Joe Rosenthal and Schrodinger's Infidelity
[Word Count: 7466]
Preamble to my Long-Ass Post
Hi! For those who don't know me, I'm apocryphascribe. Elsewhere online, I may be "aeonscribe", "a_scribe", or "blackestEidolon". "Scribe" is in my name for a reason; it's because I post long-winded, befuddling, meandering, barely edited, and scatterbrained takes whenever I'm heavily invested in something, and unfortunately for me and everybody else who sees this, I am back on my fandom bullshit after many years of being away from public fandom engagement. I do not apologize for anything I say in here, nor how long the post will be (and it will be long!)
I am currently unable to post comments on the comic's main website (95% sure I got caught in the spam filter for making too many comments too quickly while not being currently whitelisted yet, as all my old comments are still up for moderation), so I am posting this here instead to make it everybody else's problem. You know, everybody! The everybody that's the...one or two of you who might actually read this.
This is the first in what is likely going to be a series of posts about Dumbing of Age, chapters, characters, storylines, as well as personal fan theories. This post as well as subsequent ones will primarily be constructed as narrative and character analysis focusing on tropes, narrative events, themes, continuity, and meta-analysis of audience perceptions and reactions, with my own personal anecdotes and arguments mixed in. They are not intended to be objective, rigid, High Ivory Tower Literary Critique™, nor a completely off the cuff reaction based entirely in snap emotional judgments, but an attempt to articulate and reflect upon why I (read: me, myself) have the thoughts and feelings I have, distilled in a form that will allow me some measure of catharsis. There will be pedantry, there will be assumptions, there will be conclusions drawn based on potentially dubious claims. No matter what examples I show or language I use, this is a write-up about *feelings*, and thus is firmly within the realm of subjectivity.
In other words, I am the primary audience and beneficiary of this post, and all that come after. If it helps, treat this like any old fan rant, just, written in cursive, or dressed in formal wear, or something fancy like that. Read it, skim it, ignore it, whatever.
I have been depressingly unemployed and broke for nearly a year and my ancient English B.A. is doing nothing to help that, so this is what I am choosing to do with my life at this moment instead. If you want to see more, or, alternatively, would like me to shut up, please throw me some cash at my Ko-Fi here. Disclaimers below the cut.
DISCLAIMERS (READ PLEASE)
This extensive list of disclaimers exists as a precaution because I previously endured actions and behaviors that led to me disengaging with fandoms entirely. Please respect them.
I'll get this out of the way up front: I have a special interest in cheating stories/narratives, and therefore this post will be biased accordingly. If that doesn't sound interesting to you, you can stop reading here.
This post will not be going into the basics of who these characters are, as I am assuming the reader to already know them, as well as the comic. Quite frankly, this post is already too long as it is. If you're somehow reading this and haven't read the comic, I don't know why you'd do that, but thanks for reading I guess?
All of my takes, conjectures, and conclusions are made within the context that this post is in response to strips BEFORE 11/4/2025. If the things I say in here age poorly (and I hope they do, actually), that's a risk I take for posting about a daily updating comic strip.
This is not a post about shipping. Relationships related to Joe will come up as needed for context, and relationships unrelated to Joe but related to the topic of infidelity will also come up as needed, but this ain't about any ships in particular, or how I PERSONALLY feel about them (that's 2-3 posts from now, depending on how I'm feeling and whether or not I get the reaction I'm afraid I'll get for THIS post). I will, however, talk about audience reception at certain points in this post, which will inevitably involve shipping as, well, it's the most popular form of fandom engagement and it would be nearly impossible to do this post while pretending that isn't true.
This is not a "call out" post singling out Willis, or any other particular individuals whose comments I may be referring to. I am not trying to rile up anger or start even more discourse about the actual, real world people who have said the things I will be citing in this post (as either allusions or screenshots with any identification cropped out, because again, I am not targeting individuals here, plus I'd like to ask permission for direct citations with uncensored usernames, and I can't exactly do that being caught in the spam filter and not whitelisted, can I?).
This is not a post asking for "the comic to be changed" to suit my whims. As a creator myself, I know full well that changing your creative work to suit the immediate desires of the people who aren't making it is a fool's errand, a race to the bottom that always ends poorly. Willis chooses to take critique into account on a case by case basis, and outside of that, the comic is what it is and everyone has to deal with it.
