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Chapter 20: The Shadow of Siegfried - Part Two So, with Milov having just symbolically murdered Jaden, instantly the focus shifts to how Jaden is really the one at fault. I will say I hate how Milov frames his violent attack as a "lack of control". It's such a stereotypical excuse for this kind of violence. Just absolving the man of agency and responsibility in the act. One thing I want to point out here too is that Jayden expresses that this is an almost unforgivable betrayal, before the narrative establishes that cheating is an ur-sin in "werewolf culture". In fact very little time is spent establishing the rules werewolf culture prior to this point, other than their insularity. I point this out because everything that is happening in this narrative is under Mookie's control, and I hate it when fans of the work will defend problematic elements by stating that there is an in universe explanation for it. I don't think anyone in this thread would do it, but I remember at the time people defended Milov's response by referencing the explanation Mookie will provide, as if that could justify this arc in the first place. It doesn't, and the fact that Mookie only goes about justifying this response after this big emotional moment shows that this is really what he was after.  This strip on its own is fine, except for being part of this narrative. But it's followed by...  This strip! I really cannot fathom Mookie's need to undercut any drama or genuine emotion in his comic with these jokey asides with the worst side character in the world. Of course, even though Dominic's sin is tiny in comparison to the apparent magnitude of what Jayden did (just look at the description she gives here), Dominic can still get to feel bad and have a little bit of pathos about betraying a friend without facing any real consequences.  And see, right into to pure comedy for the weekend strip. Though I will say it is noticeable clear that once again the joke is "teehee nudity".  Here's another strip where Mookie is trying to juxtapose two conversations together like you would in a TV show. Again I don't think it really works, and makes the conversations feel a little disjointed. But yes here's where we learn that Nimmel isn't just a student who was accepted into the prestigious Coldfire Academy, but in fact the first human or foreigner to be ever accepted at all! For something that was introduced as an aside in a previous trip, it's funny how unique and singular this privilege that Nimmel is getting is. One wonders how he even managed to organize it, if this wasn't a normal thing to happen. It's not built up as a special exchange or diplomatic efforts or anything. Also, Luna, always keeping the most important thing in view, of course immediately reverts to feeling bad about herself and what she said, so that Dominic can comfort her about her loyalty to the friend that she has instantly stopped thinking about. And apparently left alone? That's cold, Luna.  Milov is a drama queen.  To start with, just a little thing, but I hate that Nimmel knows that part of the house is blown apart in the first panel there. There's no establishing shot saying that they were near the house, no indication of where they travelled or how far they are from the city that they were just in, and no indication that he noticed it prior to the howl. It’s these little moments that Mookie does that make his world feel fake. Just a little bit more establishing time, a little bit more thinking about where and how these characters are interacting, would help a lot in removing the feeling that all of this is a stage play with all the supporting cast standing just off panel. That's a lot of information to communicate with one howl when you think about it  Nimmel, being a Deegan surrogate, of course becomes immediately judgmental of this culture that he is entering, and gets caught up in his own stupid melodrama instead of making any attempt to understand the gravity of the situation. The heir to Luna if there ever was one. Clock the use of nudist as an insult here too. There's just something so Freudian about every interaction with sex in this comic  The dialogue is ham-handed, but I don't hate this explanation as to why Jayden would start being attracted to Siegfried. There's probably a good YA romance love triangle in this story, if it was not being written by Mookie. I don't think writing about infidelity needs to inherently be misogynistic or patriarchal in its framing. But, it's the little things that make this story problematic. First, Milov is of course blameless and perfect in every way, despite coming from a culture that apparently tolerates and even celebrates violence. Of course, he must be perfectly blameless and a perfect gentleman up to this point, even with his sudden homicidal rage. Second, the invocation of the bad boy nice guy trope by Luna, which is tired and clichéd...  Third, the general framing of giving in to temptation, which is applied to jayden but not to Siegfried. You'll see in a strip of the later on, that Jayden believes that she lead Siegfried astray, exactly reproducing the tropes of the wicked seductress and the very common misogynistic belief that women's sexuality exists to corrupt and entrap men. Old-school St. Augustine poo poo here. I don't know what's happening in that last panel there but it doesn't look like a very comfortable position  Unable to maintain focus for more than two strips, Mookie yet again shifts to spark with the sight gag so old and terrible the Looney Tunes wouldn't run it  And then makes it even worse by referencing it in the next strip as if it was a serious event that could have had consequences. I don't know what the PFFT joke is supposed to be about.  Katya at least does not fly into a murderous rage, so I'm more willing to accept her apology. It’s a little rude, but as far as werewolves go, I think she probably has the best way of expressing her anger. I will say that at this point I think some rules as to how this spectre is able to manifest would be good for us to understand the stakes of his appearance. So far it's just been gruesome visions, but with some of the action to follow, it's very unclear how literal were supposed to be taking any of it  See? Are those actual blows that Milov is landing? Is he punching the air, or the walls of his house? Or this purely happening as head? No way to know  This will be an extended sequence of these sort of weird experimental strips here. And I have to say I don't hate them as an idea. It was genuinely a new thing to try so kudos to Mookie for that. But I will say that much like the demons in the war in hell, this whole sequence exists to confront Milov with a truth he is avoiding, that he did break his promise to Jayden that he would never hurt her, and was violent in the way that he should consider dishonourable. And just like in the war in hell, instead of facing up to his truth, Milov will be rescued by Dominic who will absolve Milov of his sins and tell him that all of his negative feelings was just a demon playing with his emotions  I love how corny that dialogue is. That's the best Mookie can think up with for how Siegfried seduced Jayden.  Yes, that is indeed Dominic's scarf breaking through like a Beetlejuice worm. Much like an Elder God, his signs appear before he does.  Thank goodness Dominic was here to save the day and prevent Milov from thinking at all about what he has done. Mookie sure does love these power poses for Dominic, just standing in total dominance over the puny owner of the mindscape he’s in. This will reach its natural, again very Freudian, apex with this strip:  Which I’m just going to leave here without further context.  I hate these little moments of suffering on Dominic's part, because there obviously meant to elicit sympathy from us, to show the pain and effort that Dominic is putting himself through help his friends. But none of it is earned. Every time it's just Dominic manifesting an all-powerful psychic avatar in the other person's mindscape, and manipulating reality however he wants to. The fact that he gets a nosebleed in the real world doesn't change the absurdity of the power level Dominic is working on, which he apparently earned by being a nerd in high school. What stakes are there to any of this if Dominic can just purge Siegfried?  I guess were supposed to understand that Milov went from his family compound back to the conclave or whatever between panels six and seven. And more nonsense generalities about loyalty and betrayal, with no further examination as to what a society with this strict rule code would actually be like.  See, what exactly is Milov supposed to show loyalty to in this context? Mookie's characterizations of other cultures is so boring. First he undercuts drama by get again having jokey asides, and then because he identified loyalty as being the most important thing to werewolves, Milov also has to "show loyalty", because everything in their culture revolves around that one concept. Not even "face" or honour, it has to be loyalty again. Get ready for the most awful part of this arc!  Here's what I was talking about earlier, Jayden gets straight up assaulted by Katya, with I'm sure Mookie thinking it can be forgiven because they were both women. Again look at the viciousness with which he draws Katya breaking Jayden's nose, and the language she uses which is obviously Mookie using her as a mouthpiece. The pulling up by the hairs also very visceral and terrible as an image.  Here's where he doubles down on the problematic weird poo poo. The canonical explanation for why Katya did what she did, and the reason why she will get away with it, is because she is literally mentally handicapped and is therefore prone to violence. I know the framing is not at all mentally handicapped people are violent, that he's physically saying only this very specific type of mental handicap because it, but given that a slur that will be used against Katya in "A Nimmel House" is "Runtard", the parallel Mookie's drawing is obvious. Mookie loves invoking this idea of uncontrollable rage as somehow primal and true, as a way of excusing the violence itself. Here, Jayden even says that she is inviting this violence are self as penance. That's a hosed up thing for a character to say. I do find it funny that one of Mookie's obvious avourite fantasy cultures in his setting once again proves to be horrifying in some way that should be really unconscionable to the characters, but no one will mention it. Killing disabled children at birth! The Werewolves are just as the best! Of course the idea loyalty is once again raised up.  It wouldn't be s Luna and Nimmel moment with at least one of them reminding the audience about all the baggage these characters have.  Again, classic Luna dialogue, where her emotional fragility has to be front and centre, and the only thing that matters about her character, even after all the growth she really should've gone through by this point. I like how this is about to be a tender moment between Luna and Jayden, but the focus has to be on Luna's failures and not on Jayden’s suffering, even though she is the ostensible focal point of this arc.  We now learn that apparently Milov is the one who founded the Magic school Nimmel is going to. Milov, like every Mookie proxy, must immediately be elevated beyond being a normal good guy, to become a singular exemplar for their people. Everything good emanates from them. Any flaws they may bring up are instantly dismissed, the very act of bringing up the flaw being itself a sign of humility. It's excruciating. Also I love that Milov "benefiting his family" (let's generously assume this means his broader clan) is just listed as an unqualified good by Nimmel. As it was welcoming the evangelical Luanian church. Both of these could reasonably be places where maybe there could be some disagreement as to whether or not Nimmel was the greatest, but of course Mookie won't examine that.  Mookie interrupts his heavy-handed drama for yet more terrible puns. Of course Luna and Nimmel together instantly revert to their codependent sadsack ways and commiserate over their shared shitiness. This is also the seriousness with which Mookie treats a character like Siegfried's fall from grace. You can really tell that he hated revisiting this. We were just supposed to accept Siegfried as deserving of hell.  A perfect cliffhanger to leave this review on, what follows is a whole ton more psychoplane nonsense. Nice Russian alcoholic joke there, Mookie.
