144

Sitch
Posted on December 5, 2017 by David M Willis

144 thoughts on “Sitch”

  1. Ana Chronistic

    aww, how sweet–

    –wait, does that mean Billie is wrong

    …

    damn you willis

    1. Ana Chronistic

      eh, I will believe it is sweet ^_^

      1. meanderling

        If we’re going by It’s Walky family relations, Zaph and Rose are half siblings.

        But going by It’s Walky relations Carla would be Joe and Rachel’s daughter, so.

        1. Mountain King

          Lucy would probably have said “that makes you a great sister” in yesterday’s strip if they were related, so I’m gonna guess not.

        2. Khyrin

          Correction: if they KNEW they were related, Lucy would have said that. in the It’s Walky setting, Amber, Faz, Zaph, and Rose all had the same father and different mothers.

    2. Pablo360

      Eh, I mean based on Lucy’s reaction Billie’s at least right about Zaph and Rose.

      1. Fart Captor

        That’s the important one, because it’s the most adorable

    3. Swissaboo

      Read hall and forest quad are the opposite of each other, so logically if billie was wrong about literally everything in read hall she’s genuinely got good intuition in forest quad

      1. Needfuldoer

        Or, does this mean Malaya has excellent perception?

        1. Deanatay

          Malaya forms correct conclusions about EVERYONE.

          She just never tells anyone about them.

          Why should she? They’re all just a bunch of jerks, anyway. And that Lucy. THE WORST

      2. Reltzik

        … except about herself?

      3. Eyebrow

        Yeah, that’s my headcanon till someone disproves it.

  2. AnvilPro

    To be fair, we still don’t have REAL proof that Sal isn’t Amazi-Girl

    1. tim gueguen

      Or that Sal won’t be the next Amazi-girl when Amber is unable to continue.

      1. Doctor_Who

        Amazi-Girl 2: Winter Saldier.

        1. King Daniel

          Would that be followed by Sal-Val War?

        2. Doctor_Who

          And then Infinity Warner.

          Will Mike gain all six Infinity Nickels and fuck the universe’s mom?

        3. MatthewTheLucky

          If Infinity War follows the comics, that’s sorta Thanos’s plan already.
          Except instead of someone who gave birth to everyone, she does the opposite.

        4. SgtWadeyWilson

          Thanos: Mad Titan, or just the stalkeriest stalker to ever stalk?

          (Spoilers: it’s kinda both.)

        5. Pablo360

          And Sal-narok

    2. newllend(henryvolt)

      Sal and Amazi-girl was both in the same place in the middle of a brawl for a entire crowd to see.

      1. Clif

        But Billie wasn’t there so it didn’t happen. Either that or it was just Sal’s Amazi-girl robot being used to throw off suspicion.

      2. Deanatay

        That’s just hearsay – no one important (Billie) witnessed it, so there’s no proof it happened. It’s just one Sal’s word against a Billie’s!

      3. Daisy

        Whoever said there was only ONE Amazi-girl??? OOOOooooOOoOo

  3. King Daniel

    Last panel, Billie has stopped breathing.

    Or Elsa’s paying a visit.

    1. Passchendaele

      Let it go!
      Let it go!
      I want some beer, you know!

    2. CoMa

      I thought, just as she said it, it turned into a memory – therefore the stylistic choice of colouring it blue.

      I imagine the “dun-dun” sound of Law & Order to follow that panel, before we get a change of scenerie.

      1. CoMa

        *scenery (somehow got my languages mixed up, started in the one, ended in the second)

      2. Jason

        Turned into a flashback- we’ve seen flashbacks in this style before where DW specifically said that it wasn’t the character remembering- it was the comic mocking him. But yeah, spot on- it’s flashbacking to what just happened for context. 🙂
        (Also if you had to mix up two words due to internal language shenanigans, those two merge together well enough to barely be noticeable! It would have been worse in German. It would have been AMAZING in Welsh.)

        1. CoMa

          Ah, that’s a word I was looking for, flashback. My brain seems to have it with language shenanigans today, and just HOW did you know it was German that got mixed in? (well, the ending, at least, of “Szenerie”)
          Welsh would’ve been amazing, or possibly Irish (as that’s one I’m actually learning. Though I’m not as far as learning such sophisticated vocabulary items) 🙂

        2. Jason

          I… I didn’t! I wish I could claim that I somehow worked that out. I just imagined mashing a German and an English word together would result in something much more different than “the English word ending in ie instead of y”. And now I look silly!

