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David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission @cpsc.gov ⋅ 17h
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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“Easy A! …I mean, easy, eh??”
Robin immediately flunks her, because as a Republican she naturally disapproves of Canadians.
But Ruth isn’t even in that class?
Plot twist: Becky’s puppy eyes work on every professor. She graduates with a doctorate in political science within two weeks.
Dorothy bites through a 400 page textbook in response.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Dorothy was the kind of sincere person who would feel bad that Becky didn’t get any actual education along with that grade, and genuinely believe that she herself was in a better position for life by having taken the long road.
Now, when Becky ended up in another high-profile position by seemingly winging it… Then starts the textbook biting.
Robin: Folks, I have some bad news. I’ve given notice, and effective immediately will no longer be your professor.
Dorothy: (Oh, thank god, finally we can get someone qualifi-)
Becky: Hi, I’m professor MacIntyre!
Dorothy: CHOMP
That is hilarious to imagine, and makes me wish I had some way to “like” comments to show my appreciation.
I think you just did.
Well, true… But at the cost of not really adding anything to the conversation. When I write something, I want it to at least have the potential of being amusing or insightful for others.
But mostly, I just needed something to help round out the rest of the comment; I wasn’t seriously wishing that anything would change.
After 10 years, making tenure, and getting added as co-author on innumerable random papers, despite not knowing what’s going on…
Becky: “Maybe it’s time to run for Pres. Hey Dotty, wanna be my VEEP?”
Dorothy: cRaCKk … tinkle, tinkle.
Actually even though I’m the one who made the claim I’d argue that Becky is at least in the conversation if not an equal to Joyce in “main character” status. Especially since she also appeared in the very first DoA comic ever.
She even had the first lines!
Becky as surprise guest lecturer.
Bad Robin! XD
Joyce, love, you good?
She’s waiting to see if someone whips out a tummy wand before she decides what emotion to have.
Pfft! I love that dream, sad as it was.
Joyce had a really tough first semester. I mean they all kind of did but Joyce’s was consistently pretty awful and ideologically challenging pretty much from day one. That’s what happens when you’re the main character. Also she broke her toe once.
It may have felt like a broken toe, but in fact it was a broken tonail.
She also broke a toe, with her fists.
Is she “the” main character? She’s certainly one of the top 5 or so, but does this comic even have a 100% absolute top of the mountain “the” main character?
Inb4 you answer: Yes it does. And it’s Joyce. I just said that. XD
Yeah, no. This is total bullshit and I still feel incredibly bad for Roz a character I don’t even like.
Politics is total bullshit, yes.
See? 30 seconds and they’ve already learned something about gender, I mean politics. Robin’s good at this “teaching” thing.
This is bullshit? Seems like everyone else’s reaction is that it’s getting a little too real.
It can be both. “Bullshit” here meaning “unfair” rather than “fake.”
We are extremely good at repurposing words into unrelated meanings. Especially profanities.
It is the shit.
“Shit” is such a versatile word too; it’s a noun, a verb, an interjection, and an adjective!
I’m okay with Roz suffering hilariously until she improves. Then I can feel angry in her stead.
I don’t even care about the automatic A. Becky’s cool and deserves good thing. But the fact that Robin clearly values Becky over her own sister is really fucked up and I don’t care how obnoxious Roz has been she deserves a better sister than Robin. Fortunately she has one. It makes more and more sense why Roz would try to sabotage Robin’s political career. They’re not sisters. Not in any way that matters.
I think we’re running on too little data.
I was re-reading earlier, and they’re close enough that Robin knew Leslie was Roz’s favorite teacher. Roz complained about having traded sisterly favors for the classroom fiasco rather than “like, six helicopter rides”.
And sibling interactions can be complicated. Just because they rag each other at one level doesn’t mean they don’t love each other at another.
Assuming that is the case (and I’m not, yet), I don’t see anything especially fucked up about Robin valuing Becky over her own sister.
When she’s not running her ‘joking’ antagonism toward Dorothy into the ground (which I don’t think Robin’s seen much of), Becky’s a really likeable and generally super-nice and chill person who’s pretty much always generally been nice to Robin when she reeaallly didn’t deserve it.
Roz, meanwhile, is wannabe manipulative, obnoxious, and openly contemptuous toward Robin. I’d value Becky over her too.
