176

Wish
Posted on December 10, 2017 by David M Willis
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176 thoughts on “Wish”

  1. Ana Chronistic

    Can we turn our beds into bunkbeds?
    It’ll give us so much extra space in our room to do activities!

    1. Jess

      I LITERALLY just watched that clip on Youtube.

      Nice new icon btw.

    2. Reltzik

      THERE’S your grav!

    3. King Daniel

      That seems incredibly dangerous.

  2. Doctor_Who

    Danny, if it doesn’t work out with Amber, you can always try flirting with Joe’s mom next time you see her. Never know your luck.

    1. Screwball

      I think that’s more Mike’s turf…

    2. Cass

      But he doesn’t want to be Joe’s dad, he wants to be his bro~ther~

      So he should try driving his own parents to divorce then hooking Joe’s mom up with his dad. Or mom.

      1. Agemegos

        Perhap Joe will end up as his own grandpa.

  3. FLUFFYWOLF

    I can’t believe it. Danny actually WASN’T that oblivious, he just couldn’t comprehend Joe’s dad being married.

    1. Roger

      called it

      1. Liliet

        yup

    2. ProfessorDetective

      Thought so.

  4. brionl

    So, uh, who is this Cosplay girlfriend again?

    1. MM

      He means Amazi-Girl.

  5. Cattleprod

    I’m going cross-eyed trying to work out the family tree in my head.

    1. JessWitt

      Same here. And I just gave up working out all the Crazy Rich Asian relationships. *~X-(

    2. Reltzik

      “When you reduce a family tree to a family bush, you just can’t hide as much beneath it.”

    3. Needfuldoer

      It looks a bit like 17’th century European aristocracy…

    4. Marsh Maryrose

      Maybe you can use Carrie Fisher’s family tree as a template.

    5. jy3

      So far, it isn’t connected to the Brown family tree. So it’s less complicated than it could be.

  6. @zombieundergrnd

    Danny was dropped on his head as an infant, wasn’t he.

    1. MM

      Could just be too many 19th century novels. Or Harry Potter.

      1. Doctor_Who

        I’m convinced that at least 15% of the reason he married Ginny was so he could officially join the Weaselys.

        1. Larkle

          I think that’s the main reason. Harry marries Ginny, Hermione marries Ron, that way they all become literal family. Idk, I get the thematic, but it seemed a bit much to me.

    2. Pablo360

      Would that make him Goku?

      1. Betty Anne

        Depends on if he keeps Danning things up to the point his universe might get erased. 😐

    3. Agemegos

      I was. It’s not so bad.

  7. Keulen

    Somehow I don’t that’s a good reason to get married, Danny.

  8. Nightsbridge

    Yeeeee, I figured that Joe wasn’t buying what his Dad was selling.

    He’s seen all of this before.

  9. Yumi

    “I hope someday we’ll be friends again”–> “And hey, if I MARRY her…”

    1. Fart Captor

      He’s hopeless and it is adorable

      1. neeks

        Idk, planning a wedding seems pretty hopeful to me.

        1. Doki

          HAHA okay I laughed out loud, good one.

    2. Koms

      That escalated quickly

    3. Ainara

      What? You don’t marry your friends after reconciling with them? Totally normal thing to do

  10. K. Ivan Ruppert

    You know… When Joe’s Dad was first revealed, I speculated that Walkyverse Joe had invented a portal so he could jump to another universe and wound up raising a clone of himself. I mentioned this and Willis even told me specifically that this was in NO WAY canon, but the last few days have done nothing to convince me of that. 😉

    1. Needfuldoer

      Just think of the Rosenthal family tree as “Joe clones through the ages”. Grandpa with a Wilford Brimley moustache, great-great grandpa with huge, bushy Civil-War era sideburns…

      1. MM

        Literal clones or not, I’m going to be very disappointed if this isn’t the case in any Rosenthal family photos we might see. Even for the women.

  11. Agemegos

    Umm. Around here McDonald’s usually hires high school kids because they’re cheaper. Perhaps in American all hirelings are equally cheap.

    1. David M Willis

      The average age of American fast food workers is 29.

      1. Agemegos

        That’s a relief in one way.

        1. Pablo360

          Not much of one.

        2. Agemegos

          Got to take what you can get these days.

          Perhaps grad studencies will be survivable again be the time the cast of this comic have to worry about.

        3. Thulcandran

          A 29-year-old can give meaningful consent to doing things with an adult

          a 17-year-old cannot

        4. drs

          Legally, that depends on your state or country.

        5. drs

          E.g. it’s 16 in Indiana or Canada, but 18 in the state containing Hollywood.

        6. smparadox

          It’s 18 in Canada, or at least here in Ontario…

        7. Agemegos

          Here in New South Wales the age of consent is sixteen. Which I acknowledge goes to “legally” rather than “meaningfully”.

      2. Taco Tuesday

        Average, perhaps, but in my fast food workplace you’re either a high schooler or a much older parent. Okay there are a handful of younger college kids but I’m legit the only one there in the mid-twenties. None of my older coworkers work the front, the high schoolers typically do that. Maybe the average age of everyone is indeed somewhere in the late twenties or thirties, but nobody is actually that age. Of course that’s just one example though.

