Alt-text needs to also watch out for evil moms in evil dads’ clothing. Heck, not just evil parents, watch out for all the assholes disguised as descent folks, just pretending to be good.
Something something, even if we understand what drives a person to behave like a jerk (motivations, personality disorder, brain damage, paychopathy), it doesn’t excuse their behaviour. They’re still a jerk.
I’m trying to figure out how the alt text relates to anything in the strip. Can’t leave me if you stay, especially if we watch out for evil dads. It just doesn’t scan coherently.
Tho other than straight up moving to a new city for personal reasons/a career choice i can’t imagine joyce would be the type of person to ‘lose touch’ with ppl as an adult
Totaly hetero of her. The sort of thing a gal who’s a pal would say. You know, the sort of friend who would engage with her gal pal in such exteamely straight activities as dressing up and traveling together or staying together in a hotel where they discover there’s only one bed.
Someone is depicting what seems to be a queerplatonic partnership cognizantly and on purpose instead of because they’re afraid of putting gay people on screen. That doesn’t really happen in my experience. It’s kinda depressing watching people go “oh yeah this is very gay” every time anything that. You know. Queers the platonic happens. Just kind of further reinforces a feeling of “as far as people are concerned your experiences don’t exist” that is already present around this kind of experience. This isn’t an accusation or anything, it just bums me out.
In my experience, according to fandom, no relationship is too platonic (or too het) to rewrite so they can have their smut. (Also representation, but mostly smut.)
Fandom is very horny.
Preach, my aro sibling-in-arms, preach! QUEERPLATONIC JOYCEXDOROTHY FTW!!!
In all honesty, I like to laugh merrily with everyone else at the “omg Dotty and Joyce are so gay for each other” comments. It’s cute! It’s queer as all get out, in both the sexual/romantic sense and the philosophical sense! But also…yeah, underneath that amiable appreciation for a good joke is a deep, hot, anger for the way amatonormativity (among other things) has recently assassinated the entire concept of close personal friendships in many parts of our society. You know it used to be considered fairly NORMAL for close friends of the same gender to just stay in blissful, domestic, partnership for their whole lives, even after one or both of them got married? People would be completely dedicated to their school chums, their garden parties, their pen pals, their drinking buddies, their brothers-in-arms, and those relationships were in some ways MORE respected because they had no sexual component, they remained “pure”. Women could, in fact, absolutely dress up and travel together and stay together in the same bed in a hotel room, and it would just be a nice thing with genuine goddamn emotional intimacy between friends. I certainly don’t miss some aspects of this kind of attitude, but I do think that as a society we’ve lost a lot of respect for close platonic love and only bothered to make up the difference with more valuation for romantic/sexual love and distant, shallow, friendships. And even if you somehow ignored us folx in the aro community and our QPRs…that’s scary as hell. I think more people need to think about having a truly queer outlook on life, and how that necessitates allowing everyone to mix and match all kinds of expressions of love how they see fit, as long as it’s within the boundaries of consent and good communication.
And, like, I laughed along with everyone else at the laundry scene…but I think it needs to be said at some point, that if Joyce and Dorothy hug and cuddle and make deep emotional confessions to each other and even experience Pants Euphoria about separate things while holding hands together, and at the end of it all they still consider each other BFFs…that’s VALID. And FREEING. And queer as all get out, to boot.
TLDR: I’m fine if people want to joke about JoycexDorothy being kinda gay, but anybody tries to imply anything against QPR JoycexDorothy and I’ll f*cking come after them with no mercy.
… But I’m still gonna call the whole situation hella gay even if it’s confirmed to be queerplatonic, because just because it’s not gay doesn’t mean it’s not gay
It's very very weird existing in this culture as someone who feels the same kind of deep need for queerplatonic partnership that lots of people, including myself, feel about romantic attraction. Because it's not like I'm aromantic and so this is of course the way I life partner if I want to. I'm married. This is a separate also important thing! It's important to me! Really important! I feel like it's an empty space I kind of want to fill when I don't have one the same way that I kind of feel that about romantic stuff. And so many people I know don't seem to experience it at all. Just at all full stop. I sound fictional on the internet. I'm only just starting to be out enough with both of my relationships to not feel fictional in real life. I didn't really get the drive for representation (even though I was ace and really not very well represented) until I felt like the life I wanted to live would be treated as fictional in the culture I lived in. It's such a strange thing. It's such a strange thing to be so entirely unrelatable to so many people. I don't feel threatened but I do feel alien and apart.
Sorry, I have just done a weird feelings ramble. Willis, if you read things, I appreciate your comic showing a much wider range of ways of being than I am used to appearing in media. Including this one.
@AK I’m so glad you feel validated by my little rant, and by the comic in general! Your weird feelings ramble, in turn, is super heartwarming to read. <3
I definitely relate to the awful feeling that society at large considers one of the core aspects of your being to be entirely fictional. It sucks. I wish you and both of your partners luck in making space for yourselves and shining bright against the darkness of ignorance!
If Willis ever has them graduated he could later do a sequel comic with a time jump called ‘Gal Pals’ with Joyce and Dorothy as the main characters and Becky seething in the background. Dina occasionally pops up to give her girl a dose of reality.
I’m trying to find a straight reading of this and boy it’s hard. Does not help they’re constantly referred to as the gay couple by the rest of the cast.
Honestly, the rest of the cast referring to them as “The gay couple” doesn’t really influence me.
When the gay married drug store lady talks about “the things we do for love” and Dotty is has a meaningful pause about it, though, that feels an awful lot like Dotty is questioning the platonic nature of her feelings.
When Dotty has a dream about riding a unicorn with Joyce, and one of the other characters completely unknowingly drops a reference to that being really gay to someone else entirely without Dorothy overhearing it, that feels a *lot* like the *author* is implying that Dotty’s feelings aren’t completely platonic.
Before i came out as trans there was a guy who i had a crush on, he was my best friend. I was sure at the time he liked me too and found out later that he absolutely did cause he admitted it to a mutual friend (and she told me after he and I had a falling out).
One day he told me that he and I should move out of the american south to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and get a house together maybe raise a kid together eventually. Ya know just hetero things
wow, that is strangely specific location to head to. Coincidently, I live in Edmonton. Deepest redneck Alberta is probably somewhat more accepting of non-binary people than the deep south is, Edmonton even more so. Although there is a much lower chance of getting shot here; I don’t mean for being non-binary, just being in general.
