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Wednesday: Meanwhile, Kestrel is washing her hair.
(From General Protection Fault. Click for sheesh.)
Jeff Darlington's extensive game of snail chess has been known to rely upon the Idiot Plot. (This is part of Roger Ebert's extensive lexicon, and refers to "any plot containing problems which would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiots." And, as we've said quite recently, the Trish situation is a key example of this. Ten minutes of googling, people. Ten minutes. Or less; the distinctions between schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder are right there in each of the relevant pages on Wikipedia, if that's your thing.
(I'd just like to reinforce this point, guys: these are super-hyper-übergeeks who haven't thought to punch two strings into Wikipedia's search engine. It's not always desperately reliable, as recent events have demonstrated, but it's a place to start. If nothing else, as of this writing, the ICD-10 codes for schizophrenia and multiple personality are correctly cited in their corresponding Wikipedia articles. Multiplicity doesn't merit any significant writeup, but schizophrenia is well documented.)
As it turns out, the only non-idiot is Patty, a distant and secondary cast member without all that much accumulated street cred. There's not really much reason to trust her if she pops over to one of the beloved gang and gives them the skinny. And, really, what does it gain her at this point to explain it, anyway? The wedding party is already so very hung up on the symmetry issue (even Nick thinks that this is ultimately the right thing, for some reason, bizarre chocolate-as-benzodiazepene episode aside) that they were willing to have a highly unstable bridesmaid to begin with. So she's unstable and dishonest now? She can wear a dress, right? That's more than Patty's willing to do. I'm sure Fooker can get hold of enough tranqs to make any little episodes a nonissue. Or a taser.
Of course, all of this is a way to further drive home the point (in case you've forgotten over the duration) that Trish is a bungling, incompetent operative who can't be bothered to do any research for her own cover story, let alone get into Nick's laboratory or pants. Therefore, the situation will explode. This point has not been handled with any subtlety whatsoever.
Then again, with snail chess, you can't afford to be subtle. Your readers might forget.
If you come to these stories in larger chunks, the pacing surrounding Trish the Sloppy Fake Schizo-Multiple almost starts to make sense. Almost. Sort of. You get a big establishing story at the start of year six, and the beginnings of a resolution for year eight. That's enough time to cram a couple of wacky Trish stories in over the intervening years, in between other story clusters. If you read straight through, it doesn't seem quite so bad.
(I say "quite." I'm not claiming that the strip transforms into a rollercoaster ride if you read it all in one go, not by a long shot.)
Keenspot Premium subscribers have one advantage here: the weekly presentation option. Seven strips on one page. This is far closer to how Darlington scripts the comic (multiple rough comics on a single page), and it reads just a little better; each non-Sunday strip tends to flow into the next one. I suspect that the books are the same way. The flow of Stuff You're Supposed To Remember makes more sense in seven-comic chunks.
But this is a daily strip. Designed to be read as a daily strip, despite Darlington's occasional exhortations to go away for a while, come back, and read any given arc straight through instead. You have to pay money not to fight against bandwidth bottlenecks, render time and (depending on resolution and browser window size) scroll irritation. And, if you're keeping pace by the week, then you have seven days between each tiny drop of accumulated information necessary for The Big Reveal. And, make no mistake, these are tiny drops; sorting the strips together into logical units mostly serves to minimize the padding.
There is a difference between a slow, gradual build and the style of storytelling most often found in GPF. Plot chunks reach 85% resolution, only to have someone wander off into the land of This Will Be Dealt With Later. More often than not, a shadowy figure who seems Awfully Familiar makes ominous pronouncements or communications at the end. (Either that, or one of the unresolved plot threads pops back up out of nowhere.) The threads call attention to themselves, so that you know they will be resolved Later! When you're not expecting them!
This is not a "twist." This is soap opera.
Soap opera doesn't exist to have resolution. Soap opera exists to keep the reader persistently on tenterhooks. Apart from that, it's not really goal-oriented. As fictive BDSM goes, this is arhythmically flogging your bottom with about a third of the force they need, then going off to find a snack just as they start to get into it. Then, after cookies, the scene restarts abruptly with a completely different implement. The D/s goes by, same as it ever was.
(I can almost hear Alisin now: "What, that's all?")
If GPF sold itself as soap opera, that'd be fine. But overt promises of eventual resolution, if only you would be patient, run counter to this form of presentation. Any attempt to wrap things up begins to collapse under the weight of its own detail, of things we're supposed to remember. The energy isn't being channeled, so much as partitioned and reassembled when we reach certain goalposts.
