Danny: *Bolts upright from whatever couch he chose to sleep on that WASN’T nearby Ethan and thus causing a massive Awkwardness Aura for everyone else in the lounge* My time has come.
On one hand I super want Dana to come back during the next chapter and we find out that both Sarah and Raidah totally fucked her life up and she barely recovered, neither of them cared about her more than they cared being right, and then she power walks away to go date the guy they both moon over.
On the other hand, I really want to see Liz hit on Jacob.
That doesn’t sound like a very Dina thing to say, since “finally” kind of implies the sort of evangelical atheism that Joyce herself has started spouting, and which Dina clearly doesn’t have. Dina doesn’t care what other people believe as long as a) they don’t make her try to believe it and b) they aren’t wrong about dinosaurs.
“But why are you upset that Joyce no longer shares your beliefs, when you are friends with many people who never did?” is a possibility, though.
Not necessarily. She does get real blunt at how stupid she thinks Joyce’s upbringing was and what she was taught, just hearing Joyce talk about it annoys her, and then making snow angels with Sarah led her to be completely livid when Sarah described her good mood as magical, because Dina thought she was tricked into taking part of ceremonial wizardry.
Honestlyyyy I think Dina will take Joyce’s side, because Joyce is acting like Dina did to Joyce: renounce magical thinking and embrace empirical evidence.
However, “taking Joyce’s side” in this instance just means “oh cool you’re an atheist, good for her, let me tell you about dinosaurs.” Dina’s love for Becky is never going to be in doubt to anyone but maybe Becky herself, who is currently dealing with the completely rational thought process of “I can’t fuck Dina or else I’ll go to Hell, and also I’m really sad that Dina doesn’t verbally express how much she wants to fuck me all the time,” ie: the root of Becky’s current distress is in magical thinking, it’s just magical thinking she still thinks is important. Becky is as much of a fundie as Joyce, they just changed in different ways, and I think Joyce being “taken away” by atheism will lead her to start resenting her atheist companions, because Joyce provided that rock of a status quo she relied on to survive since joining the series.
I don’t think it’s definitely gonna happen so much as I think it’d be really interesting, but I think Joyce’s outgrowing her anger and her closest friends growing out of being little douchebags sticking her in a box will involve Joyce forming a support network of people outside of them, and then Becky/Dorothy/Sarah can also go through their own arcs relating to how they treat and have treated Joyce. Becky’s real mad and Dorothy and Sarah have already failed, they’re in too deep on who Joyce should be to really help her the way she needs without trying to get her to validate their own feelings. Joe’s in her corner so far and has provided the emotional support in telling Joyce that she still matters even without Heaven, Dina hits the same note of “former frenemy” with all the knowledge Joyce would want, at a time where Joyce’s atheism isn’t a belief in the non-existence of God so much as the existence of nothing and no foundation to grab onto, and for a third party member I’d go with Sal, another cast member who chafes a lot at what her peers expect of her, and then those peers get mad when she tries to stop.
Although if I thought about this, I might have been pursuing this the wrong way the whole time.
Becky wants sex, but tells herself she can’t until she and Dina get married in what is the only part of her upbringing that Becky continues to rely on magical thinking for, other than the existence of God himself. Becky’s upset that Dina doesn’t prompt the same reaction as Becky has for Dina, she’s worried it means that her eventually marriage to Dina is wrong and won’t work out*, and I didn’t think of it till now, but I wonder if sexual purity is something Becky still holds onto because it allows her some normalcy, something exacerbated now that Joyce has changed.
The last four months of her life have been a chaotic nightmare, and apart from just sexual repression issues that come with being a fundie, I wonder if she’s fearful of sex because losing her virginity is kinda like losing the last part of herself that her upbringing still has hold over her. Once it happens, Old Becky is gone forever. That’d certainly explain the implications that members of the commentariat in the know see in her, where she’s hoping Dina gets so wildly horny that she can’t stop herself from sexing Becky up, and Becky gets to have sex and still tell herself she stayed true to God.
We don’t talk about it enough because she is a funny charming goofball with a cool haircut who modifies her fact-based upbringing when presented with new information, but Jesus Christ this kid is messed up.
*This is a bit of a side question for those in the know about fundies: is it a thing to rush into marriage so you can start having God-sanctioned sex? I wonder if that plays into it for Becky too.
The other issue is that Becky wants her cool atheist girlfriend to be consumed with lust for her so that maybe said cool atheist girlfriend (who therefore doesn’t believe that sex is only sanctioned in the bonds of marriage) will lose control and they will both give into their lustful urges together, but because Dina started it it’s okay and they couldn’t HELP being so all-consumingly horny. The issue there, of course, is that Dina is aspec (so she won’t be consumed by her lustful urges) and would find the idea of having sex with Becky when she says no absolutely abhorrent. There will be no lustful atheist ravaging, and Becky is maybe kinda disappointed by that fact, and also feels shame because DINA can find Becky pretty and want to have sex but not have frequent sexual attraction, so clearly this is a failing in Becky’s faith. (It’s not, and Becky REALLY needs to get herself to an online educational resource about asexuality. And also non-shame-based resources about sexuality in general, as do Joyce, Liz, and for that matter Joe. Scarleteen is here for you, honey.)
Nah, SEP is being invisible without actually being invisible. What Brad is talking about is more like pass without trace (see various videos in which cats walk through hallways full of dominos etc without tipping any over).
Why are you makingit sound like he did somethingwrong? He was approached by a girl who said she wanted to have sex and the second she indicated she wanted to stop he did. He didn’t try to talk her out of it, he just respected her wishes every step of the way.
He did not do anything morally wrong, nor is he to blame for any issues liz might have.
However, from a Joe perspective, the idea oh handling his crush on joyce by sleeping with proxy-joyce was a bit… Questionable, from a “how do i deal with feelings” perspective.
It’s almost like he’s also a teenager who’s learning who he is, just like everyone else in the strip that commenter bend over backwards to defend. But Joe gets shit on constantly because he’s open about his love of sex, despite his constantly displaying the behaviors people say men need to have. Getting consent. Respecting girls who say no without judgement or attempting to verbally bully/guilt them into it. Supporting all of his friends and being an all around good person. He’s arguably a better person than anyone else in the strip.
Joe gets dumped on because he consistently saw women as sex objects, rated them on their looks/abilities in bed and made jokes or sexual innuendoes about them. He attempted to excuse his behavior not by seeing “Hey, I love sex” but by claiming that men were wired to think about sex every seven seconds, thus making it a fault of his gender rather than a unique flaw to himself. Remember when his female rating book got public attention and every woman he saw was glaring at him? Yeah, it’s hard to approve him for that. Perhaps it shows his love for sex but also displays a callous disregard for other people’s feelings.
That being said, he has shown growth and displays many of the behaviors you state here. If I had to have a choice between having him in the room with me and beady-eyed, sarcastic Spike, I’d probably choose Joe.
Joe acted as best as he should have in that situation, but the shame comes from his intentions- Liz was not meant to be “just a hookup”, she was a proxy for who Joe really wants sex with, and he explicitly admitted that. The shame is either in realizing how awful treating someone as a proxy for sex and/or emotional closure (unlikely) or because Joyce called him “her biggest mistake” by proxy (she didn’t, but Lis was meant to be the Joyce stand-in, so her actions, to Joe, reflect what Joyce would do)
Not morally wrong, but I’d say not “best as he should have” either. Liz was giving off all sorts of signs that she wasn’t nearly as ready as she was pretending to be. Picking up on those and not going ahead with the hookup, even though she asked, would have been better, and would have dropped the chance for emotional trauma.
I mean, to avoid relitigating anything else I’ve yammered on about; isn’t it a good thing to learn during sexual experimentation that, actually, you totally can withdraw consent whenever you feel like it and your partner needs to respect this choice?
I’m saying Joe’s kicking himself for letting the situation progress to that point, rationalizing away the voice in the back of his head telling him it’s not a good idea. What if she didn’t stop there, but felt the same regret the next morning?
Yeah, that’s a good thing to learn, but it’s not actually better to learn it by pushing yourself into doing something you weren’t ready for and panicking than to not push yourself there in the first place.
It’s definitely good that Joe stopped (obviously) and that he stopped gracefully, which is even less common, but it’s hard to argue that it was a good experience overall. He’s messed up by it now and she was definitely distraught when it happened, though we haven’t seen her since. Those aren’t signs of a good thing.
I assume Joe is concerned about how close he got to hurting a Joyce proxy.
And is starting to realize Danny might have had a point when he was refusing Billie for her own sake even if he isn’t thinking about that one instance.
Nah, Joe refusing Liz “for her own sake” would be dumb, especially when Danny did that, Joe called it out, and then Danny called back to it directly.
It’s weird to take ownership of someone else’s agency like that (though I’m guessing most of y’all mean that as “Joe decides not to have sex because he thinks these are red flags”, which is something involving his own agency) especially when the much more sensible choice (and thus, the choice that should never ever ever ever ever be made in a character drama) is Joe refusing Liz for his own sake.
But, of course, Joe’s a manly man. Guys can’t say no, that’s gay, does his dick not work or something? He refuses to process his own obvious discomfort until he turns it around; he is uncomfortable, but actually it’s because all these pesky Joyce feelings are getting in the way and he just needs to blow his load hard enough to get them out.