This goes both ways. Robin slut shamed Roz in front of an entire class in her first appearance and Robin has consistently shown more interest in her own career than her sister. Maybe even both her sisters. This is admittedly a flimsy argument but why did Riley end up spending the night sharing a cramped bunk bed with Roz when her other sister a congresswoman had a fully furnished apartment near by? Probably because Robin’s a shit sister right? One who still dragged a 12 year old on stage as prop for her “family first” campaign at that rally.
But hey, if there’s been one consistent theme of this comic it’s been that family is actually who you make it to be. (Jennifer and Walky, Joyce and Sarah, Amber and Ethan, Becky and basically anybody ect) There’s nothing saying Robin and Roz have to like each other just because they share some dna.
It’s possible Robin didn’t have the apartment before her campaign imploded, but she definitely had money for a hotel room if so. That said, Riley might have wanted to spend more time with Roz.
And she routinely dragged Riley and Roz to campaign rallies. Given Riley’s presence, kinda doubt Roz only started being dragged out as a prop when Robin needed to magnanimously ‘forgive’ her sister for being, I quote, ‘a total slutmonger.’ (And given Robin’s joking about Tony McHenry being hot and the possibility of him ‘making (Roz) respectable’ at Freshman Family Weekend, I don’t think that’s exclusively the sex tape.) Robin’s significantly older than Roz – at absolute minimum, nine years, and possibly more like eleven or more. The onus is on her to not use her sisters for political points, regardless of bedtimes (Riley was present at the midnight rally where AG and Sal encountered Ryan, and also was asleep) or their actual political leanings. The onus is also on her not to slutshame her sister in public on multiple occasions. I can’t imagine the sex tape was the first point of tension between the two.
There’s just something deeply sad, in general, that the opinion of a woman Robin knew for less than a month before the timeskip (given the Robin kissing Leslie pic leaked in early October, I think Becky only worked for the campaign for like a week) was enough to convince her to drop out of the race, while her sister’s opinion doesn’t at all.
I assumed bc Roz has access to a campus cafeteria with UNLIMITED CEREAL
I mean, SOME hotels have that, sure, but in more limited variety, and others charge
At the very least this should put to rest the “Robin’s pretending not to know her sister because she’s trying to be professional” argument.
Aha! You underestimate my contrarian powers!
Robin IS trying to be professional! She’s just very bad at it and has the attention span of hydrogen-7.
Somehow this is becoming more upsetting than killing Mike or skipping Halloween. I’m kinda ok with the Billie/Ruth split.
Less okay with Billie dating a mob stooge.
**Dina-esque raptor hiss**
Seconded.
More upsetting than killing Mike? What kind of soulless inhuman monster are you?
On the other hand, it was Mike. But still.
Mike isn’t dead, he’s back with a re-color. Why be upset over his new tan?
If anybody’s getting a mid-series actor replacement, it’s Becky. (Or maybe Aunt Viv.)
Do you really like Booster less than Mike? I mean, at least Mike got a chance to redeem his character, as drastic as that sounds.
Also, I’m a teacher, so that’s maybe why I’m so personally wigged out by this aggressively terrible person teaching college students.
I wonder who broke up with whom. Billie was kind of unreliable, like that time she was trying to get Ruth to drink again or something? She did get help eventually, but there might have been some relapses, and that might have led Ruth to believe they needed to part ways. Or maybe after baring all her flaws to Forrest quad, Billie realized “Hey, I can accept that I need help in this particular area and still be popular!”, but also she never really let go of the concept superficial=popular=good, hit it off with Asher, and decided she’d rather date someone cool than someone who roots for the Maple Leafs?
Maybe Billie’s therapist talked to her about how she met Ruth and convinced her that Ruth was a bad influence who bullied her, threatened to expose her alcoholism, and then gaslit her into falling in love by being alone with her so often? [source: longtime online best friend and RP partner dropped out of my life after suddenly saying they’d been uncomfortable with the level of intimacy in our relationship basically the entire time, and i guess i’ve gotten over losing a friend but the whole thing kinda stresses me out because i thought i’d always been very consent-oriented???]
