I’ve found my body takes issue with wheat, so no more of my beloved pasta for me, but I had rice noodles with cheesy sauce for breakfast today and am happy.
I can’t eat Kraft Dinner anymore. It tastes bad, ever since they changed the recipe, and the pasta has no cohesion, so it falls apart into little pasta strips when you boil it. Nowadays, I eat President’s Choice mac and cheese instead. Tastes SOOOO much better, and the pasta actually remains in a macaroni shape, rather than dissolving.
It kinda hurts the whatever battle of principles Joyce is going through would be so easily swayed. She is usually – regardless of position – more thoughtful and considering.
Given Joyce’s background, she’s probably internalized the idea that you HAVE to stick to your principles even when you know they are wrong because that’s what people of “integrity” and “faith” do, and even though she’s abandoned much of what she previously believed, that unconscious attitude of “changing my position is bad” is harder to shake. It clearly took a lot to get her to do it even once.
It kind of reminds me of when Joyce wanted to steal Jacob from Raidah; Dorothy’s appeal to stop her based on morals/ethics fell on deaf ears, but as soon as Walky accused Joyce of wanting Jacob for lustful purposes, she backed off. A kind of “doing the right thing for the wrong reason” situation.
“You stop behaving like a terrible friend this instant or I won’t let you make me eat any junk food tonight I will have a salad wrap, you hear me? A salad wrap.”
I never thought I’d say this, but THANK YOU, DOROTHY.
I’ve been saying for months that this Joyce isn’t “different”, she’s exactly the same kind of person she was at the start of the strip. “What I believe is right, and everybody else is wrong.”
Her being an atheist now doesn’t change that. I’m glad somebody finally called her out on it.
Personally, I was hoping she’d say something along the lines of “You can fix this by not forcing your beliefs on others”. I personally think that’s the biggest issue with Joyce’s behavior vis-a-vis this issue, and I don’t think that’s been spelled out to her explicitly.
Yeah, Joyce has yet to acknowledge what she’s been doing wrong. Dorothy told her straight up right here, but Joyce has yet to say it back, much less mean it.
Seems to me like that would make it difficult for her to fix things?
I predict that Joyce will try and apologize and be ten times more insulting than she was before.
Joyce: Becky, listen, it’s not that I don’t love you. It’s that I think God is a stupid concept, that believing in you makes you supporting a hate-filled institution of social control, and that I dearly hope you will reject all your beliefs so you can accept your mom isn’t in Hell or Heaven because she’s ceased to exist. Oh and have sex with Dinah because sexual purity is stupid too.
Neither was Liz, and she still pushed it on Joyce just as hard as Joyce would now push it on anybody else. Joyce doesn’t have to be able to follow her own good advice to proselytize it, there is no mechanism in the fundie mindset for hypocrisy in preaching the gospel. Even if the gospel is that God is Dead.
… but how can you know which cultivar Andy’s kids are having?
Honest question.
Where I live, you can have a wide variety of cultivars, often under the same generic name.
and yes my kids also hate Mc n Cheese’s sauce and love broccoli.
I just realized I am 36 years old and never considered *swapping* cheese packets.
Its powdered cheese. Its universal. You have opened my eyes an intrigued my taste buds
I didn’t find the instant cups to be edible. The flavor and texture were so horrible I couldn’t eat even a bite. But perhaps I had a bad batch and should try again. Because it doesn’t make sense for them to be so nasty.
It’s a fine line between not adding enough water (so the pasta doesn’t come out right) and adding too much (making pasta cheese soup). Can’t do much for the flavor, though.
Given the choice between Easy Mac and Chef Boyardee mac and cheese, I’d go for Hector’s can of pasta in vaguely cheese related substance every time.
A local grocery store chain up here has passable knockoff Kraft mac and cheese. They were still 3 boxes for $1 too, last time I checked.
We don’t get Kraft noodles here, but have you tried adding a bit of extra cheese to them and letting that melt in the water? I find that improves any brand or flavour of cup noodles with a cheese or cream sauce that I’ve ever tried.
I find the house brand at Winco to be superior in both flavor and texture. Although of course when my wife’s feeling up to it, her homemade mac & cheese is superior to either (I don’t know all the secrets of her sauce, but it starts with a can of evaporated milk, and the cheese is usually a Colby/Monterey jack blend).
There is good mac n cheese, but it doesn’t come out of a box. Get some blocks of good cheese, good butter, good milk and cream, good pasta, spend a little time – and you’ll be well rewarded.
While that would undoubtedly be delicious, it is a different food. It’s like a hamburger vs a steak; the steak is clearly higher value, but neither one will satisfy a craving for the other.
I’d say more like the difference between McDonald’s and a homemade burger using good meat – they’re both called hamburgers (and are), but I don’t really understand craving the one if you know about the other. Resorting to it if it’s the only available choice at the time, yes – but not craving it…
Eh, sometimes you truly just want the crappy, crappy burger, knowing it’s crap but also that something about it appeals to you. (Sometimes I get a craving for Taco Bell. There are plenty of places near where I live that serve actual Tex-Mex food, including tacos worthy of the name. And they’re good tacos! But it’s like any other junk food craving – the fact that it’s not necessarily GOOD food by any objective metric doesn’t change the fact that it’s TASTY.)
With mac and cheese, especially box varieties versus homemade, there’s also the difference between what’s better-TASTING and what you have time for. You can have a really solid mac and cheese recipe and still not feel up to making it for real some nights because of all the prep and labor involved, but still want macaroni and cheese, and hey, here’s the Kraft variety, it’s good enough. There’s a lot to be said for ‘dramatically easier and cheaper’ even when cost isn’t necessarily a concern.
(Also a factor here with Joyce: People with food-based anxieties tend to have a really limited number of ‘safe’ foods, because something about the taste or the texture or the unpredictability freaks them out. There’s an image floating around the internet showing four blueberries and how the taste and texture differ per berry, versus a Wheat Thin or something which is EXTREMELY consistent every time, and that provides a sense of security. I think the infographic’s specifically about autism, but if you have a sensory processing disorder that applies to taste and texture and smell, I guarantee it’s a factor. Joyce could well be offered the finest macaroni and cheese in the land, and still pick one that she knows because it won’t surprise her. Even if she tried and liked the fancy one, because she doesn’t know if it’s always going to be this consistent every time.)
Can’t easily Google it because I saw it somewhere on Tumblr and Google only brings up Autism Parents Shit even when checking images. It’s somewhere on Tumblr. Somewhere.
Once upon a time in a land far, far away there was a beautiful and lovely young woman named “Liz”, who had had a rotten day. I asked her, “Liz, what would you like for dinner?” Liz said that she would like macaroni and cheese. So I put some macaroni on to cook, grilled some bacon, and steamed some broccolini. Then I made a white roux and seasoned it with mustard powder, white pepper, and salt, used it to make a white sauce, melted in Mersey Valley cheese and grated Guyére, picked up the flavour with just a little dried sage, mixed the resulting Mornay sauce through the cooked pasta in an ovenproof dish, topped it with grated cheddar and smoked paprika, and toasted the top under the griller.
Liz wept because she had wanted mac and cheese like her mother made, out of pasta, a tin of Heinz tomato soup, and supermarket special tasty cheese melted on the top.
I have had three martinis this evening and am writing things I oughtn’t to.
That way lies suffering. As a proud Wisconsinite, “margarine” is a dirty word, and 1% milk is only slightly better than skim, which is just white water. Whole milk, butter, and a slice of American cheese are the bare minimum to be used.
I agree. I’m hoping this gets worse before it gets better, seeing Becky and Joyce as enemies is an interesting space for their characters since we haven’t really seen it before.
I expect it won’t get fully resolved until the end of the current book at the earliest
But I suspect she’s going to try to approach the conversation in good faith here but either Becky won’t be willing to hear her out or Becky sets an unreasonable ultimatum that blows things up again (“I’ll forgive you if yougo back to being Christian” for example)
That’s actually kind of what I’m hoping for. This dynamic is so much more interesting if it’s not literally a “Don’t Be A Bad Atheist” tract, and is a significant web of interlocking issues where both parties are fucking up in different ways.
And of course, it’d be even more interesting if Dorothy and Sarah just kept assuming it’s 100% Joyces fault for a while (because apparently they have that extreme bias against her now), even when it’s pretty decisively obvious to us that this isn’t just Joyce being a meanie head.
This is a big thing for me too. Like, it feels WEIRD that they’re suddenly all harsh and barbs the second she’s not sunshine smiley jesus-fundie joyce anymore. Like they used to have relatively unreasonable patience for *that* version of her.
is it just more palatable because she wasn’t struggling visibly? It really feels like the second she doubted/actually had trouble that Sarah couldn’t hit with a bat, they bailed.
Which feels out of character to an extent seeing to the ends they went to to comfort her/help her deal with the aftermath of Ryan.
I’m really not sure why so many people suddenly think this is Dorothy doing a good thing. She’s not. Moral superiority also doesn’t default to *her.* And right now all she’s doing is pointing Joyce, with no actual advice or support or gentleness about how she’s acting, at Becky without giving her any clue how to actually fix the problem.
“same ethos different words” is not enough and it’s teetering to what Becky said when she tried to make a dig at Joyce being ‘better than other people’
which. I’m wondering is what we’re supposed to believe is her motivation? With how much the other characters are enforcing it. But if thats the case then it wasn’t really shown vis a vis Joyce’s actions outside of a handful of things that just seemed like she was repeating her parents.
+1 to everything here, and I also wonder why the fundie version of Joyce garnered more patience. Like, she did and said some heinous stuff back in the day. If it was that they could trust she was good enough a person to bounce back, learning, and being #better… The only thing that has changed is that she’s not broadcasting a permanent smile to the world. I’d even dare say she’s depressed. It sucks that others are weirded out by it, but nobody seems to be worried. They kinda feel like they’re frustrated by the changes.
Is it more interesting if Dorothy and Sarah keep assuming it’s Joyce’s fault? Yes. But fffff, this arc already feels so long. And very uncomfortable 🙁
It’s not sudden. When Joyce started swearing, Walky and Jennifer were also extremely uncomfortable about it despite having spent a whole semester making fun of her.
I’d argue against atheism being a belief system, rendering it not the same shit, but we’ve already covered this comment section walls with blood about religion before, let’s not cover it with different feces, it’d start to look like an Ellroy novel and I’m not really inclined toward his novels being any good.
… it’s Kraft dinner, Joyce. It’s like 88¢ a box and you could easily make the microwave version when Dorothy isn’t around. Not exactly selling your deeply-held beliefs dearly, are you?
Sorry to disappoint but I’m not Canadian. I just picked up calling it Kraft dinner from y’all. I do love hockey though, so I guess I’m at least spiritually Canadian, eh?
…That is basically the same method of persuasion Dorothy used while dating Walky. (I’ll wear whatever you want). Either she only has one method of convincing people of anything, or there’s more parallels there than she’s ready to admit.
Scenes like this always make me wonder how much is preplanned and how much is in response to the audience.
…
Okay, place your bets!
Will Joyce successfully fix things with Becky?
Will Joyce and Becky at least end uo neutral?
If not, who will screw it up? Joyce? Becky? Both? A third party? Some combination there-of?
And finally…
If not, who will the thread blame?
Joyce? Becky? Both? Willis? The readers they disagree with?
The backlog is several months long and is a consistent trend. Willis has had this week’s strips written at least a few weeks before the Becky and Joyce fight debuted to us.
Despite his buffer, Willis has an eerie capacity to align what’s happening in his comics with what happens in the real world. This includes trends in the comments section. Many believe Willis is prescient.
Also what is this Becky can’t be patient dump? I guess that decade worth of friendship can’t survive one of them being an ass for a few days. I’m not trying to takes sides on this as both arguments have had their points but the idea Becky deserves some expedient reconciliation from Joyce is unfair. This isn’t reslly for the brne fit of the m. Dorothy is just annoyed now.
I think what Dorothy means is that while Dorothy can be patient while Joyce works through this and doubles down, etc. and remain Joyce’s friend, she doesn’t think Becky can. To wit, Becky walked in on Joyce sounding for all the world like she’s calling all Christians idiots, Joyce then doubled down on that in their argument by saying Becky was smart and would come around eventually, and now this bit that just happened with her mocking Becky’s belief directly. Those are, to Becky, some pretty major hits to their friendship. NOT unrepairable yet, though. So Dorothy is telling her to fix it NOW while it can still be repaired, because if it keeps taking hits like this, Becky’s not going to want to be friends again. Less of a ‘Becky deserves a quick reconciliation’ and more of a ‘fix this while it CAN be fixed’.
I think their friendship is already over because if you lie to your friends (they aren’t entitled to your beliefs but you aren’t entitled to lie to them either), don’t respect them, and insult them–then you aren’t their friend.
So how does that work? You’re saying Becky both is and isn’t entitled to know about Joyce’s Atheism
How does she keep her Atheism to herself, which is a valid choice without lying to Becky, who until yesterday in universe very explicitly tied their friendship to their apparent shared faith
I suppose it depends on what qualifies a person as a friend and how bad lying to them is. If you don’t trust them with the truth about yourself and to share your feelings, then how close are you?
Yeah, and to go further, it means “trans/gay people in the closet don’t truly have any friends, ever”, which would be a dark thing to say to a gay kid afraid to tell their religious society about stuff if you were their therapist, for all you believed it to be true.
This is a really poor way to measure a friendship.
Is Dotty not really anyones friend because she hasn’t told them she got accepted to yale?
Is Joss not Friends with Becky and Joyce because shes’ not out?
Is Becky not friends with Dina because she hasn’t disclosed that she still 100% believes in her god and no amount of new info will change that? [because she has been learning and just putting it all into her new flexible version of religion?]
It’s not a good benchmark. At all. People are allowed to keep things to themself. Do you tell your friend every single thought you think about them? Even the bad ones?
So, according to you, Joyce owes literally nothing to Becky, who broke their friendship the exact moment she told her she was here because “class was cancelled”. Great to hear, great to hear, though it’s a bit off-putting how quickly you just spun into “actually, this is all Becky’s fault and she’s the worst.”
(Becky then proceeded to, according to you, fake-friendship herself into use Joyce’s room, Joyce’s bed, and Joyce’s food allowance, making her a no-holds barred parasite. This is truly a great take you got here.)
I like Dorothy and generally find her reasonable, but she’s nnnnnnot actually being reasonable here. She has good intentions, but Joyce does need the space to work this out on her own for a while, and forcing her to try and make good with Becky before she’s done so is unlikely to work out well.
She really hasn’t been reasonable this whole storyline, but I think that it’s one part because she’s out of her depth, and one part because Willis wants to make it clear to his audience that Joyce’s being loud and high and mighty about her atheism is something he disagrees with, so he’s made the supporting cast act unnaturally hostile to her for it.
Also three parts “if something doesn’t resolve in a day it’ll never resolve given how slow comic time is”, so he has to figure out some contrivances to fast track it.
Yeah, I think Dorothy’s disapproval has a degree of authorial necessity since I do suspect it’ll take longer than this storyline for Joyce and Becky to resolve things, or Joyce to really work through the biggest stumbling blocks of religious trauma.
Not as long as it SHOULD take, but nonetheless, I think the Becky-Joyce conflict’s way too potentially interesting to be more than papered over before the end of the book. But to make sure it’s clear Joyce’s behavior isn’t going to be permanent and she WILL mellow and the author DOESN’T think atheism makes you smarter, Dorothy and Sarah have to give very little acknowledgement to the part where Joyce has a buttload of religious trauma, and I suspect Joyce’s rigidity has to be a bit more obviously unreasonable on non-atheism fronts (thus, the biphobia.)
… is Edgy Atheism as the commentariat defined it some kind of sweeping pandemic and I just never noticed? The way we’ve been talking about it I feel like some of the posts here are, like, legitimately convinced being kind of annoying I guess on the internet is exactly the same as, like, actual pain and suffering caused by the Christian church over the entire course of history and its ruinous effects on the marginalized in North America.
I don’t think Dorothy and Sarah are refusing to be emotionally supportive so we the audience know Edgy Atheism is bad, I think they’re refusing to be emotionally supportive because being emotionally supportive to Joyce is something they never have to do because Joyce constantly picks up the slack for them even while they’re laughing in her face for being an idiot fundie.
Like, the only way I can perceive this as “let’s make sure we know Joyce is in the wrong” is if it’s so we can speedrun through that and get to the part where we acknowledge Joyce’s friends are bad at caring about her when it’s mildly inconvenient, because they’ve never had to.
It’s definitely a huge difference in impact from millennia of being a cultural force often used to justify atrocities, but there is very much a brand of atheism, dismissing ALL religion as terrible, that is still very much informed by Christianocentric thinking and cannot wrap its head around the idea that non-Christian major religions have very different approaches to ethics, to how they approach and engage with their holy texts, to how they conceive of the divine and the afterlife. This is usually used to dismiss non-Christian religions in the same breath as Christianity, and it’s harmful in that respect because of Christianocentrism and how that impacts people belonging to marginalized religions – even big ones like Islam and Hinduism are the subject of serious discrimination in a majority Christian culture, especially when it ties into racism and xenophobia. (For one real-world example, see Richard Dawkins on Hinduism. He’s far from the only high-profile atheist who can’t wrap his head around the idea that not all religions have the same refusal to engage with science and allowing itself to be questioned that Christianity tends to encourage. Or every time the Really Annoying Atheists show up in the comments here and some of us point out that yes, we know people who are religiously Jewish and also don’t really believe in a god but don’t see why that precludes them being religiously Jewish, because critical thinking isn’t incompatible with all religions.)
It’s by no means the same level of harm, but a lot of culturally Christian atheists never think about how their cultural Christianity is still shaping them and that DOES impact marginalized religious people who don’t want to be lumped in with a religion that does actively oppress them. The idea of ‘goodness’ being an intrinsic quality of a person rather than a goal to strive for and actively do? Very Christian thinking. Comes out in a lot of social justice circles online in the binaristic idea of Good People (who agree with me) versus Bad People (who don’t.) And oh look, Joyce is doing that right now. The question of ‘how much does intent matter versus your actions and their impact’ can have very different answers across ethical frameworks from different religions (and tends to tie into that ‘is goodness a thing you feel/are in your heart or is it meaningless if not accompanied by action’ question.) It’s not so much how this brand of atheism hurts Christians’ feelings, even if the story is currently placing Becky as the Hurt Religious Friend since she’s what’s available (though there is also a discussion to be had about white exvangelical atheism and how it tends to dismiss the idea that some people who are in some way or other marginalized do genuinely find comfort and community in Christianity, even if they have to look for one that accepts them.) It’s more about how this brand of atheism is ultimately still very Christian in its thinking, and in that respect its refusal to acknowledge other religions might have different stances that can encourage questioning your religious teachings or specifically encompassing science in a worldview that nonetheless allows for the idea of divinity… is ultimately yet another oppressive force against already-marginalized religions. Never mind the fact that most religions bigger than one insular community usually have different sects with different philosophies towards theology, too, so even if the ‘prevailing’ opinion is this you’re still likely to find religious scholars interpreting it in other ways. This variety of atheist frequently can’t understand that ‘our holy book is 100% literal and not up to interpretation in any way whatsoever’ isn’t even a universal stance among Christianity, much less other religions. (I am by far most familiar with Jewish theological debate and philosophy on this front, and even then I’ve barely scratched the surface, but like, the Torah is by no means considered above interpretation and debate. Depending on your reading of Job, THE DIVINE is not necessarily above debating with.)
“Culturally Christian atheist” is a phrase I need to keep in mind going forward, since I think my language gets too vague when talking about Christianity since most of my interest, and the only thing I feel reasonably confident in talking about it, is more its cultural impact on North America (I did actually have to course correct that one time where it was correctly pointed out to me that certain countries have had militant atheist movements like in communist China). Bringing up how North American Christian culture goes onto influence atheists who still grew in that culture but then apply that experience globally is a thing I need to keep in mind.
“Edgy atheism” in relation to other cultures and religions is another thing I’m really glad you brought up, since by and large I have been approaching it through North American culture, where the only thing an Edgy Atheist can do to a Christian is be annoying on the internet because that’s the level of power said Edgy Atheist has, but that doesn’t carry over when dealing with other religions who, naturally, lack the innate power that Christianity has in all of North America. From there, when your only interaction with religion is the dominant one in the life of you and everyone you know, I can see how an uneducated atheist then goes on to make xenophobic commentary on other cultures with their own predominant faiths.
I don’t think I’ve changed my mind on the specific topic of “can an atheist be hurtful to Christianity in North America, let alone an atheist who personally suffered from it,” but I’m glad you informed me about stuff I’ve been neglecting.
Yeah, I get why Willis probably doesn’t want to dive TOO deeply into representing a religion he’s never been a member of, but I do wish one of the two Jewish characters who are on fairly good terms with Joyce (even if Ethan’s avoiding everyone, there’s no reason to believe he has particularly negative feelings towards Joyce at the moment so I’m assuming it’s just general avoidance of their whole social circle) was established as more strongly religious, not just culturally Jewish, in part so this talk could ultimately be textual. The issue with Joyce here isn’t so much that she’s being mean to Becky except on a personal level where this was inevitable; it’s that she’s assuming all religions are the same as her particular fucked-up variety of Christianity on ethics and theological philosophy, and that hits the religions that ARE heavily discriminated against in the US, too. Which is I think part of what Dorothy’s getting at with that ‘very Christian Fundamentalist-style of atheism’ bit, since she’s not just a no-angst atheist but one whose familial religious background was Catholic and Jewish and whose philosophical upbringing was probably very different from even her less evangelical Protestant peers. (And while Catholicism is far from blameless and the rift with Protestants has been much smaller in this country for the last forty years or so, in Indiana I could still see her witnessing some active anti-Catholic bias, if less dangerous than antisemitism would be.) It’s also the moral superiority and the ‘everyone must be like me,’ but I’d bet Dorothy has a better sense of various religions’ ethical and theological frameworks than most college freshmen, too, and how thinking all religions are equally bad is harmful to religious non-Christians and false.
Glad I made a point that encouraged you to keep something in mind!
it’s that she’s assuming all religions are the same as her particular fucked-up variety of Christianity on ethics and theological philosophy
To highlight this part, something she said to Ruth got me thinking. Joyce very adamantly and desperately tells her that she can live however she wants because “Hell isn’t real,” and I suddenly started to think Joyce might actually think, by default, everyone assumes the existence of Heaven and Hell as Joyce has had it defined by her.
Like, remember when she first met Dorothy? “Haha don’t worry, I know some people think God’s a woman,” and then she’s just floored learning Dorothy’s an atheist.
Does Joyce think everyone, by default, is a Christian? Why would she tell that to Ruth, whose thoughts on theology I don’t think we’ve ever gotten? Joyce assumes that Ruth is choosing to throw herself into the closet, but did she think that, exclusively, due to learning that Gay People Are Good, or did she do it because she thinks Ruth is living in fear of Hell?
This might be an esoteric way to put it, but I think Joyce “views all religion as dumb” because Joyce might actually just think they are Christianity with no real understanding of any of the nuances. Like, we don’t technically know how Joyce would act to, say, Asma or Raidah, who are both parts of faiths that Joyce was repeatedly told were wrong, except now Joyce has learning that everything she knew is wrong and therefore everything she was told is wrong was good all along. Shot in the dark, if she had that brought up, would she default to “oh they’re good, actually, since my parents told me they were bad!” or am I totally reaching?
That will be a very interesting thing for us to see when it ultimately happens, but yeah, I’m assuming Joyce has never actually thought about the fact that not all religions believe in a Good Place/Bad Place afterlife structure because A: see previous ‘culturally Christian atheists fail to consider their experience with religion is in no way universal’, there’s a lot of assumption that heaven and hell exist in the same exact form they do in Christianity in Judaism and Islam when most of our conception of the afterlife in Christianity is completely divorced from scripture to begin with, and B: Joyce, specifically, and her freakout when going to, as Raidah put it, a slightly different flavor of Protestant Christianity. (And Joyce’s response to the idea of going to a mosque.) I suspect she assumes Christian until directly told otherwise, and it’s not a COMPLETELY unfair assessment from my quick Googling (can’t find Bloomington’s stats, but Indiana’s 72% Christian.) I don’t think she’s thought about Judaism and Islam at all right now, much less Buddhism or Hinduism or the like that don’t even have the tenuous Abrahamic thread, and given she read Chick Tracts as I recall she probably assumes they’re all the same because she was taught they’re all secretly arms of Catholicism as the Whore of Babylon (unfortunately I have hateread enough Chick Tracts that I am not making this up,) and even if she knows that’s false now I don’t think that part of her brain’s unsnapped like the evolution thing did yet. Not fully. Not enough to recognize that they probably differ in more than just ‘different names on the same hat,’ because again even culturally Christian atheists who AREN’T rapidly deprogramming themselves from their cultish upbringing don’t seem to recognize how deep the theological differences go when your theological philosophy has been a thing of debate for a MINIMUM of 1200 years.
