Bandit Axemas Anno 5
I’m not sure Phil and I ever came to a full agreement about the nature of Bandit’s kleptomania, but hopefully that makes it feel more organic, like a mystery of one’s own psyche that’s not fully knowable. One thing is inarguable: it was a compulsion she could not resist when it first surfaced, because even at this age, she understood her culture well enough to know the consequences.
I mentioned yesterday I was living with my goddaughter at the time. Her mother was an old college friend of mine who was going through a rough time, not least because of undiagnosed mono and other health issues, as we discovered later. And I was having trouble paying the rent while on my own, so we thought we’d help each other out. The platonic, non-traditional household had seemed like a good idea for a few months, but by December, we were starting to get on each other’s nerves, me on hers more than her on mine.
So now I had two important people in my life around whom I was often walking on eggshells. That might have inspired some of the social anxiety and ostracization that riddles this tale. More on that later.
I remember in the original comments section people were talking about how this could be “explained” as the Arkerra game being released and a player starting to “control” Bandit, the idea being that the player is the one compelling her to steal all these items (since stealing is just something you do in a lot of RPGs) and it manifests as an impulse that Bandit can’t explain or understand.
I’m guessing that was Phil’s take, and you were less interested in that?
And by “I remember” I mean I saw it when I was binging the archives, haha.
Good thinking, but no… Phil just seemed to want to elevate Bandit a bit more than I did. I certainly liked her, but I liked her because I saw her as flawed, sometimes a victim of her compulsions, sometimes defensive, sometimes a little too “cutesy.” Phil was more inclined to emphasize her external issues: the prejudice she got from other gnomes and from non-gnomes, the idea that she could be 99.9% perfect and it still would be somehow not good enough. Neither of us completely disagreed with the other’s approach, and sometimes we’d write for each other’s sensibility (I wrote most of this tale of Bandit becoming a pariah; Phil wrote her arguably least likable moment in Chapter 36), but there was definitely push and pull between our takes through most of her history.
I think those two approaches complement each other pretty well, but I can definitely see how they could push the two of you in different directions.
John, I think that last panel was really well done. I’m betting it took some time to draw all those widgets.
Aye, it must have. But since you can easily tell what something is or might be it looks to have been worth it.
Thank you! It did! But I must confess that most of those widgets are based on a photo of a real scrap pile I found with Google Images. ;-D Some things just can’t be faked.