Annotated 26-14
“But I talked with her for hours first. Just as I’m talking with you, now, for what’s already starting to FEEL LIKE hours. There’s a limit to my tolerance for even respectful dissent, is what I’m getting at here.”
Blair wouldn’t say it like that, or even think it like that at this point. But the cracks in the remaining sisters’ bonds with each other are really getting more and more evident.
Phil and I fenced more about E-Merl’s abilities: Does he need to rub his hands together, or can he just rub the ring with a few fingers to get a LITTLE fire going? Phil thought he’d established the answer was the former, but the paper trail said otherwise, and backed by narrative convenience, I won this one.
E-Merl’s already got an escape plan – he bounces back pretty quick.
Man, as a Rachel fan, this chapter is hard to read, and I kind of don’t get it. Okay, Rachel was (understandably) conflicted about fighting her former friends in this chapter, but Frigg and Scipio were right to take her to task for that. Fair enough. But both of them seem to imply that she’s been letting them down lately in battles prior to this one, and that’s the part to me that felt like it came out of left field to me. I can’t recall any particular battles in which that’s the case, unless they’re talking about Rachel (again, understandably) failing to subdue Tamara back in Fightopia, which at the time no one even seemed to give a shit when she got her ass kicked. So this sudden excoriation took me by surprise on my first read-through. It feels a bit like telling, not showing.
And even Hestia’s getting in on the pile-on, claiming Rachel’s “power has been dimming lately,” when she hasn’t even seen Rachel in years!
There’s some implied-between-the-lines stuff going on there, for sure, but it’d be less believable for me if her teammates didn’t know there was something off. We saw them training together a fair bit in chapters 12-16, and they wouldn’t stop doing that just because our focus moved elsewhere, any more than an athlete stops exercising and starts shoveling in Doritos once the training montage ends. (And it wasn’t that nobody cared Rachel got her ass kicked in the previous fight; it was more that everybody else was taking heavy fire and Rachel’s battle broke off from the rest of the group’s. Even Frigg of all people asked if she was all right, before launching into her trolling.)
Hestia’s claim has less to do with the time she spent with Rachel and more to do with the ways in which she and the other sisters can perceive each other’s power. To varying extents, they have a sixth sense for that power; they know when it’s flowing, when it’s failing to flow, and what that might be linked to. The climax of this story will feature another example or two of that perception.
Thanks again for replying. Training, hmm. I thought they were implying that she had been letting them down in previous battles, but I guess I misread that. Mostly I’m relieved now that I didn’t miss something obvious. Thinking about it now, I think what got me worked up about this (besides my affection for Rachel) was the thought that I was missing something, which made me feel dumb. Not that that’s anyone else’s problem but mine.
She’s also the healer here, and to put it in Frigg terms, she can’t get it up. In the scenes we’ve been privy to we know she’s been experiencing inner conflict, and the past (two minimum, but I think it’s actually three) fights she’s been in, she’s been felled, or under preformed. This is a lady who can KA-SMITE with her fists, she’s a dps Frigg, and there’s no way her team hasn’t noticed her flagging, both “on-screen” and out of the narrative focus (like I alluded to in another comment, the mom, dad, and uncle of the group have all been too busy to deal with this, so now its the older sister and brother who have to step in, and everyone knows that kind of sucks.)
Rachel’s stuck in a “Treat everyone Equally vs Fairly” problem, she believes in love for all, but doesn’t understand (because she’s basically figuring this out for herself, and it’s hard to start a religious denomination all on your own) that while all people need and deserve love, they don’t all need the same kind of love, and at different times some are granted more or less. But I mean one of the people she’s most neglecting here is herself, she’s obviously quite unhappy with how things are right now, but isn’t willing to love herself enough to give her what she needs (which is ultimately a bit of a break responsibility wise, she’s only one woman). This ironically makes her selfish, she’s so preoccupied with her own issues, she cannot give those around her the love (in the form of incredible ass kickings…and also aid in battle and healing and stuff) they deserve.
