I’m sure that has happened at a gas station. I’m sure it has happened at a gas station I was running while I was there. We used to get some really strange people between midnight and 5 AM.
Speaking as somebody who never worked at a gas station, I’ve never gotten anybody pregnant at one, but I did get a bj in the cooler. Yes, the employee on duty at the time was involved.
Of course they were involved. Most people not obligated to hang around a gas station don’t hang around gas stations. If they’re at a gas station and decide they’re going to engage in some kind of sexual activity, if they’re not obligated to stick around, they’ll probably go elsewhere.
Gas station employees who are not fundamentally involved in any hanky panky occurring on the gas station premises are fairly likely supposed to break that sort of activity up. They’re also likely to be bored and sex tends to be considered interesting. Either way, they’re probably going to get involved in some fashion, whether it’s by breaking it up, watching, or trying to join in. In some cases, them trying to join in could be one of the most effective and efficient ways they can break it up, so gas station owners probably shouldn’t consider such attempts to necessarily be dereliction of duty, though it’s certainly reasonable for them to take issue with that approach on other grounds.
People who are aroused by gas stations in some way are more likely than average to have jobs there. Note it’s my impression there are few enough of these that people who work at gas stations are not significantly more likely than average to be aroused by gas stations in some way. But if you’re talking with someone about engaging in a sex act with them, and they respond, “Oh, yeah, that sounds cool. Um, could we go to the gas station to do it?” it *is* more likely that they’ll work at one than if they suggest some other location for the activity. Whether that’s because they’re aroused by gas stations or it’s because they go on shift soon and their risk aversion calculations are *much* more concerned about being late for work than they are about being caught at work doing *that* is anyone’s guess.
There’s probably a few ways to look at this that I haven’t detailed, including the one I intentionally avoided mentioning directly. But that said,
Direct action by the Republican Theocratic Christian identitarian movement. As networked via the Doug Coe, Alex jones, Nen Shapiro, Paul manafort, a myriad of other white supremacist pseudo fascist making a concerted effort for control of women’s bodies instead of a concerted effort for education or a reduction of abortions via birth control or fertility awareness or education or any methodology but instead actually working to make people stupider and more controllable.
That would be my guess and I could add more names but it gets a little bit ridiculous and I’m sure there’s a ton more extremely culpable individuals that isn’t just the front facing figureheads.
It’s quite modern. Until you could feel kicks (about week 20 give or take) it could be considered “blocked menses” and be “unblocked”. Then people got pissed off that half the population had too much autonomy and we had modern pregnancy confirming methods and well here we are.
Because I’m currently reading the electrifying essay Full Surrogacy Now!: feminism against the family by queer feminist Sophie Lewis, let me quote from the introduction:
What particularly fascinates me about the subject is [human] pregnancy’s morbidity, the little-discussed ways that, biophysically speaking, gestating is an unconscionably destructive business. The basic mechanics, according to evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin, have evolved in our species in a manner that can only be described as a ghastly fluke. (…)
It is the specific, functionally rare type of placenta we have to work with—the hemochorial placenta—which determines that the entity Chikako Takeshita calls “the motherfetus” tears itself apart inside. Rather than simply interfacing with the gestator’s bodt through a limited filter, or contenting itself with freely proffered secretions, this placenta “digests” its way into its host’s arteries, securing full access to most tissues. Mammals whose placentae don’t “breach the walls of the womb” in this way can simply abort or reabsorb unwanted fetuses at any stage of pregnancy, Sadedin notes. For them, “life goes on almost as normal during pregnancy”. Conversely, a human cannot rip away a placenta in the event of a change of heart—or, say, a sudden drought or outbreak of war—without risk of lethal hemorrhage. Our embryo hugely enlarges and paralyzes the wider arterial system supplying it, while at the same time elevating (hormonally) the blood pressure and sugar supply.
let me hasten to add, not to give the wrong impression, that Lewis is not advocating against making babies or anything like that. Read her Vice profile i linked to above or listen to her interview on This Is Hell! to get a better idea of her argument than i could possibly provide. She’s rad. Bit hard to read i guess, what with all the neologizing and big words and endless sentences peppered with brackets. she’s still rad though.
i mean… we already are. our bodies are augmented by synthetic hormones and all sorts of technologies already. not to mention intellectual technologies, and ideological weapons such as queer intersectional feminism.
i suggest we focus on liberating the resources we do have rather than plan for some techno-utopian future, because 1) we have the means of living in a worldwide techno-utopia now, and 2) without a revolution any technology we develop will only benefit a tiny fraction of humankind at the expense of the many.
How about we take it one step further? ’cause honestly, we might just have to. Between a planet that’s gonna become increasingly unlivable to ordinary humans thanks to climate change, as well as the same fucking class-based societies they keep persistently arranging themselves into no matter how hard they try to avert it, humans for the sake of their survival may just have to alter their physiology on a fundamental level.
“the same fucking class-based societies they keep persistently arranging themselves into no matter how hard they try to avert it”
citation needed?
On the subject (and sorry for being that guy) I cannot recommend enough another (equally exhilarating) book i’m currently reading called “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber (RIP) and David Wengrow, where they challenge, based on anthropological and archeological evidence, the hegemonic narratives betrothed to the western collective consciousness by the Enlightenment (especially Hobbes and Rousseau) about how unequal social hierarchies emerged. They conclude that all such reasonings are post-hoc and thus ideological, not scientific.
their own fundamental axiom, or bias if you will (which they proudly acknowledge rather than obfuscating it) is the simple, illuminating belief that human societies have always been political, in the sense of making collective choices based not on some innate human nature but a complex combination of environmental and cultural factors. yay anarchist science <3
Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I wasn’t referring to how class-based societies emerged but rather how to break the cycle.
Be them political parties or religious cults, social pyramids always replace themselves on the foundation of revolutionary groups who’s success depends much on how well they meet (or appear to meet) the needs of vulnerable people.
But what if we made it so that humans were no longer vulnerable in at least the ways that mattered the most? What if we altered the human body to that its most basic needs, from food to water to shelter, were guaranteed by the energy of the sun’s rays? Would any human, then, be willing to give themselves over to groups that claim to act in their interest, merely to repeat the cycle of swapping one social pyramid for another?
…also because you use the impersonal “we” (a convenient sleight-of-hand which i also struggle to avoid as seen in my own comment you responded to) i feel compelled to point out once again that our world is in no way structured so that technological progress will go boink for all. knowledge is power, and power is at present extremely concentrated so that top-down approaches are highly unlikely to improve the well-being of most of humankind.
at best the worldwide upper-middle-class (which most of us around here belong to regardless of our relative positions in our respective industrial states’ populations) will see some marginal returns, always conditional on the precarious balance of power we still have the agency to maintain against the plutocrats. Revolution, i tell you.
There’s no need. Read Childbirth Without Fear. Birth is akin to a sports injury. But, like, we don’t freak out about how no one should be playing hobbyist volleyball.
I do believe some people are more genetically predisposed to healthy pregnancy – and, to me, it makes sense to have a small handful of superbirthers in a tribe where most people don’t.
Say you have a population of 10 people. (This is too small to be viable I know)
If one person can safely have 10 babies who survive to adulthood – then the population has been replaced and 9 people haven’t had to give birth once. Assuming the standard 50/50 sex split, that’s 4 folks with a uterus who didn’t need to have kids.
Say you have a population of 20 and want to have a population of 30. (Reminder – 10 people were born with a uterus)
Two people each have 10 kids. That’s 20. The 8 other people combined would only have to have 10 between them, which is 1-2 each. A few people could choose to be childfree and the population goal is easily met.
Some people are naturally, innately childfree and have no desire to have kids – then you’ve got quiverfull people who have over 15.
To me, the answer seems pretty obvious – stop bullying childfree people into unwanted kids and support the people whose body says “yes more pregnancy please”.
And in case you think I’m just so out of touch I don’t know how hard pregnancy and birth are – 3 births, 1 herbal abortion, a deep desire to carry as many babies as I can and mourning that we don’t have the resources to support 6+ kids.
I’m one of the people whose body is like “fuck yes have all the babies”.
Please don’t. Grantly Dick-Read was a misogynistic asshole who believes women who didn’t want to give birth were defying the natural order. There’s no need for scaremongering about giving birth though. Some people have horrific pregnancies and births and some don’t. Acting like it’s a uniquely horrific, unsurvivable experience isn’t helpful and neither is acting like it’s a harmless walk in the park that everyone is suited for, even if they die giving birth, as Dick-Read did.
I agree with you in principle – let people have as many children as they want to have (even if the number is zero) but I think some people struggle with that idea, especially if it might mean NOT meeting population goals. Not every ‘superbirther’ wants to give birth to ten plus children. Hell, a lot of those Quiverfull people were raised in an environment that was heavily against birth control or other methods of ending or preventing pregnancy and to believe it was their duty to have as many children as possible. I’d hardly call that a model of reproductive freedom either.
I am sorry to hear you don’t have the resources the number of children you want. I hope somehow your situation changes for the better or that you can become a surrogate! It sounds like you’d be a good one.
“Would any human, then, be willing to give themselves over to groups that claim to act in their interest, merely to repeat the cycle of swapping one social pyramid for another?”
I’m one of those crazies who enjoys giving birth and has a good time of it. Honestly I genuinely lament that you have to make a lifetime commitment to go through it and I’m debating becoming a surrogate. So her argument feels eh.
I also did an herbal abortion when I accidentally got pregnant and was in a terrible place to have a kid. Without much issues because a well done herbal abortion can be safe – we just like scare tactics in our pregnancy.
Then, I’m also a man, so maybe I just missed some of the memo about how pregnancy and birth are supposed to be so excrutiating.
on the contrary, you sound like you would get along fabulously with Sophie Lewis. again, i’m just quoting a bit from the intro where she lays out some biological facts so as to “de-naturalize” or de-mythologize pregnancy. but she’s all for communal surrogacy and child-rearing =)
basically her argument as best as i can make out from my vantage point somewhere into chapter 2 is that “surrogacy” as it is defined under patriarchy is contrasted with “natural” pregnancy, and she’s like “who came up with that silly dichotomy, all pregnancies and all the labour of reproduction is basically surrogacy since children don’t (or shouldn’t) “belong” in any sense to their biological parents, let’s explode those categories and redefine pregnancy as a task that is freely undertaken for the common good under a socialist utopia”
also part 2 of her argument i think is gonna be sth like, “in the meantime since we do live under patriarcal white supremacist capitalism, we need to stop stigmatizing surrogacy and matronizingly talk over the surrogacy workers themselves, and instead stand in solidarity with them, and empower them to unionize and so on.”
I’m glad your pregnancies went so well, but it’s got nothing to do with missing a memo. People are different and a lot of it comes down to hips, pelvis size and shape, uterus size and shape, vaginal canals, etc. And sometimes just luck – some people have a perfect pregnancy and then a subsequent one is miserable. Bodies are weird.
yeah i mean, as Z pointed out, besides the mainstream (and very loud) discourse about how beautiful and miraculous or whatever bearing a child is supposed to be (always, for everyone— well every straight, happily married cis woman at least), the passage i quoted fits into a smaller genre of dissident discourse that has also produced a certain normativity in some circles about how pregnancy is indefensibly creepy and brutal.
as always reality is more complex. i feel like i did a bit more justice to the author by attempting to sum up her overarching thesis in response to Z above, but if you’re interested i strongly suggest looking her up and finding interviews and stuff. The book is really interesting (if, again, a bit daunting at times).
(ps evolution doesn’t have a “top”) (i know you know but i can’t not say it) (sorry) (it’s such an all-pervasive framing and it’s very very problematic) (also it’s not a “game” although i realize you’re using the word in a metaphorical sense, but thinking of “evolution” as a “force” or a “game” or some other kind of reducible object has driven so many otherwise well-meaning people to devise terrible, terrible ideas to try to “hack” it or “harness” it. We need better metaphors is what i’m saying) (fwiw mine is that “evolution” is just another word for “history”) (but people have tried to hack history too, so idk maybe the problem is really just human hubris) (which we absolutely should try to hack) (to pieces) (kbai)
BTW I don’t think caffeine makes you mean spirited, I appreciate your writing here!
But if you’re still worried, take a little bit of weed with it to even things out, 1 mg THC should do the trick!
(yet again I shouldn’t really be offering advice like this from personal experience that depends on having a very specific set of neurodivergent stripes, but still, there it is)
oh thank you but don’t worry i stand by every word in this thread =D
i’m just extreeemely wary of sarcasm because… eh, family issues probably: my 1-year-younger sister was super obnoxious as a teen and using every rhetorical trick in the book to “win” arguments in ways i found infuriatingly disloyal, and i guess i grew up believing the myth that civil & rational discussion unfailingly produces truth and justice. anyway, that’s all in the past, i love my sister and her devastating wit now, but i guess i do still carry with me that unease about edgy banter. I got better, i am now capable of doing it with close friends when i know there’s no way they will feel attacked, but i try as much as possible to avoid it in situations where i lack control over the other person’s reaction; like, in writing, and online, and with strangers…
….also, just popping back in here to inform you all that the plural of mongoose is mongeese. Some will point to dubious sources like dictionaries alleging it’s actually “mongooses” and to that i respond: Merriam-Webster, schmerriam-schmebster.
it’s mongeese, and yes i will die on that hill, that will be all
I know you’re probably joking but it honestly irritated the hell out of me. Yes the doctor is a place you should 100% feel safe showing up in a bathrobe while farting.
[me as a doctor]: “Do not even THINK of speaking to me unless you are wearing a corset and SEVERAL petticoats. I’ll not tolerate common guttersnipes in my office.”
But then Dorothy won’t be able to take credit for helping Joyce with this Jennifer, and isn’t that what’s really important
Seriously Dorothy was literally just making excuses for why she hasn’t tried to help Joyce, it feels really shitty for her to then swoop in once it’s clear there won’t be a huge freakout
Sorry meant to say it’s not NOT shitty, IE everyone calling out Dorothy for swooping in after avoiding the issue because Billie opened the door to actually pursuing a solution is correct.
One of Dorothy’s objectives in becoming RA was to keep Becky a secret. A new person would not be as distracted by depression/misery/guilt as Ruth was and would notice the loud redhead that was not Carla.
I do think the fact that she is speaking about Joyce in the third person is significant here. For emergencies it’s great to have her info. But Joyce is RIGHT THERE and she’s offering TO JENNIFER to do it. That’s weird.
Perhaps it is to indicate how she conceptualises what she is doing. In her unconsidered view Jennifer and not Joyce is the person with agency, and she is steeping in to assist with (and perhaps put her own stamp on) an undertaking of Jennifer’s.
Don’t knock it. Think of ALL the people who /do harm/ to others in order to feel good about themselves. True altruists are few and far between, so I’ll gladly take every self-serving helper I can find.
I mean, really, aren’t all helpers self-serving? I don’t know of anybody who hates helping people but does it anyway. They just won’t bother. I would know, it’s why I don’t bother helping people.
So what if someone’s doing it to make themselves feel good, or look good, so long as they’re doing it.
Honestly it’s nice to see some more character flaws in Dorothy. She doesn’t always have the moral high ground in every situation and can be selfish as well. Dorothy has a lot of expectation of perfection around her even in comic she gets criticized for trying to be too perfect and has been called boring because of it. This is rather humanizing for her.
Yeah. It’s also kinda cool to see her attempts to be perfect as a character flaw and even as self-centered, to an extent. I know in my experience, trying to be perfect and make everyone happy led to occasionally causing more harm than “allowing” (accepting, really) myself to be “not perfect” would’ve.
Yeah, I feel like this comment section has this weird hang up where they get really personally offended by every action every character takes like they know them IRL and aren’t like… fictional characters who can and should have interesting flaws that move a story along. So many people read everything every character does in the worst possible faith when to me my reaction is a lot closer to yours- “oh it’s kinda cool that we’re seeing the limits of Dorothy’s perfectionist friend manager runs role and the ways that her own stress can cloud her judgement, especially when Joyce is clearly relating to and understanding the equally depressed and angry Billie more”
Agreed. I see a lot of this, and not just here: “I identify with this character, your reaction isn’t what I would have, so how dare you do this to ME”. I have no particular way to respond to that.
Yeah. I’m glad Willis takes time to develop Dorothy as a character who just exists to resolve the crisis of the day, so the plot can move on to tomorrow’s crisis.
This and the “your version of failing is not being able to go to a better school than the rest of us” (I don’t have the wherewithal to find the comic sorryyyyy) line are two s-tier Dotty Dunks™️
I….hmmmm. I get what your saying and you might well be right. I don’t want to discount Dorothy being the jerk here. And yet I can’t help be feel that Billie is being territorial about this because this is precisely HER motivation for helping Joyce- to earn brownie points in a neglected friend circle now that Walky might be popular with her new friends. I could be reading too much into that but this is something I can see Billie doing when she’s at her worst. Popularity has always been of keen interest to her, although she has risen above that many times as well.
I dunno, Jennifer has only seemed perplexed by Walky’s sudden popularity. I think she genuinely wants to help someone that’s in a lot of pain. Head cheerleader: problem solver, remember?
If anything, she’s flexing that new found adultness she and her new pals were patting themselves on the back for having when she last made an appearance by making her less “enlightened” pals look after themselves. It might be a little power trippy but if the ends justify the means…?
If her reason for not getting involved was not angsting out Joyce and she just hear Joyce saying she would like a solution then why wouldn’t she switch position and agree that Jennifer was right?
Dorothy doesn’t want credit. She just tends to take charge.
I hate the way the last few strips everyone was saying she’s a horrible person for not taking charge and now everyone is saying she’s a horrible person for helping.
Like, I got why she’s like I just did the glasses thing and that wasn’t appreciated so I’m going to back off on this one. And now this is something Joyce actually wants so she’s happy to help.
Yes I know you all want her to be perfect and magically solve everyone’s problems in a way that makes them think they solved it themselves. But she’s 18 or 19 and this is her personality and she’s doing the best she can.
And yeah, it’s likely Joyce will get over her crush and start resenting Dorothy and they won’t be friends anymore unless she goes to Yale first.
Also, speaking from experience Uni health tends to treat gyn problems with “this is normal for teens.” Though they do also prescribe birth control which is probably a solution to the symptoms Joyce has, but they won’t be careful about which pill or tell her that different pills may have different side effects etc. Didn’t get my actual problems diagnosed until I saw specialists while trying to conceive.
I hold Dorothy to the standards she holds herself, which are pretty textually “I’m here to be Joyce’s life coach.”
No one thinks she sucks for helping here, she sucks because she only decided to help after someone else did the part she declared impossible by treating Joyce as a functional adult.
I’d categorize Dorothy more as trying to be the “mom friend” which is sometimes really helpful and sometimes brings resentment. I also don’t think she and Becky were entirely wrong to expect Joyce to kablooey. We saw yesterday that Joyce DID have the knee-jerk “Nope, can’t fix this” reaction. Was it subdued because she knew it was wrong? Or was it subdued because she didn’t have the energy to explode and she was only able to work through it in 3 panels rather than 3 or 4 strips for that same reason?
We’ll never truly know the answer to that question, but I think, based on the way that Joyce has often reacted to things that are meant to pull her out of her comfort zone, that she would not have agreed so quickly, readily, or reasonably if she wasn’t this far under the weather.
It’s fine to have some preconceived notion of where the conversation will go but Dorothy’s otherwise entirely okay with momming at Joyce and she didn’t even ask.
I don’t expect Dorothy to have all the answers and to exclusively do the right thing, or rather I don’t anymore because she’s finally becoming the dumb idiot I read this series full of dumb idiots for instead of some sagely advice-dispensing fencepost, but it feels pretty textual to Dorothy’s character that she thinks she does, at least when it comes to Joyce, because she’s fine trying to dictate her theological opinions and when she’s allowed to be angry.
Okay, but why is it okay to have a preconceived notion, based off previous experience, about where a conversation will go but not to choose not to have that conversation? Why is deciding that nothing good will come of that conversation and therefore it’s not worth having considered infantilizing Joyce instead of 2 people picking their battles and considering that particular battle not worth fighting when they figure they’ll lose anyways?