I get it, she working on the part where she’s trying her best not to ruin lives on her way to the top. That kind of requires figuring out a very meticulous way to walk on eggshells.
hurting yourself would indirectly hurt the ppl she care about , so i don’t think it’d come to that (unless she just decides to get blackout drunk, which is also unhealthy but not unlikely to hear of a college student doing either from partying or stress from exams and such)
when someone’s in a lot of pain, they aren’t thinking clearly. That includes emotional pain. if they hurt other people when they hurt themselves, it doesn’t mean they don’t care.
Naw, she always thought that she knew better than everybody and it usually worked out. People followed her advice and were well or didn’t follow it and failed. That validated her, made her feel needed. Now that people are starting not to rely on her so much and do their own thing she’s scared that she’s not needed anymore. She believes that her worth is measured by others in the same stringent way she measures herself.
…You know, Ruth *was* canonically eavesdropping on their conversation just in the last strip. Her overhearing this and drawing a comparison out loud to her & Billie’s relationship would be funny as hell!
i’d imagine she’d go crazy from studying/not able to take a proper break with no friends to chill with (tho being ‘yale dropout’ shouldn’t be a stain on her record or so if it did happen)
My understanding of top schools like Harvard and Yale is that the hardest part is getting in (talking undergrad specifically, ofc). Especially for social sciences majors, the schools at that level can rest on their rep and prioritize getting kids through and in jobs they can brag about. IU might actually be more difficult, in a way, because Yale students don’t have to be in the top 1-5% of their class to actually get a degree-related job.
You know, you don’t have to “improve” people to leave them better than when you found them.
Just treating them with kindness and respect, doing favors for them, etc. will leave them better off, even if you’re not trying to fix all their problems.
My favorite non-project life-improvement was when an ex of mine told me that he didn’t used to notice all the doggos he encountered in his everyday life, but now he does, all the time. (I really like dogs, so when we were out together, I always pointed the dogs out and fussed over them, and told him what kind they were, and I wanted to hear about what dogs he’d seen that day.) And it’s nice — I felt like I’d given him a present, without even knowing it.
i mean some ppl might improve naturally but other than jen forcing her bf to be her ideal, i think some ppl would be for it as long as they’re not told “yeah we need to do this and that” and drag them into a ‘amekover’ or so
do you know how hilarious this would be setting up Joyce-Joe endgame only to have this be a slow burn for 10 more years to Joyce-Dorothy? May your ships come true within your lifetime I suppose
I’ll say that a year ago if you had asked whether Joyce or Dorothy would textually admt to a crush on the other I would have said Joyce, and that is past tense for a reason
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised. She’s shown interest and curiosity, and I don’t think she’s particularly possessive inherently – a lot of that was directly tied into her fundie “expected life plan”.
Has she actually asked Joe to only pay attention to her while they’re dating, or is that something he’s assuming she wants?
Everyone should have a Joyce kept locked in their basement. Oh wait, did I type that out loud?
I love how Dorothy is a Rorschach test here, with some people hearing a marriage proposal, some people hearing suicidal ideation, and some people hearing whatever this is.
Oooookay, this is suicidal ideation-check-in time. We’re not necessarily at ideation, but there is some concerning shit and worrying level of calm being said and exhibited here.
I am sorry that has happened to it has happened to me as well, I just don’t think Dotty is suicidal she seems commited to doing small acts of kindness i dont view that as susidal rather her coming to terms with not always able to make big changes. its not meant to offend you
You’re good, I’m sorry for being snarky. You didn’t deserve that.
Dotty’s particular brand of mental breakdown here has her saying some stuff real close to what I was saying back in the Depression Days, so I guess it’s hitting home for me a bit.
I am truly sorry it is an awful thing to go through I know I didn’t have what Dotty had I was spiraling from a series of horrible events that pushed me to the edge thankfully I was able to find help and it’s good that your still here.
Suicidal ideation doesn’t necessarily mean she wants to kill herself per se. “I don’t want to kill myself, I just think it might not be a bad thing if I went away in some nonspecific manner I refuse to interrogate” is a common first step towards the void.
This is always the one for me. It started with “I wish I could turn myself off like the power button on a computer” and I should’ve been more concerned about how badly I wanted that
Definitly. The talk of leaving people and failure, sudden small actions designed to create some measure of positive legacy, the notion that Dorothy will leave but Joyce will stay are also worrying signs. More optimistically Dorothy could just be planning to leave for Yale.
Many comment that going to Yale is the best option, but from what I interpret in the last panel is that she will try to reinvent her vision of things and perhaps it is with Joyce that he can do it (no offense to those who love the ship, I prefer see this as friendship rather than romance), although that is not going to give a good result.
Yeaaaah. That was my immediate impression. Like she wants to leave Joyce some nice memories to remember her by – Something Joyce can’t reciprocate because. Dorothy. Won’t be.
Homegirl needs to go to a therapist’ appt, not to Yale.
I’m worried for Dorothy but cautiously optimistic for this interaction? I hope she manages to open up a bit and be emotionally honest with Joyce, I honestly think that would help a lot. Dorothy’s been so stuck in the mom friend role, I think it’s been hard for her to accept that she doesn’t just have to be there for Joyce, Joyce can be there for her too.
I don’t think it is. I can see how it could be read that way, but the “leave people better than you found them” is more of a general platitude and rest of the implications are covered by her well known plans to leave them and go to Yale.
In a more serious version of my comment above, Ruth weighing in with some advice for Dorothy right now and maybe drawing some points of comparison could be really interesting and potentially helpful.
I am not sure Dotty is suicidal here I think she actually has some clarity here the last panel I am going assume she is talking about going to Yale.
Also I am in a great mood and I don’t want to bring my mood down I got a job at a non profit and it may finally stabilize my financial situation as i am making 11 more dollars an hour then my current job and font have to use and HRA for healthcare costs.
I feel like Joyce is getting a newfound understanding of Dorothy. That’s not to say she’s going to immediately get what’s going with her, that feels unlikely to be that simple, but she’s seeing a side of Dorothy she previously did not see.
