Joyce’s Mom will probably eventually get brain cancer, and some of her last words will be about Trump only *faking* his death from cardiac arrest, and how he’ll soon be world president.
I think that Dorothy resubmitted her application and then had a moment of clarity. Does she want to be the person who leverages a situation that resulted in 3 people dying (even if more didn’t die because of her action) to get ahead? I don’t think so, not that way. If Yale had contacted her first on their own, I think she might feel differently. But going to them herself to ask for reconsideration crossed a line that she didn’t realize until after she wrote. It may be imposter syndrome, or simply wanting to earn it herself because of her own achievements.
And she does care about her friends, even if they do annoy the crap out of her. Leaving them now is not what she really wants to do. We’ve seen other people growing and changing, for good and ill. Why not Dorothy too?
I think it’s actually less that SHE crossed a line (she’s a freshman looking to get ahead) and more that THEY crossed a line. And she knew they would cross it, she expected them to cross it, it’s why she resubmitted. But it still hit different when they actually did and it was in front of her face.
She feels it’s like the “my roommate died so I get all As” myth except it actually happened to her
I suppose I would feel exactly the same way she did if, instead of just being mildly injured, my mother had died in that uninsured motorist accident, and I ended up squandering my college education fund by the settlement for that
(except that I found out after graduation that that’s how my parents paid so it wouldn’t matter either way but I’d feel a little bad)
I think Dorothy is going to go into a big speech about her reasons that will make her seem self-sacrificing and noble but she doesn’t want to admit the REAL reason: that she doesn’t want to leave her friends. That wouldn’t be Presidential and logical like all her decisions.
And like Danny at the beginning of the story she is going to give up her dreams for them, something no-one wants or asked for.
I’m hoping her friends can rally around for her and help her out here. Or she’ll be driving her kids off a cliff after another decade of self-sacrifice.
I don’t think she wants to stay because she feels like she needs to take care of her friends, though perhaps she would frame it this way. I think she loves her friends and enjoys seeing them every day. She wouldn’t be staying for them. She’d be staying for her.
I also don’t think going to Yale is ESSENTIAL or even NECESSARY for her career plans.
I don’t think it’s self-sacrificing and noble. I think it’s that every time she looks at the acceptance letter she gets flashbacks and she’s not looking forward to how it will be when she’s actually there.
It’s okay if no one “wants” this sacrifice. I can’t fault her for not wanting Yale acceptance purchased with the blood of villains, even if to ME that sounds metal as fuck.
Even her parents know her as the “responsible one” its a lot of pressure to always be the one being responsible. She probably needs to let go now and again and let someone else take the reins, like just let someone organise an activity or something that she’s not in charge of.
Which is strange considering how often Joyce, Becky, Amber and even Walky gets mentioned being traumatized by it but people forget that Dorothy and Sarah were there too for a dose of trauma as well.
I think that’s at least partially down to the fact that the pre-timeskip years already prime the audience to think of Joyce, Becky, Amber and (to a lesser extent) Walky as “characters with trauma,” but not as much to think of Dorothy and Sarah that way. Sarah’s got the backstory with Dana and the Raidah Gang, but as the years rolled on that got touched on less and less. Walky’s a bit of an outlier, given that “tragic backstory” was more often Sal’s department, but his having been Mike’s roommate accounts for a lot of that.
Dorothy didn’t get stabbed but “Ryan” was definitely going to stab her. That alone is enough to be traumatic. Y’know on top of watching Amber cut up the guy.
Yeah, but when a character acts like they have things under control, you can sometimes forget that “Oh yeah they probably were affected”
Heck, happens in real life too. Person acts stoic then “out of nowhere” shows cracks, causing people to go, “Oh crap right you were part of that. That all was… A front. Crap”
I have no doubt that Dorothy’s stated reasoning played a role in her decision.
It’s also possible, as other commenters have pointed out, that she has additional reasons to stay in Indiana that she won’t admit to others or possibly even to herself. (She’s crumbling under the combined stress of school and surviving a violent assault, she doesn’t want to leave her friends / support network / familiar surroundings, etc.)
She’s suffering this internal turmoil as a result and doesn’t know what to do about any of it. But instead of telling her friends about her own problems, she commits to solving their problems.
Actions can have multiple equally true and valid motivations. I’d even go so far as to say MOST large actions (such as life changing decisions about where to go for education) usually have several motivations, including several that you aren’t consciously aware of or don’t consciously acknowledge (there is a distinction). Perhaps even all such actions have many motivations, I’ve certainly never done anything major for only one reason, but I cannot discount the possibility that somebody, somewhere has.
Just because other obvious motivations exist does not make the ones stated here untrue or invalid, these ones were clearly chosen to paint a specific picture and lead to certain conclusions while leaving out other important pieces of the puzzle, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t a significant factor in Dorothy’s consideration.
I mean that’s very blatantly what it is. Girls been spiraling. I think a lot of people miss that Dorothy is just as deeply traumatized as the rest of the group. Hell being the one to take charge and lead them out of a hostage situation might have given her the subconscious instinct of “if i don’t take control now everyone will die.” Which is irrational but, y’know trauma responses usually are.
I think she’s very Princess Carolyn. “My life’s a mess right now and i compulsively take care of others when i can’t take care of myself.”
Good thing she’s telling Becky, the person must equipped to tell her that refusing Yals won’t do anything to help the victims of that day. Right, Becky? Right?
I really do want Becky to light her up for that. It’s a futile and wasteful gesture of martyrdom, and the people more directly impacted by those events will not benefit from it at all. Climb down off the cross, we need the wood, kind of thing.
I had never heard that phrase, pope. In digging, I was doubly pleased to see it in a movie quote from 1992 …by Dolly Parton (Straight Talk).
Loved the banter, you can hear her voice: ‘Dr.’ Shirlee Kenyon (Dolly): Why even the Declaration of Independence only guaranties life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn’t say anything about fair. Doesn’t even say you have the right to be happy. Just to pursue it.
Female Caller: But no one appreciates me, and I try to be fair, and they don’t…
‘Dr.’ Shirlee Kenyon: Get down off the cross honey, somebody needs the wood!
It’s not about helping the victims. It’s because she doesn’t want to be accepted BECAUSE of that. That event was significantly traumatic for her and her friends and she immediately spun it around as a tool to get ahead in life. And I guess that grossed herself out.
and that’s how politics works.
but she doesn’t want to be a real politician, she wants to be the kind that only exists in movies and TV and the dreams of naive young people.
Oh that is DEFINITELY what she wants and she still seems to think “I want to be a politician” given the laundry scene a few days ago and “Mike Pence made it to the White House like this”, and ugh, it will HURT when she realizes that no, she truly doesn’t want to be the kind of person who can be a successful politician.
She might get away being in a more local position with that kid of inhibitions, maybe even up to governor depending on the state. The more money and power are involved, the more likely corruption will be a big problem.
I’ve seen people suggest she’d do much better as a judge than a president, and I’m inclined to agree. They certainly aren’t immune to corruption and are often elected, but they don’t have to be making quite the same moral tradeoffs to get things done on a regular basis, and they don’t need to bank on their charisma to get positions the same way a presidential candidate in particular needs to.
But ultimately, I think Dorothy’s likely to be someone who’d have trouble working within the system as it currently exists, too. She’s got a strong sense of her own morals and wants to make the world better, and that means when she comes up against the corruption and the way the system’s so thoroughly stacked against people, it’d hit her pretty dang hard.
In other words, as I said downthread (before the refresher, though,) Dorothy saw Ross take a lethal blow, she saw him get back up and attack Blaine, and she’s the one who directed the others to leave them fighting it out and go rather than try and stop Ross being murdered. (How would this have worked? Probably it wouldn’t, and probably instead of incapacitating both of the kidnappers, they would all have been screwed. But I can see Trauma Brain reinterpreting it as “I chose to leave a man to die and spun this into an acceptance to Yale, and oh no I don’t like this.”)
I reread the arc – which, woof, is a lot – and Dorothy is clearly trying to manipulate Blaine and Toedad against each other, and then when the hammer falls she realizes what she’s done.
So even before the big “time to escape” moment, she probably is taking on some guilt for causing the violence to start.
Oh, oof, yeah, that is what’s going on there and you’re right. OW.
Granted, “Ross believes Amber when she says she’s AG / Blaine wanted Amber THERE and refuses to believe her” probably would’ve ended terribly either way, but. Ouch. Yeah rereading it knowing how it ends… yeesh, no wonder she’s traumatized over this and doesn’t want to go to Yale for it.
It doesn’t even have to be that. National leaders sometimes have to make decisions in which every choice is lethal or destructive for someone else. And not everyone can accept that level of responsibility. Even if Dorothy thinks she made the right choice, I can understand her not wanting to ever again have to decide who will die.
I also think accepting the offer would be a recipe straight to imposter syndrome. She’d immediately feel like she only got accepted because of the publicity, not because of anything of her own merit.
It’s not necessarily about the victims. It could very reasonably be about always knowing that the only reason she’s there is because of those events. You could take that as either “I don’t want to always remember I’m only there because Mike died” or as “I don’t want to always know I didn’t make it on my own merits” either of which would be a perfectly reasonable reactions.
Is it that Dorothy doesn’t want it to be the reason, or that she feels an immense amount of guilt because of using that reason and it working? She did something, ironically that wouldn’t be out of league for your average politician: she took something tragic and used it to get ahead for her own professional gain. It honestly feels like that has been why she’s ramped up on helping everyone.
Yeah this is a point in favour of my “Dorothy could never become president” read, because exploiting the tragedies and personal losses of others to advance your career is how you do that. This is politics 101 shit.
It might have also been a partially “I want to get the hell out of here” after all of that, so redid the application, only to end up with regret after her mind cooled down some. Since Yale has been her dream, she might have applied just to have the feeling that something finally good happened to her after all the traumatic stuff, only for it to happen and her to realize that it didn’t relieve the trauma.
Instead thinking about Yale is instantly tied with thinking about the reason she got in -> that day. Instead of helping it got worse! So yeah probably a good idea to not.
Also remember, her “get us all out of here” plan that day almost worked, until they let their guard down and a wild Faz appeared and the Blaine took Joyce hostage and got away. If you go back and re-read that part, you’ll see Dorothy unravel right along with her plan.
She’s got to feel extra guilt about that. Maybe that’s why she’s been doubling down on mothering helping Joyce specifically?
That’s more on Yale to me. What kind of stuck up institution needs you to overcome literal, life threatening adversity before they accept you? Dorothy was a straight A student who regularly volunteered before she even started at IU. That somehow wasn’t enough probably because her family isn’t rich. I’d say fuck it. I’m gonna get ahead, cause the system is definitely working against you.
You realize it isn’t actually Yale, don’t you? It’s a made-up Yale that Willis created for plot reasons. We have no idea what the real Yale would do, so you blaming them is silly.
Of course I’m not blaming real Yale. I also assume the real IU doesn’t have such an abundant night time predation problem, but that doesn’t’ stop me from commenting about it.
To be fair though, the real Yale probably would do something similar. It’s a believable plot point. The competitive college admissions system basically forces people to capitalize on their trauma because “overcame adversity” is just another line on the resume to set you apart from the other thousands of non-donor-family straight-A students in the country.