  12. Passchendaele

    Danny, stepbrothers-in-law – or whatever this is – means about as much as being unrelated (and it’s not really a good reason to marry someone anyway.)

    1. Rodimiss

      You can’t just crush his dreams like this! Look at his face! He’s so excited!

    2. Liliet

      Why don’t you let him have his fun???

      1. Passchendaele

        In the immortal words of a kid in SMBC: *all whimsy must die.*

    3. Deanatay

      Dude, you can add all the ‘steps’ and ‘in-laws’ you want. Changes nothing.

      Bros is bros.

  13. Rodimiss

    I love Danny, and I love the expressions on both of them in the last panel. “LINKED FOREVER BY BLOOD, JOE.”

  14. Stephen Bierce

    *plays ZZ Top’s “Burger Man” on the hacked P.A. speaker*

    1. Stephen Bierce

      It was about time we had some sexism, crudeness and bad dietary habits around here.

    2. Deanatay

      Thanks, man. I needed some ZZ today.

  15. Kyrik Michalowski

    On the one hand, Danny’s enthusiasm about maybe possibly one day being brothers with Joe is heart-warming. On the other hand, he’s forgetting all the things that make that such a nearly impossible future. But that’s why I like him, he’s either an optimist or an idiot depending on how cynical you are.

    1. Agemegos

      Being somewhat pessimistic I doubt there’s a difference.

  16. C.T Phipps

    I think Joe blames his father for the disintegration of his parents’ marriage but I wonder how much is projecting. JoeDad may be a serial philanderer and adulterer but I can’t help wonder if there’s more here. Certainly, he seems to have been profoundly unhappy in his marriage and may genuinely love Stacy.

    1. DailyBrad

      Okay, when you said projecting, at first I thought you were going to suggest Joe caused his parents to divorce, which would propel Joe up the rankings for “saddest fucking relationship with parents in DoA”, but not by as many spots as it would if so many of them weren’t awful human beings. (Blaine, Toe-Dad, Ethan’s mom, etc)

    2. Cass

      They’ve only known each other about a month, whether Richard sincerely means what he was about his relationship with Stacey or not it’s way too soon to say whether he’ll really love her enough to give up his philandering ways or just thinks so because their relationship is still in the honeymoon phase.

      1. Agemegos

        Let’s not forget that Stacy is interested in Richard for his money.

        1. Shiro

          You are reading an awful lot into a single instance of a dark-humor joke about her daughter getting sued.

        2. C.T Phipps

          I do think Joe wants to desperately believe he’s better than his dad and he’s failing by any stretch of the imagination but I’m not sure he really is. In a comic which subverts so many cliches about relationships and ideas–I wonder if Joe is assuming his dad is all at fault for his parent’s miserable marriage because of the classic Freud interpretation of a son’s overprotectiveness.

        3. drs

          > Joe wants to desperately believe he’s better than his dad

          “Aargh! I wanted to be better than my dad, but my dad is a better person than I thought he was! It’s so unfair!”

        4. Liliet

          I really really think Joe is right on this one, because we don’t just have his perception of his dad to go on, we have ACTUAL INSTANCES OF ON-PANEL BEHAVIOR. Remember when he hit on Sarah? Remember when he made Amber extremely uncomfortable before revealing he was there on behest of her mom? Remember when he told Joe he wasn’t creeping on college girls around him as a great favor to his new relationship?

          Why do people keep ignoring this? You aren’t the first, people have been surreally willing to latch on to one decent sentence Richard says and ignore the ten scummy ones surrounding it…

        5. TemperaryObsessor

          One thing about this comic is there was like one instance where a parental figure might have been better than their child thought so far. And plenty of children with crappy parents.
          You are also correct that Richard has already done plenty on panel.
          I think both Joe’s mom being perfectly fine, and this being a case of both sides sort of sucked and since Dick was clearly worse Joe didn’t notice his mothers problems are possible at this point.
          In either case Richard is likely telling himself he only cheated because of Joe’s mom’s faults and in either case that is a lie.

        6. thejeff

          Judging by his comments about Stacy, there’s an implication that’s partly the case. He says Stacy’s so hot and the sex is so good, he’s not even interested in cheating. Implying that if his ex had been hotter and the sex better, then he wouldn’t have cheated.
          Which is bullshit on the face of it.

        7. MM

          It’s worth noting that whatever Richard’s ulterior motives for being on a college campus, at least he’s shown up and spent time with his son. Unless I’m forgetting a throwaway parents’ weekend line, Joe’s mom has not.

        8. thejeff

          And immediately wandered off to get laid. After hitting on Sarah.

          I’d also assume, in any unpleasant divorce situation, such visits are negotiated, so that time with the kid doesn’t turn into time fighting over the kid. Likely, his mother brought Joe up at the start of the year and Richard got to visit on parent’s weekend.

        9. BBCC

          Joe’s mother brought him to orientation.

