Annotated 40-13
The last panel of the prior page: “Byron wanted the curse to exist.” This page: “Eric could’ve imagined Byron as a wealthy lord, but [Eric wanted the curse to exist]…” You see what I mean? Even if you take a lot of HR’s account at face value, he keeps conflating the players in his office and “their characters.” That was guaranteed to piss off Syr’Nj eventually (“Don’t feel too bad about your dead love, he was really always just a shell!”), even without the part where he was planning to murder her.
(Lord Byron?)
Original version of the script called for HR to likewise misname Frigg. I think Eric’s the only one of the gamers who ever gets a name? We could probably have named all five of them in this speech of HR’s, but I think that would’ve put too much emphasis on the tubers. Despite how we teased it here, we didn’t want you to get too attached to the idea of them as the “true” main characters.
I happened to be thinking about that the other day, that the tubefolk never get actual names (aside from Eric who I forgot). I agree with the idea that it would complicate things in a non-interesting way. If telling a different story that focused on those people and their sepia-world lives/family left behind, yeah, but here they’re more or less MacGuffins. The story at this point is playing with that, but making them “real characters” would be too far IMO.
Tubers. Heh. Now I’m picturing them as potatoes.
I’m imagining them as streamers. >_>
Just out of curiosity, did you come up with names for *all* five gamers?
We did at a couple of points. I honestly don’t remember them right now, but I might stumble across them when we do a scene with them.
“Do the next forty percent” meaning “kill Syr’nj and WAV, who HR bypasses thinking of as ‘Best’s alt’ by the simple expedient of not thinking of Best as real either.”
I don’t quite get “the next forty percent” — that sounds like he was implying that forty percent were gone already, but I’m pretty sure he knows who WAV is.
…and since he also knows what happened to Byron, he must be aware that his death did not cause his player to wake up or anything. Which means that, taking into account he also knows about Best/WAV … just what is he trying to achieve here? He must be aware that the Five effectively can’t be removed from the game.
If he had been to proper management school, he would know to leave the Five well enough alone because punishing people for something they couldn’t have known about will not help. You cut your losses and move ahead. He could simply enter the universe and use his god powers to do as he pleases. He’s still way more powerful than the Five, who in turn don’t consider themselves particularly powerful. So as long as he didn’t deliberately pick fights with them, wouldn’t that make for a much more pleasant time? Especially as he says a few times that he wants to make a “better” world than Sepia — with that type of agenda, he could probably even get the Five to work for him, as long as his vision doesn’t look worse than that of the Gastonian elite, they might even help him gain control of Gastonia.
I think he goes after the Five because he has too much ego to allow anyone else to have world-altering powers.
“The next forty percent” doesn’t necessarily mean that forty percent of the job is already done, just that *some* of it has been done (otherwise he would say “the *first* forty percent”). Assuming it’s not just an arbitrary number with no real significance, I’d guess that Byron* is the first 20%, and the next 40% is either Syr’Nj + Frigg, or Syr’Nj + Best/WAV.
(*Even if Eric hasn’t woken up, at least Byron isn’t running around in Arkerra mucking up HR’s plans, which seems to be HR’s main concern now.)
The Five have the power to impose their will on Arkerra–something HR won’t countenance anyone but himself being able to do. He’s talked about even the plots he tries to write into the game not actually working out when the Five are involved, on as basic a level as “HR writes ‘the wood elves welcome the Gastonian delegation,’ Syr’Nj’s backstory goes ‘nuh-uh my father would never!'”
He may well know that the five in the tubes are all already dead. He doesn’t care about Eric or anyone in sepia world; he just wants the Five removed, no longer able to oppose his will in Arkerra.
Speaking of Lord Byron, isn’t “tragic backstory” a pretty typical characteristic of so-called “Byronic” heroes?