In the High-Def Ultra-Wide 4K version of this strip, you can see that the girl sitting on the washer to the far left is reading a printed copy of some of Amber’s fanfic.
Some of y’all must not have ever been dorm dwellers. Washing clothes is a chore so when you wash, you wash it all. Including the clothes that you have hung back up because they didn’t look dirty and have consequently worn three times. You put on your scruffiest, least often worn in public clothes because every thing else is going in the washer. Half the people in that shot wouldn’t even be wearing underwear. Not for sexy reasons but because it is all in the wash.
It’s also expensive, so you stuff as much into every load as you can.
It was actually cheaper for me to drive across the state to my grandmother’s house, do laundry there, and drive back to college than to do it in the laundry room. Of course, gas was $0.99/gallon back then, but on the other hand my car got 18 MPG.
in all fairness, it’s a good idea to change into temporary clothing to do laundry so you can clean your current outfit if you’ve been wearing it for long enough to get it dirty
i mean it’d be a bit awkward but i wouldn’t be surprised if some ppl were tempted to sit on the washing machines versus leaning against it just because (i mean there’s even someone on the left cut off that’s sitting and being casual)
But yes it is and the reason you don’t see Hot-Shot or Sunny Jim in this group is they’ve taken the time when their four roommates are out of the dorm to masturbate.
I would imagine that laundrabation might be even more comfortable for them then other things, as they have already done it. Acknowledging feelings for each other might be too scary compared to something that they have already done before.
It lives in a grey area where they can experience joy without actually confronting the situation, or I guess sort of grey cause Joyce herself said it’s sex m
The truth is you’re allowed to bang your same sex best friend like once. Jennifer said so that means it must be true. Twice is “like” once and besides this isn’t even fully banging. So it must be okay, right?
Dorothy take Joyce to a sex shop so y’all can pick out vibrators, or at least show her an online store because Joyce would probably have a panic attack just seeing a shop like that
See, I WAS thinking that there might be some sort of open-relationship option open for Joe/Joyce/Dorothy/Walky, but now I realize that Joyce/Dorothy would have to be a clothesed relationship.
I’m cry laughing. I gotta say though laundromats/laundry rooms are on the unsexy places for me (having to use laundromats as a kid when we were too poor to fix our washer/drier and there being lots of fundamental people there with Chick tracks). Plus I’m allergic to detergent/softener. In college we just watched movies together on a laptop in the laundry room to make sure no one threw your clothes out of the dryer and stole your time. I didn’t make it to second semester though…
step 1) go buy a dildo or a vibrator like a normal person so you are not masturbating in a public space with a public machine
step 2) the plausible deniability is gone, stop cheating on your respective partners, you’re both being terrible
Approx 40% people who have absolutely never ever even caught feelings for someone without immediately turbo nuking the relationship they were currently in because wanting to bang someone is cheating. Actually talking to the person you want to bang is double cheating.
Indeed.
It’s like people forget that you can date and sleep with multiple people without it being cheating.
Joyce dryer-sexed Dorothy before she was dating Joe. By that logic, she had a preestablished relationship with Dorothy, meaning that, if anything, she was cheating on Dorothy with Joe. However, again, since no one has established any boundaries, none currently exist. Just dating someone does not give them exclusive rights to you unless you explicitly, verbally consent to that. Your partner does not own you.
There is no reading of the text in which any of the 4 involved in this are thinking like that.
They have not made explicit verbal agreements – because very few naive teens do that. Joyce did however talk about how the first laundry with Dorothy wasn’t cheating because it was before she got together with Joe and Dorothy said last night “We can’t. I’m with Walky. You’re with Joe.”
They think they’re exclusive. There’s no reason to think Walky or Joe think otherwise.
Yes, you can date and sleep with multiple people without it being cheating, but if you’re in an acknowledged relationship and you actually care about the other person’s feelings, you should talk to them about it and no rely on letter of the law “We never actually said” bullshit. Because the concern should be about hurting someone you care about, not whether you signed off on some rule.
If they go ahead with this and Joe winds up devastated by it and then Joyce pulls the “when did I explicitly, verbally consent to being exclusive” card, that’s not going to make him feel better about it.
why the hell is everyone in their socks in a communal space with a filthy floor? iit’s almost as bad as being out in the street in your socks. less chance of stepping on broken glass here but still, gross
I was going to say, that floor looks uncommonly clean to me. I mean people are sitting on it, and I can’t really see them doing that if the floor was dirty.
As someone that lived in a dorm, I can say with confidence that people routinely walked around in their socks or barefoot. The floor was vacuumed regularly and everybody generally treats the place like a really big house with a lot of housemates in it.
Grow up on a farm and few surfaces are too gross to walk barefoot on.
Though yes, having some real world experience and learning more about microbes and whatnot, there are more surfaces I’m now unwilling to walk barefoot on.
other than sandals or so maybe they were planning to take those off at the end and put them inside if not just a spare pair they’re fine with walking in at the dorms since walky and that one side chara girl has def been barefoot around the doms too
I’d have thought feet were a preference thing when it comes to clothing. They are not pubic areas, they are not connected to the body interior. I mean, licking the floor might be a bit undesirable, but toddlers and dogs do it and survive.
That’s my main issue, just that the laundry room in my dorm often had small puddles of water and wet socks suck. Also it was a tile floor in the basement– it was cold.
In my opinion, socks and shoes are gross foot prisons and I don’t wear them ever unless I have to. (Which is most of the time I go outside.) Certainly I’m not going to have my footwear decided by germs. There is such a thing as washing if you get dirty, you know.
Wow, just showing your hand here. You know Dumbing of Age commenters have never heard of washing themselves. Just look how confused people were when Joe went into the shower the other day.
At least the universe keeps sabotaging their attempts to cheat lmao. Which doesn’t actually count for much since it was still their intent but at least roadblocks can slow the momentum so they can maybe have a second thought about doing so
Their intent is just to relieve stress, they’re incapable of precessing it as cheating because they’re so in denial of their feelings for each other that they don’t see it as an intimate act with one another.
Joyce said just a few days ago that she’d had sex with Dorothy. She also told Joe before that doing laundry with Dorothy was before they got together so it hadn’t been cheating. Last night (comic time) when they were in bed, Dorothy said “we can’t. You’re with Joe, I’m with Walky”.
They’re both definitely capable of processing it as cheating.
Okay, as this is slightly relevant to today’s comic, I’ll chime in to the the “was it sex/not sex” debate with a personal memory of mine that somehow, for whatever reason, resurfaced to me.
CW: a bit creepy, but nothing bad actually happened, at least not to me.
At the beginning of my first year of uni, there was a dude who came to me and basically asked me to join a “masturbation party” with other guys. Basically, the plan was for their group to hire the service of a professional stripper and everyone would masturbate while watching the woman perform.
I absolutely noped out and told him I wasn’t interested and that story ends there.
But thinking back about it, had I somehow participated (no chance in hell, mind you, but let’s speculate), I don’t think I would have claimed I had sex after such situation, either with the stripper or the other guys, and it seems to me this situation in question is not that far removed of what Joyce and Dorothy did.
I don’t know, it’s just my personal perceptions of thing. I’d say the emotional level of implication was way higher than what I was proposed, but, to my understanding, emotional involvement is not an absolute requisite for sex to take place either.
In “Talk Dirty to Me”, Sally Tisdale tells about this time she was acting in a peep show and some guy locked eyes with her as he started to masturbate, and she stared right back and kinda got into things until it was over. And then she gets into a debate with herself over whether they’d just had sex.
It’s been ages since I read it, so I may be misremembering the details, but it seems relevant. And as I recall, it was a funny (and thought-provoking!) read.
I agree that I don’t think it’s easily clear as black and white if this can be taken as a sex act,
but for real, I don’t think it’s cheating either way.
I’m not sure about it either, but Joyce does see it as sex. I think her definition is deeply flawed, but she came to the conclusion that she’d had sex with Dorothy. If she’s willing to do something she considers “having sex”, it’s pretty hard to argue she’s not willing to cheat.
Which also ignores that lots of things that aren’t sex are considered cheating. Make-outs, for example
I’m glad there are other people there to prevent them from “doing laundry” together. Because while I think it’s a silly definition, Joyce decided to define sex in a way that would include her “doing laundry” with Dorothy. I’m kinda disappointed in her for attempting to do something that, according to her definition of sex, would be cheating on Joe.
I mean, it doesn’t really make it any better. If the only reason Joyce isn’t cheating on Joe is because she tries to but fails, the worst thing about her cheating is already there.
Keeps things up in the air longer. Gives them more of a chance to talk themselves out of it, while also keeping the tension high for us. I mean, the intent might be there, but they still could have stopped themselves. Like Dorothy did last night.
Joyce’s definition of sex wasn’t even mutual masturbation. It was when somebody you love helps you have an orgasm. Which I still think is way too broad a definition of sex. But Joyce realized right after that her definition includes the time when Dorothy helped her masturbate in the laundry room.
See, if you two had just had a threesome with Joe on impulse, none of this would be a problem. Why can’t these characters do the sensible fanfic-related thing?! Instead they keep dumbing around! It’s like
Do they have different handedness? I’m not sure entirely how not being ambidextrous affects touching one’s self, but if it’s like other things, I can imagine it could make holding hands less fulfilling for one of them, unless one is a righty and one a lefty, or one or both are amby
Truish, but at a certain point thinking becomes talking and talking becomes planning and that leads to action.
At this point, they’ve not only thought about it, but said “Hey, let’s go do it”, gotten their stuff and gone to a place to do it. They’ve made a plan and put it into action.
Now I’m imagining reading this strip out of context – either as the first DoA strip you come across or coming back after a long absence. Completely innocuous.
I’m confused. So, masturbating with your friend while you’re in a relationship is okay? Is masturbating with your friend just a thing people do together? I feel like I’m getting mixed signals everywhere
You’re getting mixed signals because there isn’t a single answer to that question. People’s relationships and the boundaries of those relationships vary by the individuals involved, so not everyone’s opinion about what is cheating is going to match up.
Ideally you would check with your partner(s) about where you and your partner(s) boundaries for “cheating” are. To make sure everyone is on the same page!
