Annotated 32-10
We like to write our characters sassy, but a lot of them don’t fit that mold on a regular basis. There are only a few that are completely incapable, but with folks like Fr’Nj, you can only do sass in special, limited circumstances.
Fr’Nj’s concern for her sister and genuine irritation as Syr’Nj ignored two-thirds of her advice opened the door to a few sassy remarks (doctors, it bears repeating, make the worst patients). But it turns out that sass was a clue to something else going on with her.
Her issue has no easy answer. If she hadn’t fought, her sister would be dead, and there’s no way to predict whether another situation like that might emerge. But just becoming another Peacemaker, fighting as they fight, means turning her back on her life’s dream, a fair chunk of her culture, and maybe even the connection with nature that makes her strategically valuable in the first place.
Thinking about Guilded Age now makes me sad.
I used to be a huge fan of this comic. I wasn´t around for the beginning, I propably came in around when chapter 15 or so was updating. I saw this comic grow and change and I have my own feelings about it. What i want to know is at what point did you decide to change the focus into the real world story? was that always intended? I gradually lost intrest after it was introduced and I completely dropped the comic once it reached the final battle. I only read the last chapter a year later.
I know this comment section propably isn´t the best place to write about this, but I don´t know where else to put this. discourse about this comic seems to be confined to this site as far as I can tell, and I don´t think I´ve ever met anyone online outside of this site that has read or even knows about this comic.
I am not writing any of this out of malice or to be mean spirited. after all, this piece of work had a huge impact on me as a person for several of my formative years. I started and graduated a school, had two realtionships and a death of a close relative during this time. Whenever I think about that period in my life, this comic comes to mind, and it always feels so unreal.
So, I guess what I´m trying to say with this essay here is thank you for giving me something that would go on to have such a profound impact on my life, and also for showing me what it was like to lose that same thing. When I think about Guilded Age, I get sad. but it´s the sweet, nostalgic a special kind of sad. the kind that makes you cry but still glad it´s there
First things first: it’s always very gratifying to know something you helped create could be a rock for someone through so many big transitions. So I thank you for that, and I’m sincerely sorry our ending disappointed you. I certainly know what it’s like to follow a series faithfully for a while and feel like it ended up leaving you, rather than the other way around.
With respect, I would say that in Flo’s and my mind, the Sepia-World scenes were never “the focus,” nor did we think of Sepia World as “the real world,” although most of the people who live in Sepia World obviously do. It was a key plot thread that needed resolving by the finale, but we had a lot of those. We never, for instance, spent consecutive chapters more in Sepia World than in Arkerra, whereas we did do consecutive chapters with no Sepia sequences at all. Which is not to say I don’t get what you’re saying, just to say that we always thought of the story as “two (or three) worlds entangled,” not “the real world and some fever-dream fantasy stuff that doesn’t really matter.”
To be clearer about our intentions, HR was always going to be the final boss, from the very earliest outlines. Flo and I were clear on that before we’d even figured out our main characters. We did expand our plans for Sepia World significantly as Guilded Age ballooned from a planned 576 to ultimately 1600-odd pages, but we expanded our plans for Arkerra even more. I’d say that most of what we added ended up bringing the worlds into a sort of thematic convergence, with Arkerra getting a little more complicated and real-world-like and Sepia World starting to feel a bit more like a campaign.