Update, 1-14-2009

[Kris@WLP]

... on the other hand, his orientation class is MUCH shorter and clearer than most professors I recall from my brief college time...

[Happygun]

...Are any of the students a) not lycanthropes b) did not just take this course for filler c) actually believe the good professor and d) enthusiastic about it?

I feel a little sorry for the professor. He has real passion for his job and nothing so far has suggested he thinks supernatural creatures should be locked away, poked and prodded until they expire.

[Kris@WLP]

a) Yes, about half the class

b) All human students were looking for an easy A

c) Skeptical at best

d) A lot less enthusiastic now than they were before they walked into the class

And Prof. Feetlebaum is so wrapped up in trying to prove that anything exists that he honestly has not given one ounce of thought to what to do once proof is in hand.

(Well, check that. He'd quite like to make whatever keeps messing up his car to pay his higher insurance premium...)

[K-MacK]

Actually, I'm a bit concerned about that fellow in the back row with the dark glasses. None of the reported Were's seem light sensitive, and y'know; he just doesn't look the type somehow.
Of course, he could be one of Kris's fabled Were-RedHerrings, but let's remember that both Peter and Sarah are the decided Faves of the Decon-Suit crowd.
He might be trolling, to see who or what bites.

If the Professor were to actually encounter a real Crypto, he'd probably be too excited to poke and prod, especially if said Crypto could talk. Give him a Crypto who could talk, AND could help him with the editing of his next publication; and he'd probably marry it!

Hmmm...other thought: the Dark-Glasses guy might be the "Contact Man" who gives the Were's in class their training in recognition and communication. I'll hold out for him being a bad guy, though. There haven't been any for a while.

Oh, and I clicked your egg, Kris. This thing is taking over.

[Happygun]

[tHEfOOL]

sounds like you could getan easy A+, just get a couple of blurry pictures of big fuzzy things or maybe a sound recording of something snufflling around in the woods while your on a camping trip

i clicked the egg too, was tempted to get one of my own just cuz it looked cool

[Lunchbox]

Sounds like the kinda teacher that you could explain the paradoxataur to and he'd give you an a.

[UberMan5000]

How dramatic.

Also, did anyone else notice that he wrote "Wotches" on the board there when he was talking about "humans with strange abilities"?

[tHEfOOL]

whats a "Wotches"?

[Dorlynn]

[Happygun]

[Khold]

[Voodoomaster]

[MitchellTF]

[bar1scorpio]

I still can't believe noone commented on Peter's confusion about the Motaba virus from the movie Outbreak a few pages back.

[Kris@WLP]

[Les]

[tHEfOOL]

[Kris@WLP]

[Happygun]

[tHEfOOL]

[Happygun]

[Kris@WLP]

Happy, you don't like The Wotch and that's your business.

That said, the creative crew there are WLP fans and could quite possibly read this thread, so I do feel I should re-read the bit in question and clarify for others.

(Yes, this is way off topic. I'll remember this and be lenient in future (for a while) on other digressions.)

As a preface, it should be mentioned that the chapter "Consequences" was a followup to a great many transformations, most of them wrought during the previous chapter "SchizophrANNEia". In that chapter the main character, Anne, a Wotch (think witch with extra bacon and cheese) experiments with a spell to split herself off so she can be in more than one place at one time. The spell-generated clones, however, are highly concentrated representations of one aspect of her personality. Without the balance of things like, for example, morals, they tended to wreak magical havoc before being stopped.

One of these clones was the representation of her feminine pride, and this is the one who zapped the jocks. At the end, when Anne's various clones were reabsorbed into Anne, Anne did not get their memories- so she had no knowledge herself of what her clones had done.

In "Consequences," Anne summons back up her feminine pride clone to get the full story. Here are the relevant pages:

http://www.thewotch.com/?epDate=2005-09-23

http://www.thewotch.com/?epDate=2005-09-26

So: the football boys were not unwritten so much as adjusted to get them to stop acting uber-macho to prove their masculinity. Anne's clone ONLY amplified the non-jock aspects of their personality, including personal memory rewrites. The rest of the town had their memories rewritten by a Mysterious Cloaked Figure, Miranda West, a former Wotch... indeed, the other characters of late refer to her as the Wicked West of the Wotch.

(And, incidentally, a development in the most recent chapter just concluded shows that Miranda is still very much in ends-justify-the-means mode, having cursed the Stereotypical Nosey Person- the Wotch version of Arthur Hazen, really- so that not only is he now a she, but anyone s/he tells about Miranda, Anne, or anything else magical will ALSO be gender-swapped. There's your moral lack, there.)

Anyway, back to the story. Anne goes to meet parents, some RPG buds of one of the transformed, and then finally addresses the victims themselves:

http://www.thewotch.com/?epDate=2005-10-21

And the fundamental moral issue is brought up here:

http://www.thewotch.com/?epDate=2005-10-24

Specifically, if everyone- including the victims themselves- is happier, and if nothing has been changed except their need to appear big, tough and brutal to fulfill gender stereotype, does Anne have the right to undo things for the sake of restoring the status quo ante?

The secondary quandary, of course, is whether or not happy ignorance should be preserved or full disclosure should be given to ensure knowledge and consent- where full disclosure could, and probably would, prevent happiness in the future regardless of outcome.

Now, I admit, all of the above might well be backwards rationalization. That said, if it is authorial ax-grinding, it's a lot quieter than many other cases I've seen (or, on occasion, committed- see Milkmaid's "All Lawsuit Issue"). Of the four cases in the chapter, one case was as above; another was left unchanged with full disclosure coming from restored memories; another was attempted reversal without success; and another was reversed successfully. These cases are, incidentally, in ascending level of victim dissatisfaction with the change.

One last layer: the spinoff comic you mention makes it clear that Jo, the pigtailed cheerleader, is the only one of the group who retains full memories and knowledge of the change. Most of the time she's happy with it, but there are occasions when she regrets it- because, at least in her case, the gender swap cost her most of her athletic ability.

OK, that's the full story on the aspect that caused you, Happy, to drop the comic. I still read and enjoy the comic, but you don't have to. (Likewise, a lot of people read PvP, although I dropped it two years ago for reasons pretty much identical to Happy's for dropping The Wotch.)

As someone else noted, we also gave a shoutout to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya; maybe you'll like that better?

And my final, and most important, word: don't confuse character beliefs and motivations for authorial beliefs and motivations.

[bar1scorpio]

[Happygun]