These people are 18/19/20 though, so they’re stupid and horny and haven’t learned how to communicate properly about this kind of thing yet. Which is awesome drama, but is upsetting some people for whatever reason.
I think it’s pretty hard to argue that Joyce at least thinks it’s cheating – unless she’s somehow confused Joe telling her that masturbation isn’t cheating to mean that doing it with Dorothy isn’t. She certainly did originally, since she had to specify it wasn’t since it was before they were together. And now she’s decided that it was having sex.
Joe might think otherwise, though I doubt it, but in this case, if she thinks it is, it seems morally equivalent to me.
Even without that take, it’s definitely close enough that you really should check, if only to keep from blowing up a relationship you care about.
I do find it interesting drama, but I don’t think I want the consequences of actually going through with it. It’s likely to blow up both of these relationships and I did really want to see Joe/Joyce play out longer first.
Good thing I didn’t try to argue one way or another about what Joyce, Joe, or Dorothy thinks. I was talking about real people in the comments section having different answers about whether this counts as cheating or not and explaining why that might be.
Like me! I personally don’t think this is cheating. I think it’s stupid and potentially going to hurt some people (maybe everyone involved) but I don’t think it’s cheating.
Probably badly stated, but one thing I wanted to get across is that if Joyce is willing to do something she thinks is cheating, that’s essentially the same moral line to cross as something you would think is cheating. She thinks it’s cheating and that’s a line she’s willing to cross. (apparently, at least.)
Yeah absolutely. That wasn’t what the conversation was about in this particular thread, but I don’t disagree that it’s obvious Joyce is willing to go against her own moral opinions to bone Dorothy down.
Sheltered home schooled (ex)fundamentalist Christian girl has done a lot of covering for social blunders caused by Joyce’s probable autism. It’s not impossible that she did come away with the impression that if masturbation isn’t cheating then masturbation with Dorothy isn’t cheating.
Especially factoring in over correction from the entirely insane biblical position that even thinking about another person is cheating (But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.). Joyce really has no reliable rudder for what is considered acceptable in a relationship so a misunderstanding like that is not unlikely even before factoring in “Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships”.
Thank you 😀 I feel complicated about it but I guess that’s because it is. I do hope this doesn’t end too badly… The comments were overloading my brain haha
Totally valid! Yeah it’s a wildly complicated issue, and when people try to boil complex, nuanced issues down to a right-or-wrong thing it tends to get… sticky at the best of times.
I’m not in agreement that what they were going to do counts as cheating, but I agree they were absolutely intending to sit on washing machines and get off together, yes.
I think we know she considers it a sexual act, but that doesn’t mean it immediately constitutes infidelity. Given her strict fundie background, it’s much more likely that she thinks she’s found a kind of sex “loophole”, of sorts, an idea that has been reinforced twice over by Billie, who we know she admires even if that admiration was tarnished by Billie’s many, visible failures.
Also, like, as much as she considers it a sex act, common sense considers it sitting on dryers jorkin it, so how bad can it be? AND, cherry on top, Dorothy has just said, flat out, it’s not because they’re attracted to one another. It’s just a release, right?
The nearly kissing was an obvious infidelity that Joyce recoiled from. But this? This is different!
… you personally might think she holds what Jennifer says as gospel truth, but I’ve seen her say and act that she knows Jennifer does not have great judgment in this area.
This is different because Joyce has said this would be cheating.
But hey, if you think neither of them know it’s cheating, then why haven’t they invited Becky or Sarah? They have rooms. They can all hold hands and masturbate together there.
I didn’t say any of that, and you know I didn’t say any of that, and you can go somewhere else with the bad faith reading, HueSat. I do not like nor tolerate your bullshit. I also didn’t make weird suggestions. That was all you, and you can fuck right off with it.
thejeff, could you link the strip because I don’t recall that statement. I’m not saying I don’t believe it, but I don’t remember it.
Lotta plot threads all coming together here! I think it’s kinda neat, personally, the way we all kind of crowd-source a consistent memory of events by sharing links with one another. 🙂
Sure, maybe, but I don’t think that makes it cheating. Joyce also thought that touching herself would send her to Hell for a long time, and I don’t think that was true either.
I do honestly have a hard time with the idea of “objective” definition of cheating separate from the specific people involved, because as one of those poly/ENM types I’ve always thought the only useful definition of cheating was “violating your partner’s expectations/boundaries/rules concerning your emotional/physical/romantic interactions with others”.
I think the issue is that a lot of folks are conflating the two.
Some people are talking about cheating only in terms of what Joyce and Dorothy think counts, other people are saying things like “so we can all agree this is cheating right”, and sometimes explicitly clarifying that they mean it would be cheating, objectively, for everyone on Earth.
In the absence of any specific agreement between the various partners, you kind of have to fall back on what their likely expectations are.
With Joyce’s and Dorothy’s own thoughts on it count mostly in terms of their intent: If they’re doing something they think is cheating, then they’re at least intending to cheat, even if most people (or even their partners) don’t think so.
Sure, but trying to enforce universal ideas of what cheating is… is just bound to rub a lot of folks the wrong way, especially when those “universal ideas” echo the exact kind of polyamory-erasure that folks also get from society. You know?
I just think we’d be having fewer and less impassioned arguments if everyone was prefacing such statements with “Joyce’s definition of sex and the relationship she’s set up with Joe makes this an attempt to cheat”, instead of……… “anyone who thinks this isn’t cheating is a horrible partner who doesn’t deserve love”, which is only like one step more harsh than I’ve seen people saying with their whole chests.
Sure, but in the absence of specific details of what they’ve agreed to, we’ve really got nothing to work with except “would most people really see this as cheating and thus be hurt by it if their partners did it to them.”
And from the other side, someone here earlier was arguing that since Joyce and Joe hadn’t made an explicit verbal agreement to be exclusive, nothing she could do would be cheating.
— “would most people really see this as cheating and thus be hurt by it if their partners did it to them”
I agree that it’s difficult to argue cogently about the situation in the comic without agreeing on certain set terms, but please understand that this desire to use what “most people” define as cheating to be the correct and only definition is… exactly what’s getting the pushback?
Like. Imagine for a moment that you are someone else, someone for whom Joyce’s definition of sex really resonated. It’s a great definition for you! It’s exactly how you’d define sex.
Now imagine reading the comment section for the last few days, where the majority opinion has decidedly been that that definition isn’t just wrong, it’s ridiculous and absurd and it must be Willis contorting Joyce’s feelings to fit the plot.
Imagine you try to point out that actually, some real people including yourself do use that definition, and being told that you don’t count, because you’re so far in the minority that your definition doesn’t matter, and that by saying something you’re actually distracting from the important conversation here, which is about how silly Fictional Character Joyce is being.
Hypothetical You already knows you’re in the minority. This is maybe the first time you’ve even seen a fictional character share your definition of sex.
…Do you not think that would chafe? Do you not think you’d feel the need to push back a little harder?
— And from the other side, someone here earlier was arguing that since Joyce and Joe hadn’t made an explicit verbal agreement to be exclusive, nothing she could do would be cheating.
This feels like an argument from incredulity, like it’s ridiculous on the face of it to feel that way, but. I actually think a lot of couples would benefit from having a conversation like that where they lay down exactly what their expectations are in terms of seriousness and exclusivity and what qualifies as cheating.
I did a fair bit of online dating, and maybe it’s different for cis straight m/f couples on dating apps, but it didn’t seem to be uncommon in my experience for folks’ expectations to clash, actually, over whether you needed to immediately set your profile to “in a relationship” once you’d been on a date with someone and you’d both had a good time, or if there was some minimum number of successful dates that a pair had to reach before the “are we exclusive now?” conversation happened and resulted in said changes to dating profiles.
1) I think this entirely missed what I was trying to say, which is probably my fault. The key to the bit you quoted there was the last phrase “and thus be hurt by it if their partners did it to them”. The reason “most people” is important is because if you don’t have reason to think otherwise, your partner is likely to fall into the “most people” category. And you probably don’t want to hurt them.
I don’t think what most people think is the “correct and only definition” and I don’t even have a particularly hard definition in my own. The goal here isn’t to hold to the one true definition of cheating, but to not hurt your partner through assumption clash. For which, I’d even say “err on the side of caution”. Or you know, talk to them.
2) I think a lot of couples would benefit from that discussion. I’ve got absolutely no problem with having that discussion. My issue is with assuming that if you haven’t had that discussion, that it must be “anything goes”. Nor does this necessarily start with immediately after the first date or after the first sex, but by the “in a relationship” stage, which clearly is the state both couples here are in (and Dorothy and Joyce are not), if you assume you’re still not exclusive just because you haven’t talked about it, you’re running a real risk of destroying the relationship and hurting someone you care about.
Not because of any moral issue beyond “unnecessarily hurting people you care about is bad”, which I hope we can agree on?
Caveat: There are likely some subcultures where that would be a common assumption, even for people who’d say they were in a relationship. That obviously changes things. Remember, I’m looking at expectations, not moral rules. Random Indiana University college kids are not such a subgroup.
Thinking a little more: Would it make more sense to drop the “most people”
and use something like “It would be reasonable to expect your partner to see this as cheating”?
1. I think it’s better to talk to them than to make assumptions either way, yeah.
2. See point 1.
Of course I agree that unnecessarily hurting people is bad, but.
Poly people know they’re in the minority. It doesn’t mean they aren’t a valid way of being a person, or that it’s fair that all the onus of making sure they and their partner are on the same page about exclusivity always falls on them, with monogamous people getting to live the life of Being the Default That’s Always Catered to Without Needing to Ask For it.
I think probably the biggest issue here is that we KNOW Joyce at least at one point thought that “doing laundry” would be cheating, but we have only the barest semblance of a vibe as to how Dorothy or Joe or Walky would feel about it.
I was just trying to explain to thejeff why people are kinda arguing… past each other about this whole thing, you know?
There’re two arguments happening. “Does Joyce consider this cheating?” (And I think we all know the answer is yes.) “Should this be considered cheating by some sort of objective definition?” (And this is where the arguments start, and things start getting increasingly personal and fraught.)
They’re separate conversations, though, and the latter shouldn’t continually be dragged into the former as if it’s the same argument, and people who are saying “this isn’t universally cheating, no” are also saying “Joyce isn’t cheating on Joe”, when… they’re mostly not, from what I can see.
