerphobic.
But that’s the point: Christianity isn’t a religion. It’s a whole bunch of religions, loosely based around a text and 2 millenia of teachings and interpretations of that text. Some of those religions are very queerphobic. Others are not.
But it’s not just random people happening to be queerphobic and then interpreting the Bible as they please. Or even then seeking out other people of like ilk and making their own churches where they can hate together. As we see in this very comic, they’re raised that way and taught that way in the church. In that religion. Some can change and break away, as Joyce is doing. Others never do.
“You’ve got to be carefully taught.” Religion is a great tool for that teaching.
Understand, I’m not blaming or attacking Christianity as a whole. Or the Bible. Or religion in general. But individual religions (or sects or denominations, if that’s what you prefer) that preach hate definitely bear responsibility for it.
And in the US, in the modern day, a certain strain of right wing evangelical Christianity is the biggest force behind opposition to gay rights. There are certainly individual bigoted atheists and people from all walks, but they’re not driving the real damage.
No, religion = something that was made up by human beings.
Human beings are still ultimately responsible for everything they do “in the name of religion”.
As I said above, what I am trying to do is not let people off the hook for being bigots by blaming it on which sports team they happen to like best.
@thejeff
I mean, it’s “random” people who translated the Torah to make parts of it queerphobic that weren’t before.
And of course it’s people interpreting it as they choose. If it weren’t, the same homophobes who hold that one line of Leviticus so sacred would also be avoiding shrimp and mixed fabrics.
It’s completely bizarre to me that people are responding in this thread as if they think I’m an overly-sensitive Christian who’s mad that Christians are being held accountable for their bullshit queerphobia, because I’m an agnostic who rejected Christianity for a load of reasons and consider the popularity within many of its sects of having priests tell you what the Bible means and questioning God being considered heresy to… be pretty bad for critical thinking.
But ultimately this is still all on people. Ultimately the original translations were twisted to suit the agendas of people. And ultimately the choice to take just that one little badly-translated bit of Leviticus literally while usually not even knowing what most of the rest of the book even says is also… on people.
I’m not sure if you want to track down the exact people who made the religious teachings that encourage bigotry, or the exact people that misinterpreted things in a bigoted way and presented those as truth… or blame the kids who were taught those bigoted things by their church and family.
either way it doesn’t seem very productive. a lot of those people are long since dead.
Ultimately, even if the Bible in its original form said “All queer people are evil and you should kill them”, it would still be on people, because people wrote the Bible.
But that doesn’t mean that the religions themselves don’t also bear responsibility. Groups and organizations can bear both credit and blame. Even though they’re made up of people. We can, for example, determine which particular groups teach particularly toxic variations on the larger religion. And which teach more positive versions.
If we’re responding that way, it’s because you’re coming across that way: As if the religion is the Bible and religion can’t be blamed for anything unless it’s actually in the Bible (as you read it). Whereas I see religion as more along the lines of “A particular group and its teachings” whether those are formally documented or just broadly shared.
And it’s not “people interpreting it as they choose”. It’s people interpreting it as they’ve been taught. By people who were teaching it as they were taught and so on. Each time likely twisting it a little bit to suit them or through misunderstanding. Even in those denominations with formal teaching, things change over time. Even in sects where questioning is allowed and encouraged, a lot is still done, just by presenting their slant on it to you at a young age.
How exactly is it more productive to blame “religion” than to blame Joyce’s parents? I’m just curious.
@thejeff
As long as we recognize that “the religions themselves” are entirely, wholly, 100% made up of people who are making choices, sure. We can blame groups and organizations. That’s just a semantic difference.
What I object to, and what I continue to object to, is pretending that religion is something beyond people’s control; that it is some sort of intelligent being, forcing innocent people to follow it.
The indoctrination of children comes from parents, using religion to control their children, and I personally find it more useful in combating this kind of programming to point that out.
I especially find it more useful than pretending that I, a culturally-Christian agnostic atheist, can possibly sit in knowledgeable judgment of religion, when there are SO many religions that I know absolutely nothing about, and when most of the criticisms I have of Christianity (the discouragement of inquiry and free thought, for example) are actively untrue of Judaism, its closest relative.
Christianity is not “religion”; it is a religion, and the fundamentalist crap that Joyce was taught is only one sect of that religion.
Which becomes especially relevant as folks continue to tell me that “religion isn’t people interpreting [the text] as they choose, it’s people interpreting it as they’ve been taught” — which is literally not even true of all forms of Christianity, like. That was the big schism with Lutherans!
Religion is not all creepy brainwashing of kids. Some of it is, yes, but that’s not “religion”, full-stop, and the people who are using it that way would have found something else, in the absence of religion. Religion is not the only tool that has ever been used for brainwashing and indoctrinating children.
Religion does not, by itself, cause these problems. Again, atheists can also be bigoted shit-heels who control women and children through violence, and pretending that if we eliminated religion then the world would immediately be a vastly better place is… a self-congratulatory fairy tale that my fellow atheists and agnostics need to stop telling themselves.
I’ve had some shitty experiences with the brand of Christianity I grew up with, too. People who have had worse than shitty experiences? Please feel free to vent about that. It hurts. Being around openly Christian people is nerve-wracking. You never know if you’re talking to someone who will hate you the second you reveal who you are.
I have just gotten much, much more aware of how little I know about religion as a whole. Cautious about generalizing my experiences with American Christianity out to the entire concept of ‘holding spiritual beliefs’. More cautious because I’m white, and the legacy of colonialism has striven to completely wipe out non-Christian religious beliefs, so thoughtless comments about religion being bad as a whole pour salt into that wound.
I’m not meaning to defend, or particularly interested in defending, Christianity. Christianity is a big, powerful bully that can take care of itself.
I’m just saying… it was human prejudice that created those queerphobic religious beliefs. And especially in America, where people very much pick and choose which parts of the Bible to take literally, the choice to always quote that one line of Leviticus is also human prejudice, seeking justification.
Similarly, you’ll see people trying to argue that homosexuality is unnatural because “we’d all have died out” (argument seeking justification in biology), or “no other animal species do it” (completely wrong argument, which would be fallacious anyway, that is nonetheless seeking justification in the animal kingdom).
You don’t need religion to be queerphobic. Once you’ve decided to hate someone, you can make up a reason afterward.
How is it useful to blame religion? That feels like a really good question to ask.
hmm… well, in the case of Scientology, some countries have banned it for being so thoroughly toxic. People have risked doxxing to spread the word about how dangerous it is, how they don’t let people simply leave. That helps protect people. If you were only looking at the level of people, and someone talked up the benefits of joining their group, by the time you found out about the dark side of it it might be too late.
It’s a way of generalizing, of knowing to be on your guard. There are ways that can turn toxic too, but, it’s still a useful tool when it’s used wisely.
looking back to what started this… it was the phrase “certain religious beliefs”. that’s definitely closer to “a religion” than “all religion”. maybe that’s part of the confusion here; you’re reading “all religion is bad” when nobody said that here.
hey, as long as you understand what I’ve been trying to say. because so far this conversation has felt very weirdly like other people were responding to an imaginary version of me, who was instead for some reason saying, “nothing wrong has ever been done in the name of Christianity, fight me”.
I’ll just reiterate that the same people who come up with cults would find other tools if cults weren’t available, and that biology and evolution are also frequently used by ignorant asshats to justify their queerphobic beliefs.
I’m less worried about false flags causing people to be suspicious of religion (although keep in mind that islamophobia and false beliefs about what Islam teaches have caused quite a bit of violence in recent years), than about letting ourselves believe that bigotry (like misogyny, like queerphobia) is _caused by_ religion allows non-religious bigots to slip under the radar.
it has certainly allowed Richard Dawkins to go decades without bothering to ever ask himself, “wait, am I harboring shitty beliefs?”, because he so thoroughly tied the idea of bigotry to religion in his own mind that he convinced himself that the world’s problems really would be solved in its absence.
anyway. this was meant to be a short comment! it is not. oops.
Ha, yeah, Dawkins… 😛 there are plenty of cis white men who have done both very good things and very shitty things, and so many people try really hard to put them into the “good person” box, not the “bad person” box… I don’t remember anyone acknowledging that there might be more than two boxes.
I get the feeling a lot of arguments here come from both sides misunderstanding the other side as saying “all X are Y” or “no X are Y” when they’re trying to say “some X are Y” or “not all X are Y”. 🙂
@Halpful: I just wanted to thank you for this comment, and for ending this discussion on a very positive note. I was so frustrated last night, and this comment was a relief to wake up to.
Gay conversion is in that poisonous area between religion and medical quackery. Every bit as much evil as your fundamentalist hate toward a group they feel as sinners plus the people who think something monstrously harmful is good because someone is profiting off it or believes it can be done because they believe it can.
Note, this is from a religious person who grew up in an area where plenty of medical quackery was common both with religious and non-religious folk leading to horrible conditions. John Oliver, thankfully, finally did a piece on the anti-vaxxers.
Honestly, electroshock therapy is way too legitimate a procedure for those places. Probably more like a car battery and a couple sponges than what is actually a reasonable useful medical procedure.
Or they’re trying a strategy to help Mindy pick up other girls whereby Anna plays the “bad cop” to make Mindy’s niceness more apparent.
…
Nah, it’s probably just the grocery store. I well understand the hatred of grocery stores. To many people, someone always grabs the last of an item on your list right before you do, there’s a baby crying in the background, the lines are super long because half the cashiers are on lunch break because they’re manager can’t schedule worth shit, and there’s always at least one old lady trying to tell you how much you remind them of their children or grandchildren and as a result think you need to know all about them. It. Drives. Me. CRAZY!!!
Welp, I do believe I have never been more happy to be proven wrong. Now I just hope that they end up being the friendly (Mindy) and unfriendly (Anna) neighbors across the street that slowly become part of the main cast through interaction with Becky.
Today’s life lesson for Becky: Homosexuals, hetrosexuals and all the other flavours of humanity are all just as likely to end up in a relationship with an unpleasant person. Being a lesbian in no way is a panacea, just in case you thought so because of the nightmare that was your mother’s life. The trick to happiness is to know when your partner’s personality simply can’t be changed and you need to walk away for your own safety.
Well Carla is more enjoyable to watch. Anna just glares and snarls at everyone around her.
And you need to actually antagonize (if only slightly) Carla for her to retaliate. Anna takes “You are shit” attitude with everyone from the start.
Welp, looks like I was way off on the flirting. Let’s see if I’m equally wrong tonight.
Also, woo, community! Cranky community! But community nonetheless!
Panel 1: Mindy is preternaturally polite here. Like, most people would have already moved forward at the point where Becky apologized, but I gotta give props for double-checking consent before going ahead as that is a genuinely awesome practice and should be more common in society.
Panel 2: Again, I love how much Becky has been growing on owning her pain and not trying to minimize it and letting the bitterness about it show on her face rather than trying to be Happy Becky 24/7. It shows just how much she’s relaxing into her current life and letting herself have some real space to heal and that’s only a good thing.
Especially as it means she’s pushing past the fear that if she expresses her hurt or shows some level of discomfort over what went down, then she’s somehow doing harm to others.
And yeah, I feel Becky super strongly here. That bitter but blunt and matter-of-fact summary of a great harm is something I’m very versed with at this point and I just had to do a round of it recently in response to folks trying to be all “Happy Father’s Day, what did you do for your father” without letting me have the dignity of giving a non-answer (honestly, if you push on someone to recount what they did for a family holiday when they deliberately didn’t answer, you should pretty much expect to get a story of pain and suffering as a matter of course).
Panel 3: See these are parts of queer community I love so much, the recounting of experiences, the sympathy for shit gone through, and the mutual support and relation, even if it’s just envying those who had it better or feeling bad for those who had it worse. If these are current students, I hope this is leading to them inviting Becky out to some of the queer clubs.
And for those who had it better, please do share those stories. Those of us who’ve had it worse love hearing about supportive parents because it gives us hope that the next generation won’t have to suffer through the same crap we did.
I love the way your analysis of Becky’s behavior. She’s absolutely owning it and I respect that so much
And good coming out story: the only thing really stopping me from coming out until I was 21 was my own internalized biphobia. When I finally told my friends and family, about half already knew and the other half were surprised yet supportive. I was extremely lucky, and I hope to pay it forward
it’s so…weird, to be someone with Unhappy Experiences around other people. because like. it doesn’t mean you can’t be happy to see people, or want to enjoy time with these people. it just also means like – that there is something that separates your experience from theirs. and just being…short and succinct and blunt is probably the best way to handle it, for people, in an easily digestible form
Becky CAN allow herself to be a Debbie Downer. That is very important indeed.
