I’m just going to take a moment to say that the lighting in this strip is just beautiful. It’s amazing how far Willis has come as an artist. I know technology gets partial credit, but stylistically, I think he’s reached his apex as an artist. Especially the first panel, Sarah looks amazing.
When I read the last two strips, I actually was hoping that the other two were still there. If your dogs just started barking for no reason, sorry about that–my supersonic squee made it round the world.
As I recall, the only way to get that many people in is if everyone got REALLY friendly and REALLY cuddly. Like “leaves nothing to the imagination” cuddly.
I’ve shared a twin size with my partner and can confirm this is the only comfortable way for adults to sleep in one. Also it helped that we’re both small. She is 5′ and I’m 5’6 and we’re both skinny af.
Two can share a twin at 5’1 and 6′, if slender enough. (This is, like your findings, also personal research.) But it helps if the headboard is to the wall, giving a bit of knee-room off either side.
Also, it reminds me of recently when I had a sex dream about a friend while sharing a bed with her, and then I woke up and felt really awkward. Though I imagine Joyce would be a bit more panicky here if that was her situation.
Entirely unrelated to anything at all save a misread, but I thought your first sentence was “The lightning is pretty into this” and I really couldn’t come up with any explanation for it.
…hahaha, I forgot I’d changed my grav. It’s not my ship, I was being silly, but it is a really fantastically comfortable and nice scene. Friend cuddles are good.
Because every good girl wants a bad boy? Or, possibly, one of the reasons Walky irritates Joyce so much is that she finds him attractive right up until the moment he opens his mouth on ‘class clown’ mode.
… Her respective reactions to finding herself in bed with these two doesn’t do much to refute Walky’s ‘Joyce has a crush on Dorothy’ theory… But I kinda don’t want it to be true because I think Becky can deal with Joyce not wanting a relationship as she’s straight, but Jorothy (Doyce?) might break her heart if that ship were to ever sail…
That’s not belittling Becky’s feelings for Dina – but an ‘it turns out that I like girls too – but not you’ from the person she thought was her soulmate would really hurt her…
I’m guessing it’s more that, in Joyce’s (former) world, two girls sharing a bed after a sleepover is just assumed to be completely platonic by default, but a girl sharing a bed with a guy definitely is NOT platonic.
That’s how I read it, too, that girl = platonic and boy = premarital sins ahoy. I was rather proud of her / pleased for her last night, for watching cartoons with a boy in bed platonically and being comfortable with everything.
(And I don’t mean that from strictly a shipping perspective. Even if she and Dotty are and remain platonic, Joyce still adores her and would probably be happy she slept over if just because they get to hang out a bit in the morning.)
It’s also a reminder that Joyce (thanks to Becky) tends to regard being in intimate quarters with another girl as just ‘something girls do’ whilst ‘sleeping with a man’ has a completely different connotation to her.
It actually does a lot to refute it. If she did, or even considered the possibility seriously, she’d most likely be freaking out, like she did when she snuggled with Ethan.
I don’t even have a case for mine… I got a stupid little sleeve that doesn’t even fit them. The joy of Medicaid. So mine sit on a cute little doggy face my ex left at our place when she left.
Have you ever tried to sleep with glasses ON? Good way to break them. Plus, it’s uncomfortable. As someone who has worn glasses for 35+ years, I’m with Dorothy on this.
If you have lived your entire life with glasses, this is something that happens at the level of instinct. No wakefulness or consciousness required.
In recent years, I have taken to wearing headphones to bed — audio helps me to get to sleep, and also I have age-related loss and I don’t want to disturb any of my neighbors. I almost always wake up to find the headphones neatly placed beside my pillow, with no memory of having taken them off.
And that they can’t remember what the first thing is….
I can’t sleep with headphones on, not even the ones that look like a headband. I have a white-noise MP3 playing through a pillow speaker at night though.
Willis would totally do that to us. We’d get highly-charged glimpses into each of their dreams, and then cutting back to them sleeping peacefully after each dream we’d see them entirely differently… and it’d all be in our minds, ‘cos he’s expert at playing us like that.
Well done Willis, for so thoroughly pwning us without even doing anything.
I am wondering if Joyce briefly thought she hooked up with Dorothy and was okay with it. Then again, it’s kinda hard to tell with the limited information we can infer here.
If I’d had a roommate who shook me into wakefulness every school morning I perhaps might not have flunked out of college the first go-round. My 8:00 classes mostly came and went without me.
…I had four alarm clocks, set five to ten minutes apart, and two of which were literally across the room from my bed. My roommate said he saw me get up and turn off each one of them, one after the other, and I would have to take his word for it because I would wake up later in the morning and literally not remember any of that.
It never occurred to me until decades later to wonder why he didn’t just wake me up himself. Like, he was already awake, and he knew I wanted to wake up for my morning classes…
That is one aspect of education in the States I will never understand: who plans eight o’ clock classes? I never had classes befor 9 AM (Netherlands), and even then, they wouldn’t start until a quarter past (because of tradition)
Most schools in the US start at 8. Like, from elementary through high school; it’s not just a thing in college. I think some schools have a later start time (and I wish more of them did, not least of all because I sub for schools), but for the most part, at least around here, 8 is traditional.
Most high schools in Canada too, at least around here. Elementary schools tended to start at 9 and go until 3 or 3:30. High schools tend to be from 8 until 2:00-2:30. My university has classes scheduled from 8 until 10PM (however, that being said, there is no guarantee the class will actually RUN that late – I had a class that ostensibly went until 10 and my prof told us straight up that they were probably not going to go that long ever because the profs wanted to be there that late about as much as we did. I think once we were only there half an hour once and it started at 7).
