Annotated 29-8
We might’ve skipped this scene if Shanna had gotten a friendlier reception in Guilded Age immediately, but as it was, I felt like her motives were too unclear to readers who hadn’t encountered her in Fans. Some, it seemed, were reading her as someone without compassion (muckraking clickbait-chaser and/or nerd-baiting bully) whose selfish pursuits would ruin everything for the Five.
For better and for worse, the institutionalization of Judith Cochran is Shanna’s “origin story,” and in everything but tone, it’s changed little from her previous incarnation, so I think it put most readers on the same page about her. We were still getting a few gripes that Shanna hadn’t “earned” so much attention, but I’m pretty sure there was nothing we could do about those, and they died off after this anyway.
In panel 2, Shanna is trying to power through this meeting without getting too emotionally involved, because she really cannot afford to become a depressed wreck for very long with Hurricane on her trail. But Dr. Seife here does not know the reason for her disengagement and ever so gently guilts her about it, and so the last few panels are like, TRIGGERED.
I don’t know that I would have assumed Shanna had the exact same backstory without it, so I’m glad it was included.
Nice avatar you got there :)
Probably good that you included it. As a reader who never read Fans, I felt absolutely no reason to like Shanna in the story up to this point. The entirety of her character up to this point is a heartless muckraking journalist who thinks gamers (your core audience for this comic) are trash and games are poison. Giving her a humanizing element here starts to move her up out of what to this point seemed to be a full-on antagonist role in the sepia world side of the story.
To be honest, the presumption of heartlessness/lack of compassion still gets on my nerves. I mean, I could see that, maybe, if she were a sort of shock jock who was just mentioning the missing-persons case to enable her rants, but she’s in the field, assuming greater and greater personal risks to seek justice for people law enforcement has pretty much forgotten. If there’s one thing I’ve hoped to achieve with the character, it’s the message that people don’t have to like your self-identified subgroup to be good (at least not at first; some softening with continued exposure is inevitable).
GA Shanna uses the same dialogue and logic as rl personalities who has a prejudice against gamers and the the gamer community at large so she is going to hit a nerve with the audience who had to deal with that type of person.
That is exactly how I perceived her character from the start, on first reading, even before this scene. Her “moral panic” angle is dialed down fairly well here, so I found it kind of obvious that she’s trying to do the right thing but just has this one blind spot in her perception.
But then, I’ve never been in an environment that was particularly hostile to me as a gamer, and even the “Counterstrike is teaching kids to kill” panic (which was also peak Counterstrike for me) went over with fairly little consequence around here, so someone else displaying Shanna’s attitude would usually just get a condescending smile out of me, not the allergic reaction some other people seem to have developed.
Really, what Shanna teaches us is that nice people can have silly ideas which may make them alienate others. That’s very human, and it’s something which internet/gaming/nerd culture is absolutely not safe from. In fact: Whatever culture/profession/party/country/out-group you dislike most, you probably have some false ideas about them, and you’re probably missing out on something they know which you don’t. Which might not make them “good” people, but probably less horrible than you think they are.
Except Nazis. I’m sure they understand something about what makes being a Nazi look like a good idea which I don’t know but that wouldn’t make them any less horrible. With an ideology pretty much based around _not_ giving anyone else the benefit of the doubt and being antagonists to everyone else … dude, screw those people.
Shanna needed some kind of introductory scene to this comic, not just plopped in on the warpath with the assumption that readers would be familiar with all the baggage she was bringing with her from another work altogether. I think she gets that retrospectively a little later on, and mellows out some more when she meets sepia!Penk, but at this point she’s been an abrasive jerk to pretty much everyone. Maybe a well-meaning jerk with completely justified abrasion, but still not someone I’d want to hang out with.
Well, again, it’s about the presumption of heartlessness for me. I really didn’t have a problem with people finding her abrasive in the beginning. If we wanted you to just love love love all our protagonists from the get-go, we wouldn’t have had our fun with Payet Best.
It’s about the ease of the jump from “I don’t like this person” to “This person is a HEARTLESS MONSTER” when the evidence really seems to point in the opposite direction.
