For Reals - 11 - HD (Patreon)

Words, words, and more words.

At egscomics 

Commentary

EDIT: The definition of "devotee" is a bit off, given that she means a person who has those traits. Panel space is limited, however, and I hope it works in context.

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I didn't start this storyline with a conclusion in mind, nor did I look up "fan" before starting this storyline. I felt I could more naturally write their discussion if I wasn't going into it with a conclusion, and if I, too, wasn't entirely sure of the definition. It wasn't until they'd decided they needed to look it up that I finally looked it up myself.

Which maybe was being too method-writer, but hey, I almost immediately reached a conclusion after looking it up. If having a conclusion was going to make this harder to write, then I think I made the right call by waiting to look it up.

TO BE FAIR, I could have written most of the storyline in advance, then looked it up, and then considered whether I wanted to edit anything based on that, but that would be the option of a FAR more organized and on-the-ball Dan than I, let me tell you.

Maybe someday I'll be in a position to write EGSNP that way, but not THIS day.

BOOOOOOOK...!

Susan is actually quoting Merriam-Webster in panel one, hence the credit and quotation marks.

Susan provides definitions without quotation marks after that because she is paraphrasing definitions from multiple sources. That wasn't actually my plan, but as I was hastily looking up one word after another on my own phone (the hardcover dictionary I mentioned having ordered is not here yet), I found some form of "enthusiasm" in literally every result.

It was only when I went back to double-check that I realized I'd used multiple sources, and that Merriam-Webster itself was less enthusiasm-obsessed than the results I got. One could fairly reword them to include forms of enthusiasm, but that would no longer be quoting them.

I wanted to play off of the recurrence of enthusiasm, everything I had written for this comic was based on specific definitions of "fan", I'd established Susan was looking "fan" up in a book, and I didn't want to claim reworded definitions were quotes when they wouldn't actually be quotes.

So... I paraphrased a bunch of things, Susan just knows these words, and she can do a decent job explaining them without directly quoting.

And it's all because I decided she was looking up "fan" in a book, and not on her phone, which would have let me note other sources.

Funny how things turn out.