I will not entertain anyone on here who comments, reblogs, or jumps into my inbox to try and start shit about the topics I'm covering or the people I'm pulling words from. I will also not entertain anyone coming in here feeling some type of way because I neglected to mention your personal bugbear or to tell me that MY feelings are "wrong" and should be corrected. This is a opinion piece. Do not make me subject or accomplice to your personal grievances.
I will not entertain attempts to Try And Make Willis Read My Post, so please do not tag or @ them. I think trying to @ the creator (of any piece of media!) in these sorts of discussions is Weird and Parasocial at best, and actively hostile harassment at worst. It's also why I wouldn't link this in the Patreon comments either, if I could still afford to be there. Please respect the author's space and peace. Failure to do this will result in me yelling at you and blocking you.
I will be giving thoughts on Willis's writing (positive and negative), exploring their goals and providing evidence-based speculation on where the story might go next, some over-the-top "Damn you, Willis" malding/jokes here and there, and that will be the extent of it. Whether you are someone who loathes negativity in all forms or can't stop talking for 2 seconds about how saccharine everything is in the comic right now, please, for the love of Black Jesus, do NOT do that shit in my comments. Please be measured in your responses.
I completely recognize that a big contributor to why I am making this post at the time I am making it is because I am impatient and want to get to a part of the story I am very interested in seeing followed through while trying to remain hopeful that it will be executed successfully. In fact, this will be brought up and addressed in greater detail later on in the post! Any responses pointing out the obvious will be mocked.
Don't be rude about me being long-winded. I warned you at the beginning, and you can leave anytime you like. This isn't Hotel California.
CHAPTER 1: Establishing the Question
Joe Rosenthal is a man, and therefore a miserable little pile of secrets. Let's take a look at that pile, shall we?
Specifically, the bottom of it. As always with fictional characters, every character in Dumbing of Age's main cast is built out of various pieces - their characteristics, their likes and dislikes, their fears and motivations - and these are built atop a foundation that is linked to and informs these characteristics, who and why they are who they are, what they are about. Maybe it's a backstory, a singular incident, or the environment the character grew up within.
These are the details that an author creates and uses to set up story arcs, character actions and interactions, how and when to best utilize and exploit them, and what stories to tell with them. These do not have to be static features of a character, and authors are not always beholden to them. In fact, part of character development and growth involves shaking this foundation, growing away from it, or coming to new understandings of it. Authors, after all, also go through their own development as people, which is often reflected in their writing over time.
The most important thing to remember about character foundations is that they are always, either immediately upon character introduction or further along in a story (or god forbid, supplemental material), given to the audience as information, directly or indirectly, in order to give them a greater understanding of the characters and to give the author an easier time later when they want to signal to the audience that something related to a character foundation is coming.
As an obvious example, Joyce's foundation is "fundie Christian who grew up in a sheltered environment, learning to fear God and hell and using that fear as the arbiter of her personal morality". That foundation informs her entire character and worldview, and is a consistent element in her ongoing storylines and character development, even to the current time of writing. Character foundations do not have to be unique; Becky has nearly the same foundation Joyce does, and yet her characteristics differ due to experiencing radically different, and worse, life circumstances growing up.
So, Joe. His dad was a serial cheater, and this repeated infidelity deeply hurt Joe's mom to the point his parents divorced over it, Joe internalized that hurt as their child, and it shapes his entire worldviews on relationships with women, masculinity, sexuality, his personhood, the whole gamut. He has deep seated anxieties and fears about infidelity, and thus hates it with an intense fervor. All of his initial characteristics and issues are connected to this. Notably, Joe's foundation is unique to him, and is not shared by anyone else in the main cast (that we know of). Remember that for later! It will be on the test.
Joe's character has been going through a growth period the last few years, one that folks have been calling a "redemption arc". The reason I use air quotes for it is firstly, it's a fan term and I don't ascribe to it being one, and secondly, because it's not...really an arc. Not yet, anyway. It's still in the early stages! This shift in Joe's character is relatively new in the comic's timescale, which means where it goes is still up in the air. Because of the ongoing, incomplete nature of Joe's journey to no longer be a misogynistic womanizing asshole (plus another factor that I will bring up later), the reception to his character has only slightly improved on average, as it is still split along polarized lines that have been there since his introduction. A split that is completely understandable by the way, and if you don't believe me, go back and read those early Joe strips. Seriously! "Sex pest" is accurate as fuck and people (in and out of universe) have plenty of reason to hold off on just accepting what we've seen so far.
