Go to your room, and no cell phone or tv or video games or books or… actually, go to MY room.
Today's edition of the Secret Commentary is empty, because Dave failed to come up with something for it.
Go to your room, and no cell phone or tv or video games or books or… actually, go to MY room.
Heh…in my case it was go to your room, lay on yoir bed an dstare at the ceiling, and putting a book between your eyes and the ceiling is also banned. foiled again…
How’d they enforce that?
Speaking as a parent – vigilance. And, it sucks! 😉
Probably like the open door policy. If your door isn’t open, “?what are you up to in there?”
I really do get the feeling Selkie’s taking this seriously. Those are very flippant remarks for someone who believes that they’re in trouble. She crossed boundaries and she herself knew it early in the game. Her lack of concern about being in trouble, it makes me think that Todd’s punishments make little or no impact.
Nah, her facial expression sells it to me. My brother was like Selkie and would joke even if he was on the gallows, but he did take the punishments seriously and to heart. Selkie’s default defense mechanism appears to be the Little Miss Snarker persona…not surprising given her background.
I really do get the feeling Selkie’s NOT taking this seriously.
I’m still kind of on Selkie’s side, this is who she is and she shouldn’t be forced to hide that. It’s also sad that the best argument for keeping it a secret came from a kid rather than from the adults.
1: Kids are more willing than adults to threaten bodily harm to children
2: It’s not about hiding or not- it’s more about her disobeying Todd and lying about it. If she wanted to be able to show off her glowy powers, the ‘correct’ course of action would have been to whine and complain and beg and wheedle and attempt to get the adults to lift the ban- not ‘do it anyways’.
It probably wouldn’t have _worked_, granted, but that would’ve been the method that would have left her un-punished.
I don’t think anyone ever told her that she wasn’t allowed to show off her powers.
It’s hardly fair to punish a kid for something that they didn’t know was forbidden.
No, she knew. Look at her immediate guilty reaction here:
https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie1153/
Then she panicked and didn’t know what to do, which is why she was desperately trying to pretend that nothing had happened.
That’s not a guarantee that they actually told her that she wasn’t alowed to do it.
That could just as easily be a case of “oh craps, I probably should have checkeds first.” Or “Oh craps, I only wanted to shows off to this jerks.”
Yeah, I’m really not in love with this particular storyline. It’s really problematic on a lot of levels. Yes, it’s fiction, but some of the people who read it are kids (and possibly some adults who are healing from child abuse). The idea of having to keep a big secret about yourself (and your race even) is disturbing—especially with adults telling the child they have to keep the secret.
Knowing when to hold cards close to your vest is one of those things kids need to learn early and often. having the ace up your sleeve IS ALWAYS a good idea.
“especially with adults telling the child they have to keep the secret.”
That.. huh. I hadn’t considered it from that interpretation. The “keep it secret” thing is something I was more thinking in terms of Superhero Secret Identity Rules.
There should be some discussion of the difference between secrets that should be kept, and secrets that should be told to an adult you can trust. I think the fact that her father is in on it and that there’s no direct harm to Selkie from the secret itself is enough to set it apart from abusive secrets.
But definitely discuss it. Have some character misunderstand, or be offended on Selkie’s behalf, or whatever. Maybe even a good place for Andi to “stand up for Selkie” by instinct. Or for Todd to discuss it with Pohl, or with his parents.
In Sesame Street, Big Bird had his friend Snuffy, and he was constantly telling adults about Snuffy but no one ever believed him because Snuffy was never where they were told to meet him.
Eventually, someone clued in to the problem with “the adults won’t believe me, and they’ll laugh at me” mindset, and so they brought Snuffy out for the adults to see. It was a good move. A vital move, even. Always gotta consider how the nuances of the message might seem to those who are vulnerable.
Last I remember seeing Andi, she was still unsure about how she felt about the entire idea that there is this whole other sentient species living on the planet with her and her own ex-boyfriend has adopted one of them!
So not sure it should be her that ‘stands up for Selkie’, but I could see Dave’s gay sibling doing so.
There was some subtle mention of this between Ken and Heather at the museum as well. So I don’t think that’s being ignored, just that this is in a different topic altogether. Spiderman keeps his powers secret (usually, and when he didn’t his whole world exploded).
She’s nervous and trying to deflect with jokes like most kids would.
Todd you dumbass know one told Selkie not to do that, AGAIN NO ONE TOLD HER.
I think it was offscreen…but at the same time she *did* end up fessing up to him. Banishing your kid from your presence after they come forward (even if it is with you interrogating him/her) is a really bad parenting move. It may work great in fiction, but in reality doing that will make a child feel less inclined to tell an adult when the child makes a mistake on their own.
