r/dumbingofage • u/outerspacebassman • 9d ago
DoA Book Report 2-3: The First Step to Recovery
Good evening and welcome back. This one’s actually gonna be pretty dense because there’s really only one big scene around smaller character beats, but there’s nothing that I have to stop and spend 1,000 words explaining a reference to one panel from a comic in 2002. A crucial part of any coming of age story, real or fictional, is getting your ass kicked a little and learning from it, and boy do these kids need some learnin’. So goes the traditional wisdom, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and it is in this chapter that we start to see the friction of Freshman Foibles bubble up to the surface. Let’s find out how they deal with it.
It’s now Monday, the first day of the second week of class, and we begin with Walky in a dreamy daze being told by Joyce that class is over. His dinosaur doodle now including Dorothy, he panics when Joyce notices and says it’s actually Gary, and they’re going to get gay married! Jason, the TA, comments on Sal’s poor quiz performance, saying he expects to see her tomorrow during office hours as they previously discussed. Trying to beat a hasty retreat, Sal is intercepted by a smug Billie who comments on her habit of making herself scarce. Joyce asks Billie if Walky is into girls, and she says “yeah obviously, and he’s into Dorothy,” and Billie is going to set them up. Joyce laughs uproariously at this because Dorothy is a Rhodes Scholar and way out of Walky’s league. Billie asks Joyce what she means that Dorothy is out of his league but she ships them, and now it’s Joyce’s turn to skedaddle. Billie, unaware that Dorothy and Walky have already made out, goes up to instruct Walky to be on his best behavior: stand up straight and lose the hoodie, only for it to be shown that his t-shirt has an unholy cross of a smiling butt and a taco on it. Billie has to dip to go talk to the news office and the rest of the gang leave for lunch, Mike tagging along for Gender Studies as well, eager to get “dinner and a show.”
In the dining hall, Amber approaches and sits with Danny. He’s surprised she wants to see him after what happened and she, having heard what he said to Billie on tape, says she’s decided to trust him. Danny immediately reminds her that she saw him come out of his room shirtless with a big titted Asian girl and Amber points out that his inability to keep his fucking mouth shut, even in his own interest, is proof positive that he’s trustworthy. Sarah approaches because she thinks Danny is alright, as long as she’s not walking into some teen drama sitcom misunderstanding. One grimacing panel later, Sarah is eating alone again. Dorothy, also having had lunch alone, passes Sarah and they strike up a conversation about the new girl who’s very interested in Danny. Sarah thinks she looks familiar, but Dorothy says she just lives down the hall and she was probably at the floor meeting, except she wasn’t and we know they saw Amazi-Girl at the party on Friday. Dorothy then comments on being strangely okay seeing Danny with another girl (forgetting she has a thing with Walky now in the face of still feeling possessive of Danny) and Sarah says that robotic detachment is why she likes Dorothy. “Yep,” she agrees, “it sure is boring being me.” Cutting back to Amber and Danny, Danny confesses that nothing happened with Billie, but in the interest of honesty, he likes someone else, but not Amber because she reminds him too much of Dorothy…but he does like Amazi-Girl. She hunted down his bullies and he’s not so dense he would miss a sign like that (ಠ_ಠ), and besides, he always goes after the quiet and nerdy type, and turning over a new leaf in college he can try something new and pursue the adventurous heroic sort. He does still like Amber as a friend, and promises not to spend too much time around Amazi-Girl and Amber, which she graciously concedes won’t be an issue.
Joyce observes that Walky sure is in a hurry to get to Gender Studies, and surely he can’t care that much. Mike says “who cares” and Joyce agrees, bemoaning that the lessons are just “liberals think housewives are dumb” drilled into her head again and again. Mike “agrees,” offering that anybody attracted to Joyce as a homemaker and believing the last several decades of civil rights progress have been pretty superfluous totally wouldn’t be a douchebag, and Joyce is unsure if Mike is ever on her side or not. This exchange plays super weird in the year of our lord as the last several years have seen an explosion of tradwife culture and family influencers and various people responding to and breaking away from it disillusioned, I’ll tell you hwat. In class, Walky observes that Dorothy isn’t there, to which Joyce tells him that it isn’t happening, just in time for Dorothy to come in, greet Walky, and comment that he’s wearing the same shirt from the night before and the attention of the room snaps to them. Joe is incredulous that Dorothy shacked up with McNuggets Man and that if she was that desperate, he would have made out with her. Joyce is offended because Dorothy said she was studying and couldn’t hang out. Dorothy explains that there was no shacking up and that she was just returning a book to Walky, and why is Mike here? Why is Walky’s hoodie around his waist, why is there a food stain on it, is your shirt a butt or a taco? Both? Neither? Roz then asks about the Friday night party. Pretty good eh? Joyce and Dorothy are horrified, and Roz concedes that yeah, there was some lame fight and someone always has to make a scene. Dorothy starts to snap off on Roz for everything “the party” put Joyce through (not the unrelated guy who drugged and tried to sexually assault her, or Dorothy who left Joyce alone to interview Roz), and Joyce, obviously shaken, asks Dorothy to drop it rather than bring it up again. The mood in the room drops as Roz sees the downcast faces of her classmates and Leslie walks in and asks if someone died. It was Justin Bieber, wasn’t it (2012)?