All that said, you probably already know what this is about. Dorothy and Joyce finally, after many years of teasing and tension and all that fun gay shit, officially got together - cheating on their boyfriends in the process, boyfriends who they quickly worked to break up with afterwards (well, Joyce worked on breaking up with Joe before going to Dorothy to finish breaking up with Walky FOR her, but I digress).
But why have them cheat at all? Well, unlike other times in media analysis where we have to speculate on the author's motivations, we actually have a direct answer! Word of Willis on the matter, in this tumblr post riiiiiiiight HERE. I'll quote the relevant part(s):
i write... completely wonderful perfect college freshmen who've never had a messy terrible end to a relationship
and
and at some point, i'm like let freshmen be freshmen they're horny idiots
Followed by a picture of Amber saying "I'm a trash goblin who craves mess!"
So the cheating was put there by Willis for the explicit purpose of making the relationship(s) in question end in a messier way than they would otherwise. The rest of this post then is dedicated to asking:
Did the cheating ACTUALLY do that, or not?
The authorial intent here is critical to my analysis, as I am using it to judge the textual, in-universe effects of the infidelity and seeing if its implementation meets the stated goal of the author. Before that though, we need to establish some very important and potentially controversial points:
First, cheating is NOT an ontologically evil act, nor does a person or character cheating make them such.
This is super important even if I'm not going to dwell on it much in this post as whole, because quite frankly the amount of disgusting homophobia, misogyny, and puritanical whining I've seen bubble up over Joyce x Dorothy finally happening has been, while unsurprising, nevertheless appalling, and I think everyone - including critics like me who are unhappy with this chapter on the whole and the writing decisions within it - should dunk relentlessly on these losers as often as we possibly can. Y'all niggas are untrustworthy, unwashed, and completely unserious people, and you gotta shut the fuck up and do better if for no other reason than nobody should have to put up with your bullshit, not even you.
Second, cheating is NOT an ontologically messy act, i.e. the presence of cheating *alone* is not enough to create mess.
The idea that cheating is messy is not an inherent quality of cheating. Cheating - that is to say, the violation of mutually agreed upon boundaries or rules in a relationship with regards to specific kinds of affection being expressed to others not within the relationship and/or outside of those boundaries or rules - is not actually on its own enough to be messy; instead, the messiness of cheating is something that is directly defined, shaped, and influenced by culture, sexual and romantic mores, relationship styles, politics and systems of power and oppression, and so much more. However, none of these things make cheating *inherently* messy, they are instead contextual qualities that color a person's understanding of and attitudes towards cheating.
I'm going to put the qualities that make infidelity (in fiction) a mess-creating act under two umbrellas: Context and Fallout.
Context is the umbrella that contains such things as: The immediate plot circumstances, prior plot developments, the relationships themselves and their status, how the infidelity is reacted to in the immediate by characters in the story, and prior usage of infidelity in the story to set precedent with regard to how and why the author has used it before.
Fallout is the umbrella that contains such things as: Repercussions connected to or directly caused by the infidelity, ones that are indirectly caused by the infidelity, the impact of the cheating on both the cheater and cheatee in the short and long term, whether or not the cheating has *unique* consequences that distinguish it from other relationship struggles and endings, and character developments that take place as a result of the infidelity.
The messiness of cheating within a narrative is completely dependent on these qualities. We on the same page? Cool, cool. Let's dig in!
CHAPTER 2: The Meat and Potatoes
So, context.
This arc of Dorothy and Joyce finally getting together has been building for several real world years, and anyone who's been reading and paying attention knows that. Because it's so important, everything else happening at the same time in the story is pushed to the peripheries of the text, sublimated into the background and only coming up when it's directly relevant to the two of them. This is due to narrative necessity; for a climax this big, it needs to be given room to breathe, otherwise it will feel insufficiently weighty for the occasion. This already necessitates that the cheating isn't as impactful as it could be, as otherwise it would become too much of a burden on the author's ability to meet their goals; focusing more on Joe and Walky's feelings instead takes airtime away from Joyce and Dorothy, so instead we get muted emotional reactions from both of them, and barely any time from the girls dedicated to how they're going to handle the two of them, time they instead spend planning how they're going to manage Becky's emotions and mental state. In fact, Joe and Walky's reactions to their relationships ending are so muted that they feel indistinguishable from an average breakup. You'd think they weren't cheated on at all!
