Teacher: Use ‘orange’ in a sentence.
Pupil: An orange is a brightly coloured edible citrus fruit with a juicy centre.
Teacher: *substitutes ‘kumquat’ in sentence* “FAIL!”
Might be an obvious dodge. I’d wager it’s more of a “it’s the last panel, we don’t have time to address this very valid point, besides we need a joke here”.
This sort of thing happens a lot (like, see yesterday, where the last panel was a joke about samesie fists instead of jumping into the obvious subject for this scene).
I hope this isn’t what Willis is going for. There’s no “valid” trauma that justifies being a butt, and comparing sources of grief kind of sucks. I know Willis is trying to do a “Joyce checks her privilege as a white Christian-atheist” arc, but this isn’t it.
Okay so I kinda want to talk about this, I’m not entirely sure how to phrase it correctly because I think asking sounds accusatory, but really I want to know for the topic itself.
Is it not weird to talk about an actual person’s complex relationship with a personal topic in relation to the fiction they create, especially when it involves speculating on them as a person?
I know the FAQ starts with “Joyce is autobiographical” where Willis shares info on their fundamentalist upbringing, but I think from there my objection is that talking about Joyce being autobiographical is something they’ve shared with us and how it informs their writing of Joyce as a character and through a deeply authentic lens. I feel that “this is Willis looking back on themself when they deconverted and going yikes” is kinda like invoking the author themself in the fiction they write? Like we’re not talking about their work of fiction anymore or the influences their life has had, we’re speculating on them as a person and how they themself feel about a complex and personal topic.
Adding to the above, “looking back on yourself and thinking ‘dude, uncool'” can absolutely be the intent. I know how I’ve been processing this storyline, but I’d feel weird if my read of the story was influenced by trying to treat a real person as part of the speculation.
I reiterate that this isn’t meant to be accusatory or judgmental, though I think I screwed that up with my last line, or that we’re going all Parasocial Relationship like how finding out John Mulaney divorced his wife became grounds for water cooler talk. It’s something I can really only understand in that if it happened to me it would upset me, that sharing myself led to me becoming part of my audience’s fiction, and I suppose I want to know if it’s an appropriate avenue of conversation since I see it crop up with artists every once in a while.
Willis has affirmed over and Over that everything related to Joyce and her relationship to a fundie upbringing is autoBio.
Everystrip he does had a main author avatar.
As for him looking back at himself and Yikesing ,
Just read his own comments on his republished Roomies scripts.
No Para social relationship necessary, just Paint By numbers media literacy and criticism. That the author turned Atheist & eventually soured on douchy public New Ashiests is historic. Their twitter is literally on every page. You dont have to read every Tumblr to know it.
“Like we’re not talking about their work of fiction anymore or the influences their life has had, we’re speculating on them as a person and how they themself feel about a complex and personal topic.”
This IS the Literal definition of “Autobiographical” so , Yeah. Thats how autobiography works. It shouldnt even be controversial at this point as Joyce has started drawing her in comic version of Roomies.
At some Point Ethan, Amber , Joe and Walky will induct Joyce into their Transformers Cult and the story will end with Joyce drawing dinobot comics forever.
As a creator myself, if I had a character who was meant to be largely autobiographical (or at least a huge aspect of them was like Joyce’s upbringing) and I had indicated publicly that was the case, then no, I don’t think it would be weird at all for my audience to consider that while reading and analyzing it. In fact, I’d probably want that to a degree!
What would be weird, to me, would be if the audience inferred something was autobiographical when I had never indicated it was. Which does happen to some creators. :C
I’m late catching up on DoA, but this comment reminded me of the preface to A Hero of Our Time (Russian novel from 1840) in which the author, Lermontov, responded to criticisms of the morality of the hero: ‘This book recently had the misfortune of being taken literally by some readers and even some reviewers. Some were seriously shocked at being given a man as amoral as the Hero of Our Time for a model. Others delicately hinted that the author had drawn portraits of himself and his acquaintances . . . What an old, weak joke!’
All this is to say that people have been taking characters as autobiographical against the wishes of their creators for a very, very long time.
Because Becky has learned how to be charismatic and funny enough about being a prick that people have trouble believing it might actually be hurting people.
Of course she also might have picked her target so that it isn’t really doing much harm.
As intentional as Joyce’ initially hurting Becky. It’s taking that strip in a vacuum and ignoring the context of her joking in the previous strip, told Ethan to his face that he had her respect for sticking around a couple strips later, and was visibly distraught (blaming herself for breaking them up) just a few strips after that when Joyce told her that she and Ethan were not dating anymore. In her words, she was explicitly doing a romcom thing to try and get Ethan to be more serious about his relationship with Joyce, not actually trying to break them up.
I cited the previous strip myself,and following strips. Becky wasn’t trying to break them up, she was trying to get Ethan into Joyce’s pants. She was upset with herself just a few strips later when Joyce told her she wasn’t dating Ethan anymore, and Becky thought it was her own fault for pushing on Ethan.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/noodle/ Becky:“So your boyfriend didn’t wanna come with, or what?” Joyce:“N-no…I’m not really sure we’re boyfriend and girlfriend after today anyway…” Becky:“What? You’re broke up now? He didn’t do it ‘cuzza me, did he? […] Aw jeez, I was tryin’ to nudge him inta noodlin’ yer caboodle, not scare him off!“ Becky (next strip):“Joyce, I’m really sorry about Ethan. I shoulda kept my dumb mouth shut. […] Why won’t you get angry at me? Joyce, I got your boyfriend to dump you. You–you should be f-fucking pissed.“
There is a difference between Becky’s playfully antagonizing Dorothy and Joyce’s maliciously attacking everyone who is religious in order to make herself seem superior. The only reason Joyce is bringing it up is to justify how shitty she treated Becky and her (Joyce’s) extreme narcissistic behavior.
This happened in an officially released Marvel comic from 2003 and it remains one of the most nightmarish things I’ve ever witnessed in the entire medium of sequential art.
Oh sure, it was an issue of Avengers where the Wasp is thrashing around in bed, climaxes, and then she pulls her sheet up as a shrunken Ant-Man walks from the shadows and between her cleavage.
Dorothy used Becky as a dildo in an official Marvel comic from 2003?
Not to unduly question your veracity, but to be completely honest, I’m having a bit of difficulty believing that. Was this a response to a different conversation or a joke perhaps?
I think Joyce needs to hear that her anger, although justified, is causing harm, but Dorothy is not the right one to tell her.
Personally, I think she needs to hear it from Jocelyne or Sarah, but Joyce won’t answer Jocelyne’s calls until someone else gets through to her, and Sarah blew a chance the day before. What Joyce really needs to see is that she’s being a hypocrite by lashing out at Becky, when everyone was so gentle with her misconceptions last semester. That’s what’s really grinding their gears, is seeing Joyce refuse to treat Becky with the same grace that Dorothy treated her with previously.
Meh. I think there is a bit of hypocrisy here but it’s that suddenly everyone is calling out Joyce for her attitude change because it’s something they don’t like and aren’t used to but other characters such as Becky have been annoying and that’s just fine because they always are. Joyce’s new expression of atheism is incredibly obnoxious and maybe a little toxic but so is Sarah’s misanthropy or Becky’s continuous jabs at Dorothy some of the latest have even been straight up mean instead of jokingly performative. Joyce will probably feel embarrassed by this as she matures but everyone telling her to tone it down or ease into it are just being assholes.
Like, I absolutely find Becky annoying as Hell, no argument. But it’s very clear that Dorothy doesn’t. She considers Becky a friend and understands that Becky’s ‘hostility’ is just a coping mechanism and she doesn’t mean anything malicious by it.
What irritates me about Joyce is how when her parents first met Dorothy, she was willing to put supporting her friends above her choice in faith. And now, she puts her choice in faith above supporting her friends (Becky). That’s what people are calling her out on, that her new decision is making her malicious and cruel.
Does it feel like everybody is ganging up on Joyce? Absolutely. But they are 100% right to call her out on her behavior.
It’s exactly faith because Joyce doesn’t know crap about how the world works scientifically and yet she doesn’t just jump into it, she’s sledgehammering everyone around her to make a point (mostly to herself)
“Facts and logic” stop being a valid argument the moment that one uses that to justify being an arse
Facts and logic are always valid, but there’s a time and a place. I do agree that Joyce doesn’t know enough to be as confident as she’s being right now.
Faith is a strong belief, confidence or trust in something. Agnostic atheism “I can’t prove it but there probably isn’t a god” isnt faith. Strong atheism “There is definitely no god” is arguably a form of faith. It is *not* a religion, but it is a faith if its as strong as Joyce is coming off here
It doesn’t really matter, it isn’t faith, or everytime you’re sure of something without checking is faith.
News of Paradise, a novel by another David (Lodge) tackles the gradual loss of faith of a clergyman, with some detailed vulgarization about academic works on faith, while one of his other novels, Therapy, has an heavy subtext about Kierkegaard’s notion of faith.
@Rowan strong Atheism is a strong certainty that there is no god, in the same way I have strong certainty that there are no teapots orbiting Jupiter and no dragons hiding in Carl Sagan’s garage. There is no evidence for them, so I dismiss the idea. I don’t have faith in any of these things – if you presented some kind of meaningful evidence for any of them I’d adjust my position.
Just because Dorothy and Becky are friends doesn’t actually make the way Becky treats her most of the time okay. Doing things like insulting Dorothy, justifying keeping her room messy, and saying Dorothy needs to be more interesting while doubling down on how she ‘s unapologetic for her own toxic possessiveness of Joyce are still bad even if Dorothy doesn’t aggressively challenge or object. It just kind of becomes one sided abuse which I think is why it rubs some of the readers the wrong way.
Also Joyce never actually chose atheism over Becky. Becky got justifiably offended at Joyce’s mockery and didn’t express shame or regret for her beliefs or lack thereof, but just that Becky heard them, Becky chose to cut things off. Which is a little more grey area for both of them considering their shared religious upbringing but that was not entirely on Joyce. It’s also not malicious or cruel. Dina’s an atheist and has said much meaner things to Joyce about her previous magical way of thinking. Joyce’s friends are actually just upset because she lost her previous optimism. They need to get over that.
Nah, Joyce defied her parents by turning to Jesus. He was her higher authority, not them.
Joyce rebelled against her parents for the sake of Dorothy, but it was still within the script of sticking to her guns. An authority figure told her to do something wrong, so Joyce appealed to a greater authority.
Or Dorothy could note “strictly speaking I agree with you, but I didn’t go insulting your beliefs, did I? I respected you as a person, if not your beliefs.”
Which might rein Joyce in a bit. Won’t solve her problem with Becky, since I’m not sure that’s solvable: Becky seems upset that Joyce is an atheist at all.
Once again, Becky hasn’t indicated that she cares that Joyce is an atheist, she cares that she caught Joyce mocking all religious people and didn’t say no when she asked if Joyce thought she was an idiot for believing in god
Definitely a dumbing moment for Dorothy. Both Dorothy and Joyce are overestimating Dorothy’s understanding of what it’s like to leave religion. Religions that focus on converting have strategies for welcoming in new converts and giving them the toolbox to deal with what they’re going through (to adhere to doctrine). You often don’t get that when you leave religion (because no authority to enforce any doctrine). And Dorothy doesn’t know what to do. Like she understands you can respect a person while thinking their beliefs unfounded. But not that you don’t have to respect a belief, because that belief harmed you when you had it.
Yeah. Dorothy had the right idea that other time when she told Danny she wasn’t the best person to talk about bisexuality. Too bad she doesn’t have the same reflex here.
I do agree with Dorothy just having no idea how to address this as a valid way to justify her actions. She didn’t say anything on this until an extended period of time, and it even now seems like she’s stumbling around trying to find something good to help Joyce out. She hits it on 3, though starts trailing off into jokey sarcasm on dildos and loses the thread afterwards, and I hope she finds it again in the next strip.
Yeah I’m not wild about that part of Dorothy’s advice. It comes across as incredibly infantilizing, which is something that everyone tends to do to Joyce, and which isn’t cool. That said, Dorothy is spot-on with her comments about Joyce’s anger and how it’s affecting those around her. Joyce absolutely should process this, and I think a lot of that is going to come out as anger after what her mom, her former church, and Becky’s dad did to her. But she needs to point that anger at someone like a therapist rather than at her friends. Being a bongo isn’t going to help her work this out, it’s just going to hurt people.
I still think the Joyce cannot be told what to do and expected to obey.
She needs an extended, open-ended discussion about religion, on terms of equality, with peers who will hear her out and not rely upon an assumption that they know better than she, in which her assumptions and reasoning are made explicit and examined, so that she can discover any non-sequiturs and logical gaps, be informed of things that she hasn’t known or though of, and has alternatives presented for her consideration.
To clarify: neither Sarah, nor Dorothy, nor Leslie, nor even Jocelyn have any proper authority over Joyce, and Joyce is done with believing on authority anyway.
Joyce needs to be shown by peers, or to discover through her own explorations, that she doesn’t have all the relevant facts yet, and hasn’t worked through the logic, so she is cocksure in her conclusions. Empiricism and logic have inherent limits, and Joyce really ought to take those into account in constructing her systems of belief.
No matter who says “Kid, you are bothering people. Shut up and try a different religion.”, that will neither command her obedience nor fix the problem of her being cocksure about things that aren’t certain.
“Rushed into Atheism too fast, try some Deism” is one of the most inane things I have ever heard, and is hilariously tone deaf to say to somebody in Joyce’s state. This isn’t hot sauces at the Thai place.
I agree, I never gradated out of Adventism but I did have a feeling similar to Joyce where I stewed in feelings I wasn’t allow to address.
Alot of people just pop out the other side go through an angry athiest period before settling down with what really matters.
Becky is doing what my call center training would call “move to resolve” but that never works until you get past empathy and assurance of help portions of a conversation. If you “move to resolve” without expressing empathy you’ll always get trapped in a circular conversation which is just a frustrating hell.
It makes sense coming from Dorothy, who was raised in a non-toxic, open-minded, supportive family where she was ALLOWED to question and explore things. Meanwhile Joyce didn’t have a “progression” from Christianity to Deism or otherwise — she had a single, unshakeable, unbending worldview, and when it shattered it took any opportunity for exploration with it…at least until Joyce heals from the shock of that change.
Dorothy really needs to acknowledge that Joyce never had the same intellectual privilege that she did growing up, that Joyce has to face the tremendous challenge of shoving the growth and phases you’re normally supposed to go through in childhood at an even pace in just a few short years.
“Hey, you’re lashing out at people” honestly IS what she needs to hear, though. She’s being a shit to people, and given Dorothy’s probably her best friend, she needs some honesty.
Dorothy is literally doing what Joyce imagined Becky was doing. Trying to take her realization away from her, she’s justifiably mad at Dorothy. If she needs to hear “you’re lashing out at people”, she needs to not hear it from a person who just said some offensive BS to her.
Like Joyce was in a private conversation being angry at her bullshit upbringing in a death cult, the worst thing you can say about her there is that she didn’t properly articulate that she only hates Bad Christians when that’s an absurd amount of emotional responsibility to expect from Joyce and at its best is pure tone policing when a victim of an evangelical death cult is forced to make nice with a powerful religious institution even in private. Becky made it about herself and Dorothy told her to go fix it and she’s disappointing for being a School Misser, and then three times now where Joyce has not been talking about it herself, Sarah tells her she’s not really sorry, that Joyce deserves to lose her job and that she needs to go back to who she was because now she’s even more annoying, and that Sarah will “forgive her” for what is obviously totally only Joyce’s fault.
Can I reiterate this? Joyce has only gone “lmao Becky you fartbutt” the three times Sarah brought it up unprompted. Is it even lashing out when you’re lashing out at the people who caused it and made it worse in every interaction?
I don’t really know how to process Joyce as wrong for lashing out at her friends when the people she’s “lashing out” at are directly the cause for her current mood and behaviour; she sure as hell was not acting like this with Joe when he gently let her process that she was a monkey and that she is real despite Heaven and Hell not being so. Like, maybe it actually matters that she was stalked to a private conversation by three people who don’t care to process why she’s feeling the way she does, and now Dorothy is telling her that her atheism should be eased into when that’s not how it works and least of all for Joyce, that Joyce needs to take responsibility for the argument that happened because Becky and Dorothy stalked her, and that Joyce doesn’t know what dildos are because she’s a dumb virgin and therefore what she says is inherently silly.
Aaaand that’s my mulligan on being on-topic for the day. Look me up if anyone wants a continuation of yesterday’s horrifying Sonic the Hedgehog facts.
I only just found and read yesterday’s Sonic thread, and I gotta thank you for your posts explaining weird Sonic canon shenanigans to people LOL. Ken Penders’s Archie writing was WILD
I’d agree but Dorothy does keep providing guidance and feedback on this issue. Seems perfectly fair to judge the quality of such advice.
If Dorothy is disinterested or too busy to engage with Joyce’s feelings, she’d be better served to make that condition clear rather than throwing out blind judgements without empathy.
Dorothy is probably a bad person to talk about this with, because her upbringing was fairly secular and she was encouraged to deliberate on and chose her own beliefs in a way that most people are not.
Yeah, the game of choosing what you believe in isn’t something you can really jump right into without a tutorial of some kind, and Joyce never got that AT ALL.
That, and there’s the fact that in choosing what SHE beleives in, she has yet to fulfill the unspoken prerequisite of telling the difference between HERSELF and her indoctrination.
In that task, the strategy she’s pretty much being forced to use right now is that she’s distancing herself from religion entirely in order to get as physically and mentally far away from her old group as possible,
like she’s going into an area with less LIGHT POLLUTION, so she can more clearly see the STAR, the solar system, the GALAXY that is HER SELF.
While I don’t agree and would rather throw a welcome party to Joyce, possibly with inviting Becky to it (so it’s clear this crisis is not about atheism), Erring doesn’t make Dorothy a bad person. Also checking privileges is swell, but it can’t become a a thing where you’re always silent or you’ll never learn and stay bigoted/full of whatev the systems made you think you were rigth for in the inside while being “good” only in appearance.
That is absolutely what they want. Notice how the moment Dorothy has to answer a reasonable question she instead mocks Joyce for not knowing what a dildo is.
To be clear: MOCKS her friend who is trying to escape a fundie brainwashing religion for not knowing a word due to the fundie upbringing and indoctrination she’s attempting to throw off.
Joyce isn’t being a great friend right now, but her life doesn’t revolve around other people. She’s allowed to be angry and hurt and stupid while she figures out what parts of her are real and what parts belong to a patriarchal power structure she is trying to step away from.
She needs support and empathy, not a call-out and mockery.
I think Joyce needs someone to talk with who will actually try to understand where she’s coming from and why she feels lied to and like she needs to lash out about that, instead of people being condescending and dismissive towards her like Sarah and Dorothy have been so far.
Joyce approached Dorothy with her samesies knuckles. Becky didn’t. Dorothy is a person who is allowed to have her own beliefs and feelings. Her sole purpose is not to be the magically wise best friend to protagonist Joyce. (Just like Becky’s sole purpose is not to be the sassy gay best friend.)
Truth to tell, after reading the comments here, many of them further down the page, I think there is considerable misunderstanding of the conversation.
Joyce is not antagonizing Dorothy, or at this point anyone but Becky. Dorothy is not upset with Joyce becoming an atheist or expressing it; rather she knows that Joyce loves Becky and, after things settle, will be sorry if she hurts Becky and will suffer if she has made a continuing friendship with Becky impossible.
Dorothy’s advice to become a Dieist was not a serious suggestion and neither was Joyce calling Dorothy a dildo a serious insult. Both were in the ballpark of what they allow each other as friends.
I realize the concept of close friends giving each other a hard time will be foreign to some of you, but it is nonetheless a thing.
Becky will take awhile to process the change in Joyce’s beliefs, but ultimately she will adjust. Probably.
ah, yeah you’re right. got carried away on this wave of outrage that keeps crashing around here.
there’s this weird disconnect between a comic that’s constantly bubbling with sarcasm and a screechingly earnest comment section. phew. i try to ignore the venom but some days it’s harder.
Becky’s been obnoxious, but 1. Dorothy hasn’t shown any signs of actually being annoyed by her and 2. she hasn’t actually hurt anyone. Wonder if Dorothy will point that out next.
I read Dorothy as deliberately being Very Patient with Becky; she’d just as soon Becky stopped, but think she’s helping by letting herself be a punching bag.
I think she’s an extremely patient person (I say that as one myself, it’s almost impossible to make me angry and I tend to just be disappointed in people), but! As an extremely patient person, I’m assuming she’s aware of how unfair Becky’s treatment of her is on paper and isn’t exactly a fan of it. She can put up with it, and is mostly okay with it, but I assume it bothers her at least a little on some level.
Actually Becky has hurt people. Joyce is one of the people she hurt.
See: “You’ve been mad at our parents for like five minutes” smart ass conversation when she didn’t get the version of Joyce she wanted.
Literally no one wants to allow Joyce to have feelings other than perky sunbeam and it’s awful to be that person in a group who isn’t allowed to express anger or hurt.
