SFP

Gotham

COULDN’T YOU TELL BY THE WAY I DRUNKENLY VOMITED ON YOUR CARPET TO ESTABLISH DOMINANCE AND MARK MY TERRITORY

rpenner

“What’s “love” got to do with it?”
“The Tina Turner song?”
“No, I mean, what possible definition of love were you using that caused you to have nuclear meltdown of a psychotic break? I mean if you were still Menace, I’d expect the body count to be in the millions.”
“Billions!”
“…”
“Oh, sorry, just a little Spacey flashback… um… I need to make some calls. Totally. Unrelated. But, yeah, it’s kinda important.”
“…”
“Hey, why don’t we meet tomorrow for coffee and we can talk about all the people that are still living. Gotta go. Bye.”
- rpenner
  
  *SLAM*
  Sleepy Feral: “Patrick is Menace?”
  “…”
  “Not judging but … hoo-whee, city life sure is complicated.”
Sasha Wian

Girls just never understand the subtlety of boyspeak.

Gotham

I got to say, although I’m sure we’ll have tons of merriment to share and concerns to consider and all—

I’m slightly disappointed? I found it so immensely more interesting if it turned out Patrick, though deeply esteeming and looking up to Alison, just wasn’t into her. It happens, people. Maybe he would have been aromantic or maybe what he saw in her would be so different and special to be chalked up to common, boring “love”.
But hey. I’m not going to pretend I don’t find the two lovebirds cute.

Now, all we need is a jingle.
“Clevin is /so/ dumped ♫”

Morri

Perhaps there is a romantic component to the love he mentions, but I think it’s camaraderie. These two have bared themselves to each other, recognized their similarities in believing themselves unlovable, believing themselves alone. They come from two sides of the same spectrum, and this whole experience in Patrick brainland brought them to meet in the middle.

I don’t know what this means for Clevin, because Patrick really fucked with him, and I’m not sure he will see himself or Alison or their relationship the same way.

As for Alison, she may consider the romantic aspect of it (gods knows he shoved it in her face that one time), but ultimately I think it’s a friendship on the mend, and a trust of being able to see each other as they are.
Thomas S

The fat lady, whilst singing, has not fully revealed her hand in this opera my dear Gotham.
Calum Cameron

Psst aromantic people still feel love; “love” and “romance” are not perfect synonyms 😉

(Like, to clarify, most people love their parents and their pets; very few people are romantically involved with either).
- Gotham
  
  You voluptuously pedantic asshat
  - Calum Cameron
    
    Yeah, that sounds like me.
    
    For real though, mostly this page does for me is makes me want to wait and find out what KIND of love Patrick’s referring to here. If they take the boring option and go with romance, that’s a very different (and inferior) story to if they take one of the various more interesting routes. Does he see her as a friend? A replacement for his dead family? A pet? A god? A comrade-in-arms? A symbol? All possibilities at this stage.
  - Kid Chaos
    
    “Voluptuously”? Were you bitten by a radioactive thesaurus or something? 😜
    - Gotham
      
      Oh, voluptuously is tame. Wait before I use “wondrously lionizing”
    - Kid Chaos
      
      It sounds magnificently subdermatoglyphic! 😁

Tiago Quintana

Hmmm. This is (apparently, at least) a very neat resolution regarding Patrick’s psyche, one which wouldn’t be out of place in most super-hero comics. I just expected different – and yes, better – from “SFP”.

rpenner

There’s a different arc on coming to terms with your “inner demons” in Naruto, volumes 1-60 (of 72) but Lord Boy was never going to make peace so full integration (at least for the moment) seemed like the only reasonable resolution.

rpenner

The threatened cloud has passed away
And brightly shines the dawning day;
What though the night may come too soon
We’ve years and years of afternoon!

Then let the throng
Our joy advance
With laughing song
And merry dance

https://youtu.be/-iVWfK9_m1s?t=40s

Bauke

It’s interesting to see the comments going “I expected more from SFP”.

You’ve read SFP, do you really think this is the way it’s going to go?

Alison isn’t going to give up Clevin just because of Patrick saying he loves her.
It doesn’t matter that Patrick loves her, to be honest.

I’m expecting a rejection.

