Annotated 47-12
Panel 1 is interesting: even as Caneghem concludes his case for isolation, he looks to Syr’Nj for understanding, comparing his people’s withdrawal from the known world to her withdrawal from the Gastonian Hall of Houses. Officially, he wants no bond with any non-sky-elf; emotionally, he can’t help reaching out when you least expect it. We saw a lot of that with him and Reynolds.
Hollinger gets one more appearance here (we’ve finally settled on which of the sky elves he’s supposed to be), and in John’s rendering, he looks a lot like he could be Hollister and Clair’s dad, which would explain the similar names.
Poor Clair: look at her crying into her hanky in panel 4. The script had “angry tears,” which doesn’t come across with these abstracted faces, but that’s okay. She really thought her people were on her side in this.
We never took a census of the population of Asallah En-Qu’Lara, nor of any other group or subgroup within Arkerra. My feeling, however, is that the total population is 300ish, and about 125 of those voted “remain,” but of those, only the few seen here are willing to give up their homeland just to remain “citizens of the larger Arkerra.” (Syr’Nj and the script put the number at a “dozen-odd,” but I count about two dozen in the panel.) As Syr’Nj says, it’s no small sacrifice they’re making…and it’ll be a bigger sacrifice for some than for others…so by all means, guys, enjoy your fuck-you dance.
FB: Here we see a lively flock of migratory, flightless birds.
Wait…they were siblings? I missed reference to that/failed to pick up on it.
… This is awkward.
I imagine so…
Huh, yeah, I can see the issue. It almost doesn’t matter either way…nothing they do with each other would be out of place in a brother-sister relationship or in a romantic relationship that’s not that outwardly demonstrative. There is one reference to “Clair’s brother” in Chapter 50, but it’s easy to miss.
Thanks for the clarification. I thought the few sky elves that left were the only ones who voted to remain thus illustrating how much they vastly overestimated their popularity. Seems fitting given our own political environment regarding progressives.
Given all of Gastonia’s treachery I would’ve voted to leave too.
I guess I might’ve confused the issue here by calling it a “remain or leave” vote: Syr’Nj was actually asking them not to remain with Gastonia, but to join the new anti-Gastonia coalition. Still, your point stands if Caneghem’s argument boils down to “fool me twice, shame on me.”
Not shown is what happened to those who were infected with the berserker and imprisoned with the sky-elves. Did they take the cages with them when they disappeared?
We get to see some of those berserkers later, so I guess not?
That, or the elves teleported them once they were stable enough to get out of prison.
Yeah, Braggadocio was released some time before all this went down, after he was judged safe enough by Gastonian allies eager to be rid of him. The next-to-last thing Caneghem would want is the responsibility for a human prisoner. (He’s not quite hardcore enough to just erase the bottom of Braggadocio’s cage and drop him Wile-E.-Coyote-like onto the desert below, at least not when all the other sky elves are watching him.) And the absolute last thing Caneghem would want is a human prisoner who might also someday spread the madness into his city.
I’d say the same applies for any other berserk-infected survivors, but IIRC, Braggadocio may’ve ended up being the only one of those.
Of course, Caneghem wouldn’t drop Braggadocio onto the desert from that height – he has contempt for the people of Gastonia, not the land itself!
That picture hits home … I remember waking up one morning in 2016 and reading the news, and deciding not much later to get off the island before things go south.
Best decision ever. I’m just really sorry for everyone who was too tied to Britain to leave, most of all Northern Ireland. Turns out you can’t simply solve your problems by blaming them on your neighbours and refusing to talk to them.
Doesn’t help that the ‘soft’ leave that was sold as being what was being voted for turned into the total mess of a ‘hard’ leave. Nor the amount of dodgy money and meddling used to stir the pot and interfere with campaigns (at least some of it Russian).
Still reality does seem to slowly exerting itself and hopefully sanity can return to UK politics at some point, there is also an increasing public and political support to finally moving to a more proportional voting system. First past the post just has a bad failure mode.
