SFP

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  • Kid Chaos

    Now what do we have here?

    • Her murder-closet, one would presume. Although how did she manage to build it under direct government observation? Does her illusory anomaly extend to screening entire apartments now? The six months or more ago that room had to have been built?

      • Oren Leifer

        That’s a fascinating twist for Moonshadow’s anomaly, going from making herself invisible to making “not-herself” (an illusionary copy) visible. Perhaps her anomaly is light-related?

  • Pol Subanajouy

    I think I have to agree with what Dartangn said on the last page. The nature documentary is commenting on what Moonshadow thinks she is doing with society. Weeding out the more aggressive elements until, you know, “you now have a new baboon culture.”

    That makes three people Allison will have dealt with with some greater plans for society. So far, Paladin is the one she gets along with the most. 😛

    • 3? because pint size isn’t all about making the world better through his mini tech, and she isn’t going to school to learn more to change things for the better? We had a character torture herself to create a new era of organ transplants, and hell, even the dude with blades for arms wants to make things better, for himself mostly, but on a global scale. It … seems to really be a theme with those with powers, just a few of them even more so.

      • chaosvii

        I figured the 3 were Menace, Paladin, and Moonshadow.

        • Pol Subanajouy

          Yep, those would be the three. Poor Feral. I’m recalling her now. 🙁

          I see her actions as her byproduct of her NOT being able to formulate a plan for society. Poor girl can take a sword to the head but, like myself were I in her situation, can’t think of a way to make people just friggin’ get along and fix the world.

    • Markus

      The thing is that any sort of criminal culture is self propagating at a rate much quicker than one person could handle. Even if Batman killed people he’d have to commit anticriminal genocide in the span of months to a couple years to effectively curb crime.

      You’re much better off doing something like encouraging effective access to abortion and birth control, limiting lead and other neurodegenerative substances, providing resources like basic income and public healthcare, and strengthening services that specifically target potential criminals with resources that will help keep them from offending.

      • Nexxo

        Someone once said that carrying a gun compels you to use it (or: if you have a hammer for a solution, every problem becomes a nail). Ironically nothing is as disempowering as a super power. It stops you from being able to look for better solutions, because you’re compelled to use da powah. And society urges you to do the same, “Hey, you can lift a car over your head. Go fight crime!”. In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan reflects on this absurd logic also.

        • Pol Subanajouy

          Wow, I’m totally stealing this later. Excellently put!

      • Ian Osmond

        Honestly, I’ve seen research that states that the “lead” thing is the biggest single factor in reducing violence around the world — that there is CONSISTENTLY, in country after country, some sort of ridiculously high drop in crime 18 years after lead is banned.

        • Pol Subanajouy

          Hmm, interesting. I just googled lead and violence. Huh, would you look at that?

          • Ian Osmond

            Yeah. It’s not PROVEN, because it’s all statistical and real-world and there are all sorts of possible other factors — but it really holds up a lot. It really, really looks like it’s a major factor.

            Could it be wrong? Yeah, sure it could — but it seems to hold up.

    • Walter

      Yeah, she sees herself as tuberculosis tainted meat.

      • Pol Subanajouy

        Would not have put it that way, but that’s kind of awesome.

  • RobNiner

    Oh oh, and it’ll be called the Moonbase!

    *pleased with self*

  • It *could* be something simple like the apartment is wrapped around something external, like the building’s elevator stack or furnace room or something like that. It could just be a really, really crappy apartment.

  • Daniel Vogelsong

    “Please be a secret door, please be a secret door…”

  • Subbak

    Good catch.

  • Subbak

    I think it’s just that the bathroom doo opens inwards and not outwards as the plan implies.

  • motorfirebox

    Come on, it’s probably just her MLP porn stash. I mean, who doesn’t have a secret closet full of that?

    I mean, I don’t. I’m just saying, somebody might and that’s perfectly fine and you shouldn’t judge.