We started school every day at 7.15 am. Living about 10 km away meant leaving home at 6.35 am. On Saturdays, too, until they changed that.
(also in Germany)
Adults on normalized 8-4 or 9-5 schedules plan 8 am classes, despite the fact that it is really not biologically ideal for just about anyone under 30. Because standardization and convenience are more important than results.
I had a roommate who had problems getting up, but she also had problems setting her alarms, so I used to sort of stare at her going “I think I remember her mentioning she had a thing, should I be shaking her awake now? What if I’ve remembered it wrong?”
…. I mean, Willis has been shipteasing J+W like crazy here BECAUSE they were an item in Walkyverse, so the fact that he’s doing it again is CLEARLY connected to that backstory.
Last panel is once again the best. Though I do wonder how big those beds are for three people to fit on one that comfortably. At the college I went to, the beds were not big enough for three people to lie in like that.
On this day, let it be known that We, The Emperor of the Internet, will be awarding the commenter Kraeniel no less than twenty-two (22) (two times eleven) (ten plus twelwe) (three less than a quarter of a hundred) (the number you can divide by seven to get a rough approximation of pi in a pinch) Imperial Internet Points for figuring out that Joyce had indeed fallen asleep together with Dorothy and Walky!
Thank you! Today’s strip is a great example of the moment of realization. From just the “Huh” for there is a sleeping Dorothy, to the instant panic, and possible flailing of limbs, if only there were room, to realizing there is a sleeping Walky. What might make it worse for Joyce is the moment she realizes that Walky was on the other side of the bed. Not only did she “sleep” with a boy, there had to be rolling around in bed for them to end up this way. Of course it would be in a totally innocent way, like puppies in a basket.
As someone else recently said, the best way to avoid this kind of thing is to first finish all the formatting, then start filling in the actual text.
Alternatively, get a wordpress account, make a blog post draft with the HTML settings , then preview the post after doing your thing. Once the preview looks fine, then C&P the whole damn thing.
“How do you explain to a 4-year-old why mommy and daddy are dressed but Rover the dog is naked?…A nude horse is a rude horse.” –G. Clifford Prout, founder of the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (S.I.N.A.)
I mean, it’s not like she’s never had a friend sleep over, in the same bed no less, so that “…huh.” seems like a different sort of revelation might be taking place.
Now, shipping-crazy comments aside, this is actually pretty big. Joyce has spent the last few weeks having a really rough time just walking outside by herself, and she’s probably somewhat less trusting of men now than when the school year started.
But Walky… She’s so comfortable around Walky she’ll fall asleep next to him. Because Walky, silly and weird and flawed as he is, has never been acting like a threat to Joyce. He’s teased her about how she follows Dorothy like a love-smitten puppy, but he’s always teased her like she’s a human being. He’s never treated her like an object.
He’s easy to be around for Joyce, and Joyce does know (even if she will never admit in public) that he obviously also cares deeply for Dorothy.
Joyce fell asleep next to Walky because she could not imagine for a second he’d take advantage of her.
my guess is she is comfortable with Dorothy due to having no potential sexual interest in her. It’s not a big deal to have a sleep over with friends. she did that with Becky and had no issue until she was told Becky was attracted to her.
Yeah, for me shipping Joyce with girls pretty much died when she rejected Becky. If she got together with Dorothy after turning Becky down, she’d be history’s greatest monster.
That’s not how anything works. Sheesh.
Being in different places of self-acceptance is super common w young wlw crushes, and having the other girl confess to you isn’t some magic fix to years of repression, and in some cases can even make it -worse- if not reacting w the stereotypical “Real attraction feels good! :)”. Because it’s a Wrong Thing, or Scary Thing, or w/e, and it overwhelms and distracts from how it might feel absent that.
Guess I’m Definitely Straight After All, Then? :/
Literally no one has any right to judge that trajectory with anything but compassion and support, Becky included, and even if she’d be wistful for what coulda been I -really- can’t see her blaming Joyce. Some jabs about her pickin’ up Joyce’s babylesbian crush on her lesdar from the start, more likely. 😛
And even if it was solely “I like this other girl now. sorry.”, which, wouldn’t be that simple for Joyce, no one has any responsibility to be with anyone. She doesn’t ‘owe’ her that. (and that kinda thinking generally has us end up forcing shitty relationships with dudes)
Not even just that she be “history’s greatest monster.”
The history with Becky puts a different light on all the signs that she might be interested in girls. Her expectations for close friendships with girls are all shaped by Becky’s massive, if unrealized, crush on her.
That’s.. not what happened. Joyce desperately wanted to keep that old quasigirlfriend intimacy with Becky, but Becky had to put a stop to that for her own emotional well-being.
I am surprised that comparatively little is being made of the difference in reactions to the various bed partners…but perhaps that’s just so much the obvious thing going on here as to be unworthy of comment.
Speculate: could Joyce’s level of horror have a force multiplier due to the revelation that Walky has farted recently?
For one split second I thought that there were two hover-texts. The actual hovertext on one side of the image, and the other text being, obviously, being “Jokers to the right of me.”
Flashbacks to every coed slumber party my friends and I ever had. Tons of cramming into tiny sleep spots and uncomfortable positions and messiness of food, blankets, drool surrounding us to wake up to…ah good memories.