Charles Moore

He likely means romantic love, but a few pages ago he proclaimed his love for ‘people’ so I’m going to wait a page or two before I start blocking out time for the big Mega-girl/Menace wedding.
Tylikcat

A rejection would be simplistic. I’ve been team “It really looks like Patrick loves Alison and is an utter fuckwit,” for a while now (this entirely fits within my definition of being a fuckwit, BTW.) And this whole journey has had aspects of being a love letter to Alison, also, it’s fairly obvious Alison feels deeply for Patrick… though not unmixed ones.

What we know about Patrick’s telepathy also suggests that all of this coming to a head as Clevin and Alison are professing their love for each other (sort of) is unlike to be coincidental. This doesn’t have to be planned, but there are other messed up layers to all of this.
- Weatherheight
  
  Nuance is so important.
- David Gillon
  
  Of course Alison Loves Clevin and Alison Loves Patrick don’t have to be as exclusive as they once were. Poly’s a lot more common than it used to be (or maybe I just know a lot more poly folk than I used to).
  - Tylikcat
    
    …I am poly. At least, usually, when I’m dating.
    
    Can you even imagine Alison trying to negotiate poly? She can barely handle college.
    - David Gillon
      
      I think I half knew that, but I had to make the point somewhere and this was as good a place as any. (Plus your threads always go interesting places)
      
      Can you imagine the colour Alison will turn when Patrick explains the concept 😉
    - shink
      
      Haha, Alison, poly? Feral could pull off poly with her eyes closed, but Alison? No no no, Patrick is about to get an ultimatum more severe than the last one he got (although probably in a much more gentle manner), and the best he can hope for in this situation is to get friendzoned, which if he’s actually mature he’ll be happy to be in.
      
      Before I unleash a horde of angry men and/or women with strong opinions on the friendzone, lemme explain. He’ll accept that he wont be one of Alison’s lovers and the two will be affectionate friends. That’s how emotionally mature people handle the freindzone (or they walk away from it if they don’t want that).
    - friendlymosquito
      
      At the very least Patrick has some emotional maturing to do. He hasn’t had a lot of practice after all.
    - Tylikcat
      
      I have to agree that Patrick might be in a worse place for it than Alison. Which is saying something.
    - AustinC123
      
      Is poly a thing one can ‘manage’ or ‘handle?’
      I mean, I see no evidence that Al is poly, but if someone says they’re poly do poly people often think ‘no way can that person handle that sexuality?’
    - Tylikcat
      
      For some people polyam is an orientation, for some it’s a relationship style. In either case, there’s a really large skillset involved, and not one you get just growing up in our culture. (I mean, a lot of skills that make you good at polyam relationships also make you a lot better at monogamous relationships – but the cultural teachings around relationships tend to suck more often than not.)
    - Tylikcat
      
      My poly life for the last couple of decades hasn’t been that interesting? I mean, I suppose some bits of it – especially the sex – might sound so, but really, I’m pretty good at the, well, interpersonal negotiation and management pieces. And I wasn’t that interested in having vast numbers of relationship, so I usually only had a couple at most at any given time*, and any issues weren’t really much about poly but individuals. Though one of my exes and I have an ex in common, and one of my best friends and I have a different (and now deceased) ex in common (and we talk a lot and commiserate about her, and how we wish we had been closer to her through the last few years of her life – we both tried…)
      
      I’m out of my living as a monk phase, and dating a little again, and got to struggle a bit with how important poly was. (Having multiple partners isn’t really. But the way poly folk work with relationships, and that I have a lot of friends where there are romantic aspects to the relationships isn’t likely to work for many monogamous folks, as boring as my actual life is these days.)
      
      * note the timeframe, my late teens and early twenties, that was another Tylikcat.
    - David Gillon
      
      *facepalm* *blush* whoops, didn’t mean interesting in that sense! More in the sensible exploration of the lived nuance (borrowing Weatherheight’s term), and the way what many people would be shocked by is just other people’s everyday normal. I suspect part of what the monagomous contingent don’t get is the way the number of intersections of relationships multiplies sharply upwards.
    - Tylikcat
      
      I wonder how much of that is poly per se, though? I mean, the subcultures I’m in tends to be pretty highly incestuous, even though they’re fairly big. I have more of a tendency for relative exogamy than do many of my friends – so there are a lot of circles where everyone seems to have dated everyone else (I’ve often been known as a person who doesn’t date much inside the various groups), polyam or mono preferences aside. (One can also get into a whole discussion of the queerness or lack thereof of various poly communities – it changes quite a bit from one group to another.)
      
