Annotated 23-12
I’m willing to defend Colonnus the Congenial a little bit here. Yes, he’s a bit casual with the ablism and the shapism, but context matters: he’s inviting his friends and fellow founders to participate in an exciting new event, clearly treating them as valued equals.
Although he’s more ridiculous than his inspiration, Colonnus is loosely modeled after one of my old history teachers, a practice I had already followed with the central male protagonists in my first two series, Fans and Rip and Teri. His name was Jett Colonna, and he likewise had a surfer’s tan and an ability to treat people (like me) as equals when they (like me) really didn’t feel like equals. Sadly, he left us a while back: this pic is from his obituary, showing him where he was probably happiest.
It’s Braggadocio’s anti-avian sentiment that gets an “ummm…” from me. Fightopia may have cut ties with the mainland, but these guys aren’t that far off, culturally, from still being Gastonians, which makes the prospect of restoring them to Gastonian society more believable. There wasn’t much difference between how the English colonists and the newly independent Americans treated the natives, either. Funny coincidence there: Mr. Colonna’s the one who introduced me to the concept of ethnocentrism.
… Jett Colonna is an awesome name.
And…I have never entirely warmed to Bragga because of that Avian line. (I seem to remember bringing it up several times.)
And, as I did on the original posting of this, I note the…ah…irony of having Bert work the fields when it was his being given land that he then had to work that prompted Bragga to drag him there in the first place.
Also as I did in the original posting, I note the phrasing of ‘fighter governed’ rather than ‘adventurer governed’ is worrying, though I know that Fightopia’s not going to last long enough to reveal whether the issues that implies would have come to fruition.
I wholeheartedly agree on all points.
I will add that Mr Colonna sounded like he was a wonderful teacher as well. Obviously, some of his history lessons found fertile ground in the author.
I was wondering if I was the only one who was a little uncomfortable with Bragga’s cavalier attitude toward eating things that talk. I am glad to see I am not.
It adds irony to later events, too.
There is a bit of a difference between eating “something that talks” and eating a friend…
Since you mention Fans, what’s up with the website?
It suffered from a bad coding-relaated incident and I’ve been slow in restoring it with everything else going on. Hopefully answering this question will be sufficient motivation for me to get it up and running this weekend. I’ll have more news about that on Monday.
Like I said before regarding Syr’Ng’s assessment of Fightopia. It’s foolish to split the country in a time of war because Harky will see no difference. Their leadership isn’t anymore enlightened if Braggadocio is typical of their leadership.
None of this answers Byron’s question for Syr’nj, though: If professional fighters aren’t willing to demand better treatment when an exterior threat exist–that is, when they’re actually needed–then when? Iwatani, Miyamoto, and in general the rest of the Heads of Houses have as much empathy for Bert as Harky does. Do they just keep doing all the fighting and the dying for people who can barely be bothered to fake not thinking of them as a kind of anthropomorphic toilet paper?
Also, Syr’nj. Syn’ng would be pronounced “Searing” instead.
Let me guess: it takes four-and-twenty avians to make a pie, right?