The thing I like about Billie and Lucy having to interact is that they both depend on pleasing others to feel valuable—Billie needs to be giving parts of herself away, while Lucy needs people to like her. When Billie doesn’t get what she wants, she withdraws into suicidal self-loathing, while Lucy gets more… persistent, let’s say, with getting people like Billie to be her friends.
It’s a neat contrast, and I’m curious if Willis plans to play with it a little bit.
I sincerely wish I knew, it’s very strange everytime they appear. If it was one person, I understand, but the entire floor is made up of these weird people that swoon over Billie and do whatever she says for no good reason. I really hope Billie gets sick of them and draws her line in the sand, and that they realize how they’re acting. Until then, I can imagine Lucy running through the college screaming “THEY’RE ALREADY HERE! READ HALL IS NEXT!”.
BBCC
I imagine it’s really only the 4 of them (Rose, Zaph, Beatrice and Nash).
I don’t think its necessarily a hard thing to comprehend. Billie has been dealing with people who have cast off the shackles of high school all year. Now she’s with people who haven’t.
Mind you, Billie is also cool by juvenile high school standards too.
Emily
I’ve never met a single person in high school (let alone college) who cared this much about “cool people” and weird nerds like these guys are my people. This dorm’s entire population feels like it was ripped directly out of a really bad and inauthentic feeling teen comedy written by someone who has never met a teen.
Savail
Lucky you.
BBCC
Apparently in some schools football and cheerleaders really do have this weird cult like status, especially in really small towns.
Emily
I’m Canadian, we didn’t even HAVE cheerleaders or a football team.
BBCC
My high school did have a football team and eventually a cheerleading one formed, but I don’t know anyone who went to games and while I’m sure I knew their names, it was because I had classes with them. I didn’t know anyone who was a cheerleader.
Lin
Oh this was an entire Thing in my first year dorm. There were established social heirachiches among the “cool” residents that they were obsessed with. Of course, they were also rampantly homophobic and racist, so my largely queer people of all races and straight women of color friends and I didn’t really register for them. And Billie wouldn’t have done well there, either.
GenJen
I think the combo of the fact that she used to be head cheerleader and prom queen in high school and the fact that she “nailed” her RA within the first 3 months of college made her a “legend” before she even showed up in the dorms. I keep forgetting that for them, high school was just, like, 5 months ago, not to mention that at some colleges, those social dynamics don’t really change they actually get more codified.
They seem a bit extreme though. Billy wearing glasses and studying journalism almost broke their image of her. Honestly I want Joyce to come back and continue her “Billy’ fails , just like the rest of us” speech from before.
Also, like, Billy is only really rudeish to her friends or people who annoy her, unlike Malaya. I doubt they’ve seen Billy like that.
geno
I have definitely met people who get attached to some who has more charisma than their peers. It can be really frustrating when you seem to be the only person in a group who doesn’t fawn over one person. Though in my experience they all kinda wanted to bang said person on some level so grain of salt I guess. As for Billie getting sick of them have you been reading this comic? Billie loves the attention. She wants a cult of personality around her if she can get it.
Doopyboop
She loves attention, but I think she’d love GENUINE attention versus this weird blind attention that can be easily shattered just by the idea that Billie wears glasses.
I’m honestly a bit worried about how impressionable Forest Hall seems to be. I feel like they could very easily get sucked into a multi-level marketing scheme.
Lucy: “You’re just going to do whatever Billie does? What if she jumped off a cliff?”
Nash: “If Billie were to jump off a cliff, she would’ve done her due diligence regarding the height of the cliff, the depth of the water, and the angle of entry.”
Lucy: “NO, SHE WOULDN’T HAVE”
… Do Nash and Rose want Lucy to resent Billie?? They are flat-out saying that anything Billie does is automatically superior – how do they not realise how rude and insulting they’re being??
That’s heartbreaking since as much as it’s possible for a super sunny type like Lucy to eventually get on someone’s nerve she’s still quite nice and seeing her becoming resentful towards someone who’s she gotten along with well enough with at this point.
Honestly if I were her I just find companionship elsewhere instead of letting this get to the point where Lucy starts to reminisce about what it was like for her before she became a one-off supporting character in the story of Billie.
this place is honestly the weirdest goddamn nightmare world like what is happening who are these people what century am I in why does anybody give this much of a shit about being a cheerleader and where is this Sheeple plotline leading to.
I envy you having not yet encountered overwhelming evidence that people do, in fact, act like that.
Derek
please give us some examples because I have never met anyone who acts like this for a FORMER high school cheerleader. Small time celebrity I could see this kind of fawning, but literally nobody gives a shit about what you did in your podunk high school before coming to college/uni
not someone else
It kinda depends on how podunk your university is and how young the freshmen you’re talking to are afaik.
DSL
I didn’t say it was limited to cheerleader-fawning or even ex-cheerleader fawning, Derek. And yes, Ivy, they’ll say it out loud, your willingness to believe notwithstanding.
