Annotated 8-12
Shit gets real. Remember what I said earlier about John knowing how to strike the right tone?
Not like anything else would be appropriate, but note that Frigg immediately and completely loses her jaunty sense of humor when she sees Gravedust. Belligerence comes to her as easily as breathing, but this is different. There’s real rage in her. She made a promise to watch her people’s backs. She promised.
On a lighter note, MAN Byron has a lot of confidence in his ability not to hurt things with his axes if he’s using one like a baton to keep Syr’Nj back there.
I’m pretty sure that last balloon of Frigg’s only LOOKS hand-lettered, from what I know of Phil’s handwriting.
Didn’t really think about it at the time but it looks like Gravedust was poisoned?
Frigg may have called him Graydong but she’d still tank for him.
Doesn’t seem like Gravedust spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder…. Oh man. Well you know what they say, never fight a land war in Gastonia, and never go against a Harky when death is on the line.
…unless you’re Penk. If you’re Penk, you can totally do it.
You still shouldn’t go against a land shark when breakfast is on the line, though.
They can detect a single pork rind from a range of 5 square kilometers.
Worse: They can tell a pre-approved, first-time homebuyer with a poor grasp of household systems by the shape of their shadow.
So, let’s break this down. The savage races have named themselves the Resistance. To prove they are not savage, they’ve accepted diplomatic envoys, poisoned one, and now are going to publicly murder the rest.
Brilliant! Waste a bunch of time showing off that you are not monsters to people you plan to kill anyway!
T briefly covers this in the annotation for the previous page. By this point, Harky had apparently already received several diplomatic envoys from Gastonia. All of whom made promises. And all of which turned out to be lies. So by this point the World’s Rebellion was no longer interested in peacefully resolving things. It was time to make a statement. And that statement was war.
He also addressed the “why Gondolessa bothers to make the case” thing in the annotation before that one: it’s part of Gondolessa’s personality to care about making his case even when he knows the person he’s making it to is about to die, and the fact that he did engage with Syr’nj intellectually is the only reason she was distracted enough to walk into the death pit at all.
So by this time in the story, had you guys decided that Harky was not going to be HR’s avatar?
I’d say it was probably the next chapter that really started to bury that idea, once we were getting to know HR and how he approached the game. Tyrants like HR can certainly pose as populists when it suits them.