Their dynamic feels like it’s changing. Not just Joyce seeing Dorothy differently, but seeing herself differently in this friendship. She sees Dorothy’s hurting, and Joyce can be someone she can lean on.
And that is why you despair, because you already have an endless number of improbable future scenarios, especially with the characters you love the most, yes, Willis really knows how to drive everyone here crazy.
i imagine she thinks joyce is going to ‘move on’ from her /not ‘need’ her anymore but joyce is the type of person who’d stay friends with dorothy even if she wasn’t helpful b/c you don’t become friends with someone who only has ‘worth’ to you
She’s still not sure.
This feels more like she’s trying to figure out how it’d be to even HAVE that conversation. Not even on a conscious level, but more that she just wants to feel like staying here isn’t a bad choice.
It’s not, but it’s also not what’s best for HER.
It’s a difficult internal battle for her, but if she were to stay, it would be great if this time everyone around her could see beyond the “girl who has a plan for everything” image and see that she is a girl with mistakes and That’s not bad, of course it would be difficult given that Dorothy wants to maintain that image, I know that possibility is difficult and it’s more of a whim on my part, but the thing is, Dorothy is a character that, at least for me, you really want. find that happiness and can smile genuinely without problems
If she wanna revise her dream into something that’s more sensible and actually does more to help the people she cares about, good on her!
I was once like her, fixated on a goal supported by an understanding of a field over-simplified for grade-schoolers. I was the 9-year-old autista who wanted to become a physics PHD, but kinda gave up on it once I discovered they don’t build robots and shit.
At my heart, I just wanna make cool things that make people happy — candy dispensers, cannabis chocolates, video games. Creating video games is what lets me make a positive difference in a way that’s not so self-destructive, and even enjoyable.
This is what Dorothy needs to do in the same vein, and by all means, cooking dinner for her friend is a neat start.
… I honestly never saw the Barbie movie.
Did I accidentally quote it?
It felt like it had the cadence of Smashmouth when I typed it, but not intentionally either.
I’m not getting suicide ideation here. I am getting codependency. Dorothy’s needs someone to mom and guide or she doesn’t see herself having value. So that line about Joyce leaving touches on a fear that Joyce will continue to become more improved until she won’t need or want Dorothy anymore.
Yep. She defines herself with her caring for Joyce because everything else isn’t working. So now she’s finally realizing it isn’t and is scared to death that Joyce might one day not need her and then she has nothing at all and is just an empty husk.
Do people really think this is about Yale? She already turned them down, so I thought that dream was done with. Or is she going to open up about her decision?
She’s talked about it as if she’d turned them down, though you’re correct that there might be time to change that decision.
But even if she has, it would still be weighing on her mind and that last line still fits. Reversed to respond to Joyce’s question, but she’s thinking of her choice not to leave Joyce, but to stay at IU.
Alright, so do we have any guesses where this is going, other than “Dorothy wants to kill herself and is making the rounds one last time”, “Dorothy is going to Yale after all”, or “Dorothy is going to try being gay with Joyce”?
Honestly, she’s probably not decided to actually hurt herself physically; she’s probably trying to gear up for making some other big and possibly self-destructive change in her life. I’m guessing it’s something catastrophic from her perspective but not necessarily actually bad, like “fuck it, I need to take compassionate leave and drop school for the rest of the semester, which means I’m giving up being President”.
Maybe she’s finally ready to admit to herself that she can’t be everyone’s support system all at once, and bit off more than she could chew last semester.
I’m hoping she actually goes to Yale, because that would actually be a seismic shift in the webcomic’s dynamic beyond ‘I guess they might be in their first year, forever’.
For a moment I wondered if Dorothy, feeling that no, she can’t do it all on her own after all, is considering a turn to religion, and wants advice from Joyce, the most religious person she knows.
Yes, I said that. Joyce was fervently Christian and is now fervently atheist. She changed the object of her devotion, but I think no more than that.
Ffs…
First off, atheism isn’t a religion, no matter how much if a dickhead redditor someone is about it. Second, she went through a phase everyone who leaves religion goes through. It was a phase, an indulgence. She hasn’t said anything like that stuff since that arc ended. She’s just a normal atheist now
atheist doesn’t mean someone is devoted to Atheo. what you said is a thing that religious people say in order to be offensive.
Dorothy’s devotion to her childhood plan to become president isn’t a religion either, but it is a devotion. Dorothy’s not turning to Joyce for advice yet, but Joyce knows what it’s like to have the foundational worldview for the life she’s planned out for herself erode out from under her.
Yeah, the important part there is the prefix, “A-“, which indicates absence, a lack of a certain state. The “-ist” suffix is only relevant as part of the word “theist”, which is just “a person who believes in the existence of a god or gods”.
It might help some folks to think of words like “asymmetry”, which means “lacking symmetry”, not “the process of measuring asym”. Because what the fuck is asym? That’s nothing, it’s not anything. Same with athe, it’s not an action, practice, state, condition, principle, or doctrine.
Words are made of parts, and while all of the parts have a purpose, not every part is equally important to the meaning in every context. Atheism is a lack of theism > theism implies religion > Joyce was religious in the past> Joyce is now an atheist > Joyce is not religious. It’s first grade, SpongeBob.
That said, there are atheists who take up their atheism with a fervor that echoes how they previously approached religion. Attempting to spread the good news to others, as it were.
That doesn’t make it a religion, (and not all religions take that approach) but it’s a trait commonly associated with religion.
Jouce flirted with that path briefly when she first came out, but seems to have put it aside.
She admitted she didn’t want to be the president, and then went back on that and doubled down on working harder. But she can’t just forget about her moment of epiphany, and thus she’s struggling to find purpose.
I mean, if you’re serious, I’ll throw my hat into “Joyce realizes this as a semi-deliberate cry for help from Dorothy, and starts trying to do more things for her in their relationship, to take a bit of the pressure off.”
I think it’s probably going to be a version of at least one of the things you said, probably more.
But, my “other than” is that no matter whatever else she says and does, she’s going to say “I haven’t been fair to you”.
Something nobody seems to have brought up yet – the thing about ‘leave ppl better than you found them’ is what she said to Walky way back. So my first thought was that she regrets the leaving part there, and doesn’t want to repeat it with Joyce… Except Yale is a thing.