Then, oops, turns out Indomitable Sex Monster Joe is can’t even have that purely physical transaction anymore, because he’s capable of emotionally hurting a woman (and a woman who’s Not-Joyce at that) even then.
“It’s weird to take ownership of someone else’s agency like that”
agency doesn’t exist in a vacuum. it’s a legalistic fiction. it’s useful, but it’s not real. people’s actions are highly determined by context, upbringing, and so on. the reality of how we make choices is shades of gray, not an on/off switch.
i’m just putting this out there, because i disagree with the way you frame this, and i think this is why.
wait ok, “legalistic” sounds dismissive. it’s also an ethical concept. i repeat, agency is absolutely a useful tool. but it’s also not the only lens that can help make sense of a situation.
I agree for the most part, I think, in that “can this legal adult have sex?” seems like a pretty clear question that gets shaped around the edges by surrounding context, I just find the specific context of Liz trying to hook up with Joe pretty simple.
Liz wants to bang Joe because she’s frustrated by how her upbringing has impacted her in life. She wants the things her friends have, she is old enough to have them, but she was not only raised in a way that wouldn’t let her explore them healthily, she’s now in a state where the person she’s pretending to be to cater to her stepmom is leading to her peers mocking her.
That’s the motivation, and I think it’s a pretty normal one for a college freshman. She affirms that she wants sex, and then boombadadoom, turns out it’s way harder and way scarier than she thought it’d be where she’d get laid and strut back to school knowing she got one over all these clowns, and enforced by norms of sexual purity or not, Liz isn’t comfortable doing this with a stranger, she wants it to be with someone she loves, and then says she would have ruined herself forever (which definitely is enforced by norms of sexual purity).
But to a partner she’s propositioning that’s not on the surface, she just enthusiastically wants to punch her V card and we’re privy to her motivations because we can infer stuff and form readings of her character. It’s weird to decide for her why she can’t have sex, which is an entirely separate conversation to Joe deciding why she cannot have sex with him, but as I’ve learned this past month and a half it’s real easy to use the same words with like six different meanings to describe the same scenario and for all I know the topic of “why it’s wrong for Liz to have sex” is less “her inherent agency as a capable adult” and more “raising red flags”, though from there I think there’s a discussion in why those flags are even flags at all.
“we’re privy to her motivations because we can infer stuff and form readings of her character.”
We’ve basically seen all the same scenes involving Liz as Joe has, except for her arrival. There’s not much we can infer that Joe can’t. He’s seen her be maniacally performative in how over her faith she is. He’s heard her voice catch before she claimed she can do what she wants. He knows the “edibles” were vitamin tabs, but that she apparently needs to believe she’s not sober.
I’m not going to link to a bunch of strips because you know what i mean, you’re just not reading them the way i do.
Anyway, i just think this specific question, of “Joe had no say over her agency and it’s a bad idea to question someone’s decision for their own good” is not as plain as you paint it, that’s all =)
Anyway, i just think this specific question, of “Joe had no say over her agency and it’s a bad idea to question someone’s decision for their own good” is not as plain as you paint it, that’s all =)
These are two separate questions.
Questioning the sexual agency of a coherent, legal adult is weird, and very pointedly, both times Danny and Joe have engaged with it, where they had to moralize their way out of having sex (in particular this speaks to me as an expression of toxic masculinity for the both of them, considering Danny had to assert he “wasn’t dead” to Joe), it was actually a front for sensible feelings like “I don’t actually want this.” Liz is actually old enough to decide she wants to have sex, she did want to have sex when she went to Joe, it just turned out she wasn’t nearly as ready as she thought she was, but that choice still has to be hers.
The leadup strip where Liz talks about how she is a Secular Adult who does Secular Adult Things like Sex With Hot Boys and Weed Drugs isn’t a sign that she’s “not ready”, because she is actually ready by the standards of being a coherent, legal adult verbally affirming her desire to have sex. That’s within a vacuum shaped by outside contexts, but that vacuum is the where the question of “whether or not I can decide to have sex” exists.
And then before it gets going she realizes it’s not what she wants, so she stops. Whether or not Liz can choose to have sex and whether or not Liz is emotionally prepared for sex are separate topics, since she only found out she wasn’t when she went for it. More pointedly, “whether or not Liz is emotionally prepared for sex” is something her partner can’t decide for her, but can certainly decide why they themself don’t want to engage with it. Hypothetically, if Joe and Liz banged and had a great time, does that retroactively mean Joe seeing her say Weed Drugs wasn’t the red flag it’s being treated as?
I don’t think anyone suggesting that Joe should have paid attention to those red flags has phrased it in terms of “agency”. That’s always been the framing of those saying he should pay no attention to any signs she’s giving other than the actual consent (and similar legal issues like “of age” and not drunk). I don’t think milu is questioning her agency at all, but referring only to your use of the term.
Personally, I don’t think Joe would be denying her agency even if he read into her behavior signs that she wasn’t as ready as she claimed and said no on those grounds. Whether he was right or wrong, that’s his agency, not hers. Joe’s big motivation is not hurting women. He can choose to not sleep with them if he thinks that will be bad for them. That’s up to him.
As for the hypothetical, red flags aren’t guarantees. They’re warning signs. If it had all turned out alright, the cautions would still be there. As a parallel, especially early on, Joe gave off a lot red flags as a guy women shouldn’t trust. It turns out those signs were performative. He was trustable, even then, but he was imitating the signs that a lot of dangerous guys give off.
Yes! thank you @thejeff, it’s not so much that i have a quibble with you or Joe ascribing full agency to Liz— really, it’s that you’re insisting this discussion is about agency at all. A small part of it is— like when some people pondered, “are you really making a conscious choice if you think you’re high but you’re actually not”.
But mostly, i don’t think those of us saying “Joe could have suspected that Liz didn’t really want this”— were concerned about Liz’s literal agency at all.
Spencer: “that vacuum is the where the question of “whether or not I can decide to have sex” exists.”
it’s interesting, because this is not the question i’m interested in. you also headed your response to my earlier comment with that same question, and i thought it was just bad phrasing and i didn’t want to get caught in semantics, but actually, i think semantics is what we’re struggling with here.
Again and again we have this conversation (well, mostly you and jeff have this conversation lol) where we clearly can’t get through to each other on this, because i say potayto and you absolutely totally hear me say potahto every time.
it’s baffling to me how on earth you come away from comments like mine thinking that “whether or not I can decide to have sex” is a phrasing of the topic i would agree with. no. of course that’s not the discussion i’m having. and conversely, i’m sure when you read my (or jeff’s) comments, it must be so obvious to you that we just don’t understand what you’re saying. it’s kind of fascinating ^^
as an aside, because this keeps coming up, i don’t think the situation with Danny and Billie is a 1:1 comparison. Danny assumed Billie didn’t really wanna fuck him based on nothing at all (or likely, as you suggest, it was old-school white-knight-ish masculinity kicking in.) It’s just kind of unfortunate that these 2 situations got equated by Danny who knows nothing about Liz and the events of the day.
I agree it’s a semantics issue where we’re using the same words to mean something different, and I mean that as non-confrontationally as possible. I don’t know if it comes off as such, but it’s worth saying it anyway.
as an aside, because this keeps coming up, i don’t think the situation with Danny and Billie is a 1:1 comparison
I think it is and that’s why the deliberate callback was drawn, but not for the overall sequence of “Joe dithers about having sex with Liz” but, specifically, just his attempts to get out of it by going “oh but she can’t decide for herself.” The reality is that Joe and Danny both did not want sex with an eager woman, and instead of just saying so they have to concoct a moral reason why sex with her is wrong for her and not them, that whoever is propositioning them doesn’t actually have the ability to decide they want sex.
Come to think of it, I wonder if that’s where I’ve been getting lost in the weeds. The issue for me is not that Liz is clearly out of her depth (which still makes her capable, but is also a reason to decide you don’t want to, insofar as you need a reason at all), but more specifically Joe attempting to say “she can’t decide for herself”, which I think is an element of that specific strip due to calling back to Danny’s go-around with the same thought processes.
From there, I wonder if I’ve been drawing in “Liz is incapable” with “Liz is capable, but also this is gonna end badly.” To be perfectly frank I don’t feel convinced I was misreading every argument I had on the subject, but by the same token that I kept arguing about it means that, inevitably, I’d run into misrepresenting someone else’s views.
