Annotated 27-18
There’s a lot to unpack in Carol’s accounting of herself here, which I think we can take as completely genuine. She’s past lies in her current state.
It probably goes without saying, especially in today’s America, that anyone who can graduate college, still be undecided about what they want to do, and have options like the fields of politics and law comes from some privilege. Carol’s likely grown up celebrated for her intelligence, and pretty enough to be elevated rather than stuck with the nerd herd. Nice childhood and adolescence if you can get it, but it comes with a lot of expectations. You didn’t get all those good grades not to solve climate change, did you?
“I needed to hear that”: I suspect that as she transitioned from college to adulthood, Carol experienced just enough struggle to realize the stubbornness of the world’s problems, from which she’d always been a bit sheltered. Things always seem to get more and more complicated. It can be appealing to be told that all those smarties are wrong, and we were right back when we thought things were simpler. Weren’t those happier times?
“Magick? With a K? Fuck that shit, call the priest, I ain’t getting involved in that nonesense!”
If only Shanna could see the spelling she’d know it was serious…
We had all kinds of debate about that spelling. I guess Carol would’ve picked up enough from HR to use it, but it still looks weird to me to see Shanna’s dialogue using it in response on the next page.
I can’t look at that spelling and not think that whoever wrote it that way wants me to pronounce it with emphasis on the i.
Y’know that page at the very beginning of this arc where you said you were trying for a sexual vibe between these two, and all the comments were like, “What sexual vibe? This is…not it.” Panel 4 has more of a sexual vibe than that whole page. Jussayin’.
Yep! I also said that vibe was something we worked in most strongly at the beginning and the end of their encounter, and we’re getting pretty close to the end. The beginning was more like playful play-acting, which is how most dates start, but this is an unexpected, unplanned flash of real intimacy. Two more pages till we get to the fallout from that…
Its also a complete shift in the dynamic between them. That first section was flirtatious, this has become intimate, it’s progression, and a counterpoint. Also, while the first part might not seem to have any other context at first glance, looked back on it in hind sight, with the current scene in context, you can read other things into it. For one thing, why did Carol come here? She’s not stupid, it makes way more sense for her to meet Shanna at her office like there’s nothing wrong, or to just ignore her altogether, and destroy the trail. But instead se chose to come out, away from H.R. and talk to a woman whose entire job consists of ferreting out secrets and telling them to everyone.
She enters the scene acting high handed, and on top, but I think this, what we’re seeing here, might have been her real goal all along.
That song is seriously missing a verse or two about how things actually weren’t simple at all “back then”, but how he didn’t notice any of that complicated stuff as a child, and how during that “simple” time, his parents probably wished for things to be as simple as it seemed to them as children, and so forth …