Danny: *Bolts upright from whatever couch he chose to sleep on that WASN’T nearby Ethan and thus causing a massive Awkwardness Aura for everyone else in the lounge* My time has come.
Omg… that would be perfect. She’s like a Joyce clone who hasn’t yet manipulated him into an awkward social situation.
Spencer
Damn, I’m stuck.
On one hand I super want Dana to come back during the next chapter and we find out that both Sarah and Raidah totally fucked her life up and she barely recovered, neither of them cared about her more than they cared being right, and then she power walks away to go date the guy they both moon over.
On the other hand, I really want to see Liz hit on Jacob.
Spencer
… wait holy shit what if Liz and Jacob hit it off and they start an LDR
woobie
Nothing is as boring as a long distance relationship.
I wonder if this will lead to some conflict between them:
D: “So you are upset that Joyce has finally seen reason?”
B: “Whose side are you on?!“
Daibhid C
That doesn’t sound like a very Dina thing to say, since “finally” kind of implies the sort of evangelical atheism that Joyce herself has started spouting, and which Dina clearly doesn’t have. Dina doesn’t care what other people believe as long as a) they don’t make her try to believe it and b) they aren’t wrong about dinosaurs.
“But why are you upset that Joyce no longer shares your beliefs, when you are friends with many people who never did?” is a possibility, though.
Spencer
Dina doesn’t care what other people believe
Not necessarily. She does get real blunt at how stupid she thinks Joyce’s upbringing was and what she was taught, just hearing Joyce talk about it annoys her, and then making snow angels with Sarah led her to be completely livid when Sarah described her good mood as magical, because Dina thought she was tricked into taking part of ceremonial wizardry.
(There’s others but comments with more than a couple links in them get caught in the spam filter.)
Spencer
Honestlyyyy I think Dina will take Joyce’s side, because Joyce is acting like Dina did to Joyce: renounce magical thinking and embrace empirical evidence.
However, “taking Joyce’s side” in this instance just means “oh cool you’re an atheist, good for her, let me tell you about dinosaurs.” Dina’s love for Becky is never going to be in doubt to anyone but maybe Becky herself, who is currently dealing with the completely rational thought process of “I can’t fuck Dina or else I’ll go to Hell, and also I’m really sad that Dina doesn’t verbally express how much she wants to fuck me all the time,” ie: the root of Becky’s current distress is in magical thinking, it’s just magical thinking she still thinks is important. Becky is as much of a fundie as Joyce, they just changed in different ways, and I think Joyce being “taken away” by atheism will lead her to start resenting her atheist companions, because Joyce provided that rock of a status quo she relied on to survive since joining the series.
I don’t think it’s definitely gonna happen so much as I think it’d be really interesting, but I think Joyce’s outgrowing her anger and her closest friends growing out of being little douchebags sticking her in a box will involve Joyce forming a support network of people outside of them, and then Becky/Dorothy/Sarah can also go through their own arcs relating to how they treat and have treated Joyce. Becky’s real mad and Dorothy and Sarah have already failed, they’re in too deep on who Joyce should be to really help her the way she needs without trying to get her to validate their own feelings. Joe’s in her corner so far and has provided the emotional support in telling Joyce that she still matters even without Heaven, Dina hits the same note of “former frenemy” with all the knowledge Joyce would want, at a time where Joyce’s atheism isn’t a belief in the non-existence of God so much as the existence of nothing and no foundation to grab onto, and for a third party member I’d go with Sal, another cast member who chafes a lot at what her peers expect of her, and then those peers get mad when she tries to stop.
Spencer
I can’t fuck Dina or else I’ll go to Hell
Although if I thought about this, I might have been pursuing this the wrong way the whole time.
Becky wants sex, but tells herself she can’t until she and Dina get married in what is the only part of her upbringing that Becky continues to rely on magical thinking for, other than the existence of God himself. Becky’s upset that Dina doesn’t prompt the same reaction as Becky has for Dina, she’s worried it means that her eventually marriage to Dina is wrong and won’t work out*, and I didn’t think of it till now, but I wonder if sexual purity is something Becky still holds onto because it allows her some normalcy, something exacerbated now that Joyce has changed.
The last four months of her life have been a chaotic nightmare, and apart from just sexual repression issues that come with being a fundie, I wonder if she’s fearful of sex because losing her virginity is kinda like losing the last part of herself that her upbringing still has hold over her. Once it happens, Old Becky is gone forever. That’d certainly explain the implications that members of the commentariat in the know see in her, where she’s hoping Dina gets so wildly horny that she can’t stop herself from sexing Becky up, and Becky gets to have sex and still tell herself she stayed true to God.
We don’t talk about it enough because she is a funny charming goofball with a cool haircut who modifies her fact-based upbringing when presented with new information, but Jesus Christ this kid is messed up.
*This is a bit of a side question for those in the know about fundies: is it a thing to rush into marriage so you can start having God-sanctioned sex? I wonder if that plays into it for Becky too.
Regalli
On the asterisk: Yes, definitely a thing.
