Was gonna make a joke referencing the infamous “Top 10 Hottest Female Sonic Characters” video but realized I can’t because even three movies in, we have yet to see ONE female character from the games in these movies. How sad is that?
i suppose maddie is roughly “the size of an average human mother”, though
Given that the first one evidently started its script existence with [insert cartoon character IP here] and ended up surprisingly good, with the second one adding the characters from Sonic 2 and 3, I think we’re doing okayish.
The supporting cast from the games doesn’t really explode until Shadow is introduced, I think.
Plus there was the Archie Sonic comic, and three different cartoons that came out before Sonic Adventure 2. Some of the Archie Sonic characters even made cameos in Sonic Spinball IIRC.
Granted, now that I think about it, there’s not exactly a huge list of female Sonic characters is there, outside of the comics. Something like 9 or 10 total I think? The Archie series was packed full of them though.
Jocelyne turns her attention back to Joyce, who’s staring at her phone. Jocelyne looks at the screen and is like, “Uh, I appreciate at support to me liking girls, but you didn’t need to pull up pictures of books for me.”
Fucking autocorrect doesn’t want me talking about boobs. Or it wants the pictures of Dorothy’s boobs to also include books, make a themed photo shoot out of it.
I mean, This is debatable but I don’t feel like doing a deep dive into the MCU to find out. (I know it’s not true if we’re just saying Marvel)
The problem with these comics getting posted at a time where it’s late for me is that I’m commenting as I’m getting ready to sleep, so sometimes I’m just hit post on a comment that isn’t a complete though.
I guess it depends on the metric. We judging by subtext, cause Civil War has the most tension but I feel like the Thor movies have the most bare ass shots. Love and Thunder was pretty horny too actually.
Actually my first instinct was that I just saw someone post the fight in the bar from Iron Man 3 and I couldn’t think of any moments from Ragnarok that came close to it in terms of horniness, although it Ragnarok might make it up in volume, I think IM3’s horny is pretty concentrated to small bursts.
The actual right answer is probably one of the non-MCU films though. One of the Blades or the X-Mans or the Deadpools.
Civil War has that scene where Sebastian Stan choke-slams Scarlett Johansson on a table while she’s got her legs wrapped around him. That’s pretty much neck-and-neck with the bar fight, aye?
I think in terms of ‘equal pandering to either gender you’re attracted to’, I’d say. Most MCU movies are pretty 80+% male (unless it’s Black Widow, Captain Marvel or The Marvels).
I guess there’s Ant-Man and The Wasp? But I don’t think that was very horny.
Ragnarok had Thor, Valkyrie, Hulk, Loki and Hera? Which is a good spread I think.
So is Becky’s fear either ‘what if Dina no longer likes me?!’ or ‘what if Joyce could be into girls after all and Dorothy steals her away?!’ or ‘what if Joyce could be into girls after all and I gave up on her too quickly because I thought she was unattainable?!’.
Or y’know, I guess all four (yes there’s a fourth one, she just hasn’t found it yet).
Becky’s identity as a lesbian was hard fought for, and I think she finds security in it. The idea that it could change is scary. It’s also hard when you grow up in an environment that thinks the correct response to queerness is to change it, to accept that change can happen in a non-abusive way. The idea that someone “can’t change” their sexual orientation is also used as are argument for why it should be accepted.
(There is a difference between changing your sexuality and your sexuality changing– but Becky’s new to considering it at all, so I’m not sure she’s distinguishing it or what)
All of this is exactly it, except that this is 90% of people who struggle with this, and the reality of advertising that attraction can change is that a bunch of people who simply do not want the gays to exist would try harder to make gay people straight.
I think your answer hits the nail right on the head. Her dad wanted to change her, her church wanted to change her, but Becky knew what they didn’t: that this wasn’t “sin,” this was how she was made, that she’s been that way “forever.”
And she knew she knew she was “fearfully and wonderfully made” as she was, and that it wasn’t *her* choice. And like she said to Joyce, she knew that God would be on “the right side.”