Oh yeah, I don’t mean she’s making the best decision, but it is a not-the-best decision that I would also probably make. I mean, not literally, schools aren’t really ranked the same way here as in the US so idgaf about that, but with my own schooling I turned down money (a bursary) I hella should have taken because the one giving it skeeved me out, even though I wouldn’t have had any connection with that person afterward.
so I get the impulse and respect it, but yeah, she probably should have (and should still) take(n) it
this and the surrounding comics imply that dorothy was the one who came up with the plan to chew out of the tape and wait for the right moment, and directed the others throughout: http://www.dumbingofage.com/unbound/
She’s the one who figured out they could probably get one person un-duct-taped and chose Joyce (because berserker rage would do in a pinch when they didn’t have any actual fighters), and she’s the one who, when the actual fight broke out, realized this was their chance and spurred the others to get going. So she did have a pretty significant role in getting them out of the murder basement, because that in particular meant the others didn’t all freeze in response to one of their kidnappers attacking the other with lethal intent. It probably would’ve ended really BADLY if they’d still been in the basement once Blaine realized there were witnesses.
It also means Dorothy got into Yale specifically for the moment where she saw Becky’s dad be murdered and left him to be attacked. Yeah, I can see her having second thoughts about that when she realized it worked. (Realistically there was nothing those kids could have done to really prevent it – we saw how hard Blaine was against them when they were all un-duct taped and had a superhero – and I really doubt Ross would have been anything but another obstacle towards Becky if they HAD stopped that attack, but rational logic has no place in traumatic guilt.)
Neither had I, honestly, I just remembered those particular strips because they’re very much a Peak Dorothy Moment.
Which, in fitting with Willis taking awesome moments and then down the line making us regret cheering that exact moment because the character’s traumatized by their actions there… here we are. When I put it that way, Mike dying IMMEDIATELY after the rooftop scene cut out makes perfect sense.
At least there’s very little Amber can hang her self-loathing on with “I made me.” At least there’s that.
Mike, somehow breaking through the coma as his passes, Ethan clutching his hand: “…promise me…everyone…everyone…will feel like shit for a whole semester…”
I posted this in reply to another comment, but it makes sense here too:
Dorothy must feel guilty that she couldn’t save Joyce after an unexpected variable (Faz) derailed the original plan. If you re-read that chapter after the lull of waiting for the authorities to show up, you can watch her confidence evaporate.
Maybe that’s why she’s been trying so hard to help Joyce, post-skip.
I get why Dorothy feels guilty, but maybe she shouldn’t. If Yale is evaluating people fairly and as they should, its not the fact that Dorothy was in a hostage situation that got her ahead, but the fact that she was able to be a calm rational leader in such an extreme environment. She wouldn’t be getting in because of the horrors of that day, but because of her own innate qualities (they just happened that something horrible had to happen for them to be readily apparent).
I don’t think you can tell her trauma response that. SHe’d been working her whole life to get into Yale and now that she’s actually getting in it’s because of THAT and that’s going to be at the forefront of her thoughts all the time while she’s also isolated from all the people she shared that experience with. Dorothy is making the right decision for her own mental health, for once 😡
Dorothy, your survivor’s guilt isn’t gonna help anybody, least of all you.
Sweetie, they’ll be okay if you leave. I promise. I’m sure that’s something that she’ll get to accepting as part of her coping with her trauma (which seems like her arc this ‘season’ and I’m into it). Not that you’ll ever leave because this semester will never end and you have until May to respond to this acceptance is my understanding from an admittedly short look at Yale’s website.
I don’t think it’s about survivor’s guilt or what will happen to everyone else. I think it’s about what will happen to HER if she goes and this is the reason she got in. Like, you think Dorothy won’t be thinking about HOW she got in all the time? Her entire life has been working to get into Yale. This shit cherry on top of actually pretty good cake is absolutely not what she needs, especially in isolation from everyone else who was there.
Okay, I was right about the decision she made, but I was very wrong about the reason why she did so. Or at least, this particular angle to it caught me off guard.
I wonder whether she’d have made the same decision if Mike hadn’t died, and it was just the deaths of two people who had repeatedly made her friends’ lives a living hell. Although even then Ross was someone Becky genuinely loved and cared about, horrible as he was. Maybe if it had been just Blaine.
Dorothy, that’s a very noble reason to make that decision. I fully understand why you made it.
Now shove that mindset up your ass and go to goddamn Yale.
The world’s unfair. Usually its unfair to your detriment, because you’re not rich, and everything’s tilted in your direction. But you didn’t ask for them to do this, you didn’t demand it, you didn’t actively use it. When the world gives you a fucking break, you fucking take it.
(Okay, yes, she did ask for it a bit, but unless she put in the cover letter “be nice to me because i was in a harrowing situation where a lot of parents got killed” I’m still putting things in her favor)
From my reading she just resubmitted what she already had sent in, no alterations, but Yale’s board of admissions now went “Oh, Dorothy Keener, you mean the girl who saved all those Indiana nobodies from those wackjobs? Sure, we’ll take her!” instead of “Dorothy who lmao, NAH”
Is it noble?
She’s always felt strongly that a position of power is how she could do the most good for the world. Hell, she even explicitly advised Becky to be mercenary in her dealings with Robin.
But now that it’s her chance to make a difference, she’s suddenly squeamish about the means? And the means aren’t even that bad in this case. This moral stance of hers doesn’t un-kill those people.
was gonna say this. idk how comfortable i would be with going somewhere that rejected me, and then only accepted after i went through harrowing trauma that resulted in multiple deaths
Totes bruh. The irony is that getting accepted in is realistically mostly a matter of random chance or being randomly born into established wealth/power to begin with, so getting the offer would be nothing to be proud of or follow through with anyway.
She’s not fitted for yale anyway. No old money, a rich nemesis in Ryan, too much pressure in IU already. It would’nt benefit her, and we know that to go to the top of the state, she’d need to drop precisely the things that qualifie her as a less shitty politician than the others, so it won’t benefit the world either.
I don’t think it’s a noble reason. I think it’s a “wait wait I think I should put brakes on burning down what remains of my mental health” decision. And she’s right to make it.
Ten years ago, I could have written : “this.” under your post. Alas, I’m not young enough to pretend to be young enough, and just not old enough to assume being outdated.
I don’t think it’s necessarily guilt that’s holding her back, as much as an abiding sense of fairness. In her eyes, it doesn’t seem fair that she’s the only one who got any real benefit from the events that transpired last semester while her friends get the short end with emotional-lock up, becoming orphaned and even worse.
If only Yale gave her something she can share with all her friends. An acceptance letter is hardly worth anything when cut up and distributed among friends you hold near and dear.
Dorothy, if you genuinely want to be a successful politician, you’ll have to learn to take your wins even if they feel dirty; in fact especially if they feel dirty. This comments section has long pointed out (and I agree) that you’re not cut out to president of the USA because you want to make sure you don’t compromise your morals; and realistically there’s no such thing as a head of state in any country on this planet that hasn’t done a problematic compromise to get to that level of power.
I should note that this is a condemnation against heads of state and governments as they are; rather than one castigating Dorothy.
Though given the complete shitshow that was the last US presidency and the current shitshow regarding the attempted coup; it feels more and more naive of Dorothy to try to enter that arena thinking she can keep her nose clean the whole way.
Okay but imagine what being in Yale, alone, without her friends (without the people who had gone through That with her), with her admission as a constant reminder of that day, would be like for her.
This is not about being a politician, this is about survival, at this point.
Her plan since the beginning of the comic was always to go Yale, “alone and without her friends”, as you put it.
If staying close to her friends so she can micromanage every minutae of their lives is a maladaptive way of coping then it’s just that: maladaptive.
Regardless of her reasons, I have a feeling Dorothy would become quickly disillusioned with politics once she finds out regardless of party or leaning just how much of the job is devoted to fund raising.
I feel like Dorothy likes fundraising (or at least has at some point convinced herself that she likes it, ie while volunteering in high school or something).
But yeah I think she would both be bad at and dislike whatever you’d call like, upper politics. senators presidents et al
“Something I can do for the dead… Then it is to win! I must keep winning to attain my dream. The same one they clung to, and risked their lives for!! To realize my dream, I will perch on top of their corpses.. It is a blood-smeared dream, after all. I don’t regret or feel guilty about it.. But to risk thousands of lives while never getting myself dirty. It’s not a dream that can be so easily realized!” – Griffith
I should have said this yesterday, but I didn’t read the comic yesterday.
And now having skimmed the comments from yesterday and not seeing any touching on what popped into my head, I’ll do so now (though I do think she should go to Yale, I figured she wouldn’t, and the reason she gives today is understandable).
Regarding Becky finding the letter on the floor in a mess, 6 possibilities came to mind after finding the last strip we saw Dorothy’s desk (it was when Walky came to talk, and I will say now that we saw a sheet of paper with folds sitting precariously on the desk near Becky’s pile of dirty clothes):
1. Someone snooped in their room. I find this highly unlikely.
2. Dorothy punched the wall and the mess occurred. While I think it’s very possible she punched the wall, I’m pretty sure she would notice said mess.
3. Dorothy is washing Becky’s clothes during her teach-Joyce-how-to-behave-inappropriately-in-public field trip, and she caused the mess when gathering the clothes. I’m reasonably sure she’d notice the mess with this, too.
4. The same as 3, only the mess was caused by her closing the door, hence why she didn’t notice the mess. The issue with that is while the piece of paper that I assume was the letter looked like it would fall over easily, nothing else did.
5. Dorothy caused the mess, probably by punching the wall, didn’t feel like dealing with it, and is pretending to be surprised. What doesn’t work with this idea is that would mean she chose to ignore the stuff that fell while simultaneously picking up the dirty clothes. Also deliberately lying to Becky about causing the mess for seemingly no reason.
6. The same as 5, but she left the mess on purpose and deliberately lied to Becky specifically hoping for this scenario so she could talk to someone about it without bringing it up herself. The problem with this idea is why not bring it up if she really wants to talk about it and why Becky as opposed to Joyce (though while writing this I realized that Dorothy really doesn’t have a lot of people she could talk to about this).
Anyway, that’s my over analytical thought process on the previous day’s comic’s topic that I didn’t notice anyone discussing in my hasty skimming of the comments.
7. Paper shoved into the back of a drawer with the intention of not looking at it any time soon has the unfortunate habit of working itself up over the back wall of that drawer over time, and land on the floor to be found when you least want to see it.
… I should really start throwing out such papers right away XD
8.Joyce came in to grab Becky’s dirty clothes for another round in the laundry room and was too horny to care about the mess.
9. Same but Joyce saw the letter and made the mess bc she lost her temper.
@Mr D: the “Someone snooped in their room” includes all possibilities including Becky. I find it unlikely that anyone, including Becky, would snoop in their room simply because there should be nothing anyone thinks is worth snooping for. There arguably was something snoop worthy, but I don’t believe anyone would believe there was based on either Dorothy’s or Becky’s behavior.
@SDRainbow: I didn’t leave out the most obvious. It was the very first option I mentioned. I just wrote it to include all possibilities and didn’t think I needed to name anyone specifically when I find everyone equally unlikely.
6.1. Freudian slip. She really wants to talk about it AND she really DOESN’T want to talk about it. She left the letter on top and doesn’t recall doing it.
I, uh, I think Occam’s razor indicates 2 or 2.1: Dorothy didn’t punch any walls but due to extreme distraction did just leave out her acceptance letter after a session of “regretful staring” and then got the sudden lightbulb of “I will teach Joyce about What Makes You A Criminal in 2077”, grabbed her laundry, and headed for Joyce Town
and the letter hit the floor due to air currents, as letters often do?
like, not everything is a weird psychological game. No one here is guilty of sin and probably this is not any more part of Dorothy’s trauma response than her…everything she’s doing?
The problem with that is a reasonable person would not call a single letter on the floor a mess, let alone Becky who had a pile of laundry on the floor big enough to hide in.
