CURRENT STORY DISCUSSION

The thing is, lacking a conscience doesn't automatically turn somebody into a horrible monster. Sometimes horrible monsters might HAVE a conscience. Lia obviously had to have had a predisposition to this sort of awful behavior beforehand, OR this is just literally out of fucking no where.

Feels more like the latter, which is annoying.

Very interesting to read all the comments here! Everybody seems to see Lia as Fiona does, through pink glasses of love. You know, when you fall in love with the image you build in your head of the person, and then get irrationally angry when they do something that doesn't follow your expectations?

In the beginning of Lia's story she was shown to be somewhat egotistical and self-absorbed. I guess it could be seen as cute innocence. This recent turn of events seems very realistic to me, and deepens and strongens my view of Lia! I am so happy to see that Megan actually made Lia more than a happy, pretty blonde.

maymay wrote:@BlueCanary1: It's an archaic word in my language, Polish . The whole phrase for nightmare was "nocna mara", now you'd say it differently though. But I think Megan could've taken it from a number of other Slavic languages.

I was about to write it


The page left me speechless for a moment...
I think Lia started to behave like that because she was in the dream (well... dreamworld anyway...)and in the dream you can do anything you want without consequences (I always steal candies from the shop or do something naughty when I realise I'm dreaming, lol). She was angry and betrayed and there was nothing left for her. She was hurt and was able to hurt others so she did.

Has nobody here ever questioned what had Sadako done to Lia's conscience? Perhaps she had tainted it on purpose, so Lia would become a murderer? (Similar to what happened to that Baku).

If anything, Lia's red eyes in the previous page should tell us something, shouldn't they?

I feel like a lot of people here are WAY overreacting. You all saw how Fi acted after just a little while without her conscience. Now imagine that, multiplied by centuries without a conscience. I for one don't have that much faith in human nature to begin with. I think we all have terrible urges, that we suppress because acting them out "wouldn't be right". Here (http://rosalarian.com/yume/?p=1654), even WITH the constant presence of her conscience, Fi would have probably torn poor Nica apart for something as relatively small as writing a dream. How many of you HAVEN'T had the urge to just punch somebody right in the face? That's obviously not as extreme as killing and torturing people, but most rational people don't even get to the point of having those thoughts, because their conscience backs them down long before that point. Not to mention the fact that Lia had JUST found out the the person she'd been living with for DECADES, the person she loved, was literally not who she thought it was. Her entire life, for decades, was a complete lie. Even people in the real world who have been emotionally traumatized like that don't act rationally. "Perfectly sane" people have been known to turn into murderers after catching the love of their life cheating. And that's just CHEATING. It's not like many people in the real world have had to deal with the fact that their lover is literally a completely different person than who they thought. So Lia runs off on her own, already angry and hurt, and without a conscience there to back her down from her worst urges, or to calm her down by adding a rational touch to her thoughts. She then goes centuries acting on every urge that popped up into her head, and of course they would get more and more extreme. With nothing but her own creative mind behind her, coupled with the power to actually control reality, she was free to come up with whatever she wanted.

I honestly would have been shocked if Lia HADN'T turned into a monster. How many people in the world are pure enough to live functionally for centuries completely without anything guiding them towards the right choices? I really think Megan showed us this exactly to prove this point. Consciences are important. VERY important. If the "Clandy is Sadako's lost conscience" theory is correct (which I think it is, there's too much evidence there for it not to be), then it explains why Sadako is the way she is today. Even Lia's time without her conscience was relatively short compared to the time Sadako has spent. Lia was only without for a maximum of 850 dream-world years or so, assuming she regained her conscience RIGHT before she met Fi. If the Sadako-Clandy theory is correct, Sadako has been on her own for nearly 2000 years now (1890 to be more or less exact).



Also, probably an important thing to note, the dreamworlders said Fiona shouldn't even have been able to cause a pepper storm outside of her own dream space, which meant she was special. Lia seems to have these same powers. So does Sadako, assuming she's a real person (which I think we all more or less agree is true). I wonder what these three have in common...

Edit: And all of this is assuming Lia had simply gone without her conscience. There's still the possibility that Sadako twisted Lia's conscience to get her specifically to do these things, which makes it even easier to forgive Lia for her actions, because they weren't even really hers in the first place.

