New York, In The Process Of Being Rebuilt.  Dust And Ominous Clouds Were Being Held At Bay By A Thin

really good observation from this liveblog actually why the fuck did cauldron decide to prioritize Interior Design for bonesaw's presence. britain just exploded what's wrong with you

You could make a pretty good Worm game with the bones of Tactical Breach Wizards

Can Heavy yell louder than Masumi? Does it matter?

(This is for @jkjones21, in a way- he asked me to write about a certain page of The Power Fantasy and I'm taking it in a completely different direction than he suggested to me. He did have a good observation about the power lines and cicada as iconic anime/manga motifs, but I don't actually have anything to add to what he said.)

Okay, so from a certain perspective, you could say these two images are proof that Heavy can yell louder than Masumi, because of the way font size works in comics. I think that's an overly reductive point of view, but I want to start with it because it's a simpler version of what I actually feel like is going on, so here goes.

In the third panel of the first image, we see Masumi from so far away that she's barely visible, and her dialogue font is small to show that we can barely hear her. Then in the fourth panel, we see her closer up, and the big font size (coupled with her angry posture) make it clear that she's actually yelling at the top of her lungs, she was just too far away to clearly hear before.

By comparison, in the third panel of the second image, we see Haven (an entire city) from far enough away that Heavy isn't even visible from where he's standing on one of its balconies- but despite the distance, his dialogue font is still really big. If you can clearly hear Heavy yelling from far away, but Masumi's voice gets muted with distance, he's louder, right?

Except nothing in comics is real. You're not visually representing a world that consistently exists, you're representing a story that shifts in emotional meaning. The aesthetic effect of Masumi's voice there (at least, its effect on me) is that for all her emotional ferocity, she's just a small angry blip in an overall peaceful world. In the context of the story, her taking the human-scale perspective of "How could you murder hundreds of people?" is immature compared to Etienne's cynical pragmatism. And the visuals back this up by deflating her anger through making her look small.

And then Heavy... I don't want to say "he's louder because you're supposed to take his anger more seriously," because that's not quite true. This is an out-of-context excerpt as of today (five more days until issue #6!!!!) but I get the sense it's being played for comedy. Heavy's louder than a person that far away has any right to be, because the force of his anger is hyperbolic.

...it's not really about who's literally more loud. It's not even about who's more angry (not that you can measure anger on a scale, even.) It's about how the reader is supposed to interpret each character's anger- and the weird thing is, Masumi's small-font anger and Heavy's large-font anger are both coded as ineffectual. She's not as loud as she seems to think she is, and he's so loud it becomes melodramatic and funny. They've both got very real things to yell about, and I'm sure they take themselves seriously... but the narrative is undercutting both of them, for effect. (Again though- I'm interpreting the second image out of context! Or I guess you could say, the second image's caption is offering a different context from when I'll actually see the whole issue.)

Oh, and my headcanon? Heavy can yell louder in terms of literal decibels, but Masumi has an ear-piercing scream that's like a zillion times more alarming.

Actually I DO think twelve year olds should get hrt. That’s the normal age to start puberty, so why does it have to be different for trans kids?

As we head into issue 6, wherein “Magnus and Heavy’s 18-years-in-the-making plans for world-domination are revealed” I think it’s worthwhile to remember that some of the most dangerous times in the Cold War was when one side erroneously believed that nuclear war was something they could win, or would soon be able to win (see, eg the Star Wars Defence system). Nuclear peace was enforced by MAD, and so too is the continuing peace between the Superpowers, but MAD breaks down the instant one side thinks they can win, that action stops being lose-lose.

Heavy thought conflict between him and The Major would be lose-lose; an instant after he learned otherwise The Major was a ball of meat.

In issue 6 Heavy and Magnus will think they can win. How many will die proving them wrong?

Blue Delliquanti, the creator of one of my all-time favorite comics, did this post a while back about cartooning technique. The quote I want to highlight is:

"A question I ask is who the “viewer” of a scene is intended to be. Adversary is often framed through Curtis’s visual perspective, but not always. There are certain things that he doesn’t see or can’t recognize, and I was very deliberate about what those moments were." (Where Curtis is one of the characters in another comic they created.)

When I first read that quote I found it intriguing, but I couldn't quite make sense of what they meant by it. I got the sense it meant more than just "Is the panel showing what any one character literally sees?" but I couldn't reason through what someone's visual perspective really was.

Now, after spending about a zillion years staring at certain pages of The Power Fantasy, I think I get it. Let's talk about what Tonya sees in this page, versus what she experiences, and how the visual storytelling zig-zags between those two things.

There's two interesting things- okay, there's a bunch of interesting things going on in this page, but let's talk about the shift between panels 1 and 2, and between panels 3 and 4. They're both communicating what Tonya experiences, but not by showing what she sees- in fact, showing the world through her eyes (literally) would probably do a much worse job of putting you in her shoes (metaphorically.)