        10. thejeff

          While this comic does subvert many cliches, it’s generally tries not to reinforce worse ones in the process. “Guy who’s only cheating because his wife is a bongo” is far more of a cliche than the straightforward take on Richard.

        11. C.T Phipps

          I wouldn’t want to justify the behavior of JoeDad by saying his wife is responsible. I would want the dysfunction to be something that was inherent to the marriage itself and something that made both sides miserable. In short, I am wondering if it’d be interesting if the flaws of the marriage were like Robin’s parents were they really would have been better off getting a divorce but society had them stick together regardless. After all, we’re seeing a lot of deconstruction of the traditional family in DOA with the the Browns are toxic together because Papa Brown is married to a bigot who emotionally abuses her children.

        12. C.T Phipps

          The short version is I’m not of the mind JoeMom is a bad persom or rampant cheating is ever justified. What I’m curious about is whether JoeDad really is more like Joe in that he’s a good person who just had horrible rearing in his behavior and a very unhappy marriage. Why am I defending JoeDad? I suspect it’s my Stacy fandom probably. I want her to be with someone who is good for her and make her happy. I also want Amber to be wrong that she’s attracted to a bad sort because that’s the worst sort of victim blaming.

        13. Havtorn

          I’d say that a fully straightforward take where the cheater has no other motivation than “that’s what they’re like” is the primary cliché, and the one where “mitigating” circumstances exist is the subversion, albeit a pretty common one. The unrepentant adulterer is not exactly a character that tends to get a lot of depth, most of the time. But yeah, depends on what your media intake is, I guess.

          At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter much, tbh. Even if a little more info on the circumstances would make the situation ambiguous the version that Joe has internalized is totally black and white, and that’s really the version we’re concerned with. If nothing else because the time it would take for Richard to prove Joe wrong about him would likely require years, not weeks or months, and as such it’s unlikely that that’s where this arc is heading simply due to comic time.

        14. BBCC

          Freud was a QUACK. I wouldn’t take anything he said too seriously.

        15. Fart Captor

          No, all she said is that *if* Richard hurts her, Amber shouldn’t murder him until he’d outlived his usefulness.

          Even then, I feel rather confident she was joking

    3. BigDogLittleCat

      Genuine question: on what do you base your statement that Richard was profoundly unhappy in his marriage to Joe’s mother and why do you think his unhappiness was the result of something other than his wife’s objections to his cheating?

      Assuming Joe learned his ways from his father, Richard’s cheated because he can’t keep it in his pants. Richard cheated because he can’t be monogamous, not because he was unhappy. Or, if he was unhappy, it was because his wife didn’t want him to fuck around.
      Either way, Richard’s desire to fuck around was a problem, not a symptom.

      1. C.T Phipps

        Generally, it’s due to the fact JoeDad hits on a lot of women and Joe hates his father but all of the encounters we’ve had with the former so far have been him trying to bond with his son or his relationship with Stacy. He’s hit on much younger women but I’m not sure that qualifies as genuinely evil. Amber disrespects and treats her mother like a weak victim but I think that’s Amber’s issue and Stacy seems to be a genuinely good and well-adjusted person who just happened to be trapped in a violent situation. The fact she is comfortable and likes Richard makes me inclined to think there’s more going on there. We’ve also seen with Robin’s parents, it’s possible for two decent people to be profoundly unsuited or unhappy with each other without there being a “villain.”

        1. C.T Phipps

          Hitting on a woman literally half your age is gross but not evil when they’re adults. As for making Amber uncomfortable, it’s contrasted to the fact Richard makes Stacy comfortable–which is an interesting issue. Stacy is a survivor of abuse every bit as much as Amber but seems to think Richard is a good egg. I also think Amber’s put downs of her mother being a victim who likes victimizers is complete bullshit. It’s just her trying to put her view of the world on her mother. Stacy strikes me as one of the most well-rounded and decent members of the cast like Papa Brown.

        2. thejeff

          Whether Stacy is actually attracted to abusers or not, her relationship with Blaine does call her judgment into question. In the long run, she was able to break away from him, which is definitely a good sign.
          That Richard makes her comfortable could theoretically be a sign that it really is a good relationship or just that he’s got her fooled – possibly even unintentionally.

        3. C.T Phipps

          I find that kind of attitude to be extremely troubling as it blames women for not “seeing” abusive assholes as that until it’s too late which is not how it goes in RL. A lot of times it’s the fact they keep things under wraps until they have someone in their power.

        4. thejeff

          I’m not trying to blame her. I’m saying that her being comfortable with him is not evidence he’s actually a good egg.
          We know she’s been fooled before.

        5. thejeff

          And no, I don’t think him hitting on college age girls makes him “genuinely evil”. It makes him creepy as hell, but still not in a class with Blaine or Toedad.

  17. Shiro

    Danny is such a pure soul. I want the ability to make that expression in the last panel, stars and all

    1. RacingTurtle

      Danny is adorable.