I mean, if we take the jokes out of the strip 2 days ago, we end up with Becky and Dorothy essentially saying “We haven’t broached this topic with her because she doesn’t react well to suggestions of medical help and the last time we did it was an entire fucking thing and we don’t think she’d willingly take whatever assistance is available so we’d end up having to see the thing through and keep on her ass about it.” Are the jokes unkind? I can see the argument, though I’d consider them normal for friends, and it’s a comic strip anyways. A bit of unrealistic and hyperbolic dialogue is to be expected.
I guess it comes down to your read of the characters in question. Is Dorothy the mom friend who’s there when it’s time to help you do something that’s necessary but you’re afraid of doing yourself, who sometimes oversteps because of that role that she’s taken on and been tacitly allocated, and who is fully within her rights to back away from a fight like this when she thinks it’ll just be a pain for everyone involved and have no good outcome? Or is she a control freak who ignores people’s boundaries, dictates their emotions, and tries to keep them in little preconceived boxes because that’s the way she best keeps her hold on them? If you believe something closer to the first, you’re rather more okay with this story arc. If you believe something closer to the second, as I think you in particular do, Dorothy hasn’t been a good person in quite some time.
Okay but the jokes are real important to that because they frame it as part of the larger context of “Dorothy and Becky don’t think Joyce can or should make her own choices” that’s been going on since the Faith-Off.
That they infantilize her so hard is the point, it’s not just some optional bike tassels, and more importantly it was that behaviour that led them to avoiding asking it altogether instead of even trying to approach the topic. She’s okay pushing on glasses. She’s okay telling Joyce she’s way worse than a School Misser after hunting her down to a private conversation and listening in on her venting about her death cult. She’s okay telling Joyce to find a nice deism, that her anger’s only good when it’s constructive, and that if Joyce doesn’t being mean then her lifelong best friend that Joyce has been in two separate car chases for will hate her forever.
But she’s not okay even touching this topic even though it’s of actual, literal, physical necessity for Joyce, because Dorothy doesn’t think it’s worth bothering with. She did not even ask, and that she didn’t ask is the important part because the Whys of that have been screaming on-page for seven months.
Dorothy is not making the informed decision to stop meddling with Joyce, she just doesn’t think this warrants her meddling on the ground that Joyce is a moron.
As I said, it comes down to your read on the characters. You clearly have a very different read on Dorothy and they way she’s reacted to Joyce than I do, and that comes out in the way that you see what she’s doing now as infantilizing. I don’t agree; I don’t think Dorothy is acting in bad faith, miscategorizing what’s going on in Joyce’s head, or even acting particularly badly in general. And since you’re basing so much of your read on what happened in the Faith-Off, which I’ve said before I’d rather not debate with you any further, it’s very clear we’re not going to come to terms on this.
Dorothy’s not acting in bad faith, no. That is, as the kids say, the problem.
She’s still running with all the same scripts and patterns that, last semester, worked wonderfully because Joyce was entirely receptive to what she was saying and they were binary enough a problem that Dorothy couldn’t really say the wrong thing, because Dorothy’s got a functioning moral compass and can parse through problems like “my fundamentalist dogma is pressuring me to do wrong, but I want to do right.” Dorothy wants to do the right thing now, but she has her own preconceived biases getting in the way of that and leading her to do what she’s doing now.
And, yeah, of course I’m relation Dorothy’s behaviour now to an entirely unresolved conflict that’s the shining example of Dorothy’s failures in trying to run with the same script. That’s what past events in an ongoing story are for.
There’s also the thing where, I think, Joyce would be aware that while Dorothy is ride-or-die, and no amount of foot-dragging is going to make her leave, there is a definite upper limit to how much nonsense Jennifer is going to take before bailing.
I hate the way the last few strips everyone was saying she’s a horrible person for not taking charge and now everyone is saying she’s a horrible person for helping.
Well, I don’t know about “everybody”, but I don’t think that that is what I did. In the last few strips I was bagging Dorothy for thinking that she had the authority to take charge. And now I’m bagging her for trying to take charge.
Whereas Jennifer is helping without taking charge: she respects Joyce’s agency, the need to have Joyce’s consent for medical treatment.
Swooping in to solve other peoples’ problems for them whether they’re ready for it or not doesn’t always help them. Sometimes it does, but there’s the risk it can spectacularly backfire. (I think the only time we’ve actually seen this happen was the kidnapping, but even then Faz’s presence was an unforeseen variable.)
Dude, yes! I keep a Farley File in my contacts (pet names, birthdays, etc.), just ’cause I forget so much, but I worry so that Google Contacts is going to data mine it all. Useful, though.
HIPAA regulations wouldn’t allow Dorothy to have access to Joyce’s medical records, unless Joyce authorized it. Of course, she might have done that, because you know Dorothy. If anyone’s ever IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS, it’s her.
She didn’t even say “medical info” she said “all her information. She is clearly talking about her CONTACT information, which is necessary for setting up a new patient visit.
Yeah. Dorothy probably took down the information to make Joyce the eye doctor appointment and just kept it. Which is kind of yucky, but who knows, maybe could be useful in case of an emergency, since she is one of Joyce’s best friends.
personally if someone not only remembers my birthday but goes as far as to have a present that they specifically know i will love because of something i mentioned in a conversation weeks earlier, i will instantly break off all contact with them. what are they doing, writing down stuff about me?? oh, they want to be “”nice”” and “””””thoughtful””””” really? really?????
thanks for saying that Ed. i wasn’t sure it came off that way. regardless, i still kind of don’t want to put myself in a position of *maybe* antagonizing or annoying someone (except when i do because they’re trolls or bigots haha)
anyway that’s just me and my lil neuroses, occasionally i’ll roast someone and then grovel about how mean that was, don’t mind me lol
See this is hilarious to me because I was raised to believe in obligation to do exactly what you described. Don’t play the same in every crowd, I’ve found out.
Ngl as someone who has spent way too much time filling out medical paperwork over the years, if someone made a dossier to use only for noble purposes I’d be like “yes thank you omg.”
But that’s also the sort of thing you should probably check with someone beforehand because I get the impression most people are not cool with it.
But yeah plz make dossiers on me. Make all the dossiers you want as long as it’s for the sole purpose of saving time/convenience. XD
I keep seeing this “in case of emergencies” thing being mentioned in the comments but like, in context, isn’t she referring to Joyce’s insurance info? I’ve never heard of anyone giving their friends that kind of information for emergencies. Especially seems odd for a friend you’ve known for five months! Seems like a huge lack of boundaries on both of their ends.
I don’t think we have actually been told how Joyce’s details got onto Dorothy’s phone or why Dorothy keeps them. I kind of assume that she picked them up somehow while making Joyce’s optometrist’s appointment and kept them without giving it much thought, her habit of preserving all information because it’s costless being better-developed than her position on privacy.
The thing about “in case of emergencies” I take for irony from commenters such as myself who think that Dorothy has no good reason to have somebody else’s medical insurance details recorded.
In the time that Dorothy has known Joyce, she’s been drugged, threatened with a deadly weapon, and kidnapped. I think “in case of emergencies” is more justifiable here than in most cases.
“Look, if you have a clumsy child, you make him wear a helmet. If you have death-prone children, you keep a few clones of them in your lab.” – Dr. Jonas “Rusty” Venture
Becky didn’t even have her social security number until she broke into her own house. I wonder if Joyce decided it was safest to give her information to a friend she trusts just in case her parents got (even more) fucky.
This all just really makes me want this side story to be csnon. Mike doing a rare solid for Walky that lead him to getting with Billie is really fitting somehow. It works.
It’s fun to fantasize for some of us but we all know this happening in story would throw a lot of things off, “a big deal” would be putting it lightly.
Mike in heaven is like “Don’t say I never gave you anything”…yes I’d push thed idea that he’s in heaven for whatever characters in the story the still believes there’s an afterlife nothing would piss them off more than knowing he made it there.
Shoot, I’m confused. When Walky was talking about how quiet his room was and “missing” Mike, I assumed this was taking place after he died. I hope those are real condoms and not imaginary ones.
I’ve been a big fan of your work for a long time Yotomoe, and I want to say that the moment where you establish that Mike would get condoms for the sole purpose of keeping amber safe is not just a really sweet character moment for this increasingly well written and in character porn comic, but is Genuinely the only time I’ve seen someone accurately describe what Mike would do in a situation in the 10 years I’ve been reading Willis stuff.
this story is so gooood Yoto! just a perfect wholesome fanfic, and the characters are spot on and i love your drawing! I haven’t commented around here for a while cos i was travelling, and having relationship drama. but i’ve been following it and it rules <3 thnk yuuuu
I don’t know whether you saw: a woman in German has been convicted of sexual assault for making holes in her (casual) partner’s condoms without his knowledge or consent.
Kudos to Germany, but the double standards and full mentalness in the US, its not the same. A) its a woman in that case, so she probably wouldn’t even get charges pressed against her, if they did she’d get minimum sentence. B) In a few of the left leaning states its not even a crime to knowingly give someone HIV/AIDs anymore. So what are a few holes in a condom.
I believe that Dorothy was likening showing up without an appointment to showing up in a bathrobe and her mental model of Walky suggested it would be something that he might do and further suggested the addition of farting.
*furiously struggling on whether to call Dorothy a neolib for the weird classism against something used by people without health insurance or that she swoops in like a hero after a cooler and more assertive person confronts the problem*
I don’t think this has anything to do with insurance, but the lack of structure implied by just going and waiting rather than having an appointment. The Health Center at my school allowed both walk-ins and appointments, and insurance wasn’t an issue either way (coverage was part of the student activity fee).
She’s drawing on a specific structure and visual that is defined by the poor working class and she’s some little nerd with big ideas and no spine who’s probably never had to consider a scenario of why someone goes to a walk-in clinic in the first place.
Like I absolutely get your point, don’t get me wrong, but things still exist in wider contexts. I can tell my kid “if you don’t go to college you’ll be a garbage man or flip burgers!” to make a point about the importance of academic achievement but I’d still be demeaning a kind of work as a fail state when the former is of utmost necessity and the latter being treated as the biggest fail state is why places like that get to exploit their employees. I know I meant it in a vacuum, that’s why it’s a problem for me to say it in the first place.
I wish I could be a garbageman! Stellar pay, good benefits, satisfying work in that your are directly contributing to public health and functioning society. I think they even have a good union in my area, but I don’t know for sure.
Why do I get the distinct impression that Dorothy, at some point, took Walky to a walk-in appointment in a bathrobe while he was farting?
Anyway calling it now, the doctor is gonna be… shit, I genuinely can’t think of any obscure Walkyverse doctor characters who haven’t shown up yet in DoA. I guess there’s Leo, but given that he was a bit of a fundie (albeit well-meaning) I’m not sure how likely he’d be to prescribe birth control medicine.
I think it’s also to try and introduce the topic of birth control as obliquely as humanly possible, especially with Joyce’s recent acknowledgement that she’s currently phasing out of a cultish belief system
All “hey, there’s this thing that can probably make you feel less like you’re enduring the ire of a scornful god (oh and it’s also a thing that has been demonized and vehemently rejected by your former belief system but nvm)”
Maybe they should have different packages of the same thing with different names, like Zyban (for quitting smoking) versus Wellbutrin (for treating depression) despite being exactly the same drug.
You may be onto something, but it’d be mighty hard for a pharma company to skirt around the contraceptive effects without severe breaches of consumer ethics
It’s a pity that the objection to walk-ins that Dorothy comes to express is not her intolerance for their flexibility but the fact that they are used by working-class trash-people.
I need something explained here. Are, uh, bathrobes lower-class? I’m having trouble thinking of them in those terms. Like, gun to my head, fancy people wear bathrobes. Bathrobes are fancy. Bathrobes are a luxury. If they absolutely have to be applied a class level of some sort.
It’s, you know, really about the immediacy.
The poor people angle has totally blindsided me, and I need to figure out if I’m missing some bathrobe-class-related zeitgeist.
I can’t believe I’m with Billie on this one, but it’s kinda cowardly that Dorothy just tries to involve herself after Joyce reveals she’s amendable to seeing a doctor. You already chose to not get involved because it was too hard, Dorothy.
Same, it’s weird but Billie is right in this case. Dorothy didn’t do anything to help Joyce, and what’s wrong with going to a walk-in clinic in a bathrobe or whatever when you have a medical issue that should be checked out sooner rather than later?
Glad somebody finally steps in the way of Dorothy always trying to be on top of things, its kinda unhealthy… If we didn’t KNOW that Dorothy is just trying to do good by everybody, and just wants to help, it would look like a toxic relationship in the making. She needs to learn how to chill and just be a Friend, not a Guardian.
I’m hoping she will atleast appreciate how messed up it is making someone in pain wait longer then they have to just to maybe seek help. An appointment would have likely meant waiting a while.
Continue to rock this, Jennifer! Shut down Dorothy’s ‘just gonna nip in t the head of this parade’ thing. She had nothing to do with this, it’s all you for suggesting (actually suggesting, not pressuring!) a medical professional, and Joyce being, you know, not a particularly dumb hysterical puppy.
She has! I genuinely particularly like that she included ‘no promises’ in her ‘let’s go to the clinic’ proposal. I am a fan of setting realistic expectations.
I also like her ‘no, screw your appointment garbage, we’re going to the walk-in’. Because I think Jennifer might think ‘Joyce is willing now, she might not be in a day or whenever you get an appointment, so we do this NOW.’
This is more than a little shitty on Jennifer’s part, to be frank, but I get if she feels like she did the “hard part”, getting Joyce’s stubborn-ass to take the right steps.
You really don’t think calling someone a “maternal vulture” is in any way shitty? Dorothy is acting problematic here, but that was a nasty way to say that.
Dorothy literally just finished effectively sniggering with Becky about how Joyce is a dumb hysterical puppy who would need to be force-fed pills hidden in peanut butter except it wouldn’t work because lol lol the dumb hysterical puppy is even dumber about food. In Jennifer’s hearing. Forgive me if I don’t consider a 100% accurate calling-out and shutting down of a different jerk behavior before it could really get rolling to be unwarranted or even particularly mean.
Is it nice? Nope. But it’s far from unearned, so it’s still on the right side of the line for me.
@milu I agree that vultures are rad, but it clearly seems to be used as an insult here (just like how I know that pigs and snakes are super rad, but it’s normally intended as an insult to call someone a snake or a pig, or to compare someone to them).
it’s shitty because Dorothy probably isn’t viewing this in the prideful way that Jennifer is. she offered to help because she had a shortcut available. she (probably) wasn’t swooping in like a vulture, jen just saw it that way because to her everything has to be a contest.
not everyone is constantly going after accolades and credits, yall.
Dorothy’s not a shortcut. Joyce already has all her own information, because she’s where Dorothy got it in the first place.
She could have offered this same help to Joyce and actively chose not to. It’s only now that Joyce has accepted help from a Not Dorothy that Dorothy appears, ready to put things on rails and feel good about helping.
For me it’s making choices that value someone elses needs instead of your own ego when helping others. Yea adulthood can have assumptions associated with it that screw over people who don’t meet that criteria(particularly with aesthetic), but I’d say there’s at least ways that are more mature than others when dealing with problems at least. Like watching cartoons or whatever doesn’t mean you are or aren’t adult but taking a situation where someone’s in pain and centring yourself is absolutely not mature.
But the difference between real compassion and the corrupt imitator born of pride hardly has anything to do with maturity, in my opinion. Even children can value others’ needs when helping them, but I have had the displeasure of meeting countless adults who constantly made themselves the center of attention when others were in pain, including myself.
Oh for sure, but I guess for me while I’ve met kids who value other peoples needs, they don’t actually understand that other people have stuff going on inside themselves. It’s why I don’t judge kids who are mean but I do with adults.
I struggle with understanding other people but even I know they have interior lives and perspectives. Though I don’t think age matters past like 21 or whatever. At that point it’s all fair in terms of moral care. Which honestly makes those adults who are over the age of 30 real terrible.
Maybe there needs to be better words for it but I guess I’m talking moral maturity, not aesthetic maturity
Yeah, I guess I’m just not used to the way you’re using “maturity” in this context. Given my insight and (sometimes gruesome) experiences, I hold that human adulthood really guarantees no skill or insight of any kind on its own.
Perhaps a better word for it is “morality” or “compassion”. Above all else, this is not a matter of being an “adult” or a “child”, but rather that of being part of a social species where we help each other survive and thrive in an indifferent and unjust universe.
No heroes no villains no winners no losers. Except Joyce hopefully getting the medical care she very obviously needs. THAT part is a winner.
I hope Jennifer is a good person for Joyce on this one. She’s got a legit caring instinct her. It is not expressed well, a lot of the time, because Jennifer is a huge awful mess herself, but I do think there is something inside her that wants to make other people’s lives better or easier.
Also, shallowly, I’m desperate for Joyce getting to exist outside of Becky and Becky’s circle (which now firmly includes Dorothy), for five minutes. Yeah, yeah, they’re childhood best friends! they grew up together! Joyce questioned and then abandoned the defining ideology of her entire life based on her love of Becky! They have weathered near-death experiences together! Normally this is catnip to me. But uhhhhhhh also there is so much unhealthy between them, and amazingly it’s not even just the unrequited crush. They need a break. I want *Joyce* to be able to take that Yale transfer, to get away from this. (But keep texting Joe.)
I get that for sure. I thought it was a really powerful moment when we first realized she was texting Joe while back home, because he was outside of her current friend group and she could genuinely be herself rather than others’ expectations. I really like their chemistry together and always want to see more scenes of them together.
I don’t know what Joyce and Becky are like when they aren’t running on trauma responses and Joyce chronically undermines her own problems around someone who’s so this desperately possessive.
Like what do they get up to when they aren’t fighting dads? Because so far the answer is “each other.”
There have been moments when Joyce seemed to benefit from the comfort and familiarity of Becky’s presence—having Becky in the room calmed her down enough to get through the eye puff test, after all. It was an anxiety-inducing situation; it helped her to have someone around who understands those anxieties well.
But in the larger sense, Becky is like a textbook example of why it can be….like, a problem to go off to the same college as an agemate sibling, or friends from high school. Because part of college is the opportunity for personal reinvention, of trying on new identities, trying new experiences, without being weighed down or held back by the perceptions and expectations of people you have a lot of history with. Joyce is already having that problem with people she’s only known a few months—she made such a vivid impression on them that they’re surprised and not welcoming to any signs of change in her. With Becky, the childhood best friend, it’s a million times worse, because Becky has outright admitted she needs Joyce to be her emotional comfort object, and to stay exactly the same (except with a few minor modifications that serve to Becky’s benefit, like being cool with gay people). That is not okay, and I’m not even giving her points for the self-awareness to know and name that, because she didn’t say that and then release Joyce *from* the implicit obligation to fill that need for her, just as Joyce fills so many of Becky’s needs.
When Becky first showed up, she really was all alone, and she NEEDED that unswerving, unstinting support from Joyce. But they’re now at a point when frankly, the only thing that gives Joyce more stability than Becky is a living, non-estranged parent who’s supporting her financially (this is absolutely not a small thing! But Becky is no longer homeless, she has a place in the system and a path to move forward, and there’s no indication that she’s going to do anything to fuck that up for herself. It’s gonna be hard, but she’s no longer desperate, and she has several people in her corner who emotionally prioritize her highly and will offer her as much support as she needs. Possibly to their own detriment but you know what’s I kind of don’t care about Dina and Leslie enough to mind).
Meanwhile, Joyce’s emotional support system is SHIT. She’s not on speaking terms with two-thirds of her family, and her father is making the right noises but there is clearly some tension and lack of trust there, while her sister is in survival mode to the point where Joyce doesn’t even know she’s trans (no shade whatsoever on Joycelyn; she is doing what she needs to protect herself and no one is ever obliged to come out to anyone unless and until they want to and know they’re safe doing do), which inhibits the kinds of conversations they can have. Her closest friends have been assholes to her about her religious trauma. There are very, very very few people Joyce feels like she can be remotely honest with about huge, life-changing questions—she actively hid her atheism from everyone but Sarah (and then…Joe! Hmm!) because she knew the kind of blowback she’d get over it—and she was right. That is not a good sign, in a friendship. Joyce’s friends are failing her, and Becky’s regular presence in her life, and the demands of Becky’s everything are actively making that worse. It’s causing her real harm, and it’s creating tensions in that beloved childhood friendship that could destroy it for good, if this dynamic stays in place.
