Cue montage of Billifer cheering people up through being bad at stuff. With obligatory 80s-esque montage music.
(You’re the worst! Around! No one ever leaves you down!
You’re the worst! Around! No one ever leaves you down!
You’re the worst! Around! No one ever leaves you dooooooowwwwwwwn owwwww-owwwwnnnn….)
Nah Billie, that’s just evidence of your ignorance. 😑
On the plus side, at least more of Jennifer’s inner-Billie is starting to surface, so for what it’s worth it’s a step in the right direction? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Agreed. To me, she’s always been a “you hate to hate her” character because whenever she makes decisions, whether good or bad, it’s so often for the wrong reasons. I don’t want to dislike her, because deep down inside, she’s a good person who’s driven by a need to help others. Problem is, her primary driver is a need to be better than everyone around her.
Neurodivergnce is :” differing in mental or neurological function from what is considered typical or normal (frequently used with reference to autistic spectrum disorders)” it is something that effects cognitive ability not a mental illness classifying conditions such as anxiety and depression as neurodivergent causes problems beacuse those are mental illness that needs to be treated while neurodivergency is a condition that you can live with and even thrive.
The person who actually coined the term disagrees with you. Direct link to the post as my Website URL. I’ve bolded the part where they specifically say that mental illnesses count.
“PSA from the actual coiner of “neurodivergent”
Yo. Many of you need to take an entire stadium of seats. Like a football arena in Texas number.
I coined neurodivergent before tumblr was even a thing, like a decade or more ago, because people were using ‘neurodiverse’ and ‘neurodiversity’ to just mean autistic, & possibly LDs. But there’s more, like way more, ways a person can have a different yet fucking perfect dammit brain.
Neurodivergent refers to neurologically divergent from typical. That’s ALL.
I am multiply neurodivergent: I’m Autistic, epileptic, have PTSD, have cluster headaches, have a chiari malformation.
Neurodivergent just means a brain that diverges.
Autistic people. ADHD people. People with learning disabilities. Epileptic people. People with mental illnesses. People with MS or Parkinsons or apraxia or cerebral palsy or dyspraxia or no specific diagnosis but wonky lateralization or something.
That is all it means. It is not another damn tool of exclusion. It is specifically a tool of inclusion. If you don’t want to be associated with Those People, then YOU are the one who needs another word. Neurodivergent is for all of us.
Annoyedly yours,
Neurodivergent K of Radical Neurodivergence Speaking”
I mean, there are very valid reasons for wanting to have a label for people outside their marginalized group, but if people want a word for “not-autistic” the term allistic already exists.
If they coined it after neurodiverse and neurodiversity were already things, I dunno how watertight their claim is on coining it. They’re similar enough that I can see lots of people coming to it independently. But I dunno, maybe they’ve got a solid claim.
(I appreciate their definition and use it myself, personally.)
Thank you, that is amazing.
Being mindful of how we use labels matters.
I think the worry of gatekeeping a label comes from the fear that someone will go „well i am neurodivergent and my experience is universal, so yours isn’t valid“ and will try to speak for all ND people. And will be listened to by the public because they are loud and more convenient in their opinion than the rest of us.
As long as we are humbly communicating that our experience is personal, not universal, and keep listening and validating other people’s experience within the label, we can share the labels someone made for people who might be similar to our experience. Empowerment for all of us without taking it away from each other! <3
For some of them, that might just be the college talking.
I am, as far as I know, neurotypical. But a combination of stress, poor sleep due to needing to both work and handle classes, lousy dietary habits, and general angsty/hormonal teenagerness definitely took a toll during my college years.
Yeah, I get we need to normalize neurodivergence so it isn’t taboo, but saying every-single-mental-thing might end up not being a good thing? Or a bit of a slippery slope?
Like for example, I had PTSD. I say “had” because I went and got treatment for it to stop the PTSD. But you don’t go and get treatment for autism. Autism is just another way of having a brain in the meat mechasuit we call a body. You can get as much “treatment” as you want, autism doesn’t stop or go away. PTSD, things like anxiety and depression can be treated and in some cases ultimately go away. Autism doesn’t go away, even if “treated” (please note the use of quotes).
It also opens up the pathway to go back the other direction, and I still remember when autism WAS considered a mental illness and attempted to “treat” away. I don’t like heading back in that direction, it was a bad time.
It’s really not. You’re making mountains out of molehills, here. Neurodivergent is not a medical term, it is a social term that is MEANT to be inclusive of all different kinds of folks with experiences in common when it comes to mental health.
Are you also going to say the same of the word “disabled”? There are some disabilities which can be treated, and others which can’t and that most people probably don’t WANT to be treated because they resent the idea that their difference in how they live their life is considered a defect in them which must be fixed–and all that can be done is to provide accommodations so that the disabled person can more easily exist and function within an abled society.
Nonetheless. Both types of disability are still disabilities, because you are disabled in your ability to function as ‘expected’ within society. And the same thing goes for neurodivergence. Whatever the cause or whether it’s ‘treatable’, the fact remains that your experience of how your mind works deviates from the norm in a way which impacts how you are treated and perceived by others and how you are able to function in society, because society is not built to meaningfully accommodate your experience.
And that impact and experience of being and feeling othered is what the term ‘neurodivergent’ is meant to describe. The reason it needs to be normalized is not because ‘oh these weirdos can’t help it or change themselves so we should be more accepting’, it’s to simply create a society which more broadly accommodates the many different ways brains can work. Even if that state is potentially temporary, it still needs to be accommodated. Part of those accommodations might even be treatment.
Even then, those things don’t always go away. Some people’s brains just are like that. (And genetic predisposition to it — even to PTSD iirc — points that direction.)
ADHD is closer to autism than it is to PTSD in this comparison, but that can also be treated, and in a lot of cases it’s super beneficial to treat even though it’s just how your brain naturally works.
BTW Suzi many places autism still is considered an “illness” that needs to be “cured”, no thanks to the very goal vicious practices of the hate group Autism Speaks. 😖
The fact that you think that this is an issue is very telling of what you think ‘neurodivergence’ even is.
It’s not supposed to be some in-group out-group thing where there’s a clear defined line between the two. It is a term which describes a certain kind of experience within society, of which some people deal with quite a lot more than others. To the degree that having a word to describe that experience and axis of system oppression is useful. That’s it.
Hopefully someday, the word neurodivergent IS useless, and describes nothing of note. That’s SORT OF THE GOAL.
Yeah, but as long as the norms are out there, a lot of people are perceived as normal.
For example, if normal weight of an apple is 170g to 210g (kinda fictional, idk), then of course you can go ahead and say „all apples have different weight“, but both the apple at 171g and the apple at 209g will be perceived as within the „acceptable“ weight, while the apple at 120g will probably be thrown away rather than sold in the supermarket, and the apple at 340g will be sold as a special deal. Yes, all apples are different, but that doesn’t mean some of them aren’t considered typical apples.
(sorry?? She’s clearly not neurotypical. Think about how she sits in chairs. Oral fixation. The way she’s always fidgeting. She’s calmest when she’s stunting. Needs to multitask. Struggles to follow directions in spite of being highly intelligent.)
I would really be careful in stating anxiety and depression as neurodivergent behavoir beacuse its onset isn’t always driven by genetics it can be driven by outside forces and can go into remission unlike other neurodivergent behavoir.
Why is that such a terrible thing to include? Why would it have to be exclusively genetic conditions? It’s not like there’s A Single Treatment For Neurodivergent People that we’d be compromising. What exactly are we being careful of? What’s the fear here that we should be careful to avoid??
I really don’t like generalizing all conditions under an umbrella term beacuse i fear it will lead to misconceptions about said conditions. It may not in alot of people’s but I have had live with depression anxiety autism adhd and dyslexia all needing different approaches in handling it and misconceptions has led to negative outcomes and i aware that my experince does not reflect everyones experience but i hasnt been for me and like me not everyone is an expert in neurological behavoir or brain chemistry and I don’t want people to spread misinformation yeah I know I might have done so in one my previous comments which makes me feel god awful beacuse but I try to err on the side of caution when talking about subjects that I really don’t have an expertise on alm on this subject I have is my own experience and my experience has sucked.
Yeah I also ramble to be honest I feel shitter now then i did before and regret commenting
It’s true, they do all take different approaches. But that’s also true for almost any combination of things that can fall under the neurodivergent umbrella, even excepting non-genetic conditions.
The thing that I feel is that if we don’t create an umbrella term, people like Jennifer are just going to continue to call us weirdos. I see an umbrella term as a way for us to find common ground with each other, even when we respond differently to the myriad ways in which the world was not built for us. I don’t think this will compound existing misconceptions, and I think since there are so many ways to be neurodivergent it could have the impact of gaining solidarity with folks who may not have thought of themselves as one of us.
As you can see, brevity is not a defining character trait for me. If it makes you feel any better, I harbor no grudge against you, I appreciate your ability and willingness to hear and listen.
Because most mental illnesses aren’t the same as something like autism. I said in a comment above, but my PTSD was treatable. My anxiety was treatable. Autism is not “treatable”. There are coping mechanisms and things you can learn, sure, but it isn’t “take this pill and your autism goes away” – I can definitely see some maybe fitting the neurodivergent umbrella but I also worry about it swinging back the other way, back when autism was thought to be a mental illness that could be “treated” away, often resulting in abuse to a lot of autistic folks. These things matter.
ADHD is (to a degree) treatable, but is just as genetic and persistent as a bunch of other things. Too many divisions just creates separation, and we all have needs for society to take us into account when designing…everything really. This is no less true for people with depression, anxiety, or PTSD.
I’m absolutely thrilled for you that your PTSD and anxiety were treatable. But wouldn’t it have been even better if you could reliably count on accommodations or being given grace before treatment takes hold? And for folks whose similar conditions are only semi-treatable or even not treatable? I like an umbrella term because these are things we all need, even if they don’t look the same for everyone under the umbrella. The need that we all share is a general shift in societal thinking.
My depression definitely altered my brain (depression can make you worse at focusing, for one), and it’s never going to go away. It’s always going to affect my life and make me different from a lot of people.
I feel like it counts.
I know that feeling – but from my experience, depression can absolutely go away. It took years of learning and healing and figuring out how to pilot this meat vehicle I’m in, and sure, when I let my habits slip it creeps up sometimes. But right now, my brain is atypical as hell, but not depressed.
🙄 Totes on that one Masumi, piloting this human meat vehicle. I swear working with my host brain and body is a bongo and a half, like trying to get a picture on a TV that never came with an instruction manual — when you just barely get it working after a day of exhausting effort trying to get it that way, you be like “you know what, this is good enough, I’ll stop here”.
You know, on that topic, you might wanna check out huberman lab podcast on YouTube. It’s basically 1-2 hour lectures by a neuroscientist on how to cooperate with you brain. They’re awesome.
There is a big difference between juvenile-onset mood disorders and what I think of as “situational” depression. The latter can be just as or more dangerous and can last years, but they are not the same.
I can tell you right now that my brain, fucked since childhood, probably with contributing genetics but an obvious trauma basis, is NEVER going to be neurotypical. And I very much appreciated the psychistrist who corroborated that: you can improve, but there is no such thing as becoming psychologically within normal when your pathways were fucked while they were still developing.
/constantly bitter at people thinking “get therapy” means you can just erase mental illness. No, you can mitigate it and learn strategies to function in the world. Obviously you can in some cases! But it’s not a given! I spend too much time on AITA.
I mean, sure, you can work to be stable, but I’ve been living with depression for over 10 years, even after I felt really stable and healthy for almost a whole year. But even then I had depressive episodes. I don’t think it will ever completely go away.
And like, I will never know how it feels not to be depressed, and I’ve had… SO many experiences with people just not being able to understand why I’m sad or empty or exhausted for apparently no reason, or I can’t get shit done if it’s – to them – quite easy.
So I def think depression counts as neurodivergent. It’s just a term for “you probably CAN’T get me because my brain works differently from yours”.
You personally do not identify as neurodivergent. Great for you. Don’t speak for others, thanks. Your experiences are not universal and your consistently ableist and exclusionary language in this comment section whenever this topic comes up is honestly getting a little tiresome.
Look, Suzi has only been talking about their personal experience and how they personally understand their experience within the spectrum of human experience, neuropathy, and psychology. They aren’t speaking for others. They are speaking for themselves. That’s a good approach for having good faith discussion.
