Annotated 16-23
Rachel’s endgame wasn’t simply to get Frigg to show her power where someone else could see it, but to get her to understand– physically, which is how Frigg understands things– the nature of this power, feel it flowing through her and not just acting as a Lego attachment to her weapons or granted her by some outside force.
With her mission accomplished, Rachel not only has no more need to fight, she has no more frustration to fuel her. Her faith has been rewarded already.
There’s no question in my mind that she means this dialogue in the moment. She’s not eager to die and she doesn’t think that she will– she believes in Frigg’s goodness, too– but she knows death or grievous injury is possible, here. She’s given her all to what she knows was right, and she accepts whatever the world will offer her in return.
Speaking of Rachel, it’s silly but I’m still a little sad/annoyed she isn’t in that “Support Us on Patreon” banner with the rest of them. After all, it’s not like that image is representative of any particular point in the story.
I agree. But for what it’s worth, Best is back as himself in that banner and he never met Rachel. As WAV he did, albeit briefly. But not at his Best.
Yeah, but if you’re going to make that argument, Bandit would never stand that close to Byron – and with her back to him, no less – at any point in time post-Rachel. So she has to still be around.
John didn’t design Best’s Freddie Mercury phase very long before we started using it, so the Patreon image had to come from our last year (but probably before we caught up to E-Merl and Scipio as B’ial Vezk citizens). I wasn’t very involved with developing this one, but I know we wanted to create something that’d put a friendly face on the series at that point as a whole; hence the presence of several characters who were no longer active members but could return at any time, with their various emotional problems smoothed out (E-Merl’s as well as Bandit’s, and Syr’Nj wouldn’t have been that cool about posing with Bandit, either). But I think it might’ve been too jarring to include Rachel at that point, especially since we weren’t done telling stories about the effect of her absence.
Best in the Patreon image was changed to the Freddy Mercury look when Best in the story changed to it (I’m sure there were comments about it, but I can’t be bothered to search for them). By that time the Patreon image had existed for several chapters IIRC.
Ha, shows what I remember.
Still, I’ll stick to the main point… putting Rachel in there standing next to the others while E-Merl and Frigg were still in mourning would’ve felt more like twisting the knife than leaving her out.
Makes sense. (Though, the selfish part of me, several years removed from her death, would like to see a banner that includes everyone. There’s even a conveniently empty spot there behind Bandit!)
Well that’s not worth much to me because my point is that the this group of people were never all together, even without Rachel. Bandit never even met WAV, much less post-WAV Best.
I wonder if Rachel had any ability to shield her face with that glowy faith based energy. With the way Frigg struck her she should have more than a black eye.
How come Wolfy here isn’t tagged in chapter 44?
I took over tagging when we shifted to annotations, so I can’t answer this one. Might change it. Probably just slipped Phil’s mind, although maybe it was an acknowledgment that this “god” never fully deserved the capital-G title.