detrius

Boo! I say Boo to this!!! *starts petition to bring back demonic Susan*

Elliot seems to have a bit of a "There's a name for that?" moment.

Well, after the kidneys have taken the water, it doesn't just stay there. Alcohol is a diuretic, meaning you have to pee more. And if that water doesn't get replaced, you become dehydrated.

If you look at her face, you'll notice how tired she is. She just shrank herself and her clothes to the maximum degree. My guess is that she has to actively keep this up and the final transformation just drained the last bit of energy from her, so she now needs some time to recover.

I tink that we can still get a few "cube-square law" strips out of this before that becomes relevant again.

Maybe the door is just a visual gag. The picture of a locked door is commonly used to indicate a sense of being trapped - which would be an appropriate response for someone who suddenly finds themselves surrounded by giants.

I just noticed Ashley has little hearts in her pupils. Is that in any way relevant?

In that case, you'd see enchanted everyday items such as pens, watches, lighters and pocket knives instead of wands. Staves and canes also used to be part of everyone's EDC kit (Every Day Carry) until about 100 years ago, so they would have been rather inconspicuous items. The main reason why they went out fashion is because modern-day cities are much cleaner than cities just a few decades ago. There's literally much less shit on the streets nowadays, so most people don't need a third leg to avoid slipping. Just look up Col. George E. Waring Jr., who in 1895 led an army of white-uniformed street cleaners into New York to remove millions of tons of feces, corpses and urine from the streets: http://scrapyardexhibit.org/the-colonel-who-cleaned-up-new-york/ So I guess it would make sense if at least historically, magic staves were a lot more common than magic wands.

Well, in Germany we say "Zauberstab", which of course means exactly the same thing. An even better example might be the baton used by a conductor to direct an ensemble of musicians.

This strip made me wonder about wands, specifically the traditional black-and-white wand of stage magicians. When you think about it, a wand is actually quite useless. It's not good as a weapon or as a kitchen utensil. You could use it for stirring, but you'd replace it with a spoon as soon as possible (and some witches in folklore actually use spoons rather than wands). They're a bit too big if you wanted to use them as chopsticks and you'd need two of them anyway. They're also not pointy or sturdy enough to be used as needles. And yet wands are "a thing". We're not calling them "straight-sticks" or "stafflets", there's a word for them (at least in the English language) - and they're a symbol for vast and arcane power. It seems to be a bit of an odd choice. The one thing wands are good at is pointing. It's not hard to imagine a group of hunter-gatherers sitting in a circle 30.000 years ago, with one of them holding a small stick and talking to the others while they use the stick to emphasize their words. "See that little stone over ~here~? Let's say that's the mammoth. If ~you~, ~you~ and ~you~ hide in the bushes over ~there~ and make a lot of noise, the mammoth will get scared and run right over the cliff on ~this~ side and fall to its death. Easy dinner." So over time, the little stick might become a tool associated with people who explain "things", because they're the ones who "know stuff". And this gives them power. There's of course also the "big stick" AKA "the club", which is associated with physical power. So when humans finally invented their gods, those gods naturally also carried sticks, big and small, to signify their might - and also as a conduit of divine power: Hermes used his rod to put people to sleep and Circe used a wand to turn men into pigs. So sticks mean power, which is why kings and queens have scepters. And smaller sticks mean this power is less about the physical and more about the arcane. When stage magicians then adopted the tuxedo with the top hat and the white gloves as their working garment in the 19th century, the wand followed the same colour pattern. The black makes it easy to conceal and the white tips are meant to attract the attention of the audience, while still being easy to hide when necessary. And it has tips on both sides so it can be held either way, meaning you don't have to worry about the orientation of the wand when you're "pulling it out of someone's ear".

Nanase was specifically responding to Ashley saying "I like men turning into women". So does she like men turning into women? Well, Ellen is her girlfriend, so there's one. And yes, you're exactly right: she considers Ellen her own person rather than reducing her to being Elliot's clone, and she thinks of her as a female rather than as a "guy trapped inside a woman's body" or something like that. But she's not ignorant of Ellen's origin. She knows exactly who Ellen is and how she came to be. So she must have considered the implications of male-to-female trasformations, and the end result was total acceptance of Ellen and getting into a relationship with her. She could have decided that Tedd's transformation gun and that magic diamond didn't produce a "real woman" (which would have made her a bigot), but she didn't. The difference between Nanase and Ashley is that Ashley's interest is based on a transformation fetish, while to Nanase, it's just the normal state of things.

When I was in college, a flatmate who was studying psychology once told me that most psychology students chose that discipline just to cure their own mental problems.

Ellen is her girlfriend.

BTW, Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Animate Dead (for creating zombies), Haste & Slow are 3rd Level spells in D&D. Not really something a 1st level character would have access to.

FIREBALL! FIREBALL!! FIREBALL!!!