Saint James Infirmary #1355: “The Seraglio”

[Daphne]

Script: Daphne • Line Art: Plutonian Knight • Colors and Lettering: Octavia Moon

[Sharque]

So I think here we have Reka as a Satyr, Laura as a Lamia, Jacqui as a centaur, and Miriam as a harpy (those last two might be reversed, can’t quite tell), and an unknown, disrobed witness

[jwik01]

Presumably it ties to Amaltheia as a mermaid. Odd that Miriam is one of the monstrous zoo-animal women, rather than the keeper, but perhaps even in Miriam's own dreamscape that role is reserved for Jakob.

[lancehunter]

Yeah, I'm assuming that this is the Amaltheia fantasy and so all the non-Amaltheia characters are a bit like the faux Erin that is part of Aiken's fantasy in 1349.

[Daphne]

Although it was a completely reasonable assumption, the creatures aren't patterned after specific SJI characters.

[Sharque]

se·ragl·io

noun
HISTORICAL

1.
the women's apartments (harem) in an Ottoman palace.

[GodWilling]

The pop-up says, "A man of refined tastes." Are the legs at the bottom supposed to be he? The discarded red robes remind me of Réka's purchaser (and seller). The setting looks similar too.

Amaltheia would seem a good fit though (presumably they're not her legs). The last couple of pages with Aiken and Amaltheia are somewhat confusing. I was rather thinking that Miriam was Amaltheia's fantasy captor.

Another possibility is Raven, if we're going to see Jakob being removed from her mind, after we skipped the confrontation in Dani's.

[lancehunter]

I don't even know if the identity of the man here matters that much. It seems like the dynamics are more important than the specific identities. Trying to sort this all out, here's what I'm seeing...

- Réka was a warrior woman caught by slavers/barbarians and gem-controlled (1335/1336) who was then given to creepy robe dude (1352).

- Amaltheia was a mermaid caught in a net (1346) and is now presumably in the bestiary of to the man here (1355). (Fun easter egg I noticed as I was checking archives, Amaltheia had that intense seaside fantasy featuring Miriam way back in 863, after they met and flirted over fish tank supplies.)

- Jacqui was drugged by someone (1337), turned into a mindless fuck-doll used by another man (1338), and is then being conditioned further by the original man (1353).

- Erin was strapped to an operating table by a doctor and conditioned (1332/1333/1334) to be a housewife, and appears to have taken to that conditioning for her husband while still fucking the doctor who did the conditioning (1354).

The only case where it seems like the identity of the other people in the fantasy matter is Aiken's, where he is getting a chance to control Erin (1348/1349).

It seems like a common theme here (excluding Aiken) is that the subject is under someone's control who then makes them serve someone else. I think someone in a previous thread pointed out that this makes sense for Miriam's agenda. She is Adrian's slave (1108/1109/1116) but she clearly wants to be in control. So she is shaping the other women around Adrian to her liking. Now, is this happening because the perfume unleashed something sinister in her? Is any of this Jakob-related somehow? I trust we'll find out eventually.

[jwik01]

That's interesting analysis! I would have guessed that Miriam's offscreen master-figure isn't Adrian but Jakob, but I dunno. In #1248 Erin hesitates when Miriam commands her to leave the house with her, until Miriam assures her "he'll love it." I assumed this was Miriam manipulating Erin by claiming to be acting in Adrian's interest while actually carrying out her own agenda (the agenda programmed into her by Jakob) but maybe not! Adrian certainly saw Jakob's hand in Miriam's bimbofication of Danielle, but that might be Miriam carrying out the routines Jakob programmed into her without Miriam actually working in service to someone other than Adrian. Right this second, does Miriam believe she is building a harem for her own pleasure, as a gift to Adrian, or is she consciously working for some third party?

Oh, also: there might be some clue to interpreting events in the story within the various what-ifs and especially pinups, which have consistently depicted Miriam as one of the larger pool of sexy gals, not as someone set apart from or over them.

[lancehunter]

I definitely don't think Miriam is consciously working for some third party. There may be echos of Jakob in her that are causing her to act the way she is, but I would suspect that she thinks she is the queen in charge of this situation. (Just a queen who has to be prepared to feign deference to King Adrian.)

[Sharque]

Well, we can potentially draw inferences from the one case of domination Miriam exhibited before the BE arc: Heidi.

Throughout Miriam’s slow corruption of Heidi, she has seemed to be controlling her for the ultimate advantage of two people: herself and Adrian. Since their first encountered Miriam seduces Heidi until she is willing to do virtually anything Miriam asks, up to and including being whored out to Reka and Weston for a night. It’s clear though that part of her motivation is bringing Adrian another slave, given the lewd picture of Heidi she sent to Adrian, and he would clearly be interested given him asking if she delivers.

Thus far, there’s no indication that her seduction of Heidi is some grand plan being executed by proxy through her on Jakob’s part. Sure, she’s dominant and her motivations are morally dubious, but this is SJI. There are plenty of morally dubious actions by our heroes; Caitlyn recently lobotomized Hitomi and made her professor into a love slave.

However, we then have to ask what is causing such drastic action on Miriam’s part as she has taken during the BE arc. Surely if she just wished to shake up the harem hierarchy, maybe dethrone Erin as queen bitch, she could do so easily enough. It doesn’t necessitate the sheer machiavelianism she’s displayed. Jakob is clearly an influence even if he is not an active agent in this scheme. Corrupting Erin and Raven and Mallory into loveslaves is one thing; bimboizing Dani, lobotomizing Jacqui, and the entire soul removal situation seems far more sinister. Miriam knows that Adrian would not approve, evident in her urging of Erin to leave the infirmary without him knowing their plans. However, that very same statement implies at face value she is doing all this for Adrian. It could be that, having been programmed by Jakob, she associates the very concept of enslavement with Jakob’s fetishes, and thus she is recreating Jakob’s harem for Adrian.

That would actually be a rather fitting theory. Sure, Jakob likes his “tits and holes” girls (Dani said he liked them very empty), but recall that he had others as well. Dani was a French maid, Claudia had a degree of command and seemed to have a dominatrix vibe. There were other fetishes. And what is Miriam doing? Creating a combination of various fetishes (Erin-stepford wife; Reka-slavegirl; Dani-bimbo; etc) while also indulging in the emptiness (Jacqui).

[GodWilling]

I don't even know if the identity of the man here matters that much. It seems like the dynamics are more important than the specific identities.

That's what's odd about this page though - the star of the show doesn't appear. And we have this figure at the bottom, but we can only see his(?) legs. Apart from establishing that he'd probably be interested in obtaining a mermaid, it doesn't really tell us anything about him. That's not to say it isn't going to be Amaltheia.

[lancehunter]

Well, we to see the titular "seraglio" of monster-women, so I'd read that more as the fantasy being about mermaid-Amaltheia's addition to that collection more than an insight into the collection's owner.