Oh, this might be one of my new favourites!
I love the expression on all of the faces, and I find it especially cute that both Dorothy and Walky fell asleep around Joyce and not next to each other, considering how they were positioned in the strip before yesterday’s.
…. okay, this is better than previous nights. I can sympathize a bit with her antisocial “everyone leave me alone” misanthropy and her bouts of “why do I even school anymore” listlessness. (Though a lot of both might be depression in her case.) She’s got a stubborn core of integrity in which she’s ready to sacrifice her own well-being and interests and desires for greater ideals, no matter how much that integrity has gotten a bit frayed about the edges, and I can relate to that too.
That said…. she’s violent. I don’t do violence. She’s deliberately and casually abusive. I don’t go for that either. And yes, she’s trying to reform, good for her, best of luck. (Some skepticism, but best of luck. And some people might think it’s unjust to forgive her, but I view the point of justice as building a better world, and reform and healing do that better than an eye for an eye.)
I’m not really in her place when it comes to mental health, sheer attitude of badassery, or so on. She has it together in ways that I do not — I freeze in a clinch and she just kicks ass. She commands respect (albeit through awful means) and I do not.
Speaking again about Ruth’s efforts at reform…. I don’t think much of them. TACTICALLY, I don’t think they’re sound. Oh, sure, Ruth’s genuinely intending to make them work, and I think she might pull it off out of both sheer stubbornness and the low standards of her superiors, but they just amount to subtracting something (violence) from her life, something she was relying on to get things done with. She hasn’t found anything to replace it with. That means she’s suddenly having a harder time doing what used to be easy, and that means the absence of that option will be a big, gnawing hole taunting her every time she struggles to do peacefully what she used to do violently. If it were me, I’d have mapped out alternatives first thing. That’s because I have an analytical approach to things. Ruth isn’t analytical. She’s a frigging MMORPG tank. Take it on the chin and keep going.
I definitely, definitely, definitely cannot relate to her abused background.
So no, Grav Roulette. It’s good that you delivered me someone other than a bit part, but Ruth and I only have a few similarities. She does not represent me well.
Nice try, though. You’re improving. It’s good to see you out of the slump. Hopefully a few more good shots like this and you’ll be completely back in the groove.
Okay, I was wrong yesterday but I don’t mind because I was wrong in such a funny way! Okay, I mean that it’s obvious that nothing happened last night but that won’t stop Joyce freaking out left, right and centre about this! Especially because Walky (with whom Joyce has a mutual antagonism of sorts) was one of the participants in what Sarah will doubtless insist on calling her ‘first threesome’ (giggle, snort)! 😀
Hopefully, Joyce will get over this in time and take it for what it is – A sign that she trusts both of them and that both of them trust her to the degree that they can be at their most vulnerable with her without the slightest problem!
How does a dorm room bunk bed even support that much weight? And how does Sarah even sleep knowing that there is a combined weight of nearly 400 lbs right over her head that could come crashing down on her at any minute??
It’s not a bunk bed. It’s a unit with a bed on top over a desk and chest of drawers below. There’s a good shot of this in the last panel of this strip. Since the units are mirror-symmetrical, you can see the chest of drawers in Joyce’s unit and the desk in Sarah’s unit.
That’s easy for you to say. 🙂 Or to excerpt from Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness”:
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
True and I’m expecting a humorous but awkward ‘morning of shame’ for all three of them because they can’t get their minds past the sense that they did something forbidden, even though all they did was fall asleep on the same bed.
How the hell did three people sleep in that bed? When my boyfriend and I tried to squeeze into the twin beds at our school, we regretted it in the morning.
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Oh, lord, poor Joyce. XD
Poor WALKY.
….
…. because you know this is gonna be all his fault.
He just had to get her started on an episode arc you can’t stop watching in the middle of!
Yea poor walky, his whole days gonna be agony. look how he’s laying, his shoulder, arm, neck and possibly back are gonna be completely stiff and sore.
wait? when did my gravatar change?
10 days ago, in the Great Gravatar Reshuffle of ’17. Or, as the man behind the curtain put it in his twitter feed, “BENIGN ANARCHY IN THE COMMENTS”.
Apparently I got Jim. I’m not complaining, I just have no idea who he is.
Wasn’t he the guy who organized the LGBT pizza mixer? The time Dina lent her hat to Ethan.
I wonder who I got.
Kablammo, fixed.
Go back ten days, I made a big effortpost on how to reroll your gravatar
If you know how to reroll your gravatar, why are you Blowjob Cat? 🙂
Because his name is Mr D and he is perfect.
Are you saying you would not want to be blowjob cat?
Who doesn’t want to be Blowjob Cat?
We’re clearly in the best timeline
Oh gods, no one roll a d6!
*rolls percentile dice*
I’m just going to take a moment to say that the lighting in this strip is just beautiful. It’s amazing how far Willis has come as an artist. I know technology gets partial credit, but stylistically, I think he’s reached his apex as an artist. Especially the first panel, Sarah looks amazing.
Joyce tries to announce the name of her favorite MST3K episode, but the sight of Walky distracts her and messes up her pronunciation.
Watch out for snakes.
Hi-keeba!
Sandstorm!
Aaaaaand, Cliffhanger!
Look, it was a wild night of cartoon watching.
When I read the last two strips, I actually was hoping that the other two were still there. If your dogs just started barking for no reason, sorry about that–my supersonic squee made it round the world.
Somehow your squee hit the resonant frequency of my glass figure collection and shattered them. You owe me some new hand blown Deadpools!
