I have the entire same ethical and sociopolitical alignment I had when I was 8. Star Trek. When Captain Picard’s your moral compass, and your ideal form of government is “moneyless socialist utopia”, why ever change?
White chocolate, dark chocolate. They’re both sweet, moral, and strong people who strive to exemplify the ideals of their “moneyless socialist utopia”. Solid role models both.
Not really. The big thing about that episode wasn’t that Sisko cast aside his morals for the sake of expediency like Section 31, or that he had no morals to begin with. The big, interesting part was that he was moral, but flexible enough to be non-violently devious… except that Garak was violently devious. It wasn’t “Sisko’s moral” vs “Sisko’s amoral” it was “will he accept the consequences of his failed attempt to walk the edge of his morality”.
and about the baby teeth thing, around the time I was about to get braces, the dentists had to remove a bunch of my baby teeth so that those wouldn’t be a problem
As an eight-year-old, I thought it was REALLY annoying how EVERY single song was about love and smooching, and EVERY single book or movie meant to be watchable/readable by adults HAD to have a romantic subplot. However, I quickly learned that regardless of how I felt now, once I grew up my opinion would completely change and suddenly all those love songs and subplots and stuff would be the Best Thing Ever. That seemed bizarre to me, but I accepted the inevitability of it, and patiently waited.
Turns out I’m acearo and I still think amatonormativity can go f*** itself lol
I one hundred percent stand by A nightmare on Elm Street being a damn good horror flick, Gremlins being the best Christmas movie, and Ghostbusters being the best comedy. I have yet to be presented any sufficiently convincing evidence that any of these are incorrect, I just lucked into some great movies when I was eight.
Heh – love that line.
I wish I could claim to have ever said it myself, but no – when things awakened things in me, it always came as a complete surprise.
I can definitely see Becky flashing back to the moment later on like, “Oh, that’s what I meant!” Followed by the thought, “Wait, is that what Joyce also meant?”
well joyce did have some kinda ‘boy crazy’ phase at one point, tho i’m sure some kids realize that at that age, although i guess it’s good parents aren’t too harsh to leap in logic when you hear ‘boys are gross’ and thinking that there might be an ‘issue’ with wanting to spend more time with their own gender more
That speech bubble’s actually coming from the vehicle’s stereo, not Toedad, but that’s still a good catch. For those unfamiliar with the story in question, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, as a test of faith. Just as Abraham is about to kill him, God tells him to stop and that it was only a test of his loyalty. It is… very much in line with Toedad’s “parenting.”
You who build these altars now
to sacrifice these children,
you must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
and you never have been tempted
by a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now,
your hatchets blunt and bloody,
you were not there before,
when I lay upon a mountain
and my father’s hand was trembling
with the beauty of the word.
God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.”
Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want, Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well, Abe said, “Where you want this killin’ done?”
God said, “Out on Highway 61”
For the moment. But I think when kids start saying“boys are gross” / “girls are icky” then it’s hard to go wrong when thinking “well, that’s just about to change!”
I think that she allowed herself a rare moment to feel the possibility of attraction, liked it, and is now drowning in Puritan shame. Joyce is a social person; her friend’s suggestion was able to rattle her youthful repression.
Even non-fundies can find the transition from cooties to crushes awkward and uneven, though
Why would it be anything like that? Joyce doesn’t have to pretend to crush on boys, we’ve seen her do it multiple times in the present. This is just her first pass at it.
The key to understanding Joyce, as far as I’m concerned, is that she’s always been DESPERATE to see herself as a pure, noble, virgin who’s perfectly content doing nothing but following other people’s orders and waiting to catch the eye of a man, who will then court and marry and put babies in her in a purely functional manner. But, in part BECAUSE of that desperation, she’s also super needy and touchy-feely and horny (though that last one maybe doesn’t apply as much in this flashback).
