Harley and Ivy is one of those ships I REALLY like…but mostly in BTAS. I feel like later depictions kinda water Ivy down to being more of Harley’s straightman (ironically) than her own person.
To be fair the latest Harley Quinn season had Ivy chasing acting more on her villain ambitions while circumstances led Harley to rediscover her passion for providing therapy.
Honestly I stopped watching after season 1. The show just didn’t feel like it was for me. I didn’t really like Harley or Ivy in it and it all felt too try hard in terms of the violence and profanity. Maybe season 2 is better but I haven’t felt much of a push to watch it.
Season 2 strays away from the tryhardiness a lot, I feel. The writing is a lot tighter too, and the ongoing storylines involve a larger cast outside Harley’s crew, with a lot of focus on the Bat-Family and Kite Man.
They definitely toned it down in season 2. I understand the first season really feels like it’s trying too hard to be edgy, but season 2 does a better job of making Harley and Ivy less like harsh caricatures of themselves and makes them more relatable. But watching a whole season to get there is a big time investment.
I definitely recommend new viewers only watch some of the key scenes in Season 1, or possibly a recap video that just presents things as they are without saying “and this is bad because”, to avoid painting people’s opinions.
I’m not watching an entire season of something if somebody tells me it’s the worst season. I didn’t do it for Steven, Homer, Finn, or even Goku, and I’ll never recommend someone else do it. If it’s a fairly silly show with some Important Plot Episodes, I’ll recommend just those ones and maybe some of the better silly ones. Every single show in existence has throwaway episodes that were created to fill a quota for a network, and it’s always morally correct to leave them in the bin.
Not me, I’m a completionist. I actually abhor the idea of skipping part so of something to get to the good part. Heck knowing there is a good part almost makes me enjoy the bad part more cuz I’m excited to see how it improved over time.
I’m a big fan of HarleyXIvy too. But I stopped watching the Harley cartoon about 5 minutes into the first episode after around 20 gratuitous f-bombs and a half dozen fatalities.
For what it”s worth, the Harley Quinn cartoons are technically still in Season Three: there’s a Sandman-like bonus eleventh episode scheduled for February 9th, to coincide with the Velma finale.
I haven’t read Sappho’s poetry yet, but considering how frequently it’s been popping up in conversation when I play Final Fantasy XIV>, maybe I should.
The thing about Sappho is very little of her works remains. Apparently her poetry was amazeballs because all the other greeks of the time say so. (also she was probably bi)
Probably not a lot; if Plato’s depiction of him was accurate, Socrates was contemptuous of writing, thought it destroyed people’s ability to remember things for themselves, and considered it far inferior to face-to-face communication.
(I wonder if he’d have changed his mind if he’d been told that all we know of him and his philosophy is thanks to it having been written down.)
Sudden wild notion: Maybe Socrates was actually severely dyslexic, and after many failed attempts at learning to read and write, sneering at the whole enterprise of writing was basically his sour grapes.
The fact that anything she wrote managed to survive for over 2500 years is pretty impressive. For most of that time, it significant time and effort to reproduce and preserve documents, so only things that people valued highly managed to survive. (I suspect ancient Greek culture contained just as much trash as our own. It only seems brilliant because nobody bothered to preserve the trash.) Even then, history is littered with lost works that we only know ever existed because of references in writings that did survive.
I find it baffling that people today try to determine Sapho’s sexual orientation, based on what? a few surviving texts (transcribed and translated accross millenia) and a lot of gossip from authors who had their own biases? not to mention our modern, western separation of bi vs lesbian (which is a late 20th century phenomena, mind you) might just not actually apply at all, that far outside our cultural context.
And now that I’m reminded that sexuality isn’t that clear cut, I’m gonna have to cut Jayce and Dorothy some slack. Even tho their holding hands invalidates my previous “five feet apart” joke. Hm.
Tbh I was full expecting Dorothy to teach Joyce a more hands on approach to masturbation. But Dorothy probably predicted that Joyce would be too nervous for that.
I played a Hellsguard Femroe, just to see if I could make one look so human that people don’t notice she’s actually a Roe. (If I played a male Roe, their football-gear shoulders would give the game away immediately.) Their Adjective-Noun meant I could use a name that would even look like a common human name without breaking lore convention. And while it wouldn’t have been unlikely for me to use “Amber” as a forename for this purpose, Willis’ comics probably helped to bring that name to mind more quickly. It took me a while to pick out a surname until I thought some more about “a name that would hide me in plain sight, beneath notice.” …Which brought the Stone Mask from Majora’s Mask to mind, and then I realized… Stone! Perfect! So her name is Amber Stone.
I have successfully fooled several people with this, including (somehow) multiple people who were present in the Discord channel where I was planning it out loud. And one of those was fooled twice. (How…? Did they just somehow forget????)
I’ve said this is gay too many times so instead I’ll say this is really straight! Nothing more friendship reaffirming than platonically supporting your bestie during her first fap!
I have had conversations with women about their first orgasm while awake (yes women have wet dreams too) and they said it was frightening from the intensity of the feeling. I imagine this is the same thing happening for Joyce.
eh, gen alpha maybe. My gen is currently experiencing a backswing on the pendulum after spending far too early of our years on Tumblr and twitter and now you’re a pedophile if you like short people. We’ve become puritans except we use therapeutic language to sound right
(Something something about people thinking Dorothy is being a coercive predator)
Short people? Wh- Okay, could you elaborate on that slightly? I feel like I’m not gonna like any potential answer, but fuck if I’m gonna Google that combination of words.
That quote is one of my favorites to exploit and sentence mix. “My grandpa has no cock, Kaiba!” “My pathetic deck has no cards!” “MY grandpa’s pathetic dick haah hAaH HAH’
I am loosing my mind in this arc, it came fast and hit hard. Is Dorothy really going just swoop in and yoink joyce when Joyce/Joe was looking so real. *What is happening im loosing my mind.*
At first, I had doubts that Dorothy’s motive for turning Joyce away from Joe was anything other than her being a mother-hen and not wanting Joyce to end up with a womanizing heart-breaker. But ummm the bar is shifting pretty hard towards Dorothy angling to be the next “Ms. Steal Yo Girl.” (Is that the right term?)
She’s holding her phone reading Amber’s slashfic with the other one. And I noticed she’s crossing her legs very hard in the last panel, she might be getting close.
1: For all else you want to say about this story arc, and there’s huuuuuuge issues with consent involved here so I don’t want to dismiss it I have them myself, lets all take a step back here.
This strip is super dawwwww, dang it.
2: I’m just puzzled why Dorothy went to this method. The critical question I have is… well, why doesn’t Joyce indulge in self-pleasure? Is it just ex-Christian Fundamentalist baggage? Is there more to it? This just feels like the sort of situation that, while more fun to solve this way, would be better addressed with a frank conversation…
It’s a cheap method that’s almost universally accessible.
A frank conversation about her baggage isn’t something Joyce is willing to have yet. And I don’t think Dorothy is the right person to have it with her, either.
Could very well be Christian Baggage. Chains of Faith can be really fickle, and Dorothy didn’t have nearly as much observation and planning as did Dina prior to her gambit. 😮
Could you elaborate on the consent issue? I mean, Joyce hasn’t once given an actual “No” that I’ve seen. Even when denying her desires she is still moving towards the situation, not away from it. She hasn’t even paused. Or have I missed something?
My biggest issue on the consent front is actually not about Joyce’s consent to this act.
Its everyone else’s that troubles me.
They’re being sneaky about it, but they’re masturbating in a public place, where anyone can come in, where there are people that should be expected to come in because… there’s a dryer running. Someone that isn’t these two is drying their clothes.
It’s a huge issue with public sex kinks, you should be getting consent from everyone that ends up witnessing it, and in a lot of situations that’s very hard to do… let alone this one, where its a public space that the two know is being used.
If you make someone party to your sex act, you need their consent. Its that simple. Or do we need to bring up comparable examples of people masturbating in front of others who did not give their consent?
In walks the judge, and in walks the Seein’ Eye Dog.
and the judge wasn’t gonna look at the forty-seven 8×10 colored glossy photographs with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was and how it could be used as evidence agaynst us
So when in my teens, I used to surreptitiously jerk off without anyone noticing in the middle of class (yes really), I should’ve gotten the consent of all 23 other boys in the class and the teacher? Or those times I did it while sitting on a packed commuter train? (I was a horny little teenaged bastard xD)
I garaun-fucking-tee you, people noticed and thought you were a creep. Likely including the teacher.
I don’t say this to judge you morally, but uh, this happens more than it’s talked about in high schools and it is always absolutely inappropriate and skeeves people the fuck out.
I’m just gonna say, if this qualifies as masturbating to a point where you need to get everyone to consent, I need to apologize to some buses filled with people after an indecent thought or two.
I feel like reading a book while sitting on a dryer, “waiting for your pants to dry” is acceptably low stakes enough pass off as normal. She’s not exactly loudly and vocally rubbing one out. No one is gonna come in and demand to know what she’s reading.
And the room is currently empty except for someone who did consent.
If you peruse the last 3 months of comments, people are getting upset at how many people have their noses in Joyce’s Brown. ‘no means no’ is an inferior measure of consent to ‘enthusiastic consent’, people (Becky and Dorothy) are mothering her about and making her do things she’s expressed unreadiness for (eg medical attention). Now Dorothy has like. Browbeaten Joyce into a sex act, basically.
I tend to agree with you, especially now Joyce has had a number of varyingly explicit outs offered, but that’s A summary of the concerns. Interfering with the autonomy of others is. A big part of being a social animal imo. But also FRAUGHT. and litters the road to hell with good intentions yadadyadayada.
Not only has Joyce not said no, Dorothy has asked if Joyce wanted to continue more than once, and also made it clear it’s okay if she’s uncomfortable and wants to stop
Not just consent but continuous affirmative consent
Counterpoint–the “enthusiastic consent” model wasn’t invented because the “no means no” and “yes means yes” models were perfect every single time, y’know?
This is fair enough, I think. That’s all I’ll say about it though, because I’m really still too exhausted to spend energy on a more detailed response. And yes, I understand the irony.
Counter-counterpoint, the “enthusiastic and ongoing consent” model is far from perfect and all-encapsulating. it’s a strategic mantra that, as you point out, served to refocus the consent convo away from misguided and/or rapey legalistic CYA-type takes, but also, like any pithy slogan, it’s no substitute for actual consent education. lots of situations of non-enthusiastic consent are fine; also the potential pressure towards enthusiasm is not great (and some will argue, neuro-normative and ace-exclusionary)
Yeah. I was trying to figure a way to say something like that. It’s really a counterpoint to flaws with the other models, but it’s got its own problems.
Oh, sure. It’s not perfect, almost by definition no simplified model is.
My overall point remains–it wasn’t clear at all until approximately a strip before this one which way this was going to fall, consent-wise, and I’m very weirded out by the people who’ve been convinced everything was just 100% great for sure since day one of the storyline.
Yes, there is a difference between the “no means no” and “yes means yes” and “enthusiastic consent” models of consent, and Joyce’s responses are consensual in two of those and “suspect at best” in the third.
I quite understand that you’re apparently not using the “enthusiastic consent” model, but it’s not all that hard to realize that the objections are coming from people who DO use that model, and that under that model it was not clear consent for most of this storyline.
I’d be more okay with non-enthusiastic consent if that was something they had talked about in the past. “It’s okay for you to push me on X, but respect a No” feels a lot better then unilaterally deciding for someone else that they are ready to push a boundary, specifically when that person looks up to you as a figure of authority, and no one can really say Joyce doesn’t see Dotty as some kind of authority figure.
Especially when Dotty is apparently taking charge of Joyce’s sexual awakening.
Allowing herself to be dragged to a pharmacy to get birth control, having Dotty enrolling her into a nude life drawing class.
This is just one more weird step in Dotty “Fixing” Joyce’s sexual repression, and it’s effing creepy.
It’s probably that the last interaction they had immediately before this whole thing ended with Joyce shouting at her friends to stop bringing up sex decisions with her.
To be fair, it’s important to note the context of Joyce shouting that, which was Dorothy and Roz very publically and loudly arguing with one another about her in front of their whole friend group while simultaneously acting as if she wasn’t there. There’s a degree to which it’s reasonable to conclude that the irritation was less the sex talk and more just the condescending attitude on display. A conclusion that seems reinforced by the way that she’s ultimately going along more favourably with this more one-on-one and non-argumentative interaction with Dorothy
Honestly, she might have baggage with the assault on top of the fundamentalism. She wasn’t adverse to r*pey mcr*peface, until things went bonkers, then things went more bonkers, and things ended in repeated stabbings.
So the whole warm fuzzies might bring back mental trauma from thing What Happened.
That’s just making me think of “leave room for Jesus”. I actually visualized it for once and Jesus is a fuckin pervert aye, wanting to be sandwiched between two teens at a school dance or whatever. Fuckin sicko
Completely disagree. I dunno how to communicate it if you don’t have that anatomy but she’s shifting to control the level of stimulation. However, being nervous and curling in on yourself as the shameful feelings come over works against that. Dorothy holding her hand shows her she’s not alone, and Joyce can relax and Enjoy The Ride, as it were, legs still crossed for stimulation but no frowny eyebrows.
I noticed that Joyce has crossed her legs in panel 2. So this might be working better than I originally anticipated. I still believe this isn’t the end of Dorothy teaching Joyce to masturbate. After all, she can’t do this every day without people noticing and commenting.
It’s like applying a matte grey coat to your miniatures before painting them. works fine, you can totally get a little use of of ’em that way, but the real fun begins when you get out the airbrush and metallic primary colors.
I mean, keep in mind, she’s been… ready to pop… for weeks at this point. They could have taken a bus ride down any Indiana road and sped this up by a few pages in all honestly.
My concern from over 50 years of pleasuring women is she might fixate on this one particular method of achieving orgasm. I know lots of women who the only way they can reach orgasm is by repeating their first orgasm, whether that was from manual stimulation, oral sex, or a vibrator. The woman who could only get off with a vibrator was extremely frustrating if she didn’t bring her vibrator or if the batteries were dead.
It’s from a song that was forcibly adopted by Owl House fans who ship Lumity for how damn well they felt it fit Amity (note that aspects of Amity’s character had not been revealed at the time so it’s not a 100% fit now that we know her more). My HTML is too rusty to make a link. https://youtu.be/VhZIikh-z7g
You don’t really need to find out what’s going on.
You don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone.
Just leave well enough alone, eat your dirty laundry.
Kick ’em when they’re up, kick ’em when they’re down.
Platonic girl/girl hand-holding while you both sit on the dryers and read smut (I assume Dorothy’s smut involves a flowchart). Nothing gay happening here, move along.
And y’know what, blanket statement that I’m 100% fine with this scenario and how it’s played out, I see no problems here, and if anyone else does that’s fine but just don’t argue with me and I’ll do the same. The last few days have been mentally exhausting and I have no energy left to engage in the #Discourse.
I mean both Dorothy and Amber have had… intimate relations with Walky (I don’t remember if Amber actually had sex with him, but there was implied dry humping to climax). So she might be looking for Amber fanfic with thinly veiled references to Walky or uh, Nightguy.
I feel like Dorothy’s smut involves time travel or a period piece and some strong but soft Fabio type in a pirate blouse (bring that shit back peak make fashion), and heavy usage of the word “member”
Yknow, proper mom shit
This may be a little problematic. Dorothy’s motivations are perhaps a little clouded by insecurity over Roz’s remarks, possessiveness over Joe/Joyce, and her being a little bossy and overprotective. Dorothy might be acting a little pushy here, too.
This can also be cute and charming. Dorothy isn’t being perfect here, but Joyce is visibly happy to be here–she’s joking around, playing at not wanting to do this, but every time Dorothy checks in she eagerly reaffirms she does.
Yes, Dorothy is being a little bossy, but that’s always been their dynamic, and it’s clearly one Joyce is used to and, in this case, doesn’t mind. This is something she wants to be able to experience. Joyce is free to leave, and she doesn’t want to.
Also, people saying “these girls are canonically straight”–Dorothy has only said she’s straight once, and she herself acknowledged there was no way to be 100% sure. It was literal books ago. Sexuality is fluid! As for Joyce, the comic has been joking about her being bisexual for years. C’mon. It’s not a sure thing.
All I can think of is Daisy telling Joyce that her Julia Gray comic strip was queerbaity. Which I do not think is what this is, to be clear, this scene is just…really not straight and the parallel there has me amused. Like, I want to know how whatever Daisy was reading stacks up to this, in terms of non-hetero energy.
To be fair Daisy said they the main character’s had a lot of ship teasing going on and only said it was queetbaity after Joyce told her she didn’t mean for there to be romance between them.
I’m glad I don’t ship them because then I’d have to be torn between how cute this is and how much I hated the leadup to it. Instead, I just get to be like, well, this is what is happening now, guess I’ll see how it turns out
Daww…. this is still super weird and cringy given everything that has happened up to this point.
Not learning to masturbate thays fine but all the steps Dorothy has taken to get to this point and her reasoning to do so and its in a public area.
“This is loving (sexual)” and/or “this is loving (romantic)” is covered under “this is gay and good.”
“This is loving (platonic) and good” is. Not a thing I have seen anyone say and I would be mildly confused if someone did. “This is loving (queerplatonic)” maybe.
This is loving (queerplatonic) is kind of exactly how I read this. I mean like both of these people are straight and not attracted to one another romantically or sexually, but this act is definitely not straight in any kind of normative way. It does however reflect the level and tone of queerplatonic relationships I’ve been part of, hence that pretty strongly being my read.
OK, I’ll bear the standard for the fourth camp. This is friendly concern, and that is good. The way it’s being done is worse than bad; it’s stupid. But even stupid ideas work out sometimes….
Cannot believe I am correcting my correction. That’s what I originally meant to write, changed it, didn’t read it right, and tried to fix it. Too early, not enough tea, whatev.
Hey you can be straight and still do gay acts. A guy can suck a cis dick and still be straight but that’s still a very gay thing he just did
Holding your friends hand while she gets off for the first time is pretty gay
+1 to “not gay and good”! I’m sorry y’all, like…ship your ships, lesbians 4 life and whatever etc etc, I will not stand in your way, and I do fully support bi Joyce. But Dorothy is still an impenetrable wall of hetness. Not a hint of a gay vibe from her at all and I’m serious about that. Trust me, I’ve been watching the last week or so of strips VERY closely, but she’s giving me nothing to work with!
See, like…sexually, y’know, kinda yeah? Dorothy does seem like her sexual interest is basically completely dude-oriented, or you’d think we’d see like, more of a blush, more unconscious responses, etc. Now, that could be not true, or true, in equal measure—Dorothy is Very Straight(?) by observation, let’s just say.
BUT, romantically, I am 99.99999% sure she’s down bad for Joyce and doesn’t fully realize the extent of those feelings.
Yeah, see, I just………I really, really don’t think she is, though. I’m truly, honestly not sensing ANYTHING non-platonic from her. Honestly, she had way more romantic tension with Amazi-girl back in the day- in 2017 I could have seen her going biromantic at least. But it’s been a long time since then, and towards Joyce there is just…no romantic chemistry at all. In fact, if anything I’d say what vibes there were have DECREASED in the last few years.
If, in tomorrow’s comic, she suddenly gazes longingly at Joyce and blushes, I will personally consider it a huge swerve. Put more succinctly, if Willis intends her to be read as having feelings toward Joyce, he is failing to convey it.
Hey, that’s fair! A not-insignificant part of my analytics comes from “SONG LYRIC TITLE MEAN SOMETHING!!” so I stand a decent chance of being totally wrong.
[sitting in front of youtube lyric videos, clutching your headphones in a white knuckled grip like you’re at NASA trying to decipher language out of electric signals from the edge of the galaxy] “this MEANS something, i know it does- !!!”
Okay but if the electric signals from the edge of space translate to “Can you hear me?” I am grabbing my gunblade and getting on the first rocket ship out there so I can solve some fucking problems or at least give the astronauts air in the attempt.