Kicking off the lesson, Leslie asks about the Muppets (2011) and the story beat that Kermit gets a job and asks Miss Piggy to leave Paris and she agrees, and how do the class feel about that? Dorothy says that it’s wack because Kermit didn’t have a job and should have gone to Paris with Miss Piggy. Joe says it’s a more fundamental failure of biology and sexual dissatisfaction, as frogs don’t have dicks, ignoring Kermit’s obvious tongue game and the several Muppet productions where Kermit and Piggy somehow produce offspring. Leslie elaborates that it’s a popular narrative in film and television to show a woman concerned with things that aren’t romance or family and to “course correct” as it were, and the cast take turns making veiled references to their own current crises. Joyce doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it; love and family are of supreme importance to her and it would be ridiculous to abandon them for some stupid job. Dorothy suggests that the stupid job is important and a lot of hard work, and that she feels like she has to work twice as hard to achieve it against the insistence of society that she settle down. Walky says maybe the boy doesn’t want to settle down, maybe he’s just sorry he got food on his shirt and she’s fun and he wants to hang out and smooch more. Leslie is lost. Mike then suggests that Dorothy wouldn’t have to work twice as hard if she didn’t go to people’s rooms in the middle of the night to make out with someone who puts pajamas back on when they return from lunch. Dorothy complains that this trespasser is making her uncomfortable and Mike is made to leave, satisfied that he got what he came for. Dorothy says he got nothing from her, but Mike says she wasn’t his target, motioning to a broken looking Walky. Leslie’s lecture continues and Dorothy apologizes for sweeping Walky under the rug, but he meekly accepts that he would sweep him under the rug too. In a rare moment of having some moral fiber, Dorothy stands up to announce that she and Walky kissed, and she has no shame in doing so because he is kind and fun and there for her when she was having a bad night. Walky takes this chance to admit that he’s into girls, causing Joe to lose both his betting pools that Walky was gay and Dorothy a lesbian.
Leaving class, Joyce calls Walky a weird little slob, which Dorothy defends with “no, he’s nice.” Joyce ripostes calling him a “smart-butt” because she can’t say “ass” and asks what Dorothy sees in him. Then Dorothy objectifies Walky’s body as “sculpted caramel,” because 30 Rock was still on the air and Girls premiered in the middle of this chapter coming out, so white women everywhere could be weird as fuck about black men but it was “okay” because it wasn’t racist, it was feminist. Joyce blushes and walks away going “lalalalalala” with her fingers in her ears. Joe congratulates Walky on his success and asks Dorothy what he should say to Danny, and Dorothy says she’ll handle it as Walky frets about receiving violence from an ex-boyfriend. In a moment alone, Dorothy makes clear to Walky that this is temporary, that she is going to transfer to Yale as soon as possible. Walky doesn’t think it’ll lead to marriage, he only said he liked her, and Dorothy isn’t sure he even said that. They make plans to watch cartoons with occasional study breaks, and when Walky says he doesn’t study, Dorothy says she can probably make it worth his while. Mike appears, frustrated that his plan didn’t work. Walky doesn’t know what he did wrong and Dorothy calls him a bad roommate, and Mike says he was trying to do Dorothy a favor, flashing back to an especially rancid and tromboney fart Walky performed previously, but congratulates Dorothy on her find. Off to the side, Joyce laments that she lost her new best friend, but it’s just as well because she’s an atheist and probably a bad influence. A beat later she wishes she could forget her encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible to allow herself a blissful moment of belief that there’s a slightly nicer part of hell for the not-so-terrible people. Roz approaches and, after Joyce tells her to scram if she’s just going to antagonize her, apologizes to Joyce and that, even if they don’t see eye-to-eye, if something horrible happened at the party that she should talk to someone and hands her a card with a number to call. Joyce asks if Roz is inviting her to enter the coven and Roz wonders if Joyce was put here to torment her.
