I'm technically a black belt in Tae Kwon Do but so long out of practice and so out-of-shape I probably couldn't even get a Hap Ki Do pulled off on an errant bunny.
Really? Really? She can’t not poke at Selkie for one…darn…day? Even in the throes of joy she has to go out of her way to try to make “the fishface” feel bad? Here’s one, how crappy is Selkie gonna feel that AMANDA’s mom came back for her, especially seeing as Selkie remembers her mom?
URghhhh I keep trying to remember this character is just a child, a damaged child, but she’s such a little jerk!
Yeah but you are only imagining the fight when they find out they are sisters.
we still get 3 fights for the price of one when Todd finds out Andi lied about Amanda Dying, then secretly put her up for adoption, when his family gladly would have raised her.
and then a second fight when he finds out what happened to Amanda when she was in foster care. His Parental instincts will kick in and he’ll blame Andi, because Amanda never would have been in foster care if she wasn’t put up for adoption in the first place.
Then the Third Fight When Amanda finds out Selkie and her are sisters, and the feelings of abandonment when her own father adopted a Sarnothi, over his own flesh and blood.
An important PSA: kids are not goods and cannot be ~damaged~. You don’t get a discount on a damaged kid. Kids are kids, and Amanda has gone through abuse and abandonment. She’s just a kid with bad temper.
just please don’t use that word
I understand how the word can trigger you. Speaking as someone who was a profoundly broken child, I personally didn’t take offense. I saw Leoness as acknowledging all that had been done to harm Amanda, not declaring her no longer any good.
My apologies if I upset you. It’s a word I’ve used for myself many times due to abuse I went through growing up. To me it was always – I’ve been damaged but with time I’ve mended. Cracked and put back together.
Damage doesn’t necessarily means damaged goods. In this sense, it’s more of a hurt, broken-inside meaning. Kind of like acknowledging that some things happened in her past that she needs to work through before she can fix her problems.
There is more than one meaning to the term “damaged.” Amanda is very much damaged, and Andi has been told this and has been given the task by Lillian to help her heal. To her credit, she willing took responsiblity for the girl and will help her to do just that. In this case, both Todd and Andi are admirable parents, as they both have adopted children that need help, with the intent of trying to give them that help. (reference Todd getting upset with Agent Brown when he felt he was impeding Todd’s ability to care for Selkie)
Nobody here is looking at Amanda as an “object” but rather an innocent little girl with a very tragic past. Calling her “damaged” does not objectify her, but helps to underscore the fact that she needs help to heal.
When the truth comes out this will be even worse for Selkie. Even though she’s Dave’s daughter now that she’s been adopted, it will hurt Selkie so much more to know she’s the only member of the “family” that’s not actually blood related. Of course, I can also totally understand the irrecoverable rift between Andy and Dave that would result when he finds out that Andy kept a living daughter secret from him all these years.
I doubt that it’ll be worse than Selkie because she already knows she’s not blood related and although she may not know 100% why, she DOES know that her mom loves her and had to leave for a good reason (as per the hologram from her bow).
Most orphans don’t get to know why their parents left them or if it was even out of love. Plus she’s not the only member of the family who’s not related… her getting adopted by Todd is actually even MORE inclusive because his parents adopted him AND his brother & sister. So her father, aunt, & uncle are ALL adopted.
If anything.. Amanda being the biological daughter will be strange.
A crapstorm -is- coming, but I think it will have MUCH less to do with “I’m blood related and you’re not” (because Todd being adopted himself would NEVER treat amanda or selkie differently based on genetic relation) and more to do with a) Andi’s well-kept secret b) Todd’s ‘passing over’ Amanda for Selkie and c) The fact that two girls who absolutely hate each other will now be forced to live in a family dynamic where they’re sisters.
I think that here is where Andi and Todd’s relationship will REALLY be put to the test.
“You kept the secret of our child being alive for EIGHT YEARS!”
“Yeah well you went to the adoption agency she was at and adopted ANOTHER CHILD.”
Hopefully they’re mature enough to deal with this though.
