There’s the same text blurb on what happened at the end of this part but a tl;dr, some really bad things happened this past week in the family that flipped my life upside down, things are gradually getting better for the moment but I’ll probably put a pause on comic things to work on lighter stuff or commissions to keep my mind off of them
an anniversary piece was in the works for the comic’s 6 years, but my full workstation is at home and im afraid i don’t have arms that can stretch around the world to work on it yet! i promise i’ll get something out eventually, even if it’s not on time
Man I love the direction you took Landon here, he walked the path of bloody revenge and doesn’t want the same for Juniper. And Juniper always gonna become the Peacekeeper, but I feel that this moment with Landon will really solidify that drive.
Loving the dichotomy here, Pandora wants to live longer to experience the life that was robbed from her while Juniper doesn’t want to grow weary and jaded like Theos/Valencia
Dayum, Valencia’s going scorched earth and is gonna straight up nuke the grand rift huh. I wonder if Juniper and everybody else will be out by then or if will really hit the fan
Durza’s first nuke makes Valencia’s Temu-edition planetary bombardment look like firecrackers ngl
But still epic to see how absurd the recoil is for that cannon
(starting off, a shitty meme I concocted. It’s a ridiculous oversimplification of the situation at hand, but I saw an opportunity and took it.)
Now, where in the world do we begin when it comes to this? Oh, yeah, Landon’s death is probably a good place to start off. We all knew it was gonna happen, but it’s still tragic nonetheless.
Rambling about Landon's Character
Landon as a whole is really tragic. After he retreated, yeah, sure, he would live to see another day, but that’s a crushing thing to live with; living because he left his crew for dead, and knowing that he basically doomed them to die in the heat of the moment. He atoned for what he did by facing his fear and conquering it in the end, but that act of cowardice was still something he did and can’t change, and he’ll have to bear that burden for as long as he lives. (Which, sadly, wasn’t very long after the fight ended.) What matters, though, is that he didn’t sink further into that despair and let it consume him, and lo and behold, he didn’t.
On a side note, I love the parallel between The Rotten and Landon. The Rotten and by proxy, the rest of the Scourge, were wronged, and let the grief and hatred take hold until they became the monsters they so passionately swore they would stand up to. And Landon could have become something similar. He could have held that grudge against the Scourge until it consumed him. Hell, it almost did, considering his massacre on the Scourge and his acknowledgement that it was an incredibly selfish thing to do. He almost even became another deluded maniac who used their grievances and revenge to justify atrocities. But in the end, he snapped himself out of it, and he told Juniper to not make the same mistake he did. He stopped others from joining him in sinking into despair, while the Scourge itself just kept on plummeting further down and dragging others with them.
I could ramble on for WAAAAAAAY longer about this guy and my thoughts and opinions on him, but I have a Chapter 39 Part 5 to discuss.
And next, we have the scene that triggered my instinct to concoct shitty memes out of random stuff I see.
You know the saying “The truth hurts”? Yeah.
The funny light and magma guys are two of my favorite characters in the AU as a whole, but yeah. If they did stay behind to assist, this would have gone much differently.
But the thing is: like our current group, those other people we helped along the way have their own stories, and our paths happened to meet. (I don’t quite clearly remember Jack’s story, but for the rest of this smidget, I’ll be talking about the fact that Averill and Trigno aren’t present assisting Juniper and the rest of the gang in the current moment) Did we expect a reward for what we did? No! we helped them because we wanted to. In fact, Trigno made it VERY, VERY clear he DIDN’T want us interfering in his business with Rupin. And besides, after they overcame their struggles, they went on to walk their own paths and continue their adventures, and I daresay it’d be even more selfish if we denied their will to keep going forward and demanded they come with.
Secondly, Pandora’s want to live. Yeah, in my book this is a reasonable desire. Who wouldn’t want to live if they woke up and realized they’d been dead for a thousand years?
But as Juniper says herself, we’ve seen what people who have lived for near or even multiple millennia were like. People like Theos, Valencia, or Freedrock are noticeably tired after they’ve gone through the cycle of things growing and dying again and again. Or even worse, you could always become a lunatic mad with power like Rupin or Durza. The want to live is reasonable, but you can have too much of a good thing, and they have enough time to defeat the Dark Wizard and living and enjoying life without dooming themselves to the shackle that is eternity.
I’d like to also give my thoughts on the AG business and the Solstice, but I’m tired and don’t want to spend another who knows how long mindlessly typing on my laptop. I might come back and give my opinions another time, but I hope you enjoyed listening to my thoughts on Chapter 39 Part 5.
I love this part cause what Pandora’s saying makes sense on the surface. Especially in the lore doc it seems kinda wack that Averill and Trigno just kinda scram after their business with Juniper/PK. Like y’all aren’t gonna help out Juniper and repay her in taking down a GLOBAL threat? (Jack’s case is more understandable, she didn’t really ask for help from Juniper and co, in fact she actually helped them out against Rebecca and the Blacksite)
But like you said, Juniper helped Trigno and Averill of her own volition and to make the world a safer place (esp with Rupin), not to get an IOU from them. That said, it brings up an interesting dilemma now that their personalities are separate - Juniper is the one who did it out of the kindness of her heart, not Pandora. As we’ve seen through Coconut and Pandora’s past, she is a lot more selfish and self-centered cause that’s how her world operated and how she survived. Had Pandora been in control, she definitely would’ve needed some incentive to even consider helping them out. This also bleeds into the next topic you went over of Juniper not wanting to get worn down by time but Pandora wanting to experience the life that was taken from her.
will really hit the fan
