I’m gonna run around happy screaming until my whole neighbourhood hates me. It…would not be the first time I’ve done that over Sal.
You’d think they’d have bought noise cancelling headphones by now but APPARENTLY the onus is on me to be a good neighbour and not scream unless I’m being murdered at some Godforsaken hour.
It’s set based on your email. So you can randomize by entering a new email, and there’s no limit on that(unless you trip a spam filter or annoy Willis). That said, click the link next to the “Name” field and you can set any image you want as your avatar, which is so much easier.
If you do it too many times in one day, the system gets janky and you end up not able to make it work, so I do it once. My email has 8 letters in it and so I’ve been screwing with the capitalization in various combinations.
Is your whole email 8 letters, or do you mean just the prefix? Caps jangling is a binary operation, so you have 2^8 = 256 options/chances there. If thats not enough, traditional domains are not case sensitive, so between the .com (3 bits) and hotmail/gmail (7/5 bits or what-have-you) you may have significantly more chances. The prefix (your email part) may or may not be case sensitive. It’s left open in the specification, so different mail servers may treat bob@ and BOB@ as the same or unique. Hot and gmail take them as case insensitive. Also gmail ignores periods in the prefix, so b.ob bo..b and bob and BOB are all the same: bob@gmail.com. So there still more options.
I don’t know about unicodes and the new top-level domains though.
I haven’t messed with anything after my @ because I was afraid the site wouldn’t get my email right but that is interesting! I may have a better chance then.
You can add +whatever after the name bit of your email and it doesn’t change it. That’s standard for almost every mail provider, and it’s in the SMTP standards. So like, name+extra@example.com and name@example.com will always both be delivered to name@example.com. So you can get practically unlimited options out of just one email.
Yes! the +suffix is part of RFC 5233. And it is glorious. Unfortunately a lot, (I mean A LOT, including government), of email submission forms and mailers choke on +suffixed email prefixes. So yes it’s def useful here for Gravatar roulette (can confirm), but isn’t 100% reliable when suffixing your email to keep track of which a**hole leaked your email or had their system hacked.
Also, the example is properly demonstrated as: example+ultra@example.com
because PLUS ULTRA, well done on getting the correct domain. Many people don’t know that example.com is a reserved domain for exactly this sort of purpose.
I don’t know exactly how it works, but I do know that I once lost the ability to comment for several days after doing the gravatar roulette too much. I had to change my username slightly to be able to comment again. My username was originally Keulan, not Keulen as it is now. That was before I decided to use my current Twilight Sparkle avatar, of course.
I was thinking the same thing, but then I remembered the quote from John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834-1902): “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
She’d learn to become ruthless.
I don’t know, even if she’s using it in an attempt at being nice NOW, this is still basically zeroing in on what’s actually driving a person’s actions and using it to verbally nail their weak spot.
Every now and then, they get changed/some get added, and that shift in the “pool” is enough to move them around. I don’t think it’s on any particular schedule.
In this case it was due to the time skip and the new “season”. I think the last one was back in 2017. Basically whenever Willis wants to add new pictures to the pool.
This time, I think he threw out all the old ones, so that all the gravatars would be from the new season. In previous swaps I think it was just additions.
I think some of the old ones did in fact change out to more current art as well, but it could be harder to tell when they’re usually just face crops. But I know Roz had a switch from Default Roz to Roz With The Cool Hat from when she was RA campaigning for a while.
If anyone could carefully explain how to get your own gravatar thatd be grand. Went there, subbed in, added email and picture, exported it….and Im still Walky. What am I missing? (I suppose of all the dudes I could be Walky’s not the worst, I mean I could be Danny, but it’s still a dude.)
Actually one could say Dorothy always being a shiny paragon of virtue is annoying! Even the avatar lied once and a while! Stop rubbing how good you are in everyone’s face!
Much like Head Alien II, Dorothy is actually a transplant from an alternate universe first shown in an old fancomic: Smart People Always Do The Right Thing.
Dorothy isn’t a shiny paragon of virtue, she clearly has significant character flaws that she needs to work on, but criticizing her for turning the other cheek instead of being a jackass is kinda insanely dumb.
Dumb but entertaining! How’s Becky supposed to get an odd couple going if Dorothy keeps taking the high road?
Also speaking more seriously I haven’t seen many character flaws from Dorothy besides over working herself which isn’t really much of a flaw. When she gets angry it’s usually justified, she always has the reasonable advice, she loves learning and studying, works out regularly, is generous and patient, she even flipping volunteers! Not saying I hate any of that stuff mind you. Just noting it. I can’t remember the last time she was petty or did something purely selfishly. If you have examples I’d sincerely love to see them. Maybe that onee time when she hot drunk at what was supposed to be a dry party for Joyce? Like evryone else was. I got nothing here.
Her major character flaws are basically that she’s running herself into the ground, trying to be the responsible one all of the time, ignoring any signs of problems, never letting up.
It sounds like the “My biggest flaw is that I work too hard” cliche job interview answer, but its a recipe for burnout. A single bump in the road, a single thing goes wrong, and it could upend her entirely.
Because yeah, what Dorothy is doing all of the time isn’t healthy. It’s productive, so its easier for people to overlook it, but it’s just as much of a problem as Walky’s “Slacker For Life” mentality.
She’s also a jerk in both romantic relationships we know she’s had, and a controlling jerk in at least one of them at that. Additionally, she’s terrible at dealing with people, which is why Roz got the upper hand in their RA-wannabe contest.
Agreed. Society rewards constant work and devalues leisure time, so this variety of flaw gets overlooked, but it is absolutely damaging in the long-run, and burnout tends to hit hard when it arrives. Socializing is necessary for people – even the highly introverted need interaction at some point. Rest and relaxation are necessary. And so are sleep, eating, and hygiene, which we absolutely saw Dorothy neglect to worrisome amounts in an attempt to up her grades. It paid off and got her the transfer she wanted, sure, but I have absolutely seen high-achieving high schoolers hit burnout early in college, and it is BAD. Hit that wall hard enough and you can lose some stamina permanently.
And agreed with JBento that she’s got issues handling relationships (I rankle SO MUCH at people who said she was ‘too good for’ Walky or the like, because no, they both have potential and she is absolutely flawed,) though I’m willing to bet things with Danny were better before he started actively shaping his life around her and assuming she’d do the same eventually. That said, I can definitely see this endless kindness being part of the reason why it ended so badly, too – she needed to put her foot down and say ‘it’s been nice, but I am going to leave no matter what and you cannot keep acting as if I’ll change my mind on this’ WELL before that point, because Danny clearly wasn’t taking hints. She’s also very much someone who has to make a clean break, because as we saw with Walky and the ‘pause’ and her getting far more invested, quite fast, in a relationship she initially intended to be ‘just for fun’, because she’s not actually one for casual relationships. Not a flaw in itself, and a forgiveable one with Walky because it’s likely she hadn’t tried a casual relationship before to know, but still kept him from knowing exactly where they stood. I wouldn’t say she’s fully in the gifted kid school of getting screwed over once they hit college and don’t know how to study/socialize/both while society assumes you know already – she clearly DOES know studying techniques in a way definite Gifted Kid Walky can’t grasp, and just as clearly knows how to handle prickly people she cares about like Joyce and Becky – but there’s shades of it in that she consistently undervalues socializing vs pure achievement, whether that’s academics or volunteering. She will absolutely struggle in politics if she doesn’t figure that one out, and it’s better she learns it before she goes to Yale since the value there is really in networking.
Well I’m definitely seeing some takes I hadn’t considered. I do think that Dorothy being pretty controlling of her friends and relationships is a solid critique. She did get called out pretty hard for even setting up this appointment without asking Joyce and she very much dictated the flow of her relationship with Walky and assumedly Danny too. Walky never really got to decide what the relationship was Dorothy set the terms and ended it on her own terms. Not fair to Walky and I trust you all know how hard it is for me to say that.
Just to be pedantic. I don’t really see lack of charisma as a character flaw. To me charisma is more like a skill or talent. Like singing or being able to do a backflip and you don’t criticize someone for not being able to sing right?
Her overworking I’m a little more 50/50 on. Like it was a problem but it was also addressed pretty quickly by her and she ended up getting accepted into Yale after just one semester. I getting mixed signals on how I’m supposed to take that? It is bad? It seems like it paid off for her and also she knew how to handle it.
Although speaking of Yale her hiding that application and lying by omission to Becky is a good hint at flaw. I’m not sure of what yet, but it doesn’t inspire confidence. Maybe she doesn’t trust her friends to take it well which leads well into the her being very controlling angle.
I personally don’t think it’s lack of charisma so much as weird/lack of socializing. Like, yes she has a chart about the people in her hall, but that suggests observation more than actual, meaningful interactions. More to the point, she cut out social activities over grades during the extra credit arc, which is both unhealthy and counterproductive. By all accounts, the difference between an Ivy League school and any other (decent, accredited) one isn’t generally their academics – it’s the networking you do there, much like Dana suggested to Sarah during freshman year. That didn’t work out well for her, granted, but knowing someone who knows someone is ABSOLUTELY how a lot of people get hired in fields like law and politics. Dorothy’s never really brought that up as a reason for wanting to go to Yale, which could be setting us up for a storyline where she realizes this fact in 2035 or so after transferring… but again, I’d like her to get a better sense of work-life balance before then.
(I will note that like, some schools DO obviously put more focus on certain programs and fields than others while still being decent and accredited, so sometimes for more niche programs you want a specific school, but for general education requirements or poli-sci at a Big 10 school? Dorothy would get a just fine education here, she just wouldn’t get the connections.)
She did get accepted as a transfer, of course, but that doesn’t make the massive study binge any healthier. As Sierra said, she was neglecting sleep. As Dorothy herself recognized, she was neglecting showering. That was going on for a week or more. That’s a serious red flag she isn’t actually handling things well. And the resolution being her completing the extra credit after she broke up means she didn’t really rebalance things so much as the current stressor was gone. She was already reading ahead, not because she was expected to but to keep momentum going, last storyline before classes started. She’s still overemphasizing academics, and that takes a toll because human brains are not meant to be ‘productive’ all the time. I’ve seen way too many kids who were hardworking, academic types in rigorous programs, and while many of them are still in decent shape afterwards, a whole lot of them have anxiety and depression issues. There’s an entire phenomenon a lot of former ‘gifted’ kids describe on the internet (through various social media outlets, mainly, but enough that it’s been reported on) of how they built their entire sense of self worth on academics and the approval of adults around them and then didn’t know what to do with themselves when things didn’t come effortlessly, or when they met challenges that couldn’t be solved with the things they learned as students. Sound familiar to you?
Walky and Dorothy are two sides of the same Gifted Burnout coin, and while they present different sets of symptoms (and Dorothy, who DID learn to study and probably isn’t dealing with an undiagnosed disability the way Walky’s been hinted as having ADHD, hasn’t hit her breaking point in the same way yet,) they’re both still showing clear ones. For Walky, that’s anxiety, avoidance, horribly low self-esteem, and absolute TERROR at being unable to live up to his (abusive) mom’s expectations – ones he doesn’t actually share, but may well expect he has to try anyway. For Dorothy, that’s considering things that aren’t schoolwork or resume-builders unimportant, up to and including very essential self-care. We’ve started seeing signs of how it bothers her, too, that she has this Perfect Plan to the Presidency and yet Becky managed to stumble into politics despite not having any interest in it – an issue where her hard work and studying doesn’t guarantee success, because fair or not politics also includes a heavy personal component. Walky’s already started his crash, and I expect it to return – especially whenever Linda rears her asshole head again. Dorothy is still pushing through, but it’s not just when you’re sleep-deprived in the short term that the work you turn in is worse. Constant pressure like that exhausts you, physically and mentally, and if you try to push through stress burnout you’ll only crash harder. People leave industries after bad episodes, because they cannot do it anymore even once they’ve recovered. Hell, I had a depression-based episode in college and my energy’s never recovered to where it was before, and that was years ago. That’s why I’m concerned – her work ethic, while admirable, is genuinely unsustainable if she doesn’t build in dedicated relaxation time and consider it every bit as essential as her classwork. It also can’t hurt in the networking department, but if her primary form of rest is watching cartoons for an hour or so before bed? That’s still good, and that’s still necessary. It might be years before Dorothy hits that wall. It might be weeks. But I’ve known too many people like Dorothy over the years not to think she needs to course correct before it does lasting damage, because it works very well right up until it doesn’t.