Also Billie herself has thought she was straight and experimenting (“We get curious. It’s basically inevitable.”), so maybe after getting some alone time she convinced herself it couldn’t have really been love. That’d be alongside the ego boost and return to shallowness, I think.
sorry for rant in the middle, i probably should have just vented into that middle-paragraph theory without doubling back on my potential catharsis and also over-disclosing
Based on Ruth’s line “I didn’t ‘lose’ Billie–” I’m assuming Billie relapsed. To be fair, it was always a possibility, relapses occur and that was Billie’s first honest attempt, but until we know more odds are it was Billie.
Am I okay with them splitting up? Yes. It was always an open question about whether the relationship was more healthy than toxic, and as long as no one’s committing suicide or having a complete meltdown as a result of the relationship ending I’m going to call that a win.
Am I okay with not getting to watch the train wreck? No.
Joyce, that was very specific, are you alright?
Corruption knows no end.
You don’t have to be asleep to have NIGHTMARES
NIGHTMARES!
No, you don’t have to be asleep to have NIGHTMARES!…
But Are You Sleeping?
Just consider 2020.
2020 had some good things. Just think, the guy who crippled the CDC just before covid was discovered, tried to abuse his veto powers to force Congress to ban email in a military funding bill, and repeatedly wrecked the economy using poorly thought out executive orders, was voted out of office that year.
Genuinely caring about Becky and enthusiastically wanting to give her all the things is a VERY effective way to get on my good side
An automatic A is a bit too dangerous. How about a semi-automatic A.
Settle for a bolt-action B+.
Those last two panels say it’s silenced.
An automatic A over a manual A would probably easier to handle for a younger student.
A bit too easy to handle – someone could easily get hurt.
That’s the problem. The youngin’s aren’t strong enough to pull with their finger so they spin the A around and use their thumb instead. It’s not a pretty picture.
Also does this mean Joyce’s dreams have Bisexual Lighting? Or would that be more pink and teal
Joyce’s nickname should be the Bisexual Nightmare! She can only repress it for so long!
That would be quite the twist…
Joyce dreams in CGA.
I love Robin’s face in the fourth panel
No, Becky, you can not have an automatic A.
“May I have an A?”
Yes, you may.
NOD NOD
“Yes, no, I dont know, can you repeat the question”
This is going to be the most accurate lesson in politics any of these kids could possibly get. Robin is going to be an amazing teacher.
Yeah, feels like she could answer the “Do you know how to teach?” thing with, “I already taught you one lesson profs never do. If anything, I’m going to be BETTER than having a normal prof!”
… so long as we don’t get too specific about how we mean the word “amazing”, I’ll agree with that.
Of course you can, Becky!
But… I would like you to do us a favor though…
Damn, y’all, Robin about to teach more real lessons about American politics than any course
It’s honestly pretty amazing for Joyce to openly tell Robin that the idea of having her as a professor is a nightmare.
Also, Joyce has a lot of purple and teal nightmares? Poor kid.
The other thing to remember about Robin promising Becky a good grade is that they had a deal: Becky would work for her, and Robin would get her tuition. Robin did that by getting her a political science scholarship, and as we know from Sarah, scholarships can be lost if your grades aren’t good enough. So promising Becky a good grade is actually just Robin keeping up her end of the bargain.
Eh, of everybody there, Becky getting an autopass makes sense considering she saved an unsaveable campaign
Like geeze, that was a miracle
Just because she’s a natural at politics doesn’t mean there isn’t anything for her to learn. Not that she needs to be learning politics. Let her learn biology!
Well, that’s everyone in the background’s cue to openly resent Becky.
“She’s a real teacher’s pet. Or rather, a fake teacher’s pet.”
A real fake teacher’s pet.
So far, I like Robin as a professor more than a politician.
Threat level has been downgraded from “political meltdown” to “university dumpster fire”.
not yet. Nobody’s actually set any ACTUAL dumpsters on fire yet.
Wait, Roz made a good point yesterday?
Someone hold me, I’m scared.
Roz usually makes good points in ways that make us hate them.
the trainwreck is already starting to happen
DoA is a succession of trainwrecks happening in slow motion for our horror and entertainment.
*taking down notes* given how politics work I’m learning a ton in this class already!
I feel like Robin’s either gonna be the best political science teacher these students could ever have, or an absolute trainwreck. And there will be no in-between.
