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akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Bad Seafood posted:

I read Cutter's speech as him saying he kept their souls from dispersing and separating, keeping them whole, conscious, and lucid.

I'm pretty sure that the whole souls he has strapped into that thing are kept in tremendous constant agony. I don't think they are lucid anymore.

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akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Duane's such a goober, even when he's trying to be deadly serious he can't stop talking. Guess he needs to say something since he doesn't need to speak to cast.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

tentacles posted:

Whoa, I never even noticed the redacted panels, and I usually go over these things with a fine tooth comb =S Nice catch

Live in the best world.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Gally posted:

What were you expecting, her to just eat her buffer all at once? Its a chapter cover, like all the rest of the returns.

This has been the longest break between chapters she's ever done. Not to say that a longer break wasn't probably needed after wrapping up the arc, but this took so long I honestly almost forgot about this comic. A 45 page buffer seems almost excessive, but I'm not making the comic and I'd rather she has what makes her comfortable. Given the average rate of updates it's like a quarter of a year in buffer.

Still wanting a page of the comic after more than two months of waiting isn't exactly crazy; it's hard to get excited about a chapter cover that doesn't even feature a single thing we've seen before, and I at least wanted to be hype about Unsounded coming back. Instead I'm waiting for Wednesday's update.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Autonomous Monster posted:

Jivi's on it, and that could be the Queen, who we haven't seen but has been a major background character for a while.

Chill dude, you'll get your REAL PAGE tomorrow.

(it will be 100% scene-setting with no dialogue)

Uh could you like do an ms pain circle around Jivi, because I do not see him. Yes, both Jivi and Iomori(?) comment that it is a school uniform that they gave him.

Also not upset, just bummed. It's actually impossible to maintain hype for two months, and I didn't build any from that page. If you did then more power to you.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Motherfucker posted:

I'm gonna need way more good art up in my eyeballs before I can deign to muster any hype. I mean why can't you draw as fast as I can look at things??

said no one, but hey man i'm sure that your commitment to casting the most milquetoast of complaints as ridiculous hyperbole will be rewarded in shitposting heaven. clearly the reasonable fans like you should be talking about all the things in monday's page that got them excited.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Steelion posted:

I binged through the comic a couple days ago, so good timing. Reading it in one go the whole finale of the last chapter kind of mushed together a little, and it was really hard to figure out what was going on in a lot of the panels. That said I probably just missed the explanation somewhere, but how/why did flooding the tunnel save the day? Just by washing away all the people-goo that the silver was animating/feeding on?

Toma stabbed the silver's glowing weakpoints so it stopped trying to get people from the brothel on the surface and brought all it's mass into the caves, then the wall of water hit it when it wasn't attached to everything and it was washed away.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013


That was a really sweet comic.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

he's a guy who sneers at p much everybody and is a dick to them because he is acutely aware he's the lowest of the low, and everyone except Matty knows it

he amps up the hate when Duane's around because he's the rotten cannibal corpse who loudly judges him and also really is better than him at doing everything he does. Like, at least when Starfish was around he wasn't the worst guy in the room. He's just also able to work with people he loving hates when the chips are down because well that's what he does for a living.

I think he's so down on Duane in this scene because he was brutally owned by Rahm like 3 minutes ago and is taking out his frustration on a safe target. I mean the reader knows that for all Duane is a jingoistic religious nut he can pretty much always be counted on to do the right thing without hesitation or second thoughts whenever the chips are down. Quigley's a guy who has gotten a bad deal in life and has made it his business to spite those that look down on him. In the end, Quigley does have a sense of right and wrong; he's just shoved them aside while justifying his actions with the lovely world he lives in and the lovely life he's led. Someone who's had it worse and is better (both as a mage and as a person) cuts too close to the underpinnings of Quigley's ego.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

FAT BATMAN posted:

Woah, poo poo, "Adeliers" plural? If he messed with the man's family, hoo boy, the wrath this guy is calling down...

They're implying that the guy that stabbed him in the back after he helped kill Duane is Lemuel.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

T.G. Xarbala posted:

There've been hints that Lemuel was in on the hit, but I think this is the first time it's been implied that he also turned on the rest of the hitmen.

