Just for the record, those so-called “Obama phones” are merely the same telephone “Lifeline” program that was introduced back in 1985 (during Reagan’s second term, so it’s not some Johnny-come-lately liberal thing). Of course, THEN it provided federal subsidies for land-line phones, but as more and more people ‘cut the cord’, it was expanded to allow for cellular phones.
Legend has it, if you shine the Obamaphone’s torch at the sky on a cloudy night, Obama will return, flying in the Obamawing, wearing his Obamabelt with a can of shark-repellant Obama-spray on it.
Joe: “I don’t think I’m qualified to teach you evolution, but I know of someone who is. Just give me a second to find some Cocoa Puffs. Or Chicken McNuggets. Whatever we can get our hands on sooner. Or if you’re willing to spare some health points and maybe a shred of clothing, just make fun of dinosaurs.”
IDK, I think Joyce is probably aware enough that if she spends more time with Liz, she’ll spot the problems. They’re both overcorrecting hard, and another example of that may be just what she needs. If it helps her with her other repressed issues at the same time, that’s a win-win.
Don’t get me wrong. The sheer amount of SQUISH I’m picturing in my head is not a dissatisfying mental image. They’ve actually got similar curves (though Liz is quite a bit moreso) and that might be fun.
Since neither of them would know what they’re doing Liz x Joyce has the potential to be either very wholesome or very underwhelming but entertaining regardless.
The problem is that they wouldn’t be HONEST about not knowing what they were doing. The whole “let’s experiment cautiously, communicating clearly and honestly with each other what’s working and what isn’t and what we’re feeling apprehensive about” thing? That’s the exact OPPOSITE of what they would be doing.
Spencer
Okay but that’s really fucking funny.
Two bumbling virgins trying to convince the other that they’re the best at doing sex things.
“Sorry, Liz, but you know we can’t do a Cowgirl without the hat.”
Clearly Ruth’s a switch, if she’s even a bottom at all. Emotionally maybe, but once engaged she always seemed to be in physical control of Ms. Billingsworth.
Spencer
Daisy raised her voice at Ruth for an entire two panels and Ruth instantly become interested and invested.
Ruth only dommes Jason because he’s a boring lay with zero initiative. If Daisy got in on that it’d be a poly triad with Ruth and a lamp.
StClair
yeah, the classic “Go Leafs?” scene seemed IMO to be an (equally classic) case of Billie goading Ruth into topping her in the most epic of hatefucks.
But do I not the skill. I mean I can try but I just haven’t been liking my art as of late.
woobie
Art is best judged by the audience.
The Wellerman
This!
justin8448
We like your art Yotomoe!
It’s fine if you don’t. No pressure. But you absolutely have fans here.
Needfuldoer
Your skills of an artist are up to the task. Believe in yourself!
Eskeboi
@yotomoe I would pay real money to see u illustrate such a holy threesome. And I’m poor as shit. If that doesn’t boost your confidence a bit idk what will. If u won’t do it for us at least do it for the squishy goodness
Roborat
Most artists don’t like their work. Don’t let that stop you.
I mean, yeah, she obviously has no idea what she’s talking about, but I think the undercurrent of “I’m tired of being judged for someone I’m not and living without all these other experiences” is on-point. That’s kinda what being a repressed virgin in a society that teaches you to innately fear and be repulsed by sex while constantly staring at it does to you.
I really only see that as red flags if Joe himself is uncomfortable with sleeping with someone who’s that driven by wanting it than really knowing it, but, y’know, it’s just an orgasm.
I have to admit I’m a little proud of myself here. I kind of figured Liz wasn’t as far ahead of Joyce as she seemed. Especially since she apparently can’t tell the difference between edible weed and a vitamin gummy.
Partly, I guess, because my analysis of her came to a hard stop when I decided she was a dumpsterfire of a human being. I’d written her off by the time she popped the gummy.