Which boyfriend are you talking about? Cause Walky was always a fling and she at least believes dumping Danny was a mercy which even though I believe it was a dick move is kind of true. His identity was too tied up in hers. She should’ve dumped him in high school though which even she acknowledged.
“Walky was always a fling”. Uh, no he wasn’t, and that was the problem. Dorothy started the relationship setting up a boundary that it was going to be a fling that wasn’t serious, then randomly decided she was in love with him and broke her own boundary trying to get way more involved in his life than he actually asked for, overworking herself in the process, decided they needed to go “on break” and then kissed him again despite the break, like.
She kept on dangling Walky on a string and refusing to actually stick to literally any boundaries she set. In the end she broke up with him in large part due to the fact that she recognized her doing that constantly was wrong, and even THEN she was severely tempted to go back on that AGAIN just because Walky was sad they broke up.
One of Dorothy’s main flaws is that she is super controlling!!! And has this eerie way of just easing herself around people’s boundaries like they aren’t even there. The whole debacle with her and Roz competing for RA and how she wasn’t “approachable” was entirely because her keeping notes on people and junk was kind of creepy and made everyone feel like they were just datapoints for her to manipulate instead of people to care about.
Like her being WEIRDLY controlling is even cropping up in this storyline. Like, yes, Joyce is having vision problems and making an eye appointment for her is helpful, in the long run, and is probably what she needs. But there is no universe in which just unilaterally deciding to make a doctor’s appointment for someone and then strong-arming them into going for “their own good” isn’t like….a really big overstepping of regular-person boundaries.
IDK Dorothy’s character flaws are very obvious to me personally because she’s quite a lot like my mom in those respects. If Dorothy were slightly worse she’d have a martyr complex a mile wide and severe codependency issues–which she already does have snippets of here and there, but thankfully she’s just well-adjusted enough to avoid that.
Agreed. One of Dorothy’s main issues is that she has trouble setting, keeping, and respecting boundries. Now that I’ve thought about it, I’ve noticed another pattern as well–one that’s probably related to her chosen profession. She likes saving people. While there’s nothing wrong with having compassion and wanting to help people, it can be problematic when one wants to “save” people who don’t necessarily need it (e.g, Walky and/or Danny), don’t necessarily want it (i.e., Becky), or who simply refuse to be saved (let’s say Joyce for the sake of an example–although I realize that’s a stretch.) It’s also problematic in that Dorothy seems to attract people who need saving in one way or another–which is going to hurt her in the long run. Indeed, the fact that she’s keeping her acceptance into Yale a secret indicates to me that she’s considering sacrificing a major life goal because she feels (maybe rightly, maybe wrongly) that she’s needed at the U of I.
Though the trick with that that makes it more of a personal flaw and less of an asshole thing is that she was setting those boundaries for herself and not being able to live up to them. The boundaries were supposed to keep her from getting too involved, not to limit the other person.
And we saw this from the very start of the relationship – even before she went and kissed him the first time, she was trying to talk herself out of it, calling it self sabotage, since her plan involved focusing just on her studies with no room for relationships.
I do hope we return to this, because I think it seems to have been resovled for the moment as “Yes, Dorothy should stick to the plan, avoid relationships and she’ll succeed”. She broke up with Walky, got her grades under control and she’s getting into Yale. Obviously the lesson learned is stomp down harder on that urge to self-sabotage.
First: boundaries CAN be changed/renegotiated. It’s why we call them boundaries and not fundamental physical constants.
Second: When Dotty moved the boundary, Walky (and it appears Danny) didn’t object, so it’s not like the fault is entirely Dot’s.
None of this is an argument for Dot. She’s human. Just speaking up because so many comments here sound very binary, instead of analogue and aware of nuance.
But she didn’t negotiate. She dropped it on him as a fait accompli. In one case, got mad at him when he responded snarkily to her declaration of love.
Basically though, I don’t think it’s binary, just putting it out there as an acknowledged flaw of hers that I think is still an area for character growth.
I don’t think Dorothy is trying to be a paragon. She is trying to do what she thinks is the right thing, coming from a background that thinks peaceful relations to your neighbors is the way to go.
She said herself she shouldn’t have kept her relationship to Danny going past high school, I really think she hoped he’d get the message and not follow her to the university of her choice. He did, and then looked down at her ambitions, and she blew her fuse and dumped him. Probably was agonizing about the way she did it for ages.
Meanwhile, she seems to have learned to address stuff more directly- maybe seeing a man with a knife go after a friend and said fried stabbing him back, being abducted by crazy guys and being in a fight for their lives ending with a dead person (well three, in die end), mad her more clear about the difference between direction and aggression, allows her more clarity in saying what she sees and wants?
Aang was a horrible paragon of virtue, for the record. He got better, sure, but up until the end of season (and arguably parts of season 3) he was a pretty bad Avatar.
I get people hated it but imo, lying to those two groups to make them stop fighting was absolutely the right call. They’ve been fighting so long they don’t even REMEMBER what happened – and it’s not like they were even particularly attached to their versions of what happened, seeing how quickly they gave them up when told the ‘real’ version. It’s a silly fight and it was making the situations for the two groups worse. Lying to get them to cut it out isn’t something that really upsets me.
To be fair and to go against my original point as well, he was still 12. A lot of the problems I had with him as an Avatar up until Season 2 had mostly to do with him being a sheltered 12 year old who didn’t always know better (his reaction to Bato is a good example of that).
Of course, considering the creators named the organisation after the KMT’s spymaster, there was never a chance for those guys not to turn into corrupt assholes.
She… She has a lot of flaws. She’s just the most put together of everyone.
She is, however, colossally stressed, shaming herself anytime she prioritizes having some actual fun over being productive, burning the candle at both ends, and hiding the fact that she’s leaving in a semester or so.
Just like as a case in point. Pick a nickname they hate and keep using it till they explode, then play the victim because you’re being over sensitive, it’s just a joke.
It doesn’t even have to be an overtly insulting nickname. My own name has several common nicknames that many people prefer to the full thing … but I prefer the full thing. People insisting on using any of the standard nicknames would still be being a dick. And being a dick is what you do to people you don’t like.
Or people you really like and just have that kind of mutual relationship with. Relationships are weird.
It’s almost worse when the nickname isn’t insulting because it becomes so easy for people to say you are over-reacting.
I hear it all the time to the point of nausea. My name has a few nicknames. The one that my parents insisted be used is the only one I hate. Growing up, when anyone tried to call me a name I like better – my mother flipped out on them. It got to the point that everyone stopped trying and I just accepted that I would be stuck with it.
It wasn’t until a few years after my mom passed that a newer friend pointed out that I don’t have anything to do with my family anymore so I could just use a different nickname.
Great. Accept for the fact that a number of people in my life who know how I feel about the old nickname won’t stop using it. “I was introduced to you as ______, so that is what I will always call you.”
Also that thing where they pinch you or stab you with a compass or pencil or hit or trip you when the teachers aren’t looking so that you’ll respond physically and then they can play the victim and pretend you slugged them for no reason.
Oh thank heaven, I think this plot thread is interesting but lately it’s gotten to the point where it feels like the story is almost trying to make me dislike Becky. Hopefully she’ll cut that shit out!
So, now that it’s pretty much been confirmed that Becky’s behaviour towards Dorothy is because she’s lashing out and trying to keep as many things as possible the same because she’s lost so much in such a short space of time, and that Dorothy both understands that and is trying to help Becky through it, can we PLEASE stop acting like Becky is the worst person imaginable for doing so?
No, because none of that is new and she’s still obnoxious and annoying. The commenters haven’t been mad at Becky because they didn’t understand her, we dissected her motivations ages ago.The frustration comes from her being irritating, and while it’s deliberate that does change that it’s still irritating
Except regardless of whether or not it’s irritating, it’s part of her character arc. And “irritating” is one thing, but a lot of the comments I’ve seen act like what Becky’s doing is this horrendous, irredeemable thing when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Yeah but it’s still not a great thing to do. I always think about people identifying with different characters. Overreacting and tearing a character down can tear those people down too. Also I just don’t get the appeal of hating on someone.
No, but it’s made going into the comments section a pretty miserable experience. And while you may understand that this is a character arc and chose to overreact to it anyway, I’m not convinced that everyone who’s been insisting Becky is a terrible person isn’t being completely serious.
You must be new here. Most of the commenters overreact in some pretty horrific ways. It’s apparently some kind of catharsis for reality being shit or something, which means they need to share the shittiness here. I’ve learned to take breaks.
Breaks are important. Because yeah people can be super horrible and over dramatic and it makes me not read the comments most days. Why people are so willing to hate on fictional barely adults/basically children is just beyond me.
Exactly. Just because we understand that someone is bpd, other, or socio or-psychopathic, doesn’t mean they aren’t being a jerk when they act like one. They are still being a jerk.
True – not that Becky is dealing with any of those.
But in fiction, when we’re clearly dealing with character development, not static just bad people, it’s frustrating for everything just to be reduced to “she’s awful”.
I think we’re too into wanting characters to be likable sometimes.
Ruth isn’t really *likable* because she’s a cantankerous, aggressive, sullen jerk who barely knows how to interact with people. Ruth is also my favourite character these last few years, ever since that strip where she bold facedly told Billie to stop trying to get her to relapse into alcoholism.
We are. But the problem is different in a slice-of-life once-a-day comic strip than in a beginning-to-end piece of fiction. In the latter, you can pick it up and experience it and then put it down. In the former, though, it’s like having that person in your life.
Frankly, I think the issue with Becky is less what she’s doing now and more that she went from being 100% sympathetic in the previous storyline to being the Irritant-in-Chief of the current one. The whiplash is probably a factor in how people are seeing her.
I’m going to bring up a wrestling analogy here. There are faces and heels, good guys and bad guys. Bad guys act like jerks, so they can get what’s called “heat”. People boo them and they’re doing their job.
There’s also a thing in wrestling known as “go away heat”. People don’t dislike the character because they do bad things, they just hate them because they’re unbearably obnoxious and want them to go away. That’s where Becky is for a lot of people.
Malaya and Carla can be mean, but they’re at least creative about it and don’t focus all their petty childish insults on one person. Up until this one, every single freaking strip with both Becky and Dorothy has had Becky make the same childish joke, and it got old ages ago.
Maybe not, but honestly, the way some comments come across, it’s like they think Becky slaps Dorothy in the face every time they interact. That’s my issue, personally.
Keep in mind that Becky’s treatment of Dorothy started in early 2015, was kept on the backburner, and has now been the main focus of every single strip featuring the two since the timeskip.
I definitely wanted this to go places, but I don’t blame anyone else for wanting Becky to knock off the attitude to someone who literally has done her no wrong.
No?
This strip has no surprises. We knew that Becky’s been a bongo and that Dorothy is letting her.
Explanations aren’t excuses. Going through trauma isn’t a ticket to pass it on. Becky’s been repeatedly mean to someone who’s only been nice to her, who is in fact now her roommate. That’s pretty shitty, period, regardless of Dorothy’s choice to be Becky’s emotional punching bag.
