There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
The Otherknown
Lorian Merriman
Chandra is a 12-year-old accidental time traveler with a reluctant new dad, who happens to be a member of a feared galactic crime syndicate.
Slightly Damned
Chu
Rhea Snaketail returns from the dead, befriending a Demon who falls in love with an Angel. The afterlife ain't what it used to be!
Beeserker
TJ Cordes
This comic is about a robot powered by bees, but it's also about the kind of people who think filling a robot with bees is a good idea, and why they're wrong.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Mac Hall
Matt Boyd
The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Paint the Town Red
Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
Countdown to Countdown
Velinxi
Iris Black is a self-proclaimed inventor with the curious ability to bring his drawings to life, and yearns to find a space where he can use his powers freely.
Fantomestein
Beka Duke
Desperate for companionship, Frankenstein's Monster pretends to be the Opera Ghost. A grave mistake.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
2 Slices
RJ Morel
After a case of mistaken identity, will awkward Daisuke find help from excitable Mamo, or will his love life be thrown completely off track?
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
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And alt-text, when I pan left on mobile (ffox), it puts a purplish shadow over the right side of the last frame It added a neat kind of transition effect… if you were going to go red panels.
Loving Joe’s little dig there, but something tells me he’s here to offer friendship/support, nor to crack Dorothy .
re: little dig, I mean supporting Dorothy and cracking her a little ain’t mutually exclusive, at the same time that shouldn’t look like a professor using “Socratic Method” either XD
also WOAH 500+ comments already?!?! :0
WTF happened when I was sleeping in a pile of weed and heat packs?
imo, I don’t think dorothy has ‘power’ over joyce, but it def comes across as abusing the trust Joyce has in her as a peer, even if she wasn’t aware of the *why* at the time, the why was still there.
Would Dorothy have consented/suggested if she knew? Even if she did have some hidden sapphic desire deep down that even she didn’t know about, it doesn’t change her previous relationship and interactions.
Current consequences for tiddy pic is appropriate. Casting her in a “predatory lesbian” stereotype is not (not you specifically, but the comment section currently).
Yeah I think this is less that Dorothy wasn’t being honest with Joyce and more that Dorothy didn’t know. Joyce and Dorothy consented to that situation as they both understood it, and framing it as a predatory vibe is gross to me personally.
Once Joyce learned that Becky was into her, Joyce shut that down IMMEDIATELY (even though she cares deeply about Becky). So that makes me think that Joyce would NOT have consented if she thought Dorothy was coming on to her.
Yeah but it wasn’t Dorothy coming on to her so that’s why it doesn’t work as a good metaphor. Becky literally kissed her without asking or really discussing it. Dorothy constantly offered outs and framed it as the ‘probably akward thing that it was going to be’ and it was done first and foremost out of fear Joyce would make mistakes Joyce would herself be ultimately uncomfortable with due to lack of outlets most people have access to in order to release horny and make rational decisions.
While I’m kind of expecting Dorothy to beat herself up for that sequence here, I’ll be shocked if the ultimate message is that Dorothy was, in fact, trying to make a move on Joyce there, or that Joyce feels more than “very embarrassed” about this revelation.
Yup. “To what extend do you understand what’s going on” and “to what extent _can_ you understand what’s going on” are different, yet both important, questions.
OK, for the record, I am not calling Dorothy a “predatory lesbian,” or infantilizing Joyce, or saying Joyce is incapable of consent, or ANY of that. ‘K?
All I was saying was that saying, “I’ll teach you about sex” by /doing/ sex stuff, is a super weird vibe. That’s all. It’s just a trigger, that’s all I was saying.
I know, nobody was being gruff to me, I’m just being gruff to y’all. I’m sorry about that. I just — wanted to make sure I wasn’t misunderstood.
“I’m just a fool whose intentions are good, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”
This time dilation deal has me just a little out of sync. Inside the DoA time sphere, how many days ago did Dorothy teach Joyce the Miracle of the Maytag?
Each chapter is one in universe day, and that was nine chapters ago (ten if you include this one I guess)
There didn’t seem to be any indication of a time skip between those chapters when I checked the archives but I was just glancing really so who knows what I missed.
Yes, Dotty may have been in denial, maybe to the extent of actively lying to herself, but it’s certainly not her entire burden. Virtually everything we are socioculturally taught and exposed to (especially in THIS economy) assumes and expects heterosexuality. And we know Dorothy is trying to deliver on expectations, even if those are her own expectations of herself. Dotty expects herself to be hetero because WHY WOULDN’T SHE
So yes she should stop denying it but at the same time she doesn’t deserve to bear the entire brunt of thousands of years of cultural stupidity trying to convince her that she’s something that she’s not
Dorothy has spent AGES reminding people (including Joe) that Joe was an awful person, so when her major hang up is that this makes her as bad as SOME IMAGINED VERSION OF JOE, he has every right to push her nose in it.
Black hair, very fair skin, CS major who had a while thing at the floor meeting about how people don’t change. That was about Ruth, but still. I can’t recall if she said the same of Joe, though I do know she called him out rightly for his do list last semester.
Until she knowingly contributes to his actively suicidal mindset, no she’s not. Rachel’s entire character consists of beating Ruth while she’s down. Dorothy has an actual history with Joe that we’ve gotten to see and learn about beyond “was generally a downer when they met”, which is all we know about Rachel and Ruth.
It might. Took like ten years for the story to circle back to Alice and her history with Billie, and Rachel feels like she serves a parallel function for Ruth.
Based on the Joe we’ve seen before now, why the hell should she have been a friend of his? He was a sexist, creepy jerk that pulled the “you’re not into me? must be gay” bullshit on her, she has every right to not be his friend.
Probably because he felt that if she was in distress that she could rely on him for the emotional support that he’s attempting to provide her. Which is to say Joe believed they were friends and he would have her back in a traumatic situation like this.
There’s absolutely no reason she should. BUT, until recently, Joe hasn’t been very smart about things. We’ve seen him apologizing to Dorothy after making one joke too many with “I’m sorry, Dorothy, is today a bad day?” Which is the sort of thing a friend might say.
Dorothy was never his friend; she put up with him because she had to.
Joe, however, was under the impression that they were friends. And if asked, he might very well have said he was a *snerk* “friend of Dorothy*. With the snerk being very loud.
If it weren’t for his very early appearances putting Dorothy on the Do List the moment she dumped Danny, I’d even think that he treated her as “one of the guys,” never realizing that she was taking his joshing as insulting. (And clearly he knows better now, given his non-apology-but-explanation in yesterday’s strip.)
Some dudes absolutely bounce back and forth between “you’re one of the guys” and “but you’re also a giiirr-ll” and yanno what, having latent queer vibes ups the oscillation rate…
I’m pretty sure Joe just thought it was banter because there’s not a doubt in my mind Dottie called him shit too. He 100% started it, but he was an idiot 15 year old who only had American Pie and Fifa to help him figure out stuff.
We’ve got football (what USAians call ‘soccer’) here. It’s the 4th largest sport here, but it’s also the fastest growing (in popularity and money) of the top 4. We’re behind y’all, but getting up to speed.
Maybe he reconceptualized her that way, but old Joe didn’t have female friends. She was Danny’s girlfriend until they broke up, when Joe put her on the list.
Their interaction immediately post-break-up was very “hello, acquaintance”. Dorothy asked if it was okay to ask him how Danny was doing, and he didn’t seem surprised by that approach, the way he probably would have, if he’d thought she was his (Joe’s) friend.
She outright said that in a previous strip. I forget which one but she refers to her associatio with Joe as being friends with Danny since kindergarten and “they were a packaged deal” or something to that regard. I legit forget which strip though. I may have hallucinated it. Whether Joe was actively aware or at least knew deep down is unknown.
I’m pretty sure the problem Joe perceives isn’t the morality of Dorothy’s actions, so hurrying this meltdown along is helping. Then they can get back to Dorothy accepting her feelings.
When you’ve been in denial for a long time, it can take a big jolt to flip your perception. The brain goes to amazing lengths to avoid cognitive dissonance, like the religion you loved in your youth being toxic or Joe growing into a more humane person than I-do-everything-right Dorothy.
It may not be helping but she insulted him first. It’s also clear she’s used to putting him down going back to their high school days. If he’s going to be petty right now, I’d say he’s allowed to be.
Sadly, many presidents were prone to infidelity. Fortunately, this means Dorothy can betray those closest to her and still somehow be trusted by the public not to forsake her obligations to them, the faceless masses.
In fact all the most historically celebrated Democratic presidents, FDR and JFK, as well as the current Republican president appear to have been adulterers. So go ahead Dorothy and cast aside basic human decency. You’re not shattering hearts and leaving lasting pain, you are forging yourself into the future leader America needs.
Not really. Lots of presidents have cheated on their spouses. American presidents have never really been the bastions of good behavior that lots of people seem to think they are.
She’s definitely freaking out a bit that she’s bi but she knows that, as a modern educated women, she should have no problem with being bi so she’s probably freaking out even more about freaking out.
Her issue is she *has* been acting on them. She’s sent nudes, she’s helping Joyce masturbate, etc. She’s lying to herself so she can say she’s not acting on her feelings for Joyce (cheating), she’s just acting like that because that’s just how friends act with one another (supportive and playful).
Hmm…“lying to herself,” might be more than we have evidence for and kind of assumes the worst. “Been very confused, stressed, and depressed,” would be more accurate and charitable, I think.
I’d say “lying to herself” is better than the alternative. She’s basically been in denial about it, which isn’t malicious. Doing the same things, but doing it while accepting she was into Joyce would have been worse.
But yes, the “confused, stressed, and depressed” certainly plays a role.
I think you two are just having a terminology snafu, where you (thejeff) mean “lying to herself” in the sense of being in deep denial, but Chubseus was objecting on the grounds that “lying” kind of implies a degree of conscious intent.
Chebseus’s alternative, I think(!!!), is more like: “Dorothy is so confused and SO deep in denial here that she genuinely believed she wasn’t attracted to Joyce,” rather than “knew, on some level, that she was attracted to Joyce, but buried the knowledge on purpose because she couldn’t face it”.
“One giant polycule” did, in fact, describe the extended social group that I was a part of during my college years. We had theatre and larp people, which just made us slutty and poly.
Joyce hasn’t done anything that’s too unusual for (what I’m going to dub) straight girl culture. There’s a very large and thick line of acceptable behavior which weirdly does include a familiarity with others toplessness and overly physical affection. The fact that Dorothy managed to reach the other side through MM is astounding; tbh if Joyce has seen the tit pic, she probably could’ve shrugged it off entirely as either meant for Wally or a genuinely friendly joke.
I’m a bi lady and known it almost my entire life (even before I had a word for it), so I’ve always been acutely aware of that giant river of “platonic but not platonic shaped” interactions and made very uncomfortable by them.
Joyce could be into Dorothy, I’m not ruling it out, I just feel like we haven’t seen very strong evidence to support elevating it to a romantic/sexual crush rather than just idolization. That being said, I don’t think Dorothy needs to be in a poly relationship right now (Walky neither.) They aren’t the most communicable people, and I’m pretty sure Dorothy would actively try to undermine Joe’s part of the polycule, which I’m fairly sure is not good.
I’m not sure where the characterization of Dotty and Walky as “not communicative” comes from when they really do talk frequently (including about tough topics) and understand one another well whenever we see them on screen together. Maybe it’s a lack of screentime feeding into people feeling that way? Unsure.
I think it’d be fair to say they’re not too communicative outside of each other. Walky deflects constantly with anyone not Dorothy (and took a lot of time to stop doing that with her), and Dorothy has until very recently been super concerned with projecting an image as solid, omnicompetent, and driven to serve others. They end up spending a lot of time not being very honest with themselves and others about how they feel.
See. I think classifying this as sexting is already going a step too far in the series of events that lead us here. I don’t think the line is that thin. Intent matters a lot in these situations and I still don’t understand what Dorothy’s end goal was.
Intent does matter a lot, and that’s what Dorothy’s saying here. If she’s actually into Joyce, that means there was intent on her part, and therefore it was cheating. But she can’t be a cheater, therefore there can’t be intent, therefore she can’t be into Joyce.
Or, and here me out, that’s Dorothy’s negativity talking and she doesn’t actually think that she’s just insecure about being percieved that way and ‘accepting it in advanced’ because that’s what people with low self esteem do.
I don’t think Dorothy knows what Dorothy’s end goal was, this seems to be a fairly new and surprising revelation for Dorothy and if she does have romantic/sexual feelings for Joyce I think it would be fair to say that she probably wasn’t fully aware of those feelings until recently or even right now, and any actions she took that might be considered cheating were probably motivate by her subconscious and perhaps shouldn’t be judged too harshly, I just hope Dorothy can find a way to come to terms with things and accept herself and whatever feelings she may or may not have, because watching her spiral ever since her realizations about politics has been somewhat difficult.
dorothy took joyce to get her birth control from the pharmacy, because Joyce was too much of a disaster to do it herself
and the lesbian pharmacist immediately diagnosed Dorothy as the Top in that Lesbian Marriage
the reality of Joyce and Dorothy is, neither of them came into their adulthood with normative ideas of the social boundaries that come naturally to most of us, and as a result, their platonic friendship reads more as domestic, or even romantic, than either of their actual romantic relationships.
so, yeah, it’s easy to read both of them as being vastly ignorant of boundaries, and unaware that their friendship crosses a ton of lines that make it seem fully non-platonic. it’s merely because neither of them know how to, or care to, set those boundaries; neither of them are doing anything wrong, until the other one actually acknowledges that the other is doing something wrong. Joyce and Dorothy are the ones who get to make that decision, not the rest of us observers.
like, jeez, it’s almost as if they’re both autistic girls, with life-long limited social networks, and severe obsessions with morality and ethics; just, one of them was fundie, and the other was fully secular.
Yeah, I mean. While this seems very much to indicate that there’s probably attraction there (sexual? romantic? just attention? We shall see), their very domestic friendship is part of why they have read as queerplatonic. Their other relationships follow romance scripts much more effectively, the kind of energy they have in them is much more flirty and energetic than the extremely casual domestic relationship they have with each other.
From experience – the line of culturally acceptable platonic girl behavior is way further than acceptable platonic boy or opposite sex behavior, but it… Does not stretch as far as they are. I too have been clocked as in a lesbian relationship by half of everyone who encountered my first queerplatonic partner and I. (We laughed about it, she was bi, we would have known.) But if people don’t *tell* you where the lines are and you’re not skilled enough to intuit them or don’t care enough to be bothered with them they’re not like. Obvious and controlling.
Joyce and Dorothy (at least up til this point) have both been very happy with their very domestic snuggly and intimate friendship. We’ll see whether that changes with the introduction of… Whatever Dorothy is processing right now. But til now neither of them has objected to anything so it’s pretty much all kosher.
I’d argue that intent *wasn’t* there, even though attraction was.
It’s very clear that Dorothy is heavily, HEAVILY in denial. The entire past storyline with the pics has been her going to poor choices for advice, and instant, impulsive behavior. I think it’s clear that Dorothy has been repressing these feelings and not allowing them to come to her conscious mind.
Joe standing here, calling a spade a spade, and asking a very simple question, is bringing that repressed knowledge into full view. And her answer isn’t “Yes, I guess I am,” it’s “I can’t be.” It’s more denial, because this isn’t /her/, she’s DOROTHY, she’s not like Joe…
And again. I love how Joe is taking this. He is, AGAIN, speaking to the person who is sending his girlfriend lewds and who, deep down, wants to break them up and explore those feelings… but he’s not angry or upset. He’s patient. Concerned. And yes, he gets that zing in, but that is one hell of an earned zing, with all that Joe has done to improve himself.
She wanted to send a titty pic to Joyce because she had weird bottled up fellings for her. Yes Amber suggested it, but she was perfectly capable of denying it if she wanted and did even after having the opportunity to back off. She just wanted Joyce to see her, consciously or not, but also immediately regretting it.
She was also capable of not hitting “resend” 100 times after it didn’t go through the first 99 times (or however many tries it actually took, but it was clearly a fair few)
It only took one. It failed once and she spent a long time staring at the message agonizing over whether to press the resend button. When she eventually decided to do it, the pic went through immediately.
I think she was a bit rattled by having received such a photo from Joyce, and unsure what to do about it. (Which would in itself be unsettling for Dorothy. Hello, spiral.)
Right. I don’t think she ever would have started that exchange. Doesn’t mean she should have responded, but it does change the emphasis.
Which I kind of dislike? It makes this entirely arc seemed seem contrived. Reliant on Joyce accidentally sending her lewds to Dorothy without realizing it.
I mean, that’s not a hard thing to do? Joyce is excitable and inattentive, and the two people she probably texts the most are Joe and Dorothy. Not all coincidences are evidence of hack writing.
They kind of are though. It may not be hard to do, but when it’s the hook a whole plot arc is hung on, it’s a bit much. We also get Joe happening to have the phone rather than Joyce when the shot comes through.
Dorothy is holding herself to a high standard of always knowing what her intent is.
A little bit of lying to herself about her intentions, about an action that has yet to hurt anyone or could reasonably be assumed to hurt anyone in any real sense, at a time when she’s at a universally-acknowledged low point in her sense of self, is hardly a grand moral failing.
But it looks like that’s still enough to send her into panic.
I both really like Dorothy and am really enjoying this arc.
I don’t think Dorothy understands what Dorothy’s end goal was. I’m waiting for her to reflect, and tell us what she believes when she’s had space to consider calmly. Joe’s not going to get a definite, trustworthy answer for a few moments at least.
Is sending lewd photos with romantic emotions attached *not* cheating in somebody’s world? Like, I just don’t think I’d be okay with my husband sending someone a dick pic and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be chill with me sending somebody a pic of my tits. If it was to my friend that he knows I’ve always had an on/off crush on, I think the marriage would be over, or at least in need of some dire counseling.
It’s definitely an issue, but I think there are extenuating circumstances in this case that make it more questionable. It definitely needs to stop now that she’s starting to acknowledge what’s going on.
Part of the distinction is that while there are emotions attached, there isn’t intent. Or at least the intent is behind layers of confusion and denial.
So, different relationships have different boundaries. Not everyone views flirtation or sending nudes as cheating, some people even think it’s fun and hot when they or their partner do that and then come home to bang it out together. It’s more about personal feelings and personal interests. Do I think Walky is going to see this as cheating? Yeah, there’s a good chance.
I doubt it. He might be concerned about what it means – did she just come back to him to distract herself from her denial over Joyce?
I don’t think he’ll be framing it as cheating.
I think Walky will PROBABLY try to make it into a joke (he did recently tease her about seemingly being attracted to Joyce), but I agree that he’s unlikely to be like “my girlfriend’s potentially in love with someone else but that someone is another girl so that makes it sexy”.
I also don’t think he’s that emotionally invested in this relationship — I think he probably knows it’s pretty doomed, from the looks he keeps getting on his face whenever Dorothy talks about her own feelings — but it might still be a blow to his self-worth, especially if he feels cheated on.
Like, he already clearly feels like Lucy dumped him and then immediately upgraded by “scoring” Jacob, whereas he fell back into the arms of an ex who he knew was spiraling. I doubt this is how he wanted to ever be “proven right” about his jokes wrt Joyce being in love with Dorothy.
Pretty sure this does count as cheating in a monogamous relationship. Or, judging by my mom’s hoard of husbands (my gaggle of dads) even a poly one. I’ve witnessed many a man ousted from the group over a text.
Like, I said above why I think it’s cheating, but we’d really kind of need Walky to weigh in on this. It kind of doesn’t matter what Dorothy thought she was doing, he might view lewd photos as a line crossed in a very fragile relationship where he’s already been put through the wringer several times because of Dorothy being kind of… idk the word, flakey? It’s not flakey, but she kind of keeps unilaterally changing this dynamic up on him without his input, and if I were him I’d be getting really tired of it by now. But he’s also Walky, so he might be chill.
I don’t understand how people are reading this. We’ve seen the chain of events. This wasn’t Dorothy sending Joyce a tit pic with intent to entice Joyce into some sort of passionate affair. She was goaded into it by Amber in response to a photo sent by accident. Why should Walky have to weigh in? Just the act of sending the picture is enough regardless of any context behind it? Especially since Dorothy doesn’t fully understand her emotions behind this feels like very strict judgement of her.
Was Joyce also cheating then even if unintentionally? What about Jennifer’s tit pic? We know Joyce actually saw that one too. Was Joyce cheating then too? Why does this one count as cheating? It feels like it’s just because Dorothy vocalized that fear that cheating is even being considered. Maybe my priorities are different but this barely registers as a conversation, not a reason to potentially break up.
Cheating is a stretch, but not completely out of line.
Because yeah, it’s always situational. Joyce is basically in the clear: Hers were sent by accident and just looking at a lewd someone sends you unexpectedly isn’t cheating – unless you respond as if it were.
I don’t really know what was up with Jennifer, but I don’t think she even knew who they were going to, so she’s in the clear.
Dorothy wasn’t actually trying to entice Joyce, but she’s clearly got feelings involved and doing sexually suggestive stuff with feelings involved gets risky. It’s crossing a line that wouldn’t be there if the motivations were pure. Joyce sending first, even by accident, mitigates it somewhat, but I wouldn’t put much weight on Amber’s prodding. That worked because of the feelings.
It’s not a huge deal I think, but it wouldn’t really be out of line for Walky to be upset over it. I doubt he will be, but I wouldn’t blame him.
Or Joe either, for that matter. Or Joyce.
Important distinction: Joyce’s were sent with intent towards *Joe*. She just send them to the wrong person on accident. Which means it’s embarrassing, but not cheating.
Dorothy being initially goaded into it by Amber? A mistake. But she was given two chances to bail out, one by Billy, then one by her phone not initially sending her tit pic.
She went past those, and intentionally sent it due to her own repressed desire for Joyce, which I’d argue is cheating.
Part of the problem here I think is binary thinking. Either cheating/not cheating. When nothing emotional is ever on nice clean binaries. If we count this as cheating, it’s definitely way down on the low end of the scale, due to the repressed nature of any intent behind it.
Does it really do any good to anybody her to be agreeing with Dorothy? “If you are into Joyce, then you really are a cheater?” Same logic let Amber talk her into it in the first place. If she hadn’t been repressing her desire, she wouldn’t have done it.
of course she skips right over the sexuality crisis and into the morality crisis LMAO
obviously joe isn’t being super helpful but i can’t say i’d be any better. get her joe (with love and support once her head blows off her shoulders)
Joe’s ability to remain calm and understanding of Dorothy in this situation is simultaneously the best way for him to be kind and supportive to her, while simultaneously refuting all her judgments of him.
One of the few advantages of self-loading is that once you’ve managed to rise above it, it is a wonderful insulator against people trying to use that against you (even unintentionally).
“I can’t be like you, you’re awful”
“Oh yeah I suck, but you’re currently being worse than I was, lol”
Oh, yeah, Joe’s got powerful growth now. He saw what he was; he wanted to change for the better; he _did_ change for the better. He’d make a great counselor, lawyer, middle school teacher, or therapist.
I mean, Joe does deserve a chance to needle Dorothy about her stance on him, and show his changes. I suspect he’ll do a good job in the coming panels, helping her through it. He’s always come in clutch for his friends in fraught situations, from Danny to Amber and even Sarah.
Yeah, Joe definitely has some further growth and accountability to do (looking at the years of calling Dorothy a lesbian thing that he should apologize for some time), but you know what? He hasn’t cheated, and he’s actually been very against cheating and the idea that he might hurt his self-image for a long time… objecting to the idea that cheating makes her like him seems fair enough.
Okay yeah, that reframes it. Wasn’t thinking enough from Joe’s perspective. From his point of view, even something only cheating adjacent like this is definitely worse than his old objectifying, near predatory approach.
Joe’s old ways were worse than what Dorothy has done, I agree. And I think even Joe would agree if it was spelled out like that– but he has worked to change, and he knows that, even if Dorothy doesn’t, plus there’s just the nature of taking offense to being insulted, so I see why he’d defend his current self.
If Dorothy had said, “No better than you *were*,” then I think he’d have a different response.
Joe quite pointedly HASN’T actually disagreed that he was worse than Dorothy is. He never cheated, but he was a jerk. The last panel is ONLY a funny joke if the reality is that it’s not possible for a Dorothy to be worse than a Joe.
In calling Dorothy a Disaster Lesbian the insistence is that she is a LESBIAN, not bi or straight or whatever. I am objecting to her being assigned as a lesbian.
Yeah. Daisy and Leslie both fall neatly into the disaster lesbian role, though to be fair neither is a main character so there’s still a vacancy in the main cast
I suggested they do the Spice thing. Just “The Lesbians” and one is Disaster, one is Useless, one is Lipstick, and one is Butch. They didn’t go for that.
“Dammit, you’re right, I _am_ worse than you! I might as well just have my _own_ website ranking the campus’s women! Except, wait, mine would be better; I’d incorporate Google Sheets, an intro Slides deck, gotta do better password protection than yours, of course, oh, peer-review ratings, not just arbitrary single point values, oh, and–“
I kind of love that somebody is hitting on his gf and his first reaction is to go and check whether said somebody is okay. Zero jealousy or insecurity.
Also, critical hit.
He’s known Dorothy for ages, plus knows Dorothy is profoundly important to Joyce, so her doing something rather out of character for her is going to merit investigation.
True, but most people would show at least some emotional reaction to someone trying to break up their relationship, and that someone being in the same social circle is usually regarded as betrayal.
It’s interesting that you insist on framing it as an attempt to break them up.
Like, there was a whole thing where she was explicitly trying that, and a whole scene where she clearly decided she would stop doing so, directly to both Joe and Joyce.
This is basically what this strip says. Dorothy finds out that she does like Joyce and that she was sexting her. If you send sexy pics to a person you like, it usually is a bid to get their attention. Which is why it was important to her that Joyce saw the pic in yesterday’s strip.
And Joe mostly finds it amusing.
Joe knows Dorothy well enough to know that her attempts to break them up would take the form it actually did: threatening him t9 his face, glaring at him when in company with Joyce, trying to explain to Joyce was a bad mistake she’s making.
Dorothy isn’t Sarah. She doesn’t do sneaky backhanded tricks to break up relationships. Therefore, this is more likely a cry for help rather than a betrayal.
Well it’s now proven it also includes tiddy pics. It’s literally what just happened. And Joe deciphered before Dorothy herself did.
Seeing the cry for help and responding to it instead of being angry she made a pass at his girlfriend is what impresses me.
To be fair, this is also related to Joe’s terrible insecurity. He sees Joyce as way out of his league, so from his perspective, he has no agency over whether or not Joyce leaves him for “someone better.” He’s fully obsessed and fawning over Joyce, so he’ll pretty much accept anything she were to tell him about their relationship status.
He has a point. Especially with this context, the washing machine incident feels way more predatory + self gratifying. (And people said we were overthinking it when we pointed it out.)
You know, I say this as someone who was pretty squicked out by the laundry room incident:
I’m really getting concerned about how people are re-framing the incident to say that Dorothy has “power” over Joyce, that she’s predatory, taking advantage over someone who “can’t consent”. Guys, there’s nuances here. The laundry room incident can be a bit weird and gross to people without it turning into an SVU case.
You’re putting words in my mouth about what I said.
I fully believe Dorothy was being unintentionally predatory in how she approached it in regards to her repressed feelings towards Joyce. Specifically in regards to Joyce knowingly consenting- I’m fairly sure she’d feel differently about that whole thing if she knew Dorothy was into her *in that way.*
She didn’t mean to, but she was absolutely using the situation, and Joyce’s libido as a way to satisfy not only her repressed desire for Joyce, but to exert some amount of ‘control’ over the situation, since she didn’t want her to do anything with Joe due to her libido. (This also probably stemming from her jealousy towards Joe and Joyce.)
Like, people can make mistakes, and that whole incident was a HUGE one for Dorothy, even if was due to the combo of repression/feeling like she was losing any source of control in her life (of her own life or otherwise, vis a vis being ‘needed’.)
I’m not intentionally putting words in your mouth but I am summarizing, hence the word ‘people’, that I am seeing multiple people use these phrases regarding the laundry room incident.
I think “unintentionally predatory” has gotta be just another single most judgemental thing I’ve ever heard. Like, c’mon, think about what “intent” means for about half a second more.
I kinda love that there are people in this society who have been so underexposed to predatory behavior that they think “unintentionally predatory” is a thing.
Also love that the person doing this has called themselves “Rabbit”.
I was pondering on how best to respond because I kept thinking in my head “can someone unintentionally be predatory? Creepy, maybe, or weird, but outright predatory, which kinda requires a desire to predate upon someone?”. I eventually decided trying to debate it might be a lost cause but I wanted to comment to say I agree. Unintentionally predatory isn’t really possible. A cheetah doesn’t unintentionally eat a gazelle.
??? Rabbit is just a nickname I go by due to various habits I developed as an adolescent. I don’t get what the implication of it is here.
And when I say ‘unintentionally predatory’ I mean she’s engaging in behavior that I view as predatory, but not intending to predate. (i.e, her teaching joyce to mastrubate having more purpose than just ‘showing joyce how its done so she knows how its done). Ulterior motive. I don’t know a better term for it, but if you do, go ahead and shoot.
Yeah, it does kinda feel gross to me (even though I also felt squicked by the laundry thing) because a lot of autistic people, especially young AFAB people, are often infantilized and treated like we can’t consent. Joyce did consent to it. Would she have felt differently about the situation if she knew Dorothy might have feelings for her? We don’t know, but neither of them knew about that at the time. It was weird and ill-advised, but she DID give free consent to a peer and equal
I’m autistic, and AFAB. I’m not ‘infantalizing’ Joyce. We see multiple times that she *can* be naive, and she trusts Dorothy. Like, people jumping to say that people are infantilizing Joyce in regards to it, when literally hours earlier she told Dorothy to stay out of her business in that sense, and then having Dorothy decide to take the reigns and get Joyce to use the washing machine.
Like. It’s an established character trait that Joyce is kind of naive. She is incredibly sheltered, even well into the story and that’s not a secret. She trusts Dorothy, but Dorothy wasn’t actually acting in her best interest. It was to get her to de-horny for Joe, and likely on some level, gratification, even if repressed.