This is very much my own personal opinion but: who gives a fuck about Blaine or Ross?
In-universe they were both shitty abusive parents who made their children’s lives better by dying.
On a meta level their stupid Evil League of Evil Dads was so cartoonishly over the top that I could not take it seriously for one second. Between the costumes and the dialogue; it really felt more like a batman parody than any conclusion to the stroylines being wrapped up. In spite of that, as the audience we’re supposed to be sad and shocked Mike died and accept that every single one of the kidnapped characters us now traumatized.
Yeah, it’s a bit awkward how for so many of the characters it has become this major axis around which their characters have developed, but as the audience looking in it just felt pretty nonsensical.
…Are you saying it would make more sense if the kidnapped characters shrugged it off? I mean, seeing even a stranger get killed in front of me would leave me pretty messed up, never mind if my own life were threatened.
I’m saying it would have been better if they hadn’t been kidnapped at all, together, in daylight, in a crowd. Their kidnapping makes sense if we’re suspending our disbelief to allow for cartoon villainy; but then there’s real consequences (psychological trauma).
To be fair, their kidnapping didn’t occur in daylight. It did happen in a crowd, but it also occurred in a drowsy, chaotic crowd that was woken up in the middle of the night by a fire alarm. I think people in the crowd could be forgiven for not paying attention due to the chaos. Everything else such as the chase and fight scenes, I’ll cop to them being cartoony.
I agree with most of what you’re saying but… people have let people get murdered and heard screaming for minutes/hours and didn’t report it because “someone was probably over reacting/ not our place/ oh look they quieted down now” so my suspension of belief isn’t all that much for that portion of it.
Of course they’re traumatized? They got kidnapped and watched a man die. Things were not particularly goofy for them. Mike and Amazi-Girl were the only main cast members party to the goofiest stuff, which makes sense given their multiversal history together, and that these are the two goofiest, least realistic characters. For everyone else, they were kidnapped while half asleep, then witnessed a murder, then barely escaped.
THEY WATCHED A MAN KILL ANOTHER MAN WHY ARE YOU SURPRISED THEY ARE TRAUMATIZED
In between the strips of Blaine beating Ross to death we got jokes about Walky having a cute butt, Dina correcting (pro date rape??) frat bros about dinosaur facts and Amber breaking the laws of physics so she could drop from the ceiling multiple times. AND the whole time everyone was bantering to each other and their enemies, including Blaine, who just beat another man to death with a hammer.
So no, know I don’t know if it’s “of course” that they’re traumatized; the entire thing was goofy as hell for every character involved.
I was genuinely expecting our main characters to walk away from it saying “whoops doop dee doo, I guess those two are not a problem anymore” because that’s the tone the story itself set for this incident.
Wait wait wait. Are you telling me there were still jokes?? In a comedy strip explicitly patterned after Newspaper comics? Even while trying to tell a more dramatic story? Clearly this is a first for the medium, and you are right to be baffled and confused as to why characters in a funny comic are sad they witnessed murder.
And banter?? In superhero comics?? That is completely new to the medium and tonally throws me out! I wish we had instead had two solid months without jokes. That would have been good storytelling.
It was cartoonish, but a thing can be both parody and serious at the same time. Sometimes the parody or fantasy is the vehicle for the serious drama and insight, like the Lego Batman Movie.
I’ll say this: combining parody with somberness and genuine character growth is a very fine needle to thread and the kidnapping storyline didn’t do it for me in the slightest. I literally said “oh for fuck’s sake” out loud when I saw that Becky had poured her heart out on a twitter thread
Survivor’s guilt sucks. I hope Becky can talk to her about it, either to make a decision or to suggest talking to Amber about it, too, if Dorothy won’t take her word for it.
im not gonna read the comment section for a few days so im just gonna say that i admire dorothy and that trauma is difficult on everyone and it’s different for everyone
Dorothy…
If you’re bot willing to capitalize on truly tragic bullshit to achieve meaningful change, you may not be able to make it as a federal level politician.
jesus dorothy you wrote a personal essay days after that all went down? talk about grist for the mill…
though i understand this was all likely a mechanism for coping with everything for dorothy. i agree yes she shouldn’t play this as some kind of collegiate acceptance trump card, but declining yale because she feels guilty now does nothing, though it will certainly be interesting for the story! 🙂
To be fair I feel like American uni applications kind of ask you to do this. In the UK you literally just write why you’re interested in your major and maybe a little about relevant extra-curriculars (very similar to a job application). The American system seems to want you to be a lot more personal (please correct me if I’m wrong).
A bit. It’s especially true for the exclusive schools, where you’re trying to find a way to stand out among far more extremely well qualified applicants than the school can accept.
Reminds me of the time a co worker of mine asked me for advice on taking up an offer from his estranged Dad to pay for college. I said let him pay and he said “But he’s ignored me for so long, I don’t think I should”. I reaffirmed he should “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” and just take a freebie for once but he shut me down saying he wasn’t going to take it. Not sure if he ever went to college.
It’s hard to feel like your advancement is at another person’s expense. And like. She did a genuinely heroic thing, but Mike died, and a lot of her friends were hurt and traumatized even though she got her friends out of the worst of it. And she watched a man die. It’s not a triumphant moment of leadership for her, it was probably the worst day or her life. I get not wanting to build a brand on reliving that as a hero narrative.
oh my… that…. that paints the whole thing in very different colours.
I still think she should go ahead and go to Yale, but it is more difficult than going “Come on Dotty, you don’t have to stay to protect Joyce or whatever…”
This is sth else.
Okay, so putting everything else aside, can I just bask in the glory of the em-spacing in the third panel, now that everyone’s trying to gaslight us older Millennials into thinking en-spacing was always the way?
Double spaces between sentences is a weird American thing that nobody else does. It arguably looks better in a monospace font, y’know, on the typewriter, but not elsewhere, and of course computers tend to fuck it up anyway – so it’s dying out even in the US.
To be fair, prestigious institutions like Yale (or giant corporations like Google or Apple) get way, way, WAAAAY more applications and interest than they can ever possibly use or accept. I can tell you now that you may be in the nation’s top 5%, but it turns out that they’re only looking for the top 1%, unless something truly extraordinary happens to leapfrog your application to the top of the pile.
The hostage situation that Dorothy feels ashamed of for “exploiting”? That IS the extraordinary boost they were looking for. Something that tells the bigwigs that this person is special. I do understand where Dorothy’s coming from, but I think she’s making a big, BIG mistake. Every year, in real life, there are many thousands, perhaps TENS of thousands, of capable, hard-working and talented people who get passed over and overlooked, just because they lacked that something special and unique to catch the attention of the people in charge. Dorothy actually lucked out here; she was in a situation that proved her strength of spirit and ability to handle crisis situations AND it was on national television. She’s passing up an opportunity that many people would beg for, possibly even KILL for, to break out of the masses of anonymity and perhaps have your name really go down in history if her ultimate goal of becoming President becomes a reality.
I mean, the point is that the people who *are* accepted are also capable, talented, and hard-working. But if you’ve got (pulling numbers out of my ass…) 150,000 applications for about 2,000 spots available, a lot of qualified people are going to miss out.
A large part of those who get accepted are academically nothing special. Being the child of a former Yale graduate counts hugely on your application. Not officially, but the statistics don’t lie.
If you’ve got tens of thousands of capable, hard-working, talented people applying and only a thousand openings, it’s hard to say they’re making mistakes. When you’ve got more qualified applicants than you can take, what are you supposed to do?
It’s just a matter of finding a way to make yourself stand out from the crowd, so they notice you rather than any of the other equally capable people.
It doesn’t even have to be anything useful. HR folk and admissions officers spend a lot of time staring at a stack of best choices for a single slot and looking for some way to make a decision.
Bag Yale, Dorothy. As soon as everything was over, I am surprised the CIA, FBI or Army didnt come calling to recruit you. You’ve got some serious chops.
Put in 8 years with one of those agencies, get out and run for US senator from Indiana, get on all the “right” committees… you’ll be president before you’re 45.
I just woke up, so this might be a silly question; the way I’m reading it is that she was declined by Yale the first time until she submitted another application with the revision? Is that right? She actually was NOT accepted until she added that part about the hostage stuff?
I don’r think it was ever confirmed, but I believe you’re probably right that she was rejected when she applied during her senior year of high school and accepted when she reapplied. As to whether or not she included the hostage situation in her application or (as other commenters have indicated) admissions just heard about the incident on the news and decided she wasn’t a nobody, that’s not clear; although, her guilt about it would suggest that maybe she did use it.
So even if Dorothy *does* make the decision to go to Yale, wouldn’t her first term there not be until September? Since the semester already started and I don’t think joining mid-year is good for anyone?
Which makes this obviously an important character decision for Dorothy and a compelling story arc, but I don’t think we’re in danger of losing her presence in the comic?
This could be because I’m 30 and graduated in 2016 but I don’t get the whole Yale thing. Like how much does she know about the university and the courses? Is it a prestige thing (which she’s better off dropping now) or a genuine desire? Does she even really want to be president, enough to base all her choices around it?
Given some of the stress she’s shown in comic, I’d be wary about joining a more intense environment especially as she may find it harder to make friends and build a support network at this stage.
I say this as someone who had to take a year out at undergrad and was really glad I went to a uni I preferred the vibe of rather than continuing my Cambridge application.
An Ivy League school does tend to be a significant bump to one’s status. Even if Dorothy decides she doesn’t want to be president anymore, having Yale on her resume would open a lot of doors.
She wants to be president, and Yale is known for their very strong political science program. 3 out of the last 6 presidents went to Yale. Not to mention that a majority of the US Supreme Court went to Yale
My grandfather went to Yale Divinity School. In contrast to modern politicians, he was one of the most principled people I’ve ever met, and genuinely found his calling as a minister helping people in both postwar Japan and Korea.* He wasn’t perfect, but he was still an amazingly dedicated and wonderful individual. Rest in Peace, Bapa.
* As an aside, my grandfather is why I have a hard time painting all missionary work with the same brush. He was genuine and sincere about his religion and wanted others to join him, but to my knowledge none of the institutions he worked for excluded folks on the basis of their belief or not.
Further evidence that Dotty is _not_ok_. She seems to be rationalising her behaviour in a way that is neither healthy nor honest. I think our girl needs therapy, or at least a friend who she can talk to for real.
I’m not convinced the reason she hasn’t responded to the Yale letter is what she says it is here. I think she’s much more conflicted about her goals, about leaving all her friends to chase a political career. I think she regrets ending things with Walky etc etc.
As someone who applied to Harvard for undergrad 20 years ago – under pressure from parents as I had no realistic shot – and went through the interview process… this is exactly what it feels like. It’s also how applying for the Rhodes/Marshall scholarships feels. You need to either have connections/legacy or have some ridiculously good PR story or an athletics connection for 95% of applicants.
Okay hot take? I genuinely don’t think Dorothy should go to Yale. At least not until she’s had extensive sessions with a phycologist (or psychiatrist, she gives me the vibe of constant underlying anxiety) to work out her trauma from the kidnapping and, to a lesser but also very important extent, how to establish a healthy work like balance. A real psycholo/chiatrist, not the mediocre at best underpaid therapists she’s currently seeing at school. Bc otherwise she WILL have a breakdown at Yale, and potentially flunk out because of it. She’s already so stressed and wound up so incredibly tight at this state school, and at least she has a support network here. Going somewhere guaranteed to be even more stressful, surrounded by snobs, all alone, with all that unresolved trauma. It’s a powder keg. She WILL explode and it will be messy.