Yeah, as you hint at the end, many of this variety of atheist don’t even grasp that Christianity isn’t all like the brand they were raised in and are reacting to, much less how completely different religions work.
It’s always fun watching atheists argue for Biblical literalism.
[[She really hasn’t been reasonable this whole storyline, but I think that it’s one part because she’s out of her depth, and one part because Willis wants to make it clear to his audience that Joyce’s being loud and high and mighty about her atheism is something he disagrees with, so he’s made the supporting cast act unnaturally hostile to her for it.]]
Ehhh. In RL, friends can react VERY badly to changes you’d think they’d agree with.
Lots of people prefer consistency to agreement with their attitudes.
I think that it’s one part because she’s out of her depth, and one part because Willis wants to make it clear to his audience that Joyce’s being loud and high and mighty about her atheism is something he disagrees with
Authorial intent is a tricky topic of conversation in that we’re, y’know, talking about An Actual Real Life Person, but I don’t really agree with this at all.
Like, Joyce being an Edgy Atheist; none of it happened until her friends took ownership of her feelings on her death cult. After the Faith-Off she’d only get ornery about it when Sarah kept dragging it up, and today she’s aggressively pushing herself as an expert on all things because relying on being right is what she relies upon when struggling, except “being right” now just means “everything over there is wrong.”
And, y’know, Joyce is a character who has previously expressed to Sal that she feels that people keep her in boxes the way Sal feels she is by Joyce, and whose previous attempt at being open at questioning her indoctrination led to Becky telling her she was going through a stupid phase. Not a one of them has asked Joyce how she is feeling, what brought this about, or god forbid that she’s allowed to hate her stupid bullshit death cult; Dorothy, Becky and Sarah have all approached this as Joyce not being their Joyce anymore, except that Joyce was someone they constantly exploited for emotional support.
That strikes me way more as Authorial Intent than whether or not Joyce is being too mean to her death cult. I don’t think the story is nearly as against Joyce as it’s repeatedly claimed to be, I think we’re just seeing a lot of Joyce at her most emotionally chaotic because Joyce is the main character and shows up all the time, and not a single one of her idiot children friends can ask how she’s doing.
And, y’know, Joyce is a character who has previously expressed to Sal that she feels that people keep her in boxes the way Sal feels she is by Joyce, and whose previous attempt at being open at questioning her indoctrination led to Becky telling her she was going through a stupid phase. Not a one of them has asked Joyce how she is feeling, what brought this about, or god forbid that she’s allowed to hate her stupid bullshit death cult; Dorothy, Becky and Sarah have all approached this as Joyce not being their Joyce anymore, except that Joyce was someone they constantly exploited for emotional support.
Yes to all this. I will be very surprised (and disappointed) if Dorothy’s callous attitude isn’t addressed eventually. Willis digs into complex emotional contradictions like that a lot; both “Joyce needs to get over the Edgy Atheist thing” and “Joyce’s friends care more about making her less obnoxious than trying to understand what she’s going through” can both be true!
But man, in the meantime I am so frustrated with Dorothy. I mean, she’s as much of a dumb kid as everyone else, of course she’s not going to react perfectly, but that superior “I am being gracious by tolerating your little temper tantrum” attitude is just driving me up a wall. For the love of- uh… something… can somebody, *anybody* ask Joyce if she is okay???
I mean, yeah, these two need to try and talk things out if it’s ever gonna get better and offering dinner is a great way to motivate Joyce to try to do it as fairly as she can instead of doubling down. That’s not a slam on Joyce – neither she nor Becky is in a good place for this right now and I don’t think Becky can be made to do something with a Mom Friend stern word and offer of dinner like Joyce can.
Remember her explanation of tuna casserole? Where she convinced herself it was a casserole tree that produced it and therefore not a mixture? I’m sure she has the same thought with the three cheese powder
Remember her explanation of tuna casserole? Where she convinced herself it was a casserole tree that produced it and therefore not a mixture? I’m sure she has the same thought with the three cheese powder
As a picky eater myself (though in a different way than Joyce is), I can safely say that cheese is cheese is cheese, and it mixes together to make More Cheese. The different kinds of cheese don’t matter as much, and the pickiness generally (for me) comes from if the food can be separated on the plate, and is a recognizably different substance.
Yes. If there’s a strong textural difference between the cheeses, or varieties that don’t taste good together, that’s an issue, but that’s an issue for everyone. And this is Kraft cheese powder, so they’re not going to have a vast taste difference like if someone were experimenting with their homemade mac and cheese.
hhmm… are you hacking the Muzal with… Muzak?
I don’t know about tis particular piece, but Vivaldi’seasons for example have been muzakified (spring especially), so I’d argue any commercial-related piece is Muzak….if you name it by the commercial name before the piece name.
…Well, it’s heartening to see the New Joyce can care about other things than evangelical Atheism.
I meant that to be facetious, but then I had a closer look at panel 4. Is that doubt? Maybe even guilt? Are we finally ready to let a smidge of humanity past the armor of philosophical righteousness? It feels like it’s many months overdue.
I am against Dorothy here. She’s not got the ground to stand on with telling Joyce to fix her friendship. Maybe Joyce and Becky just need to, well, break up. If Joyce doesn’t respect Becky’s beliefs and Becky can’t give her space then it’s best to just acknowledge their bestiness was broken by events.
But also if you’re friends with someone it’s probably at least worth a try to reconcile a disagreement, rather than dumping them like yesterday’s trash as the first option.
Joyce doesn’t need to respect Becky’s beliefs in order for her to respect Becky. I mean, she spent most of the time pre-timeskip not respecting Dorothy’s beliefs but still being “half the comments section is shipping them” close.
I think Dorothy’s right on the money here, at least as it comes to telling Joyce that she needs to try to sort this out sooner rather than later, while the wound is still fresh and hasn’t gotten scabbed over or gone septic, to utterly butcher an analogy.
Ups for both Taffy and Wraith for their respective comments. I am going to be a little harsher. Just keep in mind, I’m pissed at your idea, not you.
Sometimes shiz does just happen. But this didn’t just “happen”. These are not “events”. They have both made decisions for themselves. They didn’t understand how the other would feel in response, and so they couldn’t consider it. They set the bridge on fire, not some intangible force or random chaos. They can put the fire out before it burns down.
I know how easy it is to get a masochistic rise out of cutting your own heart out and leaving a relationship behind the moment there’s a serious conflict to solve. And you could point to countless examples of you trying and failing to reconcile as a justification for thinking it inevitable.
But you gotta suck it up. Learn to reconcile well enough, and the tendency will flip. Not only will you get to Keep most of your friends, you will be better to each other than before in the end.
I am casting Doubt on Dorothy having the patience, since in panel three she straight up ordering Joyce to have a painful conversation with Becky that might actually put the nail on the coffin on their friendship
I’m not saying Dorothy is WRONG to say this conversation needs to happen, but yeah, really doubting that patience line.
I think having patience for Joyce regarding her Own relationship with her, and having patience for Joyce’s treatment of Becky, are two very different things.
She has the patience to wait and see if and when Joyce realizes being self-righteously aggro at everyone is not okay. Watching her hurt herself and her own best friend in the meantime? It doesn’t matter if she has patience in general, why would she Allocate any patience for that? Dorothy’s being a pretty good friend if anything. A big part of being a friend is telling them when they are f*cking up.
But this part isn’t about Dorothy’s patience. She’s saying she would have patience, but Becky won’t. That doesn’t mean Dorothy’s impatient for Joyce to fix it, but that she thinks letting it stew with Becky will make it irreparable.
She could be wrong about that of course, but that’s about her judgement not her patience.
I cook for somebody who has been warned off turmeric (a natural food coloring) by their doctor, somebody who’s been warned off Yellow Dye #5 (an unnatural food coloring) ditto, and somebody who’s been warned off anything over one and a half percent saturated fat, ditto. So I recommend Annie’s Shells & Cheese, which can be made with one percent or skim milk and no butter. Also, a squirt of mustard will make it taste more like sharp Cheddar.
Yeah, food dye allergies and sensitivities are 100% A Thing. Just because you can’t taste it doesn’t mean it’s not making your body freak the fuck out.
Yellow mustard does not, so far as I know. I believe that’s just mustard powder (which is ground mustard seeds), vinegar, maybe some salt, and some stabilizers.
Also rather annoyed at the phrasing of “fix it.
It’s actually plausible that Joyce CAN’T fix anything, because Becky has decided this friendship is over/or that Joyce needs to go back to her theist self.
Joyce can address it and open a conversation with Becky. Whether the situation is fixed or gets even more broken is not entirely up to Joyce and it kinda bothers me that the “fix it” command makes it Joyce’s responsibility entirely
Well, Becky has two issues. “She didn’t lie to me” and “She doesn’t make fun of me”. Those are listed separately. Even if Joyce wasn’t being an asshole, Becky’d still have felt betrayed by Joyce not telling her she no longer believed. It woulda felt like Joyce was ‘just humoring her’, probably because she doesn’t understand the atheist mindset at all, even if she’s usually polite with it.
Remember that this is the person who said “Sarah, who hates everybody, but somehow doesn’t hate everybody *enough* to be atheist!” (insteada agnostic), sandwiched between her sniffing around Joyce going ‘Hey hey you’re still christian right? You wouldn’t liiieeee to me right Joyce? You wouldn’t betray your bestie riiight?’.
Just because Becky had *a* legitimate grievance doesn’t mean *all* of her grievances were legitimate.
There’s been a lurking undercurrent for a long time that Becky and Joyce have fundamentally incompatible understandings of religion, and that Becky reacts badly to Joyce changing in ways she doesn’t want her to. This is not completely one-sided, although Joyce is more at fault
Dorothy at this point doesn’t seem to have picked up on Becky’s issues that are exarcerbating this conflict, and that Joyce’s attitude is the sole source of problems
Yeah, this. Joyce can’t fix this by herself, it depends on whether Becky is willing to fix it too, and whether Becky can accept that Joyce is now an atheist.
From what I’ve read, it isn’t that Becky can’t accept Joyce is an atheist, its that Joyce can’t accept Becky is a Christian. I mean it’s right there in todays comic, Joyce doesn’t see how this can be fixed so long as Becky is Christian.
I don’t think we know enough to say whether Becky is upset about Joyce’s atheism or not. She’s definitely *more* upset by the shitty things Joyce said to her, but because of that she hasn’t really even addressed how she feels about Joyce being an atheist. Heck, she may not even know how she feels about it because the way Joyce is treating her is overriding any other consideration. I suspect if she hadn’t learned about Joyce’s atheism in the Worst Possible Way, she might be pretty upset about it. Joyce isn’t Dina or Dorothy, Joyce and Becky shared the same religious experience and seeing your lifelong best friend reject that experience when you aren’t is probably gonna stir up a lot of feelings! It would be weird if it didn’t! But right now, I don’t think she even has room to think about the atheism seperate from everything else – it’s too wrapped up in Joyce suddenly acting like she’s from the Mirror Universe.
I mean, I think early Joyce respected Dorothy despite her beliefs, not for them. She was *gasp* horrified by Dorothy, but she also really liked Dorothy, so worked around it. And Dorothy knew what she thought, so at least there wasn’t a secret.
Joyce has *been* working about Becky’s beliefs for the past three months, but in secret, and now it came out since Becky stalked her. Joyce can value Becky as a friend, and maybe learn to keep her mouth shut, but “I respect your Christian belief” would be as much a lie as “I respect your atheism” would have been in September.
Joyce has a lot of sorting out to do about what she believes and why, and what she feels about people who don’t agree and what it is decent to do about that. It takes most people a couple of years, with discussions and help. Which is why “sophomoric” means what it does.
The thing is, Joyce doesn’t need to sort all of that out to get things on the mend with Becky. She just has to, well, not lash out at Becky for her still being religious.
That’s it. Hell, if she outright says “I’m still figuring out what being an Atheist really means for me, I’m sorry for judging you so hard”, then I think Becky would be mostly fine. In the end… I think all Becky really wants is for her closest, oldest, most beloved friend to not sneer at her. That doesn’t seem too much to ask.
Becky *should* be mostly fine. But she won’t be. It won’t be on Joyce though. Becky’s repeatedly been church police / inquisitor towards Joyce. Joyce is her “Bestie in Christ”. She has unreasonable expectations of Joyce, just like Joyce has of her. Joyce can only fix how she acts towards Becky, not the other way around.
Joyce is going to have to not start shit, like she did a couple of strips ago. But also hold off on taking bait.
And if Becky does continue that, then she’d be outright in the wrong, fully agree. Becky does need to get used to Joyce as being an Atheist, and that isn’t exactly going to be easy for her.
But Joyce not acting like a giant fucking asshole all the time will probably help that out a fair deal. As has been noted elsewhere, Becky has no issue with Dina being a non-believer (probably more on the Agnostic side of things), because Dina holds no issue with Becky’s faith as long as it doesn’t get in the way of scientific accuracy.
But yeah, I don’t think we’re going to get a “everything’s magically fixed” scene here. Just hoping for more “awkward and unstable non-aggression pact” rather than “100 years of peace”, so to speak :).
I love the self-hatred in Dorothy’s face in the last panel. “Oh gods, I’m going to have to bribe her. And go through with it. This goes against my every moral value, but…”
Excellent training for when you’re president, Dotty!
College freshmen frequently think they already know everything or decide they have epiphanies that give them the Truth. Most get over it, but in the meantime they can be insufferable, even to other freshmen.
This case is even worse, as Joyce’s very noisy (as Dorothy says, fundamentalist-style – dare I say, holier than thou) freshman certainty completely shits upon her best friend’s core beliefs and she made clear to that friend she believes those core beliefs are stupid. Someone needs to try to break through her sanctimony if there is hope for a true conversation, and Dorothy tried the cold water method. That apparently didn’t work, so she resorted to bribery. It’s not clear that any of this will work, but I don’t understand the posters who are complaining about her trying, or who are defending Joyce. (And I’m pretty sure Willis isn’t taking that view.)
Joyce is being an asshole. But she is being an asshole as a consequence of a very complicated and deep level of trauma from her upbringing and the multiple life-changing events she’s experienced in rapid succession at the age of 18. It is entirely reasonable to think that she might need, and to some extent deserve, some time and space to work through that and grow without literally everyone around her becoming massively more hostile than when she was being much more of an asshole, just with more smiles and fewer swears.
It’s also frustrating to put the onus solely on Joyce to resolve a conflict which blatantly is caused by both her and Becky simultaneously being insufferable assholes in incompatible ways. Becky created this situation through violating Joyce’s privacy out of totally unreasonable possessiveness, and then refused to accept the truest apology Joyce could reasonably have given at the time. Yes, Joyce then ramped it up to 11, but it’s entirely possible she could have worked through this privately and much more healthily if not for Becky’s actions.
I don’t see *how* Joyce can fix this single-handedly when Becky doesn’t appear to be willing to resolve this without Joyce changing her worldview back to something that will make her happier.
Because Dorothy is only concerned about the fact that Joyce is acting in a way she doesn’t like. She hasn’t expressed any concern about Joyce’s own well-being. Joyce is definitely acting in an unacceptable way, especially towards Becky. But none of Joyce’s friends have asked her how *she* is feeling. Joyce has just lost the touchstone she built her entire life around and now sees it for a lie. It is totally, totally normal for her to be angry and to reach for certainty. It’s not a license for her to be a jerk to everyone, but it is understandable.
Dorothy does not understand that, and worse, she doesn’t seem *interested* in understanding. She is incredibly dismissive of everything about Joyce’s apostasy. She just wants Joyce to stop the annoying behavior and go back to being normal, nice Joyce. She doesn’t get how big a deal this is for Joyce, that Joyce *can’t* just go back to “normal”. Joyce has changed in a fundamental way and needs time to figure out who she is now without the belief that defined her whole life. Pushing back against her shitty behavior is fine- necessary, even! But without trying to understand *why* Joyce is acting this way, it’s like putting a bandaid on a broken bone.
It’s funny you said College freshmen frequently think they already know everything or decide they have epiphanies that give them the Truth. Most get over it, but in the meantime they can be insufferable, even to other freshmen.
Because that’s how I feel about Dorothy right now! Dorothy thinks she knows what’s going on with Joyce and has decided it is essentially a temper tantrum she needs to get over. Dorothy sees herself as the mature, worldly person who knows better than Joyce what Joyce needs to do. She’s not asking how Joyce is feeling because she doesn’t think she needs to.
Becky was never going to help Joyce figure out her feelings about religion. She’s not going to have the patience now, indeed, but that doesn’t mean Dorothy gets to order (and then bribe) Joyce into apologizing, or that she should at all. IDK, y’all. I’m tired of this arc because I’m tired of watching everyone wanting Joyce to be the ray of sunshine she was before she was thoroughly traumatized, and shaming her for… What? Falling out with the feeling of Faith that’s so tied for her to her upbringing in a cult? A cult that brainwashed her and her family, zombified her mother and oldest brother, shunned her, broke her family apart, almost got her and her friends killed multiple times, and that’s without taking Jocelyne into account.
Like she doesn’t deserve to be angry, or bitter, or to have a private catharsis session with someone who felt similarly, consciously away from the people who would take it the wrong way. Like she didn’t literally agonize over sharing the pain of losing her faith with her best friend, precisely because she already knew this would happen.
I’m not sure about the whole scene with Ruth because it does feel not like Joyce. Put there for the sake of remarking the binaries and absolutes that still dwell in Joyce? I cringed on everyone’s behalf but good scene. Adding Becky to it? It immediately turned it into “Joyce is being irrational and smug and should apologize to Becky”, when Becky doesn’t want an apology. Becky wants, like everyone, Joyce going back to who she used to be.
Meanwhile Dorothy has been enabling Becky when, honestly? She should be pretty damn pissed at her, considering all the bullying her literal roommate has enacted upon her. Does she think this will earn her Becky’s approval, or is she just so fed up with the situation she’s going “let those two work it out”, convincing herself it’s the reasonable path?
There’s a difference between wanting Joyce to turn back into a fundamentalist believer and wanting Joyce to turn back into a non-asshole. No one (with the possible exception of Becky) wants the former – and even she wouldn’t want the fundamentalist part – at most the believer part. But the latter is probably not too much to ask.
As far as Becky being a jerk (not a bully) to Dorothy – that was clearly almost completely fear of losing her place as Joyce’s best friend after she had already lost almost everything else. Dorothy saw that, so didn’t take it seriously, so I’m pretty sure it’s the author’s intent that we not either.
Joyce can absolutely be less of an asshole than this. I’d support it. This brand of atheism that goes “INVISIBLE SKY DADDY” and “FACTS AND LOGIC” are insufferable and pretty harmful. The problem here is that the conflict with Becky – A fear of friction, turned friction, turned now into a fight after she once again inserted herself in Joyce’s hanging out with other people, and heard something that was meant to be private venting… Radicalized Joyce. She wasn’t going through her falling out with faith like this until now. I actually think she called out Dorothy pretty accurately in a previous strip, pointing out that she never had empathic parents that gave her the tools and the freedom to explore things, so she shouldn’t be expecting her to have a pleasant transition into apostasy.
I don’t think most characters want her being back to being a fundie, but they’re sure are having a lot of trouble coping with a Joyce that tries to set boundaries, and expresses anger less as a badass rising-to-the-occassion outburst, and more as a reaction to a lot things in her life getting pretty damn shitty.
As for Becky being a bully (sorry but I call it the way I see it) to Dorothy – Dorothy understands the explanation, but she mistakes it with a justification. I can see how our resident redhead lesbian has gotten to this point of lashing out and insecurities, I hurt for her, it’s all about old coping mechanisms turning toxic when applied to other contexts– But that doesn’t mean I support her dickery. Or that I can’t think Dorothy’s patience with her is misguided.
Seconded in full. It’s getting really really gross to me how the only person who seems to actually care about Joyce’s trauma or feelings or be willing to support her is Joe. Everyone else is all about Poor Becky.
I can feel empathy for Becky and still think she’s being a really bad friend; the same that I’m cringing for these last outbursts that are one M’lady short of a Brony Brand Atheist, and still think that holy shit, literally nobody’s supporting Joyce through this (except for Joe, and Joe has now excellent, unrelated reasons to take some time for himself)
Like. Give this poor girl some space to breathe, figure out and work through her feelings (with bitterness being an obvious outcome to a lot of stuff), and be willing to consider her pain. And maybe don’t go and tell her “FIX THIS NOW BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T YOU’LL LOSE YOUR FRIEND FOREVER”. It’s uncomfortable af to watch.
Except Dorothy make be correct in her assessment that Joyce could, in fact, lose her best friend forever over this. And given that Joyce has also become one of her best friends, she does care about Joyce suffering through that, too. And while everyone who has any wind of this but Joyce understands, she is working through some serious trauma of her own, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is incapable of seeing the very legitimate reasons Becky has to feel unbelievably hurt at having heard what Joyce said, even if there was no reasonable premise that Becky ever would have heard it. She did hear it, and since Dorothy and Becky both understand better than nearly everybody else that Joyce has a full-blown fundie mindset, and how deep that goes, and what that means for her, and so Dorothy understands that it is more reasonable than most cases for Becky to worry very seriously, if her lack of atheism means she has lost all intellectual and moral respect from Joyce, because unlike Joyce, Dorothy and especially Becky understand how Joyce’s brain works, and that there is now a level on which Joyce feels like she needs to fix everybody’s non-atheism.
The thing about this which I think is crucial, for Dorothy to press this to be dealt with so fast, is that the way Joyce is treating Becky, and others, over this new paradigm shift, will not slow or revert, it will only getworse as time passes. Even if Joyce had just done a shitty thing and hurt Becky, and they could sit on that, Dorothy wouldn’t be putting pressure on it. But it is nigh-inevitable that Joyce is going to keep hurting Becky over this, to the point it will practically be abuse, and furthermore, Becky’s way of coping with that behavior will be to not show any effect from it, even though it will fucking tear her to pieces in side every time.
Dorothy is being a my-way, imperialist know-it-all, but she also knows her friends, and she doesn’t want them to get hurt because they act exactly the way they will obviously act in this scenario.
Fuck I’m so used to newfangled systems of post formatting and being able to edit, it makes me look dumb every time switching back to something like this lmao
Fam. Joyce only dug her heels in after the Overhearing Incident exploded. Her whole deal right before it was walking on eggshells because she had no idea of how to talk about this with Becky, knowing that Becky would take it the worst possible way. She’d been going through this with questions, looking up things on the internet, and keeping to herself and the few people she trusted with her shameful secret. Now the cat is out of the bag and she’s doubling down in self-defense. It’s not a pretty reaction, nor is mature, but it’s understandable considering Becky’s reaction… And Dorothy’s.
Yes, she needs to be shaken out of the black-and-white mentality, and de-radicalized from the new paradigm she’s latched on, but you lost me when you mentioned abuse. Also “my-way, imperialistic-know-it-all” as a descriptor for Dorothy is both VERY unkind to the character you’re claiming to defend (and whom I like); and pretty damn gross considering everything about the CIA in general. Including, in particular, how they installed a fascist dictatorship in my country in the 70’s. Not everyone here is from the USA, so… Uhm. The thing you’ve just said? It evokes an image several orders of magnitude worse than what you likely were aiming for.
Exactly. Joyce only doubled down and went full Fundie Atheist because of the explosion of the incident. Becky went to find her at a time she was not invited + explicitly to show her ‘christian friend’ that she already had that title.
I don’t know why everyone before that forgot that Joyce was walking on eggshells and doing her best to make leniencies with Becky to keep her from exploding at her because she knew Becky wouldn’t take it well.
Her anger and defensiveness are not because she thinks Becky is stupid. It’s because becky was a jerk to Joyce, specifically, first. Joyce who has multiple times gone out of her way to appease, make amends, and go against their religion, for Becky, even so far as to hide her loss of faith from her til she could tell her in a kinder way.
I can empathize with Becky being upset. But Becky was a jerk to her first over a conversation venting about her cult upbringing because she perceived it to be targeting her. In a way that gave Joyce basically no room to explain. Nobody does well when put on the spot about hard topics, and Joyce especially doesn’t.
