Annotated 23-19
I’m trying not to dwell on this, but here again, a character seems to be stomping on my outlined intent for the chapter.
We’ve seen Braggadocio and Byron resolve other differences in a cheery punch-’em-up with little risk of serious injury. Some of these fighters now seem to approach this battle the same way: Colonnus is more gleeful than anything, Byron and Sundar are debating while fighting… there’s still a lot of energy here, but they don’t seem to be going after each other the way they would fight the World’s Rebellion. “Gently,” as Syr’Nj said.
In an early draft, Rendar was testing his weapons alongside the others, hitting Byron with a primitive taser. But Phil wanted stakes, so here he’s got blueprints that say “LETHAL WITHIN TWO-ARMWIDTHS RADIUS,” giving the lie to his brother’s hopes for a utopia with no adventurer’s blood spilled. I mean, I guess you could assume he’ll try to scare people off and keep them outside that radius, but… he won’t.
I’m aware there shouldn’t be an endquote in that first panel 2 caption, but editing the lettering isn’t really feasible at this point. Y’ALL GETTIN’ OUR SHIT THE WAY IT WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED, YO.
Shooting arrows at each other is not exactly a friendly fist fight, the Peace Keepers may be pulling punches I always read this page as Fightopia waiting for a fight with their former bosses. They call themselves fighters for a reason after all.
It would never have occurred to me that panel 2 was ever meant to be anything but an ironic highlighting of how hypocritical Sundar was actually being.