Unsounded

Maybe the lizards were smart and brought some orphaned, unhatched eggs with them, that could help.

Wow, the comments on the page just before this got real interesting. I expected the gay burying accusations, but the commentators going full nationalist for Mother Alderode was unexpected.

I can't tell if that guy was for real but it's kind of fascinating how there are two extreme opposite ends of the political spectrum reading and (I assume?) enjoying the same story.

It must be hard for right leaning people to find webcomics to read. Most of them do skew hard left. I imagine you take what you can get wherever you find it.

Nah us real internet nazis arent all so fragile as pol makes us seem ive got at least 20

I understand hating Cresce, but if you hate Cresce for being authoritarian (forces a job on you), I don't know how you could root for Alderode (forces a lifespan, caste, etc. on you and can kill you or make you a pariah at any time).

That hits the spot. Thanks user!

Roger and Sonorie's friendship is super fucking wholesome. All this time, working together to bring down Alderode. I love it.

I want Dhampir to bully Lemon some more.

I am not right wing, and I barely read webcomics anymore while I used to read many. It's not so much politics as it is bad writing and too much virtue signalling.

Take Terry Pratchett - he puts pretty much everything in his books and everyone can enjoy those because they are well written. Fuck, everyone loved gaying it up with Galgy and Jeff in RPGWorld, because they were good characters. Putting an sjw trophy character in a comic and then not letting them do anything, or have a personality, or let anything bad ever happen to them, is what is repelling readers, not their political preferences.

Dhampir is hot. Thanks for all the pretty people, Ashley.

With that hair? Girl needs a salon.

Mira, however...

Erm is cute! A bit of an unconventional name for a Crescian.

I want Dhampire to die in an ugly way and for Duane to be the harbinger of it.
But this is Unsounded, we only get hero moments once every three years.

Fuck Alderode.

>Vienne confirmed better construct engineer than filthy Crescians
On the other hand, even Claggart and his dudes instantly saw the potential for a baby Ogre construct. And anyway the real genius of Uaid is his anti-pymary field. I wonder why Cresce didn't see the same potential? Is their construct tech just beyond it now?

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It's almost like bad writers need to rely on extremely specific demographic appeal to stay in business.

Speaking as someone who is a bit right-wing himself, my sympathy for Alderode rests entirely on their tolerance for the Ssaelit faith. Cresce wipes them out wherever they get the chance, at least Alderode allows them a home. I'm sure Ashley constructed Ssaelism to be more palatable to Euro-American sympathies, but she did a good job, because I like them all a lot more than the Gefendur. I mean it's basically death metal Christianity.

That and the absolute safest and uncontroversial topics. Gamez, u guyz.

This entire comic can be taken as anti-religion propaganda because every singly religion in it is pants-on-head retarded and make everyone's lives hell.

It feels like a "Yes, it's a very nice vein of coal but we have plenty of oil fields back home" deal to me. If you're strapped for resources, it's one thing but you have an alternative back home that's superior.

To be fair, Alderode only really allows it a home because the Ssaelit fought a war for it, I think, and forced the issue. The Gefendur are pushing back on it now that they have the opportunity. And Ssaelit is really no more open to freedom of religion than Gefendur is. The two faiths in Alderode are a realpolitik situation, not really something born out of enlightened idealism or recognition of rights. Alderode's got literal thought police, though Cresce would probably do the same if they had the opportunity.

Of course, the Gefendur are the ones who actually genocided all other religions, which means they actually did the crime. Ssaelism was just late to the party and there was no one left to obliterate.

Unsounded is a world of religious zealots and radical nationalists. There's not really any country to root for, which I imagine is the point. The real sympathy draws are people trying to navigate these problems.

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I wonder what Mahrshane is like; it's on the opposite side of the continent from Alderode and Cresce but doesn't border Sharteshane directly.

Like the other user says, the caves the Crescians stole from the lizards were extremely rich in First Material
That's why Cresce has always had the advantage in constructs, they have far more material available than Alderode
And on its own, First Earth is one of the less exciting materials, it's Vienne's genius that was the "holy fuck" breakthrough and the secret mostly died with her

The Mmatont still exist I think. Their religion might have the most truth in it.

They're pretty much just on that one island between Sharteshane and Alderode.

