Skip to content

Obverse & Reverse Ch6 Page 22

Obverse & Reverse Ch6 Page 22 published on 45 Comments on Obverse & Reverse Ch6 Page 22

We made it through August! Now our reward: September.

It’s September and that means it’s time for the Patreon Pin Club! This pin will mail out in November, which is Skin Deep’s birthday! To celebrate 15 years of Skin Deep, I got a fancy special fun pin! Click here for more information!

45 Comments

I suppose this is the start of the operation to smuggle Eleanor out of Wonderland in a discreet manner to avoid a panic from either the local inhabitants or the population in the Avalon / Avalons outside of Wonderland (imagine the scandal of a strange monster being found inside an Avalon).

It figures that the roughest thing about Wonderland is all the *talk* that goes on in it.

I think they are ignoring the obvious possiblity: Elanor obviously has parents or someone taking care of her. Someone taught her language and manners. Unless either she’s magic like that or she lost her parents recently (to what?).

A: “The Neighbors will talk” has always been a crap argument.
B: I love the emoting horns. I know it’s not the first time we have seen em, but so rare to get so much of em.

Not only is “the neighbors will talk” a crap argument, I’m disappointed in Wonderlanders engaging in such gossip. Sounds hypocritical.

an exception is during times of high tension and paranoia, when the neighbor talking can lead to being killed or exiled. This happen during religious wars, or ideological ones (macarthism and the red fear), or concurrent to extermination campains. In less extreme cases, it can still lead to being excluded or denied help or service that would have been accessible otherwise.

it does not make it a good moral reason , the opposite, in fact, but it does make it a practical/survival one.

In this case, we know wonderlander are highly xenophobic, and rather irrational, with a focus on appearance. That kind of context could make being seen as the stranger/outsider, or as helping one such (because other-phobic people often see the thing they are afraid of as contagious) rather uncomfortable, and a question that is not unreasonable to raise.
(to precise, the question is not limited to the dichotomy to help vs to reject. it also include the rather important matter of how to help, and the search for long term solutions. also, whether help is actually needed and which kind of support to provide)

The argument is not moral, but it is practical: these people have made their home here and the neighbors’ perception can either make or break their communal and social life. And for these people, both of those things are essential not only for their psychological wellbeing but also their survival and even partially their livelihood.

Especially when you consider that Wonderland isn’t just a fancy gated community, but a sanctuary for a people that refuse (or outright cannot) to live by outsider rules and instead insist on living on their own rules in the place of their own creation. They are now contemplating violating one of those rules.

And we have to consider that those rules may be there for a good reasons we do not know or understand (yet). For one, it is possible that Elanor requires the high-magic fields that is within the woods and will have problems (could be mental, could be health, could be some random magical or other) outside of it. Or that there is some magical defense ward that’ll trigger to Elanor’s presence or something. And yes, plain old pointless prejudice should also be considered but we can’t discount that there is more to these rules than we think.

I’m not trying to defend the notion of leaving an innocent kid to live alone in the woods is either a good or acceptable option, I’m just trying to put forward what is going through their minds.

So much ditto to both of yous.

Even if many a times you can boil a thing down to black or white, don’t mean you always should.

Sometimes it’s okay for the white guy to sport an afro too. :D

I mean, the worst thing that could realistically happen is that they’d be ostracized until they have enough and move out.

That’s a non-trivial issue for mythics (and again, I keep forgetting what the comic calls them). Even if they a medallion, switching normie jobs can be problematic even if they know there is a welcoming Avalon nearby (and there might not be). And these people chose to live in a Avalon for a reason.

I mean…yes…no?

A case within 15 years ago happened up in AZ, if I recall. A group of high school football males sexually assaulted a young girl. It was caught on camera. The family of the girl–her dad was forced out of his job, they were ostracized socially and financially, and they had rocks thrown through their window, as well as physical threats, “for ruinin them reputations of them poor innocent young boys who had so much promise an’ played our football.”

Hmmm… even if Antoine disregards what the neighbors think, taking care of another kid isn’t a snap decision to make, especially when the community is bound to ostracize you for doing so, so I don’t think he’s in the wrong to be hesitant. Eleanor is safer in some ways under his roof, but less so on others.

The Wonderlanders need to get off their high horses, but they won’t do it just like that and in the meantime Eleanor’s gonna have a real bad time. :[

Outside of the fire breathing being a hazard, I am not really seeing a problem. She’s no more or less bizarre than any other critter.

The problem is the “rampant xenophobia” which Eleanor mentioned. The problem is that some liminals are labeled “monsters” because the Sphinxes didn’t make them Medallions. The problem is the same sort of racism we see on the human side of things but translated to creatures for whom it makes even *less* sense, but nonetheless provides the same sort of structural hierarchy where there’s someone a person can feel good about looking down on as “lesser”.

I also suspect that before humans forced all the mythics (forgot what the comic called them) probably have histories of feuds (maybe even wars) between each other. The war between the sphinxes and dragons are probably only one of many and these inter-mythic feuds shimmered down into prejudices into the modern day. And it’s also probably a half-conscious thing, like the prejudice is taught unconsciously but consciously the history is already considered a thing of the past.

Correction: my sentances are more confusing than they should be because I started in one line of thought and switch to another.
Line I wanted to emphasize: mythics may have history of feuds and worse with each other, so it’s not just the usual closed-community drama but bad blood that has festered. And also consider how some families may keep a strong look on their ancestral history as means of rooting their own identity.

Line I originally began: consider also that these are communities that are essentially forced to live together due to a collective need to hide from humans… were not one community. Consider how we saw in snapshots of the past how roaming knights made sport to hunt mythics, they killed bloody dragons. How the hell does a guy with a sharp pointy stick defeat something that is an armored, airborn flamethrower? Flames go around shields. Comments on history suggest that this is not a new thing.
And now consider how far away these communities likely were. As we have seen, mythics can be just as awful to each other as people are to each other if given an excuse, so it’s likely that they feuded as well as made friends. When pushed together to form Avalons, it is likely that there was friction that turned to feuds if there weren’t feuds beforehand.

I’m intrigued how they’ve decided she’s not much older than Rupert.

Maybe she becomes frumious around puberty?

… well, whatever will happen, it seems that neither the boys nor Eleanor will have to stop visiting/living in Wonderland right away:
https://www.skindeepcomic.com/reader-questions/rq-6-wonderland/

Gee, now if only they knew someone who lived on a large country estate with its own deep network of secret catacombs….

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Content Footer