Webcomics

The Angst-O-Meter: Day 4

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(From Ctrl+Alt+Del. Click for full-sized incriminating evidence.)

I know I said I was done with the Angst-O-Meter until after the election, but circumstances have intervened and I have to comment on today’s strip, despite the mountain of other stuff on my plate.

So it seems that if, when Shannon was first introduced, you had Ethan leaning on her as an escape from Lilah, well… you were half right. Ethan wasn’t having any of it, but Lilah was sure going to think he was.

This strip, in a way, is really a summary of the past month or so of strips, with a couple of peeks into Lilah’s actual situation and some looks at Lucas’ attempts to patch things up with Kate. As that relationship appears to be on the mend, if slowly, it’s possible the main reason for that subplot may be the last panel of this strip.

Ethan really has been focusing almost singlemindedly on his contest with Christian, and looking back on previous strips, it’s partly his fault. How far has his relationship with Lilah deteriorated that he’s not telling her about his day-to-day life, his day-to-day struggles? Even after Christian reassures him he’s not looking for Lilah, Ethan acts like a paranoid maniac with someone he knows is sensitive right now, leaving him unable to talk about his situation with someone who might be a more useful font for ideas than Shannon turns out to be, which leads to a phone conversation that inadvertently backs up Christian’s story about a cheating Ethan.

There are two reasons I’m not setting the Angst-O-Meter to 100%: Lucas still appears to be on the mend with Kate and the strip is still nominally having punchlines each day. But this strip about a week ago is the last strip that can be said to have a real punchline, and I can just see Ethan going on a woe-is-me diatribe within a couple of strips. And don’t forget Buckley’s ominous warning, back during the miscarriage, that “I know who moves out and when”. He assured people there wouldn’t be too much in the way of woe-is-me diatribes, but it’s sure looking like that’s only because he’s too busy adding more angst-worthy stuff to the fire.

So up goes the Angst-O-Meter to 92% and I could easily justify setting it higher. And I’m pretty darn close to the end of my rope with Ctrl+Alt+Del – it’s pretty much train-wreck fascination at this point.

I would have at least revised, if not done away with, the third-to-last panel. Awk-ward.

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized anti-climax.)

Once again, this post has nothing to do with politics, despite my spending two days and a weekend without a word on the subject. I should be returning to it later today.

“I bet everyone was expecting a big battle for strip #600.”

Apparently Grandpa really hasn’t spent much time looking at the world of the living.

There are a lot of things that people were wondering about for strip #600. Perhaps a return peek at Team Evil, with potential huge ramifications, or a look at some other faction we haven’t looked at for a while. Perhaps contact finally being made between the two halves of the Order. Perhaps the prophecied death of Belkar. The previous sequence of strips probably led many to expect either a confrontation or alliance between Vaarsuvius and the imp Qarr. The start of this strip led me to wonder if it was going to end with Roy being called to be resurrected.

But a “big battle”? Not given the state of the OOTS right now, where they’d settle for being in one piece. The closest thing anyone would have predicted to a “big battle” was a confrontation between Haley and the Thieves’ Guild’s Crystal. Maybe, before #599, a confrontation between Vaarsuvius and the rest of that half of the OOTS plus the remnants of the Sapphire Guard.

Since nothing big happened in #600 (unless you count the start of the switch back to Haley, Celia, and Belkar), it’s looking increasingly likely that none of the major objectives of this book will be completed until it’s about over. No resurrection of Roy, no union of the two halves of the Order, no retaking of Azure City, nothing.

Now, given the pace at which Rich Burlew writes, it’s possible that “it’s about over” may be sooner than many of us think. Certainly the union of the Order and resurrection of Roy are things that should probably be taken care of by the end of this book if they are to be taken care of at all. Those are things that need to be set up in turn, and that may take multiple tens of strips. Judging by the last two books, we’d expect this book to end somewhere in the 660s, which means we might expect one of those objectives to be completed possibly as early as the 640s. Or maybe the build will begin about now, considering how much into high gear both plots were starting to move last we checked.

But it’s becoming apparent that this section of the OOTS’ story is going to have far-ranging consequences that could prevent some of those goals from ever being completely fulfilled. This first really became apparent last strip, where Vaarsuvius announced his departure from the ship to find Haley and Roy’s body without distractions, referring specifically to Elan and Durkon. And announcing “I have no intention of returning”. And that he might decide to arrange a meeting between Haley and Elan/Durkon elsewhere… “but probably not”.