First impressions are important. If a character starts off acting a certain way, it’s understandable to assume that’s who they are until demonstrated otherwise.
So far Shanna’s been acting just a muckraking games critic, mostly interested in getting clicks and grinding her axe. As the author you understand there’s more going on with her from having recycled her character wholesale from another comic, but that hasn’t come through in GA at this point. I think she would have stood to benefit from a “call to action” introduction scene, maybe following up with a tip from a relative of the Five who is now completely reticent (because JJ), and in that scene depict Shanna as you’d have liked her to be perceived.
In contrast, Best’s first scene was almost perfect (minor nitpick: the joke with Peter made it seem like Best would be a Mistaken Hero character taking credit for other’s success, which sold his own ability short), in that it established his character as a douche. He grows out of it eventually, but right then that’s who he is. Likewise Goblaurence’s introduction portrayed him as an abrasive jerk, but only speaking up to insightfully resolve an inefficiency. His second scene he’s an abrasive jerk to Magda, but relaxes almost immediately when she tosses it back. You don’t need to read a whole other comic with his backstory to get that he’s using abrasiveness as a defense mechanism.
IIRC we already know she’s a “muckraking games critic” who is investigating *missing people*. I figure that should buy her a lot of moral credit. Actually is she even a games critic, if she doesn’t like games? Or is she a regular journalist who’s drawn into the game world because she’s investigating missing gamers?
Depends on whether she’s doing it for the missing people, or to stroke that grudge-boner.
She’s not a ‘game critic’ in the sense that she critiques/reviews games, she’s a ‘game critic’ in the sense of criticizing games. Which is still not an unpopular niche for certain ‘journalists’ to settle themselves into.
From what we know of Shanna, that doesn’t seem likely to be her only beat (but it is the one most relevant to the other primary characters), and her work, outside of that one facet is likely better than most of the hacks who get into the ‘MMOs are killing people and FPSes are making them kill each other (and RPGs have sexy women who have sex with other sexy women)’ nonsense.
I’d say she’s not even criticizing games, she’s just opposed to them and the culture around them. As such, she doesn’t really seem to criticize any particular game, it’s just the whole games thing. But that doesn’t seem to be her main occupation, more her private obsession. This means whenever she can write something unpleasant about games in one of her stories, that’s a bonus. Which in turn is why she stuck to this missing-people case much longer than anyone else. Because none of the games journalists covering the game or the convention would ever dare contemplate that Hurricane could be involved in something like this.
I feel like it’s time to recuse myself here, but I gotta say, the first four pages of Shanna don’t contain a single shred of anti-nerd sentiment. Her only interaction with another human in that period is to thank them for a favor.
At the risk of stealing Derps’ thunder, she thanks that person verbally.
Internally she refers to them as “useful” and characterizes the favor as payment for a previous favor, which sounds a lot more transactional.
So it’s unclear whether she’s being nice to a friend, polite to a resource, or both.
JJ would be someone who demonstrates the distinction between being nice and being polite.
And of course the favor in question is the “theft” (depending on local regulations) of some confidential information.
I think what it boils down to is that Shanna is a very hard to read character. She maintains an emotional distance. She crosses various lines for various reasons and feels little need to monologue about it, internally or otherwise. People will project onto someone like that. Sometimes favorably, sometimes not.
Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for wading into the discussion for a while! I’ve found it interesting, and I hope you have as well!
I dunno if there’s a trope for this, but I feel like the issue somewhat is that there’s a not-insignificant portion of people who have actually faced real-world prejudice for being gamers, and Shanna is a stand-in for that institutional prejudice. It seems like a very localized issue–in my corner of the Midwest, games are seen as children’s toys and any adult who plays then is seen as immature. At no point in my life, have I ever felt comfortable telling people I work with what my hobbies are, because I know I will lose respect if I do.
If Shanna’s only redeeming feature is “actually happens to be right this time as she fans the flames of prejudice,” it didn’t earn any points in my eyes. It’d be like if Payet made some quip about “women’s place is in the kitchen” as he slayed a mass-murdering witch–sure, he’s killing a genocidal bad guy, but enough women have had to put up with that shit enough IRL that’d put Payet in significantly worse regard than the witch.
