Annotated 40-15
Sometimes the only heroic option is to do what you can, even when it looks hopeless.
Not too much else to say about this one. Honestly, I’m still caught up in thinking about HR in the hypothetical 60-chapter Guilded Age Flo and I could never have done. This chapter could’ve ended with him captured. He could’ve fainted from Syr’Nj’s potion, woken up imprisoned by the sky elves’ strongest magicks, and thus been forced to interact from a position of weakness.
Apart from a brief scene showing him as a student, we’ve never seen him in such a spot before. He’s always been on top, backed by wealth, superior mystic force, or both. Would such limitations make him more sympathetic to the reader? More empathetic in fact? Maybe, but I don’t think it’d change the direction of his arc in the end. Most likely, he’d use the promise of his knowledge of a world beyond Arkerra to hoodwink a sky elf into loosening his bonds just a bit and then…alaka-bam.
If he was kept captive by our heroes in sky-elf-made cold-iron manacles, it’d be pretty much the same deal…though we might’ve surprised the reader there by having E-Merl resist his appeal, having fallen for Iwatani’s. In that case, the ultimate victim of his manipulation would likely be Frigg.
I think it might have been funnier if he offered one of the random Sky Elves/Adventurers an Epic Mount in exchange for letting him go.
I find Syr’Nj’s logic here a bit hard to follow because it’s not quite clear to me from the first panel whether the potion arrows are broken by HR’s fading force field, by Frigg’s “berzerker aura”, or by her mace.
Unless it’s the second one, increasing the distance, then trying another arrow (and another, and so forth) should give Syr’Nj enormously increased chances of landing a potion — which seems to be the only plausible way to end this thing (as far as anyone has any reason to believe at this point).
Given that her first thought is “impenetrable field,” of those options, you can cross off 1) the fading one and 2) the one that isn’t a field.
“Sympathetic HR”, to me, would have been a HR sincerely trying to rescue the Five, and not quite understanding that Arkerra is real.
I mean, it’s a matter of degree. He’s a monster. But if you’re asking your readers to spend a lot of time with a monster, you’ve usually got to leaven their disgust with other feelings here and there.