I don’t understand why people think she should. It’s not going to make her more likely to be president, or even more likely to end up doing a grown-up version of that goal.
She’s burning out, doesn’t know how to study, losing direction. I don’t see how moving 800 miles from everyone that cares about her right now wouldn’t be disastrous for her.
The answer from my perspective is Dorothy is clearly disastrously ill suited to Indiana University. She’s suffered multiple horrible traumas, is reminded them at every turn, and she is fumbling through everything. Yale is a place she could focus on her studies and getting the best education possible.
Sigh… Dorothy finally decided to leave the college for go to that fancy college she used to dream about. This will be a very dramatic moment for both of them… Can’t wait to see the drama!
Why is Dorothy so sad about her friends not leaving her behind? I know she’s not going to Yale or whatever, but it’s not like she’s at some terrible community college without a degree program or something. I know that it’s going to ruin the fiction if we just put some characters in therapy, but if there’s ever a time for it, it’s in college when it’s free and available (and life is admittedly strange and new).
She’s conflicted about not leaving them behind. And probably feeling like them moving on from relying so heavily on her (or in Walky’s case, not coming back to her) means she made the wrong call in not responding to Yale’s offer.
Yeaaaaaah this isn’t making me feel better from where I saw her yesterday. I’ve been here, this is going to end with her wandering aimlessly off into the woods to return to monke isn’t it /half-joking.
But for real though, I don’t read this as her deciding to go to Yale. She’s not quite at the point of outright suicidal ideation, but she did admit to Amber that she viewed existing as work. She’s gonna do something else self-destructive and continue to spiral when that fails to make her feel any better. Might even end with her dropping out [temporarily, but that’s effectively permanent in this universe] before eventually returning to uni for something like social work or whatever degrees most help someone run a charity.
I really like Joyce’s question here. Friendship shouldn’t be one way– it isn’t healthy. Dorothy desperately needs a real friend, and Joyce can be that if Dorothy lets her. (I still feel like a lot of Dorothy’s last spiral could have been avoided with an appropriately timed Joyce hug and conversation.)
Dorothy is overthinking a lot of her problems and making them into a huge existential Thing right now, but frankly a think a lot of her problems could be solved by something as a simple as “a friend who unconditionally supports her and doesn’t assume she can handle everything by herself”. She has not actually had that until now! And it’s REALLY FRIGGIN IMPORTANT!
Loading ...
“That made water come out my eyes” /Freakazoid
Alt-text needs to also watch out for evil moms in evil dads’ clothing. Heck, not just evil parents, watch out for all the assholes disguised as descent folks, just pretending to be good.
Something something, even if we understand what drives a person to behave like a jerk (motivations, personality disorder, brain damage, paychopathy), it doesn’t excuse their behaviour. They’re still a jerk.
p.s. I saw the typo, and decided to leave it.
I’m trying to figure out how the alt text relates to anything in the strip. Can’t leave me if you stay, especially if we watch out for evil dads. It just doesn’t scan coherently.
Dumbing of Age 14: I Seem Kinda Small Potatoes Especially if We Watch Out for Evil Dads
This chapter opened with Dorothy having a nightmare about losing Joyce to Toedad. It seems to be on her mind and inspiring her arc this chapter.
Ah. Thank you.
Ditto. Thanks muchly.
Jesus Dotty, date a girl for a while before you propose to her.
Yeah even I was all NO DOTTY TOO EARLY
goddammit dotty
I was about to say, that sounds like a proposal.
either a proposal or desperate clinging.
Tho other than straight up moving to a new city for personal reasons/a career choice i can’t imagine joyce would be the type of person to ‘lose touch’ with ppl as an adult
A proposal at this stage of their relationship (the one where they aren’t dating and Joyce is dating someone else) is desperate clinging.
Dotty would have to see Joe as a person for their relationship to count.
You have a point!
What are you talking about? That was a totally hetero thing to say.
Totaly hetero of her. The sort of thing a gal who’s a pal would say. You know, the sort of friend who would engage with her gal pal in such exteamely straight activities as dressing up and traveling together or staying together in a hotel where they discover there’s only one bed.
C’mon let the girls have their soft queerplatonic situation. Not all deep intimate love has gotta be romantic.
Aw, come on. Let us have the romance. Screw the logic of the characters. Heck with artistic integrity. Immerse us in hot, wet romance.
Someone is depicting what seems to be a queerplatonic partnership cognizantly and on purpose instead of because they’re afraid of putting gay people on screen. That doesn’t really happen in my experience. It’s kinda depressing watching people go “oh yeah this is very gay” every time anything that. You know. Queers the platonic happens. Just kind of further reinforces a feeling of “as far as people are concerned your experiences don’t exist” that is already present around this kind of experience. This isn’t an accusation or anything, it just bums me out.
In my experience, according to fandom, no relationship is too platonic (or too het) to rewrite so they can have their smut. (Also representation, but mostly smut.)
Fandom is very horny.
Preach, my aro sibling-in-arms, preach! QUEERPLATONIC JOYCEXDOROTHY FTW!!!
In all honesty, I like to laugh merrily with everyone else at the “omg Dotty and Joyce are so gay for each other” comments. It’s cute! It’s queer as all get out, in both the sexual/romantic sense and the philosophical sense! But also…yeah, underneath that amiable appreciation for a good joke is a deep, hot, anger for the way amatonormativity (among other things) has recently assassinated the entire concept of close personal friendships in many parts of our society. You know it used to be considered fairly NORMAL for close friends of the same gender to just stay in blissful, domestic, partnership for their whole lives, even after one or both of them got married? People would be completely dedicated to their school chums, their garden parties, their pen pals, their drinking buddies, their brothers-in-arms, and those relationships were in some ways MORE respected because they had no sexual component, they remained “pure”. Women could, in fact, absolutely dress up and travel together and stay together in the same bed in a hotel room, and it would just be a nice thing with genuine goddamn emotional intimacy between friends. I certainly don’t miss some aspects of this kind of attitude, but I do think that as a society we’ve lost a lot of respect for close platonic love and only bothered to make up the difference with more valuation for romantic/sexual love and distant, shallow, friendships. And even if you somehow ignored us folx in the aro community and our QPRs…that’s scary as hell. I think more people need to think about having a truly queer outlook on life, and how that necessitates allowing everyone to mix and match all kinds of expressions of love how they see fit, as long as it’s within the boundaries of consent and good communication.