And that’s why I really, really, really wish they could take a break from each other and put some distance between them. Maybe they can be friends again in the future, reassess each other as the people they’ll be then, see what from their past still works, and what they need to leave behind. Because this? This is a train wreck in slow motion, and it is phenomenally unfair to Joyce.
ykw thanks for bringing up how Becky rolled in with the glasses thing because I pretty much only remember that for the part where she fought against it on the grounds that Joyce having glasses is a change and that’s bad, so it’s good to remember that when given the opportunity she just went in there and friended hard like she did when she found out about Joyce getting drugged at the party and just immediately handled it like a pro.
Because I think it’s a major element to Becky’s character and her relationship with Joyce that Becky is a good friend only in circumstances when Joyce allows her to be one, but Joyce chronically undervalues her own problems around Becky and Becky can’t help out with the religious trauma because of her own hangups on What Joyce Needs To Be, and so she hasn’t had much opportunity to be anything to Joyce but someone to protect from a larger threat, and, for as harsh as this probably sounds, Becky is really an anchor around the neck to Joyce at the moment not just for her own “I need my buffer” shit but for how Joyce’s other best friend adamantly values Becky’s feelings over Joyce’s. Between the three people who Joyce loves most, who does she get to talk to about her own problems?
I do think they need a long break from each other because it’s not healthy now when it really needs to be for Joyce’s sake in the immediate moment and for the both of them long term. There are no more evil dads, Becky is no longer homeless, she is not literally reliant on Joyce’s goodwill to survive, and she’s got a support network of a frenemy, a dino girlfriend, and two teachers who dote on her, one of whom threw away their revolting political career because Becky made her change. It’s okay for her to eat a Snickers and learn to chill with the codependency.
Is it so far-fetched to believe that Dorothy really does care, but is just overcorrecting after Jennifer called her out to start with? No, no, obviously Dorothy could only possibly be a cynical glory-seeker who sees every interaction as a possible achievement.
I guarantee everyone on earth has scrambled to fix their social fuckup like this and made things worse at least once. But ignore that! Dorothy’s the one in the path of our mighty armchair psychiatry today, so let’s see what cynical moral judgments we can extrapolate from another normal, muddy interaction by college students with *gasp* personality traits!
Criticized certainly. Dorothy’s approach was tactless as ever, much like her RA campaign. She needs to read the room and accept when she’s made a mistake and needs to let it sit rather than rush to fix it.
I’m just more than a little pissed off at yet another round of “normal college first-year makes social mistake among friends, therefore she doesn’t actually care about anyone but her own ego and is, in fact, dead inside and a Narcissist.”
Dorothy has a consistent pattern to her realistic and not-very-important social mistakes, which reveals something about her character. She is bossy. She assumes that she is better and wiser than her peers, and ought naturally to be in charge.
That is quite a realistic flaw for a character like Dorothy, and not even exaggerated.
To put it another (more compassionate) way than “assumes that she is better and wiser than her peers and ought naturally to be in charge”, Dorothy has ambition that she desperately needs to live up to, and that means always being in a leadership role, and means she always has to know best, putting pressure on herself to be in that position.
She’s explicitly talked about sublimating a whole lot of desires to get even as far as she’s gotten so far, and I’ve seen familiar foreshadowing of the breakdown that is likely coming in her future when she inevitably falls short of a goal that she thinks she can’t afford to miss.
The neat thing about this more compassionate reading is the results are still a flaw, but also you can potentially see the underlying problems.
TBH I don’t expect this to gain a whole lot of traction in this comments section.
If you want to excite my sympathy for Dorothy, pointing out that she is “just” engaged in her plan to become the leader of the free world is not the way to do it. It would be more effective to point out that she is probably just modelling adult behaviour on her mother’s maternal behaviour, probably because modern WEIRD society gives children too little exposure to adult role models interacting as equals.
I mean yeah, that is Dorothy’s character, or at least how I think of her.
But I think the worst behaviours towards Joyce these last seven months are also a major part of her character, and I think the same of reading her as someone who’s performatively nice in the sense that she bottles her thoughts to avoid raising a fuss. They’re not incompatible reads, she’s motivated by loving Joyce and relying on a status quo that only worked when problems not only had binary answers, but binary answers that Dorothy was capable of recognizing as binary.
I believe that Dorothy does care, but part of her caring is ‘Joyce is MY project, I cannot lose control of her like this, Jennifer can’t steal this’. It’s not the whole of her caring, but it’s a very gross and imo very real part of it.
I see what you mean. I think it’s less about possessiveness of Joyce specifically, and more of not wanting to be the idiot who wasn’t helpful, regardless of situation. But I can see how those don’t look too different either.
Let’s also not forget please that just a few months ago Jennifer was Billie the borderline-suicidal alcoholic disaster lesbian. Dorothy might just not trust her to fully follow through on being helpful.
I’m pretty sure she will, but I won’t blame anybody who doesn’t have that faith.
I think it’s more about an internal Dorothy monologue of “What good am I if I’m not making things better and I clearly failed and have to make up for it.”
Dorothy has the flaw that she wants the “Arete” of being President and glory but thinks she’d do a genuinely good job. There’s also a lot of evidence that she could. Really, the bigger issue is that Dorothy has shown none of the networking skill she’d need or ability to smooze and favor trade.
And I bet you anything if the roles were reversed here between Dorothy and Jennifer people would be ragging Dorothy for not asking Joyce if she prefers a walk-in at the sports clinic vs an appointment. Jennifer’s just doing what people are accusing Dorothy of.
Overcorrecting is a good way of framing this, I think. I’m not at all impressed with Dorothy in this situation, but she does genuinely care about Joyce. Jumping in to take some ownership of this “helping Joyce get badly-needed medical care” thing when she wasn’t willing to touch it before someone else took the potentially risky step of suggesting it to Joyce in the first place is obnoxious. But I think it is less Dorothy being some kind of narcissistic, credit-seeking gloryhound than it is that she got called out on being a bad friend, and Dorothy legit wants to be a good friend to Joyce. (And, in fairness, to be SEEN to be a good friend to Joyce, after the calling out part.)
I don’t understand the comments section shitting on Dorothy because “she has no character flaws; she’s boring” and then shitting on Dorothy when she does anything that demonstrates her character flaws (which have been established for years now, particularly in her relationship with Walky).
That’s not a secret, it’s just established and accepted for some reason. It’s also a really good reason not to engage a lot of the time, especially when any hot-buttom character is on the screen.
so, i’m trying to find a non-confrontational way to phrase this for a few minutes now, so instead of pointing out the obvious let me ask: what exactly is it that you do not understand?
Amber tries to press Ethan for advice and then acts like a horny weirdo, then Amber tries to start being a better friend and Ethan isn’t receptive, and both times these characters were Assholes and just because you could explain why they’re Assholes doesn’t mean you can excuse it.
I recognize I’m a cultish obsessive who remembers things like the alt text of a 2013 Raidah strip about how she’s glad her dad isn’t here on family weekend, but it does often feel like the most immediate strip is the one that matters entirely.
For me, at least, it’s because I’m commenting on the strip in question. So if I don’t like the way a character is acting in one particular strip, yeah, my comment about that strip is probably going to be about that, even if I otherwise like them in the comic overall or agree with them in the overall scene.
But I am likewise an obsessive who remembers exactly the strip you mean so there you go 😛
i meant to reply to annika actually, and yeah like you said below, my intuitive explanation for why “the comment section” behaves incoherently is that it’s made up of a whole lot of different commenters saying incompatible things at any time.
but also i guess Annika was voicing a frustration more than a actual puzzlement probably. to which i say, “fair”
@milu It’s frustration and real confusion. It’s true that the comment section is made up of many people with different opinions and beliefs! It just seems like I see a lot of intense criticism of Dorothy no matter what she does, really, and of course people are absolutely entitled to their opinions. I know lots of other characters are similarly grilled, but it seems to be often over fairly slight missteps (or even lack thereof) with Dorothy and I’m not sure why. Maybe I just had a strong reaction to it because it reminds me of how society as a whole tends to devalue women regardless of what they do and hold them to unfair, often conflicting standards.
hm yeah it’s been pointed out before how some of the criticism of Dorothy may have some gendered pointedness to them, but i’m unconvinced because like 90% of the cast is female. then again maybe this has more to do with specifically her ambition which yes, is typically attacked in women way more often and viciously than in men.
but i guess.. how can i put this. this comment section, my impression of it as a whole, is rarely openly or blatantly misogynistic, and when such expressions arise they are usually promptly yelled or laughed out of the room if not moderated away altogether by Willis.
so, beyond that, i find it kind of… difficult? to speak meaningfully of “the comment section” in aggregate. then again, you may be right that Dorothy gets picked on more often, and quite possibly for a specific sort of transgression of the patriarcal norm. idk sure. it’s possible. I’ve been mostly skipping the character discussions lately, tbh. but i think i at least understand what you mean now! sorry for being a bit dense lol =P
It is true that Dorothy gets some very odd heat from the comment section sometimes, especially in earlier storylines. Willis has commented on it before. Others who often get weird heat are Amber, Sal, Carla, Ruth and Becky. Sometimes Joyce too.
You can discuss the characters and the subject matter without casting sweeping moral judgments on them. My problem is not when people say “yeah Dorothy messed up here, go Jennifer, hope Joyce gets help, etc” but rather when they say “Wow Dorothy messed up, therefore she must only care about taking credit and doesn’t actually want to help her friends” (???).
See also: Joyce & Becky arguing about faith and hordes of commenters using that argument to “prove” that either one never ACTUALLY cared about the other one.
People love to judge cartoon characters extremely harshly for the stupidest, pettiest shit and it’s exhausting.
well i for one think the comment section today (besides Yoto being awesome and, why not, a squee or two of Dinappreciation) should be about vulture facts. why is nobody talking about vultures? like how condors have recently been found to be capable of parthenogenesis?! that’s some awesome maternal vulture energy.
Here let me fix panel 4 real quick,
Jennifer: “Dorothy, back off. You can’t just swoop in and take charge of Joyce like some maternal… hermit crab or whatever, who the fuck knows what those weirdos get up to. Now if instead you were a sick-ass MATERNAL VULTURE you would just ping your own baby vulture into existence, bam! sayonara losers, cool shades emoji.”
Honestly I think it’s in part because the comic so rarely shows us much of her flaws at all that people jump at it when she exhibits them now.
Even before, overall she was commended eventually (by Jennifer, the person hurt most by what she did in trying to take over the RA position.) for how she behaved towards her.
The narrative itself doesn’t really have moments like these with dorothy often/she’s often showcased as the voice of reason/correct.
Honestly I think it’s in part because the comic so rarely shows us much of her flaws at all that people jump at it when she exhibits them now.
I mean yeah I think this is a major factor for me at least.
Dorothy’s never been worth devoting any of my single brain cell towards previously, she was just kinda Generically Nice for a whole decade while she acted as a stabilizing element to more outgoing and colourful characters, and her advice-dispensing was sensible because she was dealing with morally simple conflicts that don’t need a whole lotta arguing. She’s just a deeply empathetic person who wants everyone to get along, but that’s all she is so I filed her with Ethan as a character who sure does exist.
She was Cyclops but without the part where he threw coffee in Wolverine’s face and then beat the shit out of him and then all of their teammates at once so they’d stop being traumatized, is what I’m saying.
Nowadays she’s running with the same script and ruinously fucking up, everything that made Dorothy be good and kind and helpful being twisted into failures not even because of her but because her friend has changed and she doesn’t know how to adapt, she’s never had to before, well that I’m devoting this many words to Dorothy lately is fun! It’s nice to give a shit about her even if it’s just to laugh at how much she sucks, because sucking now means she’s probably gonna stop sucking later.
The easy answer is that those are things probably being said by two different people.
Except for me, I’m definitely saying both, but that’s because I only started liking Dorothy now that she’s making the kind of mistakes that mean she’s not boring with no character flaws anymore. I want Dorothy to mess this up because then I get to see her overcome those flaws! Or just live with them and continue doing wrong for a while! That’s also okay!
Is Dorothy urging that Joyce ought to delay getting treatment, and risk being no longer symptomatic by the time that she gets to see a doctor, in order to avoid rubbing shoulders with uncultivated proles?
Optometrists are different than internists, ime. (True/gross fact: ‘internists’ was almost ‘real doctors’. BAD ME. Not cool!) You can find optometrists basically anywhere, but GP/internist doctors are generally thinner on the ground.
That said, IU does seem to have a very robust medical school indeed! The largest in the US according to their site. If it’s like where I live (in the UW Medicine area) you might have to bear with being watched by bright-eyed medical students (or asked if that’s okay and watch them get shooed off if it’s not) but the standard of care might actually be pretty decent, fingers crossed.
Yeah, walk-in clinic is definitely a better option although I got the impression Dorothy’s disdain for it is moutlying because you can’t schedule at a walk-in clinic and it is therefore INEFFICIENT, THE MOST MORTAL OF SINS
Jon: writes normal word
dumbingofage.com: MOUTLYING TEH WORD IZ MOUTLYING CHNAGE IT NOW COZ I SAIDD SO
Jon’s phone: ….wtf dude
dumbingofage.com: I HACK U FOR BREKFAST OK I FUKKIN HACK YU NOW WRITE IT OR I SWEAR TO FUK I HACK YUOR BRAIN U DUM AUTOCORRECT BTICH
Jon’s autocorrect: ok ok chill, there, happy?
dumbingofage.com: NO FIGHT ME
dumbingofage.com: BUT OK U GOOD FOR NOW NOW FUK OFF
Jon: the heck is going on
Personally if I had a choice between a walk-in and a scheduled appointment I would pick the scheduled appointment (assuming the delay wasn’t very long). Setting a time to show up means you won’t be stuck in a waiting room for potentially hours waiting for your turn.
I very often get stuck in a waiting room for at least twenty minutes even when I have an appointment. The only person involved in my care who seems to be able to be on time for an appointment is my clinical psychologist.
It depends on the situation. But the last time I went to a walk-in clinic with high temperature, lack of energy, etc (it was a ruptured appendix) I had to wait around 3 hours. When I see a regular doctor I do sometimes have a wait, but the wait is usually under 20 minutes. And I know I am guaranteed to see a doctor (i.e. no showing up and being told “too late in the day. Come back tomorrow”)
Nah, just last-panel-of-the-comic silliness. She prefers doing things in the proper way to best arrange with schedules and make sure everything is as optimized as possible, and its being played up a bit in order to create a joke. Never take the last panel to be completely literal, strip’s got to end on a joke 99% of the time and all.
Sure, if you give the absolute least charitable read of the strip possible for some reason and then get mad about things she didn’t even imply. She offered to schedule an appointment because Dorothy is an organization nerd. Clearly she’d prefer a pre-planned appointment over an unorganized walk-in. Odds are an appointment would be good for tomorrow if not that day. Also…..you don’t need to be ON your period to get help for it. I have similar ones to Joyce and I plan to not be on mine when I talk to my doctor about it in a week or two. Makes it more conducive to actually being able to show up. If something is wrong with her uterus/vagina/ovary/whatever, it’ll still be wrong when she goes.
Not from the states, but we’re specifically talking about an appointment (or walk in) at the student health services building. Which, sure, could still be crammed with other students I guess, but probably not as much so as a regular hospital or practice.
Dotty is a child who has never needed serious health care so she doesn’t know how doctor’s appointments work. She would call and the receptionist would say “He can see you in a month, if you need urgent care go for a walk in appointment at a clinic.”
I know Dorothy has best intentions in everything, but I am so happy Jennifer swooped in and took control before Dorothy started controlling Joyce’s life decisions again.
Just because she was right about the glasses doesn’t mean she can decide things for Joyce (like a “maternal vulture”).
Yes, and though Dorothy has the best intentions, and although encouraging and helping Joyce to see a doctor is a good thing, Dorothy’s influence of Joyce in the matter of her deconversion and her quarrel with Becky has not been benign. Benevolent, but not benign. It would be best for Joyce if she did not allow Dorothy to continue as her commander-in-chief, but rather cultivated a wider acquaintance and more equal relationships.
Dorothy is a planner. Doing something unplanned causes her anxiety. Maybe not to the point where it’s interfering with her life, but definitely to the point where she will choose planned over spontaneous if she can. She will also consider that the best course of action for anyone she cares about. And she will try to be helpful by planning for them.
Joyce probably only agreed because Jennifer used her head cheerleader powers on her. (You may argue that there is no such thing, but I’m pretty sure Jennifer believes she has them. If this works out, she’ll do a fist pump and say “Yes! Still got it.”)
I’d also argue that Jen’s presentation is much more focused on the results (Joyce feeling better). Whereas Dor is much more focused on showing everyone how capable she is of handling the process to overcompensate for the fact that she didn’t immediately take charge of the issue and is turning the process into a much more complicated ordeal that Joyce is more likely to reject, especially considering her limited bandwidth atm
Dorothy had it all prepared long ago and just needed an opportunity, but Cheerleader Billie isn’t about to forgive her for standing on the side until now.
I do love Dorothy, but I think step 1 here should be apologizing for not trying to help earlier. Prioritizing conflict avoidance (based on assumptions) over helping a friend in constant pain is kinda shitty.
Because she’s happy to do it for the glasses (and that did eventually end with Joyce venting about change is scary and is pretty much what motivated her freaking out about them), she’s happy to do it about Joyce being a School Misser, and she’s happy to do it about Joyce’s theological opinions and even how and when she’s allowed to be angry. When does Dorothy treat Joyce as capable of making her own choices?
Jedi’s completely correct in saying Dorothy prioritizes conflict avoidance, she’s done it over the entire course of the series, it’s just never been for the reason of “cannot be assed.”
Perhaps she is modelling her behaviour on her mother’s behaviour because that (and school-teaching) is the only adult behaviour that she has been given a role model for. Modern middle-class Western society doesn’t expose children to enough examples of adults interacting as equals.
As someone who gets anxiety over being unfamiliar with restaurant menus, specifically because I won’t be able to know what I want to order in advance – it is the weirdest and most specific anxiety and I HATE IT – I sympathize with my girl. Plans Are Good, Plans Protect You, Plans Keep You From Being In Someone Else’s Way.
I’m still disappointed in yesterday!Dorothy, but I feel today!Dorothy keenly. (hah!)
So, I feel it is safe to assume at this point that Dorothy and Becky have NOT suggested Joyce go to a doctor before this moment and Jennifer really IS the first one to suggest it. I’m not as critical of Dorothy as many here but this definitely makes her swooping in to help at this moment a little worse.
Indeed. A few strips ago it was made clear they didn’t broach the topic in the slightest because Joyce is too stupid and naive to talk about taking birth control. It’s possible it was discussed back in September or November over timeskips, but with what the text has given us they just aren’t talking about it.
Dorothy and Becky started cracking up about how they’d have to hide it in peanut butter to sneak it by, but then it wouldn’t work because Joyce would consider it food mixing.
Embracing the hater role but for silly things that don’t matter. This strip my hatred is focused on Dorothy’s boring hoody, PICK A BETTER COLOUR HOODIE DOROTHY! THE HINT OF PINK DOES NOT DO ENOUGH TO MAKE THE BORING HOODIE WORK!
