It can be exhausting to share space with someone who constantly needs quiet time, especially if you need a place to unpack or just chill. Dorothy would legit be a hard person to share space with.
It makes you feel bad when you see somebody trying so much harder than you are. It can make you feel really guilty, like you aren’t doing enough with your time in school. But relaxing and socializing and overdramatic relationships are important parts of college too, which Dorothy hasn’t really learned yet.
For me, seeing something be made a huge deal or something that I think would be stressful can exhaust me to look at even if the people involved are not stressed out by it.
Like, I used to get stressed out by Iron Chef because the buildup for the competition always made it sound like losing this one match was going to destroy somebody’s career and reputation.
Something about the outsized reaction is stress/anxiety inducing in a way that a reasonable response to a bigger problem isn’t. Dorothy wanting to get a head start wouldn’t bother me personally, but if she was constantly talking as if she’s two steps behind when she’s five steps ahead it would get to me.
I can’t tell if that’s a ‘oh boy I’m glad I got out of there when I could’ or a ‘I forgot how much I miss your hyper productivity, I love you and I want a million Dorothy frecklebabies’.
I feel like both are unlikely, personally. She seems more worried about Dorothy’s well-being than relieved at not having to deal with her anymore. Imo, that face she makes at the end is the face of someone who is trying *really* hard not to say something that might not be 100% tactful.
I think Dorothy has already crashed once. It was a while ago so I’m not sure I’m remembering it 100% correctly but her grades slipped, which lead to her breaking things off with Walky and going into study overdrive before realizing she maybe spread herself too thin and decided to slightly cut back on her self imposed work load. I think. Someone can correct me if I’ve gotten some or all of that wrong.
Anyway Dorothy is someone who just can’t not be doing something. I’ve known a few people like that in life. I think everyone’s at least met one workaholic.
It certainly happened but I wouldn’t call it a crash. More of a vague downwards saunter. She’s still Normal Mommish Dorothy most of the time, and I think there’s some extremely transparent performative cheerfulness when dealing with Becky’s deliberate provocations.
thejeff
It was pretty close to a crash, at the time. She seems to have mostly recovered now.
Some of the spreading herself less thin was also finishing all the extra credit assignments she’d taken on for herself (though not trying to tutor Walky and balance a relationship with him almost certainly did free up some time.) Resolved the immediate issues of grades and an unbalanced schedule, and I think it did let her reassess what extracurriculars she really did value, but I don’t think she’s actually hit the wall yet on the grades/burnout situation. (Doubting Walky has on his own studying problems, for that matter.)
Especially with a strip like this and last panel’s Concerned Sierra face, I wouldn’t be shocked if that arc’s still waiting to explode. Very possibly when it runs up against Becky’s jealous antagonism, since she’s hit on actual sore spots now.
thejeff
I hope it does. Resolving that arc with Dorothy with “well she broke up with Walky and caught up, so she’s fine now” never sat well with me.
From either a more standard work-life balance point of view or a more specific “women who want to achieve have to forgo relationships” point of view.
Regalli
There was so much Concerning Shit going on there, totally unrelated to the breakup, that if her problem IS 100% resolved by the breakup I’ll be seriously disappointed. My bet is still slow burn arc because it would shift a LOT of Dorothy’s dynamics in the short term, and some of them would probably be permanent changes.
It always bugs me when people act like Dorothy isn’t as much a messup as all the other characters when her workaholism has led her to repeatedly neglect her physical health, mental health, romantic relationships, platonic relationships, and even her ability to help others. Dorothy broke up with Walky in large part because she couldn’t stop trying to help him even when she had left herself no time to do so. Joyce has repeatedly referred to Dorothy not having much time to spend with friends. Dorothy has to be reminded to eat, and schedules every waking moment of her day. Oh, and she thinks studying hard and going to a good college will let her become president, and her dedication to her “by-the-numbers” political career has been shown to be, well, naive and even counterproductive (you are often *much* better off trying to get involved in local activism, like Roz, especially in today’s day and age).
