Hey Benedict! – Chapter 8, Act 2, Strip 113

Well, I haven’t really got a suitable quote by Napoleon to apply to this. I’m sure he would have had something to say about it, but it’s mostly the short and pithy sayings which tend to survive through the ages, and even Napoleon would have been hard-pressed to describe this confusing set of events well, let alone succinctly.

And, yeah, the survival of records is unfortunate, in this case. It’s true that the availability of documents lays the basis for reconstructing events accurately…but their absence helps in reconstructing them in a matter that actually makes sense. Because when there are gaps in the record, you’re allowed to fill them applying common sense and logic…if there are no gaps, you unfortunately have to live with the illogical and senseless way in which events tend to go down in real life. >_>

Fortunately, though, it’s actually not really necessary to try and reconstruct the events depicted here in any sort of detail – especially since the location remains vague, which makes it uncertain which sub-department of the history faculty would even be responsible for it. For the purposes of the comic it’s sufficient to summarize the results: “The good guys are winning! But, suddenly…” And it helps that those results were kind of predictable: With all of the fluffing of Gregory’s heroic and inspirational status, it’s only naturally that the good guys would score success after success…and with the nature of commercial plot writing, it’s just as natural that there would be a setback just before the end.

As for the villain who has to deliver that setback, I stuck with precedent from history. Which I reconstructed from memory, so it’s possible that things got mixed up a bit. Doing proper research wasn’t really called for, and would violate the true spirit of B-movies. And blaming Arnold for everything that goes wrong seems appropriate on any number of level, so…

More on Monday.

6 Replies to “Hey Benedict! – Chapter 8, Act 2, Strip 113”

  1. I hope Japanda/Canapan sticks. It’s just like the Professorian/Barbessor all over again. <3

  2. As a former researcher and historian, I concur. With one caveat: oftentimes the records are missing or inconsistent because those in charge are covering up their ineptitude and re-writing things so that their failures are portrayed as setbacks or “part of the plan.” I’ve been personally told by people in positions of authority “you’re not recording that” when they wanted to massage the narrative. And since those peoples’ signatures were required for the final product submission, I had to phrase things in a manner they wanted.

    1. Yeah, that problem has been around since very near the beginning of written records – proven falsifications have been found both in Ancient Egyptian as well as Sumerian records, meaning that records were falsified practically as soon as they were being kept. XD And then there are the records that aren’t falsified, but just wrong by dint of somebody making an error…or somebody being a monk and having not the faintest idea about the things he’s supposed to be chronicling. Which all only offers more support for my theory that it’s better if there are no surviving records, so that historians can make up something reasonable and rational from whole cloth. XD

  3. Well on the plus side, we may just get a confirmation as to what the heck Gregory even IS now. I mean, I’ve been wondering if he’s still a zombie or not since Stockades and Skeletons. Like, if DM revived his body or just gave him a makeover…

    Then again, I suppose it depends on where our traitor hits. A zombie might reasonably survive a shot to the chest, but the brain is fatal regardless of what your affiliation with live/unlife is.

    1. Well, he definitely wasn’t a zombie for the duration of the Stockades and Skeletons chapter – that would have caused just too many potential problems in the that kind of setting, between alignment questions and the ability of clerics to turn undead, among other issues. And as far as I am concerned, he remained a non-zombie on his return to his original world – although I couldn’t say, at the moment, whether I after made that explicit/canonical at any point.

      But it won’t become an issue here, for I went for the elegant solution you already suspected: Arnold is a surprisingly good shot with a musket. =P

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