Story Wednesday July 6, 2016

[Stature 96]

http://www.egscomics.com/?id=2211

 And thus, a star is bored. In this case, the greatest plot line is born.

Imma go in my bunk and whine about youth for a while now.

[partner555 170]

The start of her start of darkness. THIS IS HUGE!!!

[Wixelt 18]

Woo! Finally some backstory on everyone's favorite mad "god".

Also, I think that more or less confirms who the second silhouette on the cover was.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

Who is telling this story?

While it could be Dan giving the backstory straight to the audience, I suspect something different.

Nanase and at least one of the Dunkels (possibly with others) will approach Agent Edward Veres about the griffon related developments, Edward, upon hearing the immortal-centric story, will begrudgingly put aside past anger and turn to the one person he can reach who knows more about immortals than anyone at the bureau.  Thus Adrian comes over to the Veres house and tells the story of his mother to Edward and the meddling kids.

So at the end of the storybook sequence, the focus switches to Adrian, Edward, and the rest and we are told how the professor got involved. Edited July 6, 2016 by Pharaoh RutinTutin
Relevant detail added

[Sweveham 65]

The fairy-tale mood in this comic is truly wonderful. Creative writing classes have as a rule to "show, don't tell", but "telling" can be very effective and this comic is an example of this.*

Also, the Zelda reference in panel 2 is amusing.

*[warning: off-topic rant] I despise creative writing classes. They tend to create boring, bland and mediocre literature. It's because they encourage their students to play it safe and follow the rules, which seldom makes for stirring writing. Read a lot of great writers instead, perhaps study literary criticism as well, you'll learn a lot more about writing that way.

[ijuin 572]

I'm thinking that this is the point where she decided to produce a child to be her legacy?

[Scotty 1,061]

1 hour ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Who is telling this story?

While it could be Dan giving the backstory straight to the audience, I suspect something different.

Nanase and at least one of the Dunkels (possibly with others) will approach Agent Edward Veres about the griffon related developments, Edward, upon hearing the immortal-centric story, will begrudgingly put aside past anger and turn to the one person he can reach who knows more about immortals than anyone at the bureau.  Thus Adrian comes over to the Veres house and tells the story of his mother to Edward and the meddling kids.

So at the end of the storybook sequence, the focus switches to Adrian, Edward, and the rest and we are told how the professor got involved.

Certainly looks possible.

14 minutes ago, ijuin said:

I'm thinking that this is the point where she decided to produce a child to be her legacy?

And while we're at it, I'm not certain we should bury the theory of Susan and Diane being related to Adrian just yet. Young Pandora bears a pretty strong resemblance to them. So being Adrian's half-sisters could be possible and still explain the Susan-like illusion Adrian put on Grace. Pandora could have used magic to suppress the elven nature of Susan and Diane so that even other immortals couldn't detect it. She was disappointed that Adrian couldn't act to his full abilities growing up, so made sure that Susan and Diane didn't receive those restrictions.

[HarJIT 97]

Hmm...

Maybe Susan's and Diane's parents are Pandora and the Blonde Woman?

...

I'm just gonna leave this here.

[Scotty 1,061]

Just now, HarJIT said:

Hmm...

Maybe Susan's and Diane's parents are Pandora and the Blonde Woman?

...

I'm just gonna leave this here.

I was thinking more like Pandora was the Blonde woman. Which raises the question, did she intend on Susan seeing her with her father (or adopted father)? Would make sense if Pandora wanted Susan and Diane to have very different childhoods, Diane seemed to have had a pretty normal if a bit spoiled childhood, while Susan grew up in a broken family. How would Susan have been if her father didn't cheat? Probably the same as Diane I think.

[Drachefly 30]

1 hour ago, Sweveham said:

Also, the Zelda reference in panel 2 is amusing.

Panel 4 resembles certain Zelda concept art. I suspect all the panels are.

[mlooney 3,417]

Plot points and questions about who the narrator is aside this proves, if there was any doubt, that Dan is not capable of drawing a young female and her not ending up cute.

[hkmaly 490]

Hmmm ... anything pointing out WHEN was Pandora young? Let's see ... based on what the boy with chicken is wearing ... definitely not Egyptian ... did Roman wear stuff like this?

Also, I'm really interested in that dragon.

1 hour ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Who is telling this story?

While it could be Dan giving the backstory straight to the audience, I suspect something different.

Nanase and at least one of the Dunkels (possibly with others) will approach Agent Edward Veres about the griffon related developments, Edward, upon hearing the immortal-centric story, will begrudgingly put aside past anger and turn to the one person he can reach who knows more about immortals than anyone at the bureau.  Thus Adrian comes over to the Veres house and tells the story of his mother to Edward and the meddling kids.

