#a6a5

[5706-5710] It looks so delicious. You are presumably being compelled to lick the sucker by some powerful juju enchantment. But it's making you nervous. You must resist!

[5598-99]

It was a box of Gushers, and you were stunned to realize that awful gooey fruit snack was manufactured by the very same company you were due to inherit. As everything you thought you knew came crashing down around you, that day you swore the moment you ascended to the throne of the BCCorp empire, you would issue an immediate global recall of the foul product and discontinue it forever. You often joked that the snacks were so nasty, it was almost like they were filled with multicolored slime harvested from plump extraterrestrial larva. When you told your dad about your plans for the product, you both had a good laugh.

And then the very next page from that somber moment we get the “gushers are made of troll grubs” bit. This comic is a tonal yoyo.

There’s an animatic of the main part of the convo on YouTube. Normally I would link something accessible like that, but in this case I won’t b/c the animatic doesn’t really work for me. the animatic poses Hal as an embodied being for the purpose of visually representing the conversation, but this obscures two of the most important dynamics of the scene, namely:

Dirk has promised to give Hal access to a physical body via the kernelsprite, but Dirk is now explaining that he is going to break his promise and keep Hal confined to a pair of anime shades.

Dirk is holding said shades through the entire conversation, and has the ability to break the shades and kill Hal throughout the conversation, while Hal is unable to defend himself.

Dirk is full of self loathing at this point, and when his alter ego pushes him he responds by threatening that alter ego with death. I think that it is important that Dirk has this capacity to grow into an extremely cruel man, because his conflict in this scene is in one sense a lack of control over who he is, and indulging in controlling and punishing behavior by lashing out and killing Hal will cement him into a villainous sort of character.

Something visually important are the cracks which come from Dirk twisting the shades. He stopped himself from murdering Hal, but the act of violence has still left its mark on his victim.

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