>>118595964Right.
Ashley, I am an Unsounded fan. I've read the comic regularly since I first encountered it partway through chapter 4 and I've backed physical copies of every one of your Kickstarters. I've been in for the long haul and I've put my money where my mouth is, and I say all of this out of love.
That said, absolutely nothing in your comic has tested my patience like this Litriya Shrine arc. It has been unremittingly AWFUL. Ever since Duane first spazzed out and burned a tapestry it has been getting progressively worse.
I hesitate to use the phrase, because I know /co/mrades will call me a fag over it and it's hackneyed at the best of times, but this honestly feels like - forced drama. Characters are being compelled to act against their established natures purely to contrive implausible conflict.
Duane's behaviour at Litriya might have made sense if we were still at the stage where he'd just arrived in Ethelmik, but his recurrent freak-outs are all coming after the following:
-Duane shouldn't be so allergic to the very presence of a Gefundur shrine. Duane is an Alderode patriot, and Alderode's big thing that makes it unique in Kassalyne is religious tolerance (if not quite amity). Duane even gives a little speech on it to one of the Vits Lords in a flashback chapter. Even if your gods are deeeeeeeaaaaaaaadddddd he's still grown up alongside Gefundur all his life, and even if his only previous visits to Twins shrines were as a kid to doodle rude pictures on Twins statues, he shouldn't live in existential fear of its empty mummery.
-Furthermore, Duane has had time to psych himself up. He wasn't just dumped in the shrine unawares and confronted with evils unprepared, he was marching to it deliberately and knew what to expect. This can't all be a discombobulating horror for him.
(1/3)