In a case equivalent (one where safety is an issue) to this I would have given a stern talking to, and probably grounded the child from going out of the house with friends and access to electronics for a couple weeks or more (yes, that long when it comes to safety—especially if doesn’t seem like it sank it completely), but *never* tell her she’s banished away from me to her room. I wouldn’t make the punishment a big deal either. I’d pretty much tell the kid they need the downtime to think about their actions and talk with me if needed. You want the lines of communication *open*.
Except she *didn’t* “end up fessing up”, she got called out on it by a third party… basically, she only changed her plea from “not guilty” after the witnesses were called to the stand.
Haha, grounding a kid and not giving them access to ANYTHING is just going to make things worse because they won’t have an outlet. My Mom used to ground me with no TV or video games, but I was still allowed to read books.
I couldn’t imagine just sitting in a room, with only homework to do, or literally nothing. Even prisoners get to watch TV. Hell, manual labor would be better than just sittingt here watching the paint dry.
Yeah, when I would get grounded, reading was the one enjoyable activity I was allowed, and it was allowed because 1) I was more likely to be less of a problem if I had *something* to do (idle hands, etc), and 2) reading was a mentally stimulating/educational activity — and when grounded, comics or illustrated books were off limits, I was restricted to text only.
Similar to what i was going to say. But i forgot to press send before falling asleep.
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Obviously grounded means no tv, phone, internet, video games, or friends, and being confined to the bedroom. But taking away books and toys is a tad unreasonable. Children can’t handle boredom on the best of days, forced boredom as a punishment already is torture to a child.
I was never grounded. I had the corner, or the chair (sometimes called the “thinking chair”) where I was supposed to think about what I had done wrong, and what I should have done better. Except they wouldn’t tell me what I had done wrong, they would come back after 5 mins and ask me what I had done wrong, then I had to think about what I should have done better.
The downside was the occasional time when I really didn’t have a clue what I had done wrong, and would end up sitting there for HOURS.
I don’t like Todd in this story—especially the last three panels. I’m not an advocate of parents who always try to be their kids friends and don’t set consequences (they do their children and society no good service by this), but this is over-the-top and very insensitive on Todd’s part. Selkie is being told to hide a very big part of herself (one that she *should* actually feel proud of), and he is behaving as if she cussed out a teacher. He comes off in this story as a toxic macho male who only parents when a child is inconvenient.
I’m having trouble understanding your perspective, here. How is Todd being over-the-top to ground her for lying and doing something she knew not to do?
As far as we, the readers, have seen, no one actually told her that she had to keep being an Echo a secret.
There was the wearing the sunglasses when she couldn’t turn it off, but that was when they were claiming she was a human with an inherited geneticdisease ratherthan a differant species.
The only evidence that Selkie knew she shouldn’t be showing off was when she panicked at her teacher seeing her glowing eyes, and that could easily be read as”oh, craps, that’s something else to explain” or “I was only trying to show off to this jerk” or “wait, maybes I should have checked to make sureI was alloweds to do this.”
If Selkie was not explicitly told to keep being an Echo secret, even from other Sarnothi, then it’s *not* reasonable for her to be punished for not keeping it a secret.
Hey, remember that long storyline we went through where Todd argued with himself if he would tell Selkie about what happened to her clan, and eventually told her what happened and Selkie understood a lot easier than he thought she would?
No?
That’s because it happened off screen. Just like the telling to not use powers public. We don’t need to see every single thing happening to understand that she would be told not to use it in public. I’m pretty sure that was one of the first things Pohl told her was don’t use it in public when starting the lessons.
https://selkiecomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Selkie1167-1.png
Just a few pages back but this looks a lot like this is the first time she was explictly told.
I don’t see that at all. She lied to him. From the second she got in the car. I may not like all the ways it has been handled regarding Benny, but I don’t see this as unreasonable punishment at all.
Yeah, I gotta say, whatever you are reading in to this, you’re wrong.
Selkie’s history already has a sketchy past and both him and Selkie are aware that there’s a lot of restrictions on the nature of her history and her people.
And while I don’t recall the comic ever actually showing us, I am willing to bet during her Echo training, someone would have told her to keep it on the down low. Not just because people on the surface may not be willing to accept it, but because if her own people in a form of political found out about her, may endanger her own well being.
You can even ignore the fact a giant fricking laser beam was shown on the news, the fact of the matter is Selkie screwed up. And as a parent Todd needs to be able to punish her for behavior like this.
What would you have had Todd do? Give her five bucks and take her out to the movies? Gimmie a break.
