Annotated 35-38
As before, Sundar may look like a goofball, but he is saying the things that someone really needed to say, even if only to be wrong.
At the start of this chapter, I mentioned that Prill saw Penk as “real-life Batman,” but as I said earlier, we were more directly inspired by Captain America. And like Cap, Penk represents the best of what his country is supposed to be, hoping to use his authority to influence what it actually is.
Obviously Penk was never going to repay the Peacemakers’ aid with treachery. But I think that before seeing what they’d lost, he might not have offered the hospitality of his settlement to them. “Go in peace” is different from “Stay as you need to recover, then go in peace.” The latter means that he will have to order all his surviving people not to harm these enemy combatants, and I’m sure Fleck and Gravels will have opinions about that choice, to say nothing of the difficulties of continuing to restrain Hammerhead. It is a more meaningful gesture, and a firmer step on the path to what he will become.
One last note about this story, which I couldn’t figure out where else to put. We briefly considered having Rachel’s power serve as a kind of antidote to the Corruptor Beast’s, allowing her to reverse the otherwise irreversible process of derezzing, since she understands better than anyone that her power is pure life and thus the opposite of unlife. This would’ve maybe added some thematic resonance and made the climax more surprising, but it would’ve made it very hard to prove to you that Rachel was absolutely 100% D-E-A-D dead without getting so graphic as to feel sadistic. And she would have died, in any case. We’d decided this fate for her at least a year before. Sometimes, there are things you have to do for the good of the series, even if they hurt.
Got to love the “That is the Gastonian way”, when you just looked at the guy on your side who charged in to your enemy-of-an-enemy while fighting the arguably bigger treath and who still would instantly bounce on them.
So… Hammerhead is Gastonian?
Not to mention that even Penk no doubt recognizes the simple strategic value of attacking spent enemy on your own territory. In the eyes of his people he probably would not even lose face for that (Magda being exception).
Heck, you could even consider this disrespect towards our adventures (added to the Gastonian line) that he doesn’t need these advantages to beat them. He doesn’t need to take offered chances like this.
‘Cose his mind is not yet made different in regards his goals. He still plans to beat them later. But naa, he doesn’t need to do it now. Get better, get your strength back. It won’t do you any good anyway. :D
But maybe there was some ember already burning a different colour in his gut already… Those pesky, pesky gut feelings…
»We’d decided this fate for her at least a year before. Sometimes, there are things you have to do for the good of the series, even if they hurt.«
And hurt it did …
May I ask what made you decide to go this way? Generally, allowing one of the protagonists to die certainly helps to raise the stakes (and for me, that move was very successful), but why did you decide on Rachel?
I think tomorrow’s write-up will cover a lot of this. Basically, a lot of it boiled down to character evolution… which characters had the most evolving still to do, and which characters’ loss would push other characters to evolve in ways they might not have, otherwise.
That second consideration is sometimes criticized as fridging, and sometimes rightly so. But dealing with the loss of others is ultimately a part of life. In Rachel’s case, I think she had an arc of her own over and above her effect on others, but both that arc and that effect had to be considerations.
»So… Hammerhead is Gastonian?«
Noo, Hammerhead is Hammerhead. Once someone’s been declared the enemy, they stay the enemy. You don’t negotiate or cooperate with the enemy, just like you don’t negotiate with your food. Enemies are made, then destroyed. Very straightforward, no second thoughts.
The Gastonian way is the other way round: No amount of niceties can guarantee that you won’t be declared enemy tomorrow if that happens to be the more profitable choice. Which also means that enemies can become allies very quickly if and when the right people have a political advantage to gain from it.
To Hammerhead, Penk is kinda acting like a Gastonian here.
I’d say it’s more that certain peoples have been declared food and not-food, and you do not tell a predator that an enemy is not-food.
There are many insanities that end up with the same outcomes.
Three are evidenced or referenced here:
All-consuming nihilism : The beast
Conniving, back-stabbing opportunism : Gastonia
Single-minded unrelenting grudge-holding : Hammerhead
I still have mixed feelings about Rachel. Obviously the story had to go this way but wow, it just had to be the only really dark skinned sympathetic character, whose player then turns out to be white (though given her other marginalizations that bothered me less than it otherwise would.) Meanwhile a lotta main villains are asian.
I love so much about this comic and… appreciate… the racial-diversity attempt, but it needed work.
This is something I did bite my fingers about a few times. I can at least say it was sort of accidental: we had no idea of the ultimate destiny of Rachel or the Iwatanis (or Miyamoto) when we designed them. (Admittedly, we figured out pretty fast that Taro would be bad news.)
FWIW, we designed Gravedust as Middle Eastern, and of course there’s the entire race of wood elves, but I’m well aware that any nonhumans that aren’t specifically Asian- or Black-skinned tend to register as “white with a filter” in most readers’ consciousness.
If I had it to do over again, knowing what I know now, I probably would’ve lobbied to make Scipio darker. E-Merl’s status as perpetual screwup, the way Byron and Frigg are defined early on by animal impulses, and Payet Best’s general assholery might’ve led to problems if we’d made any of them “the dark-skinned one” of the early or secondary groups. Not that you have to stop at one, of course.
That shot of Gravedust and Frigg though… it’s the little details that really make this stand out.