Well, she TRIED.
I like Giselle and I'd like to do more with her, but as a character she's going to need some juggling between good traits and whatever traits make her a person who responds to being snitched on with "spend a week plotting complex revenge schemes".
“…they talked AT me…”
Very telling right there. Went in one ear and out the other. While she may be really trying to help Heather (in her own twisted way), she still hasn’t really changed, and hasn’t really learned anything.
Glad to see that Heather is changing, though.
I find Giselle far more of a bully and ‘bad’ kid than I do Amanda. Amanda has reasons for why she does what she does. Abuse, neglect, abandonment, insecurity. But Giselle? As far as we know her home life is normal and her mom seems nice.
Glad to see Heather owning up to her lies though. And yes, I say lies because she DID lie. She said Amanda was just crazy and hit her for no reason. That’s a lie. Before it was just omission of the truth, but at that point it became a straight up lie. Hopefully her dad eases up on Amanda now or outright just backs off. Yeah, the issue of Amanda hitting needs to be addrsssed, but I get the feeling Todd and Andi are gonna deal with that soon. Like right after Lilian talks to them and Amanda isn’t tipsy.
And HOPEFULLY Lilian freaking tells Andi the more important bits about Amanda and her problems instead of just handing Andi a huge file. Like, did Lilian freaking tell her about the Sandersons? Did she properly explain that Amanda gets into physical altercations pretty often? Cause that’d be the first two things I would tell her. I’m sorta mad at Lilian, because while she’s the one who’s clearly tried to help Amanda the most, at the same time I can’t help but think she should have noticed these issues before they got so out of hand.
And finally, I hope Amanda finally has a long talk with her parents or at the very least with Andi. I want her to talk her freaking issues out. At the very least the Sanderson thing needs to be talked about. Oh and of course they need to talk to her about Heather and how hitting is wrong and how she’s sad about losing her friend.
I don’t think we can say that yet. Giselle is certainly a less sympathetic character at this point (I find her actually to be amusing), but about 100 or so comics back so was Amanda. We haven’t met her dad, though. Maybe he’s a sociopath and her mom can’t cut custody off. Or maybe he’s a nice guy and has a crazy abusive girlfriend. Maybe the grandparents are heavily in her life and are manipulative jerks and this is where she’s learning that behavior (I’ve seen this happen with an ex-friend’s kids). Bad children *can* happen without reason, but that is usually very rare.
Hence why I said as far as we know. I thought Amanda was a little hell spawn before I knew what I did about her. Maybe Giselle has a terrible home life, but again, as far as we know, her life is pretty standard and she’s just a mean spirited brat.
Sometimes amoral characters are the most interesting ones simply because they make a story unpredictable. She’s young now, but at some point her Good/Evil alignment (to use a Gamer analogy) is going to start to solidify to one side or the other; and we can but hope that it moves toward the Good.
Neutral is also an alignment option. ;P
Don’t forget Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic.
Thing is, the Good-Evil part of the RPG alignment spectrum doesn’t exactly end up working very well with “neutral” absent the original Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic part.
On a pure good-evil cultural spectrum, neutral basically comes out being “amoral/self-serving”. Which in a creature with no concept of morality (an animal) is fairly normal, but in an intelligent creature that has been exposed to morality (a human), “neutral” basically comes out as “sociopath” (or amoral). You can’t really be “neutral” if you are a creature with intelligence and a society—“neutral” ends up being nearly as dangerous as “evil”.
If you’re on the cosmic good-evil alignment, then “neutral” works fine, but is basically more like Buddhism in which evil and good are considered to be things that must be in balance, and is pretty uncommon in human society.
Neutral doesn’t mean the absence of Good or Evil, its more along the line of a grey area. A Neutral (G/E) person isn’t someone who does no evil or good acts but usually balances them out in various ways. Telling small lies but being loving to family members, gives to charities but also does not go out of their way to help those in need right in front of them. Manipulates other to get what they want, but makes sure that others are mostly unharmed by it.
The “alignment” grid built in to (some) roleplaying games is useful as an assist for players who start with no skill in creating a character. The trouble is, it is a truly inadequate model of actual human behaviour, and once people get in the habit of applying the faulty model within the game, they extend it to other, better forms of fiction and even real life… without ever realizing they’re using a model.
That’s why you get extended discussions whenever anyone brings up alignments. It’s a Procrustean bed: stretch to fit, lop off anything extra, and what you’re left with rarely resembles a real person.
This is a problem with ALL models of the human psyche — though obviously, simpler ones are usually worse. The only real defense against mistaking the map for the territory is to know multiple models, and keep reminding yourself that each one may offer the possibility of some useful insights. Whenever one of them starts to seem too real, correct yourself by looking at the situation through a couple of others.
For instance: how would Giselle score on the Meyers-Briggs personality test? The Big Five test? How about the Oxford Capacity Analysis? (Warning, that last one is Scientology!) Or you can look at her through the lens of strengths and weaknesses – what is she good at? what mistakes is she likely to make?
The point is, each model can give insights… but they are all going to leave out important points, and they’re all going to encourage making definite pronouncements about her that aren’t justified by the evidence.
“what is she good at?”
Not art.
The way I see it:
Good is “I will always do the right thing”.
