Unsounded

Bell.

Oddly if you read the old Duane/Sette Q&A, Claggart is the only person who bothered to write Duane back after being discharged from the army when he tried to keep in touch cross-caste & class. Granted, it was to not-too-subtly tell him to stop sending letters, but at least he actually responded.

>So Jay, what did you think of Teeth exploding from his own high blood pressure?

>Duane trying to keep in touch and nobody does

Damn it’s good I’m at the gym, these feels are weighty

That's depressing.

Damn

How long was it after the army before he met Leysa?

You'd think military brotherhood would supercede such lines, but I guess not.

Dracula?

I need to catch up with this comic. I'm still at the fight with the silver monster and I never caught up because I'm so busy.

I am given to understand that military leaders and middle managers are pretty much required to be mean and assholish. They need their troops to be both aggressive and focused, and attitudes from management tend to trickle down.

Can any anons who've actually served in the military tell us if Claggart would be actually good at his job, or would his smugness get in the way?

In a sense you haven't missed much

But in the other you've got a LOT of catch up to do

Our world's systems, much less modern ones, are very iffy to apply to a world like this, particularly Alderode where people are born consistently, quantifiably different and their society is built around that

Yea Forums missed page 30? no Unsounded thread on wendesday? disappointing, we are slacking

Attached: ch14_30.jpg (600x900, 256K)

It's because Monday's thread never died, so we just posted in that instead of starting a new one. It was nice.
I think people are all discussed-out now, though.

...I’ll ship it

>Years later, Claggart has returned home
>Claggart struts out to the mailbox, sees a letter
>From ADELIER
>THAT Adelier
>His eyes light up with joy
>Gleefully rushes to his writing desk
>Breaks out his finest quill
>Clears his throat, his eyes squint, his happy smile turns to a foul and snobbish snear
>Cocks his nose upwards at a firm 45 degree angle above parallel
>Locks his non-dominant arm bent snootily to his side
>Begins to write a polite, yet curt, letter stating his distaste for the man, and that such an action as this is unbecoming of a Duane owing to his low birth and inferior caste, and that Claggart is only replying because he is such a gentleman
>Every movement of the pen is lavish and fanciful
>Every letter written with wild gesticulation, his fingers holding only slightly to the pen, the feathered end swishing wildly
>When his masterwork is finished, he holds it up, beaming gleefully as he observes his work
>Carefully places it in an envelope
>Practically runs back to the mailbox to place it
>Spends the rest of the day with a shit eating grin

>Magnus leading duane through a minefield like a child leading his parents to meet his teacher

Adorable!

Oh, I laft.

Well it does at least among the common soldiers, they all bowed to him during the flashback and had his back after the nobles beat the shit out of him.

Weren't those soldiers golds, though?

Boi you just weren’t paying attention

Double length thread

The ones after he got beaten definitely were. The ones who nodded to him when he first came in for the day seemed to have brown hair. But maybe it was just lighting.

casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic/ch07/ch07_88.html
Looks like Golds here, yeah

casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic/ch07/ch07_65.html
With Bronze and what looks like at least on Silver in the back

And it's a slightly different situation but that one Jet motadwe seemed to like him quite a bit

The Temple services Ssaelit of all castes, I believe. He's preaching to Bronzes and Golds on the panel after the second one you posted.

What the fuck even is the Temple's construction

is there just seating all the way up that stupidly huge spire and that's where the services are held? did they build it that way just to symbolize Ssael's glorious boner reaching to the heavens before the eyes of all?

fabulous

Magnus is best boy. Nose picking and all

Poor Lem

I wonder how Duane will take the revelation that Sette is the product of Sael’s glorious boner and a decidedly not-dead god he is having dream-sex with?

>tfw reading this post and realizing how incomprehensible it must be to someone not reading the comic

Unsounded is the craziest thing I've ever read, I love it to death.

Attached: 1515979079594.jpg (720x958, 51K)

Did she hatch from an egg? Does her lion sibling somewhere out there have a human butt? So many questions!

>Sette's counterpart is a lion with a small patch of pale, hairless human flesh where its tail should be
How revolting.

Could Mozart still be alive?

[explosive laughter]

>Can any anons who've actually served in the military tell us if Claggart would be actually good at his job, or would his smugness get in the way?

