Annotated 1-9
I love that dog Erica rendered in the corner there, he’s a great representative of Henry and Emory’s personalities: simple-minded, usually slow-moving, reactive. There’s also a fun circularity to this page: Byron just sort of appears next to them like a sneaky sneak, and then the kobolds do the same to him.
Glad we didn’t go with the idea to have Henry and Emory have little golden speech bubbles over their heads. We had a few impulses to “video-game-ize” the reality of Arkerra more in its early days, which we mostly resisted, thank God.
I sometimes wonder if we should have run this scene before Frigg’s. It is the simplest of the five establishing scenes, and therefore the easiest to understand. There is no life-changing moment or huge subversion of narrative tropes as in Best’s story, no complex backstory or taxonomy as in Syr’Nj’s and Frigg’s, no mystery as in Gravedust’s, and no special narrative tricks as in Gravedust’s and Frigg’s… except maybe for a subtle one we’ll get into later. This is pretty much just the story of a guy’s day on the job, which is of course the point.
On the other hand, trying too hard to sell this as “just another RPG transcript” after the fairly typical bit of adventuring against Moribundi might’ve backfired and kept away some of the readers we really wanted, who were looking for something a hair more challenging.
Awfully KoBOLD of ’em! Eh?
…
Yeah, I got nothing.
I’m a bit curious, what ever happened to the Kobolds? They seemed to disappear from the story as it went on.
They also seemed (to me) like the most sentient creatures (maybe even than the landsharks) not to join in the war with the Savage races and Gastonia. What prevented them from doing so?
In terms of Canon, how does the new society view Kobolds?
I’ll probably put this in the annotations at some point. TBH, it’s a lingering point of disagreement between me and Phil. Last time we talked about it, he said that kobolds would probably be recognized as sentients with rights at some point: “they have clothes, they have tools, they’re on their way.”
With the new society’s leadership in place, it’s safe to say that a race that is sentient would be recognized as such sooner or later. So the question is: are kobolds sentient?
Tools and some forms of clothing aren’t human-exclusive practices on our world, but I’ll concede that the kobolds have fashioned more elaborate clothes and tools than you’d see from any of our world’s creatures. However, I’m still not sure that proves sentience. Unlike the orcs, we’ve never seen them sustain farmland or society on their own; they just seem to parasitically go after others’ crops and food. We only showed a handful of animal species with any regularity in Arkerra, and I have no problem believing the kobolds are such an animal species, albeit one that mimics sentient humanoids in some respects.
My real motivation for not wanting them to be sentient, though, is that if they are, then pretty much every scene they’re in takes on a vastly different character. Six different heroes are shown blithely slaughtering them with no more qualms than a farmer spraying for locusts (as we’ll see starting tomorrow). Again this is unlike the orcs, whose introduction to the series highlights the atrocity of their enslavement. Sure sure, systemic injustice is sometimes never questioned until it is, but I don’t want Frigg to be even an accidental mass-murderer, you know?
As I said, it’s a point of disagreement, and I’ll let Phil have the last word here if he feels the urge.
If you asked me, the question is, how do you define sentient? Clothes and tools do not make a society; they’re products of it and paraphernalia that reflects it (albeit, perhaps certain clothes and tools are also extensively relied-upon by at least some segments of any society; uniforms and tableware, for example).
That being the case, the tools in question are for parasitism and/or murder (simplistic enough activities for any parasite/predator animal); the clothes are sparse and lacking individuality, and much in the way of function (some creatures choose where they sleep with similarly spartan reasoning), and where one is practical the other seems almost ornamental (either out of a sense of shame, or a need for warmth in one’s extremities); both are chosen without favoritism for their outward displays of a particular personality, and no hierarchy is visibly expressed by them. So…
Scenario A: At worst, Kobolds are roving warlike bands of people, driven either by lack of more desirable and reliable means of survival (and I’m missing the signs of environmental cataclysm that could provide this motivation, unless Gastonia or other sapient cultures turn out to be the environmental stressor in question), or by a sinister force as yet unbeknownst to us readers (equally if not more probable).
