Annotated 50-5
John renders a particularly tricky mix of emotions in panel 1. From the script: “Nobody looks actively unhappy to be there, but they’re all about ready to sleep for a week.”
This chapter’s about tying up loose ends, but some of our mains had way more loose ends than others. At one extreme were Gravedust and Bandit, whose new lives demanded a lot of page-space to depict them. Fr’Nj and Scipio were on the other end, having basically sewn up their arcs already. But it wouldn’t feel right not to give them a little love in the finale, so here’s Fr’Nj’s little moment: she’s first to say what everyone else doesn’t want to admit.
As usual, John delivers on every reasonable detail we scripted in: the belching contest, the “I lovvvvvvve you, man” bit between Byron and Scipio, and the two reserved sippers at right. But my favorite bit has got to be Syr’Nj, who, like her husband, is leaning on a fellow hero for support. She hasn’t been drunk like this since the series’ opening arc. Once she couldn’t even deal with the memory of her dad when sober, but time heals most wounds, and now she laughs as she urges E-Merl to “make ‘im frownier!”
FB: “But then we just said ‘screw that’ and kept drinking. ‘My Travels,’ dayyyy… what day is this?”
“Humbled human and raucous rebel alike claimed kinship with the slayers of the ultimate tyrant.”
This…never made sense to me. I mean, I get the narrative requirements obviously for a denouement, but actually fitting it into the world seems to break it?
What tyrant are they talking about? Can’t be HR. No one here except the five even know who he is and he was fought well away from everyone else who was trapped in the city. Taro? There might be arguably enough humans glad he’s outta the picture, but the rebellion as written just viewed the concept of Gastonia/Iwatania/humans at large as the enemy. But that’s also kinda irrelevant since Taro’s death was essentially off-screen for them and, more importantly, the five where nowhere near him when it happened.
How does anyone even know who these people are and why would they care? What is being celebrated here?
Not being dead or purple, I suppose.
You’re thinking about this way too literally. What’s being celebrated here is that the war is over, the people and city are safe, and these five were instrumental in making that happen. The finer details don’t really matter. It’s basically just propaganda and memes afterward.
I think most inhabitants did notice the purplezerkers, and the Tarozerker in particular, quite a few potentially even saw it battling Tectonicus. So they would know that there was something more, but I agree that to many of them, it would be hard to work out whether that came from the rebels or not, and I bet that most “average” people have had enough racism fed to them to default to the assumption that it was in fact the rebel army causing this thing, and they’d be hard to persuade otherwise.
…except if maybe the remainders of the old government (Ardaic, for instance), the rebels, Syr’Nj and a bunch more well-known representatives of the adventurers’ guild all told the same story, in which case a significant part of the people should believe that story.
Another thing that would be hard in a more realistic setting: Keeping *everyone* in the rebel army from plundering. There are bound to be some factions, units, low-level officers or just individual soldiers who have a very deep hatred for anything human, and especially Gastonian, after all those years of being treated like savages, and may find it difficult to convince themselves they should not give Gastonia some of their own medicine, at least for a night or two. I’m sure Penk would have issued very clear orders, and announced very clear consequences for those who don’t follow them, but there’s one law I can’t see not being broken a lot, at least for the first few days after the main battle is done. There should also be some Gastonian units who keep fighting, for mostly the same reasons (just the other way round, of course).
…but it’s okay. These are exactly the kind of things that nobody in the leadership wants to represent the current situation, hence a large and harmonious celebration is in order to drown out any news of transgressions, in order to put a friendlier narrative in place. Which is actually needed to allow a friendly coexistence later. These things are weird…
For me as a reader: It’s also fine, I can use a nice celebration now, after all the excitement. Maybe that’s also how a large part of the population feels?
The ultimate tyrant here is HR. Gravedust and his friends didn’t do jack to Taro.
Penk and the Champions know who HR is! Weo told them. And then they told everybody else who asked, after the Tarozerker’s disappearance up to the return of the Arkerran Five. So by the time the Five got back (possibly about a day later?), Penk had a lot of people ready to cheer…or to mourn, if it turned out they hadn’t survived.
Penk wasn’t doing this just to be a great pal. The army he had led along with his newly conquered humans were looking to him for answers: What created the purplezerkers and Tarozerker? Would they be back? What was with that big purple eye in the sky? Penk, who prefers to tell the truth anyway, soon realized that the chosen-five-versus-HR story was doing a lot to quell public unrest. As Gravedust says, it played well with the Rebels because the Arkerran Five were their allies in the war, and it played well with the humans because the group included a couple of humans and the legendary, half-human Payet Best. (The conquered humans half-expected the Savage Races to start eating them immediately after the government fell, so you better believe they’re happy to cheer any sign that humans might be praised in the new order.)
Plus the Five are pretty familiar faces to most Iwatanians, thanks to earlier news coverage as Peacemakers and Best’s overall fame. I don’t think Bedard got around to smearing them specifically, either.