Which is probably a roundabout realization to the effect of “the next time a Joyce strip comes around I should probably go touch grass.”
ok no, i definitely went on a bit of an overgeneralization there when i said you misread me “every time” and sorry about that. I think what’s happening, as often in these discussions— and to be clear, i welcome the discussion, and feeling like we’re not getting each other a lot of the time is ok, that’s just life— is that we take away something different from the comic. to use a common saying around here, that’s a tribute to Willis’s writing, that the same strip will elicit such interestingly different readings from different people. the characters are just that real.
for instance, i think i get it when you say that Danny and Joe are in some sense doing the same thing in those two situations, but i might focus on what sets each case apart when you find the similarities more compelling. in the end, we’re coming at it with our own biases, and we react differently as a result. this is a bit wishy-washy probably, and i def could go back and pick at your choice of words again, but i think i’m good for tonight lol x_x
i don’t know if you got into the weeds or anything, that’s of course for you to say. but that is certainly a thing that happens to me any time a discussion i’m involved in goes on for too long: i start to lose track of what i was arguing and it all just starts to sound like gobbledygook and i wonder what i got myself into. i think there’s an art to knowing when to agree to disagree. debates rarely just naturally reach that sweet spot where you can walk away satisfied at having had a good brain workout. i try to keep that in mind and just pull out as gracefully as i can before it gets either too unpleasant or just plain confusing ^^
@milu: Yeah, this matches a lot of how I think about this. Particularly the “shades of gray, not an on/off switch” part. Ties in, I think, to what I’ve said before about how we keep framing social interactions in terms of what characters owe to each other, rather than what are good ways of treating each other.
yes, absolutely.
i’ve read through a decent amount of the long discussions you and Spencer have had, and, before i can put any words on it, i just know that i agree with your outlook just on a physical level, whereas i just tense up and wince at Spencer’s. I won’t necessarily know how to express it then and there, but there’s this feeling of “YES THANK YOU YES” going on when i read your replies.
no offense Spencer ^^ a lot of people find your reads comforting, so you know. strokes and blokes and all that.
but the nerdy, analytical part of me now wishes i could put my finger on where the sort of fundamental difference in values between these two subtly (?) opposing worldviews resides. you know?
or am i making too much of this. that’s how it feels to me, though.
oh no, i didn’t realize you’d be bothered by that! i don’t think it’s about the way you write, Spencer. it’s not you, it’s me! honest.
Maybe i wasn’t clear. I find myself tensing up physically when i read some of your posts, because they’re challenging to me, to my preconceived notions, to my worldview. that’s not a bad thing, in fact it’s a good thing in that what makes me tense up is the feeling that you’ve got a point, and you make it very eloquently— and yet i don’t want to agree with you, because your conclusions don’t dovetail with my intuitive read. so that kind of chafes, right? i’m sure you know that feeling? and this might drive me to look for a solution to that tension. is it your framing? is it your reasoning? or are you just… right?
And yes sometimes i’ve found that the way to resolve that tension (that cognitive dissonance, if you will) is to change my mind. i think i’ve said once or twice before that you’d convinced me? probably most of the time you didn’t, but that’s ok. you’re an Extremely Online Person. you know that changing someone’s opinion on the internet is a rare occurence =) hell, it’s rare irl, too.
Haha, you don’t need to worry about me. I’ll say again that my ego is unbreakable, you really can’t say anything here that’ll bother me and certainly not through being as constantly polite as you’ve been.
I’ve been trying to pull back on those long discussions because I have a similar reaction to a lot of Spencer’s posts and it’s deeply frustrating. It’s not so much the logic or the rhetoric, I suspect we’re just starting from different axioms and there’s no real way to reconcile the conclusions.
Might sound dumb, but…I admire Joe. Being capable of shame means he wants to grow… to be better. that he has the idea of a version of himself that he wants to be.
I don’t think that’s a good example of how not “Smarting Of Age” this coming is called, OK Joe did hope Dina would know to ask what he was ashamed about but when she didn’t he immediately came clean and told her that’s what he’d been hoping for. (OK he didn’t exactly say that, and I guess Dina may not have caught the implication of “sometimes people want you to ask anyway”, but still— he’s doing pretty good)
And…. just how is Dina implicated in Joe’s personal struggle? Was she there to hear it when Liz’s comment tore him to shreds and flushed them down the toilet?
which prompt do you mean? panel 1 or panel 5?
Panel 1: yeah, that’s fair.
Panel 5: no, that would be extremely clear to me coming right on the heel of the panel 1-2 interaction. I don’t know about Dina though— as Needfuldoer suggests, maybe she really is that impervious to anything not stated explicitly. But to neurotypical me, there’s not a single doubt that panel 5 Joe wants Dina to ask what he’s ashamed about.
Joe’s not exactly known for being direct and upfront about his feelings, either.
yay internalized toxic masculinity :/
Most people would notice an acquaintance is distraught and ask about it. My read is Joe was trying to nudge Dina toward that but it went over her head.
huh. yeah, i definitely know that that is true but don’t know what to do with it. like, i don’t want to pressure someone who actually doesn’t want to talk about x subject and has made that clear. i guess maybe the lesson is that when you want to talk about something, sometimes the initiative to have that conversation has to come from you.
I don’t know that Joe’s statement is “true”, honestly. I think it’s more of a romcom/sitcom trope than a real thing. Maybe in a close relationship you learn that when your friend tells you they don’t want to talk about something, that actually means they want you to needle it out, but Dina and Joe are not close friends (yet), and Dina is not Joe’s mom. (Yes, there’s also a gendered slant to this sort of expectation.) If he wants to talk to her about something, he can ask her if she’s willing to listen, like a grown-up.
Which in a sense, is exactly what he does in panel 5… But this being Dina maybe she doesn’t understand that he’s talking about himself right now and not making a general statement, or maybe she understands very well… and just pretends not to.
It’s definitely a thing I’ve experienced on either end. Throwing out the “I don’t want to talk about it” and then someone pressuring on that can feel relieving.
I say ‘pressuring’, to be honest it’s more like trying to absolve yourself from saying because of whatever discomfort there is. Anecdotally I had an issue that was, for lack of a better term, a social faux pas to discuss, so I kept dancing around it until eventually I had to privately confide in a friend about it.
yeah no that makes sense. i think some people are just better at this— at reading a person to know when to press and when to drop it.
i guess i’m uncomfortable with second-guessing people generally, like i’m terrible at sarcasm and ribbing for instance. i think this falls in the same class of subtle social dances where you’re not supposed to take words at face value, so you have to be extra sensitive to tell a disguised invitation from a hard limit.
Indeed. It’s a boundary I only feel pushing on with the smallest amount of people, and even then I relent after that one effort; maybe if I “dug deeper” or whatever I’d get to the problem, but not only is that not my responsibility, maybe I’m making it worse by dragging it out and the consequences of that aren’t something I can adequately manage for their sake.
Personally feel that no matter how good you think you are at reading these alleged “ques” for discerning disguised invitations from hard limits, it’s still quite the gamble if you decide to go engage about it anyway. Lots of times it’s not worth the risk, even if its an invitation, it’s not your responsibility anyway.
Either that or my S.A.D. makes me biased. I dunno.
i’m gonna re-use my metaphor, but it really is like a dance. it’s tricky, and you might make a fool of yourself, but when you’re in sync with the other person it’s just so thrilling. It’s kind of like play-fighting when you’re a kid? did you use to do that? (do you maybe still do that, idk, no judgement) Sometimes it was just good fun; sometimes it would turn into something more vicious.
but also, i think… it’s just a fact of how a lot of people do interact. i mean, there’s a case to be made that whether you think this sort of social game is “worth it” or not, it’s good to be aware that people do expect (or hope) certain unbidden reactions from people. is that a neuro-normative thing to say?
as i said i’m kind of sucky at it but i still get it, if a moment too late. i know not everyone works that way, so i try not to assume that’s the case with people i don’t know. maybe that’s good policy, generally? i don’t know, it’s what i do but not out of any sort of committment to inclusive communication. i haven’t given it that much thought, i guess.
Yeah, I guess play-fighting is fun, and I guess it doesn’t come off as too rambunctious if you do it with a friend you’ve come to really know, as opposed to just some random stranger.
As for social interaction, I just don’t know how it’s the same kind of fun?
Anyway, in this case in particular, I don’t think Joe should be expecting that kind of thing from people who’ve never seen him like this before.
There’s also the fact that Dina has only JUST started to have more serious interactions with him.
hah, it’s interesting that you don’t see the parallel. maybe those really are two very different sort of social games. but to me there’s a lot in common: there are rules, even though they’re unspoken. you’re supposed to pretend to be doing something, but not really do it. anyway.
and yeah, Joe is asking a lot of Dina here. that much i do agree with.
Yeah, I guess there’s similarities on that level, but besides the fact that those *unspoken* rules can vary a lot between social webs, not to mention the need to keep it within the other person’s limits, both of which really underscore the prerequisite for really KNOWING the person, I can notice one stark contrast where the metaphor ultimately fails–
People don’t usually play-fight to work through tough personal issues.
That, and in this particular case again, when’s the last serious, pre-time-skip interaction that Dina had with Joe anyway?
I dunno, it’s just that expecting Dina to engage with Joe in this kinda social play-fight or whatever you wanna call it kinda reminds me of that episode of SpongeBob where it was “Opposite Day”, and Squidward wanted to engage in wacky playful banter with Spongebob, much to the latter’s confusion, ’cause Squidward doesn’t usually act like that.
“People don’t usually play-fight to work through tough personal issues.”
don’t they though? ^^ just kidding. i muddled the conversation by dragging in other sorts of “social games” and in particular in my mind play-fighting was more of an analog for sarcastic banter, where you roast each other and sometimes say some pretty mean things with a straight face, but as long as you both know what’s up this can be a really satisfying bonding game.
Anyway, i notice you keep dragging this back to Dina and Joe specifically and pointing out that they’re not close friends or whatever. I think what i’m saying applies to situations where people are not close friends, but sure, it’s even less guaranteed to click. you always take a chance when you make an implicit request. part of the “rules” is you’re not allowed to be mad at the other person when they don’t catch the implicit part. (like, that makes you a jerk.) so it’s like, yeah. it doesn’t always work. it doesn’t have to work. but that’s… fine? like, it’s not a big deal if Dina didn’t get what Joe wanted. Joe will know to be more explicit next time, that’s all. it’s whatever, honestly.
