Annotated 36-39
It took us three full drafts to get this concluding confrontation to its final point… and even then, John’s interpretation adjusted it a little more. I don’t remember for sure what drafts were whose, although I feel like most of the important stuff was Flo’s.
The hard part was letting go of all the things we wanted these two to say to each other. There’s so much left unsaid. “Y’never cared that he killed me… y’never really cared. Y’r goddamn celebrity couple was always more important than anythin’.” “Byron would have axed his EYES OUT before allowing himself to berserk again! HE KILLED HIMSELF WITH EVERY KILL! *YOU* WERE THE ONE IN COMMAND OF YOURSELF HERE! And you think you can wriggle out of your responsibility by venting old grievances and petty grudges? WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, A HEAD OF HOUSE???”
But the more words we put in, the more it started to feel like intellectual rhetoric and continuity porn getting in the way of raw feeling. Some of our ideas were things we’d slip in later, in Chapter 37 or in the non-canon rap battle, but they didn’t belong here.
All that belonged on this page were a few cold facts: The fighting is over. Byron is dead. Syr’Nj and Bandit both believe that Bandit killed him. So Bandit might as well have actually done it, really. Bandit will not apologize.
…
Funny thing, though. I looked back at the script for this page, and panel 3 plays out a little differently there than how I read it here. Description reads, Close on Bandit, still woozy from the meds. A flash of regret and sorrow crosses her face: Byron was her friend, really, and it’s largely fear and panic and failure that’s made her say the things she has… And then panel 4 starts with, But those emotions aren’t quite done with her yet.
That might’ve been asking a bit too much for expressions to convey. To my eye, all panel 3 conveys is “woozy from the meds,” and it seems more like her limited wakefulness is still processing that he’s actually dead, not yet feeling one way or the other about it. You might read it differently.
I do wonder how it’d play with the audience if we’d let Bandit vocalize any conflict about Byron’s fate anytime after this moment. I do think the warmer feelings she had for him are still in her somewhere. But after this, she’s gonna do her best to bury them like they’re old tender memories of a toxic ex.
I read Panel 3 the same as you.
And yeah, Panel 4 is definitely a place where she crosses the line. I’m not 100% sure about anything in the last few pages, but telling someone that you’re glad you killed their spouse? Yep.
I mean… It would be a bummer to go all out and try to kill someone, just for someone to come tell you that you failed at it anyway.
For me the whole sequence was very natural. Sure the fight might be over in sense that people are gathering around, but there still could be combatants active in the field they are just not aware of, the tranqued people need attention ASAP for both treatment and detainment and over all there’s a hella lot of debriefing to do with a bunch of people. And Syr’Nj knows Bandit is medicated beyond her head at the moment, so trying to get her to “see sense” would be like asking a drunk person why they are drinking. Sure you get somewhere, but it’s far better to talk to them when they’re sober.
And Bandit’s face might have needed a bit more down drawn corners of mouth and eyes to better show regret. Buuut I think she wouldn’t have it at this point. She’s not really “cooled down”, she’s still burning, but being blanketed by the meds. Her rage is being suffocated, not calmed. So I would still see her set in her course, and lets be honest, you don’t go about killing a friend lightly (questions about what is friendship not withstanding) and as she had made her mind that Byron needs to go… It’s only natural that she’d be just relieved and clad that she could actually accomplish it too.
Though the meds must also be keeping her from remembering that it’s not the first time Byron has died aaaaaaaaand it might not be the last… Dundunduuunnn…
I read the pause itself as conveying a lot. Her immediate reaction isn’t joy, or relief – it’s bewilderment and hesitation. And yeah, maybe meds, but yeah, maybe those dawning feelings of hesitation and reconsideration. The ambiguity of that moment lends a lot to both sides of the deepening emotional chasm.
I read panel 4 as – Bandit desperately wants to be recognized for making and taking the truly hard call in the battlefield. The one she implied she’d take if she had to. And in a misguided way, she’s hoping that asserting the outcome was intentional will lead to that recognition.
But she’s not following through on the regret part. Or explaining why it was necessary, in a heavy-is-the-head kind of way. She’s just leaving it there – “I was right, damnit, and you better believe it.”
