Something something Elsa
[Next comic will be Friday. I’m on a new shift at work for a new role, and the OJT is a trial by fire. I’m wiped.]
Something something Elsa
[Next comic will be Friday. I’m on a new shift at work for a new role, and the OJT is a trial by fire. I’m wiped.]
Conceal, don’t feel.
Don’t let it glow…
@ Benjamin Nice.
An even more on-point quote from the movie for this scene though, is probably the line in the troll song.
“People make bad choices when they’re sad or scared or stressed.”
Maybe Grandma needs to sit down and watch a particular movie with the kids?
Good talk. 5 stars, would recommend getting scolded from Todd again. He went straight for the most crucial, practical part of this issue.
So he understands better than we thought when Theo gave him the reprimand earlier. Good.
Wise papa is in Grandmaster mode.
I think Mari means well, she’s just scared and overwhelmed. As the brain gets older, it can lose some neural plasticity and make it more difficult for an older person to understand and adapt to new things–not saying that every old person is stuck in their ways or can’t change at all, just that it doesn’t always come as naturally.
I’ve watched this in my own life, and I’m only 45. But the ability to learn and shift that came easily to me during college is far, far more difficult now.
And yes, I feel for Mari, and I think she’s mostly operating out of fear and lack of information by which to make better choices. Better awareness can reduce fear (much like learning about snakes can make snakes less scary).
As I noted on a previous page, if you only knew the destructive power of fire, you would fear it. But you wouldn’t consider it that bad if you were also aware that it can warm, cook, cause beneficial chemical reactions, destroy germs, provide energy, etc.
Todd struggles with his anger sometimes, but he’s explaining remarkably well and not letting his temper get the better of him. Grandma will need some time to process after this and I think things will work out ok
Todd, don’t forget to talk about the importance Echos have in Selkie’s culture and her learning about this ability has helped her reconnect with this culture and community.
I think it’s smart not to bring this up right now, actually. This is about both Selkie and Amanda, and you don’t want to emphasize the “alien” nature of the ability, because that could lead to Mari doubling down on “Well in that case, it’s unnatural for Amanda, what is this infection?”
Obviously, I doubt that Mari would ever quite get to a full-on “What has your alien daughter done to my human granddaughter” position, but she’s always been just a shade less comfortable than anyone else in the family with the fact that Selkie is a different species, so you don’t want to reinforce that at the moment — you have to keep it to “These are two children in a tough situation, we have to help them deal with these abilities.” Not least to prevent Mari from (maybe unconsciously) starting to treat the girls differently, one of them the poor human who’s been corrupted (deserving of sympathy) and the other who’s the cause of that. You can imagine how that would play in with Selkie’s probably still not completely buried outrage (for lack of a better word) at Amanda getting Echo powers/stealing her glory.
Later, once Mari’s calmed down a bit and come to terms a bit with the abilities, you can move on to the cultural aspects. But at the moment, if you start talking about how this “horrid stuff” is central to Selkie’s home culture, you’re likely to make Mari distrust the Sarnothi even more, on an instinctual level, and not want Selkie to reconnect with that culture.
Yes, lead with the pain of suppression aspect. That not using it actively hurt Selkie in the long run and trying to hold it in again would hurt both Selkie AND Amanda. Which is the last thing any of them should want. And honestly, a specialized range for all surface bound echos should be something discussed with Avery after this.
The sudden stammering is really telling here.
She realizes that what she was trying to say was… Maybe not “wrong” but phrased badly, and she’s trying to find a way to clarify/defend her position, but every rephrasing she comes up with sounds bad even in her own head and she knows it.
She’s trying very hard not to say the quiet part out loud but she realizes she’s talking to someone who knows her too well for dissembling to work.
Here is some required reading, its called X-men…
Yeah we don’t want for Amanda and Selkie to Doofenshmirtz this just because granny could not keep her mouth shut.
I’m just here to give compliments to the art on the page. They say it’s a good character design when you can recognize the silhouette, and Selkie and Amanda are very recognizable in the bottom panel.
It helps that, in context, there are only two girls that Todd could possibly be talking about 🙂
If you had seen those silhouettes somewhere else on the internet, would you have been able to tell “oh, those are the girls from Selkie”?
Without context and just an image I’d still be likely to think something along the lines of “Those remind me of Amanda & Selkie.”