The other issue is that Becky wants her cool atheist girlfriend to be consumed with lust for her so that maybe said cool atheist girlfriend (who therefore doesn’t believe that sex is only sanctioned in the bonds of marriage) will lose control and they will both give into their lustful urges together, but because Dina started it it’s okay and they couldn’t HELP being so all-consumingly horny. The issue there, of course, is that Dina is aspec (so she won’t be consumed by her lustful urges) and would find the idea of having sex with Becky when she says no absolutely abhorrent. There will be no lustful atheist ravaging, and Becky is maybe kinda disappointed by that fact, and also feels shame because DINA can find Becky pretty and want to have sex but not have frequent sexual attraction, so clearly this is a failing in Becky’s faith. (It’s not, and Becky REALLY needs to get herself to an online educational resource about asexuality. And also non-shame-based resources about sexuality in general, as do Joyce, Liz, and for that matter Joe. Scarleteen is here for you, honey.)
I do so admire that ninja skill. Is that what’s called an SEP field?
StClair
Nah, SEP is being invisible without actually being invisible. What Brad is talking about is more like pass without trace (see various videos in which cats walk through hallways full of dominos etc without tipping any over).
Why are you makingit sound like he did somethingwrong? He was approached by a girl who said she wanted to have sex and the second she indicated she wanted to stop he did. He didn’t try to talk her out of it, he just respected her wishes every step of the way.
He did not do anything morally wrong, nor is he to blame for any issues liz might have.
However, from a Joe perspective, the idea oh handling his crush on joyce by sleeping with proxy-joyce was a bit… Questionable, from a “how do i deal with feelings” perspective.
MisterJinKC
It’s almost like he’s also a teenager who’s learning who he is, just like everyone else in the strip that commenter bend over backwards to defend. But Joe gets shit on constantly because he’s open about his love of sex, despite his constantly displaying the behaviors people say men need to have. Getting consent. Respecting girls who say no without judgement or attempting to verbally bully/guilt them into it. Supporting all of his friends and being an all around good person. He’s arguably a better person than anyone else in the strip.
Ragingagnostic
Joe gets dumped on because he consistently saw women as sex objects, rated them on their looks/abilities in bed and made jokes or sexual innuendoes about them. He attempted to excuse his behavior not by seeing “Hey, I love sex” but by claiming that men were wired to think about sex every seven seconds, thus making it a fault of his gender rather than a unique flaw to himself. Remember when his female rating book got public attention and every woman he saw was glaring at him? Yeah, it’s hard to approve him for that. Perhaps it shows his love for sex but also displays a callous disregard for other people’s feelings.
That being said, he has shown growth and displays many of the behaviors you state here. If I had to have a choice between having him in the room with me and beady-eyed, sarcastic Spike, I’d probably choose Joe.
Joe acted as best as he should have in that situation, but the shame comes from his intentions- Liz was not meant to be “just a hookup”, she was a proxy for who Joe really wants sex with, and he explicitly admitted that. The shame is either in realizing how awful treating someone as a proxy for sex and/or emotional closure (unlikely) or because Joyce called him “her biggest mistake” by proxy (she didn’t, but Lis was meant to be the Joyce stand-in, so her actions, to Joe, reflect what Joyce would do)
Odditude
Where is your avatar from?
I absolutely love it 🙂
The Wellerman
I found this after some searching. I think it’s just about what you’re looking for ?
Not morally wrong, but I’d say not “best as he should have” either. Liz was giving off all sorts of signs that she wasn’t nearly as ready as she was pretending to be. Picking up on those and not going ahead with the hookup, even though she asked, would have been better, and would have dropped the chance for emotional trauma.
The only thing Joe did wrong was projecting his doubts onto Liz so he could justify ignoring all the red flags his conscience was waving.
Spencer
I mean, to avoid relitigating anything else I’ve yammered on about; isn’t it a good thing to learn during sexual experimentation that, actually, you totally can withdraw consent whenever you feel like it and your partner needs to respect this choice?
Needfuldoer
Yes, that is a good thing which happened.
I’m saying Joe’s kicking himself for letting the situation progress to that point, rationalizing away the voice in the back of his head telling him it’s not a good idea. What if she didn’t stop there, but felt the same regret the next morning?
thejeff
Yeah, that’s a good thing to learn, but it’s not actually better to learn it by pushing yourself into doing something you weren’t ready for and panicking than to not push yourself there in the first place.
It’s definitely good that Joe stopped (obviously) and that he stopped gracefully, which is even less common, but it’s hard to argue that it was a good experience overall. He’s messed up by it now and she was definitely distraught when it happened, though we haven’t seen her since. Those aren’t signs of a good thing.
Needfuldoer
To be clear, “she said stop, he stopped no question” was the only good thing that happened there. That situation as a whole was dumpster fire.
MisterJinKC
To be clear, that dumpster fire was because of Liz, not Joe. People take a lot of shit about him that he doesn’t deserve.
Needfuldoer
I’d split the blame 75% Liz, 25% Joe.