And I’m just so happy for her randomly bumping into a pair of queer girls in the grocery store. After everything she went through, just having this casual confirmation of the existence of queer girls is wonderfully validating.
I think she went through something similar that first day on Joyce’s floor when she met Billie (and it makes me hope her samplin’ expedition to the shower put her in the path of Grace, Mandy and Sierra)
Panel 4: Anna is very cranky, brusque, and a bit rude and maybe that’s all to her character. Someone who’s a bit of a douchebag to others, but I can’t help seeing a potential other aspect to her character.
And that’s basically, all her comments so far have been time based. About getting through the chores as fast as possible. And I can identify with that. I have some pretty crippling social anxiety and outings with lots of people, especially judgmental suburban style people can be super draining and crankiness-inducing. This is largely because of the gauntlet of stares and muttered comments and hyperawareness that makes a simple outing like getting groceries into a genuine miserable slog.
So I tend to go along on these trips to reduce the amount of time I’m dealing with stuff and I’ve stopped bringing my gf with me on any trips (I’ll ask her what she wants, but I won’t bring her with me), because she’s a very Mindy personality and will dawdle at places and stop to pet all the dogs and want to expand into side trips and linger while shopping. And that ended up leading to conflicts cause I’d run out of spoons but felt bad about trying to hurry her up so I could get home.
And well, I have a lot of marginalizations, but one big fat privilege I have is white privilege. And POC, especially queer women of color get it a lot harder than I do on a lot of different levels. In terms of street harassment and aggressive policing of space, muttered slurs in a majority white area like this, general harassment by store employees (in the form of being followed around to “make sure” you “don’t steal something”).
And most damningly of all, in the frequent murder and sexual assault of POC by cops with little hope for justice. Like I get scared sometimes of being killed going out because of being a trans woman and it’s likely my case wouldn’t get justice, but at least it wouldn’t likely be at the hands of a white supremacist in the police force that viewed me as target practice.
So yeah, I can feel Anna feeling uncomfortable and antsy to get home and wanting to hurry up Mindy especially if she has a habit of dawdling and befriending people in the store and trapping her for way longer than she has the spoons for.
Now, I might be entirely wrong about that. She might just be a jerk, but I can’t help but read more into her statements even though that didn’t work out well for me in the last strip.
Panel 5: Though they also seem like a slightly dysfunctional couple (assuming they are a couple) given the harshness of Anna’s statement and the casual dismissiveness of basically saying “my parents didn’t really want me to date you” to a current or former romantic partner.
There’s also the fact the act of shopping is something a lot of people approach differently. I come from a very rural area where shopping is something akin to a social activity for some. Lots of searching, looking around, comparing, and chatting with shoppers. For me, shopping is a necessary evil (I’ve also been commented as “weird” being a married man who does the shopping) so I attempt to do it as efficiently and quickly as possible with pre-planning to spend the minimum amount of time in such a location as possible.
Why? Because I have other things to do. Important things. Like keeping house.
So true about the shopping social activity. My family knew all the employees and regular customers at our local grocery store. Every visit took at least an hour. I definitely couldn’t stomach it every week, so I don’t blame Anna at all if she’s just out of spoons (even if she should apologize later for being rude)
thank goodness there’s other people who don’t view shopping for groceries as social hour. My family has always been painfully inefficient at shopping, always getting sidetracked, conversing with people, looking at 99999 things that we aren’t there for, etc… with the exception of me, and so I end up doing most of the actual shopping myself and go retrieve my mother and brother when I’m done… or I just go alone to begin with. I’m there to get in, get my shit, and get out again. Part of it is that I have both social anxiety and ADD (and as a result of the latter large groups of people give me migraines if I’m around them too long because I can’t filter out all the background noise they make), but mostly I just have better things to do with my time
Anna is a bit abrasive but, again, she’s been waiting in line while Becky has been Twittering (including ignoring Mindy in a conversation mid-conversation) then is distracting her partner while doing said ignoring. If you’re in a hurry and/or hate shopping then this is notable–especially if you find your partner telling deeply personal stories to a random millennial she’s just met.
Yeah, FWIW, I think that Mindy and Anna are on the verge of a breakup because, in the end, Anna can’t stop being nasty to… well everyone and that isn’t Mindy’s idea of appropriate behaviour.
At the moment, I’m thinking that there is a small but measurable possibility that meeting Becky will move Mindy into a brief but ill-advised relationship, affair or hook-up with Leslie. I’m guessing that, after that, she might try to reconcile with Anna or simply leave the story. I still think that Leslie/Robin is the ultimate relationship goal of Leslie’s arc but I am willing to be proven wrong. It’s just my feeling of where Willis is taking this at the moment.
BTW: I think that Mindy and Anna are probably grad students – around 25 years old. What does everyone else think?
It’d be interesting if Becky tries to set up Mindy and Leslie (assuming either a breakup or trying to break them up because Anna is “mean”) while Leslie is more attracted to Anna.
Because Leslie seems to like rude passionate people given her known crushes of DeSanto and Starbuck.
Maybe, but yeah, I always worry when I see couples taking snipes at each other in front of strangers because that’s usually a major red flag that things are not doing great and there are things below the surface needing to be talked out.
Interestingly, my wife is often confused when I ask her not to reign in her anger or bad attitude. She grew up in a household very much like Joyces and became a rebellious Goth who lashed out a lot. She’s much happier in my home but a little weirded out that I mention I like her angry remarks and jabs.
like. it’s not something Becky needed to know. and it kind of gives the impression that Anna’s rudeness embarrasses Mindy.
which, for someone as clearly friendly/social/polite as Mindy is, has got to be a hard thing to carry; and for someone like Anna who calls things like she sees them, that has to drive her a bit nuts in a why-don’t-you-get-to-the-point kind of way. like if they just were accepting that Anna likes to be blunt and rude, and Mindy likes to be social and friendly everywhere, then it would be a lot more healthy. they’d just be doing the thing that they do. but it’s not quite like that, here
although maybe this is just their dynamic
but like u have got to be supportive of your partner is the thing
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s just how the couple interacts. I know one could that does that and if you don’t know them well, it can weird you out. It’s like they’re always on the verge of a fight that never actually happens. If you get a little deeper though, you can see the needling deliberately avoids all the actual weak spots.
Mindy throwing back the comment about her parents actually strikes me as a good sign here.
Same. I’m honestly really here for couples that teasingly make cracks at each other. Not a lot of them, ’cause it’s not a common dynamic, but it’s a good one. Then again, I might be biased since that’s how me and my girlfriend are.
Even if it isn’t anxiety, it’s entirely possible that Anna is on a time crunch for where she needs to be after, whether a job, a class, a social engagement, a favorite TV show, any number of things with a set start time, and had an agreement with Mindy that this shopping trip needed to be quick, in-and-out, just the stuff we need. That can certainly make one a bit snippy. Though whether this is an appropriate level of snippy for that is gonna depend a lot on how you read her tone of voice here.
well i mean becky just unleashed the “my dad’s in prison” bomb so a “my parents dont accept my girlfriend” bomb might have been in order re: personal backstory
I don’t see the problem. It’s HER backstory to tell, and unless Anna is in the closet (which seems unlikely), revealing they went to prom together isn’t terribly personal info. She doesn’t even explicitly say she’s referring to her.
I kinda wonder if Anna is trying to get through this ASAP because she has some sort of time is of the essence work to get done or something coming up REALLY SOON so they need to get home ASAP to get ready.
Hey, I just realised something. Mindy has coloured-in eyes and brown-blonde hair in a shoulder-length cut as well as a big smile that could be triangular if you look at it in the right way. If she hangs around for long, In other words, she looks a little like a grown-up Joyce.
I’m wondering if Becky may mention this to Joyce at some point: “Yeah, Mindy’s cool. She’s a lot how I imagine you when you’re in your 20s!” Joyce (being Joyce) has a bit of a BSoD at the thought of a lesbian woman (who, by this point, may or may not be in a relationship with Leslie) being the image Becky has of her as a grown adult.
Like, it’s easy for me to be… not annoyed, but mildly frustrated at the abundance of queer ladies vs. the comparative lack of queer men. But then there’s the queer women who read this series who are thrilled to bits to see themselves so represented. Where seeing total bit characters Grace, Mandy and Sierra manage a poly setup makes them write essays of happiness.
Like one of my favourite webcomics right now is Monsterkind, and its filled to the brim with interesting queer men and it’s about the trials as and tribulations and romances of those queer men, and it’s written by a lady. How I feel for Monsterkind is how a lot of queer women feel about Dumbing of Age.
But, yeah, I’d be thrilled if we saw more queer men in the series. I’m always championing to see more Sayid, and Wills has shown with Danny and Shortpacked!Ethan that he’s capable of writing interesting, three dimensional queer men.
YES. It is all so cute. I found out about it when she did a guest page for Paranatural which I really like for its sense of humour. Monsterkind is where the cute is at though.
He’s just sad, gay, and sad about being gay, and other than occasional glimpses in to his nerdy side there’s nothing else to his character. Every time he hangs out with Amber, his childhood best friend, it inevitably descends into a conversation about his Sad Gay Angst.
Eh, I dislike it for a lot of reasons, all the scenes with the two I like are because it showcases Danny well, but Ethan’s still just… just this boring blank slate that Danny gets boners over, and that’s it. I don’t care about him in the slightest. He’s just there for Danny to bounce off of. Otherwise now he’s whining about he has to fuck Mike because apparently there’s no other queer men at IU except for him and Danny.
I want to like it, because god knows even with the total lack of bi m/f in this comic now there’s still a lack of m/m, but there’s nothing to it so far other than “they’re dudes who want to bang”, and I can get that elsewhere and better written in Monsterkind, Rock Cocks, Check Please, and Transformers MTMTE.
I would, at the least, like to overcome my feeling of “Ethan is just entitled to Danny’s cock because he’s the one gay dude in the cast, so fuck you, Amber”, and so far that’s gone really well, which I hugely appreciate because I thought Danny/Ethan was gonna be the thing that made me quit the comic and tell everybody.
MAybe it’s because SO much of Shortpacked was about Ethan and his personal development? I agree that I’d love to see more of him besides “Amber’s sad gay friend” but maybe Willis just got a little burned out on Ethan and is waiting to delve into his story later?
Though, I do feel that, since you were able to name so many male-centric alternatices off the top of your head, that we may just have to appreciate that this comic does offer such a good variety of queer female characters. (and you did kind of acknowledge that already, so props)
That said, every comic needs more of every queer character, in my opinion.
49% of all LGBTQ characters on TV and streaming shows were specifically cis gay men.
That’s deeply inaccurate in terms of the general population. (Bi people make up the lion’s share of our community.)
We would need a LOT more comics like this one before “but where are the cis gay men in this web comic, it has too many queer women” was a serious complaint.
(It is different for bi men! Bi rep sucks in general, GLAAD notes that most bi characters are horrible and damaging stereotypes, but still bi women outnumber bi men, getting 23% to their 7% of the tiny pie of LGBTQ characters.)
I completely understand wanting to see yourself more in your favorite web comic (this is not directed at you, Spencer!), but at the same time if Willis had fewer queer women and more queer men that.. would only make the imbalance even worse overall.
The real point is that we all need more rep, because we are currently fighting over LESS THAN 5% of the characters on TV. Don’t complain that there are too many “lesbians” (you literally don’t know how these wlw identify…), ask for MORE gay dudes. That’s a different request.
And maybe ask it with more self-awareness that overall you’re still the group getting the vast majority of our scant rep… that, to try to correct that imbalance, it’s inevitable that you’re going to sometimes run into a webcomic where it’s mostly queer women, and that that’s okay.
(Again, though, we need more bi dudes badly. I would love to see Sayid become a regular for lots of reasons.)
I’m digging Mindy’s character design, by the way. You’ve been getting better at hitting that balance point where each character is identifiable but still flexible enough to support the cartoon expressions as the strip goes on, and the contrast between that and the updated version of a character you designed over a decade ago is kind of an interesting visual bit in today’s strip.
I was going somewhere with this, but I forgot where, exactly… good job, Mr. Willis, I guess was probably the short version?
Well, as an easy if not random sample I looked through the cast page. I count:
6 men
6 women who have only shown interest in men so far
4 women who have only shown interest in women so far
Billie, who has shown interest in both
Carla, who has shown interest in neither
So 22% of them, and 33% if you only take women, are (at least potentially) Lesbian. I know there are more like Leslie, Mindy, and Anna who aren’t on the page, but then we also run into others like Raidah, Penny, and Mary, so I doubt that completely reverses the statistics.