But also because I’m bad at this kind of thing.
Bryy
This makes her corruption of Joyce much more irritating.
quixoticmaunster
“her corruption of Joyce”
YUCK.
Joyce is not “corrupted” just because she is growing and changing in ways which aren’t fun for everyone. LIZ is not some demon who came in and tempted Joyce into the dark side.
They are both teenagers who are trying to break their own religious indoctrination and (like teenagers do) they are being emotional and boastful rather than admit how frightening it is to accept that you might really be all alone in a world where nothing was planned ahead of time for you.
This narrative people have that Liz is some corrupting evil influence is getting fucking tiresome.
I hope people were more understanding for you when you were going through whatever cringe-filled awkwardtastic changes you went through as a young adult.
LadySilence
Eh; “corrupting” more in the sense of being a REALLY bad example of how to handle her newfound loss of belief in God. If Liz had been the sort of person who said “meh; I don’t really believe that shit anymore but I’m not going to shove it in their faces” when Joyce brought up how she posts all this Christian stuff on facebook, instead of initiating the “mocking the ever living fuck out of the concept of being religious”, it’d be a whole different story.
Just because she’s a teen breaking religious indoctrination doesn’t give her a pass on encouraging Joyce’s behavior.
Spencer
Genuine question: how is Joyce supposed to react?
Because I see a lot of “ugh I used to be such an edgy atheist, so cringey” and yeah I get that, but I get that because I’m pretty sure most of us didn’t grow up in a fundamentalist death cult. How is she supposed to act?
LadySilence
My church wasn’t as fundie as Joyce’s, and I personally am still a Christian, but the kids in my class who walked away from the church just…stopped attending. They went away to college or whatever they did next, maybe tried a new church in that area or maybe not, and eventually started sharing posts on facebook calling out the shit some churches do (the one I’m thinking of in particular was homeless for a while and posting about how little help the church gave her family while they were still members, and how the church-run shelters that she and her mom went to were at best unhelpful and at worse abusive). There was no “edgy atheism”, just a quietly starting to walk away.
That said, none of the people I’ve seen go through this had the kind of shock-trauma to their faith that Joyce did. But calling out specific shit that the church is wrong about / harmful for about is very different from diving headfirst into the “edgy athiest” persona.
Spencer
I mean, is quietly walking away from that the only mature answer? Is it not right to get mad if the circumstances that made you lose your faith were enraging? Of all the reasons to straight up hate Christianity, is a good reason for it, if only in the immediate moment, not in being personally wronged by the arm of it that exists in your personal life, like say an abusive shelter?
Because I lost my faith the same way I lost interest in Youtube guys on my Recommendations list: they just phased out of mind. For me to be as angry in the same way as Joyce would be weird, in that there’s a lot about the institution of Christianity as a political and culture force in North America I have a beef with but not any individual Christian who processes their faith as a personal aspect of their lifestyle. As a matter of human decency, I think it’s important I respect the religious faith of all individuals even if faith is something I don’t really understand anymore, because it’s not something I have to understand to respect.
But, I sure as hell wasn’t Joyce, who grew up in a fundamentalist death cult that taught her the Earth is 6000 years old and dinosaurs were placed on the ark and eventually hunted to extinction by humans. Joyce never had faith, the way a Christian doesn’t objectively knows God exists but believes in him for a myriad of reasons, she had a set of inerrant facts she was told were true. All of it was real, all at once, and every part of it had to be as real and as important as the other, or else it would all fall apart.
And then traumatic experience after traumatic experience kept happening to her, and they were done by the authority figures in her life she was brought up to unquestionably obey, until eventually it all caved because the only faith Joyce ever had was in an authority figure telling her what to do.
So now Joyce is an atheist, except she can’t actually bring herself to say out loud to herself that she’s one, and that atheism doesn’t mean “a belief in the non-existence of God”, it means she now has a lack of belief in everything she was told, including the origin of life, her own morality, and even who the hell “Joyce” is as a person, because the Joyce she is was made by that same death cult. She doesn’t have a new set of facts to grasp onto, it’s all just gone.
