Quote Originally Posted by Ellen View Post
I'm not sure where the comic is going with this.

Surma is not what I expected. I figured she was more rough and tumble than Annie from the glimpses we had of her before. Instead, I'm not sure what her strengths are or what really motivates her. So, I'm not really attaching to her in this story.

(I'm also completely lost about what a certain white wolf in the Forest saw in her, but that's another issue).

I suspect the story is going to try and make me like Tony. But, while I'll cut him some slack for what a terrible father he's been--there's more incompetence than malice in him--he's still a terrible father who's hurt his daughter badly and is likely to keep on hurting her.

Kat's parents have a close up view of what he's doing to Antimony. If they've told him, he's not listening. If they haven't told him, then we've got adults who won't intervene to keep a man from abusing his daughter but who will gaslight the daughter to tell her why her dad isn't such a bad guy and how she should let this go.

But, that may not be the aim of this story. Also, Anja didn't go into this trying to win Annie over to a different POV. Instead, she's responding to finding out Annie thinks her father forced her mother into a relationship against her will.

Which puts me back to square one and not knowing how to take this.
It seems that Anthony has greatly pulled back his abuse. Annie's still living in the weird giant dorm room thing, but otherwise he seems to be about as hands-off now as he was before he showed up. He's given back Reynard, she's got plenty of freedom. It seems like she's suffering some consequences for cheating (Held back a grade, put under careful scrutiny with her homework), but that's not unreasonable.

Which isn't to say that Anthony isn't a terrible father who heaped horrible emotional and mental abuse upon his daughter, because that is VERY much the case.


We've actually gotten a pretty good picture of Anthony Carver. He keeps his emotions bottled up, he rarely talks, and he doesn't really feel comfortable dealing with anybody outside a very specific group of people, but to them he's a normal, if somewhat reserved, guy.

His biggest problem is that he, apparently, cannot deal with strong emotions. His wife died, and so he abandoned his daughter and wandered the globe searching for an answer. When he saw his daughter again, he couldn't handle that, and his instinct was apparently to publicly shame and humiliate her. It doesn't seem like he's ever really been comfortable interacting with Annie, and that hasn't changed since he returned.

The whole whisky chapter with Kat's dad was supposed to demonstrate that, around people he's comfortable with, he's pretty normal guy, albeit one with extremely unhealthy coping mechanisms. I guess the point of this chapter is to show us what Surma (And by extension I guess everybody else) saw in him.