Annotated 11-24
Cause and effect is a little ambiguous in the entangled worlds of Arkerra and Sepia. So Bandit has been hoping her old mates would turn up alive because (A) she is played by Chrissie, who knows how rezzing in games usually works OR (B) she is a hopeful person in the main, and the first real friends she’s made as “Bandit Keynes” deserve her best hopes.
Here’s the original end gag for the chapter, and I think it’ll be pretty clear right away why we didn’t use it.
3. Bandit Keynes hops back into the empty chair at the table, looking up at her erstwhile comrades in arms. She’s clearly enjoying the heck out of her dramatic entrance.
Bandit Keynes: We been eatin’ at this lousy dive hopin’ to run into you guys for close t’ two weeks, now.
Bandit Keynes: Pull up some chairs, guys. We got s’m catchin’ up t’ do.
4. Frigg feigns ignorance as Bandit looks up at her.
Frigg: …Is this seat taken, or are you in it? I can’t really tell.
5. Frigg explains the joke, and Bandit’s eyes narrow as she continues to look up at Frigg. Bandit’s good mood is dissipating.
Frigg: It’s because you’re short.
It’s fun sometimes to subvert a big moment by having the characters refuse to treat it as such (Peter David and Joss Whedon, two earlyish influences on my writing, do this quite a lot, and other Marvel movies have often followed Whedon’s example in this), but it just doesn’t work here. Nor is it an issue of taste. Frigg needs to be shocked. She saw Bandit hacked to bits, and it’s weird enough to Frigg just that she and the others are alive, even with an expert in death-magick to bend the rules in their favor. We could still work in a little comedy, but the closing gags had to grow naturally out of that stunned penultimate panel.
Syr: ‘It never even got into my mouth, and I’m clearly already drunk…human mead is not to be underestimated.’
How happy Bandit looks to see all her old teammates… for now. While I can understand her later “Some wounds never heal” attitude towards Byron (and by extension, Syr’Nj), the contrast between that moment and this one still makes me a little sad.
I feel like Bandit grew bitter the more separated she became from her player. For a player who can respawn with a click, a “death” is a mere annoyance that’s easy to brush off. For the person who actually died (horribly), it may not be so easy to forget.
That’s my sense of it, too. And it connects pretty well to Chrissie’s ‘Bandit can’t get her happy ending if I keep poking her’ line, too.
I think dropping the original end gag was a good choice. Since the reader at this point probably still isn’t entirely sure what’s going on either (ex. “Is it really a video game or not?”), I think having that confusion demonstrated by the characters was a good choice.
I like how Syr’Nj looked like she was both perturbed at spilling on herself, and wondering what was in the mead that was causing this hallucination.
The Big Reveal of chapter nine made me lose faith in the comic, but I didn’t stop reading right away. I read pretty much right up until before The Five sans Best made it back to Gastonia. I really, really liked chapters 10 and 11, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that sooner or later, the MCs would have to face sepia-toned “reality” and have their entire lives being written off as nothing but dreams.
I should have kept reading, because this scene and the following chapter showed me that Arkerra was evolving. Here were a new group of protagonists who definitely, probably, weren’t in tubes in HR’s basement. It wasn’t just about The Five anymore. Why would the story take this route if it was just about getting the MCs back to Earth?
And so I kept reading, and was rewarded greatly. ^_^
Also, I love how they go from the exact same facial expression in the penultimate panel to completely different facial expressions in the final panel. ^_^
Byron: “But… I… przglerk? Fhah!”
Syr’Nj: “This is regular mead, right?”
Gravy: “Hmm, assuming the existence of non-savasi mystics, or a Soul Affinity Coefficient of more than 8.3, could it perhaps be that a necromancer would be able to… But that would require…”
Frigg: “Okay, I’ve been through some weird fucking shit lately, I just need someone to tell me what specific kind of weird fucking shit this is.”
As a longtime reader, I’m still with Frigg on this one. And I already read this to the end the first time.
(C) She’s just yanking their chains and is as surprised as they are.
Actually this does bring up a question. This world is a MMO so logically people come back to life all the time(do to character respawn), but the 5 and Bandit are the only examples actually shown that I can recall and they are treated like miracles which implies that resurrections are rare which given the rules as they are, I am very confused
I think the implication is that when what appears on Sepia World screens is a PC dying and respawning, what appears in actual Arkerra is that person only being badly injured and recovering later. Bandit appeared to actually die in Arkerra as well as Sepia World because she was involved in one of the Five’s scenes; if Syr’nj had been watching her through a telescope from outside the arena while Harky killed her instead of being inside it while Byron killed her it would, instead, have been a matter of, “She’s out of the fight! Still breathing, though.”
So most players only get “hurt” but do to Byron’s influence that one time it caused actual death. That seems reasonable, thank you.
That actually makes a huge amount of sense. Some Tabletop RPGs have taken to doing this as well, when the narrative calls for a climactic fight the PCs must lose as a result of bad rolls.
Basically, real!Arkerra fudges where the KoA game pretends not to.
Depends. Is Arkerra a permadeath server? If it is, then this isn’t the same Bandit, it just looks, talks, and acts exactly like the previous one and has had a couple of months to get back into the same circles as before.