Annotated 1-3
I mean, I guess “playing with fire” is a pun? If you read it in its purely figurative sense? But Frigg, you literally JUST MADE A PUN ON THE PREVIOUS PAGE. “He’s a ‘mouth.’ ‘Going down.'” We were all there.
Frigg’s pun-aversion was somewhere in our original design notes for the character, and this is… you guessed it… its first and last appearance. I’m reasonably sure I knew why we put it in: we knew that Guilded Age was going to do the pun thing now and again (I mean, look at the names of the main characters, for God’s sake) so we thought Frigg reacting badly to that would add a little extra amusement value, whether or not you enjoyed the puns themselves.
We didn’t make a conscious decision to drop it, but I think working with Frigg for about eight pages was enough time to subconsciously realize that she didn’t need any weirdly specific dislikes to provoke her into being prickly. She was already prickly about almost everything, practically all the time.
Gravedust and Syr are getting a lot closer to clicking here, though. His first line here still makes me chuckle.
The main characters’ names are puns? o_O I mean I get Syr’nj and Best, but…Byron? Gravedust? I don’t see the punnage.
Oh, and I guess Frigg sounds a little like a swear. :3
“Byron Hackenslasher”, “Gravedust Deserthammer” and “Bandit Keynes” are aptonyms, and deliberate aptonyms are a form of punning in the same sense that “Syr’Nj” is a pun – names that contain information about their subjects’ personal characteristics even though in our naming tradition names are supposed to be merely ornamental, any likeness to their bearers mere coincidence. “Our” is important here because at least for bandit, the relevant arkerran naming tradition is a straightforward expression of personal information, not the obscured expression that would make it a pun, but these names were all conceived in sepia world – where they are puns.
Also – why is Best tagged on this page?
The gnoll is Best’s alt.
*flees*
Frigg is really reminding me of one of my RP characters, here. She doesn’t mind puns (couldn’t be played by me, if she did), but…mouthy and aggressive, and likely to respond badly to fire types (she uses fire, herself, as her only ranged attack, but she has reason to hate enemies using it against her…)…
OMG did we just discover that Best=Bandit? You guys are really throwing down the reveals …
More seriously, though, having tectonicus as a god with so little agency he can’t act without a summoning orb seems like a pretty significant difference from later characterization.
Does it? He only appears without being specifically called upon once in the entire comic, and it’s when the world is moments from ending.
And, in fact, the only “god” to ever appear without being summoned in the entire comic is H.R. Graiya needs to be specifically summoned when the World’s Rebellion steals her holy artifact and tries to torch all her worshipers.
He was summoned too, if you remember. He only thought he came through on his own. The cultists built a whole stargate for him and everything.
He is being called upon in that moment too, I believe.
I always interpreted Frigg’s counter to the puns as just an excuse to make fun of the Gnoll, rather than an aversion. Even later on when she gets so irritated with Rachel’s puns, it always seemed to me as more irritation that Rachel was worshipfully imitating her (Frigg) than at the punning itself. So I guess what I mean to say is, good job. I never knew this started out as a pun-version.
Test?
Sorry for the spam. Having trouble posting.
It’s weird that Bandit calls Byron “sweetie” both because it seems uncharacteristic of her and especially because of what will happen between those two in the future.
No friendship would have been lost there if Byron and Bandit were never friends.
I took a double take on that, too.
Like I always say, the world’s full of should. It’s a real should-y place.
I didn’t remember Gravy starting out as the same height as his compadres.