She’s a pol-sci major. Being seen opposing the current RA when the current RA is disliked increases her chance of replacing her as RA later, which in turn gives her more influence over the dorm, and is a chance to endear her to everyone else. This, in turn, would give an opening to run for a high ranking student council position which in turn opens up more opportunities, and so forth.
Except that as long as Mr. Hughes holds the amount of influence with the college that he does, there’s no way Ruth is getting replaced as RA. Which leaves her back at square one, with the currently-literally-unreplaceable-RA pissed off at her.
Getting arrested for being a crimelord or being grabbed by a cyborg and thrown down a reactor shaft you conveniently placed in your throne room are both particularly elegant moves in twenty-dimensional chess, so
Fun fact: The wall is actually Joe. And he’s.. okay with it.
In fact, he’ll even still be okay with it in a moment, after they realize he’s not actually a wall. He’ll even still be okay with it a week later, after his femurs heal. That Joe, what a guy.
She is in a rare position of benefiting either way: she gets them back together or she ensures they never even think of getting back together. Either way, she has a quiet class from now on
It isn’t necessary for her to be well-liked. It’s already been established that there’s external power in play keeping her in place whether or not even Ruth herself wishes it so.
Mind you it’s unlikely Becky knows the particulars of that, but she’d likely be at least partly aware that there was discussion of removing Ruth when things came to a head last time and it didn’t happen, so I’m not sure what groundwork she’s laid here that’s more meaningful than what’s already come out.
I don’t know if Leslie is a good teacher, at least not on all merits.
She has some very effective teaching points. But she’s also clearly shown bias in the past, and ditched her lesson and left it in the hands of her unprepared student while pursuing her own personal agenda.
I think this depends on a couple of things- first, how much the students buy into their education, and second, how much of an asshole the teacher is. When you’re in a classroom full of people who already see the value in their education, then you’re right, prioritizing teaching over creating positive relationships with your students is important; but when 3/4ths of the class struggles to give even a single shit, showing that you buy into them goes a long way into them buying into the class.
And also I’ve known a few teachers who could stand to try and be liked a little more I mean damn where do you get off treating people that way
Some segment of the Antivaxxer crowd would argue that she should have been put on an ice floe and pushed out to sea because an autistic child is worse than a dead one, or one who is wracked by permanent complications from any number of now-preventable diseases.
Oh, yes, SillyGoose, even Dina. For, you see, she’s too passive or her dinosaur obsession is creepy and is currently harming the character they hold in exaltation, or it’s just that she’s romantically entwined with Becky the Irredeemable and who would ever, what is wrong with her.
Imagine whatever projection you can do to these comic characters, and without fail, the comments section will provide a living example.
Dina’s clearly been brainwashed into preaching the left’s liberal science agenda. Plus she’s in denial of her sexuality… I guess? I find it hard to think bad things about Dina.
Yes, everyone will be hated by someone, but that doesn’t mean some of those positions don’t have more or less justification for that hate. Painting it as all equally valid is just disingenuous.
Oh, I don’t mean to paint it all as equally valid, that’s sarcasm for the sake of civility. I think some of the time it’s a completely valid response and I engage in drinking the haterade myself.
But there’s certain contingents who come out of the woodwork when a character they don’t like *breathes* or *speaks*, and I believe pretty firmly they need to fucking cut it out.
Their very first exchange was along the lines of “because of what you did, you should drop the class” “no, you drop it” without either of them mentioning their breakup or past relationship. It was only in the next strip, when Becky got involved and started talking about how they should smooch and how Billie still “has the hots” for Ruth, that they started referring to the actual nature of their relationship
Neither of them was closeted though. They only ever hid their relationship because of Mary’s blackmail. Once that was dealt with they were totally in the open about it
Sure, and also to Jennifer’s floor over in Forest, and anyone who happened to see them out on that date, or just cuddling in the hallway
They very clearly weren’t hiding their relationship. Being careful not to out people is great, but there’s a point where you have to let people be Out and stop treating their sexuality and relationships like dirty secrets instead of completely normal things
I am well aware of the risks of being outed to the wrong crowd. I’m not terribly worried about the Gender Studies class taught by a lesbian though, and clearly Ruth and Jennifer aren’t either
They only reacted to their dirty laundry being spilled
Do Ruth and Jennifer know that? Should they have to? Why is Becky the one who gets to dictate when and how other people find out about their sexuality?
I said as much yesterday that I think this is exactly how Becky would act in this scenario, she would enthusiastically chat with her new lesbian mom about the two girls on the rocks, but that doesn’t make an action okay, it just makes it sensible for a character to take.
It’s still a problem, it’s just a gentle instance of that problem versus something like Becky running around screaming in public about it (which she’s kinda doing here, because there’s an entire classroom the two just got outed in front of, even if they’re off-panel and might as well not exist).
But it’s not even “told about my sexual orientation”. It’s more like “saw you making out publicly with your partner”. There’s no “trust” involved to betray.
A good friend of mine has been married for a decade. Am I supposed to treat that as a secret that can’t be mentioned to anyone I’m not sure doesn’t already know?
As FC said, it’s the idea that orientation always has to be treated like a dirty secret that seems off to me here. And doesn’t match my real-world experience.
And just to be clear, if someone is keeping it secret or even just relatively quiet, that is something that absolutely should be respected.
Did or did Becky not just stand up in the middle of the class to explain to Leslie, this complete stranger, and the rest of the classroom, that Billie and Ruth had dated and were both queer.
As for you friends, if you have to ask, then ask how they want that information meted out. It’s not complicated. The problem is not in the choice of how Queer people acknowledge their identity the problem is in other people taking it away without personal regard or even god forbid that someone particularly vile could be listening.
Yeah, and them being cuddly in hallways and doing relationship stuff was their decision. Speaking publicly about their relationship this time, in this class, with this particular group of people, was not their decision. It was dragged out of them by Becky.
I get that Becky’s a likeable character, but I simply cannot agree with her actions here. I apologise if I have expressed myself too harshly, but “never out people without their consent” is something I take seriously.
“Treat every gay person as if they are still in the closet until they start making out in front of everyone in the room” is not the great take you think it is
I’ll take your word for it. I’m not familiar with rhetorical techniques nor debates, especially in English.
I’m honestly confused as to why this comment thread blew up the way it did. I don’t even dislike Becky; I actually quite like her. I just don’t agree with her actions in this situation and that they constitute outing these two specific characters to this specific group of people without their consent. I still believe that to be true.
That somehow has been misrepresented as me saying that I believe we should “treat every gay person as if they are still in the closet until they start making out in front of everyone in the room”, and I’m not sure where that came from. If it was because I expressed myself too harshly, then I apologise. If my words came across that way, then I apologise because that is not what I meant at all.
Being in denial about her bisexuality is not the same thing as denying she’d been in a relationship with Ruth. Something she’s very loudly failed to deny or demonstrate any desire to hide
She was in a relationship, but she’s also said it was a phase. That at least sounds some kind of trying to diminish the relationship, like experimenting in college or something.
Who were the people involved in that relationship that Becky just outed?
Like, if we’re talking about them saying this to the rest of the class that’s one thing, because the strip’s focus was on the three main characters so you can read that no one else really cares, but then Becky stands up and starts spewing about their relationship to Leslie and now to the rest of the class, and all for incredibly manipulative and awful ends.
Huh? I don’t understand the question. Jennifer and Ruth, obviously.
My only point in that response was that even if Jennifer is claiming it was just a phase, she hasn’t shown any signs of wanting to hide the relationship.
And yes, I agree that Becky’s way out of line with what she’s doing, but I don’t think “outing” is a significant part of it. This would be just as shitty if it was an opposite sex couple instead.
It probably wouldn’t be because straight folks don’t have a thing going on where finding out they’re straight can lead to their life being worse off and fundamentally altering how people view them.
Well, I’d certainly be surprised, but yes, I get that.
If on the other hand I was married to a guy and as open about it as Ruth and Jennifer were (once they stopped hiding it for abuse of RA authority reasons), I’d be weirded out if people who knew treated it as a big secret that they had to conceal from others. If I was hiding it, then I’d want help, but if I was casual about it, I wouldn’t.
OTOH, I wouldn’t want anyone spilling stories about my relationship problems in front of a crowd of strangers and that applies queer or straight.
Just FYI outing an opposite sex relationship can absolutely be a thing. Being outed as bi in a gay or lesbian space can lead to some really shitty consequences and potentially lead to a vulnerable queer person being ostracised from their support network. Absolutely a thing.
And that’s the issue here, you’re clearly trying to apply a simple hard and fast set of rules to something that’s nuanced and requires a lot of judgement of individual situations and circumstances.
After some of their fights, along with the scandal of Billie moving wings, there’s a pretty high probability both are pretty infamous characters on campus. People definitely heard about this prior.
Indiana University Bloomington has nearly 45,000 students. Unless their “scandal” made national news, I find it hard to believe that they’d be infamous on a campus-wide scale (or anything much beyond their floors/dorms)
we’re supposed to overlook that, even though that’s a huge taboo in the community…but yeah, she not only outed them she sparked a whole argument that could hurt both of them and did so just to get rid of them.
But it’s Becky, so anyone that’s upset about her outing Jennifer and Ruth is factually wrong! /s
Seriously, this is a big chunk of why I can’t stand Becky. Big-yapped and can’t keep from broadcasting other people’s business, and has a lot of fans who expect people who don’t like her to keep it to themselves. She’s DoA‘s version of Rudy “dude, she’s a lesbian” Strongwell, and that’s not a good thing in any way.
Thank you. I don’t really get why people find her so likeable. I feel bad for what she’s gone through, but if I met someone in real life with her personality, yikes.
I mean, I find her likeable, but that doesn’t mean I think everything she does is likeable. I don’t think everything my actual real life close friends do is likeable.
I found her likeable for a while due to the bad stuff she’s gone through, but her behavior made me cringe even when she was going through that stuff. Now that it seems like most of that bad stuff is over, it’s hard for me to like her since her behavior is still pretty bad.
I view it less as Becky being protected from criticism (because, and this is true, I’ve been reading it since she first arrived on-scene) and more that Becky’s gotten a lot of shit for things outside of her control, either through genuine and awful or just plain disingenuous trolling comments.
So the difference now though is that Becky just got off a several month long binge of bullying Dorothy where she suffered no consequence, had plenty of her always excellent interactions with Dina, then starts pulling this on Ruth and Jennifer. It’s just kind of hard to like her when she mugs for the camera and gets away with it.
Becky, like a lot of the cast of DoA, also represents something important for a lot of people here, so it’s easy to see why they’d be willing to if not defend at least contextualize her actions. When Amber was at her worst post-car chase and breakup with Danny I did spend a lot of time trying to go “okay as someone with most of these problems this is what is influencing these actions and her current mental distress” but wasn’t really making any headway since the resounding conclusion for a very long time, until she started to redeem herself, was “man, fuck Amber”, and that sucked! Because Amber was really true to life for me and I took it personally!
My personal take on it is that many people are at least open to being sympathetic to a lot of these characters, but will (hopefully rightfully) call them out on things which that they can, in fact, control.
Amber had a lot of mental issues, yes, people understood that. But she was also outright dismissive of therapy and refusing to seek help in a healthy manner, and while a lot of people understood why she might be reacting in such a manner, it was also ‘okay, but you need to be able to start doing better’. Similarly, a lot of us understand why Becky might be being performative, or being firmly ‘lesbian good, guy/girl bad’, but it’s also a fair read when people are irritated by her actions, her treatment towards Dorothy, or her manipulative behaviour. Just because one understands her actions doesn’t mean condoning them.
It’s fair to call out bad behaviour or treatment, even in real life, because that’s how people can change.
Sure, but that wasn’t what a lot of people back during the break up were saying, which is Spencer’s point. A lot of people dismissed her mental illness as tantrums or called for her to be ‘locked up in the looney bin’.
That’s certainly true. Someone might be out to a few of their closest friends. Or they could be out to their peers but be keeping it secret from their parents.
At some point though, if you show no signs of being in the closet, people will treat it as if there is no secret to be kept.
If you are not the person yourself and you have never asked if they are open, you should consider yourself as not having permission to share it regardless of all other actions. If Ruth and Jennifer wanted to shout out everything in the class themselves, they are choosing to reveal it themselves. If they make out in hallways, they are revealing it themselves.
But if Becky never asked for their okay to share with others, both would 100% have the right to be livid with her REGARDLESS OF IF THEY HAVE SHARED IT IN PUBLIC BEFORE OR NOT, as remember, Ethan recloseted himself early in DoA, and some people may do that after break-ups and prefer extra privacy.
Even if someone SEEMS open to you, that doesn’t mean they’d want you going around sharing for them as they might like being in control of when and where and how. It’s not your call when someone is ‘open’ enough that it is okay for you to do whatever, it is always that specific person’s call.
A few people have claimed this here. I get what they think. I’ve never seen this approach in real life.
While this has come up a few times before in the comic, I’ve also never seen any of the characters comment on it. None of the times commenters have gotten pissed about a character outing someone who’s basically out, (usually Jennifer), have they shown any signs of caring about it.
See, this is how we end up with so many assholes in politics – because people have, over the decades, created the expectation that people who work in politics are assholes.
It’s the other way around. Politics means power and that attracts the kind of people who want it and who can get it. Politics is a very dirty game where manipulative sociopaths thrive. Democracy is, after all, nothing more than a popularity contest, the one who can manipulate people the best, wins.
U.S. democracy is sometimes a popularity contest, sometimes a tribal-identity-fest, sometimes a “who has deeper pockets” contest. It’s not that many decades ago that people voted on the actual issues sometimes.
Meanwhile, India elected a literal rocket scientist (Kalam) a few years ago. So don’t overgeneralize too much about democracy, please.
They also have a hindu nationalist government that has tacitly endorsed anti-muslim riots (to the point where police were caught participating) and arrested the legally elected representatives of kashmir with no plans to hold new elections. So uh…maybe not the best example of…whatever it was you were trying to prove by dragging india into this.
Yeah sorry, I didn’t mean you dragging india into this, just missed the right reply button. Iirc india has been a democracy for quite a while, but has still had their share of political assassinations and racist pogroms. And before that, the british did those for them.
I totally feel for them. My own country has been under the boot of one or another invader for some to 150 years. It takes time to recover from that kind of crap.