The only way for her to go to Yale next semester and not end up in disaster is if she withdraws for this semester and puts all her focus into therapy
And then there’s the fact she would be going there BECAUSE of the kidnapping, meaning every time she thinks about her lifetime of work and piling up achievements to get it, THIS would be on top. I am no therapist, but I cannot help but imagine that the hypothetical good one helping Dorothy would suggest that she not go.
Oh, yeah, Dorothy has “MASSIVE crash and burn out that takes years to even START recovering from” written all over her actions, and leaving for Yale (a high-stress environment hours away from her entire support network) would be a TERRIBLE choice. That she’s now thinking about it in terms of the kidnapping makes it worse, but this would be bad for her even if she’d gotten accepted for a transfer under normal circumstances.
To ealaborate: I don’t think this is survivor’s guilt or any kind of guilt for exploiting a tragedy. I think Dorothy submitted the reapplication with all that fresh on her mind, churning there like butter, hoping it would get her out of the pit at least a little. And then the acceptance came back and she was already more okay, and she was happy for the first 2 seconds and then her mind went to the journey she got through to get there and the journey culminated in That Day and suddenly it was That Day in her brain again.
And that’s how Dorothy found out it woudl be a bad idea for her to accept this acceptance.
I frankly don’t think there’s anything immoral on her part in this situation. Yes, she used a personal tragedy to get ahead, it hurt literally no-one. It’s just that now she’s stuck with this tragedy in the place where the pinnacle of her achievements goes, and – yeah let’s redo that.
it’s an understandable feeling.
Capitalizing on the grief of others is never a good feeling, unless you are one of those S(u^bags that likes hurting other people.
I don’t think it’s even about the grief of other people. I think it’s about her own grief and horror and trauma coming right back the minute she thinks about Yale now. Including horror AT others’ grief. THis is not DOrothy being immoral or moral, not her being guilty or deservedly guilty or whatever. This is trauma pure and simple.
I really don’t get where this guilt comes from, in a cold logical way both Becky and Amber should be the ones feeling guilty since their asshole dads endangered their friends and acquaintances. Dorothy would have been okay if she didn’t know either of them.
I should clarify: it’s good and correct that they DON’T feel guilty; because the blame is 100% on on the kidnappers and not the victims.
But if this scenario of “I feel guilt over what happened regardless of where the true blame lies” it’s weird to have Dorothy feel it, because her presence was completely incidental. She wasn’t the target; and she was only there to add to the potential body count. She was a faceless hostage as far as the “plan” went.
As for taking credit for leading her fellow prisoners to safety: she DID do that, so what’s wrong with taking credit?
She wrote an essay about a time in her life where she faced a challenge and she used her wits and cool head to prevail: there are no lies in that statement. Why feel bad about that?
not what i was expecting but i am not surprised !! dorothy seems like a very genuine person to me and that kind of get-ahead behavior is Icky.
Unfortunately it may ultimately be her downfall in her journey to becoming president lol
As much as I hate to admit it, Dorothy does have a good reason. When you think about it, that’s one he’ll of a psychological burden that would weigh on her for the rest of her life. Even if everyone affected uttered her to take the enrollment to Yale.
I stand by my comment on the comic before this that it would been a proper Becky assumption that Dorothy was girl crushing on Joyce now (actually deciding she should continue to look out for Joyce, but Becky filter here) and Becky would call her out on it.
I admit that this is very Dorothy reasoning, though mefeels it is partially, maybe a small part, excuse/justification.
Meh. She didn’t make anybody dead, she’s not even a related-yet-blameless reason (like Becky and Amber) of why any of those people are dead, she’d be morally fine in taking that in.
Yeah, primates like humans, chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys are just so stupid and under-evolved with their natural abiding sense of fairness, aren’t they? /s
Yes, I totally think every situation where someone is trying to be fair is stupid, and not just this specific situation where trying to be fair isn’t actually helping anyone. /s
Because I’m sure people have gotten into Yale for more bullshit reasons, and if Dorothy really thinks she can do good things with her career and Yale can help, she should take that opportunity regardless of the reason.
I can see both sides, but I think I agree. If Dorothy’s real motivation is to stay with her friends, which is what I had assumed, that may or may not be pragmatic relative to her goals, but I was certainly ready to cheer for that as a positive move in relation to her existing interpersonal relationships. But pragmatically, if Dorothy achieving her goals would do good, and if going to Yale would help Dorothy achieve her goals through networking opportunities, I can see that it might feel very uncomfortable to her to get accepted over that, but it’d still be advancing her goals. Other people (at Yale) were being shitty, sure, but her turning down getting accepted over shitty is not really making things substantially better. I can see why it would feel emotionally awful to go with it, and why she wouldn’t be okay with accepting it on those emotional terms – which are valid, we are emotional creatures at least roughly as much as we are logical creatures, after all – but pragmatically, this feels like unreasonable reasoning. Especially given that Dorothy is gunning for one of the most by-necessity pragmatic positions in the history of the world.
I think Dorothy, in the wake of that hostage situation, sees it similarly to Groucho Marx’ quip about “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member” – meaning that she feels like she’s not getting in on her own merits here, but rather because “Yale accepts hero student!” is astounding press for them to put out publicly.
I get being skeeved out by using a ton of other people’s tragedies to further your own life(and distance yourself from them). I can’t really say I’d do otherwise in her shoes.
Buuuuut Dotty performed impressively back then. How she handled herself and led them is something to be proud of. Impressive leadership in the face of colossal danger is worth recognising, celebrating, and leveraging.
When my best friend died, I had to reassess a lot of things about who I was and why I did anything as part of the grieving process. Which led me to understand a lot of things about myself that I couldn’t have when she was around.
For the rest of my life, this “enlightenment” will have been the result of the worst thing that happened to her.
So I understand where she’s coming from. But also, it’s inevitable. Denying yourself the good things that came out of tragedies devalues them. That’s when you make it about yourself and your personal journey. Take what you have been given. The price is already paid.
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“so if you want me gone, you’ll have to help me, like, oust Ron DeSantis”
Patreon comment that I hate just reposting but folks seemed to like it:
“I’m holding out for Joyce’s mom’s death”
…
wait no
hold on
Joyce’s Mom will probably eventually get brain cancer, and some of her last words will be about Trump only *faking* his death from cardiac arrest, and how he’ll soon be world president.
i had to google that. i thought it was real and he was dead. why you play with my feelings like that
is that not its own reward
That’s not the reason I was expecting. But it fits the persona she projects.
I was not expecting that amount of introspection from Dorothy. Not at all.
To me it looks more like imposter syndrome.
I think that Dorothy resubmitted her application and then had a moment of clarity. Does she want to be the person who leverages a situation that resulted in 3 people dying (even if more didn’t die because of her action) to get ahead? I don’t think so, not that way. If Yale had contacted her first on their own, I think she might feel differently. But going to them herself to ask for reconsideration crossed a line that she didn’t realize until after she wrote. It may be imposter syndrome, or simply wanting to earn it herself because of her own achievements.
And she does care about her friends, even if they do annoy the crap out of her. Leaving them now is not what she really wants to do. We’ve seen other people growing and changing, for good and ill. Why not Dorothy too?
I think it’s actually less that SHE crossed a line (she’s a freshman looking to get ahead) and more that THEY crossed a line. And she knew they would cross it, she expected them to cross it, it’s why she resubmitted. But it still hit different when they actually did and it was in front of her face.
I think I missed the part where leading a number of people to safety is not an achievement.
Leaders don’t provide perfection. They provide decisiveness and direction. Lead well a high enough proportion of the time and you are a good leader.
I respect Dorothy’s opinion here but I don’t share it.
She feels it’s like the “my roommate died so I get all As” myth except it actually happened to her
I suppose I would feel exactly the same way she did if, instead of just being mildly injured, my mother had died in that uninsured motorist accident, and I ended up squandering my college education fund by the settlement for that
(except that I found out after graduation that that’s how my parents paid so it wouldn’t matter either way but I’d feel a little bad)
I think Dorothy is going to go into a big speech about her reasons that will make her seem self-sacrificing and noble but she doesn’t want to admit the REAL reason: that she doesn’t want to leave her friends. That wouldn’t be Presidential and logical like all her decisions.
And like Danny at the beginning of the story she is going to give up her dreams for them, something no-one wants or asked for.
I’m hoping her friends can rally around for her and help her out here. Or she’ll be driving her kids off a cliff after another decade of self-sacrifice.
Dorothy’s bound to be a listless empty-nester someday, but that day should be in her 50s or 60s, not because she left all her friends behind.
(I mean “listless” as in low-energy and unmoored, she’s still going to make plenty of lists.)
I actually do think this is the real reason.
I also think this is therapeutic for her.
Given Becky and her friends wouldn’t WANT her to do that, I’m not sure how therapeutic it is.
I don’t think she wants to stay because she feels like she needs to take care of her friends, though perhaps she would frame it this way. I think she loves her friends and enjoys seeing them every day. She wouldn’t be staying for them. She’d be staying for her.
I also don’t think going to Yale is ESSENTIAL or even NECESSARY for her career plans.
I don’t think it’s self-sacrificing and noble. I think it’s that every time she looks at the acceptance letter she gets flashbacks and she’s not looking forward to how it will be when she’s actually there.
But this decision isn’t Presidential or logical either. Do you think politicians care why they win elections?
Meh. Get what you can girl. Keep chasing the bag. Mike at least would be cool about it.
He’d make biting sarcastic comments about her doing it to make her feel guilty.
…. not because he cared, but he’d sense the vulnerability. Sharks, blood, you know how it goes.
He would mock her mercilessly for this weird sacrifice that no one wants.
He would absolutely mock her regardless of her decision and changing her mind would only make him mock her harder.
He’d do both, 100%.
It’s okay if no one “wants” this sacrifice. I can’t fault her for not wanting Yale acceptance purchased with the blood of villains, even if to ME that sounds metal as fuck.
If you look at it, the white Yank mostly paying in villain’s blood is almost a step up
And now I am re-evaluating all the smothery stuff Dorothy has done as some sort of trauma response
You’re just now re-evaluating that. It was pretty clear from the start she was not okay. She just feels like she has to be the okay one.
Yup, Dorothy is really not OK.
Even her parents know her as the “responsible one” its a lot of pressure to always be the one being responsible. She probably needs to let go now and again and let someone else take the reins, like just let someone organise an activity or something that she’s not in charge of.
I think a lot of people knew she was not coping well, just many of us discounted how related to her trauma it’d be.
Which is strange considering how often Joyce, Becky, Amber and even Walky gets mentioned being traumatized by it but people forget that Dorothy and Sarah were there too for a dose of trauma as well.
I think that’s at least partially down to the fact that the pre-timeskip years already prime the audience to think of Joyce, Becky, Amber and (to a lesser extent) Walky as “characters with trauma,” but not as much to think of Dorothy and Sarah that way. Sarah’s got the backstory with Dana and the Raidah Gang, but as the years rolled on that got touched on less and less. Walky’s a bit of an outlier, given that “tragic backstory” was more often Sal’s department, but his having been Mike’s roommate accounts for a lot of that.
pre-time skip Dorothy already had to cope with rapist assaulting and being stabbed several times, no?
Don’t think she was ever stabbed, just that she saw Amber do some stabbing
I was saying the assaulter was stabbed. You may be OK with retribution, it’s still violence that you have to cope with.