      I find heteronormative monogamous culture randomly terrifying. Sometimes it’s just fine… other times people are launching random gender expectations or wanting to be controlling and/or abusive.
    - Loranna
      
      I, for one, would find it endlessly amusing to see Alison make the attempt.
      
      But then, I also love watching Raul Julia create scale-model train wrecks. ^_^
      
      Loranna
    - Weatherheight
      
      ::beams at Loranna::
      ::bounces around happily::
Ian Osmond

What “rejection”? Telling someone you love them isn’t, in itself, a thing that needs to be accepted or rejected. It’s just a statement.

“Will you date me?” is an offer that needs to be accepted or rejected. “I love you” is a simple fact that may or may not be dealt with.

Diana Dawe

D’awwwwwwwww. It’s sweet. Stop being such nitpicking snobs and let some joy into your hearts you gollums 😉

I like the way he’s cradling his younger self so protectively.

Thomas S

Yes, Lord Boy, being the first, should be loved even though he has passed his use by date …
- palmvos
  
  isnt that one of the defining points of adult? when you childhood is past your use by date? then thinks about international relations….. um nevermind.
Jubal DiGriz

Exactly the sound I made in the last panel.

Thomas S

Meanwhile, in meatspace, Clevin is madly trying to stop up gushers of blood from Alison, Patrick and Ferral, in dreamspace Alison flexed her mighty invulnerable muscles and shredded the bed, Ferral is twitching ands frothing like a bad pavlova while unwashed Patrick is gibbering in all the tongues he has ever melded with.

Clevin’s cake is just not cutting it as a gift tonight.

Clevin for the win – secretly being Guwara all this time under our noses so sneaky like …

Philip Bourque

So, 4 out of 5 pieces of Patrick are dead. Who is the person in panel 4 and 5?

Tylikcat

What’s this dead stuff? Integrated Patrick! It’s like Open Source Software – no reason not to build links and then compile them together. And a prototype can totally be built in a minute or so!

…I’ll just leave you with that thought.
- Zorae42
  
  Oh jeez, that’s just painful. Please no, why would you ever try such a terrible thing?
  - Tylikcat
    
    Academic software! *cackles*
    
    (Okay, I’m big for support of well managed projects. But I do mention the promiscuous nature of open source code frequently…)
    - David Gillon
      
      Promiscuously linking in every bit of code we come across is basically how we ended up with mitochondria (okay, and junk DNA).
      
      “Your biological uniqueness will be assimilated into our collective” isn’t alway a bad thing.
      
      (But I still shudder about the time I discussed safety critical coding with the Extreme Programming junkies)
- Philip Bourque
  
  The last time we saw them, they were being washed away, there were “mindquakes” all over and the city was falling apart. We see them now half-buried in the fiery ruins, unmoving, eyes closed with no signs of life. Little Pity Pat manages to gasp out his last instructions before he to goes still. And Mullet Patrick appears to be mourning them? Why shouldn’t assume they are dead?
  Although, ‘dead’ is the wrong term here. They are mere psyche fragments, not alive to begin with. Maybe ‘Terminated processes’ would be more appropriate?
  As for ‘integration’, what makes you think that? We have one panel with the remnants of his mind, one reaction shot of Alison and then a panel of just one Patrick. There is no concrete indication of what happened. To me it is just as likely that the fragments were deleted and Patrick reset is psyche to a previous state. From his appearance, I’d say to before Al threw the mug at him. What this persona actually is remains to be seen.

bryan rasmussen

hmm, so Menace is gearing up for another run at world domination and needs to build up his army I see.

Fluffy Dragon

well, that puts a spin on the ‘conversation’ Patrick had at Clevin earlier on…

some said it was just Patrick being Patrick. Guess not, just average, normal, everyday jealousy … from someone who can read your darkest secrets and fears like a book.

friendlymosquito

I’m in favor of ace, but also I think Patrick has a lot of self-work to do before he can fully understand his feelings. I think at the most basic level we can (hopefully) assume that he cares about Alison and her happiness, and whether they end up together or not, he will hopefully respect her decision. But also I think this is a conversation they should have when they wake up because they have zero boundaries right now and I dunno, I feel like Patrick needs a chance to pull himself together before anyone holds him to things he said inside his brain.
Sterling Ericsson

And you forgot the part about it being from someone who can’t properly understand or read his own feelings to figure out that he’s acting this way because of jealousy. I wonder if he even now realizes that.