And this results in a general pattern of feelings and behavior which has stayed pretty constant throughout not only this strip, but also the Walkyverse: find someone who’s both physically AND socially attractive to her (e.g. “my parents would totally approve of this person as a husband”), obsessively plan out their inevitable future courtship/marriage/reproduction, assume that all her desires are actually his desires (and therefore OK for her to have), and then stay glued to his hip as much as possible in order to catch his attention.
I think this scene is the stirrings of the very first formation of that pattern for Joyce. She’s just starting to find boys attractive, just starting to feel pressure form her peers to have a boyfriend, and she’s just been told Tristan likes her. And I think there was a line somewhere in the past about her biking past Tristan’s house as a kid a silly number of times “by accident!” I predict that soon enough, we’ll get to see flashback Joyce secretly drawing her and Tristan getting married in her notebook or something.
It’s hard to know right from wrong when you’re raised in a cult.
He COULD have got into the ultra-conservative life for the power tripping, but I’m betting, given how devote he was, that he’s little more than a product of his raising, and that Joyce only escaped because she had a social network outside the church, she had exposure to the wider world, and her church isn’t THAT crazy.
He wanted to be “a good dad” but had such a deranged understanding of what that entailed that he was instead a horribly abusive one, if not outright evil.
Hey Willis. How much of this backstory did you have worked out before starting the strip and how much of it are you making up as you go along? As a writer, I’d love to know.
I know this time period (as fluctuating as it is) would’ve have had Britt Nicole releasing this at that point, but he only relevant song I can think of is “You stood right there until I saw me, I saw me through Your eyes.”
Not exactly sure how old she’s supposed to be, but I’d certainly think older than eight. (She has braces, which most kids don’t get until at least a couple years later, and the fantasy details that sprung to Tristan’s face seem more in line with a tween perspective.)
misha is DEFINITELY if giving the vibe that shes trying to get joyce to embarrass herself. i had a “friend” that did a similar thing to me when i was about her age (told the guy i had a crush on i liked him behind my back and then tried to innocently get me to tell himself knowing he didnt feel the same bc she thought it would be funny)
i wouldn’t be surprised if some kids that age wanted to play cupid, some of my friends in high school tried setting ppl up but it sometimes backfired, more times than not tho none had bad intentions, but given that joyce said ‘boys are gross’ i imagine she’d be backed up by becky if misha just goes up to tristan and says “joyce liiikes you” anyways lol
I think you might be confused. A sedan-style car refers to the typical style with 5 total seats – two up front, and three in back. Are you thinking of a station wagon?
Are they all in the same vehicle? Tristan and Misha both have left side shoulder straps, but it looks like the glasses kid is behind Ross. Are there 4 row suburbans?
My family had a van with four benches, plus the driver and front seats. Pack a small family’s worth of stuff under the seats, and every kid got to lie down on their own bench for a four day road trip to the other side of the country. Pull out the back bench for storage space, and you can easily carpool twelve kids on a six hour ride to and from summer camp.
Hey, you never know when Gravedigger can’t make it and the Coach needs a guy (no sic) in the audience to drive his own truck from the parking lot to take place in the monster truck competition.
Be funny AF if Tristan turns out to be gay… or trans… or socialist… or– ya know what, just *different* in any way whatsoever from that mythical 1950s ‘Murka.
Some pronounce it Amurka. And rather than being mythical, the 1950’s were a great time to grow up in, provided you were a white middle-class mainstream protestant kid who wasn’t weird.
Fair enough, but there was something to be said for growing up in a time and place safe enough that we never locked our doors before I was about 12, even when making two week trip to visit relatives, and nothing was ever stolen.
it’d be cool if they could meet as present day friends and vibe, though the mom didn’t say anything when she visited, assuming he hadn’t moved away or interacted as much by them lol
I have it in mind that Tristan grew disenchanted years ago, escaped that church, is at IU, and has been carefully avoiding Joyce for fear she’ll try to drag him back in. Sadly, he’ll never know how she’s evolved.
Yeah, I just had a big 🙁 on my face reading that. I don’t know if Joyce kept this act up throughout their childhood, but if she did, I can see why Becky felt like Joyce was a kindred spirit and why she fell as hard for her as she did.