For Walky this at least makes some sense, as he and Dorothy were only together for a few days this go round, he JUST broke up with Lucy earlier in the week (holy shit btw, it's only been that long?!), and cheating would simply be the latest in a list of ways that Dorothy has been stringing him along without taking him seriously as a partner (as that would require personal sacrifices she has historically not been willing to make for him - Joyce is her only exception in more ways than one), and the comic actively goes out of its way to hammer readers over the head about them being a bad match for each other despite their chemistry. While we get a couple really good strips out of his talk with Jennifer (including one in which he says one of the most heartbreaking lines I've seen any character say in this entire comic), that itself could have easily happened without cheating involved.
OOF. Damn my chest ACHED when I saw this. I've been there, buddy.
Meanwhile, Joe...oh, man. Joe's reaction (or rather, lack thereof) is precisely the entire reason I am making this post. We'll dig in later on the details but suffice to say, I was thoroughly disappointed by how basic and sauceless it was. As I said above, indistinguishable from a normal breakup.
Before we move on though, there's one more thing. While not exactly infidelity "arcs", we've seen "fucking around with the boundaries of relationships" used repeatedly amongst the main cast as a storytelling tool. There are in fact 2 separate instances I'm thinking of this being used to explore character motivations, growth, interactions, and interpersonal conflict in the comic, and funnily enough they both involve either Joyce or Dorothy. (I'm not counting Asher cheating on Jennifer because of how it was clearly played as a gag, making fun of her continued ignorant trip down to the bottom of the barrel).
The first instance is easily the biggest one; in Book 8, Sarah hatches a scheme to use Joyce's unquenchable lust for Jacob like a grenade, trying to get her to either seduce or distract Jacob and blow up his and Raidah's relationship. Here, infidelity is an option on the table as a way to hurt someone else and shift relationships; Sarah hates Raidah and therefore wants to watch her relationship fall apart even if it means not getting with Jacob herself, and thus she accepts infidelity as a possibility to make that happen; Joyce is damn near clueless about how much she's being manipulated by Sarah (and since she wants Jacob anyway it's kinda working out for her); and oh, there was one more character involved, wasn't there? Kinda on the sidelines watching everything go down, but voicing disapproval nonetheless?
Oh, right, there he is!
This arc is one of my favorites in the entire comic. We get to see so many different sides of characters, their motivations, what lines they will and won't cross to reach their goals, how badly they want to screw (in both senses of the word) relationships without caring about collateral damage, and the consequences of this arc are STILL being felt to the present day. In other words, it was a glorious, glorious mess.
This is the arc that showed us that Sarah has strong manipulation skills, and the arc where Joe's hatred of "fucking around with and within relationships" is reinforced while giving us continuing signals wrt his feelings about Joyce. It's the arc where we get to see Jacob's strength of character on display, as he does the same thing Joyce and Dorothy do in the current arc, which is break up with his partner as soon as he can after the cheating has taken place. It's the arc that reveals the depths of Joyce's single-mindedness when it comes to love. And most importantly, all of the pieces to make this work are given to the reader pretty early on or set up during prior chapters, letting them see the dominoes being placed before they inevitably fall and crash into the ground. Very good character and story work, some of the best writing Willis has ever done imo.
The second example, though smaller, is still relevant. In Book 14, we get the tug of war between Dorothy and Walky where Dorothy is...well I'll just let Walky say it for me.
Yeah that. Thanks, Walky.
This is peak relationship fuckery on display. Dorothy is mid breakdown about basically her entire life (including her sexuality, but she hasn't recognized that part yet), she's constantly trying to move Walky to a place that's convenient for her desires but those desires keep changing and he's getting whiplash from it while trying to remain empathetic, it's just god awful, good stuff. The status of his relationship with Lucy at this moment aside, it's clear that Dorothy, at her worst, is fine fucking with relationship boundaries if it means continuing to assuage herself of her anxieties.
