Amanda’s caretakers ARE aware of this story and taking it in advisement, if that wasn’t clear from yesterday.
I was so tempted to draw this with crayons and notebook paper in real life, but I like my Ctrl-Z too much.
Amanda’s caretakers ARE aware of this story and taking it in advisement, if that wasn’t clear from yesterday.
Poor baby. I feel somewhat bad for her.
That is indeed a terrible story — very good but terrible. Truth is often like that. I wonder what Selkie will think of it?
In my house, that would have gone-
“That’s a terrible story!”
“Your FACE is a terrible story!”
“Your MUM is a terrible story!”
“Your MUM’s FACE is a terrible story!”
Eh, that story is kind of crap but then she’s a kid so what do you expect. 😀 I’m more disappointed that we didn’t learn anything after all, arm and leg cutting obviously didn’t happen so it puts the previous stealing stuff into question too.
Perhaps she’s referring to something psychological? Something that would feel like being dismembered. Trust, happiness, patience, kindness, etc perhaps?
I believe the stealing part. I think the arm/leg thing was something really awful she can’t put into words. If they were older brothers my mind would immediately go to molestation, but I’m going to guess they did something else really horrible and heartbreakingly cruel.
She could be exaggerating actual physical attacks to show just how unfair the parents are. Instead of “They hit me see! Look they pushed me. They pulled my hair! Ect” It becomes a much more obvious wound that the parents ignore. Its also a lot shorter but shows just how stressful things were to her without having to go into repetitive detail.
From what Ive seen of children I wouldnt doubt all of her things were taken, hidden and or broken. Children can be terrible and much like the example with Truck: the moment you excuse their bad behavior by denial you create monsters.
Yea, my thought was that if pushing and hair pulling gets exaggerated to arm chopping then stealing all my stuff could have been playing with my toys or not wanting to share.
Actually, I knew a girl who had younger twin brothers who often stole (literally) and broke her toys. Another had an older brother who melted her Care Bear collection with a blowtorch, “Oh NO! Mr. Freeze is meeeeelting!”
That kind of stuff happens, and as a parent I am fully against the concept of children being forced to share toys that are explicitly theirs (versus community/family toys). Doing that actually creates a kid who’s more likely to be selfish and grabby.
A friend brought me her grandson’s favorite stuffed animal, his twin brother disfigured it with scissors in a jealous rage. I stitched it back together, not too much worse for the wear but yes…intentional toy breaking happens.
Maybe it wasn’t as bad as actually cutting limbs off but I did have a sib who ended up cut with a knife…he had anger management problems, another brother used a knife to try to scare him off when he berzerked and things got out of hand. This particular selkie scenario never happened in that exact fashion in my birth family but enough similar things did that a scenario where two jealous siblings holding Amanda down to cut her then saying she did it herself accidentally and is only trying to get them in trouble actually does sound plausible. Dismembering seems a little exaggerated but two boys threatening her with knives, not so much.
Swords match so maybe matching knives? Screams jack knives to me. Parents probably gave’m as a birthday present or something, thinking their little angels were too grown up to use them to threaten another person.
Swords are pretty straightforward freudian imagery. Sounds to me like Amanda was a victim of abuse.
If you mean sexual abuse, I think you can safely take your mind out of the gutter. Sometimes a sword is just a sword… or a long knife in a hand small enough it might as well be a sword, or some other weapon; the point is they hurt her with them.
This story is an exaggerated version of what most likely happened in her first adopted family. You may have notice you have never seen Amanda in short sleeves or short pants.
I’ll bet that Selkie says something good about it, and or rags on ?Chanelle? for slamming it, and that maybe, just maybe, she may give Amanda advice on how to go further with her story than just a dead stop to it like she currently has it ending. and that Amanda might start to get over some of the rage inside her over Selkie, the other girl that got adopted without her, and well, basically everything else for that matter…
… until she learns that it was her biodad who adoped Selkie over her. Then there’s no telling where the spiral of madness will land. But by what I have seen of Daves and story telling, this one has a story that will end up well.
Maybe if she takes the news more like “Oh wait, Selkie is my sister now?” (maybe not at first, but eventually), Amanda might actually get to like Selkie.
Regardless, it would be nice if they eventually saw themselves as siblings rather than rivals. Although, considering the way some biologically-related siblings treat each other as rivals… well…
Hmm…that….story is awfully reveling isn’t it?
oh nooooooo, my heart has been shattered into one thousand pieces
The continuation of this story should be a beautiful prince from another kingdom breaking into the tower and saving the princess
Or a princess. Or a deserving rogue. Or a dragon. Let’s keep our options open here.
Or a fish-girl.
I suspect the entrance of a Punk Rock Princess.
