Guilded Age

There’s a moment in the first few pages of Fans that I liked so well, I came close to repeating it in the first few pages of Rip and Teri, and I wanted a variation of it here. In a crisis situation, like an active shooter drawing out their gun, about 80% of people freeze. 10% just go wild and are more likely to increase the danger than to help, and 10%… just act, with about as much presence of mind as if they’d rehearsed it. Which, of course, doesn’t always mean doing the best possible thing, but at least they’re their most capable selves in that moment.

So in Fans, all the characters including Shanna freeze when the gun comes out except Rikk, whose whole life begins to change with a single instinctive motion. In Rip and Teri, Rip performs a similar reflex action against a school shooter, which blows the cover he’s been maintaining for years in a matter of seconds.

Shanna is not one of the optimal 10%. The collision of fight and flight impulses represented in the first frame here hold her immobile for roughly five minutes, certainly long enough to be too late in those other two situations. But this scene is similar to those two in that when she does act, it’s as if her body is making its own decisions, independently of any “higher” brain functions, many of which would argue for discretion instead. That’s working in favor of a big hero moment right now, but the dynamic will shift a bit on page 7.