Won't keep talking about it, as Dorothy X Walky is gonna be its own separate post, but we can see here something similar to the previous example; the violation of relationship boundaries is something that Willis has used before to great effect. However, in these examples, infidelity is never Center Stage. It is always an aspect at play with other story ideas, either a smaller tool used to explore characters more deeply, or a spice added on to make things more dramatic and messy.
This time around though - despite all conveyed intention to make it Center Stage - there's literally no room in the narrative for it, because as previously stated, making room for it would require taking space away from DoJo finally lifting off, and that is significantly more important to Willis than basically anything else in the comic. The result is that, while we are told the cheating exists, the narrative actively minimizes it, like it minimizes the protest, and minimizes Jocelyn's presence until she's there to boost the profile of the comic's Main Ship, and so on.
"Wait, if the context surrounding the cheating actively minimizes it, what about the fallout?"
YEAH ABOUT THAT
The direct fallout of Joyce and Dorothy getting together is, so far, limited to 4:
Billie wisecracking about them finally getting together before bemoaning having to go be a good sibling for Walky
Sarah getting mad at the two of them on Joe's behalf before going to comfort him
Becky's current depression spiral being triggered by them and potentially breaking up with Dina in the process
Amber feeling terrible about doing her part to accelerate Dorothy and Walky's relationship ending, even unintentionally
The indirect fallout is so far:
Being outed on the front page of the school newspaper after hijacking a protest in the process
Potentially having rumors spread about their promiscuity, impugning their characters
Causing chaos within the friend group, enough so that Dorothy is hesitant to consider many of their friends still friends
Notice anything? I said "fallout of Joyce and Dorothy getting together", because that is precisely the situation. All of these repercussions are a result of Dorothy and Joyce getting together, NOT a result of the cheating. It is perfectly within reason, given what we have seen in the comic, to assume that whether cheating was involved or not, all of the above would still have occurred with minimal story changes needed to compensate: Billie doesn't care that much (and the care she does have is out of obligation), Becky's problem is completely disconnected from the cheating as it directly relates to Joyce's queerness and her lingering feelings, they still would have hit the front page of the school paper if they had dotted their I's and crossed their T's by breaking up before going to the protest both because Jocelyn would still be there, and because Daisy's entire character is driven by an absurdist horniness; and ALL of that still would have caused chaos within the friend group whilst rumors spread.
The only one you could make a case for being upset about the cheating specifically is Sarah and...actually, let's talk about Sarah for a moment!
Sarah is a very interesting character for a variety of reasons: she's rude, grumpy, but deeply caring of people in her inner circle. She has really bad trust issues and also (as we have come to see on multiple occasions) has a bad habit of assuming she knows what's best for people, and this tends to get in the way of her do-gooding efforts. Furthermore, if you're outside her inner circle of friends, she's cordial at best, and god forbid if you're an enemy of hers, like her narrative foil, Raidah. We see this on display twice in this current chapter, once when she confronts Joyce and Dorothy in their dorm room, the other when attempting to comfort Joe after his conversation with Joyce immediately prior to her and Dorothy getting it on.
Here, Sarah's motivations are laid bare. Her primary concern is not that cheating occurred, but that it's Joe - a guy she admits she assumed a lot about and needed to reassess in the very next strip after this - who is on the other end of it. So...
First, Sarah only cares about the cheating insofar as it is affecting Joe, a person who (to her dismay) she is beginning to actually care about.
Second, she cares more about Joyce's relationship with Joe because, from her point of view, it was a net positive for Joyce AND Joe, and ending it *at all* is an idea she dislikes.
With this information we can come to an educated conclusion: Sarah would *still care* about their relationship ending, even if Joyce had broken up with Joe before getting with Dorothy, because the cheating is secondary to the things she cares about, namely that she is emotionally invested in Joe and Joyce as a couple and thinks that Joyce ending the relationship at all is a bad idea. Conversely, imagine this exact scenario with no changes, except instead of current Joe, it's Old Joe from the beginning of the comic strip. Do you think Sarah would give even an iota of a damn about Joyce ending THAT relationship? FUCK NO she wouldn't! So even here, the cheating is functionally irrelevant to the end result; instead, this is a consequence of Joyce ending her relationship with Joe, and this confrontation would have happened regardless of how she got there.
