i was really worried that today’s update would contradict my new fic that’s set later in the same day… luckily i GOT OFF SCOT FREE SO FAR…
(and speaking of that fic! i saw someone else link their doa fanfic in the comments before, so here you go — it’s mostly based on the newer amazi-girl strips. and amber horny. and what goes on in her brain when nobody else is around. https://archiveofourown.org/works/58884769 )
I am amazed at how much before this strip I thought of Roz as one-dimensional. I really like that she’s taking the time to be candid with Joe while answering his questions. No sugar coating but no accusations either.
Except she’s wrong. It’s not fundie talk in his case. It’s his fear that he’ll be a womanizer like his father. He wants to make sure he’s not being deceived by his dick into thinking he cares more about Joyce than he actually does. It’s not a religious thing at all. It’s from his innate sense of decency and a desire to not do anything that would hurt Joyce. Roz is ignoring his very real concerns and fears and blowing them off because to her sex doesn’t mean anything other than sex.
It’s not what Roz says in the strip, but she’s lacking a lot of information. We semi-omniscient readers are privy to a lot more data about what might be affecting other characters than any one person in the strip.
Marillius
We semi-omniscient readers can also see that a.) Joe doesn’t disagree with her and b.) Roz is RIGHT because of Joe’s encounter with Liz.
There might also be a c.) that joe is always worried about being his dad, but in this case the situation is definitely at least partly him getting some of Liz’s self shame on him.
Nothri
SEMi-omniscient? Tch. Speak for yourself.
BTW Greg yes I mean you. Combine your wedding anniversary and your daughter’s birth then add 34567 to the total when you get your next lottery ticket. You won’t regret it.
Stan by this point there isn’t a way to stop the heart attack two years from now but eat a salad today and you can avoid it being fatal.
Little suspicious/concerning you left out Daniella.
Nymph
People in the comments sometimes interpret the comic in whatever way suits them personally at the time (especially if it means they can declare someone The Bad Guy) and they don’t take silly little things like “what is literally in the strip” into account.
Jeremiah
(Looking at literally every single comment by Freemage) Yuuuuuup.
But she can only react to the things he says. And classifying sexual active woman as “used” and talking about their “virginity belonging to someone”is fundie talk. Those are the words he says. There is something else behind it sure, but those are still fundie talking points.
Freemage
The point, though, as always with Roz, is that she assumes she has all the facts, when usually she has a much more narrow perception than she realizes. Not all sexual hang-ups are of religious derivation (and, BTW, Joe’s prior attitude towards sex was hurting him without him realizing it, even though it was Roz-approved).
And for that matter, a consider how this convo has gone:
1: Roz assumes Joe’s here for a booty call.
2: Roz assumes that Joe’s here for… sex tips, I think?
3: Roz assumes that the issue is that Joyce wants to wait.
4: Roz finally asks a question (“Why?”), and then assumes from his answer that he’s worried Joyce will dump him.
5: Finally, she’s assuming that his issue is religious in nature.
I grew up watching sitcoms in the 70s, and that many misunderstandings on one scene would’ve been considered unrealistic writing, even for Three’s Company.
The only reason the conversation moved forward at all is that Joe is so freaked out about the situation with Joyce and not wanting to screw it up that he has been willing to correct her all the way through.
thejeff
They’re all pretty reasonable misunderstandings and they’re all cleared up almost immediately. Only really hits sitcom level when they’re left hanging to drive further conflict.
Roz just intuiting Joe’s changes would be far weirder.
Marillius
Except, you know, how she’s right.
a.) Joe doesn’t disagree with her and
b.) Roz is RIGHT because of Joe’s encounter with Liz.
There might also be a
c.) that joe is always worried about being his dad
But in this case the situation is definitely at least partly him getting some of Liz’s self shame on him.
Suzi
I mean she is reacting to the facts as she knows and hears them (That IS fundie talk – doesn’t matter if there’s also his fear of becoming his father, but the language he is using is fundie verbage) which is literally all anyone can do so it’s a bit odd to criticize her for doing… Just something we all do by default.
I feel like it’s less that his worry is that his dick is tricking him and more that his worry is he’s overcorrected and is ONLY attracted to Joyce because she represents the opposite of his previous promiscuous past which he’s trying to get away from, and that if he gives in and he takes her virginity he’ll lose that attraction and hurt her. He does care about Joyce, he cared about her long before they got together when they were just friends, and so because he cares about her he doesn’t want to hurt her, and he recognizes that if they jump in too fast before they’re certain about being together long term and then they realize they weren’t as good of a fit as the hormones made them think, it’ll hurt her more if he took her virginity than if they just let things run their course.