But, if it’s something that actually CAN be changed. That, if she had tried enough, she could have done. Why, then that doesn’t sound like “how you’re made” anymore; that sounds like however many other sins that take hard work.
… We don’t even know the circumstances of Becky’s mom’s death. We know she took her own life, and we know that Becky feels some responsibility, if not for her mom’s death, then for living a particular way. On the page that Thag mentions, actually. The “sorry, Mom.”
sexuality, gender and neurodivergence
all fluid things, this ya need to learn yeah
breakin free of the conformist hive
gonna kick things up into overdrive
HRT does that sometimes! Not always. Some people go from straight to gay, or gay to straight, or gay to gay… Or become bi. Or stop being bi? Or straight to straight.
And its tricky to predict, too. Like, you’ll have a boyfriend you’re really, really into, you level up at night, and BOOM, you’re suddenly a Sylveon? What happened to Umbreon? What the fuck are Baby Doll Eyes??!!
I’m cis, but I had to get HRT for a while because my meds fvkced with my hormones, and when my wife went through menopause she also did HRT to mellow out the changes from that (sometimes women’s E production drops too fast and HRT gives a gradual reduction). Both of our HRT was in the form of a topical cream.
It’s hard to accept change in yourself. When I came out as bisexual, I was met with people saying that would change, or asking if I was “still bisexual” at various points. And then when “bisexual” felt like it no longer really fit as a label, it was hard to let go of–like, it felt like it would be biphobic of me, or supporting biphobia or something.
I also didn’t go to gay or straight like the people saying bisexuality doesn’t last were saying– it just got messier and didn’t feel like “bisexual” worked for me anymore.
So now I just use “queer” and let what that means change as I do, but there are still things that are hard– like, I’m probably aromantic now, but I didn’t used to be– I used to be super romantic, and I miss those feelings and miss wanting those things, but now it’s kind of like I reach for them and they’re just… not there.
I’ve met plenty of people who are Very Not Cool with other people’s sexual fluidity, including several queer people. Sometimes it’s discomfort like Becky’s having here, but sometimes they’re being intentionally exclusionary for other reasons.
My working theory for a lot of this stuff is that the way we think about sexuality and gender and honestly a lot of things is constrained by the need for advocacy movements to adopt the positions that are the most rhetorically effective rather than the ones that are the most true.
It means the way we think about these things are often positions designed to resist attack from bad actors rather than positions designed to help us actually understand ourselves.
I wish we were in a world where people were allowed to just be whatever the hell they wanted. Unfortunately, we have to preemptively worry about how bigots will take us when explaining ourselves, which definitely hamstrings communication quite a bit.
It’s actually quite interesting to see Becky who is usually depicted as remarkably well adjusted to accepting different gender/sexual orientations for someone with her religious fundamentalist background having a point of struggle. She’s usually a step ahead of Joyce out of the two of them.
I don’t think she so much scared about her suddenly liking boys, than what it means that maybe someday she could. Her quest to be herself led to her loosing ties to her only real community she had ever had, her church, and, ultimately, her Dad being beaten to death in a dark basement surrounded by her traumatized friends.
The idea that she could one day like boys is the idea that maybe if she had just stuck to the program, kept her mouth shut and held out a little longer, then maybe she could still have been happy and all that pain and death avoided.
None of what happened was her fault, but I doubt she lacks some feelings of guilt about what happened and the idea that it wasn’t needed must be horrifying.
Metaphorically speaking, she decided to walk her through a minefield because she had been told 100% the enemy had a sniper on the other path, and then a bunch of her squad got hurt by mines. Later she learns there was a 95% chance the sniper was even there.
Second guessing herself or feeling guilty isn’t logical, she didn’t kidnap her friends or kill her dad and she was working with the best information she had, but I think part of her will always be afraid that if she had waited and chosen the other path, then just maybe nobody would have gotten hurt. As such, part of her will always be terrified that that would mean all pain was her fault.
Because Becky has defined herself as lesbian and styled every single aspect of her existence as ‘not into dudes’ and now it’s being undermined by someone who confirms nothing is set in stone.
