Annotated 27-17
At least a few readers were confused by the last panel, so just to be clear: Shanna is not doing anything to Carol but staring her down. She’s just been verbally hammering at Carol’s swollen growth of guilt until it finally burst.
Here’s a brutal fact of life. I hate that it’s true, but I can’t deny it. If you’re dealing with someone who’s been brainwashed, there are times you’re going to have to get rough, emotionally speaking, because “rough” is what they’ve been trained to respect, whether they know it or not. You don’t need to keep it up as long as the original brainwasher, and you can be kind before and after. But Shanna would not have gotten any good result here just by gently telling Carol to respect herself.
Not that Shanna’s faking anything here. This speech is very her, especially “e-life” and “sky orcs.” But aside from her issues with fandom, she has few illusions about who she is. Life is less about making big changes to yourself and more about learning to use who you are.
You don’t have to look someone in the eye to kill them. Garroting and bullets to the back of the skull do the trick. Of course Carol already has someone under the payroll who has no problem whether the victims stares at him or not.
[SPOILERS]
(As vague as i can make them but still, sorry)
Wow I just realized that panel 7 is The Start Point of the sepiaworld spiralling-hitman-violence arc, because of those specific words from Shanna to Carol(‘s side) and that the arc is bookended really neatly with a First Panel and a Last Panel a while later.
Things you can just miss when webcomics format means arcs take months or years.
I just had a conversation like this with one of my friends; God, this hit hard. I love the closing line in your commentary. “Life is less about making big changes to yourself and more about learning to use who you are.” You’ve got me, lol, where’s your next piece?
“Life is less about making big changes to yourself and more about learning to use who you are.”
Yeah, there’s about ten years of therapy distilled into one sentence. It’s not that people don’t change, it’s that so often they try so hard to change the thing about themselves that don’t need it, and fail to control the things that do. The sooner you can get a real good look at yourself, and see what makes you tick, where you excel, where you falter, and what makes the machine that is you work best, live best, the sooner you’ll be on track to taking some measure of control over your future and well being. It’s very hard to make plans, or decisions when you don’t know the terrain, and it’s very hard to know what you’re capable of when you don’t know yourself, or worse are deluded about who you really are.
Rot13’d spoiler:
Bs gur gjb ynqvrf va guvf cntr, obgu raq hc fubbgvat crbcyr qrnq. Orjner Fgneohpxf.
Wise words under many circumstances.