Technic[Bot] wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2018 2:18 amHowever as far as i remember the Towers sinking black mana was a one time thing. Only possible since Trace was plugged into the Tower and went haywire when Flora was attacked. Since he probably designed the things himseld I simply assumed her reversed the Tower to get the power he neede at the moment. Yet i tend to read too fast so I sometimes omit the details...
So a lot of
that is drawn from Tom's DA, when he did a cutout of the Tower design. Specifically he notes that the design of the towers seem to have a side effect -- that they draw life energy from their surroundings once they exhaust the local mana flow.
Technic[Bot] wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2018 2:18 amOn the other hand I just went Occam Razor about the towers. If the Basitian Tower was meant to lobotomize the basitian, why would the design for the rest of the Towers be any different? For all we know Crazy Trace might have given up enterily on resurrection and is only focused on revenge.
Which is, of course, a fair perspective to argue. We can safely assume that the mechanisms must be different though, because Keidran
can use magic safely. Basitins cannot. It was not so much the Tower in and of itself which was lobotomizing the Basitin leadership as it was the Tower making mana available to them and them putting it to use. Clearly from Alabaster's array of mana stones when he tried to stop the party from destroying the Tower, once they are properly trained, a Basitin can also use mana stones. In either event, they destroy their minds, as we know from what happened to Vehra. But, as I said, there's plenty of room to argue that the Towers have a more...corrupting design for use against Keidran than what I have suggested.
Technic[Bot] wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2018 2:18 amI always assumed humans on Mekkan to be mostly racist. Sure there are some good guys. Saria seemed to be opposed to slavery and treated Rose well. But the average layman seems to have a pretty bad opinion on Keidran. By extension an armed magical militia such as the templars meant to "protect" the humans stuck me as more racist for some reason. But that is open to interpretation.
Really no more racist than the Keidran or Basitins, and not for wholly undeserved reasons. The Keidran have shown themselves to be as ignorant and racist regarding Humans as the Humans are to them (given their shared history of conflict, that's not entirely surprising), and they're also pretty racist between the various sub-species of Keidran. The Basitins respect Humans only because the Humans were the ones who beat them in the original invasion. Basitins see Keidran as weak, promiscuous, and disorderly, and therefore look down on them.
The argument isn't so much that "humans on Mekkan [are] mostly racist," as it is "everybody on Mekkan is mostly racist."
To a large degree, the judgement of racism on the societies of Mekkan is as much a product of our cultural assumptions as it is their (fictional) cultures. How you define "racism" affects how racist you think the situation is. I tend to feel that the Basitins are pretty racist, with their harrumphing about all these promiscuous Keidran, going around and
touching each other every day, outside of the privacy of the marriage home during their scheduled two week period for reproduction (they'd probably say the same about Humans, but they respect Human magic and therefore hold their tongues). But that's definitely my culture talking. I don't tend to personally see the institution of the Templar as racist (although the implementation of that institution often leaves something to be desired) because I see them more as border guards against a frequently hostile neighboring nation than an organization designed from the ground up to "keep the Keidran in their place." Our own opinions color our perspectives. Again, I really like this about Tom's work. It's intricate and very rarely based on obvious strawman or black-and-white moral contrivances. Instead, all of these very flawed and realistic individuals are forced to confront their own feelings and perspectives and learn about each other.
Of course, we
should see a lot of flavors of racism in the comic, since that's the meta plot. The whole goal of the comic, to drag this back around to the thread topic (more or less) is to get these characters past their own racism and try to move them to the one place in Mekkan that is an idyllic village
without racism clouding every individual's thoughts.
Technic[Bot] wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2018 2:18 amI've been thinking about the Laura and came to the conclusion that she had plot armor at the moment. She needed to live to save the day 6 years later.
And here I thought she needed to live to complicate Keith and Natani's budding romance some years later.
I am going to push you to look past mere plot armor and see what it does to the characters. Because, quite frankly, if all Tom needed was "Laura regrets her decision to send Keith away but turns back from following him though eventually goes to look for him on the Basidian Isle so that she'll be there to save the day and die, redeeming her character," then he really didn't need to have her captured by slavers at all. She could have just stumbled on the carnage of Trace's revenge without being captured; maybe even without actually seeing Trace. That alone would have gotten her to turn back -- her great failing, or what she took as her great failing, was something like cowardice. She didn't need to be captured to make her afraid. So the contrivance of Trace and Laura meeting and Trace sparing Laura's life must have a purpose beyond simply Laura living to save the day at the Basidian Tower.
amenon wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2018 7:00 pmavwolf wrote: ↑Mon Feb 05, 2018 6:26 pm...Or maybe it wasn't a martial service? What if their King had just fallen ill? (We don't know when King Adelaide's illness began.) What if Trace had cured the Human King of some ailment -- which caused the King to grant him noble title -- and the Basitins saw Trace as a healer (wouldn't that be ironic?) who might be able to help their own King?
Ah, but if they actually
wanted Trace they wouldn't have sent
Keith
One does what one can with the tools one has. Two birds and all. If Keith succeeds, great. If he doesn't, well, that's what the delegation Vehra was in is all about anyway.
I just hope there's some kind of reasonable explanation. I'm trying, darn it!
amenon wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2018 7:00 pmavwolf wrote: ↑Mon Feb 05, 2018 6:26 pmI'm sure such a hypothetical person would appreciate the highlight of the passage, being as such a hypothetical story
could play off of the exact language in all kinds of directions. I mean, what if "The Templar should have put you down when they had the chance" alludes to a
much earlier event than anything so far depicted in the comic... (Our hypothetical person could go all boring and make it when Trace initially went crazy, but that'd require Alabaster to accept and admit that magic can make you crazy, and I don't know that he's willing to go that far.
)
Some other hypothetical person might now be inclined to cast this as a story of illicit love, lost and lorn, turned to resentment
That will be an interesting hypothetical story to result in
that line spoken to Trace.
I mean, the whole "Alaric and Keith mirror Alabaster and Cornelius" (to stick with last name of the other and first name of the Keiser) is pretty obvious, but that shouldn't result in a comment about the Templar to Trace.
amenon wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2018 7:00 pmSo I would say that there certainly are bad guys in this story; it's the existence of the good guys that's in question
Still, as far as I can remember, we don't know anything untoward about the tigers, the foxes, or the snow wolves. And the basitins are, well,
basitins, but I would personally be pretty prepared to count them as good. Or possibly somewhat orthogonal to conventional morality.
And of course, there are plenty of
characters that are good or good-ish people. Keith, Flora, Mike, Raine, Kat, Laura... there are more, but these are the ones that quickly came to mind as pretty clear-cut cases.
Like you say, there are definitely a fair number of good-ish people around, but this is not a very cheerful story of lightness and jest. Not nearly so much as it oft pretends to be.