Emotional therapy is one of the things he direly needs to figure out what emotions he’s actually feeling and what he himself feels like. But it’s also something he just can’t do because of his powers interfering.

eliza

HES TOO CLEAN CUT, LIKE A MORMON MISSIONARY. I DON’T TRUST THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *literally willing to trust everything else 100% before seeing this “him” appear – but this is susp*

Tylikcat

It’s almost worse – blue shirt with brown pants? Ew.

I wanted to see character development. Who knew that character development was expressed as mild scruffiness?
- palmvos
  
  character development is bloody scrapes, broken bones, bruises, back pain, and other suffering. you want real growth.. get the stuffing beaten out of you. at least that was what i took from all the ‘good, it builds character’ comments when i was younger.
  - Tylikcat
    
    A lot of the best things that happened to me look kind of awful if you don’t understand the context.
  - Weatherheight
    
    That’s what I took from the very few fights I got into when younger (lost all but one, but that one sort of… gave me a reputation as a lunatic).
Cori J.

Some of us are into it. 😡

I take this outfit as a callback to his last appearance in Issue 5. http://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-5/page-97/

Ellie

Another early page? Are they changing the schedule again? I’m not complaining I’m just confused.

Dan Nicholson

Throughout this arc, people have been crying about how mental illness doesn’t work this way. I have mental illness. And, well, duh, it doesn’t work this way because none of us are telepaths. This guy has read/write access to brains, and a helper. There isn’t anything in here that resembles a real-world mental illness and that is cool. ^_^

I mean, I lived through years of mediocre therapy and trying all the wrong meds before landing on something that lets me… live. That makes for a shit story. And has nothing to do with a telepath having a breakdown.

Teyar

Thank you! That’s the exact feeling I’ve been having every time I come into these comments, and I just haven’t been able to articulate it.
- Diana Dawe
  
  Agreed. And even if we’re talking about an individual dealing with his own trauma, I can’t speak to other peoples’ experiences, but I have twenty years of dealing with anxiety and depression (including four mental breakdowns and many years with some amazing therapists). I found that when I read the critical comments, I felt defensive of the writer and illustrator. I thought that it all served as a really accurate metaphor, actually. We do have to break down our walls and be willing to be vulnerable and “feel our feelings” in order to move forward. We do have to learn to accept contradictory parts of ourselves. If anything, anxiety does feel like an overwhelming flood of emotions. It’s completely logical to me that someone dealing not only with his own shit, but also the shit of everyone he’s ever stood close to, would do exactly what Patrick has done.
  
  When my mother was killed in a car accident last year, the main thing that helped me was listening to music that reminded me of her and crying my eyes out. I would explain to people that I had two choices when it came to the pain – deal with it, or run from it. And only one of those has an end point. I found the city vs. nature metaphor very apt.
  
  And yeah, did the “breakdown of walls” happen quickly? Of course. It’s a story. To paraphrase Gene Roddenberry, stories move at the speed of plot. Also, as was also done very well in the metaphor, the city walls were already starting to crumble because of the event that took place months ago. (Over a year ago? I lost track of narratives)
  
  And speaking of “unrealistically fast”, what do you think musical montages are for? In Mulan, they trained the chinese army in one song. Tarzan and Simba both grew up in one song. Elsa got over decades of repression in one song. Do you really want to have no progress in the story whatsoever for the next two years because Allison has to painstakingly remove the walls brick by brick? Hell no! Knock those fuckers down and let’s see what happens next! I’ve been waiting for Patrick to come back since she ripped a strip off of him last time, and this whole chapter has been immensely satisfying.
Deanayettie

Honestly? I found some of it a little hokey until he talked about how he loved humans and wanted to be one. Then I just about broke down myself. I’m an abuse survivor and used to feel a lot that way myself for a large part of my life.
- Deanayettie
  
