#(and the artists ditched her retro style and started putting her in more objectifying clothing)

[isfjmel-phleg]

This is a Serling Roquette appreciation post.

Is sixteen and has a doctorate. But not a driver's license.

Shows up for her first day of work in a leopard-print vest, striped skirt, knee-high pink platform heels, and giant yellow smiley face earrings.

Is at odds with her mom on matters of independence, so she gets a live-in job at a shady cloning institution with such high security that her mom can't follow her there. As one does.

Is EXCITED about SCIENCE. Cadmus is "on the cutting edge of research," so she arrives full of confidence that she'll fit in there.

Interned at a place where all her colleagues were elderly and thus developed a taste for all things retro.

Listens to "garbage" that scandalizes her mom: Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Louis Prima, and the Brian Setzer Orchestra!

Unironically uses expressions like "the bee's knees," "the cat's pajamas," and "holy hand grenade!"

Unironically uses "quantum" as an expression of admiration.

Collects Pez dispensers and Seuss memorabilia. When Kon takes her to Hawaii on a visit, she wants a Honolulu snow globe.

Attended only eight grades between kindergarten and grad school.

As a prodigy, has been thrust into adult roles and expectations that are a lot of pressure for someone her age. (Sound familiar?)

Rises to the occasion with performing whatever scientific/medical feat is required of her, but it's repeatedly clear that she's anxious: “All right—think! I’m a child prodigy—I can do it! I need help…”

During the "Sins of Youth" storyline, gets put on the spot to resolve the seemingly uncorrectable problem of Kon's inability to age. If she fails, he could die. If she succeeds, the boy she's developed feelings for will now be too old to be interested in her (but old enough for the ex-girlfriend who has just returned). Very emotionally compromising circumstances, but she still operates--and succeeds.

(The narrative doesn't really highlight how hard this must have been for her on multiple levels, but she deserves credit for it.)

This panel! The parallels! The bonding over comparable traumas!

(for context, this is after he has reencountered Knockout, a woman who groomed and abused him. it's unclear whom Serling is referring to from her own experience--this doesn't sound like Guardian, her initial object of interest at Cadmus, who is too decent to reveal a "darker" level to a minor.)

Continues to develop clarity about herself and her motivations, like realizing that her interest in Guardian was not so much as a crush as an identification of him (a clone of a hero from the 1940s) with the generation of people she grew up around, reminding her of "when I was little, when everything was fun and easy."

Clinging to her youth while still trying to assert an identity as an independent "adult" with an intellectually demanding job is a recurring theme for her. She's pushing the bounds of scientific probability on an apparently daily basis, but at the end of the day she still returns to a room full of her carefully saved childhood possessions and listens to an old transistor radio that belonged to her mom--who never does show up at Cadmus to supervise her daughter.