Annotated 33-12
Xan pretty well won over the readers here, and I hope this also finally buried the last of the “she’s just doing it for the moneyyy” sentiment about Shanna. I hope, likewise, that you can tolerate my griping about that interpretation, since it partially inspired this scene, and my/Shanna’s defensiveness probably gave it some extra juice. (She’s kinda beating Xan over the head with her moral superiority here, but that’s a vice I’m comfortable admitting she has.) It’s important to turn all your feelings to constructive purposes when composing fiction.
Mrs. Ackerton is the mother of the woman who plays, and in some senses has become, Frigg Akerfeldt.
ICYMI, Shanna asks for Xan’s phone instead of using her own because she’s pretty sure somebody’s after her (not necessarily a single hitman… could be a squad, or cops, or an Anonymous-like collective of hardcore users). She’s already using burners, but the more conservative she is with her own phones’ use, the fewer phones she has to go through. It’s not like she can use her old credit cards to buy new ones without possibly revealing her location… she’d have to pay cash, and carrying cash carries its own risks… dodging the grid is hard. Xan, at least, probably has a reliable method to cloak his own phone’s use, considering how nonchalantly he hands it over.
“Huh? Oh. No. I just remembered something funny. Go on.”
Man, did Best’s real life bandmates actually like him though? Obviously there’s not a canon answer, but I have to imagine he was way too Ziggy Stardust to be tolerable.
I’ve had colleagues I disliked, but if they vanished I’d be concerned.
I also think it’s a mistake to assume that an obnoxious character necessarily maps to an obnoxious _player_, rather than someone who knowingly created an obnoxious character for a game.
This. The ‘player characters’ are not one for one with their ‘real world’ counterparts which is even highlighted during the final battle. Best is also Wave who shares non of Best faults so each persona is similar but they all lived different lives.
We’ve seen Sepia-Best, and he had the same sort of egoism as his in-game equivalent before his disappearance. But his bandmates may be the same way, or it may be a public persona that he shelves when around them, or they may put up with it because, like in-game Best, he has the skills to back up the ego.
I didn’t realize until the commentary run that the authors were so bitter about Shanna’s reception. I wish the comments lent themselves better to long form discussion. I feel like we have the people for a good one, but not the medium.
I wouldn’t call myself bitter about anyone’s reception overall. Most people got where we were going with Shanna from the get-go, and that percentage was on a steady uptick throughout (except for one big flare of disapproval next chapter). The naysayers could be frustrating, yes, and their reactions influenced certain choices about how we presented her, but I’d argue that the knowledge we had to “sell” her made her story better, just as it did with Payet Best and Sepia World more generally.
My emotions about Guilded Age all exist on a backdrop of “Glad we did it and glad so much we did worked, and I love and respect Flo, even if I never want to have that kind of co-writer relationship again.” But contentment is only so interesting to read about, so these annotations do tend to highlight the challenges.