ARGH NO PATTI YOU SILLY BITCH
GET HIS AUTOGRAPH
OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOD EEEEEEEEEE
(Ben what the hell are you putting in your copybooks so that a reader could recognize you from behind, dude.)
ARGH NO PATTI YOU SILLY BITCH
GET HIS AUTOGRAPH
OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOD EEEEEEEEEE
(Ben what the hell are you putting in your copybooks so that a reader could recognize you from behind, dude.)
Best fangirling out since Numbers Rodriguez. :)
Oh Ben… Dangerous when there are losers like Patty runnin about…
Why’s she a loser? She likes his work even if he doesn’t.
Fangirling is weak. You can be excited and enthusiastic about someone and their work without going all SKREEEEEEE! Like a fucking banshee.
I disagree, the banshee shrieks are the best part.
Yeah, cos owning ear plugs is so cool. ._.
Banshee shriek is the true sign of a fangirl in vicinity of their target of adolation. Me, I can’t get my voice go that high, so I’ll have to settle for a lower-pitched squeal. Which I have made all of 3 times in my life (so far). Also, Osten, I get the sense you are male, and I’ve found that in general males tend to have trouble understanding the extremeness of the fangirl reaction.
…mind you, some male friends of mine have said that when meeting their idol, they would have wanted to drool and start humping their idol’s leg. Perhaps that’s the fanboy reaction, then.
Is the sexism really necessary?
Poor, poor Osten. Ostin has very plainly never felt passion for any person or idea. One can only hope that since Ostin’s post, Ostin has felt the passion that unleashes the ban sidhe’s keening.
Scream, ban sidhe, scream!
I’m guessing she knew it was him because he was so short!
Is she wearing tap shoes? It seems odd to highlight her footsteps that way otherwise, with the possible exception of trying to impart that somehow it became absolutely silent in the shop.
Also, I love his Hnh hnh hn laugh. I have a very clear idea in my mind about what that sounds like, and it amuses me.
I’m super excited because in my head he turned into the Death of Rats while he laughed. It was excellent.
Oh man, you’ve… I’d say ‘ruined’ but the word is really ‘enhanced’. You have much enhanced this installment for me.
*points* SQUEEK
Yessss….Grim Squeaker ftw ^.^
Good thing he didn’t overhear their conversation!
Hahahahahahaha XD
Maybe he was facing her (so to speak) and turned around just as she did?
I am also moderately surprised Ben didn’t overhear ANY of their chat back there…
He’s probably doing what I do when the employees of a shop talk caddily, ignore them, because usually their conversation is inane and boring compared to what I’m reading.
Come to think of it, if he were anyone other than the subject of their conversation that’d be exactly right in this case too.
This is the only obvious answer.
The link from my username, I mean.
Maybe he put a picture of the back of his head in his copybook.
Is that a thing now? Are tongueprints on their way out?
Every page of Ben’s copybook contains a close-up photo of his ass. It’s avant-garde.
Well, _avant-garde_ wouldn’t be showing his _derrière_, but… never mind. ;-)
I have this eerie feeling based on how I understood Mesmer’s reaction to Ben’s writing, that maybe Hypatia isn’t actually fan-girling. Like, maybe what she knows about him from his writing is enough that she knows she wouldn’t actually want to meet him in person. Evidently she’s into writers who are “tortured” in whatever way, but clearly there’s something different about Ben, as from the phone conversation she just had, she doesn’t seem like the type to be afraid of approaching someone.
Of course, my high-drama detector may be (in fact, probably is, given that Valentine hasn’t gotten the same idea as Hypatia apparently has, other than that “his shit’s affected”) malfunctioning in a big way. I tend not to do a lot of theorizing as far as comics are concerned. I just suppose that as rich as the world that surrounds him is, and how Ben has seemed just to drift along with it so far, it’s easy to forget that there’s something up with him.
I tell ya, though, maybe I just haven’t spent enough time on the internet, but if I’m even remotely in the right neighbourhood, I can’t imagine what he’s putting down in writing that could prompt such a reaction.
I think Hypatia finds Ben cute because he’s something novel in Templar – namely, someone NOT from Templar. He’s this adopted kid from a rich family who is socially inept and moves to the weirdest place in the world with no goddamn clue what it’s like, all in a desperate bid for self-confidence.
I think Valentine is completely off in his guessing – Ben isn’t terribly messed up at all. He’s shy, he’s inept, he probably has some anxiety issues, and he takes a medication that he has a fair dependence on, but that’s kind of the extent of it. We’ve seen him do enough physical things to know that his condition is purely mental, and we’ve seen him behave in ways that cement the fact that his medication is enough to help him out, and that most of his problems are just the sort of suburban bullshit neuroses one needs to sort out with time and experience.
So to my mind, Hypatia is actually infatuated with Ben, thinks he’s different and sweet and loveable, and she’s having a massive fangirl moment here.
