Ok first of all shout out to our first comic book. Some say a picture is worth a thousand words, and if that's the case, we've probably already read more words than in The Odyssey.
Sorry for that cheese but I'm not gonna delete that lol
But to the main point of this post -- my appreciation for how honest Satrapi is (or at least sounds). Not only is it written in the stream-of-conscious style, the way Marji thinks and acts really resembles the polarity of a child's mind (aka they switch opinions/ideas/thoughts in general really easily since their ideas aren't totally grounded), which is then pushed to the extreme with the chaos in Iran.
One of the largest "swings" in opinion Marji has is her relation with God. The public played a huge role in her relationship -- for example, when her teacher didn't approve of her wanting to be a prophet and told her parents, she then told her parents that she wanted to become a doctor (and secretly reassured God that she just said that to make her parents happy). However, when the fundamentalists took over and required everyone to pray throughout the day (as suggested by Marji's mother, telling her to say that she prays in the daytime), she would lie again to the public, saying that she prays 11 or 12 times a day, while in reality she wasn't praying at all. This shows her rebellious nature, something that children like to do. Adding onto that, she even changed her dream from becoming a prophet to becoming a chemist (and then the universities were all conveniently closed for two years).
Though this is more of a process than a swing, it's really fun to watch Marji's political opinions change as she learns more from her parents and friends. Her initial innocence was cute, how she declared how suffering in old people will simply be forbidden. Not too long after, she chants "down with the king", pretending to be Che Guevara. After her dad told her about how the king wasn't actually chosen by God and learned about her grandfather's suffering in prison, she became even more revolutionary. When she learned that her friend's father had been in jail, she wished she had a relative in jail -- of course, that all changed again when her uncle got executed. when Iran was at war, she also wanted to go to war -- then she changed her mind when she learned that her friend's father died, and learned the importance of having a complete family (and how it's better than having a dead hero as a father).
I guess to sum things up, Satrapi was really good at depicting how a child thinks, making her story both relate-able and honest -- something that I really appreciate.
