Even sloppier– JJ can’t possibly know this, but if he kills Xan–Penk– he kills part of the little narrative H.R.’s been building in Arkerra, and H.R. may well get increasingly nuttier as a result.
Abit, but not much. She took false realities as a general blame, and gamers having been loud nd obnoxious in the new medium of her field (the internets new newspaper) got her pissed and she tied both negatives together. It makes good sense, it’s a good motive for her actions, albeit going extreme and (for a good reason in this specific situation) pretty paranoid. She’s got a good motive or her actions, great writing as usual
Yeah, I’m really hoping we see that explored! It makes me realize Shanna is more important to the themes of this story than I could have guessed during her first few chapters!
Shana’s mom consistently loses herself in make-believe worlds. From a certain perspective, games encourage people to do the same. To someone whose loved one got lost in the land of make believe, that could seem like a dangerous sort of affirmation, one that it might be best to tear apart before someone else’s life gets ruined. We are suppositioning that this page demonstrates this line of thinking as the basis of Shana’s anti-game crusade.
I would take it more as an example of psychological transference. That’s an irrational emotional response. Basically, she takes the emotions cause by her mother’s situation out on anyone and anything that reminds her of that. It’s like what you said, except that rather than there being a “line of thinking,” it’s just automatic. So, perhaps her mother’s lapses into unreality caused her to feel abandoned, but she suppressed those emotions, and now to her it feels as if the gamers are are abandoning her. It’s the suppressed emotions popping back up inappropriately.
Rectangular text is not something Shanna actually said, but something she prepares to say. It gets interrupted by conversation from JJ Berten standing at Xan’s door – JJ’s visible in the last panel.
(I had to reread the strip a few times to get this, so I thought this might help others figuring things out.)
I don’t think so; she stalks off, and then turns around, and starts back over. She thought of what else she wanted to say, and was angry enough to actually go back and say it.
Looking at it again, I almost completely agree, but I don’t think she necessarily knows what she will say when she returns. She walks away, then stops. Then she turns around while replaying part of the argument. I think she’s getting angrier and more determined to keep arguing as she replays the argument, but we don’t see a good comeback from her and I’m not getting the sense that she’s satisfied with something that she just thought of.
I suspect that Xan mentioning Freud may have reminded Shanna of psychiatrists and her mother and psychiatric issues seemed to be a major topic in Fans, so that comment, in particular, may have been what set Shanna off.
Rectangular text is all Shanna’s. “Freudian personal basis” is a comeback at Xan’s suggestion that Shanna needs to explore her own reasons for disliking computer games. Shanna tries to convince herself that her anti-gaming bias is purely objective, but deep down she may have realized there’s a connection to her mother’s illness.
“I have an issue with fucking unreality being marketed as a market alternative to reality!”
That does nag at me.
I’ve long thought that the ability to imagine fictional narratives — to imagine other points of view, other possible worlds — is essential to self-consciousness. In other worlds, it’s fundamental to being human.
But, it worries me how extensively certain sorts of fictional narratives are marketed to us. How often it is that we receive the heroic fantasy, in which one isolated individual — or at best, a small group — is the agent of historic change. Yet that’s not how things ever work.
Real problems are less like a band of adventurers slaying a dragon, more like the creation of an adventurers’ guild in order to agitate for rights and government support.
Come to think of it, if one’s been immersed deeply enough in the community of players in an MMO, you’ll actually see democratic movements sprout up from time to time, though rarely so strongly “in character” as the adventurers’ guild.
Historically, heroic fantasy has a perfectly valid point – it’s not trying to realistically represent the RW experience (what would be the point in that?), it’s simply trying to feed us the imaginary narrative with us as the protagonist. That’s a socially useful because it makes people strive toward an imaginary goal, and even though that’s almost invariably futile, the side effects serve a purpose. If every soldier on a battlefield has a fantasy of being The Hero and winning the war, they’re more likely to charge suicidally into gunfire than they’d be with a clear awareness of their actual role (fight feebly and die horribly).
