Um. Yeah. LARC for all — it’s all we’ve got right now.
SO glad Joyce is getting on birth control! *Whew!*
Reading all that **** in the news recently about child abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, in the Catholic Church, in The Church of Latter Day Saints, in Amish communities, in the Church of Scientology, among Jehovah’s Witnesses, in the breakaway Presbyterian Church in America, at Contemporary Christian Music concerts… I’m really hoping that Joyce and Becky and their friends never had to deal with that particular kind of hell, anyway.
Body autonomy is hard enough to figure out even when you get to wait until adulthood before having to face the hard questions about sexuality and personal privacy.
🥺 I’m sorry Willis. All I wanted to do was have a way for people to engage with the community without discussing issues that could potentially trigger them, but I’m really sorry if I caused you any trouble with this! 😖
Thanks, Willis. I participated in the discussion the last couple days, but I really do tend to come to the comments section of a comic for discussion of the comic, so thanks.
I mean, it wasn’t drama, it just wasn’t about the comic. In my opinion, it didn’t help that the off-topic things would be among the first posts each day.
I do get not wanting to engage with the content of the comic each day, but then, it might be the best to be in a space literally for that.
might be that I had a decent enough childhood and that I haven’t encountered the worst of it, but I hadn’t even found the last few strips that triggering. someone coming to terms with their own mental-scape? that’s character development to me. Dorothy and Billie being insensitive about things? I mean sure but I’ve seen far worse than them in my life on all kinds of issues. heck I wouldn’t be surprised if my younger self was worse than the two of them
your comic, your prerogative, so that’s cool. having said that: I was really enjoying the off-topic discussions and felt like they were fostering a lot of goodwill around here. should we all start a subreddit or uhhh a discord or whatever the hip kids do to connect these days??
I mean, if you gotta have them, don’t…. post them right away. If every day you get to the comic and the first thing you gotta do is scroll several pages past people not actually using this space for what it’s for, then I might as well shut the comments down. Like, wait until morning, maybe, to start your OT thread, just to give folks who are here for the comic some time and space to talk about the comic. If talking about the comic bums you out and you need a reprieve, then this is probably not a great place to be to begin with.
nah, makes total sense that this isn’t the best place for, like, random chitchat esp if you have to moderate the whole thing yourself and other folk can’t skip past it all. hence my wish for a discord chat or whatever
I’m just glad at all that I can interact with the here in this wonderful, diverse, accepting community, without having to talk about triggering issues.
I like all of you, you understand me better than any community I’ve ever been to, and I don’t want triggering things to render it inaccessible for me and lots of others here for indefinite numbers of days.
Hopefully fan games don’t count as off topic. When I publish them I mean.
Maybe don’t say THE doa discord. It’s an unaffiliated fan space and I hope you make that clear in the discord itself. Also I hope this doesn’t become another thing you spam.
You have been using the comments to advertise/ask for help with your DoA fan game every single day, often multiple times per day. That’s spam by my definition.
What I’m intending to achieve is a little self-awareness on your part. You’ve been responsible for a new rule AND the ability to flag/report comments – take a hint that you’re being disruptive.
I wasn’t talk about my game in regards to “spam”. I was talking about the discord link.
Is it really that “disruptive” to remind people that there’s a non-triggering way to engage with the community with but a single comment linking the discord that people don’t really need to respond to?
All I want to do is foster good will around here so things don’t get too fiery to the point to which this place becomes inaccessible to lots of people around here.
If people really think that anything I post here counts as spam, they could easily flag it themselves without anyone reminding them what counts as spam.
I do flag your comments now that the option has been made available. Unfortunately there is no option to block you, which I would prefer.
I will, however, refrain from interacting with you from this point on. Please do not reply/respond to any of my comments in future, and I’ll do the same to yours.
I can’t make you care about other people, but you personally made this comments section a stressful and less fun place for me to be. YOU are one of the people making it inaccessible to people. I’m sure you’ll ignore that and continue on the way you want to, but I hope I’m wrong.
This server has seemed, every time I tiptoe into it, to be reserved exclusively for screaming about how bad the kidnapping plotline was and how awful Willis is
I would not recommend it as a sober and non-confrontational alternative to the comments
Yeah I poked my head in there again because I wasn’t expecting it to be the same server and the most recent conversations in both the room for the comic and the room about Willis??? That’s a normal thing to have were bellyaching about the same stuff they were bellyaching about the last time I went in there, so
Good god thank you. It’s been an increasing slog, and its not really heartening to scroll past like 300 posts of increasingly off topic discussion just to get to ‘so heres why X female character is A Monster’. I’d at least like to have enough energy to keep scrolling.
sometimes vs often I begin at the bottom of the comments, where heavy toned comments and shitpost has already happened and I feel it’s more level headed.
Doesn’t work everytime though, and probably not since I said it…
Really? It was pretty funny, my guess.
It’s a long running comic, it’s natural to people here know each other more.
But if the creator wishes ti end it, I’ll understood. It’s hard to moderate a lot of communities.
I should say I think it’s fine, nice even when off-topic conversations come up naturally, but an entire thread for the purpose of being off topic was a lot to scroll through (esp. on mobile).
To be fair this was/is an issue with a daily advice column where they wanted a community but also just clogged up discussion of the column to where they had to INVENT AN OFF-TOPIC FLAG which at least allowed people to hide posts flagged as such
This was great until they updated the site and this unfortunately broke that functionality 😕
I frequent another comic where the off-topic replies are marked clearly with OT: (in the same vein as a CW content warning, pre-text).
Unfortunately they’re also nearly always the only content on the thread.
It does seem like creating an off-topic social space *within* the comment threads, especially if unmarked, but generally either way, shuts down commentary to some degree on the content. Even though this other community had their comment replies nested by default – which DoA does not!
It’s a shame, but one worthy of considering, sadly.
Just to say I absolutely second the creation of a fanmade or official forum or other content area to engender more community conversation. It’s a much more appropriate place than randomly on the comment threads (and while I understood the OT threads you began to be specifically meant as a distract from this current in-universe day/plot/ND focus, they were growing in scale and overload more than they were shutting it down, IMHO – sorry..). But that sort of a community needs good, even-handed, reliable regular moderation to avoid negativity spiralling long-term just as the comment section on a comic does, and I don’t know if Willis has the time for that or any plans to recruit others to work on the matter. Also, any mods/runners from the community would probably need to have avoided strong partisanship, which then rules out some more passionate members – it’s not the easiest thing in the world. But I’ve seen other comics succeed at running a forum (Gunnerkrigg for example), so maybe it’s possible…?
Like, sorry, are you talking about something a completely different website/content provider did? Or was this a thing Willis did with a previous website?
Thank you. I’m in the UK so by the time I was checking the comic each day, it was impossible for me to scroll through a wall of utterly unrelated musings to try and read the comic discussion, so I gave up.
Calling them breaks from heavy subjects was a mockery when you couldn’t actually FIND the heavy subjects.
Ditto, I appreciated the sentiment, but I wasn’t heading to the comments to /not/ see others’ takes on the material whether for discussion, elucidation, venting, checking before adding my own, etc. It’s a nice idea but it doesn’t work quite as intended when readers have to choose to access comments to begin with (as opposed to say, having to click through them before seeing the comic, like a FB headline-and-image with a thousand “top comments” flagged before first click).
This whole discussion feels incredibly disingenuous when half or more of the people complaining don’t post regularly and have apparently come out of the woodwork specifically about this; if scrolling down past threads you don’t want to read is so taxing, why am I so sure 90% of you are on twitter?
It’s Willis’ website and he can do as he pleases, but this whole discussion of the issue is just dishonest.
Uh, from my end I can actually see how many comments each person has made on this site, right next to their names, and the “the people complaining don’t post regularly” claim is not supported by these numbers in any way. And even if it was? The reading experience of lurkers matters, too.
And comparing it to scrolling through Twitter makes no sense??? Because Twitter isn’t a dedicated forum for discussion about one specific topic, and also you can choose???? who you read??? and if you don’t like their content you can just unfollow them??? so I don’t understand how it’s relevant?????????