The way he’s talking about her virginity very much is though?
Freemage
Yes and no. He’s not worried about making her ‘impure’. He’s worried that if he loses interest after sleeping with her, he’ll be causing her to ~feel~ impure. He suspects, likely correctly, that Joyce, for all her willingness to no longer be a virgin–with HIM, specifically–would feel used and maltreated if after he sleeps with her he immediately moves on to someone else.
As others have noted, this ain’t about God, it’s about his daddy issues.
Proxiehunter
Re-read pannel two where he litterally tells Roz that he’s worried about “taking her innocence” and his worry about “taking something frommher that somebody else shoukd have”. Yeah his daddy issues are a huge part of this but he’s not giving Roz anything to go on there and what he’s been actually saying to her with his mouth words is 100% purity culture bullshit. She’s got nothing to work with to reach any other conclusion and is giving the best advice she can with the information she has.
Kimi
I am wondering if he doesn’t want to admit the daddy issues. It might be a whole lot easier to say that he is worried about the social stereotype of purity culture than admit his most inner fear.
Mark
Or perhaps he’s struggling to express something complex, and his environment just handed him a simple answer that seems to fit.
Freemage
My issue is that she’s rushing to the advice stage before she’s bothering to complete the investigation stage.
It’s a lot like when, after overhearing ten seconds of conversation (that she was not invited to participate in), she immediately opted to give Joyce the Pill lecture that had absolutely nothing to do with the reason Joyce wanted the Pill. She gave accurate and even useful information, but not at a time when Joyce could absorb it, all because she’s so hyper-focused on assuming everyone should be as sex-positive as herself.
If you’re going to accept the role of counselor/advisor, the absolute first step is finding out about the advisee’s situation, not simply making one assumption after another.
Yumi
You’re getting kinda exhausting on this.
Jeremiah
I think you just really want Roz to be in the wrong here for some reason I don’t get.
Rogue 7
Roz *is* wrong. Not morally or ethically wrong, she’s just…incorrect.
Jeremiah
But they aren’t talking about how factually accurate her statement is but how she is being bad somehow for what she is saying and how she is saying..
Rogue 7
Not in this thread from what I can see. It’s mostly people talking about how she doesn’t have our perspective on Joe.
Jeremiah
I am talking about what freemage is saying which is very much that.
Rogue 7
So am I. They’re saying this isn’t the first time Roz has assumed that anyone who doesn’t share her views on sex is a prude. But they’re still just saying that Roz is factually wrong, not morally wrong.
Freemage
Correct. My issue is not with Roz’s views on sex. It’s with her views on other people, and her assumption that she knows what’s best for all people, all the time.
Jeremiah
That is literally what I mean that is wrong about what you are saying.
I think that’s where he’s started, but his mental framing has started to slip from “I don’t want to be a user” to fundie bullshit. It’s an understandable mistake, the language we have for why being a user is wrong is perilously close to the fucked-up fundie ideas he’s parroting (“her innocence” as something valuable he’d be taking and the WORSE idea that someone else should “have”.
I think the trap is right there in his phrasing — his fear is being a user; a user uses; so she’d be “used”; and then BOOM into the fundie mindtrap of a then she’d BE “used” and devalued. His concern should be (and I think is) about not hurting her feelings by being the cad Sara and Dot think he is, but he’s conflating the harm being “Joyce would be hurt because I was emotionally deceptive” with the harm being “she’d be sullied by fucking.”
It’s an interesting and resonant error!
thejeff
I think he’s phrasing it poorly, but I think he’s more concerned that she’ll feel that way afterwards than that she’ll actually be sullied in some fundamental sense.
Especially combined with his fear that he’ll lose interest and leave her.
So we’re combining his long term fear of being his dad (though cast more as leaving her than as cheating here) with the new trauma of Liz thinking she’d have been ruined if she’d gone through with it. And remember, Liz was also very clearly willing and enthusiastic, up to the moment she panicked.
He’s using the fundy phrasing, but I think it’s only infected him in that he’s thinking about how she might react, not in terms of his own approach.
Marillius
Except we know he specifically had a girl breakdown before it happened and it was entirely fundamentalist thinking that she spoke about, giving him mild trauma about that.
thejeff
That’s kind of what I said.
My point is that at least based on that, he’s worried about her having regrets because of her old fundamentalist trauma, not that he’s absorbed enough fundamentalism to think that way himself.
