Unused strips for August 9-12, 2023

The year is 2023! Walky has just taken Amber to dinner with his parents to be his fake girlfriend! Ethan just ran through snow to put his mouth on Asher's mouth! And Joyce has just told Joe that yesterday, she and Dorothy did laundry together, ultimately pulling Joe away to put their mouths on burgers instead of each other's non-mouth body parts.

And instead of showing Joe and Joyce out getting burgers, with Joe demonstrating the gentle burger smashing he is capable of delivering, there was almost a strip where Joe instead asks Dorothy if she's into Joyce.

It's a bold strategy, Cotton! Let's see if it pays off!

   After half-finishing the fourth strip in the sequence, I decide.... nope! Doesn't pay off at all! I need to put these four strips in the trash.

1) I don't even like what these characters are saying! I'm trying to have a big Joe Asks Dorothy If She's Into Joyce without it actually paying off in any way. I try to hedge Dorothy's responses in ways that she can keep on being noncommittal about it later. I'm trying to have a big moment while keeping the status quo.

2) But I can't keep the status quo. Look, once Dorothy is told, hey, you're acting like you like Joyce, and once that's something she considers, I basically can't have fun shipteasing moments where they both go out and get drunk and are accidentally super gay on each other. It's no longer accidental now! I'm removing the capability to do one of my favorite things to do.

3) I am murdering the Joe/Joyce relationship in its crib. They've been dating for no more than a few hours at this point and already I'm throwing a Dorothy bomb in there. That's not fun! And Joe's reasoning at this point makes little sense. If he's going to step aside for Dorothy because Joe's "corrupted" Joyce in any way, Joyce... has to have been actually visibly corrupted. She's not dropping F-bombs yet or even touched a dingdong. She's basically the same as she was yesterday. Joe would first need any ammunition at all for his self-destructive step-aside suggestion.

So I shelve the entire sequence, and don't do any "unused strips" posts on here about them in the meantime because, you know what, I'm probably going to use some of this later. And I did. Sort of. It's quickly very different, as you have seen.

And y'all get this strip instead:

 because goddamn let them have one (1) meal together

And as a result, in the meantime, we were able to have:

-Dorothy's super gay dream about riding a horse with Joyce

 -Dorothy fixing Joyce her favorite meal, for Reasons

 -Dorothy displaying incredible levels of gay pining she doesn't understand yet in the exercise room

 -Ruth and Jennifer taking Dorothy out to karaoke her sexual frustrations

 -Joyce taking Dorothy out to get drunk so Dorothy can lovingly run her finger up and down her arm

 -Dorothy making her rebound with Walky be all about Joyce for some reason

-Dorothy... helping Joyce chart out her sexual experiences with/for her

-Dorothy sending back a photo of her tiddies, for joke reasons

-and probably way more i'm forgetting just now

 got two years of some primo stuff cuzza shelving those four strips when i did

we were almost robbed