BTW I’m both bored and eager to try new wordly foods, so tell me, what’s your favorite meal to cook? I wanna try to make it! (orange just how you like your hotdogs, or both!!) 😋
will you look at that piece of SHIT third tree from the right in the last panel, going lalala i don’t give a fuck and branching out at a FUCKING 45° angle BARELY off the ground like it’s alone in the MFing forest when all of the other trees are making the effort of being nice and polite and gently fanning out after a solid 10 feet of vertical growth???? like heelllooooo third tree from the right in the last panel you ever tried, oh i don’t know, NOT being a LOW-BRANCHY JERK?!!!!
like, sorry, like, WHO do you even think you ARE to expect us to abide your riDIculous trash life choices, third tree from the right in the last panel you selfish son of a …potato? or fungus, or whatever? look who cares how trees even grow goddammit i’m so FURIOUS rn shit damn pissfuck pus-filled pathetic nonsense “””angiosperm”””, more like IEATSHITsperm rrrahhhughhhhsdfmkgfksdgfhdpsdpfsqregsmd
…
…
…
*deep breath*
…aaah thank you florence that was nice <3
In short, Dorothy and Becky did the wrong thing for the right reason, while Jennifer is doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Should Dorothy have asked earlier? Maybe. Periods are personal after all, and I wouldn’t blame Dorothy on waiting and seeing instead of spending emotional capital on a potential argument over Joyce’s own medical choices. Should Jennifer shunt Dorothy aside and take all the credit? It probably won’t hurt Joyce, but it’s really petty, and shows that helping Joyce wasn’t the goal. It was asserting the ‘head cheerleader’ control over the people around her. Because Jennifer is ‘healthy’ now, so she knows best. Otherwise, what’s the harm of showing Joyce that all of her friends were concerned, even if they weren’t the ones to suggest it?
I’ve seen this kind of pettiness in my own family, so it really rubs me the wrong way. Just my own personal perspective.
I’m not seeing this “right reason” you’re attributing to D+B. Their reasoning was literally “but that might be haaaaaaaard :(“. Jennifer is ALSO not shunting Dorothy aside and take all the credit. Shunting someone aside is literally what Dorothy tried to do, as soon as she found out that she could get some credit without putting in any actual effort.
To be fair, just trying to get Joyce to go to an eye doctor and get glasses was like PULLING TEETH, and that was like what? Just a few days ago? I don’t blame either of them for not wanting to go right back into “Fighting Joyce to do something for her health yet AGAIN” Mode.
except for the fact that Becky has known about this for years and Dorothy for months and months. Knowledge that Joyce has debilitating periods predates the glasses by far
Yeah okay, but like Periods are personal, Becky has grown up with them being the norm for Joyce, Joyce has grown up with it being just “What is expected” and fixing Joyce’s period problems shouldn’t fall on Dorthey to fix either, like dang I had debilitating periods too, none of my friends had to have a ” talk to me” about going to the doctor.
Sometimes you have to decide for yourself “You know what, I cant live with this” and do something about it.
Dorothy’s Joyce’s friend, not her parent, and tbh her not taking care of every little issue for Joyce should be encouraged so she can step outa Mom mode, and more into a “Friend” mode.
Normally I’d agree, but they already know what her previous take on doctors was and as a friend who knew about that and her other changes you can bring this up. Not in a “let’s drag her away” glasses shenanigans, but I’d suggest it without being a mom. When my friends latch on and attribute everything to one thing in their childhood I suggest therapy. Not in an asshole way but in a “this seems to be taking a lot for your energy, and it might be nice to take that weight off. If you’re struggling by yourself, there’s people who can help when you’re ready.” Or someone who thinks their cough is just a cough at week 8 and I can go “I’ve had this, and this isn’t considered normal. Your cold might have mutated into something else or you might be having prolonged spasms. Maybe go check it out to be safe?”
It’s kinda funny, but with what you shared here and last time, I think we both came from the same shtick; I got people in my life I desperately want to help, but it’s more important that they ignore the problem since solving it is, like, way harder??? And my opinion is irrelevant even when it involves me suffering the consequences of their problem?????
And that’s why Jennifer’s speaking so hard to me right now, and why I think Dorothy and Becky are displaying the latest example of why they are turbo buttholes; Jennifer sees the problem, there are things that can be done, the people who nominally should aren’t up to it, and so it falls to her. I don’t think that’s powerful or assertive or whatever, it strikes me as the simplest, most basic form of human decency I possibly believe in, and why I get so utterly flummoxed when it’s treated as some huge forceful leap; helping someone out with a problem too big for them is the most goddamned normal thing in the universe.
And that’s how I am, I think. I’m no mother hen, but I can’t stand seeing someone I know suffering some obvious distress and not being helped, because “suffering some obvious distress and not being helped” is what my entire adolescence turned out to be where I was surrounded by adults who expected Teen Spencer to handle the responsibility of leaving my drunkass mom. That’s kinda what it became for me, I guess; if I don’t make the right decision, it’s my fault, and it took me like a decade to realize I never should have been in that position to begin with, let alone that I should have been able to rely on the actual goddamned adults in my life to pick up the slack. Then, y’know, my 20s hit and I Am An Adult with unknown mental disorders, my antidepressants stop working but I’m still on them a few years, no prospects or future, but I Am An Adult so I’m just supposed to pick up the slack for what my folks were supposed to teach me.
I’m only the person I am now because I had to pass through the darkest, lowest point in my life, but maybe I never would have had to go through it if I had people who were willing to talk.
It seems to me that Sarah, as roommate, must have suggested something. Unless she just thinks it’s normal, which, as people have noted previously, a lot of people (even doctors) do.
…But in a bathrobe, farting, is how I attend all my doctor’s appointments, why is Dorothy’s dialogue framed like that’s somehow the wrong way to do it? 🤨
Go Jennifer! Give Joyce all the help she needs and chase away the nosy maternal vulture! On the other hand, I can’t wait to read how Raidah will comment on the whole situation. If she’ll say to her precious friend Jennifer that she did a great thing or if she’ll said she had to leave Joyce to suffer for her own ignorance.
This is a very bad look for Dorothy. She talks about Joyce in the third person, then insults people who use the walk-in option, and then polices what people should be allowed to wear to receive medical care.
I thought the infantilizing complaints from yesterday’s comment section sounded unfair, but here we see her act like Joyce doesn’t have any agency at all. 🙁
Anyway in more lighthearted takes: Jennifer in like four strips did a better job at doing Dorothy, Becky and Sarah’s thing than they were.
Joyce has a problem? Okay sure, I’m gonna confront it and be assertive in being right while also having the ability to understand that Joyce is an autonomous human being who can make informed choices she missed out on thanks to her repressive upbringing, she just needs to hear it the way that’ll make sense to her.
We all want that kind of alpha bongo in our lives. Unless you’re Yotomoe, in which case you really want that kind of alpha bongo in your life.
It gives me a warm in my hearth each time I read a strip that Willis has already showed as a teaser (like today).
It’s like: congratulations! You reached the strip. Now you know what’s happened in the teaser.
I am with Jennifer on this; the only reason Dorothy jumped in was, because she saw the Joyce was not putting up the same resistance when she went to get her eyes examined. If the two tag teamed, worked together, then Dorothy’s suggestion would be okay.
Aight I gotta question the oft-mentioned Glasses Incident because that really didn’t seem like a thing that proves Joyce is completely untenable and chaotic about doing things she doesn’t want to do.
Here’s a strip where Joyce fights it. By the time she starts laughing maniacally I was pretty okay with filing this under Funny Joke Time instead of a deathly serious analysis of what actually happens when Joyce is confronted by a problem.
Then she expresses resentment over how her life has changed, afterwards she goes.
She is having a bad time but otherwise just goes through with it. Afterwards she complains while picking her glasses out and, as may have been implied by the visuals of recent strips, has just kept on wearing them despite how much she hates it. She once again draws specific reference to the idea of wanting things to stay the same and resenting change.
Afterwards Sarah and Walky start ripping on her about it and she, for the third time; talking about resenting change. Sarah tells her to take them off in her dorm but Joyce sticks to it, and then Sarah calls her “cute widdle Joycey, so pissy.”
(As I may have noted, Joyce’s friends are the actual worst)
So someone’s gotta square why this was some Herculean undertaking for Dorothy “you’re not allowed to be angry without a good reason” Keener when all she did was take her there while Joyce stormed about it while still going through with it anyway. The strip where Dorothy books the appointment entirely without Joyce’s input even has Dorothy say out loud that Joyce “owes it to herself to investigate all possible obstacles to success.”
TLDR: Dorothy did the thing and then Joyce went along with it and then kept along with it entirely within her own power while griping about rigid fixation on things staying the same and hating the tactile sensation that was now permanently on her face (an ASD mood if there ever was one). As if, and bear with me on this one; Dorothy’s an idiot and deciding at her own leisure which parts of Joyce’s life she’s allowed to control, like this is not a major fixture of Joyce’s current struggle with her three closest friends or something.
Huh, I just noticed that Dorothy emphasises the first “I”. So it’s not “I can set up the appointment for her.”, it’s “*I* can set up the appointment for her.” She. Not Jennifer, go away Jennifer, you can’t set up appointments, *Dorothy* is the one that sets up appointments, even though she wasn’t going to do anything about this until you walked the path to make sure it wasn’t mined, but now that we know nothing’s gonna blow up and it’s safe, make way for *Dorothy*.
You know, all this goes back to the whole “Joyce is the worst” thing going on a few months back when she was lashing out over her spat with Becky. And I’m just going to say that the problem here is the same problem it was then: Joyce’s friends are the fucking worst.
I’m suddenly wondering if a part of the problem with Joyce’s closer friends fucking up so spectacularly compared to people who’ve chosen or who desperately tried to step away at points (Joe, and now Jennifer) is a part of being too close to see the wood for the trees. And like Joe deep down wants his relationship with Joyce to change anyway and Jennifer doesn’t care if Joyce hates her or whatever. Like back when they were all closer and Jennifer went by Billie she thought Joyce swearing was weird and Mike called her out about it because didn’t she find chipper Christian Joyce annoying or a joke? But with time and distance she’s not as invested as keeping Joyce in a particular role. Heck, with her name adaptation she’s trying a few new roles herself now anyway.
Then again maybe Joe, Jennifer and Joyce need to start a new team: I’m thinking the J force.
Jocelyn all things being well, can come too.
Then again Walky who is also a step or two away from Joyce also doesn’t do too badly sometimes given Sunday. Maybe he can be an honorary member.
It’s outright textual with Becky but Dorothy and Sarah are running with the script where Joyce naively does wrong and she just has to listen to them to set it right, but this is a scenario where they can’t get their Joyce back because it’s not a wrongdoing on Joyce’s part, they just see Silly Pollyanna Joyce who doesn’t mix food as Real Joyce and don’t recognize her stepping out of that as a valid expression of Joyce.
This is the third time someone other than the Bad Friend Squad saw Joyce have a problem and instantly moved to address it, and that can be done because they don’t rely on Joyce being their emotional support teddy bear.
I think Joyce would have gone Kablooey were Becky an Dorothy the ones to approach her. I think them choosing to sit this one out (for the time at least) was an acknowledgement that they know they’ve been pushing her a lot recently and don’t want to push her even more. They are close to her and we tend to be the harshest on those we are close to.
Considering that Joyce is already irritated with Dorothy and Becky, I can easily see her behaving differently if it were them asking instead of Jennifer. Still, Dorothy didn’t need to swoop in.
Dorothy makes no effort to solve the problem because she doesn’t want to mess with the status quo but once someone else tries to solve the problem she jumps to be in charge. She really is fated to be a politician.
Oh FUCK. Are we about to actually witness the fabled Neuroses and Character Flaws of the Dorothy?! I love her, but it’s exciting to see her feel out of control, or wrong about something, for once.
I sympathize, walk-in appointments stress me out. But mainly because every place I’ve been to that has them seems to be “walk-ins = long wait, appointment = seen quickly.” Dunno if that applies to student health centers though (my little art school didn’t have one though if anyplace needs one it’s art school).
Loading ...
“GO AWAY YOU MATERNAL VULTURE, IT IS I, MATERNAL FERAL DOG WHO WILL CARE FOR HER”
idk
alt: bc if you show up in a bathrobe, farting, they might immediately prescribe Gas-X and a colonoscopy instead
alt-text: I mean SURE you COULD get pregnant at a gas station, that is totes a thing that can happen
I’m sure that has happened at a gas station. I’m sure it has happened at a gas station I was running while I was there. We used to get some really strange people between midnight and 5 AM.
Speaking as a former convenience store employee, I can only agree with this.
Speaking as somebody who never worked at a gas station, I’ve never gotten anybody pregnant at one, but I did get a bj in the cooler. Yes, the employee on duty at the time was involved.
Of course they were involved. Most people not obligated to hang around a gas station don’t hang around gas stations. If they’re at a gas station and decide they’re going to engage in some kind of sexual activity, if they’re not obligated to stick around, they’ll probably go elsewhere.
Gas station employees who are not fundamentally involved in any hanky panky occurring on the gas station premises are fairly likely supposed to break that sort of activity up. They’re also likely to be bored and sex tends to be considered interesting. Either way, they’re probably going to get involved in some fashion, whether it’s by breaking it up, watching, or trying to join in. In some cases, them trying to join in could be one of the most effective and efficient ways they can break it up, so gas station owners probably shouldn’t consider such attempts to necessarily be dereliction of duty, though it’s certainly reasonable for them to take issue with that approach on other grounds.
People who are aroused by gas stations in some way are more likely than average to have jobs there. Note it’s my impression there are few enough of these that people who work at gas stations are not significantly more likely than average to be aroused by gas stations in some way. But if you’re talking with someone about engaging in a sex act with them, and they respond, “Oh, yeah, that sounds cool. Um, could we go to the gas station to do it?” it *is* more likely that they’ll work at one than if they suggest some other location for the activity. Whether that’s because they’re aroused by gas stations or it’s because they go on shift soon and their risk aversion calculations are *much* more concerned about being late for work than they are about being caught at work doing *that* is anyone’s guess.
There’s probably a few ways to look at this that I haven’t detailed, including the one I intentionally avoided mentioning directly. But that said,
TL;DR: Of course they were.
well that was satisfyingly exhaustive =) thank you.
But was it completely theoretical or backed by empirical evidence?
Only happens at full service gas stations.
Nice.
I see your MATERNAL FERAL DOG, and raise you A MATERNAL MONGOOSE, Jennifer really exudes mongoose energy to me.
Mongoose really says underdog to me and Jennifer really doesn’t do underdog.
Mongoose really know how to manage their own reproductive systems!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31795853/
Fascinating! Goes to show that unfortunately, you humans are definitely NOT top of the evolution game in everything! 🤭
Actually, animals across the kingdom animalia will spontaneously or use herbs to end pregnancies in response to relationship changes, changes in living situation, social conflict, stress and trauma, resource scarcity, fetal illness or nonviability, and for many reasons.
Humans just use more advanced methods to exercise the same reproductive selectivity that other animals do.
See, e.g.:
Elephants, with borage: https://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c03/e6-79-19.pdf
Chimpanzees: https://asknature.org/strategy/eating-leaves-to-control-reproduction/#.U5dCpRCVDYQ
Gelada monkeys: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-bruce-effect-why-some-pregnant-monkeys-abort-when-new-males-arrive
and others (but I only get 3 links before my post gets flagged as spam).
Fascinating!!!! And to think that SOME people deem abortion “unnatural”. 🙄
Students in grade school almost never learn about this. Care to guess WHY?
Direct action by the Republican Theocratic Christian identitarian movement. As networked via the Doug Coe, Alex jones, Nen Shapiro, Paul manafort, a myriad of other white supremacist pseudo fascist making a concerted effort for control of women’s bodies instead of a concerted effort for education or a reduction of abortions via birth control or fertility awareness or education or any methodology but instead actually working to make people stupider and more controllable.
That would be my guess and I could add more names but it gets a little bit ridiculous and I’m sure there’s a ton more extremely culpable individuals that isn’t just the front facing figureheads.
It’s quite modern. Until you could feel kicks (about week 20 give or take) it could be considered “blocked menses” and be “unblocked”. Then people got pissed off that half the population had too much autonomy and we had modern pregnancy confirming methods and well here we are.
Because I’m currently reading the electrifying essay Full Surrogacy Now!: feminism against the family by queer feminist Sophie Lewis, let me quote from the introduction:
What particularly fascinates me about the subject is [human] pregnancy’s morbidity, the little-discussed ways that, biophysically speaking, gestating is an unconscionably destructive business. The basic mechanics, according to evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin, have evolved in our species in a manner that can only be described as a ghastly fluke. (…)
It is the specific, functionally rare type of placenta we have to work with—the hemochorial placenta—which determines that the entity Chikako Takeshita calls “the motherfetus” tears itself apart inside. Rather than simply interfacing with the gestator’s bodt through a limited filter, or contenting itself with freely proffered secretions, this placenta “digests” its way into its host’s arteries, securing full access to most tissues. Mammals whose placentae don’t “breach the walls of the womb” in this way can simply abort or reabsorb unwanted fetuses at any stage of pregnancy, Sadedin notes. For them, “life goes on almost as normal during pregnancy”. Conversely, a human cannot rip away a placenta in the event of a change of heart—or, say, a sudden drought or outbreak of war—without risk of lethal hemorrhage. Our embryo hugely enlarges and paralyzes the wider arterial system supplying it, while at the same time elevating (hormonally) the blood pressure and sugar supply.
let me hasten to add, not to give the wrong impression, that Lewis is not advocating against making babies or anything like that. Read her Vice profile i linked to above or listen to her interview on This Is Hell! to get a better idea of her argument than i could possibly provide. She’s rad. Bit hard to read i guess, what with all the neologizing and big words and endless sentences peppered with brackets. she’s still rad though.
Wow! Fascinating! Thank you for the reference — something interesting to look forward to.
Makes me wonder if it’s at all possible to augment the human body to work more like this when it comes to reproduction.
i mean… we already are. our bodies are augmented by synthetic hormones and all sorts of technologies already. not to mention intellectual technologies, and ideological weapons such as queer intersectional feminism.
i suggest we focus on liberating the resources we do have rather than plan for some techno-utopian future, because 1) we have the means of living in a worldwide techno-utopia now, and 2) without a revolution any technology we develop will only benefit a tiny fraction of humankind at the expense of the many.
How about we take it one step further? ’cause honestly, we might just have to. Between a planet that’s gonna become increasingly unlivable to ordinary humans thanks to climate change, as well as the same fucking class-based societies they keep persistently arranging themselves into no matter how hard they try to avert it, humans for the sake of their survival may just have to alter their physiology on a fundamental level.
“the same fucking class-based societies they keep persistently arranging themselves into no matter how hard they try to avert it”
citation needed?
On the subject (and sorry for being that guy) I cannot recommend enough another (equally exhilarating) book i’m currently reading called “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber (RIP) and David Wengrow, where they challenge, based on anthropological and archeological evidence, the hegemonic narratives betrothed to the western collective consciousness by the Enlightenment (especially Hobbes and Rousseau) about how unequal social hierarchies emerged. They conclude that all such reasonings are post-hoc and thus ideological, not scientific.
their own fundamental axiom, or bias if you will (which they proudly acknowledge rather than obfuscating it) is the simple, illuminating belief that human societies have always been political, in the sense of making collective choices based not on some innate human nature but a complex combination of environmental and cultural factors. yay anarchist science <3
Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I wasn’t referring to how class-based societies emerged but rather how to break the cycle.
Be them political parties or religious cults, social pyramids always replace themselves on the foundation of revolutionary groups who’s success depends much on how well they meet (or appear to meet) the needs of vulnerable people.
But what if we made it so that humans were no longer vulnerable in at least the ways that mattered the most? What if we altered the human body to that its most basic needs, from food to water to shelter, were guaranteed by the energy of the sun’s rays? Would any human, then, be willing to give themselves over to groups that claim to act in their interest, merely to repeat the cycle of swapping one social pyramid for another?
…also because you use the impersonal “we” (a convenient sleight-of-hand which i also struggle to avoid as seen in my own comment you responded to) i feel compelled to point out once again that our world is in no way structured so that technological progress will go boink for all. knowledge is power, and power is at present extremely concentrated so that top-down approaches are highly unlikely to improve the well-being of most of humankind.
at best the worldwide upper-middle-class (which most of us around here belong to regardless of our relative positions in our respective industrial states’ populations) will see some marginal returns, always conditional on the precarious balance of power we still have the agency to maintain against the plutocrats. Revolution, i tell you.
wrote that before reading your reply, but i think it applies perfectly…
but ykw by all means go forth and figure out an open-source way of delivering human metabolism from heterotrophy. i’m all for it, i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There’s no need. Read Childbirth Without Fear. Birth is akin to a sports injury. But, like, we don’t freak out about how no one should be playing hobbyist volleyball.
I do believe some people are more genetically predisposed to healthy pregnancy – and, to me, it makes sense to have a small handful of superbirthers in a tribe where most people don’t.