Dorothy’s running herself into the ground. Honestly, my biggest worry with this comic is that Willis is going to be too reluctant to explicitly run a “the woman needs to stop being so ambitious” storyline to adequately acknowledge how toxic Dorothy’s current lifestyle and career goals have become for her. Because she… does. Dorothy needs to slow down and even out her goals. This isn’t healthy. Neglecting your relationships isn’t healthy, and frankly, it’s not fair to your friends.
Not that I knew someone like Dorothy once and have since developed very strong opinions on the “I think neglecting and ignoring my friends and girlfriend to focus on my career is actually a brave feminist take” attitude. Haha. Ha.
Like, Dorothy’s flaws are easy to read as positive traits if read from a capitalist framework, and I’m worried the comic isn’t going to really let her crash the way she kind of needs to to reflect the dangers of burnout in reality. “I’ll just postpone sleep” is a real thing people say and do, and it kills people in real life.
Actually you have to take people as you find them and all the main characters are perfect as they are, warts and all. Except for Mike. He was even more perfect and obviously too good for DOA.
It always bugs me when people act like Dorothy isn’t as much a messup as all the other characters…
There’s a post on Tumblr that says something along the lines of, “The adults at your school ignored your obvious mental and social problems because they caused you to be a ‘good student’ (quiet, stayed out of trouble), pretended to care when your grades dropped, and then never brought it up again.”
It was very, “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it”.
I think Dorothy’s ambitions and goals are good. It’s just that she needs to slow down a bit to take a breath. Yeah, her goal of being president is unrealistic, but she know what she wants and she knows how to work to get results. It’s easy to judge someone who would seem to functional in a setting where everyone is a mess, so her virtues could be seen as negative things by those who don’t share those virtues.
Also, I must clarify her relationship with Walky was doomed and I don’t see a future with that ship. Walky is too immature and impulsive, and he, like Joyce, glorifies Dorothy too much.
Nono
I mean, with regards to being president, Anthropic Principle I guess.
I don’t think that Walky/Dorothy was exactly a doomed ship, but it needed to survive past the baby stages so the veneer of the perfect partner wears off. If you can survive past that, then that’s one major hurdle cleared.
thejeff
Except that in canon, those qualities of Walky have nothing to do with why they broke up. They broke up because she was too overworked to have time for him, despite loving him. In fact, some of Walky’s most mature and least impulsive moments were in dealing with that problem. He’d decided he was going to have to break up with her, so he’d stop being a strain on her studies. That’s not exactly immature or impulsive.
On the other hand, setting high goals and striving for them can be exactly what some people want out of life – they would genuinely be uncomfortable and less happy if they felt like they were “wasting” their time because they hadn’t scheduled it for something “more productive”. And some of them would actually crash completely if they didn’t structure themselves this way, because they just don’t handle unstructured time well, and slip more and more into missing deadlines that are actually important instead of simply self-imposed ones.
I mean, it seems exhausting and miserable to me, but some people thrive with that kind of lifestyle, and it doesn’t seem unnatural to me to see one in a college setting.
And while Dorothy isn’t exactly a social butterfly, she does have close friends and is able to manage her relationship with them once she realizes that she needs to budget time for them as well. That seems healthy enough to me.
There’s a difference between being a workaholic, and setting ambitious goals – Dorothy explicitly wants to transfer to a more prestigious university, and that requires putting in an unhealthy amount of effort. It really isn’t possible for her to have as much free time as her friends if she values that goal – and, well, it’s likely that many of these people wouldn’t be a part of her life if she does transfer, so it doesn’t make much sense to prioritize those relationships over the new ones she’ll make in the future. This isn’t her being a workaholic; it’s a realistic judgment of what she needs to do in order to accomplish a time-sensitive goal.
She’ll have plenty of time to relax once she transfers; the hard part is getting in, not the work once she’s there. If she’s still insisting on late nights and no downtime once she’s there, then she has a problem – but what we’ve seen so far is pretty much just the price of getting her foot in the door.
