Annotated 46-1
Say goodbye to Weo, whose story ends here. I appreciate the sad, strange boundaries of his character arc: knowing that he’s fated to die in childhood, he nevertheless tries to get as much joy as he can from the life he will have. A little melancholy creeps in as he says his goodbye to Byron. But he’s foreseen his own life often enough to know there’s no point in crying over what can’t be changed.
(I also appreciate the declaration that our heroes will never see the winter elves again, because it precludes the possibility of any real Guilded Age sequels with the high stakes of the original. As writers, you gotta know when to walk away.)
And say hello to “Freddie Best.” We knew a change in his look was almost a requirement after the events of “The Last Axemas,” but picking one was harder than it looked from my perspective. He had to come across as somehow sensitive yet powerful. A lot of musicians’ personas are on the arrogant side, which of course worked fine for earlier incarnations of Best but wouldn’t fit his new attitude. And yet the team was about to face its two greatest challenges ever—war on Gastonia and the battle with Dedalus. Best couldn’t look weak (or “emo”) if he was to stand shoulder to shoulder with the others in that. So what music-star persona could possibly—but Flo brought up Freddie Mercury almost immediately, and then that was pretty much that.
Wait…Weo dies as a kid?!
News to me!
Same though!
I guess the line “this is the only real adventure he’ll get to be a part of, and he knows it” was more foreshadowing and less a testament to the mundane nature of Winter elf life…?
Man that really does paint the winter elves in a darker shade. If they all knew he was going to die soon they could have shown him a little kindness instead of avoiding him like the plague.
Would it have changed anything?
Not trying to be grim, just thinking within the canon.
If you’re thinking along those lines — why don’t they all just kill themselves instead of being assholes towards each other?
(asnwer: Maybe they’re not actually assholes towards each other, just a bit annoyed with outsiders, because outsiders are the reason they have to hole up on the north pole…)
Also: How many adventures do the other winter elves go on, in their lives? As far as I can tell, the average should be very close to zero — so the fact that someone is not going to have any _more_ adventures in their life tells me extremely little about the length of their life.
Seems like allowing Weo to entertain the adventurers was their idea of a kindness, to allow him the chance to indulge in entertaining outsiders when everyone else just wants to stay out of it.
Not that they could help it; it was totally fate that this would happen anyway.
Yeah, I thought the “This is the only adventure he’ll be a part of” thing was that in the end, Winter Elves are pretty boring people, and that they would avoid further contact, not that he was going to die young. I guess I learned something new today.
Further to this, I wonder how many people came away from the story (not any further discussions of the story, but the story itself) thinking that was the little guy’s fate. Because I am completely taken by surprise by this revelation.
I don’t think anyone knew weo was going to die. Nobody mentions it in-comic and it’s not exactly normal for people to see a kid and assume they’re gonna die young.
If we were intended to know, then it needed to be more blatant.
Can confirm, am completely surprised.
Same.
I would never have interpreted it this way. He says that they won’t come to visit, which, to be honest is how most “we’ll come to visit again” stories go.
I interpreted this very much as him knowing that they won’t find the time/opportunity to come back and visit. But of course, after he told them directly, they won’t even try. Weo must know that what he says has an effect on the future (otherwise he wouldn’t have played the oracle), so saying this directly causes the Five to never even try to come back. That means his prediction that they won’t meet again is true, without the need for anything else to happen to anyone.
so … why this very sad and cruel interpretation?
Well, you gotta understand that it’s not an “interpretation” as far as I remember it. There’s a slight chance I have this wrong, but I believe we decided Weo’s lifespan early on and a lot of other things, including his particular joie de vivre, were developed from that idea or in relation to it. The irony of someone only appreciating omniscience when they had less time to enjoy it appealed to us, IIRC. I feel like almost all our other likable-character deaths were crueler on our parts because we created those characters some time before deciding that they’d be dying on-panel.
But I’m prepared to file this into the folder of “plot points that were clear to us but communicated to so few readers that they might as well not be part of the story at all.” It’s a thin folder, thankfully, but I started it after discussing “Syr’Nj’s short-lived crush on Best.”
Changing clothes is one thing, especially since we know where he got the new ones. But, how did he grow a mustache since the end of the axemas comic? I’m assuming that was a few hours ago at most. Was there a fake mustache in the pocket of the yellow jacket?
Not a fake mustache, a magical one. The persona that the jacket imbues requires a mustache, so it gave him one. The axemas gifts came from a cache of magic stuff, dinnit?
Does it disappear when he takes off the jacket? That could be inconvenient in certain circumstances.
Part of the jacket’s enchantment, clearly.
Rockstar juju, don’t question it.
You don’t even need to question it. Just look up the Bard class in the Player’s Handbook, it’s all there.
Actually … Weo doesn’t say they won’t meet again, he says the Five won’t come back — which contains zero information about Weo.
… T, should we be worried?
(please don’t do anything to Weo, I like the little guy!)
Yeah uh, for me personally I’m just gonna invoke Death of the Author here. Nothing in the published comic indicates Weo will die, just that he’ll have a boring life ahead as an adult Winter Elf.
Wait, did I miss a page? When did anything about Weo getting sudden childhood death syndrome come up?