But now they’re thinking, maybe Joyce is the righteous man, and John is the evil man, and mister 9mm is the hand of god protecting Joyce’s righteous ass in the valley of darkness…
That is SO appropriate for this situation: Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.
Ezekiel 25:17 is “I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the LORD, when I take vengeance on them.” (NIV)
I dunno about that. Just because somebody’s okay with gayness doesn’t mean that they’ll be accepting of transgenderness. Hell, even gay people can be downright rotten to trans people. Some of the worst treatment I’ve received since beginning my own transition has been from gay men, and drag queens in particular. Some of them can be real jerks.
That being said, I do HOPE that Becky and Joyce are more open minded than that, but you never know when it comes to this particular subject. :l
I’ve been wondering if at some point Joss will feel comfortable coming out to Becky specifically, at which point we’ll see if that leads to comfort confiding in Joyce or not.
Yeah. Unfortunately true. The cruelest people I’ve ever met have been ‘political lesbians’, also called TERFs, who have made sport out of hunting and outing and destroying the lives of trans women. Some of them keep public databases of us, to destroy our ability to find work, or shelter. There are true, genuine monsters out there, and they aren’t all in the form you might expect. :/
Good lesson to remember: any movement, without the ability to police itself, will eventually be hijacked by assholes. No exceptions. Sadly, feminism is no exception.
I’d argue that that specific example is less “hijacking” and more “radical splinter group”. Not to say that you’re entirely wrong, though…hell, look at what happened to Occupy Wall Street.
It is radical splinter groups… who are doing a pretty damn good job of hijacking the movement. Feminism seems to leave a sour taste in the mouths of many, many people who would normally agree with feminist ideas, and that’s mostly because the term has been dragged through the mud by extremists.
That’s why I don’t like relying on labels. I prefer simply saying exactly what I mean. You can hijack feminism because it’s not self-explanatory. Try doing the same with gender equality. Movements against racism and homophobia have never had to deal with those issues because they don’t have labels… and the moment they try to have a label (Black Lives Matter), it instantly gets sullied by its most moronic members.
That’s so horrifying my sheltered little mind can’t believe it’s true. Those that have been forced to the fringes of society for being nothing more than themselves, which brings no harm to anyone, should at the least have solidarity. Why do people have to be such…people.
Hate sometimes breeds hate, I guess? Some people, when marginalized, feel a need to lash out and marginalize others in turn. Obviously I say “some”, because a lot of folks are better human beings than that, but it definitely happens. I went through a number of traumatic bullying experiences at school as a kid, and when it got really bad (and no adults, however well-meaning, could do shit to fix it), I started taking my misery out on other girls at school who were even more emotionally vulnerable than me, just because it meant I wasn’t the bottom of the pecking order if I did. When I realized what I was doing I was disgusted with myself, and I forced myself to stop. Feeling marginalized can twist and warp your mind, to the point that you end up rationalizing actions you aren’t proud of. It is never, EVER an excuse to treat someone else poorly. But, having done it, I totally understand the impulse. 🙁
That seems like exactly it, unfortunately, yeah. They don’t really want to dismantle patriarchy – they just want to take on it’s authority for themselves, and use it to punch down. It’d be sickly hilarious if it wasn’t so horrible.
Well, historically, regardless of what you want, one of the best ways to stop from being hit yourself, is to join the authority in beating on those even lower down.
Think various waves of immigrants to the US becoming “white” partly by joining in on abusing the blacks. Especially the Irish, but Italians and others follow similar patterns.
Or for that matter the average elementary school bullying dynamics.
People suck.
When they’re not surprising you with how wonderful they can be.
Yup, one of those carefully coached my family on standard TERF talking points and they used that authority to feel justified in all the awfulness they threw at me including trying to angle me to reparative therapy. And I got out lucky for an encounter with a TERF given how many are fond of harassing trans kids with their dead names and trying to get them fired/kill themselves.
Yeah. I dated a promiment figure in the trans activism scene for a while, and as soon as it became known that I was her girlfriend, I started getting a fucking *blizzard* of hate and stalking from them, because TERFs are so gross that they’ll happily attack the loved ones of their targets to cause them pain. Anonymous accounts started popping up to attack my appearance, declare that I couldn’t have been a victim of sexual abuse because I was “unrapeable”, and more, and it went on, literally, for a fucking year. It was just fucking ceaseless, every damn day. That’s what those fuckers are like. :/
I think she will, but not now. This isn’t the time for it. For one, Becky’s the focus right now and bringing up the whole “BTW I’m actually female” thing would make it into one of those situations where you’re trying to show you can relate (and/or wish to reciprocate their gesture of trust in telling you whatever) but it ends up coming across like you’re trying to make it about you. For another, they’re in public and while Becky is fine with yelling “HEY I’M A LESBIAN” in public Joss doesn’t want to risk someone overhearing her and word getting back to their parents.
On top of that, Joyce is already at full mental capacity. She’s fighting through her personal crisis of faith, her ideas of good and evil aren’t comfortably definite, and the real world has taken away the rose colored glasses she saw her entire life through. With all these moving parts, she needs a stable “known” to fall back on. Fortunately for her, she has an sibling on her side who’s experienced many of the same obstacles and found a balance.
Joss should absolutely not stay closeted forever, but for now she can crack the door and wait for the right time. Joyce has proven she follows the values of her faith, not the memes. She’ll be there to reciprocate the support.
I’m curious whether her telling Ethan, ostensibly Joyce’s boyfriend and certainly a friend of Joyce’s, was some kind of attempt to get outed to Joyce without having to come out herself.
Given what has been said here about not being able to count on gay men to be allies, it seems like she took a big risk with that text to Ethan.
It does. Honestly though, I suspect there was a lot of meta at work there. She came out to Ethan mostly because Willis needed an in-world way to have her come out to us.
Seconding Needful. Considering where she started, Joyce has made huge strides. But she’s pretty much up against her limits. I recognize the sense of anger and betrayal she is displaying that comes when what was once a rock solid world view starts crumbling. Dumping the knowledge that her brother is actually her sister on her at this moment in time would be a bridge to far for her. Also Jocelyn’s advice is sound. When you’re fighting what amounts to an emotional guerrilla war, you want to avoid frontal assaults. And as much as it might gall her to compromise her principles, she and Becky need resources.
Besides which, she has the full support of Jocelyn. Her father is actually trying to be more accepting and seems to be succeeding to a degree. She may not be as alone.as she thinks.
Yeah, in that moment I was focused on the slave stuff and forgot the whole rest of the book (which I WOULD call satire). Once I started remembering the thing it fit.
Satire usually “pretends” to support the issue it’s ridiculing. “Pretends” is in quotes since the pretending is often intentionally unconvincing.
For example, Colbert back when he hosted the “Colbert Report” was being satirical since he was pretending to be an extreme conservative. Just outright mocking conservatives wouldn’t be satire.
Dumbing Of Age doesn’t “pretend” to support Christian fundamentalism. It outright criticizes certain aspects of fundamentalism. That means it isn’t satire.
I donno, I think that only works if you water down “mock” to levels where pretty much anything could be a satire. Huck Finn addresses slavery, and Gatsby criticizes the idle rich, but there isn’t the element of exaggeration that’s typically in place for satire. Huck Finn’s satire is things like the people from the town he left, where “civilized” folks feud, steal, and other vices. Or how Huck and company can be just fine around murderers, but get into jams when pursiong storybook adventure hijinks.
“The Divine Comedy” is a comedy in the old sense of having a happy ending – see the second and particularly third definitions in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/comedy .
A useful rule of thumb is to ask: “Can someone take this literally and therefore angrily miss, often comically, the point the work’s creator is attempting to make?” If yes, you’ve probably got a bit of satire on your hands.
I think satire also includes absurd exaggerations of reality, in order to hold up those things to ridicule. DoA has picked topics that are already sufficiently crazypants without having to exaggerate them.
The only possible reason for them to do so is if they’re selling those items at a loss in order to get people with kids to come to their restaurant (and are expected to order overpriced appetizers and steak for the parents). So clearly this can be solved by asking to pay full price.
As I said in a previous strip, actual food is one of the smallest factors in the cost of providing a restaurant meal. Overhead and staffing and the like are a far larger factor and don’t vary much depending on the amount of food ordered. Yet customers, for understandable reasons don’t like paying nearly as much for the half size portions. Which is why restaurant portions tend to be so huge – food is cheap and it looks like you’re getting more for your money, even if you can’t (or shouldn’t) eat it all.
So, while they’re not likely selling them quite at a loss, they’re probably going out of business if too many people take advantage of the cheap kids menu.
I don’t know, I mean, what she’s saying is certainly the practical solution (and comes directly from her own experiences), but it seems like Jocelyn’s encouraging Joyce to hide her opinions from her family, which may not be entirely healthy for her given the amount of shame and trauma she’s already repressing.
I’d guess that the followup to this first part of the conversation though is that Joyce can think of Jocylene as someone she can talk to and express these feelings with a safe person, since clearly Joyce had no idea that Joss was someone she could go to – as far as Joyce knew, all she had was another brother that would react the same way John did, until this conversation. So, that could be a good way to help Joyce stay civil with the rest of the family but also take comfort in the one sibling she can talk to freely.
Very true. Though she promised venting. I hope she delivers to Joyce on the venting.
It’s ironic also to think that Jocelyne also needed someone in the family to talk frustrations about the family’s stance on queer issues with and didn’t know she had that (and thus prompting Jocelyne to reveal that she also shares those stances to Joyce) until Joyce was “unwise” and blew up at John and her folks.
Sometimes people need to do the unwise unsafe option for their emotional betterment and emotional health.
Getting pulled out of school, separated from her support network and dragged back home to be “recentered” isn’t likely to be entirely healthy for her either.
And might well be likely to break her away from her family entirely, because she won’t recant and give up Becky, which will have very serious practical effects, as well as even more shame and trauma.
Sometimes repression is necessary, until you can get to a safe place.
Being open with her family is dangerous. Not nearly as dangerous as it would be for Joss, but still dangerous. Let her get back to school where she can be open with her friends.
And get some therapy, but that’s a long shot.
Consider that Willis *might not be* advocating Jocelyn’s stance as the *ideal* solution, but is depicting a very real way some people in her situtation choose to “cope” with it. Might want to give W. a chance to explore and present Jocelyn’s situation before rushing in with the instant analyohwhothehellamIkidding?
I think that’s exactly what he is doing. Showing a bit of how Jocelyne has survived and the reasons why. It’s not necessarily the best track, but given what thejeff says above, it may very well be the only one she sees open to her at the moment outside ending up on the streets.
It’s a very bad hand that too many young queers just trying to survive their families end up dealing with.
They can be Best Sister Tag-Team. Sarah does the tough love, “I pretend I don’t like you but I’ll beat a guy with a bat for you” thing, and Jocelyne takes care of the loving supportive advice without prefacing it with, “Ugh, you freshmen and your drama. I’m only helping you so you’ll stop crying and I can do my homework.”
To be honest, I always thought Becky was already regarded as family by the Browns. Both Joyce and Hank have given that impression. At the very least before they began taking sides on whether or not Ross’ actions were justified.
This really hurts, knowing what we know that Joyce doesn’t, that Joss is speaking from harsh experience, here. She can’t afford to cut herself off entirely, and she knows Joyce and Becky can’t either, so she has to council them to do the same.
Yeah, I’m worried about the negative consequences advice like this could have for Joyce. I mean, it might be the only practical thing to do since causing her family to cut ties would be a heck of a lot worse, but she’s already repressing so much crap.
She would lose her education. She would lose her autonomy. She would lose all her new friends and family. Those are just the conservative consequences. They range from those very guaranteed ones, all the way up to and including *her family murdering her to preserve their honour and the local community covering it up.* Some things could go a little bit wrong here.
At least “reddit’s doofy code” [i]looks[/i] like something someone might use in a pure-plaintext medium. No-one would have even noticed, probably. [i]I[/i], on the other hand have no excuse when I do [i]this[/i].
I mean, the ‘negative consequences’ she was referring to were the negative consequences of NOT doing all that, but yes, that’s why I said it might be the only practical solution.
With Hank’s currently expressed support of Joyce I don’t think any of those are at all likely. Unless he’s full of shit about respecting her right to make decisions for herself I really don’t see him allowing her to be pulled out of school or quashing that selfsame autonomy.
It could get ugly, though. I believe Protestants allow divorce, but the local community might still frown heavily on it and blame Joyce for ‘allowing Becky to corrupt her’ and ‘luring’ her fine, upstanding father from the path of righteousness, shunning (or worse) Becky and the blue-eyed Browns.
It’s a quote from Hamilton the musical, but it is first spoken by Burr as a rebuke to Hamilton. Hamilton himself is always speaking up, which gets him shot.
Hamilton does use it in the play, but is smirking as he says it.
Using my first comment ever on Dumbing of Age to simply commend this comment. I’d also curse it for making Hamilton stuck in my head but honestly I can’t think of a time since September that it hasn’t…
It’s because we were all you at one point 😉 Welcome to the club! Have you done the Hamilton starter kit? (watched all the Ham4Hams, followed LMM on twitter, done Schuyler Sisters choreo in front of a mirror? xD)
So Becky is a Brown now. That makes her the only ginger in the family. Harry Potter was the only non-ginger in the Weasley family. So does that make the Browns the nega-Weasleys?
The Weasleys were about love and staying together against the world, while the Browns are about being “better”(?) than the world. So anti-Weasleys rather than nega-Weasleys.
This strip and yesterday’s are lovely. I’m so, so happy for Becky that she now has a trusted adult in her life who understands what she’s going through and can mentor her about stuff like this. I’m so happy for Joyce and Jocelyne both having an ally in the family and that Jocelyne is teaching Joyce about how to be a good ally in the personal and political sense – validating her anger while gently reminding her that helping Becky is the number one goal. Jocelyne is best older sister.
So agree with that. I don’t know about Jocelyne’s advice to Joyce, but her role as mentor to Becky is the best thing that could ever happen to Becky short of being given a free house.
Jocelyne is careful, a writer, and clearly does her research given her checklist of questions she tried to do earlier when John was there.
She knows exactly what Becky needs to do to get back on her feet, because she’s probably been running through paranoid checklists of what she would do if she ever snapped and told her parents the truth about her.
And so, she’s perfectly poised to help Becky through some of the practical adult stuff that she’s been a bit stuck on. I’m looking hella forward to the Jocelyne-Becky team-ups that are about to follow.
Shame that Jocelyne’s probably got a point here. If we had a better social safety net the other Browns could go to hell, but emotional distress might be preferable to economic distress. Maybe.
Someone has to help Joyce pay fro College. Once she is ready to be out on her own, she can then decide how much separation she desires from the rest of her family.
Becky too, it’s going to be hard enough for her as is.
Loans are pretty hard to come by when Joyce’s mom could easily put her in the exact same situation that Becky is currently in. Not to mention, even if she tried to go over her mom’s head, Lord knows that none of the local administrators of her town would be willing to help her, either. She’d probably end up homeless.
The “value of martyrs” part of this resonates strongly for me. I’m so grateful for the martyrs that went before me and had just utterly brutal lives so as to make it safe enough to be out as much as I can be. And I hope I can do some of the same for the next generation.
Um. Not sure what you’re saying. You could be saying that Joyce doesn’t need college, and that may be technically true in that she could survive without it, but that doesn’t make it a good option.
Family is the best source for a lot of problems. Your folks can afford to send you to college? Either let them and smile and say thank you, or refuse. But if you don’t want your family to support you, don’t expect the gummint to.
Too true. And I think that’s part of why there’s such strong support, especially among fundamentalists, of a weak social safety net. Because if people could easily survive without family, they’re more likely to stand against their family’s views when they don’t share it. But it’s a tough thing to come out or speak out about your family’s racism or sexism if you know you could lose a potential home if everything goes pear-shaped.
That’s something I’d never considered, but there’s likely truth in it.
I’d always seen it the other way around: The wealthy owners and businessmen who want the safety net cut because they don’t want to pay for it use the “values” issues to get the Christian right to support them against their own economic interests. It may be more of a symbiotic relationship than a parasitic one, as I’d thought.
Where is the other shoe. It’s about time for it to drop and this makes me nervous. Also I love Jocelyne!!! It almost seems like her and Becky have the same levels of sass.
the other shoe is when john nearly gets hit by a truck on the highway, but ruth comes right the fuck out of nowhere and sacrifices herself to save his life
Does The Oatmeal even have a Patreon? Their only crowdfunding I know of was the campaign to build a Nikola Tesla museum, and when Elon Musk saw that Model S comic he donated a million dollars and pledged to build Superchargers on-site.
Uh, you do realize that Patreon is more about being an audience controlled version of an artist or writer’s salary, right? A way for fans of the work to pay money to encourage work they like showing up in their free entertainment?
It’s not actually supposed to be the beggar’s bowl at their feet, so they can literally survive (but too often it is).
Jocelyn is so awesomely playful, she’s gotten entirely past Joyce’s sort of semi serious “I’m an adult” thing she’s got going on. Of course Joyce has been under tons of stress recently, though. Great sister, though.
Yeah, I’ve been Jocelyne in this situation. Felt like Joyce about it, too. It’s incredibly frustrating to have to hide how you feel from parents. But while they were financially supporting me (at least partially) through college, I had to bite my tongue.
Actually, they still don’t know I’m no longer a Christian. I keep trying to pass along subtle hints so it’s not a big deal when that shoe drops, but they keep not seeing it.
I’m loving how much Joss is giving Joyce and Becky a handhold, something stable to hold on to… they don’t know how much she also needs them, and how much hope they give her, too. Augh, I love them all!
I’m actually really relieved by this page tonight.
Something that’s really REALLY been rubbing me the wrong way is how Joyce is having all this ally rage when the truly hurt party is Becky. I mean, sure, she got caught up in it but we have to remember that’s a plot device that was decided on by another (well meaning) ally (Willis, love you man and sorry about all the plot critique I’ve had as of late).
Like for all the naysaying I’ve had about how the trans/gay characters who are actually hurt by something get kinda shoved to the wayside so we can focus on someone else (Ruth, Joyce) again has made me really uncomfortable. Like, I’m always hearing how hard my existence is as a trans guy to everyone around me. Even if it’s well meaning difficulty, it’s just… annoying, cus they’re not the one ACTUALLY going through it.
So hearing Jocelynn say this and put Joyce in her place is a breath of fresh air and a big “FINALLY” moment for me. I hope we see more of this level headed sister.
See, that’s the thing. I understand where you’re coming from, and it’s a very reasonable thing to critique, but sometimes authors (like Willis, who seems to do a good job about things like this) do things like this (putting a straight ally in the limelight when she shouldn’t be) for a reason (in this case, being called out on it, as she should be). Pacing of comic strips make it difficult to have that reason be evident at first, which means we as readers had to wait weeks/months (maybe?) for the calling out to happen, but… yeah. Willis has to balance story and pacing, and sometimes that balance isn’t always evident.
(Also, I know what you’re trying to say re: “about how the trans/gay characters who are actually hurt by something get kinda shoved to the wayside so we can focus on someone else (Ruth…)”, but remember, Ruth is gay, too, and is being punished by Mary too. Not to the extent Carla is, but that’s still there.)
Ruth’s bi, actually. But yeah, also being blackmailed by Mary, and in fact I suspect Carla’s actually Mary’s secondary target* since Ruth has power Mary wants and Carla does not.
* At the moment. If Mary actually got RA power, Carla would probably be at or near top of the list of People Who Would Suffer Greatly, but fortunately that’s currently a hypothetical.