So Liz comes in and Joyce has the first opportunity ever, at all, to just be mad. She was lied to, bad things happened to her and she kept telling herself it was all God’s plan and it was just random violent chaos. She believed stupid bullshit like the sky sea that protected humans from the sun’s rays and let them live to 900 and it was all wrong, and she’s saying it out loud.
And then Becky intrudes on this private conversation, all of Joyce’s friends judge her without offering even the slightest sympathy or understanding, and right now, doubling down on being right is all Joyce has got even if “being right” means nothing to her at the moment because the only facts she has are that nothing matters, except that’s not “nothing matters” in an aggressively teenage way, nothing matters anymore because the source of her morals was her upbringing that then went on to repeatedly traumatize her over and over.
Look, Joyce is a kid from a fucked up situation and she’s reacting poorly to the loss of everything she’s ever known and now that’s even worse because none of her friends give a shit enough to ask how she’s doing. That’s not “edgy atheist”, that’s getting right and proper furious at the institutions that made her believe and act in a way her peer group constantly mocked her for that they’re now demanding she go back to because she’s making too much of a fuss.
Joyce didn’t have a normal Christian upbringing. For me to be this angry would be for me to get angry at something that was at best a casual part of my childhood, not the dissolution of everything I believed in as so factual that knowing God doesn’t exist anymore is as devastating to my view of reality if math and physics stopped working.
Durandal_1707
^ ?
Spencer
Oh good we’re still on about that.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Yeah, not everyone is done talking about things when one person decides they are.
543 thoughts on “Totally not”
Ana Chronistic
and not-Christians are totes amoral sex beings who do it all the time
with moms
for nickels
…or so I hear
Ana Chronistic
Joe if he goes through with it
Wraithy2773
…wow, SSDD, that’s a blast from the past…
C.T. Phipps
Some of Christians are amoral sex beings! I feel misrepresented.
🙂
Clif
Makes note of Alien Amoral Sex Beings from Outer Space as a potential title.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Why do I see Joe going to have a Kronk ethics debate between Danny on one shoulder and Joe’s cock/libido on the other?
Unless he’s just grabbing Danny to shove him out the door.
mrnoidea
I figure it would be Joyce on one shoulder and Joe’s Dad on the other.
BarerMender
Or if he’s asking Danny to finally make up a three-way.
Decidedly Orthogonal
I think even Joe would prefer JT or Andy Samberg for that position, or y’know Sal.
Although now I’m bugged to remember who Joe thinks is the hottest girl on campus. But _the list_ is dead for good reason.
Ana Chronistic
it WAS Rachel (Eleven)
although now I’m imagining Rachel as Eleven (Elle)
Decidedly Orthogonal
Stranger things have happened.
Miles
Am I the only one gettig “Nope Out” vibes from Joe for the last like, 7 panels?
Doctor_Who
Liz: I am a grownup. I do taxes and mortgage.
Joe: This is getting weird.
Liz: And I’m secular! Show me to your cauldron, I’m ready to learn D&D!
Joe: Fuck this, I’m out.
Liz: Teach me evolution! At a pride parade! With your Obamaphone!
Kitschensyngk
“Take me to your transgender bathroom and show me some universal health care!”
drs
“You do know we’re still in Indiana, right?”
Lanie
Liz: “I have completed one whole jury duty, and it was thrilling!”
BarerMender
In the jury room. After we deliberated, I got liberated.
BarerMender
By eight guys and two gals. The other one was a Christian.