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Jul 14, 2021 13:43
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 Mookie's just loving with us now.
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Jul 16, 2021 06:19
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Captain Oblivious posted:Remind me, didn't Nimmel end up hooking up with Katya? As a designated Quasi-Deegan it was his right to magnanimously heal broken women with his Nice Guyness or something. Yes, his whole college arc is situated around her and the way THE JOCKS treat her. Famously, Nimmel will declare that the reason he came to that island full of "emotion craze beast people" is because his winter based spells made it so he could dominate them. This will cause her to swoon, as it should.
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Jul 17, 2021 00:46
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Similarly, I don't think Mookie is bored with Snout. Quite the opposite, I think he's getting emotional catharsis out of this soft boy and the world that bends and dotes around him, sort of like watching insipidly cute animal videos on facebook. He just doesn'\t understand how the story reads to someone without a deep emotional investment in the character.
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Jul 17, 2021 02:32
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But that's also because formal surnames aren't a thing for most of human history. LIke Leonardo da Vinci's full name was Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, because that's how Medieval italians generated a surname structure (son of x, from y), if you weren't from a noble house. Everybody in Deeganverse has a formal surname like they have a census or something. Also, despite Prento apparently writing an entire book, the only information we or Snout seems to have gotten is from the preface. Like maybe the full names of the students could have been assumed to be somewhere in that big rear end book? No, apparently the only thing Snout had time to read was the intro.
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Jul 19, 2021 17:15
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 Honeslty, could Mookie even come up with a more condescending way of presenting Snout. He's literally an inspirational figure by just sitting around vacantly staring.
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Jul 21, 2021 05:49
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Mors Rattus posted:Fun fact: one of the biggest subtle ableism issues (as opposed to obvious ones like inaccessibility) is inspiration porn dehumanizing the disabled and making them just a tool for the abled to feel better about themselves. Yeah this is what I've been trying to articulate when I call this all condescending. Snout is literally a charity case, every good person around him swarming up to give him a maternal smile and let him know it's all going to be ok, the poor little freak. It's saccharine and infatilizing.
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Jul 21, 2021 16:51
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He also looked up information in a book that was directly useful to his goals, and had little montages of his basic survival activities. He was presented as solitary, maybe in a little over his head, but competent. Versus now, where even his library visits are overseen by benevolent parental figues.
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Jul 22, 2021 17:34
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Chapter 20: the Shadow of Siegfried Part 3 we start with some fanart time including mostly just to show how Mookie was a part of the web, community at the time. And how much better most of them were that he was at drawing     this is just a small thing but I hate that second panel. He always feels the need to call out how much efforts saving the day is for Dominic. If he just did it sparingly, it would be fine. But Mookie has a constantly remind us of what a good dude Dominic is and how much he suffers for everything that goes on.  again this is pretty cliché, the blood coming out of the nose due to psychic stress in particular. But I hate is also that Mookie can’t think of any way to represent mental combat other than physical sword swings. What exactly does that represent? What sort of damage is Siegfried doing? And how are they fighting back? There is no difference between these mental battles, and Luna physically blasting people with magic laser beams.  I do have to credit Mookie on at least experimenting a little bit with the format. But it gets old fast  Here at least we understand that the armor that Milov is manifesting appears to come from his memories of Jayden. That’s at least something that you can point to as a symbolic representation of a abstract idea being used in mental combat. Now if only Mookie would do it at any other point when he does these sort of things.  I like that it’s memories of friendship with Siegfried that keep him at bay here.  Mookie then instantly ruins whatever moderates coolness his story had generated by having Dominic call out what just happened and explain it in the dumbest terms. Am I the only one who feels this way? That calling out what you just represented symbolically in art effectively ruins the symbolism? Even just having characters acknowledge it in universe annoys me. Just let it stand on its own!  More harping about poor widdle Dominic. Don’t worry though, he’s just going to hand off his duties to the proxy Deegan. I mean this literally, he will tell Nimmel what to do, because heaven forfend that Dominic not still be the ultimate controller of the situation.  Loyalty in this case will be blowing up a church. I don’t hate this beat, of having Jayden imagine a reconciliation like this, on its own. But too little this story has been about Jayden up to this point, so it doesn’t really feel like it makes sense.  I’m just as well the surprise, the person Dominic is talkingis yet again his mother. Once again the protagonist of this web comic calls his mommy and to solve his problems.  Pretty obvious that this comic was addressed to Mookie’s angry fans, accusing him of once again allowing Dominic to manipulate everything. You’re really starting to see the feedback loop of Mookie trying to get ahead of his critics.  Werewolves wear the dumbest clothing. It’s a tiny thing but I love the absolutely enormous pine trees. Look at the scale of those tiny figures next to them. Mookie did some filler art at this point. None of these things would actually come to pass.     this is another dynamic that I hate about Mookie story. Even places where it would make sense for there to be xenophobia, he can’t commit to it. Instantly, the tension of Nimmel being the stranger here is diffused because obviously it’s only a few bad apples who are distrustful of him, despite all the buildup we’ve had about how resistant the werewolves should be. He doesn’t need to prove himself, he doesn’t need to prove the villains wrong in any way, instantly people love him because he’s a protagonist.  this seems an extreme course of action but given how little we know about werewolf culture in general, it’s really not possible to tell whether or not this make sense. I know that fantasy stores can can err on the side of too much world building, but it really feels like Mookie is the other extreme. Everything about the werewolves exist just as convenient props for Mookie to use in his story, they don’t feel real.  of course, yet another chance for the Deegan clan and hangers on to talk about how awesome and cool and special they are. I can’t really speak to Milov’s whole proclamation and then immediate backpedaling, other than to say that again it makes the actions and punishment seem arbitrary.I mean, none of the other priests in the archipelago did anything wrong either.  of course, everybody has heard about the attack already, since no one can have partial knowledge in the Deeganverse. At least is a chance for some drama though!    More filler  Except, no, wait, nevermind. Nimmel is instantly able to talk his way out of it. I hate how quickly this resolves and how instantly opposition to Nimmel melts away in the space of one strip. It’s just so lame! He is not to prove himself, he doesn’t have to deal with his guilt coming back again or anything. Just three panels of dialogue and everything is resolved. Hell, the elder who called him out even sort of like him now. It’s very tedious and one note to keep harping on the loyalty thing of the werewolves over and over again. We get it. Nimmel will obviously learn no such thing during his college frat arc.  time for the climactic final battle  again, is this real? Is this an illusion? Dream? Who knows.  Have to get in Tessa choking in the corner there. Would not be a Deegan fight without a woman in peril!  I’d like some information on how this sacred protection works, because it’s interesting that two wildly different pantheons appear to provide the same protection. It doesn’t really matter but again, I at least prefer there to be some consistency or logic in magic so that you can know what to expect or guess at what the solution might be. But that’s just me.  so, we’ve established that this is all happening in some sort of mental plane, right? Because their bodies are physically on the ground in the church.so did Milov and Nimmel incept their way in? Are they unconscious now too? Could Nimmel do this before? Are those still happy memories Milov is using to kamehameha everything?  What does “where’s Jayden” mean in this context? Is there actually a set geography to this mental plane? People can get seperated and lost on it? What does that mean?  once again, demons are just able to flip an evil switching you and turn you over, without any actual effort on their part to tempt you or lead you astray. It’s the dumbest sort of demonic possession. Mookie should have spent at least a strip having the Siegfried apparition talk to Jayden and turned her against Milov  again, no real set rules at the heart of this is supposed to work.  Finally, we get to the point of this. Time for the character assassination of Sigfried Gunther Aern Damaske von Callan.  another filler, I’m including it because this is where you see movies weird fetish for cannibalism in hell, for the first time. Whenever there is a subsequent arc in hell from this point on it’s going to be tons of people eating people  of course the solution is that good old Deegan staple  Here it is, yet another infamous strip in DD history. Mookie took one of his most nuanced characters, the one whose death was maybe legitimately the only truly impactful event in his entire comic’s history, and retroactively makes him a literal child murderer. Setting aside the analysis of how an apparently teenage Siegfried would even go about committing this mass murder on his own, I want to talk about authorship and authorial intent here. Mookie, like a lot of immature people on the Internet, understands fiction as if things in it just happened, and onto a product of deliberate intent on the part of the author. Here he was trying to get people to stop liking Siegfried, so just like with Blackhole Bill In Star Power, he has the character do what he thinks is an unforgivable act. But since he already lost his fan base’s goodwill, they were willing to follow along with this, and were rightfully angry that Mookie undermined his own narrative because he disliked the fandom one of his characters was getting. I’ve been thinking about what authors owe their fans, and I think with serialized fiction in particular, there is a certain responsibility not to ruin things retroactively like this. I mean, there’s nothing ultimately anyone can do about Mookie’s choices, but I don’t think by this point in the comic anyone owed him any sort of goodwill or meeting him halfway. Anyway, sort of random musings, but it’s making me think about how much fiction at its best is somewhat of a collaborative art between the author and the audience, and that when you lose that collaboration you end up with things like legacy, where the author is second-guessing his own work to thwart his audience. Or pieces whose only audience is people who hate it.  see, Jayden hates him, now you should too!  This is the last time Jayden will speak until the wedding, I’m pretty sure.  just absolutely allergic to tension.  Problem solved ! Moving on! Don’t dwell on Sigfried or his fate! He’s done and gone and you don’t need to think about him anymore!  Of course, once again, Luna’s sole characterization is that she is ugly and has low self-esteem because of it. Somehow in an art that didn’t even need to include her at all, she still manages to slip in some self-pity.  see! Once again it’s about her and her ineptitude! It can never be about anyone else. She is literally the worst character ever. Mookie also loves having his characters make little effigies to vanquish their foes symbolically. It’s weirdly childish, and the fact that it happens so often with a variety of characters makes it all the more weird   Just blows up a building with people nearby! Hopefully there’s no shrapnel or debris! I love just how unnecessarily violent this last act is. No ceremony, no planning, just magic laser beam. And of course Jayden had to watch it happen too.  and of course, Milov still gets to be the good guy in the end. He doesn’t need a vow of silence or a death pilgrimage to redeem himself! Obviously Mookie was responding to people pointing out how terrible milov was being, so this letter is here to once again right the scales and make it clear that no Deegan friend can ever be bad in any way. What follows are 3 strips pushing the overarching plot forward. I don’t have much to say about them, other than I don’t hate them.    next up,a stupid fake out leading to a dumb marriage proposal, and then yet another incredibly stupid arc that I actually am very excited for, The Oracle Hunter!