  18. tirachokko

    ngl, I like Joe more and more as a character partially b.c while his mindset regarding his own relationships (or lack of) with other people is something I can understand. Can’t willfully fuck someone up with something you already told them would never happen, and I can’t see him as someone who would (going to be a little cringey here, sorry) tap a clingy ass. On the flip side, I may or may not kind of be like his dad and knowing that while knowing the values of the people I’m dating is kind of shitty to them :/ sometimes I want to have Joe’s resolve to not get somewhat selfishly emotionally attached

    Also partially liked Joe from the start b.c I ship him with Joyce 😐 #sorrynotsorry

    1. Deanatay

      Yeep, the SS Joece is definitely gonna need more passenger space…

      *pulls into drydock, starts adding more levels*

  19. Mr D

    So, fellas, What D&D Class would you assign each DoA character? (Dual-classes allowed)
    Joyce is p. obviously a Cleric.
    Danny seems to be turning into a Bard (Mostly useless but HEY, SONGS!)
    I’d say that Ruth is a Warrior.

    1. Reltzik

      Which edition? Prestige classes or 3rd party content allowed?

      1. Mr D

        Let’s go with classicc 3.5, Core classes and regular prestige, no 3rd party.

        I mean, shit, there are so many prestige and 3rd party you could pretty much make any class combination.

        If you are gonna use a prestige class, you gotta explain it properly, that’s it.

        1. Reltzik

          Okay, yeah, Bard was pretty worthless in 3.5.

          Let’s see. Joyce is paladin. All the god stuff and pretty smitey. (We’ll ignore the lack of armor for all of the characters.)

          Billie is…. hmm. Some flavor of BSF. Definitenly not the outdoorsy type. I’ll say just a straight up fighter.

          Amazi-Girl is some flavor of rogue build. Gadgets, accrobatics, surprise sneak attacks.

        2. thejeff

          I still say Joyce is Barbarian. All her power is from Rage.

    2. Woobie

      Only fellas?

      1. Mr D

        Is there any gender-neutral thing I could use that would have the same meaning and informality I could use here instead of fellas?

        Also, is fellas gendered?
        (ESL, asking honestly)

        1. toby

          “Guys” might be less gendered than “fellas” in this situation, although it’s still not entirely neutral

        2. Chris Phoenix

          Yes, fellas is gendered – it’s a form of fellows – definitely masculine connotations.

          Guys has recently become semi-non-gendered, in some usages – mainly that you can say casually to a mixed-gendered group, “Hey, guys!” But if you’re talking about a group of people and refer to them as “guys” it will likely be heard as male-only – and the word was fully masculine until pretty recently.

          “Folks” is not used much, at least in my part of the country, but it is the best non-gendered equivalent of “guys.” “People” works sometimes too.

        3. Doki

          Just gonna chime in here and say that when I see ‘hey guys’, I don’t think someone’s only talking about men. (It’s been that way for at least ten years too, maybe longer?)

          And yeah, ‘folks’ just… isn’t used by anyone I know? I know some people use it, of course, but no one I personally know does.

        4. Zee

          Fellas doesn’t have to be gendered if you don’t want it to be. I am a huge advocate of making gendered words gender neutral. So far I’ve got bro, guys, dude, man, boy, girl (usually used in exasperation)

        5. Agemegos

          “Folks” might do it.

        6. Deanatay

          “Folks” is that I’d use.

        7. Yumi

          I’m not from the South, but I support the normalization of “y’all” throughout English.

      2. missilentmurmur

        It may be that I’m a foreign speaker, but it didn’t occur to me that I’m not included.

      3. Needfuldoer

        “Dude” covers everybody, according to Dudeism and Good Burger.

    3. toby

      Hey, I play a bard!

      …I type as I remember how, in this week’s session, my character attempted to Viciously Mock a bunch of centipedes to death as the rest of the party used their “weapons” to “attack them”.

      1. UniqueSnowflake2

        *Continues ZZ Top theme by playing “Legs” on the hacked lute*

    4. Cass

      I might argue Paladin for Joyce over cleric.

      Amber: A barbarian who has fooled folks into thinking she’s a monk.

      1. Mr D

        I thought about that initially but not really, Paladinhood implies a certain zealotry that Joyce no longer has. She is willing to question her beliefs and dogmas, a Paladin can’t risk that, they may lose their powers.

        1. Cass

          I think a case like hers depends on the DM; her faith in her god himself doesn’t seem to have faltered, and she still tries to live her life as as good Christian, it’s the trappings that men have built up around him that she’s started to question.

    5. Kernanator

      I definitely haven’t created a character sheet for a bard that’s based on Billie. Nope, definitely not.

      1. hallucigenia

        I can see that, but I’d have put Billie as a sorcerer, myself.

        Joyce– probably cleric but I’m wondering if she took a level in barbarian recently for the sweet rage bonus. Sal is definitely a paladin.

    6. Doki

      “Mostly useless but HEY, SONGS!” is an adorable (and accuracte) way to describe New Danny.