  But I agree… It probably would be different if we were all telepaths… There’s enough realism in this I can suspend my beliefs about his healing. The other thing to understand is he may not be mentally ill in the sense of having something that’s usually on going (like many personality disorders can be), but someone with a healthy brain who was raised in an unhealthy situation, and he may have been taking steps already to get himself help. There’s lots of ways to heal and a therapist can help, but they are not the be-all or end-all. There’s much work we have to do on our own.
Sprainogre

I also don’t think he’s gonna walk away from this perfectly fine. He’s gonna walk away with this big break through that someone he trusts and cares about went to the wire to help him get through. He’s probably gonna be better, because he has an incredible ability to turn the eye inward as it were, and actually move forward. Narrative wise, this is a turning point for his character. It has to be dramatic and have pay off, because that how story telling works.
Tylikcat

This works for me, and I get annoyed pretty quickly at extended dreamscape sequences that don’t serve solid narrative purpose, and also how trauma and the dealing with trauma is handled. I did at one time have to deal with a lot of past trauma in a short period of time (I’m talking weeks and months, not hours, but still, that’s really fast) and whoa, that would make a lousy comic 🙂 (Okay, there might even be a way to tell that story that would suck – probably by focusing more on everything else that was going on, because a lot of me exploring my past and raging and crying is not super scintillating, I gotta say. My memories are pretty influenced by having my hypervigilance turned up to the max, and having to make important life decisions under major and sustained sleep deprivation. A lot of good things and personal triumphs came out of that time, but, bah, sleep is my religion.)

It mostly didn’t look much like this! (Though on the neuro side, there’s a temptation to note that we mostly deceive ourselves about having a singular distinct consciousness, and the existence of a bunch of semi-autonomous processes isn’t a bad model without being pathological. Also, everyone should be glad I’m not a telepath, for a bunch of reasons, including that no one wants to spend time in my brain. Muahaha.)

David B Huber

Alison (looking uncomfortable) replies “I’m really here about the Conspiracy…”

Patrick: “I know. There can never be anything more than friendship between us.”

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Feral wakes up and decides the only way she can save Alison is to remove Patrick’s head…

Tylikcat

“…you mean the part of my memory you just set on fire?”

bryan rasmussen

Ok the thing is really, this is the least believable I have ever found Patrick.

Weatherheight

Looks like persona integration to me.
I could be wrong.

And that would explain the final panel, too, now that I think on it.

Zac Caslar

What? As in, is the last panel your first statement or your second?
- Weatherheight
  
  It can be all of the above… 😀
  - Zac Caslar
    
    *dirty look*
    
    You could be due for a re-shoeing. I could have heated up some nails in preparation of doing the job.
    - Weatherheight
      
      Patrick’s statement in the final panel is, going with the extremes, either
      (a) a manipulative lie (I’m choosing to believe it isn’t, but it’s possible) OR
      (b) a moment of supreme trust and vulnerability and self awareness.
      
      In my life and in the lives of those people I know, a mind divided against itself has problems making those kinds of statements – but someone who truly knows who they are can leave themselves wide open to rejection and embrace that kind of feeling, even if they’re terrified while doing so.
    - Zac Caslar
      
      Thank you.
      
      Also seriously your shoes are a mess. Hold still. And your hooves could use a trim, your ribbons are just everywhere in your mane, I swear your ears looked gnawed on, and you smell like Ponyville -are you (blah blah blah 😉 )
Philip Bourque

Why assume integration? Since the fragments disappear between panels 1 and 3, why not assume they have simply been deleted?
- Weatherheight
  
  Possible, but from a psychology point of view, what remains isn’t a viable person – it’s a fragment, and thereby far FAR more dangerous than an integrated person would be.
  
  There’s a lot of built-up code in the human brain. Deleting it en masse is crippling, not liberating (go watch EST sometime and talk to the recipient). If it’s powerful enough to wipe out personality fragments / alternate identities, it takes quite a while and a lot of of hard work to get back to being a functional human being. Putting it another way, delete 80% of a computer program’s modules and it’s unlikely to run at all, much less well.
  
  FinalPatrick seems a bit too coherent to me to have sustained identity obliteration.
  
