Varanus wrote:Tako wrote:But, is Leonard doing anything to stop Heather from turning more girls? What about their parents? Those are underaged girls...shouldn't their parents be making a huge fuss? Shouldn't the parents of all the other children be taking their offspring away from that place where their kids are turned into bloodsuckers? How can the school still operate under those conditions? Wouldn't be easier to protect Heather from wannabe vampire hunters if she were just moved to another school under a fake name, rather that allow her to keep stoking the fears and hate of the locals?
Perhaps they aren't hated by the locals? That PETM is so powerful in this world suggests there are a lot of people who are okay with monsters living around them provided they aren't killing anybody (and in some cases seemingly even if they are). If they are indeed "contained" and kept an eye on then perhaps they have become something like local celebraties.
And given there is no cure for vampirism beyond gorgon blood, if the B squad went and offered to become vampires there isn't much anybody can do after the fact, especially given the special legal status cryptids seem to have. I doubt Heather would refuse her teammates a transformation given her own high opinion of being a vampire. Being underage doesn't seem to be that much of a factor in whatever morals she may have.
Those people escaped terrorized when the VC were outed as vampires. And Heather's parents must have told their neighbours that Heather was keeping them enslaved. Same for the parents of the other VC. Taking into account those precedents, I can't see the parents of the rest of the students being happy about their children being turned into vampires.
Also, you have to take into account that, if Heather keeps creating new vampires, those will need more and more blood. Maybe Summerfield can convince the locals to "donate" some blood now and then, maybe even paying them, but not everybody will be willing to give blood, and even those who are willing may refuse to do it constantly for the rest of their lives.
Summerfield should, at the very least, stop Heather's enslaving of her parents and demand that she gets permission from the parents of the other girls before turning them (without using mind control to get said permission, of course); he has the power to force Heather to do that, since he is legally authorized to cage her. If he doesn't even do that, he isn't "containing" anything.
Varanus wrote:Two strips? So, things are going to end like this? Heather keeps her parents as slaves and cattle forever? And the baby is raised by zombies?
This is depressing, very, very, very depressing. And it ends the VC story leaving us with a horrible impression of Heather, and of J.C. Summerfield, who allows her to keep causing mischief.
He didn't say that though. All we know is what happened in this two part strip. I took him saying that anything else that happened wasn't relevant to the current story to mean it is at least
possible that J.C. or others DID do something about the situation with Heather's parents, Adam is just neither confirming or denying it.
But what is the point of these two strips, then? The only new information they offer is that the baby is indeed born and that Heather re-enslaves her parents. Of those two pieces of information, only the latter is relevant. I guess there was a chance that Heather's mom had a miscarriage, but I never gave too much thought to that and assumed that, unless we were told otherwise, the baby was born.
The only pieces of information that the comic has given us are that Heather re-enslaves her parents and that she isn't stopped or punished and is allowed to keep creating more vampires to make her cheerleading routine intead. For the reader who hasn't checked the forums, there is zero reason to think that Heather is stopped. The strip itself doesn't give an ambiguous ending, it just shows Heather re-enslaving her parents, period.
The thing, is, it would be easy to redeem Heather at least partially. She was halfway there after being punished with the Gorgon's torture and being forgiven by her parents. All she had to do was to accept getting grounded for a while and making amends with her parents. Some readers would still demand her to be punished, but many more would smile at the happy end...and then we got this step back into darkness.
Sometimes I get the feeling that I'm being subject to an elaborate social experiment, that Heather was created a sweet-looking, cute character who is treated by everybody as she were a good, nice girl but who does really evil things in order to test if the readers will side with her because she is presented as a sympathetic character despite her evil deeds, or if the readers will hate her despite her cuteness.