All in all, I think we can conclude it’s common in the Dumbiverse – maybe more than in real colleges, I have no idea – but not close to almost everyone. If it seems like that, it’s probably because you’re used to there being almost none.
In kind of a creepy way from the Walkyverse. A chunk of them were from the all female squad that Joe was assigned to for the purpose of a bisexual orgy joke.
Turned out all right here, though.
Part of the reason for the dominance of women over men here is just that we’re focused on Joyce and her floor. We haven’t even been introduced to everyone on the guy’s floor.
As creepy and objectifying as you may (rightfully) find them, I still like them. They’re moral and honest about their intentions, Mandy and Grace’s genuine love for each other is never questioned or doubted, they kick the shit out of Joe when they think he’s hurting Joyce, and, well, they just like boffing.
I know I’m a dude arguing that these Strong Female Protagonists can bang whoever they want, but I still like them, and I’m glad Willis returned to their poly setup in this universe.
I mean like, I think it originated as a fairly “male gaze” trope, but has turned into an awesome representation of women who are comfortable with their sexuality and just like having sex, so I am cool with it. For the concept of strong female characters to be inclusive, we obviously have to have some of them who are poly and more sexually free, just as we need some who are super monogamous when it comes to sex and some who are asexual. And thankfully we get the full spread in this comic.
First of all, we flock together. Each LGBTQIAN+ person’s friend group is gonna be more highly made up of LGBTQIAPN+ people than a random sampling of the population. And DoA is not a random sampling of the population. There are multiple out people in it, who, unsurprisingly, seek out other LGBTQIAPN+ people. Either for partners, or for friends.
Second of all, polls of millenials actually show that only a minority (less than half) identify as straight and cis. So the cast page is actually unrealistically straight and cis, for a random sampling of modern college students.
I prefer queer, and I find MOGAI most concise as an acroynym, but I don’t mind adding on All The Letters if it means that people outside the community are more likely to know what I mean. The “LGBT” at the front clues in folks from the US who might not even have a strong grasp of what all those letters stand for.
Sounds like a case of “if you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. Like that study where if 33% of the talking in a meeting was from women, the men perceived it as the women doing like 70% of the talking.
I don’t find it that unusual, personally. I suspect bi/gay people are actually FAR more common in an average sampling of society than most people believe, simply because only recently have a lot of people felt comfortable coming out.
I’m in the art industry, granted, so I don’t know how it reflects other circles, but I know more gay/bi people than straight people (and I’m one of the few straight people so it’s not even a case of my own sexuality informing my social circle).
Now it’s unusual as far as depictions in fiction go, simply because most media tends to have a mostly-straight cast with the occasional “token” non-straight person, but frankly THAT’S unrealistic (and a bad thing) so, yay for DoA being both more inclusive and probably more realistic with its sexualities.
It’s also worth noting, there are a lot of bi people who may be in straight relationships atm whom you may not even realize are bi. So you may know more bi people than you think!
Yep, I’m one of those. People just assume I’m straight. I’m not, but neither do I want to just say I’m bisexual either, because that really doesn’t adequately explain that I’m biromantic with more frequent romantic attraction to the same sex, and demi-bisexual with more frequent sexual attraction to the opposite sex…
I just read the archive, as well as “Shortpacked!” and “Its’ Walky.” I still haven’t found the ‘universe’ where Joe and Ruth are an item, and an android replaces Ruth. Did this happen, or is it just a side issue for Shortpacked?
Oh, and obviously I love these comics!
Oh no. Oh no no no no. Joe and Ruth were never together. Ruth gets [REDACTED] wayyyy before Joe ever even goes into engineering. It has been suggested that the humanoid chassis for Ultra Car slightly resembles Ruth because she was the one who suggested Joe go into the engineering field, but this is never confirmed.
Oh, but now that I think about it, a storyline similar to what you outlined does take place in Joyce and Walky, but not with Ruth, rather Rachel. You’ve got to pay to read the entirety of Joyce and Walky, which is probably why you haven’t found it yet.
Welp.
Either Anna and Mindy aren’t dating any more, or Mindy is secretly the dom to Anna’s sub.
Only way I could see these two working.
Or really anything else I guess?
Not my comic.
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the best thing to do is start out with someone horrible so when you finally pick someone better, they’re SO RELIEVED
“best”
I’ma side with Mindy’s parent on this one. CHOOSE ANOTHER LADY, MINDY.
I mean yes, Anna is being particularly abrasive. Calling people idiots and saying “you should be sorry” for blocking a line by looking at your phone. I would be stressed if I was in the supermarket, mostly because negative public social situations is just social anxiety kryptonite for me.
Bad first impression to be sure. But she may have her good parts, hard to judge a character by only two strips.
Ah, but FIRST IMPRESSIONS are lasting impressions of a person, and very difficult to overcome later. Even more true in life than in comics. The saying, “you can judge a person by how they treat strangers & Wait Staff” is very true. If they’re jerks for no reason to those people, DO NOT DATE THEM.
Some people are nice to their friends and mean to strangers and some people are the opposite. Like some people try to be nice by default to people they don’t know but are okay being kind of blunt and sassy and sarcastic to friends who like them and won’t turn their nose up for it.
And she is rude to both her partner and a stranger, so I really dislike her as she is put here.
How do you feel about Sarah?
To Clif– I like Sarah, because I was actually given a view into why she is how she is. People are more inclined to be decently understanding of cranky people if they get to know that cranky person.
I dislike the person here because she’s not just cranky, she’s outright rude to both a stranger and her partner in the span of a few strips and while we’re not given any sort of backstory for her, I’m not going to like her.
Additionally, Sarah doesn’t have a partner right now, so she can’t be rude to one she doesn’t have. That’s only one generally cranky strike against her, instead of the two strikes I’m seeing here.
As we see more of this character I will determine if I like her more or less, but as it stands bad first impressions tend to stick around for me IRL.
That statement used to be “You can judge someone by how they treat their animals and servants.”
I like that. I feel like it still fits relatively well. Replace “servants” with “service industry staff” and it’s- well, it’s less catchy but the point works I feel.
Definitely like the bit about animals being in there, personally.
” “you should be sorry” for blocking a line by looking at your phone.”
????
Especially because there are no lines for the deli in any of the several grocery stores near me. They either have the little pull tab to take a number, or people just stand at the counter and rely on courtesy to let the person who was there the longest be served next. And I’ve never seen it be a problem. I mean, I’ve been asked by the counter person if they could help me when what they should have said “Who is next, please?” instead, but I just said something like “This lady was here before me” and that worked just fine.
But yeah, if there is an actual line then standing in it obliviously while working your phone is a bit discourteous.
My girlfriend’s family [well, mostly one sister] gave me a lot of stink-eye, tried to set the dog on me, expressed a wish for my plane to crash when I was on vacation, deliberately burned me with a hair dryer when I was being a model for them in cosmetology school…
Then she started dating a guy who was 26 to her 17. Suddenly they wanted to know why I never came around anymore.
oh dear lorde is she doing okay
I think it’s premature to say she’s horrible. She has a bad attitude but some people like that. Such as myself. It’s people who are sunshiny and happy who scare and repulse my dark pseudo-Goth soul.
*Hisssss*
Agreeable. Those people don’t understand the dark, demonic inner workings of the soul. Those sunshine people scare me. They’re too lighthearted *Hiss*
Yeah “horrible” requires a great deal more data, I’m settling for “kind of a jackass.”
I’m not saying that’s what Mindy did, just it’s a viable strategy ¬.¬;
This has been true for some time, but you deserve to be told; I like the way you think.
not speaking from experience, NOPE
I think most people’s solution is to, y’know… not take their significant other to meet their parents if their parents are judgy about it.
My standard for “when to introduce her to mom” is “no more than three weeks after the wedding license is signed and filed”. And this is as someone who _likes_ his parents and trusts their judgement even over his own at times. At some point there’s value in having boundaries just to have them.
Trickier when you’re in high school. Or even still living at home.
Then it’s more like “hiding them from your parents”, rather than just not meeting them. Never having them visit, or visiting them, if they have the same issue, etc.
I hereby award this pair the coveted DoA Best Hair Award.
Good luck getting the trophy off of Sal, though.
Is it just me or does Mindy look like an older Joyce?
Little bit.
Wait, I’ve got more.
You. Freaking. Nailed it.
And I had no idea until you saw it for us.
I am begining to think that you are a socket puppet of Willis, so we can understand better his work O.o
Although Anna certainly is abrasive like Mike, I think she’s more like Faye (or Renee) from QC. Perhaps they fused together when crossing into the Dumbiverse.
Good call.
Perfect avatar.
Faye from a while back, for sure, I can see it. Less so nowadays. She seems much less prickly, in a good, less-defensive way.
Renee… harder for me to say, we’ve not seen her interact all that much with strangers as I recall.
But yeah, good call!
Nice one.
Happy and well adjusted future joyce? We can pray.
Mindy and Anna seems like Older Joyce and Sarah. Sarah, too, is CRANKY! It’s amazing!
Jocelyne and Carla. If either of them would be attracted to the other.
I welcome Mindy to the comic!… Anna can wait in the car
whelp, guess we were all right about her being a new love interest for the baby lesbian. Too bad neither of them are single.
Hold on a sec. They are apparently a couple, but it’s too early to say for sure that they’re monogamous. Remember Grace and Mandy and Sierra?
Although I’m pretty sure Becky still has eyes only for Dina.
I think Maveric meant Leslie, though I could be wrong. ~<3
“The baby lesbian”? That’s definitely Becky…
My God, it’s like an alternate universe Joyce and Becky.
I am getting alt-universe Joyce vibes from Mindy, but do not really see much in common between Anna and Becky.
Becky can be rude, but she isn’t nearly as antagonistic as how Anna is acting.
I based that mostly on the short punk-y hairdo similarities, but I suppose in an “evil twin” sense Anna could just be Becky’s bluntness combined with an upbringing of entitlement and over-indulgence.
An AU within an AU. Matryoshkas!
Oh, so that’s what AU stands for. Knew what it meant, just never figured out the actual words. I feel dumb now.
oh my god that’s lovely
As someone showed above. It’s more like Joyce and Mike XD
Her parents must have been saints, or have the patience of one.
They probably hope that the infatuation with This particular girl will go away like a bad case of cold.
Yo dog guess EVERYONE WAS WRONG
Well, not the people (person?) giving spoilers.
So they have that going for them.
honestly I’m being a little bratty cause all the people saying Mindy was flirting gave me a dang panic attack so since they’re wrong I’m gonna act all smug and mean for a lil bit.
I get that. I felt that way when it was a knife.
I apologize for giving those spoilers. I thought they were a couple in its Walky and it was well known.
Honestly this is the Best Ending Imma throw a dang party right here who’s with me
I’m actually very pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong so, can I join?
Absolutely! Foods a little salty from yesterday, but the punch is oh, so sweet.
Mindy-anna… Damn…
Yay, I was right.
So that really was an intended pun? Daaaang Willis.
I guess so. It’s written right on Anna’s chest. 🙂
Hey, stop staring at her chest! Her eyes are up there!
Though the “I” mysteriously moves from the right side of the zipper to the left.
Mindy-anna from Indiana. Yep.
Now all they need is a threesome with Mary.
Mary Mindy Anna Mary Mindy Anna Mary Mindy Anna let me tell you once again….
Mary Mindy Anna Mary Mindy Anna Mary Mindy Anna them’s the girls who knew me when….
Ihank you. That was beautiful.
This is a crime against humanity 🙁
Third panel dialogue strikes me as odd in a couple ways.
Supportive parents? In a David Willis comic?
Fly, you fools! THE HOUR OF DEVASTATION IS UPON US!!
Actually, I was more wondering how actually supportive they were, with the phrasing “they even stood by me.” I suppose she may have gone to a religious school or a school in a very conservative area where there was push back about her taking a girl. That also explains “tried,” which was the other thing I found odd.
Also, I guess we still don’t know the characters’ ages, which could play into it as well.
Indiana isn’t known for being particularly liberal, and a lot – I’d even swing *most* LGBTQ kids are scared to come out. It can feel like we have to be eternally grateful just for people not being assholes to us for our orientation or gender. When leaving my last job, I literally thanked my coworkers for being cool about my transness.
To clarify, I’m not in Indiana. I just know it’s not known for being particularly liberal.
If it’s stood by her against the school, that’s impressive in most parts of the country at this time.
