My brother took me out for sushi on my birthday last year and I got what was called a Spicy Girl. The greatest gift of all was him saying “Ah, a spicy girl for a spicy girl!” (I’m a trans woman)
I’m pretty simple though, one of my favorite rolls is simply just raw salmon.
Love Sushi but i am pretty sure jve only really had Americnaized/Canadian Sushi i had a rainbow ? roll and a salomn roll recently ? . I have serious doubt that ill ever be able to afford a trip Japan i suppose ill have to settle sushi from a Toronto Japanese restaurant which is the closest to authentic sushi ill be able to get.
I love sushi! I can’t say I have a favorite roll mostly because I don’t think I’ve had enough varieties yet.
I mean, when it come to nigiri, you can never go wrong with just raw salmon. I love the stuff.
But for actual maki rolls? Lots of possibilities I don’t think I’ve managed to sample yet.
Clif
If I tried sushi, I would probably love it, but I’ve made it a personal goal to get through life eating as few raw meats as possible.
Time Sage
Sushi doesn’t have to be raw. I eat sushi with cooked shrimp all the time. And Egg sushi exists too. The word sushi refers to the rice used in it’s preparation.
VicMortimer
That seems like an odd goal.
I suppose I could make it a day goal or something….
Eh, who am I kidding. Had raw salmon with eggs for breakfast yesterday.
The eggs weren’t raw yesterday – but I’ve had an absolutely delicious ‘sashimi martini’ with raw quail eggs.
The only one I haven’t particularly liked was the raw chicken. I haven’t tried raw alligator or frog, but I suspect they wouldn’t be great either. And raw snail seems like a bad idea.
My favourite piece of sushi is a lightly flambéd salmon with fried onion on black rice nigiri. Only ever eaten it in one place. Fried unagi (eel) is my favourite staple piece. Rolls-wise… Not sure. Mood-dependent I think. So many rich flavours.
The best piece of a sushi dinner I’ve ever had was a pacific tuna sashimi my I ate with my friends when we decided to blow a thousand pounds on a collective 30-year birthday dinner. It’s been over a decade and I can still feel it melting on my tongue. I’ve become more of a sashimi person as I’ve aged.
Adeptus
Sadly eating bluefin tuna is like eating tiger sashimi. They are apex predator fish, and in no way numerous enough to be treated as food. Please don’t buy tuna.
I’m a simple girl, I love my maki 😀 I love to get a good variation and decide throughout the meal what order I eat them. I love alternating, like avocado -> salmon -> cucumber -> salmon – > cream cheese-spring onion etc.
I would eat sushi once or twice a week if it wasn’t so pricy! I love red tuna, don’t usually pay up for otoro because I’m too much of a simpleton to tell much of a difference. Salmon is delightful when it’s really good but just fine otherwise.
For rolls a really good fresh hand roll with fish, something crunchy and roe is delicious but hard to eat! Other than that just gimme some interesting flavor combos and I’m happy. Except avoid shrimp. I don’t like shrimp in a roll and I don’t like cold shrimp at all so no shrimp in sushi for me.
very fond of kappa maki (my boss said it was eaten as a palate cleanser in his homeland), my cities sushi tradition is reletively authentic (considering we are smack innthemiddle of north america, we have a tradition food scene that is the envy of most cities 3times our size.) currently there is a lot more of the BC’ized sushi than there used to here, but most of our sushi chefs till about 20 years ago all trained under the same japanese guy who opened a sushi place in the city years ago serving traditional japanese sushi and dinners (they were extremely popular with the cities japanese diaspora, and the japanese family buisness i worked for said they were about the closest to home cooking he could get in north america). also love the taryaki rolls
I loved tuna before I was vegetarian (as in the kind used in sashimi and sushi, not that I minded canned for a melt or whatever), now my favourites are yam rolls, avocado rolls, and fancy rolls with mango or whatever. Oh, and a place used to have an amazing specialty asparagus roll.
And if I’m getting sushi, sunomono salad and gomae as sides
I swear to Christ if these children stopped hitting each other for five seconds they’d all simultaneously be the best fucking friends in the world. If they live to see 25 they’re all going to be living together in a two-bedroom apartment in Seattle with three trans women and someone’s adorable exotic pet autism service animal.
