Even that’s a bit weird because as many noted yesterday his lie was incredibly obvious. I think in reacting to her own trauma Joyce is neglecting to realize Joe has some too. Kind of the exact opposite of hers honestly. He’s worried about being seen as a predator and she’s worried he would try to prey on her. Great relationship conflict honestly. This is good stuff.
Joyce is autistic and was drunk – things that seem incredibly obvious to you, as a reader, might not have been at all obvious in-world, to Joyce.
He had a chance to communicate directly with her when she was sober and talking about having a drinking party, he chose to try and skirt the issue and then lied about it (obvious or not, it’s still a lie).
So Joyce has feelings about it. And her trauma has been triggered (which isn’t really a thing you can logic yourself out of).
Honestly, I think that Joyce has been doing some of what Lucy’s been doing with Walky: she’s got a version of Joe and expectations in her head that don’t fit the person in front of her. She didn’t ASK if he wanted to get drunk; she declared it. Just like she didn’t ASK if she was ready to be intimate; she’s loudly proclaimed to her friends that he’s going to be doing sex stuff to her soon.
Autism can be a reason, but it’s not an excuse. She’s been basically parading Joe around like her toy boyfriend who does what she wants, instead of as a person. And I get, much of that is probably the rush of all these big changes, but she can’t stop treating him with respect.
I guess a chunk of that is dealing with my neurodivergence, and I’m probably projecting onto Joyce. Both I and my wife were adult diagnoses – me first with ADHD, her later with autism – and one of the parts of my journey was understanding that just because some things are far harder for me or don’t come naturally, doesn’t mean that then that it’s an excuse. It means that I understand better some of my gaps, and have to employ other tools to meet with others.
Otherwise, wife and I would have no chance. Each of us hurt by the other, each demanding that the other just accept the hurt action because that’s how we’re built. Not even sure how we’d parent our daughter, who is both autistic AND has ADHD. (take a wild guess how we learned later in life that, oh, these quirks of mine aren’t just character flaws or weird preferences)
We all life on the same world and have to learn to meet each other where we can. Everyone comes from somewhere else but the main thing we can all agree on is everyone should be treated with the same respect, understanding, and kindness that you expect of others.
And the comment about her “toy boyfriend” from the second para.
For whatever it’s worth, though, saying “things that seem incredibly obvious to you, as a reader, might not have been at all obvious in-world, to Joyce” isn’t me saying “autism is an excuse and Joyce should be allowed to disrespect people and do whatever she wants and never learn”.
It’s literally just a reason I gave as a suggestion for why the overwhelming number of people who think an untreated, untherapized 18yo autistic person should just magically be able to see through lies while drunk is super weird to me.
Yeah, I can see that. I guess, my thought is – in the morning prior to the part, she did a TON of things that seemed really off. Like, when Becky was making her feel guilty because she saw through her excuse, grabbing Joe and saying, “Here, you deal with it, that’s what you’re for.” (6/9) Then deciding that they were totally going to have sex and announcing it. (6/20). Then deciding that the two of you are totally going to get drunk and completely ignoring his protestations beforehand (6/21, 7/11)
She’s not treating him like a human being with his own autonomy and will. She’s treating him like something that she has control over because of her relationship. Honestly, this might’ve been how Carol and Hank functioned – she was ABSOLUTELY outraged that he had a different opinion than her.
It put Joe in a position where he clearly did not feel like he could talk to her about not drinking. And so decided the best course of action was to give her the night she was demanding, while keeping her safe.
Yes, Joe should have talked to her, should have leveled with her – but him needing to pull her aside and talk to her, is only happening because she didn’t -once- stop the Joyce Train and ask HIM, “Hey, would you like to go to Becky’s Keg Party with me?” Or, “Hey, I feel like I’m ready to have sex; do you feel the same?” Or even, “Hey, do you feel comfortable [doing whatever the hell June 9th was]?”
If it’s a reason, it is there for automatically not an excuse. The difference between the two is that a reason is an acceptable explanation of why something happened, and an excuse is an attempt to weasel out of responsibility.
In the case of being autistic, ‘I didn’t know about this social norm’, particularly for someone inexperienced like Joyce, is a very good reason for a lot of her behavior. Further more she has proven, through action and words, that if someone points out something she is doing is wrong she is willing and ready to change.
The combination of those two factors means that anyone who is her friend, and understands her faults, and is not autistic, is accepting the social contract of informing her when she makes such mistakes so that she can correct them. It is only bad behavior when she has been informed and refuses to change, something she does do sometimes, but something she has been trying to be better at.
As such, saying that her autism is ‘a reason, but not excuse’, shows that you do not understand the basics of autism, social contracts and more.
Ironically in this case, autism has literally nothing to do with the situation. Joyce was DRUNK and has very little experience being drunk. She has significantly less culpability for her actions while inebriated and her choice of words. Not none, but less. Thus, her telling Joe to get drunk, while bad, and something she should be capable of understanding from her own experiences without explanation, is less of a ‘she did a bad’ and more of a ‘she was drunk and can’t be taken as seriously’.
Quite literally the reason Joe likely avoided getting drunk, so he didn’t do something with Joyce when both of their cognitive functions were hampered. Ironically the same reason Joyce herself is currently dealing with trauma, because her cognitive function was hampered but Joe’s wasn’t and that scares her.
Mistakes were made on all sides, and the mistakes were made before consumption, not during. Communication is the key to most of life’s problems. And when it’s not, it’s because someone is being dishonest.
You are correct, but Joe was in a really difficult position. He obviously had real and valid reasons not to be drunk. Saying that right in the middle of the party when Joyce was having a great time would have been a massive buzzkill. On the other hand, pretending and (hopefully) not being caught on the lie would protect everybody’s feelings.
I don’t think he is worried about how other people would perceive him. I think the problem is that Joe doesn’t trust himself. It’s a commonly held belief that being drunk brings out the “true self.” I think Joe believes that his true self is someone who is just interested in sex and using women for his pleasure. Something he has been fighting against this whole arc. I think he’s worried that if Joyce is drunk, she’ll be more likely to give in to sex and if he is drunk, he’ll actively pursue it. He has been making a lot of effort going at a pace that isn’t going to hurt Joyce and he doesn’t trust himself to keep that perspective when compromised.
Ultimately she should have had this conversation before she started drinking.
It’s flatly not okay to pressure someone into drinking, and she wasn’t able to adequate communicate that it would have been better for him to leave rather than stay around sober.
So very much this. Her failure to communicate ~prior~ to chugging down, coupled with her decision that he was going to need to, is just wrong. It may be understandable, but it’s wrong even so, and hopefully someone will help her see that.
But Joe also should have brought it up when Joyce said she wanted to go to a party that was centered around drinking alcohol. When he agreed to go, wasn’t there an implication that he would be participating?
Becky invited them to the keg party, which Joyce talked over Joe to accept. He then asked if they could do date stuff, and she said “we can go to the keg party.” He tried arguing, saying “Look, you already got drunk with Dorothy,” and she told him again she wanted him to be drinking with her. THEN she got him his own drink, giving him extra because he’s a “Big Boy”.
And then AGAIN before they drank, he was questioning her, asking “Hey, are you sure this is a smart idea?” and she said “We’re adults, we can handle it.” Then, “Makeouts, Joe! I require drunken make-outs! Why am I not being smooched upon?”
The only time she asked him anything was angrily asking “Why aren’t you being drunk with me, Joe?”
What the hecking heck do you mean that’s not pressuring.
Joyce wasn’t (intentionally) pressuring Joe, she thought they were both happy and going to have fun drinking together. And she had no reason to doubt that since Joe didn’t speak up about his own reservations.
Joe was trying to be nice and not disrupt Joyce’s entertainment, but unfortunately the ‘secretly not drinking’ part probably triggered Joyce more than merely ‘not drinking’ would have.
The ‘drink or no’ is not a conversation she needed to have, it’s a conversation they both needed to have.
It would have been fine if Sarah hadn’t opened her mouth about it.
She just had to jump in and tell Joyce that Joe didn’t drink (neither did Jacob).
I feel she wanted to hurt some relationship because she failed to get with Jacob (her fault) and Lucy winded up with Jacob.
I gone to parties with a date, where she got drunk and I didn’t drink at all and didn’t tell her. Most ended where I just took her home, put her in bed and went to sleep on the couch or we both sat on the couch and she went to sleep on me. Never do anything with drunk people because what they may have wanted to do drunk wouldn’t be what they would do sober.
Then he might’ve gotten away with it this time, but it would’ve still been a ticking bomb for any future drinking occasions.
I doubt Sarah had any nefarious intent here, she cares too much about Joyce to deliberately hurt her like that. Poke fun at, sure. Deliberately trigger traumatic memories, no.
Not trying to disregard your experiences, but I don’t think those are quite the same situation. Simply not drinking (openly or not) is indeed a sensible choice in such situations, and in normal circumstances it is probably the best one. However, in this particular instance Joyce has actual trauma about someone only pretending to drink with her. That’s what’s causing the main problem here, not the not joining in the drinks itself.
Not that lying is good, but as far as I can remember, this “you can’t be sober if I’m drunk” rule is not one Joe agreed to prior. So once Joyce starts drinking, his options are 1. to drink, which he doesn’t want to, which would be kind of coercion on Joyce’s part, 2. Don’t drink, and potentially cause an argument with a now-inebriated Joyce over her trauma response, or 3. pretend to drink, and hope she never finds out (unwise) or talk to her about it later when she’s not drunk (which is happening now, but Sarah forcing the issue meant he couldn’t choose a time he felt comfortable discussing it with Joyce).
Basically, if Joyce is going to enforce a rule that Joe must be drunk when she is, *and then gets drunk*, Joe is put in a position where he either is coerced into drinking, leaves, fights with her right then and there, or puts off that fight until later. It might be easy to say that the least-bad option would be to simply leave, but that would have caused the fight to happen immediately as well, also when she’s still drunk.
Joyce’s trauma is real, and wanting to feel safe around her partner is a valid one, but personally I feel that forcing her partner to engage in heavy drug use without his consent is pushing it too far; that’s a completely unreasonable rule to hold him too unless *she* agrees not to drink without *his* consent, which, unless I am misremembering, she didn’t ask of him.
Good perspective!
None of this was previously discussed, so while i understand that this triggers Joyce’s trauma, it’s not fair on Joe to suddenly conjure up a rule and pretend it had existed before she got drunk.
The only way to solve this, if she wants to stick to this rule, is to tell Joe her boundary, not put a rule on him:
Rule: “you are not allowed to be sober when i’m drunk“
Boundary: “since i can’t feel safe in a situation where i am drunk and you are sober, i can’t have you be in my vicinity when i am drunk and you are not“ > she can drink, but she has to do that somewhere where Joe isn’t.
