Annotated 38-17
Panel 4 is Bedard in a nutshell. He takes his direction from the others: what they decide is most useful for Gastonia to hear is more or less what he will print, with just enough truth in there that an overworked populace won’t question the rest. And he can do that with no qualms, because he doesn’t care. As long as he has interesting stories for the people to read, he’s a happy man… which would be all right, perhaps, if he were writing novels.
Syr’Nj has mostly put aside the pain that hobbled her in the last chapter, but in panel 5, it threatens to resurge. Caneghem may hate everything about being here for this, but consciously or not, he’s doing her a favor in panel 6 by interrupting her before she goes too far down that road.
“Well, technically, he’s not even in the ground. Last I heard, his body was being used as a dwarven tote bag.”
Bedard is basically William Randolph Hearst. People forget history when evaluating the media landscape. Over a century ago the US had yellow journalism taking us into war against Spain. Now we have it destroying our democracy.
I didn’t realize publishing was in Bedard’s blood to that extent – I had read him as having found propaganda his suited niche among the Heads of Houses. (Publishing seems like it would be too small an industry to make you a Head on its own.)
Everyone sitting down behind a table in this scene looks like they’re standing up and are just really short. I think it’s because they’re facing the 4th wall almost dead-on.
I didn’t see that the first time round, but now that you mention it: Hmmm, yes.
Weirdly enough, the desks are actually at some angle to the viewer, so there should be *some* visible offset between legs and torso.
Interestingly, the legs on most of them seem in the correct position in the last panel of the previous page, although they’re drawn much smaller, so the shift due to perspective would be smaller there. Oh well, I guess that’s the curse of the comment section, because without it, you’d have been the only person to ever become aware of the effect :)
The heads of houses are all secretly gnomes.
They even pretend to be human to the other gnomes.
A conspiracy within a conspiracy… literally, to some extent.
Man, that takedown was so cold that not even Miyamoto could celebrate it, as much as he hates Syr. Maybe it’s because he had already played his “not grieving enough” card.