AAaA Bandit 2
This was a fair question, especially since we’d designed Bandit to be the most conventionally attractive of our heroes, though since we applied “but gnomish” to that description, we were always playing around with different forms of femininity, and maybe trying to encourage broader standards of beauty.
Not that Flo and I spent much time, when writing the series, thinking about what was eye candy for us. Except a little fan-service here and there, we spent most of our time seeing through the characters’ eyes, not simply looking them over. But we knew how important first visual impressions were in cartooning, and we coded Bandit as someone who seemed likely to attract a partner. We hinted that one or two of her gnomish colleagues had crushes on her, which would overcome both the objections she brings up here. Yet of the non-monk Peacemakers, she’s the only one who never got with anybody, at least not in time for her last in-comic appearance.
I think the last panel’s a hint to why that is. Bandit has such powerful issues with social acceptance. She’s grateful beyond measure to be accepted by the Peacemakers, yet afraid she will lose that acceptance, and she’s aware that such paranoia might be what poisons her relations with the others, but that may not be enough to save her, and sometimes it makes her more nervous… you get the picture. Apply those issues to a relationship context, and yikes. Even if she and one of her fellow odd cogs start meshing their gears at some point in the future, I think it’d be hard for her to go the distance. I mean, I wish her luck… but she’d definitely need it.
She was an outcast, a lonely exile, and finally found that beautiful family and friendship she always wanted. She cherished it so.
Then argued with them and left them for a random band of background gnomes.
…Yeah she’s got a tough road on the relationship game. lol
You forgot the parts where one member of her cherished family brutally murdered her and after she got better and forgave him because he and others assured her that he’d be on his best behavior, he went off the deep end again.
Yeah, so fuck absolutely everyone else, though.
Well, all the others sided with the team killer over her, so yeah.
Well, not quite. He underwent treatment for it before he was forced into another episode by the cultists. I didn’t really ever get the impression that Bandit’s grudge over that was ever supposed to be a sympathetic quality, especially considering she was in charge of the group when Byron got captured – if it was something anyone could have anticipated, she should have put her foot down and kept him back, but even she didn’t see it coming.
It’s an understandable enough thing for her to do, given that she gets locked up for saying that it’s a good thing that she stopped the rampage by killing him in the heat of the moment, and has issues with believing that she can have a place in a group anymore.
But it still comes across to me like something she SHOULD know better about.
Completely understandable. Sexism has always been a problem, and adding people who are half drunk and have a thing for “shortstacks” doesn’t help.
That said, there is not a gnome that I know of that is ANYWHERE near as pretty as bandit. And she’s not a super model, even if she’s pretty even to be a model. Arkerran
That said, facial proportions on most versions of gnomes are generally all “messed up” in comparison to humans, such as always having a too big of nose, or simply look more like garden gnomes (which is very “dwarfish” in appearance). Arkerran gnomes seem to be a bit of an exception thankfully.
“Oh, that’s all right. I don’t need datin’. I have my family!”
Well, that took a unexpected turn. I didn’t see that one coming from someone that kink shames randos in a tavern, though