Dorothy didn’t get stabbed but “Ryan” was definitely going to stab her. That alone is enough to be traumatic. Y’know on top of watching Amber cut up the guy.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/directory/
Yeah, but when a character acts like they have things under control, you can sometimes forget that “Oh yeah they probably were affected”
Heck, happens in real life too. Person acts stoic then “out of nowhere” shows cracks, causing people to go, “Oh crap right you were part of that. That all was… A front. Crap”
It may still fit though. The trauma response.
I have no doubt that Dorothy’s stated reasoning played a role in her decision.
It’s also possible, as other commenters have pointed out, that she has additional reasons to stay in Indiana that she won’t admit to others or possibly even to herself. (She’s crumbling under the combined stress of school and surviving a violent assault, she doesn’t want to leave her friends / support network / familiar surroundings, etc.)
She’s suffering this internal turmoil as a result and doesn’t know what to do about any of it. But instead of telling her friends about her own problems, she commits to solving their problems.
Dorothy!!! 🙁
Actions can have multiple equally true and valid motivations. I’d even go so far as to say MOST large actions (such as life changing decisions about where to go for education) usually have several motivations, including several that you aren’t consciously aware of or don’t consciously acknowledge (there is a distinction). Perhaps even all such actions have many motivations, I’ve certainly never done anything major for only one reason, but I cannot discount the possibility that somebody, somewhere has.
Just because other obvious motivations exist does not make the ones stated here untrue or invalid, these ones were clearly chosen to paint a specific picture and lead to certain conclusions while leaving out other important pieces of the puzzle, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t a significant factor in Dorothy’s consideration.
Yeah, I suspect they’re all true reasons.
The problem is that so far she’s only talking about / admitting to one of them. :-\
I mean that’s very blatantly what it is. Girls been spiraling. I think a lot of people miss that Dorothy is just as deeply traumatized as the rest of the group. Hell being the one to take charge and lead them out of a hostage situation might have given her the subconscious instinct of “if i don’t take control now everyone will die.” Which is irrational but, y’know trauma responses usually are.
I think she’s very Princess Carolyn. “My life’s a mess right now and i compulsively take care of others when i can’t take care of myself.”
Mhm
“Make life rue the day it thought it could give Dorothy Keener lemons!!!!”
“I’ll burn you house down! With the Lemons! I’ll get Carla to build a combustible lemon that burns your house down!!!”
Dorothy no
Good thing she’s telling Becky, the person must equipped to tell her that refusing Yals won’t do anything to help the victims of that day. Right, Becky? Right?
*most equipped
*refusing Yale
My first reaction was “okay, so that’s why Becky is the first to know. You know, plot reasons.”
Also Becky’s level of tact(lessness) means she will probably outrightly say “that’s dumb” and argue it, rather than leaving it alone
Let’s hope so! Come on Becky!
I really do want Becky to light her up for that. It’s a futile and wasteful gesture of martyrdom, and the people more directly impacted by those events will not benefit from it at all. Climb down off the cross, we need the wood, kind of thing.
Yeah, that speech is long overdue.
I had never heard that phrase, pope. In digging, I was doubly pleased to see it in a movie quote from 1992 …by Dolly Parton (Straight Talk).
Loved the banter, you can hear her voice:
‘Dr.’ Shirlee Kenyon (Dolly): Why even the Declaration of Independence only guaranties life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn’t say anything about fair. Doesn’t even say you have the right to be happy. Just to pursue it.
Female Caller: But no one appreciates me, and I try to be fair, and they don’t…
‘Dr.’ Shirlee Kenyon: Get down off the cross honey, somebody needs the wood!
Given how Becky has seemingly dealt with it so far, mainly by blatantly saying Joyce over-reacted, I’m inclined to agree. I really hope not, though.
It’s not about helping the victims. It’s because she doesn’t want to be accepted BECAUSE of that. That event was significantly traumatic for her and her friends and she immediately spun it around as a tool to get ahead in life. And I guess that grossed herself out.
and that’s how politics works.
but she doesn’t want to be a real politician, she wants to be the kind that only exists in movies and TV and the dreams of naive young people.
Oh that is DEFINITELY what she wants and she still seems to think “I want to be a politician” given the laundry scene a few days ago and “Mike Pence made it to the White House like this”, and ugh, it will HURT when she realizes that no, she truly doesn’t want to be the kind of person who can be a successful politician.
She might get away being in a more local position with that kid of inhibitions, maybe even up to governor depending on the state. The more money and power are involved, the more likely corruption will be a big problem.
I’ve seen people suggest she’d do much better as a judge than a president, and I’m inclined to agree. They certainly aren’t immune to corruption and are often elected, but they don’t have to be making quite the same moral tradeoffs to get things done on a regular basis, and they don’t need to bank on their charisma to get positions the same way a presidential candidate in particular needs to.
But ultimately, I think Dorothy’s likely to be someone who’d have trouble working within the system as it currently exists, too. She’s got a strong sense of her own morals and wants to make the world better, and that means when she comes up against the corruption and the way the system’s so thoroughly stacked against people, it’d hit her pretty dang hard.
Yup. Now she’s forced to face the cruel reality of a broken system that brings the worst out of everyone involved.
“All that is solid melts into air” indeed.
Technically that’d be sublimation, not melting.
The system isn’t broken, it’s working as intended. It just works for the rich, not us.
She clearly can’t stomach acting like a politician. I wonder if she’s made this connection and reconsidered the presidency thing yet.
Yeah, especially since the moment where we most clearly see her take initiative is this one:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/moment-2/
In other words, as I said downthread (before the refresher, though,) Dorothy saw Ross take a lethal blow, she saw him get back up and attack Blaine, and she’s the one who directed the others to leave them fighting it out and go rather than try and stop Ross being murdered. (How would this have worked? Probably it wouldn’t, and probably instead of incapacitating both of the kidnappers, they would all have been screwed. But I can see Trauma Brain reinterpreting it as “I chose to leave a man to die and spun this into an acceptance to Yale, and oh no I don’t like this.”)
Another insightful comment and thanks for the relevant citation!
I reread the arc – which, woof, is a lot – and Dorothy is clearly trying to manipulate Blaine and Toedad against each other, and then when the hammer falls she realizes what she’s done.
So even before the big “time to escape” moment, she probably is taking on some guilt for causing the violence to start.
Oh, oof, yeah, that is what’s going on there and you’re right. OW.
Granted, “Ross believes Amber when she says she’s AG / Blaine wanted Amber THERE and refuses to believe her” probably would’ve ended terribly either way, but. Ouch. Yeah rereading it knowing how it ends… yeesh, no wonder she’s traumatized over this and doesn’t want to go to Yale for it.
It doesn’t even have to be that. National leaders sometimes have to make decisions in which every choice is lethal or destructive for someone else. And not everyone can accept that level of responsibility. Even if Dorothy thinks she made the right choice, I can understand her not wanting to ever again have to decide who will die.
Wow this thread. Definitely insightful.
Most insightful comment.
And she thinks she has what it takes to succeed in politics…
I also think accepting the offer would be a recipe straight to imposter syndrome. She’d immediately feel like she only got accepted because of the publicity, not because of anything of her own merit.
It’s not necessarily about the victims. It could very reasonably be about always knowing that the only reason she’s there is because of those events. You could take that as either “I don’t want to always remember I’m only there because Mike died” or as “I don’t want to always know I didn’t make it on my own merits” either of which would be a perfectly reasonable reactions.
Yeah, that’s how I’m reading it. It’s about no-one but herself, and that’s perfectly valid.
You are very stupidly straightforward to a T, dotty.
which would be the absolute worst match for a politician in real life (99% of the time). But it’s fiction. You could still make it.
“trauma is just grist for my mill” not working for you anymore, eh? dumbingofage.com/advice/
can’t get to the top without stepping over anyone, dead or alive unfortunately
but yeah she needs more therapy and maybe some calming medication or just to get high occasionally maybe and hope she can find a fulfilling career
“or just get high occasionally”
Meredith finally gets her time with the main cast!
The hero we’ve been waiting for.
Is it that Dorothy doesn’t want it to be the reason, or that she feels an immense amount of guilt because of using that reason and it working? She did something, ironically that wouldn’t be out of league for your average politician: she took something tragic and used it to get ahead for her own professional gain. It honestly feels like that has been why she’s ramped up on helping everyone.
The guilt has manifested.
Dorothy was always helpful, but yeah it does seem like she is more aggressive with it lately.
that… wow, it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah this is a point in favour of my “Dorothy could never become president” read, because exploiting the tragedies and personal losses of others to advance your career is how you do that. This is politics 101 shit.
it could be a bit of both but it is quite heavy to think about in retrospect
It might have also been a partially “I want to get the hell out of here” after all of that, so redid the application, only to end up with regret after her mind cooled down some. Since Yale has been her dream, she might have applied just to have the feeling that something finally good happened to her after all the traumatic stuff, only for it to happen and her to realize that it didn’t relieve the trauma.
Instead thinking about Yale is instantly tied with thinking about the reason she got in -> that day. Instead of helping it got worse! So yeah probably a good idea to not.
Also remember, her “get us all out of here” plan that day almost worked, until they let their guard down and a wild Faz appeared and the Blaine took Joyce hostage and got away. If you go back and re-read that part, you’ll see Dorothy unravel right along with her plan.
She’s got to feel extra guilt about that. Maybe that’s why she’s been doubling down on
motheringhelping Joyce specifically?I respect it. I don’t super respect resubmitting it with that particular alteration in the first place, but whatever.
that said, I think she should continue re-applying to Yale and/or others without that
That’s more on Yale to me. What kind of stuck up institution needs you to overcome literal, life threatening adversity before they accept you? Dorothy was a straight A student who regularly volunteered before she even started at IU. That somehow wasn’t enough probably because her family isn’t rich. I’d say fuck it. I’m gonna get ahead, cause the system is definitely working against you.
You realize it isn’t actually Yale, don’t you? It’s a made-up Yale that Willis created for plot reasons. We have no idea what the real Yale would do, so you blaming them is silly.
Of course I’m not blaming real Yale. I also assume the real IU doesn’t have such an abundant night time predation problem, but that doesn’t’ stop me from commenting about it.
and likewise sirksome is blaming this fictional yale (although tbh this seems realistic enough for real life yale)
To be fair though, the real Yale probably would do something similar. It’s a believable plot point. The competitive college admissions system basically forces people to capitalize on their trauma because “overcame adversity” is just another line on the resume to set you apart from the other thousands of non-donor-family straight-A students in the country.
I mean ivy league schools are pretty reliably shitty
Oh yeah, I don’t mean she’s making the best decision, but it is a not-the-best decision that I would also probably make. I mean, not literally, schools aren’t really ranked the same way here as in the US so idgaf about that, but with my own schooling I turned down money (a bursary) I hella should have taken because the one giving it skeeved me out, even though I wouldn’t have had any connection with that person afterward.
so I get the impulse and respect it, but yeah, she probably should have (and should still) take(n) it
She almost died, other characters were using what happened as fuel to accomplish things, makes personal and narrative sense to follow suit.
Also, not sarcastic, not shitting on Dorothy- DID she lead them out of that situation? That wasn’t my read but maybe I missed or forgot something
She was great! https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/unbound/
She took charge in this strip and this one.
this and the surrounding comics imply that dorothy was the one who came up with the plan to chew out of the tape and wait for the right moment, and directed the others throughout: http://www.dumbingofage.com/unbound/
always someone faster with the links, lol.
She’s the one who figured out they could probably get one person un-duct-taped and chose Joyce (because berserker rage would do in a pinch when they didn’t have any actual fighters), and she’s the one who, when the actual fight broke out, realized this was their chance and spurred the others to get going. So she did have a pretty significant role in getting them out of the murder basement, because that in particular meant the others didn’t all freeze in response to one of their kidnappers attacking the other with lethal intent. It probably would’ve ended really BADLY if they’d still been in the basement once Blaine realized there were witnesses.