Yeah, and we can’t really discount the influence of Poe’s Law — we have both “a lot of people who are incredibly vehement about aspects of this storyline” and “a lot of people who are incredibly dedicated to being trollishly vehement about aspects of this storyline”.
It is deeply interesting, and of course being poly makes it LITERALLY more complex because of all the potential multiplicative relationships, each of which might have its own standards.
Hell, you could do a dissertation on “my partners’ other relationships partially impinge on me because we’re all connected at one remove” vs. “my partner’s relationships are theirs to manage, and it is my partner’s sole responsibility to set/enforce any boundaries their partners’ wanted”.
If I found out my partner mutually masturbated with someone I’d absolutely consider that cheating. In most monogamous relationships I’d imagine people would. All the people in the comments saying they wouldn’t consider it cheating are baffling me.
Unless you’re fully in an open relationship and do not give a shit if your partner engages in sexual acts/intimacy with another person without telling you… it’s pretty obviously cheating.
If you read this like an AITA then Joyce and Dorothy would both be TA.
See, @thejeff, here’s an example: could have just said “obviously Joyce considers this cheating and that’s all that matters”, instead said that most people in monogamous or indeed any relationship that isn’t “fully open” would and that it’s baffling that anyone thinks differently…
Also “don’t give a shit” when talking about how such people feel about their partners, which is kinda loaded.
Yeah, but this other aspect to the conversation is almost certainly why Nymph felt the need to reply the way they did. Because some folks are either definitely trying to litigate some sort of universal definition of cheating that centers only monogamous people who feel just like they do, or trolling, and it gets exhausting.
Fair: only those four fictional characters’ definitions of cheating matter to whether what these two are doing is hurting their partners.
Less fair: if mutual masturbating isn’t cheating for you personally, you’re a weirdo and a bad partner.
If it’s not cheating for you then whatever- but some of these comments are treating it as like a default ‘oh that’s not cheating’ which is the part that is baffling.
Let’s all sternly express our disappointment in Joyce & Dorothy some more. Eventually it’ll reach through the fabric of our reality into the comic & they’ll start making better, more moral choices.
Me personally, I’m sternly expressing my disappointment in the hopes they make more ENTERTAINING choices — the fact that the more entertaining choices would also be the more moral ones is just a happy accident, but Joeyce > Joyrothy is just a fact of life.
Just to throw another aspect into the jumble of definitions:
Joyce thinks that their first laundry time was sex because Dorothy “helped her”. Specifically, helped her by teaching her – not by being present. Thus, this second time, when no more teaching is necessary, there’s no helping, therefore no sex.
Is this what’s going on in her head? No clue. But it’s a consistent way of looking at it.
I don’t have any idea what’s actually going through Joyce’s head right now, so I kind of suspect she’s in Too Hornt to Think Straight (haHA pun) territory, but this is one possible explanation for why she might think this isn’t something she needs to talk to Joe about before it happens.
One interesting thing about this whole arc is that we’ve gotten a good look at where Dorothy stands on this, but we’ve seen a lot less introspection from Joyce so far.
It’s definitely been on purpose, too? A lot of the tension in the pre-Joe/Joyce date was wrapped up in the fact that we didn’t know what was going on in Joyce’s head.
Today, all that’s really changed is that we know she thinks the last laundry room encounter was sex, and that she was interested in a repeat experience, but there’s so much still fuzzy about what she’s thinking.
I suspect my inability to comprehend this entire plot point might hinge on me simply being too ace to understand how the fuck “Too Hornt to Think” even works, or is a thing.
Like that just sounds like a fake thing people made up???? I know it’s real, I guess, but it really just sounds super fake.
There’s an extent to which being horny gets so distracting it’s hard to focus on other things, but there’s no way people are going into Sex Berserker states where fucking is the only thing their brain can comprehend. Being too horny into think straight/clearly is certainly a thing, but at that point it’s still possible to recognize it’s become a bit much and you should chill out.
@Joyfulldreams: I am so very right there with you, and I think it’s part of why I have no idea what Joyce is thinking, heh.
@Taffy: genuinely appreciative of the breakdown!
(Not being able to imagine it as a thing myself is, I think, where the appeal of something like Sex Pollen comes from for me — the second there’s Actual Magic happening, I find it much easier to be like, “okay yes this makes sense.” Haha.)
Like, cheating as a concept only makes any emotional sense to me if — okay, let’s say we have a fictional love triangle: Jane, Jack, and Joan.
So many stories, both fictional and from stuff like AITA, where Jack and Jane are perfectly happy together, but Jack winds up sleeping with Joan anyway, or feels really tempted to, and I’m just…? At a loss? Because the only way that makes any empathic sense to me is if Jack was really miserable with Jane.
And it’s not “being a better person” in this case, it’s just lacking a specific drive. I can perfectly understand eating a cupcake when you’re trying not to have too much sugar!
So intellectually I know it’s a thing, but it’s a strange thing to me, something I will only ever really understand by rough description.
Sex Pollen is a hilarious concept to me. “Oh no, a large bee landed on the Fuck Flowers and now the Sex Pollen is falling on us! Welp, guess we’re doing cowgirl position for the next hour or so, what can ya do.”
I think that’s part of why I like it, because it’s SO over the top and silly.
The general category also includes things like love potions, special pheromones, etc, but sex pollen will always be the most fun to say and joke about.
I expected this. I think they’re both in a position now where they can’t fall back on “doing laundry”, and anything else (like going back to one of their rooms) would feel like an escalation compared to that so they’re going to actually have to confront how they both feel about this whole messed up scenario.
I’m still, frankly, hoping they don’t cheat. Joeyce is too fun a ship to watch for it blow up before it even really sets sail.
I think Willis agreed with that last part, which is why this didn’t happen two years ago. (Per their own public-but-on-Patreon posts about it.) But that at this point, they consider Joeyce as having set sail “enough” for whatever this is.
I still have my fingers crossed for poly, because I don’t want anyone to be sad (including Joe), but that’s still gonna be more Dorothy/Joyce than a lot of readers want. We can’t all win here unfortunately. :/
I suspect “enough” depends on what this turns out to be. They may have now come close enough to cause sufficient drama that they don’t need to go through with it, which will definitely blow everything up.
As much fun as the drama from Dorothy and Joyce doing laundry together again might be, I suspect it would probably blow up both relationships, which I don’t think would be what anyone wants.
Poly would be nice, but I don’t think any of them are ready to jump right into that. Could still be long run, but I doubt it’s a good way to handle them being horny today.
I’m just talking about how they said they almost started this storyline two years ago, then stopped, explicitly because Joe and Joyce hadn’t even had dinner together yet.
That seemed to me like a very similar sentiment to what Big Z was saying, and I just wanted to… I guess it might turn out to be “offer my condolences”, but it really does depend on where this is going.
(Which I tried to acknowledge by describing what’s currently happening as “whatever this is”.)
I mean, yeah, I also think I’d be pretty disappointed in Joyce for doing something she herself considers “cheating”, but I’m also Team Relationship Paladins (whatever the hell that means).
Side note: At one point, some of my friend groups started calling me Social Justice Paladin both to mock the SJW thing with actual D&D classes and because I have a fairly infinite amount of patience with trying to argue down incels and other toxic dudes without actually hitting anyone. =P
Heh, good for you on the side note. I do like reclaiming SJW and also expanding it to more classes, like Social Justice Bard.
On the other thing: that’s fair! And I just… yeah. Genuine sympathy for you and all the other Joeyce shippers if it gets sunk here in the process. :/ They’ve been sweet together, and I want poly in part because I also don’t actually want them to stop being sweet together…
(One other very possible outcome is that Joyce and Dorothy fooling around blows up not only their relationships with Walky and Joe but ALSO just doesn’t work out, so everyone winds up alone and sad for a while. I currently don’t foresee a path forward here where Joyce and Dorothy don’t hook up in some fashion, but I certainly see paths where everyone loses! Maximum Damn You Willis energy there.)
See, IMHO, at least in Joyce’s case given her moral bents, I think the only really plausible outcome of “Joyce and Dorothy fooling around” IS that everyone ends up lonely and sad — I think Joyce will have a hard time staying in a relationship that started as “cheating” (by her definition), even if she gives into temptation. Like, more Rich Mullins nightmares and such.
Well yeah and that’s why I don’t want them to cheat here.
I also get why they’ve already crossed the moral event horizon for a lot of readers, because yeah, they did come into this room with certain intentions. (Jury’s out on whether or not they would have stopped if the room had been empty, though. I think there’s just enough denial in that first panel that we might be looking at a case of one or both of them still kinda fooling themselves into thinking this doesn’t qualify as real masturbation/sex/cheating (in that order)….)
Still time for them to have a conversation instead of giving into horniness and feelings.
I just definitely don’t think there’s still time to fully get the genie back in the bottle here. These are not the actions of people who regret almost kissing right before Joyce’s date with Joe, for whom it was a one-time mistake to walk away from back to their boyfriends.
My experience is that’s by far the most common outcome of relationships blowing up because of something seen as cheating.
And I don’t think I like that outcome, even in a Damn You Willis! way. I don’t think it goes to particularly interesting places storywise. He could surprise me of course.
My preferred scenario has at least a CHANCE of leading to ploy, mostly because “forced to actually confront this” is the best chance I think they have for no one to feel cheated on, which in my experience is a significant prerequisite for poly to happen.
“I guess we should just go back to our rooms. Our respective rooms.”
“…Yeah, that would probably be best.”
They go upstairs and give each other a small wave. Joyce opens her door, then glances down the hall before going in. Dorothy is standing in front of her door (which has a hair tie or something on the doorknob).
“Dorothy?”
“Becky and Dina are, um, ‘occupying’ my room.”
“W-well, I guess you can just… come in mine…”
Twenty or so minutes later, Sarah comes back to her room– with Joe walking with her, since he’d just been helping her work out. Joyce and Dorothy didn’t put anything on the doorknob. (Because why would they, when they definitely weren’t going…do… anything…) (Or they do put something for “privacy,” but it’s not a sock, and Sarah and Joyce haven’t actually established their own system…)
I would like to tie a few more storylines into this for max chaos, though.