Now if you’ll excuse me, apparently I’ll be writing a short fanfiction.
Like Joyce isn’t even being more explicit about it than Dina in the first panel here.
Astariel
Oh, there’s always an excuse to double standard Joyce & Dorothy.
Li
@Astariel: look, there are things we agree on, I’m not asking you to avoid me in the comment section or anything, but pls. Pls.
Reasonable people can just forget that a thing happened, it does not have to be double standards.
Yotomoe
Also I’m pretty sure not everyone was on board for that partoxular”tell everyone we had sex” arc. Though I will say the posts Li posted have a notable difference. And that is that dina and Becky are close friends with everyone in that room. While Lucy and Joyce are like…acquaintances at best.
Li
@Yotomoe: re: “Joyce and Lucy are acquaintances as best”
I think Lucy was actually genuinely friends with Becky, and I think she wanted to be better friends.
I’m not sure if she and Becky are still close post-Walky-dumping, but. That second strip is Lucy volunteering to help Becky convince Joyce to take birth control, so I think “acquaintance” is probably a weak word for it.
Yeah it’s crazy how quickly I’ve soured on this relationship. I get these are college kids and the priorities of college kids are 1) don’t fail out and 2) find the next orgasm, in the reverse order, but good lord, Joyce.
I gotta say I love “hater containment thread” and then the next comment being you like “It’s me, I’m haters” lmao
Donovan
Sometimes you gotta be the zookeeper of your own enclosure
Clif
You mean that we should start a sub-thread inside the hater containment thread for people that hate hater containment thread?
I don’t think I could make the second comment their though, because I’m more like, meh, it’s sometimes amusing. But I think Dot’s missing a trick by not bribing NPGZ to let her have the hater Containment thread as the first comment thread.
Dot
At some point I’ll subcontract the containment thread out to them
Why the hell isn’t Dorothy informing her that no informing people unprompted that you’ve just had sex is something of a social faux pas
Scruffy looking nerfherder
I mean she kind of did, we just haven’t gotten to the part of the storyline where we address how much Joyce ignores things that Dorothy says not to do out of respect just because she wants to anyway.
As noted by others: It was’t that long ago that they both witnessed the cringe that was Becky shouting from the mountaintops that she and Dina has Done The Deed.
Jon
In a goofier, more boisterous, and more vague way, all of which helps it feel less creepy.
When does this start to cross the line into harassment
Nono
I mean Becky and Dina were doing it too. It’s still like, ehhh but on the list of Bad Joyce things this one is… like, whatever at this point.
I think I just get more apathetic about it with each strip. Yes yes Joyce is a menace.
Donovan
That wasn’t really a super serious criticism. At this point I’m just hating for the love of the game. I was born to Hate.
Seralyna
I have such a large amount of respect for you for admitting this. Just like, earnestly really funny.
Donovan
I’ve never hidden it. Its just fun to point at these bitches, turn to someone else who feels likewise and say “lmao do you see this fuckin’ shit? Wack.”
Its really no deeper than that. They bore me together, so I make my own fun.
Nyzer
It makes way more sense for Becky’s character. As well as Dina’s to go along with it.
Nono
But it didn’t make it any less rude? Like do we give Becky a pass because “oh that’s just how Becky is”?
Nyzer
Not a full pass, but… a bit of leeway, I suppose? It was decently clear that she was doing it as a coping mechanism, caught between wanting to brag about it but also not feeling like she was ready to tell Joyce.
She was also a less graphic than Joyce is being to Lucy, so there’s that too.
And yeah, I’ll admit that there’s a bit of “she’s already obnoxious and attention-grabbing about her sexuality so this isn’t nearly as much of a step up” at play too.
All this said? I wasn’t impressed by Becky doing it either. But I’m definitely less impressed here.
Scruffy looking nerfherder
I think it’s less a pass and more an acknowledgement of that Becky is an annoying loudmouth we expect this from and matches her character. Joyce was not that and has lost all semblance of herself to become this way, making it feel more jarring and outlandish as a result.
Nono
Joyce who was always about loudly declaring anger and freedom?