        3. Carms

          English is a Germanic language! English is the bastard offspring of German, which the Vikings brought with them into celtic/pictish’s house, and then had wild unfaithful flings with every other language in the continent.
          English has an untidy background

      3. Deanatay

        Actually, I saw it more like NCIS ‘foreshadowing’ the last frame of the act at the beginning of the act (‘act’ being the part of an episode separated by commercial breaks).

  4. Shanunu

    Wow Billie has been totally wrong about a lot of stuff this far

  5. Cattleprod

    Flashbacks to things that happened seconds ago will never not be the height of comedy.

    1. Pablo360

      Hey, remember right now, when we had a flashback to the beginning of this sentence?

      1. Architex

        I’m so good at commenting on DoA strips. Remember that time I posted such a great comment? It was two sentences ago!

        1. Koms

          Even the background of this page is flashback blue.

        2. MatthewTheLucky

          looks upward, ripples

        3. Liquid Len

          “Blue girls come in every size…”

    2. Reltzik

      Of course not, because you can flashback to the flashback and top the joke. And since you can keep adding to it recursively, there IS no upper bar (aka height) of comedy.

  6. laladoria

    Don’t worry, Billie, one day your intuition will be right!

  7. Nono

    In Bizzaro campus, Billie has amazing intuition.

    Ask her how she cracked the case of the Blackboard Cooter Burglar.

    1. MatthewTheLucky

      Oddly enough, it was still Joyce.

  8. BBCC

    I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time, Billie. Thanks!

  9. Kernanator

    I tried to think of something funny for Billie to be wrong about, but I blanked. So let’s brainstorm some ideas!

    1. King Daniel

      Billie believes the world is carried on the back of a turtle.

      Everyone knows it’s on an elephant’s back.

      1. Maveric1984

        No, it’s carried on the backs of four elephants riding on the back of a turtle.

        1. Leorale

          The turtle moves.

          Anyway Billie thinks love can cure somebody’s crushing mental illness.

        2. Nobody

          No the turtle stays still while the dung beetle rolls the sun across the sky

        3. MatthewTheLucky

          No the Earth is a sphere and we are bound to it by the will of Om.

      2. Emily

        No, it’s turtles all the way down.

  10. Passchendaele

    *god* the narrative’s gotten even snarkier with time, I love it

  11. Roger

    love the gilligan cuts

    1. Pablo360

      I mean, traditionally a gilligan cut refers to a cut to present. Not sure if there’s a special term for a flashback that serves the same function.

      1. Pablo360

        I know if it’s a flash forward then that would be a smash cut.

  12. Benvincible

    You know, some say New York City itself is one of the characters

  13. Pablo360

    Not seen: Panel 7, which is just a smaller version of panels 4 through 7 arranged in a rectangle

  14. timemonkey

    Well, not being drunk all the time will probably help.

  15. Danni

    billie is kind of a dingus sometimes

  16. brasca1

    Who was it that Billie thought Mary liked. It’s been awhile.

    1. Pablo360

      Carla.

      (Yeah she was way off)

      1. brasca1

        That’s what I thought, but I thought she might’ve been referring to Roz.

  17. Roger Sterling

    I’m reminded of an old Patrice O’Neal bit from the Roast of Charlie Sheen:

    “See the problem with Seth MacFarland is he doesn’t have a partner like Hanna-Babera. I know we’ve heard that whole story where Hanna said ‘I’m bigger than Yogi’ and Barbera slapped the shit out of him for saying that-

    Seth needs a barbera to slap him, and to slap him twice:

    Once: to say ‘don’t forget why people [actually] love you.”

    The second reason he gave was, although highly objectionable in itself, weirdly rhymes with Billie’s own insane experiences with Ruth-

    and of course when he says slap I’m assuming/hoping he was being figurative.

  18. Derek

    what does sitch mean?

    1. Pablo360

      Situation. What’s happening. Lo que pasa en el mundo. The present set of circumstances. The deets. The biz.

    2. Passchendaele

      situation, basically

    3. Nono

      Ahh, memories of Kim Possible.

    4. Roger Sterling

      Also may/may not have originated with Kim Possible, and seeing as mid ’00s cartoons/teenage fads seem to form the entirety of Lucy’s cultural frame of reference-

      -I’m not slating her for that! Mid-00s cartoons are fifty percent of mine! I’m just saying it would never occur to me to try to bond with people exclusively through TV shows, young adult books and commentary tracks based on same. That just seems like a real self-imposed challenge is all.

      1. Dara

        Kigo was very important to younger me.