Like I said, it WAS a weird situation that felt kinda gross. I 100% agree with that. I just don’t think it’s fair to characterize it as predatory. If Dorothy had knowingly had feelings for Joyce and then done everything the same way, I might not disagree. But they’re same-age peers and good friends. Dorothy doesn’t have power over Joyce, and some people who didn’t like the scene *did* lowkey infantilize Joyce when they were criticizing it. I’m not saying you did, but it has happened. And it is a societal issue worth calling out.
My dislike from it is that Joyce had recently (for comic time) removed herself from a very cult like religious system, where her entire rationale was “Follow the Authority, don’t question the Authority, and everything will work out because Grand Plan” Its not because she’s autistic.
And she falls out of that cult-like mindset and falls right into Dotties “Gonna fix em” system.
I don’t think Dottie was predatory per say at the time, but I have trouble making Dottie’s stance of “using your trust in me, I’m going to convince you to yank it in the laundry room, and it’s for your own good… Even though it’s for *my* own good, so you don’t try and bang Joe” sound… not creepy.
And I really dislike the “Joyce could just say no” stance, because she’s been conditioned since birth to follow authority, and it took her best friend nearly being kidnapped for her finally get to a place where she could say no to things, and that was seen as a huge leap forward for her.
And as much as people like to say Dottie and Joyce are equals.. Let’s be frank, Dottie was the red ranger to Joyce’s pink.
Also, it doesn’t even necessarily need to be that Joyce views Dottie as an authority- but she IS someone Joyce trusts without much thought otherwise/without question. Potentially as a peer, but she views Dottie as being smarter/knowing more than she does.
I just think everyone holds Dorothy to such a high standard around here, that they rarely assign to Joyce. Like… Is this not evidence Dot is naive too? She’s also barely an adult and figuring herself out. Joyce didn’t know she was autistic. Dorothy didn’t know she was bi. Joyce may not realize she’s bi either, and she’s done and said a LOT of things that get reframed if we learn she’s bi. Just… Idk. I feel like young women do get infantalized, but some get …maturized? And I feel like the comments let Joyce get away with tons of stuff because she didn’t mean to or didn’t realize, that they won’t let pass in Dorothy.
The issue, at least for me, is that Dottie put herself on the pedestal. And because she put herself there, she should be held to a higher account then the others.
She’s been walking around as the “voice of reason.” The one who tries to make the others “better” as if she has some higher place on the totem pole of maturity, and seeing her stumble has a tinge of Schadenfreude as we watch her realize she’s no better then anyone else.
In a way, she’s very much like Billie, in that she was the big fish in a very small pond in high school, who was hucked into the much bigger lake that is college, and she’s floundering.
That’s pretty much a branding issue. Dorothy presents herself as Not Being Naive, so when she is naive, it doesn’t get labelled as “Dorothy Does A Naive Thing,” it gets labelled as “Dorothy Makes a Willfully Wrong Mistake Because She’s a Bad Person.”
Which, to be fair, that’s also how Dorothy sees it. She’s not like, misrepresenting the way she sees herself; she actually sees herself this way. And she’s naive, for not realizing that seeing herself that way, is really self-abusive!
Less a “Dottie is a bad person” And more “Dottie has been a massive hypocrite and I’m tired of people defending it because they want her to smooch Joyce.”
Malaya should be foaming at the mouth when she see’s Dottie.
This interpretation I will fully cosign, I do think there’s a lot of ascribing willful planning and intention to Dorothy’s clumsy mistakes, and it’s been going on since the very beginning when she broke up with Danny and a significant subset of the comments acted like she had calculatedly waited until he was already enrolled at IU and stuck there before doing it, so that she could……….????? Hurt his academic future, the thing she was expressly concerned about, I guess.
The takeaway I have from all this is that Dorothy’s going through an extended breakdown/maybe autistic burnout right now. The entire main driving focus of that burnout has been the realisation she was never on this pedestal legitimately, that she needs to see her flaws to grow around them, and resultingly she doesn’t know who she wants to grow into anymore. So of course she’s getting overwhelmed and frustrated, as her previous mask of perfection is crumbling around her. Dottie’s not necessarily been a hypocrite about this; if she is an autistic “gifted kid”, then the world has probably always insisted she present a certain way, and rewarded her for wearing that mask – so she’s bought into the image herself, too. Unlike Raidah, she never glorified in thinking herself superior to others, and unlike Jennie her sense of self-esteem and social belonging wasn’t knowingly constructed solely upon that pedestal but rather has been unwittingly foisted there by anxiety. I think Dottie only accepted that “higher path” everyone around her told her she was meant to walk to try and help the world for others. It’s taken some major self-awareness for her to unpack all that even this far. I expect she legitimately believed she was helping Joyce prior to now and saw the way she felt about being close with her as normal for platonic found family. Elements that would have been exploitative if meant with worse intention were honestly unexamined.
The comic never really made anything of this, and even if it had, Joyce’s newness to EVERYTHING would have absolutely overshadowed it, but is Joyce Dorothy’s first female friend???
Some people seem to be seeing this as reframing the situation as being more intimate than it was. Like, there are people who would absolutely, having convinced themselves to be brave and do this thing with their friend, freak out a bit if they knew their friend might be getting off about them at the time. We don’t know if Joyce is one of them or if she’d think of it that way.
It’s like… y’know how there’s a spectrum between “people against kink in public sometimes mean gay hand-holding” and “people for non-explicit kink in all spaces are sometimes literally getting off to tricking people into ERPing with them”? I think some people are debating where Laundry Day is on that spectrum and some people are debating whether it’s even on the spectrum to begin with.
Right. But Joyce CONSENTED to it. And Dotty was being honest about her intentions as she knew them.
It’s not Dorothy’s fault she didn’t know she was into women/Joyce, she grew up in a heteronormative society and god forbid she be affected by that in some ways.
What happened hurt absolutely no one, and had zero intent to do so. To call that “predatory” is so far out of line as to be laughable. It was just dumb, that’s all, and given the name of the comic I think people need to chill out about dumb stuff happening.
You have your opinion, I have mine. Mine is that the washing machine incident was creepy and duplicitous to some extent, and as someone with similar ‘life experience’ to Joyce (since everyone brings that up when I have issues with it that she’s autistic/afab/ and not to infantilize her)
It’s a creepy thing to do, and the underlying reasons were also creepy and if I were in that situation and found out that person was also repressing a crush on me, (and was my best friend previously who I trusted to be thinking in my best interests) I’d be weirded out.
what did dorothy teach her? cause from my reading, she was just there for moral support. she was as much a non-participant in that sexual act, as I think it’s possible for a person to be? Dorothy wasn’t engaged in any sex act. She was just there. Because her friend was scared of doing this thing, which she actually did want to be able to physically do for herself.
They weren’t exactly sitting across from each other, pointing at one another’s parts, giving advice on technique and types of stimulation. Dorothy was In The Room. They probably weren’t even looking at each other. Because the point of the exercise was not for them to engage in a mutual sex act, and neither of them intended for it to be that.
So like, what did Dorothy actually do besides offering her presence?
Your reading is on the opposite end of the spectrum of mine, realistically it probably is going to fall somewhere in the middle of ours. Because no matter how many people get upset when I say it- Dorothy’s entire thing with the washing machine *was* creepy and kind of weird, even if it’s not predatory.
What gets me about your read is that Dorothy has been fast to point out Joyce’s accidental sexual hypocrisy in other situations – like how the idea of “soaking” ie PIV sex without thrusting but facilitated with a “helpful” third party bouncing on the bed is basically a threesome, fully intent on sexual pleasure while desperately trying to bend the rules enough to justify it all. I think Dottie was specifically ignorant of the sexual connection involved in the laundry room sit because of where she believed her intention “to help” was coming from. She didn’t go in there to intentionally share Joyce’s sexual awakening, certainly not consciously, but IMHO honestly did believe at the time that she was only helping her friend release tension and learn about herself in a way her upbringing had denied. She’s recontextualising it *now*, but didn’t register it was weird or needed self-examination *then*.
I agree, honestly. Joyce was overwhelmed and nervous and I don’t think anybody else in the cast could have convinced her to go ahead with this but Dorothy – and that only because of the level of unchallenged trust Joyce has placed in her across the series to date, seeing her advice as sound support in the challenge to unpack a radical-cultish-church homeschooled upbringing. She sees Dorothy as a wise voice of normative reason and, despite some allusions to this by others, isn’t factoring in any possibility Dottie might be underschooled / undersocialised in some areas herself. She also sees her as a safe person. If Joyce had known at the time that Dorothy had any feelings for her of this type, then she’d probably no longer have seen Dottie as a safe person to reassure and encourage her along those lines. Which is why I think it’s really important that Dottie *didn’t* realise at that point that she was into Joyce. If she had, the laundry thing would definitely have been creepy and manipulative, not just a bit over-intimate. The difference for me lies in where Dottie thought the impulse to advise all that was coming from – legitimate concern vs unexplained interest.
Yeah, I am inclined to agree. Joyce had agency throughout and was given multiple instances to bail on it if she chose to, and she chose not to.
It’s been a bit since I read it, but from what I recall, whether or not it was read as enthusiastic content, she did give explicitly expressed consent.
The conversation started with “Remember how you told me to stop acting like you’re about to sprint into Joe’s room just because you’re on BC? Well, to keep you from sprinting into Joe’s room, let’s go have you masturbate for the first time.”
Afterwards, Dorothy reiterates to Joyce’s face that Joyce shouldn’t be with Joe.
Only later do we see that Joyce had secretly been plotting to use her newfound knowledge to keep her cool when spending time with Joe, negating the worst aspect of the situation: Dorothy policing Joyce’s relationships.
If anything it recontexualizes her motives to de-horny Joyce so she stops being into Joe.
And several of Dorothy’s other actions, like propositioning Walky immediately after seeing them talk in the tree.
but why stop there? Dorothy can use this revelation to evaluate every decision she has ever made in her entire life! Maybe 15 year old Joe was right! Maybe that’s why she was attracted to Danny in the first place! Maybe that’s why she has always strived so hard at perfection in everything she has done so as to avoid this exact realization!
I feel like we’re taking this one a little too seriously. Every aspect of this has been ridiculous in nature, from Joyce initiating with incredibly low quality barely legible shots sent unintentionally, to Dorothy being goaded into a high effort glamour shot by Amber, or even Jen barely qualifying it as cleavage and sending her own. Joe is clearly just messing with Dorothy. None of this has actually been problematic except them all being a little too dismissive about having even slightly compromising photos circulating.
It implies that Dorothy was intentionally forcing Joyce into that situation. She did not. Was it weird? Yes. Can you say, with a straight face, that you haven’t had any weird early homosexual (or hetero if you’re into that) experiences where both parties are figuring it out as they go along?
We can have both parties be innocent here. It’s important to be careful with our words as using things like predatory improperly blurs the definition and it should hold more weight. But it’s also fair to examine and wonder, WAS it predatory? I don’t think so but I’m interested to hear the reasoning for that word choice.
Predatory is the word that comes to mind when I think of it. Using Joyce’s lack of knowledge on it + her trust in dorothy to do this thing that was clearly not actually focused on doing something for Joyce despite being presented as such.
I’ve definitely had weird homosexual experiences where people (including me) are figuring things out- but they weren’t as weird as the situation Dorothy had Joyce follow into.
I think you are giving her intentions she didn’t at that time have.
Was it a weird thing to do? Sure. Not recommend. But that’s a far way from predatory.
Unfortunately, given she’s Joyce, she will draw exactly that conclusion about the situation and will spiral even worse.
I agree with Suzi: it’s important to not use strong meaningful words on things that are not its core content. That’s how people came to the oh so horribly wrong conclusion that it didn’t matter who wins the US election last year bc it makes no difference.
This veered into a direction I can’t follow, so I’m just gonna say I obviously don’t support the orange turnip in office, nor do I want LGBT rights taken away. And I don’t think my opinion on a fictional character making questionable choices inherently ties into that?
Something I’ve honestly noticed online in general, not just here but across social media and such, is people’s willingness to use strong meaningful words to describe things without remembering what it means. In fact, let me give a real world example.
My old job involved working with kids. While I was on vacation during pride month, apparently my superiors decided to have a rainbow themed craft with the kids, including wearing rainbow shirts, etc. Since I wasn’t there, I got conflicting reports from coworkers but all I can confirm is it was pride month, and kids were given rainbow activities/colors/etc. Parents were upset, as were other coworkers who apparently approached the head honcho and said they think that such activities were “grooming”.
Head honcho immediately stopped the convo in its tracks and asked coworker to please explain what they mean; as grooming is a very loaded, strong, powerful phrase with legal implications and has NOTHING to do with giving kids a rainbow shirt or crayons to color in a rainbow.
Okay, I can understand that… but I don’t see how it applies to the specifics of this conversation in terms of ‘loaded words.’ That’s very obviously not grooming. If you have a better word for ‘Doing something under the guise of assisting someone when it’s really for your own gratification/need for control’ then please tell me so I can use that instead.
There is no easy answer because frankly, I don’t think there is a singular word for it. Dorothy and Joyce are messy even outside of the laundry room thing, because they have a lot of messy feelings about each other. They love each other. They’ve been through traumatic experiences together. I do think Dorothy truly thought “well, Joyce is just horny. She’s very repressed. If I help guide her to masturbate, she won’t fall for Joe’s tricks”. I don’t think Joyce jilling off gave her any sense of gratification, at least not sexually. I do think it was caused by her being jealous of Joe (although she’s in denial about that). I can’t say for sure if I think Dorothy did it out of a need to control Joyce, mainly because in the end it was Joyce’s choice to stick her hand in her pants and go to town.
It’s a messy situation, and it’s weird, and like I said, I found it squicky. But there’s unfortunately no better word to describe it other than messy and weird. At least in my opinion.
To add on, the best I can offer is that I don’t think what you described is necessarily what predatory means. It’s… duplicitous? But being predatory is seeking to take advantage of someone, such as financially or sexually. A person can be duplicitous to take advantage of someone, but you can be duplicitous without trying to take advantage of someone in a predatory way. Somebody could be lying to themself or others to stay out of trouble. I think Dorothy clearly lies to herself about her feelings for Joyce, but I don’t think any of it has been intentional. I think she’s just afraid of what those feelings would mean, especially since Joyce is clearly not available right now.
“Predatory” definitely got all the way under my skin. I still don’t agree with “duplicitous”, but that’s a matter of opinion that I can disagree with civilly, rather than… you know, triggering feelings about the persecution of LGBTQIA+ people (most visibly trans people, but by no means limited to trans people) that is currently going on, SPECIFICALLY under the guise of protecting straight cis women and girls from us predatory groomers.
One of my pet peeves is people using literal, when they mean figurative. ”He dropped a literal atom bomb on the legislation” is an actual paraphrased example.
The person then took extreme offense to it being pointed out that no _literal_ atom bomb had been dropped. What’s worse IMO, is that the venue being reddit, I got to see that it represented the majority opinion.
The major difference here is that I strongly believe Dorothy was fully under the impression her impulse towards “needing to teach Joyce safe ways to release” were to help Joyce first and foremost. I think we’re all having it recontextualised now that they *may not have been, subconciously*. But there’s plenty of evidence in the text that Dorothy is an undiagnosed “gifted kid” autistic who has basically believed fully in her societally-insisted-upon mask for her entire life to date. This breakdown is the burnout from realising she isn’t actually down with that lifepath anymore, and may not have ever been the person she’s been told she is and has to be til now.
Back in the laundry room, while she was still “perfect helpful world-fixing mature wise Dorothy”, she was trying to protect and support Joyce from what she saw as “bad decisions” – such as a naive SA survivor jumping straight from a gay beard boyfriend to someone else’s boyfriend to Joe, who we’ve repeatedly seen Dorothy over-pigeonhole as “sexualising chauvinist” despite a lot of recent growth. The intent behind that “tuition” at the time was, I truly think Dottie believed, protective and platonic albeit super intimate. She often oversteps with way too much drive and enthusiasm – and this probably felt like just another example of that, with fear of Joe/Joyce as the driving force behind her urgency.
We can now see Dottie was probably also too ready to suggest such an intimate event, too trusting of her own unexamined intentions, and too controlling of Joyce’s love life unconsciously … because she cared too much to want her to be with anyone else, especially with someone she disliked and distrusted as much as Joe. But I think it’s key that neither woman noticed this *at the time*.
Can’t edit, so just to add that I agree Dorothy was already being too controlling of Joyce’s love life back then and was too ready to infantilise her or pigeonhole her as the student to Dottie’s wise worldly educator. This is still wrong! Just saying that it isn’t necessarily manipulative and retroactively predatory; there’s plenty of completely presumed platonic impulses Dottie could have misread all this behaviour as coming from. I think that the incredible pressure she, and probably a lot of people in her life to date, had put herself under, to be the perfect leader/problem-solver, goes a long way toward explaining why she didn’t examine those impulses to guide and control Joyce’s growth. And yes, there’s a real analogue here to Jennie’s “head cheerleader” persona – and I think that’s why we keep seeing those two as foils and focus characters throughout this storyline!
And if she doesn’t realize that Joe thinks it’s a funny joke because the very concept of DOROTHY being a worse person than him is hilariously impossible.
Dorothy’s statement just before makes no sense unless she does – or at least unless she’s referring to old Joe or to Joe overall, which makes his response also at least understood as doing so.
And from his point of view, I think it makes sense. Joe’s take on this all of this is driven by his reaction to his dad, so cheating is the worst thing. Even if Dorothy’s only been cheating adjacent, that’s what all of old Joe’s shitty behavior was intended to avoid. It makes sense that, even though he’s learned that behavior was still harmful, he’d still see it as better than anything even close to cheating.
We can disagree with that, but it makes sense for him.
Maybe it isn’t worse, and maybe Joe is ratcheting the tension up to the breaking point because Dorothy needs for her assumptions to break, and begin to replace them with honest self appraisal?
She might have earned it, but Joe is the last person who should be firing any shots at her, given his past douchebaggery towards her that he hasn’t tried to make amends for.
I think a better description of events would be that Dorothy is bringing up her past victimization by Joe in order to distract from the issue he’s asking about.
Dorothy isn’t wrong to still be mad about Joe’s bad behavior from years ago. But that’s not actually relevant to the question that Joe’s asking her. A question that he has a right to ask.
That’s been pretty much this whole convo. Joe attempting to actually be a friend and dorothy keeps turning around and trying to make this his fault, somehow, as well as pointing to her past victimization to do so.
Truly. ‘Hey, are you into my girlfriend?’ ‘This again? God you’re such a PIG.’ ‘Yeah, I was, but you DID send my girlfriend a tit pic, so… figured I’d ask.’ ‘Oh, and you stole her phone and SNOOPED? You piece of shit!’ ‘Um, no, I was holding her phone when the message came in?’ ‘God, I’m the second-worst aren’t I? I’m hitting on my best friend who has a boyfriend while I have a boyfriend! I’m almost as bad as YOU, you disgusting cheater snoop pig.’
People are just DESPERATE to frame Dorothy’s unintentional baby-gay flailing as real harm and it’s just ridiculous. She’s dumb and didn’t know she liked Joyce, framing that as harassment is nonsensical.
But people are allowed to be upset by Dorothy’s general ‘flailing’ as you put it. Just because you don’t intend something doesn’t mean it can’t come across poorly.
Doubly so because unfortunately, even in real-life people coming to discover things about themselves (and involving other people) Can still in fact be harmful to the other party.
I’m all for self exploration, but that’s not how the situation w/ joyce comes across to me at all. And Dorothy’s whole last two panel thing with her outright saying that she’s been in denial partially because then she has no justification for her actions towards joyce.
So the comment I responded to got removed, because it LITERALLY said “harassment”. You’ll note I didn’t say a single word about “the pictures” so I’m not sure where that came from in your message.
I get that you have issue with me thinking all this fuss is ridiculous. I still think it is. I disagree with your viewpoint, and I didn’t say you “weren’t allowed” to be upset. I just think it’s an overreach and a catastrophization of what actually happened in the comic.
I am just now remembering that when she and Danny discussed the Kinsey scale she said she was a 0 as far as she could tell, but actually seemed fairly casual about it and open to the idea that it could change.
“…I dunno, probably a zero, best I can tell? I guess that estimate could change” is the exact quote, and it is funny how many people have been misremembering that scene for the last fourteen years as one where Dorothy made it clear that she’d totally given her orientation a LOT of thought and was VERY sure she was 100% straight.
I mean it also could be she genuinely has never been attracted to another woman before Joyce and even that Joyce is the only one she’ll ever find attractive.
That would be my guess, yes. Or that if she has been attracted to women before, it didn’t register as such. Which is an extremely common experience among queer afab people especially, as the, shall we say, common plumbing? Doesn’t send signals of the same clarity level as one of the other options.
Dorothy is 18, and far from history’s latest bloomer.
I’m probably one of those people, but I’ve long argued that I’d take a statement like that as more seriously than a flat out denial. It shows at least some consideration and that she was open to the possibility.
Maybe I’m still wrong, but I doubt we’ll see a revelation that Dorothy’s been having crushes on women her whole life and just repressed them all.
My objection is that “…I dunno, probably [number]?” reads, to me, like Dorothy’s first time thinking about it at all.
And, given the context of the moment (which was understandably very focused on Danny), I don’t think she spent much more than those few seconds considering it.
The writing for that scene had always struck me as conveying “Dorothy isn’t queerphobic, so she takes the possibility as having neutral value, she hasn’t ever had reason to question her own sexuality before, so she hasn’t”.
(Which isn’t to say Willis couldn’t have changed their mind on that first bit, just as they decided to embrace the problematic implications of Carla not being on Joe’s “do” list. “It’s fine for other people to be gay/bi/etc, I’m just NOT, I’m normal” isn’t an unheard-of manifestation of internalized queerphobia.)
I meant to write: “so she takes the possibility as having neutral value, BUT she hasn’t ever had reason to question her own sexuality before, so she hasn’t”
saying that feels like it’d be like a monkey paw curling or manifesting it into like “a string of alarmingly hot girls constantly bump into/hit on dorothy”
In your defense, Dorothy, you’re pretty deep in denial so I wouldn’t say you knowingly sexted Joyce with intent to cheat. You just denialed yourself into thinking it was a funny haha goofy joke between friends!!
I’m pretty sure that early in this comic Dorothy self-reported her Kinsey score to be “probably a 2,” meaning not entirely straight.
I recall this because I mis-remembered it as “0” once and posted comment about it, and was helpfullly corrected by other readers.
I think the actual issue is that Dorothy doesn’t want to acknowledge that she’s been attracted to her best friend all this time, rather than her not wanting to admit that she could be attracted to women generally.
You’re welcome! Honestly reading your comment I was like “whoa, I remember it as a 0 too, was I also mistaken?” so I mainly checked to doublecheck myself.
I mean, her entire thing here is that she’s denying the attraction and framing this as ‘normal friend stuff’ because if she doesn’t it means she’s essentially been cheating on her boyfriend/making passes at her taken friend.
Honestly, re-reading the conversation she had with Amber, it looks a bit like Dorothy panicked her way into it being a “haha funny joke”. Her first anxious look in that sequence is after Amber tells her that sending a retaliatory pic would be the platonic friend thing to do, and that asking Amber to delete it permanently from the Cloud (which is what Dorothy came to her for help with doing) is what would be sus and weird.
I’m not saying any of this is Amber’s fault, mind. I’m just saying I think Dorothy double-denial’d her way into it. She literally only got herself onto this path of sending Joyce “lewds” because she was afraid NOT sending Joyce a suggestive photo would be gayer.
Pff, okay, we can go with that, in that I don’t think Dorothy would have sent any photos if Amber hadn’t responded exactly the way she did.
I was also rereading, and I think the evolution of Dorothy’s reaction panels as Joyce sends the barrage of photos is… interesting.
This face is a lot more ambiguous than this one, and I think the difference is that by that second photo, Dorothy has devised what’s happening, so she knows these are mis-sent, and she’s irritated as well as exasperated.
But that first face? Recontextualized, it could be a lot of different feelings at once.
yeah, genuinely never forget, Amber is literally manipulative and expresses consistent and extreme desire to have literally everybody she knows bumping uglies to a hyper-sexual degree. But nobody is out calling her a predator. She’s a smol bean cinnamon roll and she deserves kids gloves. Dorothy, however? Death penalty.
All I meant is that Amber did not take the phone out of Dorothy’s hands and send the photo without her consent or over her objections. (Unlike Jennifer, lol.) So there is a LIMIT as to how much culpability Amber has.
But also I reiterate: yikes. The level of shit Amber gets for being horny in a way the readership finds weird is kinda disproportionate and makes me really uncomfortable as a queer afab person who discovered both my sexuality and gender through slash fanfic.
I think RPF is hella cringe, and I cannot relate at ALL to Amber’s habit of directly telling people she’s writing RPF (albeit with fandoms tacked on) about them, and Ethan certainly has the right to tell her to leave him alone, but I get the feeling from the emphasis folks have placed when they condemn her that they’d be just as upset if she stuck to fics about Superman and Batman, and thaaaaaaat sucks.
Like “nobody is calling her a predator” are you sure, because I think you’re forgetting a loooooot of comments Amber has gotten over the years.
Dorothy gets a LOT of disproporinate hate, absolutely, but she is far from the only target. Sal and Amber and Roz have all gotten hate-mobbed for various misdemeanors over the years. And Lucy! Oh my gosh, has Lucy gotten hate-mobbed for no reason at all.
and to be fair, like…straight women do this. i cannot stress this enough. platonic hetero men and women’s interactions can sometimes be gay asfuck. None of my gay friends say as much gay shit on the regular, as my straight friends do to my other straight friends.
We gotta remember, Mike wasn’t the only one punching Joe that night. Joyce did too, although I’m not sure how she scales against Dotty. She definitely hurt him, and he said as much, but I don’t recall Dorothy doing much fighting.
I don’t think Dorothy even engaged with anyone during the post-basement kidnap fight. I’d believe it if she’s done basic self-defense, but I really doubt she knows more than that.
In terms of raw strength, I’m pretty sure Joyce beats Dorothy by a solid margin. What Dorothy’s got going for her is mainly bony elbows.
To be fair, I’m sure that Joyce had been saving up the righteous anger behind that blow for literally decades. She coulda knocked that Saitama guy over.
Can you IMAGINE the drama if Joyce actually turns out to be bi? Becky is going to go into a full meltdown that DOTTIE turns Joyce’s crank but she doesn’t.
I think it’d be hilarious if Joyce is Bi, but not into Dorothy OR Becky in that way. (I’d argue her type probably skews more towards Sal or Billie, if it’s recongizable at all.)
Ease up on yourself Dorothy. Responding to one cheeky pic with another is flirting, not hitting on. Flirting is not cheating, especially if you’ve yet to DTR.
Flirting may not be full-on cheating, but in most monogamous relationships, it’s still unacceptable. I think she’s valid to feel uncomfortable about her actions (especially since she knew Joyce only sent it to her by accident)
‘no better than you’ makes me think she’s implying that joe’s cheated or so, which i don’t think is the case? Unless he hooked up with girls with bfs/willing to cheat as opposed to just unattached flings but i’d hope he wouldn’t rly ruin relationships as opposed to being casual back then, since dannys never brought it up or chastized him about it/willing to stay friends with him
I think with Joe’s body count, it’s very easy to make an assumption that Joe’s “cheated” on girls (or never checked to see if the girl is in a relationship herself, which is more a her problem than his). I use quotation marks for cheated because as he points out, Joyce is his first actual relationship, at least as far as he’s concerned (but I’d be willing to be he’s had a few FWB setups that took it more seriously than he let it get BECAUSE of his whole “If I set the bar for myself low enough I’ll never fail anyone” schtick).
Oh the partner definitely cops most of the blame with cheating, but I’d still say someone who hooks up with someone they know is in a relationship are still pretty bad, just not to blame for the relationship exploding.
I do need to state that a picture of essentially, a bra, is not the same as a dick pic even remotely but I get what he’s saying. it’s about intent or whatever.
Also come on man don’t rag on the girl /while/ she’s having a weird breakdown about morality. You can presumably still do that later.
This is great stuff though, I love weird breakdowns about morality
Back in the Walkyverse days I always felt like Joyce and Walky were SO SO similar. In this universe they’ve had new differences added but like. This is still so funny to me like damn. Dorothy has a TYPE.
Also lol I thought she’d be feeling guilty bc Joyce is STRAIGHT and SHELTERED and Dorothy would be worrying about TAKING ADVANTAGE etc. but she jumps straight to the practicalities lmao. That’s actually a really interesting detail that I think might say a lot about what she’s thought about already and what she hasn’t.
Like, it’s kind of a dick move to say that to her, but then telling him she was afraid of being no better than him was also a massive dick move, so I guess it’s kinda warranted? Somewhere out there, Mike is shedding a single tear.
Considering that cheating is basically a trauma button for him–considering what his dad did to his mom–the fact that Dorothy, who’s known him long enough to be aware that’s an issue, basically accused him of being a cheater is shitty. Tbh it’s entirely warranted for him to snap back (and the fact that he did it in a somewhat jokey way is a kindness)
Right? his entire Thing pre growth was “I make everyone fully aware of what I am, if you’re down to bang the trash fire, you’re at least going in with open eyes”
And we don’t know if he ever **actually** cheated on anyone either. that seems like his biggest fear/trigger, so I doubt he actually has.
I’d say we know he hasn’t cheated on anybody, ever. On account of, the whole point of his prior persona, was to absolutely eliminate any possibility of him actually being in a relationship. You can’t cheat on anybody, when you actively avoid dating anybody. Which was a major part of his underlying reasoning.
I mean, she’s essentially saying that she’s no better than him as an insult, but she’s stating something he never actually did (cheat, because that’s like. A huge thing for him? cuz of his dad?) so I’d say it’s warranted as a response. He’s handling this whole thing pretty damn well, considering.
Okay, counterpoint: We don’t see them interact much. As far as we know, we never see him outright insult her, and we only know he referred to her as gay because she wasn’t into him- but he clearly knew she was dating his roomie and that they probably boinked, so it clearly wasn’t meant to be a serious thing.