Becky might not be as rigidly fundamentalist in her thinking as Joyce can be but she’s still from the same type of upbringing.
Huh. I honestly had no idea sexuality could change. I always just figured it was locked in and people just… figured themselves out better. Is that a thing that just happens or is it an HRT thing?
It can be either, although IMO the true extent of what causes what is unclear. It’s not really easy to research this stuff, since so much is self reported.
yeah as it turns out, earth creatures including humans are THAT many orders of magnitude more complicated in many things, including the diversity of sexuality and how it changes
Sexuality can and does change, but also I knew a guy who’s gay now who was pretty anti-straight relationships when he was a girl (like down to some of that “all straight sex is inherently rapey” nonsense) because imagining himself in a relationship with a dude made him feel… very girl in ways that felt violating for reasons he could not yet understand. Being able to imagine yourself in a relationship without triggering dysphoria would, I imagine, change a lot about who you could comfortably feel attracted to.
There’s also a lot of crossover in the general messaging around gender and sexual orientation, so someone might think their feelings that go with not being feminine, for example, mean that they’re a lesbian. (Sexuality is more permissible to question than gender, generally, especially before recent years.) (“More” does not mean to imply that people are particularly invited to quest their sexuality either.)
There was a transwoman that I knew before and after transition, who went from a straight dude to a straight woman in the space of 9 months. There was a brief bisexual period in the middle, but only a few months after she got into a bra and stopped using falsies she was dating a dude and left her girlfriend, who is also one of my friends.
It can be a result of HRT, therapy, rebuilding mental frameworks, self-acceptance, natural hormone shifts in the body over time, and probably too many other things to count. In my experience, people don’t usually talk about it, because biphobia and conversion therapy are so heavily entrenched in US culture. It’s nice to see people (and fictional characters) being more open about this kind of shift.
It’s one of those topics where people get real nervous real quick, and for fairly good reason. There’s just too much precedent of discussions like it having either malicious or technically-well-meaning-but-ultimately-very-harmful intent behind them.
Kinda like how, if I say I’m curious why some people are gay and some aren’t, someone’s probably gonna worry I’m looking for a way to ‘cure’ being gay. When actually it’s just: okay so why are sexualities a thing at all?
So, yeah, it is nice to see some discussion of it in what is pretty obviously not going to be a maliciously-based context. We can safely assume that the solidly queer-inclusive webcomic is not about to say “well actually gay bad, let’s fix it”, which makes a good platform where people are (hopefully) not expecting to hear some conversion therapy bullcrap.
For a lot of people, that is true. For some it’s not though. Sometimes it’s related to hormones like HRT and sometimes it’s about understanding yourself or labels better and sometimes stuff just plumb changes.
Hmm. Ragnarok doesn’t have Gamora (green) or Nebula (blue, cyborg, Karen Gillan), so it doesn’t have the MCU’s hottest women in it, but it does feature Abs Hemsworth, the third hottest MCU dude, so it’s pretty high up there.
For some reason, my first pass over this strip was backwards (not sure why, I haven’t been reading manga lately) and I got to the second-to-first panel before I realized that it was Jocelyne, not Joyce. The only surprising bit was that “Joyce” was being that open about it with Becky…
Becky’s heading for a breakdown about sexuality stuff, isn’t she? Not because of her own, from what I’ve seen, but just the idea that it *is* fluid for many people clearly stresses her out. Which I get, as someone 1) who likes being able to put everything into neat little boxes and 2) whose sexuality(/gender) has definitely changed and cannot be categorized well At All–but even if hers *did* change one day, that wouldn’t make her experiences right now mean any less. I just worry about what’s going to be the catalyst for that impending breakdown.
(Also: oof, I remember how HRT makes one’s libido go all weird, lmao)
^*to clarify, I meant that I haven’t seen any indication that Becky’s own sexuality has changed at all (and ofc I believe someone when they say who they are)
Oh, yeah, that’s a thing, for gender and sexuality both. They can’t be deliberately changed, but, like pretty much everything else about people, they can shift over time.
