Football or football? Because for me, football involves corrupt European refs, “no visible blood on the uniform”, a checkered ball, and a lot of good footwork.
And phenomenal Oscar worthy acting chops. What? He touched me? OW! MY LEG! MY LEG! I AM A WORLD CLASS ELITE ATHLETE AND HE BROKE MY LEG WITH A TOUCH! 😛
Except that a gun is not a toy. You bring it, you use it. Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.
And after it rains there’s a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It’s not that the colors aren’t there
It’s just imagination they lack…
Everything just takes me back–to My Little Town–Paul Simon
one of my greatest delights is the knowledge that Carrie Fisher and Paul Simon were married for a year and when they broke up he wrote songs about their relationship and her “cold coffee eyes”
only once in a lifetime can the Mythical Ace be spotted. They range wild and free, evading capture with ease, as much of a legend as the Yeti or Bigfoot. Yet accounts of them range everywhere, from the highest ranks of office to the local grocery store.
Agatha Hendley: One time I saw an ace in the mold on my refrigerator! … Then it turned into Emilie Autumn.
The Normal Times: Pandemonium raged on the scene as Farmer Haggis reported an ace in his barn by running through town three times half-naked. It was later discovered that it was also the site of his child’s laboratory for scientific experiments, which created the confusion.
Cashier: Look, you gonna buy something or are you gonna sit there asking me dumb questions while a line of people backs up behind you?
It’s very similar to the sort of thing it was still acceptable to say about gay people in the 80s.
Still, I don’t think ace people will ever see the same kind of widespread social awareness as the rest of the LGBT community, just because we ultimately can’t be oppressed as much. There is no way to introduce discriminatory legislation against asexuals, for example.
And also because a lot of asexuals see the concept of forming an asexual community in the same way as there is a gay community as being a pointless exercise. Nobody wants to go to an ace bar.
I strongly disagree with your first comment, and your second comment is part of why I want sapphic cafes. There is an implicit sexual element to “”gay”” bars, which is a problem for a lot of reasons. We as a community need ways to socialize with and validate each other that aren’t so focused on sex and dating.
I got into a long e-mail argument about ten years ago over that idea, but with a twist: The guy I was arguing with was insisting that everyone is really gay, that anyone who identifies as straight is in denial, and that meeting “the right person” would open their eyes and make them embrace their true (in his opinion) sexuality.
This was on an e-mail group for a convention I was involved with, and the admin told us to take the discussion offline right after I asked how suggesting that there was some magical man who would make me no longer want to be with women was any less offensive than someone suggesting that there was some magical woman that would make him no longer want to be with men.
And with that, plans for a “singles mixer” at the con were cancelled.
What’s really ironic about this exchange is that near me is a queer coffee shop. And somewhat by happenstance it’s become sort of the default place for trans and ace folks to go and hang, largely because there’s not the same predatory feeling there as there is at queer bars.
To clarify over “acceptable to say about gay people in the 80s”, I don’t mean it was actually okay to say it, I mean that, for example, it could be said on television or in a major release movie without offering public apology.
For the oppression of asexuals, I mean that we can really only be hurt with low social visibility and by people dismissing our existence. That’s nasty stuff on its own, but it would be impossible for conservative media to fabricate an equivalent controversy to the trans bathroom issue or gay marriage rights.
Speaking for myself, nobody else in my immediate social circle is ace, and I rarely if ever hear about the dating lives of my friends. I’ll make nice with anyone, but the idea that I should congregate with other ace people specifically because we aren’t interested in sex seems something like starting a community of people who aren’t interested in tennis.
Man, I wish. It would be awesome if ace people were kinda passed by for bigotry. Sadly, though, there’s all manner of awfulness that ace folks get targeted by.
Disbelief from loved ones, demands by religious leaders that we “be fruitful and multiply” regardless of our comfort levels, medical mistreatment, diminishment and disbelief of our relationships to the point of treating them as fictitious, immigration rules that can have our marriages dissolved and our immigrations denied because we are “clearly faking it”, risk of being labeled insane simply because of our orientation, all manner of negative stereotypes and negative statements (me and a friend had a good hour-long exchange going over all the ones that were off the top of our heads, also it’s worth noting that child molester is one of the stereotypes of ace people), risk of physical violence (my very allosexual gf nearly got her ass beat once because she wore an ace shirt going to the grocery store), and the big mack daddy awfulest of them all:
Sexual assault and rape. Asexuals are sexually assaulted at absolutely terrifying numbers and a lot of that has to do with the way we don’t actually pay much attention to coercion as a sexual assault tactic, nor do we check our assumptions that every romantic relationship will involve regular sexual activity of a typically heteronormative fashion.
As such, a lot of ace people get pressured by romantic partners to perform sexual activities they don’t want because “if you loved me, you’d do this” or “you don’t want to be broken, do you”.
And even that is somewhat minor compared to the dark elephant in the room, which is the sheer frequency asexuals are targeted for corrective rape by friends, loved ones, or relatives hoping to “fix” them of their “delusions” and thus make them “normal” again. Asexuals who come out typically are more targeted as a result and there’s not the same social condemnation of using sex to “correct” an asexual as there is using sex to “correct” a lesbian.
Many of these things will eventually need the creation of legal categories of protection and at the very least massive changes in social attitude and greater awareness and acceptance of ace people.
Not to mention that bigots get really creative in inventing new political awfulness to target the minority group du jour. See the bigots pitching a segregationist fit over trans bathroom use or the attempt back in the 70s to make it illegal to be gay and a teacher.
Ehhh, I’m not so sure about the whole “can’t legislate against Ace” bit, if the hyperChristian contingency ever manages to get ahold of government enough (not far from that in my humble pessimistic opinion, especially as far as some states are concerned *coughNorthCarolinacough*), they can always make a rule that every single person has to get married (in a straight marriage ofc) and make babies.
Thanks for your post, it was illuminating. I suppose a pitfall of never really engaging with online ace communities is never being made aware of problems I am not experiencing.
Yeah, I. I’m still sorting out where my gray-aceness lies, and things were going really well with a GF until she said she wasn’t confident I was sexually interested in her, I explained that I think I might be demisexual, and she was very relieved and said she wasn’t sure she could date an asexual person and then offered to take the initiative more since I “can’t”. It was almost what I wanted to hear, but boy did it ever make me feel tremendously pressured and less safe. With more distance from it, I can’t help hearing coercion in her “offer”, that I would have been signing up to accept coercive physical contact throughout the rest of our relationship. Thankfully I followed my instincts even tho I wasn’t fully sure WHY I was so uncomfortable, and ended it.
Bah, clearly we are jibing with them when we say we’re ace. For the fortieth time… this month… THEY JUST ASSUMED WE WERE REALLY UNCREATIVE, OKAY, GEEZE!
Well, it’s like meeting an old friend who has a squirrel dry-humping his nuts, wait no, her knockers. You just do a short greeting in the hope that you’ll be able to talk under less distracting circumstances later on.
idk. like, not everything that is toxic is outright abusive, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t terrible. people can have good intentions and still be awful for you. finding that good makes it a different situation, i think. like if someone’s trying to control you, even if they think it’s for your own good, that is kind of abusive; if someone’s doing controlling things without realizing that they’re controlling because they’re screwed up, that’s another.
like i guess i feel like the point of this arc is that just because these people aren’t pointing guns at their heads doesn’t mean that they aren’t being toxic.
Because Mr. Powers is this universe’s version of The Cheese? Carla was a car and is now a human, so the same can happen to The Cheese (BTW I hope the guy who was an alien is an exchange student from Madeupistan or something.)
Powers and Cheese wear a yellow shirt with black marking. The Cheese was a God like deity, this guy is a pastor. This guy has a red tie, Cheese had a red cape. Cheese first met Joyce after a bunch of her friends died which the Cheese could have prevented, while this guy (maybe) encouraged a train of though that almost got Joyce’s friends (Dina, Becky, Amber, Sal) killed. First time the audience met The Cheese he quickly vanishes and Powers does the exact same thing.
And the hover text.
And his name is Powers. Now you would think its because The Cheese was powerful… no. “Behold the power of Cheese”.
What proves it is he’s known in comic as “Professor Rees” and Alan’s last name is Rees. (Also, what’s the tag he’s known by? I can’t seem to find him.)
My church briefly had two youth pastors. (Recently moved to different cities, for better jobs, since our church is small and has an old congregation that can’t afford to pay for two youth pastors.) Generally, they were….okay, kinda nuts. One of them was really young and struck me as always kind of awkward. The other was older, but great with kids so he was always amazing.
As for how the system works….well, it depends on which church you’re with. Like, the Salvation Army, you basically take classes and decide what fellowship you’d like to specialize in and get training and materials and you can go out and do that. (I confess, I miss how organized the SA was.) The Nazarene church has more of a hit or miss thing where you just basically put out an ad in the paper or whatnot and hope you find one.
There’s no one way, other than just tending to be more excited than average and into kids stuff. Some are just kinda awkward, others are the class clown type. Still others just seem oblivious to obvious things happening in the church.
I wouldn’t call it “nuts” per se, but I’ve never met one that seemed just like a normal guy.
Yeah, that’s the face of someone who if they already hadn’t put queer issues or “family loyalty” issues up on the planned sermon, has just now decided to do so.
I think it’s more of a panicked “crap I wasn’t expecting her to be here uuuhh uuuuuuh whatdoIdo uuuuuuh okay, can’t treat her as I normally would because evil satan gayness, but I don’t want to make a scene…. uuuuuh…. OHHIJOYCE!”
I think they’re mostly afraid to associate with her in any way in front of the congregation out of fear of reprisal. I don’t think they’re bigots, I think they’re cowards who are also bigots.
This happened to me when I got married to my partner. I invited my fundamental Christian relatives and they never replied; it took them several years before they finally started acknowledging the fact that he existed at all. But at least they’ve gotten better about it.
In contrast, they drove across the country to attend my straight cousin’s wedding, even though it wasn’t religious at ALL.
Yup, that mask is slipping just a little in Panels 3 and 4. She’s trying so hard to push through and act like everything’s normal and this isn’t scary and off-putting and everyone’s small slights are getting to her and it’s using up every ounce of energy she’s got.
Becky knew this would be a clusterfuck before the weekend even started. Being loud and in your face is her way of dealing with it. She’s just emotional support for Joyce as the reality of how shitty their community really is sinks in.
I’m amazed no one actually seems to care about someone pointing a gun at Joyce or checking in on her about that (oh and Becky–sarcastic). There’s fundamentalist bigots and there’s these guys.
Oh great. Now I have to do this. Someone puts a parody in my head, and I have to write it. It’s a sickness. Let’s see.
(Joe)
There’s nothing makes Christians grin
Then going to University full of sin
Their parents drop them off thinking their good
But the students in the common don’t act like they should
Take Carol Brown, well she’s always praying
Uh oh, but little does she know that
Her daughters, Joyce, Jocelyn, Becky
Broke into a house, cause they didn’t have a front key
(All)
Sin, Sin
(Jocelyn)
Jocelyn
(All)
Sin, Sin
(Joyce)
Joyce
(Becky)
And Becky
(All)
Sin, Sin
The Brown Sisters
(Jocelyn)
Jocelyn
(Becky)
(Joyce)
Joyce
(All)
Sin!
(Becky)
Daddy wants me to love a husband
(Jocelyn)
Daddy thinks that I’m a man
(Becky)
Daddy says that I disgrace him
(Joyce)
Aren’t we still part of God’s plan?
(Jocelyn)
Well, look around, look around,
Our lives are so much different here in college
(Joyce/Becky)
College
(All)
Jocelyn…
Sin!
(Becky)
It’s bad enough Daddy says no having fun
(Joyce)
Didn’t want to get us shot
(Becky)
It’s bad enough that he chased me with a gun
(Jocelyn)
Brand new stupid sis says what?
(Becky)
What!
(Jocelyn and All)
Look around, look around
(Joyce)
I think maybe things are changing a little fast
(Jocelyn’s Readers)
She’s looking for me!
(Jocelyn)
Joyce, we’re living in a world of sin (Sin, Sin)
We’re living in a world of sin (Sin, Sin)
We’re living in a world of sin (Sin, Sin)
Whoa-a-a
(Sisters)
Whoa-a-a
(Company)
Sin!
(Joe)
Whoo!
There’s nothing like freshman at a college
Mixing up their books with a little carnal knowledge
Excuse me Joyce, I know you look pretty
But that naive charm’s gonna crack here in Indy
Why you coming here and thinking it’ll be like home
When sinners are the winners and good girls can roam?
(Joyce)
Joe, I’ll pray for you
(Joe)
Better than prey on me
Watch that right hook, baby, you might hook me
(Joyce)
I’ve been reading Bible tales since I was four
But I’m finding it won’t cover what’s in store
They’re teaching evolution, but I trust in creation
From Genesis to Revelation
(Sisters)
Love God with all my heart, mind, and your strength
And love my neighbor as I love me
(Becky)
And I think neighbors includes lesbians
(All)
Unh!
(Jocelyn)
And those whose gender isn’t what they assigned my ID
(All)
Work!
(Joyce)
Look around, look around
It’s changing so fast, and everything is new
(Joyce and Becky)
Look around, look around
It’s changing so fast, and everything is new
(Sisters)
Our outlooks and plans-a in Indiana are being canned, Ah, but we
Are the greatest sisters in the world
(All)
In a crazy, changing sinful world
(I’m not even going to try to write the rest, because it splits into three parts and is all very confusing, and I’ve spent almost an hour on it. But since it’s just repeats of what happened before, you can use those lyrics.)
Am I reading way too much into minor details of how the characters happened to be posed, or is the train of events: Joyce waves with her bandaged hand, Youth Pastor Powers excuses himself while holding his own hand, and then Joyce looks uncomfortably at her own bandaged hand, still awkwardly raised? Did he notice her injury and unconsciously react to it in a way that made her self conscious about it? Eh, I feel like it’s probably just a coincidence that their poses/line of sight both emphasize their hands.
nah, willis is pretty good at adding in these kind of details. everytime i reread a comic here i always notice something new about the events from looking at minor details
Could it be he’s holding his hand while saying “stay out of trouble” because he’s sub-/consciously thinking about Joyce punching Ross (small community, I’m sure everyone knows what happened to her hand) and subtext telling her not to get into any fights?
Yeah, it’s a really intentional moment. And it’s definitely being related. I read it almost as that’s the sign that all that wasn’t some abstract thing miles away, but something real that happened to actual patrons of the church, and for Cool Youth Pastor Scruff here, it’s to two people that were probably given a lot of leadership duties in the youth circle and who he has very personally known.
His shying away I think is him getting hit by the dissonance of what he is required to believe and the story their appearance gives. The realness of the brace making it real. And the rest I think is what everyone else has already said.
Also, poor Joyce in that last panel, looking at her hand, like “what did I do”. She cares so much for the good regard of the church she has already given so much to, and is not at all prepared for how much of an outcast she has been deemed as simply for supporting her lesbian friend and trying to fight for her.
I don’t think you’re reading too much into it at all. Reading it again, it seems less like the pastors are shunning Becky and more like they’re scared to talk to her. I think that may be worse than a straight out bigoted shunning.
The pastors are scared talking to Becky since they heard Joyce punched the living daylights out of Ross when he tried talking properly oriented love to Becky? And it doesn’t help looking at Joyce’s punching brace?
I think they’re treating her like a leper because they’re afraid of what the congregation will do to them. Pastors can get fired for any number of reasons, depending on how the church is structured. Even if the pastor is completely in charge with a board of elders that will rubber stamp anything, it could cause a church split. I think the biggest factors in this would be how well people like Becky’s dad and how they feel about her dead mother.
We’re seeing them utterly fail in their responsibility as leaders. I’ve seen it before and it would warm my cold, black heart to see them pay for it.
Incidentally, the Baptist on the Bridge is my favorite joke of all time.
I think the biggest factors in this would be how well people like Becky’s dad and how they feel about her dead mother.
No, I don’t think you understand fundies. Her mother took her own life. That’s a deadly sin. The devil is in this house and has claimed her. Becky has fallen into his his fangs as well and turned perverse. It fell to Ross to root out the evil, but he was weak and unable to pull the trigger.
It doesn’t matter whether or not they hate or like Ross, he has failed. Now the devil has set out into their own congregation, and she’s putting her claws into Joyce, one of the most faithful.
It doesn’t matter shit what they feel about Ross or Becky’s mother. This will be all about Becky.
when i see Willis drawing a character holding his/her own hand like a dead rat, i cant help but mutter: “you should rather cut the hand that has sinned than let the whole body fell to hell”. its some scripture? burned in the back of my brain….(ok, i was high on jesus on my youth too…)
I use it as my goto scripture in the second round of the anti-trans argument. The first round is pointing out that God never says that a man is someone with a penis and a woman without, so none of the “guys should not wear women’s clothing” scriptures work. Then they tend to reply with stuff about “mutilating your body” being a sin. That scripture shows it isn’t.
Some people say that sort of thing is pointless, but I have to admit that I went through the same phase Joyce did with homosexuality. It really did help.
Dang. Yeah if it was the Dark is Rising it would’ve been Walker, not Wanderer. I’ve read all the walkyverse stuff but I don’t recognize the reference… :/
I am headcanoning they’re suffering cognitive dissonance beacsue they recognize what Ross did was wrong and awful but can’t figure out how to justify it in their hate-filled views. It’s like the humanity of Becky is being shoved in their faces.
Tsk-tsk-tsk.
How dare she bring her personhood before God to church!
Yeah, it was over him calling the depression of other people “godpertunities” in order to minister to them and convert them to the Lord.
Walky was (rightfully) disgusted by a worldview that sees the humanity of depressed people treated so casually and so inhumanely as if their only value is in how their pain and suffering can be exploited by the church.
I’m inclined to agree. While I think setting him on fire is something of an overreaction, his callousness and spineless dismissal of someone he’s known for years is making his face seem very punchable right about now.
Pastor Powers is based off a minor character from It’s Walky! named David Powers, who was Linda’s boyfriend in the 70s and was murdered by Martians.
Apparently, the resemblance was just a coincidence, and when David Powers was originally created Willis didn’t resemble him as much as he did later. I used to think that was the joke; that Willis included himself in the comic to get murdered by Martians and inspire Walky’s name, but I guess not.
with grievous eyes and quivering bones,
the Starveling Cat blocks our way to our homes.
the Starveling Cat! The Starveling Cat!
won’t take a meal, but will take our mat!
I keep reading it in the “…and Steven!” Voice from Steven Universe, even though I know Becky would be way more awkward because she’s being ignored, whereas everybody loves Steven.
There is one minor difference… in an intervention they want you to change because they like you, in a public shaming they want you to change because of hate.
In either case, it is “who you at the moment sucks”.
Unless of course the entire congregation feels they have every right to tell her she’s taking the wrong choice by siding with Becky, in which case, very much public.
I had a church just like that. I was raised as a Jehovah’s witness and they did not believe in higher education. So when my family sent me away to college and I came back to visit it was like I had the plague. No one would associate with me. Let’s just say I’m no longer part of that. But this brings back memories.
They’ve probably heard rumors about Becky and the father may have alluded to a ‘disease’ but seeing Becky there with her “lesbian” hair coupled with Ross in jail, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place with how to deal with it all.
Plus a lesbian Christian must be boggling their minds (“omg never expected her to actually want to RETURN here!”)
That last part very much. I’ve seen the idea of LGBT Christians blow minds in these types of churches.
I remember a preacher talking about how there there are gay people who speak in tongues. In his mind, he meant that it was proof that Satan mimics everything God does, and reason to tell people that speaking in tongues wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be that they really were Christians, no siree.
Well, to many Chrisitians, “not a Christian” really just means “not a Christian yet“. Christian lesbian and Christian lesbian-supportive are probably worse things to be than not yet Christian to fundie minds.
I was invited to several church days and was treated exceptionally well (though the sermons were fucked) because they were hoping to convert me and it was before I realized I was the long laundry list of queer identities that I am.
Folks who’ve tried to come out in those same communities… yeaaaah, fared a mite bit worse, one could say.