Meanwhile, we see Dotty here both misrepresenting him, insulting him after sending his monogamous girlfriend boob pics because she’s into her, and then trying to deflect by accusing him of snooping, and when that doesn’t work she turns to insulting him by calling him a cheater- something she likely knows is a button of his because of his dad? considering she’s known him about as long as she’s known Danny? I can’t imagine it never came up, even if secondhand from Danny.
Following up, she realizes she is in fact in the wrong here, even if she’s in denial about her feelings.
And none of this prompts an angry outburst from Joe, he doesn’t get defensive, and he’s actively trying to be empathetic to Dorothy, only putting in a mildly teasing jab after she accuses him of doing the one thing he set out intentionally to never do and formed his entire persona around not doing?
Oh, Joe is largely being good here. This isn’t “Dorothy is great and Joe is the devil” at all, rather its more “Joe was a giant ass for years and a thorn in her side that she constantly had to deal with because she was dating Danny, her hostility towards him is entirely justified and he has yet to make amends to her for all of that crap”.
He’s improved! He’s doing significantly better! But he’s not her friend for a very damn good reason, and he needs to not be teasing her like a friend would be, because he hasn’t earned that from her at all.
Yeah, that’s an interesting point. Joe’s retort may be justified, and intended as a joke. But it doesn’t seem like Dorothy has ever given him an indication that they’re at that level of friendship.
Joe wasn’t there for Dorothy for years, instead insulting her and mocking her while she had to put up with it for Danny’s sake. Joe doesn’t get to claim friendship now.
I mean, was he? We aren’t exactly getting flashbacks.
I’d believe that that guy Joe was, would have unsavory things to day about a mutual acquaintance who was a woman, that were meant to be funny, but were actually just really shitty.
However, I’d also believe that someone like Dorothy, would be viewing every single thing Joe has ever said to her or around her, since that one day he made a truly nasty joke to her, through that same lens. That, no matter what Joe has said to anybody since that day, Dorothy has internally given it the most disgusting reading possible, because she’s already determined that He’s That Guy, because People Are Either Entirely Morally Perfect Or Else They’re Morally Degenerate.
We’re taking Dorothy’s word on whether Joe was awful to her for years after the fact. And, as we’re seeing, Dorothy is both the type of person to get fixated on one detail until is colours every interaction she subsequently has with a person, and the type of person who has a need to morally sort every single thing anybody around her says into “Good” and “Bad” piles.
tl;dr I’m not saying Joe “wasn’t bad” to Dorothy for years. What I am saying is, “Dorothy experienced the worst subjective version of Joe that was possible, because her initial judgement of his character has fully coloured every subsequent interaction with him.” Which is a view of Joe that persists in force, up to this very day. Her internal model of Joe, has always been a caricature of the person, even back when Joe intentionally made himself a living caricature of a horn dog.
She and he agree he joked about her being a lesbian because she wasn’t into him when he was 15. She said it was habitual since then and he didn’t object. We saw him crack a joke about her coming out as lesbian back in first semester. There is no reason to think this wasn’t going on all along.
And this was old Joe. He put her on his “Do List” minutes after she broke up with Danny. He never interacted with women other than to hit on them. That was his whole thing. She didn’t have to fixate on one detail – Joe was doing his best to make himself into a walking talking red flag.
Also, having scanned their tags together, there were more than a few incidents of him saying Dorothy should kiss / makeout with other girls, and at least once where he did the same thing to Roz and Joyce when they were shouting at each other.
Joe’s aversion to cheaters has already pointed out, so I’d like to highlight his unquestionably horrified reaction when Joyce made a 1-to-1 comparison between the guy who roofied her at that party and the kind of guy who’d have a “do list”.
hell, even before that when the list became public knowledge he set up a table in a public area that literally says “that was me, sorry about that, here’s a donut if you want one”
like the man has standards. low standards maybe, especially for himself, but they’re there, and he has been holding himself to a higher standard ever since he realized his feelings for Joyce, higher still when she reciprocated
Actually Dorothy, I think the hitting on Joyce in this case was unknowlingly because while you knew the actions you didn’t know the subconcious intent (repression == subconcious.)
Joe, buddy, pal, I do actually like you but you really gotta stop teasing Dorothy when she’s clearly having a mental breakdown. I mean after this set of panels. This set of panels was totally warranted by Dorothy’s complete buffoonery? I think we are now calling it?
The last time we got a Dorothy face like this was when Dorothy admitted that she didn’t know what she was doing with her life anymore, and Joyce told her that it’s not so bad, because she could be undeclared, like Joe!
Realizing that she’s on Joe’s level appears to be Dorothy’s biggest trigger.
You know, he has expressed the idea of being a hate sink before, to Sarah. I don’t know if he’s consciously thinking that here, but getting someone to feel better by taking it out on him has actually crossed his mind.
I’m really hoping that Dorothy’s brain goes to work and she realizes that that joke would only be funny to Joe (and he thinks also to her) if the very concept of her being worse than him is hilarious because it’s not possible.
That’s the problem, when you’re the type of perfectionist who needs everybody around you to believe you’re perfectly mentally stable and omnicompetent:
When your freaking nonsense hits a limit, and you actually need to break down? They aren’t ready for it, because you never once let them consider that you were capable of acting that way, in the first place.
This is extremely kind of him! He’s actively teasing and undermining her sense of self on an issue because she’s visibly and obviously having a mental breakdown about not just her sexuality, but also her understanding of her relationship to Joyce. This is days after Joyce also pulled the truth out of her and reassured her that she’s not her presidential ambitions.
Bisexual crises over your best friend since college started would be scary for anyone. Now add that to the prolonged crisis Dorothy’s been fighting for a bit and her rigid, stubborn self-confidence that tells her to power through any doubts. This was never going to be easy for her! Joe’s doing the right thing by attacking her weaknesses gently, teasing the truth out of her by refusing to let her build a defense that involves altruism.
This! And at least lately, this exact brand of gentle poking is his go-to around people having meltdowns in his orbit, and it’s super effective.
Is he being nice? No. Nice is oassive and covers shit up with a fake smile. He’s being kind, or trying to be, giving Dorothy the real help of refusing to let her hide the shit that’s hurting her anymore.
I’m truly impressed with how Joe is handling Dororthy’s mega crash out over Joyce, tbf. I would not handle someone doing this about my girlfriend this well, especially with all the insults and digs that have been peppered in towards him.
And re: The washing machine incident, I fully think Dorothy instigated it out of a mix of jealousy towards Joe/Joyce, her lack of control/spiraling about her sacrifices and being needed/and self gratification.
Joyce was fine with it in the context she had, if a bit apprehensive. But she also did not have all the information for *informed* consent imo? Like Dorothy being into her is a massive bit of information that she was missing there, even if Dotty was in denial at that point.
And people pointed it out back when the plot point happened that it was weird/squicky/etc even if Joyce is written to be totally cool and fine with it- it’s still odd, especially given the context at the time having Joyce essentially yelling to stay out of her business in that sense.
TLDR: Dotty has some serious self reflection to do.
I mean? Eh? Yes and no. She’s known Joe a very long time and Joe was a bad guy for a fairly long time and has only recently improved. Wanting to give your friend tools to make rational not pants driven decisions about someone you think is dangerous isn’t nasty, it’s morally grey at best.
Joe started doing stuff people found cute and now all the history of Joe’s past is erased and it’s just Dotty being mean to good ol Joe who’s never done anything wrong ever.
The “ethical slut!Joe” faction has indeed been around for a very long time. I feel like at LEAST as long as his argument with Danny about then-Billie’s consent, but definitely as long as his argument with Walky about fragile masculinity.
But I do think there’s some significant rose-colored glasses about all of it. I don’t think this faction remembers his voiced intentions about his first date with Joyce back in the day, and they certainly don’t remember how he used to subscribe people to his “do” list’s RSS feed at the drop of a hat, or what he clearly intended it to be used for. Lots and lots of fuzzy memories of the worst things he said and did, combined with rosy memories of him standing up for women’s ability to consent and rejecting certain stripes of toxic masculinity.
What I’m saying is Joe has always contained multitudes. He was a guy who sometimes had good points even at his worst. It tends to flatten out in one’s memory into either “always a dick” or “always a good guy”.
I mean, still not her place to teach Joyce specifically so she doesn’t do things with Joe?
Like, at a certain point, Dorothy doesn’t really get a say in what Joyce chooses to do. Which I think to some extent was part of Dorothy’s problem. Joyce used to kind of default to Dorothy’s judgement on things. Nothing serious, but yknow.
Oh I know,it’s ridiculous this whole thing, Dottie needs to go to an actual ACTUAL therapist and since she’s no longer racing to be president an ACTUAL DOCTOR too because she is going to snap.
The only thing Joe’s doing wrong here since this is all on Dorathey’s behavior is acting like they are pals.
“All the information”. Dorothy being unaware she is into her makes this entire line of thought fucking bullshit. It’s even arguable it’s homophobic but hey let’s not accuse you here of doing something conciously when you didn’t have all the information because that’d be hypocritical ok? So let me explain why instead.
Talking to your friend about masturbation isn’t ‘the normal experience’ but it’s certainly not as weird as many people make it out to be. Friends can have a relationship where they talk about sex stuff and it be completely mutual and just ‘another topic one talks about’. If you have that kind of relationship and said friend is repressed and denied all natural knowledge one uses to handle their sexual feelings is it really that fucking wrong to offer to teach them so they can chill the fuck out? If you agree move on to the next part of my argument otherwise stop there because we are not going to get anywhere I just think you are wrong and you just think I am wrong.
Queer people can have friends and talk about sex shit without them being directed at the friend. So jumping from that to ‘she was hiding something relatively important about the consent’ is putting an assumption on Joyce and definitely putting an assumption on Dorothy in a way that just really isn’t cool. What even causes you to jump there? It’s hard for me to come up with explanations that aren’t something like ‘Joyce would have been more apprehensive if she knew Dorothy liked girls’. Why do I assume it wouldn’t be ‘Joyce didn’t know Dorothy liked Joyce’? Because, DOROTHY HERSELF DIDNT FUCKING KNOW. This is extremely important when we are talking about intent and consent. Let alone the fact that Dorothy ‘being into Joyce’ isn’t even a confirmed thing at this point because she’s too busy having a moral conniption to even ask the question honestly to herself. If she really does like her it’s not a fucking ‘sin’ for that to have been a gradual thing. You don’t know when Dorothy fell in love and honestly, neither does fucking Dorothy! Putting the onus on her for that as if subconciously hid it or used the fact that it waws hidden to prey on her as you have said in other comments, and therefore framing it as if she’s maliciously hiding it is doing basically the same thing as homophobic people do by assuming that since there is interest possible romantically by a queer person that this translates at all sexually. What SHOULD she have done. BESIDES ‘ask herself if she’s into Joyce sooner’ which was obviously ‘not going to happen’ because her life has been a constant train wreck since October.
I think we both agree she has serious self reflection to do, but unless you can answer me why Joyce is ‘somehow’ missing ‘information for her informed consent’ for a reason that isn’t homophobic I’m still filing it as ‘that’s kind of fucked up of you to think’. I don’t like the concept of ‘thought crime’ very much and this get’s conceptually close to that territory so pardon my extreme reaction. Hope you have a good day.
Calling what Dotty did weird, creepy and squicky isn’t homphobic.
The entire point of *this* is that Dotty has been justifying her actions as normal friend things because if she doesn’t that means she’s been making passes at her friend.
If someone wanted to talk to me about mastrubation and they were my friend and I trusted them to be doing it in my best interests, I’d have a very different reaction than if I knew that friend had a secret in-denial crush on me and were only talking to me about it in hopes I wouldn’t excercise that interest towards someone else.
I don’t know why you’re swearing at me, either. You’re getting worked up over an imagined adversary, dude.
Most people don’t like swearing when it’s like, directly insulting them like “you are an asshole” or “you are a fucking idiot”, unless they are like, one of those very religious type like Joyce was at the start of the comic.
Rabbit: AnonGrouch was not swearing AT you. AnonGrouch was just using swearwords. As a High School teacher, I was always very aware of the difference. Because the difference is HUGE.
I just swear, it’s a part of how I talk. I will not apologize for it as it was not AT you it was just ’emphatic’ in every case. I will attempt to ‘self filter’ for the sake of conversation so you feel ‘less yelled at’ as that isn’t my intent. Being queer doesn’t mean you can’t be homophobic. That out of the way….
Ok good, from the sound of things it sounds like you don’t disagree on part of the fundamental basis. But you definitely seem to come off as like, idk, intentionally trying to make Dorothy the bad guy for reasons I don’t quite understand yet. Again if Dorothy herself doesn’t know she has a crush it’s not ‘a secret in denial crush’ in the way that would actually matter to consent. Does it recontextualize some stuff? Absolutely. But at least let’s recontextualize the RIGHT stuff and not immediately jump to ‘Dorothy is a creepy predator’. You know what IS hella sus? Watching Joyce sleep. Didn’t get the hint then Dorothy? Hooooooow. But again, this webcomic is about young adult development so ‘yeah ok your level of self awareness is earthshatteringly low’.
I think we can both agree that Dorothy is generally an instructive person who is capable of separating herself from her feelings when she has a higher level care for the outcome of the thing than her own emotions. It’s been displayed in this comic multiple times in multiple ways with multiple levels of restraint. She has a ‘teaching mode’. So yeah, to me it’s completely easy to believe ‘that was one of those moments’ and even if she DID ‘love Joyce in that moment’ (which again we have NO IDEA when it started and to ‘think she should have been accountable for it at all times with her relationship with Joyce is not something I agree with) I would also ‘have believed it was for the stated intention ‘getting Joyce off of being hyperfixated on jumping bones so she could jump bones ‘responsibly”. Dorothy has always supported Joyce’s freedom of choice and honestly it’s a really like… Idk how to put it without being offensive. I feel like if you said that to Dorothy’s face and she knew you knew everything she knows and more she’d feel rightfully insulted. Dorothy could have done a lot to manipulate her away from Joe. Dorothy did not use her power and authority to isolate Joyce or make Joyce solely reliant on her. She didn’t control her means of communication or time being spent alone. She’s been at the worst ‘worried’.
So yeah, I get YOU might have that reaction in Joyce’s position upon hearing the news but I certainly wouldn’t given who Dorothy is and I still don’t see how you can possibly think there is a ‘lack of meaningful consent’ just because Dorothy was oblivious to possible feelings. Again, your only expressed logic hinges on both Dorothy being actively malicious in a way that doesn’t bear out in the facts of how she’s behaved in the comic and thought crime level nonsense if not homophobic nonsense. I’d love for you to explain your position and why you think a malicious reading of Dorothy is warranted despite all evidence to the contrary besides outright disrespect of her character which is the only argument I’ve seen from you so far.
In their defense, they’ve been consistently on the receiving end of people accusing them of being infantilizing towards AFAB Autistics throughout every stage of this broader discussion.
As a non-obviously queer person, I can confirm that it’s very frustrating to have your voice dismissed on those topics, based upon the assumption that you are a cishet male who lacks perspective; while I think most people find it annoying, and I’d honestly argue the practice is even unfair or demeaning to queer people, the reality of the situation is that, in these discussions, you sometimes need to “show credentials” to be heard. They were unwilling to be dismissed, or talked over, on those grounds.
Sure, but their retort also contained within it the assumption that they were being dismissed and talked over by cishet allistic men. So they’re getting pushback along the lines of: “and? You’re not the only one here, you don’t speak for all of us.”
You’re in a comment section FULL of trans, neurodiverse, and queer people, and we all know that being a member of a marginalized group doesn’t actually prevent you from holding harmful opinions toward those communities.
Treating queer people who don’t know they’re queer yet (or who aren’t out of the closet) like they are intentionally lying and being predators is actually pretty homophobic but I’m willing to accept it wasn’t your intent. Language policing is wild, though. We’re adults here, swearing is part of it. Unless it was to call YOU a name, I think you’re just going to have to accept that it happens and you can’t control other people’s linguistic choices.
Maybe my nerves are just raw because it was a year ago tonight I got sent to one for trying to jump off a bridge, but the whole “grippy socks” thing is fucking disgusting.
Just today I grabbed a pair of socks to wear as I was headed out, then when I went to put them on before putting on my shoes, I realized they were my own grippy socks. So then I went to get another pair, but I forgot that I had just shoved them in my pocket, and then later I went to pay for something and was like, “hm, sure do just have these with me.”
I’m genuinely sorry that happened to you. I can relate to an extent (not to the anniversary part), and I can’t stand when people flippantly throw around these terms like they’re jokes, when both suicidality *and* institutionalization are really serious and traumatic things.
Also, I wanted to apologize for jumping down your throat a bit earlier. While we don’t agree on everything, I still could’ve been more polite. Tbh we’re all going through some shit right now, and sometimes it’s easier to lash out at random people when we can’t lash out at those who actually hurt us. So I’m sorry for doing that, and I hope tomorrow is easier.
It’s sometimes easier for me to cope personally by making light of it. But, that’s just me, and it was inconsiderate of me not to think about how others might receive that, especially considering the general state of the world right now.
Glad you’re still here, sorry it’s a shitty fucking anniversary. I really hope you treat yourself to something nice today, even if it’s just a piece of fruit with intention.
If it’s any mild consolation, every single person I’ve heard use “grippy socks” as a joke IRL, did so because they learned about them first hand. I’ve yet to encounter an internet troll glom onto the term and use it; it seems to be well-contained to the actual mental health community, at least in the circles I’ve run in.
As someone who has *been* in a mental ward, no, that was not what i was implying. I was saying that she’s been spiraling for a while now, and a direct confrontation like this might make her spiral worse.
My local friend group and I routinely use ‘grippy sock vacation’ lightheartedly when we’re feeling our mental state getting worse. Genuinely I forget sometimes that those kind of jokes don’t land universally, and so I make them off-handedly. Apologies.
Wow. I learn so much from reading this. I have no idea what “grippy socks” means, but clearly something severely fraught. I’m off to look the whole thing up, to avoid any accidental references.
All I know is children sometimes get them so they can run around indoors, in shoes-off houses, without having an accident…
Oh. Wow.
The internet gave me a million innocent references to pilates/yoga.
Then one “squicky” one about attractive women and “specifically what it might be like to have sex with them”, hmmm, what can that mean!
And finally what people are referring to here.
Try “hospital socks”. Much less noise. My wife has a sizable collection of these from various surgeries. When one is an inpatient for any reason, they issue these so that one does not slip and fall on the hard polished floor when walking about without shoes.
It would appear that I may have come off as genuinely implying that I think Dorothy needs a psych hold, here. No, as someone who’s had to be in a ward, that is not what i was implying. I make jokes like this about my own mental health, and often make such remarks without thinking; i forget not everyone is comfortable with it. Sorry, folks.
There’s nothing wrong with lesbians, says Dorothy! Or bisexual women! Or similarly aligned enby people of similar persuasion! Some of her best friends are queer! However she cannot be. Ohhh no, that would RECONTEXTUALIZE her female friendships and make her ontologically evil.
TFW you’re not homophobic but you’ve got perfectionism so severe every hit to your self-image is apocalyptic.
Dorothy already self-reported that she’s a “probably 2” on the Kinsey scale, way back near the beginning of this comic. Perhaps she was underestimating, but she definitely did not self-identify as completely straight.
I think her actual problem is that she’s discovering that she is attracted to her best friend and probably has been for a long time. That alone is still a pretty big realization, and at very least it’s probably embarrassing for her to admit that it took her so long to figure out. Plus the fact that this will force her to recontextualize many of her own actions.
Blerg. Nevermind. I completely mis-remembered Dorothy’s reply to Danny’s question about her location on the Kinsey scale. As pointed out to me by kind readers of a different comment of mine above.
I mean, to be frank, it’s not that it ‘recontextualizes platonic behavior’ as ‘I’ve been using being straight to avoid the repressed feelings and actions I’ve taken in regards to those feelings as totally platonic, and if I AM queer, then I have to acknowledge the behaviors I’ve been engaging in, and my entire self image hinges on being a good and upstanding person, morally.
As someone born in the 50’s, the repression was brainwashed into me. Admittedly my realisation was VERY gradual, and it was of being bi, so it wasn’t that obvious. But it is very very easy (in my opinion!) to have pretty much zero idea of what is going on in the more fundamental parts of your brain.
On the bright side, Joe doesn’t seem to mind much, and Walky would probably be overjoyed that all his Joyce/Dorothy teasing just got so much more ammunition.
Heh, most comments rule out Walky from all this and others fear a negative (yes, I include myself), but I think you are the first to comment on a different perspective.
Walky has always been the sticking point for as long as Willis has been burying this ship in the subtext.
We know that Joe will go along with letting Joyce do whatever she wants, whenever she wants, without even thinking about whether he’s truly comfortable or not. He’s placed her on a high pedestal, and has made it his life’s mission to not lose her, since he feels so deeply that she’s way out of his league. Joyce could ask to have a train of strangers raw her, and Joe would fold immediately, no matter how he feels.
Walky, though? He might actually care, but the question is, whether or not he does care, will he actually communicate his feelings about the situation adequately? Or, will he Walky it up, and agree to something that isn’t actually good for him?
That’s my real concern tbh. Walky and Joe both have terrible self-worth, and both see their partners as an unachievable ideal that they’re lucky to have any hope of securing. So, my main concern is them both reflexively agreeing to be open, and then both suffering for it, and not even having the language to sit with themselves and ask themselves why. That would be the saddest thing, to me.
I feel like Walky will either try to be way too chill about it and blow up the relationship or learning about Dorothy doing this will destroy the relationship by him being very Not Chill about it.
Him being Not Chill doesn’t feel in character, but he’s kind of been on an emotional roller coaster with Dorothy. First they were FWB, then she loves him, then she goes on break with him for grades, oh now we’re broken up, now he’s with Lucy, now Dorothy is trying to break him and Lucy up? Now he’s single and can go back to Dorothy, now they’re back together and it just… idk, I feel like I’d be at the end of my rope if I were Walky. Dorothy keeps switching things up on him and he’s always expected to deal with it because he’s a chill guy. But he hasn’t seemed as starry eyed this go around as he was before, I think he’s kind of heading to his own mini-crash out. I think I was on team “Let Walky be single for a little bit” after Garbage Skow sank.
But regardless, I don’t think him and Dorothy are gonna make it past this event.
I don’t think they were ever going to last for very long, though. Everything Dorothy has said about getting back together with him has had more than a whiff of “futilely trying to turn back time”. She didn’t want to be with Walky again, she wanted to be her first-semester self again.
And Walky, for his part, has seemed convincingly into Lucy for the first time ever, jealous of Jacob, drawn in by Lucy’s new self-confidence, etc. Which isn’t to say I think he and Lucy will get back together, or even necessarily that Walky would want that if he had the opportunity — mostly I just think it’s Willis sending us pretty clear signals that Walky’s head and heart are not in this renewed relationship with Dorothy.
After Dorothy tried to titilate him with the possibility of a threesome with Joyce, though, I doubt he’d be terribly surprised by this revelation.
Dorothy at this point you just need to give in and embrace it.
You broke up with Walky because he was ‘distracting you’, and kept yo-yoing all over him even after that point. Then you threw him together with a different girl, then you tried to pry him AWAY from the girl YOU THREW HIM AT, WHILE HE WAS STILL WITH HER, and then right after he got broken up with you kinda guilted him into getting back together with you immediately??
Honey you are a mess and you have always been a mess! And I love it tbh!
I applaud that her concerns aren’t due to like.. internalized homophonic or anything but rather the more moral/ethical fact that if she was she’d be disrespecting a friend’s committed relationship AND cheating on Walky at the same time.
Willis, I imagine, would be pretty bored just redoing Danny’s bisexuality arc with Dorothy, especially since Dorothy was the one to talk him through it and she seemed pretty nonplussed. It’s way more interesting to make it more about Dorothy’s rigid moral compass and exceedingly high expectations she applies to herself.
Now I’m trying to find any way to categorize Dorothy as a bear. She’s definitely not a big hairy gay dude, so that one’s out. She’s not a mom (unless we’re about to learn some serious shit about her high school years), so the “mama bear” thing might not fully apply, she’s all thin and bony so I doubt she gives bear-like hugs, and I certainly wouldn’t describe her as “of very little brain” so even the Pooh comparison falls short.
I’m going to call it right now: Joyce has already seen the pic and was completely nonplussed by it. After getting two separate boob photos from Dorothy, Joe and Joyce probably worked out what happened and took it as the prank Dorothy convinced herself it was. This whole conversation has been solely for the benefit of Dorothy.
She saw the Jennifer pic! It wouldn’t surprise me if she was like “oh, jeez, that’s embarrassing of me to do,” then moved on with her day quietly, sending Joe and Dorothy here.
Oh, Dotty. All meaning in this is assigned by you. Even Joe isn’t especially fussed, as witness the matinee of Not The Right Time Theater in the last panel.
Maybe he’s trying to flip her back into rage? Maybe he thinks that the (to him) self evident LOL of thinking she even COULD be worse than him will snap her out of the spiral pattern. I don’t know. (I kind of hope so, Joe could be good for Dorothy in much the same way as he’s often good for Joyce: gently accepting ribbing to make the hard things less so.)
Okay the only solution here is, Joyce and Dorothy need to sleep together and Joe and Walky get to watch off panel so as not to spoil the Slipshine comic
Dorothy, there’s something to be said for being honest about your feelings, processing and thinking them through and then deciding what to do about them.
But yes, I know, this isn’t Healthily Processing Emotions of Age.
Thinking about it, i guess we’re kind of in the healthy emotion processing arc for a lot of the characters. Joe’s doing it. So’s Joyce. Becky’s not doing so bad. Even Ruth’s processing some of her stuff. There’s progress for a lot of characters.
People, people, look, this can all be resolved easily enough;;Joyce spanks Dorothy for her presumptiveness, Joe films it for their Only Fans, every one’s a winner, yeehaw
I dunno, Dorothy, I don’t know if you can say you “knowingly” hit on someone when you didn’t fully realize/acknowledge what you were doing at the time.
Okay, now my imagination has started acting up. What if some of Dorothy’s hatred of Joe… is gender envy. I’ve known guys like that. (I’ve been guys like that.) Guys who hyperfocus on hating everything gross about men and reacting violently towards misogyny as an expression of self-hatred- it’s hard to notice because those are ostensibly good things, even if you’re doing them to punish a hypothetical alternate you that you feel represents you giving and accepting you’re throwing away your “worth as a woman” and ethical high ground.
(See? It’s right in line with everything else she’s going through!)
And then Joyce can be straight and OT3 anyway! Which saves Becky some screaming.
I don’t think there needs to be anything special behind Dorothy’s hatred of Joe beyond having to deal with him as Danny’s best friend for years in high school.
Joe absolutely refusing to let Dorothy place herself on a pedestal to avoid answering the question if she’s gay for Joyce is a perfect way of handling this and I love him for it.
(simpsons voice) and if you pause the video just right, you can see the EXACT moment her sense of ego collapses.
Also as an aside to everything else here, I really like Joes expression in the second panel. It feels very sweet and sympathetic. Somehow joe is actually the right person to be having this conversation.
Not going to go through all 400 comments, but I’m glad I’m seeing more people realize Dorothy pushing Joyce into masturbating and her reasons behind it were not above board at all.
I’m talking about Dorothy just saying to Joyce’s face “You don’t know better.” Super gross infantalization and negation of Joyce’s agency that was glossed over because so many people were getting their rocks off. I saw very few people address just how fucked the situation was at the time.
To add, this was the same afternoon/evening of Sarah and Dorothy slutshaming Joyce until fucking Roz came to her rescue about taking birth control pills and that engagement ended with Joyce saying “Leave me alone about this.”
The next time Dorothy spoke to Joyce (that we saw) was her saying “So, you think you want to fuck Joe. Here’s why you’re incorrect.” Dorothy’s subliminal feelings are irrelevant.
Eh, just because the situation is fucked, doesn’t mean it is damaging. Joyce really needed to get her rocks off and she did while setting her boundaries properly, and her boundaries in that specific instance on the washing machines were respected.
The general commentariat has been rooting for Joyce to cheat on Joe with Dorothy for as long as Joe and Joyce who’ve been a couple. The first iteration of this was calling for Dorothy to cheat on Walky with Joyce.
The cheating angle has been fantasized by many commenters, I’m not sure how it could be missed.
I really haven’t seen this, but I’m not a comments scholar, I just wanna be the voice to say “yeah I don’t know what this one is talking about.” Cause damn that’s a hefty accusation to people, like, damn.
I’ve seen a lot of people shipping the two of them, but shipping two people who have other canon relationships isn’t really calling for them to cheat. It’s mostly just handwaving those other relationships out of the way to get where you want.
Love to see Dorothy questioning her feelings for her best friend. Joe is having fun with this conversation. Maybe that’s mean. But is not so hard to be on his side.
Joe’s only giving what he gets here, sure, but I’m still not sure I dig the fact that Joe is the one having this conversation with Dorothy, if only because I think literally anyone else would be getting less hostile and more honest answers from her.
Then again… if this is what it takes to break through her obvious denial, then maybe this is fine after all?
Whatevs, I’m here for trainwrecks and I gottem!
Exactly. Any other person who could be confronting Dorothy about this, is somebody Dorothy would not be straight-forward with. Because she cares what those people think of her, and sees those relationships as constructs which are Her Responsibility to perfectly maintain. Dorothy would immediately shift the focus of the conversation to “not her” ASAP, because that’s the space where she’s comfortable in relationships.
Joe is the perfect person to bring this up with her, because Dorothy does not give a shit what Joe thinks of her, and holds herself in a full, objective position of moral superiority to him; therefore, he can actually bore directly through her Wall Of Deflection, because it’s easier for him to make the situation about the thing its immediately about, and not Dorothy simply trying to micromanage their relationship back into the place where Dorothy was comfortable. Which she is extremely adept at doing to her entire “actual” support network, since she’s conditioned basically everybody in it, to see her as the authority on Making Things Work.