It’s why you get some people who know they’re trans from childhood, and why you get some people who don’t just take awhile to notice, they very firmly /are not/ at odds with their AGAB until some later point in life. Sometimes the person who starts transitioning in their 30s didn’t realize or didn’t accept it until now, sometimes they just… genuinely weren’t trans yet.
Vaguely related, I’ve seen a… theory? way of thinking? floating around somewhere that says “girl” and “woman” are different genders, and “boy” and “man” are different genders. Most girls grow up into women, most boys grow up into men, but sometimes a girl grows up into a man or a boy grows up into a woman.
When it comes to sexuality, you can also get people who have or develop exceptions. Say you have a straight dude whose wife, after 20 years of marriage, turns out to be his husband. Sometimes you then get a straight dude who’s very attracted to his husband. Or you can have a straight guy who’s attracted to a good chunk of women and to, like, one random guy ever, who doesn’t consider himself bi because it’s literally just been the one guy. Sexuality, like any other aspect of human behavior and personality, can be wiggly for some people.
For all of that, discussion can be a bit tricky. Both because people get (somewhat reasonably) scared of ill intent if there’s a discussion about changing gender/sexuality, and because we can’t really point a Bi-O-Matic at people to figure out if some of their attraction is new or if it just wasn’t accepted/present/relevant until now.
I’m aware, for example, of someone who’s taken testosterone now and then while tinkering with their gender, who’s normally a lesbian but winds up bi when they’re on T. They can’t tell how much of that is because men perceive them differently and interact with them differently, potentially in less offputting ways with less offputting implications, when they’re on T.
I actually really like Becky being horrified at the prospect of shifting sexuality as her liberation from fundamentalism is based on “knowing thyself.”
I was terrified of that happening to me, I met so many who said they were going to be lesbians, and 4 years of hormones and a surgery later you would meet their boyfriends. So GLAD I never had to deal with that! 25 years later, happily man free. There hasn’t been a penis in the apartment since the dog died. Heh.
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what you’d have to watch out for is after filling up with gender fluid if you would do the entire cast of Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Don’t forget to top of your gender fluid.
Now we need a complete 3-phase diagram of the freezing & boiling points of gender fluid.
I mean –
[frantically shoves Sonadow art under a table]
Hahaha nothing to see here!
Was gonna make a joke referencing the infamous “Top 10 Hottest Female Sonic Characters” video but realized I can’t because even three movies in, we have yet to see ONE female character from the games in these movies. How sad is that?
i suppose maddie is roughly “the size of an average human mother”, though
Given that the first one evidently started its script existence with [insert cartoon character IP here] and ended up surprisingly good, with the second one adding the characters from Sonic 2 and 3, I think we’re doing okayish.
The supporting cast from the games doesn’t really explode until Shadow is introduced, I think.
I mean, before Shadow we had Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Metal Sonic, Mighty, Ray, Espio, Charmy, Vector, Fang, Bark, Bean, Big and Gamma.
Plus there was the Archie Sonic comic, and three different cartoons that came out before Sonic Adventure 2. Some of the Archie Sonic characters even made cameos in Sonic Spinball IIRC.
Granted, now that I think about it, there’s not exactly a huge list of female Sonic characters is there, outside of the comics. Something like 9 or 10 total I think? The Archie series was packed full of them though.
I mean, there was Longclaw, but yeah, no Batface the Rouge (…yet?)
Gender fluid is more stable than resublimated thiotimoline see “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline” by Asimov et al.
No, but it’s getting there. Think of it as a transitional compound.
Nice job 🙂
Really wish I could watch Joyce’s facial expressions though that conversation.
She got a text with pictures that distracted her.
oh gods
I hope you’re right
gods I hope you’re right xD
Jocelyne turns her attention back to Joyce, who’s staring at her phone. Jocelyne looks at the screen and is like, “Uh, I appreciate at support to me liking girls, but you didn’t need to pull up pictures of books for me.”
Fucking autocorrect doesn’t want me talking about boobs. Or it wants the pictures of Dorothy’s boobs to also include books, make a themed photo shoot out of it.