I think what we’re all ignoring is that if Joyce and Dorothy both have sex in a way that’s recognised by both as sex, then they will complete the final part of the prophecy(the one only whispered in dark alleys) and thus begin the age of vampire robots
I was all set to make a “so how’re we doing, folks? We being normal at one another for having different tastes in webcomic drama?” top-level, but this is so much better than anything I could have come up with that I’m just gonna admire it for a while longer instead.
I’m pretty firmly Not team Relationship Paladins but i also really don’t think these two are genuinely going to just get up and cheat on their partners no problem. What makes me curious more than anything is still what the hell Joyce’s gameplan is here.
Dorothy doesn’t consider her attraction to Joyce real, to her this is a neat trick that will hopefully get them to stop being horny for each other (a doomed effort) while Joyce is under no pretenses here she arguably knows more about what this situation actually is than Dorothy does.
A lot of folks (me included) were really curious as to what was going on through Joyce’s brain for the past few months but i’ve come to the conclusion it was in fact actually very bold of us to assume she was thinking at all!
Joyce is a very impulsive person she isn’t unintelligent but she thinks by the seat of her pants doing things via instinct and something you need to know is that instincts will sometimes lead you to places which braver men wouldn’t go with a gun.
I immensely look forward to seeing how this unfolds.
Am I the only one perplexed by the alt-text? I assumed that if I waited long enough, someone would have already explained it in another comment. Guess it wasn’t long enough.
I think it’s to do with an old picture Willis drew. Basically the origin of the whole ‘Joyce masturbating with a washing machine’ thing, the picture showed Sarah and Joyce both sitting on washing machines and Sarah had a book with the title ’57 varieties of ketchup’. Basically a fake porn title I think? I can’t find the picture to properly confirm this or not but I’m like 75% sure that’s what it’s referring to.
Aha, found it! Yep, that’s what it was referring to, Sarah’s book is called 57 varieties of ketchup and the cover is bright red. Also in case anyone tries to correct me as far as the washing machine thing yes I know it’s also a joke from Scrubs and yes I know Willis is a fan of Scrubs therefore that’s probably why they drew that picture.
STORY TIME, INSPIRED BY BUT UNRELATED TO THE CURRENT COMIC DRAMA:
My long-time college roommate tells the story of how he got to move in two weeks early due to some special program he was in, and in the course of the campus being deserted he met a girl on his first or second day and they ended up going to the laundry room (since both their roommates were ALSO on this “college preview” trip and very homeboy types). Hanky-panky started to ensue… until a troop of players from the football team (also early onto campus) burst in.
Pause, deer in headlights look from all parties, until one of the players boomed “Damn, my brotha’ is GETTIN’ SOME.” and the team filed back out.
Obviously my roommate and his lady friend could not continue at that point. They kept hanging out, not being able to find any alone time. He finally, towards the end of the second week, convinced her it was a fluke and they’d have even less opportunity once the rest of campus filled up with students.
They are in the laundry room, hanky-panky has begun to ensue.
A door creaks.
“DAMN. Brotha’ is STILL GETTIN’ SOME.”
And thus did a whirlwind romance end, as stupidly as it began.
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HAHA
My thoughts exactly
In the High-Def Ultra-Wide 4K version of this strip, you can see that the girl sitting on the washer to the far left is reading a printed copy of some of Amber’s fanfic.
Good catch.
Damn girl.
No shame – you get some dryer goodness with your Amberfic.
I was gonna guess bible.
Anything can be a bible if you’re a big enough fan.
Bible just means “Book”, in Greek.
God just means “god,” in English
Maybe when they keep talking about The Lord, they mean “Freyr,” in Old Norse
Amazing
see a couple comments referencing this, so I assume it’s true that the patreon version shows more? as a poor person I cannot confirm this. ~<3
I can see slightly less than half of someone sitting cross legged on a drier reading a book with a blue cover. The rest is in people’s minds…
It’s a running gag at this point. There is no “High-Def Ultra-Wide 4K version of this strip”; there’s no writing on the plain blue cover at all.
lol it figures, I was paying the patreon before and didn’t see anything like that but it’s been a while, for all I knew something changed. ~<3
curses! foiled by society once more!
*glances at the poll*
[and yet we live in one meme]
Joyce turns five heads with “maybe we should just bang.”
Clearly this is post-bang unless they changed clothes mid-quad.
How about they went to get the stuff to wash, changed and put the clothes they were wearing in the wash?
Given how early in the day this was, that just seems very silly to me lol. Those clothes should have still been clean!
I’d assume they wanted more comfortable clothes for their particular style of “doing laundry”.
Some of y’all must not have ever been dorm dwellers. Washing clothes is a chore so when you wash, you wash it all. Including the clothes that you have hung back up because they didn’t look dirty and have consequently worn three times. You put on your scruffiest, least often worn in public clothes because every thing else is going in the washer. Half the people in that shot wouldn’t even be wearing underwear. Not for sexy reasons but because it is all in the wash.
It’s also expensive, so you stuff as much into every load as you can.
It was actually cheaper for me to drive across the state to my grandmother’s house, do laundry there, and drive back to college than to do it in the laundry room. Of course, gas was $0.99/gallon back then, but on the other hand my car got 18 MPG.
Ahhh, the rustic antiquity of… the dot-com bubble.
“Well… I came all this way…”
“No… no?”
They even got undressed for it.
wait a second
in all fairness, it’s a good idea to change into temporary clothing to do laundry so you can clean your current outfit if you’ve been wearing it for long enough to get it dirty
i mean it’d be a bit awkward but i wouldn’t be surprised if some ppl were tempted to sit on the washing machines versus leaning against it just because (i mean there’s even someone on the left cut off that’s sitting and being casual)
Well no they didn’t. Not yet anyway.
do any of these characters even get names?
heck I don’t care if they never get tagged and we never see em again, but come on, I’d settle any names given to them no matter how rediculous
No! Not even their mamas named them!
From left: Bodkin Van Horn, Snimm, Dorothy, Joyce, Marvin O’Gravel Balloon-Face, Zanzibar Buck Buck McFate
You misspelled Snimn’s name.
My bad.
Is this a “Too Many Daves” reference?
Well, now it’s too late to tell.
But yes it is and the reason you don’t see Hot-Shot or Sunny Jim in this group is they’ve taken the time when their four roommates are out of the dorm to masturbate.
Honestly to me they all look like reskins of people we know. From left to right skipping Dorothy and Joyce:
Sarah
Booster
Ruth
Billie
I legit thought that was Booster and was confused why they weren’t tagged.
So they’re the palette swapped versions that are harder to beat up? Dumbing of Rage II has such an amazing soundtrack.
When the boys do their laundry, we instead see the original Japanese release of the same game, known as
BareBear Moose Knuckle IIFrom right to left, their canon names are Brandy, Chris, Ziva, and Dippin’ Dots Laura.
They were named by canons?
Their cannon names, by contrast, are Basilic, Dora, Schwerer Gustav, Zamzama, and Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket Pistol.
We should start a petition
considering their expert clamblock, they should all be named so we can curse them. ~<3
I think Willis knows that if he names them, the weirdos on Patreon will going to force him to think of a bonus strip to write about them.
He thinks not having a name is going to keep the weirdos from forcing him to think of a bonus strip about book girl?
I mean none of them even got their faces drawn
They don’t have faces. If they turned round they’d be smooth and blank like eggs.
I think the ponytail girl is a hair dyed Catcher Fraiser AKA Catch Phrase Girl!
This is actually the group of people who yelled about pegging in the quad.
God some part of me would love Joyce and Dorothy to run into that group again. “So, did you ever figure out which not-sex kink was your favorite???”
Joyce and Dorothy find out that they’ve become like mini-celebrities for this group and they come up constantly as an inside joke.
Isn’t one of them Booster?
Well its not stopping the lady on the left
She even has some sexy Amber fics to get her in the mood.
GATEKEEPING THE LAUNDRY ROOM?!??
DURING PRIDE MONTH?!???!?!!?
I know, it’s appalling.
Hands up if you also forgot what day of the week it’s meant to be in this story.
✋🏽
\o
I barely keep track of what day of the week it is in real life, so it’s not that high of a bar.
👋🏻
Why not do each others’ laundry?
What?
You can do laundry by hand, believe me!
If this page had upvotes, you would have one from me. Bravo.
So when, as a kid, my grandma told me that she used to do laundry by hand, she was assuming (correctly) it would go over my head?
Run with this, Willis!
This masturbation strategy needs workshopping….unless you’re daring.
Crossed legs, dark hair, with blue book might be bold and going for it.
Probably has a bottle of fabric softener strategically placed…
strategically placed just off screen.
EXTREMELY good comedic timing of the rare use of only two panels in a strip.
They’ll have to share a machine.
Or join the girl on the left.
who just wants to read her slash-fic in peace.
Oh my god I can’t believe Joyce and Dorothy are going to cheat on their boyfriends in a large 6 person orgy
Thank you, this genuinely made me laugh
What if they get to watch?
A six person laundry orgy was not something I knew I needed today.
It’s okay, it’s a self cleaning sin
We should had see it coming.
Okay, I did not think they’d move this fast
I thought we’d be living in the moment of “we’re into each other?” But I guess let’s barrel ahead
I would imagine that laundrabation might be even more comfortable for them then other things, as they have already done it. Acknowledging feelings for each other might be too scary compared to something that they have already done before.
I think you’re right
It lives in a grey area where they can experience joy without actually confronting the situation, or I guess sort of grey cause Joyce herself said it’s sex m
What is the truth Joyce?!?
The truth is you’re allowed to bang your same sex best friend like once. Jennifer said so that means it must be true. Twice is “like” once and besides this isn’t even fully banging. So it must be okay, right?
Logic checks out
Oh thank god but also dammit. (I am a Sickos all the way.)
But where do you fall on the Ultra-Sicko to really just Pro-Train-Wreck spectrum?
honestly those are the same thing to me
It’s the difference between trash-goblin and chaos-goblin.
By most people’s standards, very likely Ultra-Sicko.
they truly were ready to go cheat on their respective partners huh
As they should.
I mean it was pretty clearly telegraphed, yeah
joe aside, would walky even be upset versus “called it”
Also, as far as Joyce is concerned, Jennifer gave her permission.