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Jul 25, 2021 22:08
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Twelve by Pies posted:
Yeha I'm pretty sure Mookie was trying to underline it for the audience. We knew that Siggy had participated in the war on the Orcs, but Mookie wanted to underline that he personally massacred people and enjoyed it.
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Jul 26, 2021 00:28
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Regalingualius posted:Man that’s some crazy timing, though, to have the batch of strips depicting Siegfried lynching some orcs be posted on Emmet Till’s birthday. O.O Totally unintentional I assure you
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Jul 26, 2021 16:59
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RoboRodent posted:Oh yes, I, too, sleep contorted so that both my rear end and tits point towards the ceiling and any unseen voyeurs. 
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Jul 29, 2021 01:34
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His arm is in an unatural position, because the original is much more of a flat overhead view than the angle Mookie drew the headboard at.
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Jul 29, 2021 14:08
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Chapter 21: Endings and Annoyances. This one is nice and short, and really only represents Mickey's inability to ever have his protagonists in conflict.  I think from the transition from the previous strip were supposed to understand that the Infernomancer is the one who attacked the the temple mentioned in the paper, but because of the way the archive is separated it really breaks the flow between the two strips and makes it harder to parse that. As for the royal knights disbanding, it again raises the question of exactly how Callan functions and what role they played in its legal structure. Were they like the FBI? Or the RCMP? It's just so stupid to have this nation with all the trappings of a modern state, but called medieval words. Also goth jokes in 2007  So here again we see that the royal knights were apparently infantry and police force of the kingdom? Wouldn't that make the kingdom a sort of military junta, if the legal system as it administered directly by the military? Without a basic understanding of how Callan works, there is no way for the reader to suss out why any of these changes are good or bad. Why is a wizard army a bad idea? Given that you go to study magic in school, why not give all your troops magic powers? Also those last four panels seem to imply that all the magic users in the royal knights got to stay around because of their magic. How is that even disbanding, then?  Mookie sure does love a having his female characters lust after male characters during every interaction. Look at how long that torso is partly got along those arms are. Stretch Hansi.  Here's a fun preview of what's to come with the March across Maltak. Now tack is a seemingly almost flat plain of undulating dunes with mountains in the distance, always in the distance no matter where you go.  Dominic to be a huge rear end in a top hat. Nice of him to remind his girlfriend about this in front of people. And I'll say it again but Mookie's slurs are a little too close for comfort to real ones for her to be using them as often as he is  I love how Dominic contextualizes this as being a grouch instead of being incredibly petty dick with no impulse control. Obviously Mookie thinks that Dominic is at least partially at fault here, but it's funny that Mookie's idea of Dominic behaving a little badly is literally infantile behaviour.  And of course, with Hansi coming into the protagonist circle, any of his participation in previous atrocities or previous acts of harassment and bigotry are washed away. He didn't really mean any of those things he was forced to be that way by the Knights! No introspection to be had and no sins to be forgiven, it turned out he was a good person all along  This is a stupid juvenile attitude toward sex, , I hate that Mookie thinks it's funny that the dude is like catatonic because of sex.  this is a trying to say that both sides are bad, but again it's really just Dominic being a huge dick again. Luna is giving him a mild ribbing at most and he accuses her of losing her head over her coworker leaving, after his own insanely childish outburst. The one time Lune is really expressing a genuine emotion that isn't her reframing the situation around her own inadequacy, and Dominic accuses her of being self-centred. If I didn't know better from reading the rest of this comic I would swear Dominic was gas-lighting Luna  I like how most of these questions are fairly innocuous and exactly the sort of thing that you might go see your local, confirmed real, fortuneteller. What's wrong with asking if someone likes you? What's wrong with having fun with the dude to see if he's legit? This only works as a side against the townspeople of Barthes if you think that Dominic is so important that he can't spend his time doing his god drat job.  Again, a perfectly fine reaction from Luna here because her boyfriend is a manipulative, borderline abusive jerk, and she is finally waking up to it. I mean, that's not really whats happening, but it's how you could take it. It's really clear that Mookie wants to frame it as both of them being irrational, but Dominic is clearly worse in every way! Luna's annoyance with him is the first time she seemed like a real person!  Actual drama the relationship! Maybe even the chance that Mookie would put them on a break so that their twee romance scenes would stop for a while? A glimmer of something interesting happening in this comic that wasn't just Mookie directly channeling his Id onto the page?  Luna has a mental illness brought on by years of abuse and neglect, Dominic has a fantasy ailment that doesn't actually happen in the real world, so of course Mookie equivocates them. Luna is also right that Dominic allows the visions to control his life and deliberatly feeds into them. And also if Dominic doesn't like how Lunas feelings of inadequacy manifest maybe he should stop feeding her weird codependence with him, since it's not like prior to this point he did anything to try and help her work through her issues other than telling her to rely on him. It's also funny that the last series of strips does feature Dominic being a grouchy rear end in a top hat and manipulative withholding of information, while Luna has in no way been self-deprecating or acting in her usual sadsack way, instead we're inching again a genuine emotion of loss for a relationship, while not expressing that to the coworker who is moving on to better things, which is exactly the right thing to do in that situation.  So here's how Dominic turns it all lovey-dovey again, and commits a personal "sacrifice" that in no way will actually be a hindrance moving forward. She has him tapping rocks was him talking to the rock elemental from before. Dominic gave up his leg, which is why he falls to the ground, because I guess his prosthetic leg was magical or something. I don't remember. He'll get a new one, and it will go back to not affecting his ability to move or do things at all. Mookie loves the symbolic sacrifices that cost the character nothing in reality. It his way of evening the playing field or turning the moral calculus towards his favourites, while avoiding bumming himself out by actually making an experience real hardship.  So yes that was the purpose of this whole arc, the most twee, manic pixie dream girl, proposal acceptance ever  Not much to say about this page other than look at snout face on Dominic. Looking I realized they wouldn't be super simple to fix by just moving the mouth, because he is real problem is that he doesn't draw side profiles of faces. I mean I must've known this in the past but is really struck me when I look at this image that the tip of Dominic's nose is directly connected to his chin. Next up; the Oracle Hunter Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Aug 1, 2021 |
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Aug 1, 2021 18:18
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:I mean, it's not uncommon for a fantasy setting to assume that the knights are also the legal system, since they're not just the warrior elites but also landed nobility. But since the Deeganverse is such an anachronistic and schizoid mess, yeah. It reads less like a depiction of a vaguely medieval feudal society where the warrior elites are also the government, and more like a military junta. Yeah, my problem is more what's implied with the whole "disbanded and replaced by battlecasters" thing. Feudal societies had some civil institutions, but a big hallmark of it being a feudal society is that power is decentralized, the trust networks and fealty oaths are what keep the system going. The knights in knightly orders were historically competing powers to the landed gentry. It just annoys me that we are supposed to understand Callan as both a medieval kingdom and a modern institutional state. I think i would forgive this more in another comic, but Mookie does this in literally every story he writes. It's always just fantasy america with no thoughts. It's like if you were writing a period piece and a sci-fi epic from 10000 AD, and both have pizza places on the corner because you can't imagine a world that doesn't work exactly like your immediate experiences.
