Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT: 2878-2882 (19-23 January 2015)

<< < (188/191) > >>

themacnut:
BTW I don't think that Faye has hit bottom yet, in fact I don't think she's even gotten close. Sure, she's lost her job, and probably her friendship with Dora, but her reaction in the previous comic to this one indicates she thinks both are replaceable (her opinion on that may change when or if she sobers up). None of that was enough of a shock for her to resist the siren call of more hard liquor.

So she's now passed out in her own vomit on the couch, after doing only Jeph knows what to Pintsize (always assuming Pintsize didn't short himself out trying to match her drink-for-drink). The consequences of that are yet to be depicted, maybe Marten has her taken to the ER, maybe not, he may be able to wake her, which could cause more problems in itself.* We also don't know Pintsize's condition, he may be fine after a reboot and a cleaning out of his chassis (not necessarily in that order).

Even if the worst case happens, Faye ends up in critical or intensive care and Pintsize is seriously damaged or even gone, I think Faye will be entirely too stubborn to stop drinking. Rather the opposite, she may have an even stronger desire to drink to escape all the nasty consequences of her recent drunken actions coming down on her head. That's how alcoholics think, after all, and Faye has definitely become one if she wasn't one already. I would say she's at the very least crossed the line from "hard drinker", seeing as how she has allowed her drinking to start badly affecting everyone around her.

* If Marten is able to wake Faye, I'd bet the first thing she'll want to do is grab for a bottle. Marten may try to stop her, in which case she'll most likely go all angry drunk on him. In that case, I think the abuse we've seen her heap on him in the past may pale in comparison to what she may say and/or do to him then. Get between a drunk and their next bottle? That's just asking for trouble there, son. The ultimate consequences of that may be Marten deciding he can't live with Faye as long as she continues drinking. He may ask Faye to leave, or he may move out himself. Yes Marten is a chill guy who takes a lot of crap from people, but even he has his limits; if Faye clocks him or kicks him in the nuts for getting between her and her next bottle, he may decide he's taken enough and he ain't takin' no more, especially if it turns out she's done serious damage to Pintsize as well.

Is it cold in here?:

--- Quote from: hedgie on 24 Jan 2015, 01:19 ---Depending on what Marten knows about the situation, phoning emergency services might mean not just a short trip to the ER, but a longer trip to a mental hospital.  It's a safer place for her to detox than rehab, at the very least, and if the speculation of her having pills in that vomit is true, it shows that she's suffering from suicidal impulses.

--- End quote ---

Marten knows there's a suspected suicide attempts in Faye's past. If those are pills, and if a doctor asks Marten the right questions, a mental hospital had _better_ be on the agenda.

Channelore HellicottAtham:
I don't think this is rock bottom for Faye yet either. For what it's worth the puke just looks like the bourbon she's drinking to me, exact same colour, with neither frank blood nor coffee grounds type haematemisis present. Had she been vomiting for a long time, or been a very long term alcoholic, we may expect frank blood. Ditto the darker oxidised blood that had been sitting in her stomach for a while pre-emesis. This just seems to me that she drank herself unconscious during the afternoon and vomited what drink she had left in her stomach.

As for rock bottom, this is only the start, this is the descent. She is not yet grinding herself into the bedrock. That I feel would come when Faye continually drinks her way through her unemployment for days on end, alienates every friend and wears out even Marten's limitless compassion and best intentions, and finds herself homeless and friendless as well as jobless and Angusless. I'll not inflict a protracted scene-by-scene prediction upon you all, but I doubt Jeph would take it that far; I expect rather that an early intervention from friends and possibly (probably?) family too will be incoming.

Having said that I don't think either that her recovery will necessarily be so rapid as her decline, and frankly I'd rather it weren't. Even if the common descent of alcoholism + depression isn't bashed out in full, I cannot imagine Jeph skimping on the recovery and skimming over the fact that such recoveries are very slow, painful, and exhausting for both the patient and their support crews.

jwhouk:
I think the problem we're having is that people who are just coming into the strip haven't seen the whole character development of Faye Whitaker. She started out being jerkish, but we eventually got a compelling character with one hell of a backstory.

I wasn't here at the beginning, but with the number of strips that we're at, I might as well have been (1323 was when I came 'round, by the way). It took a while to understand who people were, and why they were acting the way they were, but once it fell into place - Jeph had me hooked.

I've picked up all four (to date) dead tree versions of the strip, and when I read through the whole commentary that Jeph had about wanting to end the strip after The Talk - but felt like he couldn't, because that wasn't the end of the story - I realized that this wasn't a comic about just Marten and Faye. It was a comic about Marten and Faye and the whole menagerie of people they interact with regularly as they wander through the streets of fictional Northampton.

Even at the point where I came in, if you would have told me that he and Faye would eventually hook up, and have a relationship serious enough that their breakup would end in her going on a full-on drunk... well, I would have looked at you very funny and said, "Oh, yeah, right, and the next thing you're going to tell me is that Marten and Dora are going to break up."

In this whole strip, when it comes to characters, the old song is true: "There ain't no good guys, there ain't no bad guys, there's only you and me, and we just disagree." Every character has faults, every character has positives. (Okay, maybe not Vespa Avenger, but that was long ago.)

And, I think, we need to remember that this isn't a webcomic based on real life. The tipoff, as Jeph has also said, is that there's a bunch of little robots wandering around.

ReindeerFlotilla:
Also, a space station with rotational gravity that's been in orbit since at least 1986. And holograms.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page