It also means Dorothy got into Yale specifically for the moment where she saw Becky’s dad be murdered and left him to be attacked. Yeah, I can see her having second thoughts about that when she realized it worked. (Realistically there was nothing those kids could have done to really prevent it – we saw how hard Blaine was against them when they were all un-duct taped and had a superhero – and I really doubt Ross would have been anything but another obstacle towards Becky if they HAD stopped that attack, but rational logic has no place in traumatic guilt.)
Thank you (and Liz and Leorale and Lauralot)! I haven’t reread the super traumatic parts in a while.
And yeah I absolutely understand why Dorothy would second guess it once it worked.
*miz. thought they were all L names for some reason
Neither had I, honestly, I just remembered those particular strips because they’re very much a Peak Dorothy Moment.
Which, in fitting with Willis taking awesome moments and then down the line making us regret cheering that exact moment because the character’s traumatized by their actions there… here we are. When I put it that way, Mike dying IMMEDIATELY after the rooftop scene cut out makes perfect sense.
At least there’s very little Amber can hang her self-loathing on with “I made me.” At least there’s that.
I like to think Mike picked that exact moment to shuffle off this mortal coil specifically because it would hit the hardest.
Mike, somehow breaking through the coma as his passes, Ethan clutching his hand: “…promise me…everyone…everyone…will feel like shit for a whole semester…”
I posted this in reply to another comment, but it makes sense here too:
Dorothy must feel guilty that she couldn’t save Joyce after an unexpected variable (Faz) derailed the original plan. If you re-read that chapter after the lull of waiting for the authorities to show up, you can watch her confidence evaporate.
Maybe that’s why she’s been trying so hard to help Joyce, post-skip.
How are you gonna be president if you’re not gonna prop yourself up on the corpses of your past?
Naw but I really respect it.
I get why Dorothy feels guilty, but maybe she shouldn’t. If Yale is evaluating people fairly and as they should, its not the fact that Dorothy was in a hostage situation that got her ahead, but the fact that she was able to be a calm rational leader in such an extreme environment. She wouldn’t be getting in because of the horrors of that day, but because of her own innate qualities (they just happened that something horrible had to happen for them to be readily apparent).
I mean yeah but, it’s Yale. Ivy leagues love that trauma shit, it’s fantastic PR
I don’t think you can tell her trauma response that. SHe’d been working her whole life to get into Yale and now that she’s actually getting in it’s because of THAT and that’s going to be at the forefront of her thoughts all the time while she’s also isolated from all the people she shared that experience with. Dorothy is making the right decision for her own mental health, for once 😡
Dorothy, your survivor’s guilt isn’t gonna help anybody, least of all you.
Sweetie, they’ll be okay if you leave. I promise. I’m sure that’s something that she’ll get to accepting as part of her coping with her trauma (which seems like her arc this ‘season’ and I’m into it). Not that you’ll ever leave because this semester will never end and you have until May to respond to this acceptance is my understanding from an admittedly short look at Yale’s website.
I don’t think it’s about survivor’s guilt or what will happen to everyone else. I think it’s about what will happen to HER if she goes and this is the reason she got in. Like, you think Dorothy won’t be thinking about HOW she got in all the time? Her entire life has been working to get into Yale. This shit cherry on top of actually pretty good cake is absolutely not what she needs, especially in isolation from everyone else who was there.
Of course instead she’s going to spend all her time thinking “I could have achieved my goal. I could be in Yale. But I self-sabotaged again.”
That would make sense but that’s not going to help anyone, least of all her, either.
And this is why she can’t be a politician.
Yep.
Ah, and here we see the Great Filter that keeps the best out of politics, and invites the worst.
She can totally be a politician, but probably not a president. Even Jimmy Carter got his hands dirty.
Still, people can and should be part of the process that might not necessarily reach the top.
Then they next guy derailed the hostage negotiations, and did Iran-Contra.
…Oh.
Okay, I was right about the decision she made, but I was very wrong about the reason why she did so. Or at least, this particular angle to it caught me off guard.
I wonder whether she’d have made the same decision if Mike hadn’t died, and it was just the deaths of two people who had repeatedly made her friends’ lives a living hell. Although even then Ross was someone Becky genuinely loved and cared about, horrible as he was. Maybe if it had been just Blaine.
Hm…I can actually understand it, well being accepted into Yale and turning them down out of principle is just as good.
Wasted time on sentimentality and let things hold her down.
But I guess we’ll still see her around.
Dorothy, that’s a very noble reason to make that decision. I fully understand why you made it.
Now shove that mindset up your ass and go to goddamn Yale.
The world’s unfair. Usually its unfair to your detriment, because you’re not rich, and everything’s tilted in your direction. But you didn’t ask for them to do this, you didn’t demand it, you didn’t actively use it. When the world gives you a fucking break, you fucking take it.
(Okay, yes, she did ask for it a bit, but unless she put in the cover letter “be nice to me because i was in a harrowing situation where a lot of parents got killed” I’m still putting things in her favor)
From my reading she just resubmitted what she already had sent in, no alterations, but Yale’s board of admissions now went “Oh, Dorothy Keener, you mean the girl who saved all those Indiana nobodies from those wackjobs? Sure, we’ll take her!” instead of “Dorothy who lmao, NAH”
Well, she stated that she was updating her resume pretty much straight out of the hell cave, which I guess is what she resubmitted : https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/05-this-was-halloween/personalgrowth/
Oh right, that.
I wasn’t sure how to take that then (it’s clearly funny, but is it a joke?) and I’m even less sure how to take it now. Dammit, Dorothy.
Is it noble?
She’s always felt strongly that a position of power is how she could do the most good for the world. Hell, she even explicitly advised Becky to be mercenary in her dealings with Robin.
But now that it’s her chance to make a difference, she’s suddenly squeamish about the means? And the means aren’t even that bad in this case. This moral stance of hers doesn’t un-kill those people.
was gonna say this. idk how comfortable i would be with going somewhere that rejected me, and then only accepted after i went through harrowing trauma that resulted in multiple deaths
Totes bruh. The irony is that getting accepted in is realistically mostly a matter of random chance or being randomly born into established wealth/power to begin with, so getting the offer would be nothing to be proud of or follow through with anyway.
She’s not fitted for yale anyway. No old money, a rich nemesis in Ryan, too much pressure in IU already. It would’nt benefit her, and we know that to go to the top of the state, she’d need to drop precisely the things that qualifie her as a less shitty politician than the others, so it won’t benefit the world either.
I don’t think it’s a noble reason. I think it’s a “wait wait I think I should put brakes on burning down what remains of my mental health” decision. And she’s right to make it.
Ten years ago, I could have written : “this.” under your post. Alas, I’m not young enough to pretend to be young enough, and just not old enough to assume being outdated.
Life is not a bucket and you are not a crab. Dorothy, don’t let you guilt hold you back.
I don’t think it’s necessarily guilt that’s holding her back, as much as an abiding sense of fairness. In her eyes, it doesn’t seem fair that she’s the only one who got any real benefit from the events that transpired last semester while her friends get the short end with emotional-lock up, becoming orphaned and even worse.
If only Yale gave her something she can share with all her friends. An acceptance letter is hardly worth anything when cut up and distributed among friends you hold near and dear.
Dorothy, if you genuinely want to be a successful politician, you’ll have to learn to take your wins even if they feel dirty; in fact especially if they feel dirty. This comments section has long pointed out (and I agree) that you’re not cut out to president of the USA because you want to make sure you don’t compromise your morals; and realistically there’s no such thing as a head of state in any country on this planet that hasn’t done a problematic compromise to get to that level of power.
I should note that this is a condemnation against heads of state and governments as they are; rather than one castigating Dorothy.
Though given the complete shitshow that was the last US presidency and the current shitshow regarding the attempted coup; it feels more and more naive of Dorothy to try to enter that arena thinking she can keep her nose clean the whole way.
Okay but imagine what being in Yale, alone, without her friends (without the people who had gone through That with her), with her admission as a constant reminder of that day, would be like for her.
This is not about being a politician, this is about survival, at this point.
Her plan since the beginning of the comic was always to go Yale, “alone and without her friends”, as you put it.
If staying close to her friends so she can micromanage every minutae of their lives is a maladaptive way of coping then it’s just that: maladaptive.
Regardless of her reasons, I have a feeling Dorothy would become quickly disillusioned with politics once she finds out regardless of party or leaning just how much of the job is devoted to fund raising.
She seems to already have a good grasp on what politics is like, so she probably already knows about the requirement to fundraise almost constantly.
It’s incredible how her dream survived both de Santo’s lifes…
I suspect she’s very aware, but wants to change politics by being better than that.
I feel like Dorothy likes fundraising (or at least has at some point convinced herself that she likes it, ie while volunteering in high school or something).
But yeah I think she would both be bad at and dislike whatever you’d call like, upper politics. senators presidents et al
“Something I can do for the dead… Then it is to win! I must keep winning to attain my dream. The same one they clung to, and risked their lives for!! To realize my dream, I will perch on top of their corpses.. It is a blood-smeared dream, after all. I don’t regret or feel guilty about it.. But to risk thousands of lives while never getting myself dirty. It’s not a dream that can be so easily realized!” – Griffith
I don’t think Dorothy would keep hold of the Crimson Behelit for more than like, five seconds
She would be actively trying to get rid of that thing
(As well she might, it’s gross)
Interesting the Yales’s way of approval. She sent the application and scroll your life, news, to see if your are eligible.
This is scary, and a huge price Dorothy have to pay for entrance. If it’s true, Yale is the chance of her life.
I should have said this yesterday, but I didn’t read the comic yesterday.
And now having skimmed the comments from yesterday and not seeing any touching on what popped into my head, I’ll do so now (though I do think she should go to Yale, I figured she wouldn’t, and the reason she gives today is understandable).
Regarding Becky finding the letter on the floor in a mess, 6 possibilities came to mind after finding the last strip we saw Dorothy’s desk (it was when Walky came to talk, and I will say now that we saw a sheet of paper with folds sitting precariously on the desk near Becky’s pile of dirty clothes):
1. Someone snooped in their room. I find this highly unlikely.
2. Dorothy punched the wall and the mess occurred. While I think it’s very possible she punched the wall, I’m pretty sure she would notice said mess.
3. Dorothy is washing Becky’s clothes during her teach-Joyce-how-to-behave-inappropriately-in-public field trip, and she caused the mess when gathering the clothes. I’m reasonably sure she’d notice the mess with this, too.
4. The same as 3, only the mess was caused by her closing the door, hence why she didn’t notice the mess. The issue with that is while the piece of paper that I assume was the letter looked like it would fall over easily, nothing else did.
5. Dorothy caused the mess, probably by punching the wall, didn’t feel like dealing with it, and is pretending to be surprised. What doesn’t work with this idea is that would mean she chose to ignore the stuff that fell while simultaneously picking up the dirty clothes. Also deliberately lying to Becky about causing the mess for seemingly no reason.
6. The same as 5, but she left the mess on purpose and deliberately lied to Becky specifically hoping for this scenario so she could talk to someone about it without bringing it up herself. The problem with this idea is why not bring it up if she really wants to talk about it and why Becky as opposed to Joyce (though while writing this I realized that Dorothy really doesn’t have a lot of people she could talk to about this).
Anyway, that’s my over analytical thought process on the previous day’s comic’s topic that I didn’t notice anyone discussing in my hasty skimming of the comments.
Does anyone have any thoughts?
