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Eric: Apropos of nothing, have we truly ruled out that the man's surname isn't "Luca" and his actual given name "King?"

(From Nukees! Click on the thumbnail for full sized Funky Chick!)

This snark is going to indulge in a little good old fashioned analysis. Alternately, today might be an example of what Joe Zabel refers to as my obsessively fannish persona. I have no way to tell because I don't even know what that means (other that I'm clearly damned if I do and damned if I don't), but I digress. I think today's Nukees is what I'm going to call a Keystone strip.

A Keystone strip (yeah yeah, I know. Adding to the Lexicon and never actually updating the Lexicon. Whatever. Get over it) is a strip upon which the structure of the story rests. Before the Keystone strip is published, the story is building towards it, presaging its presence. After the Keystone strip is published, the subsequent story rests upon it. The Keystones themselves aren't necessarily revelatory. They are, however, absolutely necessary. Pull those strips out, and the structure of the story collapses, unable to support itself.

Significant buildup has led to today's strip -- the long awaited, deeply anticipated return of Ma'at, the Personification of Truth, Order and Efficiency and Gav's one true love, met the last time Gav went into clinical death and changing Gav's life course following. We ended on a cliffhanger, and we have today's strip, where Gav has returned to Ma'at's apartment... and found Cecilia.

Cecilia, for those new to Nukees, is a law student at UC-Berkeley, who met Suzy Gee (who if you don't know you should check the Nukees Cast Page) when they took psychology courses together. Cecilia has dove into the Nukees pool headfirst, immediately taking up King Luca's quests (and then kidnapping him for a long period of time) and acting as Gav's aide-de-camp and Sheriff of Nottingham during the /~hua/bin/hood saga. Over time, it has come out that Cecilia has an obsessive need to be like, but doesn't really understand how to make friends. Instead, she makes trouble, generally by trying to play the same games the others play, but taking them to their extremes. She was the genesis point of the breakup of King Luca and Suzy, when she forced Suzy to realize that Luca doesn't take anything seriously (most particularly their relationship, because "if it isn't fun, then what is the point.") At the same time, it also became clear that Luca was a phenomenal boyfriend who was considerate and truly cared about Suzy. Naturally, Suzy dumped him. But I digress.

The point is, Cecilia has always been more an enabler than an instigator. She doesn't cause trouble, she assists it. She assisted Suzy's sister Cindy Lee's quest to learn the secrets of the Treasure Room. She assisted Gav's drive to use King Luca's absence to conquer the Nukee undergrads and use them to remake and torment Teri. She assisted Suzy's own quest to get the Treasure Key itself. And, when Gav was being tortured by Teri through a panorama of images being projected onto his glasses lenses, she effectively yes-anded whatever he said.

But left to her own devices, she is all alone, and very scared, and only wants friends but does not know how to have them. Which may be why she and Suzy don't mix well at all, despite being friends. Cecelia yearns for friends and adventures and fun. Suzy has all of them, and yearns to leave them behind and graduate -- which in this strip is akin to abandonment.

So, what does that have to do with today's strip, you wonder? And what makes today a keystone strip? After all, no questions are being answered. If anything, questions are being asked, instead.

Well, let's go back to another keystone strip. This was during Gav's joust with Teri, when she was confusing his perceptions with images and sounds being projected through his glasses (which he can't remove because... well, among other things because they've been welded to some of his ear piercings, and which are internet-capable for the Gavcam that downloads images to his website. But I digress). Teri was trying to make Gav miserable, but for the most part it was failing. And then he perceived Cecilia as Ma'at, who as we mentioned before he met during his last near-death experience. And this took the heart out of Gav's fight. It was too dirty a set of pool for Teri to inflict on him. He was just as happy to die after that, since death would -- in his mind -- lead either to the oblivion he believed in or an eternity in Ma'at's apartment.

The only thing is... how would Teri know what Ma'at looked like? Or even who she was, outside of the traditional representations? Teri might be very closely connected to Gav, and learning more about him all the time, but she can't read his mind.

The more likely scenario is that Gav, still recovering from a near death experience, landed with a rather hard impact on Cecilia -- hard enough that he was woozy in the strip in question. Which means Ma'at was his hallucination. For some reason, before he ever even really knew Cecilia, he associated her with his one true love.

And now, in today's keystone, we see that he perceives Ma'at as Cecilia, in converse. The circle, as a Sith Lord might say, is complete. The equation is balanced.

The question is -- why?

Well, that goes back to the nature of Gav's near-death experiences. A nature we don't actually know the truth of. There are several possible scenarios I can think of, however, and each has their own set of implications.