I’m not sure that you just read the same strip I did. This isn’t Dorothy being a punching bag. This is Dorothy addressing a problem in a calm unaggressive but effective method.
Yeah, which is why I’m saying that everybody who’s acting like Becky is the worst person in the comic can stop now, because this strip is pushing forward through that.
Again, though, she’s not actually the worst person in the comic. Not even close. Call her out on her actions, sure, but acting like she’s kicking puppies every time she appears is ridiculously disingenuous.
everyone who behaves badly gets called on it. Becky just seems like she gets more because the comic has been showing her a lot and she’s been doing it in every appearance.
I’ve been calling it her unrequited rivalry. She started off relatively low-key, and has been gradually accelerating as she hasn’t gotten the response she was after.
Just because you ‘have a reason’ to lash out does not excuse you for lashing out?
Like, she’s still being awful to someone who’s biggest crime is *having existed and made friends with her friend*. Becky’s not a terrible person, but she’s still being a jerkass to Dorothy, and, clearly, KNOW’S she’s being a jerkass, *and is doing so intentionally*.
I never said it was. I just said that it’d be great if people stopped acting like Becky IS a terrible person because of this. Especially because yeah, it’s obviously going somewhere as part of her character development.
I wish the commenters had an opinion between “this character is a saint uwu sweet baby” and “this person is the literal devil they personally victimized me in my home burn them at the stake”
Like, so many times I’ve said yea this characters being kind of an ass but holy shit chill, you’re acting like they’re as bad as toedad or ryan. Like, remember when people were calling lucy evil because she was too friendly and wanted to hang out with her floor mates? It actually makes it harder to dislike characters like becky because of how disproportionate the vitriol is
(I won’t be a hypocrite, i did overreact too in the past like with amber/mazi. But then they did things more intense than be a prick for a few months)
Thank you! This is pretty much exactly my thoughts. Calling Becky out on her attitude is one thing, but I’ve seen far too many people acting like what she’s doing is this horrific, Moral-Event-Horizon-crossing action. And it’s just incredibly frustrating, since it’s the furthest thing from that.
The replies insisting that “character makes fun of another character” and “character commits actual murder” are morally equivalent and should be treated as such are…something else.
Agreed. My primary emotion with most of the cast tends to be ‘I love you you absolute dumbass, PLEASE make better choices.’ But I love how this strip depicts them all as flawed, mostly understandable kids, and I’ve got sympathy even for the ones who aren’t just jerks but antagonists. (Except for Mary, but blackmailing Ruth showed she is in fact pretty evil. I also don’t really care for Raidah due to the ableism and elitism, but she was totally the wronged party in Sarah’s seduction plan via Joyce.)
Exactly. This whole comic is about nuance and growth and that gets lost when we pick characters out of the cast to be villains for the day.
That aspect of the Raidah/Jacob/Joyce/Sarah thing was my favorite part of it. Raidah was definitely both wronged and not sympathetic and that’s a pretty rare thing to see in a romance arc.
Anywho if this is indicative of the glorious war of who gets to be Joyce’s best friend coming to a conclusion: I’m bummed. I was hoping for juicy character drama.
Becky started her haterade on Dorothy like six years ago now, and it was easy to digest because it barely came up. Putting the two in same room felt like a great way to put two characters who kind of won out all the time in a situation where some genuine anger and resentment could boil over and… Dorothy quickly diffuses the situation with a heartfelt spiel, like she always does with everything that ever happens to her.
I dunno, it’s been ten years now and I’ll be reading for at least another ten; I might just need to accept I’m never gonna like Dorothy. I wanted to see some of that ugliness to Becky’s character too since, as I’ve gone on about, I really only like characters when we see them at their worst every once in a while, but it’s easier to take with Becky because at least she’s got Dina, and when Becky and Dina are on panel it’s basically just magical all the time as those two defy every convention about happy couples in fiction not working with their endless devotion to being decent and understanding of one another.
It’s probably just what I want out of this series. Like, my all time favourite moment that Willis has ever done is 100% always going to be the death of Dina in It’s Walky!. It’s a raw, unfiltered gut punch, where Dina tries to prove her worth and dies pointlessly for it, lasting just long enough to ponder how she’ll be remembered. It’s haunting, it’s visceral, it’s ugly and unrewarding and I build myself up to it every time I archive binge through IW! because it’s like the emotional core of the whole series. I love the emotional gut punches in character dramas, they’re always what stick out for me.
Meanwhile a bunch of other people reading this strip will come away from it saying “ah yeah, I love that Dorothy is nice and strives to do the right thing and understands why other people act like this”, and like, that’s valid. It’s not what I’m into, but it’s valid.
I’m going to disagree about where the emotional core is. While Dina’s death was an emotionally powerful moment, the emotional core for me has always been the “it’s the rain” speech. It’s why there was a Joyce and Walky.
I agree. I’ve noticed in DOA, though, that Joyce and Walky generally don’t interact much as individuals. They’re always around each other as part of the group cast, but I don’t think they’ve spent any real time together even as acquaintances. Maybe Willis feels he’s gotten everything out of the It’s Walky/ Joyce and Walky relationship and wants to explore other character arcs.
I get that it was getting REALLY aggressive in the last two arcs, but agreed. I like Dorothy but she desperately needs to actually hit a wall she can’t simply power through to bring her flaws to the forefront, and Becky seemed like a good setup for it. Now she has the Yale transfer coming and is starting to defuse Becky, and while I don’t want to tear Dorothy down because of her ambitions, I do want to see her break a bit so she can build back up again. Even the best-adjusted characters in this strip (Dina and Carla among the major players, I’d say) are still aware of things they don’t do perfectly. Or do performatively to keep people at arm’s length, in Carla’s case, but it’s very clear that’s a defense mechanism and where it comes from. Dorothy’s setting herself up for burnout and has definite interpersonal issues, but has managed to skirt around either of those becoming critical yet. That can’t last, or at least it shouldn’t. I want to see characters improve long-term, but that requires them to address their flaws head on first.
And Becky has very clearly been covering up her own insecurities through wackiness, but again: That center can’t hold. I want it addressed eventually, but such things tend to be more interesting (and more likely to stick) when someone does actually get justifiably pissed off. The Ruth-Billie scene where Ruth told Billie to knock it off trying to get her to drink you mentioned upthread is a great example, and does a lot without getting explosively furious.
Hmm. That phrasing got to some of what bothered me with the Dorothy overwork/break up with Walky arc. We got to see her break a bit, but we never saw her build back up again. She didn’t change or really grow from that. She just broke up with him, had a few moments of regret/longing, caught up with her work and was fine.
Yeah, that’s why I REALLY don’t want that arc to be the ‘resolution’ on that front. She didn’t realize that yes, she did need to be more selective with extracurriculars and volunteering, but she was doing better work with regular breaks and VERY basic self-care and needed to build those in. She finished her extra credit assignments, and as such there’s no guarantee that there won’t be a ‘next time.’ Walky’s tutoring wasn’t the only point of overextension there, and the fact that her habits were unhealthy was made VERY clear. The Sierra strip last storyline is still setting up how she’s studying ahead to the point where it’s probably unnecessary. (‘You’re freeeeeeee,’ the alt text tells Sierra.) That doesn’t bode well given the other warning signs she has of eventual burnout. I’m guessing it’s still on the backburner for now, but like… I really don’t want her to transfer to Yale before it gets to her. If for no other reason than how it’ll probably be A LOT worse if she crashes in Yale mid-semester, but also because I don’t want that storyline going on for another decade until she transfers.
Given we literally saw her go into extra credit schoolwork binge mode while neglecting exercise, basic hygiene, and sleep? If she went through that before now she took the wrong lesson.
Yeah, I think this kind of nails why I’m not enthusiastic about Dorothy getting into Yale. I love Dorothy and want her to succeed, but it feels like succeeding at this specific point validates her decision to put her relationships and health on hold, and means missing out on some really valuable character growth.
It couldn’t have been that many years. Ghost Outline Flashback Becky (who found Bonnie with the bottle of pills) looks exactly like current Becky, but with long hair.
I think it might have been late spring or early summer ‘last year’.
Grade 12 is a truly shit time to lose a parent. Yes, all times are crap to lose a parent, but with how much pressure perception our culture puts on highschool transcripts, it’s definitely a catalytic time for making problems worse.
Unfortunately, it’s not actually all that surprising that a community of people who are extremely controlling of their children ‘for their own good’, to the point of banning Disney movies that ‘present adults as fallible’ (the justification for Becky and Joyce never seeing Frozen until college) would lie to a roughly 17-year-old. Nor is it surprising that a community whose stance on mental health is that faith is all that’s necessary would try and cover up the fact that someone attempted suicide. (Ross was the one who said ‘Satan took’ Bonnie from them, but Joyce was the one who suggested to a deeply depressed Billie that prayer would fix all her ills, well before that.) Especially if, as I’ve long speculated, Bonnie’s depression was in part because of how restrictive the role she was ‘allowed’ to have was in that community. (I would also lay very good money that the man who didn’t let his daughter have a cell phone when she left for college and later hit her after kidnapping her at gunpoint was abusive to his wife, as well.)
We’d had a hint over on Patreon that Bonnie’s death was within sight of Becky graduating (but clearly before,) and as mentioned Ghost Becky was definitely high school age and her haircut was recent (since she had to ‘accidentally’ get glue in it to be allowed to cut it short,) but this is the first confirmation that yeah, Bonnie’s death at least was very recent. She could have been in the hospital for a while between the attempt and the damage killing her, but that doesn’t help.
God, no wonder Hank was surprised Joyce didn’t know. (He was definitely fairly hands-off with her, but also didn’t question the church until he realized there was a real chance Joyce might estrange herself, as well.) And god, poor Becky. It was always going to be cruel to leave her unable to actually get support from her best friend about finding Bonnie – even if she didn’t want to, at least having the option open and Joyce knowing why it was even more sensitive than it seemed would probably help – but knowing that they were still seen as children unable to handle difficult truths that near to college on top of things? Ouch.
As to Bryy’s comment: Apparently, yep. Most traumatic year ever. Given the kidnapping, I’d assume that either Ross didn’t think Becky was gay until she was literally found making out with her roommate, or he was starting to suspect but still confident Anderson would ‘correct’ such things while they were still in the bud. Probably the former, I think, since he did in fact let her go to college. So he didn’t have reason to send her to conversion camp (or whatever he had planned) while Bonnie was still alive. The recency of Bonnie being ‘taken by Satan’ (his phrase) probably added to his urgent fervor, but honestly I don’t think it was all that much. He was always going to keep Becky in that same suffocating box at any cost.
At no point does Dorothy state how dangerous Beckys actions are (Joyce clearly needs glasses yet Becky tries to ensure Joyce doesn’t get them) nor does she mention Beckys bullying behaviour (dismissive attitude, name calling) or gaslighting (“we’re enemies”, “no we’re not” “yes we are”)
The only time Dorothy mentions Beckys destructive behaviour is the first panel “what do you have against glasses” yet it minimises Beckys actions and the fifth panel could almost give Becky an excuse to keep going with her actions “we’ll still be here” “I’ll always be in your corner”
Dorothy could have asked any number of questions about her abhorrent behaviour but doesn’t so from this point on if (and I also acknowledge this might also put Becky on a better path so it might not happen) Becky keeps bullying Dorothy then Dorothy is to blame
DISAGREE. Not being able to stop a bully from being a jerk to you does NOT make you responsible for them being a bully and acting like a jerk. Could Dorothy do a better job redirecting Becky’s inane behaviour? perhaps, but Becky’s actions STILL remain entirely on her. Dorothy is not a therapist let alone /Becky’s/ therapist, nor even a first year psych student.