It may well turn out that with this action, Vaarsuvius just unilaterally, in an instant, without Roy even being alive to object, kicked Elan and Durkon out of the Order of the Stick. This is especially likely when you consider this strip, in which Vaarsuvius not only fails to grasp who Therkla is but comes to the conclusion that she was Elan’s active girlfriend (despite being present in disguised form when Elan brushed her off). If V can convince Haley of that idea, (s)he might dissuade her from pressing V to chase Elan and Durkon back down.

(Incidentially, early on in my reading of OOTS I had trouble seeing Vaarsuvius as anything but female, partly because of the hair… but as he’s grown more insane and his hair has become more frazzled I’ve found myself using male pronouns more often. Is that worth reading anything into?)

Now comes evidence that Roy hasn’t paid any attention to the travails of Haley, Celia, or Belkar since this strip – he’s still talking about that group having reached Cliffport by now. Which sort of makes me wonder if he’ll even be able to find them. Unlikely, but he will have no idea what’s been going on. (And neither will we. No way “weeks” passed between #572 and the end of our last look-in on Haley/Celia/Belkar.) In a more important development, Roy probably will even be confused by something in evidence towards the end of the last check of Haley and Co.: the curse of the Mark of Justice potentially starting to wane from Belkar.

And there are other far-ranging consequences that have been built for a while that seem inevitable. Vaarsuvius’ insanity won’t be fixed just by finding Haley, or even by finding Haley and a good, long trance, because the last strip seems to suggest V has given up trances for good. Belkar’s been afflicted by the curse of his Mark of Justice and “will draw his last breath – ever – before the end of the year. (That’s an “in-comic” year, not a real-time year, Oracle fans!)” Unless Roy keeps all his memories of what happened while he was dead, including his memories of his conversation with the Oracle, it’s likely that, at the least, something important will happen before he’s resurrected.

It is even entirely possible that no one’s predictions on the future or ending of the comic are correct, because they all assume that the composition of the Order at the end of the strip will consist of some combination of Roy, Haley, Durkon, Vaarsuvius, Elan, and Belkar, and almost always all of the above. The revelation that Belkar’s death would come “before the end of this [in-comic] year” first put a wrench in those plans, but one could easily deal with that. But now that it’s possible that, for the moment, Elan and Durkon are no longer members of the Order, we could be looking at a semi-full-fledged Order of the Stick at the end of this book that shares only Roy and Haley with the Order of the first 500 strips or so (with V insane or even a god, Belkar dead, and Celia officially one of the new members), one that spends as much if not more time trying to find and rope back Elan and Durkon than trying to foil Xykon’s plot. And the prospect of a very different Order of the Stick becomes especially chilling when you consider the Oracle’s prediction of a “happy ending – for [Elan], at least”. If Elan is no longer a member of the Order, what does that say about the Order?

And who’s to say this wasn’t an incredibly important strip… in its very lack of importance?

As for the plot… what can I say? It’s a plot.

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(From Girl Genius. Click for full-sized discussions of idiocy.)

This post, like the last one, has nothing to do with politics or voting, so if you just came in yesterday and you have no interest in this sort of thing, just skip past it. If you’re the sort of person who only ever came to Da Blog for the webcomic reviews, I have an OOTS review down the pipe for next week – which will essentially be a moment in time; I’ll recap my thoughts on the past few strips, probably running through #600 – and that’ll be it until the week after the election.

Phil and Kaja Foglio are miniature Gods of the webcomic community for their decision to switch Girl Genius from a print comic book to a fairly standard full-page webcomic – a decision that implicitly validated the webcomic form as a viable form, and which, to hear Phil tell it, partly came out of a feeling that the Internet was a good business model for comics and partly out of a financial crunch.

But what Phil and Kaja actually did was take the stories they were already writing for the comic book and just release them page-by-page to the web. The result shows, as the strip is rather clearly plotted with the comic book in mind, and there are some strips that make little sense on their own, including at least one splash page. A splash page that leads to another strip that tells us little that we didn’t learn in the previous strip. While following Girl Genius for the past two weeks, I often found myself looking back at the previous strip to see how we got to where we are in this strip. In essence, Phil and Kaja are still writing a comic book, not a comic strip – or rather, are writing a graphic novel rather than a comic strip.

