She Kills Monsters

Scene 11 is the only scene in which Agnes does not appear, and the focus on Vera and Miles emphasizes how Agnes’s peers and adults in general are unsympathetic to youths. Both Vera and Miles are rude and dismissive to each other and to the student, Steve, who merely wants advice about how dropping marching band will affect his college applications. Steve’s role typically provides comic relief as he pops in briefly in both the real and fantasy worlds, only to be immediately shooed away or violently killed on the spot, respectively. However, in this scene, Steve talks back and tells the two adults, “I think you both suck” (53). His utterance represents the sentiments of youths who feel patronized and silenced by the adult world.

As Steve’s peer and schoolmate, Tilly also has typical anxieties about growing up and experiencing isolation as a lesbian youth. Vera’s acerbic role as the school counselor emphasizes how few supportive resources for exploring sexual identity Tilly had in real life. Likewise, Miles represents an encroachment upon Tilly’s home life, for his presence raises the possibility that Agnes will leave home and compound Tilly’s feelings of isolation and abandonment. This dynamic is reinforced when Agnes hesitates over killing Miles’s doppelgänger in the fantasy world; Tilly claims, “See, and once again, you’re choosing your boyfriend over me” (57). Miles will later become a more sympathetic character when he helps Agnes through her grief, but from Tilly’s perspective, as revealed in her private module, adults like Vera, Miles, and Agnes have always been indifferent to her experiences.

Like Tilly, Agnes also has anxieties about her future and uses the D&D module to exorcise her doubts, particularly regarding her next step of moving in with Miles. In Scene 12, Agnes is at first hesitant to fight an abstract representation of Miles in New Landia and is surprised to see her boyfriend characterized as a villain. Miles’s character then devolves into a caricature of all the worst characteristics Agnes fears might be true of him. He takes the form of a sexist and hypermasculine Conan the Barbarian­ character, and his first words to her about packing her apartment reference the couple’s real-world plans to live together. When Miles’s doppelgänger repeatedly attacks her, and then lewdly suggests that Agnes pleasure him sexually, she confidently proclaims, “I don’t care who you look like, nobody disrespects me!” (59) and annihilates him. The imaginary combat scene thus represents the very best of D&D role-playing in that it allows her to assert her power and address her fears that moving in with Miles might compromise her independence.

The split between reality and fantasy continues to function as an analogy for Agnes’s split between her conscious and repressed feelings about her romantic relationship with Miles. In Scene 13, Tilly’s ghost appears in Agnes’s classroom rather than in the mediated realm of New Landia, further intensifying the blurred boundaries between fantasy and reality. When she asks Agnes why she hasn’t followed the typical trajectory of most Ohioans her age and probes, “[H]ow come you’re not married to him?” (61) and “Shouldn’t you already have a kid? Or two?” (62), the persistent questions highlight the internal pressure that Agnes feels to follow a prescribed life conforming to the common gender expectations of becoming a wife and mother. At the end of the scene, Agnes finally realizes that she is having the conversation with herself and is using Tilly’s ghost to voice her own inner doubts. Thus, Agnes’s experience of playing D&D allows her to tap into her repressed feelings and question expectations that she would normally have accepted without reflection or criticism.