(Of course, there are bigger problems with her plan – namely, that the networking opportunities of a prestigious university are the only real value they have over a less expensive institution, and getting her basic credits here lock her out of many of those opportunities. But I assume that’s artistic license because her character wouldn’t be in this comic at all if she went to Princeton first.)
I think Dorothy’s on another slow burn arc, given how explicitly worrisome things were during the extra credit/breakup period. A lot of the really big character arcs – Joyce’s gradual loss of faith, Amber and AG and Sal, and Billie’s depression, all to name a few – have ended up percolating for much of the run of the strip before any kind of payoff, and we’ve seen all of them addressed in time. There’s several others that definitely went on the backburner as the Blaine arc reached its climax, but had some pretty clear plot hooks for later before the timeskip. (Case in point: Look if you see Raidah’s last line and DON’T think she’s going to be an antagonist in the near future, I don’t know what to tell you.) I think this moment with Dorothy is being set up to establish ‘no, this issue has not resolved offscreen, and it wasn’t resolved when she finished the extra credit assignments,’ especially alongside Becky’s comment about Yale actually hitting a sore spot.
All that said, while I agree with most of what you said, I will point out that Dorothy has engaged politically – she’s mentioned specifically that some of her volunteerwork’s included campaigning for Jake Manley, the guy who has Robin’s seat in the House now. We haven’t seen her do subject-specific activism, but then we haven’t seen Roz do any for quite some time, either. (She might have done some canvassing for Manley, but if so it was either non-explicit in the strip Dorothy brings up she did or AGES ago.) She doesn’t have the natural charismatic knack Roz or Becky have, no, and she’s not focusing on building connections which would be seriously helpful, but she’s not disengaged and Becky immediately went to her as the qualified person when the Robin job came up. I’ll take skill over charisma any day. She just needs to learn to balance it like she needs to balance grades vs free time, and that very few people follow a perfect, linear path in their careers. (Especially not in politics.)
thejeff
I’d take skill over charisma any day for most things, but not if the goal is winning political office.
Regalli
I mean, winning people over’s clearly a necessary skill in itself, but since we currently have All Fascist Cult of Personality Charisma No Competence* in the White House, I may be a bit… skewed.
* Like, even if I didn’t find his policies abhorrent, he sucks at covering up his many many crimes as well.
Dorothy is generally seen as less of a mess not because she doesn’t have issues, but because her issues aren’t moral problems or as obviously self-destructive. She won’t call someone an asshole just because they hurt her feelings, she won’t drink herself into a coma, she won’t encourage bad choices. Her actual screw-ups like that are very rare.
Her messes are more self-contained and societal expected messes. If you are a student, you are expected to sleep poorly, eat poorly, have bad hygiene. Working on things overnight is expected. Studying until morning is expected. Working yourself to the bone to get to that prestigious school you want is expected. College students are expected and even encouraged to have bad self-care routines to get their work done.
Dorothy is the type of person that makes an excellent ideal well-behaved student that doesn’t trouble their teachers or staff too much… and slips right through the cracks by not being temperamental, overtly self-destructive or problematic in a way that it causes problems for *staff*.
I think it is fine for Dorothy to have grand ambitions and a lofty goal as she does. But she needs to accept that she doesn’t have to try to speedrun it and can go for it at a steady pace while looking after herself along the way.
I don’t know if that’s a
“Agatha is WAY TOO LAID BACK. I need help getting motivation.”
or a
“Thank goodness, I’m not rooming with this motivation monster anymore.”
Yeah Sierra doesn’t strike me as the type to obsess over homework and grades, so I imagine sharing a room with Dorothy was difficult in some ways. Now knowing Becky, she’ll be motivated by Dorothy and want to keep up because of her rivalry.
Now the question is, who will drive whom up the wall first? Dorothy or Becky?
130 thoughts on “Laid back”
Ana Chronistic
woo
studying
yay
=|
Marsh Maryrose
Studying, studying (yeah!)