Seems clear that her parents were fully supportive – the word “tried” implies that the school was not supportive and in fact prevented it, and her parents went against the school – which deserves the “even.”
Dina’s are my rebuttal to this.
Yeah, I was trying to be funny, I know that not all David Willis parents are awful people.
…on the outside.
(just kidding, please don’t hurt me)
The Ruttens.
Before you get all excited, remember that in DoA the general opinion of most of Joyce’s home community is that _Toedad_ was being “supportive” with the whole gunpoint-kidnapping thing.
Second-hand attestation of supportiveness leaves plenty of room for the usual shenanigans.
(Or, alternately… we’ll just never see the parents in the comic 🙂 )
Carol thinking Ross’s heart was in the right place is an entirely different animal. There was never any indication that he was ACTUALLY supportive, because he wasn’t, and Becky didn’t have any illusions about that.
I think we can trust Mindy when she says her parents were supportive.
What was the butter doing in your ass, Anna? That doesn’t sound sanitary AT ALL
How do you think Mindy got in there in the first place?
it’s midwestern lube
Opposites attract I guess…or Mindy has apparently been with this person since senior year of high school at least and it’s really hard to just walk away from that.
only other out lesbian at school maybe.
Potentially. I mean we might just be seeing Anna in a bad mood but I’m not getting the impression Anna likes Mindy much if this is how she talks to her in front of strangers.
I don’t think that’s it. If they were BOTH grouchy, they’d be unlikely to get to know each other well enough so see past it to anything else.
Patient, excessively friendly people on the other hand, can pair up with just about anyone, because they tend to get to know people better. Anna probably has positive qualities once you get past the crabbiness
Yeah probably but I’m just imagining if Anna were a dude talking to their (assumed) girlfriend in public like this and it just comes off as rude as fuck and also emblematic of some much worse qualities.
You don’t know what Mindy’s hands are doing in the last two panels! If she means that literally you’re going to feel very foolish!
Indeed I will.
Anyone considered the possibility that Anna’s being especially abrasive to drive off the feisty young lesbian who’s sniffing around her woman?
I am in love with Mindy’s expression in the last panel.
Me too
Three lesbians in one deli line?! This is statistical insanity! I wholeheartedly approve.
I think the fact that two of them are dating reduces the odds 😛
Hopefully Leslie is on the other side of the store right now, because I’d hate to see them taken over by Soggies.
Soggies may rule
I just realized why her name was changed from Molly to Mindy.
She was formerly a Molly?
Yeah, for like five seconds until Willis changed it to Mindy.
Arguably, Molly could also be used in a similarly punny way (Molly-Anna=Pollyanna)
True, but Indiana is more relevant to the location.
True I just noticed because I decided to try substituting Molly for Mindy and see what happened. 😛
*is secretly hoping anna turns out to be a jerk with a heart of gold (a favorite trope of mine)*
also, hahaHAHA, internet finally works, I’m back! You’re all stuck with my pointless and bad rambling. Yay. 😛
I am a PROUD resident of the state of Mindiana, thank you very much. :p
Two wild lesbians approach! Becky uses shocked stare!
It took me like a solid minute to figure out the pun.
Took me the same minute to realize it wasn’t a new pun.
–Buttons chases Mindy while Rita sings a verse
The writers flipped, we have no script, why bother to rehearse?
They’re Anna-Mindy-acs! (I’m so sorry)
They have pay-for-play con-tracts! (I’M NOT)
I think I’m missing some context regarding the butter. Also not sure if I want to know.
wait…is the pun Mindy-Anna? Like Indiana?
Did not expect the Mindy/Anna ship there, since Mindy’s so nice and Anna’s kind of a jerk.
They are just like magnets, their opposite sided attract each other.
What is this thing you call “small talk”?
Wait, is Mindy in Anna’s ass because she’s making friends or is she in Anna’s ass because she’s standing with her in line instead of getting butter?
Probably the latter, if I had to guess.
I think Anna is pressed for time here. Becky has not only been slowing down the Deli line but also her partner in grocery shopping. I suppose Game of Thrones is on later tonight!
I doubt that can be it, new eps of GoT air on Sundays and this is Saturday…
Or go fuck yourself, Anna.
I am in need of a hero for Anna’s line in the fourth panel, could someone please obliged?
To translate from the language of the crabby and crass? Sure. Anna is commenting on Mindy’s tendency to stand around chatting, instead of getting groceries (butter, specifically) as quickly as possible so they can leave (the “get out of my ass” line is akin to “get out of my hair”, or “leave me alone”/”stop doing the thing that is bothering me”). Two different perspectives on the grocery store; Mindy seems pretty social, and Anna seems to hate the place regardless of the purpose it serves. Anna seems similar personality-wise to Sarah. They probably wouldn’t get along.
Anna may also have things she wants to get done quickly so she can do other things. Like, say, get the groceries done to make food so she can eat or perhaps later watch television, have sex, play video games that requires her to rush through grocery shopping. I feel this way about every trip to Kroger’s.
Alright, I think I was reading it a bit literally.
I like these two. These two should keep appearing.
hey i’m seeing a fairly unpleasant pattern going on in these here comments so I’mma just remind ya’ll doofuses that abrasive people exist and they can still find love and they don’t gotta, yknow, not be abrasive to people they don’t know. You feel me.
I thought the major advantage of being abrasive is that abrasive people don’t seem to spend their energy caring what anyone thinks of them.
yea but I’m not abrasive so I gotta care about what people care about them ya feel
If it’s OK to ask, is there a story behind this for you?
Either way, I respect your right to care about anyone you want, of course.
I mean I tried to write a thing down but my dang webpage keeps rebooting on me, so let’s just say I got bad anxiety and I don’t pick up on social cues and call it a day
Fair enough!
She’s not just being abrasive to someone she doesn’t know she’s also openly being a dick to her girlfriend.
I’m slightly surprised that people are talking about Anna’s comment, but no one seems to have mentioned Mindy’s line in the last panel. That doesn’t seem like a very nice thing to say about one’s (presumed) girlfriend either.
Yeah, I don’t read it as them being together. I once dated a friend of mine; we both realized in less than three weeks that it was a bad idea, but we’re still close. In fact, we live together. I’m reading this as a similar situation: friends/roommates, not dating.
hey hey hey here’s an idea. wild idea. crazy idea. the wacky tobaccy of ideas right here.
What if, see, what if instead of doing this thing where we scrutinize everything about this interaction of these two characters we’ve just met, these two gay characters in a relationship yea, and instead of trying to figure out which one of them is Secretly Evil or that they’ve actually got Relationship Issues.
What if we say, yknow, maybe they’re used to each other? maybe because they’ve been in a relationship since, yknow, high school, maybe they’ve gotten a good notion of who the other person is and that these little interactions they’ve gotten aren’t, yknow, emblematic of being a dick but just, yknow, their personalities and how they operate in a public and how they’re overall dynamic is like. And how maybe Mindy making a joke about her parents and how Anna can be, and Anna giving Mindy a little shit about her tendency to be friendly can be, yknow, little jabs that they can make with each other because having been in the relationship they know their faults as human beings, and it doesn’t diminish their relationship? Because people can just do? that?
And maybe people can have, yknow a little fun. a schmidgen of joy. a pinch of good clean content. Without this nonsense. And we can all just. Enjoy. It.
But, yknow. Totally wacky.
I was more expressing my surprise that people were applying that level of scrutiny to Anna but not (at the point when I commented) generally applying the same level of scrutiny to Mindy, which struck my as inconsistent.
I see I was unclear in my statement of such, and apologise.
I suspect it’s partly just that nearly everything we’ve heard from Anna so far has been at least somewhat obnoxious, while this is the first insulting thing Mindy’s said. She had a chance to make a good impression, so we cut her more slack. She’s also saying about someone who’s made a bad impression on us and who’s just said something obnoxious to her.
Nah, you were pretty clear with “slightly surprised” that you weren’t actually offended or anything.
That comes across as Mindy trying to apologize to Becky since Mindy just called her an idiot.
I just wanna say, I kind off understand Anna’s frustration right now. In a different comment below I list reasons as to why going to the grocery store can suck and why someone would want to get out as quickly as possible. I mean, I can understand why she’s coming off as jerkish but I don’t know why she’s getting so much crap today and two days ago.
because we like becky (suddenly??); anna was rude to becky; and she’s brown
Becky held up the Deli line to do Twitter. For people in a hurry that’s a death penalty offense.
i mean like finding a place where you’re not in line or blocking anything important is…kind of important if you’re going to be on your phone. spatial awareness + consideration for others. i could see how that would be annoying. and for someone with a low verbal filter for the stuff that comes out of their mouth, i could see them doing what Anna did.
i mean like it’s mutual rudeness but not The Worst Thing Ever. i personally would rather someone communicate when i’m annoying them or in their way than spend unnecessary time continuing to be in their way/annoy them. that kind of straightforwardness is kind of its own gift
Like many teenagers with phones, I imagine Becky really thinks of her Twitter as important businessTM (and it is but she’s the only one) so it’s not something she’s too concerned about in relationship to herself.
well i mean it is important business, she just changed a politician’s entire direction with a few tweets
but like twitter is addictive anyways
I’m a WOC and I absolutely understand anxiety in public places. I usually try to move quickly, making myself as small as possible and avoiding eye contact, sometimes taking a different route so I won’t have to move past people. Because I’m afraid of pissing off the wrong stranger and having them get disproportionately hostile over a minor slight.
I also have some experience with trying really hard to be attentive to everything around me, failing, and being treated like an “idiot” who is obviously inconveniencing people on purpose.
I’m glad people are making an effort to see things from Anna’s side, because prickly people deserve empathy too and she might be a decent person underneath the unnecessary meanness, but I just do not sympathize with this behavior. I’m sorry.
You can leave now, Anna.
Why would a delightful nice person date such a jerk? I know Willis loves writing acerbic characters, but I’m just not a fan. She should go date Malaya off-panel and leave everyone else alone.
Maybe the sex is great?
I hope so! We’ve only seen her for like ten seconds, after all. I just have trouble with mean people.
Can she vibrate like Robin?
This has apparently been going on since high school. You get used to people.
Which could be anything from around 6 months (depending on when prom was) to maybe 5 or 6 years, right? They don’t look much older than mid-20s. I’d guess they’re students, probably not freshmen, though they could be.
maybe they have different attitudes toward life and people but the same general outlook and ethos, idk
I like passionate people who don’t give ****s so I’m naturally inclined to Anna. I guess I’m a Veronica instead of a Betty person. Maybe Mindy is too.
Heh. I’m amused by this because people on the comment threads insist on calling me nice (which, you are all terribly terribly wrong) and my fiancee is basically Anna on steroids and has actually publicly blown up at transphobes and tends to be super spiky in any space that involves more than a handful of people.
Sometimes there’s a lot of value in someone who is passionate and fights for themselves and what they believe in, that carry that inner fire from the injustices they face. It can be a very attractive feature.
My wife is much the same way and that’s why I love her. Congratulations.
But there’s a difference between taking no shit from people trying to start trouble and berating random strangers in the grocery store for unintentionally mildly inconveniencing you. One is standing up for yourself/others and the other is being a super unpleasant person who needs to work on their social skills.
Sure, but we have known Anna for less than two full strips, and people were already dismissing her completely as an obvious asshole from the first one, just for being a bit rude to Becky while in line.
A lot of people have zero patience when in lines. A lot of people are rude because they’ve had shitty days. It doesn’t make that rudeness any more pleasant for the people who experience it, but neither does it mean they’re completely irredeemable people to everyone in their lives all the time, which is currently what the comments are en masse assuming.
OTOH, first impressions matter. They matter even more in fiction when the author is deliberately choosing that first impression to emphasize an aspect of the character. Even if it happens with real people, it’s very rare to choose to give a misleading impression for a character’s first appearance.
It can work, but it really needs to be linked to something major about the character – otherwise it just feels like the character isn’t consistent. If someone’s uncharacteristically obnoxious in their first appearance, that first appearance should probably lead into why.
I imagine this is going to? Other readers have noted that Anna seems VERY pressed for time. She wasn’t just rude to Becky in a random way; she seems to consistently be upset about being here for too long.
I mean, in as much as anyone can be consistently ANYTHING, when they’ve existed for 1.5 strips.
There’s a great excerpt from How Not To Write A Novel where you generally don’t want to introduce a character taking a poo, because no matter how you characterize them going forward they will always be The Character Who Poos.
I suspect that Willis doesn’t subscribe to the idea
bwah
What’s the pun in their names?