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Aug 2, 2021 07:13
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 Oh hey more recaps
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Aug 13, 2021 22:56
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 Oh good she chose a name that means nothing. It's so touching. Also will restart my readthrough tomorrow (today but later, after sleep)
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Aug 16, 2021 05:36
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I think the issue is more that they apparently assign her the name "Redactor" on the spot, despite Ink witch having previous encounters. It's not that the Redactor's true name is unknown, its apparently that Ink Witchs just get random nicknames on a spur of the moment situation.
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Aug 20, 2021 03:11
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SubG posted:I enjoy the fact that Dominic Deegan is so comprehensively poorly written that any criticism needs to be carefully qualified to avoid being confused with being a different criticism of some adjacent error. If Mookie had just said, "she goes by" it would literally have been fine. But he had to specify...
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Aug 20, 2021 04:21
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 I'm guessing some sort of orc holocaust memorial Also I know I didn't start my readthrough again, it's been a looooongggg week. It is coming though.
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Aug 20, 2021 08:38
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super sweet best pal posted:How does everyone here come up with names? I just stare at the screen and think of random syllables until something sounds right. mythology dictionary and/or looking at place names on a map and riffing off those.
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Aug 21, 2021 13:00
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 Mookie is just addicted to emotional catharsis now. Just sacharrine moments devoid of real meaning, like a webcomic This Is Us. (I know this is us is better written than DD, don't attack me) What comic do you think he traced panel 2 from?
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Aug 27, 2021 11:20
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Who What Now posted:Eeeeehhhhhhhhh depends on the episode I wasn't able to watch past season 1 cause I felt the writers trying to artificially twang my heartstrings. But even they wouldn't try to pull a Mookie and have characters who have otherwise barely interacted having a tearful moment over some long dead love of one of them, after months of nothing happening. Mookie, you can't possible believe that any reader is feeling sympathy for Arudak right now.
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Aug 27, 2021 14:24
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Chapter 22: The Oracle Hunter [Part 1] There's nothing wrong with the initial set-up, other than another juvenile balls joke right in the second panel. Listen I'm not saying that genitals aren't funny, but put some effort in! You've already done the crystal "ball" joke several times. I will say that I do find the use of Zanzibar as a funny word annoying. It's like people who say Timbuktu as a joke. Not to get all cultural critiquy, but there's something about using place names of foreign cultures as code for wacky or funny that is inherently problematic. It centres a Western experience and treats these joke names is inherently peripheral or fringe, despite them being the homes and cultures of their own people. But honestly this is just a pet peeve and I don't really feel super strongly about it, I don't think that Mookie has ill intent or that's all that serious. But just something that I feel not enough people think about when they're using these words.  This is again a strip that I feel would be perfectly fine if not for the fact that I hail these characters, and I hate their reactions the things because I don't feel them as sincere. Like when you think about it what is Miranda's character? Is it really surprising that she is having a freak out instead of Donovan? I don't think Miranda has been characterized as particularly reserved. Also get a look at Dominic's face in panel eight. What is going on there.  Here's where this arc gets in with the problematic sexual politics again, because no arc can escape that in DD. The comic really does jump cut from Luna and Dominic at dinner with his parents, to Szark's weird nightmare fantasy upon presumably learning of the engagement. So yes, once again Szark's whole character is consumed by being the gay boy who is in love with a straight guy, a sad cliché even when this was being written in the early 2000's. Plus again the signifiers of kink, like leather straps, as code for degenerate sexuality or evil. I know in this case it's Szark imagining it, but it's worth pointing out how often Mookie would resort to that imagery when his comic touches on negative depictions of sexuality.  I think I need to explain how weird the dialogue in the first four panels are, it's pretty obvious that this is more self insert fantasy on Mookie's part that we are just riding along for. But I will say that I find it funny that in panel one Mookie has to directly call out Miranda's "freak out" to remind the audience I guess of what happened two strips ago. It just feels like is an unnatural piece of dialogue. I like how the girl in panel seven seems to be wearing some sort of loosefitting robe on her torso and arms, but still has her breasts exposed. Gotta have that boob window. It's a small thing to but I feel like a knife jumps around a little bit in perspective, but that's to be expected given Mookie's lack of planning his drawings out.  Oh that's why the boob window is there! Because otherwise the boobs don't have room to inflate when the lady is in mortal distress. I'm pretty sure that's canon in the DD verse. This lady in particular has a very strong boob inflation reflex.  Gay Joke! Sure does make me take Szark seriously as a character when every arc is and how to make at least some juvenile joke about gay sex. It's actually not really clear to me how this strip follows from the previous one either. It feels like there's a beat missing in between, where Szark actually reacts to what he's seeing  There is something creepy about Szark's character. Having the only gay character in the comic have this compulsion that is continuously referred to as "giving in to temptation" feels weird, right? Like in the fiction of the comic it is that he has his murderous compulsion that originally came from a demon infected wound, but it leads to these moments that just feel inherently problematic, like there's some coded symbolism that I don't think Mookie intended. But everything in this comic that touches sex or sexuality has this running streak of uncomfortable implications through it. And I'll say in this reread, I am really shocked at how often this comic loops back onto sex as a topic. It really didn't seem that way when I was reading it as a kid.  The lady's breasts deflate back to normal size, the danger having passed. Could the people in DD be related to frogs many species of which are known to inflate their throats to intimidate predators? That's the theory I'm going with. They're going to dance around this a lot, because Mookie thinks that deliberately withholding information from the audience is good mystery building instead of annoying. This arc is repeatedly going to imply that the Oracle hunter looks like someone familiar, it is going to pretend that there is it a question as to whether or not she is Dominic's sister due to Donovan's infidelity. I'm going to ruin the mystery now though because it's dumb, but the Oracle hunter is in fact another one of Luna's terrible sisters. And the thing is if Szark had actually finished that thought bubble, then this entire arc would have no mystery or drama, so Mookie basically cuts away every time a character is about to say "oh she looks like Luna", even though logically they could have just communicate that information offscreen, and the mystery would have been solved much quicker. For Mookie, it really is that if it doesn't happen on panel, it doesn't exist.  These magic newspapers work fast. I mean at this point citing clear what city these killings are happening in. Also what is article in the hospital when they don't have hospitals, they have healing houses?  See? Again it's fun that there's no travel time, or information dissemination time, or any sort of time passage whatsoever between these plot points. Information is just known instantly by everyone, and is quickly written into the paper as fast as possible as a justification for that, and characters just teleport to wherever they need to be on the world. Zelda has the ability to inflate her breasts to mimic distress, as shown in panel six. It's a useful trait for frog people who want to go into the acting business.  Given the subject matter that this arc is going to go into, and the bloody murderers we've already just witnessed, I'm again struck by Mookie's inability to stick to even a semiserious tone for more than a few strips, before coming in with the jokey slice of life nonsense and wacky characters again.  Don't try to justify it Mookie! This does make Dominic even more of a self insert for Mookie though, who was a theatre kid when he was growing up. That play sounds terrible though. What classical play has a character called "the wicked".  Voyeur jokes again, ho! I'll say that I do recognize and it was a different time, but it's funny how cringing I find that stuff today. You realize how to normalized sexual harassment and sexual assault were in the culture, to the point that jokes about it were slipped in everywhere. Also long monkey cheese random, again undercutting for serious eyes of the situation, which is a serial killer.  A waste of a strip on more jokey nonsense, and further proof that Mookie just thinks the term balls is funny in general because he is a 10-year-old boy.  See, this is again Mookie patting himself on the shoulder for help progressive his characters are, despite the fact that Stark's sole characterization is his gayness for Dominic. Also, I understand that DD is a product of a specific time and place, and that Mookie was not writing a subversive gay epic, but again there's of the inherently problematic of having your one gay character remark about how nice it is not to be defined by his homosexuality for once, to the point where it is the nicest thing that anyone has ever said to him. This is why Callan needs gay pride.  More woe is me nonsense for Dominic and Luna, who suffer so much. And again, who knows how the geography in Callan works. Are Prontus and Barthis close, far? How much time is passed and how fast is this Oracle hunter travelling? Stories are all you need to settle things like geography and travel time down, but in this case Mookie has spent specific time is doubting that all the locations are separate and distinct, especially Barthis which has always been depicted as rural and separate from the major population centres. In this case it makes it feel like again these characters are teleporting that they can just be instantly in one town and then another with seemingly no time passing.  I'm not actually sure what the Oracle Hunter's motivations for following Szark would be, since he has nothing to do with her apparent goal of cutting out seers' second sight. She just seems to follow him on a whim, which is good because otherwise the story would not have progressed  Of course Dominic could instantly get a sense of what had happened to Zelda, something none of the healers or other suppliers apparently were able to do, simply by touching her neck for a little bit. See what I mean though? If Barnet had not randomly followed Szark, she would not have decided apparently to hunt Dominic next. It is totally random chance that he apparently leads that happening. That's just bad writing.  I hate Szark. I hate how the only part of his internal life that we get to see is his obsession with Dominic. And how often that theme is repeated. He's literally just an excuse for Mookie to pat himself on the back about how progressive he is, and how he will be totally okay for gay dude was coming on to him.  So this is where the main mystery the arc is laid out. Barnet is going to repeatedly call Dominic her brother, because he's going to be her brother-in-law. But her weird turn of phrase and the inability of anybody to finish their sentence when they say that she looks like X, and portrayed this whole impression that maybe Donovan was unfaithful and had a bastard child. Of course is going to turn out not to be the case, and without ruining it too much, the self-congratulatory bullshit about how Donovan is such a good dude is on par with Dominic wankery for how terrible it is. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Aug 29, 2021 |
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Aug 28, 2021 19:54
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 Snout's wife and his mistress are talking, it's a disaster! also I guess the only purpose of that war memorial was as a pretext to literally tell the audience what we had already figured out, which is that Arudak's main squeeze died. Arudak couldn't have said he needed Asinotaph for his resurrection magic anywhere else, had to be at Orcetnam Veteran's Memorial.