Clear, concise with no room for misunderstanding whereas Dorothy isn’t clear at all other than she’ll always be there so Becky can continue to act however she wants
That is reasonable enough. I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of foggy transmissions, and been blamed for not listening when I asked for clarification. /eye-roll/
Doesn’t mean Dorothy is to blame for Becky being a jerk, but could be for not being clear enough to tell Becky to cut it out. Whether or not Becky stops is still on Becky, and frankly Becky is aware of what she is doing and Dorothy is saying. reference the last panel.
They’re being sarcastic, mocking people who will use this as an excuse for becky, and probably the commenters a bit higher who was asking people to please stop acting like becky is evil now. At least, that’s what I gather given MrSmiths past comments
Dorothy is choosing to allow Becky to continue acting the way she does, “we’ll still be here” and “I’ll always be in your corner” isn’t exactly “please stop acting like a bongo because its unjustified and making me feel bad when all I’ve tried to do is help you”
Seems like Dorothy’s trying a more gentle approach initially, taking the fact that, like she said, Becky’s trying to keep things as close to what she knows as possible.
Which, given everything that’s happened to her, is understandable, though not excusable. To make things clear, I’m by no means saying that Becky should be allowed to continue acting the way she does towards Dorothy. I am saying that I get why she’s doing so, and that I don’t think she deserves to be raked over the coals for it. Especially when it’s hardly the worst thing a main character in DoA has ever done.
Admittedly, I’m blanking on what Ruth did to earn her that “win”, but personally, it’s Danny wishing death on Mike for me.
And yeah, it’s a constant thing, but I dunno, a lot of it just kind of reeks of “trying too hard” (as Becky herself unintentionally pointed out), so I can understand why Dorothy’s going with the approach she’s going with.
Yeah, no, I’m siding with Smith on this one. Ruth is the one main character that I would qualify as “evil”. She’s a tyrannical bully who subjected her charges to an atmosphere of psychological abuse for at least a year and a half, and counting.
We know, and Dorothy knows, what Becky is like so while Becky shouldn’t be acting this way Dorothy also has a responsibility to tell Becky what her actions are doing and she doesn’t so Dorothy is allowing Becky to continue to act the way she does
That’s fine if Dorothy has the patience to outlast Becky, which she does since she has guessed correctly that Becky is decompensating but otherwise lucid. Becky’s behavior is a front (which is in retrospect the most logical reason for her abrupt change in attitude from last semester), and the more it becomes clear that Dorothy is a good, supportive person, the more it eats up Becky.
Dotty breaks my heart. She’s so goddamn smart, even in interpersonal realtions. But damn Joyce girls with glasses are qt3.14 to the max, join the club!
I posted this on the Patreon page yesterday but I’ll repost it here because not everyone may have seen it.
Firstly, my impression is that Becky has built too much of her identity around being “the girl who fights back”. One wonders how long she’d been struggling with her father’s demands and the expectations of her childhood community. The problem is that, right now, there’s no-one immediately available to hate her for who and/or what she is and, feeling lost, she’s trying to resolve that problem by creating an enemy.
Secondly, panel 6 is disturbing isn’t it? To me, Becky’s words and expression say: “Why won’t you hate me? I have done everything I can to make you hate me! I need you to hate me!”
Crossing over from another comic: “[Dorothy] didn’t sign up to manger her emotions for her”
Becky has shit she’s going through and whatever, but she was being a prick to Dorothy before that and regardless, it’s not Dorothy’s responsibility to carry Becky.
That’s definitely a thing that happens in the community for some folks. They get so used to struggle and upheaval they can’t trust it when things seem stable. I get the feeling Becky’s running into that a bit.
Agreed about panel 6. That’s very much the face of ‘please dear God hate me so I can fit you into a frame of reference I already have.’ (Soulless atheist, friend-stealer, anything that justifies her insecurities about Joyce.)
And Dorothy responds to this by being ridiculously understanding. (Honestly, I’ve gotta wonder now just how bad Danny was missing cues before last semester started if she reached her limit with him.) She sure as hell doesn’t need to do this, she’d be perfectly justified losing her cool, but she decides the best way to handle this is with kindness… and that is almost certainly grating on Becky more.
Becky probably also isn’t accustomed to receiving genuinely unconditional support. Affection from the community she was raised in was always on hivemind terms, where it could be lost based on behavior and who she is. Where she had little agency.
She’s only just recently started feeling unconditional support from the likes of Leslie, Joyce (post-kiss), and Hank. Even though the rational part of her knows they’re there for her no matter what, she’s probably still thinking “okay but what’s the catch” in the back of her mind.
Maybe making an “enemy” she can control out of Dorothy gives her a safe pressure relief valve for that thinking.
Dorothy is too damn nice. I don’t understand how she can go this long putting up with Becky treating her like this without getting angry and snapping at her. I would’ve yelled at Becky to cut it out long ago.
Where is legendary on the S.I. prefix scale? I assume huge, stupendous and their ilk are already below Legendary, but what comes next? Epic? Mythological?
Can the Epic-meter and Mytho-gram be a thing? How big is the universe? One and a half epic-meters? How massive? Just a couple of mytho-grams. Give or take several legendari-grams.
You can have increased patience when it is in the name of testing a hypothesis. Here, Dorothy has correcty guessed that Becky’s sudden change in attitude is due to deeper lying problems and the more Dorothy doesn’t fit Becky’s worldview the more it’s going to force Becky into a reckoning with herself.
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“We can’t all be you, Becky”
(yeah my current Grav is ironic huh)
Very
Becky should be careful what she wishes for though.
*has horrifying vision of the entire cast acting like Becky*
Inbefore the whole cast physically turns into Becky.
“I’ll always be in your corner.”
“HOW DARE YOU!“
First of all, how dare you.
Second… *breaks down into tears*
I’m happy they’re getting around to talking about this
Yes exactly the schtick is so played out at this point JUST TALK LIKE NEAR-ADULTS
Pistols at dawn it is then.
Woah, slow down there Burr. 😛
Don’t you mean… wait for it? =P
Custard pies at Noon
I mean to be fair it has been only like 2 days in universe, and Dorothy is a patient individual
teardrop
*pounds fists on table*
I wanted bloooood
That’s in the other room, with the eye needles.
Why won’t you accept my hatred.
Because if Dorothy gets Becky to give up the feud and admit how dumb and pointless it is, DOROTHY WINS.
GodDAMN, I think that was the most polite fatality I’ve ever seen. Dorothy really came for her whole schtick in one go.
Booster, I love you and were I not on a QUEST, I’d be thrilled, but sadly, you are not Sal.
I think I’m going to be just as excited as you when you finally get Sal.
I just got Danny and I feel both seen and attacked on several levels
I’m gonna run around happy screaming until my whole neighbourhood hates me. It…would not be the first time I’ve done that over Sal.
You’d think they’d have bought noise cancelling headphones by now but APPARENTLY the onus is on me to be a good neighbour and not scream unless I’m being murdered at some Godforsaken hour.
Yeah. Try not to do that.
And if not, being murdered in the daylight hours is much more considerate.
I know, I know, but the murderers don’t seem to get the memo. Rude.
Dammit, dude, JUST GET A GRAVATAR
It’s all in how and where you put your upper and lower case letters.
Is there a limit on rerolls or do the odds change everyday? Just trying to get an idea on your chances.
It’s set based on your email. So you can randomize by entering a new email, and there’s no limit on that(unless you trip a spam filter or annoy Willis). That said, click the link next to the “Name” field and you can set any image you want as your avatar, which is so much easier.
SOME people find the random chance of the grav roulette part of the charm. 😛
Grav checks out.
Let’s spin it right round.
Like a record baby, right round round round.
And some people are just finicky enough to want their own.
I respect those people! If I ever do decide I want a set gravitar, I already have a couple ideas, but right now I am DETERMINED.
And I respect your determination. You almost might say
I’m in your corner.
you can also fiddle with the capitalization :3
If you do it too many times in one day, the system gets janky and you end up not able to make it work, so I do it once. My email has 8 letters in it and so I’ve been screwing with the capitalization in various combinations.
Is your whole email 8 letters, or do you mean just the prefix? Caps jangling is a binary operation, so you have 2^8 = 256 options/chances there. If thats not enough, traditional domains are not case sensitive, so between the .com (3 bits) and hotmail/gmail (7/5 bits or what-have-you) you may have significantly more chances. The prefix (your email part) may or may not be case sensitive. It’s left open in the specification, so different mail servers may treat bob@ and BOB@ as the same or unique. Hot and gmail take them as case insensitive. Also gmail ignores periods in the prefix, so b.ob bo..b and bob and BOB are all the same: bob@gmail.com. So there still more options.
I don’t know about unicodes and the new top-level domains though.
I haven’t messed with anything after my @ because I was afraid the site wouldn’t get my email right but that is interesting! I may have a better chance then.
Shouldn’t matter and I’d expect it to still count for the hash.
Doesn’t really change the odds though – even in your 8 characters there are more possibilities than there are gravatars.
As I expected, it worked. Now to go back, since I was happy before.
You can add +whatever after the name bit of your email and it doesn’t change it. That’s standard for almost every mail provider, and it’s in the SMTP standards. So like, name+extra@example.com and name@example.com will always both be delivered to name@example.com. So you can get practically unlimited options out of just one email.
I, however, don’t need to try this since apparently I’ve already won gravatar roulette! 😀
Needs to be tested though. gmail takes + for address extensions, but the old Unix standard was -. And Amazon Workmail doesn’t take either.
OTOH gmail also ignores all periods, so you can sprinkle those into your username.
Yes! the +suffix is part of RFC 5233. And it is glorious. Unfortunately a lot, (I mean A LOT, including government), of email submission forms and mailers choke on +suffixed email prefixes. So yes it’s def useful here for Gravatar roulette (can confirm), but isn’t 100% reliable when suffixing your email to keep track of which a**hole leaked your email or had their system hacked.
Also, the example is properly demonstrated as:
example+ultra@example.com
because PLUS ULTRA, well done on getting the correct domain. Many people don’t know that example.com is a reserved domain for exactly this sort of purpose.
I don’t know exactly how it works, but I do know that I once lost the ability to comment for several days after doing the gravatar roulette too much. I had to change my username slightly to be able to comment again. My username was originally Keulan, not Keulen as it is now. That was before I decided to use my current Twilight Sparkle avatar, of course.
Have you considered just finding someone else with a Sal gravitar, saving the picture and just making it your permanent gravitar?
Why would I want to do that? 😛 I’m having fun playing gravitar roulette.
Ah, that’s cool. Thrill of the hunt and all that.
Exactly! Same reason Skulker doesn’t stick to stalking easier, non special ghosts to hunt.
I used to have Sal and now I’ve got Professor Robin. 😒
I used to have Dina and now I have Walky. Talk about some serious downgrading.
Dorothy is too nice to ever be President.
She’ll get a call from Jimmy Carter one of these days.
Ah, Carter, the nega-Trump.
At first I read that as “mega” and was very confused.
I was thinking the same thing, but then I remembered the quote from John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834-1902):
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
She’d learn to become ruthless.
She will collect so many femurs.
I don’t know, even if she’s using it in an attempt at being nice NOW, this is still basically zeroing in on what’s actually driving a person’s actions and using it to verbally nail their weak spot.
That could be pretty darn useful in politics.
If dunking on nerds was all it took for political success, the last four years would have looked very very different.
I mean, isn’t that basically what “owning/destroying the libs” basically was?
I think you mean “all years EXCEPT the last four would have looked very different”.
Dorothy uses kindness on Becky. It’s super effective! (…at making her incredibly angery)
If it doesn’t deal damage it can’t be super effective
“Emotional” is still a type of damage.
I guess that’d be Dark-type?
Oh thank goodness. So done with this game.
I’m hoping Becky can start dealing with things, rather than trying to joke her way through trauma.
Oh, I don’t think we’re done with this yet. I *hope* it’s done soon, but I don’t really expect it.
