Annotated 33-13
Xan and Shanna may have had a bumpy start, but what saves them here is mutual devotion to the work of information-gathering. Shanna sets terms for her continued presence and Xan immediately meets them (possibly looking a little chastised as he does so, though it’s hard to tell with him). And as soon as he does, Shanna’s irritation is all but forgotten.
The Fans version of Shanna often clashed with the hacker Tim Mitts, who shares Xan’s contempt for established authority structures and old media. Dealing with Tim, though, would mean lots of corny attempts at flirting and vulgar jokes, not this nearly affectless professionalism. I’ve already said why I didn’t want to use Tim, but I’m also glad we didn’t try to repeat that dynamic more than we’re doing here: it’s arguably outdated, would probably read creepy in this situation, and would’ve felt to me like stale repetition.
I was really interested in infographics at this point, and I thought we could wring some nice easy humor out of the way some of them are poorly designed. What I didn’t figure on was that it was tough to find graphics that Xan would use that wouldn’t be at least somewhat “readable” to Shanna, so I ended up creating more work for Flo and John than I meant to.
I definitely agree that Tim wouldn’t have been the right choice for this scene. Every concern you listed I agree with, but there’s also the fact that this comic is finally introducing the real-world gamers who actually play Kingdoms of Arkerra. In Fans! every main character is some variety of geek, nerd, or geeknerd, so Tim comes off more as true-to-life, since most nerds know (or at least know of) someone like that. Here, it would feel much more like playing to the “neckbeard gamer” stereotype. That can still be good, but it’s very easy for that to be lazy and offensive, and if that were our first impression of the game’s fanbase, it would make it harder to empathize with the gamer characters we meet later.