And, like, I laughed along with everyone else at the laundry scene…but I think it needs to be said at some point, that if Joyce and Dorothy hug and cuddle and make deep emotional confessions to each other and even experience Pants Euphoria about separate things while holding hands together, and at the end of it all they still consider each other BFFs…that’s VALID. And FREEING. And queer as all get out, to boot.
TLDR: I’m fine if people want to joke about JoycexDorothy being kinda gay, but anybody tries to imply anything against QPR JoycexDorothy and I’ll f*cking come after them with no mercy.
[applause]
You’re absolutely right.
… But I’m still gonna call the whole situation hella gay even if it’s confirmed to be queerplatonic, because just because it’s not gay doesn’t mean it’s not gay
@ Terrible Transit I’ll allow it
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1959754-senor-changs-ill-allow-it
This was very cathartic to read. <3
It's very very weird existing in this culture as someone who feels the same kind of deep need for queerplatonic partnership that lots of people, including myself, feel about romantic attraction. Because it's not like I'm aromantic and so this is of course the way I life partner if I want to. I'm married. This is a separate also important thing! It's important to me! Really important! I feel like it's an empty space I kind of want to fill when I don't have one the same way that I kind of feel that about romantic stuff. And so many people I know don't seem to experience it at all. Just at all full stop. I sound fictional on the internet. I'm only just starting to be out enough with both of my relationships to not feel fictional in real life. I didn't really get the drive for representation (even though I was ace and really not very well represented) until I felt like the life I wanted to live would be treated as fictional in the culture I lived in. It's such a strange thing. It's such a strange thing to be so entirely unrelatable to so many people. I don't feel threatened but I do feel alien and apart.
Sorry, I have just done a weird feelings ramble. Willis, if you read things, I appreciate your comic showing a much wider range of ways of being than I am used to appearing in media. Including this one.
@AK I’m so glad you feel validated by my little rant, and by the comic in general! Your weird feelings ramble, in turn, is super heartwarming to read. <3
I definitely relate to the awful feeling that society at large considers one of the core aspects of your being to be entirely fictional. It sucks. I wish you and both of your partners luck in making space for yourselves and shining bright against the darkness of ignorance!
If Willis ever has them graduated he could later do a sequel comic with a time jump called ‘Gal Pals’ with Joyce and Dorothy as the main characters and Becky seething in the background. Dina occasionally pops up to give her girl a dose of reality.
She is admittedly deeply miserable and lonely and struggling to figure out what to do, which sounds like love confession.
I’m trying to find a straight reading of this and boy it’s hard. Does not help they’re constantly referred to as the gay couple by the rest of the cast.
She’s thinking about herself and not going to Yale, then reversing the logic to talk about Joyce staying not her.
Honestly, the rest of the cast referring to them as “The gay couple” doesn’t really influence me.
When the gay married drug store lady talks about “the things we do for love” and Dotty is has a meaningful pause about it, though, that feels an awful lot like Dotty is questioning the platonic nature of her feelings.
When Dotty has a dream about riding a unicorn with Joyce, and one of the other characters completely unknowingly drops a reference to that being really gay to someone else entirely without Dorothy overhearing it, that feels a *lot* like the *author* is implying that Dotty’s feelings aren’t completely platonic.
Before i came out as trans there was a guy who i had a crush on, he was my best friend. I was sure at the time he liked me too and found out later that he absolutely did cause he admitted it to a mutual friend (and she told me after he and I had a falling out).
One day he told me that he and I should move out of the american south to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and get a house together maybe raise a kid together eventually. Ya know just hetero things
wow, that is strangely specific location to head to. Coincidently, I live in Edmonton. Deepest redneck Alberta is probably somewhat more accepting of non-binary people than the deep south is, Edmonton even more so. Although there is a much lower chance of getting shot here; I don’t mean for being non-binary, just being in general.
… stay with me and be my love.
… a U-haul
*plays “Simple and Clean Music Box Version” from Kingdom Hearts Soundtrack on hacked muzak*
Dorothy: “Looks like my summer vacation is… over.”
I get it, she working on the part where she’s trying her best not to ruin lives on her way to the top. That kind of requires figuring out a very meticulous way to walk on eggshells.
I think it’s more thinking about whether she even wants to pursue the dream
I can’t tell if Dorothy is planning to propose or hurt herself, but this conversation seems be drifting to an ominous place.
Nah i think she finally has some clarity here she probably talking about Yale
I really hope so. Dorothy is good egg (not that bad eggs deserve to suffer like that).
Clear intent is not always for the best and Dorothy is clearly feeling a lot right now
hurting yourself would indirectly hurt the ppl she care about , so i don’t think it’d come to that (unless she just decides to get blackout drunk, which is also unhealthy but not unlikely to hear of a college student doing either from partying or stress from exams and such)
when someone’s in a lot of pain, they aren’t thinking clearly. That includes emotional pain. if they hurt other people when they hurt themselves, it doesn’t mean they don’t care.
Naw, she always thought that she knew better than everybody and it usually worked out. People followed her advice and were well or didn’t follow it and failed. That validated her, made her feel needed. Now that people are starting not to rely on her so much and do their own thing she’s scared that she’s not needed anymore. She believes that her worth is measured by others in the same stringent way she measures herself.
And here I was, hoping this comic could only have *one* lesbian suic*de pact.
…You know, Ruth *was* canonically eavesdropping on their conversation just in the last strip. Her overhearing this and drawing a comparison out loud to her & Billie’s relationship would be funny as hell!
Go to Yale, Dorothy.
(In all honesty considering how much she’s struggling at IU I don’t know how well she’d actually do at Yale, but she should go.)
i’d imagine she’d go crazy from studying/not able to take a proper break with no friends to chill with (tho being ‘yale dropout’ shouldn’t be a stain on her record or so if it did happen)
My understanding of top schools like Harvard and Yale is that the hardest part is getting in (talking undergrad specifically, ofc). Especially for social sciences majors, the schools at that level can rest on their rep and prioritize getting kids through and in jobs they can brag about. IU might actually be more difficult, in a way, because Yale students don’t have to be in the top 1-5% of their class to actually get a degree-related job.