That’s okay my brain changed it back for you anyway ^_^
My instinct is that it’s just locked in a still frame of mild embarrassed shock
who wouldn’t amiright
Thor Ragnarok was like the horniest Marvel movie.
I feel like that’s debatable?
I mean, This is debatable but I don’t feel like doing a deep dive into the MCU to find out. (I know it’s not true if we’re just saying Marvel)
The problem with these comics getting posted at a time where it’s late for me is that I’m commenting as I’m getting ready to sleep, so sometimes I’m just hit post on a comment that isn’t a complete though.
I guess it depends on the metric. We judging by subtext, cause Civil War has the most tension but I feel like the Thor movies have the most bare ass shots. Love and Thunder was pretty horny too actually.
Actually my first instinct was that I just saw someone post the fight in the bar from Iron Man 3 and I couldn’t think of any moments from Ragnarok that came close to it in terms of horniness, although it Ragnarok might make it up in volume, I think IM3’s horny is pretty concentrated to small bursts.
The actual right answer is probably one of the non-MCU films though. One of the Blades or the X-Mans or the Deadpools.
I was going to say ‘but we had naked Hulk in Ragnarok’, but then I do remember we had actual Thor butt in Love and Thunder.
Yeah it’s probably the first Deadpool then. I often think of outside the MCU as not even Marvel but now they’re all under the same umbrella anyway.
Civil War has that scene where Sebastian Stan choke-slams Scarlett Johansson on a table while she’s got her legs wrapped around him. That’s pretty much neck-and-neck with the bar fight, aye?
I think in terms of ‘equal pandering to either gender you’re attracted to’, I’d say. Most MCU movies are pretty 80+% male (unless it’s Black Widow, Captain Marvel or The Marvels).
I guess there’s Ant-Man and The Wasp? But I don’t think that was very horny.
Ragnarok had Thor, Valkyrie, Hulk, Loki and Hera? Which is a good spread I think.
What, ALL of them? Even Taika Waititi? Jeff Goldblum?
I mean, Peter Dinklage I get.
Dang Becky, almost elbowed right into those 4-month-of-E tits, that’ll hurt a girl 😛
Oh god don’t remind me of that 😖
So is Becky’s fear either ‘what if Dina no longer likes me?!’ or ‘what if Joyce could be into girls after all and Dorothy steals her away?!’ or ‘what if Joyce could be into girls after all and I gave up on her too quickly because I thought she was unattainable?!’.
Or y’know, I guess all four (yes there’s a fourth one, she just hasn’t found it yet).
“What if I’m not really a lesbian and all this was for nothing!”
I think it’s “Becky is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that she could be anything other than a Lesbian” for very understandable reasons given her history.
I think you’re definitely on the right path for where Becky’s story might be heading
All of em is good
Becky’s identity as a lesbian was hard fought for, and I think she finds security in it. The idea that it could change is scary. It’s also hard when you grow up in an environment that thinks the correct response to queerness is to change it, to accept that change can happen in a non-abusive way. The idea that someone “can’t change” their sexual orientation is also used as are argument for why it should be accepted.
(There is a difference between changing your sexuality and your sexuality changing– but Becky’s new to considering it at all, so I’m not sure she’s distinguishing it or what)
All of this is exactly it, except that this is 90% of people who struggle with this, and the reality of advertising that attraction can change is that a bunch of people who simply do not want the gays to exist would try harder to make gay people straight.
I think your answer hits the nail right on the head. Her dad wanted to change her, her church wanted to change her, but Becky knew what they didn’t: that this wasn’t “sin,” this was how she was made, that she’s been that way “forever.”
And she knew she knew she was “fearfully and wonderfully made” as she was, and that it wasn’t *her* choice. And like she said to Joyce, she knew that God would be on “the right side.”
But, if it’s something that actually CAN be changed. That, if she had tried enough, she could have done. Why, then that doesn’t sound like “how you’re made” anymore; that sounds like however many other sins that take hard work.
… We don’t even know the circumstances of Becky’s mom’s death. We know she took her own life, and we know that Becky feels some responsibility, if not for her mom’s death, then for living a particular way. On the page that Thag mentions, actually. The “sorry, Mom.”