    5. Derek

      uuuugh it’s another abbreviation, I do not like (English is my second language and I never understand these because they’re usually based on pronunciation rather than how they are spelled)

      1. Inahc

        Being both English and Canadian, I often feel the urge to apologize for this bastardized mess of a language. Although it does have some lovely flowery words I wish I could remember right now, so I could properly insult it.. with.. it…

        how do I words 😛

        1. Marsh Maryrose

          As English speakers, we can just blame everything on the Danes, the Germans, and the French. 🙂

  19. DarkoNeko

    Jesus, forget one’s roomate she’s doing that to the whole floor

  20. Keulen

    Intuition’s kind of a crapshoot really.

  21. Tacos

    RE: ALT-TEXT: So what color should forest quad’s halls be instead? Neon orange?

    1. Marsh Maryrose

      Apparently Forest Quad is in the middle of a massive renovation, so given the floating timeline, who knows? The gallery of
      the current IU:RPS page for Forest
      shows no hallways but it does show three common areas, one in Flashback Blue, one in a neutral color I can’t name, and one in a cheerful two-toned orange.

      I assume there is someone at IU whose full-time job it is to read DoA with a view towards proposing renovations/remodelings/amenity changess just to thwart Willis.

      (Also, it’s been so long since I’ve seen a .cfml extension. Memories.)

  22. pjeseb

    To be fair, lack of self-awareness was something Billie’s had since the very beginning of the strip. So it’s probably not a side-effect of Forest Quad inflating her ego.

  23. Architex

    Gotta love the recursive confidence here, arguing a position by using the current situation as reinforcement for itself is a classic power move.

  24. some guy

    the BEST intuition

    1. Reltzik

      Hilarious intuition IS the best intuition.

  25. JessWitt

    I wonder if Lucy’s people-pleasing isn’t that pleasing.

    What else has Billie been wrong about?

    1. Jason

      Wee-eell, we’ve seen how it went with Malaya…
      People here seem pretty easy going, though, so I imagine many people just shrug and ignore it.
      People pleasing is a sad trait. It never comes from a good place. You can want to make life better for those around you from a good place, but people pleasing means putting yourself aside for others, defining yourself by what you can do for others. I wonder where it came from for Lucy.

  26. newllend(henryvolt)

    Billie intuition has got to be the worst super power.

    1. Marsh Maryrose

      The worst super power? Worse than being able to induce a slight fatigue?

    2. Yumi

      Well what’s your superpower?
      (Mine is that I’m impervious to being hit by cars;not impervious to hitting the ground, though.)

      1. Leorale

        I have the best superpower, it’s just like Squirrel Girl, the power to win as long as it’s funny.

        Some really stupid superpowers might include:
        Always knowing where North is because you can only face North
        Having an extra elbow
        The power to ripen fruit
        Time travel, but only at a rate of one second per second

        1. Nobody

          How about mine, being able to navigate in the dark but running into shit and tripping over nothing in broad daylight

        2. Bagge

          Have you considered being Batman?

        3. Needfuldoer

          So time travel, but you can only pause or fast-forward?

          The power to untangle jammed 8-track tapes with a snap of the fingers.
          Insides that are impervious to lava, but skin that isn’t.
          Spider-sense for toast popping out of toasters.

        4. MatthewTheLucky

          Pausing or fast forwarding time would be incredibly useful and overpowered if you knew what you were doing.

        5. Reltzik

          Ripening fruit would let you increase production times, yields, and profits for Big Agriculture by a lot! You could contract with them and make millions!

        6. anonymsly

          There’s a canon character who has the power to ripen fruit.

          Hurray for the Legion of Superheroes and people who somehow fail to be good enough to join them!

        7. Tacos

          I think I remember there was some character whose superpower was that their arm could fall off.

        8. thejeff

          Arm Fall Off Boy. Another failed Legion candidate.

          His name’s actually slightly misleading – he could pull an arm off and beat you with it, then reattach it.
          Not so much that his arms would just fall off.

          Legion tryouts were great for one-shot (sometimes one-panel) wacky powers.

    3. Gojira

      What about having a heightened sense of smell but only for spoiled milk?

      1. Bagge

        Sounds like the makings of a great witch-finder.

    4. Bagge

      We once ran a quick superhero roleplaying game and went around the table asking players to come up with a character concept and super power on the spot.

      One of the players panicked and blurted out “I’m cold blooded!!!” and spent the rest of the game reacting to the temperature of the surroundings while the rest of us controlled electricity and what-not. (He totally fooled an IR security camera, though).

