Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT 03-07 May 2021 (4516-4520)
Penquin47:
I cannot imagine Hanners renting out her apartment without personally vetting the people coming in for cleaning skills, at the very least. Which it's possible she did, but it's far more likely, given her neuroses, that she would rather let the apartment sit empty and deal with the dust when she got home rather than risk people coming in who might leave crumbs and attract insects, or leave puddles on the floor that grow mold, or ruin her good cleaning equipment (doesn't she have an autoclave?) by misusing it.
Hanners has access to money. She was able to just buy Winston a top of the line body, because she likes her companion and knew it would make him happy, without a second thought. Whether it's practically unlimited or just "lots" doesn't matter, nor does whether it's a trust fund or access to her parents' accounts or she just has a lot of money saved from her counting job. Money is there if she needs it, but because she lives a mostly minimalist life, she rarely needs it for much. No mention of "I'll just eat ramen for the next few months" or any thought of getting paid back, like when Marigold bought Momo her new body. She's not working at Coffee of Doom because she needs the money, she's doing it because she knows it's good for her to get out and deal with messes and people and having that kind of routine and responsibility in her life.
The sense I got from the way Hanners described her working holiday is not that she took the jobs because she needed the money to finance her trip - it's that she needed the work for her mental health. She was disgusted with the way her mother treats the people around her, and didn't like the person she became when dealing with Tilly and her mother. "I made a rule - I needed to make myself useful wherever I went" is not the kind of thing you say when you're taking a job cleaning up yak poop because you need the money. It's what you say when you take a job cleaning up yak poop to ground yourself and distance yourself from the privilege your parents always provided for you. That ties into the "rich white girl trying to find herself" description - her own words, not projection.
Financially, she is indeed privileged. Her family life sucks, and she definitely suffers a great deal from her mental illness. Just because you're privileged in one way doesn't mean you can't suffer in others, or vice versa. Acknowledging that she's financially privileged - which she does herself - doesn't mean we hate her at all.
Tova:
--- Quote from: Penquin47 on 13 May 2021, 22:38 --- Whether it's practically unlimited or just "lots" doesn't matter, nor does whether it's a trust fund or access to her parents' accounts or she just has a lot of money saved from her counting job.
--- End quote ---
Okay. I mean, it does kind of matter, though only in the sense that this was the very claim that I was debating to begin with. If you recall, someone claimed she had access to practically unlimited funds and I disagreed.
We can agree she’s not on struggle street at any rate.
I feel compelled to add qualifications to your post.
“Top of the line model” - yeah sure. Top of a “regular” line consisting of precisely two models. Not the cheapest but also probably not their most expensive model.
You remember how anxious Winslow was? Not the attitude of someone who knew his sponsor was absolutely loaded.
Of course she didn’t say “I will eat ramen for a week.” She does have some tact. Whether she could pay with cash or go into debt and make sacrifices, she would smile and say “I can afford it.” She likes to help her friends.
Hanners might not tolerate a roommate but she’s more than capable of handling messes.
Finally: “financially privileged” isn’t the phrase that was used.
Wingy:
There's different "levels of privilege". Hanners clearly has access to some resources beyond what she makes at the coffee shop. Given what we've seen, she apparently makes little use of them. I can see Dad giving Hanners some stock or a small puddle of cash as she boards Shuttle to go down to Earth and when she gets there, she puts it into an account she rarely accesses; witness the checkbook she uses occasionally.
I follow a similar scenario in my own life. My wife and I worked as contractors for a decade. Early on, we put the clamps down on our spending and saved up a years living expenses. That was the level of personal safety net we felt we needed in case contracting went bad. First off, being able to save that much indicates we had relatively good paying jobs; and we still do 20+ years and several different employers later. Second, that we actually saved that much (and have kept it up to date as our expenses changed) says something about our ideas of living simply and within our means, and our thinking about savings. So thirdly, as a result, if something bad happens, the likelihood is we can afford to pay our way out of the situation. That makes us "privileged" in many peoples eyes, even though we are nowhere near "rich".
Example: our furnace failed one year while we were out of town. Got back and it was colder in the house than it was outside. Frozen pipes everywhere. I ended up replacing two toilets, two faucets, a dishwasher part, and redoing a bunch of plumbing and drywall in addition to paying for the furnace repair. Total cost: ~$1000 and 6 weeks of after work time spent on fixing things; it would have been nearer $5000 if I had to contract that work out, but we're both handy. (Fortunately, when I redid the plumbing in this house shortly after purchasing it, I put valves everywhere so I was able to isolate individual rooms with plumbing issues until I could get to them.) Some friends of ours had something similar happen the next year and they had to deal with their insurance company because they couldn't afford the repairs they needed otherwise. So are my wife and I "privileged"? You bet we are, even though we'll never have a second or third house or a sports car or ... And we got there by making saving for a bad day a priority and keeping those savings out of our daily spending by deliberate intent. That little puddle of money is very carefully put away for when we need it and both of use are very clear on what "need it" means. And as others have noted, as soon as you've got a substantial emergency fund, bad days seem to go away which we also experienced.
As I read Hanners, she's got a puddle of money, however acquired, that she can access when she wants but seldom does. Does that make her privileged? Yes, clearly. Does that make her rich in the sense that her mother is rich? Not at all necessary, or at least, we have no indication from the strips that she is.
Oenone:
--- Quote from: Gyrre on 09 May 2021, 06:15 ---
--- Quote from: Oenone on 07 May 2021, 05:08 ---Samesies. At one point they used the IP address of the coffee shop I sometimes posted from to make a range of what apartment buildings I might live in.
--- End quote ---
😱😬
Yikes!
I hope someone put a stop to that before the creep could hurt anyone or lead to anyone getting hurt.
[Only my FB page has my real name. I keep it separate from everything else.]
--- End quote ---
Someone on their page posted and was basically like, are you stalking a book blogger because they didn’t like a character in a book you haven’t read? This seems a bit much. I also stopped being active as a blogger for several years. At this point the person’s site is down, so I’ve been considering getting back into.
Re: names
What got me wasn’t my real name, it’s that I wasn’t careful about my IP address (I didn’t know that was a thing), had a set of icons I used on other sites, and didn’t realize how easy it is to figure out someone’s region based on little details of their day, like if I mentioned being late because of the T, which would be very Bostonian of me. What scared me the most is that that meant they’d been reading my non “pro blogging” stuff pretty avidly and searching up old usernames, reverse image searching my avatars, etc.
It’s not that it’s a LZoT of effort, it’s that it was very concentrated effort.
Oenone:
Also re: Hanners
I think she’s wealthy but doesn’t have a lot of liquid wealth. She’s never mentioned any big dips or rises in her finances, so she probably has access to a steady, but not bananas amount of money, and she’s never joked about the cost of her psych meds. Those would both be expected topics of conversation if she’s a millennial of average means with mental health issues.
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