Annotated 49-48
FB: Sometimes you get a big win, and sometimes you get a clean win. But the biggest wins are rarely the cleanest ones.
The deaths of the Sepia Five had been foreshadowed in Carol’s dreams, in the readouts that weren’t EEGs, and in the way HR created their semblances as puppets instead of summoning them from their sleep. But it was still a jolt. There are various reasons we did it, including narrative streamlining, our desire to keep Sepia World a little gritty, and our desire to emphasize certain main characters over their Sepia counterparts. Flo might argue that we didn’t have a choice, but magick means lots of choices: the death of HR and his magicks could’ve restored the Sepia Five to life as easily as it took them out of their illusory suspension. In the end, this felt like the right choice. A win in Sepia World shouldn’t be a clean one.
I’m always amused by the thought of that 911 operator frantically flagging down her supervisor. “She says she’s Carol Masters, the acting CEO of that GIANT COMPANY DOWNTOWN. Is this a prank call? How do I tell?”
This is probably coloured by my…frequently voiced frustration with so many readers refusing to accept it even after it was explicitly stated, but I think that killing – or confirming the deaths of – the Sepia Five was also necessary from the standpoint of hammering home the reality of Arkherra. I feel like if they were alive, even disconnected from the game server, the final chapter would have had people insisting the only reason Arkherra persisted was because of them.
(Said frustration was aggravated because this is neither the first nor last fandom I’ve been in that had that attitude. And all 3 made it clear that the ‘fake’ people, despite their origins, were every bit as real as their naturally formed counterparts.)
Every single piece of media has people who just can’t understand its story whenever it defies their expectations. They will argue endlessly in favor of things that obviously aren’t true, and it’s impossible to convince them otherwise.
Not even just media.
(At least with fiction, you can’t do much damage by doubling down on a plainly incorrect interpretation of events.)
Hey, it had at least one person who had apparently missed this entire section going “but the servers have to stay up or everyone in Arkerra ceases to exist” as it was.
And yeah, if you didn’t catch it, I’ll second that. The fact is, these five characters never appeared onstage except in one of Carol’s dreams. Equating them with the comic’s protagonists was one of the big lies HR tried to hard-sell.
I usually call that “cleansing the One Power” in honor of the time I was that person while reading “Wheel of Time” and could not for the life of me figure out what the fuck was going on but all of my friends both easily understood and /loved/ its brain-cancer-fueled fever dream of a story.
I mean, for fun, I like to think that Sepia World was the imagined one all along.
Back in chapter 9, in HR’s attempt to pull them out, the five still appear alive. Or at least HR appears to believe it even without anyone in the scene to lie to.
So when did you decide they were dead in Sepia world?
Could be lying to himself. Maybe hopeful he could pull them back to stop them from preventing his ascension… Though the quite decomposed state of the bodies in the shattered tubes makes me think their not-rotten condition earlier had to be some form of illusion. It was pretty clear when he went in the tube that he died to go to Arkerra.
I assume by “he” you mean HR? What would the narrative point of Carol shooting HR be if he were already dead?
The sepiafive, though, they are definitely and without doubt ultra-dead.
Pretty sure that Sepia HR was alive until Carol shot him. Also pretty sure that what she shot was not just Sepia HR. Whatever he became in Arkerra and Cyberia, was also connecting back to Sepia World.
We don’t know, of course, if that was his plan, or some accident. (Keeping the connection to Sepia World. Becoming the Thing was likely not his intention
I was about to post the same question. And while reading yours (and Yash’s reply), I thought of two possible explanations:
1:
HR might not have been trying to get the players out of the game and back into their lives at all. He might also have noticed at some point that the Five had a lot more power over Arkerra than he had expected, that they might pose an obstacle to his plan, and that he therefore should try to remove them from Arkerra — completely independent of whether their players were alive afterwards or not.
2: They might have had a chance of coming back to Sepia World for a while, but the more the Five immersed themselves in Arkerra, and shaped it, and the more they “leveled up”, the less of them was left in those tubes.
Pretty late! It may have even been when outlining this story. But I think SUBCONSCIOUSLY we were leading up to it for quite a while.
No to digress, but…
Merry Axemas to T Campbell, Flo, John Waltrip and everyone reading this!
Final body count in Sepia World: Nine, if I haven’t forgotten anyone.
The Five, HR, Ferris, Kaye, and JJ.
I wonder exactly whose murders she’s confessing to?
Strictly, I understand she would “only” be responsible for Kaye’s murder, but she helped with covering up Ferris, and she shot HR (which I wouldn’t count as murder, of course).
But in the emotional state she’s probably in, most people probably wouldn’t dwell on that kind of detail.
I don’t remember, though will get an answer shortly, but I think she’s just confessing to the Five, HR, and possibly Ferris. Though she would possibly also admit to being culpable in Kaye’s. I think it’s not, strictly, that she feels personally responsible. But I think more that she feels that responsibility must be taken, and no one else is left to take it. Perhaps, even now, she wants to shield the memory of HR from being saddled with any more than he would have to. And give closure to the families of those that are dead with a person to blame.
If she’s completely open and honest, she would be confessing, at the very least, to the wrongful imprisonment and possibly the wrongful deaths of the Five via neglect; accessory after the fact to the murder of Ferris; the hiring of an assassin to kill 6 people, with one success; and the shooting of HR. It’s only this last one that she might argue was in self-defense (and indeed in defense of the entire universe), but there’s no way in hell anyone’s going to believe that part.
SirSoliloquy in tomorrow’s comments reminded me that there were also 2 cops shot dead by JJ. He’s analyzed the whole legal situation far better than I could.
I always took the explosive release of the Five as the result of them mystically burning their bridge through the previous page’s spirit splurge to end JR