I’m sort of looking forward to the ultimate pay off (which is probably far distant) when Becky’s behaviours finally starts losing her people whose friendship she wants like Joyce.
I know it’s never going to happen, but I’d actually kind of love if Mike just walked back in one day and everyone starts wilding and he drags it out long enough that he was in witness protection because Lester tried to kill him in his coma.
It’d be some Dallas ass shit but if anyone could pull it off, it’d be Mike. Also I think he was left off in too interesting a position as a character and it bums me out it’ll never be explored.
doing the wrong thing in the wrong way for the right reason and not caring one bit about the outcome? That’s Mike for you and she earned the title whole hog!
Smart would have been heading this problem off before the class started, since she clearly knew they both had this class. This is just her thinking she’s a lot smarter than she is. Especially given that ruth and jennifer storming off together while arguing is in no way preventing them from getting back together – quite the opposite!
I like it because I prefer reading interesting characters that move the plot and create conflict with the potential to learn better than homogenous casts that go nowhere
Huh, I’m delightfully surprised. I was starting to worry Becky was echoing first-semester Joyce “Parent Trap” tendencies. Not sure how I feel about her playing 4D chess with people’s emotions to reach her goals but at least she recognizes that Jennifer and Ruth shouldn’t get back together if this is how unhealthy their relationship is going to be.
There’s a conversation about the appropriateness of Becky’s actions these last few strips that I’m sure everyone is chomping at the bits to have, but I wanna talk about why I like this strip’s mechanics.
Using Becky, the Sapphic Bishop, as a voice to support the two seems like a pretty solid take to lead up to this. Becky’s enthusiastically gay, but even she gets it with these two: complete trash fire of a relationship, no hope as is.
Becky can always turn out to be wrong of course, but I think for now the message the comic is going with is clear: Ruth and Jennifer are done, and it’s for the best.
Billie was actively aiding and abetting Ruth’s drinking, and Billie sure as heck was not cleaning anything up: she still wanted to drink and Ruth yelled at her to stop dragging her into more of it.
They absolutely tried, by guv they did, they meant the absolute best for each other, it just wasn’t enough.
Like, you know who really got Ruth help? Carla. Carla broke the door down and made everyone realize Ruth was in danger.
You can’t stop in the middle of the story and call it the whole arc. Billie did quit drinking. She did go to therapy. Ruth was happy. She was willing to leave her room and go out in public. It’s a win.
Didn’t jeniffer… unquit drinking, try to push ruth to drink, soft-break-up with her, succeed in getting ruth to drink (causing an allergic reaction in the process that sent her to a hospital) and then refuse to let ruth break up with her?
Jennifer was making the first attempt at stopping drinking. That she could have fallen off the wagon was always a possibility, and I don’t understand why people aren’t acknowledging that.
We did see her quit and know that she started therapy. There’s a whole book after “Vote for Robin” before the timeskip.
Jennifer stopped drinking, went through withdrawal, introduced Ruth to the Forrest crowd, went to therapy. They ended the first season on a high note. You can’t ignore the whole resolution to that arc.
I don’t think she ever lied about going to therapy. She was pretty up front about not doing it when she wasn’t.
As for quitting drinking, the withdrawal signs were very clearly shown. She had definitely stopped. Doesn’t mean she didn’t relapse, but she was clearly shown having done so before the timeskip.
Chapter 3 is the entire kidnapping thread. Ruth appears for her RA duties, but since it doesn’t involve Forest at all we only see Jennifer as a speech bubble over Ruth’s phone.
Chapter 4 is the kidnapping epilogue. Ruth suplexes Carol off-screen, and Jennifer tries to defuse Linda. Lucy smooths over all the drama they left in Forest Quad back in chapter 2. We get confirmation from Jennifer that she’s going to therapy:
If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am:
I’m a lesbian and proud of it; I rock the sapphic glam
I’m clever and creative and I think three steps ahead;
In politics (the science of) I’d say I’m quite well read
Of toxic personalities I know a thing or two;
I can call them on their bullshit in a second — and I do
I love my fellow ladies, and I help them as I shall
Yet everybody says I’m such a disagreeable gal!
And I can’t think why!
It may surprise you (and Carla) to learn that not all of the thousands of students/faculty members/various other employees present on IU’s campus are acutely aware of what goes on in the tiny corner of the campus over which Ruth is RA.
Ah yes, Ruth’s dorm, that place that houses every single student and faculty member in IU, who all immediately learned Ruth and Jennifer were queer ladies and dating.
I’ve loathed amber this entire comic but I’m not going to say people can’t like her because that’s being an asshole. Shut up and let people like their characters
I’m not saying that anyone can’t like any character, just expressing surprise that airing people’s dirty laundry and outing them as ambiguously queer is seen as a joking matter. Shut up and stop misrepresenting what I’m saying.
Hrrmmm. I’m not sure how I feel about this honestly. On one hand I’m relieved Becky isn’t some creepy as hell Joe-ish type shipper but for anything women’s love. But uh, I also really don’t like her judging other people’s relationships. Either way she kind of comes off like a bit of a jerk. Maybe that’s the point?
Publicly making a scene involving two people who really don’t want to talk to each other by dragging their relationship out to a teacher they’ve just met for the hidden purpose of keeping them apart, like they needed help with that, is kinda awful.
They 100% are better off not having a class together at this time. Like, even if they eventually get back together it seems pretty clear proximity is not gonna be healthy for them for a while
That’s not Becky’s decision nor should it ever be. Whatever Becky thinks about them is moot, and if they get disruptive Leslie can do something about it.
Becky overstepped her boundaries to an extreme degree here.
The argument that Ruth and Jennifer are “better off” after being manipulated and forced into an ugly, painful confrontation…we already heard that argument about Mike’s manipulations, and it was just as dumb then. The only real difference is that Becky does it a lot less often.
Whether or not that true it is neither Becky’s choice nor her business,
And airing out others dirty laundry with the full intention if frustrating them to the point they will never want to get back together is extremely manipulative,
There is no good way to frame that
Speaking of whom, I’m really curious about what, exactly, Ethan’s situation is post time-skip. Mike’s death probably hit him harder than just about anybody else in the cast (the only others who could come anywhere close are Amber and Amazi-Girl), and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s taking the semester off, but the fact that nobody’s mentioned him once (unless I missed it) worries me. He’s still on the cast page, though, unlike Mike, so… who knows?
Definitely grieving away from Amber, since Amber is giving him his space so he can process his own feelings, and that’s definitely gotten worse with Mike’s death.
See I thought the reveal that Mike actually thought he was helping through his high school psychology abuse bullshit, that both interpretations of the character were true at the same time, was great. I wrote Mike off for a long time and never though he could be that interesting.
So Becky realizes Ruth and Billie are a “bad couple”. Was there any reason to expect they would have gotten back together had Becky not played her little game? Billie is now dating Asher, and Ruth seems to be focused on getting better. Not much chance of restarting a romance there.
All Becky seems to have done is alienated herself while airing their dirty laundry in public.
And relocated their argument outside of the classroom, where there isn’t anyone to tell them they need to stop because class is starting.
I can see how the momentum of them sharing a class could either facilitate them getting back together or prevent it entirely, but I can’t see how any of Becky’s actions affected either outcome at all.
Did… did we skip the entire class, or are they just walking out at the beginning? That’s slightly disappointing if it’s the former, and also disappointing if they end up dropping full time if it’s the latter. Good on Becky for recognizing that their relationship was unhealthy, though.
We’ve seen some real ingenuity from Becky before (mostly under stress— tricking Ross into a confession on a 911 call here and exposing Blaine’s crimes to the world via delayed Tweets here), so I’m intrigued to see more explanation of her trickster side, even if I can’t shake the feeling that this is going to have unintended consequences (drinks shot).
Start of the class. I’d be surprised if they really both wound up dropping though. Too much to be had narratively from keeping them both in the class. Otherwise it’s just Becky and Leslie in here and there’s much less point in showing it.
I know a lot of people hate Becky because she can be annoying and often uses her cunning in underhanded ways but it honestly makes her one of my favorite characters. Mike was also a favorite of mine. I just really like assholes, alright? I got Butts Disease.
I also liked mike, but… I think if becky is gonna be “new mike” then people in the strip should treat her like mike, right? It’d be weird to me if Ruth was willing to tolerate her after this
Oh I get it now I’m supposed to believe this is some galaxy brain strat that was planned along and not just Becky being wildly obnoxious as per the usual.
Same strat as tossing a quick “I was kidding” reply on a bad take tweet.
Okay but even if Becky wanted to make absolutely sure they didn’t get back together… why?
They were already being adamant about being over each other. Why did she think they needed any help? Was she trying to make sure? Did she think they were being too nice to each other and civil? What?
She said something about her likability quotient wrt how she was treating Dorothy. I think that’s less of a factor with Ruth and Jennifer, which seems to support what you’re saying, I think.
Maybe everyone forgot, but Becky came from the same sheltered upbringing as Joyce. We shouldn’t be too surprised that she also has no clear sense of boundaries, like not meddling in your friends love lives, or discussing other people’s private lives in public, or outing your gay friends. She even thought Joyce’s barging in uninvited was normal, for the really obvious parallel.
More surprising is that Leslie is totally ok with all of this. Understanding boundaries is damn near part of her curriculum.
Yeah tbh Leslie’s reaction here, some funny “oh Becky you stinker” instead of admonishing Becky for playing games with her other students’ lives… like, that ain’t okay.
Other than when she’s with Dina, because those two can make magic happen, I just have a hard time liking Becky at all.
True. Leslie is an excellent teacher, but most of what we’ve seen of her private life is a trash fire. A small one compared to Jennifer and Ruth’s toxic waste barge on the river Phlegethon, but a trashfire none the less.
Leslie’s intent in that plan had nothing to do with outing Robin. Mostly, she was hot for Robin, but her intent to was to talk to Robin and try to change her. Possibly through getting her to realize she was queer and then coming out herself.
Roz’s plan was to out Robin and Leslie was acceptable collateral damage.
This. Leslie knows being outed could get you killed. Roz hoped that Robin would out herself but was willing to take any kind of outing of her as a good thing and didn’t actually care if Leslie was collateral damage for it.
Becky rarely receives any actual blowback for her day to day annoying behaviour. Joyce never seems to respond to it, Dorothy just shoulders it, Sarah gets ignored.
Becky’s trauma appears to have turned her into a total asshole. When Dina eventually catches on and realizes this Becky is not the person she fell in love with, its going to suck.
Becky doesn’t think that Ruth and Billie are a good couple, so she’s thrown some petrol on the fire to make doubly sure that they don’t get back together. She obviously thought it was funny to start them fighting and get them to quit the class too.
Okay, Becky’s actions are definitely questionable at best, but I legitimately love the nod to her veiled ability to be subtle and calculated in her true intentions when she wants to be.
Like, it’s still pretty questionable, but questionable actions haven’t stopped me from enjoying how interesting a character’s layers are before and it sure as hell won’t stop me now.
Oh, God. Becky is Mike. She’s turned into a more peppy less blatantly vicious Mike. Aggravating responses from people for “their own good,” micromanaging the relationships around herself for her own interests. Kiiiiinda using Dina to work through her personal issues about Joyce, though I hate to see it that way because I love Dina. The irritant of change that might spur other characters to interesting places, but who still is a self-centered asshole. She and Boomer are like Mike, if Mike broke into 2 pieces with slightly different specialties and compartmentalized issues. Oh, God.
I don’t think she’s using Dina to work through her Joyce feels, rather now it’s more about how she’s terrified of having sex and, paradoxically, feeling bitter that Dina doesn’t perceive her as a sexual being the way Becky does Dina.
I think it’s a neat way to take their relationship.
This might be the only webcomic I know where the comments largely revolve around obsessively analyzing the character’s moral fiber instead of whether it’s funny or not. I don’t remember Willis’s old comics having such salty comments… I miss the old lighthearted community.
And why is it you think that you haven’t grown with the rest of us? Could it be some sort of moral failure on your part that you’re too ashamed to talk about?
The world’s also changed. Upheaval of politics means things like ‘oh, that wacky Senator Desanto’ isn’t nearly as funny anymore.
Also, DoA is largely in a much more realistic setting, so stuff like ‘oh haha, Joyce pretended to be engaged to Danny’ is… not even nearly as funny if you put that in this universe so people ripped the Joyce/Jacob fabrication apart.
Yeah, Willis’s old comics had jokes in the middle of like, killing people. And they were good jokes, but DoA made it pretty clear from the beginning that it was going for a different tone. I loved a lot of the walkyverse stuff and DoA’s amazing, but plots that’d fly in one as largely humorous are gonna be taken a bit more seriously here
My theory is that the last four years have taken a severe toll on everyone’s temperament and patience, and it’s leaking out here. Too much energy gets spent on scolding because that’s what we’re used to doing now.
It’s a different comic with different standards now.
Unlike the screwball tone of the Walkyverse, DoA’s always been a lot more grounded and sensitive about the messages it wants to convey. It’s a series that strives to depict lived realities with nuance and respect, so consequently, a series of jokes ending up in the reveal that Becky had hard meddled with two people for no reason and completely gets away with it, feels incredibly jarring. It’s in the ballpark of what Mike could do in Shortpacked!, but he sure couldn’t have done it here.
Consequently, it’s also why Amazi-Girl storylines have kinda fallen flat a bit recently; disregard for physics and ‘realism’ of things like kidnaping a bunch of people in a crowd gets picked up on by the readers because it’s a notable departure from the rules of this universe.
recently? The disregard for physics goes back at least to the car chase and slightly less dramatically to everything AG has ever done – the “amazi squirrel” bit very early one comes to mind.
You must not read very many webcomics. The ones I read all have these kinds of discussions, or don’t have any continuity/story. Also, I would bet money there were discussions about the character’s morals back when roomies! Was running, given that that was one of it’s main recurring themes. Think you just need to take off the nostalgia goggles.
You must not read the same comics as me, I read Bittersweet Candybowl and people have been questioning the moral fibre of these cats and dogs since 2006 and when the chapter December in 2011 struck, the comments were in anarchy (comment section was eventually removed due to difficulty moderating it). Paranatural is more suited for a light-hearted community, but they kept breaking things once they figured out how to make comments in the future so the comment section got removed.
Are Poli Sci majors considered scientists when they graduate? Becky told her dad that she was going to go to college and become a scientist when he was in the hospital under arrest.