Studying, studying (woo!)
fridge_logic
So I just took an online test and found out I’m a Ravenclaw.
The test was me watching the video.
Doctor_Who
Just for my own personal amusement, I’m gonna make it headcanon that Agatha is obsessed with shoes and has a whole closet full of them.
Stephen Bierce
Oh no, you can’t do that…
Scoops!
betch
nobodybasically
She wears a pair on her hands to make up for the ones Sierra’s not wearing.
JetstreamGW
What’s the problem with the roommate being a workaholic? That doesn’t make you a workaholic 😛
It’s not contagious, Sierra!
Nono
Join usssss… in alphabetising your notes and textbooks… join ussss…
Doctor_Who
“Granger’s Disease” affects thousands of students a year. Ask your doctor if Nogivvafuk is right for you.
Alexander Hammil
It can be exhausting to share space with someone who constantly needs quiet time, especially if you need a place to unpack or just chill. Dorothy would legit be a hard person to share space with.
clif
Becky has no problem. I mean, she was all set with the dividing tape.
Wonderboy
It makes you feel bad when you see somebody trying so much harder than you are. It can make you feel really guilty, like you aren’t doing enough with your time in school. But relaxing and socializing and overdramatic relationships are important parts of college too, which Dorothy hasn’t really learned yet.
Nono
Dorothy dumped someone on her first day and then shacked up with McNuggets boy in less than two weeks.
They then broke up not even two months in.
abysswatcher1993
I was in college for 7 years and I didn’t have overdramatic relationships. I just had friendships and some annoying acquaintances.
abysswatcher1993
This response was for Wonderboy
Reaver
Pretty sure the literal kidnapping got that out of her system
Rectilinear Propagation
For me, seeing something be made a huge deal or something that I think would be stressful can exhaust me to look at even if the people involved are not stressed out by it.
Like, I used to get stressed out by Iron Chef because the buildup for the competition always made it sound like losing this one match was going to destroy somebody’s career and reputation.
Something about the outsized reaction is stress/anxiety inducing in a way that a reasonable response to a bigger problem isn’t. Dorothy wanting to get a head start wouldn’t bother me personally, but if she was constantly talking as if she’s two steps behind when she’s five steps ahead it would get to me.
Nono
I can’t tell if that’s a ‘oh boy I’m glad I got out of there when I could’ or a ‘I forgot how much I miss your hyper productivity, I love you and I want a million Dorothy frecklebabies’.
Mra
By the alt-text I am guessing the former.
Carla's #2 Fan
Alt text suggests former lol, freedom!
Marsh Maryrose
People who are organizers generally don’t just want to organize themselves, they also want to organize anyone around them.
Marsh Maryrose
That was supposed to go above but I guess it applies here too sorta
Needfuldoer
Am messy at home but the organization lead at work, can confirm.
The plumber’s house has leaky pipes, the mechanic’s car has squeaky brakes.
Opus the Poet
And the cobbler’s children have no shoes.
Needfuldoer
Overrated!
Jhon
Sierra knows.
Lionheart261
I feel like both are unlikely, personally. She seems more worried about Dorothy’s well-being than relieved at not having to deal with her anymore. Imo, that face she makes at the end is the face of someone who is trying *really* hard not to say something that might not be 100% tactful.
Sirksome
I’m not sure exactly what Sierra’s feeling here but it’s always good to see her! Sierra is underrated!
woobie
Yes! sadly.
Needfuldoer
She’s feeling the floor, anyway.
BBCC
Agatha is definitely more like Sierra’s style.
Spencer
That is the face of someone who is now living a drama free college life.
Dorothy’s gonna crash one day, and it’ll make for a good story.
Sirksome
I think Dorothy has already crashed once. It was a while ago so I’m not sure I’m remembering it 100% correctly but her grades slipped, which lead to her breaking things off with Walky and going into study overdrive before realizing she maybe spread herself too thin and decided to slightly cut back on her self imposed work load. I think. Someone can correct me if I’ve gotten some or all of that wrong.