It’s also a nice wake up call that the person she built for herself is a lie and probably deserves to be destroyed because that’s what college is about, shattering your delusions about yourself.
As usual, she’s deeply confused as to why everybody hasn’t started fucking by now, because that’s what happens in all the fiction she uses to replace engaging with real life
Even if Dorothy has been into Joyce for a while, it’s pretty clear that she probably didn’t realize it until now. Speaking as someone who thought I was straight until my 30s when I realized I’m bi, it’s surprisingly easy to be bi without knowing it for a long time.
I was in my mid-thirties when I realized I’m not bi, I’m ace – it was just that ‘I am equally uninterested in both sexes’ is the same statement as ‘I am equally interested in both sexes’. Confusing!
I am too Aso (a-social, which is distinct from anti-social) to be very sexually active. I am not, however, Ace, nor am I Aro. I like sex, and when I am in love I like romantic gestures. I’m not good at them, but that’s a skill issue
*no better than Joe? but that would make me…h-h-h-human!*
Is it bad that I kind of love Joe’s twist of the knife in panel 5? Not because I think it’s “deserved”. But it’s comedy grounded in truthbombs, it’s lighthearted in Joe’s bro-bantery way, and it may end up being helpful in the long run. Plus, it’s just a good repartee. Joepartee.
I honestly wrote way more about it but editing it enough to the point where I would actually ever click post would have taken… some amount of time I’m not not going to say out loud. Which is also how long I’d already spent typing it. Not, like, an excessive or embarassing amount of time, why would you even assume that.
Also, hi, new commenter, long time reader. I may in fact have been one of the QC guest strip immigrants from ten years ago as mentioned by someone in a comment the other day. I don’t remember exactly but I believe I’ve been reading for around that long. sup
There are too many people here to reply to so I just want to remind everyone Joe was ready to fuck Sarah immediately after starting his relationship with Joyce, and 100% knew what he was doing. How long ago was this, people who know the in-world timeline?
So please. If you just hate Dorothy, at least don’t pretend that Joe is on higher moral ground or significantly more mature. It’s nice that he’s changing for Joyce, I like him a lot as new Joe, but they’re all literally weeks into their current relationships IIRC, and they’re all like 18-19. Nobody here is mature
Look at that smile in the second to last panel. Is that an expression you have ever seen on Joe while taking sex seriously? No, that is obviously a forced over the top fake smile where he cannot contain his mirth.
Which is literally what Joyce CALLS it in the next comic: she says change is gradual and that one mistake doesn’t mean he ISN’T changing.
Like, the textual reading presented by Joyce’s defense and the strip’s own alt text is “Joe was so caught off guard and excited by the offer that he briefly forgot he was in a relationship”, which I don’t think condemns him to death or anything, but which definitely did not help Sarah’s opinion in that moment.
I refuse to fuck Mary. I’m a big fan of casual sex, but I need to respect my very temporary partner. I’ve got plenty of self-disdain, I don’t need to add to it.
At the risk of sounding prudish… I hope that doesn’t end in polycules (at least not with these characters). Faans is the only story I’ve read (and I admit there are many, many stories I haven’t read) that made it feel like it worked for all of the participants and wasn’t just fanservice (faanservice?). I feel like Walky and Joyce (OTP-ness from their own story aside) wouldn’t work in those sorts of scenarios. And I hope/feel New Joe wouldn’t like it either!
For what it’s worth, polycules don’t necessarily (and in fact generally do not) mean that everyone in the polycule is dating each other. A polycule that would work for this group would be W shaped:
Joe is dating Joyce
Joyce is dating Dorothy and Joe
Dorothy is dating Walky and Joyce
Walky is dating Dorothy
That’s a lot more common than everyone dating everyone else in the group at the same time.
I don’t remember any of other thing where a trouple happened fanservice or not. And even if there were, that’s good! Poly relationships are already incredibly underrepresented outside of fanfiction, if they exist at all that is good in of itself.
Ehhhhh, look, I absolutely love Dotty, but no, sending the titty pic to Joyce was not a mistake. Joyce sending one to *her* was, but she made a decision to reciprocate, and she clearly did so in a hopeful, probing fashion. That’s cheating. You could argue it’s pretty minor cheating, she only *just* got back together with Walky, and it’s much less egregious than most cheating stories, but it is still, as a singular act, kind of a betrayal of her relationship.
There’s a tendency of some people to treat these things as binary when they’re not. Not all cheating is equal, but I don’t see how you can define what Dotty did as not cheating unless you apply a pretty restrictive definition to the term.
Cheating depends on promises. And in the case of vague and non-verbal promises it depends on intent. It is possible for Dotty to not be aware of her feelings, which means there was no intent to cheat (I think, good space for a discussion on the nature of free will there (not whether it exists(that’s a different conversation), but what it would be like assuming it exists.))
Doesn’t mean she doesn’t owe Walky a full accounting and an apology.
Yeah, if there’s one trait Dorothy should burn out of herself, it’s her instinctive ‘I am the grownup here, you are all idiot children in need of my sage guidance and perfection’ attitude. She ISN’T any better than most of her agemates and friends, with very few exceptions that her friends are ALSO better than. (Mary, mainly. Also Raidah.)
despite the fact that he’s been with many women you can’t really say he ever cheated, since he made it pretty clear from the beginning that he had no intentions of pursuing those relationships beyond a fling
He doesn’t make romantic mistakes, because he’s approaching romanticism seriously and sincerely.
His previous pattern of behavior was deliberately honed to prevent him from ever being able to make mistakes romantically, by precluding any possibility of romance. So, he was never really “serious and sincere” when he was only focusing on his sex life. His sex life was actually a self-protective behavior, to try to prevent him from failing at the thing he actually took seriously, and cared about.
And in so doing, while he avoided romantic failures (by avoiding romance) he still failed and hurt people, as Joyce strongly pointed out to him after the apology donuts.
Thanks to his dad, he focused so strongly on the “cheating is bad” side that he ignored that other things could also be bad. And no, he was never “honest, open, and supportive” in his sex life. He was basically honest about his lack of interest in anything beyond sex*, but not really much else.
*Or was he? It’s not like he told Joyce about his intent to “fix her with his penis” before that disastrous first date. Possible early season weirdness though.
Given what Dorothy knows about Joe’s past, the whole cheating comment is actually really shitty of her. Worse, I doubt she even notices because she assumes Joe has ALL the misogyny.
That’s the point I tried to make elsewhere, but I think I failed. Dorothy is not wrong to have previously identified that all Joe’s outward behavior was misogynistic; however, Dorothy fully projects onto Joe, like, this persona of the “Perfect Misogynist.”
Dorothy doesn’t hate Joe, as much as she hates the idea of Joe that she’s built up in her head, after dealing with him for years. But her idea of Joe never actually represented reality, even during the time period where Joe was deliberately acting as misogynistic as possible.
However badly he was acting, Dorothy still always saw it as worse. I fully believe she just ASSUMED that Joe cheated on people with impunity, because why wouldn’t she? He says and does all that other bad stuff! He’s a Bad Guy! So he does every thing that Bad Guys do!
1) I don’t think Dorothy’s saying Joe’s cheated. She’s saying that her “cheating” is as bad as his past bad behavior, not that it’s the same.
2) What does she know of his past? I mean, she knows about his objectifying women and the list and all that and she also knows his dad cheated and probably that he hit on every woman in sight, but I don’t think she has any reason to think Joe’s whole pose was to avoid cheating like his dad did.
Gonna reiterate: Danny probably barely knows about that last part, if at all. Joe and Danny have both said things recently that indicated Joe has been opening up to Joyce emotionally in ways he never has with Danny, due to toxic masculinity.
C’mon, sending your female friends a jokey picture of your boobs in a bra is not cheating, I don’t care if you’re subconsciously attracted to them. The action itself is harmless.
I’m pretty sure there’s some fancy Greekish or Latinish term for If A then B, and I don’t want B to be true therefore A must be impossible.
… ah, here it is “Appeal to consequences”.
I don’t know maybe it’s the time blindness but I never understood why Joe got so much haye he was never a bad person it seems he was surprisingly an ethical slut and his bad understanding of women seemed firmly to be bro stupidity and not actual malice and he never seemed to support or like assault or even ball at rejection or consent he just was stupid dude and he’s learning
The thing that made him not great isn’t that he was an ethical slut who didn’t commit, though it was something he was doing to attempt to shield himself from hurting other/potentially philandering because he believes it’s inevitable because of his dad.
Biggest things Joe did that was shitty:
The ‘Do’ List, and the fact it was subscribable, in addition to how dehumanizing some of the comments seemed
Not taking ‘No’ for an immediate answer (I think. I feel like it was with Sarah early early on?)
(outside the bedroom. Insofar as we’ve seen he respects consent *in* the bedroom/if they change their mind. )
Yes his biggest mistake was the do kist which he accepted responsibility for and even tried to make ammends for giving out donuts and deleting it. It was horrible and when he wa pointed out how awful it was he was shaken. Joe was good at seducing women. B ut bad at understanding them. It really seemed ike he was a dumbass not actually hateful he just had the wrong ideas. Because of his dad and is growing fast now.
I think we saw hints of it. I think the issue is Joe doesn’t seem heinous on comparison to others we see like literally there are far worse men so Joe seems stupid not actually problematic we have people like the incelerator recently and the guy who drugged Joyce and the history of Billie and her friend. So Joe comes across as merely dumb and horny but not really harmful especially when he doesn’t double down about the do list.
Oh DoA comment sections about Dorothy’s sexuality, why can’t I quit you.
My $2.05:
— Joe is taking this really well, but I wonder at his reasons.
One possibility is that Joe knows he has nothing to worry about because the answer to Dorothy’s question at the end of yesterday’s strip was: “Yes, she saw it, and she had a complete nonreaction. She currently thinks it was a joke or a mistake. I didn’t disabuse her of that notion, but I suspected there might be something else going on here, so I came to talk to you about it.”
In this scenario, the only thing Joe could add that would be MORE crushing for Dorothy would be something like, “The reason why I haven’t told Joyce what I suspect yet is because she thinks you’re her best friend who would never do anything to hurt her, and I didn’t want to shatter that illusion.”
I don’t think this is terribly likely, but it did occur to me.
Another possibility: Joe isn’t upset because more than anything else, he wants Joyce to be happy, and he fully intends to let Joyce choose which of them would make her happier. This would be a pretty crushing blow to Dorothy’s current image of Joe. Very “King Solomon” in terms of proving which of them deserves* Joyce more.
But it might also be reflective of Joe’s own self-image problems. He’s indicated before that he was fine just being Joyce’s friend, and I think on some level it might be a relief for him to imagine going back to that. I think he’s probably still at least somewhat worried that he’s going to wind up hurting Joyce, the way he thinks he almost hurt Liz**.
In this reading, Joe isn’t upset right now because he thinks even IF Joyce leaves him for Dorothy, that would be okay. This reading depends on Joe thinking Dorothy is one of the best people he knows.
Lots of readers would disagree with Hypothetical Joe about that last part, and Dorothy would be right there with them, but I’m not talking about anyone else’s opinion here: just Hypothetical Joe, who I agree has predicated his joke in the last panel here on the idea that it’s absurd to suggest Dorothy might not be a better person than him.
* This is ofc a false dichotomy. Romantic interest isn’t a prize you earn by being the most worthy, it’s a feeling that either happens or doesn’t. Someone can be the Most Deserving and still not be a person you want to date.
** Emphasis on this being Joe’s perspective. I can’t really blame Liz for saying what she said because she was deep in her own miserable struggling-to-escape-brainwashing feelings, but I can definitely say that it wasn’t fair to Joe. No matter how guilty Joe might feel, having sex would have been a mutual decision on both their parts, and her shame and self-loathing would not have been his fault.
— This strip has also raised the question of whether or not Joe and Dorothy are friends, and I don’t think they are, though this conversation might be the first step toward changing that.
I think Dorothy and Joe have known each other for a long time, but that they spent that whole time just sort of tolerating each other for Danny’s sake. I don’t think Joe disliked Dorothy as actively as she disliked him, but in their early interactions, he often seemed amused by her misfortunes.
I also don’t think Joe has to think he and Dorothy are friends to have shown up here, either because he wants to protect his relationship or out of empathy. It’s not like he wasn’t, himself, recently in her shoes here, being in denial about having feelings for Joyce.
— Currently, I don’t think Joyce has seen the photo. I think Joe has had Joyce’s phone ever since the text came in last night, and I don’t think she’s noticed it’s missing. But given this approach, I am tentatively placing bets on “Joyce won’t be moved by the photo when she finally sees it”. It’s not really the outcome I want (and nor is “Joyce and Dorothy cheat on Joe and Walky”, for the record) — but it’s the direction I feel the narrative is currently headed.
My main source of hope for anything else is currently that it might be too close to a retread of Becky’s coming out arc, but it’s also been like ten years since that happened, and Willis might just have a different enough angle on this that it doesn’t feel redundant.
In terms of, like, textual evidence, I can point to a lot of Very Gay things Joyce and Dorothy have done together or said about each other, and Joyce’s most recent questionable line was definitely this (May, 2024), but. imho recent events have felt moooostly like one-sided longing on Dorothy’s end, while Joe increasingly supplants Dorothy in Joyce’s life (see: this beat (August, 2024)).
I’d be happy to be wrong, because I’ve shipped it for a long time, but yeah. These are my expectations.
Still wouldn’t be queerbaiting, FWIW. Dorothy coming to terms with being more bi than she thought is more than enough to prevent it from being queerbaiting. I’ll just, you know, be sad. As will Dorothy, if the last panel of yesterday’s strip is anything to go by.
— What about Walky in all of this?
…What about him?
Dorothy should definitely have a conversation with him, but Dorothy/Walky Take 2 has been doomed from the start, not by Joyce but because neither of them are really that into each other right now.
Dorothy is clearly chasing the simplicity of her first few weeks at IU, and hoped that dating Walky would take her back to who she was then, but it hasn’t worked.
Walky, meanwhile, is just as clearly on the rebound from Lucy, and he seems more hung up on her than he was at any time when they were actually dating.
Which is not to say I think Walky and Lucy should get back together? Lucy has no reason to be interested in a second try, especially not when Jacob is giving her everything she wanted from Walky but didn’t get — very much including feeling physically desired. But Walky’s heart isn’t in his new relationship, either. He probably needs to be single for a while, so that he can sort out what — if anything — he actually wants romantically.
OTOH, he and Dorothy are kiiiind of on the same page this time… there would be nothing wrong with them continuing a FWB relationship if it was what they both wanted, and Dorothy weren’t maybe, you know, in love with and longing for someone else.
— And on that note: no, I don’t think sending the photo to Joyce counts as cheating, nor do I think we’re meant to. I think Dorothy is in a shame spiral and that Joe is teasing her about it, but I think Dorothy created the photo at all because Amber triggered genuine anxiety in her with the suggestion that sending a pic back would be the Normal, Platonic, Heterosexual Thing to do, and I think when it failed to send, Dorothy felt the first stirrings of… something identifiable.
(I think she felt disappointed, but not quite sure why.) (And then, as soon as she hit “resend”, a rush of regret.)
(I also think she’s been trying not to be anxious about the total silence from Joyce ever since, and that she stayed home instead of following everyone else to their math class because of a vague but powerful reluctance to face Joyce and see — whatever reaction, or lack thereof, there would be.)
TL;DR: I don’t think Dorothy has the necessary intent here to have cheated. I think she’s just reframing it that way now, after the fact, just as she’s also reframing her efforts to break up Joe and Joyce. But I don’t think Dorothy is an evil schemer here. I think she’s just a huge mess.
Nice to see theresone sane take at least. Lots of commenters taking some kind of extreme view or another abojt characters or actions. Few account for the complexity of each character and the context of the actions. Thanks for typing this all out
I read it all, and I agree with many of your takes (though I’m not on the “Dotty/Walky is doomed” train), but while I did have energy enough to read it all and appreciate the salient points made with helpful links for example, I don’t have the energy to bat my own thoughts around at you so I hope this comment suffices!
I’m a multi-shipper and I kind of wanted them to get back together because I liked his relationship with her best of the relationships he’s been in… but I was already getting Bad Vibes even before Joe knocked on Dorothy’s door and suddenly Willis was definitely going to address this possibility in a concrete way.
It’d be very neat if instead we got some sort of poly ‘ship here where they weren’t all dating each other but were somewhat intermingled.
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LOL Sal was right, Dorothy really IS Lisa Simpson XD
Yes we’re just missing a lisa style scream at the end.
And alt-text, when I pan left on mobile (ffox), it puts a purplish shadow over the right side of the last frame It added a neat kind of transition effect… if you were going to go red panels.
Loving Joe’s little dig there, but something tells me he’s here to offer friendship/support, nor to crack Dorothy .
re: little dig, I mean supporting Dorothy and cracking her a little ain’t mutually exclusive, at the same time that shouldn’t look like a professor using “Socratic Method” either XD
also WOAH 500+ comments already?!?! :0
WTF happened when I was sleeping in a pile of weed and heat packs?
Ah, yes, the source.
C’mon Joe, that’s not helping.
Good.
She deserved that one.
Considering that this reframes Dorothy teaching Joyce to masturbate.. she really does deserve it
Ugh… “teaching” about sex, by engaging in it…
Barf.
Makes me shudder.
Yucks. D-:
…I mean, Joyce was kind of into it, but still… *facepalm*
Consent is complicated. Feels complicated, here.
imo, I don’t think dorothy has ‘power’ over joyce, but it def comes across as abusing the trust Joyce has in her as a peer, even if she wasn’t aware of the *why* at the time, the why was still there.
Yeah. It’s just a trigger for me. I’m dealing with some **** right now. Doesn’t take much to send me off into a squick spiral…
Squickety split…
That’s about where I’m landing. While Joyce did have several outs and did consent, Dorothy wasn’t being completely honest to her or to herself.
Would Joyce have consented if she knew Dorothy was into her? …Probaby? It’s really hard to say.
Would Dorothy have consented/suggested if she knew? Even if she did have some hidden sapphic desire deep down that even she didn’t know about, it doesn’t change her previous relationship and interactions.
Current consequences for tiddy pic is appropriate. Casting her in a “predatory lesbian” stereotype is not (not you specifically, but the comment section currently).
Joe is handling this well, especially considering they are all teenagers.
I think Dorothy wasnt honest with herself more than she was dishonest with Joyce
Yeah I think this is less that Dorothy wasn’t being honest with Joyce and more that Dorothy didn’t know. Joyce and Dorothy consented to that situation as they both understood it, and framing it as a predatory vibe is gross to me personally.
Once Joyce learned that Becky was into her, Joyce shut that down IMMEDIATELY (even though she cares deeply about Becky). So that makes me think that Joyce would NOT have consented if she thought Dorothy was coming on to her.
Yeah but it wasn’t Dorothy coming on to her so that’s why it doesn’t work as a good metaphor. Becky literally kissed her without asking or really discussing it. Dorothy constantly offered outs and framed it as the ‘probably akward thing that it was going to be’ and it was done first and foremost out of fear Joyce would make mistakes Joyce would herself be ultimately uncomfortable with due to lack of outlets most people have access to in order to release horny and make rational decisions.
^^^
While I’m kind of expecting Dorothy to beat herself up for that sequence here, I’ll be shocked if the ultimate message is that Dorothy was, in fact, trying to make a move on Joyce there, or that Joyce feels more than “very embarrassed” about this revelation.
Joyce described that as “we’ve both learned to let each other say yes”: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-15/01-love-dares-you-to-change/curating-2/
Yup. “To what extend do you understand what’s going on” and “to what extent _can_ you understand what’s going on” are different, yet both important, questions.
OK, for the record, I am not calling Dorothy a “predatory lesbian,” or infantilizing Joyce, or saying Joyce is incapable of consent, or ANY of that. ‘K?
All I was saying was that saying, “I’ll teach you about sex” by /doing/ sex stuff, is a super weird vibe. That’s all. It’s just a trigger, that’s all I was saying.
I know, nobody was being gruff to me, I’m just being gruff to y’all. I’m sorry about that. I just — wanted to make sure I wasn’t misunderstood.
“I’m just a fool whose intentions are good, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”
Ok, no, no, *facepalm*, that song was NOT the best reference for contrast…
*SMDH*
This time dilation deal has me just a little out of sync. Inside the DoA time sphere, how many days ago did Dorothy teach Joyce the Miracle of the Maytag?
Where are Gordon Jump and Jesse White when you need them?
Nine days give or take.
Each chapter is one in universe day, and that was nine chapters ago (ten if you include this one I guess)
There didn’t seem to be any indication of a time skip between those chapters when I checked the archives but I was just glancing really so who knows what I missed.
Obligatory heteronormativity mention
Yes, Dotty may have been in denial, maybe to the extent of actively lying to herself, but it’s certainly not her entire burden. Virtually everything we are socioculturally taught and exposed to (especially in THIS economy) assumes and expects heterosexuality. And we know Dorothy is trying to deliver on expectations, even if those are her own expectations of herself. Dotty expects herself to be hetero because WHY WOULDN’T SHE
So yes she should stop denying it but at the same time she doesn’t deserve to bear the entire brunt of thousands of years of cultural stupidity trying to convince her that she’s something that she’s not
She could just say sorry to Joyce for being weird and be more transparent with everyone when hitting on girls.
Dorothy has spent AGES reminding people (including Joe) that Joe was an awful person, so when her major hang up is that this makes her as bad as SOME IMAGINED VERSION OF JOE, he has every right to push her nose in it.
she’s as bad as rachel, in that regard
Rachel?
Black hair, very fair skin, CS major who had a while thing at the floor meeting about how people don’t change. That was about Ruth, but still. I can’t recall if she said the same of Joe, though I do know she called him out rightly for his do list last semester.
Ah. Thanks for the context!
Also Joe’s significant other and co-creator of Ultra Car in the Walkyverse
Rachel.
Thanks for that link because it led me to this one:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/supply-2/
which is also interesting in this context.
Honestly pretty sympathetic to Rachel.
We don’t share her perspective, but two years of pre-character development Ruth probably builds up a fair bit of bad blood
Until she knowingly contributes to his actively suicidal mindset, no she’s not. Rachel’s entire character consists of beating Ruth while she’s down. Dorothy has an actual history with Joe that we’ve gotten to see and learn about beyond “was generally a downer when they met”, which is all we know about Rachel and Ruth.
Yeah and if that history is actually just “Ruth was kind of a downer to her” I’ll eat my hat.
Yeah, we got some hints at that some years back and then no follow up. Hopefully it comes up again.
It might. Took like ten years for the story to circle back to Alice and her history with Billie, and Rachel feels like she serves a parallel function for Ruth.
Not like Rachel is a villain, but anyway…
We were on a break!
Wait, wrong Rachel. Still applicable, though.
“AGES”, for most of which Joe was a horrible person and for most of the rest of which he was still pretending not to have changed.
This is more akin to Joyce’s hitting on Jacob than to Joe’s years of objectifying women.
He has been trying to help, but for any of his faults, he hasn’t cheated before, so her comment invited a retort.
Dorothy has been throwing shade on Joe this entire conversation.
I think Joe is only now realizing she never considered him a friend at all.
Based on the Joe we’ve seen before now, why the hell should she have been a friend of his? He was a sexist, creepy jerk that pulled the “you’re not into me? must be gay” bullshit on her, she has every right to not be his friend.
Probably because he felt that if she was in distress that she could rely on him for the emotional support that he’s attempting to provide her. Which is to say Joe believed they were friends and he would have her back in a traumatic situation like this.
There’s absolutely no reason she should. BUT, until recently, Joe hasn’t been very smart about things. We’ve seen him apologizing to Dorothy after making one joke too many with “I’m sorry, Dorothy, is today a bad day?” Which is the sort of thing a friend might say.
Dorothy was never his friend; she put up with him because she had to.
Joe, however, was under the impression that they were friends. And if asked, he might very well have said he was a *snerk* “friend of Dorothy*. With the snerk being very loud.
If it weren’t for his very early appearances putting Dorothy on the Do List the moment she dumped Danny, I’d even think that he treated her as “one of the guys,” never realizing that she was taking his joshing as insulting. (And clearly he knows better now, given his non-apology-but-explanation in yesterday’s strip.)
Some dudes absolutely bounce back and forth between “you’re one of the guys” and “but you’re also a giiirr-ll” and yanno what, having latent queer vibes ups the oscillation rate…
I’m pretty sure Joe just thought it was banter because there’s not a doubt in my mind Dottie called him shit too. He 100% started it, but he was an idiot 15 year old who only had American Pie and Fifa to help him figure out stuff.
Hey now that’s not fair.
He’s American, they don’t do FIFA, they have handegg, not football.
They might have meant the video game version, but then Madden would be more likely.
We’ve got football (what USAians call ‘soccer’) here. It’s the 4th largest sport here, but it’s also the fastest growing (in popularity and money) of the top 4. We’re behind y’all, but getting up to speed.
Yes, exactly!!! *Facepalm* *SMDH*
I don’t remember ever seeing any indication Dorothy considered Joe a friend, but a lot that she didn’t?
Dorothy is Joe’s friend, but Joe isn’t Dorothy’s, is how I see it. We have lots of indications he saw her as one after all, even if its not mutual.
Maybe he reconceptualized her that way, but old Joe didn’t have female friends. She was Danny’s girlfriend until they broke up, when Joe put her on the list.
+1
Their interaction immediately post-break-up was very “hello, acquaintance”. Dorothy asked if it was okay to ask him how Danny was doing, and he didn’t seem surprised by that approach, the way he probably would have, if he’d thought she was his (Joe’s) friend.
She outright said that in a previous strip. I forget which one but she refers to her associatio with Joe as being friends with Danny since kindergarten and “they were a packaged deal” or something to that regard. I legit forget which strip though. I may have hallucinated it. Whether Joe was actively aware or at least knew deep down is unknown.
I would assume that joe definitley already knew that, she’s been openly hostile and he gets why.
eh, considering the situation. . . give him a jab or two here.
He’s not used to being in the right on this sort of thing lol
Joe is helping.
I’m pretty sure the problem Joe perceives isn’t the morality of Dorothy’s actions, so hurrying this meltdown along is helping. Then they can get back to Dorothy accepting her feelings.
Is he expected to help?
When you’ve been in denial for a long time, it can take a big jolt to flip your perception. The brain goes to amazing lengths to avoid cognitive dissonance, like the religion you loved in your youth being toxic or Joe growing into a more humane person than I-do-everything-right Dorothy.
It may not be helping but she insulted him first. It’s also clear she’s used to putting him down going back to their high school days. If he’s going to be petty right now, I’d say he’s allowed to be.
Hard disagree. She needs this, bad. She can’t sustain living her life under this toxic framework.
it sure is, this is a W for Joe. ~<3
Okay, that last panel is perfect. LOL
Joe is surprisingly formidable
that would be almost unpresidential
Sadly, many presidents were prone to infidelity. Fortunately, this means Dorothy can betray those closest to her and still somehow be trusted by the public not to forsake her obligations to them, the faceless masses.
In fact all the most historically celebrated Democratic presidents, FDR and JFK, as well as the current Republican president appear to have been adulterers. So go ahead Dorothy and cast aside basic human decency. You’re not shattering hearts and leaving lasting pain, you are forging yourself into the future leader America needs.
Those presidents were dudes though. Womenfolk are held to a higher standard.
We can’t all be Indira Gandhi.
Not Obama though.
Not really. Lots of presidents have cheated on their spouses. American presidents have never really been the bastions of good behavior that lots of people seem to think they are.
She’s so much unpresidential, not so much because cheating, but for cheating and losing her cool so easily…
FATALITY
Also Panel 2 Joe is hilariously relatable, since he would definitely know and isn’t afraid to say it xD
also also, the hair horns in dorothy’s hands are pretty funny if she’s thinking oh no I’m the devil xD
That’s almost as deserving of infamy as the Its Walky magazine with an arrow in the checkout line.
Love that it’s not the realization that she’s bi that’s freaking her out but rather the moral implications of tit pics
Those are probably the correct priorities
I’m not 100% convinced it’s not at least some because of realizing she’s bi.
Yeah, easier to focus on what it means in terms of her immediate actions than her identity or future.
She’s definitely freaking out a bit that she’s bi but she knows that, as a modern educated women, she should have no problem with being bi so she’s probably freaking out even more about freaking out.
Plus “Oh no I taught Joyce how to jill off; I’m a dirty corrupt person and had a hidden agenda!”
man im starting to think that dorothy and joyce might be character foils
Well deserved zing at the end.
Having feelings for someone isnt the same as acting on them
Besides lets be honest this college is one giant polycule
But she has been acting on them is the problem.
She has basically been peer-pressured into doing what she did and been told this is what a good friendly joke constitute.
Her issue is she *has* been acting on them. She’s sent nudes, she’s helping Joyce masturbate, etc. She’s lying to herself so she can say she’s not acting on her feelings for Joyce (cheating), she’s just acting like that because that’s just how friends act with one another (supportive and playful).
Very good summarization!
Hmm…“lying to herself,” might be more than we have evidence for and kind of assumes the worst. “Been very confused, stressed, and depressed,” would be more accurate and charitable, I think.
I’d say “lying to herself” is better than the alternative. She’s basically been in denial about it, which isn’t malicious. Doing the same things, but doing it while accepting she was into Joyce would have been worse.
But yes, the “confused, stressed, and depressed” certainly plays a role.
I think you two are just having a terminology snafu, where you (thejeff) mean “lying to herself” in the sense of being in deep denial, but Chubseus was objecting on the grounds that “lying” kind of implies a degree of conscious intent.
Chebseus’s alternative, I think(!!!), is more like: “Dorothy is so confused and SO deep in denial here that she genuinely believed she wasn’t attracted to Joyce,” rather than “knew, on some level, that she was attracted to Joyce, but buried the knowledge on purpose because she couldn’t face it”.
… Oh my god Dottie is literally trying to Gal Pal.
A sex web…
“One giant polycule” did, in fact, describe the extended social group that I was a part of during my college years. We had theatre and larp people, which just made us slutty and poly.
there’s literally a poly trio in your building, y’all, and Joyce doesn’t seem to mind THAT too much
Although to be fair I can understand why Joe might want to retort the way he did – would be more sympathetic if Dorothy didn’t try to be all judgy
At this point in time Joyce does seem to be very heterosexual however. So not too relevant.