You (and others) shutting down people from talking honestly about their personal experiences because it doesn’t align with an absolutist ‘inclusivity’ narrative is not helpful, it’s pretty dismissive and rude. Personally, I believe the entire point of having these conversations is to better understand the diversity of human experience. To understand and be more understanding of differences, and that is how you foster real inclusivity, by understanding, accepting, and tolerating differences. By better understanding each other, we can overcome stigma, oppression, othering, etc etc.
At this point in time, we (humans) absolutely do not understand human neuropathy and psychology completely. This isn’t an opinion, that’s just where we’re at with human knowledge. We’re honestly just barely starting to approach it from a perspective of trying to understand it, rather than just classifying it as demonic possession or more generally using it as a tool for oppression. To say that any ideology of human neuropathy and psychology is Absolutely The One Answer is honestly a refusal to engage in real understanding and learning. You do not know everything. I do not know everything. We do not know everything. When we accept that, we can begin to learn, and to better understand. We know our own experiences. We can listen to the experiences of others. We can learn from those along with evidence-based studies and better our understanding. It’s a process.
With neurodiversity, neurodivergency, the spectrum of human psychology, and mental health, and how to label things, the point is to be able to communicating experience, which can help with understanding differences and overlap. So that we can better understand, help, and make reasonable accommodations. That is more important than semantics of language, or at least I personally think it ought to be. Refusing to accept someone’s personal, lived experience, is not inclusive. It’s excluding a personal experience (and excluding people) because it doesn’t match an abstract dogma you’re granting absolutist status to. I don’t think that’s helpful.
Swing and a miss. Suzi said that they don’t think PTSD “counts” as neurodivergence. That’s not “speaking for themselves,” and the people objecting to that have fair points. I don’t disagree with the concept of a lot of your other points, but I do think you come off as a jerk about it when you’re acting like other people made claims that they didn’t.
I genuinely have no idea what you’re responding to, because never at any point have I made any of the claims you seem to think I am. Everyone is absolutely free to talk about their own individual experiences, but they…don’t give you the right to decide what does or does not ‘count’ as neurodivergence, and every other time this topic has come up in the past Suzi has said things like ‘Autism is a worthless word because it’s too broad’ and ‘if Joyce is autistic, nobody is’, which are extremely judgemental and dismissive things to say and are by no means “talking about their personal experiences”. Slinging around judgements based on their own biases, more like.
I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that I ever claimed to know everything about…anything? All I’ve done is explained the sociopolitical role that terms like ‘neurodivergent’ and ‘disabled’ or even ‘autistic’ play in giving people the vocabulary to speak about broad sociological phenomenon.
I’m not even the one talking about semantics! It’s the people who are sitting around trying to argue that x or y thing doesn’t “count” as neurodivergent because “technically mental illnesses can be cured, so they shouldn’t be lumped together with things like autism using the same word” that are getting so bogged down in semantics!
Why am I the one being called a jerk, when the person I responded to is literally one of the people doing the thing you are accusing me of?!
Are you sure it was Suzi who said those things? I mean, I’ve gone looking, and while I find comments from other people making similar claims, I don’t see any attributed to Suzi. I do see some posts like that from “Lucky Winner,” who also has a Malaya Gravatar, but as far as I can tell, they’re not the same person.
And I would say, having C-PTSD, that it does count as neurodivergence. Not everyone experiences things or views things in the way that you do, and you are not the sole voice of authority on the topic. Please kindly stop “correcting” people using that term as an umbrella.
Feel free to say “I do not identify as ND, and would like to not be referred to that way” and we’ll respect the hell out of it. Feel free to STOP saying “That’s not a neurodivergence because I said so.”
Now THAT I would like to see. ‘s got the same energy as Carla yelling in the hallway about fixing people’s problems, ripping the band-aids off left and right.
Eh, even if they do, I just hope it’s made clear that it’s not because of some “autism buddies” thing.
Something tells me that Joyce, being no stranger to black and white thinking, will alternate from loathing and freaking out about her neurodivergence to a position of toxic positivity, all the while frustrating Dina, who very likely has a VERY nuanced view of the topic. Considering that the bigoted systems that stopped Dina from getting a diagnosis pretend to be professional science, her passion and way of life, misconceptions of neurodivergence must be something that REALLY piss her off 😬
Hasn’t Walky respected the name change, for the most part?
It’s more her ditching everyone for the “cool kids” that he seems to focus on if anything.
And even then, he doesn’t object to her having new friends, just the being ditched part.
When they do interact, he tries to keep the same dynamic, and while she doesn’t seem to want that, that’s not really about the name in and of itself for either of them.
Has he? I don’t think Walky has once called her Jennifer since the name change. That and he purposefully mentioned “Billie” when they last talked. It’s pretty clear he doesn’t like the new name.
Never said he liked it.
I said he respected it.
Other than calling her Billie when she first showed up after the time skip and she said to call her Jennifer, he has not once referred to her as Billie that I noticed.
And I’d like to point out that in one of those same strips where he calls her Billie, Joyce also refers to her as Billie while speaking to Lucy and Lucy responds with no issue or correction.
After Jennifer says to call her as such and Walky says to himself that it doesn’t sound like her, Joyce then says to call people what they want to be called to which he reluctantly agrees.
You are correct that he almost never says Jennifer in the strips he shares with her (I don’t feel like going through all the recent Walky strips to see if he called her Billie when she wasn’t around); he says it once to Lucy when Jennifer says they’re almost bearable as a couple, but he never refers to her as Billie in the strips he shares with her either other than what I’ve already mentioned.
And while he did mention the name Billie when they last talked, that was to make the distinction that her personality has changed with the Jennifer persona and that he was no longer sure that the things Billie did were also things Jennifer did as clearly there are some differences. That in and of itself is an acknowledgment that she’s Jennifer now, else there would be no need for that distinction.
Remember also that he apologized for giving her that nickname regardless of whether either them actually know he didn’t and are just saying he did.
So, long story long, he stopped calling her Billie in the strips they shared, he has referred to her as Jennifer at least once in the strips they shared, he acknowledged Jennifer for who she is now by stating that he thought some of her actions were left behind with the Billie nickname, and he apologized for giving her the name despite the fact that he didn’t and that it’s not really something that needed an apology.
So yeah, that sounds kinda respectful to me.
Hrmmm This is interesting because in this situation I read it totally different from this. You argue Walky has always been respectful of the name change but to me I think he never took Jennifer’s new expression of identity seriously until she started really trying to distance herself from him. She told him to call her Jennifer and he took it so badly he followed her around most of that morning just to annoy her. It didn’t register with him until Jennifer finally broke her composure and told him they weren’t friends anymore.
So the whole idea that Jennifer abandoned their friendship is his fault. She was still there (and effectively still since they regularly meet walking to the same class and he’s dating her roommate) he just didn’t like the boundaries she set for him at first.
In the their last conversation I don’t think he realized how serious Jennifer is about changing her identity until she literally tells him she hates the name Billie. That’s when he apologizes. But every time Jennifer has to reinforce her decision with him. For me the fact she’s had to do that more than once registers to me Walky didn’t really get it until just now.
This is a pretty complex dynamic developing between them and neither is really understanding the other’s point of view because of their pseudo-sibling dynamic. Their group date should be very interesting.
It isn’t the first time she’s told him they weren’t friends. It’s something she does when she’s looking for higher social status, then comes back to him for support when she’s down. It’s a pattern. Not something he should easily take as serious.
Something that has him worried about her, not him not liking the boundaries. He was already worried by her being “elusive” when he and Sal came back at the start of the semester.
And he apologizes for giving her the name in the first place, not for whatever else you think he’s doing wrong.
Nor does he get how serious the change is. I’m not sure I do either – other than the name change, it’s hard to see what’s different about this change than her previous attempts. In that very sequence, she reaffirms that all the alpha bongo stuff that was Billie, Jennifer still claims.
You see, I got that he was trying to hard to annoy her that first day we see them after the time skip specifically because the distancing had already started and had been ongoing sometime between Halloween, when a nice chunk of the cast seemed to have some kind of issue, and the start of second semester. And if she had already distanced herself before the break, then he almost certainly hadn’t seen her during the break, so that was the first time he’d seen her in almost a month (depending on how long their break is). Admittedly, that’s my head canon, but there’s currently nothing that goes against it.
Also, when she told him they weren’t friends, that wasn’t in an angry broken composure way (though I’ll check to make sure), but in a matter of fact way. Nor was it the first time she had done that, as she did so in the previous semester as well, arguably with more annoyance. And earlier that same day, she told him they weren’t enemies, she was just busy. Generally, when you want to reassure your friend that you and them are still good, you say you’re still friends; you don’t say you’re not enemies. That implies “not enemies” is the best place the relationship is at right now, further supporting that saying they weren’t friends was not breaking composure, but instead just rephrasing what had already been said (but again, I’ll check).
Also, he doesn’t apologize because she tells him she hates Billie. He apologizes because she says he was the one who gave her the “stupid” name, and said he thought she liked it. After that is when she says she never like the name and that’s when he pushes back a little and starts talking about failing so much makes her a better helper. As for reinforcing her decision to be called Jennifer, that was not even what that conversation was about. It was about his surprise that she waited for Joyce despite the other changes in her behavior. Billie would wait. Jennifer waited? That conversation was Jennifer reaffirming that HELPING is what she does (head cheerleader, alpha bongo, problem solver), not her reaffirming that he should call her Jennifer as he hadn’t been calling her Billie.
And it’s kinda ironic that she had that whole conversation with Joyce about how people wanting to view her the same despite her wanting to change, but her conversation with Walky is that he shouldn’t have been surprised she waited as that part had never changed. Which led to him pointing out how he’s supposed to know what changed and what didn’t when she repeatedly told them, not just him, that she’s not the same and that they’re “strangers” (admittedly, I don’t know how much or how often she told him they were strangers, but I fully believe she’s told him she’s different pretty often over the past few weeks).
After going back over the Jennifer strips, she did say she and Walky were not friends with emphasis.
I wouldn’t say she broke her composure, but the text was emphasized in her speech bubble.
Also, Sal called Jennifer Billie to her face and then referred to her as Billie when she bumped into the cool kids on her bike. So if anyone isn’t respecting the name change, it’s Sal, not Walky (though she did say that she wouldn’t respect it to AG, so that’s no surprise).
But as you say, she’s done the “we’re not friends” thing before and it didn’t stick then. It’s a pattern. Why should he accept that this time it’s a real serious change and turn his back on her?
To be fair, he’s got every right to do so. To stop trying to connect. To blow her off next time she turns to him when everything else falls apart. He won’t though, because he’s trying to do better by both his sisters, even the one that’s a really shitty friend to him.
This is getting way deeper than I intended. I don’t even know who to respond to. thejeff or cbwroses…uh anyway.
My point is that this identity change bothers Walky more than anyone else and while it’s easy to label most of the fault on Jennifer’s attitude no one is really respecting what she’s trying to do here. Sure it’s a pattern of behavior that she tries to abandon her old friends and reinvent herself to get in with the cool crowd but that doesn’t actually make her goals less valid. Walky expecting this to fall apart just because it has in the past (which I don’t think he does, he just doesn’t like the distance between them) would be really messed up.
Jennifer’s actually trying to be a better person and she’s vocalized frustration that her old friend group won’t allow her to do that because of the baggage “Billie” represents. That’s Walky by the way, who for all his innocent intentions can’t have a conversation with Jen without calling her a butt. That brings out the worst in Jennifer. She knows this, which is why she distanced herself. They can’t have a conversation without devolving like that which is not something Jennifer enjoys but Walky does. He enjoys it so much he even stated he wants to be in that very specific period of time again. But that’s kind of a too bad cause people have the right to try and change.
It does frustrate me that people think Jennifer is shitty to her friends for this. This comic proves she still very much has her friends backs. A lot of people thought she was being as asshole to Ruth too when it’s very likely Ruth broke up with her and pitched it as doing Jen a favor. Jennifer was very invested in that relationship and it went bust anyway. (But that’s just a theory I have. Not canon yet)
Relationships are two way streets and as much as I love Walky I can’t just pretend he’s the victim in this.
@Sirksome
My point was that Walky respected her wanting to be Jennifer.
You’re trying to say he’s bothered by it because he doesn’t like the distance between them.
I’m saying he’s bothered by the distance between them, period.
Also, he wanted to go back to the old days of last semester as that had been the closest they’d been since before high school. The only other good times were before high school.
So yes, between shove him into lockers Billy and I don’t really know you or want to be around you Jennifer, he wanted I grudgingly acknowledge your existence and occasionally treat you like a sibling Billy, even if that Billy now wanted to be Jennifer.
