Wapsi Square Forum

http://wapsisquare.com/comic/go-with-you/
Dang it, Shawna! <hug>

Scarlet: "Run away! Run away!"

She certainly has more than one personal style.

When it's an emergency involving somebody else, she can jump right in, become the assertive boss, and take charge of the whole situation.

When it's personal... not so much. I'm not sure Paul has ever shown us a character who is so self-effacing, and lacking in self-confidence. She crushes more easily than "Reginald" did.

It really doesn't help that she has feelings for a silly boy who appears completely oblivious to love.

Drakkenmensch wrote:It really doesn't help that she has feelings for a silly boy who appears completely oblivious to love.

Very few teenage boys are mind readers. I think the largest number ever recorded in a psychology experiment involving several thousand boys in dozens of high schools was approximately Zero, plus or minus a statistical margin of error of Two.

This really isn't against Scarlet's nature, thinking about it. She was always rushing off to console Timothy in Kindergarten after Cass and Day pushed him aside. She's kinda doing the same thing for Shawna.

...that makes her Castela's clean up crew, doesn't it?

It's about this time that Timothy tells Hiroshi when Scarlett runs to talk to somebody walking/running away somebody else has majorly screwed up.

. . .

"Where's the earth-shattering kaboom?! There's supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!"

--FreeFlier

Sometimes you just have to grab the bull by the horns and shake sense into them. My daddy used to tell me at puberty boys should be nailed up in a barrel and when the hit the teenage years drive the bung in.

I hope Castela is paying attention. Because the way Hiroshi treats Shawna, now, gives clues as to how he will treat her once the limerence wears off.

oldmanmickey wrote:Sometimes you just have to grab the bull by the horns and shake sense into them. My daddy used to tell me at puberty boys should be nailed up in a barrel and when the hit the teenage years drive the bung in.

I've always heard that this was a quotation from Mark Twain, but apparently it hasn't ever been tracked down to a specific source, and the attribution to Twain isn't regarded as authentic. It may be an old piece of American folk wisdom. Maybe even older... human behavior hasn't changed much since the late Stone Age, so the saying may be only a few hours younger than the first invention of the barrel. I wonder what the Beaker People had to say about that topic...

The problem with teens is they lack social experience which makes people just want to lock them away or as they say in TX "Bury them when they turn 12 and not dig them up until they turn 21". Which is all fine and dandy, but how do you fix a lack of social graces without social interaction? Some people never learn more than the rudiments, just as some people never learn to ride a bicycle.

I noticed that none of the characters have asked him how he feels about Shawna, and instead are expecting him to reciprocate just because she showed an interest in him. The thing is, he really shouldn't be "required" to feel that way about her, and given how easily he forgot about saying he'd hang out with her, he may have actually just thought that's all it would have been, and not something more. Just because he may have put Shawna in the friend zone doesn't make him a bad guy, though.

Dave wrote:

oldmanmickey wrote:Sometimes you just have to grab the bull by the horns and shake sense into them. My daddy used to tell me at puberty boys should be nailed up in a barrel and when the hit the teenage years drive the bung in.

I've always heard that this was a quotation from Mark Twain, but apparently it hasn't ever been tracked down to a specific source, and the attribution to Twain isn't regarded as authentic. It may be an old piece of American folk wisdom. Maybe even older... human behavior hasn't changed much since the late Stone Age, so the saying may be only a few hours younger than the first invention of the barrel. I wonder what the Beaker People had to say about that topic...

Heinlein - The Rolling Stones.

Roger Stone maintained that boys should be raised in a barrel and fed through the bung.

At eighteen, you'd drive in the bung.

{Approximate, from memory.}

Something that occurred to me while at work:

Is Scarlet's impending conversation with Shawna going to lead to the latter girl winning the guy after all? That really won't bode well for Scarlet's friendship with Castela.

Alkarii wrote:I noticed that none of the characters have asked him how he feels about Shawna, and instead are expecting him to reciprocate just because she showed an interest in him.

And much the same here on the forum.

The thing is, he really shouldn't be "required" to feel that way about her, and given how easily he forgot about saying he'd hang out with her, he may have actually just thought that's all it would have been, and not something more. Just because he may have put Shawna in the friend zone doesn't make him a bad guy, though.

Agreed.

It WAS careless of him to forget what day he was scheduled to hang out with Shawna. But while teen boys may be more prone to that than some other categories of people, there's nobody immune.

The simple fact is that while he apparently hits all the right buttons in Shawna, she doesn't have the same effect on him. There's a word for this sort of situation; it's "life". Shawna needs to understand that this says absolutely nothing about her as a person, or as an attractive female, or in any other regard. In fact, at that age the buttons are still moving around, so it's possible (not expected, just possible) that in another month he'll be pining over her while she's mooning about some other guy.

Warrl wrote:The simple fact is that while he apparently hits all the right buttons in Shawna, she doesn't have the same effect on him. There's a word for this sort of situation; it's "life". Shawna needs to understand that this says absolutely nothing about her as a person, or as an attractive female, or in any other regard. In fact, at that age the buttons are still moving around, so it's possible (not expected, just possible) that in another month he'll be pining over her while she's mooning about some other guy.

Castela, Timothy and Scarlet?