Also, to Megan, you're doing an AMAZING job on this comic. I don't even think this deeply about my all-time favorite books, haha.

The thing is, lacking a conscience doesn't automatically turn somebody into a horrible monster. Sometimes horrible monsters might HAVE a conscience. Lia obviously had to have had a predisposition to this sort of awful behavior beforehand, OR this is just literally out of fucking no where.

I think it could. The frontal lobe is considered responsible for what we call conscience. Some of its executive functions involve the ability to ponder and recognize the consequences of our actions, choose between good and bad, and suppress unacceptable social responses.

There was this case around the fifties, a man got a tumor removed from its frontal lobe and the damage to that part of his brain ended up in a total lack of inhibition. That is to say, the poor man went berserk and did not have any regards towards other people. I wish I had my psych book with me, because I cannot remember the guy's name.

This is merely one real life example of what lacking a conscience could do to someone.

Now I'm wondering what drew Lia to Fiona in the first place. I feel like it had to have been something more than coincidence. I think she auditioned for a part in Fi's dream purposefully to get closer to Fi, although I'm not sure why yet. Considering Lia, Fi, and Sadako all have the same dream-reality bending powers, the fact that they all ended up in the same dream seems like it couldn't have been pure chance. I get why Sadako would pop up once the dream started rolling and Lia and Fi started falling for each other, but why was Lia there in the first place?

Edit: unless ALL real people have those powers in the dream world. I wonder, how often do real people get taken out of their dream space and into the dream world at large? Obviously it's happened before, because Sadako got there, and so did Lia. But are they the only cases other than Fi, or does it happen on a regular basis?

K, so here's a question.

If Lia rampaged the Dreamworld for centuries, and, as shown on today's page, kept her own face for much of it, then why don't any of the Dreamworlders recognize her?

Attempts were made to capture her, so I assume there would have been information about her in the news, wanted/warning posters and definitely word of mouth.


Also, I'm having a hard time with today's page...this just seems to have come out of nowhere.

I think eventually, that will be how exactly Sadako keeps Lia on the leash.

I think.

A sociopath is someone who cannot view the world the same way as you, has a skewed version of reality. That is not an 'excuse', that is their existence. They can't help but be born that way. To say that they are innately evil or bad is really stupid and ignorant. I'm not saying anyone here did, but I have heard people say that.

Yes, they do bad things. But, depending on the degree, the type and how it manifests, they either don't know better or don't have any way to care. They don't process the caring bit at all. They do what they feel like doing.

It's wrong, but it's not like we can really blame them. They aren't held accountable anymore than a child who picks up a gun, doesn't know what it is and shoots someone in the head with it. It depends on the degree of the sociopathy, but it's still pretty hard to say that a sociopath is 'ignoring' anything. It's just not there.

Truthfully, I have a hard time understanding why so many of you can't swallow this page. What do you think a conscience is? Have you noticed how important having one has been throughout this comic?

A conscience is your ability to tell right from wrong.

Right now Lia is hurting. BADLY.

She knows that she will never see her mother again, she will never be able to live again, she is dead, she is trapped in another world... And the one person she sacrificed it all for, this heaven she thought she was in, it's all a lie. Like someone said, people go in to homocidal rages when they see their significant other cheating.

She is hurting. She has become separated from her conscience. She wants the hurt to go away. Her ability to tell right from wrong is gone. So she is letting out her hurt.

Now is it right? Is it constructive?

No.

But it isn't her fault. Mentally, right now without a conscience, she can't process right from wrong, so she is doing what feels good. She doesn't care either way, she can't process caring. She can only process that this feels good, that making other feel her pain feels good.

She can't know better, because the part of her that knows better isn't with her right now.

And how does this all not link back to the her from before? How is this not something you could have seen coming?

She was ostracized from her home for so long. People hated her. She had to lie to everyone. People only loved her when she lied above who she was. She has a lot of pent up issues.

Truthfully, intense, seering emotional pain + past suffering involving other people being assholes + loss of a conscience = tendencies that won't exactly be the happiest or the most constructive.

Skies wrote:
Truthfully, I have a hard time understanding why so many of you can't swallow this page. What do you think a conscience is? Have you noticed how important having one has been throughout this comic?