Again, Todd had no idea whatsoever Amanda was his biological daughter. I still see where Amanda could have a hard time dealing with that, but it’s unlikely that Andi will use that argument.
Exactly, and in fact the belief that his daughter Amanda died could have been a major factor, subconsciously or otherwise, in the fact that he didn’t want to adopt her. It’d have been too close to trying to replace the little girl he lost.
I was never saying Todd would discriminate against her or even Andi. The only one who would maybe pack a sucker punch like that would be Amanda. However you don’t need to SAY or DO anything for a child to feel left out or sad knowing that they’re the odd one out in the family unit. When it was just Selkie and Todd that was different, but when Amanda is brought in (as she must and will be) that will add a whole different dynamic.
I know Todd was adopted and yes I see that as a factor that would make Selkie feel more comfortable. In fact, we can probably recognize that Todd being adopted is why he wanted to adopt. However the grandparents are not part of the nuclear family, but a young daughter (like Amanda and Selkie) with their parents (Andi and Todd) would be.
This begs the question, though — why assume Todd and Andi are going to be a “nuclear family”? I don’t think they’re going to get back together. They’d drifted apart. The mere discovery of their shared genetic kid isn’t going to make them suddenly fall in love again, and if they’re wise, they’re not going to try to move in together.
The question will probably be: what relationship will Amanda want with her genetic father? Will she want to have anything to do with him, once she finds out who he adopted over her? She might not. Or she might want to see if she can “steal” him from Selkie. (That’d be doomed to failure, betcha.)
Until/unless the birth certificate gets amended from “Father: Unknown” (see footnote), Todd will have no legal say in the matter, so it really is up to Andi and Amanda. Even if the birth certificate got amended, though, Todd probably wouldn’t want to push the matter much if Amanda was furious with him.
Footnote: As I mentioned before, I am pretty sure that Todd can’t be on the birth certificate, or else he would’ve had to sign the surrender-for-adoption papers as well. (Or his legal guardian, if they were both 17 at the time?) Either Andi will have to do the paperwork to get the certificate amended, or Todd will need to have a paternity test done, to get him onto the certificate.
Which, honestly, he might push for — if only because he would want to make sure Amanda didn’t go back to the orphanage if Andi got hit by a truck. (Or to insist that if Andi were in the hospital, Amanda didn’t have to stay with her grandmother-who-pushed-for-the-adoption-thing when Andi was vulnerable and Todd was gone.)
Actually, Selkie won’t be the only one who’s not a blood relative. Todd is adopted—as is his brother and sister. And he not only continued the tradition of adopting, but picked Selkie over Amanda.
Jeez, they are already squabbling like they are sisters!
….of course all the orphanage kids ARE siblings, so they have a massive head start on the reflex.
well, in the last panel as they were walking out of the orphanage, Andi DID say that “she’s working on it”… who knows what transpired over the last few days (or however long it’s been comic-time) she may have told her his name and such, never believing that they would come into contact, and thus a “safe” name to tell her… of course the next thing that happens is that Amanda brags to Selkie about him and she says his name… then Selkie has to call to Todd, etc..etc..etc.. then we have the whole blow-up that afternoon when Selkie has Todd wait for Andi to show up for Amanda, like someone else mentioned a while back…
See, and I look at the squabbling as totally typical of those two and (hopefully) not particularly meaningful. What I got all focused on was that Andi took Amanda out and got her ears pierced, and how ‘fancy’ that must have made Amanda feel, and how it shows how hard Andi’s trying to learn her daughter and make things right. Sure, there’s a thousand ways that it could backfire, but it turned into a very sweet thing in my headcanon.
Last page I said “Happy Amanda is freaking me out too.” Now I’ll tell you why. Her dancing in the lunchroom with a tray of food seemed ‘over the top’ and at the time I thought it was indicative of some mental problem she might have: When you combined that high with the lows we’ve seen I was thinking she might be manic-depressive, bipolar, or something. Now I’m thinking her dancing was a planned exaggeration for the purpose of rubbing her good mood in the faces of the others.