Scenario B: At best, they’re just clever wild animals, though if so, their only displayed means of survival isn’t reliable from an evolutionary standpoint, and so can’t be the only one they use (unless we are witnessing a species on the brink of extinction, in which case that’s why they won’t go on).
Miscellaneous thoughts: Setting Occam’s Razor back down, safe to say they probably also forage, which makes me wonder why they’d turn to raiding, looting, and other activities spears make useful tools for, when those tools are better suited to hunting – wild animals can be clever little buggers, but they don’t often make a lifestyle out of preying on animals higher on the food chain (humans, etc.) than them. On the other hand, sentient creatures, as most people define them, are apex predators (or a reasonable facsimile) pretty much by default.
Sorry to say, but this implies Kobolds are more likely sentient than not, until word of god says otherwise.
Also… this is a setting with gods and meddling outsiders. If we assume Scenario C: “Kobolds were created as a mockery of sentient species,” (and a certain meddling user of arcanometry comes to mind as one likely culprit) then I’m willing to accept the idea that they’re nothing more than automatons created to populate a fantastic world.
Just felt I could have been a little fairer in my initial assessment.
Scenario C: They’re a barely sentient race that breed like crazy. That would explain their parasitic/scavenger nature. Simple hunting/gathering would not be enough to feed their large numbers. They’re intelligent enough to mimic the other races and use simple tools, but not enough to think of solutions like animal domestication and farming. The over-breeding would make them nuisance enough to require adventurers to thin the herds so to speak.
That brings into question the landsharks, then, who are also pretty much just a roving parasitic species in Arkerra, and by the end of the story are shown to have only mastered very basic tools, clothes, and musical instruments. Yet they are treated as sentient enough to join with the other “savage” races for at least a little while.
Seems very similar to the kobolds, other than the flip of rather than them being mass-murdered, they are themselves mass-murderers. And perhaps in that there was one of them who was smarter than the others in Hammerhead, but maybe the kobolds have such as well, we just never saw it.
My understanding of Landsharks was that only a very few of them are sentient and the rest of them just follow whichever sentient Landshark is the loudest.
Out of curiosity’s sake, what species has used some form of clothing in our world? I’m aware of different forms of tool usage. But can’t recall hearing anything about clothing.
Hermit crabs. Caddis fly larvae. Are the first two off the top of my head.
Hermit Crab. Caddis Fly Larvae.
Octopuses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUN6c5yWJhQ
Admittedly, all the examples I know are from the arthropod phylum. Hermit crabs are the big ones from my own experience: they use shells that unlike those of most crabs and turtles, are not made of material they generate themselves. Assassin bugs stack the carcasses of their victims on themselves to confuse predators. Decorator crabs do the same with algae and sea sponges. I don’t count most cocoon-spinning creatures, as a cocoon seems more like a chamber than clothing to me, but clothes moth larvae spin and “wear” partial cocoons for camouflage and warmth throughout their larval cycle that strike many observers as more clothing-like, hence the name.
Any creature that can produce, wisely, and habitually use a tool (clothing or not) whether produced as a byproduct of their biological processes or from reliable resources, strikes me as aware enough to classify as sentient.
Spiders, for example – one happens to be using my car as a mobile fixture on which to build “sails” out of its webbing, to catch passing insects, and uses the inside of the driver’s rear-view mirror as a “shell” in which to shelter from the wind and extreme speeds.
I don’t generally kill spiders these days (and my marriage has reinforced that habit) but, um, I can’t say I never have. I think we’re working off different definitions of “sentient”… I’m using it to mean a human or near-human level of consciousness, and if I thought I’d killed a spider with a mind at that level, my sleeping patterns would be very different.
Yeah, that’s one reason why I normally open with a question about how the word’s defined, followed by my own views, when it comes up.
