But not before Joe finally get’s his threesome. With Danny. Then Joe realizes that by limiting his playing field to one team, he has been just limiting his own potential.
Then moments before Joe recreates the world into a sex orgy, Rachel stabs him twice. The 2nd time because Joe jokes that he thought he would be penetrating her during hate sex.
It’s a portmanteau of “clue” and “Ludo”, another board game with a movement mechanic similar to Clue. Americans didn’t know what it was, so Parker Brothers just shortened it to “Clue”.
I think Americans call Ludo Parcheesi, but the portmanteau doesn’t work with that. Also, “Ludo” is basically just Latin for “a game”, and the original Indian version was something like Pachisi, so I guess that makes more sense…
“Parcheesi” was a trademarked name for a version of Pachisi, which a lot of Americans first got to know by way of the Parker Brothers version named Sorry! – Pachisi on a computer is a halfway decent timewaster (ahhh, those dialup internet days, killing time while a webpage loaded)
my Hoyle Board Games calls it Pachisi, with board colors reminiscent of Sorry!, and I always thought they were ducking trademarks more than any other reason for spelling it differently – I only wish Pachisi had something similar to the “move backwards” card in Sorry!, which could leapfrog you from the entry point to just before the home stretch
And since we dropped the “-do” in Cluedo, we moved it over to Where’s Wally and made it Where’s Waldo.
I don’t know what we’re doing with the “-ly.” It’s very powerful, as it can turn an adjective into an adverb, so perhaps we’re keeping it as a potential weapon.
I’ll give you a clue: in greek the game is called “the complainer”. So, no. Unless you’re literally three years old and it’s the first game you play, I guess.
We call it “Fia med knuff,” roughly “Sophie with a bump.” Only time I’ve had any fun with it as an adult, was when it was incorporated into a game of Nomic.
I was always told Fia was from the latin “Fiat” which someone figured was latin for “walk on”. So the intent was to call it “Walk around and get bumped”.
Not to say I won’t dismiss her good deeds, like calling out Joe on his misogynistic behaviour, and I can synpathize with her general frustration regarding Ruth’s reinstatement as R.A., but let’s just say I’m still waiting for someone to blow up in her face regardin what she said to Ruth.
She assigned someone the permanent role of abuser and told her that she would never ever be a better person for the rest of her life.
And that trying otherwise is a lie.
Indeed, she didn’t say that she actually wanted Ruth to die.
She did say, to a girl fresh out of the hospital for having suicidal tendencies (which PROBABLY had something to do with thinking she could never be a good person), that she, indeed, was never going to be a good person.
Really, the best interpretation is that Ruth is really, really, really fucking stupid.
Yeah. I’ve got all the sympathy in the world for Ruth, but it’s easy to see Rachel’s point of view too. Abusive RA, abusive relationship, suffers no consequences from getting busted. Remember, Rachel knows nothing about Sir or why Chloe left her in charge. She’s harsh, but she doesn’t have our vantage point either. She’s got no reason to believe Ruth is actually trying to change. Why should she?
I honestly don’t know how to feel about Ruth. There’s so much about her I hate, but I get where she comes from, but even that doesn’t excuse even a lick of what she’s done. I feel… “dirty” is way too strong a word but it bugs me when I catch myself sympathizing with her or wanting her and Billie to stay together. She’s pulled way too much shit and is only saved from Villain status by getting protagonist screen time.
Then again I like Amber a whole lot so I think I’m a hypocrite.
I wouldn’t call it hypocritical. Both Ruth and Amber are pretty complex to the point where it’s easy to be on the fence about either of them. The difference in their characterization (and the nature of their crappier moments) is enough to explain why you might fall on a different side of the fence for each.
I think that made me twitch a bit, but I tend to be optimistic that all people have some good deep down, and given the chance, it can be brought out and they can be healed of their pain. Granted by that logic, I should be forgiving of those that talk down those them, but my brain wires bullies differently, I guess. Eh, you’re always the hero of your own story, I suppose.
I think that’s an unfair description of what she said.
She argued that you can’t erase your past, and she’s right, you can’t. You can -learn- from it, but redemption in the sense of giving you a clean slate isn’t real.
If redemption is real, it’s in the sense of learning who you are and how to cope with that.
Countercounter point: Was she wrong? Abusers OFTEN use threat of suicide to get out of the consequences of their actions. The only reason you don’t like Rachel is because narrative has spent a lot of time building up Ruth and why she acts the way she does. Rachel has none of that “behind the scenes” that we have.
Normally, I’d say they were overreacting like the dingbats they are, but uh, in this case, the look on her face is definitely leaning towards a murder or two.
That’s what I’m thinking. That, there’s nothing on the server side checking that you’ve entered the password when you try to access the feed, so if you know the URL, you can skip the login page and go right to it without entering anything
Years ago one of the toprankers of a coupla-hundred-employee I did support me wanted me to log in as him on his laptop to clean up some mess. So he told me his password. “foreskin”.
Passwords are supposed to be private and never shared, so possibility of offense is not part of “professional standards” for passwords.
So yeah, assuming it had special characters, numbers, upper and lowercase characters, and met a minimum length? Then it could totally meet contemporary professional standards and still juvenile humor.
Well, unless it’s a emergency/root account password. Which led to a fun time when we needed a lady at one of our field sites to console in to the firewall. I’d made up the latest password, holiday-themed, and I overheard my buddy Nick trying to break it into chunks for her..”Yeah, so it’s…capital M, 3, two r’s, capital Y, capital F…uh…lowercase u…ck1…ngc…capital HR, 1, dollar sign..tm, ‘at’ symbol, 5″
Top-level managers get to declare their own password requirements, so as $support we do what we’re told and live with it. And then clean up the mess they’ve made of their toy, and do our damnedest not to see any hints of their browser histories.
Joe, you can’t call it hacking when you spread the password around like that green plastic grass on Easter. I just. You brought every single step of this on yourself, Joe, you literally have no one to blame but you.
I think his ego won’t let him admit that to himself. Someone must have hacked him deliberately using secret spy powers, otherwise his plan of giving the password to every tom, dick, and harry that wanders by was a bad, dangerous, and stupid one.
And for a certain type of guy stuck in Joe’s type of toxic masculinity, admitting that one has made a mistake is akin to stating one is a woman and to be avoided with whatever fantasy best protects the delicate ego.
Pretty much. “I, a man, made a mistake ever in my life??? Nonsense, must blame nearest woman!!”
I mean, I’m pretty sure he’s right in that Rachel did distribute the list, but literally he had like three different points where he could have made better choices and avoided that.
That’s actually a two-in-one: “The woman that you made for me gave me, and I ate”. Blame a woman or blame a higher power, because it can’t possibly be your own fault…
The best churches are the ones that recognize this and don’t fall for the “I completely misunderstood Genesis and think women are the root of all evil” trap.
Honestly, I’m doing pretty bad. I got through my teaching day, but got home exhausted and still crying so crashed for a huge number of hours. I’m still in the pain processing phase, so luckily there’s no PTSD symptoms yet, but I’m sure they are coming especially as the assault happened on an area of my body I already had PTSD assault triggers about.
I had a bunch of plans for tomorrow, but I think I’m going to have to make it a mental health self-care day instead. Fucking chasers, man.
I wish you the best for your mental health self care, and send all of my sympathy your way. I’m sorry this happened to you, and I’m especially sorry that this sort of thing has happened to you before. That’s horrible.
Cerberus: one of the best things abt DoA is having met you here: ive felt my humanity grow thanks to you. I hope that all of the commenters’ love can help you through this crisis.
Heh, a huge amount of hacking revolves around finding things people were too careless to properly secure. I remember rumors that the DNC hack got started by a simple phishing scheme.
That was the Podesta hack, and it was confirmed (and IIRC the phishing site was still up and structured in a way that let investigators get a list of other targets)
Yes, but finding implies intentionally looking for it, not just having the password shouted at you for existing in Joe’s physical vicinity for too long.
Then it’s possible hacking is the right word, but there’s also been enough establishment that he gives out the password like candy that I’d also buy it happening off-camera, it’d just break the flow of the story to show it.
I think you might be overstating it, but I agree his concerns are less about people knowing about it and more about the “wrong” people knowing about it. I’m pretty sure he hands out information to people he figures would be “flattered” by it. Still a flaw of his own assumptions concerning proper behavior.
I doubt that. If it was Rachel, she hacked it. Unfair not to show us him giving the password to her otherwise.
Of course, it’s still possible this is a red herring and it wasn’t Rachel and it was one of those he did just give it to. If so, Raidah is my bet, as the latest disgusted woman we know he sent the password.
I’d rather it was her. More directly his own fault and less validation of his fantasies of persecution.
…I can’t even find it in me to get mad at this trolling because it’s that ridiculous you consider Joe the victim in this. You know, rather than the women he’s been dehumanizing en masse all this time.
His opinion of people while however shitty doesn’t suddenly make it OK to violate his privacy just because he has a shitty opinion.
“Well he was really judgemental, must be ok to violate his rights.” Is a -very- unacceptable ground to justify things.
(1) he’s not just having an opinion, he’s sexually harassing half the school.
(2) He didn’t get hacked in the first place, and any court would laugh at anyone who claimed his “privacy” was violated. He has very conscientiously and repeatedly put his list in the public domain, and is upset that, shockers, people are looking at it.
This is like someone posting to reddit “my name is john smith and I hate minorities”, then getting upset when people say “wow, this john smith guy hates minorities”.
So technically, if I give your neighbor the password to my wifi, and you get it and log in without my saying it’s okay first, and then access files on my share, you have committed hacking. Just nothing will ever come of it because probably no one cares. Just like nothing will come of this, Joe will get the stink eye from a bunch of people for a while and then he’ll be fine.
Bottom line, I don’t know why that one cat brought up “free speech” but privacy is a real right, and if you decide that doing bad things is necessary you get to stop pretending you’re the good-guy. Just maybe not the worst guy.
But that’s just it, Joe has granted access to anyone to whom he’s given the password, so I agree with thejeff, it’ll be sweeter if the leaker was someone to whom he actively gave the password.
Maybe Rachel will end up being bffsies with Raidah, or something.
We have already had enough murders/attempted murders, she should just go smack him upside the head for accusing her (rightful or not) and call it that. 😛
and three! It’s better not to make accusations in public and still treat the entire thing like an elaborate game, especially as Joe hasn’t publicly shown any signs of learning anything and is still being a twit, to the frustration of the people around him.
He really was not. He was exactly the Sherlock Moffat wanted, but like JLM even looks more like the classic illustrations. BBC Sherlock was a big flashy lazy adaptation that suffered badly from Moffat’s ever inflating ego. The guy really thinks he did Sherlock’s death and comeback better than Doyle. He really thinks the original Moriarty was a boring villain and that his half baked Heath Ledger’s Joker version is better.
Sorry, rephrasing: I found that adaptation entertaining. If the characters’ names and the setting were different, it wouldn’t change my opinion of the show.
I only read a couple of the books (and one was an illustrated childrens’ adaptation many moons ago), so I don’t have much context of the originals to go by. I should probably go download some of the public domain ebooks…
Well first let me just apologize for jumping on your comment like that. I love Elementary and I hate Moffat but the latter is not your problem and I didn’t mean to be That Person who won’t let strangers enjoy stuff. 🙂
Not really. I mean, maybe if he was attempting to be a dark horse comics version of Sherlock, but not Sir Conan Doyle’s Sherlock. The original Sherlock is actually a decently polite and cheerful fellow, though does suffer from mood swings at times. The original Sherlock also does use cocaine in 1890s medical injection format. He takes it…once a day if I remember correctly. Elementary is, as a result, a more faithful representation of Sherlock Holmes (actually even Robert Downey Jr., in those two live action Sherlock Holmes movies, was a better Sherlock than Benedict Cumberbatch). Benedict Cumberbatch is the perfect “insufferable genius” character archetype in the BBC show. And even then, the only real reason to watch the BBC version was for Martin Freeman’s Watson in my opinion.
You only watch “Sherlock” for Martin Freeman’s Watson. He and Benedict Cumberbatch’s interactions are really entertaining, but Watson is the only well done adaptation of any of the original characters in my opinion. It may have gotten Cumberbatch famous, but it is nowhere near his best role, let alone his best performance. I’d say his best is either Dr. Strange or Smaug ironically enough. Maybe Khan from the new Star Trek movies.
eh. arthur conan doyle’s sherlock knew how to apologize, i’m pretty sure
bbc!sherlock is only a small snippet of the many potential and present sherlocks in existence, and should be treated with all due relevance
which is very little, as im sure it will be lost to the sands of time eventually as “that one thing that didn’t last very long and only came out like every ten years or whatever”. which. thank goodness
…these punctuation marks look a lot more aggressive than i was intending, i think; i was going more for Strong Emotions
see i really kind of hate how manchild is a legit part of sherlock holmes’ characterization now. because like, if this guy is so smart, how come he hasn’t figured out any social skills??? why is he making life harder for himself by alienating people? it just does not compute.
i mean, granted, original flavor holmes does come up with some pretty ridiculous shit (omfg, there are like a million uses for the knowledge that the earth revolves around the sun, you don’t have to be a flatlander in order to be logical!) but. i mean. at least he, like, had a sense of social responsibility; there is a very real sense that he thinks this is the best use for his skills to his society. it’s an emotional tie as well as a rational one, and his emotions aren’t inscrutable. he has boundaries, i guess.
it’s kind of like the batman thing: i prefer the guy that’s a decent dude and has human emotions and isn’t infallible, but the other uberperfect one that’s out there is too widespread to be ignored
It’s been a while since I watched Elementary, but I recall that Sherlock slowly learning to be accountable for his actions and apologetic when he crossed lines, or else Watson would be mad at him and he’d look like a puppy that peed on the rug.
Well…I admit I haven’t seen it since…either first or second season, so I suppose he might have had enough growth. But the ones I’ve seen, he was no better than the BBC or Downy versions.
Nor is Rachel a hardened criminal ready and willing to murder to avoid doing hard time for her crimes.
