I forgot about that strip until you told me, but I've seen it before.
I think it's actually much worse because Hobbes is imaginary. However, that imaginary aspect isn't just Calvin's creativity. Hobbes is the manifestation of the other parts of Calvin's personality. See, Calvin's actually a bit of an egotistic, troublemaking, little shit. He gets himself into more trouble than anyone or anything else. Hobbes would be someone else's "Jungian Shadow", but he's more like Calvin's Jungian ""Conscience"". This is mostly because Calvin and Hobbes are meant to literally represent rival philosophies, but for our purposes we'll keep seeing Calvin as a 6 year old little boy. Hobbes is still Calvin's passion, optimism, sense of humor, and reasoning to counter Calvin's more cynical and pathological tendencies.
Not only is that dulling his imagination, it's dulling the parts of his personality that actually balance him out. It's damaging some of the best parts of him.
Watterson himself said he doesn't consider Hobbes part of Calvin's imagination, and that Hobbes was more about "the subjective nature of reality" than about dolls coming to life.
Source: the Tenth Anniversary Book, possibly the only publication where Watterson talks at length about each character.
God, that was disappointing to read. Reality is objective.
I forgot about that strip until you told me, but I've seen it before.
I think it's actually much worse because Hobbes is imaginary. However, that imaginary aspect isn't just Calvin's creativity. Hobbes is the manifestation of the other parts of Calvin's personality. See, Calvin's actually a bit of an egotistic, troublemaking, little shit. He gets himself into more trouble than anyone or anything else. Hobbes would be someone else's "Jungian Shadow", but he's more like Calvin's Jungian ""Conscience"". This is mostly because Calvin and Hobbes are meant to literally represent rival philosophies, but for our purposes we'll keep seeing Calvin as a 6 year old little boy. Hobbes is still Calvin's passion, optimism, sense of humor, and reasoning to counter Calvin's more cynical and pathological tendencies.
Not only is that dulling his imagination, it's dulling the parts of his personality that actually balance him out. It's damaging some of the best parts of him.
Watterson himself said he doesn't consider Hobbes part of Calvin's imagination, and that Hobbes was more about "the subjective nature of reality" than about dolls coming to life.
Source: the Tenth Anniversary Book, possibly the only publication where Watterson talks at length about each character.
God, that was disappointing to read. Reality is objective.