…do the avatars change yearly? I’ve never figured that out.
Every now and then, they get changed/some get added, and that shift in the “pool” is enough to move them around. I don’t think it’s on any particular schedule.
In this case it was due to the time skip and the new “season”. I think the last one was back in 2017. Basically whenever Willis wants to add new pictures to the pool.
This time, I think he threw out all the old ones, so that all the gravatars would be from the new season. In previous swaps I think it was just additions.
I think some of the old ones did in fact change out to more current art as well, but it could be harder to tell when they’re usually just face crops. But I know Roz had a switch from Default Roz to Roz With The Cool Hat from when she was RA campaigning for a while.
Maybe. I thought both Rozs (Rozes? Roz’s?) were around as gravatars for awhile.
I’ll believe Becky’s done with this stupid “joke” rivalry with Dorothy nonsense when I see her actually stop doing it.
I’m not holding my breath, but I am crossing my fingers.
Love of god please resolve this subplot SOON
Dorothy’s working on it. She’s already got them a room together.
Is Becky finally going to drop the “I hate Dorothy” act and answer my(and many others) prayers?
Also, I’m still not sure about my current gravatar but it could be worse.
Joyce comes out of room wearing new glasses.
“Hey guys, look, these frames are actually pretty-”
(sees Becky and Dorothy hugging it out)
“Doc, I think these actually made my vision even worse!”
Did the gravatars all change? Do I finally not have Sydney? (I think I got that spelling right.)
Wow, you have Sal. BBCC has been trying to get Sal’s gravitar.
Whoa you’re right! I’m finally rid of angry screaming dude from whatsit pizza place!
FOOL!
(His name’s Galasso, btw)
If anyone could carefully explain how to get your own gravatar thatd be grand. Went there, subbed in, added email and picture, exported it….and Im still Walky. What am I missing? (I suppose of all the dudes I could be Walky’s not the worst, I mean I could be Danny, but it’s still a dude.)
Sometimes it takes a bit to take effect. If it’s not there in a day or so there may be an issue? I haven’t messed with it in ages.
Hmmm
Actually one could say Dorothy always being a shiny paragon of virtue is annoying! Even the avatar lied once and a while! Stop rubbing how good you are in everyone’s face!
Much like Head Alien II, Dorothy is actually a transplant from an alternate universe first shown in an old fancomic: Smart People Always Do The Right Thing.
Dorothy isn’t a shiny paragon of virtue, she clearly has significant character flaws that she needs to work on, but criticizing her for turning the other cheek instead of being a jackass is kinda insanely dumb.
Dumb but entertaining! How’s Becky supposed to get an odd couple going if Dorothy keeps taking the high road?
Also speaking more seriously I haven’t seen many character flaws from Dorothy besides over working herself which isn’t really much of a flaw. When she gets angry it’s usually justified, she always has the reasonable advice, she loves learning and studying, works out regularly, is generous and patient, she even flipping volunteers! Not saying I hate any of that stuff mind you. Just noting it. I can’t remember the last time she was petty or did something purely selfishly. If you have examples I’d sincerely love to see them. Maybe that onee time when she hot drunk at what was supposed to be a dry party for Joyce? Like evryone else was. I got nothing here.
Her major character flaws are basically that she’s running herself into the ground, trying to be the responsible one all of the time, ignoring any signs of problems, never letting up.
It sounds like the “My biggest flaw is that I work too hard” cliche job interview answer, but its a recipe for burnout. A single bump in the road, a single thing goes wrong, and it could upend her entirely.
Because yeah, what Dorothy is doing all of the time isn’t healthy. It’s productive, so its easier for people to overlook it, but it’s just as much of a problem as Walky’s “Slacker For Life” mentality.
She’s also a jerk in both romantic relationships we know she’s had, and a controlling jerk in at least one of them at that. Additionally, she’s terrible at dealing with people, which is why Roz got the upper hand in their RA-wannabe contest.
Agreed. Society rewards constant work and devalues leisure time, so this variety of flaw gets overlooked, but it is absolutely damaging in the long-run, and burnout tends to hit hard when it arrives. Socializing is necessary for people – even the highly introverted need interaction at some point. Rest and relaxation are necessary. And so are sleep, eating, and hygiene, which we absolutely saw Dorothy neglect to worrisome amounts in an attempt to up her grades. It paid off and got her the transfer she wanted, sure, but I have absolutely seen high-achieving high schoolers hit burnout early in college, and it is BAD. Hit that wall hard enough and you can lose some stamina permanently.
And agreed with JBento that she’s got issues handling relationships (I rankle SO MUCH at people who said she was ‘too good for’ Walky or the like, because no, they both have potential and she is absolutely flawed,) though I’m willing to bet things with Danny were better before he started actively shaping his life around her and assuming she’d do the same eventually. That said, I can definitely see this endless kindness being part of the reason why it ended so badly, too – she needed to put her foot down and say ‘it’s been nice, but I am going to leave no matter what and you cannot keep acting as if I’ll change my mind on this’ WELL before that point, because Danny clearly wasn’t taking hints. She’s also very much someone who has to make a clean break, because as we saw with Walky and the ‘pause’ and her getting far more invested, quite fast, in a relationship she initially intended to be ‘just for fun’, because she’s not actually one for casual relationships. Not a flaw in itself, and a forgiveable one with Walky because it’s likely she hadn’t tried a casual relationship before to know, but still kept him from knowing exactly where they stood. I wouldn’t say she’s fully in the gifted kid school of getting screwed over once they hit college and don’t know how to study/socialize/both while society assumes you know already – she clearly DOES know studying techniques in a way definite Gifted Kid Walky can’t grasp, and just as clearly knows how to handle prickly people she cares about like Joyce and Becky – but there’s shades of it in that she consistently undervalues socializing vs pure achievement, whether that’s academics or volunteering. She will absolutely struggle in politics if she doesn’t figure that one out, and it’s better she learns it before she goes to Yale since the value there is really in networking.
Well I’m definitely seeing some takes I hadn’t considered. I do think that Dorothy being pretty controlling of her friends and relationships is a solid critique. She did get called out pretty hard for even setting up this appointment without asking Joyce and she very much dictated the flow of her relationship with Walky and assumedly Danny too. Walky never really got to decide what the relationship was Dorothy set the terms and ended it on her own terms. Not fair to Walky and I trust you all know how hard it is for me to say that.
Just to be pedantic. I don’t really see lack of charisma as a character flaw. To me charisma is more like a skill or talent. Like singing or being able to do a backflip and you don’t criticize someone for not being able to sing right?
Her overworking I’m a little more 50/50 on. Like it was a problem but it was also addressed pretty quickly by her and she ended up getting accepted into Yale after just one semester. I getting mixed signals on how I’m supposed to take that? It is bad? It seems like it paid off for her and also she knew how to handle it.
Although speaking of Yale her hiding that application and lying by omission to Becky is a good hint at flaw. I’m not sure of what yet, but it doesn’t inspire confidence. Maybe she doesn’t trust her friends to take it well which leads well into the her being very controlling angle.
Thank you for the feedback.
I personally don’t think it’s lack of charisma so much as weird/lack of socializing. Like, yes she has a chart about the people in her hall, but that suggests observation more than actual, meaningful interactions. More to the point, she cut out social activities over grades during the extra credit arc, which is both unhealthy and counterproductive. By all accounts, the difference between an Ivy League school and any other (decent, accredited) one isn’t generally their academics – it’s the networking you do there, much like Dana suggested to Sarah during freshman year. That didn’t work out well for her, granted, but knowing someone who knows someone is ABSOLUTELY how a lot of people get hired in fields like law and politics. Dorothy’s never really brought that up as a reason for wanting to go to Yale, which could be setting us up for a storyline where she realizes this fact in 2035 or so after transferring… but again, I’d like her to get a better sense of work-life balance before then.
(I will note that like, some schools DO obviously put more focus on certain programs and fields than others while still being decent and accredited, so sometimes for more niche programs you want a specific school, but for general education requirements or poli-sci at a Big 10 school? Dorothy would get a just fine education here, she just wouldn’t get the connections.)
She did get accepted as a transfer, of course, but that doesn’t make the massive study binge any healthier. As Sierra said, she was neglecting sleep. As Dorothy herself recognized, she was neglecting showering. That was going on for a week or more. That’s a serious red flag she isn’t actually handling things well. And the resolution being her completing the extra credit after she broke up means she didn’t really rebalance things so much as the current stressor was gone. She was already reading ahead, not because she was expected to but to keep momentum going, last storyline before classes started. She’s still overemphasizing academics, and that takes a toll because human brains are not meant to be ‘productive’ all the time. I’ve seen way too many kids who were hardworking, academic types in rigorous programs, and while many of them are still in decent shape afterwards, a whole lot of them have anxiety and depression issues. There’s an entire phenomenon a lot of former ‘gifted’ kids describe on the internet (through various social media outlets, mainly, but enough that it’s been reported on) of how they built their entire sense of self worth on academics and the approval of adults around them and then didn’t know what to do with themselves when things didn’t come effortlessly, or when they met challenges that couldn’t be solved with the things they learned as students. Sound familiar to you?
Walky and Dorothy are two sides of the same Gifted Burnout coin, and while they present different sets of symptoms (and Dorothy, who DID learn to study and probably isn’t dealing with an undiagnosed disability the way Walky’s been hinted as having ADHD, hasn’t hit her breaking point in the same way yet,) they’re both still showing clear ones. For Walky, that’s anxiety, avoidance, horribly low self-esteem, and absolute TERROR at being unable to live up to his (abusive) mom’s expectations – ones he doesn’t actually share, but may well expect he has to try anyway. For Dorothy, that’s considering things that aren’t schoolwork or resume-builders unimportant, up to and including very essential self-care. We’ve started seeing signs of how it bothers her, too, that she has this Perfect Plan to the Presidency and yet Becky managed to stumble into politics despite not having any interest in it – an issue where her hard work and studying doesn’t guarantee success, because fair or not politics also includes a heavy personal component. Walky’s already started his crash, and I expect it to return – especially whenever Linda rears her asshole head again. Dorothy is still pushing through, but it’s not just when you’re sleep-deprived in the short term that the work you turn in is worse. Constant pressure like that exhausts you, physically and mentally, and if you try to push through stress burnout you’ll only crash harder. People leave industries after bad episodes, because they cannot do it anymore even once they’ve recovered. Hell, I had a depression-based episode in college and my energy’s never recovered to where it was before, and that was years ago. That’s why I’m concerned – her work ethic, while admirable, is genuinely unsustainable if she doesn’t build in dedicated relaxation time and consider it every bit as essential as her classwork. It also can’t hurt in the networking department, but if her primary form of rest is watching cartoons for an hour or so before bed? That’s still good, and that’s still necessary. It might be years before Dorothy hits that wall. It might be weeks. But I’ve known too many people like Dorothy over the years not to think she needs to course correct before it does lasting damage, because it works very well right up until it doesn’t.
A paragon who let her grades slip because she thought her boyfriend had it together, (as he was quickly falling behind in math).
A paragon who dropped her boyfriend because she was “going places”, and he, wasn’t.
Dorothy is a decent person, but she’s no paragon.
She was right to drop said boyfriend. He was pathetic! And needy in a selfis way. And I don’t mean pathetic for lack of ambition.
Which boyfriend are you talking about? Cause Walky was always a fling and she at least believes dumping Danny was a mercy which even though I believe it was a dick move is kind of true. His identity was too tied up in hers. She should’ve dumped him in high school though which even she acknowledged.
“Walky was always a fling”. Uh, no he wasn’t, and that was the problem. Dorothy started the relationship setting up a boundary that it was going to be a fling that wasn’t serious, then randomly decided she was in love with him and broke her own boundary trying to get way more involved in his life than he actually asked for, overworking herself in the process, decided they needed to go “on break” and then kissed him again despite the break, like.
