page 1248 – good adult advice
Before anything else, THERE WAS A HALLOWEEN COMIC ON MONDAY! GO BACK AND SEE THAT IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY!
Okay, with that out of the way, welcome to Tuesday Far Out There! It’s literally no different from Monday Far Out There except now I I’ll actually have some free time on Sunday because the update’s not quite as close! Yay!
Also, look! New outfits! Is this entirely because I just got sick of drawing that lumpy thermal sweater vest thing Mariska was wearing? Mostly! But yeah, that just leaves Tabitha and The Twins to turn up in new duds, because NO those amalgamations of a dozen costumes at once are not what they’ll be wearing in future comics.
EDIT: New TWC Voting Incentive is up! Incidentally, I MIGHT be changing the new Incentive date in the near future. Big brain supergenius that I am, it never occurred to me that bumping the main comic update back a day would mean I’d have one less day before needing to get THIS done. The forward linear progression of time continues to be my worst enemy.
No, Layla, there is not. Why, I’ve even heard rumors that there’s a disgraced former heir to a MASSIVE CRIMINAL EMPIRE on board that ship. What could be a worse influence than that?!
😉
I had a really clever, sarcastic quip to build off of that, but I’m pretty sure if I actually said it, Layla would materialize out of the computer and slap me around.
Well, we definitely want to hear that quip now.
I’ve kind of forgotten the wording that flashed across my head at the time, but it was something along the lines of “Well, she can’t be THAT bad of an influence, seeing as how she’s now just the FORMER heir.” …only it was a lot snarkier.
See, that’s because you and we know the whole story, that she was kicked out essentially for not being callous and unethical enough, but normally when someone hears ‘disgraced former heir kicked out’ of somewhere it kind of implies they did something intolerably bad or corrupt, so the disgraced former heir to a criminal syndicate, without knowing the details, would sound like it was someone so bad that even the minimal ethics of a criminal syndicate were offended, so evil that even the evil people would not tolerate it.
Actually, there are two, maybe three, people who aren’t a bad influence on this ship. The two guaranteed “not bad influences” are Marshall and Vengeance. The third “maybe a bad influence” is Captain Crosby.
Marshall would currently be a good influence… if he actually succeeded at influencing anyone. Which he can’t, for multiple reasons, one of which being the fact that he ends up working himself into exhaustion without thinking about it on the regular.
Vengence… scares people too quickly to influence them one way or another. If they got to know him, he would probably be a good influence as well, but that too challenging a starting point for most people in this comic who aren’t inherently bad influences for one major reason or another.
And Captain Crosby is too busy to interact with people. The only bad influence he would likely give is willingness to do things like shove 50 people into a singular room just because they’re only being transported to another ship instead of another planet.
Avatar is a bad influence in her own way, particularly with her indestructability resulting in her willingly hanging out with dangerous individuals such as Stillez, Tax and Ichabod.
Cap’n Crosby would probably “encourage” Trigger to fix stuff around the ship for free that most experts charge a lot of money for… but then poetic justice would strike when Trigger wouldn’t be able to help himself from sabotaging something.
There’s definitely stuff I could say about the others, too, but *bites tongue again*
I’m already saying that Avatar’s a bad influence. That Captain Crosby keeps himself locked away & flying the ship so that he can’t be an influence. That Vengence is too scary to influence Trigger to do anything but leave a room. And that, while Marshall appears as if he would be a good influence, tends to exhaust himself doing things like preparing lavish dinners just because he could and is thus would have difficulty being an influence.
…unless Trigger decided he wanted to learn how to cook. Then Trigger would learn to avoid him more thoroughly than he avoids Vengence within five minutes.
Generally speaking, given Layla’s overly controlling nature, and one who is not her starts out in her “bad influence” column, so it’s pretty hard to get out of that category.
Nevertheless, Avatar is not a bad influence! Avatar is never bad. So sayeth the Avatar Fan Club! 🙂
One can’t really say Marshall is good or bad as we still don’t know nearly enough of his backstory, but Layla would likely put him in the bad column just for being a Nitpicker. (This is probably not limited to her either – I suspect that most of the population at large looks at Nitpickers the way current culture sees Lawyers, sometimes useful to hire, but even when it’s YOUR lawyer you still don’t really like them. And Nitpickers seem to fill a very similar function to Lawyers or Auditors. Who also are not usually well liked.)