  • chaosvii

    Aww, looks like Moonshadow’s all tuckered out and Alison is being a good friend by trying to find the linen closet for a nice illusory blanket 🙂

  • KatherineMW

    It’s not a poster, it’s a visualization of what Allison is thinking so that we, as readers of the comic, can know what she’s figured out without her needing to talk to herself. Look at her hands in the third-to-last panel: she’s plotting out the dimensions in her head.

    • ∫Clémens×ds

      Thanks, I got that. I was being silly.

  • motorfirebox

    This made me laugh way harder than it should have.

  • You know… i’ve lived in apartments shaped like that.

  • Mechwarrior

    Redrum!

  • Damien S.

    There wasn’t any.

  • Nexxo

    It’s the only logical choice.

  • Hawthorne

    *stretches coat hanger into closet*

    *presses hidden button*

    *discovers Comedian costume*

    *later gets vaporized in Antarctica*

  • Mechwarrior

    In Alison’s case, she’s probably watched just to provide potential early warning, like what the weather service does with tornados.

  • Bo Lindbergh

    The plan doesn’t match panel 1 of page 125 either. The relative positions of the entrance doors for 2D and 2E (or maybe it’s 2C) just don’t work.Conclusion: Mary’s actual power is creating non-Euclidean space warps.

  • StClair

    “… and if the males don’t get that, the alpha females drive them off or kill them.”

    • Rod

      Sorry, no, alpha females, if such things exist, would be the ones driven to be too soft and gentle, to their own detriment. You can’t just label an entire swath of females with a trait that’s inherently, objectively bad!

  • Ian Osmond

    …. you’re about to punch through a wall, aren’t you? I mean, busting the lock on the balcony was bad enough…

  • Walter

    Or worse culture, for that matter. History is super clear. Slaughter enough folks who disagree with you and the survivors will adopt your beliefs as a survival mechanism.

    • Doesn’t seem to be true on the grounds you state. I offer the Serbs, who were roundly wrecked at the Field of Blackbirds by the Turks, and spent the next four and a half centuries fuming until they fought out from under the Muslim yolk. They defined their culture in *opposition* to the oppressors and conquerors. Culture seems to survive the slaughter of rebellious youth and aged leadership alike.

      The cases we have where one culture was subsumed and converted by another culture… I’m reading Paul Johnson’s History of Christianity, and he’s writing about how the barbarian successor kingdoms – Arian and Germanic – were quickly taken over by the Catholic episcopacy. The nominally conquered bishops, priests and monks were literate, and they took the oral culture and unwritten laws of the tribes and wrote them down for them, and in the process Romanized the laws and shifted the barbarians away from their Arianism to orthodox Christianity.

  • Walter

    I don’t think we can ascribe the documentaries motives to her. It just happened to be playing on her tv when Alison came in.

    Her motivations, based on what she said, are to kill rapists (and mercenaries, and guys Alison meets at parties, and…) to protect their hypothetical future victims.

    We’ve seen nothing to think she’s crazy enough to believe that one knife murderer on a planet of 7 billion can cause some sort of genetic shift.

    • Caeli Jollimore

      >We’ve seen nothing to think she’s crazy enough to believe that one knife murderer on a planet of 7 billion can cause some sort of genetic shift.

      You missed the point. What the documentary points out is that trying to be Alpha isn’t based in genetics, but social pressures. The same goes for both baboons and humans. Social pressures are exactly what Moonshadow is already manipulating.

  • Walter

    I don’t think she does torture. I’m going to guess murder shrine, it’ll have the articles that gave her an excuse to act “Accused rapist goes free”, “Mercs kill a bunch of ladies”, and then the death notices, ideally with victim quotes. “I’m glad he’s dead, whoever offed him made the world a better place”.

  • KatherineMW

    She was just wiping out non-violent offenders like the date-rape college guy(I realize that date-rape is violent but he was essentially being punished for a crime he hadn’t yet committed. Much more morally questionable than killing people who had actually committed rape.)

    Page 82 of this chapter (http://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-5/2308/) includes a newspaper article describing Miles being accused of sexual assault in the past. So she was killing him for a crime he’d committed, though the YouTube video from the party is likely what brought him to her attention. And she made a point of publicizing his past actions by leaving his computer displaying the emails about his past assaults.