Ah Joe… maybe at first, he desired the idea of ‘breaking Joyce in’ (his words, not mine!), but that clearly hasn’t been the case for… like 7 months in comic. By this point he loves Joyce for who she is, which is incredibly scary for him. Because he clearly thinks she couldn’t ever love him for who HE is.
It’s interesting, in that what he’s saying now embodies the emotional flip side of the same outlook. It’s just now that he cares about Joyce as a person, he’s afraid of becoming the Tex Avery wolf he was already imagining himself as. Innocence as a precious consumable luxury that holds value because of its rarity and breakability.
Agreed, plus based on what he said in yesterday’s comic I think another worry of his would be that basically sex is all he brings to a relationship, ergo once Joyce gets that, and he’s “ruined” her to do it… surely she wouldn’t stick around.
281 thoughts on “Established”
Ana Chronistic
Shamefully Transcripted Dogma
Ana Chronistic
Scripturally Testamented Infection
Jo_cubstar
OMG that Joyce face wow
Needfuldoer
I liked Shamefully Scripted Clerks better.
Michael Steamweed
They are good movies, yeah, but definitely worthy of shame. 😀
EtchJetty
i was really worried that today’s update would contradict my new fic that’s set later in the same day… luckily i GOT OFF SCOT FREE SO FAR…
(and speaking of that fic! i saw someone else link their doa fanfic in the comments before, so here you go — it’s mostly based on the newer amazi-girl strips. and amber horny. and what goes on in her brain when nobody else is around. https://archiveofourown.org/works/58884769 )
EtchJetty
in other news, looks like it’s not just Amber who Joe’s swapping problems with
Dana
Fun read. Not a fanfic person, so I had to leave kudos as a guest. 🙂
Doctor_Who
Turns out Joe and Joyce are slowly swapping original personalities.
Joe’s gonna end up an obnoxiously chipper morning person who refuses to curse or engage in hanky panky.
Joyce is gonna release a list of guys ranked by hotness, and possibly slip Roz a note asking to be “penciled in”.
Coatl
It’s true, we just have to wait until they stop Joyce’s carefree state, because she’s taking things pretty slow.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
What is the Joe version of the DingDong bandit?
Taffy
He’s known as the Vagooter Looter.
Michael Steamweed
I am terrified of this outcome.
(and aroused)
((i am terroused.))
staszu13
The Return of Anti-Joyce!
Sirksome
Dumbing of Age: The Phantom Liz.
Charles Phipps
I was obnoxious in how much I wanted more Liz.
Seriously, I whined about how strips didn’t have her in them before Willis sent her back to her home planet.
3oranges
Note: Liz probably didn’t die on the way to her home planet, Sarah would have been upset
Needfuldoer
Not if she was the one who did it!
Red
Seems like what happened with Sarah’s sister really impacted him. (Can’t remember her name oops)
Nono
It’s Joyce!
Bryy
Nah, it’s Liz.
AY
Her name was Liz iirc
Yumi
Her name was Liz, but it was short for Crystallization, which was an odd detail.
Taffy
Sarah’s sister is named Princess.
Morleuca
her name was Robert Paulson
Taffy
Another voice actor who unfortunately passed away this week.
Call Me Deacon Blues
What? Robert Paulson didn’t die. You’re thinking Peter Renaday
Taffy
No, I’m definitely not. I’d have to know the name to be thinking it.
Plain Marie
Go Roz! Call it out.
audkitten
I am amazed at how much before this strip I thought of Roz as one-dimensional. I really like that she’s taking the time to be candid with Joe while answering his questions. No sugar coating but no accusations either.
Jeremiah
Roz contain multitudes. And all of them are hotter that you.
Thag Simmons
Joe and Roz actually seem to get along okay, so we’re getting her with all of her positive qualities and none of her more abrasive
MisterJinKC
Except she’s wrong. It’s not fundie talk in his case. It’s his fear that he’ll be a womanizer like his father. He wants to make sure he’s not being deceived by his dick into thinking he cares more about Joyce than he actually does. It’s not a religious thing at all. It’s from his innate sense of decency and a desire to not do anything that would hurt Joyce. Roz is ignoring his very real concerns and fears and blowing them off because to her sex doesn’t mean anything other than sex.
GingerMadman
Um, that’s not what it says in the strip?
Jeff K!
It’s not what Roz says in the strip, but she’s lacking a lot of information. We semi-omniscient readers are privy to a lot more data about what might be affecting other characters than any one person in the strip.
Marillius
We semi-omniscient readers can also see that a.) Joe doesn’t disagree with her and b.) Roz is RIGHT because of Joe’s encounter with Liz.