Although, my initial comment, farther up the comments section (the one I made on the 4th), was working off of what I know to be a more common definition of the word, for ease of argument – a definition which is actually closer to how I use the word sapient. I avoided the more specifically-human term, there, in favor of sentient, for a reason.
I like to imagine intelligence exists in a sort of spectrum of sophistication, and the two words occupy different points in it that are somewhat distant from each other, but still in close proximity to one another (with sapient denoting a more complex state of sentience than I think we can observe in many wild animals, but with the more common sentience still displaying some facility with tools and inventiveness).
That said, I also tend to imagine that, since humans still occupy some niches in their ecosystem, they also occupy one in the cycle of natural selection* at large, and thus can find at least some degree of self-preserving necessity to injure those that compete with their own niches or occupy neighboring ones. Following that reasoning, there’d be similar caveats in moral theories in any fantasy universe where multiple sophisticated self-aware species must coexist.
*and I will avoid going on a tangent about “natural” being a pernicious weasel word, since there’s a soldier featured in the scene where Syr’nj is introduced who seems nebulously sympathetic to my view – I’m sure you can guess what that rant would entail).
It’s been 4 and a half years since this comment, but I thought I’d weigh in on this a little. What you’re describing is more “Sapient”, Intelligence born of Wisdom and Knowledge, than “Sentient”, Intelligence born of Emotion or Sensation. Dogs are sentient (they react to and learn from emotional stimuli, like being goodest boy), but not sapient (they’re not going to pick up a book, or pursue an alternative path via experimentation).
ALL animals are sentient. The question becomes one of sapience.
In this regard, the kobolds fit the bill of being a sentient race, but not a sapient one. (and a lot, A LOT of sci-fi and fiction conflates the two, leading to needless confusion over the term). Kobolds are capable of the emotion or sensational need of “hungry, need food. There food. Get food”, but don’t have the sapient ability to reason out sustainability or alternative tracks (farming, trade, etc). Orcs meanwhile are clearly shown to be capable of reason and intelligence (they’re just assumed to be non-sapient due to being non-verbal).
“However, I’m still not sure that proves sentience.”
I honestly don’t see how you can argue their NOT sapient. That last panel alone explicitly shows them using group tactics, intimidation, and of course coordination…all without verbal communication if I’m to accept Byron’s comment as truth and that’s ignoring the loincloths, which – if you’re unsure, let me assure you – seals the deal.
I mean I get what you’re saying about how it changes the context…but then I gotta wonder: Why would you exclude them? What made – say- the landsharks worthy of focus, and these guys just meat on the table?
Honestly, group tactics, intimidation, and coordination seem less like proof to me than the loincloths, which I will admit are more sophisticated “clothing” than the examples given above. I mean, many, many, MANY animals use group tactics, intimidation, and coordination, from fish to wolves to bees.
Far more often than not, Guilded Age uses fantasy races to reflect human-rights issues. But I think we occasionally felt the need for a simpler, humans-vs.-nature type conflict. Had I been able to foresee that this would be a point of contention, I would’ve argued for making the kobolds look less obviously human-like, fantasy traditions be damned, or just used some other invented race entirely like “razorwolves” or “dire locusts” or “floating hands with mouths in the palms.” But once this chapter and the next firmly established kobolds as a regular threat to crops whose skins form part of the Gastonian economy, we’d committed to that detail.
Of course, we could’ve developed it differently. Phil could have taken me aside and argued that we should show one of the kobolds signing “I’m just trying to feed my daughter” or some such. But it never really occurred to me until it was too late that so many readers would regard the kobolds as people, just because they have humanoid shape, clothing, weapons, and pack behavior. We’ve never shown them doing anything but attacking crops, attacking adventurers, and getting clobbered… which doesn’t make them NOT people, sure, but even the land sharks showed more varied interests than that.
Phil will doubtless be happy to see how this discussion went, though!
I really appreciate the way you discuss this matter on all the comments here and I think I get where you are coming from. I think I’m with Phil on this one, but in one detail I’m not sure whether I really got your point: Is being sentient or non-sentient a binary distinction for you? Because I would have thought that a species could be more or less sentient.