Say you have a population of 10 people. (This is too small to be viable I know)
If one person can safely have 10 babies who survive to adulthood – then the population has been replaced and 9 people haven’t had to give birth once. Assuming the standard 50/50 sex split, that’s 4 folks with a uterus who didn’t need to have kids.
Say you have a population of 20 and want to have a population of 30. (Reminder – 10 people were born with a uterus)
Two people each have 10 kids. That’s 20. The 8 other people combined would only have to have 10 between them, which is 1-2 each. A few people could choose to be childfree and the population goal is easily met.
Some people are naturally, innately childfree and have no desire to have kids – then you’ve got quiverfull people who have over 15.
To me, the answer seems pretty obvious – stop bullying childfree people into unwanted kids and support the people whose body says “yes more pregnancy please”.
And in case you think I’m just so out of touch I don’t know how hard pregnancy and birth are – 3 births, 1 herbal abortion, a deep desire to carry as many babies as I can and mourning that we don’t have the resources to support 6+ kids.
I’m one of the people whose body is like “fuck yes have all the babies”.
Please don’t. Grantly Dick-Read was a misogynistic asshole who believes women who didn’t want to give birth were defying the natural order. There’s no need for scaremongering about giving birth though. Some people have horrific pregnancies and births and some don’t. Acting like it’s a uniquely horrific, unsurvivable experience isn’t helpful and neither is acting like it’s a harmless walk in the park that everyone is suited for, even if they die giving birth, as Dick-Read did.
I agree with you in principle – let people have as many children as they want to have (even if the number is zero) but I think some people struggle with that idea, especially if it might mean NOT meeting population goals. Not every ‘superbirther’ wants to give birth to ten plus children. Hell, a lot of those Quiverfull people were raised in an environment that was heavily against birth control or other methods of ending or preventing pregnancy and to believe it was their duty to have as many children as possible. I’d hardly call that a model of reproductive freedom either.
I am sorry to hear you don’t have the resources the number of children you want. I hope somehow your situation changes for the better or that you can become a surrogate! It sounds like you’d be a good one.
Also
“Would any human, then, be willing to give themselves over to groups that claim to act in their interest, merely to repeat the cycle of swapping one social pyramid for another?”
Yes. I believe the answer is yes. Because humans.
I’m one of those crazies who enjoys giving birth and has a good time of it. Honestly I genuinely lament that you have to make a lifetime commitment to go through it and I’m debating becoming a surrogate. So her argument feels eh.
I also did an herbal abortion when I accidentally got pregnant and was in a terrible place to have a kid. Without much issues because a well done herbal abortion can be safe – we just like scare tactics in our pregnancy.
Then, I’m also a man, so maybe I just missed some of the memo about how pregnancy and birth are supposed to be so excrutiating.
Childbirth Without Fear is a much better read.
on the contrary, you sound like you would get along fabulously with Sophie Lewis. again, i’m just quoting a bit from the intro where she lays out some biological facts so as to “de-naturalize” or de-mythologize pregnancy. but she’s all for communal surrogacy and child-rearing =)
basically her argument as best as i can make out from my vantage point somewhere into chapter 2 is that “surrogacy” as it is defined under patriarchy is contrasted with “natural” pregnancy, and she’s like “who came up with that silly dichotomy, all pregnancies and all the labour of reproduction is basically surrogacy since children don’t (or shouldn’t) “belong” in any sense to their biological parents, let’s explode those categories and redefine pregnancy as a task that is freely undertaken for the common good under a socialist utopia”
that last line should be, “redefine surrogacy”
also part 2 of her argument i think is gonna be sth like, “in the meantime since we do live under patriarcal white supremacist capitalism, we need to stop stigmatizing surrogacy and matronizingly talk over the surrogacy workers themselves, and instead stand in solidarity with them, and empower them to unionize and so on.”
gestators of the world unite, if you like ✊
I’m glad your pregnancies went so well, but it’s got nothing to do with missing a memo. People are different and a lot of it comes down to hips, pelvis size and shape, uterus size and shape, vaginal canals, etc. And sometimes just luck – some people have a perfect pregnancy and then a subsequent one is miserable. Bodies are weird.
Wow, I had no idea. That’s crazy. And pretty creepy. Parasitic fetuses, basically.
yeah i mean, as Z pointed out, besides the mainstream (and very loud) discourse about how beautiful and miraculous or whatever bearing a child is supposed to be (always, for everyone— well every straight, happily married cis woman at least), the passage i quoted fits into a smaller genre of dissident discourse that has also produced a certain normativity in some circles about how pregnancy is indefensibly creepy and brutal.
as always reality is more complex. i feel like i did a bit more justice to the author by attempting to sum up her overarching thesis in response to Z above, but if you’re interested i strongly suggest looking her up and finding interviews and stuff. The book is really interesting (if, again, a bit daunting at times).
(ps evolution doesn’t have a “top”) (i know you know but i can’t not say it) (sorry) (it’s such an all-pervasive framing and it’s very very problematic) (also it’s not a “game” although i realize you’re using the word in a metaphorical sense, but thinking of “evolution” as a “force” or a “game” or some other kind of reducible object has driven so many otherwise well-meaning people to devise terrible, terrible ideas to try to “hack” it or “harness” it. We need better metaphors is what i’m saying) (fwiw mine is that “evolution” is just another word for “history”) (but people have tried to hack history too, so idk maybe the problem is really just human hubris) (which we absolutely should try to hack) (to pieces) (kbai)
Classic Milu 😆
Great to have you back, friend!!! 😊
hehe =) thanks mate, good to be back (for now) =)
BTW I don’t think caffeine makes you mean spirited, I appreciate your writing here!
But if you’re still worried, take a little bit of weed with it to even things out, 1 mg THC should do the trick!
(yet again I shouldn’t really be offering advice like this from personal experience that depends on having a very specific set of neurodivergent stripes, but still, there it is)
oh thank you but don’t worry i stand by every word in this thread =D
i’m just extreeemely wary of sarcasm because… eh, family issues probably: my 1-year-younger sister was super obnoxious as a teen and using every rhetorical trick in the book to “win” arguments in ways i found infuriatingly disloyal, and i guess i grew up believing the myth that civil & rational discussion unfailingly produces truth and justice. anyway, that’s all in the past, i love my sister and her devastating wit now, but i guess i do still carry with me that unease about edgy banter. I got better, i am now capable of doing it with close friends when i know there’s no way they will feel attacked, but i try as much as possible to avoid it in situations where i lack control over the other person’s reaction; like, in writing, and online, and with strangers…
….also, just popping back in here to inform you all that the plural of mongoose is mongeese. Some will point to dubious sources like dictionaries alleging it’s actually “mongooses” and to that i respond: Merriam-Webster, schmerriam-schmebster.
it’s mongeese, and yes i will die on that hill, that will be all
Plays “Eighth Wonder” on the hacked Muzak
Love that song!
You got something against bathrobes, Dot? Now I’ve officially lost respect for you! Specifically over bathrobe shaming!“““““““
I know you’re probably joking but it honestly irritated the hell out of me. Yes the doctor is a place you should 100% feel safe showing up in a bathrobe while farting.
[me as a doctor]: “Do not even THINK of speaking to me unless you are wearing a corset and SEVERAL petticoats. I’ll not tolerate common guttersnipes in my office.”
In fact, according to one tiktok I saw this very night, that is actually a prescribed treatment.
Not sure for what exactly, but apparently the young girl’s stomach was distended/bloated and they prescribed “fart walks.”
“Fart walks” is a great name for a garage band.
😂😂😂
This is gonna go like that one SpongeBob episode where he got the suds, isn’t it?
Sure hope Joyce gets better though!!!! 🤒
*plays “Sugar Plum Fairy 59” by Pytor Illyich Tchaikovsky on hacked muzak*
Re: that episode – I don’t even want to consider how Jennifer might employ corks in this situation.
If by “corks” you mean “menstrual cup”…
But then Dorothy won’t be able to take credit for helping Joyce with this Jennifer, and isn’t that what’s really important
Seriously Dorothy was literally just making excuses for why she hasn’t tried to help Joyce, it feels really shitty for her to then swoop in once it’s clear there won’t be a huge freakout
I was thinking the same thing, I’m honestly with Jennifer on this one, calling her Maternal Vulture feels right on the money here
Honestly starting to suspect she helped Joyce with her vision issues to feel good about herself rather then out of any real concern for Joyce
I feel like you’ll be surprised at how often that’s the case.
Eh, it’s not shitty but I don’t think we’ve seen anything to make us think Dorothy is quite THAT cynical about her personal relationships
Sorry meant to say it’s not NOT shitty, IE everyone calling out Dorothy for swooping in after avoiding the issue because Billie opened the door to actually pursuing a solution is correct.
I mean, isn’t that what she did with the RA position? I mean ROZ wasn’t a great alternative, but…
One of Dorothy’s objectives in becoming RA was to keep Becky a secret. A new person would not be as distracted by depression/misery/guilt as Ruth was and would notice the loud redhead that was not Carla.
Yeah, screw Dorothy for *checks notes* realizing Jennifer was right, changing her stance, and trying to help. The absolute gall.
And keeping Joyce’s confidential information on file in case of emergencies.
I do think the fact that she is speaking about Joyce in the third person is significant here. For emergencies it’s great to have her info. But Joyce is RIGHT THERE and she’s offering TO JENNIFER to do it. That’s weird.
Perhaps it is to indicate how she conceptualises what she is doing. In her unconsidered view Jennifer and not Joyce is the person with agency, and she is steeping in to assist with (and perhaps put her own stamp on) an undertaking of Jennifer’s.
For “steeping” read “stepping”.
Don’t knock it. Think of ALL the people who /do harm/ to others in order to feel good about themselves. True altruists are few and far between, so I’ll gladly take every self-serving helper I can find.
I mean, really, aren’t all helpers self-serving? I don’t know of anybody who hates helping people but does it anyway. They just won’t bother. I would know, it’s why I don’t bother helping people.
So what if someone’s doing it to make themselves feel good, or look good, so long as they’re doing it.
Just so. Any motivation can be analysed as “… in order to self-affirm”, and this makes not difference at all.
Little of column A, little of column B.
Really tempting to say that it is good practice for a career in politics…
Honestly it’s nice to see some more character flaws in Dorothy. She doesn’t always have the moral high ground in every situation and can be selfish as well. Dorothy has a lot of expectation of perfection around her even in comic she gets criticized for trying to be too perfect and has been called boring because of it. This is rather humanizing for her.
Yeah. It’s also kinda cool to see her attempts to be perfect as a character flaw and even as self-centered, to an extent. I know in my experience, trying to be perfect and make everyone happy led to occasionally causing more harm than “allowing” (accepting, really) myself to be “not perfect” would’ve.
Yeah, I feel like this comment section has this weird hang up where they get really personally offended by every action every character takes like they know them IRL and aren’t like… fictional characters who can and should have interesting flaws that move a story along. So many people read everything every character does in the worst possible faith when to me my reaction is a lot closer to yours- “oh it’s kinda cool that we’re seeing the limits of Dorothy’s perfectionist friend manager runs role and the ways that her own stress can cloud her judgement, especially when Joyce is clearly relating to and understanding the equally depressed and angry Billie more”
Agreed. I see a lot of this, and not just here: “I identify with this character, your reaction isn’t what I would have, so how dare you do this to ME”. I have no particular way to respond to that.
yeh
I for one am thrilled.
Yeah. I’m glad Willis takes time to develop Dorothy as a character who just exists to resolve the crisis of the day, so the plot can move on to tomorrow’s crisis.
You mean “beyond” that kind of character, right?
This and the “your version of failing is not being able to go to a better school than the rest of us” (I don’t have the wherewithal to find the comic sorryyyyy) line are two s-tier Dotty Dunks™️
Yeah, this is an interesting update. Dorothy’s biggest flaw is workaholism/toxic productivity, and it hasn’t been acknowledged as a flaw in a while.
I’m not sure “I’m willing to help as long as I’m not going to get my head bitten off for trying” is quite as damning as you make it out to be, but.
Tea
I….hmmmm. I get what your saying and you might well be right. I don’t want to discount Dorothy being the jerk here. And yet I can’t help be feel that Billie is being territorial about this because this is precisely HER motivation for helping Joyce- to earn brownie points in a neglected friend circle now that Walky might be popular with her new friends. I could be reading too much into that but this is something I can see Billie doing when she’s at her worst. Popularity has always been of keen interest to her, although she has risen above that many times as well.
I dunno, Jennifer has only seemed perplexed by Walky’s sudden popularity. I think she genuinely wants to help someone that’s in a lot of pain. Head cheerleader: problem solver, remember?
If anything, she’s flexing that new found adultness she and her new pals were patting themselves on the back for having when she last made an appearance by making her less “enlightened” pals look after themselves. It might be a little power trippy but if the ends justify the means…?
If her reason for not getting involved was not angsting out Joyce and she just hear Joyce saying she would like a solution then why wouldn’t she switch position and agree that Jennifer was right?
What Rowen Moreland said.
Dorothy doesn’t want credit. She just tends to take charge.
I hate the way the last few strips everyone was saying she’s a horrible person for not taking charge and now everyone is saying she’s a horrible person for helping.
Like, I got why she’s like I just did the glasses thing and that wasn’t appreciated so I’m going to back off on this one. And now this is something Joyce actually wants so she’s happy to help.
Yes I know you all want her to be perfect and magically solve everyone’s problems in a way that makes them think they solved it themselves. But she’s 18 or 19 and this is her personality and she’s doing the best she can.
And yeah, it’s likely Joyce will get over her crush and start resenting Dorothy and they won’t be friends anymore unless she goes to Yale first.
Also, speaking from experience Uni health tends to treat gyn problems with “this is normal for teens.” Though they do also prescribe birth control which is probably a solution to the symptoms Joyce has, but they won’t be careful about which pill or tell her that different pills may have different side effects etc. Didn’t get my actual problems diagnosed until I saw specialists while trying to conceive.
I hold Dorothy to the standards she holds herself, which are pretty textually “I’m here to be Joyce’s life coach.”
No one thinks she sucks for helping here, she sucks because she only decided to help after someone else did the part she declared impossible by treating Joyce as a functional adult.
I’d categorize Dorothy more as trying to be the “mom friend” which is sometimes really helpful and sometimes brings resentment. I also don’t think she and Becky were entirely wrong to expect Joyce to kablooey. We saw yesterday that Joyce DID have the knee-jerk “Nope, can’t fix this” reaction. Was it subdued because she knew it was wrong? Or was it subdued because she didn’t have the energy to explode and she was only able to work through it in 3 panels rather than 3 or 4 strips for that same reason?
We’ll never truly know the answer to that question, but I think, based on the way that Joyce has often reacted to things that are meant to pull her out of her comfort zone, that she would not have agreed so quickly, readily, or reasonably if she wasn’t this far under the weather.
It’s fine to have some preconceived notion of where the conversation will go but Dorothy’s otherwise entirely okay with momming at Joyce and she didn’t even ask.
I don’t expect Dorothy to have all the answers and to exclusively do the right thing, or rather I don’t anymore because she’s finally becoming the dumb idiot I read this series full of dumb idiots for instead of some sagely advice-dispensing fencepost, but it feels pretty textual to Dorothy’s character that she thinks she does, at least when it comes to Joyce, because she’s fine trying to dictate her theological opinions and when she’s allowed to be angry.
Okay, but why is it okay to have a preconceived notion, based off previous experience, about where a conversation will go but not to choose not to have that conversation? Why is deciding that nothing good will come of that conversation and therefore it’s not worth having considered infantilizing Joyce instead of 2 people picking their battles and considering that particular battle not worth fighting when they figure they’ll lose anyways?
I mean, if we take the jokes out of the strip 2 days ago, we end up with Becky and Dorothy essentially saying “We haven’t broached this topic with her because she doesn’t react well to suggestions of medical help and the last time we did it was an entire fucking thing and we don’t think she’d willingly take whatever assistance is available so we’d end up having to see the thing through and keep on her ass about it.” Are the jokes unkind? I can see the argument, though I’d consider them normal for friends, and it’s a comic strip anyways. A bit of unrealistic and hyperbolic dialogue is to be expected.
I guess it comes down to your read of the characters in question. Is Dorothy the mom friend who’s there when it’s time to help you do something that’s necessary but you’re afraid of doing yourself, who sometimes oversteps because of that role that she’s taken on and been tacitly allocated, and who is fully within her rights to back away from a fight like this when she thinks it’ll just be a pain for everyone involved and have no good outcome? Or is she a control freak who ignores people’s boundaries, dictates their emotions, and tries to keep them in little preconceived boxes because that’s the way she best keeps her hold on them? If you believe something closer to the first, you’re rather more okay with this story arc. If you believe something closer to the second, as I think you in particular do, Dorothy hasn’t been a good person in quite some time.
Okay but the jokes are real important to that because they frame it as part of the larger context of “Dorothy and Becky don’t think Joyce can or should make her own choices” that’s been going on since the Faith-Off.
That they infantilize her so hard is the point, it’s not just some optional bike tassels, and more importantly it was that behaviour that led them to avoiding asking it altogether instead of even trying to approach the topic. She’s okay pushing on glasses. She’s okay telling Joyce she’s way worse than a School Misser after hunting her down to a private conversation and listening in on her venting about her death cult. She’s okay telling Joyce to find a nice deism, that her anger’s only good when it’s constructive, and that if Joyce doesn’t being mean then her lifelong best friend that Joyce has been in two separate car chases for will hate her forever.
But she’s not okay even touching this topic even though it’s of actual, literal, physical necessity for Joyce, because Dorothy doesn’t think it’s worth bothering with. She did not even ask, and that she didn’t ask is the important part because the Whys of that have been screaming on-page for seven months.
Dorothy is not making the informed decision to stop meddling with Joyce, she just doesn’t think this warrants her meddling on the ground that Joyce is a moron.
As I said, it comes down to your read on the characters. You clearly have a very different read on Dorothy and they way she’s reacted to Joyce than I do, and that comes out in the way that you see what she’s doing now as infantilizing. I don’t agree; I don’t think Dorothy is acting in bad faith, miscategorizing what’s going on in Joyce’s head, or even acting particularly badly in general. And since you’re basing so much of your read on what happened in the Faith-Off, which I’ve said before I’d rather not debate with you any further, it’s very clear we’re not going to come to terms on this.
Dorothy’s not acting in bad faith, no. That is, as the kids say, the problem.
She’s still running with all the same scripts and patterns that, last semester, worked wonderfully because Joyce was entirely receptive to what she was saying and they were binary enough a problem that Dorothy couldn’t really say the wrong thing, because Dorothy’s got a functioning moral compass and can parse through problems like “my fundamentalist dogma is pressuring me to do wrong, but I want to do right.” Dorothy wants to do the right thing now, but she has her own preconceived biases getting in the way of that and leading her to do what she’s doing now.
And, yeah, of course I’m relation Dorothy’s behaviour now to an entirely unresolved conflict that’s the shining example of Dorothy’s failures in trying to run with the same script. That’s what past events in an ongoing story are for.
There’s also the thing where, I think, Joyce would be aware that while Dorothy is ride-or-die, and no amount of foot-dragging is going to make her leave, there is a definite upper limit to how much nonsense Jennifer is going to take before bailing.
I hate the way the last few strips everyone was saying she’s a horrible person for not taking charge and now everyone is saying she’s a horrible person for helping.
Well, I don’t know about “everybody”, but I don’t think that that is what I did. In the last few strips I was bagging Dorothy for thinking that she had the authority to take charge. And now I’m bagging her for trying to take charge.
Whereas Jennifer is helping without taking charge: she respects Joyce’s agency, the need to have Joyce’s consent for medical treatment.
Dorothy, I hope your strict schedule has “have a nervous breakdown” in there somewhere. Because she’s going to need one.
WHY NOT INDEED!?
Also Jennifer is 100% correct about Dotty. Glad someone said it.
Yeah! Finally!
Swooping in to solve other peoples’ problems for them whether they’re ready for it or not doesn’t always help them. Sometimes it does, but there’s the risk it can spectacularly backfire. (I think the only time we’ve actually seen this happen was the kidnapping, but even then Faz’s presence was an unforeseen variable.)