Haha thanks. Had a slow day =)
However, i just realized Jekyll is the upstanding citizen. For some reason i find that’s a more sinister-sounding name than Hyde. So, woops.
note to editors of my “Complete Collection of Clever Comments on Comics”: please quietly replace that with, say, “Jabroni”. Jabroni jerkery jobbed for jack? Eh, sure why not
bruh, I don’t think I could touch another human being who is not my sexual/romantic partner while rubbing one out; holding hands with a platonic friend while doing it is very very weird
I mean I haven’t because I don’t masturbate, but I’ve had sex with my best friend (queerplatonic partner) as a platonic escalation of physical closeness. Sex has the meanings that you give it. It’s just closer hugging in that context.
I promise that while it is queer and unusual, this type of interaction does exist amongst certain kinds of close friends. Much the way that I appreciated that Dina felt like representation of a way of being ace that communicated like the actual way it feels for a person like me to exist in the world, I appreciate that these guys are doing queerplatonic friendship in a way that seems like it’s communicating the way it feels to be in such a friendship.
These kinds of comments and response to portrayal of queerplatonic experiences are always kind of disheartening to me because it means that there’s not space in some folks’ internal worlds for people like me to exist. It’s a reminder that if I write about my own experiences through fiction people will absolutely say I’m full of shit.
Queerplatonic relationships sadly aren’t that well known, alongside the imlpcations of what it can mean. For a lot of people this kind of intimate closeness has only been something that people in typical relationships do. I really fucking sucks because if I mention “queerplatonic throuple” people instantly lock on to the throuple part and not the rest of the phrase I half jokingly use to desccribe the relationship me and two friends have.
But I am glad that non normative relationships are being shown, and that people can see the ways platonic relationships can blurr the lines and be more than just friends. (they can be friends who hold hands when masturbating)
Thank you. I’ve been disappointed with a lot of the comments because they seem to be itching to label and categorize what Joyce & Dotty are doing here, to fit them into some box. Though I’ve not experienced one, I can totally see the kind of relationship you’ve described as a thing that happens in real life.
If you have the time and inclination, I would love to ask you to explain more about this sort of relationship because it simply does not make sense to me to call someone you have sex with a platonic friend instead of a sexual partner.
From what I understand; someone is a sexual partner even if the sex only occurs occasionally or or just the one time. In the most simple and neutral terms it’s simply “a person who had sex with another one”; which sounds like what you did with your friend.
I don’t get not calling that a sexual relationship or encounter beyond just having an issue with the name or perhaps the implied motivation.
I do want to get though, so if you want to explain I would love to listen.
Obviously this is very personal so please only reply if you’re comfortable telling this to strangers
I think platonically gets used in this situation in contrast to romantic rather than in contrast to sexual. My queerplatonic partner is a sexual partner, but they aren’t a romantic partner, which is what the default assumption is when you’re that emotionally intimate with a sexual partner. Neither of us finds the other remotely romantically attractive, but we are best friends and very snuggly (clearly) and enjoy a very high level of emotional intimacy and plan our lives around one another. It’s the type of friendship where even though I don’t feel the need to date multiple people I feel the need to call myself poly because normal monogamy relationship norms would think of this kind of friendship as an emotional affair even without romantic interest or the sex element. I’m unbelievably lucky I found a romantic partner who was okay with me having these kinds of friendships before I found poly terminology and would have been able to filter for it. I’ve always felt the need for this kind of friendship partner bond, much the same way that I feel the need for a romantic partner bond. Fundamentally different kind of relationship. Not something people really know what to do with most of the time.
Possibly just as significantly, the sex isn’t about sex if that makes sense? Neither of us are sexually attracted to one another outside the bounds of what it accomplishes for our friendship, I guess. I mean I guess that’s really obviously the case for me since I don’t really have a sex drive most of the time, but it is also the case for them. It’s not about pleasure (though my partner does experience pleasure–I don’t in any normal way and never have), it’s not about whatever special intimacy it seems like non-ace folks only get out of sex. It’s the same thing hugging and snuggling and touch is for communicating but more. It’s a space where it’s appropriate to play games with identity in ways that help us understand each other better as people. But like. It matters for that escalation of physical affection and that weird social space it sometimes creates, but no one is gonna be unhappy if they don’t get off? Like I’ve done things that are objectively sex acts but that really are just being closer in the way that allows until the snuggling is done because there’s no real looking for stimulation thing to it at all beyond more complete touch. It’s possible that this is way more normal than I think it is, but I don’t get the impression that that’s very normal. It seems like most people have a certain set of things they want when they have sex and many of those things are mostly peripheral or irrelevant for us.
So yeah it really is about the implied motivation. In purely objective terms, it is a non-romantic sometimes sexual friendship. But when people talk about fwb they don’t seem to mean what I mean when I talk about my thing most of the time. So. I use queerplatonic to describe a relationship that exists within what seems to be a place of category crisis for the society that we live in. It doesn’t fit in any of the common boxes, and when people try to fit it in a common box they put connotations onto it that are simply wrong.
I hope that makes sense? I don’t feel like that was a very good explanation. Like I feel like we all know the difference between friendship feelings and romantic feelings or wanting to give a friend a hug and sexual attraction, but like. God help me if I want to describe the way that distinction feels in the kinds of specifics that would make me feel like I’d communicated usefully. So I just have to hope that at least we experience those concepts similarly enough that I can reference them as a baseline and you’ll get the idea.
If you have more specific questions I can try to answer them, hopefully that was helpful though.
To be clear, I don’t think Joyce and Dotty are going to go the full friendship sex direction that has existed in my current qpp. I don’t think their relationship is quite like that. This just also feels like queering a thing into a place of category crisis about what the relationship is by putting together pieces that usually go in different boxes. And the tone of this strip specifically feels very right for things I have experienced in those “I don’t know how to define this, there’s no box, we just kind of have to make up the rules here because no one ever told us how to have this kind of relationship, but the kind of connection I’m finding here is good” spaces even if the details are very very different.
thanks for answering! you’ve given me some ideas to chew on.
for this strip in particular, I still maintain it’s weird, or at least that a boundary has been crossed here sexually for Joyce and Dorothy. Now, I should clarify that crossing sexual boundaries is not necessarily bad, there are plenty of contexts in which it is part of positive growth. What I don’t think is that either Dorothy or Joyce are approaching this in a healthy manner.
If you’ll permit using your own relationship as an example, it sounds like you’re very close and intimate with your queerplatonic friend in ways that you’re not close with other people. I don’t think Dorothy and Joyce have achieved that level of emotional intimacy with each other.
The “dream” angle also meshes with my earlier frustration over the trope of women masturbating with washing machines, which is no longer a thing with modern machines—and Dorothy told her to get on a dryer, which apparently has never been a thing. But Joyce, whose sex-ed knowledge has been filtered so strongly, would believably (A) think this is a thing, and (B) get the washer and dryer confused.
They’ll have to make a trip to the store first, which is honestly where I see this going at this rate. Like, in a few days we might see Dorothy saying “Alright, now that you’re in the right mindset, let’s go to Screwby-Do’s and pick you up something a little more thorough, my treat.”
Or Joyce could say “That was neat, and thanks for literally holding my hand through it, but I think I’m gonna go watch anime.”
Yeah I’m stepping away from here for a little bit. I really don’t like how Joyce was pressured to this point. Plus, if Roz found this out after the situation with Joyce literally yelling at people to leave her out of sex stuff, it’s going to be framed as Dorothy being predatory. Which, yeah it kinda is because Joyce was very loud about her no and very uncertain about her yes.
Say what you want about Joe but he drops it after getting a no.
Joyce has literally asked Joyce if she wanted to stop multiple times and assured her it was okay if she’s not comfortable continuing. Like, only a couple strips back. What comic are y’all reading??
Has he actually not stopped after getting a no or has he bragged about something like that, which we know, from his own mouth, that he exaggerates his sexual adventures
As fat as I know the only time something like this was shown on screen he stopped the exact second he was told no
In terms of actual sex, no. The only time is the one you’re thinking of.
While hitting on women though, we’ve really only seen him back down when yelled at and even then he’s come back later to continue. For a long time, he didn’t really have any other mode of interacting with women, so if he got rejected and talked to them again, he was right back at it.
It all ties into to my big problems with Joe’s portrayal. We haven’t really seen him work. He used to hit on everyone. It’s implied he gets laid a lot. The only cases we’ve seen we either didn’t see the beginning or he was approached. We’ve seen him rejected, but only by women who weren’t at all interested and jumped straight to “go away!”
Yeah, that’s our only real look at him doing his thing with any success and it still went quickly to anger (and punching.) Also, I suspect it suffers from a bit of early season weirdness.
“Plus, if Roz found this out after the situation with Joyce literally yelling at people to leave her out of sex stuff, it’s going to be framed as Dorothy being predatory.”
And she’d be right to do so. This IS Dorothy being predatory, no matter if she realizes it or not.
I continue to be unable to find Joyce being loud about her no. And we know she has said yes multiple times. I don’t think the yeses are weak, but having them off-panel is going to make them not click for some.
The loud no was a few hours ago, and about a different (but related) situation, when she yelled at Dorothy, Sarah, and Roz to butt out of talking about her sex life. It was fairly boorish of Dorothy to come on so strong immediately after that exchange, which has made some people understandably uncomfortable, but to me Joyce has made it fairly clear with her repeated assent that this situation is okay with her regardless of her feelings on that previous encounter.
I assure you, as one gifted with prophecy by Phoebus Apollo’s magic dodgeball, it will definitely lead to some kind of adjustment in Dorothy and Joyce’s relationship.
Pay no attention to the monkey’s paw I am carrying that just curled one finger, ominously.
Is Dorothy wearing a plain wristwatch, or is it one of those exercise sensor things, so DYW can just fade the lights out and show us the intensifying pulse rates?
maybe joyce has moved to a 3 or a 4 on the kinsey scale now? Though sexual situation aside we all need someone to hold our hands throughout life moments haha
Are we using the Classic Kinsey Scale that only counts sexual encounters? In that case she’s moved from an X immediately to 6, on account of this, her first and so far only sexual experience, being with another woman. If we’re using a more modern and moderated version that accounts for attraction, this probably bumps her from a 1 to a 2, as this is *far* from incidental but there’s also no evidence her overall attraction is any less predominately focused towards males than it was previously.
Generally I trust Willis to be aware of what he’s representing, but I don’t think he realizes this is a kind of sex.
Because it is presented as more of a soft friendly initiation to a basic personal activity, and clearly Joyce doesn’t frame this as “her first time having sex with someone” in her mind.
This whole mini-arc of Dorothy REPEATEDLY forcing her way in Joyce’s sexual life, even after having been told to back off by multiple people – including Joyce herself! – and ending up pushing Joyce into this activity, is extremely disturbing and disheartening.
I think Willis realizes this is a kind of sex. But it is also a soft initiation into a personal activity. Some things are queer in the way of queering relationship types and norms. This strikes me as extremely queerplatonic.
While a lot of what has gone on in relation to Joyce’s sex life and Dorothy’s interference in it has not been great in the broader arc, this specific segment of it has involved repeated interactions in which Joyce has been given the ability to leave and not engage and Joyce has repeatedly decided to stay. Joyce is uncomfortable with what she feels is judgment of and decisions other people are making about her sexuality and sexual behavior, but actual conversations she’s had with Becky and this particular thing with Dorothy (Dorothy’s level of personal maturity notwithstanding) has seemed pretty positive post-freak out. Which not coincidentally is when the tone of those interactions got a lot less judgmental.
About Joyce being given “multiple opportunities to leave”, I’ve just said all there is to say (in my opinion) on the matter lower in the thread of comments. Really uncomfortable sequence IMO.
I prefer the hypothesis of Willis not realizing this is a kind of sex because the precautions around consent as depicted here are insufficient IMO, and in fact I read this situation as coercion and manipulation.
This may be an effect of day-to-day consumption of the story (I -may- not have been this disturbed by this in archive-bing mode) but this is still… well, not okay.
Willis is clearly aware this is a sexual act. There are two reasonable explanations for his portrayal of this encounter:
A) Willis does not subscribe to the enthusiastic consent model and considers the level of consent which has been given in-panel to be sufficient for this to be an ethical sexual encounter.
B) Willis does not wish to portray this as a perfectly ethical sexual encounter, and has chosen an ethically gray standard of consent to illustrate the problems with what’s going on.
I’ll go further and say Joe was never shown, in this continuity at least, to be as dismissive of people’s consent and agency as Dorothy is here. When people express discomfort towards his advances he generally stops immediately. Not to idealize the guy, particularly the version of him before his current epiphany arc, but Dorothy is worse here, way worse.
In bed, yes, he does, but no, when people don’t want his advances, he generally has not stopped immediately. Ask Rachel or Sarah how many times they had to express ‘not interested’.
And how forcefully they (especially Sarah) had to do it. But it’s okay because he thought her angry energy was hot.
Back to my usual complaint that I really wish we’d seen more of old Joe at work with women who didn’t immediately react with anger, but also weren’t interested in jumping right into bed with him.
Yeah, to masturbate in the presence of someone else, or of multiple people, is a kind of sex, even more so when there is direct interaction such as the activity being proposed by one of the people involved.
Sex is not limited to penetration and can even happen without any kind of physical contact. Cybersex and phonesex, for example, are still sex.
Now, the question I have is: If we accept that this is “a kind of sex”, does it also count as “fucking”? What I mean by that is, do we get to now say that Joyce and Dorothy have fucked, since they’ve held hands while sitting on vibrating objects with the express purpose of stimulating their privates? Or is that too strong a word to use, would you say?
Okay, from the people in the comments who do not see the FLAWS OF CONSENT in the situation, let’s just list them.
Before starting, I’ll say I DON’T THINK THIS IS INTENTIONAL FROM WILLIS, I think it is an unfortunate situation brought upon by pacing and general habits of comedy.
But this is still very unfortunate.
GENERAL DYNAMICS
First and overall, Dorothy’s relationship with Joyce is, from the beginning, a relation of power. Dorothy ALWAYS positions herself as Joyce’s mentor, tasked to guide her through a complicated adult life, and Joyce in return admires Dorothy and generally follows her advice.
This makes any kind of sexual intimacy between them unbalanced, to say the least. Dorothy has POWER over Joyce, period.
01/21/2023
Dorothy checks on Joyce’s emotional start, then immediately starts issuing orders: “Gather your laundry. And go pee.”
Joyce is already expressing discomfort (she’s starting to stutter).
Then, after Joyce obeys her first order, Dorothy explains to her why she asked herself to do so. This is the exact representation of a known abuse technique (applied knowingly or unknowingly by Dorothy, we do not know; my working theory is that Willis himself did not realize what he was representing), COMPLIANCE in sociology/psychology. “See also Foot-in-the-door technique”.
The idea is that Joyce already gets psychologically engaged in the larger project through her ACTIONS, before even knowing what the project is. This is (again, knowingly or unknowingly) complete manipulation.
01/22/2023
Dorothy exposes her reasons. She phrases that Joyce NEEDS to learn how to masturbate.
As a bonus, Dorothy once again uses the opportunity to shittalk Joyce’s attraction to Joe, while her opinion on this matter is already well-known AND Joyce previously asked her to BACK OFF from this topic.
01/23/2023
Dorothy gives lip service to an approximative idea of consent: “Joyce, if you really don’t want to”.
She then completely ignore Joyce’s obvious discomfort, conveyed in both her body language and verbal expression.
01/24/2023
Dorothy issues multiple orders to Joyce: “Take off your pajama pants”, “Now go sit on top of that dryer”.
Joyce protests the first command, and Dorothy then insists (“Yes”, aka “That’s the point”).
Joyce doesn’t protest the second command, but expresses discomfort again (“O-Okay”). Dorothy does not care.
In the punchline for the strip, Joyce protests AGAIN (“But you can see my LEGS!”) and Dorothy is once again dismissive of her objections.
Generally speaking, Dorothy sees neither Joyce’s repeated objections nor her repeated expressions of discomfort as reasons to stop the “experience”.
01/25/2023
Joyce: “If I say this is stupid, can I leave?”
Dorothy: “Yes.”
Joyce: “O– Okay. Well, this IS stupid.”
And then Joyce doesn’t leave, and Dorothy doesn’t interrupt the “experience”.
And so Joyce’s “first time” is something she did not have any time or space to weigh, proposed in a moment of vulnerability by someone she trusts and who has power over her, someone she trusts and who has power over her. Dorothy dismisses all of her objections and completely ignores her discomfort. Also, she starts leading Joyce into this without telling her what it was about first, which is a classic manipulation technique.
I think too much emphasis is being put onto ‘discomfort’ here. When you have mental hangups, especially the kind that have basically been indoctrinated into you by what might as well be a cult, there’s a degree to which discomfort becomes an inevitability that must actually be confronted in order to be overcome, and Joyce has repeatedly been shown to be the type who won’t confront anything without getting a push to do so.
At the same time, Joyce has also been shown to push back when people try to shove her too hard or past any solid boundaries she’s set for herself, including people of considerably greater ‘power’ over her than Dorothy. (And the level of power Dorothy has over her I find incredibly questionable. Feels like to me that if we’re lowering the bar for balance of power that much, then by that logic, it feels like every relationship ever will always be unbalanced and thus anything sexual ever should be forbidden.)
Furthermore, take into account the context of the scene where Joyce does ask people to back off from the topic (a public shouting match between Dorothy and Roz in front of their friends while simultaneously acting as if Joyce herself is not literally standing right there), and it becomes possible to infer that Joyce’s issue was not actually the focus on sex, but rather the attitude of the people on display.
Lastly, it should be noted that this is a work of fiction, and a work of fiction should not be expected to portray every character and relationship as flawless, even the likeable protagonists. Not only is it fiction, it’s fiction about first year college students, aka, stupid people doing stupid things, sometimes intentionally and sometimes just because young dumb idiots make mistakes. Like… everyone remembers Jennifer and Ruth, right? Everyone remembers how their relationship started, right? Even IF you want to take the absolute least charitable reading of this storyline, it still wouldn’t even come close to being the most toxic relationship interaction. There’s a degree to which you have to just accept a work of fiction about young college kids that is part drama is going to have characters naturally behave in ways that don’t paint them in a flattering light.
This is a really cogent analysis, I thank you deeply for it, and I invite you to join me in begging others of the comments section to stop reading a weird fucked-up abusive power dynamic into Dorothy and Joyce that is entirely fan-invented. I just. Please. Dorothy does not have Joyce’s agency in a goddamn phylactery, people.
Counterpoint: even if we accept the framing where Joyce has to be pushed to overcome discomfort (and how is THAT not infantilizing Joyce, I wonder?), there are better and more consent-aware ways to help someone over that boundary.
“it should be noted that this is a work of fiction, and a work of fiction should not be expected to portray every character and relationship as flawless”
that’s just a non-take. i’m not weighing in one way or the other but the sheer repetition of this sort of point just nags me. we all know this is a work of fiction. the problem is not that Character does Thing, it’s HOW Thing is portrayed and contextualized. there’s a wazillion ways a work of fiction can, Willis willing, highlight that a eponimously Dumb action is Cool And Good Actually, or Ambivalent-to-Iffy, or Neutral, or Cringe, or Bad or any other ethical and emotional hue.
Maybe Characters have conversation about Thing. Maybe Character B has a nightmare, or a panic attack. Maybe Character A privately cackles maniacally.
It being a work of fiction with the word “dumb” in the title is irrelevant to this conversation, imo
Joyce is not a child. She’s a grown ass adult person in college, and Dorothy is her classmate and best friend. Dorothy does not have any position of power or authority over Joyce aside from that which Joyce consciously chooses to give her. Power imbalances in relationships aren’t about “this person tends to take the lead over this person” that’s just called a “top”. Power imbalances in a relationship are when one person has an impaired ability to consent, or when one person has external authority over the other person’s health and well-being.
Honestly, posts like this infantalize Joyce and I find it really super fucking patronizing. She is perfectly capable of stopping or going away if she wants to. She *decided* to follow Dotty. She *decided* to get on the dryer. She *decided* to stay.
> She’s a grown ass adult person in college, and Dorothy is her classmate and best friend. She is perfectly capable of stopping or going away if she wants to. … She *decided* to follow Dotty. She *decided* to get on the dryer. She *decided* to stay.
Like I know what you’re getting at, but saying that adults can’t get coerced into uncomfortable sexual situations and that the person who was uncertain could have just said no is… not a great take.
If the dialogue and actions we’d seen between Dorothy and Joyce here had happened between Joe and Sarah’s sister (whose name escapes me at the moment) would people be saying “well she could have left”, “she decided to stay”, or “she didn’t explicitly say no?” – I’d sure hope not.