Jamie
I want an Obamaphone now…
Bicycle Bill
Just for the record, those so-called “Obama phones” are merely the same telephone “Lifeline” program that was introduced back in 1985 (during Reagan’s second term, so it’s not some Johnny-come-lately liberal thing). Of course, THEN it provided federal subsidies for land-line phones, but as more and more people ‘cut the cord’, it was expanded to allow for cellular phones.
davidbreslin101
Legend has it, if you shine the Obamaphone’s torch at the sky on a cloudy night, Obama will return, flying in the Obamawing, wearing his Obamabelt with a can of shark-repellant Obama-spray on it.
A Red Balloon
Joe: “I don’t think I’m qualified to teach you evolution, but I know of someone who is. Just give me a second to find some Cocoa Puffs. Or Chicken McNuggets. Whatever we can get our hands on sooner. Or if you’re willing to spare some health points and maybe a shred of clothing, just make fun of dinosaurs.”
Yotomoe
Alright. NOW I don’t want Joyce to fuck her. Cuz that is a vocal string of red flags she just spewed.
Giguioto
Nah, they would actually have lots of fun, I think v:
Lumino
I assume that was a type, but knowing these comments…
Viktoria
IDK, I think Joyce is probably aware enough that if she spends more time with Liz, she’ll spot the problems. They’re both overcorrecting hard, and another example of that may be just what she needs. If it helps her with her other repressed issues at the same time, that’s a win-win.
Yotomoe
I mean Joe, but I guess I also don’t want Joyce to fuck her either.
Well maybe.
actually…
Doctor_Who
A VERY Freudian slip. Your subconscious is 8 parallel shipping dimensions ahead of you.
Yotomoe
Don’t get me wrong. The sheer amount of SQUISH I’m picturing in my head is not a dissatisfying mental image. They’ve actually got similar curves (though Liz is quite a bit moreso) and that might be fun.
DarkoNeko
no no, no need to correct. they’re made for each others ! (in their denial)
Sirksome
Since neither of them would know what they’re doing Liz x Joyce has the potential to be either very wholesome or very underwhelming but entertaining regardless.
Yotomoe
Joyce painted in her purple lipstickReltzik
The problem is that they wouldn’t be HONEST about not knowing what they were doing. The whole “let’s experiment cautiously, communicating clearly and honestly with each other what’s working and what isn’t and what we’re feeling apprehensive about” thing? That’s the exact OPPOSITE of what they would be doing.
Spencer
Okay but that’s really fucking funny.
Two bumbling virgins trying to convince the other that they’re the best at doing sex things.
“Sorry, Liz, but you know we can’t do a Cowgirl without the hat.”
StClair
I lol’d.
Yotomoe
I mean to be fair, it is sexier with the hat.
zee
And so, they were both bottoms
Spencer
This is why Ruth/Jason is doomed.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Clearly Ruth’s a switch, if she’s even a bottom at all. Emotionally maybe, but once engaged she always seemed to be in physical control of Ms. Billingsworth.
Spencer
Daisy raised her voice at Ruth for an entire two panels and Ruth instantly become interested and invested.
Ruth only dommes Jason because he’s a boring lay with zero initiative. If Daisy got in on that it’d be a poly triad with Ruth and a lamp.
StClair
yeah, the classic “Go Leafs?” scene seemed IMO to be an (equally classic) case of Billie goading Ruth into topping her
in the most epic of hatefucks.Yotomoe
But they were both bottoms is a sad event but they were both tops is GOOD SHIT.
Spencer
Nothing can convince me that Ruth isn’t one of those “cuddle me to death after violently destroying me” kind of subs.
Yotomoe
While I’m having this slip up Let me just say this.
Joe/Joyce/Liz. That would be fun. For me. (And I assume them)
Rocket Relm
You’re an artist. You have the power.
Yotomoe
But do I not the skill. I mean I can try but I just haven’t been liking my art as of late.
woobie
Art is best judged by the audience.
The Wellerman
This!
justin8448
We like your art Yotomoe!
It’s fine if you don’t. No pressure. But you absolutely have fans here.