Dorothy kept all of Joyce’s medical info?
Dorothy’s ready for politics.
Starting her Farley File early.
Dude, yes! I keep a Farley File in my contacts (pet names, birthdays, etc.), just ’cause I forget so much, but I worry so that Google Contacts is going to data mine it all. Useful, though.
Ok so its been a while since I was their age so I accept times change but storing someones medical info seems a tad…unusual?
I’d assume this isn’t her test results, just thing like her name, address, student id number, etc.
HIPAA regulations wouldn’t allow Dorothy to have access to Joyce’s medical records, unless Joyce authorized it. Of course, she might have done that, because you know Dorothy. If anyone’s ever IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS, it’s her.
She didn’t even say “medical info” she said “all her information. She is clearly talking about her CONTACT information, which is necessary for setting up a new patient visit.
Name, birthdate, student ID number, parents’ names and phone numbers (or at least Hank’s).
I’m convinced Dorothy keeps a secret dossier on all her friends and acquaintances.
I’d go all the way to “transgressive”.
Yeah. Dorothy probably took down the information to make Joyce the eye doctor appointment and just kept it. Which is kind of yucky, but who knows, maybe could be useful in case of an emergency, since she is one of Joyce’s best friends.
That’s what I was thinking, anticipating future usage of that information.
I can only hope she follows ethics that are strict as ever in doing so.
Yeah I suppose but just seems a bit iffy to me is all
I, too, am suspicious of do-gooders compiling dossiers.
personally if someone not only remembers my birthday but goes as far as to have a present that they specifically know i will love because of something i mentioned in a conversation weeks earlier, i will instantly break off all contact with them. what are they doing, writing down stuff about me?? oh, they want to be “”nice”” and “””””thoughtful””””” really? really?????
@Agemegos: um, apologies. i guess caffeine makes me sarcastic and mean-spirited now??? i was being silly but also unpleasant i think. oops. sorry
I got the humor, and I think you did it pretty well.
thanks for saying that Ed. i wasn’t sure it came off that way. regardless, i still kind of don’t want to put myself in a position of *maybe* antagonizing or annoying someone (except when i do because they’re trolls or bigots haha)
anyway that’s just me and my lil neuroses, occasionally i’ll roast someone and then grovel about how mean that was, don’t mind me lol
See this is hilarious to me because I was raised to believe in obligation to do exactly what you described. Don’t play the same in every crowd, I’ve found out.
Makes notes in Agemegos dossier not to reveal the existence of the dossier.
Ngl as someone who has spent way too much time filling out medical paperwork over the years, if someone made a dossier to use only for noble purposes I’d be like “yes thank you omg.”
But that’s also the sort of thing you should probably check with someone beforehand because I get the impression most people are not cool with it.
But yeah plz make dossiers on me. Make all the dossiers you want as long as it’s for the sole purpose of saving time/convenience. XD
I keep seeing this “in case of emergencies” thing being mentioned in the comments but like, in context, isn’t she referring to Joyce’s insurance info? I’ve never heard of anyone giving their friends that kind of information for emergencies. Especially seems odd for a friend you’ve known for five months! Seems like a huge lack of boundaries on both of their ends.
I don’t think we have actually been told how Joyce’s details got onto Dorothy’s phone or why Dorothy keeps them. I kind of assume that she picked them up somehow while making Joyce’s optometrist’s appointment and kept them without giving it much thought, her habit of preserving all information because it’s costless being better-developed than her position on privacy.
The thing about “in case of emergencies” I take for irony from commenters such as myself who think that Dorothy has no good reason to have somebody else’s medical insurance details recorded.
In the time that Dorothy has known Joyce, she’s been drugged, threatened with a deadly weapon, and kidnapped. I think “in case of emergencies” is more justifiable here than in most cases.
“Look, if you have a clumsy child, you make him wear a helmet. If you have death-prone children, you keep a few clones of them in your lab.” – Dr. Jonas “Rusty” Venture
Becky didn’t even have her social security number until she broke into her own house. I wonder if Joyce decided it was safest to give her information to a friend she trusts just in case her parents got (even more) fucky.
Showing up in a bathrobe, farting is how Walky would do it.
Possibly something she saw when they were dating.
The wavy trees are flickering out of existence! The simulation is collapsing!
https://i.imgur.com/5JyqE16.png (NSFW)
https://i.imgur.com/Y77eqlq.png (NSFW)
Alright I lied actually we still have a bit before sexy time.
Story so far…
https://imgur.com/a/9Ob1cy3 (NSFW)
Mike actually did something nice? This is fan fiction!
Well just to be fair, he was probably motivated first and foremost for an underhanded opportunity to denigrate Walky somehow.
If you recall, Mike’s last day was spent being “helpful Mike” he was still sassy but he actually was trying to be nicer.
This all just really makes me want this side story to be csnon. Mike doing a rare solid for Walky that lead him to getting with Billie is really fitting somehow. It works.
I mean, until we get something that directly contradicts this it can be cannon.
Mike giving Walky condoms because of Amber can be canon easily. Walky and Billie banging would be a Big Deal.
It’s fun to fantasize for some of us but we all know this happening in story would throw a lot of things off, “a big deal” would be putting it lightly.
It would put a hilarious new light on Jennifer downplaying Walky’s hotness, if they had in fact doinked.
Mike giving Walky condoms because of Amber can be canon easily. Mike giving Walky defective condoms because Mike can also be canon easily.
You could remove his dialogue about Amber and just leave the insult to Walky, or expand Mike’s insult to Amber, for a more original flavor Mike.
Mike in heaven is like “Don’t say I never gave you anything”…yes I’d push thed idea that he’s in heaven for whatever characters in the story the still believes there’s an afterlife nothing would piss them off more than knowing he made it there.
Well Mike did die trying to atone for his sin. So the Cheesus forgives.
Becky doesn’t believe in hell, but I’m too lazy to find the strip where she explains that…
This is frickin’ amazing!
Shoot, I’m confused. When Walky was talking about how quiet his room was and “missing” Mike, I assumed this was taking place after he died. I hope those are real condoms and not imaginary ones.
It was Walky remembering an exchange he and Mike had in the past. If only he can now remember where he put them…
think of that strip as coloured in shades of blue ^_~
I’ve been a big fan of your work for a long time Yotomoe, and I want to say that the moment where you establish that Mike would get condoms for the sole purpose of keeping amber safe is not just a really sweet character moment for this increasingly well written and in character porn comic, but is Genuinely the only time I’ve seen someone accurately describe what Mike would do in a situation in the 10 years I’ve been reading Willis stuff.
“Sole purpose”? You don’t think he gets all those nickels riding bareback do you? He’s not *that* much of an asshole.
Joke’s on Mike – amber already had her pocket full of amazi-condoms
this story is so gooood Yoto! just a perfect wholesome fanfic, and the characters are spot on and i love your drawing! I haven’t commented around here for a while cos i was travelling, and having relationship drama. but i’ve been following it and it rules <3 thnk yuuuu
not gonna lie, if I got condoms from mike I’d be looking for holes
I don’t know whether you saw: a woman in German has been convicted of sexual assault for making holes in her (casual) partner’s condoms without his knowledge or consent.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-woman-sentenced-for-poking-holes-in-partners-condoms/a-61689670
Kudos to Germany, but the double standards and full mentalness in the US, its not the same. A) its a woman in that case, so she probably wouldn’t even get charges pressed against her, if they did she’d get minimum sentence. B) In a few of the left leaning states its not even a crime to knowingly give someone HIV/AIDs anymore. So what are a few holes in a condom.
I believe you are factually incorrect about B if intent can be shown.
Sometimes Billie aggravates me but sometimes she gets it right
Billie is the only one who could say this to Dorothy right now. No one else has the aggro.
Its also good to see
Impressed with Jennifer, and good for Joyce! I hope her pain is dealt with soon.
Like farting isn’t a period symptom lol
I believe that Dorothy was likening showing up without an appointment to showing up in a bathrobe and her mental model of Walky suggested it would be something that he might do and further suggested the addition of farting.
*furiously struggling on whether to call Dorothy a neolib for the weird classism against something used by people without health insurance or that she swoops in like a hero after a cooler and more assertive person confronts the problem*
I’d keep struggling.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m too harsh to Dorothy and then she just does these things.
I started calling her that as a joke and ever since then I feel like I got the They Live! glasses stapled on my face.
I suspect that it’s less weird classism and more showing up with no appointment offends Dorothy’s sense of order. It’s unorganized.
It’s both
Something about this reminds me of a little exchange between Rick and Morty in that one episode with the Vindicators:
Morty: “It doesn’t matter how right you are Rick. When you’re acting like an asshole, nobody wants to give you the satisfaction.”
Rick: “Yup. People only want who they LIKE to be right. That’s why popular people are dumb as fuck.”
It just seems to me to be relevant here somehow. I dunno, I could be wrong though.
I don’t think this has anything to do with insurance, but the lack of structure implied by just going and waiting rather than having an appointment. The Health Center at my school allowed both walk-ins and appointments, and insurance wasn’t an issue either way (coverage was part of the student activity fee).
She’s drawing on a specific structure and visual that is defined by the poor working class and she’s some little nerd with big ideas and no spine who’s probably never had to consider a scenario of why someone goes to a walk-in clinic in the first place.
Like I absolutely get your point, don’t get me wrong, but things still exist in wider contexts. I can tell my kid “if you don’t go to college you’ll be a garbage man or flip burgers!” to make a point about the importance of academic achievement but I’d still be demeaning a kind of work as a fail state when the former is of utmost necessity and the latter being treated as the biggest fail state is why places like that get to exploit their employees. I know I meant it in a vacuum, that’s why it’s a problem for me to say it in the first place.
The garbage men and burger flippers are contributing way more to society than the rich CEOs anyway.
You got that right. Hell, a dart throwing chimpanzee could very easily replace them, and that’s HARDLY an exaggeration. 😮
I wish I could be a garbageman! Stellar pay, good benefits, satisfying work in that your are directly contributing to public health and functioning society. I think they even have a good union in my area, but I don’t know for sure.
Every time Dorothy clashes with somebody, I remember that she hasn’t told anyone she got into Yale
When did she get confirmation?
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/letter/
I found it. I had forgotten.
Dorothy they’re doing a quick check up at a clinic not a sit down at a parents teachers conference.
Why do I get the distinct impression that Dorothy, at some point, took Walky to a walk-in appointment in a bathrobe while he was farting?
Anyway calling it now, the doctor is gonna be… shit, I genuinely can’t think of any obscure Walkyverse doctor characters who haven’t shown up yet in DoA. I guess there’s Leo, but given that he was a bit of a fundie (albeit well-meaning) I’m not sure how likely he’d be to prescribe birth control medicine.
PFFFT, yeah, fair, of course Dorothy hates walk ins. They’d frazzle her need for careful scheduling and organization.
And were I Joyce, “maybe we can make them a little more even” would not feel sufficient but it’s definitely a better patch than nothing.
“Periods more even”-> “Now the pain is evenly high every time!”
But really, I think it’s just trying to be cautious/under-promise, which is smart of Jennifer since they haven’t gotten a doctor’s input yet.
Oh, for sure! And, like I said, ‘even’ is better than nothing, even if that’s not what I’d personally aim for.
I think it’s also to try and introduce the topic of birth control as obliquely as humanly possible, especially with Joyce’s recent acknowledgement that she’s currently phasing out of a cultish belief system
All “hey, there’s this thing that can probably make you feel less like you’re enduring the ire of a scornful god (oh and it’s also a thing that has been demonized and vehemently rejected by your former belief system but nvm)”
Maybe they should have different packages of the same thing with different names, like Zyban (for quitting smoking) versus Wellbutrin (for treating depression) despite being exactly the same drug.
You may be onto something, but it’d be mighty hard for a pharma company to skirt around the contraceptive effects without severe breaches of consumer ethics
drug 1: PREGNOSTOP (side effects: in over 1 in 10 patients: may affect the regularity or intensity of your period)
drug 2: MENSTREGUL (side effects: in over 1 in 10 patients: no babies)
there, done
It’s a pity that the objection to walk-ins that Dorothy comes to express is not her intolerance for their flexibility but the fact that they are used by working-class trash-people.
That’s not what she really feels, I’m sure.
I need something explained here. Are, uh, bathrobes lower-class? I’m having trouble thinking of them in those terms. Like, gun to my head, fancy people wear bathrobes. Bathrobes are fancy. Bathrobes are a luxury. If they absolutely have to be applied a class level of some sort.
It’s, you know, really about the immediacy.
The poor people angle has totally blindsided me, and I need to figure out if I’m missing some bathrobe-class-related zeitgeist.
okay i feel less unmoored now
https://twitter.com/damnyouwillis/status/1526014394571816960
I can’t believe I’m with Billie on this one, but it’s kinda cowardly that Dorothy just tries to involve herself after Joyce reveals she’s amendable to seeing a doctor. You already chose to not get involved because it was too hard, Dorothy.
I’m undecided as to whether Joyce is giving Dorothy the side eye in panel two or if its a continuation of panel one
I’m hoping its the former
I don’t think Joyce has enough mental bandwidth to feel emotions currently.
Same, it’s weird but Billie is right in this case. Dorothy didn’t do anything to help Joyce, and what’s wrong with going to a walk-in clinic in a bathrobe or whatever when you have a medical issue that should be checked out sooner rather than later?
Glad somebody finally steps in the way of Dorothy always trying to be on top of things, its kinda unhealthy… If we didn’t KNOW that Dorothy is just trying to do good by everybody, and just wants to help, it would look like a toxic relationship in the making. She needs to learn how to chill and just be a Friend, not a Guardian.
“a Friend, not a Guardian”
Had a bad dream, better microwave the Joyce.
iunderstoodthatreference.png
I’m hoping she will atleast appreciate how messed up it is making someone in pain wait longer then they have to just to maybe seek help. An appointment would have likely meant waiting a while.
I mean, it might not have meant waiting a while. The last time Dorothy made an appointment for Joyce (for the optometrist) it was same day.
I mean yeah.
Why not?
DOROTHY, GET BEHIND ME
Continue to rock this, Jennifer! Shut down Dorothy’s ‘just gonna nip in t the head of this parade’ thing. She had nothing to do with this, it’s all you for suggesting (actually suggesting, not pressuring!) a medical professional, and Joyce being, you know, not a particularly dumb hysterical puppy.
Billie has handled this situation quite well
She has! I genuinely particularly like that she included ‘no promises’ in her ‘let’s go to the clinic’ proposal. I am a fan of setting realistic expectations.
I also like her ‘no, screw your appointment garbage, we’re going to the walk-in’. Because I think Jennifer might think ‘Joyce is willing now, she might not be in a day or whenever you get an appointment, so we do this NOW.’
Yes.
The under-promise and (hopefully) over deliver result is a good way to go.
I hadn’t thought of the we do it now reason but that makes sense also
This made me feel something but I’m not sure what
Hopefully you will wade through.
This is more than a little shitty on Jennifer’s part, to be frank, but I get if she feels like she did the “hard part”, getting Joyce’s stubborn-ass to take the right steps.
How is it shitty? Dorothy IS trying to charge in and take control after the fact, it’s not wrong to call her out for it.
You really don’t think calling someone a “maternal vulture” is in any way shitty? Dorothy is acting problematic here, but that was a nasty way to say that.
Maternal vulture is precise terminology I would say. Dorothy us culturing credit while acting like she’s Joyce’s mom.
It doesn’t have to be a lie to be a shitty thing to say to someone.
Dorothy literally just finished effectively sniggering with Becky about how Joyce is a dumb hysterical puppy who would need to be force-fed pills hidden in peanut butter except it wouldn’t work because lol lol the dumb hysterical puppy is even dumber about food. In Jennifer’s hearing. Forgive me if I don’t consider a 100% accurate calling-out and shutting down of a different jerk behavior before it could really get rolling to be unwarranted or even particularly mean.
Is it nice? Nope. But it’s far from unearned, so it’s still on the right side of the line for me.
it’s not shitty coz vultures are rad actually.
i will not expand on this (but my favourite palaeontology podcast will)
Vultures are super-rad, and I’m appalled that Jennifer has done them the disservice of comparing them to Dorothy.
For real. She SUCKS at sniffing out carcasses, plus we ALL know digesting rotting flesh without falling grievously sick is NOT her forte.
And if you don’t poop on your feet to keep cool, I don’t want to know you.
PS per wikipedia, “A group of vultures that are feeding is termed a ‘wake'”
😍
Yep. See also, “a murder of crows”.
Cute, and fitting.
@milu I agree that vultures are rad, but it clearly seems to be used as an insult here (just like how I know that pigs and snakes are super rad, but it’s normally intended as an insult to call someone a snake or a pig, or to compare someone to them).
haha i know i was just being silly ^^
…but also people stop saying mean things about vultures, you’re not half the vulture they are ok???
it’s shitty because Dorothy probably isn’t viewing this in the prideful way that Jennifer is. she offered to help because she had a shortcut available. she (probably) wasn’t swooping in like a vulture, jen just saw it that way because to her everything has to be a contest.
not everyone is constantly going after accolades and credits, yall.
Dorothy’s not a shortcut. Joyce already has all her own information, because she’s where Dorothy got it in the first place.
She could have offered this same help to Joyce and actively chose not to. It’s only now that Joyce has accepted help from a Not Dorothy that Dorothy appears, ready to put things on rails and feel good about helping.
That hover text is probably a joke, but somehow I do believe that Dorothy and Walky will end up doing just that.
Ok see NOW I don’t like Jennifer.
Why?
Jennifer earned that slap down of Dorothy, acting like an actual adult instead of the technically correct version Dorothy aims for.
What is an “actual adult” anyway? No offense, but it appears that defining that seems to be no more than an exercise in power.
Admist the confusion of who’s right and wrong for whatever reason here, at least Joyce is getting help for her pain, as AGONIZING as it is. 😖
For me it’s making choices that value someone elses needs instead of your own ego when helping others. Yea adulthood can have assumptions associated with it that screw over people who don’t meet that criteria(particularly with aesthetic), but I’d say there’s at least ways that are more mature than others when dealing with problems at least. Like watching cartoons or whatever doesn’t mean you are or aren’t adult but taking a situation where someone’s in pain and centring yourself is absolutely not mature.
Very good points.
But the difference between real compassion and the corrupt imitator born of pride hardly has anything to do with maturity, in my opinion. Even children can value others’ needs when helping them, but I have had the displeasure of meeting countless adults who constantly made themselves the center of attention when others were in pain, including myself.
Just for reference, these adults were 30+ years old and “adults” by any standard.
Oh for sure, but I guess for me while I’ve met kids who value other peoples needs, they don’t actually understand that other people have stuff going on inside themselves. It’s why I don’t judge kids who are mean but I do with adults.
I struggle with understanding other people but even I know they have interior lives and perspectives. Though I don’t think age matters past like 21 or whatever. At that point it’s all fair in terms of moral care. Which honestly makes those adults who are over the age of 30 real terrible.
Maybe there needs to be better words for it but I guess I’m talking moral maturity, not aesthetic maturity
*insert the picture of 2 philosophers walking in rome
Yeah, I guess I’m just not used to the way you’re using “maturity” in this context. Given my insight and (sometimes gruesome) experiences, I hold that human adulthood really guarantees no skill or insight of any kind on its own.
Perhaps a better word for it is “morality” or “compassion”. Above all else, this is not a matter of being an “adult” or a “child”, but rather that of being part of a social species where we help each other survive and thrive in an indifferent and unjust universe.
No heroes no villains no winners no losers. Except Joyce hopefully getting the medical care she very obviously needs. THAT part is a winner.
I hope Jennifer is a good person for Joyce on this one. She’s got a legit caring instinct her. It is not expressed well, a lot of the time, because Jennifer is a huge awful mess herself, but I do think there is something inside her that wants to make other people’s lives better or easier.
Also, shallowly, I’m desperate for Joyce getting to exist outside of Becky and Becky’s circle (which now firmly includes Dorothy), for five minutes. Yeah, yeah, they’re childhood best friends! they grew up together! Joyce questioned and then abandoned the defining ideology of her entire life based on her love of Becky! They have weathered near-death experiences together! Normally this is catnip to me. But uhhhhhhh also there is so much unhealthy between them, and amazingly it’s not even just the unrequited crush. They need a break. I want *Joyce* to be able to take that Yale transfer, to get away from this. (But keep texting Joe.)