She should’ve realized she really wasn’t ready in the first place.
He shouldn’t have ignored his conscience recognizing it.
I assume Joe is concerned about how close he got to hurting a Joyce proxy.
And is starting to realize Danny might have had a point when he was refusing Billie for her own sake even if he isn’t thinking about that one instance.
Nah, Joe refusing Liz “for her own sake” would be dumb, especially when Danny did that, Joe called it out, and then Danny called back to it directly.
It’s weird to take ownership of someone else’s agency like that (though I’m guessing most of y’all mean that as “Joe decides not to have sex because he thinks these are red flags”, which is something involving his own agency) especially when the much more sensible choice (and thus, the choice that should never ever ever ever ever be made in a character drama) is Joe refusing Liz for his own sake.
But, of course, Joe’s a manly man. Guys can’t say no, that’s gay, does his dick not work or something? He refuses to process his own obvious discomfort until he turns it around; he is uncomfortable, but actually it’s because all these pesky Joyce feelings are getting in the way and he just needs to blow his load hard enough to get them out.
Then, oops, turns out Indomitable Sex Monster Joe is can’t even have that purely physical transaction anymore, because he’s capable of emotionally hurting a woman (and a woman who’s Not-Joyce at that) even then.
“It’s weird to take ownership of someone else’s agency like that”
agency doesn’t exist in a vacuum. it’s a legalistic fiction. it’s useful, but it’s not real. people’s actions are highly determined by context, upbringing, and so on. the reality of how we make choices is shades of gray, not an on/off switch.
i’m just putting this out there, because i disagree with the way you frame this, and i think this is why.
wait ok, “legalistic” sounds dismissive. it’s also an ethical concept. i repeat, agency is absolutely a useful tool. but it’s also not the only lens that can help make sense of a situation.
Spencer
I agree for the most part, I think, in that “can this legal adult have sex?” seems like a pretty clear question that gets shaped around the edges by surrounding context, I just find the specific context of Liz trying to hook up with Joe pretty simple.
Liz wants to bang Joe because she’s frustrated by how her upbringing has impacted her in life. She wants the things her friends have, she is old enough to have them, but she was not only raised in a way that wouldn’t let her explore them healthily, she’s now in a state where the person she’s pretending to be to cater to her stepmom is leading to her peers mocking her.
That’s the motivation, and I think it’s a pretty normal one for a college freshman. She affirms that she wants sex, and then boombadadoom, turns out it’s way harder and way scarier than she thought it’d be where she’d get laid and strut back to school knowing she got one over all these clowns, and enforced by norms of sexual purity or not, Liz isn’t comfortable doing this with a stranger, she wants it to be with someone she loves, and then says she would have ruined herself forever (which definitely is enforced by norms of sexual purity).
But to a partner she’s propositioning that’s not on the surface, she just enthusiastically wants to punch her V card and we’re privy to her motivations because we can infer stuff and form readings of her character. It’s weird to decide for her why she can’t have sex, which is an entirely separate conversation to Joe deciding why she cannot have sex with him, but as I’ve learned this past month and a half it’s real easy to use the same words with like six different meanings to describe the same scenario and for all I know the topic of “why it’s wrong for Liz to have sex” is less “her inherent agency as a capable adult” and more “raising red flags”, though from there I think there’s a discussion in why those flags are even flags at all.
“we’re privy to her motivations because we can infer stuff and form readings of her character.”
We’ve basically seen all the same scenes involving Liz as Joe has, except for her arrival. There’s not much we can infer that Joe can’t. He’s seen her be maniacally performative in how over her faith she is. He’s heard her voice catch before she claimed she can do what she wants. He knows the “edibles” were vitamin tabs, but that she apparently needs to believe she’s not sober.
I’m not going to link to a bunch of strips because you know what i mean, you’re just not reading them the way i do.
Anyway, i just think this specific question, of “Joe had no say over her agency and it’s a bad idea to question someone’s decision for their own good” is not as plain as you paint it, that’s all =)
Spencer
Anyway, i just think this specific question, of “Joe had no say over her agency and it’s a bad idea to question someone’s decision for their own good” is not as plain as you paint it, that’s all =)
These are two separate questions.
Questioning the sexual agency of a coherent, legal adult is weird, and very pointedly, both times Danny and Joe have engaged with it, where they had to moralize their way out of having sex (in particular this speaks to me as an expression of toxic masculinity for the both of them, considering Danny had to assert he “wasn’t dead” to Joe), it was actually a front for sensible feelings like “I don’t actually want this.” Liz is actually old enough to decide she wants to have sex, she did want to have sex when she went to Joe, it just turned out she wasn’t nearly as ready as she thought she was, but that choice still has to be hers.
The leadup strip where Liz talks about how she is a Secular Adult who does Secular Adult Things like Sex With Hot Boys and Weed Drugs isn’t a sign that she’s “not ready”, because she is actually ready by the standards of being a coherent, legal adult verbally affirming her desire to have sex. That’s within a vacuum shaped by outside contexts, but that vacuum is the where the question of “whether or not I can decide to have sex” exists.