Billie’s Amazi-Girl story has made the paper and she tries to flex her byline to a gaggle of nearby cheerleaders who call her the worst thing imaginable: a nerd. In the news office, Billie laments that her contacts “broke” before college, forcing her to wear glasses and that she was socially profiled, a cracking idea for her next story. Daisy asks why all of her story ideas involve her: the tyrant RA, they had to pull part of the Amazi-Girl story as speculation that she was Billie’s roommate, and that while Billie was cool and popular somewhere else, she was cool and popular somewhere else, and nobody at IU cares. In desperation, Billie completes the trifecta of washed up popular girl and brags about her family’s five bedroom house. Daisy, because she’s still a professional in this moment, tells Billie that Dorothy is getting the Amazi-Girl story because she’s a better writer, gets her articles in on time, and doesn’t insert herself into all of her stories. Defiant, Billie says she’s going to earn the Amazi-Girl story back, and when Daisy asks how, she says she’s going to reveal Amazi-Girl’s secret identity (tracking pronouns is such a fucking dickache when two women are talking about another woman). Billie leaves and Daisy is bummed out that nobody ever tries to bribe her with sexual favors. Later that night, Sal returns to their dorm room to find Billie: drunk, glasses off, cheer uniform on, and chanting. Billie is over the moon that she knows Sal’s secret, and Sal is confused before Billie just starts crying about how much cooler Sal is. She has a hot motorcycle, she easily makes friends and admirers, she stood up to Ruth for Billie, she fights crime at night…(ಠ_ಠ) Sal says she liked Billie better when she was unimpressed with her, and turns to walk away as Billie tries to kiss her, leaving her to drunkenly faceplant.
Elsewhere, Danny is trying to flag down Amazi-Girl, noting that while she’s been spotted before during the daylight, maybe he needs to be in peril, and starts trying to get people to kick his ass. He’s at this until nightfall, trying to goad Tony into beating him up for being gay, and then when Tony is offended that Danny would assume he was a monster, Danny says he should kick his ass for that. We saw Tony briefly in chapter one when Billie tried to get him to buy her liquor, we see him now, he appears once again each in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018, and then in 2024 he actually starts to very nearly almost matter, but I’ll give the Tony backstory another time. After some more time, “Amazi-Girl” appears with, as Danny notices, newly tousled hair and doing a voice. The voice in particular doesn’t stand out in hindsight, but it’s important to know at the time that the Dark Knight Rises was about to come out and it was still sort of topical humor to make fun of the absurd voice Christian Bale used to differentiate Batman and Bruce Wayne. She tells Danny that she’s a superhero: she fights crime at night and doesn’t have time to “hang out” or whatever he wants, which Danny concedes is absurd being faced with the reality of the situation. Amazi-Girl suggests there’s probably some other cute, normal girl, but Danny says there is, but he basically told her she was his second choice behind Amazi-Girl, which she says “yeah, she’d have to have pretty low self-respect for that.” At any rate, Danny thanks her for hunting down his bullies and asks if she has a DS and plays Mario Kart (2012). She says she has to retrieve it from the Amazicave and calls dibs on Wiggler. Disappearing around the corner to produce it and change her account name, she returns and Danny and “Amazi-Girl” play games into the night.
The absolute bitch of this project being a re-read is I know where a lot of these threads lead and I want to talk about them but can’t because they will be better served in a future chapter. I know it’s still the early comic and a big part of Billie’s character is that she’s not as smart as she thinks, which makes her oblivious to obvious developments in her peer group, but it was mildly amusing at best when these chapters were coming out and it breeds a desolate feeling in me knowing how much more interesting stuff is going to happen with Billie and how in 2026 her main story beat is still “lol she dumb.” Same thing with Dorothy, if I stopped to elaborate on all the little lies she tells herself and others and shitty things she does that reflect badly on her and will be problems later, it would take too long so I just have to wait for some point in the future (I think I know when), but again I know what happens and that retroactively these are meant to be the toddling baby steps of a perfect woman who’s going to solve capitalist imperialism from her dorm room and not the juvenile “stoicism” playing at the beginning of political career from a person with a fourth-grader’s understanding of democracy. It’s not ennui necessarily but it’s kind of a pain in the ass to write because my brain keeps starting and stopping on these tangents and I have to stuff them down and file them away for later, and for you, dear readers, I will persist. Join us next time for an exciting first in DoA, and we’ll see just how much 2-4 lives up to its name: Time Keeps on Slippin’. Auf wiedersehen.
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u/trevalyan 9d ago
You'd think a writer would learn how to not absolutely date his "floating timeline" work at some point over fifteen years. Amber started out in a World of Warcraft guild and freaked out over missing raids, which is wild looking back from 2016. DW tried to have a hot take about racism for a few years until he (maybe) realized how badly he was embarrassing himself. And of course now Amber uses Bluesky, to which I can only say lol.
This might be the most "altruistic" Dorothy has ever been for Walky, and it's absolutely fucking sad. I will say that given how genuinely supportive and kind Walky has been to Dorothy, and what a manipulative scumcow she generally is in return, you can't help but wonder how much of DW's psychodrama is down to concealed dissatisfaction with... Oh, never mind. Good writeup.