After her brother goes missing, Samantha vows to become a Knight and help those around her in the Kingdom of St. Helena.
Wychwood
Varethane
When Tiara's pyrokinesis is finally noticed, she is captured by a magical research organization for study. If she cooperates, she could be helping to save humanity from a dire threat - but can she trust them?
[un]Divine
Ayme
A highschool senior thought giving up his soul for a demon was a good idea. It wasn't.
How to be a Werewolf
Shawn Lenore
Malaya Walters was bitten by a werewolf as a child. After being raised by her human family, she faces the chance to learn what being a werewolf is really like as an adult.
Fairmeadow
Kendra P. / KP
A wayward soldier finds herself in a pacifist commune deep in the wilderness of a war-weary land. Living in isolation brings her closer to those she was sworn to kill than she could ever imagine - but also threatens to tear the place apart.
Sam & Fuzzy
Sam Logan
Troubled by gangster rodents, lovesick vampire stalkers, or confused ninja assassins? Don't panic! Sam and Fuzzy are here to help. (For a reasonable fee.)
Spinnerette
Krazy Krow, Rocio Zucchi, Pablo Rey
When a lab accident gives Heather Brown spider powers and six arms, she does what any midwest comic geek would do: Become Ohio's #3 superhero!
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.
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.
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?
Shaderunners
Alex Assan, Lin Darrow
A ragtag band of bootleggers open a speakeasy for bottled colour in the greyscale city of Ironwell.
Far to the North
Allison Shaw
Kelu turns to the monsters of her remote mountain home when her family is held hostage by outsiders.
Girl Genius
Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio
In a time when the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war, Mad Science rules the World...with mixed success.
Clockwork
Chikuto
Cog Kleinschmidt is a diligent, quiet worker at the Mercia Fortress, the world power's leading stronghold. His orderly life is thrown into chaos when an enemy kingdom sends a diplomat for peace talks. This diplomat needs something from Cog - whether he agrees to their terms or not!
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.
The Witch Door
Anni K.
Katariina Lehto discovers her neighbor is a witch called Jousia Muotka. Jousia introduces Katariina to the strange people and places beyond the witch door...
No End
Erli, Kromi
A queer romance about people attempting to build lives in a cold, post-apocalyptic world ravaged by hordes of undead.
Goblins
Ellipsis
A fantasy RPG as told through the eyes of the low-level monsters.
Real Science Adventures
Brian Clevinger
Spin off stories and other adventures from the world of Atomic Robo!
Drugs & Wires
Mary Safro, Io Black
Dan used to be a VR operator until his brain got fried by malware. Now he's stuck delivering packages in a post-Soviet hellhole all while trying to adjust to his new life and find some answers.
Awaken
Koti Saavedra/Flipfloppery
Superpowers, monsters and conspiracies. Piras, the spoiled Dameschi heir, fights to recover his identity after becoming a terrorist!
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Star Trip
Gisele Weaver
Jas is a human taken from her home planet on a trip across the galaxy she will never forget.
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!
El Goonish Shive
Dan Shive
WARNING: This comic often ignores the Laws of Physics
Patrik the Vampire
Bree Paulsen
Patrik loves to knit, bake, and help his friends while dealing with his own demons... like his thirst for blood because, oh yeah--he's a vampire.
Wilde Life
Pascalle Lepas
Oscar decided to rent an old haunted house, and that's when things got weird...
Go Get a Roomie
Clover
Experience the queer journey of an upbeat hippie and the friendships she makes along the way! A tale of self-discovery and love of many forms.
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Sunshine Boy
Moosopp
New-kid Kelly is sweet but naive. Luckily, he's got his outgoing neighbor Grey in his corner.
Folklore
Adam Ma, Colin Tan Wei
A superhuman horror story focused on a small band of survivors trying to navigate a war-torn world in the aftermath of the Federation’s collapse.
Demon Studies
Miyuli
Four students summon and study potentially dangerous demons within the walls of the mysterious Summerland University.
Between Failures
Jackie Wohlenhaus
The low stakes adventures of an assorted group of 20 somethings trapped in the declining years of American retail. They are naughty and say lots of swears.
Come Hell or High Water
Jenny/Star, Mori
Prince Gladimir was never meant to fall for a pirate. Swearing off love for duty, the threat of war propels him back into the Captain’s world of high seas and high stakes. Their relationship could be the thing to save the kingdom of Yvoire - or destroy it.
Monster Pulse
Magnolia Porter Siddell
Four kids run afoul of a creepy secret organization's experiments, which turn their body parts into fighting monsters. Part sentimental coming-of-age story, part monster-training shonen manga, with just a bit of sci-fi body horror.
MASKLESS
kickingshoes
In a world where people can wield the magic of elemental Masks, all Ashe wants to do is help. Maskless and useless, with dreams of fire and smoke on the back of his tongue, he finds himself on a strange, dangerous path to uncovering the secrets of these incredible objects, and the source of the monsters plaguing his home.
Hazy London
Scotty
A story about messy relationships. From friendly foes to crazy families. Nothing is black and white, just full of color. But, all colors can get a little hazy...
Heart of Gold
Eliot Baum, Viv Tanner
A pianist with failing eyesight seeks out a priest with a miraculous healing touch, drawing him deeper into a world of miracles and curses.
Killjoys
Flatw00ds
When two disgraced ex-feds fall backwards into trouble with the clown mafia, getting out in one piece is gonna be no joke!
Anacrine Complex
Sae Cotton
A superhuman heist involving probably too many pigeons than entirely necessary.
Obelisk
Ashley McCammon
In 1908 New York, a young woman struggles to put her life back together in the wake of her father's death - until she discovers a vampire in the shambles of her inheritance.
Demon's Mirror
Harry Bogosian
Based loosely off of "The Snow Queen", a story by Hans Christian Andersen, we see things take a different turn as the demons become central characters, and the side characters stick around. Yup, that's the only differences. Enjoy!
Lunar Blight
Studio CARTRIDGE, Laura Lee
Lunar Blight is a gothic horror story about an elite knight serving a moon cult who must choose between upholding his honoured duty or condemning everything he’s grown to know.
Atomic Robo
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener
The robot punches monsters and bad robots and one time he was a cowboy.
The Lonely Vincent Bellingham
Diana Huh
Vincent is an unkind man looking to disappear, and finds himself in the care of a vampire and her two wicked children.
Tove
Severin
The end of the world is coming, and Tove doesn't want to be a hero, but SOMEONE has to look after her little brother.
Whomp!
Ronnie
A depressed, portly, hirsute anime fan stumbles through life in the ever-pursuit of chicken nuggets and other life-shortening indulgences.
Lighter Than Heir
Melissa Albino
A young Volant woman joins the military in an effort to upstage her war-hero father.
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.
Knights Errant
J.R. Doyle
Wilfrid's humble quest for revenge becomes bigger and bloodier by the day.
BOOKMARK Click "Tag Page" to bookmark a page. When you return to the site, click "Goto Tag" to continue where you left off.
BUFFER WATCH
Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:
For her noticing : pretty high.
As for telling them to get a room : I think it’s more likely she encourages them to consummate right there in the lecture hall.
Robin, whose career was upended because she was outed by an anonymous person? This seems like the kind of thing she’s pretty thoughtful about, even while exuding chaos energy. I’m for she says nothing.
Having increased attraction to one person of the same gender doesn’t increase your number on the spectrum. It’s if you have interest in the same gender broadly.
Like Dorothy could be bi… but she could also be demi or pan, both of which would still fall under her crushing on Joyce.
I wouldn’t call being demi bi-erasure, you can still be bi-romantic and demi-sexual or bi-sexual and demi-romantic. Imo, demi works more as an explanation of *how* you experience attraction, rather than what groups you’re attracted to.
Does the 80s synth pop duo Erasure count as collectively bi? One being gay and the other being straight or at least married to a woman, so if you average their Kinsey score it’s at least three and under six. Because if so, I’m a big fan of that form of bi Erasure, their song “Sometimes” frequently gets stuck in my head.
I mean I’m gonna be honest here. I don’t fully understand the Kinsey scale. I don’t really believe a person’s sexuality can be scaled to begin with. Too many variables. One person can be a super mega lesbian and then one day their gf wears a suit and suddenly they’re questioning. What’s the Joycey Scale rate Dotty at then?
It’s science. They gotta oversimplify shit that nobody’s been allowed to study for hundreds of years because The Sin, because without someone throwing something at the wall, there’s nothing to build on.
But to answer your question, I’m looking at about three sevens.
Kinsey needs context. It was like inventing calculus compared to normative sexuality views of its time. *Newton* was wrong, too, but he was a lot closer than Copernicus.
Like many scales, it’s meant to be a rough estimation. Where, generally, does one fall:
Straight. Bi-curious straight. Straight-leaning bi. Dead center bi. Lesbian leaning bi. Bi-curious lesbian. And Lesbian.
When I was in college, I was a 3 – full on bi with no lean.
When I started dating my (future) wife, I bumped over to a 4, cause bi girl in serious lesbian relationship.
During the pandemic when over 50% of the “men” I had dated came out as trans girls, I reevaluated to a 5.
As that demonstrates, it’s a scale best used to identify how you feel about yourself, not to try to hang other’s on.
Finally, there are far better, far more precise scales. For example, technically speaking, what I actually am is: bisexual and homoromantic. I enjoy men and women equally as sex partners, but I only seriously date other women. However, that’s a huge mouthful, whereas saying a single kinsey number is very fast, so convenience over accuracy.
The essential point of the Kinsey scale is that there are degrees of in-between between heterosexuality and homosexuality. The actual numbers are irrelevant, just like with “five star” ratings.
Think of it like moon phases. We say there’s new moon, full moon, crescent, and gibbous, right? Well… it changes literally day by day, waxing and waning, but having actual terms is hard unless you start talking numbers like “5% lit” or whatever.
It’s kinda outdated and oversimplified in this day and age where enbies and transfolk have some visibility in pop culture and there are a panoply of medical procedures, but it was a bit of a big deal in its day to say, “Well, a person can be both interested in guys and girls.”
The original kinsey document that introduced the scale also included the fact that someone’s place on the scale can change, so you understand better than you think.
Originally, the Kinsey scale was not for orientation but for actual past behavior, so your place on it was both objectively calculable at any given moment (by anyone who knew all your past sexual encounters) and very easy to change.
But weird as hell for that same reason. Most people lack the statistically significant number of sexual encounters that would give a proper reading. Just one new partner could drastically change your score.
For someone who had a lot of sexual partners, it would eventually stabilize, but most people just don’t have enough.
As someone who came to this late in life, due to being born in the 50s, repression has a lot to do with actual partners, too. Looking back, it was clear right back at highschool that I was bi, but a large number (I lost count, it was the era of “free love”) of encounters with the opposite genitalia, and none with the same, I’d Kinsey out as straight.
It’s a variable, which I think most people would agree is well-defined and carries some kind of meaning. That is the kind of stuff you have to use if you want to do any kind of science. Like “what is the average Kinsey number in this sample” is a question that, theoretically, does have an answer. “What is the average sexuality” does not. All models are wrong, some are useful.
I trust Joyce at her word (when Becky came out to her) that she’s 100% straight. I think Dorothy is misreading the situation. To Joyce, Dorothy has been an extremely helpful hetero friend.
I feel a little bit bad for Joyce tbh. Having two of your friends go gay for you sounds like a good way for one to lose their trust in the true intentions of people claiming to be friends.
Sure, we know Becky & Dorothy care about Joyce more than “juat” romantically or sexually, but her two best friends she previously thought were straight becoming attracted to her?
I dunno. I’m a dude, so maybe it’s different, but I’d definitely be a bit more gun shy about showing affection to friends for fear of giving the wrong message.