And yes ofc context matters but it’s still got a lot of weird and uncomfortable similarities to how coercive sexual assault happens, as do many of the defences of it.
To quote the RAINN website: “Simply put, enthusiastic consent means looking for the presence of a “yes” rather than the absence of a “no.” Enthusiastic consent can be expressed verbally or through nonverbal cues, such as positive body language like smiling, maintaining eye contact, and nodding.”
As viewers we have not seen this, only hesitation and uncertainty on Joyce’s part, and I am not sure what is infantilising about expressing the uncomfortable similarities leading up to here.
My point wrt Liz and Joe’s is that if Joe had said hey Liz come with me we’re gonna jack off together and Liz had given Joyce’s half-hearted responses ppl would have lost their shit.
Also I may be making a harsh comparison as there are people literally saying Dorothy is fine because Joyce never technically said no, which is frankly terrifying like do not go near any assault survivors please 💀
Sorry if Liz had given Joyce’s responses and Joe had continued just has Dorothy had (ordering her to take off her pants etc] ppl would have lost their shit.
The characters involved also matter. They don’t have the same kind of relationship and Joe has a reputation.
Which means Joe wouldn’t do it, not because he’s better at consent than Dorothy is in some abstract sense, but because it would be an entirely different and much creepier situation.
My big thing is: It’s not Dotties place to teach Joyce this stuff.
My “mom over emphasis” be damned, this is just *creepy.*
“Well she needed to be pushed out of her comfort zone” Why? And why in a public place, on a time crunch? Because we know some rando is coming back for those clothes and is going to see two pants-less girls holding hands grinding the dryers.
Which will probably negate any headway Dotty is trying to make with Joyce’s being comfy with getting herself off.
We just had Joyce enthusiastically tell *specially* Dottie to fuck off about her sexual issues, and now we have Dottie drip feeding her sexual stuff.
“I know you told me to not do this, but it’s for your own good, for reasons I will not explain. So I need you to publicly grind on this with me, but it’s cool because I’m your mom friend, and people want to see us bash clams.
Try not to think about how you’re still getting over throwing your trash mom in the garbage, been told you might be autistic, and realizing your entire belief system might be a lie, you are *ready* to release 19 years of sexual repression in this dank-ass laundry room.”
Describing this as “grinding” is a bit over the top. They’re sitting.
If someone walks in, the worst that likely happens is that they see them drop hands quickly and Joyce act all flustered.
Anyone seeing it is more likely to think the fluster is more about the hand-holding than to jump to the conclusion they were masturbating.
In class? I swear I’ve read that sort of thing before, but it’s a baffling concept. Who’s got the stealth levels to goon in class without being caught?
I remember reading a newspaper article about Dr Ruth. (You know, the Muppet that talks dirty.) It mentioned how different people have different “thresholds” to reach orgasm. 5% of the population are incapable regardless of what is done, and 5% can achieve orgasm just by closing their eyes and thinking about it. The majority of course are somewhere along the spectrum (can orgasm but need more or less work to achieve it).
I, very unfortunately, found out a guy in one of my classes was getting off in class. He had a big sweatshirt and had cut a hole in it leading into the pocket and….. yeah.
Becky walks up with an empty dinosaur-themed laundry basket *right* as Joyce hits the high note, in a call-back to when Becky told Joyce she might be getting married some day.
So I can relate to Joyce a lot in this story line and I find it really difficult to equate sitting on a drier to masturbating. Like yes it will feel good and warm, like, to get comfortable with sensations. This is like pre maturation lessons.
I only lived in a dorm for one semester and the laundry rooms were in the basement and co-ed. I’m assuming this is a gals only laundry room?
I am a trans guy and my hesitance to masturbate was more dysphoria than anything else. I didn’t have an orgasm until I was 19 and thought I was dying/habing a medical emergency.
JOYCE WE HAVE *GOTTA* HAVE A TALK ABOUT YOUR TASTE IN BONY POINDEXTERS (FEMME-PRESENTING)
(Actually, damn, Joyce’s taste in masc-presenting people, which is to say hot ethnically-Jewish beefcake on the hoof with a badonkadonk, is real diametrically opposed to her apparent taste in femme-presenting people, which is to say, again, bony poindexters. But hot bony poindexters with freckles.
There’s a lot of homophobia in these comments, intended or otherwise, but I would have been ecstatic to have had a friend like Dorothy do this for me. As long as you know the person in a position of mentorship or “power” over you will listen to you if you say no, having a teacher is invaluable in these matters. Maybe I’m too pan to say their presentation and how it relates to my orientation wouldn’t have mattered, but I think until some significant genital contact happens I’m very Who Cares about their respective orientations. Like, did you never watch Rocky Horror with your homies? Because I guarantee there was a lot of thigh clenching in that room.
Just a lot of the comments about how they are treading where they should not sounds like nothing but antigay panic to me. Not all of them, but a lot of them.
Like, did you never watch Rocky Horror with your homies?
I watched it in school, in a music lesson, because it’s a classic. I found it bizarre and vaguely disgusting and see no reason to watch it again. As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing remotely sexy about it, if that’s what you mean.
At the time it came out until maybe late 80s it was a piece of unabashed gay fun. I hated the part where Frankenfurter dresses up as someone else to get into their so’s pants, but it was over the top hilarious in the confrontation between “the wholesome Americans” and their gay nightmare.
I think Risky was trying to describe that lots of het men react to it and are hiding that?
Don’t quite get how this relates, so please explain.
It’s a horrible movie, which is why the point is the audience participation. It’s not supposed to be good, you’re supposed to be making fun of basically every line in it.
I still think Dorothy’s being a bit Billie about this whole deal, just sort of barging in and ‘fixing’ things.
But at least she’s doing it in a supportive way? That’s something, at least? Maybe?
I think trying to be Billie-esque is part of the point.
Dotty really likes helping people out—it’s one of her love languages, I would say—and lately she’s been visibly feeling very useless, especially where Joyce is concerned. And she knows Billie was able to help Joyce when she couldn’t, and it gets her goat!
(She also has deeply buried subconscious romantic feelings for Joyce, and she is unconsciously Jealous as Fuck rn)
I think that’s another big WTF for me about this: That Walky’s moving on from her *seemed* to be the impetus for her to start the “Any O
‘s but from Joe” campaign. So it’s turned into a big “I’ll make *someone* orgasm god dammit” jealously ball.
Alright alright alright I’m gonna. This is gonna be a long post but I hope it gets some interaction because I have Thoughts, and also a question. A question that needs answering.
Let’s start with the question, which I want to pose openly to everyone who is uncomfortable with this arc:
Do you believe that Dorothy is knowingly undertaking her actions with sexual intent?
Because IF SO, if that is your reading of the situation, I understand a lot more why this is so disheartening. If—and I emphasize if Dorothy is acting to, for lack of a better word, stake a sexual “claim” on Joyce’s person, if she’s actively trying to seduce her on the dryers, or she intends to go to Joe and tell him “Joyce and I are dating now, haha, FUCK OFF”, etc., then…I get why that would be really disgusting and if that IS revealed to be Dorothy’s deal, I will join you on being disgusted.
BUT…
I don’t think that’s the case. I think that while David Willis recognizes mutual masturbation ‘twixt Joyce and Dorothy as a form of sexual interaction between them, neither Joyce nor Dorothy do. They know that there’s a sexual *characteristic*, like, duh, they know what they’re here to do, but, and this is Very Important: how I am reading this, neither one of them is acting with sexual intent towards the other.
Dorothy really is, for all that the plan is a Pepe Silvia conspiracy map, here to execute a plan to get Joyce post-nut clarity so that Joyce realizes that Joe is a big drooling gorilla and she was thinking entirely with her libido, at which point she’ll go “OH! Thanks Dorothy, you steered me away from becoming a sex victim!” and Dorothy will bask in the warm glow of Helping. Joyce really is here because, well, masturbation is something Cool Secular Girls know how to do, and she trusts Dorothy implicitly, and y’know if she knows more about SEGGS maybe she can get Joe to let her chew on his beautiful buttocks! (Dorothy is so wrong about him, he’s changed. But she’ll see! Becky and I came to a mutual understanding, surely Dorothy and I will.)
NOW. Does this mean there’s no sexual feelings here? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA GOD NO IT DOES NOT. Joyce is a bi supernova waiting to explode, and Dorothy’s self-Kinsey rating is a fake idea. This shit is gay as hell. This is Sappho on the Lesbos beach. This is MAD gay. There’s so much sexual tension here that, to quote cinematic masterpiece The Room, “I feel like I’m sitting on an atomic bomb waiting for it to go off”.
But it isn’t conscious—Joyce and Dorothy are both deeply closeted and they repress things they internally aren’t comfortable with something AWFUL. And they both have this thing they do where practices are a huge part of their identities, and they’re not good at dealing with shifts in that identity! So of course they’re not going to have had the queer epiphany yet, let alone off-screen, it’s not who either of them are!
Dorothy is acting on what *she* thinks is just logical protective instinct but is actually romantic and sexual desire/jealousy. Joyce is acting on what *she* thinks is natural curiosity and a learning opportunity but is in fact buried sexual desire of her own. It’s a web, people, not puppet strings.
Do I think it’s gonna work out? God, no. But I don’t think it’s villainy on anyone’s part, it’s just a tragic romance.
Sorry to not argue but i’m agreeing with you here. Dorothy is basically the unreliable narrator of her own life. She’s so determined to control her own life she doesn’t see the subconscious intent behind her own actions.
But then because she seems so in control, and seems smart/reliable enough to help others through their own issues, it can be hard to see that she only ‘thinks’ she’s being logical with her actions here ‘for the sake of helping Joyce’, where there’s clearly stuff that buried in her that she doesn’t realise is trying to push its way to the surface.
Your ‘web, not puppet strings’ sums it up perfectly. It’s a complex situation, with different factors weighing in. Dorothy is being a little predatory here, but she doesn’t know it, because she doesn’t fully realise the feelings that she’s feeling, and her logical usual way of handling things has convinced her that this is a perfectly sensible solution, all boosted by a gut reaction of sticking it to Roz.
She is pushing and being pulled by all the parts of her life, as is Joyce, as is Joe. As are we all.
You know, I think from Dor’s pov, what happened was something like, Walky left her feeling sad-horny, she decides she needs to do laundry to get her mind off him (she’s known about the dryers for a while so laundry time = me time for dorothy), then joyce shows up and Keener-brain goes, “my girl needs this even more than i do” and grabs her along for the ride, feeling pretty smart and mom-y and failing to spare any thought for how gay as all fuck this little project of hers was, instead seeing only the scheduling prowess of a) getting off AND b) teaching her repressed bestie about good vibrations, AND c) hopefully solving the Joe situation, AND d) showing the little Roz in her brain she is actually super sex-positive. AND, e) getting the laundry done.
Okay like the mom thing is so creepy. I don’t think that she’s trying to do that, it would be creepy of her if she was, but it’s just such a creepy thing to say. Please stop it.
@milu: That is a perfectly cogent read, yes! Like, that’s what I’m talking about, I think that could have been exactly Dorothy’s mindset!
@Joy: I think you are under a misapprehension and I want to address this as gently as I can. I would also like to address this to everyone else who thinks there’s some bizarre power dynamic in play here: Dorothy and Joyce do not, absolutely do not have a parent/child relationship, and no one is saying that they do.
When people in the comments who are using the term “mom-ing” re: Dorothy’s behavior, what they mean is a shorthand for: Dorothy is protective of Joyce and feels a certain sense of responsibility for her well-being. This is not an unhealthy connection or feeling to have. It’s perfectly appropriate to feel protective of and responsible for the well-being of a friend or lover. The shorthand is used in jest and good-naturedly.
It does not confer parental powers on Dorothy. It does not mean Dorothy seeks parental control of Joyce or wishes to adopt her as a child. Dorothy is a peer, not a parent or authority figure!
agreed about my use of “mom”. it’s a common metaphorical shorthand for the behaviour you describe in my vocab. that said, the creepy undertones are not necessarily unwarranted in the present case.
I agree that’s how milu used “mom”, but there’s definitely been a contingent around using it much more negatively, implying both that Dorothy’s trying to control Joyce like a child and that it leads to an actual power imbalance making this scenario much worse.
So tensions are high around any use of the term.
Let’s start with the question, which I want to pose openly to everyone who is uncomfortable with this arc:
Do you believe that Dorothy is knowingly undertaking her actions with sexual intent?”
Honestly, the parts about this that make me supremely uncomfortable all seem to be explainable if we assume Dorothy is not thinking about her actions at all except in a very self-focused, goal-oriented manner. “I want to get over my feelings about Walky, I want to prove I’m right about Joe to Joyce, I want to prove I’m not a prude to (absent) Roz, I want to prove I’m actually someone worth listening to because I am smart and make good decisions (in general).”
And it seems to me there’s no room in there whatsoever for other thoughts, such as “Didn’t Joyce tell me to stay out of her sex life?” and “Gee, Joyce is going along with this but she sure seems super uncomfortable, could I be approaching this differently?” And that latter bit, the seeming lack of what would seem to me to be ordinary concern that this plan isn’t 100% okay with Joyce, is what makes all of this feel very loose in a “consent” way that was making a lot of the thread (at least in my view) so viciously combative in the early part of the storyline. I perceive Dorothy as treating Joyce like a prop in a story Dorothy has about how this is going to go. Which I’ll concede is different in INTENT than Dorothy being a cackling puppetmaster, but not really much different in outcome.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Dorothy is IMHO doing the equivalent of lighting a cigarette at a gas station because she wants nicotine now and she’s the smart one so bad things don’t happen to her plans. It MIGHT all work out fine, but it could have and still could blow up or catch fire in an unexpected way at any point, and that seems like a poor choice of risk to take with your repressed and fragile friend’s sexual development.
Honestly, I think my biggest issue is that I think Dotty infantilizes Joyce.
Maybe mom is the wrong term, but I see Dorothy treating Joyce as basically her project person. That Dorothy intends to Uplift this poor naive girl into being a Proper Human Being, regardless of what Joyce thinks is best for herself. And that is a very high pet peeve for me.
A lot of people see her as being the cool big sister, but I just see someone who thinks they’re better then everyone else around them, that she’s got a Savior of the Masses mindset.
You have a far more forgiving stance with “fixing people is her love language” and I fully admit that I’m probably taking her actions in the worst possible light.
I think Dotty’s not *maliciously* treating Joyce’s agency like a screen door, but she’s still walking through it without regard to Joyce’s boundaries. And as someone who is VERY much a proponent of “Safe, Sane, and Enthusiastically Consensual” I get *hella* creeped out by how this all happened.
“I know better then you, so sit down and do what I say.” is all I really heard until they parked their butts on the dryers.
Which (I know, Oh god I know, I get it) feels VERY much like something Joyce’s mom would have said to her. And that’s not a parental dig, it’s a “they’re not so different” thing.
Dotty’s so concerned that Joe will fuck up Joyce, she’s willing to risk Joyce being on display in a public place having her possibly first orgasm, and I really don’t have the words to describe how wrong that feels, and how weird it feels that people are both okay about it, and possibly eager to see it happen.
Also, having recently drawn quite a few hands holding phones, Joyce’s hand looks wrong (unless she has one of those cases with a thingy for hooking your fingers around).
Far as i can tell, single-handed phone grip involves either the pinkie supporting the phone from below, or at least one finger wrapping all the way around the back to vice-grip together with the base of the thumb. Feel free to update me if you find another position that works
One of the reasons I dislike these thin-as-a-cracker phones vs. my old not-smart bar phone (or the handset of a classic wired phone) is that I can’t wrap my paw around them properly. I wind up with the phone resting against the lower edge of my palm, pinching it from side to side with my thumb and index finger like it’s something vaguely disgusting that I don’t recognize.
Also. I did a whole thing where I studied the hell out of hand anatomy and it didn’t help much if at all. Got slightly better when I went back to the shapes method, hope I live long enough to get it right.
Ugh, too many comments. Here’s my take on the poll… I get why an overwhelming majority think they want the joe/joyce ship, but I believe it’s that they all want SOME ship to actually work.
I am not against a college romance between the two of them. I think Joe could possibly teach Joyce as much about her sexuality as Dorothy, maybe more, maybe not.
But I am firmly of the belief that Joe is ABSOLUTELY not right for Joyce’s Mrs. degree. He has curtailed his tail hunting. For the moment. He got majorly shamed, and possibly rightly so, for his do-list. (I say possibly, because kink-shaming is bad, and why is his (personal kink) any different than any others? It was his list. It wasn’t anyone else’s.) He realized that he possbily maybe has feelings for Joyce and has stopped chasing others. (We think.)
However, that is a relationship doomed for failure. Joe is very into his “genetic spread-his-seed-wide-and-far” drive, and I don’t believe he can remain monogamous to any partner.
A “kink” is just any unconventional sexual practice or interest. That’s an incredibly broad definition, which means there are tons of kinks. I dunno if this is a hot take or whatever, but some of them? A *few* of them? Should definitely be shamed.
I think you’re wrong. They had insane compatibility in It’s Walky and I’d argue even more than she and Walky did. (Like. I’ve been doing a mass re-read. She had a childhood friendship with Walky, but I didn’t get any romantic or sexual tension from either of them together before they got together or during.)
Also if you think Joyce is still going to be going to school to find a husband with the growth and change she’s had, I don’t think you’re reading the same comic as I am.
Also we’ve seen point blank that Joyce is the one who has had the most impact on him, and left a serious impression. If *any* girl was gonna get him to want to stick with her, it’d be Joyce. Especially in this continuity. You’re essentially ignoring years of character development on both sides to claim it wouldn’t hold up.
Also “Joe is very into his “genetic spread-his-seed-wide-and-far” drive” Is just straight up distasteful and incorrect. Claiming it’s genetic, even with his dad the way he is is kind of messed up.
I literally came back just to comment this. I’m peacing back out on this storyline. Again.
I know a ton of people are hyped for potential dorothy/joyce but while Joyce is a ticking bisexual timebomb, Dorothy, to me, has never read as anything but a straight girl.
Like even now, there’s no tension at all. At most it’s a weirdly ooc moment meant to make you go ‘awww’
Not only that, but remember that Dorothy is in it to become President. She didn’t give up that dream for Walky (someone whom it seems she actually loves, even though I agree that her and Walky are not compatible in terms of long-term goals), and she’s sure as hell not gonna give it up for Joyce either, who has her own (and possibly worse) set of neuroses that would be a drain and a distraction from Dorothy’s goals. And don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Joyce and want to see her happy, but I’m quite convinced she won’t find it in Dorothy’s arms, as much as she likes Dorothy.
Once you create an RSS feed with subscribers for your list, I think you forfeit any right to call it a personal, private kink. At the very least you’ve made it a public one.
I think the list was gross because he was treating women as objects for his own pleasure, reducing them to numbers based purely on looks. And it didn’t stay private, he would tell girls his rating of them as a pickup line.
There’s pretty reasonable evidence her could remain monogamous, I think. Subtext has told us that he’s been remaining celibate recently apart from his almost-encounter with Liz, which was a thing in large part as an attempt to ‘cure himself’ of Joyce. He’s curtailed his behavior for/as a result of her even without them officially being in a relationship.
It’s really weird and I just can’t tell if he’s been remaining celibate. I’d thought he had been, but when Danny got sexiled for the Liz incident there were comments from him and another character that implied it was still a common thing.
It’s definitely not been explicitly stated, so maybe it’s just me making things up. The main statement that made me think this was actually before (or at the beginning of?) the Liz incident. That combines with the general behavior we’ve seen from him since then, but that’s really just vibes. You could definitely read Danny’s comment after being banished to the lobby as meaning it’s still a regular occurrence.
I love reading the DoA comment section for the posts that [try to] explain what the characters are thinking and how people (the readers) process those thoughts, because I am terrible at figuring it out myself. I have become better at reading people because of DoA and the wonderful commenters here.
But I am still totally lost on this arc. At least it seems I am not alone in this.
(Gonna rant all confused and slightly annoyed here, please skip if you’re not into that.)
Ooooh, hand-holding while sitting four feet apart at least, mostly clothed, and not even looking at each other is so sexually charged and romantic. It isn’t, or at least I don’t see that at all.
