page 1237 – perfect directions
OOOOoooookay, I’m doing this again. Sorry, but the past week Real Life has been even more disruptive than usual, and I wound up not even getting started penciling this page until Sunday evening. And now it’s a little after 4am and I just don’t have it in me to push on any further. So I’ll slap up this lineart version now and come back to finish up the post once I’ve actually gotten some sleep. See ya’ll in a bit!
EDIT: Okay, there. Honestly, there wasn’t THAT much left too do. After all, half the joke for this page is how plain all the halls in The Exposition are. I couldn’t very well use any color gradients as backgrounds this time. And just for the record, I did NOT specifically write this page to be something that’d take on an extra meta aspect when posted unfinished, that was just a happy accident. As I always say, I’m not clever enough to have a plan.
I’m ALSO not clever enough to have had this in mind way back when I first drew Mariska going directly to the TV room instead of her new quarters. It didn’t hit me until just this weekend that, oh yeah, how WOULD she know where to go? And then things just sort of snowballed from there, including this whole reminder of what May’s like, just sort of off the cuff. And that’s how writing works!
EDIT: New Voting Incentive up!
I wanted to go back and say that May showed more competence than this back in the dimensional-travelling space ship, but looking back all we see is enthusiasm, attitude, and a statement & scene indicating Marshall’s competence. So this IS consistent with her earlier characterisation, despite me thinking otherwise.
Dang my wanting to believe the best about fictional characters histories when I’m objectively wrong.
Like many Nitpickers, may can be incredibly competent and knowledgeable about things that don’t have much practical usefulness. It’s only when the time comes to be a sensible, reasonable, mature individual in regular daily life that things get tricky.
…heck, that’s not even a dig at Nitpickers, that’s just ALL of us.
The FOT Universe has days when sensibility, reasonableness and/or maturity is more beneficial to people than having obscure trivia knowledge on over one hundred topics? Really? Are those the days that only exist in the timeskips? Because I don’t think we’ve seen them in the comic itself.
We just never see that stuff happening because it exclusively occurs in places where NONE of our main characters are at the moment.
Do any of the Nitpicker’s Guild run into places that experience days like that while they are there? Because it seems like the way the guild operates, a series of coincidences commonly results in Aunt Domino being the one sent to places that experience days like that, and since she’s Aunt Domino she immediately STOPS the days she’s there benefiting from sensibility, reasonableness and/or maturity.
Every part of the above statement completely checks out.
A font of useless knowledge and minutiae? I wish I could be paid for that. I’m made for that job. It’d be being a museum docent all over again, but without having to worry about customer service! And the pay would be better. (It doesn’t matter what they get paid- the pay would be better.)
Oh, Nitpickers have to worry about Customer Service. It’s just that, when their customers have issues, instead of worrying about an angry letter and someone giving bad reviews, they need to worry about torches, pitchforks & execution stakes coming out. Or starting off a war or three.
If I’m allowed to fight back, it still counts as a better class of job in my book.
I’m sure that it all depends on what daily annoyances the individual finds worse. I’m sure there’s some people who’d rather deal with a homicidal space duke from the kingdom of astro-cabbage than an angry mom and her screaming kids, and some who’d prefer it the other way around.
True. The grass is always greener*, etc. “it may not be better, but I’ll settle for different”
*an aphorism conclusively disproven by the recently bred “red grass” aka “blood-drinking-super-death-grass” which has engulfed three continents since its creation. Fortunately, vigorous quarantine has prevented it from spreading off Valuntoo, it’s planet of origin. Unfortunate for the two billion lives lost, but at least that cliche has been laid to rest!
An attempt to “Fight Back” is completely different when you are alone, have 50+ “enemies”, are expected to be unarmed and unarmoured in all ways, other than inherent biological methods, and your “enemies” can be reasonably assumed to be both armed and armoured.
The most you can be reasonably expected is talk back and call the most offensive person an ignorant fool. Which is kind of what a Nitpicker’s Job is.
“We really should number them or something” – King Bumi, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” (quote might not be exact)
FWIW, I think the rooms on the Exposition are already numbered, but possibly only on the schematic, since I couldn’t quickly find a page confirming the room doors are directly labeled.
We have seen information screens with directories on them, and SOMETIMES there have been arrows and directions on the walls. But since I can’t be trusted to keep those kinds of background details consistent, they don’t show up very often. There’s probably some kind of scifi explanation that all the door numbers and directories only show up when you’re standing right in front of them, and otherwise fade into the walls so as not to disrupt the sleek futuristic aesthetic.
You want a scifi explanation? How about this: there’s a ship AI that could tell them what each room number is, but nobody (possibly including the captain) knows it exists, because they’ve never tried talking to the ship.
That’s a bit too reasonable for FOT. How about that there’s a Ship’s AI that somehow got registered to Blip, who only uses it to mess around with minor things on the walls. Because it doesn’t really do anything problematic, the fact that Captain Crosby has literally never used it for it’s intended purpose (steering the ship in low traffic zones while he sleeps), and the fact that nobody, including AVATAR, can actually work out how to change the settings off of Blip without destroying the ship itself, the AI is completely ignored by everyone who knows about it.
…and if Blitz remembers this wild expansion of a suggestion two to five years down the line, it’s entirely possible that Trigger will cause some major issue when he stumbles across the central processor for the AI and acts on his training without thinking about it.