And YAY I’m happy Joyce now! Gravroulette saves the day!
And there was much re-joycing.
… I like you, you pun.
Indubitably
Oh great. I was hoping that there were more people capable of shattering my ear-drums in this comment field.
Bagge, could you and Freemage take a trip to Mars and squee together there?
well played, Sarah.
well bloody played.
Are these people fucking midgets?
I felt crowded in my undergrad bed by myself.
Also, SWEATY.
As I recall, the only way to get that many people in is if everyone got REALLY friendly and REALLY cuddly. Like “leaves nothing to the imagination” cuddly.
I’ve shared a twin size with my partner and can confirm this is the only comfortable way for adults to sleep in one. Also it helped that we’re both small. She is 5′ and I’m 5’6 and we’re both skinny af.
Willis has mentioned that, although he stays very true to the IU campus, he purposely made the beds much wider, for storytelling possibilities.
I don’t want to know how tough it must be to find Full XL sheet sets outside of Back-to-School season…
Especially in Dexter & Monkey Master colors.
Two can share a twin at 5’1 and 6′, if slender enough. (This is, like your findings, also personal research.) But it helps if the headboard is to the wall, giving a bit of knee-room off either side.
Don’t forget the 8 dozen plushies.
Related:
http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=765
Aaaand the follow up
http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=815
I was waiting for someone to reference that strip!
I had a great time re-reading Tai’s relationship woes.
They seem to have kicked the sheets off.
Also, “midget” is a slur, so you should go with “little person”, or “dwarf”. ;p
The lighting is pretty in this.
Also, it reminds me of recently when I had a sex dream about a friend while sharing a bed with her, and then I woke up and felt really awkward. Though I imagine Joyce would be a bit more panicky here if that was her situation.
Entirely unrelated to anything at all save a misread, but I thought your first sentence was “The lightning is pretty into this” and I really couldn’t come up with any explanation for it.
Thor digs threesomes.
That face is ideal
The really bad moments are those where you are not sure if you dreamed that or not 😈
Things have changed a bit since the last time we saw these two in bed together.
They’ve expanded their diet to include sandwiches.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Jokers to the right…
Here I am
stuck in the middle with you
Yes, I’m stuck in the middle with you.
“Yes, I’m” so glad someone did this.
So hard to keep the smile off Sarah’s face,
As Joyce freaks out all over the place
This threesome was inevitable, wasn’t it?
And you’re loving every second of it, I’m sure.
…hahaha, I forgot I’d changed my grav. It’s not my ship, I was being silly, but it is a really fantastically comfortable and nice scene. Friend cuddles are good.
It really must comfortable to be able to fall asleep like that.
How did Joyce end up in the middle?
FAMBLY.
Welcome to a fambly, son.
YES
id scream too if i woke up in a bed with walky
Finally, the threesome of Joyce dreams, even if hidden as the one of her nightmares 😛
Why is Walky there instead of Joe then?
Because Joe irritates, annoys, and infuriates her, but Walky disgusts her.
okay, okay, one of the threesomes of Joyce dreams.
Because every good girl wants a bad boy? Or, possibly, one of the reasons Walky irritates Joyce so much is that she finds him attractive right up until the moment he opens his mouth on ‘class clown’ mode.
I figured it’d be Ethan and Billie.
Ethan’s body, Dorothy’s mind, and Sal’s luxurious river of hair.
Sal needs counting twice, ‘cos of her sweet sweet wheels.
Joyce’s and Billie’s Billies.
… Her respective reactions to finding herself in bed with these two doesn’t do much to refute Walky’s ‘Joyce has a crush on Dorothy’ theory… But I kinda don’t want it to be true because I think Becky can deal with Joyce not wanting a relationship as she’s straight, but Jorothy (Doyce?) might break her heart if that ship were to ever sail…
That’s not belittling Becky’s feelings for Dina – but an ‘it turns out that I like girls too – but not you’ from the person she thought was her soulmate would really hurt her…
I’m guessing it’s more that, in Joyce’s (former) world, two girls sharing a bed after a sleepover is just assumed to be completely platonic by default, but a girl sharing a bed with a guy definitely is NOT platonic.
That’s how I read it, too, that girl = platonic and boy = premarital sins ahoy. I was rather proud of her / pleased for her last night, for watching cartoons with a boy in bed platonically and being comfortable with everything.
I’m pretty sure that’s more Dotty = pleasant surprise and Walky = Ewwwwww.
(And I don’t mean that from strictly a shipping perspective. Even if she and Dotty are and remain platonic, Joyce still adores her and would probably be happy she slept over if just because they get to hang out a bit in the morning.)
I wonder who else knows of Joyce and Ethan having their platonic, clothed nap? That’s not what Joyce would blab to everyone about.
It’s Joyrathy, so as to not get confused with Joe/Dorothy.
I started shipping it as a crack ship, but every now and then Willis comes along and trips my “I WANT TO BELIEVE” brain circuit.
Me and Brock/Ash Pokemon fanfics. It makes no sense but I like it anyway
It’s also a reminder that Joyce (thanks to Becky) tends to regard being in intimate quarters with another girl as just ‘something girls do’ whilst ‘sleeping with a man’ has a completely different connotation to her.
It actually does a lot to refute it. If she did, or even considered the possibility seriously, she’d most likely be freaking out, like she did when she snuggled with Ethan.
SIN!!!! LOLOL!!!
And yet, Dorothy remembered to take off her glasses.