I thought Joyce knew better than to listen to Jennifer about stuff like this
Joyce knows better than to listen to Billie about common sense things!
Fucking your best friend, though, is a woman of the world thing, and Billie is nothing if not an exemplar of the world-femme.
Meh. It happens.
Joe and Walky deserve better :/
They will wait until next Sunday
Or they could realize that either of their bedrooms are likely to be less crowded. I’m mean Sarah’s probably working out in a gym somewhere.
There are not two separate vibrating driers in their rooms, but yeah, they could each go to their room.
Dorothy take Joyce to a sex shop so y’all can pick out vibrators, or at least show her an online store because Joyce would probably have a panic attack just seeing a shop like that
i woudln’t be surprised if they’ve passed by sex shops before and joyce had no idea what it is
i haven’t been but i think i saw a local one on the map that was in the same shopping area as some church
The Adult Bookstore and the Christian Bookstore next door share a storeroom. And clerks trade off on wearing the nun costume.
I suppose that’s marginally better than trading a nun back and forth.
I bet that the Sisters of Our Lady of the Scarlet Letterhead that are being put out of work by nun cosplayers would disagree!
See, I WAS thinking that there might be some sort of open-relationship option open for Joe/Joyce/Dorothy/Walky, but now I realize that Joyce/Dorothy would have to be a clothesed relationship.
As wet as this can get, hopefully they can get dryer
I’m cry laughing. I gotta say though laundromats/laundry rooms are on the unsexy places for me (having to use laundromats as a kid when we were too poor to fix our washer/drier and there being lots of fundamental people there with Chick tracks). Plus I’m allergic to detergent/softener. In college we just watched movies together on a laptop in the laundry room to make sure no one threw your clothes out of the dryer and stole your time. I didn’t make it to second semester though…
Girls…
Women.
Just bros being bros.
Roommates even.
Oh my gods, they were roommates.
Wait, Dorothy is Becky’s room mate!
And not a guy in sight!
step 1) go buy a dildo or a vibrator like a normal person so you are not masturbating in a public space with a public machine
step 2) the plausible deniability is gone, stop cheating on your respective partners, you’re both being terrible
The first step is fully reasonable. The second step is a filthy lie.
The first step might be reasonable, but maybe not for everyone. For the owner of the blue book, it might be part of the charm.
The second step starts out not understanding plausible deniability at all and goes downhill from there.
i’m surprsied at least dorothy wouldn’t have one but would be amusing if roz had some extra unused ones that she’d give away like with the condoms
What? By masturbating? They might have been intending to sit on driers across the room from each other.
Even if they’re right next to each other, holding hands, it doesn’t have to qualify as cheating.
Grey areas?!? In terms of sexual intercourse and relationships?!? In THIS comments section?!??????
I know, right? As if nobody here has fucked, diddled, or even cybered outside their established relationship.
Approx 40% people who have absolutely never ever even caught feelings for someone without immediately turbo nuking the relationship they were currently in because wanting to bang someone is cheating. Actually talking to the person you want to bang is double cheating.
They’d have to start cheating first. I like the way you think.
Indeed.
It’s like people forget that you can date and sleep with multiple people without it being cheating.
Joyce dryer-sexed Dorothy before she was dating Joe. By that logic, she had a preestablished relationship with Dorothy, meaning that, if anything, she was cheating on Dorothy with Joe. However, again, since no one has established any boundaries, none currently exist. Just dating someone does not give them exclusive rights to you unless you explicitly, verbally consent to that. Your partner does not own you.
There is no reading of the text in which any of the 4 involved in this are thinking like that.
They have not made explicit verbal agreements – because very few naive teens do that. Joyce did however talk about how the first laundry with Dorothy wasn’t cheating because it was before she got together with Joe and Dorothy said last night “We can’t. I’m with Walky. You’re with Joe.”
They think they’re exclusive. There’s no reason to think Walky or Joe think otherwise.
Yes, you can date and sleep with multiple people without it being cheating, but if you’re in an acknowledged relationship and you actually care about the other person’s feelings, you should talk to them about it and no rely on letter of the law “We never actually said” bullshit. Because the concern should be about hurting someone you care about, not whether you signed off on some rule.
If they go ahead with this and Joe winds up devastated by it and then Joyce pulls the “when did I explicitly, verbally consent to being exclusive” card, that’s not going to make him feel better about it.
Joyce has also described herself as “in a monogamous relationship with another person” while talking to Dorothy: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/03-trystin-in-the-wind/aboutchange/
I’d forgotten about that one. Thanks.
why the hell is everyone in their socks in a communal space with a filthy floor? iit’s almost as bad as being out in the street in your socks. less chance of stepping on broken glass here but still, gross
You can’t prove in a court of law that the floor is dirty.
I was going to say, that floor looks uncommonly clean to me. I mean people are sitting on it, and I can’t really see them doing that if the floor was dirty.
As someone that lived in a dorm, I can say with confidence that people routinely walked around in their socks or barefoot. The floor was vacuumed regularly and everybody generally treats the place like a really big house with a lot of housemates in it.
Grow up on a farm and few surfaces are too gross to walk barefoot on.
Though yes, having some real world experience and learning more about microbes and whatnot, there are more surfaces I’m now unwilling to walk barefoot on.
other than sandals or so maybe they were planning to take those off at the end and put them inside if not just a spare pair they’re fine with walking in at the dorms since walky and that one side chara girl has def been barefoot around the doms too
I’d have thought feet were a preference thing when it comes to clothing. They are not pubic areas, they are not connected to the body interior. I mean, licking the floor might be a bit undesirable, but toddlers and dogs do it and survive.
Unless the floor is wet, who cares? Socks get dirty.
That’s my main issue, just that the laundry room in my dorm often had small puddles of water and wet socks suck. Also it was a tile floor in the basement– it was cold.
Their shoes are in the wash.
In my opinion, socks and shoes are gross foot prisons and I don’t wear them ever unless I have to. (Which is most of the time I go outside.) Certainly I’m not going to have my footwear decided by germs. There is such a thing as washing if you get dirty, you know.
Wow, just showing your hand here. You know Dumbing of Age commenters have never heard of washing themselves. Just look how confused people were when Joe went into the shower the other day.
Joe wasn’t going into the shower to wash himself, he was going to “wash himself.”
If you say so, Philip.
Socks are easier to draw than bare feet.
:/
You rang?
No, but thank you for asking.
At least the universe keeps sabotaging their attempts to cheat lmao. Which doesn’t actually count for much since it was still their intent but at least roadblocks can slow the momentum so they can maybe have a second thought about doing so
I believe you may be confusing a slippery slope with the edge of a cliff.
Their intent is just to relieve stress, they’re incapable of precessing it as cheating because they’re so in denial of their feelings for each other that they don’t see it as an intimate act with one another.
Joyce said just a few days ago that she’d had sex with Dorothy. She also told Joe before that doing laundry with Dorothy was before they got together so it hadn’t been cheating. Last night (comic time) when they were in bed, Dorothy said “we can’t. You’re with Joe, I’m with Walky”.
They’re both definitely capable of processing it as cheating.
ORGY!
This was literally just an attempt to cheat, full stop.
Dorothy I expected, she’s imploding right now after all. But I expected better from Joyce.
Would had been awesome.
I think now that they have to take this forced pause, they will think about it and realize that they need to talk.
Go Team Relationship Paladins!
Damn. Guess they’ve just gotta have gay sex the old fashioned way
Accidentally reported my favorite comment on the page 🙁
Well, now you have to report yourself to cancel it out.
I had to do this same thing. MagicalDuck, your comment is beautiful but apparently cursed by a witch.
DARN
ha.
fffffffft.
Sickos continues to stay on the winning
all 4 background characters are in a polycule and you can’t prove otherwise (unless you’re Willis but I dont see why they would)
They were going to do laundry together, but now that Joyce and Dorothy are there they’ll have to clean their clothes.
it reminds me of that joke from Friends when someone else took their table/seat in a pub
Okay, as this is slightly relevant to today’s comic, I’ll chime in to the the “was it sex/not sex” debate with a personal memory of mine that somehow, for whatever reason, resurfaced to me.
CW: a bit creepy, but nothing bad actually happened, at least not to me.
At the beginning of my first year of uni, there was a dude who came to me and basically asked me to join a “masturbation party” with other guys. Basically, the plan was for their group to hire the service of a professional stripper and everyone would masturbate while watching the woman perform.
I absolutely noped out and told him I wasn’t interested and that story ends there.
But thinking back about it, had I somehow participated (no chance in hell, mind you, but let’s speculate), I don’t think I would have claimed I had sex after such situation, either with the stripper or the other guys, and it seems to me this situation in question is not that far removed of what Joyce and Dorothy did.
I don’t know, it’s just my personal perceptions of thing. I’d say the emotional level of implication was way higher than what I was proposed, but, to my understanding, emotional involvement is not an absolute requisite for sex to take place either.
In “Talk Dirty to Me”, Sally Tisdale tells about this time she was acting in a peep show and some guy locked eyes with her as he started to masturbate, and she stared right back and kinda got into things until it was over. And then she gets into a debate with herself over whether they’d just had sex.
It’s been ages since I read it, so I may be misremembering the details, but it seems relevant. And as I recall, it was a funny (and thought-provoking!) read.
I agree that I don’t think it’s easily clear as black and white if this can be taken as a sex act,
but for real, I don’t think it’s cheating either way.
I’m not sure about it either, but Joyce does see it as sex. I think her definition is deeply flawed, but she came to the conclusion that she’d had sex with Dorothy. If she’s willing to do something she considers “having sex”, it’s pretty hard to argue she’s not willing to cheat.
Which also ignores that lots of things that aren’t sex are considered cheating. Make-outs, for example
As long as they don’t hold hands while interlocking their fingers, this isn’t cheating yet.
How in the name of Cheese are there already so many comments lol
this is actually the funniest strip ever
I really wish this was the last strip of the storyline. Or even of the book.
I’m glad there are other people there to prevent them from “doing laundry” together. Because while I think it’s a silly definition, Joyce decided to define sex in a way that would include her “doing laundry” with Dorothy. I’m kinda disappointed in her for attempting to do something that, according to her definition of sex, would be cheating on Joe.
