Annotated 37-18
We’ll see a bit more of Scipio, and he’ll pick up the sword one more time in defense of the new life he’s going off to find here. But this is essentially the end of his arc, just as the previous scene was essentially the end of the E-Merachel ship, and in both cases, the rest is denouement. (E-Merl the individual has further to go, though.)
Part o’ me wishes we’d spent a little more time showing Scipio getting closer to this break with his sword-swinging role, even if his reticence would make it challenging to do so. Part of me, though, is glad for the surprise of this page and the last. It does gel with what we’ve seen, including that first bedroom scene with Fr’Nj and the horrors he’s just been through at Pardo’s village. And there’s something very Scipio about having his own quiet arc while nobody noticed and only telling people what was going on with him after it was over.
It’s certainly a better ending for him than my earlier concept, which was that Fr’Nj would head back to start her mission without him, then suddenly sense his presence leaving the web of life…just as Scipio’s player died violently and he in turn died of an aneurysm. I lost an uncle to an aneurysm while he was getting the paper, and I clearly imprinted on the idea that death could come so suddenly and inexplicably. But we usually want our fiction a bit more structured. And on a more practical level, the idea that Arkerrans’ lives and deaths were entangled with their Sepia World players’ was more than a little problematic (would that mean a rash of heart attacks or aneurysms on our world, after the events of Pardo’s village? Or would that mean anyone who stops playing an Arkerran kills them? If so, bad news for Bandit…). Better for Rachel’s player to survive her, just as Scipio (spoiler) will survive his player.
Finally, I think that’s a serious contender for the funniest alt text Flo ever wrote. It’s top five, minimum.
Beats “Is this a… butterfly?”
Yeah…the alt-text is brilliant. I like that it’s not even formatted in a way that calls out that it’s a joke, it just lets the humour hit you.
I do like the idea that Sepians and Arkerrans weren’t so strongly intertwined, but I feel it would’ve been nice if they had lost “something” in the process. I also feel bad for such a vague suggestion. I don’t know what the something is. Feeling different, slightly different motivations or impulses, very slight personality shifts like a small loss of empathy more characteristic to their “twin soul”, for example.
Just a brainfart. I get behind what is basically a cosmic coincidence in their alignments but it’s odd it’s also very largely irrelevant who they’re “connected” to, you know?
Yeah, I get what you mean!
Unlike BM03, I’m _really_ glad you made them essentially completely independent, with Scipio not even noticing that anything’s changed with Kaye’s death. The “the game Kingdoms of Arkerra goes down permanently” ending would be a lot darker otherwise.
Same, too many became dismissive of some characters after the introduction of the Sepian world.
Well I did say closing that link wouldn’t have a massive impact, so that ending doesn’t have a reason to be that dark. Either way, I feel like establishing these specific characters as connected somehow but having absolutely NO importance to each other whatsoever, not even a minor influence, raises a bit of a Chevok’s Gun situation.
They had plenty of importance to each other. Going the way you’re talking about, from Sepia World to Arkerra, Byron’s player was able to create the berserker curse, and Syr’nj’s player probably invented Graiya; E-Merl’s player is able to dictate that E-Merl will not walk away from the obvious slimeball shortly. Going the other way, we all saw how upset Rachel’s player was when Rachel was erased from existence.
What there does not seem to be, is a positive ongoing influence from Sepia World on Arkerra. All the Sepia World players who appear in the comic, embedded or non-embedded, envisioned their characters as heroes, and perhaps that’s the only reason they became so or even the only reason the specific characters Scipio, Bandit, and so on ever existed, but that doesn’t mean that there’s some less-empathetic “default Bandit” now. When E-Merl’s connection to his player is cut, he will indeed lose something: the influence of a puppeteer who can make him do stupid things because they’re more interesting from a Sepia World “it’s all a game” perspective.
Also, Chekov’s Gun only makes sense conceptually in works that are really simplistic. A story is stronger and more immersive if you can’t look at everything that’s depicted and say “that’ll be used at some point later or the prop wouldn’t be here.”
If there was Arkerra-to-Sepia overlap, I’d think perhaps the Zerkapocalypse could have corresponded to a gamer subculture getting radicalized into foaming-at-the-mouth nutballs.
But, of course, that wouldn’t be believable
/s