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[Shjade]

I'd say the only real stretch in Marigold's doom theory was the leap that someone would connect Faye talking about a friend of hers selling nudes online to possibly being the vtuber they like to watch stream. I don't see how those two dots would be linked.

Once that link *was* made though the rest sounds plausible. A longshot, maybe, but not unheard of.

[Wombat]

I'd say the only real stretch in Marigold's doom theory was the leap that someone would connect Faye talking about a friend of hers selling nudes online to possibly being the vtuber they like to watch stream. I don't see how those two dots would be linked.

Once that link *was* made though the rest sounds plausible. A longshot, maybe, but not unheard of.

But Marigold isn't talking about a scenario in which people are talking about her selling nudes. She starts off with "Dora finds out"-- that refers to Dora finding out about her being a vtuber, not the situation as it stands.

[Farideh]

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.

That's disturbing. I'm so sorry!

[Tova]

... At minimum she has a huge trust fund set aside for her at birth, complete with stock in the company, access to company properties(vacation homes, private jets, the station!), rights to use company resources, and other things. She only has to work because of her mind needing the distraction, it's therapeutic more than anything.

Basically, she's the QC equivalent of Lisa, Reed, Erin, or Eve Jobs or Jennifer, Rory, or Phoebe Gates. She has a LOT of wealth, but chooses to not use it due to her own reasons.

That all seems speculative. Got a link?

The part about work being for therapuetic reasons is attested in #1709: her reasons for applying are "I thought it might be fun and I talked to my therapist and she said it'd be a good experience for me". There's similar wording in 1707 as well.

I'm more interested in links to back up your claims that she has access to trust funds and shares. It's more likely from what I've seen that she only needs to work for therapeutic reasons because she lives modestly (her main expense is her therapy, and it's highly likely that one of her parents pays for it).

Her parents seem more the types to expect Hanners to stand on her own two feet rather than set up lavish trust funds, shares, and such.

[Shjade]

But Marigold isn't talking about a scenario in which people are talking about her selling nudes. She starts off with "Dora finds out"-- that refers to Dora finding out about her being a vtuber, not the situation as it stands.

Ahhh, I misunderstood that somehow. Yeah, totally plausible then.

[Gyrre]

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.

😱😬
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.]

[Perfectly Reasonable]

Yep, Marigold's complexion has definitely cleared up.

[Is it cold in here?]

Hannelore may very well not want her parents to have the kind of influence over her that would come from having an allowance. It would be a different story if they'd settled some lump sum on her.

[sitnspin]

The thing is, even if she doesn't have an allowance or trust fund or any amount of money she has direct access to, the fact that if she has billionaire parents she could turn to if she ran into financial trouble puts her in a position of incredible privilege.

[JimC]

Samesies. At one point they used the IP address of the coffee shop I sometimes posted from to

Yep. To misquote,  there are people out there not only crazier than you imagine, but crazier than you can imagine. I once copped a bunch of completely fabricated abuse simply because my name was on my employers' who is record. And that was in the 90s before the net was even a big thing.

[Tova]

Sorry, I thought we were talking about whether she had access to shit-tons of money, not whether she was privileged. Of course she is privileged.

[jesslc]

Rather late to the discussion but I wanted to add my two cents...

Personally I've been under the impression that Hannelore has the ability to access as much money as she wants at any time. Most of the time she doesn't access that much but if she ever want more, it's there.

I think this is supported by the comic. For example, not that long ago (in comic time) she took off on a lengthy trip around the world on the spur of the moment. That implies easy access to significant money in my opinion. It's not just that she can pay for the trip itself - quite a lot of people can afford to travel but most of them wouldn't be able to head off for an indefinite amount of time on the spur of the moment like she did.

Hanners didn't give a single thought to questions such as "how long can I afford to be away for?" or "if I don't have a job when I get back (because I abandoned it on the spur of the moment), what will I do?" Paying rent on an empty apartment for an indefinite amount of time is no issue for her at all. These are not things she ever has to worry about.

