SFP

AvangionQ

Oh hey, that hairdo looks much better now after the toss. Good 🙂

Looking forward to seeing how this plot line develops …

Lostman

Really Alison! you don’t know were Mary lives and saved the world how many time with this person?

I’m to say this: there are more war vets out there who know more about the men who try to kill them then you know of your entire team.

P.S is this starting to feel like a murder mystery?

ampg

She pretty definitively cut ties with everyone after taking off her mask. Once Mary split off from the Guardians, she would have no way of knowing where she went.

I wonder if Pintsize knows, though…I’d check with him if I were Alison.

Ryan

I don’t think Alison convinced either of them with that last line.

Ken Gagne

Even the alt tag was left speechless.
- Ryan
  
  Each new page generally doesn’t get a hover text for some hours after being posted.

Josh Jasper

Is the doc in on it with Moonshadow?

Dean

Alison looks kind of like Tintin with her hair pushed forward like that. All she needs is a little white dog.

Rafinius

Why do I get the distinct feeling that the doc is actively protecting Moonshadow.

Abel Undercity

I’m sensing a definite air of not-fine-ness.

fyrehair

Panel 5: A definition of ‘fine’ we were heretofore unfamiliar with.

Michael Corley

That’s not a fine face. Not at all.

Gus Snarp

The doc may not have pushed Moonshadow, but I’m 100% certain she’s on her side. And doing her darnedest to keep Alison off the trail.

Elaine Lee

The Guardians’ headquarters was recently shut down. Perhaps Moonshadow had lived there before.

Pol Subanajouy

One thing I’ve learned about adults by being an adult. We say one thing and mean another because we don’t know how else to act like adults.

Markus

The doctor really pisses me off with her last little monologue. She’s all “Let’s make it as emotionally damaging as possible when you inevitably confront moonshadow/the slasher, so now that I’ve already firmly implied that you’re betraying women everywhere by catching a serial killer, I’m going to leave you with the persistent idea that the only reason you’re trying to do legitimate social good is so you can maintain an illusion of control that you lack in your school and family life.”

Sabriel

I know! She’s giving this evil, manipulative advice but it’s framed as “concern.”

That is next-level villainy. Between the doc and Patrick, if he turns out to be playing Alison, Alison is so fucked.
- John
  
  “if”? More like, “when he turns out to be playing Allison”.
  - Sabriel
    
    Yeah. Most likely.
    
    She is surrounded by so many manipulative people. See also: Violet.
Ian

Not how I interpreted it at all. I don’t feel that she implied stopping the serial killer would be a betrayal of women–she explicitly said she doesn’t condone the murders–just that the fact that such a super powered murderer exists is an unsurprising result of existing power structures being overturned.

She also isn’t dissuading Allison from doing legitimate social good; she’s trying to dissuade her from doing it with her fists. Allison falls back on physical violence as a solution to problems very easily. She as much as admitted to Cleaver that part of her wishes she could just punch all her problems into submission, and when she exploded on the protesters at the hospital her threats and demeanor were WILDLY out control and targeted at presumably innocent parties.

The way she dealt with Miles at the party is a great example of this. She did the right thing in breaking things up and preventing a rape, and Miles (especially now that we know he had a history of this) was a scumbag, but she could have done that trivially by separating them, verbally shaming him, restraining him, etc. Instead, she grabs the guy by the throat and hoists him in the air, making him fear for his life. There’s might be arguments for how this might be legally or ethically justified (I’m not sure I buy them, given that nothing had happened yet and Allison was basically just working off a hunch at the time), but the main point is that her FIRST resort was violence.

The doctor encouraging her not to indulge in that side of her personality is probably a pretty healthy thing for everybody involved.

Samael76

Wow, I really don’t like this doctor. So much emotional manipulation.

Mechwarrior

And so blatant about it.

Jerden

Probably. But we don’t KNOW that yet.

Jerden

I think it is going to be a bit of a murder mystery. I mean, that’s not Alison’s “I’ll just go home now, this really doesn’t concern me” face that we see in that last panel.

Anthony Jackson

From a reader perspective, it certainly looks like the doc may be actively involved in supporting or even guiding Moonshadow. Not sure if it would be as suspicious in real life. One of the problems with presenting mysteries in any literary form is that the reader knows that most completely irrelevant stuff has been taken out and is thus immediately more suspicious of those scenes that are left in.

S.I. Rosenbaum

Yeah, why is she so interested in these murders? I mean she only stumbled on the not-yet-cold body of someone she knew. Yeesh, Doc

MrSing

Interesting thing about this conversation: the doctor is in complete control of the situation.
Even thought Alison could kill her and get away with it quite easily, the doctor is the one in power here.
Alison is one of the most powerful humans in the world and invincible in a straight up fight, but she has lost many, many times.
Menace convinced her to stop being a hero, Feral convinced her to let her go through with her life long torture, and here the doctor manages to quite easily brush her off when she comes asking for information. And we don’t even know how many times she has lost beyond that.
All because people are charming, manipulative, or plead to her emotions.
Alison’s weakness is that she is just as easily manipulated as an ordinary person and it keeps blindsiding her every time.
Alison wants to change the world, but maybe she should join a debate club before doing anything like that.