Stories already have powerful significance to Selkie. I think she’s going to be the only child to see through the symbolism of the story and understand that Amanda just told them all what happened in the family that adopted, scapegoated and abandoned her. This will also frustrate Selkie. She’s way more comfortable being Amanda’s enemy, she won’t want to feel compassion for and understand Amanda, but won’t be able to help the feels from coming on anyway.
Well this is the first insight we’re given into the situation with Amanda’s first adoptive family. Obviously the things Amanda described are metaphorical (which is surprisingly insightful for a kid to work into a story so subtly), but at least now we’re getting a feel for where she’s coming from.
…I can’t say I’ll feel too much compassion for Amanda until she stops being a massive asshole to everyone around her.
I don’t know. I think some of her assholery is justified. It’s got to suck waking up with friends screaming at you to wake up and painting your face.
Even to this day, Amanda’s is the exact response I have to insults/bad criticism.
“The tv show you’re watching is for kids.”
“YOU’RE FOR KIDS.”
Poor girl. She’s not had it easy. I would think that her anger issues are a response to how she was treated – she doesn’t know how to deal with them and is lashing out. Of course, this bad behaviour results in vindication of her anger – “nobody listens to me. They think I lie”. But then, what do I know? ;P She really does need a parent who’ll be patient and understanding of her. Someone she has ‘to herself’ and some time to heal. Being in the orphanage, such a chaotic environment, where she doesn’t really have her ‘tower’, her own private space; isn’t helping. Like Lady Obvious says: poor baby.
How *she* was treated? *She’s* the princes in the “outer” story.
Many little girls think of themselves as Princesses. Until recently (with the most favorite Disney movie character finally be a Queen), most little girls have been raised to think of Princesses like super heroes.
Yes, how *she* was treated. The story describes what we know of Amanda’s life. She was adopted as a baby, and then abandoned at an orphanage by the parents she’d known all her life because her siblings disliked her. The kind of people who would do such an awesomely fucked-up thing are exactly the kind of people who would inflict the emotional abuse she’s describing, and my own younger sister is a good example of how the favoured siblings react to that kind of dynamic. I have all my limbs, but I also still have scars from her teeth and fingernails, and a fair few of my possessions were stolen or destroyed, in addition to some other shenanigans that didn’t end well for me.
Amanda’s also followed up her abuse/abandonment trauma by sitting around watching other kids get chosen for adoption over her. Her behaviour is actually not too bad for a kid in this situation. As far as we know, she’s not mutilating herself or younger kids, hurting animals, starting fires, running away, trying to poison her caretakers or even just the more mild stuff like food hoarding, abandoning her toilet training or destroying her own possessions. There’s a reason foster parents are trained to deal with everything I just mentioned. She’s not the nicest kid in the world, for sure. But bear in mind – kids learn empathy and altruism by internalizing that which their carers demonstrate to them. Amanda’s models were pretty darn lacking in that respect.
AI feel i should point out… She DID destroy some of her own things. She threw her GBA-expy, possibly one of the few things she still had from her ‘adopted’ days, to the floor when she heard Selkie was adopted before her.
personally, I’d chalk that one up to a really bad case of Rage-Quit… notice that even the other kids were surprised that she did it, implying that she DOESN’T normally do things like that
You amuse me greatly with this comment. My home life was more similar Cinderella than anything else and I was still a princess in the fairy tale I constructed to deal with their crazy. Princess just means daughter of a king/queen. God knows I heard my father spout off about being king of his castle oft enough, royalty is a very good representation of parental authority – including having the power of literal life or death over children. Wasn’t til I got old enough to start deconstructing the layers of meaning in it that I realized how hard my subconscious had worked to keep me sane. There were layers and layers of symbology stolen and pieced together from stories, cartoons, and reality. Looking at it as an adult, it was scary amazing how it all fit together.
Because they stole Princess Magic, Chanelle!
Win! 😀
I just realized that none of the other three pages tagged ‘Jenny’ is showing the kid in the blue sweater.
Two are showing Andi’s friend Jenny and https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie146/ should be tagged ‘Tina’ instead of ‘Jenny’ (according to the seating chart on the same page)
Woops, you’re pretty much right about that. I forgot I have two Jennys (Jennies?), and Tina is definitely mis-labeled.
https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie150/ does have a previous appearance of Jenny Evanston, but she’s obscured by Joe’s arm and also not labeled either. 🙁
My favorite comeback
In this story the “tower” represents the orphanage, right? Or is something else before the ditching, a punishment maybe?
Seems more likely it was “Go to your room, and stay there until you quit lying”. Locked in a tower – restricted to your bedroom.
Could be locked in her room literally. It does happen.