Post by Matilda on May 5, 2019 3:48:20 GMT
(yes, I know I depart from Rosa there; but I hate most time travel stories, anyway, so it's easy for me to disregard Chapter 0).
Does NOT make psychological sense to me that a person would be motivated to work hard by being shafted. (…) Does the idea of how the dime functioned as motivation for young Scrooge, either in Rosa's Chapter 0 or in DT '17, actually make sense to any of you?
In other words, he's not "motivated to work hard by being shafted", which indeed makes no sense. He's motivated to work hard by getting paid for his work, and then motivated to be wily while doing by getting shafted. The issue, I think, is that the first-level use of the Dime (motivating Scrooge's work ethics) was so familiar to Rosa that he considered it obvious and immediately skipped to adding new depths to the proceedings, without considering that not everyone will have long-held childhood memories of Getting that Healthy, Wealthy Feeling.
At any rate, this is all only for Rosa. DuckTales 2017 simplifies this considerably: there, there is, AFAIR, no mention of the Dime being worthless or a trick due to its American-ness. The narrative DT17 tells is a considerably simple one where Scrooge didn't seem to be having any luck with his shoeshine business and Fergus sent him his first customer (Dime in hand) to ensure that Scrooge wouldn't get demoralized on his first day. Not only is it much simpler, but it makes sense within the scope of DT17's characterization for Scrooge: getting a customer on his first day was the first in the long line of easy successes that eventually get you the modern, "utterly blasé about being the greatest adventurer in history" Scrooge. Hence the reveletation that he didn't actually succeed on his own merits as a shoeshiner is felt by him a betrayal and a very great wound in his ego. (Of course, it therefore totally ignores the question of why Scrooge got paid with an American dime, but you can't make an omelet without breaking some plotpoints.)
What's not believable is adult-Scrooge's motivation to inspire Duke, since I don't understand how the dime is supposed to have inspired child-Scrooge.