HR might be a murderous Raskolnikovian CEO, but I haven’t had to deal with murderous CEOs in my day-to-day. I have had to deal with the consequences of the bullshit Shanna has hypothetically spewed.
I suspect that there may be people for whom some of those moral panics and whatnot have had serious real-life consequences, and such people might develop a strong knee-jerk reaction to any criticism of their hobby/culture/thing.
… Thereby proving that yes, harsh words *can* hurt a human enough to consider their very being under threat, and fight back. Which is why I think it’s important not to fall into the same pattern of indiscriminate hate for members of some group, in reaction to indiscriminate … ignorance? … of that group. Because that’s repeating their fallacy back at them. Not helping.
I played tons of CS during the CS panic, and I sometimes did get weird looks but my attitude has always been that people who don’t try to understand me are not my problem, and most people who knew me also knew what I think of stereotypes, and how I react if someone applies them to me, so they stopped doing that. By now, all those discussions are a very distant memory, and I don’t think that kind of panic could happen again these days. That’s done and over with.
It’s all week and good to say “people who don’t try to understand me aren’t my problem” until this same people are the ones signing your paycheck. I’ve literally been told “no, you can’t be one of THOSE people, they’re all assholes” by the person responsible for HR at a previous job.
As annoying and frustrating as they is, those are individual people and while they’re part of the problem they’re just individuals. I would argue, though, that journalists and influencers don’t fall under the same standard. They aren’t just part of the problem, they’re at the root of it. When I look at Shanna, all I can think is “people like YOU are why my 6th grade teacher warned me I’d become a mass murderer for playing a board game.”
Yikes. I wasn’t even aware that sort of thing existed, at that level of shittyness. That would certainly explain some reactions, and it would also probably make it much harder to differentiate…
See, I don’t even read Shanna as one of the drivers of the anti-gaming “movement” (or whatever you’d call this line of thinking), she’s just been influenced by it. She’s not preaching, she’s got a job doing journalist stuff, and she has (as we’ll learn in the upcoming strip) an issue not with gamers but with games and the games industry. Basically, she sees gamers as victims, not criminals. And she’s not making up crazy stuff: She *believes* crazy stuff, and then goes looking for evidence. At least as long as we trust the story’s authors on this (and I think we should), we should know that she won’t find her prejudice confirmed.
That said: Yeah, I think this makes a lot more plausible why some gamers (and roleplayers, and associated) react as strongly as they do to perceived attacks on their hobby. Thanks for spelling that out for me.
I have to admit her interaction with Carol was extremely offputting to me, having known a lot of people people who have been in abusive relationships. Her series with Carol came across ugly and manipulative, more like she was putting the screws to Carol to get her story, not like she had any motivation to help break her out of her cycle of abuse. This comic was the first moment in my initial read of the series that she had any motivation aside from ‘hates gamers, wants to stick it to Hurricane no matter the cost.’
I never knew there was a previous work Shanna came from before GA annotated, and I don’t really feel like the GA team laid the groundwork to put the ‘pro’ to Shanna’s ‘tagonist’ up to this point without the Fans reference. I have enjoyed many unlikeable protagonists but I don’t feel Even with Carol burying the body for H.R., she came across much more like someone who was going to do the right thing in the end than Shanna before this set of comics.
I’m late to the party, but I still want my crack at answering this.
I have no doubt that parts of the comment section had poor reasons for presuming Shanna’s heartlessness, but there’s little need to presume.
She’s been on about two dozen pages so far. I’m skimming the archives and my memory, but I can’t find one where she isn’t lying, deceiving, or emotionally manipulating someone to get what she wants. Her skill makes it clear she’s been doing it a lot longer than that. There’s suggestion she may be doing it to herself too, which would make even her internal monologue untrustworthy.
What she wants (to discover Five missing persons) is clear. Why is not, especially with the end of the above paragraph in mind. Journalists are rare as villains but there are plenty of examples, fictional and otherwise, of individuals who care deeply about the story but nothing for the people. In addition the conviction with which she assumes the worst possible scenario, even without or against evidence, and the volume at which she clings to that narrative suggest that she’s both on a personal Crusade and deeply vulnerable to confirmation bias.