This. Grade inflation is crazy real at ivies. (Except in like engineering majors, where it’s less crazy.)
she doesn’t know how to study though. She would make it hard.
NO! Other people are not fixer-uppers! Don’t not improve other people without informed consent.
You know, you don’t have to “improve” people to leave them better than when you found them.
Just treating them with kindness and respect, doing favors for them, etc. will leave them better off, even if you’re not trying to fix all their problems.
Dorothy treats people like projects though.
The point is to be a positive influence in the lives of the people around you
My favorite non-project life-improvement was when an ex of mine told me that he didn’t used to notice all the doggos he encountered in his everyday life, but now he does, all the time. (I really like dogs, so when we were out together, I always pointed the dogs out and fussed over them, and told him what kind they were, and I wanted to hear about what dogs he’d seen that day.) And it’s nice — I felt like I’d given him a present, without even knowing it.
i mean some ppl might improve naturally but other than jen forcing her bf to be her ideal, i think some ppl would be for it as long as they’re not told “yeah we need to do this and that” and drag them into a ‘amekover’ or so
do you know how hilarious this would be setting up Joyce-Joe endgame only to have this be a slow burn for 10 more years to Joyce-Dorothy? May your ships come true within your lifetime I suppose
The eternal ship wait, gotta love it, lol.
I’ll say that a year ago if you had asked whether Joyce or Dorothy would textually admt to a crush on the other I would have said Joyce, and that is past tense for a reason
or joyce being in a polycule by the end of this lol
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised. She’s shown interest and curiosity, and I don’t think she’s particularly possessive inherently – a lot of that was directly tied into her fundie “expected life plan”.
Has she actually asked Joe to only pay attention to her while they’re dating, or is that something he’s assuming she wants?
Geez, next thing you know Dorothy will be saying “It rubs the lotion on the skin…”
She’s putting pepper on Mac and cheese – she’s half way there already.
Yep! I definitely got that feeling. “You can’t leave me if I have you locked in my basement.” Y I K E S .
Everyone should have a Joyce kept locked in their basement. Oh wait, did I type that out loud?
I love how Dorothy is a Rorschach test here, with some people hearing a marriage proposal, some people hearing suicidal ideation, and some people hearing whatever this is.
It’s all weirding me out, because I’m hearing her talk about her feelings about (not) leaving for Yale.
Oooookay, this is suicidal ideation-check-in time. We’re not necessarily at ideation, but there is some concerning shit and worrying level of calm being said and exhibited here.
It does not seem suicidal she seems to actually have some clarity here realizing that small victories help. She also might be talking about Yale.
Sure, that’s exactly what I wanted people to think about me when I was mad suicidal.
I am sorry that has happened to it has happened to me as well, I just don’t think Dotty is suicidal she seems commited to doing small acts of kindness i dont view that as susidal rather her coming to terms with not always able to make big changes. its not meant to offend you
You’re good, I’m sorry for being snarky. You didn’t deserve that.
Dotty’s particular brand of mental breakdown here has her saying some stuff real close to what I was saying back in the Depression Days, so I guess it’s hitting home for me a bit.
I am truly sorry it is an awful thing to go through I know I didn’t have what Dotty had I was spiraling from a series of horrible events that pushed me to the edge thankfully I was able to find help and it’s good that your still here.
“Could a depressed person do this??” [cooks mac&cheese]
No, but I have to, because I’ll starve if I don’t.
Suicidal ideation doesn’t necessarily mean she wants to kill herself per se. “I don’t want to kill myself, I just think it might not be a bad thing if I went away in some nonspecific manner I refuse to interrogate” is a common first step towards the void.
This is always the one for me. It started with “I wish I could turn myself off like the power button on a computer” and I should’ve been more concerned about how badly I wanted that
Yeah, this is concerning, also seems like some kinda codependent behavior to engage in with the “don’t leave me” bit
I think she’s saying “you’re not leaving, I am” but I can see how it can be read like that.
Definitly. The talk of leaving people and failure, sudden small actions designed to create some measure of positive legacy, the notion that Dorothy will leave but Joyce will stay are also worrying signs. More optimistically Dorothy could just be planning to leave for Yale.
I think that’d be worse. She’s still be spiraling but with no support structure around her.
Many comment that going to Yale is the best option, but from what I interpret in the last panel is that she will try to reinvent her vision of things and perhaps it is with Joyce that he can do it (no offense to those who love the ship, I prefer see this as friendship rather than romance), although that is not going to give a good result.
Last we knew she’d already decided not to go to Yale. Seems pretty obvious that’s what she’s talking about. It’s definitely been on her mind.
Yeaaaah. That was my immediate impression. Like she wants to leave Joyce some nice memories to remember her by – Something Joyce can’t reciprocate because. Dorothy. Won’t be.
Homegirl needs to go to a therapist’ appt, not to Yale.
I’m worried for Dorothy but cautiously optimistic for this interaction? I hope she manages to open up a bit and be emotionally honest with Joyce, I honestly think that would help a lot. Dorothy’s been so stuck in the mom friend role, I think it’s been hard for her to accept that she doesn’t just have to be there for Joyce, Joyce can be there for her too.
I don’t think it is. I can see how it could be read that way, but the “leave people better than you found them” is more of a general platitude and rest of the implications are covered by her well known plans to leave them and go to Yale.
the sheer amount of planning dotty would have to do to off herself will keep her alive for at least the next seven years of strips if not longer.
In a more serious version of my comment above, Ruth weighing in with some advice for Dorothy right now and maybe drawing some points of comparison could be really interesting and potentially helpful.
Carla: You can’t leave me better than you found me bec…
Dorothy: ..because you can’t improve upon perfection. Yea yea.
But doesn’t an inability to improve count as an imperfection?
I’m hoping this’ll lead to a longer conversation and Joyce can talk Dorothy out of giving up.
Trying real hard to not see the last panel in a negative light
Okay, but depressing/worrisome stuff aside, panel 4 is almost verbatim my life motto, and I think that’s pretty neat
I’ve been saying it (panel 4) to myself a lot recently, and I feel like you’ve chosen a pretty dang good life motto there.
Dorothy no, statements like that are unhealthy for everyone involved.
I am not sure Dotty is suicidal here I think she actually has some clarity here the last panel I am going assume she is talking about going to Yale.