We’re all parts of a mechanism, and heroic fantasy has been a necessary lubricant for centuries. However, it serves less of a purpose in the modern world, and yet it’s being force-fed to us harder than ever before. The inevitable disappointment when it turns out we don’t actually win at life and get the girl and ride off into the sunset… well, I imagine it’s a significant contributor to the global depression phenomenon.
People who buy into fantasy as reality largely have a problem with “aberrant decoding”, something that’s one of the first signs of schizophrenia and other schizoid mental illnesses. Aberrant decoding has a genetic component, but is often enabled by childhood abuse or neglect: If you don’t get an accurate idea of how the world works from family, friends, or outside education/intervention, media is your only friend. A key case: That guy who shot up a sorority, as well as being mentally ill, had a dad who bought their kids’ affection: Notably, through a copy of “The Secret.”
“Don’t be a hero” is pretty much a cliche for an NCO to say to troops — because soldiers who try to be “the hero” and take extraordinary risks get themselves killed, while endangering their fellow soldiers. Soldiers depend upon teamwork and mutual support, and heroics are completely incompatible with that.
“Don’t be a hero” but also “you got this, and if it turns out you don’t, we totally never leave our own behind except when we do”. They don’t want all-out heroics, true, but they do want the baseless unthinking optimism.
Heroic fantasy is about more than warfare, though. The feeling of the whole world being centered around us and our glorious, inevitable success is what makes people move forward with their lives, (hopefully) being productive members of society. It also makes some people act like unbearable, monstrously entitled assholes too…
Hitler’s little band changed a good deal of stuff.
It doesn’t take that much work to call the FBI in, if you’ve already got the evidence.
You really can take advantage of institutions, if you’re willing to understand how they operate.
The heroic fantasy has a number of uses, not the least of which is that we all are the center of our own heroic struggle. The stakes may not always be life-changing, but we are forced to make similar choices, if only in an abstract way (self-gain vs. self-sacrifice, responding to an opportunity/”call to adventure”).
But perhaps more relevant is this idea of the Hero’s Journey, an archetype in literature and storytelling that has been discussed a lot by critics in the past few decades. George Lucas used it when writing the original Star Wars, following the traditional arc of impetus, initial refusal, mentorship, acceptance of the call, loss, descent into danger, and eventual achievement. But the Journey isn’t just about tropes, it’s about the “spiritual” side of growth. All of the growth that a Hero undergoes in a relatively limited time mirrors what we undergo in real life. So maybe the heroic narrative doesn’t give us detailed advice on positive change on our communities, but it gets at the challenges we all face.
Not every story is intended to exactly model behavior, and even children can generally tell the difference without trouble. When the hero slays the dragon, people get that you should take away “believe in yourself,” not “go fight fire-breathing monsters alone.”
Besides, reality does often produce stories with a small number of heroes. The Civil Rights Movement, for example, involved tons of people, but only a few people like Martin Luther King Junior or Malcolm X. They’re the heroes, and everybody else was the supporting cast. Sure, we could go into a lot more detail, but it’s a reasonable simplification and it’s how people naturally see things.
She’s close enough that I’m not sure Berten couldn’t have seen her. He might be doing that on purpose to try and see if endangering Xan makes her come back, taking the chance to avoid violence again. Then again, totally inconspicuous coat.
The difference that Shanna doesn’t see is choice. People choose to enjoy games. People like her mother didn’t choose unreality over reality, she’s unable to distinguish one from the other.
The lack of choice in her mother’s case is what makes it infuriating to Shanna. Gamers can simply log out, but her mother is unable to switch voluntarily. That said, Shanna might dislike theater & other forms of entertainment as well.
Always interesting how the Bad Guy arriving at the house never bothers to look down the street both ways. I mean, it looks like Shanna was just leaving, having left the house maybe a minute earlier, then stopped and returned.
Annnnnnd that was supposed to be a response to Theodemus but my copy of How To Make Replies To Comments For Dummies (TM) is under the leg of the table so it doesn’t wobble.
