Early update for October 30, 2025
Added 2025-10-29 03:55:02 +0000 UTCshe can be taught, maybe
Comments
If it’s anything like my old work study position it’s not much at all.
Tifani
2025-10-29 22:32:31 +0000 UTCI dunno what Asma gets paid for this, but Jesus fuck, someone double it
BBCC
2025-10-29 22:02:45 +0000 UTCDorothy: "CHALLENGE ACCEPTED"
Harold
2025-10-29 20:56:52 +0000 UTCThis has been bugging me a little overnight, so I'm gonna try to get it down - but also, this is my third day without sleep, so I don't know how lucid I'm gonna be. My main issue with the dialogue here is that Joyce heads off down into purity culture tropes and Asma follows her. "What am I supposed to do, not kiss her?" "She was right there, it was impossible not to." Just on a factual level, this is incoherent. She wasn't 'right there' until Joyce ran into the protest to tell her that she *could* have what she wanted. And Joyce didn't just grab her and kiss her; there was very clear communication between them first. So where does this come from? This sort of assumption that romantic/erotic feelings are uncontrollable and have to be expressed regardless of context (or, from what Joyce just said, consent!) is what drives a lot of fundamentalist bullshit about sexuality that leads to the authoritarian repressiveness that Joyce was raised with (and that is being legislated for in far too many places, today!) Asma's response, "Don't put yourself in a position where you're tempted to," is word for word purity culture teaching. "Don't get in the back seat with boys." "Don't be alone with a boy." All aimed at girls - who are responsible to police their behaviour to keep the boys safe from their uncontrollable lusts. And of course the girls, who aren't allowed to have sexual feelings at all, have to practice the sort of double-think that Joyce gives us in the final panel. Joyce is better than this. In the Walkiverse, during the writing of which Willis was doing a lot of the work of deconstructing his own upbringing, Joyce was so terrified of her own sexual feelings that they ended up in an 'Anti-Joyce' clone. Which she shot in the head, as she couldn't tolerate that Joyce's uninhibited (selfish and enthusiastic) sexuality. In the Dumbiverse, Anti-Joyce has made a single brief appearance in dialogue, during which Joyce uses her as a way of telling Joe exactly how horny she is for him. But it's an integrated Joyce who gets down from the tree, and the following few days show how she gets to grips with being a sexual person in a safe, consenting, kind relationship. I've commented elsewhere about how Dorothy's anxiety short-circuits her brain - and so does her horniness. Is the same true for Joyce? We could argue it doesn't have to do much; she's always expressive about her feelings and thoughts. But this is 'post-nut clarity' Joyce. And honestly, I think she's often expressing herself most honestly and accurately when she's at her most passionate. In this dialogue I think she's actually regressed a little. In her own mind she's married this woman, and she's thinking like the romantic (home-)school girl she used to be - with all it's associated bullshit. Which is all to say, I think Dorothy has some more fundy to fuck from her.
ArdieBea
2025-10-29 20:29:46 +0000 UTCBringing this back to relational ethics (my beloved) : At its core, Joyce’s unraveling is not about morality in the theological sense. Though that’s its roots. Her recent behavior represents a breakdown in systemic balance — the field of mutual accountability that holds relationships coherent. Relational ethics posits that morality is not an internal belief structure but an external network of interdependence. Every individual choice exerts measurable force on that shared field — strengthening or distorting it. When someone acts as though autonomy exists outside that network, dissonance occurs. The system compensates by producing consequence, not as punishment but as correction. Joyce’s error is procedural. She redefined authenticity as impulse and mistook personal liberation for ethical coherence. In doing so, she severed her awareness of reciprocity — the understanding that freedom without regard for others ceases to be ethical and becomes extractive. Her relationships, once stabilizing forces, now reflect the distortion she introduced. Hedonism was never her nature. Joyce’s rebellion was motivated by relief from shame, not pursuit of pleasure. But by converting relief into license, she displaced rather than resolved her moral framework. The guilt and grief surfacing now are not residues of her old faith — they’re signals of system imbalance. What appears as emotional collapse is, in relational-ethics terms, a reassertion of equilibrium. The field is closing its loop. The consequences she faces are not divine or moralistic; they are structural. She is encountering the unavoidable feedback of shared existence — the point where private narrative collides with collective reality. Ultimately, Joyce’s crisis is diagnostic. It demonstrates that liberation divorced from accountability is not freedom but entropy. When the self refuses to acknowledge its impact on others, the relational system enforces recognition. The reckoning is simply the return of coherence — the moment when there is no one left to lie to, including herself.
Tifani
2025-10-29 05:27:55 +0000 UTCThis strip has me feeling the strongest level of “this would be really cute, if it weren’t for the cheating” so far. Like it was really cute when Amber and Walky were relying on Dina to not fuck instead of using self control (strip titled Precipice). Not cute when Joyce is saying cheating was impossible for her to not do.
SmartAlec105
2025-10-29 05:24:13 +0000 UTCAm I crazy or does this give Becky energy?-- Like when she first came out? Maybe Joyce is channeling her a lil here.
JarJar
2025-10-29 05:17:08 +0000 UTCJoyce can’t handle even mild pushback because she’s finally being forced to explain herself — not to others, but to the moral framework she abandoned. For days, she’s been living in a closed circuit where lack of impulse control felt like freedom. Now she’s encountering the relational cost of that experiment. She went against her own moral code and called it liberation; now she’s realizing that even rebellion has accountability. That’s why the smallest resistance feels catastrophic — it isn’t about the criticism, it’s about the mirror. The system she thought she’d escaped is asking for coherence again, and she’s not ready to face how far she’s drifted from her own compass.
Tifani
2025-10-29 05:14:28 +0000 UTCAdding to this was Joyce carrying this entitlement out of the protest and into her real life. It fully explains her behavior over the last day. She wanted to do what she wanted to do and she wanted to use a lack of impulse control as her excuse but she’s just frog and/or Toad eating all the cookies instead of just walking away from the temptation. Yeah Dorothy’s cookies. But acting like her behavior is somehow so completely out of her control when she orchestrated the conditions to get what she wanted is just a way to absolve herself of guilt so she can hold on to her idea of herself a moral.
Tifani
2025-10-29 05:07:50 +0000 UTCSelf control? Joyce does not know her and refuses to be introduced. This is I wanna eat the world after a life time of being starved of it behavior.
Tifani
2025-10-29 04:51:11 +0000 UTCWonder what Asma, as a Muslim, thinks about gay people and/or sex-positivity, given the common views held by those of her faith on such matters.
Purple Floof
2025-10-29 04:46:45 +0000 UTCHope this joke is a setup for tomorrow. Hope it won't be cringe, specially for Asma
Amós Batista
2025-10-29 04:23:12 +0000 UTCasma's right in the real world logic kinda way, while joyce is right in the "i had to stop my now-wife from committing suicide by cop" kinda way. in my opinion
QueenOfSodor
2025-10-29 04:22:08 +0000 UTC