By the way, the correct answer is that nobody “gets to” be a giant ball of rage, and Becky is responsible for her bad behavior just like Joyce is responsible for hers. Pain and grief and sickness don’t actually excuse bad behavior, they just explain it and help us understand how to do better next time.
I mean, people have, generally in-comic given no comeuppance or like anger towards becky acting like a bongo at times. They all suddenly care because its joyce and they’re so used to her behaving how they used to make fun of her for.
I think it’s less of a general question and more of a literal “I lash out a BIT for half a day and everyone treats me like I’m a monster, Becky acts like a pill for half a year and everyone is super accommodating to her” Granted Backy’s circumstances are difference and Becky was being a pill in a different way than Joyce is being a pill. Still I can understand how someone can feel like there’s a double standard and find that frustrating.
Not even half a day, literally one paragraph. Immediately as soon as that first incident happened, she lost 100% of her support network. Dorothy went “that’s (as) disappointing (as when you did homophobia)” (given that’s the only other time she’s ever acted towards Joyce like this), Sarah immediately went into full “I want you to fail, and you’re a bongo who doesn’t even try to be empathetic”, Becky flipped out, and Joe never was able to help to begin with.
Joyce has good reason to believe that everyone is acting her this way because they found out she was Atheist, her fears of all the hate and her friends abandoning Joyce for her abandoning her religion, her reason for hiding her changes in belief all these months, *proven right*.
If everyone’s going to treat her like she’s “being a pill” regardless of whether she’s a little confident or a *lot* confident, why not just go full smug ass? The only way she can win is if she convinces everyone that she’s Right About The World either way.
(Obviously no, from a fully adult and outside perspective we can see that this isn’t fully justified, that her friends don’t see Atheism as a big reason to be upset at Joyce (except maybe Becky), and that there are better ways to resolve this, but I can’t expect that level of awareness from Joyce.)
I definitely feel like a double standard to me. Becky’s been acting like a jerk for ages and all the other characters seem to be ok with it for some reason that I still don’t understand, while Joyce is justifiably angry that her former religion lied to her and is lashing out and everyone treats her like she’s some terrible person for that.
Yep. I get why Joyce is angry, because Becky definitely did some lashing out at her in turn yesterday, but that does not change the part where Joyce woke up today and is being an aggressively unpleasant jerk right now.
That said, Dorothy’s ‘couldn’t you just try deism instead’ isn’t a great tack to take here, either, which makes sense because HER religious journey was not founded in trauma, abuse, and total rigidity, and she probably did sort of try out a couple steps along the way. As ever, I point out that Joyce’s friends REALLY aren’t equipped for helping her unpack this, and that she DESPERATELY needs someone who’s experienced in helping sort through religious trauma. Because Joyce DOES need somewhere to be a ball of rage about her upbringing, it just needs to be somewhere she won’t be hitting other people in the process.
The big problem is the person who has experienced the same level of religious trauma is the one Joyce is most angry at. I think the real reason is that Joyce is mad that Becky blames the church and not God.
Joyce is mad they fundamentally disagree about what an appropriate response is.
There’s no reason it can’t be both. Joyce can be simultaneously disgusted with faith and jealous of those who can retain theirs. I know I certainly feel that way at times.
Cognitive dissonance isn’t exactly uncommon in fundamentalist circles, after all.
no. Joyce does not think Becky should blame God. Because Joyce does not think God exists. Atheists aren’t angry at God. Joyce is mad because of the things Christianity got her family to do to her, and got her to do to herself. She’s flabbergasted that Becky doesn’t question Christianity. Especially when the thing that got Joyce to question Christianity was what it said about Becky.
Yep. Atheists — well, deconverts, anyway — aren’t angry at God, and the implication that they are is a belittling put-down. They are angry at the smug people who told them lies in order to pocket prestige, privileges, power, and tithes, or to enable abusers.
This anger may sometimes be based on a very uncharitable appreciation of their elders’ motives. But that is beside the point: it isn’t directed at a fictitious character.
Joyce is also angry at the practice of Christianity–which would be valid if she were angry at Christian fundamentalism; but no, she’s just angry at Christianity in general. Maybe religion in general. Certainly faith in general.
I think that is a ridiculous sentiment. I don’t believe the mythical Q anymore than Slenderman exists but I absolutely hate the concept of Qanon and the people who use it to justify hate. Indeed, its hard to understand your take. Becky continuing to believe is clearly something that bothers Joyce.
Joyce for SURE needs a safe space and person to work through this, but unfortunately, there just doesn’t seem to be ANY.
Regardless of whether there actually are any available, they’re totally useless if Joyce doesn’t / want to see them. In order for her to use such resources, she has to perceive them.
In a nutshell, brace yourself for even more collateral damage as Joyce undergoes even more explosive growing pains.
Joyce is still thinking in terms of sides to be taken, and if Leslie’s going to take anyone’s side it’s Becky’s. And Jacob’s in the “likes religion” camp too… plus, you know, burnt bridges.
I’m betting ‘end of the book at latest,’ personally. You can get some drama and character development out of a fight like this, but I don’t think it’s a permanent friend breakup or even a semi-permanent one like Ethan and Amber.
So, how one defines neurodivergence is extremely varied and prone to disagreement. I’ve seen ‘it only refers to autism and ADHD, maybe OCD,’ ‘it DOESN’T refer to autism just ADHD and related conditions that aren’t autism’ (a stance I disagree with strenuously and find ahistorical, and which appears to be unusual,) a lot of pointing out that only including autism and ADHD ‘because they’re frequently comorbid’ excludes the similarly co-occurring dyspraxia, speech disorders, intellectual disabities, and schizophrenia (which are generally less acceptable than autism and ADHD, and it’s not like they’re socially acceptable to begin with,) and it goes on and on. Generally, what it strictly refers to is ‘neurodevelopmental conditions, viewed non-pathologically while acknowledging they can still be disabling.’ Technically in that light, I don’t think the ones generally classed as mental illnesses count, but ultimately I just lean on the side of ‘fuck it, I will count everything, ultimately you’re not going to cure PTSD so much as manage it but it still deserves compassion and recognition people will keep having it and some conditions that people weren’t born with – which the neurodevelopmental framing generally implies – should absolutely be viewed through this lens.’ (Case in point, DID. As far as anyone can tell, that’s something brains develop in early childhood when their sense of self is still forming, and significant abuse and trauma can lead to said small child brain compartmentalizing to the point that it doesn’t ultimately form a single sense of self, it forms several. Per plural people, attempts to make other alters go away and ‘cure’ it pretty much always fail, because an ‘original’ identity didn’t really develop in the first place.) My depression is best described as a chronic illness, emphasis on illness, but at a certain point you have to acknowledge that yeah, exciting new TREATMENTS might appear, but a permanent cure is unlikely and another depressive episode is inevitable.
@Regalli
This is an extremely well-explained and helpful post. I knew it all already, but I just wanted to thank you for putting it out there! 😀
And, The Wellerman, here’s my two cents:
As with any niche community, there are unfortunately gatekeepers to the term ‘neurodivergent’, sadly. I tend to err on the side of including more people than not, and would say even things like depression and anxiety clearly count – they warp people’s thinking in a way that is NOT easily understood unless you’ve experience them yourself. I was technically diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, but even putting that aside I would say my history of depression, anxiety, and the constant low-level PTSD of being queer would absolutely qualify me to use that term for myself. My autistic and plural husband would also agree with me. (I bring that up because autism and DID are pretty universally considered non-neurotypical haha)
It would have been an awkward, embarrassing, and troubling conversation if it had been about how Joyce was now an atheist. But it became about how Joyce thinks Becky is still brainwashed by their cult and Becky thinks Joyce is just an atheist to feel superior.
Liz might have been a good person to express rage to, but she doesn’t have either the breadth nor the depth in her knowledge of religion and philosophy to be much help to Joyce in constructing a sound system of beliefs.
Honestly, I don’t think Liz was that person, either – they both clearly needed someone who had experience WORKING WITH religious trauma, sorting through the feelings of hurt and feeling dumb for ever believing while encouraging them to be less hard on themselves and to reassess the ‘all religion is dumb and so are the people who believe it!’ (‘So do you think that about Becky? How about your friend Jacob, him too?’) They needed space to express that hurt and someone who understood, but they were both too hurt themselves to unpack the stuff that COULD hurt their friends. Like, seriously, this is ‘topics you eventually have to bring up in therapy, probably over a period of years.’ Jacob might know Joyce well enough to defuse a couple points, so could Joe. Leslie or Jocelyne as adults with firsthand experience with the ‘raised in a religiously abusive environment’ department but also a bit of distance from that trauma might do even better. But while expressing that anger is necessary and important, so is the subsequent asking of gentle but pointed questions. Joyce shouldn’t feel dumb for ever believing, and I’m damn sure she doesn’t actually think Walky (known atheist) is smarter than her friends on the cast who are religious simply because he’s an atheist. She just needs those redirects, and the willingness to ultimately acknowledge that maybe Jacob’s, or Jennifer’s, or even Becky’s experiences with faith are fundamentally different than what Joyce experienced, and that doesn’t mean something’s wrong with Joyce but it does make it easier for them to reconcile their faith with the people who use it to hurt people.
There’d be a beat panel with a scrunched up face of pain and anguish and then one where Joyce grinds “…yeeees?” out between clenched teeth. I don’t think she’s in any mental state to back down even when presented with a question like that.
Agreed. I think she could back off once she’s no longer on the defensive, but she’s going to be on the defensive until the person asking if she thinks that is doing so while acknowledging Joyce’s anger and loss of faith are both valid and reasonable.
(On the subject of Walky and Jacob’s relative intelligence – Walky’s definitely very smart and not utilizing things well due to undiagnosed ADHD hitting a breaking point. Jacob’s clearly a smart cookie as well – law is hard. I’m not ranking their intelligence, but Joyce clearly doesn’t think Walky’s good enough for Dorothy, and I think that includes not acknowledging that he IS smart but doesn’t apply it in ways Joyce sees as Smartness.)
Walky actually probably IS smarter than Jacob, it’s jsut that his ADD doesn’t let him apply that intelligence to university coursework properly.
Walky is also a better person than Jacob, a statement I base on the fact that we’ve never seen Walky surprise-kiss a girl and IMMEDIATELY follow that up with “you’re not who I want”.
Whether Walky is objectively more intelligent that Jacob or not, Joyce’s distaste for Walky will only let her claim he is if she’s doubling down in a different argument.
This… doesn’t follow? I assure you that Joyce’s distaste for Walky is VASTLY inferior to my absolute loathing for, say, McConnell, but I’ll still acknowledge that McConnell is quite possibly the best-at-politics in the United States government. It’s just that his politics are absolute shit, just like his entire party and the people who vote for them.
You’re not Joyce, though. I think she has a rather lower threshold for dislike and a much much higher one for admitting good things about those she dislikes.
Yeah. I strongly doubt Joyce has a clue what deism is, and at this point, Dorothy should’ve realized that.
But 100% agree that all of Joyce’s friends are badly suited for this conversation. Which is part of why I’m so frustrated by comments that are slagging the entire cast for not paying proper obeisance to Joyce.
And sometimes the why’s are sympathetic enough that the people around us aren’t really bothered by it, like Dorothy isn’t really upset by Becky doing her ‘we’re enemies’ bit.
Which, doesn’t really help with Dorothy and Joyce here because I don’t think Dorothy knows the full extent of what’s going on or how Joyce has been feeling, so she doesn’t really have the opportunity for that.
Plus Dorothy has talked to Becky about the “we’re enemies” bit and her approach to Joyce here isn’t any harsher. Or less effective, for that matter.
It’s also an awkward thing for Joyce to bring up, since she would have been the obvious person to confront Becky about being a dildo to Dorothy, but she’s one of the people who let Becky “lash out”.
No, it’s just that Joyce has ALWAYS yearned for a special samesies-knucks-level connection with Dorothy, and dreams of a moment when they’re totally vibing.
Main difference is probably that Dorothy and Becky do not love each other. Which still doesn’t make Becky’s behavior towards Dorothy okay, but when someone you love lashes out at you, there’s a betrayal that just isn’t there when the person lashing out at you is ‘your best friend’s other besty who’s now your roommate, but not quite a friend’.
But Becky didn’t lash out at Dorothy because of not being a fundie any more (and apparently Becky doesn’t think she has to swing all the way over to “atheist” just because she’s learned the church she was raised in was wrong). Becky harassed Dorothy out of jealousy, because Joyce likes her. And now Becks seems to have decided that a friendly rivalry is more fun than being enemies.
I haven’t seen any evidence of friendliness on Becky’s part. She’s just putting less effort into bullying because Dorothy isn’t reacting (aka hurting or fighting back) like Becky wants.
She did buy her the donut but when Dorothy suggested it was a sign they were actually friends, she shouted at Dina that Dorothy was twisting the situation around.
This is the most interesting Joyce face I can recall. She’s hurt, She’s trying. She doesn’t have to be all sunny alla the time. And indeed – Why does Becky get to be a bongo but Joyce gets grief for being a tympani? /sorrynotsorry/
First of all, at least Joyce is doing good by laying forth why she’s so angry and frustrated, and why she’s making this change.
Anger is totally OK, so long as it’s focused on the abuse and manipulation she was subjected too. However, she is not right to take it out on those she loves, as well as other innocent people she lumps in with the abusive elements. On that note, she really needs to learn that you don’t need to be stupid to be manipulated. Unfortunately, something tells me she’s not gonna take a critical thinking or similar course until at least next semester.
Second, Joyce might actually have a point about Becky being allowed to lash out while she isn’t. They’ve both been through some REALLY though stuff, and frankly I think she’s been getting the short end of her friends who’ve always stuck her in her role of the “naive Weirdo girl”.
“Until at least next semester” might as well be never in DoA-time, given that it took the comic a full decade to reach the start of this semester even with at least three notable timeskips. 😛
Joyce definitely has a point re: ‘Becky gets this and I don’t?’ The ‘Becky gets support and understanding while Joyce is told to stop it and shut up’ feel has bugged me for a long time, such that my reaction to Joyce saying it was ‘Finally it’s text!’
Not great that she’s immediately dismissed by subject change, but I’ll take what I can get.
I’ll be happy to be wrong, but I doubt it. If I were betting, my money would be on Dorothy picking up again, some more, about how Joyce should go grovel to Poor Becky and stop having inconvenient feelings and unprocessed thoughts.
She had it in hand the night they moved back in, but given when it was sent it HAS to have been for the fall. It would almost certainly have been received after registering for classes for this semester given the reveal timing, and it makes no sense to go for a couple weeks at one school and then transfer to another hours away mid-semester.
One of my best friends in high school and myself would call each other dildos more times a day than I could count. Don’t really like to think about high school but there is one nice memory at least.
You can’t really “rush into atheism” though, Dorothy. Like, you can’t choose whether or not you believe in a god/gods–otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many people I know (myself included) who desperately tried to cling onto their faith for years but couldn’t, because you can’t force yourself to believe something you don’t. Is Joyce being too abrasive about it? Sure, but it’s not like she chose to lose the faith that once meant the world to her.
Joyce *is* hurting people she cares about and she *is* acting like the “annoying new atheist” stereotype, but she does raise a valid point in the penultimate panel. I know it’s just because Joyce is the protagonist and Becky isn’t, but Joyce *does* get a lot more shit in-universe for her actions/behavior (not gonna touch the subject of meta with a ten-foot pole here) than Becky does. And… she’s not wrong to be upset by that, tbh. From a writing perspective, I get it. But as a person, I’d be pissed by the double standards, too.
yeah, it’s kind of like saying you’re “rushing” into the ground. You’re not really putting any force into it — it’s gravity doing the work for you as you fall from faith
Now, the question is whether or not it’s like those Wile E. Coyote cartoons, where you only start falling once you realize gravity works.
Like, obviously they’re both traumatized kids, and they both deserve to be met with compassion and kindness when they inevitably lash out because of it. But the difference in the way they’re treated when they act badly is grating.
(That was to clarify my earlier comment, not a response to yours. Though that’s good food for thought! I definitely think you fall *faster* once you realize it.)
Dorothy also had the luxury of exploring Atheism in her childhood, rather than having the One True Path drilled into her skull.
What looks like “rushing” to her is very likely a much more complicated dynamic, where Joyce is rapidly re-evaluating everything she’d ever been taught and conditioned to believe in a relatively short time, at a point in life where ALL of her friends are expecting her to remain exactly the way she was before.
Also Joyce has been stewing this since early October. But since she didn’t keep Dorothy in the loop, it may look more sudden to D… I wonder if D is also hurt by that. “I’m your atheist friend! Why is this the first I’m hearing about it?”
Right, it would be like rushing in to understanding a proof in mathematics. One moment you can’t get across the pons asinorum, then suddenly you get it and you see that the fifth proposition of Euclid is true. There’s no halfway house of isoceles-agnosticism, and no way of choosing not to understand.
Although on Dorothy’s point, I don’t think there’s a …good way to ease into being an atheist. Like…once you stop believing you sorta stop believing. You don’t get like…training wheels or anything. I balk at her notion that you should have something between religion. Though I’d also say that having a perspective out of your own involvement with religion can do wonders for you. Like just because your religious experience is bad doesn’t give you a right to talk down to other people and their experience.
Yeah, as much as Dorothy is clearly trying to help she really has no idea what she’s talking about in that regard. She doesn’t have any actual experience with deconversion because she was never religious in the first place.
The stuff about how Joyce will one day realize that her anger is hurting the people she loves is closer to right, but I’m pretty sure Joyce is aware that the things she said hurt Becky at this point. She just doesn’t know what else to do, and Dorothy doesn’t really have much to give her in the way of constructive ideas.
I think it’s because Dorothy eased into it herself – when we meet her parents, they basically say that Dorothy got to choose, even deliberately experimented with faith.
There’s plenty of ways. It’s just that most atheists don’t recognize that any of them went through them.
Like, there are many, many volumes of theological text where Christians struggled with the nature of their beliefs. They exist and demonstrate many, many different positions on how faith interacts with life. But the vast majority of Christians do not know these texts exist, and consequently, the vast majority of post-Christian atheists also do not know these texts exist. They went through their struggles alone and did not tap the rich history of thought that would have made it feel less like a desperate freefall and more like a rappelling down a wall.
That’s not really quite the same. The theological texts about Christians struggling with their beliefs lead to those Christians affirming their beliefs, otherwise they wouldn’t be theological texts. Reading more about how people overcame their doubts and returned to the fold isn’t a great model for breaking out of their faith.
There is a lot of material available these days about deconversion and becoming an atheist, especially online, but a huge amount of it is from the angry atheist side.
We definitely need more resources about leaving the more toxic forms of religion and making a healthy transition to something else – whether it’s atheism or a healthy denomination. That falls more into counseling than into theology though.
I’m not suggesting self-help books. I’m suggesting theological texts. Ideally, these texts are recommended by your personal pastor or priest, because these are people who have gone to school and learned these things and have libraries with copies. But the more non-denominational and fanatical your sect is, of course, the less likely the leader has any kind of adequate training or foundation in shared beliefs with people across history.
These texts are usually relatively strong in argumentation. There are a lot of garbage premises, of course, but what’s important is that the author shows you how he (it’s always a he) thinks. Shows you how to construct a framework for belief, how one thing leads to another, how to actually take in evidence and work it in. And more importantly, shows you how to discover flaws in that framework and how to criticize it.
I am not suggesting that you become an atheist by this process. I am suggesting that you become a thinker by this process, and specifically someone who has tools for thinking about faith. Tools mean that you can traverse the metaphorical cliff-face at your own pace, rather than jumping into the air and releasing yourself to gravity.
Is Becky even a huge ball of rage? She’s been annoying to Dorothy, who only met Becky a couple months ago, and therefore has a pretty small emotional connection to her. She’s also, so far, never seemed to actually hurt Dorothy- the things she’s a dick to Dorothy about are not things that Dorothy finds super meaningful, right? Like Dorothy isn’t super hung up on the idea that Becky’s known Joyce longer, and accusing her of being super productive is, like, basically a compliment. At worst, she’s been pretty rude and obnoxious, and it’s not GREAT that she’s doing that; I probably wouldn’t hang out with someone who did that.
Joyce is torpedoing her longest and most important friendship by declaring that her deeply-held foundational beliefs are stupid. That’s not, like… the same thing, Joyce.
Whether or not it’s the same thing exactly, the point is a good one and someone needed to put it textual, I think. Becky is petted and praised for her jerkery, or at least smilingly excused with no warning or consequence, for months on end. Joyce is ‘torpedoing her deepest friendships’ by… being a pill for half a day.
There’s some fairness to that, but it’s a pretty lousy argument for Joyce to use.
Of all the people who were allowing Becky to lash out, Joyce was the most prominent, while Dorothy was the target. Now that Joyce has lashed out at Becky, she’s upset that Dorothy is (pretty mildly really) not okay with it. “I didn’t help you when my friend was being a jerk, so why are you helping her when I’m being a jerk” isn’t really a good take.
I seem to recall Becky fine-tuning her frenemies act to do the most damage possible over those couple of months, and when Dorothy did actually start to get bothered she was pleased.
