Annotated 35-37
I’ll be honest with y’all: I was not expecting as many feels as I got annotating this chapter. And in some ways, this expression of grief is even tougher to do than the death scene was. What John did with Frigg here, those tears spilling down the shoulders of her armor, is just… whew. Good thing we’ve got a lighter story between this and Chapter 36.
The script is 100% Flo, and I’m sure she was digging deep on this one. When we were naming easiest and hardest characters to write, she cited Frigg as the easiest for her and Gravedust, with his emphasis on spirituality, as the hardest.
Plotwise, this page advances two arcs. As well as spiritual issues she’s been putting off, Frigg is now going to have to confront emotions outside her normal comfort zone of joy, rage, boredom, and lust… a bit like she had to do when she was feeling some sexual inadequacy, but a lot more seriously and permanently. But Penk is also coming to grips with humans having those feelings. What he sees here affects a speech and a decision that he’ll make on the very next page.
“She’s … she’s been …………. deleted from my Friends List”
YEAH FRIGG YOU TELL THAT ORANGE-HAIRED LOLLYGAGGER
Look. I’ll level with you. I was curious.
This page is an emotional ride. The dialog and expressions are heavy (I really like panels 3 and 4) and very well done but I still get a goddamn chuckle out of panel one.
Is grief really that alien to Frigg? Or, as the dialog suggests in panel 4, is this enhanced pain somehow related to the spiritual power she and Rachel could tap into?
Rachel understood Frigg on a level nobody else did. Initially that was just naïve adoration but it turned into something else over time, and at any rate, no matter how deferential Frigg may have been to Rachel, it did provide a very important source of self-confirmation for Frigg. And that’s on top of the stuff she actually learned from Rachel. I suspect she’s never had anyone as close and important to herself as that. And she certainly never had anyone taken away from her in such an irreversible way, either.
And she is very used to world where you don’t “show weakness” or some f*cking f*cker willl try to f*ck you up, and now being completely unable to hold it back, to control herself, show her feelings who’s the boss…
Not quite the same, but for me, when I get angry, like really angry, I start to cry. ‘Cose I get so frustrated over things not working as they should. And it’s very much out of my control. And you can imagine how pissed off it makes me to show completely wrong emotion when I’m angry already.
In Frigg’s case, she’s supposed to be sad, but for her the feeling comes out as anger and it is pissing her off. If that makes any sense, which it probably doesn’t.
»If that makes any sense, which it probably doesn’t.«
It actually does, to me. I just find the term “wrong emotion” difficult. It’s just not the expected/intended emotion. I know someone who works in psychological care, and for their clients, “wrong” emotions usually have really good reasons in the form of hidden “automatic” assumptions and expectations about themselves or their environment — usually of the kind that can’t possibly be met, or at least not in the way they’re trying.
In Frigg’s case that would be the assumption that pretty much anyone in the world is out to get her, she must never show weakness, and that personal affection was one such weakness. She’s trying to view any interaction with others as a competition of some sorts, which she must win of course. Now she notices that her internal emotional state isn’t really what she expected (completely understandable to an outsider, but mostly new to herself), which in itself is upsetting, and now everything is just wrong. Little miss No-Fucks-Given gets an undeniable glimpse of the fact that she’s still a human who most of all wants to love and be loved
This shouldn’t surprise us because the reason she’s with the Peacemakers and not on Team Iwatani is precisely that she does have a sensibility for justice and what’s “right”. She wants to play her part in helping the weak, she just likes to pretend she was never weak herself, and that any emotion except anger was a weakness — which Rachel’s story has comprehensively proven to be utter rubbish.
That moment in Panel 2 … Frigg is about to go on a good old (more or less) cathartic tirade and Gravedust (of all people) interrupts her by telling her what he seems to not have realized is the reason for her tirade.
YES, THANKS FOR REMINDING ME OF THE THING I’M ALREADY SHOUTING ABOUT!
That’s probably good for Penk (and the Peacemaker/Champions relationship in general) because it interrupts Frigg’s strategy of externalizing bad feelings (find someone to blame, punch them until you feel better) and gets her to use words to explain things, which triggers thoughts, which trigger feelings, which … oh so many feelings!
Frigg thought her strength was in not caring, not feeling.
Rachel taught her that there was strength in feeling.
Late did Frigg realize this also meant caring.
This is one of those moments in this story that tells you that it’s a special story – one worth following to the end. You guys really knocked it out of the park here. And in so many other places!