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familial stranger, page 16
🕑 Added 2018-06-12 03:50:18 +0000 UTC first page - previous page - next pagethis page was interesting to write out, mostly for lola's lines. lola's been such a well-established character for so long, it's been a while since i thought i could say anything truly new about her.
lola's been confrontationally passive-aggressive before, sometimes as a joke in sketch strips, sometimes in other places, but right here it's sort of in its most unbridled toxic form, which lola will reflect on a bit before the comic's over (hopefully).
the downside to noticing many small things is that you notice a lot of people's mistakes and flaws, and when you're always trying to keep your head down and your mouth shut, it starts to turn into resentment.
i was thinking about how this is definitely a behavior she learned from her mother, obviously went back to look back at elizabeth's previous dialogue to see how similar it was.
asking loaded questions to which there is no answer that would diffuse the situation or fix the problem
and following up with insults that prompt jason to defend himself if he doesn't answer
to, ideally, eventually get a response that gives her something to throw back in his face, along with a long-standing relevant grudge.
this method of handling conflict pretty quickly instills a sense of helplessness and unshakable guilt in the person you're arguing with. they stop arguing back, because their words are quickly used against them. they don't retaliate later by starting to hold grudges back, because by connecting an irrelevant mistake from the past with the current argument, you've implicitly led them to believe there wasn't just a mistake they made, but an immutable flaw about their person that you've barely tolerated.
(you can also see elizabeth do the same leading question thing here. at this point, she can either directly insult lola and lola will leave, or she can save it for the garden of resentment.)
i can say that just because you learned to act a specific way from your parents doesn't mean you're at liberty to do it as an adult; although i can also say that people don't just gain knowledge out of thin air without being taught.
i would guess that, while lola's passivity is explained by other circumstances like defensiveness from her mother's abuse and general racism, she also actively represses herself because she's afraid of how she acts when she deals with conflict. lola still hasn't ever been shown entertaining the tense conversations you need to have in your relationships to address conflict, but she has stopped being so afraid of the potential of conflict that doesn't exist yet.
this is a pretty important distinction from elizabeth, in my opinion, because it says "i don't like this, but i don't know what else to do" rather than "i don't know what else to do, but that's fine, because this works."
i won't say that lola's exactly like her mother, or abusive at all, but she's got some work to do on herself. it's important to me to acknowledge that saying you don't want to be like your parents, or that you won't, isn't enough, and that any behavior can be twisted into abuse, but many of them are only abuse with repetition to create the cycle of abuse itself.
while i was looking over those obyki pages, a couple of other interesting things i noticed:
jason's pause at the beginning of the argument. he was already familiar with this cycle of behavior (he was probably also aware that there was no winning and there was no stopping it from happening). no doubt his attempt to diffuse the argument in this page was because of the same familiarity.
lola says "best for me" when throwing words back, but jason had phrased it differently. however, the phrasing lola used was also used during the argument in obyki.
Comments
bramblepaws
i keep coming back to reread this page & your commentary on it. it's so interesting to see Lola's personality explored further -- and really interesting to see the foundation that makes her like this. you put so much thought into making your characters real, it's really inspiring.
RJ
I really appreciate your commentary on this page + the examples. I don't really have an insightful response rn but it's always interesting to see the inner workings