So at the end of the storybook sequence, the focus switches to Adrian, Edward, and the rest and we are told how the professor got involved.

Only problem with this is that it would make the story over faster - wait, wasn't Dan worried about pacing?

(Pandora's involvement so far was carefully done in way it was hard to connect everything together. Currently, Raven and Magus are only one who knows her name - not even Sarah knows that. I suspect they will spent some time before connecting everything together ...)

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

I'm thinking that this is the point where she decided to produce a child to be her legacy?

Not sure if she didn't get other idea first, but I still think Adrian Raven will be born in next two pages.

38 minutes ago, Scotty said:

And while we're at it, I'm not certain we should bury the theory of Susan and Diane being related to Adrian just yet. Young Pandora bears a pretty strong resemblance to them. So being Adrian's half-sisters could be possible and still explain the Susan-like illusion Adrian put on Grace. Pandora could have used magic to suppress the elven nature of Susan and Diane so that even other immortals couldn't detect it. She was disappointed that Adrian couldn't act to his full abilities growing up, so made sure that Susan and Diane didn't receive those restrictions.

Hmmmm ... well it makes more sense than the alternatives like Adrian having child using Uryuom eggs and not knowing it.

26 minutes ago, HarJIT said:

Maybe Susan's and Diane's parents are Pandora and the Blonde Woman?

Well, I see no reason why that might be problem.

19 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Which raises the question, did she intend on Susan seeing her with her father (or adopted father)?

If she was as careless as she usually is, it was just question of time.

20 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Probably the same as Diane I think.

No. While the two most formative events of her live are her father cheating and the encounter with Vampire, there was something else which made Diane use boys as source of "stuff". Possibly just her being poor (well, not rich), or some formative event with some boy buying her something she really wanted but couldn't get.

She would, however, certainly end up more proud at her look. She have it in herself, she's just suppressing it due to memory of the blonde woman. She would probably wear more revealing clothes.

[Stature 96]

3 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Hmmm ... anything pointing out WHEN was Pandora young? Let's see ... based on what the boy with chicken is wearing ... definitely not Egyptian ... did Roman wear stuff like this?

Also, I'm really interested in that dragon.

And that is why I am dismissing the era as "fantasy".

[hkmaly 490]

43 minutes ago, Stature said:

And that is why I am dismissing the era as "fantasy".

You might want to talk with Andrea (and Tara) about that.

Just based on what was already shown in EGS, the dragon can easily be summon, someone's monster form or from the other half of Earth. And that's assuming dragons were not common on our side of Earth too, before they were chased away and their existence camouflaged as legends by DGB.

[Stature 96]

Parallel universe not related to ours, therefore "fantasy"??

[hkmaly 490]

24 minutes ago, Stature said:

Parallel universe not related to ours, therefore "fantasy"??

Oh. You mean from your point of view, not from EGS point ... although, EGS is implied to have known history very similar to ours. Never confirmed, though ...

[Aura Guardian 57]

So, Pandora was ALWAYS like this, only less insane. Good to know.

[hkmaly 490]

43 minutes ago, Aura Guardian said:

So, Pandora was ALWAYS like this, only less insane. Good to know.

Jerry also was like this, but then he grown out of it.

[Don Edwards 548]

3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Hmmm ... anything pointing out WHEN was Pandora young? Let's see ... based on what the boy with chicken is wearing ... definitely not Egyptian ... did Roman wear stuff like this?

For several thousand years ending a few hundred years ago, what the average agrarian-peasant kid wore was dictated by the local environment much more than by culture.

That boy has rather nice shoes for a random medieval peasant kid... but that could just be a way Dan avoids having to draw feet.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

That boy has rather nice shoes for a random medieval peasant kid... but that could just be a way Dan avoids having to draw feet.

That kid? A peasant? Are you JOKING? If he was from around half a millennium ago or more, he came from a wealthy family. He had a BELT. He had a tunic AND a kaftan. And that stuff all looked brand new, not second hand.

Anyway, if I were Pandora and wanted a good laugh, I'd pick a self-important rich kid and not a hapless peasant boy. Who would almost certainly be barefoot anyway.

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

6 hours ago, Sweveham said:

*[warning: off-topic rant] I despise creative writing classes. They tend to create boring, bland and mediocre literature. It's because they encourage their students to play it safe and follow the rules, which seldom makes for stirring writing. Read a lot of great writers instead, perhaps study literary criticism as well, you'll learn a lot more about writing that way.