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Aug 30, 2021 11:57
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So I guess the Ink Witch took Kaianda for a makeover? Is that what happened? Also, new chapter name: Chapter 52: A LONG FLIGHT - "August 30, 2021" Yay this is gonna be fun -_- Not sure what the Library Card was referrencing, given how inconsequential Snout's card turned out to be.
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Aug 30, 2021 13:58
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Zerilan posted:Snout at this point just has no internal thoughts at all. He has to literally write in his book non-stop just to be able to briefly retain information. Oh man I didn't even think about that. He is updating his diary real time like he's having a conversation with it. No wonder Arudak is looking at him so weird.
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Aug 30, 2021 14:02
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 This is more facebook witch level poo poo Mookie. "Names have power, what would you name me? Post in the comments below". Shouldn't Arudak have come up with a name for her by now?
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Sep 1, 2021 09:16
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RoboRodent posted:To be fair, names having power is an old folkloric thing, particularly with fairies. You don't give a fairy your name, because that will give it power over you. In return, a fairy is unlikely to give you its true name either. Fairies in old folklore are weird, powerful, and potentially very dangerous. They steal babies, after all, and make binding bargains with unexpected costs ("your hardship and poverty will end, and in return I ask for the thing you have at home that you don't know you have" and then the dude goes home to discover his wife is pregnant and he just bargained away his unborn child), and kidnap people away to trick them into servitude at the fairy court, so names are part of the rules that are supposed to protect you from them. As others have said, this is a particularly poor implementation of the symbolic power of names. But what gets me is the Facebook-witchy nature of Mookie's formulation. I have nothing against Tumblr witches, but one thing I see a lot is them defining magic in a way that they think is poetic, but really comes off as fake and saccharine. You can turn someone's frown into a smile, that's transmutation! It's stuff like that, at least a certain subset of New Age witchy spiritualism is. And some of it actually ends up being almost harmful in the way that they conceive of things. And that is what is Mookie is doing here. She says that names have power, but the power that she ascribes to it is actually incredibly trite when you think about. Yes what other people label you as does in fact confer some information about how they see you. It's pretty slim pickings as mystical revelations go, and is actually a pretty messed up moral when you take it out of this very specific context of a close friend giving you a magic nickname. For instance FlocksOfMice posted:I love the idea that no see, give ME a name and then I gain the power of insight of another angle of myself! What name you choose for me will teach me so much about myself and how you see me! I guess it gives you the power of... if they name you Dingus, now you know they think you look like a Dingus I guess? The only thing that you can take what the ink witch says is that the ink witches value the input of bullies and bigots as providing them insight into who they are. It doesn't make any thematic sense, in terms of plot relevance is meaningless. It's really reflective of the type of writing that characterize later Deegan, where events happen in quick succession to have no thematic rhyme or reason. I think someone described in this thread as anti-plot and that that is really what it is
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Sep 2, 2021 02:02
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Chapter 22: The Oracle Hunter [Part 2] So we start this section of the arc with some more Primo Mary-sue bullshit from Dominic. Dominic instantly knows what he's dealing with and just need to consult his books to confirm the one specific thing this could be. I also hate that now spells apparently can leave incidental residues that Dominic can magically analyse like h's some sort of mystical spectrometer. Every time we see him using his oracular powers, he gets more powerful, needing less input to come to his conclusions. In fact, in this case the only incorrect part of the information is the part that's provided by the book. Barnett is not part of the blinders, and is actually just doing it all to gently caress with Dominic. Mookie thinks this is a clever twist, where after providing the readers with a statement that the perpetrator can only be a member of this group, expectations are subverted by saying that "naw, she was just doing it for no reason at all!".  Gross. And I'm as sex -positive as anyone else, but stuff like this just seems juvenile to me. I'm sorry, but having your male characters in particular brag about bringing their partners to orgasm is sad and desperate. I mean the whole conversation has a gross dudebros in the locker room air to it, but I'm also struck by the fact that Donovan thinks dating murder cultists is okay, because they believe in something? Not to think too much into it but isn't the appeal of piety the idea of innocence and purity? Apparently for Donovan, the appeal lies in bloodthirsty zealotry. A new spin on the Manson family motivations to say the least. "Why did you help this dude murder all those people?" "What can i say, I find pious dudes hot!"  This strip exists entirely to misdirect the readers in the most obvious way. And to set up the cliffhanger...  For a pretty funny sequence. From the looks of it she just sort of mildly tossed the knife, and it just skewered Dominic straight through. I guess she could have thrust forward while holding Bumper and then pulled back. If that's what she did the motion is not conveyed very well. For once Dominic may be facing a real threat! This is a weapons specifically designed to target people like him, so he'll be at a disadvantage.... Rights Mookie...? Right?  Well of course not. The physical danger is instantly solved offscreen. And the all-powerful archmage who has repeatedly solved everyone's problems with magibabble literally walks in with a pun about being a deus ex machina. It's not clever if that's actually what the character is Mookie! Though it's going to turn out that Miranda doesn't even need to be there because the virus spell is actually no threat.  Again, maybe waiting more than one strip to dissipate all the tension and switch back to comedy would be good if you're trying to have the story have meaningful stakes. We instead find out that Dominic is indeed such a powerful seer that weapons specifically designed to take him out aresomething that he is going to go have a brain battle with, and win.  And I say brain battle because it's not like previous fights where Dominic was dominant in a psychoplane, but in this case it really does appear to be Dominic actually projecting into his own brain to physically beat the pathogens with his walking stick. There is no mind over matter here, it's literally just punching and kicking  See, we have no understanding of what exactly Dominic's mental power , in this case even his quick wit and clever retorts taken away in favour of violence. Cool meaningfull display the power of knowledge and preparation Mookie! You know that thing that was the direct point of the previous arc?  Once again the Deegans proved to be mistrustful monsters with no sense of personal boundaries, this time with Miranda digging into her husband's personal life without bothering to consult him or ask him whether he would be okay with it, whether he might know something, or anything at all.  Again, maybe asking Donovan if he has any ideas would be better than doing what Miranda does here, which is becoming suspicious of her husband after violating his privacy. This also starts another horrible part of this arc, which is Szark losing his attraction to Dominic because he's a prissy gay man who can't stand mess and bodily fluids! It does appear the virus spell is literally taking little chunks out of Dominic's cerebellum.  Now, answer me this friends. What is this even supposed to represent? Everyone understands a little bit of poetic license when it comes to drawing magic and psychic things in the story. But only Mookie would stress that poetic license to the point of breaking by having a character fighting in his own "mind" literally exit through the front of his forehead as a tiny version of himself. It would almost be a parody or satire of traditional stories with psychic powers in them, if Mookie was a better author. As it is, a really models the whole story and this emphasizes the growing feeling that nothing that happens matters or has any rhyme or reason.  This strip is mostly pointless, but I do love Luna's logic in that first set of four panels. Dominic is exhibiting extremely strange and erratic symptoms, we should probably not tell anyone because we want him to keep his "dignity". Good thing those symptoms wouldn't imply that he was suffering brain damage. Oh wait! That's exactly what they were! If not for Dominic's insane gambit, he might actually have suffered permanent brain problems because of it.  A tender moment with no stakes. Also I find it funny, given what is it going to come out of the Miranda/Donovan story here, that when a man suspects a woman of infidelity, the narrative bends over to justify the fear and justifies his anger and outrage, but when a woman suspect infidelity, is going to be revealed to be irrationally jealous and you just have trusted her husband keeping secrets. Like yes Miranda should not have pried, but after she does pry it is funny that Mookie in no way validates her further, unlike what he did with Milov. I know it's not one-to-one, but it's just another instance of the pattern of female versus male sexuality and sexual agency in DD.  Mookie suddenly decides to have Dominic dress up like He-man. I mean the costume is a lot more simplistic than he man's and is less barbarian than go-go dancer twink. Don't worry though, Mookie does especially call it out as Dominic being inspired by his "action books"  Again, what exactly is being represented here, with that final punch, as different from all the other punches? Why is he barfing out the virus spell if he already pulled it out of him? What did any of the last several strips even mean????  The answer is nothing. Also I do love that jar that Luna summoned now appears to be a glass container with a lid, when Dominic barfed directly into it without removing the lid or anything in the previous trip. It just he suddenly has a lid. It really show that Mookie is ad-libbing his way through. Like I said, the comic is going to make Miranda out to be irrational.   These two strips really made me wonder if this was the point of all this, as a way of getting the love triangle diffused without Dominic or Luna being a bad person. Szark's whole inclusion in the story is entirely superfluous when you think about it, especially after that initial scene.  just like we've seen several times in legacy, Mookie's lack of planning when it comes to the metaphysics of his magic really messes up the story and our ability to understand what's going on. This virus spell that he introduced here is pretty unprecedented in the scope of the comic, having a physical manifestation that looks to be alive and possibly intelligent. What does that mean? Previously spells a bit like a bolt of lightning, summing that is inherently impermanent and lacking its own reality and being. Now that we see that spells persistence way, it opens up a whole host of possibilities. None of these will be explored because the point of all that was just to keep the guessing gamg egoingt. Just like the brother line, it's not really interesting because there's no real thought behind it. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Sep 2, 2021 |
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Sep 2, 2021 05:54
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What is your ideal relationship: "Platonic cuddles and the type of patronizing love you give a beloved pet." "That's not creepy, right?"
