Annotated 49-30
FB: HR was usually a pretty hands-off CEO, but he’s starting to look like the kind of boss who kidnaps his best employees for a staff meeting right before they’re about to close an important deal.
That FB promotion makes clearer what some of you didn’t get at first. What saves Penk and everyone in Gastonia from the Tarozerker is that HR is gathering all his “raw material” back into himself. Had he waited, like, another two minutes, the Tarozerker he’d be reabsorbing would have devoured the entire capital city and everyone in it. Still, it’s a fitting end to this last lingering aspect of Taro Iwatani. He who lives by hunger dies by hunger.
(Perhaps it’s also fitting that a large percentage of you never even realized that this monster had any aspect of Taro in him. In the end, his posthumous claim to glory was just a footnote in HR’s similar but grander quest for power.)
And what does Penk live by? His pair of close-ups here show again what kind of being he is. All hope seems lost…God Himself has failed. But if this is to be the end, he will meet it as a troll, on his feet and staring it in the face.
Honestly, when this comic was first running, I didn’t even realize that the Tarozerker was even a separate entity from HR until probably right around this page.
I don’t think I was alone in this. Reading the old comments from this chapter’s original run, plenty of people referred to the Tarozerker as “HR.”
There are some “failures to communicate” that give writers a lot of grief, like when readers admire a character that a writer meant them to hate, or when a key aspect of the story just isn’t coming across.
This one…didn’t really bother me or Flo at all. The exact nature of the monster is a fun little detail for me, but it’s not really that important. And honestly, I kind of enjoy that Taro the narcissist fails to get credit for his “role” in this sequence.
Hah! Fair point.
Are there ones from this comic that did bother you?
I had to think a while about this one, because I try not to hold onto frustrations like that. I don’t seethe about the past, on the whole. But here are a few things that bugged me a little. In ascending order of how much they bugged me, they are:
1) The miscommunication of Syr’Nj’s crush on Best in the first few chapters. We scripted this, Erica drew it, we were all pleased with the results…and then, apparently, nobody got the idea. I didn’t learn until the annotations started up that the hints we thought were clear sailed right by everyone.
I mostly shrug this off, but if I had it all to do over again, I might’ve had us redo the bottom of this page to be a slow pan in on Syr’Nj staring at Best. And then we’d make her flushed cheeks visible in the closest close-up. To my mind, it makes the arc of Byr’Nj a bit better if Syr’Nj starts getting to know Byron’s virtues at the same time she’s actively mooning over someone else, rather than “They just clicked as partners right at the start and then she started falling for him, then she asked him out. Simple as that, and we never really saw either of them attracted to anyone else.” Of course, things did get complicated after that first date, but even so.
2) The insistence that HR was just trying to save the Five. We wanted you to be thinking this was a possibility at first, but some readers kept the faith wayyy longer than HR’s behavior justified it, to my mind. (I now understand why readers didn’t get the Syr’Nj-Best thing, but why they couldn’t see what a monster HR had become after Ferris is still a mystery to me.)
3) The impulse to say that in Syr’Nj and Bandit’s friend-breakup, one of those two had to be the bad guy. I more or less got into my views about that here. I feel like that arc is one of our finest because it acknowledges certain messy truths. In Chapter 50, you’ll see us spelling out those truths a little more plainly when it comes to Bandit.
Tectonicus went the same way as Harky did, both arguably a self-sacrifice, leaving Penk behind to carry the torch on his own.
I think the “power levels” of various characters/monsters are a bit hard to gauge.
So Frigg just smashed though “HR”‘s eye, more or less stopping him in his tracks, though of course not ending him. It should stand to reason, then, that the Champions, with the help of the non-Five peacekeepers and Ardaic (who not long ago was a match for Frigg) should be able to at least significantly slow down the Tarozerker. So, maybe Tectonicus lost because Purplezerkers have some sort of resistance to god-powers, since they’re not really from Arkerra and might follow different laws, but a lot of people were successfully mowing down individual Purplezerkers, and Ardaic has similar powers to Frigg, who is definitely more than a mild inconvenience to HR right now.
So … there were a lot of scenes in this chapter where I didn’t quite understand who was supposed to be definitely and obviously able to win a fight against whom.
It doesn’t help that the whole approach to gods so far has been that they’re annoying and easily dispatched. There’s the tinman from really early on…Priestlord Joebob or something who died before the story really started and was an armor puppet during the story. There’s the memegods which seem to mostly not be a thing and are “defeated” by being told to fuck off. There’s Graiya who was defeated by putting down the stick. And there’s Tectonicus who hasn’t done anything at all before appearing here and was pretty handily put down by the borg. While people in the story say that gods are a big deal, the actual actions of the gods are pretty underwhelming.
Heh … having read “Small Gods”, some of this makes a lot of sense, actually. Why would gods need followers if they could just do all the stuff they want themselves?
Priestlord Gigundus was not actually a god, as I understand, just a pretty powerful cleric. Frigg’s internal god has a follower number of 1, and we haven’t seen any followers of the meme gods. Tectonicus, on the other hand, has a lot of followers, but although he’s great at helping out with the occasional lava fountain and rock statue, the Troll army is probably better at conquering Gastonia than he would be.
what’s missing, I find, is some way for readers to understand at least roughly how these things work in GA. I can make up my own theories now, close to the end of the story, but they might still be proven wrong completely by some wrinkle in the story which I overlooked (wouldn’t be the first time). It would be great if there was some established way to tell what a god can or cannot do. Or, alternatively, if they played an overall much more passive role, and really only directly show up in dreams (Frigg’s encounter could easily have been a dream-like thing). So if Tectonicus had not shown up in person but helped by opening a huge rift, then creating a big ol’ volcano under the Tarozerker, and if that had not stopped him, then we’d also know that the Champions and associated friends are unlikely to stop the Tarozerker, without having to update our ideas about how gods work in Arkerra so often.
-glances at the annotations picture-
I wonder if Summon Bigger Fish was a thing at the time of the original.
Oh, absolutely. This episode was first released in January 2018. Summon Bigger Fish dates back to January 2011, way back in episode 37 of Darths and Droids.
(I just checked — Darths & Droids is still running. It’s currently on episode 2240. They’re right at the beginning of The Last Jedi, from the look of it)
My mistake. It goes all the way back to December 2007. The site got relaunched in 2011 and the dates all changed.
First I (:(
But then I ):(