I’m sorry, what comic have YOU been reading?
Joyce hasn’t done anything that’s too unusual for (what I’m going to dub) straight girl culture. There’s a very large and thick line of acceptable behavior which weirdly does include a familiarity with others toplessness and overly physical affection. The fact that Dorothy managed to reach the other side through MM is astounding; tbh if Joyce has seen the tit pic, she probably could’ve shrugged it off entirely as either meant for Wally or a genuinely friendly joke.
I’m a bi lady and known it almost my entire life (even before I had a word for it), so I’ve always been acutely aware of that giant river of “platonic but not platonic shaped” interactions and made very uncomfortable by them.
Joyce could be into Dorothy, I’m not ruling it out, I just feel like we haven’t seen very strong evidence to support elevating it to a romantic/sexual crush rather than just idolization. That being said, I don’t think Dorothy needs to be in a poly relationship right now (Walky neither.) They aren’t the most communicable people, and I’m pretty sure Dorothy would actively try to undermine Joe’s part of the polycule, which I’m fairly sure is not good.
MM?
Mario Mario
Mutual masturbation
Didn’t look mutual to me. More like Parallel Play.
Couch co-op masturbation
Ah. Thank you for the explanation, helpful helpers!
I’m not sure where the characterization of Dotty and Walky as “not communicative” comes from when they really do talk frequently (including about tough topics) and understand one another well whenever we see them on screen together. Maybe it’s a lack of screentime feeding into people feeling that way? Unsure.
I think it’d be fair to say they’re not too communicative outside of each other. Walky deflects constantly with anyone not Dorothy (and took a lot of time to stop doing that with her), and Dorothy has until very recently been super concerned with projecting an image as solid, omnicompetent, and driven to serve others. They end up spending a lot of time not being very honest with themselves and others about how they feel.
This one?
What do these kids think cheating is?
Apparently nothing involving a laundry room
Well yeah, nobody was dating anybody on Laundry Day.
All are single on laundry day. All are cleansed on laundry day. Praise be to laundry day. Amen.
Like Christ, the Maytag absorbs the sin unto itself, to save the poor sinner’s soul.
Sin and socks.
“Feeling sexy. May tag later, dunno.”
Nah, sexting *definitely* counts as cheating… If she’s in a relationship with someone (aka Wally)
Sending a joke pic is slightly different, but there’s a REALLY thin line to cross.
See. I think classifying this as sexting is already going a step too far in the series of events that lead us here. I don’t think the line is that thin. Intent matters a lot in these situations and I still don’t understand what Dorothy’s end goal was.
Intent does matter a lot, and that’s what Dorothy’s saying here. If she’s actually into Joyce, that means there was intent on her part, and therefore it was cheating. But she can’t be a cheater, therefore there can’t be intent, therefore she can’t be into Joyce.
Or, and here me out, that’s Dorothy’s negativity talking and she doesn’t actually think that she’s just insecure about being percieved that way and ‘accepting it in advanced’ because that’s what people with low self esteem do.
I don’t think Dorothy knows what Dorothy’s end goal was, this seems to be a fairly new and surprising revelation for Dorothy and if she does have romantic/sexual feelings for Joyce I think it would be fair to say that she probably wasn’t fully aware of those feelings until recently or even right now, and any actions she took that might be considered cheating were probably motivate by her subconscious and perhaps shouldn’t be judged too harshly, I just hope Dorothy can find a way to come to terms with things and accept herself and whatever feelings she may or may not have, because watching her spiral ever since her realizations about politics has been somewhat difficult.
in context i just want to remind the whole chat
dorothy took joyce to get her birth control from the pharmacy, because Joyce was too much of a disaster to do it herself
and the lesbian pharmacist immediately diagnosed Dorothy as the Top in that Lesbian Marriage
the reality of Joyce and Dorothy is, neither of them came into their adulthood with normative ideas of the social boundaries that come naturally to most of us, and as a result, their platonic friendship reads more as domestic, or even romantic, than either of their actual romantic relationships.
so, yeah, it’s easy to read both of them as being vastly ignorant of boundaries, and unaware that their friendship crosses a ton of lines that make it seem fully non-platonic. it’s merely because neither of them know how to, or care to, set those boundaries; neither of them are doing anything wrong, until the other one actually acknowledges that the other is doing something wrong. Joyce and Dorothy are the ones who get to make that decision, not the rest of us observers.
like, jeez, it’s almost as if they’re both autistic girls, with life-long limited social networks, and severe obsessions with morality and ethics; just, one of them was fundie, and the other was fully secular.
Yeah, I mean. While this seems very much to indicate that there’s probably attraction there (sexual? romantic? just attention? We shall see), their very domestic friendship is part of why they have read as queerplatonic. Their other relationships follow romance scripts much more effectively, the kind of energy they have in them is much more flirty and energetic than the extremely casual domestic relationship they have with each other.
From experience – the line of culturally acceptable platonic girl behavior is way further than acceptable platonic boy or opposite sex behavior, but it… Does not stretch as far as they are. I too have been clocked as in a lesbian relationship by half of everyone who encountered my first queerplatonic partner and I. (We laughed about it, she was bi, we would have known.) But if people don’t *tell* you where the lines are and you’re not skilled enough to intuit them or don’t care enough to be bothered with them they’re not like. Obvious and controlling.
Joyce and Dorothy (at least up til this point) have both been very happy with their very domestic snuggly and intimate friendship. We’ll see whether that changes with the introduction of… Whatever Dorothy is processing right now. But til now neither of them has objected to anything so it’s pretty much all kosher.
I like this reading. Thanks!
I’d argue that intent *wasn’t* there, even though attraction was.
It’s very clear that Dorothy is heavily, HEAVILY in denial. The entire past storyline with the pics has been her going to poor choices for advice, and instant, impulsive behavior. I think it’s clear that Dorothy has been repressing these feelings and not allowing them to come to her conscious mind.
Joe standing here, calling a spade a spade, and asking a very simple question, is bringing that repressed knowledge into full view. And her answer isn’t “Yes, I guess I am,” it’s “I can’t be.” It’s more denial, because this isn’t /her/, she’s DOROTHY, she’s not like Joe…
And again. I love how Joe is taking this. He is, AGAIN, speaking to the person who is sending his girlfriend lewds and who, deep down, wants to break them up and explore those feelings… but he’s not angry or upset. He’s patient. Concerned. And yes, he gets that zing in, but that is one hell of an earned zing, with all that Joe has done to improve himself.
*sketches little upvote button and pastes it under this comment*
Somebody hack this website to add up vote functionality, right now!
Oh heck no. Then I’d know exactly how much of an ignorant fool I make of myself at different times.
Downvotes are the tool of a coward. If I say some dumb shit, tell me outright, don’t hide behind an icon.
Intent was there the second she was given more than one ‘out’ to not send her own (first with Jennifer, and then with her own not sending.)
She wanted to send a titty pic to Joyce because she had weird bottled up fellings for her. Yes Amber suggested it, but she was perfectly capable of denying it if she wanted and did even after having the opportunity to back off. She just wanted Joyce to see her, consciously or not, but also immediately regretting it.
She was also capable of not hitting “resend” 100 times after it didn’t go through the first 99 times (or however many tries it actually took, but it was clearly a fair few)
It only took one. It failed once and she spent a long time staring at the message agonizing over whether to press the resend button. When she eventually decided to do it, the pic went through immediately.
I think she was a bit rattled by having received such a photo from Joyce, and unsure what to do about it. (Which would in itself be unsettling for Dorothy. Hello, spiral.)
Right. I don’t think she ever would have started that exchange. Doesn’t mean she should have responded, but it does change the emphasis.
Which I kind of dislike? It makes this entirely arc seemed seem contrived. Reliant on Joyce accidentally sending her lewds to Dorothy without realizing it.
I mean, that’s not a hard thing to do? Joyce is excitable and inattentive, and the two people she probably texts the most are Joe and Dorothy. Not all coincidences are evidence of hack writing.
They kind of are though. It may not be hard to do, but when it’s the hook a whole plot arc is hung on, it’s a bit much. We also get Joe happening to have the phone rather than Joyce when the shot comes through.
It’s not a deal breaker, but I’m not fond of it.
Dorothy is holding herself to a high standard of always knowing what her intent is.
A little bit of lying to herself about her intentions, about an action that has yet to hurt anyone or could reasonably be assumed to hurt anyone in any real sense, at a time when she’s at a universally-acknowledged low point in her sense of self, is hardly a grand moral failing.
But it looks like that’s still enough to send her into panic.
I both really like Dorothy and am really enjoying this arc.
Neither does Dorothy – that’s why she’s freaking out.
I don’t think Dorothy understands what Dorothy’s end goal was. I’m waiting for her to reflect, and tell us what she believes when she’s had space to consider calmly. Joe’s not going to get a definite, trustworthy answer for a few moments at least.
Is sending lewd photos with romantic emotions attached *not* cheating in somebody’s world? Like, I just don’t think I’d be okay with my husband sending someone a dick pic and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be chill with me sending somebody a pic of my tits. If it was to my friend that he knows I’ve always had an on/off crush on, I think the marriage would be over, or at least in need of some dire counseling.
Sounds like Joyce cheated first, then.
Accidental cheating?
It’s definitely an issue, but I think there are extenuating circumstances in this case that make it more questionable. It definitely needs to stop now that she’s starting to acknowledge what’s going on.
Part of the distinction is that while there are emotions attached, there isn’t intent. Or at least the intent is behind layers of confusion and denial.
Accidentally sending a picture isn’t cheating. It’s an embarrassing accident.
So, different relationships have different boundaries. Not everyone views flirtation or sending nudes as cheating, some people even think it’s fun and hot when they or their partner do that and then come home to bang it out together. It’s more about personal feelings and personal interests. Do I think Walky is going to see this as cheating? Yeah, there’s a good chance.
I doubt it. He might be concerned about what it means – did she just come back to him to distract herself from her denial over Joyce?
I don’t think he’ll be framing it as cheating.
I think Walky will PROBABLY try to make it into a joke (he did recently tease her about seemingly being attracted to Joyce), but I agree that he’s unlikely to be like “my girlfriend’s potentially in love with someone else but that someone is another girl so that makes it sexy”.
I also don’t think he’s that emotionally invested in this relationship — I think he probably knows it’s pretty doomed, from the looks he keeps getting on his face whenever Dorothy talks about her own feelings — but it might still be a blow to his self-worth, especially if he feels cheated on.
Like, he already clearly feels like Lucy dumped him and then immediately upgraded by “scoring” Jacob, whereas he fell back into the arms of an ex who he knew was spiraling. I doubt this is how he wanted to ever be “proven right” about his jokes wrt Joyce being in love with Dorothy.
That’s fair tbh.
to be fair i think joe is joking and dorothy is having a mental breakdown
she’s been having one of those for several years now
*What does Dorothy think cheating is. This is her overthinking morality brain going into overdrive.
It’s definitely cheating adjacent. Or at least would be if she hadn’t been in complete denial about what was going on her head.
Knowingly hitting on someone across relationship boundaries (both of their relationships) counts, even if it hasn’t gone beyond sending pictures.
Pretty sure this does count as cheating in a monogamous relationship. Or, judging by my mom’s hoard of husbands (my gaggle of dads) even a poly one. I’ve witnessed many a man ousted from the group over a text.
Like, I said above why I think it’s cheating, but we’d really kind of need Walky to weigh in on this. It kind of doesn’t matter what Dorothy thought she was doing, he might view lewd photos as a line crossed in a very fragile relationship where he’s already been put through the wringer several times because of Dorothy being kind of… idk the word, flakey? It’s not flakey, but she kind of keeps unilaterally changing this dynamic up on him without his input, and if I were him I’d be getting really tired of it by now. But he’s also Walky, so he might be chill.
I don’t understand how people are reading this. We’ve seen the chain of events. This wasn’t Dorothy sending Joyce a tit pic with intent to entice Joyce into some sort of passionate affair. She was goaded into it by Amber in response to a photo sent by accident. Why should Walky have to weigh in? Just the act of sending the picture is enough regardless of any context behind it? Especially since Dorothy doesn’t fully understand her emotions behind this feels like very strict judgement of her.
Was Joyce also cheating then even if unintentionally? What about Jennifer’s tit pic? We know Joyce actually saw that one too. Was Joyce cheating then too? Why does this one count as cheating? It feels like it’s just because Dorothy vocalized that fear that cheating is even being considered. Maybe my priorities are different but this barely registers as a conversation, not a reason to potentially break up.
I agree. I think sometimes the comments take character feelings as absolute truth and run with it.
I do think there’s a shot Walky feels like it’s a big deal though.
Cheating is a stretch, but not completely out of line.
Because yeah, it’s always situational. Joyce is basically in the clear: Hers were sent by accident and just looking at a lewd someone sends you unexpectedly isn’t cheating – unless you respond as if it were.
I don’t really know what was up with Jennifer, but I don’t think she even knew who they were going to, so she’s in the clear.
Dorothy wasn’t actually trying to entice Joyce, but she’s clearly got feelings involved and doing sexually suggestive stuff with feelings involved gets risky. It’s crossing a line that wouldn’t be there if the motivations were pure. Joyce sending first, even by accident, mitigates it somewhat, but I wouldn’t put much weight on Amber’s prodding. That worked because of the feelings.
It’s not a huge deal I think, but it wouldn’t really be out of line for Walky to be upset over it. I doubt he will be, but I wouldn’t blame him.
Or Joe either, for that matter. Or Joyce.
Important distinction: Joyce’s were sent with intent towards *Joe*. She just send them to the wrong person on accident. Which means it’s embarrassing, but not cheating.
Dorothy being initially goaded into it by Amber? A mistake. But she was given two chances to bail out, one by Billy, then one by her phone not initially sending her tit pic.
She went past those, and intentionally sent it due to her own repressed desire for Joyce, which I’d argue is cheating.
Part of the problem here I think is binary thinking. Either cheating/not cheating. When nothing emotional is ever on nice clean binaries. If we count this as cheating, it’s definitely way down on the low end of the scale, due to the repressed nature of any intent behind it.
Does it really do any good to anybody her to be agreeing with Dorothy? “If you are into Joyce, then you really are a cheater?” Same logic let Amber talk her into it in the first place. If she hadn’t been repressing her desire, she wouldn’t have done it.
of course she skips right over the sexuality crisis and into the morality crisis LMAO
obviously joe isn’t being super helpful but i can’t say i’d be any better. get her joe (with love and support once her head blows off her shoulders)
Joe is trying to be understanding and supportive but Dorothy is letting loose five or six years of barely suppressed loathing on him.
Joe’s ability to remain calm and understanding of Dorothy in this situation is simultaneously the best way for him to be kind and supportive to her, while simultaneously refuting all her judgments of him.
It’s pretty great.
Agreed.
One of the few advantages of self-loading is that once you’ve managed to rise above it, it is a wonderful insulator against people trying to use that against you (even unintentionally).
“I can’t be like you, you’re awful”
“Oh yeah I suck, but you’re currently being worse than I was, lol”
Oh, yeah, Joe’s got powerful growth now. He saw what he was; he wanted to change for the better; he _did_ change for the better. He’d make a great counselor, lawyer, middle school teacher, or therapist.
It’s an identity crisis either way.
I mean, Joe does deserve a chance to needle Dorothy about her stance on him, and show his changes. I suspect he’ll do a good job in the coming panels, helping her through it. He’s always come in clutch for his friends in fraught situations, from Danny to Amber and even Sarah.
That’s true, but Dorothy has repressed a lot, what’s really disturbing is how she expelled it.
Yeah, Joe definitely has some further growth and accountability to do (looking at the years of calling Dorothy a lesbian thing that he should apologize for some time), but you know what? He hasn’t cheated, and he’s actually been very against cheating and the idea that he might hurt his self-image for a long time… objecting to the idea that cheating makes her like him seems fair enough.
It’s kind of fascinating that Joe clearly thought it was gentle teasing between friends but they were friends.
And Dorothy is letting him know she HATED him.
That’s a Joe problem, not a Dorothy one. Joe earned it.
Okay yeah, that reframes it. Wasn’t thinking enough from Joe’s perspective. From his point of view, even something only cheating adjacent like this is definitely worse than his old objectifying, near predatory approach.
I don’t agree, but I see why he reacts that way.
Joe’s old ways were worse than what Dorothy has done, I agree. And I think even Joe would agree if it was spelled out like that– but he has worked to change, and he knows that, even if Dorothy doesn’t, plus there’s just the nature of taking offense to being insulted, so I see why he’d defend his current self.
If Dorothy had said, “No better than you *were*,” then I think he’d have a different response.
Joe quite pointedly HASN’T actually disagreed that he was worse than Dorothy is. He never cheated, but he was a jerk. The last panel is ONLY a funny joke if the reality is that it’s not possible for a Dorothy to be worse than a Joe.
I’m not sure Joe’s intending it as a funny joke.
LOVE this dynamic. dot youre a disaster
Well this comic was in need of a disaster lesbian.
Disaster lesbians make the world go ‘round.
Ms. MacIntyre would like to have a word.
Beck is a Wonder Lesbian. She’s got this whole lesbian thing figured out, so nothing can go wrong ever!
Dot is a Disaster Lesbian. She can’t possibly be a lesbian, because then she’d be doing EVERYTHING wrong, and that’d be a…
I know, she’s got this whole attracted-to-men thing which is just the worst failure for a lesbian. Disastrous, truly.
Bi?
Normal?(wait…)In calling Dorothy a Disaster Lesbian the insistence is that she is a LESBIAN, not bi or straight or whatever. I am objecting to her being assigned as a lesbian.
“Oh my god I’m bi this can’t be I’m freaking out!!”
Apropos for the Beckster and Dotster.
*Dina and Walky passing each other the popcorn, while waiting for their s.o.’s to calm the fuck down.
And Dina is a dinosaur lesbian.
newspaper editor
Yeah. Daisy and Leslie both fall neatly into the disaster lesbian role, though to be fair neither is a main character so there’s still a vacancy in the main cast
But she’s more of a disaster bisexual. Different flavour.
Excuse you, she’s a bi disaster.
Disaster Lesbian…
BAND NAME !!
I suggested they do the Spice thing. Just “The Lesbians” and one is Disaster, one is Useless, one is Lipstick, and one is Butch. They didn’t go for that.
Joe is definitely helping! XD
Joe in the rare, rare position of feeling morally superior to someone else in regards to sexuality? He’s gotta get a dig in!
“Dammit, you’re right, I _am_ worse than you! I might as well just have my _own_ website ranking the campus’s women! Except, wait, mine would be better; I’d incorporate Google Sheets, an intro Slides deck, gotta do better password protection than yours, of course, oh, peer-review ratings, not just arbitrary single point values, oh, and–“
I kind of love that somebody is hitting on his gf and his first reaction is to go and check whether said somebody is okay. Zero jealousy or insecurity.
Also, critical hit.
He knows said somebody well enough to know she is better than that.
He’s known Dorothy for ages, plus knows Dorothy is profoundly important to Joyce, so her doing something rather out of character for her is going to merit investigation.
True, but most people would show at least some emotional reaction to someone trying to break up their relationship, and that someone being in the same social circle is usually regarded as betrayal.
It’s interesting that you insist on framing it as an attempt to break them up.
Like, there was a whole thing where she was explicitly trying that, and a whole scene where she clearly decided she would stop doing so, directly to both Joe and Joyce.
This is basically what this strip says. Dorothy finds out that she does like Joyce and that she was sexting her. If you send sexy pics to a person you like, it usually is a bid to get their attention. Which is why it was important to her that Joyce saw the pic in yesterday’s strip.
And Joe mostly finds it amusing.
“…usually a bid….” What are the statistics on that? Vs. subconsciously trying to discharge some unwanted emotional energy, say?
Joe knows Dorothy well enough to know that her attempts to break them up would take the form it actually did: threatening him t9 his face, glaring at him when in company with Joyce, trying to explain to Joyce was a bad mistake she’s making.
Dorothy isn’t Sarah. She doesn’t do sneaky backhanded tricks to break up relationships. Therefore, this is more likely a cry for help rather than a betrayal.
Well it’s now proven it also includes tiddy pics. It’s literally what just happened. And Joe deciphered before Dorothy herself did.
Seeing the cry for help and responding to it instead of being angry she made a pass at his girlfriend is what impresses me.
Then why are you insisting repeatedly that Dorothy’s intent is a breakup and a betrayal? We agree that it’s NOT.
To be fair, this is also related to Joe’s terrible insecurity. He sees Joyce as way out of his league, so from his perspective, he has no agency over whether or not Joyce leaves him for “someone better.” He’s fully obsessed and fawning over Joyce, so he’ll pretty much accept anything she were to tell him about their relationship status.
He has a point. Especially with this context, the washing machine incident feels way more predatory + self gratifying. (And people said we were overthinking it when we pointed it out.)
Self-gratifying, sure. Predatory, absolutely the fuck not.
You know, I say this as someone who was pretty squicked out by the laundry room incident:
I’m really getting concerned about how people are re-framing the incident to say that Dorothy has “power” over Joyce, that she’s predatory, taking advantage over someone who “can’t consent”. Guys, there’s nuances here. The laundry room incident can be a bit weird and gross to people without it turning into an SVU case.
One day, people will understand that women are capable of consent.
Joyce is only 216 months old after all.
Practically a newborn, truth be told.
Say what?! Whenthehell did _this_ happen? Why didn’t I get the damn email?? Why doesn’t anyone _tell_ me these things?!?!
You’re putting words in my mouth about what I said.
I fully believe Dorothy was being unintentionally predatory in how she approached it in regards to her repressed feelings towards Joyce. Specifically in regards to Joyce knowingly consenting- I’m fairly sure she’d feel differently about that whole thing if she knew Dorothy was into her *in that way.*
She didn’t mean to, but she was absolutely using the situation, and Joyce’s libido as a way to satisfy not only her repressed desire for Joyce, but to exert some amount of ‘control’ over the situation, since she didn’t want her to do anything with Joe due to her libido. (This also probably stemming from her jealousy towards Joe and Joyce.)
Like, people can make mistakes, and that whole incident was a HUGE one for Dorothy, even if was due to the combo of repression/feeling like she was losing any source of control in her life (of her own life or otherwise, vis a vis being ‘needed’.)
I’m not intentionally putting words in your mouth but I am summarizing, hence the word ‘people’, that I am seeing multiple people use these phrases regarding the laundry room incident.
That is not even close to what predatory behaviour entails.
I think “unintentionally predatory” has gotta be just another single most judgemental thing I’ve ever heard. Like, c’mon, think about what “intent” means for about half a second more.
I kinda love that there are people in this society who have been so underexposed to predatory behavior that they think “unintentionally predatory” is a thing.
Also love that the person doing this has called themselves “Rabbit”.
I was pondering on how best to respond because I kept thinking in my head “can someone unintentionally be predatory? Creepy, maybe, or weird, but outright predatory, which kinda requires a desire to predate upon someone?”. I eventually decided trying to debate it might be a lost cause but I wanted to comment to say I agree. Unintentionally predatory isn’t really possible. A cheetah doesn’t unintentionally eat a gazelle.
??? Rabbit is just a nickname I go by due to various habits I developed as an adolescent. I don’t get what the implication of it is here.
And when I say ‘unintentionally predatory’ I mean she’s engaging in behavior that I view as predatory, but not intending to predate. (i.e, her teaching joyce to mastrubate having more purpose than just ‘showing joyce how its done so she knows how its done). Ulterior motive. I don’t know a better term for it, but if you do, go ahead and shoot.
Rabbits are prey animals so it is an irony.
Yeah, it does kinda feel gross to me (even though I also felt squicked by the laundry thing) because a lot of autistic people, especially young AFAB people, are often infantilized and treated like we can’t consent. Joyce did consent to it. Would she have felt differently about the situation if she knew Dorothy might have feelings for her? We don’t know, but neither of them knew about that at the time. It was weird and ill-advised, but she DID give free consent to a peer and equal
I’m autistic, and AFAB. I’m not ‘infantalizing’ Joyce. We see multiple times that she *can* be naive, and she trusts Dorothy. Like, people jumping to say that people are infantilizing Joyce in regards to it, when literally hours earlier she told Dorothy to stay out of her business in that sense, and then having Dorothy decide to take the reigns and get Joyce to use the washing machine.
Like. It’s an established character trait that Joyce is kind of naive. She is incredibly sheltered, even well into the story and that’s not a secret. She trusts Dorothy, but Dorothy wasn’t actually acting in her best interest. It was to get her to de-horny for Joe, and likely on some level, gratification, even if repressed.
Like I said, it WAS a weird situation that felt kinda gross. I 100% agree with that. I just don’t think it’s fair to characterize it as predatory. If Dorothy had knowingly had feelings for Joyce and then done everything the same way, I might not disagree. But they’re same-age peers and good friends. Dorothy doesn’t have power over Joyce, and some people who didn’t like the scene *did* lowkey infantilize Joyce when they were criticizing it. I’m not saying you did, but it has happened. And it is a societal issue worth calling out.
100% agree with Ian on this.
My dislike from it is that Joyce had recently (for comic time) removed herself from a very cult like religious system, where her entire rationale was “Follow the Authority, don’t question the Authority, and everything will work out because Grand Plan” Its not because she’s autistic.
And she falls out of that cult-like mindset and falls right into Dotties “Gonna fix em” system.
I don’t think Dottie was predatory per say at the time, but I have trouble making Dottie’s stance of “using your trust in me, I’m going to convince you to yank it in the laundry room, and it’s for your own good… Even though it’s for *my* own good, so you don’t try and bang Joe” sound… not creepy.
And I really dislike the “Joyce could just say no” stance, because she’s been conditioned since birth to follow authority, and it took her best friend nearly being kidnapped for her finally get to a place where she could say no to things, and that was seen as a huge leap forward for her.
And as much as people like to say Dottie and Joyce are equals.. Let’s be frank, Dottie was the red ranger to Joyce’s pink.
Also, it doesn’t even necessarily need to be that Joyce views Dottie as an authority- but she IS someone Joyce trusts without much thought otherwise/without question. Potentially as a peer, but she views Dottie as being smarter/knowing more than she does.
This. Yes. It felt like a violation of trust.
Joyce trusts Dottie to do what’s best for her, to protect her, and Dottie did a selfish thing and tried to spin it as selfless.
Thank you, I couldn’t put it in the right words into why it was twisting me up.
Yes. Dorothy was manipulative.
I just think everyone holds Dorothy to such a high standard around here, that they rarely assign to Joyce. Like… Is this not evidence Dot is naive too? She’s also barely an adult and figuring herself out. Joyce didn’t know she was autistic. Dorothy didn’t know she was bi. Joyce may not realize she’s bi either, and she’s done and said a LOT of things that get reframed if we learn she’s bi. Just… Idk. I feel like young women do get infantalized, but some get …maturized? And I feel like the comments let Joyce get away with tons of stuff because she didn’t mean to or didn’t realize, that they won’t let pass in Dorothy.
The issue, at least for me, is that Dottie put herself on the pedestal. And because she put herself there, she should be held to a higher account then the others.
She’s been walking around as the “voice of reason.” The one who tries to make the others “better” as if she has some higher place on the totem pole of maturity, and seeing her stumble has a tinge of Schadenfreude as we watch her realize she’s no better then anyone else.
In a way, she’s very much like Billie, in that she was the big fish in a very small pond in high school, who was hucked into the much bigger lake that is college, and she’s floundering.
That’s pretty much a branding issue. Dorothy presents herself as Not Being Naive, so when she is naive, it doesn’t get labelled as “Dorothy Does A Naive Thing,” it gets labelled as “Dorothy Makes a Willfully Wrong Mistake Because She’s a Bad Person.”
Which, to be fair, that’s also how Dorothy sees it. She’s not like, misrepresenting the way she sees herself; she actually sees herself this way. And she’s naive, for not realizing that seeing herself that way, is really self-abusive!
Less a “Dottie is a bad person” And more “Dottie has been a massive hypocrite and I’m tired of people defending it because they want her to smooch Joyce.”
Malaya should be foaming at the mouth when she see’s Dottie.
This interpretation I will fully cosign, I do think there’s a lot of ascribing willful planning and intention to Dorothy’s clumsy mistakes, and it’s been going on since the very beginning when she broke up with Danny and a significant subset of the comments acted like she had calculatedly waited until he was already enrolled at IU and stuck there before doing it, so that she could……….????? Hurt his academic future, the thing she was expressly concerned about, I guess.
The takeaway I have from all this is that Dorothy’s going through an extended breakdown/maybe autistic burnout right now. The entire main driving focus of that burnout has been the realisation she was never on this pedestal legitimately, that she needs to see her flaws to grow around them, and resultingly she doesn’t know who she wants to grow into anymore. So of course she’s getting overwhelmed and frustrated, as her previous mask of perfection is crumbling around her. Dottie’s not necessarily been a hypocrite about this; if she is an autistic “gifted kid”, then the world has probably always insisted she present a certain way, and rewarded her for wearing that mask – so she’s bought into the image herself, too. Unlike Raidah, she never glorified in thinking herself superior to others, and unlike Jennie her sense of self-esteem and social belonging wasn’t knowingly constructed solely upon that pedestal but rather has been unwittingly foisted there by anxiety. I think Dottie only accepted that “higher path” everyone around her told her she was meant to walk to try and help the world for others. It’s taken some major self-awareness for her to unpack all that even this far. I expect she legitimately believed she was helping Joyce prior to now and saw the way she felt about being close with her as normal for platonic found family. Elements that would have been exploitative if meant with worse intention were honestly unexamined.
@Kelibath: Plus also…
The comic never really made anything of this, and even if it had, Joyce’s newness to EVERYTHING would have absolutely overshadowed it, but is Joyce Dorothy’s first female friend???
Some people seem to be seeing this as reframing the situation as being more intimate than it was. Like, there are people who would absolutely, having convinced themselves to be brave and do this thing with their friend, freak out a bit if they knew their friend might be getting off about them at the time. We don’t know if Joyce is one of them or if she’d think of it that way.