Besides, you’re asking when Dina and Joe had a serious pre-timeskip interaction. I don’t get it. they did have a bit of friends-y moment in the lab earlier that week, didn’t they? why isn’t that more relevant than their pre-timeskip relationship.
“I did not realize you were a organism capable of shame”.
How couldn’t dinosaurz breath fire like dragons? If Dina is able to apply sick burns on her victims…
On board, 1000%
If sal gets Danny, amber can take Asher
I propose the ship name Embers. Bc it sounds like amber, and y’know ash. And it’s go down in glorious flames
Something I love about Shortpacked!Amber is that she was this timid, withdrawn abuse victim, and her character development doesn’t just involve asserting herself, it involves indulging in hedonistic anger and dating the most horrible person in the universe, except both of them are actually totally perfect and in love with each other because Amber gets to process that aggression with someone who can never, ever be hurt by it.
It got me thinking of how in SP! Mike was trying to lead Amber to Jacob, because Jacob was kind and sweet and affirming, and Amber didn’t want that; she wanted this horrible asshole and his stupid 2D haircut, and it gets me to think on how Amber/Danny here was, ultimately, not gonna work, not because Amber’s “too angry but because she needs a partner she can be angry at who won’t break down and, consequently, make Amber feel like shit for giving into her anger again. Sal’s got some pent-up anger too, but it’s on a different scale than Amber’s with a Danny who’s gone through some major character development, including standing up for himself in the face of the One Person At A Time he’s allowed to think romantically about. That’s a level where if Sal lashed out at him over something, Danny might be healthy enough to stand up for himself again.
Obviously I’m just inventing this out of whole cloth, but Amber dating the guy who:
– called the cops on Sal and is in part responsible for the robbery.
– helped Blaine, not realizing that he was now an accessory to Amber and all her friends getting kidnapped.
– actually had Amber’s dad shot in the face.
… like, come on, that is my exact kind of trash. I need it.
Embers is go!
(Alternatively Asher/Ethan, because I think the latter has probably developed a thing for bad boys)
Remember, Dina doesn’t do subtlety. If Joe had said, “I’m having feelings and I need to talk about them!”, Dina probably would have replied, “As you are a friend, and your feelings are important, I will listen to them.” Joe’s attempt at subtlety went straight over her head.
Remember, she is also short, and he is tall. Many things about Joe go straight over her head. This is one of them.
Well just to be fair, Joe having feelings like this AND wanting to talk about them is uncharted territory for pretty much ANYONE who’s come to know Joe.
I’m afraid his worse fears may be true — that at least for now, he’s on his own when it comes to this.
Okay, between the two beat panels, and Dina long having walked out of frame, this one is a hoot and also painful at the same time. That’s what keeps me coming back.
Is Joe ashamed that he let Liz withdraw consent(he better not be after I gave him props for doing it)? Ashamed he went along with the sexytimes at all? Ashamed he was banging Joyce in his mind during that? Dangit Dina make him talk about it so I can know!
Yep. Joe’s the Indomitable Sex Monster, he does not meaningfully want to be this person anymore, but he’s sure as hell not gonna escape it. Probably relevant to other characters who exist in a specific box that other characters criticize them for being in, and then get mad, disbelieving or incredulous when they step out. Joe, Joyce, Dina and Sal should form a D&D group.
How I’ve come to think of Joe is that unlike IW!Joe, who was a Funny Horndog Manly Man who mellowed out while still more or less retaining those traits, DoA!Joe is someone who began believing that becoming Funny Horndog Manly Man would make him happy and safe, and not totally ruin everything like he feels it has here. I won’t say it’s outright performative or even that Joe doesn’t “really believe” in it, so much as I don’t think it was an entirely natural sauntering towards that behaviour, and I think that Joe’s character development going forward will involve not just emotional honesty, but in happily engaging in things he brushed aside as not Real Man enough for him to do come college.
Relevant to that tweet Willis made featuring Joe juxtaposed to a tagline about monogamy, it’s actually pretty funny how both continuities’ Joes are deeply monogamous when it comes to romantic affection. IW!Joe liked Joyce but he wasn’t willing to change himself for her, and by the time he started thinking about romance in lieu of just casual sex he fell for Rachel real fast, was exclusive to her until her disappearance, whereupon he mourned for two years until he tried with Robin and then went back to Rachel once she was rescued. I think he even outright says Robin was the only woman he had slept with during that time too.
And then you got DoA Joe falling hard for the first girl who took him seriously, it’s gucci.
The things that people say and don’t mean make life hell for the people that actually mean the things they say. I have lost count of the amount of times someone has assumed I want to talk about something that I REALLY REALLY DO NOT. This has literally ended friendships, because a few of them would not stop. Because the neurotypical white lie BS is so ingrained that some people act like I’m not even ALLOWED to be telling the truth.
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Dina will remember that.
And at the most inconvenient time, although painfully appropriate, time.
“Dina will remember that.”
“And at the most inconvenient time, although painfully appropriate, time.”
Here, this was made just for you two (and any Telltale players): https://imgur.com/a/9bzRQCT
I was not disappointed.
Exactly what I expected, and also gut-wrenching
Dina is learning!
Already she knows not to attack the same part of her enclosure twice. She’s testing for weaknesses.
Either that or she already knows that SHAME is exactly the reason why anyone would want to be forced to talk about something.
But hey, your guess is as good as mine 😀
cheetah speed. astonishing jumper.
The siren Danny keeps under his hat has now activated.
It’s time to talk about feelings, Joe. There is no escape, Danny has been waiting years for this moment.
And suddenly in my brain Danny is JD and Joe is Dr. Cox and a hug is about to happen.
Danny: *Bolts upright from whatever couch he chose to sleep on that WASN’T nearby Ethan and thus causing a massive Awkwardness Aura for everyone else in the lounge* My time has come.
He’s out biking with Sal when the alarm hits, so he begins to pick up speed until the bike propels itself into the air.
You mean like those love-powered bikes from Futurama? 😀
climactic ET music swells
An emergency beacon pop out of the top of his hat, like Inspector Gadget’s. Cars pull to the side to let him pass.
go talk to jacob. remember jacob? he’s a good guy.
He’s too busy dating Dana.
It’s Jacob’s running gag that he dates people Sarah has had dramatic backstories with.
Soooo Liz next?
Omg… that would be perfect. She’s like a Joyce clone who hasn’t yet manipulated him into an awkward social situation.
Damn, I’m stuck.
On one hand I super want Dana to come back during the next chapter and we find out that both Sarah and Raidah totally fucked her life up and she barely recovered, neither of them cared about her more than they cared being right, and then she power walks away to go date the guy they both moon over.
On the other hand, I really want to see Liz hit on Jacob.
… wait holy shit what if Liz and Jacob hit it off and they start an LDR
Nothing is as boring as a long distance relationship.
What about watching someone else play an RPG?
“I will remember that when dealing with someone I actually care about, like my girlfriend or Amber.”
There is a non-zero chance that Becky tries the same line and Dina goes “ah, Joe demoed this for me today, he was very helpful.”
Very possibly, maybe even likely, about why Becky doesn’t want to see Joyce or why she’s in a bad mood.
Oh yeah that’s right, Dina wasn’t there!
I wonder if this will lead to some conflict between them:
D: “So you are upset that Joyce has finally seen reason?”
B: “Whose side are you on?!“
That doesn’t sound like a very Dina thing to say, since “finally” kind of implies the sort of evangelical atheism that Joyce herself has started spouting, and which Dina clearly doesn’t have. Dina doesn’t care what other people believe as long as a) they don’t make her try to believe it and b) they aren’t wrong about dinosaurs.
“But why are you upset that Joyce no longer shares your beliefs, when you are friends with many people who never did?” is a possibility, though.
Dina doesn’t care what other people believe
Not necessarily. She does get real blunt at how stupid she thinks Joyce’s upbringing was and what she was taught, just hearing Joyce talk about it annoys her, and then making snow angels with Sarah led her to be completely livid when Sarah described her good mood as magical, because Dina thought she was tricked into taking part of ceremonial wizardry.
I think she cares. It’s even a book title!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/renounce/
Also, this one:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/proven/
(There’s others but comments with more than a couple links in them get caught in the spam filter.)
Honestlyyyy I think Dina will take Joyce’s side, because Joyce is acting like Dina did to Joyce: renounce magical thinking and embrace empirical evidence.
However, “taking Joyce’s side” in this instance just means “oh cool you’re an atheist, good for her, let me tell you about dinosaurs.” Dina’s love for Becky is never going to be in doubt to anyone but maybe Becky herself, who is currently dealing with the completely rational thought process of “I can’t fuck Dina or else I’ll go to Hell, and also I’m really sad that Dina doesn’t verbally express how much she wants to fuck me all the time,” ie: the root of Becky’s current distress is in magical thinking, it’s just magical thinking she still thinks is important. Becky is as much of a fundie as Joyce, they just changed in different ways, and I think Joyce being “taken away” by atheism will lead her to start resenting her atheist companions, because Joyce provided that rock of a status quo she relied on to survive since joining the series.