Joyce isn’t even my favorite, but it would be cruel for her to go through that again.
Dorothy is still my favorite in the comic, but what I’m worried about is that my perception of her will change abruptly because of this whole mess she’s going through.
I don’t get it, I feel like I’d be more likely to respond with “of course my best friend is attracted to me: they love everything about me, and I’m attractive”.
That doesn’t mean anybody needs to do anything about it
I can’t wrap my head around how anybody could. She has repeatedly professed an immense attraction for nearly every female friend she is close to, directly in the strip. She simply hasn’t had the language to describe, or the impetus to interrogate, those feelings at all, at least until very recently.
She’s constantly talking about how sexually interested she is in multiple girls in this comic; she just doesn’t flat-out say it directly, because she genuinely hasn’t reckoned with the fact that the weird feeling she has for some other girls, is her hanky-panky feeling.
Like, she’s just barely coming to terms with her hanky-panky feeling where BOYS are concerned. She literally still utilizes the phrase “hanky-panky” to label her own sexuality.
She’s ultimately all but come out and said, in her own words, that she wants to do very-obviously-sexual-things with at least Sal, Dorothy, and Jennifer; she just did so in Joyce language. It’ll be another 20 years in comic time before she can actually say the phrase “Fuck she’s hot, I wanna suck her tits” about another woman in plain terms, I assure you all, if you read between the lines, she has said just about that several women in the strip. She merely hasn’t reckoned with the fact that that feeling, is what it is.
It’s definitely possible. All of that can be explained away, but there definitely have been hints.
I’d say up until pretty recently, the hints were stronger for Joyce than for Dorothy – though of course it’s now been made canon for Dorothy.
One argument though is that even though she still having trouble coming to terms with her sexuality with boys, she’s long been shown as being strongly aroused by them, despite her denial. Back to confused dreams of Ethan and tummy wands. She’s said some things about girls, but I don’t think we’ve seen any of the signs of outright horniness that have been so clear for guys.
Funnily enough, she never actually said she was straight. She said she didn’t feel that way about Becky, and Becky interpreted it as her being straight, repeating it as such when recounting the event. To be fair it’s a reasonable interpretation for both of them — if she wasn’t straight why wouldn’t she be into Becky — it’s just interesting that it was never stated.
I don’t think she’s 100% straight, but I don’t think she feels for Dorothy the way Dorothy feels for her. https://www.dumbingofage.com/iloveyous/
The way I read the punchline, Joyce feels the distinction is clear. But it confuses Dorothy in like a reflexive way. Joyce makes Dorothy feel appreciated, and that can be attractive, if it feels like the appreciation is romantic.
In another timeline, where Dorothy didn’t waste so much time with her poor study habits perhaps, and she made her move sooner, maybe things would be different. Because there’s a chance she’d be open to the idea of being with Dorothy, even though every time we’ve seen Joyce’s fantasies, they’re of guys.
I think it’s very possible there is a kernal of not-totally-straightness in there somewhere, but I don’t think she’s there yet, and Dotty’s current thirstiness is probably not going to draw her in.
I don’t think she recognizes Dorothy’s feelings yet. She’s picking up that something’s off about how Dorothy’s smiling at her, but probably not what it means.
Joyce is already in a relationship, and while it’s mixed in with her figuring out her horniness, she seems to really care for Joe. Also, Dorothy was vocally against the two of them dating, so I could see Joyce suspecting that Dorothy was just jealous (which might also be the case).
Yeah, but sexual activity with another girl would be a matter of personal growth and Joyce exploring who is she is as a person. Cheating on Joe when they’re in a comitted relationship? That’s so out of character as to be off the table entirely. Joe’s a notorious poon-hound who had to do epic personal growth to make a repationship with Joyce even possible. Several cast members were seriously opposed because they know Joe’s past behavior. He’s already walking a fine line trying to be a good guy and not pressure Joyce on bedroom stuff. If Joyce cheated on Joe he would be destroyed. Also, Joyce and Dorothy would be ostracized for doing something so shitty to their freind. Just because they’re women hooking up with each other doesn’t mean they aren’t stabbing Joe in the back. The only possible way I can see it happening is if Joyce went to Joe and proposed a three-way with Dorothy. Even the Slipshine subscribers would object to a plot line that ridiculous.
Carla’s parents being involved in war profiteering would be an interesting, if unexpected twist. I can imagine Willis being inspired by recent events and having a Carla arc, were she (as an extension of her parents company) finally gets all the attention even she could ever want on campus, because her parents products are being used for … contentious purposes.
I don’t really feel like that would be a twist, tbh. The military just is going to take an interest in any kind of weaponizable tech, and drones are pretty blatantly weaponizable. It’s mostly a question of whether Ruttech actually bid on or won the contract.
Booster accuses them of mere wage theft, but I really doubt that’s their only bit of gray morality.
Booster is not (nor was Mike) a reliable source of morality.
Booster has done numerous things that are breeches of ‘right-doing’ and explicitly encouraged/enjoys drama, despite or possibly because of the hurt and pain that it causes…. Basically, Booster enjoys schadenfreude.
Imagine all the background characters living their own separate lives full of crazy events, drama, and character development. And we only get glimpses of it when they occasionally show up as extras or if it’s a good day even have a line or interaction.
Think of your reaction as the reaction of at least half of the students. Like that person in the polo shirt, they’re baffled in panel 2. Doing weird things to common phrases feels like it’s something Robin does a lot, though. Like it amuses her, so if other people don’t catch on, their loss.
That wordplay was tortured, insulted for having been tortured, and then shamed for feeling bad about being insulted. And then it learned someone stole its lunch
and here i was, thinking that dorothy/joyce would be a nice and stable slow burn endgame kinda ship, not a “cause degrassi levels of messy teen drama right from the get-go” ship. truly love that for everyone involved.
they’re both so sheltered, they spent their teen years trying to be perfect adult women. they’re WAY BEHIND on the “being a high school girlfailure” checklist of life experiences
what is dumbing of age if not a beautiful vessel for messy bisexual girlfailures. one can only hope for a Sal bisexuality arc in 2045 so we can canonize Sal/Amber
idk if anything Jennifer being unconsciously attracted to a different woman who is incredibly mean to her post-Ruth might explain why she’s been so down to please Raidah even though she treats Jennifer like shit.
but more importantly i’m always pro-pioneering whole new levels of insane f/f, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
jennifer is innately suspicious of kindness because she feels she doesn’t deserve it and gravitates to people who treat her badly because she sees abuse as the only kind of love she deserves. so yeah. 100% seconded
raidah meanwhile would fuck jennifer if that’s what it took to get the billingsworths’ attention, little knowing that those two have absolutely no interest in their own daughter let alone her friends and relations
That’s a really solid observation, and probably a big part of how each of them is set up to be very understanding of each other’s self discovery experience.
I’m slowly starting to think the twist when this all goes down, is that Joyce AND Dorothy AND Joe AND Walky will end up being, at least initially, pretty cool about this.
The bigger twist possibly being, Becky is going to have a full-scale mental breakdown the likes of which we as readers are not possibly prepared for.
Every time Dorothy has ever wanted anything for sure, she’s gone at it with her whole heart. That’s definitely included love… and it caused some huge messiness last time.
This whole thing feels like it has been a huge slow burn though (although it hasn’t been super stable for a while maybe), like since very early in the comic slow. I don’t even know how many years that is anymore!
it’s been like a decade, that’s pretty slow burn, also i accidentally reported your comment cus the button is right next to reply and don’t know how to undo that
joyce: hey dorothy guess what!! me and joe are going on a date tonight and then afterwards we’re gonna do some hanky-panky!!!
dorothy, teeth gritted, consumed by lust for hanky-panky: i’m… very happy for you……
i mean ,dorothy’s meticulouslness aside, i don’t think there’s any benefit to rly being early to robin’s class, if anything i’d expect her to be 15-20 mins late herself lol. if not like, just ‘lecturing’ in the middle of the cafeteria or so casually XD
Probably I mean I would, also this would be the class for it Also I am pretty sure Robin would probably tell her that day dreaming about that hunk of steak short king is far more important.
Seeing all these DorothyxJoyce glances with the Book 14 cover art that has them arm-in-arm below the strip on the page seems like it just has to be intentional. It’s gotta be
(sorry for absence in recent comment sections, currently having tech problems.)
Don’t worry about it – I think a lot of us have been increasingly withdrawn of late as well. Regardless, it is good to have you back. I am sorry to hear you are having technical problems.
Becky getting jealous would also have knock on effects with her relationship with Dina, which would be bad. Then again, Becky is far more observant and intelligent than she lets on. Becky may already know about Dorothy’s feelings. Additionally, Becky might actually feel less threatened by Dorothy getting shut down by Joyce, as it would balance there relationship. Becky would no longer need to worry that her failed advances towards Joyce somehow damaged their bond and let Dorothy usurp her position at Joyce’s right hand.
Yeah, I am wondering if she just thinks something is off about Dorothy and is concerned for her friend, or if she getting subtle alarm bells from her one-sided romantic misadventure with Becky.
Alt text says “get it, because the strungs are high”, indicating that Robin is calling something (not sure if she’s referring to Dorothy or Joyce) as highly strung
Joe knows this, but we’re honestly not sure how Walky will react. Some assume everything will be fine, and he’ll even joke about it (I want to hold onto that possibility).
And believe me, I love Dorothy, but I’m terrified that my perception of her will change because of all this chaos.
Joe really feels like he’s not exactly down for this, but he would martyr himself for Joyce’s happiness, because he thinks he *has* to. His “I will suffer so others do not have too, while pretending to be a man ho” complex is gonna cause issues with all this I think.
Yeah, that has always been my biggest fear between the four of them, for this situation: that neither Joe nor Walky will actually be “okay” with sharing their girlfriends with each other’s girlfriends, but each of them puts their romantic partner on such a pedestal, in terms of feeling like they don’t deserve them; I’d hate to see them both feel internal pressure to assent to Joyce and Dorothy also being together, purely because of their own insecurities, or because “well what kind of men would we be if we didn’t want hot gals to ‘les out?'”
Feels to me like both of them will be thinking more in terms of stepping aside than of a poly relationship. Walky especially will likely see Dorothy turning back to him as part of her denial of her crush on Joyce. (And he might be right about that.)
Joe’s situation is somewhat different, since Joyce hasn’t actually had her bisexual awakening yet, so we don’t know how she’s going to respond.
If Joyce plays her cards right, she can probably pull off an afternoon/evening double-header. Hell, with Dorothy up first, she doesn’t even need to shower in-between.
People looking at Joyce’s smile dropping in the last panel and still thinking she’s likely to reciprocate is crazy to me. This one’s gonna get messy, and not in the fun way.
Well, I’ll still enjoy it, but only in a pseudo-voyeuristic, “thank god these aren’t real people” kind of way.
I feel like that assumes Dorothy is even going to pursue a physical relationship at all. Admitting attraction and acting on it are two very different things. They are both in relationships to begin with and frankly it’s already pretty messy. Joyce wants to watch Dorothy fuck. That’s already where they’re at in a platonic friendship.
You saying things are already messy kinda proves my point. Even if she doesn’t pursue a physical relationship, Joyce is going to figure out one way or another, and it’s going to recontextualize everything that’s happened between them. I don’t see that wrapping itself up neatly, if for no other reason than because this is a comic where things usually play out as dramatically as possible.
Right, because it’s not like Dorothy is radiating misery, or anything. It’s gotta be Joyce thinking “uh-oh, I don’t return the feelings I assume are behind my friend’s unhappy expression”.
I don’t think this strip means anything one way or the other, but seeing this take repeatedly is as weird to me as people still holding out hope are weird to you, heh.
Saying Dorothy is radiating misery is the wildest take I’ve seen on this update, honestly. Everything about her expression in panel 7 radiates attraction.