Iirc she gets a full ride in the polisci program because of her political experience, but she’s planning to take a bunch of biology classes at the same time. Not sure if a full double major.
So, hold on… Several strips back, Becky said she and Ruth signed up for this class together, just before Joe showed up and was VERY Joe to Ruth. Then we get in here, and Jennifer says SHE signed up with Ruth. Now, if this is all true, doesn’t that look like Becky signed them up for the class together? And if this is true, has Becky been playing this angle as far back as a month, or possibly longer? Because I think her statement that Ruth and Jennifer is a terrible couple is her actual honest opinion (I can’t see why she’d lie to Leslie; if she really wanted them back together, she’d keep grinning and say “I give it ten minutes before they start making out against someone else’s locker”). So did Becky actually facilitate that breakup? Because if so, that’s not your everyday manipulation, that’s some scorched earth “what’s burned stays dead” dedication to ending that relationship.
TL;DR: Go back through the last week or so, and you’ll see Becky’s been playing the long game.
I absolutely agree. This is the kind of dirty laundry you don’t air publicly, and as much as I want to like Becky, she really kinda lost me with the Dorothy stuff, and she’s not winning back points here.
This is still a shitty thing to do? Actually this probably makes it worse, as yesterday I thought it came from a place of ignorance and wasnt deliberate. This is none of Becky’s business and she’s intentionally riling them up so they don’t get back together? Like how is this ok? Why is Leslie making a snarky joke about Becky being devious as if this is a normal thing to do?
Yeah… So, we’re still doing the: “Let’s make the character you like show their evil side” thing, huh? Though I do have to say that Willis is certainly going the extra mile with denigrating Becky since the soft reboot.
To me its interesting because Becky has always been this way since she joined the cast so its…gratifying (don’t know if thats the right word) to see more of the readers starting to see what I think has always been there
That did happen but after finding out they broke up she immediately felt guilty because she was trying to get him to noodle Joyce’s caboodle. I thought it was pretty clear she was messing with him and then it, seemingly, blew up in her face at Joyce’s expense and it was her fault.
But there was no sign that they had any intention of getting back together?… One’s already in a new relationship, and they were already bickering about who needs to drop the class before Becky Becky’d the entire argument.
I mean, I half-suspect they will get back together after this, but she had no reason to think that.
And, like, this is still tossing their relationship drama into a room full of people who didn’t know about it, and probably shouldn’t know about it. There were probably a bajillion less messy ways to prevent them from getting back together, including the incredibly simple “talk one of them into dropping the class that they already half-want to drop because their ex is in it, they just need a graceful way to get out”.
This is an extremely destructive overreaction to something that’s not even any of her business. Does she, like, personally hate Jennifer or Ruth and is looking for excuses to be cruel to them, or something?
No, she’s just learned that she enjoys controlling people’s behaviour by manipulation and thinks it’s the best way to mould her personal universe into the shape she wants.
There’s plenty of ways of doing that without making them a public spectacle, though. All this did was humiliate them on top of ensuring that they don’t spend time together – assuming that they don’t end up bonding over griping about Becky.
If she wanted to be sneaky and manipulative about it, she could have just painted the “No, you drop out!” thing in the least charitable light while still encouraging one of them to drop out for such-and-such benign reason; ensuring they still don’t spend time together, dislikes the other a bit more, and not involving the rest of the class.
You’re making a flaw out of what I’m increasingly concerned that Becky considers to be a feature: That she now has the ability to hurt people for her own amusement. It’s a power that she likes having and is enjoying using.
Maybe this is a response to the way she feels she’s been hurt all her life? Basically, she wants revenge on the world for Ross and she’s going to get it out of everyone else, no matter how uninvolved they were? If so, it just proves things about the continuity of abuse and makes me wonder if, long-term, Dina might be endangered.
I dunno, Roz was pretty okay outing her own sister to make a point… It might also have been nice for Joe to know that his sextape was probably going to make headlines. Don’t get me wrong, this is NOT a defense of Becky, I’m just pointing out that they’re both… gifted politicians, one might say.
Robin has taught you well, young apprentice. Robin has taught you well.
I don’t know if Becky’s been dedicated to ending them forever or anything, but frankly it’s great not to have them in the same room anymore. Ruth can be healed later and Jennifer can ride her dream motorcycle off a cliff, like she is extremely determined to. Everyone wins!
So, guess we gotta take back a bunch of Becky-bashing. But she does seem to struggle with genuine interaction. While this seems to be a successful short term tactic, I don’t think it will be as effective as a long term friendship with honest advice.
I’m not taking it back. She is interfering in something that is None Of Her Goddamn Business. A revelation that her apparent goal is not her actual goal does not change that.
Peoples’ lives are their own. Peoples’ choices are their own. Except in extreme circumstances, butt out when you know your input is unwelcome.
I mean it was bad enough that she was outing people even for sapphic enthusiasm. Now we find out she’s doing it because she knows better than everyone else.
You’d think Leslie would have some comments along the lines of “please don’t decide people’s feelings and relationships for them and then rant at them until they drop my class so they don’t have to be in the same room as you”. Before or even after finding out it was just a scam to. . .manipulate their relationship into what Becky had decided for them.
In theory, she still could. the strip ends with Leslie saying Becky is incredibly devious. She doesn’t say that’s a good thing. I’m still holding out hope that Leslie calls Becky out on this.
But Becky, you just made them leave together and have something to agree over! I’m sure you could have solved this in a way that didnt mean both of them had to drop what I’m sure would have been an actually helpful class by use of public spectacle…
I could see them potentially getting back together as a result of this. Also I really don’t like what Becky’s done here, manipulating people in front of an entire class is pretty jerky behavior, and I also don’t like that Leslie apparently is fine with this.
That’s the thing about Leslie, isn’t it? She’s lonely and a bit neurotic about people who are close to her. She’ll go dramatically out of her normal character to try to guarantee that people she values in her life stay in her life. So, If I’m right, expect her to become a bit of an enabler to Becky’s bullying to try to make her more important to the girl than she’s afraid that Robin is becoming.
I would have liked Joyce and Dina to witness this. I think Joyce would disavow Becky so hard. Strange how they supposedly had the same upbringing but Joyce turned out to be a so much better person, with compassion and a sense of ethics, while Becky has none of that. Becky is selfish and only respects those useful to her. Joyce used to be ignorant but she’s always wanted to to good, and to become a better person to everyone. Becky is stuck in her ways, she’s incapable of questioning right or wrong, let alone herself.
Lol, Biden says it won’t take any action because of Kashoggi’s murder because “it’s policy not to sanction foreign leaders.” I had zero expectations for this administration, and it’s failing to meet even that.
Okay, I am not Becky’s number 1 fan, in fact, I very much dislike her half the time. But this is one of those moments, I kinda appreciate her. But I enjoy people who play 7D chess on people.
Becky has seen first hand the cost of relationships where violence and control are the key dynamic. She will squash it like a bug every chance she gets. She may be a poli sci major but she’s survived a lot of violence cloaked in loving words. She’s not having that. She doesn’t revel in destroying relationships but if she can short circuit one that has this much violence in it even after it is nominally done, she will. She’s not a shit poster or edge lord, just a survivor.
That’s a fair point that softens this a bit for me. If she’s just hardcore anti-romanticizing violence as love or is traumatized by the near suicide and how much it stirred up, that makes this a little more understandable.
So the comment section seems to have handled the Becky aspect but what about the class aspect? Billie at least would hugely benefit from this class as she loves words and might be able to start internalizing some messaging without being on the defense. Ruth seems pretty confident in her orientation, but after the mess last year and her journey to improvement, she could learn a lot of helpful tools for being an RA. ex: how to be a good ally and healthily enforce boundaries
Also, is it just me, or since we’ve lost Mike have many of the other characters been portrayed as social engineers as opposed to engagements coming naturally due to interaction? I can’t tell if the ratio has always been the same, but it’s more noticeable when we don’t have an absolute on the machivelli scale, or if the narrative has taken on a very different tone. Might also be leakage in having to reestablish where we are but… it feels off? I imagine the characters should feel off after a large portion were traumatized but I mean beyond that.
I guess Booster and now Becky, but I can’t think of anyone else. Booster’s being set up as more positive type where they thoughtlessly say things they think are just neat anecdotes that end up annoying people, but for Becky herself this feels kind of left field. The extent of “manipulations” was in trying to get Ethan to bang Joyce, and then later on position herself as an antagonist to Joyce and Jacob after church so they could start complimenting each other, but those felt both really small scale and altruistic without actual malice or fear of things blowing up (well they did for Ethan and Joyce in Becky’s view, but the truth is more complicated).
In an abusive household you need to become hyperaware of others’ mental states and familiar with how to push their buttons (often to deescalate but also sometimes to manipulate them into giving you something you need or want) as a matter of survival. It’s established that Becky is good at covering up her true self and that she plays the goofball partly because of her insecurity and partly because she feels safest when others are underestimating her. We know she parlayed a prank into a full scholarship to school, so she’s got the gift of gab.
We also know Ruth’s near death by suicide very much triggered her and that she felt deeply guilty she didn’t see it coming. We know she feels kinship with Ruth on a orphan with background of abuse front and feels protective of both Billie and Ruth. Finally, we know that Becky knows that both Ruth and Jennifer got better mentally while apart from each other: neither are irredeemable people, but they bring out the worst in each other and make each other sicker. I am not surprised Becky wants to sabotage any opportunities for them to fall back into old patterns, or that she has the skills to do so without either of them catching on. It actually tracks with everything we know about her and her relationships with Jennifer and Ruth.
This is a great reading and if this is where Becky’s being taken then I’m for it, like it’s okay to acknowledge growing up in a shitty situation does bad things to your mental health and it’s not always something that only hurts inward.
I guess the problem is that Becky just got done bullying Dorothy to no consequence (and not even a hard confirm that she’ll stop *that* until later strips contextualize their relationship) and now she’s getting praised by Leslie for how she’s treated Ruth and Jennifer. So far (because if you’re right, and I hope you are because I *love* what you wrote) the message is Becky doing what she wants and getting away with it.
Like a lot of readers got hardcore nettled about Booster’s psychoanalyzing, but at least most everyone in the room responded to that with annoyance and frustration, and Booster seemed to have realized from Amber that they had crossed a line.
Oh yeah I expect and hope Becky is gonna have her antagonistic attitude towards Dorothy blow up in her face soon. Idk what the final straw will be but there will be a final straw.
And Sarah saying others misery makes her happy, and dorothy manipulating Becky and Joyce for Joyce… It’s not that there haven’t been flashes in all of them, but to have what seems like the majority of new snap shot start or feature it just seems odd to me. It isnt that certain aspects for characters don’t make sense, but the aggragate. I dunno. We shall see where it goes.
We’ll see on Sarah but right now I’m running with the interpretation that she’s actually in a good mood and being extremely performative that it’s some kind of mystical, alien phase she’s going through, because otherwise she and other people would have to acknowledge she can be anything but a misanthropic killjoy.
As for Dorothy, I don’t think that was manipulative of her, that was just her putting out a little speech because little speeches are how Dorothy solves everything.
Mike was the sacrifice who sucked up all the negative waves. Well, a lot of the negative waves, anyway. Without him to balance The Force, The Dark Side is spreading out instead of being pooled around him.
Ok so I’ve never liked Becky, I always found her loud and obnoxious so shes someone I’d have nothing to do with in real life
Having said that she is turning into a very interesting character. Her actions here show just how intelligent, cunning, manipulative and extremely ruthless she can be and how well hidden it is
I’m now wondering if she was always like this, deep down or if it was developed through her home life and no character wanting to call her out on her behaviour because of her upbringing and sexual preferences and is just trying to learn to fit in so she “got away with” behaviour other people wouldn’t have
We’ve already seen her interfere in Joyces relationship with Ethan and now this, is it a pattern or just coincidence?
Shes been around the halls for awhile now yet she really only has Joyce, Dina and maybe Walky as friends, is that deliberate
I’m looking forward to more Becky but shes not someone I’d like to meet in real life (which is a shame because I do like red heads)
She has always been cunning and intelligent and manipulative. She is a master at hiding her own feelings and pain. It was a necessary survival skill in her upbringing to present as if completely open while actually being completely shut off, likely to prevent punishment.
And she is a master at this. Because what she does, is be excessively loud about some things and airs out everyone else’s issues. This convinces you, she is extremely bad at keeping things to herself. The reality is that if she makes you so uncomfortable about the topic of her dead parents, you will stop goddamn asking about it and she will get to keep all her feels hidden.
Becky knows how to lead reactions sometimes as well too to get her preferred result. She did it with Joyce and Jacob and now Ruth and Jennifer.
People don’t really catch on that she is doing this unless she outright states it. Because it is very hard for us to imagine the same person always spilling your secrets is covering up the ability to keep secrets. But in a strictly religious household where you might be punished for trying to have an ounce of privacy, you need to present as if you are open and just get far better at burying any secrets you do have.
begs the question if she’s heavily emphasizing christianity largely around Joyce, if that’s to needle Joyce because she can tell Joyce is fading from the faith.
Also given becky got kicked out of one of her schools for making out with another girl, that whole abstinence thing -also- seems rather like a ploy.
Nah the abstinence thing is definitely Becky’s sexual hangups from her upbringing. She’s supposed to fall in love with one person, get married, and exclusively have sex with them for the rest of her life, but she figured out that her true love is a girl.
Becky right now is dealing with a cocktail of wanting to be seen as sexually attractive to Dina, someone who can’t reciprocate in the exact, overly enthusiastic way Becky has shown her, while also denying herself ever having sex with Dina until marriage.
I mean this is really only applicable in the sense that both Becky and Toedad have acted out of a belief that they know better than whoever it is they’re trying to “help.”
Like I get what you’re saying but the way it’s phrased invites the response of “Becky hasn’t tried to shoot people with a gun and kidnap them in a speeding car” and that obfuscates the issue. Becky’s being a manipulative, egotistical jerk but that doesn’t make her like her danged dad.
I think Joyce has posited that she knows best and dips her toes into “fixing” relationship problems, but she’s been comedically ineffectual at actually enacting that save for Jacob, and that just exploded in her face because she *wanted* to be Jacob’s girlfriend and went about it in the absolute worst way.
I sort of agree with this. At the very least a small portion of what just happened there was Becky’s authentic feelings. I believe the red background is proof of that.