Final comic of the strip, RA Mary in the middle of an empty dorm floor, having gotten everyone expelled, laughing maniacally. (cue soft scrape of roller blade wheels on carpet)
Not doubting you necessarily, but is she bi? I can’t remember her being interested in guys at all or saying she’s bi, though I could’ve missed something from Willis stating otherwise. I know Billy’s bi, though.
The scene with Howard where she says it’s all complicated is the closest thing to in-universe confirmation here, but Word of Willis, the Walkyverse, and the fact that she was in the Bi Day banner with Billie and Danny all establish it. It’s mostly secondary though don’t blame you for missing it.
Ahhh… see, I took the “it’s all complicated” line to mean the complications that came from Billy being a student under her RA watch (and thus a very big no-no if anyone found out, you know?). That does make sense, though, especially with the banner (which I actually just saw ’cause someone linked it below, hah), since I’m not too knowledgeable on the Walkyverse* outside of Shortpacked!. Thank you for the explanation!
(*Basically what I know about it is that most of the characters here are from there in some way, there’s aliens, and most of them have superpowers from the aliens that they use to fight said aliens? And a lot of people die? Ruth being one of them, it seems… Also memes. So many memes. XD;; )
On a note tangential to your post, I feel it’s limiting to insist that bi characters must always be shown to display attraction to both sexes, since we end up at a point where bisexuality is something that “needs” to be proven.
It’s an easy way, of course, and there’s certainly nothing inherently wrong with it, but it often manifests as bisexuality being implicitly linked with promiscuity.
Sure, but then it comes to the point where bi characters have to be written in a specific way to actually count. The years long confusion over Ruth’s sexuality, that she must be gay (and not pan, or bi, or demi, or any other less represented sexuality) because we’ve only ever seen her attracted to a woman, and if she were really bi we’d see her express an interest in all those guys she literally never has any panel time with. Mandy, Grace, Sierra and Marcie are also characters who get this, specifically because we’ve only ever seen them with other women. Another issue with this is that it puts a timer on the relationships of bi characters (usually in opposite gender relationships), that, since they’re bi, we need to see them boink someone of the same gender because otherwise we “don’t really know.”
Like, I think it’s pretty likely that, say, Walky/Dorothy lasts the entirety of the comic, but if it eventually came out that Walky was bi out of comic like how we know Ruth is bi, but then he never acted on it because he was forever with Dorothy, we’d still get an onslaught of “I thought Walky was straight” comments.
Well, yeah. That’s because “Show, don’t tell” works. We process things we actually see play out much more strongly than things we’re only told. Particularly if the existing relationship keeps getting referenced and the bisexuality doesn’t.
That’s not prejudice. That’s just how people work.
But you don’t have to actually have them boink people of different genders, but you do actually have to show the attraction somehow. They can comment on it. They can flirt. They can deal with past relationships.
A simple statement once early on or in a character bio doesn’t register the same way. When was the last time Ruth being bi came up? Not in the comments, in the actual strip. Why are you surprised people don’t know it.
OTOH, Danny actually has plotlines dealing with it and people remember.
We get “I had no idea Jocelyne was trans” comments. Because it was shown once in the comic, subtly. Even though it’s all over the comments, a lot of people missed it or forgot.
If it’s just out of comic info, of course we’d get comments on it.
The only reason we know Mandy, Grace, Sierra and Marcie are bi is because they were in the all-girl squad in It’s Walky that was basically a “Lucky Joe gets put in with the lesbians who are really all bi” joke, right? It hasn’t come up at all in this actual comic. But somehow it’s a problem that people don’t realize this?
Have we actually seen Sierra in any kind of romance or anything in DoA? I’d expect most readers to assume she was straight by default.
And that’s the problem; that we’re in a point where unless a characters “acts” bi enough, then we don’t know they’re bi. That straightness is assumed because we treat straight as the norm, and that every single expression of same sex attraction must mean that they’re gay because alternative sexualities don’t exist.
And, yes, it’s a problem, because erasure fundamentally is a problem.
When there isn’t evidence, you make assumptions. That’s what people do. And generally, you base those on probabilities. As long as you’re open to admitting you were wrong.
Do we need to assume that every character everywhere actually is bi, unless we’ve been explicitly told by word of god that they’re not?
I get that bi erasure is a problem. I’m just not real sure that forgetting minimal mentions from years back (and in some cases from other works entirely) is a symptom of it.
Yes and that’s why correcting erasure is important.
And it’s not about assuming every character is bi, it’s looking at specific situations and deciding that, because they fit someone’s preconceived notions, that they definitely aren’t.
Nah, I know that 🙂 It’s just that she hasn’t said she’s bi (or hinted at it, or anything like that), and short of that happening, the only other way I can think of to get in-universe confirmation is to show she’s been interested in guys before and/or isn’t unattracted to them?
I’m a little confused about how that automatically leads to the bi person being promiscuous, though. I know a lot of writers fall into that trap, and a lot of fans do as well, but (for example) bi people are allowed to think people they aren’t dating are hot/attractive, too. That doesn’t mean they’re automatically promiscuous, or that their relationship will end, or that they would (or had) jump the bones of someone if gosh-darn-it they weren’t attached. 😛 And this isn’t a point that they have to act “bi enough” – though I can see how it would come across as that way in the hands of a lesser writer – it’s more giving them the same opportunities as other characters. We’ve learnt about Dorothy’s past relationship, Danny’s problem with crushing on one girl while dating another, Joe’s and Roz’s escapades, Sarah’s crushes, etc. In this case, Ruth is probably a bad example, since depression does a number on things like this, but… yeah.
And one could argue that Billy’s flipped the “promiscuous” trope on its head in this comic; people whisper about how much she got around before (though it sounds as if that wasn’t the case), but we as readers see her as being loyal to Ruth even though we know she finds guys attractive too, you know? (And Danny’s on the way to doing that, too; he’s still loyal to Amber/Amazi-Girl, even with being attracted to Ethan, you know? The cracks that’re starting to show in his relationship aren’t due to his sexuality, but rather Amber’s unresolved issues, which is a whole other can of worms. :P)
It’s not a matter of it automatically leading to that trope (and indeed, to reiterate; promiscuity isn’t this inherently awful evil thing that a bi character can never ever ever do, but more that it’s a common stereotype), it’s that it’s pretty much something that just gets automatically assigned to bi characters because it’s an easy way to show that said character is attracted to either gender. It’s just another box used for bi characters that I resent because it’s one of like maybe five or six bisexual plots out there and I’d like to see other ones. And as for how we just want to jump everyone’s bones if we weren’t bound in a relationship, or how our relationships need to end so we can enter a different one to really “count”, well, that’s Typical Bisexual Plots #3 and #4, right after “inherently incapable of faithfulness” and “wants to bang everything all the time.”
As for Ruth, I guess I could say, like, she hasn’t indicated she’s not into dudes? She was confused about her attraction to Billie and she used to have a boyfriend, but those could still, on their own, indicate that Ruth was never interested in guys, or still is. It’s just that we know that she is attracted to both per Word of Willis. I feel that we’re at a point where it should be okay to have bi characters who don’t need to be empirically shown to be bi; that we don’t need to assume that the only reason they’re expressing same sex attraction is because they’re gay and that’s the only way for it to manifest. Admittedly that leads to the problem of assuming that these bi/pan/demi characters are gay, but I feel like occasionally chiming in and correcting some assumptions is a small price to pay for having more varied bisexual characters and stories.
This banner predates the day we learn Danny is bi by almost a year.
Originally one could assume Billie’s the only person on the banner which is bisexual.
The reveal that Danny is bi makes it clear all characters on the banner are bi.
Yeah, I think another problem that is causing a lot of the focus to fall on the reflected trauma is that Joyce and Ruth wear a lot of themselves on their sleeves. Ruth, admittedly when in private in her room, but Joyce, everywhere.
And Becky, Jocelyne, and Carla very much don’t and instead internalize it a lot until moments where their armor is all the way melted through and even then rarely. As such, we’re not going to see a scene where Becky stews about it out of her head or Carla curses to herself about Mary, because both are trying to play like they’re totally cool and nothing can knock them down.
Hell, we’re seeing that with Sal too. She bottles a lot of her feelings about her mom and her mom’s racism up, so with the cookie storyline, we ended up spending the majority of it with Billie and Walky and their reactions to it, because they were the ones displaying the impact of it.
But yeah, I can definitely see it being somewhat annoying to Kole and I can definitely empathize as that part does sit a little awkwardly for me as well given how much I’ve twisted my life up out of guilt for those who’ve experienced reflected trauma from me being treated awfully and I’ve had a number of experiences where people straight up told me that we couldn’t discuss or process something awful that happened to me, and instead it was expected that I comfort them for how scared they were for me instead.
yeah… I’ve been liking this particular aspect of the writing because its felt so true to me. Sure, the directly impacted parties are quieter. ‘Cause when Sal tells Walky how it is, she gets rejection. And she knows she’ll get rejection. When you’re hurt enough, its just easier to hunker down and avoid the risk of more pain.
I agree. A lot of my friends do the the same thing, pulling in on a lot of stuff, especially among people who are more normative because their experiences about talking about stuff often involves being victim blamed for their experiences.
Ehh…in this case, Joyce is a hurt party as well because her family is actively trying to subjugate her by any means necessary, including cutting off contact with the outside world. There can be more than one hurt party.
Not to mention the specific things which happened to her, Joyce’s entire world view and identity are … she’s always believed that she and her family are they goodguys, now she’s realizing that they’re the baddies https://youtu.be/hn1VxaMEjRU
Seriously this isn’t like principled rage about the general treatment of queer people this is very personal rage about the treatment of her best friend and also herself.
(If it needs to be said, all of the following should be taken with a hearty helping of IMO:)
Becky’s not a main character. She’s supporting cast.
(Sure, in RL she’d be the center of her own story, but this isn’t RL.)
Joyce is.
(Heck, given the semi-autobio nature of the strip, a case can be made that she’s the main character.)
This has nothing to do with the depth or validity of her suffering, her worth as a person, or any of that. (That goes double for people who happen to share some of her qualities in real life.) It just is.
This is Joyce’s story, the focus is on her, and Becky’s narrative role is to be part of that story.
Now I want to make up a “DoA Zodiac” placemat like the ones in Chinese restaurants.
2010 – Year of Danny
2011 – Year of Dorothy
2012 – Year of Amber
2013 – Year of I got tired of skimming the archive for confirmation bias of who showed up a lot.
2014 – Year of I am too lazy to hack the tag database and make up a Powerpoint presentation
2015 – Year of Becky
2016 – Year of Jocelyne (we hope)
I feel like Year of Ruth/Billie would work for 2013 as that’s when we started to delve into their character more, and likewise for 2014 with Danny where he received significant focus, grew a lot, spent time away from Amber, and discovered his bisexuality.
I don’t know, I mostly saw it as Joyce being angry about the injustice happening to Becky, the injustice happening to herself came just on top of that. So what exactly is wrong about her being angry about people being jerks and worse towards Becky, except it being not the most helpful thing for Becky, who needs a calm ally more than an angry ally?
Joss did not put anyone in her place. That’s what John was doing. Joss specifically told her that it was okay to be angry. She spoke with her reasonably. She did not show contempt for her.
Just because you identify with what Becky is going through doesn’t mean you need to belittle what Joyce is going through. Again, that’s what John was doing, and it is what made him an asshole.
What Joss is doing here is the right thing. She is talking with her and giving her advice, not acting like some jerk who put her in her place. The whole point is that Joyce doesn’t have a place.
It’s not a matter of belittling Joyce, it’s that Kole feels that, to a degree, Becky’s issues are being used to prop up Joyce’s story.
Which, I really disagree with, as Joyce is the main character of the series so she kind of has to have top billing and I feel that Becky has also been given tons of focus in the series to develop her beyond just being Joyce’s gay BFF, but even if I really like the dynamic these two have, it doesn’t change the fact that fiction almost always focuses on allies and how sad they are that their cardboard cut outs are being operatically abused. That I don’t think it’s not happening in this case does not suddenly mean it’s stopped everywhere, or that Kole doesn’t deserve to feel the way he does.
Also please don’t implicit Kole as an asshole because he is acting kinda sorta vaguely adjacent to a character in the comic’s actions. That’s super uncool.
Except that Becky wasn’t the only victim. Joyce is hurt in a different way. In some ways Becky at least has closure, but Joyce has to deal with her own family denying her trauma and blaming it in her best friend.
It isn’t just about her being an ally. This is also about what Joyce has lost.
And to be honest, blazing angry is a reasonable reaction to this.
It is really, really common for allies to get the focus in stories about the tribulations of Queer characters. It happens all the fucking time. Just because Kole has issues we don’t agree with (and I do agree with him on the matter of Ruth and Carla) does not suddenly mean he doesn’t get it or that he’s missing the point.
Can we not try to alienate Queer readers of the series just because they aren’t towing the fucking party line?
Maybe it’s the still dull headache from this weeks Arrow, but man did that line twitch a nerve.
And it’s not about Becky entirely, she needs some help and it’s good to see she’s got lots of people willing to help.
The thing is I just look at Joyce in that last panel and realize she’s going to have to keep putting her own issues aside just so she can help Becky. That downward look and the fact that Jocelyn hasn’t asked how Joyce is feeling makes me sad. I just wish someone would ask “Joyce, are you ok?”
I’m smiling, but it’s a tired smile. Some days aren’t paladin days, some days are just hunker down and take care of you and yours til the world becomes less shit days. I’m sad Joyce has to learn that, but Joss is a great big sis for teaching.
This advice is painful, and hard to give… and, as a trans girl, both deeply personal and keenly felt by Jocelyne. Like me, she probably knows more than a few girls in our community of sisters who have been thrown out of their homes, disowned by their parents, and left homeless on the streets. A lot of us in that situation end up resorting to survival sex work, because there aren’t a lot of people looking to employ homeless trans or queer youth, and there’s a lot of charities and shelters who outright refuse us entrance just for being trans.
It’s a really shitty situation, having to hide who you are in order to keep access to resources and safety, until you’re established – but it’s a better situation than ending out on the street, with nothing. :/ That’s the kind of choice people like Jocelyne, people like me – people like *us* – face every day, all over the country.
Yeah. I know too well the position and awareness her advice is born out of. And it sucks telling people in pain, on the raggedy edge to try and hold on where they can to get someplace safe so they can be themselves in more places than just on campus.
But it’s also misapplied by Jocelyne. Becky is already homeless. Joyce is already in hot water with the folks. Telling them the cold importance of this type of sad safety calculus to “avoid them ending up on the streets” is a bit awkward and little not okay given that Becky already is on the streets. Is already homeless. Is already facing directly all the dire consequences.
Telling them to be cautious and play the game for survival now is kind of like unveiling your plan to keep the animals in the barn after they’ve already escaped the open door.
And that might be down to that difference of experience. Jocelyne is terrified of a fate like Becky’s. Becky is already in a fate like Becky’s and so has lost some of her fear about it.
Ooooh, good point here. I knew there was something rubbing me the wrong way about Jocelyne’s advice.
Joyce’s parents are already discussing pulling her out of college, John will already testify in favor of that, and there’s no ‘obedient daughter’ position for Joyce left to take if she doesn’t want that.
Becky isn’t on the streets yet, but she’s going to be there in a big rush if campus administration is given a tip (say, by a certain shithead minister) to check Joyce’s friends for Becky. And Joyce, herself, ABSOLUTELY can have things get worse real quick. Her family is irate with her, but this is absolutely recoverable. Where it stops being recoverable is when they say they won’t pay for tuition anymore.
Agreed that Joyce is just on the cusp of realizing what bad for herself would actually look like and how close she is to it.
With Becky, she’s homeless and not living under a bridge yet, but there’s so many random occurrences that are poised to fuck her right now. Hell, the fact that Mary already knows about her and is pissed at Ruth means that shithead missionary brothers are the least of her worries.
Besides telling on Becky would be acknowledging that she is a person and he wouldn’t stoop to considering Becky to be a person, certainly not a person worth ruining. Just another trendster ruining her family and others, whatever, right?
I think the life he’s going to try to ruin will be Joyce’s, by immediately calling the folks with a skewed story about how she went off on him for no reason and how he thinks she should be kept at home to “be made better”.
But ruining Joyce’s life screws Becky over too. If Joyce gets pulled out of school, Becky’s place there gets a lot less secure. And it ain’t that secure to start with.
Getting separated from Joyce guts Becky’s fragile support network. She’s got Dina, but that’s a romantic relationship that’s about a week old. Scary as hell to rely on. Beyond that a couple of other girls she’s basically just met.
Even more, being responsible for ruining Joyce’s life would devastate her. Not that she actually would be, but she’d see it that way.
That’s really true and very good point. Joyce ruining her life “for Becky” would destroy Becky, not just materially, but emotionally, and she might not be able to recover from the guilt of that as easily given her strong feelings.
I know when my life was going to shit, it was the guilt of the reflected trauma on loved ones that ate me up the most and it was having someone I cared about deeply hurt to the point of no longer being happy connected to me that got me to fully break away from my own toxic family.
Yeah, this advice just isn’t really all that great. Like it’s applicable to Joss’ situation but A) everything you said, and B) Joyce is a cis hetero person she inherently has a lot more leeway to express herself than a queer person would. Especially when Hank has already made it clear he supports her and understands her anger which makes it far less likely she’s going to face severe consequences for it seeing as he’s the “man of the house.”
Now she can claim to Carol and Hank that she was able to “talk sense into Joyce”, where John was not.
This gives her bonus points on most-liked son competition and makes her advice to the parents (to keep Joyce at IU) the crucial one – whatever John may say.
When she says “i will keep close contact with Joyce to help her fend off secular seducements”, they will trust in her. (Contact via telephone or Hank occassionally lends her his car – she seems too poor to own one herself).
(Which reminds me – how are the parents thinking about John’s Mustang financed by church tithings? Is this the reason he is not the most liked son?)
She may even invite Becky in her home for some time to “re-inforce Becky’s belief in God”.
Well, maybe not, because story-telling reasons requires Becky to also be at IU, but maybe some days.
Oh man, so much in revealing character moments here.
Joyce’s tiredness with her anger and its silencing. She’s been sitting on the urge to scream at her family for being awful fucks for a good week now and every bit has just been this barrage of passive threats of removal from school or outright dismissal. Hell, even the majority of her friends openly pine for an old Joyce who wasn’t angry, even if the reason for lacking that anger was passively supporting bigoted systems that hurt friends of hers.
Joyce needs someone to validate and allow space for her anger and her frustration.
And that has another dimension beyond the obvious. Which is Toedad is the second fellow traveler from her community who has directly committed an act of violence against her. The faith that she was taught was the only moral thing, that told her she was a sinner for following the Lord and refusing to abandon friends simply because they were gay or an atheist, that is supposed to be the only source of goodness to the point where she is expected to throw her entire life away to be a sex slave providing unpaid labor in order to propagate said faith and community.
That faith and those who have demanded her trust because they were members of her faith have betrayed said trust on more than one occasion and not only that, but her own family has seen at least part of this violence and decided the problem is with her and has openly minimized the very real harm she has faced.
Of course she has anger she can’t bottle up anymore. Of course she’s about to blow up all over all the fellow travelers of her faith. She’s got PTSD scars down her back and the only people until now who’ve given a damn have been a lesbian and an atheist, two people she was raised to think of as irredeemable sinners.
No, she didn’t burn that bridge, I suspect. It takes more than one disagreement for that (Usually). She annoyed her brother, but she’s still family (I’m pretty sure). John can get mad, but he can’t shit talk her for being annoyed by her wealth very effectively.
And Jocelyne continues to be exactly the sister Joyce and Becky have needed. There’s no negotiation or antagonization, or need to wait to grow to accept her. Nope, just, boom, you’re family, now I’m going to mercilessly tease you just like I do Joyce when we’re alone.