Joyce is being a jerk here, and loud and atheistic in part due to the authors bias against it and wanting to show he doesn’t support it (which I think was already covered with Dorothy imo) but also is likely because she feels attacked and very unsupported even by people who she thought should support her, like Dotty.
Oh god yeah, the “inserting herself in Joyce’s day” happened specifically because Becky was once again jealous of anyone who might threaten her Best Friend status.
All of this leaves a bitter taste in my mouth because everyone is talking about Joyce being a jerk and needing to apologize, stat… And nobody is acknowledging she’s also owed an apology from Becky. Who acted in the exact way she’d been fearing this whole time, except I don’t think Joyce saw coming she’d get basically zero benefit of the doubt, no the “OH SO YOU THINK I’M AN IDIOT” angle. The latter in special must’ve been a surprise.
Like don’t get me wrong, I love Becky and Joyce and Dotty, this arc just feels weird and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I know some people are saying Becky just wants Joyce to not talk about it/be nice about it but like. It doesn’t feel like that’s the issue Becky is taking here with it.
It’s like. The whole point of inviting Liz was so that she could meet up with someone who had a similar experience and maybe commiserate and bond. Figure out what to do about it and just dunk on their past selves and pat themselves on the back for realizing that they were raised in a cult.
Which sounds bragadacious but imo…. is fair? Like She escaped a literal frockin cult, cut her some slack.
I’ve re-read those comics a couple times and Joyce DOES apologize for it. But Becky doesn’t care about it if she doesn’t rescind it.
And this is a common theme for Becky. I’ve been re-reading. Joyce vocalized about the fact that the people around them were full of bull-honky, and Becky immediately went on the defensive and invalidated Joyce’s response/take on it. She came for advice but wasn’t clear on ‘i wanna b convinced not to have sex’ and when joyce was like: does it really matter? everything else we were taught was a lie, why stop yourself?
Becky reacted poorly. It’s kind of a trend for her (which I get. She’s also traumatized. But she’s never really punished in narrative/in-comic for treating her friends poorly, especially not in the way Joyce is.)
No one invited Liz, near as I could tell. Joyce might have known she was coming (and hid that from Sarah, just as an aside to those horribly upset that Becky went looking for her friend down the hall), but she certainly didn’t invite her because they had similar experiences. Everyone thought Liz was still Jesusy until she showed up.
Joyce did take Liz to Joe as a friend she could meet (and Joyce could show off) who she was okay with being all “shit yeah, fuck god, shitty shit” in front of, if that’s what you mean. And half what they were “bonding” over was lying about sex and drugs before they really got back to religion bashing before Becky showed up. (Now, I’m wondering what the Becky and Dorothy reaction to the “friends with a reward program” part would have been – hilarious I expect.)
Exactly. Becky felt entitled to just Kramer into Joyce’s attention any time she wanted. She just happened to encounter a side of Joyce that had been intentionally hidden from her, and at the worst possible time.
Joyce breaks free-ish from a cult and musters the courage to speak up against it (with like company) for the first time in her life, and it blows up in her face because she cast her net too wide at just the wrong moment.
The thing about this which I think is crucial, for Dorothy to press this to be dealt with so fast, is that the way Joyce is treating Becky, and others, over this new paradigm shift, will not slow or revert, it will only get worse as time passes.
The thing is, whether or not Joyce will lose Becky if she doesn’t fix things soon, Joyce *cannot* fix things now because she still has the same fundamental issue that she had when she first talked to Becky. Trying to “fix things” now, when Joyce still feels like this, is imo way more likely to destroy the friendship than having a period of distance.
Also… Becky is not entitled to Joyce’s friendship? Like, obviously losing your lifelong best friend is a devastating thing, of course Becky gets to be as angry or sad or whatever about that as she wants. But Joyce deciding she doesn’t want to be friends anymore is not abuse, ffs. It would be sad and a loss and I think Joyce would eventually regret it. I hope they can work through this, but Joyce is not somehow *obligated* to fix things with Becky.
Right. Spite her being condescending about Joyce for some time, I thought what she said in this strip was just fine. I mean, look at what she has to work with.
Joyce never really had the intellectual and developmental growing room during her childhood that she had, and expediting that process that’s supposed to go on during childhood is no easy task.
If you had to deal with Joyce like that, you think you could do any better?
for reals though the sooner we outlaw religious indoctrination the better
Dorothy does lots of stuff wrong inter-personally even though all her heuristics are generally right, but like, I don’t see how she could deal with this better. I couldn’t have delivered that to Joyce that well, and I’m a decade and change older than Dorothy is. And while aspects of this have been handled poorly, she may well be right that Joyce should fix this sooner rather than later.
I personally give Dorothy a pass, and I think she gets a pass from more people than you’d say, they’re just quiet about it.
I do think she gets (and deserves) less slack overall, even if she still deserves some, when acting as the Voice Of Reason inserted into the comic. The dynamic changes if we’re meant to treat her as a flawed character, or as presenting the moral compass.
I mean… she could ask Joyce how she feels about losing her religion. That is one thing she could do. Like, I feel you on people being harsh on Dorothy- you’re right that she’s just as much of a kid as everyone else and trying to figure things out! But the fact that no one has expressed concern about how Joyce is dealing with the loss of *the* defining factor of her identity for a long time is just… really stark. And I think Dorothy gets the brunt of that because she presents herself as an authority- like, I’m also mad at Sarah about it, but Sarah’s not the one ordering her to “fix” things. (Becky I exempt, she’s dealing with her own shit.)
I actually like Dorothy a lot, and like her even better when it’s demonstrated that her perfectionism veers into neurosis, and that trying to be the designated Mom Friend is a mistake when she’s not actually equipped for it.
What worries me about this arc (does it count as an arc?) is that she’s messing up beautifully here, but the text appears to support her as if she’s not, nor being selfrighteous herself.
Oh, they’re all self-righteous teens, with variable levels of trauma, and thrown into the maws of higher education which involves a high amount of information and not the best tools to process it. The remark about “DUMBING” has been done to death.
What’s left after acknowledging they’re all messy, dramatic freshmen who’re nevertheless pretty likeable (I do like mostly everyone in the cast), is watching out for who’s supported in their actions by the narrative. Dorothy messing up is understandable, but does the story state/implies she’s actually right? I hope not.
The thing is, Dorothy can be right about some things, but the issue with it is that being right about those some things implies correctness on *other* points. Is Dorothy correct to call out Joyce’s “Same ethos, just with some words swapped”? Yes. Does this mean that Dorothy is right to not have any idea how to talk to Joyce or consider her feelings, or to consider the several bad things Becky’s done and might need to answer for? No.
Honestly if Dorothy truly wanted to get this resolved, she’d get them together and mediate. I don’t blame her for not thinking about that, being a self righteous teen, but it does feel a little like she’s passing the buck by not offering any advice or help, and by making it seem like Joyce has *no* legitimate grievances.
It is literally not Dortheys role to mediate a fight between two long term friends like that, especially since Becky can easily say its “ The athiests siding against her” no matter what Dorthey says….
Today’s comic jolted the brainmeat enough (with Dorothy/Joyce shipping material) I’ve come to the conclusion that Joyce’s disgruntled reaction to Ruth being bi is rooted in denial of her own feelings plus a dash of prototypical new-to-lgbt-concepts bi erasure. This may or may not have been mentioned previously in the comments.
I’d be down to discuss how this frankly awful (mis)understanding of bisexuality is actually about Joyce’s denial of his own, even if someone else has done it before. “You can be bisexual but you’re only queer if you don’t date anyone of the opposite sex” (with the corollary of “you can also pass as straight if you focus on the opposite sex”)
Very performative, very in line with the worldview of a girl who was raised a fundie, and believing goodness was actually god acting through you instead of a core value reflecting your personal ethic.
A lot of people are talking about how they want this wrapped up in a bow by the end of this book or arc, how they just want this all over with, and I’m hoping for the opposite. This is a goldmine for drama, content, and personal growth for all the characters involved, even the secondary characters to this plot thread like Sarah and Dorothy, and seeing how things spin out both in comic and in the comments section is something I highly enjoy.
It’d frankly break my suspension of disbelief some if Joyce went up and perfectly apologized to Becky, and Becky then went “yeah Joyce thanks, I had no issue with you being atheist, I just didn’t want you to berate me for it”, and they were back to besties for the next story arc.
What I want is intense character interactions, for Joyce to have to go through intense personal growth, fight through it like she always has, make a proper apology to Becky and a promise to go forward at the end of this book… and then for Becky to still reject it, and to say that Joyce lying about still believing to be bad, and to unearth some of her issues with atheism in general.
I want Joyce to, in frustration and sadness, go back to her room, and for Dorothy and Sarah to keep having their reflexive “Joyce is 100% wrong” reactions, and to batter Joyce and mindscrew her about it. To eventually later realize they’d been unknowingly pushing viewpoints they didn’t want to, because let’s be real here, when Joyce came back, nobody watched the argument, nobody asked her.
If that perfect apology *had* come out, and then Becky still had huge issues with it being hidden, and Joyce came back, Sarah still woulda said “you didn’t even try, did you” in that condescending manner.
Characters messing up and having misunderstandings and behaving badly is the lifeblood. I know I’m a sucker for a happy ending, but that happy ending has to have *all* the characters grow, not just one, and for the road to be difficult to truly give it meaning.
… whew, that was a longer rant than I thought it’d be, apologies, to those few of you still reading the comments 4 hours after comic post time.
I’m trying not to get into heated arguments but I agree with all of this, the drama of Joyce and Becky struggling with each other’s differing beliefs is juicy drama. I only hope Becky actually has a deeper conflict like the one you described instead of “my friend was mean one time about my beliefs” cause that’s a weak reason to stay eternally mad at someone. I’ve had my agnostic beliefs mocked by close friends and talked it out, and my beliefs aren’t a part of the most powerful religion in the world.
Also I really want to see Dina and Becky have a real conversation about atheism where Becky isn’t being wacky about it, I feel like there’s some deep stuff about her mum that have yet to be explored. Beckys deification of her mother vs the uncomfortable possibilities
I am reading this series for these idiot disaster children, they are what I’m here for.
It’s not Dina’s death in IW! unless she’s accidentally responsible for it by leaping into the same room she threw a bomb into because she was getting shot while trying to defend her work, the only thing that gave her any meaning when Joe showed up and any play at self-worth had evaporated, and then Mike stomped on whatever’s left.
Stories are not a linear line to the most optimal solution to an ongoing conflict!
Yea, I get wanting good things to happen and they can be good, but when bad things happen and the story ties it all together it’s so good. Centaurworld did that recently with the nowhere king and the pain there is still in my head
Agreed. I’m hoping Joyce and Becky START making up by the end of the book, if only because I’m not sure how much longer the fight could sustain itself interestingly, but I want this attempt to blow up in Dorothy’s face and for it to keep being a bit messy even after the two of them start trying to find common ground again and acknowledge they never had the same approach to faith. Give us Becky finally acknowledging her insecurities about Joyce’s friendship!
This arc is definitely still on its upswing. What will their dynamic look like as they rebuild? Was their shared upbringing the only thing they actually had in common this whole time? Will Becky finally drop the wacky mask long enough to be genuine about her feelings?
I hope they can put the fire out and start frankly talking again by the end of this book, but it’s going to take longer than that for them to find their new normal.
Yeah- to me it would be pretty unrealistic if Becky was immediately 100% fine with Joyce being an atheist. Belief is a huge part of their shared history- Joyce explicitly rejecting that has got to make Becky feel some kinda way, you know? I’m not as convinced as other people seem to be that Becky would outright *reject* Joyce for being an atheist, but I also can’t buy her having *no* reaction.
Obviously right now Joyce is going about it in the absolute worst way, so at the moment “how Becky feels about Joyce being an atheist” is impossible to disentangle from “how Becky feels about Joyce suddenly being an enormous jerk.” But assuming Joyce gets over the enormous jerkitude, I think there will still be a lot of unresolved issues.
Oooooh, character development for Dorothy! She has a lower boredom threshold now and she has learned to make offers that can’t be refused (good for her presidential aspirations).
Dorothy knows she ain’t gonna be here much longer and been trying to tie off loose ends. Because she thinks of herself as being in charge of Joyce. And Joyce also thinks of her as being in charge. It’s that sort of (mostly one way, probably unbalanced if that’s a thing) dynamic.
So she’s telling Joyce to fix things with Becky because once she’s gone, Joyce is gonna need someone else close to her to talk to, which has usually been Becky. I don’t think this is necessarily accurate (because friendships do fall apart and that’s life), but I do think it’s right. At the very least, it’ll be better for Joyce not to have a bitter relationship with her closest friend after she loses Dorothy.
Which is another thing that’s gonna be drama. Because “the adult in the room” is afraid to come out ahead of that. She should tell Joyce if she doesn’t want her to end up feeling betrayed by all her friends.
See that’s how you know Dorothy’s gonna make a good Democrat one of these days.
She’s already well versed in reciting textbook solutions to complex problems, refusing to engage on any personal level on why a crisis is occurring, and when her platitudes don’t immediately solve the problem she starts demanding someone who’s more involved with more stake in it handle it themselves.
“Fix it. Now.” – Dorothy Keener, political maverick, whose sterling advice definitely worked yesterday when she said this exact thing.
Anyway, I’m down for seeing Dorothy be a huge fuck-up at the moment. It’s not even a matter of Character Flaws or whatever at this point, I just think it’s neat seeing her usual ability to solve Joyce’s problems be twisted into something where she’s not helping nearly as much as she wants and can’t even recognize it, because it always worked before and maybe the world’s more complex than a 19-year old middle-class white girl with big ideas can solve.
Like actually maybe Dorothy being wrong will, in turn, help her forge the beliefs, ideals and most importantly the resolve she needs to learn in order to succeed instead of ending up some toothless neo-lib who tweets complaints that she tried so hard you guys, vote for me in midterms.
Something which has been hinted at but never really explored is that Dorothy struggles with a lot of important politician stuff. Dorothy is intelligent, honest and hard-working, but she isn’t good with the sort of politicking that comes naturally to Roz and Becky. They’re seemingly effortlessly better than her at the thing she wants to do, which is demoralizing as hell, I’ve certainly been struggling to deal with that feeling.
Dorothy wasn’t great at solving anything before and she’s not fucking up so much now. She knows Joyce and Becky enough to know that their friendship will stand without her doing anything. What has changed from past Dorothy is that she got bored of their bickering really fast.
Dorothy is stating directly to Joyce’s face that she can put up with her but Becky cannot, and Becky has sure as hell not hinted she’s interested in their friendship standing.
Intruding into Joyce and Dorothy’s conversation was Becky’s way of hinting she’s still hoping there will be a reconciliation. Of course, not before a lot of grandstanding. Probably, it will take Dina to cut through all the BS.
Anyway, I’ve felt for a while that Dorothy does not, strictly speaking, respect Joyce, and panels 2 and 3 here kinda solidifies that for me. She loves Joyce to pieces, but she’s been reliant on a script where Silly Fundie Joyce acts up and Patient Mom Dorothy calmly lectures her, and this has been easy because Joyce’s problems are binary and are overcome by her empathy; if you tell Joyce to do the right thing, then she does it. Dorothy isn’t this genius sage, she’s just surrounded by emotionally traumatized kids who are extremely bad at processing feelings while Dorothy is a person bursting with empathy, and so until now she’s been a genuinely amazing force for good in all their lives.
But this isn’t a binary problem and Dorothy is thinking all she has to do is say “stop being mean :(” and boom, problem solved, and she’s incapable of recognizing Joyce’s huge-ass pile of trauma and anger because Dorothy grew up with overwhelmingly kind parents who gently guided her and let her figure things out herself, so Dorothy just tries the same shtick with a resolve that she can fix it without any of the knowledge, experience, or even really the empathy she thinks she has right now.
Dorothy loves Joyce to pieces, but she has no idea what Joyce needs right now and it’s fine that she does not. Dorothy Keener does not, actually, need to solve all the world’s ill, and she’s sure as hell not solving it by throwing platitudes at Joyce until she throws her hands up and threatens her that this is all Joyce’s fault and if she doesn’t stop having this wild trauma response at a lifetime of religious indoctrination into a death cult then she’s going to permanently lose her lifelong best friend she has actually nearly died for like three times, because Dorothy processes conflict on a level of civility doctrine where being angry about the wrong thing makes you the bad guy. Anger only counts if it’s for a good cause, ergo Joyce doing a thing that made Becky angry regardless of any circumstance (that nobody around Joyce has even asked about yet, as if there is a more complex story going on than Joyce learning not to be an edgy atheist) makes Joyce the villain, and being the villain means it’s Joyce’s responsibility to sit down and shut the fuck up.
Ok, so I’ve been reading your comments since this whole thing started, and here is my response:
I know you relate heavily to Joyce and what she’s going through, and it seems like an absolute dick move with how her friends are treating her. You know who relates even more heavily with Joyce? Willis. She’s a fictional character, but this Joyce is the main character of the comic and the one Willis has poured a lot of themself into. So, you don’t really have to worry about Joyce’s friend’s or the narrative being mean to her, because the person who is both hardest on and most sympathetic to her is writing this. In the end she will come out of this both stronger and better. You don’t have to fight for her honor by trashing all the characters around her, she’ll be fine.
Before the next section, a note to every single commenter on this site: This comic is called “Dumbing of Age” because every character is a fuck-up. They’re 18-20, of course they’re fuck-ups. It’s understandable, and the whole point. So, for your own sanities, learn to forgive and forget when they mess up, because they will, frequently and spectacularly. Everyone is flawed and also trying their best. Just like we all were/are at that age.
As for the other characters, I think there has been a massive misreading of why the characters are mad at each other and what they’re arguing about. It’s easy to see it as “Becky is mad Joyce is no longer religious (and thus thinks Becky is an idiot) and everyone is mad at Joyce for being a mean atheist, but I don’t think so. This whole thing started, before Liz ever got here or Bonnie’s birthday, with Sarah saying “You should tell Becky you’re an atheist.” Why would she do this? Sarah has historically, not cared one bit about Becky. In fact, she actively distrusted her for the longest time. What Sarah DOES care about is 1) avoiding drama, and 2) Joyce, and what Joyce cares about, more than anything else in the world, is Becky. So, to me, it seems obvious that she isn’t annoyed at Joyce for being an atheist, acting superior, or being mean to Becky, because she’s never cared about any of those things. What she cares about is Joyce getting hurt and knew that Joyce not telling Becky would hurt Joyce. Could she say any of this better? Definitely. But see above “fuck-up” comment.
As for Becky, I think this is where the biggest misreading comes in from everyone. I don’t think Becky is mad at Joyce for being an atheist, she’s had no problem with that for Dorothy or Dina. And I honestly don’t think she’s mad at Joyce for changing. I think she’s mad because JOYCE DIDN”T TELL HER. Specifically, that she didn’t trust her enough to tell her. Becky has shown, repeatedly, that there is nothing she hates more than being treating like she’s fragile or broken, especially by Joyce. Its why she puts on her mask and tries to hide who she is, and someone who does that can’t be as selfish as the comments seem to think she is. She spent the first part of the strip, before she showed up on campus being Joyce’s sounding board over the phone and hiding all the drama that was going on with her. That first day she showed up on campus, she spent the whole day hiding what was going on with her and trying to pretend everything was fine and be there for Joyce. She has repeatedly gone out of her way to help others and their emotional issues. When she was freaking out about sex with Dina it was because she was worried she would be forcing Dina to do something she didn’t want to do and talked to other people about it instead of Dina for that reason. She just showed that she actually cares about Ruth (and Billie) and making sure neither of them are in a suicide pact, even if that means losing hot lesbians. And before ANY of this, she hid how her mother died and her father abused her, even from her best friend and crush, because doing otherwise would cause trouble. Becky is not a perfect person, she screws-up, comes on strong, and rubs people the wrong way. She’s a fuck-up, but selfish and uncaring about other’s feelings she’s not.
I think, if Joyce had told her, none of this would have happened. Becky would not care that Joyce is an atheist, and they’d still be friends. Yes, Joyce’s conflict with her religion is personal and something she should have space to struggle with, and there’s a very good argument that she shouldn’t have to tell Becky, except, as Joyce herself said, her atheism IS about Becky. She became an atheist BECAUSE of how Becky was treated by their community. She couldn’t reconcile those two things, so she chose Becky over religion. But she didn’t trust Becky enough to tell her that, and that is, in my opinion, what Becky is mad about. That Joyce didn’t trust her enough, thought her to0 fragile to tell her. Because, no matter what you may think of her and all her fuck-ups, Becky is not fragile, and she can’t stand that Joyce thinks she is.
Am I saying that Joyce is an irredeemable monster and the only one at fault? Hell no. I like Joyce and think she’s a great main character and I expect great things from and for her. Am I saying that Becky is a precious little baby that can do no wrong and needs to be protected? Hell no, she’s shown that she’s strong enough to deal with trauma, observant enough to see when other people are having problems, AND a major fuck-up, because she’s just now getting to be selfish and grow-up. I could argue that neither or both of them are at fault but assigning blame here isn’t important. What’s important is they talk this out and solve their issues with each other, because no one is more important to them than the other (and I think Dorothy knows this, even if she could show it better).
TLDR: I’m going to continue to watch to see how this whole thing plays out, knowing that the person writing it relates to all of these characters and will write the best story for all of these fuck-ups who are just trying to get through life. And I implore all of you, the whole comments section, to let them do so without deciding any of them are Actually-Satan.
I’ll be honest, I feel like all this “The Evil Hateful Comments Section” stuff is fanfiction. I’ve been delving into these and I don’t find anybody super demonizing anybody, and those comments just feel like they hate high tension discussion and interesting topics and want to strawman the people and conversation.
That said, on the matter of “I think she’s mad because JOYCE DIDN”T TELL HER.”, I feel like yes, that would have made Becky feel notably better, or at least capable of handling it. The issue is that Becky was doing her damned best to signal she was *not safe* to share new-found atheism with, and I can’t blame Joyce in the slightest from hiding her opinions from Becky.
I don’t think there is (much) demonizing, but there have definitely been “these other commentors are disappointing me in how they are viewing these characters” and I really didn’t want the focus of what I was saying to be on that, so it was intending more as a “I’m not arguing about which side is right or not.”
Except for the part where every time Joyce did try to broach the subject, or push back or question Becky in any way, she was told “this is a shitty phase, I know my mom is in Heaven having cake, how dare you question your faith or have trauma when I just discarded the inconvenient bits of the first and go through life pretending to everyone I don’t have any of the latter”.
So before I get to anything, I do want to be clear that I’ve read through this twice, I’m just not gonna try and respond to the whole thing, all at once, ’cause otherwise I’d be here for another hour.
(which, um, that’s illuminating to how I usually write posts, I guess)
All I can really say here is that “the characters being flawed” is a thing I’m actually here for and all about, and that thinking Dorothy is being a huge fuckup right now doesn’t mean I think she’s either an Evil Person or a Bad Character, if only because Dorothy as a character has previously been very vanilla to me and so seeing her screw up in a situation she has otherwise been able to perfectly handle is something I’m excited about for the same reason Ethan meant nothing to me before he came back as a malnourished goth with a permanent scowl. Dorothy’s mistakes here feel true to her character as someone who constantly, repeatedly tries to be good, except the difference here is that she’s in a scenario where “being good” isn’t as easy as it usually is and she’s unequipped to help Joyce, and so her attempts are making things worse.
I don’t think Becky would deal with the reveal of Joyce’s atheism well, she sure didn’t deal with Joyce questioning it at Dina’s party. She’d still be mad, I think, just a different kind of mad, and moreover it’s not really a topic Joyce could broach with her because she was still figuring it out and already had a bad experience with saying as much to Becky.
I’m “concerned” about Joyce’s friends being mean to her in that I think it’s an intentional part of Joyce’s current status quo that her friends relied on her existing in a specific box and they don’t know how to handle her otherwise, and I’m not at all concerned about the narrative; the only thing I can control, and am interested in controlling, is what I feel about the story. I’d certainly be disappointed if this ended with Joyce tearfully apologizing for being an edgy atheist and all her friends warmly forgive her, if only because that’s something where I think “blame Joyce” would make for a boring story, but I’m not at all convinced of that happening (which is probably bad news, because I live in a state of being perpetually wrong about plot developments).