Mechwarrior

For someone who can punch her way through a brick wall, Alison’s kind of a pushover.

But then, superheroes with phenomenal physical abilities have traditionally been vulnerable to mental effects.
- Paradoxius
  
  Oh boy. I really hope that it doesn’t turn out that Patrick, Lisa, and the doctor are all evil and manipulating Alison. That seems a little too normative for this webcomic, though.
  - Jerden
    
    It would be funny if they all are, but they have different goals so the manipulation just cancels out.
    - Noyoki
      
      Sounds like the plot of a really bad drama.
Stephanie Gertsch

A debate club sounds like it would be exactly the kind of thing she’s into!

However, I don’t see her tendency to be persuaded as a weakness necessarily. Only if she were to betray her own moral compass to do so. (For example, she didn’t agree with the “But he’s a nice guy!” arguments at the roof party.) Listening to reasonable arguments and being able to change one’s mind is the mark of a very mature, very strong person.

Alison’s still got a way to go as far as finding a balance, but I think she’ll get there.
- MrSing
  
  I would agree with you, but most of the time she has been convinced it wasn’t by reasonable arguments.
  Menace convinced her to stop fighting crime in any way for at least a few years simply by implying that what she was doing was good, but not good enough. We know that Alison demands perfection and doing simply good isn’t good enough for her. So she started focusing on finding out what the best thing to do is. And doing that had a large negative effect on a lot of people.
  So, instead of continuing to fight crime or do some form of good she simply stopped, because she can’t bear the thought of not “winning the fight in one punch”.
  A more mature person would be able to search for a better way while still doing some form of lesser good.
  And here the doc is manipulating her in the same way. She is trying to convince to give up doing the good of stopping a serial killer by pleading to her that there is a greater injustice going on at this moment. Maybe it didn’t stop Alison completely, but it did manage to make her stop pumping the doc for information.
  Feral managed to convince her under the guise of arguments, but it seemed to me that she was more convinced by the very emotional plea that Feral made.
  The people on the rooftop didn’t manage to manipulate/convince her, because they didn’t know which buttons to push. Here Alison saw a, for her, clear cut case of injustice, and trying to talk her out of it only made them see unjust in her eyes.
- delphic
  
  This, I don’t think it’s weakness at all, she’s perfectly aware she’s being convinced / persuaded and just because she’s going along with that thread of the conversation doesn’t mean she’s accepting it.
Classtoise

Her biggest weakness is being afraid to stand up to others. It’s not COMPLETELY unreasonable. Standing up to someone has a much different connotation when literally no one can stop you if you decide to do things your way. But this is being used against her by people who know her insecurities. People like the doctor here are using it to push her around and make her feel small so she won’t interfere in their agendas.
Jerden

Alison’s a very reasonable person. I don’t think it’s a weakness to try to see another person’s point of view, although I suppose it is if you’re meant to be fighting them.
I think the question is, was she right to be convinced by others?
I don’t know.
Alison probably doesn’t know for certain either.
- Markus
  
  I think the problem with how open Alison is to being convinced is that she’s comes from the opinion that the people talking to her are talking in good faith. Patrick obviously wasn’t, he’s supervillain whose whole schtick is manipulating people. The Doc’s quite possibly either enabling Moonshadow or outright manipulating her into killing.

Perlite

Yo, doc. I following you until you pulled that emotional manipulation crap. “Worried about your level of interest in these murders” Yeah, it’s not like she stumbled upon the fresh corpse of someone she had a VERY public confrontation wi- OH WAIT.

Jerden

I think it’s perfectly normal to be interested in a murder that you stumbled upon. I’m not sure though, I don’t know any murder-witnesses.
- Perlite
  
  Not all murder witnesses! D:<

Ryan

Do you know where all your former co-workers live? I don’t, and they’re not even working under false identities.

Lostman

Yes but this doesn’t change the fact that Alison was fight along theses’ people for how long and didn’t one thing about them? I am if I sound a little aggressive but think about it; you have fought along with theses’ people and you don’t know that one has parents split up or the other possibly being mental unstable ,and what makes this worse is that all the others look at Alison as a leader figure, the strongest among them. So when she left on live TV people (even ones with super powers) do what natural; they followed.

At this point I wouldn’t call Alison a superhero or even a hero, how can expressed someone to fundamentally change the world when she couldn’t fundamentally save her friends. So in a way this is all Alison fault.
- Dean
  
  Remember, Alison was a teenager when she was active as Mega-Girl. It’s not reasonable to expect a group of teenagers to think and react like a group of adults would. This is one of the reasons that I think that whoever decided to kit the Guardians out as superheroes and tell them that they should go out and fight crime did therm a severe disservice.
  - Jerden
    
    Well, what else do you do with a group of kids with superpowers?
    I personally blame children’s TV for the whole fiasco.
- Ryan
  
  Even if Alison did know where Mary lived as a Guardian, it’s almost certain that Mary would have moved after quitting.
  - Lostman
    
    Here a idea then? why not track down Mary parents and/or another relative and ask them if they have been in contact, if that does’t work she could then try to figure out the killer pattern.
    