Non-Christians tend to get a better welcome than people they think have left the fold. They supposedly knew the truth and rejected it. Some even say that is what the unforgivable sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit really is.
The ones who leave the fold might be welcome if they were clear enough about the fact that they repent their wicked ways and will not stray again. At least that’s the impression I always got when they kept giving sermons on how one lost sheep that’s been found again is worth more than the rest of the flock that never strayed and the story of the prodigal son, which left me vaguely confused as a child since it seemed to be saying “If you’ve been obedient all along we don’t give a rat’s ass about you”, which is a very odd moral. But then they also considered the story of how God told Abraham to kill Isaac a proper story for Children’s Time, so.
Of course Youth Pastor Powers has his own dirty little secret. His fellow members of the congregation would not be amused at the lifestyle his cousin Austin leads.
idk it feels more to me like the community they grew up in and were told to love and trust has suddenly become inadequate to their needs as growing individuals once their experience expanded past the acceptable social mores of that community, to the point that none of them can even acknowledge Becky’s existence despite having known her since she was a child.
Joyce though is getting the full lesson on what exactly the full meaning of those “sweet lesbian facts” were and what that angry moment of being so “gosh-darned angry at the church” means. As I don’t think she’s fully made the connection that when she was criticizing the church, she was criticizing her own church and that she’s been deemed a fellow sinner owing to her refusal to shun and erase Becky: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/faithbased/
Church is “the safest place she’s ever known”… but that’s only because she’s not aware quite yet of the full extent of its betrayal of her.
Okay, everyone — make your guesses as to what the subject of this week’s sermon will be!
a) “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” is not a valid way to earn the Lord’s favor
b) Those wearing the devil’s panties must change to the raiment of the Lord
honestly the more i think of it the more the classic conception of sin as i’ve had it preached just seems more and more toxic. like. i’m not even sure i know how to articulate this, but: focusing on all the things you do wrong doesn’t seem like a particularly good way to focus on how to do things right??
like. not everything you do “wrong” is a sin that could send you to hell. sometimes things are screwed up and there’s not really a right or wrong way it’s just how you cope with it. and then sometimes there’s a more effective way, which could potentially be the “right way” but there was no way to know that when you began with it
i mean. start with “love your neighbor as yourself” and go on from there and you should be fine???
The entire basis for the Christian religion is that we are all horrible, disgusting and corrupt at our very core and worthy of eternal torment. It is only through the sheer grace of the divine that we don’t, and even then only if we beg forgiveness and worship it. The whole concept is toxic from its very foundation.
Actually, the idea is Jesus has fixed Original Sin so we’re cool with God now. The entirety of Christianity has missed this and become less interested in God’s love than Judaism that had the benefit of saying, “Original Sin or not, God chose US.”
well i mean like. Jesus fixing original sinners means that he’s made us not be terrible people anymore. it means that our imperfections are mortal affronts against God. and that’s not…a very forgiving attitude, I don’t think.
like, okay. people do a ton of terrible things. but the way to stop doing them is not to put yourself on an eternal guilt trip where you’re never good enough. it’s to accept that these are things that you’ve done, and make efforts toward not doing them anymore, and gradually you can move on to not being that person anymore. usually. idk like the nearest parallel is unlearning racism: you are going to fuck up, a lot, but if you’re willing to listen and change then it is possible to be a much less racist person than you were previously.
which weirdly enough sounds like Christianity, a bit! like the concept is that you confess your sins, God forgives you, and then you go and sin no more and it’s over and done with. but we get a ton of mileage out of the guilt trip. we sit and simmer in the concept of being sinners, i feel like. i think a lot of our spirituality is tied to emotional catharsis, where admitting that you are a sinner and abasing yourself before God takes precedence over actively working to be better and more aware people???
idk part of the problem i think is language. we’re stuck with the language and ideas of generations ago instead of reinventing ourselves to work with the times and our understanding of what it means to be human and what the world around us is like. tradition/stability has become more important than actively engaging with the world. heck you could probably even make an argument that these concepts we’re dealing with here are directly tied into white supremacy/patriarchy/homophobia/transphobia and there’s probably a better word to group all those together but i don’t know it
Yeah, it sets up a fucked way to be good, because it makes goodness about all the “bad” acts you avoid rather than any good acts you do.
Though, to be fair, that is intentional in the Calvinist-derived religious sects of the U.S. Southern Baptists and a bunch of other fundie groups view the faith vs works debate as not only one that favors faith, but that favors faith to the exclusion of works. And where trying to do works to show godliness is actually an act against God, because you are insulting God to imagine that your fealty to him is not enough to save you and he must be bribed with small actions and favors.
This sadly leads to a toxic worldview where all that matters is being part of the right church crowd, rather than what you do with that. You’re saved if you’re in this church praying the right magic words and avoiding the laundry list of sinful behaviors or at least grovel and admit you’re a sinner and make a big show of turning away from sin and towards god.
And it’s where it’s viewed as more evil to simply exist and not be interested in changing than it is to do something monstrous, but “show repentance to the Lord”.
And it is thus by this that by their religion, Becky is evil and Toedad is good and the cognitive dissonance in having that worldview and how victim-blaming that is in this case is causing the pastors a lot of discomfort and awkwardness.
i love kamala khan so much. “good is not a thing you are, it’s a thing you do.” my understanding was that you work out your faith by good works; good works is the evidence of faith, stems directly from that. much like the fruit of the Spirit stems directly from having the Holy Spirit in your life. which has the awkward implication that you can’t be a good person unless you’re Christian. C.S. Lewis argues that you fulfill the forms of Christianity/good works and the motivation falls into place; you shape the person you want to be whether you feel like it or not, and then the feelings fall into place. which makes sense, but doesn’t restrict itself to Christianity? also is not helpful to persons with impulse control issues, hahaha.
but like the problem, as always, is how do you be effectively good? and a lot of people have different answers to that. for the majority of conservative people who are attracted to the church because it’s traditional, i think it’s respecting social mores. i’ve noticed that in a lot of ways the church can be just like the outside culture but more so. and then, you know, additionally uniquely repressive because they can use the fear of God to pin people into place.
…i just really wish there was a way to actively re-interpret all this in a way that isn’t so damaging to people. like, i know that liberation theology is a thing, but i’ve never seen it in action.
Part of me is still (stupidly) hoping that this guy Landrum will take this opportunity to preach acceptance and try to give Becky and Joyce a little something to hope for. Most of me is expecting fire and brimstone, and possibly an actual attempt to call some down.
My votes are definitely with either of those. I feel like those are the most likely given all we’ve seen with regards to Carol’s response to the tragedy.
Yeah! They’re going to hell but we shouldn’t be the ones to send them there! It’s not like any church pastor would ever, say, call for the government to round up the gays and execute them by firing squad.
(Note that the above contains far more sarcasm than I wish it did. Stupid stupid stupid stupid current events.)
d) A talk about forgiveness, focused on forgiving poor Brother Ross, who is only guilty of getting too swept up in his desire to properly serve the Lord.
Oof. That is definitely the look of people avoiding them. And they’re especially avoiding saying Becky’s name-or, really, acknowledging her at all. I feel really bad for Joyce-she’s never been blatantly excluded from anything. Especially among people she knows and (currently or soon to be up for debate) loves. They’re good at not saying anything straight-up, but that’s some very real, very solid passive aggression. Church folks are good at that.
Ok so is there a religious type word for when you shun someone like this? Also like jocelyn unlocked joyces rage i think now would be a time to let beckys sass be unleashed, consequences be damned!
Okay, going to go out on a limb and make 2 predictions.
(1) Joyce is going to lose her temper during whatever hate-spew the pastor has planned, stand up, and force feed him all the nice-Jesus passages. …. no, not literally tear them out of the Bible and shove him down his gullet, but that’s an option too. Create a huge scene, basically denounce him, and get a lot of the churchgoers on her side by actually knowing her Bible.
(2) Carol will come out of this actually respecting Joyce and her choices.
yeah carol would have to see joyce as a person separate from who she wants her to be. and she’s not gonna, otherwise she wouldn’t have called joyce standing up for her friend and her beliefs “defiant”.
Bold on both accounts. Personally it is my understanding that people who hold beliefs based firmly on circular logic tend to not let go of them so easily.
I will make two different predictions.
1. The service and sermon will include oblique references to the sins of same sex love and/or disobeying one’s parents, with plenty of sidelong glances and whispers
2. One of the pastors will have a quiet word with Hank or Carol suggesting things might be better if they didn’t bring Joyce or her friends back until she was clearly of the body again. No specific mention will be made of invisible Becky.
If #1 happened, it would be epic. #2, however, would definitely not happen as a result, and then DoA would change from a comic about college kids to a comic about two young women who’ve been disowned by their families and community trying to find jobs so they don’t starve to death in the gutter.
Disowned or no, Joyce’s tuition is paid up, so she’d still be able to live in the dorm until the end of the semester, which the comic will get to sometime in 2024, I think. We’ve got time to brace ourselves for the tradition.
This is going to end with the Browns (well, mostly Carol) trying to get everyone to pray the gay away, isn’t it? I can see this shit storm a-brewin’ even more with the way they’re ignoring Becky.
I have so many feelings about this, especially having witnessed this happen to my closest friend. It sort of reminds me of the parable of The Sheep and the Goats. In the interest of brevity, I’ll post up the two verses that resonate the most.
Matthew 25:44-45 –
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
I truly hope this plays a part in the story; it sounds like something Joyce would bring up.
HAHAHAHA OF COURSE NOT LOOK AT HER SHE HAS THE NERVE TO CUT HER HAIR AND BE VISIBLY NON-APPROPRIATELY FEMININE AND SUBSERVIENT HAHAHAHAHA *sobs* I have no hope for this storyline whatsoever it’s gonna end baaaaad.
There are a few outcomes to the inevitable “homosexuals are bad and we should praise those who hold guns to them” bullshit that will be said.
Joyce gets angry, makes a rightful scene, storms out with Becky.
Joyce gets angry, makes a rightful scene, is shunned by everyone, including her parents, storms out with Becky.
Joyce gets angry, makes a rightful scene, is looked upon disapprovingly by everybody, is told by her parents to sit down and be quiet, does so, Becky storms out.
Joyce gets angry, makes a rightful scene, is looked upon disapprovingly by everybody, is told by her parents to sit down and be quiet, does so, and Becky also stays and sits in embarrassed, angry silence.
Unless there’s a 5th, out of left field option, it’s going to be one of these. And it’s going to end VERY poorly.
I’m holding out a vote for “it’s done so passive-aggressively and victim-blaming that Joyce internalizes the message that ‘God’ hates her for standing up for Becky and she gets really sad in a similar fashion that she did here when she got upset with her parents for being rude and dismissive to Dorothy: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/takeittogod/
I think that’s the sickest part of this whole arc. Not the weird blame or the eggshells she’s had to dance on, but this complete erasure of the idea that she is a person who has suffered something devastating and traumatic simply because it is more important to everyone in this worldview to simply see her as the “queer girl” who’s “living a life of sin”.
It’s more important to every one of them to be pushing against the evils of her sexuality and make sure she doesn’t corrupt others or promote immoral behavior or so on than it is to show the slightest amount of compassion and support.
Even Hank who’s trying his little heart out has given her a grand total of one single hug in the form of support while she was awake and paying attention. This is caused by his awkwardness around the existence of gay people, but think about that in context.
Becky nearly died that weekend. She lost her home, her family, any legal place to live, her future, and nearly got shot and definitely got kidnapped in order to be tortured by an angry violent man. She’s been through literal horror movie shit simply for existing and ever since she’s been being oh so polite and apologetic for the impact her suffering has had on others and it’s treated like… yes, yes, you should have to apologize for all the trouble, yes, you deserved to have that happen, yes, you need to walk on eggshells and the most important thing is whether or not you corrupt others with your deviance.
Not a single person from this culture is holding her tight, saying it’s okay to cry, saying that what happened to her is awful, showing genuine warmth.
Hell, Jocelyne got closest and she still stuck mostly to providing material support to the situation she is in.
And that’s the biggest tragedy of them all, because we’ve seen how she internalizes and views her emotions and suffering as an imposition to others and this whole trip has been one big reinforcement of that headspace.
“Not a single person from this culture is holding her tight, saying it’s okay to cry, saying that what happened to her is awful, showing genuine warmth.”
AND ONCE THINGS START SOLIDIFYING IN HER LIFE IS PROBABLY GOING TO HAVE SOME KIND OF A COLLAPSE
i am kind of looking forward to that actually because those are legitimate emotions to have in the wake of the garbage that has been her life and you gotta go through them before you can start healing
Yeah, I’m seeing her having a similar path to me when all the awfulness collapsed on my life. Basically, keeping it together, keeping it buried while trying to get through it all and put the pieces of my life back together and then periodically have random crying jags and various PTSD effects everywhere because all those buried emotions didn’t actually just go away.
like positive therapy where you get all your emotions out and start rebuilding yourself stronger
…i’ve been lucky, most of my therapy experiences have been good ones. but that’s the nice thing about going to therapy as an adult: college therapists are usually free, and if you don’t like your therapist you can fire them.
Oh, believe me, I have therapy. For those it works well for, it works well for. This comic strip and the community surrounding it has also helped with a lot of the processing of what happened and building healthier habits of recovery from it and from the traumas of my youth.
But it’s not a magical bullet and it doesn’t mean you don’t have all the scar tissue from being emotionally stabbed and all the emotional mobility issues that come with it.
As much as I love Becky I think this will probably lead to another situation that she just makes worse. She didn’t start this fire, and she sure as hell isn’t responsible for it though. Either way I won’t be surprised if things are about to explode. I’m just gonna hope Jocelyne is gonna save the day again.
This fire would or would not burn without her. Without her presence, Becky would embody every nasty whisper about her, be the demon child who’s pure sin. Her mom would hit her just as hard for daring to support her over “her own family”. The Church would still likely have planned for a nasty sermon with some oblique notes about sin.
At least this way, they see Becky. They see she’s still the same overly rambunctious kid. See that she does not have horns or fangs. Is just a regular person like anyone else. Is forced to confront the awkward reality of what happened to her as a real person than keeping it in the realm of concepts.
Becky being here is better for everyone except for her. It’s shredding her apart.
Yeah, that’s important. Horrible and painful as hell, but still important.
Just being there, being Becky is her only chance. I said that way back when she went home with Joyce. It worked with Hank, to an extent. It didn’t with Carol. It’s not going to be enough here, though it might sow some quiet seeds of doubt.
Next to the name field there’s a link that says “Get a Gravatar”. You can use it to set up an avatar associated with your email that’s consistent across sites that use gravatar. Including this one.
Some congregations are basically ruled by a pastor and a board of elders who will rubber stamp anything that the pastor suggests. Others are more egalitarian, which can easily descend into mob rule who throw out pastors because it’s raining on a Tuesday. If the pastors are partially refusing to acknowledge that Becky is a person out of fear of the congregation, we could see a good old fashioned Protestant schism! It would be an interesting direction to take and it’s something that Willis hasn’t covered much yet.
It really boggles my mind how there’s people out there who would rather focus on the passages that can be vaguely interpreted as “gay people are horrible” instead of the far more numerous and clearer “show everyone warmth and love no matter how different or sinnery they may be” passages
AFAIK most of those people are now using the epistles for their arguments, to the point my Mormon housemate and I joke about the “Gospel Of Paul”
Current Catholic, non-churchgoer (because fudge it, not getting up at 8 on a Sunday.)
Paul. Never met Jesus alive, tried to root out his followers, then decided to hop on the bandwagon and invent his own Messianic version of Judaism. James throws him out from Jerusalem, he makes up his own “everybody is saved and does not need to follow the Mosaic laws except where convenient” religion and a few centuries later the first “Christian” pogroms on Jews can commence.
Yup, those letters get thrown out so frequently as if they were the direct words of Jesus. And when you note that, the excuse tends to be, everything in the Bible is God approved and he would never let anything in there that wasn’t 100% true to his will and so he must have guided Paul’s hand.
OTOH, those are the oldest parts of the New Testament and thus the best evidence of what the early Church was like.
All the actual “words of Jesus” in the Gospels are traced through ~40 years or so of oral tradition before the earliest Gospel was written down.
Wow! They all seemed super-nervous of Becky! I mean, yeah, I know that she’s basically a loose cannon on deck; who knows what she’ll say or do next? However being almost scared of her? I have the feeling that this is a bad conscience at work; too many people knew or guessed that Ross had started going off the deep end after Becky’s mother died and too few people though of the consequences until news of his arrest came back from Bloomington.
They were probably also planning on a specific denunciation of her in their sermons which, given that she’s going to be present probably now makes them feel guilty. They’re the sort of guys who are great at yelling ‘sinner’ at someone who is absent; yelling it at someone in the crowd is a bit harder for them!
they are borderline puritain, just the fact that Becky is gay is enough to scare them, those type of people are like that, they are worried that the mere presence of this “impurity” would ruin their precious lifestyle
They were planning to preach about the evils of Beckyness, but are uncomfortable about having their words apply to an actual person instead of some abstraction. Tough.
Yup, her being here rather than an avatar of “see why it is important to have a mother AND a father, when one falls, the children may suffer and fall to sin” messes up the script a bit.
It’s one thing to rant about teh gays. It’s another thing to rant against Phil, that kindly guy who likes to bring cookies to all the church potlucks.
I suspect that’s usually the reason why queer congregation members who refuse to go back in the closet are “gently” and repeatedly encouraged to move on to another parish or “be less forceful” by simply existing.
Max Power, he’s the man whose name you’d love to touch, but you mustn’t tooooouch! His name sounds good in your ear, but when you say it, you mustn’t fear! Cause his name can be said, by anyone!
Man ‘going to church’ is a completely and utterly foreign experience to me… I think I’ve only experienced something like that through fiction. Even when we did go to church a few time I never got the whole ‘community’ feeling from it.
This whole part of the arc is incredibly unpleasant to me…
It’s a good thing Joyce wanted to go to the early service and the later service, because if(/when) she decides she’s had enough passive aggressive interactions for the day she can leave after the first one without feeling guilty about not having gone at all.
Assuming the sermon isn’t rage-inducing and causes her to go on a public rant and ragequit mid-service.
(this would’ve worked much better if I weren’t a lazy bum and had actually gone to the trouble to of creating a burner account for this second post, wouldn’t it?)
It’s funny because the church is not safe at all and religious bigoted adults that are still fundies after their 20s and go to church are shitheads?
Like. C’mon. I’m not trying to talk shit on this out of some religious perspective, I’m very non-religious, but isn’t this kind of black and white? I understand there’s a lot of past frustration injected into this comic, but this just feels icky to me.
I don’t think this storyline is funny at all. I think it’s in deadly earnest.
Notably, you make a point which is becoming almost a meme. Willis portrays a religious character as bad, someone pops up and accuses him of being simplistic, of not portraying them with nuance.
I call bullshit.
Willis has always portrayed his villains with nuance and shade – even Mary and Toedad. We’ve only just been introduced to Landrum and Powers. I’m not sure you can expect such depth in these few frames.
True, and there IS nuance. This very strip we see Pastor Powers falter in the initial intention to not address Becky, and last strip we met Marcus who by all account is a great kid and – more to the point – is exactly the kind of kid that Joyce and Becky were just a few short years ago.
This confrontation with church is not a throwaway gag to hammer home a point – it is one of the central themes of the comic and has been so from start. This community gave birth to both Joyce and Mary and Becky, both ToeDad and Carol and Hank, both John and Jocelyne and Jordan. Villains and victims and people who are more on the fence.
Joyce is the closest this comic has to a central protagonist, and her central story ark is how to reconcile her upbringing with her expanding world view. Her befriending Dorothy, the aftermath of her getting assaulted by the preacher’s son at the party, her chosing Becky over Doctrine and her decking ToeDad are all milestones of her character arc, and those are direct reactions to her upbringing. Here. Her upbringing in this community and in this church.
Everything we see in this church, everything Carol and ToeDad have done and said, is Joyce in the beginning of the comic. This is not a dip into black-and-white-villian-town. This. Is. The. Story. The story we have read for several years now.
