Annotated 23-24
…And then Bert was trampled by the robot to the right in that last panel, the end.
So, following up from before: Rendar comes off as a little cold, right? Of course, he couldn’t be that uncomfortable with killing if he was rolling out innovations for the Gastonian military like a one-man DARPA. But also of course, there’s killing savages and then there’s killing fellow adventurers. The former wouldn’t have made him stand out too much in Fightopian/Gastonian culture, but the latter… there’s a moral difference between him and Sundar that we never really brought up again.
Not sure if his intervention would really have the desired effect anyway. It’d probably just make the others take off the kid gloves. Like a lot of cerebral types, Rendar tends to overestimate the rationality of others when he tries to predict their actions.
I felt like Rendar was kind of an underexplored character. He’s a major player behind the scenes throughout the entire story, but never really comes to the forefront.
I was getting the impression he was about to get killed in the story myself.
I think he might have been one of those things expanded upon by the bonus stories on their subscription, like Syr’Nj’s bag?
Yub-nub
I guess Bert is throwing up his crutch to shield himself from the ball? That took me a while to figure out, and I’m still not 100%. In terms of dramatic framing it looks more like he’s suddenly fighting it, rather than just not having gotten clear in time.
He was saving Fr’nj, because Bert is a good dude
I believe the “Run along… Run. Run…” in the previous page is Bert himself mentally pleading them to just leave in time because he didn’t really mean for any of them to lose their life, he was just making a stand. Like the other reply said, he’s a good boy. So now he’s saving her because she couldn’t GTFO in time.
Oh hey, it’s tank treads!
Remember my jerk comment from yesterday, that these machines made no sense? Well, now they do!
But now I’m confused why they were such a fast-moving threat; tank treads don’t exactly permit speedy movement or easy course correction, and bipeds are generally more maneuverable in both regards, especially if vertical movement is possible. The threat level has gone up, but it still reads as “less threatening than a weed whacker”, especially now that Bert just wrecked one with a crutch.
That said, covering tank treads with a bell shield isn’t stupid. Clearly more thought was put into these machines than I presumed.
I disagree with your assessment of treads, although the thematic convenience with which these things maneuver is a bit difficult to swallow.
T mentioned a few updates ago that these contraptions are gravity-powered; ergo, the treads are not providing the locomotion, but are driving the whirliness as gravity pulls the whole thing downhill.
I always thought this version of Rendar (i.e. “Kill one to chase them off.”) conflicted a bit with the later version of him we see (i.e. “I’ve got to stop that death machine I built!”).
“Taking off the kid gloves” when someone upps the stakes wouldn’t be irrational in a case like this where there’s not enough mutual trust to allow for a withdrawal.
Showing the new weapon to intimidate might manage to de-escalate, or if he’d done it before the fight broke out, but in the middle of an ongoing battle like this where your enemy can’t co-ordinate and may have lost track of which direction “away” is, any seasoned fighter is going to quickly recognize that the safest place for them is as close to the Fightopian ground troops as possible, and hopefully take some of them hostage to dissuade bombardment. There’s not enough communication possible right now to try anything else.