I don’t think Joyce has necessarily figured out just what Dorothy is feeling right now, but her expression in the final panel certainly strikes me as that of somebody who realizes something has changed, and is uncomfortable and unsure of what to make of it.
She could reciprocate and it could still get messy. That’s kind of where I’m at– I think she may well realize she’s attracted to Dorothy, but she’s in a relationship with Joe and she’s really happy with him. Though I think *that* would put more strain on their friendship than if it was one-sided from Dorothy…
Kinsey got it wrong. His “scale” has only one axis. Actual relationships aren’t that easy. Putting level of attraction on the Y axis and sexual orientation on the X axis and romantic orientation on the Z axis leaves too few axis, there are many more types of attraction not shown.
So what’s the over / under on Joyce developing a complex about how all her best friends turn out to be super into her and not realizing it until way later?
Are some of us reading that last Dorothy panel as… arousal?
Is that’s what’s happening in the comment section for this one?
Because to me that looks like “struggling to force a smile, and not entirely succeeding”.
Which leaves room for a lot of things, like:
– Feeling guilty about Walky
– Feeling anxious about doing or saying something that gives herself away to Joyce
– Worrying about how Joyce is going to react if she says anything
And in turn, Joyce’s falling smile is equally open-ended.
It could be that she’s putting things together about the photo, but it seems every bit as likely to be a response to Dorothy’s radiated misery.
Like I’m not saying she’s going to reciprocate Dorothy’s feelings, I have no faith in that being the outcome we’re headed for and very little hope!
I’m just saying this particular strip is a weird one to use as definitive proof of a sunken ship. It seems pretty deliberately ambiguous, in that I don’t think Joyce is on the same page as the readers right now.
For ship-sinking, I think “Joyce didn’t put any more thought into Dorothy’s cleavage pic” is better evidence, but Willis also provided her with some very compelling distractions, so that’s got ambiguity, too.
TL;DR: I’m not failing to see Joyce’s sad face, I am just not convinced it’s connected to any thoughts she might or might not have had so far about Dorothy’s intentions wrt the photo (which, just to say, would’ve had to have taken place off panel, which I think would be an odd choice for a storyline with this much build up).
Joyce looks more confused than sad, to me. Dorothy looks less miserable and more (unknowingly?) openly thirsty for Joyce, which leads to the confusion. Like, “Oh hey, my bestie!” “Oh yeah, I’d love to hit that” “Wait, what?”
It’s not just that one panel, it’s the whole progression. In the first panel with Robin, she’s blank-faced; when she spots Joyce gesturing for her to come sit next to her, she cracks an awkward half smile, showing a little bit of teeth; in the panel where they sit next to each other, she has sort of a crooked slanted closed-mouth half smile; and then in response to Joyce’s relentless triangle grin, she once again shows teeth in an awkward crooked half-smile, this time with eyebrow action. Cover her mouth, and her eyes are sad in the last panel.
What you’re seeing as a struggling smile in Dorothy’s last panel there reads as a lower-lip bite to me, which would be Dorothy escalating from “troubled but buoyed by my relentlessly-cheerful friend” to “Wow, that smile does things to me.” Which Joyce has never seen from Dorothy, so Joyce moves to less-smile, more raised-eyebrow puzzlement.
Possibly with a little subconscious unease because while she hasn’t twigged to it quite yet, she has seen that from a BFF before. Becky.
It is a lower lip bite, I just see the bite as part of the struggle.
As I noted to Yumi below, there’s no blush on Dorothy’s face, and her eyebrows are sad. If you cover the mouth, her eyes look sad to me. Meanwhile we’ve mostly seen glassy eyed neutral eyebrows from horny faces, or else happy eyebrows (in the comic they linked with Dina and Becky’s very mutual excitement).
Anyway if I’m wrong I’m wrong. As also noted below to Aura, I might just be too ace for this. I don’t usually run into that issue with DoA but it’s always a possibility. I can’t imagine being turned on in this situation if I were Dorothy (and I’ve been in what I think is her exact emotional place several times). But that doesn’t mean I have to be reading her correctly.
If any of the panels had indicated Dorothy’s gaze had gone below Joyce’s neckline, if Dorothy were blushing, any number of things would make me think this was arousal, but as things stand no.
The progression I’m seeing is. A neutral expression for Robin, a little “Ooh, it’s Joyce” smile of recognition, an “I’m sitting next to my cute bestie” smile, the same smile from a different angle, possibly held for slightly too long, and then “Mmm, Joyce” with attraction leaking out (intentionally or not”.
To answer your question, everybody reading Dorothy’s expression as arousal is exactly what is happening here, and you are, as far as I can see, alone in your assessment.
So hey, if you’re right, you get to tell literally everybody else on the page “I told you so!”
If there weren’t the lines indicating that Dorothy is biting her lower lip in her last panel, I could see that, but as it is, a lip bite smile like that is often used to convey attraction or arousal. Consider this strip of Becky and Dina being horny as hell: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/03-trial-and-sarah/rightnow/
I think in this case it’s more likely to be nervousness or something. While there are certainly a lot of horny lower-lip bites in Willis’s art, there have also been numerous examples of non-horny ones that people in the comments assume are horny no matter how unlikely in the circumstances. I think this is another one of the latter.
I wouldn’t say Dorothy’s here is necessarily “horny”– I so think it conveys attraction, and nervousness about that attraction fits ad part as well. I think seeing it as not-attraction-related here would have to ignore a lot of the circumstances.
Ughh, my phone insists on too many unhelpful “corrections”… “I so think” should be “I do think” (though it basically works as either), and “fits ad part” should be “fits as part”
I mean, yes, her new awareness of her attraction to Joyce is absolutely the cause of like, the vast majority of her emotional state right now, on that much I can certainly agree.
Then I guess the difference is just in whether we perceive that attraction coming through in her expression. For me, that penultimate panel had the Muses from Hercules popping into my head to say she’s got, got, got it bad.
Honestly, I just thought you hadn’t noticed the lip-biting lines (they’re small, so that’d be fair), so I was looking for an example where it was obvious. There are horny lip bites without blushing in comic, but the easiest example for me to find is Amber being gross, and I’m not really feeling that right now.
Anyway, like I said, I’m not really reading Dorothy as horny here. I think lip bite can be used for “attraction or arousal” (among other uses, yes), and here I think it’s attraction. Like, it’s not something I would expect her to be looking at Joyce’s body for. I think looking at Joyce’s smiling face is more likely to pull at that “I am so into her” feeling.
(I’ve been the type that goes “she’s so pretty I’m gonna cry” when having crushes–when there’s strong emotion there not focused on the “horny for this person” part that may or may not be part of it, so that’s also part of where I’m coming from.)
I want to make a joke about how ofc she had cheek blushes, if she didn’t then it was Amazi-Girl being horny.
But mostly I just felt like I had to make a counterpoint comment. We’ll see, I guess.
I do still think it’s a wild reading of the text of this comic to take Joyce’s expression as simultaneously understanding that Dorothy is In Sapphic with her and rejecting her, but I am open to the possibility of being wrong about all of it really.
But by that logic, Dorothy has cheek blushes here, so your counterpoint would eat itself.
Yeah, that seems like a lot to put on one thin panel of Joyce’s expression. I’m in the camp that’s more her going, “Uh, that is different and I am unsure what’s happening?”
Here’s my read, it’s I think not quite the same as yours but much closer to that than the horny dorothy and cold Joyce ones, which honestly seem kind of wild to me.
Panel 2: Joyce: Yay Dorothy’s here! Panel 3: Dorothy: Spirits buoyed a little by excited Joyce Panel 4: Joyce: Hi Dorothy I love you bestie!!~
Dorothy: Feeling nervous and awkward Panel 5: Dorothy: Little smile for Joyce, because someone being genuinely that happy to see you, especially someone you love, is going to be at least a little bit infection. Panel 6: Joyce: big encouraging smile returning Dorothy’s little one Panel 7: Dorothy: Experiencing a whole lot of feelings (I don’t think any of them right now are likely to be arousal). Not sure of the exact mix, speculation to follow. She’s smiling, but overall looks very vulnerable in this panel. Panel 8: Joyce: Notices the fragility of Dorothy’s smile, is worried about her, particularly along with her uncharacteristic lateness.
Speculation re: Dorothy’s emotions in Panel 7:
I think we definitely have at the very least the aforementioned nerves and awkwardness remaining, combined with a degree of emotional turmoil because she’s still processing what this means for her and for her friendship with Joyce and her relationship with Walky. I suspect there’s also a dose of appreciation for Joyce and her Joyceness here — her cheeriness, her simple joy at seeing her friend, her encouragement, etc. Which possibly leads to an ‘oh god, I really do love this girl, what do I do?’ reaction. Tbh overall I read her as being potentially about 5 seconds from falling apart, with the shiny eyes indicating nascent tears/vulnerability rather than excitement, the lip-bite being nerves/anxiety rather than arousal, and the smile one of some very mixed emotions, and maybe a little forced.
Like, maybe I’m just too ace for this. I don’t usually run into that as a problem in DoA, but it’s very possible! I just don’t see how Joyce’s triangle smile could be prompting arousal so intense Dorothy is struggling to keep it off her face, and I’ve been in the “afraid my bff is gonna notice I have non platonic feelings for her” camp a few times in my life, and very rarely did that concern mingle with feelings of being attracted to them; it always blotted out any other feelings.
I’d be reading it differently if Joyce’s body was at all in frame for Dorothy to be looking at, I think?
I especially have trouble believing that Willis would have had Joyce get from “why did Dorothy send me a lewd? Oh… I should delete this… or is deleting it weird? Wait, what did Jennifer just say about kissing your best friend????” to “that photo was DEFINITELY because Dorothy has feelings for me” in like, 0.5 seconds, based on Dorothy looking at her here, so I’m especially struggling with the idea that Joyce’s loss of happiness is because she KNOWS that Dorothy is Looking Respectfully TM, but.
I really think it isn’t you being ace Li, I think it’s the paneling being way too tiny to properly express what Willis wants. I thought similarly to you and def am not ace but reading the comments definitely informed me that it could be ‘horny’ i guess. Idk.
Joyce in the last panel seems to be thinking something like “Uh, why is Dorothy looking at me like I’m a particularly sexy steak dinner?” She clearly registers that look as unusual.
It’s college. No one cares if you’re late. Dorothy cares because she is high strung. Robin is saying that in her usual Robin way of “y’all strungs be up there, fo rizzle”
@ dash: i’d think considering you’re paying for the class unless you got in throug ha scholarship/rich parents/connections, the person themselves would care more than the teacher unless they’re also social/friendly enough to get a copy of a note if they miss a day or so if not asking the prof to email them a summary or so
I cannot wait until we go back to a storyline that does not involve the comment section screaming for Joyce to cheat on the boyfriend she loves because there’s a girl adjacent to her.
You’ve either just recently joined, or really haven’t been paying attention. Throughout the entire series, Dorothy and Joyce have been developing closeted feelings for each other. And each have had their respective, not healthy reasons (Joyce being a Fundie, and Dororthy thinking that it would hurt her political aspirations), to either push them in the background, or just straight up ignore them. Something was bound to happen between those two, and what happens next, depends on whose advice wins out, Danny’s, or Jennifer’s.
If we read “Dorothy and Joyce should hook up” or descriptions of same as “screaming for Joyce to cheat”, there are arguably 2-3 visible on my screen while I am responding to this post.
I mean, if they are doing so in a context where they want it to happen right now … I think it kinda is.
Look, I’m also poly queer IRL, and I’ll specifically say that I read “calls for Joe to be involved” still read as “encouragement to cheat” until/unless everyone involved comes out as poly/open first, which exactly zero of them have done.