And then before it gets going she realizes it’s not what she wants, so she stops. Whether or not Liz can choose to have sex and whether or not Liz is emotionally prepared for sex are separate topics, since she only found out she wasn’t when she went for it. More pointedly, “whether or not Liz is emotionally prepared for sex” is something her partner can’t decide for her, but can certainly decide why they themself don’t want to engage with it. Hypothetically, if Joe and Liz banged and had a great time, does that retroactively mean Joe seeing her say Weed Drugs wasn’t the red flag it’s being treated as?
thejeff
I don’t think anyone suggesting that Joe should have paid attention to those red flags has phrased it in terms of “agency”. That’s always been the framing of those saying he should pay no attention to any signs she’s giving other than the actual consent (and similar legal issues like “of age” and not drunk). I don’t think milu is questioning her agency at all, but referring only to your use of the term.
Personally, I don’t think Joe would be denying her agency even if he read into her behavior signs that she wasn’t as ready as she claimed and said no on those grounds. Whether he was right or wrong, that’s his agency, not hers. Joe’s big motivation is not hurting women. He can choose to not sleep with them if he thinks that will be bad for them. That’s up to him.
As for the hypothetical, red flags aren’t guarantees. They’re warning signs. If it had all turned out alright, the cautions would still be there. As a parallel, especially early on, Joe gave off a lot red flags as a guy women shouldn’t trust. It turns out those signs were performative. He was trustable, even then, but he was imitating the signs that a lot of dangerous guys give off.
Yes! thank you @thejeff, it’s not so much that i have a quibble with you or Joe ascribing full agency to Liz— really, it’s that you’re insisting this discussion is about agency at all. A small part of it is— like when some people pondered, “are you really making a conscious choice if you think you’re high but you’re actually not”.
But mostly, i don’t think those of us saying “Joe could have suspected that Liz didn’t really want this”— were concerned about Liz’s literal agency at all.
Spencer: “that vacuum is the where the question of “whether or not I can decide to have sex” exists.”
it’s interesting, because this is not the question i’m interested in. you also headed your response to my earlier comment with that same question, and i thought it was just bad phrasing and i didn’t want to get caught in semantics, but actually, i think semantics is what we’re struggling with here.
Again and again we have this conversation (well, mostly you and jeff have this conversation lol) where we clearly can’t get through to each other on this, because i say potayto and you absolutely totally hear me say potahto every time.
it’s baffling to me how on earth you come away from comments like mine thinking that “whether or not I can decide to have sex” is a phrasing of the topic i would agree with. no. of course that’s not the discussion i’m having. and conversely, i’m sure when you read my (or jeff’s) comments, it must be so obvious to you that we just don’t understand what you’re saying. it’s kind of fascinating ^^
as an aside, because this keeps coming up, i don’t think the situation with Danny and Billie is a 1:1 comparison. Danny assumed Billie didn’t really wanna fuck him based on nothing at all (or likely, as you suggest, it was old-school white-knight-ish masculinity kicking in.) It’s just kind of unfortunate that these 2 situations got equated by Danny who knows nothing about Liz and the events of the day.
164 thoughts on “Organism”
Doctor_Who
Dina will remember that.
Bicycle Bill
And at the most inconvenient time, although painfully appropriate, time.
HeySo
“Dina will remember that.”
“And at the most inconvenient time, although painfully appropriate, time.”
Here, this was made just for you two (and any Telltale players): https://imgur.com/a/9bzRQCT
Harmony
I was not disappointed.
Ana Chronistic
Exactly what I expected, and also gut-wrenching
Ana Chronistic
Dina is learning!
Doctor_Who
Already she knows not to attack the same part of her enclosure twice. She’s testing for weaknesses.
The Wellerman
Either that or she already knows that SHAME is exactly the reason why anyone would want to be forced to talk about something.
But hey, your guess is as good as mine 😀
milu
cheetah speed. astonishing jumper.
Spencer
The siren Danny keeps under his hat has now activated.
It’s time to talk about feelings, Joe. There is no escape, Danny has been waiting years for this moment.
Doctor_Who
And suddenly in my brain Danny is JD and Joe is Dr. Cox and a hug is about to happen.
Regalli
Danny: *Bolts upright from whatever couch he chose to sleep on that WASN’T nearby Ethan and thus causing a massive Awkwardness Aura for everyone else in the lounge* My time has come.
Spencer
He’s out biking with Sal when the alarm hits, so he begins to pick up speed until the bike propels itself into the air.
The Wellerman
You mean like those love-powered bikes from Futurama? 😀
Regalli
climactic ET music swells
Needfuldoer
An emergency beacon pop out of the top of his hat, like Inspector Gadget’s. Cars pull to the side to let him pass.
misanthropope
go talk to jacob. remember jacob? he’s a good guy.
Spencer
He’s too busy dating Dana.
It’s Jacob’s running gag that he dates people Sarah has had dramatic backstories with.
Jamie
Soooo Liz next?
