Sorry folks, but today’s strip is gonna have to be blue lines for now. I’m going to try and get it properly outlined and colored sometime this weekend. My apologies for the low-art day.
-EDIT- Done!
She's forgetting the part where magic fairies fix everything forever.
And…..there it was. The Question.
She popped The Question.
“Because I didn’t know it was you, and adopting someone with the same name as my supposedly dead daughter would be too creepy?”
Yeah, but she’s 8, and magical thinking is still very much a part of her thought process. He’s her dad, he should have an instant, intuitive connection with her.
Amanda grew up in an adoption center. There, more than anywhere else, kids need to learn that relations by blood are not inherently stronger than those made by commitment. If anything, she may asume that Todd is only interested in her because he feels obligated, not because he wants to. After all, if he valued her for WHO she is and not WHAT she is, why did he get involved with her after he learned the latter?
That sounds a bit better than:
Tod: “You reminded me a lot of my ex-girlfriend (your mom) whom I was kind of annoyed with, and trying not to think about. I worried I’d be transferring some of my pissiness at her to you.”
Andi: “Also, dumping your girlfriend and then immediately adopting an 8-year-old who looks a lot like her is creepy on an entirely different level.”
Todd: “…Selkie, Amanda, cover your ears for a minute or three. I’m about to use words you shouldn’t be repeating.”
That’s… Not even remotely what the story is about, Amanda.
Also, hate to break it to you, Amanda, but if this /were/ a Cinderella story your role is more likely to be one of the Wicked Stepsisters that give Cinderella a hard time than that of the long-suffering-but-still-kind protagonist.
I disagree!
Yes, Amanda is a bully now. But we know she was adopted at birth by a family who proceeded to favor their biological children and abuse Amanda. So to her, a story of a mother who favors her biological children over her adopted (step) daughter and abuses Cinderella makes sense.
Look. Amanda is not a nice person. She’s also an abused child who isn’t very good at processing her own emotions or disentangling why she does the things she does. Do you think people really get out of horrific abusive situations as ‘long-suffering-but-still-kind’? Even the well-adjusted people have fleas they need to ‘wash out’ of their brains.
Whoops, also wanna clarify – I’m not saying abuse victims can’t be kind or whatever. I’m saying abuse victims are going to be left with patterns of behavior from their abuse that need to be worked through, and a child abused when she was so young and for a period of time spanning several years is definitely going to have emotional issues. Amanda is responsible for her own actions, but the factors have to be taken into account.
It’s also important to note that childhood abuse actually has a physical effect on the brain’s development. Their hippocampus is actually smaller than normal, and that’s the place where we process emotions and memories. You see the same thing in people with depression and schizophrenia. I know in people with depression, the hippocampus can actually recover and return to normal size, but if someone’s brain has been like that for the entire time it was developing I’m not so sure. Taking in a damaged kid like this, it’s not just a ‘we’ll show them love and everything will be all right’ scenario quite so much as it is ‘we have to figure out how to *completely freaking rewire* this kid’s brain’.
Technically, there are variants where one of the stepsisters does repent of her negative behavior toward the main character, and gets something like a happy ending. I think this also happens in some variants of Beauty and the Beast — the main character eventually seeing to it that the sisters or stepsisters get high-ranking marriages, which was basically a happy ending in the mindset of that timeframe.
That took only slightly longer than I thought it might.
Now it gets interesting. I wonder if Mari & Theo just happened to bring “The Urn” with them? Telling her they thought she was dead isn’t something she’s likely to believe without some solid proof to back it up. This is a kid that’s used to getting the shaft by the adults in her life.
I’m thinking that by the time the dust settles on this one, much of the blame is going to get shifted to the one person who, imo, deserves it the most – Andi’s mother. What Andi did was wrong (to put it mildly), but I feel that the situation would have likely played out very differently without her mother’s heavy influence.
well, the DID bring the “UM…” 😀
the way the text is on my screen makes it look like the R and the N are joined into one letter (M) and i was scratching my head going “but they DID go ‘UM’, why would you ask that?!”
Ah, the joys of keming.
Your a monster.
No, you’re a monster. Ah, the joys of grammar.
Shouldn’t that be ‘rnonster”?
