Annotated 19-3
The world of Fans, like the Sepia World of Guilded Age, started out looking like our own, then got stranger. In Fans’ first pages, Shanna was a low-paid journalist craving approval (with an old-fashioned bouffant hairdo and shoulderpads like a linebacker’s). She was drawn into the other characters’ orbit because one of them was her childhood friend and because they were always where the newsworthy action was. She was at first the voice of denialism about superscience or the supernatural, but once those forces overtook her life, her skepticism found other outlets.
In time, she transformed almost entirely, marrying and developing firm friendships with the geeks she once disdained, joining a paramilitary squad to stop the threats she once denied. And the world of Fans changed with her because to some degree, those forces overtook everyone’s life: we’re talking aliens living among humans and manifestations of the imaginary on your local street corner.
In Sepia World, magic and superscience are still secret, and Guilded Age Shanna’s denialism and geek-dislike have yet to be challenged. But she’s not quite the Shanna from Fans page 1, either: she’s much more seasoned as a journalist, sharper, more sensible. She’s outgrown Original-Flavor Shanna’s desperation to be taken seriously and therefore her let’s-be-kind-and-call-them-retro wardrobe and hairstyle.
A few traits seem to be constants, including mild carpal tunnel syndrome and a tendency to narrate “My name is Shanna Cochran” like it’s a consciousness-clearing mantra.
(I love the low-key comedy John brought to those last two panels, especially since BOTH those Carols are slight exaggerations of the reactions Shanna will eventually get.)
Anything with “conservative” in it suggests a lack of conscience, nowadays.
“Conscience” is a rare commodity these days, especially anywhere that politics is involved. Everyone seems to aspire to follow in the footsteps of mass murderers. The only difference is how.
“Conservative” thinkers prefer to go with the “traditional” values and methods. They follow in the footsteps of Caesar and Hitler and prove their “strength” by doing their killing directly via soldiers.
“Liberal/Progressive” thinkers prefer to be “compassionate” and “merciful”. They greatly favor the methods of Stalin and Mao. Killing people directly is messy and distasteful. Just cut off their supplies of food and medicine and let them die slowly (and, more importantly, quietly) from starvation and disease.
“Conscience” would require asking whether killing all these people actually serves any good moral purpose, and since the people doing the dying are almost always the ones the leaders claim to be trying to save it’s hard to see how the answer could be anything other than “no”.
bOtH sIdEs ThO
As Sporky pointed out, what a load of bull.
The “conservatives” want terrible things, and are killing people in many ways, usually by proxy, but also by inaction and by action, by selling arms to terrible people, by actively blocking necessary environmental actions.
Their ideas about “traditional values” boil down to spreading hatred in order to control the populace.
Liberals can certainly be faulted for many things, but most involve buying into watered-down versions of conservative bullshit.
Obviously, the conservatives would argue differently. I thought that panel was a rather elegant way to give us some insight into Shanna’s worldview.
Fun fact: This is the strip that cemented my theory (which I held for a long time) that Bandit was Carol’s deeply submerged alt in Arkerra. I had suspected it because of the horrified look on Carol’s face when HR said that he was going to burn Bial’vezk and kill the five, followed by Bandit stumbling on the theft of Graiya’s bough and preventing that from happening despite HR’s best efforts. I thought that Carol and HR both wanted to get the five out of the tubes, but Carol didn’t want to risk killing them (and it still wasn’t clear to me that HR wouldn’t consider this a bug, but a feature). So she went in with her own off the books character and made sure that HR’s plans would fail, at least in the short-term.
This strip gave me an “Aha!” moment as to Bandit’s name. If Carol was in a Young Republicans sort of group in college, then she might be familiar with John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was an economist who advocated partial government control of the economy, which earned him the ire of more laissez-faire economists. So I thought a conservative character might find some sly humor in naming their rogue “Bandit Keynes.”
And then I waited like six chapters for a reveal that never happened.
Yeah; as someone who never read Fans, I really didn’t like Shannon’s character only because she paralleled real world media personalities who villainized gamers, gamer community and the industry. There is no proof anything bad has actually happened (why no one else is investigating it) Shannon just assumes something bad is happening because gaming-is-evil and ass backwards stumbles into a actual plot. I liked her character more more as time went on but her introduction still reminds me of a bias that still exist that I hate.
This; but at the same time, this is also what made Shannon not only a great character in the end, but also believable.
I love the last panel. It’s a face that I think Carol would never actually make, and that makes it even funnier in hindsight.
I love the last two panels. I enjoyed reading the Sepia World pages but these make me wonder what was happening in Cobalt World and Slate World.
Yay Shanna!