Murphy's Law 6: Will we ever stop burning through threads so quickly?

[Eleanor_Rigby]

Question: Does Lloyd trigger your "gaydar" at all?

Paladin.

'Nuff said.

You would say this in The Playground: home and birthplace of the rabid O-Chul fanbase? Truly, sirrah, you are a braver man than I (assuming here that you are in fact a man, which I am not...)

Really? Then I'd like to hear your feel of Matt and Tinder, please.

I'm not sure what you're asking for exactly, character analysis? I guess I could try.

I think two basic things apply with both Matt and Tinder that make me feel I 'know' them better than the rest of the party: their introductions and their range.

More in depth stuff, spoilered for wordiness:

Spoiler

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For me, Matt was the first character in the comic to get a proper introduction - we pretty much met him in situ and because of the way he joins the party we can see his personality and a bit about his background almost straight away. Matt's introduction is also one of the main places we see what Lloyd's like as a person. I like Lloyd, but he tends to strike me as quite a straight forward 'straight-man and party leader' figure. We've been shown that Lloyd isn't infallable but so far he's always been pretty quick at realising his wrong doings and atoning for the bad behaviour. With Matt we see somebody who can be told that they are in the wrong (anti-elven agenda) but is much harder to convince. As far as the elves go, he changed his tune pretty quickly about the Peakanes, but as far as I recall he's still prone to thinking of the family as the exception to the rule - meeting them was an eye opener for him and he might give pause before mouthing off about elven arrogance to an elf in person now, straight away, but his overall mentality doesn't seem to have been fundamentally changed by the experience.
As far as 'range' goes, we've seen Matt in some pretty serious circumstances - we saw him shoot a child and we've seen the fall out from that - but there's also a lot of levity to the character - the panel of Matt downing the cookies in the background of Lloyd and Janine's drama is quite easily the funniest thing I've seen in the comic so far.
What I like about Matt is that he is so fallible and that there is humour to him too. He knows he can be a bit of a screw up, and so he tries to remedy that but because he's human it doesn't always work out. I also find his relationship with the 'loveable rogue' archetype, the fact that he's so aware of its existence and that he tries to live up to it but the fact is that he just isn't that smooth and sometimes he just comes off as incredibly dorky/ a jerk.
Tinder is similar in this regard (range). His backstory is incredibly dark but he seems to have found a way to cope with it and even look back on the tragedy with a hint of black humour - we've seen that Tinder has suffered terrible things and generally doesn't have it easy, this could have made him an incredibly angsty character, but he isn't: he'll make jokes with the rest of them and he's not tragic and wounded and pitiful enough to prevent him from taking the time to merrily wallow in a sack of gold coins.
Tinder's introduction to the comic was a nice blend of expositionary back story and honest to goodness action and it plot to it too. I know quite a long time was spent on Serrin's introduction to the party too, but when we met Serrin we also met a family of five other members, plus familiars, and apart from the fact that she's energetic and enthusiastic, I didn't pick up a lot about her as a person. When we met Tinder he was reacting to a much more intense situation; you learn more about a person when you see how they respond to things.
I like Tinder as a character because he's laid back and he's honest, occaisonally blunt. You've said that Miles is the most observant/analytical character in Murphy's Law's cast, for me that honour goes no question to Tinder (not saying he's more these things than Miles is but as one of the six leads we have and should have seen more of Tinder than we have of Miles) who's been shown to be very astute about emotional matters, etc. He's also very good at containing himself. In the most recent comic Radic says 'We're all here, even Tinder' and a couple of people have questioned this, but the thing is that of the five of them Tinder probably has the most reason to be angry about what Lloyd did due to his background, however because Tinder is a very rational and reasonable person and because of his experience with unrepentent murderers, Tinder was able to accept the fact that Lloyd has changed since then; he, unlike Serrin, contextualises the information.

So um... phoo. There's a bit about my thoughts on Matt and Tinder and how I see their characters. Does that answer your question at all?

CWater: you made a lot of interesting points in your 'review'. I'd respond to a couple of them but I've been sitting and typing for long enough now, perhaps I'll come back to it later.