page 710 – Helping Until Someone Explodes
WOW this one is late. I’m really sorry, guys. I can’t even blame this one on convention preparation or whatever. It just took me forever to get started on this page, and even longer to get finished. Measures will be taken to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
At least I can say I like how this page turned out. Seeing Layla go all Mama Bear to protect Trigger is always cute. The second panel underwent a weird creative progression: At first, the plan was for Trigger to have felt a trail of plain ol’ deactivated robots… but since Stilez was already trashing robots and everything else in the place, it didn’t seem like that would stand out much. Somehow, the solution was glitchily sing Beatles songs. Because of course it was.
Anyway, if nothing else, at least I got a new Voting Incentive done on time. That’s SOMETHING, right?
(Historical Notes: SEVERAL things to get into here. First, this is another page where the effects really got away from me, and I had to some major re-editing surgery to make it clear where the robots stop and the backgrounds begin. Second, the whole “Beatles lyrics for some reason” thing is another one of those jokes that I don’t think belongs as the main punchline of a comic. I’ve said it before, but that kind of real world reference needs to be limited to background gags. And besides, why did I pick BEATLES songs for this joke in the first place? I know at least a DOZEN other bands that would have been better representations of druggy psychedelic bands AND wouldn’t have been quite so obvious! Finally, it was asked why Trigger didn’t just reprogram the robots to protect Layla. The idea was supposed to be that he was in too much of a hurry to actually hack them into doing anything USEFUL, which is why the end result is so random. That does NOT come through in the finished page, though.)
@ Historical Notes: There’s also the fact that while Trigger has shown his ability in breaking things, he hasn’t shown much ability in rapidly changing things to work in a different way. From what I’ve seen, Trigger simply “disarming” the killer robots to rapidly release their power-source’s energy in relatively safe light show, while they themselves just start singing like a drugged up psychedelic band is perfectly reasonable. Honestly, this is one time when I APPRECIATE getting the “background” joke. The punchline of this comic page wouldn’t have made much sense to me if it WASN’T the Beatles Sings, and I likely would have just assumed that they were making random sounds, regardless of what other band you chose.
That’s a fair point. Causing something to stop function the way it was intended is NOT the same as causing it to function in an entirely different fashion, and being good at one does not automatically result in being good at the other.
Agree with Darius, Beatles was definitely the right choice here, as I know very nearly squat about music, but even I recognize Beatles lyrics. “not obvious” would likely mean “we don’t get the joke at all” for 99% of the audience unless they googled the lyric. Which we won’t. Because we’re lazy. Because internet.
With regard to sabotage, making something not work at all is probably your last choice as a saboteur, unless you can be 100% sure you’ve broken it completely unfixably, because your victims will likely notice the sabotage immediately and begin repairs, or replacement.
Generally the better sabotage is if something continues working, but incorrectly, as it will likely go unnoticed for longer.
Best sabotage is if the thing continues to apparently work 100% correctly until it self-destructs catastrophically just before it’s most needed. This, of course, carries the risk that it might actually continue to work correctly when it’s needed. Ooops.
So the compromise of “continues to work, but wrong” is probably usually your best bet.
(…Ed8 says, as if he knows anything at all about sabotage…on the internet, everyone is an expert….)
On the subject of Sabotage, Trigger, in particular, was trained to use sabotage to delay a single, particular, project. Sabotaging something in such a way that it isn’t noticed would, over the long term, be a more successful method than it would be over the short term. So doing that to some large & non-vital parts of the project would be appropriate, but for much of the vital tech, Trigger would have to make it break far more rapidly.
This is PARTICULARLY important due to the fact that the thing Trigger was supposed to Sabotage was the moving of a planet, due to the belief that said moving was too dangerous to actually attempt. Making the things that would actually cause the planet to move to self-destruct while in use could easily have catastrophic results, in many types of easily predictable manners. Having the thing just break in 17 ways to sunday while the support equipment needed to move or replace said planet-moving tech keeps self-destructing is a lot safer.
yeah, there’s probably a million ways for sabotaging a terraforming project to go very very badly wrong and really only one way for it to go right. which just makes the people who wanted to sabotage it look like even bigger idiots than they already did.