I mean she’s more rude these days about it but I don’t think it’s that uncharacteristic now that she’s decided she will no longer feel shame about sex.
Still rude and uncalled for, but I don’t feel that it’s jarring.
Nyzer
Unless I’m forgetting it, I don’t think anyone would have known that she was masturbating now or that she was having sexual encounters with Joe unless she was talking to someone she was already very comfortable with or who had already figured it out. This is a very sudden post-Dorothy change and yeah, it feels jarring for it, especially considering it hasn’t even been 24 hours since she openly realized she’s not straight.
And wasn’t she usually declaring anger and freedom in response to her or one of her friends being hurt in some way?
Lee
Word choice matters a lot on something like this. “Dorothy was inside me” is SIGNIFICANTLY more cringe and invasive than…well I can’t remember exactly when it happened to look it up but I think Becky blurted out something like “We totes fucked!”, which I feel is really not all that wild at all for close friends in this age bracket.
Big Z
This right here. Bragging about HAVING sex is on the line. Bragging about the SPECIFIC MECHANICS of sex is over the line.
Compare/contrast “We’re trying for a baby!” and “My husband shoots fat loads into me every night!”
deliverything
Really, it’s so far over the line that, if someone said something like that to me, I’d assume it was actually referring to something nonsexual that they were trying to make sound sexual for a joke. Like dentistry, for example. It’s a very unnecessary level of detail for without the bait-and-switch humour, unless you somehow already know the listener’s fine with that level of detail.
That said, I’m not actually hating on this. Joyce being creepy and offputting is at least more interesting than their generic relationship stuff was, so if it’s one or the other, I prefer Joyce doing everything wrong.
I’m just glad the comic’s actually framing it as bad, though. If I wanted to read people being creepy and cringeworthy in a comic that tries to pretend they’re being perfectly reasonable, I’d read 9 Chickweed Lane.
Every comic that passes without actually addressing the fact that Joyce left her Schrodinger’s boyfriend on read vis a vis the actual state of their relationship is another gray hair on my scalp.
Like, yes yes, these two are dweebs and that’s very nice, Willis, but I could have sworn this storyline had, like. A story?
It just makes me check out more and more. For a cheating storyline, I’d either expect overwhelming shame (especially from at least one of these two) or the kind of self-centered rationalization to justify it until the reveal occurs, and then a bunch of shame as a result of the judgement of the people around them.
And it’s fine to be the latter and get a slow burn on it, but then I don’t get the point of making it be front page news and have Joyce’s dad already show up and have Joyce come out of the closet to him, while very heavily avoiding the feeling of shame on multiple occasions AND also inserting this C plot of “white girls kissing takes away from the point of the protest and the characters invested in the protest are bothered by it”.
Maybe the point could be that everything is blowing up at once, but not if we’re going to do things like put all of that on pause for them to go have sex and act all lovey-dovey in private, or if they’re going to go out of their way to have a performative apology and arrange a double date with poor description mixup shenanigans. It doesn’t feel like a messy situation, it feels like a messy story with a lack of focus.
Jallorn
TBF, I don’t think Joyce ever got around to mentioning she didn’t actually break up with Joe? Dorothy is the one who’s most likely to freak out and she thinks everything is… well, legal, if not moral. Which, let’s be real, is really more what she’s been about in the first place. Like, she’s legalistic as a shortcut to being moral, but that means that she’s able to lean on the legalism to avoid feeling guilt over doing harm.
Cause, fun fact, you can okay legally, even okay morally, and still do harm to someone. And it doesn’t help fix the harm that you were in the right.
Adeptus
It feels like a badly written fanfic about somebody’s OTP.
Odo
I think the thing is that is isn’t primarily being approached as a cheating storyline. It is being approached as a rom-com.
In a cheating story, where the protagonist is the cheater, the central conflict is the protagonist’s own limitations. Can they recognize that they did wrong? Can they try to repair what they broke? How will they grow from their mistake?
A rom-com focuses on the couple coming together. Other things are thrown in to create drama, but the central conflict is “Will they manage to make their love work?”. The cheating is just an obstacle to be overcome on the path to love.