Maybe it’s not fair, but it is realistic. People do this sort of thing all the time. It’s entirely possible Joyce didn’t even have this rule beforehand but just realized it bothers her now (or even if she did realize it, she didn’t think to discuss it because people don’t always have perfect foresight).
The notion that both people in a relationship will always behave 100% rationally and fairly is completely unrealistic (and a standard I see people holding others to, fictional or not, far too often these days).
What really matters isn’t whether a couple can avoid making any mistakes, it’s how they DEAL with those mistakes after the fact, and talk through and learn from them.
Probably because it’s not really an argument. This is just how her trauma made her feel going forward. This was a trigger for her, and understandably so. I imagine not understanding someone’s intentions, or not being on the same level as them would be scary for her (when it comes to alcohol). I don’t think either of them is to blame, it’s just that communication should’ve happened. They’ll hopefully work through this since they’re talking now.
Trauma doesn’t follow perfect logic, particularly not when someone’s just hit something upsetting a moment ago. She’s not deciding to be upset, this is an understandable knee-jerk reaction. Give ‘er a bit.
please remember that trauma, that is causing her to hold her hand like that, stemmed from someone getting her drunk at a party, on purpose to take advantage of her, logic isn’t going to be at the forefront of her mind, right now it’s all flashbacks and fear. ~<3
If they’re both drunk and something happens, they were drunk. If they were both sober, we made a choice. If she’s drunk and he’s sober, that’s too much like him taking advantage of her.
It’s not an entirely logical reaction, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Yes, everybody should have talked to everybody more, but Joyce isn’t exactly making the best decisions in her whole rebelling against her upbringing phase.
Trauma responses don’t always make sense to people outside the traumatized person’s brain. Heck they don’t always make sense to the person who is inside the traumatized brain. If trauma responses always followed logic, they’d be much easier to treat and recover from.
Regardless of whether or not it’s rational to be comparing this situation to her past trauma because the situation is clearly different, there are enough similarities to remind her of it and therefore be triggering.
And honestly that’s basically what he should say, I think. He doesn’t trust himself not to screw up and hurt her, he’s terrified that he’ll hurt her. The way his dad hurt his mom, over and over. He wants to be good for Joyce, not bad for her. Etc.
Though the hallway’s not an ideal place for it, admittedly.
I think it’s honestly less incompatibility than Joe’s issues coming front and center where Joyce can really see them for the first time. He’s so scared of ‘ruining’ her, and the base of that is him thinking he is nothing but poisonous trash no matter how he tries not to be, and that does need to be dealt with.
And yet, for some reason, I kind of want a week of strips that just follows Mary around while she does Mary things. We really only see her when she is being antagonistic or crazy and thus, she is sort of the boogeyman of the hall. Still behind all the cruelty and insanity she clearly has her own very weird life going on separately from the main cast. I want to watch that train wreck just to see what it could possibly be like.
Mary’s shtick is that she desperately wants friends but just can’t stop being evil, but now she’s so ineffectual at being evil that Becky/Dina don’t even find her offensive anymore, and it makes me really want to see a storyline where Mary and Becky get stuck together for a while and allllllmost become unironically friends.
I think Mary has a bit more to her than just being a villainous asshole. Not enough that she should have this heroic face turn or anything and be accepted into the group, but I think a storyline that flirted with the idea could actually be a lot of fun. Mary has, dare I say it, untapped Vriska energy.
Eh, Mary appearing to have sympathetic or nuanced qualities before revealing that she’s exactly as awful as she’s always appeared to be is a recurring thing with her. She’s a bit of a glass onion.
Mary feels like the type of person that grew up normal but because she’s young and white she probably fell down an alt right pipeline trying to carve out some identity and fell into her religious self righteousness, but if really challenged on it, she would crumble as fast as Joyce did.
Becky somehow carving a friendly relationship with her would be funny because Mary is essentially just Joyce but she never met Becky or likely had a real friend ever.
I don’t remember even a single instance where Mary showed the slightest desire to be friends with any of the characters. Only time she interacted purely positively was when she was kind of love drunk due to her boyfriend. Mary is a fully one dimensional hate sink (honestly like a fundamentalist republicans are) and that’s fine, she doesn’t need to be anything more.
She was neutral at best, way back near the beginning when she invited some of the others to church. Then they turned out to be their own people and not Mary clones, so she wrote them all off.
Like the first two Mary storylines were “Mary starts to be friends with people but then they are Sinful and she is simply incapable of not torching everything over it”.
She’s since turned into kind of evangelical Galasso. “Bush-era evangelical” was getting a little dated as a reference (not that there aren’t homophobic evangelicals, obviously, but her vibe is distinctly pre-Trump), so it was either make her sillier, make her more like the modern alt-right, or enter the Vriscourse route by having her more sympathetic, but I kind of miss that early Mary who was never going to not be an asshole but felt bad about not having friends. I think there’s a lot of untapped comedy potential with that tension, especially as Mary is increasingly silly and defanged.
I didnt put this together in my head until i read a bunch of these comments, but….Mary’s here because she can overhear about them getting drunk and try to threaten them because it’s illegal? Now that my brain is on this track I’m not looking forward to it
I was never in the dorms when I went to IU, but I *do* work for a company that delivers alcohol in Bloomington, so I’ve had to learn some of the relevant policies. My understanding is that it’s less an issue of underage drinking (because it’s the morning after and the alcohol is likely mostly out of their systems by now) and more an issue of being against dorm policy. The dorms are all dry, even if you are over 21 it is against the rules to have alcohol in the dorms, I don’t know what the specific penalties are for getting caught, but I do know it can escalate to getting kicked out of the dorm and possibly expelled from the university if you have serious or numerous enough violations.
All that said, a student reporting that she overheard a conversation between two other students in the hallways about possibly getting drunk is not sufficient evidence for any kind of disciplinary action. Mary would need to go to Ruth first, who may or may not conveniently forget about overhearing the party the night before, and even if she went over Ruth’s head, at most there would be a check of Joyce’s and Joe’s rooms for alcohol, which won’t turn anything up since that isn’t where the party was. Mary doesn’t know there was a party or where it was located, and for all she knows this exchange is hypothetical. I fully expect her to tattle, but I don’t expect it to go anywhere, especially since she has a documented history of actively trying to get other people in trouble, so she isn’t exactly a reliable source.
Ironically she was okay with sex with Joe where they were both drunk, and that was the scenario he was afraid of, so he didn’t get drunk with her, which led to them being… unequally incapacitated, let’s call it, which triggered some ptsdish fears about when Ryan drugged her, which coupled with the lying is why she’s having trust issues with him right now.
Linking again today for prosperity, here’s everything Joe knew (at minimum, not including how they might have talked in the long text convos they had and over the time skip):
Multiple women came forward about this, Joe knew the details of what this man did, Joyce has explained that it happened to her as well and told him that his behavior affects people.
Honestly, I think this was part of the reason he started trying to be better and less misogynistic. I also really think they’re going to have a serious conversation about this and come out of it with a better understanding of each other and a closer relationship.
Where there is trauma (and there is always trauma) there are misunderstandings and issues like this. Just a part of life.
More specifically that it was Joyce, who he had already started to see as a person first and a woman second.
One of Joe’s things has always been that everybody be on board if _anything_ is going to happen. It’s the one thing that kept him from just being a total skeeze. Joyce was seeing the night as “I can let my hair down around you because you’re trustworthy, while Joe was seeing it as “I need to maintain my sobriety because I don’t want this person, who I love, to regret anything we do and I can’t trust myself drunk.” It’s a communication breakdown that I hope they get a chance to fix before Mary tries anything.
I interpreted the “ironically” to refer to the fact that she trusts him despite him lying to her. She said in last strip, “you lied about it,” and now she’s saying “I trust you.”
Or that this happened, Ruth knew, and that she did nothing about it. She’s not quite at that point in terms of the knowledge she has, but it’s a dorm — it wouldn’t take much for her to get there.
I can get Joyce’s feelings on this due to her trauma, it would have been really nice for her to make that clear though instead of “hey I have this expectation that you will get drunk here and if you don’t I will feel really bad.” It honestly hits kind of close to home for me. I’ve had times where I felt like wasn’t allowed to be mad at a person because I overstepped their boundaries but I wanted to be mad because they refused to make those boundaries clear, even when asked (I know that’s not exactly the situation here).
In this situation, the same could be said for Joe. They both needed to establish their boundaries before this happened- but I think they both thought that they could handle it/there wouldn’t be a risk. I’m not sure if Joyce knew this would be triggering for her, people have been careful around her when it came to alcohol and she was fine, so this might be the first time in a while she was faced with something that triggered it.
For Joe, he’s very ashamed of himself and believes he’ll fall into his old behavior or the same traps as his father. He hadn’t really communicated beforehand that he wouldn’t be getting drunk with her, and he did lie that he was drinking (no matter how exaggerated the lie was, he still never told her whether or not he’d be getting drunk at the party and why). Joyce seemed to be bulldozing his feelings, but she also didn’t know the extent of them. Same with Joe. They just both didn’t know what the other was feeling of could end up feeling.
(Also a note that trauma responses aren’t always entirely rational etc, etc)
Anyway, this’ll lead to a conversation and I want them both to resolve it and hold hands or smth 🙁
I can’t speak to your experiences, obviously. But so far as your comment pertains to Joyce specifically, I think there was no real good option for her here. With how badly Joyce has been affected by this in the past, I think bringing up those concerns to Joe in the first place probably would’ve been pretty fucking triggering in and of itself.
Yeah there’s no great way to bring it up, but she deliberately made the choice to drink and get drunk here. If she’s going to do those things when she has bad history it would be a good idea to talk about this stuff. I think it’s possible she didn’t realize it would hit this badly though and I overall don’t blame her for not perfectly navigating complex trauma.
Yeah, I’ve had the same issue a lot, people don’t express a boundary, or worse claim there isn’t one when asked point blank, and then get mad at you for crossing a line you had no way of knowing was there. Some boundaries are common enough that I’ve learned to assume they are there until shown otherwise, but a lot of people don’t even realize they *have* a boundary until it’s been crossed but then also don’t seem to realize that’s what happened because they think you’re the unreasonable one for not knowing it was there. It sucks. I will happily respect boundaries when they’ve been made clear to me, so it’s insulting to be treated as a bad person for not reading your mind.
Having said that, I don’t feel that’s applicable here. Joe was aware of Joyce’s trauma, and while it’s reasonable to assume it didn’t occur to him that this might trigger her, I don’t think the issue is that she thinks he knowingly crossed a line, it’s that she’s triggered and therefor not in a place to have a rational conversation about it, meanwhile he’s trying to explain himself and make up for it in the moment instead of giving her space to cool down and talking about it when they are both in a better headspace.
