Latest Page Discussions/Comic Update Chitchat

[Lazy8]

What I've been thinking is that right now, Emil isn't really sure how to express all the emotions he's feeling, and he doesn't really have any good opportunities to either. Like wavewright said, it's been maybe a day or two since the "shopping" scene, after which point Emil has been cut off from connecting emotionally with Lalli for a while. So Tuuri's death came at a time when Emil and Lalli's relationship was strained and uncertain, Emil can't communicate with Reynir, and I doubt he feels very comfortable expressing whatever strong emotions he's feeling to either Sigrun or Mikkel.

So now to these recent pages- I don't think Emil is being an "uncaring narcissist." I think he's between a rock and a hard place emotionally, and to me it looks like he's finally giving Lalli the space he needs.  Also, looking back at page 759, Emil volunteers to stay with Lalli so he can finish his mage work. Then he patiently waits until Lalli finishes, and follows him away from the cattank. By trying to walk evenly with Lalli, he showed that he was willing to try and reconcile, but Lalli made it clear that he is in no mood for that, so Emil now hangs back.

I think Emil is still being quite sympathetic to Lalli, and not in the heavy-handed way that has caused them problems before.

Maybe. I'll admit that it's that "Are we going now?", coupled with Emil's bored expression, that bothers me the most. From the perspective of "giving Lalli his space", I think that whole scene would have worked better if he'd simply stayed quiet, and not said anything at all, as he has at other times when he was aware that Lalli needed his space. I hope that what he does on the next few pages will answer some of those questions.

[Jharad17]

I think what Keeper said makes the most sense to me. Emil's been completely rebuffed by Lalli several times now, and, as mentioned, he can't talk with Reynir, and he doesn't seem likely to open up about how Tuuri's death is affecting him with either "Are you done moping now?" Sigrun or "Face cancer"/momma-cat killer Mikkel. Of course, he can't really "talk" with Lalli either, but they've had that non-verbal communication thing going on since they met. And Emil really felt Lalli was a friend. So, he's lost two people in as many days (if wavewright's correct about the time, and I suspect they are.) So, in my estimation, Emil is reeling, emotionally, but keeping himself in check, deliberately casual and maybe looking for an opportunity to reconnect with Lalli, but he keeps getting rebuffed.

But we'll see what happens over the next few days, I guess.

[Lazy8]

I actually managed to come up with my own explanation over the past few hours, which is that Emil, unlike Sigrun or even Mikkel, has rarely if ever admitted he was wrong, because he spent the entirety of his childhood being taught that he could do no wrong. Instead, whenever he's in a bad situation (public school, the Cleansers), instead of engaging in any degree of self-reflection and considering the possibility that part of the problem might be with him, he puts all of the blame on the situation and runs away to something that he thinks is going to be better. Rinse and repeat.

So, Emil is very strongly empathic and capable of engaging himself fully in suffering provided he's not part of the problems. The kittens died because they were left in cold water and separated from their mother for too long - not Emil's fault. Mamacat died because she was torn up by a dog Beast - not Emil's fault. Cthulhund died because it was unfortunate enough to be non-immune and catch the Rash, and he was doing it a favor by putting it out of its misery - not Emil's fault. But, now that his friend is upset because Emil inadvertently said something hurtful, when he reassured Lalli that it was going to be okay and it turned out to be very much not okay? I can see the possibility that Emil would be mentally running away from anything and everything that's wrong with this situation, especially as relates to his own involvement in it.

I could be wrong. But it's the only thing I could come up with that makes the remotest amount of sense.

[CAMIR]

I can understand why Emil's behavior seems off-putting to you, Lazy8.

Apart from what has been already said I just want to throw in another two cents that might or might not make sense.
First of all there is this phenomenon in movies that people cry a lot when animals die but not at all when people die. (There is a fun spoof of that in A Fish called Wanda. To recap for people who haven't seen the movie: A guy is tasked with killing an old lady with three dogs. But he accidentally kills the dogs instead of the lady and is devastated each time because he loves animals. Only when he kills the third dog inadvertently the old woman dies of a heart attack. According to the producers several people asked whether any of those poor dogs were harmed in reality and their reaction was: Nobody cared about the old lady.)
So obviously some people react differently to the death of animals than to the death of people (the example above is from a comedy, granted, but it doesn't change the viewer's reaction towards it.). I don't know why this is the case because I am not one of these people but I hear this quite often. Only recently I saw a cartoon (I have no possibility to find it again) where a person walks away from an injured human only to help an injured animal in the next panel. I find this view biased and exaggerated and there might no statistical truth behind it, but there is a reason why this cartoon existed.
So it might be possible that Emil is one of these people. That it is easier for him to show emotions at the death of animals than humans.

