Annotated 26-20
That’s it for Blair, who was probably my favorite one-chapter character. I’m of two minds about her expression in panel 1, which closely follows the script: “Despite her physical defeat, she looks confident, even contemptuous. One of the problems with being a trickster is the temptation to believe that no one can see through your bullshit. Blair has succumbed to this.”
Part of me feels that she should have seemed more believably helpless; after all, that’s how she looked to E-Merl just before she sniped him. Phil did point out, though, that this might have made Scipio’s action read more like cruelty than prudence. And it doesn’t seem too out of line for her to get a little overconfident after E-Merl turned out to be such an easy mark.
(It’s kind of like that story about the scorpion and the frog, only in this version the frog knows the scorpion’s nature too well to trust it even a little. And ironically, Scipio here is the frog, not the scorpion.)
A frog with a scorpion sting!
You can’t get more climatic than devolving your conversation into a battle of
NO U
In DND I once got into a smack talk battle of the bards. It took so long that “NO U” is kinda what it devolved into because everyone only has so many good zingers for any given hour, though the killing blow was a “your mamma” joke.
The way I see it, she was not smiling contemptuously because he thought that Scipio was a mark, but because she thought him truly shackled to “honour” or whatever, so even if he could see her manipulating him, he would not be able to force himself to harm her. Little did she know that he used to be an arena gladiator.
I dunno, he’s armoured up killing in an arcing downward strike, he’s still heavy in the scorpion brand. It’s more like if the Frog was actually always planning to drown the scorpion, but was like trust me bug creature, I have no hidden agendas behind getting you and your shiny scuttling self, alone, on a river, where if you do anything to me you’ll drown. And the scorpion just said “Nah”.
I’m saying Frogs have controlled the narrative too long people, it was self defense!
Only Frigg could vomit with such authority as to weaken (or beat, I don’t remember this bit) a poison that was injected rather than ingested.
I always think this is a combination of excellence in your field and ego, both. It’s a delicate balance. In social engineering, it requires you to be confident and ‘act like you belong’, just like deception like this, but on the other hand, it’s quite easy to buy into the deception you’ve been selling, because that just makes the act better… however, it also compromises your ability to ACT nonchalant.
Takes a scorpion to know a scorpion!
Also Blair was wrong: adventurers have no chivalry; they’ll do everything they can to make sure the villain of the day will not be recurring.
True, adventurers hate their villains getting away un-murdered.
The thing this page made evident to me, oddly enough, is that “you shame us all” can either be a statement of humility or a call for it, depending on whether it’s phrased in past or present tense, and whether the intonation is pejorative or deferential.
English is weird.