Annotated 34-20
I’ve already discussed why I’m not a fan of like 98% of interrogation scenes in media, and Lectrus’s lamp, however imperfect a fact-finding method it’ll prove to be, at least makes me feel like we weren’t reinforcing any bad ideas in the discourse. Scipio only gets tough when he knows, absolutely knows, this is a murderer or accessory to murder. No “playing a hunch” here, at least.
Again we prove Gravedust’s thesis that just because Cultism is about destroying it all, that doesn’t mean every individual Cultist is completely committed to all aspects of that cause. We could’ve gotten a true radical here, but the business in panels 2 through 4 is much funnier.
This will be the last time we see Lectrus alive, although there will be several further echoes of his story. In Chapter 36, Scipio and E-Merl will realize that nobody ever thought to question the questioner; in Chapter 41, it will be revealed that he is no longer among the living; and in Chapter 50, his personal effects will reappear in another’s hands.
Yeah, I’m still in the ‘why are you running into a obvious trap?’ camp
Upon re-reading, it does look like Byron is walking right into the trap, spurred on by his need to personally stop the cultists, so I guess he is somewhat to blame for what happens later.
But at the same time, there really is a good point the he is the one person who is permanently on meds that counteract the madness. It could equally well be that he was the person wisest to send (given the imperfect information he has).
Hey, T! In your head, did you imagine a specific death for Lectrus, even if it wasn’t shown “on-screen”? Or do you not always work stuff like that out if it isn’t necessary for the story?
I was fairly hands-off for most of Lectrus’ arc, but I did propose that we should show what happened to him, and that conversation meant that Flo and I worked that part out. The short-short version is “Cultist double-cross,” but I’ll get into his fate more when E-Merl and Scipio discuss him.
Honestly, I never really got the role of Lectrus. Was there a need for him to be a cultist? How and why did he die? What was he trying to do?
Well, as I said above, I’d like to save some of that for Chapter 36, but here are some lightning-round answers:
It was not necessary for any one character to be a Cultist, but I think Flo definitely wanted one named character to be one, and Lectrus had gotten the least exposure so far. For obvious reasons, it didn’t feel right to make it one of the backers’ creations, but we could have gone with Colonnus or Rabbit.
As a seeker of knowledge above all else, Lectrus was willing to sacrifice morality and risk his life to learn the things that only Cultists know. His only role was to aid in the setup that led Byron further into the lion’s jaws, and the Cultists already in the village saw to him shortly after that work was completed.