Glad you managed to get out and the choice went well for you.
Yeah, we celebrated a bit when Boris finally had to step back, but in the meantime, he’s moved the perception of “normal” by some margin. And independent of him, the moment all those “Norway option” people started saying that only lifting the anchors and sailing off entirely was counted as actual Brexit, because you’re a weakling if you so much as pay attention to the views of the other 48%, and even a large number of “remain”-voters agreed … something’s wrong, and I don’t understand it, and it scares me.
I also wouldn’t hold my breath on the voting system. Neither of the two large parties has an interest to change it.
Same thing in Germany: There’s been an age-old debate brewing about the distribution rules for parliamentary mandates, and several decisions by the constitutional court, but the tiniest and least consequential changes have become virtually insurmountable challenges, even when they fell short of the constitutional requirement… Still better than being stuck with first-past-the-post, but illustrates the point nicely. Unless the large parties foresee a catastrophe for themselves if they don’t act, they’re not going to.
BoJo’s style could only ever be described as “Gross Infantilism”.
Apparently that hit the mark of an electorate so deep in the clutches of Rupert Murdoch’s “media”.
Good riddance, but too little and too late.
I remember this the first time around. Its so great!!!
Considering how the epilogue shows an impoverished sky elf who is magically prevented from using his magic, it kind of feels like Caneghem made the right decsision. It kind of feels like forcing the Avians not to fly.
I’m curious about that elf. Was he one of this group that grew jaded after the war or did Canegham do what Castro did and empty out the prison cells?
I never considered the idea that Jemmington could be a former prisoner. In my view, he was just a young elf who believed in Hollister and Clair’s principles of pluralism but didn’t possess their moral fiber, just as not everyone who agrees with you at the ballot box is actually someone you’d like if you got to know them. I’ll get into him more when he shows up.
Jemmington isn’t forbidden from using all his magic, just portal spells and conjuration, and that was a choice made by other refugee sky elves, not imposed on them by Penk. (You may recall that the ethics of conjuration were a sticking point for Clair from the start.) It is true that Jemmington and others were not prepared for what this exodus would actually mean, and his fall from privilege is not an enviable one. But, y’know, nobody’s stopping him from throwing lightning bolts at Bandit’s crew.
And the street elves’ lives are totally different than they would have been had Caneghem joined the World’s Rebellion. In that scenario, Caneghem and the occasional referendum would still be in charge of all sky elf affairs…though Caneghem might have his own reasons for limiting portal spells, in that case.
So it’s not so much Caneghem making the right decision as it is the impoverished sky elves making the *wrong* one — for themselves, at least.
Well .. who knows. They might have ended up being unhappy or otherwise in a bad state if they had stayed. Maybe Jemmington was already not quite getting along in Asallah En-Qu’Lara, and expecting things to get worse, and decided to leave because he expected things could only get better? Or maybe he’s just a selfish jerk who thought he’d go from being a nobody among Sky Elves to being able to easily take advantage of all the other races on account of his Sky Elf abilities?
I like the idea that some Sky Elves, who have been living on more or less stolen stuff turn to actually hanging on to those habits in a more direct manner, but do get shown their boundaries in ways they weren’t used to “back home”.
You know, I really don’t mind Caneghem’s position here. The World’s Rebellion didn’t automagically cease to be genocidal slave mongers when Gastonia turned into an autocratic dystopia. Why try and pick “least bad” when your nation actually has the option to run away?
I’m curious how things would have played out if the wood elves and gnomes had come to him asking for co-evacuation. Would the Sky elves have accepted pluralism then?
I couldn’t fault it either. If nothing else, Caneghem saw through the BS long before anyone else in this scene, and had been working on his plans long before being approached. What’s he going to do – abandon his nearly finished plan at the last second in order to have a Round 2 of “trust the Peacemakers and find out”?