Letters Column in January 2012: “‘The Fashiolanche Has Started,’ Said Posh. ‘It is Too Late for the Little People to Vote.'”

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Jenna

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There is a new guest comic up on Chibi-Ex today! Warning! May contain peanuts.

Over here on Hitherby, we’re going to continue posting 3-10x a week for at least a while, so don’t be too put off by the length of this particular letters column. It was like 6000 words of stuff when I started queuing entries up on Wednesday!

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And on a tangent…

I find it interesting that we have separate tags for “God-Defying Lightbringing Yama King’” and “the Devil.”
— Eric, on Vincent and the Devil

They are distinct characters. Possibly they are the same person. Possibly they are not!

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> “Three things you can ask me, to decide what you’d like to do. And I’ll tell you right now that I’ve got a trick worthy of the Enemy himself, which is to say, I can’t promise you that walking away and turning me down is the right and moral thing to do, much less the way to save your soul.”

Hm. “The Enemy” is the term demons use to refer to God in The Screwtape Letters. (I’ve only read reviews, but one excerpted some of this.) So reversing the situation, since the Devil is referring to God’s trick not his own — does God here not promise that obedience is good? Perhaps that would make things too easy, or make free will vapid. So he’s left the option open that rebellion is the right thing to do. There was a similar idea in the blockquotes in “An Unclean Legacy: Sophie and the Devil”. What do we call that kind of quoted text anyway? Does it parallel the vignettes Jenna is known for in RPGs, or is it something else?
— dave.o, on And Three Points is the Game

In An Unclean Legacy, it was a voiceover. ^_^

In general, I don’t know!

I guess you could call them pull-quotes, legends-in-legends (legend colegends? monogatari comonogatari?), or stock footage.

I think the Devil is not so much claiming to have stolen and mirrored one of “the Enemy’s” tricks so much as boasting about how awesome this particular trick he’s using is. Look, he’s saying. Aren’t I clever? You’d think a person should never listen to anything the Devil says, but it is possible that “walk away and have nothing to do with me” is the thing that will get this damned boy damned.

Whether he’s saying that to the reader, or to God, or to Vincent, or to himself, is not currently clear.

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Why the heck did I say “we” back up at the top? There’s only me here! I am alone in Taiwan loading up Hitherby into glass bottles and casting it out onto the sea.

I think it is possible that I wanted to be one of those POSH authors with a POSSE. A POSHSE, as it were. I would lounge around in vintage memorabilia and crack a whip with my wineglass hand—for a true author fears no great labors, but rather will put down the wine glass or consider drinking it dry before cracking the whip, and then filling it up again—and my posse would run, lurchingly, dragging the posts forward into the world. Behind me it would be always winter and never Christmas, except when it was spring, summer, fall, or, well, December 25. But even on those occasions I would only reach into my bountiful collection of Christmas cards and throw handfuls of them, laughing, from the posts. The people would be lashed about by these devious well-wishings but they would look up to me nevertheless with faces bright with joy.

I would be welcome at all the greatest parties and all should love me and despair!

P.S. I do not drink wine. That is part of the elegant fantasy. In reality it would be water and would only turn into wine if someone, I’m not going to say who, I’m not naming names here, gets a little too loose and fancy free with the Christmas miracles. If you know what I mean.