Maybe some of the people saying they want the comments section to…be more focused on actually commenting on the comic…have been alienated or put off by the comments section being commandeered as a community building website that doesn’t have a lot to do with the actual comic?
I’m not on Twitter and I like this damn comic strip and I’d like to be able to talk about it without having to navigate every single day through hundreds of comments about toast, on a thread I can’t collapse, that is only there in the first place because someone wanted to talk about toast toppings more than they wanted to talk about the comic that this comments section is supposed to be here for.
Consider that some of the people posting read but don’t often add to the comments, and that others may have not commented recently, especially if the OT threads were putting them off…!
But honestly, I think the biggest issue for anything like this is that DoA’s site doesn’t auto-nest discussion threads. (Or bold new thread headlines, or do anything else in particular to make thread-starters stand out…) This makes a single off-topic thread of a few dozen chats and replies into a massive, sprawling mess that honestly I have to agree has been unreadable over the last week or so. To me, anyway.
I actually thought the OT-to-chill section was a sweet idea but it doesn’t seem like it’s been working as intended and I’ve seen similar efforts backfire (or at least solidly alter reader engagement, good or ill) even on comics that DO nest comments, so alternative chat host options are a good call at this point.
Speaking only for myself, I find that the bandwidth used by a comment or two about carefully selected music choices to accompany the day’s comic to be more germane than half of the postings. Please do not allow a request to tone down the off-comics-topics to dissuade you from advising us of your recommended background music. It is IMAO germane to the comic.
Remember Joyce you used to be a right wing Christian nut job, the stuff you’ve said today likely doesn’t even register on the “harmful words from Joyce scale”
Considering how divisive our country has become (Today being a prime example) I have to wonder what Joyce would be like if her character development reset today. Like if the comic had just started to day and she was right back to the day one right wing Christian. Would she be even more radicalized? Or maybe she would already have started drifting from her parents beliefs. We gotta remember Joyce started college in a pre-Trump world and is now attending when the damage of that presidency has already be done and we’re still dealing with the never ending aftershocks.
Part of growing up, is finding out WHO you are. Not who you think you are, not who your parents think you are, not who your school/job/friends think you are. There are millions of people on both sides of the right/left divide who are really nothing more than more extreme versions of their parents, because they didn’t bother to grow up, they just emulated the adults around them, becoming miniature (and later not so miniature) caricatures of their parents without so much as a single thought of their own.
So…Joyce reset to today?? Probably a lot the same as she is right on the page here. She started as a caricature of her parents, and found out it doesn’t work that way in real life, so she’s struggling to have original thoughts.
She’s GROWING UP, becoming her own person who isn’t a media driven, culturally cultured, authority-crafted stereotype.
She’s behind Dina in that. Dina’s probably the most functionally adult person in the cast-she’s further along, at least, in working out WHO she is, instead of fretting over WHAT.
Posting to say that I’m not sure that all the damage of Trump’s first presidency is done. His Supreme Court is going to keep on keeping on probably for twenty years.
By that rationale the damage of the Rutherford B Hayes presidency isn’t done yet. That’s true in the sense that the damage done in his presidency laid the foundation for future damage, but his regime is over and unless we live in the bad timeline will remain over
Miserably, it seems that you’re being proven right. I was really, really hoping that there was enough fight left to prevent what’s recently occured. I hope there’s enough left to undo the harm going forward.
I don’t think that’s quite what she’s worried about – though it’s certainly a valid concern.
She still sees doctors as authority figures, so she’s thinking “What if the specialist determines I’m not really autistic” and assuming that the doctor would be right.
I really like the nuance of this read. It’s as if Joyce is only capable of re-categorising her prior respected authority figures as failed, no longer valid in any way, in her eyes, when she learns they were flawed or harmful or just plain ignorant/wrong in any way. She still has a lot of that left-over automatic submission to perceived authority in her therefore and unless and until medical staff give her cause to question them as well (or she realises that they, like every other authority, have the potential to be wrong) she may very well immediately trust whatever is being said.
What is it with the characters in this comic not even taking .5 seconds to have empathy. The closest we got was Jennifer in Billie-mode just now and when she took her.
Comment section has an entire day to feel empathy for characters in a given strip and often doesn’t manage it. Society at large can go decades without managing it. Why’s it so weird the comic characters can’t manage in real-time?
The comment section isn’t friends with any of these people and aren’t talking to them directly. It’s reasonable to expect individual people to be more empathetic with their real human being friends than the-entirety-of-society is with the-entire-rest-of-society, or this entire comment section is with fictional characters. (Even if real people can relate to them and be hurt by criticisms of them.)
The comment section has people with sympathy for every character every day that I’ve read it. So does society. Both also have people who aren’t sympathetic. Groups of people aren’t good at being monolithic.
Exactly. I’d expect someones closest friends to at least manage a handful of empathy. I get that it’s not like…. feelingsofage or whatever but so far they’ve been like. Not great at that aspect of friendship.
Not quite the whole point of her fear. She’s worried about what she’s said about autism being messed up if she’s not really autistic. Sarah’s talking all the messed up stuff she’s said before the autism came up – much of it due to the warped upbringing.
Yeah… I think it’s like Joyce realizing this has really brought to the surface different feelings of ableism she has. And that might feel more bearable to her in the context of “this is because I’ve learned new things about myself that I need to process” vs “this is how I’ve always been.”
Either way, it presents her with a chance to reflect and grow. It might just be harder to accept–or equally hard, since she was struggling before. Just a different way of worrying about it on top of what she was already thinking.
I can especially relate to Joyce here in the third panel — she’s mortally afraid of living the result of other people’s thinking instead of her own. 🥺
When you find out it’s possible you’re a neurodivergent, this is a very toxic pitfall that’s very easy to fall into, I just hope Joyce can pull herself out before the voices of others completely drown out her own! 😭😭😭
These two halves may be speaking the same “English” words, but they might as well be using two different languages.
I swear, why do we even bother calling it the “United” States anymore? It hasn’t really been that way for well over a century now, and it probably won’t be anytime soon.
Try never. I reckon the U in “USA”, much like the one in “UK” was always at best aspirational and programmatic. Politics is fanfiction with an army and a navy, as the saying goes
I think there are still things that can bring us together.
Live Music.
Natural disasters and volunteerism.
Military service or other national service branches, sometimes.
Teaching farms.
College, sometimes.
Internships and practicum training.
…I’m just thinking about things that cause folks from urban areas to relocate temporarily to rural areas, and vice versa, or that cause people to move for a while to a different part of the country. (E.G., North to South, coasts to Midwest, Southwest to Northwest, etc.) Sure, people will find pockets of like minded community wherever they go, but along the way they will be exposed to people who are unlike them. And that exposure will be educational, and will teach kinship and fellow feeling. Just as it has here for Joyce.
I’ve been moving around, meeting different kinds of people, with different kinds of views, my whole life, and I am STILL overcoming my ignorance. Sadly, I am STILL making mistakes and causing offense. And I still have to learn to check my privilege and approach others with humility. Just as Joyce has been doing. The journey never ends.
Sure, it gets tempting to just want to retreat. I often feel some of the rejection sensitivity and social isolation that sometimes accompanies neurodivergence. More so since the pandemic began. For me, and perhaps for others, it often comes from that same fear of making mistakes and inadvertently insulting or dehumanizing others that Joyce is experiencing right now in this strip.
(“If you can’t say something sensitive and perfectly correct and up to date with the latest sensibilities, don’t say anything at all.”)
Maybe she’s right. Maybe the consequences of making mistakes are too great for those whom her mistakes are likely to hurt or exclude, and she shouldn’t risk voicing her feelings at all. But unless she allows herself to make mistakes, she’ll never learn how to make fewer mistakes. Like Joe was saying to Jacob: Joyce KEEPS TRYING to be better, again and again, every time she overcomes a piece of her own ignorance.
Sorry, sorry, I wasn’t meaning to make some kind of pro-military statement there. I was just thinking back to how these kinds of shared experiences bring people out of their comfort zones to do something together.
About that Laura, very much emphasize with your points above. 😖
It seems these days that no matter where you go, the room for personal growth between your comfort zone and overload from rejection is razor-thin.
Accidentally step outside the predesignated “comfort”-zone, and you’re ostracized.