Bad Dorothy! On your face or in their case!
I don’t even have a case for mine… I got a stupid little sleeve that doesn’t even fit them. The joy of Medicaid. So mine sit on a cute little doggy face my ex left at our place when she left.
Have you ever tried to sleep with glasses ON? Good way to break them. Plus, it’s uncomfortable. As someone who has worn glasses for 35+ years, I’m with Dorothy on this.
Oh, definitely, that’s “in the case” time. But “on the pillow” isn’t a good option, is what I’m saying.
The case for mine have the last pair in them, but I do have a spot on the dresser for them.
But yeah, Dorothy’s glasses would have realistically wound up somewhere near the bottom of the pillow with one temple bent out the wrong way.
If you have lived your entire life with glasses, this is something that happens at the level of instinct. No wakefulness or consciousness required.
In recent years, I have taken to wearing headphones to bed — audio helps me to get to sleep, and also I have age-related loss and I don’t want to disturb any of my neighbors. I almost always wake up to find the headphones neatly placed beside my pillow, with no memory of having taken them off.
Age-related hearing loss. Also I forget to type words sometimes and don’t realize it until after I’ve posted.
They say memory is the second thing to go…
But what if your memory ISN’T going? What if you only REMEMBER it as being better?
And that they can’t remember what the first thing is….
I can’t sleep with headphones on, not even the ones that look like a headband. I have a white-noise MP3 playing through a pillow speaker at night though.
No, you were right the first time. “Age-related loss”, that’s deep.
Did anyone comment on the glasses yesterday? I didn’t notice them, but they seem really obvious now when I look at yesterday’s strip.
The movie wasn’t so hot
It didn’t have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked
Our reputation is sho–Wake Up Li’l Suzie!
I hink I’m wearing ou my keyboard.
Forunaely here’s no “t” in “hacked Muzak”! 🙂
That song would have been more interesting with a menage-a-trois.
Wake Up, Lil & Suzie?
The horror! The horror! He snores really loudly!
Not loud enough to disturb her sleep, though.
Ok, so now we get a Joyce-Dorothy-Walky slipshine, right?
Um…. maybe?
Is there a “fully clothed mostly-platonic sleep-cuddling adorableness” category of pornography?
I mean, I’d normally say that wouldn’t cross the line, but Rule 34 and all…
……
Screw it, everyone’s gonna vote for this now.
Ethan: I honestly don’t see any harm in being adjacent to you in my bed. But you might feel differently.
Joyce: What I feel? What I feel is that it made me very happy. As happy as the rest of my friends who do stuff like this and worse all the time and don’t hate themselves for it.
Willis would totally do that to us. We’d get highly-charged glimpses into each of their dreams, and then cutting back to them sleeping peacefully after each dream we’d see them entirely differently… and it’d all be in our minds, ‘cos he’s expert at playing us like that.
Well done Willis, for so thoroughly pwning us without even doing anything.
I love the “Huh, that’s weird,” reaction to Dorothy, followed immediately by extreme horror upon seeing Walky. 😀
See, this is COMPLETELY unrealistic.
….
Sarah should be video-recording this.
Sarah is awesome and brilliant and the best big sister.
She took ALL the photos before waking her.
Yeah, but pre-photos don’t preserve the look on her face or the scream in the air.
Obviously Sarah set up her webcam at the foot of the bunk to record everything.
It’s actually tied to Walky’s foot.
The long game: “innocently” reminding her of this little tableaux during the church service.
At every (every) opportunity.
I am wondering if Joyce briefly thought she hooked up with Dorothy and was okay with it. Then again, it’s kinda hard to tell with the limited information we can infer here.
Maybe not hooked up with. Just that she was ok waking up next to her in a way she didn’t expect. Hence the “…huh”.
Awwwww. That little smile is just all sorts of adorable. Joyce does not mind a little bit of Dorothy cuddling. Doesn’t mind it at all…
So… Dorothy is a joker, then?
*shrugs*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DohRa9lsx0Q
Needs more cowbell.
If I had a roommate who told me when to get up I’d be Pissed.
Yay I’m Pretty Girl now
If you WERE that roommate, you wouldn’t really have grounds for complaining, though
If I’d had a roommate who shook me into wakefulness every school morning I perhaps might not have flunked out of college the first go-round. My 8:00 classes mostly came and went without me.
…I had four alarm clocks, set five to ten minutes apart, and two of which were literally across the room from my bed. My roommate said he saw me get up and turn off each one of them, one after the other, and I would have to take his word for it because I would wake up later in the morning and literally not remember any of that.
It never occurred to me until decades later to wonder why he didn’t just wake me up himself. Like, he was already awake, and he knew I wanted to wake up for my morning classes…
That is one aspect of education in the States I will never understand: who plans eight o’ clock classes? I never had classes befor 9 AM (Netherlands), and even then, they wouldn’t start until a quarter past (because of tradition)
Most schools in the US start at 8. Like, from elementary through high school; it’s not just a thing in college. I think some schools have a later start time (and I wish more of them did, not least of all because I sub for schools), but for the most part, at least around here, 8 is traditional.
Most high schools in Canada too, at least around here. Elementary schools tended to start at 9 and go until 3 or 3:30. High schools tend to be from 8 until 2:00-2:30. My university has classes scheduled from 8 until 10PM (however, that being said, there is no guarantee the class will actually RUN that late – I had a class that ostensibly went until 10 and my prof told us straight up that they were probably not going to go that long ever because the profs wanted to be there that late about as much as we did. I think once we were only there half an hour once and it started at 7).