Part of me feels sorry for walkyverse billie and ruth, but in fairness toxic codependent relationship based on shared substance abuse probably wasn’t a lot better than bitter exes, it does seem pretty unlikely no matter what that this will eventually lead to Best Friends, anyway.
No one’s mad at her for having sexual hangups with her girlfriend they’re mad at her for bullying Dorothy and now pulling a Mike on Ruth and Jennifer in a classroom full of strangers!
Oh, and Leslie cements her status as a bad teacher, leaving the number of competent staff at the university at three, and I think at least two of them are students (Asma, Alex, and the podpeople’s RA, whose name I forget).
How does any of this make Leslie a “bad teacher”? She took no role in causing Jennifer and Ruth to leave, and while she could (in theory) intervened during Becky’s little introduction, it likely would have happened too quickly for her to have stepped in.
Well specifically, she sees Becky out two queer girls and get them riled up enough to flee the classroom, and then instead of admonishing her for playing around with other peoples’ lives she just calls Becky “devious” without any hint of disapproval.
She also had like a total of two panels to say anything, so maybe later on she’ll get to a proper chiding, causing Becky to run to Fun Mom Robin because Strict Mom Leslie is trying to discipline their rowdy daughter.
She could still call Becky out, though. The last thing she says here is that Becky is devious. She doesn’t say its a good thing. For all we know the next comic could start with Leslie telling Becky that that wasn’t a compliment, and that what she did was actually really terrible.
What SPencer said. She just let one of her students annoy to others enough that they stormed out of the room and are going to drop her course, right in the middle of class. Extra points for having “wow, you’re effective” as a response.
So for a lot of people Booster was seen as new Mike (even being voiced by Amber), and now Becky too.
Also honestly Leslie was dating (is she… still dating?) someone who was basically and literally made to be older lesbian dentist Mike. Granted she was a minor character and I have no idea if we’ll see her again but…
How many potential Mikes until we reach critical mass?
Did the original dying cause some serious reality physics to break? Or is it more a biological process where others desperately try to fill what they subconsciously view as something close to an ecological niche which is waiting to be filled?
Becky is now officially the most dangerous character in DOA. Just moments ago, I had thought her to be naive, and now I know how wrong I was. It also makes a lot more sense how she could functionally helpful to DeSanto as well.
It still makes no sense how she could be functionally helpful to Robin, especially since she wasn’t trying to be.
Everything we saw her doing should have been turning Robin’s base off in an attempt to appeal to leftist voters who should never have trusted her and aren’t enough to win with in her red district anyway. She was trying to win with a combo of SJWs and homophobes, right-wing conservatives and leftier-than-thous.
And it wasn’t working, according to the polls, up until the sympathy from the kidnapping.
yeah, even if she’s being shitty, I’d rather see her experiences changing/influencing her and her acting on those things and doing stuff and being dynamic and fucking up sometimes than see her being perfect and unobjectionable and just quietly attending class or hanging out with Dina.
I realize you probably meant this more in a ‘making jennifer and ruth argue is funny and maybe helping them stay broken up’ way, but I wanted to expand on what I was thinking
Not every character *has* to be at their worst every once in a while, but it’s a nice touch. Other than Dina going all Amazing Atheist every once in a while she’s basically a perfectly nice girl whose problems stem from other people misinterpreting her.
Becky’s problem, at least to me, is that she does these things and then there’s no real consequence or acknowledgement. She snipes at Dorothy for six years of comics and then ramps it up for their every scene together to the point of outright bullying come the timeskip, and then Dorothy just magically defuses Becky with a heartfelt spiel, and then after that Becky takes another shot at it afterwards anyway so Dorothy tells her to go solve her relationship problems with Dina, and now she has, for the time being, been a weird manipulative asshole to Ruth and Jennifer on the grounds of not wanting them together, so she publicly drags out their dirty laundry and Leslie tells Becky she’s “devious” instead of “grossly irresponsible.”
That’s why I’m not into Becky, but I lurv Becky/Dina comics, because not only do those two defy every cliche about relationship drama by just being endlessly supportive and uplifting to each other, we now have a major piece of juicy drama to chew on with Becky’s particular mix of sexual hangups, where she can’t bring herself to have sex before marriage but also quietly blames herself for not evoking in Dina the same overtly, expressive sexual attraction that Becky feels for her.
I don’t like what Becky has done here, but solely because she’s caused Ruth to exit the scene. On the other hand, this Duck Season/Rabbit Season thing is also very funny, so I’m fine with it.
Y’all who dislike Becky’s character development probably want this strip to go back to wholesome characters making wry observations about the blowjob cat.
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Becky in fact playing twenty-dimensional chess
(this would’ve been a good avatar change for yesterday but eh)
Not really. They are going to both drop this class and substitute the same replacement elective, arguing about it all the way.
Is antagonising your RA a good move in twenty-dimensional chess?
It is if they actually think it’s their ex-girlfriend that’s antagonizing them. Three moves ahead, that Becky.
She’s a pol-sci major. Being seen opposing the current RA when the current RA is disliked increases her chance of replacing her as RA later, which in turn gives her more influence over the dorm, and is a chance to endear her to everyone else. This, in turn, would give an opening to run for a high ranking student council position which in turn opens up more opportunities, and so forth.
Except that as long as Mr. Hughes holds the amount of influence with the college that he does, there’s no way Ruth is getting replaced as RA. Which leaves her back at square one, with the currently-literally-unreplaceable-RA pissed off at her.
Getting arrested for being a crimelord or being grabbed by a cyborg and thrown down a reactor shaft you conveniently placed in your throne room are both particularly elegant moves in twenty-dimensional chess, so
*claps ever so slowly I move into the next class*
*Dumbiverse Me slips into one of the vacated seats* Yeah I was gonna audit, but now you have space?
Wait, so who’s teaching this new class? Leslie, Becky, or Willis? And what’s the course code so I can sign up?
Also, I’m cooking up the crow to eat my share. How do the rest of y’all want yours done?
Huh. Clever girl
Except knowing those two this might *actually* be the catalyst for them getting back together.
They probably are already hate fucking.
They literally left the room eight seconds ago.
And?
Knowing Ruth’s moves, they’re already up against a wall.
Hawt
Fun fact: The wall is actually Joe. And he’s.. okay with it.
In fact, he’ll even still be okay with it in a moment, after they realize he’s not actually a wall. He’ll even still be okay with it a week later, after his femurs heal. That Joe, what a guy.
As James Franco once said “your pants are already halfway down your legs”.
But did he say that to you?
That most definitely sounds like James Franco..
He was fun enough in his roles as an actor, but when the actual actor behind the roles comes out at all, it gets a bit.. crude.
But the hatefucking will have the healing power to change them from a terrible couple to a good couple. Queen to E₈⊗ℂℙ⁴⊕PSL(2, 7), CHECKMATE.
Group theory represent
Yeah, I feel like the best way to get those two to hook up is to really want them not to.
Hell, THEY didn’t want them to hook up, and look what happened.
Well, the best way to get teenagers to do something is to make it seem like you really don’t want them to, so checks out.
…Which was Becky’s ACTUAL plan all along!
What a twist!
I guess we’ll see how well it works.
Well, played Becky, well played. Unless this whole charade leads to Hate Fucking, then we back at square one.
Which might be Becky’s plan. Or not.
I play both sides so I always come out on top
Hah, name of your sex tape!
(I couldn’t help it, seeing Roz is your Gravatar)
She is in a rare position of benefiting either way: she gets them back together or she ensures they never even think of getting back together. Either way, she has a quiet class from now on
She also pissed off her RA, so it may be a pyrrhic victory.
As someone else said – Ruth isn’t well liked…so she just laid the groundwork to replace Ruth as RA….
It isn’t necessary for her to be well-liked. It’s already been established that there’s external power in play keeping her in place whether or not even Ruth herself wishes it so.
Mind you it’s unlikely Becky knows the particulars of that, but she’d likely be at least partly aware that there was discussion of removing Ruth when things came to a head last time and it didn’t happen, so I’m not sure what groundwork she’s laid here that’s more meaningful than what’s already come out.
Wait, was Becky thinking they’d go into rebound sex with each other if they’d stayed in the class?
Like… I dunno. This whole thing stinks. I don’t like Politics Becky.
With any luck, Robin will be such an incompetent teacher that she’ll actually cause Becky to learn a negative amount of politics.
that’s doubtful…folks hate her but she might actually be a great teacher.
seriously, the best teachers I ever had were ones who disregarded being liked and were honest- which Robin was.
I didn’t know folks hated Leslie. I can’t say she’s my favorite, but I like her.
I think the point is more that good teachers don’t PRIORITISE being liked – they prioritise TEACHING.
So you can have both likable and unlikeable teachers who are good at their subject. Leslie is the former.
I don’t know if Leslie is a good teacher, at least not on all merits.
She has some very effective teaching points. But she’s also clearly shown bias in the past, and ditched her lesson and left it in the hands of her unprepared student while pursuing her own personal agenda.
I think this depends on a couple of things- first, how much the students buy into their education, and second, how much of an asshole the teacher is. When you’re in a classroom full of people who already see the value in their education, then you’re right, prioritizing teaching over creating positive relationships with your students is important; but when 3/4ths of the class struggles to give even a single shit, showing that you buy into them goes a long way into them buying into the class.
And also I’ve known a few teachers who could stand to try and be liked a little more I mean damn where do you get off treating people that way
(Source: I’m a teacher)
They’re talking about Robin, not Leslie.
Everyone in this comic is someone’s irredeemable white whale of a monster asshole shithead, dear reader. Everyone. E V E R Y O N E.
Wait, even Dina? Surely not Dina.
Some segment of the Antivaxxer crowd would argue that she should have been put on an ice floe and pushed out to sea because an autistic child is worse than a dead one, or one who is wracked by permanent complications from any number of now-preventable diseases.
But they’re only preventable because of vaccines… no, no, don’t try to follow their logic…
Oh, yes, SillyGoose, even Dina. For, you see, she’s too passive or her dinosaur obsession is creepy and is currently harming the character they hold in exaltation, or it’s just that she’s romantically entwined with Becky the Irredeemable and who would ever, what is wrong with her.
Imagine whatever projection you can do to these comic characters, and without fail, the comments section will provide a living example.
Dina’s clearly been brainwashed into preaching the left’s liberal science agenda. Plus she’s in denial of her sexuality… I guess? I find it hard to think bad things about Dina.
Yes, everyone will be hated by someone, but that doesn’t mean some of those positions don’t have more or less justification for that hate. Painting it as all equally valid is just disingenuous.
Oh, I don’t mean to paint it all as equally valid, that’s sarcasm for the sake of civility. I think some of the time it’s a completely valid response and I engage in drinking the haterade myself.
But there’s certain contingents who come out of the woodwork when a character they don’t like *breathes* or *speaks*, and I believe pretty firmly they need to fucking cut it out.
Even Jacob? And Jacobs brother? Surely not Jacobs brothers baby!
NOPE not Joe he is not an acceptable grav
Lucy? Yes excellent
Jacob? Yes. A thousand times yes. People have projected a multitude of mortal sins onto Jacob.
Also for the short time Jacob’s brother was in town he became host to a conspiracy culture about how he was a secret emotional abuser.
The baby…
The baby is innocent, in the eyes of the Commentariat. For now. For NOW.
By that logic, Professor Brock must be the best teacher at IU.
Isn’t Robin’s entire thing she’s incredibly competent at politics? Terrible at literally everything else, of course.
You can be really good at something and really bad at teaching it. Teaching is its own skill.
Maybe she thought that having them together in the same place, even if just for class, was a bad idea right now.
Yeah, the manipulation and humiliation strikes me as being a bit excessive.
If it were Mike, excessive manipulation and humiliation would be seen as “helping” the victims.
Does this devious plan mean that Becky is also “helping” Dorothy by apparently trying to hurt her?
Also, who, if anyone, in the cast is not Mike now, and just as wrong as he was?
This is definitely going to backfire.
Depends on what Becky’s actual intentions are.
Woooow
Florida has joined the table
Still outed them and aired their personal business to an entire class, though?
Like their arguing hadn’t already done that.
Their very first exchange was along the lines of “because of what you did, you should drop the class” “no, you drop it” without either of them mentioning their breakup or past relationship. It was only in the next strip, when Becky got involved and started talking about how they should smooch and how Billie still “has the hots” for Ruth, that they started referring to the actual nature of their relationship
Neither of them was closeted though. They only ever hid their relationship because of Mary’s blackmail. Once that was dealt with they were totally in the open about it
To their floor, sure. Not this particular Gender Studies class.
Sure, and also to Jennifer’s floor over in Forest, and anyone who happened to see them out on that date, or just cuddling in the hallway
They very clearly weren’t hiding their relationship. Being careful not to out people is great, but there’s a point where you have to let people be Out and stop treating their sexuality and relationships like dirty secrets instead of completely normal things
The problem is when the people who *don’t* view it as a completely normal thing find out and hold it against you.
If anyone I’d told about my sexuality betrayed that trust, even with the best of intentions, I’d be completely livid.
I am well aware of the risks of being outed to the wrong crowd. I’m not terribly worried about the Gender Studies class taught by a lesbian though, and clearly Ruth and Jennifer aren’t either
They only reacted to their dirty laundry being spilled
Do Ruth and Jennifer know that? Should they have to? Why is Becky the one who gets to dictate when and how other people find out about their sexuality?
I said as much yesterday that I think this is exactly how Becky would act in this scenario, she would enthusiastically chat with her new lesbian mom about the two girls on the rocks, but that doesn’t make an action okay, it just makes it sensible for a character to take.
It’s still a problem, it’s just a gentle instance of that problem versus something like Becky running around screaming in public about it (which she’s kinda doing here, because there’s an entire classroom the two just got outed in front of, even if they’re off-panel and might as well not exist).
But it’s not even “told about my sexual orientation”. It’s more like “saw you making out publicly with your partner”. There’s no “trust” involved to betray.
A good friend of mine has been married for a decade. Am I supposed to treat that as a secret that can’t be mentioned to anyone I’m not sure doesn’t already know?
As FC said, it’s the idea that orientation always has to be treated like a dirty secret that seems off to me here. And doesn’t match my real-world experience.
And just to be clear, if someone is keeping it secret or even just relatively quiet, that is something that absolutely should be respected.