Ivy
I don’t believe you. People may think someone is cool and want to be around them, but they’d be self-aware enough not to say out loud that they just want to follow whatever the cool person is doing
BBCC
I can believe it, but in my experience, they tend to use more flattering terms like ‘I want to be like them’, ‘they inspired me to do this’, ‘they make it seem like fun’, ‘I want to hang out with them’, ‘I just want to be like them’.
245 thoughts on “Different, better”
Ana Chronistic
uh oh
BILLIE’S HYPOTHETICAL MOVIE NIGHT WITH LIVE STRIPPERS
butts
“I’ll build my own movie night! With blackjack! And hookers!”
Owlmirror
Porntube and beer!
Oh, wait. Underage drinking is illegal, right? So non-alcoholic beer.
This is totally not a flask of liquor, and I am not spiking my beer with it.
(Actually, hasn’t Billie given up on drinking, temporarily, for Ruth’s sake?)
BBCC
The first thing she wanted to do in Of Mike and Men was go to a bar, so I don’t think so.
Kamino Neko
Nope. She’s started hiding it better, but while Ruth has started trying to clean up, Billie has not.
Clif
Billie doesn’t really believe that she has an actual problem.
Kaidah
Addicts seldom do until their lives have gone completely tits up. Bille just hasn’t had her “rock bottom” moment yet.
shadowcell
Dumbing of Age Book 9: Before There Was a Hypothetical Better Version!
Ana Chronistic
Dumbing of Age Book 9: Did She Say She Was Coming?
(secret double entendre WOO)
Yumi
“You all want to be having sex with Ruth?”
LeslieBean4Shizzle
Yeah, that was basically my thought.
vlademir1
More or less where my mind went as well.
butts
nerds just orbit billie, don’t they
because of her powerful gravitational fieldKyrik Michalowski
It is the power of her butt, it can destabilize nearby orbits like no other.
Related to butts, nice new gravatar.
butts
the willis giveth (usable shots of billie’s butt)
but he also taketh away (good opportunities for shots of ethan’s butt)
Jimi
It is the power of 2-dimensional character behavior that I frustratingly have yet to understand the narrative purpose of.
I like the butt talks tho
Kyrik Michalowski
Oh boy, so when is the bottom going to fall out of Billie’s “cool” status?
butts
when it collapses under its own weight HEYO
Sporky
Honestly, my prediction is that it won’t, at least not any time soon, and Lucy is going to start resenting Billie.
Why? IDK. It’d be interesting.
Nikol Geier
The thing I like about Billie and Lucy having to interact is that they both depend on pleasing others to feel valuable—Billie needs to be giving parts of herself away, while Lucy needs people to like her. When Billie doesn’t get what she wants, she withdraws into suicidal self-loathing, while Lucy gets more… persistent, let’s say, with getting people like Billie to be her friends.
It’s a neat contrast, and I’m curious if Willis plans to play with it a little bit.
Durandal_1707
Lucy and Joyce just need to team up. No power in the world could resist their combined might.
Needfuldoer
The resulting supernova of sunshine and optimism will destroy the Earth, leaving about a dustpan worth of ashes behind.
Marsh Maryrose
“Everybody loves you
So don’t let them down”
Also, they will never forget you till somebody new comes around.
Bathymetheus
Hotel California is a great poem. And the music is good too.
Bathymetheus
I should mention that I know you were quoting New Kid in Town, but I just don’t find that as compelling. It is quite good in its own way, though.
ShinyNeen
What is this social hierarchy nonsense and why is it so unkind to Lucy!?
Doopyboop
Obviously, these are pod people. And Billie’s the source!
Jamie
Seriously, what is wrong with these people.
Doopyboop
I sincerely wish I knew, it’s very strange everytime they appear. If it was one person, I understand, but the entire floor is made up of these weird people that swoon over Billie and do whatever she says for no good reason. I really hope Billie gets sick of them and draws her line in the sand, and that they realize how they’re acting. Until then, I can imagine Lucy running through the college screaming “THEY’RE ALREADY HERE! READ HALL IS NEXT!”.
BBCC
I imagine it’s really only the 4 of them (Rose, Zaph, Beatrice and Nash).
C.T Phipps
I don’t think its necessarily a hard thing to comprehend. Billie has been dealing with people who have cast off the shackles of high school all year. Now she’s with people who haven’t.
Mind you, Billie is also cool by juvenile high school standards too.
Emily
I’ve never met a single person in high school (let alone college) who cared this much about “cool people” and weird nerds like these guys are my people. This dorm’s entire population feels like it was ripped directly out of a really bad and inauthentic feeling teen comedy written by someone who has never met a teen.
Savail
Lucky you.
BBCC
Apparently in some schools football and cheerleaders really do have this weird cult like status, especially in really small towns.
Emily
I’m Canadian, we didn’t even HAVE cheerleaders or a football team.
BBCC
My high school did have a football team and eventually a cheerleading one formed, but I don’t know anyone who went to games and while I’m sure I knew their names, it was because I had classes with them. I didn’t know anyone who was a cheerleader.
Lin
Oh this was an entire Thing in my first year dorm. There were established social heirachiches among the “cool” residents that they were obsessed with. Of course, they were also rampantly homophobic and racist, so my largely queer people of all races and straight women of color friends and I didn’t really register for them. And Billie wouldn’t have done well there, either.