I don’t think it’s definitely gonna happen so much as I think it’d be really interesting, but I think Joyce’s outgrowing her anger and her closest friends growing out of being little douchebags sticking her in a box will involve Joyce forming a support network of people outside of them, and then Becky/Dorothy/Sarah can also go through their own arcs relating to how they treat and have treated Joyce. Becky’s real mad and Dorothy and Sarah have already failed, they’re in too deep on who Joyce should be to really help her the way she needs without trying to get her to validate their own feelings. Joe’s in her corner so far and has provided the emotional support in telling Joyce that she still matters even without Heaven, Dina hits the same note of “former frenemy” with all the knowledge Joyce would want, at a time where Joyce’s atheism isn’t a belief in the non-existence of God so much as the existence of nothing and no foundation to grab onto, and for a third party member I’d go with Sal, another cast member who chafes a lot at what her peers expect of her, and then those peers get mad when she tries to stop.
I can’t fuck Dina or else I’ll go to Hell
Although if I thought about this, I might have been pursuing this the wrong way the whole time.
Becky wants sex, but tells herself she can’t until she and Dina get married in what is the only part of her upbringing that Becky continues to rely on magical thinking for, other than the existence of God himself. Becky’s upset that Dina doesn’t prompt the same reaction as Becky has for Dina, she’s worried it means that her eventually marriage to Dina is wrong and won’t work out*, and I didn’t think of it till now, but I wonder if sexual purity is something Becky still holds onto because it allows her some normalcy, something exacerbated now that Joyce has changed.
The last four months of her life have been a chaotic nightmare, and apart from just sexual repression issues that come with being a fundie, I wonder if she’s fearful of sex because losing her virginity is kinda like losing the last part of herself that her upbringing still has hold over her. Once it happens, Old Becky is gone forever. That’d certainly explain the implications that members of the commentariat in the know see in her, where she’s hoping Dina gets so wildly horny that she can’t stop herself from sexing Becky up, and Becky gets to have sex and still tell herself she stayed true to God.
We don’t talk about it enough because she is a funny charming goofball with a cool haircut who modifies her fact-based upbringing when presented with new information, but Jesus Christ this kid is messed up.
*This is a bit of a side question for those in the know about fundies: is it a thing to rush into marriage so you can start having God-sanctioned sex? I wonder if that plays into it for Becky too.
On the asterisk: Yes, definitely a thing.
The other issue is that Becky wants her cool atheist girlfriend to be consumed with lust for her so that maybe said cool atheist girlfriend (who therefore doesn’t believe that sex is only sanctioned in the bonds of marriage) will lose control and they will both give into their lustful urges together, but because Dina started it it’s okay and they couldn’t HELP being so all-consumingly horny. The issue there, of course, is that Dina is aspec (so she won’t be consumed by her lustful urges) and would find the idea of having sex with Becky when she says no absolutely abhorrent. There will be no lustful atheist ravaging, and Becky is maybe kinda disappointed by that fact, and also feels shame because DINA can find Becky pretty and want to have sex but not have frequent sexual attraction, so clearly this is a failing in Becky’s faith. (It’s not, and Becky REALLY needs to get herself to an online educational resource about asexuality. And also non-shame-based resources about sexuality in general, as do Joyce, Liz, and for that matter Joe. Scarleteen is here for you, honey.)
Yeah, maybe you want them to make you talk about it, precisely because it is SHAME that’s holding you back from initiating the discussion yourself.
Oh my God I love Dina so much.
<3 This is very good.
She’ll pick up that sidequest later
gotta get to the main plot
That’s not how you RPG. You do the sidequests FIRST, lest advancing the main plot makes the sidequests unavailable.
Do you even game, bro? (/s)
That, and doing the sidequests first means you can be overleveled so you can beat the bosses more easily when you finally get to the main plot.
I’ll never forgive Fable for adding fake side quests at the beginning of the game, how am I supposed to complete the game if I can’t do EVERYTHING?
Dina is excellent, and apparently she really brings out Joe’s emotional intelligence.
I like both these characters a lot
I think in part since Dina’s Dina, and she has a way of just kind of walking through peoples’ emotional minefields without stepping on anything.
I do so admire that ninja skill. Is that what’s called an SEP field?
Nah, SEP is being invisible without actually being invisible. What Brad is talking about is more like pass without trace (see various videos in which cats walk through hallways full of dominos etc without tipping any over).
Joe doesn’t seem to be enjoying lying in the bed he made.
Why are you makingit sound like he did somethingwrong? He was approached by a girl who said she wanted to have sex and the second she indicated she wanted to stop he did. He didn’t try to talk her out of it, he just respected her wishes every step of the way.
He did not do anything morally wrong, nor is he to blame for any issues liz might have.
However, from a Joe perspective, the idea oh handling his crush on joyce by sleeping with proxy-joyce was a bit… Questionable, from a “how do i deal with feelings” perspective.
It’s almost like he’s also a teenager who’s learning who he is, just like everyone else in the strip that commenter bend over backwards to defend. But Joe gets shit on constantly because he’s open about his love of sex, despite his constantly displaying the behaviors people say men need to have. Getting consent. Respecting girls who say no without judgement or attempting to verbally bully/guilt them into it. Supporting all of his friends and being an all around good person. He’s arguably a better person than anyone else in the strip.
Joe gets dumped on because he consistently saw women as sex objects, rated them on their looks/abilities in bed and made jokes or sexual innuendoes about them. He attempted to excuse his behavior not by seeing “Hey, I love sex” but by claiming that men were wired to think about sex every seven seconds, thus making it a fault of his gender rather than a unique flaw to himself. Remember when his female rating book got public attention and every woman he saw was glaring at him? Yeah, it’s hard to approve him for that. Perhaps it shows his love for sex but also displays a callous disregard for other people’s feelings.
That being said, he has shown growth and displays many of the behaviors you state here. If I had to have a choice between having him in the room with me and beady-eyed, sarcastic Spike, I’d probably choose Joe.
Joe acted as best as he should have in that situation, but the shame comes from his intentions- Liz was not meant to be “just a hookup”, she was a proxy for who Joe really wants sex with, and he explicitly admitted that. The shame is either in realizing how awful treating someone as a proxy for sex and/or emotional closure (unlikely) or because Joyce called him “her biggest mistake” by proxy (she didn’t, but Lis was meant to be the Joyce stand-in, so her actions, to Joe, reflect what Joyce would do)
Where is your avatar from?
I absolutely love it 🙂
I found this after some searching. I think it’s just about what you’re looking for 😉
https://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/04/beautiful-things-happen-when-151-artists-take-on-151-pokmon/
Not morally wrong, but I’d say not “best as he should have” either. Liz was giving off all sorts of signs that she wasn’t nearly as ready as she was pretending to be. Picking up on those and not going ahead with the hookup, even though she asked, would have been better, and would have dropped the chance for emotional trauma.
He didn’t do anything wrong in the past 24 hours but I think he is questioning the life choices that led him here.
The only thing Joe did wrong was projecting his doubts onto Liz so he could justify ignoring all the red flags his conscience was waving.
I mean, to avoid relitigating anything else I’ve yammered on about; isn’t it a good thing to learn during sexual experimentation that, actually, you totally can withdraw consent whenever you feel like it and your partner needs to respect this choice?
Yes, that is a good thing which happened.
I’m saying Joe’s kicking himself for letting the situation progress to that point, rationalizing away the voice in the back of his head telling him it’s not a good idea. What if she didn’t stop there, but felt the same regret the next morning?
Yeah, that’s a good thing to learn, but it’s not actually better to learn it by pushing yourself into doing something you weren’t ready for and panicking than to not push yourself there in the first place.
It’s definitely good that Joe stopped (obviously) and that he stopped gracefully, which is even less common, but it’s hard to argue that it was a good experience overall. He’s messed up by it now and she was definitely distraught when it happened, though we haven’t seen her since. Those aren’t signs of a good thing.
To be clear, “she said stop, he stopped no question” was the only good thing that happened there. That situation as a whole was dumpster fire.
To be clear, that dumpster fire was because of Liz, not Joe. People take a lot of shit about him that he doesn’t deserve.
I’d split the blame 75% Liz, 25% Joe.
She should’ve realized she really wasn’t ready in the first place.
He shouldn’t have ignored his conscience recognizing it.
I assume Joe is concerned about how close he got to hurting a Joyce proxy.
And is starting to realize Danny might have had a point when he was refusing Billie for her own sake even if he isn’t thinking about that one instance.
Nah, Joe refusing Liz “for her own sake” would be dumb, especially when Danny did that, Joe called it out, and then Danny called back to it directly.
It’s weird to take ownership of someone else’s agency like that (though I’m guessing most of y’all mean that as “Joe decides not to have sex because he thinks these are red flags”, which is something involving his own agency) especially when the much more sensible choice (and thus, the choice that should never ever ever ever ever be made in a character drama) is Joe refusing Liz for his own sake.
But, of course, Joe’s a manly man. Guys can’t say no, that’s gay, does his dick not work or something? He refuses to process his own obvious discomfort until he turns it around; he is uncomfortable, but actually it’s because all these pesky Joyce feelings are getting in the way and he just needs to blow his load hard enough to get them out.
Then, oops, turns out Indomitable Sex Monster Joe is can’t even have that purely physical transaction anymore, because he’s capable of emotionally hurting a woman (and a woman who’s Not-Joyce at that) even then.