So, we've waited two years and change for this anticlimax. In the process, common misconceptions of two mental conditions -- misconceptions which, in the popular culture and consciousness, have served to stigmatize and antagonize people with those conditions for years -- have been used as a tenterhook. (Never mind what those misconceptions do when applied to fictional antagonists in general.) And it's all going to end in tears, because a group of super-skilled geek geniuses couldn't be arsed to do a bit of reading about a colleague's ostensible issues.
It's as though the point was to have Trish appear and screw up her part of the wedding, and everything else about her story had simply been working backwards from that goal. Following the checklist. "Rubber flogger? Done. Red star clapper paddle? Here y'go. Yawn. Hair pull? 'Kay..."
Getting the buttons pushed in order, so that we can get to the main event.
Marking time.
Posted by Wednesday White at December 8, 2005 12:52 PM
Comments
Comment from: SeanH posted at December 8, 2005 1:09 PM
As fictive BDSM goes, this is arhythmically flogging your bottom with about a third of the force they need, then going off to find a snack just as they start to get into it. Then, after cookies, the scene restarts abruptly with a completely different implement.
I humbly request that every subsequent snark contain at least one BDSM analogy.
Comment from: Christopher B. Wright posted at December 8, 2005 1:11 PM
As to the "idiot" thing -- Schizophrenia and MP's are *frequently* confused by the general population... which is why, whenever I read about one or the other, I always see a disclaimer stressing that they are not the same thing. Jeff is playing on the fact that the two get confused by people *all the time.* Geeks are no more or less immune to this than anyone else, unless they have an interest in psychology. If someone tells me that they had cancer or Multiple Sclerosis, my first impulse isn't to trawl the net looking for symptoms to see if they're lying -- my first impulse is to take their word for it. If someone tells me they have ADD or they are bipolar or something along those lines, I also tend to take their word for it. In any of those cases, the person could be lying to me, but unless they're asking for money, why would I care? I still don't see the problem with that.
As to the pacing, well, I can see how some people would be put off by it. It's never bothered me.
Comment from: Wednesday White posted at December 8, 2005 1:15 PM
It's got nothing to do with seeing if they're lying and everything to do with figuring out what to expect. They were making a deliberate effort to include her in social functions. Trish claims to be bad about her medication, at least at first. Medication itself can have some wacky side effects on its own, so she might have had a good reason for not being diligent about it.
When someone in my life tells me they have a particular condition that I don't know about, I go and read up on what to expect from the situation. My friends and loved ones have tended to do the same for me. When something comes up to disrupt life, you read the documentation.
Comment from: Christopher B. Wright posted at December 8, 2005 1:21 PM
When someone in my life tells me they have a particular condition that I don't know about, I go and read up on what to expect from the situation. My friends and loved ones have tended to do the same for me. When something comes up to disrupt life, you read the documentation.
*You* do. Which is laudible, but not everyone does. I don't. When someone in my life tells me they have a particular condition that I don't know about, I expect that they'll know me well enough to feel free to tell me what accommodations need to be made for them.
Besides, I'm a technical writer. I *never* read documentation...
Comment from: Wednesday White posted at December 8, 2005 1:32 PM
Because someone with a mental disorder that affects their ability to interact reasonably with the outside world (which isn't often the case with MPD/DID, and isn't necessarily the case with schizophrenia, but is obviously the case with Trish's persona) is going to be together enough to go into detail about that? I don't think that's a safe assumption to make when you live in a world like the GPF gang's, and you attract bizarre and unusual events with your breakfast cereal. It's irresponsible, especially if you're making a visible attempt to Care About Them and Include Them In Things.
Then again, Nick, for example, can't be bothered to keep encrypted offsite backups of certain Mutex logs, even when they might very well be of strong sentimental value to his future wife -- and destroys them in a fit of pique, no less. I hope this tendency doesn't extend to his day job.
I've always been offended by the geek stereotype that we don't read documentation, or shouldn't be expected to, or whatever. That's a bloody toxic way to act. And who among us, besides, is buying all the O'Reilly books?
Comment from: gwalla posted at December 8, 2005 1:45 PM
I was having flashbacks to the Wheel Of Time series while reading this.
Comment from: Christopher B. Wright posted at December 8, 2005 1:47 PM
It's irresponsible, especially if you're making a visible attempt to Care About Them and Include Them In Things.
It's irresponsible, therefore it doesn't happen?
Then again, Nick, for example, can't be bothered to keep encrypted offsite backups of certain Mutex logs, even when they might very well be of strong sentimental value to his future wife -- and destroys them in a fit of pique, no less. I hope this tendency doesn't extend to his day job.
When I started Help Desk I didn't bother making backups of my strips, either. One day I installed a new SCSI drive by sandwiching it between two IDE drives and the heat from the SCSI drive fried the other two -- one of which had all of the files I used to create the early strips.
