Annotated 49-52
I don’t know why I ended up fake-naming Chrissie’s favorite game when we made it a point to use real brands like Starbucks and Electronic Arts elsewhere. But the original comments (and Flo, with the alt text) had tons of fun with it, so no regrets. (ICYMI, Eversummer is a riff on both EverQuest and Neverwinter.)
Xan is not perfect, but he knows that when he hears Chrissie call his name in alarm, priority one is to get immediately to her side. Since JJ breaking into Chrissie’s house was a trap that Chrissie and the others engineered, I doubt it was as traumatic for her as JJ breaking into Xan’s apartment to torture him was for him. They do have to live in Chrissie’s house now, presumably, and spackle the bullet holes from the cop fight. But even so, I think Chrissie’s occasional “jumpiness” has more to do with other times in her life. Her courage is strong in part because of how much she’s had to use it. Xan’s chill is well suited to her, and she’s good at instructing him in the arts of being a partner.
I like that “the guys” are still a part of Chrissie and Xan’s life six months after the events that pulled them together. And I love that Xan, who thought the game was fine but nothing special, was working on restoring part of it as a gift for the people who really loved it.
The real reason we close the chapter with this scene, though, is to sunset the connection between Sepia World and Arkerra. Kingdoms of Arkerra was never restored, despite desperate stakeholders’ best efforts: the game depended on a mystic link between worlds that ended with HR’s death. For the inhabitants of this world, it’s time to move on. And Bandit and the others will be moving on, too.
FB: [Fade to sepia-toned white]
I’m still waiting for the day when someone does a visual gag of having people talking about made-up off-brands while the actual brands they’re ‘avoiding’ are just out ‘n proud in the background.
And now I’m picturing a scene where they are lampshading the made up off brand thing by some character going something like
“I don’t get why people are so afraid of saying real brand names in stuff. If you mean Ground Beef Monarch say Ground Beef Monarch not some made up name like ‘Burger King'”
Is there a reason the archives don’t extend beyond chapter 46? Is that reason remediable?
I think we forgot that page even existed? We’ve got no direct links to it any more. I could probably fix it to go up to 50 in an afternoon, but I’m not gonna put the annotations in there.
The heart of all icon between the back and forward buttons is a link to the Archive
It’s pretty standard across many comics, so I guess it’s from one of the softwares.
Right, I’d honestly forgotten that did anything.
I find it ironic that Chrissie would move on from a World of Warcraft stand-in to an Everquest stand-in, considering that in the real world, WoW basically eclipsed EQ.