There might also be a c.) that joe is always worried about being his dad, but in this case the situation is definitely at least partly him getting some of Liz’s self shame on him.
Nothri
SEMi-omniscient? Tch. Speak for yourself.
BTW Greg yes I mean you. Combine your wedding anniversary and your daughter’s birth then add 34567 to the total when you get your next lottery ticket. You won’t regret it.
Stan by this point there isn’t a way to stop the heart attack two years from now but eat a salad today and you can avoid it being fatal.
Gene? Fuck you too buddy. Who even does that?
Taffy
Little suspicious/concerning you left out Daniella.
Nymph
People in the comments sometimes interpret the comic in whatever way suits them personally at the time (especially if it means they can declare someone The Bad Guy) and they don’t take silly little things like “what is literally in the strip” into account.
Jeremiah
(Looking at literally every single comment by Freemage) Yuuuuuup.
Queezle
But she can only react to the things he says. And classifying sexual active woman as “used” and talking about their “virginity belonging to someone”is fundie talk. Those are the words he says. There is something else behind it sure, but those are still fundie talking points.
Freemage
The point, though, as always with Roz, is that she assumes she has all the facts, when usually she has a much more narrow perception than she realizes. Not all sexual hang-ups are of religious derivation (and, BTW, Joe’s prior attitude towards sex was hurting him without him realizing it, even though it was Roz-approved).
And for that matter, a consider how this convo has gone:
1: Roz assumes Joe’s here for a booty call.
2: Roz assumes that Joe’s here for… sex tips, I think?
3: Roz assumes that the issue is that Joyce wants to wait.
4: Roz finally asks a question (“Why?”), and then assumes from his answer that he’s worried Joyce will dump him.
5: Finally, she’s assuming that his issue is religious in nature.
I grew up watching sitcoms in the 70s, and that many misunderstandings on one scene would’ve been considered unrealistic writing, even for Three’s Company.
The only reason the conversation moved forward at all is that Joe is so freaked out about the situation with Joyce and not wanting to screw it up that he has been willing to correct her all the way through.
thejeff
They’re all pretty reasonable misunderstandings and they’re all cleared up almost immediately. Only really hits sitcom level when they’re left hanging to drive further conflict.
Roz just intuiting Joe’s changes would be far weirder.
Marillius
Except, you know, how she’s right.
a.) Joe doesn’t disagree with her and
b.) Roz is RIGHT because of Joe’s encounter with Liz.
There might also be a
c.) that joe is always worried about being his dad
But in this case the situation is definitely at least partly him getting some of Liz’s self shame on him.
Suzi
I mean she is reacting to the facts as she knows and hears them (That IS fundie talk – doesn’t matter if there’s also his fear of becoming his father, but the language he is using is fundie verbage) which is literally all anyone can do so it’s a bit odd to criticize her for doing… Just something we all do by default.
Psychie
I feel like it’s less that his worry is that his dick is tricking him and more that his worry is he’s overcorrected and is ONLY attracted to Joyce because she represents the opposite of his previous promiscuous past which he’s trying to get away from, and that if he gives in and he takes her virginity he’ll lose that attraction and hurt her. He does care about Joyce, he cared about her long before they got together when they were just friends, and so because he cares about her he doesn’t want to hurt her, and he recognizes that if they jump in too fast before they’re certain about being together long term and then they realize they weren’t as good of a fit as the hormones made them think, it’ll hurt her more if he took her virginity than if they just let things run their course.
Shade
The way he’s talking about her virginity very much is though?
Freemage
Yes and no. He’s not worried about making her ‘impure’. He’s worried that if he loses interest after sleeping with her, he’ll be causing her to ~feel~ impure. He suspects, likely correctly, that Joyce, for all her willingness to no longer be a virgin–with HIM, specifically–would feel used and maltreated if after he sleeps with her he immediately moves on to someone else.
As others have noted, this ain’t about God, it’s about his daddy issues.
Proxiehunter
Re-read pannel two where he litterally tells Roz that he’s worried about “taking her innocence” and his worry about “taking something frommher that somebody else shoukd have”. Yeah his daddy issues are a huge part of this but he’s not giving Roz anything to go on there and what he’s been actually saying to her with his mouth words is 100% purity culture bullshit. She’s got nothing to work with to reach any other conclusion and is giving the best advice she can with the information she has.
Kimi
I am wondering if he doesn’t want to admit the daddy issues. It might be a whole lot easier to say that he is worried about the social stereotype of purity culture than admit his most inner fear.