It’s like… y’know how there’s a spectrum between “people against kink in public sometimes mean gay hand-holding” and “people for non-explicit kink in all spaces are sometimes literally getting off to tricking people into ERPing with them”? I think some people are debating where Laundry Day is on that spectrum and some people are debating whether it’s even on the spectrum to begin with.
imo theres no ‘non intimate/not really intimate’ version of ‘im gonna teach you how to masturbate”
Right. But Joyce CONSENTED to it. And Dotty was being honest about her intentions as she knew them.
It’s not Dorothy’s fault she didn’t know she was into women/Joyce, she grew up in a heteronormative society and god forbid she be affected by that in some ways.
What happened hurt absolutely no one, and had zero intent to do so. To call that “predatory” is so far out of line as to be laughable. It was just dumb, that’s all, and given the name of the comic I think people need to chill out about dumb stuff happening.
You have your opinion, I have mine. Mine is that the washing machine incident was creepy and duplicitous to some extent, and as someone with similar ‘life experience’ to Joyce (since everyone brings that up when I have issues with it that she’s autistic/afab/ and not to infantilize her)
It’s a creepy thing to do, and the underlying reasons were also creepy and if I were in that situation and found out that person was also repressing a crush on me, (and was my best friend previously who I trusted to be thinking in my best interests) I’d be weirded out.
But this is a comic
Yes. And you stated yours, and then I stated mine lmao. You repeating it doesn’t make me agree with you or think it’s less wildly incorrect.
what did dorothy teach her? cause from my reading, she was just there for moral support. she was as much a non-participant in that sexual act, as I think it’s possible for a person to be? Dorothy wasn’t engaged in any sex act. She was just there. Because her friend was scared of doing this thing, which she actually did want to be able to physically do for herself.
They weren’t exactly sitting across from each other, pointing at one another’s parts, giving advice on technique and types of stimulation. Dorothy was In The Room. They probably weren’t even looking at each other. Because the point of the exercise was not for them to engage in a mutual sex act, and neither of them intended for it to be that.
So like, what did Dorothy actually do besides offering her presence?
Your reading is on the opposite end of the spectrum of mine, realistically it probably is going to fall somewhere in the middle of ours. Because no matter how many people get upset when I say it- Dorothy’s entire thing with the washing machine *was* creepy and kind of weird, even if it’s not predatory.
What gets me about your read is that Dorothy has been fast to point out Joyce’s accidental sexual hypocrisy in other situations – like how the idea of “soaking” ie PIV sex without thrusting but facilitated with a “helpful” third party bouncing on the bed is basically a threesome, fully intent on sexual pleasure while desperately trying to bend the rules enough to justify it all. I think Dottie was specifically ignorant of the sexual connection involved in the laundry room sit because of where she believed her intention “to help” was coming from. She didn’t go in there to intentionally share Joyce’s sexual awakening, certainly not consciously, but IMHO honestly did believe at the time that she was only helping her friend release tension and learn about herself in a way her upbringing had denied. She’s recontextualising it *now*, but didn’t register it was weird or needed self-examination *then*.
I agree, honestly. Joyce was overwhelmed and nervous and I don’t think anybody else in the cast could have convinced her to go ahead with this but Dorothy – and that only because of the level of unchallenged trust Joyce has placed in her across the series to date, seeing her advice as sound support in the challenge to unpack a radical-cultish-church homeschooled upbringing. She sees Dorothy as a wise voice of normative reason and, despite some allusions to this by others, isn’t factoring in any possibility Dottie might be underschooled / undersocialised in some areas herself. She also sees her as a safe person. If Joyce had known at the time that Dorothy had any feelings for her of this type, then she’d probably no longer have seen Dottie as a safe person to reassure and encourage her along those lines. Which is why I think it’s really important that Dottie *didn’t* realise at that point that she was into Joyce. If she had, the laundry thing would definitely have been creepy and manipulative, not just a bit over-intimate. The difference for me lies in where Dottie thought the impulse to advise all that was coming from – legitimate concern vs unexplained interest.
Yeah, I am inclined to agree. Joyce had agency throughout and was given multiple instances to bail on it if she chose to, and she chose not to.
It’s been a bit since I read it, but from what I recall, whether or not it was read as enthusiastic content, she did give explicitly expressed consent.
I just read it like last week, and that did happen.
I re-read it yesterday, and she gives a shy, embarrassed, but clear “yes” to the proceedings more than once, even.
Welp, to prison with her.
The conversation started with “Remember how you told me to stop acting like you’re about to sprint into Joe’s room just because you’re on BC? Well, to keep you from sprinting into Joe’s room, let’s go have you masturbate for the first time.”
Afterwards, Dorothy reiterates to Joyce’s face that Joyce shouldn’t be with Joe.
Only later do we see that Joyce had secretly been plotting to use her newfound knowledge to keep her cool when spending time with Joe, negating the worst aspect of the situation: Dorothy policing Joyce’s relationships.
If anything it recontexualizes her motives to de-horny Joyce so she stops being into Joe.
And several of Dorothy’s other actions, like propositioning Walky immediately after seeing them talk in the tree.
but why stop there? Dorothy can use this revelation to evaluate every decision she has ever made in her entire life! Maybe 15 year old Joe was right! Maybe that’s why she was attracted to Danny in the first place! Maybe that’s why she has always strived so hard at perfection in everything she has done so as to avoid this exact realization!
I feel like we’re taking this one a little too seriously. Every aspect of this has been ridiculous in nature, from Joyce initiating with incredibly low quality barely legible shots sent unintentionally, to Dorothy being goaded into a high effort glamour shot by Amber, or even Jen barely qualifying it as cleavage and sending her own. Joe is clearly just messing with Dorothy. None of this has actually been problematic except them all being a little too dismissive about having even slightly compromising photos circulating.
Predatory is an interesting word choice.
It implies that Dorothy was intentionally forcing Joyce into that situation. She did not. Was it weird? Yes. Can you say, with a straight face, that you haven’t had any weird early homosexual (or hetero if you’re into that) experiences where both parties are figuring it out as they go along?
We can have both parties be innocent here. It’s important to be careful with our words as using things like predatory improperly blurs the definition and it should hold more weight. But it’s also fair to examine and wonder, WAS it predatory? I don’t think so but I’m interested to hear the reasoning for that word choice.
“Innocent” might be too strong a word upon review, maybe “neutrally mid toned morally” is better lol
Predatory is the word that comes to mind when I think of it. Using Joyce’s lack of knowledge on it + her trust in dorothy to do this thing that was clearly not actually focused on doing something for Joyce despite being presented as such.
I’ve definitely had weird homosexual experiences where people (including me) are figuring things out- but they weren’t as weird as the situation Dorothy had Joyce follow into.
I think you are giving her intentions she didn’t at that time have.
Was it a weird thing to do? Sure. Not recommend. But that’s a far way from predatory.
Unfortunately, given she’s Joyce, she will draw exactly that conclusion about the situation and will spiral even worse.
I agree with Suzi: it’s important to not use strong meaningful words on things that are not its core content. That’s how people came to the oh so horribly wrong conclusion that it didn’t matter who wins the US election last year bc it makes no difference.
+1
This veered into a direction I can’t follow, so I’m just gonna say I obviously don’t support the orange turnip in office, nor do I want LGBT rights taken away. And I don’t think my opinion on a fictional character making questionable choices inherently ties into that?
If I’m missing something please let me know.
Something I’ve honestly noticed online in general, not just here but across social media and such, is people’s willingness to use strong meaningful words to describe things without remembering what it means. In fact, let me give a real world example.
My old job involved working with kids. While I was on vacation during pride month, apparently my superiors decided to have a rainbow themed craft with the kids, including wearing rainbow shirts, etc. Since I wasn’t there, I got conflicting reports from coworkers but all I can confirm is it was pride month, and kids were given rainbow activities/colors/etc. Parents were upset, as were other coworkers who apparently approached the head honcho and said they think that such activities were “grooming”.
Head honcho immediately stopped the convo in its tracks and asked coworker to please explain what they mean; as grooming is a very loaded, strong, powerful phrase with legal implications and has NOTHING to do with giving kids a rainbow shirt or crayons to color in a rainbow.
Okay, I can understand that… but I don’t see how it applies to the specifics of this conversation in terms of ‘loaded words.’ That’s very obviously not grooming. If you have a better word for ‘Doing something under the guise of assisting someone when it’s really for your own gratification/need for control’ then please tell me so I can use that instead.
There is no easy answer because frankly, I don’t think there is a singular word for it. Dorothy and Joyce are messy even outside of the laundry room thing, because they have a lot of messy feelings about each other. They love each other. They’ve been through traumatic experiences together. I do think Dorothy truly thought “well, Joyce is just horny. She’s very repressed. If I help guide her to masturbate, she won’t fall for Joe’s tricks”. I don’t think Joyce jilling off gave her any sense of gratification, at least not sexually. I do think it was caused by her being jealous of Joe (although she’s in denial about that). I can’t say for sure if I think Dorothy did it out of a need to control Joyce, mainly because in the end it was Joyce’s choice to stick her hand in her pants and go to town.
It’s a messy situation, and it’s weird, and like I said, I found it squicky. But there’s unfortunately no better word to describe it other than messy and weird. At least in my opinion.
To add on, the best I can offer is that I don’t think what you described is necessarily what predatory means. It’s… duplicitous? But being predatory is seeking to take advantage of someone, such as financially or sexually. A person can be duplicitous to take advantage of someone, but you can be duplicitous without trying to take advantage of someone in a predatory way. Somebody could be lying to themself or others to stay out of trouble. I think Dorothy clearly lies to herself about her feelings for Joyce, but I don’t think any of it has been intentional. I think she’s just afraid of what those feelings would mean, especially since Joyce is clearly not available right now.
Duplicitous is a better word, I can agree. I’ll use that in future discussions when referring to it.
“Predatory” definitely got all the way under my skin. I still don’t agree with “duplicitous”, but that’s a matter of opinion that I can disagree with civilly, rather than… you know, triggering feelings about the persecution of LGBTQIA+ people (most visibly trans people, but by no means limited to trans people) that is currently going on, SPECIFICALLY under the guise of protecting straight cis women and girls from us predatory groomers.
One of my pet peeves is people using literal, when they mean figurative. ”He dropped a literal atom bomb on the legislation” is an actual paraphrased example.
The person then took extreme offense to it being pointed out that no _literal_ atom bomb had been dropped. What’s worse IMO, is that the venue being reddit, I got to see that it represented the majority opinion.
The major difference here is that I strongly believe Dorothy was fully under the impression her impulse towards “needing to teach Joyce safe ways to release” were to help Joyce first and foremost. I think we’re all having it recontextualised now that they *may not have been, subconciously*. But there’s plenty of evidence in the text that Dorothy is an undiagnosed “gifted kid” autistic who has basically believed fully in her societally-insisted-upon mask for her entire life to date. This breakdown is the burnout from realising she isn’t actually down with that lifepath anymore, and may not have ever been the person she’s been told she is and has to be til now.
Back in the laundry room, while she was still “perfect helpful world-fixing mature wise Dorothy”, she was trying to protect and support Joyce from what she saw as “bad decisions” – such as a naive SA survivor jumping straight from a gay beard boyfriend to someone else’s boyfriend to Joe, who we’ve repeatedly seen Dorothy over-pigeonhole as “sexualising chauvinist” despite a lot of recent growth. The intent behind that “tuition” at the time was, I truly think Dottie believed, protective and platonic albeit super intimate. She often oversteps with way too much drive and enthusiasm – and this probably felt like just another example of that, with fear of Joe/Joyce as the driving force behind her urgency.
We can now see Dottie was probably also too ready to suggest such an intimate event, too trusting of her own unexamined intentions, and too controlling of Joyce’s love life unconsciously … because she cared too much to want her to be with anyone else, especially with someone she disliked and distrusted as much as Joe. But I think it’s key that neither woman noticed this *at the time*.
Can’t edit, so just to add that I agree Dorothy was already being too controlling of Joyce’s love life back then and was too ready to infantilise her or pigeonhole her as the student to Dottie’s wise worldly educator. This is still wrong! Just saying that it isn’t necessarily manipulative and retroactively predatory; there’s plenty of completely presumed platonic impulses Dottie could have misread all this behaviour as coming from. I think that the incredible pressure she, and probably a lot of people in her life to date, had put herself under, to be the perfect leader/problem-solver, goes a long way toward explaining why she didn’t examine those impulses to guide and control Joyce’s growth. And yes, there’s a real analogue here to Jennie’s “head cheerleader” persona – and I think that’s why we keep seeing those two as foils and focus characters throughout this storyline!
Pretty sure Joe is trying to cut the tension with a joke in that last panel but inadvertently made it much worde
I mean it’s only insulting if Dorothy thinks Joe is still a POS.
And if she doesn’t realize that Joe thinks it’s a funny joke because the very concept of DOROTHY being a worse person than him is hilariously impossible.
Dorothy’s statement just before makes no sense unless she does – or at least unless she’s referring to old Joe or to Joe overall, which makes his response also at least understood as doing so.
And from his point of view, I think it makes sense. Joe’s take on this all of this is driven by his reaction to his dad, so cheating is the worst thing. Even if Dorothy’s only been cheating adjacent, that’s what all of old Joe’s shitty behavior was intended to avoid. It makes sense that, even though he’s learned that behavior was still harmful, he’d still see it as better than anything even close to cheating.
We can disagree with that, but it makes sense for him.
Maybe it isn’t worse, and maybe Joe is ratcheting the tension up to the breaking point because Dorothy needs for her assumptions to break, and begin to replace them with honest self appraisal?
Joe can’t remain TOO supportive without at least a few shots across the bow, or Dorothy probably wouldn’t think he’s being genuine.
Especially if she puts him in a position of having legitimate moral authority over her after an uncalled for shot, where he give some smug dunking.
I’m enjoying everything about this strip! Also, wow, middle panel is beautiful
Self-denial has been Dorothy’s thing since the start and now the dam is breaking.
And that was the last time anybody ever saw Joe…
Damn Joe.
“Fire the shot across the nose, not up it.”
She earned that one, though.
She might have earned it, but Joe is the last person who should be firing any shots at her, given his past douchebaggery towards her that he hasn’t tried to make amends for.
Joe was also here trying to be understanding when she’s been trying to steal his girlfriend and sexually harrassing her.
And she’s acting like the victim.
No she’s not.
I think a better description of events would be that Dorothy is bringing up her past victimization by Joe in order to distract from the issue he’s asking about.
Dorothy isn’t wrong to still be mad about Joe’s bad behavior from years ago. But that’s not actually relevant to the question that Joe’s asking her. A question that he has a right to ask.
That’s been pretty much this whole convo. Joe attempting to actually be a friend and dorothy keeps turning around and trying to make this his fault, somehow, as well as pointing to her past victimization to do so.
But yea, pretty much.
Truly. ‘Hey, are you into my girlfriend?’ ‘This again? God you’re such a PIG.’ ‘Yeah, I was, but you DID send my girlfriend a tit pic, so… figured I’d ask.’ ‘Oh, and you stole her phone and SNOOPED? You piece of shit!’ ‘Um, no, I was holding her phone when the message came in?’ ‘God, I’m the second-worst aren’t I? I’m hitting on my best friend who has a boyfriend while I have a boyfriend! I’m almost as bad as YOU, you disgusting cheater snoop pig.’
Joe’s frankly being pretty gentle IMO.
Snoop pig as usual, I see.
Little thumbs up for that comment because, yeah. That’s basically a good summary of how this conversation’s going.
Snoop pig forever, Taffy!
People are just DESPERATE to frame Dorothy’s unintentional baby-gay flailing as real harm and it’s just ridiculous. She’s dumb and didn’t know she liked Joyce, framing that as harassment is nonsensical.
I never said that the pictures were harrassment.
But people are allowed to be upset by Dorothy’s general ‘flailing’ as you put it. Just because you don’t intend something doesn’t mean it can’t come across poorly.
Doubly so because unfortunately, even in real-life people coming to discover things about themselves (and involving other people) Can still in fact be harmful to the other party.
I’m all for self exploration, but that’s not how the situation w/ joyce comes across to me at all. And Dorothy’s whole last two panel thing with her outright saying that she’s been in denial partially because then she has no justification for her actions towards joyce.
So the comment I responded to got removed, because it LITERALLY said “harassment”. You’ll note I didn’t say a single word about “the pictures” so I’m not sure where that came from in your message.
I get that you have issue with me thinking all this fuss is ridiculous. I still think it is. I disagree with your viewpoint, and I didn’t say you “weren’t allowed” to be upset. I just think it’s an overreach and a catastrophization of what actually happened in the comic.
Ah, sorry didn’t get deleted, I see it up there in the mess.
Charles Phipps said: “she’s been trying to steal his girlfriend and sexually harrassing her.”
I just plain wasn’t talking to or about you this time.
well this is something, she’s not denying it in a simple way… and stop laying it on thick, Joe!
can I replace my last wish that came true? I don’t just want the rise of Dorothy Faces…
Dorothy: [full epistemological collapse]
Funny how “I am straight” is not amongst those reasons.
I am just now remembering that when she and Danny discussed the Kinsey scale she said she was a 0 as far as she could tell, but actually seemed fairly casual about it and open to the idea that it could change.
“…I dunno, probably a zero, best I can tell? I guess that estimate could change” is the exact quote, and it is funny how many people have been misremembering that scene for the last fourteen years as one where Dorothy made it clear that she’d totally given her orientation a LOT of thought and was VERY sure she was 100% straight.
Like, literally every word but “a zero” is a weasel word, but somehow it’s an absolutely definitive statement of unalterable fact.
I mean it also could be she genuinely has never been attracted to another woman before Joyce and even that Joyce is the only one she’ll ever find attractive.
This shit gets messy.
That would be my guess, yes. Or that if she has been attracted to women before, it didn’t register as such. Which is an extremely common experience among queer afab people especially, as the, shall we say, common plumbing? Doesn’t send signals of the same clarity level as one of the other options.
Dorothy is 18, and far from history’s latest bloomer.
Yeah, I don’t think she was lying when she told Danny that she thought she was a zero.
But I think she’d be lying if she said the same thing to Joe now.
Yeahhhh.
I’m probably one of those people, but I’ve long argued that I’d take a statement like that as more seriously than a flat out denial. It shows at least some consideration and that she was open to the possibility.
Maybe I’m still wrong, but I doubt we’ll see a revelation that Dorothy’s been having crushes on women her whole life and just repressed them all.
My objection is that “…I dunno, probably [number]?” reads, to me, like Dorothy’s first time thinking about it at all.
And, given the context of the moment (which was understandably very focused on Danny), I don’t think she spent much more than those few seconds considering it.
The writing for that scene had always struck me as conveying “Dorothy isn’t queerphobic, so she takes the possibility as having neutral value, she hasn’t ever had reason to question her own sexuality before, so she hasn’t”.
(Which isn’t to say Willis couldn’t have changed their mind on that first bit, just as they decided to embrace the problematic implications of Carla not being on Joe’s “do” list. “It’s fine for other people to be gay/bi/etc, I’m just NOT, I’m normal” isn’t an unheard-of manifestation of internalized queerphobia.)
I meant to write: “so she takes the possibility as having neutral value, BUT she hasn’t ever had reason to question her own sexuality before, so she hasn’t”
sighs at the lack of an edit button
saying that feels like it’d be like a monkey paw curling or manifesting it into like “a string of alarmingly hot girls constantly bump into/hit on dorothy”
Are sending a downshirt pick and a dick pic equal offenses?
Huh seems the argument was deleted, probably for the better.
No, for similar reasons that being topless and being pantsless are of different severity
You can function without pants, but it’s difficult to function without a top.
Spoken like a bottom.
You cut off your top and you just have a new top.
Yes, I’m intentionally ignoring the inuendo.
Or embracing it?
So true.
I feel like it’s easier to function without a children’s toy than it is to not pant for breath, but maybe I just need more cardio.
In your defense, Dorothy, you’re pretty deep in denial so I wouldn’t say you knowingly sexted Joyce with intent to cheat. You just denialed yourself into thinking it was a funny haha goofy joke between friends!!
Yeah… honestly, if she accepts her attraction, it will probably help her make choices she is more morally comfortable with.
But that would require accepting that her previous conclusions around her sexuality were wrong
I’m pretty sure that early in this comic Dorothy self-reported her Kinsey score to be “probably a 2,” meaning not entirely straight.
I recall this because I mis-remembered it as “0” once and posted comment about it, and was helpfullly corrected by other readers.
I think the actual issue is that Dorothy doesn’t want to acknowledge that she’s been attracted to her best friend all this time, rather than her not wanting to admit that she could be attracted to women generally.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/03-the-butterflies-fly-away/kinsey/ She does say a zero here though? Unless she said something later and corrected herself.
Yeah, I don’t think she’s ever outright stated that it changed. People might have just been pointing to how she acknowledged it *could* change?
Damn. How the hell do I keep mis-remembering this comic?
Anyway, thanks for the correction, and I appreciate the correction. Again, apparently.
There was never a comic. You just imagined it all.
This is actually a recipe blog
You’re welcome! Honestly reading your comment I was like “whoa, I remember it as a 0 too, was I also mistaken?” so I mainly checked to doublecheck myself.
Well, that’s what bookmarks are for.
Based on this comic, that does not seem to be the issue.
I mean, her entire thing here is that she’s denying the attraction and framing this as ‘normal friend stuff’ because if she doesn’t it means she’s essentially been cheating on her boyfriend/making passes at her taken friend.
Sure, but in doing so, she’s basically admitting it. Probably for the first time, even to herself.
Yeah, exactly?
i would say the ‘laundry room incident’ is way closer to ‘cheating’ than the bra pic
Cheating on my non-existent boyfriend I’m not dating by jacking off in public, brb.
Have fun. Don’t get locked up behind bars.
Unless it’s the drinking kind.
It would be if it had happened now. But at the time of the laundry room incident, neither of them was in a relationship.
Cheating on who?
Rich Mullins.
isn’t that the guy who died for our sins? i don’t follow the other strips and he doesn’t show up much in this one.
Honestly, re-reading the conversation she had with Amber, it looks a bit like Dorothy panicked her way into it being a “haha funny joke”. Her first anxious look in that sequence is after Amber tells her that sending a retaliatory pic would be the platonic friend thing to do, and that asking Amber to delete it permanently from the Cloud (which is what Dorothy came to her for help with doing) is what would be sus and weird.
I’m not saying any of this is Amber’s fault, mind. I’m just saying I think Dorothy double-denial’d her way into it. She literally only got herself onto this path of sending Joyce “lewds” because she was afraid NOT sending Joyce a suggestive photo would be gayer.
Oh, it’s definitely Ambers fault, it’s just not her responsibility.
Pff, okay, we can go with that, in that I don’t think Dorothy would have sent any photos if Amber hadn’t responded exactly the way she did.
I was also rereading, and I think the evolution of Dorothy’s reaction panels as Joyce sends the barrage of photos is… interesting.
This face is a lot more ambiguous than this one, and I think the difference is that by that second photo, Dorothy has devised what’s happening, so she knows these are mis-sent, and she’s irritated as well as exasperated.
But that first face? Recontextualized, it could be a lot of different feelings at once.
yeah, genuinely never forget, Amber is literally manipulative and expresses consistent and extreme desire to have literally everybody she knows bumping uglies to a hyper-sexual degree. But nobody is out calling her a predator. She’s a smol bean cinnamon roll and she deserves kids gloves. Dorothy, however? Death penalty.
Hey, yikes, that’s not at all what I said?
All I meant is that Amber did not take the phone out of Dorothy’s hands and send the photo without her consent or over her objections. (Unlike Jennifer, lol.) So there is a LIMIT as to how much culpability Amber has.
But also I reiterate: yikes. The level of shit Amber gets for being horny in a way the readership finds weird is kinda disproportionate and makes me really uncomfortable as a queer afab person who discovered both my sexuality and gender through slash fanfic.
I think RPF is hella cringe, and I cannot relate at ALL to Amber’s habit of directly telling people she’s writing RPF (albeit with fandoms tacked on) about them, and Ethan certainly has the right to tell her to leave him alone, but I get the feeling from the emphasis folks have placed when they condemn her that they’d be just as upset if she stuck to fics about Superman and Batman, and thaaaaaaat sucks.
Like “nobody is calling her a predator” are you sure, because I think you’re forgetting a loooooot of comments Amber has gotten over the years.
Dorothy gets a LOT of disproporinate hate, absolutely, but she is far from the only target. Sal and Amber and Roz have all gotten hate-mobbed for various misdemeanors over the years. And Lucy! Oh my gosh, has Lucy gotten hate-mobbed for no reason at all.
and to be fair, like…straight women do this. i cannot stress this enough. platonic hetero men and women’s interactions can sometimes be gay as fuck. None of my gay friends say as much gay shit on the regular, as my straight friends do to my other straight friends.
Somehow I find it endearing that both Dorothy and Danny are confused disaster bisexuals.
Joe is helping.
Whoa. Sick burn.
You can hit him, it won’t do anything.
Silly, girls can’t hurt guys!
I think they more meant that Joe is a brick wall of a man. If anything dotty may hurt her hand.
Mike didn’t seem to hurt his hand.
Of course, Mike was into pain. Or at least he could give that impression as a tactic. With Mike it was hard to tell.
Mike also probably had more experience punching people.
We gotta remember, Mike wasn’t the only one punching Joe that night. Joyce did too, although I’m not sure how she scales against Dotty. She definitely hurt him, and he said as much, but I don’t recall Dorothy doing much fighting.
I don’t think Dorothy even engaged with anyone during the post-basement kidnap fight. I’d believe it if she’s done basic self-defense, but I really doubt she knows more than that.
In terms of raw strength, I’m pretty sure Joyce beats Dorothy by a solid margin. What Dorothy’s got going for her is mainly bony elbows.
Joyce punched Becky’s dad so hard that he flew into the air and landed in a pile of cops. I think she may have kept her abductee powers.
To be fair, I’m sure that Joyce had been saving up the righteous anger behind that blow for literally decades. She coulda knocked that Saitama guy over.
Also, he’d literally just stood up from a car crash. Probably didn’t take a lot to knock him down.
When she tried it on Blaine, she got taken hostage.
I can’t wait for Becky to find out!
Can you IMAGINE the drama if Joyce actually turns out to be bi? Becky is going to go into a full meltdown that DOTTIE turns Joyce’s crank but she doesn’t.
I think it’d be hilarious if Joyce is Bi, but not into Dorothy OR Becky in that way. (I’d argue her type probably skews more towards Sal or Billie, if it’s recongizable at all.)
Joyce lands Marcy and and the entire universe implodes.
She’s into Sal and Billie on the aesthetic level for sure. Whether it’s in a ”I’d hit that” way or not is a different topic.
Ease up on yourself Dorothy. Responding to one cheeky pic with another is flirting, not hitting on. Flirting is not cheating, especially if you’ve yet to DTR.
Flirting may not be full-on cheating, but in most monogamous relationships, it’s still unacceptable. I think she’s valid to feel uncomfortable about her actions (especially since she knew Joyce only sent it to her by accident)
Whether flirting is acceptable is relationship dependent. Couples with good communications can have different comfort levels with it.
There is no universe where I would consider Walky and Dorothy a couple with good communication skills. Both halves are actually terrible at it.
Strongly disagree.
I wouldn’t say they’re “terrible” at it. Their core communication skills are fine, even above average, when they use them.
However, if you’re saying they’re pathologically avoidant of communicating…well, yeah, now we’re getting somewhere.
Flirting being ”unacceptable” sounds like no way to live.
‘no better than you’ makes me think she’s implying that joe’s cheated or so, which i don’t think is the case? Unless he hooked up with girls with bfs/willing to cheat as opposed to just unattached flings but i’d hope he wouldn’t rly ruin relationships as opposed to being casual back then, since dannys never brought it up or chastized him about it/willing to stay friends with him
You know, I’m not at all sure she was accusing Joe of cheating specifically, just of being morally reprehensible.
‘no better than you’ after referencing the possibility of her cheating, def gives the impression she was calling *him* a cheater.
I don’t agree. She could mean her sexual misbehavior is as bad as his sexual misbehavior even if the behaviors are different.
Joe’s response is about cheating, because he thinks cheating is worse than everything he did.
I think with Joe’s body count, it’s very easy to make an assumption that Joe’s “cheated” on girls (or never checked to see if the girl is in a relationship herself, which is more a her problem than his). I use quotation marks for cheated because as he points out, Joyce is his first actual relationship, at least as far as he’s concerned (but I’d be willing to be he’s had a few FWB setups that took it more seriously than he let it get BECAUSE of his whole “If I set the bar for myself low enough I’ll never fail anyone” schtick).
Oh the partner definitely cops most of the blame with cheating, but I’d still say someone who hooks up with someone they know is in a relationship are still pretty bad, just not to blame for the relationship exploding.
I do need to state that a picture of essentially, a bra, is not the same as a dick pic even remotely but I get what he’s saying. it’s about intent or whatever.
Also come on man don’t rag on the girl /while/ she’s having a weird breakdown about morality. You can presumably still do that later.
This is great stuff though, I love weird breakdowns about morality
I mean, if Dorothy’s pic counts as a titty pic you can make a dick pic that is just as unrevealing while still being erotic
Back in the Walkyverse days I always felt like Joyce and Walky were SO SO similar. In this universe they’ve had new differences added but like. This is still so funny to me like damn. Dorothy has a TYPE.
Also lol I thought she’d be feeling guilty bc Joyce is STRAIGHT and SHELTERED and Dorothy would be worrying about TAKING ADVANTAGE etc. but she jumps straight to the practicalities lmao. That’s actually a really interesting detail that I think might say a lot about what she’s thought about already and what she hasn’t.
…holy shit, Joe.
Like, it’s kind of a dick move to say that to her, but then telling him she was afraid of being no better than him was also a massive dick move, so I guess it’s kinda warranted? Somewhere out there, Mike is shedding a single tear.
