Annotated 49-27
Hey, make up your mind, Gravedust, can he kill you guys or not? Or just keep pissing him off, I guess that’ll settle the question on its own.
I’ll give HR props where it’s due: his renditions of the Sepia World Five are sort of convincing in their details! “Best” is predictably egocentric, “Frigg’s” self-critique is apt, and of course there’s a Lord Byron quote. The only problem is motive. Remember how I said these guys were gearing up to plead for their existence? Well, these guys are not really arguing for their lives—only “Best” hits a self-interested note at all, and there’s nothing about “Best’s” musical career or “Frigg’s” mom who misses her or “Syr’Nj’s” cat or anything else that our heroes would be saving by their surrender. It’s all just different ways of saying “You’re not real, and we are, just accept it.” Almost as if they don’t really care about themselves, just about guilting the Arkerrans into oblivion… That’s the spot where HR’s puppet strings would be visible, even if Weo hadn’t already prepped our group for this moment.
Had this moment been timed to go before the revelation about the Sepia Five’s brainwaves, it might’ve been more ambiguous. Flo and I were done with ambiguity at this point. We were happy to play with your expectations by doing this scene, which some of you might’ve expected in some form since the revelations in Chapter 9. However, we did it mostly so we could put the concept of it to bed. Anyone who can think or feel for themselves is as real as they will let themselves be.
I always felt the idea of Wave and the Sepia 5’s consciousness being dead things and lost lives very disheartening and even mildly depressing. Would it be weird for Gravedust, a nearly 60 year old (coded) dude to suddenly have memories of being a 40 year old D&D nerd? Sure. But I doubt it’d change him. Any of them. Hell, Best REMEMBERS being Wave and he’s changed by the experience hardly at all, more so changed by things that happened after. And really the idea that Wave is dead, but not, being brought back shortly is even stranger. The certainty and finality of it is belied by his appearance in the Best Finale many one man band, but the idea that Wave IS more alive inside him then he let others to believe, as sweet an idea as it is, is belied by the idea that the Sepia 5 are not here now and never were. Some part of their soul is, but that is not them. And so if that is the case for them, then the thing that looks like Wave in the finale is a dead puppet of a memory.
Ultimately it’s a very small detail in the grand scheme of things, but I’ve always been of the mind that maintaining the separation of fantasy and reality in fiction is more depressing then not. By sort of saying that everyone who has come to Arkerra from our world did so insane, dead or both you belie the very existence of a world where the magic that made Arkerra is used to make a much less bloody portal to another world where magic and science and all that can blend. It’s way far gone from the themes of the story, sure, and very high and out there concepts that don’t real have anything to do with the comic… But all the same it is a conscious choice to separate fantasy from reality by literal death. It is depressing, fundamentally, even if it is more realistic.
Hmm, is it necessary, ‘though? I was under the impression that the Five are brain-dead because of HR’s screw up due to inexperience, and not an intrinsic requirement of the transition process – especially since the upcoming comics demonstrate some sort of synchronization between the two of HR’s incarnations (particularly the “simulkill” scene).
What occurs to me here is–well, suppose the Sepia World Five were still alive. Suppose that, e.g., Byron and his player both coexisted in Byron’s mind.
Would it strain plausibility for all five of the Sepia World Five to accept remaining in Arkerra forever?
If one of them didn’t accept it, what would that mean? Someone would have to be able to make the decision “we wake up back in Sepia World” or “we stay in Arkerra.” Which means someone would either be obliterated, or still have consciousness but no control.
What would Byron, in particular, really have to say to the guy who decided casually that it would be more interesting if he had slaughtered his brothers and his entire village? Bandit’s not one of the Five and thus not really a consideration here, which is lucky as if there was any question of her player being shoved into Arkerra what Bandit would have to say to someone who casually chose for her to be a kleptomaniac outcast also comes immediately to mind.