For Amanda happiness seems to be a ‘zero-sum game.’ She can’t be truly happy unless somebody else isn’t.
Kind of surprised Amanda’s not pulling the “My REAL Mommy came back and got me so nyah!” card, especially on Selkie. She probably knows Selkie’s mom dropped her off…
Well children boasting about the power of their parents. That is certainly normal enough just so long as the parents don’t follow through in the “I am better ” department.
Oh, lordy. When they find out …
I can only imagine. O_O
suddenly sisters. man this will be the shock of there lifes.
I can’t wait. XD
Yyep. No way this can end well. Unless Dave just keeps them from finding out until much much later.
Aw who am I kidding, it still can’t end well.
Yeeeeaaaahhhhh… this will be… bad…
They both know karate how convenient… So who wants to bet andi and todd took these supposed karate lessons together?
or you know one or both girls is a fibber but whats the fun in that? 😀
I doubt Selkie’s fibbing here. If she was lying, she’d probably have said ‘black belt’, not ‘green belt’
Really? Really? She can’t not poke at Selkie for one…darn…day? Even in the throes of joy she has to go out of her way to try to make “the fishface” feel bad? Here’s one, how crappy is Selkie gonna feel that AMANDA’s mom came back for her, especially seeing as Selkie remembers her mom?
URghhhh I keep trying to remember this character is just a child, a damaged child, but she’s such a little jerk!
I can’t imagine how Dave is going to play this out.
Amanda: “MY mother came back for me.”
Selkie: “Yeah? Well YOUR father chose ME over YOU.”
This is going to be so ugly.
I can’t wait! 🙂
Yeah but you are only imagining the fight when they find out they are sisters.
we still get 3 fights for the price of one when Todd finds out Andi lied about Amanda Dying, then secretly put her up for adoption, when his family gladly would have raised her.
and then a second fight when he finds out what happened to Amanda when she was in foster care. His Parental instincts will kick in and he’ll blame Andi, because Amanda never would have been in foster care if she wasn’t put up for adoption in the first place.
Then the Third Fight When Amanda finds out Selkie and her are sisters, and the feelings of abandonment when her own father adopted a Sarnothi, over his own flesh and blood.
there is plenty of drama to look forward too.
We also get the fourth drama when Selkie worries about what to do if Selkie’s mother comes back and whether she has to leave Todd.
It will be like watching a train wreck with boxcars full of puppies!! So painful, so sad, so much “I can’t not look!” (leaves to get popcorn!)
That’s what I said on the last page!
An important PSA: kids are not goods and cannot be ~damaged~. You don’t get a discount on a damaged kid. Kids are kids, and Amanda has gone through abuse and abandonment. She’s just a kid with bad temper.
just please don’t use that word
I understand how the word can trigger you. Speaking as someone who was a profoundly broken child, I personally didn’t take offense. I saw Leoness as acknowledging all that had been done to harm Amanda, not declaring her no longer any good.
My apologies if I upset you. It’s a word I’ve used for myself many times due to abuse I went through growing up. To me it was always – I’ve been damaged but with time I’ve mended. Cracked and put back together.
Damage doesn’t necessarily means damaged goods. In this sense, it’s more of a hurt, broken-inside meaning. Kind of like acknowledging that some things happened in her past that she needs to work through before she can fix her problems.
There is more than one meaning to the term “damaged.” Amanda is very much damaged, and Andi has been told this and has been given the task by Lillian to help her heal. To her credit, she willing took responsiblity for the girl and will help her to do just that. In this case, both Todd and Andi are admirable parents, as they both have adopted children that need help, with the intent of trying to give them that help. (reference Todd getting upset with Agent Brown when he felt he was impeding Todd’s ability to care for Selkie)
Nobody here is looking at Amanda as an “object” but rather an innocent little girl with a very tragic past. Calling her “damaged” does not objectify her, but helps to underscore the fact that she needs help to heal.
Ya, he’s gonna Lean Six Sigma all over her!
todd is an architect. if he does park design, maybe he *does* have a green belt.