(That said, I’ll also cop to just hating the entire concept of the Joyce x Dorothy ship and wishing it would run aground and burn to the waterline at the same time, so I am 100% biased)
Hating a ship is fair enough, and hating a ship when you’re in the minority can be rough. I don’t necessarily want Joyce x Dorothy to happen myself, but if I did (or if we were on the Joe-Joyce-Dorothy-Walky-Amber W ship I kind of want but mostly ship for the hell of it), saying something like “god I want these two to get together” in response to this strip wouldn’t mean I want them to cheat.
I don’t think we disagree on what cheating is, but… again, that’s very few of the actual commenters. But one is right by this post. If you assume everyone who ships them and mentions wanting them together wants that to be right now, okay, but that’s a pretty unfair assumption.
Reasonable people can disagree, but IMHO the sheer consistent pressure of the Dorothy x Joyce fandom carries with it an immediacy, and has done so since the laundry room incident (which I still dislike on so many levels).
That said, I also think it’s entirely plausible that you can read things in the way you’re suggesting, in that it’s all implicitly carrying a “after Joe and Joyce break up/agree to just be the nexus of das uberpolycule”.
I just don’t think it’s unreasonable to read “they should make out (in front of Joe)”, in a context involving a Willis lip bite, as having a “right the fuck now” implied, either.
Shrug emoji. I’m gonna keep right on shipping these two in a way that doesn’t require anyone to cheat on anyone, but I’m also gonna go right on feeling neutrally about people who don’t care about fictional cheating, because fictional cheating is morally neutral and completely fine for people to want to see.
(D) Since there is some confusion mixing up interpretations of behavior with predictions/hopes/expectations, I reiterate: no opinions here about what they should do, and me believing they might have some attraction to each other doesn’t mean I think they should act some specific way about it
She’s realising her attraction, in whatever shape it takes, is what allows her to be happy in this moment. Turns out, feelings is feelings. Something to manage, but not something to fight.
I am reading this strip on my phone, and thanks to my eyes, I need to zoom in to catch all the details. That eyebrow of Joyce’s in the last panel is doing a TON of heavy ambiguous lifting g. If you zoom out to see the whole strip, you may not notice the eyebrow – which gives Joyce a look of content. She seems happy that Dorothy is starting to warm up and smile a little. I didn’t think Joyce picked up on the additional motivations going on with Dotty, but I definitely thought she was just pleased to see her friend in a good mood for the first time in a while.
Then I zoomed in. And noticed that eyebrow.
Tbh, I still don’t think Joyce has any specific idea of what Dotty is going through right now, but she definitely knows something is different, and it is making her suddenly question… something. Exactly what that something is, I still don’t think has occurred to Joyce, but there is definitely something new going on with Dotty and it is triggering some kind of inner question for Joyce. I suspect she can’t articulate just what that question is right now, but it is now definitely there.
My guess is that Joyce gains realization of what Dotty is feeling towards her, and absolutely rejects it all. Denies, suppresses, pushes it all away and down. This likely leads to a strain and some distance between them. It also is the catalyst for Joyce to co front and come to grips with her own sexuality in whatever way that plays out – if she does have more-than-friend feelings for Dotty, I can see her feeling no small amount of guilt or shame at how she handled/felt about Becky (see the strip that others have linked to).
And I feel like that’s a good thing. Neither one of them are in a place where jumping into a more-than-friendship relationship would end well for them. It’s not that I ship them – I would be cool with either direction playing out – but if the two if them DO end up in a romantic or physical relationship with each other, I would like for it not to be doomed from the start.
Basically how I see it happening, except I don’t think Joyce will suppress it entirely or deny it outright (see how she frames the idea of Dorothy sending the pic, keeping it, and how she reacts to Jennifer’s sage wisdom about best friends). She’ll alter it to fit into a framework that doesn’t make it “weird”, which opens up another can of worms. Joyce’s affection leaning into being sapphic has mostly been used for comedy despite other people in-universe commenting on it, but there are also a few serious eye raising moments. Any serious questioning from Joyce would involve more self-denial than she’s ever previously shown relating to sexuality. How long ago did her reaction to Ruth/Jason and the “love Dorothy” explanation to Joe happen in-universe?
Trusting Willis as a writer, I don’t think he will repeat the same exact thing that happened with Becky, and it wouldn’t make sense based on the set up (whether from sporadic things from many years ago, or more explicitly since Book 13) and their established relationship. It causing a rift between the two doesn’t quite make sense at the moment, given how a more inexperienced Joyce handled Becky’s sudden infatuation (from her perception), and it seems doubtful Dorothy will explicitly convey any sort of romantic pinning from what we’ve seen. That’s up in the air. Joyce will most likely either have to guess but never be sure for awhile, or one of the four people who has an inkling of this tells her. That being said, I don’t see a happy ending to this short-term (that’s like a year our time), but nothing involving cheating.
It’s interesting because all of this coincides with Joyce moving forward, mostly physically, with Joe, and her hang ups about sex are still center stage despite her recent teasing about “hanky panky.” Dorothy was the Joyce/Joe liaison that led to them getting to third base, so I’m wondering how that’ll end up now.
This is an extremely funny moment in time considering the origins of this spin-off universe/comic with Dorothy’s deal with Head Alien. Dorothy managed to get Walky for herself but is fully crushing on Joyce. Basically ready to throw a Monkey Master doll at her head.
Dorothy’s gonna do exactly what Becky did when she revealed she was gay, isn’t she? Not exactly TELL Joyce she’s into her, just flat out smooch her and wait for Joyce’s reaction.
I think I know how Joyce will respond (given she’s dating Joe and has insinuated she’s VERY sexually attracted to him) but Dotty’s reaction to getting rejected? No clue. Also Dotty doesn’t seem nearly as sympathetic as Becky was , given she, Dotty, is also dating someone.
It would be a bit out of character for her, but people sometimes do some weird stuff when they want something super bad and don’t have a path to get it. Dorothy’s already done some pretty weird stuff w/ Joyce on that front.
This could be the end or the beginning of something. Dorothy seems unable to stop her feelings now that she knows she has them. But please Dorothy, not during class!
“This time though, let’s look directly into each other’s eyes though! Oh and if you could say my name that might really do it for me–… uhhh forget that last part!”
Joyce be like “man if I hadn’t a nickel for every time my best lady friend turned out to be secretly into me the whole time I’ve known her, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but AAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGHHHHHHH!”
god, i just want things to go better for dorothy this time than they did in the walkyverse. she doesn’t need to end up with joyce or walky or anyone but it would be nice if she just didn’t get shoehorned into being a villain
dumbing of age has mostly been about people fucking up and getting better so, you know, i have hope, but i keep bracing myself for a heel turn from one of my favorite characters
why does that guy behind sarah seem concerned? i imagine most ppl , o ther htan it being a ‘requirement’ for their major, consider robin’s class to be a blow off class (unless they actually care about politics or so and wanna trasnfer as immediately as possible but she’s the only one doing that subject, right?)
Loading ...
What’s the over/under on Robin immediately noticing this and loudly telling them to get a room?
At least 50%. Possibly more.
Seems kinda high for Robin. I’d say more in the 20 to 30 percent range.
80% her adhd brain is going to pickit up and fixate
oh no oh fuck oh gosh
That’s a hope!
Are we talking order of operations?
First you nope, then you fuck, then you gosh. (or in goofy’s case, gawrsh)
“… have you two been banging every weekend, or was it just this last weekend?”
For her noticing : pretty high.
As for telling them to get a room : I think it’s more likely she encourages them to consummate right there in the lecture hall.
It didn’t involve Roz, so she doesn’t notice anything.
How do you do over/under on a binary option like that?
las vegas loves to do it
Robin, whose career was upended because she was outed by an anonymous person? This seems like the kind of thing she’s pretty thoughtful about, even while exuding chaos energy. I’m for she says nothing.
That lower lip bite thou.
Tardy…. to being straight.
Better late than straight, I always said just now.
read this in stoned Ragatha’s voice lol
Yup, Dotty’s gone on Joyce now.
And I am so friggin’ HERE for that! ^^
Usually lip-bites are with incisors. Here, it’s being done with bi-cuspids.
Is it though? I thought Dotty’s lip bite was with incisors here – or maybe a canine.:)
So like a 4 then?
Having increased attraction to one person of the same gender doesn’t increase your number on the spectrum. It’s if you have interest in the same gender broadly.
Like Dorothy could be bi… but she could also be demi or pan, both of which would still fall under her crushing on Joyce.
this is the ONLY form of bi erasure i will tolerate in this comments section! lmao
I wouldn’t call being demi bi-erasure, you can still be bi-romantic and demi-sexual or bi-sexual and demi-romantic. Imo, demi works more as an explanation of *how* you experience attraction, rather than what groups you’re attracted to.
The only bi-erasure i will tolerate are the ones that make things exponentially more complicated!
So… quadratically more complicated isn’t good enough?
NEVER!
Gotta be a 3rd-degree polynomial at least.
minimum Dodecatricaly (doubt i spent it right)
(miss hit enter too early)
Does the 80s synth pop duo Erasure count as collectively bi? One being gay and the other being straight or at least married to a woman, so if you average their Kinsey score it’s at least three and under six. Because if so, I’m a big fan of that form of bi Erasure, their song “Sometimes” frequently gets stuck in my head.
I mean I’m gonna be honest here. I don’t fully understand the Kinsey scale. I don’t really believe a person’s sexuality can be scaled to begin with. Too many variables. One person can be a super mega lesbian and then one day their gf wears a suit and suddenly they’re questioning. What’s the Joycey Scale rate Dotty at then?
It’s science. They gotta oversimplify shit that nobody’s been allowed to study for hundreds of years because The Sin, because without someone throwing something at the wall, there’s nothing to build on.
But to answer your question, I’m looking at about three sevens.
A slot machine? Must be getting leftover residual readings from her contact with Joe, the recovering slut machine.
Recovering Slut Machine will be the name of my Mindless Self Indulgence cover band
X Is The Name Of My Y Cover Band is the name of my Paul And Storm cover band.
Kinsey needs context. It was like inventing calculus compared to normative sexuality views of its time. *Newton* was wrong, too, but he was a lot closer than Copernicus.
Like, 100, I’m sure.
Like many scales, it’s meant to be a rough estimation. Where, generally, does one fall:
Straight. Bi-curious straight. Straight-leaning bi. Dead center bi. Lesbian leaning bi. Bi-curious lesbian. And Lesbian.
When I was in college, I was a 3 – full on bi with no lean.
When I started dating my (future) wife, I bumped over to a 4, cause bi girl in serious lesbian relationship.
During the pandemic when over 50% of the “men” I had dated came out as trans girls, I reevaluated to a 5.
As that demonstrates, it’s a scale best used to identify how you feel about yourself, not to try to hang other’s on.
Finally, there are far better, far more precise scales. For example, technically speaking, what I actually am is: bisexual and homoromantic. I enjoy men and women equally as sex partners, but I only seriously date other women. However, that’s a huge mouthful, whereas saying a single kinsey number is very fast, so convenience over accuracy.
The essential point of the Kinsey scale is that there are degrees of in-between between heterosexuality and homosexuality. The actual numbers are irrelevant, just like with “five star” ratings.
Think of it like moon phases. We say there’s new moon, full moon, crescent, and gibbous, right? Well… it changes literally day by day, waxing and waning, but having actual terms is hard unless you start talking numbers like “5% lit” or whatever.
It’s kinda outdated and oversimplified in this day and age where enbies and transfolk have some visibility in pop culture and there are a panoply of medical procedures, but it was a bit of a big deal in its day to say, “Well, a person can be both interested in guys and girls.”