And now Danny’s joining in supporting Joe’s wild fantasies.
is this how he supports his cartoonist career? with porn and also secret betting? does he know when trump is gonna get impeached/kicked out of office???
or maybe we’re just that predictable but i know which is the more interesting route
charles xavier looks at his enterprising new student. “you poor soul,” he says, a single tear edging from his single-tear duct. he too knows the depths of the abyss of the human soul
To cause this arc, obviously. However blase Joe may have been with the existence and password, his own actions didn’t directly lead to everyone in the dorm finding out about it, reading it, and getting upset over it.
It took someone else *choosing* to publicize it for that to happen. Absent a third actor (Rachel, Raidah, or someone else), a lot of people would have been happier this day.
Rachel! Solve two problems at once, and take Danny’s ukulele, and hit Joe with it! (Preferably across the back, as you’ll cause sufficient pain with less actual injury. I can’t really bring myself to wish anyone actual harm.) Joe will face a consequence that’ll actually get through his meat-skull, Danny will be sans a ukulele, and no one will be happy about any of it! It’s the perfect solution!
Her wording in the first panel sounds as though she didn’t do it out of spite but actually hoping that it would teach Joe a lesson. Maybe she likes him? Or is it just my IW! ship talking?
If IW!Joe and Rachel showed up right now, they’d both agree that Rachel should just walk away until Joe grows up, and even then she’s under no obligation to come back and check on him. Not that they’d need to warn her about getting involved, because even if she does find him attractive on any level – which it’s not at all clear she does – his behavior has cuddled that into complete disgust.
Although making the list was a pretty shitty thing to do, I think spreading it around was kinda shitty too? Not close to the same level of shitty, but it seems like all of the consequences of sharing a list like that weren’t really thought through (someone could be dealing with some issues that seeing their ranking made worse). Not sure what I would do in that situation but that probably wasn’t the most tactful way of handling it.
You’re talking about someone who talks smack to a girl who literally JUST got back from being hospitalized for being suicidal.
You’re talking about someone who has more than once shit-picked on said girl’s relationship with her girlfriend, even though that relationship – albeit not healthy – was probably one of the only reasons she was still alive at that point.
Rachel does not consider consequences of her actions. She’s on a “feminist” crusade to make sure absolutely everyone knows how to be a perfect feminist and to hurt them if she considers them a fuck up. Obviously, there’s something underlying going on in her own life, but she’s letting it eat at her until she becomes one of the worst types of person.
Being suicidal is not a get out of jail free card for physically assaulting multiple people and -emotionally torturing others- (including Billie), to the point *they* are considering suicide as well.
It is seriously appalling that so many people are defending emotional blackmail here and trying to shame someone who spoke out about it.
While Rachel has every right to be pissed at Ruth’s attempt of redemption, her tirade against Ruth was when Ruth was at her most vulnerable, and while a suicide attempt doesn’t magically erase your past crimes, but you really shouldn’t tear someone down so soon after one. Also, Rachel did absolutely nothing to challenge Ruth before. she didnt notify the RM, she didnt warn freshmen about Ruth, and she did nothing to help Billie, who in her mind is an abuse victim, but then took the moral high ground when accusing Ruth.
Her downward spiral would have probably led to a suicide attempt, and it was considered serious enough that Ruth had to be hospitalised and given anti depressants. While i agree that Rachel is under no obligation to challenge Ruth, she’s not in a good position to condemn what Ruth has done when she didn’t even voice an objection to what Ruth was doing
> her tirade against Ruth was when Ruth was at her most vulnerable
Saying “woe is me” *is not a get out of responsibility for abuse card*.
No. This is *messed up*. This is one of the most common ways to abuse a family member or loved one, to claim that they are hurting you or “maybe you’ll just commit suicide”, and it’s *horrific*.
For all the progress Ruth has made since then, her speech to the dorm showed that she was starting to peel back from responsibility — and Billie is being a shithead by *encouraging* that. To anyone who can see, Ruth is a violent abuser who got her grandpa to come in and hush things up when she almost got caught *flagrantly* breaking the rules and grooming one of her dorm mates — and is continuing to associate with that dorm mate! There are rules against what Ruth is doing not because the “Man wants to keep true love down”, but because what they were doing was *monstrously unhealthy and destructive*.
If people want to look at what was kept secret, what *wasn’t* immediately apparent to everyone there (because Ruth and Billie were *lying to everyone about how they violently hated each other to cover up their even more appalling love affair*), then we have to look at what Ruth actually *did* — use her power to pressure one of her dorm mates into a relationship, allow/encourage an alcoholic to continue to booze up, and create a suicide pact with them.
I understand why people see that as somehow a tragic romance. Society has primed us to think that it’s “dangerous” and “sexy”. But in reality, it’s not romantic at all, it’s a *shitshow*, and it’s really frustrating that people are giving Rachel shit for it by simultaneously claiming that she should know stuff only the audience knows, but that stuff that would validate her doesn’t count because she wouldn’t have known it.
Saying “woe is me” *is not a get out of responsibility for abuse card*.
I agree with this completely, and that Rachel’s absolutely in the right about confronting her about her past behaviour, but she chose to do it at the worse possible time she could. She definitely knew about Ruth’s suicide attempt because she was the one who reported it, yet she still chose to attack and tear down Ruth right after Ruth came back.
As a general rule, I’d say that hacking someone is pretty shitty.
In this specific case, well, no, still shitty (don’t hack people). But there’s nuance. Joe was always open to acknowledging that the list existed, and happily shared particular scores with certain folks as some misguided form of flattery, in public. At one point in front of an entire classroom full of people. So he had no problem with people knowing the list existed, he simply didn’t want to have to deal with the negative consequences of the list existing.
So, you know, hacking is wrong, but the victim manages to be sleazier than the perpetrator.
I agree. I mean, Joe can screw himself, but for the sake of the girls whose names are on the list and were probably hurt and publicly humiliated by its public distribution, I think this was a well-intentioned but thoughtless move on Rachel’s part.
I don’t think this was well-intentioned at all. Whoever spread it most likely just wanted Joe to be figuratively marched naked through town, shame bell ringing loudly, and distributing the list was the most sure-fire way to accomplish that. Other considerations would be secondary, probably with quite a margin.
Something we haven’t seen is the reaction of the male parts of the campus. We already know it has unsavory elements, how long will it take before Joe’s Do-list gets picked up and made into a campus-spanning living google-sheet?
It could definitely be Rachel, but I still can think of several other people who might have “hacked” Joe’s do list. If he wanted his do list to remain secret, he shouldn’t have told so many people about it.
I really want it to be Danny. Either because he’s trying to encourage personal growth, or because “New Danny, a Good Egg” secretly aspires to be a supervillain.
Hey, Danny? Now would be the time to walk away and let Joe face the consequences of his own shitty behavior.
I mean he was a shitty friend anyway
so you’re not really losing anything even if he doesn’t come crawling back to the only person who still tolerates him (which he almost certainly will).
I know that sounded really bitter, but Joe reminds me way too much of my brother who is an absolute douchenozzle about the same sorts of things
(actually got really angry when I explained that asexuality is a thing that exists). Thankfully we live on different continents now.
Motive, ability and opportunity is not actual evidence you dunderheads.
If Rachel is going to murder you, it is because you are stupid enough to blame the first person who could have done it with 0 proof to backup your claim. And that DOES look like a murder face but YOU CAN’T SEE THAT SO WHY DID YOU IMMEDIATELY JUMP FROM ‘YOU ARE A HACKER’ TO ‘YOU ARE A MURDERER ALSO THAT WILL NOW KILL US FOR CALLING YOU OUT, GODDAMN WAS THIS A BAD IDEA’???
All of this. Rachel’s definitely a possibility, but now I really don’t want it to be her, because I don’t want Joe to be right for making such ridiculous leaps.
Hmmm. I really like characters like this. I’m glad Rachel’s finally getting some development.
Willis really does shine in graying up the value spectrum of his “good” characters. Like in this case, was it really the right thing for Rachel to hack this list? I mean, leaving out Joe, who deserves all the flak he’s getting – how many girls were hurt by finding out some random douchebag has been perusing their bodies and giving them low rankings? I know I wouldn’t want to know.
It’s a little bit like Roz, where in one’s crusade to take someone wrong down, you end up creating some thoughtless collateral damage.
I don’t see how the blame for that would fall on Rachel. The perusing and ranking was being done, and semi-publicly at that, whether or not they knew about it. Don’t blame Rachel for Joe’s actions.
I’m not blaming Rachel for Joe’s actions. HER actions were to spread the list around to everyone. And I question the benefit this was to the girls she spread the list around to.
I mean, let’s take everyone who was ranked, say, below a 5.Is it really helpful to those girls for EVERYONE ON CAMPUS to see them labelled as a “2” or a “3.5” or a “0”? Is that something everyone has to know? Is that something most people would want everyone to notice and talk about? You know what actually happens when stuff like this happens on a real college campus (and it does)?
The people who are “high” in ranking will start laughing at the ones who ranked “low”. They become a matter of public spectacle and discussion.
Like, I get that Rachel had…noble intentions and I like that about her. But intentions don’t always matter if your actions will probably hurt more people than it helps…and the only person that publicly releasing the list could conceivably help is really Joe himself (i.e. helping him become a more thoughtful person).
And I think from a character-writing standpoint, this moral grayness is really interesting and sophisticated.
Like, it’s not a bad thing that “good” characters in DoA sometimes do questionable stuff.
So instead, he just keeps on with the list, adding more girls to it, spreading it to interested (and therefore probably even creepier) people.
Much the same consequences on a smaller scale, but longer term.
The people it helps are all the future entries on the list or those targeted if the list should spread in secret.
And if outing the list helps change Joe’s behavior it also helps all the girls he would have creeped on.
1. There is no indication he shares this list with “other creepers” in that sense, and until there is, it’s a pointless assumption.
2. So, it helps hypothetical people at the expense of…actual people, as I’ve already described in my previous comment.
3. Joe is an ass, but he’s not exactly a “creeper” in the predatory sense. Which isn’t to defend his ass-ness, but it also means that there isn’t really anyone being…”helped” by this outing. Again, aside from MAYBE Joe himself getting some character development from it.
Like, I see your point, and I’m certain this would be the exact reasoning Rachel herself used. But what I’m trying to say is that this type of action, in a real-life scenario, would mostly just play out as widespread humiliation and mockery of many of the actual girls on that list. (And I say this because things like this DO happen on college campuses and I’ve seen it firsthand.) To say that what Rachel did was 100% good and right means ignoring the very real pain and humiliation that what she did could have caused, regardless of her intent.
True, i feel like he already made aware to just about anyone in proximity to him that he has the list – so really it probably just ended up being a self-confidence blow (or raise?) to a lot of people.
i mean, like, yes: you do let more people know about this list who could be hurt by this. but also you out Joe as the person who made this list and what his actual (public!) opinions are.
…like Carla, you don’t have to know what the list actually says if you don’t want to. but apparently everyone knows exactly who put this bs out. and whether that’s word of mouth or…something else? who knows
I like that how most of the characters have a mix of good and bad in them. Life is messy, and people are far more complicated then they tend to be depicted in the media, all the more so when you’re just starting college and living on your own for the first time.
I’m inclined to think Rachel didn’t do it now because that’s not a “Oops, my scheme to expose corruption and PUA evil has been uncovered.” No, it’s, “why the hell would I want to deal with you assholes more than I already want to, let alone intrude on your f-ed up fantasyland” look.
I’d agree with this, but panel 1 does not read like someone who did not have a hand in it. I mean she’s literally saying “After all that you didn’t learn a damn thing.” That reads as someone frustrated that their actions were meaningless.7
Could just be her thinking he should’ve learned something from all this – or even just from her getting angry during their first encounter – and frustrated he didn’t.
True, but coupled with Rachel’s previous actions… I don’t know. She’s had a habit of downplaying consequences to actions, that bad things happen all the time to people so they don’t matter as well (The gunman on campus) as well as not reading the body language in the room when she helped trigger Ambers breakdown.
i actually really would enjoy it being mike for multiple reasons
1) it’s such an asshole thing to do
2) it’s an asshole thing to do that kind of has positive results??
3) he enjoys calling people out on their shit and this is such calling people out on their shit. like, godtier of that
4) this mike seems to be motivated mostly by annoyance; and i could see all of joe’s attitude getting really annoying really fast
5) it’s coming from a guy, which means that joe is going to take it more seriously. possibly? it is a fellow dude telling him to knock it off.
5a) contraripoint, being a fellow dude could make joe take this less seriously than coming from a woman who is telling him viscerally how she has been hurt by his actions. because the whole problem is that he doesn’t take women seriously as human beings
but like a) i like that rachel is getting storytime, and b) mike’s all up in the ethan/danny storyline, so he’s probably busy. and it really, really fits in well with rachel’s known character.
This strip makes it pretty obvious she’s not the one who did it, I think.
That’s not the face of someone who’s been caught doing something, that’s the face of someone who’s been accused of something they didn’t do.
And from a narrative standpoint, there’s nowhere to go with this conversation, if he’s right, and it’s not particularly useful for Joe’s potential development into someone who doesn’t do shitty things.
If his list was, in fact, cracked by a Grumpy Feminist with computer skillz, he doesn’t need to be confronted by the fact that it’s really shitty. But if it was someone he gave the password to – someone he thought would be into it – then he’d have to look at himself.
It could also be the face of someone thinking “You call that hacking? All I had to do was change a ‘false’ into a ‘true’ in the url you yourself made public to gain full access. What’s next? Are you saying using an ATM is bank robbery?”
That last point is why I really hope it wasn’t actually “hacked”, however easy it might have been.
I don’t want Joe to have an excuse to play the victim here.
