2013-04-30: [CT]Hate! Hate! Hate!

[The Comment Golem]

Discussion thread for [CT]Hate! Hate! Hate!

Update: Poe changed the mouth. That panel had to be altered anyway because of the format change for the books.

[Neko7]

Oky, you guy gonna hate me, but Ian's mouth on the last panel look very very odd.
Can't say if this is a design choice or just a drawing problem, specialy since their is number of time
when Poe complain about his art, I tend to think it look great despite his commentary on it,
but here the mouth is odd, even off.

[Michael Poe]

Yeah, I've noticed that too. I'm not sure what happen since the mouth looked fine when it was scanned in.

[hkmaly]

I never really thought about whether or not Ian’s anger is typical or if he’s just a special little snowflake level of pissed off.

He is probably one of less anger half elves from Santuariel. I mean, he was able to explain that with less that 50% of four-letter words and without shouting.

[Graybeard]

Real-world analogy here (and no catgirls will be harmed in the making of this message). There have existed in the RW villages and even whole (small) cultures that were in danger of extinction if they were discovered by larger, warlike cultures that really did exist. Consider, for example, the Gallina culture of the southwestern US, which apparently was wiped out around 1300 by a combination of climate change and malevolent neighbors. The article contains this telling observation:

Almost every Gallina skeleton ever found has been that of someone murdered. Broken necks are the most common and the skeletons rarely appear to have been buried. Also commonly found has been remains of Gallina who were murdered, thrown into their homes, and then had the homes burned. Some of the skeletons of the murder victims have been found in the towers. The debate is ongoing for the cause of these murders. GENOCIDE! has been considered, and so has internecine war.

How else could a Gallina farmer of circa 1275 (i.e., 25 or so years before the final wipeout) have felt about his neighbors except Ian-like fear and hatred, even as he felt it necessary to keep trading with them? That big G-word that has become a meme here really does happen in the real world. If someone could point to modern anthropological studies of "lost tribes" that faced, or still face, a Gallina-like risk of extinction (say, start with Peter Matthiessen's "Under the Mountain Wall"), I think the evidence would suggest that Ian would fit right in, and that his hatred for his culture's potential murderers wouldn't be out of place in his new culture at all. I never thought of his attitude as in any way misplaced in the story.

Incidentally, I agree with Neko about Ian's mouth here. It makes him look like he's about to turn into a drooling maniac. There's not the slightest evidence of that in his personality ... until he gets Anilisized.

[dubioso]

That big G-word that has become a meme here really does happen in the real world.

Ben Kiernan lists plenty of it in Blood and Soil. The discussion of what constitutes a G in the introduction is quite interesting. I got to the end of chapter 6 until I decided that I prefer bedtime reading of a more cheering nature.

[BloodHenge]

Incidentally, I agree with Neko about Ian's mouth here. It makes him look like he's about to turn into a drooling maniac. There's not the slightest evidence of that in his personality ... until he gets Anilisized.

The thing about his mouth, to me, is that it's very ambiguous where his lips are and whether his teeth are clenched or even showing. I keep looking, and I just can't figure out what his mouth is supposed to be doing.

[Imp-Chan]

Aaaaaand the mouth has been changed. As it happened, we had to edit that panel anyways because the page proportions are different now.

Final book dimensions are now 6" by 8.625." When you remember that there is a 1/4" gutter, that leaves 5.75" by 8.625" of viewable page, which is the same proportions as all of the original page art, namely 2:3. Back when we were doing the books at 5" by 7.5" we still had a 1/4" gutter, and were allowing 1/8" of extra space at the bottom of the page for the page numbers, so the page dimensions were more like 4.75" by 7.375," which would have required me to do a new layout for every single page that was significantly different from the originals. Thus the change in book size, which saves me work on the remaining thousand or so pages, but does require to me do new layouts for the 200 I already lettered.

^-^'

[Bytemite]

I like it!