Another idea – which I don’t intend to be provocative but which perhaps is: Would you consider it possible, that in never thinking of the slaughter of Kobolds as mass murder you did exhibit a blind spot in a way? And now your decision not to think of Kobolds as sentient is not coming from your intellect but from you (or Frigg, who you identify with in a way) wishing to be morally good? I thought you wrote more or less as much above:
> Sure sure, systemic injustice is sometimes never questioned until it is, but I don’t want Frigg to be even an accidental mass-murderer, you know?
I hope I brought it across that I don’t want to insult you (neither morally nor intellectually). If I should have failed to articulate that I apologize in advance.
Nah, I get it, and I’m not offended at all, don’t worry. I’d say sentience is close to binary for me, yeah. I know there’s a debate to be had about where you draw the line, but there’s a certain kind of thinking you only find in humans on our world. If there’s anything close to the borderline, I’d say it’s the majority of the land sharks, but that’s another convo.
I don’t think there’s a blind spot here, so much as a conscious choice of what to believe.
Phil gets annoyed when I point out that all this stuff is basically ours to decide. I know kobolds with a more developed culture and language are part of Dungeons and Dragons, but our orcs clearly aren’t the same as that universe’s, so our kobolds don’t have to be either. And I am sincere in my belief that signifiers like clothes and weapons (which we don’t see them make, only use) should not be a deciding factor.
Based on the text, therefore, I find the issue of kobold sentience to be… inconclusive. There’s nothing I would consider proof of it, but it’s almost impossible to prove a negative, and it’s certainly impossible to prove it with the very little screen time the kobolds get.
All that remains in question, then, is “What makes the story work?”
Personally, I rather liked the idea that the combination of let’s-say-person-like traits and animal-like traits in our species could go either way: that in addition to animal-like people, we could get somewhat person-like animals. It seemed to make the imaginative world more fully realized.
Had I not felt that way, or if Phil had really wanted to press for kobold personhood, we could’ve had them join the World’s Rebellion. We could’ve had them revolt on their own. We could’ve even just had someone discover a quiet society deserving of protections and hidden from human eyes. But see, if they could reason, they could be convinced to embrace a way of life that didn’t endanger human crops. And we’re not in a Time Machine-like situation where kobold hide is the only clothing type available.
So if we had done any of that, I would’ve insisted we bring Sundar, Frigg, Byron, and Scipio face to face with the fact that they’d casually and unnecessarily murdered these beings as part of their day-to-day lives, with the attendant feelings of guilt and PTSD to follow. Because either the kobolds are not people, or our heroes, knowingly or otherwise, have slaughtered at least dozens, probably hundreds, of people they could have made peace with instead. You cannot have one and not the other.
Since we didn’t do any of that, it does seem most reasonable to me to go with my original reading, the one that doesn’t ask you to root for heroes who kill people they don’t have to and then forget they even exist.
(Somewhat related: you may enjoy Lindsay Ellis’ breakdown of the 2017 Beauty and the Beast remake, which, among other criticisms, notes how certain story choices end up making the Beast more morally questionable than he was in the first Disney treatment, even though they seem to be trying to fix that. It’s not unrelated to these issues.)
Wow, I appreciate the response and lively discussion! I can respect the decision to make the Kobolds non-sentient based on the reasoning you had given T. I also hadn’t realized that clothing and tools are actually created by other creatures in nature!
I’ll share a bit of my personal head cannon and thoughts I had developed to add to the discussion.
“””
I had personally seen Kobolds as a race that may once have been more cohesive and advanced than they currently are (perhaps a nomadic or agrarian society). However, growing nations in previous millennia had pushed them off of their lands and left them fragmented and with few resources. Eventually their main source of resources came from raiding and as other civilizations advanced, theirs regressed leading them to their current, near feral, state.
Kobolds today are universally despised due to their ways of life directly conflicting with organized societies and their lack of communication with others. I could also see that they didn’t join the Savage races because they do not have the organization or leadership to do so. Perhaps this will change in the future as new morals are established in the new society.