You never expect the Spanish Inquisi… I mean the new character XD
It does seem likely though. The way she talked about not learning anything in the first panel. It’s like she set Joe up hoping that he will learn he is a douchebag and now is exasperated because he failed to get the hint.
idk i feel it’s a little more like she thinks she’s exposing a douchebag, and meeting him afterwards she is like “why am i not surprised”. it more just reinforces her pre-existing opinion of people’s ability to change
I’m actually interested if anyone was actually reading the Do-List for it’s contents. It occurs to me the only people who would, would be Mike (for the fact its a gold-mine of usable information) and Jason. Mostly because Jason is the kind of arrogant perv who might think it a measure of his masculinity to see who he could and couldn’t date.
I’m sure Ryan would have been interested, if Ryan is still capable of reading such things.
Of course, people like Ryan are the ones who would happily accept the password access Joe has long been throwing around.
Panel 1: It hasn’t been very long for Joe to process things, but there’s a lot of truth to Rachel’s words in this panel.
Joe’s typical MO when called out or when his actions have been ill-advised has been to rewrite the script on the moment. Being an ass in Gender Studies class and getting consequences for that becomes the teacher and the class being out to get him and trap him, getting yelled at by Sarah is because she’s feisty and unhinged or looking for a secret threesome, and so on.
And it’s tied to a thing I’ve seen a lot from a certain type of guy wrapped up in this cult of toxic masculinity. Which is the idea that to be wrong, to change one’s mind, to be openly and visibly empathetic and responsive to the ideas and emotions of others, especially women, is to be a (slur for gay man), to be rendered feminine.
In the most extreme cases, you get things like the Republican Party where they will support an ever-cascading list of terrible ideas before ever admitting they got conned or supported the wrong thing and cheer the “moral clarity” of doubling down on terrible decisions because at least that’s “decisive”.
And it’s understandable that folks would feel that way. Being willing to introspect on one’s self and see “am I right” requires a certain amount of vulnerability. And for a philosophy that sells itself on the idea that one can masculinity away those feelings of vulnerability, of indecision, of feeling lost, anything that makes one vulnerable as a man must be bad.
For Joe, perhaps this is just his public fronting before he gets home and really sits with what he’s done and the harm he’s caused and severely re-evaluate his self-image and this desperate performance that doesn’t even help him achieve his stated goals and makes him lie to his best friend.
But his public words state a plan of just waiting it out and then returning to the exact same behaviors that got him into this mess, simply to avoid the vulnerability and difficulty of re-evaluating something he’s made the very core of his ego and sense of self.
Especially as he still hasn’t seemed to cotton on for even the real reason for so many women’s anger on this subject nor showing any willingness to find out what that reason is, merely dismissing it as a witch hunt against him, which with modern political parallels is especially meh.
I THINK it is mostly just Joe’s on the fly defense mechanism. He flaps his gum and says whatever stupid shit while re-positioning him into a position where things are not his fault.
Not a great mechanism, but understandable. Not unlike Walky’s more stupid moments.
The problem with Joe is that a) All his flapping comes at the expense of others (rather than Walky’s, who mainly comes at the expense of himself, such as when Regionald, duke of Thingley, picked a fight with a tree). Since the list leaked he has actively annoyed every single woman within earshot and done no-trivial amount do Danny’s reputation, not to mention done a lot to ruin Danny’s day.
b) and he never retreats from his bullshit later when he has had time to cool down (with the one exception of apologizing to Dorothy). He reframes it so he tries to avoid the same behavior again, but there is no apology, no sincerity and no assurance to the people who put up with him that he wont do the same thing again (promising to back off Sarah in the most obnoxious way possible is a good example).
And sadly, you are completely right. In certain circles “never back down, never be wrong, never apologize,” is the most important tenet of the Man code. To admit to be wrong is to show weakness. To show weakness is to be KNAPSU, or non-alpha, or whatever (thank God there is no president with that mindset, can you imagine?)
Panel 2: Dudes, just let her finish going to class.
Panels 3-4: Yes, Joe. Every woman who dislikes you or calls you out on something is trying to destroy you personally, because you are the center of their world. And your system was super secret and protected and not something you handed out like goddamn candy, RSS feed and all to literally everyone who popped on your radar because you so desperately wanted someone to validate the work you spent creating your creepy objectifying list.
Like, he’s still hung up on this idea that he was hacked. And who knows, maybe it’ll turn out that someone did hack him, but I’m going to guess at the end of the day, it’s not. How this got out is likely because of the same way it got out in the first place, him handing it out like candy until it got to the point where he could no longer control who saw it. And it probably was done without much of a thought to Joe and his shit.
Because that’s one of Joe’s central tragedies. He is convinced that he’s not only the hero of his own life, but everyone else’s as well. Every attractive woman wants to sleep with him, every unattractive woman is sad he doesn’t want to sleep with him, every man is cheering on his list and seeing it as valuable and if they aren’t they just need to be pushed into being as “free” as him.
That’s the central pillar of the fantasy he has cocooned himself behind.
And it needs to topple over.
Panel 5: Oh dear, no. No Danny, don’t enable this, though this is also incredibly adorable.
Yeah, the enabling here is just awful. Danny should either be saying “And?”, making it clear that he doesn’t see someone exposing Joe’s ugliness being a dirty deed, or trying to just get Joe to drop it and move on.
Like, I’ve been trying to give Danny the benefit of the doubt here, but this is just the exact wrong thing to do.
It’s still a bad thing to hack assholes, especially since Joe is a jerk but he’s not like… abusing anyone. He doesn’t have that POWER over anyone. He’s uncomfortable and makes women’s days a little worse when they have to be around him, and that’s a bad thing that he needs to fix, but it doesn’t mean any retaliation for that is automatically heroic and justified.
Yes, hacking people is always bad. But there’s degrees of bad, and thus far it appears that the only thing leaked out are Joe’s identity and the “do list”, which I’d count as semi-public (given that he was giving it out to a number of people, personally identifying it as a list that he collated).
No phone number, email, online screen names, unrelated personal history, information on his actions performed in an anonymous setting, explicitly private data or really anything else that could do harm.
Again, still not super-awesome from whoever handed the data out to the campus, but not remotely as bad as it could possibly be.
I’m gonna have to take a hard no stance on the idea that hacking/doxxing people is always bad. There are any number of situations where it’s an objective good that can protect people from harm such as when it targets sexual predators, violent abusers, con artists etc.
You know, I’ll just put in Cerberus’ words yesterday when someone asked whether the list did any harm:
It gives targeting information to dangerous people, encourages harassment of “high numbers”, bullying of “low numbers”, is an open testamen to one’s dehumanization which makes one feel like rancid garbage and like a piece of meat that is uncalled in an institution of learning and that you are unsafe in your own living space (because he’s always creeping in the girl’s dorm).
On top of that, it adds an additional color to his instances of sexual harassment in the past knowing he’s been compiling this list on his fellow students, thus making those instances feel way more dangerous and like pushing back against him will result in being publicly shamed in a scary PUA guide.
Additionally it lends support to predators, helping to maintain their worldview that their dehumanizing and targeting activities are normative and just what guys do as well as a good list of people with low self-esteem or naivety to exploit in sexual assault.
Plus sexism feeds into and reinforces a number of marginalizations and violence that take a number of tolls on a large number of people.
This stuff has real consequences and does real harm even if that harm is not as obvious as a bigot curb-stomping someone and can be what encourages and supports those more obvious systems of abuse.
Not really a derp. It’s just that if you’ve never been affected by this kind of behaviour yourself in your life (in itself a good thing), then it’s not something you’ll automatically understand. Sadly, the main way to spot the red flags early on remains to have lived through them.
And equally sadly, this sort of thing is not -actively- taught to the extent it should. Sure, the information is out there, but it’s not reaching nearly as many people as possible, because it’s not being discussed nearly as heavily as it should in f.ex. school.
So it can be a real hit or miss whether you find someone on the internet who knows about these things and who is willing to share the information with you. I for one count myself immensely lucky to have found Cerberus and ischemgeek and Lailah and Bluewind and other people in this comment field (sorry if I forget your names) who are doing just that.
Well put. Women want him, men envy him. The ONLY possible exceptions are men and women who are hotter than him, who hopefully will approve of his attempts to better himself, and people who are “crazy”.
And just as you have mentioned several times, his bullshit completely works against that fiction. Roz DID want him for sex, until he sabotaged her class. Walky WAS jealous about his escapades, until he insulted Dorothy. Danny seem to feel more pity than anything else.
Someone mentioned Assigned Male on here a few days ago. I can’t believe it wasn’t mentioned before. It’s awesome. So I’m going to mention a few times, so more of the cool commenters on here have a chance to enjoy it if they haven’t already heard of it.
Thanks for linking! I’m really concerned about transphobia, but being cis I don’t know the experience. It’s super helpful to read something like this ^^
Joe has actively tried to get him to join in since the list first leaked, so this is Danny finally giving in. Again, this is Joe’s whole MO. Loudly and relentlessly pretend reality is the way he wants it and demand people play along, until some of them do. Same goes for his attempts to woo women (his first attempt to come on to Rachcel, for example).
I’m holding judgement until the next strip because I read that last panel as Danny being sarcastic and mocking him. The fact he cuts Joe off (at least that’s what that panel overlap’s always been in most comics in the past) shows an odd shift in their dynamic, but I could be wrong.
“Also: 5 bucks says that Joe’s going to suddenly leap up and exclaim that it must have been one of the women CS majors who hacked it, because no man would want to expose his list, clearly any man that came across it would treasure the least for its valuable insights and bountiful strategy and I think I need to go take a shower…”
Are we seriously shaming a character for speaking out against a violent abuser who assaulted multiple people and nearly drove *another* person to suicide?
Billie is also depressed, possibly suicidally so, but Ruth didn’t, like, encourage her suicidal tendencies. She basically did all she could in her damaged mental state to ward Billie off that kind of thinking.
Which, I mean, they still entered a suicide pact. Thy both agreed that they would kill themselves together. But I don’t think either of them really thought it through, thankfully.
While I agree that it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to change in the course of a day (I’d expect at least a week or three to go from awful to awkwardly tolerable), it is perfectly understandable that she’s frustrated with someone who’s treated her like her most admirable trait is how much better she’d look with her shirt off.
I can usually detect sarcasm on the internet, but for this one I wasn’t sure at first. But the extreme scenario he describes, emphasis on murder and police custody, confirms it. Danny isn’t dumb enough to believe either of them are likely to happen and is just venting frustration at how dense his friend can be.
Well, to be fair, that’s more due to Joe actually being pretty dense than Danny doing something badly. If Joe doesn’t understand how inane it sounds, then Danny’s fault was using sarcasm to begin with.
Sorry. I reread the comic and I think I see what you mean. Danny’s particular choice of words does perpetuate Joe’s delusion that it’s not him or his actions that’re to blame and that he is right to feel like the victim.
Actually, I’ve been thinking Mary was the one who leaked the do-list. Such an act of sabotage might possibly explain why she’s been acting uncharacteristically human of late.
Also, Joe’s presented a previous knowledge on things before. I like when he said “Sherlock guy” he did mean the general character of Sherlock Holmes with no specific iteration in mind.
I’ve decided to Defend Rachel against attacks and Slurs.
Because she seems indefensible.
And from what we know of Rachel ( IW ) and Willis logic, it just doesn’t add up.
It’s too unlikely.
We are being asked to believe that Rachel is just being an intolerant Bingo who piles on other people when they are down. We are being asked to believe that even Mary is nicer than Rachel this week.
Obviously Willis is just screwing with us.
Now she is a little over the top here, but FML Joe called her “eleven” . Those are fighting words. In context Joe ought to have known better. He’s rubbing it in.
What we don’t know is anything about this Rachels life. For that reason alone I’m giving her a pass.
The more I think about it,vthe more I think this arc will be about Rachel and what bad things happened to her.
This is going to be unpopular but most of what I say is.
It doesn’t really matter WHO unleashed “the list” because of few things. Even though “the list” would be considered a scummy thing to do, Releasing it is just as bad.
It incites the real possibility of actual physical harm from people, perhaps even a murder attempt. There are far many of these crackpot “Words=violence” people who think that saying something jusitifies violence and honestly, having gone to IU I have to say the campus is FULL of these antifa-esque assholes.
Quite right. While The List is quite douchey it was just Joe’s creepy little hobby. It wasn’t hurting anyone. He did mention it and spread it around so it Kinda lessens the impact but still it’s a bit too similar to revealing someone’s thoughts and secrets to the public. Not something you should do.
It didn’t hurt anyone physically. But lists like that are very capable of affecting people emotionally, especially people with low selfesteem and emotional damage can be just as dangerous as physical damage, albeit in different ways. Of course, we don’t know if anyone in the comic was affected that severely, but the point still stands that it has the potential to be very harmful.
That’s why I pointed out Joe mentioning it. Basically if it was something he was writing into the drawer or only sharing with his male buddies it would have been a harmless but creepy hobby.
No as soon as he shares his list with one other person its not exactly harmless. Him telling Danny he thinks Billy is fat and desperate would be enough to make it non harmless.
Sharing that someone is emotionally vulnerable and drinks heavily (as he did with Billie), for the express purpose of encouraging other dudes to try to fuck her is absolutely a bad thing, regardless of how many or few people it’s shared with.
It’s not just the women who were given low ratings that are pissed at him. It’s all of them. Because this is sleazy behavior.
Mhm I am not defending Joe but what you are doing here is getting Dangerously close to Policing Thoughts and opinions. When two people can’t share an opinion with each other because it speaks negatively about another person… that’s not good for freedom of speech.
No the difference between telling one person something telling five people something and telling the whole school is just a matter of scale. Sure one harm is less than 500 harm but its still not zero harm. If this was something he kept in his diary it would be harmless.
Freedom of speech is important because what you say can effect change.
You can share a negative opinion but lets not pretend that it is a harmless act. Also sharing a negative opinion can be a good thing like warning people that Ryan is a creep.
Having the legal right to something and having something be the right thing to do are two different things. And having the legal right to do something and something being harmless are two entirely different things.
Joe having the legal right to say Billie is fat and desperate doesn’t make it right or harmless – he can still be an asshole for doing so and people can tell him to keep dickery like that to himself.
And free speech = government can’t arrest you for saying something. It doesn’t mean people can’t censure you for being an asshole.
