Selkie413
Dec22
on December 22, 2013
at 8:49 pm
And now the Kool-Aid man bursts through the wall.
A cut-for dialogue-flow panel from this page was Selkie grasping her throat in mock-gagging and saying, "Ughs! MORALS..."
And now the Kool-Aid man bursts through the wall.
I dunno about the rest of the readers, but for some reason I love her face in the last panel… it looks slightly out of style, and I kinda like it :3 I think it’s her mouth…
I love her face in the first panel too. XD
Actually loving all of Selkie’s expressions on this page!
Welcome to your conscience, child.
BIG moral question. Do I want to be honourable or moral?
Wait, what do I mean by that? An honourable man would keep his word no matter what. A moral man might break his word if keeping it did more damage. I think.
I’m coming down on the side of “moral”. Easy to justify failing to act well by hiding behind a promise, but not so easy to justify acting badly when you break one. A promise can be used to prop a bad conscience. A broken promise may torment the conscience, so the break must have some positive justification.
But so much of society is based on the inviolability of the contract! Where would it all end?
Perhaps best to try to be honourable, until the conscience demands otherwise.
Piers Anthony seems to like sticking his heroes in situations where promises get extracted from them through duress or deception, and then having the oh-so-honorable heroes horrified that they can’t do this or that because “I promised!”
It became one of my pet peeves. Yeah, I appreciate the ending of Tangled, but even so, if the promise wasn’t made fairly, or if it looks to do more harm than good, there had better be a reason to keep it other than “Well, I *did* promise.” (I’m okay with some of the Bible ones, where the moral seems to be “Look, you’re My chosen people, and when you make a promise I expect you to keep it, so don’t make dumb promises, okay?”)
On the other hand, I don’t like the ending to Rumpelstiltskin. The heroine’s father’s an idiot who gets her in trouble with the King, and Rumpel happens by and saves her life not once but several times. Then when she doesn’t have anything left to bargain, he says he’ll help her in exchange for her firstborn child, and she agrees.
Once she’s married to the King (one of the more annoying “happy endings”: would you like to be married to a guy who repeatedly threatened to kill you?), she gets pregnant, thinks about the promise, and then uses all her effort to weasel out of it. Finally her efforts not only break the promise itself but kill Rumpelstiltskin as well.
The thing is, there’s not a hint that he meant anything bad to the child. It’s not “Oh, he’s going to eat my baby!” or “Oh, he’s going to turn my baby into a monster!” or anything. From the little I’ve read about it, it seems to be the moral that strangers are evil and inherently untrustworthy (even ones who’ve repeatedly saved your life!), so you shouldn’t feel compelled to keep your word to them because they don’t deserve it. I mean, what the hell?
But yeah, if you promise to not harm someone, and he turns out to be the villain en route to harm others, break that promise. Or if the villain forces you to promise X or Y or he’ll kill your family, promise and then break it.
This is also a principle you should teach your kids: If someone does something that makes you feel uncomfortable (such as trying to look under your clothes, or touch you in a place you don’t want them to), and then tells you to promise not to tell, you should promise, get away from them, and tell an adult you trust. “I won’t protect someone who’s doing bad things by keeping it a secret.”
KILLER point, Kilyle, you sweep all uncertainty before you. I am no longer undecided, morality wins.
Of course Rumpelstilskin wasn’t going to harm the child. There’s no harm in taking a child from a different species and turning them into one of your own, right? Because that’s what the fair folk do ALL THE TIME. THAT was the implied peril the child was in, and it didn’t need to be explained in that story because “duh, everyone knows that’s how it works”.
Now, in our modern educated society that’s forgotten almost all of the old folklore, the threat does seem rather vague. But to the original audience, the threat is obvious. There’s no need for Rumpelstiltskin to threaten to eat the child or anything, the fact that he wanted to take the child for is own is bad enough (to us humans).
On a side note, White Wolf made this the entire theme of Changeling: The Lost. The number one reason you don’t want to be a human in the land of the Fair Folk is because you won’t stay human for long.
Jane Yolen did a re-telling of Rumplestiltskin in which the Rumpel character is a Jewish moneylender and the “princess” feels justified in breaking her bargain with him because he is Jewish. I can’t remember the title, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find with Google. I love Yolen’s faerytale re-tellings.
My sentiments exactly:
OOOOOHHHH
YEEEAAAAAH.
Holidays can really drag you down. I’d share the story of how I once cooked the family Christmas spaghetti dinner with a temperature of a hundred and three, but…wait a minute, I just did, didn’t I?
Hang in there, see you post-Christmas…
103° is not hot enough to cook spaghetti?!? 😛
That is the joke.
Maybe using a stove…
I’m guessing 103°F wich is a little under 40°C, I’d say everyone better make friends with a bucket :p
I predict that Selkie will gain a lot more sympathy for Agent Brown and HIS secrets…
What really gets me is that she’s misremembering how that went down. Amanda figured it out because Selkie had a bad poker-face (pages 328-9), not because she “told.”
But guilt is definitely one of those emotions that doesn’t let facts get in the way once it gets running.
What is fascinating IS how she remembers it. Look at Selkie’s dialogue. No additional “s”s! Intriguing…
Hilarious and unambiguous scene about morality being taught and learned. Well done.
Yea, the Koolaid man bursting through the wall was my first thought when I read the last panel.
I don’t get the cool-aid joke… 😕
I know the story of the suicide cult, but don’t get a lot of jokes around it.
The kool-aid joke appears to be showing its (and our) age.
I suspect the Kool-Aid Man was mostly 80’s and early 90’s? The ad was basically that someone would mention Kool-Aid and this giant guy/pitcher of Kool-Aid would bust through the wall with a hearty “OH YEAH!”
So when people ref Kool-Aid and they’re talking about busting through walls or yelling “Oh YEAH!” they aren’t talking about anything cultish. They’re just talking about the original ads, which were silly and campy.
Here’s an example of one of the old ads. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBeUGqeYsQg
I figured even if people don’t know the original ads, they’ll recognize it as “that bit Family Guy does sometimes.”
Excellent job showing the change in Selkie’s demeanor between panels 3 and 4.
Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it! Seasons Greetings to everyone else!
Nadolig Llawen!
That’s a meme.
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?