Not Their Fault 2013-10-01

[ActionKermit]

We don't know that she has gotten over it that quickly. She could be putting on a strong face for the moment because she needs to for the demons, and deal with it privately when she has the chance.

[Mark N]

We don't know that she has gotten over it that quickly. She could be putting on a strong face for the moment because she needs to for the demons, and deal with it privately when she has the chance.

Exactly. Many survivors of rape will put on a strong face for family but when they close the bedroom door its Niagara Falls.

As for what the tar is, I still think that it is some form of P.T.S.D. from the crash. Rape is a used as a form of control (The priests used it on the girls before immolating them) and that may be the Tar's manifestation of such.

[Timotheus]

I'm just wondering if Georgettes metabolism is going to normalize after this and she's going to start putting on weight, thereby ending the modeling career and all of THAT stress.

[illiad]

I appreciate the feelings of the above posters, but what if nothing physical happened - it was only experienced in a very lifelike dream??? I am sure your psychiatrist would have something to say about that... especially if it involved some 'thing' definitely nothing to do with anything human or animal.. :/

do check the previous strip comments..

we will have to wait and see if jet ever knew anything about it, or if she just wakes up in mucho mocha thinking nothing happened?? she was just having a snooze in their comfortable sofa, after a *great* cup of coffee ...

[shadowinthelight]

We don't know that she has gotten over it that quickly. She could be putting on a strong face for the moment because she needs to for the demons, and deal with it privately when she has the chance.

Or just a delayed reaction. Sort of like after she retrieved the second portal cloth.

[Jay-Em]

"Guidance" is kind of a sweetie, isn't she.

In that light it's quite amazing that she ,it, had Georgette running pretty well in her life, despite the horror inhabiting her C-space.

Why does that sound so naughty?

Guidance is a sweetie for sure... maybe not a Tina, but she's got potential.

Uh oh. Non-native speaker here. Did I accidentally hit some obscure colloquialism with a raunchy undertone??

[ActionKermit]

Uh oh. Non-native speaker here. Did I accidentally hit some obscure colloquialism with a raunchy undertone??

Not really. Dily was free-associating an alternative meaning for "C-Space". In that context, a horror inhabiting one's C-Space could wind up looking a lot like this. (Or like this, I suppose, but that's more on the weird side.)

[eee]

Gee. Wow. I wonder if we will ever find out what the TAR was and why it invaded Jet. Unless Tina explains to them after they wake I guess we won't. Just love it when it's all action and no explanation. Does that make this an anticlimax?

We'll have to wait and see what happens. It might be we'll get an explanation and it will be such a humdinger that it will rock us back on our heels. Like that there are millions of Tars infecting people and they're the reason humanity is so screwed up. And Monica and Co. will have to find out what they are and how to stop them...

[DinkyInky]

If only getting dressed in the mornings was as effortless as clothes appearing on your body like that.

Yeah, no kidding!!! She's just talking away and her clothes are reappearing like nothing happened... me? I gotta stand in front of the damn closet for half an hour to decide what I want to wear!!!

Lucky. I no sooner inch open my closet door when I hear, "Moooooom! I can't find my{insert just have to wear this shirt and chinos combo today when you know it's in the wash}! Can you help me?"

I sigh and toss on wrinkled yesterdays jeans and a baggy shirt and try to explain that it can't be worn today. My son, likes dressy casual wear...for school. He's trying to convince me to get him a bunch of button ups to go with his ties(yeah, all bespoke silk ties that were gifted from a friends Mother, very modern, very sleek, very dressy, very how the heck do I match these with suits, let alone get him suits?). He's eight, I'm doomed.

Oh, and he asked me if I could make him the Jeremy Brett version of his Sherlock outfit. *watches mad money fly out the door as a bolt of caviar wool, black settles onto my sewing table.* Dear God, I just remembered that one has a silk cravat, tophat and a cane. OMG I am doomed. Maybe I can find a cheap fake android phone(nevermind, he'll just borrow mine ) and make the scarf and mock up a Belstaff(cause I sure as hell can't afford the real deal on a fixed budget), and make him a modern Sherlock. He's already got the 'do.

Then again, I can put a twist on it and give him a Steampunk-ish Holmes and just modify his current outfit...*wanders off muttering*

[Boxilar]

We don't know that she has gotten over it that quickly. She could be putting on a strong face for the moment because she needs to for the demons, and deal with it privately when she has the chance.

I tend to agree with this. When Shelly came back from the time forest, she made a show of "I'm fine, everything's back to normal," when in reality, she wasn't "fine" and nothing was ever going to be the same again. I think the same thing is happening to M here. She compartmentalized so she can do what she needs to do and deal with a covey of truamatized demons who have been enduring worse for much longer. I don't doubt we'll see a moment, when she's with somebody she trusts, similar to her meltdown over being stabbed in the head during the Calander Machine resolution. That took several years in comic to manifest. With the way Paul spins plot threads and keeps them for later use, I have no Doubt we'll be seeing the reprecussions of this at some point.

[Haylo]

If one demon can be assigned to multiple hosts at one time, can the same "Tar" be in multiple "Deamon Spaces" at the same time? And if so, did Monica just exorcise the Tar from multiple people at once? (Or, possibly, will she later learn how to do many at once?)

[Opus the Poet]

The Covey (via Guidance) are very much fitting the descriptions I have read of the survivors of abusive relationships, so M has to project strength and confidence to them to facilitate their healing process. This brings up an interesting question: Do abused demons go through the same healing process as the humans they "inhabit"?