Yeah, and to be fair to Joyce, this issue of a less obvious boundary/trigger wouldn’t have come up like this if Joe hadn’t lied, and not wanting to be lied to is a very common boundary. I can understand why Joe lied, but I can’t fault Joyce for not laying out how the difference in intoxication might make her feel when she didn’t think that would be coming up at all.
Oof. It always hurts to see Joyce grab her hand like this. Obviously there was no way that what happened to her that night wasn’t going to come up in a situation like this, but it always sucks to see. I guess it never really leaves, does it?
Sadly, no, that kind of thing doesn’t ever really leave. It does improve, you get better at managing your reactions to being triggered, you grow and heal until it’s a rarer problem… but less than a year from it? It’s definitely popping up more than we see on camera and Joyce just isn’t verbalizing it.
See, this is the kind of boundary you establish BEFORE the drinking commences. You know, hash it out, see where each party is comfort-wise when it comes to mind-affecting substances so you can reach a reasonable compromise built on honesty and communication.
Tragically these kids are both afflicted with a terminal case of Being-Eighteen-itis, and “not having the life experience necessary be good at communicating alcohol boundaries” is a known symptom that can only be cured by that bongo known as time.
I can understand why Joyce is upset here, but its not like she has explained this boundary to Joe, this is all a miscommunication and those are never fun to see.
That being said, there will always be struggles when a neurodivergent person like Joyce is dating a Neurotypical person like Joe, their brains work very differently already on top of Joe’s extreme mistrust of himself. If he HAD gotten drunk and something did happen, he would have had a mental breakdown, or at the very least started hating himself even more then he already does.
I really hope they can talk this out and come to a understanding and set those boundaries properly this time, I don’t want this to be the end of their honestly great relationship.
It’s definitely triggered her PTSD, but developing Rules that Cannot Be Broken in response to trauma which are so Fundamental and Obvious that you can’t even verbalize them or consciously know they exist before they’re broken… That doesn’t have to be an exclusively autistic trauma response, but since Joyce is autistic her trauma responses have probably been colored by it.
But Joe also did not explain his boundary to Joyce. They were going to a party where everyone was drinking, and he didn’t even mention it. Then he lied about it because it was too awkward to have an honest conversation in front of all their friends.
We haven’t been told why he lied. “It’d be too awkward to have an honest conversation in front of their friends” is one of the less charitable reasons one could come up with.
He was given an order disguised as a rethorical question, and when someone you love is drunk and acting stupid you pretend to go along with their ideas so you can be there to protect them from themselves if that is needed. Or you walk away and let them crash and burn, that’s an option too, but having an honest conversation with a drunk person while you’re sober is pointless, frustrating, occasionally hilarious, but mostly just a bad idea.
Joyce, I have no sympathy for you here. I know, you had a traumatic experience, but Joe wasn’t involved, you weren’t getting drunk, and you chose to drink this time. Joe chose not to because he believed it would be better if he didn’t. You chose to get drunk because you think that’s what you want.
Trauma is very well know for being completely rational all the time and care about the exact details of situations that trigger it. She should get therapy, but we can say that without being as uncharitable as possible.Also quick aside, she choose to get drunk because she tried it before and had a good time and so choose to do it again and also had a good time.
And if Joe had been upfront about this, before going to a party where everyone was drinking, they could have had a conversation and worked this out in advance. Instead he lied about it, so she rightfully feels that her trust was violated.
That’s kinda the fun nuance of this. I 200% agree with Joe in this situation. BUT him lying about it is inherently puts him in the wrong. Even though as someone with social anxiety I also would probably just…lie in this scenario? Like for me, I hate drinking and I hate doing it, but who wants to be the wet blanket who’s like “I don’t wanna drink and here’s why?” It’s easier to just pretend I’m joining in.
This is true and extremely frustrating. I hate lying. Does that mean I never lie? No, I feel like I’m supposed to due to social pressure and so I do sometimes and I hate it. Even the innocuous ones like: “How are you feeling?” “I’m fine”; “What’s up?” “nothing much”; that kinda thing.
And from a social perspective, if Joe was in the role of babysitting Joyce (the sober person who makes sure that drunk/high people don’t make overly bad decisions), this would probably be innocent, especially if it was pre-negotiated.
As it stands, I think that this is a case of “I am sorry. I will communicate better next time.”
(sidenote: people just use “What’s up” like “Hey” for some reason, as in, rhetorically. For I while I would try and actually start answering.)
My favorite past time is actually saying how I’m feeling when people ask “how are you?”. Like i’ll just say “Oh I feel crummy” or something. Cuz what’s the point in asking if you don’t care. Don’t ask rhetorical questions and force me to waste my breath with rhetorical answers.
It’s also an interesting challenge to answer that question fully and honestly when it’s not at all what I was thinking about before I ran into the asker.
I don’t even view those as lies TBH. A lie communicates (deceptively), but in those pleasantries no information is actually exchanged. It’s just a social signal of ‘I acknowledge you’.
Oh, I’m that wet blanket. I’m quite content with my soggnitude. “I don’t drink, no it’s not a moral thing, I just think it’s disgusting. No, you’re not going to talk me into it, and no, that’s not why I’m refusing to go to your party. I also hate being around drunk people. They’re even more obnoxious than alcohol is disgusting. That is why I don’t go to parties.”
It’s just nice to get it out there so people know better than to bother me about it in the future.
I definitely let my cousin talk me into getting a Margarita on my birthday and actually it tasted like crap just like I had predicted. And honestly I wish I had just pushed the issue and just said “don’t worry about it.”
I know people can be really obnoxious about pushing alcohol at a party. If someone doesn’t want to drink, it would certainly be easier to lie about it. But you shouldn’t lie to your partner about it. If you’re not able to be honest with them about your choices, then you’re not in a good place.
Man, I’m so glad I don’t hang out with any of these people who are pushy about others drinking. Pretty much all my friends drink, or have at various points during our friendship, and I’ve never needed more than an “Oh, I don’t drink” for the subject– usually arising because they were offering me a drink– to be dropped.
Now, my parents’ friends? Yeah, some of them are obnoxious about it. At one point my *dad* was trying to pressure me to drink because, I don’t know, I should try it out with safe people before getting wasted at a random party? But I had no desire to drink at all. And I think the safer people would have been the ones who were chill with me making the decision for myself.
But I think comparing to the “I don’t drink” situation distorts what was going on here. There’s no reason to think that Joe doesn’t drink at all, just that he didn’t want to drink in this particular situation. With Joyce, at this party. For reasons that seemed good to him, but that might not have seemed so to her and certainly would have turned into a big, probably trauma filled discussion.
There are a lot more pitfalls here than the common “I don’t drink and don’t push me to do so.”
I think I disagree with the distinction you’re trying to make. Whether or not someone never drinks, there shouldn’t be pressure to drink. Joyce was (unintentionally and unknowingly and imo innocently) pressuring Joe to drink in that moment. The social outcomes of saying no to alcohol are quite uncomfortable — people are somewhat more likely to respect “I don’t drink” than “I don’t feel like drinking tonight”, but I don’t think categorical refusal should have more weight than a one time “no”.
No means no, but it is very socially acceptable not to simply accept a no when it comes to alcohol. NO ONE DID THAT HERE, (except Joyce accidentally) but it was reasonable for Joe to expect it.
None of that to say Joe deliberately lying to Joyce about it was OK. Just that it was a situation that inherently comes with pressure to drink
I agree with most of this, but Joyce didn’t fail to accept a no. She was never given a ‘no’, we have no idea how she would have responded to that either accidentally or intentionally.
I expect that you’re going to have trouble with me continuing to disagree with you. Is that social pressure to agree with you or is it a personal opinion that I am free to take actions about regardless?
I get that and I don’t think there should be pressure for him to drink anyway, but I do think when you’re refusing to drink for someone else’s sake, it’s a very different situation and leaves room open for “I don’t want you to do this for me.”
I’ll be honest, it takes a *lot* for me to condemn someone for choosing *not* to drink alcohol, and even this doesn’t cross that line. Joyce is triggered because Joe ostensibly had more control over the situation by not being inebriated, but rationally him drinking dramatically multiplies the chances that something bad would happen (I trust that Joe *would* be on his best behavior- a 0% chance multiplied by anything is still 0%, but that’s just how alcohol works) and Joyce needs to recognize that. I understand where she’s coming from with her trauma, but she *is* still wrong here.
See the problem is, there was a stretch of a few hours before the party where joe could have explained his anxieties to a sober, not partying Joyce. And maybe even that would kill the building vibe, I’ve got the social anxiety too so I can definitely see that being a concern.
I feel like Joe’s been scared or reluctant to express his lingering anxieties about himself and his past behavior. He needs to communicate that things are not, in fact, all good with him, and that he’s not the party boyfriend who’s comfortable doing sex things to Joyce right now so that she can adjust her expectations and behavior accordingly. I think he’s scared of letting her down, she’s acting like a normal teen college student and enjoying life without puritanical shame for the first time ever. He doesn’t want to hinder that. But he needs to communicate it, bc otherwise there will be situations where she’s getting drunk and he’s too scared to, and that imbalance triggers her trauma.
Basically this. They’ve been good so far, but part of that has been Joe overcompensating for his past ways and that’s clashing with Joyce (probably) overcompensating for hers.
ah, joe. its tough when the worlds spent a lot of time telling you ‘well obviously sexual intent is just INHERENT to you! look at all the shit your dads doing!’.
Probably she just holds off on the drinks then. She’s fine with both staying sober. Or Joe just steps out for an evening, probably also fine. It’s even possible that she might be able to handle it if Joe (who she does trust) openly tells her he won’t be drinking.
This isn’t about Joyce being unable to interact with someone who doesn’t want to drink. This is about her trauma from someone who secretly didn’t drink.
I THINK she’s saying she was ironically trusting him with getting drunk, not that she “trusts him ironically”. Strange wording. I understand Joyce’s trauma here but he makes a solid point. SHE got HERSELF drunk and he simply DIDN’T WANT TO. The deception was wrong. I am still curious what her reaction would have been if he had actually said something at the party though. She was all-in on saying the f-word and drinking herself stupid.
Sometimes you tell tiny lies to keep things going and Joyce would be willing to let this one go…if it wasn’t for her very specific trauma irrationally defining the roofie as “if I’m drunk and he’s not then I’m in danger.”
I’m pretty sure that’s coming next. If I had to predict, this is the narrative reminder that Joe doesn’t want to hurt Joyce and this is a big fear for him, so when Joyce consents in the near future (because that’s what this is probably leading up to) their fucking is sweet and romantic and not haunted by Joe’s past.