And that’s exactly what Becky needs and has needed from whatever remnants of family she’s got left. Someone besides Joyce to unconditionally accept her and show her that she hasn’t lost even the illusion of family of her own because she was born gay.
Yes!!! No fanfare, no bullshit, just “high five, little sis.” This was exactly what Becky hoped, but didn’t really expect, with the Browns. It was a huge risk but if she could get just one more family member it would be worth it. And it was!!!
I love this with Becky. We are about ten minutes after she – freaked out of her mind – ran into the restaurant opening up with Hitler jokes to derail what she thought would be another horrible family time.
Then Jocelyne comes back completely out of the blue and adopts her, and it takes Becky just one moment of hesitation and then she is all into it.
Becky – when life gives you a cookie you EAT THE SHIT OUT OF THAT COOKIE
So yeah, on one hand, I love the little adds that Jocelyne puts in to try and make sure it’s not just another “stop being angry” bullshit tone policing.
But… oh, man, the thing is that I think this advice may be good on its surface and without context. Bob knows I’ve given similar to queer and trans students of mine to walk into potentially disastrous situations with safety plans in mind.
And it’s definitely what’s ruled Jocelyne and how she has survived to get here. Avoiding any heated conversation, finding excuses to limit direct interaction, hide any anger or discomfort and just deflect nasty conversations as best she can.
And it’s impossible to blame Jocelyne for that. She faces a chasm of awful if she was to come out. She will lose her family and her safety net and an unreliable freelance writer’s paycheck is not going to protect her from a bad spell leaving her completely impoverished or if her landlord evicts her for being trans. She’s done her research, she knows exactly what landmine strewn field she’s looking at for her options.
But it’s not really the advice Becky and Joyce need. Like, yeah, in the short term maybe. It’s the thing Becky’s been doing so far, just absorbing bigotry directed at her without raising a fuss and Joyce really needs to not be pulled out of school…
But it’s kind of too late for all that. Becky is already out, Joyce is already on record yelling at her mom’s voicemail and promising to protect her and that was enough alone to have her mom talk about pulling her out of college. And she’s now added stealing their car and “being unchristian” to her brother to that repertoire.
Her mom is not going to passively accept stoic Joyce refusing to engage, because Joyce hasn’t actually initialized jack shit. Carol and John have gone after her, because she’s publicly supported a “sinner” and Carol at least is not above constant passive-aggressive digs of dehumanization and victim-blaming, because she sees it all as a battle she has to WIN to save Joyce’s soul.
Even if Joyce was to pull a full Jocelyne, her mom will still try to attack her over her support of Becky and try and draw her into an argument.
This is no longer the time for stealth and closets and “playing it safe”, because to survive, what she actually needs to do is counter her mom’s narrative with a strong defense of her core values like she did with her mom and dad in defense of Dorothy.
And the reason is that right now, her only hope for not being yanked from school is Hank being enough on her side to veto his wife’s ideas (yay, exploiting sexist power dynamics) and he responds best to honest openness and signs of how emotionally meaningful something is to one of his kids.
It’s also…
It’s also a poison. I’ve been there, bottling up large parts of myself to try and avoid triggering family poison as much as possible and well, it’s just awful and dehumanizing and is more likely to fill you up with rage and sadness to the point where it can negatively affect your emotional health in major ways.
And well, as noted earlier, Jocelyne has lived by this method, which protects her in crucial ways, but traps her. She can’t grow her hair out long or style it femme or in a girl’s style because her family needs her to regularly make family appearances where she needs to be ultra in the closet and getting called the wrong name all night.
Additionally, she’s not really seen, neither in these comics nor in the Patreon bonuseswhere she’s just at home miles from her folks, living herself authentically in much of a way. Trans women don’t all need to be femme, but she has never once looked comfortable in boy’s clothes and yet she’s stuck in them in most scenes. I guarantee she sees the risk being too high for anything like HRT or to even get too intimate with a guy and risk that getting back home.
Additionally, there’s little sign that she’s yet feeling safe enough to take legitimate steps towards detangling her life from her folks. And we’ve definitely seen how the strain of things is pushing her to the breaking point (see “say something I can never take back”).
That pathway, in the long term is toxic as hell when trying to survive toxic folks and can make escape harder and harder as you sink good time after bad into trying to narrowly stay on the good side of people who’s support is mercurial and conditional.
I don’t think her advice is good advice to where Joyce and Becky are right now.
It definitely is not good advice for Jocelyne at the moment. Safety is important, but I just see her getting shredded for it in a similar way to how I did, because folks like Carol don’t see that sacrifice of humanity as a call to do better, but an allowance to get even worse and dismiss things like identity.
Basically, Joyce following this advice could put herself in an even worse position than she is now.
Yeah, I think this is a case of an AWESOME, caring, character giving kinda not really perfect advice. Especially after the gun the situation is so different for Joyce and Becky that her own survival methods are not always perfectly applicable.
Which is as it should be. Jocelyne is not a magical queer fairy swooping in to solve their problems, she struggles as good as she can and does her own compromises – as seen back in the fountain scene when she and Ethan were equally useless to Joyce as she stood up to her parents (and won a victory with Hank that Jocelyne has never won herself). She doesn’t really manage to live up to her own advice either – if she did she would not have pissed off John with the burn about the car (however awesome). She would have made a much more vague exit and kept her place outside the conflict (as far as he knew).
Still it is one of the BEST advice Joyce have got, and from a person who is 100 percent on her side. It’s just not a PERFECT advice, and there will be problems with it.
Hmmmm. Joyce’s big sisters, Jocelyne and Sarah really do have a lot in common, don’t they?
Very much agree. Of all the advice she has been given regarding this situation, this is one of the best and definitely the most caring. And I definitely agree with the Sarah comparison.
Both give advice, some of it is excellent, all of it is compassionate and understanding of the situations she is in, but all of it is based on their own perspectives, life experiences, and what they would do, and so has that weight to them. To Jocelyne, this sort of thing is key to survival as a queer person, just like Sarah’s faith in the justice system led her to push for going straight to the cops after the assault from Ryan.
I was expecting this advice from Jocelyne. Remember, she’s been hiding who and what she is from literally everyone in her home and native community since she was a pre-adolescent. Hiding has become such an automatic second nature to her to the point where no other strategy even exists in her mind. It makes sense that she would advocate the Joyce and Becky hide too.
It is exactly the advice Jocelyne would have given, because it’s the strategy she’s been using and in her experience, especially comparing herself to Becky, it’s all she’s seeing as working to stay safe. I don’t blame her at all speaking from her experiences and her researched awarenesses of how bad it could easily get for her if she wasn’t this areful.
And thus it makes sense why she would give this advice and believe it to be the best advice she could. She just hasn’t become fully aware of the flip-side trap to the lose-lose situation she is in.
Yeah, this advice is predicated on Joss’ assumption that their parents are united in their lack of support and this just isn’t the case. Joyce KNOWS she has room to express herself relatively safely and now Joss has come in with this pretty uncool guilt tripping to cast a whole pile of doubt over that. She’s succeeding in smothering Joyce’s dissent where everyone else in the family has failed and that’s a tragedy.
That’s a good point. Joyce has blown up at her folks and challenged them in a major way and so knows that Hank actually responds to that and she knows about Hank’s current struggles with supporting her and the extra leeway she has gained with him.
Jocelyne has deliberately minimized the amount of contact with her folks as possible and so has not seen Hank’s current shifts this last week and while she saw the positive resolve to the support for Dorothy fight, she didn’t see how Joyce resolved it and was only half paying attention, because she recognized it as a fight and so intentionally disengaged.
So yeah, to Jocelyne, her parents are a monolith of awful, whereas Joyce actually knows that her dad responds well to honesty and is trying very hard to be on her side.
Over the last few months, I have had the honour and privilege to learn to know why. It’s been painful to read, though certainly nowhere, nowhere, NOWHERE as painful as having to have lived it! But it’s also been necessary, and in its own way good (if you understand what I mean), and it’s been a true learning experience.
And the comic itself has grown on me thanks to Cerberus (and also ischemgeek and Bagge and other thoughtful commenters whose nicks I should probably be remembering. I apologize to all of you for not doing so). It’s been helpful to understand properly just what Willis is actually saying with his characters and plots. It has been helpful to realise that it’s a lot less hyperbole than you would think. It is not happy knowledge (because it makes you wish that the comic simply was that hyperbolic), but it is necessary knowledge. If we are to right the wrongs in the world, we must first know what those wrongs really are.
The only ‘downside’ is that I can probably never read binge read the archives ever again, because I will now be incapable of reading the comics without also reading the comments, and then each strip will take half an hour to go through, meaning it’ll take years to get back to the current strip.
Finally, that middle bit where Jocelyne brings up “doing it for Becky”, it’s in direct response to Joyce saying that she can’t compromise what she believes.
Meaning the “it” here is compromising her value system for survival. And it’s something Jocelyne has clearly done her fair share, but it’s kinda a bit of a monstrous thing to demand of someone, especially by adding a guilt trip to the end, hitting Joyce in the heart.
Like, I love you Jocelyne, but that little bit was kinda super uncool.
Was it a demand or just a statement of fact? There is an opportunity cost here: Joyce speaking her mind could cost Becky the resources she needs to get on with her life right now.
It doesn’t really matter if the Browns come around on this or not; simply that they provide Becky with a place to stay and food to eat for a few days while she tries to get access to the things she needs so that she can get on with her life.
That’s what I got out of it: Just keep quiet for a few days, until Becky’s sorted out, and then you can say whatever you want.
You had god damned better be willing to burn your values system and sense of righteousness for someone ELSE’S survival. When you’re playing with your life, no 1 curr. When you’re playing with others’, though? You play by their’s. And Becky has, quite bluntly, not been doing this brinkmanship FOR A REASON.
Becky’s been actually doing the Jocelyne thing all weekend. Trying to be on best behavior (except when she’s hyper-nervous and trying to distract everyone to prevent a Joyce anger meltdown), absorbing abuse without much pushback, deflecting passive-aggressive attacks by Carol into a joke and a distraction before Joyce could explode. She even questioned the choice of taking the car and tried to follow Carol’s unspoken rules by trying to avoid being in a closed room with Joyce as she knew that would cause Carol to freak out.
Becky’s trying like hell to not screw up Joyce’s life and is absolutely not doing brinkmanship.
Joyce on the other hand, is very much going to the mats for what she believes and has gone into this weekend wanting to fight. She’s got a lot of anger she feels she needs to express, partially for Becky, but mostly for herself in defense of her own existence as a moral actor. She’s also always held her value system and righteousness very highly and prioritized them over safety at times.
And while I somewhat agree with you (someone “standing up” for a queer person by “defending” them and their queer identity to the parents they are closeted to is one of those unfortunate “you were trying to help and now you’ve fucked everything things). I’m not seeing that dynamic here, largely because Becky is not going to lose much from the Browns if they were to totally reject her based on Joyce’s defenses.
So what Joyce is risking is her own damn safety and it’s in fear of that that her sister is giving this advice. She really doesn’t want to see her little sister be burned by her principles.
I think you misread Rutee’s…post. He said exactly what you did regarding Becky, which is that she’s been avoiding confrontation. Rutee thinks part of it is because of access to resources, though I think Becky would still be doing it because that’s just how instinctively in comes to her.
I do disagree with your root post though. However you want to slice it, be it lies or compromise or whatever, Becky is heavily dependent on Joyce for now, and Joyce blowing up at her family risks taking out avenues of the network Joyce is using to support Becky.
Justified anger always feels good at the time. And certainly everyone has the right blow up and shout. But it’s a self-destructive method in most cases.
That’s true and I probably was misreading Rutee’s post (I’m pretty sure her pronouns are she though though I might be misremembering). It’s kind of a shit sandwich of a situation no matter how you toss it, in’it?
honestly i wish i’d expressed more of joyce’s sort of anger at my mom. i mean, i don’t think my mom would have kicked me out. probably, anyway. but i just shut down and pretended i’d never tried to come out to her, because i didn’t know if i could handle turning my own home into a battlefield.
staying good and quiet to stay safe, whether emotionally, physically, or financially, is tough
This. Part of why Jocelyne’s advice doesn’t sit right with me is that I did follow that thinking to the letter. I avoided unnecessary conflicts. I allowed a lot of awful and when pushing back, I was sure to overemphasize the ways in which my family were trying. I even coordinated outfits to try and challenge them the least. To this day, my family doesn’t even know my real (and now legal) name because of how much I wanted to hold their hand through all of this.
And it went awful and probably more awful than if I had been loud and abrasive about it all. Not doing so gave them a license in their mind to demand I submit to reparative therapy and admit that I was delusional and forced to be trans by my sorceress girlfriend and so on. And in the end, I felt like shit and a fool for months clinging to an unsalvageable wreck, denying important aspects of my transition process in fantasies of allowing them some manner of input, and I still lost them completely and lost a long relationship because of the strain of having to debase myself and the weight of their hatreds became way too much.
Staying safe is key, but you also have to be able to recognize when a situation is unsalvageable and its time to just gather what you can and build safety net in other ways.
I did the opposite, and my father disowned me. He hasn’t spoken a word to me in over a year, probably two, now. He also threw everything he had towards trying to destroy me, which ended up losing me one of the most important relationships in my life, helping to break up my marriage, and almost killed me a dozen times over. So, I guess, I hope you can understand where I come at this from the other side of things? I’m even now just barely starting to guess at what recovery looks like, from all of the shit he put me through. It’s a long, long time off.
My sympathies to you both. All I can think, though, is it’s on neither of you and nothing should have been in the first place. It should have been on those who should have loved you no matter what.
The only way to have won is not to be born to shithead parents. And yet we’re expected as kids and young adults to have solved it enough to find the “best” outcome. I don’t know if anyone really does other than by changing the overall culture so that shit happens less.
All of the *hugs* for you too, sis. And you’re right, it is exactly fucking that. It’s just the most gross, fundamental betrayal when the people who are supposed to love you unconditionally betray and wound you more than anyone else in the world.
I took the help from states away to get back on my feet. When I was back on my feet, I eventually came out to my parents by showing up with my wife (In a public place, which was scary in my hometown for direct reasons). Disowned, terrible shit and all, but I was basically okay and wife can provide basic safety net now, and soon a proper place to live.
Keeping my head down benefitted me immensely, even if it didn’t help the final part. It might have made coming out worse. I don’t care. I got the emergency help I needed. And Joyce is dependent on her parents income in the general.
Very true. The calculated calculus of survival is complicated and different amounts of both Jocelyne’s and Joyce’s strategy are often necessary for it… and we never know which is which until we’re destroyed by a wrong choice.
I would never blame Jocelyne for choosing what she sees as safer. I would even less blame someone having to make that choice in real life and I think having contingency plans for things like that are always so important and weighing the stress and pain of not coming out versus it equally so.
And Joyce is relying on her parents quite a bit right now and could end up in a very similar situation to Becky if Carol is to win the upper hand in her parents’ fight.
Bob damn, why can’t parents just be less shit, in general?
Because they’re people and people suck. But seriously, a lot of them are less shit and it’s really only getting better as opinions on all of this shift.
But yeah, Joyce is in a rough place and needs to tread carefully. She can’t really go completely back in the closet as an ally and she’s not giving up on Becky. She needs to be honest and open enough to win Hank over while somehow not scaring Carol away any more than she already has.
And not leaving home this time without a copy of her birth certificate and SSN. 🙂
Oh, ooof, yeah. Sorry, wasn’t thinking. It’s been a long time since I heard the full phrase and I totally forgot about the beating part. >_<;
I take it back.
Jocelyne is downright fantastic. I hope she gets to a place where she’s safe to tell these two the full deal with who she is. I mean, by that point, they’ll both have gone back to IU and experienced quite a bit more growing as people (Joyce isn’t going to be pulled out, that would essentially end the strip and I don’t think Willis is quitting any time soon). I also hope that Joyce and Becky both find/accept the resources there that’ll help them out, though surely hijinks will ensue before that happens.
Ah. And as Jocelyne is a poor writer, I’m sure it’s advice she’s had to give herself many times. Probably wise, since the parents were talking about pulling Joyce out of school entirely….but it might dent idealistic Joyce up a little in the process.
I misinterpreted ‘poor writer’ for a second. I was like, “How do you know she’s not a good writer?!” But now I see you meant she’s a writer without a lot of money.
Yep Jocelyne is definitely a Slytherin with good intentions to me. We’ll see how this works out though. I mean Gryffindor!Joyce has definitely made it clear how angry she is though. Then again she hasn’t yelled at her /parents/ yet about how her mother is acting- just her brother as far as I recall. So she may be in with a shot?
But I could just see John, as Joyce tries to hold it together, giving some smug ‘ah so you’ve finally seen my side of things’ thing which tips her over the edge.
Nah, this is more of a Hufflepuff ‘Patience’ thing than a Slytherin ‘Cunning and Ambition’ thing. A Slytherin would be looking for how to carve an advantage out of the situation, not how to simply survive it. Unless she moves on to advice of how to build resources outside of the existing social network she has, it misses Hufflepuff’s ‘Hard Work’ virtue, though.
No, they don’t. The bridges are on fire when Joyce has to find her own way to pay for college. This is the EXACT MOMENT the advice should be coming, as far as Joyce is concerned, because she still has tuition. She DOES have her parents arguing about whether it’s appropriate, but that isn’t the same as ‘having agreed to stop’.
Mm, I would argue the bridges are on fire. Maybe Jocelyne’s advice helps Joyce put it out before it fully burns down. Maybe Hank is able to build a companion bridge, but there’s definitely fire trucks headed out to the bridge. It’s why Joyce has been freaking out all morning about what to do.
I would agree that the bridges are on fire. Right now, it could still be a superficial fire and not a structural one though. If things keep heading south, it’ll be a structural fire for sure.
It shouldn’t have to come down to Joyce putting it out, but I’m damn familiar with putting out the superficial bridge fires and that’s how it goes with shitty people if you still depend on them for some kind of support.
I mean she’s pretty wrong. She doesn’t know that Hank IS supportive if not of queerness than of Joyce and her judgement and so this advice comes from a mistaken assumption when in reality it seems fairly unlikely that Hank would allow Joyce to be pulled out of school for defending Becky the way he has already expressed support for her doing.
My headcanon is increasingly Toedad was Joyce’s deranged maternal uncle and Becky is her Tyler Durden–and this is all the story about her coming out to her family.
tone policing is really rude, because it discounts the feelings as a part of the argument. Its like telling someone who was stabbed by their ex to stop being so emotional and in pain and just say what happened.
The thing about Jocelyn’s advice here is, it’s for Joyce. Not for Becky.
It’d be a completely different story if she were telling Becky to calm down, be quieter, be more inoffensive. She’s not (so far).
Joyce’s anger is on Becky’s behalf; it’s not about Joyce (as far as we know). She absolutely does need to be careful that what she does, allegedly for Becky’s sake, is actually safe for Becky and in line with what Becky wants. Righteous anger is all well and good, but if you’re escalating a confrontation to ‘defend’ someone who really, really doesn’t want you to, you’re doing the opposite of helping.
Also, like… personally, as a trans woman, I think Jocelyn is talking about herself here. Even assuming Joyce would be 100% on her side, would it be safe to come out to her? Or would Joyce end up outing her and putting her in danger while ‘defending’ her? That’s what’d be on my mind, anyway. Allies who’re so wrapped up in righteous anger that they won’t curb it when you ask them to… those allies can be really fucking dangerous. I don’t know if Joyce has gone too far or not, but it’s a real risk.
