Eliza and Her Monsters

The protagonist and first-person narrator, Eliza changes from a quiet, anxious, and online-obsessed girl to a more mature, balanced, and insightful person. At age 18, Eliza is creative and artistic with a passion for drawing her webcomic: “I still love Monstrous Sea. I’m still obsessed with it. And that makes sense, right? Because I created it. Who isn’t obsessed with the things they create, they love?” (260). Because she loves nothing more than Monstrous Sea, her creative vision acts as her purpose. Eliza is a talented, respected artist, and these attributes are some of her greatest strengths. She can escape from her often-overwhelming life of family pressures to live in the “real” world and peers who find her “creepy” to the online world, where she is creative, successful, and popular.

Thus, while Eliza shows great organizational skills and determination to post pages of her comic every week, her devotion to work also reveals her anxiety and chosen isolation. Eliza’s shunning of offline interactions stems from her constant worry and low self-esteem. Eliza frequently feels anxious about interactions and imagines the worst:

The story is at once very easy and very hard to explain.