If you could name these three fights she’s underperformed in, that would help, cuz like I said, I can’t think of them, unless you’re talking about her two bouts with Tamara here, whom we have no reason not to believe would be her equal.
In neither bout was Tamara her equal; rather, Tamara crushed her.
In this last fight, Rachel did not manage to get her glowy fist thing going, when Hestia was ablaze, Frigg’s hammer was doing its thing, and she looked pretty weak against Tamara.
But what’s more, she behaves differently, and on this page she actually says it loud: “loving all others equally is hard” — because that’s the task she set herself, and that’s the one she’s failing at. That’s what made her pull punches against her former sisters, doubt herself (a lot!) lately, and her comrades are right to point that out. Scipio simply states it, in hopes of getting her to either explain or put an end to it, but Frigg is of course a little less constructive and just throws it at her face because that’s how Frigg talks about things.
This whole journey was Rachel’s naive attempt to reconcile with the live and people she remembers, and the beginnings of the fear that she can’t get that, mixed with the fallout of her equally naive approach to “loving all equally” (i.e. rejecting Merl, and the fallout from it) mean that she’s busy with herself right now and a lot less available to her friends. In matters of life or death, that _is_ something your fellows have every right to remark upon.
The good news is that she’s about to outgrow both of the issues she’s struggling with. And when we meet her player character later, my impression is that a similar development must have happened in Sepia world, too. Possibly around the same time?
So Blair spent hours talking with Rosita before poisoning her. I can imagine how that went:
Rosita: “You are beating up people for your amusement.”
Blair: “We are at war with the Heads of Houses.”
Rosita: “You are beating up people for your amusement.”
Blair: “We are at war with the Heads of Houses.”
[Repeat umpteen thousand times.]
Rosita: “You are beating up people for your amusement.”
Blair: “We are at war with the Heads of Houses.”
Rosita: “You are beating up people for your amusement.”
Blair: “WE ARE AT WAR WITH THE HEADS OF HOUSES!”
Rosita: “You are beating up peo–”
Blair: “SCREW THIS! DROP DEAD!”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bigger disconnect between what is shown and what is told. From what we have seen, these sisters are petty thugs who terrorize the local population because they obviously enjoy it (and probably also because it lets them take whatever food and other things they need without anyone daring to oppose them). This doesn’t match what they tell themselves about themselves at all. They would have to be pretty incompetent to think they could seriously oppose the Heads of Houses (even the Fightopians were smart enough to get the support of the people for their cause), and the part about fighting “monsters like Scarlett” just seems completely delusional. (WHAT monsters like Scarlett? Also, why would the new recruits, who presumably never met Scarlett, care about that?)
Well, they were religious zealots who had their faith completely shattered when their icon was revealed to be a lie, then restored when the iconoclast who shattered it in the first place revealed another path, and then were abandoned and left to figure it out on their own. Magical thinking, and needing to place your faith in something completely outside yourself, with no guidance, plus trauma, makes for some pretty distorted world views.
There’s also probably a bit of “If it were wrong someone would have stopped us.” like someone stopped their predecessors. But it’s pretty obvious that even had Rachel and co not shown up, pretty soon this situation would have imploded. They’re already killing off sisters not falling for the party line, ending every conflict in a ideological ouroboros, and basically skating by on charisma and their cool new powers. It sounds like Tamara would be next on the chopping block, and then eventually Hestia and Blair would come into conflict. Even odds one would kill the other, either with Hestia wiping Blair out in an all out assault, or Blair taking Hestia out with poison. Or maybe you get a schism. Then you’re left with a Scarlett situation, a single powerful individual, who’s passed the point of reason, and is leading a bunch of young women further into madness.
Basically without guidance we tend to default to our training. Hestia and the girls were trained by a crazy lady, and they never looked elsewhere to see how else they could be.
I’m pretty sure the meta point is that they are “monsters like Scarlett”, or at least are well on their way to becoming so.