Annotated 36-32
So all these demons with no wounds to enter, you think they’re just gonna give up? Heck no! If there’s no front door into the body, they’ll just make one! I guess nobody’s going to be obligingly laughing like Brother Tom, so the mouth’s no good. And maybe they’re too squeamish to try anal.
Oh, geez, oh, geez. RIP Astoria. I mean, your body won’t be resting in a minute or two, but go on to a better existence, please.
Colonnus’ moxie in trying to wrestle his berserker demon reminds me of Auraugu. Which just makes me glad Auraugu isn’t here, because… well, you’ll see, I’m afraid.
I’m not entirely sure why Byron is still on his feet right now. Later events will make it plain that his body isn’t emptied of its original berserker spirit, so maybe that’s what’s keeping him going. If so, it must be at low ebb, since Byron is more staggery than swingy. The berserker does eventually yield control of the body when unstimulated or sedated… it’s just that sometimes, there isn’t a living spirit to yield to.
The last frame is obviously unfair of Bandit. But she’s been pushed and pushed and pushed. She’s pushed and pushed and pushed herself. And as reward for that, here’s her worst goddamn nightmare. Allies dying left and right, an entire village destroyed, and all of it… her fault? For her decisions, for presuming she could ever be more than a thief? No, no no, it can’t be…
And the rage and terror she’s been packing down since forever bursts forth like a swarm of demons. The alt text jokes, but this is her own berserk moment. Even heroes have breaking points.
This, unfortunately, is why Bandit is in the wrong. Not that she’s alone on that score, there’s plenty of responsibility to spread around here. But she definitely deserves a share, and this moment is why. It doesn’t matter that this is a nigh-involuntary PTSD response. The fact that she can just scream at Byron that he’s at fault for something he objectively isn’t at fault for is just beyond unfair. He’s a victim, not a victimizer.
So her friend died, and she found herself continuing to blame him for her own mistakes. Even as the corpse ran cold she screamed onto him all of the promises she had failed to keep, and everything she had ever gotten wrong. For his part, he listened solemnly. He had no longer in him the strength to argue back.
Something I’ve noticed about framing things as “wrong” – it’s easy to blur the distinction, or make the association, between factual incorrectness and personal worth. At least, lately it seems like the two become synonymous.
Bandit is unaware of Tom and Homon’s plot. She’s overwhelmed by a desperate situation. She’s a fallible mortal, like the rest of us, responding as best she can to what she sees and knows. She’s a victim of circumstances that are pretty well out of her control.
It’s not factually correct, at all, that Byron acted with intent or negligence* in a way that led to this. So yeah, that’s wrong. But Bandit is completely understandable in reacting as she does. That doesn’t make her response right. But it doesn’t, to me, put her “in the wrong” either.
* (Well, hmm. He *did* decide to go despite Syr’nj’s warning. But I digress.)
Yeah, no. She’s taking out her fury on someone who not only does not deserve it, but is in fact the biggest victim of this whole mess. It’s very understandable that her PTSD erupts here and causes her to do this, but she’s still wrong to do so.
But he isn’t really there to listen to it, so, you know, it doesn’t really matter.
No, this moment is the very justifiable eruption of what she has been holding back for a long time, of a trauma that she supressed since the first time, and admirably so.
Of course Byron is not to blame for everything so, as Matt said, her statement is not objectively accurate, but Byron has berzerkered the entire to death before, got very close to doing it a second time, and now he’s at the center of another mass-killing which (and I wish it had been shown a little more directly) also killed the only other gnome she got along with. So in my book she gets a medal for holding back this kind of reaction for so long.
Also, Byron did walk into that trap in a rather naïve way. He of all people should know what kind of stuff the cult can do. So … yeah, this is in part his fault. Also, he’s already very, very dead, so she can’t really hurt him anyway.
Except that it’s not justifiable. Having PTSD isn’t a magical “get out of responsibility free” card. It doesn’t release you from the obligation to manage yourself and treat other people the way they should be treated. Nor does Byron already being dead make her treatment of him any less reprehensible.
One way I like to be treated is: not savagely murdered by my leader who led me into a death trap knowing and concealing the fact that he’s actually got a terrible infectious madness our enemies want to unleash.
No one is saying Bandit has zero responsibility. We’re saying we understand how she got where she is, and we don’t blame her for being angry. Feelings – they’re real, we get to have them. Putting an expectation on anyone in circumstances like this to get even more superheroic and stuff that crap is just unrealistic and unfair.
Plus – if Byron were somehow alive and able to hear and understand her, do you think he’d fall over weeping or something in response? He’d probably be thinking it himself in the back of his mind. And he’d be swinging serious axe to try to fix it.
Just a little heads up, the tag for Astoria is Astoria Troy.
This is the only page in the whole comic tagged with just “Astoria”.
Gotcha!
This is unfair of Bandit indeed, and so is what she says to Syr’Nj a bit later.
At the same time, poor Bandit.
The world thrust so much on her, and she did try to do well despite it.
But she also had a ton of unresolved issues, and is so used to being distrusted by others that she in turn hasn’t trusted in anyone to help her through it.
This is a lot less unfair than Syr’Nj’s reaction later. Even that is of course understandable, given that this is about Byron, but Bandit still believes that she was Byron’s only party kill, and her view that Byron was a danger for himself and everyone around him is very justified. So … after watching this carnage and running out of Anti-berzerk, killing him the usual way is logical, and so is being very, very shaken.
The first time I read this, I thought that she was going a bit over the line, but upon revisiting it a few times, I don’t think it is. She’s not without blame for what follows, but I’d actually put the majority of blame with Syr’Nj, who started her whole journey looking for a way to make peace with everyone, and then refuses to engage with Bandit’s point of view, or even explain any of the stuff she’d been hiding from her, because she thinks that losing her dear Byron is worse than Bandit losing her home, again, for doing the thing that seemed right.
Gah, I’m angry at Syr’Nj, and we haven’t even gotten to that scene…
I too am mad at Syr’Nj for what comes later, and I expect we will talk about that when we reach the scene, but that makes Bandit’s reaction here no less wrong.
She is pouring all her personal ire at Byron, who really isn’t even the source of it, as all that anger came a lot earlier in her life and she has never managed to deal with it.
I know there is some projection and deflecting going on here, as well as knowing the ‘real’ Byron must be dead after that scene but I still can’t help yelling at the screen ‘who thought it was a good idea to send Byron into the woods in the first place!’
»RIP Astoria«? In this scene, they’re being overpowered by berserker spirits — but we know that this is survivable.
True, but Chapter 37 will confirm that she did not survive this battle.
Byron elected to be cursed himself. It IS objectively his fault to have chosen to be this way.
Sort of? Byron the player wanted the curse to be part of the character’s backstory but did not fully appreciate what that meant. They were still just a gamer. Byron the character both is and is not Byron the player. I think it’s a stretch to say they had true agency.
Byron and Byron’s player are two separate entities: Byron is not at fault for anything the player may have thought would be cool. Otherwise, one could just as easily argue that Bandit chose to be an outsider and any racism Syr’Nj experienced was her own fault, because of choices their players made. And that’s just a road I don’t want to go very far down. HR will invoke it a time or two, but he doesn’t think Arkerra is real the way the Arkerrans do.
Yeah, you might as well say it’s my D&D character’s fault that she died and is currently a tree-person, because I thought it would funny. Which it was, but she never appreciated the humour.
She’s never been more relatable.