One other thing? It may be a good idea to take time and read about children of color who are adopted by white families before taking this story much further. It was really fun and cool when Selkie’s species was a mystery—even when we met Pohl and his family, but with the addition of the other Sarnothis it is teetering on the edge of potentially being racist—especially with the main adult character (as well as the “authority” person) being a white guy (sorry, but that really does come into play). This can can go into amazing fun and funny places or it could easily fall into stereotypical racist “white guy/white knight on a pedestal” story-telling.
” It was really fun and cool when Selkie’s species was a mystery—even when we met Pohl and his family, but with the addition of the other Sarnothis it is teetering on the edge of potentially being racist”
I won’t lie to you, I know I’m balancing on a razor’s edge with this one. I’m working behind-the-scenes to keep things overall “in-tone” and not go too hard on the heavy stuff.
Could you expand on the “white knight on a pedastal” comment? I’m unclear what you mean by that.
It’s a sort of “White Man’s Burden” type of thing, where a person writes to defend women/minorities not because they actually care about them, but as a way to show off how forward thinking they are. It’s most obvious when something becomes VERY preachy from someone who’s not of that group. People get accused of it a lot more than they actually do it, but it is something to consider when your writing a story involving those kind of topics.
I seriously can’t figure out how that trope plays anywhere into the comic.
See, I just figured that part of Todd’s touchiness on the subject comes from having parents and siblings that aren’t white. He probably witnessed racism directed at them and so this aspect of Sarnothi culture being directed at his daughter is the same sort of crap all over again.
Oh – great call. Didn’t think of that but it would make sense.
Ha ha Dave, don’t worry about it, you are going to find people whining about stuff like this EVERYWHERE.
Hell, one of my biggest complaints early on was that you were being way too inclusive and unrealistic with how you portrayed the cast.
No, I never got a racist vibe from your comics, including this one.
Look up White Man’s Burden, and Mighty Whitey, on TV Tropes. They go over how these tropes have played out in previous fiction, and might give you a more rounded view of the potential problem, as well as a starting place for research (pick a medium you like, look through the examples, see which ones you might have already seen or which ones you might read (or at least read about) as research).
I definitely see the racism facet of your story — it’d be hard not to — but I don’t see all the pitfalls, because I’ve never had to deal with any of that, nor do I have friends (that I see face-to-face) who deal with that (although I do have many friends in other countries that I know only online, who do deal with that… it’s just not what we tend to talk about, so I’m just as much in the dark unless I start the conversation).
Seeing what’s gone before, and what might be potential triggers, is a good thing to avoid derailing your story by implying things you did not mean to imply.
My most recent brush with this was writing a genderswap story in which the main character (Always Female variant) gets driven home by a major supporting cast member (canon female), and I ended up giving it a title that referenced Driving Miss Daisy, a movie I knew about but hadn’t seen. It took a friend pointing out the problem: the driver in my story was Black, and yet I had zero references to or interest in discussing racism within my little tale, so pointing to a movie that is *strongly* centered on racism was going to push for an interpretation that just wasn’t there (and set up wrong expectations, even for those who took the text at face value).
In point of fact, I’d forgotten that “Black” was a canon trait of the woman, until I was reminded. Female, cop, staunchly moral, somewhat snarky, doesn’t take a lot of nonsense, kinda annoyed by being called in to help the team but also willing to help because she knows the kind of good they’re doing even if she objects to the mechanics… all of that was far more central in my conception of her character than her racial characteristics. Which is as it should be, honestly… except for the fact where my brain codes people as “white” without thinking about it.
So racism is quite far off my radar, and I still managed to do something that called attention to racism, far more than ever intended. That’s the sort of thing you want to watch out for, and watching out for it comes in two form: research, or having a minority you can run the story past who can point out things that they recognize as meaningful to minorities in a way that the majority group can’t grasp. (In America, “minority” means PoC, though that isn’t the case in, for example, Japan or South Africa. A Japanese creator might need to run ideas past a white person to consider where their viewpoint differs from the majority unspoken understanding.)
Don’t worry about it dude, you can’t and shouldn’t please everybody who whines and finds fault in everything. It’s not humanly possible to do so. This is your story. You tell it how you see fit. If people don’t like it, they’re free to NOT read it. It’s not even healthy to try and cater to everyone, so please don’t sweat it.
Judging by all the “But no one TOLD her not to do it” comments, people seem to be confused as to whether or not Selkie actually *knew* she wasn’t supposed to glow at school (or in public in general).
I suspect that ‘in-comic’ Todd and the other adults may have just assumed that Selkie knew better. In my case, once I got to a certain age (maybe 10ish+) my parents began assuming that some things clicked with me as ‘common sense’ sort of things. So I can sort of see why they might have assumed the same for Selkie but it’s always a risky proposition to assume anything with a child, especially an 8 year old.
