Annotated 30-9
Not sure it’s entirely clear that Syr’Nj is doing the “stop, drop, and roll” in panel 3. Her quick thinking saves her life, there, but she’s still burned sufficiently that she’s done being a relevant factor in this fight.
Penk’s soliloquy in panels 5 and 6 is one of my bits. Along with “smaller than I imagined,” it shows he’s getting a crash course in the difference between reality and mythology. But he’s got more to learn before this battle’s over.
I probably expend more thought than necessary on questions like “do I include Auraugu and Frigg in the tags here, even though they’re out of frame, since they’re part of this general melee?” But if the camera’s completely forgotten about them to the point that they’re not even off-panel voices or light sources, then so should the tags, I think. They’ll be back next page.
Not much to say here, but this is an exciting sequence.
As a person who uses the tags to track character appearances, thank you for taking that stance.
This scene does suffer a little from bad-guy-explaineritis, though. Of course I’d rather not he kills Syr’Nj but this kind of monologue is the first thing any adventurer learns not to do, on day one of adventurer class.
So although I appreciate the content of his speech, it makes Penk look that much less competent, and his upcoming setback a lot more like his own stupid fault.
I think speech like these are necessary considering the medium. If this was a novel, it could be neately put in a paragraphe describing the thoughts running through Penk’s head. Here though, it would require a narrative speech box describing Penk’s thoughts in third person, which is really clunky.
Personally, I just put this into my suspension of disbelief because the speech is more adressed to us than to Syr’Nj.
This is a fair critique, but for me, Penk’s psychology justifies this little chat. He’s got one kill to his name already, but that was under orders and over almost before he had time to think about it. Now it looks like his second kill will be one of his people’s great enemies, arguably the greatest from where he’s standing. Part of this talk is necessarily psyching himself up to do it, and part is his philosophical side trying to suss out for himself what it all means. Those are luxuries a battlefield doesn’t often afford, but he’s too new to battlefields to realize that.
Yeah, fair point. He probably *is* mightily impressed by the opportunity before him, and some remark highlighting his situation (“in-game” and to the reader) is certainly in order.
… still (especially) Penk must have more than a little adrenaline going round his body right now, so … I don’t know. Maybe something with fewer words? With something to do while he says it? I know it’s a little unfair for me to criticize your writing, years after the fact, without any writing credit to my own name, and not knowing how many issues you solved/avoided by choosing this version over whatever I would have done… just, it’s a little annoying that Penk fails in such a clichéd way.
I feel like I should bow out of the discussion after this reply… you’re certainly welcome to evaluate it differently than I would, and you don’t need any writing credits or university degrees to do that, as long as you straight-up make sense.
The failing-because-of-monologuing thing is a pet peeve of mine as well, and one I tried to limit overall. It wasn’t really even my intent here, though I can certainly see how it ends up reading that way. If it helps, you can imagine the scene playing out with just one word from Penk, “Impressive,” and then him gearing up to do his swing without saying anything else. Had we cut the dialogue for whatever reason, that’s probably how it would’ve gone, meaning only that Frigg’s interruption on the next page would’ve come a little faster.
I confess, I really really wanted to get this observation of how the trolls saw Syr’Nj into the text, and there was clearly no other way to get it in. It makes all kinds of logical sense to me that she’d be a half-mythical source of terror to them as Harky is one of inspiration, but I wouldn’t expect readers to be thinking about that until Penk spelled it out. So in that sense, I guess it is “a speech for the readers,” but one I considered to be for Penk as well as I stated above. Aaand now I’m starting to talk in circles, so that’s it on this one from me!
he’s acting like a n00b because he is a n00b. just because he’s all twinked out in max level pvp gear doesn’t mean he’s got the skillz and reactions to justify it… yet. he’s smart enough to learn, but not smart enough to know before having the actual experience.