page 682 – Smells Like… Person
So… another laaaate update, and for one of the most embarrassing reasons possible. I literally fell asleep while I was supposed to be drawing this thing. Uh, oops? Well, that and I spent most of the day fiddling with the next month or two of storyline stuff. As always, I’m planning to put the regular story on pause in December for a big Christmas Special Thing, and the thought occurred that if I re-organized some future stuff a bit, I could pause everything on a pretty cool cliffhanger… Well, it turned out that “a bit” actually meant “a whoooooole lot”, which also delayed things quite a bit.
But speaking of story stuff, AWESOME NEWS! WE’VE FINALLY GOT NEW VOTING INCENTIVES AGAIN!!! I know, right? How long has it been? TOO LONG, I SAY! So, go vote on TWC and see some glimpses of Far Out Theres that never were!
Oh, and if you’d rather just read COMIC comics again, I finally updated the Incentive Gallery too! Yay!
(Historical Notes: Okay, I got distracted on the notes for the last page, so I’ll say it here instead. I do NOT like the way Disonar is written here. I know that being weirdly okay with objectively not-okay things is kind of a staple of Far Out There’s humor, but there’s still the matter of consistent characterization, and Disonar should be WAY more visibly creeped out than we’re seeing here. Dude’s a pathetic, spineless dweeb; being surrounded by remains ought to make HIM the grossed out one, not Layla. Well, maybe “even more so than Layla” is the better way of putting it. Either way, the only person here who actually SHOULD be shrugging all of this off is Astrid. Actually, that should have been the punchline here: Everyone else is retching while Astrid is just making some withering remark, then she notices that she’s standing out and starts shrieking to stay “in character.”)
@ Historical Notes: I’m actually perfectly fine with Disonar, despite being a pathetic, spineless dweeb, being alright with what’s happening around him. Not because he isn’t a pathetic, spineless dweeb, but because he knew what he was going to see and mentally prepared himself, possibly through self-hypnosis or something similar. That, and he’s almost certainly been here before, and probably worked through all his disgust and panic attacks then. It would even bring to mention the timing of his mentioning the person-dust, he was told about it while creating his passwords, so he remembered while entering them in.
It could really go either way. Disonar has spent years working to cover up for horrible people and become jaded to this sort of stuff, Astrid’s job probably has her encountering person ash a lot more than she might like, and Layla’s little tour she gave Ichabod way back when she was a crime lord of the various disturbing enterprises, pet recycling, or whatever she was involved in means a little person ash shouldn’t bug her too much…
…OR one could argue that Disonar’s a wuss and would never become immune to it, Astrid’s background as a spoiled rich girl makes her usually avoid cases which involve gross stuff like this, and Layla isn’t nearly as tough as she wants everyone to believe, so they all could be really grossed out.
Ichabod would probably just note that it smells kind of like when his previous traveling companion got vaporized in his room.
To me, it’s more a manner of how both Disonar and Astrid have been written in their appearances (such as they are) after this. Disonar’s defining characteristic is basically following Astrid around like a puppy, so now this just doesn’t feel like the kind of joke I’d write for him anymore. It’s like I was saying earlier: there’s the Disonar who was introduced at the start of this arc to be unpleasant, and then there’s the Disonar at the end who’d been rather drastically reworked to be Astrid’s love interest. This is one of the last gasps of the former before the later truly took over.
Ah, well, that’s easily explained. It’s actually a pretty common affliction in the distant future. It’s presents usually with significant personality changes, ofte,n but not always, retroactively, commonly known as “Pattie Quartment’s Syndrome”, although I think the technical medical term is Hyperretconiosis.
😉
And here I thought that it was just simply the fact that Disonar has never had an actual, proper, relationship before Astrid, particularly not with someone who is actually attracted to him and not after his fame or some fictional money he doesn’t actually have but exists in fiction due to said fame.
Basically, I’m of the opinion that Disonar as become, if you excuse the profanity that I’ll make due to not knowing a better way to word this, “Pussy Whipped”, and regardless of what he was before, he’ll be Astrid’s cute & obedient pet dog for a while. Possibly even as long as she wants to keep him, in which case, if she kicks him to the curb, he’s likely to become a drunken mess and make life choices that make the ones from BEFORE he met Astrid look positively healthy.
That’s definitely how I’m trying to explain the whole thing retroactively, it just really struck me how differently I would have written this bit if that was the plan from the beginning.
But giving Disonar some character growth is a GOOD thing! Particularly with the fact that most of the other character’s “character growth” so far can be boiled down to “retcon’s, things that weren’t known to the audience & new relationships (be they friendships or crushes)”.
Oh I agree! I probably wouldn’t even WANT to keep using Disonar if he stayed the way he started out. I mean, look at Frank. The only reason we see him at ALL anymore is because I surrounded him with other characters who are much more likable. I’m just observing the rough edges that can’t help but show when that development isn’t properly planned out ahead of time.