I will fucking police men who think it’s their business to catalogue their every thought about women’s sexual attractiveness like it matters all day every day. It’s fucking gross and unnecessary.
Also people definitely aren’t trying to control Joe’s thoughts. He can be as creepy as he wants in his own head. The list that he made an RSS feed for and gave out passwords to and which he loudly updates complete strangers on is not Joe’s thoughts.
Locke, if thinking “words=violence” is absurd, Joe should be just fine then, shouldn’t he? After all, the list is “just words”. Or maybe you’re just not being at all consistent.
In any case, the fact that people might get extremely angry at him is not a valid reason not to expose someone’s lecherous behavior.
I would honestly not have much issue with the release of Joe’s List. I mean, yeah, breaking into anyone’s online anything is kinda a crappy thing, but… well, he keeps a list of every woman he knows rated by how much he wants to bang them, and puts insulting personal notes in it, maintains it on a server, and hands the password out to other men. This is… well, predatory behavior. Releasing it and letting people mostly make light of it feels… just.
Except that we know Rachel, now, and we know that she’s not, at her core, a good person. She’s a lot like Mary – convicted in her idea of right, wrong, and how the world works, and willing to actively and deliberately cause harm in pursuit of what she sees as Just. While her moral framework might be less internally horrific than Mary’s – Mary is a bigot, while Rachel is a misanthrope – she is still a fanatic. And, if her release of the List doesn’t come back on Joe as hard as she thinks it should, she’s likely to continue her campaign against him.
Joe’s a scummy guy. He’s hilarious, but he’s scummy. His sins, though, are mostly sins of ignorance rather than of malice. Rachel is acting on malice. Rachel spends a lot of her screentime acting on malice.
For the record, we don’t actually know Rachel did anything. Joe’s leaped to that conclusion, based on essentially no evidence.
It’s certainly possible, but not at all guaranteed at this point.
I continue to like Rachel. As a female in a CS major, she is putting up with being hit on and ignored and worse in every class, every day. She has no more fucks to give about toxic children like Joe. Or the the drama around an RA who is wildly abusive and incompetent but still keeps her job. Its no way to run (a class, a wing, a school or) the company she is going to start next year. Still I expect more backstory that will make it clearer. DYW doesn’t do loose ends or narrative dead ends.
Same. I have a lot of issues with dealing with abusive people in my life, and it’s really gratifying to see someone actually refuse to enable that, instead of a whole lot of romanticizing of abuse that was being done. Not sure if it was intentionally on the part of the author or the audience, but it was starting to get super uncomfortable watching certain characters and their abusive actions be cheered on as romantic or heroic.
I enjoyed the heck out of the Rachel close-ups! Epic eyeroll in panel one, shocked little pupils in panel four, and the “would any jury in the world convict me?” side-eye in panel five.
He is messing around with his best friend. Must remind him of the great time before Joe discovered girls and decided they are be-all-end-all of the universe
Ruth physically assaulted many people and willingly encouraged someone else to commit suicide with her.
I get that she was a victim, but she was also a violent abuser, and being a victim does not excuse that. Blaine and Ruth’s grandpa were almost certainly victims of their own families when they were young. Abusive people almost never become abusive from having happy backgrounds, and if you’re going to exempt abusers for being victims, then you’re exempting every abuser from responsibility.
They were NOT almost certainly victims of their own families. The rate of abusers that were abused themselves? About 20% which is close enough to the average of the general populace that it is statistically insignificant. The reason why people believe it is higher? BECAUSE ABUSERS LIE. The idea that abusers come from abusive or neglectful households in particular is one that abusers themselves perpetuated for sympathy – they are also the ones who perpetuate similar other myths that give them sympathy and shift the blame of their abuse onto emotions, drugs, alcohol or mental illness (none of which are the root cause of abuse, they can add onto and worsen an abuse problem but the root cause is ALWAYS their way of thinking, a sense of entitlement and a lack of respect for who they abuse).
All abusers, no. Some are just shitty, lead in the water, other reasons. But there is a massively significant chance that a victim of abuse will in turn become an abuser.
My grandparents were relative saints to me, but my father and my uncle both reported that they were abused by them as kids, and I believe them. It’s actually very common for grandparents to put the grandchildren on a pedestal, as long as they still have the original victim to abuse.
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BUT HIS DO LIST
BUTTERY MAILS
Buttery males?
Have you heard about that Ben Gazi guy everyone keeps talking about?
Is he the guy who runs the pizza place?
No, that was fake news. There was never any stuffed crust at that establishment.
I prefer to parse it “butt hurt males”. More correct to people’s actual complaints about Hillary.
No, no, it goes “But his freedom of speech!!!!!!!!!”
Freeze peaches!
Mystery solved!
Good job Detective Joe, another case is in the books
Sadly, it will be his last. Rachel Moriarty will see to that.
But not before Joe finally get’s his threesome. With Danny. Then Joe realizes that by limiting his playing field to one team, he has been just limiting his own potential.
Then moments before Joe recreates the world into a sex orgy, Rachel stabs him twice. The 2nd time because Joe jokes that he thought he would be penetrating her during hate sex.
Fun fact: J’accuse is the French name for Clue.
…….
…. noooooooo.
…. oh, wait, you mean the board game was marketed under the name J’accuse? That makes sense. I misread that as being a direct translation.
What? I never heard of J’accuse!, Cluedo is called Cluedo in France too.
And when a frenchie reads J’accuse! the thing (s)he immediately thinks about is the article written by Emile Zola in defense of Marechal Dreyfus.
So first thing I wondered about when reading that alt text was “wait, is this a joke on Joe being Jewish?” :/
But try to explain Cluedo.
Shitty Spanish translators.
Sometimes England’s just fuckin’ weird.
It’s a portmanteau of “clue” and “Ludo”, another board game with a movement mechanic similar to Clue. Americans didn’t know what it was, so Parker Brothers just shortened it to “Clue”.
^ This. Cluedo was the original.
I think Americans call Ludo Parcheesi, but the portmanteau doesn’t work with that. Also, “Ludo” is basically just Latin for “a game”, and the original Indian version was something like Pachisi, so I guess that makes more sense…
Parcheesi is also not a super popular game here in America. I mean, it’s one of those games I’ve definitely heard of but never played.
“Parcheesi” was a trademarked name for a version of Pachisi, which a lot of Americans first got to know by way of the Parker Brothers version named Sorry! – Pachisi on a computer is a halfway decent timewaster (ahhh, those dialup internet days, killing time while a webpage loaded)
It looks like Parcheesi was also a Parker Bros. game, and Sorry! is an adaptation of that. I always liked Sorry!… Sorrcheesi? Sorrcluesi?
my Hoyle Board Games calls it Pachisi, with board colors reminiscent of Sorry!, and I always thought they were ducking trademarks more than any other reason for spelling it differently – I only wish Pachisi had something similar to the “move backwards” card in Sorry!, which could leapfrog you from the entry point to just before the home stretch
Cluecheesey. Hm…
And since we dropped the “-do” in Cluedo, we moved it over to Where’s Wally and made it Where’s Waldo.
I don’t know what we’re doing with the “-ly.” It’s very powerful, as it can turn an adjective into an adverb, so perhaps we’re keeping it as a potential weapon.
This is “ly.” It’s spelled L-Y and it’s very useful.
Like Ludo, but with clues.
Is Ludo any fun?
I’ll give you a clue: in greek the game is called “the complainer”. So, no. Unless you’re literally three years old and it’s the first game you play, I guess.
We call it “Fia med knuff,” roughly “Sophie with a bump.” Only time I’ve had any fun with it as an adult, was when it was incorporated into a game of Nomic.
I was always told Fia was from the latin “Fiat” which someone figured was latin for “walk on”. So the intent was to call it “Walk around and get bumped”.
That sounds more fun.
Though honestly any game that encourages players to shout “J’accuse!” at one another during the course of play is top-tier in my book.
What’s so special about this Jack Huges guy anyway?
I think it’s because he’s Canadian.
If he was Canadian, his name would end in an A?
No. Spelled normally, just pronounced that way.
Do you know where French lawyers go to relax?
The j’accuzzi!
I can’t believe it either, Rachel. And now Joe, feeling like a victim, will go on another tirade.
Weeell, hacking by sheer definition of the law IS illegal…regardless of how much Joe had it coming…
Or he will use this to attempt to get laid again. Since he is douchebag, he will probably succeed too.
“Oh woe is me, a lesbian didn’t like how I was visiting the girls dorm and pulled this prank on me.”
Oh, I think I like Dumbiverse Rachel.
Expressive, ain’t she?
Counterpoint: She told a suicidal girl that you can’t change things you don’t like about yourself.
She’s not perfect. She’s got issues, certainly.
In short, she’s a Dumbiverse character.
Just so.
No no, that’s not how you do it.
Whenever a character displays a character flaw you have to decry them as horrible and irredeemable and talk endlessly about how much they suck.
That’s what the comments teach me.
Especially if it’s Joe.
Rachel is Joe?
Once they reach second semester, everyone will be Joe.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!
Also remember it is a direct reflection on the beliefs and morality of the author
Issues?
Walky skipping classes and not getting help are “issues”.
Sarah’s fatalistic cynicism and loner tendencies are “issues”.
Telling a suicidal girl she is a lost cause who can never ever earn the trust of people around her is what I like to call “fucking despicable”.
Not to say I won’t dismiss her good deeds, like calling out Joe on his misogynistic behaviour, and I can synpathize with her general frustration regarding Ruth’s reinstatement as R.A., but let’s just say I’m still waiting for someone to blow up in her face regardin what she said to Ruth.
She didn’t say she wanted Ruth to die. She told an abuser that her actions couldn’t be swept under the rug.
She assigned someone the permanent role of abuser and told her that she would never ever be a better person for the rest of her life.
And that trying otherwise is a lie.
If Ruth didn’t want to be assigned the role of abuser she probably shouldn’t have abused the people under her care.
Indeed, she didn’t say that she actually wanted Ruth to die.
She did say, to a girl fresh out of the hospital for having suicidal tendencies (which PROBABLY had something to do with thinking she could never be a good person), that she, indeed, was never going to be a good person.
Really, the best interpretation is that Ruth is really, really, really fucking stupid.
*Rachel.
Or maybe she’s lashing out at the violent abusive authority figure who got away with everything.
What good will lashing out at Ruth do? Chloe (thanks to “Sir”) is responsible for putting Ruth back in power.
She’s lashing out at Ruth because Ruth was the one who abused her charges and regardless of reasoning she got away with it.
If she didn’t want blowblack from that she shouldn’t have fucking done it.
Yeah. I’ve got all the sympathy in the world for Ruth, but it’s easy to see Rachel’s point of view too. Abusive RA, abusive relationship, suffers no consequences from getting busted. Remember, Rachel knows nothing about Sir or why Chloe left her in charge. She’s harsh, but she doesn’t have our vantage point either. She’s got no reason to believe Ruth is actually trying to change. Why should she?
I honestly don’t know how to feel about Ruth. There’s so much about her I hate, but I get where she comes from, but even that doesn’t excuse even a lick of what she’s done. I feel… “dirty” is way too strong a word but it bugs me when I catch myself sympathizing with her or wanting her and Billie to stay together. She’s pulled way too much shit and is only saved from Villain status by getting protagonist screen time.
Then again I like Amber a whole lot so I think I’m a hypocrite.
I wouldn’t call it hypocritical. Both Ruth and Amber are pretty complex to the point where it’s easy to be on the fence about either of them. The difference in their characterization (and the nature of their crappier moments) is enough to explain why you might fall on a different side of the fence for each.
I think that made me twitch a bit, but I tend to be optimistic that all people have some good deep down, and given the chance, it can be brought out and they can be healed of their pain. Granted by that logic, I should be forgiving of those that talk down those them, but my brain wires bullies differently, I guess. Eh, you’re always the hero of your own story, I suppose.
Where’s the joy in life if we can’t brutalize bullies and blame them for the world’s ills?
She was right that the desire to change does not mean you’ve changed problem solved. She was wrong in that it’s a damn good place to start.
I think that’s an unfair description of what she said.
She argued that you can’t erase your past, and she’s right, you can’t. You can -learn- from it, but redemption in the sense of giving you a clean slate isn’t real.
If redemption is real, it’s in the sense of learning who you are and how to cope with that.
Countercounter point: Was she wrong? Abusers OFTEN use threat of suicide to get out of the consequences of their actions. The only reason you don’t like Rachel is because narrative has spent a lot of time building up Ruth and why she acts the way she does. Rachel has none of that “behind the scenes” that we have.
Counter point overruled, Rachel stays.
Normally, I’d say they were overreacting like the dingbats they are, but uh, in this case, the look on her face is definitely leaning towards a murder or two.
J’accuse indeed.
Considering Joe’s likely age when that password was set, it was probably “boobies” or something, so didn’t take very long to guess.
Considering DANNY’S likely age when he coded the password, it’s probably visible if you just look at the webpage source code.
Danny even said the security of it was a flimsy as a paper bag.
That’s what I’m thinking. That, there’s nothing on the server side checking that you’ve entered the password when you try to access the feed, so if you know the URL, you can skip the login page and go right to it without entering anything
And that’s all still assuming it was actually “hacked” and not just released by someone Joe had given the password to.
Please.
It was OBVIOUSLY “penis”
Years ago one of the toprankers of a coupla-hundred-employee I did support me wanted me to log in as him on his laptop to clean up some mess. So he told me his password. “foreskin”.
When I say “mess”…
(“… of a coupla-hundred-employee company I did support for wanted me to…”
yeesh)
….that sounds very professional.
Hey, it just happened to be the name of his pet goldfish.
Passwords are supposed to be private and never shared, so possibility of offense is not part of “professional standards” for passwords.
So yeah, assuming it had special characters, numbers, upper and lowercase characters, and met a minimum length? Then it could totally meet contemporary professional standards and still juvenile humor.