  I could, of course, be wrong…
  - Philip Bourque
    
    The current persona’s appearance is part of why I’m so skeptical about his state of mental well being. He looks awfully sharp and clean for a guy who has just had his coping mechanisms, ways of thinking, ways of organizing his thoughts and everything about him reduced to rubble.
    I find it more likely that this is just another fragment or his clean-cut appearance is only skin deep. One of the possibilities I thought up was that ‘Patrick’ doesn’t actually exist and he’s actually just comprised of bits and pieces of other people’s psyches. Like a Frankenstein’s monster.
    That might be a little complex for this comic, considering Al is supposed to be the main character.
    - Weatherheight
      
      If we assume that everything we just saw was some form of act, I think your observations & conclusions are dead on. It’s possible that none of this was real and he’s just showing Alison what she needs to see to be back on his side.
      
      All excellent points, but if we assume that all of this arc was 100% legit, none of this quite works. If, however, any part of it isn’t legit, then all of these could well come into play.
      
      The Patrick-as-gestalt-being / “Frankenstein’s monster” idea has occurred to me as well. Take a person with a dissociative disorder, give them the ability to harvest templates from other people (perhaps compulsively) and it gets messy really fast…
    - Philip Bourque
      
      And if Patrick were the focus character of the comic, his rebuilding of his psyche would be a fantastic arc to see next. Since Al is the alleged strong female protagonist, we’ll never see that. A shame.
      I’m just having some trouble suspending my disbelief here. It just seems to be wrapping up too neatly again.
    - Weatherheight
      
      Noted.
      I’m firmly in the middle of the Ambivalent section.
- pleasechangemymind
  
  If that were the case, wouldn’t this Patrick look the same as Scruffy!WabbitSeason!Patrick?
  - Philip Bourque
    
    If he did, I’d be cool with that. It would be a visual acknowledgement that he did have a major psychological upheaval and was beginning to… pull himself together?
    At any rate, given that his physical state was like he had slept in a dirty alley for a month and had been eating out of dumpsters for that long. His mental state was fevered, delirious and delusional. I don’t feel I can trust anything we’ve seen here.
Laurelinde

That’s how I read it too, since the new singular Patrick looks different than any of the components. (Slightly scruffy flannel Patrick was cuter, though. 😜 )

KatMa

Let’s not forget that Klevin left his phone in the apartment before this arc started!! 🙂 So excited for the next week’s updates!

David B Huber

Next panel, Patrick continues “Even though I know you don’t feel the same about me, you’re the only one I trust. The only one I could trust.” / next panel, turning away / “I needed help. That’s what you do.” / next panel, Patrick hiding a tear as he walks away from Alison / “Let’s get out of here and you can tell me about this ‘Conspiracy’.”

Ladon

“I love you. I always have.” “Then why did you beat me up with robots so much? And why were you such a fucking asshole to me earlier? And why are you hurting people I love with your words and actions?” “Well… you know how Mara Jade tried to kill Luke Skywalker before she ended up marrying him?” “Yeah…” “and you know how Murtagh tortured Nasuada even though he was in loved with her?” “Uh-huh…” “Talia Al Ghul tried to ruin batman’s City countless times despite believing him to be the only one for her” “ok, yes.” “And Vriska three Tavros off a cliff rather than admit her feelings for him” “I actually never read Homestuck. I’m not THAT much of a nerd.” “Oh, yeah, I guess it is a bit much” “never liked webcomics in general, really.” “Well the point I was making was, we bad guys? TERRIBLE at expressing affection.” “I see.” “You got lucky, really.” “No. No, I really didn’t.” “… yeah, ok.”

Sterling Ericsson

Honestly, it’s just pretty general supervillain courtship. The best way to show your love is to attack them with giant robots.
- Diana Dawe
  
  My favourite example of this trope is actually from a kid’s show called “Wordgirl”. One of the supervillains is named “Tobey” (voiced by Patton Oswalt, because of course)
  
  It is HILARIOUS:
  
  Tobey: Okay… cease! Or the rest of my robots will tear this city apart!
  
  WordGirl: Fine. (throws the robot she is holding to the ground) I’ve halted.
  
  Tobey: Oh, you think you’re so smart, don’t you? With your super powers, and your vocabulary, and your luminous smile–
  
  WordGirl: What?
  
  Tobey: But you can be beaten, just like everyone else! I’m going to prove that I’m smarter than you! And then you’ll be mine, all mine!!
  
  WordGirl: What do you mean by, I’ll be all yours?
  
