Annotated 36-2
The gist of the original last line was something like “Aw man, you turned him into a monster!”, building on “you taught him condescension.” Flo vetoed this as too obvious and forced, and she was probably right. I also pondered having a younger Brother Tom in the final panel, either skulking in the shadows or walking up in the spot currently occupied by the kobold skinner, moseying to the center of town like it ain’t no thing. I vetoed that one myself, for pretty much the same reason. We know what happened to these guys. No need to belabor it… any more than the next couple of pages will belabor it, at any rate.
I love what John did with the “It was THIS BIG!” fish story being told at bottom right.
Alt text is accurate. So that’s it for these two! I think the obvious love they bear each other and Byron goes some way toward explaining why Byron’s issues weren’t even worse after all he’s been through. But some of “all he’s been through” is coming up in those next two pages.
Did Byron lose his accent on account of losing his brothers and hometown? It’s not as thick, but he certainly sounds different.
I don’t notice and accent. Is it because he said “wee” for “tiny”?
It’s not spelled out as much (because he’s not using the same keywords) but I think it stands to reason that he would share the same accent as his brothers.
My read on it is that he lost these social circles at a fairly young age, and a lot of time has passed since then, so his accent would have shifted towards Gastonian
The influence of Byron’s player could also be a factor.
The brothers all have some kind of accent, indicated by the odd phrasing and word usage. I’m not sure if any existing American or British accent was meant to be indicated – some bits hint at Irish but then lose it. Overall, it doesn’t call to mind any accent that I’ve ever heard.
“ye” occurs in Irish and Scottish but can also be heard in some northern parts of England. There’s so many accents in that range (even within Ireland, there are people who sound very different from the stereotype accent), that I’m sure you could probably find someone speaking in a way that could be transcribed as seen here.
That said: I don’t think it needs to be an actual accent that exists. If a story tried to depict someone from a particular place and time, and mixed up their accent, that would matter. But Battleshire is fictional, set some whatever past time period fantasy stories are set, and was created by some programmers and HR. Bayen and Brayen are a product of Byron’s player. Whatever they thought at the time the Battleshirean accent was, that’s what it is — and they’re all Americans, as far as we know, so they probably wouldn’t have an intimate knowledge of particular local accents from the British Isles.
The “it’s created by a bunch of programmers and HR” excuse is not one I would ever want to use, or have used on our behalf. Sorta-creation story in Chapter 45 aside, Arkerra had to be as real as Sepia World for the series to work, in my view.
That said, you’re right that Battleshire is not any part of the UK and doesn’t need to be a linguistic match to any place on Earth. We used Irish as a reference point for Bayen and Brayen’s dialect, but weren’t super strict about it. Since the reader never hears any other Battleshireans speak, it’s not entirely clarified whether their dialect is shared by all or most Battleshireans. It’d make sense for Byron to pick some of it up, and lose it later, either way.
I’d have thought Byron imprinted his own (possibly incomplete or inconsistent) ideas of what old-timey backwater folk talk like onto the area that became “his”.
Sort of like the Demiplanes of Dread, small pockets generated by the personality of their prime inhabitants (or captive, more like)?
In my head canon, Arkerra is as real as Sepia, but a bit more malleable magickally speaking – but it sort of fights back all on its own, which combined with the subconscious resistance of the 5 to spell real trouble for HR. Or, actually, I’ve been assuming that’s the real canon most of the time, but I see others have different ideas from time to time, leaning more into the literal “Arkerra was created, not discovered”.
I got distracted by the fact that the Bayen’s first bit is rhyming. Had to read the rest of the text twice to make sure I’m not missing the fact they’re all speaking in verse (but they don’t).
One thing I’ve been curious about; is that chain they’re all wearing or is that just the patterning on their clothes?
I think it’s suppose to be some kind of chain.