SFP

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  • yourbiggestnumber1fan

    I really dont know what to say for this page but alison just remember that at the end of the day no matter how hard the challge is you are never alone

  • Pol Subanajouy

    Go on…

    I’m curious what epiphany Al just had.

    • Silva

      “I can ask Feral for a pancreas!” ?

      • Mystery girl

        How would she get the surgery to have a new pancreas? If she can’t be cut (except be Cleaver), how can she get life saving surgeries? What if she gets kidney cancer, or breast cancer, or a brain tumor, or something like that and they can’t remove it? Or what if when she is pregnant and something goes wrong?

        • Rod

          It would be for her father.

        • Bryn Schut

          I think the above poster meant that Alison can ask Feral (who grows new organs that can be used by anyone) for a pancreas for her (Alison’s) Dad (who has cancer). Not that Alison needs the organ herself, but that she could ask for one on behalf of her father.

        • Prodigal

          Might be what Al’s dad needs, though…

        • Silva

          The pancreas would be for her father. She *can* be cut (hard as it is), I don’t remember whether it’s been shown whether cutting her while unconscious presents any difficulty, and such things might get solved as she controls her power (apparently *not* “invulnerability”) better.

  • Guilherme Carvalho

    “also a kind of narcissism” – very important piece of advice many people in Al’s situation (or comparable) should listen to.

  • KidUrza

    I don’t think they changed color. It’s just a poorly-lit room.

    • Wizardblizzard

      Actually, I’ve been noticing it for a while. They’ve been grey almost all the time since (just been checking) page 133 or so – the start of the scene in the dam. I don’t know whether this is deliberate or just a way the illustrator’s hit on to speed up her colouring.
      And yes… I too am not quite sure whether that’s an epiphany or something startling has just entered the room. We’ll see in a bit!

  • Rod

    “It’s, frankly, also a kind of narcissim.”

    Thank you, Paladin! That splash of reality was just what that conversation needed!

  • Rod

    She gave her capecakes. Some would say that’s even better.

  • Kid Chaos

    SEE ALSO: Collar 6, because being the voice of reason seems to be a thing this week.

  • telk

    Uh, did you miss #CapecakesAndChill? We did that bit already.

  • Divaldi

    i dunno why, but my mind suddenly went back to cleaver. I wonder if she still visits him every once in a while?

    • Mechwarrior

      I don’t think that it’s been more than a week since she visited him.

      • Divaldi

        oh man, only a week? danng, a lot’s happened in a week!

  • Sergio Le Roux

    Well the comic is called Strong Female Protagonist, not ProtagonistS 😀

  • Ian Osmond

    “Tact” is not the superpower that will help Allison right now.

  • DaktariD

    After all, “hug” is an anagram of “ugh”.

    • joe

      i love this. don’t get me wrong, I also love hugs. But this fits the slight awkwardness Palantir feels about how self pitying Al is being perfectly.

      • Eagle0600

        Palantir? Really?

        • Kid Chaos

          As LOTR tells us, the Palantir knows all, sees all.

  • Markus

    One of the things I think this strip shows in a very compelling way is that Lisa is, on some levels, a very unempathetic person. Instead of showing that as a crippling character flaw though, Lisa’s tearing through the bullshit and essentially saying “Alison, you’re a literal lifesaver. Almost everyone on earth is thankful to have you around.”

    • Arthur Frayn

      Tough love.

    • Hermitage

      Lisa took Alison in, with all her crap, with no notice in the middle of the night. And is helping her work through her quarter life crisis while Lisa is literally in the middle of having everything she’s ever wanted/worked for/dreamed of being stripped away from her. How is she “unempathetic”?

      • Rod

        She doesn’t “emote” in the same way a lot of people expect, with primary concern for everyone’s feelings first and foremost. And I’d wager she also consciously tries to take action for rational reasons (such as an embracement of the concept of duty towards friends) rather than doing so because, say, she saw Al in a bad spot and felt emotional toward her.

        Trust me, it’s not uncommon for people to be labelled such for exactly those reasons.

        • Catherine Kehl

          There’s also some interesting gender coding going on here – I suspect her slight awkwardness and preference to provide food or show off cool things when Alison is feeling down (and then provide a much needed reality check when she actually has something to say) would pass as pretty darn decent behavior for a geeky guy. But there’s the expectation that women, especially media portrayals of women, are going to be overflowing with sympathy and compassion. (I do think “unsympathetic” would be a much better term than “unempathetic”.) She clearly gets where Alison is coming from – it’s hard to tell how much she doesn’t know what to do, and how much she just doesn’t have patience for that shit. I’d kind of guess a mixture – flavored pretty heavily by the fact that she’s totally not at her own best, either, and knows it.

          Count me as being relieved that we aren’t doing culture-stereotyped squishy girl times.

  • Silva

    Those impressed with Lisa’s non-look: check diggercomic.com . One of the main deuteragonists is a (telepathically, so no lip movement) talking statue – that looks like having a different expression from each angle it’s portrayed from.

    I won’t praise Lisa now because, based on past episodes, she might reserving something *extremely stupid* for the end of this conversation. 😛

  • martynW

    It’s kind of like one super-powered character discovered in the great comic series “Love and Capes.” It’s the people you couldn’t save that will haunt you, but you have to remember the ones you did.

  • motorfirebox

    “Not… knot! That’s it! Moonshadow is going to strike next at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California!”

    • Kid Chaos

      “Quick, Robin! To the Batplane!”

    • AlphaCentari

      Or … Moonshadow was not alone. Somebody is working with her. Maybe Alison’s doctor?
      Or .. neither Lisa nor Alison are alone … Moonshadow is in the room right now.

