El Goonish Shive

Comic Tlod017

...

WELL, this is sort of like Justin being in a comic.

Huh. So that is getting addressed. Fascinating.

I see all the "that's going to be ignored like it never happened" is way off the mark.

I'm a little disappointed, honestly. Anyone who's been paying attention knew Rick was part of it, but this arc seemed to suggest it went deeper than that, that her view of boys had become so stunted that she saw them as utilities. (Or, rather, she'd so broken from patriarchal orthodoxy that she correctly saw boys as utilities.) What's more, all we've been seeing of her and Lucy, we're not seeing anything of her, Rhea, and Rick but this aside telling us what we already knew?

Earlier: people complaining her past actions were going to be whitewashed. Now: someone complaining that it's being brought up rather than shoved under the carpet.

Can't please everyone, I suppose.

It's not truly ridiculous until it's the same person doing both things

Her past actions are still being whitewashed. "NONONONO She was a really good person she was just going through a rough time" is every bit as much a whitewashing as sweeping it under the rug and just never talking about it. In fact, Shive openly admits in the blurb that the character Diane is now has very little connection to that introduction.

Shive lets his characters write themselves and just puts whatever they come up with on paper, which is the source of a lot of issues with his writing. His after-the-fact absolution of his villains makes perfect sense through that lens, as it's basically the result of letting his imagination run wild with the villain going, "No, see, this is why I was secretly the good guy all along," and Shive nodding along and going, "Yes, I see. You had perfectly good reasons for everything you did all along."

He goes on to basically say that this is getting addressed specifically because we, the fans, keep bringing it up.

Diane is basically having an internal argument for the audience's benefit about how cool she is as a character, in which she acknowledges that she is totally aware of every criticism we have but has justified reasons for why she would be that way.

This stopped being storytelling the moment Mirror Diane entered the picture to just say things that the author wants said but doesn't have a convenient character nearby to say them.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 26th 2018 at 8:21:15 AM

To be fair, she's calling herself out on just how pitiful that Freudian Excuse is. And while you think it might be cheap, there's a reason we have a full-blown trope covering it.

Edited by ironballs16 on Sep 26th 2018 at 10:38:56 AM

I think it's cheap that she's able to cherry-pick that moment without being prompted by anyone else.

Like, it stands out to us because it's her Establishing Character Moment that says, "This is who this character is." This was the first time we'd ever met her. It was the scene that defined her as a character before any development came along.

But for Diane, that should have been just another Tuesday. Indeed, by raising such a fuss about it in a moment where she's alone with her thoughts, the scene suggests that this was wildly abnormal behavior for Diane that is not and never was indicative of who she is as a person, and that it's been weighing heavily on her mind ever since.

In the course of absolving her of past wrongdoing, her Establishing Character Moment has been rendered into O.O.C. Is Serious Business.

That is the issue with the retcon. It was never about Shive going "That scene didn't happen." It was Shive going, "Diane was never that person."

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 26th 2018 at 9:11:00 AM

Yeahhh. I mean, I'm glad it got brought up, it's better than not doing it, but I wouldn't call it skilled by remotely any means. Tobias' analysis is spot on.

Maybe it will read better when compiled in its entirety and we have all the information, but meh, reading in the moment is still relevant when we get updated once a day.

Except she was that person. That's what the scene is establishing! "This is the sort of person you became" and that it isn't wildly out of character because—as the entire past few strips have been saying—she's normally not introspective enough to notice this or remotely question her own behaviours. It takes actually finding out what everyone thinks of her and one of her friends shouting at her for any of this to even be questioned at all. And even then she's been trying to make excuses to herself for said behaviours which she throws back at herself as not an excuse for having that opinion in the first place.

Also, there's an obvious reason why she'd remember that scene that has 0 to do with her attitude to Justin and everything to do with making a terrible impression with someone she thinks is really cool.

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 26th 2018 at 5:23:35 PM

I kind of object to the idea that that moment was 'weighing heavily on her' when the whole point of this segment is that she never gave it a thought. She only realised, just now, that that was a horrible thing to say. She absolutely was that person, but she wasn't always or only that person.

Raineh: I mean yes, there's a justification for everything. Shive has undoubtedly made an attempt to justify it all.

We're not saying there was no written attempt, we're not saying a structure was not being built.

We're saying it's not good enough. We are expressing dissatisfaction with the attempt.

"I don't like this house, it looks poorly made"

"but it has walls and a roof!"

is sort of what's going on here.

That doesn't look like what Tobias said, which comes across a lot more like "this comic is saying the opposite of what it's saying" than writing criticism.