On multi-cultural frontier, the potential for accidental offense is almost unlimited, so misunderstandings are really better off treated as the rule, not the exception.
Not to sound pessimistic, but I really don’t think there’s a way to repair the divide. We could all just come together and decide not to talk about personal politics no matter what, but that (to me) inherently means defaulting to some kind of political “norm”, which we did for decades and look where it got us. Nobody talked about anything and now the only way to bring everyone together is pretty much just death, because that’s when we’re all really equal. But right now, the only way to get “normal” back is to buckle up and hope we survive the war long enough to start rebuilding after it passes.
Also, between being rejected here when I try to talk about my experiences with the autism*-label, and being rejected here today when I try to cool things down,
I think you’re right that this place really IS impenetrable sometimes. 😮💨
Can’t wait to play Yu-Gi-Oh with you.
Also we can make our own Discord Server, just the two of us if you’d like!
Appreciate the positive and hopeful thoughts @Laura! I’ve not lived in the US myself, so I don’t have any first hand experience with the political reality there. My comment was more to point out that the US, as a colonising and slave-owning power, was always materially divided. I’m not opining about how bridgeable the political/cultural rift that is so evident in your country today is (and the recent anti-abortion scotus decision is just the latest poignant reminder of how sharp it is), only pointing out that it runs deep and old.
Oh, yeah, way true. And even though I am in the “minority” in some ways (trans, disabled, AFAB, multicultural heritage, family caregiver…), I still have enough privilege to be seen as one of the “elite”, the “in-group”. Not excluded from and shut out of social and civic participation, as so many are in the States today. But still, I had many good (and scary!) experiences that let me travel all over the States (and over a fair amount of the world) and meet all kinds of folks, even bigots. Hiking the Appalachian Trail and wildfire forestry really helped with that. And I found that (to me at least) most people were kind. Most people were welcoming. Most people were grateful and gracious. Even though I’m sure my appearance triggered every hot button they had. Maybe I would have had a different experience today: that was very long ago. But I feel like I have to still believe in the inherent worth of each human being, no matter how many prejudices they were raised with. I think they all can change. Maybe I’m just being a Pollyanna. I’ve seen some ugly behavior and my life has been endangered many times by other people. But I don’t know — perhaps I’m just naive. I think we still can find some common ground somewhere.
To me Joyce is trying to reconcile her harmful rhetoric since she came to IU as the possible misunderstandings and miscommunication of someone struggling with autism. But she worries if she’s not autistic, then it was just a bunch of hurtful bullshit she was parroting without knowing any better.
So Joyce would be the outsider to her friend group. At least that’s how i interpret this. She hasn’t just been talking about herself, she’s been saying very harmful things in judgement of her peers this whole time. Like a more palatable version of Mary.
I read it as more specific. She’s not talking about her whole time here and blaming everything hurtful she’s done on being autistic. She’s talking about the things she’s said today about autism being harmful if it turns out she isn’t autistic and she said them from outside as someone who isn’t autistic.
The “warped upbringing” only comes in as a reason the first doctor suspected autism.
Outsider to the autistic community. If she’s questioning her own mind and figuring stuff out, that’s one thing. If her statements apply exclusively to other people and not herself, that’s different, and likely insulting.
I don’t fully agree with Joyce on that, but I’m not going to tease out the details of where the borders of acceptable behavior meet with internalized ableism at 11 at night.
And I’m with you that I don’t think it’s as binary as Joyce is making it out to be. It’s vitally important that people be allowed the grace to ask questions about themselves, to explore the possibility that they may belong to a category or an identity that’s marginalized or stigmatized, and for that self-questioning to be acceptable even if at the end, they conclude the answer is “no, I don’t think that’s mean after all.”
Okay hear me out. “The Outsider” should be Joyce’s masked vigilante identity. The position of campus masked hero is wide open right now. The Outsider’s time has come!
Also yeah, it could be the idea that she was just a vessel for parroting her parent’s dogma. There’s a few different ways to read this. Joyce probably doesn’t even fully know what she means.
She’s saying that if she’s not on the spectrum she’s nothing but the ignorance and prejudice of the community that raised her. She doesn’t have her own identity; she’s just some program other people came up with.
I also kind of wonder at the snark from Sarah. I’m assuming that Sarah feels that Joyce is including her and her other college friends in that ‘outsider’ catagory but I don’t think that’s what Joyce means. She means .. La Porte, I guess.
unless your subconscious is a dick, i was half asleep this morning and could hear my mom nagging in the background and it made whatever i dreamt about having me even more pissed off than if i was just partially and grumpy
personally i prefer to sleep through without dreams, idk about rem cycles and stuff but i’m also a light sleeper, at least i don’t have to worry about sleep paralysis, or if it has happened before i never opened my eyes so i don’t see any ‘freaky demon shit’ that ppl talk about (i vaguely think i had lucid dreams a couple of times but not much you can rly do about that. tho i’m sure the ppl who claim they can astral project might have some fun )
If you got Master Duel, I’m on that cuz it’s cross-platform and free. My name on there is just Taffy, idk how to search that stuff up though, and if I can’t do it without doxxing myself that’s all the info I’m comfy providing. Otherwise I exclusively play offline.
I definitely had imposter syndrome last year, when I suspected I might be autistic but hadn’t been diagnosed yet. Even after taking a bunch of tests and the results showing high likelihood, and sending those results to a doctor, I was still worried they would somehow conclude that I wasn’t autistic.
Barely related but I feel like admitting I’ve been pulling a Billie thinking “I’m not all that bad with changes in routine, I change my routine all the time!”
Well, I’m stressed about needing to finish my thesis like today, the janitors cut one of the branches of the tree in front of my window, so now I see more sky and less tree when I look outside, and it *annoys me very much*. That is all, back to writing.
as long as it’s not too strict/inflexible, i can see the comfort on a reliable schedule, nothing wrong with doing something diff/new for yourself if things get monotonous but knowing that certain things won’t change would be good, tho i’m hardly an adrenaline junkie/thrill chaser or so
I don’t think there is a single person in this cast who cares more or works harder at being a good person than Joyce. She may be upset and unsettled by the degree of change in her life, and that she sees in herself, but SO MUCH of that change has come out of her desire for continual self-improvement, her desire to do the right thing, to be a good person to the people around her.
The thing she’s having the hardest time with right now is having abandoned the set of rules for “how to be a good person” she was raised with, and not knowing how to be a good person outside of them. She’s had the eye-opening experiences that made it clear that the hardcore Christian fundamentalism she was immersed in from birth is, in fact, harmful (to put it gently). But where do you go, when you’re walking away from the only world and the only way of thinking you’ve ever known? It’s an incredibly wrenching thing, and she has very, very little support in this.
(Gotta say, one of the things that really sold me on Joe/Joyce is that the moment we realize he’s in love with her is during his speech to Jacob about how yeah, Joyce says three incredibly fucked up things every day, but that it used to be five, and that Joyce is getting better because she’s *trying* to get better, and she will keep getting better, until someday she’s perfect. Like, my god, what a beautiful thing to see in someone, and to say about them. What a beautiful thing to love in someone! It’s too bad he was saying it to someone who’d just gotten burned by Joyce fucking up, and was in no mood to hear it, or probably even to realize what a huge fucking deal it is for a person with Joe’s issues and Joe’s historical approach to sex and dating, to be forming this kind of emotional attachment to someone, an attachment rooted in really *seeing* them, and thinking “my god that’s amazing”.)
Oo, thanks for that callback to Joe. I’ll wait patiently until Joe comes back into the story. And that reminds me, Joe is trying to be a good person too. He’s a little effed up in his approach, but he’s trying to get better. He could be a good anchor for Joyce as she’s navigating her new realizations.
He is! He’s done a little backsliding on the “trying to be better” front, but the fact that he’s trying at all, when he’d gotten himself into this comfortable little emotional rut where sex and emotions had nothing to do with one another, and this was his solution to Not Becoming His Father, is impressive! And I really appreciate that he decided he wanted to be better partly *because* of Joyce. Not solely *for* her and her alone (which is a good thing), but because seeing her as a *person,* hearing her talk about the harm sexual objectification had caused her *got* to him in a way even public scorn hadn’t. And I think he’s also just inspired by watching her try to improve herself and learn (and also a little overawed by her? He’s literally on record as feeling he’d “ruin” her if he acted on his feelings towards her, which is a pretty strong sign now is not their time).
