I’m confused. Why are these people cheering for the person who’s calling them all a bunch of meanyheads? Or are the five kids we’ve seen making rude remarks the only ones who do so, while the cheering people have merely stood by and done nothing? If so, why was she addressing the group at large, instead of the handful of detractors? And harassment is one thing, but is failure to reach out to the special needs kids, who do seem to have their own bond with each other, and therefore wouldn’t necessarily need new friends, an act of inhumanity?
On preview: Shodan, I think it’s like this. Shannon’s different, only she’s not. Silly things like how she talks are important to jerks like Jeremy, and serious things like her loyalty and the joy she gets out of life are important to angels like April. It depends on whether you look at her with your eyes or with your heart.
And Justin, Shannon had a TA in cooking class, and a digital recorder for the lectures. Now in high school, she has software that reads to her. And she calls him Justin. No, I’m not kidding.
Michael is about my age; Elizabeth is about my sister’s age. When we went to school, it would have been inconceivable to be as nasty to disabled kids as is portrayed in that strip. Some joking behind someone’s back, some isolated jerks to be sure, but openly insulting them in the cafeteria would have offended most of the student body and made you a social pariah.
I also agree 100% with Shodan (there’s a rare thing) in that Johnston is cheating in a sense, by having her mentally retarded character suddenly act not mentally retarded. Shannon is mentally disabled when it’s convenient for her to be mentally disabled, and now suddenly she’s Joan of Arc. As he points out, off-the-cuff speeches and melodramatic acts of noble defiance don’t happen to normal people much anyway and are pretty much off the board for someone with mental disabilities. Kids with developmental problems tend to react to stress in inappropriate and counterproductive ways, not by giving Hollywood speeches.
Being nice to the retards is easy when they’re magical Hollywood retards that make witty, noble speeches (I am using the term “retards” with a degree of irony here) and they don’t start fights or spit at you or yell “Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!” for seven minutes straight. What people need to learn to do is to be compassionate and kind when they DO spit and fight and do inappropriate things and are inconvenient as opposed to folks who aren’t disabled. The test of your character is how you react in those situations, not when everything’s hunky-dory.
No doubt you’re right, but that merely means that the strip teaches “we ought to respect the disabled because they are saints”.
The depressing thing is that FBoW is one of the less crappy comics in my local paper. There were a couple of strips this morning which, not only did I not find them funny, but I couldn’t figure out what about them was supposed to be funny.
But the sad thing is, that last line of mine that you quoted is exactly the kind of thing Lynn would say. Check Jess’s link, and read the Shannon strips, especially the last page. April makes a droll analogy, comparing Shannon to a late-arriving flight. And gets in the obligatory “It’s mean people who are less than” dig at the end.
I was bored yesterday, so I read Tuesday’s strip in the paper, I didn’t get what was going on because I don’t normally read this strip. I hadn’t read the previous week. It was confusing. I thought she was imitating a robot or something. Yeah, I skimmed the strip.
I was thinking the same thing. My niece was born with a cleft lip and palate in Bulgaria. My sister adopted her when she was two and a half, and she had surgery around the age of four to fix the botched job the orphanage did on her palate as well as finish closing the hole and putting tubes in her ears. There are other related problems with her lip, nose, and ears which they cannot fix till after she hits puberty. Before the operation, my niece had no speech whatsoever in any language except about five words of sign language; she could also barely hear. Now, two years later, you cannot shut that girl up. She still has a few blips, but none of them include speaking haltingly. I could see maybe there be other issues that, combined with a late surgery to correct a cleft palate, may create such a speech pattern as Shannon’s, but blaming it wholly on the cleft palate is definitely not realistic to me.
Her disablility hasn’t really been specified, beyong ‘special needs’ and ‘mentally challanged.’ There’s the speech thing, and she can’t read. The non-reading seems to be a visual-perceptual learning disablity (her assistant tells April, in one of the early strips, that Shannon has ‘problems with word recognition in print.’
Those two things, taken together don’t seem too bad, but Shannon is presented as being far more mentally delayed than just those things indicate. In another of the earlier strips, Shannon gets separated from her Mom in a store and is all freaked out. April finds her and stays with her until her mother comes back. On the website, there’s a write up about Shannon which says she’ll never be able to drive, for instance.
Shannon is based on Johnston’s niece, BTW, who is developmentally delayed. She’s in her 20s now, works as receptionist in a sheltered workshop and has her own apartment.
Again, this could have been a pretty good storyline – apparently basing the character on an actual person has skewed Johnston’s judgement. The earlier disabled character (Liz’s teacher) was much less irritating than poor Shannon, whose possibilities have been buried in glurge.
Can’t say I would have been much nicer if someone got that anal retentive about the ages in a long-running comic strip either. Actually, I can say I would have been much ruder.
