AO Secret 42: Upchuck

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I wanna apologize in advance if this page grossed you out in any way. xD After a while that 4th panel gets hard to look at...

So now we get a peek in a classroom during school hours! Exciting, right? Anyone beginning to miss school yet?... Yeah, me neither.

Now judging by the strong reaction I got from the last two pages, I feel the need to elaborate on the personality of one of our previously beloved stars of the comic. A lot of you were put off by Clinton's juvenile actions in the end of part 1, and I couldn't agree with you more on that. It was wrong of him to take something from Ollie without his permission, especially something so ornate and unusual, but a lot of you felt that, judging by his theft, Clinton really is an evil little jerk who purposely betrays his friends. And truthfully, strangely enough, I have to defend Clinton for a moment. The thing about Clinton that I feel some of you have missed is that he is stupid. I mean, really stupid. He's kind of like a little kid, in the way that he takes what he can grab without consideration for the feelings of others. But it's not that he's aware of common courtesy and chooses to ignore it, but rather, he's completely unaware of it. If you think of Clinton as a little kid rather than a 13-year-old, then his actions make much more sense. He doesn't know better. He thinks he can have whatever he wants. He doesn't realize when he's hurting people, especially when he offends Ollie (because in Ollie's mind, Clinton is a really great guy who can do no wrong, so it'd be a rare occasion that he would try to correct him on anything). So when Clinton was desperately searching for a present for Tasha, and found the box of chocolates in Ollie's locker, it made sense for him to take it if he replaced them after (the problem with that though, which Clinton failed to see, was that he didn't necessarily replace them in time. Plus he probably forgot about it after... xD). Coupled with the fact that Clinton had absolutely no idea that Tasha had a secret admirer, nor that the admirer was really Ollie, nor that Tasha now thinks the admirer was him this entire time, then it becomes clear that the tragedy that occurred in the last two pages wasn't entirely Clinton's fault, at least not on purpose...

Now you might know someone who has the same personality defect as Clinton. And you probably can't stand them. I've met many people like Clinton, and they're not the most pleasant people to be around. xD That being said, I'm not saying you have to /like/ Clinton, necessarily. You're not supposed to. Even in the comic, most of the kids in the Drama Club can't stand Clinton. In fact, /they/ think Clinton is just an evil little jerk who purposely hurts his friends. But as the audience, I just want you to understand where he's coming from.

When you think about it, that's really why he needs Ollie as a friend, and it's why Ollie is such a good person. I know in some parts of the comic it hasn't seemed this way, but Ollie isn't stupid. He's not smart, either. He actually gets better grades than Clinton, but his problem is that he's naive. He still thinks that the world is wonderful and everything's rainbows and sunshine, and he truly believes that there are only good people in the world. And this never-fading cloud of optimism in Ollie's mind is what keeps him from seeing what a jerk Clinton is, so rather than shunning him like everyone else, he sees Clinton as a wonderful person who was willing to be his friend (that will show more in this next part of the plot. There will be quite a few flashbacks.) And of course when people try to tell Ollie that Clinton is being a jerk, he ignores them because his rainbows-sunshine-clouded mind tells him that there are no bad people in the world, just bad actions. So yeah, he's basically impervious to Clinton's jerkiness, in a way.

I'm sorry I've written so much. XD; Thanks to those who've managed to read the whole thing. The fact that you wouldn't understand Clinton's ways is really a flaw in my writing, not in your analysis, because as a writer I probably should've made these kinds of things more obvious. But I'm still learning, so as long as you get it now, we can just continue with the comic, smooth-sailing, from here on in. C:

Now I've gotta put comic-making aside for a mo and get back to making more arts!