Annotated 22-23
Okay, this scene transition really makes it look like the Cultists are going to come through to our world, doesn’t it? Especially given the use of purple in the previous scene.
I guess we could’ve done that. Would’ve meant throwing out our concept of Guilded Age‘s cosmology, but I don’t think there’s anything in the story up to this point that would say it couldn’t be done. And even if so, the Cultists are about breaking the traditional rules of the universe anyway, right? That’s one thing they and HR have in common, sorta.
Heh, worth thinking about. I had Bezos money, I might fund some What If? alternate story where HR, driven by madness and reasons he can’t name, gives the Cultists a door into Sepia World, meaning he and Carol would have to ally with the Peacemakers to stop the destruction of both universes. It’d be less satisfying in the long run than what we did, but as a thought experiment, it could get pretty wild.
Panel two is basically everyone right now with that quarantining going on.
It’s eerie just how prescient many of these webcomics seem to be on reread or on repost.
I keep wanting this page to either be earlier or later for some reason. I think it’s because it feels like the point where HR’s downward character arc finally takes the nosedive off the cliff into a full on plummet. Maybe he could have pulled up before this, but after….nope. But it kind of feels like maybe he should have hit this point before he blew up at Carol in that earlier strip. It’s also a pretty abrupt transition which might be another reason it feels like it should be in another spot.
But that’s just how it all feels to me anyway.
I confess to being curious as to what might have happened if Carol had been there. Like….I don’t think HR was ever NOT going to try to attain true godhood and everything, but Carol being here might have kept him from going off the deep end right now and delayed things for a bit longer.
I agree, something about the timing is wrong. This is a layer to the whole chapter’s story, and a step in HR’s personal arc, that should not be only getting introduced just now.
At the very least, show us that HR is idly watching Armageddacon before cultists (or at least Brother Tom) start talking about their ideology. Maybe have a moment where Brother Tom’s powerpoint presentation is undercut by a perspective shift, we switch to his voice coming from the speaker (or being rendered in text?) on HR’s monitor while HR is idly bemused by what his little NPC man is up to, maybe some musings on a theory about how his prophesies could be part of what’s messing hisncontrol.
And then Tom’s powerpoint shows HR’s silhouette. And HR is suddenly profoundly unnerved as he realizes Tom is now talking about HIM, and foretelling *things HR will supposedly do.*
It doesn’t help we never got HR’s motivation and what lead to this point. He had to be unstable to begine with but most of what makes HR tick is left for us to figure out.
For better and for worse, HR’s descent into lowercase-m madness was more of a jagged slope than a straight line. At times he seemed to recover more sanity than he’d had the day before, and then there were the bad days with the steep drops.
I will not pretend that we planned it that way. But I do like a lot of the results; they feel more organic to me than they would’ve if we’d just slowly and steadily adjusted him over time, as if we were twisting the volume dial one notch per chapter.
I’ll talk more about that in his next scene.
Yeah, and that’s fair. I will say that this page feels like the last time he felt like he could be …redeemed or something. After this point, it feels like he doubled down on everything and seriously committed to doing anything he needed to do to become a god.
The thing is … I’m not sure about his motivation. He starts out trying to get those people back out of the tubes, getting frustrated, resorting to …unsavoury … methods, but in the end he just wants them dead. But if that was the aim, he could just try unplugging their physical bodies first.
I feel like his arc would have deserved a few more pages. This way it feels like I’m seeing short vignettes but find it hard to guess at how he got from A to B.
As near as I can tell, his actual motivation is, and has always been, to become a god and the experiment with the Five was supposed to be another step upon the road. A “human trial” if you will.
Then, when he couldn’t bring them back, that confounded him. I think that trying to bring them back was really more of an ego thing. He’s *supposed* to be the god of this world so why isn’t it *obeying* him? Why *can’t* he just bring them back?
Now, that said, he knows that Carol cares about people and that, if anyone found out that they’d accidentally killed five people, there would be legal and/or PR problems and, heck, maybe at certain points he even believes it himself, that he’s actually trying to save them, to bring them back, to fix things.
But, ultimately, it’s still all just about him becoming a god. And, once he is in the system, he gains that power, so all the other considerations and lies and everything else falls away.
Now, could this have been made clearer? Maybe? But, when someone is lying to both themselves and everyone else about their goals that hard, it’s definitely tricky to make clear.
I do think that this page in particular makes it pretty clear what his real ultimate goal always was though: http://guildedage.net/comic/chapter-31-page-22/
Between that and everything else, I think it’s pretty clear that this was always about him wanting to be a god and not the lives of those people…but I will grant that’s much more clear on a reread and the first time through this page does seem to be a pretty big swerve: http://guildedage.net/comic/chapter-42-page-6/
Or at least it felt that way to me.
I definitely don’t think that, because earlier pages clearly allude to HR and Carol being absolutely flabbergasted that Arkerra doesn’t work the way they expected it to. They have a serious talk when HR starts to realize he tapped into an actual living world, Carol tells him that’s impossible, and his response is that he thought the same thing, except for the fact that with all the failures, it fits the facts better than the idea that it is only a digital world with a magic boost.
A major part of the reason he tried to get the Five killed seemed to have been that it would render their minds unconscious, which would at least stop them from influencing the game and perhaps be the key to allow their souls to finally be pulled out of there.
I think his initial bounce back after this snapping point is mostly legitimate. Up to this point, he seems to have been haunted by having essentially kidnapped and murdered five people, and the stress of spending weeks upon weeks trying to save them. The horrible realization that he’s essentially hijacked an entire goddamn world full of actual, living beings, and saddled it with a war story that has resulted in countless deaths so far. On top of that, if he’s spent time watching the cultists, and has seen that they call his likeness their god, it’s probably been shocking.
But I think that after this moment, he changes the way he thinks about that idea. If his power over Arkerra is essentially godlike, then the possibilities are nearly endless, as long he stops focusing so hard on the Five, who have influenced Arkerra so much that all his crude attempts to go after them directly have amounted to nothing. He realizes that he has real power at his fingertips, he just needs to think of something more productive to do with it than waste it against the only five people who can counter it.
He’s definitely still broken in a lot of ways even after his bounce back, as we can see with his casual murder of an employee. But I don’t think that was his plan then, either. It’s kind of like… he finally found a way to cope with the guilt of having ruined so many lives, and that way was to make their sacrifices mean something. He accepts here that he’s damned for all he’s done, but he’s resolved to accept that for the greater good, even though it’s almost certainly going to result in more deaths before he can figure out the final plan. Sure, the expectation was probably that those deaths would take place on Arkerra, but HR has by now accepted that Arkerra’s lives are just as real as anything on Sepia World, so when it turns out that Ferris is the first of those deaths to occur, it’s… just another drop in the bucket for him.
He also realizes what he can do with Ferris’ body. And between the Cultists’ prophecy, the horrifying realization of the full scope of his actions, and his new resolution to find a better way to use his unasked for status… he does it.