Oh nevermind, I got it.
ADORABLE
ok im sold
See? THAT’S the proper reason to hate who your daughter dates. Not because she’s a girl, but because she’s kind of an abrasive jerk.
Welp, Mindy is immediately my favorite 100%-all-new-for-DoA character. Those facial expressions are adorable.
I thought Mindy was hitting on Becky last strip.
i feel like a lot of people feel like much older lesbians are hitting on becky. like, this was a thing with leslie, too.
i kind of wonder how much of it has to do with the predatory lesbian trope? and how much of it has to do with just, like, wanting these characters to be in warm supportive relationships. AND I MEAN LIKE when you have a dearth of lesbians, you kind of have to go for what you can get and not worry too much about age gaps, i think.
but idk like interactions are weird and easy to read either a lot or a little into – like, in the context of this strip, it’s easy to read last strip as mindy being “oh good another gay person who is, in fact, adorable, and who we can hang out with and maybe protect from some of the stuff we had to go through”. which. i mean. the one of us sentiment is real close to the kindred spirit sentiment which is real close to the i like you sentiment which is real close to the attraction sentiment.
I think it also probably depends on how old people saw Mindy as. Like you, I saw her as older (late 20s or 30s), but people in the comments section yesterday were putting her at 23, which is older but a substantially less sketch age relative to Becky than what I had imagined.
Yeah, by first glance I thought she was student around Joyce’s age – MAYBE a sophomore or junior. Same with Anna, because of the Indiana shirt. If indeed they’re substantially older, that would make it creepy.
Same here. I was guessing around somewhere in the 21-24 range.
What BBCC said. I assumed they were juniors or seniors.
that is an excellent point. idk, she read as a little older to me because she’s got that “put-together adult” look. i am 25, personally, and i have not mastered that “put-together adult” look IN THE SLIGHTEST. especially not to the degree of wearing a button-down to the grocery store.
This reads ‘put together’ to you?
being able to wear a button-down with a nice collar reads Adult to me. choosing, of your own will, to wear a button-down with a nice collar reads Put Together Adult to me.
but then again i’ve struggled to find button-downs that actually fit me, so this level of Adulting may well be beyond me
I would simply like to state that I am 25, wear button-downs casually on occasion, and am in no way a put-together adult.
im intimidated by your perceived adultness
<3
(personally, i can't wear most button-downs because they don't fit over my boobage. and so this personal signifier of adulthood is forever denied to me, so it's just…never really lost that tinge to me of being More Dressed Up than you may or not actually be. like. it just feels more like office wear than any day-to-day thing.)
Sadly, at a certain point, “office wear” becomes a “day-to-day thing”.
Luckily shorts and t-shirt is “office wear” at my job – well, jeans in the winter. Some days I even wear sneakers. Instead of sandals. 🙂
“like, this was a thing with leslie, too.”
Sometimes I disappear from the comments section even though I still take a minute to read the strip. Apparently I have missed things!
I honestly didn’t get that impression from the strips at all. I wonder if with Leslie it was folks hoping Becky’d replace Robin.
Anna agrees with you.
In college, my parents were upset because I was dating a Catholic boy, so I was like “fine, next time I’ll bring home a nice Jewish girl” and they were like “see, that would be fine!!”
Everyone has different priorities.
lol that’s precious
Well, did you?
Oh I see what you did there. Mindy/Anna. Well played.
HA! N!ce.
I can not type today.
Aw bollocks :c
u know what Anna’s deal is? she speaks her mind and gives no fucks. bless her. i bet she says all the shit Mindy’s too polite to say, and Mindy gets them out of confrontations with her social skills. but they’re both still metaphorically at stonewall, raising hell
lesbian socialization. what a world
My god. A good comment. An oasis in the wasteland.
There is wine here to revive you.
There is bread to make you strong.
There’s a bed to rest ’til morning.
Rest from pain, and rest from wrong.
just don’t friggin’ steal my silver candlesticks or there’ll be a body in the lounge if u know what i mean
(<3)
Exactly!
The trope is everywhere, “Nice + friendly but too-push-over-y x Jerk with heart of gold.” BFFs (Leslie Knope / Ron Swanson, Nanny Ogg / Granny Weatherwax) and romantic pairings (Andy Dwyer / April Ludgate, Boothe / Bones, Asami / Korra to an extent). Heck, even the foil dynamic in a five man band often has these types play off each other and become close friends or lovers (Aang and Toph come to mind, as do Joyce and Sal in this very comic).
The Nice One is usually extroverted while the Tough One is introverted. The Nice One is often more emotionally intelligent, while the Tough One generally is more book smart OR is a better fighter (depending on the genre). Often, the Nice One’s emotional intelligence lets them not take the Tough One’s aggression personally, usually finding them funny, and they have a very “water off a duck” ability when it comes to snarky remarks and such. The Tough One never lets anyone hurt the Nice One and can protect them from truly villainous people, whom the Nice One gives benefit of the doubt to when she shouldn’t.
And I like this trope! It’s a bit exaggerated than in real life, sure. But, honestly, everyone ready to hate Anna, do you also hate Toph, April Ludgate, Ron Swanson, and Granny Weatherwax? Because honestly I think I just named my favorite characters from my favorite series in that list right there.
#teamAnna #MindyAnna
It’s like I found heaven in the comments section. Sanctuary. Bliss. None of that fuckshit on this day.
exactly!!!
like. u need one person to be the grumpy cat, and one person to be the sunny cat. but in the end everybody gets pussy
*ba dum tish*
Lars and Sadie?
that always seemed pretty unhealthy to me. although Anna seems much more of a threat to my sanity than lars.
i was thinking kind of like rumple and belle from ouat s1, although post that….is not a good example…
but it’s very much that hufflepuff/slytherin dynamic. although i suspect that the grumpy one is the hufflepuff and the nice one is the slytherin in this dynamic
Agree with most of that, but calling Nanny Ogg a pushover… Nope, not even remotely. She saves face (to be clear: Granny Weatherwax’s, not her own), but she’s the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove. Don’t mess with her ^^
@Silly Goose — fair; Nanny Ogg doesn’t fit the trope to a T because, as you say, she’s not a pushover. Sometimes I suspect, in her youth, maybe she *was* a pushover, but then some of Granny Weatherwax’s headstrong-ness rubbed off on her. But that’s headcannon, not canon-canon.
This is me and my boyfriend, sometimes…
(And I’m not trying to be funny with my name, I really am Anna and I’ve commented a few times before, a very long time ago.)
Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson. There’s need for the spiky rabble-rousers as well as the nice welcoming Ellen types.
exactly
YES
I don’t think being rude to everyone and your girlfriend is a good thing. If she is like this all the time, that’s gotta be honestly hard to deal with. But I don’t like the “Grump & Pushover” trope either.
we’ve had like all of two strips with her. i mean, it does seem to be her general personality, but it’s definitely a way to interact with the world. she could be like this and then also be, like, a solid brick of perseverance and kindness besides. people are complicated.
i wouldn’t stylize it as “grump and pushover” so much. it’s just…i could see how the interplay between Mindy and Anna’s very different styles of peopling could be something they value. -shrug-
you don’t have to like Anna!! but i personally am intrigued and a little amused by her so far. she seems to me like an asshole who is an asshole because they don’t choose to use tact, and…not everybody has to.
Anna is kind of an insufferable jerkass from what we’ve seen so far. You don’t have to be super bright and friendly but there’s no reason to be a complete asshole to random strangers for such horrible crimes as “not realizing they were blocking the line at the deli counter.” Like Jesus the hoops people are jumping through to pretend this is appropriate behaviour are a thing to behold.
Dunno. It’s probably better to be an insufferable jerkass, if that’s what you are in your heart, than to put on the cloak of civility and pretend to be something you’re not. As long as you don’t object to being treated like an insufferable jerkass.
It’s absolutely not. Making other people feel bad doesn’t become magically less shitty because you’re being authentic you’re actually more of an asshole than someone who recognizes that’s not appropriate and tries to at least pretend to care about how they affect the people around them.
I know, I know. I was being facetious ;3
Well maybe Becky is super gassy today, and Anna is cranky because she was standing “downwind” for the past five minutes and didn’t even need to be. I’d be a bit cheesed about that if it happened to me
i guess i interpreted the other strip differently from you! because what i saw was Becky making both Anna and Deli Lady uncomfortable because she was zoned out in line for too long. That’s pretty rude on Becky’s part. Not that Anna wasn’t equivalently rude, but, I mean. it’s not the worst thing in the world to be straightforward about the things you think are problems. It’s very much a “no, you move” approach.
It is very possible to be straightforward without being an utter ass.
Seriously. There is nothing indirect about “hey, you’re next in line.” It certainly takes less time than “GET OFF YOUR PHONE. SORRY? YOU SHOULD BE. YOU ARE IN LINE AT THE DELI COUNTER. WHAT IS SO IMPORTANT ABOUT BEING ON YOUR PHONE ANYWAY?”
yeah, but like. some people are just asses. it doesn’t make them bad people.
Today I learned that straight camp apparently involves electric shocks. Man, that puts those brochures my co-worker showed us in an entirely different light.
also a lot of food deprivation, contact deprivation, emotional neglect/abuse, and bible verse memorizing apparently
or at least that was the case last time i looked into it
And gender essentialism and forced stereotypical gender roles!
And (CONTENT WARNING FOR RAPE)
sometimes copious amounts of corrective rape as well.
ha. ha. semi-good times. ohgod.
that is. one of the things! that started me walking away from the church
Frequently copious amounts of corrective rape.
I’m eternally grateful I managed to dodge my dad’s intentions and rebuild my life without him.
I’m glad you were too *hugs if wanted, appropriate gesture of support if not*
Oh yeah, you didn’t know that? Gay conversion therapy. Not ALL those camps use shock treatment, but many do. And our dear Vice President is notoriously in favor of the zappy camps.
You build a camp based around hate and you attract hateful people who now have power over others.
It’s basically that Prison Experiment and the electro-shock one thrown open with a homophobic and often religious edge.
The difference being is the Electroshock one used ACTORS and no actual volts, If I recall correctly.
@Khyrin: yes, that was the Milgrim Experiment, and it used actors. Although at least one participant had a stroke from the stress of being socially pressured into zapping people. Somehow, I think that the people who run these camps might not have the same problem.
(Then again, I am of the opinion that anyone who has been involved in those camps, as well as any “parent” who ever sent their child to one, should be charged with attempted murder. But that’s just me.)
Yeeeah, those camps are really scary and harmful to people.
Sorry that your coworker sucks.
I didn’t think they still tried to A Clockwork Orange people in 2017, no. I thought that was long dead.
Never underestimate human stupidity, particularly when it’s tied with certain religious beliefs…
Let’s not pretend religion actually has anything to do with it. The Bible barely mentions “gay bad”, in mistranslated passages; while meanwhile there are at least two actual gay marriages in it. And even the mistranslated passages don’t say ANYTHING about torturing people into changing.
People use religion as an excuse to be violently queerphobic.
It most certainly does. Who taught those people that homosexuality is bad? Priests. That kind of stuff certainly didn’t pop out of thin air.
Priests are also people, capable of using religion as an excuse to be queerphobic.
If religious beliefs were the issue, all or most religious people would be queerphobic. They’re not. It is a choice to read that into the religion, and people make it because they want to be queerphobic.
And atheists are every bit as capable of being queerphobic — also misogynistic, etc. Atheists trying to say that shitty, ignorant beliefs are solely the domain of religious people is exactly where bigoted asshole atheists who excuse themselves from needing to do any self-reflection because “I’m not religious so I’m smart and enlightened” come from.
You see, even if you claim that religion is not fault or that it was mis-translated the fact remains that those sentences Are there and people know and remember them. When you start to re-interpret them you get fractures in the religion and… well pushed to the extreme you get US with it’s mountain of sects who see everyone else as a heretic…
People created religion.
Religion is not some weird, floating, amorphous thing with a will of its own.
I don’t understand why this is such a contentious thing, that I want to not let people off the hook for choosing to be queerphobic by blaming it on “religion”.
because in the process, you’re letting *religion* off the hook for making lots of kids queerphobic.
like, Joyce did not choose to be queerphobic. She was raised that way, then figured out it was wrong, and changed.
There are people that use religion to excuse their bigotry, and there are people who are unintentionally bigoted because they were raised in a religion (or other cultural whatsit) that taught them it was right. These things are not mutually exclusive.
Joyce wasn’t raised by a disembodied cloud of religious zeal. She was raised by parents. The parents made the choice to instill queerphobia in her.