Or… I dunno, were you disappointed in Lord of the Rings when Mordor turned out to be a not-very-nice-place? Or in Alice in Wonderland when the Queen of Hearts didn’t turn out to be a very sane person? Because those are central elements of those stories as well.
I understand frustration at seeing Christian characters being dicks, but we’re not seeing the One Christian Story ever. It’s vitally important to Joyce’s character arc that she be confronted with the dark side of what she’s been raised with, because this is Joyce’s story. If Sierra was the main character we’d probably see more positive Christian characters and more unilaterally positive elements of Christianity, because Sierra’s relationship with her religion isn’t the same as Joyce’s.
Consider also that there ARE Christian non-assholes in the story: Joyce, Becky, Sierra and the Morman blonde woman whose name escapes me, to name just the ones we’re certain of. There is also possibly Hank (his assholitude remains to be determined), Jocylene (I am uncertain whether she’s Christian), Billie (her assholitude likewise remains to be determined – I think she’s going to mature to be significantly more tolerant of “dorks”), Sal and Walky (both of whom I am uncertain of whether they are religious), etc.
Seriously. I’m a little more than frustrated with the intentional erasure of anyone who’s not the “right type” of Christian in order to set this up like Willis against all religion. There are so many caring empathetic and good Christian characters.
But people want to pretend that it’s only Mary and Carol and Toedad and Ryan and the awful people at church who are religious or are being presented as emblematic of all religion and it smacks so much of what I grew up with where only Pre-Millennial Dispensationalist Rapture-believing Fundamentalist Southern Baptists were considered Christian and everything else was some form of pagan/devil worship.
I’m pretty sure it’s actually happened here, someone complains that all the Christians are bigots, they’re countered with the list of all the Christians who aren’t, and then the original complainer replies that they aren’t real Christians because they aren’t bigoted. And of course, they don’t see any cognitive dissonance with complaining about Christians being depicted as bigots while also claiming bigotry is integral to being Christian.
I think underlying the attacks is the idea that Christians should always be portrayed as “good” people.
Abrahamic religions are particularly prone to this. Their proselytizing means that they see themselves as good, and anything (including art) that views them in a dispassionate light, warts and all, must be attacked. IIRC, it’s viewed as a battle for souls, a cultural war. If Willis is to remain true to his art, he can do nothing about them or their attacks.
As others in this thread have said, this is a work of fiction dealing with Joyce’s struggle with her religion and how it interacts with the culturally diverse world of college and the more inward looking community of her youth.
People along the way are portrayed as good, bad or indifferent. That’s what makes it a great work of fiction, imo.
And I think it’s the problem of privilege. They’re used to works praising them and treating them like the heroes, so showing up as villains, even as individuals strikes them as grossly wrong, because they don’t have the raising environment that say… trans people do of having the vast majority of works depict them as nefarious and murderous and evil.
This, but simultaneously (and I don’t know how this isn’t a paradox), many are hypersensitive to persecution and thus perceive any form of criticism or any negative portrayal of its membership as an attack.
I can’t speak for Islam as I am not Muslim, but this, in my experience, has been more endemic to Christianity specifically and not the entirety of the Abrahamic religions. At the very least, it’s not endemic to Judaism for the most part as we tend to get the shaft from the rest of the world in this regard. Granted, this is in part subverted in media as many villains, particularly modern ones, are Jew- and Muslim-coded. I just wanted to point this out as, unfortunately, a lot of times when people say “Abrahamic religions” they are speaking from a strictly Christian perspective.
To talk on the topic at hand, when there’s a group that’s used to unilateral privilege in an area, any attempt to portray them as less than perfect is usually met with exponentially unnecessary resistance, which is what Cerberus and Reltzik already pointed out. Social politics are weird. :/
Yes, this ^^^ thank you! Proselytizing is an ENORMOUS no-no in the Jewish community, and if you ever tried it, every Rabbi within a twenty-mile radius would close in on you and give you hours-long lectures.
Yeeees thank you I was thinking the same thing! We don’t do the proselytizing… I think you’re right though, a lot of times people will say ‘Abrahamic religions’ or ‘Judeo-Christian’ and I read the thing and am like… I think you just mean Christianity, bud. (No hard feelings though to anyone who does this, I’m sure it wasn’t intentional but now you know for future reference.)
I want to gay marry this comment, because it is just so beautiful and perfect. This really is the story. This awkward coming of age reconciling faith with life. With overcoming how one was taught and accepting the beautiful rich tapestry of human existence is the main storyline of the comic and its central protagonist. It’s the reason why Willis chose to write this in the first place, to exorcise the demons of his raising.
This has always been the comic, so it’s baffling those who stumble in here shocked that the awkwardness and awfulness of this particular interpretation of the Christian faith is given center stage. Like, were they all reading some other comic this entire time?
Another point I wanted to make – for those who thought ToeDad was cartoonish and unrealistic – this is where he gets fleshed out and nuanced. These are the people who held his back, who gave him his ideas, whose judgement he cared about.
We have already met Carol. Now we are going to see the a lot more people who think that maybe Ross didn’t have the entirely wrong idea after all…
ToeDad was not a cartoonish plot element. He was a plausible and – sadly – real consequence of the community Joyce and Becky come from. This story ark describe that community. This story ark IS the nuance people have been waiting for.
They don’t want nuance. They want Toedad to be unrealistic, they want willis to be wrong, they would rather people like this not exist and so they will pretend it is unreasonable to suggest they exist in stories. This story won’t change anything for them.
“religious bigoted adults” are shit heads. Hell, “bigoted adults” are shit heads, but a lot of the prejudice against LGBTQ folks is religiously driven, so it’s worth leaving in.
religious non-bigoted adults who still go to church after their 20s are cool.
It’s the bigoted part that’s the problem. And this church teaches that. We’ve seen that from the start. Joyce’s whole character arc is about recovering from the teachings of this church.
Though it’s a little trickier than that. Bigots can be good people in areas where their bigotry doesn’t come up. In some cases it can be a great shock since “They were always so nice to me!”
Absolutely, and again, that is something this comic has spent a lot of time and effort to portray in a nuanced manner.
Most obviously with Joyce who is a wonderfully good person and also occasionally a horrible bigot due to her upbringing and ignorance. Seen for example in her interaction with Ethan, Billie, Becky, Agatha and directly pointed out by Roz in one of the most commented strips of the comic.
Lovely, goofy Becky made a snide remark to Billie about bisexuality, loving accepting father Hank has to force himself to give Becky the time of the day, Fun-loving, surprisingly warmhearted Walky completely diminishes the racism experienced by his own sister… Bigotry is not exactly an unknown theme of this comic, and not in any way exclusive for the “cartoonish evil” characters.
Bigots will do stuff fucked up and say things fucked up and believe things fucked up, because how they are raised is to do those things. They may still be “decent” people who love their (straight) kids and treat others who are exactly like them with empathy and compassion, but it matters how they treat the others outside of that focus, the ones who are disadvantaged and disempowered and publicly hated.
People being awful do harm, real harm. Even lovely goofy Becky making an unintentional diminishing comment about bisexuality to Billie, even sweet innocent Joyce saying all manner of awful slut-shaming bigoted fucked-up stuff as she’s recovering from how she was taught. And when it is unchecked leads to whole societies thinking it is perfectly normal to collectively treat the disadvantaged less.
And that’s not just the major theme of this comic. This is the major theme of life that we are ALL complicit in. The way that so many minority groups are simply treated as less simply for existing and thus live life on a harder difficulty than they should ever be expected to. Deal with bullshit they shouldn’t. With no one making an active choice to be intentionally evil, but nonetheless…
We have what we have, with our laws, with our mass shootings, with our lists of dead and suffering, with our “sweet lesbian facts”. We have what we have. And the first step in changing that is not looking away from the heart of bigotry and dismissing it as “unrealistic” because we want to think better of those who perpetuate it without question.
I didn’t mean they can’t have any good traits or can’t be three-dimensional people, though I do think you need to work on your bigotries in order to truly achieve “good” status.
But I was referring to the people who keep, apparently without irony, complaining because bigots aren’t being portrayed as perfect angels, whose “”difference of opinion”” about LGBTQIA people magically never hurts anyone.
This is where Willis grew up. He’s said more than once that writing this strip is a form of therapy for himself. That the scenes where the religious elements seem out of left field and fucked up are actual views he was carefully taught to believe wholesale growing up. Actual things his parents or his church or himself said before growing up and realizing they were fucked up.
And I can say from growing up surrounded by it, this is the nice side of that particular sect. It is not exaggeration. It is simply how it is. And the people in it do not see it as rude, as dehumanizing, as wrong or immoral in any way. It simply is what needs to be done to turn one’s back on sin and live “right”.
And it’s the reason that LGBT kids are a way disproportionate number of the currently homeless youth.
i guess i feel like this is one of the more nuanced, gray depictions of Christianity out there? like a lot of times when Christians show up in fiction, it’s very black and white: either they’re Evil, or they’re Good, and there’s only one right way to feel about it. this isn’t about that. this is about this Christian church’s homophobia and how it’s harmed their children. it’s not telling you how to feel about it: it’s just showing you the damage from the perspective of those children.
like, on a level, there are no two sides on this issue. homophobia and transphobia are direct assaults on gay and trans’ people’s right to existence. in a society where gay and trans people do not exist, it is not because they aren’t there. it’s because they’ve been pressured into silence. and that is what these nice people have done, and are doing. and because they do this, bad things happen.
it’s not that gay and trans Christians don’t exist. it’s just that they don’t exist here, at this church.
And the irony is that they do exist at this church. Becky existed at this church for 18 years before she realized she was gay. She’s existing now. The problem is that now she knows and now that she’s out and now that she’s publicly seen as gay, they’ll start pushing her out as they are doing above, making her feel unwelcome and encouraging her to leave or “get fixed”, all to keep the illusion that this is a church without gay people in it.
As always, can we differentiate between this type of “Christian” and the church that says to my brother-in-law when he comes out (a la Hank) “I can’t understand, but I will pray; you are still a valued member of this community, please continue to join us for services”?
All Christianity does not necessarily equal evil/stupidity. Individual congregations (usually in hick-town USA) equal insensitive/callous/cruel. I’ve found college towns to be the most inclusive- probably due to the high turnover rate which means the steady congregation is more exposed to different types of people.
Now, this particular church Becky and Joyce are at? Screw ’em.
This awkwardness feels a bit artificial as someone who also grew up in a church. To someone like Becky people would actually be being a liiiitle bit too nice, either because they genuinely believe that such an obvious lost soul must be welcomed and encouraged to keep returning or because they want to appear like they believe it.
As someone who came out as queer in a small town. This feels super genuine. And I’m rethinking some of my forgive and forget I had about the situation later in life.
I dunno, being trans and ace and a whole bunch of things people are publicly encouraged to be actively treated as fictional and easily dismissed, I’m starting to get a wee bit salty at all the times personal life experiences are treated as “artificial” or “unrealistic” or “clearly demonizing of X group”.
Fair enough. I was compelled to mention it, because we’re obviously seeing Willis’ own personal experience so now we have two. It seems to me that Willis was in a particularly bad church and now his comics make it seem as though all churches are like that, which of course is something that militant atheists lap like melted ice cream.
Regardless of your opinion of religion, it is possible for Christians /not/ to be awful hypocrites, terribly judgemental assholes or blindly ignorant zealots and believing otherwise makes people as bad as these caricature Christians they love to mock. A good big deal of them are smart, truly compassionate and lovely people that don’t deserve to be demonised along with the bunch of hypocritical imbeciles that admittedly make a vocal minority of religious communities (and of all communities, really).
I am myself not religious anymore, but I don’t approve of the depictions Christians get in popular media.
It’s not a “particularly bad church” like it was some weird exception. Nor, of course, is it all Christians. It’s a broad fundamentalist strain that’s quite common in much of the US. You can tell by all the “religious freedom” protests over same-sex marriage and all the other bigoted freakouts using religion as an excuse. Not to mention all the commentors here going “Yeah, this was my life.” It’s real. It’s too common. It’s a problem.
But it’s certainly not “all Christians” as you say. It’s not even all Christians in this comic. A bunch of the kids are explicitly Christian, plus a Mormon and a couple of Jews and one explicit atheist.
We’re focusing on this church because this is Joyce’s story. This whole comic is basically about Joyce getting over all the horrible shit this church taught her. So that’s going to get a lot more of the focus than, for example, Sierra hanging out at church and being cool.
Yeah, it was not so much that I was trying to minimise the likelihood of churches like Joyce’s existing, but making a point of noting that not all are like that. I know that it is like arguing that a comic with an anti-racist theme needs some white people in it, but I’ve always thought it is important to remind people not to go too deep in negative characterisation of groups of people (even if it could be warranted), lest that they end becoming as hateful and discriminating as the people their targets.
I think her nearly getting shot by her own father and a member of their church is what makes it most awkward for them. It’s like a tug of war between “well I mean…murder is a huge sin. This girl was almost murdered by her dad” and “BUT SHE WAS A LESBIAN, SHE RAN AWAY FROM HER DAD SHE IS NOT BLAMELESS” so they’d rather just…not deal with her. It makes things too ‘weird’ for them because they have to evaluate how much of her father’s actions they may have helped along.
I don’t know he doesn’t look as Sharp as her brother. ANd I don’t think he could be as big of a Munster. And like most youth pastors I bet he’s a real big Cheddar. His attitude looks like it’s making Joyce a little Bleu….. Cheese.
Sadly, Joyce is about to learn that her fellow Christians strongly adhere to 2 Corithians 6:14-17. I’m sure they’d also gladly remind her of Deuteronomy 13:6-10. She’s going to need her friends when she gets back to college.
Awww jeez coming home to church after having been gone so long or having admitted to someone you thought you could trust that you’re queer. I know that feeling, this is nostalgic in a bad way….
Man, I am a stone-cold atheist and I am treated with more genuine warmth and kindness when I visit my wife’s church. And not once has any of them tried to convert me.
One is a convert waiting to happen in their eyes, someone who was raised “wrong” but can be fixed with “love”.
The other brings the whole edifice into question and begs dark questions. If someone who is “raised right” nonetheless turns to sin and is present to the sermons but still chooses sin, what does that mean and is the sin really as bad as they are claiming. Is what they are doing even doing fuck all to prevent it?
That’s going to breed defensiveness and defensive people lash out at the thing that prompts that defensive introspective. A lot more barbs thus come out. A lot more hate.
And/or this church just breeds insecure intolerant fuckers. Like Joyce would have been at the start of the comic if not for her irrepressible innocent and loving personality.
It will probably be OK, the church looks pretty sturdy, reinforced concrete and stuff like that. With some luck the JoyceRage will be contained within the state.
Okay, changing locations isn’t fair! My bet moves up one day for each day we’re not in Churchtown, South Religiona. So it’s Friday. Friday it is. Now back to the good part!
Is youth pastor powers subconsciously touching his arm, the one that Joyce has broken? Not cool man. And dude, we don’t believe that no one sees Becky she’s a redhead in a flamboyantly pink dress.
Pastor Graybeard: “Briiiing foooooorth the viiiiirginiallllll saaaaaaacriiiiificeeeee!”
Joyce: “About that…”
Becky: “Do mouthsmooches count?”
Dina: “We just finished having sex”
…sooo who else is expecting a “hate the sin not the sinner” sermon, followed by “pray for Toedad, who, while misguided, was doing his best for his family”
For going to church, it seems to be a-c. Joyce is still very faithful, and not going to church would be not only very wrong to her, it would also be a break of habit.
It was also a safe space to her, which is part of why she came home. She’s not just trying to convince her parents, she’s trying to convince herself she hasn’t changed too much, and going home to see people she cares about and that care(d) about her is to help with that. There’s probably a bit of hope that maybe, just maybe, it’s not as bad as she’s starting to fear, and people will be more like Hank and less like Carol.
I think Becky is almost entirely here to support Joyce (getting some of the info she needed from her house was a very helpful bonus, as was finding out Jocelyne is on their side). Also, I have a hard time believing that Carol would’ve let Becky stay in their house while they weren’t there, though I’m also afraid that she’s planning to get the church to try and ‘pray the gay away’ or something even worse.
What AgentKeen said, she’s at church today, because she’s a “good Christian girl” and good Christian girls do. not. miss. Church. No matter what. Plus, this is her church, raised to be her whole life and support network, the thing her whole life has revolved around.
This is as much home as the physical house she grew up in. It was no choice for her, but she’s not at all aware of how toxic this place is or how much awful she’s been able to recognize due to all the growing she’s done this last month and especially in the last week.
She’s been having a crisis of faith and this is the place she’s supposed to go for that. To make her feel one and connected with the holy spirit again.
Becky’s already lost that innocence. She is here as you and AgentKeen note, entirely to support Joyce. I doubt she has any illusions as to how awful today is going to be.
But it’ll be okay, she was encouraged to have a personal relationship with God and as far as she is concerned God still loves her, God still protects her when she is in danger, and God still answers lesbian prayers. No matter what some stupid old church says.
i thought Joyce came back because she survived a shooting and her parents wanted to see her and make sure she was okay.
but now i’m thinking that Hank wanted to see her and make sure she was okay, Carol wanted to see her and make sure she was still faithful, and neither of them really wanted to deal with the Becky issue. it’s entirely possible that John just didn’t particularly care??? i’m still kinda o.O with him. like, what a self-centered prick. sister almost gets shot at and all he can do is go on about how he’s not being respected enough before driving off in an expensive car.
Jocelyne probably wanted to see Becky, I’m pretty sure. she was super prepped for that scenario. if not, she was probably prepared to help Joyce get stuff for her.
Joyce has to go to church because not going to church isn’t an option. it would mean that she’s as much of an apostate as her mom seems to think she’s in danger of becoming. also it seems to me like church was probably Joyce’s only social outlet for most of her life – she was homeschooled, so maybe she met other homeschooled kids, but I doubt that there were many outside resources that were holy enough for her mom.
I think it was expected for Joyce to come back so as to “show love” for what she’d been through, but only Hank meant that directly and still only planned for that to extend to Joyce and is a bit unsure how to react to Becky. Carol’s far more worried about her losing her faith over this and still being “good” and “virtuous”. John probably didn’t even want to see her, but felt it was owed, because family.
And I think you’re right that Jocelyne was the only one who actually wanted to see both of them and reach out genuinely.
this is such a shitty thing, but I feel like it almost would have been simpler for her church if Toedad had killed Joyce? it would be so much easier for them to Rachel Joy Scott her. they could grieve her, and bury her, and they could all blame Becky, and then mythologize Joyce as someone just trying to reach out for Good Christian Values. Toedad would’ve become that strange man with mental issues who didn’t understand what he was doing but his heart was in the right place. and the moral of the story would be “don’t support gay people, children”.
but because she’s a survivor, she gets to be there and live and remind them all of how their values don’t quite sync up with reality. she and Becky get their voices. and that’s just about as challenging a thing to their worldview as anything else could be
I think this is one of the problems that style of faith has in over-emphasizing their religious figure’s sacrifice over his life and deeds. It makes one very equipped with handling over-the-top sacrifice of one’s life and has ready narratives to encapsulate and sanitize it.
But living for one’s beliefs? Being messily human? Messes with a lot of those narratives.
And I say that particular flavor of religion, but this also applies to this country and those raised with this mentality. The big brave hero who did the good thing and has fallen we know how to handle.
The wounded soldier coming home with half their limbs, 12 flavors of PTSD, and some bitter resentment at the world? We try and hide that shit away and not think about it.
Well, for one-yes, because she always goes to church. This is something that should be familiar and comfortable, something that should be welcome after everything that’s happened. Should being the keyword. Second, also yes because she wants to see old friends. Again, Joyce is seeking out familiarity for comfort.
Becky is there because she has to be. Like the Browns would allow her to get away with skipping church. They’re probably convinced she needs God now more than ever.
But most of this all leads back to this: They’re desperately seeking out familiarity in a desire for comfort. They’ve been through a lot lately, and they want something that makes them feel safe. And it used to be church.
Quote, “My pastor says liking the right things is important for establishing a proper gender identity“.