Or he is in denial over Tuuri. At least concerning the readers there was no instant where Emil (or anybody) saw the corpse as opposed to those animals. We don't even know what was buried on the pike. Some people need visual proof of the death of a being to be able to grieve. In Tuuri's case it might not have been provided.

Lastly, another unconnected thought: Maybe the way he showed his emotions when those animals died and the way the others reacted to him showing these emotions prompted him to behave differently this time.

[Lazy8]

I can understand why Emil's behavior seems off-putting to you, Lazy8.

Apart from what has been already said I just want to throw in another two cents that might or might not make sense.
First of all there is this phenomenon in movies that people cry a lot when animals die but not at all when people die. (There is a fun spoof of that in A Fish called Wanda. To recap for people who haven't seen the movie: A guy is tasked with killing an old lady with three dogs. But he accidentally kills the dogs instead of the lady and is devastated each time because he loves animals. Only when he kills the third dog inadvertently the old woman dies of a heart attack. According to the producers several people asked whether any of those poor dogs were harmed in reality and their reaction was: Nobody cared about the old lady.)
So obviously some people react differently to the death of animals than to the death of people (the example above is from a comedy, granted, but it doesn't change the viewer's reaction towards it.). I don't know why this is the case because I am not one of these people but I hear this quite often. Only recently I saw a cartoon (I have no possibility to find it again) where a person walks away from an injured human only to help an injured animal in the next panel. I find this view biased and exaggerated and there might no statistical truth behind it, but there is a reason why this cartoon existed.
So it might be possible that Emil is one of these people. That it is easier for him to show emotions at the death of animals than humans.

Or he is in denial over Tuuri. At least concerning the readers there was no instant where Emil (or anybody) saw the corpse as opposed to those animals. We don't even know what was buried on the pike. Some people need visual proof of the death of a being to be able to grieve. In Tuuri's case it might not have been provided.

Lastly, another unconnected thought: Maybe the way he showed his emotions when those animals died and the way the others reacted to him showing these emotions prompted him to behave differently this time.

That... actually makes weird amounts of sense. (Though I'd also say people were asking the producers specifically about the dogs because they knew no one would actually kill a human just to make a movie - animals might be a different story, thus the common disclaimer "No animals were harmed in the making of this film".)

Denial, as well. He honestly thought everything was going to be okay, and talked to Lalli as if everything was going to be okay, but then it wasn't, and he's still having a hard time coming to terms with that.

[CAMIR]

I'm glad I could be helpful. You're of course right that people knew that the actress wasn't harmed but couldn't be so sure about the dogs.

[thorny]

For what it's worth: a lot of what I read includes awful things happening to humans (mystery stories, comics, sf, etc.); and, for whatever reason, this doesn't generally bother me (though I dislike too many graphic details). But I very much dislike it if awful things happen to non-human animals in these stories. I'm not entirely sure why; but I think it has something to do with their not being capable of understanding it -- I note that such stories rarely have terrible things happen to babies, at least on-stage; babies are also incapable of understanding. An adult or older child being stalked by a murderer, or by a troll, may well be terrified -- but at least they have some idea what's going on.

If it's a nonfiction situation, such as something on the news, I agree that a lot of the reaction probably has to do with people assuming the humans are being cared for, but worried that non-humans may not be. If I see a photo of a flood with humans and other creatures both clinging to debris in the water, I assume that rescue teams are trying to help the humans; but I don't know whether anyone tried to help the cat, and very likely nobody tried to help the fox. (ETA: though a fox would at least not have been expecting help from humans; while a cat very likely would have been, and wouldn't have understood why it was being ignored.) And very often the news story doesn't say.

But the reactions of a human grieving IRL for specific known humans/non-humans seem to me likely to be in a different category. The pain of losing a friend or family member may be too great to give in to, especially in a dangerous situation; the pain of the death of a non-human -- especially one the griever just met -- is safer to express specifically because it's lesser.

Nobody in Minna's crew has sat down and wailed out loud for hours or days. Even Lalli, who appeared at first to be collapsed in grief, turned out to be instead concentrating on essential work. They can't afford to wail out loud -- it might draw trolls. They can't afford to collapse -- doing so would risk not only their own lives, but those of the rest of the crew. The emotional control that allows them to continue to function may or may not be conscious, and is probably conscious in some of them and unconscious in others; but it needs to be there if they're going to survive.

[Róisín]

Note: I can't do spoilers, but some things below probably come under 'don't read if squeamish'.