I don't know if Hanners has a trust fund/shares/etc, possibly she just has a credit card linked to her Dad's account or something like that. But however she has access to money, it didn't seem like she needed to ask anyone before paying for multiple flights on the spur of the moment - first to confront her Mum, then to bring Winslow to meet her and then to go wherever they went first on her trip.

I've known a couple of different people who went traveling round the world for a year (back in the days before covid obviously). The difference between them and Hannelore is that all of them did some significant planning and budgeting in advance. (Even the one who's a doctor). Most of them rented out their homes while away or gave up their lease and stored their stuff. And they all had some sort of plan in place for when they got back eg. a job lined up or friends/family they could crash with until they found work again. It's just so different from how Hanners approached her trip that I can't see her actions as anything other than proof that she has easy access to lots of money.

[Tova]

Sorry, I disagree. Not everyone who travels does so with a budget and significant planning. There are plenty of people who embark on what is essentially a working holiday. They pick fruit or wait tables*. If you're working on a farm, you're probably getting board as a part of your payment.

Not all students who take gap years are flush with cash, and worries about returning to a job don't stop them. You save up money for a cheap flight, then find a flea pit to stay in and a job to keep you going. Yes it's hard, and yes you get exploited. But it's a thing.

Hannelore was working on a farm  and as a cleaner at a laboratory; she wasn't staying in hotels and booking chartered flights. If she had money, don't you think she would have indulged in an extravagance or two? She was definitely taking a working holiday.

Just because you can't think of any reasons for her actions other than "easy access to lots of money" doesn't mean there aren't any. She has a job at Coffee of Doom whenever she wants, really. The people you know who did significant planning did so because they had a budget, not in spite of it. And how do you know Hanners didn't rent her place out while she was gone?

I will grant you that she could probably call her Dad if she were in dire straits. That's all I'll grant you, though. I'm not sure she would. She has called her parents for favours before -- and maybe someone with archive-fu can confirm or deny, but as I recall, she has always done that for her friends, not for herself.

She's estranged from her mother, she's got a father who basically ignores her when she doesn't take active steps to get in contact, she's struggled with a lifetime of mental illness that she has worked very hard to overcome, and for some reason all people can talk about is how privileged she is. Have we all just decided we hate everyone in the original cast now?

---

* Side note: various companies in Australia are suffering from the lack of cheap labour right now because the ready supply of working tourists has dried up, for reasons that will occur to you.

[JimC]

If she had money, don't you think she would have indulged in an extravagance or two?

Yes but 4048:  https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=4048 "at first I did a lot of the stereotypical "Rich white girl trying to find herself" things"

[Tova]

I'm sure she did.

[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]

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.

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]

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.

😱😬
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.]

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.

[sitnspin]

Privilege is not a moral state. Saying someone has privilege is not a condemnation, just a statement of fact. I deal with significant mental health issues, I had a shit childhood, I am a gay biracial woman, and my parents were extremely emotionally neglectful, but I am also relatively well off financially, which grants me a significant amount of privilege compared to other people with similar struggles. Recognising that a person has a degree of privilege does not negate their other struggles, nor does it imply any degree of hatred towards them.

[oddtail]

Yeah, "privilege" is (sometimes justifiably) an upsetting/uncomfortable idea, but it's not necessarily one hostile against people who are privileged.

People who react to it strongly, IME, tend to be defensive because they don't like the implications of their being privileged - i.e. that there are many others who do not have what the privileged person instinctively thinks of as a baseline. And while that fact is not any single individual person's fault, it's hard not to feel guilty about it, rightly or not. And people who feel guilty tend to get defensive.

[Oenone]

That, and often ppl with privilege are pretty invested in the idea it’s earned, and that it’s fair that they have privilege. Naming it suggests that maybe it’s not fair that some people have it and others don’t.

[Tova]

You cannot tell me that a thread arguing about how wealthy Hanners is coming from a forum population that frequently regards the wealthy along with the capitalist system that got them there with open contempt can simply be regarded as disinterested statements of fact.