Did or did Becky not just stand up in the middle of the class to explain to Leslie, this complete stranger, and the rest of the classroom, that Billie and Ruth had dated and were both queer.
As for you friends, if you have to ask, then ask how they want that information meted out. It’s not complicated. The problem is not in the choice of how Queer people acknowledge their identity the problem is in other people taking it away without personal regard or even god forbid that someone particularly vile could be listening.
Yeah, and them being cuddly in hallways and doing relationship stuff was their decision. Speaking publicly about their relationship this time, in this class, with this particular group of people, was not their decision. It was dragged out of them by Becky.
I get that Becky’s a likeable character, but I simply cannot agree with her actions here. I apologise if I have expressed myself too harshly, but “never out people without their consent” is something I take seriously.
The only people who would care would be the fundagelical ass lords.
There was a whole story arc about that IIRC.
“Treat every gay person as if they are still in the closet until they start making out in front of everyone in the room” is not the great take you think it is
It’s more about making sure the agency of being out falls on the individual and who they choose to share that with.
Then it’s a good thing I didn’t say that, isn’t it?
hyperbolic exaggeration is a common rhetorical technique
I’ll take your word for it. I’m not familiar with rhetorical techniques nor debates, especially in English.
I’m honestly confused as to why this comment thread blew up the way it did. I don’t even dislike Becky; I actually quite like her. I just don’t agree with her actions in this situation and that they constitute outing these two specific characters to this specific group of people without their consent. I still believe that to be true.
That somehow has been misrepresented as me saying that I believe we should “treat every gay person as if they are still in the closet until they start making out in front of everyone in the room”, and I’m not sure where that came from. If it was because I expressed myself too harshly, then I apologise. If my words came across that way, then I apologise because that is not what I meant at all.
Jennifer is still kinda in the closet re: bisexual.
Being in denial about her bisexuality is not the same thing as denying she’d been in a relationship with Ruth. Something she’s very loudly failed to deny or demonstrate any desire to hide
She was in a relationship, but she’s also said it was a phase. That at least sounds some kind of trying to diminish the relationship, like experimenting in college or something.
Nonetheless, she’s not denying that the relationship existed, which is all that was outed here.
Who were the people involved in that relationship that Becky just outed?
Like, if we’re talking about them saying this to the rest of the class that’s one thing, because the strip’s focus was on the three main characters so you can read that no one else really cares, but then Becky stands up and starts spewing about their relationship to Leslie and now to the rest of the class, and all for incredibly manipulative and awful ends.
Huh? I don’t understand the question. Jennifer and Ruth, obviously.
My only point in that response was that even if Jennifer is claiming it was just a phase, she hasn’t shown any signs of wanting to hide the relationship.
And yes, I agree that Becky’s way out of line with what she’s doing, but I don’t think “outing” is a significant part of it. This would be just as shitty if it was an opposite sex couple instead.
It probably wouldn’t be because straight folks don’t have a thing going on where finding out they’re straight can lead to their life being worse off and fundamentally altering how people view them.
It’s shitty because she’s telling everyone their relationship problems. That’s lousy on a personal level regardless of orientation.
I’m sure you understand the inherent power discrepancy that comes with being outed as Queer in front of complete strangers.
If someone found you were married to a lady, what’s going to happen to you? How would that impact your life?
Well, I’d certainly be surprised, but yes, I get that.
If on the other hand I was married to a guy and as open about it as Ruth and Jennifer were (once they stopped hiding it for abuse of RA authority reasons), I’d be weirded out if people who knew treated it as a big secret that they had to conceal from others. If I was hiding it, then I’d want help, but if I was casual about it, I wouldn’t.
OTOH, I wouldn’t want anyone spilling stories about my relationship problems in front of a crowd of strangers and that applies queer or straight.
Just FYI outing an opposite sex relationship can absolutely be a thing. Being outed as bi in a gay or lesbian space can lead to some really shitty consequences and potentially lead to a vulnerable queer person being ostracised from their support network. Absolutely a thing.
And that’s the issue here, you’re clearly trying to apply a simple hard and fast set of rules to something that’s nuanced and requires a lot of judgement of individual situations and circumstances.
After some of their fights, along with the scandal of Billie moving wings, there’s a pretty high probability both are pretty infamous characters on campus. People definitely heard about this prior.
Indiana University Bloomington has nearly 45,000 students. Unless their “scandal” made national news, I find it hard to believe that they’d be infamous on a campus-wide scale (or anything much beyond their floors/dorms)
we’re supposed to overlook that, even though that’s a huge taboo in the community…but yeah, she not only outed them she sparked a whole argument that could hurt both of them and did so just to get rid of them.
But it’s Becky, so anyone that’s upset about her outing Jennifer and Ruth is factually wrong! /s
Seriously, this is a big chunk of why I can’t stand Becky. Big-yapped and can’t keep from broadcasting other people’s business, and has a lot of fans who expect people who don’t like her to keep it to themselves. She’s DoA‘s version of Rudy “dude, she’s a lesbian” Strongwell, and that’s not a good thing in any way.
Thank you. I don’t really get why people find her so likeable. I feel bad for what she’s gone through, but if I met someone in real life with her personality, yikes.
I mean, I find her likeable, but that doesn’t mean I think everything she does is likeable. I don’t think everything my actual real life close friends do is likeable.
I found her likeable for a while due to the bad stuff she’s gone through, but her behavior made me cringe even when she was going through that stuff. Now that it seems like most of that bad stuff is over, it’s hard for me to like her since her behavior is still pretty bad.
Seriously? She has been nigh-universally hated on for these last couple strips.
i’d say she’s been nigh-universally hated on for a couple months now tbh.
Okay, I worded that poorly. Insert “her” between “of” and “fans”, and you’ll get my meaning.
I view it less as Becky being protected from criticism (because, and this is true, I’ve been reading it since she first arrived on-scene) and more that Becky’s gotten a lot of shit for things outside of her control, either through genuine and awful or just plain disingenuous trolling comments.
So the difference now though is that Becky just got off a several month long binge of bullying Dorothy where she suffered no consequence, had plenty of her always excellent interactions with Dina, then starts pulling this on Ruth and Jennifer. It’s just kind of hard to like her when she mugs for the camera and gets away with it.
Becky, like a lot of the cast of DoA, also represents something important for a lot of people here, so it’s easy to see why they’d be willing to if not defend at least contextualize her actions. When Amber was at her worst post-car chase and breakup with Danny I did spend a lot of time trying to go “okay as someone with most of these problems this is what is influencing these actions and her current mental distress” but wasn’t really making any headway since the resounding conclusion for a very long time, until she started to redeem herself, was “man, fuck Amber”, and that sucked! Because Amber was really true to life for me and I took it personally!
My personal take on it is that many people are at least open to being sympathetic to a lot of these characters, but will (hopefully rightfully) call them out on things which that they can, in fact, control.
Amber had a lot of mental issues, yes, people understood that. But she was also outright dismissive of therapy and refusing to seek help in a healthy manner, and while a lot of people understood why she might be reacting in such a manner, it was also ‘okay, but you need to be able to start doing better’. Similarly, a lot of us understand why Becky might be being performative, or being firmly ‘lesbian good, guy/girl bad’, but it’s also a fair read when people are irritated by her actions, her treatment towards Dorothy, or her manipulative behaviour. Just because one understands her actions doesn’t mean condoning them.
It’s fair to call out bad behaviour or treatment, even in real life, because that’s how people can change.
Sure, but that wasn’t what a lot of people back during the break up were saying, which is Spencer’s point. A lot of people dismissed her mental illness as tantrums or called for her to be ‘locked up in the looney bin’.
Or now when people are talking about Becky being a sociopath.
I don’t think outing is something you can accuse people of when someone isn’t in the closet.
It’s not a binary decision. You can be out to certain people and not want certain others to know.
That’s certainly true. Someone might be out to a few of their closest friends. Or they could be out to their peers but be keeping it secret from their parents.
At some point though, if you show no signs of being in the closet, people will treat it as if there is no secret to be kept.
If someone isn’t enthusiastically, explicitly clear that they are fine with other people knowing, it’s not your place to out them. Simple as.
And I have never been in a culture where that is true. Nor is there any indication in this comic that any of the characters think that way.
At least not if Ruth and Jennifer don’t count as “enthusiastically, explicitly clear that they are fine with other people knowing”.
If you are not the person yourself and you have never asked if they are open, you should consider yourself as not having permission to share it regardless of all other actions. If Ruth and Jennifer wanted to shout out everything in the class themselves, they are choosing to reveal it themselves. If they make out in hallways, they are revealing it themselves.
But if Becky never asked for their okay to share with others, both would 100% have the right to be livid with her REGARDLESS OF IF THEY HAVE SHARED IT IN PUBLIC BEFORE OR NOT, as remember, Ethan recloseted himself early in DoA, and some people may do that after break-ups and prefer extra privacy.
Even if someone SEEMS open to you, that doesn’t mean they’d want you going around sharing for them as they might like being in control of when and where and how. It’s not your call when someone is ‘open’ enough that it is okay for you to do whatever, it is always that specific person’s call.
A few people have claimed this here. I get what they think. I’ve never seen this approach in real life.
While this has come up a few times before in the comic, I’ve also never seen any of the characters comment on it. None of the times commenters have gotten pissed about a character outing someone who’s basically out, (usually Jennifer), have they shown any signs of caring about it.
Dun Dun Dun DUNNNNN!
Is this when the comment section starts speculating that whenever Becky is being annoying she’s actually playing 47d chess
Also this will almost certainly backfire
Nah she just went from one flavour of annoying jerk to another.
Like we know Becky is savvier than she lets on, which makes her incredibly suited for politics.
But also, we’re all tired of politics.
Well this basically means that she is a manipulative sociopath. Anyone suited for politics should be treated with extreme amounts of suspicion.
See, this is how we end up with so many assholes in politics – because people have, over the decades, created the expectation that people who work in politics are assholes.
It’s like with lawyers.
It’s the other way around. Politics means power and that attracts the kind of people who want it and who can get it. Politics is a very dirty game where manipulative sociopaths thrive. Democracy is, after all, nothing more than a popularity contest, the one who can manipulate people the best, wins.
U.S. democracy is sometimes a popularity contest, sometimes a tribal-identity-fest, sometimes a “who has deeper pockets” contest. It’s not that many decades ago that people voted on the actual issues sometimes.
Meanwhile, India elected a literal rocket scientist (Kalam) a few years ago. So don’t overgeneralize too much about democracy, please.
And now the Indian government has their hands full with a farmers’ revolt because they tried to sell them out to the private companies…
They also have a hindu nationalist government that has tacitly endorsed anti-muslim riots (to the point where police were caught participating) and arrested the legally elected representatives of kashmir with no plans to hold new elections. So uh…maybe not the best example of…whatever it was you were trying to prove by dragging india into this.
Well I’m not the one who dragged India into this. I don’t even know enough about them to talk, they used to be… Socialist? Or Communist?
Yeah sorry, I didn’t mean you dragging india into this, just missed the right reply button. Iirc india has been a democracy for quite a while, but has still had their share of political assassinations and racist pogroms. And before that, the british did those for them.
I totally feel for them. My own country has been under the boot of one or another invader for some to 150 years. It takes time to recover from that kind of crap.
That. . .doesn’t make any of what just happened right though? Or justified?
Or your right to do?
Aaaaand that’s why some of us can’t stand her!
I’m sort of looking forward to the ultimate pay off (which is probably far distant) when Becky’s behaviours finally starts losing her people whose friendship she wants like Joyce.
Huh. Not sure if this redeems Becky or makes her worse.
My immediate reaction was to cheer, so we’ll go with that for now.
Worse, far worse.
A good demonstration of the difference between performative BECKY! and actual Becky
Nah, both are dicks.
Love her
So not only is she annoying, she’s actively an asshole.
New Mike confirmed.
How many Mikes are there in this comic strip! IS HE A HYDRA
It’s like Mephisto, except it’ll go on forever.
Cut off one Mike and four more shall take his place.
You struck him down, now he’s become more powerful than you can imagine.
I feel like this is like the Death of Superman, and we’ve got like four New Mikes.
Can’t wait to see Real Mike’s hip 90s hair when he reappears.
I’m excited for Cyborg Mike!
The theory that Mike’s ghost has somehow infected the cast with trace amounts of extra jerkishness has only gotten stronger!
No, Willis confirmed that Jennifer is Mike the day before yesterday!
That was merely to keep us from realizing that Becky was Mike in disguise all along.
What if…we are Mike?
I’m Mike, and so is my wife!
Maybe the real Mike was the friends we made along the way.
Is this when someone does a Mike drop?
No. Blaine already did that.
Didn’t Mike jump over with Blaine in his arms, not the other way around?
🙄
Seems like a lot of the cast have been competing to take Mike’s place since he died.
Mike’s death created an ‘asshole vacuum’ that other characters are rushing in to fill.
I know it’s never going to happen, but I’d actually kind of love if Mike just walked back in one day and everyone starts wilding and he drags it out long enough that he was in witness protection because Lester tried to kill him in his coma.
It’d be some Dallas ass shit but if anyone could pull it off, it’d be Mike. Also I think he was left off in too interesting a position as a character and it bums me out it’ll never be explored.
doing the wrong thing in the wrong way for the right reason and not caring one bit about the outcome? That’s Mike for you and she earned the title whole hog!
Newsflash. Beck’s an asshole. What else is new?
Yeah I think the Universal New Yorker Caption applies here…
It’s suddenly very clear why Becky and Dina are together.
Yep. I don’t know if our thoughts are running in the same track, but yep.
Uuuuhhh.
Help?
It’s not clear to me.
Am i missing something?
Sorry for being dense but I’m not clear on it other than convenience
I’m missing what you mean by this too.
Because they’re both smart.
Smart would have been heading this problem off before the class started, since she clearly knew they both had this class. This is just her thinking she’s a lot smarter than she is. Especially given that ruth and jennifer storming off together while arguing is in no way preventing them from getting back together – quite the opposite!
Ooh I like it, because I dislike the Ruth Billie pairing that much 😅
Ooh I hate it, because it moves Becky from “jerk” to “bongo” 😡
I like it because I prefer reading interesting characters that move the plot and create conflict with the potential to learn better than homogenous casts that go nowhere
Good Choice
Ooh I have really mixed feelings, because I was rooting for Ruth and
MikeJennifer.And absolutely terrible class since they dropped on the fist day.
