Current Events > Finished Saga Vol.9 (SPOILERS just in case)

(+) Yeah! (+)

This.

Fucking.

Comic.
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CyricZ posted...

This.

Fucking.

Comic.

I've not read vol.9 yet, and that's basically me for all of these volumes, where I just want to throw the book across the room.
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The setting is cool. The tone feels really optimistic most of the time, and I feel like the characters and the world's conflict are potentially fixable. There is a sequence of answers that might lead us to a happy ending if people could restrain from fucking up for frustrating reasons.

Also the book has an inconsistent relationship with candid representations of the human form. From the opening panels of the first volume we swing from full page images of our protagonists copulating, which is absolutely just here to surprise and scintillate. Then later nudity is treated casually, just the human form unposed and unpretentious. Then there's nudity as humiliation and nudity as desperation representations present on the brothel planet when we see the slaves, or in moments of Prince Robot's self-loathing. I see all these and I feel like the book is really trying to dismantle any hang-ups the reader might hold about nudity, and decouple nakedness and sexuality in our treatment of media. Cool.

But then we're still doing those smash cuts to panels of two people banging framed like sex scenes out of modern action movies, potentially retreading the vapid flesh peddling of some of the edgier nineties comic titles. Early in this book, like in the second chapter, we smash cut from a really tense intrigue about a potential betrayal involving some horrific war crime at the end of the previous chapter, to a rather bombastic sequence of someone getting eaten out rather spectacularly. I'm still on the 'oh no what's about to happen mindtrack. I'm worried about how this last scene is going to play out. I'm on the 'oh no, betrayal and broken families' frequency, not the fun pornographically shot sexy times one. It's one thing when the book starts that way. But then we did a bunch of other things and now this feels a little rote.

All things considered, I'm writing a lot about what is really a very minor observation. The bigger topic on my mind is how much I should invest in this setting. It's a tension that I struggled with in GoT up the burning of Shireen before I lost interest in the future of Westeros and soon after dropped the series. Similarly here I'm always jerking back and forward on what level of engagement I should have here.
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