AAaA Annunziata
After the first couple months (eight entries), Flo did most of these with no input from me until the last minute and sometimes not even that. That generally worked out fine: her meta-sensibility meant her brain was better at switching back and forth between the world of Guilded Age and the not-quite-real “reality” of Ask an Adventurer. But I wish we’d talked about this one, so that I could’ve at least tried to talk her out of it.
It’s not that I don’t see the realism in this scenario. Privileged crapstains escaping their just punishments has been a recurring theme in our history, and some of that history is very recent, and in some cases, the jury’s still out. A few loyalist cronies could certainly have engineered this.
But just because something is realistic doesn’t mean it’s the best option for our story. The sendoff we gave Annunziata in his last appearance was the more cathartic for being exceptional in Gastonian government. And yet there was already a major downside to it: it was the beginning of a progressive consolidation of power that would ultimately complete Gastonia’s transition to dictatorship. With that many shades of black in the picture already, you don’t need to also reverse what little justice actually got done. It’s just too much.
There was an endgame here. At this stage, Flo was thinking that our heroes would spend some time asea themselves, after Gastonia turned on them but before they found the winter elves. (In this version, the sky elves did not know where the winter elves were, so our heroes would have to go on a longer quest with fewer clues.) So she was setting Annunziata up as a future sparring partner for the ex-Peacemakers. That’s a little better than just rewriting an ending to go “ha ha fooled you,” but I’m still not into it. His spectacular flameout would be difficult to follow up, either by somehow making him even more wildly delusional or by turning him into a competent antagonist. You could maybe justify the latter by saying he’s back in the element where he was once productive, but… eh.
All that said, I do enjoy the cackling crescendo he builds to in the last panel. No matter what other choices you make, you gotta commit to the bit.
Well, he winds up getting eaten by Gralor.
Very possibly. But that was not in our plans at this time.
Just read this as why we won’t be seeing this character again.
Yeah – I suspect you are having much stronger a reaction to this update than the fanbase, T. Annunziata’s a douche but he’s not a Taro or a Brother Tom.
Whereas the fact that I do find him just about as repulsive as Taro, is why I would never have been satisfied had he actually disappeared permanently from the story with his “house arrest.” However cathartic it was meant to be, it was still (as T actually noted in the commentary on one of the strips around it) a vastly lighter punishment than–say, Syr’Nj’s counsin would have gotten had Syr’Nj not intervened, and that’s before the government of Gastonia gets hit by two massive upheavals that would make “Annunziata’s still under house arrest, nothing’s changed for him” an impossible sell.
That’s an interesting perspective in the annotation. I’m not sure on my first readthrough I had quite figured out that the AaA strips weren’t precisely canon, but this read through it seems really clear to me that they are only very loosely canon (or even not at all). But even that said, by the time we got to this Anunziata strip, I am pretty sure I had it figured out that this probably didn’t actually happen.
my thought was “oh, he’s gone off to become a pirate.” that’s… what a warship without a nation backing it up basically is. they’d have to raid constantly just to keep supplied. a fitting end for him, really… sailing off with grandiose plans, and a decade later, he’s the leader of a ragged bunch of remnants, scrounging for whatever they can find on the seas, and probably, yeah, eaten by Gralor in the end.
I mean, if you take this scene at face value, then yes, it is not a fitting end for such a douche, but it could very well be seen as a “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” moment in the making. Annunziata may have escaped with some of his wealth abord his fancy ship, and he may still has a crew of fervently loyal mooks, so yeah, things are not too bleak for him for now, but I bet a self-important egomaniac like him has never even heard of living on a budget, and he might still retain a few die-hard henchmen because there hasn’t been too long since he was a powerful figure, but eventually it will dawn upon those henchmen that Annunziata has no future. There are no riches or infuence to be gained by serving him. The first of Annunziata’s loyalists that says “screw this, I’m out” will surely lead the others.
Maybe this noncanonical ending for Admiral Annunziata is just a slower, sadder comeuppance that we don’t get to see
Again–we see him grappling with Gralor at the end of the comic. I’m pretty sure his commupence involves getting eaten. (And if this one strip isn’t canon, well, he had to get back to sea somehow, for the unambiguously-in-plot cameo showing him with Gralor to work.)
I read this strip as Annunziata re-interpreting his flight as some sort of victory, but really, he’s gone from house arrest in his spacious villa to house arrest on a much less spacious ship, with not much to win but a lot to lose (the ship for instance), as others have mentioned. It’s really just his own hubris keeping him afloat at this point.
But that’s not a part of reality which he’s willing to acknowledge.