“””
This head cannon has its holes based on some of the things we saw in the story. Ex: there was absolutely no Kobold communication shown in the story, I don’t know how and if a group of peoples could completely lose the ability to communication, though I could see it becoming very basic.
Personally I am fine with Kobolds being sentient but marginalized by all of society. No society is perfect and we will all probably do things that will be seen as unspeakable in the coming centuries, otherwise how could we continue to develop and improve?
To be fair, we never definitively established that they COULDN’T communicate. There’s not a lot of detail established about ’em in general, which is what makes headcanon more possible!
if you require a sophisticated, productive material culture before affirming a people’s sentience/sapience you are unpersoning a significant chunk of human history. certain christians have made such an argument to justify biblical genocide – they dismiss the tribes the israelites genocided as mere parasite cultures, incapable of civilization (hence the pointlessness of trying to save their noncombatant children at least). and in fact these kobolds have a sophisticated material culture – their loincloths appear to show some evidence of tailoring, which suggests division of labor, and their spears have metal tips. that means either they have metallurgy, they engage in trade with other species, or at a minimum they have learned systematic theft of a form of implement evolution didn’t program them to use. this is fundamentally unlike hermit crabs mindlessly crawling into discarded shelters for aeons – this behavior requires a mind, abstract thought. if they had attacked using tree branches as improvised clubs you might have had an interesting ambiguity, but these guys are more sophisticated than many humans. in fact if you had drawn cavemen with exactly this behavior and material culture and then depicted your heroes casually butchering and skinning them you would never have even thought to handwave it with “well, maybe they aren’t sentient”. the real determining factor is how humanoid their appearance is, as you suggest.
really, the loinclothes are even more significant than the metal-tipped spears, because loincloths have no productive value, fulfill no evolutionary role, they are products of taboo, of a sophisticated culture. maybe a mindless animal could snatch away your spear and jab at you with it, but it would never conceive of making and wearing a loincloth.
That seems wrong, actually! Despite what Genesis claims, the upright, two-legged design of the kobolds means the loins are vulnerable and likely sensitive. Seems reasonable that a species that fights would evolve some means of protecting those. In fact, that seems to be how we discovered clothing…the cultural prohibitions tend to come after finding a practice that makes good sense at the time, just as most of the rules in Leviticus seem to be a how-to guide for helping an ancient tribe survive. (And then we tend to cling to these rules long after we’ve outgrown their original purpose, but that’s another discussion.)
This is hair-splitting, but it’s a fair example of how these kinds of evidence-based arguments just don’t cut any ice with me here. Cavemen were real; kobolds are made up, and Guilded Age is clearly not bound by what races are like in other fantasy works. The only real evidence about Arkerran kobolds is what’s in our text, and literally the only things they do in Guilded Age are attack crops, fight heroes, and die. If a decently made spear is proof enough of a human-equivalent soul, then I’ll put a spear in my potted plant and say “Behold: a man.” You might view this position as ignoring anthropology, and that’s your right: I’d view it as a certain freedom of imagination that fantasy is poorer without.
I don’t believe I ever said that there were requirements for sentience that the kobolds clearly failed to meet. I’m pretty sure my position, in 2018 as now, was that either interpretation was possible, but the kobolds-are-sentient interpretation is one I can’t personally abide. Because, at the risk of being a broken record here…I don’t want our heroes to be mass-murderers! Not even accidentally! Not even as some kind of statement about the dehumanization of indigenous cultures that gets taken for granted until it isn’t, that’s exactly what the orcs are already for!
I don’t want characters I put this much of my heart into to be cast in that role! I don’t think that’s too much to ask, when the overall evidence is this inconclusive! Byron does not need MORE guilt!
