Rain
Comic 1337 - Time Keeps Flying
Author Notes:
I think, at the very least, his introductory statements tell us the gist of what we needed to hear anyway.
And in case anyone's forgotten about the details brought up in panel 2, Emily was the valedictorian, but she had the title taken away after revealing she was pregnant. Maria was the salutatorian, but she was expelled. And Father Quenton "resigned" after he was exposed to have been purposely ignoring the widely destructive actions of a problematic student.
A very strange year, indeed!
©2004-2021
Rain, all characters and all other aspects of the story are copyright material belonging to me.
Support our Patreon.
You can buy Rain: Vol. 1 through 5 here!
And you can get Rain shirts, stickers, mugs, and more at RedBubble.
You can also follow Rain on Facebook!
And of course, follow me on Twitter!
"Strange year"
. . .
Is Rain suddenly going to gush with courage when she walks across the stage to receive her diploma, step up to the podium, and come out publicly and proudly to her entire class, the whole school and everyone in attendance?
And I bet the strangeness is not over yet. Not if Ru(d/b)y has a say!
When you started on your degrees 3 years ago, you would have had to answer any simple legal question with, "I don't know." Now, after more hours of classes and studies than you can imagine, you can look the person who asked in the eye and confidently tell them, "That depends."
This was not my graduation ceremony, but I decided I could confidently give that answer also. I mean, I had sat around in the next room over for many of those hours of study, and heard the recorded study materials. And, OMG, that stuff all depends so much. I had no idea before.
...mostly because I need the inspiration right now.
It's because of the Characters page. ^^;
There's a lot wrong with the Characters page. Like, a lot of errors from being wildly out of date. So on the one hand, I feel obligated to mention you can't trust everything on that page. On the other hand, yes, Brother Arthur is ace. Even if it's never mentioned directly in the comic.
That speech is impressively valid for our world too. He says it's been a strange year, and it sure was, but he has no idea how strange it was for us in this world!
Valedictorian and salutatorian are the top student and second from the top respectively. :)
The salutatorian is the student speaker whose speech opens the graduation ceremony, "salutare" being Latin for "to welcome."
The valedictorian is the student whose speech is at the end of the ceremony, "valedicere" being Latin for "to say farewell"
Even more useless trivium:
At my school, the salutatorian speech was customarily given in Latin (maybe still is.) Since the Salutatorian rarely knew Latin, somebody in the Classics department did the translation. It generally contained a lot of in jokes, but since very few of the other graduates knew any Latin, either, the graduating students got a transcript with little notes like "hoc ridete" ("laugh here") at the appropriate places, and they could figure out enough Latin to follow along and laugh or boo or hiss or cheer at the right places. The parents and dignitaries didn't get those transcripts, of course, so they got the impression that their darlings were actually fluent in Latin!
Vs. my school, where I was an absentee valedictorian. I had no intention of sitting through a graduation ceremony and my having a role in it didn't change that.