Annotated 36-20
I don’t think I appreciated how sound Flo’s storytelling instincts were here. On one level, the reader wants to see Tom confronted and defeated, even if it’s not really Tom here, and this fight is a good warm-up for the carnage to come.
But on another, it’s very important to establish what this does to Bandit, emotionally. The last time she was this close to a berserker, she died. As traumatically as possible, with no real warning (yes, Syr’Nj did try to warn her, but that shout didn’t reach her ears quick enough to be much foreknowledge). She came back, but she did not come back among friends.
She has the presence of mind to defend herself here with dagger and syringe. But it’s close: she’s also screaming, fighting off flashbacks, irrationally begging. The others don’t really know she has these psychological scars… she hasn’t wanted them to know. Both the scars and how she’s hid them will be important to the rest of this chapter. She’ll face more berserkers like this one, including what appears to be the same berserker who killed her.
Bandit’s death is that one bit of the story that didn’t quite click with me proper. The blurry line of “videogame but not really it’s more of a cosmic coincidence kinda thing” went weird there to me. The absolute only person to ever come back without straight up divine intervention was Bandit. Kinda nutty to thing nobody else, especially in this big ass pack of adventurers that are about to get destroyed, has a “player” counterpart to account for respawning.
Just something that felt odd to me. It’s not that missing a single beat ruins a song for me.
Since resurrecting is definitely not commonplace in Arkerra, we have to presume that the game’s rezzing mechanics are invisible to them. Some games have exploited this conceit where “lives” are merely possibilities that ended wrong so the “story” continues in a timeline where things went “right”(mostly because the player now knows better or is more skilled).
So Bandit being resurrected and remembering it is a special occurrence. If you check back the strip T linked, he says that the “Harky’s blood” theory is basically canon. Maybe Tectonicus deemed her worthy.
All that link did for me was leave me in complete awe at the realization these annotations have been going for over two years. Hot. Dang. Never felt that long.
I agree, it’s one of a few loose ends that never really felt well-explained to me. In particular, it exposes a lot of the hand-waving about how closely connected The Game™ really is to the world of Arkerra. I get that some of that obfuscation was deliberate, but in the end, I wanted some more solid answers and none ever came.
Like you, I don’t feel that it ruins the story by any stretch; it’s very minor. But it still nags at me.