What this has spoken to me as a story since the Faith-Off began is one where the three people Joyce loves most are just completely incapable of being emotionally supportive in a way Joyce needs, and that’s something born from them relying on Joyce as a constantly cheerful, positive, sunny character who bulldozes into other peoples’ crises who’s also really funny to laugh at all the time because she thinks the Earth is 6000 years old, and I don’t think any of them really know how to step up to the plate. I definitely think that, because none of them have asked her how she’s feeling or what brought it about. If there’s any part of authorial/narrative intent I want to concern myself with, in that I try to stay away from making commentary to the effect of “this is definitely David Willis’ point and what they were thinking while writing,” the part where no one can ask if she’s okay before telling her she’s more disappointing than a School Misser, that who she is now is worse than the person they made fun of all the time, and that she only had faith because she wanted to lord superiority over everyone? That seems intentional to me.
Or: I think we’re more in agreement on this series being about idiot disaster children butt fumbling through life than you may think I am.
“What this has spoken to me as a story since the Faith-Off began is one where the three people Joyce loves most are just completely incapable of being emotionally supportive in a way Joyce needs, and that’s something born from them relying on Joyce as a constantly cheerful, positive, sunny character who bulldozes into other peoples’ crises who’s also really funny to laugh at all the time because she thinks the Earth is 6000 years old, and I don’t think any of them really know how to step up to the plate. I definitely think that, because none of them have asked her how she’s feeling or what brought it about. If there’s any part of authorial/narrative intent I want to concern myself with, in that I try to stay away from making commentary to the effect of “this is definitely David Willis’ point and what they were thinking while writing,” the part where no one can ask if she’s okay before telling her she’s more disappointing than a School Misser, that who she is now is worse than the person they made fun of all the time, and that she only had faith because she wanted to lord superiority over everyone? That seems intentional to me.”
This is the part we disagree on, but I obviously did a bad job of communicating that. I don’t read them as acting that way towards her, but I’d really rather not write another essay length post trying to convince you of it. I think their reasons are different and have absolutely nothing with putting Joyce in a box or making fun of her. If that didn’t come across, I’m sorry.
the part where she savagely broke up with Walky after asking for some space, breaking into his, and then dumping him like a broken action figure for not being able to keep her hands off him. All because she couldn’t manage her own time and needed to blame the goofball for that.
She didn’t “blame” him, she’s burning herself out trying to be at maximum Dorothy capacity all the time.
She didn’t think she was capable of being with him and still devote herself to schooling, so she thought boxing him out and ending it entirely after slipping would get her back on track and it really has not.
It’d be nice if even one of Joyce’s friends did that, instead of condescending to her and demanding that she fix things with Becky immediately, as if the problem is all Joyce’s fault and it’s all her responsibility to fix Becky’s bad reactions to Joyce’s views changing.
See. Joe basically did that, actually, when he was worried about Joyce frowning at her phone literally I THINK the day previous in-comic? But I think it’s unlikely that Joe is going to come out of his shame hole to be the friend Joyce needs right now. Which sucks.
I really hope this conversation doesn’t involve Joyce apologizing and giving in on everything. Maybe Joyce can mention that she is used to always doing that, being the obedient daughter, the agreeable saint, and Becky can realize she, too, hurt Joyce. She has always been the aggressive energy to match her friend’s supportive energy. With their newfound self awareness, they can redraw the boundaries that used to define their dynamic.
Hmm interesting wish past me, but if it is a trainwreck then Dotty will have to deal with Becky’s side. When Becky throws whatever accusations she does about stealing friends, Dotty can drop the Yale bomb right back at her. End of book.
My problem with this whole deal is how, exactly, is Becky reconciling what she was taught as a child with what she has become as a woman. Yes, Joyce needs to understand that people have differing religious views and religiosity levels than her, but how, how, HOW can Becky survive being a Lesbian when her whole worldview, AS SHE WAS TAUGHT, says she goes direct to hell, don’t pass go, don’t collect $200.
Everybody cherrypicks, because the Bible is a diverse collection of documents written by a wide variety of people over many different generations, all of whom had different motives and viewpoints. Everybody interprets, and everybody does some cherrypicking, except those who do not believe in any of it at all.
Which is also fine! As an atheist, it’d be weird for me to say otherwise 🙂
But unless you’re calling ALL Christians “trite”, which is rude as heck….
There’s a pretty significant philosophical gap between “This law is unjust because it was written by flawed people,” and “This religious tenet doesn’t gel with my worldview therefore I choose to jettison it.”
We can see human beings, we can speak to them and weigh their words and actions, and either personally or collectively say “Fuck that,” if what they’re peddling is garbage. It’s immensely different to have a hundreds-to-thousands-of-years-old collection of texts with contradictory passages that is being passed off as a single immutable work and then say that parts of it suck while the rest don’t because it turns out some of “God’s word” is mutable.
You’d be right, except Becky (like most Christians) don’t believe the bible is the inerrant word of god and understand that the bible was written by many authors over the course of hundreds of years. I don’t see any value in belittling people who apply critical thought to their religious texts.
We are all sinners deserving of Hell, but God loves us, and through Christ’s sacrifice, we are absolved.
It’s pretty simple, really. Note that while Becky is in a relationship with Dina, this relationship has remained platonic because Becky is afraid of taking the next step into actual sexual intimacy.
(Also, while the Old Testament condemns male homosexuality in Leviticus, it doesn’t say anything about female homosexuality. And Jesus made a new Covenant meaning that the old laws are no longer relevant. Keep in mind the Leviticus also forbids eating shellfish or wearing a cotton/polyester shirt. Somehow, the people who insist that the Bible forbids homosexuality tend to be blissfully unaware that these things are equally forbidden with the same strength.)
“Before Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, there was no sin, no pain, no death! There’s no room for evolution in a world where nothing can die! And if humanity isn’t the cause of sin and pain and death, if it existed before us, and we didn’t unleash it, then God did. And if that’s true, then everything, EVERYTHING, EV-ER-Y-THING I’ve ever known, everything we’ve been taught, is a goddamned lie.”
Because she recognizes those precepts were at best tertiary to the central message of Christianity, and have only been stirred up by hatemongers seeking any excuse to put people down rather than lift people up?
Look at the amount of the new testament Jesus spends talking about loving and accepting everyone, and the amount of the new testament Jesus spends saying all gay people go to hell, and you might be able to get some idea about how how Becky has been able to maintain her faith and her lesbian identity at the same time.
Joyce (angrily) brought that exact point up to Becky after her non-apology on the stabbin’ steps. Becky had no answer, except taking another jab and storming off.
Eh, no one needs to justify their faith. If Becky was still going to a church that preached the burning of gays, sure, I’d question that. But her reasons for having faith in a specific deity? That’s no one’s business but her own.
Becky also already justified it to Joyce when she first came out and Joyce cheerfully told her ‘hey I googled stuff and I THINK you’re safe in the bible!’ and Becky pointed out that she didn’t have to google it, she had faith that God would have her back. And later, when evolution came up and Joyce was angry with Becky for learning about evolution, and Becky pointed out that “facts” such as ‘Earth is only 4000 years old’ weren’t the important parts of the bible. The love for others, compassion for others, forgiveness, and doing right by others, THAT is what is important in the bible for Becky. Joyce has merely forgotten these discussions because it is easier to tell herself that Becky is ‘being dumb’.
I didn’t read that as having no answer, it was refusing to dignify that statement with an answer. Because it sounds a lot like Joyce saying their could be no god that loves Becky.
I imagine that a big part of Joyce’s conflict with food is the merging of different textures and hardness. Like, I just don’t like nuts in a lot of food, not because I hate nuts, but just because the combination of textures is unpleasant.
With Cheese? Well, beyond that Kraft Mac & Cheese cheese has nothing resembling actual cheese in it, the varieties of cheese blend well together to become a more consistent texture, which doesn’t set off Joyce’s food issues.
No, nobody deserves Joyce as long as she’s acting like this. But then, today’s strip marks her showing some regard for another human being for the first time since she discovered it was cool to say “God isn’t real”.
Well, before they both went to different colleges, Joyce was equally codependent with Becky. Then, Joyce went to a good college in the real world, made friends outside her abusive cult, and suddenly didn’t need Becky for extreme emotional co-dependence anymore.
In the same time period, Becky went to crazy fundie school, came out, dropped out, presumably made no new friends or networking connections, then her only family tried to kidnap, likely rape, and possibly kill her with a gun, then she was a homeless gay teen in America with no support system besides the new friends that Joyce made, that made her no longer need Becky as much, anymore. So it’s not actually a huge wonder that so many people are treating their friendship with Joyce as pseudo-surrogate to their friendships with Becky, and treating Joyce much more harshly when it comes to making sure she is appropriately supportive of Becky: That pseudo-surrogacy is fact, Joyce 100% thrust her friend Becky into everybody’s lives, expressly because of her lacking the proper social skills to evaluate how much of an imposition it was of her to do that. But Joyce’s ethics, like Dorothy’s, boil down to always do the right thing or else you’re bad, and hold everybody to that standard. She literally does not know anything but that pattern of thought and behavior, and has never attempted to learn anything more than that, just like her mother, because why would you learn anything beyond the single axiom that guarantees your moral superiority to everybody? That level of internal reassurance is highly addictive, as you can tell when you actually have to deal with the deep-seated rage of a fundie whose scene or routine is disrupted.
If you view everybody’s actions in a vacuum, they are incredibly unfair to Joyce. But if you view them through the lens of “everybody but Joyce is mature enough to clearly see that she is twisting a knife in her best friends’ heart, second after second, and that it’s only going to keep getting worse,” and beyond that, everybody knows Joyce well enough that she is backsliding into a behavior pattern for comfort because of her fear of backsliding in exactly that way, and that she will be mortified once she gets over herself and honestly internalizes how she is acting, and that she ultimately would hate herself for acting like this via her own ethics – which are clearer to everybody else than they are to her – and ultimately that she has a giant support network to help her with her trauma, in a place of relative comfort, safety, and privilege, while Becky is never going to realistically open up about her trauma to the rest of Joyce’s friends, because of how she is, and she really needs her life-long, dangerously co-dependent bestie, right now. Because that’s who inflicted this new trauma upon her, in the first place.
And if we really want to try to act like it’s one of their fault or the others’, more, let’s consider one final, deeper thing: why is Joyce so utterly, hideously, embarrassingly lacking in any social skills or self-awareness? She never needed them. She out-sourced those to her platonic, co-dependent life partner, Becky. Becky wants all social situations to go smoothly, and to avoid conflict, and deals with that anxiety by being super-manipulative the same way Joyce deals with it by latching on to her simple heuristics, and so Becky’s the one who managed all this shit for Joyce, Joyce’s whole life. That isn’t the only reason she is stunted, but Becky is used to doing FOR Joyce, the thing she currently, desperately needs FROM Joyce. It’s neither of their fucking fault. This is how they are due to patterns of behavior which began for them before they had the critical reasoning capacity to detect or critique them. They are literally two heavily-stunted children. That’s why this comic is called “Dumbing of Age.” They are babies, and this is frustrating precisely because of how hard this is for them, but if it wasn’t hard for them, they wouldn’t be them, and also there would be no fucking comic.
tl;dr, we’re biased in our perspective as readers, because this story started right after the point in Joyce’s life where she was just as fucking needy of Becky, as Becky is of her. Joyce literally just got more friends, and Becky wasn’t around, so she slipped into her friendship patterns of behavior with the people who were near because she needed that comfort she didn’t have from Becky. Becky didn’t get to do that. Becky still needs Joyce as badly as she ever did, whereas Joyce could literally lose Becky as a friend right now, feel completely justified, and never worry about it, again…even though every person who knows Joyce, knows deep down, she doesn’t actually feel that way, she has just convinced herself she is SUPPOSED TO, and therefore is fighting to convince herself that she does. Becky doesn’t deserve to be in the crossfire of a mental meltdown that utterly stupid, even if she is needy.
I thought there was something that wasn’t getting addressed in any of the comments on this storyline but I couldn’t figure out how to express it, and here you went and did. Thanks for making the effort.
Becky *does* have a support system outside of Joyce’s friends now, though? She connected with Dina and Leslie and Robin all on her own. She actually seems pretty good at making friends. I think you have a point about Joyce’s lack of self-awareness, but I don’t really buy that Becky has been emotionally managing things for her the way you’re framing it. I think it’s more mutual than that (before Joyce left).
If you view everybody’s actions in a vacuum, they are incredibly unfair to Joyce. But if you view them through the lens of “everybody but Joyce is mature enough to clearly see that she is twisting a knife in her best friends’ heart, second after second, and that it’s only going to keep getting worse,”
No, it is still incredibly unfair through that lens. Is Joyce being cruel to her best friend? Yes, and that sucks. But she is not “twisting a knife into Becky’s heart second after second.” She is dealing with her own trauma, not particularly well, and for all your talk of her support system not one of them has asked Joyce how she’s feeling about a pretty major change in her life.
Like… absolutely Becky has trauma, and absolutely it sucks that she is now at odds with the person she was previously closest to. But.. Joyce cannot help her with that right now, because the issues Joyce is dealing with make her the absolute wrong person for Becky to open up to. It sucks! As you say, it’s not either of their faults! But I think trying to force Joyce to make up with Becky *before* she has worked through at least *some* of her feelings about atheism is only going to make things worse. And I also don’t think Becky would be able to help Joyce with her current crisis, either, even if Joyce wasn’t doing her best impression of an atheist in a Jack Chick comic. They are not the right people to help each other right now. Honestly, I think some distance is the best thing for them, because otherwise they’re just going to keep stabbing each other’s tender spots.
I am sorry people, but I am feeling particularly juvenile today, and have to do this to get it out of my system.
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Ref the alt text: That’s what she said!
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Okay I’m getting confused. Is the resistance to change due to Aspergers or ADHD? Having both it’s hard to keep track of what traits I have are associated with one and no the other.
It’s a stripe that can occur with ALL kinds of unique flavors of neurodivergence, and on a grander level it’s really more a human thing than anything else. I think us neurodivergents just have a more anxious time processing it than others?
Joyce has always felt like a girl on the autism spectrum to me. Not so sure she has ADHD – she seems able to focus on what she needs to get done just fine.
Hey uh, sorry if this is an inappropriate place to ask, or it’s too personal, but there’s something you’ve said once that intrigued me, about the ways being Japanese and Autistic interact, and I’d like to know more.
What particular aspects of your autism interacted with what particularly aspects of your being Japanese do you think had the biggest impact on how you grew up / turned out?
We definitely can focus, it’s just that we get hyperfocus where you get so intently absorbed you totally lose track of time.
Anecdotally, it’s really easy for me to get lost in a cycle of endlessly checking and refreshing different pages, since there’s a little change to whatever it is I’m looking at.
My dorm didn’t have a mini kitchen. Some doink the semester before set the damn thing on fire and it was made off-limits. I was reduced to making grilled cheese in my electric corn popper.
You know who I’d really like to see Joyce talking to right now? Jacob. I really wonder what a conversation between the two of them would look like right now.
Quite the echo: When Joyce was dating Ethan and made noises about “saving” him, Sarah replied, “If anybody else finds out you’re doing this, they will not stand for it… You will especially lose Dorothy.
I certainly can’t sympathize with people who don’t like Mac & Cheese at all, but my god … does it have to be one of the grossest kinds? Kraft Mac & Cheese is an abomination before the gods of both Dairy and Pasta.
Well shit, I was actually just testing to see if I could post comments again, and now I find myself being quoted by Willis on Twitter (for the second time!). Sure hope it doesn’t get me re-“banned”!
you know dots has another reason to get them back together simply in the fact that if Joyce and Becky don’t makeup Joyce will never leave her alone if she doesn’t have to
At least Joyce and Becky will do something together giving dots a break
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easy breezy mac n cheesy
so mad rn bc I could totes go for some Kraft cheesy but my blood glucose skyrocketed bc I had some fries
ouch.
I’ve found my body takes issue with wheat, so no more of my beloved pasta for me, but I had rice noodles with cheesy sauce for breakfast today and am happy.
sadly rice is the literal worst for me, which is such a betrayal 😫
Have you tried chickpea pasta? I find it yummy.
I can’t eat Kraft Dinner anymore. It tastes bad, ever since they changed the recipe, and the pasta has no cohesion, so it falls apart into little pasta strips when you boil it. Nowadays, I eat President’s Choice mac and cheese instead. Tastes SOOOO much better, and the pasta actually remains in a macaroni shape, rather than dissolving.
The Art of the Deal. Dorothy is a better politician than you might expect.
It kinda hurts the whatever battle of principles Joyce is going through would be so easily swayed. She is usually – regardless of position – more thoughtful and considering.
She just needed an incentive to overcome her reluctance to go and admit she was in the wrong despite already knowing she was.
Given Joyce’s background, she’s probably internalized the idea that you HAVE to stick to your principles even when you know they are wrong because that’s what people of “integrity” and “faith” do, and even though she’s abandoned much of what she previously believed, that unconscious attitude of “changing my position is bad” is harder to shake. It clearly took a lot to get her to do it even once.
Solid take, though it seems to be applying equally well to both Joyce and Becky.
It kind of reminds me of when Joyce wanted to steal Jacob from Raidah; Dorothy’s appeal to stop her based on morals/ethics fell on deaf ears, but as soon as Walky accused Joyce of wanting Jacob for lustful purposes, she backed off. A kind of “doing the right thing for the wrong reason” situation.
What, no white cheddar mac and cheese? No deal!
Unless one of them wears the mac&cheese shirt walky bought dorothy.
Wow Dotty is angry
Angry Dotty is STILL super nice.
“You stop behaving like a terrible friend this instant or I won’t let you make me eat any junk food tonight I will have a salad wrap, you hear me? A salad wrap.”
Damn, but that sounds like a threat no ears should ever have to endure.
I agree. That is COLD!
It’s a biting remark.
What kind of salad wrap?
Macaroni salad, duh.
But no cheese.
I never thought I’d say this, but THANK YOU, DOROTHY.
I’ve been saying for months that this Joyce isn’t “different”, she’s exactly the same kind of person she was at the start of the strip. “What I believe is right, and everybody else is wrong.”
Her being an atheist now doesn’t change that. I’m glad somebody finally called her out on it.
Dorothy, I couldn’t have said it better myself!
… is the server borked again? Why can’t I post my reply to this?
(Watch this one post with no problems…)
**eyebrow twitch**
….
ANYWAY…. Ahem….
@The Wellerman re Dorothy
I know, right?
Yeah that’s happened several times to me already. I just fix it by resetting my browser.
Personally, I was hoping she’d say something along the lines of “You can fix this by not forcing your beliefs on others”. I personally think that’s the biggest issue with Joyce’s behavior vis-a-vis this issue, and I don’t think that’s been spelled out to her explicitly.
Yeah, Joyce has yet to acknowledge what she’s been doing wrong. Dorothy told her straight up right here, but Joyce has yet to say it back, much less mean it.
Seems to me like that would make it difficult for her to fix things?
I think that’s what she was trying to say in the second panel.
Like Sambo, I think I could have said it better, but I’m three times Dorothy’s age and I have had a few days’ notice.
I certainly could have. Just saying “fix it” with can only work on people who know what they need to do, and it doesn’t look like Joyce gets it.
If Joyce doesn’t know what she needs to do, hopefully she’ll ask Becky. I rather suspect she won’t, though.
Somehow I don’t think this is getting fixed today. Just a guess.
Either way, I can guarantee that at least Joyce will be feasting on SOMETHING by the end of this storyline, one way or another.
I hope it’s humble pie.
Oh you’ll SEE! 😈
*demonic laughter commences*
Idk, Mac and Cheese is a powerful motivator.
I predict that Joyce will try and apologize and be ten times more insulting than she was before.
Joyce: Becky, listen, it’s not that I don’t love you. It’s that I think God is a stupid concept, that believing in you makes you supporting a hate-filled institution of social control, and that I dearly hope you will reject all your beliefs so you can accept your mom isn’t in Hell or Heaven because she’s ceased to exist. Oh and have sex with Dinah because sexual purity is stupid too.
I’m not sure Joyce is ready to reach that last step.
Joyce already told that last line to Becky almost verbatim before the timeskip.
SAUCE?
Here: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/drop-2/
Well, deep down, all she wants is for her best friend to be happy, so that’s good.
It kinda bothers me that reaching this conclusion is something people who have been reading regularly need a citation in order to reach.
By the way, sorry the commission’s not done yet.
But when it is, I guarantee it’s gonna BLOW your mind 🤪
Neither was Liz, and she still pushed it on Joyce just as hard as Joyce would now push it on anybody else. Joyce doesn’t have to be able to follow her own good advice to proselytize it, there is no mechanism in the fundie mindset for hypocrisy in preaching the gospel. Even if the gospel is that God is Dead.
Excellent work Dorothy, you might just save a friendship. Plus you get macaroni and cheese for supper. What more could you want?
…Now I’m hungry, this too is Joyce’s fault and I expect an apology.
she can still sneak some veggies in it too lol. at least her portion. (tho i’d rather have cheesy potatoes than melted cheese on broccoli)
Roast broccoli. My kids literally have to be told to eat the rest of their food before they can have seconds on broccoli.
Agreed, the new cultivar is both better tasting and has more nutrition (micro-nutrients) than the one commonly grown a few years ago.
… but how can you know which cultivar Andy’s kids are having?
Honest question.
Where I live, you can have a wide variety of cultivars, often under the same generic name.
and yes my kids also hate Mc n Cheese’s sauce and love broccoli.
Spiral! But use the three cheese packet.
I just realized I am 36 years old and never considered *swapping* cheese packets.
Its powdered cheese. Its universal. You have opened my eyes an intrigued my taste buds
The spirals are indeed the best variety of noodle!
The best ones are the novelty shapes, they hold the most cheese
I never liked the novelty shapes, they always seemed starchier than the regular pasta.
Anyone used to play the Kraft flash games?
I used to play the Quest for Cheese game featuring the Kraft Dinosaur ALL THE TIME!
The absolute tops, though, in terms of the best cheese-sauce-to-pasta ratio, would be either the little shells (conchiglie) or radiators (radiatori).
This is obvs the correct answer.
Oh my gosh is Joyce gay for Dorothy
I dunno, I just think they have a neat friendship
“What? It’s totally platonic!”
There are too many historians in this thread.
I say just the right amount!
I have looked into this comment section’s future, and I have seen…death.
Is it because of the fight over the best Mac and Cheese? (No Name White Cheddar obvs)
I think it’s because some people are offended easily… when you tell them the kraft instant cups are better than the kind that comes in a box.
I didn’t find the instant cups to be edible. The flavor and texture were so horrible I couldn’t eat even a bite. But perhaps I had a bad batch and should try again. Because it doesn’t make sense for them to be so nasty.
It’s a fine line between not adding enough water (so the pasta doesn’t come out right) and adding too much (making pasta cheese soup). Can’t do much for the flavor, though.
Given the choice between Easy Mac and Chef Boyardee mac and cheese, I’d go for Hector’s can of pasta in vaguely cheese related substance every time.
A local grocery store chain up here has passable knockoff Kraft mac and cheese. They were still 3 boxes for $1 too, last time I checked.
We don’t get Kraft noodles here, but have you tried adding a bit of extra cheese to them and letting that melt in the water? I find that improves any brand or flavour of cup noodles with a cheese or cream sauce that I’ve ever tried.
Why would you ruin perfectly good cheese by mixing it into Easy Mac?
Hey, hey. BIG diff between Mac’N’Cheese and Easy Mac. HUGE. jus’ sayin.
But that’s what we were discussing? (The cups of instant nastiness and lies pretending they’re real macaroni and cheese.)
Take it back, motherfucker. Take it back.
lol I’m so glad this worked
Cheetos released their own version of Mac and cheese and they have a flaming hot flavor, its unironically my favorite Mac and cheese now
Which is weird cause I’m not a huge fan of flaming hot cheetos
Man I tried it and it tasted like a chemical spill to me I could not do it and I’ll eat flaming hot anything
I like President’s Choice White Cheddar best. Kraft tastes too artificial to me. Plus where I live you can usually get the PC noodles for 1$ per box.
I find the house brand at Winco to be superior in both flavor and texture. Although of course when my wife’s feeling up to it, her homemade mac & cheese is superior to either (I don’t know all the secrets of her sauce, but it starts with a can of evaporated milk, and the cheese is usually a Colby/Monterey jack blend).
Naturally. No topic more fraught exists in this world!
I fix Mac n Cheese the way my wife likes it, and then I fix a salad for myself.
There is good mac n cheese, but it doesn’t come out of a box. Get some blocks of good cheese, good butter, good milk and cream, good pasta, spend a little time – and you’ll be well rewarded.
While that would undoubtedly be delicious, it is a different food. It’s like a hamburger vs a steak; the steak is clearly higher value, but neither one will satisfy a craving for the other.
