I better start now if I’m typing out 997 words for the next strip.
At least it’ll be light on drawing.
Today's edition of the Secret Commentary is empty, because Dave failed to come up with something for it.
I better start now if I’m typing out 997 words for the next strip.
At least it’ll be light on drawing.
Selkie’s in it for the long count.
No! Don’t count down in case it becomes, well, a countdown!
I’m hoping that during the count-down she’ll calm down ending with a failure to launch.
Dave; you feeling top fit, or at least better?
Probably no new comic today because he’s still typing out nine hundred ninety nine, out nine hundred ninety eight,….
Or else he’s really feeling poorly.
Poor Dave, he must have a job interfacing with the public to get sick so often,… Or else! He’s playing video games All freakin’ night?
He’s not wrong.
I get the feeling this arc is building up to Selkie “growing up” and dropping the drama act.
I would like that. A lot of people act a certain way when they are growing up because they like it at the time, or think they are perceived a certain way. Only they latter get a big ole dose of reality. When I was younger I tried white knighting for a while (the overly polite kind, not the creeper kind that expect things for it) I eventually had a freind (girl) inform me that it wasn’t helpful or nice to go out of my way for women, who dont ask for the help.
Tony’s not off the hook, imo. It’s a pretty big jump from hearing them call her weird, and hearing her cackle about plots and plans (which she has *always* done, long before Te Fahn was ever introduced) to “Selkie’s plotting against you”.
^This^
Tony has never liked her and he’s been vocal about it.
He’s graduated from lying to rationalizing his behavior.
My point is the ‘this is Tony’s fault’ bandwagon isn’t my jam. Saying that Georgie and Te Fahn only took this the wrong way because of Tony is excusing Selkie’s behavior. And I do agree with him to some extent. For one, he didn’t actually lie. We never saw him say that Selkie was trying to embarrass Te Fahn, for all we know she came to that conclusion herself. And Selkie IS always cackling about being an evil genius and having slaves and minions to do her bidding as well as taking over the world. That’s her just being a kid, but to Te Fahn it’s a very real threat of power abuse.
My point is this outcome wouldn’t have changed much even if Tony hadn’t dropped by to meddle by saying vague statements. Selfie screwed this up herself. Tiny is STILL a jerk for intentionally coming by to tease Selkie more as well as him butting into the situation, but overall, he didn’t do anything to make it 10× worse.
4 things though-
Lying is a subcategory of deceit. He DECEIVED them for his amusement. Why even point out the deceit he used wasn’t a lie?
Selkie was a ‘minion’ in this plot.
Her friends wouldn’t have seen it as revenge without Tony’s input. The friends said so. He did, in fact, make it much worse
There’s nothing immoral about setting friends up. She violated the boys agency by impersonating him with her lie, and she lied to her friends. Totally different lessons she needs to learn.
Disagree here almost entirely.
He didn’t deceive them at all. He, in fact, told them that Selkie overheard them calling her weird. Not a lie at all. He then told them Selkie was talking about a plan. Again, not a lie at all. If anything he misled them a bit in how he said it immediately after saying she overhead them, but they came to their own conclusions about it. Te Fahn was already worried about Selkie due to Echo things on top of Selkie being dramatic about being evil. Te Fahn BARELY KNOWS SELKIE! She took her antics the wrong way from the start. Nothing to do with Tony.
Selkie was a minion in her own plan? What? She came up with the idea entirely on her own and executed it herself. She was in no way a minion. This was her dumb plan entirely.
Again, Te Fahn already was worried about Selkie. Georgie had tried to make things better and soothe her, but Te Fahn was already anxious about the whole thing. Tony saying that she overheard them certainly didn’t help at all, but if anything their own guilty conscious for trash-talking their friend made them jump to conclusions coupled with Selkie making it worse by being dramatic and weird about her plan. Tony made it SLIGHTLY worse, but not by that much. Even if he hadn’t said that she heard them, they likely would have come to the conclusion that she did and that she was mad about it given how she was acting. He did not, in fact, make it THAT much worse. Selkie did a fine job of that on her own.