Her self-centeredness in the moment is the downfall. And imo, the same can be said of Syr’nj.
Hear, hear.
How much of the berseker curse/virus etc was thought out when you created Byron the Berserker? And did you ever regret naming him “the Berserker”?
1) It took a little while, as covered in early annotation. At first we thought he’d be just a little mad all the time. Then we thought he’d be a wild but still mortal and reachable fighter on special occasions, and that would constitute “going berserk.” Only after deciding he’d fail to go berserk against Best did we realize he was holding back something big. And that made us decide what.
2) Never. I can see how people would think this would be awkward to explain, but once we figured him out, the psychology behind the title appealed to us immediately.
Now I am remembering that bandit has a history of embracing being the criminal others believe her to be.
I am just not seeing the ambiguity the author is attempting to convey here.
I just realize that on top of Bandit’s other grievances which have already been described, Syr’Nj has not just taken the whole thing out of her hands but treated her like an obstacle to her mission rather than someone without hose help this whole thing would have been way beyond saving. She doesn’t say it, and probably doesn’t think it but if I was Bandit, her actions would tell me, in no uncertain terms: “you don’t know how to do this right, get out of the way and let me do it”. Just another stab at an old wound.
At the same time: Yeah, I think Bandit would have done well to show some empathy for Syr’Nj here, but she’s not really in the correct state of mind for that.
Another issue that’s getting in the way of empathy is that, in Bandit’s mind at least, she did what had to be done, but Syr’Nj couldn’t and wouldn’t do.
“I do wonder how it’d play with the audience if we’d let Bandit vocalize any conflict about Byron’s fate anytime after this moment.”
Huh, I JUST made a comment about this on the next page before hitting back.
Honestly, for me, I’d see her in a very different light. Going forward, she never really shows regret, and always acts with an air of righteousness. And I can see why she’d act that way with regards to Syr’nj, because this interaction and Syr’s choices from here on would definitely be enough for Bandit, with her history, to consider those bridges forever burned, even if Syr could ever possibly get past this moment.
But she and Byron grew fairly close, and he was one of her most supportive friends when she was promoted to field leader. And given how desperate she was for validation and belonging, his attitude should have meant a lot to her.
Without regretting her failure to stop him from being taken, or regretting that she’d had to kill him (if not regretting the act itself), she comes across more like she’s willfully refusing responsibility for any of this in order to justify her newfound hatred for Syr’nj and the guild. She goes so far as to utterly discard her friendship with Byron and build up a hatred for him in its place, all for something she’s very aware he had no control over, something she should know for a fact that he would have preferred to die rather than be forced to do.
Even worse is that her justification for this seems to be that she considers Syr’s treatment of her to be unfair and unjustified. She frames it not as though Syr’nj is emotionally compromised, but that she’s a total idiot for thinking any of this could have worked and that this was an unavoidable outcome. And yet she should – easily – be able to understand why Syr’nj is mad, even if only in hindsight, and even if she disagrees that she deserves that anger.
On top of that, Bandit, as field commander, had enough authority to at least argue against the plan. Yet she didn’t even try. She even carried some of the serum herself, meaning she DID believe it worked. There’s no good reason for her to be acting like Syr’nj shit all over her in order to make her hubby happy by giving him field work, and thus got everyone killed while Bandit was there as the lone voice of reason.
Bandit comes across as being willing to rewrite the facts of the situation in order to make herself feel righteous, and she sacrifices everything her friendship with Byron meant in order to achieve that end.
I don’t even have a problem with any of her actions here, or really, during her escape when things are still fairly fresh. Nor do I have an issue with her carrying a permanent grudge against Syr’nj going forward. It’s her decision to move forward by holding a grudge against Byron for something Bandit herself had more agency in, yet failed to stop, that turns me against her future character development.
It’s like resenting someone for getting you in a car accident after they drove drunk, when you gave them the keys in the first place, despite knowing they were drunk. Even if the circumstances had forced you to take that risk, it still doesn’t make you look like a good person to place all the blame on them.