Needfuldoer
Your skills of an artist are up to the task. Believe in yourself!
Eskeboi
@yotomoe I would pay real money to see u illustrate such a holy threesome. And I’m poor as shit. If that doesn’t boost your confidence a bit idk what will. If u won’t do it for us at least do it for the squishy goodness
Roborat
Most artists don’t like their work. Don’t let that stop you.
newlland(Henryvolt)
I fucking told you she was problematic, but it would be more like you’re making a life Ruining decision for her more than yourself.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Yup. I don’t like her or her flags, but I can admire her apparent confidence.
Jamie
That’s not confidence. That’s desperation.
justin8448
“I’m gonna rip that band-aid off no matter how hard I have to pull!”
-Liz
Decidedly Orthogonal
“Ow ow ow ow OW! Fuck! It’s not a band-aid, DON’T RIP IT OFF!”
— Joe soon. (Maybe)
Needfuldoer
Yeah, to me that “I can– I can do what I want” screams “I’ve got something to prove to myself”. She’s only slightly less inhibited than Joyce.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Lucy the ‘(fake it till you make it) tart.’
Nicoleandmaggie
Any chance Joe will send her off with a lecture on consent and how secular people can’t consent when high? No? Sigh.
Spencer
I don’t really see how.
I mean, yeah, she obviously has no idea what she’s talking about, but I think the undercurrent of “I’m tired of being judged for someone I’m not and living without all these other experiences” is on-point. That’s kinda what being a repressed virgin in a society that teaches you to innately fear and be repulsed by sex while constantly staring at it does to you.
I really only see that as red flags if Joe himself is uncomfortable with sleeping with someone who’s that driven by wanting it than really knowing it, but, y’know, it’s just an orgasm.
Sirksome
OMG! She has been fronting!
Sirksome
I have to admit I’m a little proud of myself here. I kind of figured Liz wasn’t as far ahead of Joyce as she seemed. Especially since she apparently can’t tell the difference between edible weed and a vitamin gummy.
Jamie
Yeah. Liz had me mostly fooled, tbh.
Partly, I guess, because my analysis of her came to a hard stop when I decided she was a dumpsterfire of a human being. I’d written her off by the time she popped the gummy.
But also because I’m bad at this kind of thing.
Bryy
This makes her corruption of Joyce much more irritating.
quixoticmaunster
“her corruption of Joyce”
YUCK.
Joyce is not “corrupted” just because she is growing and changing in ways which aren’t fun for everyone. LIZ is not some demon who came in and tempted Joyce into the dark side.
They are both teenagers who are trying to break their own religious indoctrination and (like teenagers do) they are being emotional and boastful rather than admit how frightening it is to accept that you might really be all alone in a world where nothing was planned ahead of time for you.
This narrative people have that Liz is some corrupting evil influence is getting fucking tiresome.
I hope people were more understanding for you when you were going through whatever cringe-filled awkwardtastic changes you went through as a young adult.
LadySilence
Eh; “corrupting” more in the sense of being a REALLY bad example of how to handle her newfound loss of belief in God. If Liz had been the sort of person who said “meh; I don’t really believe that shit anymore but I’m not going to shove it in their faces” when Joyce brought up how she posts all this Christian stuff on facebook, instead of initiating the “mocking the ever living fuck out of the concept of being religious”, it’d be a whole different story.
Just because she’s a teen breaking religious indoctrination doesn’t give her a pass on encouraging Joyce’s behavior.
Spencer
Genuine question: how is Joyce supposed to react?
Because I see a lot of “ugh I used to be such an edgy atheist, so cringey” and yeah I get that, but I get that because I’m pretty sure most of us didn’t grow up in a fundamentalist death cult. How is she supposed to act?