Ba-Dump-Shish
Wow. The irony is thickening with every panel…
As to who could beat up whom… I don’t like to speculate as to the kind of shenanigans other people get up to in the bedroom.
Glad I wasn’t the only one who thought that.
Ouch!
I’m dreading what’s going to happen next.
Voting is still broken for me.
When the truth comes out this will be even worse for Selkie. Even though she’s Dave’s daughter now that she’s been adopted, it will hurt Selkie so much more to know she’s the only member of the “family” that’s not actually blood related. Of course, I can also totally understand the irrecoverable rift between Andy and Dave that would result when he finds out that Andy kept a living daughter secret from him all these years.
you might want to amend those “Dave” comments to be “Todd”. Dave’s the creator of the strip, not the character.
I doubt that it’ll be worse than Selkie because she already knows she’s not blood related and although she may not know 100% why, she DOES know that her mom loves her and had to leave for a good reason (as per the hologram from her bow).
Most orphans don’t get to know why their parents left them or if it was even out of love. Plus she’s not the only member of the family who’s not related… her getting adopted by Todd is actually even MORE inclusive because his parents adopted him AND his brother & sister. So her father, aunt, & uncle are ALL adopted.
If anything.. Amanda being the biological daughter will be strange.
A crapstorm -is- coming, but I think it will have MUCH less to do with “I’m blood related and you’re not” (because Todd being adopted himself would NEVER treat amanda or selkie differently based on genetic relation) and more to do with a) Andi’s well-kept secret b) Todd’s ‘passing over’ Amanda for Selkie and c) The fact that two girls who absolutely hate each other will now be forced to live in a family dynamic where they’re sisters.
I think that here is where Andi and Todd’s relationship will REALLY be put to the test.
“You kept the secret of our child being alive for EIGHT YEARS!”
“Yeah well you went to the adoption agency she was at and adopted ANOTHER CHILD.”
Hopefully they’re mature enough to deal with this though.
Again, Todd had no idea whatsoever Amanda was his biological daughter. I still see where Amanda could have a hard time dealing with that, but it’s unlikely that Andi will use that argument.
Exactly, and in fact the belief that his daughter Amanda died could have been a major factor, subconsciously or otherwise, in the fact that he didn’t want to adopt her. It’d have been too close to trying to replace the little girl he lost.
I was never saying Todd would discriminate against her or even Andi. The only one who would maybe pack a sucker punch like that would be Amanda. However you don’t need to SAY or DO anything for a child to feel left out or sad knowing that they’re the odd one out in the family unit. When it was just Selkie and Todd that was different, but when Amanda is brought in (as she must and will be) that will add a whole different dynamic.
I know Todd was adopted and yes I see that as a factor that would make Selkie feel more comfortable. In fact, we can probably recognize that Todd being adopted is why he wanted to adopt. However the grandparents are not part of the nuclear family, but a young daughter (like Amanda and Selkie) with their parents (Andi and Todd) would be.
I also worry about the guilt Todd will feel over this…
This begs the question, though — why assume Todd and Andi are going to be a “nuclear family”? I don’t think they’re going to get back together. They’d drifted apart. The mere discovery of their shared genetic kid isn’t going to make them suddenly fall in love again, and if they’re wise, they’re not going to try to move in together.
The question will probably be: what relationship will Amanda want with her genetic father? Will she want to have anything to do with him, once she finds out who he adopted over her? She might not. Or she might want to see if she can “steal” him from Selkie. (That’d be doomed to failure, betcha.)
Until/unless the birth certificate gets amended from “Father: Unknown” (see footnote), Todd will have no legal say in the matter, so it really is up to Andi and Amanda. Even if the birth certificate got amended, though, Todd probably wouldn’t want to push the matter much if Amanda was furious with him.
Footnote: As I mentioned before, I am pretty sure that Todd can’t be on the birth certificate, or else he would’ve had to sign the surrender-for-adoption papers as well. (Or his legal guardian, if they were both 17 at the time?) Either Andi will have to do the paperwork to get the certificate amended, or Todd will need to have a paternity test done, to get him onto the certificate.