Given the strip about how Joyce is “not coming back”, I think the actual explanation for this (in that it’s the one Willis wants us to believe) is that Joyce literally forgot about him.
Lumino
Which is just awful because Joe was her FRIEND.
Joyce threw everyone and everything under the bus to satiated her own libido.
Big Z
That’s what burns me about all this. And he was a good enough friend that he’s trying not to be angry and that means he’s just 100% hurt instead.
We’re gonna be in this “nobody besides Dorothy exists to Joyce if she can’t physically see them” loop for a while my guy
Holly
Which is interesting, because lack of object permanence and lack of peope permanence is a potential neurodivergent trait that some people have. We might be learning the hard way that Joyce has a degree of that.
thejeff
It’s weird though, because I don’t think we’ve seen any sign of that before this arc.
Blume
I was about to be offended but then I realized that I’M that way. I’m sorry for my almost knee jerk reaction. My object permeance sucks so bad
487 thoughts on “TOGETHER-together”
Amber
That’s right, when she stuffed that sushi in my mouth all those months ago
NGPZ
heh guess that’s a good a topic as any for off-topic diffusion
anyone here like sushi? what are your favorite rolls?
Amber
My brother took me out for sushi on my birthday last year and I got what was called a Spicy Girl. The greatest gift of all was him saying “Ah, a spicy girl for a spicy girl!” (I’m a trans woman)
I’m pretty simple though, one of my favorite rolls is simply just raw salmon.
UrsulaDavina
Love Sushi but i am pretty sure jve only really had Americnaized/Canadian Sushi i had a rainbow ? roll and a salomn roll recently ? . I have serious doubt that ill ever be able to afford a trip Japan i suppose ill have to settle sushi from a Toronto Japanese restaurant which is the closest to authentic sushi ill be able to get.
DiDi
I love sushi! I can’t say I have a favorite roll mostly because I don’t think I’ve had enough varieties yet.
I mean, when it come to nigiri, you can never go wrong with just raw salmon. I love the stuff.
But for actual maki rolls? Lots of possibilities I don’t think I’ve managed to sample yet.
Clif
If I tried sushi, I would probably love it, but I’ve made it a personal goal to get through life eating as few raw meats as possible.
Time Sage
Sushi doesn’t have to be raw. I eat sushi with cooked shrimp all the time. And Egg sushi exists too. The word sushi refers to the rice used in it’s preparation.
VicMortimer
That seems like an odd goal.
I suppose I could make it a day goal or something….
Eh, who am I kidding. Had raw salmon with eggs for breakfast yesterday.
The eggs weren’t raw yesterday – but I’ve had an absolutely delicious ‘sashimi martini’ with raw quail eggs.
The only one I haven’t particularly liked was the raw chicken. I haven’t tried raw alligator or frog, but I suspect they wouldn’t be great either. And raw snail seems like a bad idea.
steph
Raw CHICKEN seems like a bad idea. Salmonella?
Ray Radlein
I would love it except that the vinegar rice doesn’t work for my taste buds. Sashimi, on the other hand, yummmmm
Alan
My favourite piece of sushi is a lightly flambéd salmon with fried onion on black rice nigiri. Only ever eaten it in one place. Fried unagi (eel) is my favourite staple piece. Rolls-wise… Not sure. Mood-dependent I think. So many rich flavours.
The best piece of a sushi dinner I’ve ever had was a pacific tuna sashimi my I ate with my friends when we decided to blow a thousand pounds on a collective 30-year birthday dinner. It’s been over a decade and I can still feel it melting on my tongue. I’ve become more of a sashimi person as I’ve aged.
Adeptus
Sadly eating bluefin tuna is like eating tiger sashimi. They are apex predator fish, and in no way numerous enough to be treated as food. Please don’t buy tuna.
/ecologist
Taffy
Now I’m gonna eat 10,000 tuna fish a day, just to show you how wrong you are.
Li
I thought you said you were a biologist?
missilentmurmur
I’m a simple girl, I love my maki 😀 I love to get a good variation and decide throughout the meal what order I eat them. I love alternating, like avocado -> salmon -> cucumber -> salmon – > cream cheese-spring onion etc.