Neutral is “I will do the right thing, as long as it isn’t too big a bother.”
Evil is “I will do the right thing, as long as it also serves my interests.”
Except, no real person, ever, reduces to such a simple rule.
Real decisions are always complicated. Always situational. Always dependent on ten thousand factors — and what looks like the right thing at the time may not be so right in the light of more information.
Most people think of themselves as good. Basically good… They’re doing the best they can under the circumstances. They’re trying to do the right thing. Sometimes they can’t. Sometimes they can’t even figure out what the right thing is. If they do something they know afterwards, or even knew at the time, isn’t entirely right… well, there’s reasons, okay? Big ones. Just had to. Couldn’t help it. It was them or us. They deserved it. They started it. They were going to do something bad to us. That’ll teach them. Serve them right.
This, all by itself, explains most of the evil in the world.
jy3, the latter two are BOTH Neutral. Serving one’s own interests is neutral. Evil is actively working against the interests of others, or being selfish to the point of harming others.
For example, lying to save my own skin is neutral. Lying in such a way that it gets someone else in trouble is evil.
As I nearly posted last page, but didn’t: even when Giselle is trying to do the right thing, she has a devious mind. She sees ways to manipulate people, and doesn’t have a very good handle yet on why she shouldn’t use them.
Was it CS Lewis who said that a lie is a child’s only means of self-defence?
Um… must find source…
New text font or are my eyes messing with me?
I like the “new” Giselle, I think. It’s still concerning that her first impulse is to … not exactly blackmail Heather, but something that seems pretty close.
Giselle is like the little conscience devil sitting on Heather’s left shoulder, whispering bad ideas to her. Or something.
I agree, especially on the font
Used Arial instead of Lucida. Mostly silimar but a bit smaller, and allows for italics
Arial is horrible for the eyes (why a lot of us designers shun it). May I suggest Helvetica or Futura? Same kind of deal (sans serif), but a lot easier on eyes.
Yeah, the Arial is a lot harder to read. More squished up together, and while I can crank the comments-font up when my eyes are giving me grief… not so much the comic’s font, y’know? (I have bad floaters that drift across my field of view; it’s basically like having constantly dirty glasses… where the dirt moves, like it’s underwater. I have to crank up font sizes so I can see enough of the shape of letters even when I’m effectively looking at them through rippling water.)
Going through my Fonts, I have…
Calibri, Candara, Century Gothic (may be too rounded/fat?), Chalkboard (could work), Corbel (may be too skinny/squished like Ariel’s being), Lucida Sans, News Gothic MT, Noteworthy (light; may not have italics?), Optima, and Verdana.
Mmm, fonts!
Not a fan of the new font, kind of strains my eyes and looks.. too sharp, if that makes sense?
If you’re looking for a new font, don’t go with Arial. It has the same problems as Lucida, only less legible because it’s narrower.
There are some good suggestions here: http://comicfury.com/forum/viewthread.php?id=11494
The best suggestion in that thread is to pick a typical page from your comic, then download and try out many different fonts in it to see what gives the best feel. Since the comic is about kids, you might want something softer, less rigid, a little bit more of a hand-drawn look than one of the standard word processing fonts.
But you still want upper and lower case, and accented characters, and italics, and maybe bold. And you want an upper-case I to be distinguishable from a lower-case l, and the numeral 1. (These constraints will let you discard a lot of candidate fonts without having to try them out.)
…and you see the problem in Arial, right? I am talking about upper-case i and lower-case L, which look identical, making words like “I’ll” look weird.
Yeah I’ve noticed that problem with Lucida for years but kept using it because it’s clean and crisp. But I’ve recently started to think it may be TOO crisp. Something clean but organic may look better.
Also tempted to make a font out of my terrible handwriting and start hand drawing the speech bubbles.
Paul Taylor, the author of Wapsi Square did that, and it’s worked out great for him. maybe you can ask to use HIS handwriting font instead of yours if you truly feel that yours is that bad…
That’s right, Luke,… I mean, Dave. Give in to your anger! Come to the Dark Side! Give in to the hand drawn speech bubbles! Feel the power coursing through you? Soon Gisselle will be speaking in Acid Etch- italic, and Selkie in Tiny Bubbles- Narrow. mMWwahahah!!!!
You may want to play with serif fonts (in the same realm as Times Roman). Some of the more subtle ones (I’m thinking Minion) come off as clean yet organic. If you are looking for something like handwriting that is clean, Chalkboard can be very nice. Whatever you get, it’s useful to find one that has both the postscript and truetype files so it looks great on screen and print. You can get around not having postscript by flattening the work into a TIFF, but it’d have to be around 600 DPI or higher for the text to look crisp.
Of course making your own font can be really fun and creates a lot of individuality. While it’s time-consuming to be begin with, the gains are having a strip that looks hand-penned/penciled that’s just typed in.
There’s free fonts all over the place, but you have to be careful where you get them as most are personal use only and “Selkie” may be considered business. You always have the option of finding the creators and buying a license, though.
Welp. It looks like Heather isn’t “smart” at all.
In other news, hurrah for Heather! Deciding what kind of person you want to be and what sorts of things you will or won’t do to enforce that is something most adults can’t even get right.
Wherever things are going, this is the right direction for her.