CHAPTER 3: Schrodinger's Infidelity
The Verdict
Taking all of this into account, if we judge the cheating solely upon whether or not it is messy and is contributing to the overall chaos of the ongoing plot, as Willis intended it to, we can only come to one answer to our question above: No, the cheating does not do that. If that was Willis's goal, they failed.
When you combine all the factors in play - the cheating being minimized by the context and barely considered a factor in universe, the incredibly muted and "indistinguishable from a normal break up" reactions from Joe and Walky, the fact that all of the repercussions currently lined up for Joyce and Dorothy are decoupled from the cheating - the end result is infidelity we are told exists and is contributing to the mess, yet, without any solid proof or weight upon the narrative, we are not shown that it exists in any meaningful capacity.
The cheating is narratively implemented in such a way that our only knowledge it exists and has been recognized to exist is characters in universe saying it does, and Willis saying it does, yet its effects, its so called "messiness", is unobservable. It is a weightless, toothless, sauceless cheating that carries no sting and leaves no mark nor mess. It operates in a purely perfunctory manner and could just as easily be removed from the comic with little to no change required for the rest of the plot beats to continue along their current trajectories, which is the ultimate sign of its emptiness.
And because it is so empty, instead of weight given to the cheating *by* the characters or the story, it is instead the audience that determines the existence, extent, and impact of the cheating for themselves. Without the audience's reaction, the cheating is in multiple states at once: existent and nonexistent; important and unimportant; mattering and not mattering. Thus, Schrodinger's Infidelity - a quantum superpositional cheating, its composition and magnitude entirely dependent upon the observer (i.e., the audience) and the thoughts, opinions, and worldview they bring to gaze upon it. Each audience member will think and interpret the cheating differently, leading to drastically differing opinions and clashing worldviews. They will project, they will downplay or highlight, and they will do these things because the story gives them all the room in the world to do so. And this would not be a bad thing, were it not for the fact that we know that Willis wanted the cheating to matter.
Naturally, it is no surprise then that the wide array of opinions have led to schisms within the commentariat. We have arguments about whether the cheating is unimportant or important, or if it's meant to be important, or if it's insufficiently messy, or an unnecessary addition to the story, or if it even exists at all! We have arguments about cheating as a subject and how seriously it should be taken in a story like this, and whether or not it's implementation has "ruined" certain characters or relationships. Escalated tensions and heated rhetoric leading to many burning out on the comic, it's characters, and interacting with the community in general.
I don't care if I'm still in mod limbo months later, SOMEBODY is gonna see my comments, dammit.
To summarize:
The Joe/Joyce fans have their ship sunk and are upset about it
The Dorothy/Joyce fans of the "relationship paladin" persuasion are upset because they're stuck with this infidelity albatross flying over their ship
Many queer readers are upset because DoJo's "consequences" are a direct result of them getting together, which is a victimless act they are nevertheless being punished for by the narrative
The OT3 fans are upset because of the comic's framing of Joe's poly offer as a last ditch effort to not lose Joyce instead of being fully genuine
The cheating haters are upset because cheating is present
The Story & Character Enjoyers are upset because of the pace getting bogged down with months of very few developments outside of the Main Couple getting together
The standard commenters are upset at all the negativity in the comments lately
And finally, the "Trash Goblins Whomst've Craved Mess" who were there because they expected CHEATING DRAMA™ are left confused and scratching their heads because...well, the cheating is pointless! We expected a drama bomb planet buster and got Dave & Busters instead. Damn you Willis! Where's my kaboom?!
There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!
And there is no bigger indicator of how much of a nothingburger the cheating is than Joe's entire dull reaction to being cheated on.
"So, About That Redemption Arc..."
To sort of repeat myself from the beginning (because this is a long post and you may have forgotten):
Joe is built atop a foundation of anxieties and fears surrounding infidelity and relationship fuckery. He hates it, he hates divorce, and he hates his dad. His entire character is built atop, in conversation with, and a reaction to these facts about his life, and notably, he is the only character in the entire webcomic with these traits. They are Joe-unique.
Joe is in the middle of a growth journey trying to be a better person, and not only is that relatively new in the comic's timescale, he has yet to run into a single Major Obstacle on this journey. Not once has he been dealt a shitty hand that directly threatens his progress, tempts him to backslide, or dares him to persevere through struggle. Aside from dealing with people who don't believe in him, his growth and character has never been tested and this journey of his has gone unopposed and unchallenged by the narrative in a major way.