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Sep 9, 2021 15:05
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Chapter 22: The Oracle Hunter [Part 3] Again, the gravity situation is totally undermined by the jokey comic characters not taking it seriously. It sort of reminds me of the battle droids in the prequel trilogy, suck the energy out of tense battle scenes with their wacky Three Stooges hijinks. Quilt is that. Anything he's added to instantly becomes silly and not scary. Let me remind you that the threat here is literally supposed to be an assassin trying to kill the protagonist  Meaningless Jurassic Park reference, and also get again talk about this magic face blindness which doesn't actually seem to matter at all when you think about it. What does this anonymity grant the Oracle Hunter? As far as we can tell she doesn't need it to get close to her targets at all, she just comes in blade swinging so it's not like not knowing her face is somehow a disadvantaged to the heroes. No, that magic literally only exist to justify the misdirect that Mookie is trying to set up.  It looks like they have a plan, but they really don't. Quilt going to warn Gregory and Donovan will have actually no effect on what actually transpires, and more effect what turns out to be their plan to stop the Oracle Hunter. You can really feel Mookie ad-libbing the strips at this point. There's simply no flow to any of the actions and things happen with zero consequence or follow-through.  I let this one slide because obviously Barnett has made some inquiries about Dex for her to wear the facemask, but I hate this when he retort that would really only make sense if the characters knew each other more than not at all. Whose benefit is this for? And also we remembers whether or not "not taking your eyes off the interceptor" is even a slaughterball thing. Has it been established? Who cares it vaguely sounds like a saying in the real world so Mookie will include it  And with this little window into Donovan and Miranda's marriage we realize yet again that the Deegans are all horrible people. It's also interesting that once again Mookie focuses on on the idea of infidelity. It comes up so often in DD. And it's the unquestioning way in which people treat essentially nonmarital sex as bad so telling of Mookie. This makes it sound like part of Donovan's past before marrying was the freelove bard stereotype, which makes it weird to consider why he would fall in love and marry with someone who would scry his entire love life. It's creepy, but apparently Donovan didn't think so. And then there's the question of what exactly Miranda would've done if she found out that Donovan did have a child out of wedlock. Would that be a dealbreaker for her? Would she hunts the kid down? Is it an inheritance thing? Mookie doesn't bother thinking up reasons why Miranda would be motivated to do what she did, nor what it would say about her character. You just assume that it was correct and that Donovan is the wrong one for having lied about the fact that one woman might exist who could hide the existence of a child from Miranda the all seeing snoop. She's obviously going to forgive him instantly in a confrontation later, but it's really clear with the way Mookie frames at that he thinks Miranda is in the right. And again it's about this desire to control a partner and no everything about them in a creepy possessive way.  See what I mean about how none of the actions with Quilt and Garritt mattered. She's instantly at the house, so the warning was literally pointless, and she could apparently trip travel the same speed as a football pass through the streets of Barthis. We also get the introduction of more meaningless magical nonsense, like spell wards that are just the lasers from that resident evil scene.  In fact almost positive that that's directly what inspired this, though I don't know if the timelines match up. Obviously this by going through lasers is just a generic image as well so it could easily have been some other James Bond related thing or something. But still it's great that we get yet more filler of useless nonsense that is neither visually impressive nor useful to the plot at all.  Now here's where we get into some real nonsense. What exactly is going on with the sword swings in this strip. First, looks like she's swinging the blade the wrong way, with the obvious flat blunt edge leading. Maybe that's why she manages not to hit Greg despite his motion really not getting out of the way all. Then she gets close enough to throw sand directly into his mouth, which is a unique take on the sand in eyes probe. Then Donovan uses some sort of anime ninja move from a videogame to cut the glasses and mask off her face??? It's such an absurd thing for him to do, why doesn't he incapacitate her first? Again just more buildup for the stupid misdirect.  So all the defences have failed, basically almost instantaneously, and now we get this. I actually can't tell if Mookie was thinking this was genuine when he penned this strip or not. Like it really doesn't make sense that the defences were actually to defend against Dominic, because they were doing anything of the kind. But what's about to happen is so stupid and pointless that it makes me wonder if Mookie thought it would be cool if Dominic was actually possessed, then reversed course.  Because you get this big reveal, that makes absolutely no sense.... Good excuse to draw Barnet's entire butt crack though.  Only to have it revealed that it was all an illusion. Something that, given how prepared Barnet seems to have been, you'd think she would've prepared for. But no, there's no clever reason why this subterfuge to the worker and all the previous things they tried were instantly overcome. So I guess they just risked injury or death for Dex, Quilt, Gregory and Donovan for no reason.  I mean here's probably the biggest joke in DD history. Like it sure is true that the Oracle hunter does look like Luna, which you could tell previously. But that's only because all female and male characters look like in this strip. Literally only their hair distinguishes them, and Mookie only does about three or four different anime hairstyles. I almost swear that Mookie was trolling his audience with this, like saying "ha ha it was Luna all along but you couldn't tell that because my art is so lovely."  Makes no sense at all in terms of logic. It's one of those things that's only clever in the author's mind, because it comes off is way too contrived. It's really unclear to me exactly what the fog spell was supposed to be doing in this case anyway, apparently you forget the face but you do remember that it might look like someone else's face that you do know??? Mookie just writes himself into knots. But yes the big reveal is that Luna has yet another bitch sister who came out of the woodwork just to gently caress with Luna's life. Cinderella had better family relations than Luna does.  This is a little thing but I again hate how generic a setting Callan is. What does it mean about the setting that goggles to reveal magical spell wards are illegal, but the spell wards themselves are not? What would the wards have even done? Why are porter pellets illegal, when teleportation obviously isn't? Anti-non-magic user bias? Who knows! The important thing is that she had spy gear and it's a legal so you know she's a bad person! Also Dominic ominously says he's going to interrogate her, and it leads to quite possibly some of the most directly misogynistic imagery that appears in DD. Also see what I mean, Miranda is going to be irrationally angry about the fact that Donovan told her and ex-lover was dead, which was really just in hiding. And given the way Miranda is reacting, the question becomes whether Donovan was trying to protect this woman from Miranda irrationally going off and killing her? That seems to be the implication but obviously Mookie would never follow through with that.  Don't worry quilt, the answer to both those questions are incredibly stupid.   So here's an interesting two-parter. What Dominic is going to do to Barnet in the strips after this is torture. He's going to basically subject her to psychological abuse that does involve what appears to be pain sensations, as well as mental probing. He's going to justify this by saying that he is trying to save her life, in reference to Celesto killing her. But then Celesto is going to come in and torture her anyway. And I'm sorry but there's just no way for me to read it now without feeling like Mookie which is setting up so that he could draw someone who looked like his waifu in extreme pain and distress. There is at least one more full updates of strips in this arc because of the extended Barnet mindscape torture sequence. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Sep 13, 2021 |
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Sep 12, 2021 04:18
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Bismuth posted:You know, having a curse that just makes one species look like a different species is also extremely weird. Do they have the opposite version, where sometimes Orcs just look human? Or whatever other races are in this, i've never seen anything but orcs, humans, mongrels, and orclings. Just seems like its only really a curse if you're racist It is specifically a curse visited upon Callanians for their crimes in the orc war. Something about seing their sins I think? It really doesn't make a lot of sense when you think about it for more than a second.
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Sep 12, 2021 21:07
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Mookie reminding himself of the knots he's tied once again.