As far as GPF is concerned, Nick built the mutex because he has some kind of mad scientist gene, like his uncle Wisebottom... and carelessness appears to be a trait that comes hand-in-hand with it.
I've always been offended by the geek stereotype that we don't read documentation, or shouldn't be expected to, or whatever. That's a bloody toxic way to act. And who among us, besides, is buying all the O'Reilly books?
You can be offended if you like. It's true for me nonetheless.
Though I never said I didn't *buy* the books. They just tend to gather dust.
Comment from: 32_footsteps posted at December 8, 2005 1:50 PM
See, I could buy the carelessness angle if Nick trusted Trish at all. But as has been made quite clear, he doesn't at all. If someone I didn't trust claimed to have some medical issue I could look up, I'd be sure to do so. If, for no other reason, to see if my lack of trust is founded on something credible.
Comment from: sun tzu posted at December 8, 2005 2:30 PM
Jeez, are you actively looking for excuses to criticize GPF? I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculus. For instance, Patty is NOT the first character to notice the incoherence in Trish's lies - Fred and Nick too are aware that Schizophrenia isn't the same thing as multiple personalities. It's one of the chief reasons Nick doesn't trust her.
Comment from: Darren Bleuel posted at December 8, 2005 2:31 PM
Hey Weds,
Thus far, I've agreed with a lot of your points (sorry I'm only posting to the one in which I am in contention), but one of your points I have to take issue with is that good stories should be short and sweet, with plot points all nicely wrapped up at the end of each 23 minute episode.
That's the polar opposite of what I find to be great about webcomics, as opposed to nearly every other form of entertainment on earth. It's certainly opposite of the method with which I do my own comic. I don't consider it "soap opera" to leave issues hanging. I consider it a closer model of real life, in which issues are not wrapped up neatly after 23 minutes (or, in the case of newspaper comics--no more than two weeks).
In fact, wasn't there a complaint here (by Eric, I think), about Ki's dad "suddenly seeing the error of his ways" and thus all was right with the world? So between the two of you, you're saying the problem with GPF is that (a) things get wrapped up too nicely and quickly and (b) things don't get wrapped up nicely and quickly enough?
Comment from: Brendan posted at December 8, 2005 2:41 PM
Even if the know the difference, how are they supposed to know she does? Sure, a psychiatrist might have corrected her now and again, but the two are used interchangeably enough in layman's speech that she still might get them confused. Similarly, people call schizotypal schizoid and schizoid antisocial all the time, even people who should know better, and do know better.
Comment from: Zaq posted at December 8, 2005 2:45 PM
Darren: There's a difference between a nice extended plot arc and introducing a Big Thing which you just leave sitting there. Many subpar cartoonists (not pointing a single finger, I'm not thinking of any particular examples) call them the same thing, which causes Problems.
Comment from: theliel posted at December 8, 2005 3:11 PM
I gotta back up wends. especially since she so eloquently put it into a metaphor i can understand (that random amount of kinky or kink aware people on the net, otoh, is another response. most liekly best left to professionals as part of doctorial thesies.)
It's the 'sit com' syndrome. nothing is ever resolved. even 'big changes' don't feel it, and other changes feel forced. just...these guys are supposed to be geeks, austensably verymuch like people i know and work with, yet when reading later strips i heard loud exclamations in the office about 'what are you doing' from people. much like in a bad horror flick when people do stupid things.
it's very much appropriate, and in long, i agree.
(also, more bdsm analogies, they are both amusing AND diverting)
Comment from: kirabug posted at December 8, 2005 4:58 PM
You get a big establishing story at the start of year six, and the beginnings of a resolution for year eight. [...]If you read straight through, it doesn't seem quite so bad.
This is the exact way I feel when I approach Megatokyo. The story doesn't move along as coherent blocks so much as in pages of a book.... in order to make consistent sense out of it I have to back up by about a month and then reread that month all at one shot, oh, about every month or so. I'm trying to learn from it so I don't make the same mistakes, but dang, pacing is hard.
Comment from: Jamie posted at December 8, 2005 5:09 PM
As others have said, Schizophrenia is OFTEN confused with MP. This confusion is so integrated into our society that I genuinely believe people who know better just go with it. In fact, I heard schizophrenia defined as MP on a recent TV show, I think one of the Law & Orders.
Comment from: ItsWalky posted at December 8, 2005 5:15 PM
Though I generally agree with you, Weds, when it comes to GPF's gender/sexuality issues, I kinda think you're reaching here. At the very least, since the offending issues today are the sort of things that plague most ongoing dramatic storylines, I'd personally find some other strip to showcase your distaste for them. Otherwise, by the time you get to the meat of your issues with GPF, you might find that people have tuned you out. I agree with the above poster that, at least to onlookers, that you appear to be *looking* for problems.