Pleased up until she realized she’d gone too far and talked to Dina about ways to make it up to her.
Partly I think the context for their relationship is that Becky, like Joyce, is poorly socialized. Becky wants to be friends with Dorothy, but her model for friendship is Joyce and that friendship is based partly around Becky teasing Joyce. Which works for them, but Dorothy doesn’t react right when Becky does it to her, so she kept doubling down.
This isn’t good and it’s something she’ll need to overcome, but it’s also neither malicious as often portrayed here or her lashing out in rage as Joyce describes it.
At least if I’m at all right about her.
She’s not wrong in panel 3 (Joyce is also not wrong in 4, there is a double standard). Dorothy’s so very wrong in panel 1. She’s doing exactly what Joyce mistakenly thought Becky was fighting about. Offensive and nonsensical, you can’t choose to believe.
That doesn’t make any sense. That’s pretense, not belief. I sincerely do not believe any gods exist. I didn’t choose not to believe, I realized that I didn’t. I can’t choose to believe some any gods exist, even though some of them are appealing.
It feels like a lot of people pick their beliefs by what they think is true, but then a lot of people pick their beliefs by what they really want to be true, and the two have a difficult time understanding each other.
Like for instance there are a lot of things like Pascal’s wager that try to bribe people into believing. That won’t make sense to you and it doesn’t to me either, but plainly it a lot of people think it does.
I don’t feel or believe that I pick or choose what to believe at all. I’m doubtless as much inclined to cognitive biases as the next person, but it seems and feels to me that I believe what seems to be true whether it is welcome or not, and without any voluntary yea or nay.
I don’t believe it’s pretense. I believe you control what you are. If you say you believe or don’t then you are making a stand against raw emotion. I view it as any other form of self-control.
Then again, I have been said to think in a fundamentally “weird” way before I found out I was neuroatypical.
You may not choose to believe things, but of course other people choose to believe things. That’s the difference between believing and known. I know scientific facts, which have been proven to be true. I choose to believe in religion, which can’t possibly be proven to be true. If I were certain it were true, it wouldn’t be a belief, it would just be another fact about the universe.
Not really, I think. There’s a different distinction. I don’t know any more than you do in terms of hard scientific evidence or logical proofs, but I just don’t believe. I never made any conscious choice not to, but I don’t. I can accept that others have made that choice – either to believe or not to believe, but I never experienced it as a choice. I don’t see how I could decide to believe in God. I could pretend to, but I don’t see a way that I could change my actual lack of belief.
From my reading of the comic, Joyce is much the same, though she came to it through losing her belief rather than not having any to start with. She never chose it, she just stopped believing. She stopped feeling God or realized she never felt him in the first place and her belief went with that.
Amtelope, there are no scientific facts which have been proven to be true. There are those with a lot of evidence. All it takes is one counter example though and science changes its mind. Proof only comes up in mathematics, where things are logical consequences of definitions and counter examples to proofs only means that it didn’t fit the definition to start with, so it isn’t really a counter example.
Yeah, the problem isn’t that Joyce is atheist, but that she is vocally telling people (including believers) that NOT being an atheist is silly and makes you an idiot.
I also wish Becky didn’t lash out. Worth noting too is that Becky never tells people that their beliefs are dumb. Becky and Dina have a nice relationship despite not sharing religious beliefs, and part of that is not calling the other person an idiot all the time for their beliefs.
She thinks Becky believes a stupid thing, but she’s explicitly said that Becky is smart, and that’s why she’s confident that Becky will let go of the stupid things that they both “believed” (really that only Joyce ever believed because Becky didn’t consider those the “important” parts) the same way she did..
Amusingly, Jesus’ ministry was all about reform Judaism and ignoring the crappy parts. So, yes, Becky is actually a leg up here on reform. I can imagine Biblical Joyce being appalled at Historical Jesus for all the screw ups he’s making of scripture.
Joyce and Becky never actually had the same religious beliefs at all. Becky believed that God loved her, and backed her against her oppressors. Joyce believed that the substitutory sacrifice of the incarnate God was necessary to save her from Original Sin.
Becky dumped belief in the Creation, Eden, and the Fall last semester, with no effect on her faith, which was never in those beliefs. She doesn’t actually believe half the beliefs that Joyce thinks are so dumb.
Yup. I alluded to this yesterday: using labels like “Christian” is useless. All that this label demonstrates is that you believe in calling yourself a Christian. On a different forum, someone asked what beliefs were shared between various right-wing hucksters, and the answer is the same: they believe that they have a right to use that label.
The label doesn’t actually tell you anything useful about what they believe. It’s like asking an undocumented immigrant in America whether or not they’re an American. Think about the actual answers you’d get from such a question… and that question has the convenience of actual legal status and established geopolitical borders.
This comment actually happens to bring up a really interesting angle I personally relate to.
I’ve never been undocumented – but at the same time, I’m a third culture kid and grew up in a country (Germany) that was not my parents’ (the US). We were there with permission, but I’ve never legally been German… but on the other hand, legality can also go fuck itself considering I celebrated as many German holidays as American ones growing up. And I only just reached the point where I’ve lived in the US as long as I lived in Germany. So, in a very real sense, I’m at least part German, legality be damned LOL.
Like, almost no one in the US knows what Martinstag or Krampusnacht/Sankt Nikolaus Tag are. Or Fasching. Or Hexennacht. Or what the hell a Schultüte is. Or even that Christmas trees are from Germanic pre-Christian pagan traditions. HUGE culture shock when I moved here and discovered people didn’t know what these things were haha. Yet on paper, I’ve always been 100% American despite only spending the first seven months of my life there before I moved ‘back’ to the US.
So yeah. Labels aren’t always clear, and you have to dig deeper and see what people actually mean when they use them.
yes… when Becky went to Joyce for counsel and support and Joyce was too wrapped up in her crisis of faith to actually offer such… how horrible of Becky.
She doesn’t attack specific people for their beliefs, but she does attack beliefs themselves. It’s pretty hard to read Panel 2 of this and come away with something other than Becky declaring “The defining feature of Atheism is hating people.”, and to somebody secretly Atheist like Joyce is at this point, she’s got good reason to feel attacked.
Let’s look at it like this, Joyce is obviously trying to hard to push the whole fact she now identify as atheist, yeah I get it’s maybe somehow liberating for her but still I don’t think being a douche about it is the practical way to go about it especially since Dorothy and Dina don’t seem to act that way either.
As for “being a dildo to Dorothy” the only people letting her get away with that were Joyce and her.
Dina literally yelled “I CAN STILL SAVE THIS ONE” when Joyce brought up some of her previous beliefs while Becky and Dina were talking science. If that’s not telling somebody that you think their beliefs are stupid, I’m not sure what is.
I think part of the issue is that Becky doesn’t believe in Creationalism or Biblical literalism but people unfamiliar with….99% of religious people, assume all religious people are fundamentalist literalists.
Dude, I think you (and much of this comic’s readership) massively overestimate how your experience of religious people translates over the rest of the world.
And on the Gallup side, apparently 40% are strict creationists in the USA. And this is a “secular” nation with tolerably good education. You think places with worse science education are going to have any better rates?
First of all, to address your main point, that still leaves at least 60% of a nation that is, I’ll remind you, majority Christian, who don’t believe in creationism. It’s really not unusual for Christians, especially outside of the evangelical movement, to believe in evolution, as evidenced by the Scientific American article you linked.
Second, I honestly think you’re overvaluing the quality of American education in this respect. In some parts of the country, they don’t just fail to teach evolution properly, they actively teach creationism. I get the sense that you’re thinking about this a bit wrong, like creationism is just a more primitive understanding of the world that people believe until they’re taught otherwise, rather than what it actually is – a concerted reactionary pushback to secularization and the encroachment of scientific discoveries onto conservative religious doctrine.
My main point is that you guys can’t keep treating literalism as some kind of negligible aberration. It’s a massive part of the belief system of this country. Yes, other western nations are better, but do you think for a second Iran, Iraq, hell even most of rural Inda actually know about evolution and other scientific principles? (Worth noting, India’s minister for education has publicly attacked evolution.)
To address your second point… well, what is your point? Are you trying to say that people didn’t believe this before scientific advances gave us better explanations for life? Because they definitely did. Are you saying that there’s a concerted effort to keep this factually wrong belief system in circulation? Because yes, obviously. And it’s a very large (and extraordinarily vocal) group pushing this. See above large group of believers.
And that rolls right back around to why some Atheists feel the need to get quite vocal on why exactly this shit makes no sense.
I think Becky accepted literalist statements because everyone around her affirmed them, but never really cared about them. Her reaction to an honest explanation of evolution and the evidence for it (as distinct from a straw man constructed to deceive her about it) was a “Wow! That’s so cool!” that did not touch her faith at all.
People don’t think Becky was a creationist because of notions about “what all Christians believe”. They think she was a creationist because of what the faith she and Joyce were raised in taught. And she was, until Dina converted her to evolution.
It’s not bashing or misunderstanding Christianity to look at the actual specific (non-)denomination in question.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t remember Becky being that much of a jerk? I don’t remember anything mean from becky toward anybody but dorothy at all. And Dorothy obviously wasn’t terribly bothered by it and Becky didn’t escalate it to a level that was actually hurtful to Dorothy. So who has Becky actually hurt?
becky has been literally actively trying to make joyce dislike dorothy since her introduction – something she admitted when dotty confronted her in their room after they became roomates – and has also admitted to actively going out of her way to try and upset and belittle dorothy
yes, she does it in a ‘jokey haha I can totally claim I wasnt serious but I was’ way, but shes still doing it.
like yes it didnt hurt dorothy, because dorothys mature enough not to be bothered by it, but she was still trying and she was so unsubtle at it the one person she was trying to hide it from saw it
but yeah, joyce is still being a bongo here and lashing out
is fine for a few days, they’ve only been living together for a few days at this point. In my experience, it’s harmful after about a couple of weeks, or when ants/mice/mold show up.
Becky scolded Joyce for not doing Christianity the way she wanted. Becky interrogated her when she was trying to be supportive.
And maybe Joyce is talking about when Becky lashed out at her dad.
When Becky first started the frenemies routine, Dorothy was bothered by it. She wants to be liked by everyone and it upset her that Becky was against her. Post-timeskip she started doing the “I’m not really bothered” act, but she admitted it was an act specifically designed to get Becky to stop being passive-aggressive. Therefore Dorothy found the behavior annoying, she just didn’t see the value in calling it out.
ymmv. some readers react very strongly to her. but there’s precious little in-comic indication that any actual character ever got angry or upset at Becky for crossing boundaries. So far, my own feeling has been that Becky for all her high-drama antics is actually pretty good at reading people and respecting boundaries. Based, again, on how the actual characters respond to her. Not on how I would feel in the situation.
But hey! we’ll see if this gets addressed by Dorothy tomorrow.
Joyce needs a healthy outlet that doesn’t involve the people who are directly involved with her trauma and situation tbh
All the energy that shs been holding in for a long time is out and i understand her feelings of not being apologetic about it, especially since she vented her feelings out to someone who has been an unhealthy influence on her and it only just so happened that becky and dorothy were there. It doesnt excuse her actions at all but i get where shes coming from
I think people often forget that she didnt have much time or didnt know how to process these feelings and its very hard for people to react maturely, even if you’re an adult, when they’re directly involved with it.
I just hope it doesnt take too long for her to realise that her current outlook is unhealthy for her and that she can find a healthier outlet to procesd her feelings
Exactly!! If she had done it delibrately in front of becky/dorothy i wouldve been more judgemental but yeah, i really cant fault her for not being apologetic about this
I feel like they’re different since its also about how joyce’s dynamics with her friends. Like with becky joyce is clearly scared of her knowing that shes atheist (cant comment on dorothy) but shes more comfortable with joe and sarah since its likly she assumes that they don’t have as much expectations of her. So i don’t think i can comment on her actions with joe and sarah. Again though, i’m not excusing her actions at all, the comment i made was more emphathizing with her trauma and actions more than anything
“Joyce, everyone is annoyed by the way you keep telling people their religious beliefs are wrong. This is because your religious beliefs are wrong. Try deism or another, less annoying religion”
Becky is an orphan after her sole remaining parent, the gun-toting maniac that almost killed her friends, was brutally murdered. Joyce may have had her entire afterlife torn away and is suffering the existential backlash, but at least she still has family that care about her. Becky’s letting loose and trying to discover herself while still holding onto the emotional crutches that she needs to (i.e. her mom isn’t “really” gone). Joyce is latching onto anything that justifies her worldview (“I am somebody who knows THE TRUTH and I’m better than those other people who don’t”), no matter how toxic the source, just like her mom.
Joyce didn’t have her afterlife torn away from her. It’s her real life that’s been damaged. I mean we *just* saw how that kind of upbringing effects a person’s life even after they realize there’s no god waiting to torture them for eternity if they have sex at the impious time.
She doesn’t know how much of her family will still care for her. Well, she knows some of them won’t. We don’t know the specifics of what happened with Jordan, but it sounds like there’s some degree of shunning.
I kind of am fully expecting Jordan to be revealed to be an actual monster when Joyce assumes he’s being shunned for something righteous. Like he’s a child abuser or something. That and we’re running out of bad guys.
Given the whole sex abuse scandal involving the 19 Kids and Counting family, I (unfortunately) don’t think child abuse would be enough to prompt shunning so long as he was still a GOOD CHRISTIAN child abuser. Even if the person he abused was, say, his very young sister.
It’s possible he’s actually an asshole, but Hank’s clear regret for the situation and Carol’s ‘we got the Jordan situation by not squeezing hard enough’ to justify pulling Joyce from school both say to me that they were, in fact, in the wrong there. This is not incompatible with ‘and subsequently became a real asshole,’ but I feel confident that whatever reason Jordan’s estranged, Hank and Carol did wrong by their kid there and Hank realizes he did.
Yeah, you really cannot underestimate just how much evangelicals are willing to.completely overlook horrid things a person has does because they share the same belief system.
By their particular community? And the parents specifically? No, there is DEFINITELY a belief that the kid made sufficient amends to God that it’s okay, because… he’s male, I guess. Cults!
Yeah, I could see him being a real edgelord atheist, especially if he got more set in his edginess after cutting ties.
I could also see him being *gasp!* Catholic, or even worse converting to some NON-CHRISTIAN religion, but my main realistic guesses are ‘atheist’ and/or ‘pornlord.’
I like to think Hank had some lines he wouldn’t cross and that would have driven him to disown Jordan but you’re rigfht if he regrets it then he’s probably a nice kid.
Hank said Joyce reminded him of Jordan when she told her family to stop being assholes to Dorothy. He also thinks they ‘squeezed too hard’ and that while they disagreed with Jordan, he was still a good person.
I don’t think it’s shunning, except on Jordan’s part. He cut ties and ran for some reason or other. Given how specifically Joyce seems to have been told ‘you’ll find out when you’re older’ and he’s ‘too Jordan’ to attend or be included in family stuff part of me suspects he’s some brand of pornlord, Internet or otherwise.
I though maybe a high-school science teacher or worker as a Family Planning clinic, something that they would be very hostile too. But since that threw him out of the family when Joyce was very young he probably didn’t graduate high school and is now likely in financial hardship.
Yeah, if Jordan actually is the third-youngest just before Joyce and not second-oldest right after John, he seems to have split from home… worryingly young.
Joyce’s family’s been pretty torn apart, I think. Her mom supported toedad while her dad did not and we have no clue how that is affecting their marriage. Most of her siblings escaped while they could, and she hasn’t seen them in pretty much forever except for Jocelyn. I don’t like playing the “more tragic than thou” game, it’s not fair to either of their world views.
John is still around too, when he’s not off in India exploiting the locals through his missionary work. We haven’t heard from him since, but he’ll clearly take Carol’s side in the divorce.
I forget who said it and how it goes exactly, but “There are few things more annoying than a newly minted evangelical Christian, but one of them is a newly minted atheist. And the only thing more annoying than either of them, is a 14-year-old boy who has just ‘discovered’ Led Zeppelin.”
Okay, so, Joyce bringing up Becky’s treatment of Dorothy is both an obvious what-about-ism – a deflection from examining her own behavior – and also a wild false equivalence. Becky sniping at Dorothy never comes across as anything more than banter, and, importantly, when she did go a bit too far, she acknowledged it, made amends, and dialed it back. Joyce’s rhetoric about religious people is actually hurtful and ignorant, her attempted apology kinda sucked, and she’s kept doubling down on that rhetoric even as everyone around her tells her that she’s acting like a twat.
Becky’s behavior strikes many of us as toxic, not banter. It’s also been prolonged. Joyce has been out as an atheist for maybe 24 hours; just a few days ago she was denying atheism to Sarah.
This, exactly this. And not just her treatment of Dorothy with the playful but not really rivalry, but her CONSTANT smashing through other people’s boundaries if she doesn’t want to acknowledge them.
Becky’s sniping at Dorothy is way more than banter, though she tends to frame it as such to avoid consequences; like the “wacky Becky” act in general, it’s covering up a whole lot of jealousy, insecurity, and other messy issues.
The social expectation that you and your friends have created is that that behavior is okay, because one of your group did it a lot and it was okay. Everyone allowed it, so did you. Then you engage in the behavior and suddenly it’s not okay?
If everyone but you had been allowing it, and you had been complaining about it… it wouldn’t make it any more okay to engage in that behavior, and you’d be a hypocrite. At least by allowing it for others in your group before engaging in it yourself, you’re not being hypocritical about that one thing.
“Becky sniping at Dorothy never comes across as anything more than banter”
We live on completely different planets, because I have OFTEN found Becky’s petty sniping to be entirely too much and in fact have made comments that Dorothy must have the patience of a saint not to have punched Becky in the mouth for how badly Becky treats her all the darn time.
Seconded with a. Exclamation mark. If I were Dorothy I would have almost instantly demanded a roommate reassignment. Imagine having to LIVE with that rather than just tolerate it every so often.
I assumed that they (Dorothy and Becky) had requested to be together. Otherwise, odds are pretty good that she’d have been dropped into one of the 13 other residence halls, especially since she started on a different term than everyone else. Maybe Joyce had asked it as a favor of Dorothy, since she wanted to be closer to Becky.
I love this arc so much. Willis has really handled this so well. Put yourself in the shoes of a character and so much of their choices make sense even if you don’t agree with them.
Is “insert character here” being a jerk or are they understandably angry?
Does “insert character here”‘s trauma excuse their actions?
I admit that I don’t think panel one makes sense or is good for Dorothy to say, but the real thrust is panel three, which does hit at the crux of the matter. No matter how right Joyce is, and no matter how much Becky can be an ass sometimes (including hounding Joyce for her newfound belief system), that doesn’t make it right for Joyce to do those same kinds of things back. Ideally they both get a nice sit down and get to hash things over to get to healthier mindsets.
Aaaaand Joe remains the most supportive and understanding friendship Joyce has this semester. If that feels like I’m dunking on on Becky (i’m tired of your stupid phase) and Dorothy (yes, you’re having a crisis but could you try not having one instead?) I kind of am.
Dorothy is honestly, not handling this well?
Her response to her behaviour had boiled down to “maybe go back to believing something loosely” rather than, trying to explain the concept of being an atheist while still respecting others beliefs.
Much of Joyce’s anger might be defused by pointing out Becky’s christianity probably helps her still feel close to her dead mum. Religion does serve other purposes besides forcing someone to fall in line. From the sounds of it, Joyce hasn’t had much connection to the spiritual side of spirituality…
One of Becky’s accusations was literally that Joyce supported her during the dead mum party when she didn’t actually believe that dead mum was eating cake in heaven.
The accusation was that Joyce’s support wasn’t sincere. From Becky’s point of view, Joyce’s rejection of Christianity would include a rejection of heaven. Which means a rejection of the idea that her mum is still looking out for her. Because she isn’t there.
Joyce has blinders on right now. She’s rejecting the control her parents and church had over her via religion. She hasn’t stopped to think that the reason Becky is so upset is because Joyce – whether she meant to or not – basically said Becky was dumb for thinking her mum was still out there somewhere and looking after her in whatever way she could. Becky was clearly close to her mother and as we saw, it’s the anniversary of when she lost her. Joyce’s aggressive atheism is gonna sting extra hard right now.
Sure, but that’s my point. Joyce fully understands that Becky’s christianity helps her feel closer to her mum, which is why Joyce was at that party and her answer to “do you think my mum is eating cake in heaven?” wasn’t “actually, your mum is dead and gone because heaven isn’t real”.
The moment Becky decided to throw that party for dead mum and ask Joyce that question, Joyce had no good options. Like, she had to pick between:
a) not going to the party (which would’ve lead to this anyway);
b) tell Becky her mum is dead and gone and heaven isn’t real; or
c) do what she did.
Which is a situation you’re likely to wind up in when you’re hiding big things from close friends. It may be necessary, it may be worth it, but you’re going to wind up having to lie to them and do things that will hurt them and piss them off when they find out about it.
