Stupid Hormones 2014-12-16

[AnotherFairportfan]

Well, she's 16-17 now, so...

I just had a horrible thought: what if Atsali decided she wanted to get her driver's license?

As Diana says after Meg restores Venus' arms in Thorne Smith's Night Life of the Gods: "She'll be dragging them in by the hair now."

[Thor]

Well, she's 16-17 now, so...

Er, no. She's 15. She's clearly 15 here. And when they go back-to-school shopping, she is still 15. Back-to-school shopping happens in late August. She's back to school in September, and has her pool incident with the tuna girls. Then she goes to the coffee shop with Monica, who can't help but mention she's still 15. By the time we meet Cricket, Berdine lets us know that it is still the same school year. On the day we meet Cricket, we have a very eventful lunch period, which culminates in the transfer of the Queen Bee status to Atsali. That arc ends (in real time) on Aug 15, 2014. When we jump to Atsali & Co later, we learn that some time has passed, but not much as the attention on her has yet to die down. Later that same weekend (which we know because Atsali has not had a chance to see the twins on Monday to apologize for running off or to see if Berdine wasback to normal yet) Nadine mentions the talisman to hold Atsali's form on the webchat. When we get back to Atsali and Nadette again, it is unclear how much time has passed (though we see in the intervening Monica storyline that winter weather has started (which in Minnesota means anywhere from October to April). It has been long enough for Nadette to get Atsali one of her grandmother's talismans, which should have taken no more than a month, tops, unless Nadette had to go on foot back to the West to retrieve it in person.

So, at most, a couple of months have passed since September, when she was declared by Monica to be 15. Now theoretically, Atsali could have turned 16 in those couple months, but given the amount of scrutiny the transformative events in her life receive, I think that it is doubtful that we would have had her turn 16 without a single mention of it.

[Yamara]

http://wapsisquare.com/comic/know-what-this-means/

Of course, an incubus is usually a male (or the male form of a) succubus.

Which makes this conversation rather compelling:

http://wapsisquare.com/comic/a-few-favors/

No. Not as naïve as she looks.

Either that or the author forgot what he had written earlier when he declared Atsali's father to be an incubus. It's hard to tell exactly, since we know almost nothing about Atsali's parents and how they met their demise. I'm hoping we get clarification is both the lineage and the earlier mention are accurate, or a ret-con if the earlier one (or the later one) are a boo-boo.

Or Atsali has the life experience of the ethetians, and is like most of us 'been there, done that, got the tshirt {yawn}' type.. The siren stuff is new, so she is subtly trying it out...

Well, she's got the Ethetian computer still in her head as she's saying that, but the context is her realizing that Brandi, the "nicest" golem, was casually letting them die in an atomic cauldron. I think Paul's being very consistent: Atsali is a young teen here, who's terrified of what her parentage will cause her to become, and as an orphan, no longer has her parents to guide her through it. Bud is essentially explaining that Brandi is not just the sweetie, but also a deadly Hatred.

And considering Atsali's earlier assessment of Brandi-- "I wanna be her when I grow up!"-- this revelation would come down particularly hard.

I think it was Paul's intention that self-awareness that she's half-incubus has driven her character from the beginning. It actually places the fanservice trope of agonizing over her own grand voluptuousness into a serious context. She can force people to do her bidding, and then eat their souls. Monica had a hard-coded countdown limiting her time to play at denial; Atsali doesn't have that luxury.

[Prester Fred]

(wax on... wax off... ears on... ears off...)

Earwax?