Mark
Or perhaps he’s struggling to express something complex, and his environment just handed him a simple answer that seems to fit.
Freemage
My issue is that she’s rushing to the advice stage before she’s bothering to complete the investigation stage.
It’s a lot like when, after overhearing ten seconds of conversation (that she was not invited to participate in), she immediately opted to give Joyce the Pill lecture that had absolutely nothing to do with the reason Joyce wanted the Pill. She gave accurate and even useful information, but not at a time when Joyce could absorb it, all because she’s so hyper-focused on assuming everyone should be as sex-positive as herself.
If you’re going to accept the role of counselor/advisor, the absolute first step is finding out about the advisee’s situation, not simply making one assumption after another.
Yumi
You’re getting kinda exhausting on this.
Jeremiah
I think you just really want Roz to be in the wrong here for some reason I don’t get.
Rogue 7
Roz *is* wrong. Not morally or ethically wrong, she’s just…incorrect.
Jeremiah
But they aren’t talking about how factually accurate her statement is but how she is being bad somehow for what she is saying and how she is saying..
Rogue 7
Not in this thread from what I can see. It’s mostly people talking about how she doesn’t have our perspective on Joe.
Jeremiah
I am talking about what freemage is saying which is very much that.
Rogue 7
So am I. They’re saying this isn’t the first time Roz has assumed that anyone who doesn’t share her views on sex is a prude. But they’re still just saying that Roz is factually wrong, not morally wrong.
Freemage
Correct. My issue is not with Roz’s views on sex. It’s with her views on other people, and her assumption that she knows what’s best for all people, all the time.
Jeremiah
That is literally what I mean that is wrong about what you are saying.
Marillius
Reread his mild trauma from Liz’s breakdown.
BSD
I think that’s where he’s started, but his mental framing has started to slip from “I don’t want to be a user” to fundie bullshit. It’s an understandable mistake, the language we have for why being a user is wrong is perilously close to the fucked-up fundie ideas he’s parroting (“her innocence” as something valuable he’d be taking and the WORSE idea that someone else should “have”.
I think the trap is right there in his phrasing — his fear is being a user; a user uses; so she’d be “used”; and then BOOM into the fundie mindtrap of a then she’d BE “used” and devalued. His concern should be (and I think is) about not hurting her feelings by being the cad Sara and Dot think he is, but he’s conflating the harm being “Joyce would be hurt because I was emotionally deceptive” with the harm being “she’d be sullied by fucking.”
It’s an interesting and resonant error!
thejeff
I think he’s phrasing it poorly, but I think he’s more concerned that she’ll feel that way afterwards than that she’ll actually be sullied in some fundamental sense.
Especially combined with his fear that he’ll lose interest and leave her.
So we’re combining his long term fear of being his dad (though cast more as leaving her than as cheating here) with the new trauma of Liz thinking she’d have been ruined if she’d gone through with it. And remember, Liz was also very clearly willing and enthusiastic, up to the moment she panicked.
He’s using the fundy phrasing, but I think it’s only infected him in that he’s thinking about how she might react, not in terms of his own approach.
Marillius
Except we know he specifically had a girl breakdown before it happened and it was entirely fundamentalist thinking that she spoke about, giving him mild trauma about that.
thejeff
That’s kind of what I said.
My point is that at least based on that, he’s worried about her having regrets because of her old fundamentalist trauma, not that he’s absorbed enough fundamentalism to think that way himself.
Amós Batista
Thanks. I was worried because I didn’t understand anything about this strip.
EpochFlame
dang, they swapped headspace
Doopyboop
Ah Joe… maybe at first, he desired the idea of ‘breaking Joyce in’ (his words, not mine!), but that clearly hasn’t been the case for… like 7 months in comic. By this point he loves Joyce for who she is, which is incredibly scary for him. Because he clearly thinks she couldn’t ever love him for who HE is.
Dday
It’s interesting, in that what he’s saying now embodies the emotional flip side of the same outlook. It’s just now that he cares about Joyce as a person, he’s afraid of becoming the Tex Avery wolf he was already imagining himself as. Innocence as a precious consumable luxury that holds value because of its rarity and breakability.
Doopyboop
Agreed, plus based on what he said in yesterday’s comic I think another worry of his would be that basically sex is all he brings to a relationship, ergo once Joyce gets that, and he’s “ruined” her to do it… surely she wouldn’t stick around.
RassilonTDavros
Weirdly enough, I have actually heard a few horror stories about Sexually Transmitted Purity Culture Bullshit.
Charles Phipps