I mean, it doesn’t really make it any better. If the only reason Joyce isn’t cheating on Joe is because she tries to but fails, the worst thing about her cheating is already there.
Keeps things up in the air longer. Gives them more of a chance to talk themselves out of it, while also keeping the tension high for us. I mean, the intent might be there, but they still could have stopped themselves. Like Dorothy did last night.
I don’t think it’s particularly silly to define mutual masturbation as a sex act.
Okay, but Kyulen does.
Joyce’s definition of sex wasn’t even mutual masturbation. It was when somebody you love helps you have an orgasm. Which I still think is way too broad a definition of sex. But Joyce realized right after that her definition includes the time when Dorothy helped her masturbate in the laundry room.
See, if you two had just had a threesome with Joe on impulse, none of this would be a problem. Why can’t these characters do the sensible fanfic-related thing?! Instead they keep dumbing around! It’s like
I DEMAND NAMES FOR THESE NULL-CHARACTERS! ANYONE CAN PROVIDE THEM!
One of them is Hugh
Saved by the rush hour?
Oh no. Now they’ll have to do it in one of their rooms. Maybe on the same bed. And maybe they’ll hold hands
Woah there, let’s not get wild with hand holding
I may be a sicko but this is too far even for me
Do they have different handedness? I’m not sure entirely how not being ambidextrous affects touching one’s self, but if it’s like other things, I can imagine it could make holding hands less fulfilling for one of them, unless one is a righty and one a lefty, or one or both are amby
That’s what’ll lead to the obvious solution of just touching each other instead.
Oh they cannot seriously be thinking about doing this
No, I think they passed the thinking about it stage and are on a pit stop to doing-this town.
I think it’s more that they skipped the thinking about it stage.
idk, I think they’ve been thinking about it for a long looonnng time.
Fantasizing is thinking about it, right?
Thought crimes aren’t real. They’re allowed to think about doing anything they want.
Truish, but at a certain point thinking becomes talking and talking becomes planning and that leads to action.
At this point, they’ve not only thought about it, but said “Hey, let’s go do it”, gotten their stuff and gone to a place to do it. They’ve made a plan and put it into action.
And this, friends, is why thinking about committing a crime *isn’t* a crime, but taking an overt act towards the commission of that crime *is*.
Now I’m imagining reading this strip out of context – either as the first DoA strip you come across or coming back after a long absence. Completely innocuous.
Then reading the comments.
I don’t really think Dorothy considers mutual masturbation sex. It’s only really Joyce who arrived to that conclusion.
Now what should really happen is they do Walky and Joe’s laundry at the same time. I’m sure that’ll solve more problems
Even if it’s not sex, that doesn’t mean it’s not cheating.
I’m confused. So, masturbating with your friend while you’re in a relationship is okay? Is masturbating with your friend just a thing people do together? I feel like I’m getting mixed signals everywhere
You’re getting mixed signals because there isn’t a single answer to that question. People’s relationships and the boundaries of those relationships vary by the individuals involved, so not everyone’s opinion about what is cheating is going to match up.
Ideally you would check with your partner(s) about where you and your partner(s) boundaries for “cheating” are. To make sure everyone is on the same page!
These people are 18/19/20 though, so they’re stupid and horny and haven’t learned how to communicate properly about this kind of thing yet. Which is awesome drama, but is upsetting some people for whatever reason.
I think it’s pretty hard to argue that Joyce at least thinks it’s cheating – unless she’s somehow confused Joe telling her that masturbation isn’t cheating to mean that doing it with Dorothy isn’t. She certainly did originally, since she had to specify it wasn’t since it was before they were together. And now she’s decided that it was having sex.
Joe might think otherwise, though I doubt it, but in this case, if she thinks it is, it seems morally equivalent to me.
Even without that take, it’s definitely close enough that you really should check, if only to keep from blowing up a relationship you care about.
I do find it interesting drama, but I don’t think I want the consequences of actually going through with it. It’s likely to blow up both of these relationships and I did really want to see Joe/Joyce play out longer first.
First sentence should be “Joyce at least *doesn’t* think it’s cheating”
Good thing I didn’t try to argue one way or another about what Joyce, Joe, or Dorothy thinks. I was talking about real people in the comments section having different answers about whether this counts as cheating or not and explaining why that might be.
Like me! I personally don’t think this is cheating. I think it’s stupid and potentially going to hurt some people (maybe everyone involved) but I don’t think it’s cheating.
Probably badly stated, but one thing I wanted to get across is that if Joyce is willing to do something she thinks is cheating, that’s essentially the same moral line to cross as something you would think is cheating. She thinks it’s cheating and that’s a line she’s willing to cross. (apparently, at least.)
Yeah absolutely. That wasn’t what the conversation was about in this particular thread, but I don’t disagree that it’s obvious Joyce is willing to go against her own moral opinions to bone Dorothy down.
Sheltered home schooled (ex)fundamentalist Christian girl has done a lot of covering for social blunders caused by Joyce’s probable autism. It’s not impossible that she did come away with the impression that if masturbation isn’t cheating then masturbation with Dorothy isn’t cheating.
Especially factoring in over correction from the entirely insane biblical position that even thinking about another person is cheating (But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.). Joyce really has no reliable rudder for what is considered acceptable in a relationship so a misunderstanding like that is not unlikely even before factoring in “Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships”.
Thank you 😀 I feel complicated about it but I guess that’s because it is. I do hope this doesn’t end too badly… The comments were overloading my brain haha
Totally valid! Yeah it’s a wildly complicated issue, and when people try to boil complex, nuanced issues down to a right-or-wrong thing it tends to get… sticky at the best of times.
Glad it helped, hope you’re enjoying the story!
It’s like Jennifer said, a little nookie with your best friend is no big deal.
Just so we’re all in agreement (HA!), Joyce and Dorothy were going to cheat on their partners but were laundry blocked.
They got blue sheeted
I’m not in agreement that what they were going to do counts as cheating, but I agree they were absolutely intending to sit on washing machines and get off together, yes.
Regardless of whatever we think on what constitutes cheating or not, we know Joyce DOES think it would.
I…don’t think we do know that?
I think we know she considers it a sexual act, but that doesn’t mean it immediately constitutes infidelity. Given her strict fundie background, it’s much more likely that she thinks she’s found a kind of sex “loophole”, of sorts, an idea that has been reinforced twice over by Billie, who we know she admires even if that admiration was tarnished by Billie’s many, visible failures.
Also, like, as much as she considers it a sex act, common sense considers it sitting on dryers jorkin it, so how bad can it be? AND, cherry on top, Dorothy has just said, flat out, it’s not because they’re attracted to one another. It’s just a release, right?
The nearly kissing was an obvious infidelity that Joyce recoiled from. But this? This is different!
When she first told Joe about doing laundry with Dorothy, she clarified that it wasn’t cheating because they weren’t dating yet.
Also it was Dorothy that recoiled from the near kissing, not Joyce.
… you personally might think she holds what Jennifer says as gospel truth, but I’ve seen her say and act that she knows Jennifer does not have great judgment in this area.
This is different because Joyce has said this would be cheating.
But hey, if you think neither of them know it’s cheating, then why haven’t they invited Becky or Sarah? They have rooms. They can all hold hands and masturbate together there.
I didn’t say any of that, and you know I didn’t say any of that, and you can go somewhere else with the bad faith reading, HueSat. I do not like nor tolerate your bullshit. I also didn’t make weird suggestions. That was all you, and you can fuck right off with it.
thejeff, could you link the strip because I don’t recall that statement. I’m not saying I don’t believe it, but I don’t remember it.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/04-but-dont-give-yourself-away/cheating-2/
Huh. Okay, that does cast things in a different light. Thank you, thejeff.
Lotta plot threads all coming together here! I think it’s kinda neat, personally, the way we all kind of crowd-source a consistent memory of events by sharing links with one another. 🙂
Sure, maybe, but I don’t think that makes it cheating. Joyce also thought that touching herself would send her to Hell for a long time, and I don’t think that was true either.
I do honestly have a hard time with the idea of “objective” definition of cheating separate from the specific people involved, because as one of those poly/ENM types I’ve always thought the only useful definition of cheating was “violating your partner’s expectations/boundaries/rules concerning your emotional/physical/romantic interactions with others”.
I think the issue is that a lot of folks are conflating the two.
Some people are talking about cheating only in terms of what Joyce and Dorothy think counts, other people are saying things like “so we can all agree this is cheating right”, and sometimes explicitly clarifying that they mean it would be cheating, objectively, for everyone on Earth.
In the absence of any specific agreement between the various partners, you kind of have to fall back on what their likely expectations are.
With Joyce’s and Dorothy’s own thoughts on it count mostly in terms of their intent: If they’re doing something they think is cheating, then they’re at least intending to cheat, even if most people (or even their partners) don’t think so.
Sure, but trying to enforce universal ideas of what cheating is… is just bound to rub a lot of folks the wrong way, especially when those “universal ideas” echo the exact kind of polyamory-erasure that folks also get from society. You know?
I just think we’d be having fewer and less impassioned arguments if everyone was prefacing such statements with “Joyce’s definition of sex and the relationship she’s set up with Joe makes this an attempt to cheat”, instead of……… “anyone who thinks this isn’t cheating is a horrible partner who doesn’t deserve love”, which is only like one step more harsh than I’ve seen people saying with their whole chests.
Sure, but in the absence of specific details of what they’ve agreed to, we’ve really got nothing to work with except “would most people really see this as cheating and thus be hurt by it if their partners did it to them.”
And from the other side, someone here earlier was arguing that since Joyce and Joe hadn’t made an explicit verbal agreement to be exclusive, nothing she could do would be cheating.
— “would most people really see this as cheating and thus be hurt by it if their partners did it to them”
I agree that it’s difficult to argue cogently about the situation in the comic without agreeing on certain set terms, but please understand that this desire to use what “most people” define as cheating to be the correct and only definition is… exactly what’s getting the pushback?
Like. Imagine for a moment that you are someone else, someone for whom Joyce’s definition of sex really resonated. It’s a great definition for you! It’s exactly how you’d define sex.
Now imagine reading the comment section for the last few days, where the majority opinion has decidedly been that that definition isn’t just wrong, it’s ridiculous and absurd and it must be Willis contorting Joyce’s feelings to fit the plot.
