Annotated 39-11
#SorryNotSorry for rewriting today’s alt text… even when we posted the original, certain complaints about millennials were starting to feel a bit dated to me. A little while back, some commenter referred to a character I edited as “terminally millennial” because she was on her phone instead of looking at who she was talking to, and I was like…how old are you, holy crap.
The original tag, “That’s the Millennial spirit, Chrissie!”, probably reflected the conflict between me and Flo over Chrissie’s idea to “go viral with this.” On that issue, I was more Chrissie-ish, Flo was more Kaye-ish. To be fair to Flo, in the current info-drenched era, companies are not necessarily brought to their knees by scandals, even outrageous ones shared seemingly everywhere. (You fuckin’ know Hurricane has a lawyer somewhere whose job it is to call Fox News and say, “Well, Sean, this latest made-up scandal is just proof of how much some young people blindly hate capitalism.”) But I think Chrissie has a point: you don’t give up the fight just because you probably won’t win it in a single blow.
Chrissie’s fire is the main thing that’s kept this scene from being just a lifeless stack of expository branches, so far. I’m hoping she comes across here as a fully realized character, informed by but not generalized by her various minority identities (black, trans, woman—and yes, I know women aren’t really a minority, but nobody seems to have told certain segments of our society that, so).
Huh. I knew Chrissie was trans since the Christmas-scene the first time around, but didn’t know she was black until today.
Same.
I had also forgotten that and had to go back and remind myself that it was revealed in the annotations before (the QUILTBAG character she’s based on was visibly black). In Sepia World, it seems everyone appears … sepia. Likewise in Arkerra, I don’t recall a lot of color representation — unless you count green, orange, or Heads of Houses who happen to be named after Asian game creators.
You forget Braggadocio and various background characters who are brown or black.
You’re right, I did forget Braggadocio. And now I remember the blind Sister of the Unyielding Heart. But when I wrote the comment, without going back through the archives, I couldn’t remember any brown or black characters except the girl we saw Iwatani with in his imagination a few pages ago.
“Then you know that standing up to bullies doesn’t actually work”.
THANK YOU!
I’m horrified that so many people give this advice to victims of bullying and think it’s problem solved!
If a kid stands up to a bully in school, either the bully is stronger and just beats them, or the bully is not stronger but goes to fetch a handful of their bullying mates and they beat the kid together.
(Yes I talk from experience).
Fully agreed (also from experience). The problem is that the advice does work against /some/ bullies. Mainly those who are not super popular or powerful and are merely lashing out some of their own issues in the other way they know. Thing is, that sort of kids need to be helped and loved, not “stood up to”.
I would agree. Although giving in to bullies also does not work.
The thing that kinda works is either getting help against bullies, or being more patient than bullies.
Both of which you might call standing up. Know which fights you can’t win, but also which ones you can.
A friend of mine once said “Practicing running gives you much better chances than practicing karate.”
I agree, but you should never allow them to ruin your confidence.
I met one of my bullies from 4th grade when we were 19, and boy did I feel sorry for him. He barely managed to say a word, poor guy. *Not* rubbing it in felt so amazingly empowering.
No strategy always works, but that doesn’t mean it can never work. I’ve stood up to a bully, and then had them never bother me again. It’s worked multiple times, for different reasons each time. It just as easily could have gone badly for me, but I didn’t really have another option. It was do something, or continue to suffer. Mostly it was reflexive rather than planned. Thankfully as an adult I’ve learned how to nip such interpersonal issues in the bud.
It worked. Sometimes it does, but it’s a gamble, like any untested strategy.