Annotated 6-2
“Nohk-roh”… “Roanoke?” Rut-roh.
Okay, lesson learned. After what I considered to be like six different tiny hints that Syr’Nj was crushing on Best, all it took was this one (admittedly much more obvious) penultimate panel here to pull everyone on board the Syr’Nj-likes-Byron train. We’d set things up pretty well with their earlier interactions and the respect he gave her in them, but this is a more profound expression of respect, and she’s in a headspace to respond to it. This, literally one page after he makes her grimace with “you don’t actually count those.”
This scene was assigned to Phil, but I ended up doing a lot of it. In fact, I got pretty handsy with this chapter in general, reworking a lot of its dialogue (more often, it’d be the other way around). He did rein me in a little bit here, though: I tried to get Byron a little moment of ax-trickery to warn the others to be quiet. Phil rightly pointed out that this page was already as packed as it could reasonably get.
Gravedust’s dry sense of humor always cracks me up.
A dry sense of humor is generally preferable to slobbering everywhere…
I love seeing how people work. Thank you for taking the time to break down each page of this amazing story, your thoughts, discussions, and challenges. It turns this whole process into something real and collaborative.
Didn’t Fans have a “Whatever Whacks” school of martial arts?
Whatever-Works!
I have so much love for the dialog in panel two…
Oh I’m a berserker and that’s okay. I sleep all night and I whack all day!
I read the reaction on this page as more uncomfortable/humble than romantic/blushy.
Syr’Ng / Byron just makes more sense. The couple of times I noticed she was staring at Best, I assumed she was thinking: “Eew.” Maybe that’s just because I was projecting my own thoughts about him onto her, but still. Eew.
Wait a second…. when I last saw Frigg, about 3 days ago, she was hanging on a wall spitting on the Reverend Mother….
This is a flash-forward.
Makes sense that she’d forgive him for the “you don’t actually count those” thing almost immediately, since that came across as more genuine confusion out of cultural illiteracy, not deliberate bigotry. Syr’Nj must know how to tell the difference by now.
And I love how we can see the group dynamics here — Byron and Frigg being bash bros, Bandit maybe trying a little too hard to back up Frigg, Gravedust’s dry snark, Byron’s more intellectual respect for Syr’nj… it’s a thing of beauty.