Why not also be both?
Schrodinger’s teacher.
This would be the moment where I, as a student, would go from “this isn’t what I signed up for, but let’s give her a chance” to “I’m switching to another section”.
Teaching skill is not a requirement for a teaching position. Just ask Jason
He wasn’t a full teacher though, he was a TA
The people who say “How hard can it be?” usually find out fairly quickly, even if they Dunning-Kruger themselves into thinking they’ve got this. I’ve been a classroom guest speaker enough times to have total respect for teachers who do it every day and do it well.
Sarah’s face in the first panel is interesting. Kind of off-style; more subdued expression, a style that compared to the usual style for character faces is almost realistic. I wonder if that’s a byproduct of depicting an expression of quiet suspicion.
Whatever it is, she looks really cute
I suspect Robin will NOT find out she’s a bad teacher fairly quickly. I think that despite racking up loads of evidence to the contrary, she will come to the end of the term insisting that she is the greatest teacher that the university ever had and that her dismissal for cause is the result of faculty fraud.
Bingo. She’s the team mascot for Failing Upwards.
I guess the “how hard can it be” attitude must be a requisite if you want to be a career politician…
Or a Top Gear presenter.
There is Free ride, then there is FREE RIDE!
And then there is also free ride, but i dont think that is what is happening here.
Becky: I don’t actually care about this class, though!
But if she doesn’t get good grades she will lose her scholarship.
Which is why she wants the A+ automatically!
Waitaminute… I might have just realized something (or maybe I am reading too much into it).
Certain fundamentalist organizations use purple and teal filters and lighting when depicting evil or bad acts as part of a way to trigger the viewer into the emotional state they want.
Has Joyce seen so much of those kinds of films she basically internalized their color scheme?
Given Willis’ own background in this, that may be intentional. I never would have picked up on that due to my own lack of experience in it.
Since I first saw this strip, I’ve been wondering how likely it is that Joyce is going to sufficiently worry Robin that she’ll frog march her to a therapist’s office.
This is Becoming less and less funny, with each strip. It is not just Roz that will have to suffer through Robin’s ineptitude, but the entire class. How is this funny? And openly showing favoritism towards a student is not only as unprofessional as it gets, but the rest of the class is only going to resent her because of it, and dump their frustrations on her. Congratulations, you are making a lovable character unlikable, while having two other characters needlessly suffer. Good job!
Basil Fawlty is a horrible hotelier and his hotel is full of innocent people who suffer for it.
General Melchett once casually shot his own aide in the foot because he needed a convincing injury for a spy mission, and routinely sends his troops on missions that seem to have the primary purpose of getting them killed.
The punchline of one Red Dwarf episode is that Lister has fallen down a manhole and the others decide to leave him there.
I don’t know why these things are funny, and the more I think about it the weirder it is, but they are. That just seems to be something about the way (most) people’s brains are wired.
“Tragedy is when I prick my finger, humor is when you fall down a manhole and die.”
One of Heinlein’s old novels put forth the thesis that all comedy is based on the suffering of others.
This argument so distressed me that I sought, and fought, at least one counter example: the absurd non-sequitur (e.g. much of Monty Python).
Oh my god, maybe that’s why I’m so in love with dada-style humor, no one has to suffer for it.
Such an interesting discussion! Yeah, I definitely disagree with Heinlein as well. For a few other types of humor that come to mind: absurd juxtaposition makes up a lot of what I find funny, even when things aren’t explicitly absurdist – even in a character-based comedy, where we laugh because people have well-defined worldviews and act according to them, I think we’re laughing to an extent because they are taking a collection of more sensible viewpoints and taking them to extremes, and their action is absurd when compared to what we expect. Also, more generally, a lot of humor depends on the unexpected: Abraham Lincoln proclaiming “Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers got REAL fuckin’ drunk”, for instance. If that’s funny, it’s funny because this goes against our expectations for Abraham Lincoln, language of the time, and formal public speaking by a President. Antihumor also depends on the unexpected, and on the juxtaposition between what is expected and what is given. Also this comic from SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2006-06-23
Robin doesn’t have tenure, so she’s vulnerable to student evaluation and complaints. [Colleges will have students evaluate their professors toward the end of a semester. It’s taken with a grain of salt, but it definitely plays a role into whether a contract gets renewed for another year. Prior to an end of year situation, dropping a class before a deadline en masse would send a message to campus leadership.]
