Annotated 49-32
I was a little dubious when Flo dropped this page, because it seemed to be teasing that our heroes would now just…become gods like HR. Their “leveling up” is, I think, just believable because of their connection to the Sepia Five. But fights between omnipotent beings are often a lot more boring than you’d expect. Since the powers at work are supposedly beyond the readers’ understanding, the conflict often boils down to abstract-art backgrounds and figures making big, stagey gestures while making faces that look like they’re trying to poop.
Thankfully, Flo kept the proceedings less cliched than that, more personal to the characters into whom we’d invested so much of ourselves.
FB: Would you warp the very nature of reality for a Klondike bar?
This may be me completely off my rocker, but does their “leveling up” come in part from the fact that they’re involved in writing their own stories? Some earlier dialogue implied that the Sepia Five pitched their own backstories to HR, which made me wonder if they had some power over reality in Arkerra.
It also seemed like their “leveled-up” abilities they used in this fight fit what the characters and their writers would want – like with Byron attaining harmony with his berserker side, or Syr’nj getting more dynamite to do science with. Was the intention to have the characters themselves sort of writing their own powerups, or am I completely out to lunch?
That’s along the lines of how I understood it as well
I mean, I’d say that’s pretty fair. We always knew that the Arkerran Five were uniquely equipped to deal with HR because of their link to HR’s native world. What we start to see here are the practical implications of that.
@FB question, who wouldn’t.
I mean, how much warping are we taking about? I would totally make all chickens blue for a Klondike bar
Maybe if “warp reality” meant “turn that Klondike bar into a Klondike-bar-sized Andes mint.
Oh dang caught up on annotations . Get to read live now.
Lovely work on the facial expressions here.