And this advice directly lead to the strict gender enforcement Joyce and Jocelyne had growing up.
So anyone hoping that this sermon isn’t going to be devastating… are definitely going to be getting some Leicester City winning the Premier League odds on those bets.
Panel 1: So many have commented on this, but it’s so telling that Becky is being treated like she’s not here. Simply because her existence, by existing, ruins a lot of the narratives, a lot of the sermons about sexuality, humanizes the life experience.
And this is why gay shows are protested and why people try and take them off the air because they are “corrupting children” or are trying to force trans people to stay home more instead of being out in public or why there are neighborhoods where it is enforced with bullets where a black person can walk.
Because the actual existence of the other, being human, being a person, blunts the hate. It’s why coming out works so well. It’s why I so often adopt the role of “friendly neighborhood trans ace”. Because being seen as actual human beings is what is being stripped away in service of hate.
And why it is so critical to them not to address Becky directly (John did the same thing in the diner). Because if they extend that humanity to her, then that smudges their white cloth of purity with her sin. Shows God that they mistrust his condemnation of such a grave sin and their approval of it. Risks their souls as surely as hers is forsaken to Hell.
They’ve been raised to believe that simply being humane to a gay person is what could make them deserve in the eyes of their Lord, an eternity of torture. And they cannot risk something so great for something so small. And that’s the excuse for not simply growing as a person, for keeping the bigotry going, but it does not actually need the religious reinforcement to exist. Plenty of areligious people are capable of being just as passive-aggressive and cruel to those who are queer in order to protect their bigotries and biases.
Panel 2: Ayup, his sermon is going to be brutal. If it wasn’t already going to be brutal, it’s gonna be now. Especially given that he’s the source of all the homophobic shit Joyce has been spewing all comic…
Panel 3: Ah man, there is so much in that sad eyebrow of Pastor Greybeard’s. I’m suspecting that he intended something general and a bit victim-blamey and wasn’t quite prepared for the subjects of the attack, with personal experience with it were actually going to be in attendance. I don’t think this will cause him to back off his rhetoric though, if anything, he is probably going to see this as a chance to try and “save” their souls by preaching stronger at them and any of the other congregation members who see this tragedy and the one in Orlando that occurred so recently in that universe as a call to be more welcoming to queer folk.
Panel 4: And Youth Pastor Scruff makes an appearance, doing a subtle callback to It’s Walky! Yeah, given the unified response, I’m guessing that there’s been a long discussion behind the scenes on how to handle things and McScruff here has been “encouraged” to stay on point for it.
Also, Becky’s face is starting to do the lopsided smile she does when she’s super nervous and expects things to go wrong. This is absolutely ripping her apart and her mask is in serious danger of disintegrating completely. I still have money on her breaking down and crying during the sermon, thus letting Joyce see that all this stuff is still bothering her and allow them both to start emotionally supporting each other in ways that aren’t trying to bury their emotions in order to “be strong” for the other.
Panel 5: Largely because that face there looks so much like the face of someone who is in a bit of internal conflict between what he’s been taught and how much he’s known them and probably relied on the two of them to help him mentor the younger kids in all the church programs in the last couple of years (the way that it works is often high schoolers are called upon to mentor the other kids and foster their moral and spiritual growth and serve as counselors at things like Christ Camps or on field trips).
Rubbing that arm, running away at first chance, emphasizing staying out of trouble, this is all way realer than he can handle. But who knows, maybe it’s the preview panel of Hank seeking him out, but maybe he can be the one to help make an excuse for them all to make an early exit and maybe Hank taking them all back to school and away from all this awfulness.
Panel 6: Oh Becky, never lose that eternal optimism. But you know as well as I that that was all the dark portent and veiled commentary and this is going to be a complete and utter fustercluck of epic proportions. Sigh, (urge to give fictional character hug rising).
And poor Joyce, staring at her hand, full of hurt. It’s clear she hadn’t realized the full extent of what it meant that her church has been an enemy of those who are queer and those who support them. And how that means that even those who did everything to befriend and support her before will turn on her more and more now because of what she did morally right.
Cool Youth Pastor McScruff likely was the majority of her church world growing up, was the person giving her advice when she struggled with feelings for boys, was the one who lead all the “cool” youth outings, prolly worked really hard to be read as “not just one of the olds, but someone who can be your friend”. And now, he turns away from her with that pained expression with barely a hello. After she was practically jumping up and down to see him again. And in response, she looks at her own hand in betrayal and confusion.
That may be the most poignant symbol of this entire arc right there. Of how doing the right thing makes her an outcast in her faith and how she was raised. Makes her seen as fallen and sinful rather than praiseworthy. And shows that this is no longer her home and her safest place and it’s up to her to carve out another as she has already been doing with her group of friends in college.
It’ll be rough, but I think she’s going to come out the other side of this even more invested in what she’s built at IU and even further away from the church she was raised in. Because with Toedad and their response to Toedad, the church and its believers have largely failed her and Becky in service to the beliefs they cling to so tightly, far tighter than she ever could with clean conscience.
Spot on as usual, and there is nothing in your analysis that makes me less worried about the following strips…
About your observations about the youth pastor… yeah, he was close to the kids he helped raising. He has known Becky for all her life – and he knew Bonnie and ToeDad too. How much did HE pick up about their home life? How often did HE see Becky’s mask falter? Or not to make a too fine point about it – how surprised was HE when ToeDad went after his child with a gun?
And even those who might be sympathetic, who haven’t fully swallowed the hate, know that if they step out of line, they’ll be outcast too. And the sermon and the ostracizing of Joyce will just reinforce that.
I’m also remembering that Joyce would rub and clutch that arm even before Toedad – back to Scarface.
In regards to your take on panel two it sounds a bit like the Banality of Evil to me, doing wrong because the behaviour has been normalized by the society they live in
Also Youth Pastor Power (which sounds awesome by the way, like biblemans sidekick or something) isn’t doing a good job of shunning Becky since he specifically says you two…maybe a warning, maybe sees its wrong but isn’t strong enough to defend them
But this to me is when Mr Willis is at his best, the slow torturous build up, making people think what’s going to happen, a glimmer of hope to think that just maybe it won’t be as bad as we think and then those hopes are dashed away…
That’s a sucker’s bet, Retrikaethan. With what we’ve seen of her, she’s probably been passively aggressively sniping about Becky and the whole situation at bible studies or whatnot ever since she heard about it.
In fairness, it won’t be so much that homosexuals ARE evil, but that they’re “being tempted into sin”. Kind of the same thing at its core, but far more “palatable” phrasing.
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You know the best part of church? The community!
…if you’re, like, OLD.
and also not the daughter and friend of the daughter of someone involved in a campus shooting
Based on Joyce’s moms reaction, I doubt it’s the “daughter of a school shooter” and more the “lesbian she-devil” thing
Come on.
“Lesbian she-devil?”
There’s no need to be redundant like that.
“malignant daughter”
whoops, tautology!
The Lesbian She-Devils would be a great name for a football team.
but will this rough and tumble team have what it takes to make it to the intercity championship?
I suddenly want to be on a roller derby team with this name.
I mean, I’d die within 5 minutes of the start of the first match, but it would be AWESOME
thats what practice is for! so you dont die in 5 minutes!
So just maimed instead?
…. hmm, now I’m imagining a team named “The Malicious Maimaries”
Count me in for team “thanks for the maimeries”
Reltzik-
I think we’ve got an official cross-town rivalry set up between them and the Lesbian She-Devils.
football???
the Lesbian She-Devils would CLEARLY be a rugby team
Do they play rugby in Greece?
Football or football? Because for me, football involves corrupt European refs, “no visible blood on the uniform”, a checkered ball, and a lot of good footwork.
And phenomenal Oscar worthy acting chops. What? He touched me? OW! MY LEG! MY LEG! I AM A WORLD CLASS ELITE ATHLETE AND HE BROKE MY LEG WITH A TOUCH! 😛
And the most fake falls in sports!
lesbian she devil actually sounds cute.
Have you seen roller derby?
Totally calling one of my gay friends that next time I see her.
I want to believe you’re joking, but your Gravatar makes you sound serious.
I shipped at least two of The Flying She-Devils together. I think just two.
I think it’s a combination of the two, and they fall more along with the Brown family on perhaps Becky’s dad was justified.
Wouldya believe I completely forgot that somehow? Damn librul media making me think loving my neighbour is some kind of GOOD thing to do!
*looks at the cover of Book 5 again as a reminder*
Except that a gun is not a toy. You bring it, you use it. Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.
Someone once referred to me and my lifepartner as “Militant Lesbians from Hell”. I was flattered.
I hope you both have jackets with that sewn on the back.
It’s the oversupply of pitch forks and torches I find disturbing.
And what a welcome those two are getting.
So inviting the way they don’t acknowledge Becky
Becky? Who’s that?
(Waves to Joyce)
i thought invisibility was just a bi superpower but maybe they’re all colorblind and can’t see rainbows
And after it rains there’s a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It’s not that the colors aren’t there
It’s just imagination they lack…
Everything just takes me back–to My Little Town–Paul Simon
paul simon truly is the man with a song for every occasion
One of my favorite simon and Garfunkel songs is “so long, frank Lloyd wright,” an ode to the deceased famous architect.
one of my greatest delights is the knowledge that Carrie Fisher and Paul Simon were married for a year and when they broke up he wrote songs about their relationship and her “cold coffee eyes”
Dude, if bi people get invisibility, we ace peeps must get, like, mythical being status (along the lines of unicorns and dragons).
…actually. I’m okay with that.
only once in a lifetime can the Mythical Ace be spotted. They range wild and free, evading capture with ease, as much of a legend as the Yeti or Bigfoot. Yet accounts of them range everywhere, from the highest ranks of office to the local grocery store.
Agatha Hendley: One time I saw an ace in the mold on my refrigerator! … Then it turned into Emilie Autumn.
The Normal Times: Pandemonium raged on the scene as Farmer Haggis reported an ace in his barn by running through town three times half-naked. It was later discovered that it was also the site of his child’s laboratory for scientific experiments, which created the confusion.
Cashier: Look, you gonna buy something or are you gonna sit there asking me dumb questions while a line of people backs up behind you?
Heh, the Ace float at the Pride I was at last WE had a unicorn theme. XD
You folks are basically myths already since NOBODY BELIEVES YOU GUYS WHEN YOU SAY YOU’RE ACE.
They “just haven’t found the right one, yet”.
It’s very similar to the sort of thing it was still acceptable to say about gay people in the 80s.
Still, I don’t think ace people will ever see the same kind of widespread social awareness as the rest of the LGBT community, just because we ultimately can’t be oppressed as much. There is no way to introduce discriminatory legislation against asexuals, for example.
And also because a lot of asexuals see the concept of forming an asexual community in the same way as there is a gay community as being a pointless exercise. Nobody wants to go to an ace bar.
I strongly disagree with your first comment, and your second comment is part of why I want sapphic cafes. There is an implicit sexual element to “”gay”” bars, which is a problem for a lot of reasons. We as a community need ways to socialize with and validate each other that aren’t so focused on sex and dating.
I’m with Li. I’m really sick of queer automatically being viewed as PG-13.
I got into a long e-mail argument about ten years ago over that idea, but with a twist: The guy I was arguing with was insisting that everyone is really gay, that anyone who identifies as straight is in denial, and that meeting “the right person” would open their eyes and make them embrace their true (in his opinion) sexuality.
This was on an e-mail group for a convention I was involved with, and the admin told us to take the discussion offline right after I asked how suggesting that there was some magical man who would make me no longer want to be with women was any less offensive than someone suggesting that there was some magical woman that would make him no longer want to be with men.
And with that, plans for a “singles mixer” at the con were cancelled.
What’s really ironic about this exchange is that near me is a queer coffee shop. And somewhat by happenstance it’s become sort of the default place for trans and ace folks to go and hang, largely because there’s not the same predatory feeling there as there is at queer bars.
To clarify over “acceptable to say about gay people in the 80s”, I don’t mean it was actually okay to say it, I mean that, for example, it could be said on television or in a major release movie without offering public apology.
For the oppression of asexuals, I mean that we can really only be hurt with low social visibility and by people dismissing our existence. That’s nasty stuff on its own, but it would be impossible for conservative media to fabricate an equivalent controversy to the trans bathroom issue or gay marriage rights.
Speaking for myself, nobody else in my immediate social circle is ace, and I rarely if ever hear about the dating lives of my friends. I’ll make nice with anyone, but the idea that I should congregate with other ace people specifically because we aren’t interested in sex seems something like starting a community of people who aren’t interested in tennis.
Crumplepunch –
CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Assault
Man, I wish. It would be awesome if ace people were kinda passed by for bigotry. Sadly, though, there’s all manner of awfulness that ace folks get targeted by.
Disbelief from loved ones, demands by religious leaders that we “be fruitful and multiply” regardless of our comfort levels, medical mistreatment, diminishment and disbelief of our relationships to the point of treating them as fictitious, immigration rules that can have our marriages dissolved and our immigrations denied because we are “clearly faking it”, risk of being labeled insane simply because of our orientation, all manner of negative stereotypes and negative statements (me and a friend had a good hour-long exchange going over all the ones that were off the top of our heads, also it’s worth noting that child molester is one of the stereotypes of ace people), risk of physical violence (my very allosexual gf nearly got her ass beat once because she wore an ace shirt going to the grocery store), and the big mack daddy awfulest of them all:
Sexual assault and rape. Asexuals are sexually assaulted at absolutely terrifying numbers and a lot of that has to do with the way we don’t actually pay much attention to coercion as a sexual assault tactic, nor do we check our assumptions that every romantic relationship will involve regular sexual activity of a typically heteronormative fashion.
As such, a lot of ace people get pressured by romantic partners to perform sexual activities they don’t want because “if you loved me, you’d do this” or “you don’t want to be broken, do you”.
And even that is somewhat minor compared to the dark elephant in the room, which is the sheer frequency asexuals are targeted for corrective rape by friends, loved ones, or relatives hoping to “fix” them of their “delusions” and thus make them “normal” again. Asexuals who come out typically are more targeted as a result and there’s not the same social condemnation of using sex to “correct” an asexual as there is using sex to “correct” a lesbian.
Many of these things will eventually need the creation of legal categories of protection and at the very least massive changes in social attitude and greater awareness and acceptance of ace people.
Not to mention that bigots get really creative in inventing new political awfulness to target the minority group du jour. See the bigots pitching a segregationist fit over trans bathroom use or the attempt back in the 70s to make it illegal to be gay and a teacher.
Ehhh, I’m not so sure about the whole “can’t legislate against Ace” bit, if the hyperChristian contingency ever manages to get ahold of government enough (not far from that in my humble pessimistic opinion, especially as far as some states are concerned *coughNorthCarolinacough*), they can always make a rule that every single person has to get married (in a straight marriage ofc) and make babies.
Cerberus –
Thanks for your post, it was illuminating. I suppose a pitfall of never really engaging with online ace communities is never being made aware of problems I am not experiencing.
Yeah, I. I’m still sorting out where my gray-aceness lies, and things were going really well with a GF until she said she wasn’t confident I was sexually interested in her, I explained that I think I might be demisexual, and she was very relieved and said she wasn’t sure she could date an asexual person and then offered to take the initiative more since I “can’t”. It was almost what I wanted to hear, but boy did it ever make me feel tremendously pressured and less safe. With more distance from it, I can’t help hearing coercion in her “offer”, that I would have been signing up to accept coercive physical contact throughout the rest of our relationship. Thankfully I followed my instincts even tho I wasn’t fully sure WHY I was so uncomfortable, and ended it.
Bah, clearly we are jibing with them when we say we’re ace. For the fortieth time… this month… THEY JUST ASSUMED WE WERE REALLY UNCREATIVE, OKAY, GEEZE!
Cryptid
Yep, I’m also pretty OK with being considered a mythical being.
But this is La Porte, not Pleasantville…
It seems to me that they are pointedly ignoring Joyce as well.
Or at least brushing her off as best as they can.
More like the latter. It looks like they want to minimize interactions.
That’s still nothing compared to the outright dismissal of Becky even though she’s the one to greet them instead of Joyce, which is just plain rude.
It seems to me that Becky has become a nonperson.
Well, it’s like meeting an old friend who has a squirrel dry-humping his nuts, wait no, her knockers. You just do a short greeting in the hope that you’ll be able to talk under less distracting circumstances later on.
It’s honestly a better welcome than I expected
Maybe this won’t be a horrible experience? Just an awkward one where everyone keeps having to leave immediately.
Oh, look at the time! Can’t read the comments tonight.
I CAN HOPE PEOPLE AREN’T COMPLETELY TERRIBLE!
I mean, it’s a vain hope but…
Admit it. It’s the slow motion train wreck that keeps bringing you back.
Just like the rest of us.
It is. And yet.
I don’t know. I keep wishing some little part of the world Joyce came from will turn out to be anywhere near as nice as she believed it was.
she loved it so much i just kind of wish it was capable of loving her back the way she needs it to
Yes. Basically. Except that feels vaguely like a domestic abuse problem.
So I kind of want her to find one good thing but then run back to college and get far away from it to grow as a person.
Damn that still feels like a domestic abuse analogy.
idk. like, not everything that is toxic is outright abusive, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t terrible. people can have good intentions and still be awful for you. finding that good makes it a different situation, i think. like if someone’s trying to control you, even if they think it’s for your own good, that is kind of abusive; if someone’s doing controlling things without realizing that they’re controlling because they’re screwed up, that’s another.
like i guess i feel like the point of this arc is that just because these people aren’t pointing guns at their heads doesn’t mean that they aren’t being toxic.
i would think of a word that isn’t Toxic but it’s late
Well the later stages of Billie and Ruth were not abusive still horribly toxic though
Jocelyne’s been pretty cool so far, Hank’s certainly trying, and of course she’s still got Becky…
La Porte, Indiana: the home of Belle Gunness.
I feel like that’d still be horrible for Joyce. For someone like her, a church community is a family.
Finding out your family is peacing out on you is pretty rough.
You think the cheese fun is funny, but maybe it’s not…
Pun…fun…spelling…
What cheese pun?
The Cheese has many Powers and this is one of them.
Youth Pastor Powers sound like a bad trope
Because Mr. Powers is this universe’s version of The Cheese? Carla was a car and is now a human, so the same can happen to The Cheese (BTW I hope the guy who was an alien is an exchange student from Madeupistan or something.)
Powers and Cheese wear a yellow shirt with black marking. The Cheese was a God like deity, this guy is a pastor. This guy has a red tie, Cheese had a red cape. Cheese first met Joyce after a bunch of her friends died which the Cheese could have prevented, while this guy (maybe) encouraged a train of though that almost got Joyce’s friends (Dina, Becky, Amber, Sal) killed. First time the audience met The Cheese he quickly vanishes and Powers does the exact same thing.
And the hover text.
And his name is Powers. Now you would think its because The Cheese was powerful… no. “Behold the power of Cheese”.
Oh oh oh, and we can’t see Power’s legs.
I hope Elvis here is never shown above the waist, like a reverse Mom and Dad from Cow and Chicken.
Alan is their calc professor actually. It says his name in the tag when you can see him from far away.
What proves it is he’s known in comic as “Professor Rees” and Alan’s last name is Rees. (Also, what’s the tag he’s known by? I can’t seem to find him.)
Oh and David (the character who becomes the Cheese) was based on Austin Powers, so i’d guess this might him. Not sure yet though.
This is indeed David Powers, confirmed by Willis through the use of ugly yellow pants
It’s always awkward when old parishioners show up, and you don’t know how to tell them you’ve transitioned to worshiping He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
Who is that?
The God/Demon/Terrible Special Effect from Children of the Corn.
His teachings have less to do with sex before marriage, more about murdering everybody over the age of thirteen.
Well that’s just basic common sense.
If they are brought up properly, they are dead inside by thirteen anyway.
I can’t tell if Becky is being sarcastic or sincere in that last panel. It could honestly go either way.
Sincastic might be the word you’re looking for.
No, the proper word is sarcere.
…..
I’m pretty sure that neither of those are words.
I’m pretty sure they are both librapropomisms.
