Annotated 39-12
So whose death scene was more obviously foreshadowed, Kaye’s or Persson’s? I’m thinking that on some level, we wanted to shock you a little bit less after the Cultist slaughterhouse. Both of them had to die for the sake of the larger arc, and their departures themselves needed to be wrenching, but the story makes a little more effort to prepare you for their demises than it does with deaths we really didn’t want you to see coming, like Naror’Nj’s in Chapter 18 and Gravedust’s in Chapter 8.
That said, we did at least want to make sure we killed Kaye at her most lovable, and so, with her last words, she shows herself to be not only snarky but a worthy debater. I don’t think this chapter would’ve worked if somebody didn’t resist the call to action, and with Daniel and Chrissie on the idealistic side, it was going to be Lia or Kaye.
There’s no really firm evidence of this in the text, but for some reason I think of Kaye as a little shaky, health-wise. Maybe it’s the way the script never has her going outside. Although she could be an Olympic gymnast and it probably wouldn’t make a difference to what’s about to happen.
A stray thought on this page:
Is there a significance to {Extremely pixellated pillow} in panel 1?
Like an “unnecessary censorship” gag?
Or something else I just don’t get?
I think it’s just a neat knitting pattern. Those shapes are too irregular to be pixels.
No significance at all. It’s just an interesting pattern I found somewhere to liven up an otherwise drab room.
https://d.justpo.st/media/images/2017/03/15/darkwing-duck-unnecessary-censorship-1489610050.jpg
Non-figurative blocks of slightly differing color – one of the more unlikely things now ruined by porn.
:p
Hot take. She deserved it.
…
Naa, not really. No-one deserves to die for that, but come on.
You don’t have to believe it, you can doubt it. But, damn does she sound like “No, no, no. You’re all wrong and I know better and YOU don’t have any RIGHT to say anything, ‘cose wrong.”
We get that way too much these days.
So yeah. She deserved something for her troubles, but maybe not death. Like a certain character said in a very wacky movie…
“Don’t kill him! If you kill him, he won’t learn nothin’!”
It is a bat-s**t story without the benefits of seeing all this stuff go down as a reader. We know game companies, like any other company, have a bad habit of getting greedier and more detached from their customers as they get larger, Sure. A game company kidnapping people to preform experiments on them for their new Beta while sending assassins to cover up any loose ends like a cyberpunk novel? Someone is going to call them out as cranks in a believable story.
There’s calling someone out, and then there’s refusing to listen. From two pages ago, Kingdoms of Arkerra sounds uncanny valley levels of weird if you pay attention to it closely enough. Unfortunately, Kaye doesn’t and refuses to.
They skipped the part where Shanna explained the whole story. It’s not that Kaye isn’t listening, it’s that she thinks it’s a con. Yes, she is being incredibly blunt but the story has made it very clear Kaye has trouble connecting with people and blurts stuff.
I’m going to say that Kingdoms of Arkerra being super weird isn’t actually relevant to their ability to convince Kaye that its CEO is holding people prisoner in his basement. Shanna scoffed when Carol said there was real magic(k) involved; none of them are going to believe that until they’re at Hurricane’s headquarters and encounter what HR’s turned into in person. So, from Kaye’s perspective, a yellow journalist who hates gaming and an anti-government wacko (I like Xan quite a bit, but rational he’s not) showed up and said, “The leaders of your guild never break character because they’re actually directly hooked up to the computer, in Hurricane’s basement, and also a huge thug with a huge mustache is probably coming here.” The odd thing isn’t that Kaye’s acting like this is ridiculous; the odd thing’s that they didn’t get laughed out of the apartment by everyone there.
(JJ, of course, is–and honestly, has been from the start–doing exactly the wrong thing for his stated goal. First he…convinced Xan to leave his house and help Shanna more actively than he had been, now he’s about to convince all of these people to do the same thing.)
Not believing all that stuff is absolutey and entirely understandable.
I don’t think the others are entirely swayed either, they’re just less unwilling to entertain the thought.
I mean, Xan didn’t quite believe her, either, until someone put a knife through his hand.
Definitely succeeded in making it wrenching, really well-written.
I, for one, did not recognize this as a death sequence on first read. Iwatani’s betrayal, however, seemed par for the course as someone who dealt with Cultists. I honestly thought JJ would go after Shanna’s mother first.
That’s a kind of interesting angle. But it seems like something that would have been “first phase JJ”, where he’s just applying gentle-yet-terrifying pressure; at this point, he’s looking to tie up loose ends in a permanent fashion.
I agree he should know where her mother is, however.
And then there were three…
For some reason I think of Kaye as a little shaky, health-wise.
The way she stands up from that chair, with her legs close together and her left leg in an odd angle, seems to indicate a physical disability. (That’s how I always read her.) She places all her weight on her right leg. On the other hand, it’s not like she keeps a cane nearby.
Interesting detail that the parts of the signs on Kaye’s wall that we can see in that last panel read “Stop” and “No”.
Yeah, that’s a good touch! Subtle work from John, there.
The foreshadowing on Persson was easy to notice. In this case, it scene caught me unaware. That is, I did notice that that was maybe not the pizza guy at the door, but I did not expect him to be that ….direct. Although, in hindsight, it was fairly logical that that’s what he would be doing, since his less deadly methods had failed him so far, and he was probably rather a little upset about this by now.
Aside from the “no one deserves to be murdered by a psychopathic hitman just to cover the tracks of an even more psychopathic CEO” angle, I fail to see how Kaye believing the story had any effect on her getting murdered or not. It’s not like her scepticiam contributed in any way to her death, so I honestly don’t get in what way it made her deserving of it.
She didn’t deserve it, that was the point. It really could have been any of them if they’d been isolated. She was the one who was alone, which made her the easiest target.
It also could have been, being the lone dissenter, removing her made the entire group more prone to doing what the plot needed, though I think her skepticism would have vanished after you know, what happens next if it had been anyone else.