3202 A Kings Priorities
on April 12, 2019
Chapter: Voyage of the Azure Osprey
Characters: Eddy the Mage, Runtherd "Runt"
Location: Ch'Thier's Celestial Tomb
For those of you who have noticed and mentioned some internal problems with the site, delays, error messages implying that pages are missing and so on…
Rest assured that it hasn’t gone unnoticed and I think that I know what the issue is. YAFGC is over 11 years old and has a LOT of content. WordPress has some problems coping with the amount of information that’s getting stored and I need to find some time to expand the allocated memory inside it. I’m not a coding expert, so these things take me a little bit of time. So bear with me and I’ll try to fix it before the whole thing crashes out like last time. 🙂
Thank you for your patience!
Rich “BK” Morris
Ceterum autem censeo Guestinem esse delendam
Runt, don’t let your rage guide your actions in this. You know Eddy’s right, your people must come first.
"There is no emotion; there is peace." 😛
Yeah, Eddy is absolutely right…but he’s no better a diplomat than he ever was, shutting down Runt’s arguments out-of-hand, and ending with that smug, condescending "You have to be that King, Runtherd."
Better to take a little time to reason things through with the King, and let Runt himself arrive at the conclusion that there are bigger priorities right now than rescuing his damsel in distress. If Runt had felt like this was his decision and not Eddy’s, he wouldn’t be stalking off with that sulking timebomb expression on his mug…
(Besides, it would be good training for all the tough decisions Runt will have to make when Eddy’s NOT right there to do his thinking for him.)
I didn’t hear that as condescension, more as a grim pronouncement.
I was there, the day the King fallen in the dark side
I don’t blame Runt for being frustrated. He’s finally found someone that I hope he’s feeling happy with (I vaguely remember Alaria being really nice), so I’d be feeling pretty freaked out, and worried about her. Now if only Eddy sounded as wise as he hopes he does, and not an arrogant old coot, he might have been able to calm Runt down. I hope someone else can cool our king’s temper. Rushing in stupidly is only going to get everyone killed.
Damn. This is really good. I get where both of them are coming from, and I feel the weight they bear, and… both of them blew it pretty badly there.
Excellent strip.
t!
🙂 Thank you!
Yes indeed. I…see shades of Obi-Wan and Anakin in this relationship, and that worries me greatly.
"The council does not confer the rank of Master, Your Majesty."
Eh… this doesn’t really compare to Anakin. Anakin decided to betray everyone who trusted him and slaughter a bunch of kids, all in order to cozy up to a con artist who implied he MIGHT have known a guy who MIGHT have learned how to keep people from dying, and MIGHT have taught said con artist. All because Anakin had had a bad dream and decided it was prophecy.
Frankly, the only way the Council handled things badly there was in not keeping a nice wooden club on hand for whacking idiots. "Will you knock it off!? You KNOW this appointment to the Council was purely political! if you were worthy of being called a Master, you wouldn’t be throwing a tantrum about in the first place! Now sit down, shut up, and try not to make a mess when they bring in the snacks. Huh? Oh, yeah… there are a few perks to being on the Council. Just… shut up, and enjoy."
I’m not compared His Majesty to Anakin in those respects. I’m comparing the relationship of mentor and mentee, with the failings on both sides, to Obi-Wan and Anakin’s relationship prior to Anakin’s heel turn. And I acknowledge it’s not identical; the extent of that very brief observation above was to observe the character of the growing rift between Eddy and King Runtherd.
Indeed, that sums it up well. Neither one of this handled it well.
Runtherd’s scowl worries me greatly about where things might go from here. I’m hoping that someone will soon come along to talk him down from this and help him make the right decisions.
That last panel is not the face of a man who has accepted the harsh wisdom of his advisor and is preparing himself to do his duty no matter how painful
I can understand his dilemma. He’s imagining her hung up in a dungeon calling out his name while he does nothing. Sometimes wisdom is too painful.
They’re feeding the worst in one another. Eddy has framed their relationship as a parent/child relationship, not a peer relationship…and this is complicated by the fact that the "child" outranks the "parent."
