The Order of the Stick

Before I saw Bloodfeast's tail, for a moment I thought that Calder was choking on it.

I actually had the same thought when seeing the page.

Shoot, now I want to make a Dinotopia movie reference, but it's probably too obscure...

I do think at least one of the purposes of this battle was to let Bloodfeast have his moment in the sun outside of fighting Xykon.

Sometimes you set up Chekhov's Gun so you can take it down and shoot it at the bad guy in the finale.

But sometimes you have a Chekhov's Gun set up that you want to take down and shoot, but the bad guy's wearing a bulletproof vest. It'd be disappointing, after the audience is waiting with anticipation to see the gun go off, if it fails uselessly the first time it's fired.

So you shoot it at something else, to give people all the awe and spectacle of seeing the gun go off at something. That way, they won't be disappointed when you either a) shoot the bad guy ineffectually with it or b) don't bother shooting it at the bad guy at all. It's already had its moment.

I don't know if it's the only purpose for this random encounter, but letting Bloodfeast have his moment in the sun so it's not disappointing if he's useless against Xykon certainly seems like a fulfilling purpose for this random encounter.

I personally did not expect that the story would end with a dinosaur eating a lich, so yeah.

Bloodfeast survives this fight, even levels up, becomes Belkar's awesome mount, then gets one-shotted by Xykon once he shows up.

Just to add to what Raichu KFM said: judging characters' worth by their "narrative purpose" is what a certain villain did. And it was extensively examined and skewered then. It's safe to say Rich does not operate like that.

No one is judging. That is something you just made up for the sake of a cheap gotcha.

Would you prefer "evaluating a character's worth"? Doesn't really change anything.

And now you're doing it again.

Sure sounds like a statement on his narrative worth to me.

It says literally nothing about a character's worth. Just about whether it 's a character you'd keep around.

The disconnect here is that the narrative worth of the character is being judged, yes; but being judged as narrative worth. I did that too, though my judgement was more open-ended than the ones I was responding to. Tarquin's moral failing is judging the worth of people by their relation to the narrative he imagined the world was following.

If people were saying characters in the story shouldn't care about Bloodfeast because he (supposedly) probably serves no narrative purpose beyond this encounter, ignoring that Bloodfeast is worth caring about as a living being, then that would be making the mistake Tarquin made; but I don't think anybody was doing that? So the point there was a bit overboard, though I don't think you were making it up in intentional bad faith or anything.

That said, I think there is something in expecting Rich to flaunt making things happen just due to narrative expediency rather than what would make sense in the world? Either as a deliberate subversion, or as a happenstance coincidence; like, here, just not really thinking about killing Bloodfeast off in this scene in the first place, like if this was the Bloodfeast gets redino'd scene building towards later stuff Bloodfeast does.

I think a lot of the analysis of things as a complicated narrative artifice is following rules/notions that keep consistently failing to predict what's coming next, and yet people keep going forward with those ideas, without even diminishing confidence. People had on Bloodfeast dies here goggles, and the deniers tunnel visioned on Sunny coming back, and we all forgot that V can dispel magic and possibly might here. Hopping right back to the prior that just got blown up in everyone's face as if it's as certain as it was thought before is... weird. People are calling it I Know You Know I Know as if the Genre Savvy guesses are actually paying off. It's not surprising; that's the predominant mode of thinking of this entire site, and it's great fun for those who like it. I'm not even dissing it, it has certainly led to correct calls and fun ideas I never would have stumbled on.

But I think it can be a bit easy to be overly confident in it, as if stories were more formulaic than they actually are, as if common trends are absolute rules of narrative. Like, plenty of developments lately have been surprises, I think, without coming off as 'subverting expectations for the sake of subverting expectations'; they were satisfying, because they made sense.

I'm going anecdotal here, and was the last two paragraphs if you hadn't noticed; but I certainly feel like the comic has been operating more as a coherent, consistent world, rather than a tropey genre-pastiche or a story intentionally hitting 'narrative beats'. It's more like real events, with little jokes and references to its nature as fiction still, but not being nearly so important. And I think this makes sense, as we close in on our climax, as we understand the real nature of the conflict, as we have to really confront the stakes we've known for so long—this is about stopping the end of the world. Not the generic terrible badthing, but saving so many lives, so many places, so many cultures, giving things a future and a chance to get better.

This isn't a stick figure fantasy parody. That's what it is to the gods, but they're wrong, it's more than that, it's worth something.

So I think it's only fitting that the basic structure of the story reflect that. This isn't a narrative; this is the happenings in this fictional world that the story is showing us. People are acting in clever and unexpected ways and working together and acting like people with capabilities and motivations, not baubles in the toolkit to be pulled out for problem-solving. And, sure, you can tell me I'm being silly, this is still a story, a narrative, and the characters like everything else in it are tools. And you'd be right. But I still feel this way, and I think that's a testament to the story, even if I'm alone in it.

What I'm saying here, were I to put it rather more succinctly, is that shit got real.

Edited by RaichuKFM on Apr 11th 2024 at 4:14:27 AM

There is definitely a narrative going on here, it cannot be denied. The staple of good writing is that when something happens then it makes sense for the world and situation that brought it to happen instead of being a mere narrative coincidence. You don't just hang Checkhovs Gun on the wall if you don't intend to fire it. When Bloodfeast got polymorphed and the Order brought him with them, we knew, we expected, him to one time return to his original shape, because that's how stories work. That it happened exactly in this scene definitely has narrative significance too. Yet it feels natural because of how well-built the narrative is. It's well-built because when something happens, it doesn't come out of the blue, it feels natural to happen in the situation, yet it isn't glaringly obvious either.