      1. thejeff

        Mystery Men and the Invisible Boy, whose power was to be invisible when no one was looking.

  27. the final pam

    Now, in all fairness, she did say that Rose “maybe” had a thing for Zaph, and ended with “I dunno”

    So if she’s completely off base, she can always fall back on that, right..?

  28. Sporky

    Panel 4 is a redraw referencing this early strip:

    http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/hero/

    (The dialogue in this panel is a bit of a cheat)

    Panel 5 is copied straight from a much more recent strip:

    http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/secretly/

    1. JBento

      “Shoves is not loves” is still one of the best lines in the entire DoA run.

    2. ValdVin

      Thanks for the legwork!

      Today’s strip flashes back to that Hero one, which flashes back to two more.

      Next up: An infinite regression of flashbacks?

  29. motorfirebox

    Painting the walls Flashback Blue is also, somehow, a result of Billie’s great intuition.

    1. Slartibeast Button, BIA

      This is a clue that this scene isn’t real, it is all a fever dream Billie has while she is dying.

  30. Yumi

    I’m having one of those nights where I want to look more non-binary, and of course if you’re non-binary then however you look is how that looks, you know? But like. I want to confuse people. I want people who insist that one person can’t be a “they” to panic and use they or avoid pronouns altogether when referring to me because they don’t know what to do.
    Just not feeling enby enough I guess. Tried giving my reflection finger guns and saying I was valid, but eh.

    I realize this isn’t really relevant to the strip but no one followers the tumblr I would ramble on and it’s nice to think that someone might actually read my ramblings.

    1. CJ

      Do you want to rattle specific people or is your idea just to be about and rattle random persons?
      I’m not sure the strategy works with random people. Maybe with people who have to be polite to you? People who don’t believe in binary usually don’t care if they use the right pronouns anyway, and also http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/proven/

      1. Yumi

        See, a couple years back I shaved my head, and it did rattle/confuse some people. Random people too, some who were bigoted and some who were just confused. (On the bigoted side:
        Me: *super short hair, clothes from the men’s section but wearing lipstick*
        Random dude passing me on campus: “Faggot.”

        On the just confused side:
        Random volunteer at an event I was at: “The…men’s bathrooms are this way and…the women’s bathrooms…are that way…”

        And you’re right that the first person probably wouldn’t care about being bigoted incorrectly. He’s probably an asshat. But with the pronoun thing specifically, I have seen people respond in the way I described, and people that go ahead and make an assumption but clearly aren’t sure about it and people who say things that I laugh about years later.
        (I wad once with my mom with my super short hair and clothes from the men’s section, and the worker at the place we were at asked my mom, “And is he older than seven?”
        Like not even twelve or something. Seven. And I was a grown ass adult.)

        1. Chris Phoenix

          Wild idea: Make half your head/face look subtly masculine, the other half subtly feminine, and stand so someone’s first impression is a profile view of you.

          Bonus points for turning 180 degrees while they’re not paying attention.

          Double bonus points if you blend the looks well enough that when they finally see you from the front, it takes them a while to figure out what you did.

        2. Jason

          I just lost a fairly long and personal comment about how hard it can be to separate the need to do for yourself vs the need to be perceived by others AS yourself- especially for trans* people- so I’ll end with the bit I ended with anyway.

          I have really cute bunnies and I send you cute bunny cuddles over the Internet.

        3. Yumi

          Cute.

    2. Anna

      I met someone like that, Taiwanese actor/general famous person Kiwebaby. Pictures in this article: https://udn.com/news/story/8/2261158.

      I asked this actor whether I should refer to them as he or as she (in Chinese it’s tā either way).
      He is fine, he said. And then, on second thought: he when I’m in men’s clothes, she when I’m in women’s clothes.
      What about now, I asked, because the actor was wearing the outfit in the picture, which was as fashionable as it was androgynous.
      Not sure, Kiwebaby laughed.

      This isn’t relevant to the strip either, but I thought of Kiwebaby in that outfit when I read your post. Yay for confusing non-binary looks.

      1. Kamino Neko

        Gods, that outfit is ugly as sin… I’m not sure if it’s so much androgynous as distracting you from considering their gender with sheer hideousness.

  31. BenRG

    What Billie should be saying is: “I can’t have such a hideous track record forever! Eventually I have to get it luck, even if it’s just by applying common sense or by completely blind luck!”

    1. Reltzik

      Being naturally able to effortlessly learn lessons selectively so as to avoid uncomfortable self-awareness of one’s own ineptitude is its own kind of luck! And it’s DEFINITELY blind luck!