Well, unless it’s a emergency/root account password. Which led to a fun time when we needed a lady at one of our field sites to console in to the firewall. I’d made up the latest password, holiday-themed, and I overheard my buddy Nick trying to break it into chunks for her..”Yeah, so it’s…capital M, 3, two r’s, capital Y, capital F…uh…lowercase u…ck1…ngc…capital HR, 1, dollar sign..tm, ‘at’ symbol, 5″
“Oh, you guys!”
Yeah, there was a reason I hadn’t asked him.
(well, two)
Top-level managers get to declare their own password requirements, so as $support we do what we’re told and live with it. And then clean up the mess they’ve made of their toy, and do our damnedest not to see any hints of their browser histories.
(this was a good ten years back, mind.)
Can’t wait for “elementary” to become a recurring gag as DoA evolves into a mystery webcomic.
“Last time, on ‘The Mystery of the White Board Ding-Dong Bandit!'”
I’m so okay with this.
“Elementary, my dear Walkertons.”
Just murder the tall one, Rachel. Leave the other for questioning
“Questioning”? He’s already out.
:V
Bravo.
😐
…;)
*slow clap*
Hah, 👍!
*snap* *snap* *snap* *snap* *snap* *snap*
Actually laughed out loud here. XD
ayy lmao
Well played.
Joe, you can’t call it hacking when you spread the password around like that green plastic grass on Easter. I just. You brought every single step of this on yourself, Joe, you literally have no one to blame but you.
I think his ego won’t let him admit that to himself. Someone must have hacked him deliberately using secret spy powers, otherwise his plan of giving the password to every tom, dick, and harry that wanders by was a bad, dangerous, and stupid one.
And for a certain type of guy stuck in Joe’s type of toxic masculinity, admitting that one has made a mistake is akin to stating one is a woman and to be avoided with whatever fantasy best protects the delicate ego.
Pretty much. “I, a man, made a mistake ever in my life??? Nonsense, must blame nearest woman!!”
I mean, I’m pretty sure he’s right in that Rachel did distribute the list, but literally he had like three different points where he could have made better choices and avoided that.
“The woman gave me, and I ate.”
That’s actually a two-in-one: “The woman that you made for me gave me, and I ate”. Blame a woman or blame a higher power, because it can’t possibly be your own fault…
The best churches are the ones that recognize this and don’t fall for the “I completely misunderstood Genesis and think women are the root of all evil” trap.
Btw, how are you feeling?
Honestly, I’m doing pretty bad. I got through my teaching day, but got home exhausted and still crying so crashed for a huge number of hours. I’m still in the pain processing phase, so luckily there’s no PTSD symptoms yet, but I’m sure they are coming especially as the assault happened on an area of my body I already had PTSD assault triggers about.
I had a bunch of plans for tomorrow, but I think I’m going to have to make it a mental health self-care day instead. Fucking chasers, man.
Please take it easy and look after yourself ♥ If ever there was a time for your most self-indulgent self-care, it’s now.
*hugs* if wanted, soft cuddly blankets and fancy gourmet hot chocolate otherwise
-more gentle soothing emotions like the fluffiest of cats keeping you warm-
I wish you the best for your mental health self care, and send all of my sympathy your way. I’m sorry this happened to you, and I’m especially sorry that this sort of thing has happened to you before. That’s horrible.
A lot of people who you’ve never met love you to (bits? death? bad metaphors) the sky and back. Take all the time you need to recuperate.
I know I’m just an internet stranger but hang in there. Reading your comments makes this comic more interesting. Feel better!
All the ghost hugs for you because it is all I can offer. =<
Cerberus: one of the best things abt DoA is having met you here: ive felt my humanity grow thanks to you. I hope that all of the commenters’ love can help you through this crisis.
That sounds bad. I don’t know what happened, but if you’d like the internet hug of a random stranger, I have some available.
there must be drama!! shots fired at sunrise!!!
my vote’s on rachel winning this duel tho, she has the clear psychological advantage
I still can’t decide if the offer to put her on the feed was serious or sarcastic.
Heh, a huge amount of hacking revolves around finding things people were too careless to properly secure. I remember rumors that the DNC hack got started by a simple phishing scheme.
That was the Podesta hack, and it was confirmed (and IIRC the phishing site was still up and structured in a way that let investigators get a list of other targets)
Yes, but finding implies intentionally looking for it, not just having the password shouted at you for existing in Joe’s physical vicinity for too long.
Unless I’m missing a different comic, there’s nothing in their prior interaction that indicates he gave her the password.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/hiatus/
Then it’s possible hacking is the right word, but there’s also been enough establishment that he gives out the password like candy that I’d also buy it happening off-camera, it’d just break the flow of the story to show it.
I think you might be overstating it, but I agree his concerns are less about people knowing about it and more about the “wrong” people knowing about it. I’m pretty sure he hands out information to people he figures would be “flattered” by it. Still a flaw of his own assumptions concerning proper behavior.
I doubt that. If it was Rachel, she hacked it. Unfair not to show us him giving the password to her otherwise.
Of course, it’s still possible this is a red herring and it wasn’t Rachel and it was one of those he did just give it to. If so, Raidah is my bet, as the latest disgusted woman we know he sent the password.
I’d rather it was her. More directly his own fault and less validation of his fantasies of persecution.
Nice victim blaming there. Maybe Joe shouldn’t have been asking to get hacked and dressed a bit differently.
…I can’t even find it in me to get mad at this trolling because it’s that ridiculous you consider Joe the victim in this. You know, rather than the women he’s been dehumanizing en masse all this time.
Well, I don’t wanna argue the point when we both can’t agree. I really blame myself here. I came on too strong and opinionated, so now I’m a troll.
His opinion of people while however shitty doesn’t suddenly make it OK to violate his privacy just because he has a shitty opinion.
“Well he was really judgemental, must be ok to violate his rights.” Is a -very- unacceptable ground to justify things.
(1) he’s not just having an opinion, he’s sexually harassing half the school.
(2) He didn’t get hacked in the first place, and any court would laugh at anyone who claimed his “privacy” was violated. He has very conscientiously and repeatedly put his list in the public domain, and is upset that, shockers, people are looking at it.
This is like someone posting to reddit “my name is john smith and I hate minorities”, then getting upset when people say “wow, this john smith guy hates minorities”.
The logic that it’s okay because he made himself easy to hack is a defense I’ve seen before, but never really accepted.
Another reason I’d rather have it not be “hacking”, but just someone he gave access.
So technically, if I give your neighbor the password to my wifi, and you get it and log in without my saying it’s okay first, and then access files on my share, you have committed hacking. Just nothing will ever come of it because probably no one cares. Just like nothing will come of this, Joe will get the stink eye from a bunch of people for a while and then he’ll be fine.
Bottom line, I don’t know why that one cat brought up “free speech” but privacy is a real right, and if you decide that doing bad things is necessary you get to stop pretending you’re the good-guy. Just maybe not the worst guy.
No. Really it isn’t. Maybe the wifi, but this wasn’t wifi. This was a site with an RSS feed.
Hacking actually has meaning.
Yes it does, gaining unauthorized access to a secured system, ie something with a password.
But that’s just it, Joe has granted access to anyone to whom he’s given the password, so I agree with thejeff, it’ll be sweeter if the leaker was someone to whom he actively gave the password.
Maybe Rachel will end up being bffsies with Raidah, or something.
Quick, condemn Joe for coming to the same conclusion multiple readers reached weeks ago!
Nice 🙂
Ah, predictable comment jokes, the puncline’s always right in front of your FAAAAAAACE!
*”Bohemian Rhapsody” continues from yesterday…*
Let Him Go!
Bismillah! We will not let him go
Let him go!
Joe’s just a poor boy, nobody loves him
JOE’S JUST A POOR BOY, FROM A RICH FAMILY
SPARE HIM HIS LIFE FOR THIS MONSTROSITY
We have already had enough murders/attempted murders, she should just go smack him upside the head for accusing her (rightful or not) and call it that. 😛
Assaulting Joe won’t really solve anything.
It’ll make me feel better.
Make that two in the: made readers feel better column.
and three! It’s better not to make accusations in public and still treat the entire thing like an elaborate game, especially as Joe hasn’t publicly shown any signs of learning anything and is still being a twit, to the frustration of the people around him.
No, he would probably stop talking
No, but finding every girl on his “Did List”
And posting their grades of his Sexy times performances, probably would equalize things.
Well RACHel out said it yourself. There is no redemption.
She is definitely making up for not doing much for the first 6-7 books.
I like how Joe was going to mention “Elementary” and not “Sherlock”.
Only one of those shows has a gender-bent Watson in it, guess which one Joe would rather watch.
Clearly he has SOME taste.
Sherlock got weird.
Benadryl Cabbagepatch was a perfect Sherlock though.
He really was not. He was exactly the Sherlock Moffat wanted, but like JLM even looks more like the classic illustrations. BBC Sherlock was a big flashy lazy adaptation that suffered badly from Moffat’s ever inflating ego. The guy really thinks he did Sherlock’s death and comeback better than Doyle. He really thinks the original Moriarty was a boring villain and that his half baked Heath Ledger’s Joker version is better.
Sorry, rephrasing: I found that adaptation entertaining. If the characters’ names and the setting were different, it wouldn’t change my opinion of the show.
I only read a couple of the books (and one was an illustrated childrens’ adaptation many moons ago), so I don’t have much context of the originals to go by. I should probably go download some of the public domain ebooks…
Well first let me just apologize for jumping on your comment like that. I love Elementary and I hate Moffat but the latter is not your problem and I didn’t mean to be That Person who won’t let strangers enjoy stuff. 🙂
It’s all good 😀
The joke is that he was right.
As an aside, I am now picturing Danny and Joe dressed as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock and Watson, and it is pretty hilarious.
Not really. I mean, maybe if he was attempting to be a dark horse comics version of Sherlock, but not Sir Conan Doyle’s Sherlock. The original Sherlock is actually a decently polite and cheerful fellow, though does suffer from mood swings at times. The original Sherlock also does use cocaine in 1890s medical injection format. He takes it…once a day if I remember correctly. Elementary is, as a result, a more faithful representation of Sherlock Holmes (actually even Robert Downey Jr., in those two live action Sherlock Holmes movies, was a better Sherlock than Benedict Cumberbatch). Benedict Cumberbatch is the perfect “insufferable genius” character archetype in the BBC show. And even then, the only real reason to watch the BBC version was for Martin Freeman’s Watson in my opinion.
You only watch “Sherlock” for Martin Freeman’s Watson. He and Benedict Cumberbatch’s interactions are really entertaining, but Watson is the only well done adaptation of any of the original characters in my opinion. It may have gotten Cumberbatch famous, but it is nowhere near his best role, let alone his best performance. I’d say his best is either Dr. Strange or Smaug ironically enough. Maybe Khan from the new Star Trek movies.
Joe, Sherlock has studied a variety of armed and unarmed martial art techniques and knows how to precisely target specific bones for precise breakage.
THAT ISN’T YOU.
joe, sherlock actually acknowledges when he’s wrong and apologizes when he’s been shitty
THAT ISN’T YOU.
Not in Britain!
eh. arthur conan doyle’s sherlock knew how to apologize, i’m pretty sure
bbc!sherlock is only a small snippet of the many potential and present sherlocks in existence, and should be treated with all due relevance
which is very little, as im sure it will be lost to the sands of time eventually as “that one thing that didn’t last very long and only came out like every ten years or whatever”. which. thank goodness
I can see that for book-Sherlock, but not for any of the modern TV/Movie versions.
elementary??? did he forget to do apologies??
and i’m pretty sure granada was a good egg
…these punctuation marks look a lot more aggressive than i was intending, i think; i was going more for Strong Emotions
see i really kind of hate how manchild is a legit part of sherlock holmes’ characterization now. because like, if this guy is so smart, how come he hasn’t figured out any social skills??? why is he making life harder for himself by alienating people? it just does not compute.
i mean, granted, original flavor holmes does come up with some pretty ridiculous shit (omfg, there are like a million uses for the knowledge that the earth revolves around the sun, you don’t have to be a flatlander in order to be logical!) but. i mean. at least he, like, had a sense of social responsibility; there is a very real sense that he thinks this is the best use for his skills to his society. it’s an emotional tie as well as a rational one, and his emotions aren’t inscrutable. he has boundaries, i guess.
it’s kind of like the batman thing: i prefer the guy that’s a decent dude and has human emotions and isn’t infallible, but the other uberperfect one that’s out there is too widespread to be ignored
It’s been a while since I watched Elementary, but I recall that Sherlock slowly learning to be accountable for his actions and apologetic when he crossed lines, or else Watson would be mad at him and he’d look like a puppy that peed on the rug.
Well…I admit I haven’t seen it since…either first or second season, so I suppose he might have had enough growth. But the ones I’ve seen, he was no better than the BBC or Downy versions.
Yeah he actually has character development. If you wanna give it another go sometime you might be pleasantly surprised.
I’m pretty sure Elementary!Sherlock actually DID pee on the rug at some point.
It really held the room together.
Lol
Nor is Rachel a hardened criminal ready and willing to murder to avoid doing hard time for her crimes.
And now Danny’s joining in supporting Joe’s wild fantasies.
I mean, that doesn’t look like someone who wouldn’t murder them.
Yeah, the face she makes in the last panel is that of “They know too much, I’ve got to get rid of them!”.
I interpret it more as, ‘No jury on EARTH would convict me!”
panel 1 rachel is…a lot of people during this arc
panel 4 joe is also a lot of people during this arc
when did characters start embodying general attitudes of commenters, or has this always been a thing
I was thinking the same thing
let’s do the brainwarp again!!
Willis is spying on us all through a time-scope for plot threads.
o.O
this changes the entire game
is this how he supports his cartoonist career? with porn and also secret betting? does he know when trump is gonna get impeached/kicked out of office???
or maybe we’re just that predictable but i know which is the more interesting route
…..
……
….
Okay, I know we shouldn’t, but let’s set up a temporal paradox.
*chinhands* i’m with you so far
But were you with me before I said it?
if i wasn’t before, i will be in a later before!
Good point.