I believe Joyce is saying it’s ironic that she trusts him, because he doesn’t trust himself enough to behave if he’s drunk. (Have we even SEEN Joe drunk in any Willis World continuity?)I do feel Joe didn’t get drunk not because he’s afraid of sexual involvement with Joyce, which she very obviously wanted, but because he fears true intimacy. He’s good with this sort of sweet romantic stuff, but intimate sex, as opposed to merely fuck buddy type sex (looking at you, Roz) is scary stuff. Joe’s dad’s womanizing clearly has affected him. He thought for so long casual sex is ok as long as neither party had deeper expectations. (Again ironically, that may well have been Dr Rosenthal’s excuse “Oh c’mon hun, she meant nothing to me!”). But for Joyce, intimacy was the whole point. Getting wasted was merely a gateway in that sense, or maybe a get out of jail card “We couldn’t help it, Mom! We were both drunk!”
I also foresee Mary Bradford doing her judgmental bongo thing shortly.
the word you originally meant was replaced because the comments section couldn’t be trusted not to be misogynistic as hell to a couple of the characters.
He’s definitely worried about sex with Joyce. Specifically he’s worried that she’ll jump into doing something that she’ll regret later, like Liz almost did with him.
That worry escalates drastically if she’s drunk when it happens and if he’s drunk too, he might not have the willpower to turn her down.
Joe has always been about consent, his entire hat was that he saw himself as an ethical man slut, regardless of some of the crass jokes he made before. Drunk *anyone* cannot give full consent.
Joe has always been about creepily sexualizing every single situation and every woman he met. He kept an online list of how much he’d like to fuck women on campus. He thought he’d “fix” Joyce with his dick and he thought it was appropriate to “joke” about having sex with drunk women that they would not have had otherwise.
He’s a lot better now, but talking about him like he’s always been a misunderstood “ethical” slut is just not factual.
That he was confused on what counts as consent doesn’t mean he wasn’t all about consent. People can be wrong while still being all about being right. A colourblind person can be a true and honest fan of red, even when it is sometimes green.
I’m all about Magic: The Gathering. I’ve never played a single game, don’t know any of the rules, barely notice the cards when I’m someplace that sells them, deliberately bring other games to game nights, and shower at least twice a week, but I’m all about that card game.
This has almost nothing to do with consent. Drunk people consent to sex all the time – very often with other drunk people. You can say that morally speaking they raped each other, but neither the law nor people in the real world treat it like that.
Nor was he worried about it in those terms. He was worried about a drunk Joyce doing something she’d regret and him being too drunk to say no to something he really wants. That’s not a consent issue, it’s an avoiding bad choices one.
As I said yesterday— this isn’t litigation, this is trauma. The normal rules of who’s “at fault” don’t apply.
Neither of them is “in the wrong” here. They both tried their best with good intentions and leftover trauma from Druggo McStabbed is complicating the situation.
Joyce shouldn’t have pressured Joe and Joe shouldn’t have lied, but that’s small potatoes stuff really. Communicate and they’ll get through this.
Okay, but Joe Normal Summoned a monster, which activates Joyce’s Spell, allowing her to negate the Summon and inflict that monster’s ATK as damage. So like, yeah.
Well this is the start of an open and honest conversation, if they keep going like this they could resolve this positively.
After that, Mary just has to mysteriously disappear, never to be seen again.
it seems to have blown up in the other direction though
feels like something to address once everyone’s awake properly – and with the context you gave rather than “he was only pretending to drink”
Joe doesn’t trust himself, Joyce. He wants to sleep with you. Sober he knows what he really wants is to wait for you to be ready to sleep with him and to have a normal non-sexual boyfriend-girlfriend relationship with you. He’s also scared that drunk him will interpret signs of affection from drunk you as “being ready” and tomorrow you’ll feel betrayed and hurt and reject him for being awful like you did the night after the first date.
More I think that drunk Joyce would actually make a move and want to, no misinterpretations involved and that non-drunk Joyce afterwards would feel like she “ruined” herself.
And that drunk Joe wouldn’t be able to turn down drunk Joyce when she did try.
I was gonna say it’s been over two years since we’ve seen Mary, but I saw she had a brief appearance from where Sarah was sending out texts to everyone asking if they were Lucy. It’s been over two years, however, since we’ve seen Mary from more than just the neck up.
The train derailment from this conflict is going to be an absolute ruin, isn’t it? Like…Mary overhears this argument, cares nothing about the who-was-drunk-who-wasnt angle and latches on to the illegal drinking part.
Say she brings it up with Ruth. Ruth denies any knowledge, making a competent excuse – out of the building, headache, early to bed, etc. Not satisfied, Mary goes over Ruth’s head and finds someone either malicious or overprotective and things escalate.
Joe can’t escape the allegations, even if Joyce denies them herself. He gets blamed for the alcohol showing up, at which point, he’s saved by Dina, selflessly taking the blame and facing the consequences. Suspension? Expulsion?
So that’s just where my brain took the worst case scenario, anyway.
Ruth denies knowledge on the basis that she has no knowledge and there’s no reason why she would.
Mary escalates, and the accusation isn’t credible, isn’t worth investigating, and isn’t really enforceable anyway as there isn’t likely to be any evidence and Mary doesn’t even know anything anyway.
I feel like “it’s okay if we’re both drunk” is a very common, deeply ingrained meme and it’s just not true. If anything, being drunk makes malicious people worse and good people careless.
It’s not necessarily okay if you’re both drunk, but it’s at least an even playing field. And it’s a long way away from one person getting the other one drunk while pretending to drink but secretly staying sober.
I would say the problem there is “getting the other one drunk”. Doesn’t matter whether they’re drinking themselves, if someone is pushing another person to drink more it’s a huge red flag regardless of their own intoxication state.
i think it’s never an even playing field, because two people aren’t the same amount of drunk, might not have the same experience of navigating being drunk.
(then again, sober people *also* have different experience levels, also relevant for navigating consent…)
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Aww Joe 🙁
Aww Joyce 🙁
Aww 🙁
Lol. I don’t get this argument. I get Joyce’s trauma, but I don’t get her not trusting Joe for trying to respect her and his own reputation.
I think the lying part is the bulk of the problem.
Even that’s a bit weird because as many noted yesterday his lie was incredibly obvious. I think in reacting to her own trauma Joyce is neglecting to realize Joe has some too. Kind of the exact opposite of hers honestly. He’s worried about being seen as a predator and she’s worried he would try to prey on her. Great relationship conflict honestly. This is good stuff.
Joyce is autistic and was drunk – things that seem incredibly obvious to you, as a reader, might not have been at all obvious in-world, to Joyce.
He had a chance to communicate directly with her when she was sober and talking about having a drinking party, he chose to try and skirt the issue and then lied about it (obvious or not, it’s still a lie).
So Joyce has feelings about it. And her trauma has been triggered (which isn’t really a thing you can logic yourself out of).
IDK it makes sense to me.
Honestly, I think that Joyce has been doing some of what Lucy’s been doing with Walky: she’s got a version of Joe and expectations in her head that don’t fit the person in front of her. She didn’t ASK if he wanted to get drunk; she declared it. Just like she didn’t ASK if she was ready to be intimate; she’s loudly proclaimed to her friends that he’s going to be doing sex stuff to her soon.
Autism can be a reason, but it’s not an excuse. She’s been basically parading Joe around like her toy boyfriend who does what she wants, instead of as a person. And I get, much of that is probably the rush of all these big changes, but she can’t stop treating him with respect.
You and I fundamentally disagree on the vibes of those situations you’re talking about, but that’s okay.
I guess a chunk of that is dealing with my neurodivergence, and I’m probably projecting onto Joyce. Both I and my wife were adult diagnoses – me first with ADHD, her later with autism – and one of the parts of my journey was understanding that just because some things are far harder for me or don’t come naturally, doesn’t mean that then that it’s an excuse. It means that I understand better some of my gaps, and have to employ other tools to meet with others.
Otherwise, wife and I would have no chance. Each of us hurt by the other, each demanding that the other just accept the hurt action because that’s how we’re built. Not even sure how we’d parent our daughter, who is both autistic AND has ADHD. (take a wild guess how we learned later in life that, oh, these quirks of mine aren’t just character flaws or weird preferences)
We all life on the same world and have to learn to meet each other where we can. Everyone comes from somewhere else but the main thing we can all agree on is everyone should be treated with the same respect, understanding, and kindness that you expect of others.
Also if I misunderstood your point and the main area that you and I disagree with on is something different, my apologies for the text wall. >.<
Yeah that’s absolutely not the part I meant. It was your first paragraph I wholly disagree with tbh.
And the comment about her “toy boyfriend” from the second para.
For whatever it’s worth, though, saying “things that seem incredibly obvious to you, as a reader, might not have been at all obvious in-world, to Joyce” isn’t me saying “autism is an excuse and Joyce should be allowed to disrespect people and do whatever she wants and never learn”.
It’s literally just a reason I gave as a suggestion for why the overwhelming number of people who think an untreated, untherapized 18yo autistic person should just magically be able to see through lies while drunk is super weird to me.
Yeah, I can see that. I guess, my thought is – in the morning prior to the part, she did a TON of things that seemed really off. Like, when Becky was making her feel guilty because she saw through her excuse, grabbing Joe and saying, “Here, you deal with it, that’s what you’re for.” (6/9) Then deciding that they were totally going to have sex and announcing it. (6/20). Then deciding that the two of you are totally going to get drunk and completely ignoring his protestations beforehand (6/21, 7/11)
She’s not treating him like a human being with his own autonomy and will. She’s treating him like something that she has control over because of her relationship. Honestly, this might’ve been how Carol and Hank functioned – she was ABSOLUTELY outraged that he had a different opinion than her.
It put Joe in a position where he clearly did not feel like he could talk to her about not drinking. And so decided the best course of action was to give her the night she was demanding, while keeping her safe.
Yes, Joe should have talked to her, should have leveled with her – but him needing to pull her aside and talk to her, is only happening because she didn’t -once- stop the Joyce Train and ask HIM, “Hey, would you like to go to Becky’s Keg Party with me?” Or, “Hey, I feel like I’m ready to have sex; do you feel the same?” Or even, “Hey, do you feel comfortable [doing whatever the hell June 9th was]?”
Again. We don’t agree on this. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand your points, it was that I don’t agree with them.
Yeah, I feel like she’s caught up in the excitement of finally being able to rebel and not taking his feelings into the equation.