      I APPROVE

    7. Deanatay

      Gonna import my suggestions from a few comics ago.
      -Becky’s a human Ranger
      -Dina’s a Raptrosian Arcane Trickster (I know, it’s a 3rd party race, but Dina would insist on role-playing a dinosaur if she knew it was possible!)

      And, c’mon, Ruth is the GM.

  20. Tacos

    Look at Danny’s expression at the end there. He’s so happy at the idea of being brothers with Joe.

  21. Reltzik

    All in favor of this awful plan, say “Aye, ship it.”

    1. Deanatay

      Called it yesterday!

      So, clearly I’m in.

  22. Mr D

    HERE IS TODAY’S AWKWARD CONVERSATION :TOOT:
    (Also, possible trigger warning RE: Sexual situations, consider yourselves warned)

    (Cross-posting from today’s itswalky strip)

    If you will let me bring foth something I once read:
    There was this romance manga I once read (Apparently it was a shonen but the plot was so Shojo it hurt).

    The basic plot initially started as that old tale of a guy having a crush on a girl and another girl trying to help him and the both of them slowly falling for each other without noticing.

    Then we got to the backstory of the female lead and ohh dear. She had trauma with intercourse because her former boyfriend had his friends do a secret recording while they were getting busy in the Gym Locker.

    So when the Male lead and the Female lead are finally alone in her room, she has a lot of issues with intimity and not being willing t do it, while the male lead is very sexually frustrated but equally understanding and supportive. The girl notices his frustration and decides that the best way to break through her trauma is asking him to basically rape her, (Paraphrasing here: “Do it, and don’t stop no matter how much I cry and beg you to stop”). The guy is obviously taken out of it, and while she starts undressing them both, he states that he won’t do something to hurt her and he refuses.

    She breaks up with him, because she feels it is unfair to him that he has to deal with her hangups about sex.

    (Anyone interested, I no longer rememer the name of this manga, it ended about 7-8 years ago I think)

    Could the Woker-parts of this fandom analyze this scene for me?

    1. Mr D

      (Also, yes, this manga does end up with a happy and satisfying enough ending)

      1. Mr D

        Man I expected this to get a lot more answers…

    2. KRVeale

      Basically that situation you describe is well into Oh Hell No territory for having sex, since the woman involved is basically saying “I am incapable of consenting to sex, *but I desperately want that to change.*”

      Skipping the part where she BECOMES capable of consenting to sex is basically the worst possible idea there is.

      In that situation the best response would be to say “I’m not planning on going anywhere, and would LOVE to have sex once you’re able to enjoy it: in the meanwhile, how about we get you a Wet Metric Bearded SHITTONNE of therapy as we work towards that?” and y’know hang out and do cool emotionally intimate things together in the meanwhile.

      (I’ve run into multiple examples of Japanese media features people trying to do crazy self-harming things rather than going to therapy, but the same can be said of that kind of toxicity appearing across popular culture across the world so it’s not like Japan is unique in that regard.)

      There’s lots of tricky situations out there in the real world for consent, because people get hung up on the Specific Magic Words rather than looking at the principles behind them.

      For example, “Don’t have sex with drunk people, or get someone drunk to have sex with them” is a pretty good principle. I’ve seen that one rubbished by a guy “because that made him a rapist” because his partner at the time enjoyed particular Sexy Things that she only felt confident enough to do when drunk.

      The key is that consent is tied to ONGOING communication, and the ability of either party to communicate that they want to stop at any point: in that case, his partner was clearly communicating what she wanted to do, and to continue doing. There were risks, since the booze might reduce her ability/capacity to communicate clearly, but they were basically talking about ground rules beforehand and checking in afterwards.

      But people treat stuff as black and white word-magic where if you Don’t Do The Thing, while Doing the Other Thing then you’re safe, and… no.

      Consent is not about incantations or social magic, it’s about communicating ongoing, sustained enthusiasm for participating in Whatever People Are Doing.

  23. Ashley

    I want a gay Joe.

  24. Munchkin13

    @ Mr. D
    I wouldn’t describe myself as woker, but another confused person coming at it from a possibly different angle.

    To some degree in society a woman’s worth is determined by how capable she is at giving sex to men. And its such a weirdly pervasive thing in media that you can believe it even if you don’t think you believe it.

    Like, for a while what was depicted as a strong woman was one who could use her sexual power to manipulate men. The promise of sex might have been an empty promise but it was still there, and there were so few examples of alternate power for women to hold that it seemed like if you couldn’t promise sex or pretend to promise sex you were losing out on a whole lot of power.

    And everytime somebody says to a girl that a guy hangs out with her “because she’s a pretty girl” It kinda makes her wonder how many friends she’d have if she clearly could not offer sex or romance. So a lack of sex drive may or may not bring fears of lack of power and social isolation.

    The beauty of women is so utilized and valued around us its hard sometimes to imagine how anything can be more valuable. And yeah Physical attractiveness directly relates to ability to give good sex in perception, for some reason.