Same for V, we really are up in the air as to his good or evilness, intentionally so it would seem, although he himself has implied that he is not trustworthy (I think that was the word he used), whatever that might amount to.
In general, we could make 2 arguments for each person on board, as to whether WE would consider them a bad influence, and whether Layla would.
The only person on board currently who I think both the audience and Layla would agree on not being a bad influence is Alphonse. (Putting aside whether Zombies are considered persons or not under applicable local laws.)
Nitpickers = Lawyers is a good way of putting it, actually.
@ Hovertext: May’s currently banned from 3 Sovereign Nations, while Ichabod was banned from 9 by 30 and Mariska was banned from 8 by 30.
The single difference between them was reversed in Ichabod’s favour later on, due to the one he was banned from that Mariska wasn’t is the Sovereign Nation of Ichabod’s Girlfriend, and it was reversed around a week after he reached 30 as a birthday present from said girlfriend, alongside a second nation who automatically bans anyone who’s banned in five allied nations as an accidental bonus. It would have been the day of his 30th birthday, but bureaucracy got in the way and delayed it a week, not counting the additional two months for the official paperwork to reach Ichabod himself. And, yes, it was sent electronically, it just took three weeks to upload and over five weeks to download.
Either way, its not actually all that many: Whilie it’s unclear what the range of human expansion is in FOT, it’s at least the entire galaxy, so a minimum of 100bil+ available planets. If even one in a million are terraformable (and it’s almost surely higher than that), that’s still 100k planets, each with probably multiple sovereign nations. Nitpicker training probably actually includes a large section on how to avoid getting banned from governments you’ve offended, as it limits future employment opportunities. Frequently, if you manage to screw up a soverign nation so much that they may want to ban you, they probably actually need to HIRE you to fix all that stuff anyway. Or at least hire another nitpicker, in which case they don’t want to offend the guild by banning too many of its members. Actually, that brings up an interesting question: what happens when two opposing forces both want to hire the guild? Is that a conflict of interest? Are there huge bragging rights involved if the side you are Nitpicking “wins”? There are, aren’t there? 😉
Honestly, I was making those numbers up based on the assumption that each “Sovereign Nation” was responsible for a minimum of 1 colonized planet, and could easily reach up to 20, with the most expansive being about 150 inhabited planets. This is partially because I believe that each planet we’ve seen has appeared to have been ruled by a singular dominant governing body, even if that governing body could have been less internally cooperative than the US Governing Parties on their worst day.
“Sovereign Nations” smaller than an entire planet, with this logic, can’t be seen as “Sovereign Nations”, and instead as part of a Planetary Collective. A Planetary Collective, or multiple Planetary Collectives, can organize to become a Sovereign Nation, but they do need to have a set of universal laws that they all agree to.
Much like in Star Trek other such franchises, I’ll tend to write whole planets as having a singular nation/culture because having to come up with more than one is just too much work. In universe, though, Far Out There has the added excuse that “indigenous populations” really aren’t a thing. All planets started out uninhabited until some long distant past human mission colonized it, so tracing everything back to a single group/organization explains a lot of world-building laziness. I do LIKE the idea of distinct nations and cultures existing on the same planet, since it’s less “planet of hats” level of cliche, but I’d kind of need to write a given story from the ground up to justify it. Otherwise, there’d be waaaay too many Walls of Text and exposition dumps all to explain something that the plot doesn’t actually need. I do that too much as it is.
Also, I much throw up my hands and confess that I’d never once considered the possibility of multiple Nitpickers being hired by the opposing sides of a conflict before. The obvious answer is that The Guild would prevent such double-booking, if only to avoid adding more internal conflict than they already have, but there’s just WAY to many possibly ways it could wind up happening regardless. And yes, the “winner” would ABSOLUTELY NEVER LET THE LOSER LIVE IT DOWN.
There would only be three ways in which the loser avoids the bragging of the winner:
1. The Loser practically never sees the Winner again (aka, The Winner Is Ichabod solution, so long as we consider the Holiday Specials as non-cannon)
2. The Loser avoids contact as much as possible (aka, The Loser Is Ichabod solution, again with the caveat that the Holiday Specials are non-cannon)
3. A similar event occurs again, with the previous Victor or Loser exchanging victory & defeat. This way they can meet each other again, but conversations would effectively be in a cold-war situation going forward. Aka, the Mahizam & Maziham Solution. Because they would have definitely ended up in this situation a dozen times, despite only working as partners on their cases. Because reasons and sibling fights.