It’s almost like, somewhat appropriately, in Victorian days where writers like Charles Dickens would publish chapters from their coming novels in serial forms in popular magazines – only that really describes the model that has seemed to be the status quo in print comic books, and what Phil and Kaja are doing is to release their novel a paragraph at a time. What I’m trying to say is, the result is rather awkward. When you have different media, you have different expectations and mechanisms for moving the story forward, and the Foglios are using a… different mechanism to say the least. Not that I fault them for doing so – that’s what they set out to do, and especially given the serious nature of the subject matter, they can’t be expected to change to a more episodic form. And they have certainly adjusted their style from the print comics, pages from which have been assigned what appear to me to be arbitrary dates and placed in the archive. Read from the beginning and it’s obvious this was never intended to be released in an episodic form – the story establishes itself too slowly. That’s why most webcomics start with a strip-a-day format and undergo Cerebus Syndrome later.

If there’s any strip that has managed to balance the episodic format of the web with the coherent storytelling of the print format, it’s – guess who! – Order of the Stick. Every strip is a coherent strip in itself, with its own gag wrapping it up, yet also makes sense as a page in a larger book. To pull this off, Rich Burlew will sometimes release multiple pages at once as double or even triple pages, and is flexible enough in the format that he’ll even pull infinite canvas techniques that would be difficult to pull off on the printed page. The Foglios would benefit from double or triple strips on occasion, but that would increase their workload as they’d then have to complete another page faster.

It’s just that I’d be a bit amazed if – as, paradoxically enough, I suspect they do – they had an audience that was much more than just the people along from the print comics, especially ones that hadn’t already taken the massive archive binge, as the pace of the story and the incompleteness of the fragments would likely turn anyone else off from trying to follow it day-by-day.

The Angst-O-Meter: Day 3 or Conclusion

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(From Ctrl+Alt+Del. Click for full-sized surprises.)
 
This will be the last Angst-O-Meter, at least for now… I’m about to launch into something big and webcomics posts are about to be curtailed sufficient to force me to stop. Neither of the conditions I set when I started are extant; I just need to save time.
 
Last time, I set the Angst-O-Meter at 62%. Since then:
  • Ethan met Shannon, Christian’s representative in absentia, and established her competence. I was concerned when Shannon announced her hatred of Christian that, despite the opening this now opened up for Ethan to escape some angst, it also opened up an opportunity for Ethan to find a little love and escape Lilah, offsetting those gains. So far, though, their relationship is purely strategic.
  • Meanwhile, Lucas attempted to get back on the dating scene, with disastrous results.
  • Ethan, post-strategy session, challenged Christian to find out who could run the store better. This was sort of a big bet on the strip’s angst: if Ethan won, the status quo would be restored; if Christian won, Ethan would “work for me for free for the rest of your life.” So a lot of the strip’s standing was at stake here.
  • Lucas managed to recover some semblance of normalcy by getting back in with Kate. So it looks like the strip is managing to bounce back from the dark days of earlier in the summer.

And then came today’s strip to shoot the Angst-O-Meter through the roof.

Ethan just lost everything he was counting on on the flop (Shannon won’t help even in subtle ways) and Christian just pushed him all-in (trying to get back with Lilah).

(Pardon the poker metaphors. I’ve just been trying to catch up on WSOP episodes.)

At this point, if Ethan loses this bet, it would send the Angst-O-Meter straight up to 100% and it would be game over anyway. There are only two reasons I’m not sending the Angst-O-Meter well over 75%: Lucas getting back with Kate and the fact that somehow, someway, Ethan has to win this bet for the sanity of the strip.

Yet I wouldn’t be surprised if Christian won, given what Buckley has said in the past.

So the Angst-O-Meter, for now, jumps up to 72% on its last edition until at least after the election… and even if I would otherwise feel like picking it up afterwards, I might not under the ground rules I set for it anyway.

A webcomic post that isn’t about Darths and Droids or Order of the Stick? It’s the apocalypse!

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(From PVP. Click for full-sized awkward re-introductions.)

Here’s what’s happened over the past year in PVP:

First, Jade was invited to a high school reunion, which started out fairly normally, until it turned into a murder mystery (and a locked room mystery to boot!), with the obvious suspect soon ruled out and turned into the murderee. Oh, and there’s a fairly blatant continuity error.

Then Brent and Jade showed up as superheroes for a halloween party, which thankfully lasted for only two strips, before Cole pressed Francis into training the rest of the gang for a Halo 3 battle with Max Powers, prompting Brent to ask, “Since when is this comic strip about video games again?” The match itself takes place entirely off-screen, though, and is also mercifully brief.