I won’t deny your conclusion, but I don’t think it’s an act. A lot of kids go through a stage in which attraction and repulsion develop together, before attraction wins, repulsion having done its job. I think it’s a mechanism for finely synchronizing the development of different components in the machinery of sexual/romantic response.
It’s also terribly confusing and flustratious. Oh, Joyce….
From a bonus comic (April 2023), she did keep up the act, but it was very obvious she was into Tristan. Like so obvious it wrapped around and Becky thought she was pretending to like Tristan by intentionally pretending poorly not to like him.
To me, it’s just kind of funny– Becky definitely fully didn’t understand what she meant by that, or else there’s no way she would have said it so casually in this setting. My own queer awakening included flashbacks to various “oh, THAT’S what I was on about” moments from earlier in my life, so that’s what I see this moment as being for Becky.
(When I was, like, six, I pulled two of my neighborhood friends into my garage to tell to them that the reason I was being mean to a particular babysitter was because I liked her. Took me another seven years to understand what I meant by “liked.”)
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imagine still having the same opinions you did when you were like eight
*shudder*
I STILL firmly maintain that Keebler’s Soft Batch Cookies are better than Chips Ahoy, and you can fight me!
But not as good as homemade!
More consistent though.
I’ve had (and made) some pretty lousy homemade cookies.
The best pre-packaged cookies are from Peggy Lawton.
https://www.plkitchens.com/products/chocolate-chip-cookies
But, they are though. Chips Ahoy are too cry and crummy.
Dry* But you know what, you’re crying as you eat them because your mouth is drier than a desert after one cookie.
I liked “cry” better
I have the entire same ethical and sociopolitical alignment I had when I was 8. Star Trek. When Captain Picard’s your moral compass, and your ideal form of government is “moneyless socialist utopia”, why ever change?
… cause Sisco is hotter?
White chocolate, dark chocolate. They’re both sweet, moral, and strong people who strive to exemplify the ideals of their “moneyless socialist utopia”. Solid role models both.
“In The Pale Moonlight” has some thoughts on that one :v
Not really. The big thing about that episode wasn’t that Sisko cast aside his morals for the sake of expediency like Section 31, or that he had no morals to begin with. The big, interesting part was that he was moral, but flexible enough to be non-violently devious… except that Garak was violently devious. It wasn’t “Sisko’s moral” vs “Sisko’s amoral” it was “will he accept the consequences of his failed attempt to walk the edge of his morality”.
And with shiny heads!
Meanwhile Picard seasons one and two…
Crunchy peanut butter is STILL better than smooth, I maintain.
Dr. Pepper is the best Coke.
for sandwiches and cookies, yes, but for making sauces or icings not so much.
i mean, being able to have tater tots/nuggets for lunch and a nap time doesn’t seem so bad
Rodimus is a better leader than Optimus and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on all these years later.
Square pizza still slaps. (Though I wouldn’t have said “slaps” 42 *shudder* years ago)
What’s wrong with that? Becky did, and now she has an awesome girlfriend.
I don’t think she’s eight. I don’t think anyone has braces before 12. 12 is the age most people get their last adult teeth.
I got braces around 9
and about the baby teeth thing, around the time I was about to get braces, the dentists had to remove a bunch of my baby teeth so that those wouldn’t be a problem
Imagining these comments in Homestar’s voice is delightful ^^
1. I said “like 8”
2. bc she’s acting MENTALLY like it
As an eight-year-old, I thought it was REALLY annoying how EVERY single song was about love and smooching, and EVERY single book or movie meant to be watchable/readable by adults HAD to have a romantic subplot. However, I quickly learned that regardless of how I felt now, once I grew up my opinion would completely change and suddenly all those love songs and subplots and stuff would be the Best Thing Ever. That seemed bizarre to me, but I accepted the inevitability of it, and patiently waited.