Religion is not an independent force with a will of its own. It cannot ever be “on” the hook. It does not make choices. People make choices.
saying religion isn’t an independent force is like saying a tidal wave isn’t an independent force, just a bunch of water molecules. From that perspective, it can be argued that People are just a collection of cells, cells are just a bunch of molecules, which are just a bunch of atoms… protons, electrons… quarks…
Different concepts are useful in different situations; people really like to think we’re special and different, but we’re not.
Please just read my response downstream. I’m tired.
@Li
Religion is a concept, an entity. With it’s own set of rules, knowledge and prejudice. It’s like not “blaming” religion for Muslims not wanting to eat pork or praying five times a day. It’s park of the religion and everyone who practises it is Expected to follow the religion in it’s entirety. Queerphobia is Expected.
Queerphobia is an Integral part of Christianity (and quite a few of other religions too). Christians who chose not be queerphobic are a minority. The mainstream religion has within it the foundation for making people queerphobic.
@Eldritch Gentleman
I was gonna leave this, but just one thing. Christianity isn’t a religion. Christianity is lots of religions with very different ideas on everything, including homosexuality. Some denominations are horrific. Others happily hold gay weddings and ordain gay clergy.
It’s true in the US that the majority of organized opposition to gay rights comes from various Christian groups, but given the swing in public opinion over the last decade or so and the overwhelmingly Christian nature of the US, I’d be shocked if it’s still even a majority of Christians.
A large, loud and dangerous minority, certainly.
Queerphobia is an Integral part of some strains of Christianity. People in those versions are expected to be publicly queerphobic. They’re taught it. In others it isn’t and they’re not.
@thejeff
Well it might be a case of cultural difference. I’m from Poland and over here Christianity is almost synonymous with Catholicism. So my experience with queerphobic Christianity comes from the monolithic, centralized religion that is Catholic Christianity.
“Religion” isn’t just “the Bible”, even Christian religion. It’s everything that’s grown up around it, whether in textual form – like Catholic catechism or Jewish Talmud & commentaries, or just in teachings, tradition and practice.
People do not just use religion to be queerphobic – people are taught by their religion, as part of their religion, to be violently queerphobic.
Except of course for all those religions (or sects of religions, if you prefer) that don’t.
I’m making an explicit distinction between people deciding to be shitty and using books they don’t otherwise even take literally, and homophobia being actually part of the religion.
You can’t tell me that you don’t know perfectly well that LOTS of religious people are not queerphobic. It is a choice to interpret the text that way.
You’re missing the point, which is that religion = scripture + dogma + culture. And there’s a lot of shitty Christian culture.
I consider myself one of the good Christians’s. But I’ve known some bad ones.
Not all religious people are queerphobic. Not all religious people are Christians. Nor are all Christians queerphobic.
But that’s the point: Christianity isn’t a religion. It’s a whole bunch of religions, loosely based around a text and 2 millenia of teachings and interpretations of that text. Some of those religions are very queerphobic. Others are not.
But it’s not just random people happening to be queerphobic and then interpreting the Bible as they please. Or even then seeking out other people of like ilk and making their own churches where they can hate together. As we see in this very comic, they’re raised that way and taught that way in the church. In that religion. Some can change and break away, as Joyce is doing. Others never do.
“You’ve got to be carefully taught.” Religion is a great tool for that teaching.
Understand, I’m not blaming or attacking Christianity as a whole. Or the Bible. Or religion in general. But individual religions (or sects or denominations, if that’s what you prefer) that preach hate definitely bear responsibility for it.
And in the US, in the modern day, a certain strain of right wing evangelical Christianity is the biggest force behind opposition to gay rights. There are certainly individual bigoted atheists and people from all walks, but they’re not driving the real damage.
@Pablo360
No, religion = something that was made up by human beings.
Human beings are still ultimately responsible for everything they do “in the name of religion”.
As I said above, what I am trying to do is not let people off the hook for being bigots by blaming it on which sports team they happen to like best.
@thejeff
I mean, it’s “random” people who translated the Torah to make parts of it queerphobic that weren’t before.
And of course it’s people interpreting it as they choose. If it weren’t, the same homophobes who hold that one line of Leviticus so sacred would also be avoiding shrimp and mixed fabrics.
It’s completely bizarre to me that people are responding in this thread as if they think I’m an overly-sensitive Christian who’s mad that Christians are being held accountable for their bullshit queerphobia, because I’m an agnostic who rejected Christianity for a load of reasons and consider the popularity within many of its sects of having priests tell you what the Bible means and questioning God being considered heresy to… be pretty bad for critical thinking.
But ultimately this is still all on people. Ultimately the original translations were twisted to suit the agendas of people. And ultimately the choice to take just that one little badly-translated bit of Leviticus literally while usually not even knowing what most of the rest of the book even says is also… on people.
I’m not sure if you want to track down the exact people who made the religious teachings that encourage bigotry, or the exact people that misinterpreted things in a bigoted way and presented those as truth… or blame the kids who were taught those bigoted things by their church and family.
either way it doesn’t seem very productive. a lot of those people are long since dead.
Ultimately, even if the Bible in its original form said “All queer people are evil and you should kill them”, it would still be on people, because people wrote the Bible.
But that doesn’t mean that the religions themselves don’t also bear responsibility. Groups and organizations can bear both credit and blame. Even though they’re made up of people. We can, for example, determine which particular groups teach particularly toxic variations on the larger religion. And which teach more positive versions.
If we’re responding that way, it’s because you’re coming across that way: As if the religion is the Bible and religion can’t be blamed for anything unless it’s actually in the Bible (as you read it). Whereas I see religion as more along the lines of “A particular group and its teachings” whether those are formally documented or just broadly shared.
And it’s not “people interpreting it as they choose”. It’s people interpreting it as they’ve been taught. By people who were teaching it as they were taught and so on. Each time likely twisting it a little bit to suit them or through misunderstanding. Even in those denominations with formal teaching, things change over time. Even in sects where questioning is allowed and encouraged, a lot is still done, just by presenting their slant on it to you at a young age.
@Halpful
How exactly is it more productive to blame “religion” than to blame Joyce’s parents? I’m just curious.
@thejeff
As long as we recognize that “the religions themselves” are entirely, wholly, 100% made up of people who are making choices, sure. We can blame groups and organizations. That’s just a semantic difference.
What I object to, and what I continue to object to, is pretending that religion is something beyond people’s control; that it is some sort of intelligent being, forcing innocent people to follow it.
The indoctrination of children comes from parents, using religion to control their children, and I personally find it more useful in combating this kind of programming to point that out.
I especially find it more useful than pretending that I, a culturally-Christian agnostic atheist, can possibly sit in knowledgeable judgment of religion, when there are SO many religions that I know absolutely nothing about, and when most of the criticisms I have of Christianity (the discouragement of inquiry and free thought, for example) are actively untrue of Judaism, its closest relative.
Christianity is not “religion”; it is a religion, and the fundamentalist crap that Joyce was taught is only one sect of that religion.
Which becomes especially relevant as folks continue to tell me that “religion isn’t people interpreting [the text] as they choose, it’s people interpreting it as they’ve been taught” — which is literally not even true of all forms of Christianity, like. That was the big schism with Lutherans!
Religion is not all creepy brainwashing of kids. Some of it is, yes, but that’s not “religion”, full-stop, and the people who are using it that way would have found something else, in the absence of religion. Religion is not the only tool that has ever been used for brainwashing and indoctrinating children.
Religion does not, by itself, cause these problems. Again, atheists can also be bigoted shit-heels who control women and children through violence, and pretending that if we eliminated religion then the world would immediately be a vastly better place is… a self-congratulatory fairy tale that my fellow atheists and agnostics need to stop telling themselves.
like. look.
I’ve had some shitty experiences with the brand of Christianity I grew up with, too. People who have had worse than shitty experiences? Please feel free to vent about that. It hurts. Being around openly Christian people is nerve-wracking. You never know if you’re talking to someone who will hate you the second you reveal who you are.
I have just gotten much, much more aware of how little I know about religion as a whole. Cautious about generalizing my experiences with American Christianity out to the entire concept of ‘holding spiritual beliefs’. More cautious because I’m white, and the legacy of colonialism has striven to completely wipe out non-Christian religious beliefs, so thoughtless comments about religion being bad as a whole pour salt into that wound.
I’m not meaning to defend, or particularly interested in defending, Christianity. Christianity is a big, powerful bully that can take care of itself.
I’m just saying… it was human prejudice that created those queerphobic religious beliefs. And especially in America, where people very much pick and choose which parts of the Bible to take literally, the choice to always quote that one line of Leviticus is also human prejudice, seeking justification.
Similarly, you’ll see people trying to argue that homosexuality is unnatural because “we’d all have died out” (argument seeking justification in biology), or “no other animal species do it” (completely wrong argument, which would be fallacious anyway, that is nonetheless seeking justification in the animal kingdom).
You don’t need religion to be queerphobic. Once you’ve decided to hate someone, you can make up a reason afterward.
How is it useful to blame religion? That feels like a really good question to ask.
hmm… well, in the case of Scientology, some countries have banned it for being so thoroughly toxic. People have risked doxxing to spread the word about how dangerous it is, how they don’t let people simply leave. That helps protect people. If you were only looking at the level of people, and someone talked up the benefits of joining their group, by the time you found out about the dark side of it it might be too late.
It’s a way of generalizing, of knowing to be on your guard. There are ways that can turn toxic too, but, it’s still a useful tool when it’s used wisely.
looking back to what started this… it was the phrase “certain religious beliefs”. that’s definitely closer to “a religion” than “all religion”. maybe that’s part of the confusion here; you’re reading “all religion is bad” when nobody said that here.
hey, as long as you understand what I’ve been trying to say. because so far this conversation has felt very weirdly like other people were responding to an imaginary version of me, who was instead for some reason saying, “nothing wrong has ever been done in the name of Christianity, fight me”.
I’ll just reiterate that the same people who come up with cults would find other tools if cults weren’t available, and that biology and evolution are also frequently used by ignorant asshats to justify their queerphobic beliefs.
I’m less worried about false flags causing people to be suspicious of religion (although keep in mind that islamophobia and false beliefs about what Islam teaches have caused quite a bit of violence in recent years), than about letting ourselves believe that bigotry (like misogyny, like queerphobia) is _caused by_ religion allows non-religious bigots to slip under the radar.
it has certainly allowed Richard Dawkins to go decades without bothering to ever ask himself, “wait, am I harboring shitty beliefs?”, because he so thoroughly tied the idea of bigotry to religion in his own mind that he convinced himself that the world’s problems really would be solved in its absence.
anyway. this was meant to be a short comment! it is not. oops.
Ha, yeah, Dawkins… 😛 there are plenty of cis white men who have done both very good things and very shitty things, and so many people try really hard to put them into the “good person” box, not the “bad person” box… I don’t remember anyone acknowledging that there might be more than two boxes.
I get the feeling a lot of arguments here come from both sides misunderstanding the other side as saying “all X are Y” or “no X are Y” when they’re trying to say “some X are Y” or “not all X are Y”. 🙂
@Halpful: I just wanted to thank you for this comment, and for ending this discussion on a very positive note. I was so frustrated last night, and this comment was a relief to wake up to.
🙂 🙂 *agos*
Gay conversion is in that poisonous area between religion and medical quackery. Every bit as much evil as your fundamentalist hate toward a group they feel as sinners plus the people who think something monstrously harmful is good because someone is profiting off it or believes it can be done because they believe it can.
Note, this is from a religious person who grew up in an area where plenty of medical quackery was common both with religious and non-religious folk leading to horrible conditions. John Oliver, thankfully, finally did a piece on the anti-vaxxers.
Religion and bad science are two things often used to prop up bad beliefs people already have.
Honestly, electroshock therapy is way too legitimate a procedure for those places. Probably more like a car battery and a couple sponges than what is actually a reasonable useful medical procedure.
I like that it’s a reoccurring thing that Mindy befriends strangers in the grocery store.
Ooooooooor she really IS flirting, Anna is picking up on it and is jealous.
the no-fun police are on their way
Or they’re trying a strategy to help Mindy pick up other girls whereby Anna plays the “bad cop” to make Mindy’s niceness more apparent.
…
Nah, it’s probably just the grocery store. I well understand the hatred of grocery stores. To many people, someone always grabs the last of an item on your list right before you do, there’s a baby crying in the background, the lines are super long because half the cashiers are on lunch break because they’re manager can’t schedule worth shit, and there’s always at least one old lady trying to tell you how much you remind them of their children or grandchildren and as a result think you need to know all about them. It. Drives. Me. CRAZY!!!