We even had tests on Saturday at 8am in Germany.
I hated early classes.
We started school every day at 7.15 am. Living about 10 km away meant leaving home at 6.35 am. On Saturdays, too, until they changed that.
(also in Germany)
Adults on normalized 8-4 or 9-5 schedules plan 8 am classes, despite the fact that it is really not biologically ideal for just about anyone under 30. Because standardization and convenience are more important than results.
I had a roommate who had problems getting up, but she also had problems setting her alarms, so I used to sort of stare at her going “I think I remember her mentioning she had a thing, should I be shaking her awake now? What if I’ve remembered it wrong?”
When a forgotten night goes from good to bad.
New gravatar?pls?
nope, nope
*mike drop*
Took me too many seconds (I.e. more than one) to see the full scale of this pun. I am now in awe.
Is it pure coincidence that this strip is running while Joyce and Walky are nekkid together over in the Walkyverse?
Of course not.
…..
…. I mean, Willis has been shipteasing J+W like crazy here BECAUSE they were an item in Walkyverse, so the fact that he’s doing it again is CLEARLY connected to that backstory.
Last panel is once again the best. Though I do wonder how big those beds are for three people to fit on one that comfortably. At the college I went to, the beds were not big enough for three people to lie in like that.
My bed wasn’t big enough for just me, much less me and two others.
I’ve got a King Single and while I don’t sleep too well with other people in my bed three fits vaguely comfortably in such a small bed.
The beds in DoA are bigger than real dorms for storytelling purposes. To me they look like Full width with a few extra inches of height.
Joyce seems like she was ok with this outcome until she looked to her left.
Tbh I ship it.
OT3. Tbh.
ANNOUNCEMENT!
On this day, let it be known that We, The Emperor of the Internet, will be awarding the commenter Kraeniel no less than twenty-two (22) (two times eleven) (ten plus twelwe) (three less than a quarter of a hundred) (the number you can divide by seven to get a rough approximation of pi in a pinch) Imperial Internet Points for figuring out that Joyce had indeed fallen asleep together with Dorothy and Walky!
*plays a fanfare*
This being the comment in question in yesterday’s strip.
Thank you! Today’s strip is a great example of the moment of realization. From just the “Huh” for there is a sleeping Dorothy, to the instant panic, and possible flailing of limbs, if only there were room, to realizing there is a sleeping Walky. What might make it worse for Joyce is the moment she realizes that Walky was on the other side of the bed. Not only did she “sleep” with a boy, there had to be rolling around in bed for them to end up this way. Of course it would be in a totally innocent way, like puppies in a basket.
“Innocent”? Puppies are NAKED!
ps well done.
Even cute little doggies and pussycats cannot be trusted.
Underneath their fur… absolutely NAKED
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ0SRgh3X9Q
Are they REALLY naked, butting?
ARE THEY?
(Cue moderation in 3… 2…)
….. or, you know, I can just screw up the links. That’s an option.
As someone else recently said, the best way to avoid this kind of thing is to first finish all the formatting, then start filling in the actual text.
Alternatively, get a wordpress account, make a blog post draft with the HTML settings , then preview the post after doing your thing. Once the preview looks fine, then C&P the whole damn thing.
“How do you explain to a 4-year-old why mommy and daddy are dressed but Rover the dog is naked?…A nude horse is a rude horse.” –G. Clifford Prout, founder of the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (S.I.N.A.)
Yeah, there must have been something going on for Joyce to wind up in the middle. Dorothy and Walky started out cuddling each other.
THREESOME!
She’s done more than that before, what’s the problem?
I’ll give you a free clue. It begins with ‘W’ and ends with marriage and a son in a parallel universe!
Dare my shipping heart start to hope after panel 4?
If it does, you’re better of not viewing panel 5.
I mean, it’s not like she’s never had a friend sleep over, in the same bed no less, so that “…huh.” seems like a different sort of revelation might be taking place.
Joker to the right.
Here I am.
Anyway, here’s a serious thing to consider.
Joyce fell asleep next to Walky.
Now, shipping-crazy comments aside, this is actually pretty big. Joyce has spent the last few weeks having a really rough time just walking outside by herself, and she’s probably somewhat less trusting of men now than when the school year started.
But Walky… She’s so comfortable around Walky she’ll fall asleep next to him. Because Walky, silly and weird and flawed as he is, has never been acting like a threat to Joyce. He’s teased her about how she follows Dorothy like a love-smitten puppy, but he’s always teased her like she’s a human being. He’s never treated her like an object.
He’s easy to be around for Joyce, and Joyce does know (even if she will never admit in public) that he obviously also cares deeply for Dorothy.
Joyce fell asleep next to Walky because she could not imagine for a second he’d take advantage of her.
Because he wouldn’t.
Little brother may be a poop-head, but he’s family.
fff
Dammit I wasn’t shipping Joyce and Dotty before, but iunno!! It’s so cute how comfortable Joyce is even after realizing she’s there.
my guess is she is comfortable with Dorothy due to having no potential sexual interest in her. It’s not a big deal to have a sleep over with friends. she did that with Becky and had no issue until she was told Becky was attracted to her.
Yeah, for me shipping Joyce with girls pretty much died when she rejected Becky. If she got together with Dorothy after turning Becky down, she’d be history’s greatest monster.
That’s not how anything works. Sheesh.