Turns out I’m acearo and I still think amatonormativity can go f*** itself lol
I one hundred percent stand by A nightmare on Elm Street being a damn good horror flick, Gremlins being the best Christmas movie, and Ghostbusters being the best comedy. I have yet to be presented any sufficiently convincing evidence that any of these are incorrect, I just lucked into some great movies when I was eight.
This better not awaken anything in me…
-Joyce
Heh – love that line.
I wish I could claim to have ever said it myself, but no – when things awakened things in me, it always came as a complete surprise.
*plays “School Rumble End Theme” on passing car’s radio*
Oh Becky, you realize you drove Joyce down the road of heterosexuality.
The blue filter is the filter of REGRET AND DESPAIR!
We really don’t get happy flashbacks that often, huh
I don’t get what you mean? Only thing Becky says here is “totes” about boys being gross. Which unlike Joyce she is completely sincere about.
She’s the one who is encouraging her to Tristan.
That’s Misha.
i’m just more surprised ‘totes’ would be slang even that far back in their childhood versus them being teens
Been using it since the early 90s so it’s been around for a while.
This is only about 5 to 7 years ago.
But 5-7 years before when? The sliding timescale is weirdly sci-fi like.
I half expect to see a car with Joycedriving, Becky shotgun, and Hank napping in the back, going the other way.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/get/
It’s always five to seven years ago.
Ergo the “sci-fi” sightings. Reading webcomics is like being outside of time and watching all the timelines alongside each other.
We’re all totes surprised.
I mean, it’s better than the red ones.
Who’s the untagged Glasses Kid in Panel 1? Jocelyn?
anyways misha is giving serious Other Mother
Deduction suggests Misha?
Nah, we already know what Misha looks like. As stated below, it’s probably just a rando background character.
I think his name is actually Rando.
I think one of the Brown siblings wouldn’t be calling Hank “Mr. Brown”.
I could maybe see Jordan doing it as an act of rebellion, though.
Wait, it’s not Jocelyn, since they’re saying “Mister Brown” instead of “Dad”.
Joss has Joyce’s Blue Eyes. Might be Jonathan, but I would assume if they aren’t tagged they aren’t important.
Belay that “might be Jonathan”, he wouldn’t be calling his own dad Mr Brown.
And he’s significantly older than Joyce. He’s probably in his mid to late 20s at this point.
Statistically Jennifer, but based on the haircut more likely Steve.
Eh, Steve!
I was just trying to teach my 10 year old about hsr!
Jeez, I wonder why Becky might have thought Joyce was also gay.
Yeah, it’s honestly not that big of a leap.
I can definitely see Becky flashing back to the moment later on like, “Oh, that’s what I meant!” Followed by the thought, “Wait, is that what Joyce also meant?”
well joyce did have some kinda ‘boy crazy’ phase at one point, tho i’m sure some kids realize that at that age, although i guess it’s good parents aren’t too harsh to leap in logic when you hear ‘boys are gross’ and thinking that there might be an ‘issue’ with wanting to spend more time with their own gender more
Toe Dad is notably thinking of sacrificing Becky. Who is doing NOTHING.
He’s literally a worse father than the one in Castlevania.
That’s the radio, not Toedad singing.
But yeah, what an evil toe.
The lyrics about Abraham playing over him feels deliberate.
It’s what we call post-forshadowing.
For sure, but he’s not singing along here.
That speech bubble’s actually coming from the vehicle’s stereo, not Toedad, but that’s still a good catch. For those unfamiliar with the story in question, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, as a test of faith. Just as Abraham is about to kill him, God tells him to stop and that it was only a test of his loyalty. It is… very much in line with Toedad’s “parenting.”
You who build these altars now
to sacrifice these children,
you must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
and you never have been tempted
by a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now,
your hatchets blunt and bloody,
you were not there before,
when I lay upon a mountain
and my father’s hand was trembling
with the beauty of the word.
Always upvote Leonard Cohen
God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.”
Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want, Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well, Abe said, “Where you want this killin’ done?”
God said, “Out on Highway 61”
Goes off to check which parts of Highway 61 go through mountains.