As for Mesmer’s reaction to Ben’s work? Look at how Mesmer is acting just before that. He’s going on about how Ben must be a rich kid, but notice Mesmer doesn’t seem to realize Ben’s not from Templar. He speculates Ben must have “some mansion in the sorrows”, and he thinks that a thousand dollars for an adoption is ritzy deluxe. Mesmer’s a goddamn idiot with no exposure to the rest of the world, except his mom’s organic nut butter farm. He thinks he know anything about wealth, and he has no idea.
So when he actually reads Ben’s work, and finds out just how weird (to Mesmer) Ben’s suburban homelife must have been, he’s a little gob-smacked. Thought he had Ben figured out as a spoiled rich kid like all the others in Templar, finds out he’s something else entirely that Mesmer’s never seen.
Least, that’s my view.
~D.
If you read what Spike has said about Ben, you may be really surprised. She said Ben will be a character we’ll go from loving to hating by the end of Templar. That and the forshadowing of him doing things like considering tossing out his meds makes me think he has really *major* issues—even though he’s very adorable and kind right now.
I’ve been thinking that perhaps Ben will simply not do something that he NEEDS to do. We’ve seen him become very passive with Dr. Bash. Perhaps he will freeze up, shut down, or get scared when we really need him to help another character. I could see Spike making another character’s death/grievous injury/ect. essentially Ben’s fault, and some of the other characters not giving a fig about what was going on in his head.
Mesmer seems to me like someone whose world revolves around being deliberately offensive. He lives for shock value and for getting under other peoples’ skins, and he works at a place that caters to tastes that a lot of people would consider wildly offensive. I don’t think he’s easily shocked. Whatever his origins are, I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss him as having had no experience about the rest of the world whatsoever. He knows enough about wealth to be correct in his assessment of Ben–he does come from money and obviously he was adopted.
We don’t know what Mesmer’s reading, (spitting out theories again, it’s possible it’s the same thing Ben didn’t want Reagan reading, way back in Chapter 4 [http://templaraz.com/?p=382] , although the wiki also states that Ben pays his rent by selling erotic fiction, which we’ve seen on his screen before, which presumably he doesn’t offer under his own name, nor is it something he’d want Reagan to know about) but I think it’s been pretty plainly conveyed that it’d take a lot to leave Mesmer gobsmacked. If there’s been weirdness in Ben’s suburban home life, and if that’s what Mesmer’s reading about, I think it’s going to have to have been pretty damn weird to leave Mesmer shocked.
Anyway, tl;dr, it seems to me that if it’s a copybook Mesmer’s looking at, it’s one of the three types that Ben has written:
1) The erotic stuff that pays his rent (has been/will be published, doesn’t have his name on it)
2) The stuff Reagan was interested in, about the Cook Family and that kinda thing (don’t know what name this is published under, if published as a copybook vs. a crusade article, or even at all)
3) What Hypatia’s engrossed by, described by Val as Ben’s struggle to “explain hisself to hisself” (written under BJK)
My theory is that this third category is most likely to contain the sort of stuff that would leave Mesmer wide-eyed, and might possibly cause Hypatia to recoil from actually meeting Ben.
Erotic-slash-psychotic fiction, perhaps…
Has anyone coined the term Psychoerotic before? If not, I’m claiming it.
Sorry, that category exists already. :-P A very small niche for really creepy stories, but it exists. (If considered with a wider angle, any murder mystery with a love/lust story entangled with it, could be considered to belong into that category, thus making it much more all-encompassing.)
Yes!
Val, you made MY day! Ha ha ha ha
How could she recognize him? Unless like he copies a photo of himself in the copybook or something, which I thought wasn’t a thing.
Hypatia’s hands in the 5th panel are UH-mazing.
I’m impressed with her ability to self-stifle a fangirl squeal -and- retreat without drawing attention, myself, but yes, the hurried ‘hands-on-mouth’ pose is more commonly a controlled, full-palms-and-closed-fingers position. Panel 5 gives it a reflexive feel, like her brain almost didn’t catch up with her hands before her squeak could get out.
Even if he ignored the shopkeep patter, I could imagine Ben glancing back curiously as to the source of the noise, shrugging, and going back to reading whatever he’s looking at.
I’m guessing it’s less that she recognized him, and more that she realized it had to be him, through deduction. Why else would the random guy in the front of the shop be of particular interest to the conversation that she was just having?
That’s how I read it as well.
As for Ben not hearing them talk about him, he is pretty shy and insular. He probably didn’t even think to listen to them; he’s engrossed in his book.
Also, random people talking more than 2 steps away from you tend not to get your attention unless they mention your name – and as Ben didn’t have a writer-name thought up, I don’t think he’d recognize that as “his”.
Maybe Ben has his initials on his shirt/bag?
I assume she guessed it was him based on the fact that he was standing in the exact spot she was just told to go look, to ‘make her day’.