I’d say Ford Moustache 2015 GoaT, but that’s looking more similar to a Camaro convertible. Moustachevrolet just doesn’t roll off the tongue as much, though. Still, the trim looks suitably different.
Ah, you know what, I misread a few pages back where Xan was talking about making first contact. For some reason I assumed that he would go with Shanna. I realize now he was simply talking about e-mailing the people in question.
On another note, she didn’t warn Xan like she did Joel, did she?
I suspect that she would have been too annoyed to do it and Xan didn’t seem to be welcoming any advice from her, so I doubt it. Actually, thinking to do that might have been a reason for her to turn around, but her thoughts and facial expression don’t support it.
Although with Xan’s technical know-how he might already have a laptop in hand and climbing out a window, communicating through the intercom with a walky-talky.
Though I do feel that I need to add that Shana is not very introspective if she really believes she has no personal bias against escapist entertainment.
How can anyone who is biased know that they are biased? If you know that a belief is wrong, you don’t believe it anymore. It’s not quite that black and white — a person may go through a period where they question their beliefs or where they become aware of thought patterns that have led them astray in the past, but so far Shanna doesn’t seem to be doing that.
People can still be introspective and yet have blind spots. Psychological transference is irrational. If someone could that they were doing it, they wouldn’t be doing it.
People can definitely know they’re biased. In Shanna’s case, though, the bias may not be particularly obvious to her unless her mother was an avid gamer.
There was a study done that found that rats in a cage did drugs as much as possible. But they also found that rats in a rat paradise with food, room to run, other rats to hang with, greenery, and all sorts of other good stuff ignored the drugs.
For the most part, life is a cage. It sucks. This has been recognized forever. 2500 years ago Plato wrote in the Republic that the idea of an afterlife was necessary as reward for service in this world, to motivate people to be good and faithful. But at the same time he recognized that if people understood that the afterlife was a paradise, they would seek death or even kill themselves to get to that paradise and out of the hardships of this life. So those who commit suicide are denied the afterlife.
This is held true in most major religions; Islam, Christianity, Judaism all present an afterlife as a reward for service and faith in this world, but also indicate that suicide is prohibited and will deny the afterlife to that person.
For many, life sucks donkey sphincter. Many people want to spend as little time as possible in the real world as they can. Escapist entertainment such as video games are – theoretically – less destructive than drugs, but the principle is the same.
Because the same question holds for us as it did for the rats. Is life a paradise, or a cage?
* and yes, that includes suicide bombing so even if Allah is out there, he isn’t going to be thrilled with suicide bombers – no virgins for them
Its getting harder to hold on to the hope that she told him about the danger off camera and is not a scatterbrain… but at least he has enough information to piece it together if he is as intelligent and paranoid as he initially came off as.
Still Shanna, are you going to just go merrily bouncing around endangering the lives of everyone who might be helping the Five in the game as well? Try to get your cloak and dagger on a bit harder.
Oooh, Sloppy work, JJ. Letting Shanna see you before you saw her.
Even sloppier– JJ can’t possibly know this, but if he kills Xan–Penk– he kills part of the little narrative H.R.’s been building in Arkerra, and H.R. may well get increasingly nuttier as a result.
Oh. Right. Her mother.
Can’t believe I missed that.
Still a leap but yeah, she needs someone to blame.
Abit, but not much. She took false realities as a general blame, and gamers having been loud nd obnoxious in the new medium of her field (the internets new newspaper) got her pissed and she tied both negatives together. It makes good sense, it’s a good motive for her actions, albeit going extreme and (for a good reason in this specific situation) pretty paranoid. She’s got a good motive or her actions, great writing as usual
Yeah, I’m really hoping we see that explored! It makes me realize Shanna is more important to the themes of this story than I could have guessed during her first few chapters!
Oh yeah. I missed it too. Explains her motivations.
Although I really loved the cameo by Faans Shana on the weekend. :)
Huh?
Shana’s mom consistently loses herself in make-believe worlds. From a certain perspective, games encourage people to do the same. To someone whose loved one got lost in the land of make believe, that could seem like a dangerous sort of affirmation, one that it might be best to tear apart before someone else’s life gets ruined. We are suppositioning that this page demonstrates this line of thinking as the basis of Shana’s anti-game crusade.
