Annotated 31-15
“Marge, I have no idea what you were just thinking about. Why would you think I did?”
“We do not make war on terror, Deserthammer! What kind of ridiculous superpower would waste its energies by warring on a complete abstraction?”
Remember what Syr’Nj said about “a certain number of hours of useful consciousness?” I don’t know how clear it was, but the reason she doesn’t get any lines on this page and looks all squinty in panel 2 is that she’s running out of steam. Ardaic is still concerned about her, but he’s also not above using her limits to support his argument.
Even so, I find myself leaning a little more toward Ardaic here, and… I’m not sure if that’s a story flaw? The rest of the sequence will have many of our heroes agreeing, “Yeah, Ardy’s just an asshole,” but Gravedust hasn’t really made his case as convincingly as he could, even when he’s not pushing Ardaic’s buttons by nation-shaming. Ardaic has a broken arm, Syr’Nj has a singed back, they are both discussing enormous casualties, and he just stumbles in and tells them they’ve been wasting time with second-stringers. You weren’t there, man! They had a berserker shark who was tall as a house! Conversely, it’s kind of like he expects the others to see the pictures in his head when he talks about the Cultist threat. He’s totally convinced it eclipses the Rebels, but nobody’s even seen this monster yet, so a lot of that is based on his intuition. Such intuition will prove correct, but no, I can’t really blame Ardaic for not buying it.
Honestly, at this point in the story, even having read the whole comic, I’d say Ardaic is in the right here. Gravedust is ultimately correct, but given the info all of them have between them, Gravedust has no sufficent reason to believe that this monster is more dangerous than the tangible threats they’ve seen and his argument of not taking his people seriously is pretty weak when his people are currently enemy combatants. I think the fact that it’s muddled and Gravy’s argument is a bit weak adds to the story more than just going off the assumption that anyone who argues with the main cast must be wrong would have done. Gravedust has a bit of a bad habit of viewing his wisdom as clear and assuming rather than earning the moral high ground, so it fits in with the rest of the story.
Me thinks that telling them to shut up because they’re so-n-such were one the reasons they became “the enemy” in the first place. XD
But yeah, going off on a hunch can work really well if you’re a Hollywood action hero, but otherwise if you have nearly as bad a situation already, one needs to have a bit more tangible case than “is hella spoopy”.
Still it’d be unwise to not give any notion towards the case presented, and especially on basis of “you hurt my pride and people like you are the meanies, so you’re all buttheads anyway”… “How could this get any worse” likes to prove itself time after time. XD
But got to appreciate how the statues are socially distancing. :D
No. Always fight the death-cultists first. Otherwise you’ll find they take over your country and run it into the ground while you were busy killing other schmucks like yourself, just born in another place.
Meanwhile, the death-cultists on both side prosper.
Yeah, bringing Gastonia’s arrogance (however real it may be) into the argument was kind of a tactical error. Gravedust could have taken the opportunity to refute Arcaic’s rather facile comparison from panel 1 (“Drunkards are unlikely to get your own mind on their side. The cultists have shown themselves entirely willing to do that, even if they have to consort with dark forces!” or something) but he didn’t. He just went for an argument that Ardaic was always going to interpret as an ad hominem attack. You’d think someone his age would be more aware of the importance of politics.
“your people have thrown in with genocidal warmongers” would probably be more of a put down if Gastonia wasn’t also a warmongering nation that consider their enemies non-people to be eradicated.
“What? You wound me sir! Of course we don’t regard non-humans as little more than beasts to be eradicated. Perish the thought! They are little more than beasts to be exploited, yes, but to wastefully kill them? My word! Of course once their usefulness has reached its end, if they’re occupying land/resources we want, that’s another story, but that’s beside the point altogether.”
When I read this the first time around, I found I really wanted to know what argument Gravedust actually made. We don’t really get to see the “meat” of that, and so can’t really tell if Ardaic’s dismissal of his input is because he’s an arrogant Gastonian or because Gravedust didn’t quite make his point clear.
That is, at least there seems to have passed some time of arguing between this page and the previous time we saw them, while the scene in Sepia World was playing out.
“I’m not sure if that’s a story flaw?”
Why would it be a story flaw, that Ardaic has reasonable justification for opposing Gravy? If anything, this is Gravy’s “tragic flaw” of being unable to hold a political discussion with a human in a diplomatic way coming around to bite him. Having reasonable, well-established character traits lead to interpersonal conflict (as opposed to “this character is an asshole/has an Idiot Ball shoved up their ass”) is like Basic Good Storytelling 101