7. Paper shoved into the back of a drawer with the intention of not looking at it any time soon has the unfortunate habit of working itself up over the back wall of that drawer over time, and land on the floor to be found when you least want to see it.
… I should really start throwing out such papers right away XD
8.Joyce came in to grab Becky’s dirty clothes for another round in the laundry room and was too horny to care about the mess.
9. Same but Joyce saw the letter and made the mess bc she lost her temper.
Number 10:
Becky snoops through Dorothy’s shit
yeah why are we leaving out the most obvious – oh, right, unbelievable charity to becky, none to dorothy, what was I thinking
Maybe because Dorothy accepts it?
Not sure how “none to Dorothy” applies here, though I guess if we’re talking about reaction to her over the last week or so it makes sense.
@Mr D: the “Someone snooped in their room” includes all possibilities including Becky. I find it unlikely that anyone, including Becky, would snoop in their room simply because there should be nothing anyone thinks is worth snooping for. There arguably was something snoop worthy, but I don’t believe anyone would believe there was based on either Dorothy’s or Becky’s behavior.
@SDRainbow: I didn’t leave out the most obvious. It was the very first option I mentioned. I just wrote it to include all possibilities and didn’t think I needed to name anyone specifically when I find everyone equally unlikely.
6.1. Freudian slip. She really wants to talk about it AND she really DOESN’T want to talk about it. She left the letter on top and doesn’t recall doing it.
I, uh, I think Occam’s razor indicates 2 or 2.1: Dorothy didn’t punch any walls but due to extreme distraction did just leave out her acceptance letter after a session of “regretful staring” and then got the sudden lightbulb of “I will teach Joyce about What Makes You A Criminal in 2077”, grabbed her laundry, and headed for Joyce Town
and the letter hit the floor due to air currents, as letters often do?
like, not everything is a weird psychological game. No one here is guilty of sin and probably this is not any more part of Dorothy’s trauma response than her…everything she’s doing?
Possibly had it out for that “regretful staring” when she was interrupted by Walky, which led to the sudden lightbulb.
The problem with that is a reasonable person would not call a single letter on the floor a mess, let alone Becky who had a pile of laundry on the floor big enough to hide in.
This is very much my own personal opinion but: who gives a fuck about Blaine or Ross?
In-universe they were both shitty abusive parents who made their children’s lives better by dying.
On a meta level their stupid Evil League of Evil Dads was so cartoonishly over the top that I could not take it seriously for one second. Between the costumes and the dialogue; it really felt more like a batman parody than any conclusion to the stroylines being wrapped up. In spite of that, as the audience we’re supposed to be sad and shocked Mike died and accept that every single one of the kidnapped characters us now traumatized.
Yeah, it’s a bit awkward how for so many of the characters it has become this major axis around which their characters have developed, but as the audience looking in it just felt pretty nonsensical.
…Are you saying it would make more sense if the kidnapped characters shrugged it off? I mean, seeing even a stranger get killed in front of me would leave me pretty messed up, never mind if my own life were threatened.
I’m saying it would have been better if they hadn’t been kidnapped at all, together, in daylight, in a crowd. Their kidnapping makes sense if we’re suspending our disbelief to allow for cartoon villainy; but then there’s real consequences (psychological trauma).
To be fair, their kidnapping didn’t occur in daylight. It did happen in a crowd, but it also occurred in a drowsy, chaotic crowd that was woken up in the middle of the night by a fire alarm. I think people in the crowd could be forgiven for not paying attention due to the chaos. Everything else such as the chase and fight scenes, I’ll cop to them being cartoony.
I agree with most of what you’re saying but… people have let people get murdered and heard screaming for minutes/hours and didn’t report it because “someone was probably over reacting/ not our place/ oh look they quieted down now” so my suspension of belief isn’t all that much for that portion of it.
Bad Horse is both better and eviller than them, how very dare you
Of course they’re traumatized? They got kidnapped and watched a man die. Things were not particularly goofy for them. Mike and Amazi-Girl were the only main cast members party to the goofiest stuff, which makes sense given their multiversal history together, and that these are the two goofiest, least realistic characters. For everyone else, they were kidnapped while half asleep, then witnessed a murder, then barely escaped.
THEY WATCHED A MAN KILL ANOTHER MAN WHY ARE YOU SURPRISED THEY ARE TRAUMATIZED
In between the strips of Blaine beating Ross to death we got jokes about Walky having a cute butt, Dina correcting (pro date rape??) frat bros about dinosaur facts and Amber breaking the laws of physics so she could drop from the ceiling multiple times. AND the whole time everyone was bantering to each other and their enemies, including Blaine, who just beat another man to death with a hammer.
So no, know I don’t know if it’s “of course” that they’re traumatized; the entire thing was goofy as hell for every character involved.
I was genuinely expecting our main characters to walk away from it saying “whoops doop dee doo, I guess those two are not a problem anymore” because that’s the tone the story itself set for this incident.
Wait wait wait. Are you telling me there were still jokes?? In a comedy strip explicitly patterned after Newspaper comics? Even while trying to tell a more dramatic story? Clearly this is a first for the medium, and you are right to be baffled and confused as to why characters in a funny comic are sad they witnessed murder.
And banter?? In superhero comics?? That is completely new to the medium and tonally throws me out! I wish we had instead had two solid months without jokes. That would have been good storytelling.
It was cartoonish, but a thing can be both parody and serious at the same time. Sometimes the parody or fantasy is the vehicle for the serious drama and insight, like the Lego Batman Movie.
Also, yeah, fuck Blaine and Ross. But it couldn’t be easy to watch anyone die.
I’ll say this: combining parody with somberness and genuine character growth is a very fine needle to thread and the kidnapping storyline didn’t do it for me in the slightest. I literally said “oh for fuck’s sake” out loud when I saw that Becky had poured her heart out on a twitter thread
Survivor’s guilt sucks. I hope Becky can talk to her about it, either to make a decision or to suggest talking to Amber about it, too, if Dorothy won’t take her word for it.
im not gonna read the comment section for a few days so im just gonna say that i admire dorothy and that trauma is difficult on everyone and it’s different for everyone
Dorothy…
If you’re bot willing to capitalize on truly tragic bullshit to achieve meaningful change, you may not be able to make it as a federal level politician.
jesus dorothy you wrote a personal essay days after that all went down? talk about grist for the mill…
though i understand this was all likely a mechanism for coping with everything for dorothy. i agree yes she shouldn’t play this as some kind of collegiate acceptance trump card, but declining yale because she feels guilty now does nothing, though it will certainly be interesting for the story! 🙂
I like to think she did it at the same time that Walky went to his midterm, that’d be cute and a nice juxtaposition.
To be fair I feel like American uni applications kind of ask you to do this. In the UK you literally just write why you’re interested in your major and maybe a little about relevant extra-curriculars (very similar to a job application). The American system seems to want you to be a lot more personal (please correct me if I’m wrong).
A bit. It’s especially true for the exclusive schools, where you’re trying to find a way to stand out among far more extremely well qualified applicants than the school can accept.
Reminds me of the time a co worker of mine asked me for advice on taking up an offer from his estranged Dad to pay for college. I said let him pay and he said “But he’s ignored me for so long, I don’t think I should”. I reaffirmed he should “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” and just take a freebie for once but he shut me down saying he wasn’t going to take it. Not sure if he ever went to college.
Aaand here’s the meltdown. (???)
It’s hard to feel like your advancement is at another person’s expense. And like. She did a genuinely heroic thing, but Mike died, and a lot of her friends were hurt and traumatized even though she got her friends out of the worst of it. And she watched a man die. It’s not a triumphant moment of leadership for her, it was probably the worst day or her life. I get not wanting to build a brand on reliving that as a hero narrative.
This is absolutely the most Dorothy reason possible to crush your own hopes and dreams underfoot
That’s more altruistic
Still kinda sucks
HUG HER!
Oh shit, she’s got survivor’s guilt. Figures.
Well it’s a way better reason than sticking around to babysit Joyce
It’s good to be eighteen and question what you’ve always thought you wanted. I mean, it hurts like hell, but it’s good.
Willis, are you aware that the shading on the back of Dorothy’s head kiiiiiinda looks like a ghost?
Ohhhhh, she has some fierce Survival’s Guilt.
oh my… that…. that paints the whole thing in very different colours.
I still think she should go ahead and go to Yale, but it is more difficult than going “Come on Dotty, you don’t have to stay to protect Joyce or whatever…”
This is sth else.
Okay, so putting everything else aside, can I just bask in the glory of the em-spacing in the third panel, now that everyone’s trying to gaslight us older Millennials into thinking en-spacing was always the way?
(Sorry, fifth panel.)
Double spaces between sentences is a weird American thing that nobody else does. It arguably looks better in a monospace font, y’know, on the typewriter, but not elsewhere, and of course computers tend to fuck it up anyway – so it’s dying out even in the US.
First-wave Millennial here. The only time I end sentences with double spaces is on my phone, which replaces that with a period and a single space.
Dorothy, that’s ridiculous. Get yer butt to Yale and out of this comic.
Wait, Yale suddenly wanted to *have* her after the hostage situation? Yikes.
To be fair, prestigious institutions like Yale (or giant corporations like Google or Apple) get way, way, WAAAAY more applications and interest than they can ever possibly use or accept. I can tell you now that you may be in the nation’s top 5%, but it turns out that they’re only looking for the top 1%, unless something truly extraordinary happens to leapfrog your application to the top of the pile.
The hostage situation that Dorothy feels ashamed of for “exploiting”? That IS the extraordinary boost they were looking for. Something that tells the bigwigs that this person is special. I do understand where Dorothy’s coming from, but I think she’s making a big, BIG mistake. Every year, in real life, there are many thousands, perhaps TENS of thousands, of capable, hard-working and talented people who get passed over and overlooked, just because they lacked that something special and unique to catch the attention of the people in charge. Dorothy actually lucked out here; she was in a situation that proved her strength of spirit and ability to handle crisis situations AND it was on national television. She’s passing up an opportunity that many people would beg for, possibly even KILL for, to break out of the masses of anonymity and perhaps have your name really go down in history if her ultimate goal of becoming President becomes a reality.
If tens of thousands of capable, hard-working, talented people get overlooked, then I reckon it’s really those bigwigs that are making the mistakes.
I mean, the point is that the people who *are* accepted are also capable, talented, and hard-working. But if you’ve got (pulling numbers out of my ass…) 150,000 applications for about 2,000 spots available, a lot of qualified people are going to miss out.
A large part of those who get accepted are academically nothing special. Being the child of a former Yale graduate counts hugely on your application. Not officially, but the statistics don’t lie.
I think that it even figures in officially. Legacy admissions.
The family being donors might play a less official role.
But if you’re trying to fight for the rest of the spaces, that’s where you need something to stand out.
If you’ve got tens of thousands of capable, hard-working, talented people applying and only a thousand openings, it’s hard to say they’re making mistakes. When you’ve got more qualified applicants than you can take, what are you supposed to do?
It’s just a matter of finding a way to make yourself stand out from the crowd, so they notice you rather than any of the other equally capable people.
It doesn’t even have to be anything useful. HR folk and admissions officers spend a lot of time staring at a stack of best choices for a single slot and looking for some way to make a decision.
But we also won’t her to leave. At least, me.
We also want her to succeed and become America’s least awful president. If she doesn’t go, she’ll come to regret the decision.
Are you trying to tell us something, alt-text?
Bag Yale, Dorothy. As soon as everything was over, I am surprised the CIA, FBI or Army didnt come calling to recruit you. You’ve got some serious chops.