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Sep 13, 2021 06:36
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This is because Mookie thought of the broad concept of a long car trip, thinks of snout as a child, and despite not planning ahead, is actually incapable of thinking on his feet. Chapter 22: The Oracle Hunter [Part 4] Brace yourselves because what transpires is pretty messed up in terms of imagery  So already we start with an incredibly hosed up set-up. Dominic seems to have trapped Barnet in some mix of room 101 and hell, where he gets to be the inquisitor to Barnet's sins. Again right off the bat though he is justifying this by saying that he is trying to save her life. I don't think there's been a more clear example of Mookie's dark impulses coming out in the comic, only to be justified by the overall goodness of the protagonists.  But the true nature of this inquisitorial space is actually to draw memories out of Barnet's mind, exposing her entirely in a way that you would think would violate some sort of seer ethics. And I think it's telling that, despite Mookie's assurances that Dominic is only doing this as a Barnet's life, Dominic starts this strip out with a rant about how she doesn't get to define sick to him because she was evil first. The other thing is that this part of the narrative is going to walk back essentially all of the setups that Mookie is introduced in this arc. I think he did this because if Barnet was actually a member of the anti-seer cult, then he have to actually directly confront the thorny issues of Dominic's morality when it comes to his snoopy omniscience. Mookie wasn't able to think about how directly deal with that, so instead he distracts the audience by claiming that that was never the premise of Barnett's actions anyway, so the arguments the cult makes are irrelevant. This is bad and boring writing and a waste of potential.  This one is a direct response to speculation that were happening at the time, I do remember this. Barnet conspicuously does not kill Dominic, even though she seemingly had the power to. Instead she cripples his site, which may bore speculate was because she couldn't bring herself to kill her brother. I guess Mookie hated that speculation so much, because it attributed some good to Barnet, that he felt the need to come in and wreck on it here, even though it doesn't really fix the problem of why Barnet would choose not to kill Dominic when she confronted him, if that was her goal along. I think Mookie actually resents that his audience don't take his characters the way he does. Here's also conspicuously when Dominic just starts prying into embarrassing personal moments as a way of punishing Barnet. This could be out of a black mirror episode, only here the heroes are doing it and it's morally, justified of course.  So that's what the big twist reveal is. The reason why all of this contrived set of happiness because Barnet wanted to mess with Dominic before she killed him, I guess. It's one of those nonsense motivations that was obviously thought up in hindsight for inexplicable behaviour. Also, not that Mookie was unique in this, but I do find the fact that he thinks Barnet doing certainly feminine things as some kind of uber humiliating moment is pretty maladjusted male nerd on Mookie's part.  And once again we have the excuse of "it was all a dream", which is really essentially the same excuse as "it was all an illusion", to justify the heinous actions of the protagonists. Here though it's particularly funny because even though Mookie is making it very clear that Barnet recalls these experiences with clarity, the mere fact that he was only doing this in a projected mindscape and not in the real world is apparently enough to absolve Dominic. Even Barnet is like "oh, you got me", instead of saying "no, that was incredibly hosed up and the blinders are right to fear seers". Also, given her propensity for invading other people's dreams, maybe Ink Witch is related to Dominic   Some filler for the around the world arc, I don't know where he got the qualenti, but they seem cribbed off of something. Sea elves or the like  I'm still struggling to figure out what is that Miranda thinks Donovan did wrong. Why is she privy to every single aspect of his previous life? Why can't you have made promises to ex-lover not to reveal that she was alive? I said it previously but I'm going to repeat it again here, the fact that fidelity and sex come up so often in Dominican is really weird considering the audience it was being consumed by and the setting Mookie created. It's almost a soap opera, except worse written  Why would Serk choose to hire someone related to Luna to assassinate Dominic? What possible advantage could that give him? This is pretty obviously a post hoc explanation for everything that happened because otherwise he would've had to introduce some new element to the story, he had long since run out of ideas for new original characters.  Why aren't the claims of seer is admissible in court? Why is the city jail protected from scrying? I mean, to be fair, those make sense as laws in assaying legal system, but Dominic has previously used his second sight to gain information that got Serk thrown in prison the first place, so it's obviously a system with some pretty enormous loopholes in it. Really I think the lesson here, don't invoke legal ideas without some basic understanding in your mind of how your fictional world laws function, and to what purpose they would serve.  Oh poor sad little Dominic, always pressed to save the day. It is funny that Dominic went through that whole torture rigmarole to ostensibly save Barnet from Celesto, and yet still let her get attacked, making the torture pointless and therefore even more cruel  Again, life-and-death situations undercut by puerile sex puns. This also seriously ups the power that Celeto manifests, essentially letting him remotely assassinate anyone in the world. Despite this he will never use his power again even, even though Celesto should have been going all death note with it as soon as he could.  I'll give props for Mookie's parenting a little bit with the panel structure, but again this is more gobbledygook in terms of magic. We don't understand the stakes of anything that happens or why anything is happening, essentially making magic random plot in order that can just be applied any time to drastically alter the situation. This is a bad way to write magic. I know there's a great variety of ways people can approach stories and settings, but I do think that Mookie's way of doing it where magic can just do anything when it's convenient, makes it impossible to follow or figure out what sort of danger Dominic might be in  This was just Mookie getting off obviously. He loves drawing that painned Luna face  Again, here's a dynamic where despite Dominic getting to mentally torture Barnet, and despite Barnet still experiencing extreme pain and torment, the narrative has twisted around so that the villain can be blamed for the truly unforgivable acts. Now, Dominic's previous torture looks mild and unimportant by comparison.  Celesto goes all edgelord again...  And Dominic actually makes the argument he should have made the first time. I mean, the real question is who appointed either of these assholes to be the supreme judge of the world, but at least this is better than Donovan saying "yeah they all deserver to burn, but you need to save the world for the few good people in it".  I think that is what I find most grating about Dominic at this point in the comic. He acts as though he is morally superior to the rest of the world, even though canonically he has lived an incredibly privileged life. If the world is sad, isn't it the fault of people like his archmage mother? Why wouldn't she be in the halls of power, shaping society? Even her chosing not to do something is a little suspect, given the scope of her abilities. Also, what is being ominously implied here? Why is Dominic worried, seeing as he has interacted directly with souls before?  I hate the Domcinic gets physically beaten up in this mindscape. This really is the point where Mookie started thinking of astral projection as literally tiny people inside someone else's brain   No comment.  Literally going to the core of this torture victim and seeing her naked and vulnerable in the fetal position.  Again, Dominic can just diagnose something with no research or insight. All he has to do is look at the thing and suddenly the voice of the author floods his mind with expostion. And of course, here we have our requisite Dominic in pain scene, because at this point Mookie was still willing to that for the sake of Dominic's saintly martyrdom  What? Why is this happening? Does this imply the virus came from Barnet's soul? Of course not, Mookie is just lazy and doesn't think about what reusing the imagery might imply  Of course, Luna has yet another unmentionned magic contrivance that will solve the problem. Who needs setup?  Still not hearing a justification for your "inquisition" Dominic. Barnet is right to be mad.  SCRY/ARCANA --------------------- MIND/PLANAR 5x2=ARCANA ------------------------- LORE<E36113 Donald in Mathemagic Land this aint  Yep, so here it is. Dominic in He-man garb, with an enormous phallic sword, towering over a cowering naked woman. Couldn't get more Freudian if you tried.  Thanks for reminding us about Supermage. And here's where Barnet reveals the Travoria part of her nature by describing how damaged she is  I cannot but wonder why any of this was necessary in an arc that started out as a whodunit murder mystery about seers getting killed. All of his back story feels out of place, for a character that we barely know and didn't really need a motivation for.  Oh here's why. This is yet again a case where another character's entire story exists solely to act as extra justification for why the main cast are so much better than everyone else. Despite Luna's constant insecurity, here Barnet has claimed that she was strong all along. You know, Luna, the one who tried to kill herself multiple times. This back story literally directly flies in the face of everything Luna has been characterized as to this point. And I'm not saying that someone who has tried to commit suicide can't be strong, but remember why Luna tried to do it, and how often. Luna's whole characterization was based on how fragile and insecure she was, which was what made her such an awful character to read. This feels like Mookie trying to address complaints about how terrible Luna is  Look at this smarmy bullshit. This is all Dominic is going to have to do to justify everything in this arc. That one line, the corneas line possible in the context. I also love Dominic's scarf insidiously emerging and wrapping itself around Barnet, as if assimilating her into the hive mind  It is incredibly stupid that "Trumpet" does not play trumpet  This one actually is pretty good  Something's wrong with Rachael's breasts  One more wrapup part to go after this. But I think were all feeling like Barnet is in that last panel Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Sep 21, 2021 |
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Sep 21, 2021 00:11
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Nighthand posted:The "older sister views abused sibling as strong because they hide their pain, but they're not close so she doesn't recognize the truth" plot point isn't a bad one but it doesn't work here because mookies characters don't actually reflect the plots invoked. In a good comic it's fine, but here it comes across as unearned. Yeah I don't disagree, there's just no groundwork justifying it, and at this point it's almost impossible not to read a metareasoning into it. I also hate how these women's insecurities manifests in spite of their obvious competence. The clutzy girl with insecurities may be a cliché, but I prefer it to these women who are amazing sorcerors or battle hardened assassins, but explode out in tears and teenaged angst as soon as Dominic is around.