“It’s weird to take ownership of someone else’s agency like that”
agency doesn’t exist in a vacuum. it’s a legalistic fiction. it’s useful, but it’s not real. people’s actions are highly determined by context, upbringing, and so on. the reality of how we make choices is shades of gray, not an on/off switch.
i’m just putting this out there, because i disagree with the way you frame this, and i think this is why.
wait ok, “legalistic” sounds dismissive. it’s also an ethical concept. i repeat, agency is absolutely a useful tool. but it’s also not the only lens that can help make sense of a situation.
I agree for the most part, I think, in that “can this legal adult have sex?” seems like a pretty clear question that gets shaped around the edges by surrounding context, I just find the specific context of Liz trying to hook up with Joe pretty simple.
Liz wants to bang Joe because she’s frustrated by how her upbringing has impacted her in life. She wants the things her friends have, she is old enough to have them, but she was not only raised in a way that wouldn’t let her explore them healthily, she’s now in a state where the person she’s pretending to be to cater to her stepmom is leading to her peers mocking her.
That’s the motivation, and I think it’s a pretty normal one for a college freshman. She affirms that she wants sex, and then boombadadoom, turns out it’s way harder and way scarier than she thought it’d be where she’d get laid and strut back to school knowing she got one over all these clowns, and enforced by norms of sexual purity or not, Liz isn’t comfortable doing this with a stranger, she wants it to be with someone she loves, and then says she would have ruined herself forever (which definitely is enforced by norms of sexual purity).
But to a partner she’s propositioning that’s not on the surface, she just enthusiastically wants to punch her V card and we’re privy to her motivations because we can infer stuff and form readings of her character. It’s weird to decide for her why she can’t have sex, which is an entirely separate conversation to Joe deciding why she cannot have sex with him, but as I’ve learned this past month and a half it’s real easy to use the same words with like six different meanings to describe the same scenario and for all I know the topic of “why it’s wrong for Liz to have sex” is less “her inherent agency as a capable adult” and more “raising red flags”, though from there I think there’s a discussion in why those flags are even flags at all.
“we’re privy to her motivations because we can infer stuff and form readings of her character.”
We’ve basically seen all the same scenes involving Liz as Joe has, except for her arrival. There’s not much we can infer that Joe can’t. He’s seen her be maniacally performative in how over her faith she is. He’s heard her voice catch before she claimed she can do what she wants. He knows the “edibles” were vitamin tabs, but that she apparently needs to believe she’s not sober.
I’m not going to link to a bunch of strips because you know what i mean, you’re just not reading them the way i do.
Anyway, i just think this specific question, of “Joe had no say over her agency and it’s a bad idea to question someone’s decision for their own good” is not as plain as you paint it, that’s all =)
Anyway, i just think this specific question, of “Joe had no say over her agency and it’s a bad idea to question someone’s decision for their own good” is not as plain as you paint it, that’s all =)
These are two separate questions.
Questioning the sexual agency of a coherent, legal adult is weird, and very pointedly, both times Danny and Joe have engaged with it, where they had to moralize their way out of having sex (in particular this speaks to me as an expression of toxic masculinity for the both of them, considering Danny had to assert he “wasn’t dead” to Joe), it was actually a front for sensible feelings like “I don’t actually want this.” Liz is actually old enough to decide she wants to have sex, she did want to have sex when she went to Joe, it just turned out she wasn’t nearly as ready as she thought she was, but that choice still has to be hers.
The leadup strip where Liz talks about how she is a Secular Adult who does Secular Adult Things like Sex With Hot Boys and Weed Drugs isn’t a sign that she’s “not ready”, because she is actually ready by the standards of being a coherent, legal adult verbally affirming her desire to have sex. That’s within a vacuum shaped by outside contexts, but that vacuum is the where the question of “whether or not I can decide to have sex” exists.
And then before it gets going she realizes it’s not what she wants, so she stops. Whether or not Liz can choose to have sex and whether or not Liz is emotionally prepared for sex are separate topics, since she only found out she wasn’t when she went for it. More pointedly, “whether or not Liz is emotionally prepared for sex” is something her partner can’t decide for her, but can certainly decide why they themself don’t want to engage with it. Hypothetically, if Joe and Liz banged and had a great time, does that retroactively mean Joe seeing her say Weed Drugs wasn’t the red flag it’s being treated as?
I don’t think anyone suggesting that Joe should have paid attention to those red flags has phrased it in terms of “agency”. That’s always been the framing of those saying he should pay no attention to any signs she’s giving other than the actual consent (and similar legal issues like “of age” and not drunk). I don’t think milu is questioning her agency at all, but referring only to your use of the term.
Personally, I don’t think Joe would be denying her agency even if he read into her behavior signs that she wasn’t as ready as she claimed and said no on those grounds. Whether he was right or wrong, that’s his agency, not hers. Joe’s big motivation is not hurting women. He can choose to not sleep with them if he thinks that will be bad for them. That’s up to him.
As for the hypothetical, red flags aren’t guarantees. They’re warning signs. If it had all turned out alright, the cautions would still be there. As a parallel, especially early on, Joe gave off a lot red flags as a guy women shouldn’t trust. It turns out those signs were performative. He was trustable, even then, but he was imitating the signs that a lot of dangerous guys give off.
Yes! thank you @thejeff, it’s not so much that i have a quibble with you or Joe ascribing full agency to Liz— really, it’s that you’re insisting this discussion is about agency at all. A small part of it is— like when some people pondered, “are you really making a conscious choice if you think you’re high but you’re actually not”.
But mostly, i don’t think those of us saying “Joe could have suspected that Liz didn’t really want this”— were concerned about Liz’s literal agency at all.
Spencer: “that vacuum is the where the question of “whether or not I can decide to have sex” exists.”
it’s interesting, because this is not the question i’m interested in. you also headed your response to my earlier comment with that same question, and i thought it was just bad phrasing and i didn’t want to get caught in semantics, but actually, i think semantics is what we’re struggling with here.
Again and again we have this conversation (well, mostly you and jeff have this conversation lol) where we clearly can’t get through to each other on this, because i say potayto and you absolutely totally hear me say potahto every time.
it’s baffling to me how on earth you come away from comments like mine thinking that “whether or not I can decide to have sex” is a phrasing of the topic i would agree with. no. of course that’s not the discussion i’m having. and conversely, i’m sure when you read my (or jeff’s) comments, it must be so obvious to you that we just don’t understand what you’re saying. it’s kind of fascinating ^^
as an aside, because this keeps coming up, i don’t think the situation with Danny and Billie is a 1:1 comparison. Danny assumed Billie didn’t really wanna fuck him based on nothing at all (or likely, as you suggest, it was old-school white-knight-ish masculinity kicking in.) It’s just kind of unfortunate that these 2 situations got equated by Danny who knows nothing about Liz and the events of the day.
I agree it’s a semantics issue where we’re using the same words to mean something different, and I mean that as non-confrontationally as possible. I don’t know if it comes off as such, but it’s worth saying it anyway.
as an aside, because this keeps coming up, i don’t think the situation with Danny and Billie is a 1:1 comparison
I think it is and that’s why the deliberate callback was drawn, but not for the overall sequence of “Joe dithers about having sex with Liz” but, specifically, just his attempts to get out of it by going “oh but she can’t decide for herself.” The reality is that Joe and Danny both did not want sex with an eager woman, and instead of just saying so they have to concoct a moral reason why sex with her is wrong for her and not them, that whoever is propositioning them doesn’t actually have the ability to decide they want sex.
Come to think of it, I wonder if that’s where I’ve been getting lost in the weeds. The issue for me is not that Liz is clearly out of her depth (which still makes her capable, but is also a reason to decide you don’t want to, insofar as you need a reason at all), but more specifically Joe attempting to say “she can’t decide for herself”, which I think is an element of that specific strip due to calling back to Danny’s go-around with the same thought processes.
From there, I wonder if I’ve been drawing in “Liz is incapable” with “Liz is capable, but also this is gonna end badly.” To be perfectly frank I don’t feel convinced I was misreading every argument I had on the subject, but by the same token that I kept arguing about it means that, inevitably, I’d run into misrepresenting someone else’s views.
Which is probably a roundabout realization to the effect of “the next time a Joyce strip comes around I should probably go touch grass.”
ok no, i definitely went on a bit of an overgeneralization there when i said you misread me “every time” and sorry about that. I think what’s happening, as often in these discussions— and to be clear, i welcome the discussion, and feeling like we’re not getting each other a lot of the time is ok, that’s just life— is that we take away something different from the comic. to use a common saying around here, that’s a tribute to Willis’s writing, that the same strip will elicit such interestingly different readings from different people. the characters are just that real.
for instance, i think i get it when you say that Danny and Joe are in some sense doing the same thing in those two situations, but i might focus on what sets each case apart when you find the similarities more compelling. in the end, we’re coming at it with our own biases, and we react differently as a result. this is a bit wishy-washy probably, and i def could go back and pick at your choice of words again, but i think i’m good for tonight lol x_x
i don’t know if you got into the weeds or anything, that’s of course for you to say. but that is certainly a thing that happens to me any time a discussion i’m involved in goes on for too long: i start to lose track of what i was arguing and it all just starts to sound like gobbledygook and i wonder what i got myself into. i think there’s an art to knowing when to agree to disagree. debates rarely just naturally reach that sweet spot where you can walk away satisfied at having had a good brain workout. i try to keep that in mind and just pull out as gracefully as i can before it gets either too unpleasant or just plain confusing ^^
and on that note… take care, Spence xoxox
@milu: Yeah, this matches a lot of how I think about this. Particularly the “shades of gray, not an on/off switch” part. Ties in, I think, to what I’ve said before about how we keep framing social interactions in terms of what characters owe to each other, rather than what are good ways of treating each other.
yes, absolutely.
i’ve read through a decent amount of the long discussions you and Spencer have had, and, before i can put any words on it, i just know that i agree with your outlook just on a physical level, whereas i just tense up and wince at Spencer’s. I won’t necessarily know how to express it then and there, but there’s this feeling of “YES THANK YOU YES” going on when i read your replies.
so, you know. thanks ^^
no offense Spencer ^^ a lot of people find your reads comforting, so you know. strokes and blokes and all that.
but the nerdy, analytical part of me now wishes i could put my finger on where the sort of fundamental difference in values between these two subtly (?) opposing worldviews resides. you know?
or am i making too much of this. that’s how it feels to me, though.