I don’t know if I like Smug!Becky any more than I did Oblivious!Becky. This is a little too emotionally manipulative for me
Yeah, this is very much worse for me.
Just when we thought she hit the bedrock suddenly she found a fresh hole.
Huh, I’m delightfully surprised. I was starting to worry Becky was echoing first-semester Joyce “Parent Trap” tendencies. Not sure how I feel about her playing 4D chess with people’s emotions to reach her goals but at least she recognizes that Jennifer and Ruth shouldn’t get back together if this is how unhealthy their relationship is going to be.
DAMN. Just….DAMN, girl
There’s a conversation about the appropriateness of Becky’s actions these last few strips that I’m sure everyone is chomping at the bits to have, but I wanna talk about why I like this strip’s mechanics.
Using Becky, the Sapphic Bishop, as a voice to support the two seems like a pretty solid take to lead up to this. Becky’s enthusiastically gay, but even she gets it with these two: complete trash fire of a relationship, no hope as is.
Becky can always turn out to be wrong of course, but I think for now the message the comic is going with is clear: Ruth and Jennifer are done, and it’s for the best.
See now what I’m hoping is that Becky respects Jennifer’s wishes and calls her by that name.
I’m willing to give Ruth a slide on still calling her Billie, but Becky knows better.
there’s a time and place and that was neither the time nor the place to act like that…
Trashfire? Not. Billie gave Ruth something to live for, and Ruth helped Billie to clean up her act. I thought they were good for each other.
Billie was actively aiding and abetting Ruth’s drinking, and Billie sure as heck was not cleaning anything up: she still wanted to drink and Ruth yelled at her to stop dragging her into more of it.
They absolutely tried, by guv they did, they meant the absolute best for each other, it just wasn’t enough.
Like, you know who really got Ruth help? Carla. Carla broke the door down and made everyone realize Ruth was in danger.
Carla’s the absolute best, honestly.
Incredibly true facts.
You can’t stop in the middle of the story and call it the whole arc. Billie did quit drinking. She did go to therapy. Ruth was happy. She was willing to leave her room and go out in public. It’s a win.
Didn’t jeniffer… unquit drinking, try to push ruth to drink, soft-break-up with her, succeed in getting ruth to drink (causing an allergic reaction in the process that sent her to a hospital) and then refuse to let ruth break up with her?
She actually went to therapy and quit drinking afterwards later on.
Like yeah there was a lot of mess in between, but don’t forget where we saw them leave off before the timeskip.
Jennifer was making the first attempt at stopping drinking. That she could have fallen off the wagon was always a possibility, and I don’t understand why people aren’t acknowledging that.
I don’t think we got to see that, though. The part we saw was Jennifer being emotionally abusive over the course of “Vote for Robin”.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/04-vote-for-robin/decade/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/04-vote-for-robin/refusing/
(More than two links and my comment will get caught in the spam filter, but it’s the entire Jennifer/Ruth arc in that chapter.)
She could have fallen off the wagon. So could Ruth for that matter.
But it’s people like Spencer and Diner Kinetic just above that don’t even acknowledge she got on the wagon in the first place that make us push back.
We did see her quit and know that she started therapy. There’s a whole book after “Vote for Robin” before the timeskip.
Jennifer stopped drinking, went through withdrawal, introduced Ruth to the Forrest crowd, went to therapy. They ended the first season on a high note. You can’t ignore the whole resolution to that arc.
Yeah that’s not even the first time “things got better” for them. Inevitably something would go wrong and they’d be powerless to deal with it.
They need therapy, not a Sexy Lesbian Suicide Pact.
Jennifer has lied about going to therapy and quitting drinking before. Her word is no longer enough to say she’s done these things.
I don’t think she ever lied about going to therapy. She was pretty up front about not doing it when she wasn’t.
As for quitting drinking, the withdrawal signs were very clearly shown. She had definitely stopped. Doesn’t mean she didn’t relapse, but she was clearly shown having done so before the timeskip.
@Spencer: they were both in therapy. That was a good thing right?
We didn’t get to see her do too much in Book 10.
In Chapter 1, she’s dealing with the early symptoms of withdrawal.
Chapter 2 is mostly focused on other characters, but Jennifer and Ruth come clean to the Forest pod people about their relationship.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/02-to-remind-you-of-my-love/introductions-2/
Chapter 3 is the entire kidnapping thread. Ruth appears for her RA duties, but since it doesn’t involve Forest at all we only see Jennifer as a speech bubble over Ruth’s phone.
Chapter 4 is the kidnapping epilogue. Ruth suplexes Carol off-screen, and Jennifer tries to defuse Linda. Lucy smooths over all the drama they left in Forest Quad back in chapter 2. We get confirmation from Jennifer that she’s going to therapy:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/04-is-a-song-forever/narcissism/
“Could haves” are a dime a dozen. We have no information that Billie has fallen off the wagon.
I’m not sure what irks me more. That Becky called them a terrible couple, or that she’s right.
Huh, yeah, you summed it up.
Becky’s auditioning to play King Gama in the campus production of Princess Ida, I see.
If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am:
I’m a lesbian and proud of it; I rock the sapphic glam
I’m clever and creative and I think three steps ahead;
In politics (the science of) I’d say I’m quite well read
Of toxic personalities I know a thing or two;
I can call them on their bullshit in a second — and I do
I love my fellow ladies, and I help them as I shall
Yet everybody says I’m such a disagreeable gal!
And I can’t think why!
Somewhere, Gilbert and Sullivan are beaming.
*snaps fingers in applause*
YOU’VE BEEN HIT BY
YOU’VE BEEN STRUCK BY
A SMOOTH LESBIAN
She almost certainly outed them to a non-zero number of classmates in an cruelly manipulative manner. Don’t know why that’s not a problem for you.
Fart Captor is unabashedly a Becky defender, so really, shrug.
You can’t out what is not in hiding.
It may surprise you (and Carla) to learn that not all of the thousands of students/faculty members/various other employees present on IU’s campus are acutely aware of what goes on in the tiny corner of the campus over which Ruth is RA.
It may also be that Billie and Ruth are not closeted to anyone on campus.
That ain’t how it works.
Did ya miss when Ruth and Billie outed themselves to both of their dorms or smth
Oh fuck oh god not Malaya….
Ah yes, Ruth’s dorm, that place that houses every single student and faculty member in IU, who all immediately learned Ruth and Jennifer were queer ladies and dating.
People are allowed to be becky fans even if you don’t like her, let FC be
I gotta strange hunch that you won’t take that stance if I start rooting for a character that most find repugnant. Just a feeling.
I’ve loathed amber this entire comic but I’m not going to say people can’t like her because that’s being an asshole. Shut up and let people like their characters
I’m not saying that anyone can’t like any character, just expressing surprise that airing people’s dirty laundry and outing them as ambiguously queer is seen as a joking matter. Shut up and stop misrepresenting what I’m saying.
Billie are you ok? are you ok? are you ok Billie?
Can’t wait for this to backfire and they have angry sex OR they talk it out and both walk away better people.
Hrrmmm. I’m not sure how I feel about this honestly. On one hand I’m relieved Becky isn’t some creepy as hell Joe-ish type shipper but for anything women’s love. But uh, I also really don’t like her judging other people’s relationships. Either way she kind of comes off like a bit of a jerk. Maybe that’s the point?
She’s manipulating her friends and yelling their secrets in public. Pretty jerky.
And just like that, I both gain and lose respect for Becky…so she’s back to just being an obnoxious jerk who is hurting her friend more than helping.
Everyone was mentioning Booster possibly being the new Mike? Nah, Becky just secured the job!
Sure, if your wanna totally downplay the fact that Mike was deliberately abusive to everyone around him 🙄
Publicly making a scene involving two people who really don’t want to talk to each other by dragging their relationship out to a teacher they’ve just met for the hidden purpose of keeping them apart, like they needed help with that, is kinda awful.
They 100% are better off not having a class together at this time. Like, even if they eventually get back together it seems pretty clear proximity is not gonna be healthy for them for a while
That’s not Becky’s decision nor should it ever be. Whatever Becky thinks about them is moot, and if they get disruptive Leslie can do something about it.
Becky overstepped her boundaries to an extreme degree here.
Yep. Becky’s expertise in relationship therapy is pure Dunning-Kruger. And even if she were expert at it, intervening without consent is unethical.
The argument that Ruth and Jennifer are “better off” after being manipulated and forced into an ugly, painful confrontation…we already heard that argument about Mike’s manipulations, and it was just as dumb then. The only real difference is that Becky does it a lot less often.
Whether or not that true it is neither Becky’s choice nor her business,
And airing out others dirty laundry with the full intention if frustrating them to the point they will never want to get back together is extremely manipulative,
There is no good way to frame that
Hey now.
He was kinda nice to Ethan.
Speaking of whom, I’m really curious about what, exactly, Ethan’s situation is post time-skip. Mike’s death probably hit him harder than just about anybody else in the cast (the only others who could come anywhere close are Amber and Amazi-Girl), and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s taking the semester off, but the fact that nobody’s mentioned him once (unless I missed it) worries me. He’s still on the cast page, though, unlike Mike, so… who knows?
Definitely grieving away from Amber, since Amber is giving him his space so he can process his own feelings, and that’s definitely gotten worse with Mike’s death.
Avatar checks out
Like Becky being abusive to Dorothy?
So, like how everyone did that for Mike anyway?
See I thought the reveal that Mike actually thought he was helping through his high school psychology abuse bullshit, that both interpretations of the character were true at the same time, was great. I wrote Mike off for a long time and never though he could be that interesting.
Of course, this is probably going to backfire because their whole relationship started with mutual hatred
…counts as a win?
So Becky realizes Ruth and Billie are a “bad couple”. Was there any reason to expect they would have gotten back together had Becky not played her little game? Billie is now dating Asher, and Ruth seems to be focused on getting better. Not much chance of restarting a romance there.
All Becky seems to have done is alienated herself while airing their dirty laundry in public.
And relocated their argument outside of the classroom, where there isn’t anyone to tell them they need to stop because class is starting.
I can see how the momentum of them sharing a class could either facilitate them getting back together or prevent it entirely, but I can’t see how any of Becky’s actions affected either outcome at all.
Oh, the ol’ “Playing both sides against the middle” strategy.
Well played.
Did… did we skip the entire class, or are they just walking out at the beginning? That’s slightly disappointing if it’s the former, and also disappointing if they end up dropping full time if it’s the latter. Good on Becky for recognizing that their relationship was unhealthy, though.
We’ve seen some real ingenuity from Becky before (mostly under stress— tricking Ross into a confession on a 911 call here and exposing Blaine’s crimes to the world via delayed Tweets here), so I’m intrigued to see more explanation of her trickster side, even if I can’t shake the feeling that this is going to have unintended consequences (drinks shot).
It’s almost certainly the former.
Becky is, if nothing else, an efficient politician.
Start of the class. I’d be surprised if they really both wound up dropping though. Too much to be had narratively from keeping them both in the class. Otherwise it’s just Becky and Leslie in here and there’s much less point in showing it.
I know a lot of people hate Becky because she can be annoying and often uses her cunning in underhanded ways but it honestly makes her one of my favorite characters. Mike was also a favorite of mine. I just really like assholes, alright? I got Butts Disease.
I also liked mike, but… I think if becky is gonna be “new mike” then people in the strip should treat her like mike, right? It’d be weird to me if Ruth was willing to tolerate her after this
Oh I get it now I’m supposed to believe this is some galaxy brain strat that was planned along and not just Becky being wildly obnoxious as per the usual.
Same strat as tossing a quick “I was kidding” reply on a bad take tweet.
So, we should look at basically anything she’s done that doesn’t involve the Fathestro Corps as if it was a complex plan, I guess?
Okay but even if Becky wanted to make absolutely sure they didn’t get back together… why?
They were already being adamant about being over each other. Why did she think they needed any help? Was she trying to make sure? Did she think they were being too nice to each other and civil? What?
they were seconds away from one throwing a toy at the other
Because Becky has learned that hurting people is fun. It isn’t fun enough with Dorothy so she has to find other people to bully.
She said something about her likability quotient wrt how she was treating Dorothy. I think that’s less of a factor with Ruth and Jennifer, which seems to support what you’re saying, I think.
deciding she’s sadistic is a bit of a leap
Because Becky is going to end up with Ruth, and this will make sense in hindsight.
Maybe everyone forgot, but Becky came from the same sheltered upbringing as Joyce. We shouldn’t be too surprised that she also has no clear sense of boundaries, like not meddling in your friends love lives, or discussing other people’s private lives in public, or outing your gay friends. She even thought Joyce’s barging in uninvited was normal, for the really obvious parallel.
More surprising is that Leslie is totally ok with all of this. Understanding boundaries is damn near part of her curriculum.
Yeah tbh Leslie’s reaction here, some funny “oh Becky you stinker” instead of admonishing Becky for playing games with her other students’ lives… like, that ain’t okay.
Other than when she’s with Dina, because those two can make magic happen, I just have a hard time liking Becky at all.
At this point I think Dina just makes nearly anyone better.
Dina is a precious natural resource. Wars have been fought for Dina.
Leslie participated in Roz’s plan to out her sister. As great as she is, she’s not exactly always a perfect human Bean.
That is an excellent point I nearly forgot about.
In that situation, Leslie was blinded by the nookie; not an excuse by any means, but better than this reaction here.
By yay much.
People who are actively harming gay people while gay themselves need to be outed. Roz and Leslie were on the side of the angels.
True. Leslie is an excellent teacher, but most of what we’ve seen of her private life is a trash fire. A small one compared to Jennifer and Ruth’s toxic waste barge on the river Phlegethon, but a trashfire none the less.
Leslie’s intent in that plan had nothing to do with outing Robin. Mostly, she was hot for Robin, but her intent to was to talk to Robin and try to change her. Possibly through getting her to realize she was queer and then coming out herself.
Roz’s plan was to out Robin and Leslie was acceptable collateral damage.
This. Leslie knows being outed could get you killed. Roz hoped that Robin would out herself but was willing to take any kind of outing of her as a good thing and didn’t actually care if Leslie was collateral damage for it.
Becky rarely receives any actual blowback for her day to day annoying behaviour. Joyce never seems to respond to it, Dorothy just shoulders it, Sarah gets ignored.
