Annotated 42-6
Droppin’ the Clarke’s Third Law reference like old-school nerds over here! That’s one of the bits that it might surprise people to find was written by Flo, not me.
Ulak deserves some kind of award for his delivery of that “Anyway.”
Transcending his “I’ll get you next time, Gadget, next time” relationship with the Peacemakers is one of several transcensions HR will be making over the next few pages.
I am so glad we were doing this series on our own and didn’t have to navigate around any F-word restrictions. Especially of the follow-up F-word on the next page.
They’re talking about Tectonicus, right? Or the Nameless? I suppose that since HR ends up eating him, even if Tectonicus was a god he wasn’t cosmically powerful or anything.
Was the Nameless anything other than “the land of berserker demons in Cyberia?”
They’re talking about the Countless, the entity Ulak and the Cultists worship.
Ok, Countless – not Nameless. Same question still.
The Countless were sometimes conflated with the Berserker Demons, but I don’t think they were literally shown the way Tectonicus was, no.
That makes me want to ask – were the Countless “real” then, in the same sense as Tectonicus is real? Were Bro Tom and the cultists praying to some actual entity? Is Ulak’s confusion justified?
Or is HR “right”, but for the wrong reasons? He’s assuming that the “in-game” deities are just lore made manifest, and not truly powerful. But was that so for the Countless too? Who would win in a god-mode-HR vs Countless fight?
Thinking of your comments on the next page about HR’s pride, and thinking about this – it occurs to me that his main flaws are ignorance and hubris – he assumes way too much that doesn’t turn out to be so, and ironically he could have gleaned that from observing the Five, but his lack of curiosity does him in.
I get the impression that HR is still not taking this whole roleplaying business too serious.
I wonder why, since he seems to intend to spend the rest of his life in there, and he designed it specifically for that purpose.
He’s probably benefiting from the fact that the NPCs have been scripted to react well (or simply got used) to players who don’t use appropriate language (that is: L33t5p34k instead of badly-faked olde medieval Englishe) or break character :)
Once he’s ascended, he’ll be sitting in the light from which all reality descends, able to make whatever shadow puppets on the wall of Plato’s cave he wants, just by moving his hands.
So, yeah, I don’t really see him feeling the need to keep up the pretense long term.
So, we’re going hentai here, huh?
(cue Ulak confronting the Pacemakers one-on-one, ending with the Peacemakers succumbing to him and doing ahegao faces)
I can’t hold this against you. This is the Internet. But damn, I didn’t want that imagery. :p
This is actually an interesting position for HR to take. He’s finally shed any care/pretense he has for their earthly lives, but also apparently decided that he no-longer cares that they persist in thwarting him.
That his ascension to godhood is more important than proving he controls everything here.
Which is ….*kind of* like character growth? Maybe? If you squint?
It’s definitely character growth, but not really in either a positive or negative direction. Remember, he was originally driving himself to madness trying to get them out, which is something he thought he’d need to kill all their characters to achieve. When he finally broke away from that spiral, it was to accept that Arkerra was more real than he’d originally thought, and to try to find a way to take advantage of that – which involved real-world murder.
This is more of that growth. He’s growing further away from that obsessive, self-destructive spiral… and more towards one of destroying everything else.