PaRARGdox 95
Nun under the gun: Back to Go!Anna and Tros… last seen on page 7.87 under attack by the escaped, mostly invulnerable, Sista Superior… who may be minus her habit but is still in the habit of blowing things up.
And Tom is right – Freya, Justine and Ken were blasted by the psycho nun in the scene starting page 7.60. We presumed their fate but now know that, indeed, sadly, they did not survive. 🙁 RIP
Patrons: Over on Patreon page 97 is now up… page 98 should go up in 1-2 days… 😎
Next update: Sunday January 24, 2021: This ain’t gonna end well…
This kind of thing drives me crazy. She’s obviously a multi-murderer – kills people every time she gets out, most likely.
Oh, but now she’s killed people that MATTER, so it’s OK to kill her? She should have been executed LONG ago.
Same problem with Batman and the Joker. Out in the real world, where all the nobodies and extras have names and families, the 3rd or 4th time he broke out and killed a few dozen people, he would have found himself “shot will escaping” at point blank range several dozen times, and the cops or guards who did it would get a stern scolding… and privately, a whole lot of thank yous.
If you can’t keep the serial mass murderer in prison (which is also apparently impossible in super-hero comics), you kill them. Otherwise, you are ALLOWING them to murder more people. I know it’s a trope of comics, especially of the super-hero variety*… but BLARGH, it’s dumb.
*Yes, I know it’s because coming up with truly great villains (or even passable ones) is hard, and otherwise, you end up with nearly everyone being the Punisher with a different costume. Tough – it’s still dumb.
And yet, I still read primarily super-hero comics. Yep, I’m dumb, too, I guess.
Yeah I disagree with you on the trope being dumb. Hell in this comic I bet they’ve tried to kill her a few times but she was just unable to be killed.
If there’s any chance of a grenade in the mouth killing her, they haven’t actually put ANY effort into attempts to kill her before.
… maybe there isn’t …
Given that a bazooka…fire…rocket or whatever it was that she was shot in the face with earlier was enough to give her what seem to be somewhat severe burns and blind her, I’m inclined to agree that she seems quite killable.
How often she escapes and what kind of damage she causes, I don’t think we quite know and thus she might not be quite as ridiculous of an example as the Joker.
Oh, I don’t know of ANYTHING as ridiculous as the Joker in that regard…
I’m 100% with you about this trope. Mind you… deaths in comics usually do not equal staying dead either… so you can’t win either way…!! 😉
You do have a point about that… though in this comic, death seems to be pretty dead (barring time travel, but that forks reality, and they’re still dead in the original reality, which keeps going).
Even Oglaf’s resurrection power seems… extremely suspicious, to put it mildly.
Olaf, you mean – OGLAF is a comic. Although I’m pretty sure he’s done resurrection…
It’s easy to mix up Olaf and Olga, though, probably where you got it.
Yeah, Oglaf is a verrrry different comic!! 😀
😳 What th…??
Oglaf and Magellan have ONE thing in common, at least.
They’re the only two webcomics I am currently staying abreast of.
Snap!
‘Though my other ‘abreast of’ is Questionable Content.
I see what you did there…..
Whaaaaaaat? What ever could you possibly mean? I figured I had bared the pertinent facts. It’s only the naked truth. Nothing nefarious.
To be fair, it took an alien invasion to free Sista Superior. And, ironically, the same things that kept her neutralized were probably what let her keep her powers when the Raarg struck.
As far as the Joker goes, I have far less of a problem that Batman never kills him (It’s sort of his thing and it’s not like he’s never called on it) than with (especially with the overuse of the character) the fact that almost no one else tries. And half the time they do, Batman stops them. Dude should have mob snipers on his ass 24/7, if nothing else.
They’ve specifically referenced her getting out several times. In fact, at the _beginning of this episode_, they are returning her after one of her escapes.
And yes, I can deal with one or maybe two characters have a *thing* about killing (that’s Batman’s thing – also, Superman has a pretty big thing about that, but when you can literally kill hundreds or thousands of people with a careless sneeze, that seems like a good idea).
But the “no one else kills the Joker either” thing is what’s so silly about it.
It’s possible it’s NOT officially ok to kill her now either but noone will dare to mention it.
And yes: Batman not killing him is acceptable. Noone else trying is not. Hey, don’t they have several possible cellmates who don’t like Joker at the same prison?
I think it’s less an offender of that trope than Joker. It seems to me that the ruling morality in the Magellanverse setting is pretty clear: When you can detain, you detain. ESPECIALLY if the subject is sapient and is self-aware.