Hot take: being mad at a friend for “lying” about a thing that they were only lying about because they were still working through their own feelings on it and weren’t comfortable talking about it yet (and also had very good reason to believe that people would get upset with them if they were honest about it) isn’t justified.. Lying about Becky’s mom being in heaven was the appropriate thing to do in that situation, and Joyce recognized that, so she did it because it made her friend happy.. Becky doesn’t get to be mad that Joyce did exactly what she asked her to do just because Joyce was retroactively being “insincere” when Becky demanded that Joyce spout off “Joyce Nonsence” on command..
Look, if your point is that Joyce should have felt safe enough to tell Becky “I’m an atheist now.” before the whole thing, I agree. Of course, FOR VERY OBVIOUS REASONS she did not, in fact, feel safe enough to do so. Additionally, Becky’s not entitled to that information. Joyce’s beliefs are hers to share (or not) as she sees fit.
I deliberately did not speak in terms of “entitlement” because that’s not how I think about personal relationships.
I said that’s the trade off. That’s the risk. Yes, Joyce can not share her beliefs if she chooses, but there may be consequences to hiding them – which may be worse than revealing them up front.
She can choose not to share. Becky can be upset over the deceit that comes with that.
This entire character bit for Joyce kinda feels like it’ll be more digestible once it’s finished and we can read it in full. This moment-to-moment hyperanalysis is a little hard to parse, as a person completely separated from the issues being discussed.
I wonder how Becky’s anger at Joyce’s atheism and expression of it is affecting Becky’s behaviour towards Dorothy. Is Becky still executing her “we’re rivals for Joyce’s affection” schtick? If so, how does it play out now that Dorothy has seduced Joyce to atheism and Becky’s relationship with Joyce is in a state of rupture?
I doubt it will change Becky’s treatment of Dorothy at all, or if it does she’ll amp up the bullying. Dorothy is Becky’s favorite target for cruelty, and she’s got a lot of anger simmering now because Joyce has escaped the box.
While I dont agree with Joyce’s dickish behaviour (though i understand it) she does make a good point.
People let Becky away with way too much. Honestly, this seems to be one of the few times someone has even ack owledged it besides dorothy, and Becky herself that one time and then didnt stop the behaviour at all.
Doesnt excuse Joyce’s behaviour of course but shes not wrong here either.
Because Becky’s sniping was mostly directed at her and she could handle it, while Joyce’s has just led to a big blow with Becky.
Now that could be that Dorothy really wasn’t bothered by it, while Becky obviously was or that Dorothy is better at standing up for others than at standing up for herself. Though it’s also worth remembering that Dorothy has tried to talk to Becky about it, with little more success than this interaction.
That’s a really bad parallel though. The better one would be why Joyce had infinite patience for Becky harassing her other friend.
Dorothy can’t be serious. That’s something an intelligent person/sensible friend can’t say. Joyce is become extreme, but say her to “find yourself a nice deism”? Wait, what? But it’s nice to see Dorothy in a situation where she has no idea what to say. Maybe, the only one that could give some good advice to Joyce is Leslie.
Yeah, Leslie is probably the single best member of the regular cast to help Joyce with this. (The absolute best person to help her period is likely Jocelyne)
This is pretty much the reverse of the Danny/Ethan blow-up at the hospital, where “person I know the longest gets to be an absolute dickbag to everyone and that’s ok” was the stance.
Also, I have no idea why people are surprised at this stance by Dorothy, when Dorothy has always been the middle-of-the-road centrist critter. She’s always been Hillary Clinton, minus the support of war crimes (but give her time).
The strip has been scripted and drawn thru mid-April, so we’re pretty much locked into the story line as it is. But this would be a good time for both Jocelyn and Joyce’s dad to orbit back in for a little added drama.
Drama, hell. I honestly think Joyce talking to her dad might help her work through some of her anger. If nothing else, it gives her an appropriate outlet at which to direct that anger; even if he’s been shown to be slightly more tolerant than Carol, he’s still enabled her and sat back when he should’ve spoken up.
Talking to Hank about her atheism is a much bigger risk than talking to Becky was. I like to think Hank would accept it, but that might be a step to far for him. In Joyce’s shoes, I certainly wouldn’t be ready to take that step.
I feel like Joyce just made a really good point in the fourth panel. Becky’s been acting like a jerk to several people (including Dorothy, and I don’t get why she doesn’t seem to care how badly Becky treats her) for a long time, and none of the other seem to care, while Joyce loses her religion and gets angry that she was lied to and lashes out a bit, and everyone acts like she’s a terrible person for it. Why does Becky get to act badly for months and nobody says or does anything, while Joyce acts kinda badly (for good reasons) for a day or two and everyone treats her like she’s a horrible monster?
Based on other responses in this thread alone, I think probably because Becky’s frankly terrifying boundary-breaking and consistent snarky-asshole personality don’t bother people as much as Joyce’s unfiltered anger.
On a personal note, I used to have a buddy who had the Becky personality of “playful japes and jabs” constantly. It gets REALLY old REALLY fast when it’s not confined to every other day or so in a webcomic.
I’m hoping Joyce talks to Dina at some point. Dina would give her the praise for converting to atheism that she is obviously craving, and that might calm her down enough to listen to reason.
Becky was not playful. She has been unceasingly cruel to Dorothy and has been fairly controlling and stalkers of Joyce. Becky is simply good at sounding playful enough that no one calls her on anything.
It’s funny, I’ve always considered myself to be thin skinned, but then I see people who name call anyone anyone who disagrees with them, and throw a fit about it being unfair when anyone returns fire.
Why do people have different standards for Becky and Joyce? It could be because the in-your-face, cartoonishly abrasive Becky is the only Becky they have known, while they have seen Joyce go from smug judgmental Bible thumper to questioning authority and caring about people and then back to smug judgmental Atheist.
I don’t see a lot of comparison really, except for the time Becky came out as a lesbian and was so happy about it she had to make sure everyone in the hemisphere knew about it. I compare that to this mess of bitterness, misdirected aggression and spewing of ignorant dogma and I can certainly see why more characters are giving Joyce a hard time.
Yeah, I think that’s a lot of it.
Joyce did get a huge amount of tolerance and forbearance from Dorothy and from the rest of her friends. And she improved greatly, on the boundaries and the smug Christian thumping. Now she’s snapped back to judgmental, just from a different direction and no one’s ready to deal with it again.
Becky has definitely been malicious and hurtful, multiple times. And not just to Dorothy: she pretty much told Walky dating him was shameful, for example.
She also ‘fired’ Ethan and tried kick him out of Joyce for the grievous sin of… respecting Joyce’s boundaries and leaving her pants where she put them.
Thing of note that occurred to me: she “fired” Ethan for not pressuring Joyce hard enough into abandoning the concept of sexual purity and then a few weeks later yelled at Joyce for not affirming how totes cool and important sexual purity is and said it was “just a phase” that Joyce responded that sexual purity is bullshit actually..
I mean, cuz doing a playful but ultimately harmless “rivalry” schtick is completely different from insulting someone’s entire belief system, both behind their back and to their face? Especially when that belief system gives them comfort while they’re still processing the death of both of their parents?
Like, am I the only one who thinks these two aren’t equivalent? Joyce is allowed to be angry at fundamentalist Christianity. Hell she’s allowed to be angry at her parents for what all it did to her. She isn’t entitled to lash out at her friends and insult them just because she personally doesn’t believe in god anymore.
There’s a pretty major difference between “I think it’s funny how uptight you can be sometimes, time to make jokes about that!” and “I think that people’s religious beliefs are stupid and that people who think that way are deluded.”
Becky once cheerfully exclaimed in Dorothy’s face “I did not hear a word that you said!” while smiling, even though the thing that Dorothy had just said was something meant to help Becky and Joyce. That’s not playful banter, that’s just insulting her directly.
I had the thought: “Nobody’s upset that Joyce is an atheist now; they’re upset that she lashed out at Becky. But the real change here is that she’s clearly unhappy and covering it up.” Then it hit me:
The last time Joyce felt happy was when she felt completely confident in her beliefs about the world. That’s what she’s trying to recapture here.
Of all the places on the internet to learn about dildoes (dildos?), that’s probably one of the best for her. Focus on safe sex (not that she’s seriously considering premarital sex to be okay yet), judgement free, they generally seem very nice over there.
I feel like we’re not taking into account a comparison between another person here: Amber not only lost her father, but also her sense of identity and her best friend. I feel like comparing Amber’s coping with Joyce’s is worth exploring. Even if it may seem “standard behavior” to y’all, Amber has fully become a recluse. She’s shut herself off from the world again, after making all those strides to be more social and maybe not outgoing, but going out at the very least. Amber seemingly has given up trying to pick up the pieces again. She’s fine where she is, where “she can’t hurt anyone anymore”. But that is clearly just as unhealthy, but we’re accepting it because, again, it’s “an Amber thing” and it’s harmless to others; but it’s sooo self-destructive in the long term. At least Joyce is TRYING something, harmful to others it may be in the short term, but over-correcting is at least an attempt to balance her life out. If her friends all shun her now as she’s trying to readjust her life, she’ll be struggling very hard to reach that plateau of emotional stability, but I believe she’ll get there. She’ll just be very bitter for a while.
I’m not sure the parallel is that simple. Joyce is adjusting from a position where others are harmful to her, whereas Amber needs to adjust from a position where she believes she’s harmful to others.
In that light, that Amber’s reaction is to shut herself in makes sense, because it solves the problem how she perceives it – if she doesn’t contact with anyone, she can’t hurt them.
I’m becoming more convinced that Joyce should maybe try talking to people outside her usual circle, I still maintain that Sal is a good choice for Joyce to talk to, Jocelyne is another good choice
Joyce should form a D&D group with Joe, Dina and Sal.
Maybe a prog rock band. Either or.
Speaking of Jocelyne, I wonder if it’s gonna be emotionally devastating to Sarah when Joyce says “I can’t believe I actually have a big sister!” when Jocelyne comes out to her.
Playing a dinosaur might requiring homebrew.
Playing a druid with a dinosaur pet and/or capable of turning into a dinosaur would be easy in at least some editions.
I actually went back to the archives and re-read some of the storylines to solidify this opinion: I don’t much care for Becky and her brand of “wackiness”. (saying this to acknowledge bias)
She only treats two people in this planet with any amount of decency: Joyce and Dina.
Anybody else is fair game to make mock, lie to and ignore/dismiss. Becky was particularly awful to Dorothy and Leslie, two people that went out of their way to help and accommodate her.
Now, Becky has a hard time trusting people, which makes sense given her circumstances. That still doesn’t change the fact that she’s at best fake to and at worst outright attacking to people who are not her two chosen ones.
We’re seeing something similar right now with Joyce: Joyce’s circumstances explain this attitude, but she’s still being a butt. And her grievance is real: why does Becky get so so much leeway with her nonsense in-universe by the people around her while they act like Joyce has kicked all the puppies?
I get that Joyce doesn’t exactly understand what religion is, and why she acts the way she acts, but why isn’t anyone sitting down with her and explaining her what Christianity and the Mediterranean monotheistic religions are, and what is spirituality in general ????
Have we done the ‘you’re rushing into lesbianism, try easing into it via bisexuality’ comparison yet? Cos Becky?
Is this a bit about how atheism is less acceptable in current American society than homosexuality?
hhhhhhhhhh now I gotta think about why I agree that Becky’s overthetop behaviour is/was okay and Joyce’s is kinda shitty. I can TOTALLY see her saying these lines about being gay instead of atheist and it being SO much less insufferable.
Dorothy: “I’ve never thought of Becky as an uncomfortably-sized, inanimate tool to assist me in my sexual self-care… and now the mental picture is burned into my brain, so thanks for that, Joyce.”
Four months may seem like a short time to abandon religion for atheism. But just how much time was Joyce supposed to take on this matter? A year? Ten? Was she supposed to go to conversion therapy or talk shop with other atheists for years before she concluded that the idea of god was a fraud? On the other hand, she needs to examine her reasons for becoming an atheist.
As for avoiding the trap of feeling smug and superior for being an atheist, that might take time. A lot of non-theists fall into that mindset but time helps them to dig their way out of it. Besides, it’s not as if religious people can’t be arrogant and self-righteous. The very notion that they’re superior to non-believers and will go to a wonderful place after they die while everyone else is damned or doomed is very much part of their canon.
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Joyce’s technically correct answer for the test question: “Use ‘dildo’ in a sentence”
And if a more complex sentence is required, there’s always “Your mom is a dildo.”
I had a teacher who said if we could substitute ‘kumquat’ in the sentence then it wasn’t a good enough sentence.
Most of the time my sentences were “[Word] means [definition].”
Teacher: Use ‘orange’ in a sentence.
Pupil: An orange is a brightly coloured edible citrus fruit with a juicy centre.
Teacher: *substitutes ‘kumquat’ in sentence* “FAIL!”
Joyce: “Bilbo Baggins, more like DILDO Baggins!”
Teacher: … 🤔
Have you read Bored of the Rings, by the Harvard Lampoon?
The best kind of correct!
Joyce, no.
Dildos make people happy.
You bet they do!
In fact, stay tuned for a dildo-y work coming to an Amber strip near you!
Amber is stripping? that would get my vote, although probably it wouldn’t work for president.
Unless they’re used on the non consenting
Now, why did you need to take it that direction?
So do dicks, cocksuckers, and things that even I dare not mention here.
To be honest, calling someone a dildo can work as an insult. It’s like calling them a dick, but you’re also saying they’re fake.
Yes! This is exactly why I love it as an insult.
That’s actually a good point by Joyce. Becky is a dildo to Dorothy and kind of just gets a free pass for it.
And that was an obvious dodge by Dorothy, so it’s been on her mind too
Might be an obvious dodge. I’d wager it’s more of a “it’s the last panel, we don’t have time to address this very valid point, besides we need a joke here”.
This sort of thing happens a lot (like, see yesterday, where the last panel was a joke about samesie fists instead of jumping into the obvious subject for this scene).
“Becky’s an orphan. Are you?”
“…not yet.”
“Joyce, there is no way you can afford a hitman with your lunch money”
“Are you sure? What with the pandemic, hitmen have had a lot of competition. That’s got to have driven prices down.”
“I’ve heard Dina works for Froot Loops.”
I hope this isn’t what Willis is going for. There’s no “valid” trauma that justifies being a butt, and comparing sources of grief kind of sucks. I know Willis is trying to do a “Joyce checks her privilege as a white Christian-atheist” arc, but this isn’t it.
That isnt whats happening. Joyce is auto biographical.
and in this scene Dorothy is probably too
Sometimes you look back on yourself and think “dude, uncool.” Hopefully, that’s what Dorothy represents here.
Okay so I kinda want to talk about this, I’m not entirely sure how to phrase it correctly because I think asking sounds accusatory, but really I want to know for the topic itself.
Is it not weird to talk about an actual person’s complex relationship with a personal topic in relation to the fiction they create, especially when it involves speculating on them as a person?
I know the FAQ starts with “Joyce is autobiographical” where Willis shares info on their fundamentalist upbringing, but I think from there my objection is that talking about Joyce being autobiographical is something they’ve shared with us and how it informs their writing of Joyce as a character and through a deeply authentic lens. I feel that “this is Willis looking back on themself when they deconverted and going yikes” is kinda like invoking the author themself in the fiction they write? Like we’re not talking about their work of fiction anymore or the influences their life has had, we’re speculating on them as a person and how they themself feel about a complex and personal topic.
Adding to the above, “looking back on yourself and thinking ‘dude, uncool'” can absolutely be the intent. I know how I’ve been processing this storyline, but I’d feel weird if my read of the story was influenced by trying to treat a real person as part of the speculation.
I reiterate that this isn’t meant to be accusatory or judgmental, though I think I screwed that up with my last line, or that we’re going all Parasocial Relationship like how finding out John Mulaney divorced his wife became grounds for water cooler talk. It’s something I can really only understand in that if it happened to me it would upset me, that sharing myself led to me becoming part of my audience’s fiction, and I suppose I want to know if it’s an appropriate avenue of conversation since I see it crop up with artists every once in a while.
It’s probably reading a little too much into it, but on the other hand I cringe at younger me all the time so there’s probably some projection there.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I dont think its that weird.
Willis has affirmed over and Over that everything related to Joyce and her relationship to a fundie upbringing is autoBio.
Everystrip he does had a main author avatar.
As for him looking back at himself and Yikesing ,
Just read his own comments on his republished Roomies scripts.
No Para social relationship necessary, just Paint By numbers media literacy and criticism. That the author turned Atheist & eventually soured on douchy public New Ashiests is historic. Their twitter is literally on every page. You dont have to read every Tumblr to know it.
“Like we’re not talking about their work of fiction anymore or the influences their life has had, we’re speculating on them as a person and how they themself feel about a complex and personal topic.”
This IS the Literal definition of “Autobiographical” so , Yeah. Thats how autobiography works. It shouldnt even be controversial at this point as Joyce has started drawing her in comic version of Roomies.
At some Point Ethan, Amber , Joe and Walky will induct Joyce into their Transformers Cult and the story will end with Joyce drawing dinobot comics forever.
As a creator myself, if I had a character who was meant to be largely autobiographical (or at least a huge aspect of them was like Joyce’s upbringing) and I had indicated publicly that was the case, then no, I don’t think it would be weird at all for my audience to consider that while reading and analyzing it. In fact, I’d probably want that to a degree!
What would be weird, to me, would be if the audience inferred something was autobiographical when I had never indicated it was. Which does happen to some creators. :C
I’m late catching up on DoA, but this comment reminded me of the preface to A Hero of Our Time (Russian novel from 1840) in which the author, Lermontov, responded to criticisms of the morality of the hero: ‘This book recently had the misfortune of being taken literally by some readers and even some reviewers. Some were seriously shocked at being given a man as amoral as the Hero of Our Time for a model. Others delicately hinted that the author had drawn portraits of himself and his acquaintances . . . What an old, weak joke!’
All this is to say that people have been taking characters as autobiographical against the wishes of their creators for a very, very long time.
I don’t quite understand how this is addressing my concerns. Joyce is her own character, too.
Because Becky has learned how to be charismatic and funny enough about being a prick that people have trouble believing it might actually be hurting people.
Of course she also might have picked her target so that it isn’t really doing much harm.
It harmed Ethan.
How did Becky harm Ethan?
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/grandchildren/
How do you read that strip and come away with “Becky harmed Ethan”? Honestly asking.
There are many kinds of harm.
It seems plain to me that her jealous spite directly and immediately cause him intense mental anguish.
And unlike Joyce’s insult to Becky, which we are so exercised about right now, it was intentional.
As intentional as Joyce’ initially hurting Becky. It’s taking that strip in a vacuum and ignoring the context of her joking in the previous strip, told Ethan to his face that he had her respect for sticking around a couple strips later, and was visibly distraught (blaming herself for breaking them up) just a few strips after that when Joyce told her that she and Ethan were not dating anymore. In her words, she was explicitly doing a romcom thing to try and get Ethan to be more serious about his relationship with Joyce, not actually trying to break them up.
I’ll just as cheerfully cite the previous strip as my evidence, if you like. A cruelty that is passed off as a joke is no less of a cruelty.
I cited the previous strip myself, and following strips. Becky wasn’t trying to break them up, she was trying to get Ethan into Joyce’s pants. She was upset with herself just a few strips later when Joyce told her she wasn’t dating Ethan anymore, and Becky thought it was her own fault for pushing on Ethan.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/noodle/
Becky: “So your boyfriend didn’t wanna come with, or what?”
Joyce: “N-no…I’m not really sure we’re boyfriend and girlfriend after today anyway…”
Becky: “What? You’re broke up now? He didn’t do it ‘cuzza me, did he? […] Aw jeez, I was tryin’ to nudge him inta noodlin’ yer caboodle, not scare him off!“
Becky (next strip): “Joyce, I’m really sorry about Ethan. I shoulda kept my dumb mouth shut. […] Why won’t you get angry at me? Joyce, I got your boyfriend to dump you. You–you should be f-fucking pissed.“
Recklessness is not an excuse.
Then it shouldn’t be an excuse for Joyce either.
No. But Joyce wasn’t reckless. At worst, negligent. She did not willingly nor even knowingly say what she said to Becky.
There is a difference between Becky’s playfully antagonizing Dorothy and Joyce’s maliciously attacking everyone who is religious in order to make herself seem superior. The only reason Joyce is bringing it up is to justify how shitty she treated Becky and her (Joyce’s) extreme narcissistic behavior.
No there isn’t actually. It would get tiresome after a while, and then considering the time skip, down right mean spirited and awful.
Whoa. WHOA! Did I miss a slipshine when Dorothy finally topped Becky and started using her as a dildo?
Failing that is this something Yotomoe can help us out with? (please)
surely she’d have to shrink Becky to do that…?
…not that I wouldn’t want to see that x3
This happened in an officially released Marvel comic from 2003 and it remains one of the most nightmarish things I’ve ever witnessed in the entire medium of sequential art.
what
Details please.
Oh sure, it was an issue of Avengers where the Wasp is thrashing around in bed, climaxes, and then she pulls her sheet up as a shrunken Ant-Man walks from the shadows and between her cleavage.