It comes down to this:
Would Walky be more bothered by the personality she has now while keeping the name Billie?
OR
Would he be more bothered by her acting the same as before the time skip while insisting she be called Jennifer?
If you believe he’d be more bothered by the latter, then the name is the big deal.
If you believe he’d be more bothered by the former, then the distance is the big deal.
I don’t think Walky would have any issue with the latter and would be very bothered by the former.
It’s a fact that people get lonely, ain’t nothing new
But a woman like you, baby, should never have the blues
Let me help, I’ve got two for me, let me help
It would sure do me good to do you good
Let me help–Billy Swan but everybody associates it with Ringo
i imagine that it’s just one of the things that came up during her first semester gender studies class? it’s all but outright stated that that’s where her rote-memorised definition of bisexuality a little bit ago came from, and i would be shocked if disability was something that never came up in that class, even if only in passing
Thanks, friends. Recently, I’ve been having a bit of an existential crisis like Joyce is. Had a good talk with my doc today, though, asked for some ADHD meds. We decided the stimulant effect would just stress me out, but he let me get some other medicine instead. Should help. Hoping! Very kind guy. So sweet and easygoing. Maybe a little like Dr. Kaur.
One thing that kinds of stands out for me: Jennifer not knowing about the terms “neurotypical/neurodivergent”.
In comments on an earlier strip, some people (myself included) questioned how Jennifer could diagnose Joyce, given her background. Her seeming lack of knowledge about these terms sort of reinforces the question.
Jennifer also is probably blanketing here. Going by how she doesn’t think bisexuality actually exists, she probably has a VERY effed up view on EVERY legitimate “not normal” term.
She has a very effed up view of what’s “normal”, too. Seems like everything she’s proud of is “normal”, and everything she’s ashamed of is “not normal”.
The problem with “normal” is it has different meanings to different people (imagine that…) as it can relate to any of these things:
– preconcieved notions of good and bad (as in “women having lower income than men on the same job is not normal” which means it should be different, even though it clearly is the norm), which can be somewhat misleading, and is not OK at all when applied to a person.
– “the norm” which is how “most people” are or behave, which can be anything from insensitive to alienating (or toxic, as you put it).
– the expectations of the person speaking, which closely resembles the one above, but is generally more accomodating to differences or context variations, and can be OK if the speaker does leave room for that variation.
All in all, I’d still steer away from using words like that about a person.
I remember so many debates between friends arguing about what is or is not normal, each of them using a different meaning (mostly the first and second).
The word “normal” has been coming up a lot recently in my- I was about to call it my threesome (which puts my friend’s jokes about ending up as a third without meaning to in an odd context)- my trio, me, my spouse and my best friend.
ANYWAY accidental polyamory aside, I think it’s interesting and pertinent!
We keep coming back to an idea around “normality”. What we experience- especially (but not exclusively) as children- is “normal”. That is, the experience of each person establishes their baseline of normal. But it is not the norm. It is not “normal” to the entire rest of the world- or even a majority of them.
Example. In our trio- we are all trans. We are all autistic. Two of us have ADHD. Two of us are masc-presenting non-binary. We have all experienced bullying. All of us have experience of long-term abuse (that- and this is part of why this is so important- seemed normal at the time. We all love animals. We all dislike most spectator sports. We all love nature. We all lean politically left. I could continue.
We are also the people we are all closest to, so each of these things is normal to us- and deviation from it has become a level of abnormal to us. Which is fascinating! But also something we all have to be aware of because OUR “normal” is NOT society’s “normal”. At all. And if we go into the world assuming otherwise we are the ones who will pay the price for it.
Anyway that was a rambling tangent but the discussion of “normal” made me think of it and I wanted to share! (Also it is somewhat related to the strip when you consider that, as it’s such a human experience, the experience of the characters is similar- “this is my baseline of normal, which means it must be THE baseline of normal.”)
Eh, part of me feels like Jennifer is playing down her knowledge of the subject. After all, if she doesn’t know the “nerd words” then *clearly* there can’t be anything “wrong” or different about her. This is pretty similar to what she did about her sexuality in the past too.
Her figuring out the situation purely based on Joyce’s reaction makes me wonder if she has been in that exact same situation in the past.
Going by today, I’d say that she’s the sort of person who as part of her forceful “self-actualisation” learned that she shouldn’t use words like “spaz” anymore but rather, “autistic”. A word she now uses with almost the same dismissive intention.
Yeah, between the people here who respect “autism” as being this intrinsically fluid thing with no hurtful assumptions made, and those out there who use it to paint over us and see it as a “dehumanize me” sign, we might be using the same word, but it’s as tho we’re speaking different languages entirely. Hence, the connection between language and social classes.
Am I the only one that finds it somehow unnerving that Joyce still has her new full sclera-included eye she got with her glasses after she takes them off. It makes her strikingly different from most of the cast (half of whom have weird wet, Carolinely button eyes).
Every time I look at that character model sheet I think it’s a goddamn crime Joyce doesn’t wear her hair in a ponytail more often. It’s an incredibly cute look for her.
I still don’t understand the design logic behind who has button eyes, who has button eyes with white, and who has colored eyes. I assume there must be a reasoning, but I cannot for the life of me see any genuine patterns.
I’m pretty sure it’s just a matter of having or not having sclera. Characters who have them may still have black as their eye color – Agatha’s situation is pretty unusual though.
Oh no, my confusion isn’t about what it MEANS for different characters to have those differences, I’m wondering WHY certain characters have one type of eye over another. I’m wondering if it has to do with the character themselves and the types of expressions they’re drawn to have more often than not, if a certain eye design is more effective at portraying certain emotions in a certain way? But…I dunno.
In reality the reasoning is probably just ‘thats just how their character design evolved over time’ and there’s no actual internal logic. BUT I WANT THERE TO BE LOGIC TO IT.
Ngl I have genuinely been struggling to not call her Billifer since the time skip. As soon as I read of her reverting to her first name Billifer has been hooked in my brain and won’t go away.
Kind of reassuring to see someone else call her that.
(Also, technically I think the term is “allistic” – using “neurotypical” in this context runs the risk of conflating autism with neurodivergence in general.)
Yeah, ya think it could especially be that last panel?
Her glasses are off, that world balloon helps highlight the volume of her breasts, her hair is a little messy and her clothing and the surrounding context of the bed really just say, “queen of comfort”.
All in all a pretty effective gestalt for bringing out her hot! 🥰
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so how about an expressive DOA avatar? Some that come to mind is Dina’s angry face or Sal’s series of faces when she heard Jennifer go callous and classist during a phone call with her dad who’s friends with a mayor.
It does seem to help Joyce. Through I am not sure it will help long term or if Joyce just thinks something like “yesterday I did not know that word either so I must be “normal” too” or something like that.
But yeah I am not happy with Jennifer either right now. Her word choice, her talking about “made up words”ugh… I feel like I like (almost) every Cast member less post time skip.
But… I dunno…. I always took “weird” or “weirdo” as a compliment. My whole life. Because it was the most common thing people ever called me. Made me feel proud.
Like the 3 Weird Sisters, in Macbeth. Or the Weirding Way (“The Voice!”) in Dune. Weirding always conveyed secret special powers, in my estimation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/weird
…I dunno. Maybe being named after an ancestor who had been hanged as a witch in Salem gave me an early appreciation for the “weirdos” of the world. Weird, wild, and wonder-full.
But yeah, I do get that it is tough to hear sometimes, Devin and Queezle. I hear where you’re coming from. If it’s any help, we’re all a community here, regardless of what words are used.
Yeah, I am not sure if I have a problem with the word “weirdo” on it’s own as such, I was mostly called different terms “freak” being the “nicest” among them.
But contrasting it with the “Normals”. That just reminds me of people complaining about the term cis gender and heterosexual and saying you could just say “normal” instead. Which is a really upsetting rhetoric and Jennifer’s “terms weirdos made up to for us normals” really reminded me of that. It can be kind of tiring when so many things about you (appearance, sexual and romantic orientation and so on) are just seen as a divination from the norm from how you should be.
And thank you, the discussion here has been rather, uhm, heated lately so it is good to hear that there is still a sense of community here.
Oh, yeah. I got “freak,” too. And worse stuff. That’s OK. But it’s not quite OK when you’re a teeny child. Kids learn to find ways to make themselves be OK, and tell themselves that it doesn’t matter. But it’s really not an OK thing to happen. No matter how “normalized” bullying is, it’s still cruel.
And yeah, it is frustrating to see populations sliced up into standard deviations on the bell-shaped “normal curve”, with the naturally occurring variations of life being slapped with the label of “ab-normal”. And what’s wild is that — no matter how conforming people become — there will STILL be a smaller and smaller range of “included” and “normal” variations on life, while everyone else gets “exclused” and pushed into the “abnormal” sections. (https://www.simplypsychology.org/normal-distribution.html)
It’s like that old song by Moxy Früvous, that goes “That guy who wrote the book about the bell curve…” A song about rotten jerks.
Your parents specifically named you after a 17th century relative who was hanged for witchcraft? That’s not neurotypical or neurodivergent. That’s hardcore. What are your folks like?
My parents are some straight-up free-range chickens. Both did not get raised much by their own parents. And both have some serious brain uniqueness, too.
Both had very strange, very different experiences as they were growing up, very much shaped by wartime experiences. They’ve been kind of “faking it” ever since, just trying to find ways to fit in (with varying degrees of success).
I learned a lot from them — some good, some bad. :-/ Trying to unlearn some of that stuff now. But it is good to remember all the good lessons and experiences they gave me.
The interesting thing is I don’t mind being called weird in and of itself. But I want to be identified as weird for the things I do intentionally, not as a label for my neurodivergence.
And…I get that those aren’t entirely mutually exclusive, but specifically as a stand-in for neurodivergence, it really super rubs me the wrong way. And especially when it’s a division of Weirdos and Normals, which always feels to me like it carries a level of moral judgement when coming from someone who considers themselves Normal.
I really appreciate the affirmation of community, it always helps to have folks who understand.
Sadly, Blennie (given your apparent willingness to switch between Billie and Kennifer at the drop of a hat, ‘Blennie’ is who you end up being), then “not knowing the word the weirdos made up for normals” isn’t evidence in your favour; since the terms ‘neurotypical’ and ‘neurodivergent’ were coined by neurotypicals, you just accidentally put yourself into the neurodivergent camp.
Ah, but then, you aren’t nearly as clever as you think you are.
Am I the only one expecting this to end badly for Ms Billingsworth?
Just linking in my website URL instead of reposting the whole thing I posted above again. The term neurodivergent was coined by a neurodivergent person to describe themselves.
“Billie was always just the biggest dumb-ass bongo, but like, in a lovable way.”
“Uh, thanks, Joyce, but…”
“Like, those videos of cats on the Internet who keep failing the same jump, or get a box on their head and run around bumping into things, meowing pathetically, but hiss when you try to take the box off? That’s Billie, to me.”
I think Jennifer sees Billie as her “screw-up” self. And Joyce wants to relate to that. Jennifer is a little less accessible because she tries to be more perfect.
Probably there are some bad associations with the old nickname that contributed to the decision to drop it. But I don’t think Jennifer wants to be seen as a completely separate person from Billie. She just wants to go by a new name.
I think Willis’ choice to have Jennifer smile as she made her little weirdo comment is genius. It inspired me to take a look back and really, Jennifer post-rename doesn’t smile. “Billie” smiled a lot more, and she was a CHEERleader. She had that devilmaycare attitude even about her DUI crash, which was obviously inappropriate. but now she’s something of a.. somberleader. She has a couple more counted smiles with/involving Ruth than her own boyfriend; even in total, the smile count is still so so low.
What “Jennifer” and “Billie” still “share” is the tendency to smile to clown on others or at her own witticisms. Jennifer has fewer, but when she does smile, it’s in this context 99.9999999% of the time.
I don’t think she’s outright revealing her thought processes, rather than doing both of the above actions. It’s like someone having a laugh over people who say “normie” seriously. Those non-normie people may or may not define their own selves as weirdos, but they definitely think they aren’t “normal,” they like to throw that on others. Is “typical” not similar? “Neurotypical” is not the same as “normie” in any way, but it reflects a desire to rename and reframe the conversation. Ableism means the conversation needs to go through that change TO BE CLEAR.
I think Jennifer’s pride as an journalist is being like, no my word was right, your word was unnecessary, and I’m going to show you how it sounds so you agree, with a dash of like, mean humor.