There is everything wrong with trying to set two people up without their consent or input. She absolutely needs to learn to respect people’s personal lives and space and not meddle. No one asked her for her help. For all anyone knew, they were more than content with just being friends. Making it weird for them is DAMAGING to their friendship. It also hurts their perspective of Selkie. She needs to learn to not be involved with everything.
Blaming Tony for her screw up is just bad behavior on her part. She needs to REFLECT on what she’s done, not blame others. Tony is still a jerk for commenting and butting in where he wasn’t needed, but SO IS SELKIE. She butted in where she didn’t belong and is paying for it. She needs to own up to her actions, not try and say it was Tony’s fault.
Tony isn’t wrong in what he said. Tony wasn’t even wrong for saying she overheard them. Tony shouldn’t have said it the way he did nor should he have mentioned the plan thing. If he was truly worried about them, his warning could have been better. His intent was to cause trouble and he helped do that, but not nearly as much as you’re giving him credit for. You just don’t want to find fault with Selkie because she’s the protagonist, but sometimes protagonists can be crappy people too. She was pretty crappy here.
Again, not saying Tony isn’t a jerk, because he is, but in this scenario, Selkie is the bigger jerk for not owning up to her actions and apologizing properly on top of her meddling.
Well, actually he just said two things. “Yeah, she definitely heard you two” and pointed out while they were talking about her she was going on about a plan of some kind. Tony was doing it in his abrasive way, but his facts were accurate. And since she’s usually plotting against someone *when was the last time she plotted to someone’s benefit?), it seems unnecessary to bring that up. He might have been trying to stir up the pot but, “Hey, your friend might be plotting against you because you’re talking crap about her behind your back” is actually a pretty cool thing to do.
He gave info he knew was very likely to be taken the wrong way by Te Fahn at least. Georgie’s known Selkie long enough to come to the realization that “Wait…that’s just Selkie being Selkie” if only the doody hadn’t hit the fan with the flowers. It wouldn’t surprise me if Te Fahn being willing to forgive Selkie to an extent comes from an off panel conversation where Georgie told Te Fahn about Selkie’s Evil Scientist schtick. Given Tony’s history, his alert to Georgie and Te Fahn that Selkie overheard them is much, much more likely to come from Tony being a little poop than anything remotely altruistic.
Georgie has also known Tony long enough to say, “Wait a minute… That’s just Tony being Tony.” on TOP of knowing Selkie long enough to know she’s always been like this. Point is, even Georgie was convinced Selkie was up to no good. Why? Selkie’s overly dramatic side was out in full force on top of her being incredibly vague and showy about keeping a secret from them.
You can make all the excuses you want for Selkie here, but they’re going to fall flat. Pointing fingers at Tony just makes it worse, because it only feeds into her believing she didn’t do anything wrong because of her good intentions.
Tony manipulating people to hurt them for his amusement is the topic of discussion. Specifically, him trying to justify his behavior. It sounds like you are agreeing with what he is saying.
Saying ‘what about Selkie?’ Doesn’t make that all better.
No one at any point made an excuse for Selkie.
Weird.
That word IS one of those weird exceptions to the “‘I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’ and in words like….weird….” rule. Gosh, the English language has so many exceptions.
One of my friends taught me the rhyme as, “‘I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’ and when it sounds like an ‘A,’ like in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh.'” And yet that still doesn’t account for “weird.”
Adam Ruins Everything breaks that down pretty well – in short, that rule has WAY too many “exceptions” to be reliable.
there are more exceptions to the rule than there are words that FOLLOW the rule.
“ee” (see) and “ey” (they / cafe) are both regular sounds of E.
“aye” (pie) and “ee” (babies / radio) are both regular sounds of I.
The first is the Primary sound (when it says its name), and the second is the Tertiary sound (cafe/radio). Most languages use the Tertiary sound, while The Great English Vowel Shift made that far less common in English.
But we ended up with both vowels having the same sound (ee), with IE representing that sound in a lot of cases.
