Comic for Monday, January 22nd, 2018
Originally I just had Amy changing “Go bug Amy” to “Go talk to Amy”, but when I noticed that I’d spelled it “If its a secret” rather than “if it’s a secret” on the whiteboard I couldn’t resist the meta joke… 😉
Some faces here we haven’t seen in awhile… though probably not the faces that people are impatient to see again. This may be the longest we’ve gone without Naomi or Ila showing up. Maybe I’ll have to do more bonus art to entice patience. I still think I owe a page or two of Minus Years and haven’t put the next Patreon goal because of that yet. I don’t even know what the next goal will be, but I feel we should have one soon.
Ended up not making the most of the spare time I’ve had recently. Was a little less busy than I’ve been, but a little more wasteful with my time in equal proportion… sometimes you’re like “man, I should go spend that time productively” and next thing you know the time you had planned to spend productively has fled into squandered hours. Probably should have applied more sleep and coffee, as the intake of those things seem pretty directly related to productivity.
Also had to spend more time on my D&D groups than usual, as both of them keep running screaming off the rails in the wrong direction. Sandbox games are a pain in the arse to run when your players are morons. 😉
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2 pages ago, Panel 8: If IT IS a secret…
1 page ago, Panel 4: If ITS a secret…
This page, Panel 7: If ITS a secret…
My suggestion would be to change the writing on the wall from two pages back.
Hi! I’ve just read through the archive. First, great comic. The comments have been great! Been reading all of them for every page for last 100 pages or so (took awhile!) With so much helpful information in them, there are a few questions I am still missing if anyone knows?
Why did Mium’s hair originally have a white strip in it?
Why are Ila’s eyes yellow/gold when all the others have blue eyes?
How old is Miko? Actually, how old is any of the cast? Need to know what ships are legal. 😮
If you will allow one tiny critique, I would just note that cast does not seem very diverse. Not looking to start a flamewar here, just a thought to keep in mind.
I’ll leave answering any of those to enterprising commenters, as some theorizing would be required.
To the answers… We’ll put them down on the want to find out list. I think were into the hundreds now, so be patient in us recognizing when the answers come up.
We should actually make that list. But I have too many questions. The task is too daunting even for me.
I do not think we have a definite answer on any of those, but here are some guesses.
1) Mium is more or less confirmed to originally have had white hair (see Ila and F5). Why there was a white strip it, I do not know for sure.
2) No idea! Blame Mir?
3) This is the subject of speculation. I personally assume the characters are in their early twenties late teens. Miko is explicitly “older than she looks”, likely related to something in her past (it seems she was in a coma or something).
Re: the last point there. Remember that 99% of this comic does not take place on earth. We don’t even have confirmation that Central is earth, but we can be sure that Palindra is not. It’s not really applicable here.
I’ve been wrong before, but I believe it is established canon that Central is not Earth. Past described it as… someone from Earth would probably recognize the globe, but have trouble with the political boundaries and history test?
So alternate Earth at best.
Right, I recall that as well, it was in one of the Q&As. I think xspacetrue asked if Central was Earth and PastUtopia said that.
Either way, I don’t really think we have enough information to know if the “diversity” argument really applies. Malsans seem to be by default darker skinned with black hair, and we only really know a handful of people from Central. Orish tend to be pale and blond haired, Arponese and Resh look mostly like Malsans (which geographically makes sense). The designer children are mostly just Malsans with vibrant hair and eye colors.
There could be a question why Mium/Ila are pale skinned considering they were made by a company based in Malsa and Arpon, but considering they were also white haired and both of very low pigment eye colors (yellow and blue) its likely this has more to do with their lab created nature than anything… plus we don’t know what Mir or Martin looked like (assuming Martin wasn’t Peter all along, in which case he isn’t Malsan or Arponese).
And frankly, the cast is pretty split when it comes to most “diversity” categories anyway. Trying to be intellectual about it, just rubs me a little the wrong way when people talk about diversity where it clearly does not really apply.
It might be set in a fictional world, but it is still fiction in this world, which is why diversity is important.
First and foremost, you may rejoice! For all the characters are definitely of legal age as shown by their active involvement in the military, in what ammounts to a magical college, or the fact that they have been active for enough time to be obviously too old to be a minor! Er, Illa possibly excepted, depending on how you count age for an AI (though that could also apply to MIUM (since both of these things depend on mental age which means that the ability to speak and reason means that their mental age started significantly higher then newborn (though, to be fair, some of MIUM’s parts may be old enough as it is (though this brings up weird questions about how the combination works as a whole when it comes to age)))), so ship away to your hearts content!
Illa is a robot android robot… thing… There may or may not be a reason why “she” is a girl or has a taste for sweets, but most likely the eye color is not a specific color for a specific reason. Then again it may be an attempt to conform to Malsian “color law”, which is the reason that all the genetically modified humans have the same hair and eye color despite how unnatural it is (this despite her non-human nature).