Put in 8 years with one of those agencies, get out and run for US senator from Indiana, get on all the “right” committees… you’ll be president before you’re 45.
I just woke up, so this might be a silly question; the way I’m reading it is that she was declined by Yale the first time until she submitted another application with the revision? Is that right? She actually was NOT accepted until she added that part about the hostage stuff?
I don’r think it was ever confirmed, but I believe you’re probably right that she was rejected when she applied during her senior year of high school and accepted when she reapplied. As to whether or not she included the hostage situation in her application or (as other commenters have indicated) admissions just heard about the incident on the news and decided she wasn’t a nobody, that’s not clear; although, her guilt about it would suggest that maybe she did use it.
I don’t think it’s guilt. I think it’s horror.
Yup.
I wonder how Danny will react if/when he finds out that Dorothy considered turning down Yale. I think it will be funny
It would be ironic if he didn’t really care much. Having moved on like Dotty wanted him to.
…somehow, I didn’t expect this. But I’d probably do the same if I was in her shoes. That does feel pretty icky.
Survivor guilt with a large order of ethics and side order of morality. Yeah, I can see it. Valid reason also.
Being unwilling to climb a pile of corpses to get to the top only proves that Dorothy isn’t presidential material.
Good for her.
Yup. Now she just has to figure out how to climb out of the ruins of her carefully laid plans for the future.
Daaaaaaaaaang.
Dorothy, if Hungry Burger can get support after 21 years, you can go to Yale on the back of a couple corpses.
Is that a Yugi-Oh reference? That name brings back childhood memories.
Makes sense! Dorothy’s got a lot going on up there!
So even if Dorothy *does* make the decision to go to Yale, wouldn’t her first term there not be until September? Since the semester already started and I don’t think joining mid-year is good for anyone?
Which makes this obviously an important character decision for Dorothy and a compelling story arc, but I don’t think we’re in danger of losing her presence in the comic?
So the big question seems to be, if she just hasn’t responded, is she past the deadline? Can she still accept?
This could be because I’m 30 and graduated in 2016 but I don’t get the whole Yale thing. Like how much does she know about the university and the courses? Is it a prestige thing (which she’s better off dropping now) or a genuine desire? Does she even really want to be president, enough to base all her choices around it?
Given some of the stress she’s shown in comic, I’d be wary about joining a more intense environment especially as she may find it harder to make friends and build a support network at this stage.
I say this as someone who had to take a year out at undergrad and was really glad I went to a uni I preferred the vibe of rather than continuing my Cambridge application.
An Ivy League school does tend to be a significant bump to one’s status. Even if Dorothy decides she doesn’t want to be president anymore, having Yale on her resume would open a lot of doors.
She wants to be president, and Yale is known for their very strong political science program. 3 out of the last 6 presidents went to Yale. Not to mention that a majority of the US Supreme Court went to Yale
Though Clinton went to Yale Law as a grad student, which is probably a better plan to follow than either of the Bushes.
Probably true for the Court as well, though I haven’t dug deep.
If you go for the advanced degree, that’s what matters, not your undergrad school.
My grandfather went to Yale Divinity School. In contrast to modern politicians, he was one of the most principled people I’ve ever met, and genuinely found his calling as a minister helping people in both postwar Japan and Korea.* He wasn’t perfect, but he was still an amazingly dedicated and wonderful individual. Rest in Peace, Bapa.
* As an aside, my grandfather is why I have a hard time painting all missionary work with the same brush. He was genuine and sincere about his religion and wanted others to join him, but to my knowledge none of the institutions he worked for excluded folks on the basis of their belief or not.
Ok, this is seriously weird.
Further evidence that Dotty is _not_ok_. She seems to be rationalising her behaviour in a way that is neither healthy nor honest. I think our girl needs therapy, or at least a friend who she can talk to for real.
Which part do you think is dishonest?
I’m not convinced the reason she hasn’t responded to the Yale letter is what she says it is here. I think she’s much more conflicted about her goals, about leaving all her friends to chase a political career. I think she regrets ending things with Walky etc etc.
It’s not as simple as she lays it out here.
Dorothy’s proclamation was so surprising that even her freckles were surprised.
As someone who applied to Harvard for undergrad 20 years ago – under pressure from parents as I had no realistic shot – and went through the interview process… this is exactly what it feels like. It’s also how applying for the Rhodes/Marshall scholarships feels. You need to either have connections/legacy or have some ridiculously good PR story or an athletics connection for 95% of applicants.
Okay hot take? I genuinely don’t think Dorothy should go to Yale. At least not until she’s had extensive sessions with a phycologist (or psychiatrist, she gives me the vibe of constant underlying anxiety) to work out her trauma from the kidnapping and, to a lesser but also very important extent, how to establish a healthy work like balance. A real psycholo/chiatrist, not the mediocre at best underpaid therapists she’s currently seeing at school. Bc otherwise she WILL have a breakdown at Yale, and potentially flunk out because of it. She’s already so stressed and wound up so incredibly tight at this state school, and at least she has a support network here. Going somewhere guaranteed to be even more stressful, surrounded by snobs, all alone, with all that unresolved trauma. It’s a powder keg. She WILL explode and it will be messy.
The only way for her to go to Yale next semester and not end up in disaster is if she withdraws for this semester and puts all her focus into therapy
Yeah.
And then there’s the fact she would be going there BECAUSE of the kidnapping, meaning every time she thinks about her lifetime of work and piling up achievements to get it, THIS would be on top. I am no therapist, but I cannot help but imagine that the hypothetical good one helping Dorothy would suggest that she not go.
Oh, yeah, Dorothy has “MASSIVE crash and burn out that takes years to even START recovering from” written all over her actions, and leaving for Yale (a high-stress environment hours away from her entire support network) would be a TERRIBLE choice. That she’s now thinking about it in terms of the kidnapping makes it worse, but this would be bad for her even if she’d gotten accepted for a transfer under normal circumstances.
Ok that’s. That’s a good reason.
To ealaborate: I don’t think this is survivor’s guilt or any kind of guilt for exploiting a tragedy. I think Dorothy submitted the reapplication with all that fresh on her mind, churning there like butter, hoping it would get her out of the pit at least a little. And then the acceptance came back and she was already more okay, and she was happy for the first 2 seconds and then her mind went to the journey she got through to get there and the journey culminated in That Day and suddenly it was That Day in her brain again.
And that’s how Dorothy found out it woudl be a bad idea for her to accept this acceptance.
I frankly don’t think there’s anything immoral on her part in this situation. Yes, she used a personal tragedy to get ahead, it hurt literally no-one. It’s just that now she’s stuck with this tragedy in the place where the pinnacle of her achievements goes, and – yeah let’s redo that.
it’s an understandable feeling.
Capitalizing on the grief of others is never a good feeling, unless you are one of those S(u^bags that likes hurting other people.
I don’t think it’s even about the grief of other people. I think it’s about her own grief and horror and trauma coming right back the minute she thinks about Yale now. Including horror AT others’ grief. THis is not DOrothy being immoral or moral, not her being guilty or deservedly guilty or whatever. This is trauma pure and simple.
Glob, I love her.
Becky needs to explain to Dorothy how wrong she’s, that she needs help and a group hug by her friends. And maybe more time with Joyce and the dryer.
I really don’t get where this guilt comes from, in a cold logical way both Becky and Amber should be the ones feeling guilty since their asshole dads endangered their friends and acquaintances. Dorothy would have been okay if she didn’t know either of them.
I should clarify: it’s good and correct that they DON’T feel guilty; because the blame is 100% on on the kidnappers and not the victims.
But if this scenario of “I feel guilt over what happened regardless of where the true blame lies” it’s weird to have Dorothy feel it, because her presence was completely incidental. She wasn’t the target; and she was only there to add to the potential body count. She was a faceless hostage as far as the “plan” went.
As for taking credit for leading her fellow prisoners to safety: she DID do that, so what’s wrong with taking credit?
She wrote an essay about a time in her life where she faced a challenge and she used her wits and cool head to prevail: there are no lies in that statement. Why feel bad about that?
not what i was expecting but i am not surprised !! dorothy seems like a very genuine person to me and that kind of get-ahead behavior is Icky.
Unfortunately it may ultimately be her downfall in her journey to becoming president lol
As much as I hate to admit it, Dorothy does have a good reason. When you think about it, that’s one he’ll of a psychological burden that would weigh on her for the rest of her life. Even if everyone affected uttered her to take the enrollment to Yale.
I stand by my comment on the comic before this that it would been a proper Becky assumption that Dorothy was girl crushing on Joyce now (actually deciding she should continue to look out for Joyce, but Becky filter here) and Becky would call her out on it.
I admit that this is very Dorothy reasoning, though mefeels it is partially, maybe a small part, excuse/justification.
Meh. She didn’t make anybody dead, she’s not even a related-yet-blameless reason (like Becky and Amber) of why any of those people are dead, she’d be morally fine in taking that in.
That’s so fucking stupid
Yeah, primates like humans, chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys are just so stupid and under-evolved with their natural abiding sense of fairness, aren’t they? /s
Yes, I totally think every situation where someone is trying to be fair is stupid, and not just this specific situation where trying to be fair isn’t actually helping anyone. /s
I also think that by making this decision, Dorothy is actually less evolved than the rest of us /s
why, in your opinion, is it stupid?
Because I’m sure people have gotten into Yale for more bullshit reasons, and if Dorothy really thinks she can do good things with her career and Yale can help, she should take that opportunity regardless of the reason.
I can see both sides, but I think I agree. If Dorothy’s real motivation is to stay with her friends, which is what I had assumed, that may or may not be pragmatic relative to her goals, but I was certainly ready to cheer for that as a positive move in relation to her existing interpersonal relationships. But pragmatically, if Dorothy achieving her goals would do good, and if going to Yale would help Dorothy achieve her goals through networking opportunities, I can see that it might feel very uncomfortable to her to get accepted over that, but it’d still be advancing her goals. Other people (at Yale) were being shitty, sure, but her turning down getting accepted over shitty is not really making things substantially better. I can see why it would feel emotionally awful to go with it, and why she wouldn’t be okay with accepting it on those emotional terms – which are valid, we are emotional creatures at least roughly as much as we are logical creatures, after all – but pragmatically, this feels like unreasonable reasoning. Especially given that Dorothy is gunning for one of the most by-necessity pragmatic positions in the history of the world.
It’s a good thing the political landscape hasn’t given Dorothy millions of reasons to not think her skill set will change anything at all!
Oh, hey. Dorothy’s 900th strip.
I’ve already dubbed you Chief Executrix, Dotty. You can’t not go to Yale.
I think Dorothy, in the wake of that hostage situation, sees it similarly to Groucho Marx’ quip about “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member” – meaning that she feels like she’s not getting in on her own merits here, but rather because “Yale accepts hero student!” is astounding press for them to put out publicly.
I get being skeeved out by using a ton of other people’s tragedies to further your own life(and distance yourself from them). I can’t really say I’d do otherwise in her shoes.
Buuuuut Dotty performed impressively back then. How she handled herself and led them is something to be proud of. Impressive leadership in the face of colossal danger is worth recognising, celebrating, and leveraging.
When my best friend died, I had to reassess a lot of things about who I was and why I did anything as part of the grieving process. Which led me to understand a lot of things about myself that I couldn’t have when she was around.
For the rest of my life, this “enlightenment” will have been the result of the worst thing that happened to her.
So I understand where she’s coming from. But also, it’s inevitable. Denying yourself the good things that came out of tragedies devalues them. That’s when you make it about yourself and your personal journey. Take what you have been given. The price is already paid.