[sitnspin]

I can tell you that and am in fact doing so. But hey, feel free to project all you want.

[Wingy]

My wife and I got ours by getting into a lucrative field early, playing the wage slave game well, and saving like crazy at the expense of a "rich" lifestyle.  We take our pleasure in simpler things that didn't cost much money (just time and effort).  And because we prefer our time and effort hobbies, we usually associate with many who are neither rich nor privileged, which keeps us thoroughly grounded about the value of money and completely unwilling to "act rich".

In other words, we're part of the system, and by deliberate intent we've used the system to our best advantage.  There will soon come a day when we aren't in the wage slave game any more and then we can work on the system if we want.  But we won't do it from a position of "rich".  I should also note that our privilege has allowed us to make some unconventional employment choices and allow others around us to advance when we could have instead, so I don't feel one whit bad for playing the corporate game.  We've also had to watch as others around us make poor choices and totally F. themselves over which is much harder than it sounds when they are good, if misdirected, people.

[Is it cold in here?]

There's a privilege thread over in RELATE.

We know Hannelore's opinion. She has called herself privileged and is looking for ways to use it for the common good.

[Oenone]

Please don’t take my discussion of Hanners personally; I just find her a lil bit boring as a character, and tbh find the handwaviness of her flexible budget a really stupid plot device. I feel like focusing on Hanners’ money distracts from Hanners’ character growth, and that whenever there’s a moment for her to really demonstrate how she navigates growing up in one world but coming into herself as another there’s a whacky “crazy space gal” joke,and we actually avoid going deeper with her character.

[Scarlet Manuka]

On Hannelore's wealth: I trawled through every comic from her introduction to today. It took a while...

In 665, which I know is basically pre-history at this point:
Faye: "So you're not only crazy as hell and richer than the average Saudi prince, you're from friggin' space?"
Hannelore: "Yep! I'd say 'explains a lot, doesn't it' only it doesn't really explain very much."

She bought a drum kit more or less on a whim in 865.

There's not much more that reflects on her wealth until she buys Winslow a new body in 3542 with the comment "It's a gift, Winslow. I can afford it and you deserve it." May describes her a few strips later in 3549 as "a billionaire space heiress" but -- being May -- there's not much reason to take that literally at all, let alone as specifying money that she has access to right now.

She does have incidents like "borrowing an invisible plane to go to an acquaintance's house for the weekend", but as previously noted that is an expression of privilege rather than wealth per se.

So the main highlights are buying Winslow a body and being able to take off on her trip of self-discovery. She is never presented in a situation where money is more than an afterthought, however, so for me the general impression is that she is indeed quite wealthy. But there's not a lot of hard evidence for it.

A tidbit I'd forgotten in #977 (though it is noted on her wiki page) on partly why she switched jobs: she used to enjoy the counting work, but "ever since I took up the drums work feels like... well, WORK".

[jesslc]

She's estranged from her mother, she's got a father who basically ignores her when she doesn't take active steps to get in contact, she's struggled with a lifetime of mental illness that she has worked very hard to overcome, and for some reason all people can talk about is how privileged she is. Have we all just decided we hate everyone in the original cast now?

I don’t hate Hannelore at all. I actually really like her (and the majority of the original cast). I just disagree with people who think Hanners doesn't have a lot of money because in my opinion that isn't supported by the comic. Hanners even self describes herself as rich in the comic linked by JimC.

For what it's worth, I also read all the jobs she did while away as volunteer type work, not paid work. It wasn't actually specified so it could be either, but the way it was written and Hanners' own words about how she decided she would make herself useful everywhere makes me think that it wasn't a case of her working for money but for personal reasons as Penguin47 described.

Also for what it's worth, I don't think being rich invalidates Hannelore's awful family situation or mental health issues in any way. She's had a really tough life in multiple ways. Never having to worry about money (which is how I read the comic with regards to her) doesn't make those things go away.