……. I think we need to introduce vocabulary for a second time dimension.
…. and then figure out how to paradox THAT one up as well.
if then, then was; but was not, then that?
we’re going to have to learn how to program.
I’ll go kill Ocelot, real fast.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if we set up a temporal paradox! Let’s do it!
The ability to read future comment sections must be one of the worst super powers ever.
charles xavier looks at his enterprising new student. “you poor soul,” he says, a single tear edging from his single-tear duct. he too knows the depths of the abyss of the human soul
It’s actually a time scope that peers roughly 3 months into the past.
It’s always been a thing.
good to know, thank u for yr information
hdgfjhs danny and joe are so cute
What would be to point of hacking his “do list” when he gives it out to people who don’t even want it?
To cause this arc, obviously. However blase Joe may have been with the existence and password, his own actions didn’t directly lead to everyone in the dorm finding out about it, reading it, and getting upset over it.
It took someone else *choosing* to publicize it for that to happen. Absent a third actor (Rachel, Raidah, or someone else), a lot of people would have been happier this day.
I was hoping it was Roz. Still am, actually.
Danny’s crotch speaks the truth, always make sure they’re in police custody first
[Insert crude joke that doubles as an excuse to reiterate that I ship Danny/Ethan here.]
I for one wish to go on record as saying that I really like Rachel’s face in panel 5.
I, too, wish to offer up a platitude so as to avoid certain death from Rachel.
“Nice job undermining Joe… can I leave now?”
-Onion Furry
Rachel! Solve two problems at once, and take Danny’s ukulele, and hit Joe with it! (Preferably across the back, as you’ll cause sufficient pain with less actual injury. I can’t really bring myself to wish anyone actual harm.) Joe will face a consequence that’ll actually get through his meat-skull, Danny will be sans a ukulele, and no one will be happy about any of it! It’s the perfect solution!
The fact that her irises are only white when she’s rolling or narrowing her eyes is honestly a little unsettling.
wait until you can see the whites of their eyes
Not irises. Sclera. She lacks visible irises.
Okay the way Joe says “That Sherlock guy” makes me think Elementary might be the only version of Holmes he’s aware of.
Her wording in the first panel sounds as though she didn’t do it out of spite but actually hoping that it would teach Joe a lesson. Maybe she likes him? Or is it just my IW! ship talking?
Please… no… this is almost Gilgamesh/Saber level of a bad couple…
What Joe and his own mother?
would that hit the mark? Instead of being almost as bad?
If IW!Joe and Rachel showed up right now, they’d both agree that Rachel should just walk away until Joe grows up, and even then she’s under no obligation to come back and check on him. Not that they’d need to warn her about getting involved, because even if she does find him attractive on any level – which it’s not at all clear she does – his behavior has cuddled that into complete disgust.
Ugh, curdled, not cuddled. I’m sure he’d like to cuddle, but…
Maybe she just wants him to be less of a virulently awful person towards woman because it’s fucking exhausting and dehumanizing to deal with.
I mean, hypothetically if I’m being a jerk to someone I don’t like, I don’t really care if they learn anything.
Only if she wasn’t entirely sincere in her “there is no redemption” speech.
Although making the list was a pretty shitty thing to do, I think spreading it around was kinda shitty too? Not close to the same level of shitty, but it seems like all of the consequences of sharing a list like that weren’t really thought through (someone could be dealing with some issues that seeing their ranking made worse). Not sure what I would do in that situation but that probably wasn’t the most tactful way of handling it.
You’re talking about someone who talks smack to a girl who literally JUST got back from being hospitalized for being suicidal.
You’re talking about someone who has more than once shit-picked on said girl’s relationship with her girlfriend, even though that relationship – albeit not healthy – was probably one of the only reasons she was still alive at that point.
Rachel does not consider consequences of her actions. She’s on a “feminist” crusade to make sure absolutely everyone knows how to be a perfect feminist and to hurt them if she considers them a fuck up. Obviously, there’s something underlying going on in her own life, but she’s letting it eat at her until she becomes one of the worst types of person.
She’s definitely on a crusade, but I don’t think it’s particularly feminist. Just going against whatever draws her attention this week.
Maybe she’s just hav
Being suicidal is not a get out of jail free card for physically assaulting multiple people and -emotionally torturing others- (including Billie), to the point *they* are considering suicide as well.
It is seriously appalling that so many people are defending emotional blackmail here and trying to shame someone who spoke out about it.
While Rachel has every right to be pissed at Ruth’s attempt of redemption, her tirade against Ruth was when Ruth was at her most vulnerable, and while a suicide attempt doesn’t magically erase your past crimes, but you really shouldn’t tear someone down so soon after one. Also, Rachel did absolutely nothing to challenge Ruth before. she didnt notify the RM, she didnt warn freshmen about Ruth, and she did nothing to help Billie, who in her mind is an abuse victim, but then took the moral high ground when accusing Ruth.
Ruth didn’t attempt suicide.
Plus it isn’t Rachel’s job to challenge Ruth.
Her downward spiral would have probably led to a suicide attempt, and it was considered serious enough that Ruth had to be hospitalised and given anti depressants. While i agree that Rachel is under no obligation to challenge Ruth, she’s not in a good position to condemn what Ruth has done when she didn’t even voice an objection to what Ruth was doing
I mean, for all we know show she has. Rachel hasn’t had any prominence until her lashing out at Ruth.
Maybe we’ll see that in flashbacks
> her tirade against Ruth was when Ruth was at her most vulnerable
Saying “woe is me” *is not a get out of responsibility for abuse card*.
No. This is *messed up*. This is one of the most common ways to abuse a family member or loved one, to claim that they are hurting you or “maybe you’ll just commit suicide”, and it’s *horrific*.
For all the progress Ruth has made since then, her speech to the dorm showed that she was starting to peel back from responsibility — and Billie is being a shithead by *encouraging* that. To anyone who can see, Ruth is a violent abuser who got her grandpa to come in and hush things up when she almost got caught *flagrantly* breaking the rules and grooming one of her dorm mates — and is continuing to associate with that dorm mate! There are rules against what Ruth is doing not because the “Man wants to keep true love down”, but because what they were doing was *monstrously unhealthy and destructive*.
If people want to look at what was kept secret, what *wasn’t* immediately apparent to everyone there (because Ruth and Billie were *lying to everyone about how they violently hated each other to cover up their even more appalling love affair*), then we have to look at what Ruth actually *did* — use her power to pressure one of her dorm mates into a relationship, allow/encourage an alcoholic to continue to booze up, and create a suicide pact with them.
I understand why people see that as somehow a tragic romance. Society has primed us to think that it’s “dangerous” and “sexy”. But in reality, it’s not romantic at all, it’s a *shitshow*, and it’s really frustrating that people are giving Rachel shit for it by simultaneously claiming that she should know stuff only the audience knows, but that stuff that would validate her doesn’t count because she wouldn’t have known it.
Saying “woe is me” *is not a get out of responsibility for abuse card*.
I agree with this completely, and that Rachel’s absolutely in the right about confronting her about her past behaviour, but she chose to do it at the worse possible time she could. She definitely knew about Ruth’s suicide attempt because she was the one who reported it, yet she still chose to attack and tear down Ruth right after Ruth came back.
Sounds like someone just has a beef with feminism.
As a general rule, I’d say that hacking someone is pretty shitty.
In this specific case, well, no, still shitty (don’t hack people). But there’s nuance. Joe was always open to acknowledging that the list existed, and happily shared particular scores with certain folks as some misguided form of flattery, in public. At one point in front of an entire classroom full of people. So he had no problem with people knowing the list existed, he simply didn’t want to have to deal with the negative consequences of the list existing.
So, you know, hacking is wrong, but the victim manages to be sleazier than the perpetrator.
I agree. I mean, Joe can screw himself, but for the sake of the girls whose names are on the list and were probably hurt and publicly humiliated by its public distribution, I think this was a well-intentioned but thoughtless move on Rachel’s part.
I don’t think this was well-intentioned at all. Whoever spread it most likely just wanted Joe to be figuratively marched naked through town, shame bell ringing loudly, and distributing the list was the most sure-fire way to accomplish that. Other considerations would be secondary, probably with quite a margin.
Something we haven’t seen is the reaction of the male parts of the campus. We already know it has unsavory elements, how long will it take before Joe’s Do-list gets picked up and made into a campus-spanning living google-sheet?
That last panel is just good old fashioned comedy.
Why isn’t there a detective character named Jack Hughes?
Seize the opportunity! Or pass it along to a writer friend!
Well, now I know what to name the PI in my next D&D session.
He used to be a narc, but now he investigates insurance fraud. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-hughes-367b18141
“And the name’s ‘JOHN’. Only my Mom calls me ‘Jack’.”
It could definitely be Rachel, but I still can think of several other people who might have “hacked” Joe’s do list. If he wanted his do list to remain secret, he shouldn’t have told so many people about it.
I really want it to be Danny. Either because he’s trying to encourage personal growth, or because “New Danny, a Good Egg” secretly aspires to be a supervillain.
Would be kind of cool, but a) it’s not Danny and b) we really should have seen some clues of it by now.
Hey, Danny? Now would be the time to walk away and let Joe face the consequences of his own shitty behavior.
I mean he was a shitty friend anyway
so you’re not really losing anything even if he doesn’t come crawling back to the only person who still tolerates him (which he almost certainly will).
I know that sounded really bitter, but Joe reminds me way too much of my brother who is an absolute douchenozzle about the same sorts of things
(actually got really angry when I explained that asexuality is a thing that exists). Thankfully we live on different continents now.
Motive, ability and opportunity is not actual evidence you dunderheads.
If Rachel is going to murder you, it is because you are stupid enough to blame the first person who could have done it with 0 proof to backup your claim. And that DOES look like a murder face but YOU CAN’T SEE THAT SO WHY DID YOU IMMEDIATELY JUMP FROM ‘YOU ARE A HACKER’ TO ‘YOU ARE A MURDERER ALSO THAT WILL NOW KILL US FOR CALLING YOU OUT, GODDAMN WAS THIS A BAD IDEA’???
I am torn between being amused and facepalming.
Now that you mention it, they do look a bit alike.
http://i.imgur.com/YWmW7U0.jpg
All of this. Rachel’s definitely a possibility, but now I really don’t want it to be her, because I don’t want Joe to be right for making such ridiculous leaps.
Hmmm. I really like characters like this. I’m glad Rachel’s finally getting some development.
Willis really does shine in graying up the value spectrum of his “good” characters. Like in this case, was it really the right thing for Rachel to hack this list? I mean, leaving out Joe, who deserves all the flak he’s getting – how many girls were hurt by finding out some random douchebag has been perusing their bodies and giving them low rankings? I know I wouldn’t want to know.
It’s a little bit like Roz, where in one’s crusade to take someone wrong down, you end up creating some thoughtless collateral damage.
I don’t see how the blame for that would fall on Rachel. The perusing and ranking was being done, and semi-publicly at that, whether or not they knew about it. Don’t blame Rachel for Joe’s actions.
I’m not blaming Rachel for Joe’s actions. HER actions were to spread the list around to everyone. And I question the benefit this was to the girls she spread the list around to.
I mean, let’s take everyone who was ranked, say, below a 5.Is it really helpful to those girls for EVERYONE ON CAMPUS to see them labelled as a “2” or a “3.5” or a “0”? Is that something everyone has to know? Is that something most people would want everyone to notice and talk about? You know what actually happens when stuff like this happens on a real college campus (and it does)?
The people who are “high” in ranking will start laughing at the ones who ranked “low”. They become a matter of public spectacle and discussion.
Like, I get that Rachel had…noble intentions and I like that about her. But intentions don’t always matter if your actions will probably hurt more people than it helps…and the only person that publicly releasing the list could conceivably help is really Joe himself (i.e. helping him become a more thoughtful person).
And I think from a character-writing standpoint, this moral grayness is really interesting and sophisticated.
Like, it’s not a bad thing that “good” characters in DoA sometimes do questionable stuff.
So instead, he just keeps on with the list, adding more girls to it, spreading it to interested (and therefore probably even creepier) people.
Much the same consequences on a smaller scale, but longer term.
The people it helps are all the future entries on the list or those targeted if the list should spread in secret.
And if outing the list helps change Joe’s behavior it also helps all the girls he would have creeped on.
1. There is no indication he shares this list with “other creepers” in that sense, and until there is, it’s a pointless assumption.
2. So, it helps hypothetical people at the expense of…actual people, as I’ve already described in my previous comment.
3. Joe is an ass, but he’s not exactly a “creeper” in the predatory sense. Which isn’t to defend his ass-ness, but it also means that there isn’t really anyone being…”helped” by this outing. Again, aside from MAYBE Joe himself getting some character development from it.
Like, I see your point, and I’m certain this would be the exact reasoning Rachel herself used. But what I’m trying to say is that this type of action, in a real-life scenario, would mostly just play out as widespread humiliation and mockery of many of the actual girls on that list. (And I say this because things like this DO happen on college campuses and I’ve seen it firsthand.) To say that what Rachel did was 100% good and right means ignoring the very real pain and humiliation that what she did could have caused, regardless of her intent.
If he hasn’t already shared it with other creepers, him not sharing it with other creepers is luck.
True, i feel like he already made aware to just about anyone in proximity to him that he has the list – so really it probably just ended up being a self-confidence blow (or raise?) to a lot of people.
hmm that’s a good question
i mean, like, yes: you do let more people know about this list who could be hurt by this. but also you out Joe as the person who made this list and what his actual (public!) opinions are.
…like Carla, you don’t have to know what the list actually says if you don’t want to. but apparently everyone knows exactly who put this bs out. and whether that’s word of mouth or…something else? who knows
I like that how most of the characters have a mix of good and bad in them. Life is messy, and people are far more complicated then they tend to be depicted in the media, all the more so when you’re just starting college and living on your own for the first time.
“Like in this case, was it really the right thing for Rachel to hack this list? ”
No. The fact that this is up for debate worries me.
There are very few cases where violating people’s privacy is justified. To “teach them a lesson” or hurt them? Is not one of those.
