Randall Munroe, author of the xkcd comic, has many strips that are just off the rails in creepiness. I get the not-so-subtle feeling that ‘cueball’ is a self-insert, and the obsession with ‘Megan’ is Randall being obsessed about his ex girlfriend. Assuming I’m correct, what kind of person writes this stuff?
Let’s say that I’m right and Cueball is really Randall and Megan is his ex girlfriend. That means his poor ex has to deal with the embarassment of having this guy’s Nice Guy Passive Agressive Rant scrawled all over the internet. Maybe nobody knows who his ex girlfriend is in real life, even then it has to be pretty embarassing to have him write stuff like this.
I agree with the OP that Cue Ball is Munroe and Megan is his girlfriend / wife. But like others said, I thought they got married. I think she’s still alive and haven’t read anything about her lately. Clearly her cancer has influenced a number of his strips and was responsible for his long hiatus a couple of years ago.
Just an amalgamation of women from the eyes of the “good guy who finishes last”
I also figured he stopped writing about her once he got a real girlfriend (now wife)
Myself, I thought there were probably a lot of real-life inspirations for ‘Megan’ - the fiancee/wife who had cancer, yeah, but some of his exes are probably mixed up in there too, and friends.
According to this site, “The name Megan derives from a lost love of the author’s.” Which is different from the character being based on an ex or “really” being an ex. These days I always get suspicious when people say a fictional character is “really” some real person.
Can’t you see the narrator standing in a tuxedo at a dais, delivering this speech as an incredibly awkward toast to the bride (his first love) and groom (his best friend)?
Oh that. When you get down to it, everything in the OP is an assumption: Megan is the ex, Cueball is Randall, the speech represents the author’s real feelings. What’s the basis for believing any of that?
Everyone knows that if a character in a story makes a statement, that means the author believes it to be true and is trying to convince the readers that it is true.