The cheating SHOULD matter because it is the secret sauce, the missing link to connect Joe's entire character foundation to his ongoing character growth by testing him, poking him like a mad scientist to see where and how he responds to his first love and first ever serious relationship (!!!) ending with him being cheated on! If you were going to pick only one character to Do An Infidelity to, Joe "I Have Infidelity Trauma And I Make It Everyone Else's Problem" Rosenthal would be the best pick out of the entire cast for those reasons alone, because to do otherwise would be a massive squandering of Joe's story and character potential. It's what I can only describe as The World's Most Obvious Chekhov's Gun, and yet we are supposed to be impressed when said gun is fired and all that comes out is a piddle of smoke?
Piddle of smoke, Exhibit A.
Look, I see what Willis is trying to do here.
Joe is downplaying how much he's hurt, because he hates himself and doesn't feel like he deserves to feel hurt (it's why he also self-sabotaged his own relationship the second he confirmed Dorothy was into Joyce by basically throwing them at each other). 12 days is nothing compared to the MONTHS he and Joyce were texting each other, comforting each other, and being vulnerable with each other, and all the time they were getting used to each other before that. But he's not thinking about any of that right now, because he is still in a punitive mindset, one that ultimately places him in a sacrificial role because he believes he doesn't deserve anything good, especially not The Biggest Good that is Joyce, because of who he is trying not to be anymore. That's the reason Sarah says it's "his" attempted pity party here: Joe's avoiding the idea that he's hurt and he refuses to accept it, because it would require both a recognition of his own self worth, and an acknowledgment that Joyce hurt him in the worst way that he specifically could be hurt in a relationship. And he won't do either, and...
It just doesn't land.
This moment doesn't work at all for those purposes, *because the cheating is minimized by the narrative and disconnected from the mess*. If you had removed it and replaced it with a break up instead, this entire strip would need no changes. Joe is heartbroken, yes, but he's not heartbroken in a way that is recognizably different from your average break up. His heartbreak isn't messy! It is surprisingly and unfortunately restrained in a moment where we needed to see Joe hurt in such a way that he doesn't even have the energy to put up a facade like this. His Achilles' Heel was struck - something that by all accounts and audience expectations should be A Big Deal - and yet we have Mostly Held Together Joe, keeping a stiff upper lip and doing his best to hide his oh so very sad faces. It's not like I want him to be sobbing and snot-faced about it! (I actually do, it would be a nice change of pace to have one of the boys emote in that fashion, I can't recall at all the last time that happened in the comic).
ADDENDUMS
These are addendums retroactively added in (how meta!) on 11/10/2025. They're here to add a few more points to this post that I had overlooked or failed to elaborate on more.
Additional Point 1) The Presumed Audience Lens
The audience is either majority monogamous or they live in monogamy centric cultures, which means they come to the comic with a certain set of emotionally charged understandings regarding what the bare basics of cheating are. This is the lens they view the story and characters through, and this is something authors are (or should be) privy to. What this means is that, for a given story, all you need do is *say* that infidelity occurred, and you will have done most of the work necessary to rile the audience up into a frenzy, without actually having to follow through and make the cheating interesting, compelling, or actually impactful within the narrative.
As stated earlier, the consequence of not doing those things means you are giving your audience all the room in the world to read into the cheating whatever they want to read into it. This can sometimes be done on purpose, but given that we know that Willis hates cheating and has historically never actually gone into an arc with a focus on it until now because of that, and that this is the first time they've tried to write it seriously, I don't believe this was the intended result.
Giving weight and impact to the infidelity is also important for another reason, namely that that weight is what dictates to the audience how seriously it should be taken, and how serious their responses ought to be. Because none of that is here and the audience is bringing their own biases and experiences to project onto the characters, we have the aforementioned schisms in the audience commentariat, and as much as I hate to admit it and would love to disagree, the many people who have and continue to say "the cheating wasn't that bad" are completely correct, which is my exact problem with this whole thing in the first place.