Anyway I love ‘em and I hope we see more of them interacting soon. It’s been awhile.
Honestly, he already has been. Joyce opens up to him and he’s the only one who actually takes what she says and fucking cares about it and how she feels and tries to actually engage her on it. “Hell was never real, but you are.” and “We can choose for ourselves what has meaning.”
All Joe needs to do is work through his fears of somehow ruining Joyce and focus on how much he cares about her in order to be there for her more, and they’ll both be much better off.
YESSSS I find myself shipping Joeyce more and more!! and, come to think of it, “bless their heart for trying so hard” applies to like 75% of these characters, doesn’t it
I know it’s amped up for dramatic/comedic effect, but it’s sort of refreshing in a way that many of them are handling this stuff clumsily. It is something that, frankly, a lot of people do handle clumsily due to ableism baked into their preconceptions, poor societal/cultural understanding, etc.
That said, wonder if this is going to wrap back around to when Joyce said Dina was “like a robot” and her realizing how awful a thing to say that was. Like, that would make a lot of sense, and looking back, does feel like it was foreshadowing.
I don’t say that as like a “Take THAT” at Joyce, either, since like I said, a lot of them have said low key ableist stuff during this storyline, not maliciously so, but out of their misunderstandings. It just makes me wonder if Joyce is going to end up ruminating on that any.
Has college turned poor Billie into some kind of complete dejennierate?
Oof. That was rough. I should probably apologize for that joke. But I won’t because an apology should be sincere. And I’m not sorry. I will never be sorry.
Sarah’s heavily implying in that last panel that Joyce has been saying harmful things today, which might be true, but is kinda rich coming from her considering all the things she’s been saying today. Kettles and pots and all.
I think that was intended to mean ‘what you’ve said today is not the most harmful of the things you have said’ in like a more general sense of throughout the comic rather than specifically this day.
Love not found is cute and charming and low stakes and even a little romantic.
Something Positive is angry and sarcastic, and starts with a joke that’s even more topical today, so maybe skip if you don’t want to feel angry.
Sam and Fuzzy has the same weird vibe as Shortpacked. The drama tag got pulled with that about when Sam got a steady if I recall.
Sarah isn’t getting any credit for any of this and she should. She’s been awesome, taking care of Joyce. Far above and beyond what I would consider to be the normal for roommate interaction. She’s not been perfect, don’t get me wrong, but still… props to her.
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also it’s legit unhelpful to be worried about something that hasn’t actually happened yet
like, sure, be prepared, but spending your time ACTIVELY worrying about a POSSIBILITY is unproductive at best
or so sayeth the serenity prayer
might not even be autistic = don’t worry about it rn
on the other hand, being of child-incubating age in the U.S. = absolutely worry rn, maybe with pitchforks
Um. Yeah. LARC for all — it’s all we’ve got right now.
SO glad Joyce is getting on birth control! *Whew!*
Reading all that **** in the news recently about child abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, in the Catholic Church, in The Church of Latter Day Saints, in Amish communities, in the Church of Scientology, among Jehovah’s Witnesses, in the breakaway Presbyterian Church in America, at Contemporary Christian Music concerts… I’m really hoping that Joyce and Becky and their friends never had to deal with that particular kind of hell, anyway.
Body autonomy is hard enough to figure out even when you get to wait until adulthood before having to face the hard questions about sexuality and personal privacy.
Seriously, if I hear any more of this injustice imma turn into fucking Ghost Rider 🔥👿🔥
*plays “Exorcism” from Ghost Rider OST on hacked muzak*
Yeah it’s unhelpful to be worried about stuff you dont know yet, but anxiety doesn’t work that way, and Joyce certainly doesn’t work that way lol
why settle on inefficient pitchforks when Joseph-Ignace Guillotin already came up with a much more efficient metal and wood device back in the 1700s?
Not even in the top 13 really. Early Joyce, was a lot to deal with.
okay no more six solid pages of off-topic discussion to scroll through anymore, don’t try to start offtopic stuff here on purpose
But how will I know what people feel about 30XX if I don’t start hilariously off-topic discussions in this extremely charged comment section?
Oh no. This going to turn into six pages off-topic discussion about off-topic discussion isn’t it?
argh! Flagged by accident.
Of course not, it will turn into six pages of off-topic discussion about off-topic discussion about off-topic discussion.
🥺 I’m sorry Willis. All I wanted to do was have a way for people to engage with the community without discussing issues that could potentially trigger them, but I’m really sorry if I caused you any trouble with this! 😖
(If only there were a way to collapse threads or something)
Y’all should start a subreddit. Just people who like Dumbing of Age talking about anything they want.
Maybe a discord channel would work better
Of course nothing like this should be done without Willis’s permission
I don’t see why we would need Willis’s permission to talk to each other.
To talk to each other? No.
To use his intellectual property (the comic and related characters and logos)? Yes.
Make it clear he doesn’t endorse the channel and it should be fine.
Thanks, Willis. I participated in the discussion the last couple days, but I really do tend to come to the comments section of a comic for discussion of the comic, so thanks.
Dare I ask what the topic was?
I mean, it wasn’t drama, it just wasn’t about the comic. In my opinion, it didn’t help that the off-topic things would be among the first posts each day.
I do get not wanting to engage with the content of the comic each day, but then, it might be the best to be in a space literally for that.
*it might be the best to NOT be in a space literally for that, lol
yea, I gotta agree on that
might be that I had a decent enough childhood and that I haven’t encountered the worst of it, but I hadn’t even found the last few strips that triggering. someone coming to terms with their own mental-scape? that’s character development to me. Dorothy and Billie being insensitive about things? I mean sure but I’ve seen far worse than them in my life on all kinds of issues. heck I wouldn’t be surprised if my younger self was worse than the two of them
sandwiches largely
I feel like it’s usually been sandwiches
your comic, your prerogative, so that’s cool. having said that: I was really enjoying the off-topic discussions and felt like they were fostering a lot of goodwill around here. should we all start a subreddit or uhhh a discord or whatever the hip kids do to connect these days??
I mean, if you gotta have them, don’t…. post them right away. If every day you get to the comic and the first thing you gotta do is scroll several pages past people not actually using this space for what it’s for, then I might as well shut the comments down. Like, wait until morning, maybe, to start your OT thread, just to give folks who are here for the comic some time and space to talk about the comic. If talking about the comic bums you out and you need a reprieve, then this is probably not a great place to be to begin with.
nah, makes total sense that this isn’t the best place for, like, random chitchat esp if you have to moderate the whole thing yourself and other folk can’t skip past it all. hence my wish for a discord chat or whatever
OK Willis, thank you for letting me know.
I’m just glad at all that I can interact with the here in this wonderful, diverse, accepting community, without having to talk about triggering issues.
I like all of you, you understand me better than any community I’ve ever been to, and I don’t want triggering things to render it inaccessible for me and lots of others here for indefinite numbers of days.
Hopefully fan games don’t count as off topic. When I publish them I mean.
*interact with the people here
typos bruh…
I’m pretty sure thats bro, bro.
Nah, bruh’s a lot more gender neutral IMO, I’m gender fluid (she/they) 😄
Do you ever wish that people addressed you as DW, like you were Darkwing Duck?
I’d imagine they wouldn’t want people calling them when something troubling them, though.
Your wish has been granted!
Here’s the DOA Discord Server:
https://discord.gg/j2VZ6jbw
See you on the other side! 😛
Maybe don’t say THE doa discord. It’s an unaffiliated fan space and I hope you make that clear in the discord itself. Also I hope this doesn’t become another thing you spam.
I know you have good intentions, but just what do you intend to achieve by gate-keeping what counts as “spam”?
That isn’t what “gatekeeping” means.
You have been using the comments to advertise/ask for help with your DoA fan game every single day, often multiple times per day. That’s spam by my definition.