I mean I don’t know what else to say here either, I’ve never had someone tensing up reading my posts.
I dunno. I’m blunt and direct in writing, maybe it come off as rigidly uncooperative.
oh no, i didn’t realize you’d be bothered by that! i don’t think it’s about the way you write, Spencer. it’s not you, it’s me! honest.
Maybe i wasn’t clear. I find myself tensing up physically when i read some of your posts, because they’re challenging to me, to my preconceived notions, to my worldview. that’s not a bad thing, in fact it’s a good thing in that what makes me tense up is the feeling that you’ve got a point, and you make it very eloquently— and yet i don’t want to agree with you, because your conclusions don’t dovetail with my intuitive read. so that kind of chafes, right? i’m sure you know that feeling? and this might drive me to look for a solution to that tension. is it your framing? is it your reasoning? or are you just… right?
And yes sometimes i’ve found that the way to resolve that tension (that cognitive dissonance, if you will) is to change my mind. i think i’ve said once or twice before that you’d convinced me? probably most of the time you didn’t, but that’s ok. you’re an Extremely Online Person. you know that changing someone’s opinion on the internet is a rare occurence =) hell, it’s rare irl, too.
Haha, you don’t need to worry about me. I’ll say again that my ego is unbreakable, you really can’t say anything here that’ll bother me and certainly not through being as constantly polite as you’ve been.
I’ve been trying to pull back on those long discussions because I have a similar reaction to a lot of Spencer’s posts and it’s deeply frustrating. It’s not so much the logic or the rhetoric, I suspect we’re just starting from different axioms and there’s no real way to reconcile the conclusions.
So we argue past each other with no resolution.
This scenario is giving me a very odd sense of deja vu, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…
Joe, go find Danny. Where’s Danny, Joe? He’ll make you talk about things. Go get Danny.
Is there a danny version of the bat-signal to summon him? Maybe a spotlight that shines an image of a ukulele in the sky?
I wish there was, that would be awesome! Instead, Joe may have to rely on ok’ tried-and-true SMS.
All of his worry that people cannot change, and Joe went and changed anyhow.
Might sound dumb, but…I admire Joe. Being capable of shame means he wants to grow… to be better. that he has the idea of a version of himself that he wants to be.
I get that.
Well in any case, he shouldn’t expect Dina to read his mind and know where he wants to go in being forced to talk about it.
In fact, he shouldn’t expect anyone to automatically know.
But then again, this isn’t Smarting of Age, so go figure. :/
I don’t think that’s a good example of how not “Smarting Of Age” this coming is called, OK Joe did hope Dina would know to ask what he was ashamed about but when she didn’t he immediately came clean and told her that’s what he’d been hoping for. (OK he didn’t exactly say that, and I guess Dina may not have caught the implication of “sometimes people want you to ask anyway”, but still— he’s doing pretty good)
I think the issue is that maybe Dina doesn’t care. Joe interactions have historically not been great for her.
He’s trying to get her to break the ice using implication. That might have worked on almost any other character, but not on someone who takes the content of your dialogue literally, at face value.
And…. just how is Dina implicated in Joe’s personal struggle? Was she there to hear it when Liz’s comment tore him to shreds and flushed them down the toilet?
Joe’s implying he wants Dina to directly ask him why he feels shameful, Dina missed that prompt.
“something that is suggested without being said directly : something that is implied”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/implication
I dunno, considering Joe’s history, there’s a part of me that feels that reading this prompt requires reading his mind.
I mean, has ANYONE seen Joe like this before? Would they know what to do?
which prompt do you mean? panel 1 or panel 5?
Panel 1: yeah, that’s fair.
Panel 5: no, that would be extremely clear to me coming right on the heel of the panel 1-2 interaction. I don’t know about Dina though— as Needfuldoer suggests, maybe she really is that impervious to anything not stated explicitly. But to neurotypical me, there’s not a single doubt that panel 5 Joe wants Dina to ask what he’s ashamed about.
Joe’s not exactly known for being direct and upfront about his feelings, either.
yay internalized toxic masculinity :/
Most people would notice an acquaintance is distraught and ask about it. My read is Joe was trying to nudge Dina toward that but it went over her head.
I dunno, I kinda feel that read kind of depends on knowledge that we have which Dina does not, regarding Joe’s encounter with Liz.
Poor Joe 🙁
Time to talk with Danny about feelings. FINALLY! Let’s hope he will be available. I wonder if Danny has spent the night in Sal’s room.
“Maybe we can get you a hat to show that you have matured.”
“No hats!”
huh. yeah, i definitely know that that is true but don’t know what to do with it. like, i don’t want to pressure someone who actually doesn’t want to talk about x subject and has made that clear. i guess maybe the lesson is that when you want to talk about something, sometimes the initiative to have that conversation has to come from you.
also grav roulette!
no no. no no thank you
i’m ok with Joyce! i’ll try for Dina again later
^ This.
I don’t know that Joe’s statement is “true”, honestly. I think it’s more of a romcom/sitcom trope than a real thing. Maybe in a close relationship you learn that when your friend tells you they don’t want to talk about something, that actually means they want you to needle it out, but Dina and Joe are not close friends (yet), and Dina is not Joe’s mom. (Yes, there’s also a gendered slant to this sort of expectation.) If he wants to talk to her about something, he can ask her if she’s willing to listen, like a grown-up.
Which in a sense, is exactly what he does in panel 5… But this being Dina maybe she doesn’t understand that he’s talking about himself right now and not making a general statement, or maybe she understands very well… and just pretends not to.
It’s definitely a thing I’ve experienced on either end. Throwing out the “I don’t want to talk about it” and then someone pressuring on that can feel relieving.
I say ‘pressuring’, to be honest it’s more like trying to absolve yourself from saying because of whatever discomfort there is. Anecdotally I had an issue that was, for lack of a better term, a social faux pas to discuss, so I kept dancing around it until eventually I had to privately confide in a friend about it.
yeah no that makes sense. i think some people are just better at this— at reading a person to know when to press and when to drop it.
i guess i’m uncomfortable with second-guessing people generally, like i’m terrible at sarcasm and ribbing for instance. i think this falls in the same class of subtle social dances where you’re not supposed to take words at face value, so you have to be extra sensitive to tell a disguised invitation from a hard limit.
Indeed. It’s a boundary I only feel pushing on with the smallest amount of people, and even then I relent after that one effort; maybe if I “dug deeper” or whatever I’d get to the problem, but not only is that not my responsibility, maybe I’m making it worse by dragging it out and the consequences of that aren’t something I can adequately manage for their sake.
Personally feel that no matter how good you think you are at reading these alleged “ques” for discerning disguised invitations from hard limits, it’s still quite the gamble if you decide to go engage about it anyway. Lots of times it’s not worth the risk, even if its an invitation, it’s not your responsibility anyway.
Either that or my S.A.D. makes me biased. I dunno.
i’m gonna re-use my metaphor, but it really is like a dance. it’s tricky, and you might make a fool of yourself, but when you’re in sync with the other person it’s just so thrilling. It’s kind of like play-fighting when you’re a kid? did you use to do that? (do you maybe still do that, idk, no judgement) Sometimes it was just good fun; sometimes it would turn into something more vicious.
but also, i think… it’s just a fact of how a lot of people do interact. i mean, there’s a case to be made that whether you think this sort of social game is “worth it” or not, it’s good to be aware that people do expect (or hope) certain unbidden reactions from people. is that a neuro-normative thing to say?
as i said i’m kind of sucky at it but i still get it, if a moment too late. i know not everyone works that way, so i try not to assume that’s the case with people i don’t know. maybe that’s good policy, generally? i don’t know, it’s what i do but not out of any sort of committment to inclusive communication. i haven’t given it that much thought, i guess.
Yeah, I guess play-fighting is fun, and I guess it doesn’t come off as too rambunctious if you do it with a friend you’ve come to really know, as opposed to just some random stranger.
As for social interaction, I just don’t know how it’s the same kind of fun?
Anyway, in this case in particular, I don’t think Joe should be expecting that kind of thing from people who’ve never seen him like this before.
There’s also the fact that Dina has only JUST started to have more serious interactions with him.