Considering that cheating is basically a trauma button for him–considering what his dad did to his mom–the fact that Dorothy, who’s known him long enough to be aware that’s an issue, basically accused him of being a cheater is shitty. Tbh it’s entirely warranted for him to snap back (and the fact that he did it in a somewhat jokey way is a kindness)
Right? his entire Thing pre growth was “I make everyone fully aware of what I am, if you’re down to bang the trash fire, you’re at least going in with open eyes”
And we don’t know if he ever **actually** cheated on anyone either. that seems like his biggest fear/trigger, so I doubt he actually has.
I’d say we know he hasn’t cheated on anybody, ever. On account of, the whole point of his prior persona, was to absolutely eliminate any possibility of him actually being in a relationship. You can’t cheat on anybody, when you actively avoid dating anybody. Which was a major part of his underlying reasoning.
Eh, it’s not a dick move, turnabout is fair play. Besides, it’s pretty obviously not him being serious.
He’s been pretty sympathetic to her, all things considered.
I mean, she’s essentially saying that she’s no better than him as an insult, but she’s stating something he never actually did (cheat, because that’s like. A huge thing for him? cuz of his dad?) so I’d say it’s warranted as a response. He’s handling this whole thing pretty damn well, considering.
Generally, although I’d say that he owes her several years worth of apologies before he’s entitled to take shots at her…
Okay, counterpoint: We don’t see them interact much. As far as we know, we never see him outright insult her, and we only know he referred to her as gay because she wasn’t into him- but he clearly knew she was dating his roomie and that they probably boinked, so it clearly wasn’t meant to be a serious thing.
Meanwhile, we see Dotty here both misrepresenting him, insulting him after sending his monogamous girlfriend boob pics because she’s into her, and then trying to deflect by accusing him of snooping, and when that doesn’t work she turns to insulting him by calling him a cheater- something she likely knows is a button of his because of his dad? considering she’s known him about as long as she’s known Danny? I can’t imagine it never came up, even if secondhand from Danny.
Following up, she realizes she is in fact in the wrong here, even if she’s in denial about her feelings.
And none of this prompts an angry outburst from Joe, he doesn’t get defensive, and he’s actively trying to be empathetic to Dorothy, only putting in a mildly teasing jab after she accuses him of doing the one thing he set out intentionally to never do and formed his entire persona around not doing?
Oh, Joe is largely being good here. This isn’t “Dorothy is great and Joe is the devil” at all, rather its more “Joe was a giant ass for years and a thorn in her side that she constantly had to deal with because she was dating Danny, her hostility towards him is entirely justified and he has yet to make amends to her for all of that crap”.
He’s improved! He’s doing significantly better! But he’s not her friend for a very damn good reason, and he needs to not be teasing her like a friend would be, because he hasn’t earned that from her at all.
Yeah, that’s an interesting point. Joe’s retort may be justified, and intended as a joke. But it doesn’t seem like Dorothy has ever given him an indication that they’re at that level of friendship.
The an again, she DID send a titty pic to his girlfriend so he gets a bit of leeway on this one.
”hey, do we share a girlfriend?”
I mean Dorothy is unloading with the fact that she hates Joe and never considered him her friend.
When, ironically, Joe was trying to be her friend here as well as understanding.
What, before this semester, has Joe done to deserve friendship from Dorothy?
You don’t deserve friends. You either are and help them when they need help or you aren’t.
You don’t earn them.
Joe would be there for Dorothy and we see him doing so here.
Joe wasn’t there for Dorothy for years, instead insulting her and mocking her while she had to put up with it for Danny’s sake. Joe doesn’t get to claim friendship now.
I mean, was he? We aren’t exactly getting flashbacks.
I’d believe that that guy Joe was, would have unsavory things to day about a mutual acquaintance who was a woman, that were meant to be funny, but were actually just really shitty.
However, I’d also believe that someone like Dorothy, would be viewing every single thing Joe has ever said to her or around her, since that one day he made a truly nasty joke to her, through that same lens. That, no matter what Joe has said to anybody since that day, Dorothy has internally given it the most disgusting reading possible, because she’s already determined that He’s That Guy, because People Are Either Entirely Morally Perfect Or Else They’re Morally Degenerate.
We’re taking Dorothy’s word on whether Joe was awful to her for years after the fact. And, as we’re seeing, Dorothy is both the type of person to get fixated on one detail until is colours every interaction she subsequently has with a person, and the type of person who has a need to morally sort every single thing anybody around her says into “Good” and “Bad” piles.
tl;dr I’m not saying Joe “wasn’t bad” to Dorothy for years. What I am saying is, “Dorothy experienced the worst subjective version of Joe that was possible, because her initial judgement of his character has fully coloured every subsequent interaction with him.” Which is a view of Joe that persists in force, up to this very day. Her internal model of Joe, has always been a caricature of the person, even back when Joe intentionally made himself a living caricature of a horn dog.
She and he agree he joked about her being a lesbian because she wasn’t into him when he was 15. She said it was habitual since then and he didn’t object. We saw him crack a joke about her coming out as lesbian back in first semester. There is no reason to think this wasn’t going on all along.
And this was old Joe. He put her on his “Do List” minutes after she broke up with Danny. He never interacted with women other than to hit on them. That was his whole thing. She didn’t have to fixate on one detail – Joe was doing his best to make himself into a walking talking red flag.
Also, having scanned their tags together, there were more than a few incidents of him saying Dorothy should kiss / makeout with other girls, and at least once where he did the same thing to Roz and Joyce when they were shouting at each other.
I don’t see him asking her to be his friend. I see him being a friend to her, appreciated or not.
You could say that Dorothy made an unsolicited massive dick move which solicited a dick move from Joe.
(Here’s hoping I remembered how to do italics.)
Joe’s aversion to cheaters has already pointed out, so I’d like to highlight his unquestionably horrified reaction when Joyce made a 1-to-1 comparison between the guy who roofied her at that party and the kind of guy who’d have a “do list”.
hell, even before that when the list became public knowledge he set up a table in a public area that literally says “that was me, sorry about that, here’s a donut if you want one”
like the man has standards. low standards maybe, especially for himself, but they’re there, and he has been holding himself to a higher standard ever since he realized his feelings for Joyce, higher still when she reciprocated
Joe: Yes, Dorothy, you are inferior in morality to me. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
Dorothy: NOOO! THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!
Joe: Join me and together we’ll explore Joyce’s sexuality.
Some shippers and fanfickers have been working on this for years.
Turns out that when Vader threw the Emperor down that big hole, it was…well, it meant something different in the subtext, lemme tell you.
Actually Dorothy, I think the hitting on Joyce in this case was unknowlingly because while you knew the actions you didn’t know the subconcious intent (repression == subconcious.)
Somebody needs to assemble a definitive collage of Dorothy freak-out faces. Get on that, people.
I, too, would very much like to see that.
Pencils and paper are cheap.
Joe, buddy, pal, I do actually like you but you really gotta stop teasing Dorothy when she’s clearly having a mental breakdown. I mean after this set of panels. This set of panels was totally warranted by Dorothy’s complete buffoonery? I think we are now calling it?
It’s possible that Joe thinks there won’t be any repercussions, but yeah, that expression from the last panel is really worrying.
The last time we got a Dorothy face like this was when Dorothy admitted that she didn’t know what she was doing with her life anymore, and Joyce told her that it’s not so bad, because she could be undeclared, like Joe!
Realizing that she’s on Joe’s level appears to be Dorothy’s biggest trigger.
Damn, it’s true!
And Joe was there that day.
Is Joe looking for Dorothy to really explode and expel everything in one shot?
You know, he has expressed the idea of being a hate sink before, to Sarah. I don’t know if he’s consciously thinking that here, but getting someone to feel better by taking it out on him has actually crossed his mind.
I’m really hoping that Dorothy’s brain goes to work and she realizes that that joke would only be funny to Joe (and he thinks also to her) if the very concept of her being worse than him is hilarious because it’s not possible.
Here’s to hoping this finally results in Dorothy separating past Joe and current Joe!
That’s the problem, when you’re the type of perfectionist who needs everybody around you to believe you’re perfectly mentally stable and omnicompetent:
When your freaking nonsense hits a limit, and you actually need to break down? They aren’t ready for it, because you never once let them consider that you were capable of acting that way, in the first place.
This is extremely kind of him! He’s actively teasing and undermining her sense of self on an issue because she’s visibly and obviously having a mental breakdown about not just her sexuality, but also her understanding of her relationship to Joyce. This is days after Joyce also pulled the truth out of her and reassured her that she’s not her presidential ambitions.
Bisexual crises over your best friend since college started would be scary for anyone. Now add that to the prolonged crisis Dorothy’s been fighting for a bit and her rigid, stubborn self-confidence that tells her to power through any doubts. This was never going to be easy for her! Joe’s doing the right thing by attacking her weaknesses gently, teasing the truth out of her by refusing to let her build a defense that involves altruism.
This! And at least lately, this exact brand of gentle poking is his go-to around people having meltdowns in his orbit, and it’s super effective.
Is he being nice? No. Nice is oassive and covers shit up with a fake smile. He’s being kind, or trying to be, giving Dorothy the real help of refusing to let her hide the shit that’s hurting her anymore.
I did an edit per the alt text on DMW’s twitter in response to his post for today’s strip
I’m truly impressed with how Joe is handling Dororthy’s mega crash out over Joyce, tbf. I would not handle someone doing this about my girlfriend this well, especially with all the insults and digs that have been peppered in towards him.
And re: The washing machine incident, I fully think Dorothy instigated it out of a mix of jealousy towards Joe/Joyce, her lack of control/spiraling about her sacrifices and being needed/and self gratification.
Joyce was fine with it in the context she had, if a bit apprehensive. But she also did not have all the information for *informed* consent imo? Like Dorothy being into her is a massive bit of information that she was missing there, even if Dotty was in denial at that point.
And people pointed it out back when the plot point happened that it was weird/squicky/etc even if Joyce is written to be totally cool and fine with it- it’s still odd, especially given the context at the time having Joyce essentially yelling to stay out of her business in that sense.
TLDR: Dotty has some serious self reflection to do.
Dorothy hoped that Joyce masturbating would keep her away from Joe.
Which is….really nasty.
I mean? Eh? Yes and no. She’s known Joe a very long time and Joe was a bad guy for a fairly long time and has only recently improved. Wanting to give your friend tools to make rational not pants driven decisions about someone you think is dangerous isn’t nasty, it’s morally grey at best.
Joe started doing stuff people found cute and now all the history of Joe’s past is erased and it’s just Dotty being mean to good ol Joe who’s never done anything wrong ever.
That’s nobody’s real opinion.
Yeah, anyone who believes that never thought Joe did anything wrong. They didn’t need the history of Joe’s past erased.
There’s long been a “Joe did nothing wrong” faction.
The “ethical slut!Joe” faction has indeed been around for a very long time. I feel like at LEAST as long as his argument with Danny about then-Billie’s consent, but definitely as long as his argument with Walky about fragile masculinity.
But I do think there’s some significant rose-colored glasses about all of it. I don’t think this faction remembers his voiced intentions about his first date with Joyce back in the day, and they certainly don’t remember how he used to subscribe people to his “do” list’s RSS feed at the drop of a hat, or what he clearly intended it to be used for. Lots and lots of fuzzy memories of the worst things he said and did, combined with rosy memories of him standing up for women’s ability to consent and rejecting certain stripes of toxic masculinity.
What I’m saying is Joe has always contained multitudes. He was a guy who sometimes had good points even at his worst. It tends to flatten out in one’s memory into either “always a dick” or “always a good guy”.
I mean, still not her place to teach Joyce specifically so she doesn’t do things with Joe?
Like, at a certain point, Dorothy doesn’t really get a say in what Joyce chooses to do. Which I think to some extent was part of Dorothy’s problem. Joyce used to kind of default to Dorothy’s judgement on things. Nothing serious, but yknow.
Oh I know,it’s ridiculous this whole thing, Dottie needs to go to an actual ACTUAL therapist and since she’s no longer racing to be president an ACTUAL DOCTOR too because she is going to snap.
The only thing Joe’s doing wrong here since this is all on Dorathey’s behavior is acting like they are pals.
They aren’t
The easiest way to be a friend is to act like one.
“All the information”. Dorothy being unaware she is into her makes this entire line of thought fucking bullshit. It’s even arguable it’s homophobic but hey let’s not accuse you here of doing something conciously when you didn’t have all the information because that’d be hypocritical ok? So let me explain why instead.
Talking to your friend about masturbation isn’t ‘the normal experience’ but it’s certainly not as weird as many people make it out to be. Friends can have a relationship where they talk about sex stuff and it be completely mutual and just ‘another topic one talks about’. If you have that kind of relationship and said friend is repressed and denied all natural knowledge one uses to handle their sexual feelings is it really that fucking wrong to offer to teach them so they can chill the fuck out? If you agree move on to the next part of my argument otherwise stop there because we are not going to get anywhere I just think you are wrong and you just think I am wrong.
Queer people can have friends and talk about sex shit without them being directed at the friend. So jumping from that to ‘she was hiding something relatively important about the consent’ is putting an assumption on Joyce and definitely putting an assumption on Dorothy in a way that just really isn’t cool. What even causes you to jump there? It’s hard for me to come up with explanations that aren’t something like ‘Joyce would have been more apprehensive if she knew Dorothy liked girls’. Why do I assume it wouldn’t be ‘Joyce didn’t know Dorothy liked Joyce’? Because, DOROTHY HERSELF DIDNT FUCKING KNOW. This is extremely important when we are talking about intent and consent. Let alone the fact that Dorothy ‘being into Joyce’ isn’t even a confirmed thing at this point because she’s too busy having a moral conniption to even ask the question honestly to herself. If she really does like her it’s not a fucking ‘sin’ for that to have been a gradual thing. You don’t know when Dorothy fell in love and honestly, neither does fucking Dorothy! Putting the onus on her for that as if subconciously hid it or used the fact that it waws hidden to prey on her as you have said in other comments, and therefore framing it as if she’s maliciously hiding it is doing basically the same thing as homophobic people do by assuming that since there is interest possible romantically by a queer person that this translates at all sexually. What SHOULD she have done. BESIDES ‘ask herself if she’s into Joyce sooner’ which was obviously ‘not going to happen’ because her life has been a constant train wreck since October.
I think we both agree she has serious self reflection to do, but unless you can answer me why Joyce is ‘somehow’ missing ‘information for her informed consent’ for a reason that isn’t homophobic I’m still filing it as ‘that’s kind of fucked up of you to think’. I don’t like the concept of ‘thought crime’ very much and this get’s conceptually close to that territory so pardon my extreme reaction. Hope you have a good day.
I’m afab, i’m autistic, and I’m queer.
Calling what Dotty did weird, creepy and squicky isn’t homphobic.
The entire point of *this* is that Dotty has been justifying her actions as normal friend things because if she doesn’t that means she’s been making passes at her friend.
If someone wanted to talk to me about mastrubation and they were my friend and I trusted them to be doing it in my best interests, I’d have a very different reaction than if I knew that friend had a secret in-denial crush on me and were only talking to me about it in hopes I wouldn’t excercise that interest towards someone else.
I don’t know why you’re swearing at me, either. You’re getting worked up over an imagined adversary, dude.
Swearing is neutral.
Maybe to you, but people swearing at me I am generally averse to.
That’s deeply unfortunate, for many reasons.
I mean, I imagine most people don’t like being sweared at, but being Autistic my meter for most people probably isn’t correct on most of those counts.
Most people don’t like swearing when it’s like, directly insulting them like “you are an asshole” or “you are a fucking idiot”, unless they are like, one of those very religious type like Joyce was at the start of the comic.
Meaning they disavow swearing in any context.
Rabbit: AnonGrouch was not swearing AT you. AnonGrouch was just using swearwords. As a High School teacher, I was always very aware of the difference. Because the difference is HUGE.
I just swear, it’s a part of how I talk. I will not apologize for it as it was not AT you it was just ’emphatic’ in every case. I will attempt to ‘self filter’ for the sake of conversation so you feel ‘less yelled at’ as that isn’t my intent. Being queer doesn’t mean you can’t be homophobic. That out of the way….
Ok good, from the sound of things it sounds like you don’t disagree on part of the fundamental basis. But you definitely seem to come off as like, idk, intentionally trying to make Dorothy the bad guy for reasons I don’t quite understand yet. Again if Dorothy herself doesn’t know she has a crush it’s not ‘a secret in denial crush’ in the way that would actually matter to consent. Does it recontextualize some stuff? Absolutely. But at least let’s recontextualize the RIGHT stuff and not immediately jump to ‘Dorothy is a creepy predator’. You know what IS hella sus? Watching Joyce sleep. Didn’t get the hint then Dorothy? Hooooooow. But again, this webcomic is about young adult development so ‘yeah ok your level of self awareness is earthshatteringly low’.
I think we can both agree that Dorothy is generally an instructive person who is capable of separating herself from her feelings when she has a higher level care for the outcome of the thing than her own emotions. It’s been displayed in this comic multiple times in multiple ways with multiple levels of restraint. She has a ‘teaching mode’. So yeah, to me it’s completely easy to believe ‘that was one of those moments’ and even if she DID ‘love Joyce in that moment’ (which again we have NO IDEA when it started and to ‘think she should have been accountable for it at all times with her relationship with Joyce is not something I agree with) I would also ‘have believed it was for the stated intention ‘getting Joyce off of being hyperfixated on jumping bones so she could jump bones ‘responsibly”. Dorothy has always supported Joyce’s freedom of choice and honestly it’s a really like… Idk how to put it without being offensive. I feel like if you said that to Dorothy’s face and she knew you knew everything she knows and more she’d feel rightfully insulted. Dorothy could have done a lot to manipulate her away from Joe. Dorothy did not use her power and authority to isolate Joyce or make Joyce solely reliant on her. She didn’t control her means of communication or time being spent alone. She’s been at the worst ‘worried’.
So yeah, I get YOU might have that reaction in Joyce’s position upon hearing the news but I certainly wouldn’t given who Dorothy is and I still don’t see how you can possibly think there is a ‘lack of meaningful consent’ just because Dorothy was oblivious to possible feelings. Again, your only expressed logic hinges on both Dorothy being actively malicious in a way that doesn’t bear out in the facts of how she’s behaved in the comic and thought crime level nonsense if not homophobic nonsense. I’d love for you to explain your position and why you think a malicious reading of Dorothy is warranted despite all evidence to the contrary besides outright disrespect of her character which is the only argument I’ve seen from you so far.
you’re afab, autistic, queer, and still wrong. Not sure what the assigned gender at birth had to do with any of this tho.
In their defense, they’ve been consistently on the receiving end of people accusing them of being infantilizing towards AFAB Autistics throughout every stage of this broader discussion.
As a non-obviously queer person, I can confirm that it’s very frustrating to have your voice dismissed on those topics, based upon the assumption that you are a cishet male who lacks perspective; while I think most people find it annoying, and I’d honestly argue the practice is even unfair or demeaning to queer people, the reality of the situation is that, in these discussions, you sometimes need to “show credentials” to be heard. They were unwilling to be dismissed, or talked over, on those grounds.
Sure, but their retort also contained within it the assumption that they were being dismissed and talked over by cishet allistic men. So they’re getting pushback along the lines of: “and? You’re not the only one here, you don’t speak for all of us.”
You’re in a comment section FULL of trans, neurodiverse, and queer people, and we all know that being a member of a marginalized group doesn’t actually prevent you from holding harmful opinions toward those communities.
Treating queer people who don’t know they’re queer yet (or who aren’t out of the closet) like they are intentionally lying and being predators is actually pretty homophobic but I’m willing to accept it wasn’t your intent. Language policing is wild, though. We’re adults here, swearing is part of it. Unless it was to call YOU a name, I think you’re just going to have to accept that it happens and you can’t control other people’s linguistic choices.
Oh that last line might break Dorothy. Might be time for grippy socks.
Oh, because she’s crazy and belongs in a mental ward, right? That’s what you’re saying?
You know what, I’ve been hard disagreeing with you higher up in the comments, but you’re totally right here. That’s a fucked up thing to imply
Maybe my nerves are just raw because it was a year ago tonight I got sent to one for trying to jump off a bridge, but the whole “grippy socks” thing is fucking disgusting.
I’m glad you’re still here.
Just today I grabbed a pair of socks to wear as I was headed out, then when I went to put them on before putting on my shoes, I realized they were my own grippy socks. So then I went to get another pair, but I forgot that I had just shoved them in my pocket, and then later I went to pay for something and was like, “hm, sure do just have these with me.”
They didn’t let me keep mine, or my scrubs. Which is kind of a shame, because then I could have at least done a 28 Days Later cosplay for Halloween.
I’m genuinely sorry that happened to you. I can relate to an extent (not to the anniversary part), and I can’t stand when people flippantly throw around these terms like they’re jokes, when both suicidality *and* institutionalization are really serious and traumatic things.
Also, I wanted to apologize for jumping down your throat a bit earlier. While we don’t agree on everything, I still could’ve been more polite. Tbh we’re all going through some shit right now, and sometimes it’s easier to lash out at random people when we can’t lash out at those who actually hurt us. So I’m sorry for doing that, and I hope tomorrow is easier.
Honestly, same. Like I said, I guess I’m just extra raw today, but that’s not other people’s problem. So, I’m sorry for being a jackass about it.
Aww I love a good ending.
It’s understandable to be on edge on an anniversary like that. We’re cool
So true!
Important to remember. I’ve been snappy and irritable all evening too.
It’s sometimes easier for me to cope personally by making light of it. But, that’s just me, and it was inconsiderate of me not to think about how others might receive that, especially considering the general state of the world right now.
Internet gesture of comfort.
Glad you’re still here, sorry it’s a shitty fucking anniversary. I really hope you treat yourself to something nice today, even if it’s just a piece of fruit with intention.
I like “fruit with intention”. I’m-a commit aggravated vegetable. First-degree trail mix. Treason salad. Pirating a smoothie.
lmao pre-meditated carrots and hummus.
If it’s any mild consolation, every single person I’ve heard use “grippy socks” as a joke IRL, did so because they learned about them first hand. I’ve yet to encounter an internet troll glom onto the term and use it; it seems to be well-contained to the actual mental health community, at least in the circles I’ve run in.
As someone who has *been* in a mental ward, no, that was not what i was implying. I was saying that she’s been spiraling for a while now, and a direct confrontation like this might make her spiral worse.
My local friend group and I routinely use ‘grippy sock vacation’ lightheartedly when we’re feeling our mental state getting worse. Genuinely I forget sometimes that those kind of jokes don’t land universally, and so I make them off-handedly. Apologies.
In a purely comic way, the idea of Dorothy having a mental shutdown at the idea Joe is her moral superior is indeed actually hilarious.
Just not if she was a real person.
i hate to break it to you, but like every single gifted kid IRL turned into exactly Dorothy in college, and this is about as well as it ever goes down
Wow. I learn so much from reading this. I have no idea what “grippy socks” means, but clearly something severely fraught. I’m off to look the whole thing up, to avoid any accidental references.
All I know is children sometimes get them so they can run around indoors, in shoes-off houses, without having an accident…
Oh. Wow.
The internet gave me a million innocent references to pilates/yoga.
Then one “squicky” one about attractive women and “specifically what it might be like to have sex with them”, hmmm, what can that mean!
And finally what people are referring to here.
I had to look it up, too, but I found the meaning for this context immediately. Nothing about children or sex or whatever, strangely enough.
Try “hospital socks”. Much less noise. My wife has a sizable collection of these from various surgeries. When one is an inpatient for any reason, they issue these so that one does not slip and fall on the hard polished floor when walking about without shoes.
It would appear that I may have come off as genuinely implying that I think Dorothy needs a psych hold, here. No, as someone who’s had to be in a ward, that is not what i was implying. I make jokes like this about my own mental health, and often make such remarks without thinking; i forget not everyone is comfortable with it. Sorry, folks.
These things happen. Don’t sweat it.
Personally, when it’s winter, grippy socks are so nice
Genuinely, if you haven’t, go out and buy some
Well, it’s not the drama from a kiss of chaos but Dorothy’s panic is still delicious
Give me that delicious “my whole world has changed” realisation
There’s nothing wrong with lesbians, says Dorothy! Or bisexual women! Or similarly aligned enby people of similar persuasion! Some of her best friends are queer! However she cannot be. Ohhh no, that would RECONTEXTUALIZE her female friendships and make her ontologically evil.
TFW you’re not homophobic but you’ve got perfectionism so severe every hit to your self-image is apocalyptic.
Dorothy already self-reported that she’s a “probably 2” on the Kinsey scale, way back near the beginning of this comic. Perhaps she was underestimating, but she definitely did not self-identify as completely straight.
I think her actual problem is that she’s discovering that she is attracted to her best friend and probably has been for a long time. That alone is still a pretty big realization, and at very least it’s probably embarrassing for her to admit that it took her so long to figure out. Plus the fact that this will force her to recontextualize many of her own actions.
Blerg. Nevermind. I completely mis-remembered Dorothy’s reply to Danny’s question about her location on the Kinsey scale. As pointed out to me by kind readers of a different comment of mine above.
My apologies for getting it wrong again.
I mean, to be frank, it’s not that it ‘recontextualizes platonic behavior’ as ‘I’ve been using being straight to avoid the repressed feelings and actions I’ve taken in regards to those feelings as totally platonic, and if I AM queer, then I have to acknowledge the behaviors I’ve been engaging in, and my entire self image hinges on being a good and upstanding person, morally.
As someone born in the 50’s, the repression was brainwashed into me. Admittedly my realisation was VERY gradual, and it was of being bi, so it wasn’t that obvious. But it is very very easy (in my opinion!) to have pretty much zero idea of what is going on in the more fundamental parts of your brain.
Reminds me of when I had Gay Thoughts™ in college and went to go say my hail marys in the empty physics building at 2am.
Why the physics building?
Better acoustics.
Makes sense! (-:
It was empty?
Easier mirror for her to come kill you through.
Okay Joe, but that means it’s not impossible for you to be attracted to other men, right?
Just… filing away bi Joe dreams.
This would be SO good.
She should kiss Joyce and he should kiss Walky
That way they can know for sure
my rhythmic “polycule. polycule.” chanting grows ever louder
Please please, Joyce was learning about polycule. Let it happen. Just this once.
On the bright side, Joe doesn’t seem to mind much, and Walky would probably be overjoyed that all his Joyce/Dorothy teasing just got so much more ammunition.
Heh, most comments rule out Walky from all this and others fear a negative (yes, I include myself), but I think you are the first to comment on a different perspective.
Walky has always been the sticking point for as long as Willis has been burying this ship in the subtext.
We know that Joe will go along with letting Joyce do whatever she wants, whenever she wants, without even thinking about whether he’s truly comfortable or not. He’s placed her on a high pedestal, and has made it his life’s mission to not lose her, since he feels so deeply that she’s way out of his league. Joyce could ask to have a train of strangers raw her, and Joe would fold immediately, no matter how he feels.
Walky, though? He might actually care, but the question is, whether or not he does care, will he actually communicate his feelings about the situation adequately? Or, will he Walky it up, and agree to something that isn’t actually good for him?
That’s my real concern tbh. Walky and Joe both have terrible self-worth, and both see their partners as an unachievable ideal that they’re lucky to have any hope of securing. So, my main concern is them both reflexively agreeing to be open, and then both suffering for it, and not even having the language to sit with themselves and ask themselves why. That would be the saddest thing, to me.
It might actually blow up Walky and Dorothy if he tries that tbh.
I feel like Walky will either try to be way too chill about it and blow up the relationship or learning about Dorothy doing this will destroy the relationship by him being very Not Chill about it.
Him being Not Chill doesn’t feel in character, but he’s kind of been on an emotional roller coaster with Dorothy. First they were FWB, then she loves him, then she goes on break with him for grades, oh now we’re broken up, now he’s with Lucy, now Dorothy is trying to break him and Lucy up? Now he’s single and can go back to Dorothy, now they’re back together and it just… idk, I feel like I’d be at the end of my rope if I were Walky. Dorothy keeps switching things up on him and he’s always expected to deal with it because he’s a chill guy. But he hasn’t seemed as starry eyed this go around as he was before, I think he’s kind of heading to his own mini-crash out. I think I was on team “Let Walky be single for a little bit” after Garbage Skow sank.
But regardless, I don’t think him and Dorothy are gonna make it past this event.
This.
I don’t think they were ever going to last for very long, though. Everything Dorothy has said about getting back together with him has had more than a whiff of “futilely trying to turn back time”. She didn’t want to be with Walky again, she wanted to be her first-semester self again.
And Walky, for his part, has seemed convincingly into Lucy for the first time ever, jealous of Jacob, drawn in by Lucy’s new self-confidence, etc. Which isn’t to say I think he and Lucy will get back together, or even necessarily that Walky would want that if he had the opportunity — mostly I just think it’s Willis sending us pretty clear signals that Walky’s head and heart are not in this renewed relationship with Dorothy.
After Dorothy tried to titilate him with the possibility of a threesome with Joyce, though, I doubt he’d be terribly surprised by this revelation.
Dorothy at this point you just need to give in and embrace it.
You broke up with Walky because he was ‘distracting you’, and kept yo-yoing all over him even after that point. Then you threw him together with a different girl, then you tried to pry him AWAY from the girl YOU THREW HIM AT, WHILE HE WAS STILL WITH HER, and then right after he got broken up with you kinda guilted him into getting back together with you immediately??
Honey you are a mess and you have always been a mess! And I love it tbh!
Dorothy “Why Won’t Anyone Cheat With Me?” Margot Keener.
Oooh, that’s a good one.
Sometimes you need to knock someone down a few pegs.
For their own good.
And enjoy it.
ALSO WHY IS JOE MORE ATTRACTIVE IN EVERY PANEL HE’S IN
he’s giving consistently more evidence over time, that he can trusted to Not Be A Shithead
which is the single most attractive quality in a straight man, and it’s not even close
That would make sense but it goes against what I know my taste in men to be.
I applaud that her concerns aren’t due to like.. internalized homophonic or anything but rather the more moral/ethical fact that if she was she’d be disrespecting a friend’s committed relationship AND cheating on Walky at the same time.
Sending the boob pic was all kinds of messed-up and crossing boundaries, but Having feelings is not cheating.