It seems like he might have been okay with killing Duane, but he was markedly not okay with whatever Bastion was doing to Duane's soul post mortem.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

SlothfulCobra posted:

I'm not sure what there is left for Elka to do. All she can really do is skedaddle with Toma and her new recruit. There's no way for her to save the town, the most she could do is run around telling people to run for it.

The rest of the cast has already decided to leave town chasing the silver, so they're not going to help. This whole place is turbofucked.

Elan's dead dude. Also Duane'd probably jump at the chance to kill some Crescians acting exactly as evil as he believes them to be.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

GunnerJ posted:

It also might be that it doesn't take a whole lot of the total amount of kinetic energy in the waterfall to get poo poo done. So there might be an effect but not an easily visible one because the energy you need to gently caress a dude up is a really small fraction of the energy all that water flow has.

I think the way it's supposed to work is that you can "hold" a certain amount of aspect in your "khert ports" and then unleash it, the more you hold the more troublesome controlling it is and the faster you have to let it go before it messes you up instead. Better wrights are just better at every step of the process, but there's also some weird bullshit with "khert lines" that link up casters to the thing they're trying to effect. I guess that the peaceguard mage is tapping an ill advised amount of power from the waterfall, so that no one else can use it. If Duane were here (or maybe Quigley) he could steal control of the set up from captain stigmata, but Elka isn't good enough to do so. If someone did hijack his spell, he would probably explode spectacularly.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Paramemetic posted:

I think the thing is that Quigley is a chump and his wife was the more skillful, but he's clearly competent because he's an illegal, unlicensed wright and that poo poo can go bad if you don't know what you're doing. That's all per supplemental material tho that isn't in the comic itself at all and only something I read while trying to remember the aldish castes, because people keep using "plat" as a pejorative despite it being the top in Alderode.

Plats are pretty much the bottom of Aldish society if they aren't wrights, or whores. And they live for less than 30 years, jets and coppers seem to be on top of political life. I don't think that Quigley is supposed to be a bad wright. The weather stuff that he does in particular is supposed to be very hard. But Duane is supposed to have been one of the best combat mages in Alderode, those red fingered gloves he had are a big deal according to the author, while Quigley was a mid level magical cop.

Gabriel Pope posted:

Right. The point is that this is the only time of that we've been told Quigley got in a fight without getting chumped, and we basically only have his word that it went down that way at all.

In one of the short stories he takes out some Cescian constructs.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013


I was just about to post how utterly unexcited I am to see budget joker wax pseudo-philosophic.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Roland Jones posted:

Oh, hey, evidence against Murkoph being Ssael. Nice. Never liked that theory.

Bad luck today friend :(

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

TheFuzzyLumpkin posted:

I don't even think it's personal, I think Lem had been descending into religious fanaticism for quite a while. Look at how he behaves on the current page. The whole "everybody can be Ssaelit" is one of the core tenants of the religion, and here Lem is talking about how Crescians can rot, which is basically the most extreme curse the Ssaelit can make.

I can't figure out what the endgame is for the Aldish, though. Duane's assassination definitely served to further tensions between the Aldish Gefendur and Ssaelit, but it seems like doing that would just weaken Alderode in its perpetual cold war with Cresce. If it came down to a religion-based Aldish civil war it definitely seems like the Ssaelit would have stood on the losing end of it, both because of their lack of numbers due to the weeping plague and because if the Crescians did sweep in during the fighting, they DEFINITELY would plan to mass-murder all the Ssaelits.

On the other hand the Ssaelit military we've seen has been confidant that they could win a war against the Aldish Gefendur even if it would be a pyrrhic victory in the end.

reignonyourparade posted:

Honestly my assumption was that Duane's assassination was intended as the false flagging of a false flag? Make it seem like cresce was trying to false flag to run up the Aldish Gefendur hate for Cresce. May have misinterpreted it I guess.

Duane became a political liability the moment he threw away the chance to be a composer, explaining why would make the Ssaelit look weaker and expose internal divisions that would further embolden their political opponents. Ultimately he's a preacher and a single skilled mage, as a martyr he unifies the Ssaelits.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

GunnerJ posted:

The gamble of the false flag here is that nationalism can counter religious enmity. Sure, it's all well and good when Aldish Gefendur want to take advantage of a loving plague to politically sideline the Ssaelit, but getting help from goddamn Crescians? gently caress that! If anything, they'd have to abandon the re-balancing just to show their loyalty to Alderode and distance themselves from Crescian terrorists.

