ALL animals are sentient. The question becomes one of sapience.

In this regard, the kobolds fit the bill of being a sentient race, but not a sapient one. (and a lot, A LOT of sci-fi and fiction conflates the two, leading to needless confusion over the term). Kobolds are capable of the emotion or sensational need of “hungry, need food. There food. Get food”, but don’t have the sapient ability to reason out sustainability or alternative tracks (farming, trade, etc). Orcs meanwhile are clearly shown to be capable of reason and intelligence (they’re just assumed to be non-sapient due to being non-verbal).

This is hair-splitting, but it’s a fair example of how these kinds of evidence-based arguments just don’t cut any ice with me here. Cavemen were real; kobolds are made up, and Guilded Age is clearly not bound by what races are like in other fantasy works. The only real evidence about Arkerran kobolds is what’s in our text, and literally the only things they do in Guilded Age are attack crops, fight heroes, and die. If a decently made spear is proof enough of a human-equivalent soul, then I’ll put a spear in my potted plant and say “Behold: a man.” You might view this position as ignoring anthropology, and that’s your right: I’d view it as a certain freedom of imagination that fantasy is poorer without.

I don’t believe I ever said that there were requirements for sentience that the kobolds clearly failed to meet. I’m pretty sure my position, in 2018 as now, was that either interpretation was possible, but the kobolds-are-sentient interpretation is one I can’t personally abide. Because, at the risk of being a broken record here…I don’t want our heroes to be mass-murderers! Not even accidentally! Not even as some kind of statement about the dehumanization of indigenous cultures that gets taken for granted until it isn’t, that’s exactly what the orcs are already for!

I don’t want characters I put this much of my heart into to be cast in that role! I don’t think that’s too much to ask, when the overall evidence is this inconclusive! Byron does not need MORE guilt!

And yes, obviously, if I’d known this was going to be any kind of issue, I would’ve asked Flo and/or Erica to redo this earliest of Byron scenes and swap the kobolds out for something less sapient-looking. Maybe a bunch of flying serpents, maybe some shambling horrors that a wizard created years ago. Maybe zombies… kinda funny to me to think of zombies as a nuisance to spray your crops for while rolling your eyes, instead of The End of All Civilization (we have berserkers for that). Of course, even then, it’s hard to prove a negative without a reliable omniscient narrator. Could the Corruptor Beast have been composing sonnets in its head all the time it fought our heroes? Did it want to love as well as to feed? As far as the text is concerned, who knows? But it doesn’t have the kind of appearance that prompts such speculation. I guess kobolds do, at least for some. Darn those loincloths and spears!

Even if I’d realized this would be an issue after the kobolds had been established and before the end of the series, I would’ve pushed for some way to address it in Chapter 40 (the kobolds’ last appearance). Maybe WAV could’ve played the kobolds some music and determined their lack of intelligent thought from their inability to recognize patterns. Or, if you insist, he could’ve found out the opposite, and blithe kobold-slayers like Frigg and Sundar would’ve had to confront the blood that was on their hands without their knowledge. As I’ve said, I wouldn’t like that (one of Sundar’s defining moments involves his defense of the orcs), but it would at least be better than thinking kobold sentience was an issue and still just ignoring it. “Figuring out what’s right is a never-ending process. You’re never done,” Syr’Nj could’ve said to comfort her fellows, as the sky elves relocated the remaining kobolds to someplace far from human lands.

But instead, Flo did not mention to me that she thought kobolds were sentient until after the last chapter was scripted and mostly published, so THANKS, BUDDY, THANKS HEAPS

This will, I think, be my only kobold-related post of 2022, except to pull people back to this thread. I’ve got other stuff to deal with. And ultimately, no matter how much I talk, “our” comic becomes “your” comic, in the end. It’s on your screen, you can read it as you see fit. I can’t control that experience, and I wouldn’t even want to. But if I could offer a bit of advice, I’d say: read it in the way you enjoy it most. Life’s too short not to take what pleasures we can make for ourselves. And if what you enjoy is to poke at one of the series’ most regrettable creative decisions…seriously, why didn’t we use dire locusts or some kind of floating mouths?…then hey, that’s your business.