Which, honestly, he might push for — if only because he would want to make sure Amanda didn’t go back to the orphanage if Andi got hit by a truck. (Or to insist that if Andi were in the hospital, Amanda didn’t have to stay with her grandmother-who-pushed-for-the-adoption-thing when Andi was vulnerable and Todd was gone.)
Ungh, I’m sick and rambling. Sorry.
Actually, Selkie won’t be the only one who’s not a blood relative. Todd is adopted—as is his brother and sister. And he not only continued the tradition of adopting, but picked Selkie over Amanda.
No bets on whether it will be a massive shock to find they are sisters now.
The question is, implosion or explosion?
Hugs? Hugs of death? 🙂
Knowing those two: Hugs. Really, really tight hugs. Around each other’s necks.
A hug is a great way to get your knife hand behind someone’s back.
“My Dads coulds beats ups your Mom.” Isn’t that how this all started?
Now, now, “knocks ups” and “beats ups” are entirely different things.
Jeez, they are already squabbling like they are sisters!
….of course all the orphanage kids ARE siblings, so they have a massive head start on the reflex.
I really like how Selkie starts answering the “what’d YOU do yesterday” question totally seriously. Nice touch.
So this means Andi still hasn’t told Amanda who her father is. I wonder if that was deliberate…
well, in the last panel as they were walking out of the orphanage, Andi DID say that “she’s working on it”… who knows what transpired over the last few days (or however long it’s been comic-time) she may have told her his name and such, never believing that they would come into contact, and thus a “safe” name to tell her… of course the next thing that happens is that Amanda brags to Selkie about him and she says his name… then Selkie has to call to Todd, etc..etc..etc.. then we have the whole blow-up that afternoon when Selkie has Todd wait for Andi to show up for Amanda, like someone else mentioned a while back…
See, and I look at the squabbling as totally typical of those two and (hopefully) not particularly meaningful. What I got all focused on was that Andi took Amanda out and got her ears pierced, and how ‘fancy’ that must have made Amanda feel, and how it shows how hard Andi’s trying to learn her daughter and make things right. Sure, there’s a thousand ways that it could backfire, but it turned into a very sweet thing in my headcanon.
Last page I said “Happy Amanda is freaking me out too.” Now I’ll tell you why. Her dancing in the lunchroom with a tray of food seemed ‘over the top’ and at the time I thought it was indicative of some mental problem she might have: When you combined that high with the lows we’ve seen I was thinking she might be manic-depressive, bipolar, or something. Now I’m thinking her dancing was a planned exaggeration for the purpose of rubbing her good mood in the faces of the others.
For Amanda happiness seems to be a ‘zero-sum game.’ She can’t be truly happy unless somebody else isn’t.
It’s what she knows. She’s been coping with her situation by using anger and bullying to hide her pain. Never show weakness, never show kindness.
When you do something for so long it can be hard to let it go.
Kind of surprised Amanda’s not pulling the “My REAL Mommy came back and got me so nyah!” card, especially on Selkie. She probably knows Selkie’s mom dropped her off…
Dave, I’m a 1st degree black belt in Songham Taekwondo!
Nice!
I’m a 1st degree black belt in 911 & my-lawyer’s-a-bitch.com
Hit me and your money will make the pain worth it.
And I’m a black belt at being a big damn beast of a man. People don’t pick fights with me period.
Yeah, but George’s parents are ninja astronauts, so they could beat up your parents.
Ok, I guess I was wrong on Wednesday. She IS being smug.
Logging a prediction for future reference, encrypted to avoid spoiling it.
knfwfcbgyeikshbuopepwlgzshpvesdbkcwbcdrvyesdbgxbpvsofrlpbyopnqncymmsiu
okay, that’s not rot13. What’s the key?
Well children boasting about the power of their parents. That is certainly normal enough just so long as the parents don’t follow through in the “I am better ” department.
Funny story… Tod and Andi took the same karate class together.
They’re both green belts.
Hop boy, Amanda is going to inwardly collapse when she finds out who her dad is.