    Anyway so you bring up a story where a girl cannot have sex. That means she lacks value as a person and lacks the ability to provide in a relationship. Just because it isn’t true doesn’t mean it isn’t believable to the protagonist. Therefore she wants to be fixed. She thinks maybe that if she has sex with a person she trusts in a more comfortable situation she’ll actually like it. She knows some of the initial discomfort will kick in but she thinks maybe the pleasure will kick in after that and she’ll actually like it.

    I know it might be silly to think you’d like something while obviously being afraid but I think I can name a few yaoi mangas and bodice ripper romance novels where one protagonist protests against something done to them and then proceeds to give into it and like it. There’s even a kiss scene like that in On the Water Front. If she’s young with limited experience to romance beyond fiction, that’s easily believable.

    So then he doesn’t do this.
    So maybe she’s angry at him for not helping “fix” her, but maybe she also doesn’t think he’d be happy.

    It’s what we’re told.
    “Men only think of one thing”
    “Watch out for boys they only have one thing on their mind”
    “foreplay is just for girls sake”

    So even if men are complex creatures who can desire things out of life and out of women than sex, we have not been informed so. I’m sorry to all men for that. We really shouldn’t consider you two-dimensional.

    So man not get sex=man not happy=anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves. Also we’ve connected sex and relationships so in her mind the person in a relationship must be the one giving sex So she honestly thinks leaving him will have an end result of him being happier because he can be with someone who can provide him with his desires.

    Does that help?

    1. Mr D

      This is all very complicated.
      I actually expected more answers, my usual “Awkward questions” comments tend to garner more reactions.

      Oh yeah, I waddled throu hundreds of romance manga these past few hours to find the one I was talking about (You’d be amazed how many borderline porn manga counts as Shonen).
      The manga is called GE – Good Ending, if anyone is interested.

      1. CJ

        The phrasing of your question probably didn’t invite answers. I’m not really sure what “woke” means, it’s a word I noticed cropping up in US media about two months ago. It seems to serve as a divider. Some people think it’s good to be that, some think o goddess what’s this hype and for some it makes you the enemy. More or less like PC.
        RE: the manga.
        Japanese Manga are really bad at giving good advice about relationships. The – to me – strange combination of repression and hentai in Japanese culture leads to really bad stories they tend to tell about relationships and what being female means.
        There is an episode of Detective Conan where Ran, a skilled karateka, nearly lets herself be killed because she thinks the (absent) boy she crushes on will only love her if she adheres to the traditional women role because of some fortune she picked and a friend read to her. Fortunately the would-be-murderer can’t resist reading that fortune to her before going after her with a knife – and as it said something totally different, he gets so badly beaten up by her that the arriving friends and police are a bit afraid of her.

        We should import Ran and her friends into that other comic to get the video and make clear to the protagonists ex and his cronies that their behavior is very much not approved. Or maybe amazi-girl and Sal.

        That said, the protagonist obviously has taken to hearth the – totally wrong – idea that as a women in a relationship she has to be able to have sex her boyfriend at any given moment. And she seems to see her not wanting to do this as a problem (maybe just giving the relationship more time would have made her feel more comfortable?).
        So she is asking her boyfriend for what she thinks will be the solution of this and he declines. Good for him. It wouldn’t have been. It would have made him a rapist, and he has every reason to not consent to that. And it would neither have helped her sexual hangups (if they existed which I’m not sure of) nor her problems with trust. That she breaks up with him because she can’t imagine any other solution is depressing.

        From what you said, I’me not sure if the author consciously uses the well-worn sacrificial trope very common in fantasy settings to subvert it, or just uses that trope. But if you leave out the sex, it’s all this “I need to do this for the bettering of the world/winning against dark forces/.. and even if I want to stop in the middle don’t listen to me” stuff that is supposed to make the heros.
        So she want to do the sacrifice and become the hero of her own story. She wants her agency back. The way she chose just doesn’t work.

        1. Mr D

          You seem to be assuming a lot about the manga :P.
          As I remeber this manga, the Male Lead was frustrated but he never took the first step, hell, he himself never seemed to realize he was frustrated, the female lead understood it from lingering stares and stuff.

          And yes, she did have hangups, specifically the trauma caused by her old relationship manifested as a fear of intimacy. I’ve been re-reading those specific chapters and somme reviews and it has jump-started my memory:

          She broke up with him after he didn’t want to force her because she thought A)It was unfair to him in her opinion, B) She thought he would be happier if he went on to date some other girl who had a crush on him and less drama and C) It actually hurt her to see him being so nice and accepting of her problems because it made her feel worse.

          Also, this is a slice of life rom-com, not a fantasy manga 🙂

        2. KRVeale

          *blink*
          But what the hooting bearded hell does any of that have to do with what CJ said?
          For one thing, CJ makes a clear connection to tropes/themes that appear in fantasy manga, and isn’t saying “since this is a fantasy manga, therefore…” as part of their argument.
          Reading comprehension is an Important Thing.

        3. Mr D

          Reading comprehension is already hard enough when not sleep deprived and reading in my native tongue 😛

        4. KRVeale

          Entirely fair, and apologies for presuming english as native language.

