ta82220 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 09, 2021 6:27 pm
Been reading for maybe 15 years now and I know this isn't going to be a popular opinion, but the writing has gotten pretty bad recently.
Why kill Brutus? I just don't get the logic behind killing off a character who's appearances are 95% sketches/voting incentives and 5% actually in the comic.
Tom chose to write in this dramatic death of a character that, if you haven't been looking at non-cannon stuff for the past five or so years, has very little relevance in the story. Why should I care that Brutus died? It's just bad filler imo, with the issue being that it's not supposed to be filler. This chapter (much like the last few) has been crawling by and it's honestly pretty annoying that it's gotten to the point where we're waiting months for a death that makes little impact on the story. Clovis is going to become a different person now that Brutus is dead? Okay cool, but like we barely knew what Clovis was like before that. No real character growth, hardly any transformations that the reader can pick up on, just "hey here's that character I've been sketching, also he's dead now." Our perception of Clovis has hardly changed, if at all, with this death.
I feel bad for anyone who just started reading or doesn't check the sketches/voting incentives every now and then, because this current chapter is written so much worse than the previous ones.
Ill try to explain it as best I can here. Brutus was killed, because we needed to understand Clovis. It seems he is going to be made more and more relevant in the story, and Zen's description of him as a "rich prick" doesn't make him dangerous enough. Not in a world where there are Templar super-mages, Keidran warlords, and Bastian generals. The guy was JUST a pampered Keirdran mob boss. He needed to be more. We needed to see just how far he would go in his pursuit of greater power.
This comic showed us Clovis crossing a terrible threshold. Other killings were 'just business' I'm sure. This one was personal. It hurt him. Did you notice he was trembling before he did it? He didn't want to. But in his own, twisted view of reality, he HAD to. Brutus was a loose end. A weakness that could be held against him. He needed to be removed, so Clovis could keep the world at arms length.
As somebody whos own mental issues have caused me to cut off, or push away people when they got too close, for fear that they could hurt me. I get it. I know it's WRONG, but I understand why he did it. Maybe that's why this scene hit me personally.
Also, I find it funny how you all keep acting like the hired killer who probably has a double-digit body count is somehow a 'good boy'. Brutus may be dumb and cheerful, but he was leading the charge to burn the village down. An attack that caused many casualties, and almost killed Maeve. If Trace had not been there, there would have been more casualties & probably more than a few fatalities. So yeah. NOT a good boy.