I would take it more as an example of psychological transference. That’s an irrational emotional response. Basically, she takes the emotions cause by her mother’s situation out on anyone and anything that reminds her of that. It’s like what you said, except that rather than there being a “line of thinking,” it’s just automatic. So, perhaps her mother’s lapses into unreality caused her to feel abandoned, but she suppressed those emotions, and now to her it feels as if the gamers are are abandoning her. It’s the suppressed emotions popping back up inappropriately.
Careful, Shanna! Point your nose away from him.
Welp, that was a close call.
Rectangular text is not something Shanna actually said, but something she prepares to say. It gets interrupted by conversation from JJ Berten standing at Xan’s door – JJ’s visible in the last panel.
(I had to reread the strip a few times to get this, so I thought this might help others figuring things out.)
I thought it came off more as her thinking about the tail end of their conversation before she left which we didn’t get to see.
That’s the way I read it, too.
I don’t think so; she stalks off, and then turns around, and starts back over. She thought of what else she wanted to say, and was angry enough to actually go back and say it.
@ Chris & Swagner: That’s what I thought at first too, but then I reached the conclusion insomniac describes above.
Same here
Looking at it again, I almost completely agree, but I don’t think she necessarily knows what she will say when she returns. She walks away, then stops. Then she turns around while replaying part of the argument. I think she’s getting angrier and more determined to keep arguing as she replays the argument, but we don’t see a good comeback from her and I’m not getting the sense that she’s satisfied with something that she just thought of.
I suspect that Xan mentioning Freud may have reminded Shanna of psychiatrists and her mother and psychiatric issues seemed to be a major topic in Fans, so that comment, in particular, may have been what set Shanna off.
Rectangular text is all Shanna’s. “Freudian personal basis” is a comeback at Xan’s suggestion that Shanna needs to explore her own reasons for disliking computer games. Shanna tries to convince herself that her anti-gaming bias is purely objective, but deep down she may have realized there’s a connection to her mother’s illness.
Another Chris! This isn’t good… not good at all.
…or is it?
Since your avatar is already making eyes at HR above, I’d say you two’ll get along fine. ;)
“I have an issue with fucking unreality being marketed as a market alternative to reality!”
That does nag at me.
I’ve long thought that the ability to imagine fictional narratives — to imagine other points of view, other possible worlds — is essential to self-consciousness. In other worlds, it’s fundamental to being human.
But, it worries me how extensively certain sorts of fictional narratives are marketed to us. How often it is that we receive the heroic fantasy, in which one isolated individual — or at best, a small group — is the agent of historic change. Yet that’s not how things ever work.
Real problems are less like a band of adventurers slaying a dragon, more like the creation of an adventurers’ guild in order to agitate for rights and government support.
Come to think of it, if one’s been immersed deeply enough in the community of players in an MMO, you’ll actually see democratic movements sprout up from time to time, though rarely so strongly “in character” as the adventurers’ guild.
Historically, heroic fantasy has a perfectly valid point – it’s not trying to realistically represent the RW experience (what would be the point in that?), it’s simply trying to feed us the imaginary narrative with us as the protagonist. That’s a socially useful because it makes people strive toward an imaginary goal, and even though that’s almost invariably futile, the side effects serve a purpose. If every soldier on a battlefield has a fantasy of being The Hero and winning the war, they’re more likely to charge suicidally into gunfire than they’d be with a clear awareness of their actual role (fight feebly and die horribly).
We’re all parts of a mechanism, and heroic fantasy has been a necessary lubricant for centuries. However, it serves less of a purpose in the modern world, and yet it’s being force-fed to us harder than ever before. The inevitable disappointment when it turns out we don’t actually win at life and get the girl and ride off into the sunset… well, I imagine it’s a significant contributor to the global depression phenomenon.