However, when it comes to Freya, Tom seems awfully ready to disregard that morality. Remember what happened when Miasma mind-mojo’d him back in Chapter 4?
I expect Go!Anna will make efforts to talk him down . . . although, granted, considering how close Go!Anna was to Freya as well, she might not be -too- worried. But then we have Tros present too, and -they- are likely to step in.
Really, there’s a chance that Tom killed Freya, Ken, and Justine, actually. When he hit SisSup the first time, the concussive and incendiary energy of the rocket could have easily been what killed the three people in the elevator.
Tom might be on a grief/shame/blame-shifting anger spree right now.
That blast could have been injurious to people in the elevator, but we saw SS fire a double-handed blast into the car from near point blank range. That would have been the primary contributor to their deaths, if not the sole one.
Going through the above comments I was collecting things to say, but I’m not surprised to find that @VileTerror already said them. Then I had another comment, but @Michael said that. Great minds think alike? 😀
“It seems to me that the ruling morality in the Magellanverse setting is pretty clear: When you can detain, you detain.”
And how many times do they get out and kill more people before you accept the fact that you *can’t* detain even close to reliably enough? That’s the problem.
Sure, once, detain. Maybe even twice.
But at some point, all those nobodies and extras dying every time should matter to you. Apparently, supervillains are more valuable than the nobody little people.
Given that this particular chapter included characters wrestling with the morality of sacrifice and murder “for the greater good,” I’m not sure where a viewer might have developed such a black-and-white perspective on the matter. The issue is easily as contentious in this setting as it is in real life, which is something I personally appreciate about Grace’s writing. It’s believable given the fantastic fiction in which the setting is grounded.
Oh, de facto, it’s much less contentious in the real world.
Yes, yes, there are debates about the death penalty, etc, etc, and that is contentious, yes. But real-world jail-breaks are rare, and real-world criminals die in firefights fairly often (or are maimed if they live), and if a real-world criminal manages to avoid those two problems, eventually, they develop a bad case of “shot 37 times at point blank range while ‘running away'”, and nobody cares because they’ve murdered so many people.
In the real world, effectively, this kind of problem simply isn’t possible in any significance.
Also, because all our nobodies and extras have names and families. You can’t murder 237 people and have any realistic chance of ever being free again, even by jail-break. If you’re not locked up forever, it’s because someone killed you, legal or not.
We appear to live in very different portions of the real world.
“We appear to live in very different portions of the real world.”
Well, I am assuming the civilized, law-and-order portion of the world, obviously. That “murdered 237 people” guy could be quite free and happy *working for the government* in some areas, yes. And yes, there are a few places in the world where there’s not enough government to do anything about stuff like that.
But in the US, Australia, nearly any place in Europe, some significant chunks of Asia, and even some places in Africa, it would hold true. Certainly, if such a criminal was in a jail in the US or Europe, that would be the end of them, practically speaking. There are no modern examples of jail-breaks by notorious criminals who go on a public killing spree and are them calmly returned to jail in any of those kinds of places.
Because eventually, when you are on such a killing spree, you are unofficially put in the status of “Wanted: Dead Not Alive”. Debate morality about that all you like, it’s still going to happen. Because our extras and nobodies have names, families, and coworkers.
I do live in a country in Europe. We have a maximum jail sentence, I don’t remember exactly what it is, but something like 25 years. No matter how much wrong you’ve done, unless you’re already old when you get convicted, you’re likely to live the end of your life free. I’m not sure but I think most if not all of Europe are like this, we never really lock people up forever. Just long enough that most of them re-evaluate. Those who don’t… I don’t actually know of any such case. I guess they are kept under strict enough surveillance that they end up not doing anything when released.
The real world I live in appears to have a striking lack of supervillains. And jailbreaks.
I think it’s also imperative to remember that the majority of people incarcerated in real life are under criminal charges that are much more mundane than super-villainy, with far smaller body counts even in the cases of mass, spree, or serial killers. Perhaps the most unrealistic thing in the Magellanverse, aside from superpowers themselves is that the criminal justice system doesn’t seem incredibly corrupt here. Then again, we’ve only had scant glimpses in to it, and Locke Island is decidedly a special case.
At this point, they have no way to “detain” her. Nor can they trust any surrender she might offer. Even under the strictest ‘real world’ rules-of-engagement, deliberately killing her would be justified.
Deliberately killing her was justified *LONG* ago. That’s the point I was making.
