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Obverse & Reverse Ch3 Page 13

Obverse & Reverse Ch3 Page 13 published on 22 Comments on Obverse & Reverse Ch3 Page 13

Dis is a lot like a weird liminal gas station you visit in the middle of the night while driving across country except you can never leave and the sun never comes up.

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22 Comments

Man I feel sorry for the dragons. If they will leave dis then humans will hunt them down again and sense other mythicals won’t help them then they will end up deader the the sphinxs.

Yeah :-(

I’m hoping that there will be an optimistic outcome to all of this, even if it takes years (in real world time, not webcomic time) to reach that point, and even then, not everybody might make it out alright.

I know it sounds like a stretch, but I’m just hoping for the best possible outcome for these guys. Sphinx, Dragon, or other.

My running theory is they’re going to ask her for medallions. It’s about the only way they could leave and also live outside Dis safely. The problem is we’re not sure Michelle even knows how to create one and they may not believe her if she says she can’t.

On the darker side, it’s possible they made some deal with Darklord and she has promised them some kind of freedom in exchange for Michelle.

Strictly speaking, Michelle has awoken to her true sphinx-dom since encountering the egg, hence why her eyes are constantly glowy now. Part of that package of ability is the combined total knowledge of every sphinx that’s ever lived. So if any sphinx ever knew how to make a medallion, now she does. It’s just a question of how long it’ll take her to parse through that incredible amount of information and find the bit she needs.

I forsee her offering to try and make them before the dragons even formally ask her to. She’s looking around at what they’re dealing with and finding that it really sucks. Whatever bomb Carver’s about to drop regarding the demon’s tax on their presence is just going to cement a desire to help.

…damn.

Dis is actually hell. It’s like that guy whose forced to push up a rock, but it always falls back down to the bottom, over and over again.

I hope the Dragons make it out alright in the end, I hope :-(

Sisyphus, an evil Greek king.

Every character needs plausible motivations that make sense to them, and limitations to work around, otherwise you end up with cardboard villans and boring Superman style heroes.

Sisyphus was not exactly a nice guy, but from what i remember his punishment by the gods was far more about daring to mess with their rules and those of fate for his own benefit, like cheating death (twice, one with his wife’s help) than actually being a bad king or tyrant.

Also, it was partly self-imposed – the punishment is a TRIAL that will make him into a god if he ever succeeds into, while being rigged to never succed. Sysiphus KNOWS this and could leave at any moment. But is too ambitious and proud of his cunning to ever quit.

And here it comes. I wonder what price the dragons have to pay.

And also how man generations of dragons are living there. Even when you take the properties of Dis into account, without the need to hide and keeping their existance a secret there could be several generations, depending on their life cycle.

Yes, pretty much how I figured it – absolute stasis. Nothing really ‘lives’ in Dis, it just exists, for all eternity. It’s the gas station that Sapphire and Steel end up trapped in.

It’s probably only ‘magic’ that keeps the dragons alive at all, and the demons will have the monopoly on that, keeping the dragons under strict control. If so, the power of the entire sphinx species within Michelle is exactly what they want, to free them.

She’s also making that ‘sucking her cheeks in’ face of hers, which is never a good omen.

Well, this is kind of amazing.

Looked at in certain senses, the result of extreme hubris, and genocide, is literal time in hell. When the dragons’ situation and behavior is viewed through a classic lens, that is poetic. I do not say it is right. Genocide is not right, either, yet no one generally wishes suffering upon another.

From Romans: “For the wages of sin is death…” or from Galations: ““The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction.”

The above are not pro-religion. It’s more an acknowledgement of a classical outlook and era, and if I dug around, there’s doubtless books from earlier times on the consequences of hubris and/or sin.

And, adding to the layers: if we look upon the middle ages, it is in one sense a time of quotations such as the above. It was also a classic era, involving classic creatures (dragons). In that era, dragons became hunted. …I’m going to noodle about here and suggest that that isn’t unrelated.

The demons may have been glad in some senses to welcome them, and gobble/feed upon the results of the dragons’ behavior.

If we continue the metaphor, the dragons will have needed to learned, and improved upon themselves, to get out of hell.

But will they have?

And from Rev: “The huge dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who deceived the whole world, was thrown down to earth, and its angels were thrown down with it.” Mind, there are other verses that tie dragons to the Great Enactor of Evil, but I can’t find them at the moment. It all seems to fit with that “classic” mindset/metaphor, though, of them being thrown to the hells after their acts.

Only one dragon survived the Great War, though, all others (barring Bloodcarver) presumably haven’t even seen a Sphinx before today. Even assuming the previous generations of dragons were totally in the wrong, same doesn’t apply to their descendants. Mind you, not everyone shares or shared that viewpoint.

And it seems there’s some magical reason for it being miserable, so it’s not their fault the dragons really haven’t done a great job with decorating the place they’ve lived in for several centuries.

To the modern thought, yes. In older times, the curse was passed to descendants. It’s an interesting thought exercise. I’m not arguing if it is true or not.

Regarding old dragons: The Father has seemed in favor of continuing the war; Bloodcarver defied Him to not slaughter Michelle. He had not let things go for ages, and nursed the grudge, and employed his own children as executioners. Perhaps Dis does not let you heal. Perhaps he…really was that old and bitter, to teach and then order his children to kill. If “the children shall be innocent,” then should that not apply to say, Michelle’s father and so on who had come after?

Kill Michelle before she realises what she is, and it would have been a very short war.

Less flippantly, given that sphinxes were a big part of dragons being hunted nearly to extinction, and now there’s one alive that will inherit all their power soon, the Father doesn’t have to be bitter to want to kill her. Even if both sides want peace, if either side thinks the other does not, or thinks that the other side thinks that they do not, it’s a good time for everyone else to get insurance and go visit Wonderland for a bit.

There’s a small detail, though. The sphinxes refused them medallions. The dragons went to complete genocide: if we cannot have them, no one ca , and they which refused us shall die down to the last generation. The dragons initiated genocide. The Father kept that demand alive for generations and passed it onto his children. Michelle was not tasked with murdering dragons.

When the Fathers children refused His orders of genocide, he near slaughtered them.

That is a grudge love and well. We are being fed a sob story now, by a child. It likely has elements of truth–the best methods of control do. We must eye it carefully however, and realize though it may be truth, and even largely truth–it is likely not the whole truth.

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