El Goonish Shive

It makes more sense than a goddamn Gym Leader having only two Pokemon and both are under level 15.

Isn't that brought up in one of the Black/White games? A Gym Leader lamenting he can't use his actual team in Gym Battles because they're too strong?

You can fight them in the post game with appropriately high-leveled and varied teams, too.

New strip up, and Tedd invokes The Power of Friendship for Sarah worrying if Pandora would remember her.

Edited by ironballs16 on Jul 12th 2018 at 10:56:06 AM

I think the gym leaders having more powerful teams for when they're not doing badge testing was canon as of HeartGold/SoulSilver (where you could get their contact info for the purposes of rematches against all 16). At the very least, it's very strongly suggested there.

I get why Tedd is saying what he's saying, and why Sarah would be all invested in Pandora... but eh, from the reader perspective, I find it hard to be all that worried as to how and in what way Pandora's new incarnation will remember everything. I only have so much sympathy for a Well-Intentioned Extremist who got snapped into said position because of a bit of a contrived situation.

It also doesn't help that both Sarah and Tedd met pandora once or twice at best. I get being shaken but man those are some tears.

Edited by MrAHR on Jul 13th 2018 at 10:24:19 AM

Well, there is one sense in which I get Sarah and Tedd crying. In Tedd's case, given that he's very clearly wanted a mother figure in his life and has been very needy in that regard, I do have sympathy for him (yes, me, with sympathy for Tedd unconditionally). For Sarah, though, it comes off more as "but who is going to give me an awakening?" So yeah, my reaction towards her tears are "really?"

She could be sad for Tedd. I've got friends who cry when sad things happen to their friends. Sarah could be one of those people.

Plus, it was kind of implied that she and Pandora met more than the times we saw them together. She might have actually made a friend in her. Pandora sure seemed to think so.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Jul 13th 2018 at 12:35:41 PM

Reminder that these are teenagers, and this is probably their first acquaintance who 'died'. Of course they're going to cry, because they have no coping mechanisms of their own yet, and crying is what they're told people do when someone dies, right?

And that's assuming, of course, that Pandora didn't leave a few hooks to make them love her... even without explicit magic, she's had a few thousand years to learn headology.

It sucks when everyone has the same emotional response to bad things.

Like I experienced 4 deaths before I graduated from high school. I only cried over one, and that wasn't until days later.

Sarah has officially cried more than I ever did over my grandparents and my aunt dying.

And that's not a bad thing, but it just strikes me to that long running problem where everyone in Shive's verse is running the same emotional code.

Sarah met Box quite a few times, and the final one she had the latter open up and confide in her - which is damn-near unheard of when it comes to Immortal/Human relations. Plus, Box was the only reason she was able to get any magic, so that would engender some loyalty from Sarah, who'd been getting somewhat jealous of her magic-using friends.

Edit: Also, the conversation about Pandora only came up afterward - Sarah's first question was "Why were all those vampires at the mall?", and related that back to Susan's meeting with Diane. Given what Sarah knows about Susan's history with fighting vampires, that makes her crying a lot more reasonable.

Edited by ironballs16 on Jul 13th 2018 at 11:42:33 AM

Yeah, I'm with AHR and Footsteps on this one. This traumatized breakdown doesn't really feel earned. It comes across more as Sarah mourning the loss of her chance to gain cool magic powers than the abrupt severing of a real emotional relationship.

And even further feels unearned because, as Tedd points out, this is totally a cop-out death that means nothing anyway and even the characters know it. Even with as cheap as death already is for Immortals, Pandora found a way to make it cheaper. Which apparently any Immortal can do and must just don't because "Shrug".

It's super awkard that Pandora's god-son is the one having to console a person who's been having on and off conversations with her for like a week. But it makes sense tha the's not too torn up about it, on account of the fact that she's not really dead and there is zero emotional weight to be found in what happened to her - which, itself, makes it hard to buy into why any consoling even needs to be done.

This is a lot of drama over someone Sarah barely knows taking a short vacation from existence.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jul 13th 2018 at 4:07:21 AM

Not because "shrug" because this

Also, NP Gam-12

That's a shrug.