To stop them from doing further harm is though.
Of course, if you think the list is harmless …
“DUH NUH NUH NAAA”
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMYME-UlzCc
Danny….why are you helping Joe? This isn’t a “crime” you should be helping with unless you really are Joe’s enabler.
Bingo.
I’m inclined to think Rachel didn’t do it now because that’s not a “Oops, my scheme to expose corruption and PUA evil has been uncovered.” No, it’s, “why the hell would I want to deal with you assholes more than I already want to, let alone intrude on your f-ed up fantasyland” look.
I’d agree with this, but panel 1 does not read like someone who did not have a hand in it. I mean she’s literally saying “After all that you didn’t learn a damn thing.” That reads as someone frustrated that their actions were meaningless.7
Could just be her thinking he should’ve learned something from all this – or even just from her getting angry during their first encounter – and frustrated he didn’t.
True, but coupled with Rachel’s previous actions… I don’t know. She’s had a habit of downplaying consequences to actions, that bad things happen all the time to people so they don’t matter as well (The gunman on campus) as well as not reading the body language in the room when she helped trigger Ambers breakdown.
And I would have gotten away with it, too, it it hadn’t been for you meddling bros!
Rachel seems too obvious. And I’m not even gonna bother speculate who it is.
Dark Horse twist candidates are:
* Mike: Because Joe’s misery amuses him.
* Danny: Because he’s going through a change.
* Sarah: Because she’s found out about Joe and Joyce’s texting.
* Joe himself by accidentally hitting all his e-mail contacts.
i actually really would enjoy it being mike for multiple reasons
1) it’s such an asshole thing to do
2) it’s an asshole thing to do that kind of has positive results??
3) he enjoys calling people out on their shit and this is such calling people out on their shit. like, godtier of that
4) this mike seems to be motivated mostly by annoyance; and i could see all of joe’s attitude getting really annoying really fast
5) it’s coming from a guy, which means that joe is going to take it more seriously. possibly? it is a fellow dude telling him to knock it off.
5a) contraripoint, being a fellow dude could make joe take this less seriously than coming from a woman who is telling him viscerally how she has been hurt by his actions. because the whole problem is that he doesn’t take women seriously as human beings
but like a) i like that rachel is getting storytime, and b) mike’s all up in the ethan/danny storyline, so he’s probably busy. and it really, really fits in well with rachel’s known character.
I really hope it’s not Mike, because that just reinforce Mike’s asshole in a good cause image, which is bullshit.
mmm
mike: self-serving asshole, or well-intentioned asshole?
nah hahaahah it’s self-serving all the way. and he really doesn’t stand to benefit from it the way that rachel does
This strip makes it pretty obvious she’s not the one who did it, I think.
That’s not the face of someone who’s been caught doing something, that’s the face of someone who’s been accused of something they didn’t do.
And from a narrative standpoint, there’s nowhere to go with this conversation, if he’s right, and it’s not particularly useful for Joe’s potential development into someone who doesn’t do shitty things.
If his list was, in fact, cracked by a Grumpy Feminist with computer skillz, he doesn’t need to be confronted by the fact that it’s really shitty. But if it was someone he gave the password to – someone he thought would be into it – then he’d have to look at himself.
It could also be the face of someone thinking “You call that hacking? All I had to do was change a ‘false’ into a ‘true’ in the url you yourself made public to gain full access. What’s next? Are you saying using an ATM is bank robbery?”
That last point is why I really hope it wasn’t actually “hacked”, however easy it might have been.
I don’t want Joe to have an excuse to play the victim here.
You never expect the Spanish Inquisi… I mean the new character XD
It does seem likely though. The way she talked about not learning anything in the first panel. It’s like she set Joe up hoping that he will learn he is a douchebag and now is exasperated because he failed to get the hint.
idk i feel it’s a little more like she thinks she’s exposing a douchebag, and meeting him afterwards she is like “why am i not surprised”. it more just reinforces her pre-existing opinion of people’s ability to change
L’accusé a été contesté de manière acceptable
Je ne suis pas certaine de ce que Google Translate a essayé de dire.
French to English, and what it spits out was exactly how I put it in.
I’m actually interested if anyone was actually reading the Do-List for it’s contents. It occurs to me the only people who would, would be Mike (for the fact its a gold-mine of usable information) and Jason. Mostly because Jason is the kind of arrogant perv who might think it a measure of his masculinity to see who he could and couldn’t date.
I’m sure Ryan would have been interested, if Ryan is still capable of reading such things.
Of course, people like Ryan are the ones who would happily accept the password access Joe has long been throwing around.
Since when was Jason a perv?
Since he told Sal he was changing his office hours to “right the fuck now”.
To be fair, I’m not sure he’s exactly that kind of perv.
Comic Reactions:
Panel 1: It hasn’t been very long for Joe to process things, but there’s a lot of truth to Rachel’s words in this panel.
Joe’s typical MO when called out or when his actions have been ill-advised has been to rewrite the script on the moment. Being an ass in Gender Studies class and getting consequences for that becomes the teacher and the class being out to get him and trap him, getting yelled at by Sarah is because she’s feisty and unhinged or looking for a secret threesome, and so on.
And it’s tied to a thing I’ve seen a lot from a certain type of guy wrapped up in this cult of toxic masculinity. Which is the idea that to be wrong, to change one’s mind, to be openly and visibly empathetic and responsive to the ideas and emotions of others, especially women, is to be a (slur for gay man), to be rendered feminine.
In the most extreme cases, you get things like the Republican Party where they will support an ever-cascading list of terrible ideas before ever admitting they got conned or supported the wrong thing and cheer the “moral clarity” of doubling down on terrible decisions because at least that’s “decisive”.
And it’s understandable that folks would feel that way. Being willing to introspect on one’s self and see “am I right” requires a certain amount of vulnerability. And for a philosophy that sells itself on the idea that one can masculinity away those feelings of vulnerability, of indecision, of feeling lost, anything that makes one vulnerable as a man must be bad.
For Joe, perhaps this is just his public fronting before he gets home and really sits with what he’s done and the harm he’s caused and severely re-evaluate his self-image and this desperate performance that doesn’t even help him achieve his stated goals and makes him lie to his best friend.
But his public words state a plan of just waiting it out and then returning to the exact same behaviors that got him into this mess, simply to avoid the vulnerability and difficulty of re-evaluating something he’s made the very core of his ego and sense of self.
Especially as he still hasn’t seemed to cotton on for even the real reason for so many women’s anger on this subject nor showing any willingness to find out what that reason is, merely dismissing it as a witch hunt against him, which with modern political parallels is especially meh.
I THINK it is mostly just Joe’s on the fly defense mechanism. He flaps his gum and says whatever stupid shit while re-positioning him into a position where things are not his fault.
Not a great mechanism, but understandable. Not unlike Walky’s more stupid moments.
The problem with Joe is that a) All his flapping comes at the expense of others (rather than Walky’s, who mainly comes at the expense of himself, such as when Regionald, duke of Thingley, picked a fight with a tree). Since the list leaked he has actively annoyed every single woman within earshot and done no-trivial amount do Danny’s reputation, not to mention done a lot to ruin Danny’s day.
b) and he never retreats from his bullshit later when he has had time to cool down (with the one exception of apologizing to Dorothy). He reframes it so he tries to avoid the same behavior again, but there is no apology, no sincerity and no assurance to the people who put up with him that he wont do the same thing again (promising to back off Sarah in the most obnoxious way possible is a good example).
And sadly, you are completely right. In certain circles “never back down, never be wrong, never apologize,” is the most important tenet of the Man code. To admit to be wrong is to show weakness. To show weakness is to be KNAPSU, or non-alpha, or whatever (thank God there is no president with that mindset, can you imagine?)
Speaking of “on the fly”, will Rachel be the second woman Joe’s gonna leave the vicinity of in a full seeing today?
Ugh autotype!
“In a full-on sprint?”
Joe is a comic tragedy, sometimes.
Panel 2: Dudes, just let her finish going to class.
Panels 3-4: Yes, Joe. Every woman who dislikes you or calls you out on something is trying to destroy you personally, because you are the center of their world. And your system was super secret and protected and not something you handed out like goddamn candy, RSS feed and all to literally everyone who popped on your radar because you so desperately wanted someone to validate the work you spent creating your creepy objectifying list.
Like, he’s still hung up on this idea that he was hacked. And who knows, maybe it’ll turn out that someone did hack him, but I’m going to guess at the end of the day, it’s not. How this got out is likely because of the same way it got out in the first place, him handing it out like candy until it got to the point where he could no longer control who saw it. And it probably was done without much of a thought to Joe and his shit.
Because that’s one of Joe’s central tragedies. He is convinced that he’s not only the hero of his own life, but everyone else’s as well. Every attractive woman wants to sleep with him, every unattractive woman is sad he doesn’t want to sleep with him, every man is cheering on his list and seeing it as valuable and if they aren’t they just need to be pushed into being as “free” as him.
That’s the central pillar of the fantasy he has cocooned himself behind.
And it needs to topple over.
Panel 5: Oh dear, no. No Danny, don’t enable this, though this is also incredibly adorable.
i mean, like, if he’d been doxxed he’d probably have some much more serious shit coming his way
if he’d been hacked, we’d probably have things like Some Person Writing Reviews Of Joe or something
Yeah, the enabling here is just awful. Danny should either be saying “And?”, making it clear that he doesn’t see someone exposing Joe’s ugliness being a dirty deed, or trying to just get Joe to drop it and move on.
Like, I’ve been trying to give Danny the benefit of the doubt here, but this is just the exact wrong thing to do.
It’s still a bad thing to hack assholes, especially since Joe is a jerk but he’s not like… abusing anyone. He doesn’t have that POWER over anyone. He’s uncomfortable and makes women’s days a little worse when they have to be around him, and that’s a bad thing that he needs to fix, but it doesn’t mean any retaliation for that is automatically heroic and justified.
Also publicizing Joe’s list is not a good thing to do. That hurts the victims.
On a scale of 1 to 10, this is a 3, at most.
Yes, hacking people is always bad. But there’s degrees of bad, and thus far it appears that the only thing leaked out are Joe’s identity and the “do list”, which I’d count as semi-public (given that he was giving it out to a number of people, personally identifying it as a list that he collated).
No phone number, email, online screen names, unrelated personal history, information on his actions performed in an anonymous setting, explicitly private data or really anything else that could do harm.
Again, still not super-awesome from whoever handed the data out to the campus, but not remotely as bad as it could possibly be.
I’m gonna have to take a hard no stance on the idea that hacking/doxxing people is always bad. There are any number of situations where it’s an objective good that can protect people from harm such as when it targets sexual predators, violent abusers, con artists etc.
You know, I’ll just put in Cerberus’ words yesterday when someone asked whether the list did any harm:
It gives targeting information to dangerous people, encourages harassment of “high numbers”, bullying of “low numbers”, is an open testamen to one’s dehumanization which makes one feel like rancid garbage and like a piece of meat that is uncalled in an institution of learning and that you are unsafe in your own living space (because he’s always creeping in the girl’s dorm).
On top of that, it adds an additional color to his instances of sexual harassment in the past knowing he’s been compiling this list on his fellow students, thus making those instances feel way more dangerous and like pushing back against him will result in being publicly shamed in a scary PUA guide.
Additionally it lends support to predators, helping to maintain their worldview that their dehumanizing and targeting activities are normative and just what guys do as well as a good list of people with low self-esteem or naivety to exploit in sexual assault.
Plus sexism feeds into and reinforces a number of marginalizations and violence that take a number of tolls on a large number of people.
This stuff has real consequences and does real harm even if that harm is not as obvious as a bigot curb-stomping someone and can be what encourages and supports those more obvious systems of abuse.
…………okay, good point. Derp.
Not really a derp. It’s just that if you’ve never been affected by this kind of behaviour yourself in your life (in itself a good thing), then it’s not something you’ll automatically understand. Sadly, the main way to spot the red flags early on remains to have lived through them.
And equally sadly, this sort of thing is not -actively- taught to the extent it should. Sure, the information is out there, but it’s not reaching nearly as many people as possible, because it’s not being discussed nearly as heavily as it should in f.ex. school.
So it can be a real hit or miss whether you find someone on the internet who knows about these things and who is willing to share the information with you. I for one count myself immensely lucky to have found Cerberus and ischemgeek and Lailah and Bluewind and other people in this comment field (sorry if I forget your names) who are doing just that.
Well put. Women want him, men envy him. The ONLY possible exceptions are men and women who are hotter than him, who hopefully will approve of his attempts to better himself, and people who are “crazy”.
And just as you have mentioned several times, his bullshit completely works against that fiction. Roz DID want him for sex, until he sabotaged her class. Walky WAS jealous about his escapades, until he insulted Dorothy. Danny seem to feel more pity than anything else.
Joe is doing REALLY bad, and it’s his own fault
Someone mentioned Assigned Male on here a few days ago. I can’t believe it wasn’t mentioned before. It’s awesome. So I’m going to mention a few times, so more of the cool commenters on here have a chance to enjoy it if they haven’t already heard of it.
http://assignedmale.tumblr.com/post/99204841272/stop-gendering-genitals
I’m a BIG fan of that comic. There is a childrens book coming out soon I really look forward to.
Thanks for linking! I’m really concerned about transphobia, but being cis I don’t know the experience. It’s super helpful to read something like this ^^
(and by “experience” I mean the everyday challenges such as sexism, binarization, and transphobia associated with being trans or non-binary)
also I may have binged the whole archive in one day
On the one hand, those could be the faces of someone that was just caught by someone she thought was too bumbling to catch on.
On the other, those could be the faces of someone upset that anyone would think she’d done that, which I would find hilarious if Joe got it wrong.
…
*smacks Danny upside the head*
This is called enabling, you dolt. There’s no justification for this now that’s not enabling. Staaaaaap.
Yup, I don’t think he gets that that’s what he’s doing, but it’s what he’s doing.