Subjektivity
Omg… that would be perfect. She’s like a Joyce clone who hasn’t yet manipulated him into an awkward social situation.
Spencer
Damn, I’m stuck.
On one hand I super want Dana to come back during the next chapter and we find out that both Sarah and Raidah totally fucked her life up and she barely recovered, neither of them cared about her more than they cared being right, and then she power walks away to go date the guy they both moon over.
On the other hand, I really want to see Liz hit on Jacob.
Spencer
… wait holy shit what if Liz and Jacob hit it off and they start an LDR
woobie
Nothing is as boring as a long distance relationship.
The Wellerman
What about watching someone else play an RPG?
Kravis
“I will remember that when dealing with someone I actually care about, like my girlfriend or Amber.”
Spencer
There is a non-zero chance that Becky tries the same line and Dina goes “ah, Joe demoed this for me today, he was very helpful.”
Thulcandran
Very possibly, maybe even likely, about why Becky doesn’t want to see Joyce or why she’s in a bad mood.
Needfuldoer
Oh yeah that’s right, Dina wasn’t there!
I wonder if this will lead to some conflict between them:
D: “So you are upset that Joyce has finally seen reason?”
B: “Whose side are you on?!“
Daibhid C
That doesn’t sound like a very Dina thing to say, since “finally” kind of implies the sort of evangelical atheism that Joyce herself has started spouting, and which Dina clearly doesn’t have. Dina doesn’t care what other people believe as long as a) they don’t make her try to believe it and b) they aren’t wrong about dinosaurs.
“But why are you upset that Joyce no longer shares your beliefs, when you are friends with many people who never did?” is a possibility, though.
Spencer
Dina doesn’t care what other people believe
Not necessarily. She does get real blunt at how stupid she thinks Joyce’s upbringing was and what she was taught, just hearing Joyce talk about it annoys her, and then making snow angels with Sarah led her to be completely livid when Sarah described her good mood as magical, because Dina thought she was tricked into taking part of ceremonial wizardry.
Needfuldoer
I think she cares. It’s even a book title!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/renounce/
Also, this one:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/proven/
(There’s others but comments with more than a couple links in them get caught in the spam filter.)
Spencer
Honestlyyyy I think Dina will take Joyce’s side, because Joyce is acting like Dina did to Joyce: renounce magical thinking and embrace empirical evidence.
However, “taking Joyce’s side” in this instance just means “oh cool you’re an atheist, good for her, let me tell you about dinosaurs.” Dina’s love for Becky is never going to be in doubt to anyone but maybe Becky herself, who is currently dealing with the completely rational thought process of “I can’t fuck Dina or else I’ll go to Hell, and also I’m really sad that Dina doesn’t verbally express how much she wants to fuck me all the time,” ie: the root of Becky’s current distress is in magical thinking, it’s just magical thinking she still thinks is important. Becky is as much of a fundie as Joyce, they just changed in different ways, and I think Joyce being “taken away” by atheism will lead her to start resenting her atheist companions, because Joyce provided that rock of a status quo she relied on to survive since joining the series.
I don’t think it’s definitely gonna happen so much as I think it’d be really interesting, but I think Joyce’s outgrowing her anger and her closest friends growing out of being little douchebags sticking her in a box will involve Joyce forming a support network of people outside of them, and then Becky/Dorothy/Sarah can also go through their own arcs relating to how they treat and have treated Joyce. Becky’s real mad and Dorothy and Sarah have already failed, they’re in too deep on who Joyce should be to really help her the way she needs without trying to get her to validate their own feelings. Joe’s in her corner so far and has provided the emotional support in telling Joyce that she still matters even without Heaven, Dina hits the same note of “former frenemy” with all the knowledge Joyce would want, at a time where Joyce’s atheism isn’t a belief in the non-existence of God so much as the existence of nothing and no foundation to grab onto, and for a third party member I’d go with Sal, another cast member who chafes a lot at what her peers expect of her, and then those peers get mad when she tries to stop.
Spencer
I can’t fuck Dina or else I’ll go to Hell
Although if I thought about this, I might have been pursuing this the wrong way the whole time.
Becky wants sex, but tells herself she can’t until she and Dina get married in what is the only part of her upbringing that Becky continues to rely on magical thinking for, other than the existence of God himself. Becky’s upset that Dina doesn’t prompt the same reaction as Becky has for Dina, she’s worried it means that her eventually marriage to Dina is wrong and won’t work out*, and I didn’t think of it till now, but I wonder if sexual purity is something Becky still holds onto because it allows her some normalcy, something exacerbated now that Joyce has changed.
The last four months of her life have been a chaotic nightmare, and apart from just sexual repression issues that come with being a fundie, I wonder if she’s fearful of sex because losing her virginity is kinda like losing the last part of herself that her upbringing still has hold over her. Once it happens, Old Becky is gone forever. That’d certainly explain the implications that members of the commentariat in the know see in her, where she’s hoping Dina gets so wildly horny that she can’t stop herself from sexing Becky up, and Becky gets to have sex and still tell herself she stayed true to God.