Appearances aside, the players of the Five are really extremely minor characters. They show up in Carol’s dreams, HR creates images of them, but neither of those is even actually them, but them filtered through how villains saw them. It’s sad that HR killed them. But not really any sadder than the deaths of five random wood elves recently.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you– I was pretty shocked when the story actually confirmed that the Five were gone, they were braindead and also exploded, period, end of story. But I did find it easier to believe that they existed in a significant fashion within their characters. Best actually seems like the proof to me. While it’s true that the winter elves and then Byron forced a huge paradigm shift in him, the fact that he stuck around to listen at all was a big departure from the guy who destroyed a whole temple the first time he encountered a significant challenge to his world view. I read that as Wav’s influence opening the door that Byron was able to step through and finally reach him with.
Particular props to Mr. Waltrip on the last panel here – it’s just so delightfully creepy, especially the grinning, faux-friendly facial expressions on the Sepia simulacra, seemingly still running on the “convince them to merge” autopilot while HR’s core personality is already showing rage.
Thank you!
I’m reminded of _The Golden Transcendence_ (by a writer who’s now well off the deep end into horribleness but wrote some redeemable books earlier) where the main characters agree to engage in intellectual conversation with neuron-complete copies of themselves their antagonist AI has spun up and convinced of the rightness of its cause.
The ultimate compliment to an author’s creativity: when their creation suddenly talks back to them!
It’s amazing how many other works this scene reminds me of. (Obligatory spoiler warnings for all of the following.)
There’s Quag Keep by Andre Norton (the first ever D&D novel), which is about a bunch of gamers who are incarnated as adventurers in Greyhawk with no memory of their former lives. At the end they discover the truth about their origins, but decide to stay on in Greyhawk rather than returning home.
Then there’s “You have no power over me” from Labyrinth.
And the “red pill” scene from Total Recall.
And “I am a person. You are not” from Severance.
So … what is HR (or the thing that incorporates HR now) trying to achieve here, and is that linked to what HR was trying to achieve for most of the story?
It seems like he’s still desperate to get the Five out of Arkerra because they stand in the way of HR’s plan to control it. Probably because they have started reshaping the world in ways HR had though impossible for players who didn’t know that they had this power. So by getting the Five to accept that they are players in a game, what would he gain? To get Frigg to let down the shield, so he can kill them? To get them to leave Arkerra voluntarily and return to their Sepia bodies (which we know would get them killed)?
And then what? Keep devastating everything until there’s nothing left worth ruling (and then maybe rebuild it in a different way? Was that his original plan? It seems like somewhere on his journey, HR turned from “ambitious young universe-ruler” to “universe-consuming monster”. He just seeminlgy regained some of his eloquence (how, why? Or was it just hidden in the previous few pages?), but his plan seems to be really superficial, very far from what Sepia HR might have come up with — which would be backed up by the fact that even the appearance of his likeness is off.
My guess is that he’s also started to become absorbed by Arkerra. He’s forgetting about Sepia world, or at least separating his existence from Sepia HR in some way, as did the Five. That would include forgetting what he actually came here for, or at least the details of it. At the same time, though, we know that some of all this is also manifesting in Sepia world, so the connection can’t be quite lost.
So … on some level it makes some sense, but I still find really hard to guess at what the whole story would look like from HR’s perspective. There are a lot of antagonists in this whole story who are extremely understandable, sometimes even sympathetic, which is rare — but HR is still a riddle to me.
Yeah, 1000% this. If there’s something I really hoped to understand better between the first read through and then sticking around for these annotations, it’s this. I truly don’t understand whether, or how much, HR *in this page* is a different agent with different goals than *whatever HR was expecting to be* when he entubed and enportaled.
I kinda *desperately* want that classic villain monologuing here, and failing that, some enlightening narrator / director commentary. T, can we prevail upon you to say more?
To say HR had a huge ego is no big revelation at this point. One of the consequences of that ego is that when he started this quest toward godhood, he didn’t really, really realize how much of himself he’d end up losing on the way. The ravenous god he’s become can briefly fake being the man he was, but it’s a pose based on imperfect memories.
He’s focused on the Five, again, because they’ve always been resistant to his manipulations. He wants control. He wants all others’ surrender and obedience. He’ll do whatever it takes to get there, including murder or trickery.
At this point, there’s not much more to him than that.