Annotated 34-3
Sometimes you need to pit your hero against a superior tactician, maybe with the additional advantage of surprise. Your hero might develop tactics of their own by the end of the story, but handling that initial encounter can be tricky: how to let your hero survive without using dumb luck as a cheat, or worse, making the antagonist suddenly get stupid?
One method is to make a plot point out of whatever makes your hero distinctive, the actions they perform that most others wouldn’t. Not even the best tacticians can anticipate every action a person might take, like doubling back just to spend five more minutes on a freaking intercom in the middle of the street, trying to shout-win an argument that’s poked her right in the mommy issues. JJ isn’t looking around much right now because really, who would plan for the target to double back on her own trail?
Had Shanna not done this, she would have kept the original appointment with Chrissie that was set up via PMs on Xan’s computer. JJ would’ve shown up at that agreed-upon time and place, found Shanna and maybe Chrissie too, and, well, that would’ve been that.
This is the last time I’ll mention my clashes with Flo for a while, but another one of them was a partial inspiration for this scene. Let’s just say it takes some pretty intense argument for walking the streets of Philadelphia alone to feel like a preferable alternative.
Haha, yeah, Shanna is exactly the sort of person to run back from an argument she walked away from and scream “AND ANOTHER THING”
Run back to, pretend I can write
I used to live in Philly. He looks like he might live in one of the nicer parts of Philly. I wasn’t afraid to walk around the nice parts alone at night, though maybe I should have been. (I actually lived there when this was first published — didn’t realize this was set there!)
Unreality has always been a market alternative to reality; we just occasionally develop new delivery methods. It used to be storytelling and plays, then novels, then movies, now games. All basically the same thing presented in different ways, and being opposed to games because they are unreal is nonsensical unless you are also opposed to the other things I mentioned for the same reason.
Shannon is looking for a scapegoat like many other crusaders (though she can’t admit it to herself) While games are the biggest target for blame today, movies and books have also been attacked. Life is easier when you have someone/something to blame.
As T has mentioned, she does in fact oppose the other things you mentioned, and was doing well not to immediately walk back “I go to the movies” with “documentaries, of course!” As presented, she’s actually responded to her mother’s mental health issues by becoming opposed to imagination, which is why I’m bemused when T describes her as someone who has issues with geeks and kind of has a point: the character on the page is just about as messed up as HR.
(pseudo-editing to add to the end of my post: “and only has issues with ‘geeks’ if ‘geeks’ describes very close to everyone else in the human race; even Shanna needs to be furiously trying to defend herself to be as overt in her reputation of imagination as she is here.”)
*Sigh* Xan seems like a nice person. He lives by his -slightly misguided- principles, and I respect that.
But every time I hear or read about a “sovereign citizen” that simply decides not to believe in the authority of the government, I cringe in frustration. Luckily, Xan’s idiosincracies are keeping him safe(er) in this case (it does pay to be paranoid when there really are people are out to get you). IRL, however, “sovereign citizens” tend to be nothing more than pigheaded rules lawyers trying to reinterpret laws that they never actually read in a way they were never intended to be used
I read him more as a passive resistor to the government as opposed to a Sovereign Citizen. He’ll make them go do the paperwork and make sure everything is completely in order before he’ll give an inch, and he will not cooperate. Honestly, I can’t blame anyone who does that. After all, honest cops say to never talk to cops other than through a lawyer.
To be fair, this cartoon is from before libertarianism openly admitted to just being about racism.
Today the same effect could have been had through the ACAB adage.
I think that’s not quite what Xan does. As I read it, he’s well aware of the increase in government surveillance these days, very suspicious of it (which I can absolutely get behind!) and counters it with a generous dose of caution when dealing with the government. He’s probably also got some violations of the DMCA to his name, and some other things related to intellectual property and attempts of translating physical property concepts to digital things. So he probably has a very low opinion of such laws. But I can’t imagine he’d be the person to violate speed limits and then claim to the police officer who stops him that “your laws don’t apply to me!”.
He’s a digital outlaw in the sense that many security researchers have been made outlaws in recent years. He may also have knowingly committed a thing or two which he may not be so proud of, and he may be concerned about on constitutionally-questionable government surveillance more than most people, but he can actually back up his beliefs with published fact, as we’ll see later. And as you note, that attitude is going to turn out to be a life-saver.