Panels 1 and 2

While Tonya is being yanked through the air by Heavy's gravity powers, the colors go from "realistic" (full-spectrum) to a limited palette that turns her skin blue. This isn't an indication that gravity powers turn things blue- they never do that any other time, and also it doesn't make sense for gravity to have a color. Heavy's powers aren't blue, Tonya's feelings are blue- it looks weird and unnatural to have blue skin, and it feels weird and unnatural to be sent flying. Also- I think the implication is that in panel 1 of this page, she's already arrived, because the only movement we see is her opening her eyes. She continues to feel like the world has gone all wrong, right up until she opens her eyes and sees that she's arrived.

Panels 3 and 4

Panel 3 is the one panel on this page that could plausibly be what Tonya actually sees- page 4 definitely isn't. But they both communicate how she interprets Heavy in that moment, even if she can't literally see his face from their positions in panel 4. He goes from a friendly, somewhat romanticized figure in panel 3 to sketchy and roguish in panel 4. Heavy's suddenly in shadow (even though he's facing a light source, if you really think about it!) because he's acting shady. (A lot of visual effects overlap with verbal idioms, which is something I could talk about for about a million years if given the change, but I'm trying to stay on topic.)

...so this entire page is fairly strongly from Tonya's perspective, even if only one panel of it is through her eyes. I plan to keep digging into this topic, because I don't think that's always the case- I think there's scenes/pages that switch back and forth between characters, that don't align the reader with any one character, and so on. Updates forthcoming as I learn more.

I believe you but this is insane to me because it’s explicitly a small village, the sort of place that the left is meant to view as a socially conservative backwater. That it’s not being presented negatively, by default in fixing it, is honestly kinda worrying re the state of the left

It says something that every single attempt to "fix" the cute witch in the alps game concept makes something that is vastly, vastly worse than the original idea, and sometimes is more actually fascist.

Mostly it's that the thing the Disco Elysium writers were going for is much harder than it looks from the outside. But also other things.

At least he got one thing right, I guess.

America's modern psychic shields are Magnus's Numinous tech, which implies that they didn't have shielding prior to Magnus's rightward shift and his involvement with America. So when then, did Etienne not stop the New Mexico Festival Massacre, or at least warn Valentina? Was it a deliberate attempt to alienate her from America? Or was he even hoping that they would succeed? The balancing act would be easier with one less Superpower around, even if its Valentina, but I think they're were still too close at that point for Etienne to do that.

And more importantly, how did he explain this lapse to Valentina?

I really love how Taylor can either hold a grudge forever or have it disappear alarmingly fast, and it all depends on if she acts on her anger at first. Like she forgives and is willing to work with Sophia after the bullying, Lung after he tried to kill her, Rachel after she tried to fuck her over, Defiant after the everything. Like most people wouldn't forgive all those acts and trust those people afterwards, but she hardly even considers otherwise because she believes that people should work together against unbeatable foes despite their differences and when she fights alongside someone she kind of just forgets the things they've done.

When she acts on something though, when she acts immediately in an irreversible way the people she lashes out against are immediately marked as 100% irredeemable evil bastards in her mind. Alexandria, she doesn't regret the murder in the slightest despite the fact that it had consequences and Alexandria isn't a being of pure evil. Since she killed her she has to convince herself that it was right and just and that she doesn't regret it, which erases any nuance Alexandria had in her mind that would lead to her forgiving her. She does this again a buncha times throughout the book. Against the C53s in the Cauldron raid she thinks about how everyone in the crowd could be innocent, forced to go along with the mob out of fear that they'll be next and with no chance or choice of getting away and being peaceful. But then she dangles a disintegration knife into all their faces to kill Mantellum and suddenly they're all monsters who delighted in torturing innocents and all voluntary members of the mob and none of them deserved any mercy because they're Evil Bad People, so she'll never lose sleep or forgive them.

Aisha points something like this out in 29.5 actually, she says her and Alec had an argument over it because Alec was annoyed at how quickly and easily Taylor stopped being mad at her bullies and didn't want revenge. I think Alec equated Sophia to Heartbreaker in his mind because they caused both their respective triggers, and he can't fathom the idea of someone not wanting to slowly torture and kill their Heartbreaker to make them feel an ounce of the pain he felt, and honestly Alec is the normal one here I think? I think most parahumans would get revenge on the people who caused their triggers in a heartbeat if given an opportunity, and honestly poor Alec imagine trying to understand and make sense of your dulled emotions and Taylor Hebert is there as the worst example ever with her weirdo decisions. Aisha defended Taylor and her choice to not get revenge but she still got revenge for Alec because she hold grudges for herself and other people.

Letting go of hatred to someone isn't something other people can really do like Taylor. Going back to Aisha, she fucking despised Bonesaw during Gold Morning and hated how she got a redemption, but Taylor was fully willing to work with someone who sawed her skull open for the greater good when it would be completely fair for her to never want to get help from her. Idk what my point is here I just think it's really neat that unless someone is her enemy right then and there or unless she already killed that person and sorted them into the Bad Person Category, Taylor is willing to forgive anything and everything to make sure everyone works together.