MarshallBanana
I would eat sushi once or twice a week if it wasn’t so pricy! I love red tuna, don’t usually pay up for otoro because I’m too much of a simpleton to tell much of a difference. Salmon is delightful when it’s really good but just fine otherwise.
For rolls a really good fresh hand roll with fish, something crunchy and roe is delicious but hard to eat! Other than that just gimme some interesting flavor combos and I’m happy. Except avoid shrimp. I don’t like shrimp in a roll and I don’t like cold shrimp at all so no shrimp in sushi for me.
Embe13
very fond of kappa maki (my boss said it was eaten as a palate cleanser in his homeland), my cities sushi tradition is reletively authentic (considering we are smack innthemiddle of north america, we have a tradition food scene that is the envy of most cities 3times our size.) currently there is a lot more of the BC’ized sushi than there used to here, but most of our sushi chefs till about 20 years ago all trained under the same japanese guy who opened a sushi place in the city years ago serving traditional japanese sushi and dinners (they were extremely popular with the cities japanese diaspora, and the japanese family buisness i worked for said they were about the closest to home cooking he could get in north america). also love the taryaki rolls
Axel
I loved tuna before I was vegetarian (as in the kind used in sashimi and sushi, not that I minded canned for a melt or whatever), now my favourites are yam rolls, avocado rolls, and fancy rolls with mango or whatever. Oh, and a place used to have an amazing specialty asparagus roll.
And if I’m getting sushi, sunomono salad and gomae as sides
NGPZ
good lord it’s even worse than when Becky came out XD
Nono
I guess the analogue would be when Becky and Dina did it and they were practically shouting it down the hallway.
not someone else
I swear to Christ if these children stopped hitting each other for five seconds they’d all simultaneously be the best fucking friends in the world. If they live to see 25 they’re all going to be living together in a two-bedroom apartment in Seattle with three trans women and someone’s adorable exotic pet autism service animal.
Now if you’ll excuse me, apparently I’ll be writing a short fanfiction.
Tequila Mockingbird
Be sure to link it, because I would read the hell out of that.
Pocky
in retrospect; Dina was pretty chill with Becky announcing the news like that lol
ESM
Becky was just kind of loud, Joyce is getting dangerously close to sexual harassment.
Dot
Yeah there’s a difference between “I’m a lesbian” and “my girlfriend had her fingers inside my vagina an hour ago”
Pocky
How we never picked up on the lack of her social understanding as Joyce actually being on the spectrum still get me lol
Olofa
Well, there’s being on the spectrum and there’s being raised as an Evangelical Xtian, and she hit the daily double.
Pocky
wombo combo of suppressed hornies lol
Li
I don’t think that’s the comparison to be made, so much as this:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/04-dont-stop-billie-ving/judgyjudgy/
Which. Y’know. Is this really “worse”.
Li
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/04-dont-stop-billie-ving/unknowable/
Like Joyce isn’t even being more explicit about it than Dina in the first panel here.
Astariel
Oh, there’s always an excuse to double standard Joyce & Dorothy.
Li
@Astariel: look, there are things we agree on, I’m not asking you to avoid me in the comment section or anything, but pls. Pls.
Reasonable people can just forget that a thing happened, it does not have to be double standards.
Yotomoe
Also I’m pretty sure not everyone was on board for that partoxular”tell everyone we had sex” arc. Though I will say the posts Li posted have a notable difference. And that is that dina and Becky are close friends with everyone in that room. While Lucy and Joyce are like…acquaintances at best.
Li
@Yotomoe: re: “Joyce and Lucy are acquaintances as best”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/03-trial-and-sarah/godstrings/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-13/02-turning-saints-into-the-sea/helper/
I think Lucy was actually genuinely friends with Becky, and I think she wanted to be better friends.
I’m not sure if she and Becky are still close post-Walky-dumping, but. That second strip is Lucy volunteering to help Becky convince Joyce to take birth control, so I think “acquaintance” is probably a weak word for it.
Dot
Hater containment thread ⬇️
Dot
Jesus Christ we’re back to this huh. Just when I thought we were getting somewhere
Sirksome
Pffffft!?
Clif
I choose to believe that Lucy is sitting across from Jacob.