This is going to be big.
sexuality, gender and neurodivergence
all fluid things, this ya need to learn yeah
breakin free of the conformist hive
gonna kick things up into overdrive
HRT does that sometimes! Not always. Some people go from straight to gay, or gay to straight, or gay to gay… Or become bi. Or stop being bi? Or straight to straight.
yeah it like a branched Pokemon evolution, it can go either way depending on a lot of stuff ^^
And its tricky to predict, too. Like, you’ll have a boyfriend you’re really, really into, you level up at night, and BOOM, you’re suddenly a Sylveon? What happened to Umbreon? What the fuck are Baby Doll Eyes??!!
‘Its terrifying. Glad it didn’t happen to me
Saw this conflict for Becky coming and called it in a previous strip only to get told off for it man it’s tasty to be vindicated nomnomnomnommers
Oh my fucking god, FINE. I’ll call my doctor and talk to them about HRT. Even webcomics are rubbing it in my face now
Good luck!
4 years last month.
Zero regrets
Does it come in topical cream form? Cuz then you could really rub it in your face.
I’m cis, but I had to get HRT for a while because my meds fvkced with my hormones, and when my wife went through menopause she also did HRT to mellow out the changes from that (sometimes women’s E production drops too fast and HRT gives a gradual reduction). Both of our HRT was in the form of a topical cream.
I mean… mood…
LET’S GOOOOOOOOOO
People seem to be cool with sexuality fluidity until they realize their own sexuality could be fluid.
i mean, maybe?
Becky’s is more the exception than the rule it seems, given what Leslie told her about fluidity.
And then they spend like an hour taking pictures of their boobs to send to their BFF, and tack on a “lol” like it makes it not mean anything.
It’s hard to accept change in yourself. When I came out as bisexual, I was met with people saying that would change, or asking if I was “still bisexual” at various points. And then when “bisexual” felt like it no longer really fit as a label, it was hard to let go of–like, it felt like it would be biphobic of me, or supporting biphobia or something.
I also didn’t go to gay or straight like the people saying bisexuality doesn’t last were saying– it just got messier and didn’t feel like “bisexual” worked for me anymore.
So now I just use “queer” and let what that means change as I do, but there are still things that are hard– like, I’m probably aromantic now, but I didn’t used to be– I used to be super romantic, and I miss those feelings and miss wanting those things, but now it’s kind of like I reach for them and they’re just… not there.
I’ve met plenty of people who are Very Not Cool with other people’s sexual fluidity, including several queer people. Sometimes it’s discomfort like Becky’s having here, but sometimes they’re being intentionally exclusionary for other reasons.
im an alien and really fluid myself, I do not find that exclusion stuff fun 🙁
Is Becky ready for the real talks about sexuality and that it can still change decades into your life or sometimes even moment to moment?
I have missed these adult conversations about sexuality Becky seems to foster
My working theory for a lot of this stuff is that the way we think about sexuality and gender and honestly a lot of things is constrained by the need for advocacy movements to adopt the positions that are the most rhetorically effective rather than the ones that are the most true.
It means the way we think about these things are often positions designed to resist attack from bad actors rather than positions designed to help us actually understand ourselves.
Oops, this was meant to be a reply to Nono.
I think you’re definitely onto something here.
I wish we were in a world where people were allowed to just be whatever the hell they wanted. Unfortunately, we have to preemptively worry about how bigots will take us when explaining ourselves, which definitely hamstrings communication quite a bit.
Well put, Thag!
I can’t support this statement enough. Succinct, elegant, and tactful.
you said the thing i was thinking but good !
Why is Becky so worried about sexuality changing doesn’t mean hers will
Because she finds the idea that a core pillar of her identity could just shift like that frightening on it’s own.
I think that’s a pretty reasonable thing to be unnerved by, the potential malleability of the things that we think make us ourselves.
It’s actually quite interesting to see Becky who is usually depicted as remarkably well adjusted to accepting different gender/sexual orientations for someone with her religious fundamentalist background having a point of struggle. She’s usually a step ahead of Joyce out of the two of them.