1. The afterlife Gav perceives is real. He really did start up the tunnel of rapturous light each time, he really did dive through the tunnel walls both times, and he really has been galavanting about with the gods for five plus months worth of strips. If this scenario is true, then everything is at face value. Gav really has met and fallen in love with Ma'at, who fell in love with Gav in return. It's entirely possibly she traveled with him, waiting for an appropriate 'host,' and slid into Cecilia's skin when Gav and Cecilia collided in the earlier keystone strip. Cecilia, now in Ma'at's apartment, is the real Cecilia, displaced by Ma'at in the real world.

This, frankly, is highly unlikely. Nukees is not a fantasy strip, and I don't think Bleuel would drive the strip in that direction. We'll know in a few days if it's likely, however. If Cecilia (in Ma'at's apartment) doesn't remember recent events or doesn't reference them, then we're on track to showing this scenario as having strength.

Alternately, if it's all true, then Cecilia might naturally be an avatar of Ma'at, or otherwise might be cohabiting with the essence of Ma'at, or otherwise have some situation where Ma'at==Cecilia==Ma'at. This has the advantage of being a version of Ma'at that Gav can love in the 'living' world, while sidestepping the whole 'Ma'at is married' issue that Mythology forces upon us. (Though if I remember my mythology, marriages are rarely impediments to affairs between the gods and mortals.)

This variant is more likely, since it means that Cecilia can be here and on Earth at the same time. It also lets Ma'at A) really exist and B) be an active part of the Nukees cast outside of Gav's near-death experiences, which is appealing in all ways. I can easily see this variant or something close being the truth of the matter, but my personal bets are against it. The test for this one is simple enough -- if there's evidence that Cecilia consciously or subconsciously remembers these events, then bang's your uncle.

2. None of this is 'real.' There is no tunnel of rapturous light. There is no city of the Gods. There is not now nor has there ever been a Ma'at. All of this is Gav's oxygen starved brain creating a delusion in his last moments of life. This one has a lot going for it. We know Gav "slept through" an Egyptian Mythology course, so it's acceptable that his brain has some myth flotsam floating around it. Gav's hallucination of Ma'at over Cecilia's body -- caused by his fall and impact with her when he was still recovering from nearly having died before -- has given him certain subconscious predilections that Cecilia and Ma'at are the same person. This may also be Gav's subconsciousness smacking Gav upside the head and saying "this is the only girl on Earth who'll take your insanity at face value and jump in with it. Grab her, you moron!

This won't be as popular a theory, since it consigns Ma'at to nothing more than an O₂ starved brain trying to cudgel Gav's conscious mind into better life choices, but I think in a lot of ways it fits Nukees better as a whole. Nukees is the comic strip of Agnostica and the invocation of "Frank" instead of "God." Having a purely mundane explanation of all of this is at the very least thematic.

The test for this scenario is simple -- whatever happens between Gav and Cecilia/Ma'at in this sequence is remembered by Gav but in no way remembered by Cecilia upon his eventual reawakening. Of course, Gav might not know it, because Cecilia's already shown a willingness to play along with whatever cockamamie scheme comes out of his mouth. We the readers may be able to tell even if Gav himself can't, however.

3. It doesn't matter. Gav's about to die. This is possible, but highly unlikely. The goth girls and Danny seem pretty unconcerned with whether or not Gav is badly hurt, so the likelihood of a hospital jumpstart of Gav's heart is significantly lower than the last time. So, this might be Gav's sailing into the sunset, whereupon the strip then moves on to the other cast members. Of course, sooner or later Gav might return in some other, more terrible form.

It seems nigh impossible that this is true, but we have to put the card on the table. Bleuel might have reached a point where he wants to close out Gav, at least for a while, and work on other things. And death would certainly accomplish that. It's not like we'd expect Gav to stay dead, after all.

4. All of this is Teri's doing. We know that, despite being designed to fight opponents (after all, Teri started life as a virtual pet fighting monster), Teri actually loves Gav. However, it seems less and less likely it's a romantic love and more and more likely it's the love of a psychotic daughter for her megalomaniacal father. We believe that Gav's glasses-lenses were replaced after they shattered when he nearly died the last time. However, the possibility exists that they were replaced beforehand, and in recognizing that Gav is in a near-death state, Teri's doing a little brain programming with subliminals. This would explain how she knew what Ma'at looked like -- and for whatever reason Teri is trying to push Gav and Cecilia together.

I don't personally buy this theory, mind, but it's at least possible enough that it should be mentioned.

Regardless of if one of those scenarios or any number of others is true, today's strip is a keystone both of what has come before and what comes after. This was the moment of subversion of expectation, of payoff from earlier seeds, of innate structure. What gets built on this keystone we don't yet know.

I know Ma'at fans are disappointed, today. I've heard from a couple. I, on the other hand, see nothing but possibility moving forward. And at the very least, the next iteration should be interesting.

Especially when we remember that Cecilia kissed Suzy Gee....

Posted by Eric Burns-White at June 13, 2005 11:26 AM

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