Being in different places of self-acceptance is super common w young wlw crushes, and having the other girl confess to you isn’t some magic fix to years of repression, and in some cases can even make it -worse- if not reacting w the stereotypical “Real attraction feels good! :)”. Because it’s a Wrong Thing, or Scary Thing, or w/e, and it overwhelms and distracts from how it might feel absent that.
Guess I’m Definitely Straight After All, Then? :/
Literally no one has any right to judge that trajectory with anything but compassion and support, Becky included, and even if she’d be wistful for what coulda been I -really- can’t see her blaming Joyce. Some jabs about her pickin’ up Joyce’s babylesbian crush on her lesdar from the start, more likely. 😛
And even if it was solely “I like this other girl now. sorry.”, which, wouldn’t be that simple for Joyce, no one has any responsibility to be with anyone. She doesn’t ‘owe’ her that. (and that kinda thinking generally has us end up forcing shitty relationships with dudes)
. . . Yeah, by that metric, I’d be a horrid person by a couple metrics. I think you need to chill.
Not even just that she be “history’s greatest monster.”
The history with Becky puts a different light on all the signs that she might be interested in girls. Her expectations for close friendships with girls are all shaped by Becky’s massive, if unrealized, crush on her.
That’s.. not what happened. Joyce desperately wanted to keep that old quasigirlfriend intimacy with Becky, but Becky had to put a stop to that for her own emotional well-being.
Note the painstakingly Photoshopped lighting effects
I am surprised that comparatively little is being made of the difference in reactions to the various bed partners…but perhaps that’s just so much the obvious thing going on here as to be unworthy of comment.
Speculate: could Joyce’s level of horror have a force multiplier due to the revelation that Walky has farted recently?
Here I am, stuck in the middle with the twin of the only girl I’d ever go gay for.
…And the other girl I would go gay for.
For one split second I thought that there were two hover-texts. The actual hovertext on one side of the image, and the other text being, obviously, being “Jokers to the right of me.”
Then I tested to see if I was seeing things.
Sadly, I was.
*sigh*
I don’t think they make bunk beds that support three full grown adults.
The “full-grown” part is debatable.
It’s not like it’s Jacob, Ruth, and Carla after all.
Flashbacks to every coed slumber party my friends and I ever had. Tons of cramming into tiny sleep spots and uncomfortable positions and messiness of food, blankets, drool surrounding us to wake up to…ah good memories.
Oh, this might be one of my new favourites!
I love the expression on all of the faces, and I find it especially cute that both Dorothy and Walky fell asleep around Joyce and not next to each other, considering how they were positioned in the strip before yesterday’s.
Waits for a “*yawn* morning wal- *dorothy hugs joyce*
Or vice versa, actually yes Walky hugging Joyce is better reactions.
Cuddle puddle!
The best kind of puddle.
And thus one more step from Joyce’s church days to her carreer as an Internet porn master was taken.
College life is wild.
(I’m joking around I can see their clothes)
….. actually, getting comfortable enough about the religious taboos to be in bed with a guy and (literally) sleep with him is a step on the road.
….. it might be step 5 out of 53,987, but it is still a step.
And tonight, Grav Roulette has offered me Ruth.
….
…. okay, this is better than previous nights. I can sympathize a bit with her antisocial “everyone leave me alone” misanthropy and her bouts of “why do I even school anymore” listlessness. (Though a lot of both might be depression in her case.) She’s got a stubborn core of integrity in which she’s ready to sacrifice her own well-being and interests and desires for greater ideals, no matter how much that integrity has gotten a bit frayed about the edges, and I can relate to that too.
That said…. she’s violent. I don’t do violence. She’s deliberately and casually abusive. I don’t go for that either. And yes, she’s trying to reform, good for her, best of luck. (Some skepticism, but best of luck. And some people might think it’s unjust to forgive her, but I view the point of justice as building a better world, and reform and healing do that better than an eye for an eye.)
I’m not really in her place when it comes to mental health, sheer attitude of badassery, or so on. She has it together in ways that I do not — I freeze in a clinch and she just kicks ass. She commands respect (albeit through awful means) and I do not.
Speaking again about Ruth’s efforts at reform…. I don’t think much of them. TACTICALLY, I don’t think they’re sound. Oh, sure, Ruth’s genuinely intending to make them work, and I think she might pull it off out of both sheer stubbornness and the low standards of her superiors, but they just amount to subtracting something (violence) from her life, something she was relying on to get things done with. She hasn’t found anything to replace it with. That means she’s suddenly having a harder time doing what used to be easy, and that means the absence of that option will be a big, gnawing hole taunting her every time she struggles to do peacefully what she used to do violently. If it were me, I’d have mapped out alternatives first thing. That’s because I have an analytical approach to things. Ruth isn’t analytical. She’s a frigging MMORPG tank. Take it on the chin and keep going.
I definitely, definitely, definitely cannot relate to her abused background.
So no, Grav Roulette. It’s good that you delivered me someone other than a bit part, but Ruth and I only have a few similarities. She does not represent me well.
Nice try, though. You’re improving. It’s good to see you out of the slump. Hopefully a few more good shots like this and you’ll be completely back in the groove.
So, aha, this is gonna be fun to watch. *popcorn*
I’m guessing Joyce didn’t think that Walky would be the first guy she slept with.
Maybe not but I’ve got the feeling, years later, she’ll laugh about this.
He’s not.