I’d say more like the difference between McDonald’s and a homemade burger using good meat – they’re both called hamburgers (and are), but I don’t really understand craving the one if you know about the other. Resorting to it if it’s the only available choice at the time, yes – but not craving it…
Eh, I actually opt for the Packaged Mac and Cheese because the homemade stuff is too rich for me a lot of the time.
Same goes for French Fries.
That’s the neat thing; with home cooking you can adjust your recipe so you’ve got a lighter sauce.
True. But yet again, why would I try to recreate a great food that already exists which I can get cheaply and easily?
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Eh, sometimes you truly just want the crappy, crappy burger, knowing it’s crap but also that something about it appeals to you. (Sometimes I get a craving for Taco Bell. There are plenty of places near where I live that serve actual Tex-Mex food, including tacos worthy of the name. And they’re good tacos! But it’s like any other junk food craving – the fact that it’s not necessarily GOOD food by any objective metric doesn’t change the fact that it’s TASTY.)
With mac and cheese, especially box varieties versus homemade, there’s also the difference between what’s better-TASTING and what you have time for. You can have a really solid mac and cheese recipe and still not feel up to making it for real some nights because of all the prep and labor involved, but still want macaroni and cheese, and hey, here’s the Kraft variety, it’s good enough. There’s a lot to be said for ‘dramatically easier and cheaper’ even when cost isn’t necessarily a concern.
(Also a factor here with Joyce: People with food-based anxieties tend to have a really limited number of ‘safe’ foods, because something about the taste or the texture or the unpredictability freaks them out. There’s an image floating around the internet showing four blueberries and how the taste and texture differ per berry, versus a Wheat Thin or something which is EXTREMELY consistent every time, and that provides a sense of security. I think the infographic’s specifically about autism, but if you have a sensory processing disorder that applies to taste and texture and smell, I guarantee it’s a factor. Joyce could well be offered the finest macaroni and cheese in the land, and still pick one that she knows because it won’t surprise her. Even if she tried and liked the fancy one, because she doesn’t know if it’s always going to be this consistent every time.)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that blueberry info graphic. SAUCE please?
Can’t easily Google it because I saw it somewhere on Tumblr and Google only brings up Autism Parents Shit even when checking images. It’s somewhere on Tumblr. Somewhere.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen my issues with food put into words. I am very much Joyce when it comes to what my brain deems “eatable”
Once upon a time in a land far, far away there was a beautiful and lovely young woman named “Liz”, who had had a rotten day. I asked her, “Liz, what would you like for dinner?” Liz said that she would like macaroni and cheese. So I put some macaroni on to cook, grilled some bacon, and steamed some broccolini. Then I made a white roux and seasoned it with mustard powder, white pepper, and salt, used it to make a white sauce, melted in Mersey Valley cheese and grated Guyére, picked up the flavour with just a little dried sage, mixed the resulting Mornay sauce through the cooked pasta in an ovenproof dish, topped it with grated cheddar and smoked paprika, and toasted the top under the griller.
Liz wept because she had wanted mac and cheese like her mother made, out of pasta, a tin of Heinz tomato soup, and supermarket special tasty cheese melted on the top.
I have had three martinis this evening and am writing things I oughtn’t to.
It’s because of all the macaroni and cheese, isn’t it.
What if we use margarine and 1% milk instead?
That way lies suffering. As a proud Wisconsinite, “margarine” is a dirty word, and 1% milk is only slightly better than skim, which is just white water. Whole milk, butter, and a slice of American cheese are the bare minimum to be used.
Meh. I personally would like them to slow burn beat around the bush on this for another five years.
I agree. I’m hoping this gets worse before it gets better, seeing Becky and Joyce as enemies is an interesting space for their characters since we haven’t really seen it before.
I expect it won’t get fully resolved until the end of the current book at the earliest
But I suspect she’s going to try to approach the conversation in good faith here but either Becky won’t be willing to hear her out or Becky sets an unreasonable ultimatum that blows things up again (“I’ll forgive you if yougo back to being Christian” for example)
That’s actually kind of what I’m hoping for. This dynamic is so much more interesting if it’s not literally a “Don’t Be A Bad Atheist” tract, and is a significant web of interlocking issues where both parties are fucking up in different ways.
And of course, it’d be even more interesting if Dorothy and Sarah just kept assuming it’s 100% Joyces fault for a while (because apparently they have that extreme bias against her now), even when it’s pretty decisively obvious to us that this isn’t just Joyce being a meanie head.
This is a big thing for me too. Like, it feels WEIRD that they’re suddenly all harsh and barbs the second she’s not sunshine smiley jesus-fundie joyce anymore. Like they used to have relatively unreasonable patience for *that* version of her.
is it just more palatable because she wasn’t struggling visibly? It really feels like the second she doubted/actually had trouble that Sarah couldn’t hit with a bat, they bailed.
Which feels out of character to an extent seeing to the ends they went to to comfort her/help her deal with the aftermath of Ryan.
I’m really not sure why so many people suddenly think this is Dorothy doing a good thing. She’s not. Moral superiority also doesn’t default to *her.* And right now all she’s doing is pointing Joyce, with no actual advice or support or gentleness about how she’s acting, at Becky without giving her any clue how to actually fix the problem.
“same ethos different words” is not enough and it’s teetering to what Becky said when she tried to make a dig at Joyce being ‘better than other people’
which. I’m wondering is what we’re supposed to believe is her motivation? With how much the other characters are enforcing it. But if thats the case then it wasn’t really shown vis a vis Joyce’s actions outside of a handful of things that just seemed like she was repeating her parents.
+1 to everything here, and I also wonder why the fundie version of Joyce garnered more patience. Like, she did and said some heinous stuff back in the day. If it was that they could trust she was good enough a person to bounce back, learning, and being #better… The only thing that has changed is that she’s not broadcasting a permanent smile to the world. I’d even dare say she’s depressed. It sucks that others are weirded out by it, but nobody seems to be worried. They kinda feel like they’re frustrated by the changes.
Is it more interesting if Dorothy and Sarah keep assuming it’s Joyce’s fault? Yes. But fffff, this arc already feels so long. And very uncomfortable 🙁
ignorance grants patience
Joyce knows about bi, she’s being petty, she doesn’t deserve patience
She knows about Becky being hurt, she’s being petty here too
tbf Becky’s being some kind of petty too.
I’m all for a right to pettiness, and a right for a priori ignorance. But mind you, not for a for keeping ignorance as a sacred treasure.
It’s not sudden. When Joyce started swearing, Walky and Jennifer were also extremely uncomfortable about it despite having spent a whole semester making fun of her.
But then we’d have 5 years of having this comment section be angry at Dorothy.
I doubt forcing this conversation is going to be helpful, it wasn’t helpful last time
But then again I’m not sure I’d enjoy years (in real time) of them passive aggressively sniping at one another
Same shit, different belief system.
Yeah. But I’m glad Joyce got called out on it. She was being an ass
I’d argue against atheism being a belief system, rendering it not the same shit, but we’ve already covered this comment section walls with blood about religion before, let’s not cover it with different feces, it’d start to look like an Ellroy novel and I’m not really inclined toward his novels being any good.
Yeah, more like same galaxy of shit, no black hole in the center.
does it matter or does it antimatter?
I’d argue same belief SYSTEM, different beliefs.
… it’s Kraft dinner, Joyce. It’s like 88¢ a box and you could easily make the microwave version when Dorothy isn’t around. Not exactly selling your deeply-held beliefs dearly, are you?
Yes but it’s dinner with Dorothy where she doesn’t have to eat weird things like sushi.
It’s wifely roleplay with Dorothy.
And Joyce is just a fighter pilot’s license and kid’s cartoon show away from making this fantasy marriage work.
Always nice to see other Canadians in the comments.
*BBCC has entered the chat*
Hey, I’m here too.
Subverting the American menace by putting the ‘u’ back in all the words it was removed from.
Just for that, I’mma add “u” to wourds that never had it to start with. We’ll see who’s a menace then.
Sorry to disappoint but I’m not Canadian. I just picked up calling it Kraft dinner from y’all. I do love hockey though, so I guess I’m at least spiritually Canadian, eh?
We’ll adopt you anyway.
…That is basically the same method of persuasion Dorothy used while dating Walky. (I’ll wear whatever you want). Either she only has one method of convincing people of anything, or there’s more parallels there than she’s ready to admit.
In both cases, Dorothy’s companion really wanted kraft mac n’ cheese. Sometimes this comic is autobiographical.
Scenes like this always make me wonder how much is preplanned and how much is in response to the audience.
…
Okay, place your bets!
Will Joyce successfully fix things with Becky?
Will Joyce and Becky at least end uo neutral?
If not, who will screw it up? Joyce? Becky? Both? A third party? Some combination there-of?
And finally…
If not, who will the thread blame?
Joyce? Becky? Both? Willis? The readers they disagree with?
The backlog is several months long and is a consistent trend. Willis has had this week’s strips written at least a few weeks before the Becky and Joyce fight debuted to us.
I nominate Wayne
https://ifunny.co/picture/the-world-was-going-down-the-tubes-they-needed-a-TF6EOnZD2
The bufferwatch on the side says that comics are uploaded already through May 7th.
“The readers they disagree with” is always a safe answer.
Despite his buffer, Willis has an eerie capacity to align what’s happening in his comics with what happens in the real world. This includes trends in the comments section. Many believe Willis is prescient.
Angry Dorothy is when Joyce knows she fucked up.
“Appropriate avatar”, etc.
I, on the other hand, am way too happy.
As much as I’ve been loving this new Joyce in a lot of ways, it’s been adorable and sweet to see some of happy innocent Joyce shine through again.
Also what is this Becky can’t be patient dump? I guess that decade worth of friendship can’t survive one of them being an ass for a few days. I’m not trying to takes sides on this as both arguments have had their points but the idea Becky deserves some expedient reconciliation from Joyce is unfair. This isn’t reslly for the brne fit of the m. Dorothy is just annoyed now.
“This isn’t reslly for the brne fit of the m.”
rot13 gives this as “Guvf vfa’g erfyyl sbe gur oear svg bs gur z.” I got nothin’.
“This isn’t really for the benefit of either of them”
Gotta learn to parse my-autocorrect-can’t-handle-my-inability-to-type-on-a-phine
Yeah typing on my touchscreen sux. Between that and auto correct its a miracle I can even form a comment.
What is a phine and is it sharp enough to stab someone?
“Phine” is an anagram for “niphe”, homophonous with “knife”, so the answer is yes.
I’m sure we can go full Nostradamus here.
“Phone”, substitute the O with an I because they’re adjacent on the keyboard.
“phine” is an anagram for “niphe”, which is a homophone for “knife”.
It really WAS his phone!
I think what Dorothy means is that while Dorothy can be patient while Joyce works through this and doubles down, etc. and remain Joyce’s friend, she doesn’t think Becky can. To wit, Becky walked in on Joyce sounding for all the world like she’s calling all Christians idiots, Joyce then doubled down on that in their argument by saying Becky was smart and would come around eventually, and now this bit that just happened with her mocking Becky’s belief directly. Those are, to Becky, some pretty major hits to their friendship. NOT unrepairable yet, though. So Dorothy is telling her to fix it NOW while it can still be repaired, because if it keeps taking hits like this, Becky’s not going to want to be friends again. Less of a ‘Becky deserves a quick reconciliation’ and more of a ‘fix this while it CAN be fixed’.
I think their friendship is already over because if you lie to your friends (they aren’t entitled to your beliefs but you aren’t entitled to lie to them either), don’t respect them, and insult them–then you aren’t their friend.
So how does that work? You’re saying Becky both is and isn’t entitled to know about Joyce’s Atheism
How does she keep her Atheism to herself, which is a valid choice without lying to Becky, who until yesterday in universe very explicitly tied their friendship to their apparent shared faith
You don’t lie to your friends.
But if you do, you aren’t their friend.
That seems like a remarkably black and white way of thinking
Almost Joyce-like really
I suppose it depends on what qualifies a person as a friend and how bad lying to them is. If you don’t trust them with the truth about yourself and to share your feelings, then how close are you?
Dorothy didnt immediately tell her friends she got accepted to Yale, clearly this means she isn’t really friends with them if we use this logic
Yeah, and to go further, it means “trans/gay people in the closet don’t truly have any friends, ever”, which would be a dark thing to say to a gay kid afraid to tell their religious society about stuff if you were their therapist, for all you believed it to be true.
I was gonna say.
“you can’t lie to your friends about anything or else they’re not your friends” is a level of comedic wrongness that cannot ever be evened.
If you have any secrets, from anyone, that person isn’t your friend. QED.
I think they meant that Becky should know the truth, but doesn’t get to decide what Joyce believes.
But if Joyce isn’t ready to talk about it with Becky why should she have to?
I mean, there it is. They arent friends.
If you don’t trust someone and feel you have to lie to them, they don’t have your trust.
Ergo, not your friend.
Heaven forbid she want to keep a fundamental shift in her worldview to herself as she works out her feelings towards it
How far does this logic extend for you? Is Jocelyne not friends with Joyce and Becky because she’s not out to them?
Do you just think friends shouldn’t have any privacy with one another?
Hi. There’s no upvote function in here so, have your +1 through a coment!
Come to that, was Becky not ACTUALLY friends with Joyce until she came out? Because that is what the argument’s coming off as!
This is a really poor way to measure a friendship.
Is Dotty not really anyones friend because she hasn’t told them she got accepted to yale?
Is Joss not Friends with Becky and Joyce because shes’ not out?
Is Becky not friends with Dina because she hasn’t disclosed that she still 100% believes in her god and no amount of new info will change that? [because she has been learning and just putting it all into her new flexible version of religion?]
It’s not a good benchmark. At all. People are allowed to keep things to themself. Do you tell your friend every single thought you think about them? Even the bad ones?
Becky has 100% disclosed to Dina she does repeatedly.
Why in the world would you believe otherwise?
Ehh Becky has disclosed that, frankly disclosing that fact is like 50% of her personality at this point (the other 50% is telling people she’s gay)
So Becky has disclosed the hat thing to Dina the second she felt it?
So, according to you, Joyce owes literally nothing to Becky, who broke their friendship the exact moment she told her she was here because “class was cancelled”. Great to hear, great to hear, though it’s a bit off-putting how quickly you just spun into “actually, this is all Becky’s fault and she’s the worst.”
(Becky then proceeded to, according to you, fake-friendship herself into use Joyce’s room, Joyce’s bed, and Joyce’s food allowance, making her a no-holds barred parasite. This is truly a great take you got here.)
Thank you Dorothy I was genuinely getting tired of her shit.
Introducing DOROTHY KEENER
as THE COMMENT SECTION
(what we comment, we comment without Joyce, in the name of piss and insanity)
I like Dorothy and generally find her reasonable, but she’s nnnnnnot actually being reasonable here. She has good intentions, but Joyce does need the space to work this out on her own for a while, and forcing her to try and make good with Becky before she’s done so is unlikely to work out well.
She really hasn’t been reasonable this whole storyline, but I think that it’s one part because she’s out of her depth, and one part because Willis wants to make it clear to his audience that Joyce’s being loud and high and mighty about her atheism is something he disagrees with, so he’s made the supporting cast act unnaturally hostile to her for it.
Also three parts “if something doesn’t resolve in a day it’ll never resolve given how slow comic time is”, so he has to figure out some contrivances to fast track it.
Yeah, I think Dorothy’s disapproval has a degree of authorial necessity since I do suspect it’ll take longer than this storyline for Joyce and Becky to resolve things, or Joyce to really work through the biggest stumbling blocks of religious trauma.
Not as long as it SHOULD take, but nonetheless, I think the Becky-Joyce conflict’s way too potentially interesting to be more than papered over before the end of the book. But to make sure it’s clear Joyce’s behavior isn’t going to be permanent and she WILL mellow and the author DOESN’T think atheism makes you smarter, Dorothy and Sarah have to give very little acknowledgement to the part where Joyce has a buttload of religious trauma, and I suspect Joyce’s rigidity has to be a bit more obviously unreasonable on non-atheism fronts (thus, the biphobia.)
… is Edgy Atheism as the commentariat defined it some kind of sweeping pandemic and I just never noticed? The way we’ve been talking about it I feel like some of the posts here are, like, legitimately convinced being kind of annoying I guess on the internet is exactly the same as, like, actual pain and suffering caused by the Christian church over the entire course of history and its ruinous effects on the marginalized in North America.
I don’t think Dorothy and Sarah are refusing to be emotionally supportive so we the audience know Edgy Atheism is bad, I think they’re refusing to be emotionally supportive because being emotionally supportive to Joyce is something they never have to do because Joyce constantly picks up the slack for them even while they’re laughing in her face for being an idiot fundie.
Like, the only way I can perceive this as “let’s make sure we know Joyce is in the wrong” is if it’s so we can speedrun through that and get to the part where we acknowledge Joyce’s friends are bad at caring about her when it’s mildly inconvenient, because they’ve never had to.
It’s definitely a huge difference in impact from millennia of being a cultural force often used to justify atrocities, but there is very much a brand of atheism, dismissing ALL religion as terrible, that is still very much informed by Christianocentric thinking and cannot wrap its head around the idea that non-Christian major religions have very different approaches to ethics, to how they approach and engage with their holy texts, to how they conceive of the divine and the afterlife. This is usually used to dismiss non-Christian religions in the same breath as Christianity, and it’s harmful in that respect because of Christianocentrism and how that impacts people belonging to marginalized religions – even big ones like Islam and Hinduism are the subject of serious discrimination in a majority Christian culture, especially when it ties into racism and xenophobia. (For one real-world example, see Richard Dawkins on Hinduism. He’s far from the only high-profile atheist who can’t wrap his head around the idea that not all religions have the same refusal to engage with science and allowing itself to be questioned that Christianity tends to encourage. Or every time the Really Annoying Atheists show up in the comments here and some of us point out that yes, we know people who are religiously Jewish and also don’t really believe in a god but don’t see why that precludes them being religiously Jewish, because critical thinking isn’t incompatible with all religions.)
It’s by no means the same level of harm, but a lot of culturally Christian atheists never think about how their cultural Christianity is still shaping them and that DOES impact marginalized religious people who don’t want to be lumped in with a religion that does actively oppress them. The idea of ‘goodness’ being an intrinsic quality of a person rather than a goal to strive for and actively do? Very Christian thinking. Comes out in a lot of social justice circles online in the binaristic idea of Good People (who agree with me) versus Bad People (who don’t.) And oh look, Joyce is doing that right now. The question of ‘how much does intent matter versus your actions and their impact’ can have very different answers across ethical frameworks from different religions (and tends to tie into that ‘is goodness a thing you feel/are in your heart or is it meaningless if not accompanied by action’ question.) It’s not so much how this brand of atheism hurts Christians’ feelings, even if the story is currently placing Becky as the Hurt Religious Friend since she’s what’s available (though there is also a discussion to be had about white exvangelical atheism and how it tends to dismiss the idea that some people who are in some way or other marginalized do genuinely find comfort and community in Christianity, even if they have to look for one that accepts them.) It’s more about how this brand of atheism is ultimately still very Christian in its thinking, and in that respect its refusal to acknowledge other religions might have different stances that can encourage questioning your religious teachings or specifically encompassing science in a worldview that nonetheless allows for the idea of divinity… is ultimately yet another oppressive force against already-marginalized religions. Never mind the fact that most religions bigger than one insular community usually have different sects with different philosophies towards theology, too, so even if the ‘prevailing’ opinion is this you’re still likely to find religious scholars interpreting it in other ways. This variety of atheist frequently can’t understand that ‘our holy book is 100% literal and not up to interpretation in any way whatsoever’ isn’t even a universal stance among Christianity, much less other religions. (I am by far most familiar with Jewish theological debate and philosophy on this front, and even then I’ve barely scratched the surface, but like, the Torah is by no means considered above interpretation and debate. Depending on your reading of Job, THE DIVINE is not necessarily above debating with.)
“Culturally Christian atheist” is a phrase I need to keep in mind going forward, since I think my language gets too vague when talking about Christianity since most of my interest, and the only thing I feel reasonably confident in talking about it, is more its cultural impact on North America (I did actually have to course correct that one time where it was correctly pointed out to me that certain countries have had militant atheist movements like in communist China). Bringing up how North American Christian culture goes onto influence atheists who still grew in that culture but then apply that experience globally is a thing I need to keep in mind.
“Edgy atheism” in relation to other cultures and religions is another thing I’m really glad you brought up, since by and large I have been approaching it through North American culture, where the only thing an Edgy Atheist can do to a Christian is be annoying on the internet because that’s the level of power said Edgy Atheist has, but that doesn’t carry over when dealing with other religions who, naturally, lack the innate power that Christianity has in all of North America. From there, when your only interaction with religion is the dominant one in the life of you and everyone you know, I can see how an uneducated atheist then goes on to make xenophobic commentary on other cultures with their own predominant faiths.
I don’t think I’ve changed my mind on the specific topic of “can an atheist be hurtful to Christianity in North America, let alone an atheist who personally suffered from it,” but I’m glad you informed me about stuff I’ve been neglecting.
Yeah, I get why Willis probably doesn’t want to dive TOO deeply into representing a religion he’s never been a member of, but I do wish one of the two Jewish characters who are on fairly good terms with Joyce (even if Ethan’s avoiding everyone, there’s no reason to believe he has particularly negative feelings towards Joyce at the moment so I’m assuming it’s just general avoidance of their whole social circle) was established as more strongly religious, not just culturally Jewish, in part so this talk could ultimately be textual. The issue with Joyce here isn’t so much that she’s being mean to Becky except on a personal level where this was inevitable; it’s that she’s assuming all religions are the same as her particular fucked-up variety of Christianity on ethics and theological philosophy, and that hits the religions that ARE heavily discriminated against in the US, too. Which is I think part of what Dorothy’s getting at with that ‘very Christian Fundamentalist-style of atheism’ bit, since she’s not just a no-angst atheist but one whose familial religious background was Catholic and Jewish and whose philosophical upbringing was probably very different from even her less evangelical Protestant peers. (And while Catholicism is far from blameless and the rift with Protestants has been much smaller in this country for the last forty years or so, in Indiana I could still see her witnessing some active anti-Catholic bias, if less dangerous than antisemitism would be.) It’s also the moral superiority and the ‘everyone must be like me,’ but I’d bet Dorothy has a better sense of various religions’ ethical and theological frameworks than most college freshmen, too, and how thinking all religions are equally bad is harmful to religious non-Christians and false.
Glad I made a point that encouraged you to keep something in mind!
it’s that she’s assuming all religions are the same as her particular fucked-up variety of Christianity on ethics and theological philosophy
To highlight this part, something she said to Ruth got me thinking. Joyce very adamantly and desperately tells her that she can live however she wants because “Hell isn’t real,” and I suddenly started to think Joyce might actually think, by default, everyone assumes the existence of Heaven and Hell as Joyce has had it defined by her.
Like, remember when she first met Dorothy? “Haha don’t worry, I know some people think God’s a woman,” and then she’s just floored learning Dorothy’s an atheist.
Does Joyce think everyone, by default, is a Christian? Why would she tell that to Ruth, whose thoughts on theology I don’t think we’ve ever gotten? Joyce assumes that Ruth is choosing to throw herself into the closet, but did she think that, exclusively, due to learning that Gay People Are Good, or did she do it because she thinks Ruth is living in fear of Hell?
This might be an esoteric way to put it, but I think Joyce “views all religion as dumb” because Joyce might actually just think they are Christianity with no real understanding of any of the nuances. Like, we don’t technically know how Joyce would act to, say, Asma or Raidah, who are both parts of faiths that Joyce was repeatedly told were wrong, except now Joyce has learning that everything she knew is wrong and therefore everything she was told is wrong was good all along. Shot in the dark, if she had that brought up, would she default to “oh they’re good, actually, since my parents told me they were bad!” or am I totally reaching?
That will be a very interesting thing for us to see when it ultimately happens, but yeah, I’m assuming Joyce has never actually thought about the fact that not all religions believe in a Good Place/Bad Place afterlife structure because A: see previous ‘culturally Christian atheists fail to consider their experience with religion is in no way universal’, there’s a lot of assumption that heaven and hell exist in the same exact form they do in Christianity in Judaism and Islam when most of our conception of the afterlife in Christianity is completely divorced from scripture to begin with, and B: Joyce, specifically, and her freakout when going to, as Raidah put it, a slightly different flavor of Protestant Christianity. (And Joyce’s response to the idea of going to a mosque.) I suspect she assumes Christian until directly told otherwise, and it’s not a COMPLETELY unfair assessment from my quick Googling (can’t find Bloomington’s stats, but Indiana’s 72% Christian.) I don’t think she’s thought about Judaism and Islam at all right now, much less Buddhism or Hinduism or the like that don’t even have the tenuous Abrahamic thread, and given she read Chick Tracts as I recall she probably assumes they’re all the same because she was taught they’re all secretly arms of Catholicism as the Whore of Babylon (unfortunately I have hateread enough Chick Tracts that I am not making this up,) and even if she knows that’s false now I don’t think that part of her brain’s unsnapped like the evolution thing did yet. Not fully. Not enough to recognize that they probably differ in more than just ‘different names on the same hat,’ because again even culturally Christian atheists who AREN’T rapidly deprogramming themselves from their cultish upbringing don’t seem to recognize how deep the theological differences go when your theological philosophy has been a thing of debate for a MINIMUM of 1200 years.