What I’m intending to achieve is a little self-awareness on your part. You’ve been responsible for a new rule AND the ability to flag/report comments – take a hint that you’re being disruptive.
I wasn’t talk about my game in regards to “spam”. I was talking about the discord link.
Is it really that “disruptive” to remind people that there’s a non-triggering way to engage with the community with but a single comment linking the discord that people don’t really need to respond to?
All I want to do is foster good will around here so things don’t get too fiery to the point to which this place becomes inaccessible to lots of people around here.
If people really think that anything I post here counts as spam, they could easily flag it themselves without anyone reminding them what counts as spam.
I do flag your comments now that the option has been made available. Unfortunately there is no option to block you, which I would prefer.
I will, however, refrain from interacting with you from this point on. Please do not reply/respond to any of my comments in future, and I’ll do the same to yours.
I can’t make you care about other people, but you personally made this comments section a stressful and less fun place for me to be. YOU are one of the people making it inaccessible to people. I’m sure you’ll ignore that and continue on the way you want to, but I hope I’m wrong.
Either way, that’s all I’ll say.
(For the record, this server existed long before these off-topic shenanigans and is more affiliated to the DoA subreddit than anything else.)
I appreciate the clarification, thank you.
Hey uh
This server has seemed, every time I tiptoe into it, to be reserved exclusively for screaming about how bad the kidnapping plotline was and how awful Willis is
I would not recommend it as a sober and non-confrontational alternative to the comments
There’s also a thread about dogs and fanart too.
It’s changed quite some time since last time you’ve been there, it seems.
Yeah I poked my head in there again because I wasn’t expecting it to be the same server and the most recent conversations in both the room for the comic and the room about Willis??? That’s a normal thing to have were bellyaching about the same stuff they were bellyaching about the last time I went in there, so
thank you willis
Good god thank you. It’s been an increasing slog, and its not really heartening to scroll past like 300 posts of increasingly off topic discussion just to get to ‘so heres why X female character is A Monster’. I’d at least like to have enough energy to keep scrolling.
sometimes vs often I begin at the bottom of the comments, where heavy toned comments and shitpost has already happened and I feel it’s more level headed.
Doesn’t work everytime though, and probably not since I said it…
thank you
thank you
Thank you Willis that was getting irritating…
Really? It was pretty funny, my guess.
It’s a long running comic, it’s natural to people here know each other more.
But if the creator wishes ti end it, I’ll understood. It’s hard to moderate a lot of communities.
I should say I think it’s fine, nice even when off-topic conversations come up naturally, but an entire thread for the purpose of being off topic was a lot to scroll through (esp. on mobile).
Appreciated. It was getting frustrating trying to find the on-topic comments, which are in fact what I’m looking for in a comments section.
THANK YOU. It was so annoying to have to scroll and scroll and scroll to find something about the comic rather than hotdogs or some nonsense.
To be fair this was/is an issue with a daily advice column where they wanted a community but also just clogged up discussion of the column to where they had to INVENT AN OFF-TOPIC FLAG which at least allowed people to hide posts flagged as such
This was great until they updated the site and this unfortunately broke that functionality 😕
I sure hope that feature returns. Sounds like it would be a VERY good thing to have, to create a situation where everyone wins. 😃
I frequent another comic where the off-topic replies are marked clearly with OT: (in the same vein as a CW content warning, pre-text).
Unfortunately they’re also nearly always the only content on the thread.
It does seem like creating an off-topic social space *within* the comment threads, especially if unmarked, but generally either way, shuts down commentary to some degree on the content. Even though this other community had their comment replies nested by default – which DoA does not!
It’s a shame, but one worthy of considering, sadly.
Just to say I absolutely second the creation of a fanmade or official forum or other content area to engender more community conversation. It’s a much more appropriate place than randomly on the comment threads (and while I understood the OT threads you began to be specifically meant as a distract from this current in-universe day/plot/ND focus, they were growing in scale and overload more than they were shutting it down, IMHO – sorry..). But that sort of a community needs good, even-handed, reliable regular moderation to avoid negativity spiralling long-term just as the comment section on a comic does, and I don’t know if Willis has the time for that or any plans to recruit others to work on the matter. Also, any mods/runners from the community would probably need to have avoided strong partisanship, which then rules out some more passionate members – it’s not the easiest thing in the world. But I’ve seen other comics succeed at running a forum (Gunnerkrigg for example), so maybe it’s possible…?
Like, sorry, are you talking about something a completely different website/content provider did? Or was this a thing Willis did with a previous website?
Thank you. I’m in the UK so by the time I was checking the comic each day, it was impossible for me to scroll through a wall of utterly unrelated musings to try and read the comic discussion, so I gave up.
Calling them breaks from heavy subjects was a mockery when you couldn’t actually FIND the heavy subjects.
Ditto, I appreciated the sentiment, but I wasn’t heading to the comments to /not/ see others’ takes on the material whether for discussion, elucidation, venting, checking before adding my own, etc. It’s a nice idea but it doesn’t work quite as intended when readers have to choose to access comments to begin with (as opposed to say, having to click through them before seeing the comic, like a FB headline-and-image with a thousand “top comments” flagged before first click).
This whole discussion feels incredibly disingenuous when half or more of the people complaining don’t post regularly and have apparently come out of the woodwork specifically about this; if scrolling down past threads you don’t want to read is so taxing, why am I so sure 90% of you are on twitter?
It’s Willis’ website and he can do as he pleases, but this whole discussion of the issue is just dishonest.
Uh, from my end I can actually see how many comments each person has made on this site, right next to their names, and the “the people complaining don’t post regularly” claim is not supported by these numbers in any way. And even if it was? The reading experience of lurkers matters, too.
And comparing it to scrolling through Twitter makes no sense??? Because Twitter isn’t a dedicated forum for discussion about one specific topic, and also you can choose???? who you read??? and if you don’t like their content you can just unfollow them??? so I don’t understand how it’s relevant?????????
Maybe some of the people saying they want the comments section to…be more focused on actually commenting on the comic…have been alienated or put off by the comments section being commandeered as a community building website that doesn’t have a lot to do with the actual comic?
I’m not on Twitter and I like this damn comic strip and I’d like to be able to talk about it without having to navigate every single day through hundreds of comments about toast, on a thread I can’t collapse, that is only there in the first place because someone wanted to talk about toast toppings more than they wanted to talk about the comic that this comments section is supposed to be here for.
Consider that some of the people posting read but don’t often add to the comments, and that others may have not commented recently, especially if the OT threads were putting them off…!
But honestly, I think the biggest issue for anything like this is that DoA’s site doesn’t auto-nest discussion threads. (Or bold new thread headlines, or do anything else in particular to make thread-starters stand out…) This makes a single off-topic thread of a few dozen chats and replies into a massive, sprawling mess that honestly I have to agree has been unreadable over the last week or so. To me, anyway.
I actually thought the OT-to-chill section was a sweet idea but it doesn’t seem like it’s been working as intended and I’ve seen similar efforts backfire (or at least solidly alter reader engagement, good or ill) even on comics that DO nest comments, so alternative chat host options are a good call at this point.
Thanks for writing this, calling the OT-to-chill a “sweet idea”, even tho it didn’t quite turn out too well in the end. 🥲
Whatever happens from this point on, I just hope we can create a situation where everyone wins.
Sounds nice 😀
Wow, I guess Jennifer was pretty dusty. I guess that what happens when you leave them on the shelf too long.
Either that or her pockets were full of powdered doughnuts.
There might be
A little dust on the Jenny
But don’t let it fool ya, no matter what’s inside
you could take all the text out of this strip and have a pretty solid meme template i think
Hmm… I think you’re right!
*sees an empty space in the wall housing where the hacked Muzak was*
I guess I’ll do something else for a while.
Nooo! We need your hacked Muzak!
Speaking only for myself, I find that the bandwidth used by a comment or two about carefully selected music choices to accompany the day’s comic to be more germane than half of the postings. Please do not allow a request to tone down the off-comics-topics to dissuade you from advising us of your recommended background music. It is IMAO germane to the comic.
Seconding! Recommendations /regarding the comic/ are definitely on-topic, even if addressing one particular portion of the readership.
