The title’s a little weird here, I admit, because “war” probably refers best to this prologue and “bonds” to the bonds of friendship that will be forged or firmed up in the pages that follow this one, with “war” somewhat more loosely describing the fight against the nunnery. It has nothing at all to do with gaming and no extra meanings beyond “here’s this phrase which is usually interpreted one way, but today we’re interpreting it another way.” It’s not the worst option I could imagine, but eh.

With this page, we’ve officially seen the last of the flash-forwards. Under the heavy influence of TV’s Lost at the point of its greatest critical and commercial success, we put these in the early chapters to counterbalance their relatively quiet character development with scenes of the team rocking hard as a team. As the “main stories” got more action-packed and drew the team closer together, the flash-forwards got progressively quieter, and with this chapter we’ve completed the reversal. If you’re upset about the Peacemakers having to let this injustice stand, rest assured they’ll be spending the rest of this chapter “kicking ass en masse” to make up for it.

That said, I know these time-jumps confused the audience a lot, and if we had it all to do over again it’s possible we wouldn’t have done them like this. At least the last three chapter-opening scenes are necessary to GA‘s larger plot, but we could’ve structured them differently or at least thrown up some “Later…” and “Earlier…” captions.