5% lit sounds like a great gen z insult.
it sounds like i’m going to use that as my own personal slang for %ABV from now on
The original kinsey document that introduced the scale also included the fact that someone’s place on the scale can change, so you understand better than you think.
Originally, the Kinsey scale was not for orientation but for actual past behavior, so your place on it was both objectively calculable at any given moment (by anyone who knew all your past sexual encounters) and very easy to change.
But weird as hell for that same reason. Most people lack the statistically significant number of sexual encounters that would give a proper reading. Just one new partner could drastically change your score.
For someone who had a lot of sexual partners, it would eventually stabilize, but most people just don’t have enough.
As someone who came to this late in life, due to being born in the 50s, repression has a lot to do with actual partners, too. Looking back, it was clear right back at highschool that I was bi, but a large number (I lost count, it was the era of “free love”) of encounters with the opposite genitalia, and none with the same, I’d Kinsey out as straight.
It’s a variable, which I think most people would agree is well-defined and carries some kind of meaning. That is the kind of stuff you have to use if you want to do any kind of science. Like “what is the average Kinsey number in this sample” is a question that, theoretically, does have an answer. “What is the average sexuality” does not. All models are wrong, some are useful.
This comic is the only place I ever hear about the Kinsey Scale. It’s like a character in the webcomic.
Kinsey Scale is the name of the character in Leslie’s class that had a line, but no name.
this may be hard to understand but a woman in a suit is still a woman
The intent is just to qualify that sexual attraction is more of a spectrum than a binary choice.
It’s starts with .. ONE
i agree with this 100% her being attracted to Joyce is Pan /Demi behavior not indicative of her being bi
I’m glad I’m a late voter
that was my vote on the Kinsey, but everyone else was a nonbeliever. ~<3
This would be the worst moment to just up and kiss her.
Which means it might happen.
Consult with the Doctor above concerning the spread.
You know, the over/under.
All the gambling terms I know sound like sexual euphuisms.
That makes sense since almost everyone who gambles ends up getting fucked …
Hit me.
What’s your spread?
euphemisms
wouldn’t be the first time though
Oh Dorothy…
I can only foresee more heartbreak for her
Why? There’s a good chance Joyce likes her too romantically.
I trust Joyce at her word (when Becky came out to her) that she’s 100% straight. I think Dorothy is misreading the situation. To Joyce, Dorothy has been an extremely helpful hetero friend.
I feel a little bit bad for Joyce tbh. Having two of your friends go gay for you sounds like a good way for one to lose their trust in the true intentions of people claiming to be friends.
Sure, we know Becky & Dorothy care about Joyce more than “juat” romantically or sexually, but her two best friends she previously thought were straight becoming attracted to her?
I dunno. I’m a dude, so maybe it’s different, but I’d definitely be a bit more gun shy about showing affection to friends for fear of giving the wrong message.
Joyce isn’t even my favorite, but it would be cruel for her to go through that again.
Dorothy is still my favorite in the comic, but what I’m worried about is that my perception of her will change abruptly because of this whole mess she’s going through.
Agree. I think she can handle it, but it’s a thing to deal with eventually.
It will be funny if she turns to Sarah and demands to know if she’s also into her, though.
The answer is obvious, and it’s even funnier to see Raidah suffer than to see Sarah happy with Tony.
I don’t get it, I feel like I’d be more likely to respond with “of course my best friend is attracted to me: they love everything about me, and I’m attractive”.
That doesn’t mean anybody needs to do anything about it
Normalize thinking your friends are hotties
I don’t read Joyce as straight, honestly.
I can’t wrap my head around how anybody could. She has repeatedly professed an immense attraction for nearly every female friend she is close to, directly in the strip. She simply hasn’t had the language to describe, or the impetus to interrogate, those feelings at all, at least until very recently.
She’s constantly talking about how sexually interested she is in multiple girls in this comic; she just doesn’t flat-out say it directly, because she genuinely hasn’t reckoned with the fact that the weird feeling she has for some other girls, is her hanky-panky feeling.
Like, she’s just barely coming to terms with her hanky-panky feeling where BOYS are concerned. She literally still utilizes the phrase “hanky-panky” to label her own sexuality.
She’s ultimately all but come out and said, in her own words, that she wants to do very-obviously-sexual-things with at least Sal, Dorothy, and Jennifer; she just did so in Joyce language. It’ll be another 20 years in comic time before she can actually say the phrase “Fuck she’s hot, I wanna suck her tits” about another woman in plain terms, I assure you all, if you read between the lines, she has said just about that several women in the strip. She merely hasn’t reckoned with the fact that that feeling, is what it is.
I see Walky getting a boy before Joyce.
So, next Tuesday? (Their next Tuesday not ours)
Facts. Everything in this comment covers my feelings completely.
It’s definitely possible. All of that can be explained away, but there definitely have been hints.
I’d say up until pretty recently, the hints were stronger for Joyce than for Dorothy – though of course it’s now been made canon for Dorothy.
One argument though is that even though she still having trouble coming to terms with her sexuality with boys, she’s long been shown as being strongly aroused by them, despite her denial. Back to confused dreams of Ethan and tummy wands. She’s said some things about girls, but I don’t think we’ve seen any of the signs of outright horniness that have been so clear for guys.
Wanting to curl up in Jennifer’s boobs and be warm and safe forever didn’t read as horny to you?
Of course what might confuse things for Joyce more is if she has romantic feelings for the ladies but not sexual ones.
Not really. It certainly could be sublimated horniness, but there weren’t any of the other signs Willis usually uses to signal that.
+1
Funnily enough, she never actually said she was straight. She said she didn’t feel that way about Becky, and Becky interpreted it as her being straight, repeating it as such when recounting the event. To be fair it’s a reasonable interpretation for both of them — if she wasn’t straight why wouldn’t she be into Becky — it’s just interesting that it was never stated.
She did, actually. She said what you said almost exactly.
I don’t think she’s 100% straight, but I don’t think she feels for Dorothy the way Dorothy feels for her.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/iloveyous/
The way I read the punchline, Joyce feels the distinction is clear. But it confuses Dorothy in like a reflexive way. Joyce makes Dorothy feel appreciated, and that can be attractive, if it feels like the appreciation is romantic.
In another timeline, where Dorothy didn’t waste so much time with her poor study habits perhaps, and she made her move sooner, maybe things would be different. Because there’s a chance she’d be open to the idea of being with Dorothy, even though every time we’ve seen Joyce’s fantasies, they’re of guys.
Bisexual people in the closet can lie to themselves! Joyce is lying to herself.
I think it’s very possible there is a kernal of not-totally-straightness in there somewhere, but I don’t think she’s there yet, and Dotty’s current thirstiness is probably not going to draw her in.
Based on Joyce’s face in the last panel, I really don’t think she returns Dorothy’s feelings.
I don’t think she recognizes Dorothy’s feelings yet. She’s picking up that something’s off about how Dorothy’s smiling at her, but probably not what it means.
I’m hoping that’s the case. Friendly confusion. Not friendly rejection.
Because Joyce has a partner.
Being bi doesn’t give you automatic licence to be poly.
Because there’s no authority out there granting licences for something you can literally just be.
Well, considering your experiences and parentage, Marten, I think you know what you’re talking about.
Joyce is already in a relationship, and while it’s mixed in with her figuring out her horniness, she seems to really care for Joe. Also, Dorothy was vocally against the two of them dating, so I could see Joyce suspecting that Dorothy was just jealous (which might also be the case).
Worse, I think Dorothy was (in denial about) trying to sabotage the Joyce – Joe ship.
Yeah, but sexual activity with another girl would be a matter of personal growth and Joyce exploring who is she is as a person. Cheating on Joe when they’re in a comitted relationship? That’s so out of character as to be off the table entirely. Joe’s a notorious poon-hound who had to do epic personal growth to make a repationship with Joyce even possible. Several cast members were seriously opposed because they know Joe’s past behavior. He’s already walking a fine line trying to be a good guy and not pressure Joyce on bedroom stuff. If Joyce cheated on Joe he would be destroyed. Also, Joyce and Dorothy would be ostracized for doing something so shitty to their freind. Just because they’re women hooking up with each other doesn’t mean they aren’t stabbing Joe in the back. The only possible way I can see it happening is if Joyce went to Joe and proposed a three-way with Dorothy. Even the Slipshine subscribers would object to a plot line that ridiculous.
The last panels are a prelude to something not good, mainly for Dorothy.
“So where were you?”
“Let’s just say…a number 2 has never felt so good.”
Haha! That sounds like a poop joke!
Your avatar makes your comment so much better.
oh nooo lmao this could be the funniest outcome
…hm.
Kinsey Scale? More like Keener Scale
she’s keen to test her hypothesis i tell you hwat
There will be much keening, I guarantee it.
I tell you twat?
(it’s like a booty call)
no, i’m pretty sure a booty call is when you yell into a butt? so you can hear the echo? XD
Throwatron and the Cavernous Colon available now, wherever books are sold.
Isn’t Becky in this class?
We about to see her and Robin tag team Dorothy?
… hot.
I bet that’s Bloodrose behind Sarah and Roz. I wonder why she’s not going goth today.
second observation. Chalkboard says:
your new boss -> {Military Industrial Complex}
Loc[kheed Martin]
Boe[ing]
Rut[tech?]
I bet Ruttech’s drones get military use.
Carla’s parents being involved in war profiteering would be an interesting, if unexpected twist. I can imagine Willis being inspired by recent events and having a Carla arc, were she (as an extension of her parents company) finally gets all the attention even she could ever want on campus, because her parents products are being used for … contentious purposes.
Oh no. Have the Ruttens tried to buy elections? Setup their own meme coin? Headed a government auditing department? Are they the baddies?
If they haven’t they will
I don’t really feel like that would be a twist, tbh. The military just is going to take an interest in any kind of weaponizable tech, and drones are pretty blatantly weaponizable. It’s mostly a question of whether Ruttech actually bid on or won the contract.
Booster accuses them of mere wage theft, but I really doubt that’s their only bit of gray morality.
Booster is not (nor was Mike) a reliable source of morality.
Booster has done numerous things that are breeches of ‘right-doing’ and explicitly encouraged/enjoys drama, despite or possibly because of the hurt and pain that it causes…. Basically, Booster enjoys schadenfreude.
Imagine all the background characters living their own separate lives full of crazy events, drama, and character development. And we only get glimpses of it when they occasionally show up as extras or if it’s a good day even have a line or interaction.
That’s been stuck in my brain since I read this strip
Dude in the top row can’t believe this shit
“strungs”???
Yeah, I also have no idea what that term means, and I’m too lazy to google it tonight.
“High strung”, but said in different words.
Yeah. I interpreted it as apologize to your high strung peeps that thought you must have died.
I think she possibly meant “apologize to yourself,” since Dorothy can be INCREDIBLY high strung at times.
it’s an extremely tortured wordplay on “high-strung,” which subtly suggests Robin doesn’t even understand the etymology of the idiom she’s employing
AH.
I feel this joke would have made more sense spoken aloud.
I don’t feel like it being spoken aloud would’ve helped, heh.
Maybe hand motions.
Think of your reaction as the reaction of at least half of the students. Like that person in the polo shirt, they’re baffled in panel 2. Doing weird things to common phrases feels like it’s something Robin does a lot, though. Like it amuses her, so if other people don’t catch on, their loss.