So yeah, I don’t see this whole class sticking around for a semester. If your scholarships (and future hopes and dreams) were dependent on your GPA, would you want to trust that to Robin? Especially if you were expecting a renowned professor instead?
Yes, because Robin will give you all A’s because she don’t give no figs.
Depends. If Robin is a terrible teacher but gives easy As, anyone taking this as an elective loses nothing important by staying. If no other classes rely on good knowledge from this class in particular, then you also don’t get any benefit from leaving. A lot of people aren’t Dorothy who care how they pass and what they learned, they just want to pass. Period.
IU keeps track of class average grades. While there are the occasional fluff class that the school does not mind everyone getting A’s in, typically speaking they want all of the accredited classes to shoot for a class average score of 80% or lower, meaning the class average should be in the B- through C+ range, if not lower.
Yes, that is a thing that gets driven into your skull HARD when you start lesson planning at IU. They don’t want you to have easy A classes for fear that the class will lose accreditation.
No collusion here, we’ll say no more about it *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* ten’ll get you twenty guv’nor
Jeez… Becky is turning into a regular log cabin republican… can she get any worse? This arc is realy showing us a side of her we didn’t see. Though to be fair, undoing a lifetime of religious abuse can be difficult. Right now she’s all like ‘lesbian is okay but the rest of that liberal stuff isn’t’ but hopefully she changes….
My comment about log cabin is because of how she wants to screw over others but still get free passes >.>
Where…did you get that she isn’t okay with liberal stuff? That’s literally what she was tweeting about when she hacked robins twitter. I’d very much like to know where you picked up that she’s being a conservative in any way
what
Becky hasn’t been shown to have a problem with any ‘liberal stuff’ or even things Joyce freaked out about and she isn’t trying to screw over anyone or want to (she was trying to fail as Robin’s campaign manager). She’s doing the dumb kid thing of asking an adult they know if they’ll give them a free pass.
Could the guy she replaced teach? I know Roz liked him, but last I checked, not all professors are too at teaching, as their qualifications have more to do with their familiarity of the subject…Last I heard. Has it changed?
Either way, someone should ask her if she can guarantee she’ll be able to commit to teaching this class at least until the end of the semester.
Chances are something will come up on Capital Hill or she’ll get bored before then. Anything binding to stop her from bailing?
She’s retired from Congress at the end of the current session, which should be very shortly or possibly already. (Should be Jan 5th. We don’t know the current date, but school would likely start after that. But Becky said “at least another week yesterday, so it’s not clear.) That’s why she was looking for another job. That shouldn’t be an issue very shortly regardless.
Being Robin, she could of course get bored and bail. I’m sure there’s a contract, but again, she’s Robin.
If DoA continued following the same calendar, the dates should line up with January 2011 (even though they’re always in “this year”). The new Congress gets sworn in on January 3rd, and we should be well past that. (Real world IU convened classes around the second week of 2011.)
on the other hand DoA might have jumped to the 2020 calendar given that it had a timeskip that would hide the discrepancy, and the reason the previous calendar was based on 2010 in the first place because that was the year the first season started, and this season started in 2020
but that really only matters for what day of the week it is, since we’re assuming an “if COVID-19 wasn’t a thing” reality anyway.
If that’s the case, it looks like classes start around January 19th. Congress still convenes on January third though.
https://studentcentral.indiana.edu/calendar/official-calendar/spring-2021-calendar.html
Robin is a cool mom ♡♡♡!
I pity all the side-character students in this class.
Dorothy is also writing all of this down
Damn, Robin. Two strips, two brutally accurate last-panel political lessons.
I don’t intend this to be insulting, because the comic usually deals in low-key, character-based humor, but this is the first time I actually laughed at it; that was funny
Ahahahahaha they’re going into *thousands* of dollars of debt just to be in this class, and it is incompetent and corrupt from minute one. When it comes to learning politics, I hope Robin has to go to admin and confess that Dorothy is leading the whole class in a protest.
I feel like orchestrating a successful political campaign entitles you to an automatic A in ALL poli sci courses let alone the one run by the toxic candidate you helped win then emotionally blackmailed into conceding.