(If someone can’t see that it’s ‘r n o n s t e r’.) ;-}}
http://orig01.deviantart.net/633f/f/2012/113/a/e/dun_dun_duuuun_by_invadertak2168-d4x9t2y.jpg
Well that’s a LOL!
AlaraM, you beat me to it, I was going to do the dun-dun-DUNNnnnnnn! But yeah, stole my thunder. Well done.
Well, that’s it folks, happy-family time is done. Now we’re onto Serious Business (TM)
Well this won’t end well. Didn’t Andi already tell her before though that Todd didn’t know about her?
I think it’s worse than that: why didn’t Todd choose *her*, regardless of what he knew back then? Shouldn’t he have liked her even if he didn’t know who she was? Why now, that he knows she’s his biological daughter, suddenly he wants to be a part of her life, when earlier he chose not to?
…complicated times ahead.
Todd made the choice base on his own experiences, as an orphan and as an adoptee. He’s been in the system, he knows the acts the kids put on to con the parents. He knew who needed him and who he needed.
I went back and checked and Andi does indeed tell Amanda that her dad didn’t know. So I do wonder why Amanda asked him this.
Because unlike the way movies and such work, it takes more than a single repetition for an idea to really sink its way into your brain. Most of the time. I’ve got kids in my life where I’ve explained certain concepts over and over and over and they always seem to understand it at the time but then completely overlook it later and when you re-explain it’s like they never heard the first time.
Though it could also be the case that Amanda is trying to test her mom’s statement by finding out her dad’s take on things.
“Because you’re an awful brat, that’s why.”
…would be a perfect answer except for that little “trying to be nice to his own just reunited 9-year-old daughter” thing.
Mind, at the time Todd didn’t know she was a horrid bullying self-absorbed brat; it’s just that his empathy naturally latched on to the solitary kid that was being isolated for being different.
Also, bonus points to Selkie for *not* rubbing it in by saying “Obviously he liked me betters.”
YET… although with the blue lines right now, it’s hard to tell, but it looks like she’s just as surprised at the question as everyone else is.
Yet. She hasn’t said it…yet. I’m sure as soon as she thinks of it, she will be more than eager to say it.
I’m not so sure that Selkie would be that vindictive? Cruel? I think she’s had the time and security of a dad that she would be a little more sympathetic than that (unless she starts getting afraid he will take her back and latch onto Amanda instead, but she has only been “dumped” once, Amanda has more reason to be bitter and what seems like reasonable fears of being dumped twice).
I know this is serious but to me Selkie’s face is like this [img]http://imgfave-chat-herokuapp-com.global.ssl.fastly.net/image_cache/1380141603673883.jpg[/img]
Relevant Imgur gif album:
http://imgur.com/gallery/SpdcH
On reflection, Amanda’s interpretation of (and obvious projection into) the Cinderella story gives an interesting insight in her personality.
She “got ditched” and “everyone hates her”; IE, she’s the victim, and absolutely nothing is her fault. She’s basically constructed and embraced a narrative where the universe is unilaterally and manifestly unfair to her more than anyone else.
Cinderella didn’t “get ditched”; her mother died, her father remarried to a woman that hated her, and when her father died her stepmother stopped even pretending to be kind toward her and helped her stepsisters heap abuse on her…
… But Cinderella *still* chose to “be brave; be kind; be good” despite all the crap life handed to her.
Come to think of it, that /does/ sound like someone we know. Just, y’know, not Amanda.
Keep in mind, no one feels they’re the villain of their story. Not even self professed “bad guys.” Gang members think they’re doing what they can to survive, blackmailers feel they’re punishing the guilty that would otherwise get away with their sins, terrorists feel they’re freedom fighters protecting their faith or way of life. Everyone justifies their actions to make themselves the heroes of their stories.
Amanda is hardly any of those of course. But she certainly doesn’t see herself as the ugly step sister of her story. She’s a beat up abused kid licking her wounds and fighting against a world that will keep abusing her. At least that’s how she’s telling her story. We see a mean spirited, angry kid, that needs to work through her various issues that got forced on her by some frankly pathetic people that if I said what I would love to do to them, I would come off as a worse troll than any of the ones we’ve received. ….I have a soft spot for kids and a hate on for abusers.
The Cinderella analogy breaks down here because there are no step sisters in the Selkie and Amanda story.