She kept on dangling Walky on a string and refusing to actually stick to literally any boundaries she set. In the end she broke up with him in large part due to the fact that she recognized her doing that constantly was wrong, and even THEN she was severely tempted to go back on that AGAIN just because Walky was sad they broke up.
One of Dorothy’s main flaws is that she is super controlling!!! And has this eerie way of just easing herself around people’s boundaries like they aren’t even there. The whole debacle with her and Roz competing for RA and how she wasn’t “approachable” was entirely because her keeping notes on people and junk was kind of creepy and made everyone feel like they were just datapoints for her to manipulate instead of people to care about.
Like her being WEIRDLY controlling is even cropping up in this storyline. Like, yes, Joyce is having vision problems and making an eye appointment for her is helpful, in the long run, and is probably what she needs. But there is no universe in which just unilaterally deciding to make a doctor’s appointment for someone and then strong-arming them into going for “their own good” isn’t like….a really big overstepping of regular-person boundaries.
IDK Dorothy’s character flaws are very obvious to me personally because she’s quite a lot like my mom in those respects. If Dorothy were slightly worse she’d have a martyr complex a mile wide and severe codependency issues–which she already does have snippets of here and there, but thankfully she’s just well-adjusted enough to avoid that.
THISSSSS! “Thisis the boundary. Actually, no, let me redraw that. Actually no, let me redraw THAT!”
Agreed. One of Dorothy’s main issues is that she has trouble setting, keeping, and respecting boundries. Now that I’ve thought about it, I’ve noticed another pattern as well–one that’s probably related to her chosen profession. She likes saving people. While there’s nothing wrong with having compassion and wanting to help people, it can be problematic when one wants to “save” people who don’t necessarily need it (e.g, Walky and/or Danny), don’t necessarily want it (i.e., Becky), or who simply refuse to be saved (let’s say Joyce for the sake of an example–although I realize that’s a stretch.) It’s also problematic in that Dorothy seems to attract people who need saving in one way or another–which is going to hurt her in the long run. Indeed, the fact that she’s keeping her acceptance into Yale a secret indicates to me that she’s considering sacrificing a major life goal because she feels (maybe rightly, maybe wrongly) that she’s needed at the U of I.
Though the trick with that that makes it more of a personal flaw and less of an asshole thing is that she was setting those boundaries for herself and not being able to live up to them. The boundaries were supposed to keep her from getting too involved, not to limit the other person.
And we saw this from the very start of the relationship – even before she went and kissed him the first time, she was trying to talk herself out of it, calling it self sabotage, since her plan involved focusing just on her studies with no room for relationships.
I do hope we return to this, because I think it seems to have been resovled for the moment as “Yes, Dorothy should stick to the plan, avoid relationships and she’ll succeed”. She broke up with Walky, got her grades under control and she’s getting into Yale. Obviously the lesson learned is stomp down harder on that urge to self-sabotage.
First: boundaries CAN be changed/renegotiated. It’s why we call them boundaries and not fundamental physical constants.
Second: When Dotty moved the boundary, Walky (and it appears Danny) didn’t object, so it’s not like the fault is entirely Dot’s.
None of this is an argument for Dot. She’s human. Just speaking up because so many comments here sound very binary, instead of analogue and aware of nuance.
But she didn’t negotiate. She dropped it on him as a fait accompli. In one case, got mad at him when he responded snarkily to her declaration of love.
Basically though, I don’t think it’s binary, just putting it out there as an acknowledged flaw of hers that I think is still an area for character growth.
I don’t think Dorothy is trying to be a paragon. She is trying to do what she thinks is the right thing, coming from a background that thinks peaceful relations to your neighbors is the way to go.
She said herself she shouldn’t have kept her relationship to Danny going past high school, I really think she hoped he’d get the message and not follow her to the university of her choice. He did, and then looked down at her ambitions, and she blew her fuse and dumped him. Probably was agonizing about the way she did it for ages.
Meanwhile, she seems to have learned to address stuff more directly- maybe seeing a man with a knife go after a friend and said fried stabbing him back, being abducted by crazy guys and being in a fight for their lives ending with a dead person (well three, in die end), mad her more clear about the difference between direction and aggression, allows her more clarity in saying what she sees and wants?
How dare she focus on her many year long goal for a dude she dated for like a month!
Aang was a horrible paragon of virtue, for the record. He got better, sure, but up until the end of season (and arguably parts of season 3) he was a pretty bad Avatar.
*end of season 2
Christ we REALLY need an edit button.
Proooobably because he was 12 and most avatars get told when they’re older and have several years of training, while he had to speed run it
Yeah I made mention of that a bit later. A lot of the first two seasons’ mistakes can be chalked up to that.
Season 3 and Ozai less so.
LIE FOR PEACE
STEAL FROM PIRATES
SCAM THE SCAMMERS
Aang’s Avatar’s Code!
Vs. Kyoshi’s:
BE GAY
GO DAOFEI
I get people hated it but imo, lying to those two groups to make them stop fighting was absolutely the right call. They’ve been fighting so long they don’t even REMEMBER what happened – and it’s not like they were even particularly attached to their versions of what happened, seeing how quickly they gave them up when told the ‘real’ version. It’s a silly fight and it was making the situations for the two groups worse. Lying to get them to cut it out isn’t something that really upsets me.
To be fair and to go against my original point as well, he was still 12. A lot of the problems I had with him as an Avatar up until Season 2 had mostly to do with him being a sheltered 12 year old who didn’t always know better (his reaction to Bato is a good example of that).
His reason to not killing Ozai? A little less so.
Uh, Kyoshi literally founded the Dai Li. Like, she literally helped create secret, opressive police.
To be fair, the Dai Li she created wasn’t… well… what Aang and friends had to deal with.
She even says as much in the series. Sometimes institutions that might have been benign when they were founded get corrupted over time.
Of course, considering the creators named the organisation after the KMT’s spymaster, there was never a chance for those guys not to turn into corrupt assholes.
She… She has a lot of flaws. She’s just the most put together of everyone.
She is, however, colossally stressed, shaming herself anytime she prioritizes having some actual fun over being productive, burning the candle at both ends, and hiding the fact that she’s leaving in a semester or so.
People really like to crap on Dorothy for being so dang career focused and not super invested in romantic relationships, lol it’s kinda gross.
She’s being petty with kindness.
“How dare you reject my feelings by calling them petty!! That’s so… so… SO PETTY!!”
I really cant tell how serious Becky is about hating Dorothy. I mean, would you give a nickname to someone you don’t like?
Yes. Specifically you give them one they don’t want and constantly use it.
My bullies’ nickname for me in school was Beaver because of a giant overbite.
Just like as a case in point. Pick a nickname they hate and keep using it till they explode, then play the victim because you’re being over sensitive, it’s just a joke.
It doesn’t even have to be an overtly insulting nickname. My own name has several common nicknames that many people prefer to the full thing … but I prefer the full thing. People insisting on using any of the standard nicknames would still be being a dick. And being a dick is what you do to people you don’t like.
Or people you really like and just have that kind of mutual relationship with. Relationships are weird.
It’s almost worse when the nickname isn’t insulting because it becomes so easy for people to say you are over-reacting.
I hear it all the time to the point of nausea. My name has a few nicknames. The one that my parents insisted be used is the only one I hate. Growing up, when anyone tried to call me a name I like better – my mother flipped out on them. It got to the point that everyone stopped trying and I just accepted that I would be stuck with it.
It wasn’t until a few years after my mom passed that a newer friend pointed out that I don’t have anything to do with my family anymore so I could just use a different nickname.
Great. Accept for the fact that a number of people in my life who know how I feel about the old nickname won’t stop using it. “I was introduced to you as ______, so that is what I will always call you.”
Been there, done the exploding, was lectured for being needlessly aggressive by the school AND my parents.
Yep.
Also that thing where they pinch you or stab you with a compass or pencil or hit or trip you when the teachers aren’t looking so that you’ll respond physically and then they can play the victim and pretend you slugged them for no reason.
Yes. Just ask Fuzzyhead from high school, or Scott from fencing.
“would you give a nickname to someone you don’t like?”
…have you ever been a human child, or around human children?
Or humans at all? Nicknames like “Pocahontas” or “Moscow Mitch” weren’t given out of love.
I totally forgot that insulting nicknames were a thing, but “dotty” isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind when j think of rude names
By itself it isn’t but when you add it onto everything else Becky does its just another way Becky can put Dorothy down
It means ‘kind of crazy’. Dorothy has pointed out it’s not her name, and Becky *kept using it*.
It can, but it’s also a fairly common nickname for Dorothy. I don’t think there’s any reason to think Becky’s even considered the crazy version.
Any more than she was was calling Jacob a toilet.
She called him Jakes?
Yup.
Trying to think who else she’s nicknamed. There was Ambster, of course.
My Auntie Dot was a dotty aunt after she had a stroke.
Doesn’t have to be inherently insulting. If you’ve asked someone to stop and they keep doing it, that makes it insulting.
Oh thank heaven, I think this plot thread is interesting but lately it’s gotten to the point where it feels like the story is almost trying to make me dislike Becky. Hopefully she’ll cut that shit out!
So, now that it’s pretty much been confirmed that Becky’s behaviour towards Dorothy is because she’s lashing out and trying to keep as many things as possible the same because she’s lost so much in such a short space of time, and that Dorothy both understands that and is trying to help Becky through it, can we PLEASE stop acting like Becky is the worst person imaginable for doing so?
No, because none of that is new and she’s still obnoxious and annoying. The commenters haven’t been mad at Becky because they didn’t understand her, we dissected her motivations ages ago.The frustration comes from her being irritating, and while it’s deliberate that does change that it’s still irritating
doesn’t change that it’s still irritating
Except regardless of whether or not it’s irritating, it’s part of her character arc. And “irritating” is one thing, but a lot of the comments I’ve seen act like what Becky’s doing is this horrendous, irredeemable thing when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
We’re commenters, we overreact, it’s not like our words are going to affect Becky.
Yeah but it’s still not a great thing to do. I always think about people identifying with different characters. Overreacting and tearing a character down can tear those people down too. Also I just don’t get the appeal of hating on someone.
No, but it’s made going into the comments section a pretty miserable experience. And while you may understand that this is a character arc and chose to overreact to it anyway, I’m not convinced that everyone who’s been insisting Becky is a terrible person isn’t being completely serious.
Agreed. I like all these characters and having every comment section be a teardown of at least one of them is frustrating.
All internet comment sections are miserable corrosive places. This one is comparatively pleasant.
It’s generally better than most but it’s been far from pleasant recently.
Yep. Only comparatively pleasant. I really know that I ought to stop reading it.
You must be new here. Most of the commenters overreact in some pretty horrific ways. It’s apparently some kind of catharsis for reality being shit or something, which means they need to share the shittiness here. I’ve learned to take breaks.
Breaks are important. Because yeah people can be super horrible and over dramatic and it makes me not read the comments most days. Why people are so willing to hate on fictional barely adults/basically children is just beyond me.
Oh, I’m well aware. I just haven’t given up on calling out the crap just yet.
Exactly. Just because we understand that someone is bpd, other, or socio or-psychopathic, doesn’t mean they aren’t being a jerk when they act like one. They are still being a jerk.
True – not that Becky is dealing with any of those.
But in fiction, when we’re clearly dealing with character development, not static just bad people, it’s frustrating for everything just to be reduced to “she’s awful”.
I don’t think anyone believed Becky was a bad person for lashing out at Dorothy, rather, I think most people just wanted her to stop.
Pretty much. If Becky actually stops behaving like this then she’ll become a far more likable character.
I think we’re too into wanting characters to be likable sometimes.