Then a panda in the office nearly dies, and with Brent’s interference almost does, attracting the attention of the WWF, touching off a flashback sequence that’s really a three-strip Liberty Meadows tribute, complete with Frank Cho art, ending with Brent bringing in the panda and trying to pass it off as Skull. The WWF reintroduces the panda to the office on the grounds that it can’t survive outside an urban setting, and effectively bribes Cole into keeping him, allowing Cole to buy out Max Powers and end the financial support he’d been providing.

That leads into the annual rising of Kringus, demon god of Christmas trees, which – in a last-minute change in Scott Kurtz’s plans – consists of Kringus and Scratch teaming up to steal presents and steal the secret of world-travel-in-one-night from a mall Santa, only for said Santa to turn all bad ass on Kringus, only for Scratch to taze him and reveal him not to be the genuine article.

I’m only three months into the past year. That’s before Shecky, Skull’s cousin, shows up and takes Skull to impress the woman he wants to be his fiance, only for her to decide that just because Skull loves Shecky, doesn’t mean Shecky has any redeeming qualities. Since it can’t just end like that, Skull and Shecky get into a bit of a bother, which Madeline (who did I mention is a Gorgon, better known as a Medusa?) exonerates Shecky for, though not for the reasons Shecky thinks.

Then things return to some semblance of normalcy as it only now dawns on Brent how much Francis looks up to him, just as he set a date for his wedding with Jade, which he makes up for by making Francis the ring bearer and making it sound like Lord of the Rings. Then Francis decides to keep the name Brent changed one of his World of Warcraft characters to as a joke, and along with Skull, starts forming an in-game guild, in a setup to the launch of a spinoff comic.

Then Scratch starts modeling his world domination plans after Garfield, then considering modeling it after Calvin and Hobbes. Then Cole trash-talks his way right out of being the best man, briefly plopping Francis in the role until it turns out to be a result of trouble in his own marriage. That leads to Cole rooming with Brent for the moment. And then Brent gets surprised by his parents who don’t want to wait any longer to meet Jade, and Brent’s father pressures Cole into making up with his wife, which leads to an office paintball tournament, which Miranda turns out to be an expert at, and which ends when Brent suffers a dislocated nipple. A dislocated nipple. Which means he has to wear a bra. And it turns out they left Skull behind in the woods which turns into another super-serious mystery as he goes on a mushroom-induced high.

Seriously, you will never see a more ridiculous serious line in your life than “Cole, get the equipment out of the van. We’re painting troll tonight.” Not even in a fantasy story.

And the whole thing ends when Kurtz himself shows up and ridicules the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

Then, after a lengthy bout of guest strips, the wedding arc itself starts with – if you saw this coming collect your prize! – Jade backing out. Well, turns out it’s not Jade, it’s her mother by way of Miranda, so Cole has to ask Robbie for a favor. And even the wedding becomes super-serious when Skull’s case worker shows up to tell him his job is done. And Brent is slow enough to let go that he knocks a statue’s head off with a golf club.

Sensing a pattern here? Utter silliness wrapped up in mega-serious plots. Perhaps we call this PVP Syndrome?

Okay, I know that didn’t make sense, so to further clarify what I mean by PVP Syndrome (or maybe it’s Goats Syndrome), let’s compare PVP to Order of the Stick. Both underwent Cerebus Syndrome, but OOTS was always very well-grounded in a fantasy setting. It wove a compelling plot with new elements that made sense in the setting. I haven’t read much PVP at all beyond the past year, but I get the sense that once upon a time, it was just about a bunch of people in a magazine newsroom. Yes, they had a giant blue troll as a friend, but other than that it was essentially a standard workplace comedy. Well, some of those more outre elements have become even more outre, yet they’ve also helped provide the underpinnings of what’s presented as a fairly serious plot, and it just doesn’t mesh.

Eric Burns described Cerebus Syndrome as “the effort to create character development by adding layer upon layer of depth to their characters, taking a character of limited dimension (or meant to be a joke character) and making them fuller and richer.” That’s essentially what, over the years and especially recently, Kurtz has tried to do with Skull: create a broader underpinning for the character and his concept – but not really changing the fact that he’s a big blue cuddly troll who hangs out in a magazine office. He tried to put Skull through Cerebus Syndrome but he failed. That’s PVP Syndrome: trying to put your strip through Cerebus Syndrome, but through a misunderstanding of your own material, botching it so badly and creating something so unintentionally hilarious it comes off as something out of Bizarro Monty Python.

