Annotated 3-19
Phil would increasingly defer to me when it came time to rhyme things, but he did this one, and I thought it was great. It’s a little annoying, maybe, but that’s kind of the point: like a pop song earworm that gets stuck in your head and distracts you from killing intruders. (I tend to end up improvising new lyrics for the songs I really can’t get rid of. “Russian roulette is not the same without a gun, it’s just pointing your finger at your head, it’s kind of dumb…”)
If you were having trouble getting your head around Combat-Effective Best, better brace yourself for Best the Competent Seducer. Erica plays it a bit subtle, but that’s a new expression for Frigg, there.
Since it’s been mentioned in the annotations a couple times, I never really got the idea that Best was in any way incompetent…just that he wasn’t as good as he thought (and it’s difficult NOT to be less of a badass than he thought he was) and kind of an intolerable prick that wore out whatever welcome his skills earned him…at least among other people who could hold their own in a fight.
If I understand the writers correctly, they were trying to go against the trope of the egocentric pric who then turns out to be all talk and we “good people” get to feel good about ourselves for it. It is somewhat common and a bit cheap. An egocentric pric who is actually rather accomplished is a lot harder to deal with and all the more infuriating.
One of Best’s best moments. I don’t think Frigg revisited that particular facial expression ever again.
Great pairing.
Son, you may THINK you got game, but she will snap you like a twig!
And no mention of the almost Princess Bride line? And this rhyme was pretty good, IMHO.
To me, Frigg looks like “Dude. I was gonna fuck ya anyway, you know.” ;)
Best being somewhat competent isn’t really the point. All of the main characters are competent in their own ways. Best is the only one who does so while being a gigantic douche. I mean, a really unbelievably gigantic douche. A competent douche is still a douche. I never really understood why any of the other characters put up with him, except for Frigg, who is kind of superficial, at least at this point in the story. Unlike Best, she gets less superficial later on. When I found out that Wav was actually Best, I had some hope that the experience in the other game might have made him somewhat less of a douche. But, nope. No real character development at all. And, I guess that’s the biggest reason I don’t like Best: the other characters at least make some attempt too overcome their flaws.
Best’s main problem as a character (and not, per se, as an obstacle to narrative development) is the “but thou must” that seems to be the party’s constant imperative to treat him as a valuable ally and an irreplaceable teammate (which both shockingly originates from Byron, who was the first to despise him, and makes Best more of a character development device for Byron than a real focal character, especially given his long absence from the narrative).
It doesn’t so much surprise me that the party, which is comprised of do-gooders on the whole, goes to all the trouble they went through for him, as it does that they continued to afford him enough trust to work directly alongside them, rather than using him as backup and ousting him from their immediate ensemble.