I can’t possibly judge Joss for what she’s doing in this situation. This is a matter of physical and economic safety in a situation where, well, there’s no good options and plenty of terrible ones. Still, I can’t help but think this is awful advice. Raidah wasn’t wrong that there’s toxic people in your life you have to learn to cut out because if they won’t budge, they will destroy your life. I had to cut my own mother out of my life for the most part because she refused to accept my wife.
It’s really just an awful situation in general. Cutting toxic people out is so necessary, but survival is also so necessary, but so is not killing yourself or drowning yourself in shit and losing what actually matters to said people’s toxicity.
So the “right course” is often hidden, confusing, and miserable no matter which way you run and the end part where you no longer have a safety net makes every piece of bad news or downturn into the most frightening thing imaginable.
I think that Willis deserves some considerable praise for not making Jocelyne a shining knight on a steed, solving all of Joyce and Becky’s problems. Rather, he gives us a three-dimensional character with very real downsides and opinions that are not necessarily helpful. She’s human, she’s afraid of her family too and hiding has become an essential survival strategy for her. She can’t help Joyce figure out how to win this because she’s been holding matters at a stalemate for a decade or so because she’s afraid of the consequences of moving on to an endgame.
If anything, I could see that it is Joyce’s choices and actions that helps Jocelyne, rather than vice-versa. If Joyce refuses to back down, it might inspire Jocelyne to stand up to her family in a sustained way rather than avoiding contact with her parents and snarking John.
Choosing when to express your opinion is not “to compromise [on] what you believe”. It’s called being tactful. I suppose Joyce’s character would believe something like that though
Tact in the face of bigotry IS a compromise of your principles. Like, it’s frequently a necessary compromise but even calling it tact implies that expressing such beliefs is impolite rather than the actual problem that it is unsafe.
If anything Joss has finally shown an imperfection here because this advice is not awesome. Like it’s completely applicable to her own situation but it’s very much not to Joyce’s.
I personally read that comment as a resigned “Wup, there she is… that girl that has to hide everything she is in order to appear ‘perfect’ to her family so that they will ‘accept’ her.”
Though I will be the first to apologise if that is not what Carms meant.
Either way, I do agree that the advice is not awesome. And I also agree that it’s understandable why she’s giving it. Another classic example of “We are what we experience.”
Ooh, I like that. And it gets to the shared “perfect girl” theme we’ve seen in these chapters.
Joyce in genuine danger with her folks for losing her “perfect girl” status. Jocelyne desperately trying to be “perfect” and so having little support for the “girl” and straining under the pressure of it but still believing it’s her only way to survive. Amber straining to make her Amazi-girl alter “perfect” by dumping all her negative traits onto Amber. Sal well aware that nothing she could do could ever make her the “perfect girl” to her mom. Carla actively rejecting the demand the idea that she should be a “perfect girl” to receive support and acceptance for being trans. And Dorothy still straining under her self-imposed ideals and desires to be “perfect” in order to not fall further behind on her Yale and Future President goals. And Mary beaming under the fact that she is the “perfect girl” surrounded by sinners, but not realizing that that just makes her an awful human being in general.
How is it not applicable to Joyce’s? She’s currently reliant on her parents for funding and, even if that were not the case, she needs their help at this particular instance to aid Becky in getting the things she needs to start a new life.
If Joyce speaks her mind, she might feel better for it, but there is a serious risk here that Becky will suffer for it, first and foremost. Following that, there is a question of her own financial situation. If she feels it’s worth giving those things up, well… By all means. But she has to acknowledge the costs.
The advice is to think. Speaking truth to power has a cost; it is not, and never has been, free. That cost applies, at the moment, to more than just her and that responsibility needs to be weighed.
A) Joyce is not queer which means she pretty much always has more leeway with bigots, and
B) Unlike Joss Joyce knows she has at least some degree of parental support in the form of Hank. This advice is only good advice if there’s a damn good chance that being upfront is going to get you fucked over but Joyce has already been upfront and Hank responded to her frankness with support and understanding. The danger of her facing any material consequences for staying her current course is pretty minimal especially since Hank is the patriarch and thus the most powerful member of the family within their subculture.
The advice isn’t inherently bad (though it is soul crushingly pragmatic and following it will destroy you the longer you do so) but it’s only practical given a certain scenario which is not the scenario Joyce is in. Joss is giving bad advice unwittingly because she doesn’t know what we and Joyce know and I can only hope Joyce realizes that.
I think “pretty minimal” is way overstating it. Carol is already arguing she should be pulled from school. John’s adding his voice to that. Hank’s on her side, but it’s not really clear how strongly that is. When John presents his version of events at lunch – all about how she got hysterical and lost control over basically nothing, that’s going to weigh heavily against Hank’s idea of her as an adult.
And for all the patriarchy in such subcultures, women still have a lot of influence over family matters, especially how the children are treated. Sure, officially Hank can overrule her, but she’s got plenty of ways of making her voice and her displeasure heard.
Joyce obviously can’t go all the way back into the closet as an ally. She can’t and won’t renounce her support for Becky. She’s on the record and she’s got Hank’s tentative support there. But she also has to hold back and walk a fine line. She can’t lose her temper with Carol the way she did with John. She has to convince them that she really is still holding on to her faith and her values, even though she’s losing her faith and their values.
I’m sorry, those who think Joss is wrong here, but she’s right on the nose. This is exactly a lesson Joyce needs to learn, to get away from her Fundamentalist upbringing where you think doing the “right thing” will magically make it all work out.
She does need to learn that she can do things strategically without “compromising her beliefs.” She needs to understand that beliefs aren’t even what’s important. People are.
I may bristle at people saying that Joyce is being “put in her place.” But Joss is imparting some wisdom that Joyce needs to hear. And, unlike John, she’s not belittling her or saying her anger is wrong.
Sure, you can argue that maybe Joss needs to learn the opposite lesson. And that’s probably true. But that’s the beauty of all this. That’s what adults do with each other. Unlike John who thinks he has all the answers.
The thing is, I don’t think this advice is going to work. Becky isn’t closeted and Joyce will never stop defending her. The Rubicon, she has already been crossed.
Yeah, I think Jocelyne’s advice even if not necessarily the best is full of compassion and understanding and genuine love. She’s not making this advice out of malice or to shut her up, but because she genuinely believes this is the advice she most needs to survive.
And as you say, that’s adulthood. Giving each other advice, trying your best to help people even if you need to learn more circumstances and information that might change that advice.
freakin love Jocelyn. of course she has the advice that it’s better to stay safe than to get into fights over your values. i mean, it’s literally a matter of life or death for LGBT teens and young adults, so of course safety is #1 concern.
Fire and burning bridges is all fine and well, but that can amount to jack shit if you end up getting hurt (…or worse) in the process. That’s a reality a lot of people still don’t grok.
I wish it didn’t have to be that way (fuck yea, fire!) but… yea… sometimes reality and expectations/dreams just don’t match up. This strip has been sobering this morning.
And hell, that’s kind of the thing about these very personal activisms like this. The way things change, the way people survive these hellish cages is for risk-takers to suffer by coming out and braving the flames so as to smash the wall forward down with their broken, bruised bodies.
But that’s so debilitating for the people who do that and so it becomes monstrous to demand that of anyone. People need to prioritize safety, but the community and all in it benefit from those who ignore that and take the risks and suffer for it.
It’s really awful in general and makes it hard both to give perfect advice and to even know whether a piece of advice is going to be individually useful. It’s all really complicated.
ALSO something else that occurred to me: as an ally/being in someone’s corner, you also have to think about the safety of who you’re trying to defend/protect, too. That’s something I should’ve mentioned in my first comment.
I totes see where Jocelyn is coming from. We’re I in her shoes, I’d likely give similar advice – not from a “keep your head down like a good girl” POV but more a “pick your battles” sense. Save energy and risk for the stuff that really matters.
Ultimately, Joyce needs to figure out what her goal is this weekend and work towards that single-mindedly. She needs to understand that she is not winning her family over on everything and decide what she can win them over on.
She is not getting Carol and John on-side for gay rights. That’s not happening. She can cultivate Hank as an ally on her being an adult and aim for a goal of Carol not insisting on pulling tuition. She should do that, because Joyce has no way of helping Becky if she’s stuck in La Porte with no money or roof to give Becky.
And I think that’s exactly what Jocelyn is getting at – if Joyce has the intention of going to battle for Becky, she needs to realize where her priorities are and act accordingly.
Lets face it, if Joyce does play the happy christian daughter, the worries of the mother would be far less strong, probably, because it means she is immune ™ to corruption and thus becky can be more quietly harbored with less drama and worries.
Buuuut on the other hand, we see that with Hank that willingness to stand up does have benefits.
In short, I propose small acts of strategized standing up.
Yeah, that’s the big rub messing with all the possible options Joyce has for surviving this weekend. To be considered “proper” and thus not someone to worry about, she’d have to openly support her mom’s homophobia, agree that Ross’s actions nearly killing her were justified, and openly reject Becky. And that still might not be enough.
I mean, Joyce is a RIDICULOUSLY good and perky Christian daughter already. With the exception of her non-homophobia and friendship with an atheist, there’s nothing which Carol could object to her daughter about! Ergo, the idea of playing it safe means there’s nothing but tong down her tolerance.
Does anyone else want to know more specifically about Joss’ religious views? Like if JocelyneJBrown.com had a theology tag, I would have already devoured every post under it, probably twice.
And Joyce learns another important but hard to swallow lesson. 🙁 Unfortunately you’re not going to change the mind of people like Carol or John a lot of the time, especially since they’re family. You have to learn what battles are worth fighting.
And this is the weird part of family politics. Where you disguise what you think because you’re unsure if the others in the family will disapprove or react.
And to what extent.
So you listen in on conversations, start a couple off to the side, but you’re never 100% sure on anything.
Because you know they’re doing the same thing.
So you talk a little with siblings, and get a better feel for them and their views.
And each section of your family is still talking about everything else.
It gets to the point where if you REALLY want to know, you need to take a chance with another family section.
But you’re never 100% sure.
Ever.
After reading this last night and letting it stew in my mind for a while I’ve begun realizing that I can relate to Jocelyn’s suggestions here, even if i don’t necessarily think it’s the best advice for Joyce and Becky at the moment. Now, I’m not in nearly as bad a situation as any of the characters here, but I understand having to pick my battles with my family (my father in particular) to keep myself “within access to resources”, as Jocelyn puts it. It’s a hard thing to do, and it makes me empathize with Joss even more. sigh
poor Joss, she’s giving advice that she knows because that’s what she does. And she hates saying it but she says it because she has to, she knows it and she wants Joyce to have her best shop.
I never know where to look at John’s face.
My eyes always focus on the glasses but then he seems to be staring off into space constantly and if I try to look at his real eyes the glasses just bug me…
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“the POOPFACEST”
best adoption EVAR
Seriously, that family could use a gingerjection if you know what i’m sayin’
Wouldn’t it just be a gingection?
I would’ve said ‘ginjection’ but I wasn’t 100% people would get it
They could use some gin as well.
Both is good.
A ginjection? I’m sure Billie could supply the goods… ;D
She truly speaks Becky’s language
badassteamupsayswhatwhat!
What what!
in the butt
In the butt.
Samwell opened for me once. It was surreal. Thanks for the memory.
“Sawmill opened for me once”… NOOO!!!
(Sorry Goatse flashback…)
I have only seen Goatse as drawn in “NSFW Comix”, and that was enough.
What?
Say “what” again, motherfucker!
Do they speak English in “What?”
“What” aint no country I ever heard of!
Man, I’ll bet the Browns are just huge fans of Ezekiel 25:17.
I’m sure they never gave much thought to what it meant. It’s just some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker.
But now they’re thinking, maybe Joyce is the righteous man, and John is the evil man, and mister 9mm is the hand of god protecting Joyce’s righteous ass in the valley of darkness…
Nah, that’d be Sarah and her bat.
That is SO appropriate for this situation: Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.
huh?
Ezekiel 25:17 is “I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the LORD, when I take vengeance on them.” (NIV)
The way Tarantino translated the verse is slightly different.
What is a whole new world.
Que?
what?
And remember to feed her and take her for walks.
She is potty trained
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/forevers/
Still needs regular exercise.
Of course the problem is when she starts humping someone’s leg.
*plays Run-DMC’s “Run’s House” on the jukebox*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xMJZHrG_94 <- Of all the things to become a TV series!
Is it too early to request “We Are Family”?
From an old Pittsburgh kid like me? No sweat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMVe_HcyP9Y
HOORAY! *dancing for realz in chair to this*
New little sister? Jocelyn, you are too amazing
Seems Joyce now has that sister she always wanted but knows about, as opposed to 1 she still thinks is her brother…
I got that right, didn’t I?
She also has Sarah.
He’s calling Becky “new little sister” to indicate she’s part of the family. Joyce has no reason to know she has one less brother.
Or no reason in what was just said.
Ah I love Jocelyne so much! <3
BEST reaction to new sister Becky.
Really hoping Jocelyn comes out to them. Probably the most supportive family environment she’s ever going to get.
Agreed, so wondering if she will
I dunno about that. Just because somebody’s okay with gayness doesn’t mean that they’ll be accepting of transgenderness. Hell, even gay people can be downright rotten to trans people. Some of the worst treatment I’ve received since beginning my own transition has been from gay men, and drag queens in particular. Some of them can be real jerks.
That being said, I do HOPE that Becky and Joyce are more open minded than that, but you never know when it comes to this particular subject. :l
I’ve been wondering if at some point Joss will feel comfortable coming out to Becky specifically, at which point we’ll see if that leads to comfort confiding in Joyce or not.
I love your QC avatar!!! She is one of my favorites
Yeah. Unfortunately true. The cruelest people I’ve ever met have been ‘political lesbians’, also called TERFs, who have made sport out of hunting and outing and destroying the lives of trans women. Some of them keep public databases of us, to destroy our ability to find work, or shelter. There are true, genuine monsters out there, and they aren’t all in the form you might expect. :/
WTF. I never would have imagined people like that could exist. Fortunately my opinion of humanity couldn’t go much lower…
Good lesson to remember: any movement, without the ability to police itself, will eventually be hijacked by assholes. No exceptions. Sadly, feminism is no exception.
I’d argue that that specific example is less “hijacking” and more “radical splinter group”. Not to say that you’re entirely wrong, though…hell, look at what happened to Occupy Wall Street.
It is radical splinter groups… who are doing a pretty damn good job of hijacking the movement. Feminism seems to leave a sour taste in the mouths of many, many people who would normally agree with feminist ideas, and that’s mostly because the term has been dragged through the mud by extremists.
That’s why I don’t like relying on labels. I prefer simply saying exactly what I mean. You can hijack feminism because it’s not self-explanatory. Try doing the same with gender equality. Movements against racism and homophobia have never had to deal with those issues because they don’t have labels… and the moment they try to have a label (Black Lives Matter), it instantly gets sullied by its most moronic members.
That’s so horrifying my sheltered little mind can’t believe it’s true. Those that have been forced to the fringes of society for being nothing more than themselves, which brings no harm to anyone, should at the least have solidarity. Why do people have to be such…people.
Hate sometimes breeds hate, I guess? Some people, when marginalized, feel a need to lash out and marginalize others in turn. Obviously I say “some”, because a lot of folks are better human beings than that, but it definitely happens. I went through a number of traumatic bullying experiences at school as a kid, and when it got really bad (and no adults, however well-meaning, could do shit to fix it), I started taking my misery out on other girls at school who were even more emotionally vulnerable than me, just because it meant I wasn’t the bottom of the pecking order if I did. When I realized what I was doing I was disgusted with myself, and I forced myself to stop. Feeling marginalized can twist and warp your mind, to the point that you end up rationalizing actions you aren’t proud of. It is never, EVER an excuse to treat someone else poorly. But, having done it, I totally understand the impulse. 🙁
A lot of people – a lot – don’t really want the system to change. They just want to be the ones on top, in charge, punching down.
That seems like exactly it, unfortunately, yeah. They don’t really want to dismantle patriarchy – they just want to take on it’s authority for themselves, and use it to punch down. It’d be sickly hilarious if it wasn’t so horrible.
Well, historically, regardless of what you want, one of the best ways to stop from being hit yourself, is to join the authority in beating on those even lower down.
Think various waves of immigrants to the US becoming “white” partly by joining in on abusing the blacks. Especially the Irish, but Italians and others follow similar patterns.
Or for that matter the average elementary school bullying dynamics.
People suck.
When they’re not surprising you with how wonderful they can be.
*cough cough* See harassing sexism in nerd culture *cough cough*
A lot.of it is about, “Well, my life is.complete shit, but at least I’m better than THEM.” Whoever “they” happen to be.
Yup, one of those carefully coached my family on standard TERF talking points and they used that authority to feel justified in all the awfulness they threw at me including trying to angle me to reparative therapy. And I got out lucky for an encounter with a TERF given how many are fond of harassing trans kids with their dead names and trying to get them fired/kill themselves.
TERFs suck.
Yeah. I dated a promiment figure in the trans activism scene for a while, and as soon as it became known that I was her girlfriend, I started getting a fucking *blizzard* of hate and stalking from them, because TERFs are so gross that they’ll happily attack the loved ones of their targets to cause them pain. Anonymous accounts started popping up to attack my appearance, declare that I couldn’t have been a victim of sexual abuse because I was “unrapeable”, and more, and it went on, literally, for a fucking year. It was just fucking ceaseless, every damn day. That’s what those fuckers are like. :/
*appropriate gesture of support*
Fucking TERFs.
Damn, that’s friggin’ awful.
I think she will, but not now. This isn’t the time for it. For one, Becky’s the focus right now and bringing up the whole “BTW I’m actually female” thing would make it into one of those situations where you’re trying to show you can relate (and/or wish to reciprocate their gesture of trust in telling you whatever) but it ends up coming across like you’re trying to make it about you. For another, they’re in public and while Becky is fine with yelling “HEY I’M A LESBIAN” in public Joss doesn’t want to risk someone overhearing her and word getting back to their parents.
On top of that, Joyce is already at full mental capacity. She’s fighting through her personal crisis of faith, her ideas of good and evil aren’t comfortably definite, and the real world has taken away the rose colored glasses she saw her entire life through. With all these moving parts, she needs a stable “known” to fall back on. Fortunately for her, she has an sibling on her side who’s experienced many of the same obstacles and found a balance.
Joss should absolutely not stay closeted forever, but for now she can crack the door and wait for the right time. Joyce has proven she follows the values of her faith, not the memes. She’ll be there to reciprocate the support.
I’m curious whether her telling Ethan, ostensibly Joyce’s boyfriend and certainly a friend of Joyce’s, was some kind of attempt to get outed to Joyce without having to come out herself.
Given what has been said here about not being able to count on gay men to be allies, it seems like she took a big risk with that text to Ethan.
It does. Honestly though, I suspect there was a lot of meta at work there. She came out to Ethan mostly because Willis needed an in-world way to have her come out to us.
Seconding Needful. Considering where she started, Joyce has made huge strides. But she’s pretty much up against her limits. I recognize the sense of anger and betrayal she is displaying that comes when what was once a rock solid world view starts crumbling. Dumping the knowledge that her brother is actually her sister on her at this moment in time would be a bridge to far for her. Also Jocelyn’s advice is sound. When you’re fighting what amounts to an emotional guerrilla war, you want to avoid frontal assaults. And as much as it might gall her to compromise her principles, she and Becky need resources.
Besides which, she has the full support of Jocelyn. Her father is actually trying to be more accepting and seems to be succeeding to a degree. She may not be as alone.as she thinks.
Yeah! Bleed those bigots dry for all their worth!
Wait, thinking about it…would Dumbing of Age count as satire? In the same vein as something like Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby?