He hasn't done anything officer-related yet, so who knows? He's a prick, but that's not too unusual for an officer. I believe Cope said he started off enlisted, which automatically makes him better than an academy officer.

I believe it's speculated in Ssaelism that Ssael and Tirna were allies and possibly lovers, so it might not surprise him too much that Ssael got some strange.

She said he started off enlisted and has worked his way up, but they tend to promote the shorter lived Castes over the longer lived Castes under the belief that the longer lived Castes will get there eventually. So Claggert is much older than Duane or even his commanding officer. The ranking officer is a Silver so there's probably some resentment there but Duane just got promoted straight out of school and is a 20 some odd year old Gold. I can't really blame Claggert too for treating Duane like shit.

oh cool, so Cresce is pulling their own little aghanistan then. good to know the cheeky little gits are playing this kind of game.

Ashley, draw this.

>casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic/ch07/ch07_65.html
How am I just NOW noticing Bastion? How embarrassing.

Attached: ch07_65.jpg (284x139, 21K)

Later you'll even notice the guy he's talking to. Or maybe even right now. I don't recognize him myself.

You're blowing my mind right now.
Who the hell is that even?

Probably Will's dad, the dude with the braid and the ballin' armor.

>the pissmop saves your kid from death in war
>personally tries to teach him pymary for years despite your kid being terrible at it
>about to be the first of your religion to have a government position of serious importance
...
>help some angsty blacktongue kill him
The reason concocted for killing Duane had better be damn fucking good, otherwise everyone except Bastion looks like a fucking moron, and increasingly so by the day.

They didn't "kill" him though. They changed him into a nearly invulnerable undead monster. What we need is the reason for THAT. What is Duane's ultimate purpose?

Claggart - in a modern military - would require SOME saving virtues, then. Enlisted don't get to become officers simply by faffing around long enough.

Contempt for academy-schooled officers (which is almost all of them) is common enough even today, and well-deserved besides. Good green lieutenants will learn from their senior NCOs. Bad ones will use their rank as a club and keep their eye on the birdie that is promote-or-perish.

I'm pretty sure the only one who wanted Duane resurrected was Bastion (and probably Lady I herself, using him as a catspaw whether he knew it or not). The way Bastion phrased his actions make me think so.

My going theory is that Duane was a martyr for some unwholesome Ssaelit political maneuvers. The man is a war hero, a brilliant wright, a beloved member of the clergy, and stood on the cusp of composership. He also had a conscience, and little or no political sense. A dead choir boy makes for political rocket fuel if you know how to use it.

Duane was definitely assassinated to stir popular Ssaelit opinion against the Gefendur. You think it was a coincidence that it happened while the gefender were proposing a 'reshuffling' of proportions in politics and the one guy was suggesting introducing the plague into the gefendur populace. There was that 'crescian' message over Duane's corpse too about them supporting the Aldish gefendur.

People will be way more likely to support the plague shit after a prominent Ssaelit priest and wright and his daughter are slaughtered in the streets. Like this guy said

I doubt Councilor Bodie was a major player in Duane's assassination, because if he were an important character, I'd expect Ashley would have answered this question with either more detail (for having thought about him more) or less (because spoilers!) Also, I don't recall there being any pinups of him or anything, as one might broadly gauge a character's significance in Unsounded (at least for the guys) by how many nudie pics of them are floating around.

Attached: 177525759840.png (700x445, 32K)

I didnt mean necessarily that Bodie was directly involved in that part, but just that there are motivations to take drastic measures to sway the populace. We know they are moving towards civil war, or at least bad times for the Ssaelit

Speaking of who was involved when, it's been strongly hinted that the Adelier who sliced up Bastion wasn't Lemuel, so are there any other Adeliers out there but Leysa and Simon to be suspects? Other than possibly Zombie Mikaela.

Attached: ch11_48.jpg (600x900, 298K)

What? It was totally Lemuel that interrupted Bastion and sliced him up. That's why Lem was there with eyeballs when Duane woke up undead in the chapel. He was waiting for him, he knew what had happened.

This was the first "who said it was Lemuel"-tease I could find; I vaguely feel like there were others, though.

Attached: 179201239015.png (690x330, 14K)

That's just a writer protecting a spoiler, I don't see it as good proof.