Imagine you try to point out that actually, some real people including yourself do use that definition, and being told that you don’t count, because you’re so far in the minority that your definition doesn’t matter, and that by saying something you’re actually distracting from the important conversation here, which is about how silly Fictional Character Joyce is being.
Hypothetical You already knows you’re in the minority. This is maybe the first time you’ve even seen a fictional character share your definition of sex.
…Do you not think that would chafe? Do you not think you’d feel the need to push back a little harder?
— And from the other side, someone here earlier was arguing that since Joyce and Joe hadn’t made an explicit verbal agreement to be exclusive, nothing she could do would be cheating.
This feels like an argument from incredulity, like it’s ridiculous on the face of it to feel that way, but. I actually think a lot of couples would benefit from having a conversation like that where they lay down exactly what their expectations are in terms of seriousness and exclusivity and what qualifies as cheating.
I did a fair bit of online dating, and maybe it’s different for cis straight m/f couples on dating apps, but it didn’t seem to be uncommon in my experience for folks’ expectations to clash, actually, over whether you needed to immediately set your profile to “in a relationship” once you’d been on a date with someone and you’d both had a good time, or if there was some minimum number of successful dates that a pair had to reach before the “are we exclusive now?” conversation happened and resulted in said changes to dating profiles.
1) I think this entirely missed what I was trying to say, which is probably my fault. The key to the bit you quoted there was the last phrase “and thus be hurt by it if their partners did it to them”. The reason “most people” is important is because if you don’t have reason to think otherwise, your partner is likely to fall into the “most people” category. And you probably don’t want to hurt them.
I don’t think what most people think is the “correct and only definition” and I don’t even have a particularly hard definition in my own. The goal here isn’t to hold to the one true definition of cheating, but to not hurt your partner through assumption clash. For which, I’d even say “err on the side of caution”. Or you know, talk to them.
2) I think a lot of couples would benefit from that discussion. I’ve got absolutely no problem with having that discussion. My issue is with assuming that if you haven’t had that discussion, that it must be “anything goes”. Nor does this necessarily start with immediately after the first date or after the first sex, but by the “in a relationship” stage, which clearly is the state both couples here are in (and Dorothy and Joyce are not), if you assume you’re still not exclusive just because you haven’t talked about it, you’re running a real risk of destroying the relationship and hurting someone you care about.
Not because of any moral issue beyond “unnecessarily hurting people you care about is bad”, which I hope we can agree on?
Caveat: There are likely some subcultures where that would be a common assumption, even for people who’d say they were in a relationship. That obviously changes things. Remember, I’m looking at expectations, not moral rules. Random Indiana University college kids are not such a subgroup.
Thinking a little more: Would it make more sense to drop the “most people”
and use something like “It would be reasonable to expect your partner to see this as cheating”?
1. I think it’s better to talk to them than to make assumptions either way, yeah.
2. See point 1.
Of course I agree that unnecessarily hurting people is bad, but.
Poly people know they’re in the minority. It doesn’t mean they aren’t a valid way of being a person, or that it’s fair that all the onus of making sure they and their partner are on the same page about exclusivity always falls on them, with monogamous people getting to live the life of Being the Default That’s Always Catered to Without Needing to Ask For it.
I think probably the biggest issue here is that we KNOW Joyce at least at one point thought that “doing laundry” would be cheating, but we have only the barest semblance of a vibe as to how Dorothy or Joe or Walky would feel about it.
Which is also why I’m personally a relationship paladin about it, because I’m invested in Joyce trying to “stay good” by her own terms.
Absolutely-for-sure-no-arguing-at-all.
I was just trying to explain to thejeff why people are kinda arguing… past each other about this whole thing, you know?
There’re two arguments happening. “Does Joyce consider this cheating?” (And I think we all know the answer is yes.) “Should this be considered cheating by some sort of objective definition?” (And this is where the arguments start, and things start getting increasingly personal and fraught.)
They’re separate conversations, though, and the latter shouldn’t continually be dragged into the former as if it’s the same argument, and people who are saying “this isn’t universally cheating, no” are also saying “Joyce isn’t cheating on Joe”, when… they’re mostly not, from what I can see.
Yeah, and we can’t really discount the influence of Poe’s Law — we have both “a lot of people who are incredibly vehement about aspects of this storyline” and “a lot of people who are incredibly dedicated to being trollishly vehement about aspects of this storyline”.
Big Z, I totally agree. Also as a polyamorous person *high five!* I always find the discourse around these issues interesting.
It is deeply interesting, and of course being poly makes it LITERALLY more complex because of all the potential multiplicative relationships, each of which might have its own standards.
Hell, you could do a dissertation on “my partners’ other relationships partially impinge on me because we’re all connected at one remove” vs. “my partner’s relationships are theirs to manage, and it is my partner’s sole responsibility to set/enforce any boundaries their partners’ wanted”.
If I found out my partner mutually masturbated with someone I’d absolutely consider that cheating. In most monogamous relationships I’d imagine people would. All the people in the comments saying they wouldn’t consider it cheating are baffling me.
Unless you’re fully in an open relationship and do not give a shit if your partner engages in sexual acts/intimacy with another person without telling you… it’s pretty obviously cheating.
If you read this like an AITA then Joyce and Dorothy would both be TA.
Maybe the fact that other people take on it “baffles” you shows that it isn’t actually as universal as you think?
See, @thejeff, here’s an example: could have just said “obviously Joyce considers this cheating and that’s all that matters”, instead said that most people in monogamous or indeed any relationship that isn’t “fully open” would and that it’s baffling that anyone thinks differently…
Also “don’t give a shit” when talking about how such people feel about their partners, which is kinda loaded.
Yeah, I agree that’s pretty loaded.
Like I’m not even poly and I’m irritated reading this kind of comment.
I said all agree it’s cheating because the only people that the definition matters to are:
1. Joyce, Walky, Joe, and Dorothy
Yeah, but this other aspect to the conversation is almost certainly why Nymph felt the need to reply the way they did. Because some folks are either definitely trying to litigate some sort of universal definition of cheating that centers only monogamous people who feel just like they do, or trolling, and it gets exhausting.
Fair: only those four fictional characters’ definitions of cheating matter to whether what these two are doing is hurting their partners.
Less fair: if mutual masturbating isn’t cheating for you personally, you’re a weirdo and a bad partner.
If it’s not cheating for you then whatever- but some of these comments are treating it as like a default ‘oh that’s not cheating’ which is the part that is baffling.
Yeah I get it, people who are different than you confuse you and you think that justifies rudeness.
Now where will they masturbate?
Let’s all sternly express our disappointment in Joyce & Dorothy some more. Eventually it’ll reach through the fabric of our reality into the comic & they’ll start making better, more moral choices.
HARRUMPH! Slatterns, I say! Loose women!
Everyone! TUT LOUDER!!
Me personally, I’m sternly expressing my disappointment in the hopes they make more ENTERTAINING choices — the fact that the more entertaining choices would also be the more moral ones is just a happy accident, but Joeyce > Joyrothy is just a fact of life.
I don’t think you are using “faxt” correctly.
This is how you use “faxt”:
https://xkcd.com/1467/
… the Aristocrats?
Guess Dorothy is going to have to schedule Joyce for a 2am laundry session.
I don’t know why, but I’d always associate Sunday with laundry day.
Ah. Joyce’s first orgy
“Shucks, I guess we’ll just go back to my room.”
Just to throw another aspect into the jumble of definitions:
Joyce thinks that their first laundry time was sex because Dorothy “helped her”. Specifically, helped her by teaching her – not by being present. Thus, this second time, when no more teaching is necessary, there’s no helping, therefore no sex.
Is this what’s going on in her head? No clue. But it’s a consistent way of looking at it.
This is an interesting point?
I don’t have any idea what’s actually going through Joyce’s head right now, so I kind of suspect she’s in Too Hornt to Think Straight (haHA pun) territory, but this is one possible explanation for why she might think this isn’t something she needs to talk to Joe about before it happens.
One interesting thing about this whole arc is that we’ve gotten a good look at where Dorothy stands on this, but we’ve seen a lot less introspection from Joyce so far.
Yeah, agreed.
It’s definitely been on purpose, too? A lot of the tension in the pre-Joe/Joyce date was wrapped up in the fact that we didn’t know what was going on in Joyce’s head.
Today, all that’s really changed is that we know she thinks the last laundry room encounter was sex, and that she was interested in a repeat experience, but there’s so much still fuzzy about what she’s thinking.
I suspect my inability to comprehend this entire plot point might hinge on me simply being too ace to understand how the fuck “Too Hornt to Think” even works, or is a thing.
Like that just sounds like a fake thing people made up???? I know it’s real, I guess, but it really just sounds super fake.
There’s an extent to which being horny gets so distracting it’s hard to focus on other things, but there’s no way people are going into Sex Berserker states where fucking is the only thing their brain can comprehend. Being too horny into think straight/clearly is certainly a thing, but at that point it’s still possible to recognize it’s become a bit much and you should chill out.
@Joyfulldreams: I am so very right there with you, and I think it’s part of why I have no idea what Joyce is thinking, heh.
@Taffy: genuinely appreciative of the breakdown!
(Not being able to imagine it as a thing myself is, I think, where the appeal of something like Sex Pollen comes from for me — the second there’s Actual Magic happening, I find it much easier to be like, “okay yes this makes sense.” Haha.)
Like, cheating as a concept only makes any emotional sense to me if — okay, let’s say we have a fictional love triangle: Jane, Jack, and Joan.
So many stories, both fictional and from stuff like AITA, where Jack and Jane are perfectly happy together, but Jack winds up sleeping with Joan anyway, or feels really tempted to, and I’m just…? At a loss? Because the only way that makes any empathic sense to me is if Jack was really miserable with Jane.
And it’s not “being a better person” in this case, it’s just lacking a specific drive. I can perfectly understand eating a cupcake when you’re trying not to have too much sugar!
So intellectually I know it’s a thing, but it’s a strange thing to me, something I will only ever really understand by rough description.
Sex Pollen is a hilarious concept to me. “Oh no, a large bee landed on the Fuck Flowers and now the Sex Pollen is falling on us! Welp, guess we’re doing cowgirl position for the next hour or so, what can ya do.”
