Quote Originally Posted by Rrmcklin View Post
I'm going to chime in and say I think people use the phrase "subverting expectations" way too liberally, especially when they're trying to argue for something that we just have no reason to believe.

Like, with this last cliffhanger, it was certainly a surprising end, but I don't think my expectations were "subverted" because I had no specific expectations in general.
I blame TV Tropes.

Anyway, I'm having trouble figuring, in this theory, why none of the gods would recognize the remnant of Ares, even if only in a vauge "Where do I know that from?" kind of way. I feel like a piece of divinity would stick out like the proverbial sore thumb, especially now that a lot of gods are almost certainly watching the Order's exploits, what with the Snarl being an integral part of their quest and all.

Granted, I'm firmly in the "Belkar's death will be just that" camp.

I don't think it's the fault of anything in this comic per se that people are so hung up on the idea that there might be twist ending to the "Belkar's prophecy" plot thread; fiction, especially recent fiction, is absolutely littered with instances of prophecies, foretellings, premonitions, and visions of the future that turn out to mean something entirely different than any reasonable reading would suggest that it's practically become the default in people's minds. It's a cheap way to get the profundity of making your hero doomed without having to actually go through with it.

What I think often gets lost is the best stories about "the prophecy didn't turn out the way you expected," don't hinge on the prophecy being wrong or confusingly worded or hinge entirely on a technicality or unintuitive reading of the text. They hinge on the context and circumstances being different than what the listener expects. Oedipus did indeed kill his father and marry his mother, as the Oracle at Delphi predicted. But rather than being the depraved act of deliberate usurpation everyone assumed at the start, it specifically came to pass because he didn't know that he was related to either of them in the first place.

Basically, if anything turns out to be unexpected about the fulfillment of Belkar's prophecy, it's not going to be the what, it's going to be the why.