Remember Joyce you used to be a right wing Christian nut job, the stuff you’ve said today likely doesn’t even register on the “harmful words from Joyce scale”
Considering how divisive our country has become (Today being a prime example) I have to wonder what Joyce would be like if her character development reset today. Like if the comic had just started to day and she was right back to the day one right wing Christian. Would she be even more radicalized? Or maybe she would already have started drifting from her parents beliefs. We gotta remember Joyce started college in a pre-Trump world and is now attending when the damage of that presidency has already be done and we’re still dealing with the never ending aftershocks.
Part of growing up, is finding out WHO you are. Not who you think you are, not who your parents think you are, not who your school/job/friends think you are. There are millions of people on both sides of the right/left divide who are really nothing more than more extreme versions of their parents, because they didn’t bother to grow up, they just emulated the adults around them, becoming miniature (and later not so miniature) caricatures of their parents without so much as a single thought of their own.
So…Joyce reset to today?? Probably a lot the same as she is right on the page here. She started as a caricature of her parents, and found out it doesn’t work that way in real life, so she’s struggling to have original thoughts.
She’s GROWING UP, becoming her own person who isn’t a media driven, culturally cultured, authority-crafted stereotype.
She’s behind Dina in that. Dina’s probably the most functionally adult person in the cast-she’s further along, at least, in working out WHO she is, instead of fretting over WHAT.
Sorry. Flagged by mistake.
Posting to say that I’m not sure that all the damage of Trump’s first presidency is done. His Supreme Court is going to keep on keeping on probably for twenty years.
By that rationale the damage of the Rutherford B Hayes presidency isn’t done yet. That’s true in the sense that the damage done in his presidency laid the foundation for future damage, but his regime is over and unless we live in the bad timeline will remain over
He’s not in office, but people he installed are, the people who helped him do it are.
Yeah, and I would call that “damage done during his presidency laying the foundation for future damage under the next presidency”
Miserably, it seems that you’re being proven right. I was really, really hoping that there was enough fight left to prevent what’s recently occured. I hope there’s enough left to undo the harm going forward.
That’s always fun – it’s never easy to be worried about doctors taking you seriously.
I don’t think that’s quite what she’s worried about – though it’s certainly a valid concern.
She still sees doctors as authority figures, so she’s thinking “What if the specialist determines I’m not really autistic” and assuming that the doctor would be right.
That too, but I do think there’s shades in the first bubble in panel three.
I really like the nuance of this read. It’s as if Joyce is only capable of re-categorising her prior respected authority figures as failed, no longer valid in any way, in her eyes, when she learns they were flawed or harmful or just plain ignorant/wrong in any way. She still has a lot of that left-over automatic submission to perceived authority in her therefore and unless and until medical staff give her cause to question them as well (or she realises that they, like every other authority, have the potential to be wrong) she may very well immediately trust whatever is being said.
Thaaaaaaaaat
What is it with the characters in this comic not even taking .5 seconds to have empathy. The closest we got was Jennifer in Billie-mode just now and when she took her.
What the hell.
No like forreal. Like, Sarah. She knows she’s said messed up stuff. That’s the whole point of her fear here, Sarah.
Comment section has an entire day to feel empathy for characters in a given strip and often doesn’t manage it. Society at large can go decades without managing it. Why’s it so weird the comic characters can’t manage in real-time?
The comment section isn’t friends with any of these people and aren’t talking to them directly. It’s reasonable to expect individual people to be more empathetic with their real human being friends than the-entirety-of-society is with the-entire-rest-of-society, or this entire comment section is with fictional characters. (Even if real people can relate to them and be hurt by criticisms of them.)
The comment section has people with sympathy for every character every day that I’ve read it. So does society. Both also have people who aren’t sympathetic. Groups of people aren’t good at being monolithic.
Exactly. I’d expect someones closest friends to at least manage a handful of empathy. I get that it’s not like…. feelingsofage or whatever but so far they’ve been like. Not great at that aspect of friendship.
Not quite the whole point of her fear. She’s worried about what she’s said about autism being messed up if she’s not really autistic. Sarah’s talking all the messed up stuff she’s said before the autism came up – much of it due to the warped upbringing.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!
Thank you to thejeff for explaining the comic to me. I thought I understood what was going on, but this explanation is much less convoluted than mine.
(accidentally flagged, sorry)
I’m pretty sure she’s scared that the DOCTOR said a messed up thing to her – that she’s autistic – without it being true.
Isn’t… Isn’t panel 3 just the status quo before all this?
*scrunches face* Joyce has a top ten, and I can’t be asked to check the archives this time. Nelly.
Yeah… I think it’s like Joyce realizing this has really brought to the surface different feelings of ableism she has. And that might feel more bearable to her in the context of “this is because I’ve learned new things about myself that I need to process” vs “this is how I’ve always been.”
Either way, it presents her with a chance to reflect and grow. It might just be harder to accept–or equally hard, since she was struggling before. Just a different way of worrying about it on top of what she was already thinking.
I can especially relate to Joyce here in the third panel — she’s mortally afraid of living the result of other people’s thinking instead of her own. 🥺
When you find out it’s possible you’re a neurodivergent, this is a very toxic pitfall that’s very easy to fall into, I just hope Joyce can pull herself out before the voices of others completely drown out her own! 😭😭😭
Have I mentioned all these kids need therapy, yet?
Half the fuckin’ country needs therapy, and the other half is the reason why. These kids can get in line.
These two halves may be speaking the same “English” words, but they might as well be using two different languages.
I swear, why do we even bother calling it the “United” States anymore? It hasn’t really been that way for well over a century now, and it probably won’t be anytime soon.
Try never. I reckon the U in “USA”, much like the one in “UK” was always at best aspirational and programmatic. Politics is fanfiction with an army and a navy, as the saying goes
I think there are still things that can bring us together.
Live Music.
Natural disasters and volunteerism.
Military service or other national service branches, sometimes.
Teaching farms.
College, sometimes.
Internships and practicum training.
…I’m just thinking about things that cause folks from urban areas to relocate temporarily to rural areas, and vice versa, or that cause people to move for a while to a different part of the country. (E.G., North to South, coasts to Midwest, Southwest to Northwest, etc.) Sure, people will find pockets of like minded community wherever they go, but along the way they will be exposed to people who are unlike them. And that exposure will be educational, and will teach kinship and fellow feeling. Just as it has here for Joyce.
I’ve been moving around, meeting different kinds of people, with different kinds of views, my whole life, and I am STILL overcoming my ignorance. Sadly, I am STILL making mistakes and causing offense. And I still have to learn to check my privilege and approach others with humility. Just as Joyce has been doing. The journey never ends.
Sure, it gets tempting to just want to retreat. I often feel some of the rejection sensitivity and social isolation that sometimes accompanies neurodivergence. More so since the pandemic began. For me, and perhaps for others, it often comes from that same fear of making mistakes and inadvertently insulting or dehumanizing others that Joyce is experiencing right now in this strip.
(“If you can’t say something sensitive and perfectly correct and up to date with the latest sensibilities, don’t say anything at all.”)
Maybe she’s right. Maybe the consequences of making mistakes are too great for those whom her mistakes are likely to hurt or exclude, and she shouldn’t risk voicing her feelings at all. But unless she allows herself to make mistakes, she’ll never learn how to make fewer mistakes. Like Joe was saying to Jacob: Joyce KEEPS TRYING to be better, again and again, every time she overcomes a piece of her own ignorance.
Sorry, sorry, I wasn’t meaning to make some kind of pro-military statement there. I was just thinking back to how these kinds of shared experiences bring people out of their comfort zones to do something together.
About that Laura, very much emphasize with your points above. 😖
It seems these days that no matter where you go, the room for personal growth between your comfort zone and overload from rejection is razor-thin.
Accidentally step outside the predesignated “comfort”-zone, and you’re ostracized.
On multi-cultural frontier, the potential for accidental offense is almost unlimited, so misunderstandings are really better off treated as the rule, not the exception.
Not to sound pessimistic, but I really don’t think there’s a way to repair the divide. We could all just come together and decide not to talk about personal politics no matter what, but that (to me) inherently means defaulting to some kind of political “norm”, which we did for decades and look where it got us. Nobody talked about anything and now the only way to bring everyone together is pretty much just death, because that’s when we’re all really equal. But right now, the only way to get “normal” back is to buckle up and hope we survive the war long enough to start rebuilding after it passes.