[DilyV]

The Covey (via Guidance) are very much fitting the descriptions I have read of the survivors of abusive relationships, so M has to project strength and confidence to them to facilitate their healing process. This brings up an interesting question: Do abused demons go through the same healing process as the humans they "inhabit"?

The scary thing is will Jet's demons try to overcompensate in an effort to play catch up? I'm thinking this particular covey of demons are rather like a person who is autistic or suffers from ADHD or some other disorder that precludes them from learning and applying the requisite skills to become a functioning, self sufficient and/or self-reliant member of society. While Jet doesn't suffer from this herself, her demons might be somewhat handicapped. Jet is going to have an interesting inner dynamic going forward.

[Bathorys Daughter]

I'm assuming there is considerably more to this arc, but right now it all seems more like a statement about rape than an actual Wapsi kind of tale. Was Sept. National Anti-Rape Month or something? He's done that sort of thing before when Monica cut her hair. That was to go with some sort of hair donation effort as I recall. We'll see.

It would seem like the demons would not have to go through any sort of rehabilitation as to how to be proper demons. After all, the time they have been assigned to Jet so far is less than a second compared to their overall time in existence as demons. It doesn't even make sense that they would feel disoriented at present. They should just feel normal. I find it hard to accept they would be so drastically changed by a few years being under Tar's thumb compared to their billions of years of life thus far.

[Dave]

I'm assuming there is considerably more to this arc, but right now it all seems more like a statement about rape than an actual Wapsi kind of tale.

I dunno... it seems fairly straightforward to me. Paul has introduced Monica's new nature as Jaguar Girl, Demon Shepherd, and sub-Titan over the past couple of years, but just what those things meant hadn't been clear. The story needed an arc to fill in the things he'd hinted about... and this is that arc. This little incident has clarified Monica's role, powers, and attitutues about those things quite a lot.

Yeah, it's been an emotionally rough ride, about a sensitive and brutal subject, and there are a lot of rather scary implications to the tale... but Pablo hasn't been one to shy away from the controversial!

I think this one will end up fitting into the overall framework just as well as Katherine's Big Adventure did. During that arc there were some people who felt it was entirely a side diversion and didn't fit into the main story at all... and it did (linking to things hinted about quite a few years ago) and it ended up explaining quite a lot. I doubt we've heard the end of the Big Adventure and its consequences...

... and the same is true of this arc, our Shepherd's first encounter with a wolf in Jet's clothing.

It would seem like the demons would not have to go through any sort of rehabilitation as to how to be proper demons. After all, the time they have been assigned to Jet so far is less than a second compared to their overall time in existence as demons. It doesn't even make sense that they would feel disoriented at present. They should just feel normal. I find it hard to accept they would be so drastically changed by a few years being under Tar's thumb compared to their billions of years of life thus far.

I wonder whether they (like Tina's covey/coven, and Shelly's demons who were spackled together to create Conscience) might have transgressed the "no outside manipulation" rule, and had their memories erased at some point? Guidance is clearly aware of the "no tampering with anyone other than your host" rule for demons, but we know that demons know this rule even if their other memories have been purged (or so Conscience says). If the Jet covey had lost their memories for having violated this rule, they would have been more vulnerable to Tar's influence and domination because they would no longer remember their long history as immortals.

We really don't know how common it is for demons to step over the line, and suffer what one of the characters referred to as an "automatic" memory erasure.

[dex drako]

Was Sept. National Anti-Rape Month or something?

I'd say life is Anti-Rape Month but I get the point.

It would seem like the demons would not have to go through any sort of rehabilitation as to how to be proper demons. After all, the time they have been assigned to Jet so far is less than a second compared to their overall time in existence as demons. It doesn't even make sense that they would feel disoriented at present. They should just feel normal. I find it hard to accept they would be so drastically changed by a few years being under Tar's thumb compared to their billions of years of life thus far.

yeah In was thinking this as well.

[illiad]

dex drako: If you have sisters or daughters in a violent neighbourhood, it is not just a month, it is 24-7...
even in little 'harmless' UK, there are too many naive fools who think 'it cannot happen here' and do not teach them to be strong and streetwise..

[loxmyth]

Remember, Monica is on more than speaking terms with her own demons. I suspect that trying to force guilt/worthlessness/shame on her by attacking her at the body-image level, especially by force, is more likely to make her angry than anything else. And she's just demonstrated that, and gotten a pretty darned cathartic bit of closure.

Abnormal reaction even so? Possibly. But she's not a "normal" person. Trying to abuse her is about like trying to abuse the jaguar; she's likely to simply treat it as the violence it is and rip the attacker's throat (and other organs) out at the first opportunity.

[loxmyth]

... Though I also grant the point that this is Monica in her "demon shepherd" role; she is "on" because she needs to be in order to deal with the situation -- which is not uncommon for folks who find themselves having to play the authority figure in an emergency. She may collapse and let it all out later, and I wouldn't blame her, but for now she needs to finish the job and get back to her normal level of consciousness.

I do want to know how much of this Tina anticipated when she made the "get here right now" call. She knew Monica was needed for something -- as a covey herself, did she see the tar and bring them together deliberately, or was this the automatic oracle in operation?

[kingklash]

When M gets to the part where she tells Tina that she was right, and explains why, we'll all be floored, right before she smacks her upside the noggin for the assault by Tar.