That’s a good take, bork!
theyre also college freshmen so lets not let them be too emotionally aware
This makes much sense, and I hope that Joe will soon ask her “who, exactly, is your boyfriend: me, or my public image that I’m trying to lose?”
If it’s a reason, it is there for automatically not an excuse. The difference between the two is that a reason is an acceptable explanation of why something happened, and an excuse is an attempt to weasel out of responsibility.
In the case of being autistic, ‘I didn’t know about this social norm’, particularly for someone inexperienced like Joyce, is a very good reason for a lot of her behavior. Further more she has proven, through action and words, that if someone points out something she is doing is wrong she is willing and ready to change.
The combination of those two factors means that anyone who is her friend, and understands her faults, and is not autistic, is accepting the social contract of informing her when she makes such mistakes so that she can correct them. It is only bad behavior when she has been informed and refuses to change, something she does do sometimes, but something she has been trying to be better at.
As such, saying that her autism is ‘a reason, but not excuse’, shows that you do not understand the basics of autism, social contracts and more.
Ironically in this case, autism has literally nothing to do with the situation. Joyce was DRUNK and has very little experience being drunk. She has significantly less culpability for her actions while inebriated and her choice of words. Not none, but less. Thus, her telling Joe to get drunk, while bad, and something she should be capable of understanding from her own experiences without explanation, is less of a ‘she did a bad’ and more of a ‘she was drunk and can’t be taken as seriously’.
Quite literally the reason Joe likely avoided getting drunk, so he didn’t do something with Joyce when both of their cognitive functions were hampered. Ironically the same reason Joyce herself is currently dealing with trauma, because her cognitive function was hampered but Joe’s wasn’t and that scares her.
Mistakes were made on all sides, and the mistakes were made before consumption, not during. Communication is the key to most of life’s problems. And when it’s not, it’s because someone is being dishonest.
You are correct, but Joe was in a really difficult position. He obviously had real and valid reasons not to be drunk. Saying that right in the middle of the party when Joyce was having a great time would have been a massive buzzkill. On the other hand, pretending and (hopefully) not being caught on the lie would protect everybody’s feelings.
“He had a chance to communicate directly with her when she was sober and talking about having a drinking party”
i agree, it does make sense that Joyce has a trauma reaction, and while i don’t expect Joe to *expect that*, open communication IS the key.
I don’t think he is worried about how other people would perceive him. I think the problem is that Joe doesn’t trust himself. It’s a commonly held belief that being drunk brings out the “true self.” I think Joe believes that his true self is someone who is just interested in sex and using women for his pleasure. Something he has been fighting against this whole arc. I think he’s worried that if Joyce is drunk, she’ll be more likely to give in to sex and if he is drunk, he’ll actively pursue it. He has been making a lot of effort going at a pace that isn’t going to hurt Joyce and he doesn’t trust himself to keep that perspective when compromised.
Yeah, I agree.
Ultimately she should have had this conversation before she started drinking.
It’s flatly not okay to pressure someone into drinking, and she wasn’t able to adequate communicate that it would have been better for him to leave rather than stay around sober.
So very much this. Her failure to communicate ~prior~ to chugging down, coupled with her decision that he was going to need to, is just wrong. It may be understandable, but it’s wrong even so, and hopefully someone will help her see that.
But Joe also should have brought it up when Joyce said she wanted to go to a party that was centered around drinking alcohol. When he agreed to go, wasn’t there an implication that he would be participating?
Also she literally asked him once. That’s not what “pressuring” is.
She didn’t ask him once. She never asked him.
Becky invited them to the keg party, which Joyce talked over Joe to accept. He then asked if they could do date stuff, and she said “we can go to the keg party.” He tried arguing, saying “Look, you already got drunk with Dorothy,” and she told him again she wanted him to be drinking with her. THEN she got him his own drink, giving him extra because he’s a “Big Boy”.
And then AGAIN before they drank, he was questioning her, asking “Hey, are you sure this is a smart idea?” and she said “We’re adults, we can handle it.” Then, “Makeouts, Joe! I require drunken make-outs! Why am I not being smooched upon?”
The only time she asked him anything was angrily asking “Why aren’t you being drunk with me, Joe?”
What the hecking heck do you mean that’s not pressuring.
Yup, this.
It’s like poor communication is the source of many relationship issues.
Not Billie’s. But, like, most people’s.
I don’t really think that does imply that he will be drinking. Normally, going to a party where people are drinking and not drinking is fine.
Joyce wasn’t (intentionally) pressuring Joe, she thought they were both happy and going to have fun drinking together. And she had no reason to doubt that since Joe didn’t speak up about his own reservations.
Joe was trying to be nice and not disrupt Joyce’s entertainment, but unfortunately the ‘secretly not drinking’ part probably triggered Joyce more than merely ‘not drinking’ would have.
The ‘drink or no’ is not a conversation she needed to have, it’s a conversation they both needed to have.
It would have been fine if Sarah hadn’t opened her mouth about it.
She just had to jump in and tell Joyce that Joe didn’t drink (neither did Jacob).
I feel she wanted to hurt some relationship because she failed to get with Jacob (her fault) and Lucy winded up with Jacob.
I gone to parties with a date, where she got drunk and I didn’t drink at all and didn’t tell her. Most ended where I just took her home, put her in bed and went to sleep on the couch or we both sat on the couch and she went to sleep on me. Never do anything with drunk people because what they may have wanted to do drunk wouldn’t be what they would do sober.
Then he might’ve gotten away with it this time, but it would’ve still been a ticking bomb for any future drinking occasions.
I doubt Sarah had any nefarious intent here, she cares too much about Joyce to deliberately hurt her like that. Poke fun at, sure. Deliberately trigger traumatic memories, no.
Not trying to disregard your experiences, but I don’t think those are quite the same situation. Simply not drinking (openly or not) is indeed a sensible choice in such situations, and in normal circumstances it is probably the best one. However, in this particular instance Joyce has actual trauma about someone only pretending to drink with her. That’s what’s causing the main problem here, not the not joining in the drinks itself.
Not that lying is good, but as far as I can remember, this “you can’t be sober if I’m drunk” rule is not one Joe agreed to prior. So once Joyce starts drinking, his options are 1. to drink, which he doesn’t want to, which would be kind of coercion on Joyce’s part, 2. Don’t drink, and potentially cause an argument with a now-inebriated Joyce over her trauma response, or 3. pretend to drink, and hope she never finds out (unwise) or talk to her about it later when she’s not drunk (which is happening now, but Sarah forcing the issue meant he couldn’t choose a time he felt comfortable discussing it with Joyce).
Basically, if Joyce is going to enforce a rule that Joe must be drunk when she is, *and then gets drunk*, Joe is put in a position where he either is coerced into drinking, leaves, fights with her right then and there, or puts off that fight until later. It might be easy to say that the least-bad option would be to simply leave, but that would have caused the fight to happen immediately as well, also when she’s still drunk.
Joyce’s trauma is real, and wanting to feel safe around her partner is a valid one, but personally I feel that forcing her partner to engage in heavy drug use without his consent is pushing it too far; that’s a completely unreasonable rule to hold him too unless *she* agrees not to drink without *his* consent, which, unless I am misremembering, she didn’t ask of him.
Good perspective!
None of this was previously discussed, so while i understand that this triggers Joyce’s trauma, it’s not fair on Joe to suddenly conjure up a rule and pretend it had existed before she got drunk.
The only way to solve this, if she wants to stick to this rule, is to tell Joe her boundary, not put a rule on him:
Rule: “you are not allowed to be sober when i’m drunk“
Boundary: “since i can’t feel safe in a situation where i am drunk and you are sober, i can’t have you be in my vicinity when i am drunk and you are not“ > she can drink, but she has to do that somewhere where Joe isn’t.
Maybe it’s not fair, but it is realistic. People do this sort of thing all the time. It’s entirely possible Joyce didn’t even have this rule beforehand but just realized it bothers her now (or even if she did realize it, she didn’t think to discuss it because people don’t always have perfect foresight).
The notion that both people in a relationship will always behave 100% rationally and fairly is completely unrealistic (and a standard I see people holding others to, fictional or not, far too often these days).
What really matters isn’t whether a couple can avoid making any mistakes, it’s how they DEAL with those mistakes after the fact, and talk through and learn from them.
Probably because it’s not really an argument. This is just how her trauma made her feel going forward. This was a trigger for her, and understandably so. I imagine not understanding someone’s intentions, or not being on the same level as them would be scary for her (when it comes to alcohol). I don’t think either of them is to blame, it’s just that communication should’ve happened. They’ll hopefully work through this since they’re talking now.
This.
Yup. Trauma triggers don’t logic well. But once she’s more calm, they can talk it out and communicate more clearly about their needs for the future.
Trauma doesn’t follow perfect logic, particularly not when someone’s just hit something upsetting a moment ago. She’s not deciding to be upset, this is an understandable knee-jerk reaction. Give ‘er a bit.
People with triggered trauma are going to be significantly less rational and considerate than they might otherwise typically be.
please remember that trauma, that is causing her to hold her hand like that, stemmed from someone getting her drunk at a party, on purpose to take advantage of her, logic isn’t going to be at the forefront of her mind, right now it’s all flashbacks and fear. ~<3
If they’re both drunk and something happens, they were drunk. If they were both sober, we made a choice. If she’s drunk and he’s sober, that’s too much like him taking advantage of her.
It’s not an entirely logical reaction, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Yes, everybody should have talked to everybody more, but Joyce isn’t exactly making the best decisions in her whole rebelling against her upbringing phase.
Trauma responses don’t always make sense to people outside the traumatized person’s brain. Heck they don’t always make sense to the person who is inside the traumatized brain. If trauma responses always followed logic, they’d be much easier to treat and recover from.
Regardless of whether or not it’s rational to be comparing this situation to her past trauma because the situation is clearly different, there are enough similarities to remind her of it and therefore be triggering.
This one is too emotionally raw so I’m instead gonna focus on the fact Mary is here.
Fuck you, Mary.
And we all know she is going to use this new information to start shit.
Because the entire point of Mary’s life is to inflict suffering on others.
Yeah! Fuck you, Mary!
Sadly, the problem isn’t about whether or not JOYCE trusts Joe.
JOE Doesn’t Trust Joe.
And honestly that’s basically what he should say, I think. He doesn’t trust himself not to screw up and hurt her, he’s terrified that he’ll hurt her. The way his dad hurt his mom, over and over. He wants to be good for Joyce, not bad for her. Etc.
Though the hallway’s not an ideal place for it, admittedly.
Which might be incompatibility. If Joyce wants Joe to be bad with her, but Joe wants to be good for her.
I think it’s honestly less incompatibility than Joe’s issues coming front and center where Joyce can really see them for the first time. He’s so scared of ‘ruining’ her, and the base of that is him thinking he is nothing but poisonous trash no matter how he tries not to be, and that does need to be dealt with.
