El Goonish Shive

An artist certainly has the right to choose which commission requests he'll accept and which ones he'll reject you know. Three V5 commissions in the past couple weeks (I'm including the beastplate one)? Hmmmm. HMMMMMM.

Not that I blame him or anything.

99http://www.egscomics.com/sketchbook.php?id=782 There was the shirtless Ted and Eliot, so it wasn't entirely all V5s.]]

I believe the only restrictions he placed were no zombies, no inanimate objects, safe for work.

To be fair to the commissioners, it was only 3 out of 11(not counting Vladia, as v5 is what she permanently looks like), so it's not a majority or anything.
The two six panellers that Shive chose himself present a mix of beef and cheese cake, as well as fully clad.

We also have 3 of 11 featuring Ashley, 3 featuring Tedd(2 fem!Tedd), 3 featuring Elliot(1 fem!Elliot), 2 featuring Grace, and 1 each for Vladia, Rhoda, Catalina, Diane, Liz, Susan(w/Nase), Nanase and Raven.

edited 29th Aug '14 5:22:19 AM by Daremo

Has Elliot been slacking? I seriously don't recall him looking quite that soft.

Comic!

Krak-A-Thoom!!!

......

.....

Uuhhhhhhhh......

Quick! To the Dewitchery Diamond!

edited 29th Aug '14 6:58:06 AM by GethKnight

Note that this doesn't yet say whether the mark does or does not contain the reverse non-enchantment spell. We're not yet sure exactly what the mark does, or even whether the non-enchantment girlification is part of it or a separate spell.

Just jumping to conclusions that this will be a rehash of Ellen's introduction.

Tedd's power all along was to turn into a boy, which had been always on. The mark screwed it up.

I have very mixed feelings about this development, because I think it could be fuel for amazing Character Development for Tedd, in ways that Shive almost certainly will not address.

I also think it strangely convenient that Tedd suddenly discovered that he's genderfluid immediately before being rendered female permanently, and the convenience of that is a key reason why I suspect that rather than actually addressing the challenges and hurdles this will introduce into Tedd's life, he's just going to be cool with it.

Basically, right now I feel like the Nostalgia Critic watching the AIDS episode of Captain Planet. "STOP! GO BACK! YOU ARE NOT TALENTED ENOUGH!"

edited 29th Aug '14 7:40:38 AM by TobiasDrake

Hey, remember all those ways Tedd could turn into a girl already? Two of them can set him back to his original self, can't they?

I thought Shive already admitted somewhere to having a fondness for drawing buxom ladies. It's not like it's inherently outrageous; some people just have a type that they like to go for. To Shive's credit, he's not necessarily promoting it as an ideal to strive for.

I'm not seeing just how Tedd has made the leap into thinking that this effect has done a find/replace with his Y chromosome, but it's as sound a theory as anything else. That said, I'm not sure why he looks so panicked. It's certainly not convenient in the short term, and it does have some Fridge Logic down-the-road worries attendant with it (ones the readership were clued into some time ago). But Tedd of all people has the tools to deal with this situation - he can just zap himself back into his old male form whenever he wants (and we know that Tedd does have that form "on file" somewhere; he did give a copy of it to Sarah back when she started assisting him). And we even know that Tedd can make the transformation length last a while.

It's a situation that one shouldn't sleep on, but if anyone should have it under control, it's Tedd.

Side note, the snarky part of me thinks that this is to tease the Tedd/Elliot shippers.

Tedd has his original form "on file" in the girl standing right next to him.

That too, but I think Tedd mentioned having his base form saved in a computer database he's constructed. Still, the point stands - Tedd can retrieve his base form as much as he needs to.

I still maintain that Tedd is not genderfluid; he just likes to be able to change whenever he wants. Now, who he is has been changed and he's realizing that maybe he really is a guy who likes to occasionally become a girl, not someone who can switch back and forth with no trauma.

I don't think Shive will pull that, he's not THAT stupid. It's just his incompetency at writing a gender identity showing.

Shive isn't going to be edgy about this shit again is he? Because seriously, Cloning Blues tends to drag the fuck out.

Fixed.

The real question I have to ask; is Tedd being a girl a side effect of being marked, or just a spell effect created by his mark? The former has a ton of Unfortunate Implications, to the point of rivaling The Wotch for just how many disturbing elements there are.

Almost certainly the latter, I think. None of the other marks we've seen did anything else, and Pandora was talking about how Tedd unintentionally used the new power.

Hmm.

The spell isn't 'Tedd becomes a girl'. The spell is 'Tedd becomes whichever gender she identifies as at the moment'.

edited 29th Aug '14 9:27:12 AM by Gilphon

It seems to me like permanently modifying something should be much, much easier than temporarily modifying it.

Like, a temporary modification requires a temporary shift; the f*ck do you do that? The original form has to be stored somewhere in the spell itself, or something; constantly maintained by the magic, and there has to be enough energy to last the entire duration, which would have a hefty upkeep. It's basically a glamour, wherein your real body still exists somewhere and will be returned to you once the HUGE STORES OF ENERGY maintaining your transformation ends.

Whereas a permanent transformation would be done in one go. One shot, you're changed, and that's all the magic is required to do. It only needs as much energy as is required for the initial morph.

It's the difference between reworking a car into a truck, and reworking a car into a truck that will automatically reformat itself back into a car in a month. Tedd being stunned by the permanency just feels off, because it calls attention to the fact that that's how transformations should work, and that the idea that they wear off over time really does seem more like illusions than transformation.

edited 29th Aug '14 9:57:06 AM by TobiasDrake

@16844 It definitely is the latter. If there were physical side effects of receiving a mark, then we would have witnessed some change in Justin already. Also, given that Susan got one in appropriate circumstances and knew about how they worked, she probably would have said something if they did.

Now, we have evidence that awakening causes physical changes, although based on what happened with Susan, I'd say such changes are solely based on conscious or subconscious desires for the idealized body form.

@16846 The flip side is, what if a temporary transformation is actually two spells in one? First a base transformation, and then a time-release transformation to the original form? Like I hinted at before, one of the advantages that one has in making a magic system for your own universe is that you don't have to worry about play balance like if you borrowed it from a game.

Simply put, we still don't know enough of the magic rules of the setting to say which effect should take more energy.

In the EGS-verse, your shape has a certain Ontological Inertia, and will revert to base unless something stops it. If you're going to question exactly why that should be, you might as well question every non-reality based thing that happens.

While an effect with a time-release that triggers a second transformation effect at a set point in time would also work, it would still be more mana-intensive than a spell that comprises ONLY of the first transformation effect and no other add-ons.

I believe the explanation is right; my understanding is that Enchantment use a good amount of their power to sustain themselves and then disappear once that power is used up.

Temporary tattoos may be an appropriate metaphor here.