Additional Point 2) The cheating is sauceless, which makes DoJo equally sauceless
Myself and others who have the complaint that Joyce and Dorothy are a boring or uninteresting couple are primarily interested in drama and intrarelational tension and friction. The cheating was the perfect opportunity to create that, but because the cheating itself was so short, boring, and weightless, the end result is that these two are a couple who themselves have little else going on aside from being cute and horny together, which is fine but like, for some of us it's not enough.
This is not an issue of concept - Joyce and Dorothy conceptually is actually one of the most interesting ships in the comic - but an issue of execution. Because everything drama-wise that is happening around them is mostly disconnected from their actions, their agency in the narrative is limited. Joyce and Dorothy *being* together is the primary cause of the drama around them.
What all this means is they are being met with story consequences because of *who they are*, not *what they've done*. As said earlier, the whole cluster of bullshit they're being forced to deal with right now would have been in their faces whether they cheated or not, and when you add the cheating being boring on top of that, there's basically very little, if anything, compelling about them at the current time of writing. In fact, said absence of compelling traits has made their otherwise interesting character flaws become grating and unlikable, as there's nothing there to counteract them. This can easily change in the future, but how long it will take is uncertain, which is the perfect breeding ground for impatience.
Additional Point 3) In which I continue to receive Pyrrhic Vindication
Becky's upset because of them being together
Sarah's upset because Joyce dropped Joe like a bag of rocks
Dina's upset because of Becky
Amber's upset because she blames herself
As for Asma and Raidah? WELL!
In the time between me putting out the last post and now, we got additional strips featuring Asma and Raidah essentially being pseudo audience stand-ins lobbing criticisms at Joyce and Dorothy for their actions. The issues with these strips are many, but I want to focus on the execution and meta-context.
First, we have several strips with Asma talking to Joyce and Dorothy that boil down to her vaguely grilling them over what - from her perspective - looks like impulsive decision making, that they should learn some patience and perhaps to choose to avoid temptation when it would be detrimental to them to give in.
Second, we have a couple strips with Raidah throwing homophobic shade in Joyce's face, before also vaguely hinting at being mad at her about the protest stuff.
I'll just be frank; I don't like the way these strips were written. From just a readability standpoint, both of these bits were difficult to parse at times, in a way distinct from the rest of the arc. Which makes sense, because these are new strips!! The Asma and Raidah strips were retroactively added to this part of the story after Willis received severe criticism surrounding their mishandling of the protest backdrop, and thus they weren't accounted for when this arc was originally being written over a year ago.
Because they've been shoehorned into the comic, they throw the pacing off, their writing has clearly not been given the same level of editing Willis normally gives his stuff, and there's issues with the execution. And because we have the meta-context of knowing these strips are later additions explicitly in response to criticisms about the protest, we know that they are not here for anything else, i.e. the cheating.
Furthermore, Raidah's opening salvo being homophobic remarks continues to reinforce that at the end of the day, these two queer women are facing narrative consequences only *for being queer women together*, which for a variety of reasons is Bad Feels Reading. On top of that, Raidah's presence immediately reminded me of Book 8, which was a book that did the "cheating as story tool" thing so much better than this that it's genuinely baffling. Wish I hadn't been reminded of that, but at least I continue to be vindicated for my The Cheating Sucks Ass Actually opinion.
(I could also talk about the Mass Of Racism And Islamophobia that is the DOA comment section responding to these two critiquing their OTP, but that's not fun and so I will not do that here.)
TL;DR
This is boring. The cheating is boring. The reactions from the boys being cheated on are boring. The girls doing the cheating are doing it in a boring way, which makes *them* boring too. The mess that's there isn't even caused by the cheating and the cheating's effect on the story and characters is virtually nonexistent, rendering its existence pointless.
What I expected VS What I got
It doesn't have to stay this way. There is still the possibility of this becoming messy, important, and interesting in the future, a future where this post ages like mold on rye. But this was a climax 15 years in the making and it should have hit hard NOW, in THIS moment, and it didn't. Best case scenario is this is even more plot buildup that *might* lead to another, different climax. Maybe. Will there be another perfect opportunity like this again? How many more years are we going to have to wait before the cheating matters, if it ever does? And by the time it does, will it be "too little, too late"?
I don't know, but I wish I didn't feel the need to ask.
For more posts that are relevant to this one:
quick post about Raidah
excellent post about Raidah and Islamophobia by tumblr user stupidohia
reblog of the main post with excellent tags from tumblr user smarting-of-age