page 1349 – Just A Slight Resemblance
FINALLY! Sorry this one took so long, gang. The stuff around the house did indeed throw everything for a loop… and, of course, I only managed to wind up scratching the surface of it last week, so I may well end up getting everything horribly thrown off AGAIN this coming week! Such fun!
Anyway, just so you know, I was STRONGLY tempted to stretch this “watching TV” bit out across several pages of just “Hey, remember THIS side character?” gags, but ultimately I did the responsible thing and focused on actually moving the plot forward. Because, you know, even Far Out There needs to have that happen every once and a while. And besides, it’s not like I didn’t manage to cram a LOT of callbacks into this one page anyway.
But yeah, HOPEFULLY falling a literal entire day behind schedule working on this page won’t affect getting the next TWC Voting Incentive up on Friday. As long as I can avoid spending another ENTIRE day dragging my belonging back and forth across a house, I’ll probably be fine. Just, ya know, half a day doing that should be manageable. Hopefully.
EDIT: THE HOPE CAME TRUE! New TWC Voting Incentive is up!
That explains a SURPRISING amount about him.
Yeah, I figured it was about time we actually saw some of this in an actual comic instead of just bonus incentives and comment threads.
I’m honestly curious if Avi’s the only male of the family, or if they focus most of their attention to the females as they are easier to market in the Super-modeling Industry.
It’s the latter. I don’t think there’ll be room to bring this up in a future comic, but I’m pretty sure that the dudes marrying into the family take on the “Raban” surname from their wives because it’s more marketable.
Oh, the “dudes marrying in take on the Raban name due to marketability” thing would 100% happen. I was more referring to those born into the family.
Between how rich the Reban’s have been previously stated to be, and how much they emphasise their looks, I can easily see situations which result in them ensuring boys don’t typically get born into the family. From using external wombs to prevent the mother’s from developing stretch marks during pregnancy, to genetically confirming the child’s appearance & gender long before they’re born. As such, I wouldn’t be shocked if Avi was a 1 in 1,000 situation where either all the other options were either plain girls or pretty males like himself.
Alternatively, I can see Avi being a seed-child, where he’s expected to marry non-Raban Supermodels and his grandchildren and/or great-grandchildren are expected to marry back into the family.
Considering that baby gender selection is already pretty accurate in RL, we can assume it’s 99.999999% accurate with FOT science. Seeing as how there hasn’t been a boy born into that stupermodel clan for over 1,000 years, it’s a reasonable assumption that someone screwed up. Even if they really did want a boy for some reason, and even if his parents told him repeatedly that he was totally wanted, nobody’s going to believe it. So all the kid has to do is Space-Google his own name on the Space-Internet and he’ll get 1,000,000 links to
stalkerfan web sites for the models from about a decade or so ago referring to the birth of a male Raban as “tragic error” “colossal mistake” “incredible blunder”…and those are just the nice polite phrases…it gets way worse! (And the reports that the Rabans sued the baby-gender-selection service for a zillion spacedollars and drove them out of business don’t help much either)That’s the kind of thing that would screw up even a normal kid who isn’t Avi. Aside from the obvious need to get attention that is never paid to him, he probably feels like he needs to justify his very existence by being something extraordinary like a galactic superhero or something.
…and then Layla made an inappropriate joke about disembodied brains, and Tabitha got all upset, and then Layla got lectured by Vengeance…no, wait, never mind, I think we already did all that somewhere else 😉
I started to say that it’d be pretty hard to make Tabitha genuinely upset over anything, but then I realized we have seen it happen… and it tends to involve slights against her family, so you might actually be on to something there!