Annotated Chapter 29 Cover
This cover feels kinda Brechtian to me, in that it’s not working too hard to make you like its alleged protagonists. When we’ve presented the Gastonian army before, we’ve quickly zeroed in on upbeat underdogs like Braggadocio, Bert, and Ashok, each of whom left military service almost as soon as we joined their stories.
But this two-dimensional composition shows the army more or less as the Champions will see it, the Champions whom we just spent a whole chapter getting to know, so the reader is probably as ready to boo the Gastonian army as they will be until the climax. Had we wanted you to whiplash over to the Gastonian soldiers’ perspective immediately, we could’ve shown the Rebels starting to pour over the horizon over some Gastonian soldier’s shoulder, or shown a Gastonian soldier’s pair of hands straightening their own uniform, maybe with a trembling pair of lips at the upper edge of the frame. War is hell for everyone in the middle of it, after all.
This chapter does not move as quickly as we planned for it to (reflected in that alt text, since the clashing between Champions and Peacemakers doesn’t really start until Chapter 30). Despite our desire to finish “Book 5” with a big bang, we ended up putting more weight on the quiet scenes here. And Phil’s tendency to wander more aggressively away from the outlines was making it harder for me to put in the necessary emotional energy to make them, multiple-choice or otherwise.