No, it’s not satire. It’s slice of life young adult fiction. Nothing is satirical or hyperbolic, if occasionally exaggerated.
Pretty sure the superhero stuff, carchases etc is meant to be _little_ hyperbolic.
Like the time chamber that Goku and Gohan went into?
It’s an overused term.
Huck Finn and Gatsby? Either you don’t know what satire means or I don’t know what satire means.
I DO subscribe to the theory that everything ever written by Mark Twain is probably satire somehow.
It was ment to be
Yeah, in that moment I was focused on the slave stuff and forgot the whole rest of the book (which I WOULD call satire). Once I started remembering the thing it fit.
Satire is described as introducing issues in society to scorn or ridicule.
Huck Finn mocks slavery and racism
Gatsby mocks rich people
DOA mocks fundamentalism
Well, sure, if you want to miss the point of 90% of each text, yeah.
Satire usually “pretends” to support the issue it’s ridiculing. “Pretends” is in quotes since the pretending is often intentionally unconvincing.
For example, Colbert back when he hosted the “Colbert Report” was being satirical since he was pretending to be an extreme conservative. Just outright mocking conservatives wouldn’t be satire.
Dumbing Of Age doesn’t “pretend” to support Christian fundamentalism. It outright criticizes certain aspects of fundamentalism. That means it isn’t satire.
I donno, I think that only works if you water down “mock” to levels where pretty much anything could be a satire. Huck Finn addresses slavery, and Gatsby criticizes the idle rich, but there isn’t the element of exaggeration that’s typically in place for satire. Huck Finn’s satire is things like the people from the town he left, where “civilized” folks feud, steal, and other vices. Or how Huck and company can be just fine around murderers, but get into jams when pursiong storybook adventure hijinks.
I think a lot of the problem is that definitions change over time, like no one would consider The Divine Comedy to be funny
“The Divine Comedy” is a comedy in the old sense of having a happy ending – see the second and particularly third definitions in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/comedy .
https://i.imgur.com/tyTc1Nl.jpg
Really though, pretty much all stories are either satirical or romantic (not in the love sense, but in the literary sense)
One Punch man is satirical
Batman is romantic
Star Wars is romantic
Simpsons is satire
Its Walky is romantic
Shortpacked is satire
Princess Bride manages to be both!
Basically comedies, mockeries, and ironically romantic comedies all fall under satire. While true romances and adventure tend to fall under romance.
I am using the broadest of terms here though.
When they fall under both or aren’t either but tease at one or the other is the best part.
Are you also a Northrop Frye fan?
A useful rule of thumb is to ask: “Can someone take this literally and therefore angrily miss, often comically, the point the work’s creator is attempting to make?” If yes, you’ve probably got a bit of satire on your hands.
I’m sorry, but the “rule of.thumb” scene from Boondock Saints just ran through my head.
Should I want to have any idea what you’re talking about?
Great fucking film that has literally ruined the phrase for me cause I can only think of that scene when I hear it.
I think satire also includes absurd exaggerations of reality, in order to hold up those things to ridicule. DoA has picked topics that are already sufficiently crazypants without having to exaggerate them.
if joyce keeps up all this progress she might gain another sister soon! 😀
What, she’s gonna kick Johnathan in the groin so hard he’ll become Joan?
As Ramona Flowers said to Gideon Graves …
Vote Joss for new legal guardian.
Seconded!
Seconded again, let the motion proceed!
Becky and Joyce are themselves legal adults.
Whoops, didn’t think this through enough. Just so excited!
Apparently not if Joyce still orders from the kid’s menu.
Adults with tiny appetites can still order from the children’s menu.
They can try. Some restaurants take exception.
“Ten and under.” At which point you switch to the senior’s menu. Or order half portions. Or take home a doggy bag. 😀
The only possible reason for them to do so is if they’re selling those items at a loss in order to get people with kids to come to their restaurant (and are expected to order overpriced appetizers and steak for the parents). So clearly this can be solved by asking to pay full price.
As I said in a previous strip, actual food is one of the smallest factors in the cost of providing a restaurant meal. Overhead and staffing and the like are a far larger factor and don’t vary much depending on the amount of food ordered. Yet customers, for understandable reasons don’t like paying nearly as much for the half size portions. Which is why restaurant portions tend to be so huge – food is cheap and it looks like you’re getting more for your money, even if you can’t (or shouldn’t) eat it all.
So, while they’re not likely selling them quite at a loss, they’re probably going out of business if too many people take advantage of the cheap kids menu.
Be a good time here for another .hack//SIGN if I still had my old avatar.
Be a good time here for another .hack//SIGN reference if I still had my old avatar.
Can Jocelyne stop being the best, please?
I don’t know, I mean, what she’s saying is certainly the practical solution (and comes directly from her own experiences), but it seems like Jocelyn’s encouraging Joyce to hide her opinions from her family, which may not be entirely healthy for her given the amount of shame and trauma she’s already repressing.
I’d guess that the followup to this first part of the conversation though is that Joyce can think of Jocylene as someone she can talk to and express these feelings with a safe person, since clearly Joyce had no idea that Joss was someone she could go to – as far as Joyce knew, all she had was another brother that would react the same way John did, until this conversation. So, that could be a good way to help Joyce stay civil with the rest of the family but also take comfort in the one sibling she can talk to freely.
Very true. Though she promised venting. I hope she delivers to Joyce on the venting.
It’s ironic also to think that Jocelyne also needed someone in the family to talk frustrations about the family’s stance on queer issues with and didn’t know she had that (and thus prompting Jocelyne to reveal that she also shares those stances to Joyce) until Joyce was “unwise” and blew up at John and her folks.
Sometimes people need to do the unwise unsafe option for their emotional betterment and emotional health.
Getting pulled out of school, separated from her support network and dragged back home to be “recentered” isn’t likely to be entirely healthy for her either.
And might well be likely to break her away from her family entirely, because she won’t recant and give up Becky, which will have very serious practical effects, as well as even more shame and trauma.
Sometimes repression is necessary, until you can get to a safe place.
Being open with her family is dangerous. Not nearly as dangerous as it would be for Joss, but still dangerous. Let her get back to school where she can be open with her friends.
And get some therapy, but that’s a long shot.
Consider that Willis *might not be* advocating Jocelyn’s stance as the *ideal* solution, but is depicting a very real way some people in her situtation choose to “cope” with it. Might want to give W. a chance to explore and present Jocelyn’s situation before rushing in with the instant analyohwhothehellamIkidding?
I think that’s exactly what he is doing. Showing a bit of how Jocelyne has survived and the reasons why. It’s not necessarily the best track, but given what thejeff says above, it may very well be the only one she sees open to her at the moment outside ending up on the streets.
It’s a very bad hand that too many young queers just trying to survive their families end up dealing with.
Valid Anger must be hidden beneath the bridge that hasn’t yet been burned.
*crying forever* this is the best *still cries forever* wow
“Becky is family”.
And just like that Jocelyne established herself as the bestest big sister ever.
Better than sassy, baseball bat wielding, adopted, black sister!?
Man, Joyce should just adopt sisters until bigoted fundamentalist assholes no longer control her household.
Adopt sisters until all the sisters are adopted and Joyce is family with the entire world.
I mean, I think Jesus would give that attitude a double-thumbs-up.
Because obviously having a bunch of brothers the first time wasn’t working out.
Now I’m picturing Buddy Christ.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
as-sister-lated.
You’re right, it’s a tie.
Oooooh, that is a tough competition.
Tell you what, there can’t be too many bestest big sisters ever.
They can be Best Sister Tag-Team. Sarah does the tough love, “I pretend I don’t like you but I’ll beat a guy with a bat for you” thing, and Jocelyne takes care of the loving supportive advice without prefacing it with, “Ugh, you freshmen and your drama. I’m only helping you so you’ll stop crying and I can do my homework.”
To be honest, I always thought Becky was already regarded as family by the Browns. Both Joyce and Hank have given that impression. At the very least before they began taking sides on whether or not Ross’ actions were justified.
I think so too… and when she came out as a lesbian her status as a family member was retroactively removed.
As betrayals goes that is almost as large as this
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/disagreement/
…Almost.
Yup.
I knew these two would get along.
Can one sibling make up for the general assholeishness of about 45% of the rest?…..Maybe. Probably. Definitely!
Becky’s new theme song
This really hurts, knowing what we know that Joyce doesn’t, that Joss is speaking from harsh experience, here. She can’t afford to cut herself off entirely, and she knows Joyce and Becky can’t either, so she has to council them to do the same.
Jocelyne is the smartest of age.
I totally agree with you on that.
I’m a bit uncertain, this could turn out to be “bad advice from a person just as scared as you are.”
Jocelyne’s been hiding from her family since she was little, it’s not hard to expect that to be her default advice.
Yeah, I’m worried about the negative consequences advice like this could have for Joyce. I mean, it might be the only practical thing to do since causing her family to cut ties would be a heck of a lot worse, but she’s already repressing so much crap.
Screw Negative consequences. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, as a very wise (and hot) man once said, she could “snap and suck like a billion dicks.”
Well she doesn’t have money…
She would lose her education. She would lose her autonomy. She would lose all her new friends and family. Those are just the conservative consequences. They range from those very guaranteed ones, all the way up to and including *her family murdering her to preserve their honour and the local community covering it up.* Some things could go a little bit wrong here.
Ugh, I used reddit’s doofy code instead of proper html tags and now I look like a total dunce, lmao
At least “reddit’s doofy code” [i]looks[/i] like something someone might use in a pure-plaintext medium. No-one would have even noticed, probably. [i]I[/i], on the other hand have no excuse when I do [i]this[/i].
I mean, the ‘negative consequences’ she was referring to were the negative consequences of NOT doing all that, but yes, that’s why I said it might be the only practical solution.
With Hank’s currently expressed support of Joyce I don’t think any of those are at all likely. Unless he’s full of shit about respecting her right to make decisions for herself I really don’t see him allowing her to be pulled out of school or quashing that selfsame autonomy.
It could get ugly, though. I believe Protestants allow divorce, but the local community might still frown heavily on it and blame Joyce for ‘allowing Becky to corrupt her’ and ‘luring’ her fine, upstanding father from the path of righteousness, shunning (or worse) Becky and the blue-eyed Browns.
Becky and the Blue-eyed Browns is my new square dance jug band.
Still, I guess it would be a good idea to explain things to him calmly and slowly, so that he is more likely to listen and to adapt bit by bit.
That’s a point. Use this fundamentalist patriarchal stuff against them, for once.
That said, I don’t really trust Hank yet. He’s not a total jerk, but he’s still ambiguously pretty jerky.
*wince* This is a work of FICTION!
WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT???
Everything.
And that would be why she stayed.
I have no idea what she said, but I get the jist. Family is what you what it to be, as well as what you were born into to.
I’m sure Joyce and Jocelyn’s Dad can get used to this, but it’s going to be a hard sell to the other two.
Talk less, smile more…
Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for~
(does that make Jocelyne Aaron Burr, this is worrying xD)
As long as she doesn’t shoot Alexander Hamilton, we’re good.
I think the closest she’ll get to old A.Ham is finally spending that ten bucks on those chicken fingers 😉
Why?
I’m assuming because Hamilton is on the $10 bill.
Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for
Man, like, I know that’s a Hamilton quote, but that sounds exactly like something that would come out of a fundie’s mouth.
It’s a quote from Hamilton the musical, but it is first spoken by Burr as a rebuke to Hamilton. Hamilton himself is always speaking up, which gets him shot.
Hamilton does use it in the play, but is smirking as he says it.
Using my first comment ever on Dumbing of Age to simply commend this comment. I’d also curse it for making Hamilton stuck in my head but honestly I can’t think of a time since September that it hasn’t…
Literally first heard Hamilton’s music two nights ago and am currently obsessed… how do you know me o.O
It’s because we were all you at one point 😉 Welcome to the club! Have you done the Hamilton starter kit? (watched all the Ham4Hams, followed LMM on twitter, done Schuyler Sisters choreo in front of a mirror? xD)
you and the whole goddamn world, seriously this shit is bigger than book of mormon was
Having not heard any of that production, I instead thought of a predecessor:
Never make a promise or plan
Take a little love where you can
Nobody’s on nobody’s side
Never be the first to believe,
Never be the last to deceive.
Nobody’s on nobody’s side.
So Becky is a Brown now. That makes her the only ginger in the family. Harry Potter was the only non-ginger in the Weasley family. So does that make the Browns the nega-Weasleys?
Ginger Brown sounds like an old-timey malt shoppe specialty. “I’ll have a rhubarb phosphate, and a ginger brown for the lady please.”
The Weasleys were about love and staying together against the world, while the Browns are about being “better”(?) than the world. So anti-Weasleys rather than nega-Weasleys.
Last panel is so cute and so sisterly, I can’t even deal.
This strip and yesterday’s are lovely. I’m so, so happy for Becky that she now has a trusted adult in her life who understands what she’s going through and can mentor her about stuff like this. I’m so happy for Joyce and Jocelyne both having an ally in the family and that Jocelyne is teaching Joyce about how to be a good ally in the personal and political sense – validating her anger while gently reminding her that helping Becky is the number one goal. Jocelyne is best older sister.
So agree with that. I don’t know about Jocelyne’s advice to Joyce, but her role as mentor to Becky is the best thing that could ever happen to Becky short of being given a free house.
Jocelyne is careful, a writer, and clearly does her research given her checklist of questions she tried to do earlier when John was there.
She knows exactly what Becky needs to do to get back on her feet, because she’s probably been running through paranoid checklists of what she would do if she ever snapped and told her parents the truth about her.
And so, she’s perfectly poised to help Becky through some of the practical adult stuff that she’s been a bit stuck on. I’m looking hella forward to the Jocelyne-Becky team-ups that are about to follow.
Shame that Jocelyne’s probably got a point here. If we had a better social safety net the other Browns could go to hell, but emotional distress might be preferable to economic distress. Maybe.
Someone has to help Joyce pay fro College. Once she is ready to be out on her own, she can then decide how much separation she desires from the rest of her family.
Becky too, it’s going to be hard enough for her as is.
I guess my thought is that loans are always possible, and I could see emotional distress possibly causing more damage than those.
Also the value of martyrs and that sort of thing, thought that’s a cold comfort.
Loans are pretty hard to come by when Joyce’s mom could easily put her in the exact same situation that Becky is currently in. Not to mention, even if she tried to go over her mom’s head, Lord knows that none of the local administrators of her town would be willing to help her, either. She’d probably end up homeless.
The “value of martyrs” part of this resonates strongly for me. I’m so grateful for the martyrs that went before me and had just utterly brutal lives so as to make it safe enough to be out as much as I can be. And I hope I can do some of the same for the next generation.
Social safety net? Joyce doesn’t need it. Need and luxury differ.
Um. Not sure what you’re saying. You could be saying that Joyce doesn’t need college, and that may be technically true in that she could survive without it, but that doesn’t make it a good option.
Family is the best source for a lot of problems. Your folks can afford to send you to college? Either let them and smile and say thank you, or refuse. But if you don’t want your family to support you, don’t expect the gummint to.
Too true. And I think that’s part of why there’s such strong support, especially among fundamentalists, of a weak social safety net. Because if people could easily survive without family, they’re more likely to stand against their family’s views when they don’t share it. But it’s a tough thing to come out or speak out about your family’s racism or sexism if you know you could lose a potential home if everything goes pear-shaped.
That’s something I’d never considered, but there’s likely truth in it.
I’d always seen it the other way around: The wealthy owners and businessmen who want the safety net cut because they don’t want to pay for it use the “values” issues to get the Christian right to support them against their own economic interests. It may be more of a symbiotic relationship than a parasitic one, as I’d thought.
Where is the other shoe. It’s about time for it to drop and this makes me nervous. Also I love Jocelyne!!! It almost seems like her and Becky have the same levels of sass.
the other shoe is when john nearly gets hit by a truck on the highway, but ruth comes right the fuck out of nowhere and sacrifices herself to save his life
Why? He probably hasn’t been drinking to prompt her Sudden Guilty Self-Sacrifice Sense.
Ah, but you see, that’s his secret. He’s always drunk.
Drunk on his RIGHTEOUS LOVE for the LORD
…and also, really expensive liquor, because 100 year old scotch technically counts as communion as long as you put it on the church credit card.
Seriously. Fuck the prosperity doctrine, and fuck John’s self-righteous, hypocritical face.
Fuck it with a goddamn cactus.
It’s about time someone provided Joyce with some solid advice.
Not all writers live in Ramentown. Even some webcomicers.
One posted a comic about how awesome his Model S was. I’m not contributing to his Patreon!
No no, you misunderstood. Señor Willis said he had a “Model T”, not “S”. Totally different thing. His car comes with an engine crank in the front!
Isn’t heyman talking about The Oatmeal with the Model S thing?
No idea. (I was making one of my Lame Jokes by Cho™ (patent pending))
Yep!
I can afford a Model S- if I live in it.
Does The Oatmeal even have a Patreon? Their only crowdfunding I know of was the campaign to build a Nikola Tesla museum, and when Elon Musk saw that Model S comic he donated a million dollars and pledged to build Superchargers on-site.
Uh, you do realize that Patreon is more about being an audience controlled version of an artist or writer’s salary, right? A way for fans of the work to pay money to encourage work they like showing up in their free entertainment?
It’s not actually supposed to be the beggar’s bowl at their feet, so they can literally survive (but too often it is).
So how’s the weather up there?
(atop that high horse of yours)
Jocelyn is so awesomely playful, she’s gotten entirely past Joyce’s sort of semi serious “I’m an adult” thing she’s got going on. Of course Joyce has been under tons of stress recently, though. Great sister, though.
Yes get mad, get fucking pissed, let the rage of uh wherever you’re from drive your….words?
Dang, someone else quoted the song before me!
Yeah, I’ve been Jocelyne in this situation. Felt like Joyce about it, too. It’s incredibly frustrating to have to hide how you feel from parents. But while they were financially supporting me (at least partially) through college, I had to bite my tongue.
Actually, they still don’t know I’m no longer a Christian. I keep trying to pass along subtle hints so it’s not a big deal when that shoe drops, but they keep not seeing it.
‘new little sister’ awwww
Awwwwwwww
Awwwwwwww
I know! Go Jocelyne!
New Sister! Low five!
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit how long it took me to figure out what Joss said in that last panel.
Aww, this is so sweet of Joss in that last panel. I think I’m feeling too happy as a result.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
*tries to speak, fails, instead melts into a puddle of pure love for Jocelyne*
Let it go, Joyce. It’s Ramentown.
Dumbing of Triangle: DAY 23
Here’s some more fake superheroes:
http://imgur.com/a/Z4bbe
They’re more real than you.
OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
[jk i ain’t about that hype]
I’m loving how much Joss is giving Joyce and Becky a handhold, something stable to hold on to… they don’t know how much she also needs them, and how much hope they give her, too. Augh, I love them all!
I’m actually really relieved by this page tonight.
Something that’s really REALLY been rubbing me the wrong way is how Joyce is having all this ally rage when the truly hurt party is Becky. I mean, sure, she got caught up in it but we have to remember that’s a plot device that was decided on by another (well meaning) ally (Willis, love you man and sorry about all the plot critique I’ve had as of late).
Like for all the naysaying I’ve had about how the trans/gay characters who are actually hurt by something get kinda shoved to the wayside so we can focus on someone else (Ruth, Joyce) again has made me really uncomfortable. Like, I’m always hearing how hard my existence is as a trans guy to everyone around me. Even if it’s well meaning difficulty, it’s just… annoying, cus they’re not the one ACTUALLY going through it.
So hearing Jocelynn say this and put Joyce in her place is a breath of fresh air and a big “FINALLY” moment for me. I hope we see more of this level headed sister.
