At last, the reveal!
Okay, who wants a detailed Miranda Development Backstory Lore Dump? You do? Awesome.
It started back in…well, one of the places it started was back in the Daily Show. In 2011, they had a segment where Jon discovered someone was planning to maintain/increase the amount of angry conflict on cable news. By infusing a roomful of kids with the spiritual essence of Keith Olbermann.
This is 100% canon. I’m not even kidding.
At that point, for almost a decade I’d been making And Shine Heaven Now, the Hellsing-and-increasing-crossovers fancomic. Also, the Colbert Report had done a bit where Stephen ate his stage manager. (At the end of the episode, speaking over a plate of drumsticks: “Stage managers like Bobby? Rare.”)
Again: literally canon. These shows are amazing.
It’s not canon that Stephen did this because he was secretly a vampire the whole time — but that sounded like a great premise for a Shine spinoff, so I made one. The Eagle of Hermes follows the adventures of vampire Stephen Colbert, and finishes not long before the canon reveal of the Olberclone Farm.
So I wrote a little bonus story where the Olberclones are a project of Ann Warbucks (one of the many, many Shine crossover characters), and EOH!Jon Stewart gets talked into adopting one. I used the appearance of one of the canon kids, and named the character Miranda.
No surprise, then, that when a character named Miranda showed up in BICP, a few readers immediately went “aha! That implies the most Jon-Stewart-ish character will turn out to be her dad.”
And sure enough.
I’m not gonna recap all the BICP-specific foreshadowing, but when this page finally dropped, the original comments were surprisingly divided. Half the readers were full-on “the hints were so obvious, was this supposed to be surprising?” and the other half were like “wait, you guys were getting hints??”