Yeah. Grocery shopping is madness. Why we invented services that deliver groceries
Not to be grammar/spelling Nazi, but did you really mean to use “they’re” in that sentence? Autocorrect maybe?
Wait, isn’t that basically standard deviatin’?
Oh my god I used the wrong tag
I meant to link to this: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/standard-deviatin39
anna’s…..nice
I dunno, some women (and men) prefer an Asuka to a Rei.
Mindy Anna. Oh for…
Welp, I do believe I have never been more happy to be proven wrong. Now I just hope that they end up being the friendly (Mindy) and unfriendly (Anna) neighbors across the street that slowly become part of the main cast through interaction with Becky.
Last panel Mindy face is probably my favorite.
Mindy, panel 3, thinking: “She likes girls! Confirmed.”
Why the good ones are always taken by jerks?
Careful, now.
anna probably has a “quit yer bongo-in’ or get out of the kitchen” magnet on her fridge
AH-ha.
Today’s life lesson for Becky: Homosexuals, hetrosexuals and all the other flavours of humanity are all just as likely to end up in a relationship with an unpleasant person. Being a lesbian in no way is a panacea, just in case you thought so because of the nightmare that was your mother’s life. The trick to happiness is to know when your partner’s personality simply can’t be changed and you need to walk away for your own safety.
Professor Bean, this one is all yours.
I dunno, is Anna objectively any different from Carla?
I guess Carla’s more enthusiastic?
carla is this much more charming, has had a lot more screentime, and once upon a time was ultracar
Well Carla is more enjoyable to watch. Anna just glares and snarls at everyone around her.
And you need to actually antagonize (if only slightly) Carla for her to retaliate. Anna takes “You are shit” attitude with everyone from the start.
Comic Reactions:
Welp, looks like I was way off on the flirting. Let’s see if I’m equally wrong tonight.
Also, woo, community! Cranky community! But community nonetheless!
Panel 1: Mindy is preternaturally polite here. Like, most people would have already moved forward at the point where Becky apologized, but I gotta give props for double-checking consent before going ahead as that is a genuinely awesome practice and should be more common in society.
Panel 2: Again, I love how much Becky has been growing on owning her pain and not trying to minimize it and letting the bitterness about it show on her face rather than trying to be Happy Becky 24/7. It shows just how much she’s relaxing into her current life and letting herself have some real space to heal and that’s only a good thing.
Especially as it means she’s pushing past the fear that if she expresses her hurt or shows some level of discomfort over what went down, then she’s somehow doing harm to others.
And yeah, I feel Becky super strongly here. That bitter but blunt and matter-of-fact summary of a great harm is something I’m very versed with at this point and I just had to do a round of it recently in response to folks trying to be all “Happy Father’s Day, what did you do for your father” without letting me have the dignity of giving a non-answer (honestly, if you push on someone to recount what they did for a family holiday when they deliberately didn’t answer, you should pretty much expect to get a story of pain and suffering as a matter of course).
Panel 3: See these are parts of queer community I love so much, the recounting of experiences, the sympathy for shit gone through, and the mutual support and relation, even if it’s just envying those who had it better or feeling bad for those who had it worse. If these are current students, I hope this is leading to them inviting Becky out to some of the queer clubs.
And for those who had it better, please do share those stories. Those of us who’ve had it worse love hearing about supportive parents because it gives us hope that the next generation won’t have to suffer through the same crap we did.
I love the way your analysis of Becky’s behavior. She’s absolutely owning it and I respect that so much
And good coming out story: the only thing really stopping me from coming out until I was 21 was my own internalized biphobia. When I finally told my friends and family, about half already knew and the other half were surprised yet supportive. I was extremely lucky, and I hope to pay it forward
:D! <3
Well that lightened my mood 😀
it’s so…weird, to be someone with Unhappy Experiences around other people. because like. it doesn’t mean you can’t be happy to see people, or want to enjoy time with these people. it just also means like – that there is something that separates your experience from theirs. and just being…short and succinct and blunt is probably the best way to handle it, for people, in an easily digestible form
but like damn does that take a lot of work
Becky CAN allow herself to be a Debbie Downer. That is very important indeed.
And I’m just so happy for her randomly bumping into a pair of queer girls in the grocery store. After everything she went through, just having this casual confirmation of the existence of queer girls is wonderfully validating.
I think she went through something similar that first day on Joyce’s floor when she met Billie (and it makes me hope her samplin’ expedition to the shower put her in the path of Grace, Mandy and Sierra)
Panel 4: Anna is very cranky, brusque, and a bit rude and maybe that’s all to her character. Someone who’s a bit of a douchebag to others, but I can’t help seeing a potential other aspect to her character.
And that’s basically, all her comments so far have been time based. About getting through the chores as fast as possible. And I can identify with that. I have some pretty crippling social anxiety and outings with lots of people, especially judgmental suburban style people can be super draining and crankiness-inducing. This is largely because of the gauntlet of stares and muttered comments and hyperawareness that makes a simple outing like getting groceries into a genuine miserable slog.
So I tend to go along on these trips to reduce the amount of time I’m dealing with stuff and I’ve stopped bringing my gf with me on any trips (I’ll ask her what she wants, but I won’t bring her with me), because she’s a very Mindy personality and will dawdle at places and stop to pet all the dogs and want to expand into side trips and linger while shopping. And that ended up leading to conflicts cause I’d run out of spoons but felt bad about trying to hurry her up so I could get home.
And well, I have a lot of marginalizations, but one big fat privilege I have is white privilege. And POC, especially queer women of color get it a lot harder than I do on a lot of different levels. In terms of street harassment and aggressive policing of space, muttered slurs in a majority white area like this, general harassment by store employees (in the form of being followed around to “make sure” you “don’t steal something”).
And most damningly of all, in the frequent murder and sexual assault of POC by cops with little hope for justice. Like I get scared sometimes of being killed going out because of being a trans woman and it’s likely my case wouldn’t get justice, but at least it wouldn’t likely be at the hands of a white supremacist in the police force that viewed me as target practice.
So yeah, I can feel Anna feeling uncomfortable and antsy to get home and wanting to hurry up Mindy especially if she has a habit of dawdling and befriending people in the store and trapping her for way longer than she has the spoons for.
Now, I might be entirely wrong about that. She might just be a jerk, but I can’t help but read more into her statements even though that didn’t work out well for me in the last strip.
Panel 5: Though they also seem like a slightly dysfunctional couple (assuming they are a couple) given the harshness of Anna’s statement and the casual dismissiveness of basically saying “my parents didn’t really want me to date you” to a current or former romantic partner.
There’s also the fact the act of shopping is something a lot of people approach differently. I come from a very rural area where shopping is something akin to a social activity for some. Lots of searching, looking around, comparing, and chatting with shoppers. For me, shopping is a necessary evil (I’ve also been commented as “weird” being a married man who does the shopping) so I attempt to do it as efficiently and quickly as possible with pre-planning to spend the minimum amount of time in such a location as possible.
Why? Because I have other things to do. Important things. Like keeping house.
So true about the shopping social activity. My family knew all the employees and regular customers at our local grocery store. Every visit took at least an hour. I definitely couldn’t stomach it every week, so I don’t blame Anna at all if she’s just out of spoons (even if she should apologize later for being rude)
thank goodness there’s other people who don’t view shopping for groceries as social hour. My family has always been painfully inefficient at shopping, always getting sidetracked, conversing with people, looking at 99999 things that we aren’t there for, etc… with the exception of me, and so I end up doing most of the actual shopping myself and go retrieve my mother and brother when I’m done… or I just go alone to begin with. I’m there to get in, get my shit, and get out again. Part of it is that I have both social anxiety and ADD (and as a result of the latter large groups of people give me migraines if I’m around them too long because I can’t filter out all the background noise they make), but mostly I just have better things to do with my time
Anna is a bit abrasive but, again, she’s been waiting in line while Becky has been Twittering (including ignoring Mindy in a conversation mid-conversation) then is distracting her partner while doing said ignoring. If you’re in a hurry and/or hate shopping then this is notable–especially if you find your partner telling deeply personal stories to a random millennial she’s just met.
Yeah, FWIW, I think that Mindy and Anna are on the verge of a breakup because, in the end, Anna can’t stop being nasty to… well everyone and that isn’t Mindy’s idea of appropriate behaviour.
At the moment, I’m thinking that there is a small but measurable possibility that meeting Becky will move Mindy into a brief but ill-advised relationship, affair or hook-up with Leslie. I’m guessing that, after that, she might try to reconcile with Anna or simply leave the story. I still think that Leslie/Robin is the ultimate relationship goal of Leslie’s arc but I am willing to be proven wrong. It’s just my feeling of where Willis is taking this at the moment.
BTW: I think that Mindy and Anna are probably grad students – around 25 years old. What does everyone else think?
It’d be interesting if Becky tries to set up Mindy and Leslie (assuming either a breakup or trying to break them up because Anna is “mean”) while Leslie is more attracted to Anna.
Because Leslie seems to like rude passionate people given her known crushes of DeSanto and Starbuck.
You don’t really need the quotation marks around mean she hasn’t exactly given us any reason to see her as anything else.
Becky is twittering when in line for the deli. That’s justification for a duel to the death by Thundersupermarket rules.
yeaaaaaaaaaaaaah that. last bit. seemed like kind of a real problem, especially if Mindy’s parents are otherwise supportive
but i mean it’s entirely possibly that Anna brings out Mindy’s abrasiveness
Maybe, but yeah, I always worry when I see couples taking snipes at each other in front of strangers because that’s usually a major red flag that things are not doing great and there are things below the surface needing to be talked out.
Interestingly, my wife is often confused when I ask her not to reign in her anger or bad attitude. She grew up in a household very much like Joyces and became a rebellious Goth who lashed out a lot. She’s much happier in my home but a little weirded out that I mention I like her angry remarks and jabs.
yeaaah.
like. it’s not something Becky needed to know. and it kind of gives the impression that Anna’s rudeness embarrasses Mindy.
which, for someone as clearly friendly/social/polite as Mindy is, has got to be a hard thing to carry; and for someone like Anna who calls things like she sees them, that has to drive her a bit nuts in a why-don’t-you-get-to-the-point kind of way. like if they just were accepting that Anna likes to be blunt and rude, and Mindy likes to be social and friendly everywhere, then it would be a lot more healthy. they’d just be doing the thing that they do. but it’s not quite like that, here
although maybe this is just their dynamic
but like u have got to be supportive of your partner is the thing
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s just how the couple interacts. I know one could that does that and if you don’t know them well, it can weird you out. It’s like they’re always on the verge of a fight that never actually happens. If you get a little deeper though, you can see the needling deliberately avoids all the actual weak spots.
Mindy throwing back the comment about her parents actually strikes me as a good sign here.
Same. I’m honestly really here for couples that teasingly make cracks at each other. Not a lot of them, ’cause it’s not a common dynamic, but it’s a good one. Then again, I might be biased since that’s how me and my girlfriend are.
like “why do i put up with you”
“because you love me”
“and you’re good in bed”
“damn straight i’m good in bed”
Even if it isn’t anxiety, it’s entirely possible that Anna is on a time crunch for where she needs to be after, whether a job, a class, a social engagement, a favorite TV show, any number of things with a set start time, and had an agreement with Mindy that this shopping trip needed to be quick, in-and-out, just the stuff we need. That can certainly make one a bit snippy. Though whether this is an appropriate level of snippy for that is gonna depend a lot on how you read her tone of voice here.
Hooray for happy socializing Mindy.
Hooray and Huzzah!
Damn wish my parents were like Mindy’s. At least they accepted her.
Abstract thought: I wonder what grocery store they’re at?
I vote it’s McAwesomes Grocery Store.
Galasso never shops for pizza (and subs) ingredients there!
This one:
https://www.luckysmarket.com/bloomington-indiana/
I’m sorry you had to go through that.
….
ARE they still a couple, or are they just friends in an Ethan-and-Amber sort of way?
… well not quite the same way, since Mindy and Anna seem to both be into each other’s gender, but still….
I dunno? They seem to sorta be a couple but they might just be roommates or friends. Probably a couple so I’m assuming that for now
harold, they’re galpals
Mindy, don’t tell personal backstory to strangers–especially when they involve loved ones.
Also, don’t cut down your partner in front of strangers after doing so.