I don’t think she so much scared about her suddenly liking boys, than what it means that maybe someday she could. Her quest to be herself led to her loosing ties to her only real community she had ever had, her church, and, ultimately, her Dad being beaten to death in a dark basement surrounded by her traumatized friends.
The idea that she could one day like boys is the idea that maybe if she had just stuck to the program, kept her mouth shut and held out a little longer, then maybe she could still have been happy and all that pain and death avoided.
None of what happened was her fault, but I doubt she lacks some feelings of guilt about what happened and the idea that it wasn’t needed must be horrifying.
Metaphorically speaking, she decided to walk her through a minefield because she had been told 100% the enemy had a sniper on the other path, and then a bunch of her squad got hurt by mines. Later she learns there was a 95% chance the sniper was even there.
Second guessing herself or feeling guilty isn’t logical, she didn’t kidnap her friends or kill her dad and she was working with the best information she had, but I think part of her will always be afraid that if she had waited and chosen the other path, then just maybe nobody would have gotten hurt. As such, part of her will always be terrified that that would mean all pain was her fault.
Because Becky has defined herself as lesbian and styled every single aspect of her existence as ‘not into dudes’ and now it’s being undermined by someone who confirms nothing is set in stone.
Becky might not be as rigidly fundamentalist in her thinking as Joyce can be but she’s still from the same type of upbringing.
I am amused that Thor Ragnarok gets a tag.
Huh. I honestly had no idea sexuality could change. I always just figured it was locked in and people just… figured themselves out better. Is that a thing that just happens or is it an HRT thing?
It can be either, although IMO the true extent of what causes what is unclear. It’s not really easy to research this stuff, since so much is self reported.
^
yeah as it turns out, earth creatures including humans are THAT many orders of magnitude more complicated in many things, including the diversity of sexuality and how it changes
Sexuality can and does change, but also I knew a guy who’s gay now who was pretty anti-straight relationships when he was a girl (like down to some of that “all straight sex is inherently rapey” nonsense) because imagining himself in a relationship with a dude made him feel… very girl in ways that felt violating for reasons he could not yet understand. Being able to imagine yourself in a relationship without triggering dysphoria would, I imagine, change a lot about who you could comfortably feel attracted to.
There’s also a lot of crossover in the general messaging around gender and sexual orientation, so someone might think their feelings that go with not being feminine, for example, mean that they’re a lesbian. (Sexuality is more permissible to question than gender, generally, especially before recent years.) (“More” does not mean to imply that people are particularly invited to quest their sexuality either.)
There was a transwoman that I knew before and after transition, who went from a straight dude to a straight woman in the space of 9 months. There was a brief bisexual period in the middle, but only a few months after she got into a bra and stopped using falsies she was dating a dude and left her girlfriend, who is also one of my friends.
It can be a result of HRT, therapy, rebuilding mental frameworks, self-acceptance, natural hormone shifts in the body over time, and probably too many other things to count. In my experience, people don’t usually talk about it, because biphobia and conversion therapy are so heavily entrenched in US culture. It’s nice to see people (and fictional characters) being more open about this kind of shift.
It’s one of those topics where people get real nervous real quick, and for fairly good reason. There’s just too much precedent of discussions like it having either malicious or technically-well-meaning-but-ultimately-very-harmful intent behind them.
Kinda like how, if I say I’m curious why some people are gay and some aren’t, someone’s probably gonna worry I’m looking for a way to ‘cure’ being gay. When actually it’s just: okay so why are sexualities a thing at all?
So, yeah, it is nice to see some discussion of it in what is pretty obviously not going to be a maliciously-based context. We can safely assume that the solidly queer-inclusive webcomic is not about to say “well actually gay bad, let’s fix it”, which makes a good platform where people are (hopefully) not expecting to hear some conversion therapy bullcrap.
For a lot of people, that is true. For some it’s not though. Sometimes it’s related to hormones like HRT and sometimes it’s about understanding yourself or labels better and sometimes stuff just plumb changes.
