On the other hand, I think the point Case tried to make was also that there is not necessarily one central conflict in QC, or overarching plot. Which is probably true. We don't need to hold onto the story as it started, as that's ended; we're still in its continuity, but the story has gone elsewhere.
"Yeah, what Cornelius said." 
I think that this throughline has in fact set up an expectation among the QC audience that there will be dramatic arcs within the overall setting of the daily slice of life. And I get the impression occasionally that one is being set up. Often, I don't comment on this when it appears to be magically resolved because it is always possible that Jeph is playing the long game. He certainly did that with the slow burn of the Marten/Dora relationship, where they would 'talk it out' periodically and it would kind of appear that the issue was resolved, but of course it was not. And while Jeph has resolved the external conflict of that story, the internal ones largely remain.
True. Then again, such is life. People leave things unsaid, and then the chance to say them is gone, conflicts never get resolved etc. Don't get me wrong - I hated
Lost for pretty much that reason. But that's not the expectation I have when I engage with QC. Maybe it's really just that: I'm willing to tolerate more lose ends, unresolved conflicts etc. than some other folk, because that is congruent with my experience of (un-sliced) life.
I think in the case of the current storyline, people have begun to expect - as I guess you've seen - that Jeph is preparing to tell a story that is a metaphor of the experience of gender dysphoria. I know at least a couple of people expressed a hope for something along those lines. The most recent comic appears to suggest that, in spite of somewhat slipshod counselling, this may not happen after all - that, to paraphrase Lemon, she will simply be fine. And HEY LOOK THERE IS A NEW COMIC it also does look as though the changes to her new body are pretty minor. I am still holding out hope that the story might still follow through with its promise. In the words of Roko, maybe we just need to give the comic a moment here.
Actually, I think it was just one poster who expected/hoped for a gender-dysphoria metaphor: Yours truly. (ZoeB was kind of ambivalent, iiirc)
Otherwise, nothing to add, except maybe one wild idea:
I have a hunch that our perception of the comic is warped because we're not reading it the way it's 'supposed' to be read. We come here, more or less daily, read one comic, and then bicker and deconstruct that one comic for a
whole day.
That's not the way you read the comic when you first discovered it, was it? Many people's first post in the introduction-thread is something like
"Hi! *pant* I just finished binge-reading from start to 3271 and BOY! And there's a forum, too! Shiny! Hi guys!" That's pretty much how was for me - four days of gleeful binge-reading, and ever since ... time ... has ... slowed ... down ...
And people who buy the books don't read the comic in that page-by-page-overanalysing-for-a-day style, either.
We're perceiving the comic in a sort of
bullet-time. And we use that 'extra time' to come up with endless speculations (and expectations) of how the plot might continue - some have even made a sport out of predicting the next comic. That's not how you'd read the thing if you'd read it from start to current comic - you wouldn't
have the time to speculate so much.
Maybe the intensity of the
"frustration of expectations (purportedly set up by Jeph)" is, to some degree, owed to
us having too much time to think about what to expect next.
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Topic: WCDT 7-11 January 2019 (3911-3915) (Read 64204 times)