Anyway Dorothy is someone who just can’t not be doing something. I’ve known a few people like that in life. I think everyone’s at least met one workaholic.
Spencer
It certainly happened but I wouldn’t call it a crash. More of a vague downwards saunter. She’s still Normal Mommish Dorothy most of the time, and I think there’s some extremely transparent performative cheerfulness when dealing with Becky’s deliberate provocations.
thejeff
It was pretty close to a crash, at the time. She seems to have mostly recovered now.
Regalli
Some of the spreading herself less thin was also finishing all the extra credit assignments she’d taken on for herself (though not trying to tutor Walky and balance a relationship with him almost certainly did free up some time.) Resolved the immediate issues of grades and an unbalanced schedule, and I think it did let her reassess what extracurriculars she really did value, but I don’t think she’s actually hit the wall yet on the grades/burnout situation. (Doubting Walky has on his own studying problems, for that matter.)
Especially with a strip like this and last panel’s Concerned Sierra face, I wouldn’t be shocked if that arc’s still waiting to explode. Very possibly when it runs up against Becky’s jealous antagonism, since she’s hit on actual sore spots now.
thejeff
I hope it does. Resolving that arc with Dorothy with “well she broke up with Walky and caught up, so she’s fine now” never sat well with me.
From either a more standard work-life balance point of view or a more specific “women who want to achieve have to forgo relationships” point of view.
Regalli
There was so much Concerning Shit going on there, totally unrelated to the breakup, that if her problem IS 100% resolved by the breakup I’ll be seriously disappointed. My bet is still slow burn arc because it would shift a LOT of Dorothy’s dynamics in the short term, and some of them would probably be permanent changes.
Yenklette
It always bugs me when people act like Dorothy isn’t as much a messup as all the other characters when her workaholism has led her to repeatedly neglect her physical health, mental health, romantic relationships, platonic relationships, and even her ability to help others. Dorothy broke up with Walky in large part because she couldn’t stop trying to help him even when she had left herself no time to do so. Joyce has repeatedly referred to Dorothy not having much time to spend with friends. Dorothy has to be reminded to eat, and schedules every waking moment of her day. Oh, and she thinks studying hard and going to a good college will let her become president, and her dedication to her “by-the-numbers” political career has been shown to be, well, naive and even counterproductive (you are often *much* better off trying to get involved in local activism, like Roz, especially in today’s day and age).
Dorothy’s running herself into the ground. Honestly, my biggest worry with this comic is that Willis is going to be too reluctant to explicitly run a “the woman needs to stop being so ambitious” storyline to adequately acknowledge how toxic Dorothy’s current lifestyle and career goals have become for her. Because she… does. Dorothy needs to slow down and even out her goals. This isn’t healthy. Neglecting your relationships isn’t healthy, and frankly, it’s not fair to your friends.
Not that I knew someone like Dorothy once and have since developed very strong opinions on the “I think neglecting and ignoring my friends and girlfriend to focus on my career is actually a brave feminist take” attitude. Haha. Ha.
Like, Dorothy’s flaws are easy to read as positive traits if read from a capitalist framework, and I’m worried the comic isn’t going to really let her crash the way she kind of needs to to reflect the dangers of burnout in reality. “I’ll just postpone sleep” is a real thing people say and do, and it kills people in real life.
clif
Insert Boomer rant here.
Actually you have to take people as you find them and all the main characters are perfect as they are, warts and all. Except for Mike. He was even more perfect and obviously too good for DOA.
Rectilinear Propagation
It always bugs me when people act like Dorothy isn’t as much a messup as all the other characters…
There’s a post on Tumblr that says something along the lines of, “The adults at your school ignored your obvious mental and social problems because they caused you to be a ‘good student’ (quiet, stayed out of trouble), pretended to care when your grades dropped, and then never brought it up again.”