See, that’s the thing. I understand where you’re coming from, and it’s a very reasonable thing to critique, but sometimes authors (like Willis, who seems to do a good job about things like this) do things like this (putting a straight ally in the limelight when she shouldn’t be) for a reason (in this case, being called out on it, as she should be). Pacing of comic strips make it difficult to have that reason be evident at first, which means we as readers had to wait weeks/months (maybe?) for the calling out to happen, but… yeah. Willis has to balance story and pacing, and sometimes that balance isn’t always evident.
(Also, I know what you’re trying to say re: “about how the trans/gay characters who are actually hurt by something get kinda shoved to the wayside so we can focus on someone else (Ruth…)”, but remember, Ruth is gay, too, and is being punished by Mary too. Not to the extent Carla is, but that’s still there.)
Ruth’s bi, actually. But yeah, also being blackmailed by Mary, and in fact I suspect Carla’s actually Mary’s secondary target* since Ruth has power Mary wants and Carla does not.
* At the moment. If Mary actually got RA power, Carla would probably be at or near top of the list of People Who Would Suffer Greatly, but fortunately that’s currently a hypothetical.
I mean, if Mary was R.A., she’d get half her floor expelled within a month, and be really smug about it as if it were completely justified.
Just half? Probably at LEAST two-thirds.
Final comic of the strip, RA Mary in the middle of an empty dorm floor, having gotten everyone expelled, laughing maniacally. (cue soft scrape of roller blade wheels on carpet)
THEN Mary pulls off her face to reveal SYDNEY YUSS.
Not doubting you necessarily, but is she bi? I can’t remember her being interested in guys at all or saying she’s bi, though I could’ve missed something from Willis stating otherwise. I know Billy’s bi, though.
The scene with Howard where she says it’s all complicated is the closest thing to in-universe confirmation here, but Word of Willis, the Walkyverse, and the fact that she was in the Bi Day banner with Billie and Danny all establish it. It’s mostly secondary though don’t blame you for missing it.
Ahhh… see, I took the “it’s all complicated” line to mean the complications that came from Billy being a student under her RA watch (and thus a very big no-no if anyone found out, you know?). That does make sense, though, especially with the banner (which I actually just saw ’cause someone linked it below, hah), since I’m not too knowledgeable on the Walkyverse* outside of Shortpacked!. Thank you for the explanation!
(*Basically what I know about it is that most of the characters here are from there in some way, there’s aliens, and most of them have superpowers from the aliens that they use to fight said aliens? And a lot of people die? Ruth being one of them, it seems… Also memes. So many memes. XD;; )
There was also I had a boyfriend once, back in Canada. So hints, but nowhere near enough to establish it in universe.
We know based on Word of God and that’s about it.
Canadian boyfriend.
On a note tangential to your post, I feel it’s limiting to insist that bi characters must always be shown to display attraction to both sexes, since we end up at a point where bisexuality is something that “needs” to be proven.
It’s an easy way, of course, and there’s certainly nothing inherently wrong with it, but it often manifests as bisexuality being implicitly linked with promiscuity.
OTOH, the basic storytelling principle of “Show, Don’t Tell” pushes in that direction and that’s usually a good thing.
Of course, there are ways to show attraction to both sexes without having multiple relationships or partners.
Sure, but then it comes to the point where bi characters have to be written in a specific way to actually count. The years long confusion over Ruth’s sexuality, that she must be gay (and not pan, or bi, or demi, or any other less represented sexuality) because we’ve only ever seen her attracted to a woman, and if she were really bi we’d see her express an interest in all those guys she literally never has any panel time with. Mandy, Grace, Sierra and Marcie are also characters who get this, specifically because we’ve only ever seen them with other women. Another issue with this is that it puts a timer on the relationships of bi characters (usually in opposite gender relationships), that, since they’re bi, we need to see them boink someone of the same gender because otherwise we “don’t really know.”
Like, I think it’s pretty likely that, say, Walky/Dorothy lasts the entirety of the comic, but if it eventually came out that Walky was bi out of comic like how we know Ruth is bi, but then he never acted on it because he was forever with Dorothy, we’d still get an onslaught of “I thought Walky was straight” comments.
Well, yeah. That’s because “Show, don’t tell” works. We process things we actually see play out much more strongly than things we’re only told. Particularly if the existing relationship keeps getting referenced and the bisexuality doesn’t.
That’s not prejudice. That’s just how people work.
But you don’t have to actually have them boink people of different genders, but you do actually have to show the attraction somehow. They can comment on it. They can flirt. They can deal with past relationships.
A simple statement once early on or in a character bio doesn’t register the same way. When was the last time Ruth being bi came up? Not in the comments, in the actual strip. Why are you surprised people don’t know it.
OTOH, Danny actually has plotlines dealing with it and people remember.
We get “I had no idea Jocelyne was trans” comments. Because it was shown once in the comic, subtly. Even though it’s all over the comments, a lot of people missed it or forgot.
If it’s just out of comic info, of course we’d get comments on it.
The only reason we know Mandy, Grace, Sierra and Marcie are bi is because they were in the all-girl squad in It’s Walky that was basically a “Lucky Joe gets put in with the lesbians who are really all bi” joke, right? It hasn’t come up at all in this actual comic. But somehow it’s a problem that people don’t realize this?
Have we actually seen Sierra in any kind of romance or anything in DoA? I’d expect most readers to assume she was straight by default.
And that’s the problem; that we’re in a point where unless a characters “acts” bi enough, then we don’t know they’re bi. That straightness is assumed because we treat straight as the norm, and that every single expression of same sex attraction must mean that they’re gay because alternative sexualities don’t exist.
And, yes, it’s a problem, because erasure fundamentally is a problem.
I guess. Sort of.
When there isn’t evidence, you make assumptions. That’s what people do. And generally, you base those on probabilities. As long as you’re open to admitting you were wrong.
Do we need to assume that every character everywhere actually is bi, unless we’ve been explicitly told by word of god that they’re not?
I get that bi erasure is a problem. I’m just not real sure that forgetting minimal mentions from years back (and in some cases from other works entirely) is a symptom of it.
Yes and that’s why correcting erasure is important.
And it’s not about assuming every character is bi, it’s looking at specific situations and deciding that, because they fit someone’s preconceived notions, that they definitely aren’t.
Nah, I know that 🙂 It’s just that she hasn’t said she’s bi (or hinted at it, or anything like that), and short of that happening, the only other way I can think of to get in-universe confirmation is to show she’s been interested in guys before and/or isn’t unattracted to them?
I’m a little confused about how that automatically leads to the bi person being promiscuous, though. I know a lot of writers fall into that trap, and a lot of fans do as well, but (for example) bi people are allowed to think people they aren’t dating are hot/attractive, too. That doesn’t mean they’re automatically promiscuous, or that their relationship will end, or that they would (or had) jump the bones of someone if gosh-darn-it they weren’t attached. 😛 And this isn’t a point that they have to act “bi enough” – though I can see how it would come across as that way in the hands of a lesser writer – it’s more giving them the same opportunities as other characters. We’ve learnt about Dorothy’s past relationship, Danny’s problem with crushing on one girl while dating another, Joe’s and Roz’s escapades, Sarah’s crushes, etc. In this case, Ruth is probably a bad example, since depression does a number on things like this, but… yeah.
And one could argue that Billy’s flipped the “promiscuous” trope on its head in this comic; people whisper about how much she got around before (though it sounds as if that wasn’t the case), but we as readers see her as being loyal to Ruth even though we know she finds guys attractive too, you know? (And Danny’s on the way to doing that, too; he’s still loyal to Amber/Amazi-Girl, even with being attracted to Ethan, you know? The cracks that’re starting to show in his relationship aren’t due to his sexuality, but rather Amber’s unresolved issues, which is a whole other can of worms. :P)
It’s not a matter of it automatically leading to that trope (and indeed, to reiterate; promiscuity isn’t this inherently awful evil thing that a bi character can never ever ever do, but more that it’s a common stereotype), it’s that it’s pretty much something that just gets automatically assigned to bi characters because it’s an easy way to show that said character is attracted to either gender. It’s just another box used for bi characters that I resent because it’s one of like maybe five or six bisexual plots out there and I’d like to see other ones. And as for how we just want to jump everyone’s bones if we weren’t bound in a relationship, or how our relationships need to end so we can enter a different one to really “count”, well, that’s Typical Bisexual Plots #3 and #4, right after “inherently incapable of faithfulness” and “wants to bang everything all the time.”
As for Ruth, I guess I could say, like, she hasn’t indicated she’s not into dudes? She was confused about her attraction to Billie and she used to have a boyfriend, but those could still, on their own, indicate that Ruth was never interested in guys, or still is. It’s just that we know that she is attracted to both per Word of Willis. I feel that we’re at a point where it should be okay to have bi characters who don’t need to be empirically shown to be bi; that we don’t need to assume that the only reason they’re expressing same sex attraction is because they’re gay and that’s the only way for it to manifest. Admittedly that leads to the problem of assuming that these bi/pan/demi characters are gay, but I feel like occasionally chiming in and correcting some assumptions is a small price to pay for having more varied bisexual characters and stories.
As it is also a wonderful foreshadowing i explicitly link the bi-visibility-day banner Regalli mentioned.
This banner predates the day we learn Danny is bi by almost a year.
Originally one could assume Billie’s the only person on the banner which is bisexual.
The reveal that Danny is bi makes it clear all characters on the banner are bi.
Yeah, I think another problem that is causing a lot of the focus to fall on the reflected trauma is that Joyce and Ruth wear a lot of themselves on their sleeves. Ruth, admittedly when in private in her room, but Joyce, everywhere.
And Becky, Jocelyne, and Carla very much don’t and instead internalize it a lot until moments where their armor is all the way melted through and even then rarely. As such, we’re not going to see a scene where Becky stews about it out of her head or Carla curses to herself about Mary, because both are trying to play like they’re totally cool and nothing can knock them down.
Hell, we’re seeing that with Sal too. She bottles a lot of her feelings about her mom and her mom’s racism up, so with the cookie storyline, we ended up spending the majority of it with Billie and Walky and their reactions to it, because they were the ones displaying the impact of it.
But yeah, I can definitely see it being somewhat annoying to Kole and I can definitely empathize as that part does sit a little awkwardly for me as well given how much I’ve twisted my life up out of guilt for those who’ve experienced reflected trauma from me being treated awfully and I’ve had a number of experiences where people straight up told me that we couldn’t discuss or process something awful that happened to me, and instead it was expected that I comfort them for how scared they were for me instead.
yeah… I’ve been liking this particular aspect of the writing because its felt so true to me. Sure, the directly impacted parties are quieter. ‘Cause when Sal tells Walky how it is, she gets rejection. And she knows she’ll get rejection. When you’re hurt enough, its just easier to hunker down and avoid the risk of more pain.
I agree. A lot of my friends do the the same thing, pulling in on a lot of stuff, especially among people who are more normative because their experiences about talking about stuff often involves being victim blamed for their experiences.
Ehh…in this case, Joyce is a hurt party as well because her family is actively trying to subjugate her by any means necessary, including cutting off contact with the outside world. There can be more than one hurt party.
Not to mention the specific things which happened to her, Joyce’s entire world view and identity are … she’s always believed that she and her family are they goodguys, now she’s realizing that they’re the baddies
https://youtu.be/hn1VxaMEjRU
If you think this is “ally rage” you haven’t been understanding Joyce’s motivations for being pissed off
And while you’re right and Joss is as well that it’s important to remember Becky’s the one actually getting the brunt of the bullshit stick
She is more than entitled to her best friend protective rage at the shitty parts of her family
Seriously this isn’t like principled rage about the general treatment of queer people this is very personal rage about the treatment of her best friend and also herself.
(If it needs to be said, all of the following should be taken with a hearty helping of IMO:)
Becky’s not a main character. She’s supporting cast.
(Sure, in RL she’d be the center of her own story, but this isn’t RL.)
Joyce is.
(Heck, given the semi-autobio nature of the strip, a case can be made that she’s the main character.)
This has nothing to do with the depth or validity of her suffering, her worth as a person, or any of that. (That goes double for people who happen to share some of her qualities in real life.) It just is.
This is Joyce’s story, the focus is on her, and Becky’s narrative role is to be part of that story.
I mean, I think Becky’s pretty main character at this point. Heck, I’d even argue she’s supplanted Dorothy as the deuteragonist of the series.
2015 was basically an entire year of Becky.
Now I want to make up a “DoA Zodiac” placemat like the ones in Chinese restaurants.
2010 – Year of Danny
2011 – Year of Dorothy
2012 – Year of Amber
2013 – Year of I got tired of skimming the archive for confirmation bias of who showed up a lot.
2014 – Year of I am too lazy to hack the tag database and make up a Powerpoint presentation
2015 – Year of Becky
2016 – Year of Jocelyne (we hope)
(I have too much spare time, don’t I?)
I feel like Year of Ruth/Billie would work for 2013 as that’s when we started to delve into their character more, and likewise for 2014 with Danny where he received significant focus, grew a lot, spent time away from Amber, and discovered his bisexuality.
I don’t know, I mostly saw it as Joyce being angry about the injustice happening to Becky, the injustice happening to herself came just on top of that. So what exactly is wrong about her being angry about people being jerks and worse towards Becky, except it being not the most helpful thing for Becky, who needs a calm ally more than an angry ally?
Joss did not put anyone in her place. That’s what John was doing. Joss specifically told her that it was okay to be angry. She spoke with her reasonably. She did not show contempt for her.
Just because you identify with what Becky is going through doesn’t mean you need to belittle what Joyce is going through. Again, that’s what John was doing, and it is what made him an asshole.
What Joss is doing here is the right thing. She is talking with her and giving her advice, not acting like some jerk who put her in her place. The whole point is that Joyce doesn’t have a place.
It’s not a matter of belittling Joyce, it’s that Kole feels that, to a degree, Becky’s issues are being used to prop up Joyce’s story.
Which, I really disagree with, as Joyce is the main character of the series so she kind of has to have top billing and I feel that Becky has also been given tons of focus in the series to develop her beyond just being Joyce’s gay BFF, but even if I really like the dynamic these two have, it doesn’t change the fact that fiction almost always focuses on allies and how sad they are that their cardboard cut outs are being operatically abused. That I don’t think it’s not happening in this case does not suddenly mean it’s stopped everywhere, or that Kole doesn’t deserve to feel the way he does.
Also please don’t implicit Kole as an asshole because he is acting kinda sorta vaguely adjacent to a character in the comic’s actions. That’s super uncool.
Except that Becky wasn’t the only victim. Joyce is hurt in a different way. In some ways Becky at least has closure, but Joyce has to deal with her own family denying her trauma and blaming it in her best friend.
It isn’t just about her being an ally. This is also about what Joyce has lost.
And to be honest, blazing angry is a reasonable reaction to this.
So, I’m thinking they just aren’t going to get it.
Look.
It is really, really common for allies to get the focus in stories about the tribulations of Queer characters. It happens all the fucking time. Just because Kole has issues we don’t agree with (and I do agree with him on the matter of Ruth and Carla) does not suddenly mean he doesn’t get it or that he’s missing the point.
Can we not try to alienate Queer readers of the series just because they aren’t towing the fucking party line?
towing the fucking party line
YIL (Yesterday I Learned).
gosh darn it
Damnit. I want to say Jocelyne should burn all the bridges, come out, and they can just be the trio of best-sisters-evah!!!!!!
….But that’s relly hard to do, and maybe they need all the resources they can get right now. Principles versus practical needs are hard. 🙁
“Do it for Becky.”
Maybe it’s the still dull headache from this weeks Arrow, but man did that line twitch a nerve.
And it’s not about Becky entirely, she needs some help and it’s good to see she’s got lots of people willing to help.
The thing is I just look at Joyce in that last panel and realize she’s going to have to keep putting her own issues aside just so she can help Becky. That downward look and the fact that Jocelyn hasn’t asked how Joyce is feeling makes me sad. I just wish someone would ask “Joyce, are you ok?”
Why you gotta bring up Arrow tho, that’s a fresh wound ;__;
At least we’ve got Supergi-….Uncle Grandp-……
Yeah no, fuck this world.
I love Supergirl tho. Man, no one is ever allowed to die on Supergirl, I wouldn’t be able to handle it lol.
Only thing that died on Supergirl was it’s season renewal.
… last I heard the prognosis was ‘cautiously optimistic’ for renewal. Do you know something I don’t?^^
I’m smiling, but it’s a tired smile. Some days aren’t paladin days, some days are just hunker down and take care of you and yours til the world becomes less shit days. I’m sad Joyce has to learn that, but Joss is a great big sis for teaching.
she adopted Becky ahhhhh that’s adorable.
This conversation makes me uncomfortable. Jocelyne’s sounding like a Prime.
This advice is painful, and hard to give… and, as a trans girl, both deeply personal and keenly felt by Jocelyne. Like me, she probably knows more than a few girls in our community of sisters who have been thrown out of their homes, disowned by their parents, and left homeless on the streets. A lot of us in that situation end up resorting to survival sex work, because there aren’t a lot of people looking to employ homeless trans or queer youth, and there’s a lot of charities and shelters who outright refuse us entrance just for being trans.
It’s a really shitty situation, having to hide who you are in order to keep access to resources and safety, until you’re established – but it’s a better situation than ending out on the street, with nothing. :/ That’s the kind of choice people like Jocelyne, people like me – people like *us* – face every day, all over the country.
Yeah. I know too well the position and awareness her advice is born out of. And it sucks telling people in pain, on the raggedy edge to try and hold on where they can to get someplace safe so they can be themselves in more places than just on campus.
But it’s also misapplied by Jocelyne. Becky is already homeless. Joyce is already in hot water with the folks. Telling them the cold importance of this type of sad safety calculus to “avoid them ending up on the streets” is a bit awkward and little not okay given that Becky already is on the streets. Is already homeless. Is already facing directly all the dire consequences.
Telling them to be cautious and play the game for survival now is kind of like unveiling your plan to keep the animals in the barn after they’ve already escaped the open door.
And that might be down to that difference of experience. Jocelyne is terrified of a fate like Becky’s. Becky is already in a fate like Becky’s and so has lost some of her fear about it.
Ooooh, good point here. I knew there was something rubbing me the wrong way about Jocelyne’s advice.
Joyce’s parents are already discussing pulling her out of college, John will already testify in favor of that, and there’s no ‘obedient daughter’ position for Joyce left to take if she doesn’t want that.
It’s fight time, now.
Becky isn’t on the streets yet, but she’s going to be there in a big rush if campus administration is given a tip (say, by a certain shithead minister) to check Joyce’s friends for Becky. And Joyce, herself, ABSOLUTELY can have things get worse real quick. Her family is irate with her, but this is absolutely recoverable. Where it stops being recoverable is when they say they won’t pay for tuition anymore.
Agreed that Joyce is just on the cusp of realizing what bad for herself would actually look like and how close she is to it.
With Becky, she’s homeless and not living under a bridge yet, but there’s so many random occurrences that are poised to fuck her right now. Hell, the fact that Mary already knows about her and is pissed at Ruth means that shithead missionary brothers are the least of her worries.
Besides telling on Becky would be acknowledging that she is a person and he wouldn’t stoop to considering Becky to be a person, certainly not a person worth ruining. Just another trendster ruining her family and others, whatever, right?
I think the life he’s going to try to ruin will be Joyce’s, by immediately calling the folks with a skewed story about how she went off on him for no reason and how he thinks she should be kept at home to “be made better”.
But ruining Joyce’s life screws Becky over too. If Joyce gets pulled out of school, Becky’s place there gets a lot less secure. And it ain’t that secure to start with.