Also I am in a great mood and I don’t want to bring my mood down I got a job at a non profit and it may finally stabilize my financial situation as i am making 11 more dollars an hour then my current job and font have to use and HRA for healthcare costs.
Good luck on this new job
Thanks
she might be telling joyce she’s turning down yale and planning to spend more time together
also congrats!
Thanks and maybe I guess from a narrative perspective getting rid of Dotty would be an odd choice
There will be a spinoff comic: “Dorothy vs Yale”. After it takes off, Willis can close down DoA.
I feel like Joyce is getting a newfound understanding of Dorothy. That’s not to say she’s going to immediately get what’s going with her, that feels unlikely to be that simple, but she’s seeing a side of Dorothy she previously did not see.
Their dynamic feels like it’s changing. Not just Joyce seeing Dorothy differently, but seeing herself differently in this friendship. She sees Dorothy’s hurting, and Joyce can be someone she can lean on.
I’ll admit I’m slightly confused at Dorothy’s last line here.
perils of a daily webcomic, full picture isn’t always clear at first
And that is why you despair, because you already have an endless number of improbable future scenarios, especially with the characters you love the most, yes, Willis really knows how to drive everyone here crazy.
i imagine she thinks joyce is going to ‘move on’ from her /not ‘need’ her anymore but joyce is the type of person who’d stay friends with dorothy even if she wasn’t helpful b/c you don’t become friends with someone who only has ‘worth’ to you
No Joe/Amber tonight, sorry
It’s all good.
Nothin’ to apologise for, innit.
I’m not sure what Dorothy is hinting at here. That she’s planning to leave for Yale? Something else, possibly more ominous? I don’t know.
ominous is too strong and sudden, but from the recent nightmare he had, it is evident that one assumes that.
She’s still not sure.
This feels more like she’s trying to figure out how it’d be to even HAVE that conversation. Not even on a conscious level, but more that she just wants to feel like staying here isn’t a bad choice.
It’s not, but it’s also not what’s best for HER.
It’s a difficult internal battle for her, but if she were to stay, it would be great if this time everyone around her could see beyond the “girl who has a plan for everything” image and see that she is a girl with mistakes and That’s not bad, of course it would be difficult given that Dorothy wants to maintain that image, I know that possibility is difficult and it’s more of a whim on my part, but the thing is, Dorothy is a character that, at least for me, you really want. find that happiness and can smile genuinely without problems
Yeah probably Yale.
If she wanna revise her dream into something that’s more sensible and actually does more to help the people she cares about, good on her!
I was once like her, fixated on a goal supported by an understanding of a field over-simplified for grade-schoolers. I was the 9-year-old autista who wanted to become a physics PHD, but kinda gave up on it once I discovered they don’t build robots and shit.
At my heart, I just wanna make cool things that make people happy — candy dispensers, cannabis chocolates, video games. Creating video games is what lets me make a positive difference in a way that’s not so self-destructive, and even enjoyable.
This is what Dorothy needs to do in the same vein, and by all means, cooking dinner for her friend is a neat start.
Can’t grow if you don’t go.
Ugh thanks a lot. I guess this did replace I’m just Ken.
… I honestly never saw the Barbie movie.
Did I accidentally quote it?
It felt like it had the cadence of Smashmouth when I typed it, but not intentionally either.
My “this is suicidal ideation” alarms started BLARING here, but beyond that…
Jesus, Dorothy. THAT’S SUPER GAY. I’m here for it.
checking a lot of boxes
Yep.
I bet Arnold at least has red pepper flakes or basil. Probably not rooster sauce because of the shortage.
I’m not getting suicide ideation here. I am getting codependency. Dorothy’s needs someone to mom and guide or she doesn’t see herself having value. So that line about Joyce leaving touches on a fear that Joyce will continue to become more improved until she won’t need or want Dorothy anymore.
Yep. She defines herself with her caring for Joyce because everything else isn’t working. So now she’s finally realizing it isn’t and is scared to death that Joyce might one day not need her and then she has nothing at all and is just an empty husk.
Kinda seeing a bit of both
Do people really think this is about Yale? She already turned them down, so I thought that dream was done with. Or is she going to open up about her decision?
She hasn’t turned them down, she just hasn’t responded.
She’s talked about it as if she’d turned them down, though you’re correct that there might be time to change that decision.
But even if she has, it would still be weighing on her mind and that last line still fits. Reversed to respond to Joyce’s question, but she’s thinking of her choice not to leave Joyce, but to stay at IU.
Oh, Dorothy. 🙁
Alright, so do we have any guesses where this is going, other than “Dorothy wants to kill herself and is making the rounds one last time”, “Dorothy is going to Yale after all”, or “Dorothy is going to try being gay with Joyce”?
Honestly, she’s probably not decided to actually hurt herself physically; she’s probably trying to gear up for making some other big and possibly self-destructive change in her life. I’m guessing it’s something catastrophic from her perspective but not necessarily actually bad, like “fuck it, I need to take compassionate leave and drop school for the rest of the semester, which means I’m giving up being President”.
Maybe she’s finally ready to admit to herself that she can’t be everyone’s support system all at once, and bit off more than she could chew last semester.
I’m hoping she actually goes to Yale, because that would actually be a seismic shift in the webcomic’s dynamic beyond ‘I guess they might be in their first year, forever’.
Coming in from left field….
For a moment I wondered if Dorothy, feeling that no, she can’t do it all on her own after all, is considering a turn to religion, and wants advice from Joyce, the most religious person she knows.
Yes, I said that. Joyce was fervently Christian and is now fervently atheist. She changed the object of her devotion, but I think no more than that.
Ffs…
First off, atheism isn’t a religion, no matter how much if a dickhead redditor someone is about it. Second, she went through a phase everyone who leaves religion goes through. It was a phase, an indulgence. She hasn’t said anything like that stuff since that arc ended. She’s just a normal atheist now
She’s just normal atheists
She’s just innocent atheists
atheist doesn’t mean someone is devoted to Atheo. what you said is a thing that religious people say in order to be offensive.
Dorothy’s devotion to her childhood plan to become president isn’t a religion either, but it is a devotion. Dorothy’s not turning to Joyce for advice yet, but Joyce knows what it’s like to have the foundational worldview for the life she’s planned out for herself erode out from under her.