Dunno, that seems plausible to me.

Also the Ssaelit politicians could probably spin giving up on getting a composer in exchange for sidelining the census so the Gefendur politicians can feel like their getting something for bowing to (presumed) public sentiment.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Twenty Four posted:

Unless the cut and dry pymary rules Ashley set up herself and follows pretty closely are going to get broken, I doubt this.

Ashley said wrights can't directly cast on first materials / senet beasts, and that Duane directly casts on Sette to heal her, and even uses the tanish word for "human flesh" when casting to do so. This page and the one after it go over it, and Ashley referenced it on tumblr.
http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic/ch11/ch11_16.html

Still no idea what Sette is exactly, but not a senet beast unless she is "the super most special one of all ever who can break all the rules" which i guess, but would be lame and unlikely.

Just a minor thing: you can do magic on first materials, but normally it requires direct contact and a special tool to put the spells into the first material. The whole reason the gang is heading to this temple is to use one of these machines to fix Uaid's leg since Rahm's smaller one couldn't handle the job. Sette being a "first human" with common spells already burned into her is a real stretch though.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Roland Jones posted:

Well dang, I had kind of liked Sonorie from what I saw of her, or at least was surprised and thought perhaps the rumors were wrong. Instead it seems that they, and even Duane, have underestimated just how bad she really is. I have a feeling those plots against her aren't going to go as well as the plotters hope.

Also, Chorley there is calling Bastion out. Bastion, the's an evil lawyer or something, but he's also right; you're like an overdramatic teenager sometimes.

Bell and Sonorie deserve each other.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013


It looks like Toma is missing a hand.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

PetraCore posted:

I believe it's been mentioned by Ashley that lots of plats are pampered hedonists with a side of sex work and I suppose it's not really a surprise, all things considered. Even less so if a bunch of them also have war trauma from their stints as child soldiers.

I’m pretty sure the sex workers and child soldiers are different groups. The soldiers are wrights and for all it’s pretensions of democracy Aldarode is neither going to give a valuable military/industrial/scientific asset the chance to opt out or likely to have male sex workers in its patriarchal society.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

habeasdorkus posted:

When did we see Lem being involved in Duane's current state again? I don't recall it precisely.

When Duane describes waking up after his death Len is there. It’s how Duane knows what happened after he died.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Quigly knows that the queen’s researchers reverse engineered the field spreader, which means they’ll want to destroy uaid to keep someone else from doing the same.

akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

GreyjoyBastard posted:

My first CO used to say... the real evil of Alderode is all the inhuman things they make us gleefully imagine doing in order to stop them.

But her majesty doesn't get to only imagine them.

Imperialist dictatorship carrying out an ethnic cleansing, tears running down its face, “look what alderode made me dooooo!”

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akulanization
Dec 21, 2013

Conspiratiorist posted:

Besides the catharsis inherent in airing out his shame and frustration, Quigley was looking for condemnation to distract himself while reaffirming his self-loathing internal narrative of being a despicable piece of poo poo - after all, everything happened because he wasn't strong enough, because he wasn't good enough, because he is Mathis Quigley the forever outsider, fundamentally incapable of finding happiness anywhere as everything he touches inevitably turns to excrement.

But instead, the most self-righteous ponce for hundreds of miles around, a "man" who Quigley has at-best tolerated but largely and consistently antagonized since their first encounter, and who out of all present has the cultural context to truly understand just how much of a gently caress up Quigley is, went and showed him sincere empathy.

Instantly disarmed, Quigley collapses and clings to that glimmer of acceptance.

I mean quigley says on this page that the best feeling he’s ever had in his life was being accepted and understood as he sold out his wife. Duane, for all of Mathis’s mockery, is basically the ideal ald; good enough to be righteous, cowardly enough to be pliable. Quigley must have imagined him happy, and finally getting that understanding again along with seeing his own shame reflected in Duane cuts him deeply.

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