It was very, “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it”.
abysswatcher1993
I think Dorothy’s ambitions and goals are good. It’s just that she needs to slow down a bit to take a breath. Yeah, her goal of being president is unrealistic, but she know what she wants and she knows how to work to get results. It’s easy to judge someone who would seem to functional in a setting where everyone is a mess, so her virtues could be seen as negative things by those who don’t share those virtues.
Also, I must clarify her relationship with Walky was doomed and I don’t see a future with that ship. Walky is too immature and impulsive, and he, like Joyce, glorifies Dorothy too much.
Nono
I mean, with regards to being president, Anthropic Principle I guess.
I don’t think that Walky/Dorothy was exactly a doomed ship, but it needed to survive past the baby stages so the veneer of the perfect partner wears off. If you can survive past that, then that’s one major hurdle cleared.
thejeff
Except that in canon, those qualities of Walky have nothing to do with why they broke up. They broke up because she was too overworked to have time for him, despite loving him. In fact, some of Walky’s most mature and least impulsive moments were in dealing with that problem. He’d decided he was going to have to break up with her, so he’d stop being a strain on her studies. That’s not exactly immature or impulsive.
Jane
On the other hand, setting high goals and striving for them can be exactly what some people want out of life – they would genuinely be uncomfortable and less happy if they felt like they were “wasting” their time because they hadn’t scheduled it for something “more productive”. And some of them would actually crash completely if they didn’t structure themselves this way, because they just don’t handle unstructured time well, and slip more and more into missing deadlines that are actually important instead of simply self-imposed ones.
I mean, it seems exhausting and miserable to me, but some people thrive with that kind of lifestyle, and it doesn’t seem unnatural to me to see one in a college setting.
And while Dorothy isn’t exactly a social butterfly, she does have close friends and is able to manage her relationship with them once she realizes that she needs to budget time for them as well. That seems healthy enough to me.
There’s a difference between being a workaholic, and setting ambitious goals – Dorothy explicitly wants to transfer to a more prestigious university, and that requires putting in an unhealthy amount of effort. It really isn’t possible for her to have as much free time as her friends if she values that goal – and, well, it’s likely that many of these people wouldn’t be a part of her life if she does transfer, so it doesn’t make much sense to prioritize those relationships over the new ones she’ll make in the future. This isn’t her being a workaholic; it’s a realistic judgment of what she needs to do in order to accomplish a time-sensitive goal.
She’ll have plenty of time to relax once she transfers; the hard part is getting in, not the work once she’s there. If she’s still insisting on late nights and no downtime once she’s there, then she has a problem – but what we’ve seen so far is pretty much just the price of getting her foot in the door.
(Of course, there are bigger problems with her plan – namely, that the networking opportunities of a prestigious university are the only real value they have over a less expensive institution, and getting her basic credits here lock her out of many of those opportunities. But I assume that’s artistic license because her character wouldn’t be in this comic at all if she went to Princeton first.)
Regalli
I think Dorothy’s on another slow burn arc, given how explicitly worrisome things were during the extra credit/breakup period. A lot of the really big character arcs – Joyce’s gradual loss of faith, Amber and AG and Sal, and Billie’s depression, all to name a few – have ended up percolating for much of the run of the strip before any kind of payoff, and we’ve seen all of them addressed in time. There’s several others that definitely went on the backburner as the Blaine arc reached its climax, but had some pretty clear plot hooks for later before the timeskip. (Case in point: Look if you see Raidah’s last line and DON’T think she’s going to be an antagonist in the near future, I don’t know what to tell you.) I think this moment with Dorothy is being set up to establish ‘no, this issue has not resolved offscreen, and it wasn’t resolved when she finished the extra credit assignments,’ especially alongside Becky’s comment about Yale actually hitting a sore spot.