And with Mary around, worse
Yes, to all of the above.
I can’t exactly say I have sympathy for all parties here.
Yeah, Mary sucks.
And yet, for some reason, I kind of want a week of strips that just follows Mary around while she does Mary things. We really only see her when she is being antagonistic or crazy and thus, she is sort of the boogeyman of the hall. Still behind all the cruelty and insanity she clearly has her own very weird life going on separately from the main cast. I want to watch that train wreck just to see what it could possibly be like.
We see it and it turns out that outside of being a weird asshole and doing art her life is unbelievably boring.
Mary is the Joe to our Sarah, a hate sink where we can release all the bad feelings we have.
Mary will probably become a congresswoman.
It’s probably pretty boring. People who like to meddle in other people’s lives rarely have anything interesting going on in theirs.
Mary’s shtick is that she desperately wants friends but just can’t stop being evil, but now she’s so ineffectual at being evil that Becky/Dina don’t even find her offensive anymore, and it makes me really want to see a storyline where Mary and Becky get stuck together for a while and allllllmost become unironically friends.
I think Mary has a bit more to her than just being a villainous asshole. Not enough that she should have this heroic face turn or anything and be accepted into the group, but I think a storyline that flirted with the idea could actually be a lot of fun. Mary has, dare I say it, untapped Vriska energy.
Eh, Mary appearing to have sympathetic or nuanced qualities before revealing that she’s exactly as awful as she’s always appeared to be is a recurring thing with her. She’s a bit of a glass onion.
Lovely phrase!
Mary feels like the type of person that grew up normal but because she’s young and white she probably fell down an alt right pipeline trying to carve out some identity and fell into her religious self righteousness, but if really challenged on it, she would crumble as fast as Joyce did.
Becky somehow carving a friendly relationship with her would be funny because Mary is essentially just Joyce but she never met Becky or likely had a real friend ever.
I don’t remember even a single instance where Mary showed the slightest desire to be friends with any of the characters. Only time she interacted purely positively was when she was kind of love drunk due to her boyfriend. Mary is a fully one dimensional hate sink (honestly like a fundamentalist republicans are) and that’s fine, she doesn’t need to be anything more.
She had a pretty positive rapport with Joyce revolving around art, making art for Sara/Joyce’s door, their party, etc.
She was neutral at best, way back near the beginning when she invited some of the others to church. Then they turned out to be their own people and not Mary clones, so she wrote them all off.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/carpet/
Like the first two Mary storylines were “Mary starts to be friends with people but then they are Sinful and she is simply incapable of not torching everything over it”.
She’s since turned into kind of evangelical Galasso. “Bush-era evangelical” was getting a little dated as a reference (not that there aren’t homophobic evangelicals, obviously, but her vibe is distinctly pre-Trump), so it was either make her sillier, make her more like the modern alt-right, or enter the Vriscourse route by having her more sympathetic, but I kind of miss that early Mary who was never going to not be an asshole but felt bad about not having friends. I think there’s a lot of untapped comedy potential with that tension, especially as Mary is increasingly silly and defanged.
Wait, what two storylines?
There was the bit where she was part of the group looking for a church to go to.
Really hoping that Mary is only in this comic as an incidental extra.
I didnt put this together in my head until i read a bunch of these comments, but….Mary’s here because she can overhear about them getting drunk and try to threaten them because it’s illegal? Now that my brain is on this track I’m not looking forward to it
Ooft. Or worse spreads a rumour that Joe got Joyce drunk and ~something happened~
I was never in the dorms when I went to IU, but I *do* work for a company that delivers alcohol in Bloomington, so I’ve had to learn some of the relevant policies. My understanding is that it’s less an issue of underage drinking (because it’s the morning after and the alcohol is likely mostly out of their systems by now) and more an issue of being against dorm policy. The dorms are all dry, even if you are over 21 it is against the rules to have alcohol in the dorms, I don’t know what the specific penalties are for getting caught, but I do know it can escalate to getting kicked out of the dorm and possibly expelled from the university if you have serious or numerous enough violations.
All that said, a student reporting that she overheard a conversation between two other students in the hallways about possibly getting drunk is not sufficient evidence for any kind of disciplinary action. Mary would need to go to Ruth first, who may or may not conveniently forget about overhearing the party the night before, and even if she went over Ruth’s head, at most there would be a check of Joyce’s and Joe’s rooms for alcohol, which won’t turn anything up since that isn’t where the party was. Mary doesn’t know there was a party or where it was located, and for all she knows this exchange is hypothetical. I fully expect her to tattle, but I don’t expect it to go anywhere, especially since she has a documented history of actively trying to get other people in trouble, so she isn’t exactly a reliable source.
She’s a red herring.
A red Mary-ing, so to speak
poor joe’s heart
Ohh… all right, now I see what Joyce is upset over.
I’d forgotten that terrible incident at the beginning of Freshman year. Nice call back.
ironically; y’know. . .
what?
Ironically she was okay with sex with Joe where they were both drunk, and that was the scenario he was afraid of, so he didn’t get drunk with her, which led to them being… unequally incapacitated, let’s call it, which triggered some ptsdish fears about when Ryan drugged her, which coupled with the lying is why she’s having trust issues with him right now.
Does Joe know about this? If not, I get the feeling Joyce is going to explain it, or allude to it without going into details.
He does! Someone linked to the relevant strips in yesterdays comments! 🙂
Linking again today for prosperity, here’s everything Joe knew (at minimum, not including how they might have talked in the long text convos they had and over the time skip):
Public Knowledge: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/pixely/
Where Joyce Explains: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/object/
Joyce Explaining Continues: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/affirm/
Multiple women came forward about this, Joe knew the details of what this man did, Joyce has explained that it happened to her as well and told him that his behavior affects people.
Honestly, I think this was part of the reason he started trying to be better and less misogynistic. I also really think they’re going to have a serious conversation about this and come out of it with a better understanding of each other and a closer relationship.
Where there is trauma (and there is always trauma) there are misunderstandings and issues like this. Just a part of life.
More specifically that it was Joyce, who he had already started to see as a person first and a woman second.
One of Joe’s things has always been that everybody be on board if _anything_ is going to happen. It’s the one thing that kept him from just being a total skeeze. Joyce was seeing the night as “I can let my hair down around you because you’re trustworthy, while Joe was seeing it as “I need to maintain my sobriety because I don’t want this person, who I love, to regret anything we do and I can’t trust myself drunk.” It’s a communication breakdown that I hope they get a chance to fix before Mary tries anything.
I interpreted the “ironically” to refer to the fact that she trusts him despite him lying to her. She said in last strip, “you lied about it,” and now she’s saying “I trust you.”
Mary….don’t you dare
They’re straight. Mary doesn’t havw any interest in this.
She could spread rumors that Joe tried to get Joyce drunk against her will.
Or that this happened, Ruth knew, and that she did nothing about it. She’s not quite at that point in terms of the knowledge she has, but it’s a dorm — it wouldn’t take much for her to get there.
I can get Joyce’s feelings on this due to her trauma, it would have been really nice for her to make that clear though instead of “hey I have this expectation that you will get drunk here and if you don’t I will feel really bad.” It honestly hits kind of close to home for me. I’ve had times where I felt like wasn’t allowed to be mad at a person because I overstepped their boundaries but I wanted to be mad because they refused to make those boundaries clear, even when asked (I know that’s not exactly the situation here).
In this situation, the same could be said for Joe. They both needed to establish their boundaries before this happened- but I think they both thought that they could handle it/there wouldn’t be a risk. I’m not sure if Joyce knew this would be triggering for her, people have been careful around her when it came to alcohol and she was fine, so this might be the first time in a while she was faced with something that triggered it.
For Joe, he’s very ashamed of himself and believes he’ll fall into his old behavior or the same traps as his father. He hadn’t really communicated beforehand that he wouldn’t be getting drunk with her, and he did lie that he was drinking (no matter how exaggerated the lie was, he still never told her whether or not he’d be getting drunk at the party and why). Joyce seemed to be bulldozing his feelings, but she also didn’t know the extent of them. Same with Joe. They just both didn’t know what the other was feeling of could end up feeling.
(Also a note that trauma responses aren’t always entirely rational etc, etc)
Anyway, this’ll lead to a conversation and I want them both to resolve it and hold hands or smth 🙁
I can’t speak to your experiences, obviously. But so far as your comment pertains to Joyce specifically, I think there was no real good option for her here. With how badly Joyce has been affected by this in the past, I think bringing up those concerns to Joe in the first place probably would’ve been pretty fucking triggering in and of itself.
Yeah there’s no great way to bring it up, but she deliberately made the choice to drink and get drunk here. If she’s going to do those things when she has bad history it would be a good idea to talk about this stuff. I think it’s possible she didn’t realize it would hit this badly though and I overall don’t blame her for not perfectly navigating complex trauma.
Yeah, I’ve had the same issue a lot, people don’t express a boundary, or worse claim there isn’t one when asked point blank, and then get mad at you for crossing a line you had no way of knowing was there. Some boundaries are common enough that I’ve learned to assume they are there until shown otherwise, but a lot of people don’t even realize they *have* a boundary until it’s been crossed but then also don’t seem to realize that’s what happened because they think you’re the unreasonable one for not knowing it was there. It sucks. I will happily respect boundaries when they’ve been made clear to me, so it’s insulting to be treated as a bad person for not reading your mind.
Having said that, I don’t feel that’s applicable here. Joe was aware of Joyce’s trauma, and while it’s reasonable to assume it didn’t occur to him that this might trigger her, I don’t think the issue is that she thinks he knowingly crossed a line, it’s that she’s triggered and therefor not in a place to have a rational conversation about it, meanwhile he’s trying to explain himself and make up for it in the moment instead of giving her space to cool down and talking about it when they are both in a better headspace.
Yeah, and to be fair to Joyce, this issue of a less obvious boundary/trigger wouldn’t have come up like this if Joe hadn’t lied, and not wanting to be lied to is a very common boundary. I can understand why Joe lied, but I can’t fault Joyce for not laying out how the difference in intoxication might make her feel when she didn’t think that would be coming up at all.
He does not appear overtly concussed.
He’s got a thick skull, thankfully
Mary, inexplicably and unintentionally will fix this.
That would be funny. Maybe they can all unite in their common hatred of Mary.
That would be an amazing story arc.
Just gonna leave this strip here, for reference. It seems relevant.
I still want to know how Mary feels about the kidnapping.
Oof. It always hurts to see Joyce grab her hand like this. Obviously there was no way that what happened to her that night wasn’t going to come up in a situation like this, but it always sucks to see. I guess it never really leaves, does it?