The official story is that any Immortal could do what Pandora did to maintain continuity of identity through their reset, but they just don't because they don't want to or some shit. It's not a limitation of their metaphysics, it's a personal choice. And they all independently make the same choice every time, each and every one of them no matter who they are or what their life was like leading up to it.

But Pandora gets to keep her identity and everything because she did the unthinkable and did not make the same personal choice that all Immortals always make all the time.

Which also means that she could have just done this hundreds of years ago and have maintained continuity of identity through multiple resets and none of this would ever have happened. There was literally nothing stopping her. It's just a choice that any Immortal can make but no Immortal ever, ever does. And they'd rather go insane over centuries than just flick the super-easy Keep Memories switch when resetting.

Because shrug.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jul 13th 2018 at 9:05:27 AM

When Pandora is first preparing for the refresh, she makes it sound like she's the only one who can do it because of her ridiculous power level, and even then she's not sure. "If any immortal can do it, I can." The Will of Magic referred to it as "something immortals rarely do," which sounds like a flippant choice, but it's operating on hefty Blue-and-Orange Morality. If most immortals reset at age two hundred and you need at least a century of more power to do Pandora's trick, then from Magic's perspective it would be something they "rarely do." It probably doesn't really understand why they bother resetting at all.

Even without the power considerations, it's quite easy to see how no immortals would make that decision without heavily extenuating circumstances.

It's a part of their culture.

Just as we don't go around strangling everyone who annoys us, not because of laws and such but because we mostly think doing something like that is wrong, immortals burdening their next incarnation with more attachments and obligations than absolutely required would be considered wrong.

Yes, barring Discar's posit, they could do it, but would they? From what we've seen these former fairies seem fairly Fair Folkish, low on empathy to anyone other than themselves(and future selves), and mostly oriented on their own amusements and goals. Susan and her gang managed to catch Jerry in a moment of maturity, but how has that been received?

Look at how Zeus resents Jerry making him Susan's ally. Reluctant and recalcitrant, does it seem like he'd be keen to do the same to his next self, two hundred years from now? No, he curses Jerry's name, and I don't think his reaction is out of the ordinary. It's not against immortal law, but it does seem like a Thing That Is Not Done.

That's the impression that I get.

In the comic where Magic tells Tedd about Pandora, it specifically says that whatever Pandora's doing is something any immortal can do, but never consider actually trying.

My takeaway was that Pandora is doing something that's either obscure or so highly unusual it wouldn't even occur to most immortals in the first place.

The previous strip was better and truly emotional, so emotional in fact, that this one feels muted by comparison. Never mind that the stakes are faint. I get Ted being in a point where he needs a Mother figure in his life and now mourning not Pandora herself, but the expectations Ted projected in her, but Sarah used to be terrified of Box! Come on! She was like her prisoner for a while!

??

Do what Pandora did when she reset, you'd have to stave of resetting for so long, which is why most immortals don't consider on account of the amount of damage that can be done leading up to that.

Yeah, but people do Things That Are Not Done all the time. Like. Most people don't want to dress up as animals wearing swastikas and have weird animal Nazi sex. And yet Alt-Furries exist. People are not a monolith.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jul 14th 2018 at 10:06:37 AM

Well, yeah. That's why Jerry could stick Zeus with an unwanted mortal ally, and Pandora could pass on her emotional ties. Being an alt-furry is a personal choice, but it's one the vast majority of people do not make and wouldn't understand if you tried to explain it to them.

Much as passing on emotional ties or obligations to your next incarnation would be incomprehensible to the vast majority of immortals.

But Magic did say it rarely happens, not never happens.

Again, magic said it's something they never think to even try, with my own takeaway being that it's not something they don't do because of rules or morality, but because it legitimately never occurs to them in the first place.

Also I assure you, it is not done to strangle people who annoy you, but if it was a world changing event every time it did happen, statistically it would be happening at least once a year.

New strip up and yeah... what does Mr. Dunkel do for work? I love Nanase's face in the last panel when realizing that Ellen has no idea about it.