You are right on that, thorny. I have known a number of folk who have survived wars and other horrors, and it becomes second nature to many of them to suppress the overt expression of emotion. Curiously, it often seems that the greater griefs provoke less obvious reactions than lesser ones. One in particular comes to mind - a lad whom I met when I was helping out on a project that helped refugees to resettle into life in Australia. He came from one of the less pleasant cities in South America, had lost all his family, and had lived on the streets thereafter. He was lucky in that he was rescued by an aid worker, but not before he had been shot for being a street kid. He still had a nasty half-healed shoulder wound. He was quite stoical in nature, easy to get on with, or at least I found him so, and was looking forward to his second chance at life. He would talk - reluctantly, but quite calmly - about stuff that had happened to him.

We had a community garden at the project, and he used to help out there. One of the neighbourhood dogs used to hang around the garden, and the kids there came to know it well. When the dog was hit by a car just outside and killed, that kid just came apart in helpless tears. I had heard him talk about losing his mother, and while he showed sadness, I'd never previously seen him cry. But seeing the dog killed just unleashed the floodgates. I can only suppose that he felt it was 'safe' to cry in that situation.

[Jharad17]

I can understand why Emil's behavior seems off-putting to you, Lazy8.

Apart from what has been already said I just want to throw in another two cents that might or might not make sense.
First of all there is this phenomenon in movies that people cry a lot when animals die but not at all when people die. (There is a fun spoof of that in A Fish called Wanda. To recap for people who haven't seen the movie: A guy is tasked with killing an old lady with three dogs. But he accidentally kills the dogs instead of the lady and is devastated each time because he loves animals. Only when he kills the third dog inadvertently the old woman dies of a heart attack. According to the producers several people asked whether any of those poor dogs were harmed in reality and their reaction was: Nobody cared about the old lady.)
So obviously some people react differently to the death of animals than to the death of people (the example above is from a comedy, granted, but it doesn't change the viewer's reaction towards it.). I don't know why this is the case because I am not one of these people but I hear this quite often. Only recently I saw a cartoon (I have no possibility to find it again) where a person walks away from an injured human only to help an injured animal in the next panel. I find this view biased and exaggerated and there might no statistical truth behind it, but there is a reason why this cartoon existed.
So it might be possible that Emil is one of these people. That it is easier for him to show emotions at the death of animals than humans.

Or he is in denial over Tuuri. At least concerning the readers there was no instant where Emil (or anybody) saw the corpse as opposed to those animals. We don't even know what was buried on the pike. Some people need visual proof of the death of a being to be able to grieve. In Tuuri's case it might not have been provided.

Lastly, another unconnected thought: Maybe the way he showed his emotions when those animals died and the way the others reacted to him showing these emotions prompted him to behave differently this time.

A corollary to the not crying for people but crying for animals thing: I didn't cry when my father died two years ago, not for months, and I chalk that up to the fact that I had to hold my mother together emotionally for quite some time, and from 3000 miles away. She was devastated, and I was the only stable thing she had to hold onto in the maelstrom her life dissolved into. It wasn't until she started to regain her own footing that I found my first tears for my Dad, even though we were close. On the other hand, I have been crying buckets for the past two weeks for the cat I just had to put down. In this case, I don't have anyone else that I have to prop up, I can feel my emotions now without worrying how others will be affected.

To relate this theory to Emil: with Momma cat and her kittens, and Cthulhund, nobody else needed his support after their deaths, so he could let his emotions out. But with Tuuri, if he's as worried about Lalli as I think he is, he doesn't want to be an emotional burden on Lalli in a time where he thinks Lalli may need him. This may be purely subconscious on his part, as it was, I think, with me and my father's passing. Just a thought.

[thorny]

Róisín, I remember hearing of a case -- can't now remember who it was -- in which someone had lost a close family member, and was unable to cry. Then a family pet also died -- and the tears came. For both of them. The death of the non-human had unlocked something.

That's a lot less drastic than the case you describe; but it's possible something similar was going on inside the back of the heads.

ETA: wrote that before seeing Jharad17's post, which has some similarities.

[Talimee]

tl:dr I agree that Emil is acting oddly here and I very much agree with Róisín and others that he suffers from a severe shock. This is part of Minna's plan to hurl the crew onto a road of emotional growth. Rest on my reasoning under the cut.

Spoiler: show

I do agree that Emil is behaving very oddly since the start of the chapter. And I do agree that he appears cold and detached but I want to point out emphatically that the list of behaviours (listed by Lazy8 for example) highlighting his empathy are his normal response to minor-to-middle-sad situations that do not involve him personally.

This is not a minor-to-middle-sad situation. This is not a normal situation. This is a situation that pushed Emil's world off-kilter, and that lines itself up with other horrifying experiences during the course of the comic – and Emil's response to those is different. Take the first raid for example: He panics, he acts unrationally, he vomits, he sleeps. These are all reactions to shock. Please note, how noone finds it odd at this moment that Emil sleeps. It is assumed that he is mentally fatigued because he just experienced shock and genuine mortal fear.