You mean the second Castlevania? Nocturne? The blond priest (bishop?)?
Dracula beat Alucard so bad that the dude had to sleep for a year, and he’s still a better dad than the priest in Nocturne and Toedad.
Oh dear God, the significance of that song on the radio totally flew over my head. Nice catch!
Nothing about this flashback sits well with me.
At all.
i think most flashbacks have never been as positive overall
Well I’m convinced! Are you guys convinced?
Yes. I am convinced Becky does not like boys. And Joyce also-ofcourse.
For the moment. But I think when kids start saying“boys are gross” / “girls are icky” then it’s hard to go wrong when thinking “well, that’s just about to change!”
Can’t tell where this is going; is this maybe an ‘accidentally convinced herself she had a crush on Tristan to feel normal’ sort of thing?
Pretty sure the sudden sparkles around Tristan last strip would support the opposite of that.
I thought the sparkles indicated that Tristan was secretly an 85 year old vampire.
I think that she allowed herself a rare moment to feel the possibility of attraction, liked it, and is now drowning in Puritan shame. Joyce is a social person; her friend’s suggestion was able to rattle her youthful repression.
Even non-fundies can find the transition from cooties to crushes awkward and uneven, though
Yeah, I think this is more the standard transition that comes with puberty than any religious repression.
Both?
Both.
Both is
goodeven more confusing and awkward for Joyce.I feel like if you find the transition to puberty non-awkward, you are an alien of some kind.
Fundamentalism or not.
I think this is, in part, an exploration of Joyce’s Catholic I meant Secular Guilt and she’s gonna feel horny for the first time and freak out.
Why would it be anything like that? Joyce doesn’t have to pretend to crush on boys, we’ve seen her do it multiple times in the present. This is just her first pass at it.
The key to understanding Joyce, as far as I’m concerned, is that she’s always been DESPERATE to see herself as a pure, noble, virgin who’s perfectly content doing nothing but following other people’s orders and waiting to catch the eye of a man, who will then court and marry and put babies in her in a purely functional manner. But, in part BECAUSE of that desperation, she’s also super needy and touchy-feely and horny (though that last one maybe doesn’t apply as much in this flashback).
And this results in a general pattern of feelings and behavior which has stayed pretty constant throughout not only this strip, but also the Walkyverse: find someone who’s both physically AND socially attractive to her (e.g. “my parents would totally approve of this person as a husband”), obsessively plan out their inevitable future courtship/marriage/reproduction, assume that all her desires are actually his desires (and therefore OK for her to have), and then stay glued to his hip as much as possible in order to catch his attention.
I think this scene is the stirrings of the very first formation of that pattern for Joyce. She’s just starting to find boys attractive, just starting to feel pressure form her peers to have a boyfriend, and she’s just been told Tristan likes her. And I think there was a line somewhere in the past about her biking past Tristan’s house as a kid a silly number of times “by accident!” I predict that soon enough, we’ll get to see flashback Joyce secretly drawing her and Tristan getting married in her notebook or something.
It’s unsettling to see Becky’s dad doing something as mundane as driving kids home from camp.
I think he wanted to be a good dad and I think he really, really tried – just you, know, often in very very bad and certifiably crazy ways.
It’s hard to know right from wrong when you’re raised in a cult.
He COULD have got into the ultra-conservative life for the power tripping, but I’m betting, given how devote he was, that he’s little more than a product of his raising, and that Joyce only escaped because she had a social network outside the church, she had exposure to the wider world, and her church isn’t THAT crazy.
We’re all a product of our raising. Unless we decide not to be.
He wanted to be “a good dad” but had such a deranged understanding of what that entailed that he was instead a horribly abusive one, if not outright evil.
The Banality of Toedad.
tbf this was probably before her mom died
Long before. Bonnie died a little less than a year ago, in-universe.
Or, y’know alive
Hey Willis. How much of this backstory did you have worked out before starting the strip and how much of it are you making up as you go along? As a writer, I’d love to know.
i think you might get a quicker reply if you try asking on twitter or tumblr
Dumbing of Age Book 14: Boys Are Gross!