People who buy into fantasy as reality largely have a problem with “aberrant decoding”, something that’s one of the first signs of schizophrenia and other schizoid mental illnesses. Aberrant decoding has a genetic component, but is often enabled by childhood abuse or neglect: If you don’t get an accurate idea of how the world works from family, friends, or outside education/intervention, media is your only friend. A key case: That guy who shot up a sorority, as well as being mentally ill, had a dad who bought their kids’ affection: Notably, through a copy of “The Secret.”
“Don’t be a hero” is pretty much a cliche for an NCO to say to troops — because soldiers who try to be “the hero” and take extraordinary risks get themselves killed, while endangering their fellow soldiers. Soldiers depend upon teamwork and mutual support, and heroics are completely incompatible with that.
“Don’t be a hero” but also “you got this, and if it turns out you don’t, we totally never leave our own behind except when we do”. They don’t want all-out heroics, true, but they do want the baseless unthinking optimism.
Heroic fantasy is about more than warfare, though. The feeling of the whole world being centered around us and our glorious, inevitable success is what makes people move forward with their lives, (hopefully) being productive members of society. It also makes some people act like unbearable, monstrously entitled assholes too…
Hitler’s little band changed a good deal of stuff.
It doesn’t take that much work to call the FBI in, if you’ve already got the evidence.
You really can take advantage of institutions, if you’re willing to understand how they operate.
The heroic fantasy has a number of uses, not the least of which is that we all are the center of our own heroic struggle. The stakes may not always be life-changing, but we are forced to make similar choices, if only in an abstract way (self-gain vs. self-sacrifice, responding to an opportunity/”call to adventure”).
But perhaps more relevant is this idea of the Hero’s Journey, an archetype in literature and storytelling that has been discussed a lot by critics in the past few decades. George Lucas used it when writing the original Star Wars, following the traditional arc of impetus, initial refusal, mentorship, acceptance of the call, loss, descent into danger, and eventual achievement. But the Journey isn’t just about tropes, it’s about the “spiritual” side of growth. All of the growth that a Hero undergoes in a relatively limited time mirrors what we undergo in real life. So maybe the heroic narrative doesn’t give us detailed advice on positive change on our communities, but it gets at the challenges we all face.
Not every story is intended to exactly model behavior, and even children can generally tell the difference without trouble. When the hero slays the dragon, people get that you should take away “believe in yourself,” not “go fight fire-breathing monsters alone.”
Besides, reality does often produce stories with a small number of heroes. The Civil Rights Movement, for example, involved tons of people, but only a few people like Martin Luther King Junior or Malcolm X. They’re the heroes, and everybody else was the supporting cast. Sure, we could go into a lot more detail, but it’s a reasonable simplification and it’s how people naturally see things.
Rooky mistake JJ! You almost had her.
She’s close enough that I’m not sure Berten couldn’t have seen her. He might be doing that on purpose to try and see if endangering Xan makes her come back, taking the chance to avoid violence again. Then again, totally inconspicuous coat.
The difference that Shanna doesn’t see is choice. People choose to enjoy games. People like her mother didn’t choose unreality over reality, she’s unable to distinguish one from the other.
The lack of choice in her mother’s case is what makes it infuriating to Shanna. Gamers can simply log out, but her mother is unable to switch voluntarily. That said, Shanna might dislike theater & other forms of entertainment as well.
Nice twist.
Always interesting how the Bad Guy arriving at the house never bothers to look down the street both ways. I mean, it looks like Shanna was just leaving, having left the house maybe a minute earlier, then stopped and returned.
Maybe he does so next page? Would be an interesting development for sure.
The moustache blocks his peripheral vision.
So… is she going to be an idiot and draw attention to herself by running away?
Come on, why would he need a warrant ? Isn’t his mustache official looking enough ?!
Getting close JJ, you’re hot on the trail of Carmen Sandiego.
In the tags, it mistakenly says just “JJ” this time, not “JJ Berten” as usual.
That’s just cause we’re seeing him so often now we’re on a first-name (only) basis.