I realize as an ace (sex repulsed) lady I may not have the best instinct here, but how on earth is this OMG SHIP AHOY? I see exactly zero tension or desire here between them, only possibly independent physical arousal by the situation. It’s not the same thing at all, is it?
This just feels like kind of a gross manipulation by Dorothy to me, though she genuinely thinks she’s being helpful and kind of technically might actually be helping on one or two levels. It’s fundamentally a thing she’s doing to try and control/parent Joyce, her actual peer, rather than go to the trouble of taking any real interest in Joyce’s feelings or thoughts in the form of a frank conversation. It’s much easier for her to assume Joyce is being led around by her downstairs and get her to sit on a dryer than actually get her side. It’s much easier to fall back into her usual ‘I know everything and Joyce knows nothing’ attitude than investigate to see if maybe Joyce DOES know something and if so what it is.
Regardless of either Joyce or Dorothy’s straightness r lack thereof (and as both have stated on-page that they’re straight, I decline to assign them any other status; they both get to self-define as far as I’m concerned, so I will update when they do) I cannot see anything sexy here, just vaguely gross and I hope it’s over soon.
You’re reading into this way too heavily. Straight girls hold hands and vibrate their bits together all the time, it’s like the least gay thing in the universe. Not at all mistakable for anything non-hetero. Historians will say they were good friends.
The thing is, I trust Dorothy was honest when she estimated herself to be a zero on the Kinsey Scale. That was months ago, of course, so things may have changed.
Both of these ladies have expressly said they aren’t sexually attracted to women, in situations where I can’t see why they’d have any reason to lie.
Fair. I just thought Joyce’s answer to Becky was genuine and honest, at the time. She would not have acted on the attraction, because GOD, but I don’t think she would have lied about it.
Queerplatonic relationship. A queerplatonic relationship is a platonic relationship that blurrs the lines of the strictly defined expectations of platonic relationships.
Friends in a queerplatonic relationship can potentially do sexual things in a purely platonic way.
I will hold any judgement on how gay this is until we see further evidence. Does it feel gay to me? Very. Is Dorothy doing it with gay feelings intended? I don’t know, we don’t get thought bubbles in this comic. Do I hope this is something more and the SS Joyothy sets sail? Yes! It would be an absolute disaster fire and I can’t wait!
That said, idk if anyone has pointed out the name of this chapter, “Turning Saints Into the Sea,” and the source of the phrase (or at least the most obvious source to me). Unless the phrase comes from elsewhere and that is what it’s referring to, then it’s a reference to the song Mr. Brightside.
“Jealousy, turning saints into the sea”
What kind of jealousy is up for debate. But still. Jealousy.
People are treating Joyce like she can’t comprehend what she’s being invited to do with a friend she trusts, or decide that she wants to do something she’s affirmed consent on multiple times in a row. Rather than treat her like a person who can make choices, they’re treating her like a helpless infant who can only be led and manipulated. There’s a very common trend of assuming all autistic people are doe-eyed child people who can’t consent because autism, and it’s really gross. I’m autistic, and what I hear in this kind of talk is “you are incapable of making your own decisions.”
I wonder how many people would be making similar arguments if autism had not been introduced as a possible diagnosis for Joyce. The comments on the strips in this storyline have been faintly damning.
She doesn’t know what her body is doing, where she is, who she’s with, what trust might look like to her… Really, the poor dear is barely cognizant of anything; one might even argue she’s not actually conscious or possibly even sentient.
I have to say that while I don’t think there’s really issues of consent here, I must admit that I think that this whole arc has just been…badly written. I just don’t think that this behavior at all fits in with what has been previously established about these characters. I cannot fit what I understand Dorothy’s character to be with “let’s go masturbate in the laundry room together”. I can’t fit Joyce agreeing to it. It’s weird in a way that I haven’t experienced in this comic before. Previously, cartoonishly evil dads aside, I mostly felt like the characters involved made decisions where I could see their logic. Here, it’s just not there.
One of the first arcs involved Mike repeatedly punching someone he barely knew at a pizza place, and another character was a costumed vigilante. I feel like logical choices aren’t always a factor here.
That’s a better argument than the others who aren’t liking this arc.
But I remember how Joyce is repressed in entire comic, and how sometimes she wished to be treated like a young girl who wants to experience things and not like a simple child.
I expected she could still be angry to Dorothy, but her friend brought what she always wanted.
Mike is special and punching people with no consequences was within his reality bubble. Similarly Amazing Girl /Amber’s realities were self consistent.
I disagree, there’s a lot of reasons for both of these characters. Setting aside for a moment the entire idea that either of them have repressed sexual and/or romantic feelings for the other — which would readily flip a lot of logic override switches if true — there’s a slew of reasons that this seems like a good idea.
For Dorothy, first of all: she’s frustrated and horny after her talk with Walky, and needs to let off some steam. Masturbation time is go. What leads her to invite Joyce? A combination of things: helping Joyce get over her sexual repression as a goal in and of itself, plus helping her get over Joe specifically since he’s “bad news”. Proving to herself (or Roz, or the imaginary Roz that’s taken up residence in her brain) that she’s sex-positive and not repressed herself. Why the laundry room? Just look at it. This is Baby’s First Masturbation. Not naked, no manual interaction required, no toys that are likely to make Joyce shriek and run away. To her, it’s a relatively low-stakes way to help both herself and her friend.
For Joyce, she very recently expressed in her conversation with Becky a desire to be less repressed and purity-obsessed. Her good, trusted friend Dorothy coming along with this offer immediately after would have seemed an incredible (and timely) opportunity, plus she generally trusts Dorothy’s judgment quite a bit. Dorothy thinks it’s a good idea, it aligns with something she already wanted… why would she pass it up?
Yeah, if there is a simple way to describe Dorothy’s behavior here, it is, ironically, that she is being Cool and Rational about things. She had a whole bunch of different problems, and she intuitively found one bespoke, efficient plan that happens to deal with all of them at once. The fact that this is utterly insane is, in fact, lost on her, because she is so focused on brute-forcing “being a calm, rational person” to avoid her looming mental breakdown, so it’s half that she’s blind to the insanity she’s wrought (since nothing that is happening is, strictly-speaking, “wrong”) and half her being avoidant of dealing with her own internal, emotional problems in a healthy way, because she has compartmentalized her feelings in that regard into the “irrational” box, and thus is honour-bound to ignore them. Even though, if one of her friends were mirroring that behavior, she would castigate them, though gently as possible.
Thanks! Worse comes to worse, do the mustard field drive, then maybe look into trying the cannabis strains I talked about. I find they cause much less brain/body burden than the vast majority of prescription drugs I’ve used! 😊;)
Didn’t read for a few weeks, and this comment will probably not be read by anyone.
Obviously Willis can write how his characters react to whatever situation. Not comfortable with the whole mood is “haha sexy time” though. Dorothy pressured Joyce into a sexual encounter. She did it because she decided to make Joyce cum to fix her. The last thing Joyce had said to Dorothy was angrily telling her to stop with the sex talk. Then she started this encounter without telling her. Dorothy has traits that September-Joe had that made him a piece of shit. He planned to “fix” her by making her cum, and a less than stellar understanding of consent.
Dorothy sees herself as a mentor, dispensing indispensable advice. But the last week (in comic time) she’s been whiffing constantly. Bad advice to Joyce regarding apostasy, regarding her interest in Joe, regarding her health. She gave bad advice to Walky, regarding asking Lucy out. Her advice is often self-serving. The reason she felt bad right before this is her self-serving advice made her feel bad about herself. Not because she essentially just told Walky to mislead Lucy into having sex.
She is managing her own life poorly, and is trying to manage other people’s lives to make herself feel better (and doing that poorly too). Story-wise, that’s ok. The whole point is all these kids are making dumb mistakes, even the ones who have an air of confidence and competency.
But I am not comfortable with how Dorothy pressuring Joyce into masturbating together has just sort of dropped the set-up to it, so far. Not everyone’s going to respond the same in similar situations, but I have been an apostate working through a shame reaction to horniness that I didn’t want anymore. And if a friend had pressured me into masturbating together at that time, then there are several ways that friendship could have ended, and probably none it would have lasted. And I have a suspicion that the “Dorothy has been the piece of shit she hates Joe for having been” reading isn’t going to be well received in the comments going forward.
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“I-is this what is called a hand-job?”
(I mean, SOMEBODY is gonna walk in… whoever’s laundry that is Joyce is sitting on like a cat)
Wait is THAT why cats sit on dryers?!? I just thought they liked them because they were warm and up high.
Also, how long have we had polls?
Um, 2010?
https://www.dumbingofage.com/pollsarchive/
Toucha, toucha, touch me! I wanna be dirty!
“Oh, Dorothy!”
The potentially heterosexual explanations for this are dwindling rapidly, I say this only half-jokingly.
Joyce settled on a HarleyXIvy fic.
Dorothy is reading the poetry of Sappho.
Yep, just gals being pals.
Harley and Ivy is one of those ships I REALLY like…but mostly in BTAS. I feel like later depictions kinda water Ivy down to being more of Harley’s straightman (ironically) than her own person.
To be fair the latest Harley Quinn season had Ivy chasing acting more on her villain ambitions while circumstances led Harley to rediscover her passion for providing therapy.
Honestly I stopped watching after season 1. The show just didn’t feel like it was for me. I didn’t really like Harley or Ivy in it and it all felt too try hard in terms of the violence and profanity. Maybe season 2 is better but I haven’t felt much of a push to watch it.
Season 2 strays away from the tryhardiness a lot, I feel. The writing is a lot tighter too, and the ongoing storylines involve a larger cast outside Harley’s crew, with a lot of focus on the Bat-Family and Kite Man.
They definitely toned it down in season 2. I understand the first season really feels like it’s trying too hard to be edgy, but season 2 does a better job of making Harley and Ivy less like harsh caricatures of themselves and makes them more relatable. But watching a whole season to get there is a big time investment.
I definitely recommend new viewers only watch some of the key scenes in Season 1, or possibly a recap video that just presents things as they are without saying “and this is bad because”, to avoid painting people’s opinions.
Randall Munroe did a strip recently on this mindset-
https://xkcd.com/2727/
I’m not watching an entire season of something if somebody tells me it’s the worst season. I didn’t do it for Steven, Homer, Finn, or even Goku, and I’ll never recommend someone else do it. If it’s a fairly silly show with some Important Plot Episodes, I’ll recommend just those ones and maybe some of the better silly ones. Every single show in existence has throwaway episodes that were created to fill a quota for a network, and it’s always morally correct to leave them in the bin.
Not me, I’m a completionist. I actually abhor the idea of skipping part so of something to get to the good part. Heck knowing there is a good part almost makes me enjoy the bad part more cuz I’m excited to see how it improved over time.
I’m a big fan of HarleyXIvy too. But I stopped watching the Harley cartoon about 5 minutes into the first episode after around 20 gratuitous f-bombs and a half dozen fatalities.
I think I’ll just stick to BTAS and the Harley/Ivy comic. That’s the dynamic I fell in love with and I don’t think anyone’s keen to recreate it.
For what it”s worth, the Harley Quinn cartoons are technically still in Season Three: there’s a Sandman-like bonus eleventh episode scheduled for February 9th, to coincide with the Velma finale.
You REALLY need to sign up for Chlove’s Patreon for the HarlIvy comic, that covers that night.
I haven’t read Sappho’s poetry yet, but considering how frequently it’s been popping up in conversation when I play Final Fantasy XIV>, maybe I should.
The thing about Sappho is very little of her works remains. Apparently her poetry was amazeballs because all the other greeks of the time say so. (also she was probably bi)
Go figure, more queer content banished to the Lost Content Zone.
Thanks, more fuel for my game-making mill! 🤩
To be fair it’s more the Lost Greco-Roman Zone, alongside anything Socrates actually may have written himself, for example.
Probably not a lot; if Plato’s depiction of him was accurate, Socrates was contemptuous of writing, thought it destroyed people’s ability to remember things for themselves, and considered it far inferior to face-to-face communication.
(I wonder if he’d have changed his mind if he’d been told that all we know of him and his philosophy is thanks to it having been written down.)
Sudden wild notion: Maybe Socrates was actually severely dyslexic, and after many failed attempts at learning to read and write, sneering at the whole enterprise of writing was basically his sour grapes.
The eternal lament of the historian
The fact that anything she wrote managed to survive for over 2500 years is pretty impressive. For most of that time, it significant time and effort to reproduce and preserve documents, so only things that people valued highly managed to survive. (I suspect ancient Greek culture contained just as much trash as our own. It only seems brilliant because nobody bothered to preserve the trash.) Even then, history is littered with lost works that we only know ever existed because of references in writings that did survive.
I like Mary Barnard’s translation. Whole thing reads like one epic poetry cycle, all put together.
Description here:
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520305564/sappho
Preview here:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sappho/WWF9DwAAQBAJ
Of course you have a link. Thanks kindly.
I find it baffling that people today try to determine Sapho’s sexual orientation, based on what? a few surviving texts (transcribed and translated accross millenia) and a lot of gossip from authors who had their own biases? not to mention our modern, western separation of bi vs lesbian (which is a late 20th century phenomena, mind you) might just not actually apply at all, that far outside our cultural context.
And now that I’m reminded that sexuality isn’t that clear cut, I’m gonna have to cut Jayce and Dorothy some slack. Even tho their holding hands invalidates my previous “five feet apart” joke. Hm.
Tbh I was full expecting Dorothy to teach Joyce a more hands on approach to masturbation. But Dorothy probably predicted that Joyce would be too nervous for that.
fine, i meant there are fragments that are interpreted as homoerotic and others as heteroerotic, afaik
Wait where does it pop up?
Haven’t come across it yet.
Then again i’m not familiar with her poems so i wouldn’t recognize it if i saw it.
Could/would you provide some references as to where it pops up in the game? Would love to know.
Also, which group are you playing? Sea wolf rhoegadyn for me
I’m ALSO a Sea Wolf! Femroe supremacy! Specifically, my character is Swozwall Haeredzwyn, on the Leviathan server.
If I’m reading correctly, I don’t actually mean it’s in the in-game text. Moreso the RP community, especially with the resident gay femroes.
FEMROE MASTER RACE 🤝
In fairness to the distinguished competition, we can’t all be huge and green and
sick of being called She-Hulkexquisitely stylish.it’s true, not everyone has what it takes to be Correct, but we love them anyway
I played a Hellsguard Femroe, just to see if I could make one look so human that people don’t notice she’s actually a Roe. (If I played a male Roe, their football-gear shoulders would give the game away immediately.) Their Adjective-Noun meant I could use a name that would even look like a common human name without breaking lore convention. And while it wouldn’t have been unlikely for me to use “Amber” as a forename for this purpose, Willis’ comics probably helped to bring that name to mind more quickly. It took me a while to pick out a surname until I thought some more about “a name that would hide me in plain sight, beneath notice.” …Which brought the Stone Mask from Majora’s Mask to mind, and then I realized… Stone! Perfect! So her name is Amber Stone.
I have successfully fooled several people with this, including (somehow) multiple people who were present in the Discord channel where I was planning it out loud. And one of those was fooled twice. (How…? Did they just somehow forget????)
Ooh, she’s cute! I’m biased, yes, but it’s still true.
I did the same thing: https://i.imgur.com/sl100ey.png
but being green is the best part :<
(being green actually makes it kinda hard to pick dye colors sometimes without clashing with your own skin. still no regrets tho)
omg they were dorm-mates
dorothy is surprisingly comfortable, makes me wonder if she’s had any other kinda experience or is just acting as like a big sister/teaching moment
Aw, really?
Joyce thinks she is choosing to be naughty. A little emotional support would be welcome right now, and apparently is.
I mean, Dorothy is correct to sense discomfort. Feeling such feelings for the first time is scary and unnerving.
This is very sweet. Adorable.
I’ve said this is gay too many times so instead I’ll say this is really straight! Nothing more friendship reaffirming than platonically supporting your bestie during her first fap!
Honestly it makes me regret my friendships. I have never been there for my homies when they’re rubbing one out. I should rise to meet Dorothy’s level.
Wow, you’re really gonna call ’em your “homies” when you haven’t charged your crystals together?
This comic actually made me grateful I never had any close female friendships, because this shit seems weird
I have had conversations with women about their first orgasm while awake (yes women have wet dreams too) and they said it was frightening from the intensity of the feeling. I imagine this is the same thing happening for Joyce.
hopefully gen z and the gen after that will be more open and fluid about that kinda stuff XD;
i think at most what i’d imagine as a teen if someone wanted help sexually would be to like go to a sex shop together lol
eh, gen alpha maybe. My gen is currently experiencing a backswing on the pendulum after spending far too early of our years on Tumblr and twitter and now you’re a pedophile if you like short people. We’ve become puritans except we use therapeutic language to sound right
(Something something about people thinking Dorothy is being a coercive predator)
Short people? Wh- Okay, could you elaborate on that slightly? I feel like I’m not gonna like any potential answer, but fuck if I’m gonna Google that combination of words.
I saw a story earlier today about Shauna Rae that might be related?
There was a twitter post that was like “ppl under 5’2 is ‘minor coded'” or some bs like that but might be tiktok brainrot too lol
That is very sweet of Dorothy, although it convinces me more and more that the ship Dorothy×Joyce is setting sail.
Let it be so.
To quote Pharaoh Atem: “So let it be written, so let it be done.”
And here I thought he said “MY GRANDPA’S DECK HAS NO PATHETIC CARDS, KAIIBA. BUT IT DOES HAVE!!!”
The unstoppable Expedia!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PMG7zw8eI8E
“THE UNSTOPPABLE EXODIA”
That quote is one of my favorites to exploit and sentence mix. “My grandpa has no cock, Kaiba!” “My pathetic deck has no cards!” “MY grandpa’s pathetic dick haah hAaH HAH’
I don’t really ship these two. But this is the absolute gayest.
My feels exactly. Also, accidentally flagged, sorry!
I do. I ship them. Woah, ship, ship, ship!
I ship them also – let the SS Joyothy set sail, and bon voyage! <3
I am loosing my mind in this arc, it came fast and hit hard. Is Dorothy really going just swoop in and yoink joyce when Joyce/Joe was looking so real. *What is happening im loosing my mind.*
This must be the work of an enemy stand! 😮
Speaking of coming fast and hard.
the twist is that Dorothy isn’t actually rejecting Joeyce because of Joe’s history, she’s just envious and holding her own latent feelings for Joyce
“Jealousy, turning saints into the sea“
… she’s touching his
Chest now, he takes off her
Dress now, let me go
‘Cause I just can’t look, it’s killing me
They’re taking control”
At first, I had doubts that Dorothy’s motive for turning Joyce away from Joe was anything other than her being a mother-hen and not wanting Joyce to end up with a womanizing heart-breaker. But ummm the bar is shifting pretty hard towards Dorothy angling to be the next “Ms. Steal Yo Girl.” (Is that the right term?)
Her hatred of Joe is so deep she’ll go pansexual to stop his Innocence Destroying Genitals.
Poor dude can’t help that he was born with IDG Syndrome.
“It came fast”
*snort*
Good. I friggin hope so. Breaking Ships is in Dorothy OG character.
After 5 years of Ship teasing Deathan , I hope Dorothy breaks everyone up.
I hope she sleeps with Danny & walky next.
Dorothy can be the new Bi Joe.
I read this as BI Joe like GI Joe and it just makes this comment that much better.
BBBBBBBB IIIIIIIIIII JOEEEEEEE.
Well, knowing is half the battle, and:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vacuum/altruistic/
Dorothy keeps meticulous notes.
Maybe it’s because YouTube Poops have polluted my brain embryo, but I can’t read that without Paul stretching it.
Joyce has two hands
She’s holding her phone reading Amber’s slashfic with the other one. And I noticed she’s crossing her legs very hard in the last panel, she might be getting close.
:3
*plays “The Hustle” by Van McCoy on hacked muzak*
*whispers* DO IT!
Gotta say you’re a human with a vaste and curious playlist.
I’m an alien with a human host 😛 also thanks!
1: For all else you want to say about this story arc, and there’s huuuuuuge issues with consent involved here so I don’t want to dismiss it I have them myself, lets all take a step back here.
This strip is super dawwwww, dang it.