Anna, just get your own butter.
well i mean becky just unleashed the “my dad’s in prison” bomb so a “my parents dont accept my girlfriend” bomb might have been in order re: personal backstory
but yes
I don’t see the problem. It’s HER backstory to tell, and unless Anna is in the closet (which seems unlikely), revealing they went to prom together isn’t terribly personal info. She doesn’t even explicitly say she’s referring to her.
I kinda wonder if Anna is trying to get through this ASAP because she has some sort of time is of the essence work to get done or something coming up REALLY SOON so they need to get home ASAP to get ready.
Mindy + Anna = M’Indiana.
AMIRITE?
Ouch.
Hey, I just realised something. Mindy has coloured-in eyes and brown-blonde hair in a shoulder-length cut as well as a big smile that could be triangular if you look at it in the right way. If she hangs around for long, In other words, she looks a little like a grown-up Joyce.
I’m wondering if Becky may mention this to Joyce at some point: “Yeah, Mindy’s cool. She’s a lot how I imagine you when you’re in your 20s!” Joyce (being Joyce) has a bit of a BSoD at the thought of a lesbian woman (who, by this point, may or may not be in a relationship with Leslie) being the image Becky has of her as a grown adult.
I love Mindy’s eyebrows.
Oh. More lesbians… I mean, that’s cool, but can we get more gay dudes? Maybe?
I know there is Ethan, but, you now, fuck Ethan. Ethan is THE WORST.
Aw, c’mon. Ethan’s not that bad.
Ethan was awesome when he locked Galasso away and left him to die. That Ethan was great.
I mean.
Like, it’s easy for me to be… not annoyed, but mildly frustrated at the abundance of queer ladies vs. the comparative lack of queer men. But then there’s the queer women who read this series who are thrilled to bits to see themselves so represented. Where seeing total bit characters Grace, Mandy and Sierra manage a poly setup makes them write essays of happiness.
Like one of my favourite webcomics right now is Monsterkind, and its filled to the brim with interesting queer men and it’s about the trials as and tribulations and romances of those queer men, and it’s written by a lady. How I feel for Monsterkind is how a lot of queer women feel about Dumbing of Age.
But, yeah, I’d be thrilled if we saw more queer men in the series. I’m always championing to see more Sayid, and Wills has shown with Danny and Shortpacked!Ethan that he’s capable of writing interesting, three dimensional queer men.
And DoA!Ethan is, indeed, the worst.
High five for reading Monsterkind.
More queer men in DoA would be great. I am all for more LGBT+ characters of all kinds because it feeds my soul.
Monsterkind is so good oh my god. Every page explodes with adorable.
YES. It is all so cute. I found out about it when she did a guest page for Paranatural which I really like for its sense of humour. Monsterkind is where the cute is at though.
Why the Ethan hate party?!?
Because he’s boring and awful.
He’s just sad, gay, and sad about being gay, and other than occasional glimpses in to his nerdy side there’s nothing else to his character. Every time he hangs out with Amber, his childhood best friend, it inevitably descends into a conversation about his Sad Gay Angst.
I think his relationship with Danny shows otherwise.
Eh, I dislike it for a lot of reasons, all the scenes with the two I like are because it showcases Danny well, but Ethan’s still just… just this boring blank slate that Danny gets boners over, and that’s it. I don’t care about him in the slightest. He’s just there for Danny to bounce off of. Otherwise now he’s whining about he has to fuck Mike because apparently there’s no other queer men at IU except for him and Danny.
I want to like it, because god knows even with the total lack of bi m/f in this comic now there’s still a lack of m/m, but there’s nothing to it so far other than “they’re dudes who want to bang”, and I can get that elsewhere and better written in Monsterkind, Rock Cocks, Check Please, and Transformers MTMTE.
I would, at the least, like to overcome my feeling of “Ethan is just entitled to Danny’s cock because he’s the one gay dude in the cast, so fuck you, Amber”, and so far that’s gone really well, which I hugely appreciate because I thought Danny/Ethan was gonna be the thing that made me quit the comic and tell everybody.
MAybe it’s because SO much of Shortpacked was about Ethan and his personal development? I agree that I’d love to see more of him besides “Amber’s sad gay friend” but maybe Willis just got a little burned out on Ethan and is waiting to delve into his story later?
Though, I do feel that, since you were able to name so many male-centric alternatices off the top of your head, that we may just have to appreciate that this comic does offer such a good variety of queer female characters. (and you did kind of acknowledge that already, so props)
That said, every comic needs more of every queer character, in my opinion.
Yeah, like…
Outside this web comic, specifically gay men get MUCH of our representation.
http://glaad.org/files/WWAT/WWAT_GLAAD_2016-2017.pdf
49% of all LGBTQ characters on TV and streaming shows were specifically cis gay men.
That’s deeply inaccurate in terms of the general population. (Bi people make up the lion’s share of our community.)
We would need a LOT more comics like this one before “but where are the cis gay men in this web comic, it has too many queer women” was a serious complaint.
(It is different for bi men! Bi rep sucks in general, GLAAD notes that most bi characters are horrible and damaging stereotypes, but still bi women outnumber bi men, getting 23% to their 7% of the tiny pie of LGBTQ characters.)
I completely understand wanting to see yourself more in your favorite web comic (this is not directed at you, Spencer!), but at the same time if Willis had fewer queer women and more queer men that.. would only make the imbalance even worse overall.
The real point is that we all need more rep, because we are currently fighting over LESS THAN 5% of the characters on TV. Don’t complain that there are too many “lesbians” (you literally don’t know how these wlw identify…), ask for MORE gay dudes. That’s a different request.
And maybe ask it with more self-awareness that overall you’re still the group getting the vast majority of our scant rep… that, to try to correct that imbalance, it’s inevitable that you’re going to sometimes run into a webcomic where it’s mostly queer women, and that that’s okay.
(Again, though, we need more bi dudes badly. I would love to see Sayid become a regular for lots of reasons.)
I’m hoping to see Ethan’s dad come out if we ever see them again.
Right. Three lesbian women waiting in the same line would be coincidence, so of course that means two of them are a couple.
I like Mindy’s design. It reminds me of Paul Taylor’s Wapsi Square characters.
What pun does the hovertext refer to?
Mindy and Anna are grad students at the Indiana University. (m)Indy–Anna; get it?
“Grad students”? Is that known or are you assuming?
It’s just a gut feeling on my part.
Hopefully Anna is just Billie-Light or Diet-Billie
I’m digging Mindy’s character design, by the way. You’ve been getting better at hitting that balance point where each character is identifiable but still flexible enough to support the cartoon expressions as the strip goes on, and the contrast between that and the updated version of a character you designed over a decade ago is kind of an interesting visual bit in today’s strip.
I was going somewhere with this, but I forgot where, exactly… good job, Mr. Willis, I guess was probably the short version?
soooo….apparently almost everyone is a lesbian in the Dumbiverse?
Nuh uh.
Most of them are bisexual.
That’s pretty much the theme of the comic so far, yes.
Are you saying you… only just noticed?
That doesn’t sound even remotely true.
Well, as an easy if not random sample I looked through the cast page. I count:
6 men
6 women who have only shown interest in men so far
4 women who have only shown interest in women so far
Billie, who has shown interest in both
Carla, who has shown interest in neither
So 22% of them, and 33% if you only take women, are (at least potentially) Lesbian. I know there are more like Leslie, Mindy, and Anna who aren’t on the page, but then we also run into others like Raidah, Penny, and Mary, so I doubt that completely reverses the statistics.
All in all, I think we can conclude it’s common in the Dumbiverse – maybe more than in real colleges, I have no idea – but not close to almost everyone. If it seems like that, it’s probably because you’re used to there being almost none.
Carla is actually homoromantic asexual. She likes ladies.
Ruth is bisexual, as are Grace, Mandy, Marcie and Sierra.
Hm, I don’t remember where that was established for any of them. Though Grace, Mandy, and Sierra didn’t make the current cast page anyway.
A lot of it is from the Walkyverse, and sexuality carries over from there.
In kind of a creepy way from the Walkyverse. A chunk of them were from the all female squad that Joe was assigned to for the purpose of a bisexual orgy joke.
Turned out all right here, though.
Part of the reason for the dominance of women over men here is just that we’re focused on Joyce and her floor. We haven’t even been introduced to everyone on the guy’s floor.
That’s also a really good point.
(Also I meant specifically “part of the reason for the dominance of women over men”, specifically.)
As creepy and objectifying as you may (rightfully) find them, I still like them. They’re moral and honest about their intentions, Mandy and Grace’s genuine love for each other is never questioned or doubted, they kick the shit out of Joe when they think he’s hurting Joyce, and, well, they just like boffing.
I know I’m a dude arguing that these Strong Female Protagonists can bang whoever they want, but I still like them, and I’m glad Willis returned to their poly setup in this universe.
I mean like, I think it originated as a fairly “male gaze” trope, but has turned into an awesome representation of women who are comfortable with their sexuality and just like having sex, so I am cool with it. For the concept of strong female characters to be inclusive, we obviously have to have some of them who are poly and more sexually free, just as we need some who are super monogamous when it comes to sex and some who are asexual. And thankfully we get the full spread in this comic.
First of all, we flock together. Each LGBTQIAN+ person’s friend group is gonna be more highly made up of LGBTQIAPN+ people than a random sampling of the population. And DoA is not a random sampling of the population. There are multiple out people in it, who, unsurprisingly, seek out other LGBTQIAPN+ people. Either for partners, or for friends.
Second of all, polls of millenials actually show that only a minority (less than half) identify as straight and cis. So the cast page is actually unrealistically straight and cis, for a random sampling of modern college students.
I prefer the acronymn QUILTBAG.
I prefer queer, and I find MOGAI most concise as an acroynym, but I don’t mind adding on All The Letters if it means that people outside the community are more likely to know what I mean. The “LGBT” at the front clues in folks from the US who might not even have a strong grasp of what all those letters stand for.
Sounds like a case of “if you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. Like that study where if 33% of the talking in a meeting was from women, the men perceived it as the women doing like 70% of the talking.
IIRC, that study was even stranger.
Even the women thought the women had talked far more than they had. (Maybe less than the men thought.) It runs that deep and that subconsciously.
Our expectations are shaped by our experience and culture and they shape our perceived reality.
I don’t find it that unusual, personally. I suspect bi/gay people are actually FAR more common in an average sampling of society than most people believe, simply because only recently have a lot of people felt comfortable coming out.
I’m in the art industry, granted, so I don’t know how it reflects other circles, but I know more gay/bi people than straight people (and I’m one of the few straight people so it’s not even a case of my own sexuality informing my social circle).
Now it’s unusual as far as depictions in fiction go, simply because most media tends to have a mostly-straight cast with the occasional “token” non-straight person, but frankly THAT’S unrealistic (and a bad thing) so, yay for DoA being both more inclusive and probably more realistic with its sexualities.
It’s also worth noting, there are a lot of bi people who may be in straight relationships atm whom you may not even realize are bi. So you may know more bi people than you think!
Yep, I’m one of those. People just assume I’m straight. I’m not, but neither do I want to just say I’m bisexual either, because that really doesn’t adequately explain that I’m biromantic with more frequent romantic attraction to the same sex, and demi-bisexual with more frequent sexual attraction to the opposite sex…
Is the page constantly loading for anyone else?
I assume it’s the ads but I don’t recall having the loading symbol constantly on for this site prior to a couple of weeks ago at most.
“We named the DOG Mindy, Anna!”
Mindy, Anna
Mindyanna
indiana
LOL I needed that laugh.
I just read the archive, as well as “Shortpacked!” and “Its’ Walky.” I still haven’t found the ‘universe’ where Joe and Ruth are an item, and an android replaces Ruth. Did this happen, or is it just a side issue for Shortpacked?
Oh, and obviously I love these comics!
Oh no. Oh no no no no. Joe and Ruth were never together. Ruth gets [REDACTED] wayyyy before Joe ever even goes into engineering. It has been suggested that the humanoid chassis for Ultra Car slightly resembles Ruth because she was the one who suggested Joe go into the engineering field, but this is never confirmed.
Oh, but now that I think about it, a storyline similar to what you outlined does take place in Joyce and Walky, but not with Ruth, rather Rachel. You’ve got to pay to read the entirety of Joyce and Walky, which is probably why you haven’t found it yet.
Oh damn, I just got the pun!
Welp.
Either Anna and Mindy aren’t dating any more, or Mindy is secretly the dom to Anna’s sub.
Only way I could see these two working.
Or really anything else I guess?
Not my comic.
I wish I could place an image in this, because words cannot properly express the emotional cataclysm you’ve put me under
… Awesome?
Mindy’s cute. I like her nose.