He then says “all right, Jan; your turn.”
Dorothy used Becky as a dildo in an official Marvel comic from 2003?
Not to unduly question your veracity, but to be completely honest, I’m having a bit of difficulty believing that. Was this a response to a different conversation or a joke perhaps?
And lo, as soon as I hit return, an entire conversation appeared.
Note to self, when coming back to a page hit refresh before responding.
“yes”
I am disappointed in Dorothy. Joyce needs a response, but this isn’t it.
I think Joyce needs to hear that her anger, although justified, is causing harm, but Dorothy is not the right one to tell her.
Personally, I think she needs to hear it from Jocelyne or Sarah, but Joyce won’t answer Jocelyne’s calls until someone else gets through to her, and Sarah blew a chance the day before. What Joyce really needs to see is that she’s being a hypocrite by lashing out at Becky, when everyone was so gentle with her misconceptions last semester. That’s what’s really grinding their gears, is seeing Joyce refuse to treat Becky with the same grace that Dorothy treated her with previously.
Meh. I think there is a bit of hypocrisy here but it’s that suddenly everyone is calling out Joyce for her attitude change because it’s something they don’t like and aren’t used to but other characters such as Becky have been annoying and that’s just fine because they always are. Joyce’s new expression of atheism is incredibly obnoxious and maybe a little toxic but so is Sarah’s misanthropy or Becky’s continuous jabs at Dorothy some of the latest have even been straight up mean instead of jokingly performative. Joyce will probably feel embarrassed by this as she matures but everyone telling her to tone it down or ease into it are just being assholes.
Yes
I’m going to disagree.
Like, I absolutely find Becky annoying as Hell, no argument. But it’s very clear that Dorothy doesn’t. She considers Becky a friend and understands that Becky’s ‘hostility’ is just a coping mechanism and she doesn’t mean anything malicious by it.
What irritates me about Joyce is how when her parents first met Dorothy, she was willing to put supporting her friends above her choice in faith. And now, she puts her choice in faith above supporting her friends (Becky). That’s what people are calling her out on, that her new decision is making her malicious and cruel.
Does it feel like everybody is ganging up on Joyce? Absolutely. But they are 100% right to call her out on her behavior.
It’s not faith. That’s the point.
“no faith” is a choice in faith, John.
It isn’t a choice, either.
It’s exactly faith because Joyce doesn’t know crap about how the world works scientifically and yet she doesn’t just jump into it, she’s sledgehammering everyone around her to make a point (mostly to herself)
“Facts and logic” stop being a valid argument the moment that one uses that to justify being an arse
Facts and logic are always valid, but there’s a time and a place. I do agree that Joyce doesn’t know enough to be as confident as she’s being right now.
Atheism still isn’t faith though.
Faith is a strong belief, confidence or trust in something. Agnostic atheism “I can’t prove it but there probably isn’t a god” isnt faith. Strong atheism “There is definitely no god” is arguably a form of faith. It is *not* a religion, but it is a faith if its as strong as Joyce is coming off here
Joyce doesn’t actually know most of the pertinent facts and hasn’t actually checked the logic.
It doesn’t really matter, it isn’t faith, or everytime you’re sure of something without checking is faith.
News of Paradise, a novel by another David (Lodge) tackles the gradual loss of faith of a clergyman, with some detailed vulgarization about academic works on faith, while one of his other novels, Therapy, has an heavy subtext about Kierkegaard’s notion of faith.
@Rowan strong Atheism is a strong certainty that there is no god, in the same way I have strong certainty that there are no teapots orbiting Jupiter and no dragons hiding in Carl Sagan’s garage. There is no evidence for them, so I dismiss the idea. I don’t have faith in any of these things – if you presented some kind of meaningful evidence for any of them I’d adjust my position.
Your new avatar is perfect for you.
What can I say, when it showed up on grav roulette I leaned in.
Okay there are a few things here.
Just because Dorothy and Becky are friends doesn’t actually make the way Becky treats her most of the time okay. Doing things like insulting Dorothy, justifying keeping her room messy, and saying Dorothy needs to be more interesting while doubling down on how she ‘s unapologetic for her own toxic possessiveness of Joyce are still bad even if Dorothy doesn’t aggressively challenge or object. It just kind of becomes one sided abuse which I think is why it rubs some of the readers the wrong way.
Also Joyce never actually chose atheism over Becky. Becky got justifiably offended at Joyce’s mockery and didn’t express shame or regret for her beliefs or lack thereof, but just that Becky heard them, Becky chose to cut things off. Which is a little more grey area for both of them considering their shared religious upbringing but that was not entirely on Joyce. It’s also not malicious or cruel. Dina’s an atheist and has said much meaner things to Joyce about her previous magical way of thinking. Joyce’s friends are actually just upset because she lost her previous optimism. They need to get over that.
Nah, Joyce defied her parents by turning to Jesus. He was her higher authority, not them.
Joyce rebelled against her parents for the sake of Dorothy, but it was still within the script of sticking to her guns. An authority figure told her to do something wrong, so Joyce appealed to a greater authority.
I think Dorothy could be the right person. “The Joyce I knew last term would do anything to protect Becky from harm.”
But like John Smith said, “try Deism” is pretty inane. Well, maybe this is Dorothy’s Dumbing moment too.
Or Dorothy could note “strictly speaking I agree with you, but I didn’t go insulting your beliefs, did I? I respected you as a person, if not your beliefs.”
Which might rein Joyce in a bit. Won’t solve her problem with Becky, since I’m not sure that’s solvable: Becky seems upset that Joyce is an atheist at all.
Once again, Becky hasn’t indicated that she cares that Joyce is an atheist, she cares that she caught Joyce mocking all religious people and didn’t say no when she asked if Joyce thought she was an idiot for believing in god
Definitely a dumbing moment for Dorothy. Both Dorothy and Joyce are overestimating Dorothy’s understanding of what it’s like to leave religion. Religions that focus on converting have strategies for welcoming in new converts and giving them the toolbox to deal with what they’re going through (to adhere to doctrine). You often don’t get that when you leave religion (because no authority to enforce any doctrine). And Dorothy doesn’t know what to do. Like she understands you can respect a person while thinking their beliefs unfounded. But not that you don’t have to respect a belief, because that belief harmed you when you had it.
Yeah. Dorothy had the right idea that other time when she told Danny she wasn’t the best person to talk about bisexuality. Too bad she doesn’t have the same reflex here.
That’s actually a pretty great catch.
I do agree with Dorothy just having no idea how to address this as a valid way to justify her actions. She didn’t say anything on this until an extended period of time, and it even now seems like she’s stumbling around trying to find something good to help Joyce out. She hits it on 3, though starts trailing off into jokey sarcasm on dildos and loses the thread afterwards, and I hope she finds it again in the next strip.
Yeah I’m not wild about that part of Dorothy’s advice. It comes across as incredibly infantilizing, which is something that everyone tends to do to Joyce, and which isn’t cool. That said, Dorothy is spot-on with her comments about Joyce’s anger and how it’s affecting those around her. Joyce absolutely should process this, and I think a lot of that is going to come out as anger after what her mom, her former church, and Becky’s dad did to her. But she needs to point that anger at someone like a therapist rather than at her friends. Being a bongo isn’t going to help her work this out, it’s just going to hurt people.
I still think the Joyce cannot be told what to do and expected to obey.
She needs an extended, open-ended discussion about religion, on terms of equality, with peers who will hear her out and not rely upon an assumption that they know better than she, in which her assumptions and reasoning are made explicit and examined, so that she can discover any non-sequiturs and logical gaps, be informed of things that she hasn’t known or though of, and has alternatives presented for her consideration.
To clarify: neither Sarah, nor Dorothy, nor Leslie, nor even Jocelyn have any proper authority over Joyce, and Joyce is done with believing on authority anyway.
Joyce needs to be shown by peers, or to discover through her own explorations, that she doesn’t have all the relevant facts yet, and hasn’t worked through the logic, so she is cocksure in her conclusions. Empiricism and logic have inherent limits, and Joyce really ought to take those into account in constructing her systems of belief.
No matter who says “Kid, you are bothering people. Shut up and try a different religion.”, that will neither command her obedience nor fix the problem of her being cocksure about things that aren’t certain.
“Rushed into Atheism too fast, try some Deism” is one of the most inane things I have ever heard, and is hilariously tone deaf to say to somebody in Joyce’s state. This isn’t hot sauces at the Thai place.
I agree, I never gradated out of Adventism but I did have a feeling similar to Joyce where I stewed in feelings I wasn’t allow to address.
Alot of people just pop out the other side go through an angry athiest period before settling down with what really matters.
Becky is doing what my call center training would call “move to resolve” but that never works until you get past empathy and assurance of help portions of a conversation. If you “move to resolve” without expressing empathy you’ll always get trapped in a circular conversation which is just a frustrating hell.
It makes sense coming from Dorothy, who was raised in a non-toxic, open-minded, supportive family where she was ALLOWED to question and explore things. Meanwhile Joyce didn’t have a “progression” from Christianity to Deism or otherwise — she had a single, unshakeable, unbending worldview, and when it shattered it took any opportunity for exploration with it…at least until Joyce heals from the shock of that change.
This right here.
Dorothy really needs to acknowledge that Joyce never had the same intellectual privilege that she did growing up, that Joyce has to face the tremendous challenge of shoving the growth and phases you’re normally supposed to go through in childhood at an even pace in just a few short years.
“Hey, you’re lashing out at people” honestly IS what she needs to hear, though. She’s being a shit to people, and given Dorothy’s probably her best friend, she needs some honesty.
Dorothy is literally doing what Joyce imagined Becky was doing. Trying to take her realization away from her, she’s justifiably mad at Dorothy. If she needs to hear “you’re lashing out at people”, she needs to not hear it from a person who just said some offensive BS to her.
Okay but she wasn’t until they made it A Thing.
Like Joyce was in a private conversation being angry at her bullshit upbringing in a death cult, the worst thing you can say about her there is that she didn’t properly articulate that she only hates Bad Christians when that’s an absurd amount of emotional responsibility to expect from Joyce and at its best is pure tone policing when a victim of an evangelical death cult is forced to make nice with a powerful religious institution even in private. Becky made it about herself and Dorothy told her to go fix it and she’s disappointing for being a School Misser, and then three times now where Joyce has not been talking about it herself, Sarah tells her she’s not really sorry, that Joyce deserves to lose her job and that she needs to go back to who she was because now she’s even more annoying, and that Sarah will “forgive her” for what is obviously totally only Joyce’s fault.
Can I reiterate this? Joyce has only gone “lmao Becky you fartbutt” the three times Sarah brought it up unprompted. Is it even lashing out when you’re lashing out at the people who caused it and made it worse in every interaction?
I don’t really know how to process Joyce as wrong for lashing out at her friends when the people she’s “lashing out” at are directly the cause for her current mood and behaviour; she sure as hell was not acting like this with Joe when he gently let her process that she was a monkey and that she is real despite Heaven and Hell not being so. Like, maybe it actually matters that she was stalked to a private conversation by three people who don’t care to process why she’s feeling the way she does, and now Dorothy is telling her that her atheism should be eased into when that’s not how it works and least of all for Joyce, that Joyce needs to take responsibility for the argument that happened because Becky and Dorothy stalked her, and that Joyce doesn’t know what dildos are because she’s a dumb virgin and therefore what she says is inherently silly.
Aaaand that’s my mulligan on being on-topic for the day. Look me up if anyone wants a continuation of yesterday’s horrifying Sonic the Hedgehog facts.
I only just found and read yesterday’s Sonic thread, and I gotta thank you for your posts explaining weird Sonic canon shenanigans to people LOL. Ken Penders’s Archie writing was WILD
Dorothy is not responsible to be Joyce’s guidance counselor.
Perhaps, but Joyce already thinks she’s healed and probably isn’t searching for a counselor here
I’d agree but Dorothy does keep providing guidance and feedback on this issue. Seems perfectly fair to judge the quality of such advice.
If Dorothy is disinterested or too busy to engage with Joyce’s feelings, she’d be better served to make that condition clear rather than throwing out blind judgements without empathy.
And for the same reason, has no authority to act as such.
Agreed 100%
Dorothy is probably a bad person to talk about this with, because her upbringing was fairly secular and she was encouraged to deliberate on and chose her own beliefs in a way that most people are not.
Yeah, the game of choosing what you believe in isn’t something you can really jump right into without a tutorial of some kind, and Joyce never got that AT ALL.
That, and there’s the fact that in choosing what SHE beleives in, she has yet to fulfill the unspoken prerequisite of telling the difference between HERSELF and her indoctrination.
In that task, the strategy she’s pretty much being forced to use right now is that she’s distancing herself from religion entirely in order to get as physically and mentally far away from her old group as possible,
like she’s going into an area with less LIGHT POLLUTION, so she can more clearly see the STAR, the solar system, the GALAXY that is HER SELF.
While I don’t agree and would rather throw a welcome party to Joyce, possibly with inviting Becky to it (so it’s clear this crisis is not about atheism), Erring doesn’t make Dorothy a bad person. Also checking privileges is swell, but it can’t become a a thing where you’re always silent or you’ll never learn and stay bigoted/full of whatev the systems made you think you were rigth for in the inside while being “good” only in appearance.
I’m not making a moral judgement here, I don’t know if Dorothy has the right perspective to give effective advice here.
og sorry, I reread you rcomment… I blame translation
“Try deism” is fatuous and insulting.
Joyce believes what she believes. Suggesting that she ought to believe what is convenient to others that she believe is not decent.
Yeah, it’s almost as if they WANT her to be this naive weird girl just so they can have someone to reprimand and poke fun at when they feel like it.
That is absolutely what they want. Notice how the moment Dorothy has to answer a reasonable question she instead mocks Joyce for not knowing what a dildo is.
To be clear: MOCKS her friend who is trying to escape a fundie brainwashing religion for not knowing a word due to the fundie upbringing and indoctrination she’s attempting to throw off.
Joyce isn’t being a great friend right now, but her life doesn’t revolve around other people. She’s allowed to be angry and hurt and stupid while she figures out what parts of her are real and what parts belong to a patriarchal power structure she is trying to step away from.
She needs support and empathy, not a call-out and mockery.
I think Joyce needs someone to talk with who will actually try to understand where she’s coming from and why she feels lied to and like she needs to lash out about that, instead of people being condescending and dismissive towards her like Sarah and Dorothy have been so far.
so… Dina Talk or Joe talk (this one could be fun while Joe tries not to express his shame)
Joyce approached Dorothy with her samesies knuckles. Becky didn’t. Dorothy is a person who is allowed to have her own beliefs and feelings. Her sole purpose is not to be the magically wise best friend to protagonist Joyce. (Just like Becky’s sole purpose is not to be the sassy gay best friend.)
Truth to tell, after reading the comments here, many of them further down the page, I think there is considerable misunderstanding of the conversation.
Joyce is not antagonizing Dorothy, or at this point anyone but Becky. Dorothy is not upset with Joyce becoming an atheist or expressing it; rather she knows that Joyce loves Becky and, after things settle, will be sorry if she hurts Becky and will suffer if she has made a continuing friendship with Becky impossible.
Dorothy’s advice to become a Dieist was not a serious suggestion and neither was Joyce calling Dorothy a dildo a serious insult. Both were in the ballpark of what they allow each other as friends.
I realize the concept of close friends giving each other a hard time will be foreign to some of you, but it is nonetheless a thing.
Becky will take awhile to process the change in Joyce’s beliefs, but ultimately she will adjust. Probably.
ah, yeah you’re right. got carried away on this wave of outrage that keeps crashing around here.
there’s this weird disconnect between a comic that’s constantly bubbling with sarcasm and a screechingly earnest comment section. phew. i try to ignore the venom but some days it’s harder.
sigh. that was unnecessarily pointed of me. hope no one reads this or cares enough to feel attacked. i’m having a day.
I predict a nice and calm comment section.
Ha! We wish! 😀
I have peered into the future
I looked into the future, and I saw…death.
So YOU’RE why the future went peer-shaped!
Well I certainly appreciate the reminder of why I don’t talk about religion with strangers.
Have you thought of a career in meteorology?
or STONKS?
Oh hey.
A decent point.
(Two if you count the dildo thing)
I dunno, I feel like you don’t want your dildo to be pointy.
still a bit ? a point-less cylinder sounds kinda…
Glass dildos, OK.
POINTY dildos of ANY material, I dunno.
Wikipedia says dildo glass is an old word for test tube. I dunno about that either. 🙁
I suppose it depends what they were testing with that tube.
Isn’t it possible for things to be pointy without being sharp? Or are they just pointed or possibly tapered then?
Becky’s been obnoxious, but 1. Dorothy hasn’t shown any signs of actually being annoyed by her and 2. she hasn’t actually hurt anyone. Wonder if Dorothy will point that out next.
I read Dorothy as deliberately being Very Patient with Becky; she’d just as soon Becky stopped, but think she’s helping by letting herself be a punching bag.
Or she just doesn’t care. I don’t think she cares
I think she’s an extremely patient person (I say that as one myself, it’s almost impossible to make me angry and I tend to just be disappointed in people), but! As an extremely patient person, I’m assuming she’s aware of how unfair Becky’s treatment of her is on paper and isn’t exactly a fan of it. She can put up with it, and is mostly okay with it, but I assume it bothers her at least a little on some level.
Actually Becky has hurt people. Joyce is one of the people she hurt.
See: “You’ve been mad at our parents for like five minutes” smart ass conversation when she didn’t get the version of Joyce she wanted.
Literally no one wants to allow Joyce to have feelings other than perky sunbeam and it’s awful to be that person in a group who isn’t allowed to express anger or hurt.
Just because she doesnt get angry doesn’t mean that after four months Becky’s continued pettiness doesn’t get pretty old.
By the way, the correct answer is that nobody “gets to” be a giant ball of rage, and Becky is responsible for her bad behavior just like Joyce is responsible for hers. Pain and grief and sickness don’t actually excuse bad behavior, they just explain it and help us understand how to do better next time.
thiiiiis
I mean, people have, generally in-comic given no comeuppance or like anger towards becky acting like a bongo at times. They all suddenly care because its joyce and they’re so used to her behaving how they used to make fun of her for.
I think it’s less of a general question and more of a literal “I lash out a BIT for half a day and everyone treats me like I’m a monster, Becky acts like a pill for half a year and everyone is super accommodating to her” Granted Backy’s circumstances are difference and Becky was being a pill in a different way than Joyce is being a pill. Still I can understand how someone can feel like there’s a double standard and find that frustrating.
Exactly
Not even half a day, literally one paragraph. Immediately as soon as that first incident happened, she lost 100% of her support network. Dorothy went “that’s (as) disappointing (as when you did homophobia)” (given that’s the only other time she’s ever acted towards Joyce like this), Sarah immediately went into full “I want you to fail, and you’re a bongo who doesn’t even try to be empathetic”, Becky flipped out, and Joe never was able to help to begin with.
Joyce has good reason to believe that everyone is acting her this way because they found out she was Atheist, her fears of all the hate and her friends abandoning Joyce for her abandoning her religion, her reason for hiding her changes in belief all these months, *proven right*.
If everyone’s going to treat her like she’s “being a pill” regardless of whether she’s a little confident or a *lot* confident, why not just go full smug ass? The only way she can win is if she convinces everyone that she’s Right About The World either way.
(Obviously no, from a fully adult and outside perspective we can see that this isn’t fully justified, that her friends don’t see Atheism as a big reason to be upset at Joyce (except maybe Becky), and that there are better ways to resolve this, but I can’t expect that level of awareness from Joyce.)
I definitely feel like a double standard to me. Becky’s been acting like a jerk for ages and all the other characters seem to be ok with it for some reason that I still don’t understand, while Joyce is justifiably angry that her former religion lied to her and is lashing out and everyone treats her like she’s some terrible person for that.
Yep. I get why Joyce is angry, because Becky definitely did some lashing out at her in turn yesterday, but that does not change the part where Joyce woke up today and is being an aggressively unpleasant jerk right now.
That said, Dorothy’s ‘couldn’t you just try deism instead’ isn’t a great tack to take here, either, which makes sense because HER religious journey was not founded in trauma, abuse, and total rigidity, and she probably did sort of try out a couple steps along the way. As ever, I point out that Joyce’s friends REALLY aren’t equipped for helping her unpack this, and that she DESPERATELY needs someone who’s experienced in helping sort through religious trauma. Because Joyce DOES need somewhere to be a ball of rage about her upbringing, it just needs to be somewhere she won’t be hitting other people in the process.
The big problem is the person who has experienced the same level of religious trauma is the one Joyce is most angry at. I think the real reason is that Joyce is mad that Becky blames the church and not God.
Joyce is mad they fundamentally disagree about what an appropriate response is.
Joyce may also be jealous of Becky, and ashamed that she experienced comparatively less trauma than Becky but lost her faith, while Becky didn’t.
I think that’s Becky’s take.
I think Joyce’s take is she’s disgusted at the concept of faith now when she has just seen it used so much to manipulate people.
There’s no reason it can’t be both. Joyce can be simultaneously disgusted with faith and jealous of those who can retain theirs. I know I certainly feel that way at times.