I get that for sure. I thought it was a really powerful moment when we first realized she was texting Joe while back home, because he was outside of her current friend group and she could genuinely be herself rather than others’ expectations. I really like their chemistry together and always want to see more scenes of them together.
Joe/Joyce nation rise! Our time will come… one day
I mean yeah, same (especially the Joe part).
I don’t know what Joyce and Becky are like when they aren’t running on trauma responses and Joyce chronically undermines her own problems around someone who’s so this desperately possessive.
Like what do they get up to when they aren’t fighting dads? Because so far the answer is “each other.”
There have been moments when Joyce seemed to benefit from the comfort and familiarity of Becky’s presence—having Becky in the room calmed her down enough to get through the eye puff test, after all. It was an anxiety-inducing situation; it helped her to have someone around who understands those anxieties well.
But in the larger sense, Becky is like a textbook example of why it can be….like, a problem to go off to the same college as an agemate sibling, or friends from high school. Because part of college is the opportunity for personal reinvention, of trying on new identities, trying new experiences, without being weighed down or held back by the perceptions and expectations of people you have a lot of history with. Joyce is already having that problem with people she’s only known a few months—she made such a vivid impression on them that they’re surprised and not welcoming to any signs of change in her. With Becky, the childhood best friend, it’s a million times worse, because Becky has outright admitted she needs Joyce to be her emotional comfort object, and to stay exactly the same (except with a few minor modifications that serve to Becky’s benefit, like being cool with gay people). That is not okay, and I’m not even giving her points for the self-awareness to know and name that, because she didn’t say that and then release Joyce *from* the implicit obligation to fill that need for her, just as Joyce fills so many of Becky’s needs.
When Becky first showed up, she really was all alone, and she NEEDED that unswerving, unstinting support from Joyce. But they’re now at a point when frankly, the only thing that gives Joyce more stability than Becky is a living, non-estranged parent who’s supporting her financially (this is absolutely not a small thing! But Becky is no longer homeless, she has a place in the system and a path to move forward, and there’s no indication that she’s going to do anything to fuck that up for herself. It’s gonna be hard, but she’s no longer desperate, and she has several people in her corner who emotionally prioritize her highly and will offer her as much support as she needs. Possibly to their own detriment but you know what’s I kind of don’t care about Dina and Leslie enough to mind).
Meanwhile, Joyce’s emotional support system is SHIT. She’s not on speaking terms with two-thirds of her family, and her father is making the right noises but there is clearly some tension and lack of trust there, while her sister is in survival mode to the point where Joyce doesn’t even know she’s trans (no shade whatsoever on Joycelyn; she is doing what she needs to protect herself and no one is ever obliged to come out to anyone unless and until they want to and know they’re safe doing do), which inhibits the kinds of conversations they can have. Her closest friends have been assholes to her about her religious trauma. There are very, very very few people Joyce feels like she can be remotely honest with about huge, life-changing questions—she actively hid her atheism from everyone but Sarah (and then…Joe! Hmm!) because she knew the kind of blowback she’d get over it—and she was right. That is not a good sign, in a friendship. Joyce’s friends are failing her, and Becky’s regular presence in her life, and the demands of Becky’s everything are actively making that worse. It’s causing her real harm, and it’s creating tensions in that beloved childhood friendship that could destroy it for good, if this dynamic stays in place.
And that’s why I really, really, really wish they could take a break from each other and put some distance between them. Maybe they can be friends again in the future, reassess each other as the people they’ll be then, see what from their past still works, and what they need to leave behind. Because this? This is a train wreck in slow motion, and it is phenomenally unfair to Joyce.
ykw thanks for bringing up how Becky rolled in with the glasses thing because I pretty much only remember that for the part where she fought against it on the grounds that Joyce having glasses is a change and that’s bad, so it’s good to remember that when given the opportunity she just went in there and friended hard like she did when she found out about Joyce getting drugged at the party and just immediately handled it like a pro.
Because I think it’s a major element to Becky’s character and her relationship with Joyce that Becky is a good friend only in circumstances when Joyce allows her to be one, but Joyce chronically undervalues her own problems around Becky and Becky can’t help out with the religious trauma because of her own hangups on What Joyce Needs To Be, and so she hasn’t had much opportunity to be anything to Joyce but someone to protect from a larger threat, and, for as harsh as this probably sounds, Becky is really an anchor around the neck to Joyce at the moment not just for her own “I need my buffer” shit but for how Joyce’s other best friend adamantly values Becky’s feelings over Joyce’s. Between the three people who Joyce loves most, who does she get to talk to about her own problems?
I do think they need a long break from each other because it’s not healthy now when it really needs to be for Joyce’s sake in the immediate moment and for the both of them long term. There are no more evil dads, Becky is no longer homeless, she is not literally reliant on Joyce’s goodwill to survive, and she’s got a support network of a frenemy, a dino girlfriend, and two teachers who dote on her, one of whom threw away their revolting political career because Becky made her change. It’s okay for her to eat a Snickers and learn to chill with the codependency.
Jennifer’s ideal self is “problem solver”, which I like better and trust more than “future commander-in-chief”.
Is it so far-fetched to believe that Dorothy really does care, but is just overcorrecting after Jennifer called her out to start with? No, no, obviously Dorothy could only possibly be a cynical glory-seeker who sees every interaction as a possible achievement.
I guarantee everyone on earth has scrambled to fix their social fuckup like this and made things worse at least once. But ignore that! Dorothy’s the one in the path of our mighty armchair psychiatry today, so let’s see what cynical moral judgments we can extrapolate from another normal, muddy interaction by college students with *gasp* personality traits!
Butting into a conversation you were previously afraid to have is something you can be criticized for, even if they have the best intentions.
Criticized certainly. Dorothy’s approach was tactless as ever, much like her RA campaign. She needs to read the room and accept when she’s made a mistake and needs to let it sit rather than rush to fix it.
I’m just more than a little pissed off at yet another round of “normal college first-year makes social mistake among friends, therefore she doesn’t actually care about anyone but her own ego and is, in fact, dead inside and a Narcissist.”
Dorothy has a consistent pattern to her realistic and not-very-important social mistakes, which reveals something about her character. She is bossy. She assumes that she is better and wiser than her peers, and ought naturally to be in charge.
That is quite a realistic flaw for a character like Dorothy, and not even exaggerated.
To put it another (more compassionate) way than “assumes that she is better and wiser than her peers and ought naturally to be in charge”, Dorothy has ambition that she desperately needs to live up to, and that means always being in a leadership role, and means she always has to know best, putting pressure on herself to be in that position.
She’s explicitly talked about sublimating a whole lot of desires to get even as far as she’s gotten so far, and I’ve seen familiar foreshadowing of the breakdown that is likely coming in her future when she inevitably falls short of a goal that she thinks she can’t afford to miss.
The neat thing about this more compassionate reading is the results are still a flaw, but also you can potentially see the underlying problems.
TBH I don’t expect this to gain a whole lot of traction in this comments section.
I don’t think that make Dorothy sound any better. Ambition for political power is not, in my view, a right motivation.
Well then clearly you have already Judged her and found her Wanting, and compassion is just wasted.
If you want to excite my sympathy for Dorothy, pointing out that she is “just” engaged in her plan to become the leader of the free world is not the way to do it. It would be more effective to point out that she is probably just modelling adult behaviour on her mother’s maternal behaviour, probably because modern WEIRD society gives children too little exposure to adult role models interacting as equals.
it’s nice to see some sympathetic readings of these characters that the comment section loves to hate so much.
FWIW, I think you’re right.
I mean yeah, that is Dorothy’s character, or at least how I think of her.
But I think the worst behaviours towards Joyce these last seven months are also a major part of her character, and I think the same of reading her as someone who’s performatively nice in the sense that she bottles her thoughts to avoid raising a fuss. They’re not incompatible reads, she’s motivated by loving Joyce and relying on a status quo that only worked when problems not only had binary answers, but binary answers that Dorothy was capable of recognizing as binary.
I believe that Dorothy does care, but part of her caring is ‘Joyce is MY project, I cannot lose control of her like this, Jennifer can’t steal this’. It’s not the whole of her caring, but it’s a very gross and imo very real part of it.
I see what you mean. I think it’s less about possessiveness of Joyce specifically, and more of not wanting to be the idiot who wasn’t helpful, regardless of situation. But I can see how those don’t look too different either.
Let’s also not forget please that just a few months ago Jennifer was Billie the borderline-suicidal alcoholic disaster lesbian. Dorothy might just not trust her to fully follow through on being helpful.
I’m pretty sure she will, but I won’t blame anybody who doesn’t have that faith.
I think it’s more about an internal Dorothy monologue of “What good am I if I’m not making things better and I clearly failed and have to make up for it.”
Dorothy has the flaw that she wants the “Arete” of being President and glory but thinks she’d do a genuinely good job. There’s also a lot of evidence that she could. Really, the bigger issue is that Dorothy has shown none of the networking skill she’d need or ability to smooze and favor trade.
But she’s a college freshman.
Yes! She’s still just a teenager!
And I bet you anything if the roles were reversed here between Dorothy and Jennifer people would be ragging Dorothy for not asking Joyce if she prefers a walk-in at the sports clinic vs an appointment. Jennifer’s just doing what people are accusing Dorothy of.
Overcorrecting is a good way of framing this, I think. I’m not at all impressed with Dorothy in this situation, but she does genuinely care about Joyce. Jumping in to take some ownership of this “helping Joyce get badly-needed medical care” thing when she wasn’t willing to touch it before someone else took the potentially risky step of suggesting it to Joyce in the first place is obnoxious. But I think it is less Dorothy being some kind of narcissistic, credit-seeking gloryhound than it is that she got called out on being a bad friend, and Dorothy legit wants to be a good friend to Joyce. (And, in fairness, to be SEEN to be a good friend to Joyce, after the calling out part.)
Dorothy describes Walky so well in that last line.
Walky would consider a bathrobe fancy.
“They’re like grown-up pajamas!”
Yeah, I’m gonna say Dorothy was trying to mentor steal.
Jennifer owns this.
Have you tried looking into a mirror, Jennifer, or are you too afraid that your own reflection will smite you
Yeah, good job Jennifer. Dorothy needs to realize she needs to dial it down some
I don’t understand the comments section shitting on Dorothy because “she has no character flaws; she’s boring” and then shitting on Dorothy when she does anything that demonstrates her character flaws (which have been established for years now, particularly in her relationship with Walky).
The secret is that the comments section really just loves to shit on literally whoever has made even the tiniest social misstep most recently.
Or anyone else, really. It’s all a matter of being low down a pecking order in which dominance is asserted by demonstrating superior propriety.
That’s not a secret, it’s just established and accepted for some reason. It’s also a really good reason not to engage a lot of the time, especially when any hot-buttom character is on the screen.
Dorothy being hot why not, but a bottom??
so, i’m trying to find a non-confrontational way to phrase this for a few minutes now, so instead of pointing out the obvious let me ask: what exactly is it that you do not understand?
I mean, they’re right.
Amber tries to press Ethan for advice and then acts like a horny weirdo, then Amber tries to start being a better friend and Ethan isn’t receptive, and both times these characters were Assholes and just because you could explain why they’re Assholes doesn’t mean you can excuse it.
I recognize I’m a cultish obsessive who remembers things like the alt text of a 2013 Raidah strip about how she’s glad her dad isn’t here on family weekend, but it does often feel like the most immediate strip is the one that matters entirely.
For me, at least, it’s because I’m commenting on the strip in question. So if I don’t like the way a character is acting in one particular strip, yeah, my comment about that strip is probably going to be about that, even if I otherwise like them in the comic overall or agree with them in the overall scene.
But I am likewise an obsessive who remembers exactly the strip you mean so there you go 😛
#CultishObsessiveBesties
i meant to reply to annika actually, and yeah like you said below, my intuitive explanation for why “the comment section” behaves incoherently is that it’s made up of a whole lot of different commenters saying incompatible things at any time.
but also i guess Annika was voicing a frustration more than a actual puzzlement probably. to which i say, “fair”
@milu It’s frustration and real confusion. It’s true that the comment section is made up of many people with different opinions and beliefs! It just seems like I see a lot of intense criticism of Dorothy no matter what she does, really, and of course people are absolutely entitled to their opinions. I know lots of other characters are similarly grilled, but it seems to be often over fairly slight missteps (or even lack thereof) with Dorothy and I’m not sure why. Maybe I just had a strong reaction to it because it reminds me of how society as a whole tends to devalue women regardless of what they do and hold them to unfair, often conflicting standards.
hm yeah it’s been pointed out before how some of the criticism of Dorothy may have some gendered pointedness to them, but i’m unconvinced because like 90% of the cast is female. then again maybe this has more to do with specifically her ambition which yes, is typically attacked in women way more often and viciously than in men.
but i guess.. how can i put this. this comment section, my impression of it as a whole, is rarely openly or blatantly misogynistic, and when such expressions arise they are usually promptly yelled or laughed out of the room if not moderated away altogether by Willis.
so, beyond that, i find it kind of… difficult? to speak meaningfully of “the comment section” in aggregate. then again, you may be right that Dorothy gets picked on more often, and quite possibly for a specific sort of transgression of the patriarcal norm. idk sure. it’s possible. I’ve been mostly skipping the character discussions lately, tbh. but i think i at least understand what you mean now! sorry for being a bit dense lol =P
It is true that Dorothy gets some very odd heat from the comment section sometimes, especially in earlier storylines. Willis has commented on it before. Others who often get weird heat are Amber, Sal, Carla, Ruth and Becky. Sometimes Joyce too.
Curious what everyone thinks the comments section *should* be about? It can’t all be yoto fanfic and praising Dina, that’s not much of a discussion.
It’s easy to find this much to criticize about actual people, if you follow them around for 10+ hours a day.
You can discuss the characters and the subject matter without casting sweeping moral judgments on them. My problem is not when people say “yeah Dorothy messed up here, go Jennifer, hope Joyce gets help, etc” but rather when they say “Wow Dorothy messed up, therefore she must only care about taking credit and doesn’t actually want to help her friends” (???).
See also: Joyce & Becky arguing about faith and hordes of commenters using that argument to “prove” that either one never ACTUALLY cared about the other one.
People love to judge cartoon characters extremely harshly for the stupidest, pettiest shit and it’s exhausting.
well i for one think the comment section today (besides Yoto being awesome and, why not, a squee or two of Dinappreciation) should be about vulture facts. why is nobody talking about vultures? like how condors have recently been found to be capable of parthenogenesis?! that’s some awesome maternal vulture energy.
Here let me fix panel 4 real quick,
Jennifer: “Dorothy, back off. You can’t just swoop in and take charge of Joyce like some maternal… hermit crab or whatever, who the fuck knows what those weirdos get up to. Now if instead you were a sick-ass MATERNAL VULTURE you would just ping your own baby vulture into existence, bam! sayonara losers, cool shades emoji.”
panel… 2
whatever, numbers are hard
Honestly I think it’s in part because the comic so rarely shows us much of her flaws at all that people jump at it when she exhibits them now.
Even before, overall she was commended eventually (by Jennifer, the person hurt most by what she did in trying to take over the RA position.) for how she behaved towards her.
The narrative itself doesn’t really have moments like these with dorothy often/she’s often showcased as the voice of reason/correct.
Honestly I think it’s in part because the comic so rarely shows us much of her flaws at all that people jump at it when she exhibits them now.
I mean yeah I think this is a major factor for me at least.
Dorothy’s never been worth devoting any of my single brain cell towards previously, she was just kinda Generically Nice for a whole decade while she acted as a stabilizing element to more outgoing and colourful characters, and her advice-dispensing was sensible because she was dealing with morally simple conflicts that don’t need a whole lotta arguing. She’s just a deeply empathetic person who wants everyone to get along, but that’s all she is so I filed her with Ethan as a character who sure does exist.
She was Cyclops but without the part where he threw coffee in Wolverine’s face and then beat the shit out of him and then all of their teammates at once so they’d stop being traumatized, is what I’m saying.
Nowadays she’s running with the same script and ruinously fucking up, everything that made Dorothy be good and kind and helpful being twisted into failures not even because of her but because her friend has changed and she doesn’t know how to adapt, she’s never had to before, well that I’m devoting this many words to Dorothy lately is fun! It’s nice to give a shit about her even if it’s just to laugh at how much she sucks, because sucking now means she’s probably gonna stop sucking later.
The easy answer is that those are things probably being said by two different people.
Except for me, I’m definitely saying both, but that’s because I only started liking Dorothy now that she’s making the kind of mistakes that mean she’s not boring with no character flaws anymore. I want Dorothy to mess this up because then I get to see her overcome those flaws! Or just live with them and continue doing wrong for a while! That’s also okay!
Is Dorothy urging that Joyce ought to delay getting treatment, and risk being no longer symptomatic by the time that she gets to see a doctor, in order to avoid rubbing shoulders with uncultivated proles?
Not necessarily; remember that the last time Dorothy got an appointment for Joyce (for the optometrist), it was same day.
Optometrists are different than internists, ime. (True/gross fact: ‘internists’ was almost ‘real doctors’. BAD ME. Not cool!) You can find optometrists basically anywhere, but GP/internist doctors are generally thinner on the ground.
That said, IU does seem to have a very robust medical school indeed! The largest in the US according to their site. If it’s like where I live (in the UW Medicine area) you might have to bear with being watched by bright-eyed medical students (or asked if that’s okay and watch them get shooed off if it’s not) but the standard of care might actually be pretty decent, fingers crossed.
Yeah, walk-in clinic is definitely a better option although I got the impression Dorothy’s disdain for it is moutlying because you can’t schedule at a walk-in clinic and it is therefore INEFFICIENT, THE MOST MORTAL OF SINS
No idea what “moutlying” is supposed to be doing there: this bonkers website is actively attacking my phone’s autocorrect.
Jon: writes normal word
dumbingofage.com: MOUTLYING TEH WORD IZ MOUTLYING CHNAGE IT NOW COZ I SAIDD SO
Jon’s phone: ….wtf dude
dumbingofage.com: I HACK U FOR BREKFAST OK I FUKKIN HACK YU NOW WRITE IT OR I SWEAR TO FUK I HACK YUOR BRAIN U DUM AUTOCORRECT BTICH
Jon’s autocorrect: ok ok chill, there, happy?
dumbingofage.com: NO FIGHT ME
dumbingofage.com: BUT OK U GOOD FOR NOW NOW FUK OFF
Jon: the heck is going on
Personally if I had a choice between a walk-in and a scheduled appointment I would pick the scheduled appointment (assuming the delay wasn’t very long). Setting a time to show up means you won’t be stuck in a waiting room for potentially hours waiting for your turn.
I very often get stuck in a waiting room for at least twenty minutes even when I have an appointment. The only person involved in my care who seems to be able to be on time for an appointment is my clinical psychologist.
i LOVE IT when people are late for an appointment with me. perfect excuse to chill (not that i need an excuse usually but)
It depends on the situation. But the last time I went to a walk-in clinic with high temperature, lack of energy, etc (it was a ruptured appendix) I had to wait around 3 hours. When I see a regular doctor I do sometimes have a wait, but the wait is usually under 20 minutes. And I know I am guaranteed to see a doctor (i.e. no showing up and being told “too late in the day. Come back tomorrow”)
mmmmmmmokay fair
Nah, just last-panel-of-the-comic silliness. She prefers doing things in the proper way to best arrange with schedules and make sure everything is as optimized as possible, and its being played up a bit in order to create a joke. Never take the last panel to be completely literal, strip’s got to end on a joke 99% of the time and all.
This is something that I see people struggle with an awful lot.
Sure, if you give the absolute least charitable read of the strip possible for some reason and then get mad about things she didn’t even imply. She offered to schedule an appointment because Dorothy is an organization nerd. Clearly she’d prefer a pre-planned appointment over an unorganized walk-in. Odds are an appointment would be good for tomorrow if not that day. Also…..you don’t need to be ON your period to get help for it. I have similar ones to Joyce and I plan to not be on mine when I talk to my doctor about it in a week or two. Makes it more conducive to actually being able to show up. If something is wrong with her uterus/vagina/ovary/whatever, it’ll still be wrong when she goes.