That wordplay was tortured, insulted for having been tortured, and then shamed for feeling bad about being insulted. And then it learned someone stole its lunch
before I read the alt text I searched “Strungs” and the first results are a colorectal surgeon in Madison, Wisconsin. Make of that what you will
Which could mean nothing.
and here i was, thinking that dorothy/joyce would be a nice and stable slow burn endgame kinda ship, not a “cause degrassi levels of messy teen drama right from the get-go” ship. truly love that for everyone involved.
they’re both so sheltered, they spent their teen years trying to be perfect adult women. they’re WAY BEHIND on the “being a high school girlfailure” checklist of life experiences
what is dumbing of age if not a beautiful vessel for messy bisexual girlfailures. one can only hope for a Sal bisexuality arc in 2045 so we can canonize Sal/Amber
But not Sarah/Raidah?
i said messy lol not full on radioactive nuclear meltdown. i will say though, i am fond of hypothetical toxic Raidah yuri
if we band together we can make Jennifer/Raidah DOA’s next greatest codependent sapphic couple
i have never once heard a ship pairing that sounds so equally degrading for both parties
idk if anything Jennifer being unconsciously attracted to a different woman who is incredibly mean to her post-Ruth might explain why she’s been so down to please Raidah even though she treats Jennifer like shit.
but more importantly i’m always pro-pioneering whole new levels of insane f/f, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
jennifer is innately suspicious of kindness because she feels she doesn’t deserve it and gravitates to people who treat her badly because she sees abuse as the only kind of love she deserves. so yeah. 100% seconded
raidah meanwhile would fuck jennifer if that’s what it took to get the billingsworths’ attention, little knowing that those two have absolutely no interest in their own daughter let alone her friends and relations
That’s a really solid observation, and probably a big part of how each of them is set up to be very understanding of each other’s self discovery experience.
I’m slowly starting to think the twist when this all goes down, is that Joyce AND Dorothy AND Joe AND Walky will end up being, at least initially, pretty cool about this.
The bigger twist possibly being, Becky is going to have a full-scale mental breakdown the likes of which we as readers are not possibly prepared for.
Every time Dorothy has ever wanted anything for sure, she’s gone at it with her whole heart. That’s definitely included love… and it caused some huge messiness last time.
This whole thing feels like it has been a huge slow burn though (although it hasn’t been super stable for a while maybe), like since very early in the comic slow. I don’t even know how many years that is anymore!
it’s been like a decade, that’s pretty slow burn, also i accidentally reported your comment cus the button is right next to reply and don’t know how to undo that
I reported you for tattling on yourself.
I didn’t report you, but someday, I’m definitely gonna report somebody by accident, and honestly I already feel bad about it.
And you should. Preemptive guilt is the best guilt.
Oh no
Hmmmmmmmmm
Folks, I’m starting to think Dotty might be into Joyce
I bet that, at some point in history, they may have shared [gasp] a room…
I mean if you think about it, this class takes place in a room, and they’re both in it right now. A scandal for the ages truly!
I can’t believe they’d both be roommates with their whole class. Shameful, really.
Not yet, but if she plays her cards right…
joyce: hey dorothy guess what!! me and joe are going on a date tonight and then afterwards we’re gonna do some hanky-panky!!!
dorothy, teeth gritted, consumed by lust for hanky-panky: i’m… very happy for you……
Things are hard sometimes.
Giggling and kicking my feet. Dotty has it bad.
Joyce is all, “oh, those pics were for ME.” in that last panel
Maybe.
Maybe not.
“I recognize that face. Joe keeps making that face when he looks at me.”
“…uh oh…”
Doesn’t look like a recognition-dawning sort of face. Looks more like a bit of confusion about what’s going on with Dorothy.
ah so i’m not the only one who thinks she looks a little concerned or confused
dotty being normal while gaying internally is all of us being normal while saying internally
this is the real bisexual experience
Huh… so she’s at risk of going from straight zero to 100 on processing her feelings, huh?
I like girls… probably specifically this girl. I’m gonna lean hard into that…
Gosh, I hope it’s not a repeat of Becky when she realized HER feelings. But that’d be kinda ironic.
She took one look at the triangle smile and all her angst cleared up (for now)
Imagining Becky doing the Captain America detention meme, but about wanting to fuck Joyce.
They’re going to end up with headaches from all the eyebrow semaphore.
“Hold on… you want to do what to my… OH! Right! Carry on!”
I see Dorothy didn’t answer Robin’s question. So either she didn’t die, or she did and got better.
i mean ,dorothy’s meticulouslness aside, i don’t think there’s any benefit to rly being early to robin’s class, if anything i’d expect her to be 15-20 mins late herself lol. if not like, just ‘lecturing’ in the middle of the cafeteria or so casually XD
So, is Serious Student Sarah secretly dreaming of Tony?
Probably I mean I would, also this would be the class for it Also I am pretty sure Robin would probably tell her that day dreaming about that hunk of steak short king is far more important.
… secretly?
Seeing all these DorothyxJoyce glances with the Book 14 cover art that has them arm-in-arm below the strip on the page seems like it just has to be intentional. It’s gotta be
(sorry for absence in recent comment sections, currently having tech problems.)
Don’t worry about it – I think a lot of us have been increasingly withdrawn of late as well. Regardless, it is good to have you back. I am sorry to hear you are having technical problems.
The Joyce has registered concern
Be sure that if it comes to that, it won’t be pleasant at all and what’s worse, if Becky finds out about this… oh Dorothy.
Becky getting jealous would also have knock on effects with her relationship with Dina, which would be bad. Then again, Becky is far more observant and intelligent than she lets on. Becky may already know about Dorothy’s feelings. Additionally, Becky might actually feel less threatened by Dorothy getting shut down by Joyce, as it would balance there relationship. Becky would no longer need to worry that her failed advances towards Joyce somehow damaged their bond and let Dorothy usurp her position at Joyce’s right hand.
The only predictable thing about this comic is that it’s unpredictable.
Uncertainty is inevitable.
That’s what they want you to think.
Yeah, I am wondering if she just thinks something is off about Dorothy and is concerned for her friend, or if she getting subtle alarm bells from her one-sided romantic misadventure with Becky.
I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. Like you mention she’s been here before. Combined with the tiddy pic the evidence is pretty conclusive
Ow. Am lesbian, have been here with the crushing on my best friend thing. We are still best friends, and I’m over it, but ow.
Something’s there that wasn’t there before~
Oh, Dorothy. This is going to be rough.
Now lemme roll out my 10 gallon drum of potato chips.
Brown-haired guy in the back looks like a new background character. He needs a name. I’m thinking Luke.
You can’t name him! What’re you, his dad or something?
Oh christ, dottie, rein it in, i have been there, I know, just… don’t explode. Just don’t explode.
I may or may not be imagining Dotty as a bomb with a little countdown timer on her glasses now
NEW FEELINGS WELLING UP IN DOROTHY
WHAT… WOULD SAPPHO DO?
Dorothy, sweetheart, I’m happy for you, but in class is decidedly not the time to make “I wanna fuck you” eyes at somebody
In class is the perfect time
I am. COMPLETELY lost of what the hell “vertically-ascendant strungs” could possibly mean
Alt text says “get it, because the strungs are high”, indicating that Robin is calling something (not sure if she’s referring to Dorothy or Joyce) as highly strung
Pretty sure Robin’s just referring to post-secondary students in general.
She’s saying Dorothy should apologize to herself for being late, because she’s so high-strung.
good grief that is some TORTURED wordplay, she’s getting more incomprehensible every time
ruh roh
Giving herself away with the lip biting.
…Dorothy no
you’re not even sparing a thought of guilt for Walky, huh
I half suspect we’re gonna get a flashback panel to her breaking up with him immediately after they finished having sex
Joe knows this, but we’re honestly not sure how Walky will react. Some assume everything will be fine, and he’ll even joke about it (I want to hold onto that possibility).
And believe me, I love Dorothy, but I’m terrified that my perception of her will change because of all this chaos.
Joe really feels like he’s not exactly down for this, but he would martyr himself for Joyce’s happiness, because he thinks he *has* to. His “I will suffer so others do not have too, while pretending to be a man ho” complex is gonna cause issues with all this I think.
Damn, drama is the driving force of this comic, but there are times when you wish some of the characters had their moment of peace.
Yeah, that has always been my biggest fear between the four of them, for this situation: that neither Joe nor Walky will actually be “okay” with sharing their girlfriends with each other’s girlfriends, but each of them puts their romantic partner on such a pedestal, in terms of feeling like they don’t deserve them; I’d hate to see them both feel internal pressure to assent to Joyce and Dorothy also being together, purely because of their own insecurities, or because “well what kind of men would we be if we didn’t want hot gals to ‘les out?'”
Feels to me like both of them will be thinking more in terms of stepping aside than of a poly relationship. Walky especially will likely see Dorothy turning back to him as part of her denial of her crush on Joyce. (And he might be right about that.)
Joe’s situation is somewhat different, since Joyce hasn’t actually had her bisexual awakening yet, so we don’t know how she’s going to respond.
It would be really funny if Joyce had gone through every stage of bisexual awakening off-panel without even the audience ever seeing it.
Dorothy starts stammering through coming out to Joyce, and Joyce is just like, “Yay! I realized I was bi a month ago. I’m so glad you got there too!”
Willis just like, “well I’ve already done all the possible bi coming out stories that I’m allowed, so I’ll just skip right to acceptance for Joyce”
All facial expressions are both voluntary and mutually exclusive with later expressions.
If Joyce plays her cards right, she can probably pull off an afternoon/evening double-header. Hell, with Dorothy up first, she doesn’t even need to shower in-between.
This is really cute and also really sad
“This is my girlfriend Joyce and her boyfriend Joe.”
Someone needs to tell Robin that you can’t just make up slang.
Forshizzle.
How does slang happen if you can’t make it up?
“You can’t? That’s totally babies.”
Also, Walky.
*radio crackles*
WE HAVE LIP BITE, I REPEAT, WE HAVE LIP BITE, THE MISSION IS A GO
People looking at Joyce’s smile dropping in the last panel and still thinking she’s likely to reciprocate is crazy to me. This one’s gonna get messy, and not in the fun way.
Well, I’ll still enjoy it, but only in a pseudo-voyeuristic, “thank god these aren’t real people” kind of way.
Oh god, they really are that attached to this ship.
I feel like that assumes Dorothy is even going to pursue a physical relationship at all. Admitting attraction and acting on it are two very different things. They are both in relationships to begin with and frankly it’s already pretty messy. Joyce wants to watch Dorothy fuck. That’s already where they’re at in a platonic friendship.
Also, it’s one panel that’s meant to be ambiguous.
You saying things are already messy kinda proves my point. Even if she doesn’t pursue a physical relationship, Joyce is going to figure out one way or another, and it’s going to recontextualize everything that’s happened between them. I don’t see that wrapping itself up neatly, if for no other reason than because this is a comic where things usually play out as dramatically as possible.
Right, because it’s not like Dorothy is radiating misery, or anything. It’s gotta be Joyce thinking “uh-oh, I don’t return the feelings I assume are behind my friend’s unhappy expression”.
I don’t think this strip means anything one way or the other, but seeing this take repeatedly is as weird to me as people still holding out hope are weird to you, heh.
Saying Dorothy is radiating misery is the wildest take I’ve seen on this update, honestly. Everything about her expression in panel 7 radiates attraction.
I don’t think Joyce has necessarily figured out just what Dorothy is feeling right now, but her expression in the final panel certainly strikes me as that of somebody who realizes something has changed, and is uncomfortable and unsure of what to make of it.
Shrug?
Yeah, that’s where I land as well. “That’s not normal for Dorothy. What’s going on?”
She could reciprocate and it could still get messy. That’s kind of where I’m at– I think she may well realize she’s attracted to Dorothy, but she’s in a relationship with Joe and she’s really happy with him. Though I think *that* would put more strain on their friendship than if it was one-sided from Dorothy…
Kinsey got it wrong. His “scale” has only one axis. Actual relationships aren’t that easy. Putting level of attraction on the Y axis and sexual orientation on the X axis and romantic orientation on the Z axis leaves too few axis, there are many more types of attraction not shown.