The best rant against creative writing classes, and how they stifle creativity and lead to dull cookie-cutter stories and hack writers, was the one Jim Butcher gave at DucKon a few years ago.  It was his opinion for years, until one day he decided to show his writing professor he was right....he would follow every one of her stupid rules, fill out every one of her stupid charts, plot things out ahead just the way she said, and then show her how bad the result was.

The result was The Dresden Files.

4 hours ago, Scotty said:

Diane seemed to have had a pretty normal if a bit spoiled childhood, while Susan grew up in a broken family. How would Susan have been if her father didn't cheat? Probably the same as Diane I think.

If anyone grew up spoiled, it was Susan.  She and her mother clearly have a ton of money, and spend it on sometimes extravagant creature comforts, a trip to France, at least one convention (and it wouldn't surprise me if she bought Sarah's badge too), pretty much whatever they want can be theirs.  

Diane, on the other hand, seems like she hasn't had it nearly that good, at least materially.  It seems unlikely she'd develop the strategy of manipulating boys into giving her what she wants if she could just buy what she wanted on her own.  Her sister shares an apartment with three other people, another sign they're not exactly rich enough for her to casually get her own place while in college.

Emotionally, Susan grew up with a mother who clearly cared about her and would fight for her (such as getting the school to let her go to France early), and she's mentioned cousins, but she had no siblings and, of course, no father.  Her mother taught her to be self-confident and to stand up for what she thinks is right, but not many of the social graces that help make people want to stand with her or be around her.

Other than knowing Diane has an adoptive sister she considers her genuine sister and cares strongly about, we have no idea about her background.  Did they grow up in foster homes, or were they adopted together while still young?  Were they raised with other siblings?  If so, were their parents others' foster, adoptive, and/or birth parents?  Were they all a big happy family, or was there something important missing, a need Diane tried to fill by her manipulations of boys and her Queen Bee behavior at school?  Was there anything worse than just something missing?  Inappropriately sexy dress and behaviors can be one sign of past sexual abuse; so can a difficulty forming genuine emotional attachments with others (eg a manipulative male abuser could lead to her not trusting boys and not seeing them as genuine people to have relationships with, but as something to be manipulated in return).  It could be both -- she could have had an abusive foster home, and then been adopted into a wonderful loving family.  We just don't know at this point. 

And I'd better stop here, before I end up with too strong a head-canon....

 

[Drachefly 30]

Oh heavens, if I'd had a creative writing class half as useful as that I wouldn't think it was the most useless thing I've ever done. We spent half the time talking about prose poetry and precious little on actual methods of producing a story worth reading.

[Vorlonagent 442]

There's a few choice words about creative writing classes on the podcast Writing Excuses, at least in their early years...

 

And YAY BACKSTORY!!!"

[Scotty 1,061]

5 hours ago, hkmaly said:

(Pandora's involvement so far was carefully done in way it was hard to connect everything together. Currently, Raven and Magus are only one who knows her name - not even Sarah knows that. I suspect they will spent some time before connecting everything together ...)

I wanted to say Edward might know about Pandora, but considering he wasn't knocking on Adrian's door wanting to know what his mother was up to after the encounter in the woods and then again after she appeared on TV, either Edward doesn't know Pandora, or at the very least has never seen her before. Although with a name like Pandora, Edward would have been able to connect the dots and suspect that an Immortal with chaotic behaviour would be Pandora.

6 hours ago, hkmaly said:

She would, however, certainly end up more proud at her look. She have it in herself, she's just suppressing it due to memory of the blonde woman. She would probably wear more revealing clothes.

Well, yeah, the reason why she died her hair and preferred to use her middle name Susan instead of Tiffany was because she wanted to not be anything like the woman her father had an affair with, so if that didn't happen, she would have been more likely to have stayed blonde and answer to Tiffany, her forming the feminists club at school was out of her anger at her father giving her a jaded view of all men.

This might be stretching things, but your link there, the Blonde woman's hair while not quite as long, is basically several hairbands short of looking like young Pandora's, they both have the bits of hair that fall in front of the ears(which I forgot that Pandora always had those bits in her adult form). Yeah, I know, Grace has that style as well, but it does seem too much of a coincidence that Dan used that style for both Pandora and the blond woman.

1 hour ago, CritterKeeper said:

If anyone grew up spoiled, it was Susan.  She and her mother clearly have a ton of money, and spend it on sometimes extravagant creature comforts, a trip to France, at least one convention (and it wouldn't surprise me if she bought Sarah's badge too), pretty much whatever they want can be theirs.  

Diane, on the other hand, seems like she hasn't had it nearly that good, at least materially.  It seems unlikely she'd develop the strategy of manipulating boys into giving her what she wants if she could just buy what she wanted on her own.  Her sister shares an apartment with three other people, another sign they're not exactly rich enough for her to casually get her own place while in college.