Cognitive dissonance isn’t exactly uncommon in fundamentalist circles, after all.
no. Joyce does not think Becky should blame God. Because Joyce does not think God exists. Atheists aren’t angry at God. Joyce is mad because of the things Christianity got her family to do to her, and got her to do to herself. She’s flabbergasted that Becky doesn’t question Christianity. Especially when the thing that got Joyce to question Christianity was what it said about Becky.
Yep. Atheists — well, deconverts, anyway — aren’t angry at God, and the implication that they are is a belittling put-down. They are angry at the smug people who told them lies in order to pocket prestige, privileges, power, and tithes, or to enable abusers.
This anger may sometimes be based on a very uncharitable appreciation of their elders’ motives. But that is beside the point: it isn’t directed at a fictitious character.
Very true.
I mean, Joyce (probably?) doesn’t believe ghosts, vampires, or wendigos exist. Is she angry at THEM?
Joyce is also angry at the practice of Christianity–which would be valid if she were angry at Christian fundamentalism; but no, she’s just angry at Christianity in general. Maybe religion in general. Certainly faith in general.
I think that is a ridiculous sentiment. I don’t believe the mythical Q anymore than Slenderman exists but I absolutely hate the concept of Qanon and the people who use it to justify hate. Indeed, its hard to understand your take. Becky continuing to believe is clearly something that bothers Joyce.
Joyce for SURE needs a safe space and person to work through this, but unfortunately, there just doesn’t seem to be ANY.
Regardless of whether there actually are any available, they’re totally useless if Joyce doesn’t / want to see them. In order for her to use such resources, she has to perceive them.
In a nutshell, brace yourself for even more collateral damage as Joyce undergoes even more explosive growing pains.
The best people in the cast are probably Leslie and Jacob, neither of whom Joycd is likely to approach
Joyce is still thinking in terms of sides to be taken, and if Leslie’s going to take anyone’s side it’s Becky’s. And Jacob’s in the “likes religion” camp too… plus, you know, burnt bridges.
Leslie is an interesting person to be here because she, too, hates religion for what it did to her.
But probably understands Becky’s place too.
Perhaps she’ll eventually act as a mediator between the two?
It’s probably gonna be a long time before that happens though.
I’m betting ‘end of the book at latest,’ personally. You can get some drama and character development out of a fight like this, but I don’t think it’s a permanent friend breakup or even a semi-permanent one like Ethan and Amber.
Sounds like a safe bet.
Also, sorry if this is a a bit of a tangent, but I was confused on something you wrote last strip, regarding neurodivergence, and asked you about it at the very end of the thread.
So, how one defines neurodivergence is extremely varied and prone to disagreement. I’ve seen ‘it only refers to autism and ADHD, maybe OCD,’ ‘it DOESN’T refer to autism just ADHD and related conditions that aren’t autism’ (a stance I disagree with strenuously and find ahistorical, and which appears to be unusual,) a lot of pointing out that only including autism and ADHD ‘because they’re frequently comorbid’ excludes the similarly co-occurring dyspraxia, speech disorders, intellectual disabities, and schizophrenia (which are generally less acceptable than autism and ADHD, and it’s not like they’re socially acceptable to begin with,) and it goes on and on. Generally, what it strictly refers to is ‘neurodevelopmental conditions, viewed non-pathologically while acknowledging they can still be disabling.’ Technically in that light, I don’t think the ones generally classed as mental illnesses count, but ultimately I just lean on the side of ‘fuck it, I will count everything, ultimately you’re not going to cure PTSD so much as manage it but it still deserves compassion and recognition people will keep having it and some conditions that people weren’t born with – which the neurodevelopmental framing generally implies – should absolutely be viewed through this lens.’ (Case in point, DID. As far as anyone can tell, that’s something brains develop in early childhood when their sense of self is still forming, and significant abuse and trauma can lead to said small child brain compartmentalizing to the point that it doesn’t ultimately form a single sense of self, it forms several. Per plural people, attempts to make other alters go away and ‘cure’ it pretty much always fail, because an ‘original’ identity didn’t really develop in the first place.) My depression is best described as a chronic illness, emphasis on illness, but at a certain point you have to acknowledge that yeah, exciting new TREATMENTS might appear, but a permanent cure is unlikely and another depressive episode is inevitable.
@Regalli
This is an extremely well-explained and helpful post. I knew it all already, but I just wanted to thank you for putting it out there! 😀
And, The Wellerman, here’s my two cents:
As with any niche community, there are unfortunately gatekeepers to the term ‘neurodivergent’, sadly. I tend to err on the side of including more people than not, and would say even things like depression and anxiety clearly count – they warp people’s thinking in a way that is NOT easily understood unless you’ve experience them yourself. I was technically diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, but even putting that aside I would say my history of depression, anxiety, and the constant low-level PTSD of being queer would absolutely qualify me to use that term for myself. My autistic and plural husband would also agree with me. (I bring that up because autism and DID are pretty universally considered non-neurotypical haha)
Regalli, Doki, thank you both for taking the time to explain this.
Thank you especially for helping me to learn something new about myself. 🙂
The right person would be a paid therapist.
The awkward fact is that Joyce found that person, but Becky happened to overhear and somehow claimed the high ground about it.
It would have been an awkward, embarrassing, and troubling conversation if it had been about how Joyce was now an atheist. But it became about how Joyce thinks Becky is still brainwashed by their cult and Becky thinks Joyce is just an atheist to feel superior.
Liz might have been a good person to express rage to, but she doesn’t have either the breadth nor the depth in her knowledge of religion and philosophy to be much help to Joyce in constructing a sound system of beliefs.
Honestly, I don’t think Liz was that person, either – they both clearly needed someone who had experience WORKING WITH religious trauma, sorting through the feelings of hurt and feeling dumb for ever believing while encouraging them to be less hard on themselves and to reassess the ‘all religion is dumb and so are the people who believe it!’ (‘So do you think that about Becky? How about your friend Jacob, him too?’) They needed space to express that hurt and someone who understood, but they were both too hurt themselves to unpack the stuff that COULD hurt their friends. Like, seriously, this is ‘topics you eventually have to bring up in therapy, probably over a period of years.’ Jacob might know Joyce well enough to defuse a couple points, so could Joe. Leslie or Jocelyne as adults with firsthand experience with the ‘raised in a religiously abusive environment’ department but also a bit of distance from that trauma might do even better. But while expressing that anger is necessary and important, so is the subsequent asking of gentle but pointed questions. Joyce shouldn’t feel dumb for ever believing, and I’m damn sure she doesn’t actually think Walky (known atheist) is smarter than her friends on the cast who are religious simply because he’s an atheist. She just needs those redirects, and the willingness to ultimately acknowledge that maybe Jacob’s, or Jennifer’s, or even Becky’s experiences with faith are fundamentally different than what Joyce experienced, and that doesn’t mean something’s wrong with Joyce but it does make it easier for them to reconcile their faith with the people who use it to hurt people.
Heh. Armour-piercing question Dorothy might have asked: “Do you think Walky is in the top three percent un-stupid? Is Walky smarter than Jacob?”
There’d be a beat panel with a scrunched up face of pain and anguish and then one where Joyce grinds “…yeeees?” out between clenched teeth. I don’t think she’s in any mental state to back down even when presented with a question like that.
Agreed. I think she could back off once she’s no longer on the defensive, but she’s going to be on the defensive until the person asking if she thinks that is doing so while acknowledging Joyce’s anger and loss of faith are both valid and reasonable.
(On the subject of Walky and Jacob’s relative intelligence – Walky’s definitely very smart and not utilizing things well due to undiagnosed ADHD hitting a breaking point. Jacob’s clearly a smart cookie as well – law is hard. I’m not ranking their intelligence, but Joyce clearly doesn’t think Walky’s good enough for Dorothy, and I think that includes not acknowledging that he IS smart but doesn’t apply it in ways Joyce sees as Smartness.)
Walky actually probably IS smarter than Jacob, it’s jsut that his ADD doesn’t let him apply that intelligence to university coursework properly.
Walky is also a better person than Jacob, a statement I base on the fact that we’ve never seen Walky surprise-kiss a girl and IMMEDIATELY follow that up with “you’re not who I want”.
Whether Walky is objectively more intelligent that Jacob or not, Joyce’s distaste for Walky will only let her claim he is if she’s doubling down in a different argument.
This… doesn’t follow? I assure you that Joyce’s distaste for Walky is VASTLY inferior to my absolute loathing for, say, McConnell, but I’ll still acknowledge that McConnell is quite possibly the best-at-politics in the United States government. It’s just that his politics are absolute shit, just like his entire party and the people who vote for them.
You’re not Joyce, though. I think she has a rather lower threshold for dislike and a much much higher one for admitting good things about those she dislikes.
Yeah. I strongly doubt Joyce has a clue what deism is, and at this point, Dorothy should’ve realized that.
But 100% agree that all of Joyce’s friends are badly suited for this conversation. Which is part of why I’m so frustrated by comments that are slagging the entire cast for not paying proper obeisance to Joyce.
And sometimes the why’s are sympathetic enough that the people around us aren’t really bothered by it, like Dorothy isn’t really upset by Becky doing her ‘we’re enemies’ bit.
Which, doesn’t really help with Dorothy and Joyce here because I don’t think Dorothy knows the full extent of what’s going on or how Joyce has been feeling, so she doesn’t really have the opportunity for that.
Plus Dorothy has talked to Becky about the “we’re enemies” bit and her approach to Joyce here isn’t any harsher. Or less effective, for that matter.
It’s also an awkward thing for Joyce to bring up, since she would have been the obvious person to confront Becky about being a dildo to Dorothy, but she’s one of the people who let Becky “lash out”.
The second point is true, although at least thus far, I don’t think Dorothy’s approach has been effective.
Wasn’t effective in either case. With Joyce or Becky.
Yes this!!!
“You’re a dildo.”
“You wish, Joyce.”
… because then Joyce could finally have Dorothy inside her?
maybe.
Totally.
No, it’s just that Joyce has ALWAYS yearned for a special samesies-knucks-level connection with Dorothy, and dreams of a moment when they’re totally vibing.
Vibing… each other… with dildos!!!! 🤣
Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself!
That’s a pity, I laid that out there specifically so people COULD help themselves. 🙂
hey now, sex toys are not the kind of thing your lay around so people help themselves to them
I mean, they CAN be. Just make sure to wash them thoroughly first.
I love this thread LMAO
I don’t particularly care for it when either of you do it to be fair. But I exist outside of the narrative so you’d never know.
Main difference is probably that Dorothy and Becky do not love each other. Which still doesn’t make Becky’s behavior towards Dorothy okay, but when someone you love lashes out at you, there’s a betrayal that just isn’t there when the person lashing out at you is ‘your best friend’s other besty who’s now your roommate, but not quite a friend’.
The real question is whether Dorothy falls under the “people Joyce loves” category.
Last semester, she certainly did! But this semester… that’s actually a veeery good question.
I’d pay money to know what Joyce was up to over winter break.
Two things can be true Joyce. Becky’s fake rivalry thing is dumb and you’re being a prick under the guise of enlightenment.
But Becky didn’t lash out at Dorothy because of not being a fundie any more (and apparently Becky doesn’t think she has to swing all the way over to “atheist” just because she’s learned the church she was raised in was wrong). Becky harassed Dorothy out of jealousy, because Joyce likes her. And now Becks seems to have decided that a friendly rivalry is more fun than being enemies.
I haven’t seen any evidence of friendliness on Becky’s part. She’s just putting less effort into bullying because Dorothy isn’t reacting (aka hurting or fighting back) like Becky wants.
A peacetry donut is an act of friendliness.
She did buy her the donut but when Dorothy suggested it was a sign they were actually friends, she shouted at Dina that Dorothy was twisting the situation around.
Abusers sometimes do nice things as well.
“abuser” ppl on the internet really love to take a word and run with it
She knows throwing one at Sarah keeps her happy for a while.
Allegedly.
This is the most interesting Joyce face I can recall. She’s hurt, She’s trying. She doesn’t have to be all sunny alla the time. And indeed – Why does Becky get to be a bongo but Joyce gets grief for being a tympani? /sorrynotsorry/
“You’re a cigarette!” – Clerks Animated Series.
Oh my, there’s just so much to unpack here.
First of all, at least Joyce is doing good by laying forth why she’s so angry and frustrated, and why she’s making this change.
Anger is totally OK, so long as it’s focused on the abuse and manipulation she was subjected too. However, she is not right to take it out on those she loves, as well as other innocent people she lumps in with the abusive elements. On that note, she really needs to learn that you don’t need to be stupid to be manipulated. Unfortunately, something tells me she’s not gonna take a critical thinking or similar course until at least next semester.
Second, Joyce might actually have a point about Becky being allowed to lash out while she isn’t. They’ve both been through some REALLY though stuff, and frankly I think she’s been getting the short end of her friends who’ve always stuck her in her role of the “naive Weirdo girl”.
“Until at least next semester” might as well be never in DoA-time, given that it took the comic a full decade to reach the start of this semester even with at least three notable timeskips. 😛
Joyce definitely has a point re: ‘Becky gets this and I don’t?’ The ‘Becky gets support and understanding while Joyce is told to stop it and shut up’ feel has bugged me for a long time, such that my reaction to Joyce saying it was ‘Finally it’s text!’
Not great that she’s immediately dismissed by subject change, but I’ll take what I can get.
I mean, she’s dismissed by a punchline because it’s the end of the strip. They’ll probably discuss it tomorrow
I’ll be happy to be wrong, but I doubt it. If I were betting, my money would be on Dorothy picking up again, some more, about how Joyce should go grovel to Poor Becky and stop having inconvenient feelings and unprocessed thoughts.
Dorothy wishes she didn’t have to deal with all that just as she has to find a way to announce everyone that she’s leaving for another school
I need correction. I thought she resign idea another school because if not, why she is there another term?
We saw her acceptance letter from Yale, so she could leave in the fall.
I thought that she had received, after the beginning of this semester, an offer to go to Yale at the beginning of next semester.
She had it in hand the night they moved back in, but given when it was sent it HAS to have been for the fall. It would almost certainly have been received after registering for classes for this semester given the reveal timing, and it makes no sense to go for a couple weeks at one school and then transfer to another hours away mid-semester.
Next semester is the fall.
Quite.
She was accepted to Yale for next year.
One of my best friends in high school and myself would call each other dildos more times a day than I could count. Don’t really like to think about high school but there is one nice memory at least.
Okay, rocky start, but panels 3 and 4 are getting to the crux of their respective issues with each other and I’m hoping that leads somewhere good.
And Joyce, that insult is beautiful, regardless of whether you know what it means or not. Please use it henceforth.
You can’t really “rush into atheism” though, Dorothy. Like, you can’t choose whether or not you believe in a god/gods–otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many people I know (myself included) who desperately tried to cling onto their faith for years but couldn’t, because you can’t force yourself to believe something you don’t. Is Joyce being too abrasive about it? Sure, but it’s not like she chose to lose the faith that once meant the world to her.
Joyce *is* hurting people she cares about and she *is* acting like the “annoying new atheist” stereotype, but she does raise a valid point in the penultimate panel. I know it’s just because Joyce is the protagonist and Becky isn’t, but Joyce *does* get a lot more shit in-universe for her actions/behavior (not gonna touch the subject of meta with a ten-foot pole here) than Becky does. And… she’s not wrong to be upset by that, tbh. From a writing perspective, I get it. But as a person, I’d be pissed by the double standards, too.
Re: rush into atheism,
yeah, it’s kind of like saying you’re “rushing” into the ground. You’re not really putting any force into it — it’s gravity doing the work for you as you fall from faith
Now, the question is whether or not it’s like those Wile E. Coyote cartoons, where you only start falling once you realize gravity works.
Like, obviously they’re both traumatized kids, and they both deserve to be met with compassion and kindness when they inevitably lash out because of it. But the difference in the way they’re treated when they act badly is grating.
(That was to clarify my earlier comment, not a response to yours. Though that’s good food for thought! I definitely think you fall *faster* once you realize it.)
I wonder if it’s also worth exploring the idea in this regard that “falling” from one perspective is “flying” in another.
I think that the analogy between deconversion and a fall is an unfortunate one in at least two ways, and better not pursued any further.
Dorothy also had the luxury of exploring Atheism in her childhood, rather than having the One True Path drilled into her skull.
What looks like “rushing” to her is very likely a much more complicated dynamic, where Joyce is rapidly re-evaluating everything she’d ever been taught and conditioned to believe in a relatively short time, at a point in life where ALL of her friends are expecting her to remain exactly the way she was before.
Also Joyce has been stewing this since early October. But since she didn’t keep Dorothy in the loop, it may look more sudden to D… I wonder if D is also hurt by that. “I’m your atheist friend! Why is this the first I’m hearing about it?”
“atheist” -> “best”
Right, it would be like rushing in to understanding a proof in mathematics. One moment you can’t get across the pons asinorum, then suddenly you get it and you see that the fifth proposition of Euclid is true. There’s no halfway house of isoceles-agnosticism, and no way of choosing not to understand.
You, my friend, really deserve an upvote for this insight!
By the way, I find it very fitting for today’s discussion that you’re avatar just happens to be a Black Swan!!!
There was forethought in my choice of avatar. It is not just that I come from a land where all swans are black.
Let’s see. Fifth proposition of Euclid. Wasn’t that the one that two asses are equal if and only if the bridges across them are equal?
“You’re such a strap-on”
Although on Dorothy’s point, I don’t think there’s a …good way to ease into being an atheist. Like…once you stop believing you sorta stop believing. You don’t get like…training wheels or anything. I balk at her notion that you should have something between religion. Though I’d also say that having a perspective out of your own involvement with religion can do wonders for you. Like just because your religious experience is bad doesn’t give you a right to talk down to other people and their experience.
Yeah, as much as Dorothy is clearly trying to help she really has no idea what she’s talking about in that regard. She doesn’t have any actual experience with deconversion because she was never religious in the first place.
The stuff about how Joyce will one day realize that her anger is hurting the people she loves is closer to right, but I’m pretty sure Joyce is aware that the things she said hurt Becky at this point. She just doesn’t know what else to do, and Dorothy doesn’t really have much to give her in the way of constructive ideas.
I think it’s because Dorothy eased into it herself – when we meet her parents, they basically say that Dorothy got to choose, even deliberately experimented with faith.
There’s plenty of ways. It’s just that most atheists don’t recognize that any of them went through them.
Like, there are many, many volumes of theological text where Christians struggled with the nature of their beliefs. They exist and demonstrate many, many different positions on how faith interacts with life. But the vast majority of Christians do not know these texts exist, and consequently, the vast majority of post-Christian atheists also do not know these texts exist. They went through their struggles alone and did not tap the rich history of thought that would have made it feel less like a desperate freefall and more like a rappelling down a wall.
So, of course they’re angry.
That’s not really quite the same. The theological texts about Christians struggling with their beliefs lead to those Christians affirming their beliefs, otherwise they wouldn’t be theological texts. Reading more about how people overcame their doubts and returned to the fold isn’t a great model for breaking out of their faith.
There is a lot of material available these days about deconversion and becoming an atheist, especially online, but a huge amount of it is from the angry atheist side.
We definitely need more resources about leaving the more toxic forms of religion and making a healthy transition to something else – whether it’s atheism or a healthy denomination. That falls more into counseling than into theology though.
I’m not suggesting self-help books. I’m suggesting theological texts. Ideally, these texts are recommended by your personal pastor or priest, because these are people who have gone to school and learned these things and have libraries with copies. But the more non-denominational and fanatical your sect is, of course, the less likely the leader has any kind of adequate training or foundation in shared beliefs with people across history.
These texts are usually relatively strong in argumentation. There are a lot of garbage premises, of course, but what’s important is that the author shows you how he (it’s always a he) thinks. Shows you how to construct a framework for belief, how one thing leads to another, how to actually take in evidence and work it in. And more importantly, shows you how to discover flaws in that framework and how to criticize it.
I am not suggesting that you become an atheist by this process. I am suggesting that you become a thinker by this process, and specifically someone who has tools for thinking about faith. Tools mean that you can traverse the metaphorical cliff-face at your own pace, rather than jumping into the air and releasing yourself to gravity.
Is Becky even a huge ball of rage? She’s been annoying to Dorothy, who only met Becky a couple months ago, and therefore has a pretty small emotional connection to her. She’s also, so far, never seemed to actually hurt Dorothy- the things she’s a dick to Dorothy about are not things that Dorothy finds super meaningful, right? Like Dorothy isn’t super hung up on the idea that Becky’s known Joyce longer, and accusing her of being super productive is, like, basically a compliment. At worst, she’s been pretty rude and obnoxious, and it’s not GREAT that she’s doing that; I probably wouldn’t hang out with someone who did that.
Joyce is torpedoing her longest and most important friendship by declaring that her deeply-held foundational beliefs are stupid. That’s not, like… the same thing, Joyce.