Honestly, I think you're misreading Tobias here. I think those posts really hit the nail on the head, and I don't have much to add to them.

My read of everyone's comments seems to be that what the comics are intended to be saying and what they're actually saying are coming across as two different things.

Edited by sgamer82 on Sep 26th 2018 at 11:57:57 AM

{nods} I'm alright by this comic. I'll agree that Shive has issues with keeping people as villains, but I can identify with that.

sgamer: basically. There are often two types of readers. Those that accept what the story wants to say, and those that absorb what the story accidentally says. Neither are objectively correct, as fiction is subjective, and neither is "better"

But the latter is more commonly used for analysis and long winded arguments. Most issues with fiction will be in what is being implied as opposed to what the author intended.

A good writer normally uses the things their writing implies to go beyond what they're openly writing, either to further develop the themes and/or story or to make statements about the subject matter of their writing. I can understand why people analyze that part so eagerly. It's generally where a skilled enough writer places the really good bits of their work. There is, however, an obsession over this that harms that kind of analysis. Not to throw shade at anyone here.

On the other hand, a careless writer can accidentally imbue their work with implications that they don't necessarily want. There's a reason we have a trope for that. And sometimes even the good writers slip up on that. Which is only further harmed by that careful scrutiny over the implications of the text, which can make a small accident like this seem worse than it is.

What I'm trying to get to is that yeah, analyzing implications is a worthwhile thing, but it needs to be done with good sense. Shive generally falls into those implications by accident as opposed to intention. I doubt that writing Lucy as a Lesbian Scorned was an intention, but it happened anyway. There's rarely any malice in his writing, and while he's not the Steinbeck of webcomics, he does pretty good when he's in his territory. Right now he's trying something new, and yeah, it's not turning out very good, but maybe people are being a bit too harsh about it.

Can anyone tell me the worst thing they've ever done but that they do not, at this point in time, realize was actually a bad thing to do?

That's the problem with trying to just say this is a normal Heel Realization: there is no reason for that moment to stick out uniquely in her memory before she recognizes that it was an awful thing to say. If she did not think it was a particularly notable thing to do in the moment, why is it now burned in her memory such that she can perfectly recall it and abruptly decide that it was wrong?

Mirror Diane is not a separate character who has observed her actions. She's a clunky expositional tool for Diane's internal monologue. She should not be able to bring up any criticisms of Diane's behavior that Diane does not already think are problematic. And yet here she is, bringing up how, in a lifetime of things Diane has done, she did that one thing that one time that was so terrible.

The only reason Mirror Diane would be able to perfectly recall that instance as a counterpoint is if Diane's been carrying that memory with her all this time. It would only be in this conversation between Diane and Diane if it was an important memory to Diane.

Shive is bringing this up because the fans did. He's straight-up admitted that, and it shows. It's very awkwardly inserted into the internal dialogue. There's no reason for Diane to care so much about that memory if it was just meant to be considered standard behavior for her. It should, by all rights, be lost in the chaos of unimportant day-to-day events, never to resurface unless someone else, such as Nanase or Justin, were to bring it up.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 26th 2018 at 1:33:34 PM

Yeah, you know who I think could have carried this better?

Rhoda

Like, Diane is just like "wtf I've been nothing but nice, I took you in, didn't I, Rhoda?"

And Rhoda is like "ummmmmmmmmmm"

We'd get a soft call out instead of yelling (which could contrast to lucy) AND we'd see how much Rhoda has changed as well.

Edited by MrAHR on Sep 26th 2018 at 3:39:02 PM

Yeah, no Tobias. Being able to remember things doesn't mean they've been seared into your memory by guilt and SHAME, it just means you can remember stuff. Earlier today I was idly thinking about a conversation that I had, has to have been more than 15 years ago, about whether or not Will Smith should have kissed a man in Six Degrees of Separation (he should have). I assure you that conversation was anything but meaningful.

We remember things and sometimes we recontextualise those memories. In this rare introspective and self recriminating mood, Diane remembers that she said something that she can now perceive as a terrible thing. Why that specific moment? Strictly Doylist reasons, it's the scene the readers have seen of her at her jerkiest.

Also, I don't think Shive brought this up because fans hectored him into it. I feel that bit of commentary was more in the lines of, "Here it is, the moment you've been waiting for." Shive has been pretty good at turning what were thoughtless one off gags into plot points later, see the whole of Hammerchlorians. Not that I'm in his head to know what he did or didn't intend.

...how do you get "shoved under the carpet" from what I said?

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