Comic for Monday, October 19th, 2020
I generally try to avoid copy pasting the patreon description for the comic description, but as this one was long and perhaps helpful, I figured I’d do it this time…
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This is sort of a required B-Plot of Arron returning to Central (I mean, I could have skipped it, but it’s something that needed to be addressed). On Palindra Arron could act as Major Arron Kepler of the Central Military because who was really going to tell him to stop – it placed him outside of the IDS authority and rules.
However, returning to Central operating as Major Arron Kepler has natural and immediate consequences. While Arron is fairly popular in the military, they are naturally reluctant to get pulled into what they view as IDS affairs; the Central Military is on the surface of it a powerful faction, but don’t have a strong role currently, as almost everything has come to fall under IDS jurisdiction interdimensional, and they don’t have much of a day-to-day role in Central. Most of the military members are on loan to the IDS (or, more commonly, IDS members altogether in practice as we see with the Monster Hunter’s or Kally).
In panel 5, it could appear that Arron is threatening the general, which is sort of true, but he is threatening him with political clout, not a literal jailbreak. Arron has connections to the Civil Service (Kyle) and Interdimensional Affairs (Minerva) and far more that would make it fairly trivial for him to get someone to tell the General to let him go, as both the Civil Service and the Executive Bureaucracy would be able to intervene in that; the military could try to hold him by actually pressing charges but Arron pretty clear knows they won’t, as trying it would be a political and public relations suicide for them, given that he is both publicly popular and well connected; someone like Minerva could probably drum up post-facto permission for whatever he did leaving them with no real basis, which is the root of the problem – both sides can general find a legal basis for their actions and someone willing to sign off on them. Arron is using that to his advantage here, but all that’s really getting him is to the equal footing Biana was already on. The trickier part is getting someone to actually say you cannot do X, and then finding a way to do something about it.
Central’s government has largely devolved into a bunch of semi-autonomous subroutines running on autopilot to vaguely cross purpose goals generating proxy squabbles on other worlds. Which is to say that Arron’s job here is far from simple.
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Every society has do not cross lines. They are often so ingrained that you run into the problem of the metaphorical fish not knowing what water is. I’ve been in Aaron Kepler’s shoes with our own society’s red line blind spots. It’s legitimately hard to get people to understand that in 2020 there are people who literally, not metaphorically, have a desire to be able to legally kill babies. You have to actually define babies as separate human beings physically separate from their mothers. People just don’t believe that this is a thing even though Peter Singer’s been advocacy teaching in favor of infanticide for decades in Princeton.
The mind recoils.
But our blind spots are not the blind spots that Keppler’s facing so we naturally can see past the difficulty much faster and quicker than the general is likely to. I don’t see how to play the general’s role without him coming off as rather stupid to the readers’ eyes. That would not be fair to the general.
I look forward to see how you play this difficult situation out
I don’t see the general’s blind spot as that much more difficult to spot.
Basically, the general has been trained to always follow orders. But it’s pretty rare for someone to make it all the way up to general without being able to think independantly as well. It’s almost certain that he knows exactly what Arron’s on about, but has previously decided a particular path because it’s safer for him.
But the thing is, that path specifically required orders to not be given. It depends on all of the enlisted being robots who need orders to do anything out of the ordinary. His position is finding that he has someone who is not such a robot.
The thing is, he’s aware that he’s under a Sword of Damoclese. If he makes a wrong move, it will fal, and if he doesn’t correctly anticipate exactly how it falls, he’s dead, at least politically. But he also feels that Arron’s actions can also trigger this sword to fall. And he now understands he either needs to make a move himself to stop Arron – which will probably cause the sword to fall – or let Arron do his thing and hope that Arron doesn’t cause the sword to fall.
I used to think that generals were probably mostly pretty unimaginitive and order-bound, since that’s what the military instills into privates in boot camp, and they’ve generally been in the military for over a decade to get where they’re at. All of the generals I’ve personally met went past the ’20 year retirement’ mark, because they’d gotten far enough that they felt it was just a few years more to being a general. They had at least 30 years in the military before I met them.
But the thing is, there’s more and more room for independant thinking the further up you go, and usually more and more requirement for such thinking to get to the next level. People at Arron’s level are expected to have the potential to do this sort of move. But the people above tend to hope they don’t do it at such awkward moments.
It’s likely that Major Arron Kepler will not stay a major after all of this is over. I don’t know the exact ordering of the ranks in this world, but success probably means a promotion of at least one rank. Failure probably will get a demotion of at least one rank.
“Yours” should never have an apostrophe, as in panel 2.
I feel like it would be very easy to argue that they are in fact, “at war”. Firing an HVW at a nation’s capital is an act of war. It’s hard to spin it as anything else. (probably one of the many ways Arron could obtain necessary authorizations for what he’s doing)
In general the definition of ‘at war’ is ‘your controlling political authority has declared a state of war’, which the Council has not done and has no strong reason to do. Now, there is probably some military discretion to respond to hostile actions without an official declaration of war, but that’s based on what the *other* side does, and Malsa doesn’t seem to have committed any acts of war against Central.
As I understand it, that the Council has done essentially jack shit for awhile is now is one of the problems/plot points. They are (best I can tell) just refusing to convene for political reasons, meaning that everything is running autopilot.
Arron’s defense here is actually quite clever. Sure, they could tell him to stop, but to do that they’d need to actually start doing their job, in which case they’d also stop Biana from doing whatever she wants.
“When did I stop being Arron Kepler?”
Clearly, sometime after this scene, if ever.
…this quote just caused me to spend the better part of an hour rereading the comic to go back to the scene. This comic has so damn many great characters.
Biana and Co are going to regret pissing Arron off almost as getting in Peter’s way.
The moral of the story being:
Don’t mess with the Keplers. Any of them.
I think they had a line about that.
*digs*
Ah yes: “If you want to consider history, ask yourself, how many times in history has betting against a Kepler been the right choice?”
Um, three.
Though, there are a few things to keep in mind. There’s a record of 47 times when people bet against the Keplers in a sufficiently major way to go down in history, and two of those people were actively suicidal, which changes the meaning of “the right choice” fairly dramatically in their particular cases.
Note: in most cases, being actively suicidal doesn’t really change the equation much, because they tend to not be a rather bloodthirsty job. Now, if someone were into humiliation… but it’s rare for history to make a record of such kinks.
And then there are the rare cases where Keplers stood on opposing sides. Where upon most sane people with a choice stood well back.