The Far Side of Utopia

This will be one of those long commentaries, conveniently divided into sections for you’re reading convenience. I recommend skipping all of the sections, it’s mostly just me rambling 😉

Comic Commentary:

I tried to warn you he talks a lot… and with no one around to shoot him… 🙁

Pre-emptively – is it wise to go around advertising you blow things up for the IDS – probably not. Does the IDS approve of that? Probably not. They, after all, the good guys. He said so. Right there.

But sometimes things need regulating. With explosions. And there is a guy that does that. I think we are talking to him. He’s sort of an outsourced contractor, as he’s local to this world. Some people might call his band ‘mercenaries’ but that would be awfully rude of them.

I gambled on using a “than” again in the comic. I’m sure someone will let me know in comments if I got it wrong again 😛

Style Commentary:

While ago I deliberately stopped drawing the characters from the same angle several shots in a row while talking (most of the time) to get away from the talking head syndrome. I sort of went back to on this one mostly because it amused me to run through Mium’s facial expressions (or lack there of) as our Red-Eyed-Friend ran on.

Character Appearance:

It’s… sort of hard to determine the age of the characters. When REF (Red Eyed Friend) refers to them as ‘children’ one can be forgiven for thinking he doesn’t actually look any older than Mium. This is double confusing since he… doesn’t actually look much older than Mium. He probably is, but he’s also probably mostly referring to Ila (who hopefully does look younger).

Additionally he jumps to the conclusion they are siblings; looking at them side by side in universe, they would intentionally look very similar. While I suspect it’s less obvious in the art as, well, most people look sorta similar sometimes and it’s not all the consistent, I do try to draw them in with as many similarities as possible given their differences of size/gender/etc. It’s a reasonable in-universe assumption looking at both of them – we’ll see why that is at some point 😉

The rest of his assumptions… well. REF has a very active imagination. That was probably influenced by watching too many movies.

Extra Q&A Question:

I got another question for the Q&A a little late to include in the Q&A Comic, but I figured I’d answer here as well, since I answered it in email already. Be warned, this is a rather long rambling explanation 😉

Does your magic respect the laws of conservation of energy and momentum?  If so, where does the extra energy come from?

It’s complicated! But no, not really.

Essentially magic works by altering the Form of something in Eidos, or creating an artificial form. For example, when Ila speeds up the rock, she is taking the “Rock” in Eidos and essentially just adding a large number to it’s velocity with with each gate, and the rock is then therefor moving that fast in the world.

Now that isn’t free – it does take mana/psionic energy, but the mana psionic energy isn’t interacting with the actual rock to accelerate it, it’s just required to make a change to Eidos, with a greater amount required based on how large the change is, and how much the change defies the normal rule set of physics and so forth. As soon as the mana flow stops, the object starts obeying normal laws again – if it was accelerated, it stays going that speed, but will slowdown to friction, etc.

In the case of “fake” objects that are just artificial forms created in Eidos without a real world counterpart – like the glowing hand Ila creates or the barriers most of them create, those simply cease to exist once the mana flow stops making them exist.

You can make a real object, but it’s hard, and takes a fairly large amount of power, but once made, it would stay since it doesn’t break the rules.

The best analogy I’ve come up with is to think of the comic world physics being run by a game engine; when you alter Eidos, instead of working inside the physics engine, you’re altering or creating a game object in code, but that change has to be sustained by mana/psionic energy. The world just tries to catch up to whatever you’ve done and move on like nothing happened.

The fact that the logical implication of this is that you can actually “create energy” – something impossible ‘inside’ physics/science since its generally just the conversion of some form of energy to another form of energy – doesn’t escape the people in-universe. If you’ll recall that’s the driving force behind them trying to make magic that can run without a human; if they can master that, they can get unlimited free energy (in theory – it would still require mana/psonic energy to sustain, and we haven’t covered where that comes from – though Mium clearly can use it, and he can’t do most magic 😉 )

Basically there are two principles of magic that relate to the question than; 1) Material world energy can be created, but at the cost of mana, and 2) Just as Eidos changes the Material world to suit what’s written there by the mage, any change that defies the general laws of the material world collapses as soon as mana stops sustaining it; the greater the difference the greater the mana required – this is why physical bullets can break a Eidos shield – the more force applied to something that shouldn’t be there, the harder it is to sustain.

There is more to, but it gets even more complicated from there, so I’ll call that good enough 😀

When in doubt, you can always remember that the system was designed by a Philosophy Major who does Programming for a living, and got his Physics education from Wikipedia… you can probably guess which side of things it’s going to be more influenced by 😉

Bonus Content Notes:

The bonus content (TWC, Vote Incentives, Blog Posts, Patreon Drawings, etc) have be pretty light recently; I’m aware. Even as Patreon followers may have noticed the comics are pretty close to unbuffered. Unfortunately I have a few too many pies in the oven at the moment. As many know my other job is develop games, and this I’m currently neck deep in working on one (these are one person studio games, nothing to fancy, but it’s a lot of work to make a game on your own 😉 if I have something to launch I’ll announce it here for those that may be interested).

But I’ll come up with stuff soon one or another, so stay tuned.