Nimrod wrote: So it appears to me that Monica is mostly the product of outside intervention.
She has been manipulated to this point in the story.
Indeed, there, Nimrod does. And taking a cue from Atomic's delightful Air Force anecdote, it needs to be stressed that having to face the fact that she was a football, "just getting by", was what really set her off.Wdot wrote:Nimrod has something there. Monica has been created as surely as the GGG's were created and for the same reason: as a weapon.
Monica is usually fine with her ice creams and small self-improvements and parsable island adventures. Nudge's bitching was indeed "nothing"... between friends.
But not to the undomesticated jaguar, alone within. And the nigh-mocking praise in today's installment seems directed at same.
Good catch. Monica would not want to stick around for it. But master trolling isn't about getting someone to leave... it's about finding a live one, and making them stick around and lose their shit.ShadOBabe wrote:And the mildly twisted way these guys are trolling her? If I was that distraught and I had the power to poit, I wouldn't stick around for it.
Someone in there is too proud and/or too deeply wronged to take a diss, or Nudge would not have been fried.
Especially since The One Ring's intro was a rewrite of an originally far less vicious scene.Wdot wrote:We thought that the story was about getting the gold from Smaug. In reality it was introducing The One Ring. Getting rid of the Calendar Machine was important, but getting the spike in Monica's head was more important. The more I read Wapsi, the more impressed I get.
Ever read the original Riddles In The Dark? Tolkien recast that chapter of The Hobbit as Bilbo lying about how he got the Ring. And so Professor T. masterfully recast his silly buffoonish Gollum from his children's book into the tortured mirror of the Bagginses--who wrestled not just with manifest evil but with their own denial.
Paul T. is publishing in a different time and media, but the masterstrokes come from similar inspirations. Retcon? Cerebus Syndrome? Nuts to that. It just works like he knew it all along:
Nudge-nudge.
Wink-wink.
Say no more.