Joyce noticed it and states that Jennifer blungled an attempt to help her, and that it made her feel better. I think it isn’t that Jennifer failed to help at all that was somehow uplifting, more like, Jennifer tried in sincerity to help and came off like a jackbongo, which *is* pretty funny.
I’m going to say that I sadly think Jennifer is a lot like a certain type of voter. She actually thinks IGNORANCE is something to be proud of. “Yeah, I don’t know what that word means so I’m not one of those weirdos.”
Jennifer sure talks a lot of shit about “weirdos” for someone that has had a decade-long hyperfixation and crush on a random background character from a Star Wars movie.
How old was Jennifer when Clone Wars came out?
Weird timeline stuff strikes again. Now, she would have been somewhere from 5-10, which would easily have given her time to be openly into it as a kid before putting on the image that she didn’t like such nerdy things. When the comic started though, it was still coming out and wouldn’t have started before she had her popular cheerleader/nerd hater persona.
The streak of killer punchlines continues. Jennifer BLS. (Also, Joyce being so utterly un-offended by this characterization on Jennifer’s part…Joyce may be freaking out about autism specifically, but she is certainly aware she’s considered weird; it’s the *nature* of her weirdness suddenly being called into question that’s throwing her.)
Aw, the glasses. It’s perfectly normal to take those off for a nap, or even just when you’re lying down in bed (lying face-down with glasses on is an uncomfortable no-no, bad for your face, bad for the lenses and frames), but the composition does a nice job of highlighting them as the symbol of the material, day-to-day changes in her life that Joyce is struggling so hard to adapt to right now, the ones she wishes she could just…take off and set aside.
Likewise. I only learned what the words neurotypical and neurodivergent meant last year, and was diagnosed earlier this year at the age of 33. I was definitely not “normal” before I knew what those words meant.
I don’t think Jennifer is nearly as “normal” as she likes to think she is.
Yeah agreed. Unlike Amber and AG, Jennifer/Billie don’t have separate tags. The Billie tag was just changed to Jennifer. She’s the same person/identity just using a new name, which may or may not be a permanent change, we shall see!
I see SOME similarities in that Jennifer hates parts of herself and keeps trying to deny/escape them, but while Amber/AG ended up literally dissociating, Jennifer is just hiding those aspects of herself and pretending they don’t exist even though deep down she knows they are still her.
That’s kind of been her deal from the beginning. Trying not to be a “nerd” (denying her Kit Fisto/Star Wars love, hiding her journalism major, previously being mad she had to wear glasses), claiming she’s not “into girls” as a rule/insisting bisexuality isn’t real, periodically shifting between hiding and yelling about her alcoholism, her DUI, and her feelings for Ruth (as well as any fondness she has for her “less cool” friends), etc.
I think she just has a LOT of self-loathing and shame that she has NOT confronted yet. She seemed to be doing a bit better with Ruth near the end (at least the last parts we saw before the time jump) but even then that felt more like accepting she and Ruth deserve each other because they’re both broken (see: her really awkward confessions to her new hall neighbors tied in with her introducing Ruth to them).
She seems to think she can only exist in 2 states: Billie the disaster horrible person who doesn’t deserve good things and can never be better, and Jennifer the popular together person who has everything under control by denying the bad parts of herself/pretending they don’t exist. To truly be healthy and happy she’s gonna have to reconcile the two. Accept and be honest about the bad parts of herself while accepting she can still move forward and deserve good things in spite of them.
This strip made me remember that one Dinosaur Comic where T-Rex invents the verb jennif so that anyone named Jennifer is retroactively saying that they love to jennif and I guess what I’m saying is that Billie discovered an interest in kissing people on the nose and blowing into their nostrils over winter break and decided this should be announced to the world every time she introduces herself
I don’t like how they’re talking like this is an all or nothing thing, when the fact of the matter is that the field of psychology established autism as a spectrum specifically to encompass a bunch of different disorders into one overall concept, which is how you get high-functioning people diagnosed with the same thing as people who just totally can’t take care of themselves.
In fact, after a point, it’s less like they’re “disorders” and more like the science is just developing a system of describing just everybody and how all people have various ways their brains work, just they have the medical illness terminology from how the science of psychology developed.
Billie falls disastrously in the fourth panel, but take off that one, I pretty much agree with her. At least now Joyce seems to be happy ♡. Let’s hope she and Jennifer will pass more time together. Even for see how Raidah will react.
Wait, I’m confused. Joyce’s last line makes it sound like she’s applying Jennifer’s line of thinking in the penultimate panel to herself. Is she now in denial that she has autism?
I’m a little unclear myself but I THINK it goes like this:
Billie: “Man, the fact that I don’t know the weirdo term for non-weirdos is proof that I’m not a weirdo.”
Joyce: “OK, the fact that you’re basically calling me a weirdo is kinda putting your foot in your mouth even as you’re trying to be helpful, but the thing is *I also didn’t know the term “neurotypical” myself* before the diagnosis, and and your saying that this is solid proof of non-weirdoness is kinda oddly comforting in a roundabout way by confirming that I’m actually not that big a weirdo even if I am autistic?”
But also the “man, at least I ain’t as bad at talking to people as Billie” is also a valid interpretation I hadn’t considered and is rather more Occam’s Razor.
I thought she was doing better so that fourth panel is really heartbreaking. I was so excited to prove people wrong about Jennifer being status-obsessed, but here she is talking about “weirdos” again.
Yeah, Jennifer’s arc for this season is pretty obviously going to be how she handles the inevitable revelation that Raidah doesn’t actually like her and is just using her for some as yet unknown scheme.
That’s been the interpretation so far, but I was hoping that would be wrong. We haven’t seen much from Jennifer’s perspective yet and I thought there would be more to it than just wanting to seem cool.
A diagnosis doesn’t have to change you, it is literally a word to describe symptoms and to help give clarity and possible direction to what you may be going through.
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“You’re great at raising my self-esteem by comparison!”
“…”
she’s the best wing-woman without even trying! 🤣
She’s the best at being the worst
“I feel like I’m the worst, so I always act like I’m the best.”
– Billie/Jennifer, probably
From “Oh No!” by MARINA
And in Germany, she could be the wurst.
Cue montage of Billifer cheering people up through being bad at stuff. With obligatory 80s-esque montage music.
(You’re the worst! Around! No one ever leaves you down!
You’re the worst! Around! No one ever leaves you down!
You’re the worst! Around! No one ever leaves you dooooooowwwwwwwn owwwww-owwwwnnnn….)
Is this technically failing your way up?
Another thing Billie and Walky have in common.
The fact that she would hate that comparison is a delicious bonus.
No, failing your way up looks more like floating fishies.
4th panel:
Nah Billie, that’s just evidence of your ignorance. 😑
On the plus side, at least more of Jennifer’s inner-Billie is starting to surface, so for what it’s worth it’s a step in the right direction? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ignorance *and* abelism.
Billie has quickly become, over three panels, my most hated character.
Seriously. Fucking anti-science bullshittery.
Don’t worry, at the Big Bourgeois Breakfast, Walky will most likely have what it takes to make the seemingly solid “Jennifer” melt into air.
Then she can go back to doing what she’s best at — partying hard and crashing and making an ass of herself for the entertainment of others! 😜
Even if “Jennifer” still remains intact afterwards, I’m sure the Empress of Evolution would be more than eager to kick her anti-science ass! 😈
But this is completely consistent with her attitude from the beginning.
Agreed. To me, she’s always been a “you hate to hate her” character because whenever she makes decisions, whether good or bad, it’s so often for the wrong reasons. I don’t want to dislike her, because deep down inside, she’s a good person who’s driven by a need to help others. Problem is, her primary driver is a need to be better than everyone around her.
I think it’s less anti science more she’s a. Dumbass, uneducated Midwestern kid. This is on the same level as her views on bisexuality
This.
Oh you sweet summer child, I don’t think a single member of this cast is neurotypical. (Especially if you count depression and anxiety, which I do.)
Hey I count depression and anxiety as neurodivergence too! Nice to know I’m not the only one!
Neurodivergence is any mental illness or deisoder, not just autism and/or ADHD, so yeah, those definitely count.
Neurodivergnce is :” differing in mental or neurological function from what is considered typical or normal (frequently used with reference to autistic spectrum disorders)” it is something that effects cognitive ability not a mental illness classifying conditions such as anxiety and depression as neurodivergent causes problems beacuse those are mental illness that needs to be treated while neurodivergency is a condition that you can live with and even thrive.
The person who actually coined the term disagrees with you. Direct link to the post as my Website URL. I’ve bolded the part where they specifically say that mental illnesses count.
“PSA from the actual coiner of “neurodivergent”
Yo. Many of you need to take an entire stadium of seats. Like a football arena in Texas number.
I coined neurodivergent before tumblr was even a thing, like a decade or more ago, because people were using ‘neurodiverse’ and ‘neurodiversity’ to just mean autistic, & possibly LDs. But there’s more, like way more, ways a person can have a different yet fucking perfect dammit brain.
Neurodivergent refers to neurologically divergent from typical. That’s ALL.
I am multiply neurodivergent: I’m Autistic, epileptic, have PTSD, have cluster headaches, have a chiari malformation.
Neurodivergent just means a brain that diverges.
Autistic people. ADHD people. People with learning disabilities. Epileptic people. People with mental illnesses. People with MS or Parkinsons or apraxia or cerebral palsy or dyspraxia or no specific diagnosis but wonky lateralization or something.
That is all it means. It is not another damn tool of exclusion. It is specifically a tool of inclusion. If you don’t want to be associated with Those People, then YOU are the one who needs another word. Neurodivergent is for all of us.
Annoyedly yours,
Neurodivergent K of Radical Neurodivergence Speaking”
Meant to hit reply you have a point I am sorry if I caused you distress on this.
“But then how am I going to form my cozy little in-group so I can feel superior to everyone outside of it??”
(don’t worry, you’ll find a way. humans always have.)
Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches had bellies with stars.
The Plain-Belly Sneetches had none upon thars.
Those stars weren’t so big. They were really so small
You might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all…
I mean, there are very valid reasons for wanting to have a label for people outside their marginalized group, but if people want a word for “not-autistic” the term allistic already exists.
If they coined it after neurodiverse and neurodiversity were already things, I dunno how watertight their claim is on coining it. They’re similar enough that I can see lots of people coming to it independently. But I dunno, maybe they’ve got a solid claim.
(I appreciate their definition and use it myself, personally.)
Thank you, that is amazing.
Being mindful of how we use labels matters.
I think the worry of gatekeeping a label comes from the fear that someone will go „well i am neurodivergent and my experience is universal, so yours isn’t valid“ and will try to speak for all ND people. And will be listened to by the public because they are loud and more convenient in their opinion than the rest of us.
As long as we are humbly communicating that our experience is personal, not universal, and keep listening and validating other people’s experience within the label, we can share the labels someone made for people who might be similar to our experience. Empowerment for all of us without taking it away from each other! <3
I really don’t like the implication that neurodivergency could be conflated with mental illness.
For some of them, that might just be the college talking.
I am, as far as I know, neurotypical. But a combination of stress, poor sleep due to needing to both work and handle classes, lousy dietary habits, and general angsty/hormonal teenagerness definitely took a toll during my college years.
Same, but with a small side of “just because you CAN now stay up until you physically flop over doesn’t mean you SHOULD”.
I mean if everyone is neurodivergent… nobody is, since nobody’s diverging from the norm.
But I’d say quite a few of them are culturally neurotypical. Joe, Sarah, Sal, Danny, etc.
Yeah, I get we need to normalize neurodivergence so it isn’t taboo, but saying every-single-mental-thing might end up not being a good thing? Or a bit of a slippery slope?
Like for example, I had PTSD. I say “had” because I went and got treatment for it to stop the PTSD. But you don’t go and get treatment for autism. Autism is just another way of having a brain in the meat mechasuit we call a body. You can get as much “treatment” as you want, autism doesn’t stop or go away. PTSD, things like anxiety and depression can be treated and in some cases ultimately go away. Autism doesn’t go away, even if “treated” (please note the use of quotes).
It also opens up the pathway to go back the other direction, and I still remember when autism WAS considered a mental illness and attempted to “treat” away. I don’t like heading back in that direction, it was a bad time.
It’s really not. You’re making mountains out of molehills, here. Neurodivergent is not a medical term, it is a social term that is MEANT to be inclusive of all different kinds of folks with experiences in common when it comes to mental health.