Yes, because she definitely planned this from the start.
ch-chaotic NEUTRAL Becky????…
Becky’s trauma appears to have turned her into a total asshole. When Dina eventually catches on and realizes this Becky is not the person she fell in love with, its going to suck.
I don’t understand what the point of this was.
Becky doesn’t think that Ruth and Billie are a good couple, so she’s thrown some petrol on the fire to make doubly sure that they don’t get back together. She obviously thought it was funny to start them fighting and get them to quit the class too.
I don’t see anyone laughing.
Really? You don’t consider panel 5 to be Becky laughing at the whole situation?
I do not, she just looks like she is kind of smiling e.g. showing pride at being devious.
She’s not. She’s smiling at what she has chosen to interpret as a compliment received.
Okay, Becky’s actions are definitely questionable at best, but I legitimately love the nod to her veiled ability to be subtle and calculated in her true intentions when she wants to be.
Like, it’s still pretty questionable, but questionable actions haven’t stopped me from enjoying how interesting a character’s layers are before and it sure as hell won’t stop me now.
Oh, God. Becky is Mike. She’s turned into a more peppy less blatantly vicious Mike. Aggravating responses from people for “their own good,” micromanaging the relationships around herself for her own interests. Kiiiiinda using Dina to work through her personal issues about Joyce, though I hate to see it that way because I love Dina. The irritant of change that might spur other characters to interesting places, but who still is a self-centered asshole. She and Boomer are like Mike, if Mike broke into 2 pieces with slightly different specialties and compartmentalized issues. Oh, God.
I don’t think she’s using Dina to work through her Joyce feels, rather now it’s more about how she’s terrified of having sex and, paradoxically, feeling bitter that Dina doesn’t perceive her as a sexual being the way Becky does Dina.
I think it’s a neat way to take their relationship.
*Booster
Wow. New Mike is GOOD.
I have never 180’d so fast on a scene before. I’m almost not even salty about Mike and Ethan being gone anymore.
This might be the only webcomic I know where the comments largely revolve around obsessively analyzing the character’s moral fiber instead of whether it’s funny or not. I don’t remember Willis’s old comics having such salty comments… I miss the old lighthearted community.
And why is it you think that you haven’t grown with the rest of us? Could it be some sort of moral failure on your part that you’re too ashamed to talk about?
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the old comic is rerunning. The bad news is that you’re late to the party.
Also, welcome to the 21st century.
The world’s also changed. Upheaval of politics means things like ‘oh, that wacky Senator Desanto’ isn’t nearly as funny anymore.
Also, DoA is largely in a much more realistic setting, so stuff like ‘oh haha, Joyce pretended to be engaged to Danny’ is… not even nearly as funny if you put that in this universe so people ripped the Joyce/Jacob fabrication apart.
Yeah, Willis’s old comics had jokes in the middle of like, killing people. And they were good jokes, but DoA made it pretty clear from the beginning that it was going for a different tone. I loved a lot of the walkyverse stuff and DoA’s amazing, but plots that’d fly in one as largely humorous are gonna be taken a bit more seriously here
I feel like this comment section used to be more fun, but maybe I’ve just gotten tired of it. Too many people with their hate-boners more recently.
My theory is that the last four years have taken a severe toll on everyone’s temperament and patience, and it’s leaking out here. Too much energy gets spent on scolding because that’s what we’re used to doing now.
It’s a different comic with different standards now.
Unlike the screwball tone of the Walkyverse, DoA’s always been a lot more grounded and sensitive about the messages it wants to convey. It’s a series that strives to depict lived realities with nuance and respect, so consequently, a series of jokes ending up in the reveal that Becky had hard meddled with two people for no reason and completely gets away with it, feels incredibly jarring. It’s in the ballpark of what Mike could do in Shortpacked!, but he sure couldn’t have done it here.
I feel like Mike absolutely could have done it here.
He could have, it just wouldn’t be fun or compelling.
You’d probably get some “Mike is an asshole sage and knows best” though, even if his last moments were spent tearing down that very thought process.
Consequently, it’s also why Amazi-Girl storylines have kinda fallen flat a bit recently; disregard for physics and ‘realism’ of things like kidnaping a bunch of people in a crowd gets picked up on by the readers because it’s a notable departure from the rules of this universe.
recently? The disregard for physics goes back at least to the car chase and slightly less dramatically to everything AG has ever done – the “amazi squirrel” bit very early one comes to mind.
I know a few others.
You must not read very many webcomics. The ones I read all have these kinds of discussions, or don’t have any continuity/story. Also, I would bet money there were discussions about the character’s morals back when roomies! Was running, given that that was one of it’s main recurring themes. Think you just need to take off the nostalgia goggles.
You must not read the same comics as me, I read Bittersweet Candybowl and people have been questioning the moral fibre of these cats and dogs since 2006 and when the chapter December in 2011 struck, the comments were in anarchy (comment section was eventually removed due to difficulty moderating it). Paranatural is more suited for a light-hearted community, but they kept breaking things once they figured out how to make comments in the future so the comment section got removed.
Deviously nasty.
Are Poli Sci majors considered scientists when they graduate? Becky told her dad that she was going to go to college and become a scientist when he was in the hospital under arrest.
Iirc she gets a full ride in the polisci program because of her political experience, but she’s planning to take a bunch of biology classes at the same time. Not sure if a full double major.
Since PoliSci is short for political science, it’s safe to say she will be indeed a scientist.
that sounds like a reasonable inference except that’s not how the word “scientist” is actually used, is it?
Colloquially, scientist is used for “people in lab coats”, yes.
It’s considered a social science so not the kind she meant. We’ll see if she’s double majoring in bio.
So, hold on… Several strips back, Becky said she and Ruth signed up for this class together, just before Joe showed up and was VERY Joe to Ruth. Then we get in here, and Jennifer says SHE signed up with Ruth. Now, if this is all true, doesn’t that look like Becky signed them up for the class together? And if this is true, has Becky been playing this angle as far back as a month, or possibly longer? Because I think her statement that Ruth and Jennifer is a terrible couple is her actual honest opinion (I can’t see why she’d lie to Leslie; if she really wanted them back together, she’d keep grinning and say “I give it ten minutes before they start making out against someone else’s locker”). So did Becky actually facilitate that breakup? Because if so, that’s not your everyday manipulation, that’s some scorched earth “what’s burned stays dead” dedication to ending that relationship.
TL;DR: Go back through the last week or so, and you’ll see Becky’s been playing the long game.
Of course, knowing about this in advance means she could have played this out not in public, but chose not to.
I absolutely agree. This is the kind of dirty laundry you don’t air publicly, and as much as I want to like Becky, she really kinda lost me with the Dorothy stuff, and she’s not winning back points here.
Huh. Did not see that coming.
Leslie’s outfit is quite lovely.
Also, what the heck, Becky??
They’re leaving class early, together, urgently, engaged in their version of foreplay. You don’t get to call that a win, Becky.
There is a trick in marksmanship that involves drawing the target after you fire the shot.
This is still a shitty thing to do? Actually this probably makes it worse, as yesterday I thought it came from a place of ignorance and wasnt deliberate. This is none of Becky’s business and she’s intentionally riling them up so they don’t get back together? Like how is this ok? Why is Leslie making a snarky joke about Becky being devious as if this is a normal thing to do?
Agreed.
It’s definitely still a shitty thing to do.
No! *smack*
Bad Becky!
Yeah… So, we’re still doing the: “Let’s make the character you like show their evil side” thing, huh? Though I do have to say that Willis is certainly going the extra mile with denigrating Becky since the soft reboot.
Yup, and yup.
To me its interesting because Becky has always been this way since she joined the cast so its…gratifying (don’t know if thats the right word) to see more of the readers starting to see what I think has always been there
Do you remember Becky telling Ethan he was fired because he hadn’t gotten into Joyce’s pants?
I forgot that, but I do remember her telling Danny that she wasn’t going to learn his name because she found him unfuckable.
That did happen but after finding out they broke up she immediately felt guilty because she was trying to get him to noodle Joyce’s caboodle. I thought it was pretty clear she was messing with him and then it, seemingly, blew up in her face at Joyce’s expense and it was her fault.
But there was no sign that they had any intention of getting back together?… One’s already in a new relationship, and they were already bickering about who needs to drop the class before Becky Becky’d the entire argument.
I mean, I half-suspect they will get back together after this, but she had no reason to think that.
And, like, this is still tossing their relationship drama into a room full of people who didn’t know about it, and probably shouldn’t know about it. There were probably a bajillion less messy ways to prevent them from getting back together, including the incredibly simple “talk one of them into dropping the class that they already half-want to drop because their ex is in it, they just need a graceful way to get out”.
This is an extremely destructive overreaction to something that’s not even any of her business. Does she, like, personally hate Jennifer or Ruth and is looking for excuses to be cruel to them, or something?
No, she’s just learned that she enjoys controlling people’s behaviour by manipulation and thinks it’s the best way to mould her personal universe into the shape she wants.
There’s plenty of ways of doing that without making them a public spectacle, though. All this did was humiliate them on top of ensuring that they don’t spend time together – assuming that they don’t end up bonding over griping about Becky.
If she wanted to be sneaky and manipulative about it, she could have just painted the “No, you drop out!” thing in the least charitable light while still encouraging one of them to drop out for such-and-such benign reason; ensuring they still don’t spend time together, dislikes the other a bit more, and not involving the rest of the class.
You’re making a flaw out of what I’m increasingly concerned that Becky considers to be a feature: That she now has the ability to hurt people for her own amusement. It’s a power that she likes having and is enjoying using.
Maybe this is a response to the way she feels she’s been hurt all her life? Basically, she wants revenge on the world for Ross and she’s going to get it out of everyone else, no matter how uninvolved they were? If so, it just proves things about the continuity of abuse and makes me wonder if, long-term, Dina might be endangered.
Thats an interesting take, I look forward to seeing if thats how it plays out
Becky is pretty much a more manipulative Roz at this point. Except Roz had the decency to ask for consent with Joe.
I dunno, Roz was pretty okay outing her own sister to make a point… It might also have been nice for Joe to know that his sextape was probably going to make headlines. Don’t get me wrong, this is NOT a defense of Becky, I’m just pointing out that they’re both… gifted politicians, one might say.
Robin has taught you well, young apprentice. Robin has taught you well.
I don’t know if Becky’s been dedicated to ending them forever or anything, but frankly it’s great not to have them in the same room anymore. Ruth can be healed later and Jennifer can ride her dream motorcycle off a cliff, like she is extremely determined to. Everyone wins!
It’s like Robin had a daughter with Mike and Leslie charm.
I misread “good” as a sarcastic “ooops”
Panel 6: *Becky leans forward* You think thats air you’re breathing now?
*raises eyebrows slightly*
Wait, what?
Question: Is panel 5 Becky speaking for Willis here?
So, guess we gotta take back a bunch of Becky-bashing. But she does seem to struggle with genuine interaction. While this seems to be a successful short term tactic, I don’t think it will be as effective as a long term friendship with honest advice.
Nah. She was being awful.
I’m not taking it back. She is interfering in something that is None Of Her Goddamn Business. A revelation that her apparent goal is not her actual goal does not change that.
Peoples’ lives are their own. Peoples’ choices are their own. Except in extreme circumstances, butt out when you know your input is unwelcome.
I mean it was bad enough that she was outing people even for sapphic enthusiasm. Now we find out she’s doing it because she knows better than everyone else.
Becky hasn’t been too good lately.
You’d think Leslie would have some comments along the lines of “please don’t decide people’s feelings and relationships for them and then rant at them until they drop my class so they don’t have to be in the same room as you”. Before or even after finding out it was just a scam to. . .manipulate their relationship into what Becky had decided for them.
You’d think so wouldn’t you
In theory, she still could. the strip ends with Leslie saying Becky is incredibly devious. She doesn’t say that’s a good thing. I’m still holding out hope that Leslie calls Becky out on this.
But Becky, you just made them leave together and have something to agree over! I’m sure you could have solved this in a way that didnt mean both of them had to drop what I’m sure would have been an actually helpful class by use of public spectacle…
I could see them potentially getting back together as a result of this. Also I really don’t like what Becky’s done here, manipulating people in front of an entire class is pretty jerky behavior, and I also don’t like that Leslie apparently is fine with this.
That’s the thing about Leslie, isn’t it? She’s lonely and a bit neurotic about people who are close to her. She’ll go dramatically out of her normal character to try to guarantee that people she values in her life stay in her life. So, If I’m right, expect her to become a bit of an enabler to Becky’s bullying to try to make her more important to the girl than she’s afraid that Robin is becoming.
Reverse psychology for the win?
Becky’s terrible, Leslie’s an enabler. Amount of surprises in this strip: 0.
I would have liked Joyce and Dina to witness this. I think Joyce would disavow Becky so hard. Strange how they supposedly had the same upbringing but Joyce turned out to be a so much better person, with compassion and a sense of ethics, while Becky has none of that. Becky is selfish and only respects those useful to her. Joyce used to be ignorant but she’s always wanted to to good, and to become a better person to everyone. Becky is stuck in her ways, she’s incapable of questioning right or wrong, let alone herself.
Pfffff well okay, she had *me* fooled.
Lol, Biden says it won’t take any action because of Kashoggi’s murder because “it’s policy not to sanction foreign leaders.” I had zero expectations for this administration, and it’s failing to meet even that.
Yeah, no. They didn’t look like they needed your help staying apart, Becky.
A day, Becky will be President. But I can’t understand if this will be a good thing or a very, very bad thing.
I think that dpeends on what president you’re comparing her to.
I… uh… well huh. That happened.
For a home-schooled, fundamental shut in Becky has adapted terrifyingly well to secular society.
Did Becky have a declared major for the brief time she was at Anderson?
Pretty sure Early Childhood Education, like Joyce. The “extent of her danged life goals” was to child rear.
Okay, I am not Becky’s number 1 fan, in fact, I very much dislike her half the time. But this is one of those moments, I kinda appreciate her. But I enjoy people who play 7D chess on people.
Becky has seen first hand the cost of relationships where violence and control are the key dynamic. She will squash it like a bug every chance she gets. She may be a poli sci major but she’s survived a lot of violence cloaked in loving words. She’s not having that. She doesn’t revel in destroying relationships but if she can short circuit one that has this much violence in it even after it is nominally done, she will. She’s not a shit poster or edge lord, just a survivor.