At least, in-person social interaction.
hah, it’s interesting that you don’t see the parallel. maybe those really are two very different sort of social games. but to me there’s a lot in common: there are rules, even though they’re unspoken. you’re supposed to pretend to be doing something, but not really do it. anyway.
and yeah, Joe is asking a lot of Dina here. that much i do agree with.
Yeah, I guess there’s similarities on that level, but besides the fact that those *unspoken* rules can vary a lot between social webs, not to mention the need to keep it within the other person’s limits, both of which really underscore the prerequisite for really KNOWING the person, I can notice one stark contrast where the metaphor ultimately fails–
People don’t usually play-fight to work through tough personal issues.
That, and in this particular case again, when’s the last serious, pre-time-skip interaction that Dina had with Joe anyway?
I dunno, it’s just that expecting Dina to engage with Joe in this kinda social play-fight or whatever you wanna call it kinda reminds me of that episode of SpongeBob where it was “Opposite Day”, and Squidward wanted to engage in wacky playful banter with Spongebob, much to the latter’s confusion, ’cause Squidward doesn’t usually act like that.
“People don’t usually play-fight to work through tough personal issues.”
don’t they though? ^^ just kidding. i muddled the conversation by dragging in other sorts of “social games” and in particular in my mind play-fighting was more of an analog for sarcastic banter, where you roast each other and sometimes say some pretty mean things with a straight face, but as long as you both know what’s up this can be a really satisfying bonding game.
Anyway, i notice you keep dragging this back to Dina and Joe specifically and pointing out that they’re not close friends or whatever. I think what i’m saying applies to situations where people are not close friends, but sure, it’s even less guaranteed to click. you always take a chance when you make an implicit request. part of the “rules” is you’re not allowed to be mad at the other person when they don’t catch the implicit part. (like, that makes you a jerk.) so it’s like, yeah. it doesn’t always work. it doesn’t have to work. but that’s… fine? like, it’s not a big deal if Dina didn’t get what Joe wanted. Joe will know to be more explicit next time, that’s all. it’s whatever, honestly.
Besides, you’re asking when Dina and Joe had a serious pre-timeskip interaction. I don’t get it. they did have a bit of friends-y moment in the lab earlier that week, didn’t they? why isn’t that more relevant than their pre-timeskip relationship.
Joe probably just needs an “are you sure?” to buckle. He’s grown up around Danny so he’s not used to taking the initiative around discussing feelings.
yeah that’s true. based on panel 5, he clearly didn’t need much to spill.
He did say “maybe” and not “always”, tbf. That accounts for people who actually do not want to talk about it
“I did not realize you were a organism capable of shame”.
How couldn’t dinosaurz breath fire like dragons? If Dina is able to apply sick burns on her victims…
bruh
Huh, here I thought the whole reason Dina initiated contact with Joe was because she wanted him to talk to Amber
Dina is best girl.
We need a “Shame Level” bar at the top right side of the panel.
This is unrelated to today’s strip but I came up with an Asher/Amber crack ship that I’m starting to dig.
Because “you killed my father” is always dramatic, but it’s a lot funnier if it leads to “let’s make out.”
On board, 1000%
If sal gets Danny, amber can take Asher
I propose the ship name Embers. Bc it sounds like amber, and y’know ash. And it’s go down in glorious flames
Right???
Something I love about Shortpacked!Amber is that she was this timid, withdrawn abuse victim, and her character development doesn’t just involve asserting herself, it involves indulging in hedonistic anger and dating the most horrible person in the universe, except both of them are actually totally perfect and in love with each other because Amber gets to process that aggression with someone who can never, ever be hurt by it.
It got me thinking of how in SP! Mike was trying to lead Amber to Jacob, because Jacob was kind and sweet and affirming, and Amber didn’t want that; she wanted this horrible asshole and his stupid 2D haircut, and it gets me to think on how Amber/Danny here was, ultimately, not gonna work, not because Amber’s “too angry but because she needs a partner she can be angry at who won’t break down and, consequently, make Amber feel like shit for giving into her anger again. Sal’s got some pent-up anger too, but it’s on a different scale than Amber’s with a Danny who’s gone through some major character development, including standing up for himself in the face of the One Person At A Time he’s allowed to think romantically about. That’s a level where if Sal lashed out at him over something, Danny might be healthy enough to stand up for himself again.
Obviously I’m just inventing this out of whole cloth, but Amber dating the guy who:
– called the cops on Sal and is in part responsible for the robbery.
– helped Blaine, not realizing that he was now an accessory to Amber and all her friends getting kidnapped.
– actually had Amber’s dad shot in the face.
… like, come on, that is my exact kind of trash. I need it.
Embers is go!
(Alternatively Asher/Ethan, because I think the latter has probably developed a thing for bad boys)
Wait no even better
Amber/Asher/Ethan
Too Shortpackedy, Asher would find difficult to fill Mike’s shoes in that triangle. I’ll stay with Embers.
I got it
Danny/Asher/Sal as a triad
I’m so happy this is catching on
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before, but yes it would be extremely funny.
Ok… what did Dina even want l, there? Eye contact and casual “sucks to be you”?
She owed Joe an performative eye contact. That debt has been settled.
Remember, Dina doesn’t do subtlety. If Joe had said, “I’m having feelings and I need to talk about them!”, Dina probably would have replied, “As you are a friend, and your feelings are important, I will listen to them.” Joe’s attempt at subtlety went straight over her head.
Remember, she is also short, and he is tall. Many things about Joe go straight over her head. This is one of them.
Yep.
Dina doesn’t do subtlety.
or engage in/with NT bullshit.
but, possibly, I repeat myself.
Well just to be fair, Joe having feelings like this AND wanting to talk about them is uncharted territory for pretty much ANYONE who’s come to know Joe.
I’m afraid his worse fears may be true — that at least for now, he’s on his own when it comes to this.
Considering this is after Biology class (I think?), I was expecting Dina to have come to Joe to ask him about the Becky/Joyce fallout.
Nah, it’s Saturday.
Which means Liz doesn’t have to leave to Ball State for another two days!
Okay, between the two beat panels, and Dina long having walked out of frame, this one is a hoot and also painful at the same time. That’s what keeps me coming back.
Also, after this mini-arc, I had to link to this other great comic containing Eyeee contaaaaaact….
I relate to Dina here, especially in the hovertext. Neurotypical people really should say what they mean more often.
Sometimes, Joe, when people don’t ask you to elaborate, it’s because they don’t care.
Yeah.
Dina’s not that kind of friend.
Okay grav roulette bc i miss sal
Getting closer melanin wise
Cloooserrrr
Okay thats just a tease
Given i was desperately trying to get glasses Joyce last time i can totally live with this for now
Just one chromosome off!
Is Joe ashamed that he let Liz withdraw consent(he better not be after I gave him props for doing it)? Ashamed he went along with the sexytimes at all? Ashamed he was banging Joyce in his mind during that? Dangit Dina make him talk about it so I can know!
Ashamed of being “Joe”, the absurd macho faux-persona he built for himself.
“persona” shares a lot of letters with “prison”.
Yep. Joe’s the Indomitable Sex Monster, he does not meaningfully want to be this person anymore, but he’s sure as hell not gonna escape it. Probably relevant to other characters who exist in a specific box that other characters criticize them for being in, and then get mad, disbelieving or incredulous when they step out. Joe, Joyce, Dina and Sal should form a D&D group.
How I’ve come to think of Joe is that unlike IW!Joe, who was a Funny Horndog Manly Man who mellowed out while still more or less retaining those traits, DoA!Joe is someone who began believing that becoming Funny Horndog Manly Man would make him happy and safe, and not totally ruin everything like he feels it has here. I won’t say it’s outright performative or even that Joe doesn’t “really believe” in it, so much as I don’t think it was an entirely natural sauntering towards that behaviour, and I think that Joe’s character development going forward will involve not just emotional honesty, but in happily engaging in things he brushed aside as not Real Man enough for him to do come college.
Relevant to that tweet Willis made featuring Joe juxtaposed to a tagline about monogamy, it’s actually pretty funny how both continuities’ Joes are deeply monogamous when it comes to romantic affection. IW!Joe liked Joyce but he wasn’t willing to change himself for her, and by the time he started thinking about romance in lieu of just casual sex he fell for Rachel real fast, was exclusive to her until her disappearance, whereupon he mourned for two years until he tried with Robin and then went back to Rachel once she was rescued. I think he even outright says Robin was the only woman he had slept with during that time too.
And then you got DoA Joe falling hard for the first girl who took him seriously, it’s gucci.
probably ashamed because he was told that if she slept with him, she’d be ruined for life.
he’s probably wondering if he’s just a blight on humanity or some kind of rot that ruins everything he touches
I think ashamed he didn’t asked her if she was sure and also ashamed of his Destiny to become his dad.
Well, it’s definitely not the first one.
Dina out!
Just talk to Danny, Joe.
seriously.
The Danny that just fled from Ethan ? Maybe they’ll stumble upon each other on the way
that was the night before 😉
I was hoping that Dina would take that moment of awkwardness, and express her concerns about Amber. She knows that they are step-sibs.
The things that people say and don’t mean make life hell for the people that actually mean the things they say. I have lost count of the amount of times someone has assumed I want to talk about something that I REALLY REALLY DO NOT. This has literally ended friendships, because a few of them would not stop. Because the neurotypical white lie BS is so ingrained that some people act like I’m not even ALLOWED to be telling the truth.