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Currently On Hiatus: Please Enjoy A New Reader Question Every Weekday!

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Just found this site through “the-whiteboard.com” that talked about you.

Anyway, I’m really enjoying this story. I like that the character is still in shock about what happened otherwise she would have realized that one side of her entire family is made of sphinxes instead of her being the only one.

As far as she knows, she’s the only one in hundreds of years who’s turned, and none have been born sphinxy. It’s not like she could use a slingshot to fling the medallion at members of each side of her family and see who turns- and for all she knows, she (or her mother, who looks like her) could have been adopted.

Also: Yay, The Whiteboard! My favourite Alaska-based anthropomorphic-nonhuman-mammal webcomic about paintball! (For that matter, my favourite webcomic about paintball!)

Also unless she can find a bunch of Sphinx medallions lying around somewhere, she won’t be able to turn any of them. One medallion per customer, and all that.

In addition, at least in her current state of mind I really doubt she’d want anyone else to experience this level of crazy wtfery.

…not to mention the spoilery stuff we later find out about her family /shrug.

I’ve followed this comic almost since the very beginning. It’s one of, if not my favorite ongoing webcomic. I love the story, the characters, the art style.

But…I really don’t like this page. So much so that I actually think about it a lot. I have for years, actually. Since I first read it. This page and a couple pages of the same type really bother me.

Like, what’s happening to Michelle is…pretty terrible. She’s thrown into a world she doesn’t understand with very little guidance and she’s suddenly hit with this huge realization that she’s part of an “extinct” species. She caught in the middle of a war she didn’t even know existed. She’s suddenly going to be a huge sensation in the non-human community. She’s got powers that are far beyond her control. Her life is constantly at risk. She’s already been attacked by the Momo and demons and almost saw her friend die. And she’d been a sphinx at that point for, what, less than a day (turned of course. she was always a sphinx)?

Yet pretty much every time she brings this hugely unfair,upsetting, and life threatening situation up to her friends, they basically totally disregard it and tell her to stop “whining”. “You’re not the only one with bad things to happen to you, Michelle! Greg can’t hide his ears! Jim has green hair! Merial had a really rough turning! And neither Greg or Merial had people to explain what was going on, so really you’re so much better off than they were. How dare you complain to them!” But like…none of those problems are actually nearly as bad as what Michelle is going through and, even if they were, it doesn’t excuse her friends for basically totally gaslighting her about the whole thing. And it’s not just them, other people, like Bloodcarver and Gabriel mention how whiny and annoying she is.

It’s just…Michelle has every reason to be upset, in fact she’s handling this remarkably well, all things considered. It’s just always really bothered me that she’s constantly told that she’s whiny and self-centered.

Again, I really do enjoy this comic and don’t mean this to be a jab at the comic itself or at the author, it’s just something that’s irked me literally for years and I just wanted to finally get it off my chest. And, to be fair, the comic definitely progresses in this sense later on with the character of Tony, who is treated with a lot more sympathy in a similar situation, and with Michelle herself whose friends seem to become much more understanding and supportive as the comic goes on, but some of these earlier pages just bother me.

Thanks for getting this out in the comments. I just started reading this after enjoying a story heavily inspired by this webcomic, and every time it’s come up it just keeps bothering me that Michelle just isn’t allowed to vent whatsoever. Maybe she has it “better” than her friends, but despite having people to explain everything she still doesn’t have anyone to listen to her as she’s UNDERSTANDABLY freaked out by the whole “whole new bauplan, secret family history she doesn’t know about, also being hunted by demons or something and part of a supposedly extinct species” thing.

Plus, obviously her friends haven’t worked through their things because every time she tries to vent towards one of them they get to complain about THEIR problem, and then pull the “I don’t complain about my thing which is obviously so bad so you’re a whiny baby for complaining about yours” card.

I suppose I’m just saying, thank you for saying that the comic gets somewhat better about this and thank you for showing that I’m not alone in not liking these moments.

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