  • Note the area of the world where cultures came and went like the ripples of water in a stream-fed lake, where the barriers to entry were nonexistent, the people were illiterate, mobility was high, and physical culture was minimal. I’m talking, of course, of the Great Steppe, where “people” after “people” swept through the human population like prairie fire, Huns to Avars to Cuman to Khazars to Magyar to fifty flavors of Turk to Mongols to Tatars. And the Mongols, who beat down the wide world under their thundering hooves, were everywhere conquered by their settled conquests except the feeble starveling Russias, who came out the other side a sort of tartarized paranoid mess, half fish half fowl, and finally pinned down the steppe under a net of eagle-eyed permanence.

  • Paradoxius

    Wait, but two pages ago, that balcony was on the edge of the building, with “Moonshadow’s” back to an external wall. From the outside, you can see the night sky where the hallway and secret room should be.

  • Shay Brodbeck

    It’s from Robert Sapolsky’s’ “Stress, Portrait of a Killer,” if you’re interested in seeing more context. His book “Memiors of a Primate” is also very good.

  • Walter

    I’m not sure how to pass this point. I mean, I could point to successful cultural omnomnom-ings, you could point to cases where they have failed. It seems clear that sometimes it works (Nazi Germany, American Confederacy, Imperial Japan were killed in this manner), sometimes it doesn’t (Hebrew culture survived Roman attempts at this, Native American culture survived American attempts at this)

    This is a webcomic, though, and we are going far afield of the comic. I think we can all agree that Moonshadow is unlikely to get far enough along that we’d need to ponder whether or not her Matriarchy would stick, aside from which Moonshadow isn’t actually going for that, she thinks of her murders as flipping starfish into the ocean.

    On a related topic, Moonshadow’s ability to create projections may allow her to safely attempt to get Alison on board. Its not likely to work, of course, but the gain (Alison can kill ALL THE MEN), makes it worth the relatively small risk of putting an illusion in front of her with a sign that says “We murder buddies? Check yes/no”.

    • On a tangent… Imperial Japan wasn’t so much devoured by an opposing culture, as deliberately bent towards a new, more approved direction by her conquerors. You could call it the first successful application of strategic anthropology. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was a deliberate anthropological exploration of contemporary Japanese culture, and was used post-war as a manual for the cultivation of a less pugnacious and internationally anti-social Japan. Ruth Benedict was a bona fide genius, and it’s an outrage that she’s not more famous than that fraud Margaret Mead.

      And it wasn’t done by extralegal culling of undesirables, however merited.

      • Ian Osmond

        It’s hard to say for sure that Margaret Mead was a fraud: it’s pretty much equally as plausible that Derek Freeman was a fraud.

        Or, “fraud” isn’t the right word, but he really had a weird obsession with Mead, and was very much not objective. That doesn’t mean he was wrong, necessarily, but it does mean that his research has to be taken with a serious grain of salt.

        The editorial you linked to was from the Catholic Register, which was writing about how Mead’s work was immoral and led to immoral behavior in society. And it was reprinted on a site that about intelligent design.

        So… none of that proves that Freeman’s work is wrong, but it does make it less convincing to me.

      • Ian Osmond

        Oh — but I don’t disagree with any of your main points.

  • Walter

    I consider Allison above the law. Remember her conversation with the imprisoned claw guy? She’s invincible and doesn’t kill people. No responsible police officer would attempt to arrest her and risk changing that.

    • MrSing

      If Allison is above the law than so is every John and Jane with a gun.

  • Walter

    I think its a camera, remember when the murders started the statement was made that Moonshadow had an airtight alibi for when the killings happened? She used her projection powers, which no one knows about, to fool the camera and let her slip out and kill while remaining above suspicion.

  • Seth Brodbeck

    Quite a bit of discussion of that on the previous pages. Not much more to say on the topic for the time being other than “Yup, still doing it.”

  • RobotAccomplice

    Wait, what happened to Friday’s page!?