Karen

Character reference art generated with AI.

Status: Supporting

A classmate in Uncle Rob’s night school, blonde, short hair, tank top over a sports bra, UGG boots, permanently unimpressed, and the closest thing Night School has to a Greek chorus. She watches Chino and Homeboy sleep through an entire semester, calls them pigs to their faces, flips them off, and snitches on them twice, and nothing works.

Description

The lone clear-eyed survivor of Astrophysics and Cosmology: while the class thins around her, Karen stays, stresses visibly, and says what everyone’s thinking. Her disgust is a precision instrument: deployed at the ogling (I liked you guys better when you were asleep. Pigs.), at the Jedi Mind Trick nonsense, and at the commissary hand-holding. Underneath it: she’s usually right.

Role in Volume 01

In Night School, Karen is the one who asks whether anybody should wake the sleeping duo (first day and final review both), the one who watches them post impossible perfect scores, and the one who rides along to Vandenberg to witness the field trip. There she catches the Mission Control leering, endures Chino’s transphobic! / non-gender pigs! counterattack (middle finger, deployed flawlessly, that was hot), and, after watching Chino and Homeboy leave hand-in-hand with Cindy and Olivia, goes full snitch: first to Uncle Rob (stop being a snitch), then to Lieutenant Mitchell, who deflates her with the military-escort rule. Her last beat is pointing the accusing finger at Uncle Rob as the rocket goes up (cunt, he sighs), which is, for the record, the correct read.

Relationships

• Chino and Homeboy: her nemeses; she hates everything they do and is right about most of it.
• Uncle Rob: her teacher; mutual, weary disrespect.
• Lieutenant Mitchell: the authority she appeals to, who gently overrules her.
• Cindy and Olivia: the girls she can’t believe fell for it.

Notes

• Karen is the story’s reality principle: the only person treating any of this like it matters, and the butt of the joke for doing so.