Sadly, no, that kind of thing doesn’t ever really leave. It does improve, you get better at managing your reactions to being triggered, you grow and heal until it’s a rarer problem… but less than a year from it? It’s definitely popping up more than we see on camera and Joyce just isn’t verbalizing it.
Ohhhh I didn’t catch that tic. Wow
Mary holds no interest in this because the men in the conversation are neither naked nor have anime eyes.
If Joe’s boxers lack a button, his dick might pop out, so Mary just needs to play the long game.
See, this is the kind of boundary you establish BEFORE the drinking commences. You know, hash it out, see where each party is comfort-wise when it comes to mind-affecting substances so you can reach a reasonable compromise built on honesty and communication.
Tragically these kids are both afflicted with a terminal case of Being-Eighteen-itis, and “not having the life experience necessary be good at communicating alcohol boundaries” is a known symptom that can only be cured by that bongo known as time.
That’s very much what I’m feeling about this. It sucks to see it but it’s really understandable given where they are in their lives.
I can understand why Joyce is upset here, but its not like she has explained this boundary to Joe, this is all a miscommunication and those are never fun to see.
That being said, there will always be struggles when a neurodivergent person like Joyce is dating a Neurotypical person like Joe, their brains work very differently already on top of Joe’s extreme mistrust of himself. If he HAD gotten drunk and something did happen, he would have had a mental breakdown, or at the very least started hating himself even more then he already does.
I really hope they can talk this out and come to a understanding and set those boundaries properly this time, I don’t want this to be the end of their honestly great relationship.
I legit think this is more her assault trauma finally popping up more-so then her neurodivergence.
Stabby face got her drunk, and wasn’t drunk himself. So this is flicking the trauma bean.
It’s definitely triggered her PTSD, but developing Rules that Cannot Be Broken in response to trauma which are so Fundamental and Obvious that you can’t even verbalize them or consciously know they exist before they’re broken… That doesn’t have to be an exclusively autistic trauma response, but since Joyce is autistic her trauma responses have probably been colored by it.
I was more saying the Miscommunication was partially because of the Neurodivergence. I myself am Autistic and communication can be hard sometimes.
But Joe also did not explain his boundary to Joyce. They were going to a party where everyone was drinking, and he didn’t even mention it. Then he lied about it because it was too awkward to have an honest conversation in front of all their friends.
We haven’t been told why he lied. “It’d be too awkward to have an honest conversation in front of their friends” is one of the less charitable reasons one could come up with.
He was given an order disguised as a rethorical question, and when someone you love is drunk and acting stupid you pretend to go along with their ideas so you can be there to protect them from themselves if that is needed. Or you walk away and let them crash and burn, that’s an option too, but having an honest conversation with a drunk person while you’re sober is pointless, frustrating, occasionally hilarious, but mostly just a bad idea.
PTSD is neurodivergence
Joyce, I have no sympathy for you here. I know, you had a traumatic experience, but Joe wasn’t involved, you weren’t getting drunk, and you chose to drink this time. Joe chose not to because he believed it would be better if he didn’t. You chose to get drunk because you think that’s what you want.
Get therapy girl.
Trauma is very well know for being completely rational all the time and care about the exact details of situations that trigger it. She should get therapy, but we can say that without being as uncharitable as possible.Also quick aside, she choose to get drunk because she tried it before and had a good time and so choose to do it again and also had a good time.
She’s still a teenager ffs. Don’t be so harsh.
And if Joe had been upfront about this, before going to a party where everyone was drinking, they could have had a conversation and worked this out in advance. Instead he lied about it, so she rightfully feels that her trust was violated.
You would if you had the kind of trauma Joyce has.
Not automatically. People with the same trauma can perceive and respond to it differently.
Learn what trauma is the fuck???
Yeah trauma is a bongo.
Honestly though.
Been a while since we saw Joyce’s trauma hand.
Somehow I don’t really like that Mary is in the background
Wouldn’t she be in the foreground, since she’s in front of the two perspective wise?
No she’s behind them.
There is not a lot of overlap between Joyce and Mary, but where there is (a bit of hair and the hem of Joyce’s shirt), Joyce is in front.
Nothing is ever a coincidence.
These are big sad hours
That’s kinda the fun nuance of this. I 200% agree with Joe in this situation. BUT him lying about it is inherently puts him in the wrong. Even though as someone with social anxiety I also would probably just…lie in this scenario? Like for me, I hate drinking and I hate doing it, but who wants to be the wet blanket who’s like “I don’t wanna drink and here’s why?” It’s easier to just pretend I’m joining in.
y we’re also told a Lot that it’s totally polite and cool to tell lies that make things socially easier.
This is true and extremely frustrating. I hate lying. Does that mean I never lie? No, I feel like I’m supposed to due to social pressure and so I do sometimes and I hate it. Even the innocuous ones like: “How are you feeling?” “I’m fine”; “What’s up?” “nothing much”; that kinda thing.
And from a social perspective, if Joe was in the role of babysitting Joyce (the sober person who makes sure that drunk/high people don’t make overly bad decisions), this would probably be innocent, especially if it was pre-negotiated.
As it stands, I think that this is a case of “I am sorry. I will communicate better next time.”
(sidenote: people just use “What’s up” like “Hey” for some reason, as in, rhetorically. For I while I would try and actually start answering.)
My favorite past time is actually saying how I’m feeling when people ask “how are you?”. Like i’ll just say “Oh I feel crummy” or something. Cuz what’s the point in asking if you don’t care. Don’t ask rhetorical questions and force me to waste my breath with rhetorical answers.
That’s valid. You’re allowed to answer however you like.
It’s also an interesting challenge to answer that question fully and honestly when it’s not at all what I was thinking about before I ran into the asker.
I do use what’s up like hey. I think it’s fun to say. Suuuupppp.
I don’t even view those as lies TBH. A lie communicates (deceptively), but in those pleasantries no information is actually exchanged. It’s just a social signal of ‘I acknowledge you’.
Technically if I say “I’m fine” and I’m not fine then it’s a lie.
Oh, I’m that wet blanket. I’m quite content with my soggnitude. “I don’t drink, no it’s not a moral thing, I just think it’s disgusting. No, you’re not going to talk me into it, and no, that’s not why I’m refusing to go to your party. I also hate being around drunk people. They’re even more obnoxious than alcohol is disgusting. That is why I don’t go to parties.”
It’s just nice to get it out there so people know better than to bother me about it in the future.
I definitely let my cousin talk me into getting a Margarita on my birthday and actually it tasted like crap just like I had predicted. And honestly I wish I had just pushed the issue and just said “don’t worry about it.”
I know people can be really obnoxious about pushing alcohol at a party. If someone doesn’t want to drink, it would certainly be easier to lie about it. But you shouldn’t lie to your partner about it. If you’re not able to be honest with them about your choices, then you’re not in a good place.
Man, I’m so glad I don’t hang out with any of these people who are pushy about others drinking. Pretty much all my friends drink, or have at various points during our friendship, and I’ve never needed more than an “Oh, I don’t drink” for the subject– usually arising because they were offering me a drink– to be dropped.
Now, my parents’ friends? Yeah, some of them are obnoxious about it. At one point my *dad* was trying to pressure me to drink because, I don’t know, I should try it out with safe people before getting wasted at a random party? But I had no desire to drink at all. And I think the safer people would have been the ones who were chill with me making the decision for myself.
This is why someone invented ginger ale.
It’s even easier to be autisticker than that: it doesn’t occur to me that I could be a wet blanket.
…and indeed so far I haven’t been, but that may be because of the kind of company I’ve been in.
But I think comparing to the “I don’t drink” situation distorts what was going on here. There’s no reason to think that Joe doesn’t drink at all, just that he didn’t want to drink in this particular situation. With Joyce, at this party. For reasons that seemed good to him, but that might not have seemed so to her and certainly would have turned into a big, probably trauma filled discussion.
There are a lot more pitfalls here than the common “I don’t drink and don’t push me to do so.”
I feel like you shouldn’t have to explain yourself if you say “I don’t feel like drinking, tonight”
I think I disagree with the distinction you’re trying to make. Whether or not someone never drinks, there shouldn’t be pressure to drink. Joyce was (unintentionally and unknowingly and imo innocently) pressuring Joe to drink in that moment. The social outcomes of saying no to alcohol are quite uncomfortable — people are somewhat more likely to respect “I don’t drink” than “I don’t feel like drinking tonight”, but I don’t think categorical refusal should have more weight than a one time “no”.
No means no, but it is very socially acceptable not to simply accept a no when it comes to alcohol. NO ONE DID THAT HERE, (except Joyce accidentally) but it was reasonable for Joe to expect it.
None of that to say Joe deliberately lying to Joyce about it was OK. Just that it was a situation that inherently comes with pressure to drink
I agree with most of this, but Joyce didn’t fail to accept a no. She was never given a ‘no’, we have no idea how she would have responded to that either accidentally or intentionally.
At the very least, Joe clearly expected her to have trouble with a no, which ties into social pressure.
Sure.
I expect that you’re going to have trouble with me continuing to disagree with you. Is that social pressure to agree with you or is it a personal opinion that I am free to take actions about regardless?
I get that and I don’t think there should be pressure for him to drink anyway, but I do think when you’re refusing to drink for someone else’s sake, it’s a very different situation and leaves room open for “I don’t want you to do this for me.”
I’ll be honest, it takes a *lot* for me to condemn someone for choosing *not* to drink alcohol, and even this doesn’t cross that line. Joyce is triggered because Joe ostensibly had more control over the situation by not being inebriated, but rationally him drinking dramatically multiplies the chances that something bad would happen (I trust that Joe *would* be on his best behavior- a 0% chance multiplied by anything is still 0%, but that’s just how alcohol works) and Joyce needs to recognize that. I understand where she’s coming from with her trauma, but she *is* still wrong here.
See the problem is, there was a stretch of a few hours before the party where joe could have explained his anxieties to a sober, not partying Joyce. And maybe even that would kill the building vibe, I’ve got the social anxiety too so I can definitely see that being a concern.
I feel like Joe’s been scared or reluctant to express his lingering anxieties about himself and his past behavior. He needs to communicate that things are not, in fact, all good with him, and that he’s not the party boyfriend who’s comfortable doing sex things to Joyce right now so that she can adjust her expectations and behavior accordingly. I think he’s scared of letting her down, she’s acting like a normal teen college student and enjoying life without puritanical shame for the first time ever. He doesn’t want to hinder that. But he needs to communicate it, bc otherwise there will be situations where she’s getting drunk and he’s too scared to, and that imbalance triggers her trauma.