I believe “sintastic” is the word that youth pastor might use.
For sure! ^_^
Seeing as how she had to say ‘And Becky!’ twice, the second time with more emphasis, oh, she knows what’s going down.
It has been my experience that youth pastors are always kind of nuts. Not bad people, necessarily, just… nuts.
How so? I’ve never belonged to a church that had youth pastors so I’m not even sure how the system works.
My church briefly had two youth pastors. (Recently moved to different cities, for better jobs, since our church is small and has an old congregation that can’t afford to pay for two youth pastors.) Generally, they were….okay, kinda nuts. One of them was really young and struck me as always kind of awkward. The other was older, but great with kids so he was always amazing.
As for how the system works….well, it depends on which church you’re with. Like, the Salvation Army, you basically take classes and decide what fellowship you’d like to specialize in and get training and materials and you can go out and do that. (I confess, I miss how organized the SA was.) The Nazarene church has more of a hit or miss thing where you just basically put out an ad in the paper or whatnot and hope you find one.
There’s no one way, other than just tending to be more excited than average and into kids stuff. Some are just kinda awkward, others are the class clown type. Still others just seem oblivious to obvious things happening in the church.
I wouldn’t call it “nuts” per se, but I’ve never met one that seemed just like a normal guy.
The one at my old church showed us clips from Forest Gump and explained how Forest was a false prophet.
i’ve watched “Baby Got Book” more times than i care to remember
He did had a lot of people following him at some point. And a beard. I guess that count ?
People following him? Like, detectives, or on Facebook?
Sorry, I thought you were talking about the pastor, not Forrest Gump.
My youth pastor for a long time was a woman. (And she’s still there! In a Church of Christ! I hate that that’s exciting.)
She was really cool and not really all that nuts. Maybe the male ones are more nuts? All the male ones I had were much more nuts than her.
Okay, the transition in the pastor’s expression from panel 2 to panel 3 tells me that this is NOT GOING TO GO WELL.
Expecting angry glares towards Becky from the “friendly” community.
I rather expect an inspired sermon from the pastor. Pitchforks and torches for everyone afterwards.
Yeah, that’s the face of someone who if they already hadn’t put queer issues or “family loyalty” issues up on the planned sermon, has just now decided to do so.
It’s more of a “Oh god, this is awkward” expression than a “I’m going to drop an anti-Becky sermon in ten minutes” expression, at least.
Why not both?
Aaah this isn’t boding well at all aaaaah.
Well nice to see Joyce and Becky getting a warm welcome. not
Are they… are they refusing to acknowledge Becky’s presence because they heard she’s gay? : /
Maybe they can’t see her. But normally it’s bisexuals who have a problem with visibility.
Maybe they can’t see in the Becky portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Scoring a 26 on the Kinsey Scale means that you have red-shifted deep into the infrared spectrum.
I know, right? Maybe our invisibility is contagious and she like got it from Billie? D:
I’d say she got it from Dina.
I think it’s more of a panicked “crap I wasn’t expecting her to be here uuuhh uuuuuuh whatdoIdo uuuuuuh okay, can’t treat her as I normally would because evil satan gayness, but I don’t want to make a scene…. uuuuuh…. OHHIJOYCE!”
I think they’re mostly afraid to associate with her in any way in front of the congregation out of fear of reprisal. I don’t think they’re bigots, I think they’re cowards who are also bigots.
I’m going to be optimistic and just assume that they really don’t know what so say, therefore keep their mouths closed.
That or she was sentenced to the silent treatment, and Gazorpian law is somehow recognized in Indiana.
This happened to me when I got married to my partner. I invited my fundamental Christian relatives and they never replied; it took them several years before they finally started acknowledging the fact that he existed at all. But at least they’ve gotten better about it.
In contrast, they drove across the country to attend my straight cousin’s wedding, even though it wasn’t religious at ALL.
Landrum? That’s just nonsense.
*sees it written in mirror*
Murdnal! It’s a trap, get out of there! But seriously, I can’t imagine having that name and not having the Shining referenced at you constantly.
Especially if it’s in the form of someone having to show up at all your sex parties in a bear (or dog) costume.
Youth Pastor Powers?! Bwahahahah! What’s his first name? Magnus?!
is he the powers that be?
David, actually.
Maybe his first name is Max.
it’s austin
it cant be austin, its obviously reed
Don’t laugh, he has powers! Youth Pastor Powers!
His full name is actually Sue Percival Powers.
His mom is a huge fan of Johnny Cash and his dad likes stealth puns and comic books.
Wow, you can practically taste the innevitable calamity.
Judging by the comments, it’ll be no good.
this was a bad night for criss cut fries
Wouldn’t have thought Joyce’d be the one picking up on the Incoming Clusterfuck before Becky.
The pained expression on Becky’s face seems to suggest this is an instance of Becky acting goofy to hide the pain, like she usually does.
Yup, that mask is slipping just a little in Panels 3 and 4. She’s trying so hard to push through and act like everything’s normal and this isn’t scary and off-putting and everyone’s small slights are getting to her and it’s using up every ounce of energy she’s got.
Becky knew this would be a clusterfuck before the weekend even started. Being loud and in your face is her way of dealing with it. She’s just emotional support for Joyce as the reality of how shitty their community really is sinks in.
I’m not sure Becky doesn’t notice. Would it be at all out of character for her to put on a brave face for Joyce’s sake?
The little eye-twitch lines in the last two panels indicates to me she’s well aware.
It would be out of character for her not to.
Becky notices. The difference is that Joyce expected different. The disappointment rages within her.
Foreshadowing with a sledgehammer
That’s not just foreshadowing, that’s it actually begining.
I’m amazed no one actually seems to care about someone pointing a gun at Joyce or checking in on her about that (oh and Becky–sarcastic). There’s fundamentalist bigots and there’s these guys.
i kinda have a special hate for pastors in homophobic/transphobic churches, so it’s easy for me to curse this guy here
okay, both guys. didn’t read landrum was a pastor at first
And the true passive aggressive bs begins.
Lift up your spirits though by imagining Becky’s just practicing for a role in Hamilton:
Work work, Jocelyne.
Work work, Joyce
And Becky.
Work Work, The Brown Sisters
Jocelyne, Becky, Joyce, WORK.
Oh great. Now I have to do this. Someone puts a parody in my head, and I have to write it. It’s a sickness. Let’s see.
(Joe)
There’s nothing makes Christians grin
Then going to University full of sin
Their parents drop them off thinking their good
But the students in the common don’t act like they should
Take Carol Brown, well she’s always praying
Uh oh, but little does she know that
Her daughters, Joyce, Jocelyn, Becky
Broke into a house, cause they didn’t have a front key
(All)
Sin, Sin
(Jocelyn)
Jocelyn
(All)
Sin, Sin
(Joyce)
Joyce
(Becky)
And Becky
(All)
Sin, Sin
The Brown Sisters
(Jocelyn)
Jocelyn
(Becky)
(Joyce)
Joyce
(All)
Sin!
(Becky)
Daddy wants me to love a husband
(Jocelyn)
Daddy thinks that I’m a man
(Becky)
Daddy says that I disgrace him
(Joyce)
Aren’t we still part of God’s plan?
(Jocelyn)
Well, look around, look around,
Our lives are so much different here in college
(Joyce/Becky)
College
(All)
Jocelyn…
Sin!
(Becky)
It’s bad enough Daddy says no having fun
(Joyce)
Didn’t want to get us shot
(Becky)
It’s bad enough that he chased me with a gun
(Jocelyn)
Brand new stupid sis says what?
(Becky)
What!
(Jocelyn and All)
Look around, look around
(Joyce)
I think maybe things are changing a little fast
(Jocelyn’s Readers)
She’s looking for me!
(Jocelyn)
Joyce, we’re living in a world of sin (Sin, Sin)
We’re living in a world of sin (Sin, Sin)
We’re living in a world of sin (Sin, Sin)
Whoa-a-a
(Sisters)
Whoa-a-a
(Company)
Sin!
(Joe)
Whoo!
There’s nothing like freshman at a college
Mixing up their books with a little carnal knowledge
Excuse me Joyce, I know you look pretty
But that naive charm’s gonna crack here in Indy
Why you coming here and thinking it’ll be like home
When sinners are the winners and good girls can roam?
(Joyce)
Joe, I’ll pray for you
(Joe)
Better than prey on me
Watch that right hook, baby, you might hook me
(Joyce)
I’ve been reading Bible tales since I was four
But I’m finding it won’t cover what’s in store
They’re teaching evolution, but I trust in creation
From Genesis to Revelation
(Sisters)
Love God with all my heart, mind, and your strength
And love my neighbor as I love me
(Becky)
And I think neighbors includes lesbians
(All)
Unh!
(Jocelyn)
And those whose gender isn’t what they assigned my ID
(All)
Work!
(Joyce)
Look around, look around
It’s changing so fast, and everything is new
(Joyce and Becky)
Look around, look around
It’s changing so fast, and everything is new
(Sisters)
Our outlooks and plans-a in Indiana are being canned, Ah, but we
Are the greatest sisters in the world
(All)
In a crazy, changing sinful world
(I’m not even going to try to write the rest, because it splits into three parts and is all very confusing, and I’ve spent almost an hour on it. But since it’s just repeats of what happened before, you can use those lyrics.)
-applauds-
WIN
Ironically, since this is a parody of Hamilton, this won a Tony too.
Will you internet-marry me? That was beautiful.
Am I reading way too much into minor details of how the characters happened to be posed, or is the train of events: Joyce waves with her bandaged hand, Youth Pastor Powers excuses himself while holding his own hand, and then Joyce looks uncomfortably at her own bandaged hand, still awkwardly raised? Did he notice her injury and unconsciously react to it in a way that made her self conscious about it? Eh, I feel like it’s probably just a coincidence that their poses/line of sight both emphasize their hands.
nah, willis is pretty good at adding in these kind of details. everytime i reread a comic here i always notice something new about the events from looking at minor details
Could it be he’s holding his hand while saying “stay out of trouble” because he’s sub-/consciously thinking about Joyce punching Ross (small community, I’m sure everyone knows what happened to her hand) and subtext telling her not to get into any fights?
(sub-subtext: “And especially don’t punch me“)
wow u peeps are so deep i didnt even think of any of these
Yeah, it’s a really intentional moment. And it’s definitely being related. I read it almost as that’s the sign that all that wasn’t some abstract thing miles away, but something real that happened to actual patrons of the church, and for Cool Youth Pastor Scruff here, it’s to two people that were probably given a lot of leadership duties in the youth circle and who he has very personally known.
His shying away I think is him getting hit by the dissonance of what he is required to believe and the story their appearance gives. The realness of the brace making it real. And the rest I think is what everyone else has already said.
Also, poor Joyce in that last panel, looking at her hand, like “what did I do”. She cares so much for the good regard of the church she has already given so much to, and is not at all prepared for how much of an outcast she has been deemed as simply for supporting her lesbian friend and trying to fight for her.
No, it’s just that being the good Christian he is, he visited Ross in jail and his hand ended in the same predicament as Joyce’s.
I don’t think you’re reading too much into it at all. Reading it again, it seems less like the pastors are shunning Becky and more like they’re scared to talk to her. I think that may be worse than a straight out bigoted shunning.
The pastors are scared talking to Becky since they heard Joyce punched the living daylights out of Ross when he tried talking properly oriented love to Becky? And it doesn’t help looking at Joyce’s punching brace?
I think they’re treating her like a leper because they’re afraid of what the congregation will do to them. Pastors can get fired for any number of reasons, depending on how the church is structured. Even if the pastor is completely in charge with a board of elders that will rubber stamp anything, it could cause a church split. I think the biggest factors in this would be how well people like Becky’s dad and how they feel about her dead mother.
We’re seeing them utterly fail in their responsibility as leaders. I’ve seen it before and it would warm my cold, black heart to see them pay for it.
Incidentally, the Baptist on the Bridge is my favorite joke of all time.
No, I don’t think you understand fundies. Her mother took her own life. That’s a deadly sin. The devil is in this house and has claimed her. Becky has fallen into his his fangs as well and turned perverse. It fell to Ross to root out the evil, but he was weak and unable to pull the trigger.
It doesn’t matter whether or not they hate or like Ross, he has failed. Now the devil has set out into their own congregation, and she’s putting her claws into Joyce, one of the most faithful.
It doesn’t matter shit what they feel about Ross or Becky’s mother. This will be all about Becky.
when i see Willis drawing a character holding his/her own hand like a dead rat, i cant help but mutter: “you should rather cut the hand that has sinned than let the whole body fell to hell”. its some scripture? burned in the back of my brain….(ok, i was high on jesus on my youth too…)
Mark 9:43. (Also Matthew 5:29)
I use it as my goto scripture in the second round of the anti-trans argument. The first round is pointing out that God never says that a man is someone with a penis and a woman without, so none of the “guys should not wear women’s clothing” scriptures work. Then they tend to reply with stuff about “mutilating your body” being a sin. That scripture shows it isn’t.
Some people say that sort of thing is pointless, but I have to admit that I went through the same phase Joyce did with homosexuality. It really did help.
that’s a really good catch
No, Youth Pastor Powers! Don’t wander off! Don’t become the Wanderer!
Is that a Dark Is Rising reference? 😮
It’s a Walkyverse reference.
Dang. Yeah if it was the Dark is Rising it would’ve been Walker, not Wanderer. I’ve read all the walkyverse stuff but I don’t recognize the reference… :/
Too many eyes for that.
This is so not gonna turn out well at all.
I am headcanoning they’re suffering cognitive dissonance beacsue they recognize what Ross did was wrong and awful but can’t figure out how to justify it in their hate-filled views. It’s like the humanity of Becky is being shoved in their faces.
Tsk-tsk-tsk.
How dare she bring her personhood before God to church!
Yup, which at least is a smidge more positive than I’ve been scared of their response being.
That is the look of a guy who needs to ‘powder his nose’ badly.
That’s the thing to do when you find yourself behind the 8 ball.
Ironically, Powers’ eyes and glasses make him look a bit like Harry Potter.
As soon as i read this strip one of Walky’s lines immediately popped into my head. “Your youth pastor needs to die in a fire”
Well that’s a bit extreme. Which universe?
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/04-the-whiteboard-dong-bandit/godpertunity/
Yeah, it was over him calling the depression of other people “godpertunities” in order to minister to them and convert them to the Lord.
Walky was (rightfully) disgusted by a worldview that sees the humanity of depressed people treated so casually and so inhumanely as if their only value is in how their pain and suffering can be exploited by the church.
If I’d of been told that a few years ago, I think I wouldn’t be here now. I’d be in jail for assault, minimum. That is beyond callous.
I’m inclined to agree. While I think setting him on fire is something of an overreaction, his callousness and spineless dismissal of someone he’s known for years is making his face seem very punchable right about now.
“Haha, and Becky!
Huh, y’know, I’m starting to think… people tell redheads not to wear pink because it’s like some sorta invsibility cloak!”
Yup! It works by taking everyone who looks at you and blinding them.
(Yes, I’m a redhead. Yes, I’ve worn bright pink. Yes, I’m a guy who’s really awkward about wearing anything other than a bland wardrobe. Long story.)
I am very, very glad that Becky has Joyce as a friend right now. I just want to preemptively hug her.
looks at Youth Pastor Powers
looks at Willis’ icon
Iiiiiiis it just me, or…?
green eyes…blue eyes…round glasses…square glasses…
honestly idk i think we should ask clark kent
Its David…no the other David…no I don’t mean he’s Walky, he clearly isn’t! The other other David…look, just forget it okay.
check for the twins! if there isn’t an infant screaming, it’s probably not Willis!
It’s church in the hussle-bussle of seating. There’s an infant screaming SOMEWHERE.
CONFUSION REIGNS, WE’RE DONE FOR
…unless…
the youth pastor is the one that doesn’t have a reflection!!
Given Pastor Powers was based on a character (or characters) in Walkyverse, suddenly this raises a lot of questions. o_O
Pastor Powers is based off a minor character from It’s Walky! named David Powers, who was Linda’s boyfriend in the 70s and was murdered by Martians.
Apparently, the resemblance was just a coincidence, and when David Powers was originally created Willis didn’t resemble him as much as he did later. I used to think that was the joke; that Willis included himself in the comic to get murdered by Martians and inspire Walky’s name, but I guess not.
I’m worried they’re going to try to pray the gay away with Becky and I hope this isn’t where it’s going these poor girls have been through enough
She’ll have Joyce and her barely contained rage on her side at least.
Are either of these guys based on Walkyverse characters? Is the Youth Pastor’s first name Rod?
Well, he is a hole-y man.
David, Linda Walkerton’s old boyfriend.
why is landrum only a couple letters away from laudanum
That was my first thought too, but only because I’ve been playing too much Fallen London
HAIL DELICIOUS FRIEND
😀
(Sinning Jenny for mayor!)
HECK YEAH HECK YEAH HECK YEAH
i may be working on fanart
ooh! If you’re on tumblr you should totally post it in the fallen london tag, I track that religiously
😀 😀 😀
Aww man, same. It’s the BEST.
(also, Becky is probably about to lose a quality ‘Connected to Church’ xD)
The Starvling Cat!
The Starvling Cat!
Why does it look at us like that?
with grievous eyes and quivering bones,
the Starveling Cat blocks our way to our homes.
the Starveling Cat! The Starveling Cat!
won’t take a meal, but will take our mat!
Willis is running out of clever puns?
it’s oldschool medication. THE GOOD STUFF.
heck sorry i shouldn’t have explained i guess i thought it was a clever pun 😛
I think it’s more telling his name is one letter from Landru.
…do you mean the serial killer or the star trek character
Star Trek computer. Hopefully he won’t use his powers to make the congregation go after Becky like mindless zombies.
LET’S HOPE
You are not of The Body!
heck no
i am also not Assimilated
So where are Totorum, Aquarium and Compendium at??
I keep reading “and Becky!” like “and Peggy!”
Turns out it’s actually nothing personal, they’re all just on the Act 2 version of the song.
Poor Peggy. Her only lyrics start being like “hey, I also exist!” and then she’s just a whiny wet blanket and then she just drops out of the musical.
Its OK, because the actress gets a great song later.
I keep reading it in the “…and Steven!” Voice from Steven Universe, even though I know Becky would be way more awkward because she’s being ignored, whereas everybody loves Steven.
Look around, look around, how unlucky we are to be at this church right now….
But lbr Joyce = Eliza for sure, right? Idk who Becky might be. Maybe Mulligan, what with being loud, but with the heart in the right place 😉
And Zoidberg!
An intervention coming up for Joyce, a public shaming coming up for Becky.
is there a difference between “intervention” and “public shaming” or am i completely mistaken in my understanding of these concepts
There is one minor difference… in an intervention they want you to change because they like you, in a public shaming they want you to change because of hate.
In either case, it is “who you at the moment sucks”.
GOTCHA
Well, that an an intervention need not be public, and usually isn’t. It’s with just your friends.
Unless of course the entire congregation feels they have every right to tell her she’s taking the wrong choice by siding with Becky, in which case, very much public.
That and sometimes a public shaming isn’t about changing you, it’s just about punishing and hurting you.
And scaring others who might be heading the same direction into toeing the line.
And a stress-test of its load bearing structures for the church building, courtesy of Hurricane Joyce.
Well, this inviting reception is going great as expected. *sweatdrops*
Yep, nothing bad can go wrong. *shivers*
I smell civil strife brewing.
Ohhhhh bad vibes, bad vibes 🙁
I had a church just like that. I was raised as a Jehovah’s witness and they did not believe in higher education. So when my family sent me away to college and I came back to visit it was like I had the plague. No one would associate with me. Let’s just say I’m no longer part of that. But this brings back memories.
This storyline is filthy with awkward forced smiles.
They’ve probably heard rumors about Becky and the father may have alluded to a ‘disease’ but seeing Becky there with her “lesbian” hair coupled with Ross in jail, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place with how to deal with it all.
Plus a lesbian Christian must be boggling their minds (“omg never expected her to actually want to RETURN here!”)
That last part very much. I’ve seen the idea of LGBT Christians blow minds in these types of churches.