Ruth isn’t really *likable* because she’s a cantankerous, aggressive, sullen jerk who barely knows how to interact with people. Ruth is also my favourite character these last few years, ever since that strip where she bold facedly told Billie to stop trying to get her to relapse into alcoholism.
We are. But the problem is different in a slice-of-life once-a-day comic strip than in a beginning-to-end piece of fiction. In the latter, you can pick it up and experience it and then put it down. In the former, though, it’s like having that person in your life.
Frankly, I think the issue with Becky is less what she’s doing now and more that she went from being 100% sympathetic in the previous storyline to being the Irritant-in-Chief of the current one. The whiplash is probably a factor in how people are seeing her.
I’m going to bring up a wrestling analogy here. There are faces and heels, good guys and bad guys. Bad guys act like jerks, so they can get what’s called “heat”. People boo them and they’re doing their job.
There’s also a thing in wrestling known as “go away heat”. People don’t dislike the character because they do bad things, they just hate them because they’re unbearably obnoxious and want them to go away. That’s where Becky is for a lot of people.
Malaya and Carla can be mean, but they’re at least creative about it and don’t focus all their petty childish insults on one person. Up until this one, every single freaking strip with both Becky and Dorothy has had Becky make the same childish joke, and it got old ages ago.
Not bad
Maybe not, but honestly, the way some comments come across, it’s like they think Becky slaps Dorothy in the face every time they interact. That’s my issue, personally.
Keep in mind that Becky’s treatment of Dorothy started in early 2015, was kept on the backburner, and has now been the main focus of every single strip featuring the two since the timeskip.
I definitely wanted this to go places, but I don’t blame anyone else for wanting Becky to knock off the attitude to someone who literally has done her no wrong.
You shouldn’t take comments on a webcomic so seriously.
No?
This strip has no surprises. We knew that Becky’s been a bongo and that Dorothy is letting her.
Explanations aren’t excuses. Going through trauma isn’t a ticket to pass it on. Becky’s been repeatedly mean to someone who’s only been nice to her, who is in fact now her roommate. That’s pretty shitty, period, regardless of Dorothy’s choice to be Becky’s emotional punching bag.
I’m not sure that you just read the same strip I did. This isn’t Dorothy being a punching bag. This is Dorothy addressing a problem in a calm unaggressive but effective method.
Yes, now. Reader reactions to Becky have been based on all the *preceding* strips.
Yeah, which is why I’m saying that everybody who’s acting like Becky is the worst person in the comic can stop now, because this strip is pushing forward through that.
We’ll stop when *Becky* actually stops.
Again, though, she’s not actually the worst person in the comic. Not even close. Call her out on her actions, sure, but acting like she’s kicking puppies every time she appears is ridiculously disingenuous.
everyone who behaves badly gets called on it. Becky just seems like she gets more because the comic has been showing her a lot and she’s been doing it in every appearance.
I’ve been calling it her unrequited rivalry. She started off relatively low-key, and has been gradually accelerating as she hasn’t gotten the response she was after.
Just because you ‘have a reason’ to lash out does not excuse you for lashing out?
Like, she’s still being awful to someone who’s biggest crime is *having existed and made friends with her friend*. Becky’s not a terrible person, but she’s still being a jerkass to Dorothy, and, clearly, KNOW’S she’s being a jerkass, *and is doing so intentionally*.
I never said it was. I just said that it’d be great if people stopped acting like Becky IS a terrible person because of this. Especially because yeah, it’s obviously going somewhere as part of her character development.
I wish the commenters had an opinion between “this character is a saint uwu sweet baby” and “this person is the literal devil they personally victimized me in my home burn them at the stake”
Like, so many times I’ve said yea this characters being kind of an ass but holy shit chill, you’re acting like they’re as bad as toedad or ryan. Like, remember when people were calling lucy evil because she was too friendly and wanted to hang out with her floor mates? It actually makes it harder to dislike characters like becky because of how disproportionate the vitriol is
(I won’t be a hypocrite, i did overreact too in the past like with amber/mazi. But then they did things more intense than be a prick for a few months)
Thank you! This is pretty much exactly my thoughts. Calling Becky out on her attitude is one thing, but I’ve seen far too many people acting like what she’s doing is this horrific, Moral-Event-Horizon-crossing action. And it’s just incredibly frustrating, since it’s the furthest thing from that.
The replies insisting that “character makes fun of another character” and “character commits actual murder” are morally equivalent and should be treated as such are…something else.
Agreed. My primary emotion with most of the cast tends to be ‘I love you you absolute dumbass, PLEASE make better choices.’ But I love how this strip depicts them all as flawed, mostly understandable kids, and I’ve got sympathy even for the ones who aren’t just jerks but antagonists. (Except for Mary, but blackmailing Ruth showed she is in fact pretty evil. I also don’t really care for Raidah due to the ableism and elitism, but she was totally the wronged party in Sarah’s seduction plan via Joyce.)
Exactly. This whole comic is about nuance and growth and that gets lost when we pick characters out of the cast to be villains for the day.
That aspect of the Raidah/Jacob/Joyce/Sarah thing was my favorite part of it. Raidah was definitely both wronged and not sympathetic and that’s a pretty rare thing to see in a romance arc.
red frames would be cute for joyce just saying
Thin or chunky? Wingtips? Round? Large or small? I like where you’re going, but would like to know more about the destination.
Awww, Dorothy, you precious cinnamon roll. Too good for this world, too pure.
Becky, you don’t need a new nemesis just because your Dad died.
Anywho if this is indicative of the glorious war of who gets to be Joyce’s best friend coming to a conclusion: I’m bummed. I was hoping for juicy character drama.
Becky started her haterade on Dorothy like six years ago now, and it was easy to digest because it barely came up. Putting the two in same room felt like a great way to put two characters who kind of won out all the time in a situation where some genuine anger and resentment could boil over and… Dorothy quickly diffuses the situation with a heartfelt spiel, like she always does with everything that ever happens to her.
I dunno, it’s been ten years now and I’ll be reading for at least another ten; I might just need to accept I’m never gonna like Dorothy. I wanted to see some of that ugliness to Becky’s character too since, as I’ve gone on about, I really only like characters when we see them at their worst every once in a while, but it’s easier to take with Becky because at least she’s got Dina, and when Becky and Dina are on panel it’s basically just magical all the time as those two defy every convention about happy couples in fiction not working with their endless devotion to being decent and understanding of one another.
It’s probably just what I want out of this series. Like, my all time favourite moment that Willis has ever done is 100% always going to be the death of Dina in It’s Walky!. It’s a raw, unfiltered gut punch, where Dina tries to prove her worth and dies pointlessly for it, lasting just long enough to ponder how she’ll be remembered. It’s haunting, it’s visceral, it’s ugly and unrewarding and I build myself up to it every time I archive binge through IW! because it’s like the emotional core of the whole series. I love the emotional gut punches in character dramas, they’re always what stick out for me.
Meanwhile a bunch of other people reading this strip will come away from it saying “ah yeah, I love that Dorothy is nice and strives to do the right thing and understands why other people act like this”, and like, that’s valid. It’s not what I’m into, but it’s valid.
If that’s what you want from Dorothy, then yeah, I don’t think you’re going to get it.
I’m going to disagree about where the emotional core is. While Dina’s death was an emotionally powerful moment, the emotional core for me has always been the “it’s the rain” speech. It’s why there was a Joyce and Walky.
I agree. I’ve noticed in DOA, though, that Joyce and Walky generally don’t interact much as individuals. They’re always around each other as part of the group cast, but I don’t think they’ve spent any real time together even as acquaintances. Maybe Willis feels he’s gotten everything out of the It’s Walky/ Joyce and Walky relationship and wants to explore other character arcs.
I get that it was getting REALLY aggressive in the last two arcs, but agreed. I like Dorothy but she desperately needs to actually hit a wall she can’t simply power through to bring her flaws to the forefront, and Becky seemed like a good setup for it. Now she has the Yale transfer coming and is starting to defuse Becky, and while I don’t want to tear Dorothy down because of her ambitions, I do want to see her break a bit so she can build back up again. Even the best-adjusted characters in this strip (Dina and Carla among the major players, I’d say) are still aware of things they don’t do perfectly. Or do performatively to keep people at arm’s length, in Carla’s case, but it’s very clear that’s a defense mechanism and where it comes from. Dorothy’s setting herself up for burnout and has definite interpersonal issues, but has managed to skirt around either of those becoming critical yet. That can’t last, or at least it shouldn’t. I want to see characters improve long-term, but that requires them to address their flaws head on first.
And Becky has very clearly been covering up her own insecurities through wackiness, but again: That center can’t hold. I want it addressed eventually, but such things tend to be more interesting (and more likely to stick) when someone does actually get justifiably pissed off. The Ruth-Billie scene where Ruth told Billie to knock it off trying to get her to drink you mentioned upthread is a great example, and does a lot without getting explosively furious.
Hmm. That phrasing got to some of what bothered me with the Dorothy overwork/break up with Walky arc. We got to see her break a bit, but we never saw her build back up again. She didn’t change or really grow from that. She just broke up with him, had a few moments of regret/longing, caught up with her work and was fine.
Yeah, that’s why I REALLY don’t want that arc to be the ‘resolution’ on that front. She didn’t realize that yes, she did need to be more selective with extracurriculars and volunteering, but she was doing better work with regular breaks and VERY basic self-care and needed to build those in. She finished her extra credit assignments, and as such there’s no guarantee that there won’t be a ‘next time.’ Walky’s tutoring wasn’t the only point of overextension there, and the fact that her habits were unhealthy was made VERY clear. The Sierra strip last storyline is still setting up how she’s studying ahead to the point where it’s probably unnecessary. (‘You’re freeeeeeee,’ the alt text tells Sierra.) That doesn’t bode well given the other warning signs she has of eventual burnout. I’m guessing it’s still on the backburner for now, but like… I really don’t want her to transfer to Yale before it gets to her. If for no other reason than how it’ll probably be A LOT worse if she crashes in Yale mid-semester, but also because I don’t want that storyline going on for another decade until she transfers.
I think Dotty is the sort that went through all that in prep school.
Given we literally saw her go into extra credit schoolwork binge mode while neglecting exercise, basic hygiene, and sleep? If she went through that before now she took the wrong lesson.
Yeah, I think this kind of nails why I’m not enthusiastic about Dorothy getting into Yale. I love Dorothy and want her to succeed, but it feels like succeeding at this specific point validates her decision to put her relationships and health on hold, and means missing out on some really valuable character growth.
wait
wait hold up
so Toedad did ALL of that shit the same year her mom died?
did he, like, wait until after the funeral to kidnap her?
No, the death was years earlier. Joyce was told it was cancer.
It couldn’t have been that many years. Ghost Outline Flashback Becky (who found Bonnie with the bottle of pills) looks exactly like current Becky, but with long hair.
I think it might have been late spring or early summer ‘last year’.
Willis confirmed; it was the spring/summer before Becky started college.
Grade 12 is a truly shit time to lose a parent. Yes, all times are crap to lose a parent, but with how much pressure perception our culture puts on highschool transcripts, it’s definitely a catalytic time for making problems worse.
Oh dang. That means she lost everything within a year.
Was this on Twitter, Tumblr, or Patreon? That’s a good detail for the wiki.
It was in a Patreon comment.
Unfortunately, it’s not actually all that surprising that a community of people who are extremely controlling of their children ‘for their own good’, to the point of banning Disney movies that ‘present adults as fallible’ (the justification for Becky and Joyce never seeing Frozen until college) would lie to a roughly 17-year-old. Nor is it surprising that a community whose stance on mental health is that faith is all that’s necessary would try and cover up the fact that someone attempted suicide. (Ross was the one who said ‘Satan took’ Bonnie from them, but Joyce was the one who suggested to a deeply depressed Billie that prayer would fix all her ills, well before that.) Especially if, as I’ve long speculated, Bonnie’s depression was in part because of how restrictive the role she was ‘allowed’ to have was in that community. (I would also lay very good money that the man who didn’t let his daughter have a cell phone when she left for college and later hit her after kidnapping her at gunpoint was abusive to his wife, as well.)