Eddy is accustomed to stewarding on the king’s alleged behalf, but when Runtherd asserts that he’d like to do this himself now, well, he’s not ready, he’s not mature enough, nope, let Daddy handle this. Unfortunately, we encounter a Catch-22 here: King Runtherd cannot grow and mature without experience (and its consequences), but Eddy won’t let Runtherd take on those consequences and gain that experience until he grows and matures.
And so, and perhaps with the best of intentions, Eddy has infantilized Runtherd. Unable to persuade Eddy, stuck in the "boy king" kiddie chair, His Majesty has only one tool at his disposal that has any potential power, and it’s the "I AM YOUR KING AND I COMMAND IT!" alpha-roll. Of course, Eddy sees this as the temper tantrum it is, and no-sells it.
But here we have a boy king (despite his physical age) whose complete shielding from consequences (through decisions being made for him) has left him severely ill-equipped to handle the realities of executive power and the weight of owning consequences of those decisions he’s so eager to make, but never gets to actually own and see through…and an advisor who has grown entirely too comfortable making all the decisions, and completely discrediting the will of the actual monarch as "unsuitable and childish."
This is a terrible time to be a rebellious adolescent with supreme executive power, but I fear that Eddy has, to quote The Who, resumed cleaning that blue Rolls Royce, while his young monarch sets the book of his mentor’s life onto the fire, so to speak.
I cannot imagine this will end well for either of them…or any of the souls depending on them. Oh dear, and furthermore, oh my.
Wow, I totally forgot that he was already engaged to Alaria. I actually thought he would hit it off with Queen Anna right there… and that his courteous, but professional tone was because he was much more level headed than this particular strip shows.
Oh, and there’s something obvious that Eddy is not telling Runt about. Namely, as soon as Ranna is defeated, her followers are free to do what they please with any captives, which puts Alaria in immediate danger.
Yeah, but once Ranna is defeated, her followers are going to realize they are in DEEEEEEP shit, and they never even noticed when the shit came up over their heads. They’ve been doing all kinds of horrible, horrible things, laughing about it and enjoying themselves tremendously. Any captives they have will be "offerings we can give up freely in the hopes that the retribution won’t be quite as extreme as we so richly, richly, richly deserve."
We’ve seen the ladies in rubber freed before. Their reactions varied, if I remember right, from self preservation to liberation to fear.
As for the gorgons, they might just turn to stone themselves. Not sure at all with those ones.
Possibly but its far from unknown for defeated Empires to destroy as much as they can on the way out as petty revenge against those who defeated them
Bug report: Panel 5: "under our protector" should be "under our protection". I don’t think Eddy is so frazzled as to mess up his grammar that much.
Hmmm.
Is it me, or is this strip’s comments section more tranquil, more mature, more… pleasant, somehow?
t!
Yes, I suppose I could have handled that better but…. well I didn’t. 🙂
…oh.
I think it worked Rich. Expungius ignoramus…
No, this isn’t like the prequel trilogy. This is like what the prequel trilogy aimed for and missed by a mile.
🙂
Please note that my comparison was about a certain tension in the mentor/mentee dynamic, and the comparison was not intended to be broader than that.
I’m sorry if it came across like I was being sh*tty with you… it’s a perfectly good point and a perfectly valid parallel. It *is* a somewhat similar scenario; it’s just that here it’s being done with characters with believable psychology I actually care what happens to.
No insult taken or meant, Nick. I just wanted to be clear about what I was, and wasn’t, saying with the comparison.
That face, that expression, that hairstyle; Runtherd looks like Tomin from Stargate SG-1!
https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Tomin
Hmmm… the line of ‘latin’ when plugged into google translate, gives me "But I think we should be destroyed Guestinem"
The line is just replacing Carthaginem with Guestinem in a famous ancient saying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est
The grammar is a bit off because Carthago is not the same gender or noun class as (the hypothetically Latin) Guesticus, so it could be corrected to:
Ceterum autem censeo Guesticum esse delendum.
Well Eddy sure could have handled that better. I do hope that Runtherd won't do anything stupid.
Or, you can let the true king claim his rightful throne…