Annotated 34-1
Anyway, before this sequence became about Flo and me yelling at each other, it was first about getting all the readers to yell at Shanna!
This is a tangled topic I can talk about from many perspectives, but let’s focus on the Watsonian issues first (we’ll get to the Doylist ones tomorrow). In her Fans incarnation, Shanna embedded with the Science Fiction Club, as it was always at the center of some news story. A few factors kept that club from expelling her despite her anti-geek sentiment: a best friend in the scene, tolerant leadership, a collegiate group curious about this outsider or spoiling for argument with an easily provoked authority figure, and a series of obvious external threats that’d make friends out of anyone who fought them bravely and as a team.
This incarnation doesn’t have any of that going for her at this point. Xan has barely exchanged a handful of PMs with this new social circle and spent a few tense hours with Shanna, and the social circle in question is also older and from a later era of fandom. Chrissie, her contact, is tolerant but not really a leader. They’re less likely to accept some near-rando who shows an interest in them, scornful or otherwise. The odds are already against Shanna swaying them to her cause, and here she is, ready to make them insurmountable.
Xan is completely right. Practical concerns are all that really count here. But… it wouldn’t have made much sense for Shanna’s issues to vanish as soon as they became impractical. She could mostly suspend them with Joel but probably feels more threatened by a group. As Xan will point out tomorrow, this shit’s got to be addressed, or else she’s going to go into the most important meeting of her life with a cluttered mind.
I can’t believe you had a 5-a-week update schedule. Even more so that you were keen on reducing the amount of chapters but not so much the weekly schedule.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a full blown, colored and everything, comic having such a mad update schedule.
By the way what made Guilded Age the most ambitious project, considering you already had quite a bit of comicking under your belt? The schedule? The length?
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a full blown, colored and everything, comic having such a mad update schedule.”
So you’ve never heard of Questionable Content, then. It has been updating five days a week since September 2004. What’s more, it’s written, drawn and colored by just one guy, so “mad update schedule” seems very fitting.
Absolutely nuts. Much respect to them.
Well, my principal rationales for wanting that update schedule and for wanting fewer chapters were the same: both meant we would be done with the series sooner. I obviously enjoyed doing Guilded Age on balance despite all the drama, but when that drama crested, I was like, “Let’s just get done with this story as soon as possible so we can move on with our lives.” Flo paid some lip service to that sentiment, and yet somehow she kept adding chapters to the plan, adding pages to the planned chapters, and adding little extra non-chapter chapters like “Breaking Bread With The Enemy.” I feel like part of the motive for that was an epic vision worth praising, and part of it was chasing some ideal of epicness we could never fully realize. Because we live in the real world, not the realm of ideals.
It’s still worth praising that epic vision, though. In my view, epic is what Guilded Age became. My work on Fans was technically longer (when you put its two runs together) and Penny and Aggie was in the same ballpark in terms of length, but both those series were more episodic and less about creating a fully realized world. That’s why I’d call GA the most ambitious.
(When I first got into comics as a reader, the schedule for most of them was 22-23 pages and monthly, which does roughly equate to a page every weekday, so I never thought our schedule was that crazy. But then, I doubt many of those comics had as much co-writer conflict as ours did, and the better page rates meant their creators could do comics as their sole day job.)
Since we are a tad more privy to her reason for hating Potters and other potheads, it makes perfect sense she’s very negative about letting yourself immerse in non-reality.
Like a friend with whom I had words over his comment on “why does your mom need a personal helper, woopdiduu”. Mine’s being part paralyzed from one side. His? Been dead for over dozen years. For a guy only nearing his 40s.
Makes not his “joking belittlement” any more approriate, but makes it perfectly understandable that he’d have more callous take on problems mothers might have…
Still. Explaining yourself is always good. Helps people to understand, rather than just being pissed off for you being pissed off for “no good reason”. It’s never too obvious what’s your problem.
Always communicate. :D
“makes it perfectly understandable that he’d have more callous take on problems mothers might have…”
It does?
My mother’s been dead for twice that long, and imagining myself in the situation you describe, I think my words would have begun and ended “get the fuck away from me.”
Now, “understandable” only means the ability to understand, not that a person necessarily does so. ^^”
Not to mention, the situation between you and him are likely wildly different. Even if you were of same age at the time of mother’s passing, sex (or even gender, ‘cose why not), living in same country and held even similar status in society. Still there is a lot wiggle room to go around. And I think even number of those don’t match.
We are different people and take things differently. But makes no difference that having lost a dear person at the prime of your life can affect a person in way that makes them more inclined to see people complaining about things while they are still actually alive as something less against having already lost.
Sorry to hear of your loss regardless, even if time has healed it a bunch already, I’m reading.
To be fair to Shanna here, the one playing Bandit literally is a “gamer gnome”.
I think it’s very well established that this Shanna Sepia is not like Shanna Prime. It’s also noted that she’s stressed out of her mind. Still, I must say that her OCD-like compulsion of hers of always being petulant and snide to people that could be her only chance of getting alive out of this (or at least not being killed for nothing) is bordering on self-sabotage at this point. No, I don’t think Xan would be particularly miffed by a contemptuous normie (“aren’t they all?”) but asking Shanna to let him do the talking is just common sense (and more polite than just shoving a pair of socks in Shanna’s mouth)
I have never seen Watson and Doyle referenced in this context before. A quick Google search explained what it means, but until I looked it up I was completely mystified about what Sherlock Holmes had to do with this.
One thing I wished we had looked into by the end of GA was where Shanna’s chip on her shoulder regarding geeks came from. We eventually learn that Fans!’s Shanna’s mother had episodic mental disturbances where she was regressed to infantilism and because of that, Shanna forced herself to age quickly and “put away the childish things” she used to love, so she secretly resented the geeks for reveling in the freedom to keep loving those things. (Or at least that was my reading.) I’m sure that this Shanna’s contempt is not simply ill-natured pettiness so I wish we got to see what caused it.
See http://guildedage.net/comic/annotated-29-8/ and following.