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Oh yeaaah. Feels like it’s been so long since the air cleared enough to keep track of things like that. Maybe I’ve just been inattentive.

Huh. When Annie washed the black out of her hair, I wasn’t quite expecting her to keep the goth thing going. But it works since she’s so dark-haired anyway, I suppose.

I just noticed how much Annie’s hair has been growing out.

Hey, wait a minute. Wait. I know it’s been years since this page went up but... Valerie you freaking hypocrite, you kissed Vic while he was ANNIE’S boyfriend! XP And don’t try to excuse it with “emotional ex” issues, Annie is Jamie’s ex too! :<

Yep, that is indeed the part that made me laugh! I’m a total BioWare nut, so I have a weakness for the choice wheel.

That second to last panel tho... I’m giggling like a loon right now. That’s great.

Oh yeah, no, I was relating completely to Annie’s logic. I’ve been sexually assaulted multiple times, and although it’s given me trust issues, being able to get past those trust issues and submit completely to someone is paradoxically empowering for me. I’m also just naturally one of those very femme and demure straight trans women, tho, so I’ve never really had to deal with all that fiddly identity negotiation. In some ways that appears to have been a blessing I went entirely unaware of.

“I never think about mechanics”

Maybe you should do that, Flint. If you pull a Vic after all this, I will reach through the boundary between reality and fiction and smack you upside the head :<

Yeah, okay, that’s another couple notches up the “wait, is Annie just me in a webcomic?” ladder. I swear, sometimes this comic feels like a self-insert, except then I remember I’m not the author.

In that last panel, I think “on” is a typo meant to be “one”?

Is Kora just wearing a particularly bulky outfit and closing off her posture, or is that meant to be a straitjacket?

Oh, no! Who could that voice be!? That threatening, terrifying, deafening voice, crying out for blood... It’s... It’s a *weekend cliffhanger*! Nooooo!

Heh, Annie’s laying it on a bit thick here! Not that I blame her, given that what she’s really trying to say appears to be “Yes, I saw the note, but also, I know you weren’t in a clear state of mind when you put it there and I’m not going to treat it as real,” but still, at some point the subtext can get so heavy that I have to wonder if they wouldn’t be better-served just talking about it explicitly.

Hrm. I guess this is reasonable, but it’s also really context-dependent. From my perspective growing up, having “pure vile” on the opposing side and only “supportive but with intrusive questions/doubts” on my side didn’t make me “balanced” or “stronger,” it left me completely devoid of anyone I could rely on when I was too young and too broken to figure out how to rely on myself. If this were Annie’s revelation earlier in the year, before Harper’s self-destructive idiocy caused most everyone to turn on Annie and she was beaten nearly to death over the course of multiple days, then sure, I could certainly agree that constant unflinching support can’t be one’s only feedback into their life and that they need some deep questioning to keep them grounded and improving. But when your life is on the line on a day to day basis, the part that’s going to save you is when they’re blocking the punches and convincing you that you absolutely don’t deserve to die, not picking at you over infractions that are comparatively quite minor to either the evil you’re opposing or the good you’re trying to do and spinning that into “well I guess we could entertain the argument that you deserve it.”

That’s my two cents, anyway.

“They won’t have to”... Is Annie quitting swimming...?

Is she actively ignoring a metric ton of calls right now, or just looking at the record of everything she’s missed over time?

Well I love your work! But I also hate everything I’ve ever written, so I understand the feeling. And hey, you have a goddamn thirty-four week buffer, it’s not idiotic to occasionally flip the order of a couple of events around in your head so long after creating the strips in question.

... Did I miss a strip?

This is an incredibly powerful moment, and I’m only doing this because you’ve mentioned in previous pages that you like it when readers do, so:
In panel three, the first “now” should probably be a “not”
In panel 5, “there is only so much that I can be done” should probably be either “there’s only so much I can do” or “there’s only so much that can be done”, or perhaps “that I can be doing,” but even that is odd.

Anyway... this is an amazing emotional triumph. It feels a bit sudden, narratively speaking, but from a human perspective, it’s much more common that epiphanies like this come on suddenly, from a build-up of small and seemingly-unconnected large things that’s finally coalesced, rather than from some big transcendental moment in life.

You know, for a non-action writer, you’ve certainly applied the fundamentals of crafting a good fight scene well. Not in terms of choreography or anything like that, but in terms of narrative framing; the stakes are very immediate and given the fair balance of awful things Annie has and hasn’t been able to prevent throughout the series, I really have no idea how this is going to turn out.

... I hope this rapist bastard slips on ice and breaks his neck, which means I’m also invested!