Dumbing of Age Book 14: Sometimes I Think of Abraham
I know this time period (as fluctuating as it is) would’ve have had Britt Nicole releasing this at that point, but he only relevant song I can think of is “You stood right there until I saw me, I saw me through Your eyes.”
*wouldn’t’ve had
I’m just waiting for the twist, when Tristan turns into Dorothy just as Joyce wakes up.
i kinda half want tristan to end up being a trans girl
Prediction: Tristan likes girls.
He likes Jocelyn but they can’t be together.
YET.
how much of an age difference is there? i would think tristan would be closer to joyce’s age than jocelyn
Jocelyn isn’t that much older than Joyce, is my impression. Very early twenties. Could be wrong tho.
If you think boys are gross now, 8 year old Joyce, wait until you find out what they look like without clothes.
Wait, is that how old she’s supposed to be here? I was thinking she looked more like 12 or so.
U thought someone said she was 8 in the comments to a previous panel.
That U should be an I.
Not exactly sure how old she’s supposed to be, but I’d certainly think older than eight. (She has braces, which most kids don’t get until at least a couple years later, and the fantasy details that sprung to Tristan’s face seem more in line with a tween perspective.)
He looks vaguely like rpatz with the filter in the last one (also kind of joe-ish now that I think about it) so I think she’s like 13 here.
She’s 12 here.
So like the summer of 2018, I wonder what was going on in the strip back then.
misha is DEFINITELY if giving the vibe that shes trying to get joyce to embarrass herself. i had a “friend” that did a similar thing to me when i was about her age (told the guy i had a crush on i liked him behind my back and then tried to innocently get me to tell himself knowing he didnt feel the same bc she thought it would be funny)
i wouldn’t be surprised if some kids that age wanted to play cupid, some of my friends in high school tried setting ppl up but it sometimes backfired, more times than not tho none had bad intentions, but given that joyce said ‘boys are gross’ i imagine she’d be backed up by becky if misha just goes up to tristan and says “joyce liiikes you” anyways lol
Or Misha is at that stage: “okay, boys are deliciously interesting but this is soooo scary I want someone else to go first.”
I don’t know why but I get the vibe that Tristan never thought twice about Joyce and this is a mean joke on the part of Misha trying to embarrass her.
How dare my gravatar be so accurate to my negative assumption
It’s the eyebrows. Those are NOT a pair of innocent eyebrows on Misha’s face in the second panel!
sidenote but Tristan looks familiar but I don’t know why
His character model kind of reminds me of Genderbent Walkyverse Joyce, minus the blue eyes and SEMMF stripe.
I almost feel like I’ve seen him as a background character in DOA- weird.
To me he looks a lot like Amber’s online boyfriend Nate’s (unnamed) roommate in ‘Shortpacked’ (From May 24th 2006 onwards).
Also featuring SP! Meredith.
That pit stop’s going to have to wait a bit, because apparently NO ONE here’s got a turnoff.
And that pit stop was at… THE gas station!
Becky: “Wait, you were all lying about that?”
“I – I don’t like boys! Boys are gross!”
And, since then, Becky has kept it into hearth.< like forever.
Jinkies! There’s at least seven people in that car. How is that even possible.
May I introduce you to: the power of sedans.
(my mom had one growing up. 3 seats in front, 3 in the back, two in the driver area)
I think you might be confused. A sedan-style car refers to the typical style with 5 total seats – two up front, and three in back. Are you thinking of a station wagon?
It’s a Suburban. So called because you can fit your entire suburb into it.
I never knew that, but it certainly makes sense.
Are they all in the same vehicle? Tristan and Misha both have left side shoulder straps, but it looks like the glasses kid is behind Ross. Are there 4 row suburbans?
