OOTS #1180 - The Discussion Thread

[KorvinStarmast]

Apparently, I missed this too.

You are not alone. Rich didn't communicate it very well *on screen* since I missed it to on the first read through.

No worries, his skills as a writer have grown as he's done this comic, so I think that was part of the growing process. He had an idea in his head, and to him that point was clear but it wasn't necessarily clear to all of the readers since Roy has been the leader of the OoTS since strip 0001. It was a bit jarring to me, as I read the story, to see Tarqin - who has not seen Elan in ages, and whose last contact with Elan was when he was age 9 and very much the one who was bullied by Nale, and not the "take charge" son - make this assumption that since Elan was his son me must have been the leader. I am sitting there with about 700+ strips of "Roy is the Leader" going and I go "what?" The way it came across was Tarqin's ego needing his son to be in charge. (And maybe a mechanical game thing about the higher Charisma character having to be a leader, party face?)

That Rich had some deeper things going on with his caricature of an out of touch with the times elderly male certainly gets lost - if he was trying to sell a racism theme - when one of the females in whom he has a non trivial interest is a woman of color.
Mixed signals.
I am glad to see Rich explain what was going on in his mind's eye as he was putting that all together, since I can then go back and read it again and see what it was that Rich was trying to convey.

The whole idea that some ethnically diverse country in some far away land with all sorts of unusual races and people would have a white male leader is racist. You don’t need any text to see that it’s a racist fantasy. It’s right there in full color drawings. I don’t even see how it could be more obvious.

I think you forgot the blue text. Given that a lot of us play D&D, and that Charisma and leadership often get put together in the game, and that Elan has a high Charisma and apparently looks a heck of a lot like his father (per Haley's obsesrvation when she met Tarqin), the idea that a leader (behind the scenes, since the public leader is a red dragon) is a high Charisma person would not surprise anyone. It's only later, as you meet the other members of the old team, and see the disagreements between Tarqin and Malack, that you begin to see where people of a similar power level don't quite buy into his "I am the leader" schtick (They are all running a long con) that he sells to the Order.