Annotated 29-10
At least Seife understands how bad he fucked up, tries to offer Shanna consolation, and understands when she clearly doesn’t want to hear it.
Judith had a handful of scenes in Fans, and she was at least a happy kind of crazy, usually unaware of what she put others through (a distinction from my aforementioned cousin, I’m afraid, who always seemed a little haunted by his self-awareness). Her manic energy gave some comic relief to her scenes with Shanna, and that just wouldn’t have fit in with the emotional aesthetic of Sepia World.
But more to the point, Shanna is right: if she can’t even get through this meeting without a meltdown, she really can’t afford to look her mother in the eye, tell her goodbye, and endure her mother asking her to take a Krakoa flower so she can build a portal to come back. It wouldn’t matter much whether that request were made tearfully or cheerfully.
New Shakespeare’s Trump, which is weirdly also about watching a beloved relative slip into irrational thinking? Look, I swear I’m not doing this on purpose.
Soo, what’s with the doctor’s name? I suppose most native English speakers wouldn’t even know how to pronounce it, and while it’s a German word, and German last names are fairly creative, I’ve never seen “Seife” as a name. “Seifert”, on the other hand, is reasonably frequent.
I saw it somewhere, liked its meaning, and wanted a name I hadn’t used anywhere else. That’s the extent of it… I knew people would pronounce it “safe,” “sife,” “seef,” “see-iffy” or whatever, but I figured it was short enough you’d just pick a pronunciation and move on.
I see, following the Terry-Pratchett method of naming characters. Fair enough :)
I think it is supposed to be “safe” @Zak McKracken
I don’t think there’s a clear way to transliterate the word to English. Phonetically, it’s ˈzaɪ̯fə (according to Wiktionary. I can’t read phonetic symbols). Maybe sife-eh would kinda make sense, but English doesn’t have any words ending on a short, de-emphasized “e”. But IRL, everyone in the US (including the name’s owner) would be butchering the pronunciation in different way anyway, so it doesn’t matter :)