Heavily modeled from my parents' former home on Long Island. Mar's room has that freaky vibe where childish things mingle with "adult" stuff, where one hasn't been fully traded for the other. I still think Hanna is really funny here, asking questions she already knows and dreads the answer to, airing things she's pissed about that are vaguely Marigold's fault, though Mar's in no position to take responsibility. She resists her own kindness every step of the way. Mar is also funny to me here, treating this like any other night of suburban teen binge drinking, oblivious to how strange this might be to Hanna.
7 thoughts on “OTSAN #15”
Lela
Marigold's bed-squashed nose in the second to last panel is my fav detail yet.
Tommie
I dunno. Hanna really needed to sleep. And the chemistry paper was long gone, and Jacques was a jerk anyway, and Randall could be available to pick up one bakery shift if necessary. Presumably, Marigold's parents had a landline phone and a telephone book, or even Internet, and Hannah could have made a call. I kind of see Marigold as being the nurturing, protective one, here.
I don't think this situation is Marigold's fault at all. Hannah was the one who smoked all through their study sessions and encouraged Marigold to do the same, who put the paper off until the last minute, who asked probing and insensitive questions about the boyfriend that pricked Marigold's insecurities, and then who pushed an obviously emotionally vulnerable Marigold to go out and drown her sorrows in drink, dangerous men, and loud music. Way I see it, Hannah took advantage of Marigold's vulnerability every step of the way, pushed her around like a plaything, just because she could. Just because she enjoyed being the "wise, jaded" matriarch who "knows best".
Even when following the advice of the friend who "knows best" involves denying and attempting to squash one's own pain, stalling one's recovery, and arresting one's development into a permanent, 19-year-old stasis. Marigold is the "sheep" in the relationship, but Hannah is sometimes a sheepdog and sometimes a coyote. Nothing against those who smoke, but pushing drugs on a friend who's trying to study (and even selling drug use as a personal identity and way of life, as seen in the "stoners vs. nerds" storyline), is not cool at all.
The scene when Marigold was trying to cut off her dreadlocks (which look ridiculous and culturally appropriative on white girls, BTW) to help shed that immature self-image that had so fetishized Will as a romantic stoner ideal, and Hannah nags her because Hannah spent so much time and trouble putting those locks in for Marigold… to me, that scene kind of says it all. Just as much as the "brownout biscuit" storyline. Hannah just wanted to keep Marigold stuck and under her thumb.
Hannah's the epitome of a bad friend.
rikushix
The stuffed animal net and the glow in the dark stick-em-to-your-ceiling stars are a nice touch. Classic.
Tangerine
Haha the nightlight too!
I'm trying to figure out what the "'adult' stuff" is in the room. Maybe I should recognize the posters?
lomo
LCD Soundsystem there on the right, but what's the poster on the left?
Esc
Rilo Kiley's 2004 "More Adventurous" album. Jenny Lewis was the frontwoman for that band, she also sang backing vocals on the Postal Service. She has a solo project now.
I totally didn't catch these the first time this was posted.
Tangerine
I was once in the (very large) house of a friend. The bedroom of his older sister, who had moved out years before and was now married, was basically kept as a shrine to her. All her childhood things were still there. In particular I remember one of those 80s plastic charm necklaces, of the kind I had discarded around the time I entered my teens and was not yet old enough to wish I still had.
I was a college student and was vaguely baffled and repulsed. How had she endured her teens in this unbearably sweet and juvenile room?