I’m afraid you’re very much right, Taffy.
Also, between being rejected here when I try to talk about my experiences with the autism*-label, and being rejected here today when I try to cool things down,
I think you’re right that this place really IS impenetrable sometimes. 😮💨
Can’t wait to play Yu-Gi-Oh with you.
Also we can make our own Discord Server, just the two of us if you’d like!
Isn’t a two-person server just a DM?
😅 Yeah, but we could invite others too! Anyone you’d like, from the comments section, from anywhere really.
But even then, I do miss just the two of us talking there. Good times. 🥲
Still don’t wanna do that yet, totally respect it.
Downloading Master Duel to my PC right now…..
Appreciate the positive and hopeful thoughts @Laura! I’ve not lived in the US myself, so I don’t have any first hand experience with the political reality there. My comment was more to point out that the US, as a colonising and slave-owning power, was always materially divided. I’m not opining about how bridgeable the political/cultural rift that is so evident in your country today is (and the recent anti-abortion scotus decision is just the latest poignant reminder of how sharp it is), only pointing out that it runs deep and old.
Oh, yeah, way true. And even though I am in the “minority” in some ways (trans, disabled, AFAB, multicultural heritage, family caregiver…), I still have enough privilege to be seen as one of the “elite”, the “in-group”. Not excluded from and shut out of social and civic participation, as so many are in the States today. But still, I had many good (and scary!) experiences that let me travel all over the States (and over a fair amount of the world) and meet all kinds of folks, even bigots. Hiking the Appalachian Trail and wildfire forestry really helped with that. And I found that (to me at least) most people were kind. Most people were welcoming. Most people were grateful and gracious. Even though I’m sure my appearance triggered every hot button they had. Maybe I would have had a different experience today: that was very long ago. But I feel like I have to still believe in the inherent worth of each human being, no matter how many prejudices they were raised with. I think they all can change. Maybe I’m just being a Pollyanna. I’ve seen some ugly behavior and my life has been endangered many times by other people. But I don’t know — perhaps I’m just naive. I think we still can find some common ground somewhere.
Psychosomatic.
I don’t understand who the outsider is in this circumstance. Joyce has been saying things about herself. Is she the outsider to herself?
To me Joyce is trying to reconcile her harmful rhetoric since she came to IU as the possible misunderstandings and miscommunication of someone struggling with autism. But she worries if she’s not autistic, then it was just a bunch of hurtful bullshit she was parroting without knowing any better.
So Joyce would be the outsider to her friend group. At least that’s how i interpret this. She hasn’t just been talking about herself, she’s been saying very harmful things in judgement of her peers this whole time. Like a more palatable version of Mary.
I read it as more specific. She’s not talking about her whole time here and blaming everything hurtful she’s done on being autistic. She’s talking about the things she’s said today about autism being harmful if it turns out she isn’t autistic and she said them from outside as someone who isn’t autistic.
The “warped upbringing” only comes in as a reason the first doctor suspected autism.
Outsider to the autistic community. If she’s questioning her own mind and figuring stuff out, that’s one thing. If her statements apply exclusively to other people and not herself, that’s different, and likely insulting.
I don’t fully agree with Joyce on that, but I’m not going to tease out the details of where the borders of acceptable behavior meet with internalized ableism at 11 at night.
Just going to second that she’s talking about being outsider to the autistic community.
I think that is it exactly.
And I’m with you that I don’t think it’s as binary as Joyce is making it out to be. It’s vitally important that people be allowed the grace to ask questions about themselves, to explore the possibility that they may belong to a category or an identity that’s marginalized or stigmatized, and for that self-questioning to be acceptable even if at the end, they conclude the answer is “no, I don’t think that’s mean after all.”
Don’t think that’s me*, thanks autocorrect.
Outsider to the whole… liberal college-town everything.
Maybe the outsider is her parents.
Okay hear me out. “The Outsider” should be Joyce’s masked vigilante identity. The position of campus masked hero is wide open right now. The Outsider’s time has come!
Also yeah, it could be the idea that she was just a vessel for parroting her parent’s dogma. There’s a few different ways to read this. Joyce probably doesn’t even fully know what she means.
Jennifer, bursting back into the room, looking very pleased with herself: “I knew it! You’re Nightguy, arent’t you!”
No, the Outsiders are Ponyboy, Dallas, Johnny, Cherry, Sodapop, Darryl, Twobit, Steve, Bob, Six-Pack, Dad, E.T., Bumblebee Tuna, Clamshell, Inspector Gadget, Payless Shoes, Death, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, Kid Cuisine, and Johnny.
Joyce is a victim of gangstalking, is what she’s trying to say.
You forgot Indigo and Shift.
She’s saying that if she’s not on the spectrum she’s nothing but the ignorance and prejudice of the community that raised her. She doesn’t have her own identity; she’s just some program other people came up with.
I also kind of wonder at the snark from Sarah. I’m assuming that Sarah feels that Joyce is including her and her other college friends in that ‘outsider’ catagory but I don’t think that’s what Joyce means. She means .. La Porte, I guess.
Pretty sure it’s an outsider – the doctor – saying harmful things to her.
Little bit of both ?
hmm, the RSS is shot for me, I don’t see anything more recent than june 13.
Thanks, my RSS client suddenly had the missing strips appearing, I guess it was fixed
If I was Joyce I would fall asleep.
Can’t worry about shit when you’re asleep.
unless your subconscious is a dick, i was half asleep this morning and could hear my mom nagging in the background and it made whatever i dreamt about having me even more pissed off than if i was just partially and grumpy
So sorry to hear that 🥺
Are there any good dreams you remember from the past weeks?
personally i prefer to sleep through without dreams, idk about rem cycles and stuff but i’m also a light sleeper, at least i don’t have to worry about sleep paralysis, or if it has happened before i never opened my eyes so i don’t see any ‘freaky demon shit’ that ppl talk about (i vaguely think i had lucid dreams a couple of times but not much you can rly do about that. tho i’m sure the ppl who claim they can astral project might have some fun )
Can’t fall asleep when you worry about shit!
Can’t shit if you’re asleep and worried about falling.
Hey Taffy, ya in the mood for some Yu-Gi-Oh? 🙃
What’d your preffered online client?
If you got Master Duel, I’m on that cuz it’s cross-platform and free. My name on there is just Taffy, idk how to search that stuff up though, and if I can’t do it without doxxing myself that’s all the info I’m comfy providing. Otherwise I exclusively play offline.
Don’t worry, I could always just give you my handle there!
See you on the other side, Magikuriboh!!!! 🤩
Sarah, still the best, 2022
little of column, little of column b…probably
Ah yes, the next stage of acceptance: imposter syndrome. I know it well.
Progress!
I definitely had imposter syndrome last year, when I suspected I might be autistic but hadn’t been diagnosed yet. Even after taking a bunch of tests and the results showing high likelihood, and sending those results to a doctor, I was still worried they would somehow conclude that I wasn’t autistic.
someone quick cue the “Now That’s What I Call Sarah!” theme music!
Barely related but I feel like admitting I’ve been pulling a Billie thinking “I’m not all that bad with changes in routine, I change my routine all the time!”
Well, I’m stressed about needing to finish my thesis like today, the janitors cut one of the branches of the tree in front of my window, so now I see more sky and less tree when I look outside, and it *annoys me very much*. That is all, back to writing.
as long as it’s not too strict/inflexible, i can see the comfort on a reliable schedule, nothing wrong with doing something diff/new for yourself if things get monotonous but knowing that certain things won’t change would be good, tho i’m hardly an adrenaline junkie/thrill chaser or so
I love how hard Joyce tries. like, she often fails in the most frustrating way possible, but I love her for always trying.
Joyce can be very trying.
I don’t think there is a single person in this cast who cares more or works harder at being a good person than Joyce. She may be upset and unsettled by the degree of change in her life, and that she sees in herself, but SO MUCH of that change has come out of her desire for continual self-improvement, her desire to do the right thing, to be a good person to the people around her.