I considered Shanna Neutral at best and expected that she would probably lean away from it eventually. But at this point in a narrative that had already pulled the rug a few times I was prepared to watch her lean either way.
»What she wants (to discover Five missing persons) is clear. Why is not«
Waaait, so you see someone taking huge personal risks to uncover the fate of five humans at the hands of a corporation, and your first thought is that she’s probably got questionable motives?
There’s nothing in the story suggesting any possible benefit for Shanna beyond being the journalist who uncovers a crime. Which is of course a reward, but it’s not a selfish one, and definitely nothing which could cause any undue disadvantages (unless, of course, you consider bringing criminals to justice a bad thing, maybe?). I mean, there *are* probably some gamers in Sepia worlds who’d rather have HR continue making these kind of games than go to jail for disappearing some of their own, but I’d question the moral integrity of those people.
And about lying and deceiving … sure, she’s trying to sneak into Hurricane, but not to commit a crime but to uncover one. Compare that to the lying, deceiving and *murdering* by HR and tell me who you consider “the good guys”. Everything else she says is pretty much what she herself believes. You might think her announcement to Carol that she’d have to kill her was some form of manipulation, but her actions after that show very clearly that she believes that to be the hard truth. Which turns out to be very much correct, even though I thought she was becoming a little paranoid when I read that scene the first time round. Carol, on the other hand, straight-up lies to her. And helps dispose of an employee’s body. Maybe that’s kinda not a very ethical thing to do?
There’s a difference between a journalist who follows a substantiated trail of evidence at great personal risk and uncovers a crime, and a journalist who just happens to uncover a crime because they’re harassing their target due to implicit bias and got “lucky”, then continues at great personal risk. The former is doing due diligence, the latter is fanning flames for clicks and making the world a worse place the other 99% of the time when there’s no wrongdoing.
You’d be correct if she had made up those five missing people, and then discovered they actually exist. But that’s not how it went. They went missing –> Shanna investigated. Important thing, that.
If her (definitely somewhat out-there) hypothesis had turned out to be false, then her story would have ended when she discovered that The Five got home fine after the con and just became so obsessed with the game they never talked to anyone again (or whatever the boring truth is). Then she would have turned that into a so-so story about the dangers of online gaming and earned tons of ridicule for it. In no scenario would she have ended up causing any significant damage to anyone except herself.
Her bias against gaming culture is in this case the very quality that allowed her to pick up the lead she had and follow it with more tenacity than others investigating the same issue. Because the more you identify with any group the less able you become to that group’s failings.
Shanna didn’t make up the missing people, but she absolutely made up the connection to Hurricane. “Five people reported missing after attending a con? Must be the company running it! I’m definitely an unbiased observer of this company I keep writing hit pieces on, so I should go undercover to expose this conspiracy that’s definitely happening and not at all circumstantial.”
I disagree; there’s a definite link between the five missing persons and Hurricane beyond just “Hurricane hosted the Con they disappeared at”: they are the five lucky volunteers for the immersive VR “bubble” experiment Hurricane ran at the con.
That information was carefully concealed before, during, and after the event. To my knowledge we’re never told exactly why Shanna made the connection between the missing persons and Hurricane’s five anonymous volunteers.
Okay: Five people take part in this experimental thingy, but there are *no* interviews with those five. And five people go missing. I don’t think you’d need a lot of imagination to think that pictures of those five missing people would have been available? And we know there were videos of them from before the experiment. This is starting to become very very easy to puzzle together…
Two groups of five people do not have to be related. And there was interview footage, but it anonymized the participants. If this was Shanna’s lead, she has not revealed it at this point.
Most of this strawman argument being a waste of my time, I’m going to lay out a number of relevant ground truths.
1. It is never unreasonable to question someone’s motives. If someone thinks their motives are beyond reproach and should not be questioned it’s a pretty sure bet that you should be questioning their motives.