Basically this. They’ve been good so far, but part of that has been Joe overcompensating for his past ways and that’s clashing with Joyce (probably) overcompensating for hers.
ah, joe. its tough when the worlds spent a lot of time telling you ‘well obviously sexual intent is just INHERENT to you! look at all the shit your dads doing!’.
Okay, that makes sense why she wanted him to drink so much now. Glad Joe didn’t if he didn’t want to but yeah, that checks out
So, what happens next time she wants to get drunk and he doesn’t feel like it? Not a good precedent to set.
Probably she just holds off on the drinks then. She’s fine with both staying sober. Or Joe just steps out for an evening, probably also fine. It’s even possible that she might be able to handle it if Joe (who she does trust) openly tells her he won’t be drinking.
This isn’t about Joyce being unable to interact with someone who doesn’t want to drink. This is about her trauma from someone who secretly didn’t drink.
I THINK she’s saying she was ironically trusting him with getting drunk, not that she “trusts him ironically”. Strange wording. I understand Joyce’s trauma here but he makes a solid point. SHE got HERSELF drunk and he simply DIDN’T WANT TO. The deception was wrong. I am still curious what her reaction would have been if he had actually said something at the party though. She was all-in on saying the f-word and drinking herself stupid.
She doesn’t trust him ironically. She trusts him, ironically. Ironically, she trusts him.
Commas are important people!
my heaaaaart omg
Activated my Patreon membership after several months without it because I needed to see how this turned out. That’s how much I love these two.
Joe should respond: “I’m scared of me”, b/c it’s true.
Poor Joe. But poor Joyce also. Trust issues keeping them apart.
THERE IT IS.
Her Roofie trauma is *Finally* kicking in. At least it wasn’t like.. mid coitus, it would have broken Joe.
AAAAAAnd Mary is going to pull the Drama tag.
YUP.
Fucking yup.
Either that or Mary stores this little nugget away.
Mary: “It’s a surprise tool that will help us later.”
Sometimes you tell tiny lies to keep things going and Joyce would be willing to let this one go…if it wasn’t for her very specific trauma irrationally defining the roofie as “if I’m drunk and he’s not then I’m in danger.”
Yet ironically, Joe was deliberately sober because he doesn’t trust Drunk Joe enough to leave him around Drunk Joyce unsupervised.
I hope they talk this out and mutually understand this is a communication problem, not malice.
I’m pretty sure that’s coming next. If I had to predict, this is the narrative reminder that Joe doesn’t want to hurt Joyce and this is a big fear for him, so when Joyce consents in the near future (because that’s what this is probably leading up to) their fucking is sweet and romantic and not haunted by Joe’s past.
Sad face
🥺
….. incoming Mary.
I believe Joyce is saying it’s ironic that she trusts him, because he doesn’t trust himself enough to behave if he’s drunk. (Have we even SEEN Joe drunk in any Willis World continuity?)I do feel Joe didn’t get drunk not because he’s afraid of sexual involvement with Joyce, which she very obviously wanted, but because he fears true intimacy. He’s good with this sort of sweet romantic stuff, but intimate sex, as opposed to merely fuck buddy type sex (looking at you, Roz) is scary stuff. Joe’s dad’s womanizing clearly has affected him. He thought for so long casual sex is ok as long as neither party had deeper expectations. (Again ironically, that may well have been Dr Rosenthal’s excuse “Oh c’mon hun, she meant nothing to me!”). But for Joyce, intimacy was the whole point. Getting wasted was merely a gateway in that sense, or maybe a get out of jail card “We couldn’t help it, Mom! We were both drunk!”
I also foresee Mary Bradford doing her judgmental bongo thing shortly.
Can’t I edit this? Don’t know where the “bongo” thing came from
You said the b-word, which is bongo.
Oh didn’t you we had an autocorrect for swears
Didn’t KNOW not didn’t YOU arrghh
the word you originally meant was replaced because the comments section couldn’t be trusted not to be misogynistic as hell to a couple of the characters.
I’m sure there are ways to get around the censor but you’ll probably get banned. And comment deleted.
He’s definitely worried about sex with Joyce. Specifically he’s worried that she’ll jump into doing something that she’ll regret later, like Liz almost did with him.
That worry escalates drastically if she’s drunk when it happens and if he’s drunk too, he might not have the willpower to turn her down.
Joe has always been about consent, his entire hat was that he saw himself as an ethical man slut, regardless of some of the crass jokes he made before. Drunk *anyone* cannot give full consent.
Joe has always been about creepily sexualizing every single situation and every woman he met. He kept an online list of how much he’d like to fuck women on campus. He thought he’d “fix” Joyce with his dick and he thought it was appropriate to “joke” about having sex with drunk women that they would not have had otherwise.
He’s a lot better now, but talking about him like he’s always been a misunderstood “ethical” slut is just not factual.
I do like him now though. Reformed Joe is great.
That he was confused on what counts as consent doesn’t mean he wasn’t all about consent. People can be wrong while still being all about being right. A colourblind person can be a true and honest fan of red, even when it is sometimes green.
I’m all about Magic: The Gathering. I’ve never played a single game, don’t know any of the rules, barely notice the cards when I’m someplace that sells them, deliberately bring other games to game nights, and shower at least twice a week, but I’m all about that card game.
This has almost nothing to do with consent. Drunk people consent to sex all the time – very often with other drunk people. You can say that morally speaking they raped each other, but neither the law nor people in the real world treat it like that.
Nor was he worried about it in those terms. He was worried about a drunk Joyce doing something she’d regret and him being too drunk to say no to something he really wants. That’s not a consent issue, it’s an avoiding bad choices one.
As I said yesterday— this isn’t litigation, this is trauma. The normal rules of who’s “at fault” don’t apply.
Neither of them is “in the wrong” here. They both tried their best with good intentions and leftover trauma from Druggo McStabbed is complicating the situation.
Joyce shouldn’t have pressured Joe and Joe shouldn’t have lied, but that’s small potatoes stuff really. Communicate and they’ll get through this.
Okay, but Joe Normal Summoned a monster, which activates Joyce’s Spell, allowing her to negate the Summon and inflict that monster’s ATK as damage. So like, yeah.
It’s Joe’s fault for not running Imperm. Or some level of Backrow removal.
Agree. I can definitely see both sides here and both have valid points, so hopefully they’ll talk this through and come to an agreeable compromise. 🙂
Oh no, now Mary knows…
she soon to thoroughly learn that Snitches Get Stiches D:<
Well this is the start of an open and honest conversation, if they keep going like this they could resolve this positively.
After that, Mary just has to mysteriously disappear, never to be seen again.
Quick! Someone hit Mary with a Forget-me-stick before she starts her nonsense!
The pessimist in me thinks that we’re going to cut back to Sarah feeling very pleased with herself.
i want them to kisssssssssssssssssss
Did Joe do something wrong? Not really.
Is Joyce valid in feeling upset/hurt despite that given her history? Yep.
Nobody’s in the wrong or the asshole here. It just needs communication. Should have had it pre-party but the second best time is now.
IMHO Joyce was being kiiiinda domineering and generally a huge ass to Joe during the party, though…
… Mary will tell Joyce’s family about she’s getting drunk, isn’t she?
I mean she doesn’t need to, Joyce posted a public social media post when she went out to get drunk with Dorothy
You cannot convince me Carol isn’t the sort to stalk her children’s social media
normally I’m a sarah fan but I feel like sarah blew this one up way too early to literally nobody’s benefit tbh
Meh. I’d want my friend to call that out immediately.
“You were trying to force a mind altering substance on someone and they didn’t let you” is the kind of blowing up your friends are supposed to do.
it seems to have blown up in the other direction though
feels like something to address once everyone’s awake properly – and with the context you gave rather than “he was only pretending to drink”
This would have gotten exponentially worse the more time passed. The sooner the better. Thank you sarah
Joe doesn’t trust himself, Joyce. He wants to sleep with you. Sober he knows what he really wants is to wait for you to be ready to sleep with him and to have a normal non-sexual boyfriend-girlfriend relationship with you. He’s also scared that drunk him will interpret signs of affection from drunk you as “being ready” and tomorrow you’ll feel betrayed and hurt and reject him for being awful like you did the night after the first date.
More I think that drunk Joyce would actually make a move and want to, no misinterpretations involved and that non-drunk Joyce afterwards would feel like she “ruined” herself.
And that drunk Joe wouldn’t be able to turn down drunk Joyce when she did try.
I was gonna say it’s been over two years since we’ve seen Mary, but I saw she had a brief appearance from where Sarah was sending out texts to everyone asking if they were Lucy. It’s been over two years, however, since we’ve seen Mary from more than just the neck up.
The train derailment from this conflict is going to be an absolute ruin, isn’t it? Like…Mary overhears this argument, cares nothing about the who-was-drunk-who-wasnt angle and latches on to the illegal drinking part.
Say she brings it up with Ruth. Ruth denies any knowledge, making a competent excuse – out of the building, headache, early to bed, etc. Not satisfied, Mary goes over Ruth’s head and finds someone either malicious or overprotective and things escalate.
Joe can’t escape the allegations, even if Joyce denies them herself. He gets blamed for the alcohol showing up, at which point, he’s saved by Dina, selflessly taking the blame and facing the consequences. Suspension? Expulsion?
So that’s just where my brain took the worst case scenario, anyway.
Name accurate.
Ruth denies knowledge on the basis that she has no knowledge and there’s no reason why she would.
Mary escalates, and the accusation isn’t credible, isn’t worth investigating, and isn’t really enforceable anyway as there isn’t likely to be any evidence and Mary doesn’t even know anything anyway.
I’m proud of Joe for not getting drunk. That way he could make sure his actions wouldn’t be considered inappropriate. It shows respect for Joyce.
Of course, it doesn’t mean he will avoid the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ scenario.
Yeah I suppose there would be some trauma about that
Somehow, *sad Joe* feels so sincere. i love that in him!
I feel like “it’s okay if we’re both drunk” is a very common, deeply ingrained meme and it’s just not true. If anything, being drunk makes malicious people worse and good people careless.
It’s not necessarily okay if you’re both drunk, but it’s at least an even playing field. And it’s a long way away from one person getting the other one drunk while pretending to drink but secretly staying sober.
I would say the problem there is “getting the other one drunk”. Doesn’t matter whether they’re drinking themselves, if someone is pushing another person to drink more it’s a huge red flag regardless of their own intoxication state.
i think it’s never an even playing field, because two people aren’t the same amount of drunk, might not have the same experience of navigating being drunk.
(then again, sober people *also* have different experience levels, also relevant for navigating consent…)
Sarah saved Joe from compounding the lie.
Maybe. He wasn’t given a chance to be honest either.