Annnnnd this is my first ever comment and this comic is super duper. :)
Annnnnnd that was supposed to be a response to Theodemus but my copy of How To Make Replies To Comments For Dummies (TM) is under the leg of the table so it doesn’t wobble.
That’s probably because you’ve outgrown the need for it, since this comment is pretty funny. :)
Bandit?
Ok, well, not Bandit obviously because we know what she (supposedly) looks like. But sure has the same parlance going.
Damn, he’s even quicker than I thought!
His car runs on Mustache.
I’d say Ford Moustache 2015 GoaT, but that’s looking more similar to a Camaro convertible. Moustachevrolet just doesn’t roll off the tongue as much, though. Still, the trim looks suitably different.
Damn. I was hoping Xan’s comment about whether Shanna wanted to travel more meant that they were going to leave the house immediately.
Who’s they? Xan’s not (or wasn’t; he might be now) going anywhere; Shanna did leave the house immediately.
Ah, you know what, I misread a few pages back where Xan was talking about making first contact. For some reason I assumed that he would go with Shanna. I realize now he was simply talking about e-mailing the people in question.
On another note, she didn’t warn Xan like she did Joel, did she?
I suspect that she would have been too annoyed to do it and Xan didn’t seem to be welcoming any advice from her, so I doubt it. Actually, thinking to do that might have been a reason for her to turn around, but her thoughts and facial expression don’t support it.
Might not have been necessary anyway, since Xan seems to be clever enough to put the pieces together on his own.
Although with Xan’s technical know-how he might already have a laptop in hand and climbing out a window, communicating through the intercom with a walky-talky.
J.J.’s accent appears to have gotten a lot more Southern since last we heard him speak.
Intentionally, I assume. I wouldn’t call that Southern, though. It seems rather rural / rustic, but I’m not good at accents.
JJ better dump a few more points into perception next time he levels up.
I was going to ask if Shana had issues with other forms of escapism such as movies, television, and books then I realized that she just might….
Though I do feel that I need to add that Shana is not very introspective if she really believes she has no personal bias against escapist entertainment.
How can anyone who is biased know that they are biased? If you know that a belief is wrong, you don’t believe it anymore. It’s not quite that black and white — a person may go through a period where they question their beliefs or where they become aware of thought patterns that have led them astray in the past, but so far Shanna doesn’t seem to be doing that.
People can still be introspective and yet have blind spots. Psychological transference is irrational. If someone could that they were doing it, they wouldn’t be doing it.
*sigh* Last sentence: If someone could know that they…
People can definitely know they’re biased. In Shanna’s case, though, the bias may not be particularly obvious to her unless her mother was an avid gamer.
There was a study done that found that rats in a cage did drugs as much as possible. But they also found that rats in a rat paradise with food, room to run, other rats to hang with, greenery, and all sorts of other good stuff ignored the drugs.
For the most part, life is a cage. It sucks. This has been recognized forever. 2500 years ago Plato wrote in the Republic that the idea of an afterlife was necessary as reward for service in this world, to motivate people to be good and faithful. But at the same time he recognized that if people understood that the afterlife was a paradise, they would seek death or even kill themselves to get to that paradise and out of the hardships of this life. So those who commit suicide are denied the afterlife.
This is held true in most major religions; Islam, Christianity, Judaism all present an afterlife as a reward for service and faith in this world, but also indicate that suicide is prohibited and will deny the afterlife to that person.
For many, life sucks donkey sphincter. Many people want to spend as little time as possible in the real world as they can. Escapist entertainment such as video games are – theoretically – less destructive than drugs, but the principle is the same.
Because the same question holds for us as it did for the rats. Is life a paradise, or a cage?
* and yes, that includes suicide bombing so even if Allah is out there, he isn’t going to be thrilled with suicide bombers – no virgins for them
Its getting harder to hold on to the hope that she told him about the danger off camera and is not a scatterbrain… but at least he has enough information to piece it together if he is as intelligent and paranoid as he initially came off as.
Still Shanna, are you going to just go merrily bouncing around endangering the lives of everyone who might be helping the Five in the game as well? Try to get your cloak and dagger on a bit harder.