Are you also going to say the same of the word “disabled”? There are some disabilities which can be treated, and others which can’t and that most people probably don’t WANT to be treated because they resent the idea that their difference in how they live their life is considered a defect in them which must be fixed–and all that can be done is to provide accommodations so that the disabled person can more easily exist and function within an abled society.
Nonetheless. Both types of disability are still disabilities, because you are disabled in your ability to function as ‘expected’ within society. And the same thing goes for neurodivergence. Whatever the cause or whether it’s ‘treatable’, the fact remains that your experience of how your mind works deviates from the norm in a way which impacts how you are treated and perceived by others and how you are able to function in society, because society is not built to meaningfully accommodate your experience.
And that impact and experience of being and feeling othered is what the term ‘neurodivergent’ is meant to describe. The reason it needs to be normalized is not because ‘oh these weirdos can’t help it or change themselves so we should be more accepting’, it’s to simply create a society which more broadly accommodates the many different ways brains can work. Even if that state is potentially temporary, it still needs to be accommodated. Part of those accommodations might even be treatment.
We already have a term for people who are mentally disabled. It is “mentally disabled.”
So that would include neurodivergency, mental illness, and trauma.
Even then, those things don’t always go away. Some people’s brains just are like that. (And genetic predisposition to it — even to PTSD iirc — points that direction.)
ADHD is closer to autism than it is to PTSD in this comparison, but that can also be treated, and in a lot of cases it’s super beneficial to treat even though it’s just how your brain naturally works.
BTW Suzi many places autism still is considered an “illness” that needs to be “cured”, no thanks to the very goal vicious practices of the hate group Autism Speaks. 😖
The fact that you think that this is an issue is very telling of what you think ‘neurodivergence’ even is.
It’s not supposed to be some in-group out-group thing where there’s a clear defined line between the two. It is a term which describes a certain kind of experience within society, of which some people deal with quite a lot more than others. To the degree that having a word to describe that experience and axis of system oppression is useful. That’s it.
Hopefully someday, the word neurodivergent IS useless, and describes nothing of note. That’s SORT OF THE GOAL.
Yeah, but as long as the norms are out there, a lot of people are perceived as normal.
For example, if normal weight of an apple is 170g to 210g (kinda fictional, idk), then of course you can go ahead and say „all apples have different weight“, but both the apple at 171g and the apple at 209g will be perceived as within the „acceptable“ weight, while the apple at 120g will probably be thrown away rather than sold in the supermarket, and the apple at 340g will be sold as a special deal. Yes, all apples are different, but that doesn’t mean some of them aren’t considered typical apples.
Sal??????????????????
(sorry?? She’s clearly not neurotypical. Think about how she sits in chairs. Oral fixation. The way she’s always fidgeting. She’s calmest when she’s stunting. Needs to multitask. Struggles to follow directions in spite of being highly intelligent.)
Raidah is almost certainly neurotypical though. Or that one bowtie guy, the british one. Oh, and Ruth’s grandfather. Gash-face. Those people.
Rachel is also neurotypical.
I would really be careful in stating anxiety and depression as neurodivergent behavoir beacuse its onset isn’t always driven by genetics it can be driven by outside forces and can go into remission unlike other neurodivergent behavoir.
…so what?
Why is that such a terrible thing to include? Why would it have to be exclusively genetic conditions? It’s not like there’s A Single Treatment For Neurodivergent People that we’d be compromising. What exactly are we being careful of? What’s the fear here that we should be careful to avoid??
I really don’t like generalizing all conditions under an umbrella term beacuse i fear it will lead to misconceptions about said conditions. It may not in alot of people’s but I have had live with depression anxiety autism adhd and dyslexia all needing different approaches in handling it and misconceptions has led to negative outcomes and i aware that my experince does not reflect everyones experience but i hasnt been for me and like me not everyone is an expert in neurological behavoir or brain chemistry and I don’t want people to spread misinformation yeah I know I might have done so in one my previous comments which makes me feel god awful beacuse but I try to err on the side of caution when talking about subjects that I really don’t have an expertise on alm on this subject I have is my own experience and my experience has sucked.
Yeah I also ramble to be honest I feel shitter now then i did before and regret commenting
It’s true, they do all take different approaches. But that’s also true for almost any combination of things that can fall under the neurodivergent umbrella, even excepting non-genetic conditions.
The thing that I feel is that if we don’t create an umbrella term, people like Jennifer are just going to continue to call us weirdos. I see an umbrella term as a way for us to find common ground with each other, even when we respond differently to the myriad ways in which the world was not built for us. I don’t think this will compound existing misconceptions, and I think since there are so many ways to be neurodivergent it could have the impact of gaining solidarity with folks who may not have thought of themselves as one of us.
As you can see, brevity is not a defining character trait for me. If it makes you feel any better, I harbor no grudge against you, I appreciate your ability and willingness to hear and listen.
I don’t harbor any ill will I have not been having a great week so I amm more sensitive then usual
Because most mental illnesses aren’t the same as something like autism. I said in a comment above, but my PTSD was treatable. My anxiety was treatable. Autism is not “treatable”. There are coping mechanisms and things you can learn, sure, but it isn’t “take this pill and your autism goes away” – I can definitely see some maybe fitting the neurodivergent umbrella but I also worry about it swinging back the other way, back when autism was thought to be a mental illness that could be “treated” away, often resulting in abuse to a lot of autistic folks. These things matter.
ADHD is (to a degree) treatable, but is just as genetic and persistent as a bunch of other things. Too many divisions just creates separation, and we all have needs for society to take us into account when designing…everything really. This is no less true for people with depression, anxiety, or PTSD.
I’m absolutely thrilled for you that your PTSD and anxiety were treatable. But wouldn’t it have been even better if you could reliably count on accommodations or being given grace before treatment takes hold? And for folks whose similar conditions are only semi-treatable or even not treatable? I like an umbrella term because these are things we all need, even if they don’t look the same for everyone under the umbrella. The need that we all share is a general shift in societal thinking.
My depression definitely altered my brain (depression can make you worse at focusing, for one), and it’s never going to go away. It’s always going to affect my life and make me different from a lot of people.
I feel like it counts.
I know that feeling – but from my experience, depression can absolutely go away. It took years of learning and healing and figuring out how to pilot this meat vehicle I’m in, and sure, when I let my habits slip it creeps up sometimes. But right now, my brain is atypical as hell, but not depressed.
🙄 Totes on that one Masumi, piloting this human meat vehicle. I swear working with my host brain and body is a bongo and a half, like trying to get a picture on a TV that never came with an instruction manual — when you just barely get it working after a day of exhausting effort trying to get it that way, you be like “you know what, this is good enough, I’ll stop here”.
You know, on that topic, you might wanna check out huberman lab podcast on YouTube. It’s basically 1-2 hour lectures by a neuroscientist on how to cooperate with you brain. They’re awesome.
There is a big difference between juvenile-onset mood disorders and what I think of as “situational” depression. The latter can be just as or more dangerous and can last years, but they are not the same.
I can tell you right now that my brain, fucked since childhood, probably with contributing genetics but an obvious trauma basis, is NEVER going to be neurotypical. And I very much appreciated the psychistrist who corroborated that: you can improve, but there is no such thing as becoming psychologically within normal when your pathways were fucked while they were still developing.
/constantly bitter at people thinking “get therapy” means you can just erase mental illness. No, you can mitigate it and learn strategies to function in the world. Obviously you can in some cases! But it’s not a given! I spend too much time on AITA.
I mean, sure, you can work to be stable, but I’ve been living with depression for over 10 years, even after I felt really stable and healthy for almost a whole year. But even then I had depressive episodes. I don’t think it will ever completely go away.
And like, I will never know how it feels not to be depressed, and I’ve had… SO many experiences with people just not being able to understand why I’m sad or empty or exhausted for apparently no reason, or I can’t get shit done if it’s – to them – quite easy.
So I def think depression counts as neurodivergent. It’s just a term for “you probably CAN’T get me because my brain works differently from yours”.
Dunno about everybody, but if nothing else, a substantial portion of the cast probably has PTSD, and that definitely counts.
It definitely counts as mental illness, but I would say, having had it, no I don’t think it counts as neurodivergence.
You personally do not identify as neurodivergent. Great for you. Don’t speak for others, thanks. Your experiences are not universal and your consistently ableist and exclusionary language in this comment section whenever this topic comes up is honestly getting a little tiresome.
@Joyfulldreams +others also being jerks
nO, YOu.
Look, Suzi has only been talking about their personal experience and how they personally understand their experience within the spectrum of human experience, neuropathy, and psychology. They aren’t speaking for others. They are speaking for themselves. That’s a good approach for having good faith discussion.
You (and others) shutting down people from talking honestly about their personal experiences because it doesn’t align with an absolutist ‘inclusivity’ narrative is not helpful, it’s pretty dismissive and rude. Personally, I believe the entire point of having these conversations is to better understand the diversity of human experience. To understand and be more understanding of differences, and that is how you foster real inclusivity, by understanding, accepting, and tolerating differences. By better understanding each other, we can overcome stigma, oppression, othering, etc etc.
At this point in time, we (humans) absolutely do not understand human neuropathy and psychology completely. This isn’t an opinion, that’s just where we’re at with human knowledge. We’re honestly just barely starting to approach it from a perspective of trying to understand it, rather than just classifying it as demonic possession or more generally using it as a tool for oppression. To say that any ideology of human neuropathy and psychology is Absolutely The One Answer is honestly a refusal to engage in real understanding and learning. You do not know everything. I do not know everything. We do not know everything. When we accept that, we can begin to learn, and to better understand. We know our own experiences. We can listen to the experiences of others. We can learn from those along with evidence-based studies and better our understanding. It’s a process.
With neurodiversity, neurodivergency, the spectrum of human psychology, and mental health, and how to label things, the point is to be able to communicating experience, which can help with understanding differences and overlap. So that we can better understand, help, and make reasonable accommodations. That is more important than semantics of language, or at least I personally think it ought to be. Refusing to accept someone’s personal, lived experience, is not inclusive. It’s excluding a personal experience (and excluding people) because it doesn’t match an abstract dogma you’re granting absolutist status to. I don’t think that’s helpful.
Swing and a miss. Suzi said that they don’t think PTSD “counts” as neurodivergence. That’s not “speaking for themselves,” and the people objecting to that have fair points. I don’t disagree with the concept of a lot of your other points, but I do think you come off as a jerk about it when you’re acting like other people made claims that they didn’t.
I genuinely have no idea what you’re responding to, because never at any point have I made any of the claims you seem to think I am. Everyone is absolutely free to talk about their own individual experiences, but they…don’t give you the right to decide what does or does not ‘count’ as neurodivergence, and every other time this topic has come up in the past Suzi has said things like ‘Autism is a worthless word because it’s too broad’ and ‘if Joyce is autistic, nobody is’, which are extremely judgemental and dismissive things to say and are by no means “talking about their personal experiences”. Slinging around judgements based on their own biases, more like.
I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that I ever claimed to know everything about…anything? All I’ve done is explained the sociopolitical role that terms like ‘neurodivergent’ and ‘disabled’ or even ‘autistic’ play in giving people the vocabulary to speak about broad sociological phenomenon.
I’m not even the one talking about semantics! It’s the people who are sitting around trying to argue that x or y thing doesn’t “count” as neurodivergent because “technically mental illnesses can be cured, so they shouldn’t be lumped together with things like autism using the same word” that are getting so bogged down in semantics!
Why am I the one being called a jerk, when the person I responded to is literally one of the people doing the thing you are accusing me of?!
Are you sure it was Suzi who said those things? I mean, I’ve gone looking, and while I find comments from other people making similar claims, I don’t see any attributed to Suzi. I do see some posts like that from “Lucky Winner,” who also has a Malaya Gravatar, but as far as I can tell, they’re not the same person.
And I would say, having C-PTSD, that it does count as neurodivergence. Not everyone experiences things or views things in the way that you do, and you are not the sole voice of authority on the topic. Please kindly stop “correcting” people using that term as an umbrella.
Feel free to say “I do not identify as ND, and would like to not be referred to that way” and we’ll respect the hell out of it. Feel free to STOP saying “That’s not a neurodivergence because I said so.”
Especially when the term is meant to be used as an umbrella.
Yessss… let this lead to Joyce and Dina bonding….
Followed shortly by Becky bursting into Dina’s room and shouting “Hey Dina want to have more sex???” before seeing who’s there.
Now THAT I would like to see. ‘s got the same energy as Carla yelling in the hallway about fixing people’s problems, ripping the band-aids off left and right.
Eh, even if they do, I just hope it’s made clear that it’s not because of some “autism buddies” thing.