I think part of the point is that a major part of the narrative here is that narrative rules aren’t real and life is messy and complicated and doesn’t have neat end points where the curtain drops.

That’s still a narrative, but a narrative about the failings of narratives is at such a meta level that to try and predict what happens next based on narrative rules is madness.

But that's not even the case with OOTS. It follows a well-defined narrative structure with all the character arcs and foreshadowings and plot points and all.The difficulty of predicting it is not because it's random or follows no structure or built to subvert expectation (though it sometimes does the latter), but because it's complex enough and there are enough foreshadownings hidden during its long run that there are just too many possibilities to consider.

Tarquin is Wrong Genre Savvy not because he is wrong about the narrative conventions of the story, but because he is wrong about the character roles. He thinks that he is the main villain and Elan is the main protagonist, and tries to force the story to go in that direction. But eventually, as the narrative structure defines for a side villain, he is defeated and has his karmic comeuppance. For Tarquin, it means that he is not defeated in a climatic duel by Elan, but instead left behind while the protagonists move on to the next plot point.

The same can be said for every other arc. They have their structure that serves a purpose in the story, and everything is woven together in a greater narrative. Without that, you end up in a Kudzu Plot that goes nowhere or drive the story by a series of Ass Pulls. Everything serves a purpose, even if that purpose is not always clear at the point it happens.

The story literally had a Kudzu Plot as part of the last narative arc. Sure it was probably the C plot but it was part of Durkon’s arc dammit.

Edited by Silasw on Apr 11th 2024 at 9:37:53 AM

And it is turning out beautifully instead of the mess of that trope most of the time. Tropes Are Tools has never been truer.

OOTS takes apart the whole idea of narrative causality, with Elan's character growth being the realization that a good story isn't worth endangering people. He's come a long way from the guy who triggered a self-destruct sequence just for a more dramatic exit.

I'm reminded of Bojack Horseman, where a big part of the drama was characters like Bojack trying to apply the tropes and narratives from the shows and movies and stories they grew up with or worked on to their lives. But as Princess Carolyne put it, "Life isn't a story. Life is just...life."

That was one plot thread that was brought up after a very long time, which I guess makes it technically a Kudzu Plot. It becomes messy when there are multiple of these plots coming up regularly.

OOTS is still a story. Real life doesn't have plot threads that are bound to get resolved or that are necessarily foreshadowed. There are no main characters and character arcs are not guaranteed for anyone. OOTS, on the other hand, has all of these. Elan used to think about them in the past to the level of constantly trying to do whatever he thought was dramatically appropriate in the situation. He no longer does that. He's learned from the Tarquin arc that it's better to let the story flow naturally on its own path instead of trying to force it in a way you think it should move. But that doesn't mean that plot threads and narrative magically disappear from the comic. It's there just the same as before, even though the characters themselves have stopped trying to actively manipulate it.

This of course doesn't stop fans from trying to speculate what would happen based on narrative significance. But, again, they don't become wrong because narrative significance does not exist, but because the plot is complex enough and the plot resolutions are foreshadowed in a subtle enough manner that when they come, they come as a genuine surprise to most readers but at the same time still remain logical and inevitable. This means that some fans are bound to guess right, and there are usually the few people who do guess right. The point is that not everyone guesses the same because there are no single resolution that makes sense at a given point.

Bojack Horseman was also a story obviously. But it still managed to take apart the idea of applying narrative rules to life.

I feel the need to say. That I've been following this comic for many years, and in that time I've seen a lot of people make some extremely wrong predictions and back them up with 'it wouldn't make narrative sense for anything else to happen'.

And, to be clear, they're usually not wrong because of a misunderstanding of narrative structure, but rather just misunderstanding about where the story is actually going. Like they've latched onto predicting a very specific sequence of events that is not the exact same sequence of events that's in Rich's mind.

Edited by Gilphon on Apr 12th 2024 at 11:05:25 AM

Well, yeah. That's the fun bit.

Yeah, to be clear, I am not claiming OotS is actually without narrative structure or other story elements. It clearly isn't; it can't be, even if it was actively spiting the notion of them, which it isn't fullbore trying to do.

I was just being silly and flowery about how the story is managing to feel very real and organic now, where it used to be much more artificial. And I tugged at some thematic threads that I think link in nicely with that.

I'll still say people trying to predict the story by narrative rules are often getting it wrong, and still acting like they can confidently make new predictions on similar lines. But that's, I think, not because no narrative structure can be put on the story... but because the narrative guesses are based on simplistic toy models of the world. They are looking for the narrative beat that feels like it should come next, and then find the shortest path there... But often not only are they wrong about how that beat happens, they're wrong about what sort of beat is coming next. So the basic structure of predicting 'Ah, an X beat should come next for the narrative to be satisfying' is fouled up by all the times a Y beat comes, is surprising, and is still narratively satisfying. There are few real points where only one kind of narrative beat can come next; the story isn't bucking narrative structure, but it's not in the mold people evidently expect it to be.

In the literal truth of things, Gilphon has it exactly right. In flowery pretentious metaphor, though, the problem is not taking the world seriously enough as this complex thing inhabited by people with agency. And that can tie into the themes of the comic, instead of just going, like, "I think the way people tend to predict plot points in this comic is flawed (as opposed to how I tend to predict things, which is differently flawed)".

Though it can be funny sometimes to see someone go on a wild pet theory with incredibly thin evidence.