“Odds are an appointment would be good for tomorrow if not that day.”
HA HA HA HA HA
So are you from outside the states, or have you just never had to set up a new patient appointment with a doctor?
Not from the states, but we’re specifically talking about an appointment (or walk in) at the student health services building. Which, sure, could still be crammed with other students I guess, but probably not as much so as a regular hospital or practice.
Dotty is a child who has never needed serious health care so she doesn’t know how doctor’s appointments work. She would call and the receptionist would say “He can see you in a month, if you need urgent care go for a walk in appointment at a clinic.”
I know Dorothy has best intentions in everything, but I am so happy Jennifer swooped in and took control before Dorothy started controlling Joyce’s life decisions again.
Just because she was right about the glasses doesn’t mean she can decide things for Joyce (like a “maternal vulture”).
Yes, and though Dorothy has the best intentions, and although encouraging and helping Joyce to see a doctor is a good thing, Dorothy’s influence of Joyce in the matter of her deconversion and her quarrel with Becky has not been benign. Benevolent, but not benign. It would be best for Joyce if she did not allow Dorothy to continue as her commander-in-chief, but rather cultivated a wider acquaintance and more equal relationships.
Not to mention that Becky is furiously taking notes on how to best tweak Dorothy in the future.
Sorry, Dotty, you had your chance. This is Jennifer’s show now.
Dorothy is a planner. Doing something unplanned causes her anxiety. Maybe not to the point where it’s interfering with her life, but definitely to the point where she will choose planned over spontaneous if she can. She will also consider that the best course of action for anyone she cares about. And she will try to be helpful by planning for them.
Joyce probably only agreed because Jennifer used her head cheerleader powers on her. (You may argue that there is no such thing, but I’m pretty sure Jennifer believes she has them. If this works out, she’ll do a fist pump and say “Yes! Still got it.”)
I’d also argue that Jen’s presentation is much more focused on the results (Joyce feeling better). Whereas Dor is much more focused on showing everyone how capable she is of handling the process to overcompensate for the fact that she didn’t immediately take charge of the issue and is turning the process into a much more complicated ordeal that Joyce is more likely to reject, especially considering her limited bandwidth atm
Chaotic Good vs Lawful Good
Putting her name in another one conquest? Dorothy is definitely ready to run her Presidential campaign.
chescaleigh-all-the-seats.gif
Dorothy had it all prepared long ago and just needed an opportunity, but Cheerleader Billie isn’t about to forgive her for standing on the side until now.
I do love Dorothy, but I think step 1 here should be apologizing for not trying to help earlier. Prioritizing conflict avoidance (based on assumptions) over helping a friend in constant pain is kinda shitty.
That’s stupid. She isn’t actually Joyce’s Mom, she isn’t responsible for caring for her.
Does she know that?
Because she’s happy to do it for the glasses (and that did eventually end with Joyce venting about change is scary and is pretty much what motivated her freaking out about them), she’s happy to do it about Joyce being a School Misser, and she’s happy to do it about Joyce’s theological opinions and even how and when she’s allowed to be angry. When does Dorothy treat Joyce as capable of making her own choices?
Jedi’s completely correct in saying Dorothy prioritizes conflict avoidance, she’s done it over the entire course of the series, it’s just never been for the reason of “cannot be assed.”
Still stupid.
Okay I’ll shortform it: You’re right that she’s not Joyce’s mom, it she seems to have missed the memo.
Yeah. As I said. It’s stupid.
Perhaps she is modelling her behaviour on her mother’s behaviour because that (and school-teaching) is the only adult behaviour that she has been given a role model for. Modern middle-class Western society doesn’t expose children to enough examples of adults interacting as equals.
This right here.
Often times we can find ourselves falling back on these long-ingrained models we picked up in childhood without even thinking about them.
If only childhood didn’t just happen only once….
Ah, Dorothy.
As someone who gets anxiety over being unfamiliar with restaurant menus, specifically because I won’t be able to know what I want to order in advance – it is the weirdest and most specific anxiety and I HATE IT – I sympathize with my girl. Plans Are Good, Plans Protect You, Plans Keep You From Being In Someone Else’s Way.
I’m still disappointed in yesterday!Dorothy, but I feel today!Dorothy keenly. (hah!)
She does have a wealth of knowledge pertaining to terrible and horrific things.
So, I feel it is safe to assume at this point that Dorothy and Becky have NOT suggested Joyce go to a doctor before this moment and Jennifer really IS the first one to suggest it. I’m not as critical of Dorothy as many here but this definitely makes her swooping in to help at this moment a little worse.
Indeed. A few strips ago it was made clear they didn’t broach the topic in the slightest because Joyce is too stupid and naive to talk about taking birth control. It’s possible it was discussed back in September or November over timeskips, but with what the text has given us they just aren’t talking about it.
Dorothy and Becky started cracking up about how they’d have to hide it in peanut butter to sneak it by, but then it wouldn’t work because Joyce would consider it food mixing.
Embracing the hater role but for silly things that don’t matter. This strip my hatred is focused on Dorothy’s boring hoody, PICK A BETTER COLOUR HOODIE DOROTHY! THE HINT OF PINK DOES NOT DO ENOUGH TO MAKE THE BORING HOODIE WORK!
You made me smile, Florence. Thank you. 😊
Hehe felt the need for silly
BTW sorry for the bizarre question, but are you British? 🙃
Australian, but my autistic language experience with watching too much tv means I sound like I stayed in America too long, and also sometimes Britain
All very fascinating!
BTW I’m both bored and eager to try new wordly foods, so tell me, what’s your favorite meal to cook? I wanna try to make it! (orange just how you like your hotdogs, or both!!) 😋
Gnocchi, gotta be gnocchi(specifically tomato flavour, though pesto and cheesier sorts are also good)
😋 Ooo! Gotta gather some tomatoes! What about hotdogs?
I usually have hotdogs very basic with mustard and tomato sauce
I wear hoodies like that 🙁
Don’t worry, this is only for todays strip, and only Dorothy’s hoodie specifically. Your hoodie is cool, unlike Dorothy’s that I’ve chosen to hate
More people should come to the pointless hater corner and embrace hating what doesn’t matter
will you look at that piece of SHIT third tree from the right in the last panel, going lalala i don’t give a fuck and branching out at a FUCKING 45° angle BARELY off the ground like it’s alone in the MFing forest when all of the other trees are making the effort of being nice and polite and gently fanning out after a solid 10 feet of vertical growth???? like heelllooooo third tree from the right in the last panel you ever tried, oh i don’t know, NOT being a LOW-BRANCHY JERK?!!!!
like, sorry, like, WHO do you even think you ARE to expect us to abide your riDIculous trash life choices, third tree from the right in the last panel you selfish son of a …potato? or fungus, or whatever? look who cares how trees even grow goddammit i’m so FURIOUS rn shit damn pissfuck pus-filled pathetic nonsense “””angiosperm”””, more like IEATSHITsperm rrrahhhughhhhsdfmkgfksdgfhdpsdpfsqregsmd
…
…
…
*deep breath*
…aaah thank you florence that was nice <3
Fuck that tree o’clock!
…
…
…
It’s what’s needed
How is a raven like a writing desk? 😛
Sorry I know this is the pointless hater corner but I felt like silly 🤪
In short, Dorothy and Becky did the wrong thing for the right reason, while Jennifer is doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Should Dorothy have asked earlier? Maybe. Periods are personal after all, and I wouldn’t blame Dorothy on waiting and seeing instead of spending emotional capital on a potential argument over Joyce’s own medical choices. Should Jennifer shunt Dorothy aside and take all the credit? It probably won’t hurt Joyce, but it’s really petty, and shows that helping Joyce wasn’t the goal. It was asserting the ‘head cheerleader’ control over the people around her. Because Jennifer is ‘healthy’ now, so she knows best. Otherwise, what’s the harm of showing Joyce that all of her friends were concerned, even if they weren’t the ones to suggest it?
I’ve seen this kind of pettiness in my own family, so it really rubs me the wrong way. Just my own personal perspective.
I’m not seeing this “right reason” you’re attributing to D+B. Their reasoning was literally “but that might be haaaaaaaard :(“. Jennifer is ALSO not shunting Dorothy aside and take all the credit. Shunting someone aside is literally what Dorothy tried to do, as soon as she found out that she could get some credit without putting in any actual effort.
To be fair, just trying to get Joyce to go to an eye doctor and get glasses was like PULLING TEETH, and that was like what? Just a few days ago? I don’t blame either of them for not wanting to go right back into “Fighting Joyce to do something for her health yet AGAIN” Mode.
Exactly seven days ago in-universe, as of this chapter. I can definitely see how it would make them reluctant, yep.
except for the fact that Becky has known about this for years and Dorothy for months and months. Knowledge that Joyce has debilitating periods predates the glasses by far
Yeah okay, but like Periods are personal, Becky has grown up with them being the norm for Joyce, Joyce has grown up with it being just “What is expected” and fixing Joyce’s period problems shouldn’t fall on Dorthey to fix either, like dang I had debilitating periods too, none of my friends had to have a ” talk to me” about going to the doctor.
Sometimes you have to decide for yourself “You know what, I cant live with this” and do something about it.
Dorothy’s Joyce’s friend, not her parent, and tbh her not taking care of every little issue for Joyce should be encouraged so she can step outa Mom mode, and more into a “Friend” mode.
Normally I’d agree, but they already know what her previous take on doctors was and as a friend who knew about that and her other changes you can bring this up. Not in a “let’s drag her away” glasses shenanigans, but I’d suggest it without being a mom. When my friends latch on and attribute everything to one thing in their childhood I suggest therapy. Not in an asshole way but in a “this seems to be taking a lot for your energy, and it might be nice to take that weight off. If you’re struggling by yourself, there’s people who can help when you’re ready.” Or someone who thinks their cough is just a cough at week 8 and I can go “I’ve had this, and this isn’t considered normal. Your cold might have mutated into something else or you might be having prolonged spasms. Maybe go check it out to be safe?”
To be fair this series would be SEVERAL YEARS SHORTER if everyone here actually got the therapy every.single.castmember clearly needs X.X
It’s kinda funny, but with what you shared here and last time, I think we both came from the same shtick; I got people in my life I desperately want to help, but it’s more important that they ignore the problem since solving it is, like, way harder??? And my opinion is irrelevant even when it involves me suffering the consequences of their problem?????
And that’s why Jennifer’s speaking so hard to me right now, and why I think Dorothy and Becky are displaying the latest example of why they are turbo buttholes; Jennifer sees the problem, there are things that can be done, the people who nominally should aren’t up to it, and so it falls to her. I don’t think that’s powerful or assertive or whatever, it strikes me as the simplest, most basic form of human decency I possibly believe in, and why I get so utterly flummoxed when it’s treated as some huge forceful leap; helping someone out with a problem too big for them is the most goddamned normal thing in the universe.
And that’s how I am, I think. I’m no mother hen, but I can’t stand seeing someone I know suffering some obvious distress and not being helped, because “suffering some obvious distress and not being helped” is what my entire adolescence turned out to be where I was surrounded by adults who expected Teen Spencer to handle the responsibility of leaving my drunkass mom. That’s kinda what it became for me, I guess; if I don’t make the right decision, it’s my fault, and it took me like a decade to realize I never should have been in that position to begin with, let alone that I should have been able to rely on the actual goddamned adults in my life to pick up the slack. Then, y’know, my 20s hit and I Am An Adult with unknown mental disorders, my antidepressants stop working but I’m still on them a few years, no prospects or future, but I Am An Adult so I’m just supposed to pick up the slack for what my folks were supposed to teach me.
I’m only the person I am now because I had to pass through the darkest, lowest point in my life, but maybe I never would have had to go through it if I had people who were willing to talk.
It seems to me that Sarah, as roommate, must have suggested something. Unless she just thinks it’s normal, which, as people have noted previously, a lot of people (even doctors) do.
…But in a bathrobe, farting, is how I attend all my doctor’s appointments, why is Dorothy’s dialogue framed like that’s somehow the wrong way to do it? 🤨
Go Jennifer! Give Joyce all the help she needs and chase away the nosy maternal vulture! On the other hand, I can’t wait to read how Raidah will comment on the whole situation. If she’ll say to her precious friend Jennifer that she did a great thing or if she’ll said she had to leave Joyce to suffer for her own ignorance.
This is a very bad look for Dorothy. She talks about Joyce in the third person, then insults people who use the walk-in option, and then polices what people should be allowed to wear to receive medical care.
I thought the infantilizing complaints from yesterday’s comment section sounded unfair, but here we see her act like Joyce doesn’t have any agency at all. 🙁
Anyway in more lighthearted takes: Jennifer in like four strips did a better job at doing Dorothy, Becky and Sarah’s thing than they were.
Joyce has a problem? Okay sure, I’m gonna confront it and be assertive in being right while also having the ability to understand that Joyce is an autonomous human being who can make informed choices she missed out on thanks to her repressive upbringing, she just needs to hear it the way that’ll make sense to her.
We all want that kind of alpha bongo in our lives. Unless you’re Yotomoe, in which case you really want that kind of alpha bongo in your life.
It gives me a warm in my hearth each time I read a strip that Willis has already showed as a teaser (like today).
It’s like: congratulations! You reached the strip. Now you know what’s happened in the teaser.
I am with Jennifer on this; the only reason Dorothy jumped in was, because she saw the Joyce was not putting up the same resistance when she went to get her eyes examined. If the two tag teamed, worked together, then Dorothy’s suggestion would be okay.
Aight I gotta question the oft-mentioned Glasses Incident because that really didn’t seem like a thing that proves Joyce is completely untenable and chaotic about doing things she doesn’t want to do.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/saunter/
Here’s a strip where Joyce fights it. By the time she starts laughing maniacally I was pretty okay with filing this under Funny Joke Time instead of a deathly serious analysis of what actually happens when Joyce is confronted by a problem.
Then she expresses resentment over how her life has changed, afterwards she goes.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/atwatereyecare/
She is having a bad time but otherwise just goes through with it. Afterwards she complains while picking her glasses out and, as may have been implied by the visuals of recent strips, has just kept on wearing them despite how much she hates it. She once again draws specific reference to the idea of wanting things to stay the same and resenting change.
Afterwards Sarah and Walky start ripping on her about it and she, for the third time; talking about resenting change. Sarah tells her to take them off in her dorm but Joyce sticks to it, and then Sarah calls her “cute widdle Joycey, so pissy.”
(As I may have noted, Joyce’s friends are the actual worst)
So someone’s gotta square why this was some Herculean undertaking for Dorothy “you’re not allowed to be angry without a good reason” Keener when all she did was take her there while Joyce stormed about it while still going through with it anyway. The strip where Dorothy books the appointment entirely without Joyce’s input even has Dorothy say out loud that Joyce “owes it to herself to investigate all possible obstacles to success.”
TLDR: Dorothy did the thing and then Joyce went along with it and then kept along with it entirely within her own power while griping about rigid fixation on things staying the same and hating the tactile sensation that was now permanently on her face (an ASD mood if there ever was one). As if, and bear with me on this one; Dorothy’s an idiot and deciding at her own leisure which parts of Joyce’s life she’s allowed to control, like this is not a major fixture of Joyce’s current struggle with her three closest friends or something.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Huh, I just noticed that Dorothy emphasises the first “I”. So it’s not “I can set up the appointment for her.”, it’s “*I* can set up the appointment for her.” She. Not Jennifer, go away Jennifer, you can’t set up appointments, *Dorothy* is the one that sets up appointments, even though she wasn’t going to do anything about this until you walked the path to make sure it wasn’t mined, but now that we know nothing’s gonna blow up and it’s safe, make way for *Dorothy*.
(Joyce, of course, is not to be consulted either way on who makes the appointment, because lol, Joyce with agency)
I wondered about that, I thought it might have been or it might have been my imagination
It’s noticeably different from the “I” that starts the second sentence in the same speech bubble, which is the only reason I noticed it.
yup, I noticed that too.
I mean… let’s not forget that a few months ago Jennifer was instead Billie, half of the alcoholic disaster lesbian suicide pact.
I’d be disinclined to trust her with anyone I care about.
You know, all this goes back to the whole “Joyce is the worst” thing going on a few months back when she was lashing out over her spat with Becky. And I’m just going to say that the problem here is the same problem it was then: Joyce’s friends are the fucking worst.
I’m suddenly wondering if a part of the problem with Joyce’s closer friends fucking up so spectacularly compared to people who’ve chosen or who desperately tried to step away at points (Joe, and now Jennifer) is a part of being too close to see the wood for the trees. And like Joe deep down wants his relationship with Joyce to change anyway and Jennifer doesn’t care if Joyce hates her or whatever. Like back when they were all closer and Jennifer went by Billie she thought Joyce swearing was weird and Mike called her out about it because didn’t she find chipper Christian Joyce annoying or a joke? But with time and distance she’s not as invested as keeping Joyce in a particular role. Heck, with her name adaptation she’s trying a few new roles herself now anyway.
Then again maybe Joe, Jennifer and Joyce need to start a new team: I’m thinking the J force.
Jocelyn all things being well, can come too.
Then again Walky who is also a step or two away from Joyce also doesn’t do too badly sometimes given Sunday. Maybe he can be an honorary member.
But will J-Force have to confront their nemesis, John and Jordan?
It is unavoidable. It is their… jestiny.
I feel certain it’s that, yes.
It’s outright textual with Becky but Dorothy and Sarah are running with the script where Joyce naively does wrong and she just has to listen to them to set it right, but this is a scenario where they can’t get their Joyce back because it’s not a wrongdoing on Joyce’s part, they just see Silly Pollyanna Joyce who doesn’t mix food as Real Joyce and don’t recognize her stepping out of that as a valid expression of Joyce.
This is the third time someone other than the Bad Friend Squad saw Joyce have a problem and instantly moved to address it, and that can be done because they don’t rely on Joyce being their emotional support teddy bear.
Y’all really love seeing and and assuming the worst about people, huh.
That’s the only valid form of media analysis and it’s actually you who’s weird for even mentioning it.
Probably not wrong.
It’s an assumption?
Everyone certainly does it to Joyce.
I can’t believe Dorothy wants to take all poor people and tie them up by their ankles and hwack them with a stick until they all have money.
Needs more bootstraps so they can pull themselves up by them.
The best thing about culturally alllowed microaggressions is that they’ve got built-in deniability.
Spencer with another banger. I wish I had your powers of hitting the nail on the head.
Dorothy can tolerate any insult from Becky but to be DISMISSED? Oh now Dot has an archenemy and her name is Jennifer.
How dare she suggest that Dorothy’s way of approaching and/or solving all problems is not the correct way?!
The comma eluded me at first and I pictured showing up at an event that is called a bathrobe farting and just got more confused from there.
I did not do this but this is exactly how my brain works too
I think Joyce would have gone Kablooey were Becky an Dorothy the ones to approach her. I think them choosing to sit this one out (for the time at least) was an acknowledgement that they know they’ve been pushing her a lot recently and don’t want to push her even more. They are close to her and we tend to be the harshest on those we are close to.
Considering that Joyce is already irritated with Dorothy and Becky, I can easily see her behaving differently if it were them asking instead of Jennifer. Still, Dorothy didn’t need to swoop in.
People shouldn’t say that sort of thing to me… Because I will, and have, done things like that in the past!
Dorothy makes no effort to solve the problem because she doesn’t want to mess with the status quo but once someone else tries to solve the problem she jumps to be in charge. She really is fated to be a politician.
Dotty. Walk-ins are FOR urgent care. This is urgent care. An appointment with a new doctor is gonna take a week at a minimum.
Oh FUCK. Are we about to actually witness the fabled Neuroses and Character Flaws of the Dorothy?! I love her, but it’s exciting to see her feel out of control, or wrong about something, for once.
I sympathize, walk-in appointments stress me out. But mainly because every place I’ve been to that has them seems to be “walk-ins = long wait, appointment = seen quickly.” Dunno if that applies to student health centers though (my little art school didn’t have one though if anyplace needs one it’s art school).