We don’t talk about it enough because she is a funny charming goofball with a cool haircut who modifies her fact-based upbringing when presented with new information, but Jesus Christ this kid is messed up.
*This is a bit of a side question for those in the know about fundies: is it a thing to rush into marriage so you can start having God-sanctioned sex? I wonder if that plays into it for Becky too.
Regalli
On the asterisk: Yes, definitely a thing.
The other issue is that Becky wants her cool atheist girlfriend to be consumed with lust for her so that maybe said cool atheist girlfriend (who therefore doesn’t believe that sex is only sanctioned in the bonds of marriage) will lose control and they will both give into their lustful urges together, but because Dina started it it’s okay and they couldn’t HELP being so all-consumingly horny. The issue there, of course, is that Dina is aspec (so she won’t be consumed by her lustful urges) and would find the idea of having sex with Becky when she says no absolutely abhorrent. There will be no lustful atheist ravaging, and Becky is maybe kinda disappointed by that fact, and also feels shame because DINA can find Becky pretty and want to have sex but not have frequent sexual attraction, so clearly this is a failing in Becky’s faith. (It’s not, and Becky REALLY needs to get herself to an online educational resource about asexuality. And also non-shame-based resources about sexuality in general, as do Joyce, Liz, and for that matter Joe. Scarleteen is here for you, honey.)
The Wellerman
Yeah, maybe you want them to make you talk about it, precisely because it is SHAME that’s holding you back from initiating the discussion yourself.
pope suburban
Oh my God I love Dina so much.
AKP
<3 This is very good.
Pocky
She’ll pick up that sidequest later
gotta get to the main plot
JBento
That’s not how you RPG. You do the sidequests FIRST, lest advancing the main plot makes the sidequests unavailable.
Do you even game, bro? (/s)
Keulen
That, and doing the sidequests first means you can be overleveled so you can beat the bosses more easily when you finally get to the main plot.
ninja_jesus
I’ll never forgive Fable for adding fake side quests at the beginning of the game, how am I supposed to complete the game if I can’t do EVERYTHING?
Carms
Dina is excellent, and apparently she really brings out Joe’s emotional intelligence.
I like both these characters a lot
DailyBrad
I think in part since Dina’s Dina, and she has a way of just kind of walking through peoples’ emotional minefields without stepping on anything.
The Wellerman
I do so admire that ninja skill. Is that what’s called an SEP field?
StClair
Nah, SEP is being invisible without actually being invisible. What Brad is talking about is more like pass without trace (see various videos in which cats walk through hallways full of dominos etc without tipping any over).
Uniquitous
Joe doesn’t seem to be enjoying lying in the bed he made.
MisterJinKC
Why are you makingit sound like he did somethingwrong? He was approached by a girl who said she wanted to have sex and the second she indicated she wanted to stop he did. He didn’t try to talk her out of it, he just respected her wishes every step of the way.
Segnosaur
He did not do anything morally wrong, nor is he to blame for any issues liz might have.
However, from a Joe perspective, the idea oh handling his crush on joyce by sleeping with proxy-joyce was a bit… Questionable, from a “how do i deal with feelings” perspective.
MisterJinKC
It’s almost like he’s also a teenager who’s learning who he is, just like everyone else in the strip that commenter bend over backwards to defend. But Joe gets shit on constantly because he’s open about his love of sex, despite his constantly displaying the behaviors people say men need to have. Getting consent. Respecting girls who say no without judgement or attempting to verbally bully/guilt them into it. Supporting all of his friends and being an all around good person. He’s arguably a better person than anyone else in the strip.
Ragingagnostic
Joe gets dumped on because he consistently saw women as sex objects, rated them on their looks/abilities in bed and made jokes or sexual innuendoes about them. He attempted to excuse his behavior not by seeing “Hey, I love sex” but by claiming that men were wired to think about sex every seven seconds, thus making it a fault of his gender rather than a unique flaw to himself. Remember when his female rating book got public attention and every woman he saw was glaring at him? Yeah, it’s hard to approve him for that. Perhaps it shows his love for sex but also displays a callous disregard for other people’s feelings.
That being said, he has shown growth and displays many of the behaviors you state here. If I had to have a choice between having him in the room with me and beady-eyed, sarcastic Spike, I’d probably choose Joe.
darkgloomie
Joe acted as best as he should have in that situation, but the shame comes from his intentions- Liz was not meant to be “just a hookup”, she was a proxy for who Joe really wants sex with, and he explicitly admitted that. The shame is either in realizing how awful treating someone as a proxy for sex and/or emotional closure (unlikely) or because Joyce called him “her biggest mistake” by proxy (she didn’t, but Lis was meant to be the Joyce stand-in, so her actions, to Joe, reflect what Joyce would do)
Odditude
Where is your avatar from?