Something tells me that Joyce, being no stranger to black and white thinking, will alternate from loathing and freaking out about her neurodivergence to a position of toxic positivity, all the while frustrating Dina, who very likely has a VERY nuanced view of the topic. Considering that the bigoted systems that stopped Dina from getting a diagnosis pretend to be professional science, her passion and way of life, misconceptions of neurodivergence must be something that REALLY piss her off 😬
wonder if Joyce will be the only one allowed to use “Billie”
Sal calls her Billie, but that’s because Sal doesn’t buy the name change.
It’s probably not that big a deal if Jennifer likes/respects you. Walky’s really the only one who blew the name thing out of proportion.
Hasn’t Walky respected the name change, for the most part?
It’s more her ditching everyone for the “cool kids” that he seems to focus on if anything.
And even then, he doesn’t object to her having new friends, just the being ditched part.
When they do interact, he tries to keep the same dynamic, and while she doesn’t seem to want that, that’s not really about the name in and of itself for either of them.
Has he? I don’t think Walky has once called her Jennifer since the name change. That and he purposefully mentioned “Billie” when they last talked. It’s pretty clear he doesn’t like the new name.
I mean the last time they talked he brought it up in terms of it being a previous identity, which is how Jennifer has been treating it.
And yes, he has.
So he has. I wasn’t totally sure on that. Thanks. I stand corrected.
Never said he liked it.
I said he respected it.
Other than calling her Billie when she first showed up after the time skip and she said to call her Jennifer, he has not once referred to her as Billie that I noticed.
And I’d like to point out that in one of those same strips where he calls her Billie, Joyce also refers to her as Billie while speaking to Lucy and Lucy responds with no issue or correction.
After Jennifer says to call her as such and Walky says to himself that it doesn’t sound like her, Joyce then says to call people what they want to be called to which he reluctantly agrees.
You are correct that he almost never says Jennifer in the strips he shares with her (I don’t feel like going through all the recent Walky strips to see if he called her Billie when she wasn’t around); he says it once to Lucy when Jennifer says they’re almost bearable as a couple, but he never refers to her as Billie in the strips he shares with her either other than what I’ve already mentioned.
And while he did mention the name Billie when they last talked, that was to make the distinction that her personality has changed with the Jennifer persona and that he was no longer sure that the things Billie did were also things Jennifer did as clearly there are some differences. That in and of itself is an acknowledgment that she’s Jennifer now, else there would be no need for that distinction.
Remember also that he apologized for giving her that nickname regardless of whether either them actually know he didn’t and are just saying he did.
So, long story long, he stopped calling her Billie in the strips they shared, he has referred to her as Jennifer at least once in the strips they shared, he acknowledged Jennifer for who she is now by stating that he thought some of her actions were left behind with the Billie nickname, and he apologized for giving her the name despite the fact that he didn’t and that it’s not really something that needed an apology.
So yeah, that sounds kinda respectful to me.
Hrmmm This is interesting because in this situation I read it totally different from this. You argue Walky has always been respectful of the name change but to me I think he never took Jennifer’s new expression of identity seriously until she started really trying to distance herself from him. She told him to call her Jennifer and he took it so badly he followed her around most of that morning just to annoy her. It didn’t register with him until Jennifer finally broke her composure and told him they weren’t friends anymore.
So the whole idea that Jennifer abandoned their friendship is his fault. She was still there (and effectively still since they regularly meet walking to the same class and he’s dating her roommate) he just didn’t like the boundaries she set for him at first.
In the their last conversation I don’t think he realized how serious Jennifer is about changing her identity until she literally tells him she hates the name Billie. That’s when he apologizes. But every time Jennifer has to reinforce her decision with him. For me the fact she’s had to do that more than once registers to me Walky didn’t really get it until just now.
This is a pretty complex dynamic developing between them and neither is really understanding the other’s point of view because of their pseudo-sibling dynamic. Their group date should be very interesting.
It isn’t the first time she’s told him they weren’t friends. It’s something she does when she’s looking for higher social status, then comes back to him for support when she’s down. It’s a pattern. Not something he should easily take as serious.
Something that has him worried about her, not him not liking the boundaries. He was already worried by her being “elusive” when he and Sal came back at the start of the semester.
And he apologizes for giving her the name in the first place, not for whatever else you think he’s doing wrong.
Nor does he get how serious the change is. I’m not sure I do either – other than the name change, it’s hard to see what’s different about this change than her previous attempts. In that very sequence, she reaffirms that all the alpha bongo stuff that was Billie, Jennifer still claims.
You see, I got that he was trying to hard to annoy her that first day we see them after the time skip specifically because the distancing had already started and had been ongoing sometime between Halloween, when a nice chunk of the cast seemed to have some kind of issue, and the start of second semester. And if she had already distanced herself before the break, then he almost certainly hadn’t seen her during the break, so that was the first time he’d seen her in almost a month (depending on how long their break is). Admittedly, that’s my head canon, but there’s currently nothing that goes against it.
Also, when she told him they weren’t friends, that wasn’t in an angry broken composure way (though I’ll check to make sure), but in a matter of fact way. Nor was it the first time she had done that, as she did so in the previous semester as well, arguably with more annoyance. And earlier that same day, she told him they weren’t enemies, she was just busy. Generally, when you want to reassure your friend that you and them are still good, you say you’re still friends; you don’t say you’re not enemies. That implies “not enemies” is the best place the relationship is at right now, further supporting that saying they weren’t friends was not breaking composure, but instead just rephrasing what had already been said (but again, I’ll check).
Also, he doesn’t apologize because she tells him she hates Billie. He apologizes because she says he was the one who gave her the “stupid” name, and said he thought she liked it. After that is when she says she never like the name and that’s when he pushes back a little and starts talking about failing so much makes her a better helper. As for reinforcing her decision to be called Jennifer, that was not even what that conversation was about. It was about his surprise that she waited for Joyce despite the other changes in her behavior. Billie would wait. Jennifer waited? That conversation was Jennifer reaffirming that HELPING is what she does (head cheerleader, alpha bongo, problem solver), not her reaffirming that he should call her Jennifer as he hadn’t been calling her Billie.
And it’s kinda ironic that she had that whole conversation with Joyce about how people wanting to view her the same despite her wanting to change, but her conversation with Walky is that he shouldn’t have been surprised she waited as that part had never changed. Which led to him pointing out how he’s supposed to know what changed and what didn’t when she repeatedly told them, not just him, that she’s not the same and that they’re “strangers” (admittedly, I don’t know how much or how often she told him they were strangers, but I fully believe she’s told him she’s different pretty often over the past few weeks).
I do fully agree with your last paragraph.
After going back over the Jennifer strips, she did say she and Walky were not friends with emphasis.
I wouldn’t say she broke her composure, but the text was emphasized in her speech bubble.
Also, Sal called Jennifer Billie to her face and then referred to her as Billie when she bumped into the cool kids on her bike. So if anyone isn’t respecting the name change, it’s Sal, not Walky (though she did say that she wouldn’t respect it to AG, so that’s no surprise).
But as you say, she’s done the “we’re not friends” thing before and it didn’t stick then. It’s a pattern. Why should he accept that this time it’s a real serious change and turn his back on her?
To be fair, he’s got every right to do so. To stop trying to connect. To blow her off next time she turns to him when everything else falls apart. He won’t though, because he’s trying to do better by both his sisters, even the one that’s a really shitty friend to him.
This is getting way deeper than I intended. I don’t even know who to respond to. thejeff or cbwroses…uh anyway.
My point is that this identity change bothers Walky more than anyone else and while it’s easy to label most of the fault on Jennifer’s attitude no one is really respecting what she’s trying to do here. Sure it’s a pattern of behavior that she tries to abandon her old friends and reinvent herself to get in with the cool crowd but that doesn’t actually make her goals less valid. Walky expecting this to fall apart just because it has in the past (which I don’t think he does, he just doesn’t like the distance between them) would be really messed up.
Jennifer’s actually trying to be a better person and she’s vocalized frustration that her old friend group won’t allow her to do that because of the baggage “Billie” represents. That’s Walky by the way, who for all his innocent intentions can’t have a conversation with Jen without calling her a butt. That brings out the worst in Jennifer. She knows this, which is why she distanced herself. They can’t have a conversation without devolving like that which is not something Jennifer enjoys but Walky does. He enjoys it so much he even stated he wants to be in that very specific period of time again. But that’s kind of a too bad cause people have the right to try and change.
It does frustrate me that people think Jennifer is shitty to her friends for this. This comic proves she still very much has her friends backs. A lot of people thought she was being as asshole to Ruth too when it’s very likely Ruth broke up with her and pitched it as doing Jen a favor. Jennifer was very invested in that relationship and it went bust anyway. (But that’s just a theory I have. Not canon yet)
Relationships are two way streets and as much as I love Walky I can’t just pretend he’s the victim in this.
@Sirksome
My point was that Walky respected her wanting to be Jennifer.
You’re trying to say he’s bothered by it because he doesn’t like the distance between them.
I’m saying he’s bothered by the distance between them, period.
Also, he wanted to go back to the old days of last semester as that had been the closest they’d been since before high school. The only other good times were before high school.
So yes, between shove him into lockers Billy and I don’t really know you or want to be around you Jennifer, he wanted I grudgingly acknowledge your existence and occasionally treat you like a sibling Billy, even if that Billy now wanted to be Jennifer.
It comes down to this:
Would Walky be more bothered by the personality she has now while keeping the name Billie?
OR
Would he be more bothered by her acting the same as before the time skip while insisting she be called Jennifer?
If you believe he’d be more bothered by the latter, then the name is the big deal.
If you believe he’d be more bothered by the former, then the distance is the big deal.
I don’t think Walky would have any issue with the latter and would be very bothered by the former.
well, I did say “allowed”
altho, checking on it, I don’t think Sal has interacted with Jennifer after she asked to stop being called Billie
They’ve interacted, but Sal hasn’t referred to her by name (either one) in any interaction that we’ve seen since then.
Sal rarely refers to anyone by name, with a few exceptions..
She called Ethan by his name! Eventually.
Also, Sal has a hard time learning anyone’s actual names. Billie, Wonderbread, List Bro…
also, Bro
We can’t allow there to be more than one of them. If we let more than one in on it, it’s a club, and I’d never stop with the Billie Club puns.
They’re dating now.
We can only hope.
Billie/Ruth forever
…so she still actually call her Jennifer, and was asking for her Billie persona .. ?
Seems like it, which is… better than I expected.
Or maybe she thinks that that it’s an alter like Amber.
Which, it kind of is.
If not an alter, a former. Which is not unlike how Walky was treating it the last time it came up.
Now that Joyce got the Billie she wanted there is no reason to abuse Jennifer’s kindness by making her stay in her former identity.
It’s a fact that people get lonely, ain’t nothing new
But a woman like you, baby, should never have the blues
Let me help, I’ve got two for me, let me help
It would sure do me good to do you good
Let me help–Billy Swan but everybody associates it with Ringo
Well, Billie’s always good for that, if nothing else. XD
Yeah, being raised in the Walkerton household did not a non-abelist person make.
Billie actually has managed to make me legit mad.
FUCK accidentally flagged that. Sorry.
I was trying to say – With LINDA WALKERTON as a role model? However did that happen??
The one thing Billie is good at is being the worst
She very clearly holds resentment over much of the cast for “refusing” to change when she bullies them.
I wonder if the “neurotypical/neurodivergent” terminology came up during the doctor visit or if Joyce did a bit of research on her own off screen
i imagine that it’s just one of the things that came up during her first semester gender studies class? it’s all but outright stated that that’s where her rote-memorised definition of bisexuality a little bit ago came from, and i would be shocked if disability was something that never came up in that class, even if only in passing
Wishing caring to folks today. Caring like a cool shady blanket on a summer day.
Thank you, Laura. I’m always grateful for your presence in the comments. 😊
Me too! Thanks for being here Laura! 😊
Thanks, friends. Recently, I’ve been having a bit of an existential crisis like Joyce is. Had a good talk with my doc today, though, asked for some ADHD meds. We decided the stimulant effect would just stress me out, but he let me get some other medicine instead. Should help. Hoping! Very kind guy. So sweet and easygoing. Maybe a little like Dr. Kaur.
I appreciate that. This one did a number on me and I’m trying not to let it just take over my brain.
I totally feel you on that one Devin, the struggle is real!
“Helpful in an unhelpful way” is exactly my brand of assistance!
The Joe avatar is really selling me on this
Smug Joe strikes again!
