Comic for Monday, April 28th, 2025
At long last… comic.
To save you some time, there is not need to read the faint ghost text; it’s exactly the same as the visible text. This is basically relic of an earlier draft I couldn’t ‘fix’. Essentially, in the original draft of the page, one of the ‘jokes’ was that Frank’s translation would often not match what Fairway said (correcting his comments to be more diplomatic and professional). But I decided to drop it, because it was too hard to make the faint text legible with that much of it, and I felt that many people reading it wouldn’t realize what was happening, and would think Fairway sounded out of character (a problem I wouldn’t expect people to pick up since we’ve seen him so little his character is not well established).
But just deleting the ghost text wasn’t a great solution, since obviously Fairway wouldn’t speak Maslan, and the Consul doesn’t speak Central (at least, not that she would admit and not fluently).
So we ended up with this version, where the ghost text is basically pointless, but I thought if I deleted it people would forget that these people don’t technically speak the same language, since we deal with so many people that do speak both languages.
Anyway, I’m still in international shipping hell regarding my ‘day job’, but perhaps making progress. Not going to make any promises that things will resume as normal here though, given the dumpsters are actively flaming over there and I have a dozen people involved all of how manage to disagree on how anything works while reminding me that I’m legally liable for anything that goes wrong. The absolute joys of running a ‘business’.
EDIT: If anyone saw the original version written for ants, apparently WordPress added a feature that ‘helpfully’ limits the size of max size of images to 2560 pixels in their largest dimension… Well, obviously, my comics are way bigger than (this is ~5000 pixels), so it was halving the size. Apparently I made the mistake of clicking ‘update’; something we all know you should never, ever, do, because as a rule, that button means ‘make the thing worse’ for some reason in corporate software. Anyway… should be fixed now.
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No comic this week. Schedule should be clearing a bit though, so I expect we’ll get back to the at least every other week schedule this summer.
Watch Peter using this confusion and his newly acquired pathfinder to do just what they thought he did: Sneak into Central Station.
:p
I saw the faint ghost text, and thought he was being fed his lines through an earpiece. Oh, well.
I admit I didn’t understand it right away, but I think the “ghost text as translation” device works well, and I salute you for the inventiveness.
Translator or not, however, shouldn’t the Consul say “Where I’m from,” or “Where I am from,” or “Where I come from” rather than “Where I from”..?
I hope they have formal parties more often. Formal attire sees the spotlight so rarely.
I agree with Camilla’s assessment.
Even without the narrative purpose of mistranslation, I felt that the explicit inclusion of the fact they _have_ a translator, via the ghost speech, was an excellent touch
I think the odds the Consul doesn’t understand Centrian are zero. The lack of difference in translation misses an opportunity for a later strip where she obviously acts on the original information not the sanitized, diplomatic version.
Plus of course the inherent humour of having wildly inappropriate things in the original and the contrast of the translated replies 😀
Yeah, I think the original idea made for a better page, but ultimately couldn’t make it work in the time allotted without delaying again. Perhaps I will do a mini-update next week with the original version of the page for the off-week for people that check the comic obsessively even when there is no update. No promises though.
Yeah, we people who obsessively check every day, to see if there are at least new comments, do exist!
We’re a frustrated bunch, but we’re loyal. We do love our pitchforks, tho.
Sometimes there’s new comments. Those can be cool also.
I so appreciate and enjoy the complexity and level of political intrigue displayed in FSoU. It is a major reason your universe seems so real and engaging. It is also indicative of such off-the-scale people observation skills that I strongly suspect are completely wasted in you day job. You really need a wider audience. You should be writing novels, screen plays or be a master diplomat.
I had to laugh at the poster child example of the exquisite subtle message that Peter sent to the Consul by specifically excluding Kally and Naomi from his capture and “escape”. A secret message sent in plain sight, dependent on awareness of his personal behavior and a trust that the recipient is smart enough to receive it! The last two panels where the Consul ” gets” it perfectly encapsulates the subtle essence and multifaceted complexity of the entire FSoU plot line. It is impossible to do better.
I didn’t think of Peter purposefully sending a message to the Consul, good catch!
That being said, I wouldn’t put it past Peter to be a skilled brawler but hiding this skill. I was honestly wondering if he could wield magic until it was revealed in-comic. (I suspected that it was a requirement to get enrolled at Levenworth, but he seemed to never use magic. Kally once described Peter as a magician, not a mage.)
I don’t think he is sending a message. Rather, as Mium noted last panel, appearances matter more than reality. Peter is a magician that wows the audience, but doesn’t care if they peek behind the curtain when the show is over.
What makes those magicians so incredible is they’ll tell you how the trick works, then still manage to do it without you catching them. I mean, Peter literally had to explain his illusion trick to an AI to make it work.
Yes, appearances matter. But with Peter, appearances almost always ARE the message! However, sometimes it is a bit hard to decipher exactly what the message is.
Thanks. To me it seemed so obvious in the last panel when the Consul “gets” the message that I had to chuckle. (It had to be obvious as most political messages go fa above my head!)
The problem now is what exactly IS the message?
• That Peter is devious and unpredictable? That is well known old history.
• That he is up to something? That is business as usual.
• That Central security is a joke and he can come and go as he pleases? Maybe but to whom? The Consul, Central, Both?
• To foster FUD at Central and a heads up assurance to the Consul? Probably, but not the main message.
• To bolster the Consul’s bargaining chips by exposing Central’s vulnerabilities? Couldn’t hurt.
• Many more? Of course!
• All of the above?
I think you still missed an opportunity in panel 3 to illustrate the cultural differences by having the translator use different idioms than the original for “brass tacks” and “bull runnings”.
Right, I opted to have the translated text sound more like Fairway than sound more like Malsan, that’s what I meant in the commentary.
I do think the original approach would have been better in several ways, but ultimately it was an issue of time. By the time I discovered that the comic was probably to make the dual text too hard to read, it was too late to redraft the comic.
While the comic text is written fairly early in the process, its placed fairly late in the process, and I’m often too ambitious with what I can realistically convey on the page in terms of volume, and doubling a lot of the text didn’t work out.
So that left me with displaying (a) Fairway’s original text and implying it was translated, (b) the translated text covering up how Fairway speaks, or (c) the translated text overly literal to what Fairway said, and opted for (c), since it is the thing that would make the most sense without reading the commentary of the page and it would be most in keeping with Fairway’s character.
That said, I think the final version text sort of whiffs down the middle between sounding like Fairway and Frank, since I sort of combined the two scripts for legibility. It is far from perfect, but the page was already late and I didn’t want to delay again just rewrite it anymore than I did to redraft the page.
An alternative if you were making them the same anyway would be to put one speech bubble “behind” the other rather than have two separate bubbles. I guess that makes it more difficult to split meanings if you wanted to in a later comic, though.
Looks grand to me. (Of course, I read the grayed text before I read the explanation.)
Thank you for the comic. Best of luck with the annoyances!
Even without the divergence, the reminder of the ghost text that they’re speaking different languages is still handy. It also give you a good option to come back later with the occasional difference, be it from translator discretion or translation/colloquialism difference. So good to establish regardless.