Seriously. Brent knocked the head off a living statue with a golf club. At his own wedding. And at least superficially, it’s supposed to be treated completely seriously.

Something tells me PVP needs to lose Skull at this point – if not to shake up the status quo (how much does the wedding of Brent and Jade change things, really?), to stop from becoming totally insane. Yet he just returned to Brent and the PVP gang (more on that later). It’s been hardly four months since the wedding and the strip is inexorably being drawn back to its old status quo.

And I’m not even going to talk about the Francis-and-Marcy-have-sex thing.

Then we get the misadventures of Skull’s new charge, which ends badly. Then we have more panda misadventures, this time involving a female panda who has to be brought in to copulate with the one they already have, which ends with the revelation that Brent has “the spirit of the panda inside [him]” and dressing up in a panda suit to fight the real panda, which ends when he accidentially knocks the real panda out and gets the girl panda all hot and bothered for him. But at least the boy panda has a new respect for Brent.

I swear to God I am not making any of this up.

Then Skull’s misadventures continue with a Family Circus parody, only to be saved by a Foxtrot parody. Then Robbie tries to work out his personal issues with Brent and Cole, prompting them to try to work things out with his friend Jason, who assures them that everything’s fine, which is belied by their actual interaction. The operation, then, is a success, much to Cole’s dismay.

Then we get an “interlude” where a bunch of literary supervillians team up to take on “the Lolbat”, a Batman parody that speaks mostly in Internet slang and mangled grammar, which ends badly. Then Francis and Cole get into an argument that seems intended to mirror D&D 4th Edition debates. And finally, in the current story arc, Scratch vows to get Skull back come hell or high water, starting by confronting Shecky, who gives him a key to the land of magic, where Scratch goes on a rampage, leading Madeline to agree to return Skull.

I haven’t even talked about the extraneous stuff, like the guest strips and the parody of 60s cop shows.

The funny part is, I actually developed more of an appreciation of PVP after reading all of that, and the growth and development of the characters and their relationships taking place all the while. But the two times I’ve attempted to start reading PVP have been during the second panda storyline above and the most recent storyline, and neither one has left a good taste in my mouth, seemingly proving to me that the general rule of webcomic popularity is that the weirder and more surreal, the better. I’m not even sure I understood the current storyline on first read.

This is a reference I know will resonate with Kurtz: Julius Schwartz was a comic book writer and editor, and one of the things he was fond of saying was that “every comic is someone’s first.” (I know I’ve heard that quote, but all of a sudden I’m not sure it was Schwartz’s, since he also said “the Golden Age of Comics is seven” or something like that.) Now, comics since then have largely forgotten those sage words, but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less relevant. Webcomics also have a propensity to forget them, maybe even more so, a natural result of the fact that any story-based comic is likely to have someone join in in the middle of some story arc, which is one reason why Eric Burns has recommended that any webcomic have some sort of cast page – any cast page, even one that hasn’t been accurate since the very first strip (which is why he’s also disdained webcomics that have taken down out-of-date cast pages).

But all the cast pages in the world can’t save someone’s readership of a strip if the first strip they see makes them decide it’s not their cup of tea. It’s possible for a mid-story strip to be a good introduction to the strip – I first fell in love with OOTS by reading an early strip in the battle of Azure City and becoming fascinated by the whole battle. But the current storyline is only resonant (and arguably only makes sense) if you already know who Skull is (thankfully he is listed on the cast page, which can’t be said for a good many others), that and why he was taken away, and even then you’d probably need to jump in fairly early in the storyline to understand what’s going on. With either of the storylines I started with, you might be left with the impression that PVP is a random, nigh-incomprehensible mess.

That leaves me with the impression that Kurtz is really writing for continuity-hungry fanboy geeks who jumped on board when PVP was good and popular, not trying to reach out to new readers. Perhaps this is to be expected, and perhaps Kurtz has a specific end point in mind with PVP and so doesn’t see the point in bringing in anyone new… but it’s interesting to note that Order of the Stick, a strip with a natural, clear end point, hasn’t gotten so bogged down in continuity as to turn off potential readers. All I know is that PVP gives the impression of pure chaos and randomness run amok, even if it isn’t and even if it’s still fairly decent, and that could magnify its already rather concerning flaws and obscure its virtues.

