Holy s...! Hang in there, Char. The FBI man is here.
Anyone else find it bemusing that once again it's a black man who's stepping up to save Charlotte? If she comes out of this alive and sane, she may grow to be a poster girl for race relations. (Not that I think her original paranoia of Duane was racially motivated--whether the difference is race, religion, culture or something else, the Other can be a bit scary at first, especially for someone with her secluded background.)
I think it's all but certain that Carter has heard Spankable Cyn's little gloatfest, bless his individualistic heart. As hospi pointed out, her line really sounded like the kidnapper was finally bringing her murderous intention to fruition. There's no other good reason for an even borderline capable agent to burst into private property without a warrant and wielding a weapon, and something tells me Carter is more than borderline capable. As for where that will lead... who knows. There's no criminal penalty that I'm aware of for being an abhorrent bitch, and the closest legal remedy I can think of for Cyndi's speech is a tort claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress, but even then I'm not sure a judge or jury would find her behavior sustained enough and outrageous enough. They will all, I hope and believe, agree that she is a repulsive being, but that by itself ain't illegal. I know I've been horrible ("a nasty bitch," as Brandi so succinctly put it) at different times in my life, and if that starts becoming a crime I don't know how many of us will be left on the streets.
I'm not sure why readers are so set on Cyndi facing legal penalties for her actions, anyway. Sure, she deserves lots and lots of repercussion for her actions, and the school disciplinary system may take an interest. But it's not the job of the law to punish people for being horrible human beings. The horrible human beings can do damage mostly because the rest of us let them, for the most part. It's the flaws and fault lines in the "good" guys' psyches, their fractiousness and fears, that give malice room to burrow in and hurt. That's why Penny and Aggie starting to work together is such a seminal moment in the comic, because they realized that it's the responsibility of the good guys to pull together and make positive, lasting change. Simply removing Karen from the equation was not enough; that's why they had their subsequent manifesto-signing, because they themselves needed to grow and be stronger. Else the villain of the day might be disgraced and routed but the problems remain, plenty of finger-holds for future Karens and Cyndis.
Charlotte, because she was raised in a blame-placing and lashing-out way of thought and because she has a self-destructive streak wider than three aircraft carriers (of all her objects of blame, none is as hated as herself), missed that point completely and assumed that taking out the perpetrator would remove the harm. I won't say she's all wrong on this--Cyndi is one of the more virulent strains of psycho out there, maybe better treated with antibiotic than trying to build up a good immune system. Even so, she couldn't create havoc without her much-loved finger-holds. Michelle
did have issues that allowed Cyndi to burrow into her head and lay a thousand anorexia eggs. Stan
was the one who ruined Standi with his own choices. It was Jack's (and to some extent Katy-Ann's) inability to be honest about his desires, Duane's susceptibility to being a hero-savior, and Sarah's hormones getting the better of her reason that made them even momentarily vulnerable to Cyndi. The potential for harm is always within, and does not die with the hated Other.
A word (okay, more) on the author: Reading the responses and examining my own, I can't help but marvel that we are rooting for a girl who beat, drugged, and kidnapped a classmate, while we wish terrible fates on her victim. T does it again--he's a master at peeling back the surface of labels, conventions, and mores to what lies beneath, a rich universe of human motivations, nuanced emotions, and a vibrant moral core that confronts the reader time and again with our own lives and beliefs. He's not perfect, of course--no one is, and the moment a creator thinks so is the moment his artistic decay begins--but he is his own harshest critic and strives to learn and improve. It's a pleasure taking that journey with him, even if sometimes (as it did at the start of this arc) it feels like walking a very slender tightrope over a very long fall. He has the craft and the conviction to unbalance the story and his readers and then bring them back to stable footing, and I've come to trust him as a writer even at those moments when I'm not sure where he's going. In the Cyndi & Charlotte chapter I think he's once again guided us to a very good place indeed, and I applaud him for it.