As for bludgeoning - given the limitations of the medium, it has to be done. Sure, she could spread the story out over 3 weeks instead of 1 and be a little more subtle, but that would also be thrice as insipid. So, Johnston has to get a message across in 20-24 panels - and to do that, she has to paint with broad brushes. Easy enough to get by that, understanding the limitations of the medium. The tougher part, that she’s failing, is making it entertaining. I’d stop reading if it weren’t for this damn inertia thing dragging me along.
As a visual shorthand for a speech impediment, I can accept it. If Johnston used deliberate misspellings or something to represent a speech impediment, that might be too jarring to the flow of reading the strip. As part of the clumsiness of Johnston not being able to depict Shannon in a way that is both realistic and sympathetic, I can’t.
It’s kind of funny - Johnston can depict the frustrations of the old grandpa who had a stroke in a way that (usually) does not create the impression that disabilities are good for your character, but not with Shannon.
I am probably not a good judge. I don’t care for the strip very much, and, as I said, I read it (sporadically) because there are very few other strips of any interest in my paper. It’s either FBoW, or Zippy Pinhead and suchlike.
:shrug: Just thought it was odd that someone who preaches tolerance and understanding and patience would be rude in response to an innocuous (anal-rententive or not) question.
That’s the thing - the early strips with Shannon I found to be sensitive and very touching. Lately Johnston has used here as a Special Needs Poster Child. Overall, I have liked the strip much more in the past (especially the Farley episodes), but now there’s not really much interesting going on except Grandpa (will he kick the bucket before the strip goes to Sunday only?). All the recent storylines have been telegraphed, from the new house purchase and switcheroo to Liz hooking up with Anthony. Oh well.
I am hating, nay loathing, this particular plot line.
It’s literally hard to read. I get it, the girl is speech impaired, but I’m . . . afraid . . . this . . . sort . . . of . . . text . . . is . . . ob . . . nox . . . ious.
It’s trite and unoriginal. She’s standing on the table and making a speech and then everyone who has thus far been mean to her magically sees the light and wild clapping breaks out. My gosh, that’s so original – only done before in about a million unrealistic movies. I’m assuming the only reason she didn’t use the “one person starts slowly clapping from the back and then it’s picked up until cheering sweeps the room” scenario is that it would be hard to portray that in a strip.
It’s sanctimonious and simplistic. Johnston is bludgeoning her readers with her extremely simplictic message – the developmentally disabled are people too! Be nice to them! – and it is not enough that she has crammed the message down our throats before with Shan . . . on, she has to do so again and again and again. We freaking get it!
It’s boring. Three dailies for Shannon to make her glurgy speech, more than a week devoted to the scene in the cafeteria. Boring, boring, boring.
It’s unrealistic in the context of the strip. The whole story line is completely contradicted by what we know of Shannon. I won’t search for the strips now, but when Shannon was first introduced there was a scene in which April invited her to be on stage playing a tambourine at the talent show with April’s band, and Shannon pretty well freaked out about it – “Don’t put me on a stage! Don’t make people look at me!” Shannon’s aide had to reassure April that she (April) hadn’t done anything wrong in making the invitation. THIS is the same girl who’s climbing on the cafeteria table to pull a Norma Rae? No way.
It’s unrealistic in the context of RL. No teenage girl I’ve ever known, able or not, would ever make a spectacle of herself like that. The teasing of the “retards” unfortunately does seem realistic based on my experience (though as noted really more middle school than high school), but the dramatic “WE ARE PEOPLE TOO!” speech by the classic victim never would happen in the regimented society of a real high school. AND if they did have the balls to do it, it sure as hell wouldn’t be greeted with a round of applause.
Is it wrong of me to wish Shannon into a corn field?
Yeah, that strip seems rather bland and trite, but that’s par for the course. It’s always bland. It’s a Canadian strip, right? Is everyone here comparing their high school experience with that portrayed in the strip Canadian? On the occasions I happen to read For Better or For Worse, I am always struck by the fact that the characters in the community in the strip behave nothing at all like the people who live in my real-life community. I always figured it was a Canada thing.
I live in Canada and none of the people in my community behave like that either. I tend to give FBoW a hit or a miss - sometimes it’s entertaining. This particular story line is as boring as hell.
Canadian, grew up in a small city pretty much right along the lines of what Johnston is portraying.
Johnston’s strip is set in a small Ontario city like Guelph or Barrie. People there are pretty much the same as you’ll find in, say, Grand Rapids or Rochester.
I used to read it when I was younger. I lost interest when it got all soap-opera-ish and melodramatic. I’m pretty picky, though - there are only 3 or 4 strips in the paper that I’ll even read anymore. I do think it’s clever how the characters age, though. She may not be the first one to have done that in a comic strip, but she does it well.