    From there she would then mark out locations that the Killer would be hiding; somewhere far off from human contact but close enough so she can strike out at her targets which are localized but also where she can get supplies meaning A) she been stealing her food from nearby stores near her bases or B) living off the land subjects a forest area but also subjecting that the killer would have the skills to do so which also leaves C) A larger group is supporting the Killer in her operations…

Ryan

“Wait, Alison, I almost forgot! They just added a new psychological test they want me to administer to everyone. It’s real quick. Now come and look at this picture and tell me what you see.”
“Um, a gold and white dress?”
*Doc sighs and walks away*

strongfemaleprotagonist

THIS COMIC IS SUPPOSED TO BE A SAFE SPACE
- Ryan
  
  This exchange is going to look really weird to future readers.
  - Timothy O’Brien
    
    It looks weird RIGHT NOW.
    - Ryan
      
      Hello future reader! I hope you are enjoying your glorious post-dress future! While I am not currently aware of any prophesy about the second coming of #thedress, that doesn’t mean it will not return. Keep an eye out!
Darkoneko Hellsing

…why would you do that ?
- Ryan
  
  I am endlessly amused that this is a meme.
  - Darkoneko Hellsing
    
    Y’know, I saw it gold and blue and felt so alone ;_;
    - delphic
      
      Me too!
    - Jerden
      
      Me too!
      Does this mean we’re insane? I’d always had a suspicion…
    - Insanenoodlyguy
      
      You aren’t alone. That’s what I see too.
Meghan

… does this mean us blue and black-ers are sociopaths?
Johan

… oookay ?
Insanenoodlyguy

But Allison’s sonodynamism kicks in, protecting her eyes from the optical illusion! This means she rips the picture apart and begins a bloody rampage to destroy the internet. Nobody can really say she made anything worse.
- Jerden
  
  But then how would we read webcomics?
  Well, I suppose omelettes and eggs and so on.

forksclovetofu

I’m starting to wonder if the doc IS the killer… who better to hide her own superhuman capabilities than the person whose job it is to monitor the superhero community?

MrSing

Well, we’re going on the assumption that the only superhumans in the world are the ones born during that world covering storm. Unless there are somehow older superheroes, for which we have seen no evidence yet, we can assume that the doctor is just an average human.

Kid Chaos

Your insight serves you well. 🙂

Haven

Yeah, this only seems suspicious because we know Moonshadow’s the killer. But from the doc’s perspective? Alison comes in saying she might think Mary’s the murderer, then even after Rosenblum assures her she’s been ruled out as a suspect but still promises she’ll report that information, Alison still says she wants her address.

Giving out that information would be a gross breach of confidentiality, and the possibility that Alison wants to go vigilante on an innocent woman is exactly why those rules are in place.

AlpineBob

Feral was a different thing (Ali didn’t agree, but there was no good way to bypass her decision). Patrick found something they could agree on (the world sucks, and our fighting won’t make it better). This is a psych doc, and their profession is understanding people. If they aren’t convincing, something’s wrong. Nonetheless, I don’t think she’s been controlled by the Doc, just given up on her as an info source.

I don’t think Alison is unduly manipulatable. But she is strongly
conscious of how much damage she could do if she lets loose without
enough info. The incident outside Feral’s hospital and what she learned about her ex-professor’s life just reinforced that. So she’s being careful.

Steel

What always gets me is the whole “Punisher Aspect” of these kinda stories, the idea that its ok to kill somebody in cold blood as long as they have done something bad enough. I mean don’t get me wrong rapists and people who abuse their partners are scum and should be brought to justice not butchered in the streets. Also I think that Doc will get a MIGHT bit more interested when the target is a Mayor or a Senator, ya know…some one “important”

Stephanie Gertsch

Those are some good points about her character. From now on It’s always going to be in the back of my mind that Alison is easily persuaded, so her point of view isn’t always reliable.

I can’t really blame her too much here because the doctor flat out refused to giver her Mary’s address. But there’s no denying Alison was affected by the doctor’s arguments.

Weirdly, I think if Alison stuck to her guns more and always did the optimally good thing, she’d be a better person, but I wouldn’t like her as much as a character y’know? The fact she never does anything by halves and that she’s obviously still trying to figure everything out is what makes her so relatable.

Jerden

I think Alison, like everyone else in the world, doesn’t really know what the optimally good thing is. I agree that if she did, she’d be completely unrelatable.

impishacid

Every fiber of my narrative being expects the next page to be a cut to the doctor calling Moonshadow and saying ‘SHE KNOWS.’
This, comic, though, I’m only 50% sure 😛 It WOULD be the usual next step, but the doc genuinely believing everything she’s said here would also be in character.

Perlite

Oh my God. I bet Moonshadow was there the whole time and then it’ll be revealed that the good Doctor and her are in cahoots.