Gull luv
Only a truly cruel and vengeful Lottie duplicate would be so cruel as to consort with la Grote’s feared enemy, the seagull.
Bad Machinery
New comics by John Allison
Only a truly cruel and vengeful Lottie duplicate would be so cruel as to consort with la Grote’s feared enemy, the seagull.
This clearly hints at the possibility that Bad Charlotte is a bunch of seagulls controlling a wax human
That’s quite Lovecraftian.
Virtually the exact plot of “The Festival”!
And I ran … I ran so far away …
Gotta get away.
Pleeeeease no wax people 🙁
“LOTTIE!” indeed… Im afrai she will pay for that trip with interest. At least now they could have a way to found who decided to have Lottie’s face, the seagull!
I had a feeling we were missing a piece of the puzzle or two. Probably still missing something, actually. With the physical similarity off the table, I can think of at least one person who tried to ruin Lottie’s life previously, but would that person really be this obsessed a few years later?
You know who’s good with disguises? The Wendigo from Scary Go Round volume 7: Peloton.
Patient looks through a book of samples at the doctor’s office, comes to a decision, puts it down. “Yes, I’ll take the Charlotte Grote.”
So how MANY are there?
I didn’t see this twist coming when I first read, as it’s pretty bonkers if entirely on brand. Esther is very lucky the technology wasn’t there yet when she was in college.
As a fun sidebar I started a giant days retrospective on my blog, which you can read now by clicking the link. It’ll be once a month starting with Esther’s early history and the self published issues. The rest will each cover two volumes and whatever one shots happened. I was going to put giant days x batman in this one but found out it features McGraw so I’ll save it for some point in second year.
I also plan to cover solver either mid retrospective or after it.
At least they didn’t send it to DeepFake
What if it’s NOT someone who hates Lottie, after all? What if it’s someone so obsessed with her that they want to take her place? Demoralize her so much that she just gives up her entire life, so Fake Lottie can take it over?
That’s even worse.
Or she’s not trying to bring her down at all, but adores her and just happens to be a terrible person?
🎵Gull luv!
It’s drivin’ me mad,
It’s makin’ me crazy! 🎵
I can believe she mortgaged those hips, but her face?
Bad form Lottie. Most appallingly bad form.
No – Lottie has good form. That’s why she’s in this mess!
App(e)allingly good form!
First it was the Digital Perm, now this!
Ah, the lengths we can go to get money when a school trip is at stake…. Priorities certainly change as you age.
This twist is so out of the blue and yet so totally Lottie.
I sure hope that was an AMAZING ski holiday.
Yes it was SO AMAZING she can’t remember a bit of it!
They handcraft 3-4 Lotties a year. But thanks to machine learning, they’re about to go full scale industrial. Imagine, if you will, a Devonshire of Lotties
A Job Lottie!
A mystery of Lotties!
I think the correct term is “a solvent of Lotties”.
A lot of Lotties.
Just not an iced Lottie
A Mob-a-Lotties!
More Than You Thought Lotties!
LOTTIE!!!!!!!! You sold your FACE (or the likeness thereof)!!!!! I was not expecting that….buuuuuut, 6th Form Ski Trips are a powerful temptation.
Finally a clue! Could the person who opted to be the doppelganger now be traced through the records of that plastic surgeon (or is that confidential information?)
That’s the place to start!
I believe that information would be confidential. Though not beyond Ygln’s spreadsheet prowess (we hope?)!
Ah, it might not be someone from Lottie’s past at all. It could be somebody who has decided that only she can have this face and is out to destroy Lottie for that reason. If that’s the case, that plastic surgeon may be dead.
But their business records should still exist, right? Though I suppose our villainess is thorough like that.
Perhaps Evilottie has her own Evilittle Claire who made sure the doctor’s records went out in a blaze of glory.
Damn it, that’s just not fair!
I still have so many questions. 1) That’s a thing?!? 2) Why would someone spend all that money? 3) Do weird personal vendettas really pay that well? Or is she loaded? 4) What about height and physique? 5) Will the surgical changes age the same way Lottie’s natural face does?
Ok. So we’re looking for a wealthy petite woman. Forget thinking historically, just look up the list of the wealthiest women in the UK.
Oh! Or it could be a mask, a la Mission Impossible. So we are looking for a spy. Easy peasy.
FALLON YOUNG!!!!!!!
Fallon is about a foot taller than Lottie, though.
Matching body-type also, not so easy to duplicate…
An alternate universe Lottie, perhaps?
According to John, in the comments on the Novemeber 29th page, “Alternate timelines are not at play here”.
If you want to get picky, an “alternate universe” is not the same thing as an “alternate timeline”… or is it? I think we need a ruling from Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
I suppose it depends on the cosmology of one’s specific fictional multiverse.
Pretty sure there are some quantum implications involved.
Yes! Does she even exist or not, or will we never know because of the unpredictability factors?
We can know whether she exists or not. We just can’t know her precise location at the same moment we also know her precise momentum.
No. We don’t need him Neal DeGrasse Tysonning all over the Tackleverse.
Also, Bad Charlotte would have a goatee if she was from an alternate universe. That’s just physics.