The thing she’s having the hardest time with right now is having abandoned the set of rules for “how to be a good person” she was raised with, and not knowing how to be a good person outside of them. She’s had the eye-opening experiences that made it clear that the hardcore Christian fundamentalism she was immersed in from birth is, in fact, harmful (to put it gently). But where do you go, when you’re walking away from the only world and the only way of thinking you’ve ever known? It’s an incredibly wrenching thing, and she has very, very little support in this.
(Gotta say, one of the things that really sold me on Joe/Joyce is that the moment we realize he’s in love with her is during his speech to Jacob about how yeah, Joyce says three incredibly fucked up things every day, but that it used to be five, and that Joyce is getting better because she’s *trying* to get better, and she will keep getting better, until someday she’s perfect. Like, my god, what a beautiful thing to see in someone, and to say about them. What a beautiful thing to love in someone! It’s too bad he was saying it to someone who’d just gotten burned by Joyce fucking up, and was in no mood to hear it, or probably even to realize what a huge fucking deal it is for a person with Joe’s issues and Joe’s historical approach to sex and dating, to be forming this kind of emotional attachment to someone, an attachment rooted in really *seeing* them, and thinking “my god that’s amazing”.)
Oo, thanks for that callback to Joe. I’ll wait patiently until Joe comes back into the story. And that reminds me, Joe is trying to be a good person too. He’s a little effed up in his approach, but he’s trying to get better. He could be a good anchor for Joyce as she’s navigating her new realizations.
He is! He’s done a little backsliding on the “trying to be better” front, but the fact that he’s trying at all, when he’d gotten himself into this comfortable little emotional rut where sex and emotions had nothing to do with one another, and this was his solution to Not Becoming His Father, is impressive! And I really appreciate that he decided he wanted to be better partly *because* of Joyce. Not solely *for* her and her alone (which is a good thing), but because seeing her as a *person,* hearing her talk about the harm sexual objectification had caused her *got* to him in a way even public scorn hadn’t. And I think he’s also just inspired by watching her try to improve herself and learn (and also a little overawed by her? He’s literally on record as feeling he’d “ruin” her if he acted on his feelings towards her, which is a pretty strong sign now is not their time).
Anyway I love ‘em and I hope we see more of them interacting soon. It’s been awhile.
Honestly, he already has been. Joyce opens up to him and he’s the only one who actually takes what she says and fucking cares about it and how she feels and tries to actually engage her on it. “Hell was never real, but you are.” and “We can choose for ourselves what has meaning.”
All Joe needs to do is work through his fears of somehow ruining Joyce and focus on how much he cares about her in order to be there for her more, and they’ll both be much better off.
SHIP IT LIKE WILDFIRE.
YESSSS I find myself shipping Joeyce more and more!! and, come to think of it, “bless their heart for trying so hard” applies to like 75% of these characters, doesn’t it
Sarah is helping as well as she can.
I know it’s amped up for dramatic/comedic effect, but it’s sort of refreshing in a way that many of them are handling this stuff clumsily. It is something that, frankly, a lot of people do handle clumsily due to ableism baked into their preconceptions, poor societal/cultural understanding, etc.
That said, wonder if this is going to wrap back around to when Joyce said Dina was “like a robot” and her realizing how awful a thing to say that was. Like, that would make a lot of sense, and looking back, does feel like it was foreshadowing.
I don’t say that as like a “Take THAT” at Joyce, either, since like I said, a lot of them have said low key ableist stuff during this storyline, not maliciously so, but out of their misunderstandings. It just makes me wonder if Joyce is going to end up ruminating on that any.
Ah, reflecting, I mean, rather than ruminating.
Gasp! Oh no!
Has college turned poor Billie into some kind of complete dejennierate?
Oof. That was rough. I should probably apologize for that joke. But I won’t because an apology should be sincere. And I’m not sorry. I will never be sorry.
Speaking as a proud degenerate, I don’t think that’s a bad thing to call someone.
Unless you believe in eugenics, but
I think they mean apologize for the pun.
Oh, i live for atrocious puns.
The word has very unfortunate connotations, is what I’m saying.
At least you understand how apologies work despite the flaw of making puns.
She was worried she might be autistic.
Now she’s worried she’s not autistic enough.
magnetsbrains, how do they workI’m with Sarah on this. Also, Joyce, you are still you regardless of the diagnosis.
Don’t worry, Joyce. You can be autistic *and* warped by your upbringing! 😀
(Hannah Montana voice) It’s the best of both worlds!
Both?
Both.
Both is good.
Yeah. Porque no los dos?
Yeah, she could definitely have both.
Sarah’s heavily implying in that last panel that Joyce has been saying harmful things today, which might be true, but is kinda rich coming from her considering all the things she’s been saying today. Kettles and pots and all.
Right? Everything out of Sarah’s mouth typically causes psyche damage…
I think that was intended to mean ‘what you’ve said today is not the most harmful of the things you have said’ in like a more general sense of throughout the comic rather than specifically this day.
“What you’ve said today isn’t even in your top ten of harmful words” still implies that what she said today is ON that list of harmful words.
I think she’s implying that Joyce has said more harmful things in the entire time Sarah’s known her, not just today.
Ah, I knew I should’ve refreshed the comments before replying!
In Anyone Needs a break from this topic :
I’ve heard other comics exist. I’ve never seen one before, so I guess its more of a rumor.
Also there is 10 years of archives.
Ooo Shortpacked thats One i heard of.
Thanks Adam. 🥲
Wanna tell me some of your favorite webcomics?
There’s Dumbing of Age
& Shortpackeded ( or so i hear )
and there is that one about the lawyers who kick each other in the face.
i think it was discontinued
Did you hear the one about Jesus Christ Superstar, but he works for a madman in a toystore ?
I bet the songs are GREAT.
~cant be any worse than Andrew Lloyd Webber , right?
😆 LOL. Wanna join the discord server?
“t’s just that as I went by the village I couldn’t not picture you 69ing some dude with a mustache and I had.no place at the moment”
I did join and rapidly forgot about it.
It wont let me talk.
sad, cuz ive seen nothing more interesting
^ what a friend said EXACT QUOTE when i asked why he didnt stop by when biking nearby
Is there a reason this image popped into his head?
He has a mustache, of course!
Jumping in to say: go read Octopus Pie, it’s fantastic. It’s in the list of webcomics on DoA’s home page! Plus it’s got a 10-year archive as well.
Cheers! I’m enjoying my little binge so far =)
Love not found is cute and charming and low stakes and even a little romantic.
Something Positive is angry and sarcastic, and starts with a joke that’s even more topical today, so maybe skip if you don’t want to feel angry.
Sam and Fuzzy has the same weird vibe as Shortpacked. The drama tag got pulled with that about when Sam got a steady if I recall.
Don’t forget Girls with Slingshots! They’re practically married comics
Bittersweet Candy Bowl is like DOA in high school. It starts a little silly before the author finds her groove.
Gaia is your standard D&D but really well done. You’ll need to read twice to fallow the schemes.
A tale of two rulers- Zelda and Ganondorf have a political marriage.
Demon of the Underground- a man with a telekinetic dick is lost in The Underground ruled by gangs. SFW
The Property of Hate is incredibly adorable and surreal and abstract. I think I t’s genius.
Lord Olympus Is a retelling of the Rape of Persephone. Very long love story.
Exorcism Academy is the HBO of bara. Story and art are amazing, and there’s a lot of sex.
Wildelife is supernatural horror
My outdated list of best commits has 108 entries, I’ll just leave it at that
Get some ointment for that burn.
true tho
her sudden awareness is progress
Sarah isn’t getting any credit for any of this and she should. She’s been awesome, taking care of Joyce. Far above and beyond what I would consider to be the normal for roommate interaction. She’s not been perfect, don’t get me wrong, but still… props to her.
Yeah, i love my sweet, cynical, generous, sarcastic, hypersensitive, angry, caring, misanthropic friends <3
Love the satisfied face of Sarah after she cleaned the room from anything related to Jennifer.
Yeah, Sarah is autistic and completely exhausted with Everything today.
Whether it’s autism or deprogramming, wouldn’t it be the same doctor?