2: I’m just puzzled why Dorothy went to this method. The critical question I have is… well, why doesn’t Joyce indulge in self-pleasure? Is it just ex-Christian Fundamentalist baggage? Is there more to it? This just feels like the sort of situation that, while more fun to solve this way, would be better addressed with a frank conversation…
It’s a cheap method that’s almost universally accessible.
A frank conversation about her baggage isn’t something Joyce is willing to have yet. And I don’t think Dorothy is the right person to have it with her, either.
Could very well be Christian Baggage. Chains of Faith can be really fickle, and Dorothy didn’t have nearly as much observation and planning as did Dina prior to her gambit. 😮
I agree on all fronts.
Could you elaborate on the consent issue? I mean, Joyce hasn’t once given an actual “No” that I’ve seen. Even when denying her desires she is still moving towards the situation, not away from it. She hasn’t even paused. Or have I missed something?
My biggest issue on the consent front is actually not about Joyce’s consent to this act.
Its everyone else’s that troubles me.
They’re being sneaky about it, but they’re masturbating in a public place, where anyone can come in, where there are people that should be expected to come in because… there’s a dryer running. Someone that isn’t these two is drying their clothes.
It’s a huge issue with public sex kinks, you should be getting consent from everyone that ends up witnessing it, and in a lot of situations that’s very hard to do… let alone this one, where its a public space that the two know is being used.
Passing out consent flyers in the lobby, just in case some prude notices me sitting in a dryer.
If you make someone party to your sex act, you need their consent. Its that simple. Or do we need to bring up comparable examples of people masturbating in front of others who did not give their consent?
Don’t talk down to me. I was making a joke because the mental image amused me.
Ah, sorry. Impression I got from your comment was one of sneering judgement, my bad for getting it wrong.
And yes, fully agreed, consent flyers in the lobby is indeed an amusing mental image :).
Apology accepted. These things happen.
I’m imagining at least one passerby taking a flyer all confused, asking if they need to make a donation, and signing it instead.
Yes. Please bring them up.
And draw pictures. Or full color glossy 8by 10 photographs with labels on the back
In walks the judge, and in walks the Seein’ Eye Dog.
and the judge wasn’t gonna look at the forty-seven 8×10 colored glossy photographs with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was and how it could be used as evidence agaynst us
A typical case of American blind justice.
“Well it was 58 years ago on Thanksgiving…
Always delights me to find Arlo fans in the wild.
I don’t live that far from Stockbridge, MA, so it always comes to mind when I’m driving through there.
So when in my teens, I used to surreptitiously jerk off without anyone noticing in the middle of class (yes really), I should’ve gotten the consent of all 23 other boys in the class and the teacher? Or those times I did it while sitting on a packed commuter train? (I was a horny little teenaged bastard xD)
You shouldn’t have been doing it around all those people at all, what the fuck?
Hindsight is 20/20, they say.
That’s…a crazy fucking thing to admit
I garaun-fucking-tee you, people noticed and thought you were a creep. Likely including the teacher.
I don’t say this to judge you morally, but uh, this happens more than it’s talked about in high schools and it is always absolutely inappropriate and skeeves people the fuck out.
I’m just gonna say, if this qualifies as masturbating to a point where you need to get everyone to consent, I need to apologize to some buses filled with people after an indecent thought or two.
I feel like reading a book while sitting on a dryer, “waiting for your pants to dry” is acceptably low stakes enough pass off as normal. She’s not exactly loudly and vocally rubbing one out. No one is gonna come in and demand to know what she’s reading.
And the room is currently empty except for someone who did consent.
If you peruse the last 3 months of comments, people are getting upset at how many people have their noses in Joyce’s Brown. ‘no means no’ is an inferior measure of consent to ‘enthusiastic consent’, people (Becky and Dorothy) are mothering her about and making her do things she’s expressed unreadiness for (eg medical attention). Now Dorothy has like. Browbeaten Joyce into a sex act, basically.
I tend to agree with you, especially now Joyce has had a number of varyingly explicit outs offered, but that’s A summary of the concerns. Interfering with the autonomy of others is. A big part of being a social animal imo. But also FRAUGHT. and litters the road to hell with good intentions yadadyadayada.
I’m thinking right now the ironic thing is the only person actually respecting her stated boundaries in all this is Joe.
But then again he’s always been good at boundaries when he realizes they’re there, come to think of it.
You also seem to feel qualified as a mouthpiece for Joyce, fwiw
Not only has Joyce not said no, Dorothy has asked if Joyce wanted to continue more than once, and also made it clear it’s okay if she’s uncomfortable and wants to stop
Not just consent but continuous affirmative consent
You’re not allowed to understand that consent doesn’t only come in the form of “YES!”, stop that right now, buster.
Godzilla puking the lazor down the big bug’s throat in that one movie, but the lazor is labeled “YES”.
Counterpoint–the “enthusiastic consent” model wasn’t invented because the “no means no” and “yes means yes” models were perfect every single time, y’know?
This is fair enough, I think. That’s all I’ll say about it though, because I’m really still too exhausted to spend energy on a more detailed response. And yes, I understand the irony.
Counter-counterpoint, the “enthusiastic and ongoing consent” model is far from perfect and all-encapsulating. it’s a strategic mantra that, as you point out, served to refocus the consent convo away from misguided and/or rapey legalistic CYA-type takes, but also, like any pithy slogan, it’s no substitute for actual consent education. lots of situations of non-enthusiastic consent are fine; also the potential pressure towards enthusiasm is not great (and some will argue, neuro-normative and ace-exclusionary)
Yeah. I was trying to figure a way to say something like that. It’s really a counterpoint to flaws with the other models, but it’s got its own problems.
high praise coming from you =)
Oh, sure. It’s not perfect, almost by definition no simplified model is.
My overall point remains–it wasn’t clear at all until approximately a strip before this one which way this was going to fall, consent-wise, and I’m very weirded out by the people who’ve been convinced everything was just 100% great for sure since day one of the storyline.
But does she KNOW what shes saying yes or no to? Is this informed consent?
“I’m going to teach you to masturbate’ is pretty fucking succinct.
Yes, there is a difference between the “no means no” and “yes means yes” and “enthusiastic consent” models of consent, and Joyce’s responses are consensual in two of those and “suspect at best” in the third.
I quite understand that you’re apparently not using the “enthusiastic consent” model, but it’s not all that hard to realize that the objections are coming from people who DO use that model, and that under that model it was not clear consent for most of this storyline.
I’d be more okay with non-enthusiastic consent if that was something they had talked about in the past. “It’s okay for you to push me on X, but respect a No” feels a lot better then unilaterally deciding for someone else that they are ready to push a boundary, specifically when that person looks up to you as a figure of authority, and no one can really say Joyce doesn’t see Dotty as some kind of authority figure.
Especially when Dotty is apparently taking charge of Joyce’s sexual awakening.
Allowing herself to be dragged to a pharmacy to get birth control, having Dotty enrolling her into a nude life drawing class.
This is just one more weird step in Dotty “Fixing” Joyce’s sexual repression, and it’s effing creepy.
It’s probably that the last interaction they had immediately before this whole thing ended with Joyce shouting at her friends to stop bringing up sex decisions with her.
To be fair, it’s important to note the context of Joyce shouting that, which was Dorothy and Roz very publically and loudly arguing with one another about her in front of their whole friend group while simultaneously acting as if she wasn’t there. There’s a degree to which it’s reasonable to conclude that the irritation was less the sex talk and more just the condescending attitude on display. A conclusion that seems reinforced by the way that she’s ultimately going along more favourably with this more one-on-one and non-argumentative interaction with Dorothy
Honestly, she might have baggage with the assault on top of the fundamentalism. She wasn’t adverse to r*pey mcr*peface, until things went bonkers, then things went more bonkers, and things ended in repeated stabbings.
So the whole warm fuzzies might bring back mental trauma from thing What Happened.
Woah Willis you sure you don’t want to charge for this lewd hand holding action
Hand-holding might even lead to
[stinger]
eye-gazing!
That’s why it’s in a faraway shot. You can get away with it as long as it’s not in close up.
There’s this weird thing I’ve heard of, involving “one bible length apart” or something, I forgot. at least I think it’s a thing someone back me up
Depending on the bible, there’s alot of fun that can be had technically one length apart
Now I kinda wanna look into what options are available in the “Bible-shaped sex toy” category. Y’know, for a friend.
If it exists I hope it’s called the REALLY GOOD Book.
Cue that Walkyverse comic of Joyce’s parents.
The Better Book
That’s just making me think of “leave room for Jesus”. I actually visualized it for once and Jesus is a fuckin pervert aye, wanting to be sandwiched between two teens at a school dance or whatever. Fuckin sicko
ur not allowed 2 say this abt our lord n savior jebus chripitor
[insert joke about 9 Chickweed Lane and hand-holding here]
There have been more legs than usual in the comic lately too…
Stare into the abyss long enough, it stares back at you.
A lot of are things supposed to be happening right now and I look like an idiot, energy at the moment.
Completely disagree. I dunno how to communicate it if you don’t have that anatomy but she’s shifting to control the level of stimulation. However, being nervous and curling in on yourself as the shameful feelings come over works against that. Dorothy holding her hand shows her she’s not alone, and Joyce can relax and Enjoy The Ride, as it were, legs still crossed for stimulation but no frowny eyebrows.
Just to good friends masturbating together platonically
Oh, my heart. My big, gay, sapphic heart.
I noticed that Joyce has crossed her legs in panel 2. So this might be working better than I originally anticipated. I still believe this isn’t the end of Dorothy teaching Joyce to masturbate. After all, she can’t do this every day without people noticing and commenting.
It’s like applying a matte grey coat to your miniatures before painting them. works fine, you can totally get a little use of of ’em that way, but the real fun begins when you get out the airbrush and metallic primary colors.
I mean, keep in mind, she’s been… ready to pop… for weeks at this point. They could have taken a bus ride down any Indiana road and sped this up by a few pages in all honestly.
My concern from over 50 years of pleasuring women is she might fixate on this one particular method of achieving orgasm. I know lots of women who the only way they can reach orgasm is by repeating their first orgasm, whether that was from manual stimulation, oral sex, or a vibrator. The woman who could only get off with a vibrator was extremely frustrating if she didn’t bring her vibrator or if the batteries were dead.
🎵 It’s totally platonic 🎵
Is that a real song? If so do you have a link? It sounds funny.
It’s from a song that was forcibly adopted by Owl House fans who ship Lumity for how damn well they felt it fit Amity (note that aspects of Amity’s character had not been revealed at the time so it’s not a 100% fit now that we know her more). My HTML is too rusty to make a link. https://youtu.be/VhZIikh-z7g
The song writer responded by writing one for Luz, the other half of the paring. https://youtu.be/9tMyhNUPr3Y
Oh good the links make themselves.
Oh, I like that show. Thanks for links.
Oh my gosh, they were laundrymates.
Indeed, this puts a whole new spin on dirty laundry.
That’s what i call a soap opera.
You don’t really need to find out what’s going on.
You don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone.
Just leave well enough alone, eat your dirty laundry.
Kick ’em when they’re up, kick ’em when they’re down.
Platonic girl/girl hand-holding while you both sit on the dryers and read smut (I assume Dorothy’s smut involves a flowchart). Nothing gay happening here, move along.
And y’know what, blanket statement that I’m 100% fine with this scenario and how it’s played out, I see no problems here, and if anyone else does that’s fine but just don’t argue with me and I’ll do the same. The last few days have been mentally exhausting and I have no energy left to engage in the #Discourse.
I mean both Dorothy and Amber have had… intimate relations with Walky (I don’t remember if Amber actually had sex with him, but there was implied dry humping to climax). So she might be looking for Amber fanfic with thinly veiled references to Walky or uh, Nightguy.
It’d be kinda neat seeing what another girl notices about your ex in comparison to how you see them.
In theory, it leads to fun times.
I imagine in practice, it might trigger a few insecurities.
When your girlfriend and your wife are talking and one points to you and they start giggling? That kind of insecurities?
No it totally never happened to me (slinks away covering face)
My recollection of Amber and Walky is the same. But now I want to go archive diving to make sure.
I feel like Dorothy’s smut involves time travel or a period piece and some strong but soft Fabio type in a pirate blouse (bring that shit back peak make fashion), and heavy usage of the word “member”
Yknow, proper mom shit
IT’S HAPPENING IT’S HAPPENING THE VALENTINE’S DAY SMOOCH APPLE OF ERIS IS ROLLING INTO THE HALLWAY
My hot take: Two things can be true.
This may be a little problematic. Dorothy’s motivations are perhaps a little clouded by insecurity over Roz’s remarks, possessiveness over Joe/Joyce, and her being a little bossy and overprotective. Dorothy might be acting a little pushy here, too.
This can also be cute and charming. Dorothy isn’t being perfect here, but Joyce is visibly happy to be here–she’s joking around, playing at not wanting to do this, but every time Dorothy checks in she eagerly reaffirms she does.
Yes, Dorothy is being a little bossy, but that’s always been their dynamic, and it’s clearly one Joyce is used to and, in this case, doesn’t mind. This is something she wants to be able to experience. Joyce is free to leave, and she doesn’t want to.
Also, people saying “these girls are canonically straight”–Dorothy has only said she’s straight once, and she herself acknowledged there was no way to be 100% sure. It was literal books ago. Sexuality is fluid! As for Joyce, the comic has been joking about her being bisexual for years. C’mon. It’s not a sure thing.
Yup.
I really wanna ‘awww’ at them holding hands but I’m still not sure where this is going so I’m gonna hold off on it.
This can only end in slipshine, obvs
All I can think of is Daisy telling Joyce that her Julia Gray comic strip was queerbaity. Which I do not think is what this is, to be clear, this scene is just…really not straight and the parallel there has me amused. Like, I want to know how whatever Daisy was reading stacks up to this, in terms of non-hetero energy.
Perhaps Daisy is the Cassandra of wlw vibes. She knows something we don’t, but nobody wants to listen to her.
To be fair Daisy said they the main character’s had a lot of ship teasing going on and only said it was queetbaity after Joyce told her she didn’t mean for there to be romance between them.
Awww
I’m glad I don’t ship them because then I’d have to be torn between how cute this is and how much I hated the leadup to it. Instead, I just get to be like, well, this is what is happening now, guess I’ll see how it turns out
Daww…. this is still super weird and cringy given everything that has happened up to this point.
Not learning to masturbate thays fine but all the steps Dorothy has taken to get to this point and her reasoning to do so and its in a public area.
This would have been a sweet daww moment but i read what came before it and it ruins it
The factions, as I understand them:
– This is gay and good
– This is gay and not good
– This is not gay and not good
I understand two of those!
I like that you left out “– This is not gay and good”, because it’s absolutely fucking gay.
The fourth, nonexistent camp (“not gay and good”) i find completely baffling. Or would find baffling if it was a thing people were saying.
This is not very gay and is good. Though there are various ways it could blow up.
i stand corrected. and i’m not even that baffled.
How about, “this is loving and good.”
“This is loving (sexual)” and/or “this is loving (romantic)” is covered under “this is gay and good.”
“This is loving (platonic) and good” is. Not a thing I have seen anyone say and I would be mildly confused if someone did. “This is loving (queerplatonic)” maybe.
This is loving (queerplatonic) is kind of exactly how I read this. I mean like both of these people are straight and not attracted to one another romantically or sexually, but this act is definitely not straight in any kind of normative way. It does however reflect the level and tone of queerplatonic relationships I’ve been part of, hence that pretty strongly being my read.
Don’t put parenthetical remarks in my mouth. I don’t know if it’s gay or straight, or just loving friends. But it’s good.
OK, I’ll bear the standard for the fourth camp. This is friendly concern, and that is good. The way it’s being done is worse than bad; it’s stupid. But even stupid ideas work out sometimes….
Sorry, “standard bearer“.
Cannot believe I am correcting my correction. That’s what I originally meant to write, changed it, didn’t read it right, and tried to fix it. Too early, not enough tea, whatev.
I personally find it not gay and good. I think Dorothy’s being a good friend to Joyce here.
Yup, Joyce MIGHT be bisexual, there’s enough data to make that stance. Dottie is straight, but will take the lesbian grenade to stop Joe.
Hey you can be straight and still do gay acts. A guy can suck a cis dick and still be straight but that’s still a very gay thing he just did
Holding your friends hand while she gets off for the first time is pretty gay
+1 to “not gay and good”! I’m sorry y’all, like…ship your ships, lesbians 4 life and whatever etc etc, I will not stand in your way, and I do fully support bi Joyce. But Dorothy is still an impenetrable wall of hetness. Not a hint of a gay vibe from her at all and I’m serious about that. Trust me, I’ve been watching the last week or so of strips VERY closely, but she’s giving me nothing to work with!
See, like…sexually, y’know, kinda yeah? Dorothy does seem like her sexual interest is basically completely dude-oriented, or you’d think we’d see like, more of a blush, more unconscious responses, etc. Now, that could be not true, or true, in equal measure—Dorothy is Very Straight(?) by observation, let’s just say.
BUT, romantically, I am 99.99999% sure she’s down bad for Joyce and doesn’t fully realize the extent of those feelings.
Yeah, see, I just………I really, really don’t think she is, though. I’m truly, honestly not sensing ANYTHING non-platonic from her. Honestly, she had way more romantic tension with Amazi-girl back in the day- in 2017 I could have seen her going biromantic at least. But it’s been a long time since then, and towards Joyce there is just…no romantic chemistry at all. In fact, if anything I’d say what vibes there were have DECREASED in the last few years.
If, in tomorrow’s comic, she suddenly gazes longingly at Joyce and blushes, I will personally consider it a huge swerve. Put more succinctly, if Willis intends her to be read as having feelings toward Joyce, he is failing to convey it.
To me. The most important commenter.
Hey, that’s fair! A not-insignificant part of my analytics comes from “SONG LYRIC TITLE MEAN SOMETHING!!” so I stand a decent chance of being totally wrong.
[sitting in front of youtube lyric videos, clutching your headphones in a white knuckled grip like you’re at NASA trying to decipher language out of electric signals from the edge of the galaxy] “this MEANS something, i know it does- !!!”
Okay but if the electric signals from the edge of space translate to “Can you hear me?” I am grabbing my gunblade and getting on the first rocket ship out there so I can solve some fucking problems or at least give the astronauts air in the attempt.
There *might* be something there in the 3rd and 4th panels of this
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/02-turning-saints-into-the-sea/bigger-2/
Dorothy has a lot of careful categories where she puts herself but definitely gets flustered if someone or something suggests she might belong in more categories (autism for example).
I’m mostly gay and good but sometimes it flips to not good
Well, if you can’t be good…be careful!
…this comic is about to crush one of my dreams, and I’m terrified to learn which one it is.
I am curious what your dreams are and why they might get ruined. Care to elaborate?
I’m pretty sure they ship both Joe/Joyce and Joyce/Dotty.
One of their dreams is that Joyce is monoromantic.
Admittedly I hadn’t really considered the possibility that Joyce might be poly, but that would allow both of the intended dreams to be fulfilled!
the filthiest act, even filthier than masturbation, is holding hands.
And here they are, doing both at the same time. Do these heathens know no shame????
Filthy Acts at a reasonable price.
Disreputable Behavior performed for a bargain.
Terrible Tricks enacted at huge discount.
Upsetting Events caused by price drops
Rude Ramifications at a Reduced Price.
Shit I should have said
Rude Ramifications at a Reduded RATE. I ALMOST had the alliteration.
Why do I get the feeling you are sneaking up on an AC/DC song title.
They’re not sneaking up on it, they’re doing the “I’m not touching yoou” meme except with words.
Besmirching Behavior on a Bargain-Bin Budget.
Calamitous Contrivances commenced by crowdfunding.
Excommunicatable excitement, easily elicited
Freakish fondling for freakin free-ish
Ghastly gigs for giggles, not greenbacks.
Offensive carryings–on competitively peddled.
Troublesome Times compensated with coupons
Hazardous hijinks, hardly haggled-over!
Insult and injury — inexpensively implemented.
Jekyll-ish jerkery jobbed for jack.
Knavish kerfuffle kicked-up for kopeks.
Litigable lechery let loose at a loss.
Mischief, marked down.
Nonsense for nickels.
OTT on offer.
Pants-cheap partytime.
Quibbleworthy quest for quixotic quote.
Great job, Milu!