(If I were Jeff, I'd start purposefully putting these things in, 'cuz I'd be all for getting Snarked every week. Jeff's got a racket going. No such thing as bad publicity! Well, sort of. Ask Michael Jackson.)
Anyway. Ha ha ha. I love Satan!
Comment from: PatMan posted at December 8, 2005 5:36 PM
Ghwalla worte:
"I was having flashbacks to the Wheel Of Time series while reading this."
Psssht. That's nothing. Now Scot Lobdell, there was a soap opera writer. I swear, it took me three years to figure out that X-men was supposed to be about super mutant battles and carefully plotted super archs, not angsty talks by the pool.
Sold all my Lobdell books for ridiculous prices so I could buy up the early Claremont stuff.
(And then there's Excalibur. Curse you Alan Davis for throwing out some of Claremont's most intruiging plotlines! Shadowcat murdered an alternate reality Saturnine while blanked out! What was up with that?)
(Not that I didin't adore Alan Davis's run as writer.)
Comment from: Maritza Campos posted at December 8, 2005 5:37 PM
Of course you love Satan, cuz he's got BOOBIES!
Comment from: siwangmu posted at December 8, 2005 5:58 PM
Alright, I did a quick consultation with my roommate. We both think the idea of a bunch of geeks not knowing this already and not looking into it, despite mistrust, would annoy us to death if we read the strip. It may be a peculiarity of our social milieu, but there you go. My roommate has no idea what the strip is and therefore holds no grudge, but when I described the basic situation she was actually getting visibly annoyed with me until I got to the "No, this is the thing I'm criticizing" part. Neither of us is Weds, has a reason to hate the strip or would be inclined to overlook the disorder conflation even if no one was mentioning it.
Comment from: Ununnilium posted at December 8, 2005 6:08 PM
I pretty much totally agree with Weds, except that, dangit, that's what a *badly done* soap opera is like, not *all* soap operas. IMHO.
(And it disturbs me a bit that I totally understand the BDSM metaphor. >>v)
Comment from: Tice with a J posted at December 8, 2005 10:43 PM
Of course you love Satan, cuz he's got BOOBIES!
I believe the proper phrasing would be: she's got boobies.
Comment from: Eric Astor posted at December 9, 2005 12:44 AM
By the way - as I recall, a large part of the argument when evil Trish's excuse first emerged centered on the more obscure point that there is no MEDICATION that helps with dissociative identity disorder. Many such medications exist for schizophrenia, each with its own variety of psychological side effects and every one equally hard to appropriately dose (as I know - dating a Type I bipolar with fairly strong schizophrenic episodes tends to educate you fairly quickly, especially if you do your research).
Note that what tips Patty off is NOT the confusion between schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, which only raises her suspicions, but the fact that Trish claims that the medication helps her keep her "multiple personalities" in check. I'll admit... I don't love Mr. Darlington's setup or management of this particular piece of suspense, but he is, at least, consistent with reality, despite the stretch he introduces with the idea that no one else got this yet.
Comment from: Tangent posted at December 9, 2005 9:34 AM
Two things. First, Maritza... eeeeeeeeeeeevil! Eeeeeeeeeeeeevil, I say!!! *twitch* I'd almost forgotten that... *twitch*
Second: Weds, perhaps you should look at this instead as a quick lesson for Ki. Ki is so determined to have a symmetrical "perfect" wedding that she's willing to make a mistake and let someone few people trusts be a bridesmaid. Some brides-to-be do some awfully silly things to have this day be "perfect" and Ki made one.
Thus Trish's presence has one purpose: to remind Ki that things /won't/ go perfectly, and that having an asymetrical wedding is just fine. And then to roll with the punches. Or in other words, I think Trish is going to be told "thanks but we don't need you after all" and they'll go one bridesmaid short.
Robert A. Howard, Tangents
http://www.tangents.us
Comment from: Timothy Goddard posted at December 9, 2005 1:00 PM
If GPF sold itself as soap opera, that'd be fine.
From Keenspot.com:
A geek soap opera filled with sentient slime molds, temporal paradoxes, Inventor's Genes, and more jokes than you can shake a 10Base-T networking card at.
Comment from: Paul A. posted at December 11, 2005 8:05 AM
I think Trish is going to be told "thanks but we don't need you after all" and they'll go one bridesmaid short.
Bet you half a dollar?
Comment from: Sean Duggan posted at December 18, 2005 4:34 AM
Well, now that Trish is out of this world and possibly into the next, the whole thing is resolved. ^_^ So, indeed, one bridesmaid short, unless the original Trish shows up alive, having been in a coma all this time.
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