Carter
Yeah it’s crazy how quickly I’ve soured on this relationship. I get these are college kids and the priorities of college kids are 1) don’t fail out and 2) find the next orgasm, in the reverse order, but good lord, Joyce.
Nymph
I gotta say I love “hater containment thread” and then the next comment being you like “It’s me, I’m haters” lmao
Donovan
Sometimes you gotta be the zookeeper of your own enclosure
Clif
You mean that we should start a sub-thread inside the hater containment thread for people that hate hater containment thread?
I don’t think I could make the second comment their though, because I’m more like, meh, it’s sometimes amusing. But I think Dot’s missing a trick by not bribing NPGZ to let her have the hater Containment thread as the first comment thread.
Dot
At some point I’ll subcontract the containment thread out to them
Donovan
i’m starting to think Joyce might have some exhibitionist tendencies.
Not a problem in a vacuum, but, like. Leave people alone, girl.
Dot
Why the hell isn’t Dorothy informing her that no informing people unprompted that you’ve just had sex is something of a social faux pas
Scruffy looking nerfherder
I mean she kind of did, we just haven’t gotten to the part of the storyline where we address how much Joyce ignores things that Dorothy says not to do out of respect just because she wants to anyway.
Freezer
As noted by others: It was’t that long ago that they both witnessed the cringe that was Becky shouting from the mountaintops that she and Dina has Done The Deed.
Jon
In a goofier, more boisterous, and more vague way, all of which helps it feel less creepy.
Donovan
When does this start to cross the line into harassment
Nono
I mean Becky and Dina were doing it too. It’s still like, ehhh but on the list of Bad Joyce things this one is… like, whatever at this point.
I think I just get more apathetic about it with each strip. Yes yes Joyce is a menace.
Donovan
That wasn’t really a super serious criticism. At this point I’m just hating for the love of the game. I was born to Hate.
Seralyna
I have such a large amount of respect for you for admitting this. Just like, earnestly really funny.
Donovan
I’ve never hidden it. Its just fun to point at these bitches, turn to someone else who feels likewise and say “lmao do you see this fuckin’ shit? Wack.”
Its really no deeper than that. They bore me together, so I make my own fun.
Nyzer
It makes way more sense for Becky’s character. As well as Dina’s to go along with it.
Nono
But it didn’t make it any less rude? Like do we give Becky a pass because “oh that’s just how Becky is”?
Nyzer
Not a full pass, but… a bit of leeway, I suppose? It was decently clear that she was doing it as a coping mechanism, caught between wanting to brag about it but also not feeling like she was ready to tell Joyce.
She was also a less graphic than Joyce is being to Lucy, so there’s that too.
And yeah, I’ll admit that there’s a bit of “she’s already obnoxious and attention-grabbing about her sexuality so this isn’t nearly as much of a step up” at play too.
All this said? I wasn’t impressed by Becky doing it either. But I’m definitely less impressed here.
Scruffy looking nerfherder
I think it’s less a pass and more an acknowledgement of that Becky is an annoying loudmouth we expect this from and matches her character. Joyce was not that and has lost all semblance of herself to become this way, making it feel more jarring and outlandish as a result.
Nono
Joyce who was always about loudly declaring anger and freedom?
I mean she’s more rude these days about it but I don’t think it’s that uncharacteristic now that she’s decided she will no longer feel shame about sex.
Still rude and uncalled for, but I don’t feel that it’s jarring.
Nyzer
Unless I’m forgetting it, I don’t think anyone would have known that she was masturbating now or that she was having sexual encounters with Joe unless she was talking to someone she was already very comfortable with or who had already figured it out. This is a very sudden post-Dorothy change and yeah, it feels jarring for it, especially considering it hasn’t even been 24 hours since she openly realized she’s not straight.
And wasn’t she usually declaring anger and freedom in response to her or one of her friends being hurt in some way?
Lee
Word choice matters a lot on something like this. “Dorothy was inside me” is SIGNIFICANTLY more cringe and invasive than…well I can’t remember exactly when it happened to look it up but I think Becky blurted out something like “We totes fucked!”, which I feel is really not all that wild at all for close friends in this age bracket.