I remember a preacher talking about how there there are gay people who speak in tongues. In his mind, he meant that it was proof that Satan mimics everything God does, and reason to tell people that speaking in tongues wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be that they really were Christians, no siree.
Will we see the younger teenagers being herded away from Becky, to protect them?
Wow… I’m not a Christian, but I still get a warmer welcome in church… (and yes, the church I go to knows I’m not a Christian).
Well, to many Chrisitians, “not a Christian” really just means “not a Christian yet“. Christian lesbian and Christian lesbian-supportive are probably worse things to be than not yet Christian to fundie minds.
This.
I was invited to several church days and was treated exceptionally well (though the sermons were fucked) because they were hoping to convert me and it was before I realized I was the long laundry list of queer identities that I am.
Folks who’ve tried to come out in those same communities… yeaaaah, fared a mite bit worse, one could say.
Or your church is just nicer.
Non-Christians tend to get a better welcome than people they think have left the fold. They supposedly knew the truth and rejected it. Some even say that is what the unforgivable sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit really is.
The ones who leave the fold might be welcome if they were clear enough about the fact that they repent their wicked ways and will not stray again. At least that’s the impression I always got when they kept giving sermons on how one lost sheep that’s been found again is worth more than the rest of the flock that never strayed and the story of the prodigal son, which left me vaguely confused as a child since it seemed to be saying “If you’ve been obedient all along we don’t give a rat’s ass about you”, which is a very odd moral. But then they also considered the story of how God told Abraham to kill Isaac a proper story for Children’s Time, so.
Of course Youth Pastor Powers has his own dirty little secret. His fellow members of the congregation would not be amused at the lifestyle his cousin Austin leads.
Yeah, baby, yeahhh!
I suspect this experience is not going to go well for Joyce. We may very well see her snap, before this church service is over.
Joyce and Becky seem rather naive about this. It’s like bringing children into an auditorium then revealing on stage that Santa Claus isn’t real.
But the Boogeyman and the Monster Under the Bed are real.
idk it feels more to me like the community they grew up in and were told to love and trust has suddenly become inadequate to their needs as growing individuals once their experience expanded past the acceptable social mores of that community, to the point that none of them can even acknowledge Becky’s existence despite having known her since she was a child.
why do you think Joyce and Becky are naive?
And also the Easter bunny has been poisoning you all these years.
Joyce is trying to cling onto her memories of the church as a good place.
Oh Becky knew the clusterfuck she was walking into, she just couldn’t let Joyce do it alone.
Yeah.
Joyce though is getting the full lesson on what exactly the full meaning of those “sweet lesbian facts” were and what that angry moment of being so “gosh-darned angry at the church” means. As I don’t think she’s fully made the connection that when she was criticizing the church, she was criticizing her own church and that she’s been deemed a fellow sinner owing to her refusal to shun and erase Becky:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/faithbased/
Church is “the safest place she’s ever known”… but that’s only because she’s not aware quite yet of the full extent of its betrayal of her.
When I saw the pastor’s name was ‘Landrum’ I tried to spell it backwards but all I got was ‘Murdnal’.
But you have to do it upside-down as well in order to see that it’s really Laupinw. And you know what that means.
akward youth pastor powers ACTIVATE! it used subtly offensive, its unpredictably effective
Oh hey I’d totally forgotten about the hair! Is that why Carol put Becky in pink? To make her look more girly, compensate for the demonic haircut? :0
No, it just makes the scarlet letter on the dress less conspicuous.
everyone passive aggressively hates them omigosh.
Okay, everyone — make your guesses as to what the subject of this week’s sermon will be!
a) “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” is not a valid way to earn the Lord’s favor
b) Those wearing the devil’s panties must change to the raiment of the Lord
“while we don’t condone killing anyone, gay people are going to hell” sounds nice and toasty
alternatively, “honor your mother and father” could be a fantastic act of passive-aggression
thirdly, a good ol’ rousing “REPENT YOUR SINS. REPEEENT. THOSE SINS. I KNOW YOU HAVE THEM.” just for good measure
“Hate the sin, love the sinner, because only God has the ability to judge. But we all know that there’s some sins God cannot forgive.”
(Also, seconding “honor thy father and mother”)
honestly the more i think of it the more the classic conception of sin as i’ve had it preached just seems more and more toxic. like. i’m not even sure i know how to articulate this, but: focusing on all the things you do wrong doesn’t seem like a particularly good way to focus on how to do things right??
like. not everything you do “wrong” is a sin that could send you to hell. sometimes things are screwed up and there’s not really a right or wrong way it’s just how you cope with it. and then sometimes there’s a more effective way, which could potentially be the “right way” but there was no way to know that when you began with it
i mean. start with “love your neighbor as yourself” and go on from there and you should be fine???
The entire basis for the Christian religion is that we are all horrible, disgusting and corrupt at our very core and worthy of eternal torment. It is only through the sheer grace of the divine that we don’t, and even then only if we beg forgiveness and worship it. The whole concept is toxic from its very foundation.
Don’t forget throwing money at the church. Any church. All the churches.
Actually, the idea is Jesus has fixed Original Sin so we’re cool with God now. The entirety of Christianity has missed this and become less interested in God’s love than Judaism that had the benefit of saying, “Original Sin or not, God chose US.”
well i mean like. Jesus fixing original sinners means that he’s made us not be terrible people anymore. it means that our imperfections are mortal affronts against God. and that’s not…a very forgiving attitude, I don’t think.
like, okay. people do a ton of terrible things. but the way to stop doing them is not to put yourself on an eternal guilt trip where you’re never good enough. it’s to accept that these are things that you’ve done, and make efforts toward not doing them anymore, and gradually you can move on to not being that person anymore. usually. idk like the nearest parallel is unlearning racism: you are going to fuck up, a lot, but if you’re willing to listen and change then it is possible to be a much less racist person than you were previously.
which weirdly enough sounds like Christianity, a bit! like the concept is that you confess your sins, God forgives you, and then you go and sin no more and it’s over and done with. but we get a ton of mileage out of the guilt trip. we sit and simmer in the concept of being sinners, i feel like. i think a lot of our spirituality is tied to emotional catharsis, where admitting that you are a sinner and abasing yourself before God takes precedence over actively working to be better and more aware people???
idk part of the problem i think is language. we’re stuck with the language and ideas of generations ago instead of reinventing ourselves to work with the times and our understanding of what it means to be human and what the world around us is like. tradition/stability has become more important than actively engaging with the world. heck you could probably even make an argument that these concepts we’re dealing with here are directly tied into white supremacy/patriarchy/homophobia/transphobia and there’s probably a better word to group all those together but i don’t know it
Yeah, it sets up a fucked way to be good, because it makes goodness about all the “bad” acts you avoid rather than any good acts you do.
Though, to be fair, that is intentional in the Calvinist-derived religious sects of the U.S. Southern Baptists and a bunch of other fundie groups view the faith vs works debate as not only one that favors faith, but that favors faith to the exclusion of works. And where trying to do works to show godliness is actually an act against God, because you are insulting God to imagine that your fealty to him is not enough to save you and he must be bribed with small actions and favors.
This sadly leads to a toxic worldview where all that matters is being part of the right church crowd, rather than what you do with that. You’re saved if you’re in this church praying the right magic words and avoiding the laundry list of sinful behaviors or at least grovel and admit you’re a sinner and make a big show of turning away from sin and towards god.
And it’s where it’s viewed as more evil to simply exist and not be interested in changing than it is to do something monstrous, but “show repentance to the Lord”.
And it is thus by this that by their religion, Becky is evil and Toedad is good and the cognitive dissonance in having that worldview and how victim-blaming that is in this case is causing the pastors a lot of discomfort and awkwardness.
i love kamala khan so much. “good is not a thing you are, it’s a thing you do.” my understanding was that you work out your faith by good works; good works is the evidence of faith, stems directly from that. much like the fruit of the Spirit stems directly from having the Holy Spirit in your life. which has the awkward implication that you can’t be a good person unless you’re Christian. C.S. Lewis argues that you fulfill the forms of Christianity/good works and the motivation falls into place; you shape the person you want to be whether you feel like it or not, and then the feelings fall into place. which makes sense, but doesn’t restrict itself to Christianity? also is not helpful to persons with impulse control issues, hahaha.
but like the problem, as always, is how do you be effectively good? and a lot of people have different answers to that. for the majority of conservative people who are attracted to the church because it’s traditional, i think it’s respecting social mores. i’ve noticed that in a lot of ways the church can be just like the outside culture but more so. and then, you know, additionally uniquely repressive because they can use the fear of God to pin people into place.
…i just really wish there was a way to actively re-interpret all this in a way that isn’t so damaging to people. like, i know that liberation theology is a thing, but i’ve never seen it in action.
Part of me is still (stupidly) hoping that this guy Landrum will take this opportunity to preach acceptance and try to give Becky and Joyce a little something to hope for. Most of me is expecting fire and brimstone, and possibly an actual attempt to call some down.
My votes are definitely with either of those. I feel like those are the most likely given all we’ve seen with regards to Carol’s response to the tragedy.
Yeah! They’re going to hell but we shouldn’t be the ones to send them there! It’s not like any church pastor would ever, say, call for the government to round up the gays and execute them by firing squad.
(Note that the above contains far more sarcasm than I wish it did. Stupid stupid stupid stupid current events.)
c) Sodom, Gomorrah, and the persecution of Christians in modern librul ‘murica.
Devil’s panties?
d) A talk about forgiveness, focused on forgiving poor Brother Ross, who is only guilty of getting too swept up in his desire to properly serve the Lord.
Oof. That is definitely the look of people avoiding them. And they’re especially avoiding saying Becky’s name-or, really, acknowledging her at all. I feel really bad for Joyce-she’s never been blatantly excluded from anything. Especially among people she knows and (currently or soon to be up for debate) loves. They’re good at not saying anything straight-up, but that’s some very real, very solid passive aggression. Church folks are good at that.
Maybe Becky has been dead all along…
Surviving that car crash was a bit unbelievable…
BUT IS HE WEARING YELLOW PANTS?
Judging by his expression, they might be brown pants.
Well, maybe they are now.
Made me think of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZSFvntwgEQ
You know, I’ve heard good things about Unitarian churches…
Thank god I’ve been a filthy atheist since I was like twelve. Made shit like this a non-issue.
UU Churches are quite nice. All religions are welcome, including non-religion.
Ok so is there a religious type word for when you shun someone like this? Also like jocelyn unlocked joyces rage i think now would be a time to let beckys sass be unleashed, consequences be damned!
There’s a different word for pretty much every denomination that does it. Amish shun, JWs disfellowship, and so on.
…. of course this is a nondenominational church, so I think they’re doing all the words at once.
This is…. pretty uncomfortable. At least Becky is taking it in stride.
She tries, at least. As far as I can tell she has put on her SuperStrengthExtraDelux Mask (TM). It is anyone’s guess how much she can take.
Of course, that’s a moot question since the answer is “more than it takes for Joyce to hulk out”
Okay, going to go out on a limb and make 2 predictions.
(1) Joyce is going to lose her temper during whatever hate-spew the pastor has planned, stand up, and force feed him all the nice-Jesus passages. …. no, not literally tear them out of the Bible and shove him down his gullet, but that’s an option too. Create a huge scene, basically denounce him, and get a lot of the churchgoers on her side by actually knowing her Bible.
(2) Carol will come out of this actually respecting Joyce and her choices.
I think the option of shoving pages from the Bible down the pastor’s throat is more possible than Carol starting to respect Joyce.
yeah carol would have to see joyce as a person separate from who she wants her to be. and she’s not gonna, otherwise she wouldn’t have called joyce standing up for her friend and her beliefs “defiant”.
Bold on both accounts. Personally it is my understanding that people who hold beliefs based firmly on circular logic tend to not let go of them so easily.
Yeah, but Bible-quoting is kinda like the cheat codes for this group.
I will make two different predictions.
1. The service and sermon will include oblique references to the sins of same sex love and/or disobeying one’s parents, with plenty of sidelong glances and whispers
2. One of the pastors will have a quiet word with Hank or Carol suggesting things might be better if they didn’t bring Joyce or her friends back until she was clearly of the body again. No specific mention will be made of invisible Becky.
Both of those seem very likely to me.
If #1 happened, it would be epic. #2, however, would definitely not happen as a result, and then DoA would change from a comic about college kids to a comic about two young women who’ve been disowned by their families and community trying to find jobs so they don’t starve to death in the gutter.
Disowned or no, Joyce’s tuition is paid up, so she’d still be able to live in the dorm until the end of the semester, which the comic will get to sometime in 2024, I think. We’ve got time to brace ourselves for the tradition.
It’s a trap!
Oh dear. Ohhhhhh, dear.
ain’t gonna lie, Youth Pastor Powers sounds like a pretty amazing super hero name.
…too bad that one probably won’t live up to it.
… Yep, definitely not trying to avoid a topic they feel uncomfortable around.
They’re going to include a prayer for Toedad and a collection for his defence.
Can anyone point me in the direction of replacing my icon on this thing?
Here ya go. Just sign in and you can upload a picture.
Accidentally replied as a top level comment
This is going to end with the Browns (well, mostly Carol) trying to get everyone to pray the gay away, isn’t it? I can see this shit storm a-brewin’ even more with the way they’re ignoring Becky.
I have so many feelings about this, especially having witnessed this happen to my closest friend. It sort of reminds me of the parable of The Sheep and the Goats. In the interest of brevity, I’ll post up the two verses that resonate the most.
Matthew 25:44-45 –
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
I truly hope this plays a part in the story; it sounds like something Joyce would bring up.
joyce becomes the first female pastor at her church
That would be a miracle.
Urge to kill rising.
Actually hoping it’s just people being awkward idiots after what happened (After noticing that suggestion), but. U G H.
I suspect the theme of today’s sermon was going to be “THOSE GAYS THEY’RE SO EVIL AND THEY DESTROY FAMILIES.” Hence the reactions.
It still is. It’s a rare pastor who can rewrite a sermon in ten minutes while he’s greeting everyone coming in the door.
“OMG, Becky, are you all right? What you have been through, poor girl.”
IS THAT SO HARD???? SOMEONE? ANYONE????
HAHAHAHA OF COURSE NOT LOOK AT HER SHE HAS THE NERVE TO CUT HER HAIR AND BE VISIBLY NON-APPROPRIATELY FEMININE AND SUBSERVIENT HAHAHAHAHA *sobs* I have no hope for this storyline whatsoever it’s gonna end baaaaad.
Eh, there’s still hope. Joyce could end up burning down the church.
There are a few outcomes to the inevitable “homosexuals are bad and we should praise those who hold guns to them” bullshit that will be said.
Joyce gets angry, makes a rightful scene, storms out with Becky.
Joyce gets angry, makes a rightful scene, is shunned by everyone, including her parents, storms out with Becky.
Joyce gets angry, makes a rightful scene, is looked upon disapprovingly by everybody, is told by her parents to sit down and be quiet, does so, Becky storms out.
Joyce gets angry, makes a rightful scene, is looked upon disapprovingly by everybody, is told by her parents to sit down and be quiet, does so, and Becky also stays and sits in embarrassed, angry silence.
Unless there’s a 5th, out of left field option, it’s going to be one of these. And it’s going to end VERY poorly.
I’m calling Joyce gets angry, makes a rightful scene, and convinces a majority of those present.
And may God actually lend them the strength to pull the trigger rather than let the devil creep in our midst.
I’m holding out a vote for “it’s done so passive-aggressively and victim-blaming that Joyce internalizes the message that ‘God’ hates her for standing up for Becky and she gets really sad in a similar fashion that she did here when she got upset with her parents for being rude and dismissive to Dorothy:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/takeittogod/
I think that’s the sickest part of this whole arc. Not the weird blame or the eggshells she’s had to dance on, but this complete erasure of the idea that she is a person who has suffered something devastating and traumatic simply because it is more important to everyone in this worldview to simply see her as the “queer girl” who’s “living a life of sin”.
It’s more important to every one of them to be pushing against the evils of her sexuality and make sure she doesn’t corrupt others or promote immoral behavior or so on than it is to show the slightest amount of compassion and support.
Even Hank who’s trying his little heart out has given her a grand total of one single hug in the form of support while she was awake and paying attention. This is caused by his awkwardness around the existence of gay people, but think about that in context.
Becky nearly died that weekend. She lost her home, her family, any legal place to live, her future, and nearly got shot and definitely got kidnapped in order to be tortured by an angry violent man. She’s been through literal horror movie shit simply for existing and ever since she’s been being oh so polite and apologetic for the impact her suffering has had on others and it’s treated like… yes, yes, you should have to apologize for all the trouble, yes, you deserved to have that happen, yes, you need to walk on eggshells and the most important thing is whether or not you corrupt others with your deviance.
Not a single person from this culture is holding her tight, saying it’s okay to cry, saying that what happened to her is awful, showing genuine warmth.
Hell, Jocelyne got closest and she still stuck mostly to providing material support to the situation she is in.
And that’s the biggest tragedy of them all, because we’ve seen how she internalizes and views her emotions and suffering as an imposition to others and this whole trip has been one big reinforcement of that headspace.
“Not a single person from this culture is holding her tight, saying it’s okay to cry, saying that what happened to her is awful, showing genuine warmth.”
One did. And that makes all the difference.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/pit/
That did make all the difference, you’re right. 😀
That’s what makes this story bearable – we have already seen the happy ending.
GUESS WHO PROBABLY HAS DEPRESSION
AND ONCE THINGS START SOLIDIFYING IN HER LIFE IS PROBABLY GOING TO HAVE SOME KIND OF A COLLAPSE
i am kind of looking forward to that actually because those are legitimate emotions to have in the wake of the garbage that has been her life and you gotta go through them before you can start healing
Yeah, I’m seeing her having a similar path to me when all the awfulness collapsed on my life. Basically, keeping it together, keeping it buried while trying to get through it all and put the pieces of my life back together and then periodically have random crying jags and various PTSD effects everywhere because all those buried emotions didn’t actually just go away.
time for therapy
like positive therapy where you get all your emotions out and start rebuilding yourself stronger
…i’ve been lucky, most of my therapy experiences have been good ones. but that’s the nice thing about going to therapy as an adult: college therapists are usually free, and if you don’t like your therapist you can fire them.
Oh, believe me, I have therapy. For those it works well for, it works well for. This comic strip and the community surrounding it has also helped with a lot of the processing of what happened and building healthier habits of recovery from it and from the traumas of my youth.
But it’s not a magical bullet and it doesn’t mean you don’t have all the scar tissue from being emotionally stabbed and all the emotional mobility issues that come with it.
-nodnod- at best, it helps you get the tools you need to get your life back on your terms.
As much as I love Becky I think this will probably lead to another situation that she just makes worse. She didn’t start this fire, and she sure as hell isn’t responsible for it though. Either way I won’t be surprised if things are about to explode. I’m just gonna hope Jocelyne is gonna save the day again.
Becky isn’t going to make this worse. Other than by being the lesbian sinner that everything’s going to be focused on.
If anything, Becky’s going to be trying to hold Joyce back from exploding.
This fire would or would not burn without her. Without her presence, Becky would embody every nasty whisper about her, be the demon child who’s pure sin. Her mom would hit her just as hard for daring to support her over “her own family”. The Church would still likely have planned for a nasty sermon with some oblique notes about sin.
At least this way, they see Becky. They see she’s still the same overly rambunctious kid. See that she does not have horns or fangs. Is just a regular person like anyone else. Is forced to confront the awkward reality of what happened to her as a real person than keeping it in the realm of concepts.
Becky being here is better for everyone except for her. It’s shredding her apart.
Yeah, that’s important. Horrible and painful as hell, but still important.
Just being there, being Becky is her only chance. I said that way back when she went home with Joyce. It worked with Hank, to an extent. It didn’t with Carol. It’s not going to be enough here, though it might sow some quiet seeds of doubt.
Next to the name field there’s a link that says “Get a Gravatar”. You can use it to set up an avatar associated with your email that’s consistent across sites that use gravatar. Including this one.
Meant that as a reply to Dalrint.