And yes, obviously, if I’d known this was going to be any kind of issue, I would’ve asked Flo and/or Erica to redo this earliest of Byron scenes and swap the kobolds out for something less sapient-looking. Maybe a bunch of flying serpents, maybe some shambling horrors that a wizard created years ago. Maybe zombies… kinda funny to me to think of zombies as a nuisance to spray your crops for while rolling your eyes, instead of The End of All Civilization (we have berserkers for that). Of course, even then, it’s hard to prove a negative without a reliable omniscient narrator. Could the Corruptor Beast have been composing sonnets in its head all the time it fought our heroes? Did it want to love as well as to feed? As far as the text is concerned, who knows? But it doesn’t have the kind of appearance that prompts such speculation. I guess kobolds do, at least for some. Darn those loincloths and spears!
Even if I’d realized this would be an issue after the kobolds had been established and before the end of the series, I would’ve pushed for some way to address it in Chapter 40 (the kobolds’ last appearance). Maybe WAV could’ve played the kobolds some music and determined their lack of intelligent thought from their inability to recognize patterns. Or, if you insist, he could’ve found out the opposite, and blithe kobold-slayers like Frigg and Sundar would’ve had to confront the blood that was on their hands without their knowledge. As I’ve said, I wouldn’t like that (one of Sundar’s defining moments involves his defense of the orcs), but it would at least be better than thinking kobold sentience was an issue and still just ignoring it. “Figuring out what’s right is a never-ending process. You’re never done,” Syr’Nj could’ve said to comfort her fellows, as the sky elves relocated the remaining kobolds to someplace far from human lands.
But instead, Flo did not mention to me that she thought kobolds were sentient until after the last chapter was scripted and mostly published, so THANKS, BUDDY, THANKS HEAPS
This will, I think, be my only kobold-related post of 2022, except to pull people back to this thread. I’ve got other stuff to deal with. And ultimately, no matter how much I talk, “our” comic becomes “your” comic, in the end. It’s on your screen, you can read it as you see fit. I can’t control that experience, and I wouldn’t even want to. But if I could offer a bit of advice, I’d say: read it in the way you enjoy it most. Life’s too short not to take what pleasures we can make for ourselves. And if what you enjoy is to poke at one of the series’ most regrettable creative decisions…seriously, why didn’t we use dire locusts or some kind of floating mouths?…then hey, that’s your business.
I love Byron’s animated expressions, there is a almost a Bugs Bunny like sense of humor about his approach. He is a much more serious and stern character after the first few pages, tragic backstory and all.
I never noticed the dog! Hello doggo!
You made the right decision. Frigg is more complex but understandable, whereas Byron here is fine but doesn’t really feel like himself yet with his cartoonish expressions and his ernest surprise at the goblins.
Let the casual genocide commence!
Sooner or later this comic will take up the position that nonhumans are people, too. Kobolds never quite make the transition, though.
Byron’s character changed with time too. While he’s always had an amount of pride to him I don’t think he ever acted this smug later on or looked down on common people the way it feels he does here even if it’s subtle. Also considering his past it seems very strange that he’d brag about being a “berzerker” like he does in one of the subsequent pages iirc. It’d be like Batman referring to himself as “Parent Killer”.
Yeah, the tone was very different in the first couple of chapter. It was more of a Trope buster with Byron: a berserker who didn’t go berserk, Frigg: a ‘Crusader’ who was anything but holy and Syr’Nj: a Wood Elf who likes science and gadgets vs hugging trees. Really, Bandit is the only one who plays to her trope. As the comic moved on, the character became more serious… well, except for Frigg, which just made her character seem more obnoxious in contrast.
I think starting with a more compelling back story, then shifting to a simpler one, was the right call.
In hindsight, it would have been cool to start with Gravy’s introduction. Bookends and all that.
I’m starting to have a little head-canon thing going here… the Five come into Arkerra as gamers, even if their memories have been wiped. They are acting the way they would have acted “in character” in some game they’re playing, with sarcasm and a sense of being one step removed from their surroundings. As they become more fully immersed, they change and deepen, because it’s their life now, rather than a game.
Does this make any sense?
Yeah, it’s reasonable.