Annotated 49-7
(No FB today.)
Usually, just admitting the flaws in your own writing and trying to spin them as part of a master plan doesn’t really work. (Much as I liked She-Hulk, the finale’s “No no, see, we were SATIRIZING Marvel’s bad habits” routine was not quite the subversive slam dunk that it wanted to be, and it wouldn’t have worked at all without a lot of clever secondary comedy and the ridiculously charming Tatiana Maslany.) But when it came time for us to address this plot hole, we found ourselves in a “two wrongs CAN make a right” situation. Tracking the brain activity didn’t make sense…but our readouts were kind of exaggerated from actual brain readouts anyway, so…HR was lying about this aspect of the Five’s situation from the start. Plus, it finally put to bed the few remaining HR loyalists who insisted he was the secret good guy of the series, just trying to liberate those poor deluded idiots from their tubes.
The rest of this page is mostly transitional. But I love the fact that Taro ends up forgotten. There are in-character reasons for it: Sundar’s a goofball, Rendar is a focused engineer, and Bandit is unconscious. But still, what a perfect way to end a narcissist: not by leaving him behind to die, but simply being too busy to remember he’s about to be killed.
It is the kind of ending Taro deserved.
The first time I read this I somehow missed that he’d been left for dead… Which I guess is a double whammy for the little narcissist’s sense of importance
So, am I correct in assuming that HR’s real motive was stopping those five punks from subverting the power he held over the universe?
Yeah, pretty much. He planned for them to be a bridge but instead they were a roadblock.
So…. For the record, I don’t think HR is a secret good guy. Possibly he had noble motives, once upon a time, but whatever they once were, he’s left them long behind at this point.
My understanding is that, the real reason for the experiment with the Five was to better prepare for his eventual ascension. Him not being able to pull them out and trying so hard to get them out… Well, there’s several potential motives there. Pure altruism, the bad PR that comes from accidentally killing people, HR’s narcissism…. You can argue a lot of motives there. At least in the beginning. Eventually it was just a “I should be in control here and I’m not” thing. Possibly it always was and he just became less skilled at hiding it over time, I dunno.
One could, perhaps, argue that the Five are still alive and the brain output data is hella wonky because of the magic involved and the whole soul transfer thing. Or maybe HR knew that the tubes would create a state of “deadness” but was confident in his ability to rectify that and had the fake brain readouts ready to keep Carol from nixing the experiment outright.
Thinking about this whole thing as “HR wants to find the light of the divine fire in Plato’s Cave and gain control over it and everything he’s ever done has been part of that ambition,” The Five represent an anomaly. He can’t bring them out, can’t control them, and they show that he doesn’t have anywhere near as much control over “his” world as he thought. And….I was thinking that him eventually going in before he figures out how to fix that and regain control was an error. I mean, I know I’d want to have as good an idea how everything worked before I tried to become a god.
But….I think that might be why actually. I think he felt his control slipping so he did something risky to regain control and, well, once he was in the game, getting them out didn’t really matter anymore. He has better things to do and, once he’s fully ascended, he’ll have all the power and control he needs.
There is also the off chance that he discovered the path he is on through The Five Experiment.
“I discovered this”, like some two-bit Columbus.
The first time, that final line “Did you hear thunder?” made me think that the game world was about to burst over into sepia world, and the final climactic battle would be a huge swirling fight right there in Hurricane’s basement or something. I have to admit, I was somewhat disappointed that it didn’t turn out that way. It would have felt very multi-layered to have the game-five encounter the original-five like that, and maybe save them(selves) from HR or whatever.
But, ultimately, it wasn’t to be.
We were going to get a little closer to that, at least–show more of the unnatural weather and other strange effects spilling out into Sepia World. But that was one ball too many to juggle, so that ended up mostly implied.
That thing about flaws in the writing is hard to get for me: What is the flaw, and how is it cancelled by another? You only showed any supposed EEG plots on the previous page, the same page where Xan says they aren’t EEG plots. To 99.x% of humans, EEGs are just some squiggly lines anyway, so given that this is a comic (which means you get away with … oh, say: bicycles that would break as soon as anyone sits on them, and are impossible to control…), what kind of reader would look at those squiggly lines and say “that’s not a real EEG, this story makes no sense!”?
Also … why would it be pointless to monitor brain activity in somebody attached to this kind of VR system? I mean, you practically *must* monitor it, otherwise how would you get their brain signals out to your server, and the impressions of the game world into their brain? If it’s a prototype system, you would probably especially look out for anything unusual that the participants’ brains are doing.
Even knowing that the system is actually based on magic, you might still want to check what the Five’s brains are up to, wouldn’t you?
