OOTS #707 - The Discussion Thread

[Deliverance]

Yes, the goblin was not entirely trustworthy, and yes, it wasn't a completely unreasonable option, but compare it to the actions of the goblins. When the goblins have a human at their mercy, they take it to the prisons, and keep it there.

What on earth do you base that conclusion on?

Let's face it: For the goblins to have only enough humans as prisoners that they fill up one prison or a couple of prisons, which is certainly what the story seems to have indicated so far, it has to mean that everybody, who was not imprisoned or otherwise escaped, from the fall of a major city was evacuated by the shipping available at the time the city fell.

This isn't a village or town with a few thousand people we are talking about - the hobgoblin army fielded something like 30,000 soldiers against an opposition that, while outnumbered, was set to give a good defense of themselves that might well have succeeded were it not for the superior magic of the opposition.

Even if the attack had been known well in advance and all available shipping called in from everywhere nearby, there's no way to evacuate an entire city population on a short notice, and this was not the case.

No, it is entirely more reasonable to assume that a major part of the city's population did not escape on the ships and were either killed outright or managed to flee to the countryside during the sack and looting with only a minority of the humans who ended up at the mercy of the hobgoblins ending up surviving in cushy prisons as slaves. Slavery is the survivor's problem, something that generally happens after order has been secured by main force and the dirty deeds have been done.

That would, not incidentally, also be a far better match to the real world consequences of armies taking a city by assault.

There is no need to portray the sack and looting of the city or the mass slaughter of common citizens involved in a comic such as this as it bears absolutely no importance for the main focus of the comic, but it can certainly be assumed to happen so long as the parties involved behave like humans would... which is part of the point of the comic, after all: Human, hobgoblin, elf... you can pretty much assume that they'll be acting like real life humans would in the same situation most of the time.

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The elven commander in #707 is a good case in point - killing off that hobgoblin in the way he does it is at the same time: pragmatic (both in getting rid of an inconvenience and in doing it in a way that'll get around the high-horse morality of Than if the witnesses cooperate), racist, a bit sadistic, and entirely justifiable in the situation.

In other words, the reason that his actions have taken some 14 pages to discuss so far (and will probably go further than that) is that they are so utterly human - and something that, depending on our viewpoint, we could see a "good man" doing in a bad situation or could only see a "bad man" doing.

Regardless of that, it certainly does paint the elven commander as awesome to many people, both those who agree with his actions and those who disagree with it - so long as people remember the meaning of the word "awesome" and "awe" rather than merely thinking of it as a generic term meaning something alike to "very good and impressive". :)