On the other hand, I often catch myself actually reading Selkie-as-a-character (and most of her peers) as being older than they actually are. If I didn’t know any better I’d have put her at being about 10 instead of 8. Maybe Todd slipped into the same and started unconsciously assuming more maturity than Selkie is actually capable of at this point? 🙂
*edit* Drat, this was supposed to be in response to one of Dave’s comments above :\
And Selkie *did* know – she didn’t come out like she normally would and say to Todd Hey I did this – she hemmed and hawed and covered up – he called her on lying badly. She wouldn’t be embarrassed about telling him if she didn’t know it was a no-no.
To be honest the problem that she showed off her power to fellow Sarnothi classmates wasn’t the problem. it was that she forgot that most of her friends were humans that were not ready to know about the abilities of sarnothi echos yet. all this really did was speed up the time table of what things will have to be discussed during the integration process.
I just had the door taken off the hinges for two days. That’s surprisingly an effective punishment.
That’s a massively abusive punishment that just literally destroys a kids sense of privacy/security. It is NEVER okay to do that. No matter how bad what they did was.
Question: Would your opinion on this be the same if the offense were self-harm or attempted suicide?
I could see an argument made for your point of view even in these cases (not sure whether or not I’d agree with it), but I’m wondering where the line might be drawn, for you.
I was threatened with that punishment a lot but never received it, thankfully.
If my room couldn’t have a door, I would have hid in the closet or bathroom for the duration of it. It would be an extreme invasion of privacy and definitely abusive. THINKING about having to live in a room that has to be open all the time makes me uncomfortable.
My grandma did that to my little sister once because she kept s beaming boys over. It worked splendidly lol she also only ever smacked the crap out of me once in my lifetime. Mine was when I was helping her plant flowers. She dug the hole and put the flowers in and I filled the hole and patted the dirt down. Except halfway through I got bored and started tearing the flowers out instead. She turned around and caught me and asked me what I thought I was doing and I lied and said I didn’t know and thought I was helping like this and she smacked me across the butt a few times and then told explained to me I was being punished for deliberately lying to her face. Honestly it didn’t really even hurt, but it made me know that lying to her was out of the question and I never did it again. Turns out being honest when I messed up is usually got me rewarded and not punished. My sister on the other hand decided getting caught was the issue, so when her butt smack didn’t teach her, her lesson my grandmother took away her privileges and that ended up working for her. For me, realizing that being bad and lying got me punished was enough, but for her it was a harder lesson.
Sneaking boys over*
I kind of have to agree with some of the others, de-hinging the door seems a bit over the line. I only ever got, like, slapped across the face.
rofl on the commentary below the comic, Dave:) I like the “parent’s perspective” and rethinking as the punishment is dished out. I’ve had to do that a time or two.
Wasn’t she made to wear sunglasses when her power first manifested? I also feel at that point, she would have been told *why* she had to wear them.
I sincerely don’t get why people keep saying it hasn’t been shown that Selkie knows she shouldn’t show her power to other humans. For me what happened between page 1007 – 1016 clearly indicates that she’s aware. Okay, maybe for us readers it’s not stated “explicitly”, but as many has already pointed out, a comic doesn’t need to: a lot can happen offscreen and from what happens onscreen, I feel it’s reasonable enough to believe she was told of that offscreen. Of course we can still argue if it’s reasonable to expect a kid to *be capable of* keeping a secret that big – I personally agree that I would have come up with another cover story too, but otherwise, it’s undeniable that they’re all in a pretty difficult situation, and at some point there are bound to be f-ups (if not solely for the Rule of Drama).
On a related note, I like to discuss about the various Unfortunate Implications and Headscratchers in this comic as much as the next reader, but I feel the discussion would be more interesting if it’s more in the vein of “In my place I would’ve done this…” rather than “Dave you shouldn’t write like this because it’d be bad in real life”. It’s after all a work of fiction (with the partial role of social commentary that stimulates discussion, admittedly), not a parenting manual or a legal document. If someone ends up applying what they observe in the comic to real-life situation word for word, then honestly the burden’s on them, not on Dave.
Speaking for myself only but I don’t intend criticism of Todd to come across as critism of Dave’s writing, I think it’s fine for Todd or any other characters to make mistakes or act in ways I don’t approve off.
Since when did Selkie become the character who doesn’t get a name in the tags? Breaking the comic borders and all that.
Uuhhhhhhhhhh…. oops
*narrows gaze, homing in on Dave*
. . .
Not sure if secretly plotting big reveal that Selkie has actually been Lucifer this whole time.
XD Naw, I just felt that one the panel borders hid just enough of her to warp the drawing a bit in a way I didn’t like, so I moved her above them.
Also, did you mean for your earlier reply to include your email address?