As for Mium’s hair, that is due to the artist’s style changing, I’m pretty sure. If you go back to the very first few pages, the ones redone later to make it prettier for new readers, Mium doesn’t have a white strip like he does later. Then, over some time, it gradually fades again. Nice catch, btw. I hadn’t even noticed that. I guess an in world explanation could be that he started out with white hair and got a color job but wasn’t very good at it and missed a spot, but that doesn’t sound very believable either.
As for diversity, I generally assume the most basic explanation: Dark skin is hard to draw well, especially since facial contours, noses, boundary lines, and other parts are drawn in black, so authors take literary license to just flatten down skin tones to make the drawing process less of a headache. For instance Aladin is middle eastern, and nobody is really arguing that, but he is drawn with fairly light skin-tone simply because it makes him stand out. Similarly this often applies to indications that a person is of other races. Anime from Japan is filled with Japanese people, but art conventions make the characters look like they do even considering that the artists and authors and principle audience are all Japanese and so likely know what other Japanese people look like. Even Disney, with all the money they have and decades of experience in the buisiness, only recently figured out how to do dark skin tones without looking like blackface; and even then the characters tend to look more “brown” then truly black.
Of course the most likely in-world explanation is that Malsa isn’t the United States, sometimes known as the “great melting pot”. Most other areas, even in “the west”, are still fairly homogeneous as far as population goes. Leave the west, however, and there tends to be only one or two “races” and often these groups are close enough that outsiders may not even be able to see the difference. That isn’t to say that globalization isn’t happening or that the world in general isn’t getting more “diverse”, just to say that even the real world isn’t as diverse as the traditional “Politically Correct” view would believe. In fact the very existence of races hinges upon the fact that diversity isn’t ubiquitous, otherwise the process of intermarrying would mean that everyone would generally have brown skin, brown hair, and brown eyes and rarely would have much variance from those norms.
Even just speaking about the characters from Central there is another problem: who would be best to be turned into a minority? The Summers are a possibility, but their family situation (from what it has been hinted at though Calisto’s background) has shown signs of being so dysfunctional that having them be the main biggest example of Cestraleese minorities leads to unfortunate implications. Peter being someone who is impossible to pin down as “not being evil” and being tricky and underhanded enough that even his allies look down on him means that he, and though him the entire Kepler family, is likely not a good choice either. Most of the rest on the other side are either some shade of incompetent or a designated bad-guy (Sophie is a girl, but still), so making the antagonists a minority while the main protagonists are not is asking for trouble. The IDS Criminal Investigations underlings are just that: underlings, and so making one of them a minority ends up looking like adding a token minority. So who is left from Central? Elizibeth? Better to avoid the entire minority issue completely than to risk making a larger problem trying to fix it.
That tends to be the hidden dagger in the back that comes with trying to be PC: anything short of avoiding the entire issue can easily become a trap, it is just too hard not to make a mistake. It is better to just focus on what is important (the story) than to spend too much time trying to figure out how to not be offensive in one way or another.
Thanks for the indepth reply!
My note on diversity was more of a reminder than a criticism really. I know it is not the first thing that a lot of fiction writers think about when making a world and story, but it is an important thing to consider.
Just to consider, Tyler definitely could have been a good candidate, as he’s a foreigner to Malsa as well, and diversity does cover a lot more than just skin color, though that is a good start.
I think the note that dark skins are harder to draw is interesting, but also sort of troubling. I think there is a lot of criticism to level at anime for diversity (as well as OTHER representational issues, I have a lot of problems with anime), and I am not sure that it being harder to draw is a good reason, or at least the conversation should be more around how to solve that, rather than using that as an excuse.
Webcomics are just a great opportunity to have the diversity that print comics and fantasy novels so frequently are missing.
Yes… been a long time since we saw Ila. 🙁
Each time you talk about D&D it makes me want to drive up there. 🙁 So salty. </3 (j/k <3).
Shoo, you. We both know you just want a new Ila avatar.
And here I thought running the game off the rails was what being a player in a sandbox game was all about. 😉
I think my favorite example of that from personal experience was my ex-wife loading her character with monster languages and negotiation skills, which the GM responded to with, “There really isn’t that much use for that in this game, but it’s your character, fine.”
Then we had our first encounter. She got initiative. One successful negotiation roll later, and we were finished with the entire first module the GM came up with, because he had no idea how to handle a successful negotiation roll, despite having a week of notice that one of his players was bringing that to the table.
I don’t really mind, it’s just that running a sandbox game is all about ‘draw distance’. Even if I have the broad strokes of the world, I don’t render details unless it looks like it’ll be in the players path, so when they spin about in random circles because they have the focus of drunken gerbils it’s hardmode 😉
I wonder how much focus that actually translates to.
Not much focus. Most rodents lose their laser focus as soon as they become inebriated. FoaF had this guinea pig…
panel 2: whatever, not whever
Fixed, thanks 🙂
Was “Skyammer” in panel 7 a deliberate mispronunciation?
… … … yeah… deliberate…
Haha, I sort of like the idea, given that it’s skyhammer in Central, not Malsan, but ultimately I decided playing with that was too linguistically complex, so…
The current version would just be confusing though, so fixed it 😉
Panel 5: if you guys are going to bicker
Panel 8: like taking a nap
Haha, fixed, thanks 😉