Annotated 3-12
HA! I forgot that Best came up with his own, only slightly more plausible excuse for blowing off the interrogation to sign autographs. And… (in headcanon, at least) poor Syr’Nj is eating it up with a spoon, because getting praise in this society is rare enough, and getting her first crush to say she can “shine?” Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. But okay, SURE, it also works if you strike “her first crush” and put in “her rebarbative fellow-traveler.”
Erica ignored the suggestion to draw hearts near Syr’Nj’s head here. If she had, since Syr’Nj’s line of sight includes everyone in the group, most readers would probably think we were being coy about who she liked. And then most of you’d decide she was into Byron already, or Gravedust, or Frigg. The time to draw hearts around her was back on the end of page 7, or on the start of page 8 at latest.
In any case, the one most deserving of your pity in panel 1 is Gravedust. Frigg sings for volume, not melody. [Warning: the following video is long and includes occasional profanity, which makes it the ideal representation of Gravedust’s hike so far.]
Fifty-three flagons of grog on the wall, fifty-three flagons of grahhhhg!
Up! Chuck! Spit one up! Fifty….
Fifty-FOUR flagons of grog on the wall!
Vintage Frigg, straight from the tap, only slightly metabolized!
Just give him some space. It’s been a while for him and he needs to brush up being a sage.
With a sagebrush?
Can’t believe you were this obsessed with pairing off syr’nj somehow when you had a much more natural hookup just about to blossom. I think if some cheesy cartoon hearts had appeared in the comic seemingly out of nowhere the reaction would have been mostly about their non sequitur nature rather than buying into the idea of syr’nj as ship bait.
(Between best and someone else, that is, not syr’nj and byron).
I was never on the Best hating bandwagon but even I didn’t notice Syr’s crush. Now that I know about it I guess her facial expression in the 1st panel is a bit telling but this ship is so subtle it’s practically a submarine.
“Obsessed”?
Yeah, I keep mentioning the Syr’Nj-Best thing in the annos because I think it’s weird and funny that we did this whole romantic subplot that seemed clear to all of us and surprisingly few people, if anybody, noticed. But we didn’t KNOW people weren’t noticing, so it’s not like we were Wile E. Coyote, constantly plotting to pair off the Roadrunner and feeling the sting of failure again and again. We were just following through on what we’d started.
And at this point, we definitely knew that Byron and Syr’Nj were going to get together… remember the varryn she’s making in the preview? We thought we’d mislead people into thinking that was for Best, but it’d appear in Chapter 8 as she and Byron started getting serious.
I like it when romance is a bit checkered: I certainly had a few bad choices in my own past even before I got to the “it didn’t last but I don’t regret it” kind of stories. We didn’t have time to get much of that with Guilded Age, though, so I won’t be talking about this one much past the end of this chapter.
I wonder what the action economy is like, switching from a staff to a two-handed ranged weapon.
Gravey has both weapons tagged with shortcut keys. So very little economy is wasted. ;-)
I never noticed Syr’Nj smiling in the background. Hearts might have helped change that.