2. Career advancement has motivated people to do terrible things.
3. A good deed can be done for bad reasons, and vice versa.
4. Investigations are disruptive to the affairs and reputation of those investigated. This is true whether those investigated are innocent or guilty. Because of this, an investigation must be justified by evidence.
5. Presuming the guilt of those investigated does not count as evidence.
6. A crime is not justified simply because it is a response to someone else’s crime.
7. A person does not become a better person simply because a worse person is present.
I look forward to finding out which of these we don’t agree on.
1: Yes! And that’s what Shanna does
2: Yes! See HR and Carol. Shanna does not do any terrible things.
3: Sure. Except bad deeds for good reasons are … murky, and hard to define.
4: Ahh, there we go: So questioning someone’s motives is fine, but testing the hypothesis is not, unles you’ve tested it already?
4a: An investigation is the thing which *produces* the evidence. Of course, you need reasonable suspicion, but Shanna is not law enforcement, so she can’t show up with a SWAT team, or incarcerate anyone until proven not guilty. If Hurricane had done nothing wrong, the disruption she would have caused would have consisted of wasting about an hour of an employee’s time, plus that of some of the security people. The evidence she has (5 people at a con, went into Hurricane’s tubes, never seen again, but Hurricane doesn’t mention anything again, ever…) is kinda enough to justify a lot more disruption that that.
4b: damaging reputation: As of now, Shanna has not published anything, and the fact that she’s investigating rather than just making up her story and posting that as The Truth(TM) tells you something about how serious she takes her job, and her responsibility. This means: So far in the story, Shanna’s investigation has not even touched Hurricane’s reputation. Not one bit.
5: She’s not presenting her suspicion as evidence. She’s got some circumstantial evidence, then finds some more (an employee going missing), and when she confronts Carol with her interpretation of events, Carol’s reaction is close enough to confirming it that she absolutely knows she’s onto something.
6: Crime? The crime of posing as a student to be shown around the office? Whoah, that’s almost terrorism! Dude, undercover investigations is something which investigative journalists do, and you should be thankful for that because otherwise democracy would be done for.
7: Shanna being “a bad person” is based on what evidence again? That she doesn’t like our favourite pastime? Because she probably grew up in a family which believed the moral panic back in the day? I might have missed something but go on and show me some evidence for your accusations (and what are you accusing her of anyway?) which goes beyond an investigative journalist doing her dangerous work, and having a silly, naïve opinion about video games? And how is that any worse than your opinion of her?
It seems I was unclear. None of those statements are accusations, nor are they about Shanna. I do feel that they relate to our conversation, but I’m interested in how you feel about them as general principles.
In very general:
3: see above: bad deed for good reasons … if the reasons are good enough to justify it, it’s not a bad deed. “bad” != “illegal” in this case. If the reasons are very strong, but the deed is still “bad”, then you have just completed your journey to the dark side.
4: So, where I live, you don’t publish the names or pictures of people under arrest or accused in court, with few exceptions. This is done to protect the assumption of innocence, and limit the effect of court proceedings on the lives of the people involved before they’re pronounced guilty. An investigation should always try to cause as little disruption as it can, and the tolerable amount of disruption should be commensurate with the gravity of the crime being investigated and the weight of already-available evidence. Where I live, undercover journalists finding and publishing dirt on corporations is not at all looked down on (except of course by the corporation whose dirt was published…). Truth to power and all that.
The rest are not at all false but I don’t see why you would think them relevant in this case, except after twisting whatever Shanna does to look much much worse, and whatever HR does to be completely excusable, and forget about the already-available evidence. Basically, you *want* Shannah to look bad so hard you’re ignoring bits of the story that get in the way.
I don’t think you appreciate the irony of that accusation. Would you please explain what exactly you think my evaluation of Shanna was at this point in the story? Because I’m getting the sense that we aren’t having the same conversation.
In the meantime I see some interesting discussion in your answers, so I’ll be reading back a few pages.
I’m sure I’m talking to myself at this point, so this is my last post and then I’m done with the conversation as well.
There’s too much to unpack, so let’s do one quick case study. Shanna’s first appearance. Chapter 19, page 2.