We’d had a hint over on Patreon that Bonnie’s death was within sight of Becky graduating (but clearly before,) and as mentioned Ghost Becky was definitely high school age and her haircut was recent (since she had to ‘accidentally’ get glue in it to be allowed to cut it short,) but this is the first confirmation that yeah, Bonnie’s death at least was very recent. She could have been in the hospital for a while between the attempt and the damage killing her, but that doesn’t help.
God, no wonder Hank was surprised Joyce didn’t know. (He was definitely fairly hands-off with her, but also didn’t question the church until he realized there was a real chance Joyce might estrange herself, as well.) And god, poor Becky. It was always going to be cruel to leave her unable to actually get support from her best friend about finding Bonnie – even if she didn’t want to, at least having the option open and Joyce knowing why it was even more sensitive than it seemed would probably help – but knowing that they were still seen as children unable to handle difficult truths that near to college on top of things? Ouch.
As to Bryy’s comment: Apparently, yep. Most traumatic year ever. Given the kidnapping, I’d assume that either Ross didn’t think Becky was gay until she was literally found making out with her roommate, or he was starting to suspect but still confident Anderson would ‘correct’ such things while they were still in the bud. Probably the former, I think, since he did in fact let her go to college. So he didn’t have reason to send her to conversion camp (or whatever he had planned) while Bonnie was still alive. The recency of Bonnie being ‘taken by Satan’ (his phrase) probably added to his urgent fervor, but honestly I don’t think it was all that much. He was always going to keep Becky in that same suffocating box at any cost.
Let me give in to my hate.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
And nothing will remain except the hate.
Good. Use your aggressive feelings. Let the hate flow through you.
… Is THAT what this is about? 🥺🥺🥺
Finally, truth.
Ok Dorothy you now deserve everything Becky gives from this point on
Could you explain that?
At no point does Dorothy state how dangerous Beckys actions are (Joyce clearly needs glasses yet Becky tries to ensure Joyce doesn’t get them) nor does she mention Beckys bullying behaviour (dismissive attitude, name calling) or gaslighting (“we’re enemies”, “no we’re not” “yes we are”)
The only time Dorothy mentions Beckys destructive behaviour is the first panel “what do you have against glasses” yet it minimises Beckys actions and the fifth panel could almost give Becky an excuse to keep going with her actions “we’ll still be here” “I’ll always be in your corner”
Dorothy could have asked any number of questions about her abhorrent behaviour but doesn’t so from this point on if (and I also acknowledge this might also put Becky on a better path so it might not happen) Becky keeps bullying Dorothy then Dorothy is to blame
DISAGREE. Not being able to stop a bully from being a jerk to you does NOT make you responsible for them being a bully and acting like a jerk. Could Dorothy do a better job redirecting Becky’s inane behaviour? perhaps, but Becky’s actions STILL remain entirely on her. Dorothy is not a therapist let alone /Becky’s/ therapist, nor even a first year psych student.
Yeah Beckys actions are her own but Dorothy isn’t clear enough (I think thats what I mean) in what shes saying
Take Lucy here:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/rush-2/
Clear, concise with no room for misunderstanding whereas Dorothy isn’t clear at all other than she’ll always be there so Becky can continue to act however she wants
That is reasonable enough. I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of foggy transmissions, and been blamed for not listening when I asked for clarification. /eye-roll/
Doesn’t mean Dorothy is to blame for Becky being a jerk, but could be for not being clear enough to tell Becky to cut it out. Whether or not Becky stops is still on Becky, and frankly Becky is aware of what she is doing and Dorothy is saying. reference the last panel.
What…? “ You now deseve abuse because you were supportive”?????
They’re being sarcastic, mocking people who will use this as an excuse for becky, and probably the commenters a bit higher who was asking people to please stop acting like becky is evil now. At least, that’s what I gather given MrSmiths past comments
Some slight mocking but mostly serious.
Dorothy is choosing to allow Becky to continue acting the way she does, “we’ll still be here” and “I’ll always be in your corner” isn’t exactly “please stop acting like a bongo because its unjustified and making me feel bad when all I’ve tried to do is help you”
Seems like Dorothy’s trying a more gentle approach initially, taking the fact that, like she said, Becky’s trying to keep things as close to what she knows as possible.
Which, given everything that’s happened to her, is understandable, though not excusable. To make things clear, I’m by no means saying that Becky should be allowed to continue acting the way she does towards Dorothy. I am saying that I get why she’s doing so, and that I don’t think she deserves to be raked over the coals for it. Especially when it’s hardly the worst thing a main character in DoA has ever done.
No its not the worst thing a main character has done (Ruth still “wins” on that account) but it certainly has been going on the longest
Like a constant drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip it just never ends
Admittedly, I’m blanking on what Ruth did to earn her that “win”, but personally, it’s Danny wishing death on Mike for me.
And yeah, it’s a constant thing, but I dunno, a lot of it just kind of reeks of “trying too hard” (as Becky herself unintentionally pointed out), so I can understand why Dorothy’s going with the approach she’s going with.
Sexually, physically and emotionally abusing Billie is what gives her the “win” for me.
I will say that Dorothy is a much better person than I am
Yeah, no, I’m siding with Smith on this one. Ruth is the one main character that I would qualify as “evil”. She’s a tyrannical bully who subjected her charges to an atmosphere of psychological abuse for at least a year and a half, and counting.
Did you switch tthe character names or something?
Not at all.
We know, and Dorothy knows, what Becky is like so while Becky shouldn’t be acting this way Dorothy also has a responsibility to tell Becky what her actions are doing and she doesn’t so Dorothy is allowing Becky to continue to act the way she does
That’s fine if Dorothy has the patience to outlast Becky, which she does since she has guessed correctly that Becky is decompensating but otherwise lucid. Becky’s behavior is a front (which is in retrospect the most logical reason for her abrupt change in attitude from last semester), and the more it becomes clear that Dorothy is a good, supportive person, the more it eats up Becky.
Today I learned Dorothy is Becky’s mother and it’s the victims of verbal abuse who’s job it is to correct those who are harmful to them.
Thank you for actually addressing this.
Most authors just don’t and let it stew until it boils over in this big huge reveal.
Dorothy’s too practical for that it seems. Could use her in a lot more of those scenarios.
Dotty breaks my heart. She’s so goddamn smart, even in interpersonal realtions. But damn Joyce girls with glasses are qt3.14 to the max, join the club!
*relations goddamn autocorrect letting me down
oh would that dotty could be petty towards ya becky.
I posted this on the Patreon page yesterday but I’ll repost it here because not everyone may have seen it.
Firstly, my impression is that Becky has built too much of her identity around being “the girl who fights back”. One wonders how long she’d been struggling with her father’s demands and the expectations of her childhood community. The problem is that, right now, there’s no-one immediately available to hate her for who and/or what she is and, feeling lost, she’s trying to resolve that problem by creating an enemy.
Secondly, panel 6 is disturbing isn’t it? To me, Becky’s words and expression say: “Why won’t you hate me? I have done everything I can to make you hate me! I need you to hate me!”
Crossing over from another comic: “[Dorothy] didn’t sign up to manger her emotions for her”
Becky has shit she’s going through and whatever, but she was being a prick to Dorothy before that and regardless, it’s not Dorothy’s responsibility to carry Becky.
People trying to explain character motivations isn’t the same as excusing them. This is an interesting character analysis
That’s definitely a thing that happens in the community for some folks. They get so used to struggle and upheaval they can’t trust it when things seem stable. I get the feeling Becky’s running into that a bit.
Agreed about panel 6. That’s very much the face of ‘please dear God hate me so I can fit you into a frame of reference I already have.’ (Soulless atheist, friend-stealer, anything that justifies her insecurities about Joyce.)
And Dorothy responds to this by being ridiculously understanding. (Honestly, I’ve gotta wonder now just how bad Danny was missing cues before last semester started if she reached her limit with him.) She sure as hell doesn’t need to do this, she’d be perfectly justified losing her cool, but she decides the best way to handle this is with kindness… and that is almost certainly grating on Becky more.
Oh no, now I’m getting Catra bives from Becky
I don’t we think we’re that far yet. Though an AU where Becky does go that far would be…interesting.
Never mind. That was me trying to use HTML
Becky probably also isn’t accustomed to receiving genuinely unconditional support. Affection from the community she was raised in was always on hivemind terms, where it could be lost based on behavior and who she is. Where she had little agency.
She’s only just recently started feeling unconditional support from the likes of Leslie, Joyce (post-kiss), and Hank. Even though the rational part of her knows they’re there for her no matter what, she’s probably still thinking “okay but what’s the catch” in the back of her mind.
Maybe making an “enemy” she can control out of Dorothy gives her a safe pressure relief valve for that thinking.
Where’s Booster when you need them?
Becky needs to spend more time around Mary!
Dorothy is too damn nice. I don’t understand how she can go this long putting up with Becky treating her like this without getting angry and snapping at her. I would’ve yelled at Becky to cut it out long ago.
Y’gotta have some legendary patience if you’re aiming to go into politics, I suppose.
Dorothy moved past legendary a while back
Where is legendary on the S.I. prefix scale? I assume huge, stupendous and their ilk are already below Legendary, but what comes next? Epic? Mythological?
Can the Epic-meter and Mytho-gram be a thing? How big is the universe? One and a half epic-meters? How massive? Just a couple of mytho-grams. Give or take several legendari-grams.
Mythological sounds about right
You can have increased patience when it is in the name of testing a hypothesis. Here, Dorothy has correcty guessed that Becky’s sudden change in attitude is due to deeper lying problems and the more Dorothy doesn’t fit Becky’s worldview the more it’s going to force Becky into a reckoning with herself.
Wow! Becky in the last panel is almost as vonurable as the time when Hank let her join them for the roadtrip home.
So, for anyone keep scores I would say it’s about 3 points to Becky and 240584 points to Dorothy.
I mean, daaaaaang
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang
Dorothy just politely cut her schtick down to the bare bones and it was GLORIOUS.
Definitely proud of my gravatar today.
Unfortunately, Dorothy is really strong. Pretty much unbeatable.
You heard her Dorothy, no needles!
Having ine eyeball under hair constantly would probably make it atrophy.
Seems like Becky needs to hang out with Roz
“Dammit, Dottie, I need a RIVAL, not another friend!!”
“Sorry!”
“THAT IS NOT HOW YOU RIVAL!!!”
Becky is behaving like a wounded animal. At this stage I don’t know how I could be mad at her.
She need Baymax to give her a big hug and say “There, there.”
“At this stage I don’t know how I could be mad at her.”
I don’t know how Dorothy isn’t (you can help someone and be mad at them at the same time)
Yes. You can even love them while being mad and helping. One name for it is parenting.
Dorothy isn’t mad because she sees what Becky’s been doing as “play hating”. She says so at the end of their first day back: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/bff/
Also, they’ve only back 2 days and nearly everything Becky has said to irritate Dorothy has been pretty weak.
I don’t know why, but I think Dorothy’s feeling a lot.
She’s probably feeling guilty, sad, AND angry towards Becky.
Probably leading towards a blowup at the end of the book.
She is probably sick of her bullshit but she doesn’t care to be petty
glad Dorothy explained it out
Fucking finally.
BE FRIENDS GODAMMIT
YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO
NOW KISS
It literally took me this long to realize Becky is against glasses!Joyce because Dorothy has them. Wow.
Don’t feel bad; I had to read your comment.
Oh Becky…
Pff, not hard enough
“until I leave for that other school, anyway”