Annotated 25-18
Embraisch’Nj’s deer-in-the-headlights look is that of a man who’s discovered his moral line just a little too late to stop himself from cartwheeling over it. But ethics aside, he has served his patron’s tastes well.
Syr’Nj and Byron are both widely influential public figures who have made no attempt to hide their relationship, and even in a society whose primary mass medium is broadsheets, gossip travels quickly. A fair number of people have probably been whispering about Fr’Nj and Scipio, too… and as often happens with gossip, the actual truth can snowball into wild speculation. Hey, who knows how many human men have been taking up with elfmaids? Could be twenty, could be hundreds.
This rumor would be threatening to those humans who don’t relish the competition for those men’s attention (“The gnomes are threatening to take our jobs, but the wood elves want to take our Bobs!”). But if you’re addressing men like Annunziata, you can do a lot worse than imply their species’ sexual potency is greater than your own. And if you’re inviting everyone to imagine Annunziata’s political enemy naked, on her back, and getting some “wood” from humans like themselves, then as Annunziata says, that’s a bonus. I trust I don’t need to explain her anger and hurt any further than that.
If everyone here were like Annunziata, the chamber would erupt in laughter and that’d be the end of it, and like Dean Reynolds at the trial of Taro, Syr’Nj would have been “put in her place.” But as we’ll soon see, Annunziata has managed the impressive feat of overestimating his colleagues’ racism.
Also, “human men are attracted to elf women” might hit a bit too close to home for Ardaic.
Comedy is hard.
Indeed, doubly so if you’re an oppressed, or even just foreign minority. There’s all this easy material just laying around and the audience eats it up, it’s so easy for you to pick up, in fact you’re better at it than they are. Tricky business when the only way to succeed seems like it’s by compromising all your values.
It’s weird, I would have sworn that on the original page, Embraisch’Nj had thought balloons in the two last panels, “please someone stops me” in panel 4 and then “…Thank you” in panel 5.
(I checked, there isn’t)
OTOH, his expression pretty much says it without need for words.
Damn… I regret that the swastikas are so prominent in the preview image. It’s set dressing for Mel Brooks’s pastiche of Hitler.