GenJen
I think the combo of the fact that she used to be head cheerleader and prom queen in high school and the fact that she “nailed” her RA within the first 3 months of college made her a “legend” before she even showed up in the dorms. I keep forgetting that for them, high school was just, like, 5 months ago, not to mention that at some colleges, those social dynamics don’t really change they actually get more codified.
They seem a bit extreme though. Billy wearing glasses and studying journalism almost broke their image of her. Honestly I want Joyce to come back and continue her “Billy’ fails , just like the rest of us” speech from before.
Also, like, Billy is only really rudeish to her friends or people who annoy her, unlike Malaya. I doubt they’ve seen Billy like that.
geno
I have definitely met people who get attached to some who has more charisma than their peers. It can be really frustrating when you seem to be the only person in a group who doesn’t fawn over one person. Though in my experience they all kinda wanted to bang said person on some level so grain of salt I guess. As for Billie getting sick of them have you been reading this comic? Billie loves the attention. She wants a cult of personality around her if she can get it.
Doopyboop
She loves attention, but I think she’d love GENUINE attention versus this weird blind attention that can be easily shattered just by the idea that Billie wears glasses.
StClair
*puts “Cult of Personality” on the hacked muzak*
newllend(henryvolt)
At this point I feel sorry for Lucy, all she really wants is friends but I think she could find better ones than these.
Khyrin
She THOUGHT she already had, is the problem.
Stephen Bierce
The movies are great medicine
I thank you Thomas Edison
For giving us the Best Years Of Our Lives…
BarerMender
Billy got up and walked out of here in her pajamas and I have seen her since.
When was that?
About ten minutes ago.
BarerMender
Bugger. *haven’t*
Sporky
I’m honestly a bit worried about how impressionable Forest Hall seems to be. I feel like they could very easily get sucked into a multi-level marketing scheme.
Yumi
Lucy: “You’re just going to do whatever Billie does? What if she jumped off a cliff?”
Nash: “If Billie were to jump off a cliff, she would’ve done her due diligence regarding the height of the cliff, the depth of the water, and the angle of entry.”
Lucy: “NO, SHE WOULDN’T HAVE”
DaveM
As always, there’s an XKCD on that very subject.
https://xkcd.com/1170/
Clif
Do you have some kind of searchable index for finding them?
noc
There’s a transcript for each comic in the html of its page, so they’re pretty easy to search for.
Needfuldoer
There’s also Explain xkcd, about the closest thing to an xkcd wiki that exists.
TemporalShrew
This dorm is about to be smote for idol worship or something if they’re not careful.
Marsh Maryrose
Almost-appropriate gravatar is almost appropriate. (“Almost” because Hank has been a little bit redeemed since his earliest appearances.)
Ivy
He probably still thinks idol worship is wrong
Miri
… Do Nash and Rose want Lucy to resent Billie?? They are flat-out saying that anything Billie does is automatically superior – how do they not realise how rude and insulting they’re being??
newllend(henryvolt)
That’s heartbreaking since as much as it’s possible for a super sunny type like Lucy to eventually get on someone’s nerve she’s still quite nice and seeing her becoming resentful towards someone who’s she gotten along with well enough with at this point.
Honestly if I were her I just find companionship elsewhere instead of letting this get to the point where Lucy starts to reminisce about what it was like for her before she became a one-off supporting character in the story of Billie.
thejeff
She was an occasional supporting character in the story of Malaya.
But at least there was Fuckface.
C.T Phipps
It’s not that Lucy should resent Billie, it’s just that Lucy can never equal her.
Emily
Which is absurd because she’s a blatantly better and more likable person.
C.T Phipps
Likable? Yes. Better? Absolutely. Socially inferior because Billie is cool? CLEARLY!
Roger
this place is honestly the weirdest goddamn nightmare world like what is happening who are these people what century am I in why does anybody give this much of a shit about being a cheerleader and where is this Sheeple plotline leading to.
Sporky
Second Eaton arc v2.0
Ivy
They’re poorly written characters imo. No one acts like that.
DSL
I envy you having not yet encountered overwhelming evidence that people do, in fact, act like that.
Derek
please give us some examples because I have never met anyone who acts like this for a FORMER high school cheerleader. Small time celebrity I could see this kind of fawning, but literally nobody gives a shit about what you did in your podunk high school before coming to college/uni
not someone else
It kinda depends on how podunk your university is and how young the freshmen you’re talking to are afaik.
DSL
I didn’t say it was limited to cheerleader-fawning or even ex-cheerleader fawning, Derek. And yes, Ivy, they’ll say it out loud, your willingness to believe notwithstanding.
Ivy
I don’t believe you. People may think someone is cool and want to be around them, but they’d be self-aware enough not to say out loud that they just want to follow whatever the cool person is doing
BBCC
I can believe it, but in my experience, they tend to use more flattering terms like ‘I want to be like them’, ‘they inspired me to do this’, ‘they make it seem like fun’, ‘I want to hang out with them’, ‘I just want to be like them’.