Haha thanks. Had a slow day =)
However, i just realized Jekyll is the upstanding citizen. For some reason i find that’s a more sinister-sounding name than Hyde. So, woops.
note to editors of my “Complete Collection of Clever Comments on Comics”: please quietly replace that with, say, “Jabroni”. Jabroni jerkery jobbed for jack? Eh, sure why not
What a funny valentine. Or something.
“My heart, and actions, are utterly unclouded. They are those of ‘justice’.”
—Dorothy Keener, last words
bruh, I don’t think I could touch another human being who is not my sexual/romantic partner while rubbing one out; holding hands with a platonic friend while doing it is very very weird
These last couple of strips have made no sense and the rationale is, at the very least, weak
You know you’re kinda right. Maybe it’s a dream?
I mean how many people on here have masturbated while holding hands with their best friend
This is just so out of character for both of them
I mean I haven’t because I don’t masturbate, but I’ve had sex with my best friend (queerplatonic partner) as a platonic escalation of physical closeness. Sex has the meanings that you give it. It’s just closer hugging in that context.
I promise that while it is queer and unusual, this type of interaction does exist amongst certain kinds of close friends. Much the way that I appreciated that Dina felt like representation of a way of being ace that communicated like the actual way it feels for a person like me to exist in the world, I appreciate that these guys are doing queerplatonic friendship in a way that seems like it’s communicating the way it feels to be in such a friendship.
These kinds of comments and response to portrayal of queerplatonic experiences are always kind of disheartening to me because it means that there’s not space in some folks’ internal worlds for people like me to exist. It’s a reminder that if I write about my own experiences through fiction people will absolutely say I’m full of shit.
Queerplatonic relationships sadly aren’t that well known, alongside the imlpcations of what it can mean. For a lot of people this kind of intimate closeness has only been something that people in typical relationships do. I really fucking sucks because if I mention “queerplatonic throuple” people instantly lock on to the throuple part and not the rest of the phrase I half jokingly use to desccribe the relationship me and two friends have.
But I am glad that non normative relationships are being shown, and that people can see the ways platonic relationships can blurr the lines and be more than just friends. (they can be friends who hold hands when masturbating)
Thank you. I’ve been disappointed with a lot of the comments because they seem to be itching to label and categorize what Joyce & Dotty are doing here, to fit them into some box. Though I’ve not experienced one, I can totally see the kind of relationship you’ve described as a thing that happens in real life.
If you have the time and inclination, I would love to ask you to explain more about this sort of relationship because it simply does not make sense to me to call someone you have sex with a platonic friend instead of a sexual partner.
From what I understand; someone is a sexual partner even if the sex only occurs occasionally or or just the one time. In the most simple and neutral terms it’s simply “a person who had sex with another one”; which sounds like what you did with your friend.
I don’t get not calling that a sexual relationship or encounter beyond just having an issue with the name or perhaps the implied motivation.
I do want to get though, so if you want to explain I would love to listen.
Obviously this is very personal so please only reply if you’re comfortable telling this to strangers
Hi, yeah definitely, sure.
I think platonically gets used in this situation in contrast to romantic rather than in contrast to sexual. My queerplatonic partner is a sexual partner, but they aren’t a romantic partner, which is what the default assumption is when you’re that emotionally intimate with a sexual partner. Neither of us finds the other remotely romantically attractive, but we are best friends and very snuggly (clearly) and enjoy a very high level of emotional intimacy and plan our lives around one another. It’s the type of friendship where even though I don’t feel the need to date multiple people I feel the need to call myself poly because normal monogamy relationship norms would think of this kind of friendship as an emotional affair even without romantic interest or the sex element. I’m unbelievably lucky I found a romantic partner who was okay with me having these kinds of friendships before I found poly terminology and would have been able to filter for it. I’ve always felt the need for this kind of friendship partner bond, much the same way that I feel the need for a romantic partner bond. Fundamentally different kind of relationship. Not something people really know what to do with most of the time.
Possibly just as significantly, the sex isn’t about sex if that makes sense? Neither of us are sexually attracted to one another outside the bounds of what it accomplishes for our friendship, I guess. I mean I guess that’s really obviously the case for me since I don’t really have a sex drive most of the time, but it is also the case for them. It’s not about pleasure (though my partner does experience pleasure–I don’t in any normal way and never have), it’s not about whatever special intimacy it seems like non-ace folks only get out of sex. It’s the same thing hugging and snuggling and touch is for communicating but more. It’s a space where it’s appropriate to play games with identity in ways that help us understand each other better as people. But like. It matters for that escalation of physical affection and that weird social space it sometimes creates, but no one is gonna be unhappy if they don’t get off? Like I’ve done things that are objectively sex acts but that really are just being closer in the way that allows until the snuggling is done because there’s no real looking for stimulation thing to it at all beyond more complete touch. It’s possible that this is way more normal than I think it is, but I don’t get the impression that that’s very normal. It seems like most people have a certain set of things they want when they have sex and many of those things are mostly peripheral or irrelevant for us.
So yeah it really is about the implied motivation. In purely objective terms, it is a non-romantic sometimes sexual friendship. But when people talk about fwb they don’t seem to mean what I mean when I talk about my thing most of the time. So. I use queerplatonic to describe a relationship that exists within what seems to be a place of category crisis for the society that we live in. It doesn’t fit in any of the common boxes, and when people try to fit it in a common box they put connotations onto it that are simply wrong.
I hope that makes sense? I don’t feel like that was a very good explanation. Like I feel like we all know the difference between friendship feelings and romantic feelings or wanting to give a friend a hug and sexual attraction, but like. God help me if I want to describe the way that distinction feels in the kinds of specifics that would make me feel like I’d communicated usefully. So I just have to hope that at least we experience those concepts similarly enough that I can reference them as a baseline and you’ll get the idea.
If you have more specific questions I can try to answer them, hopefully that was helpful though.
To be clear, I don’t think Joyce and Dotty are going to go the full friendship sex direction that has existed in my current qpp. I don’t think their relationship is quite like that. This just also feels like queering a thing into a place of category crisis about what the relationship is by putting together pieces that usually go in different boxes. And the tone of this strip specifically feels very right for things I have experienced in those “I don’t know how to define this, there’s no box, we just kind of have to make up the rules here because no one ever told us how to have this kind of relationship, but the kind of connection I’m finding here is good” spaces even if the details are very very different.
thanks for answering! you’ve given me some ideas to chew on.
for this strip in particular, I still maintain it’s weird, or at least that a boundary has been crossed here sexually for Joyce and Dorothy. Now, I should clarify that crossing sexual boundaries is not necessarily bad, there are plenty of contexts in which it is part of positive growth. What I don’t think is that either Dorothy or Joyce are approaching this in a healthy manner.
If you’ll permit using your own relationship as an example, it sounds like you’re very close and intimate with your queerplatonic friend in ways that you’re not close with other people. I don’t think Dorothy and Joyce have achieved that level of emotional intimacy with each other.
OH MY GOD PLEASE. Seriously, if this is a dream, it would make SO. MUCH. sense.
I’m fully on-board with this being a dream, and I will be so disappointed if Joyce doesn’t wake up in a sweat in the next few strips.
The “dream” angle also meshes with my earlier frustration over the trope of women masturbating with washing machines, which is no longer a thing with modern machines—and Dorothy told her to get on a dryer, which apparently has never been a thing. But Joyce, whose sex-ed knowledge has been filtered so strongly, would believably (A) think this is a thing, and (B) get the washer and dryer confused.
“i hope this scene ends with a lazy copout”
The dream hypothesis IS a valid one and would be SO relieving given the unhealthiness of interpersonal dynamics here.
I was thinking Dorothy will wake in a cold sweat, drop her head into her hands and moan, “OMG I am completely out of control!”
It does seem like not great heavily troped fan-fic. But whose? Maybe Joyce’s?
Remember, it is not gay unless they clasp their fingers around each other.
Right?
I thought it was only gay if the balls touch? In which case, these two should be fine.
I’d find it weird enough to be doing it while a platonic friend is present, let alone holding hands with them while doing it.
https://youtu.be/F-cOZ8bx97k Getting off can be a totally platonic thing between your best friend and sister apparently
I’m seeing some parallels between this scene and the scene where Dorothy helps Joyce pick up her prescription.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-13/01-bring-me-to-life-drawing/bimonthly/
I heartily agree with Joyce’s final statement in that strip.
So when do they get to the toy-throwing stage?
They’ll have to make a trip to the store first, which is honestly where I see this going at this rate. Like, in a few days we might see Dorothy saying “Alright, now that you’re in the right mindset, let’s go to Screwby-Do’s and pick you up something a little more thorough, my treat.”
Or Joyce could say “That was neat, and thanks for literally holding my hand through it, but I think I’m gonna go watch anime.”
Sky’s the limit.
castle in the sky‘s the limit
That’s a good fuckin’ movie, one of Ghibli’s very best. I’m partial to Nausicaä, myself.
What about the wheel in the sky?
is that an animé
It has burnt out, sorry.
Argh, now they’ve got me doing it: I heard a completely unconventional meaning in “my treat” there.
What the hell! This is weird! I called this super hot a minute ago and maybe it is but it’s also really weird!
Yeah I’m stepping away from here for a little bit. I really don’t like how Joyce was pressured to this point. Plus, if Roz found this out after the situation with Joyce literally yelling at people to leave her out of sex stuff, it’s going to be framed as Dorothy being predatory. Which, yeah it kinda is because Joyce was very loud about her no and very uncertain about her yes.
Say what you want about Joe but he drops it after getting a no.
Oh my grav is Joe. Huh.
…i mean, now, but he absolutely did not used to
So Joes evolved and Dorothy is regressing?
She’s become what she hates the most.
Based on these strips Dorothy should never be placed in a position where she can enforce her own rules
Enforce others rules sure but not her own
I wouldn’t even trust her to enforce other people’s rules after this one event. :/ This is terrible.
President, for example.
Joyce has literally asked Joyce if she wanted to stop multiple times and assured her it was okay if she’s not comfortable continuing. Like, only a couple strips back. What comic are y’all reading??
They’re reading the comic where their ideas are the only correct ones.
Hey no fair, I’m reading that one!
There’s a difference between erring on the side of caution for consent and disregarding the agency of people to let themselves get talked into things.
Yeah, the difference is that they’re two completely separate, easily distinguished behaviors that look different. What?
One would hope so.
She’s literally reaffirmed that she’s cool and wants to be here at least twice
Yes.
When did Joe not stop after getting a no?
Mostly when hitting on women who’ve told him ‘not interested’ before, often until they basically scream at him to fuck off.
Has he actually not stopped after getting a no or has he bragged about something like that, which we know, from his own mouth, that he exaggerates his sexual adventures
As fat as I know the only time something like this was shown on screen he stopped the exact second he was told no
In terms of actual sex, no. The only time is the one you’re thinking of.
While hitting on women though, we’ve really only seen him back down when yelled at and even then he’s come back later to continue. For a long time, he didn’t really have any other mode of interacting with women, so if he got rejected and talked to them again, he was right back at it.
It all ties into to my big problems with Joe’s portrayal. We haven’t really seen him work. He used to hit on everyone. It’s implied he gets laid a lot. The only cases we’ve seen we either didn’t see the beginning or he was approached. We’ve seen him rejected, but only by women who weren’t at all interested and jumped straight to “go away!”
Well he DID manage to get Joyce out on a date. It just didn’t land because uh, Joyce and Mike.
Yeah, that’s our only real look at him doing his thing with any success and it still went quickly to anger (and punching.) Also, I suspect it suffers from a bit of early season weirdness.
Yeah, this is more than disturbing.
“Plus, if Roz found this out after the situation with Joyce literally yelling at people to leave her out of sex stuff, it’s going to be framed as Dorothy being predatory.”
And she’d be right to do so. This IS Dorothy being predatory, no matter if she realizes it or not.
I continue to be unable to find Joyce being loud about her no. And we know she has said yes multiple times. I don’t think the yeses are weak, but having them off-panel is going to make them not click for some.
The loud no was a few hours ago, and about a different (but related) situation, when she yelled at Dorothy, Sarah, and Roz to butt out of talking about her sex life. It was fairly boorish of Dorothy to come on so strong immediately after that exchange, which has made some people understandably uncomfortable, but to me Joyce has made it fairly clear with her repeated assent that this situation is okay with her regardless of her feelings on that previous encounter.
Interesting. Like, damn, I wonder where this is going, even if I suspect this isn’t going to do anything to make Joyce want to fuck Joe less.
This is really weird.
A lot of people in chat are going to be disappointed when this doesn’t lead to a relationship between Joyce and Dorothy.
I’d be more disappointed if it does
Same. :/
I’m patient. I know it’ll happened, just don’t know when.
I’m honestly really hoping it doesn’t. Mostly cuz I’ve invested ALL my interest in Joyce/Joe and want to see that explored much more.
If it happens, you may create an alternative live, like you did in Walky and Billie.
It’s a relationship, it just doesn’t have to be romantic.
I assure you, as one gifted with prophecy by Phoebus Apollo’s magic dodgeball, it will definitely lead to some kind of adjustment in Dorothy and Joyce’s relationship.
Pay no attention to the monkey’s paw I am carrying that just curled one finger, ominously.
The relationship going forward will be Joyce and dryer number 5
How can Dorothy or Joe even hope to compete?
Dorothy really just swooping in here huh?
Is Dorothy wearing a plain wristwatch, or is it one of those exercise sensor things, so DYW can just fade the lights out and show us the intensifying pulse rates?
One of those tender moments that are hard to explain to others
This.
H*nd h*lding in public place?
unacceptable!
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/932/422/4ad.gif Censor it!
Being one dryer apart makes the hand-holding feels a tad tough
*harmonizes Hold My Hand by Hootie & The Blowfish on the dryers* I’ll say Joyce would be PC Principal and Dorothy would be Strong Woman in this case
strictly platonic, leaving room for jesus, etc
It’s happening! It’s really happening!
Pharmacist “The things we do for love”
Dorothy “I guess so”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-13/01-bring-me-to-life-drawing/directions-2/
maybe joyce has moved to a 3 or a 4 on the kinsey scale now? Though sexual situation aside we all need someone to hold our hands throughout life moments haha
Oh, Dorothy’s the one who needed to move up the (self-assigned eons ago) Kinsey scale, and she’s definitely hopped some rungs.
Joyce was probably always floating around bi/pan, just inside a magical little place we like to call “the closet”
Are we using the Classic Kinsey Scale that only counts sexual encounters? In that case she’s moved from an X immediately to 6, on account of this, her first and so far only sexual experience, being with another woman. If we’re using a more modern and moderated version that accounts for attraction, this probably bumps her from a 1 to a 2, as this is *far* from incidental but there’s also no evidence her overall attraction is any less predominately focused towards males than it was previously.
Does this count as premarital hanky-panky?
It counts as premarital something alright
Premarital handky-pandky, maybe.
Go to your room
I’m… I’m actually blushing right now.
Generally I trust Willis to be aware of what he’s representing, but I don’t think he realizes this is a kind of sex.
Because it is presented as more of a soft friendly initiation to a basic personal activity, and clearly Joyce doesn’t frame this as “her first time having sex with someone” in her mind.
This whole mini-arc of Dorothy REPEATEDLY forcing her way in Joyce’s sexual life, even after having been told to back off by multiple people – including Joyce herself! – and ending up pushing Joyce into this activity, is extremely disturbing and disheartening.
I think Willis realizes this is a kind of sex. But it is also a soft initiation into a personal activity. Some things are queer in the way of queering relationship types and norms. This strikes me as extremely queerplatonic.
While a lot of what has gone on in relation to Joyce’s sex life and Dorothy’s interference in it has not been great in the broader arc, this specific segment of it has involved repeated interactions in which Joyce has been given the ability to leave and not engage and Joyce has repeatedly decided to stay. Joyce is uncomfortable with what she feels is judgment of and decisions other people are making about her sexuality and sexual behavior, but actual conversations she’s had with Becky and this particular thing with Dorothy (Dorothy’s level of personal maturity notwithstanding) has seemed pretty positive post-freak out. Which not coincidentally is when the tone of those interactions got a lot less judgmental.
I feel like this is probably the single best comment on this entire storyline.
About Joyce being given “multiple opportunities to leave”, I’ve just said all there is to say (in my opinion) on the matter lower in the thread of comments. Really uncomfortable sequence IMO.
I prefer the hypothesis of Willis not realizing this is a kind of sex because the precautions around consent as depicted here are insufficient IMO, and in fact I read this situation as coercion and manipulation.
This may be an effect of day-to-day consumption of the story (I -may- not have been this disturbed by this in archive-bing mode) but this is still… well, not okay.
Accusing Willis, an Actual Pornographer, of not being able to figure out that mutual masturbation is sex is a take I did not expect to see today.
Willis is clearly aware this is a sexual act. There are two reasonable explanations for his portrayal of this encounter:
A) Willis does not subscribe to the enthusiastic consent model and considers the level of consent which has been given in-panel to be sufficient for this to be an ethical sexual encounter.
B) Willis does not wish to portray this as a perfectly ethical sexual encounter, and has chosen an ethically gray standard of consent to illustrate the problems with what’s going on.
Thank you for this comment.
I’ll go further and say Joe was never shown, in this continuity at least, to be as dismissive of people’s consent and agency as Dorothy is here. When people express discomfort towards his advances he generally stops immediately. Not to idealize the guy, particularly the version of him before his current epiphany arc, but Dorothy is worse here, way worse.
Just compare with the Liz interaction.
This, absolutely, is correct.
In bed, yes, he does, but no, when people don’t want his advances, he generally has not stopped immediately. Ask Rachel or Sarah how many times they had to express ‘not interested’.
And how forcefully they (especially Sarah) had to do it. But it’s okay because he thought her angry energy was hot.
Back to my usual complaint that I really wish we’d seen more of old Joe at work with women who didn’t immediately react with anger, but also weren’t interested in jumping right into bed with him.
Is this really a kind of sex? Is there a term for it? I have no idea where to even start, if I wanted to look more into this, is all.
I do know there’s a term that is literally “mutual masturbation”.
Oh yeah, I always forget about that.
I should think about it more, so I won’t forget.
Yeah, to masturbate in the presence of someone else, or of multiple people, is a kind of sex, even more so when there is direct interaction such as the activity being proposed by one of the people involved.
Sex is not limited to penetration and can even happen without any kind of physical contact. Cybersex and phonesex, for example, are still sex.
Makes sense to me. Thanks for the clarity! Too many people just get mad if you don’t automatically know what does/doesn’t qualify as something.
Now, the question I have is: If we accept that this is “a kind of sex”, does it also count as “fucking”? What I mean by that is, do we get to now say that Joyce and Dorothy have fucked, since they’ve held hands while sitting on vibrating objects with the express purpose of stimulating their privates? Or is that too strong a word to use, would you say?
nah, come on. there’s “did we fuck?” situations, but finger-fondling isn’t one by any stretch
Though I’d argue that this just barely qualifies as masturbation. In the worst case.
It’s definitely a kind of intimacy, but I think the sexual aspect of the situation has nothing to do with that intimacy.
Okay, from the people in the comments who do not see the FLAWS OF CONSENT in the situation, let’s just list them.
Before starting, I’ll say I DON’T THINK THIS IS INTENTIONAL FROM WILLIS, I think it is an unfortunate situation brought upon by pacing and general habits of comedy.
But this is still very unfortunate.
GENERAL DYNAMICS
First and overall, Dorothy’s relationship with Joyce is, from the beginning, a relation of power. Dorothy ALWAYS positions herself as Joyce’s mentor, tasked to guide her through a complicated adult life, and Joyce in return admires Dorothy and generally follows her advice.
This makes any kind of sexual intimacy between them unbalanced, to say the least. Dorothy has POWER over Joyce, period.
01/21/2023
Dorothy checks on Joyce’s emotional start, then immediately starts issuing orders: “Gather your laundry. And go pee.”
Joyce is already expressing discomfort (she’s starting to stutter).
Then, after Joyce obeys her first order, Dorothy explains to her why she asked herself to do so. This is the exact representation of a known abuse technique (applied knowingly or unknowingly by Dorothy, we do not know; my working theory is that Willis himself did not realize what he was representing), COMPLIANCE in sociology/psychology. “See also Foot-in-the-door technique”.
