Magellan

Discussion (4) ¬

1. 
   Michael

   May 31, 2019, 1:38 pm | # | Reply

   This comic always made me wonder about Billy. I thought he was one of the most grounded cadets of his class, but this shallow aspect makes me want to reconsider 😐

   • 
     xmung

     June 1, 2019, 5:54 am | # | Reply

     Hey, he still wants to look good!! 😀
   • 
     Scott's Folly

     January 29, 2021, 11:15 pm | # | Reply

     Maybe it’s shallowness, maybe it’s caution. Cross-time conversations usually tend towards one of two philosophies: either maximum information exchange to avoid nasty surprises, or minimum information to avoid setting up paradoxes. Evidently Jaycee/Maverick are in the first camp, and Billy/VM2 in the second. But early-onset baldness is suitably inconsequential that it’s a safe subject for discussion!
   • 
     VileTerror

     July 31, 2022, 3:11 pm | # | Reply

     He -is- still one of the most grounded. He’s basically a teenage “super man” with a very good sense of his power being dangerous if he doesn’t exercise self-control. We see regularly that he’s almost neurotic about making sure he’s in control of himself and hyper aware of the harm he could do if he wasn’t. When he broke the table in the training meeting, he knew it was his fault, and unlike someone such as Charisma, didn’t try to pass it off as “well they should have built stronger tables,” even though, well, maybe they -should- have, given how powerful so many cadets are.
     But losing his hair, especially as someone who has ingrained sensibilities of maleness from a u.s. cultural point-of-view, a loss of his hair represents a psychological threat to his maleness, which is also representative of his self-control in that culture. He asks his future self how to fight his fate on the matter. He stops using Hex2O. He -needs- to be in control of this, or else he’s afraid he’ll lose control of other things too. More important things.

     At least, that’s my reading of his character through the perspective my lived experiences have afforded me as a Canadian who is all-but-forced to consume u.s. media.
     I can’t speak to how Grace intends the character to come across. She’s known to write tongue-in-cheek facetious comments here and there, and so I don’t know if her “he still wants to look good” reply falls in to that category (sarcasm is hard enough to read in person; internet text is all but impossible for me to be sure on. Especially with the use of those little yellow faces that people use inconsistently).

     I figure we’ll either see it come to fruition in the Magellan story at some point, or Grace may find the time and energy to explain in more detail some day.