Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fandomsecrets2015-05-22 06:06 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2015-05-22 06:06 pm
[ SECRET POST #3061 ]
⌈ Secret Post #3061 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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11. [SPOILERS for Avengers: Age of Ultron]
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12. [SPOILERS for Avengers: Age of Ultron]
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13. [SPOILERS for Rusty and Co.]
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14. [SPOILERS for iZombie]
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15. [SPOILERS for Orphan Black]
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16. [SPOILERS for Supernatural]
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17. [WARNING for violence/assault?]
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18. [WARNING for disturbing imagery/gore]
[Spec Ops: The Line]
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19. [WARNING for child abuse/parental abuse]
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20. [WARNING for rape]
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #437.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
some spoilers for Gunnerkrigg Court (tons of pictures)
Annie (the girl there) grew up in a hospital with her sick mother and her doctor father, who worked tirelessly to save his wife but was always distant to Annie (and to everyone save for one of his childhood friends, presumably):
Annie was very close to her mother, who seems to have been a pretty good parent, but this is the warmest memory she has of her father:
Her mother dies, and two weeks later, her father takes her to a boarding school and doesn't contact her again... nor the school, nor his friends at the school who are Annie's teachers -- he basically goes off the grid and remains unreachable even to the most tech savvy of people there.
(This was near the start of the school year. Note how Annie blames herself for her father abandoning her.)
(And this is after the end of that school year. Note how now she can't make a good excuse for the abandonment so she changes the subject. Also also note the clothes she is wearing. It's the same dress she wears in the comic chapter I link at the end, and it resembles the dress she wore back at the hospital as a younger child. Same-ish clothes, same-ish haircut. It's not a coincidence-- this is a child desperate to have her father back in her life and hoping that maybe if she looks and behaves like she did when her family was complete [but extra obedient this time!], everything will be right again.)
The next time she hears anything about him, is two years later, in the form of a strange phone call, which turns out to be an encrypted request to have someone in the school send him medical supplies.
She pretty much shuts down emotionally:
These supplies were then used to do a weird science (magic?) thing to Annie which puts her in a brief coma. (Other students save her eventually, but no one knows what happened exactly, not the readers, and certainly not Annie.)
Anyway, over the course of the story, Annie gains new responsabilities, friends, self-confidence and seems to be having a good time despite it all, but then, all of a sudden, over three years since she (and anybody else) last saw him:
And the smackdown continues. I very strongly suggest you take a look at the chapter yourself (the pictures have a link to it), it's very short, and the whole sequence doesn't really need you to know about the previous chapters and plotlines to understand the gist of it.
It does have less emotional impact if you're not familiar with the comic, but suffice it to say: Prior to this, Annie has always been a very polite, but very rebellious girl. The transformation she undergoes after her father returns is heartbreaking if you've read the comic from the start, because you can almost see years of emotional growth being shut away in a tiny little box inside her head just so she can keep going and not have her father disappear on her again.
BTW, this is very worth mentioning too:
The teachers I mentioned, who were best friends with Annie's parents, didn't find out about Annie's father returning to the school to be a teacher until after the fact, and they didn't even find out about Annie's mother's death until they saw Annie's paperwork when she was transferred to their school.
That's just how Annie's father rolls, it seems.
Re: some spoilers for Gunnerkrigg Court (tons of pictures)
(I really love how webcomics drawn by a single person do character growth/arcs so well.)
Re: some spoilers for Gunnerkrigg Court (tons of pictures)
Yeah, this author is great at characterization! Some characters have changed so much, but so organically, that you only notice on second read-throughs. And in the case of Annie's father, a lot of his impact comes from how little he has been characterized. We (the readers) only know of him through second-hand accounts. The "appears at school out of nowhere" chapter is the first time we ever see his current-time face!
Ohhh, and another thing that I forgot to mention: Annie's long hair is symbolic of her magic abilities and in some comic pages it does neat things with the layout, so her chopping it off like that adds more to the feel of isolation and, well, wrongness in that chapter (and why it features so prominently in the "bonus page"). She only ever had short hair in flashbacks.
edit: The white wolf plushie was a gift her mother made for her (a regular toy before PLOT happened), and the makeup Annie wears is identical to the one her mother wore. In a matter of hours, she gave up all her remaining connections to her mother. More sadness yay.
Re: some spoilers for Gunnerkrigg Court (tons of pictures)
eta: seriously! you wrote it in a way that while it spoilers, it makes you want to read to see the events for yourself. It has me wanting to reread those chapters
Re: some spoilers for Gunnerkrigg Court (tons of pictures)
Re: some spoilers for Gunnerkrigg Court (tons of pictures)
(Anonymous) 2015-05-23 02:50 am (UTC)(link)They're terrible.
Re: some spoilers for Gunnerkrigg Court (tons of pictures)
(Anonymous) 2015-05-23 02:44 pm (UTC)(link)