Big Z
This right here. Bragging about HAVING sex is on the line. Bragging about the SPECIFIC MECHANICS of sex is over the line.
Compare/contrast “We’re trying for a baby!” and “My husband shoots fat loads into me every night!”
deliverything
Really, it’s so far over the line that, if someone said something like that to me, I’d assume it was actually referring to something nonsexual that they were trying to make sound sexual for a joke. Like dentistry, for example. It’s a very unnecessary level of detail for without the bait-and-switch humour, unless you somehow already know the listener’s fine with that level of detail.
That said, I’m not actually hating on this. Joyce being creepy and offputting is at least more interesting than their generic relationship stuff was, so if it’s one or the other, I prefer Joyce doing everything wrong.
I’m just glad the comic’s actually framing it as bad, though. If I wanted to read people being creepy and cringeworthy in a comic that tries to pretend they’re being perfectly reasonable, I’d read 9 Chickweed Lane.
Cheshrin
Every comic that passes without actually addressing the fact that Joyce left her Schrodinger’s boyfriend on read vis a vis the actual state of their relationship is another gray hair on my scalp.
Like, yes yes, these two are dweebs and that’s very nice, Willis, but I could have sworn this storyline had, like. A story?
Nyzer
It just makes me check out more and more. For a cheating storyline, I’d either expect overwhelming shame (especially from at least one of these two) or the kind of self-centered rationalization to justify it until the reveal occurs, and then a bunch of shame as a result of the judgement of the people around them.
And it’s fine to be the latter and get a slow burn on it, but then I don’t get the point of making it be front page news and have Joyce’s dad already show up and have Joyce come out of the closet to him, while very heavily avoiding the feeling of shame on multiple occasions AND also inserting this C plot of “white girls kissing takes away from the point of the protest and the characters invested in the protest are bothered by it”.
Maybe the point could be that everything is blowing up at once, but not if we’re going to do things like put all of that on pause for them to go have sex and act all lovey-dovey in private, or if they’re going to go out of their way to have a performative apology and arrange a double date with poor description mixup shenanigans. It doesn’t feel like a messy situation, it feels like a messy story with a lack of focus.
Jallorn
TBF, I don’t think Joyce ever got around to mentioning she didn’t actually break up with Joe? Dorothy is the one who’s most likely to freak out and she thinks everything is… well, legal, if not moral. Which, let’s be real, is really more what she’s been about in the first place. Like, she’s legalistic as a shortcut to being moral, but that means that she’s able to lean on the legalism to avoid feeling guilt over doing harm.
Cause, fun fact, you can okay legally, even okay morally, and still do harm to someone. And it doesn’t help fix the harm that you were in the right.
Adeptus
It feels like a badly written fanfic about somebody’s OTP.
Odo
I think the thing is that is isn’t primarily being approached as a cheating storyline. It is being approached as a rom-com.
In a cheating story, where the protagonist is the cheater, the central conflict is the protagonist’s own limitations. Can they recognize that they did wrong? Can they try to repair what they broke? How will they grow from their mistake?
A rom-com focuses on the couple coming together. Other things are thrown in to create drama, but the central conflict is “Will they manage to make their love work?”. The cheating is just an obstacle to be overcome on the path to love.
ESM
Given the strip about how Joyce is “not coming back”, I think the actual explanation for this (in that it’s the one Willis wants us to believe) is that Joyce literally forgot about him.
Lumino
Which is just awful because Joe was her FRIEND.
Joyce threw everyone and everything under the bus to satiated her own libido.
Big Z
That’s what burns me about all this. And he was a good enough friend that he’s trying not to be angry and that means he’s just 100% hurt instead.
Fail Earnhardt
We’re gonna be in this “nobody besides Dorothy exists to Joyce if she can’t physically see them” loop for a while my guy
Holly
Which is interesting, because lack of object permanence and lack of peope permanence is a potential neurodivergent trait that some people have. We might be learning the hard way that Joyce has a degree of that.
thejeff
It’s weird though, because I don’t think we’ve seen any sign of that before this arc.
Blume
I was about to be offended but then I realized that I’M that way. I’m sorry for my almost knee jerk reaction. My object permeance sucks so bad