Remove mom being a super-babe from the equation, Mandy is your average, hormone-addled, teenager whose spirit is being stifled under the wet blanket of familial expectation. You don’t have to be the emo daughter of a solar-powered, single-mom Princess from the Vega System to relate to Mandy in Mariko Tamaki and Yoshi Yoshitani’s I Am Not Starfire. She’s not taking the S.A.T.s, she’s not going to college, and she is NOT going to be Starfire. She’s going to figure out her fate through the process of elimination. Growing up, people expected her to be just like her celebrity, superhero mom - develop powers, maybe take an internship with the Justice League, wear a bikini, but there is no freaking way any of that is going to pan out, so what’s a conspicuously powerless goth girl to do? Take the S.A.T.s so she can go to college and major in being ordinary? Screw that. Not only are the possibilities not endless for Mandy, but narrowing. But now, suddenly her every move seems cumulative and consequential. One week it might be “marine biologist” and the next it would be “unicorn,” and both would feel equally possible. As a kid, you could change your answer on a whim and grown ups would laugh. In highschool, what was once an innocuous adult-child conversation starter - “what do you want to be when you grow up” - becomes an anxiety inducing and unwelcome probe.
By Lisa Gullickson - We meet Mandy furiously dying her roots from their naturally fiery orange to a positively pitch black.
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