Getting separated from Joyce guts Becky’s fragile support network. She’s got Dina, but that’s a romantic relationship that’s about a week old. Scary as hell to rely on. Beyond that a couple of other girls she’s basically just met.
Even more, being responsible for ruining Joyce’s life would devastate her. Not that she actually would be, but she’d see it that way.
That’s really true and very good point. Joyce ruining her life “for Becky” would destroy Becky, not just materially, but emotionally, and she might not be able to recover from the guilt of that as easily given her strong feelings.
I know when my life was going to shit, it was the guilt of the reflected trauma on loved ones that ate me up the most and it was having someone I cared about deeply hurt to the point of no longer being happy connected to me that got me to fully break away from my own toxic family.
Yeah, this advice just isn’t really all that great. Like it’s applicable to Joss’ situation but A) everything you said, and B) Joyce is a cis hetero person she inherently has a lot more leeway to express herself than a queer person would. Especially when Hank has already made it clear he supports her and understands her anger which makes it far less likely she’s going to face severe consequences for it seeing as he’s the “man of the house.”
Strongly disagree with you here.
First, for all that Jocelyne knows, Becky “sorta” has a safe place to live and “sorta” leads on a job (OK, she knows the latter is not true, Becky has no SSN).
Second, it’s excellent strategic advise!
Now she can claim to Carol and Hank that she was able to “talk sense into Joyce”, where John was not.
This gives her bonus points on most-liked son competition and makes her advice to the parents (to keep Joyce at IU) the crucial one – whatever John may say.
When she says “i will keep close contact with Joyce to help her fend off secular seducements”, they will trust in her. (Contact via telephone or Hank occassionally lends her his car – she seems too poor to own one herself).
(Which reminds me – how are the parents thinking about John’s Mustang financed by church tithings? Is this the reason he is not the most liked son?)
She may even invite Becky in her home for some time to “re-inforce Becky’s belief in God”.
Well, maybe not, because story-telling reasons requires Becky to also be at IU, but maybe some days.
David M Willis is poopfacenewlittlesister confirmed
Oh man, so much in revealing character moments here.
Joyce’s tiredness with her anger and its silencing. She’s been sitting on the urge to scream at her family for being awful fucks for a good week now and every bit has just been this barrage of passive threats of removal from school or outright dismissal. Hell, even the majority of her friends openly pine for an old Joyce who wasn’t angry, even if the reason for lacking that anger was passively supporting bigoted systems that hurt friends of hers.
Joyce needs someone to validate and allow space for her anger and her frustration.
And that has another dimension beyond the obvious. Which is Toedad is the second fellow traveler from her community who has directly committed an act of violence against her. The faith that she was taught was the only moral thing, that told her she was a sinner for following the Lord and refusing to abandon friends simply because they were gay or an atheist, that is supposed to be the only source of goodness to the point where she is expected to throw her entire life away to be a sex slave providing unpaid labor in order to propagate said faith and community.
That faith and those who have demanded her trust because they were members of her faith have betrayed said trust on more than one occasion and not only that, but her own family has seen at least part of this violence and decided the problem is with her and has openly minimized the very real harm she has faced.
Of course she has anger she can’t bottle up anymore. Of course she’s about to blow up all over all the fellow travelers of her faith. She’s got PTSD scars down her back and the only people until now who’ve given a damn have been a lesbian and an atheist, two people she was raised to think of as irredeemable sinners.
…said the guy who just burned the bridge that would have gotten him home…
Girl and her would be the proper terms here.
To be fair, she might just have expected an uncomfortablely silent car ride or something.
But I guess fundies don’t like to be called out.
No, she didn’t burn that bridge, I suspect. It takes more than one disagreement for that (Usually). She annoyed her brother, but she’s still family (I’m pretty sure). John can get mad, but he can’t shit talk her for being annoyed by her wealth very effectively.
Damn you, Willis, you break my heart.
And Jocelyne continues to be exactly the sister Joyce and Becky have needed. There’s no negotiation or antagonization, or need to wait to grow to accept her. Nope, just, boom, you’re family, now I’m going to mercilessly tease you just like I do Joyce when we’re alone.
And that’s exactly what Becky needs and has needed from whatever remnants of family she’s got left. Someone besides Joyce to unconditionally accept her and show her that she hasn’t lost even the illusion of family of her own because she was born gay.
Yes!!! No fanfare, no bullshit, just “high five, little sis.” This was exactly what Becky hoped, but didn’t really expect, with the Browns. It was a huge risk but if she could get just one more family member it would be worth it. And it was!!!
Love. Home. Happy.
I love this with Becky. We are about ten minutes after she – freaked out of her mind – ran into the restaurant opening up with Hitler jokes to derail what she thought would be another horrible family time.
Then Jocelyne comes back completely out of the blue and adopts her, and it takes Becky just one moment of hesitation and then she is all into it.
Becky – when life gives you a cookie you EAT THE SHIT OUT OF THAT COOKIE
<3
Savor it bite by bite.
… That cookie really doesn’t sound as appetizing as maybe you intended.
Beggars can’t be choosers.
FAMILY!
But oh man, that Panels 2-5, hoo boy…
So yeah, on one hand, I love the little adds that Jocelyne puts in to try and make sure it’s not just another “stop being angry” bullshit tone policing.
But… oh, man, the thing is that I think this advice may be good on its surface and without context. Bob knows I’ve given similar to queer and trans students of mine to walk into potentially disastrous situations with safety plans in mind.
And it’s definitely what’s ruled Jocelyne and how she has survived to get here. Avoiding any heated conversation, finding excuses to limit direct interaction, hide any anger or discomfort and just deflect nasty conversations as best she can.
And it’s impossible to blame Jocelyne for that. She faces a chasm of awful if she was to come out. She will lose her family and her safety net and an unreliable freelance writer’s paycheck is not going to protect her from a bad spell leaving her completely impoverished or if her landlord evicts her for being trans. She’s done her research, she knows exactly what landmine strewn field she’s looking at for her options.
But it’s not really the advice Becky and Joyce need. Like, yeah, in the short term maybe. It’s the thing Becky’s been doing so far, just absorbing bigotry directed at her without raising a fuss and Joyce really needs to not be pulled out of school…
But it’s kind of too late for all that. Becky is already out, Joyce is already on record yelling at her mom’s voicemail and promising to protect her and that was enough alone to have her mom talk about pulling her out of college. And she’s now added stealing their car and “being unchristian” to her brother to that repertoire.
Her mom is not going to passively accept stoic Joyce refusing to engage, because Joyce hasn’t actually initialized jack shit. Carol and John have gone after her, because she’s publicly supported a “sinner” and Carol at least is not above constant passive-aggressive digs of dehumanization and victim-blaming, because she sees it all as a battle she has to WIN to save Joyce’s soul.
Even if Joyce was to pull a full Jocelyne, her mom will still try to attack her over her support of Becky and try and draw her into an argument.
This is no longer the time for stealth and closets and “playing it safe”, because to survive, what she actually needs to do is counter her mom’s narrative with a strong defense of her core values like she did with her mom and dad in defense of Dorothy.
And the reason is that right now, her only hope for not being yanked from school is Hank being enough on her side to veto his wife’s ideas (yay, exploiting sexist power dynamics) and he responds best to honest openness and signs of how emotionally meaningful something is to one of his kids.
It’s also…
It’s also a poison. I’ve been there, bottling up large parts of myself to try and avoid triggering family poison as much as possible and well, it’s just awful and dehumanizing and is more likely to fill you up with rage and sadness to the point where it can negatively affect your emotional health in major ways.
And well, as noted earlier, Jocelyne has lived by this method, which protects her in crucial ways, but traps her. She can’t grow her hair out long or style it femme or in a girl’s style because her family needs her to regularly make family appearances where she needs to be ultra in the closet and getting called the wrong name all night.
Additionally, she’s not really seen, neither in these comics nor in the Patreon bonuseswhere she’s just at home miles from her folks, living herself authentically in much of a way. Trans women don’t all need to be femme, but she has never once looked comfortable in boy’s clothes and yet she’s stuck in them in most scenes. I guarantee she sees the risk being too high for anything like HRT or to even get too intimate with a guy and risk that getting back home.
Additionally, there’s little sign that she’s yet feeling safe enough to take legitimate steps towards detangling her life from her folks. And we’ve definitely seen how the strain of things is pushing her to the breaking point (see “say something I can never take back”).
That pathway, in the long term is toxic as hell when trying to survive toxic folks and can make escape harder and harder as you sink good time after bad into trying to narrowly stay on the good side of people who’s support is mercurial and conditional.
I don’t think her advice is good advice to where Joyce and Becky are right now.
It definitely is not good advice for Jocelyne at the moment. Safety is important, but I just see her getting shredded for it in a similar way to how I did, because folks like Carol don’t see that sacrifice of humanity as a call to do better, but an allowance to get even worse and dismiss things like identity.
Basically, Joyce following this advice could put herself in an even worse position than she is now.
Yeah, I think this is a case of an AWESOME, caring, character giving kinda not really perfect advice. Especially after the gun the situation is so different for Joyce and Becky that her own survival methods are not always perfectly applicable.
Which is as it should be. Jocelyne is not a magical queer fairy swooping in to solve their problems, she struggles as good as she can and does her own compromises – as seen back in the fountain scene when she and Ethan were equally useless to Joyce as she stood up to her parents (and won a victory with Hank that Jocelyne has never won herself). She doesn’t really manage to live up to her own advice either – if she did she would not have pissed off John with the burn about the car (however awesome). She would have made a much more vague exit and kept her place outside the conflict (as far as he knew).
Still it is one of the BEST advice Joyce have got, and from a person who is 100 percent on her side. It’s just not a PERFECT advice, and there will be problems with it.
Hmmmm. Joyce’s big sisters, Jocelyne and Sarah really do have a lot in common, don’t they?
Very much agree. Of all the advice she has been given regarding this situation, this is one of the best and definitely the most caring. And I definitely agree with the Sarah comparison.
Both give advice, some of it is excellent, all of it is compassionate and understanding of the situations she is in, but all of it is based on their own perspectives, life experiences, and what they would do, and so has that weight to them. To Jocelyne, this sort of thing is key to survival as a queer person, just like Sarah’s faith in the justice system led her to push for going straight to the cops after the assault from Ryan.
I was expecting this advice from Jocelyne. Remember, she’s been hiding who and what she is from literally everyone in her home and native community since she was a pre-adolescent. Hiding has become such an automatic second nature to her to the point where no other strategy even exists in her mind. It makes sense that she would advocate the Joyce and Becky hide too.
It is exactly the advice Jocelyne would have given, because it’s the strategy she’s been using and in her experience, especially comparing herself to Becky, it’s all she’s seeing as working to stay safe. I don’t blame her at all speaking from her experiences and her researched awarenesses of how bad it could easily get for her if she wasn’t this areful.
And thus it makes sense why she would give this advice and believe it to be the best advice she could. She just hasn’t become fully aware of the flip-side trap to the lose-lose situation she is in.
Yeah, this advice is predicated on Joss’ assumption that their parents are united in their lack of support and this just isn’t the case. Joyce KNOWS she has room to express herself relatively safely and now Joss has come in with this pretty uncool guilt tripping to cast a whole pile of doubt over that. She’s succeeding in smothering Joyce’s dissent where everyone else in the family has failed and that’s a tragedy.
That’s a good point. Joyce has blown up at her folks and challenged them in a major way and so knows that Hank actually responds to that and she knows about Hank’s current struggles with supporting her and the extra leeway she has gained with him.
Jocelyne has deliberately minimized the amount of contact with her folks as possible and so has not seen Hank’s current shifts this last week and while she saw the positive resolve to the support for Dorothy fight, she didn’t see how Joyce resolved it and was only half paying attention, because she recognized it as a fight and so intentionally disengaged.
So yeah, to Jocelyne, her parents are a monolith of awful, whereas Joyce actually knows that her dad responds well to honesty and is trying very hard to be on her side.
I am afraid to know why you know all of this and what experience you’ve had with these kinds of situations.
Maybe everyone just needs a hug right now.
Over the last few months, I have had the honour and privilege to learn to know why. It’s been painful to read, though certainly nowhere, nowhere, NOWHERE as painful as having to have lived it! But it’s also been necessary, and in its own way good (if you understand what I mean), and it’s been a true learning experience.
And the comic itself has grown on me thanks to Cerberus (and also ischemgeek and Bagge and other thoughtful commenters whose nicks I should probably be remembering. I apologize to all of you for not doing so). It’s been helpful to understand properly just what Willis is actually saying with his characters and plots. It has been helpful to realise that it’s a lot less hyperbole than you would think. It is not happy knowledge (because it makes you wish that the comic simply was that hyperbolic), but it is necessary knowledge. If we are to right the wrongs in the world, we must first know what those wrongs really are.
The only ‘downside’ is that I can probably never read binge read the archives ever again, because I will now be incapable of reading the comics without also reading the comments, and then each strip will take half an hour to go through, meaning it’ll take years to get back to the current strip.
(Last paragraph is roughly 50% joking.)
Awwww, thank you, your majesty. I enjoy your posts to!
Finally, that middle bit where Jocelyne brings up “doing it for Becky”, it’s in direct response to Joyce saying that she can’t compromise what she believes.
Meaning the “it” here is compromising her value system for survival. And it’s something Jocelyne has clearly done her fair share, but it’s kinda a bit of a monstrous thing to demand of someone, especially by adding a guilt trip to the end, hitting Joyce in the heart.
Like, I love you Jocelyne, but that little bit was kinda super uncool.
Joss has been here forever. Coping mechanisms on top of coping mechanisms?
Was it a demand or just a statement of fact? There is an opportunity cost here: Joyce speaking her mind could cost Becky the resources she needs to get on with her life right now.
It doesn’t really matter if the Browns come around on this or not; simply that they provide Becky with a place to stay and food to eat for a few days while she tries to get access to the things she needs so that she can get on with her life.
That’s what I got out of it: Just keep quiet for a few days, until Becky’s sorted out, and then you can say whatever you want.
Yyyyeah…
You had god damned better be willing to burn your values system and sense of righteousness for someone ELSE’S survival. When you’re playing with your life, no 1 curr. When you’re playing with others’, though? You play by their’s. And Becky has, quite bluntly, not been doing this brinkmanship FOR A REASON.
Wait, Becky?
Becky’s been actually doing the Jocelyne thing all weekend. Trying to be on best behavior (except when she’s hyper-nervous and trying to distract everyone to prevent a Joyce anger meltdown), absorbing abuse without much pushback, deflecting passive-aggressive attacks by Carol into a joke and a distraction before Joyce could explode. She even questioned the choice of taking the car and tried to follow Carol’s unspoken rules by trying to avoid being in a closed room with Joyce as she knew that would cause Carol to freak out.
Becky’s trying like hell to not screw up Joyce’s life and is absolutely not doing brinkmanship.
Joyce on the other hand, is very much going to the mats for what she believes and has gone into this weekend wanting to fight. She’s got a lot of anger she feels she needs to express, partially for Becky, but mostly for herself in defense of her own existence as a moral actor. She’s also always held her value system and righteousness very highly and prioritized them over safety at times.
And while I somewhat agree with you (someone “standing up” for a queer person by “defending” them and their queer identity to the parents they are closeted to is one of those unfortunate “you were trying to help and now you’ve fucked everything things). I’m not seeing that dynamic here, largely because Becky is not going to lose much from the Browns if they were to totally reject her based on Joyce’s defenses.
So what Joyce is risking is her own damn safety and it’s in fear of that that her sister is giving this advice. She really doesn’t want to see her little sister be burned by her principles.
I think you misread Rutee’s…post. He said exactly what you did regarding Becky, which is that she’s been avoiding confrontation. Rutee thinks part of it is because of access to resources, though I think Becky would still be doing it because that’s just how instinctively in comes to her.
I do disagree with your root post though. However you want to slice it, be it lies or compromise or whatever, Becky is heavily dependent on Joyce for now, and Joyce blowing up at her family risks taking out avenues of the network Joyce is using to support Becky.
Justified anger always feels good at the time. And certainly everyone has the right blow up and shout. But it’s a self-destructive method in most cases.
Not to say that bottling everything up is remotely healthy either. Joyce clearly needs an outlet, but the bigoted members of her family are not it.
That’s true and I probably was misreading Rutee’s post (I’m pretty sure her pronouns are she though though I might be misremembering). It’s kind of a shit sandwich of a situation no matter how you toss it, in’it?
I don’t think that Jocelyne knows any other way to live. It would make sense that she would advocate that Joyce do the same.
When you think about it, that’s a tragedy all of its own.
This. 🙁
honestly i wish i’d expressed more of joyce’s sort of anger at my mom. i mean, i don’t think my mom would have kicked me out. probably, anyway. but i just shut down and pretended i’d never tried to come out to her, because i didn’t know if i could handle turning my own home into a battlefield.
staying good and quiet to stay safe, whether emotionally, physically, or financially, is tough
This. Part of why Jocelyne’s advice doesn’t sit right with me is that I did follow that thinking to the letter. I avoided unnecessary conflicts. I allowed a lot of awful and when pushing back, I was sure to overemphasize the ways in which my family were trying. I even coordinated outfits to try and challenge them the least. To this day, my family doesn’t even know my real (and now legal) name because of how much I wanted to hold their hand through all of this.
And it went awful and probably more awful than if I had been loud and abrasive about it all. Not doing so gave them a license in their mind to demand I submit to reparative therapy and admit that I was delusional and forced to be trans by my sorceress girlfriend and so on. And in the end, I felt like shit and a fool for months clinging to an unsalvageable wreck, denying important aspects of my transition process in fantasies of allowing them some manner of input, and I still lost them completely and lost a long relationship because of the strain of having to debase myself and the weight of their hatreds became way too much.
Staying safe is key, but you also have to be able to recognize when a situation is unsalvageable and its time to just gather what you can and build safety net in other ways.
I did the opposite, and my father disowned me. He hasn’t spoken a word to me in over a year, probably two, now. He also threw everything he had towards trying to destroy me, which ended up losing me one of the most important relationships in my life, helping to break up my marriage, and almost killed me a dozen times over. So, I guess, I hope you can understand where I come at this from the other side of things? I’m even now just barely starting to guess at what recovery looks like, from all of the shit he put me through. It’s a long, long time off.
My sympathies to you both. All I can think, though, is it’s on neither of you and nothing should have been in the first place. It should have been on those who should have loved you no matter what.
What Charles Phipps said, a thousand times over, in capital letters with font size 720.
It’s a fucking lose-lose situation is what it is.
The only way to have won is not to be born to shithead parents. And yet we’re expected as kids and young adults to have solved it enough to find the “best” outcome. I don’t know if anyone really does other than by changing the overall culture so that shit happens less.
Also, all the *hugs*
All of the *hugs* for you too, sis. And you’re right, it is exactly fucking that. It’s just the most gross, fundamental betrayal when the people who are supposed to love you unconditionally betray and wound you more than anyone else in the world.
I took the help from states away to get back on my feet. When I was back on my feet, I eventually came out to my parents by showing up with my wife (In a public place, which was scary in my hometown for direct reasons). Disowned, terrible shit and all, but I was basically okay and wife can provide basic safety net now, and soon a proper place to live.
Keeping my head down benefitted me immensely, even if it didn’t help the final part. It might have made coming out worse. I don’t care. I got the emergency help I needed. And Joyce is dependent on her parents income in the general.
Very true. The calculated calculus of survival is complicated and different amounts of both Jocelyne’s and Joyce’s strategy are often necessary for it… and we never know which is which until we’re destroyed by a wrong choice.