The idea is that Joyce already gets psychologically engaged in the larger project through her ACTIONS, before even knowing what the project is. This is (again, knowingly or unknowingly) complete manipulation.
01/22/2023
Dorothy exposes her reasons. She phrases that Joyce NEEDS to learn how to masturbate.
As a bonus, Dorothy once again uses the opportunity to shittalk Joyce’s attraction to Joe, while her opinion on this matter is already well-known AND Joyce previously asked her to BACK OFF from this topic.
01/23/2023
Dorothy gives lip service to an approximative idea of consent: “Joyce, if you really don’t want to”.
She then completely ignore Joyce’s obvious discomfort, conveyed in both her body language and verbal expression.
01/24/2023
Dorothy issues multiple orders to Joyce: “Take off your pajama pants”, “Now go sit on top of that dryer”.
Joyce protests the first command, and Dorothy then insists (“Yes”, aka “That’s the point”).
Joyce doesn’t protest the second command, but expresses discomfort again (“O-Okay”). Dorothy does not care.
In the punchline for the strip, Joyce protests AGAIN (“But you can see my LEGS!”) and Dorothy is once again dismissive of her objections.
Generally speaking, Dorothy sees neither Joyce’s repeated objections nor her repeated expressions of discomfort as reasons to stop the “experience”.
01/25/2023
Joyce: “If I say this is stupid, can I leave?”
Dorothy: “Yes.”
Joyce: “O– Okay. Well, this IS stupid.”
And then Joyce doesn’t leave, and Dorothy doesn’t interrupt the “experience”.
And so Joyce’s “first time” is something she did not have any time or space to weigh, proposed in a moment of vulnerability by someone she trusts and who has power over her, someone she trusts and who has power over her. Dorothy dismisses all of her objections and completely ignores her discomfort. Also, she starts leading Joyce into this without telling her what it was about first, which is a classic manipulation technique.
I think too much emphasis is being put onto ‘discomfort’ here. When you have mental hangups, especially the kind that have basically been indoctrinated into you by what might as well be a cult, there’s a degree to which discomfort becomes an inevitability that must actually be confronted in order to be overcome, and Joyce has repeatedly been shown to be the type who won’t confront anything without getting a push to do so.
At the same time, Joyce has also been shown to push back when people try to shove her too hard or past any solid boundaries she’s set for herself, including people of considerably greater ‘power’ over her than Dorothy. (And the level of power Dorothy has over her I find incredibly questionable. Feels like to me that if we’re lowering the bar for balance of power that much, then by that logic, it feels like every relationship ever will always be unbalanced and thus anything sexual ever should be forbidden.)
Furthermore, take into account the context of the scene where Joyce does ask people to back off from the topic (a public shouting match between Dorothy and Roz in front of their friends while simultaneously acting as if Joyce herself is not literally standing right there), and it becomes possible to infer that Joyce’s issue was not actually the focus on sex, but rather the attitude of the people on display.
Lastly, it should be noted that this is a work of fiction, and a work of fiction should not be expected to portray every character and relationship as flawless, even the likeable protagonists. Not only is it fiction, it’s fiction about first year college students, aka, stupid people doing stupid things, sometimes intentionally and sometimes just because young dumb idiots make mistakes. Like… everyone remembers Jennifer and Ruth, right? Everyone remembers how their relationship started, right? Even IF you want to take the absolute least charitable reading of this storyline, it still wouldn’t even come close to being the most toxic relationship interaction. There’s a degree to which you have to just accept a work of fiction about young college kids that is part drama is going to have characters naturally behave in ways that don’t paint them in a flattering light.
This is a really cogent analysis, I thank you deeply for it, and I invite you to join me in begging others of the comments section to stop reading a weird fucked-up abusive power dynamic into Dorothy and Joyce that is entirely fan-invented. I just. Please. Dorothy does not have Joyce’s agency in a goddamn phylactery, people.
Counterpoint: even if we accept the framing where Joyce has to be pushed to overcome discomfort (and how is THAT not infantilizing Joyce, I wonder?), there are better and more consent-aware ways to help someone over that boundary.
“it should be noted that this is a work of fiction, and a work of fiction should not be expected to portray every character and relationship as flawless”
that’s just a non-take. i’m not weighing in one way or the other but the sheer repetition of this sort of point just nags me. we all know this is a work of fiction. the problem is not that Character does Thing, it’s HOW Thing is portrayed and contextualized. there’s a wazillion ways a work of fiction can, Willis willing, highlight that a eponimously Dumb action is Cool And Good Actually, or Ambivalent-to-Iffy, or Neutral, or Cringe, or Bad or any other ethical and emotional hue.
Maybe Characters have conversation about Thing. Maybe Character B has a nightmare, or a panic attack. Maybe Character A privately cackles maniacally.
It being a work of fiction with the word “dumb” in the title is irrelevant to this conversation, imo
Yeah.
…I do get how it is to be stupid, though.
Joyce is not a child. She’s a grown ass adult person in college, and Dorothy is her classmate and best friend. Dorothy does not have any position of power or authority over Joyce aside from that which Joyce consciously chooses to give her. Power imbalances in relationships aren’t about “this person tends to take the lead over this person” that’s just called a “top”. Power imbalances in a relationship are when one person has an impaired ability to consent, or when one person has external authority over the other person’s health and well-being.
Honestly, posts like this infantalize Joyce and I find it really super fucking patronizing. She is perfectly capable of stopping or going away if she wants to. She *decided* to follow Dotty. She *decided* to get on the dryer. She *decided* to stay.
> She’s a grown ass adult person in college, and Dorothy is her classmate and best friend. She is perfectly capable of stopping or going away if she wants to. … She *decided* to follow Dotty. She *decided* to get on the dryer. She *decided* to stay.
Like I know what you’re getting at, but saying that adults can’t get coerced into uncomfortable sexual situations and that the person who was uncertain could have just said no is… not a great take.
If the dialogue and actions we’d seen between Dorothy and Joyce here had happened between Joe and Sarah’s sister (whose name escapes me at the moment) would people be saying “well she could have left”, “she decided to stay”, or “she didn’t explicitly say no?” – I’d sure hope not.
And yes ofc context matters but it’s still got a lot of weird and uncomfortable similarities to how coercive sexual assault happens, as do many of the defences of it.
To quote the RAINN website: “Simply put, enthusiastic consent means looking for the presence of a “yes” rather than the absence of a “no.” Enthusiastic consent can be expressed verbally or through nonverbal cues, such as positive body language like smiling, maintaining eye contact, and nodding.”
As viewers we have not seen this, only hesitation and uncertainty on Joyce’s part, and I am not sure what is infantilising about expressing the uncomfortable similarities leading up to here.
Sarah’s sister Liz is a weird counterfactual example, because she DID in fact leave, so we already know that if she had not left that she could have. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/sorry-5/
My point wrt Liz and Joe’s is that if Joe had said hey Liz come with me we’re gonna jack off together and Liz had given Joyce’s half-hearted responses ppl would have lost their shit.
Also I may be making a harsh comparison as there are people literally saying Dorothy is fine because Joyce never technically said no, which is frankly terrifying like do not go near any assault survivors please 💀
Sorry if Liz had given Joyce’s responses and Joe had continued just has Dorothy had (ordering her to take off her pants etc] ppl would have lost their shit.
The characters involved also matter. They don’t have the same kind of relationship and Joe has a reputation.
Which means Joe wouldn’t do it, not because he’s better at consent than Dorothy is in some abstract sense, but because it would be an entirely different and much creepier situation.
Really, this is the heart of it.
My big thing is: It’s not Dotties place to teach Joyce this stuff.
My “mom over emphasis” be damned, this is just *creepy.*
“Well she needed to be pushed out of her comfort zone” Why? And why in a public place, on a time crunch? Because we know some rando is coming back for those clothes and is going to see two pants-less girls holding hands grinding the dryers.
Which will probably negate any headway Dotty is trying to make with Joyce’s being comfy with getting herself off.
We just had Joyce enthusiastically tell *specially* Dottie to fuck off about her sexual issues, and now we have Dottie drip feeding her sexual stuff.
“I know you told me to not do this, but it’s for your own good, for reasons I will not explain. So I need you to publicly grind on this with me, but it’s cool because I’m your mom friend, and people want to see us bash clams.
Try not to think about how you’re still getting over throwing your trash mom in the garbage, been told you might be autistic, and realizing your entire belief system might be a lie, you are *ready* to release 19 years of sexual repression in this dank-ass laundry room.”
Describing this as “grinding” is a bit over the top. They’re sitting.
If someone walks in, the worst that likely happens is that they see them drop hands quickly and Joyce act all flustered.
Anyone seeing it is more likely to think the fluster is more about the hand-holding than to jump to the conclusion they were masturbating.
As I remember high-school girls getting off in class, it involves crossing the legs and hooking the foot behind the ankle.
In class? I swear I’ve read that sort of thing before, but it’s a baffling concept. Who’s got the stealth levels to goon in class without being caught?
I remember reading a newspaper article about Dr Ruth. (You know, the Muppet that talks dirty.) It mentioned how different people have different “thresholds” to reach orgasm. 5% of the population are incapable regardless of what is done, and 5% can achieve orgasm just by closing their eyes and thinking about it. The majority of course are somewhere along the spectrum (can orgasm but need more or less work to achieve it).
I, very unfortunately, found out a guy in one of my classes was getting off in class. He had a big sweatshirt and had cut a hole in it leading into the pocket and….. yeah.
As I understand it, some girls just need intense pressure, thus the tangle legs thing.
So if Dorothy and Joyce end up getting so aroused they overcome their own biases about themselves and hook up, Becky will eventually discover this.
Please, may at least she will discover it AFTER.
Becky walks up with an empty dinosaur-themed laundry basket *right* as Joyce hits the high note, in a call-back to when Becky told Joyce she might be getting married some day.
Sal begins to worry about the dogs.
So I can relate to Joyce a lot in this story line and I find it really difficult to equate sitting on a drier to masturbating. Like yes it will feel good and warm, like, to get comfortable with sensations. This is like pre maturation lessons.
I only lived in a dorm for one semester and the laundry rooms were in the basement and co-ed. I’m assuming this is a gals only laundry room?
I am a trans guy and my hesitance to masturbate was more dysphoria than anything else. I didn’t have an orgasm until I was 19 and thought I was dying/habing a medical emergency.
Yeah, this is finding some vibrating chairs and reading smut
JOYCE WE HAVE *GOTTA* HAVE A TALK ABOUT YOUR TASTE IN BONY POINDEXTERS (FEMME-PRESENTING)
(Actually, damn, Joyce’s taste in masc-presenting people, which is to say hot ethnically-Jewish beefcake on the hoof with a badonkadonk, is real diametrically opposed to her apparent taste in femme-presenting people, which is to say, again, bony poindexters. But hot bony poindexters with freckles.
It just makes me 🤔)
Tbf that’s me, my taste in men is the exact opposite to my taste I’m women
There’s a lot of homophobia in these comments, intended or otherwise, but I would have been ecstatic to have had a friend like Dorothy do this for me. As long as you know the person in a position of mentorship or “power” over you will listen to you if you say no, having a teacher is invaluable in these matters. Maybe I’m too pan to say their presentation and how it relates to my orientation wouldn’t have mattered, but I think until some significant genital contact happens I’m very Who Cares about their respective orientations. Like, did you never watch Rocky Horror with your homies? Because I guarantee there was a lot of thigh clenching in that room.
Could you elaborate slightly on the “homophobia” thing? I feel like I almost get it, but not quite.
Just a lot of the comments about how they are treading where they should not sounds like nothing but antigay panic to me. Not all of them, but a lot of them.
I watched it in school, in a music lesson, because it’s a classic. I found it bizarre and vaguely disgusting and see no reason to watch it again. As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing remotely sexy about it, if that’s what you mean.
At the time it came out until maybe late 80s it was a piece of unabashed gay fun. I hated the part where Frankenfurter dresses up as someone else to get into their so’s pants, but it was over the top hilarious in the confrontation between “the wholesome Americans” and their gay nightmare.
I think Risky was trying to describe that lots of het men react to it and are hiding that?
Don’t quite get how this relates, so please explain.
It’s a horrible movie, which is why the point is the audience participation. It’s not supposed to be good, you’re supposed to be making fun of basically every line in it.
But yes, it was very much a part of its time.
I mean from a het men standpoint, the heavy petting scene is pretty hot.
Why is this so cute?
and horny…
Curny? Houte?
I wish there were words in this strip so I could read them in the most uncharitable tone possible.
I’m glad there aren’t cus I’m tired and need a break.
I still think Dorothy’s being a bit Billie about this whole deal, just sort of barging in and ‘fixing’ things.
But at least she’s doing it in a supportive way? That’s something, at least? Maybe?
I think trying to be Billie-esque is part of the point.
Dotty really likes helping people out—it’s one of her love languages, I would say—and lately she’s been visibly feeling very useless, especially where Joyce is concerned. And she knows Billie was able to help Joyce when she couldn’t, and it gets her goat!
(She also has deeply buried subconscious romantic feelings for Joyce, and she is unconsciously Jealous as Fuck rn)
I think that’s another big WTF for me about this: That Walky’s moving on from her *seemed* to be the impetus for her to start the “Any O
‘s but from Joe” campaign. So it’s turned into a big “I’ll make *someone* orgasm god dammit” jealously ball.
You wait ten years for a second hand-holding partner to arrive (Ethan back in 2012, Joe in 2022), then a third shows up five months later.
My how Joyce has grown.
(If I have to have an actual opinion, then this particular strip is kinda sweet, but I really don’t like how we got here).
Yeah, that’s actually a bigger disappointment for me than I was expecting. The leadup sucked to what COULD have been something I’d have enjoyed.
Hand-holding? Oh my how lewd.
Over in Homestuck, Caliban is starting to sweat.
Are both Joe and Becky sensing a great disturbance in the force right about now?
The USS Dorothy might be just sweeping in and canonballing the Joe/Joyce ship and I’m not sure how I feel about it!
Alright alright alright I’m gonna. This is gonna be a long post but I hope it gets some interaction because I have Thoughts, and also a question. A question that needs answering.
Let’s start with the question, which I want to pose openly to everyone who is uncomfortable with this arc:
Do you believe that Dorothy is knowingly undertaking her actions with sexual intent?
Because IF SO, if that is your reading of the situation, I understand a lot more why this is so disheartening. If—and I emphasize if Dorothy is acting to, for lack of a better word, stake a sexual “claim” on Joyce’s person, if she’s actively trying to seduce her on the dryers, or she intends to go to Joe and tell him “Joyce and I are dating now, haha, FUCK OFF”, etc., then…I get why that would be really disgusting and if that IS revealed to be Dorothy’s deal, I will join you on being disgusted.
BUT…
I don’t think that’s the case. I think that while David Willis recognizes mutual masturbation ‘twixt Joyce and Dorothy as a form of sexual interaction between them, neither Joyce nor Dorothy do. They know that there’s a sexual *characteristic*, like, duh, they know what they’re here to do, but, and this is Very Important: how I am reading this, neither one of them is acting with sexual intent towards the other.
Dorothy really is, for all that the plan is a Pepe Silvia conspiracy map, here to execute a plan to get Joyce post-nut clarity so that Joyce realizes that Joe is a big drooling gorilla and she was thinking entirely with her libido, at which point she’ll go “OH! Thanks Dorothy, you steered me away from becoming a sex victim!” and Dorothy will bask in the warm glow of Helping. Joyce really is here because, well, masturbation is something Cool Secular Girls know how to do, and she trusts Dorothy implicitly, and y’know if she knows more about SEGGS maybe she can get Joe to let her chew on his beautiful buttocks! (Dorothy is so wrong about him, he’s changed. But she’ll see! Becky and I came to a mutual understanding, surely Dorothy and I will.)
NOW. Does this mean there’s no sexual feelings here? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA GOD NO IT DOES NOT. Joyce is a bi supernova waiting to explode, and Dorothy’s self-Kinsey rating is a fake idea. This shit is gay as hell. This is Sappho on the Lesbos beach. This is MAD gay. There’s so much sexual tension here that, to quote cinematic masterpiece The Room, “I feel like I’m sitting on an atomic bomb waiting for it to go off”.
But it isn’t conscious—Joyce and Dorothy are both deeply closeted and they repress things they internally aren’t comfortable with something AWFUL. And they both have this thing they do where practices are a huge part of their identities, and they’re not good at dealing with shifts in that identity! So of course they’re not going to have had the queer epiphany yet, let alone off-screen, it’s not who either of them are!
Dorothy is acting on what *she* thinks is just logical protective instinct but is actually romantic and sexual desire/jealousy. Joyce is acting on what *she* thinks is natural curiosity and a learning opportunity but is in fact buried sexual desire of her own. It’s a web, people, not puppet strings.
Do I think it’s gonna work out? God, no. But I don’t think it’s villainy on anyone’s part, it’s just a tragic romance.
Sorry to not argue but i’m agreeing with you here. Dorothy is basically the unreliable narrator of her own life. She’s so determined to control her own life she doesn’t see the subconscious intent behind her own actions.
But then because she seems so in control, and seems smart/reliable enough to help others through their own issues, it can be hard to see that she only ‘thinks’ she’s being logical with her actions here ‘for the sake of helping Joyce’, where there’s clearly stuff that buried in her that she doesn’t realise is trying to push its way to the surface.
Your ‘web, not puppet strings’ sums it up perfectly. It’s a complex situation, with different factors weighing in. Dorothy is being a little predatory here, but she doesn’t know it, because she doesn’t fully realise the feelings that she’s feeling, and her logical usual way of handling things has convinced her that this is a perfectly sensible solution, all boosted by a gut reaction of sticking it to Roz.
She is pushing and being pulled by all the parts of her life, as is Joyce, as is Joe. As are we all.
You know, I think from Dor’s pov, what happened was something like, Walky left her feeling sad-horny, she decides she needs to do laundry to get her mind off him (she’s known about the dryers for a while so laundry time = me time for dorothy), then joyce shows up and Keener-brain goes, “my girl needs this even more than i do” and grabs her along for the ride, feeling pretty smart and mom-y and failing to spare any thought for how gay as all fuck this little project of hers was, instead seeing only the scheduling prowess of a) getting off AND b) teaching her repressed bestie about good vibrations, AND c) hopefully solving the Joe situation, AND d) showing the little Roz in her brain she is actually super sex-positive. AND, e) getting the laundry done.
Upvote
Okay like the mom thing is so creepy. I don’t think that she’s trying to do that, it would be creepy of her if she was, but it’s just such a creepy thing to say. Please stop it.
@milu: That is a perfectly cogent read, yes! Like, that’s what I’m talking about, I think that could have been exactly Dorothy’s mindset!
@Joy: I think you are under a misapprehension and I want to address this as gently as I can. I would also like to address this to everyone else who thinks there’s some bizarre power dynamic in play here: Dorothy and Joyce do not, absolutely do not have a parent/child relationship, and no one is saying that they do.
When people in the comments who are using the term “mom-ing” re: Dorothy’s behavior, what they mean is a shorthand for: Dorothy is protective of Joyce and feels a certain sense of responsibility for her well-being. This is not an unhealthy connection or feeling to have. It’s perfectly appropriate to feel protective of and responsible for the well-being of a friend or lover. The shorthand is used in jest and good-naturedly.
It does not confer parental powers on Dorothy. It does not mean Dorothy seeks parental control of Joyce or wishes to adopt her as a child. Dorothy is a peer, not a parent or authority figure!
Thank you for reading.
agreed about my use of “mom”. it’s a common metaphorical shorthand for the behaviour you describe in my vocab. that said, the creepy undertones are not necessarily unwarranted in the present case.
I agree that’s how milu used “mom”, but there’s definitely been a contingent around using it much more negatively, implying both that Dorothy’s trying to control Joyce like a child and that it leads to an actual power imbalance making this scenario much worse.
So tensions are high around any use of the term.
Honestly, the parts about this that make me supremely uncomfortable all seem to be explainable if we assume Dorothy is not thinking about her actions at all except in a very self-focused, goal-oriented manner. “I want to get over my feelings about Walky, I want to prove I’m right about Joe to Joyce, I want to prove I’m not a prude to (absent) Roz, I want to prove I’m actually someone worth listening to because I am smart and make good decisions (in general).”
