Rational Assessment – Chapter 8, Act 3, Strip 26

Living in a university with shoddy continuity has a number of drawbacks, among which the one the Queen is pointing out here isn’t the least: you might get so used to all of these little inconsistencies in your surroundings that you fail to notice the point at which your universe starts to irredeemably descend into complete and utter chaos.

Which is a problem that should, normally, only concern fictional characters – but somehow it gets easier and easier to sympathize with that experience, just living in the real world. >_>

But! What the Protagonists have to deal with is definitely a state with is, at least, far more advanced that whatever is currently going on with the real world. If your locations shifts that drastically while you’re just standing around talking, it’s definitely a symptom of a much more fundamental issue. The shift from a garage to a bunker might be somewhat subtle, but the cella was definitely something completely different. Let alone the submarine. On the pro side, the periscope Biff is using is a lot more plausible in a submarine than it ever was in that garage they started out in.

As for what Biff is seeing through the periscope…well, I was just googling “utter chaos” for inspiration, and that picture from a Nascar race popped up. And really, I couldn’t do anything but agree. I did make sure, however, that nobody was seriously injured in the incident depicted. Which is kind of amazing in its own right.

Constructing the visuals for a ‘pocket of sanity wasn’t that difficult, either. Hot pockets filled with random stuff are an established meme format by now, after all. And a Greek philosopher as a symbol of rationality seems obvious enough, as well. I did hesitate a moment using that particular picture…since one might argue that committing suicide might not really have been the most sane action Sokrates has taken throughout his life. But the picture is so iconic, and the whole strip’s basic vibe was necessarily somewhat depressive to begin with, so I decided to just go with it.

More on Monday.

4 Replies to “Rational Assessment – Chapter 8, Act 3, Strip 26”

  1. Just wanted to point out you used, “university” instead of “universe” at the beginning there. Given this comic, I can’t tell if that was a typo or intentional.

    1. Thanks for catching that typo! Which I won’t correct, however, since I find the idea of living in an university with shoddy continuity too funny. XD Quite aside from the fact that a great many students can probably sympathize with that feeling quite easily…

      So I’ll let it stand as an honored typo of legacy. =D

        1. Cela is Portuguese for Latin cella, which refers, among other things, to the room a nun lives in. One of the backgrounds I had (randomly) used for part of this sequence is actually a model of a ruined cela in the Convento da Saudação in Portugal. It just was handy! XD

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