When the sound is “ey” (they / cafe), it’s not a regular sound of I, so it’s never represented by IE (if you know of any exceptions, please point them out). (“Leisure,” btw, can be pronounced “LEE-zher” or “LEY-zher.”)
I don’t know why IE became the norm for writing “ee” in lot of cases, but E’s combos create it far more often: EA (each), EE (bee), EI (seige), EO (people — a rare combo), EY (key). It’s just that when it comes to the combo of E + I, it could go either way, and is more commonly written IE than EI because EI commonly writes the “ey” sound.
Comes of sticking over a dozen vowel sounds onto just five letters, and borrowing vocabulary from every language under the sun without actually adapting that vocabulary to our spelling system (see ET for “ey”: ballet, buffet, cabaret). The Japanese at least are sensible enough to change new vocabulary so they can write and pronounce it decently enough without having to know the word ahead of time.
IE for writing the long e sound probably comes into English by way of German, where IE is always a long e sound and EI is always a long i sound.
What I find most hilarious is that the Marvel movies use Norse terminology (Heimdall, for example) but German pronunciation: not HAME-dall but HIME-dall. I recall German has it like “eis” = ICE, etc., and I don’t recall any other language I’ve run across that is so weird with the vowels.
Well, some Greek words (eisegesis) have come down with that weird vowel shift (ICE instead of the more sensible ACE), but I think I heard that’s from students and/or professors who studied German first. Unless it’s a quirk of English again… or if modern Greek has that shift? I’ve only studied Koine.
And so Selkie leaned an important lesson about monologing that day.
That’s some pretty impressive gas lighting for a nine year old, Tony.
To be fair, all Tony said was yeah, she overhead you talking and that she had been talking about a plan of some sort in regards to them. He didn’t really embellish anything at all.
Georgie and Te Fahn came to those conclusions on their own, because of how Selkie was acting and their own guilty conscious of talking about her.
Selki was being suspicious as hell and overly dramatic. It’s her own fault for how this turned out, due to her own meddling. She STILL hasn’t acknowledged that this is entirely her own fault. She doesn’t get to try and blame Tony for this. He’s an ass, yes, and he certainly didn’t help the situation by getting involved, but Selkie did this to herself. She’s already shown that she will probably meddle again because she’s still lying by commission about how she wants them to be ‘friends’ and how this was one big elaborate and cunning plan. She hasn’t at all realized she needs to back off and stop interfering.
Tony is still an ass.
With Tony on this one, but big surprise! I’ve never really been the biggest fan of Selkie’s delight towards evil. Just a kid sure, and nothing wrong with an interest or idle fun, but she’s pretty good at buying into it. Happy a consequence is showing itself. I wonder if she’ll double-down or take a step back first?
I mean, yes, it’s something she definitely needs to grow out of, but the ‘I’m going to be evil’ thing is, I think, entirely natural for a kid who feels alone and is bullied. In popular media, evil people are very powerful, in fact they’re usually depicted as being inherently more powerful than the hero/heroes, and it’s luck/determination/hubris/betrayal that causes the villain’s downfall, otherwise it’s not a good story. Very alluring for a kid who feels powerless and thinks they’re smart enough to avoid the standard pitfalls.
I love Dave’s characters’ characterizations, they seem so relatable, so real. And I think your theory is spot-on, about bullied Selkie and the Mad (evil) Scientist plotting revenge fantasies so that she gets to win against the bullies– if only in her fantasies.
That, and the obvious: people who are blue-skinned, black-eyed, fanged, venomous, and can scream like the damned, need to get creative when looking for positive role models on television. I mean, it would be nice if people of periwinkle color could identify with a white male protagonist, but it’s harder than it sounds.
I kinda want to see a comic that’s just
‘ninehundredninetyseven ninehundredninetysix ninehundredninetyfiveninehundredninetyfour’, but maybe with spaces strategically spaced to show selkies face.
Just stick with what you were taught in school!
He can act like the mature and aloof one all he wants but his expression when he told Te Fahn and Georgie he heard everything, and his classic bullying remark about Selkie having a girlfriend from literally one page ago, indicates it’s just that – only an act.