Then he bounces back to his seemingly usual self but note that his swagger about going into troll-infested areas is gone. It was gone already after the Dalahästen-incident, but now he is cautious and inclined to shirk possible nests altogether (see: Sigrun's crap-building talk and Emil's reaction to the deer and the cat-noises).

I am glad that some other people already pointed out the possibility of a severe shock because I genuinely believe that Emil is experiencing a version of shell-shock. He is dull to the point of stating the obvious (compare this to page 616), he is exhausted to the point of sleeping in a potentially dangerous situation, he is unresponsive to negative experiences like being kicked awake (highly embarrassing situation, but apart from a hand in his hair no reaction) and being rebuffed once again by Lalli.

It is not „only“ the things that happened in chapter 15, that have lead up to Emil's unresponsiveness, tiredness and dullness.
The situation in the comic now comes after months of exposure to a row of jarring experiences which touch on everything in Emil's world. Piece by piece Minna has taken things that Emil takes for granted and has destroyed them. She even started before the Comic started in taking financial security away and in the wake of it Emil's view of himself as being clever and likeable. (The fact that he came up with an explanation that shifts the blame unto others still highlights that he knows that something is wrong and tries to find an explanation.)
Step after step Minna challenges Emil's beliefs on: Safety and Security (Troll and Giant encounters), Physical Integrity and Duration of Life (Sigrun's wound, Tuuri's wound, kittens, Momma-cat, Cuthulhund), Magic and now Friendship and Truthfulness.

Take a look at the interaction between Sigrun and Emil on pages 669/670. It is the first time we see them interact again after Sigrun vented her anger on Emil. Even though he responded on that occasion instinctively right (pointing out that he was doing his job) the relative coldness on pages 669/70 shows that he is not sure where he stands with Sigrun anymore. In the following weeks we see him less and less next to Sigrun (f.ex. standing quite a bit away when Sigrun and he watched while Tuuri repaired the tank) and more often in company with Reynir and Lalli or only Lalli.

Please note also that Emil is not great on social interaction: we rarely see him interact with Tuuri or Mikkel and really badly with Reynir. So, after being chewed out by Sigrun he is down to one person he considers a friend. Then he tries to reassure his feelings of friendship with Lalli at the worst possible moment in the worst possible manner (Aliax has written a very good short essay why Emil really had no idea about Tuuri's dire situation) and consequently gets rebuffed by Lalli.
Emil does here what he did after the soup-incident: He gives Lalli space and probably plans to engage in careful peace negotiations later on. Only that later on Tuuri kills herself and Emil is confronted with the knowledge that the whole squad lied to him about Tuuri's condition and that he cannot trust anyone's (but Lalli's) behaviour to be truthful. From his point of view, someone who broadcasted a solid signal of positiveness and acceptance of life suddenly killed herself, while others also broadcasted that nothing was wrong, knew all along that everything was wrong. This is a breach of trust of epic dimensions and I can easily imagine that Emil is now so deep in shock and disbelief and hurt that he has not even registered what he has done when he made his little pep-talk in the store. And even if he does, it is possible that he thinks that Lalli doesn't want to have anything to do with him anymore (let alone a lame and totally insufficient apology).

I am convinced that Emil's behaviour now is a way to show that he is not ok at all and should not interpreted as a sign of fudged storytelling by Minna. Remember how she explained that Tuuri's death was necessary for the things that were going to happen later in the comic. Just killing off the Tank would have been enough if Minna wanted to write the rest of the story about the crew finding their way to the coast – neither Tuuri's injury, nor her death are necessary for that. So what changes with Tuuri's death? All relationships within the crew. And in doing this and letting the persons in the crew experience and act like they do Minna hurls them all into emotional trauma one way or another and Emil being bland and uncaring here is one sign of that.

[wavewright62]

(Without quoting screeds of text), I am really thankful to thorny, Lazy8, Talimee, Rollo, CAMIR, Róisín, and Jharad17, for this insightful commentary.  You have all added so much to my understanding of this comic and the human condition in general. This sort of analysis reminds me of courses I took at uni, and it's been good for me to stretch my mind with this analysis.  I am guilty of not having thought about Emil overmuch, and appreciate the opportunity to see him from different angles.
   *throws kisses*      

[Róisín]

Thanks for the detailed analyses, all of you. It's good to have the situation so clearly laid out. And yeah, I think Emil has to lose everything before he can find himself. But the foundations of his nature are pretty solid if he learns from the experience, he'll be okay.

[October Sky]

SSSS is making me laugh again and I had forgotten how nice this feels

[CAMIR]

@ waveright62: *returns kisses* It was my pleasure.

Why do I need to think of this so badly with the new page?



(Would actually be worth to make a meme about this with Emil's head on the dog's...)