I would never blame Jocelyne for choosing what she sees as safer. I would even less blame someone having to make that choice in real life and I think having contingency plans for things like that are always so important and weighing the stress and pain of not coming out versus it equally so.
And Joyce is relying on her parents quite a bit right now and could end up in a very similar situation to Becky if Carol is to win the upper hand in her parents’ fight.
Bob damn, why can’t parents just be less shit, in general?
Because they’re people and people suck. But seriously, a lot of them are less shit and it’s really only getting better as opinions on all of this shift.
But yeah, Joyce is in a rough place and needs to tread carefully. She can’t really go completely back in the closet as an ally and she’s not giving up on Becky. She needs to be honest and open enough to win Hank over while somehow not scaring Carol away any more than she already has.
And not leaving home this time without a copy of her birth certificate and SSN. 🙂
..Does this mean Becky is LITERALLY the red-headed stepchild of the Brown family?
If that’s the case, all the prayers to avoid being the rest of that reference.
Oh, ooof, yeah. Sorry, wasn’t thinking. It’s been a long time since I heard the full phrase and I totally forgot about the beating part. >_<;
I take it back.
Do it for her? Jocelyne confirmed to be pearl!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5i-sbh7UCw
It matches up even better because in both cases they’re giving well intentioned, but pretty not great, advice
Triple threat sisters
Maybe the the combined might of Becky and Joyce working together as little sisters can ease Joyce’s burden when Jocelyne forgets how to walk.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/chattin/
It is far, far, FAR more likely that Becky will also forget how to walk, and Joyce will have to carry them both. *evil grin*
I…know this decision. I have made this decision. It was in fact the most pragmatically correct decision.
Still sucked though.
Pragmatism usually does. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have a special name for it.
ditto the phrase “lesser of two evils”.
Jocelyne is downright fantastic. I hope she gets to a place where she’s safe to tell these two the full deal with who she is. I mean, by that point, they’ll both have gone back to IU and experienced quite a bit more growing as people (Joyce isn’t going to be pulled out, that would essentially end the strip and I don’t think Willis is quitting any time soon). I also hope that Joyce and Becky both find/accept the resources there that’ll help them out, though surely hijinks will ensue before that happens.
Ah. And as Jocelyne is a poor writer, I’m sure it’s advice she’s had to give herself many times. Probably wise, since the parents were talking about pulling Joyce out of school entirely….but it might dent idealistic Joyce up a little in the process.
I misinterpreted ‘poor writer’ for a second. I was like, “How do you know she’s not a good writer?!” But now I see you meant she’s a writer without a lot of money.
Yep Jocelyne is definitely a Slytherin with good intentions to me. We’ll see how this works out though. I mean Gryffindor!Joyce has definitely made it clear how angry she is though. Then again she hasn’t yelled at her /parents/ yet about how her mother is acting- just her brother as far as I recall. So she may be in with a shot?
But I could just see John, as Joyce tries to hold it together, giving some smug ‘ah so you’ve finally seen my side of things’ thing which tips her over the edge.
Nah, this is more of a Hufflepuff ‘Patience’ thing than a Slytherin ‘Cunning and Ambition’ thing. A Slytherin would be looking for how to carve an advantage out of the situation, not how to simply survive it. Unless she moves on to advice of how to build resources outside of the existing social network she has, it misses Hufflepuff’s ‘Hard Work’ virtue, though.
she’s a writer. ton of hard work there
Good job.
this is gonna be rough
she shoudl fake being nice about it for a while..
and gtfo agian. Until she learns to handle it all better.
somehow
I’m still waiting for Becky to contribute to the conversation here… This feels like a topic she should’ve weighed in on already.
Yeah, it’s really weird the way they’re basically talking about her like she’s not sitting at the same table as them.
There is something infinitely depressing about Joss teaching Joyce to compromise and keep quiet.
I mean… she’s not wrong, I guess. But Joyce The Fighter is such a bright burning fire.
…who still depends on her parents for financial support I know I know…
It’s called “bidding your time”, once Joyce and Becky can stand on their own, they can then and only then call them out on their bigotry.
It’s called strategics.
the practical problem with this right now is that they already have
the bridges are already on fire
No, they don’t. The bridges are on fire when Joyce has to find her own way to pay for college. This is the EXACT MOMENT the advice should be coming, as far as Joyce is concerned, because she still has tuition. She DOES have her parents arguing about whether it’s appropriate, but that isn’t the same as ‘having agreed to stop’.
Mm, I would argue the bridges are on fire. Maybe Jocelyne’s advice helps Joyce put it out before it fully burns down. Maybe Hank is able to build a companion bridge, but there’s definitely fire trucks headed out to the bridge. It’s why Joyce has been freaking out all morning about what to do.
I would agree that the bridges are on fire. Right now, it could still be a superficial fire and not a structural one though. If things keep heading south, it’ll be a structural fire for sure.
It shouldn’t have to come down to Joyce putting it out, but I’m damn familiar with putting out the superficial bridge fires and that’s how it goes with shitty people if you still depend on them for some kind of support.
I mean she’s pretty wrong. She doesn’t know that Hank IS supportive if not of queerness than of Joyce and her judgement and so this advice comes from a mistaken assumption when in reality it seems fairly unlikely that Hank would allow Joyce to be pulled out of school for defending Becky the way he has already expressed support for her doing.
what
My headcanon is increasingly Toedad was Joyce’s deranged maternal uncle and Becky is her Tyler Durden–and this is all the story about her coming out to her family.
tone policing is really rude, because it discounts the feelings as a part of the argument. Its like telling someone who was stabbed by their ex to stop being so emotional and in pain and just say what happened.
…
The thing about Jocelyn’s advice here is, it’s for Joyce. Not for Becky.
It’d be a completely different story if she were telling Becky to calm down, be quieter, be more inoffensive. She’s not (so far).
Joyce’s anger is on Becky’s behalf; it’s not about Joyce (as far as we know). She absolutely does need to be careful that what she does, allegedly for Becky’s sake, is actually safe for Becky and in line with what Becky wants. Righteous anger is all well and good, but if you’re escalating a confrontation to ‘defend’ someone who really, really doesn’t want you to, you’re doing the opposite of helping.
Also, like… personally, as a trans woman, I think Jocelyn is talking about herself here. Even assuming Joyce would be 100% on her side, would it be safe to come out to her? Or would Joyce end up outing her and putting her in danger while ‘defending’ her? That’s what’d be on my mind, anyway. Allies who’re so wrapped up in righteous anger that they won’t curb it when you ask them to… those allies can be really fucking dangerous. I don’t know if Joyce has gone too far or not, but it’s a real risk.
yes, thank you, this is exactly the comment i was looking for
I can’t possibly judge Joss for what she’s doing in this situation. This is a matter of physical and economic safety in a situation where, well, there’s no good options and plenty of terrible ones. Still, I can’t help but think this is awful advice. Raidah wasn’t wrong that there’s toxic people in your life you have to learn to cut out because if they won’t budge, they will destroy your life. I had to cut my own mother out of my life for the most part because she refused to accept my wife.
Yup.
It’s really just an awful situation in general. Cutting toxic people out is so necessary, but survival is also so necessary, but so is not killing yourself or drowning yourself in shit and losing what actually matters to said people’s toxicity.
So the “right course” is often hidden, confusing, and miserable no matter which way you run and the end part where you no longer have a safety net makes every piece of bad news or downturn into the most frightening thing imaginable.
It’s really all a mess of awful.
“Oh you pretty things, don’t you know you’re driving your mommas and poppas insane”
https://youtu.be/pBQ-S6njQQw
I think that Willis deserves some considerable praise for not making Jocelyne a shining knight on a steed, solving all of Joyce and Becky’s problems. Rather, he gives us a three-dimensional character with very real downsides and opinions that are not necessarily helpful. She’s human, she’s afraid of her family too and hiding has become an essential survival strategy for her. She can’t help Joyce figure out how to win this because she’s been holding matters at a stalemate for a decade or so because she’s afraid of the consequences of moving on to an endgame.
If anything, I could see that it is Joyce’s choices and actions that helps Jocelyne, rather than vice-versa. If Joyce refuses to back down, it might inspire Jocelyne to stand up to her family in a sustained way rather than avoiding contact with her parents and snarking John.
A bit premature I think, won’t that only be true when Joyce and Becky get married? sisters in law?…….. it’s totally gonna happen. =P
Nah, Joyce is, “Just not that into you.”
Well…..Not yet. =P
Choosing when to express your opinion is not “to compromise [on] what you believe”. It’s called being tactful. I suppose Joyce’s character would believe something like that though
Tact in the face of bigotry IS a compromise of your principles. Like, it’s frequently a necessary compromise but even calling it tact implies that expressing such beliefs is impolite rather than the actual problem that it is unsafe.
Silence in the face if prejudice is effectively consent when dealing with assholes, as far as I’ve observed.
Wup, there she is… That perfect girl
If anything Joss has finally shown an imperfection here because this advice is not awesome. Like it’s completely applicable to her own situation but it’s very much not to Joyce’s.
I personally read that comment as a resigned “Wup, there she is… that girl that has to hide everything she is in order to appear ‘perfect’ to her family so that they will ‘accept’ her.”
Though I will be the first to apologise if that is not what Carms meant.
Either way, I do agree that the advice is not awesome. And I also agree that it’s understandable why she’s giving it. Another classic example of “We are what we experience.”
Ooh, I like that. And it gets to the shared “perfect girl” theme we’ve seen in these chapters.
Joyce in genuine danger with her folks for losing her “perfect girl” status. Jocelyne desperately trying to be “perfect” and so having little support for the “girl” and straining under the pressure of it but still believing it’s her only way to survive. Amber straining to make her Amazi-girl alter “perfect” by dumping all her negative traits onto Amber. Sal well aware that nothing she could do could ever make her the “perfect girl” to her mom. Carla actively rejecting the demand the idea that she should be a “perfect girl” to receive support and acceptance for being trans. And Dorothy still straining under her self-imposed ideals and desires to be “perfect” in order to not fall further behind on her Yale and Future President goals. And Mary beaming under the fact that she is the “perfect girl” surrounded by sinners, but not realizing that that just makes her an awful human being in general.
How is it not applicable to Joyce’s? She’s currently reliant on her parents for funding and, even if that were not the case, she needs their help at this particular instance to aid Becky in getting the things she needs to start a new life.
If Joyce speaks her mind, she might feel better for it, but there is a serious risk here that Becky will suffer for it, first and foremost. Following that, there is a question of her own financial situation. If she feels it’s worth giving those things up, well… By all means. But she has to acknowledge the costs.
The advice is to think. Speaking truth to power has a cost; it is not, and never has been, free. That cost applies, at the moment, to more than just her and that responsibility needs to be weighed.
Because:
A) Joyce is not queer which means she pretty much always has more leeway with bigots, and
B) Unlike Joss Joyce knows she has at least some degree of parental support in the form of Hank. This advice is only good advice if there’s a damn good chance that being upfront is going to get you fucked over but Joyce has already been upfront and Hank responded to her frankness with support and understanding. The danger of her facing any material consequences for staying her current course is pretty minimal especially since Hank is the patriarch and thus the most powerful member of the family within their subculture.
The advice isn’t inherently bad (though it is soul crushingly pragmatic and following it will destroy you the longer you do so) but it’s only practical given a certain scenario which is not the scenario Joyce is in. Joss is giving bad advice unwittingly because she doesn’t know what we and Joyce know and I can only hope Joyce realizes that.
I think “pretty minimal” is way overstating it. Carol is already arguing she should be pulled from school. John’s adding his voice to that. Hank’s on her side, but it’s not really clear how strongly that is. When John presents his version of events at lunch – all about how she got hysterical and lost control over basically nothing, that’s going to weigh heavily against Hank’s idea of her as an adult.
And for all the patriarchy in such subcultures, women still have a lot of influence over family matters, especially how the children are treated. Sure, officially Hank can overrule her, but she’s got plenty of ways of making her voice and her displeasure heard.
Joyce obviously can’t go all the way back into the closet as an ally. She can’t and won’t renounce her support for Becky. She’s on the record and she’s got Hank’s tentative support there. But she also has to hold back and walk a fine line. She can’t lose her temper with Carol the way she did with John. She has to convince them that she really is still holding on to her faith and her values, even though she’s losing her faith and their values.
A part of the point of Jocelyne’s message is that Becky needs Joyce’s resource access right now too. It’s not just Joyce who is at risk here.
Sisters. Hell yeah.
That makes three sisters Joyce has now.
What?
readers : BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD
jocelyne : let’s be practical here
I’m pretty sure a couple people were advocating decapitation, so they must not have been Khornates.
The Lord of Battles only accepts worthy skulls.
I’m sorry, those who think Joss is wrong here, but she’s right on the nose. This is exactly a lesson Joyce needs to learn, to get away from her Fundamentalist upbringing where you think doing the “right thing” will magically make it all work out.
She does need to learn that she can do things strategically without “compromising her beliefs.” She needs to understand that beliefs aren’t even what’s important. People are.
I may bristle at people saying that Joyce is being “put in her place.” But Joss is imparting some wisdom that Joyce needs to hear. And, unlike John, she’s not belittling her or saying her anger is wrong.
Sure, you can argue that maybe Joss needs to learn the opposite lesson. And that’s probably true. But that’s the beauty of all this. That’s what adults do with each other. Unlike John who thinks he has all the answers.
The thing is, I don’t think this advice is going to work. Becky isn’t closeted and Joyce will never stop defending her. The Rubicon, she has already been crossed.
Yeah, I think Jocelyne’s advice even if not necessarily the best is full of compassion and understanding and genuine love. She’s not making this advice out of malice or to shut her up, but because she genuinely believes this is the advice she most needs to survive.
And as you say, that’s adulthood. Giving each other advice, trying your best to help people even if you need to learn more circumstances and information that might change that advice.
freakin love Jocelyn. of course she has the advice that it’s better to stay safe than to get into fights over your values. i mean, it’s literally a matter of life or death for LGBT teens and young adults, so of course safety is #1 concern.
Yep.
Fire and burning bridges is all fine and well, but that can amount to jack shit if you end up getting hurt (…or worse) in the process. That’s a reality a lot of people still don’t grok.
I wish it didn’t have to be that way (fuck yea, fire!) but… yea… sometimes reality and expectations/dreams just don’t match up. This strip has been sobering this morning.
And then again, stuff like this is never clear-cut and no advice is “one size fits all.” And sometimes you don’t know until Stuff Happens.
Jury’s out whether Jocelyn’s advice will actually do more harm than good, here, in this webcomic.
Yeah. Both of these.
And hell, that’s kind of the thing about these very personal activisms like this. The way things change, the way people survive these hellish cages is for risk-takers to suffer by coming out and braving the flames so as to smash the wall forward down with their broken, bruised bodies.
But that’s so debilitating for the people who do that and so it becomes monstrous to demand that of anyone. People need to prioritize safety, but the community and all in it benefit from those who ignore that and take the risks and suffer for it.
It’s really awful in general and makes it hard both to give perfect advice and to even know whether a piece of advice is going to be individually useful. It’s all really complicated.
ALSO something else that occurred to me: as an ally/being in someone’s corner, you also have to think about the safety of who you’re trying to defend/protect, too. That’s something I should’ve mentioned in my first comment.
I totes see where Jocelyn is coming from. We’re I in her shoes, I’d likely give similar advice – not from a “keep your head down like a good girl” POV but more a “pick your battles” sense. Save energy and risk for the stuff that really matters.
Ultimately, Joyce needs to figure out what her goal is this weekend and work towards that single-mindedly. She needs to understand that she is not winning her family over on everything and decide what she can win them over on.
She is not getting Carol and John on-side for gay rights. That’s not happening. She can cultivate Hank as an ally on her being an adult and aim for a goal of Carol not insisting on pulling tuition. She should do that, because Joyce has no way of helping Becky if she’s stuck in La Porte with no money or roof to give Becky.
And I think that’s exactly what Jocelyn is getting at – if Joyce has the intention of going to battle for Becky, she needs to realize where her priorities are and act accordingly.
Becky and Jocelyne have both gained the ability “Call of the Sisters”. Only usable at family outings and such to get a +10 boost to fun!
I want to marry this guy. Marry him so hard. Marry him forever and have his babies or adopt babies and make them as happy as he’s making me.
Damn you, fictional characters. WHY CAN’T YOU BE REAAAALLLLL?!
No guy in todays’ comic?
If ‘Joshua’ were the guy she pretends to be?
Lets face it, if Joyce does play the happy christian daughter, the worries of the mother would be far less strong, probably, because it means she is immune ™ to corruption and thus becky can be more quietly harbored with less drama and worries.
Buuuut on the other hand, we see that with Hank that willingness to stand up does have benefits.
In short, I propose small acts of strategized standing up.
The problem is Carol’s idea of a good Christian daughter is one who sides with Ross. Her homophobia is THAT strong.
Yeah, that’s the big rub messing with all the possible options Joyce has for surviving this weekend. To be considered “proper” and thus not someone to worry about, she’d have to openly support her mom’s homophobia, agree that Ross’s actions nearly killing her were justified, and openly reject Becky. And that still might not be enough.
Her mother would die for her daughter but is Joyce that daughter or her idea of her?
I mean, Joyce is a RIDICULOUSLY good and perky Christian daughter already. With the exception of her non-homophobia and friendship with an atheist, there’s nothing which Carol could object to her daughter about! Ergo, the idea of playing it safe means there’s nothing but tong down her tolerance.
Dat last panel again. 😀
Joyce there’s a difference between covering up/lying about your feelings and, you know, just not wearing them on your sleeve.
JOICE SMASH!!!
So, er, this is, like, um two “good feels” DoA strips in a row. I’ll, uh, be over there if anyone needs me…
*picks up protective gear for the inevitable in-strip fallout*
I have a feeling we’re wrapping things up for a scene transition.
Someone with a level head and good advice ? That took a while..
Does anyone else want to know more specifically about Joss’ religious views? Like if JocelyneJBrown.com had a theology tag, I would have already devoured every post under it, probably twice.
Sadly, it is not even a friggin’ blog.
And Joyce learns another important but hard to swallow lesson. 🙁 Unfortunately you’re not going to change the mind of people like Carol or John a lot of the time, especially since they’re family. You have to learn what battles are worth fighting.
And this is the weird part of family politics. Where you disguise what you think because you’re unsure if the others in the family will disapprove or react.
And to what extent.
So you listen in on conversations, start a couple off to the side, but you’re never 100% sure on anything.
Because you know they’re doing the same thing.
So you talk a little with siblings, and get a better feel for them and their views.
And each section of your family is still talking about everything else.
It gets to the point where if you REALLY want to know, you need to take a chance with another family section.
But you’re never 100% sure.
Ever.
Mr. Willis’ twitter has a lovely picture of Joyce punching John in the face.
After reading this last night and letting it stew in my mind for a while I’ve begun realizing that I can relate to Jocelyn’s suggestions here, even if i don’t necessarily think it’s the best advice for Joyce and Becky at the moment. Now, I’m not in nearly as bad a situation as any of the characters here, but I understand having to pick my battles with my family (my father in particular) to keep myself “within access to resources”, as Jocelyn puts it. It’s a hard thing to do, and it makes me empathize with Joss even more. sigh
*tilts head*
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww! 🙂
One of us! One of us!
poor Joss, she’s giving advice that she knows because that’s what she does. And she hates saying it but she says it because she has to, she knows it and she wants Joyce to have her best shop.
if Jocelyne grows out her hair when she transitions people are gonna have a hard time telling her and Joyce apart.
I never know where to look at John’s face.
My eyes always focus on the glasses but then he seems to be staring off into space constantly and if I try to look at his real eyes the glasses just bug me…
not John… phone behave!