  25. Goki

    Awww Danny… you can do sooooo much better. You have improved so much as a person, please don’t go back… Still feel the reason Amber/A-Girl broke up with him was BS, but with all the stuff going on with Amber lately, he may have dodged a bullet.

  26. Some1

    I don’t think that’s how biology works Danny.

  27. Nobody

    Danny you need to learn some about how being linked by blood works

    1. Bagge

      Or possibly about how marriage (doesn’t) work

  28. Bagge

    Last panel: Marriage as Danny sees it vs marriage as Joe sees it.

  29. Bagge

    I love how Joe is trying to both learn how to help Amber out, and that he tries to check in on Danny. A-friending, Joe.

  30. Delicious Taffy

    Is that a L33tStr33t Boys reference?

    1. Bagge

      Um, Delicious Taffy, I’m not very comfortable seeing your gravatar. A bloody Joyce is a bit… upsetting given some of the themes of the comic. So…. if you would like to change it to something no doubt suitably epic, that would be awesome of you :-). Thanks.

      1. timemonkey

        But their gravatar is hilarious!

      2. Delicious Taffy

        Ah, sorry. I changed it to Zombie Joyce for Halloween, but was too busy moving house to change it back. Seems like now is a good time. Thanks for the honesty.

        1. Bagge

          For Halloween it was great 🙂

          Thanks so much. Much obliged! And Vacation Bear is most certainly epic.

        2. Delicious Taffy

          That’ll be Naughty Bear, from the games of the same name. Not most people’s cup of tea, for very understandable reasons, but the sequel is one of my favorite games.

          Uh….content warning: severe violence, if anyone wanted to look the games up. They get pretty horrific, and probably wouldn’t be allowed for sale if the characters weren’t explicitly respawning teddy bears.

  31. Danni

    thats called step-brothers, danny

    1. nothri

      Close enough.

    2. Nymphie

      Brother-in-law actually

      1. Daibhid C

        Both. Stepbrother-in-law, I guess.

        1. Deanatay

          Bros is Bros, guys.

          Bros is Bros is Bros

    3. Tacos

      Unless Danny wants to perform a blood brothers ceremony.

      1. Bagge

        If dinosaur budding riding doesn’t count I have no idea what would.

  32. OnyxIdol

    You COULD just marry Joe and skip a whole lot of family tree complexities, Dan.

    1. Deanatay

      This would both a) be gay, and b) be a commitment to a serious relationship, both things which would cause Joe to recoil in horror, so, I’m thinking it wouldn’t happen.

  33. Ainara

    I was rereading older strips and watching the comment section go from hating Danny to liking him (I mean, and still making fun of him but like, lovingly) was hilarious. I can’t tell if he’s the one who’s gone through character development or if it was us.

    1. Doki

      Haha, I was just thinking about this when reading the comments on this strip!

      1. Ainara

        He’s a good egg

    2. JBento

      I think it’s more DoA Danny overwriting Roomies! Danny in people’s minds.

      1. Ainara

        Trans-universal character development!

        That’d make sense. DoA was my first Willis-written comic, so I remember reading the comment sections when I started reading and thinking “aw come on, he’s not THAT bad. Just kinda wishy-washy”

    3. Drakkin the Alien

      it’s probably a wild speculation on my part, but i have held for long the fan-theory that Danny was the first self-insertion of Mr.W. Then came Joyce and Walky (both dark mirror splinters of himself). I guess that deep inner-life young authors make more touching characters than say those young authors that base exclusively on real people they “know”.

  34. Ran

    The Joe family do love them some cashiers.

  35. not someone else

    That… all is kind of disturbing, when I think about it. The “yelling and crying” bit. The bit where Joe believes (possibly from experience) that his Dad has so desperately little self-control that he’ll hurt someone he seems to genuinely care about over some random mildly attractive person in a frumpy apron who smells like french fry oil (I say as a former McDonald’s cashier).

    Like… to a kid, having the adults in your life start screaming and crying and throwing things and whatever for *whatever* reason can be terrifying, even if it’s not at you. Just thinking about it makes me tense up, and I haven’t been that kid in a long time. I feel some real sympathy for Joe here, and it makes me wonder if some of his treatment of women is subconsciously self-destructive. Like, he knows he’s not getting anything out of it, but he’s never to my memory seemed angry about that, he seems resigned. He comes up with these excuses for why it’s “better than the alternative” but I wonder if he thinks he doesn’t deserve a good relationship, either.

    Even if so, what he did to others in the process of hurting himself was horrible. But it often is. This particular strip is just… painful.

    1. Cerberus

      Yeah, we’re seeing some of his trauma here and it’s heartbreaking. Most heartbreaking because he’s not processing it as he needs to.

  36. Bagge

    Re: Willis’ kickstarter makeout-art

    Dina could TOTALLY save this one
    https://twitter.com/damnyouwillis/status/939794680262418433

    1. ValdVin

      Closed eyes, blushing, licky-style: Checks all the boxes.

      I don’t have a Twitter, but I gotta start following Willis’.