All that said, while I agree with most of what you said, I will point out that Dorothy has engaged politically – she’s mentioned specifically that some of her volunteerwork’s included campaigning for Jake Manley, the guy who has Robin’s seat in the House now. We haven’t seen her do subject-specific activism, but then we haven’t seen Roz do any for quite some time, either. (She might have done some canvassing for Manley, but if so it was either non-explicit in the strip Dorothy brings up she did or AGES ago.) She doesn’t have the natural charismatic knack Roz or Becky have, no, and she’s not focusing on building connections which would be seriously helpful, but she’s not disengaged and Becky immediately went to her as the qualified person when the Robin job came up. I’ll take skill over charisma any day. She just needs to learn to balance it like she needs to balance grades vs free time, and that very few people follow a perfect, linear path in their careers. (Especially not in politics.)
thejeff
I’d take skill over charisma any day for most things, but not if the goal is winning political office.
Regalli
I mean, winning people over’s clearly a necessary skill in itself, but since we currently have All Fascist Cult of Personality Charisma No Competence* in the White House, I may be a bit… skewed.
* Like, even if I didn’t find his policies abhorrent, he sucks at covering up his many many crimes as well.
Sam
Dorothy is generally seen as less of a mess not because she doesn’t have issues, but because her issues aren’t moral problems or as obviously self-destructive. She won’t call someone an asshole just because they hurt her feelings, she won’t drink herself into a coma, she won’t encourage bad choices. Her actual screw-ups like that are very rare.
Her messes are more self-contained and societal expected messes. If you are a student, you are expected to sleep poorly, eat poorly, have bad hygiene. Working on things overnight is expected. Studying until morning is expected. Working yourself to the bone to get to that prestigious school you want is expected. College students are expected and even encouraged to have bad self-care routines to get their work done.
Dorothy is the type of person that makes an excellent ideal well-behaved student that doesn’t trouble their teachers or staff too much… and slips right through the cracks by not being temperamental, overtly self-destructive or problematic in a way that it causes problems for *staff*.
I think it is fine for Dorothy to have grand ambitions and a lofty goal as she does. But she needs to accept that she doesn’t have to try to speedrun it and can go for it at a steady pace while looking after herself along the way.
Mr. Random
I don’t know if that’s a
“Agatha is WAY TOO LAID BACK. I need help getting motivation.”
or a
“Thank goodness, I’m not rooming with this motivation monster anymore.”
Axel
On reading I thought it was the first but the alt text makes me think it is the second
Kyrik Michalowski
I’m fairly certain that it the latter, Sierra does not seem enthused by the prospect of looking at homework before the semester officially begins.
Axel
I think it makes more sense this way (plus there’s the alt text), but that the last panel looks more like she’s cringing about Agatha to me
thejeff
Or she’s worried about Dorothy?
Sunny
Maybe it’s a bit of both?
Yotomoe
Remember back when I thought Sierra was best girl. Those were the days.
Now I’ve got a new favorite. Can you guess who it is!?
Sirksome
Malaya right? I still believe in Sierra though!
clif
Other Sierra?
Ana Chronistic
Still Sierra?
Jhon
Twilight Sparkle!
Kravis
Agatha is dead, isn’t she?
Kyrik Michalowski
Yeah Sierra doesn’t strike me as the type to obsess over homework and grades, so I imagine sharing a room with Dorothy was difficult in some ways. Now knowing Becky, she’ll be motivated by Dorothy and want to keep up because of her rivalry.
Now the question is, who will drive whom up the wall first? Dorothy or Becky?
showler
They’ll meet at the ceiling.
leaf
That’s not even a nerd thing, some classes expect you to have reading done before they start
abysswatcher1993
Legally Blonde warned about that. I don’t know what these kids were expecting when entering college.
Keulen
Those classes suck.
Sporky
Is this the first time we’ve ever seen Sierra not smiling?
OK, after checking the archives it’s not… still, it doesn’t happen a lot.
abysswatcher1993
Either Dorothy is as workaholic as Sierra claims she is, or Sierra is too lazy that she is scared of seeing other people working.
Ana Chronistic
You forgot? https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vacuum/rat/
Sporky