My family had a van with four benches, plus the driver and front seats. Pack a small family’s worth of stuff under the seats, and every kid got to lie down on their own bench for a four day road trip to the other side of the country. Pull out the back bench for storage space, and you can easily carpool twelve kids on a six hour ride to and from summer camp.
wouldn’t be surprised if they were driving for some kinda church event and the vehicle is owned by the church as opposed to becky’s dad’s van
Yeah I can’t make any sense of the seating arrangements. Might have needed at least one establishing shot inside the car. . .
They’re tweens — they keep swapping seats.
It’s a full size truck-based SUV with three rows of seats.
I am clearly older than you, for I grewup with … STATION WAGONS as the family vehicle
–Dave, they had a back seat and a Way Back section
The really unusual thing is a 3-row SUV with more than two people in it.
Rare as a lifted 2500 pickup truck doing anything a sedan can’t.
Hey, you never know when Gravedigger can’t make it and the Coach needs a guy (no sic) in the audience to drive his own truck from the parking lot to take place in the monster truck competition.
Be funny AF if Tristan turns out to be gay… or trans… or socialist… or– ya know what, just *different* in any way whatsoever from that mythical 1950s ‘Murka.
‘Murka? Pika pi?
*Glares in Freedom*
Some pronounce it Amurka. And rather than being mythical, the 1950’s were a great time to grow up in, provided you were a white middle-class mainstream protestant kid who wasn’t weird.
Every time is a great time to grow up, when you fit the bill for “Normal”.
Fair enough, but there was something to be said for growing up in a time and place safe enough that we never locked our doors before I was about 12, even when making two week trip to visit relatives, and nothing was ever stolen.
See also “‘murica”. Possibly a slur on the US Midwestern accent.
Pretty sure the slur is aimed a little more southways.
I asking about what ‘Murka means XD
It is the word “America” pronounced in an exaggerated accent associated with rural working-class white conservative types.
Ah, thank you for clarification.
Yeah, checks out. 😗
it’d be cool if they could meet as present day friends and vibe, though the mom didn’t say anything when she visited, assuming he hadn’t moved away or interacted as much by them lol
I have it in mind that Tristan grew disenchanted years ago, escaped that church, is at IU, and has been carefully avoiding Joyce for fear she’ll try to drag him back in. Sadly, he’ll never know how she’s evolved.
well, unless he moved away, given how big of a deal the church made about it i’m sure he would’ve at least known what happened with becky’s dad
This comic intimately understands the lesbian experience.
So, the SUV behind them is the one with the Six Jennifers? I can’t imagine this arc without them.
oh, Becky…
Yeah, I just had a big 🙁 on my face reading that. I don’t know if Joyce kept this act up throughout their childhood, but if she did, I can see why Becky felt like Joyce was a kindred spirit and why she fell as hard for her as she did.
I won’t deny your conclusion, but I don’t think it’s an act. A lot of kids go through a stage in which attraction and repulsion develop together, before attraction wins, repulsion having done its job. I think it’s a mechanism for finely synchronizing the development of different components in the machinery of sexual/romantic response.
It’s also terribly confusing and flustratious. Oh, Joyce….
From a bonus comic (April 2023), she did keep up the act, but it was very obvious she was into Tristan. Like so obvious it wrapped around and Becky thought she was pretending to like Tristan by intentionally pretending poorly not to like him.
To me, it’s just kind of funny– Becky definitely fully didn’t understand what she meant by that, or else there’s no way she would have said it so casually in this setting. My own queer awakening included flashbacks to various “oh, THAT’S what I was on about” moments from earlier in my life, so that’s what I see this moment as being for Becky.
(When I was, like, six, I pulled two of my neighborhood friends into my garage to tell to them that the reason I was being mean to a particular babysitter was because I liked her. Took me another seven years to understand what I meant by “liked.”)
Are we heading towards an embarrassment that will scar her for life?
Well, obviously. But I mean, imminently?
Do I blame Misha for playing Cupid? Maybe.
Do I wish Joyce’s statement was true? Also maybe, but you know how that went.
*plays this song instead of Rich Mullins*
Joyce’s learning that life is not only Bible and school
Well, that’s a face I had hoped never to see again