Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether the twins managed to do anything that the Watcher-Humpty-on-the-Dumpty-Wall had really never seen before, whatever it was that it did see was apparently intriguing enough to thoroughly distract the Watcher from its eponymous function.
But that sort of dereliction of duty cannot go unpunished! Especially since the Watcher doing that watching was supposed to provide the crucial framing device to relate the fate of the heroes in their individual fights versus their respective nemeses. Watching would have made that visible. Which would have been nice.
And the Watcher-on-the-Wall is, after all, one of the bad guys. To the limited degree to which concepts of morality and gender apply to it, I guess, but ultimately to the full degree in terms of narrative structure. While the good guys might get away with a slap on the wrist for a mistake, since their superiors naturally tend to be even better guys, high-ranked bad guys usually try to cultivate an image of not suffering fools gladly.*
And as far as the severity of punishment is concerned, high-ranking bad guys don’t usually mess around. Quite the opposite.
Fortunately for the Watcher, however, Nyarlathotep is somewhat constrained by its own chaotic and unpredictable nature…I would guess Latho had intended the punishment to be a bit (or a lot) more serious than it turned out to be, but if you’re in with chaos for a penny, you’re in with it for a pound.
And, hey, having a delicious donut on its head actually is some sort of punishment for a creature that doesn’t have a mouth…it’s just not quite as bad as getting disintegrated on a molecular level and spread out over the least popular corners of the multiverse. >_>
More on Thursday.
* Which is not to say that suffering fools gladly is a prerequisite of being a good guy, either in fiction or in reality. But…I haven’t thought deeply about it, but I’m not ruling it out, either. Let’s leave it at ‘undecided’ for the moment…
Before reading the last panel I thought the punishment was precisely being tempted with a delicious donut that the Watcher would never be able to eat. Which ya, short-term isn’t that bad; but the Watcher doesn’t have hands or anything to move that donut away so it’ll just sit on its “head” forever.
Also the reason good guys don’t generally need to suffer fools as much as bad guys is quite simply advertising. When you’re an evil overload bent on world domination, you can’t exactly place ads in the paper asking those interested to apply to your secret volcano lair. Which means you’re stuck with whoever you can kidnap/blackmail/scrape off the street; who are either unmotivated in the former or unskilled in the latter.
It’s the reason why bad guys either are betrayed by competent henchmen or failed by incompetent goons.
The funny thing is, I was really just trying to be random. I was aspiring to mimic the workings of chaos, after all, so I decided I’d basically just grab a random asset from my graphics program and place it there…and I felt happy with the donut as a random and harmless choice. The fact that that could actually serve as a form of punishment for a creature without a mouth didn’t really occur to me until I was writing the comment for the strip many weeks later…XD
That choice between competent and ambitious subordinates versus loyal and incompetent ones is called “the autocrat’s dilemma” in real life, and its consequences are currently starkly displayed in the case of one certain V. Putin, who quite clearly went for the second option a bit too often. But you don’t need to be a head of state or fictional villain to suffer from it, being a sufficiently autocratic manager is already enough. And perhaps that’s why so many fictional villains display that trait so prominently – it probably makes them effective villains because it makes it easier for all of the many members of the audience who have ever suffered under tyrannic bosses to hate them.