  37. Cerberus

    Comic Reactions:

    Panel 1: I love this here, the soft expression on Danny’s face as he apologizes and tries to lighten the mood. Joe’s weariness as he notes how short he expects his stint as step-brother to last. It’s just a beautiful visual panel.

    Panel 2: I want to linger on this for a second. I’ve talked a lot about Joe’s flaws and they are something he’s working through, but this right here, is a taste of his trauma that drives some of those flaws.

    This moment here is not just him reciting what he believes but partially reliving it in his head. Remembering his parents screaming at each other, his mother crying, and feeling powerless about everything.

    And that powerlessness is a thing among guys. The way toxic masculinity operates, feelings of powerlessness or vulnerability are treated very harshly, seen as weaknesses that you must purge through performative toxic masculinity.

    And it hurts the men wrapped in it so much. Joe here NEEDS to process this shit. He needs the time to really linger with these feelings and figure them out, because they are literally haunting him, but he’s at the moment still feeling hesitant to do so (though hopefully less so than before considering he’s actually talking about it).

    Panel 3: And you see that discomfort with him moving his face away from Danny’s while sitting next to him. That vulnerability is a scary space and he still can’t quite look people in the eye as he is in that space.

    But his topic change is much less harsh and obvious (good signs) and he’s even sympathetic that Danny and Amber had a rough history as he tries to ask for advice to do the role asked of him*.

    *Which let’s just take a second to just give Joe a moment’s kudos for taking a role he considers garbage seriously entirely because it was an earnest request from a woman he sees as being harmed by his dad. Like, yeah, that speaks a lot to the man he might one day become.

    1. Bagge

      Tenet one of being a man in the patriarchy: Never show weakness.

      Tenet… two I think (a high number, at any rate): Women are a way of keeping score.

      Between those two, the last ten thousand years of shit makes a disturbing amount of sense.

  38. Cerberus

    Panel 4: Oof…This is heavy and largely because Joe has no idea of the situation he is walking into here with Danny’s emotions. Danny was dating Amber… or rather Amber/AG’s AG alter and so has a lot of complex feelings wrapped up into everything and can’t really talk about all of that because it would involve outing Amber/AG’s mental health condition, which is a big no no.

    And it means he can’t really have a real talk with his friend about everything he’s processing and that’s a real bummer.

    Cause yeah, he’s hurting and as he tries to answer, that becomes really clear. And meanwhile Joe misunderstands the situation because Danny can’t really speak to the reality of the alter situation he found himself in.

    Panel 5: And this moment is just sweet. Danny wanting to be friends at least. Acknowledging that he wanted more at one time, but really just wants to remain friends.

    And that’s important for him because this would be the first ex who didn’t become a friend. Like, him and Dorothy managed to process things out and become friends and I feel that is a state he is most comfortable with exes, especially as he cares a lot about their happiness post-him.

    I guess what I’m saying is he’s a good egg…

    Panel 6: No. No, Danny. Stop. Just no.

  39. whitt

    …sorry to be “THIS GUY”, but i’mma do it.

    First, no, they would not be linked by blood, they would be linked by SEX or LOVE. I understand that this silliness is part of the joke. However…

    THE MYTH THAT FAMILY IS VALIDATED OR MADE BY BLOOD CONNECTION IS LIKE LITERALLY NAZI LEVEL, so maybe this joke is, like, NOT for this particular audience? I know both the author and the majority of the audience won’t necessarily equate this joke with the horrors of nazi ideology, but…. but “blood equals family” is SUUUPER fucked up, even as a joke, to those of us who came out queer from even vaguely white-cultural-supremacist original “families”.

    Can we please, as a culture, DESTROY the idea that blood relation makes a family, EVER? For every disowned, adopted, step-, or -by-law, person, for every person from an abusive household with fucked up parents… no one needs to hear that blood connection MATTERS. It DOES NOT.

    Not even as a joke.

    1. madock345

      I think it’s a lot more inclusive and accurate to say that “blood connection doesn’t have to matter.” We are free to choose how important it is to each of us, but it remains important to a lot of people, including in the LGBT community and especially in many other cultures across the world. I say this as someone who moved continents away from his own family. Saying that it shouldn’t ever matter will register as an attack to a lot of people and discounts a lot of perfectly healthy worldviews.

  40. whitt

    also this joke works even better with the term “love” instead of “blood”… cuz it’s these two and hilarity.

    1. Jen Aside

      “BONDED FOREVER” works better without having to spell out how

  41. Puckish Rogue

    Seems to me that Joe is a step ahead of most of the cast when it comes to maturity but chooses not to, like he has all the tools whereas most of the others, with a few notable exceptions, are gaining the tools

    Hes a good person is Joe

  42. localvigiliante

    Darn, it Danny I want the ability to make platonic shoujo manga eyes (…I may have tried this when I was a younger nerd. It really didn’t work).

  43. AY

    star!danny is my new favorite danny

    1. madock345

      It really is the best face ever

  44. JeffreyATW

    WE ARE BROTHERS!

  45. Thalass

    Augh panels 4 and 5 are my life right now and it suuuucks. 🙁

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