I think that’s part of why I like it, because it’s SO over the top and silly.
The general category also includes things like love potions, special pheromones, etc, but sex pollen will always be the most fun to say and joke about.
I expected this. I think they’re both in a position now where they can’t fall back on “doing laundry”, and anything else (like going back to one of their rooms) would feel like an escalation compared to that so they’re going to actually have to confront how they both feel about this whole messed up scenario.
I’m still, frankly, hoping they don’t cheat. Joeyce is too fun a ship to watch for it blow up before it even really sets sail.
I think Willis agreed with that last part, which is why this didn’t happen two years ago. (Per their own public-but-on-Patreon posts about it.) But that at this point, they consider Joeyce as having set sail “enough” for whatever this is.
I still have my fingers crossed for poly, because I don’t want anyone to be sad (including Joe), but that’s still gonna be more Dorothy/Joyce than a lot of readers want. We can’t all win here unfortunately. :/
I suspect “enough” depends on what this turns out to be. They may have now come close enough to cause sufficient drama that they don’t need to go through with it, which will definitely blow everything up.
As much fun as the drama from Dorothy and Joyce doing laundry together again might be, I suspect it would probably blow up both relationships, which I don’t think would be what anyone wants.
Poly would be nice, but I don’t think any of them are ready to jump right into that. Could still be long run, but I doubt it’s a good way to handle them being horny today.
I’m just talking about how they said they almost started this storyline two years ago, then stopped, explicitly because Joe and Joyce hadn’t even had dinner together yet.
That seemed to me like a very similar sentiment to what Big Z was saying, and I just wanted to… I guess it might turn out to be “offer my condolences”, but it really does depend on where this is going.
(Which I tried to acknowledge by describing what’s currently happening as “whatever this is”.)
I mean, yeah, I also think I’d be pretty disappointed in Joyce for doing something she herself considers “cheating”, but I’m also Team Relationship Paladins (whatever the hell that means).
Side note: At one point, some of my friend groups started calling me Social Justice Paladin both to mock the SJW thing with actual D&D classes and because I have a fairly infinite amount of patience with trying to argue down incels and other toxic dudes without actually hitting anyone. =P
Heh, good for you on the side note. I do like reclaiming SJW and also expanding it to more classes, like Social Justice Bard.
On the other thing: that’s fair! And I just… yeah. Genuine sympathy for you and all the other Joeyce shippers if it gets sunk here in the process. :/ They’ve been sweet together, and I want poly in part because I also don’t actually want them to stop being sweet together…
(One other very possible outcome is that Joyce and Dorothy fooling around blows up not only their relationships with Walky and Joe but ALSO just doesn’t work out, so everyone winds up alone and sad for a while. I currently don’t foresee a path forward here where Joyce and Dorothy don’t hook up in some fashion, but I certainly see paths where everyone loses! Maximum Damn You Willis energy there.)
See, IMHO, at least in Joyce’s case given her moral bents, I think the only really plausible outcome of “Joyce and Dorothy fooling around” IS that everyone ends up lonely and sad — I think Joyce will have a hard time staying in a relationship that started as “cheating” (by her definition), even if she gives into temptation. Like, more Rich Mullins nightmares and such.
Well yeah and that’s why I don’t want them to cheat here.
I also get why they’ve already crossed the moral event horizon for a lot of readers, because yeah, they did come into this room with certain intentions. (Jury’s out on whether or not they would have stopped if the room had been empty, though. I think there’s just enough denial in that first panel that we might be looking at a case of one or both of them still kinda fooling themselves into thinking this doesn’t qualify as real masturbation/sex/cheating (in that order)….)
Still time for them to have a conversation instead of giving into horniness and feelings.
I just definitely don’t think there’s still time to fully get the genie back in the bottle here. These are not the actions of people who regret almost kissing right before Joyce’s date with Joe, for whom it was a one-time mistake to walk away from back to their boyfriends.
Ugh it finally happened, I forgot which comic I was commenting on!!! Willis I’m sorry pls nuke that.
My experience is that’s by far the most common outcome of relationships blowing up because of something seen as cheating.
And I don’t think I like that outcome, even in a Damn You Willis! way. I don’t think it goes to particularly interesting places storywise. He could surprise me of course.
My preferred scenario has at least a CHANCE of leading to ploy, mostly because “forced to actually confront this” is the best chance I think they have for no one to feel cheated on, which in my experience is a significant prerequisite for poly to happen.
“I guess we should just go back to our rooms. Our respective rooms.”
“…Yeah, that would probably be best.”
They go upstairs and give each other a small wave. Joyce opens her door, then glances down the hall before going in. Dorothy is standing in front of her door (which has a hair tie or something on the doorknob).
“Dorothy?”
“Becky and Dina are, um, ‘occupying’ my room.”
“W-well, I guess you can just… come in mine…”
Twenty or so minutes later, Sarah comes back to her room– with Joe walking with her, since he’d just been helping her work out. Joyce and Dorothy didn’t put anything on the doorknob. (Because why would they, when they definitely weren’t going…do… anything…) (Or they do put something for “privacy,” but it’s not a sock, and Sarah and Joyce haven’t actually established their own system…)
I would like to tie a few more storylines into this for max chaos, though.
Ooo
MORE CHOAS! Blood for the blood god! Etc.
I think what we’re all ignoring is that if Joyce and Dorothy both have sex in a way that’s recognised by both as sex, then they will complete the final part of the prophecy(the one only whispered in dark alleys) and thus begin the age of vampire robots
Pretty problematic if you ask me
I was all set to make a “so how’re we doing, folks? We being normal at one another for having different tastes in webcomic drama?” top-level, but this is so much better than anything I could have come up with that I’m just gonna admire it for a while longer instead.
Happy to have helped
Gotta keep the comments more in the chill zone one way or another
Bleh, good reminder not to be aggro. I am failing at that again. Comment section break!!
On it boss “proceed to break comment section with a hammer 🔨*
ffffff haha oh no
God forbid women bring forth the unholy era of running blood and crushing steel.
Having thought about this you’re right, I was being a prude
I shall try to be more sex-prophecy that causes the age of vampire robots to begin positive
I’m pretty firmly Not team Relationship Paladins but i also really don’t think these two are genuinely going to just get up and cheat on their partners no problem. What makes me curious more than anything is still what the hell Joyce’s gameplan is here.
Dorothy doesn’t consider her attraction to Joyce real, to her this is a neat trick that will hopefully get them to stop being horny for each other (a doomed effort) while Joyce is under no pretenses here she arguably knows more about what this situation actually is than Dorothy does.
A lot of folks (me included) were really curious as to what was going on through Joyce’s brain for the past few months but i’ve come to the conclusion it was in fact actually very bold of us to assume she was thinking at all!
Joyce is a very impulsive person she isn’t unintelligent but she thinks by the seat of her pants doing things via instinct and something you need to know is that instincts will sometimes lead you to places which braver men wouldn’t go with a gun.
I immensely look forward to seeing how this unfolds.
I agree. I feel like she’s not considering the bigger picture at all.
Dorothy says it’s just the trauma talking, but that’s purely denial talking.
Much like Joyce said earlier that it was just “hanky-panky-crazed”
Just tell them you want to lez out, they’ll understand
Somebody’s already sitting on a machine, casually reading some smut I have to assume.
Dippin’ Dots Laura may look like she’s reading smut, but in fact she’s reading “Sweet Ermengarde”, by H.P. Lovecraft.
Hey, don’t yuck someone else’s yum.
(There are much sexier horror authors tbh but who am I to judge Laura.)
Oh, it ain’t a horror story. It’s a comedic romance.
I don’t know. Lovecraft trying to write comedic romance seems pretty horrifying to me.
Am I the only one perplexed by the alt-text? I assumed that if I waited long enough, someone would have already explained it in another comment. Guess it wasn’t long enough.
I think it’s to do with an old picture Willis drew. Basically the origin of the whole ‘Joyce masturbating with a washing machine’ thing, the picture showed Sarah and Joyce both sitting on washing machines and Sarah had a book with the title ’57 varieties of ketchup’. Basically a fake porn title I think? I can’t find the picture to properly confirm this or not but I’m like 75% sure that’s what it’s referring to.
Aha, found it! Yep, that’s what it was referring to, Sarah’s book is called 57 varieties of ketchup and the cover is bright red. Also in case anyone tries to correct me as far as the washing machine thing yes I know it’s also a joke from Scrubs and yes I know Willis is a fan of Scrubs therefore that’s probably why they drew that picture.
Okay, then. Thank you!
Oh, so they were really going to do it, huh.
Looks like they certainly intended to, yeah.
note the one girl just doing it out in the open in front of everyone else, that’s probably part of the thrill
STORY TIME, INSPIRED BY BUT UNRELATED TO THE CURRENT COMIC DRAMA:
My long-time college roommate tells the story of how he got to move in two weeks early due to some special program he was in, and in the course of the campus being deserted he met a girl on his first or second day and they ended up going to the laundry room (since both their roommates were ALSO on this “college preview” trip and very homeboy types). Hanky-panky started to ensue… until a troop of players from the football team (also early onto campus) burst in.
Pause, deer in headlights look from all parties, until one of the players boomed “Damn, my brotha’ is GETTIN’ SOME.” and the team filed back out.
Obviously my roommate and his lady friend could not continue at that point. They kept hanging out, not being able to find any alone time. He finally, towards the end of the second week, convinced her it was a fluke and they’d have even less opportunity once the rest of campus filled up with students.
They are in the laundry room, hanky-panky has begun to ensue.
A door creaks.
“DAMN. Brotha’ is STILL GETTIN’ SOME.”
And thus did a whirlwind romance end, as stupidly as it began.
Gah, typos. the roommates were homeBODY types. As in, always home.
Had a good laugh from this story. We need an upvote tool in this comments section.
oh my god
thank you for sharing
It’s fine for Joyce and Dorothy to be in this room, for the reasons they’re in it.
That is, after all, what the room is for.
LAUNDRY ROOMS ARE FOR ALLOWING REPRESSED LESBIANS TO GET COMFORTABLE WITH ORGASMS
NOT DOING LAUNDRY