Well. Chris Hazelton managed to surprise me with how the race in Misfile between Kamikaze Kate and Ash went. I was expecting, after the image of the chained specter hovering above Kate, that we’d have our angelic duo doing something to protect Ash, or maybe even Ash being possessed by the spirit. Especially with the final encounter between Kate and Ash, the manic smile on Kate’s face, and Kate’s ominous farewell.
Instead, things have become almost… mundane. Ash is naturally shaken from her encounter with Kate. She’s wondering how things would have gone if she… had been a he. Worse, what will happen if/when things are set right in Heaven again and she is restored to her old gender… with no memory of the month she’s spent as a girl.
Emily also has been encountering doubts of her own. She’d been so intent before on going to Harvard that she’d forgotten one important thing: to live. It’s like she’s become a puppet of her mother’s, dancing her mother’s tune and doing everything her mother wants to the exclusion of everything else. Emily was her mom’s way of rectifying the mistakes of her past… mistakes that started with becoming pregnant with Emily in the first place.
(Note, I think highly of Emily’s mother. She did not turn on her daughter and blame her for what happened to her life. Instead, she struggled to support her daughter and love her… but even so, the constant push to force her daughter to succeed where she herself had failed… this is not healthy for Emily or for herself. Indeed, I hope her mom either has been taking classes at the local college on the side or plans to once Emily goes off to college. Success is not just measured in our children, but in ourselves.)
The last few comics have focused primarily on Ash and her family. Her dad is rightly worried about what happened last night. His daughter has come home shaken and miserable. He feels like he’s failed somehow, and what’s worse, he can’t find out what exactly happened. Ash is shutting him out, and her friends don’t know what happened between Kate and Ash.
Ash, on the other hand, is feeling trapped. When she was a guy, this wouldn’t be an issue. It seems like her father was fairly lax, not intruding in his son’s life. It almost sounds like he didn’t treat his son with the love he apparently has shown Ash now that Ash is his daughter.
Indeed, the image of Ash sitting there, shirtless, looking down at the bra… the bra is the very symbol of her captivity. She’s not a girl, not deep down, not in her soul. She’s a guy… trapped in this woman’s body, forced to shave her legs and put on a bra and limited in a way that she was not when she was a boy. And she can’t tell her father that. She can’t tell the truth. He wouldn’t believe it, or if he did he’d turn on the two angels (one of whom doesn’t know about the Misfile, and who would likely tell Rumisiel’s superiors (and they would just as likely change the header information on Emily and Ash’s files as actually rectify the problem, because Heaven doesn’t make mistakes)).
Really, the only person Ash can turn to is Emily. I fully expect to see her turning to her new friend soon. Sadly, there’s not much Em can do, but give Ash a shoulder to cry on. And I suspect that’s the last thing Ash wants to do right now. Well, give in to, at least.