LadySilence
My church wasn’t as fundie as Joyce’s, and I personally am still a Christian, but the kids in my class who walked away from the church just…stopped attending. They went away to college or whatever they did next, maybe tried a new church in that area or maybe not, and eventually started sharing posts on facebook calling out the shit some churches do (the one I’m thinking of in particular was homeless for a while and posting about how little help the church gave her family while they were still members, and how the church-run shelters that she and her mom went to were at best unhelpful and at worse abusive). There was no “edgy atheism”, just a quietly starting to walk away.
That said, none of the people I’ve seen go through this had the kind of shock-trauma to their faith that Joyce did. But calling out specific shit that the church is wrong about / harmful for about is very different from diving headfirst into the “edgy athiest” persona.
Spencer
I mean, is quietly walking away from that the only mature answer? Is it not right to get mad if the circumstances that made you lose your faith were enraging? Of all the reasons to straight up hate Christianity, is a good reason for it, if only in the immediate moment, not in being personally wronged by the arm of it that exists in your personal life, like say an abusive shelter?
Because I lost my faith the same way I lost interest in Youtube guys on my Recommendations list: they just phased out of mind. For me to be as angry in the same way as Joyce would be weird, in that there’s a lot about the institution of Christianity as a political and culture force in North America I have a beef with but not any individual Christian who processes their faith as a personal aspect of their lifestyle. As a matter of human decency, I think it’s important I respect the religious faith of all individuals even if faith is something I don’t really understand anymore, because it’s not something I have to understand to respect.
But, I sure as hell wasn’t Joyce, who grew up in a fundamentalist death cult that taught her the Earth is 6000 years old and dinosaurs were placed on the ark and eventually hunted to extinction by humans. Joyce never had faith, the way a Christian doesn’t objectively knows God exists but believes in him for a myriad of reasons, she had a set of inerrant facts she was told were true. All of it was real, all at once, and every part of it had to be as real and as important as the other, or else it would all fall apart.
And then traumatic experience after traumatic experience kept happening to her, and they were done by the authority figures in her life she was brought up to unquestionably obey, until eventually it all caved because the only faith Joyce ever had was in an authority figure telling her what to do.
So now Joyce is an atheist, except she can’t actually bring herself to say out loud to herself that she’s one, and that atheism doesn’t mean “a belief in the non-existence of God”, it means she now has a lack of belief in everything she was told, including the origin of life, her own morality, and even who the hell “Joyce” is as a person, because the Joyce she is was made by that same death cult. She doesn’t have a new set of facts to grasp onto, it’s all just gone.
So Liz comes in and Joyce has the first opportunity ever, at all, to just be mad. She was lied to, bad things happened to her and she kept telling herself it was all God’s plan and it was just random violent chaos. She believed stupid bullshit like the sky sea that protected humans from the sun’s rays and let them live to 900 and it was all wrong, and she’s saying it out loud.
And then Becky intrudes on this private conversation, all of Joyce’s friends judge her without offering even the slightest sympathy or understanding, and right now, doubling down on being right is all Joyce has got even if “being right” means nothing to her at the moment because the only facts she has are that nothing matters, except that’s not “nothing matters” in an aggressively teenage way, nothing matters anymore because the source of her morals was her upbringing that then went on to repeatedly traumatize her over and over.
Look, Joyce is a kid from a fucked up situation and she’s reacting poorly to the loss of everything she’s ever known and now that’s even worse because none of her friends give a shit enough to ask how she’s doing. That’s not “edgy atheist”, that’s getting right and proper furious at the institutions that made her believe and act in a way her peer group constantly mocked her for that they’re now demanding she go back to because she’s making too much of a fuss.
Joyce didn’t have a normal Christian upbringing. For me to be this angry would be for me to get angry at something that was at best a casual part of my childhood, not the dissolution of everything I believed in as so factual that knowing God doesn’t exist anymore is as devastating to my view of reality if math and physics stopped working.
Durandal_1707
^ ?
Spencer
Oh good we’re still on about that.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Yeah, not everyone is done talking about things when one person decides they are.