The “step sisters” are the biological sons of the family who originally adopted her, and who abused her.
… Another possible reason for the awkward pause: They’re all suddenly realizing that Andi *didn’t* actually tell Amanda all about how things went down and they’re wondering how to break it to her.
Sometimes, kids need the truth from multiple adults for it to be come “True-true”? That’s my guess and im stick in’ to it.
It’d be interesting to learn the truth–especially invoking Andi’s mother.
Amanda’s still convinced that family-of-origin is the ULTIMATE FAMILY and anything else is comparatively bad. Since her first adoptive family favoured bio-kids over Amanda, she developed the notion that adopted kids are poised to be hurt at any time because they’re not related to the rest of the family. If most of the death/deception was orchestrated by Andi’s mom, suggesting further that Andi’s mom is not a good parent, this might enlighten Amanda that bio-parents are not instinctively “better”.
Wow, I didn’t even think of this question. No kids, myself.
Amanda assumes that the biological connection should have made her an obvious choice! The right choice, even. And Todd’s not making that choice is a rejection? It’s like in Shakespeare, “It’s a wise father that knows his own child” (Merchant of Venice). I get that, even though it’s not at all true.
I’m having to get introspective here- it doesn’t come naturally!- I just thought of Todd as Selkie’s dad, and possibly Amanda’s at some time in the future. But it seems the discovery of the biocon makes him her dad, whatever the circumstances.
It’s a whole new world, this strip.
It’s one of those things that (I understand) adopted kids, and their parents, have to go through all the time: People assuming that biological ties SOMEHOW have some mystical inherent hold on you that adopted ties can’t possibly match.
It’s one of the reasons Todd broke up with Andi (her attitude about this), and one of the reasons he so easily connected with Selkie (his attitude about it).
I’ve never understood why biological ties are elevated to such a high position. And it offends me when people deride my connection to my relatives with the idea that they’re not my “real” nephews and nieces because there’s no genetic material shared between us.
Not everyone can understand seeing someone as family without biological ties. I know that, for myself personally, I was told that “Blood is thicker than water” when I was growing up, telling me that blood relatives should and do have strong bonds.
I’m older now and know that that’s not the entire statement. But not everyone learns that family isn’t always blood. That sometimes it’s the family you choose and not the family you’re born with.
“The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”
Heh… Two of my sisters are, quite literally, “from another Mister”. We’ve known each-other for quite a few years before our parents married, so we had the bond before then.
I never heard the full version of that turn of phrase before. It has a whole other subtext to it when you hear the whole thing. O_o Also makes more sense why the hell the phrase is talking about water at all.
Most people don’t know the full phrase. Most people circulate that whole “Blood is thicker than water” crap to make children to make them feel like their blood relatives are more important than they really are.
Is there even a good answer to this question? Almost no matter what he says it’s gonna hurt either Selkie or Amanda. If he avoids the question it will still cause problems.
This is a no win situation. ….Dear god it’s a Kobayashi Maru.
You’re probably right, but i think it’s also a bit of them going “Duh!” in that the PARENTS should have gotten together FIRST, before bringing the kids along, just so that they can at least get their stories/facts straight… and this scene is them JUST NOW realizing it…
So Andi didn’t explain any of this to her before hand? Of course she didn’t, that would require a spine.
NO… she DID explain that there was “a mix-up” at the hospital and that she thought she was dead, back a few pages ago when they were playing video games at home…
BUT… that said, I’ll bet that she most likely did NOT explain that the root CAUSE of “the mix-up” was HERSELF (or more than likely, her mother and her influence over her behavior), not wanting(or even being ABLE to) to admit to Todd that she had been given up for adoption instead.
Don’t think it matters. This isn’t about the mix-up at the hospital, this is about ‘Why didn’t you magically know I was your daughter and pick me out of the orphanage when you adopted Selkie instead? If you’re my “real” dad you should’ve known.’
That seems most logical to me anyway. But I was a fairy tale buff – there’s tons of stories about people magically making the right choices. In Cinderella the prince finds her magically – in reality there’s a bajillion woman who wear the same shoe size in a small town. The princess finds the tiny pea, proving she’s a princess. That one story where the prince has to choose from a dozen copies of his love. They always make the “right” choice. There’s always a happy ending. So why didn’t he choose her?