Whether or not it’s the same thing exactly, the point is a good one and someone needed to put it textual, I think. Becky is petted and praised for her jerkery, or at least smilingly excused with no warning or consequence, for months on end. Joyce is ‘torpedoing her deepest friendships’ by… being a pill for half a day.
There’s some fairness to that, but it’s a pretty lousy argument for Joyce to use.
Of all the people who were allowing Becky to lash out, Joyce was the most prominent, while Dorothy was the target. Now that Joyce has lashed out at Becky, she’s upset that Dorothy is (pretty mildly really) not okay with it. “I didn’t help you when my friend was being a jerk, so why are you helping her when I’m being a jerk” isn’t really a good take.
I seem to recall Becky fine-tuning her frenemies act to do the most damage possible over those couple of months, and when Dorothy did actually start to get bothered she was pleased.
Pleased up until she realized she’d gone too far and talked to Dina about ways to make it up to her.
Partly I think the context for their relationship is that Becky, like Joyce, is poorly socialized. Becky wants to be friends with Dorothy, but her model for friendship is Joyce and that friendship is based partly around Becky teasing Joyce. Which works for them, but Dorothy doesn’t react right when Becky does it to her, so she kept doubling down.
This isn’t good and it’s something she’ll need to overcome, but it’s also neither malicious as often portrayed here or her lashing out in rage as Joyce describes it.
At least if I’m at all right about her.
She took some pretty sharp jabs at Dorothy to convince her to go crash the Joyce/Liz party.
I think you have a very different read on her. I don’t think Becky likes Dorothy or her close friendship with Joyce very much.
She’s not wrong in panel 3 (Joyce is also not wrong in 4, there is a double standard). Dorothy’s so very wrong in panel 1. She’s doing exactly what Joyce mistakenly thought Becky was fighting about. Offensive and nonsensical, you can’t choose to believe.
I actually think faith should be less emotional and more a decision. You are what you identify as, long night of the soul or not.
That doesn’t make any sense. That’s pretense, not belief. I sincerely do not believe any gods exist. I didn’t choose not to believe, I realized that I didn’t. I can’t choose to believe some any gods exist, even though some of them are appealing.
It feels like a lot of people pick their beliefs by what they think is true, but then a lot of people pick their beliefs by what they really want to be true, and the two have a difficult time understanding each other.
Like for instance there are a lot of things like Pascal’s wager that try to bribe people into believing. That won’t make sense to you and it doesn’t to me either, but plainly it a lot of people think it does.
I don’t feel or believe that I pick or choose what to believe at all. I’m doubtless as much inclined to cognitive biases as the next person, but it seems and feels to me that I believe what seems to be true whether it is welcome or not, and without any voluntary yea or nay.
Yeah, it’s less like trying on clothes, more like learning what you need to fix your computer.
I don’t believe it’s pretense. I believe you control what you are. If you say you believe or don’t then you are making a stand against raw emotion. I view it as any other form of self-control.
Then again, I have been said to think in a fundamentally “weird” way before I found out I was neuroatypical.
I chose not to believe.
But I’ll never get tired of atheists telling me I don’t exist.
They’re working sympathetic magic. Your Arete is too high, though.
Let them eat Paradox
You may not choose to believe things, but of course other people choose to believe things. That’s the difference between believing and known. I know scientific facts, which have been proven to be true. I choose to believe in religion, which can’t possibly be proven to be true. If I were certain it were true, it wouldn’t be a belief, it would just be another fact about the universe.
Not really, I think. There’s a different distinction. I don’t know any more than you do in terms of hard scientific evidence or logical proofs, but I just don’t believe. I never made any conscious choice not to, but I don’t. I can accept that others have made that choice – either to believe or not to believe, but I never experienced it as a choice. I don’t see how I could decide to believe in God. I could pretend to, but I don’t see a way that I could change my actual lack of belief.
From my reading of the comic, Joyce is much the same, though she came to it through losing her belief rather than not having any to start with. She never chose it, she just stopped believing. She stopped feeling God or realized she never felt him in the first place and her belief went with that.
Amtelope, there are no scientific facts which have been proven to be true. There are those with a lot of evidence. All it takes is one counter example though and science changes its mind. Proof only comes up in mathematics, where things are logical consequences of definitions and counter examples to proofs only means that it didn’t fit the definition to start with, so it isn’t really a counter example.
Alan Moore managed that trick with his snake-god, but I suspect he’s an outlier….
Hail Glycon. Though I understand Alan Moore was a sock puppet.
gross, reroll. Joyce needs an apostate to talk to, someone who understands.
Yeah, the problem isn’t that Joyce is atheist, but that she is vocally telling people (including believers) that NOT being an atheist is silly and makes you an idiot.
I also wish Becky didn’t lash out. Worth noting too is that Becky never tells people that their beliefs are dumb. Becky and Dina have a nice relationship despite not sharing religious beliefs, and part of that is not calling the other person an idiot all the time for their beliefs.
The big thing is Joyce genuinely DOES think Becky is stupid for believing now.
Which is an interesting character angle.
She didn’t apologize because she wants Becky to abandon the beliefs she has.
She thinks Becky believes a stupid thing, but she’s explicitly said that Becky is smart, and that’s why she’s confident that Becky will let go of the stupid things that they both “believed” (really that only Joyce ever believed because Becky didn’t consider those the “important” parts) the same way she did..
Amusingly, Jesus’ ministry was all about reform Judaism and ignoring the crappy parts. So, yes, Becky is actually a leg up here on reform. I can imagine Biblical Joyce being appalled at Historical Jesus for all the screw ups he’s making of scripture.
Joyce and Becky never actually had the same religious beliefs at all. Becky believed that God loved her, and backed her against her oppressors. Joyce believed that the substitutory sacrifice of the incarnate God was necessary to save her from Original Sin.
Becky dumped belief in the Creation, Eden, and the Fall last semester, with no effect on her faith, which was never in those beliefs. She doesn’t actually believe half the beliefs that Joyce thinks are so dumb.
Yup. I alluded to this yesterday: using labels like “Christian” is useless. All that this label demonstrates is that you believe in calling yourself a Christian. On a different forum, someone asked what beliefs were shared between various right-wing hucksters, and the answer is the same: they believe that they have a right to use that label.
The label doesn’t actually tell you anything useful about what they believe. It’s like asking an undocumented immigrant in America whether or not they’re an American. Think about the actual answers you’d get from such a question… and that question has the convenience of actual legal status and established geopolitical borders.
This comment actually happens to bring up a really interesting angle I personally relate to.
I’ve never been undocumented – but at the same time, I’m a third culture kid and grew up in a country (Germany) that was not my parents’ (the US). We were there with permission, but I’ve never legally been German… but on the other hand, legality can also go fuck itself considering I celebrated as many German holidays as American ones growing up. And I only just reached the point where I’ve lived in the US as long as I lived in Germany. So, in a very real sense, I’m at least part German, legality be damned LOL.
Like, almost no one in the US knows what Martinstag or Krampusnacht/Sankt Nikolaus Tag are. Or Fasching. Or Hexennacht. Or what the hell a Schultüte is. Or even that Christmas trees are from Germanic pre-Christian pagan traditions. HUGE culture shock when I moved here and discovered people didn’t know what these things were haha. Yet on paper, I’ve always been 100% American despite only spending the first seven months of my life there before I moved ‘back’ to the US.
So yeah. Labels aren’t always clear, and you have to dig deeper and see what people actually mean when they use them.
Becky told Joyce that she was tired of Joyce’s stupid phase. Back at the big party before Mike died.
yes… when Becky went to Joyce for counsel and support and Joyce was too wrapped up in her crisis of faith to actually offer such… how horrible of Becky.
But Becky has policed Joyce’s religion though.
She doesn’t attack specific people for their beliefs, but she does attack beliefs themselves. It’s pretty hard to read Panel 2 of this and come away with something other than Becky declaring “The defining feature of Atheism is hating people.”, and to somebody secretly Atheist like Joyce is at this point, she’s got good reason to feel attacked.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/warning-3/
Joyce is kind of acting like someone turned reddit inside out and everything spilled forth.
That said, tee-hee on the dildo bit.
Let’s look at it like this, Joyce is obviously trying to hard to push the whole fact she now identify as atheist, yeah I get it’s maybe somehow liberating for her but still I don’t think being a douche about it is the practical way to go about it especially since Dorothy and Dina don’t seem to act that way either.
As for “being a dildo to Dorothy” the only people letting her get away with that were Joyce and her.
Dina literally yelled “I CAN STILL SAVE THIS ONE” when Joyce brought up some of her previous beliefs while Becky and Dina were talking science. If that’s not telling somebody that you think their beliefs are stupid, I’m not sure what is.
I think part of the issue is that Becky doesn’t believe in Creationalism or Biblical literalism but people unfamiliar with….99% of religious people, assume all religious people are fundamentalist literalists.
Becky finds literalism stupid….as did Jesus.
Dude, I think you (and much of this comic’s readership) massively overestimate how your experience of religious people translates over the rest of the world.
ah, it snipped the link. Trying again: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-many-creationists-are-there-in-america/
Spoiler: At least 18% of US citizens straight-up reject evolution.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx
And on the Gallup side, apparently 40% are strict creationists in the USA. And this is a “secular” nation with tolerably good education. You think places with worse science education are going to have any better rates?
First of all, to address your main point, that still leaves at least 60% of a nation that is, I’ll remind you, majority Christian, who don’t believe in creationism. It’s really not unusual for Christians, especially outside of the evangelical movement, to believe in evolution, as evidenced by the Scientific American article you linked.
Second, I honestly think you’re overvaluing the quality of American education in this respect. In some parts of the country, they don’t just fail to teach evolution properly, they actively teach creationism. I get the sense that you’re thinking about this a bit wrong, like creationism is just a more primitive understanding of the world that people believe until they’re taught otherwise, rather than what it actually is – a concerted reactionary pushback to secularization and the encroachment of scientific discoveries onto conservative religious doctrine.
My main point is that you guys can’t keep treating literalism as some kind of negligible aberration. It’s a massive part of the belief system of this country. Yes, other western nations are better, but do you think for a second Iran, Iraq, hell even most of rural Inda actually know about evolution and other scientific principles? (Worth noting, India’s minister for education has publicly attacked evolution.)
To address your second point… well, what is your point? Are you trying to say that people didn’t believe this before scientific advances gave us better explanations for life? Because they definitely did. Are you saying that there’s a concerted effort to keep this factually wrong belief system in circulation? Because yes, obviously. And it’s a very large (and extraordinarily vocal) group pushing this. See above large group of believers.
And that rolls right back around to why some Atheists feel the need to get quite vocal on why exactly this shit makes no sense.
Furthermore, I think you overestimate how truly secular the USA is. It is far the most religious country in the First World.
Becky was a literalist. But she wasn’t as committed to it as Joyce was, and Dina got to her.
I think Becky accepted literalist statements because everyone around her affirmed them, but never really cared about them. Her reaction to an honest explanation of evolution and the evidence for it (as distinct from a straw man constructed to deceive her about it) was a “Wow! That’s so cool!” that did not touch her faith at all.
People don’t think Becky was a creationist because of notions about “what all Christians believe”. They think she was a creationist because of what the faith she and Joyce were raised in taught. And she was, until Dina converted her to evolution.
It’s not bashing or misunderstanding Christianity to look at the actual specific (non-)denomination in question.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t remember Becky being that much of a jerk? I don’t remember anything mean from becky toward anybody but dorothy at all. And Dorothy obviously wasn’t terribly bothered by it and Becky didn’t escalate it to a level that was actually hurtful to Dorothy. So who has Becky actually hurt?
becky has been literally actively trying to make joyce dislike dorothy since her introduction – something she admitted when dotty confronted her in their room after they became roomates – and has also admitted to actively going out of her way to try and upset and belittle dorothy
yes, she does it in a ‘jokey haha I can totally claim I wasnt serious but I was’ way, but shes still doing it.
like yes it didnt hurt dorothy, because dorothys mature enough not to be bothered by it, but she was still trying and she was so unsubtle at it the one person she was trying to hide it from saw it
but yeah, joyce is still being a bongo here and lashing out
I mean, while this:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/05-as-long-as-its-free/pile-2/
is fine for a few days, they’ve only been living together for a few days at this point. In my experience, it’s harmful after about a couple of weeks, or when ants/mice/mold show up.
Becky scolded Joyce for not doing Christianity the way she wanted. Becky interrogated her when she was trying to be supportive.
And maybe Joyce is talking about when Becky lashed out at her dad.
The thing where she fired Ethan was hurtful.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/grandchildren/
When Becky first started the frenemies routine, Dorothy was bothered by it. She wants to be liked by everyone and it upset her that Becky was against her. Post-timeskip she started doing the “I’m not really bothered” act, but she admitted it was an act specifically designed to get Becky to stop being passive-aggressive. Therefore Dorothy found the behavior annoying, she just didn’t see the value in calling it out.
She’s an awful bully abuser and not just kind of obnoxious /s
ymmv. some readers react very strongly to her. but there’s precious little in-comic indication that any actual character ever got angry or upset at Becky for crossing boundaries. So far, my own feeling has been that Becky for all her high-drama antics is actually pretty good at reading people and respecting boundaries. Based, again, on how the actual characters respond to her. Not on how I would feel in the situation.
But hey! we’ll see if this gets addressed by Dorothy tomorrow.
Fuckin GOT ‘er lmaoo
Joyce needs a healthy outlet that doesn’t involve the people who are directly involved with her trauma and situation tbh
All the energy that shs been holding in for a long time is out and i understand her feelings of not being apologetic about it, especially since she vented her feelings out to someone who has been an unhealthy influence on her and it only just so happened that becky and dorothy were there. It doesnt excuse her actions at all but i get where shes coming from
I think people often forget that she didnt have much time or didnt know how to process these feelings and its very hard for people to react maturely, even if you’re an adult, when they’re directly involved with it.
I just hope it doesnt take too long for her to realise that her current outlook is unhealthy for her and that she can find a healthier outlet to procesd her feelings
Well, she tried using Liz as such an outlet, in Joe’s room, where no one should have had reason to look for her.
Exactly!! If she had done it delibrately in front of becky/dorothy i wouldve been more judgemental but yeah, i really cant fault her for not being apologetic about this
Do Joe and Sarah get that right then, since Joyce knowingly did it in front of them?
Joe and Sarah weren’t hurt by Joyce venting about her religious upbringing, and Joyce knows them well enough to know they wouldn’t be.
But Dorothy wasn’t hurt by Joyce’s venting either.
Heck, Joe is still Jewish, even if he hasn’t gone to temple at all.
I feel like they’re different since its also about how joyce’s dynamics with her friends. Like with becky joyce is clearly scared of her knowing that shes atheist (cant comment on dorothy) but shes more comfortable with joe and sarah since its likly she assumes that they don’t have as much expectations of her. So i don’t think i can comment on her actions with joe and sarah. Again though, i’m not excusing her actions at all, the comment i made was more emphathizing with her trauma and actions more than anything
“Joyce, everyone is annoyed by the way you keep telling people their religious beliefs are wrong. This is because your religious beliefs are wrong. Try deism or another, less annoying religion”
Becky is an orphan after her sole remaining parent, the gun-toting maniac that almost killed her friends, was brutally murdered. Joyce may have had her entire afterlife torn away and is suffering the existential backlash, but at least she still has family that care about her. Becky’s letting loose and trying to discover herself while still holding onto the emotional crutches that she needs to (i.e. her mom isn’t “really” gone). Joyce is latching onto anything that justifies her worldview (“I am somebody who knows THE TRUTH and I’m better than those other people who don’t”), no matter how toxic the source, just like her mom.
Joyce didn’t have her afterlife torn away from her. It’s her real life that’s been damaged. I mean we *just* saw how that kind of upbringing effects a person’s life even after they realize there’s no god waiting to torture them for eternity if they have sex at the impious time.
She doesn’t know how much of her family will still care for her. Well, she knows some of them won’t. We don’t know the specifics of what happened with Jordan, but it sounds like there’s some degree of shunning.
I kind of am fully expecting Jordan to be revealed to be an actual monster when Joyce assumes he’s being shunned for something righteous. Like he’s a child abuser or something. That and we’re running out of bad guys.
Given the whole sex abuse scandal involving the 19 Kids and Counting family, I (unfortunately) don’t think child abuse would be enough to prompt shunning so long as he was still a GOOD CHRISTIAN child abuser. Even if the person he abused was, say, his very young sister.
It’s possible he’s actually an asshole, but Hank’s clear regret for the situation and Carol’s ‘we got the Jordan situation by not squeezing hard enough’ to justify pulling Joyce from school both say to me that they were, in fact, in the wrong there. This is not incompatible with ‘and subsequently became a real asshole,’ but I feel confident that whatever reason Jordan’s estranged, Hank and Carol did wrong by their kid there and Hank realizes he did.
Yeah, you really cannot underestimate just how much evangelicals are willing to.completely overlook horrid things a person has does because they share the same belief system.
Weird, I thought the Duggers were completely shunned for the cover up of their abuse because, well, it was horrifying and shunworthy.
How terrible.
By the public at large? Yeah, they’re loathed.
By their particular community? And the parents specifically? No, there is DEFINITELY a belief that the kid made sufficient amends to God that it’s okay, because… he’s male, I guess. Cults!
I used to joke that he’d converted to a Christian sect that was too strict and conservative for the Browns, but that’s not really likely.
Maybe he took the hardcore edgelord atheist route that Joyce is only flirting with here. Amazing Atheist style.
Yeah, I could see him being a real edgelord atheist, especially if he got more set in his edginess after cutting ties.
I could also see him being *gasp!* Catholic, or even worse converting to some NON-CHRISTIAN religion, but my main realistic guesses are ‘atheist’ and/or ‘pornlord.’
I like to think Hank had some lines he wouldn’t cross and that would have driven him to disown Jordan but you’re rigfht if he regrets it then he’s probably a nice kid.
Hank said Joyce reminded him of Jordan when she told her family to stop being assholes to Dorothy. He also thinks they ‘squeezed too hard’ and that while they disagreed with Jordan, he was still a good person.
I strongly doubt that will be the reveal.
I don’t think it’s shunning, except on Jordan’s part. He cut ties and ran for some reason or other. Given how specifically Joyce seems to have been told ‘you’ll find out when you’re older’ and he’s ‘too Jordan’ to attend or be included in family stuff part of me suspects he’s some brand of pornlord, Internet or otherwise.
I though maybe a high-school science teacher or worker as a Family Planning clinic, something that they would be very hostile too. But since that threw him out of the family when Joyce was very young he probably didn’t graduate high school and is now likely in financial hardship.
Yeah, if Jordan actually is the third-youngest just before Joyce and not second-oldest right after John, he seems to have split from home… worryingly young.
Joyce’s family’s been pretty torn apart, I think. Her mom supported toedad while her dad did not and we have no clue how that is affecting their marriage. Most of her siblings escaped while they could, and she hasn’t seen them in pretty much forever except for Jocelyn. I don’t like playing the “more tragic than thou” game, it’s not fair to either of their world views.
I thought we had confirmation of a divorce, whether or not it’s been finalized.
Yup. Sounds like it’s not finalized yet, but it’s definitely in process.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/seeing/
John is still around too, when he’s not off in India exploiting the locals through his missionary work. We haven’t heard from him since, but he’ll clearly take Carol’s side in the divorce.
To John’s credit, he’s exploiting the locals in the USA to pay for his missionary work.
*rimshot*
Maybe. I’ll bet they’re collecting donations overseas too.
I mean, she’s met Other Jacob, so people being sex objects could be a thing.
Sometimes the whole “Joyce is a autobiographic character” thing kinda feels pretty strong.
This is one of those times.
So Joyce has learned her insults from Cartman 9 _ 9
Or Metalocalypse.
If she pulls a “screw you guys, I’m going home”, we’ll know it was definitely Cartman.
… I’m kinda worried that this storyline is going to intersect, hard, with the ignoring-phone-calls-from-her-sibling detail.
I dildon’t believe it.
I wonder if Joyce thinks God is a “dildo”, too. XD
Joyce doesn’t think god is a dildo. Joyce knows gods don’t exist. That’s literally the definition of “atheist”, come on.
If she frames it right, she absolutely would. “Oh, you mean a fake that people shove up inside themselves to feel good? Yep, God’s a dildo”
insert french-speaker joke
I forget who said it and how it goes exactly, but “There are few things more annoying than a newly minted evangelical Christian, but one of them is a newly minted atheist. And the only thing more annoying than either of them, is a 14-year-old boy who has just ‘discovered’ Led Zeppelin.”
Pretty sure newly minted vegans belong somewhere in that pantheon. No shade at my vegan friends intended.
Okay, so, Joyce bringing up Becky’s treatment of Dorothy is both an obvious what-about-ism – a deflection from examining her own behavior – and also a wild false equivalence. Becky sniping at Dorothy never comes across as anything more than banter, and, importantly, when she did go a bit too far, she acknowledged it, made amends, and dialed it back. Joyce’s rhetoric about religious people is actually hurtful and ignorant, her attempted apology kinda sucked, and she’s kept doubling down on that rhetoric even as everyone around her tells her that she’s acting like a twat.