Willis, I imagine, would be pretty bored just redoing Danny’s bisexuality arc with Dorothy, especially since Dorothy was the one to talk him through it and she seemed pretty nonplussed. It’s way more interesting to make it more about Dorothy’s rigid moral compass and exceedingly high expectations she applies to herself.
Well, he didn’t say “reassure”.
Yeah Joe, poke that bear.
Now I’m trying to find any way to categorize Dorothy as a bear. She’s definitely not a big hairy gay dude, so that one’s out. She’s not a mom (unless we’re about to learn some serious shit about her high school years), so the “mama bear” thing might not fully apply, she’s all thin and bony so I doubt she gives bear-like hugs, and I certainly wouldn’t describe her as “of very little brain” so even the Pooh comparison falls short.
She does her best to protect the people she loves. That’s got “mama bear” energy all over it.
If we go off energy and vibes, I definitely see it. I was thinking more literally on the “mama” half.
In this particular scenario, would you say she’s smarter than the average bear?
Honestly, I’m just imagining them in the “dp you want to poke the bear” scene from Agatha All Along and cracking myself up.
Heehee
Joe is a pretty good friend
dang what a roast ,someone call an ambulance
I’m going to call it right now: Joyce has already seen the pic and was completely nonplussed by it. After getting two separate boob photos from Dorothy, Joe and Joyce probably worked out what happened and took it as the prank Dorothy convinced herself it was. This whole conversation has been solely for the benefit of Dorothy.
Joe in 3 days (our time): “Holy shit, I was kidding at first. Glad to help you work through this, though.”
Later that day
Joyce: that pic Dorothy sent was so funny
Joe: yes, a joke
She saw the Jennifer pic! It wouldn’t surprise me if she was like “oh, jeez, that’s embarrassing of me to do,” then moved on with her day quietly, sending Joe and Dorothy here.
Oh, Dotty. All meaning in this is assigned by you. Even Joe isn’t especially fussed, as witness the matinee of Not The Right Time Theater in the last panel.
Maybe he’s trying to flip her back into rage? Maybe he thinks that the (to him) self evident LOL of thinking she even COULD be worse than him will snap her out of the spiral pattern. I don’t know. (I kind of hope so, Joe could be good for Dorothy in much the same way as he’s often good for Joyce: gently accepting ribbing to make the hard things less so.)
Girl it’s fine you’ve been in denial purgatory so hard it’s basically a freebie. Just don’t do it again without havin’ a chat first, ya scamp!
Wow, it’s really happening.
That’s not a nice way to deal with her cognitive dissonance.
I mean, Dorothy hasn’t had a very nice way of thanking Joe for trying to help her, with something that’s clearly very serious to her, either.
Dorothy, Charlie Brown wants his facial expressions back.
JOE YOU ARE NOT HELPING
Okay the only solution here is, Joyce and Dorothy need to sleep together and Joe and Walky get to watch off panel so as not to spoil the Slipshine comic
Nah, all four together
pounding fists rhythmically on table
OR-GY! OR-GY! OR-GY! OR-GY!
Why don’t Joe and Walky get to sleep together, too? This is bullshit.
Walky shows up in a long wig and leather jacket, speaking in a somewhat passable copy of Sal’s accent. Joe isn’t sure how to feel.
“Walky, take that shit off. This is just too unrealistic. You know it is.”
“Honestly, thank God. I was gonna need therapy after that.”
Walky discover she is trans storyline.
That’s step 2 of this plan
Dorothy, there’s something to be said for being honest about your feelings, processing and thinking them through and then deciding what to do about them.
But yes, I know, this isn’t Healthily Processing Emotions of Age.
I be disappointed if there is healthy emotion processing before at least a couple of years of trainwrecking.
Thinking about it, i guess we’re kind of in the healthy emotion processing arc for a lot of the characters. Joe’s doing it. So’s Joyce. Becky’s not doing so bad. Even Ruth’s processing some of her stuff. There’s progress for a lot of characters.
Red Sex Refuckstion
objectively funniest grav for this particular comment
People, people, look, this can all be resolved easily enough;;Joyce spanks Dorothy for her presumptiveness, Joe films it for their Only Fans, every one’s a winner, yeehaw
Especially Willis since he gets that sweet, sweet slipshine money.
Oh dear bsod incoming
A fatal error has occurred, this Dorothy will now shut down.Would you like to send a report?
I dunno, Dorothy, I don’t know if you can say you “knowingly” hit on someone when you didn’t fully realize/acknowledge what you were doing at the time.
FATALITY
That’s what happens when you try to make your own actions look better by baselessly reframing someone else’s to make them look worse than you.
Joe dealt psychological damage, he had no idea there was a multiplier applied to it.
…
Okay, now my imagination has started acting up. What if some of Dorothy’s hatred of Joe… is gender envy. I’ve known guys like that. (I’ve been guys like that.) Guys who hyperfocus on hating everything gross about men and reacting violently towards misogyny as an expression of self-hatred- it’s hard to notice because those are ostensibly good things, even if you’re doing them to punish a hypothetical alternate you that you feel represents you giving and accepting you’re throwing away your “worth as a woman” and ethical high ground.
(See? It’s right in line with everything else she’s going through!)
And then Joyce can be straight and OT3 anyway! Which saves Becky some screaming.
*giving up
I don’t think there needs to be anything special behind Dorothy’s hatred of Joe beyond having to deal with him as Danny’s best friend for years in high school.
Tbh, I think it’s more likely Billie/Jennifer is trans than Dorothy at this point in time (though I’m not entirely sure why I get those vibes.)
idk why either but I was definitely getting SOLID trans-masc vibes the last few times Jennifer was on screen.
Joe absolutely refusing to let Dorothy place herself on a pedestal to avoid answering the question if she’s gay for Joyce is a perfect way of handling this and I love him for it.
Joe is being a good and rather believable childhood friend here. Maybe they were never that close, but they’ve known each other for a long time.
Yeah, honestly there’s real sibling energy here. It’s cute.
(simpsons voice) and if you pause the video just right, you can see the EXACT moment her sense of ego collapses.
Also as an aside to everything else here, I really like Joes expression in the second panel. It feels very sweet and sympathetic. Somehow joe is actually the right person to be having this conversation.
That last panel _definitely should have been red, with the Kill Bill ‘siren’ sound effect going off.
See, I was thinking more like “Wasted!” pops up before gving you the prompt to reload your last save.
Joe is right and he should say it.
Oh Joe is having FUN XD
Man, Joe’s enjoying getting to ride the high horse for once.
Dorothy having a meltdown every time she discovers she’s only human is a very, very relatable feeling.
Now if only she’s stop acting like there’s a loophole.
Not going to go through all 400 comments, but I’m glad I’m seeing more people realize Dorothy pushing Joyce into masturbating and her reasons behind it were not above board at all.
This is just my guess, but I’d say her reasons were probably 80% ‘below board’. In the sense that they were 80% subconscious at that point.
I’m talking about Dorothy just saying to Joyce’s face “You don’t know better.” Super gross infantalization and negation of Joyce’s agency that was glossed over because so many people were getting their rocks off. I saw very few people address just how fucked the situation was at the time.
To add, this was the same afternoon/evening of Sarah and Dorothy slutshaming Joyce until fucking Roz came to her rescue about taking birth control pills and that engagement ended with Joyce saying “Leave me alone about this.”
The next time Dorothy spoke to Joyce (that we saw) was her saying “So, you think you want to fuck Joe. Here’s why you’re incorrect.” Dorothy’s subliminal feelings are irrelevant.
Eh, just because the situation is fucked, doesn’t mean it is damaging. Joyce really needed to get her rocks off and she did while setting her boundaries properly, and her boundaries in that specific instance on the washing machines were respected.
You were reading a very different comment section then, because the whole thing was coke full of people getting mad at it.
See Dorothy, this is why you have to run away to Yale.
Panel 5 “Dorothy Face” is not “Joyce Face”, but it sure is dang close.
Also, yeah, I had not thought of the “cheating” angle. Good catch, Dorothy-who-definitely-can’t-be-into-Joyce.
The general commentariat has been rooting for Joyce to cheat on Joe with Dorothy for as long as Joe and Joyce who’ve been a couple. The first iteration of this was calling for Dorothy to cheat on Walky with Joyce.
The cheating angle has been fantasized by many commenters, I’m not sure how it could be missed.
I really haven’t seen this, but I’m not a comments scholar, I just wanna be the voice to say “yeah I don’t know what this one is talking about.” Cause damn that’s a hefty accusation to people, like, damn.
I honestly haven’t seen a lot of that.
I’ve seen a lot of people shipping the two of them, but shipping two people who have other canon relationships isn’t really calling for them to cheat. It’s mostly just handwaving those other relationships out of the way to get where you want.
Joe couldn’t resist twisting the knife in the wound ^^u
Love to see Dorothy questioning her feelings for her best friend. Joe is having fun with this conversation. Maybe that’s mean. But is not so hard to be on his side.
Joe’s only giving what he gets here, sure, but I’m still not sure I dig the fact that Joe is the one having this conversation with Dorothy, if only because I think literally anyone else would be getting less hostile and more honest answers from her.
Then again… if this is what it takes to break through her obvious denial, then maybe this is fine after all?
Whatevs, I’m here for trainwrecks and I gottem!
Less hostile? Yeah. More honest? Noooope.
Exactly. Any other person who could be confronting Dorothy about this, is somebody Dorothy would not be straight-forward with. Because she cares what those people think of her, and sees those relationships as constructs which are Her Responsibility to perfectly maintain. Dorothy would immediately shift the focus of the conversation to “not her” ASAP, because that’s the space where she’s comfortable in relationships.
Joe is the perfect person to bring this up with her, because Dorothy does not give a shit what Joe thinks of her, and holds herself in a full, objective position of moral superiority to him; therefore, he can actually bore directly through her Wall Of Deflection, because it’s easier for him to make the situation about the thing its immediately about, and not Dorothy simply trying to micromanage their relationship back into the place where Dorothy was comfortable. Which she is extremely adept at doing to her entire “actual” support network, since she’s conditioned basically everybody in it, to see her as the authority on Making Things Work.
It’s also a nice wake up call that the person she built for herself is a lie and probably deserves to be destroyed because that’s what college is about, shattering your delusions about yourself.
She was never better.
She was just a person.
I have a lot of conflicting feelings about Joe’s response here, but I will admit it. It’s funny.
Also, since this was Amber’s idea, I need to ask her: ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED??
As usual, she’s deeply confused as to why everybody hasn’t started fucking by now, because that’s what happens in all the fiction she uses to replace engaging with real life
Even if Dorothy has been into Joyce for a while, it’s pretty clear that she probably didn’t realize it until now. Speaking as someone who thought I was straight until my 30s when I realized I’m bi, it’s surprisingly easy to be bi without knowing it for a long time.
Amen, my dude. It literally took my fiancé to point it out to me.
I was in my mid-thirties when I realized I’m not bi, I’m ace – it was just that ‘I am equally uninterested in both sexes’ is the same statement as ‘I am equally interested in both sexes’. Confusing!
I am too Aso (a-social, which is distinct from anti-social) to be very sexually active. I am not, however, Ace, nor am I Aro. I like sex, and when I am in love I like romantic gestures. I’m not good at them, but that’s a skill issue
Dorothy, you keep saying “can’t” when clearly you mean “mustn’t”.
“I shan’t… unless? Nay”
*no better than Joe? but that would make me…h-h-h-human!*
Is it bad that I kind of love Joe’s twist of the knife in panel 5? Not because I think it’s “deserved”. But it’s comedy grounded in truthbombs, it’s lighthearted in Joe’s bro-bantery way, and it may end up being helpful in the long run. Plus, it’s just a good repartee. Joepartee.
I honestly wrote way more about it but editing it enough to the point where I would actually ever click post would have taken… some amount of time I’m not not going to say out loud. Which is also how long I’d already spent typing it. Not, like, an excessive or embarassing amount of time, why would you even assume that.
Also, hi, new commenter, long time reader. I may in fact have been one of the QC guest strip immigrants from ten years ago as mentioned by someone in a comment the other day. I don’t remember exactly but I believe I’ve been reading for around that long. sup
God I love the way these two bounce off each-other; great job, Willis!
There are too many people here to reply to so I just want to remind everyone Joe was ready to fuck Sarah immediately after starting his relationship with Joyce, and 100% knew what he was doing. How long ago was this, people who know the in-world timeline?
The incident
So please. If you just hate Dorothy, at least don’t pretend that Joe is on higher moral ground or significantly more mature. It’s nice that he’s changing for Joyce, I like him a lot as new Joe, but they’re all literally weeks into their current relationships IIRC, and they’re all like 18-19. Nobody here is mature
Joe makes it clear he’s joking in the last panel.
You and I read that differently lmao.
Yeah, I took it as absolutely him remembering he’s in a relationship.
Joe would never cheat voluntarily because it’s a trauma button for him.
Look at that smile in the second to last panel. Is that an expression you have ever seen on Joe while taking sex seriously? No, that is obviously a forced over the top fake smile where he cannot contain his mirth.
Not really, especially since he is actually taking off his clothes.
It reads like a reflex response, kind of like when Joyce slips back into creationism before correcting herself.
Which is literally what Joyce CALLS it in the next comic: she says change is gradual and that one mistake doesn’t mean he ISN’T changing.
Like, the textual reading presented by Joyce’s defense and the strip’s own alt text is “Joe was so caught off guard and excited by the offer that he briefly forgot he was in a relationship”, which I don’t think condemns him to death or anything, but which definitely did not help Sarah’s opinion in that moment.
Oh Dorothy… bit of advice: calm down friend no one minds if you flirt with Joyce
Well, Mary probably does, but fuck Mary.
I refuse to fuck Mary. I’m a big fan of casual sex, but I need to respect my very temporary partner. I’ve got plenty of self-disdain, I don’t need to add to it.
At the risk of sounding prudish… I hope that doesn’t end in polycules (at least not with these characters). Faans is the only story I’ve read (and I admit there are many, many stories I haven’t read) that made it feel like it worked for all of the participants and wasn’t just fanservice (faanservice?). I feel like Walky and Joyce (OTP-ness from their own story aside) wouldn’t work in those sorts of scenarios. And I hope/feel New Joe wouldn’t like it either!
For what it’s worth, polycules don’t necessarily (and in fact generally do not) mean that everyone in the polycule is dating each other. A polycule that would work for this group would be W shaped:
Joe is dating Joyce
Joyce is dating Dorothy and Joe
Dorothy is dating Walky and Joyce
Walky is dating Dorothy
That’s a lot more common than everyone dating everyone else in the group at the same time.
You need one more to really make it a W shape, so I like to throw in Walky also dating Amber.
Y’know, Booster did mention Dorothy and Walky finding a unicorn…
[gasp] They Left Her In Their Bed!
Meh, I wasn’t fussed about exactitudes.
Fair, I’ve just brought up the W shape (It’s Walky! long game reference potential) before, and that’s how I would format it.
Also, I did like Walky and Amber together, though I’ve generally likes him and Dorothy more.
I don’t remember any of other thing where a trouple happened fanservice or not. And even if there were, that’s good! Poly relationships are already incredibly underrepresented outside of fanfiction, if they exist at all that is good in of itself.
Nobody is a cheater in this storyline. Everything started with a mistake. But Joe was waiting for this ball to come to him for centuries.
Ehhhhh, look, I absolutely love Dotty, but no, sending the titty pic to Joyce was not a mistake. Joyce sending one to *her* was, but she made a decision to reciprocate, and she clearly did so in a hopeful, probing fashion. That’s cheating. You could argue it’s pretty minor cheating, she only *just* got back together with Walky, and it’s much less egregious than most cheating stories, but it is still, as a singular act, kind of a betrayal of her relationship.
There’s a tendency of some people to treat these things as binary when they’re not. Not all cheating is equal, but I don’t see how you can define what Dotty did as not cheating unless you apply a pretty restrictive definition to the term.
Cheating depends on promises. And in the case of vague and non-verbal promises it depends on intent. It is possible for Dotty to not be aware of her feelings, which means there was no intent to cheat (I think, good space for a discussion on the nature of free will there (not whether it exists(that’s a different conversation), but what it would be like assuming it exists.))
Doesn’t mean she doesn’t owe Walky a full accounting and an apology.
“maybe your faith should’ve been less about who you were better than.”
Yeah, if there’s one trait Dorothy should burn out of herself, it’s her instinctive ‘I am the grownup here, you are all idiot children in need of my sage guidance and perfection’ attitude. She ISN’T any better than most of her agemates and friends, with very few exceptions that her friends are ALSO better than. (Mary, mainly. Also Raidah.)
Ironically, losing that attitude might allow her to become Presidential material.
Evidence beg to differ.
YUUUUUUUUUUP. Dorothy, Mary, and Raidah are all different sides of the same coin.
a three-sided coin? LOL XD
Okay, I gonna need you to explain that one before it doesn’t make any sense to me, especially the inclusion of Mary there.
despite the fact that he’s been with many women you can’t really say he ever cheated, since he made it pretty clear from the beginning that he had no intentions of pursuing those relationships beyond a fling
Joe has always been honest, open, and supportive in his sex life.
Romantically he has zero experience, but he isn’t making as many stupid mistakes as I expected.
He doesn’t make romantic mistakes, because he’s approaching romanticism seriously and sincerely.
His previous pattern of behavior was deliberately honed to prevent him from ever being able to make mistakes romantically, by precluding any possibility of romance. So, he was never really “serious and sincere” when he was only focusing on his sex life. His sex life was actually a self-protective behavior, to try to prevent him from failing at the thing he actually took seriously, and cared about.
And in so doing, while he avoided romantic failures (by avoiding romance) he still failed and hurt people, as Joyce strongly pointed out to him after the apology donuts.
Thanks to his dad, he focused so strongly on the “cheating is bad” side that he ignored that other things could also be bad. And no, he was never “honest, open, and supportive” in his sex life. He was basically honest about his lack of interest in anything beyond sex*, but not really much else.
*Or was he? It’s not like he told Joyce about his intent to “fix her with his penis” before that disastrous first date. Possible early season weirdness though.
lmao, twist it
Ohhh, girl. Oh, honey.
Given what Dorothy knows about Joe’s past, the whole cheating comment is actually really shitty of her. Worse, I doubt she even notices because she assumes Joe has ALL the misogyny.
That’s the point I tried to make elsewhere, but I think I failed. Dorothy is not wrong to have previously identified that all Joe’s outward behavior was misogynistic; however, Dorothy fully projects onto Joe, like, this persona of the “Perfect Misogynist.”
Dorothy doesn’t hate Joe, as much as she hates the idea of Joe that she’s built up in her head, after dealing with him for years. But her idea of Joe never actually represented reality, even during the time period where Joe was deliberately acting as misogynistic as possible.
However badly he was acting, Dorothy still always saw it as worse. I fully believe she just ASSUMED that Joe cheated on people with impunity, because why wouldn’t she? He says and does all that other bad stuff! He’s a Bad Guy! So he does every thing that Bad Guys do!
1) I don’t think Dorothy’s saying Joe’s cheated. She’s saying that her “cheating” is as bad as his past bad behavior, not that it’s the same.
2) What does she know of his past? I mean, she knows about his objectifying women and the list and all that and she also knows his dad cheated and probably that he hit on every woman in sight, but I don’t think she has any reason to think Joe’s whole pose was to avoid cheating like his dad did.
Gonna reiterate: Danny probably barely knows about that last part, if at all. Joe and Danny have both said things recently that indicated Joe has been opening up to Joyce emotionally in ways he never has with Danny, due to toxic masculinity.
Oh, going for the kill there Joe. Granted Dorothy used a comparison to you as an insult and you aren’t actually wrong so… fair enough
Is Dorothy breaking out in stress hives? Suddenly, there are red dots on her chest.
She should send a pic of the dots to Joyce to get a second opinion.
They go all the way down, too.
“Suddenly”???
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/running-2/
Every time her freckles come out there’s at least one person worried she has hives… I’m so sorry, hah.
Schrodinger’s Freckles XD
Ya’ll those are her freckles
ahh 600 comments thats what im talking about
And only some have been personal insults!
HECK YOU!
Dat’s the good stuff.
Just 15 more… >:D
C’mon, sending your female friends a jokey picture of your boobs in a bra is not cheating, I don’t care if you’re subconsciously attracted to them. The action itself is harmless.
Kind of the point is that is what not jokey at all.
I’m pretty sure there’s some fancy Greekish or Latinish term for If A then B, and I don’t want B to be true therefore A must be impossible.
… ah, here it is “Appeal to consequences”.
While I was expecting a borderline offensive rejection from Dorothy….
I was NOT expecting full-on confirmation from Dorothy.
I’m not hearing a no…..
I don’t know maybe it’s the time blindness but I never understood why Joe got so much haye he was never a bad person it seems he was surprisingly an ethical slut and his bad understanding of women seemed firmly to be bro stupidity and not actual malice and he never seemed to support or like assault or even ball at rejection or consent he just was stupid dude and he’s learning
Wow.
Read the comic again, but this time pay attention to how many times he gets told to fuck off before he fucks off.
Yeah no, Joe’s reputation as a horndoggin dudebro proceeds him
Joe was a complicated dude.
The thing that made him not great isn’t that he was an ethical slut who didn’t commit, though it was something he was doing to attempt to shield himself from hurting other/potentially philandering because he believes it’s inevitable because of his dad.
Biggest things Joe did that was shitty:
The ‘Do’ List, and the fact it was subscribable, in addition to how dehumanizing some of the comments seemed
Not taking ‘No’ for an immediate answer (I think. I feel like it was with Sarah early early on?)
(outside the bedroom. Insofar as we’ve seen he respects consent *in* the bedroom/if they change their mind. )
Yes his biggest mistake was the do kist which he accepted responsibility for and even tried to make ammends for giving out donuts and deleting it. It was horrible and when he wa pointed out how awful it was he was shaken. Joe was good at seducing women. B ut bad at understanding them. It really seemed ike he was a dumbass not actually hateful he just had the wrong ideas. Because of his dad and is growing fast now.
According to WoW, Joe was very big on consent. But it took him a looong time to show us this in the comic.
I think we saw hints of it. I think the issue is Joe doesn’t seem heinous on comparison to others we see like literally there are far worse men so Joe seems stupid not actually problematic we have people like the incelerator recently and the guy who drugged Joyce and the history of Billie and her friend. So Joe comes across as merely dumb and horny but not really harmful especially when he doesn’t double down about the do list.
Joyce/Dorothy is everything to me. These last few days have been so #blessed.
Oh DoA comment sections about Dorothy’s sexuality, why can’t I quit you.
My $2.05:
— Joe is taking this really well, but I wonder at his reasons.
One possibility is that Joe knows he has nothing to worry about because the answer to Dorothy’s question at the end of yesterday’s strip was: “Yes, she saw it, and she had a complete nonreaction. She currently thinks it was a joke or a mistake. I didn’t disabuse her of that notion, but I suspected there might be something else going on here, so I came to talk to you about it.”
In this scenario, the only thing Joe could add that would be MORE crushing for Dorothy would be something like, “The reason why I haven’t told Joyce what I suspect yet is because she thinks you’re her best friend who would never do anything to hurt her, and I didn’t want to shatter that illusion.”
I don’t think this is terribly likely, but it did occur to me.
Another possibility: Joe isn’t upset because more than anything else, he wants Joyce to be happy, and he fully intends to let Joyce choose which of them would make her happier. This would be a pretty crushing blow to Dorothy’s current image of Joe. Very “King Solomon” in terms of proving which of them deserves* Joyce more.
But it might also be reflective of Joe’s own self-image problems. He’s indicated before that he was fine just being Joyce’s friend, and I think on some level it might be a relief for him to imagine going back to that. I think he’s probably still at least somewhat worried that he’s going to wind up hurting Joyce, the way he thinks he almost hurt Liz**.
In this reading, Joe isn’t upset right now because he thinks even IF Joyce leaves him for Dorothy, that would be okay. This reading depends on Joe thinking Dorothy is one of the best people he knows.
Lots of readers would disagree with Hypothetical Joe about that last part, and Dorothy would be right there with them, but I’m not talking about anyone else’s opinion here: just Hypothetical Joe, who I agree has predicated his joke in the last panel here on the idea that it’s absurd to suggest Dorothy might not be a better person than him.
* This is ofc a false dichotomy. Romantic interest isn’t a prize you earn by being the most worthy, it’s a feeling that either happens or doesn’t. Someone can be the Most Deserving and still not be a person you want to date.
** Emphasis on this being Joe’s perspective. I can’t really blame Liz for saying what she said because she was deep in her own miserable struggling-to-escape-brainwashing feelings, but I can definitely say that it wasn’t fair to Joe. No matter how guilty Joe might feel, having sex would have been a mutual decision on both their parts, and her shame and self-loathing would not have been his fault.
— This strip has also raised the question of whether or not Joe and Dorothy are friends, and I don’t think they are, though this conversation might be the first step toward changing that.
I think Dorothy and Joe have known each other for a long time, but that they spent that whole time just sort of tolerating each other for Danny’s sake. I don’t think Joe disliked Dorothy as actively as she disliked him, but in their early interactions, he often seemed amused by her misfortunes.
I also don’t think Joe has to think he and Dorothy are friends to have shown up here, either because he wants to protect his relationship or out of empathy. It’s not like he wasn’t, himself, recently in her shoes here, being in denial about having feelings for Joyce.
— Currently, I don’t think Joyce has seen the photo. I think Joe has had Joyce’s phone ever since the text came in last night, and I don’t think she’s noticed it’s missing. But given this approach, I am tentatively placing bets on “Joyce won’t be moved by the photo when she finally sees it”. It’s not really the outcome I want (and nor is “Joyce and Dorothy cheat on Joe and Walky”, for the record) — but it’s the direction I feel the narrative is currently headed.
My main source of hope for anything else is currently that it might be too close to a retread of Becky’s coming out arc, but it’s also been like ten years since that happened, and Willis might just have a different enough angle on this that it doesn’t feel redundant.
In terms of, like, textual evidence, I can point to a lot of Very Gay things Joyce and Dorothy have done together or said about each other, and Joyce’s most recent questionable line was definitely this (May, 2024), but. imho recent events have felt moooostly like one-sided longing on Dorothy’s end, while Joe increasingly supplants Dorothy in Joyce’s life (see: this beat (August, 2024)).
I’d be happy to be wrong, because I’ve shipped it for a long time, but yeah. These are my expectations.
Still wouldn’t be queerbaiting, FWIW. Dorothy coming to terms with being more bi than she thought is more than enough to prevent it from being queerbaiting. I’ll just, you know, be sad. As will Dorothy, if the last panel of yesterday’s strip is anything to go by.
— What about Walky in all of this?
…What about him?
Dorothy should definitely have a conversation with him, but Dorothy/Walky Take 2 has been doomed from the start, not by Joyce but because neither of them are really that into each other right now.
Dorothy is clearly chasing the simplicity of her first few weeks at IU, and hoped that dating Walky would take her back to who she was then, but it hasn’t worked.
Walky, meanwhile, is just as clearly on the rebound from Lucy, and he seems more hung up on her than he was at any time when they were actually dating.
Which is not to say I think Walky and Lucy should get back together? Lucy has no reason to be interested in a second try, especially not when Jacob is giving her everything she wanted from Walky but didn’t get — very much including feeling physically desired. But Walky’s heart isn’t in his new relationship, either. He probably needs to be single for a while, so that he can sort out what — if anything — he actually wants romantically.
OTOH, he and Dorothy are kiiiind of on the same page this time… there would be nothing wrong with them continuing a FWB relationship if it was what they both wanted, and Dorothy weren’t maybe, you know, in love with and longing for someone else.
— And on that note: no, I don’t think sending the photo to Joyce counts as cheating, nor do I think we’re meant to. I think Dorothy is in a shame spiral and that Joe is teasing her about it, but I think Dorothy created the photo at all because Amber triggered genuine anxiety in her with the suggestion that sending a pic back would be the Normal, Platonic, Heterosexual Thing to do, and I think when it failed to send, Dorothy felt the first stirrings of… something identifiable.
(I think she felt disappointed, but not quite sure why.) (And then, as soon as she hit “resend”, a rush of regret.)
(I also think she’s been trying not to be anxious about the total silence from Joyce ever since, and that she stayed home instead of following everyone else to their math class because of a vague but powerful reluctance to face Joyce and see — whatever reaction, or lack thereof, there would be.)
TL;DR: I don’t think Dorothy has the necessary intent here to have cheated. I think she’s just reframing it that way now, after the fact, just as she’s also reframing her efforts to break up Joe and Joyce. But I don’t think Dorothy is an evil schemer here. I think she’s just a huge mess.
Oh, Li, ain’t nobody got time to read all that. 🤨
Nice to see theresone sane take at least. Lots of commenters taking some kind of extreme view or another abojt characters or actions. Few account for the complexity of each character and the context of the actions. Thanks for typing this all out
skf;lsk well thank you, I tried!
I read it all, and I agree with many of your takes (though I’m not on the “Dotty/Walky is doomed” train), but while I did have energy enough to read it all and appreciate the salient points made with helpful links for example, I don’t have the energy to bat my own thoughts around at you so I hope this comment suffices!
Thank you!!
Also, completely fair!
I’m a multi-shipper and I kind of wanted them to get back together because I liked his relationship with her best of the relationships he’s been in… but I was already getting Bad Vibes even before Joe knocked on Dorothy’s door and suddenly Willis was definitely going to address this possibility in a concrete way.
It’d be very neat if instead we got some sort of poly ‘ship here where they weren’t all dating each other but were somewhat intermingled.
I love this character analysis! I’m gonna start looking out for your comments lol
Well, jeez, thanks, haha.
I’ll try to break the next one down into more bite-sized chunks.
Lovely take on the whole situation, very thorough!
damnit why Jason gravatar
666 COMMENTS HELL YEAH!!!!
IT’S SHOWTIME!!!!
*plays “BeelteJuice Opening” on hacked muzak*
Excellent number. Shame we had to ruin it.
Joe: *Ivan Drago voice* I will break you.
Daaannnggg. About 700 comments?