Yeah, as you hint at the end, many of this variety of atheist don’t even grasp that Christianity isn’t all like the brand they were raised in and are reacting to, much less how completely different religions work.
It’s always fun watching atheists argue for Biblical literalism.
Right? Apply palm to face liberally.
[[She really hasn’t been reasonable this whole storyline, but I think that it’s one part because she’s out of her depth, and one part because Willis wants to make it clear to his audience that Joyce’s being loud and high and mighty about her atheism is something he disagrees with, so he’s made the supporting cast act unnaturally hostile to her for it.]]
Ehhh. In RL, friends can react VERY badly to changes you’d think they’d agree with.
Lots of people prefer consistency to agreement with their attitudes.
I think that it’s one part because she’s out of her depth, and one part because Willis wants to make it clear to his audience that Joyce’s being loud and high and mighty about her atheism is something he disagrees with
Authorial intent is a tricky topic of conversation in that we’re, y’know, talking about An Actual Real Life Person, but I don’t really agree with this at all.
Like, Joyce being an Edgy Atheist; none of it happened until her friends took ownership of her feelings on her death cult. After the Faith-Off she’d only get ornery about it when Sarah kept dragging it up, and today she’s aggressively pushing herself as an expert on all things because relying on being right is what she relies upon when struggling, except “being right” now just means “everything over there is wrong.”
And, y’know, Joyce is a character who has previously expressed to Sal that she feels that people keep her in boxes the way Sal feels she is by Joyce, and whose previous attempt at being open at questioning her indoctrination led to Becky telling her she was going through a stupid phase. Not a one of them has asked Joyce how she is feeling, what brought this about, or god forbid that she’s allowed to hate her stupid bullshit death cult; Dorothy, Becky and Sarah have all approached this as Joyce not being their Joyce anymore, except that Joyce was someone they constantly exploited for emotional support.
That strikes me way more as Authorial Intent than whether or not Joyce is being too mean to her death cult. I don’t think the story is nearly as against Joyce as it’s repeatedly claimed to be, I think we’re just seeing a lot of Joyce at her most emotionally chaotic because Joyce is the main character and shows up all the time, and not a single one of her idiot children friends can ask how she’s doing.
And, y’know, Joyce is a character who has previously expressed to Sal that she feels that people keep her in boxes the way Sal feels she is by Joyce, and whose previous attempt at being open at questioning her indoctrination led to Becky telling her she was going through a stupid phase. Not a one of them has asked Joyce how she is feeling, what brought this about, or god forbid that she’s allowed to hate her stupid bullshit death cult; Dorothy, Becky and Sarah have all approached this as Joyce not being their Joyce anymore, except that Joyce was someone they constantly exploited for emotional support.
Yes to all this. I will be very surprised (and disappointed) if Dorothy’s callous attitude isn’t addressed eventually. Willis digs into complex emotional contradictions like that a lot; both “Joyce needs to get over the Edgy Atheist thing” and “Joyce’s friends care more about making her less obnoxious than trying to understand what she’s going through” can both be true!
But man, in the meantime I am so frustrated with Dorothy. I mean, she’s as much of a dumb kid as everyone else, of course she’s not going to react perfectly, but that superior “I am being gracious by tolerating your little temper tantrum” attitude is just driving me up a wall. For the love of- uh… something… can somebody, *anybody* ask Joyce if she is okay???
Dorothy may have ulterior motives for forcing a quick reconciliation.
She is roomates with becky ans shares classes with joyce. I am sure she doesn’t want to be caught in the middle of a fued for the next month or 2.
♫ Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you ♫
I think at the very least, Dorothy wants thrm to stop making the problrm worse.
Yes, this.
I think Dorothy is more offended by Joyce’s ‘holier then thou’ brand of athiesm than she likes to admit.
Yeah, I’m gonna have to agree with this. I’m not sure this is a problem that can be fixed in such a short time.
I mean, yeah, these two need to try and talk things out if it’s ever gonna get better and offering dinner is a great way to motivate Joyce to try to do it as fairly as she can instead of doubling down. That’s not a slam on Joyce – neither she nor Becky is in a good place for this right now and I don’t think Becky can be made to do something with a Mom Friend stern word and offer of dinner like Joyce can.
Spirals. SPIRALS. The texture is so much better!
Yes! Spirals are the best, I saw a box while shopping and just went “welp, guess I’m buying milk too *tosses boxes into cart*”.
Lesbian macaroni.
Remember her explanation of tuna casserole? Where she convinced herself it was a casserole tree that produced it and therefore not a mixture? I’m sure she has the same thought with the three cheese powder
WRONGE COMMENT LOL
Are you telling me Joyce will tolerate the mixture of three distinct cheeses?
Remember her explanation of tuna casserole? Where she convinced herself it was a casserole tree that produced it and therefore not a mixture? I’m sure she has the same thought with the three cheese powder
As a picky eater myself (though in a different way than Joyce is), I can safely say that cheese is cheese is cheese, and it mixes together to make More Cheese. The different kinds of cheese don’t matter as much, and the pickiness generally (for me) comes from if the food can be separated on the plate, and is a recognizably different substance.
Yes. If there’s a strong textural difference between the cheeses, or varieties that don’t taste good together, that’s an issue, but that’s an issue for everyone. And this is Kraft cheese powder, so they’re not going to have a vast taste difference like if someone were experimenting with their homemade mac and cheese.
I was mostly joking but honestly okay that makes sense, I can see it.
…there’s nothing in a box of Kraft that so much as resembles, in any biological manner, real cheese.
well as real cheese for most cheeses is already a mixture of milk and veal instestines’ bacteries, I’d say all the best for Joyce.
*plays the classical guitar piece Kraft used to use in their TV special commercials over the hacked Muzak*
Source?
hhmm… are you hacking the Muzal with… Muzak?
I don’t know about tis particular piece, but Vivaldi’seasons for example have been muzakified (spring especially), so I’d argue any commercial-related piece is Muzak….if you name it by the commercial name before the piece name.
the best prizes comes with the hardest tasks, Joyce…
Joyce has been carrying those mac&cheese boxes in her pocket since the first day of the quarter just in case somebody offered to have dinner with her.
They replaced her Chick Tracts.
Cheese Tracts? Sounds like something right up Sheogorath’s alley.
…Well, it’s heartening to see the New Joyce can care about other things than evangelical Atheism.
I meant that to be facetious, but then I had a closer look at panel 4. Is that doubt? Maybe even guilt? Are we finally ready to let a smidge of humanity past the armor of philosophical righteousness? It feels like it’s many months overdue.
I kind of hope Joyce will go full dark side for awhile. Not just evangelical atheist but being rude, mean, and lording over other people.
Let her experience the power of bullying!
Then shock her when her mother approves of her attitude. 😀
I’m rooting for this.
I am against Dorothy here. She’s not got the ground to stand on with telling Joyce to fix her friendship. Maybe Joyce and Becky just need to, well, break up. If Joyce doesn’t respect Becky’s beliefs and Becky can’t give her space then it’s best to just acknowledge their bestiness was broken by events.
It happens.
But also if you’re friends with someone it’s probably at least worth a try to reconcile a disagreement, rather than dumping them like yesterday’s trash as the first option.
Joyce doesn’t need to respect Becky’s beliefs in order for her to respect Becky. I mean, she spent most of the time pre-timeskip not respecting Dorothy’s beliefs but still being “half the comments section is shipping them” close.
I think Dorothy’s right on the money here, at least as it comes to telling Joyce that she needs to try to sort this out sooner rather than later, while the wound is still fresh and hasn’t gotten scabbed over or gone septic, to utterly butcher an analogy.
Ups for both Taffy and Wraith for their respective comments. I am going to be a little harsher. Just keep in mind, I’m pissed at your idea, not you.
Sometimes shiz does just happen. But this didn’t just “happen”. These are not “events”. They have both made decisions for themselves. They didn’t understand how the other would feel in response, and so they couldn’t consider it. They set the bridge on fire, not some intangible force or random chaos. They can put the fire out before it burns down.
I know how easy it is to get a masochistic rise out of cutting your own heart out and leaving a relationship behind the moment there’s a serious conflict to solve. And you could point to countless examples of you trying and failing to reconcile as a justification for thinking it inevitable.
But you gotta suck it up. Learn to reconcile well enough, and the tendency will flip. Not only will you get to Keep most of your friends, you will be better to each other than before in the end.
I’ve eaten so many boxes of spirals in my life….
How Joyce can fix things with Becky, Dorothy? She already said she was sorry. Don’t be unfair.
I am casting Doubt on Dorothy having the patience, since in panel three she straight up ordering Joyce to have a painful conversation with Becky that might actually put the nail on the coffin on their friendship
I’m not saying Dorothy is WRONG to say this conversation needs to happen, but yeah, really doubting that patience line.
Dorothy wants Joyce to be nice.
Joyce is sick of being nice.
Joyce got up and chose Violence!
I think having patience for Joyce regarding her Own relationship with her, and having patience for Joyce’s treatment of Becky, are two very different things.
She has the patience to wait and see if and when Joyce realizes being self-righteously aggro at everyone is not okay. Watching her hurt herself and her own best friend in the meantime? It doesn’t matter if she has patience in general, why would she Allocate any patience for that? Dorothy’s being a pretty good friend if anything. A big part of being a friend is telling them when they are f*cking up.
But this part isn’t about Dorothy’s patience. She’s saying she would have patience, but Becky won’t. That doesn’t mean Dorothy’s impatient for Joyce to fix it, but that she thinks letting it stew with Becky will make it irreparable.
She could be wrong about that of course, but that’s about her judgement not her patience.
I cook for somebody who has been warned off turmeric (a natural food coloring) by their doctor, somebody who’s been warned off Yellow Dye #5 (an unnatural food coloring) ditto, and somebody who’s been warned off anything over one and a half percent saturated fat, ditto. So I recommend Annie’s Shells & Cheese, which can be made with one percent or skim milk and no butter. Also, a squirt of mustard will make it taste more like sharp Cheddar.
Feel free to ignore me or to tell me to bugger off. If you’re comfortable sharing, what caused the doctor to warn someone off food colorings?
Any particular ingredient to which one can be allergic or have a generally bad reaction
I’d assume because something in the food colouring will not go over well with their digestive system
Yeah, food dye allergies and sensitivities are 100% A Thing. Just because you can’t taste it doesn’t mean it’s not making your body freak the fuck out.
Wait, doesn’t mustard have turmeric too?
Yellow mustard does not, so far as I know. I believe that’s just mustard powder (which is ground mustard seeds), vinegar, maybe some salt, and some stabilizers.
French’s and Heinz both contain turmeric.
https://www.mccormick.com/frenchs/products/mustard/classic-yellow-mustard
https://www.heinz.com/product/00013000002189
Huh. Did not see that coming. Stuff like that makes me super glad I don’t have any food allergies to worry about.
Possibly, but you can always make the mac n cheese pot without mustard and then put the mustard into your individual bowl after you serve it.
Also rather annoyed at the phrasing of “fix it.
It’s actually plausible that Joyce CAN’T fix anything, because Becky has decided this friendship is over/or that Joyce needs to go back to her theist self.
Joyce can address it and open a conversation with Becky. Whether the situation is fixed or gets even more broken is not entirely up to Joyce and it kinda bothers me that the “fix it” command makes it Joyce’s responsibility entirely
Becky loves and cherishes Dina regardless of her atheism.
Becky’s issue is Joyce doesn’t RESPECT Becky for her beliefs.
Which is a different matter than Becky demanding Joyce believe in God.
Becky demands the same respect Joyce gave Dorothy when they disagreed, which Joyce does not have.
Well, Becky has two issues. “She didn’t lie to me” and “She doesn’t make fun of me”. Those are listed separately. Even if Joyce wasn’t being an asshole, Becky’d still have felt betrayed by Joyce not telling her she no longer believed. It woulda felt like Joyce was ‘just humoring her’, probably because she doesn’t understand the atheist mindset at all, even if she’s usually polite with it.
Remember that this is the person who said “Sarah, who hates everybody, but somehow doesn’t hate everybody *enough* to be atheist!” (insteada agnostic), sandwiched between her sniffing around Joyce going ‘Hey hey you’re still christian right? You wouldn’t liiieeee to me right Joyce? You wouldn’t betray your bestie riiight?’.
Just because Becky had *a* legitimate grievance doesn’t mean *all* of her grievances were legitimate.
There’s been a lurking undercurrent for a long time that Becky and Joyce have fundamentally incompatible understandings of religion, and that Becky reacts badly to Joyce changing in ways she doesn’t want her to. This is not completely one-sided, although Joyce is more at fault
Dorothy at this point doesn’t seem to have picked up on Becky’s issues that are exarcerbating this conflict, and that Joyce’s attitude is the sole source of problems
Yeah, this. Joyce can’t fix this by herself, it depends on whether Becky is willing to fix it too, and whether Becky can accept that Joyce is now an atheist.
From what I’ve read, it isn’t that Becky can’t accept Joyce is an atheist, its that Joyce can’t accept Becky is a Christian. I mean it’s right there in todays comic, Joyce doesn’t see how this can be fixed so long as Becky is Christian.
I don’t think we know enough to say whether Becky is upset about Joyce’s atheism or not. She’s definitely *more* upset by the shitty things Joyce said to her, but because of that she hasn’t really even addressed how she feels about Joyce being an atheist. Heck, she may not even know how she feels about it because the way Joyce is treating her is overriding any other consideration. I suspect if she hadn’t learned about Joyce’s atheism in the Worst Possible Way, she might be pretty upset about it. Joyce isn’t Dina or Dorothy, Joyce and Becky shared the same religious experience and seeing your lifelong best friend reject that experience when you aren’t is probably gonna stir up a lot of feelings! It would be weird if it didn’t! But right now, I don’t think she even has room to think about the atheism seperate from everything else – it’s too wrapped up in Joyce suddenly acting like she’s from the Mirror Universe.
*if the cast was the Smarting of Age*
Joyce: I can’t fix it, Dorothy. She wants me to respect her for her beliefs that I don’t respect.
Dorothy: You could be friends with me when you disagreed but not her.
Joyce: Yep!
I mean, I think early Joyce respected Dorothy despite her beliefs, not for them. She was *gasp* horrified by Dorothy, but she also really liked Dorothy, so worked around it. And Dorothy knew what she thought, so at least there wasn’t a secret.
Joyce has *been* working about Becky’s beliefs for the past three months, but in secret, and now it came out since Becky stalked her. Joyce can value Becky as a friend, and maybe learn to keep her mouth shut, but “I respect your Christian belief” would be as much a lie as “I respect your atheism” would have been in September.
I mean, Becky looked up her Facebook to see where she was.
That’s not stalking unless the word is diluted to meaninglessness.
No, they looked up *Liz’s* Facebook feed. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/notinterested/
Joyce had pretty obviously drawn Liz to a place Joyce doesn’t normally go, specifically as a safe place to act out. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/goodenergy/
Vs. Becky getting called out as wildly over-possessive by Dorothy https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/usurper/
Yep. Maybe it’s just okay to let the friendship end.
If you can’t respect someone’s beliefs, don’t try.
Joyce really, really likes dinner dates with Dotty, huh?
Still standing by my “Joyce is gonna impulsively smooch Dorothy and Becky’s gonna see and everything’s gonna fall apart” prediction.
I’d be hard-pressed to disagree. I definitely thought back to the friend I had dinner dates with back in college, annnnnd yup.
Easier said than done.
Joyce has a lot of sorting out to do about what she believes and why, and what she feels about people who don’t agree and what it is decent to do about that. It takes most people a couple of years, with discussions and help. Which is why “sophomoric” means what it does.
“Do it today!” is pretty superficial.
The thing is, Joyce doesn’t need to sort all of that out to get things on the mend with Becky. She just has to, well, not lash out at Becky for her still being religious.
That’s it. Hell, if she outright says “I’m still figuring out what being an Atheist really means for me, I’m sorry for judging you so hard”, then I think Becky would be mostly fine. In the end… I think all Becky really wants is for her closest, oldest, most beloved friend to not sneer at her. That doesn’t seem too much to ask.
Becky *should* be mostly fine. But she won’t be. It won’t be on Joyce though. Becky’s repeatedly been church police / inquisitor towards Joyce. Joyce is her “Bestie in Christ”. She has unreasonable expectations of Joyce, just like Joyce has of her. Joyce can only fix how she acts towards Becky, not the other way around.
Joyce is going to have to not start shit, like she did a couple of strips ago. But also hold off on taking bait.
And if Becky does continue that, then she’d be outright in the wrong, fully agree. Becky does need to get used to Joyce as being an Atheist, and that isn’t exactly going to be easy for her.
But Joyce not acting like a giant fucking asshole all the time will probably help that out a fair deal. As has been noted elsewhere, Becky has no issue with Dina being a non-believer (probably more on the Agnostic side of things), because Dina holds no issue with Becky’s faith as long as it doesn’t get in the way of scientific accuracy.
But yeah, I don’t think we’re going to get a “everything’s magically fixed” scene here. Just hoping for more “awkward and unstable non-aggression pact” rather than “100 years of peace”, so to speak :).
I love the self-hatred in Dorothy’s face in the last panel. “Oh gods, I’m going to have to bribe her. And go through with it. This goes against my every moral value, but…”
Excellent training for when you’re president, Dotty!
Joyce and Becky today, China and Taiwan tomorrow.
College freshmen frequently think they already know everything or decide they have epiphanies that give them the Truth. Most get over it, but in the meantime they can be insufferable, even to other freshmen.
This case is even worse, as Joyce’s very noisy (as Dorothy says, fundamentalist-style – dare I say, holier than thou) freshman certainty completely shits upon her best friend’s core beliefs and she made clear to that friend she believes those core beliefs are stupid. Someone needs to try to break through her sanctimony if there is hope for a true conversation, and Dorothy tried the cold water method. That apparently didn’t work, so she resorted to bribery. It’s not clear that any of this will work, but I don’t understand the posters who are complaining about her trying, or who are defending Joyce. (And I’m pretty sure Willis isn’t taking that view.)
Joyce is being an asshole. But she is being an asshole as a consequence of a very complicated and deep level of trauma from her upbringing and the multiple life-changing events she’s experienced in rapid succession at the age of 18. It is entirely reasonable to think that she might need, and to some extent deserve, some time and space to work through that and grow without literally everyone around her becoming massively more hostile than when she was being much more of an asshole, just with more smiles and fewer swears.
It’s also frustrating to put the onus solely on Joyce to resolve a conflict which blatantly is caused by both her and Becky simultaneously being insufferable assholes in incompatible ways. Becky created this situation through violating Joyce’s privacy out of totally unreasonable possessiveness, and then refused to accept the truest apology Joyce could reasonably have given at the time. Yes, Joyce then ramped it up to 11, but it’s entirely possible she could have worked through this privately and much more healthily if not for Becky’s actions.
I don’t see *how* Joyce can fix this single-handedly when Becky doesn’t appear to be willing to resolve this without Joyce changing her worldview back to something that will make her happier.
Because Dorothy is only concerned about the fact that Joyce is acting in a way she doesn’t like. She hasn’t expressed any concern about Joyce’s own well-being. Joyce is definitely acting in an unacceptable way, especially towards Becky. But none of Joyce’s friends have asked her how *she* is feeling. Joyce has just lost the touchstone she built her entire life around and now sees it for a lie. It is totally, totally normal for her to be angry and to reach for certainty. It’s not a license for her to be a jerk to everyone, but it is understandable.
Dorothy does not understand that, and worse, she doesn’t seem *interested* in understanding. She is incredibly dismissive of everything about Joyce’s apostasy. She just wants Joyce to stop the annoying behavior and go back to being normal, nice Joyce. She doesn’t get how big a deal this is for Joyce, that Joyce *can’t* just go back to “normal”. Joyce has changed in a fundamental way and needs time to figure out who she is now without the belief that defined her whole life. Pushing back against her shitty behavior is fine- necessary, even! But without trying to understand *why* Joyce is acting this way, it’s like putting a bandaid on a broken bone.
It’s funny you said College freshmen frequently think they already know everything or decide they have epiphanies that give them the Truth. Most get over it, but in the meantime they can be insufferable, even to other freshmen.
Because that’s how I feel about Dorothy right now! Dorothy thinks she knows what’s going on with Joyce and has decided it is essentially a temper tantrum she needs to get over. Dorothy sees herself as the mature, worldly person who knows better than Joyce what Joyce needs to do. She’s not asking how Joyce is feeling because she doesn’t think she needs to.
Dorothy is a good friend-mom
I *love* that her eyebrows have shot all the way off her head.
Dorothy could just grab those and drag Joyce to meet with Becky
Becky was never going to help Joyce figure out her feelings about religion. She’s not going to have the patience now, indeed, but that doesn’t mean Dorothy gets to order (and then bribe) Joyce into apologizing, or that she should at all. IDK, y’all. I’m tired of this arc because I’m tired of watching everyone wanting Joyce to be the ray of sunshine she was before she was thoroughly traumatized, and shaming her for… What? Falling out with the feeling of Faith that’s so tied for her to her upbringing in a cult? A cult that brainwashed her and her family, zombified her mother and oldest brother, shunned her, broke her family apart, almost got her and her friends killed multiple times, and that’s without taking Jocelyne into account.
Like she doesn’t deserve to be angry, or bitter, or to have a private catharsis session with someone who felt similarly, consciously away from the people who would take it the wrong way. Like she didn’t literally agonize over sharing the pain of losing her faith with her best friend, precisely because she already knew this would happen.
I’m not sure about the whole scene with Ruth because it does feel not like Joyce. Put there for the sake of remarking the binaries and absolutes that still dwell in Joyce? I cringed on everyone’s behalf but good scene. Adding Becky to it? It immediately turned it into “Joyce is being irrational and smug and should apologize to Becky”, when Becky doesn’t want an apology. Becky wants, like everyone, Joyce going back to who she used to be.
Meanwhile Dorothy has been enabling Becky when, honestly? She should be pretty damn pissed at her, considering all the bullying her literal roommate has enacted upon her. Does she think this will earn her Becky’s approval, or is she just so fed up with the situation she’s going “let those two work it out”, convincing herself it’s the reasonable path?
There’s a difference between wanting Joyce to turn back into a fundamentalist believer and wanting Joyce to turn back into a non-asshole. No one (with the possible exception of Becky) wants the former – and even she wouldn’t want the fundamentalist part – at most the believer part. But the latter is probably not too much to ask.
As far as Becky being a jerk (not a bully) to Dorothy – that was clearly almost completely fear of losing her place as Joyce’s best friend after she had already lost almost everything else. Dorothy saw that, so didn’t take it seriously, so I’m pretty sure it’s the author’s intent that we not either.
Joyce can absolutely be less of an asshole than this. I’d support it. This brand of atheism that goes “INVISIBLE SKY DADDY” and “FACTS AND LOGIC” are insufferable and pretty harmful. The problem here is that the conflict with Becky – A fear of friction, turned friction, turned now into a fight after she once again inserted herself in Joyce’s hanging out with other people, and heard something that was meant to be private venting… Radicalized Joyce. She wasn’t going through her falling out with faith like this until now. I actually think she called out Dorothy pretty accurately in a previous strip, pointing out that she never had empathic parents that gave her the tools and the freedom to explore things, so she shouldn’t be expecting her to have a pleasant transition into apostasy.
I don’t think most characters want her being back to being a fundie, but they’re sure are having a lot of trouble coping with a Joyce that tries to set boundaries, and expresses anger less as a badass rising-to-the-occassion outburst, and more as a reaction to a lot things in her life getting pretty damn shitty.
As for Becky being a bully (sorry but I call it the way I see it) to Dorothy – Dorothy understands the explanation, but she mistakes it with a justification. I can see how our resident redhead lesbian has gotten to this point of lashing out and insecurities, I hurt for her, it’s all about old coping mechanisms turning toxic when applied to other contexts– But that doesn’t mean I support her dickery. Or that I can’t think Dorothy’s patience with her is misguided.