I absolutely love it 🙂
The Wellerman
I found this after some searching. I think it’s just about what you’re looking for ?
https://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/04/beautiful-things-happen-when-151-artists-take-on-151-pokmon/
thejeff
Not morally wrong, but I’d say not “best as he should have” either. Liz was giving off all sorts of signs that she wasn’t nearly as ready as she was pretending to be. Picking up on those and not going ahead with the hookup, even though she asked, would have been better, and would have dropped the chance for emotional trauma.
Alex
He didn’t do anything wrong in the past 24 hours but I think he is questioning the life choices that led him here.
Needfuldoer
The only thing Joe did wrong was projecting his doubts onto Liz so he could justify ignoring all the red flags his conscience was waving.
Spencer
I mean, to avoid relitigating anything else I’ve yammered on about; isn’t it a good thing to learn during sexual experimentation that, actually, you totally can withdraw consent whenever you feel like it and your partner needs to respect this choice?
Needfuldoer
Yes, that is a good thing which happened.
I’m saying Joe’s kicking himself for letting the situation progress to that point, rationalizing away the voice in the back of his head telling him it’s not a good idea. What if she didn’t stop there, but felt the same regret the next morning?
thejeff
Yeah, that’s a good thing to learn, but it’s not actually better to learn it by pushing yourself into doing something you weren’t ready for and panicking than to not push yourself there in the first place.
It’s definitely good that Joe stopped (obviously) and that he stopped gracefully, which is even less common, but it’s hard to argue that it was a good experience overall. He’s messed up by it now and she was definitely distraught when it happened, though we haven’t seen her since. Those aren’t signs of a good thing.
Needfuldoer
To be clear, “she said stop, he stopped no question” was the only good thing that happened there. That situation as a whole was dumpster fire.
MisterJinKC
To be clear, that dumpster fire was because of Liz, not Joe. People take a lot of shit about him that he doesn’t deserve.
Needfuldoer
I’d split the blame 75% Liz, 25% Joe.
She should’ve realized she really wasn’t ready in the first place.
He shouldn’t have ignored his conscience recognizing it.
temperaryobsessor
I assume Joe is concerned about how close he got to hurting a Joyce proxy.
And is starting to realize Danny might have had a point when he was refusing Billie for her own sake even if he isn’t thinking about that one instance.
Spencer
Nah, Joe refusing Liz “for her own sake” would be dumb, especially when Danny did that, Joe called it out, and then Danny called back to it directly.
It’s weird to take ownership of someone else’s agency like that (though I’m guessing most of y’all mean that as “Joe decides not to have sex because he thinks these are red flags”, which is something involving his own agency) especially when the much more sensible choice (and thus, the choice that should never ever ever ever ever be made in a character drama) is Joe refusing Liz for his own sake.
But, of course, Joe’s a manly man. Guys can’t say no, that’s gay, does his dick not work or something? He refuses to process his own obvious discomfort until he turns it around; he is uncomfortable, but actually it’s because all these pesky Joyce feelings are getting in the way and he just needs to blow his load hard enough to get them out.
Then, oops, turns out Indomitable Sex Monster Joe is can’t even have that purely physical transaction anymore, because he’s capable of emotionally hurting a woman (and a woman who’s Not-Joyce at that) even then.
milu
“It’s weird to take ownership of someone else’s agency like that”
agency doesn’t exist in a vacuum. it’s a legalistic fiction. it’s useful, but it’s not real. people’s actions are highly determined by context, upbringing, and so on. the reality of how we make choices is shades of gray, not an on/off switch.
i’m just putting this out there, because i disagree with the way you frame this, and i think this is why.
milu
wait ok, “legalistic” sounds dismissive. it’s also an ethical concept. i repeat, agency is absolutely a useful tool. but it’s also not the only lens that can help make sense of a situation.
Spencer
I agree for the most part, I think, in that “can this legal adult have sex?” seems like a pretty clear question that gets shaped around the edges by surrounding context, I just find the specific context of Liz trying to hook up with Joe pretty simple.
Liz wants to bang Joe because she’s frustrated by how her upbringing has impacted her in life. She wants the things her friends have, she is old enough to have them, but she was not only raised in a way that wouldn’t let her explore them healthily, she’s now in a state where the person she’s pretending to be to cater to her stepmom is leading to her peers mocking her.
That’s the motivation, and I think it’s a pretty normal one for a college freshman. She affirms that she wants sex, and then boombadadoom, turns out it’s way harder and way scarier than she thought it’d be where she’d get laid and strut back to school knowing she got one over all these clowns, and enforced by norms of sexual purity or not, Liz isn’t comfortable doing this with a stranger, she wants it to be with someone she loves, and then says she would have ruined herself forever (which definitely is enforced by norms of sexual purity).
But to a partner she’s propositioning that’s not on the surface, she just enthusiastically wants to punch her V card and we’re privy to her motivations because we can infer stuff and form readings of her character. It’s weird to decide for her why she can’t have sex, which is an entirely separate conversation to Joe deciding why she cannot have sex with him, but as I’ve learned this past month and a half it’s real easy to use the same words with like six different meanings to describe the same scenario and for all I know the topic of “why it’s wrong for Liz to have sex” is less “her inherent agency as a capable adult” and more “raising red flags”, though from there I think there’s a discussion in why those flags are even flags at all.
milu
“we’re privy to her motivations because we can infer stuff and form readings of her character.”
