Brad, you beautiful bastard. You’re gonna make an awesome elder.

…damn, someone get Brad to the closest conflict area. Dude’s a goddamn genius on what to say and when to say it.

Beyond the obvious observation that Brad Is Completely Awesome, and joy for everyone all around, I’d just like to note, in Panel 7, the background color almost matches Kiele’s dress, giving greater emphasis to their skin color – or maybe de-emphasizing their dress. Interesting choice for a panel where the previously-arguing pair are united in happiness for another.

Also, I just love the dynamorph in the tank in Panel 6. No particular reason, I just do ^_^

Loranna

I love this story arc, and I passionately feel that it wouldn’t work without the remarkably well-written characters we’ve been seeing.

Start with Gupta. He ran a remarkable class that seems to indicate to me–as a university professor in the humanities–that axiomatic thought has no place in the real world. It forces hard and inappropriate action that hurts many and helps few.

Move to rich boy. Blinded by privilege and power, he is Gupta’s implicit warning made flesh. As long as the world is capable of conforming to his deep-seated belief in absolute freedom, he’s a great guy, but that need to believe that he’s not the product of blind chance means that he just can’t cope with situations where that’s the only explanation for the way things are.

Then we’ve got Amanda. She tried that whole “dynamorphic equals superhero” thing, and found that it didn’t work. She was unfulfilled, unable to express herself as a person and forced into a role that she found boring and unnecessary, so she bailed on it and is pursuing something that she thinks will be.

And she’s such a perfect response to the Tina and Carmen dichotomy. Each of the two has internalized their victimhood as a part of their respective identities, and while their vulnerability and need is certainly valid, the centrality of that to each of their identities leaves them unable to cope with really basic parts of being alive and part of the world.

And then Brad, who might be the most thoughtful character I’ve ever seen written. He’s careful and earnest and freely admits that he doesn’t have the answers, but he does everything he can to make sure people understand that their needs have been heard and that, even if he can’t address their problems, he wishes he could.

It’s an array of ideas and ideals here that really puts the simplicity of Allison’s worldview on display, because she has more in common with rich boy than she does with Brad or Amanda–and it’s because she’s so deeply invested in her own axiomatic worldview, not because of her personality or desires. And I think she’s realizing that.

So, I just wanted to give you a big bravo here, Brennan. I know that you’ve caught a lot of flak over these characters, but now that we’ve come to where we are, I can’t imagine them being any other way.

The shading, lack of smile, and wide eyes, in the context of what has happened to her today makes me think Alison is thinking that the group doesn’t “need” her, and maybe that she doesn’t fit in, either (I hope the latter isn’t the case, but she’s had a rough day, and sometimes we think things like that even if it’s not true).

There are so many things about this sequence that are just so right.

First off, Brad, gods, you are trying so hard you are just about breaking my heart. I ran community events when I was nineteen and twenty – not quite this scale (though not that far off) and not this outre. And sometimes I (and sometimes we, it was often but not always alone) sort of had elders, and sometimes not (or only had them to be bad examples). I was already thinking about the differences between twenty year old me and forty year old me handling this kind of situation, and… yeah. Oh, Brad, how did you get so wise? But I suspect he’s taking way too much on himself.

But there is also the sense of the accelerated pace of life at a convention for a community that is otherwise geographically scattered. Everything is happening all at once!

I was interested enough by your question to do a bit of digging, and the answer appears to be “not really.” LGBTQ-friendliness is a rather hard metric to quantify, given that a country can be good in some aspects but not in others, or discriminate more against some members of the LGBTQ community more than others, so it’s kind of a hard question to answer.

Just as an example, of the countries that have gender identity laws, a lot are Spanish-speaking (so two grammatical genders) and there are quite a few others with only two (French, for instance), some have dialectical differences in the number of grammatical genders (Danish is the one I’m thinking of here; some dialects have three, some two, some one; I think a similar situation exists in Norwegian), some have no grammatical gender (English, Maltese (I think), and Vietnamese).

But if you were to look at different legal aspects of gender identity, that list would probably change (Vietnam, for instance, has legalised changing one’s gender identity if one has undergone reassignment surgery, but surgery itself is illegal, and people who HAVEN’T had the surgery cannot (I think) get their identities legally changed). Some of the same names crop up quite a lot in the top lists, others come and go, so it’s kind of hard to get an idea of which places are the most LGBTQ-friendly. On the whole I’d be inclined to say grammatical gender doesn’t have an impact on a culture’s attitudes towards LGBTQ people, or it has a negligible one if it does, but again it’s hard to be certain.

That person referencing Batman TAS was me, actually. And yes, I see your point. Though perhaps Brad himself is simply unaware of how this affects LGBTQs as well. After all, he’s also very young… but doing his best to do right by everyone, as a young community leader.

