Annotated 4-23
“Pause for effect… slick back hair… deliver catchphrase.”
Phil argued at first that Byron should win this fight, so that Best would later seek revenge against the group. Sure, Byron’s already savaged his ego by implying they’d’ve been better off without him, but wouldn’t it sting him still more to taste defeat? And Byron scoring a victory here would do something to redeem Byron’s reputation, which was already sliding after his getting sucker-punched by Frigg and Butterfly.
But it’d be less suspenseful for the group to have someone nursing a grudge against them if that someone was a loser whom one of them had already beaten. And we wanted it clear that Best does have the skills: it’s his personality that excludes him from the group.
Or, alternatively, Best could’ve hit Byron’s head with his blade in panel 1 here, which would’ve given Byron a fatal wound, triggered the berserker curse, killed ALL the tube-linked adventurers, and therefore resolved things rather conveniently for HR.
Interesting thought. If Byron got the upper hand would he have killed Best?
My thought is no, Byron has a bit of honor to him. He would have rubbed it in Best’s face though, I believe.
If he had lost his mind he would have hacked him to pieces.
Yeah, if he went berserk, everyone dies. If not, he’d just knock him around a bit and call it a day, I think. Overall, I think I prefer this resolution to any of the other reasonable possibilities. I like the Best is really good at what he does, and that his only problem is his shitty personality.
On an unrelated note; why does Byron call him self a berserker anyways? I know he is one, but wouldn’t that be something he would want to keep on the down low? Isn’t that kinda of like saying “Hi, I’m Will the Werewolf.”
I mean, if you want your friends to be ready with chains by moonrise, that’s a pretty great name.
We covered this to some degree in Volume 1’s bonus story, which I may annotate here at some point.
I think Byron is too much of a righteous guy to kill him, but fuck he logged an axed into his clavicle holy shit. Which best just shrugged off like a flesh wound, but still.
I do apologize…
But Phil was absolutely right, it would have been the Best… way.
I think my favorite part of this whole thing is how Best is slicking back hair that is already fully slicked back.
I think you made the right call. If Byron had won, it would have left too much room for the paradigm Best is operating in in this one as it is, where treating one’s allies with contempt is only a problem if one isn’t actually stronger than them.
” triggered the berserker curse, killed ALL the tube-linked adventurers, and therefore resolved things rather conveniently for HR.”
Can they even die at this point? It feels like it’s so blurred that it’s a game at this part of the story. When they actually died we could argue that they only revived because of that massive spiritual intervention, but Bandit was just waiting for them to respawn like everyone else so maybe they could’ve just… respawned? I understand that by the end of the story, this world stands as it’s own and lives (and deaths) are real but right now they’re muddled with game rules so… Are they like, the only people capable of dying permanently right now because they are linked to the tubes?
I think the authors lost track of the video game aspect of the story about half way into the third chapter. So it’s coincidental.
Uuuuh… what? The video game aspect wasn’t even revealed until chapter 9.
Assuming full spoilers at this point… it’s better to think of Arkerra’s world and its inhabitants (all the inhabitants, including the Five) as a real world that just has a few strange wrinkles in its origins. I think it would’ve killed a lot of the suspense of the story for us as writers if we’d made Byron and Syr’Nj essentially immortal. It’s a little unclear what’ll happen to Gravedust, but everyone else will live and die like people on our world do.
T, when you say ” given Byron a fatal wound, triggered the berserker curse, killed ALL the tube-linked adventurers, and therefore resolved things rather conveniently for HR”… I wonder, how much of all that did you have more or less in place at this point in the story?
The gist I get is that a LOT of the story seems to have come out of the characters “taking control” of the story as it were… evolution of the story over time.
We did know about HR and the five gamers in suspended animation right from the start. Though some details shifted, we knew of their existence and their basic role in the story.
It took us longer to figure out that Byron had a berserker “other self,” but we did know that at this point, and we knew that it would be coming out at least once or twice before we were done. The exact nature of the berserker curse was nailed down more slowly. Again, details shifted.
Fascinating! Thanks!
Who’s this Butterfly referred to in the commentary? That doesn’t ring any bells for me.
Guy who clocks Byron right here.
“You’re forgetting one thing” / “Make that three things. ON EACH HAND!” / “So, six things total.”