Of course, in the story where the guy has to choose the right girl from a dozen copies, the correct girl gives the guy a hint by moving her foot forward.
Or it happens due to developing allies — in one version, a bee, who happened to alight on the youngest and point out that she’d drunk honey (or some specific sweet drink) as none of the others did.
Really, developing allies is so much more important in fairy tales than any other quality besides generally “a good heart.” You can have zero skills or talents or objects or wisdom to your name, and be handed all the skills and talents and objects and wisdom you need because you happened to befriend the right person (or animal) at the right time.
Many of those “zero skills or talents or objects or wisdom” stories were meant as comedies. E.g., the king offered riches to anyone who could make the princess laugh. A village idiot set out to claim the award. Along the way, he picked up various objects found in the road, including a dead magpie (that’s some sort of bird) and a the sole of a shoe. Brought before the princess, they had an absurd conversation, in which he kept pulling out his found objects – e.g., the shoe sole when “soul” came up – until even the princess had to laugh.
Eh, I always thought the main thing was to make sure to be the third born/youngest. You were pretty much screwed if you were eldest and had to set out on a quest. Diana Wynne Jones did a good job of making fun of that in Howl’s Moving Castle which is a far better book than movie.
I thought her mom did tell her that he thought she was dead.
So I’m assuming her reasoning is “I’m your daughter, why didn’t you instinctively feel that connection?”
Well, what I get from the question is, “can I please have a fairy-tale ending”?
The “fairy-tale ending” in this case would also involve getting rid of the “impostor”, which Amanda is setting up Selkie for. This’ll be a very tough discussion.
Welp. This is going to be painfully awkward. Doubt that there’s an easy way to tell Amanda it’s all because of her Mother. Mmm. Man this is going to be good. >=D
If Todd and his parents go the vindictive route (I highly doubt they will.) and tell them Andi lied to them all and said she died then gave her up for adoption without them knowing, then they are equally terrible people for putting that knowledge on a clearly emotionally disturbed child. They know how fond she currently is and they know how emotionally damaged she is. Besides they’re not 100% aware of what happened yet. Andi somewhat explained it to Todd, but he was in a daze when she started to tell him, so I doubt he remembers anything she said.
I predict they will just say, they didn’t know she was alive, without specifically mentioning Andi. They will just say, “things happened” and Amanda will of course question what kind of things to which the proper response should be, “Well, we really don’t know yet, to be honest. Your mother only just told us about you.” which isn’t a lie and it’s not a stab at Andi either.
Andi will tell Amanda in time, what really happened. Telling an emotionally unstable 9 year old with severe trust and abandonment issues is not a smart thing. Lillian probably advised to wait to tell her the truth, hell, Lillian might have even told her to omit certain aspects of the truth until she’s much older and can handle something that big. Todd might even be on board with not telling her for the forsee able future as long as Andi makes it known that Todd had no idea he had a daughter until recently.
Not saying more lies are right, but perhaps a little omission of the truth is less harmful to Amanda as of now.
“Now what kind of father would I be if I let a little girl like you carry a burden as heavy as this? No, no, I shall bear this burden for now, and when you are older you might be able to bear it.”
Not a quote per se, but the general ending to a little anecdote/tale I heard about a little girl asking her dad about sex predators or something, and after he thought for a moment, he asked her to pick up his heavy luggage. It was a neat dodge and a moment of pure wisdom.
It’s from The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom. She talks about how she asked her dad what “sexsin” was, since that’s what the preachers called it and she, of course, didn’t know what that was. Her father was packing a suitcase and asked her if she could lift it. She replied that of course she could not. Cue the above paraphrase.
“Because when I met you at the orphanage, I thought you were adorable, but you also seemed very happy and you had friends. Selkie didn’t. She was alone and she reminded me of me when I was her age.” Simple. Truthful. Honest.
That’s better than anything I was coming up with, but it still puts Amanda in a position to lord it over Selkie. “Dad thinks I’m adorable and have lots of friends. He just took *you* because he was sorry for you because no one likes you. Fish-face.” I wish Amanda well, but I would use a fiery sword to protect Selkie from feeling outcast again.
Ooo, I *like* that idea.