One thing that kinds of stands out for me: Jennifer not knowing about the terms “neurotypical/neurodivergent”.
In comments on an earlier strip, some people (myself included) questioned how Jennifer could diagnose Joyce, given her background. Her seeming lack of knowledge about these terms sort of reinforces the question.
Jennifer also is probably blanketing here. Going by how she doesn’t think bisexuality actually exists, she probably has a VERY effed up view on EVERY legitimate “not normal” term.
She has a very effed up view of what’s “normal”, too. Seems like everything she’s proud of is “normal”, and everything she’s ashamed of is “not normal”.
Toxic normalcy?
IMO the very concept of “normal” is intrinsically toxic, and there’s a whole human history and present day world of humans to back that up. 😮💨
My wife is genuinely confused that “normal” is a toxic word to me.
The problem with “normal” is it has different meanings to different people (imagine that…) as it can relate to any of these things:
– preconcieved notions of good and bad (as in “women having lower income than men on the same job is not normal” which means it should be different, even though it clearly is the norm), which can be somewhat misleading, and is not OK at all when applied to a person.
– “the norm” which is how “most people” are or behave, which can be anything from insensitive to alienating (or toxic, as you put it).
– the expectations of the person speaking, which closely resembles the one above, but is generally more accomodating to differences or context variations, and can be OK if the speaker does leave room for that variation.
All in all, I’d still steer away from using words like that about a person.
I remember so many debates between friends arguing about what is or is not normal, each of them using a different meaning (mostly the first and second).
Agreed with basically everything above. I’d need some evidence to convince me that “normal” is a real thing or state that can exist.
Mostly does seem like a tool to selectively alienate people who go against a majority as being “abnormal.”
Very much so. Defining “normal” is really nothing more than an exercise in power. 😑
The word “normal” has been coming up a lot recently in my- I was about to call it my threesome (which puts my friend’s jokes about ending up as a third without meaning to in an odd context)- my trio, me, my spouse and my best friend.
ANYWAY accidental polyamory aside, I think it’s interesting and pertinent!
We keep coming back to an idea around “normality”. What we experience- especially (but not exclusively) as children- is “normal”. That is, the experience of each person establishes their baseline of normal. But it is not the norm. It is not “normal” to the entire rest of the world- or even a majority of them.
Example. In our trio- we are all trans. We are all autistic. Two of us have ADHD. Two of us are masc-presenting non-binary. We have all experienced bullying. All of us have experience of long-term abuse (that- and this is part of why this is so important- seemed normal at the time. We all love animals. We all dislike most spectator sports. We all love nature. We all lean politically left. I could continue.
We are also the people we are all closest to, so each of these things is normal to us- and deviation from it has become a level of abnormal to us. Which is fascinating! But also something we all have to be aware of because OUR “normal” is NOT society’s “normal”. At all. And if we go into the world assuming otherwise we are the ones who will pay the price for it.
Anyway that was a rambling tangent but the discussion of “normal” made me think of it and I wanted to share! (Also it is somewhat related to the strip when you consider that, as it’s such a human experience, the experience of the characters is similar- “this is my baseline of normal, which means it must be THE baseline of normal.”)
I really appreciate you for saying this.
Eh, part of me feels like Jennifer is playing down her knowledge of the subject. After all, if she doesn’t know the “nerd words” then *clearly* there can’t be anything “wrong” or different about her. This is pretty similar to what she did about her sexuality in the past too.
Her figuring out the situation purely based on Joyce’s reaction makes me wonder if she has been in that exact same situation in the past.
Going by today, I’d say that she’s the sort of person who as part of her forceful “self-actualisation” learned that she shouldn’t use words like “spaz” anymore but rather, “autistic”. A word she now uses with almost the same dismissive intention.
Yeah, between the people here who respect “autism” as being this intrinsically fluid thing with no hurtful assumptions made, and those out there who use it to paint over us and see it as a “dehumanize me” sign, we might be using the same word, but it’s as tho we’re speaking different languages entirely. Hence, the connection between language and social classes.
Am I the only one that finds it somehow unnerving that Joyce still has her new full sclera-included eye she got with her glasses after she takes them off. It makes her strikingly different from most of the cast (half of whom have weird wet, Carolinely button eyes).
Joyce’s eyes were always like that though? Right from the first issue,
Definitely nalways like this. The glasses are the anomaly
She’s always had the sclera though?
i am fairly certain i have always drawn her eyes like that
https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/itswalky/661948528618307584?source=share
No, you went through all your archives and gave Joyce sclera in your entire back catalog when she got glasses in DoA. You can’t fool us!
Every time I look at that character model sheet I think it’s a goddamn crime Joyce doesn’t wear her hair in a ponytail more often. It’s an incredibly cute look for her.
Joyce is just too powerful with her hair up.
I still don’t understand the design logic behind who has button eyes, who has button eyes with white, and who has colored eyes. I assume there must be a reasoning, but I cannot for the life of me see any genuine patterns.
I’m pretty sure it’s just a matter of having or not having sclera. Characters who have them may still have black as their eye color – Agatha’s situation is pretty unusual though.
An incomplete and probably flawed list:
Dots*: Amber, Walky, Sal, Dorothy, Joe, Danny, Becky, Leslie, Jason, Carla, Rose, Beatrice
Dots w/ Sclera all the time: Agatha, Malaya, Robin, Galasso, Ethan, Sierra, Jennifer, Dina
Colored Irises w/ Sclera: Joyce, Lucy, Mary, Hank, Jocelyne, Nash
Pseudo-irises: Marcie (pay close attention to the shine on her goggles)
*Sclera sometimes included when their expression calls for it.
Add Ruth with (green) colored irises 🙂
Oh no, my confusion isn’t about what it MEANS for different characters to have those differences, I’m wondering WHY certain characters have one type of eye over another. I’m wondering if it has to do with the character themselves and the types of expressions they’re drawn to have more often than not, if a certain eye design is more effective at portraying certain emotions in a certain way? But…I dunno.
In reality the reasoning is probably just ‘thats just how their character design evolved over time’ and there’s no actual internal logic. BUT I WANT THERE TO BE LOGIC TO IT.
My understanding is that it represents that some characters’s eyelid shape makes their eyes look bigger in comparison to other characters.
Dude what
I cannot wait for Billie to find out. Like, I legit cannot wait for her to get yelled at.
Rereading that last panel I’m not sure Joyce could have delivered a better burn if she tried
*attempts to click “Flag” button on Billie*
Excuse me- Jennifer. The way things are phrased in this comic got me mixed up for a sec.
And so Billifer found her true calling in life.
Ngl I have genuinely been struggling to not call her Billifer since the time skip. As soon as I read of her reverting to her first name Billifer has been hooked in my brain and won’t go away.
Kind of reassuring to see someone else call her that.
There’s nothing sadder than a weirdo in denial.
What, you mean, like, by comparison?
(Also, technically I think the term is “allistic” – using “neurotypical” in this context runs the risk of conflating autism with neurodivergence in general.)
I like “nypical”. It’s a little more diminutive. 😉
Sounds a little WW2 anti-Japanese?
Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. Shucks!
I was thinking more like “nipple” or “nibble”. As in “Nibble nibble, little mouse, what is nibbling at my brain?” ;-D
neurodivergent nipples…. 😏 even more material for Yoto, excellent!
Sometimes being a good friend is f*cking things up in a way that is helpful.
“I cant be neurotypical, I’ve never heard of the name—No wait”
Jennifer hurt herself in her confusion!
Hahahaha hilarious, I approve, also good burn Joyce check you out knowing exactly what you need with fine granularity.
Joyce is like…. weirdly hot in this one.
It’s the alluring combination of being in physical pain and being in the middle of an existential crisis isn’t it
I feel like I can fix her, y’know?
Taffy, your avatar, is that a serious offer? I’m more than down to play Yu-Gi-Oh Cards online with you!!! 😃
😎If you wanna lose at Duel Monsters that bad, I might be able to arrange it.
😆 You’re on!!!! What’s your preferred online Yu-Gi-Oh client?
I’ll try to figure out my online handle when I’m sober
This cracked me up lmao.
Yeah, ya think it could especially be that last panel?
Her glasses are off, that world balloon helps highlight the volume of her breasts, her hair is a little messy and her clothing and the surrounding context of the bed really just say, “queen of comfort”.
All in all a pretty effective gestalt for bringing out her hot! 🥰
I was thinking more about the line work but if that’s your thing
Hey yeah that too! Perhaps the accentuated thickness of the lines in some places is just “cartoon-ish” enough to make her look that much cuter?
Weirdos and Normals, she says.
I…do not have the bandwidth right now to come up with a proper response to this that isn’t just swearing at Jennifer.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so how about an expressive DOA avatar? Some that come to mind is Dina’s angry face or Sal’s series of faces when she heard Jennifer go callous and classist during a phone call with her dad who’s friends with a mayor.
You know, I would, except I can’t remember my wordpress credentials to access gravatar. Maybe I’ll have the RAM for it in the morning.
It does seem to help Joyce. Through I am not sure it will help long term or if Joyce just thinks something like “yesterday I did not know that word either so I must be “normal” too” or something like that.
But yeah I am not happy with Jennifer either right now. Her word choice, her talking about “made up words”ugh… I feel like I like (almost) every Cast member less post time skip.
Yeah. It is frustrating.
But… I dunno…. I always took “weird” or “weirdo” as a compliment. My whole life. Because it was the most common thing people ever called me. Made me feel proud.
Like the 3 Weird Sisters, in Macbeth. Or the Weirding Way (“The Voice!”) in Dune. Weirding always conveyed secret special powers, in my estimation.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/weird
…I dunno. Maybe being named after an ancestor who had been hanged as a witch in Salem gave me an early appreciation for the “weirdos” of the world. Weird, wild, and wonder-full.
But yeah, I do get that it is tough to hear sometimes, Devin and Queezle. I hear where you’re coming from. If it’s any help, we’re all a community here, regardless of what words are used.
Yeah, I am not sure if I have a problem with the word “weirdo” on it’s own as such, I was mostly called different terms “freak” being the “nicest” among them.
But contrasting it with the “Normals”. That just reminds me of people complaining about the term cis gender and heterosexual and saying you could just say “normal” instead. Which is a really upsetting rhetoric and Jennifer’s “terms weirdos made up to for us normals” really reminded me of that. It can be kind of tiring when so many things about you (appearance, sexual and romantic orientation and so on) are just seen as a divination from the norm from how you should be.
And thank you, the discussion here has been rather, uhm, heated lately so it is good to hear that there is still a sense of community here.
Oh, yeah. I got “freak,” too. And worse stuff. That’s OK. But it’s not quite OK when you’re a teeny child. Kids learn to find ways to make themselves be OK, and tell themselves that it doesn’t matter. But it’s really not an OK thing to happen. No matter how “normalized” bullying is, it’s still cruel.
And yeah, it is frustrating to see populations sliced up into standard deviations on the bell-shaped “normal curve”, with the naturally occurring variations of life being slapped with the label of “ab-normal”. And what’s wild is that — no matter how conforming people become — there will STILL be a smaller and smaller range of “included” and “normal” variations on life, while everyone else gets “exclused” and pushed into the “abnormal” sections. (https://www.simplypsychology.org/normal-distribution.html)
It’s like that old song by Moxy Früvous, that goes “That guy who wrote the book about the bell curve…” A song about rotten jerks.
Your parents specifically named you after a 17th century relative who was hanged for witchcraft? That’s not neurotypical or neurodivergent. That’s hardcore. What are your folks like?
My parents are some straight-up free-range chickens. Both did not get raised much by their own parents. And both have some serious brain uniqueness, too.
Both had very strange, very different experiences as they were growing up, very much shaped by wartime experiences. They’ve been kind of “faking it” ever since, just trying to find ways to fit in (with varying degrees of success).
I learned a lot from them — some good, some bad. :-/ Trying to unlearn some of that stuff now. But it is good to remember all the good lessons and experiences they gave me.
The interesting thing is I don’t mind being called weird in and of itself. But I want to be identified as weird for the things I do intentionally, not as a label for my neurodivergence.
And…I get that those aren’t entirely mutually exclusive, but specifically as a stand-in for neurodivergence, it really super rubs me the wrong way. And especially when it’s a division of Weirdos and Normals, which always feels to me like it carries a level of moral judgement when coming from someone who considers themselves Normal.
I really appreciate the affirmation of community, it always helps to have folks who understand.
Yeah. I get that, Devin.