  32. Nobody

    ”what’s to know… I dunno” this seems contradictory

    1. BenRG

      It’s meant to be contradictory. The whole objective of the formation of the sentence is to give the speaker the maximum wiggle-room.

  33. The Chosen One

    Lucy REALLY can’t catch a break; even the flashback forgot she was in the room with Billie three panels ago.

  34. Jack Spade

    I believe that Billie is right, by virtue of a broken clock.

  35. quietdevious1

    Did she just swallow her toothpaste?

    1. ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

      Is that better or worse than her just spitting it out on to the floor of the dorm hall?

      1. Pablo360

        Why was she brushing her teeth in the hallway to begin with? Even I only do that if it’s the only way to butt into someone else’s conversation quickly enough to make a lame pun!

        What I’m saying is, is Billie needs to make more lame puns.

        1. BBCC

          I pace when I brush my teeth, but I pace a lot in the first place to help me organize my thoughts.

    2. ǝ snow ʍousɐ

      She’s building up an immunity to fluoride poisoning

  36. Reltzik

    Alt-text: But if we’re in retrospect, then the halls HAVE to be flashback blue!

  37. ValdVin

    I like Billie’s blithe no-big-deal about Zaph coming out as a guy. Maybe her intuition is hilariously off, but this does help.

  38. Crumplepunch

    I’m surprised Billie has the social intuition to be aware of transgender people when she (for example) didn’t know that bisexuality existed.

    1. Pidgey

      Maybe her social… ignorance?… is why she can? In the way if you tell a child ‘Even though I look like a girl, I’m a boy’ loads of them are just like ‘okay, cool, can I have more juice mister?’
      There’s no built up expectation

      1. geno

        The majority of the cast has shown themselves to not really care about that kind of thing. Everyone who is intolerant is an antagonist or Joyce whom the whole point is showcasing her character development from a sheltered fundie to a ball of sunshine

    2. ǝ snow ʍousɐ

      Did she not know about bisexuality, or did she just not attribute it to herself? I remember Danny didn’t know about bisexuality, but was Billie that ignorant about it? Because there’s a world of difference between knowing what bisexuality is and thinking “oh hey maybe that label fits me.”
      For one thing, it’s difficult to recognize things in yourself when you have always framed it differently (“I’m ‘experimenting’ to figure out whether I’m gay or straight”). For another thing, you can understand the ideas and not understand it in practice. Billie might be trying to give off the sophisticated “oh yeah I know tons of trans people no big deal” air when she’s really thinking “i’m glad i had a toothbrush in my mouth, cuz i’d have no idea how to talk to someone trans and i’m sure i’d say something stupid”

      1. Regalli

        She thought bisexuality only existed in porn as of the last time we saw Howard.

      2. thejeff

        Well, Billie does know about Carla, so she’s had some time to adjust, even if that was her first introduction to the idea.

  39. Josh Spicer

    Billiestradamus is the new Toddstradamus.

  40. Liliet

    I wonder if this is Billie’s self-awareness kicking in or if this is the narrative making fun of her

    1. Emily

      Seeing as Billie has no self awareness probably the latter.

  41. Arianod

    “You have to know these things when you’re a head cheerleader.”

  42. Bagge

    Don’t be a gossip, Lucy.

  43. Bagge

    Pfft, sure, Billie got’s great intuation. Like when she thought Sal was Am… Oh… OK, or like the time she thought Mary was in love with Ca… Oh… Well, how about just now when she said she got grea…. DAMMIT, WILLIS. WE ARE SUPPOSED TO PROVIDE THE CHEAP QUIPS HERE. DON’T DO OUR JOB FOR US!!!

  44. showler

    Looks like Willis flipped Lucy in the first panel.

    Even the birdflash shirt is looking at Billie.

  45. silentNate

    Okay I confess… I’m shipping Carla & Mary…

    Does that make me a bad person?? 😮

    1. Smiling Cat

      Yes. Yes it does.

    2. Yumi

      It…doesn’t make you a good person.

  46. Indy

    Wow, Lucy, I like you, but never offer to explain a trans person’s “sitch” ever again. I’m out about about and that still made me uncomfortable. It’s just not something for Cis people to discuss amongst themselves – just ask the guy in person, if you need to know so desperately. (which nobody ever really needs)

    Even if she was only talking about the romantic tension…IDK it doesn’t make much sense for her to randomly offer up the details of some hallmates’ non-romance if that’s all she was planning to say.

    1. Liliet

      Maybe the guy explicitly asked his hallmates to explain this to new people for him?

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