I’d like to think the ticket to webcomic popularity isn’t to be as weird and random as possible…

(Webcomic reviews will last one or two weeks into October and could resume in November depending on how easily I balance everything I’ve already signed up for until then.)

A note for any webcomic who hopes to ever be reviewed by me if I ever return to that.

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(From 8-Bit Theater. Click for full-sized out-betrayal.)

I had been planning on posting on 8-Bit Theater in three or four weeks, starting my tracking of it after I was done with the strip I’ll post on later today.

But by all appearances, 8BT doesn’t appear to keep an RSS feed. I haven’t looked very hard, but I have looked quite a bit. In the past that would have worked; I used to follow Ctrl+Alt+Del, Irregular Webcomic, xkcd, Dinosaur Comics, and even Order of the Stick that way. And hell, I don’t have an RSS feed for Sandsday.

But at least recently (as in, for all those strips except OOTS because I didn’t subscribe to as many feeds when I wasn’t subscibed to the OOTS feed), it hasn’t worked well, and I decided to impose a personal policy to only subscribe to RSS feeds to track webcomics I wanted to review.

(No, Buzzcomix Reader is not an option. I can’t even find it on Buzzcomix at all, no thanks to the search function that produces errors in IE7.)

So I may still review 8BT… or I may not. Haven’t decided yet. But be warned.

Important notice on Da Blog’s future

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Tomorrow (which could be today as you read this) I head back to school. It’s important to me that I do as well in school as I can, yet my summer has been positively dominated by Da Blog.

Therefore, posting on Da Blog will be severely curtailed in the near future. Sandsday, the College Football Rankings, the SNF Flex Schedule Watch, the lineal titles, the college football schedule, Sports Watcher, and the Random Internet Discovery will continue as normal, but all else will stop. Which essentially means you can wave goodbye to my webcomic reviews, and even those will continue until my next regularly scheduled OOTS post. In addition, on all of these I will attempt to work as far in advance as possible, except for the College Football Rankings, Flex Schedule Watch, and lineal titles.

Four straight OOTS posts! Four straight!

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized vigilante justice.)

I can’t tell if this is because I’m starting to succumb to my temptations to post on every edition of OOTS, or just because things are really ramping up in anticipation of the 600th strip.

But it certainly seems odd that a villain built up as much as Kubota has would be wiped out of the plot that easily. Of course, this is hardly the end; Qarr still lurks behind the scenes (and who knows who he represents), for one thing, and Vaarsuvius almost certainly would be brought in for his/her own trial if there’s even one supporter of Kubota left (and we did see a ninja seemingly disappear from the fight a few strips back), and maybe even if not – with, if the general consensus on the forums is to be believed, potentially massive consequences.

(If Elan is true Chaotic Good, he sure as hell won’t be the one bringing charges against V, freaked-out look aside.)

More interesting is what this says about V’s state of mind, which for nearly the past hundred strips has been slowly deteriorating as a result of his/her single-minded quest to find Haley and return her, hopefully with Roy or his body in tow, and go ahead and include Belkar if he’s there as well. Whatever moment (s)he doesn’t spend on some harebrained scheme to find them is spent on boosting his/her level to the skies to further advance those goals even more.

So it’s interesting to read his/her last line: “Now can we PLEASE resume saving the world?”

Now, V has said in the past that “any attempt to locate and resuscitate Sir Greenhilt is also the most reliable means of finding Girard’s Gate”, which would be the next step in “saving the world”, but it seems obvious that V would probably have nothing to do with any trial, and everyone else would only have something to do with his/her quest insofar as they could find things for him/her to fight and gain experience. Which, it would seem, giving Kubota a chance to win aquittal may be the better way to go. (I mean, V just vanquished a gigantic demon summoned by Qarr as a distraction. No matter how high level Kubota may be, he can’t compare to a massive demon whose toe is about as big as Durkon.)

So is this a sign that V has finally gotten into contact with Haley? That (s)he has given up the hunt and intends to move on without her or Roy, taking Hinjo and the in-exile government of Azure City instead? Something else? Am I reading too much into a throwaway line?

Well, I’m certainly eagerly anticipating the next episode, at any rate. Then again, I eagerly anticipate every episode.

(PS: I linked to this post from the OOTS forums, so there’s a short-term bump going on here.)