For what it’s worth, the normies are missing out! ;-D
Take good care of yourself today. 🙂
Totes with ya on that Devin, I also love this affirming, diverse, wonderful community 🥲
And yet that is evocative enough to be a really good response by itself.
(Also same tbh.)
Sadly, Blennie (given your apparent willingness to switch between Billie and Kennifer at the drop of a hat, ‘Blennie’ is who you end up being), then “not knowing the word the weirdos made up for normals” isn’t evidence in your favour; since the terms ‘neurotypical’ and ‘neurodivergent’ were coined by neurotypicals, you just accidentally put yourself into the neurodivergent camp.
Ah, but then, you aren’t nearly as clever as you think you are.
Am I the only one expecting this to end badly for Ms Billingsworth?
I don’t know about expecting, but I really hope she gets a learning experience out of it.
Just linking in my website URL instead of reposting the whole thing I posted above again. The term neurodivergent was coined by a neurodivergent person to describe themselves.
Ah, but then, I’m probably not nearly as clever as I think I am, either.
“buncha nerds who watch too much Star Wars and have seen and read Harry Potters. Not that I would know “
hides poster
kinda a botch is definitely a good term here Joyce lol
Yeah but she didn’t know what bisexuality is, either and that didn’t stop her from being bi, so. Something to think about, maybe.
Oh and also, discussing who and who doesn’t count as “neurodivergent” was not what I expected from today’s comic, but it’s still disappointing.
NO ONE EXPECTS THE wait, no, sorry, old habit.
I think that is the very train of logic that has helped Joyce understand things a bit more.
Clearly not, can’t be bisexual if you vehemently deny to have had a lesbian fling or three, amirite???
“Billie was always just the biggest dumb-ass bongo, but like, in a lovable way.”
“Uh, thanks, Joyce, but…”
“Like, those videos of cats on the Internet who keep failing the same jump, or get a box on their head and run around bumping into things, meowing pathetically, but hiss when you try to take the box off? That’s Billie, to me.”
“Cool. Thanks. Shut the fuck up.”
Lmao
Isn’t that true for like half of the cast?
I’m still trying to understand the dynamic between Billie and Jennifer.
Maybe because it’s 3am, and no brain work well this hour
I think Jennifer sees Billie as her “screw-up” self. And Joyce wants to relate to that. Jennifer is a little less accessible because she tries to be more perfect.
I think Jennifer just got tired of her old nickname but doesn’t necessarily see “Billie” as a separate self.
It’s not uncommon for kids to drop childhood nicknames in college.
OTOH, there seems to be something more behind this, but I don’t think it’s nearly as drastic a personality change as some do.
Probably there are some bad associations with the old nickname that contributed to the decision to drop it. But I don’t think Jennifer wants to be seen as a completely separate person from Billie. She just wants to go by a new name.
Instead of worse.
Her denial makes is sound like she’s definitely had the thought she might be autistic and decided not to think about it.
Joyce: “thank You . billie
Billie: im Jennifer
“Your Idiocy has rescued my self esteem”
wait..
“One Again”
what?
“Youve really helped me”
thank-you ?
“By proving my superiority”
No
“Great Talk”
Ok
“Youve been the best part of having excruciating painful vaginal cramps”
is that a Good thing?
“Its a shame we’ll have nothing more in common when i take birth control pills. your function is complete”
Should i come back later?
“your function is complete”
I think Willis’ choice to have Jennifer smile as she made her little weirdo comment is genius. It inspired me to take a look back and really, Jennifer post-rename doesn’t smile. “Billie” smiled a lot more, and she was a CHEERleader. She had that devilmaycare attitude even about her DUI crash, which was obviously inappropriate. but now she’s something of a.. somberleader. She has a couple more counted smiles with/involving Ruth than her own boyfriend; even in total, the smile count is still so so low.
What “Jennifer” and “Billie” still “share” is the tendency to smile to clown on others or at her own witticisms. Jennifer has fewer, but when she does smile, it’s in this context 99.9999999% of the time.
I don’t think she’s outright revealing her thought processes, rather than doing both of the above actions. It’s like someone having a laugh over people who say “normie” seriously. Those non-normie people may or may not define their own selves as weirdos, but they definitely think they aren’t “normal,” they like to throw that on others. Is “typical” not similar? “Neurotypical” is not the same as “normie” in any way, but it reflects a desire to rename and reframe the conversation. Ableism means the conversation needs to go through that change TO BE CLEAR.
I think Jennifer’s pride as an journalist is being like, no my word was right, your word was unnecessary, and I’m going to show you how it sounds so you agree, with a dash of like, mean humor.
Joyce noticed it and states that Jennifer blungled an attempt to help her, and that it made her feel better. I think it isn’t that Jennifer failed to help at all that was somehow uplifting, more like, Jennifer tried in sincerity to help and came off like a jackbongo, which *is* pretty funny.
Billie/Jennifer: My lack of knowledge is clearly evidence that I know what I’m talking about!
I’m going to say that I sadly think Jennifer is a lot like a certain type of voter. She actually thinks IGNORANCE is something to be proud of. “Yeah, I don’t know what that word means so I’m not one of those weirdos.”
What weirdos? Educated people?
I concor. She’s definitely the kind of person who wants every part of the college experience EXCEPT the education. Go fucking figure 🙄
Dumb teens saying dumb things… Lol she tries though.
Lighting in this is good! Very moody
Jennifer sure talks a lot of shit about “weirdos” for someone that has had a decade-long hyperfixation and crush on a random background character from a Star Wars movie.
…That’s not weird at all.
*gazes wistfully at Aelaya Secura*
:O
>:O
Kit Fisto is NOT just a random background character
Y’all need to watch some clone wars. Educate yourselves
Cartoon Kit is fine as hell
Implying Jennifer has watched Clone Wars. 😛
How old was Jennifer when Clone Wars came out?
Weird timeline stuff strikes again. Now, she would have been somewhere from 5-10, which would easily have given her time to be openly into it as a kid before putting on the image that she didn’t like such nerdy things. When the comic started though, it was still coming out and wouldn’t have started before she had her popular cheerleader/nerd hater persona.
Watched it, drew fan art of
Kit Fistothe show and written fanfic aboutKit Fisto’s sex lifethe show.She’s definitely a “weirdo” in denial.
Panel 5 achieves the incredible feat of summarizing 12 years of DoA in a single sentence.
The streak of killer punchlines continues. Jennifer BLS. (Also, Joyce being so utterly un-offended by this characterization on Jennifer’s part…Joyce may be freaking out about autism specifically, but she is certainly aware she’s considered weird; it’s the *nature* of her weirdness suddenly being called into question that’s throwing her.)
Aw, the glasses. It’s perfectly normal to take those off for a nap, or even just when you’re lying down in bed (lying face-down with glasses on is an uncomfortable no-no, bad for your face, bad for the lenses and frames), but the composition does a nice job of highlighting them as the symbol of the material, day-to-day changes in her life that Joyce is struggling so hard to adapt to right now, the ones she wishes she could just…take off and set aside.
I was older than Jennifer when I learned these words, yet somehow I was failing to be normal long before that. . .
Likewise. I only learned what the words neurotypical and neurodivergent meant last year, and was diagnosed earlier this year at the age of 33. I was definitely not “normal” before I knew what those words meant.
I don’t think Jennifer is nearly as “normal” as she likes to think she is.
I am unable to tell if it’s Billie or Jennifer. If only the speech bubbles were different!
(I’ll figure it out at some point, tho.)
I don’t think they are completely separate people like Amber and Amazigirl, I think Jennifer just got tired of her old nickname.
Yeah agreed. Unlike Amber and AG, Jennifer/Billie don’t have separate tags. The Billie tag was just changed to Jennifer. She’s the same person/identity just using a new name, which may or may not be a permanent change, we shall see!
I see SOME similarities in that Jennifer hates parts of herself and keeps trying to deny/escape them, but while Amber/AG ended up literally dissociating, Jennifer is just hiding those aspects of herself and pretending they don’t exist even though deep down she knows they are still her.
That’s kind of been her deal from the beginning. Trying not to be a “nerd” (denying her Kit Fisto/Star Wars love, hiding her journalism major, previously being mad she had to wear glasses), claiming she’s not “into girls” as a rule/insisting bisexuality isn’t real, periodically shifting between hiding and yelling about her alcoholism, her DUI, and her feelings for Ruth (as well as any fondness she has for her “less cool” friends), etc.
I think she just has a LOT of self-loathing and shame that she has NOT confronted yet. She seemed to be doing a bit better with Ruth near the end (at least the last parts we saw before the time jump) but even then that felt more like accepting she and Ruth deserve each other because they’re both broken (see: her really awkward confessions to her new hall neighbors tied in with her introducing Ruth to them).
She seems to think she can only exist in 2 states: Billie the disaster horrible person who doesn’t deserve good things and can never be better, and Jennifer the popular together person who has everything under control by denying the bad parts of herself/pretending they don’t exist. To truly be healthy and happy she’s gonna have to reconcile the two. Accept and be honest about the bad parts of herself while accepting she can still move forward and deserve good things in spite of them.
Jennifer: clearly i am normal and not like you, a weirdo i am trying to comfort
Joyce: its the backhandedness i’ve missed…
Jennifer starts out sort of okay and then botches the landing SPECTACULARLY.
Billie is still a bad guy. She’s one of the most unpleasant people in the comic :/
This strip made me remember that one Dinosaur Comic where T-Rex invents the verb jennif so that anyone named Jennifer is retroactively saying that they love to jennif and I guess what I’m saying is that Billie discovered an interest in kissing people on the nose and blowing into their nostrils over winter break and decided this should be announced to the world every time she introduces herself
I don’t like how they’re talking like this is an all or nothing thing, when the fact of the matter is that the field of psychology established autism as a spectrum specifically to encompass a bunch of different disorders into one overall concept, which is how you get high-functioning people diagnosed with the same thing as people who just totally can’t take care of themselves.
In fact, after a point, it’s less like they’re “disorders” and more like the science is just developing a system of describing just everybody and how all people have various ways their brains work, just they have the medical illness terminology from how the science of psychology developed.
Billie falls disastrously in the fourth panel, but take off that one, I pretty much agree with her. At least now Joyce seems to be happy ♡. Let’s hope she and Jennifer will pass more time together. Even for see how Raidah will react.
Well, to call back… Billie’s kinda one-note, isn’t she.
Yes. Very annoyingly yes.
Thanks for justifying my distaste for you right now, Jennifer.
Seeing Joyce without glasses after a little bit of time is weird I must say.
So she’s just trying to make herself feel better, instead of Joyce
Good going
Wait, I’m confused. Joyce’s last line makes it sound like she’s applying Jennifer’s line of thinking in the penultimate panel to herself. Is she now in denial that she has autism?
I think it’s more.. “Regardless of whether or not I’m autistic, I’m *way* better at human interaction than Billie and I feel good about that.”
I’m a little unclear myself but I THINK it goes like this:
Billie: “Man, the fact that I don’t know the weirdo term for non-weirdos is proof that I’m not a weirdo.”
Joyce: “OK, the fact that you’re basically calling me a weirdo is kinda putting your foot in your mouth even as you’re trying to be helpful, but the thing is *I also didn’t know the term “neurotypical” myself* before the diagnosis, and and your saying that this is solid proof of non-weirdoness is kinda oddly comforting in a roundabout way by confirming that I’m actually not that big a weirdo even if I am autistic?”
But also the “man, at least I ain’t as bad at talking to people as Billie” is also a valid interpretation I hadn’t considered and is rather more Occam’s Razor.
I thought she was doing better so that fourth panel is really heartbreaking. I was so excited to prove people wrong about Jennifer being status-obsessed, but here she is talking about “weirdos” again.
I think the reason she’s been coming off as less status-obsessed is that she’s gotten status she very desperately wanted.
I think once that becomes threatened (which seems inevitable) we’ll see a lot more familiar behaviors.
Yeah, Jennifer’s arc for this season is pretty obviously going to be how she handles the inevitable revelation that Raidah doesn’t actually like her and is just using her for some as yet unknown scheme.
Or at least part of her arc.
That’s been the interpretation so far, but I was hoping that would be wrong. We haven’t seen much from Jennifer’s perspective yet and I thought there would be more to it than just wanting to seem cool.
A diagnosis doesn’t have to change you, it is literally a word to describe symptoms and to help give clarity and possible direction to what you may be going through.
dina down the hall: i am RIGHT HERE
I have never wanted to fling this woman into the sun as much as I do right this moment.
You will never, EVER, have it all figured out. In my experience, the people who think they do become their worst possible selves as a result.