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Sep 21, 2021 06:33
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Zerilan posted:Part of it for Mookie is just that he bound the comic to a really specific gimmick in style despite not having really thought out very far where to go with it. The comic would probably be a bit less terrible if he had given up on the Snout's perspective only/no dialogue bit once the story tried to evolve. I think it's this+an unwilligness to "tarnish" Dominic's legacy with bad things. At the beginning of the comic, it seems to imply that Dominic's actions actually engendered some sort of active conflict in the future, but at every turn Mookie has lowered the stakes from that high point, seemingly not wanting to make it seem like Dominic could have possibly done something with negative consequences. So we go from magic space ships reminicent of future adventure time, to everything being just the fooling around of the Ink witch. We go from Arudak as dangerous and unknown to just another buddy.
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Oct 1, 2021 02:15
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Mookie isn't the worst in the sense that he is openly reprehensible the way a lot of other more conservative artists are. Mookie is unique. His output is bad in ways that require you to dig into a little bit. I think that's what I find so fascinating about him. It's really the contrast between his self-assured bragging and narcissism, and how deeply untalented and lazy his work comes off as. Chapter 22: The Oracle Hunter [Part 4]  Like take this for instance. Now this is obviously Mookie playing off as a joke, but this is going right off the heels of phallic he-man Dominic literally having Barnet admitting to all her brokenness and insecurities. We're not going to get more of a resolution than this to the Luna/Barnet relationship either. There's only one other scene featuring the two of them and it's just more rehashing of how Barnet should be grateful for Dominic's mind torture. Only Mookie could spend all that time building up this inner conflict that Barnet has, tying it to Luna, and having Dominic psychically force her to confront her demons, only to have it pay off in no way whatsoever. Mookie has unique abilityto squander the potential of his stories, to the point of it seeming almost deliberate.  Meanwhile, Dominic's parents are out to ruin the life of a woman who just wants to be left alone. I can't believe how incredibly jarring this set up is when you really step back and look at it for a second. He tracks this woman down after 20 years, and he comes in making accusations with his extremely powerful wife that she endangered his new family. There is just all sorts of dynamics in that situation that feel wrong, power asymmetries that just send off all sorts of weird red lights in my brain. Obviously Mookie will never address them, just like he never addressed the colonialism and imperialism in Starpower, but it's amazing how Mookie always manages to do these set ups that just feel wrong.  Mookie is also pretty unique in the laziness of his world set ups. I don't even know how to describe how wrong it feels for this woman to have been tricked into donating her apparently very illegal weapons and tools to some sort of magical history museum that has never been mentioned before in this feudal aristocratic society where the most powerful institution of learning appears to be run by Dominic's mother. There is such a void in the space where Callan's society should be that I can't even say that the idea that there would be a museum like that is wrong. But it just feels like a weird thing to include given the sparse elements we have seen. The other thing I love that comes through in this strip is Mookie's black-and-white morality. The only way for Maira to deserve surviving when all of her cultist friends died was if she was misled when it came to what the cult was doing. She couldn't have believed that killing seers was justified, and then begin to doubt that, no she has to have been unaware because killing is always wrong (except when the protagonists do it).  And of course, Donovan can't be implicated even slightly in her crimes either. He dated her for whatever the period between meeting her and thinking she was a "pious" woman and him finding out what her religion was amounted to. Otherwise, he could have been guilty by association, and Mookie couldn't have that! That's another pretty unique Mookieism, I don't think I've seen another author who is this in love with all of his extended cast of main characters. And of course poor little Dominic needs to get a panel exploring just how much suffering he's going through.  And of course, there can't actually be any conflict between mommy and daddy, so all of it is resolved here. Personally, I think Donovan should still be mad and Miranda for being so prying and irrational in her anger towards him. Keep in mind she scried on all his previous partners apparently. It's so weird that Mookie thinks this is romantic  Again, more filler just praising Mookie's self inserts for being so awesome. To be fair, this beat would probably work in a different comic but here again it's just more unearned saccharine sentimentality for the protagonists.  Need to file a report about Barnet? With who, the battle casters? The Sheriff? And I like that Dominic is already thinking of ways to use this to bring down his other nemesis. I know that Serk was involved, but it's funny that in Mookie's mind Dominic thinks this can't be resolved as a situation without taking down all the enemies. I feel like this is an extension of his inability to let villains ever win in even a small way. The shadowy mastermind has to be punished immediately! Thankfully that will be not much of a problem, as I'm sure all of you who have already read this no that Serk is going to be popped like a blood balloon by Celesto in a few strips time, once again allowing for Dominic's enemies to suffer extremely gory punishments while keeping Dominic's hands clean  First of all this single image split over 8 panels looks terrible. I hate when he does this. Second once again the entire point of this trip is how much Dominic is suffering and stressed out by everything. Really is no end how much we must sympathize with the poor little dear.  I don't even know. I guess people were wondering where Spark was?  So this is all the closure we get for Barnet and Luna. Considering that the conflict between them was apparently the inciting incident for this entire arc, bit of an anticlimax.  It's much more important to instead focus on Szark's coldness towards his gently caress-buddies (despite widespread homophobia, it seems as though there isn't much of a gay community in Callan), the fact that apparently Szark's lover's assistant was informed on Szark's love life, and the fact that Szark is no longer hard for Dominic, because as a prissy gay man, he can't stand icky things. That's one way to resolve an unrequited gay love story Mookie!  I like how contrived this dialogue is. Dominic happens to scry in at just the moment where they're discussing Serk's unrelated plot to attack, while he's waiting to work the corrupt Callanian legal system to let him off. Interesting that Dominic and Co. nevertheless seem to want to entrust Barnet to this same system that they repeatedly have evidence is corrupt. I mean you'd think given what Barnet knows she might be a liability that Serk would try to eliminate. But that would be an interesting hook, so Mookie is definitely not going to do that!  Here it is, the just punishment for a character who has not been involved in the comic in years. Thank God he finally got his comeuppance, and Mookie was finally able to let go of that knot of tension in the back of his brain about how Serk definitely deserved a lot more pain for trying to hurt Dominic.  At least Celesto is actively doing things in the world instead of waiting for the plot to come to him like Dominic is.  Not gonna lie, this is another thing that I think would work if the comic overall was better. I like the twist on the title, I like Celesto's motivation (though in a good comic he would be a Rorschach-type character who would evolve over time, whereas here he is still a little static, though seems to have evolved beyond his wanting to destroy the entire world). I like the way he discriminates between himself and the Infernomancer. Like I said there's a lot of potential here, so it's going to be even more funny when Mookie wastes it entirely.  I'm not sure Mookie actually watched he-man as a kid. It's interesting how generic Mookie's little ersatz copies are. They don't really read as parodies. They're more like the most surface level idea of he-man and Superman. Given their prominence in the comic, I find it weird that the homage isn't more specific to the characters.  So this might be a fun sisterly dynamic to explore, except, again, obviously it never comes up. Really that the thing I find funny here is that somehow Barnet in her prison cell knows what just happened to Serk, once again confirming the Mookie hive mind. Next up is Chapter 23: Oh, Snap, which is a short one that involves among other things, Luna buying a comic book that reboots mighty man as a gritty 90s hero, leading Dominic to have a nervous breakdown. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Oct 6, 2021 |
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Oct 6, 2021 00:00
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TheHan posted:There's so much meat in just one page of OG Deegan than you'll find in an entire book's worth of the legacy. Mookie so clearly wants Miranda to come off as this mama bear protective type, but Dominic Deegan runs on such a warped sense of morality that she's this overbearing nightmare woman with a stranglehold on the balance of power in her family. But it's all ok cause she does it to protect her kids uwu (All of whom are grown men in their 30s, with godlike power at their fingertips). That's one thing that really blows my mind in this reread. Miranda comes off some much worse than even Dominic. Everything she does is terrible and manipulative.
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Oct 6, 2021 03:59
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The thing you all have to remember is that Snout is a good boy. Good boys don't have dirty thoughts about their perfect waifus. Like with Greg and Dominic, the only way for Snout to get a love interest is for them to literally fall into his lap after saving their lives. Because Mookie ended up kyboshing that idea when he had the ink witch come back into the story in control of the abducting ship, the only alternative was to have her be the initiator on innocent little Snout. So suddenly she becomes almost aggressively sexual, but only subconsciously and accidentally, because sexually active women are bad too. That sets up the whole creepy gaslighting of the Ink Witch. Then, when the creepiness and obvious power differential is pointed out, Mookie responded by creating another waifu character that Snout could save, that is literally more helpless and ignorant than Snout was in every way, so that the power differential wouldn't be the way it was with the Ink Witch. Snout has gone from being deaf but competent, to a wide eyed child in the woods who is constantly excluded from everything, so the only person who could be more in need than him was a born-sexy-yesterday mute feral woman.
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Oct 8, 2021 16:31
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