The folly of the taxonomy of feelings.
Y’know, even if Joyce was reciprocal, I don’t think her initial reaction to Dorothy acting differently would differ from this.
That must be Roz to the left of Sarah. I had to look extra hard to find things identifiable as Roz.
Sure is!
Methinks the damn is about to crack 🥲
So what’s the over / under on Joyce developing a complex about how all her best friends turn out to be super into her and not realizing it until way later?
Are some of us reading that last Dorothy panel as… arousal?
Is that’s what’s happening in the comment section for this one?
Because to me that looks like “struggling to force a smile, and not entirely succeeding”.
Which leaves room for a lot of things, like:
– Feeling guilty about Walky
– Feeling anxious about doing or saying something that gives herself away to Joyce
– Worrying about how Joyce is going to react if she says anything
And in turn, Joyce’s falling smile is equally open-ended.
It could be that she’s putting things together about the photo, but it seems every bit as likely to be a response to Dorothy’s radiated misery.
Like I’m not saying she’s going to reciprocate Dorothy’s feelings, I have no faith in that being the outcome we’re headed for and very little hope!
I’m just saying this particular strip is a weird one to use as definitive proof of a sunken ship. It seems pretty deliberately ambiguous, in that I don’t think Joyce is on the same page as the readers right now.
For ship-sinking, I think “Joyce didn’t put any more thought into Dorothy’s cleavage pic” is better evidence, but Willis also provided her with some very compelling distractions, so that’s got ambiguity, too.
TL;DR: I’m not failing to see Joyce’s sad face, I am just not convinced it’s connected to any thoughts she might or might not have had so far about Dorothy’s intentions wrt the photo (which, just to say, would’ve had to have taken place off panel, which I think would be an odd choice for a storyline with this much build up).
Joyce looks more confused than sad, to me. Dorothy looks less miserable and more (unknowingly?) openly thirsty for Joyce, which leads to the confusion. Like, “Oh hey, my bestie!” “Oh yeah, I’d love to hit that” “Wait, what?”
It’s not just that one panel, it’s the whole progression. In the first panel with Robin, she’s blank-faced; when she spots Joyce gesturing for her to come sit next to her, she cracks an awkward half smile, showing a little bit of teeth; in the panel where they sit next to each other, she has sort of a crooked slanted closed-mouth half smile; and then in response to Joyce’s relentless triangle grin, she once again shows teeth in an awkward crooked half-smile, this time with eyebrow action. Cover her mouth, and her eyes are sad in the last panel.
So that’s where my analysis comes from.
What you’re seeing as a struggling smile in Dorothy’s last panel there reads as a lower-lip bite to me, which would be Dorothy escalating from “troubled but buoyed by my relentlessly-cheerful friend” to “Wow, that smile does things to me.” Which Joyce has never seen from Dorothy, so Joyce moves to less-smile, more raised-eyebrow puzzlement.
Possibly with a little subconscious unease because while she hasn’t twigged to it quite yet, she has seen that from a BFF before. Becky.
It is a lower lip bite, I just see the bite as part of the struggle.
As I noted to Yumi below, there’s no blush on Dorothy’s face, and her eyebrows are sad. If you cover the mouth, her eyes look sad to me. Meanwhile we’ve mostly seen glassy eyed neutral eyebrows from horny faces, or else happy eyebrows (in the comic they linked with Dina and Becky’s very mutual excitement).
Anyway if I’m wrong I’m wrong. As also noted below to Aura, I might just be too ace for this. I don’t usually run into that issue with DoA but it’s always a possibility. I can’t imagine being turned on in this situation if I were Dorothy (and I’ve been in what I think is her exact emotional place several times). But that doesn’t mean I have to be reading her correctly.
If any of the panels had indicated Dorothy’s gaze had gone below Joyce’s neckline, if Dorothy were blushing, any number of things would make me think this was arousal, but as things stand no.
Again though: could be wrong.
The progression I’m seeing is. A neutral expression for Robin, a little “Ooh, it’s Joyce” smile of recognition, an “I’m sitting next to my cute bestie” smile, the same smile from a different angle, possibly held for slightly too long, and then “Mmm, Joyce” with attraction leaking out (intentionally or not”.
To answer your question, everybody reading Dorothy’s expression as arousal is exactly what is happening here, and you are, as far as I can see, alone in your assessment.
So hey, if you’re right, you get to tell literally everybody else on the page “I told you so!”
For Willis’s sake I hope I’m wrong, since one genuinely wants one’s art to be read correctly.
My analysis is above if it interests you, I don’t know what else to say. Reiterating:
?
I think Willis was trying to make it ambiguous and judging by the comments, he succeeded.
Did they? If it’s just me and maybe Aura not interpreting this as horny, we could just be wrong.
If there weren’t the lines indicating that Dorothy is biting her lower lip in her last panel, I could see that, but as it is, a lip bite smile like that is often used to convey attraction or arousal. Consider this strip of Becky and Dina being horny as hell: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/03-trial-and-sarah/rightnow/
I think in this case it’s more likely to be nervousness or something. While there are certainly a lot of horny lower-lip bites in Willis’s art, there have also been numerous examples of non-horny ones that people in the comments assume are horny no matter how unlikely in the circumstances. I think this is another one of the latter.
I wouldn’t say Dorothy’s here is necessarily “horny”– I so think it conveys attraction, and nervousness about that attraction fits ad part as well. I think seeing it as not-attraction-related here would have to ignore a lot of the circumstances.
Ughh, my phone insists on too many unhelpful “corrections”… “I so think” should be “I do think” (though it basically works as either), and “fits ad part” should be “fits as part”
I mean, yes, her new awareness of her attraction to Joyce is absolutely the cause of like, the vast majority of her emotional state right now, on that much I can certainly agree.
Then I guess the difference is just in whether we perceive that attraction coming through in her expression. For me, that penultimate panel had the Muses from Hercules popping into my head to say she’s got, got, got it bad.
Also, I realized that instead of going searching for relevant lip-biting examples, I could have just pointed to my icon, but oh well.
Counterpoint: both those lip-bites and your icon are accompanied by blushing, and in none of these examples are there sad eyebrows.
Dorothy isn’t blushing in the comic.
Honestly, I just thought you hadn’t noticed the lip-biting lines (they’re small, so that’d be fair), so I was looking for an example where it was obvious. There are horny lip bites without blushing in comic, but the easiest example for me to find is Amber being gross, and I’m not really feeling that right now.
Anyway, like I said, I’m not really reading Dorothy as horny here. I think lip bite can be used for “attraction or arousal” (among other uses, yes), and here I think it’s attraction. Like, it’s not something I would expect her to be looking at Joyce’s body for. I think looking at Joyce’s smiling face is more likely to pull at that “I am so into her” feeling.
(I’ve been the type that goes “she’s so pretty I’m gonna cry” when having crushes–when there’s strong emotion there not focused on the “horny for this person” part that may or may not be part of it, so that’s also part of where I’m coming from.)
I want to make a joke about how ofc she had cheek blushes, if she didn’t then it was Amazi-Girl being horny.
But mostly I just felt like I had to make a counterpoint comment.
We’ll see, I guess.
I do still think it’s a wild reading of the text of this comic to take Joyce’s expression as simultaneously understanding that Dorothy is In Sapphic with her and rejecting her, but I am open to the possibility of being wrong about all of it really.
But by that logic, Dorothy has cheek blushes here, so your counterpoint would eat itself.
Yeah, that seems like a lot to put on one thin panel of Joyce’s expression. I’m in the camp that’s more her going, “Uh, that is different and I am unsure what’s happening?”
I mean literally that would have been a joke.
We’ll see.
Yeah, I also meant my comment in a joking way.
Okay. Internet tone is hard
Here’s my read, it’s I think not quite the same as yours but much closer to that than the horny dorothy and cold Joyce ones, which honestly seem kind of wild to me.
Panel 2: Joyce: Yay Dorothy’s here!
Panel 3: Dorothy: Spirits buoyed a little by excited Joyce
Panel 4: Joyce: Hi Dorothy I love you bestie!!~
Dorothy: Feeling nervous and awkward
Panel 5: Dorothy: Little smile for Joyce, because someone being genuinely that happy to see you, especially someone you love, is going to be at least a little bit infection.
Panel 6: Joyce: big encouraging smile returning Dorothy’s little one
Panel 7: Dorothy: Experiencing a whole lot of feelings (I don’t think any of them right now are likely to be arousal). Not sure of the exact mix, speculation to follow. She’s smiling, but overall looks very vulnerable in this panel.
Panel 8: Joyce: Notices the fragility of Dorothy’s smile, is worried about her, particularly along with her uncharacteristic lateness.
Speculation re: Dorothy’s emotions in Panel 7:
I think we definitely have at the very least the aforementioned nerves and awkwardness remaining, combined with a degree of emotional turmoil because she’s still processing what this means for her and for her friendship with Joyce and her relationship with Walky. I suspect there’s also a dose of appreciation for Joyce and her Joyceness here — her cheeriness, her simple joy at seeing her friend, her encouragement, etc. Which possibly leads to an ‘oh god, I really do love this girl, what do I do?’ reaction. Tbh overall I read her as being potentially about 5 seconds from falling apart, with the shiny eyes indicating nascent tears/vulnerability rather than excitement, the lip-bite being nerves/anxiety rather than arousal, and the smile one of some very mixed emotions, and maybe a little forced.
Like, maybe I’m just too ace for this. I don’t usually run into that as a problem in DoA, but it’s very possible! I just don’t see how Joyce’s triangle smile could be prompting arousal so intense Dorothy is struggling to keep it off her face, and I’ve been in the “afraid my bff is gonna notice I have non platonic feelings for her” camp a few times in my life, and very rarely did that concern mingle with feelings of being attracted to them; it always blotted out any other feelings.
I’d be reading it differently if Joyce’s body was at all in frame for Dorothy to be looking at, I think?
I especially have trouble believing that Willis would have had Joyce get from “why did Dorothy send me a lewd? Oh… I should delete this… or is deleting it weird? Wait, what did Jennifer just say about kissing your best friend????” to “that photo was DEFINITELY because Dorothy has feelings for me” in like, 0.5 seconds, based on Dorothy looking at her here, so I’m especially struggling with the idea that Joyce’s loss of happiness is because she KNOWS that Dorothy is Looking Respectfully TM, but.
Who knows.
I appreciate the analysis though.
I really think it isn’t you being ace Li, I think it’s the paneling being way too tiny to properly express what Willis wants. I thought similarly to you and def am not ace but reading the comments definitely informed me that it could be ‘horny’ i guess. Idk.
Does no one else bite their lip in cringed smile when they fucked up? To me that is a ‘i fucked up’ face from Dorothy not ‘openly thirsting’…
+1
Ooooooohhhhh, I voted she is an 1…. I guess she is higher then. :O
Joyce in the last panel seems to be thinking something like “Uh, why is Dorothy looking at me like I’m a particularly sexy steak dinner?” She clearly registers that look as unusual.
I did not get it, alt-text.
It’s college. No one cares if you’re late. Dorothy cares because she is high strung. Robin is saying that in her usual Robin way of “y’all strungs be up there, fo rizzle”
@ dash: i’d think considering you’re paying for the class unless you got in throug ha scholarship/rich parents/connections, the person themselves would care more than the teacher unless they’re also social/friendly enough to get a copy of a note if they miss a day or so if not asking the prof to email them a summary or so
“Hi Dorothy!!”
“Heyyy~”
“….that’s…not the usual response I get.”
Dorothy tomorrow: “You know about the shoulder touch?”
This is like Amy being late, they should play “what happened to Dotty” like in Brooklyn 99
Not like this, Willis… :'(
Joyce being gay for Dorothy is a work in progress.