We meet Shanna here, and she presents her evidence. Five people tested Hurricane’s new interface at a huge convention. Five people attending that convention were reported missing.
She says that the interface apparently failed the test, but doesn’t explain why she thinks so. And through all this she makes it clear that Hurricane is her suspect.
This case is pathetic, yet you and others seem convinced. Do you not realize that a “huge convention” would have hundreds, maybe thousands of groups of five people forming for everything from lunch to product demonstrations to board games? Why is this group absolutely the one she’s looking for? Why a group at all, when the disappearances could be unrelated to each other? Why is it that this one company is to consume the ENTIRETY of her investigation from this point forward? Answers to these questions would make the difference between a skilled investigator and a lucky conspiracy theorist.
No answers are offered, and as best as I can recall they never will be. There are potential explanations, but if I have to make a bunch of baseless assumptions before she has a solid justification then Shanna is either bad at constructing a case or bad at presenting it.
Which is the irony. You accuse me of ignoring evidence because I “want Shanna to look bad”. But my evaluation of Shanna is and was neutral at this point, despite that her case is 5=5, therefore quintuple homicide. I see no reason to think that we aren’t looking at the same evidence. You just find it a lot more convincing than I do. I suspect that’s because you want very much for Shanna to be more unequivocally good than she is.
First and least, the project “apparently failed” because there wasn’t an announcement about it six days to six months later, and anything Hurricane is willing to hype with a contest, they should be willing to hype further with a string of teasers and announcements leading up to an actual release. No teaser most likely means nothing monetizable to see there.
I think these annotations have demonstrated that I’m prepared to admit logical issues and plot imperfections as they come up, but I’m not really seeing this one. Like, I’m sorry, but either conventions are much more of a hellscape than experience would lead me to believe or the disappearance without trace of five people from one is not the sort of thing that just randomly happens. There are, admittedly, other hypothetical culprits– some kind of serial killer springs to mind, we’ll get back to that– but most of those wouldn’t explain the lack of evidence or fuss as well as the Bubble hypothesis. Disappearing one person that effectively? Sure, happens all the time. Disappearing five in one place? That often takes resources.
And then she finds out about the tubes.
(And that’s not even getting into the publicly available video, which may not have disclosed the names of the Five, but did disclose certain phenotypal information about them that matched the missing-persons files. Still, you’re talking about impressions from early on, and we didn’t establish that she’d definitely seen that video until later.)
I think part of the disconnect here is that you’re applying a higher, and I would argue unrealistic, standard of proof. This is indeed not enough evidence to convict– there’s that hypothetical serial killer again, and maybe the tubes were purchased for the Bubble but still unrelated to the disappearance– but it is enough to be worth investigating. Shanna is a journalist, not a lawyer; she has no “case” to make at this point. It’s not her job to only investigate when there’s a huge backlog of evidence. It’s only her job to write when there is such a backlog. Before that, it’s her job to look at what evidence strikes her as suspicious, make the occasional intuitive leap, and gather further evidence if she can. She may have a firm belief that her hunch is right, but she’s not okay with just falsifying proof– if she were, her arc would be a lot less exciting. And frankly, one has to play a little dirty to investigate corporate wrongdoing; any halfway competent billion-dollar corporation has the polite channels of inquiry mostly under control, so the charge of “manipulating people to get what [pronoun] wants” seems like it’d apply to every journalist protagonist who ever faced a powerful, hostile subject. There’s no world where Lois Lane is both unfailingly polite and effective in her work.
Whether you like Shanna or not is ultimately your decision, and one that’s decided for most people in the panels, not the comments underneath. But the justification for her investigation still seems about as solid as Phil and I could make it without having HR or Carol do something much too dumb to be in character.
Yeah I’m with you, T. I too find it really odd that so many readers are not willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a journalist risking her life to find out what happened to 5 missing persons. Sure, maybe she was “manipulative” to Carol, but that’s what you have to do sometimes to break a story, and at that point Shanna had reason to believe that Carol was knee-deep in some deeply evil shit. AND SHE WAS RIGHT!