      • Kid Chaos

        Diabolical!

  • Grason Cheydleur

    I wonder if it was intentional. It could be used to show Lisa’s state of mind. That she would like to be stern toward Alison but outwardly she is being unemotional. Which then asks the question whether is Lisa choosing to show no emotion or is she unable to, or uncomfortable with, properly expressing her emotions.
    Or it could be an art hiccup. What do you think?

  • A N

    So they definitely aren’t alone in the room?

    • Kid Chaos

      Mulder and Scully are hiding in a closet. 🙂

  • fairportfan

    Even though i never got closer to real combat than the sound of the guns when i was stationed at Cam Ranh Bay, i came home from Viet Nam with what it took me years to recognise as a mild case of survivor’s guilt.

    I had just about gotten over it when the “Moving Wall” (a half-scale replica of the Black Wall) came to Atlanta, and, walking along it reading one name at random from each panel … i saw the name of a guy i remembered as one of the liveliest and funniest guys in my company at Boot Camp at Great lakes.

    Boom

    • joe

      thanks for sharing your story

  • fairportfan

    Hi! Given how tough you are, Lisa brought along a clue-by-six…

    • Spicier Angel

      Let’s all hope it’s enough. Fortunately, Lisa’s expertise in autonomous military hardware offers many options for clue assaults of increasing severity.

      So Lisa began this encounter with almost naked self-loathing. Just before the armor room she made a joke about “no, I’d rather talk to you instead of lying awake and hating myself”. To progress to chiding Alison for self-loathing? I think Alison accidentally ambushed Lisa with a glimpse in the mirror, and she’s talking to herself as well as Alison here.

      That, in context of Lisa’s remark earlier that implied she had been inspired by stories, and another that noted how super-geniuses in stories have a Dr. Watson…

      I have high hopes for Alison’s completion of this sentence.

      • Silva

        “Accidentally ambushed with a glimpse in the mirror” is an expression I must find future uses for. Thanks.

  • Bakkonator

    Finally someone said it.
    She’s so concerned that she cannot solve the basic intrinsic problem with the world that she cannot see that there is no basic intrinsic problem and that the complexities of the world’s “issues” are not solvable with a single gesture or by a single person.

    • Silva

      The world is too complex to be improved by single reductionistic course of action, much less a single person. But just as the average human could make much more of a difference than they usually do, Allison may *now* be understanding that *she* could do much more than she did (already much more than the average person, but beneath *her* qualifications), and as the closer-to-average human who notices the same, she’s *correctly* pissed. The part missing is a plan that doesn’t involve self-loathing, and, one would suppose, the various ideas from others she already rejected – she hasn’t rejected anything from Lisa so far!

    • KatherineMW

      She wasn’t tring to find out the one-shot solution to the world’s problems until after Chapter 3. Now she feels like she HAS to fix everything because Feral will keep torturing herself until she does.

  • Rod

    “Definitely not alone in that.”

    Hmm. Quite true. Alison has saved a LOT of people from dying.

    Including the Grand Conspirators.

    Perhaps the fact is that they let her live just to handle huge threats they couldn’t otherwise deal with? And if so, would that give any clue as to where to start looking for these people?

    • Kid Chaos

      Don’t stop not dying, “a LOT of people!” 🙂

    • I think the point was that, as Alison said, she doesn’t matter. Sure, she can make a difference on a small scale. But she can’t change the world. The story so far has established that.
      Of course, I think there’s a lot more story coming…

  • Owen Marshall

    I’ve been where Alison is a lot lately. And while I’m no hero (super or otherwise) Lisa’s words today hit home.

    Thank you. I needed that.

  • 3-I

    … Can you please NOT?

    Look, I get that you really strongly dislike Alison, at least in this arc. That much is clear from what you’ve been posting for the last few weeks. But, like, this is a thing friends DO. They support each other. That is not an unrealistic portrayal. And you say “narcissistic self-loathing,” but I’d go for “depressive episode.” You know, that thing people have when they’re dealing with feelings of isolation and insufficiency as a person?

    People showing compassion- and maybe even expressing it as a rather blunt “compliment”- is not unrealistic, nor is it a sign that the person receiving it is as self-obsessed as you’re saying Alison is. And it’s really kinda getting painful that you keep saying these things.

    • ∫Clémens×ds

      What.
      I love Alison! I wouldn’t be reading this comic if I didn’t. My (frankly crass) cynicism in comments is jest and nothing else.

  • Silva

    This is flat-out copied from much man-centric fiction. But here it seems intended to be beaten into paste, while in (most) man-centric fiction it’s treated as (at most) tragic but in no way the hero’s fault. The best straight portrayal of it, of course, is in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality*:

    “Every time someone cries out in prayer and I can’t answer, I feel guilty about not being God. (…) I understand that I have a problem, and I know what I need to do to solve it, all right? I’m working on it.”

    (Bonus: the author claims this is based on his actual past personality.)

    *: which I, in most aspects, *greatly* like, and yes, would dare recommend to women – it *did* slip up (to say the least) with regards to a feminist perspective, but it did spend considerable effort to portray women as those who should fight instead of those who should be fought *over*.

  • MrSokar

    Though now I can’t help thinking how Lisa probably designed them herself, yet the frames seem to completely block her peripheral vision. Is it some undersight that feels a bit off or intentional symbolism for always looking ahead?

  • Kittenbot Doomypants

    Go Go Gadget Hector?

  • Not everyone’s a hugger. Don’t impose your hug-centrism on those of us who are incapable of anything other than making everything more awkward!