Annotated 38-13
I’m not sure whether Ardaic is probing Caneghem’s feelings in panel 1 or not, but I am sure that Caneghem knows better than to show any weakness to anyone who might use it against him, and telling Ardaic anything is the same thing as telling Jarvis. It helps that his contempt for Ardaic is genuine: Caneghem may be a pawn of Gastonian aristocrats, but at least he knows that’s what he is (for now). He’s not telling himself he’s a “patriot” or whatever, you SURFACE ANT HUMAN.
I love how the framing of the last panel…and only the framing…tells most of the readers that this page is very bad news for Persson indeed. In this case, I mean “framing” not only in the way the panel shows Iwatani looking almost too sincerely sad, but also in the way it makes us linger on his dialogue. When did Iwatani ever “politics aside” anything, except maybe his son?
Around this point, Flo and I had a…spirited discussion with a reader who felt things weren’t moving fast enough, and I was like…the Heads of Houses are rolling left and right! We lost Pardo in three pages, Reynolds in two, and now (apparently) Persson in one. It’s up to each reader to decide what they’re interested in, and if they decide something’s unimportant, then it won’t register as an event. But if you care about the Heads of Houses, things have been pretty fast-paced so far. (The next stretch of pages, though, will be getting more expositiony.)
I know it’s a bit early, but Caneghem is one of my favorite characters, one note as he is. Re-reading with the context that he is, in fact, just going to up and leave as soon as possible and actually have it work makes all these stoic putting up with nonsense, bits, or put downs, really in frame.
I suspect a lot of people have known, or wished to be, like Caneghem in a job, where the only real victory is leaving a shitty situation without getting stuck there forever.
Surface dwellers exist only to provide things for sky elves to summon.
This bothersome “relationing” was always a temporary inconvenience.
By now Caneghem’s endgame must have been decided, right? Or did you have some other options brewing?
How far back did you decide on Caneghem’s endgame, was already decided when the sky elf’s were persuaded to join the coalition?
We knew that Caneghem was not really loyal to the Gastonian government or the Altruist cabal and that at some point he would prove his loyalties decisively and then return to his people to be alone. But a lot of specifics were not sorted out, IIRC. One idea I had was that he’d be the one to kill Iwatani, after waiting out the “consolidation phase” and seeing the deaths or neutralizations of all other Heads. Having thus ensured that the Gastonian state was too ruined to pose an immediate threat to the sky elves, he’d then exit the stage.
I don’t recall, why is Caneghem working with them at all?
Gastonian Airships, I think.
This is a very rough summary, and I might be forgetting a number of details, but quite a while back Syr’nj and crew persuaded enough of the Sky Elves that their isolation was about to end one way or another, and working with Gastonia was the only way to make sure it ended peacefully. So they went ahead and formed an alliance with Gastonia, but majority went along with that only very grudgingly.
Caneghem is a member of that majority. He’s been putting up with it, but he’s never liked it.
I’d say that, from my point of view, the reason this can feel a little slow is that, aside from Dean Reynolds, the guys that are getting shuffled off are fairly minor characters (at least in the amount of screen time they’ve been getting) and the “bloodless coup” here does lack a bit of immediacy.
Like, if Persson and Pardo had found a way to kick Itawani off the council, that might have registered as a bigger event? I dunno.
Same here.
On the first reading, the heads of houses appeared at such great intervals that I barely remembered their faces, let alone what they were about. That is of course compounded by the fact that I’m practically dyslexic when it comes to the stuff between the lines, and that’s where these people put like 90% of the content of their communication. So I was like “oh, okay, I guess these people are removing that one guy from the council thingy, I wonder what that was about…” I felt like it should probably tell me something but it didn’t.
Reading it again, with commentary, and having at least a foggy memory of what’s coming up, I understand it’s Iwatani’s preparation for removing everyone else, too, although I am still puzzled as to why all others would go along with it. Some exposition on the plans/motives/perspectives of some of the remaining members could have helped with that, I think. Which is not so say that there wasn’t any, but it may very well have sailed right past me.
Yeah if I’m 100% honest I couldn’t pick out the individual heads of houses aside from maybe Iwatani if you lined them up side-by-side. This part of the story needed either 1) much more development of the heads as characters, or 2) for the heads being removed to actually be part of a faction that had itself been characterized, for there to feel like there was any wight behind it. As it is it’s like “oh, there’s only 5 heads instead of 9 now? OK, I guess…”
[Mourns the missed opportunity to make a “9 to 5” image gag]