Meant, of course, as a reply to Gevaisa *facepalm*
I have just been wondering the entire time for the scene why Selkie is even there. It just seems like a set-up for a fight being that the two of them don’t get along in general. Add in the new ‘actual’ daughter, and Selkie’s new family all focusing on Amanda, and it just seems like a bad idea. Maybe a solution would have been for Andi to take Selkie somewhere fun while Todd and the grandparents get to meet Amanda. It would have broken up both groups that might have ended up fighting.
Because she lives there. They can’t just put her in the room like some over excited pomeranian. And even in the scenario of Andi taking her somewhere fun, Andi has made it clear how she feels about adopted children. I doubt it would be fun for Selkie in the slightest, in fact it could cause more trouble than her being there since she’d feel shooed away. Andi is no good with rough situations either. She cracks under pressure far too easily.
There’s no clean solution here for Selkie. Letting her stay there is the least dirty solution.
Well, actually, no. Andi hasn’t ‘made it clear’ how she feels about adopted children. What she said back then was her guilt about Amanda speaking. She wasn’t actually thinking about adoption per se, she was thinking, “Ohgod, let’s not talk about adoption because there’s a more urgent problem / person with a big claim on us both that I need to be talking about with you, and dammit, I’m too scared to start the conversation, but no, no! Adoption is not the subject you / we / you / both of us / should be thinking about!”
It came out of her mouth all wrong, which is not surprising. Since she couldn’t bring herself to say what she really needed to say, of course it got scrambled. Quite naturally it sounded to Todd like she had nothing but contempt for adoption, but now that we know what was really occupying her mind then, we should be able to figure out that’s not how she meant it at all. The only thing she has — or had then — against adoption was that she couldn’t just go along with adopting some other child and pretending everything was all right, when she knew that it so very much wasn’t.
I think we’ll find that now everything has been dragged out into the open, she has nothing whatsoever against adopted children.
I should add that I agree with everything else you said here.
Also, Andi needs to be there! This meeting is about her facing the music.
I never meant that they should put her in a room like a dog, which is why I didn’t recommend that they boot her out of the house with a babysitter. Pol might have been a better idea, but I mentioned Andi since it would give her a chance to get to know Selkie, since they are probably going to be seeing each other a lot from now on. As for her feeling ‘shooed away’, you can put it so it doesn’t seem like that, for example “I know you don’t like Amanda and would rather not be in the same room with her right now, so would you rather go see a fishy movie with Dr. Pol instead.” You could also provide the option of her staying, but with the note that she has to behave. This gives her the option of not being trapped in her own home with the “evil child”.
Also, this meeting shouldn’t be about Selkie and Amanda, or Andi and the family. It should be about Amanda and the family, since this is the first time that they meet her. It would be best to do it without interruptions and other drama (aka Andi facing the music). The only reason why Andi should be there is if Amanda doesn’t want to be left alone with people she doesn’t know and wants her there.
There are many times when I was younger where I would have greatly appreciated some one on one time with a friend or family member instead of being stuck at home or at another event where everyone was celebrating someone else and didn’t even care I was there. It made me feel ignored and defensive, which caused some reactions like one we have already seen with Selkie (saying she was not happy that Amanda was there). I wasn’t even an adopted child with a new actual child (that I hated) found out about, like Selkie. Time with someone else would have made me feel like someone still cared about me and appreciated me.
interesting thoughts, but I disagree. It can’t be about just Amanda, because of Selkie. Despite what happened between Andi and Todd, Selkie is Todd’s daughter now. I think it was better then Selkie remain then get shoved out. It’s about both Selkie and Amanda, and there’s no getting around that.
I would think that Selkie’s worries about being replaced by Amanda would be magnified if they wouldn’t even let her participate in the reunion.
Here, it’s like Amanda is welcomed in as part of the family, and that family includes Selkie. Selkie was there first and is not getting pushed to the side while they cater to the “real” kid.
A bigger question I’m wondering is why on Earth none of the families have contacted the orphanage for outside assistance? This is really a big thing to try to navigate without some kind of professional help and if I was a social worker who worked with either girl, I’d be livid no one updated me or asked for help about this.
Also—professional help aside—the orphanage’s workers had been with the girls for four years! I can kind of understand how Andi would be clueless, but it seems absolutely odd that Todd—and his parents—would overlook talking to the people who were with the girls half their lives.
Muhammad was a orphan.
Islam happens to be based on his teachings.