Shes short-circuited it by having them leave together and giving them something to mutually bond over?
That’s a fair point that softens this a bit for me. If she’s just hardcore anti-romanticizing violence as love or is traumatized by the near suicide and how much it stirred up, that makes this a little more understandable.
So the comment section seems to have handled the Becky aspect but what about the class aspect? Billie at least would hugely benefit from this class as she loves words and might be able to start internalizing some messaging without being on the defense. Ruth seems pretty confident in her orientation, but after the mess last year and her journey to improvement, she could learn a lot of helpful tools for being an RA. ex: how to be a good ally and healthily enforce boundaries
Also, is it just me, or since we’ve lost Mike have many of the other characters been portrayed as social engineers as opposed to engagements coming naturally due to interaction? I can’t tell if the ratio has always been the same, but it’s more noticeable when we don’t have an absolute on the machivelli scale, or if the narrative has taken on a very different tone. Might also be leakage in having to reestablish where we are but… it feels off? I imagine the characters should feel off after a large portion were traumatized but I mean beyond that.
I guess Booster and now Becky, but I can’t think of anyone else. Booster’s being set up as more positive type where they thoughtlessly say things they think are just neat anecdotes that end up annoying people, but for Becky herself this feels kind of left field. The extent of “manipulations” was in trying to get Ethan to bang Joyce, and then later on position herself as an antagonist to Joyce and Jacob after church so they could start complimenting each other, but those felt both really small scale and altruistic without actual malice or fear of things blowing up (well they did for Ethan and Joyce in Becky’s view, but the truth is more complicated).
Becky makes sense to me actually.
In an abusive household you need to become hyperaware of others’ mental states and familiar with how to push their buttons (often to deescalate but also sometimes to manipulate them into giving you something you need or want) as a matter of survival. It’s established that Becky is good at covering up her true self and that she plays the goofball partly because of her insecurity and partly because she feels safest when others are underestimating her. We know she parlayed a prank into a full scholarship to school, so she’s got the gift of gab.
We also know Ruth’s near death by suicide very much triggered her and that she felt deeply guilty she didn’t see it coming. We know she feels kinship with Ruth on a orphan with background of abuse front and feels protective of both Billie and Ruth. Finally, we know that Becky knows that both Ruth and Jennifer got better mentally while apart from each other: neither are irredeemable people, but they bring out the worst in each other and make each other sicker. I am not surprised Becky wants to sabotage any opportunities for them to fall back into old patterns, or that she has the skills to do so without either of them catching on. It actually tracks with everything we know about her and her relationships with Jennifer and Ruth.
I’m the iguana now?! Sweet! 😀
get on my head
get a room
This is a great reading and if this is where Becky’s being taken then I’m for it, like it’s okay to acknowledge growing up in a shitty situation does bad things to your mental health and it’s not always something that only hurts inward.
I guess the problem is that Becky just got done bullying Dorothy to no consequence (and not even a hard confirm that she’ll stop *that* until later strips contextualize their relationship) and now she’s getting praised by Leslie for how she’s treated Ruth and Jennifer. So far (because if you’re right, and I hope you are because I *love* what you wrote) the message is Becky doing what she wants and getting away with it.
Like a lot of readers got hardcore nettled about Booster’s psychoanalyzing, but at least most everyone in the room responded to that with annoyance and frustration, and Booster seemed to have realized from Amber that they had crossed a line.
Oh yeah I expect and hope Becky is gonna have her antagonistic attitude towards Dorothy blow up in her face soon. Idk what the final straw will be but there will be a final straw.
And Sarah saying others misery makes her happy, and dorothy manipulating Becky and Joyce for Joyce… It’s not that there haven’t been flashes in all of them, but to have what seems like the majority of new snap shot start or feature it just seems odd to me. It isnt that certain aspects for characters don’t make sense, but the aggragate. I dunno. We shall see where it goes.
We’ll see on Sarah but right now I’m running with the interpretation that she’s actually in a good mood and being extremely performative that it’s some kind of mystical, alien phase she’s going through, because otherwise she and other people would have to acknowledge she can be anything but a misanthropic killjoy.
As for Dorothy, I don’t think that was manipulative of her, that was just her putting out a little speech because little speeches are how Dorothy solves everything.
Maybe Mike was a Distraction Carnifex in terms of everyone socially engineering things.
I mean, this too.
Mike was the sacrifice who sucked up all the negative waves. Well, a lot of the negative waves, anyway. Without him to balance The Force, The Dark Side is spreading out instead of being pooled around him.
Yeah, I’m sad Jennifer won’t be in this class, I think it’d be good for her.
Back in their dorm room, hunched over a textbook, Dorothy smiles, and doesn’t know why.
Ok so I’ve never liked Becky, I always found her loud and obnoxious so shes someone I’d have nothing to do with in real life
Having said that she is turning into a very interesting character. Her actions here show just how intelligent, cunning, manipulative and extremely ruthless she can be and how well hidden it is
I’m now wondering if she was always like this, deep down or if it was developed through her home life and no character wanting to call her out on her behaviour because of her upbringing and sexual preferences and is just trying to learn to fit in so she “got away with” behaviour other people wouldn’t have
We’ve already seen her interfere in Joyces relationship with Ethan and now this, is it a pattern or just coincidence?
Shes been around the halls for awhile now yet she really only has Joyce, Dina and maybe Walky as friends, is that deliberate
I’m looking forward to more Becky but shes not someone I’d like to meet in real life (which is a shame because I do like red heads)
She has always been cunning and intelligent and manipulative. She is a master at hiding her own feelings and pain. It was a necessary survival skill in her upbringing to present as if completely open while actually being completely shut off, likely to prevent punishment.
And she is a master at this. Because what she does, is be excessively loud about some things and airs out everyone else’s issues. This convinces you, she is extremely bad at keeping things to herself. The reality is that if she makes you so uncomfortable about the topic of her dead parents, you will stop goddamn asking about it and she will get to keep all her feels hidden.
Becky knows how to lead reactions sometimes as well too to get her preferred result. She did it with Joyce and Jacob and now Ruth and Jennifer.
People don’t really catch on that she is doing this unless she outright states it. Because it is very hard for us to imagine the same person always spilling your secrets is covering up the ability to keep secrets. But in a strictly religious household where you might be punished for trying to have an ounce of privacy, you need to present as if you are open and just get far better at burying any secrets you do have.
begs the question if she’s heavily emphasizing christianity largely around Joyce, if that’s to needle Joyce because she can tell Joyce is fading from the faith.
Also given becky got kicked out of one of her schools for making out with another girl, that whole abstinence thing -also- seems rather like a ploy.
Nah the abstinence thing is definitely Becky’s sexual hangups from her upbringing. She’s supposed to fall in love with one person, get married, and exclusively have sex with them for the rest of her life, but she figured out that her true love is a girl.
Becky right now is dealing with a cocktail of wanting to be seen as sexually attractive to Dina, someone who can’t reciprocate in the exact, overly enthusiastic way Becky has shown her, while also denying herself ever having sex with Dina until marriage.
being manipulative doesn’t take intelligence, it just takes conceit. the girl has her father’s… what do the christians call it? humility.
I mean this is really only applicable in the sense that both Becky and Toedad have acted out of a belief that they know better than whoever it is they’re trying to “help.”
Like I get what you’re saying but the way it’s phrased invites the response of “Becky hasn’t tried to shoot people with a gun and kidnap them in a speeding car” and that obfuscates the issue. Becky’s being a manipulative, egotistical jerk but that doesn’t make her like her danged dad.
I’d frame it more like Becky and Joyce both subconsciously learned to be “kindly” manipulative from the overall environment of their upbringing.
That already came back to bite Joyce in the ass (the whole Jacob situation) but so far Becky hasn’t really been bit.
I think Joyce has posited that she knows best and dips her toes into “fixing” relationship problems, but she’s been comedically ineffectual at actually enacting that save for Jacob, and that just exploded in her face because she *wanted* to be Jacob’s girlfriend and went about it in the absolute worst way.
Seriously, this kind of manipulation has ‘busybody church lady’ all over it.
Wow… that’s actually way way worse than just being a clueless addict to romcom notions of romance and love.
Like Mike was always believed of being, she uses her headology for good.
“good”
Yep. Surely is.
tails gets trolled tails dazed meme dot jpeg
I agree that they were a terrible couple, but damn Becky, still not cool.
My dislike of her is steadily growing towards hatred.
Hell yeah Becky. I guess she’s more self aware about herself than I thought.
God do I hope this doesn’t backfire and they end up together again anyway
How to never miss the target when practicing archery.
1) Shoot your arrow
2) Call whatever the arrow hits the target
I sort of agree with this. At the very least a small portion of what just happened there was Becky’s authentic feelings. I believe the red background is proof of that.
Part of me feels sorry for walkyverse billie and ruth, but in fairness toxic codependent relationship based on shared substance abuse probably wasn’t a lot better than bitter exes, it does seem pretty unlikely no matter what that this will eventually lead to Best Friends, anyway.
And we thought Becky was playing Candyland instead of chess!
i am so sick of everyone pointing at everything becky does and going “see she’s Bad”
aaaaaaaagh
She should probably stop doing bad things then!
No one’s mad at her for having sexual hangups with her girlfriend they’re mad at her for bullying Dorothy and now pulling a Mike on Ruth and Jennifer in a classroom full of strangers!
Oh, and Leslie cements her status as a bad teacher, leaving the number of competent staff at the university at three, and I think at least two of them are students (Asma, Alex, and the podpeople’s RA, whose name I forget).
How does any of this make Leslie a “bad teacher”? She took no role in causing Jennifer and Ruth to leave, and while she could (in theory) intervened during Becky’s little introduction, it likely would have happened too quickly for her to have stepped in.
Well specifically, she sees Becky out two queer girls and get them riled up enough to flee the classroom, and then instead of admonishing her for playing around with other peoples’ lives she just calls Becky “devious” without any hint of disapproval.
She also had like a total of two panels to say anything, so maybe later on she’ll get to a proper chiding, causing Becky to run to Fun Mom Robin because Strict Mom Leslie is trying to discipline their rowdy daughter.
She could still call Becky out, though. The last thing she says here is that Becky is devious. She doesn’t say its a good thing. For all we know the next comic could start with Leslie telling Becky that that wasn’t a compliment, and that what she did was actually really terrible.
What SPencer said. She just let one of her students annoy to others enough that they stormed out of the room and are going to drop her course, right in the middle of class. Extra points for having “wow, you’re effective” as a response.
It’s hardly ‘right in the middle of class’. Leslie just got here and introduced herself. If it’s even started yet, it’s the very start of class.
Your point stands though.
Prof. Brock may be jaded and grouchy, but maybe he’s an effective teacher.
(Pod peoples’ RA is Carly Spencer. She uses her surname as her mononym.)
wasn’t it, tho
So for a lot of people Booster was seen as new Mike (even being voiced by Amber), and now Becky too.
Also honestly Leslie was dating (is she… still dating?) someone who was basically and literally made to be older lesbian dentist Mike. Granted she was a minor character and I have no idea if we’ll see her again but…
How many potential Mikes until we reach critical mass?
Did the original dying cause some serious reality physics to break? Or is it more a biological process where others desperately try to fill what they subconsciously view as something close to an ecological niche which is waiting to be filled?
Ew no, I forgot to capitalise.
Aw come on, Blowjob Cat is a top-tier Gravatar.
Becky is now officially the most dangerous character in DOA. Just moments ago, I had thought her to be naive, and now I know how wrong I was. It also makes a lot more sense how she could functionally helpful to DeSanto as well.
It still makes no sense how she could be functionally helpful to Robin, especially since she wasn’t trying to be.
Everything we saw her doing should have been turning Robin’s base off in an attempt to appeal to leftist voters who should never have trusted her and aren’t enough to win with in her red district anyway. She was trying to win with a combo of SJWs and homophobes, right-wing conservatives and leftier-than-thous.
And it wasn’t working, according to the polls, up until the sympathy from the kidnapping.
This just makes becky more fun tbh idc
Yeah, I’m gonna have to agree. It’s fine until it gets somebody hurt.
yeah, even if she’s being shitty, I’d rather see her experiences changing/influencing her and her acting on those things and doing stuff and being dynamic and fucking up sometimes than see her being perfect and unobjectionable and just quietly attending class or hanging out with Dina.
I realize you probably meant this more in a ‘making jennifer and ruth argue is funny and maybe helping them stay broken up’ way, but I wanted to expand on what I was thinking
Not every character *has* to be at their worst every once in a while, but it’s a nice touch. Other than Dina going all Amazing Atheist every once in a while she’s basically a perfectly nice girl whose problems stem from other people misinterpreting her.
Becky’s problem, at least to me, is that she does these things and then there’s no real consequence or acknowledgement. She snipes at Dorothy for six years of comics and then ramps it up for their every scene together to the point of outright bullying come the timeskip, and then Dorothy just magically defuses Becky with a heartfelt spiel, and then after that Becky takes another shot at it afterwards anyway so Dorothy tells her to go solve her relationship problems with Dina, and now she has, for the time being, been a weird manipulative asshole to Ruth and Jennifer on the grounds of not wanting them together, so she publicly drags out their dirty laundry and Leslie tells Becky she’s “devious” instead of “grossly irresponsible.”
That’s why I’m not into Becky, but I lurv Becky/Dina comics, because not only do those two defy every cliche about relationship drama by just being endlessly supportive and uplifting to each other, we now have a major piece of juicy drama to chew on with Becky’s particular mix of sexual hangups, where she can’t bring herself to have sex before marriage but also quietly blames herself for not evoking in Dina the same overtly, expressive sexual attraction that Becky feels for her.
Who is Becky trying to help? Ruth? Jennifer? Both of them?
the greater gooooood
“SHUT IT”
I don’t like what Becky has done here, but solely because she’s caused Ruth to exit the scene. On the other hand, this Duck Season/Rabbit Season thing is also very funny, so I’m fine with it.
Y’all who dislike Becky’s character development probably want this strip to go back to wholesome characters making wry observations about the blowjob cat.
I don’t dislike it but at the same time, now I want that because the thought is in my head XP
Even if she did a good thing it isn’t cool to mess with someone else’s relationships.
@Clif:
This is a DM, if you’re not Clif shoo its private (j/k)
=D
Still its incredibly inaporpiate for her to do something like that , she kid of deserves to be punished by Leslie