Emotionally, Susan grew up with a mother who clearly cared about her and would fight for her (such as getting the school to let her go to France early), and she's mentioned cousins, but she had no siblings and, of course, no father.  Her mother taught her to be self-confident and to stand up for what she thinks is right, but not many of the social graces that help make people want to stand with her or be around her.

Other than knowing Diane has an adoptive sister she considers her genuine sister and cares strongly about, we have no idea about her background.  Did they grow up in foster homes, or were they adopted together while still young?  Were they raised with other siblings?  If so, were their parents others' foster, adoptive, and/or birth parents?  Were they all a big happy family, or was there something important missing, a need Diane tried to fill by her manipulations of boys and her Queen Bee behavior at school?  Was there anything worse than just something missing?  Inappropriately sexy dress and behaviors can be one sign of past sexual abuse; so can a difficulty forming genuine emotional attachments with others (eg a manipulative male abuser could lead to her not trusting boys and not seeing them as genuine people to have relationships with, but as something to be manipulated in return).  It could be both -- she could have had an abusive foster home, and then been adopted into a wonderful loving family.  We just don't know at this point. 

And I'd better stop here, before I end up with too strong a head-canon....

Oh I won't argue that Susan didn't live without money, we've seen her house, and while it's pretty clear that her mom is willing to give Susan everything, Susan's expression towards getting allowed on that trip makes her seem more embarrassed that her mom is spoiling her. Susan didn't want things handed to her which would be why she got a job at the video store. I don't think it was her mom that taught her to be self-confident, though I think her saying "because he's a man" got Susan in the "I hate all men" frame of mind which would have made her want to teach herself how to be able to do things without a man doing them for her.

As for Diane, we don't know much if anything about her childhood, maybe she didn't have wealthy parents, though considering they adopted both her and Rhea, they must have been decently secure in their finances. Actually was Rick a member of their family too? It's clear that he's known Diane since she was at least 6 years old, and Diane showed more concern for both him and Rhea over everyone else when things went down. It's certainly possible that Rick is Rhea's childhood friend though and Diane had gotten used to him always being around. I don't think Diane got bounced from one family to her current one, unless she was still too young to remember it, remember she didn't realize she was adopted till she was 6, so it's probably safe to say she's only known her current family. Aside from that, we can only speculate how she picked up her habits.

[hkmaly 490]

On 07/06/2016 at 10:05 PM, Scotty said:

if that didn't happen, she would have been more likely to have stayed blonde and answer to Tiffany

... I find really hard to believe she would prefer Tiffany over Susan, but she might be less allergic to being called Tiffany. And yes, she would likely stay blonde - or maybe experiment with partially colored hair.

On 07/06/2016 at 10:05 PM, Scotty said:

Susan's expression towards getting allowed on that trip makes her seem more embarrassed that her mom is spoiling her.

It WAS embarrassing and for reasons not having anything to do with money or being spoiled. Going to France with minimal knowledge of language didn't make sense, especially if those trips to France were regular.

On 07/06/2016 at 10:05 PM, Scotty said:

Actually was Rick a member of their family too?

If he would, why wouldn't she mention it?

On 07/06/2016 at 10:05 PM, Scotty said:

It's certainly possible that Rick is Rhea's childhood friend though and Diane had gotten used to him always being around.

It's possible he's DIANE childhood friend. She might actually LIKE being called barbie when six.

On 07/06/2016 at 10:05 PM, Scotty said:

I don't think Diane got bounced from one family to her current one, unless she was still too young to remember it, remember she didn't realize she was adopted till she was 6, so it's probably safe to say she's only known her current family.

Definitely.

On 07/06/2016 at 8:26 PM, CritterKeeper said:

 Inappropriately sexy dress and behaviors can be one sign of past sexual abuse

First, I don't think her dress was THAT much sexy, second, while people sexually abused can show such signs, I find unlikely all people showing such signs were sexually abused. It sounds like reducing living people to just victims of sexual abuse.

Personally, I think that Diane's parents, while not as rich, were better family for her than Susan's mother for Susan. She is spoiling her with stuff and making sure she has everything she might need, but ... I suspect it doesn't include stuff like love. Diane's parents, meanwhile ... I think they shown her lot of love first, but also make clear she needs to take care of herself relatively soon (well ... she's 18, that's not THAT soon, but Susan might keep the same level of support till 30 if she wanted). They might plan to take other children (or perhaps already did).

On 07/06/2016 at 8:26 PM, CritterKeeper said:

at least one convention (and it wouldn't surprise me if she bought Sarah's badge too)

... I didn't know conventions are THAT costly.