I can see where you’re coming from on a number of these ideas, but there’s one that I just can’t agree with or give a pass on: the idea that only superficial axioms can harm. Axiomatic thought–also known as idealism, ideology, and such–is inherently dangerous not in and of itself, but because of how people behave when they truly believe in it. What makes it problematic is that, for an axiom to work, it must ALWAYS be true/accurate; if not, it cannot be, by definition, axiomatic.

Allow me to illustrate. Take a fundamentally positive, inclusive axiom: People are good, and should be trusted. A person who believes in this idea has no way of understanding or incorporating rulebreakers, like thieves, bullies, or worse. Let’s soften it: When people are good, they should be trusted. This lets us deal with the obvious troublemakers, but how do we deal with people who’re trying to manipulate you, and as such behave well whenever they’re in your presence or in a situation where you might observe or hear word of them? They certainly aren’t good, by most peoples’ definitions, and you’ll eventually be hurt once this person gets what they want.

The natural objection here is that the person in my last example isn’t good, and as such the axiom doesn’t apply. In a world of perfect knowledge, you’d be right, but that can never be in the real world.

So, let’s try the softest, squishiest, most positive axiom I can think of: learning is good. Well, Oppenheimer spent his whole life trying to manage and control the entire Atomic world after his work generated The Bomb. How many soldiers have died because some jackass in the middle east learned how to turn a garage door opener, a soda bottle, diesel, and fertilizer into an IED?

I hope you’ll pardon my lengthy examples, because my point is simple: the world is messy. Ideology never, ever stands up to extended trial in the real world, because the world doesn’t care about whatever silly little rules we come up with. That’s not to say that we should live without ideals–the point is that without cognitive flexibility, we can’t function.

…can I nominate Brad for living sainthood? Because he FUCKING DESERVES IT. ‘Our Holy Suspendered One’ has a nice ring to it, dontcha think?

Also, I don’t like Teresa’s look in the second to last panel. Of course, I don’t like her — geez, how do you go from writing Brad to writing Teresa, that’s some impressive feat of characterization — so I will admit to being biased.

The second person plural pronoun is ‘youse’. 🙂

The singular “they” is no more or less confusing than the singular “you” that came into fashion when English dropped “thee” and “thou”.

I adore Brad, but I’m also pretty anxious for him.

After poking myself to try to figure out why, I’m realizing that while we’re seeing him do some pretty amazing things supporting his community, we’re not seeing a whole bunch of people be the social network who will be there to support him in a pinch. And the existence of the first does not imply the existence of the second. (Or… well, it’s complicated.)

*grin* Now, *obviously* I’m over-reading here, and this is coming out of remember far too much what it was like being a 20 year old event coordinator running around trying to put out fires without a lot of support. But… Brad, in a way different from Patrick, generally knows a lot more about what’s going on with people than they do with him. Unlike Patrick, he’s not an utter fuckwit. But I am not convinced that all is well in the life of Brad.

Y’know, Brad really does seem like a very good person, which is endearing him to people. However, given the nature of this story, I wonder how people will react when the inevitable skeletons in his closet crop-up.

So far the one consistent with our ex-superteam members is that none of them escaped without some form of baggage and/or guilt and it seems unlikely that Alison is the only one with some form of body count to their name.

Now I’m not saying it’s going to be revealed that Brad’s done MASSIVELY horrible things but it’s always interesting to see how one’s view of the Saint they meet changes once they get to know the Man.

It’s not just in the LGBTQ community that these kinds of problems arise. I saw it happen in the early women’s movement, when people had different ideas of what being a feminist meant, when women did or didn’t think men should be allowed in certain groups, when feminists who were lesbians or women of color thought straight, white feminists couldn’t understand their problems, when women who decided to primarily be mothers thought they were being disrespected by women who were fighting for equal pay, when women who were religious thought that others, the women who believed religion was responsible for their oppression, were shunting them aside. These problems arise in any community and science fiction is one of the best ways possible to make them accessible to people, without accusing anyone of being wrong. Someone who may be guilty of behaving like one of the “bad actors” in SFP may be reading along for quite some time, feeling bad for one or another character, before realizing, “Oh! I get it! I may have been a jerk! I may have hurt someone by my behavior in the past!” That’s why you do it as sci-fi. It allows victims to enjoy the story, without re-experiencing victimization as they read. And it lets those who may not be the most sensitive folks identify with victims, before they realize they’ve been guilty of victimizing others.

In panel 7 (lower left)… is Kiele now the same height as Theresa? In panel 5 Kiele’s eyes are about even with the top of Theresa’s head.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it’s already been implied that Kiele’s outward gender shifts in response to their emotional state. Could witnessing a romantic scene have induced a gender shift that quickly? Or perhaps not, since Brad’s also now about as tall as Theresa in panel 7 too.