2012-11-24
Explanation
This comic tells a touching but ultimately cynical story about a mother giving her daughter a "worry box" at bedtime. The daughter initially suspects it'''s the traditional kind -- just an empty box where you tell it your worries and psychologically feel like they'''re gone. But the mother explains it'''s actually a computer: you tell it your worries, and when you wake up it provides solutions. She reassures her daughter that all problems are solvable, so the part of her brain that worries about everything can relax.
The daughter is excited and wants to touch it, but the mother warns "Don'''t open that!" The solution the box provides is displayed on its screen: "Solution for today: Tell the girl all problems are solvable, and then she won'''t worry over everything like you do." This reveals the cruel twist -- the box'''s solution to the mother'''s own worry problem is to deceive her daughter with false reassurance. The mother herself is a chronic worrier, and the box'''s "solution" is not to actually solve anything but to break the cycle of anxiety by lying to the next generation.
In the final panels, the mother tells her daughter "I'''m gonna need that back tonight" and the daughter simply replies "Yeah" -- both of them now aware, on some level, that the box is just enabling a comforting fiction. The votey panel adds one more instruction from the worry box: "Also don'''t tell her that her nose is weird," adding a petty, human touch to the machine'''s advice and suggesting the mother has been confessing all sorts of anxieties to it, including superficial worries about her daughter'''s appearance.