And you don’t have to know anything about the Fans version of Shanna to get that.
I’m not sure why people would see Shanna as an antagonist – at this point HR is clearly the villain and Carol is going off the rails, and Shanna is opposed to them, so she’s clearly one of the good guys, and the good guys are the protagonists (and duteragonists and tritagonists).
She’s just an asshole about the thing the other good guys havve in common. (Except maybe Xan…is it ever established if Xan plays games? He certainly wouldn’t play MMOs, for paranoia reasons, but…)
Of course, Xan is Penk’s player!
I doubt I ever complained Shanna got too much attention, my personal stance was “let’s see where they’re going with this”, but around this point the first time around things did feel off to me. I later realized it was because this is a story in two worlds that had previously felt like it was Arkerra centric and Sepia-World was just a small sideplot. Even when people started dying it felt like it was outside the “true story” until Shanna got involved and Sepia-World started to develop enough to exist alongside Arkerra.
To be clear, I’m not saying anything was done “wrong”, I think it’s inevitable when a story with one focus grows new ones. The Champions viewpoint kinda felt the same but I adjusted more quickly because it “fit” with the Peacemakers.
To me, she always was just one of those “hate gamers” journalist who stumbled upon “AAA” video game company shit and thought she hit the jackpot.
She’s so sure of her stance in that, she’s sure she’s gonna die and make a hit postmortem article.
I think it’s a sorry state for us readers that we need a scene of “but look, she has bad shit going on with her life, awww” to be able to cope with “she doesn’t like your hobby very much” and realize she’s a good character.
It just doesn’t even add up. Having bad shit happening to you doesn’t innately make you good. She just was good from the start, with a very human flaw of having a misconception, but was always acting on principle. It’s not like she goes on ranting about “getting that scoop!” or other Evil Journalist Character shit like that. It’s just a case of you being an asshole to someone and thinking you were right and then witnessing the person crying in silence and thinking “wait… I AM the asshole…”
Maybe it has something to do with being introduced late to the story that makes people less perceptive to warming up to a character? Because our story started with an asshole competition with Frigg and Best and they are absolute fan favorites. I rather believe that than us nerds feeling oh so oppressed, I need to, because there’s too much shit going out there to people because of their race, sexuality or nationality to cope with people getting hurt because someone said “haha fucking nerds”.
+1
I think this scene can help because it shows she has feelings and all that, which makes her more relatable to people who can’t relate to her otherwise. I’m starting to think the issue could have been sidestepped by introducing Shanna with a one-page story which shows off her good side, but then ends with some throwaway remark about games. Or something like that.
But then, a big part of Guilded Age is that characters are often not who they seem to be initially, and getting the reader to be open to that. So establishing Shanna too firmly as a good person with a weakness would remove the opportunity for the reader to have an initial impression and then correct it later, as more of the whole picture is revealed.
Two things:
1) The moral panic around D&D in the 80s, and then subsequent moral panics around the video games and the popular music in the 90s were the irritating background noise of my childhood. Having Shana use some of the same language and apparent motivations as manipulative politicians and hypocritical religious leaders wasn’t a great way to set her up as a sympathetic (or even interesting) character. I think you eventually got around to giving her a character arc in GA that at least makes her make sense as something other than what she sounded like in the beginning, but I don’t know if I ever really looked at her and went, “Yeah, I’d have a beer with her.”
2) This single page, without context, is what I imagine a more well adjusted version of my dad would be like. I don’t think Shana here is being like… super saint adult child of an unwell parent, but she’s definitely further down that path than Dad is–she’s at least capable of being upset with and loving her mother at the same time.
As a Fans fan I found (and still find) the Shanna hate pretty baffling. Context really is everything! Having already seen her judgy-jerk exterior and the depth under that totally framed her for me here.
Yeah but that’s the thing. At this point in the GA story, there’s little to Shanna besides the judgy-jerk exterior if you didn’t read Fans.
What’s this I read? A working link to a Fans page? Is Fans actually going to be completely uploaded again? Oh, please, please, make it so, please
I’ll do the truffle shuffle if you do…
Test comment. Might have broken something.