Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
(CW/TW: Abuse) WCDT strips 3731-3735 (30th April to 4th May 2018)
Case:
--- Quote from: traroth on 03 May 2018, 05:32 ---But we still don't know what Faye is actually thinking...
--- End quote ---
Faye's conscious - Busy oscillating at 440 Hz.
Faye's subconscious - "Yup, looks like the Boss is taking this one in her stride ..."
Faye's libido:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=I32vblmQ714.
.
.
Case:
--- Quote from: JoeCovenant on 03 May 2018, 05:25 ---As I said, I can *see* why it may have happened. It's just a little jarring in my personal experience.
(I was a pro actor for many many years. And knew, met and was very close friends with a lot of gay guys, and lesbian women. But at no point did my love for them even think of developing into anything else. (And yes, I got offers!) :) )
--- End quote ---
Well ... your finding the experience of discovering that you're not as straight as you thought you were to be outside your experience is pretty much par for the course for someone who is exactly as straight as he thought he was, no? :-D
Shortly before Jeph cliff-hangered the Faybles-arc, when we were all getting in each others' hairs about the nature of Faye's feelings for Bubbles, the matter of Faye's age came up, too, and there were two fellow forumites who said that this was pretty much their experience of discovering they weren't done learning about their orientation ...
(IIRC, one said that she had mistaken her attraction to her then-friend-now-partner as 'merely finding her aesthetically pleasing', until the "Oh? Ohhh!"-moment. I can't speak from experience, but I find that entirely plausible)
Cornelius:
--- Quote from: zisraelsen on 03 May 2018, 05:56 ---I hadn't even considered that, and actually looking back I realized jeph gave us her Panic Frequency as the title of the strip! What do you figure the harmonic frequencies of Smif Library are?
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I hadn't noticed that either. 440Hz shouldn't be a problem, I think, but perhaps someone with a better understanding of this kind of thing will disagree?
--- Quote from: Case on 03 May 2018, 06:13 ---(IIRC, one said that she had mistaken her attraction to her then-friend-now-partner as 'merely finding her aesthetically pleasing', until the "Oh? Ohhh!"-moment. I can't speak from experience, but I find that entirely plausible)
--- End quote ---
Sounds familiar. Some people just don't realise it until they meet the right person - and even then, it can sometimes really be just the one person, or a whole new panoply of thus far unguessed options.
pwhodges:
A = 440Hz is the basis of standard tuning (since 1939); it's also the note to which an orchestra tunes before playing.
I guess the real performance is about to start!
swapna:
--- Quote from: Milayna on 02 May 2018, 12:32 ---
--- Quote from: Morituri on 01 May 2018, 11:09 --- (click to show/hide)I guess my personal issues with people gossiping about / pushing for / each other's relationships get grounded here, and probably make me more sensitive to it than I have any good reasons to be. "Diminishes my perception of" is literal truth, though it reveals a streak of intolerance in myself wider than I'd like.
I don't think it's a problem with where the story's going though; mostly I see it as a problem with people having picked something in the future as a "destination" and now being focused on the unseen destination rather than allowing themselves to enjoy the trip.
Where they see a "ship tease" I see characters in a relationship that now includes some tension and some attraction and some denial and some doublethink and some orientation/identity issues. It's nuanced, and it's good character development, and the current situation is as much the "destination" as any other part of the trip. So why doesn't anybody seem to appreciate the current situation as a thing in itself, instead of just as a transitory state toward what they imagine some future situation might be?
Everybody could see, a year ago or so, that Corpse Witch was in need of a swift buttkick out of Faye & Bubbles' life. And just such a buttkick did eventually arrive. But I don't recall any serious obsessing about what form and shape that buttkick would take or how it was going to be delivered or by whom or even when. It wasn't a "tease", it was story development. And people were interested in all the bits of story along the way. People speculated about CW's past, about the skatepark's ownership, about what had been done to Bubbles, about whether CW was trying to get leverage over Faye, about past interactions between CW and the police, about corruption and complicity, etc etc etc, and it was all about the story as it was happening. We didn't have everybody focused on the single future buttkicking event as the only possible point of the whole story.
Now they are focused on one thing. They are focused on the development or non-development of romantic/sexual love between these characters. And everything else is getting lost, or passing them by, without any thought or discussion or, it seems to me, even perception. They are invested in particular outcomes, like romance or rejection etc, instead of being able to accept that good stories can be built around whatever outcome comes about. That's even true if the "outcome" is long-term continuation of the tension, since after all the author may be telling a DIFFERENT story using the tension for character depth to inform how these characters see someone ELSE's situation.
To me the sexual/romantic aspect of this character relationship is one topic. It's about five percent of what there is to discuss. It's in the future and a bunch of other things are in the present. When fifty percent of the discussion is used to talk about five percent of the subject matter, I get impatient and wonder why people are being so willfully blind to everything else.
--- End quote ---
Particlarly in your second to last paragraph, this is something I've noticed...very broadly, not just here, not just in my friend group or Tumblr or wherever, but...everywhere. Sex and relationships get particular attention. Particular emphasis. from just about everyone. It's...not something that I entirely understand, but there are many things about neurotypical behavior that I don't understand beyond acknowledging them as fact. I might try to discuss it, as a exercise in seeing how closely I'm able to interpret what I'm seeing and further my development of a more "normal" personality, though I'm not usually terribly interested in shipping, myself.
At any rate, I guess my point is, yeah, that happens for ships instead of other kinds of plot points - like Corpse Witch's manipulations - because that's, uh, how people are, I guess, and neither you nor I are going to change how 7 billion people operate.
--- End quote ---
I didn't want to add anything to this topic, because I figured Morituri and the others who dislike it when people get invested in romantic relationships weren't gonna change their mind, but if there's genuine lack of understanding I'm gonna add a few bits.
First of all, it's a slice-of-life comic. Characters and relationships, romantic or not, are the bread and butter of this comic; it's got sci-fi elements and sometimes plot archs, but those aren't the centre and don't 'lead' anywhere (this isn't meant as a negative, but it is very different from narratives that have a goal). So, it's natural to find a lot of people who are very much invested in romantic relationships. (If you want to read a comic where the speculation is mostly non-romantic/plot-related, there's erfworld, for example)
Second, romantic and sexual relationships are a very central part of a lot of people's lifes. They can empathise with all the intense feelings attached to it; love, joy, desire, heartbreak, jealousy... It's something most people go through and have to figure out for themselves. Most people are experts in this, so to say, because they've invested a lot more than 10 000 hours into figuring out relationships. Other stories don't have that advantage - they have to be a lot more information-dense to give readers the ability to accurately predict what's going to happen.
Third, characters. People are invested in characters. They like them, try know them inside and out, how they are, what they want, how they feel, etc. but most of the time we just see parts of it and have to figure out the rest.
This makes romantic storylines both predictable (because of the aforementioned experience and extensive knowledge about the characters) and unpredictable (because the information is incomplete) and therefore a lot of fun to speculate about.
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