And it seems to me there’s no room in there whatsoever for other thoughts, such as “Didn’t Joyce tell me to stay out of her sex life?” and “Gee, Joyce is going along with this but she sure seems super uncomfortable, could I be approaching this differently?” And that latter bit, the seeming lack of what would seem to me to be ordinary concern that this plan isn’t 100% okay with Joyce, is what makes all of this feel very loose in a “consent” way that was making a lot of the thread (at least in my view) so viciously combative in the early part of the storyline. I perceive Dorothy as treating Joyce like a prop in a story Dorothy has about how this is going to go. Which I’ll concede is different in INTENT than Dorothy being a cackling puppetmaster, but not really much different in outcome.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Dorothy is IMHO doing the equivalent of lighting a cigarette at a gas station because she wants nicotine now and she’s the smart one so bad things don’t happen to her plans. It MIGHT all work out fine, but it could have and still could blow up or catch fire in an unexpected way at any point, and that seems like a poor choice of risk to take with your repressed and fragile friend’s sexual development.
Honestly, I think my biggest issue is that I think Dotty infantilizes Joyce.
Maybe mom is the wrong term, but I see Dorothy treating Joyce as basically her project person. That Dorothy intends to Uplift this poor naive girl into being a Proper Human Being, regardless of what Joyce thinks is best for herself. And that is a very high pet peeve for me.
A lot of people see her as being the cool big sister, but I just see someone who thinks they’re better then everyone else around them, that she’s got a Savior of the Masses mindset.
You have a far more forgiving stance with “fixing people is her love language” and I fully admit that I’m probably taking her actions in the worst possible light.
I think Dotty’s not *maliciously* treating Joyce’s agency like a screen door, but she’s still walking through it without regard to Joyce’s boundaries. And as someone who is VERY much a proponent of “Safe, Sane, and Enthusiastically Consensual” I get *hella* creeped out by how this all happened.
“I know better then you, so sit down and do what I say.” is all I really heard until they parked their butts on the dryers.
Which (I know, Oh god I know, I get it) feels VERY much like something Joyce’s mom would have said to her. And that’s not a parental dig, it’s a “they’re not so different” thing.
Dotty’s so concerned that Joe will fuck up Joyce, she’s willing to risk Joyce being on display in a public place having her possibly first orgasm, and I really don’t have the words to describe how wrong that feels, and how weird it feels that people are both okay about it, and possibly eager to see it happen.
!
Everyone over here talkin about masturbation and gay panic, and I’m just here seething in jealousy over how Willis draws hands so nicely…
ha ha me too. hands are really tricky, believe me i know XD
Yeah, right. Like, I believe it’s the top in list of parts of body for artists.
I do ok with hands (spent many a boring high school class drawing mine). But faces, oh god
Also, having recently drawn quite a few hands holding phones, Joyce’s hand looks wrong (unless she has one of those cases with a thingy for hooking your fingers around).
Far as i can tell, single-handed phone grip involves either the pinkie supporting the phone from below, or at least one finger wrapping all the way around the back to vice-grip together with the base of the thumb. Feel free to update me if you find another position that works
One of the reasons I dislike these thin-as-a-cracker phones vs. my old not-smart bar phone (or the handset of a classic wired phone) is that I can’t wrap my paw around them properly. I wind up with the phone resting against the lower edge of my palm, pinching it from side to side with my thumb and index finger like it’s something vaguely disgusting that I don’t recognize.
Also. I did a whole thing where I studied the hell out of hand anatomy and it didn’t help much if at all. Got slightly better when I went back to the shapes method, hope I live long enough to get it right.
I’ll just say one thing:
This is the weirdest kind of “this is masturbation” life lesson I have ever seen in my life.
Seriously, the jump from…this…whatever it is, to “when you’re alone, fantasize and try touching your vulva” is a bit wide.
I can’t tell if this is weird, cute, creepy, sweet, or all of the above.
is this “vibing together”?
Ugh, too many comments. Here’s my take on the poll… I get why an overwhelming majority think they want the joe/joyce ship, but I believe it’s that they all want SOME ship to actually work.
I am not against a college romance between the two of them. I think Joe could possibly teach Joyce as much about her sexuality as Dorothy, maybe more, maybe not.
But I am firmly of the belief that Joe is ABSOLUTELY not right for Joyce’s Mrs. degree. He has curtailed his tail hunting. For the moment. He got majorly shamed, and possibly rightly so, for his do-list. (I say possibly, because kink-shaming is bad, and why is his (personal kink) any different than any others? It was his list. It wasn’t anyone else’s.) He realized that he possbily maybe has feelings for Joyce and has stopped chasing others. (We think.)
However, that is a relationship doomed for failure. Joe is very into his “genetic spread-his-seed-wide-and-far” drive, and I don’t believe he can remain monogamous to any partner.
Oh, I forgot to continue the first paragraph above.
Please add: “Come on, you don’t think Willis will give us a stable ship, do you?”
Between this and a comment yesterday, it really seems the concept of “don’t kink-shame” has gotten too far with not enough nuance.
Some “kinks” are inherently shameful, and some not all shame is kinky, after all.
“some not all shame”, huh? Good one, Taffy.
A “kink” is just any unconventional sexual practice or interest. That’s an incredibly broad definition, which means there are tons of kinks. I dunno if this is a hot take or whatever, but some of them? A *few* of them? Should definitely be shamed.
“kink-shaming” straight cis bros for being nasty creeps is based, fight me
Oh no i 100% believe we should bring kink shaming back some of y’all need to feel worse about yourselves
I think you’re wrong. They had insane compatibility in It’s Walky and I’d argue even more than she and Walky did. (Like. I’ve been doing a mass re-read. She had a childhood friendship with Walky, but I didn’t get any romantic or sexual tension from either of them together before they got together or during.)
Also if you think Joyce is still going to be going to school to find a husband with the growth and change she’s had, I don’t think you’re reading the same comic as I am.
Also we’ve seen point blank that Joyce is the one who has had the most impact on him, and left a serious impression. If *any* girl was gonna get him to want to stick with her, it’d be Joyce. Especially in this continuity. You’re essentially ignoring years of character development on both sides to claim it wouldn’t hold up.
Also “Joe is very into his “genetic spread-his-seed-wide-and-far” drive” Is just straight up distasteful and incorrect. Claiming it’s genetic, even with his dad the way he is is kind of messed up.
I literally came back just to comment this. I’m peacing back out on this storyline. Again.
I know a ton of people are hyped for potential dorothy/joyce but while Joyce is a ticking bisexual timebomb, Dorothy, to me, has never read as anything but a straight girl.
Like even now, there’s no tension at all. At most it’s a weirdly ooc moment meant to make you go ‘awww’
Not only that, but remember that Dorothy is in it to become President. She didn’t give up that dream for Walky (someone whom it seems she actually loves, even though I agree that her and Walky are not compatible in terms of long-term goals), and she’s sure as hell not gonna give it up for Joyce either, who has her own (and possibly worse) set of neuroses that would be a drain and a distraction from Dorothy’s goals. And don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Joyce and want to see her happy, but I’m quite convinced she won’t find it in Dorothy’s arms, as much as she likes Dorothy.
Don’t forget Joe’s list was semi-public. So many women were confronted with his view on them.
Once you create an RSS feed with subscribers for your list, I think you forfeit any right to call it a personal, private kink. At the very least you’ve made it a public one.
Also when you repeatedly announce your ratings to people.
I think the list was gross because he was treating women as objects for his own pleasure, reducing them to numbers based purely on looks. And it didn’t stay private, he would tell girls his rating of them as a pickup line.
There’s pretty reasonable evidence her could remain monogamous, I think. Subtext has told us that he’s been remaining celibate recently apart from his almost-encounter with Liz, which was a thing in large part as an attempt to ‘cure himself’ of Joyce. He’s curtailed his behavior for/as a result of her even without them officially being in a relationship.
It’s really weird and I just can’t tell if he’s been remaining celibate. I’d thought he had been, but when Danny got sexiled for the Liz incident there were comments from him and another character that implied it was still a common thing.
It’s definitely not been explicitly stated, so maybe it’s just me making things up. The main statement that made me think this was actually before (or at the beginning of?) the Liz incident. That combines with the general behavior we’ve seen from him since then, but that’s really just vibes. You could definitely read Danny’s comment after being banished to the lobby as meaning it’s still a regular occurrence.
Second link was supposed to go here, hope it works this time.
Sweet mother, I cannot dry my clothes.
For the sins of the unworthy must be baptised in blood and fear?
father I cannot click the book
I love reading the DoA comment section for the posts that [try to] explain what the characters are thinking and how people (the readers) process those thoughts, because I am terrible at figuring it out myself. I have become better at reading people because of DoA and the wonderful commenters here.
But I am still totally lost on this arc. At least it seems I am not alone in this.
>hand holding
2lewd4me
(Gonna rant all confused and slightly annoyed here, please skip if you’re not into that.)
Ooooh, hand-holding while sitting four feet apart at least, mostly clothed, and not even looking at each other is so sexually charged and romantic. It isn’t, or at least I don’t see that at all.
I realize as an ace (sex repulsed) lady I may not have the best instinct here, but how on earth is this OMG SHIP AHOY? I see exactly zero tension or desire here between them, only possibly independent physical arousal by the situation. It’s not the same thing at all, is it?
This just feels like kind of a gross manipulation by Dorothy to me, though she genuinely thinks she’s being helpful and kind of technically might actually be helping on one or two levels. It’s fundamentally a thing she’s doing to try and control/parent Joyce, her actual peer, rather than go to the trouble of taking any real interest in Joyce’s feelings or thoughts in the form of a frank conversation. It’s much easier for her to assume Joyce is being led around by her downstairs and get her to sit on a dryer than actually get her side. It’s much easier to fall back into her usual ‘I know everything and Joyce knows nothing’ attitude than investigate to see if maybe Joyce DOES know something and if so what it is.
Regardless of either Joyce or Dorothy’s straightness r lack thereof (and as both have stated on-page that they’re straight, I decline to assign them any other status; they both get to self-define as far as I’m concerned, so I will update when they do) I cannot see anything sexy here, just vaguely gross and I hope it’s over soon.
This just feels like kind of a gross manipulation by
DorothyWillis to meWelcome to shipping fandom in a nutshell.
It doesn’t need a reason. It doesn’t have to make sense.
People just want to see other people banging.
It just seems a bit gay to be holding hands at this exact moment, emphasizing that this is something they are purposefully doing together.
You’re reading into this way too heavily. Straight girls hold hands and vibrate their bits together all the time, it’s like the least gay thing in the universe. Not at all mistakable for anything non-hetero. Historians will say they were good friends.
So cute :3
Pretty gay, Dorothy.
That’s it. I’m on Patreon again.
Could somebody explain why it can be a platonic relationship? It’s don’t look platonic for me…
The thing is, I trust Dorothy was honest when she estimated herself to be a zero on the Kinsey Scale. That was months ago, of course, so things may have changed.
Both of these ladies have expressly said they aren’t sexually attracted to women, in situations where I can’t see why they’d have any reason to lie.
Well, Joyce has plenty of reasons to lie, mostly to herself. Horrible levels of sexual repression will do that.
Dorothy much less so.
Fair. I just thought Joyce’s answer to Becky was genuine and honest, at the time. She would not have acted on the attraction, because GOD, but I don’t think she would have lied about it.
Joyce has also tried to claim she isn’t sexually attracted to men and never gets horny, and that seems untrue.
They have no reason to lie TO OTHERS, but they could always be lying to themselves.
Queerplatonic relationship. A queerplatonic relationship is a platonic relationship that blurrs the lines of the strictly defined expectations of platonic relationships.
Friends in a queerplatonic relationship can potentially do sexual things in a purely platonic way.
I will hold any judgement on how gay this is until we see further evidence. Does it feel gay to me? Very. Is Dorothy doing it with gay feelings intended? I don’t know, we don’t get thought bubbles in this comic. Do I hope this is something more and the SS Joyothy sets sail? Yes! It would be an absolute disaster fire and I can’t wait!
That said, idk if anyone has pointed out the name of this chapter, “Turning Saints Into the Sea,” and the source of the phrase (or at least the most obvious source to me). Unless the phrase comes from elsewhere and that is what it’s referring to, then it’s a reference to the song Mr. Brightside.
“Jealousy, turning saints into the sea”
What kind of jealousy is up for debate. But still. Jealousy.
Sure is infantilizing autistic people and our ability to make informed choices in here.
huh? can you explain what you mean?
People are treating Joyce like she can’t comprehend what she’s being invited to do with a friend she trusts, or decide that she wants to do something she’s affirmed consent on multiple times in a row. Rather than treat her like a person who can make choices, they’re treating her like a helpless infant who can only be led and manipulated. There’s a very common trend of assuming all autistic people are doe-eyed child people who can’t consent because autism, and it’s really gross. I’m autistic, and what I hear in this kind of talk is “you are incapable of making your own decisions.”
I agree.
I wonder how many people would be making similar arguments if autism had not been introduced as a possible diagnosis for Joyce. The comments on the strips in this storyline have been faintly damning.
No no, you see, it’s not because she’s potentially autistic, it’s just that she [insert several hallmark autistic traits].
I agree. This infantilizing ableism just really needs to STOP. 😬
Thanks for saying it, I’ve been struggling to articulate this but I’ve been noticing it.
Yyyyyyep
Joyce is just a widdle baby with no idea what terrible things Dorothy is doing to her, which will surely scar her for life
She doesn’t know what her body is doing, where she is, who she’s with, what trust might look like to her… Really, the poor dear is barely cognizant of anything; one might even argue she’s not actually conscious or possibly even sentient.
/SSSAAAARRCAAAASSMMM
Can y’all quit it with the snark? This is serious. Joyce is being stabbed repeatedly with ghost daggers and forced to wash a stranger’s clothing.
Wait, those are daggers?! I thought it was a phone!
This is so sweet ♡. I’m here for you, you’re here for me.
Two girls, holding hands while getting off
One dryer apart cuz they’re not gay
They should get close. Joyce with her arm all stretched out, it looks very unconfortable.
…
Of course, no homo
I have to say that while I don’t think there’s really issues of consent here, I must admit that I think that this whole arc has just been…badly written. I just don’t think that this behavior at all fits in with what has been previously established about these characters. I cannot fit what I understand Dorothy’s character to be with “let’s go masturbate in the laundry room together”. I can’t fit Joyce agreeing to it. It’s weird in a way that I haven’t experienced in this comic before. Previously, cartoonishly evil dads aside, I mostly felt like the characters involved made decisions where I could see their logic. Here, it’s just not there.
One of the first arcs involved Mike repeatedly punching someone he barely knew at a pizza place, and another character was a costumed vigilante. I feel like logical choices aren’t always a factor here.
Joyce has been a pressure cooker of horny for the entirety of the comic and she trusts Dorothy. Her motivations seem simple enough
Sorry, I wasn’t copying your argument. You’re just writing your comment at same time than me.
Joyce, i get. Dorothy though? as yet, i’m unconvinced.
someone flash the Regalli-signal
That’s a better argument than the others who aren’t liking this arc.
But I remember how Joyce is repressed in entire comic, and how sometimes she wished to be treated like a young girl who wants to experience things and not like a simple child.
I expected she could still be angry to Dorothy, but her friend brought what she always wanted.
Agreed. It’s out of nowhere for me too.
Mike is special and punching people with no consequences was within his reality bubble. Similarly Amazing Girl /Amber’s realities were self consistent.
I disagree, there’s a lot of reasons for both of these characters. Setting aside for a moment the entire idea that either of them have repressed sexual and/or romantic feelings for the other — which would readily flip a lot of logic override switches if true — there’s a slew of reasons that this seems like a good idea.
For Dorothy, first of all: she’s frustrated and horny after her talk with Walky, and needs to let off some steam. Masturbation time is go. What leads her to invite Joyce? A combination of things: helping Joyce get over her sexual repression as a goal in and of itself, plus helping her get over Joe specifically since he’s “bad news”. Proving to herself (or Roz, or the imaginary Roz that’s taken up residence in her brain) that she’s sex-positive and not repressed herself. Why the laundry room? Just look at it. This is Baby’s First Masturbation. Not naked, no manual interaction required, no toys that are likely to make Joyce shriek and run away. To her, it’s a relatively low-stakes way to help both herself and her friend.
For Joyce, she very recently expressed in her conversation with Becky a desire to be less repressed and purity-obsessed. Her good, trusted friend Dorothy coming along with this offer immediately after would have seemed an incredible (and timely) opportunity, plus she generally trusts Dorothy’s judgment quite a bit. Dorothy thinks it’s a good idea, it aligns with something she already wanted… why would she pass it up?
Yeah, if there is a simple way to describe Dorothy’s behavior here, it is, ironically, that she is being Cool and Rational about things. She had a whole bunch of different problems, and she intuitively found one bespoke, efficient plan that happens to deal with all of them at once. The fact that this is utterly insane is, in fact, lost on her, because she is so focused on brute-forcing “being a calm, rational person” to avoid her looming mental breakdown, so it’s half that she’s blind to the insanity she’s wrought (since nothing that is happening is, strictly-speaking, “wrong”) and half her being avoidant of dealing with her own internal, emotional problems in a healthy way, because she has compartmentalized her feelings in that regard into the “irrational” box, and thus is honour-bound to ignore them. Even though, if one of her friends were mirroring that behavior, she would castigate them, though gently as possible.
Daww…
Becky: I got kicked out of school for being a lesbian
And that’s still the gayest thing I’ve ever seen
they’re wearing their business socks.
Huh. I didn’t know humans had socks just for doing business. 😮
there’s whole wardrobes for just doing business
You know when i’m down to just my socks it’s time for business, that’s why they call them business socks.
🙂 Splendid song!!! I gotta find a karaoke version! :0
Hopefully this doesn’t become a theme. Otherwise Dorothy is going to make Joyce’s wedding night very awkward.
Can’t be awkward if it’s Dorothy’s wedding too!
I saw that episode of “Love, American Style”!
This… uh, this isn’t very Kinsey-Scale-1, Dorothy
Ok, day 2 of ADD meds is a little rougher. Or maybe that’s just the procrastination-anxiety talking…
Tomorrow will be the real test: taxes!
Hope taxes aren’t too taxing.
Thanks, Slartibeast! 😀
And the verdict on the new medicine so far is: hives.
Gonna give it 1 more day, then — back to the drawing board.
Hope whatever happens it all works out Laura! 😊
Much appreciated, NG! You too!
Thanks! Worse comes to worse, do the mustard field drive, then maybe look into trying the cannabis strains I talked about. I find they cause much less brain/body burden than the vast majority of prescription drugs I’ve used! 😊;)
This is not becoming any less gay. Or any less “boy I hope that door is locked”.
Didn’t read for a few weeks, and this comment will probably not be read by anyone.
Obviously Willis can write how his characters react to whatever situation. Not comfortable with the whole mood is “haha sexy time” though. Dorothy pressured Joyce into a sexual encounter. She did it because she decided to make Joyce cum to fix her. The last thing Joyce had said to Dorothy was angrily telling her to stop with the sex talk. Then she started this encounter without telling her. Dorothy has traits that September-Joe had that made him a piece of shit. He planned to “fix” her by making her cum, and a less than stellar understanding of consent.
Dorothy sees herself as a mentor, dispensing indispensable advice. But the last week (in comic time) she’s been whiffing constantly. Bad advice to Joyce regarding apostasy, regarding her interest in Joe, regarding her health. She gave bad advice to Walky, regarding asking Lucy out. Her advice is often self-serving. The reason she felt bad right before this is her self-serving advice made her feel bad about herself. Not because she essentially just told Walky to mislead Lucy into having sex.
She is managing her own life poorly, and is trying to manage other people’s lives to make herself feel better (and doing that poorly too). Story-wise, that’s ok. The whole point is all these kids are making dumb mistakes, even the ones who have an air of confidence and competency.
But I am not comfortable with how Dorothy pressuring Joyce into masturbating together has just sort of dropped the set-up to it, so far. Not everyone’s going to respond the same in similar situations, but I have been an apostate working through a shame reaction to horniness that I didn’t want anymore. And if a friend had pressured me into masturbating together at that time, then there are several ways that friendship could have ended, and probably none it would have lasted. And I have a suspicion that the “Dorothy has been the piece of shit she hates Joe for having been” reading isn’t going to be well received in the comments going forward.