Annotated BBWTE 4
I’m idly wondering if Penk knows Frigg’s name yet, or if he’s just trying to get on Hammerhead’s level, since Hammerhead will definitely not be learning any human names, now or ever. It seems like Penk should be committing these names to memory, but he’s got a lot on his mind. Still, if he doesn’t know it yet, he’ll learn it the next time he encounters her. Weo tends to use everybody’s name a lot.
“It,” not “she” (or even “they”).
This story was almost all Flo, and this is the Flo-iest part of it, showing the payoff of her deep investment in various races’ cultures. Hammerhead has a philosophy, an outgrowth of land shark beliefs, though obviously one his intelligence has refined further.
With hindsight, it seems like this meeting is already doomed to end like most business meetings: unproductively. Penk will struggle with his course, but he’s already on a path toward making tomorrow’s allies out of yesterday’s enemies. To Hammerhead, this is like proposing to balance the budget by wishing really hard until pencil lead turns into gold.
I really like the alt-text.
I imagine Hammerhead as the slightly-too-fundamentalist member of the movement, who cannot view any sort of peace at the end of any sort of conflict with opposing entities as anything else than selling out your own values.
They started this whole rebellion to fight against and triumph over the humans, and now Penk is making merry with them, simply because it was more convenient for fighting that other monster that showed up. He’s very clearly completely abandoned the main mission over this thing!
All you very-very-convinced idealists out there, whatever your cause may be: Please don’t become like Hammerhead. I have regular interactions with people who are, it’s grating, and Hammerhead’s arc explains why. Don’t make “kill all the bad guys” (literally or figuratively) your only win condition, because then you pretty much cannot win, and even if you did, you’d be a worse villain than who- or whatever you were opposing.