So much about humans loves a good “just plumb changes”.
Hmm. Ragnarok doesn’t have Gamora (green) or Nebula (blue, cyborg, Karen Gillan), so it doesn’t have the MCU’s hottest women in it, but it does feature Abs Hemsworth, the third hottest MCU dude, so it’s pretty high up there.
For some reason, my first pass over this strip was backwards (not sure why, I haven’t been reading manga lately) and I got to the second-to-first panel before I realized that it was Jocelyne, not Joyce. The only surprising bit was that “Joyce” was being that open about it with Becky…
It’s okay, Becky, just because it can change doesn’t mean your’s will.
Becky’s heading for a breakdown about sexuality stuff, isn’t she? Not because of her own, from what I’ve seen, but just the idea that it *is* fluid for many people clearly stresses her out. Which I get, as someone 1) who likes being able to put everything into neat little boxes and 2) whose sexuality(/gender) has definitely changed and cannot be categorized well At All–but even if hers *did* change one day, that wouldn’t make her experiences right now mean any less. I just worry about what’s going to be the catalyst for that impending breakdown.
(Also: oof, I remember how HRT makes one’s libido go all weird, lmao)
^*to clarify, I meant that I haven’t seen any indication that Becky’s own sexuality has changed at all (and ofc I believe someone when they say who they are)
Arguably fucked up on that sliding timescale a lil, she’s, what, early twenties? Thor Ragnorok came out when she was like 14
Oh, yeah, that’s a thing, for gender and sexuality both. They can’t be deliberately changed, but, like pretty much everything else about people, they can shift over time.
It’s why you get some people who know they’re trans from childhood, and why you get some people who don’t just take awhile to notice, they very firmly /are not/ at odds with their AGAB until some later point in life. Sometimes the person who starts transitioning in their 30s didn’t realize or didn’t accept it until now, sometimes they just… genuinely weren’t trans yet.
Vaguely related, I’ve seen a… theory? way of thinking? floating around somewhere that says “girl” and “woman” are different genders, and “boy” and “man” are different genders. Most girls grow up into women, most boys grow up into men, but sometimes a girl grows up into a man or a boy grows up into a woman.
When it comes to sexuality, you can also get people who have or develop exceptions. Say you have a straight dude whose wife, after 20 years of marriage, turns out to be his husband. Sometimes you then get a straight dude who’s very attracted to his husband. Or you can have a straight guy who’s attracted to a good chunk of women and to, like, one random guy ever, who doesn’t consider himself bi because it’s literally just been the one guy. Sexuality, like any other aspect of human behavior and personality, can be wiggly for some people.
For all of that, discussion can be a bit tricky. Both because people get (somewhat reasonably) scared of ill intent if there’s a discussion about changing gender/sexuality, and because we can’t really point a Bi-O-Matic at people to figure out if some of their attraction is new or if it just wasn’t accepted/present/relevant until now.
I’m aware, for example, of someone who’s taken testosterone now and then while tinkering with their gender, who’s normally a lesbian but winds up bi when they’re on T. They can’t tell how much of that is because men perceive them differently and interact with them differently, potentially in less offputting ways with less offputting implications, when they’re on T.
I actually really like Becky being horrified at the prospect of shifting sexuality as her liberation from fundamentalism is based on “knowing thyself.”
The entire cast? Going by screen time, that includes the “taser”
Anyone can be like Meredith Baxter (not necessarily will). But if this Joyce lookalike is… then would Joyce be… nah, unless…
it makes you more attentive?
I was terrified of that happening to me, I met so many who said they were going to be lesbians, and 4 years of hormones and a surgery later you would meet their boyfriends. So GLAD I never had to deal with that! 25 years later, happily man free. There hasn’t been a penis in the apartment since the dog died. Heh.
Come on. How long will it be before Becky borrows Joyce’s phone? I have aging popcorn here.
I also wonder how much of that initial ‘repulsion’ was deep seated envy mixed with frustration. It is very easy to jumble those things up.
Re: the alt-text, wanting to do both 1999-era Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weiss just means that you have a functioning libido.