page 1230 – It sounds worse when I say it out loud
Well, I technically didn’t get this page finished before the convention, but I got ENOUGH of it done for there not to be much to wrap up once I got back. And it’s a good thing, too, cos I’m SO worn out right now that if there were any serious work left on this page, it just wouldn’t get done until some time later in the week. Heck, I’m just now noticing as I write this that I forgot to set the publish date for Monday morning instead of right now on Sunday night, and I don’t even care. Fiddling with those few controls feels like too much work right now. Thankfully, this was the last full con I’m going to all year, and I’m SO glad to go into full hermit mode for a while.
Anyway, some odd business: next Monday will be the 4th of July, meaning ol’ American me has a special holiday page planned… except that it’s ALSO the usual New Comic Day. Don’t worry, we’ll still have page 1231 next week, I’m just not sure what day it’ll land on. I worry a bit about promising it on Tuesday, since I don’t know how long Monday’s page will take, but I also don’t want to push it back TOO far and interfere with the TWC Voting Incentive on Thursday, especially since I just skipped one week already. I dunno, watch the comments on next Monday and we’ll see what’s happening then. I’ll try to at least ink both pages in the same session, that might help with time management. We’ll see.
Simple. She always puts her two kids first, and other children are ranked somewhere like 40th to 103rd place, depending on the circumstances, situation & whatever shiny creations are currently in her mind. Though 103rd place might be a bit too close to 1st place for where they rank in Tabitha’s list of priorities when she’s concentrating on a complicated science project…
But, still, anything that happens to her zombie-babies, she WILL destroy anyone and everything REMOTELY related to it. She’s a Nice Mad-Scientist while Alphonse & Bridget are what keeps her nice & friendly. Something happens to them, and her “destroy worlds” switch goes off, and you get to see what happens when she actually bothers to weaponise her actions. Warning, even Solar Systems might not survive.
It also helps that Bridget & Alphonse are already impossibly mature and well-behaved kids to start with. Half the time Tabitha doesn’t even NEED to be that “good” at raising them.
she was good enough at ‘raising’ them the first time, doesn’t need as much continued effort
Kids are much easier to raise if you build them out of quality parts using proper laboratory protocols.
got to rob high quality grave yards
Also: Sometimes, rarely, inflicting trauma on children is the correct parenting tactic – if you live next to an active minefield, your kids NEED to be very very very afraid of it. Tabitha did 100% correct thing here, she is not to be reprimanded at all – making those kids abjectly terrified of Stilez (who is absolutely an active minefield) is exactly what they need in order to avoid them doing something stupid (which they would totally do) that would end up at a minimum getting them killed and probably result in the destruction of the ship and a large surrounding area. There is no lesser tactic that would prevent this. Trauma is irrelevant if it ingrains needed survival instincts. Dying is even more traumatic! Just ask those guys back at the arms dealer convention, who failed to have the needed survival instincts! In fact, Avi is probably still not quite terrified enough not to do something stupid. She may need to scare him some more.
does bring up the question of valuing trauma when it isn’t stopping people from doing stupid things. Avi still plans to do something. does this mean he needs more trauma? is trauma just not an effective teaching tool with him? is it worse for him to be traumatized and still die, than if he just died care free?
Much like Frank, Avi always needs more trauma. But, yeah, I can definitely see him as being someone for whom trauma is not an effective teaching tool. However, the only way to know for sure is to keep traumatizing him more, just in case trauma really is effective and you just haven’t used enough of it yet!