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[Camp Comic] Monday, October 23, 2017 - Like Father Like Son
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Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
[Camp Comic] Monday, October 23, 2017 - Like Father Like Son
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I'm still waiting to hear from Linus.
The parents in this comic are in dire need of redemption arcs.
Like, on one hand, there isn't a whole lot of darkness to Malachi's dad. He's just a random donor.
But on the other, all the stories he apparently heard of his dad? They must have given him an impression to strife for something very unrealistic, ultimately causing him lots of rejection and pain.
Also, the implications for why he might have ended up here aren't great either...
Now that I think about it, Malachi does look a bit like Raz...
In earlier references to his backstory we see Mal's mom complaining that he's not as good as his father was, and never will be. Malachi is also consumed initially by the desire to be better at something- anything- than everyone else. From the perfectionist attitude he absorbed from his mother, combined with the revelation that Malachi's father is a donor described as a "superior human" with so many great attributes, do y'all think it may be that Mom was possibly involved in eugenics or at least obsessed with having the perfect child? But then when Malachi turned out to be just an average kid, she decided to abandon him and start over? But Malachi still feels a bit empty because all his life he was told he should be perfect and meet his mother's impossible expectations.
It's a bit far-fetched, and probably not at all what Katie and Adam are going for, but I thought it was interesting.
I definitely think the mom considered herself to be a superior human and only wanted to breed with another superior human. Unfortunately for her, sperm donor biographies are notoriously unreliable and often read like how something a Bachelor contestant says about their self. It's like how people fudge their resumes to sound better, only taken to even more ridiculous extremes.
As to DK613, Malachi's mom may have just wanted a child. I knew a woman years ago who insisted, with feet planted firmly on the floor, that her life would not be complete until she had a child. When Malachi turned out to be, let's say, more high maintenance than she expected/wanted, his mom threw him away.
Yeah, I think that's exactly what happened, Malachi's mother wanted a prodigy she could show off to all her friends like an expensive pedigree lapdog, and when it turned out Malachi was a completely unremarkable kid she just decided he was no longer worth the effort and got rid of him, potentially wanting to try again with a different kid.
Of course these impossibly high expectations to live up to an imaginary person Malachi had thrown at him his entire life messed him up bad as we saw with the talent show arc.
When you're all you've got, and you're not enough... what then?
It might be that Malachi's mother really does know something about the father this way. Maybe she picked a donor with an impressive resume, hoping her kid would follow in his footsteps, and Malachi turned out to be a disappointment.
All kids deserve better parents. Even Neiman, Neiman just needs very good parents to be able to deal with his Neimaness.
What a terrible human being she must be.
It makes me hope that should Malachi ever get out of here, he'll have grown enough to never want to visit his mother again.
-Tycho Brahe
I understand that, but i am self aware enough to know my limitations and I could be a good father to Mal and an Ok father to Neiman. I would become flustered with Neiman’s obsessions, but I feel I could relate to Mal appropriate enough to help guide him.
That went from "ugh what a shit person I hope they get hit by a bus" to a very human person who made a mistake and made another mistake to get out of the other one and it's all bad. Please don't make me feel these feelings.
good job in story telling. I did not see this coming. As commented. this is less bad, or it is worse. Depending how you crumble the cookie.
step 1: be 2d :c
Well, that and the fact that genetic inheritance is a bit of a crapshoot (hence Punnett squares) and we don't come anywhere close to fully understanding exactly how genes effect attributes like intelligence, which is one of the reasons why eugenics is such a horrible thing.