I choose to believe it was Leysa simply because Leysa is the best

>I'm pretty sure the only one who wanted Duane resurrected was Bastion (and probably Lady I herself, using him as a catspaw whether he knew it or not). The way Bastion phrased his actions make me think so.
Maybe, but why would Bastion be brought into an assassination if not for his Black Tongue expertise (i.e. to do some fucked up pymary)? His non-trained, garbage-pymary-casted ass clearly wasn't there to do the actual killing, and he described it as a "job" when speaking to Rahm.

Yeah, I was thinking that too. They specifically got him to do it because he had this experimental pymary that he said could rez a tacit caster. That was much more of a draw to him than money.

The issue with such a motive is it seemed to have failed. Ashley has said the rebalancing has occurred and Ssaelit have lost a lot of power because of it, and implied the country has gone to extra shit because of it.

That doesn't mean that wasn't the reason, just that if it WAS the reason, their plan failed.

Feels weird to have the people who orchestrated the death of the co-main character be politically incompetent.

I'm curious about the rationale for the rebalancing. Were the populations so evenly split before the loss of Fachlyne that the a credible case could be made that the equal representation was supposed to be proportional to population? And if that argument hadn't been ruled out before, why is 1400 (is that right?) years into Alderode's history the first time one side or the other has seized the opportunity of the ebb and flow of demographics to entrench their power permanently?

Maybe they should have just gone with bicameralism to begin with, I dunno.

>That one Jet motadwe seemed to like him quite a bit.
Until he punched Bodie.

Seems the numbers were close enough throughout history that it didn't cause too much of an issue, or if it cropped up it just never went through. Ssaelits were the minority at the beginning of their faith but were populous enough to cause a big ruckus to get themselves equal representation. Fachlyne was an entire Aldish district and being primarily Ssaelit means a lot of Ssaelits dead. I could see them pushing the numbers out of the acceptable "yeah we're mostly equal" range.

The thing that seems to have really set off the recent ill will between the Geffies and Ssaelit is the Ssaelit refusal to allow plods. Plods have revolutionized industry in the rest of the continent but the Ssaelit have Alderode stuck in the past. So the Geffies needed some pretense to weaken them politically. I don't know if they started the plague in a Ssaelit population center but there it was, and they seized on it as an argument that the Ssaelit were in decline, with a shrinking population that couldn't justify equal representation.

(Wait, no: 1200 years ago was "a few centuries before" the Council War, so it's indeed less than 1400 years that this stunt could have been tried)

It feels realistic. You don't get backed into such a corner while being better than your foe.

I find that sudden burst of light in the shot with Bastion really unusual. We know that Lemuel cannot do pymary, and neither can Leysa. Could it be that Bastion stabilized Miki to use her for spare ingredients and she nuked his ass?

I'm just wondering at this point if Bastion will still be alive when Duane pulls his guts out to show to him.

The light could just be artistic license. An explosion of action as an offscreen actor attacks Bastion. It could be Mikaila, just because I think it would be rad if she was alive enough to do that. The phrasing that Bastion uses is very weird though. "I've come to learn all the Adeliers are." Lemuel seems to be in on the plan, you'd think Bastion would know that. He would likely know Duane has a brother and he naturally would be dangerous as a seasoned soldier. Why use the word "all" instead of "both" if there were only two dangerous Adeliers?

I'm imagining, if Mikaela really is in the same condition as her father, her pulling on Duane's opposite sleeve from Sette, fighting with her over who gets dad rights. "I saw him first" versus "finders keepers" and all that.

I'm trying to imagine Duane's absolute fucking meltdown at finding out his daughter got zombified and coming up short.

He would hug her tight, tell her to close her eyes, and immolate them both.

I feel like it would be super hacky if Mikaela was also a Duane-like zombie, or really alive in any way

Horrified as he'd be, he would take it better than earlier years Duane would have because now he's convinced the Khert's refusal to mulch him means Ssael still loves him

He might apply that same logic to her, even if he's devastated that she's living this cursed existence

I absolutely do not believe she's still around however

I have no doubt that Mikaila is alive, she's the one who savaged Bastion, and she's grown into a little teenage blonde hottie who is poised to lead an Aldish revolution. Pretty sure the next time the story cuts to modern Alderode it will be from her perspective and we can see what she's been up to.

My only question is if she calls Lemuel "Uncle" or "Papa."