Some congregations are basically ruled by a pastor and a board of elders who will rubber stamp anything that the pastor suggests. Others are more egalitarian, which can easily descend into mob rule who throw out pastors because it’s raining on a Tuesday. If the pastors are partially refusing to acknowledge that Becky is a person out of fear of the congregation, we could see a good old fashioned Protestant schism! It would be an interesting direction to take and it’s something that Willis hasn’t covered much yet.
Youth Pastor Powers, your sermons are bad and you should feel bad!
It really boggles my mind how there’s people out there who would rather focus on the passages that can be vaguely interpreted as “gay people are horrible” instead of the far more numerous and clearer “show everyone warmth and love no matter how different or sinnery they may be” passages
Humans love to seek out reasons to judge and mistrust their fellow humans.
Carla’s got the right idea.
My comeback would be “Leviticus ain’t Jesus.”
Ex-Catholic, non-churchgoer here.
AFAIK most of those people are now using the epistles for their arguments, to the point my Mormon housemate and I joke about the “Gospel Of Paul”
Current Catholic, non-churchgoer (because fudge it, not getting up at 8 on a Sunday.)
Paul. Never met Jesus alive, tried to root out his followers, then decided to hop on the bandwagon and invent his own Messianic version of Judaism. James throws him out from Jerusalem, he makes up his own “everybody is saved and does not need to follow the Mosaic laws except where convenient” religion and a few centuries later the first “Christian” pogroms on Jews can commence.
Yup, those letters get thrown out so frequently as if they were the direct words of Jesus. And when you note that, the excuse tends to be, everything in the Bible is God approved and he would never let anything in there that wasn’t 100% true to his will and so he must have guided Paul’s hand.
OTOH, those are the oldest parts of the New Testament and thus the best evidence of what the early Church was like.
All the actual “words of Jesus” in the Gospels are traced through ~40 years or so of oral tradition before the earliest Gospel was written down.
Wow! They all seemed super-nervous of Becky! I mean, yeah, I know that she’s basically a loose cannon on deck; who knows what she’ll say or do next? However being almost scared of her? I have the feeling that this is a bad conscience at work; too many people knew or guessed that Ross had started going off the deep end after Becky’s mother died and too few people though of the consequences until news of his arrest came back from Bloomington.
They were probably also planning on a specific denunciation of her in their sermons which, given that she’s going to be present probably now makes them feel guilty. They’re the sort of guys who are great at yelling ‘sinner’ at someone who is absent; yelling it at someone in the crowd is a bit harder for them!
they are borderline puritain, just the fact that Becky is gay is enough to scare them, those type of people are like that, they are worried that the mere presence of this “impurity” would ruin their precious lifestyle
They were planning to preach about the evils of Beckyness, but are uncomfortable about having their words apply to an actual person instead of some abstraction. Tough.
Yup, her being here rather than an avatar of “see why it is important to have a mother AND a father, when one falls, the children may suffer and fall to sin” messes up the script a bit.
It’s one thing to rant about teh gays. It’s another thing to rant against Phil, that kindly guy who likes to bring cookies to all the church potlucks.
I suspect that’s usually the reason why queer congregation members who refuse to go back in the closet are “gently” and repeatedly encouraged to move on to another parish or “be less forceful” by simply existing.
I’m…fairly certain your last name can only be Powers if you’re either a superhero or a corrupt CEO.
It’s like a law or something.
or Dustin Diamond?
When he takes off his glasses, he becomes Power Pastor! Slayer of sin and savior of wandering sheep!
Max Power, he’s the man whose name you’d love to touch, but you mustn’t tooooouch! His name sounds good in your ear, but when you say it, you mustn’t fear! Cause his name can be said, by anyone!
Bravo! I was going to do that bit, but you beat me.
is this the youth pastor that needs to die in a fire
The one who thinks that things like depression are really openings to proselytizing, aka “godpertunity” (sic)?
Yes. Yes it is.
Man ‘going to church’ is a completely and utterly foreign experience to me… I think I’ve only experienced something like that through fiction. Even when we did go to church a few time I never got the whole ‘community’ feeling from it.
This whole part of the arc is incredibly unpleasant to me…
Funny thing is I’m like, a full on Catholic in the eyes of the church. I got all the sacrements needed to get married in a church and everything!
FYI those wafers are totally overrated.
… People like the taste of dried out cardboard?
I dunno, I get the feeling non-Catholics kinda make a big deal out of them? Like it’s quaint and unusual for them?
Man, I’m glad I go to a big-ass church where no one knows each other and shit like this is less likely to happen.
The cold shoulder, that is
yep, this looks juuuust like the village i grew up in, after my parents “dared” to get a divorce…
i live in the town now, i don’t know anyone, but at least i don’t get those looks
Becky’s smile looks more and more forced with each panel…
Tell me about it, she has to cope with the fact that many of those she knew for a long time only see her as a sinner now.
I think she’s rather trying to cope with crash-landing Joyce in a dried-out pool of compassion. She brought the wrong landing-gear.
in the last panel joyce appears to be realizing that she REALLY shouldn’t be able to wave if she’s wearing a wrist brace, it must not be on right.
Oh, Joyce. This is gonna suck so much for you, in so many ways >_<
I daresay it is going to suck a lot more for Becky.
Actually, depending on how this goes, it may at least be just as bad for Joyce.
The difference is that Becky’s pretty much braced and ready for it. Or at least thinks she is.
Joyce is only starting to get the clue now. It’s going to hit her much harder.
It’s a good thing Joyce wanted to go to the early service and the later service, because if(/when) she decides she’s had enough passive aggressive interactions for the day she can leave after the first one without feeling guilty about not having gone at all.
Assuming the sermon isn’t rage-inducing and causes her to go on a public rant and ragequit mid-service.
Never having met a “youth pastor”, this is my view of them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMMnGv5LFDU
There goes my hope that the sermon will be about 1. Samuel 19 …
At least nobody’s trying to make Becky leave the church.
I think it would be more honest if they did ask her to leave. I find the rejection deep disturbing.
They’d have to acknowledge her existence to make her leave.
Look everyone, it’s Joyce!
And Becky.
(this would’ve worked much better if I weren’t a lazy bum and had actually gone to the trouble to of creating a burner account for this second post, wouldn’t it?)
All you had to do was mess up your email address. (As I did once before.)
Awww man, only Joyce is being acknowledged. Now I’m sad.
It occurs to me that Becky has become a nonperson with that community. Very … Stalinist.
I was thinking the same.
It’s funny because the church is not safe at all and religious bigoted adults that are still fundies after their 20s and go to church are shitheads?
Like. C’mon. I’m not trying to talk shit on this out of some religious perspective, I’m very non-religious, but isn’t this kind of black and white? I understand there’s a lot of past frustration injected into this comic, but this just feels icky to me.
I don’t think this storyline is funny at all. I think it’s in deadly earnest.
Notably, you make a point which is becoming almost a meme. Willis portrays a religious character as bad, someone pops up and accuses him of being simplistic, of not portraying them with nuance.
I call bullshit.
Willis has always portrayed his villains with nuance and shade – even Mary and Toedad. We’ve only just been introduced to Landrum and Powers. I’m not sure you can expect such depth in these few frames.
True, and there IS nuance. This very strip we see Pastor Powers falter in the initial intention to not address Becky, and last strip we met Marcus who by all account is a great kid and – more to the point – is exactly the kind of kid that Joyce and Becky were just a few short years ago.
This confrontation with church is not a throwaway gag to hammer home a point – it is one of the central themes of the comic and has been so from start. This community gave birth to both Joyce and Mary and Becky, both ToeDad and Carol and Hank, both John and Jocelyne and Jordan. Villains and victims and people who are more on the fence.
Joyce is the closest this comic has to a central protagonist, and her central story ark is how to reconcile her upbringing with her expanding world view. Her befriending Dorothy, the aftermath of her getting assaulted by the preacher’s son at the party, her chosing Becky over Doctrine and her decking ToeDad are all milestones of her character arc, and those are direct reactions to her upbringing. Here. Her upbringing in this community and in this church.
Everything we see in this church, everything Carol and ToeDad have done and said, is Joyce in the beginning of the comic. This is not a dip into black-and-white-villian-town. This. Is. The. Story. The story we have read for several years now.
Or… I dunno, were you disappointed in Lord of the Rings when Mordor turned out to be a not-very-nice-place? Or in Alice in Wonderland when the Queen of Hearts didn’t turn out to be a very sane person? Because those are central elements of those stories as well.
Pretty much all of this.
I understand frustration at seeing Christian characters being dicks, but we’re not seeing the One Christian Story ever. It’s vitally important to Joyce’s character arc that she be confronted with the dark side of what she’s been raised with, because this is Joyce’s story. If Sierra was the main character we’d probably see more positive Christian characters and more unilaterally positive elements of Christianity, because Sierra’s relationship with her religion isn’t the same as Joyce’s.
Consider also that there ARE Christian non-assholes in the story: Joyce, Becky, Sierra and the Morman blonde woman whose name escapes me, to name just the ones we’re certain of. There is also possibly Hank (his assholitude remains to be determined), Jocylene (I am uncertain whether she’s Christian), Billie (her assholitude likewise remains to be determined – I think she’s going to mature to be significantly more tolerant of “dorks”), Sal and Walky (both of whom I am uncertain of whether they are religious), etc.
Agatha’s the Mormon, I’m not sure about Sal but Walky seems to have an adversarial relationship toward religion, or at least Joyce’s.
Seriously. I’m a little more than frustrated with the intentional erasure of anyone who’s not the “right type” of Christian in order to set this up like Willis against all religion. There are so many caring empathetic and good Christian characters.
But people want to pretend that it’s only Mary and Carol and Toedad and Ryan and the awful people at church who are religious or are being presented as emblematic of all religion and it smacks so much of what I grew up with where only Pre-Millennial Dispensationalist Rapture-believing Fundamentalist Southern Baptists were considered Christian and everything else was some form of pagan/devil worship.
I’m pretty sure it’s actually happened here, someone complains that all the Christians are bigots, they’re countered with the list of all the Christians who aren’t, and then the original complainer replies that they aren’t real Christians because they aren’t bigoted. And of course, they don’t see any cognitive dissonance with complaining about Christians being depicted as bigots while also claiming bigotry is integral to being Christian.
Yeah, it usually ends up when the commentator demanding that we see non-bigoted Christians who just don’t like gay people gets banned.
Danny has also mentioned that he’s Christian.
I think underlying the attacks is the idea that Christians should always be portrayed as “good” people.
Abrahamic religions are particularly prone to this. Their proselytizing means that they see themselves as good, and anything (including art) that views them in a dispassionate light, warts and all, must be attacked. IIRC, it’s viewed as a battle for souls, a cultural war. If Willis is to remain true to his art, he can do nothing about them or their attacks.
As others in this thread have said, this is a work of fiction dealing with Joyce’s struggle with her religion and how it interacts with the culturally diverse world of college and the more inward looking community of her youth.
People along the way are portrayed as good, bad or indifferent. That’s what makes it a great work of fiction, imo.
Yeah, some Christians seem to view it as a personal attack whenever someone acknowledges that not all of them are the saints they think they are.
I was more hoping to get out ahead of the folks who seem to endlessly accuse him of lacking nuance in how he depicts Christianity.
This.
And I think it’s the problem of privilege. They’re used to works praising them and treating them like the heroes, so showing up as villains, even as individuals strikes them as grossly wrong, because they don’t have the raising environment that say… trans people do of having the vast majority of works depict them as nefarious and murderous and evil.
This, but simultaneously (and I don’t know how this isn’t a paradox), many are hypersensitive to persecution and thus perceive any form of criticism or any negative portrayal of its membership as an attack.
*many _Christians_ are hypersensative to persecution, I should clarify. That wasn’t a commentary on the trans community.
I can’t speak for Islam as I am not Muslim, but this, in my experience, has been more endemic to Christianity specifically and not the entirety of the Abrahamic religions. At the very least, it’s not endemic to Judaism for the most part as we tend to get the shaft from the rest of the world in this regard. Granted, this is in part subverted in media as many villains, particularly modern ones, are Jew- and Muslim-coded. I just wanted to point this out as, unfortunately, a lot of times when people say “Abrahamic religions” they are speaking from a strictly Christian perspective.
To talk on the topic at hand, when there’s a group that’s used to unilateral privilege in an area, any attempt to portray them as less than perfect is usually met with exponentially unnecessary resistance, which is what Cerberus and Reltzik already pointed out. Social politics are weird. :/
Yes, this ^^^ thank you! Proselytizing is an ENORMOUS no-no in the Jewish community, and if you ever tried it, every Rabbi within a twenty-mile radius would close in on you and give you hours-long lectures.
Yeeees thank you I was thinking the same thing! We don’t do the proselytizing… I think you’re right though, a lot of times people will say ‘Abrahamic religions’ or ‘Judeo-Christian’ and I read the thing and am like… I think you just mean Christianity, bud. (No hard feelings though to anyone who does this, I’m sure it wasn’t intentional but now you know for future reference.)
Yes, all of this.
I want to gay marry this comment, because it is just so beautiful and perfect. This really is the story. This awkward coming of age reconciling faith with life. With overcoming how one was taught and accepting the beautiful rich tapestry of human existence is the main storyline of the comic and its central protagonist. It’s the reason why Willis chose to write this in the first place, to exorcise the demons of his raising.
This has always been the comic, so it’s baffling those who stumble in here shocked that the awkwardness and awfulness of this particular interpretation of the Christian faith is given center stage. Like, were they all reading some other comic this entire time?
This comment is now canonically named Gary.
Another point I wanted to make – for those who thought ToeDad was cartoonish and unrealistic – this is where he gets fleshed out and nuanced. These are the people who held his back, who gave him his ideas, whose judgement he cared about.
We have already met Carol. Now we are going to see the a lot more people who think that maybe Ross didn’t have the entirely wrong idea after all…
ToeDad was not a cartoonish plot element. He was a plausible and – sadly – real consequence of the community Joyce and Becky come from. This story ark describe that community. This story ark IS the nuance people have been waiting for.
They don’t want nuance. They want Toedad to be unrealistic, they want willis to be wrong, they would rather people like this not exist and so they will pretend it is unreasonable to suggest they exist in stories. This story won’t change anything for them.
“religious bigoted adults” are shit heads. Hell, “bigoted adults” are shit heads, but a lot of the prejudice against LGBTQ folks is religiously driven, so it’s worth leaving in.
religious non-bigoted adults who still go to church after their 20s are cool.
It’s the bigoted part that’s the problem. And this church teaches that. We’ve seen that from the start. Joyce’s whole character arc is about recovering from the teachings of this church.
This. I don’t understand why people keep asking for bigots to be written as good people. Bigotry is fundamentally incompatible with goodness.
Though it’s a little trickier than that. Bigots can be good people in areas where their bigotry doesn’t come up. In some cases it can be a great shock since “They were always so nice to me!”
Absolutely, and again, that is something this comic has spent a lot of time and effort to portray in a nuanced manner.
Most obviously with Joyce who is a wonderfully good person and also occasionally a horrible bigot due to her upbringing and ignorance. Seen for example in her interaction with Ethan, Billie, Becky, Agatha and directly pointed out by Roz in one of the most commented strips of the comic.
Lovely, goofy Becky made a snide remark to Billie about bisexuality, loving accepting father Hank has to force himself to give Becky the time of the day, Fun-loving, surprisingly warmhearted Walky completely diminishes the racism experienced by his own sister… Bigotry is not exactly an unknown theme of this comic, and not in any way exclusive for the “cartoonish evil” characters.
Yup! what thejeff, Li, and Bagge all said.
Bigots will do stuff fucked up and say things fucked up and believe things fucked up, because how they are raised is to do those things. They may still be “decent” people who love their (straight) kids and treat others who are exactly like them with empathy and compassion, but it matters how they treat the others outside of that focus, the ones who are disadvantaged and disempowered and publicly hated.
People being awful do harm, real harm. Even lovely goofy Becky making an unintentional diminishing comment about bisexuality to Billie, even sweet innocent Joyce saying all manner of awful slut-shaming bigoted fucked-up stuff as she’s recovering from how she was taught. And when it is unchecked leads to whole societies thinking it is perfectly normal to collectively treat the disadvantaged less.
And that’s not just the major theme of this comic. This is the major theme of life that we are ALL complicit in. The way that so many minority groups are simply treated as less simply for existing and thus live life on a harder difficulty than they should ever be expected to. Deal with bullshit they shouldn’t. With no one making an active choice to be intentionally evil, but nonetheless…
We have what we have, with our laws, with our mass shootings, with our lists of dead and suffering, with our “sweet lesbian facts”. We have what we have. And the first step in changing that is not looking away from the heart of bigotry and dismissing it as “unrealistic” because we want to think better of those who perpetuate it without question.
I didn’t mean they can’t have any good traits or can’t be three-dimensional people, though I do think you need to work on your bigotries in order to truly achieve “good” status.
But I was referring to the people who keep, apparently without irony, complaining because bigots aren’t being portrayed as perfect angels, whose “”difference of opinion”” about LGBTQIA people magically never hurts anyone.
This is where Willis grew up. He’s said more than once that writing this strip is a form of therapy for himself. That the scenes where the religious elements seem out of left field and fucked up are actual views he was carefully taught to believe wholesale growing up. Actual things his parents or his church or himself said before growing up and realizing they were fucked up.
And I can say from growing up surrounded by it, this is the nice side of that particular sect. It is not exaggeration. It is simply how it is. And the people in it do not see it as rude, as dehumanizing, as wrong or immoral in any way. It simply is what needs to be done to turn one’s back on sin and live “right”.
And it’s the reason that LGBT kids are a way disproportionate number of the currently homeless youth.
i guess i feel like this is one of the more nuanced, gray depictions of Christianity out there? like a lot of times when Christians show up in fiction, it’s very black and white: either they’re Evil, or they’re Good, and there’s only one right way to feel about it. this isn’t about that. this is about this Christian church’s homophobia and how it’s harmed their children. it’s not telling you how to feel about it: it’s just showing you the damage from the perspective of those children.
like, on a level, there are no two sides on this issue. homophobia and transphobia are direct assaults on gay and trans’ people’s right to existence. in a society where gay and trans people do not exist, it is not because they aren’t there. it’s because they’ve been pressured into silence. and that is what these nice people have done, and are doing. and because they do this, bad things happen.
it’s not that gay and trans Christians don’t exist. it’s just that they don’t exist here, at this church.
And the irony is that they do exist at this church. Becky existed at this church for 18 years before she realized she was gay. She’s existing now. The problem is that now she knows and now that she’s out and now that she’s publicly seen as gay, they’ll start pushing her out as they are doing above, making her feel unwelcome and encouraging her to leave or “get fixed”, all to keep the illusion that this is a church without gay people in it.
yUP
becky charged out of that schrodinger’s box and schrodinger is trying desperately to muffle the cat
As always, can we differentiate between this type of “Christian” and the church that says to my brother-in-law when he comes out (a la Hank) “I can’t understand, but I will pray; you are still a valued member of this community, please continue to join us for services”?
All Christianity does not necessarily equal evil/stupidity. Individual congregations (usually in hick-town USA) equal insensitive/callous/cruel. I’ve found college towns to be the most inclusive- probably due to the high turnover rate which means the steady congregation is more exposed to different types of people.
Now, this particular church Becky and Joyce are at? Screw ’em.
Is this the pastor who eventually has to close the church and sell the building after he embezzles all of the money?
This awkwardness feels a bit artificial as someone who also grew up in a church. To someone like Becky people would actually be being a liiiitle bit too nice, either because they genuinely believe that such an obvious lost soul must be welcomed and encouraged to keep returning or because they want to appear like they believe it.
Don’t worry about it. Once you get kicked out of enough churches, you’ll understand.
(sigh) Okay, repeat after me please: “The fact that my personal experience does not match someone else’s does not make their experience ‘artificial’.”
As someone who came out as queer in a small town. This feels super genuine. And I’m rethinking some of my forgive and forget I had about the situation later in life.
Ditto.