  Tobey: Oh– uh, nothing, never mind. (clears throat)
  
  https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3d9a17c81ec8fea9e4f25b6c25acfa4801e7a1a17fbe4b6333c320482a89e968.jpg
  - Sonny
    
    I Agree!
- Jicama
  
  If you could find some way to be
  A little bit less afraid of me
  You’d see the voices that control me from inside my head
  Say I shouldn’t kill you yet
  - R2D2TS
    
    That song came to mind when I read Ladon’s comment.
  - pleasechangemymind
    
    I adore that song. A++
Titan360 .

Actually, she totally did read Homestuck. Don’t you remember her Dave Strider cosplay look?

http://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-5/page-124/

Hiram

When you find yourself in the cauterized ashes of your own subconscious mind, make snow angels with a friend.

Glotos

So…Patrick manipulates people by reading their minds and telling them what’ll affect them the most. Surely this whole thing, including staggering into her apartment, could be an instance of that…?

Franklin J Gomes

“And with the combination of your powers, I am Captain Patrick”

Captain Patrick, not a hero.
Her is gonna reduce your privacy down to zero.

Jshadow

NOPE.

bryan rasmussen

A mindreader thinks I’m an idiot, I’ve never been so insulted!

Darkoneko Hellsing

oh DANG

Pol Subanajouy

Sucks that that relationship isn’t going to work out, amirite?

Mad Skyentists

Oh my….. This boy is not very bright.

BMPDynamite

To anyone worried about what Alison’s response will be, I have to agree with the others. Patrick knows he ruined his shot with Alison. And Alison knows he knows that. This is just him making up for hurting her. Let the man finally able to read his own mind enjoy a unified thought for the first time in years.

On a less wordy note: … d’awww. <3

llennhoff

First panel on Tuesday: And that is why you have to die.

Nebty

I saw this coming but I still think it’s adorable. This is something that the comic’s been building up to since the beginning.

Eileen Young

Ahhhhh, I’m so happy that this has happened.

I also really love how the backgrounds behind her are still lighter than those behind him, even with everything in flux. Just . . . the amount of weight and presence she has in his mind is a perpetual delight to me. It will, of course, all end up kind of terrible and embarrassing and hurtful when Clevin gets home, but right now I’m just incredibly happy. Patrick is doing a bit better! Patrick knows what his feelings are and is no longer (the same type of) dangerously unstable!

JohnTomato

I understand the reasoning behind this story branch it just doesn’t do anything for me. Now which one will do “The Noble” thing so SFP can continue?

YMMV

Cori J.

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d8db80f7b5cd1b0d4652c220970d616c61a639f21c90db80b196220a70c58db6.gif

Weatherheight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-fWDrZSiZs

Mechwarrior

Anyone else having an issue where they have to log into Disqus every time they visit this page?

Weatherheight

Started yesterday evening (May 25 2018)
It happened about a year ago. No idea why. Vanished after a week or two ago.

Liam Jorden

Anybody else really like that weird shadow on Alison’s face in the second and fourth panels? I’m pretty sure it’s been there a lot in other arcs but I never noticed it; it’s a really nice nod to the kind of mask she wore when she was a hero. It’s probably super symbolic somehow but I’m too tired to write out exactly why.

masterofbones

Man, its incredible how closely this parallels with Patrick mind controlling his mother. Doesn’t Patrick look happy as he says exactly what Allison has dreamed of him saying for years? Isn’t it wonderful how all the nuanced aspects of his mind have melted into a clean, bland unified persona?

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, JUST A HAPPY CURED PATRICK

Teka the Budgie

Alternate Patricks: Still, if you should ever need us…
Current Patrick: But I sometimes do still need you…
Alternate Patricks: Well why didn’t you say so!

Cue dance party.

Allison, watching at the window amused but slightly wistful, flies off into the night.

Ray Radlein

“Why did you come to find me?”

“Due to recent regulations, I have had to update my privacy policy. If you wish to opt-out of telepathic communication, please return this thought marked ‘UNSUBSCRIBE’…”

BadExampleMan

So, uh, where’s Doctor Whatsisname? Was he a manifestation of Patrick’s personality fragmentation? Is he a real person who somehow became an avatar inside Patrick’s head? Is he a member of the Conspiracy, or part of some other group acting in opposition to it? Or someone Patrick recruited for something? What was the purpose of taking over a college class for two weeks?

And…what about Naomi???