Yeah, the important part there is the prefix, “A-“, which indicates absence, a lack of a certain state. The “-ist” suffix is only relevant as part of the word “theist”, which is just “a person who believes in the existence of a god or gods”.
It might help some folks to think of words like “asymmetry”, which means “lacking symmetry”, not “the process of measuring asym”. Because what the fuck is asym? That’s nothing, it’s not anything. Same with athe, it’s not an action, practice, state, condition, principle, or doctrine.
Words are made of parts, and while all of the parts have a purpose, not every part is equally important to the meaning in every context. Atheism is a lack of theism > theism implies religion > Joyce was religious in the past> Joyce is now an atheist > Joyce is not religious. It’s first grade, SpongeBob.
That said, there are atheists who take up their atheism with a fervor that echoes how they previously approached religion. Attempting to spread the good news to others, as it were.
That doesn’t make it a religion, (and not all religions take that approach) but it’s a trait commonly associated with religion.
Jouce flirted with that path briefly when she first came out, but seems to have put it aside.
eyeroll
She admitted she didn’t want to be the president, and then went back on that and doubled down on working harder. But she can’t just forget about her moment of epiphany, and thus she’s struggling to find purpose.
I mean, if you’re serious, I’ll throw my hat into “Joyce realizes this as a semi-deliberate cry for help from Dorothy, and starts trying to do more things for her in their relationship, to take a bit of the pressure off.”
I think it’s probably going to be a version of at least one of the things you said, probably more.
But, my “other than” is that no matter whatever else she says and does, she’s going to say “I haven’t been fair to you”.
Something nobody seems to have brought up yet – the thing about ‘leave ppl better than you found them’ is what she said to Walky way back. So my first thought was that she regrets the leaving part there, and doesn’t want to repeat it with Joyce… Except Yale is a thing.
That is a very nice catch, thank you.
Ooooo!
Oof, good catch!
Ahh yes, subtext, my old arch nemesis!
Fuck, that was smooth
Don’t tell anyone but Dorothy has added Camembert to the Mac and Cheese.
She actually made it from scratch with 4 different kinds of cheese. The box is just there to lure Joyce into eating it.
She expects the revelation of this betrayal to shatter their friendship forever.
On the contrary, I’m anticipating the mildest of outcomes
But panel 3 is now new grist for my mill. Dotty…
Suet your profile pic is amazing!! 😀 ^_^
Thank you, I really love Joyce’s expressions! 😙 🤌
This is how I sound with my friends. Granted, something is deeply wrong with me. But I still think you guys are overreacting.
The choice was made ?
Dorothy, go to Yale.
I don’t understand why people think she should. It’s not going to make her more likely to be president, or even more likely to end up doing a grown-up version of that goal.
She’s burning out, doesn’t know how to study, losing direction. I don’t see how moving 800 miles from everyone that cares about her right now wouldn’t be disastrous for her.
The answer from my perspective is Dorothy is clearly disastrously ill suited to Indiana University. She’s suffered multiple horrible traumas, is reminded them at every turn, and she is fumbling through everything. Yale is a place she could focus on her studies and getting the best education possible.
Oh no, now THAT explains the Momothy thing
Sigh… Dorothy finally decided to leave the college for go to that fancy college she used to dream about. This will be a very dramatic moment for both of them… Can’t wait to see the drama!
More likely, she’s going to tell Joyce that she’d decided to stay.
Then Joyce can kick her out of her room for betraying herself.
Why is Dorothy so sad about her friends not leaving her behind? I know she’s not going to Yale or whatever, but it’s not like she’s at some terrible community college without a degree program or something. I know that it’s going to ruin the fiction if we just put some characters in therapy, but if there’s ever a time for it, it’s in college when it’s free and available (and life is admittedly strange and new).
She already has a therapist, she’s just a shithead and leaves important things out during sessions.
She’s conflicted about not leaving them behind. And probably feeling like them moving on from relying so heavily on her (or in Walky’s case, not coming back to her) means she made the wrong call in not responding to Yale’s offer.
Yeaaaaaah this isn’t making me feel better from where I saw her yesterday. I’ve been here, this is going to end with her wandering aimlessly off into the woods to return to monke isn’t it /half-joking.
But for real though, I don’t read this as her deciding to go to Yale. She’s not quite at the point of outright suicidal ideation, but she did admit to Amber that she viewed existing as work. She’s gonna do something else self-destructive and continue to spiral when that fails to make her feel any better. Might even end with her dropping out [temporarily, but that’s effectively permanent in this universe] before eventually returning to uni for something like social work or whatever degrees most help someone run a charity.
My poor girl needs some help.
Yeah that’s a healthy thing to say
I really like Joyce’s question here. Friendship shouldn’t be one way– it isn’t healthy. Dorothy desperately needs a real friend, and Joyce can be that if Dorothy lets her. (I still feel like a lot of Dorothy’s last spiral could have been avoided with an appropriately timed Joyce hug and conversation.)
Dorothy is overthinking a lot of her problems and making them into a huge existential Thing right now, but frankly a think a lot of her problems could be solved by something as a simple as “a friend who unconditionally supports her and doesn’t assume she can handle everything by herself”. She has not actually had that until now! And it’s REALLY FRIGGIN IMPORTANT!
Whelp, I now have a definitive answer for favourite strip of DOA.
You know what, same. 🥹
I definitely didn’t have a “fav” before, but this one is solidly touching. I’ll claim it too until further notice 🙂
Dotty getting ready to propose, I see
well, her meeting all of joyces siblings and ‘fixing’ their issues might be an interesting arc for her too
Hey what the —
I knew it a new avatar was added, evidently Jacob!
Looks like a new game of shuffle begins! XD
There was?
Oh no, I have to find Daisy again…
Done! Now I have to re-associate all the regulars with their new defaults…
Oh snap I liked mine before
WHO AM I NOW???
Really. Let’s see.
You know, normally I play a bit, but I’m just sticking with this.
Are we sure Dorothy isn’t majoring in Theater?
Nah, it’d be pretty obvious if she dedicated herself to committing all of Shakespeare’s plays to memory.
Joyce going like “
FatherMother I want violence”… The lesbian vibes in this strip are soooooo strong.