I dunno, being trans and ace and a whole bunch of things people are publicly encouraged to be actively treated as fictional and easily dismissed, I’m starting to get a wee bit salty at all the times personal life experiences are treated as “artificial” or “unrealistic” or “clearly demonizing of X group”.
Fair enough. I was compelled to mention it, because we’re obviously seeing Willis’ own personal experience so now we have two. It seems to me that Willis was in a particularly bad church and now his comics make it seem as though all churches are like that, which of course is something that militant atheists lap like melted ice cream.
Regardless of your opinion of religion, it is possible for Christians /not/ to be awful hypocrites, terribly judgemental assholes or blindly ignorant zealots and believing otherwise makes people as bad as these caricature Christians they love to mock. A good big deal of them are smart, truly compassionate and lovely people that don’t deserve to be demonised along with the bunch of hypocritical imbeciles that admittedly make a vocal minority of religious communities (and of all communities, really).
I am myself not religious anymore, but I don’t approve of the depictions Christians get in popular media.
It’s not a “particularly bad church” like it was some weird exception. Nor, of course, is it all Christians. It’s a broad fundamentalist strain that’s quite common in much of the US. You can tell by all the “religious freedom” protests over same-sex marriage and all the other bigoted freakouts using religion as an excuse. Not to mention all the commentors here going “Yeah, this was my life.” It’s real. It’s too common. It’s a problem.
But it’s certainly not “all Christians” as you say. It’s not even all Christians in this comic. A bunch of the kids are explicitly Christian, plus a Mormon and a couple of Jews and one explicit atheist.
We’re focusing on this church because this is Joyce’s story. This whole comic is basically about Joyce getting over all the horrible shit this church taught her. So that’s going to get a lot more of the focus than, for example, Sierra hanging out at church and being cool.
Yeah, it was not so much that I was trying to minimise the likelihood of churches like Joyce’s existing, but making a point of noting that not all are like that. I know that it is like arguing that a comic with an anti-racist theme needs some white people in it, but I’ve always thought it is important to remind people not to go too deep in negative characterisation of groups of people (even if it could be warranted), lest that they end becoming as hateful and discriminating as the people their targets.
I think her nearly getting shot by her own father and a member of their church is what makes it most awkward for them. It’s like a tug of war between “well I mean…murder is a huge sin. This girl was almost murdered by her dad” and “BUT SHE WAS A LESBIAN, SHE RAN AWAY FROM HER DAD SHE IS NOT BLAMELESS” so they’d rather just…not deal with her. It makes things too ‘weird’ for them because they have to evaluate how much of her father’s actions they may have helped along.
Well, Ross wasn’t finished with her. It would be rude of them to talk to Becky before he had a chance fixing her.
You forget that Becky incited Joyce to fight with John. John who at great personal sacrifice went to teach the law of God to savages.
Clearly Becky is of the deuce. I mean, she even arranged her hair for hiding the horns.
I call shenanigans on this as well.
“an obvious lost soul” … c’mon. Who’s kidding who?
Becky is not lost. She’s found herself. But not in a way you seem to like.
Dude, I was talking from the point of view of church people, not my own opinion.
The youth pastor looks a little like Joyce’s older brother. I wonder if that is important or if it is just a coincidence.
I don’t know he doesn’t look as Sharp as her brother. ANd I don’t think he could be as big of a Munster. And like most youth pastors I bet he’s a real big Cheddar. His attitude looks like it’s making Joyce a little Bleu….. Cheese.
Cheese puns… … you just HAD to, didn’t you? 😛
How could I not? Though some of them melted on me
Sadly, Joyce is about to learn that her fellow Christians strongly adhere to 2 Corithians 6:14-17. I’m sure they’d also gladly remind her of Deuteronomy 13:6-10. She’s going to need her friends when she gets back to college.
Awww jeez coming home to church after having been gone so long or having admitted to someone you thought you could trust that you’re queer. I know that feeling, this is nostalgic in a bad way….
Man, I am a stone-cold atheist and I am treated with more genuine warmth and kindness when I visit my wife’s church. And not once has any of them tried to convert me.
I have a bad feeling about this.
There is a difference between someone who has not seen the light yet and someone who has seen it and turns to the dark.
One is a convert waiting to happen in their eyes, someone who was raised “wrong” but can be fixed with “love”.
The other brings the whole edifice into question and begs dark questions. If someone who is “raised right” nonetheless turns to sin and is present to the sermons but still chooses sin, what does that mean and is the sin really as bad as they are claiming. Is what they are doing even doing fuck all to prevent it?
That’s going to breed defensiveness and defensive people lash out at the thing that prompts that defensive introspective. A lot more barbs thus come out. A lot more hate.
And/or this church just breeds insecure intolerant fuckers. Like Joyce would have been at the start of the comic if not for her irrepressible innocent and loving personality.
Whatever’s coming I want to be safely outside of the blast radius. The moon’s looking fairly nice I’ve heard.
I should’ve replied to this… Anyways, still taking bets!
It will probably be OK, the church looks pretty sturdy, reinforced concrete and stuff like that. With some luck the JoyceRage will be contained within the state.
If movies and anime/manga have taught me anything, it’s that the moon is the least safe place to be. It always gets blown up, eaten, or stolen ~_~
Things are gonna explode next week. Putting my money on Thursday. Taking bets over here!
Okay, changing locations isn’t fair! My bet moves up one day for each day we’re not in Churchtown, South Religiona. So it’s Friday. Friday it is. Now back to the good part!
In the last panel Joyce appears to just be figuring out something’s going on.
WHU-OH, gay people exist and our religion says that’s bad! GOTTA RUN!
Welp. I’m gonna fight them.
That Youth Pastor looks kinda like a Youth Pastor that was at my church.
My mom was my youth pastor.
Is youth pastor powers subconsciously touching his arm, the one that Joyce has broken? Not cool man. And dude, we don’t believe that no one sees Becky she’s a redhead in a flamboyantly pink dress.
it’s not a “dress” but a sacrificial robe.
To true for comfort
Pastor Graybeard: “Briiiing foooooorth the viiiiirginiallllll saaaaaaacriiiiificeeeee!”
Joyce: “About that…”
Becky: “Do mouthsmooches count?”
Dina: “We just finished having sex”
Somehow I get the distinct vibe that Joyce will not actually stay around for the second service even if Tristan does not show up for the first.
Poor Tristan, standing in the crater of his church, hoping he would had the chance to meet the cutie Joyce again.
…sooo who else is expecting a “hate the sin not the sinner” sermon, followed by “pray for Toedad, who, while misguided, was doing his best for his family”
This is gonna be so bad :(((
I’ve lost track of why Joyce is here at all. Which of these?
a) Because she always goes to church on Sunday.
b) To see friends (or crushes).
c) To reassure her parents that she is still the same old Joyce, not someone diving straight to Hell.
d) To somehow help Becky’s situation.
e) To get information about just how out of touch she is with the people who thought she was the same as.
(It is entirely possible that she’s lost track too.)
Does Becky have a purpose here other than “support Joyce”?
And the larger question, of what is Joyce trying to accomplish with her weekend home? Anything other than c) above?
Joyce is here to regain her footing. Becky helps by scouting for quicksand.
For going to church, it seems to be a-c. Joyce is still very faithful, and not going to church would be not only very wrong to her, it would also be a break of habit.
It was also a safe space to her, which is part of why she came home. She’s not just trying to convince her parents, she’s trying to convince herself she hasn’t changed too much, and going home to see people she cares about and that care(d) about her is to help with that. There’s probably a bit of hope that maybe, just maybe, it’s not as bad as she’s starting to fear, and people will be more like Hank and less like Carol.
I think Becky is almost entirely here to support Joyce (getting some of the info she needed from her house was a very helpful bonus, as was finding out Jocelyne is on their side). Also, I have a hard time believing that Carol would’ve let Becky stay in their house while they weren’t there, though I’m also afraid that she’s planning to get the church to try and ‘pray the gay away’ or something even worse.
What AgentKeen said, she’s at church today, because she’s a “good Christian girl” and good Christian girls do. not. miss. Church. No matter what. Plus, this is her church, raised to be her whole life and support network, the thing her whole life has revolved around.
This is as much home as the physical house she grew up in. It was no choice for her, but she’s not at all aware of how toxic this place is or how much awful she’s been able to recognize due to all the growing she’s done this last month and especially in the last week.
She’s been having a crisis of faith and this is the place she’s supposed to go for that. To make her feel one and connected with the holy spirit again.
Becky’s already lost that innocence. She is here as you and AgentKeen note, entirely to support Joyce. I doubt she has any illusions as to how awful today is going to be.
But it’ll be okay, she was encouraged to have a personal relationship with God and as far as she is concerned God still loves her, God still protects her when she is in danger, and God still answers lesbian prayers. No matter what some stupid old church says.
i thought Joyce came back because she survived a shooting and her parents wanted to see her and make sure she was okay.
but now i’m thinking that Hank wanted to see her and make sure she was okay, Carol wanted to see her and make sure she was still faithful, and neither of them really wanted to deal with the Becky issue. it’s entirely possible that John just didn’t particularly care??? i’m still kinda o.O with him. like, what a self-centered prick. sister almost gets shot at and all he can do is go on about how he’s not being respected enough before driving off in an expensive car.
Jocelyne probably wanted to see Becky, I’m pretty sure. she was super prepped for that scenario. if not, she was probably prepared to help Joyce get stuff for her.
Joyce has to go to church because not going to church isn’t an option. it would mean that she’s as much of an apostate as her mom seems to think she’s in danger of becoming. also it seems to me like church was probably Joyce’s only social outlet for most of her life – she was homeschooled, so maybe she met other homeschooled kids, but I doubt that there were many outside resources that were holy enough for her mom.
All of this.
I think it was expected for Joyce to come back so as to “show love” for what she’d been through, but only Hank meant that directly and still only planned for that to extend to Joyce and is a bit unsure how to react to Becky. Carol’s far more worried about her losing her faith over this and still being “good” and “virtuous”. John probably didn’t even want to see her, but felt it was owed, because family.
And I think you’re right that Jocelyne was the only one who actually wanted to see both of them and reach out genuinely.
this is such a shitty thing, but I feel like it almost would have been simpler for her church if Toedad had killed Joyce? it would be so much easier for them to Rachel Joy Scott her. they could grieve her, and bury her, and they could all blame Becky, and then mythologize Joyce as someone just trying to reach out for Good Christian Values. Toedad would’ve become that strange man with mental issues who didn’t understand what he was doing but his heart was in the right place. and the moral of the story would be “don’t support gay people, children”.
but because she’s a survivor, she gets to be there and live and remind them all of how their values don’t quite sync up with reality. she and Becky get their voices. and that’s just about as challenging a thing to their worldview as anything else could be
I think this is one of the problems that style of faith has in over-emphasizing their religious figure’s sacrifice over his life and deeds. It makes one very equipped with handling over-the-top sacrifice of one’s life and has ready narratives to encapsulate and sanitize it.
But living for one’s beliefs? Being messily human? Messes with a lot of those narratives.
And I say that particular flavor of religion, but this also applies to this country and those raised with this mentality. The big brave hero who did the good thing and has fallen we know how to handle.
The wounded soldier coming home with half their limbs, 12 flavors of PTSD, and some bitter resentment at the world? We try and hide that shit away and not think about it.
a la Lin Manuel Miranda: dying is easy; living is harder.
Well, for one-yes, because she always goes to church. This is something that should be familiar and comfortable, something that should be welcome after everything that’s happened. Should being the keyword. Second, also yes because she wants to see old friends. Again, Joyce is seeking out familiarity for comfort.
Becky is there because she has to be. Like the Browns would allow her to get away with skipping church. They’re probably convinced she needs God now more than ever.
But most of this all leads back to this: They’re desperately seeking out familiarity in a desire for comfort. They’ve been through a lot lately, and they want something that makes them feel safe. And it used to be church.
Worth noting that Pastor Greybeard there is the same pastor behind this lovely bit of homophobia/transphobia:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/03-up-all-night-to-get-vengeance/genderidentity/
Quote, “My pastor says liking the right things is important for establishing a proper gender identity“.
And this advice directly lead to the strict gender enforcement Joyce and Jocelyne had growing up.
So anyone hoping that this sermon isn’t going to be devastating… are definitely going to be getting some Leicester City winning the Premier League odds on those bets.
Comic Reactions:
I’m a bit late to these because soccer, but…
Panel 1: So many have commented on this, but it’s so telling that Becky is being treated like she’s not here. Simply because her existence, by existing, ruins a lot of the narratives, a lot of the sermons about sexuality, humanizes the life experience.
And this is why gay shows are protested and why people try and take them off the air because they are “corrupting children” or are trying to force trans people to stay home more instead of being out in public or why there are neighborhoods where it is enforced with bullets where a black person can walk.
Because the actual existence of the other, being human, being a person, blunts the hate. It’s why coming out works so well. It’s why I so often adopt the role of “friendly neighborhood trans ace”. Because being seen as actual human beings is what is being stripped away in service of hate.
And why it is so critical to them not to address Becky directly (John did the same thing in the diner). Because if they extend that humanity to her, then that smudges their white cloth of purity with her sin. Shows God that they mistrust his condemnation of such a grave sin and their approval of it. Risks their souls as surely as hers is forsaken to Hell.
They’ve been raised to believe that simply being humane to a gay person is what could make them deserve in the eyes of their Lord, an eternity of torture. And they cannot risk something so great for something so small. And that’s the excuse for not simply growing as a person, for keeping the bigotry going, but it does not actually need the religious reinforcement to exist. Plenty of areligious people are capable of being just as passive-aggressive and cruel to those who are queer in order to protect their bigotries and biases.
Panel 2: Ayup, his sermon is going to be brutal. If it wasn’t already going to be brutal, it’s gonna be now. Especially given that he’s the source of all the homophobic shit Joyce has been spewing all comic…
Panel 3: Ah man, there is so much in that sad eyebrow of Pastor Greybeard’s. I’m suspecting that he intended something general and a bit victim-blamey and wasn’t quite prepared for the subjects of the attack, with personal experience with it were actually going to be in attendance. I don’t think this will cause him to back off his rhetoric though, if anything, he is probably going to see this as a chance to try and “save” their souls by preaching stronger at them and any of the other congregation members who see this tragedy and the one in Orlando that occurred so recently in that universe as a call to be more welcoming to queer folk.
Panel 4: And Youth Pastor Scruff makes an appearance, doing a subtle callback to It’s Walky! Yeah, given the unified response, I’m guessing that there’s been a long discussion behind the scenes on how to handle things and McScruff here has been “encouraged” to stay on point for it.
Also, Becky’s face is starting to do the lopsided smile she does when she’s super nervous and expects things to go wrong. This is absolutely ripping her apart and her mask is in serious danger of disintegrating completely. I still have money on her breaking down and crying during the sermon, thus letting Joyce see that all this stuff is still bothering her and allow them both to start emotionally supporting each other in ways that aren’t trying to bury their emotions in order to “be strong” for the other.
Panel 5: Largely because that face there looks so much like the face of someone who is in a bit of internal conflict between what he’s been taught and how much he’s known them and probably relied on the two of them to help him mentor the younger kids in all the church programs in the last couple of years (the way that it works is often high schoolers are called upon to mentor the other kids and foster their moral and spiritual growth and serve as counselors at things like Christ Camps or on field trips).
Rubbing that arm, running away at first chance, emphasizing staying out of trouble, this is all way realer than he can handle. But who knows, maybe it’s the preview panel of Hank seeking him out, but maybe he can be the one to help make an excuse for them all to make an early exit and maybe Hank taking them all back to school and away from all this awfulness.
Panel 6: Oh Becky, never lose that eternal optimism. But you know as well as I that that was all the dark portent and veiled commentary and this is going to be a complete and utter fustercluck of epic proportions. Sigh, (urge to give fictional character hug rising).
And poor Joyce, staring at her hand, full of hurt. It’s clear she hadn’t realized the full extent of what it meant that her church has been an enemy of those who are queer and those who support them. And how that means that even those who did everything to befriend and support her before will turn on her more and more now because of what she did morally right.
Cool Youth Pastor McScruff likely was the majority of her church world growing up, was the person giving her advice when she struggled with feelings for boys, was the one who lead all the “cool” youth outings, prolly worked really hard to be read as “not just one of the olds, but someone who can be your friend”. And now, he turns away from her with that pained expression with barely a hello. After she was practically jumping up and down to see him again. And in response, she looks at her own hand in betrayal and confusion.
That may be the most poignant symbol of this entire arc right there. Of how doing the right thing makes her an outcast in her faith and how she was raised. Makes her seen as fallen and sinful rather than praiseworthy. And shows that this is no longer her home and her safest place and it’s up to her to carve out another as she has already been doing with her group of friends in college.
It’ll be rough, but I think she’s going to come out the other side of this even more invested in what she’s built at IU and even further away from the church she was raised in. Because with Toedad and their response to Toedad, the church and its believers have largely failed her and Becky in service to the beliefs they cling to so tightly, far tighter than she ever could with clean conscience.
Spot on as usual, and there is nothing in your analysis that makes me less worried about the following strips…
About your observations about the youth pastor… yeah, he was close to the kids he helped raising. He has known Becky for all her life – and he knew Bonnie and ToeDad too. How much did HE pick up about their home life? How often did HE see Becky’s mask falter? Or not to make a too fine point about it – how surprised was HE when ToeDad went after his child with a gun?
And even those who might be sympathetic, who haven’t fully swallowed the hate, know that if they step out of line, they’ll be outcast too. And the sermon and the ostracizing of Joyce will just reinforce that.
I’m also remembering that Joyce would rub and clutch that arm even before Toedad – back to Scarface.
In regards to your take on panel two it sounds a bit like the Banality of Evil to me, doing wrong because the behaviour has been normalized by the society they live in
Also Youth Pastor Power (which sounds awesome by the way, like biblemans sidekick or something) isn’t doing a good job of shunning Becky since he specifically says you two…maybe a warning, maybe sees its wrong but isn’t strong enough to defend them
But this to me is when Mr Willis is at his best, the slow torturous build up, making people think what’s going to happen, a glimmer of hope to think that just maybe it won’t be as bad as we think and then those hopes are dashed away…
Wasn’t the rapist the son of a pastor….?
Yup… just hopefully not this one.
Yeah, but Joyce would have recognized him if he was attached to her church. Unrelated.
I’m pretty sure he fessed up to that being a lie not long after giving her the spiked drink.
And nix that – http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/bat/ – he was being honest about being a pastor’s son, apparently.
Well, that all seemed perfectly normal, not at all awkward.
bets on the mother having spread rumors before they even got there?
That’s a sucker’s bet, Retrikaethan. With what we’ve seen of her, she’s probably been passively aggressively sniping about Becky and the whole situation at bible studies or whatnot ever since she heard about it.
“Excuse me, I have a prayer request!”
It’s not going to be an anti-Becky service or he would not have said “we should catch up”.
Think that’s too optimistic, sadly. Note that the pastors are pointed ignoring Becky (shunning even).
The youth pastor breaks the code slightly in an indirect acknowledgement, but it’s a sign this isn’t going to be good.
Why is Joyce wearing a glove
It is a brace because she hurt her wrist punching Toedad.
It’s a wrist brace, she hurt her wrist punching out Becky’s dad.
Surprised nobody thought to link “Pinky and the Brain… and Larry” with this – https://youtu.be/VorIn2ISK6w
My favorite part of church is not going anymore.
I get the feeling this church service is not going to end well.
probably along the lines of the pastor dude doing nothing but talk about how homosexual people are evil, yeah.
In fairness, it won’t be so much that homosexuals ARE evil, but that they’re “being tempted into sin”. Kind of the same thing at its core, but far more “palatable” phrasing.
You two stay out of trouble..
and remember, Birth Control is very very unreliable
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/04-the-whiteboard-dong-bandit/birthcontrol/
Next Page… The congregation give Joyce her own “Godpertunity”.
https://plus.google.com/104198940969460835363/posts/QxkuAtTUDT7
WILLIS Please delete the above COMMENT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
that link isnt not supposed be there
( firefox error. KILL it . NO I dont approve, thats how I ended up linking it somewhere else ) .