Annotated 23-11
So here’s four panels of my original page 1, reworked and retrofitted as a flashback, and the kind of smash cut to weeks later that I’d be doing a lot more of if Phil weren’t reining me in.
Original had “Thunderfisting Mountain,” see which you like better.
I think Bragga saying “literally” when he meant figuratively was a planned running gag that just never got any further on the racetrack. Between his exotic palate, his size, his boisterousness, and his poor impulse control, there was enough that was funny about him already.
Some typographical weirdness on this page. I think Phil just misjudged the size of a balloon and opted for “hunt & jail” over the original “hunt and jail” to save himself some work. And the capital I’s in the last balloon remind me that I had written it in all caps, to be shouted to his fellows rather than casually commented to himself. Braggadocio does not seem like a very introspective man. I imagine he doesn’t talk to himself much when there’s others around that he can shout to.
I bet Justice tastes just like chicken!
Question: Are Griffins related to Avians? Are they an intelligent species? They sure look very similar.
I’m wondering. Does Ardaic know that this is how people like Bert are recompensed, and honestly thinks it’s fine? Or is he simply not aware of the details of it?
I’m sure he’s abstractly aware. He knows “non-fatal casualties are compensated fairly”, and probably also knows that it’s in land. It might not have occurred to him to wonder what Bert or others would *do* with land.
Which, to be fair, might not be so bad. Land has value in most economic systems. It can be rented or sold. I don’t know enough about Gastonia’s economy to say whether either would be enough for him to live on without hard labor.
But he is trying to work it, and I’m not going to assume he and Bragga are foolish. This suggests a more subtle darkness – land might be very devalued in the Gastonian empire due to recent conquests from other races.
I almost suspect that this was taken straight from history – the Romans were in the habit of rewarding veterans with land quite often. Usually land that they helped conquer, too. This served as both a reward for the legionnaires and helped secure those conquered areas, by ensuring Romans settled there and “romanized” the area.
From the annotation all the way back in chapter 21:
“In the longer term, though, some problems with Ardaic’s approach will emerge. One is that Ardaic’s faith in the perfection of the system means that he just stamps “RETIRED” on Bert’s record and then forgets about him forever. Why shouldn’t he? Bert’s taken care of now, he’ll be fine, on to the next order of business.”
I suspect that many higher-ups who are compensated in land have enough land and enough money that they don’t have to work it themselves. It’s probably relatively easy for Ardaic to overlook that this would not apply to everyone else, too. Or possibly someone worked out how much compensation Bert was owed, then somebody else decided to give him land instead of money, and those are decisions which Ardaic just has no time to deal with.
Why bother with introspection when you can just take drastic action instead?
… instead of, say, using your massive strength to directly and immediately help the little guy right in front of you do the thing he’s clearly struggling to do? Ugh.
For a guy who’s supposedly got both at least-decent spatial reasoning (or he’d be dead), and reasonable responses under pressure when a life is on the line (or probably a lot more people than necessary would be dead – I assume), Bragga’s missing a whole lot more than just introspection in this scene.
Which is, I guess, one of the major roots of all conflict. For some reason, I just don’t expect that out of a guy who can manually brute force a griffin into being his dinner…
While yes he could use his massive strength to directly help his buddy here, that wouldn’t help the next guy, or the guy after that, or after that, ext. Now while entering open revolt also might not be the best plan, it still both solves the problem for them and sends a message to gastonia to fix its treatment of their soldiers/adventurers(plus it actually works in the end to actually solve the initial problem too so there is that)
Forget the next guy. What about the next task Bert will struggle with? And the one after that and so on?
Braggadocio can’t spend the rest of his life as a cheap farmhand. If nothing else, it would still be deserting the army, and we don’t know if Bert has enough land to feed both of them. I suspect not.
Well, ends not justifying the means, and all that, aside… for those whose only means of survival is adventuring/military service, it would be an interesting change for Bert to consider having the farm as a fallback now that his career in the military is over, and perhaps to consider how to make it so.
After all, they have no way yet of knowing revolution will solve that particular problem, and it isn’t a great hurdle for anyone with an attention span to question whether the farm’s viability, for Bert’s sake, would improve with some assistance. (Bragga right now could still pitch in today, and maybe someone else for the future, given that’s not his actual career.)
Recall Best’s stint as a farmhand, and the guy who showed up after he left: help can be found if one has a means of finding it, which an adventurer-type such as Bragga presumably represents.
That’s the whole point of questing, isn’t it? Finding things?
My point was really that Bragga’s spent too much of his life being an active agent of change, for a request he’s probably seen posted a million times, when looking for jobs, to not have the solution pop into his head, when he sees the circumstances that ostensibly led to the request being made in the first place.
To be fair though, I suspect that’d just be a more boring attempt at a solution to read.
I personally believe that Bragga would be quite happy to get Ardaic to literally shove his promises up his ass if he could figure out how.
Probably by shoving that land up his ass, one rock at a time.
In my head I read all of Braggadocio’s dialogue in the voice of BRIAN BLESSED!
People have been using literally for exaggeration for many, many, many decades. It wasn’t until rather recently that a very unpalatable individual said they shouldn’t and now ‘smart’ people try and claim others shouldn’t. Funny how language works. If you know it’s not actually literal you understand the exaggeration for what it is and so it did it’s job. Figuratively speaking.
I’m trying not to be one of those people telling others how to speak, but it does take a lot of restraint.
Of course, if you have to add “figuratively” to all your metaphors, they are not good metaphors. It’s only really needed in cases where it’s not clear whether a phrase is meant literally or not.
The thing that annoys me is that the figurative use of “literally” means that you can’t be sure of its meaning when it is used in the literal sense — i.e. to clarify whether a phrase is meant literally or not, when it can be interpreted both ways.
So someone might be stating that they mean something literally, but you still can’t be sure whether they actually mean it, because they might not mean it “literally literal”. That can lead to very unpleasant surprises.
That is, of course nothing new. The same thing annoy me with the word “paranoid”, which by definition means “so much more cautious than appropriate that it becomes a bigger problem than the one you were trying to avoid”. And then there’s people saying “not paranoid enough”. Which means that next time, I have to use at least a whole sentence to get across what could have been said with a single word — and will still be misinterpreted. Effectively, the casual use of the word makes it way harder to even talk about the concept of “harmful amounts of caution”, to the point where I had people tell me that that was not something that could ever happen, so why would we need a word for it?
The words we have and their meaning determine what we can and cannot talk about, and that limits what we can think about — so yeah, it does matter. Maybe not enough to ruin a casual conversation, but enough to point it out every now and then.