I get the feeling that Sam might not have wanted to become Valley Flower.
Maybe Laura should have asked her nicely? Maybe she might have volunteered…who knows? 😀
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Back Office
In a Call-Center…no one can hear you scream…
I get the feeling that Sam might not have wanted to become Valley Flower.
Maybe Laura should have asked her nicely? Maybe she might have volunteered…who knows? 😀
Not now, of course, but if she did it from the very beginning? Would Laura be able to convince people to follow her and help her cause and even form a harem for her? Some people are easily convinced and have little need to know what and who they really work for, but not Sam. While very few and far between, there are people who would be onboard even knowing full well that they’d be working for a maniac with intentions worse than questionable – again, that is not Sam. Could Laura be a deft manipulator, feed Sam a story that is far enough from the truth that Sam would be okay with it still close enough to the truth to be even remotely manageable for any length of time? No chance at all!
/Explainer of the rhetorical and the obvious
@08: I don’t think Laura has the social skills to pull that sort of thing off. If you’ll recall, the entire reason she invented the mind control tech and started the GREG Initiative was because she was socially isolated. https://rawrtacular.com/bo/?comic=boc03p122
I suppose it says a lot about Laura’s psyche that it never occurred to her that instead of trying to reprogram the rest of the world to like her, it’d be much easier (and ethical) to reprogram herself to be more sociable.
@Kessy: Laura has limited social skills, no doubt about that. But that is also true of some real life leaders – because some people will follow anyway.
On reprogramming oneself to be more sociable, I think you may recognize that without mind control tech this is quite hard to do (but indeed possible, perhaps to limited extent). This could be a reason for someone to invent mind control, to control their own mind. Then assume the inventor has the self-preservation instinct to test stuff on someone else first… then during testing s/he realized s/he had the power to control other people and that is where the family trait of an appetite for world domination set in. Not Laura’s backstory but it could have been! 😀
@Kessy: I’m not sure if I ever really thought Laura through initially, beyond making her a sort of “surprise” villain for the Office Party story (which is why she appears early in the chapter). The page you listed came to me shortly before I started drawing it (I did very little planning back then…beyond core plot points), but I felt that it did flesh out her motivations. I wanted her to have a reason for her actions beyond the angle of “Muh! Ha! Ha! Karen and the World shall be mine!!”
My best guess with Luara Tantrum is that her childhood alone just made her such an introvert that it never even occurred to her a little that she could actually meet friends out in the real world and even find her own “Karen” on day. Instead she buried herself in the “The Work”. The Work would bring her friends, The Work would bring her power and happiness, and The Work would bring her a Karen.
I wonder though: Is there a good Laura under all of that?
@O8h7w: I have kind of hinted a little bit about how Laura created the GREG Initiate back in “Office Party”, but it wasn’t the whole story. It’s still kind of open, but the details of why/how Laura established herself on a remote island to entrap people on “Team Building” weekends are things that even I don’t know 🙂
However, being a Tantrum just ensured that any oddball idea she had would be amplified by a factor of 10000. Hell, her Uncle nearly destroyed the World with a call queue computer ;D