Happy Wednesday! And happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian peers – I hope you had a good long weekend! I did – we did so much cleaning and cooking, and the house is fully autumnal now. I cracked out my mom’s well-loved lentil soup recipe and her equally well-loved yellow stockpot and made the house smell so good.
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TRANSCRIPT
Panel 1 (Imogen sits on the edge of the bed, looking back at Alex)
Imogen: …I talked to Eris a few weeks ago.
Alex: ..what? Why?
Imogen: I just… ran into her, and she invited me up for lunch.
Alex: What did she have to say?
Imogen: How… she felt like even though you were dating, she’d never be more than a friend.
Panel 2 (Eris, giving a younger Nolan a ride on her shoulders)
Alex, off-panel: Yeah… I guess that’s fair.
Panel 3 (Alex, throwing her hands in the air)
Alex: I can’t help it. I just take it personally when someone offers to help me… because it means they see me as someone who needs help.
Panel 4 (Imogen and Alex, just looking at each other)
Imogen: Oh, are we comparing who needs the most embarrassing help right now? I’m still in the lead.
Alex: I don’t know. I’ll need to shower eventually.
::crashing through the door:: SHE SURE WILL
I sort of get where Alex is coming from, but I do hope she can confront her toxic pride a bit during this healing process. Seems like she’s already starting to, same as Imogen needing to confront her selflessness sometimes coming from a bad spot. Still, glad Imogen sounds like she’s already given it more thought than Alex would have expected.
Augh, Eris with Nolan. 😭
Actually internalising that people can choose help you, because, sure, you could probably manage eventually after a lot of pain, but they want to? Because you have intrinsic value as a person? Oof, yeah, that’s difficult.
And add in Alex’s upbringing? This is real, relatable, and they’re still actually communicating and I am Here For This.
Is now a bad time to talk about my “Jonathan’s Mistress is a Serial Killer” theory?
Cause this character development stuff is all very good.
God just, seeing Nolan and Eris together, happy, smiling it hits something really deep. Among every messy part of Eris and Alex’s relationship, the thing that guts me most is that Nolan and Eris are no longer in each other’s life. You can tell how much they loved each other, and it’s absolutely heart wrenching to lose a child you love as your own from the fallout of an ended romance (which didn’t even seem like a romance on Alex’s end.) Not to mention actually BEING that child and suddenly an adult you adore and rely on is just gone, and you don’t understand why.
woops sorry but this one panel has made me the most emotional out of every single other thing in this comic :’)