Joe has actively tried to get him to join in since the list first leaked, so this is Danny finally giving in. Again, this is Joe’s whole MO. Loudly and relentlessly pretend reality is the way he wants it and demand people play along, until some of them do. Same goes for his attempts to woo women (his first attempt to come on to Rachcel, for example).
But Danny really should know better.
I’m holding judgement until the next strip because I read that last panel as Danny being sarcastic and mocking him. The fact he cuts Joe off (at least that’s what that panel overlap’s always been in most comics in the past) shows an odd shift in their dynamic, but I could be wrong.
Danny is being a bad egg.
Also, I’m not saying I called it? Buuuuuuut: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/ladyfolk/#comment-1249833
“Also: 5 bucks says that Joe’s going to suddenly leap up and exclaim that it must have been one of the women CS majors who hacked it, because no man would want to expose his list, clearly any man that came across it would treasure the least for its valuable insights and bountiful strategy and I think I need to go take a shower…”
…I owe myself 5 bucks, it seems.
*slides over 5 dollars and then answers the phone because you called it*
You called it!
That last panel Rachel sure seems to be plotting murder based on her facial expression XD
NO, DANNY! Do NOT allow Joe to drag him with you with his bullshit. Keep up the non-committing support thing, but do not join in.
No! Bad Danny!
Also bad Joe, obviously. And possibly maybe bad Rachel I dunno.
But bad Danny! Bad!
Danny, if you keep enabling Joe like you just did in panel 5, your ukulele and dapper cap privileges will be suspended indefinitely.
i will take up the dapper cap and ukulele!
…
Right now, I want nothing more than a DOA strip featuring Sierra in a dapper cap and with a ukulele!
this is a good idea
Sounds counter-productive, seeing as how Joe dislikes both.
Rachel’s gotten a little Liz Wilson this week.
I’d be very interested to see Rachel’s reaction in the next few strips to being around two little boys like those two!
Always good to see Elementary getting some love, even if it’s from Joe.
“Sherlock Holmes is so much better when Watson is that hot Asian chick from Charlie’s Angels.”
By God, Rachael is impatient. Rome was not character developed in a day you know!
Well no she isn’t. She also has said that people never change, so I don’t really know why she’s surprised.
Because she’s a hypocrite. She believes whichever lets her lash out.
Are we seriously shaming a character for speaking out against a violent abuser who assaulted multiple people and nearly drove *another* person to suicide?
*Really*, are we doing that?
Well, not exactly.
Billie is also depressed, possibly suicidally so, but Ruth didn’t, like, encourage her suicidal tendencies. She basically did all she could in her damaged mental state to ward Billie off that kind of thinking.
Which, I mean, they still entered a suicide pact. Thy both agreed that they would kill themselves together. But I don’t think either of them really thought it through, thankfully.
I’m pretty sure that was specific to violent abusers.
Women shouldn’t have to be patient with awful dudes treating them like shit.
While I agree that it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to change in the course of a day (I’d expect at least a week or three to go from awful to awkwardly tolerable), it is perfectly understandable that she’s frustrated with someone who’s treated her like her most admirable trait is how much better she’d look with her shirt off.
I read Danny’s reaction as sarcasm. Is it possible or is it a language problem?
definite sarcasm
I can usually detect sarcasm on the internet, but for this one I wasn’t sure at first. But the extreme scenario he describes, emphasis on murder and police custody, confirms it. Danny isn’t dumb enough to believe either of them are likely to happen and is just venting frustration at how dense his friend can be.
He’s doing it badly then. He’s feeding Joe’s scenario rather than disrupting it.
Well, to be fair, that’s more due to Joe actually being pretty dense than Danny doing something badly. If Joe doesn’t understand how inane it sounds, then Danny’s fault was using sarcasm to begin with.
Sorry. I reread the comic and I think I see what you mean. Danny’s particular choice of words does perpetuate Joe’s delusion that it’s not him or his actions that’re to blame and that he is right to feel like the victim.
I’m seeing it as sarcasm too. However, we’ll see with the next two or three strips (~1 minute of realtime); interesting cliffhanger.
Actually, I’ve been thinking Mary was the one who leaked the do-list. Such an act of sabotage might possibly explain why she’s been acting uncharacteristically human of late.
This strip is hilarious and just what I needed after the painfulness of all the latest ones lol
C’mon, don’t Dan it up now, you were doing so well! Where’s New Danny and his trusty ukulele when you need them?
They’re both going to get a kicking?
Another case closed by Fuckboy and the Lameman!
Don’t think this counts as “enabling” just because he was giving in to Joe’s theory.
If it was “enabling” he’d’ve said what she did was hacking and everything Joe has done is okay.
He’s done his part, now he’s just playing along with the moment.
Tomorrow should clear it up.
That being said: can we please get on with it?
Also, Joe’s presented a previous knowledge on things before. I like when he said “Sherlock guy” he did mean the general character of Sherlock Holmes with no specific iteration in mind.
I’ve decided to Defend Rachel against attacks and Slurs.
Because she seems indefensible.
And from what we know of Rachel ( IW ) and Willis logic, it just doesn’t add up.
It’s too unlikely.
We are being asked to believe that Rachel is just being an intolerant Bingo who piles on other people when they are down. We are being asked to believe that even Mary is nicer than Rachel this week.
Obviously Willis is just screwing with us.
Now she is a little over the top here, but FML Joe called her “eleven” . Those are fighting words. In context Joe ought to have known better. He’s rubbing it in.
What we don’t know is anything about this Rachels life. For that reason alone I’m giving her a pass.
The more I think about it,vthe more I think this arc will be about Rachel and what bad things happened to her.
This is going to be unpopular but most of what I say is.
It doesn’t really matter WHO unleashed “the list” because of few things. Even though “the list” would be considered a scummy thing to do, Releasing it is just as bad.
It incites the real possibility of actual physical harm from people, perhaps even a murder attempt. There are far many of these crackpot “Words=violence” people who think that saying something jusitifies violence and honestly, having gone to IU I have to say the campus is FULL of these antifa-esque assholes.
There is an awful lot of “well, I’m better than violence, but I don’t like this person so I hope someone else violences them up”.
Quite right. While The List is quite douchey it was just Joe’s creepy little hobby. It wasn’t hurting anyone. He did mention it and spread it around so it Kinda lessens the impact but still it’s a bit too similar to revealing someone’s thoughts and secrets to the public. Not something you should do.
It didn’t hurt anyone physically. But lists like that are very capable of affecting people emotionally, especially people with low selfesteem and emotional damage can be just as dangerous as physical damage, albeit in different ways. Of course, we don’t know if anyone in the comic was affected that severely, but the point still stands that it has the potential to be very harmful.
That’s why I pointed out Joe mentioning it. Basically if it was something he was writing into the drawer or only sharing with his male buddies it would have been a harmless but creepy hobby.
No as soon as he shares his list with one other person its not exactly harmless. Him telling Danny he thinks Billy is fat and desperate would be enough to make it non harmless.
Soooo now sharing negative opinions is bad?
There’s a huge difference between sharing negative opinions and sharing advice on how to be a sexual predator. Come on.
Sharing that someone is emotionally vulnerable and drinks heavily (as he did with Billie), for the express purpose of encouraging other dudes to try to fuck her is absolutely a bad thing, regardless of how many or few people it’s shared with.
It’s not just the women who were given low ratings that are pissed at him. It’s all of them. Because this is sleazy behavior.
Mhm I am not defending Joe but what you are doing here is getting Dangerously close to Policing Thoughts and opinions. When two people can’t share an opinion with each other because it speaks negatively about another person… that’s not good for freedom of speech.
No the difference between telling one person something telling five people something and telling the whole school is just a matter of scale. Sure one harm is less than 500 harm but its still not zero harm. If this was something he kept in his diary it would be harmless.
Freedom of speech is important because what you say can effect change.
You can share a negative opinion but lets not pretend that it is a harmless act. Also sharing a negative opinion can be a good thing like warning people that Ryan is a creep.
Having the legal right to something and having something be the right thing to do are two different things. And having the legal right to do something and something being harmless are two entirely different things.
Joe having the legal right to say Billie is fat and desperate doesn’t make it right or harmless – he can still be an asshole for doing so and people can tell him to keep dickery like that to himself.
And free speech = government can’t arrest you for saying something. It doesn’t mean people can’t censure you for being an asshole.
I will fucking police men who think it’s their business to catalogue their every thought about women’s sexual attractiveness like it matters all day every day. It’s fucking gross and unnecessary.
like everyone else has already said.
Also people definitely aren’t trying to control Joe’s thoughts. He can be as creepy as he wants in his own head. The list that he made an RSS feed for and gave out passwords to and which he loudly updates complete strangers on is not Joe’s thoughts.
Cerberus put up a very good explanation of why the list was absolutely hurtful.
Really frustrated that people are defending sexual harassment and sexism.
Locke, if thinking “words=violence” is absurd, Joe should be just fine then, shouldn’t he? After all, the list is “just words”. Or maybe you’re just not being at all consistent.
In any case, the fact that people might get extremely angry at him is not a valid reason not to expose someone’s lecherous behavior.
“they knoowwwwsssss”
I would honestly not have much issue with the release of Joe’s List. I mean, yeah, breaking into anyone’s online anything is kinda a crappy thing, but… well, he keeps a list of every woman he knows rated by how much he wants to bang them, and puts insulting personal notes in it, maintains it on a server, and hands the password out to other men. This is… well, predatory behavior. Releasing it and letting people mostly make light of it feels… just.
Except that we know Rachel, now, and we know that she’s not, at her core, a good person. She’s a lot like Mary – convicted in her idea of right, wrong, and how the world works, and willing to actively and deliberately cause harm in pursuit of what she sees as Just. While her moral framework might be less internally horrific than Mary’s – Mary is a bigot, while Rachel is a misanthrope – she is still a fanatic. And, if her release of the List doesn’t come back on Joe as hard as she thinks it should, she’s likely to continue her campaign against him.
Joe’s a scummy guy. He’s hilarious, but he’s scummy. His sins, though, are mostly sins of ignorance rather than of malice. Rachel is acting on malice. Rachel spends a lot of her screentime acting on malice.
For the record, we don’t actually know Rachel did anything. Joe’s leaped to that conclusion, based on essentially no evidence.
It’s certainly possible, but not at all guaranteed at this point.
I continue to like Rachel. As a female in a CS major, she is putting up with being hit on and ignored and worse in every class, every day. She has no more fucks to give about toxic children like Joe. Or the the drama around an RA who is wildly abusive and incompetent but still keeps her job. Its no way to run (a class, a wing, a school or) the company she is going to start next year. Still I expect more backstory that will make it clearer. DYW doesn’t do loose ends or narrative dead ends.
Rachel might be my fave right now.
Same. I have a lot of issues with dealing with abusive people in my life, and it’s really gratifying to see someone actually refuse to enable that, instead of a whole lot of romanticizing of abuse that was being done. Not sure if it was intentionally on the part of the author or the audience, but it was starting to get super uncomfortable watching certain characters and their abusive actions be cheered on as romantic or heroic.
I enjoyed the heck out of the Rachel close-ups! Epic eyeroll in panel one, shocked little pupils in panel four, and the “would any jury in the world convict me?” side-eye in panel five.
Isn’t it ‘motive, means, and opportunity’?
Of course, they also think she’s gonna murder them….
Why is Danny acting like this?
Let’s see you stop instinctively falling back into the usual chemistry with you life-long best friend.
He is a bad egg.
He is messing around with his best friend. Must remind him of the great time before Joe discovered girls and decided they are be-all-end-all of the universe
Joe is treated too poorly! I mean, this is a fertile hunting ground! He is a predator! A sexual pre….oh wait.
🙂
Careful, there.
Well, how come Rachel is astonished that he didn’t learn anything? She doesn’t believe in people learning not to be assholes anyway.
Somehow I think is will turn out that Jacob leaked the list because he thought it repulsive.
She doesn’t believe in abuser redeeming themselves. That’s different from Joe just being a creep.
Same pretense though.
She believes that Joe can learn something from this but the abuser can’t?
Maybe the point of this scene is to show that Rachel believes redemption exists for people who aren’t abusive assholes.
Ruth physically assaulted many people and willingly encouraged someone else to commit suicide with her.
I get that she was a victim, but she was also a violent abuser, and being a victim does not excuse that. Blaine and Ruth’s grandpa were almost certainly victims of their own families when they were young. Abusive people almost never become abusive from having happy backgrounds, and if you’re going to exempt abusers for being victims, then you’re exempting every abuser from responsibility.
They were NOT almost certainly victims of their own families. The rate of abusers that were abused themselves? About 20% which is close enough to the average of the general populace that it is statistically insignificant. The reason why people believe it is higher? BECAUSE ABUSERS LIE. The idea that abusers come from abusive or neglectful households in particular is one that abusers themselves perpetuated for sympathy – they are also the ones who perpetuate similar other myths that give them sympathy and shift the blame of their abuse onto emotions, drugs, alcohol or mental illness (none of which are the root cause of abuse, they can add onto and worsen an abuse problem but the root cause is ALWAYS their way of thinking, a sense of entitlement and a lack of respect for who they abuse).
This This This THIS.
So fucking sick of the myth that all abusers come from broken homes. My grandparents were saints but my mother was still a piece of shit.
All abusers, no. Some are just shitty, lead in the water, other reasons. But there is a massively significant chance that a victim of abuse will in turn become an abuser.
My grandparents were relative saints to me, but my father and my uncle both reported that they were abused by them as kids, and I believe them. It’s actually very common for grandparents to put the grandchildren on a pedestal, as long as they still have the original victim to abuse.
That being said, you’re right, and I was mistaken when I claimed that most abusers come from broken homes.
But there is a massively significant chance that a victim of abuse will in turn become an abuser
Fuck off.
Oh God Rachel’s lipstick is too thick and now I can only see her as wearing clownface
Elementary is so much better than BBC Sherlock, so at least Joe has good taste in Arthur Conan Doyle adaptations.
Too bad you need motive, method and opportunity. And “she done it wit a capooter” isn’t enough.