We’ve basically seen all the same scenes involving Liz as Joe has, except for her arrival. There’s not much we can infer that Joe can’t. He’s seen her be maniacally performative in how over her faith she is. He’s heard her voice catch before she claimed she can do what she wants. He knows the “edibles” were vitamin tabs, but that she apparently needs to believe she’s not sober.
I’m not going to link to a bunch of strips because you know what i mean, you’re just not reading them the way i do.
Anyway, i just think this specific question, of “Joe had no say over her agency and it’s a bad idea to question someone’s decision for their own good” is not as plain as you paint it, that’s all =)
Spencer
Anyway, i just think this specific question, of “Joe had no say over her agency and it’s a bad idea to question someone’s decision for their own good” is not as plain as you paint it, that’s all =)
These are two separate questions.
Questioning the sexual agency of a coherent, legal adult is weird, and very pointedly, both times Danny and Joe have engaged with it, where they had to moralize their way out of having sex (in particular this speaks to me as an expression of toxic masculinity for the both of them, considering Danny had to assert he “wasn’t dead” to Joe), it was actually a front for sensible feelings like “I don’t actually want this.” Liz is actually old enough to decide she wants to have sex, she did want to have sex when she went to Joe, it just turned out she wasn’t nearly as ready as she thought she was, but that choice still has to be hers.
The leadup strip where Liz talks about how she is a Secular Adult who does Secular Adult Things like Sex With Hot Boys and Weed Drugs isn’t a sign that she’s “not ready”, because she is actually ready by the standards of being a coherent, legal adult verbally affirming her desire to have sex. That’s within a vacuum shaped by outside contexts, but that vacuum is the where the question of “whether or not I can decide to have sex” exists.
And then before it gets going she realizes it’s not what she wants, so she stops. Whether or not Liz can choose to have sex and whether or not Liz is emotionally prepared for sex are separate topics, since she only found out she wasn’t when she went for it. More pointedly, “whether or not Liz is emotionally prepared for sex” is something her partner can’t decide for her, but can certainly decide why they themself don’t want to engage with it. Hypothetically, if Joe and Liz banged and had a great time, does that retroactively mean Joe seeing her say Weed Drugs wasn’t the red flag it’s being treated as?
thejeff
I don’t think anyone suggesting that Joe should have paid attention to those red flags has phrased it in terms of “agency”. That’s always been the framing of those saying he should pay no attention to any signs she’s giving other than the actual consent (and similar legal issues like “of age” and not drunk). I don’t think milu is questioning her agency at all, but referring only to your use of the term.
Personally, I don’t think Joe would be denying her agency even if he read into her behavior signs that she wasn’t as ready as she claimed and said no on those grounds. Whether he was right or wrong, that’s his agency, not hers. Joe’s big motivation is not hurting women. He can choose to not sleep with them if he thinks that will be bad for them. That’s up to him.
As for the hypothetical, red flags aren’t guarantees. They’re warning signs. If it had all turned out alright, the cautions would still be there. As a parallel, especially early on, Joe gave off a lot red flags as a guy women shouldn’t trust. It turns out those signs were performative. He was trustable, even then, but he was imitating the signs that a lot of dangerous guys give off.
milu
Yes! thank you @thejeff, it’s not so much that i have a quibble with you or Joe ascribing full agency to Liz— really, it’s that you’re insisting this discussion is about agency at all. A small part of it is— like when some people pondered, “are you really making a conscious choice if you think you’re high but you’re actually not”.
But mostly, i don’t think those of us saying “Joe could have suspected that Liz didn’t really want this”— were concerned about Liz’s literal agency at all.
Spencer: “that vacuum is the where the question of “whether or not I can decide to have sex” exists.”
it’s interesting, because this is not the question i’m interested in. you also headed your response to my earlier comment with that same question, and i thought it was just bad phrasing and i didn’t want to get caught in semantics, but actually, i think semantics is what we’re struggling with here.
Again and again we have this conversation (well, mostly you and jeff have this conversation lol) where we clearly can’t get through to each other on this, because i say potayto and you absolutely totally hear me say potahto every time.
it’s baffling to me how on earth you come away from comments like mine thinking that “whether or not I can decide to have sex” is a phrasing of the topic i would agree with. no. of course that’s not the discussion i’m having. and conversely, i’m sure when you read my (or jeff’s) comments, it must be so obvious to you that we just don’t understand what you’re saying. it’s kind of fascinating ^^
milu
as an aside, because this keeps coming up, i don’t think the situation with Danny and Billie is a 1:1 comparison. Danny assumed Billie didn’t really wanna fuck him based on nothing at all (or likely, as you suggest, it was old-school white-knight-ish masculinity kicking in.) It’s just kind of unfortunate that these 2 situations got equated by Danny who knows nothing about Liz and the events of the day.