Someone reiterated a question I’ve heard a few times, but which I think has some pretty simple answers; how can Kal Smit have the same surname as Anna Smit, his AUNT?!?! I put a very small amount of thought into it and came up with what I think is a reasonable explanation:
After a divorce, kids can take either parental surname as long as there’s consent. That’s it. Just permission. Very simple: https://uknamechange.com/blog/post/changing-child-surname-without-other-parent-2026/ – zero plot twists required: Kal’s dad John Archer doesn’t strike me as the litigious type, so let’s say he’s career-oriented and the kids stay with the mum (Carol Smit), John Archer consents to their surname going to Carol so in this case the kids revert to Smit. “You usually need the agreement of everyone with Parental Responsibility before changing a child’s surname” – the key words here are ‘usually’, and ‘agreement’ – esp with the PR defaulting to the mother, there is a pretty low bar in terms of what it takes to legally change a kids surname – because everyone (the courts included) want divorces to be as smooth and low effort as possible. Simple. Leaving plenty of energy to focus on more important things …
I mean whatever … I’m just glad TRMFB doesn’t look like this abomination:
… And far more glaring in the STFW comics universe, are the actual clanger mistakes in Lithium #14 – I mean on reflection, perhaps I should re-release that comic with the typos sorted out. The date, and the floating asterisk are both increasingly annoying to me, so perhaps I should go back on my previous decision and sort that series finale? Hmm.
Meanwhile, Reunited comic #2 (of 2) is rocketing ahead, with only an occasional issue holding me back …
… no idea how that happened, for some weird reason the Limb and Lips textures borked briefly, for this single render, then sorted themselves out. Looks kinda cool though! I’ll do a proper comic update soon, once I’ve had a little micro-rant about the US Midterms lol 🙂
Dear Sindy/Tira, I’d like to ask for your help.
A few years ago, you released an SE version of the first three episodes of the TRMFB series, and I used that as a basis to translate all the comics, so in my version, Kal and Anna are siblings in all seven comics. Fortunately, there weren’t many references to family members, so the translation was easy. The hardest part was when Kal’s father called them, but I got around that by treating them as siblings—since Anna stayed with her mother (the first wife) and barely saw her father, they could act like distant relatives toward each other. Kal was born to his second (the current) wife.
My question is, will this change in the future? Because I’d like to stick with the sibling relationship in my future translations, but if you start writing a monologue about an aunt-nephew relationship that can’t be adapted to siblings, please give me some ideas on how they can remain siblings in my future translations. 🙂
Thank you for your help!
🙂
Looking forward to your take/rant on the mid-terms. Over here we (the sane ones) are elated.