Panel seven: “Hey,
AdoraJoyce~♪♥”I understood that reference!
I cannot wait until we go back to a storyline that does not involve the comment section screaming for Joyce to cheat on the boyfriend she loves because there’s a girl adjacent to her.
That’s either gonna take a while or tomorrow is going to smash cut to Carla doing Carla things with her girlfriend.
You’ve either just recently joined, or really haven’t been paying attention. Throughout the entire series, Dorothy and Joyce have been developing closeted feelings for each other. And each have had their respective, not healthy reasons (Joyce being a Fundie, and Dororthy thinking that it would hurt her political aspirations), to either push them in the background, or just straight up ignore them. Something was bound to happen between those two, and what happens next, depends on whose advice wins out, Danny’s, or Jennifer’s.
There’s, like, maybe two people approaching doing what you’re saying.
If we read “Dorothy and Joyce should hook up” or descriptions of same as “screaming for Joyce to cheat”, there are arguably 2-3 visible on my screen while I am responding to this post.
I just wouldn’t read people shipping Dorothy and Joyce as the same as “screaming for Joyce to cheat” because… it’s not.
I mean, if they are doing so in a context where they want it to happen right now … I think it kinda is.
Look, I’m also poly queer IRL, and I’ll specifically say that I read “calls for Joe to be involved” still read as “encouragement to cheat” until/unless everyone involved comes out as poly/open first, which exactly zero of them have done.
(That said, I’ll also cop to just hating the entire concept of the Joyce x Dorothy ship and wishing it would run aground and burn to the waterline at the same time, so I am 100% biased)
Hating a ship is fair enough, and hating a ship when you’re in the minority can be rough. I don’t necessarily want Joyce x Dorothy to happen myself, but if I did (or if we were on the Joe-Joyce-Dorothy-Walky-Amber W ship I kind of want but mostly ship for the hell of it), saying something like “god I want these two to get together” in response to this strip wouldn’t mean I want them to cheat.
I don’t think we disagree on what cheating is, but… again, that’s very few of the actual commenters. But one is right by this post. If you assume everyone who ships them and mentions wanting them together wants that to be right now, okay, but that’s a pretty unfair assumption.
Reasonable people can disagree, but IMHO the sheer consistent pressure of the Dorothy x Joyce fandom carries with it an immediacy, and has done so since the laundry room incident (which I still dislike on so many levels).
That said, I also think it’s entirely plausible that you can read things in the way you’re suggesting, in that it’s all implicitly carrying a “after Joe and Joyce break up/agree to just be the nexus of das uberpolycule”.
I just don’t think it’s unreasonable to read “they should make out (in front of Joe)”, in a context involving a Willis lip bite, as having a “right the fuck now” implied, either.
That pressure is in your head, stranger.
Nobody’s doing that in the first place.
It’s deeply uncomfortable.
Shrug emoji. I’m gonna keep right on shipping these two in a way that doesn’t require anyone to cheat on anyone, but I’m also gonna go right on feeling neutrally about people who don’t care about fictional cheating, because fictional cheating is morally neutral and completely fine for people to want to see.
The next Slipshine is Joyce and Dorothy, making out all licky style, in front of Joe.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/03-trystin-in-the-wind/observe-2/
spiritual sequel
Oh, Dorothy, no…
Joyce’s response to Becky, for those looking: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/hindsight/
Personally, I’m reading the interaction of smiles in panels 5-6-7-8 as something like:
Dorothy: Wow, she’s really grinning at me. Maybe I should go for this.
Joyce: I can’t wait to tell Dorothy about my plans for Joe-based hanky-panky! Deploy triangle smile!
Dorothy: I can’t wait to tell Joyce about my attraction for her! Deploy lower-lip-bite!
Joyce: Something’s not going the way I expected, but it’s Dorothy so I’m going to wait to figure out what it is.
no, stop, stop it, it’s hurting more and more…
“Maybe she wants to watch Joe and me go at it? Covering one eye up, of course. Just like I offered with her and Walky (ugh).”
Oh no she’s hitting her with the light skin stare
The huh?
(A) I don’t have any opinions of what the girls will do about this situation
(B) I don’t have any opinions about what the girls Should do about this situation
C) I do have opinions that Joyce has some physical attraction to Dorothy, esp after her muttering about how she shouldn’t delete Dot’s titty pic
(D) Since there is some confusion mixing up interpretations of behavior with predictions/hopes/expectations, I reiterate: no opinions here about what they should do, and me believing they might have some attraction to each other doesn’t mean I think they should act some specific way about it
She’s realising her attraction, in whatever shape it takes, is what allows her to be happy in this moment. Turns out, feelings is feelings. Something to manage, but not something to fight.
I am reading this strip on my phone, and thanks to my eyes, I need to zoom in to catch all the details. That eyebrow of Joyce’s in the last panel is doing a TON of heavy ambiguous lifting g. If you zoom out to see the whole strip, you may not notice the eyebrow – which gives Joyce a look of content. She seems happy that Dorothy is starting to warm up and smile a little. I didn’t think Joyce picked up on the additional motivations going on with Dotty, but I definitely thought she was just pleased to see her friend in a good mood for the first time in a while.
Then I zoomed in. And noticed that eyebrow.
Tbh, I still don’t think Joyce has any specific idea of what Dotty is going through right now, but she definitely knows something is different, and it is making her suddenly question… something. Exactly what that something is, I still don’t think has occurred to Joyce, but there is definitely something new going on with Dotty and it is triggering some kind of inner question for Joyce. I suspect she can’t articulate just what that question is right now, but it is now definitely there.
My guess is that Joyce gains realization of what Dotty is feeling towards her, and absolutely rejects it all. Denies, suppresses, pushes it all away and down. This likely leads to a strain and some distance between them. It also is the catalyst for Joyce to co front and come to grips with her own sexuality in whatever way that plays out – if she does have more-than-friend feelings for Dotty, I can see her feeling no small amount of guilt or shame at how she handled/felt about Becky (see the strip that others have linked to).
And I feel like that’s a good thing. Neither one of them are in a place where jumping into a more-than-friendship relationship would end well for them. It’s not that I ship them – I would be cool with either direction playing out – but if the two if them DO end up in a romantic or physical relationship with each other, I would like for it not to be doomed from the start.
Basically how I see it happening, except I don’t think Joyce will suppress it entirely or deny it outright (see how she frames the idea of Dorothy sending the pic, keeping it, and how she reacts to Jennifer’s sage wisdom about best friends). She’ll alter it to fit into a framework that doesn’t make it “weird”, which opens up another can of worms. Joyce’s affection leaning into being sapphic has mostly been used for comedy despite other people in-universe commenting on it, but there are also a few serious eye raising moments. Any serious questioning from Joyce would involve more self-denial than she’s ever previously shown relating to sexuality. How long ago did her reaction to Ruth/Jason and the “love Dorothy” explanation to Joe happen in-universe?
Trusting Willis as a writer, I don’t think he will repeat the same exact thing that happened with Becky, and it wouldn’t make sense based on the set up (whether from sporadic things from many years ago, or more explicitly since Book 13) and their established relationship. It causing a rift between the two doesn’t quite make sense at the moment, given how a more inexperienced Joyce handled Becky’s sudden infatuation (from her perception), and it seems doubtful Dorothy will explicitly convey any sort of romantic pinning from what we’ve seen. That’s up in the air. Joyce will most likely either have to guess but never be sure for awhile, or one of the four people who has an inkling of this tells her. That being said, I don’t see a happy ending to this short-term (that’s like a year our time), but nothing involving cheating.
It’s interesting because all of this coincides with Joyce moving forward, mostly physically, with Joe, and her hang ups about sex are still center stage despite her recent teasing about “hanky panky.” Dorothy was the Joyce/Joe liaison that led to them getting to third base, so I’m wondering how that’ll end up now.
Same as the old boss.
This is an extremely funny moment in time considering the origins of this spin-off universe/comic with Dorothy’s deal with Head Alien. Dorothy managed to get Walky for herself but is fully crushing on Joyce. Basically ready to throw a Monkey Master doll at her head.
Yeahhh Joyce knows.
yeah, like, she did received pics of her yesterday
Dorothy’s gonna do exactly what Becky did when she revealed she was gay, isn’t she? Not exactly TELL Joyce she’s into her, just flat out smooch her and wait for Joyce’s reaction.
I think I know how Joyce will respond (given she’s dating Joe and has insinuated she’s VERY sexually attracted to him) but Dotty’s reaction to getting rejected? No clue. Also Dotty doesn’t seem nearly as sympathetic as Becky was , given she, Dotty, is also dating someone.
I agree Dorothy would come off as less sympathetic than Becky was if she did that, but I also really don’t think she’s going to do that.
It would be a bit out of character for her, but people sometimes do some weird stuff when they want something super bad and don’t have a path to get it. Dorothy’s already done some pretty weird stuff w/ Joyce on that front.
I’m praying that it sends Dorothy off the deep end. She’s awesome when she’s mad.
I would give a lot to know what Joyce is thinking in that last panel. It really is a masterfully ambiguous expression on her face.
BTW, does the the extra behind Sarah remind anyone else of Charlie Brown?
Unnamed dude in the back row seems to realize something weird is goin on!
Damn, Dorothy went from bi revelation to uncontrollable thirst in record time.
To be fair, she’s be at uncontrollable thirst for a while, she just didn’t know that’s what it was.
This could be the end or the beginning of something. Dorothy seems unable to stop her feelings now that she knows she has them. But please Dorothy, not during class!
“Wow, Dorothy is smiling a lot more today. I’m glad she’s feeling better!” – Joyce, probably
Dorothy, don’t.
Hey do you wanna uhhhhhhh do laundry again?
right!!
“This time though, let’s look directly into each other’s eyes though! Oh and if you could say my name that might really do it for me–… uhhh forget that last part!”
Look at her face in the last panel. She know’s something’s wrong.
Everyone wants to bang Joyce.
I’ve known people like that.
I don’t.
(okay, i’m lying. dangit.)
Looks like Dorothy replaced being president with being bi.
Can’t wait for the Damn You Willis comic for this
Joyce be like “man if I hadn’t a nickel for every time my best lady friend turned out to be secretly into me the whole time I’ve known her, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but AAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGHHHHHHH!”
* had. Autocorrect whyyyy
“Sarah, please don’t be in to me, I’ve had a very hectic week”
A two eh? Is the number creeping up as we watch?
Oh no, she’ll figure it out so fast, she’s an amazing lesbian love sleuth
Seeing Robin in action in all this time, I have to wonder:
Is it really THAT easy to get a teaching job at IUB?
Who do I send my resume to?
She was a Republican politician.
Is Jouce ever so slightly also biting her lip in the last panel?
In Dorothy’s dreams… That’s a slightly uncomfortable smile if I’ve ever seen one.
oh hey? did they ever resolve the boob text thing? She’s gotta be wondering what that was about.
oh, we are SCREWED. joyce/dorothy (we need a better ship name) is SO JOEVER….
Doyce!
Joyrothy
Much better than Joyoe.
Joeyce
god, i just want things to go better for dorothy this time than they did in the walkyverse. she doesn’t need to end up with joyce or walky or anyone but it would be nice if she just didn’t get shoehorned into being a villain
dumbing of age has mostly been about people fucking up and getting better so, you know, i have hope, but i keep bracing myself for a heel turn from one of my favorite characters
why does that guy behind sarah seem concerned? i imagine most ppl , o ther htan it being a ‘requirement’ for their major, consider robin’s class to be a blow off class (unless they actually care about politics or so and wanna trasnfer as immediately as possible but she’s the only one doing that subject, right?)
I don’t know why, but he looks like Li Shaolan.
I think robin is just a concerning person in general, and dorothy is kind of acting like somebody died