Rebel!Mikaila is the obvious heir of dead Vienne. She can avenge what was done to her father, help liberate the castes of Alderode, make peace with Cresce, unite the two faiths. Duane and Sette can deal with the magical shit in the khert but Mikaila is the vibrant living protagonist we need to handle the politics.

I'm just trying to envision the story and characters and like, balance of the comic after we're done with Cresce and I really feel she is the missing component. We need a strong protagonist in Alderode to deal with all the villains there.

She's old enough to remember her father and she very clearly loved him. I doubt she would call someone else papa after seeing him killed in such a brutal way, I think she'd see it as some level of disrespect. Simon though is a baby last we saw and very likely would only remember Duane vaguely, if at all. Him and his new half-siblings would all call Lemuel papa.

it's only been six years (and change?) after all

>We know that Lemuel cannot do pymary, and neither can Leysa
Can someone tell me how we know Leysa can't do pymary?

Ashley is a better writer than that

dont bait me boy

Women don't practice pymary in Alderode outside of very specific womanly uses. To do real pymary requires becoming a Third Option, something Leysa obviously isn't. If she was never Rited she can't do pymary. Mikaila was born an Innate, so she didn't need to be Rited, same as Duane, so they couldn't really stop her from learning pymary what with Duane having so many books about it. Or at the very least they failed at stopping her.

Something is going on with Mikaila. Her lack of full confirmed on-screen death, the vague answers Ashley has given about her over time, her being an innate tacit caster which was the exact reason her father was chosen. Something is up, what exactly no one but Ashley knows, but I would bet a large amount of money Mikaila's story isn't as simple as "she died in the snow that night".

Ashley's such a good writer that I know Mikaila's alive. Otherwise she's nothing more than a fridge trope and that's boring.

I really doubt she's undead. An undead little girl wandering around would be offputting and there is no way in fuck that Duane would be able to tolerate it. Honestly I don't want to read about zombie girl-child, the idea is gross.

I'm down for teen Mikaila though learning that her beloved uncle Lemuel had her father killed and then dad shows up a monster as the city all around them is in political turmoil and then the silver eel attacks and fuck it would be glorious.

You're giving me everything in Aldish proper society that says what a woman can and can't do but I've grown up with women in my household and you're nuts if you don't think women find a way around all that. So far as I can tell there's no direct evidence Leysa can't do pymary beyond 'the patriarchy says so.'

She demonstrates no interest in pymary in what we see? Duane doesn't every mention anything about it? She lets Duane handle all the pymary nonsense Mikaila is pulling? How could she know pymary? She's a bit of an idealist but otherwise Leysa is portrayed as a proper Ssaelit woman. We have no evidence she can do so and her knowing pymary would involve a whole lot of nonsense that doesn't seem to fit with what we know about her. I can't prove she doesn't know pymary, you can't prove a negative, but there is zero evidence she knows pymary so you're currently being supported by nothing but air.

Go ask Ashley. I feel like she'd answer this one pretty straightforward.

Is that fucking Amadwe Argenti? The coloration looks like a silver, the features seem right, and Argenti was said to have brutally hunted down and executed the assassins.

Obviously, this doesn't really influence the prevailing theory (Bastion conspired with the Aldish government), but it is a solid piece of supporting evidence if it is really him.

Attached: Argenti.jpg (204x182, 19K)

Because Leysa doesn't want to do pymary, either. She was even more against Miki doing pymary than her dad.

Here's a closeup of the guy talking to Bastion.

There's no evidence to suggest that Leysa is a tacit caster, which means she'd need to be rited, which is not something that would escape Duane's notice.

And of course I forget to attach the photo.

Attached: Conspiracy.png (331x225, 160K)

>Man saves your kid, give or take a forearm
>plot with a dissolute Black Tongue son of a bitch to murder him and turn him into a walking blasphemy

BOI

I agree with your conclusion but, just to clarify, being able to cast without being rited would make her innate, not tacit. Innate casters can cast without being rited, tacit casters can cast without speaking. Duane and Miki are both.

I don't expect that Leysa WAS a wright when last we saw her, but I think if she ever wanted to become one, she could have had a good head start because just "not completely tuning out her husband" should have filled her in on the important stuff very early on.

Love how Cope tried to further obscure his face with his foggy breath. Girl be trolling.

>nothing more than a fridge trope
There is nothing wrong with a character dying for another's motivation if it's done well. There was nothing cheap about her death.