Okay, I was wrong yesterday but I don’t mind because I was wrong in such a funny way! Okay, I mean that it’s obvious that nothing happened last night but that won’t stop Joyce freaking out left, right and centre about this! Especially because Walky (with whom Joyce has a mutual antagonism of sorts) was one of the participants in what Sarah will doubtless insist on calling her ‘first threesome’ (giggle, snort)! 😀
Hopefully, Joyce will get over this in time and take it for what it is – A sign that she trusts both of them and that both of them trust her to the degree that they can be at their most vulnerable with her without the slightest problem!
My only hope is that Sarah calls it that in Joe’s presence.
Preferably just after Joe has taken a large drink of something.
PREMARITAL HANKY-PANKY!
No, Joyce, you can’t get pregnant this way. Seriously.
…but, but her youth pastor said…
This is just so cute. Cuddles and sleepovers are so important
How the hell did all three of them fall and stay asleep in jeans? Joyce must be a pretty comfortable cuddler.
^
I sleep jeans almost every night. It’s… It’s fine. If you’re the paranoid sort.
Perhaps Walky has convinced the other two of the awesomeness of pyjama jeans?
They look like if they were dancing sevillanas in the last panel
How do you get a hardened yat lethargic Christian out of bed in time for church?
You boil the hell out of it! Oh wait wrong joke
I think unexpectedly finding Walky in bed next to her will work perfectly to roust her out–vertically.
Pictured: Joyce is preventing Dorothy to cast her body into the cragged shame pits of the lust-wolves.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/06-strange-beerfellows/skywizard/
It is indeed adorable.
Holy shit I was right (ok not really, I expected the two on the wall side)
SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP!!!
Contrast what Joyce says about Joe in yesterday’s comic with today’s “It’s Walky”:
http://www.itswalky.com/comic/this-wasnt-right/
I had to go back because, for some reason, i thought that Walky was Billy.
He is the one without boobies
Mean while in the other AU.
Joyce is living both the dream and the nightmare.
Hah! Joyce’s reactions are adorable.
i didn’t say anything for a while so I’m just checking on the gravatar stuff
heh heh heh, Joyce had a 3 way
Awww, they had a sleepover. <3
This must be why Sarah was so happy to wake Joyce up. She knew the sight of Walky first thing in the morning would freak her out. 😛
Joyce: I don’t have sex with women. But when I do, I do it with Dorothy Keener. Stay horny my friends!
I think that would be Tres Equis.
Addendum. “…Dorothy Keener and Sal. Stay horny my friends!”
I love this. Joyce sleeping with a boy (as innocent as it is). You can see her mind breaking. Well done.
How does a dorm room bunk bed even support that much weight? And how does Sarah even sleep knowing that there is a combined weight of nearly 400 lbs right over her head that could come crashing down on her at any minute??
Sarah doesn’t sleep on a ‘bottom bunk’. I think that Joyce’s bunk is built over her study area and Sarah sleeps on the other side of the room.
It’s not a bunk bed. It’s a unit with a bed on top over a desk and chest of drawers below. There’s a good shot of this in the last panel of this strip. Since the units are mirror-symmetrical, you can see the chest of drawers in Joyce’s unit and the desk in Sarah’s unit.
The term is loft.
That’s easy for you to say. 🙂 Or to excerpt from Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness”:
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
Also,you don’t build college beds that are not strong enough to withstand boffing with AT LEAST three people.
My new Gravatar actually looks like me from back when I had long hair. It’s disconcerting, frankly.
Why would you cut it!? :'(
I’m not Ari, but I used to have long hair, too. Short hair is so much easier to manage, so maybe that’s why?
Threesome thoughts? Rather not.
Probably best to start with a onesome in Dorothys case. Maybe move up to a twosome.
Threesomes would be a bit stressful for her, I believe.
Joyce, not Dorothy. I shouldnt try to brain this late.
Did Walky do some personal grooming, or did Joyce bear up-close-and-personal witness toi his “kind of an odor”?
PLATONIC HANKY PANKY
True and I’m expecting a humorous but awkward ‘morning of shame’ for all three of them because they can’t get their minds past the sense that they did something forbidden, even though all they did was fall asleep on the same bed.
Naw. Dorothy wouldn’t find it a big deal, except to be sensitive to Joyce’s feelings. And Walky would make the same juvenile jokes we’re making.
I don’t understand, did she not realize that falling asleep next to someone usually means waking up next to them too?
*Plays “I want to wake up” by the Pet Shop Boys on the hacked Muzak*
That question assumes that they were aware of falling asleep next to each other. Stuff like that can creep up on you.
What dorm beds are big enough to fit three people?
If you want it bad enough, a dorm bed can fit any number of people!
Speaking from experience?
Dorm beds expand
How the hell did three people sleep in that bed? When my boyfriend and I tried to squeeze into the twin beds at our school, we regretted it in the morning.
Now think of Becky walking in on this. Her imagination would go kaboom.
“Internal Screaming”
Okay okay, let me just replace the characters.
Joyce is now Mary.
Dorothy is Joe.
Walky is Carla.
The bed would combust. As would the dorm and 5 miles of surrounding area.
Wait, is panel 2-3 implying Dorothy snores more loudly than Sally? *Snrk*…
Anyway else hear “eagh!” and think about Link’s signature cry?
Sally… autocorrected Walky?
Yes. Goshdarnit…
They felt sleep watching cartoons, her overreaction is beautiful.
So Joyce will have to climb over Walky now?
Haha, there’s about a month-long delay between when the comments section opens and closes per comic, so I can legitimately be the last one to post.
…wow, walky’s going to have some neck pain after this.