Becky’s behavior strikes many of us as toxic, not banter. It’s also been prolonged. Joyce has been out as an atheist for maybe 24 hours; just a few days ago she was denying atheism to Sarah.
This, exactly this. And not just her treatment of Dorothy with the playful but not really rivalry, but her CONSTANT smashing through other people’s boundaries if she doesn’t want to acknowledge them.
Much like Joyce there. Comes from their upbringing. Though Joyce had started to get better about it.
Becky’s sniping at Dorothy is way more than banter, though she tends to frame it as such to avoid consequences; like the “wacky Becky” act in general, it’s covering up a whole lot of jealousy, insecurity, and other messy issues.
So Joyce known about Becky dildo behaviour and dont Say a word about it until need that to argument?
I mean you’d have to be brain-dead to not see it, but it’s true that she let it slide until now.
Until recently, pretty much everyone just handwaved it off with an eyeroll, an “Oh, Becky…” and a sitcom laugh track.
Right, but when you’re one of the main people handwaving off, you don’t get to use that when confronted on your own behavior.
Why not?
The social expectation that you and your friends have created is that that behavior is okay, because one of your group did it a lot and it was okay. Everyone allowed it, so did you. Then you engage in the behavior and suddenly it’s not okay?
If everyone but you had been allowing it, and you had been complaining about it… it wouldn’t make it any more okay to engage in that behavior, and you’d be a hypocrite. At least by allowing it for others in your group before engaging in it yourself, you’re not being hypocritical about that one thing.
“Becky sniping at Dorothy never comes across as anything more than banter”
We live on completely different planets, because I have OFTEN found Becky’s petty sniping to be entirely too much and in fact have made comments that Dorothy must have the patience of a saint not to have punched Becky in the mouth for how badly Becky treats her all the darn time.
Seconded with a. Exclamation mark. If I were Dorothy I would have almost instantly demanded a roommate reassignment. Imagine having to LIVE with that rather than just tolerate it every so often.
I assumed that they (Dorothy and Becky) had requested to be together. Otherwise, odds are pretty good that she’d have been dropped into one of the 13 other residence halls, especially since she started on a different term than everyone else. Maybe Joyce had asked it as a favor of Dorothy, since she wanted to be closer to Becky.
Joyce has met Little Jacob, so she she does know what dildos are.
I love this arc so much. Willis has really handled this so well. Put yourself in the shoes of a character and so much of their choices make sense even if you don’t agree with them.
Is “insert character here” being a jerk or are they understandably angry?
Does “insert character here”‘s trauma excuse their actions?
I admit that I don’t think panel one makes sense or is good for Dorothy to say, but the real thrust is panel three, which does hit at the crux of the matter. No matter how right Joyce is, and no matter how much Becky can be an ass sometimes (including hounding Joyce for her newfound belief system), that doesn’t make it right for Joyce to do those same kinds of things back. Ideally they both get a nice sit down and get to hash things over to get to healthier mindsets.
Being patronizing to Joyce is like the opposite of the right way to handle this.
Well you’re right about that
Aaaaand Joe remains the most supportive and understanding friendship Joyce has this semester. If that feels like I’m dunking on on Becky (i’m tired of your stupid phase) and Dorothy (yes, you’re having a crisis but could you try not having one instead?) I kind of am.
You’re not wrong.
Like yeah.
Dorothy is honestly, not handling this well?
Her response to her behaviour had boiled down to “maybe go back to believing something loosely” rather than, trying to explain the concept of being an atheist while still respecting others beliefs.
Which I’m shocked no one has thought to do yet
Much of Joyce’s anger might be defused by pointing out Becky’s christianity probably helps her still feel close to her dead mum. Religion does serve other purposes besides forcing someone to fall in line. From the sounds of it, Joyce hasn’t had much connection to the spiritual side of spirituality…
One of Becky’s accusations was literally that Joyce supported her during the dead mum party when she didn’t actually believe that dead mum was eating cake in heaven.
The accusation was that Joyce’s support wasn’t sincere. From Becky’s point of view, Joyce’s rejection of Christianity would include a rejection of heaven. Which means a rejection of the idea that her mum is still looking out for her. Because she isn’t there.
Joyce has blinders on right now. She’s rejecting the control her parents and church had over her via religion. She hasn’t stopped to think that the reason Becky is so upset is because Joyce – whether she meant to or not – basically said Becky was dumb for thinking her mum was still out there somewhere and looking after her in whatever way she could. Becky was clearly close to her mother and as we saw, it’s the anniversary of when she lost her. Joyce’s aggressive atheism is gonna sting extra hard right now.
This is entirely up for interpretation of course…
Sure, but that’s my point. Joyce fully understands that Becky’s christianity helps her feel closer to her mum, which is why Joyce was at that party and her answer to “do you think my mum is eating cake in heaven?” wasn’t “actually, your mum is dead and gone because heaven isn’t real”.
The moment Becky decided to throw that party for dead mum and ask Joyce that question, Joyce had no good options. Like, she had to pick between:
a) not going to the party (which would’ve lead to this anyway);
b) tell Becky her mum is dead and gone and heaven isn’t real; or
c) do what she did.
Which is a situation you’re likely to wind up in when you’re hiding big things from close friends. It may be necessary, it may be worth it, but you’re going to wind up having to lie to them and do things that will hurt them and piss them off when they find out about it.
Hot take: being mad at a friend for “lying” about a thing that they were only lying about because they were still working through their own feelings on it and weren’t comfortable talking about it yet (and also had very good reason to believe that people would get upset with them if they were honest about it) isn’t justified.. Lying about Becky’s mom being in heaven was the appropriate thing to do in that situation, and Joyce recognized that, so she did it because it made her friend happy.. Becky doesn’t get to be mad that Joyce did exactly what she asked her to do just because Joyce was retroactively being “insincere” when Becky demanded that Joyce spout off “Joyce Nonsence” on command..
Look, if your point is that Joyce should have felt safe enough to tell Becky “I’m an atheist now.” before the whole thing, I agree. Of course, FOR VERY OBVIOUS REASONS she did not, in fact, feel safe enough to do so. Additionally, Becky’s not entitled to that information. Joyce’s beliefs are hers to share (or not) as she sees fit.
I deliberately did not speak in terms of “entitlement” because that’s not how I think about personal relationships.
I said that’s the trade off. That’s the risk. Yes, Joyce can not share her beliefs if she chooses, but there may be consequences to hiding them – which may be worse than revealing them up front.
She can choose not to share. Becky can be upset over the deceit that comes with that.
This entire character bit for Joyce kinda feels like it’ll be more digestible once it’s finished and we can read it in full. This moment-to-moment hyperanalysis is a little hard to parse, as a person completely separated from the issues being discussed.
Yup. Some of the analyses have been quite good, though, by virtue of actually calling back to beats from old storylines, but… Sturgeon’s Law.
I wonder how Becky’s anger at Joyce’s atheism and expression of it is affecting Becky’s behaviour towards Dorothy. Is Becky still executing her “we’re rivals for Joyce’s affection” schtick? If so, how does it play out now that Dorothy has seduced Joyce to atheism and Becky’s relationship with Joyce is in a state of rupture?
I doubt it will change Becky’s treatment of Dorothy at all, or if it does she’ll amp up the bullying. Dorothy is Becky’s favorite target for cruelty, and she’s got a lot of anger simmering now because Joyce has escaped the box.
While I dont agree with Joyce’s dickish behaviour (though i understand it) she does make a good point.
People let Becky away with way too much. Honestly, this seems to be one of the few times someone has even ack owledged it besides dorothy, and Becky herself that one time and then didnt stop the behaviour at all.
Doesnt excuse Joyce’s behaviour of course but shes not wrong here either.
I was going to say something like this. How come Dorothy has infinite patience for Becky’s passive-aggressive sniping but is so cold to Joyce?
Because Becky’s sniping was mostly directed at her and she could handle it, while Joyce’s has just led to a big blow with Becky.
Now that could be that Dorothy really wasn’t bothered by it, while Becky obviously was or that Dorothy is better at standing up for others than at standing up for herself. Though it’s also worth remembering that Dorothy has tried to talk to Becky about it, with little more success than this interaction.
That’s a really bad parallel though. The better one would be why Joyce had infinite patience for Becky harassing her other friend.
Dorothy can’t be serious. That’s something an intelligent person/sensible friend can’t say. Joyce is become extreme, but say her to “find yourself a nice deism”? Wait, what? But it’s nice to see Dorothy in a situation where she has no idea what to say. Maybe, the only one that could give some good advice to Joyce is Leslie.
Yeah, Leslie is probably the single best member of the regular cast to help Joyce with this. (The absolute best person to help her period is likely Jocelyne)
This is pretty much the reverse of the Danny/Ethan blow-up at the hospital, where “person I know the longest gets to be an absolute dickbag to everyone and that’s ok” was the stance.
Also, I have no idea why people are surprised at this stance by Dorothy, when Dorothy has always been the middle-of-the-road centrist critter. She’s always been Hillary Clinton, minus the support of war crimes (but give her time).
The strip has been scripted and drawn thru mid-April, so we’re pretty much locked into the story line as it is. But this would be a good time for both Jocelyn and Joyce’s dad to orbit back in for a little added drama.
Drama, hell. I honestly think Joyce talking to her dad might help her work through some of her anger. If nothing else, it gives her an appropriate outlet at which to direct that anger; even if he’s been shown to be slightly more tolerant than Carol, he’s still enabled her and sat back when he should’ve spoken up.
Talking to Hank about her atheism is a much bigger risk than talking to Becky was. I like to think Hank would accept it, but that might be a step to far for him. In Joyce’s shoes, I certainly wouldn’t be ready to take that step.
Yeah. Remember what he was like about Dorothy’s atheism only six months ago.
There was that mysterious unanswered phone call from Jocelyn, so you might get your wish.
maybe she is just my genre but damn dotty’s clapback game is choice
I feel like Joyce just made a really good point in the fourth panel. Becky’s been acting like a jerk to several people (including Dorothy, and I don’t get why she doesn’t seem to care how badly Becky treats her) for a long time, and none of the other seem to care, while Joyce loses her religion and gets angry that she was lied to and lashes out a bit, and everyone acts like she’s a terrible person for it. Why does Becky get to act badly for months and nobody says or does anything, while Joyce acts kinda badly (for good reasons) for a day or two and everyone treats her like she’s a horrible monster?
Based on other responses in this thread alone, I think probably because Becky’s frankly terrifying boundary-breaking and consistent snarky-asshole personality don’t bother people as much as Joyce’s unfiltered anger.
On a personal note, I used to have a buddy who had the Becky personality of “playful japes and jabs” constantly. It gets REALLY old REALLY fast when it’s not confined to every other day or so in a webcomic.
Plus Becky’s stalker-level obsession with Joyce, which led her to tracking Joyce down in Joe’s room.
Becky’s always loud, brash, and doesn’t respect boundaries.
Joyce just pulled a sudden heel turn, seemingly out of nowhere (at least as far as her friends who were picking on the naïve fundie could tell).
Don’t forget that the whole thing happened because Becky feels the need to be at the center of all of Joyce’s friendships
Yeah, more often than not she acts like she’s entitled to Joyce’s attention. (Others too, but Joyce in particular.)
I’m hoping Joyce talks to Dina at some point. Dina would give her the praise for converting to atheism that she is obviously craving, and that might calm her down enough to listen to reason.
Dina becomes Joyce’s atheism mentor but it’s just extensive research about dinosaurs.
I’m guessing the thinks Dill dough is made from flower and pickle juice.
Becky was playful with her japes and jabs, everyone knew she was using humor as a coping mechansim
Becky was not playful. She has been unceasingly cruel to Dorothy and has been fairly controlling and stalkers of Joyce. Becky is simply good at sounding playful enough that no one calls her on anything.
It is not reasonable to stick barbs in everyone else and be thin-skinned yourself.
It’s funny, I’ve always considered myself to be thin skinned, but then I see people who name call anyone anyone who disagrees with them, and throw a fit about it being unfair when anyone returns fire.
So right now Joyce is between anger and bargaining?
Why do people have different standards for Becky and Joyce? It could be because the in-your-face, cartoonishly abrasive Becky is the only Becky they have known, while they have seen Joyce go from smug judgmental Bible thumper to questioning authority and caring about people and then back to smug judgmental Atheist.
I don’t see a lot of comparison really, except for the time Becky came out as a lesbian and was so happy about it she had to make sure everyone in the hemisphere knew about it. I compare that to this mess of bitterness, misdirected aggression and spewing of ignorant dogma and I can certainly see why more characters are giving Joyce a hard time.
Yeah, I think that’s a lot of it.
Joyce did get a huge amount of tolerance and forbearance from Dorothy and from the rest of her friends. And she improved greatly, on the boundaries and the smug Christian thumping. Now she’s snapped back to judgmental, just from a different direction and no one’s ready to deal with it again.
I think it’s because Becky has never been malicious or hurtful. Whereas, yes, Joyce has been.
What? She openly antagonize Dorothy from the start and skipped out on Leslie. Malicous: check. Hurtful: Check
Becky has definitely been malicious and hurtful, multiple times. And not just to Dorothy: she pretty much told Walky dating him was shameful, for example.
She also ‘fired’ Ethan and tried kick him out of Joyce for the grievous sin of… respecting Joyce’s boundaries and leaving her pants where she put them.
Thing of note that occurred to me: she “fired” Ethan for not pressuring Joyce hard enough into abandoning the concept of sexual purity and then a few weeks later yelled at Joyce for not affirming how totes cool and important sexual purity is and said it was “just a phase” that Joyce responded that sexual purity is bullshit actually..
And she told Sarah to her face that her atheism was a matter of hating everybody.
I mean, cuz doing a playful but ultimately harmless “rivalry” schtick is completely different from insulting someone’s entire belief system, both behind their back and to their face? Especially when that belief system gives them comfort while they’re still processing the death of both of their parents?
Like, am I the only one who thinks these two aren’t equivalent? Joyce is allowed to be angry at fundamentalist Christianity. Hell she’s allowed to be angry at her parents for what all it did to her. She isn’t entitled to lash out at her friends and insult them just because she personally doesn’t believe in god anymore.
Becky has repeatedly insulted Dorothy to her face.
There’s a pretty major difference between “I think it’s funny how uptight you can be sometimes, time to make jokes about that!” and “I think that people’s religious beliefs are stupid and that people who think that way are deluded.”
Becky once cheerfully exclaimed in Dorothy’s face “I did not hear a word that you said!” while smiling, even though the thing that Dorothy had just said was something meant to help Becky and Joyce. That’s not playful banter, that’s just insulting her directly.
I await your no doubt well-fundamented reasoning as to why one of those personality traits can be criticised and the other is untouchable.
How about “I think that all lack of belief, including yours specifically, is a matter of hating everybody”?
Also Sarah. Walky. Ethan.
Oh Dorothy…
I’m not surprised but like…
Why is it so hard to have empathy for your friend? Like no one has even asked “Hey whats up with you? This is not normal behavior.”
Yeah!
Kyle: Kenny what’s a dildo?
Kenny: mumble mumble mumble
Cartman: Yeah that’s what Kyle’s little brother is alright.
I just figured out what’s going on.
I had the thought: “Nobody’s upset that Joyce is an atheist now; they’re upset that she lashed out at Becky. But the real change here is that she’s clearly unhappy and covering it up.” Then it hit me:
The last time Joyce felt happy was when she felt completely confident in her beliefs about the world. That’s what she’s trying to recapture here.
Now I’m imaging Joyce going to the “Oh, Joy. Sex Toy” site.
Of all the places on the internet to learn about dildoes (dildos?), that’s probably one of the best for her. Focus on safe sex (not that she’s seriously considering premarital sex to be okay yet), judgement free, they generally seem very nice over there.
Oh god that’s… Well not the worst place to get sex education but it’s pretty fuckin far down there
I feel like we’re not taking into account a comparison between another person here: Amber not only lost her father, but also her sense of identity and her best friend. I feel like comparing Amber’s coping with Joyce’s is worth exploring. Even if it may seem “standard behavior” to y’all, Amber has fully become a recluse. She’s shut herself off from the world again, after making all those strides to be more social and maybe not outgoing, but going out at the very least. Amber seemingly has given up trying to pick up the pieces again. She’s fine where she is, where “she can’t hurt anyone anymore”. But that is clearly just as unhealthy, but we’re accepting it because, again, it’s “an Amber thing” and it’s harmless to others; but it’s sooo self-destructive in the long term. At least Joyce is TRYING something, harmful to others it may be in the short term, but over-correcting is at least an attempt to balance her life out. If her friends all shun her now as she’s trying to readjust her life, she’ll be struggling very hard to reach that plateau of emotional stability, but I believe she’ll get there. She’ll just be very bitter for a while.
I’m not sure the parallel is that simple. Joyce is adjusting from a position where others are harmful to her, whereas Amber needs to adjust from a position where she believes she’s harmful to others.
In that light, that Amber’s reaction is to shut herself in makes sense, because it solves the problem how she perceives it – if she doesn’t contact with anyone, she can’t hurt them.
I get what people are trying to do for Joyce; but it really feels like a ton of talking down to, or trying to put her back in her box.
Like it or not; Joyce is moving at her own pace, and no one is entitled to tell her if she should be an atheist/theist/etc.
a tried and true technique in the Clinton-Brown household.
That is not how I expected (or hoped) “Becky” and “dildo” to be used in the same sentence at all!
Joyce, when both your parents die, you can lash out all you want
Oh i got one. Dorothy im dissapointed
I’m becoming more convinced that Joyce should maybe try talking to people outside her usual circle, I still maintain that Sal is a good choice for Joyce to talk to, Jocelyne is another good choice
Joyce should form a D&D group with Joe, Dina and Sal.
Maybe a prog rock band. Either or.
Speaking of Jocelyne, I wonder if it’s gonna be emotionally devastating to Sarah when Joyce says “I can’t believe I actually have a big sister!” when Jocelyne comes out to her.
As someone that played D & D in my younger days and was/is a fan of Genesis I find this to be…a reasonable course of action
Dina’s character would be a dinosaur
If the rules don’t allow it she will make a homebrew for it (or find one online)
Wait that reminds me, Sal liked dinosaurs as a kid too.
This is perfect. They can make a friend group about chafing under how other people expect them to act and liking dinosaurs.
Playing a dinosaur might requiring homebrew.
Playing a druid with a dinosaur pet and/or capable of turning into a dinosaur would be easy in at least some editions.
I actually went back to the archives and re-read some of the storylines to solidify this opinion: I don’t much care for Becky and her brand of “wackiness”. (saying this to acknowledge bias)
She only treats two people in this planet with any amount of decency: Joyce and Dina.
Anybody else is fair game to make mock, lie to and ignore/dismiss. Becky was particularly awful to Dorothy and Leslie, two people that went out of their way to help and accommodate her.
Now, Becky has a hard time trusting people, which makes sense given her circumstances. That still doesn’t change the fact that she’s at best fake to and at worst outright attacking to people who are not her two chosen ones.
We’re seeing something similar right now with Joyce: Joyce’s circumstances explain this attitude, but she’s still being a butt. And her grievance is real: why does Becky get so so much leeway with her nonsense in-universe by the people around her while they act like Joyce has kicked all the puppies?
I think it’s because Joyce made a sudden heel turn, while Becky’s always been like that.
Also, no-one wants to feel as though they are joining in a pile-on with her extraordinarily awful father, nor adding to her enormous difficulties.
I like this storyline even if I find characters frustrating in it. Good food for thought.
I get that Joyce doesn’t exactly understand what religion is, and why she acts the way she acts, but why isn’t anyone sitting down with her and explaining her what Christianity and the Mediterranean monotheistic religions are, and what is spirituality in general ????
I don’t think she knows anyone competent to do that.
Have we done the ‘you’re rushing into lesbianism, try easing into it via bisexuality’ comparison yet? Cos Becky?
Is this a bit about how atheism is less acceptable in current American society than homosexuality?
hhhhhhhhhh now I gotta think about why I agree that Becky’s overthetop behaviour is/was okay and Joyce’s is kinda shitty. I can TOTALLY see her saying these lines about being gay instead of atheist and it being SO much less insufferable.
Dorothy: “I’ve never thought of Becky as an uncomfortably-sized, inanimate tool to assist me in my sexual self-care… and now the mental picture is burned into my brain, so thanks for that, Joyce.”
Joyce: “……………….” (Silent scream)
I really hope this happens in a few minutes now!
Unlikely, I know. But still, really funny!!!
Four months may seem like a short time to abandon religion for atheism. But just how much time was Joyce supposed to take on this matter? A year? Ten? Was she supposed to go to conversion therapy or talk shop with other atheists for years before she concluded that the idea of god was a fraud? On the other hand, she needs to examine her reasons for becoming an atheist.
As for avoiding the trap of feeling smug and superior for being an atheist, that might take time. A lot of non-theists fall into that mindset but time helps them to dig their way out of it. Besides, it’s not as if religious people can’t be arrogant and self-righteous. The very notion that they’re superior to non-believers and will go to a wonderful place after they die while everyone else is damned or doomed is very much part of their canon.