The new direction (there are no EEGs, and HR was just deceiving Carol) is just as plausible, of course. Although it raises the question what HR was trying to achieve at the start of the story. He did not seem determined to enter the world himself, but he seemed determined to not let the Five “win”, whatever that meant. I would guess that he did plan for them to leave Arkerra after an afternoon (in Sepia World time), and he would not have advertised the feature to the rest of the gaming world if he had not planned to make it available commercially. And if that was his plan, or even if the Five were really just meant as test subjects to find out if it ws safe for HR to enter, then he would have wanted to study very precisely what happens to their bodies while their minds are in Arkerra — which might very well have included EEGs …
In short: I’m not seeing any plot hole here that would need closing. The only thing that had me scratch my head here was Xan’s assertion to be able to tell a fake EEG from a real one.
The first flaw is: We decided The Five are dead, even though earlier we stated they had brain activity.
The second flaw is: We exaggerated the look of the EEG diagrams.
ohh! That! okay, I didn’t see that as a plot hole because at this point in the story there’s nothing saying that they were (or did I miss/forget something again?). The only hints towards that scenario are Carol’s dream (which may as well just have been a dream) and the notion that the EEGs are fake. So if the weren’t fake, the Five might well be alive in their tubes.
The exaggerated look of the EEGs … really, this is still a comic, and there are, with some regularity, pictures of humans (even in Sepia World) looking more exaggerated than the EEGs on the previous page. Things are being stylized in order to stay recognizable at small scale. I thought that was how this works?
Honestly, “the five are dead” (which we know is the correct interpretation because we’re the audience and the story is already done) is really wonky. Like…did they die instantly? If so, how come nobody (Carol) noticed? Dumping all their clothes in the same trash bin/hamper seems to imply nobody expected them to survive (unless that was a fabrication in Carol’s flashback-dream). Did they die later? If so, how come they look alive (or at least not as dead as they really are) in the tubes? Carol should have noticed (unless she’s /really/ delusional). Ferris should have noticed (not that it would have mattered ultimately, but still). Shanna and Xan should have noticed by now, making the discussion about brainwaves vs powerlevels unnecessary. Are their corpses illusioned up or something? It could make sense that there was some sort of… I donno… “greater hide from notice +5” spell on them since no friends or family came looking for them (that we know of). Similarly, what exactly was HR trying to do “getting them out” if their bodies were dead? He’d still have 5 corpses to deal with unless he expected to /immediately/ jump into godmode once he had them out (or had better magic in sepia world than he’s demonstrated up to this point).
To be clear, I don’t mind that they’re dead. Honestly, it’s a more interesting direction for the plot to go in. It’s just that there’s some connective tissue missing somewhere, because thinking about it in the context of what people in the story know, see, and do doesn’t quite add up.
One more thing that is hard to make sense of in this context: If the (Sepia-World bodies of the) Five died in the course of their immersion in Arkerra — does this mean that HR’s Sepia-World body is also dead now? Or in the process of dying? Or has he found a way to prevent that from happening? Did he plan to ever come back?
Also: If the Five are in fact dead, then is there any reason to keep their bodies connected to the machine? Because HR could have saved himself a lot of trouble by quietly removing them at some stage.
As to why nobody sees them as dead: I would think that HR put some sort of illusion on them so they appear alive (or comatose, or whatever, but at least not definitely dead in a gruesome way. At least that would be what makes the most sense to me.
I’ll try to address most of this when we get to that reveal.
I don’t recall if brainwaves were specifically mentioned the only other time they were brought up (when the four ‘revived’ for the first time) but I read it as he was measuring something real (otherwise why would it stop and start based on if their avatars are alive?) but it was something that didn’t really matter to the story. HR was measuring something they were doing, and was unable to get it to do what he wanted.
Considering that there were now three or four different story threads happening at the same time, one not doing a lot while the others progressed and set up doesn’t strike me as a major issue. The basement plotline is spinning it’s wheels a bit while the other pieces get in place doesn’t really stick out.
And the line ‘I don’t know, freaking power levels’ was pretty fun exasperation of someone who knows they don’t know what they’re looking at.
What *did* happen to Bandit? IIRC, she was last seen unconscious awaiting medical attention on top of the hull of the Ultimate Engine. She doesn’t appear to be in this strip, or the last, so did Sundar evacuate her before his brother? Or have some medics already turned up and taken her to a hospital? ‘cos she wasn’t vapourised when the core went up, nor turned into a purplezerker, so what happened to her?
Sundar has her in his right arm in panel 1. Easy to miss if you don’t look for, just as I missed Taro until now, heh.
I second your opinion on the end of She-Hulk, btw.