30-11-17 Without a second thought

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Spidrift
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Re: 30-11-17 Without a second thought

Post by Spidrift »

worldshaking00 wrote:
Sat Dec 02, 2017 3:10 am
I'm not entirely sure Takeru was malicious at all. I grant you: having your female 'protagonist' getting violated by hentai tentacles and coincidentally naming her the same name as your daughter is odd.
You say “odd”; I say “amazingly, hideously creepy”. On top of which, his first reaction when learning that his now-adult daughter had a boyfriend was to start talking about him getting her pregnant. The sense I get with Tekeru isn’t malicious; it’s something slimy and horrible.
Though, didn't Yuki & her father reconcile?
Yeah, offscreen and suspiciously quickly. Even that managed to look somehow dubious. It makes Takeru seem a bit manipulative.

This is a cute lightweight comic that isn’t going to go into really dark places. But if you wanted a lightweight, seemingly innocuous metaphor for an outright abusive parent-child relationship, Takeru and Yuki would work. The character manages to give me the shivers.
Nathan is a slimeball with significant power and charisma over naive actors, and Yvan is a desperate douchebag who hasn't (yet?) reached Nathan's level of sleaze.
Yvan is mostly just a sexually desperate geek. That isn’t an excuse; plenty of geeks are much nicer people than him. He really does seem to think of women as objects. And Nathan is just an off-the-shelf power abuser. Funnily enough, I don’t think he does a single bad thing that some nicer characters in the comic don’t also do — but he does all of it, a lot, with enthusiasm.
Last edited by Spidrift on Sat Dec 02, 2017 6:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Spidrift
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Error of Logic
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Re: 30-11-17 Without a second thought

Post by Error of Logic »

And he does it from a position of power, rather than 'simple' seduction and trickery.
He makes it mercantile. "Do what I want, or you don't get your dream."
One time I felt genuinely sorry for Dillon was after that threesome between him, Nathan snd Amber, when he was lying in her arms, looking horrified because using sex to further his career deliberately made him feel like a whore. (The character's own choice of words.)

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Spidrift
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Re: 30-11-17 Without a second thought

Post by Spidrift »

Sure, Nathan has used the classic casting couch — but so has Zii. (Though we’ve mostly seen that in bonus strips.) Nathan has more power (and less charm), but when Zii was auditioning people for a chance of stardom with her band, that was power enough. Likewise, he’s adulterous (like Angele) and self-deceiving (like Sonya), and he exploits his wealth for seduction purposes (like Erik) and his power at work similarly (like Yvan).

I’m not defending Nathan. But what he does is demonstrably what many characters in the setting do; he just gets the chance to do more of it, because he has lots of money and power (and he takes that chance with both hands). I see Takeru as worse because he’s uniquely obnoxious.

And Dillon made that choice of his own free will (encouraged by Amber, who doubtless has a rather skewed perspective on such things). Yeah, I can sympathise with his regret for choices made, but he made them.
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Spidrift
"Brevior vita est quam pro futumentibus negotium agendo."
-- Motto of Hogshead Publishing of fond memory, and wise words to set your Foes List by.
Avatar misappropriated from the wonderful XKCD.

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Re: 30-11-17 Without a second thought

Post by Don Alexander »

Well, Izzy makes a good Pierrot there at the end...
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