Batman: Arkham City is a great game from a game design perspective. But I felt unpleasant playing it, because they did too good a job of making the villains dangerous and utterly irreemable, then forced you to save them. Because you’re Batman, and Batman doesn’t kill, and apparently will stop anyone else from killing them too.
Never mind that this game showed them engage in torture, attempted rape, murder and bioterrorism WHILE STILL IN PRISON. Never mind that the previous game showed that any therapy session for these villains where the therapist leaves unharmed is a rare success. And never mind that we know the villains break out of prison to do it all again every other week.
I wanted to hand the League of Shadows the fucking matches to help them burn the place to the ground, but the game doesn’t let you. It actually gives you a choice when you play as catwoman to walk away. If you do, you get a radio message that by blowing the gangs up from the air, they somehow became stronger and run rampant, then the game literally rewinds and you get to make the correct choice of getting back into the clusterfuck.
It was bad enough that, despite its qualities as a game (that Mr Freeze bossfight is amazing, I had always wanted to see a game where the boss was smart enough to not fall for the same trick every time) I just have no wish to replay it.
Poor Tom. I can only imagine what he’s going through.
Well this is all gonna get erased to some degree.
I mean we can’t have a story if there’s no earth, right? Since Kaycee is on earth and the story is mostly about her…
The question is HOW they’re gonna unfuck this situation and who is gonna maybe stay dead?
The existence of *alternate* Magellan Earths has been established… Just throwing that out there.
Wow. I had not thought about that. Everyone dies and everyone stays dead.
On the other hand… I think we only know of one alternate so far, the one that split from the current one when DragonKlaw and Miasma time-travelled back. It seemed to be a somewhat known, but rare, occurence. Thus it appears to me that there is no alternate timeline – yet – where most of what has happened in this comic has happened, but the earth does not go extinct very soon. Then again, do we know for sure that Ambrosia’s time-slips do not create alternate timelines?
There’s already been some seeds planted alternate timelines might play a part in the story, given how Hans was stated to pull on the life force of alternate timeline counterparts to those in the timeline we’re watching right now. I’m not sure how it will all add up, but somehow retconning everything out of existence and saving everyone would seem just a little cheap after everything that has happened.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that even with time turned back, everyone who survives until the very last second keep their memories while everyone who has already died do not, creating a very large divide between everyone at Magellan.
My money is on everyone remembering, INCLUDING the dead. They’re gonna have to hire a lot more shrinks…
O8h7w had asked “do we know for sure that Ambrosia’s time-slips do not create alternate timelines?”
Well, not 100% sure, but the Magellan boffins seem to think not, mostly due to the limited temporal reach of Ambrosia’s ability (see pp 31 and 32). That does seem to imply the possibility of splitting the timeline if her limit were exceeded somehow.
This is giving me some *nasty* ideas that I’d really rather not consider 😣
Black holes do wonky things with time, I’m guessing that the Rarg’s “Earth squishing kaboom” somehow lets Cadet Paz exceed her normal limits.
I just noticed Sista Superior is yelling RARGH in panel 2 and thought of the outlandish idea of “oh no, she’s becoming one of them!”
I would say she isn’t exactly invulnerable, but she is very very tough. I would say explosives shoved down her mouth might do the trick. And, frankly, even if Magellan normally does not kill, this is one of those times that they might be able to justify it due to the situation.
Yes, that is true – this is literally a warfare situation, and she is actively trying to harm them on the battlefield.
But that’s not why Tom is doing it, you know.
Like tossing a grenade into a tank and shutting the hatch the armor doesn’t even get hot but the pressure wave inside liquified anything organic inside
Also I just noticed that the cover page of this chapter is an hourglass. Just for the fact that the Rarg are here ahead of schedule or hinting at time shenanigans about to undo some of the damage?
The latter is what I think most of us are expecting, although time is a recurring theme throughout the storyline so far.
Who can imagine life after this story arc…!
Well, in all reality, the story thereafter would have a chance to take a bunch of different directions from Magellan’s usual formula owing to the severe upheaval of the existing order. That said, I’m not sure Grace doesn’t have a reset button up her sleeve. I think that she’ll have Hans pool many parallel Ambrosias’ energy into our Ambrosia, allowing her to exceed her limit.
Oh, good idea!
Has anyone heard from Grace? She usually posts a “page will be late” notice in situations like this.
I DM’ed her yesterday and she said she was a bit under the weather 🙁 Maybe she’ll be able to put up p96 tomorrow 🤞
Health comes first, naturally.
Grace, when you find the chance to read this, I hope you feel well soon!
Best regards!
I’m REALLY hoping “Backstep” is able to be power boosted to rewind a full day