Unreasonably Hard Lines
Hey, would you like to make your own website about Paranatural? Do you need images for a textpost? Do you just want to relive the memories without dedicating 2-3 weeks to a re-read? I have got you covered!
Behold Mouse's semi-random assortment of funny jokes, good art, ship moments, and unbelievably hard bars, capped by yours truly. I did a reread of the comic specifically looking to get my facts straight for an essay I want to write, so the images I took are slightly geared toward finding evidence for that paper... but I also just capped a lot of my favorite moments, too. Where I have additional thoughts I have put them in the hovertext, just as with the comic.
I capped them, I'm hosting them, but it's sure not my art. Feel free to grab anything you like from this page but always link back to paranatural.net!
And yes, we are going to get to chapter nine. Trust. We are going to get chapter nine in here.
While I have labelled this section facetiously, Paranatural is stuffed to the gills with queer and/also genderqueer characters with fantastically varied amounts of self-awareness, self-acceptance, and toxicity. It's just good goddamn queer media. This sample platter isn't even half of what Pnat has to offer when it somes to Odd Supernatural Queers. We've got queer kids struggling with their identity. We've got queer kids NOT AT ALL struggling with their identity. We've got monster-hunting transwomen (several). We have closeted middle-aged men going through a rough divorce. We have nonbinary bullies. This place has everything.
Paranatural has a lot to say, but 'my life's work hasn't failed until it ends up the next generation's burden' is its echoing, devestating thesis statement. The second the update dropped in which Gwen said those lines, I knew that it was the absolute most concise, central statement of the story.
Of course, to phrase it as a thesis statement, you must rephrase it as 'A person's life's work hasn't failed until it ends up the next generation's burden.' It applies to everyone, not just Gwen Burger. In this story, every single generation has failed so far.
This line is just precision targeted to be the most tragic thing I have ever fucking heard. Gwen says this in what is likely her last lucid moment to a Rick as a child while he is holding Gwen's young son (the next generation after him). It is echoed in the flashback that is Rick's last real lucid moment before he begins a slow spiral of fanaticism that is driving him right out of the person he wants to be as he struggles to become that person. He swears, as a very young man, to become the person that eight-year-old Isabel needs. Years pass and he fails.
The events of chapter five make it brutally clear that Rick has finally and totally disappointed Isabel. She does not trust him now. The chapter ends on the high note of her bringing the Activity Club back together and swearing they will solve Mayview's mysteries on their own right after the low note of her giving up on Rick. The adults have failed them; it's up to the children, again, to solve problems that are generations older than them.
This burden has passed onto the next generation twice since Gwen vanished. The parents and mentors of the protagonists struggle to heal, to fix their mistakes, to at least find personal closure, and achieve none of it; out of the members of their parent's generation that still live, we see the same. Angel is as misguided as Francisco, just in another direction. June, balancing opposing promises, is forced to drop some. Shrike vanishes, leaving the overprotective father of their son to destroy him. Every reminder that they have to protect and cherish their children and apprentices leads the adults of Paranatural to becomes more paranoid of hurting anyone, isolated in their fear, and furious at their powerlessness, every time.
I know Zach Morrison is about my age—like them, I now have at least two full generations of humans younger than me, and they are living in the same world, with none of the problems I was so afraid of at their age yet fixed. I thought I could do something to make the world for them, but I couldn't. I'm just one person. I can and do work hard to make my little town a better place, but it's as much as one person can do.
Paranatural has been running for fifteen years, and from its start to its current form has seen one of those generations grow up completely. It's not a coincidence that what was once a school story about kids fighting monsters has slowly expanded to shine a light on how the adults in this setting could have ever possibly let this state of affairs persist.
Morrison is too good a writer to not resolve what seems right now to be a bleak, hopeless statement of endless self-fulfilling propchecies, people who see the problem, cannot solve, it, and only manage to pass it on. We'll all see how this ends together, whether there's any way to break the cycle for good.
Venus has only appeared in one scene (though their presense has been felt in others) but their one scene had me just enraptured. I absolutely adore the design, though 'concept' might be a better word for Venus' constantly shifting apperance. One of Paranatural's strengths are the incredible designs of the spirit characters, who often have two or three or four integrated visual concepts at once (standout examples are Cryptide and Lucifer). But Venus Guytrap just smacked me from the first page; I was rapt waiting for every update during this scene (for more than one reason). I love Venus' pink, rosy, gentle, ever-changing, subtly threatening world.
These panels are all from the same hour of the same day. I'm just proving a point here.
Lucifer makes plenty of valid critisisms about Rick. He is certainly not always wrong. That's what makes this interesting moment of hypocrisy stand out to me.
Rick clearly respects Lucifer a lot. Compare how he treats his boss with outright hostility and how he nearly begs for Lucifer's attention and approval while Lucifer replies only with insults and critisisms and tell me which one Rick respects. Compare that to how Rick in return is treated by Lucifer.
Lucifer has been in Rick's head since he was 13 and for half his life—this situation continued because, I think, the only thing worse would be not respecting Lucifer and being stuck in the same situation with him anyway. Rick has to get along with Lucifer... imagine if he didn't.
The way Lucifer talks about respect and then goes behind his back... If you don't want to see it as actual disdain, you have to see it as sheer dissapointment. The best light in which I can see this treatment is that Lucifer is desperately trying to keep some hope for Richard alive, is purposefully tending his guttering affection for his pupil, and is trying to keep his utter conviction that Rick is a failure to himself because despite everything, he doesn't want to hurt that idiot kid any more... and he needs his body to keep the Shadow in pirson.
I don't think Lucifer is malicious in his interactions with Rick in the sense that he seeks to destroy him. I think he is ill-meaning in a more subtle, neglectful way; he had lost all hope in Rick but will continue to let Rick think the fire isn't out in their relationship because it serves him, like being forced to still live with someone you've fallen out of love with because of the cost of housing. Rick can handle romantic trouble; as he's proven with June, he may not handle another parental figure thinking he's not worth sticking around for, again, very well.