I crawled in from work this morning at about 6am thinking it was Saturday (it was a… complicated night), on realising it was Friday I had a quick look around here and… no, I’m a little tired and confused, I’ll go back and look at that later. So, later I did and it was still there.
Face.
Plastic surgeon.
Sold.
I’m going to have to cut down on all this night work, it’s doing things to my head.
I can not imagine that Lottie could have done this without her mother´s explicit consent.
I don´t see this going in some strange reality. This plot comes from Wicked Things which is firmly attached to a world without strange entities and I think we will have to look for a murderer who is a human being.
I agree but also it’s been almost five years since Wicked Things so who John thinks the killer is could’ve always changed during that time.
Plus we’re at a point where the characters are directly bringing up their more supernatural adventures despite Solver having also been mostly grounded up until now.
I can imagine someone being old enough at age 18 (end of sixth form) to sell their face image rights in the UK / Bobbins- / Tackleverse.
Or Lottie having some excellent fake id.
Or maybe Lotties mother actually “never was, um, a detail-oriented parent”?
Minors can enter contracts and do so all the time, but they are not binding (i.e. the minor can exit the contract and have it voided, and so could the other party if they were misled about the person’s age).
I don’t think we’ve actually seem Lottie and Not Lottie together have we? Or have a solid, witnessed alibi for a Not Lottie spree?
So, I accuse Lottie of being Not Lottie and setting up all of this in order to flush out her framer, who she knows won’t be able to deal with somebody /else/ putting Lottie away.
We may have here: https://badmachinery.com/comic/how-is-it-still-open/
And it is confirmed here: https://badmachinery.com/comic/vapedragnz/
And that’s why you need to take care of your personal data.
Desperate voice actors taking sub-$1,000 gigs to train AI voice clones can relate.
My working hypothesis is that someone went to the plastic surgeon and arbitrarily chose to look like Lottie by browsing through a book of photos, and then some time later they came to deeply regret the decision for some yet-to-be-revealed reason.
Because they were banned for life from every swimming pool in Britane?
Brilliant! This explains everything. An extremely talented swimmer, destined for the Olympics, lost everything after she decided to get plastic surgery to change her look. Banned from every possible place to practice, she was forced to give up competitive swimming forever. Devastated, she devoted the rest of her life to exacting terrible vengeance against the person who had ruined her life.
Or not. I actually have no idea if this is it, but it’s still a great explanation.
I have concerns to offer about the idea that Doppellottie is a regular human entity, as follows:
– since the smoochy gull selfie is clearly meant to communicate “I know your weaknesses but I do not share them”, Doppellottie is aware of Regular Lottie’s seagull aversion, which would be known by relatively few people
– Doppellottie knew they were going to the Slag Pit on Halloween night and there weren’t many opportunities for anyone to overhear these plans
The best flesh-and-blood suspects from this world would be associated with the outlaw wrestlepeople (specifically the Dowager’s hipster nephew), but that all happened after the Primary Inciting Incident of Miyamoto’s murder, so the temporal pieces do not fit by my (hopefully accurate) reckoning.
I have no answers to offer…
(After a half-hour’s sober re-consideration, I’ve decided it’s the Dowager, somehow.)
I don’t know. It makes sense to me that Lottie’s greatest enemy would also have some sort of detective-like skills.
OR, a massive support group of informants and strategy teams to define the worst possible thing she could be doing!!!
I’m still hanging on to the clues in Evil Lottie’s phone and assuming that she is somehow dead (i.e. not alive) ( https://badmachinery.com/comic/vapedragnz/#comment-4027 ).
Thinking about this lead my mind in a far darker direction than anything I’d expect John to do in this story. I started by thinking about whose death has affected Lottie the most in her life, and soon, a whole dark, depressing story had unfolded in my mind.
Well if Bad Lottie doesn t turn out to be Sonny, my money is now on Camille, her most implacable enemy.
Yeah, I was thinking about Camille, too. The plastic surgery thing solves one problem with that idea. But would she really be so obsessed with Lottie a few years later that she’d do all this? Unless there are further details we don’t know about (which there probably are) I’m having trouble seeing it. If nothing else, you’d think fear of Claire would keep her away.
God I’m so FRICKIN happy to see these three together again!
I think we may have a new candidate for “worst idea Charlotte Grote has EVER HAD”.
Definitely a candidate, but it does have some stiff competition.
I doubt it’s even close to the worst idea she’s ever had. Lottie has so, so many ideas. She comes up with multiple ideas every minute. Some are brilliant, some are awful. It might possibly be the worst one she’s ever actually carried out, though.
It’s like quantum mechanics. Lottie exists in a seething sea of ideas and anti-ideas, creating and annihilating each other in a constant flicker of firefly lights. But they’re not real ideas until they’re observed and the waveform collapses.
I’m betting there is a connection between evil-Lottie and mini-chibi-Lottie, like maybe mini was a spy for evil-Lottie, or maybe even evil-Lottie herself in an alternate form? I got the impression that none of the “real” characters in the story ever saw it; maybe it was invisible to them (and more than just the artistic wink that we took it for)?
Of course this would all have to be supernatural stuff; is that off the table?