Seconded in full. It’s getting really really gross to me how the only person who seems to actually care about Joyce’s trauma or feelings or be willing to support her is Joe. Everyone else is all about Poor Becky.
I can feel empathy for Becky and still think she’s being a really bad friend; the same that I’m cringing for these last outbursts that are one M’lady short of a Brony Brand Atheist, and still think that holy shit, literally nobody’s supporting Joyce through this (except for Joe, and Joe has now excellent, unrelated reasons to take some time for himself)
Like. Give this poor girl some space to breathe, figure out and work through her feelings (with bitterness being an obvious outcome to a lot of stuff), and be willing to consider her pain. And maybe don’t go and tell her “FIX THIS NOW BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T YOU’LL LOSE YOUR FRIEND FOREVER”. It’s uncomfortable af to watch.
Except Dorothy make be correct in her assessment that Joyce could, in fact, lose her best friend forever over this. And given that Joyce has also become one of her best friends, she does care about Joyce suffering through that, too. And while everyone who has any wind of this but Joyce understands, she is working through some serious trauma of her own, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is incapable of seeing the very legitimate reasons Becky has to feel unbelievably hurt at having heard what Joyce said, even if there was no reasonable premise that Becky ever would have heard it. She did hear it, and since Dorothy and Becky both understand better than nearly everybody else that Joyce has a full-blown fundie mindset, and how deep that goes, and what that means for her, and so Dorothy understands that it is more reasonable than most cases for Becky to worry very seriously, if her lack of atheism means she has lost all intellectual and moral respect from Joyce, because unlike Joyce, Dorothy and especially Becky understand how Joyce’s brain works, and that there is now a level on which Joyce feels like she needs to fix everybody’s non-atheism.
The thing about this which I think is crucial, for Dorothy to press this to be dealt with so fast, is that the way Joyce is treating Becky, and others, over this new paradigm shift, will not slow or revert, it will only get worse as time passes. Even if Joyce had just done a shitty thing and hurt Becky, and they could sit on that, Dorothy wouldn’t be putting pressure on it. But it is nigh-inevitable that Joyce is going to keep hurting Becky over this, to the point it will practically be abuse, and furthermore, Becky’s way of coping with that behavior will be to not show any effect from it, even though it will fucking tear her to pieces in side every time.
Dorothy is being a my-way, imperialist know-it-all, but she also knows her friends, and she doesn’t want them to get hurt because they act exactly the way they will obviously act in this scenario.
Fuck I’m so used to newfangled systems of post formatting and being able to edit, it makes me look dumb every time switching back to something like this lmao
Fam. Joyce only dug her heels in after the Overhearing Incident exploded. Her whole deal right before it was walking on eggshells because she had no idea of how to talk about this with Becky, knowing that Becky would take it the worst possible way. She’d been going through this with questions, looking up things on the internet, and keeping to herself and the few people she trusted with her shameful secret. Now the cat is out of the bag and she’s doubling down in self-defense. It’s not a pretty reaction, nor is mature, but it’s understandable considering Becky’s reaction… And Dorothy’s.
Yes, she needs to be shaken out of the black-and-white mentality, and de-radicalized from the new paradigm she’s latched on, but you lost me when you mentioned abuse. Also “my-way, imperialistic-know-it-all” as a descriptor for Dorothy is both VERY unkind to the character you’re claiming to defend (and whom I like); and pretty damn gross considering everything about the CIA in general. Including, in particular, how they installed a fascist dictatorship in my country in the 70’s. Not everyone here is from the USA, so… Uhm. The thing you’ve just said? It evokes an image several orders of magnitude worse than what you likely were aiming for.
Exactly. Joyce only doubled down and went full Fundie Atheist because of the explosion of the incident. Becky went to find her at a time she was not invited + explicitly to show her ‘christian friend’ that she already had that title.
I don’t know why everyone before that forgot that Joyce was walking on eggshells and doing her best to make leniencies with Becky to keep her from exploding at her because she knew Becky wouldn’t take it well.
Her anger and defensiveness are not because she thinks Becky is stupid. It’s because becky was a jerk to Joyce, specifically, first. Joyce who has multiple times gone out of her way to appease, make amends, and go against their religion, for Becky, even so far as to hide her loss of faith from her til she could tell her in a kinder way.
I can empathize with Becky being upset. But Becky was a jerk to her first over a conversation venting about her cult upbringing because she perceived it to be targeting her. In a way that gave Joyce basically no room to explain. Nobody does well when put on the spot about hard topics, and Joyce especially doesn’t.
Joyce is being a jerk here, and loud and atheistic in part due to the authors bias against it and wanting to show he doesn’t support it (which I think was already covered with Dorothy imo) but also is likely because she feels attacked and very unsupported even by people who she thought should support her, like Dotty.
Oh god yeah, the “inserting herself in Joyce’s day” happened specifically because Becky was once again jealous of anyone who might threaten her Best Friend status.
All of this leaves a bitter taste in my mouth because everyone is talking about Joyce being a jerk and needing to apologize, stat… And nobody is acknowledging she’s also owed an apology from Becky. Who acted in the exact way she’d been fearing this whole time, except I don’t think Joyce saw coming she’d get basically zero benefit of the doubt, no the “OH SO YOU THINK I’M AN IDIOT” angle. The latter in special must’ve been a surprise.
Like don’t get me wrong, I love Becky and Joyce and Dotty, this arc just feels weird and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I know some people are saying Becky just wants Joyce to not talk about it/be nice about it but like. It doesn’t feel like that’s the issue Becky is taking here with it.
It’s like. The whole point of inviting Liz was so that she could meet up with someone who had a similar experience and maybe commiserate and bond. Figure out what to do about it and just dunk on their past selves and pat themselves on the back for realizing that they were raised in a cult.
Which sounds bragadacious but imo…. is fair? Like She escaped a literal frockin cult, cut her some slack.
I’ve re-read those comics a couple times and Joyce DOES apologize for it. But Becky doesn’t care about it if she doesn’t rescind it.
And this is a common theme for Becky. I’ve been re-reading. Joyce vocalized about the fact that the people around them were full of bull-honky, and Becky immediately went on the defensive and invalidated Joyce’s response/take on it. She came for advice but wasn’t clear on ‘i wanna b convinced not to have sex’ and when joyce was like: does it really matter? everything else we were taught was a lie, why stop yourself?
Becky reacted poorly. It’s kind of a trend for her (which I get. She’s also traumatized. But she’s never really punished in narrative/in-comic for treating her friends poorly, especially not in the way Joyce is.)
No one invited Liz, near as I could tell. Joyce might have known she was coming (and hid that from Sarah, just as an aside to those horribly upset that Becky went looking for her friend down the hall), but she certainly didn’t invite her because they had similar experiences. Everyone thought Liz was still Jesusy until she showed up.
Joyce did take Liz to Joe as a friend she could meet (and Joyce could show off) who she was okay with being all “shit yeah, fuck god, shitty shit” in front of, if that’s what you mean. And half what they were “bonding” over was lying about sex and drugs before they really got back to religion bashing before Becky showed up. (Now, I’m wondering what the Becky and Dorothy reaction to the “friends with a reward program” part would have been – hilarious I expect.)
Exactly. Becky felt entitled to just Kramer into Joyce’s attention any time she wanted. She just happened to encounter a side of Joyce that had been intentionally hidden from her, and at the worst possible time.
Joyce breaks free-ish from a cult and musters the courage to speak up against it (with like company) for the first time in her life, and it blows up in her face because she cast her net too wide at just the wrong moment.
The thing about this which I think is crucial, for Dorothy to press this to be dealt with so fast, is that the way Joyce is treating Becky, and others, over this new paradigm shift, will not slow or revert, it will only get worse as time passes.
The thing is, whether or not Joyce will lose Becky if she doesn’t fix things soon, Joyce *cannot* fix things now because she still has the same fundamental issue that she had when she first talked to Becky. Trying to “fix things” now, when Joyce still feels like this, is imo way more likely to destroy the friendship than having a period of distance.
Also… Becky is not entitled to Joyce’s friendship? Like, obviously losing your lifelong best friend is a devastating thing, of course Becky gets to be as angry or sad or whatever about that as she wants. But Joyce deciding she doesn’t want to be friends anymore is not abuse, ffs. It would be sad and a loss and I think Joyce would eventually regret it. I hope they can work through this, but Joyce is not somehow *obligated* to fix things with Becky.
Im always a slut for some sprials
How is it that Dorothy manages to keep motivating OTHERS with the prospect of giving HER mac’n’cheese products?
…. I might have to up my assessment of how well she’d do getting elected.
Dorothy sure is just straight-up bribing Joyce with a dinner date, huh.
I’d do many things for mac n cheese, this is a fair trade
Poor Dorthey cant do anything without the comments biting her face off for not doing it “ Right”
Right. Spite her being condescending about Joyce for some time, I thought what she said in this strip was just fine. I mean, look at what she has to work with.
Joyce never really had the intellectual and developmental growing room during her childhood that she had, and expediting that process that’s supposed to go on during childhood is no easy task.
If you had to deal with Joyce like that, you think you could do any better?
for reals though the sooner we outlaw religious indoctrination the betterDorothy does lots of stuff wrong inter-personally even though all her heuristics are generally right, but like, I don’t see how she could deal with this better. I couldn’t have delivered that to Joyce that well, and I’m a decade and change older than Dorothy is. And while aspects of this have been handled poorly, she may well be right that Joyce should fix this sooner rather than later.
Everyone gives Joyce AND Becky a pass for “ still learning/being young and dumb” But Dorthey never gets that grace for some reason.
I personally give Dorothy a pass, and I think she gets a pass from more people than you’d say, they’re just quiet about it.
I do think she gets (and deserves) less slack overall, even if she still deserves some, when acting as the Voice Of Reason inserted into the comic. The dynamic changes if we’re meant to treat her as a flawed character, or as presenting the moral compass.
I mean… she could ask Joyce how she feels about losing her religion. That is one thing she could do. Like, I feel you on people being harsh on Dorothy- you’re right that she’s just as much of a kid as everyone else and trying to figure things out! But the fact that no one has expressed concern about how Joyce is dealing with the loss of *the* defining factor of her identity for a long time is just… really stark. And I think Dorothy gets the brunt of that because she presents herself as an authority- like, I’m also mad at Sarah about it, but Sarah’s not the one ordering her to “fix” things. (Becky I exempt, she’s dealing with her own shit.)
I actually like Dorothy a lot, and like her even better when it’s demonstrated that her perfectionism veers into neurosis, and that trying to be the designated Mom Friend is a mistake when she’s not actually equipped for it.
What worries me about this arc (does it count as an arc?) is that she’s messing up beautifully here, but the text appears to support her as if she’s not, nor being selfrighteous herself.
I’m just over here like “ A self righteous teen? say it aint so”
Oh, they’re all self-righteous teens, with variable levels of trauma, and thrown into the maws of higher education which involves a high amount of information and not the best tools to process it. The remark about “DUMBING” has been done to death.
What’s left after acknowledging they’re all messy, dramatic freshmen who’re nevertheless pretty likeable (I do like mostly everyone in the cast), is watching out for who’s supported in their actions by the narrative. Dorothy messing up is understandable, but does the story state/implies she’s actually right? I hope not.
The thing is, Dorothy can be right about some things, but the issue with it is that being right about those some things implies correctness on *other* points. Is Dorothy correct to call out Joyce’s “Same ethos, just with some words swapped”? Yes. Does this mean that Dorothy is right to not have any idea how to talk to Joyce or consider her feelings, or to consider the several bad things Becky’s done and might need to answer for? No.
Honestly if Dorothy truly wanted to get this resolved, she’d get them together and mediate. I don’t blame her for not thinking about that, being a self righteous teen, but it does feel a little like she’s passing the buck by not offering any advice or help, and by making it seem like Joyce has *no* legitimate grievances.
It is literally not Dortheys role to mediate a fight between two long term friends like that, especially since Becky can easily say its “ The athiests siding against her” no matter what Dorthey says….
Dorothy stooping to bribery, very important for a politician.
oh my god there is a 0% chance this exact tactic hasnt been used on walky to the same success
Nobody can turn down macaroni and cheese.
*…except for vegans and the lactose sensitive.
Don’t forget those who are allergic to wheat!
That’s when you bring in the cheese alternatives.
Today’s comic jolted the brainmeat enough (with Dorothy/Joyce shipping material) I’ve come to the conclusion that Joyce’s disgruntled reaction to Ruth being bi is rooted in denial of her own feelings plus a dash of prototypical new-to-lgbt-concepts bi erasure. This may or may not have been mentioned previously in the comments.
I’d be down to discuss how this frankly awful (mis)understanding of bisexuality is actually about Joyce’s denial of his own, even if someone else has done it before. “You can be bisexual but you’re only queer if you don’t date anyone of the opposite sex” (with the corollary of “you can also pass as straight if you focus on the opposite sex”)
Very performative, very in line with the worldview of a girl who was raised a fundie, and believing goodness was actually god acting through you instead of a core value reflecting your personal ethic.
True! And very in-line with the “you’re only gay if you act on it” kinda mindset that she demonstrated with Ethan.
you mean Kraft Dinner.
“You know I’d never turn down a Kraft Dinner, Philip!”
“Do what I demand of you and I’ll let YOU fix a dinner for me” is sure a move. Look like Dorothy effectively has a future in politic.
Dorothy just moved up in my list.
*sees there’s approximately 200 comments already*
Dorothy, get behind me!
A lot of people are talking about how they want this wrapped up in a bow by the end of this book or arc, how they just want this all over with, and I’m hoping for the opposite. This is a goldmine for drama, content, and personal growth for all the characters involved, even the secondary characters to this plot thread like Sarah and Dorothy, and seeing how things spin out both in comic and in the comments section is something I highly enjoy.
It’d frankly break my suspension of disbelief some if Joyce went up and perfectly apologized to Becky, and Becky then went “yeah Joyce thanks, I had no issue with you being atheist, I just didn’t want you to berate me for it”, and they were back to besties for the next story arc.
What I want is intense character interactions, for Joyce to have to go through intense personal growth, fight through it like she always has, make a proper apology to Becky and a promise to go forward at the end of this book… and then for Becky to still reject it, and to say that Joyce lying about still believing to be bad, and to unearth some of her issues with atheism in general.
I want Joyce to, in frustration and sadness, go back to her room, and for Dorothy and Sarah to keep having their reflexive “Joyce is 100% wrong” reactions, and to batter Joyce and mindscrew her about it. To eventually later realize they’d been unknowingly pushing viewpoints they didn’t want to, because let’s be real here, when Joyce came back, nobody watched the argument, nobody asked her.
If that perfect apology *had* come out, and then Becky still had huge issues with it being hidden, and Joyce came back, Sarah still woulda said “you didn’t even try, did you” in that condescending manner.
Characters messing up and having misunderstandings and behaving badly is the lifeblood. I know I’m a sucker for a happy ending, but that happy ending has to have *all* the characters grow, not just one, and for the road to be difficult to truly give it meaning.
… whew, that was a longer rant than I thought it’d be, apologies, to those few of you still reading the comments 4 hours after comic post time.
I’m trying not to get into heated arguments but I agree with all of this, the drama of Joyce and Becky struggling with each other’s differing beliefs is juicy drama. I only hope Becky actually has a deeper conflict like the one you described instead of “my friend was mean one time about my beliefs” cause that’s a weak reason to stay eternally mad at someone. I’ve had my agnostic beliefs mocked by close friends and talked it out, and my beliefs aren’t a part of the most powerful religion in the world.
Also I really want to see Dina and Becky have a real conversation about atheism where Becky isn’t being wacky about it, I feel like there’s some deep stuff about her mum that have yet to be explored. Beckys deification of her mother vs the uncomfortable possibilities
Yeah that.
I am reading this series for these idiot disaster children, they are what I’m here for.
It’s not Dina’s death in IW! unless she’s accidentally responsible for it by leaping into the same room she threw a bomb into because she was getting shot while trying to defend her work, the only thing that gave her any meaning when Joe showed up and any play at self-worth had evaporated, and then Mike stomped on whatever’s left.
Stories are not a linear line to the most optimal solution to an ongoing conflict!
Yea, I get wanting good things to happen and they can be good, but when bad things happen and the story ties it all together it’s so good. Centaurworld did that recently with the nowhere king and the pain there is still in my head
Agreed. I’m hoping Joyce and Becky START making up by the end of the book, if only because I’m not sure how much longer the fight could sustain itself interestingly, but I want this attempt to blow up in Dorothy’s face and for it to keep being a bit messy even after the two of them start trying to find common ground again and acknowledge they never had the same approach to faith. Give us Becky finally acknowledging her insecurities about Joyce’s friendship!
This arc is definitely still on its upswing. What will their dynamic look like as they rebuild? Was their shared upbringing the only thing they actually had in common this whole time? Will Becky finally drop the wacky mask long enough to be genuine about her feelings?
I hope they can put the fire out and start frankly talking again by the end of this book, but it’s going to take longer than that for them to find their new normal.
Yeah- to me it would be pretty unrealistic if Becky was immediately 100% fine with Joyce being an atheist. Belief is a huge part of their shared history- Joyce explicitly rejecting that has got to make Becky feel some kinda way, you know? I’m not as convinced as other people seem to be that Becky would outright *reject* Joyce for being an atheist, but I also can’t buy her having *no* reaction.
Obviously right now Joyce is going about it in the absolute worst way, so at the moment “how Becky feels about Joyce being an atheist” is impossible to disentangle from “how Becky feels about Joyce suddenly being an enormous jerk.” But assuming Joyce gets over the enormous jerkitude, I think there will still be a lot of unresolved issues.
Oooooh, character development for Dorothy! She has a lower boredom threshold now and she has learned to make offers that can’t be refused (good for her presidential aspirations).
Dorothy knows she ain’t gonna be here much longer and been trying to tie off loose ends. Because she thinks of herself as being in charge of Joyce. And Joyce also thinks of her as being in charge. It’s that sort of (mostly one way, probably unbalanced if that’s a thing) dynamic.
So she’s telling Joyce to fix things with Becky because once she’s gone, Joyce is gonna need someone else close to her to talk to, which has usually been Becky. I don’t think this is necessarily accurate (because friendships do fall apart and that’s life), but I do think it’s right. At the very least, it’ll be better for Joyce not to have a bitter relationship with her closest friend after she loses Dorothy.
Which is another thing that’s gonna be drama. Because “the adult in the room” is afraid to come out ahead of that. She should tell Joyce if she doesn’t want her to end up feeling betrayed by all her friends.
See that’s how you know Dorothy’s gonna make a good Democrat one of these days.
She’s already well versed in reciting textbook solutions to complex problems, refusing to engage on any personal level on why a crisis is occurring, and when her platitudes don’t immediately solve the problem she starts demanding someone who’s more involved with more stake in it handle it themselves.
“Fix it. Now.” – Dorothy Keener, political maverick, whose sterling advice definitely worked yesterday when she said this exact thing.
Anyway, I’m down for seeing Dorothy be a huge fuck-up at the moment. It’s not even a matter of Character Flaws or whatever at this point, I just think it’s neat seeing her usual ability to solve Joyce’s problems be twisted into something where she’s not helping nearly as much as she wants and can’t even recognize it, because it always worked before and maybe the world’s more complex than a 19-year old middle-class white girl with big ideas can solve.
Like actually maybe Dorothy being wrong will, in turn, help her forge the beliefs, ideals and most importantly the resolve she needs to learn in order to succeed instead of ending up some toothless neo-lib who tweets complaints that she tried so hard you guys, vote for me in midterms.
Something which has been hinted at but never really explored is that Dorothy struggles with a lot of important politician stuff. Dorothy is intelligent, honest and hard-working, but she isn’t good with the sort of politicking that comes naturally to Roz and Becky. They’re seemingly effortlessly better than her at the thing she wants to do, which is demoralizing as hell, I’ve certainly been struggling to deal with that feeling.
Dorothy wasn’t great at solving anything before and she’s not fucking up so much now. She knows Joyce and Becky enough to know that their friendship will stand without her doing anything. What has changed from past Dorothy is that she got bored of their bickering really fast.
Dorothy is stating directly to Joyce’s face that she can put up with her but Becky cannot, and Becky has sure as hell not hinted she’s interested in their friendship standing.
Intruding into Joyce and Dorothy’s conversation was Becky’s way of hinting she’s still hoping there will be a reconciliation. Of course, not before a lot of grandstanding. Probably, it will take Dina to cut through all the BS.
I’m wondering if Dorothy will decide to stay at this school to develop her people skills instead of having a fancy college on her resume.
I think it’s more of an ending for Dorothy to head off to Yale. IIRC we’re never moving past freshman year and Dorothy got into Yale for next year.
So for Dorothy now until the end of the series, I think her story will be about becoming the person who can act on the ideals she holds to.
Anyway, I’ve felt for a while that Dorothy does not, strictly speaking, respect Joyce, and panels 2 and 3 here kinda solidifies that for me. She loves Joyce to pieces, but she’s been reliant on a script where Silly Fundie Joyce acts up and Patient Mom Dorothy calmly lectures her, and this has been easy because Joyce’s problems are binary and are overcome by her empathy; if you tell Joyce to do the right thing, then she does it. Dorothy isn’t this genius sage, she’s just surrounded by emotionally traumatized kids who are extremely bad at processing feelings while Dorothy is a person bursting with empathy, and so until now she’s been a genuinely amazing force for good in all their lives.
But this isn’t a binary problem and Dorothy is thinking all she has to do is say “stop being mean :(” and boom, problem solved, and she’s incapable of recognizing Joyce’s huge-ass pile of trauma and anger because Dorothy grew up with overwhelmingly kind parents who gently guided her and let her figure things out herself, so Dorothy just tries the same shtick with a resolve that she can fix it without any of the knowledge, experience, or even really the empathy she thinks she has right now.
Dorothy loves Joyce to pieces, but she has no idea what Joyce needs right now and it’s fine that she does not. Dorothy Keener does not, actually, need to solve all the world’s ill, and she’s sure as hell not solving it by throwing platitudes at Joyce until she throws her hands up and threatens her that this is all Joyce’s fault and if she doesn’t stop having this wild trauma response at a lifetime of religious indoctrination into a death cult then she’s going to permanently lose her lifelong best friend she has actually nearly died for like three times, because Dorothy processes conflict on a level of civility doctrine where being angry about the wrong thing makes you the bad guy. Anger only counts if it’s for a good cause, ergo Joyce doing a thing that made Becky angry regardless of any circumstance (that nobody around Joyce has even asked about yet, as if there is a more complex story going on than Joyce learning not to be an edgy atheist) makes Joyce the villain, and being the villain means it’s Joyce’s responsibility to sit down and shut the fuck up.
Ok, so I’ve been reading your comments since this whole thing started, and here is my response:
I know you relate heavily to Joyce and what she’s going through, and it seems like an absolute dick move with how her friends are treating her. You know who relates even more heavily with Joyce? Willis. She’s a fictional character, but this Joyce is the main character of the comic and the one Willis has poured a lot of themself into. So, you don’t really have to worry about Joyce’s friend’s or the narrative being mean to her, because the person who is both hardest on and most sympathetic to her is writing this. In the end she will come out of this both stronger and better. You don’t have to fight for her honor by trashing all the characters around her, she’ll be fine.
Before the next section, a note to every single commenter on this site: This comic is called “Dumbing of Age” because every character is a fuck-up. They’re 18-20, of course they’re fuck-ups. It’s understandable, and the whole point. So, for your own sanities, learn to forgive and forget when they mess up, because they will, frequently and spectacularly. Everyone is flawed and also trying their best. Just like we all were/are at that age.
As for the other characters, I think there has been a massive misreading of why the characters are mad at each other and what they’re arguing about. It’s easy to see it as “Becky is mad Joyce is no longer religious (and thus thinks Becky is an idiot) and everyone is mad at Joyce for being a mean atheist, but I don’t think so. This whole thing started, before Liz ever got here or Bonnie’s birthday, with Sarah saying “You should tell Becky you’re an atheist.” Why would she do this? Sarah has historically, not cared one bit about Becky. In fact, she actively distrusted her for the longest time. What Sarah DOES care about is 1) avoiding drama, and 2) Joyce, and what Joyce cares about, more than anything else in the world, is Becky. So, to me, it seems obvious that she isn’t annoyed at Joyce for being an atheist, acting superior, or being mean to Becky, because she’s never cared about any of those things. What she cares about is Joyce getting hurt and knew that Joyce not telling Becky would hurt Joyce. Could she say any of this better? Definitely. But see above “fuck-up” comment.