I do understand why. You see, someone just made a valid point: why wasn't there a "wanted" poster, or why didn't Fiona ever hear of the "Terrible Mara"?

Plus, the change of character of Lia is very, very abrupt.

If I try to explain this from the point of view of the story, (rather than trying to think why Megan wrote the story like this), I can only tell you that Lia did what she did because Sadako let her do it. After all, the ruler of the Dreamworld is very powerful. Why didn't she try to stop Lia herself?

Megabyte wrote:Why wasn't there a "wanted" poster, or why didn't Fiona ever hear of the "Terrible Mara"?

After all, the ruler of the Dreamworld is very powerful. Why didn't she try to stop Lia herself?

Ooooooh! Mysteries!
They will be explained... later.


I am having a lot of fun reading all your responses. This might be the most WTF page since the end of Part 1!

Megan Rose wrote:

Megabyte wrote:Why wasn't there a "wanted" poster, or why didn't Fiona ever hear of the "Terrible Mara"?

After all, the ruler of the Dreamworld is very powerful. Why didn't she try to stop Lia herself?

Ooooooh! Mysteries!
They will be explained... later.


I am having a lot of fun reading all your responses. This might be the most WTF page since the end of Part 1!

Ok, now I am like 20,000 times more curious than I already was.

Megabyte wrote:

Skies wrote:
Truthfully, I have a hard time understanding why so many of you can't swallow this page. What do you think a conscience is? Have you noticed how important having one has been throughout this comic?

I do understand why. You see, someone just made a valid point: why wasn't there a "wanted" poster, or why didn't Fiona ever hear of the "Terrible Mara"? [...] I can only tell you that Lia did what she did because Sadako let her do it. After all, the ruler of the Dreamworld is very powerful.

Exactly. And if Sadako is so powerful, and is also a human who has been conscience-less for over twice as long as Lia, who had already turned a sadistic psychopathic serial killer, it's easy to see how she would find the means and the motive to support Lia.

Edit: Of course, the connection between them is obviously deeper than just them both being psychos.

But I can definitely see how Lia just becoming that psychotic would be in character. I really really don't see how it's so shocking. Lia hasn't even specified yet how long it took her to turn that way. She just said that she evaded capture for "centuries", and she was gone for quite a while, almost definitely longer than 300 years. Fiona started cracking after just a little while without her conscience. Just imagine what only a decade would do, much less a hundred years or more.

I had thought at the time that Jeanne and Nica seemed a lot more scared than they had reason to be. Perhaps they knew that Fi had hooked up with Mara?

Edit: By the way, Mara does mean nightmare but oddly it's also where Nightmare comes from. Originally it simply meant a great fear, hence a nightmare is a great fear that comes at night.

The point I was trying to make earlier is that even people with a conscience might have urges towards cruelty or sadism. Without a conscience, of course, those urges would become stronger. I would believe this more if Lia had struggled with those urges WITH a conscience and had a predisposition to this sort of behavior.

Right now, it just feels like bad writing.

Ok, this may sound a little messed up, but I LOVE a good femme fatale, so I'm loving this.

Kill 'em all, Lia, let God sort 'em out.

Smurgleburf wrote:The point I was trying to make earlier is that even people with a conscience might have urges towards cruelty or sadism. Without a conscience, of course, those urges would become stronger. I would believe this more if Lia had struggled with those urges WITH a conscience and had a predisposition to this sort of behavior.

Right now, it just feels like bad writing.

Some people have bad consciences. Fi's conscience messed up and she attempted suicide as a result. Plausibly, then, not everyone has a good enough conscience to keep them from all kinds of evil acts.

Lia's conscience was good enough that when she was gone Lia went berzerk.

It's very important to avoid taking too many turns in the story without connecting the loose points, or yu+me will end up like a comic version of the Lost series.

The way things are now, I honestly think of this "twisted" Lia as some sort of minion, just like Baku is. You know, to keep Sadako's reign of terror working?

Maybe she didn't think what she was doing was wrong because dreamworlders aren't real people. We don't know what happens to dream worlders when they die do we? Maybe they just come back to life.

Wait... was she killing dream worlders or the actual dreamer's?

Where is her arm? http://rosalarian.com/yume/?p=1788

At least once she seems to have turned her arm into a drill. I guess she can do that.

As for killing dreamworld residents or dreamers, can she tell the difference?