As for Becky, I think this is where the biggest misreading comes in from everyone. I don’t think Becky is mad at Joyce for being an atheist, she’s had no problem with that for Dorothy or Dina. And I honestly don’t think she’s mad at Joyce for changing. I think she’s mad because JOYCE DIDN”T TELL HER. Specifically, that she didn’t trust her enough to tell her. Becky has shown, repeatedly, that there is nothing she hates more than being treating like she’s fragile or broken, especially by Joyce. Its why she puts on her mask and tries to hide who she is, and someone who does that can’t be as selfish as the comments seem to think she is. She spent the first part of the strip, before she showed up on campus being Joyce’s sounding board over the phone and hiding all the drama that was going on with her. That first day she showed up on campus, she spent the whole day hiding what was going on with her and trying to pretend everything was fine and be there for Joyce. She has repeatedly gone out of her way to help others and their emotional issues. When she was freaking out about sex with Dina it was because she was worried she would be forcing Dina to do something she didn’t want to do and talked to other people about it instead of Dina for that reason. She just showed that she actually cares about Ruth (and Billie) and making sure neither of them are in a suicide pact, even if that means losing hot lesbians. And before ANY of this, she hid how her mother died and her father abused her, even from her best friend and crush, because doing otherwise would cause trouble. Becky is not a perfect person, she screws-up, comes on strong, and rubs people the wrong way. She’s a fuck-up, but selfish and uncaring about other’s feelings she’s not.
I think, if Joyce had told her, none of this would have happened. Becky would not care that Joyce is an atheist, and they’d still be friends. Yes, Joyce’s conflict with her religion is personal and something she should have space to struggle with, and there’s a very good argument that she shouldn’t have to tell Becky, except, as Joyce herself said, her atheism IS about Becky. She became an atheist BECAUSE of how Becky was treated by their community. She couldn’t reconcile those two things, so she chose Becky over religion. But she didn’t trust Becky enough to tell her that, and that is, in my opinion, what Becky is mad about. That Joyce didn’t trust her enough, thought her to0 fragile to tell her. Because, no matter what you may think of her and all her fuck-ups, Becky is not fragile, and she can’t stand that Joyce thinks she is.
Am I saying that Joyce is an irredeemable monster and the only one at fault? Hell no. I like Joyce and think she’s a great main character and I expect great things from and for her. Am I saying that Becky is a precious little baby that can do no wrong and needs to be protected? Hell no, she’s shown that she’s strong enough to deal with trauma, observant enough to see when other people are having problems, AND a major fuck-up, because she’s just now getting to be selfish and grow-up. I could argue that neither or both of them are at fault but assigning blame here isn’t important. What’s important is they talk this out and solve their issues with each other, because no one is more important to them than the other (and I think Dorothy knows this, even if she could show it better).
TLDR: I’m going to continue to watch to see how this whole thing plays out, knowing that the person writing it relates to all of these characters and will write the best story for all of these fuck-ups who are just trying to get through life. And I implore all of you, the whole comments section, to let them do so without deciding any of them are Actually-Satan.
I’ll be honest, I feel like all this “The Evil Hateful Comments Section” stuff is fanfiction. I’ve been delving into these and I don’t find anybody super demonizing anybody, and those comments just feel like they hate high tension discussion and interesting topics and want to strawman the people and conversation.
That said, on the matter of “I think she’s mad because JOYCE DIDN”T TELL HER.”, I feel like yes, that would have made Becky feel notably better, or at least capable of handling it. The issue is that Becky was doing her damned best to signal she was *not safe* to share new-found atheism with, and I can’t blame Joyce in the slightest from hiding her opinions from Becky.
Yes, this.
I don’t think there is (much) demonizing, but there have definitely been “these other commentors are disappointing me in how they are viewing these characters” and I really didn’t want the focus of what I was saying to be on that, so it was intending more as a “I’m not arguing about which side is right or not.”
Except for the part where every time Joyce did try to broach the subject, or push back or question Becky in any way, she was told “this is a shitty phase, I know my mom is in Heaven having cake, how dare you question your faith or have trauma when I just discarded the inconvenient bits of the first and go through life pretending to everyone I don’t have any of the latter”.
[Michael Scott Thank You dot gif]
So before I get to anything, I do want to be clear that I’ve read through this twice, I’m just not gonna try and respond to the whole thing, all at once, ’cause otherwise I’d be here for another hour.
(which, um, that’s illuminating to how I usually write posts, I guess)
All I can really say here is that “the characters being flawed” is a thing I’m actually here for and all about, and that thinking Dorothy is being a huge fuckup right now doesn’t mean I think she’s either an Evil Person or a Bad Character, if only because Dorothy as a character has previously been very vanilla to me and so seeing her screw up in a situation she has otherwise been able to perfectly handle is something I’m excited about for the same reason Ethan meant nothing to me before he came back as a malnourished goth with a permanent scowl. Dorothy’s mistakes here feel true to her character as someone who constantly, repeatedly tries to be good, except the difference here is that she’s in a scenario where “being good” isn’t as easy as it usually is and she’s unequipped to help Joyce, and so her attempts are making things worse.
I don’t think Becky would deal with the reveal of Joyce’s atheism well, she sure didn’t deal with Joyce questioning it at Dina’s party. She’d still be mad, I think, just a different kind of mad, and moreover it’s not really a topic Joyce could broach with her because she was still figuring it out and already had a bad experience with saying as much to Becky.
I’m “concerned” about Joyce’s friends being mean to her in that I think it’s an intentional part of Joyce’s current status quo that her friends relied on her existing in a specific box and they don’t know how to handle her otherwise, and I’m not at all concerned about the narrative; the only thing I can control, and am interested in controlling, is what I feel about the story. I’d certainly be disappointed if this ended with Joyce tearfully apologizing for being an edgy atheist and all her friends warmly forgive her, if only because that’s something where I think “blame Joyce” would make for a boring story, but I’m not at all convinced of that happening (which is probably bad news, because I live in a state of being perpetually wrong about plot developments).
What this has spoken to me as a story since the Faith-Off began is one where the three people Joyce loves most are just completely incapable of being emotionally supportive in a way Joyce needs, and that’s something born from them relying on Joyce as a constantly cheerful, positive, sunny character who bulldozes into other peoples’ crises who’s also really funny to laugh at all the time because she thinks the Earth is 6000 years old, and I don’t think any of them really know how to step up to the plate. I definitely think that, because none of them have asked her how she’s feeling or what brought it about. If there’s any part of authorial/narrative intent I want to concern myself with, in that I try to stay away from making commentary to the effect of “this is definitely David Willis’ point and what they were thinking while writing,” the part where no one can ask if she’s okay before telling her she’s more disappointing than a School Misser, that who she is now is worse than the person they made fun of all the time, and that she only had faith because she wanted to lord superiority over everyone? That seems intentional to me.
Or: I think we’re more in agreement on this series being about idiot disaster children butt fumbling through life than you may think I am.
“What this has spoken to me as a story since the Faith-Off began is one where the three people Joyce loves most are just completely incapable of being emotionally supportive in a way Joyce needs, and that’s something born from them relying on Joyce as a constantly cheerful, positive, sunny character who bulldozes into other peoples’ crises who’s also really funny to laugh at all the time because she thinks the Earth is 6000 years old, and I don’t think any of them really know how to step up to the plate. I definitely think that, because none of them have asked her how she’s feeling or what brought it about. If there’s any part of authorial/narrative intent I want to concern myself with, in that I try to stay away from making commentary to the effect of “this is definitely David Willis’ point and what they were thinking while writing,” the part where no one can ask if she’s okay before telling her she’s more disappointing than a School Misser, that who she is now is worse than the person they made fun of all the time, and that she only had faith because she wanted to lord superiority over everyone? That seems intentional to me.”
This is the part we disagree on, but I obviously did a bad job of communicating that. I don’t read them as acting that way towards her, but I’d really rather not write another essay length post trying to convince you of it. I think their reasons are different and have absolutely nothing with putting Joyce in a box or making fun of her. If that didn’t come across, I’m sorry.
re Dorothy bursting with empathy:
the part where she savagely broke up with Walky after asking for some space, breaking into his, and then dumping him like a broken action figure for not being able to keep her hands off him. All because she couldn’t manage her own time and needed to blame the goofball for that.
She didn’t “blame” him, she’s burning herself out trying to be at maximum Dorothy capacity all the time.
She didn’t think she was capable of being with him and still devote herself to schooling, so she thought boxing him out and ending it entirely after slipping would get her back on track and it really has not.
Last panel Joyce is peak Willis.
Joyce has been carrying those around since the beginning of college, waiting for this opportunity.
I know Joyce is being annoying but I wish one of her friends had said “Hey, this isn’t like you, want to talk about it?”
It’d be nice if even one of Joyce’s friends did that, instead of condescending to her and demanding that she fix things with Becky immediately, as if the problem is all Joyce’s fault and it’s all her responsibility to fix Becky’s bad reactions to Joyce’s views changing.
See. Joe basically did that, actually, when he was worried about Joyce frowning at her phone literally I THINK the day previous in-comic? But I think it’s unlikely that Joe is going to come out of his shame hole to be the friend Joyce needs right now. Which sucks.
My poor shipper heart. 🙁
I really hope this conversation doesn’t involve Joyce apologizing and giving in on everything. Maybe Joyce can mention that she is used to always doing that, being the obedient daughter, the agreeable saint, and Becky can realize she, too, hurt Joyce. She has always been the aggressive energy to match her friend’s supportive energy. With their newfound self awareness, they can redraw the boundaries that used to define their dynamic.
I mean, I can hope. This is a trainwreck yet.
Hmm interesting wish past me, but if it is a trainwreck then Dotty will have to deal with Becky’s side. When Becky throws whatever accusations she does about stealing friends, Dotty can drop the Yale bomb right back at her. End of book.
My problem with this whole deal is how, exactly, is Becky reconciling what she was taught as a child with what she has become as a woman. Yes, Joyce needs to understand that people have differing religious views and religiosity levels than her, but how, how, HOW can Becky survive being a Lesbian when her whole worldview, AS SHE WAS TAUGHT, says she goes direct to hell, don’t pass go, don’t collect $200.
She was taught God loves her. She has faith God loves her. Anything that disagrees with that is badwrongfaith.
It’s cherry picking what she likes and ignoring everything else. I find this kind of faith very… trite, I guess? Maybe just amorphous.
We hashed this out a few weeks or months ago. Pressing this line of argument will get you a lot of hate in this comment section.
Everybody cherrypicks, because the Bible is a diverse collection of documents written by a wide variety of people over many different generations, all of whom had different motives and viewpoints. Everybody interprets, and everybody does some cherrypicking, except those who do not believe in any of it at all.
Which is also fine! As an atheist, it’d be weird for me to say otherwise 🙂
But unless you’re calling ALL Christians “trite”, which is rude as heck….
Unless you don’t speed or believe all laws are unjust your a cherry picker too.
There’s a pretty significant philosophical gap between “This law is unjust because it was written by flawed people,” and “This religious tenet doesn’t gel with my worldview therefore I choose to jettison it.”
We can see human beings, we can speak to them and weigh their words and actions, and either personally or collectively say “Fuck that,” if what they’re peddling is garbage. It’s immensely different to have a hundreds-to-thousands-of-years-old collection of texts with contradictory passages that is being passed off as a single immutable work and then say that parts of it suck while the rest don’t because it turns out some of “God’s word” is mutable.
You’d be right, except Becky (like most Christians) don’t believe the bible is the inerrant word of god and understand that the bible was written by many authors over the course of hundreds of years. I don’t see any value in belittling people who apply critical thought to their religious texts.
We are all sinners deserving of Hell, but God loves us, and through Christ’s sacrifice, we are absolved.
It’s pretty simple, really. Note that while Becky is in a relationship with Dina, this relationship has remained platonic because Becky is afraid of taking the next step into actual sexual intimacy.
(Also, while the Old Testament condemns male homosexuality in Leviticus, it doesn’t say anything about female homosexuality. And Jesus made a new Covenant meaning that the old laws are no longer relevant. Keep in mind the Leviticus also forbids eating shellfish or wearing a cotton/polyester shirt. Somehow, the people who insist that the Bible forbids homosexuality tend to be blissfully unaware that these things are equally forbidden with the same strength.)
Even more forbidden than any of those is praying in public, but that’s never stopped anyone, either.
Are you sure about that, there seems to be some opinion that those passages refer to male temple prostitution rather than homosexuality.
Joyce didn’t handle religion with nuance.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/originalsin/
“Before Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, there was no sin, no pain, no death! There’s no room for evolution in a world where nothing can die! And if humanity isn’t the cause of sin and pain and death, if it existed before us, and we didn’t unleash it, then God did. And if that’s true, then everything, EVERYTHING, EV-ER-Y-THING I’ve ever known, everything we’ve been taught, is a goddamned lie.”
Because she recognizes those precepts were at best tertiary to the central message of Christianity, and have only been stirred up by hatemongers seeking any excuse to put people down rather than lift people up?
Look at the amount of the new testament Jesus spends talking about loving and accepting everyone, and the amount of the new testament Jesus spends saying all gay people go to hell, and you might be able to get some idea about how how Becky has been able to maintain her faith and her lesbian identity at the same time.
Joyce (angrily) brought that exact point up to Becky after her non-apology on the stabbin’ steps. Becky had no answer, except taking another jab and storming off.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/refusing-2/
The answer to that question is bound to come as part of their rebuilding process.
Eh, no one needs to justify their faith. If Becky was still going to a church that preached the burning of gays, sure, I’d question that. But her reasons for having faith in a specific deity? That’s no one’s business but her own.
Becky also already justified it to Joyce when she first came out and Joyce cheerfully told her ‘hey I googled stuff and I THINK you’re safe in the bible!’ and Becky pointed out that she didn’t have to google it, she had faith that God would have her back. And later, when evolution came up and Joyce was angry with Becky for learning about evolution, and Becky pointed out that “facts” such as ‘Earth is only 4000 years old’ weren’t the important parts of the bible. The love for others, compassion for others, forgiveness, and doing right by others, THAT is what is important in the bible for Becky. Joyce has merely forgotten these discussions because it is easier to tell herself that Becky is ‘being dumb’.
I didn’t read that as having no answer, it was refusing to dignify that statement with an answer. Because it sounds a lot like Joyce saying their could be no god that loves Becky.
People are gonna be mad about this one. I’m not gonna read it but they’re gonna be mad
THREE cheese? You mean Joyce can put one cheese with TWO other cheeses?
Mind blown!
The 3 cheeses were preordained and approved so it’s alright.
Or maybe she thinks three is the name of a cheese.
To her the 3 cheese are a unit. If she had to mix the cheeses could have been harder.
I imagine that a big part of Joyce’s conflict with food is the merging of different textures and hardness. Like, I just don’t like nuts in a lot of food, not because I hate nuts, but just because the combination of textures is unpleasant.
With Cheese? Well, beyond that Kraft Mac & Cheese cheese has nothing resembling actual cheese in it, the varieties of cheese blend well together to become a more consistent texture, which doesn’t set off Joyce’s food issues.
“Macaroni and Cheese”. If they weren’t supposed to be touching, there wouldn’t be an “and” in the name.
where was she keeping those?
I hope Joyce’s recipe for mac-and-cheese involves keeping the macaroni and the cheese separate at all points.
Becky doesn’t deserve Joyce
No, nobody deserves Joyce as long as she’s acting like this. But then, today’s strip marks her showing some regard for another human being for the first time since she discovered it was cool to say “God isn’t real”.
I would argue that until this most recent storyline, Becky has been dependent on Joyce to an unhealthy degree.
Well, before they both went to different colleges, Joyce was equally codependent with Becky. Then, Joyce went to a good college in the real world, made friends outside her abusive cult, and suddenly didn’t need Becky for extreme emotional co-dependence anymore.
In the same time period, Becky went to crazy fundie school, came out, dropped out, presumably made no new friends or networking connections, then her only family tried to kidnap, likely rape, and possibly kill her with a gun, then she was a homeless gay teen in America with no support system besides the new friends that Joyce made, that made her no longer need Becky as much, anymore. So it’s not actually a huge wonder that so many people are treating their friendship with Joyce as pseudo-surrogate to their friendships with Becky, and treating Joyce much more harshly when it comes to making sure she is appropriately supportive of Becky: That pseudo-surrogacy is fact, Joyce 100% thrust her friend Becky into everybody’s lives, expressly because of her lacking the proper social skills to evaluate how much of an imposition it was of her to do that. But Joyce’s ethics, like Dorothy’s, boil down to always do the right thing or else you’re bad, and hold everybody to that standard. She literally does not know anything but that pattern of thought and behavior, and has never attempted to learn anything more than that, just like her mother, because why would you learn anything beyond the single axiom that guarantees your moral superiority to everybody? That level of internal reassurance is highly addictive, as you can tell when you actually have to deal with the deep-seated rage of a fundie whose scene or routine is disrupted.
If you view everybody’s actions in a vacuum, they are incredibly unfair to Joyce. But if you view them through the lens of “everybody but Joyce is mature enough to clearly see that she is twisting a knife in her best friends’ heart, second after second, and that it’s only going to keep getting worse,” and beyond that, everybody knows Joyce well enough that she is backsliding into a behavior pattern for comfort because of her fear of backsliding in exactly that way, and that she will be mortified once she gets over herself and honestly internalizes how she is acting, and that she ultimately would hate herself for acting like this via her own ethics – which are clearer to everybody else than they are to her – and ultimately that she has a giant support network to help her with her trauma, in a place of relative comfort, safety, and privilege, while Becky is never going to realistically open up about her trauma to the rest of Joyce’s friends, because of how she is, and she really needs her life-long, dangerously co-dependent bestie, right now. Because that’s who inflicted this new trauma upon her, in the first place.
And if we really want to try to act like it’s one of their fault or the others’, more, let’s consider one final, deeper thing: why is Joyce so utterly, hideously, embarrassingly lacking in any social skills or self-awareness? She never needed them. She out-sourced those to her platonic, co-dependent life partner, Becky. Becky wants all social situations to go smoothly, and to avoid conflict, and deals with that anxiety by being super-manipulative the same way Joyce deals with it by latching on to her simple heuristics, and so Becky’s the one who managed all this shit for Joyce, Joyce’s whole life. That isn’t the only reason she is stunted, but Becky is used to doing FOR Joyce, the thing she currently, desperately needs FROM Joyce. It’s neither of their fucking fault. This is how they are due to patterns of behavior which began for them before they had the critical reasoning capacity to detect or critique them. They are literally two heavily-stunted children. That’s why this comic is called “Dumbing of Age.” They are babies, and this is frustrating precisely because of how hard this is for them, but if it wasn’t hard for them, they wouldn’t be them, and also there would be no fucking comic.
tl;dr, we’re biased in our perspective as readers, because this story started right after the point in Joyce’s life where she was just as fucking needy of Becky, as Becky is of her. Joyce literally just got more friends, and Becky wasn’t around, so she slipped into her friendship patterns of behavior with the people who were near because she needed that comfort she didn’t have from Becky. Becky didn’t get to do that. Becky still needs Joyce as badly as she ever did, whereas Joyce could literally lose Becky as a friend right now, feel completely justified, and never worry about it, again…even though every person who knows Joyce, knows deep down, she doesn’t actually feel that way, she has just convinced herself she is SUPPOSED TO, and therefore is fighting to convince herself that she does. Becky doesn’t deserve to be in the crossfire of a mental meltdown that utterly stupid, even if she is needy.
I thought there was something that wasn’t getting addressed in any of the comments on this storyline but I couldn’t figure out how to express it, and here you went and did. Thanks for making the effort.
Becky *does* have a support system outside of Joyce’s friends now, though? She connected with Dina and Leslie and Robin all on her own. She actually seems pretty good at making friends. I think you have a point about Joyce’s lack of self-awareness, but I don’t really buy that Becky has been emotionally managing things for her the way you’re framing it. I think it’s more mutual than that (before Joyce left).
If you view everybody’s actions in a vacuum, they are incredibly unfair to Joyce. But if you view them through the lens of “everybody but Joyce is mature enough to clearly see that she is twisting a knife in her best friends’ heart, second after second, and that it’s only going to keep getting worse,”
No, it is still incredibly unfair through that lens. Is Joyce being cruel to her best friend? Yes, and that sucks. But she is not “twisting a knife into Becky’s heart second after second.” She is dealing with her own trauma, not particularly well, and for all your talk of her support system not one of them has asked Joyce how she’s feeling about a pretty major change in her life.
Like… absolutely Becky has trauma, and absolutely it sucks that she is now at odds with the person she was previously closest to. But.. Joyce cannot help her with that right now, because the issues Joyce is dealing with make her the absolute wrong person for Becky to open up to. It sucks! As you say, it’s not either of their faults! But I think trying to force Joyce to make up with Becky *before* she has worked through at least *some* of her feelings about atheism is only going to make things worse. And I also don’t think Becky would be able to help Joyce with her current crisis, either, even if Joyce wasn’t doing her best impression of an atheist in a Jack Chick comic. They are not the right people to help each other right now. Honestly, I think some distance is the best thing for them, because otherwise they’re just going to keep stabbing each other’s tender spots.
Joyce’s newfound atheism is, sadly, a typical journey. It can take a while to settle in.
I am sorry people, but I am feeling particularly juvenile today, and have to do this to get it out of my system.
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Ref the alt text: That’s what she said!
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Runs away giggling like a 12 year old.
I feel like Willis might have intentionally set that one up for you.
Fucking PERFECT!!! 😝🤣
Okay I’m getting confused. Is the resistance to change due to Aspergers or ADHD? Having both it’s hard to keep track of what traits I have are associated with one and no the other.
It’s a stripe that can occur with ALL kinds of unique flavors of neurodivergence, and on a grander level it’s really more a human thing than anything else. I think us neurodivergents just have a more anxious time processing it than others?
Joyce has always felt like a girl on the autism spectrum to me. Not so sure she has ADHD – she seems able to focus on what she needs to get done just fine.
Hey uh, sorry if this is an inappropriate place to ask, or it’s too personal, but there’s something you’ve said once that intrigued me, about the ways being Japanese and Autistic interact, and I’d like to know more.
What particular aspects of your autism interacted with what particularly aspects of your being Japanese do you think had the biggest impact on how you grew up / turned out?
We definitely can focus, it’s just that we get hyperfocus where you get so intently absorbed you totally lose track of time.
Anecdotally, it’s really easy for me to get lost in a cycle of endlessly checking and refreshing different pages, since there’s a little change to whatever it is I’m looking at.
I like it when that happens to me. I call it my “flow”, and if feels SO GOOD 🥰
Just for reference, Becky seems just about as anxious as Joyce when it comes to things changing, especially people changing.
My dorm didn’t have a mini kitchen. Some doink the semester before set the damn thing on fire and it was made off-limits. I was reduced to making grilled cheese in my electric corn popper.
We never had mini-kitchens either. That’s what hot plates were for. Just hide them when the RA comes round.
You know who I’d really like to see Joyce talking to right now? Jacob. I really wonder what a conversation between the two of them would look like right now.
I refuse to believe that Joyce would allow three cheeses to interact with each other; this punchline isn’t canonical.
She would if they’re in the form of a barely cheese adjacent powder!
Quite the echo: When Joyce was dating Ethan and made noises about “saving” him, Sarah replied, “If anybody else finds out you’re doing this, they will not stand for it… You will especially lose Dorothy.
But Sarah was wrong, no?
Dorothy didn’t find out until they broke up.
Considering the fantasy marriage strip this all has very gay undertones, much like very thing Joyce does w Dorothy
See if you showed me this page alone without context I’d think they where girlfriends.
Sometimes I feel alone in not caring for mac and cheese.
I wouldn’t even know that thing exist if not for this comic
I certainly can’t sympathize with people who don’t like Mac & Cheese at all, but my god … does it have to be one of the grossest kinds? Kraft Mac & Cheese is an abomination before the gods of both Dairy and Pasta.
Well shit, I was actually just testing to see if I could post comments again, and now I find myself being quoted by Willis on Twitter (for the second time!). Sure hope it doesn’t get me re-“banned”!
I mean, mac and cheese is fine, I’ll eat it, I just don’t love it….
you know dots has another reason to get them back together simply in the fact that if Joyce and Becky don’t makeup Joyce will never leave her alone if she doesn’t have to
At least Joyce and Becky will do something together giving dots a break
Mac & Cheese is only good as a base for Tuna Casserole. Don’t forget the broiled cheese on top for a crunchy crust!