>Geez, Lem, you kiss your mother with that mouth? Ah, you don’t actually, she died giving birth to you and this fact sits like a sick stone of guilt deep in your belly. Hey, the young researcher lady is cute!
Aouch.

>barring some unlikely discovery
heheh

too bad even that ended up being pretty useless though given that they don't seem to give much of a fuck that Quigley's walking around with it

And the antipymary thing would work for anything and any first material. First earth could be good because you could build on a mountain ogre, but you might even be able to use stuff like the mostly useless first sand somehow too. It really is a major breakthrough.

Didn't Dhampir said on the previous page that she killed all the Duane's Plat kids? It's not relevant to the events unfolding right now but "never lost a lad" seems to be completely abbandoned at this point. Of course, never trust the word of mouth in visual medium but I just dont see why would Dhampir lie and pass the opportunity to kill the kids. She must have met them seeing as how she knows about them. Did Cresciansnot allow child-slaughter? Does Vampire wish to restock on plat fodder?

No, Dhampir said that she passed them on the way down and also said something to the effect that they'd all get killed soon or something. Mostly she was just fucking with him, I imagine.

Quig’s an outlaw, but also a folk hero. It’s a messy scenario to try and pursue him. And given that he’ll be dead of old age soon anyway they can just keep track of his movements and take Uaid after he dies.

Probably just trying to cloud his mind more and break his spirit. Given that he planned to desert with them and has now been concussed, it’s hard to imagine he’s got much fighting spirit left in him. Under normal storytelling rules the plat boys would rescue the rest of their squad. But Ash doesn’t tend to be predictable.

I dunno, they still might. They talked about Plats odd ability to help repair the khert, maybe the kids will help or be a part of prematurely stopping the khertfire and then all hell breaks loose.

The thing is they’re without their captain and the next most senior squad member got cut in half. It’s going to be tough.

We need based Toma back. He's the only Crescian who isn't scum.

I think that's a bit of a misread. When it comes to webcomics at least, I believe they're entirely genuine. But that's where that whole "bad writers" thing comes into play. Cope is a great writer because she has a real knack for getting into the heads of her characters and empathizing with who they are and why they do the things they do. She's talked several times about how bad of a person Duane is, how his shitty perspectives are about to fuck over people around him. But she's also talked about living so much in Duane's head she doesn't want to draw his grandpa as the hot battle mage he probably was because it feels like drawing sexy images of her own grandpa. Duane's not just a sexist, nationalistic zealot. He's a person with desires to be good that clash with his bigotry and self righteousness. We get a quick arc with Claggart on this issue to. Prejudice against souds and Duane, he's nevertheless a good commander with wise words to impart and his own human emotions.

Bad writers are unable to separate their own morals from writing or creating a good piece of art. If gay representation is good, then surely just plopping in a gay character is good writing. Their morals are self evident to themselves, and the more wrapped up in it they become, the less they reflect on what good these morals are supposed to create in the world around them and more and more on how fucking terrible and monstrous people who don't hold these morals are. The evil too becomes self evident and there's no reason to have them be anything but monsters to be cut down to cheer and applause because they're showing how good triumphs over evil. Simple support of what you think is good begins to transcend all actual, nitty gritty quality writing. Largely I think this is just the result of them not being very good or not taking their own work very seriously. It would be just as bad even without the moralizing, the moralizing just highlights it as all moral highground staking does.

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You can create any kind of universe, any kind of story, that justifies your morality by filling it with hypocritical assholes who disagree with you and handsome, sexy heroes who agree with you, and have everything turn out for the best when people do the things you believe are good. This largely results in pretty shitty fiction. A lack of basic human empathy for mankinds imperfections and flaws will destroy any story. For me, the best morality in fiction challenges morals and forces characters to face their imperfection and the audience to face their own.

As a counter example, I've read a great series about how a military commander tries to handle his soldiers that have grown used to war crimes, lack of discipline, and a distrust of civilian government. The story itself doesn't really dig too deeply into how these things arise or how you combat them, but it takes a strong moral stance on how a modern military should behave and the story does reward its hero for sticking to his guns. But it's still a well written, entertaining work because it's primarily just an interesting military scifi story and the story doesn't moralize. It reminds the reader, and its characters, of the stakes humanity's soul faces in war and the standards it needs to hold itself to if its wants to make it out intact. And while their are despicable villains, there are shades of gray in how it handles people who are in between and has a great sympathy for human frailty and stress.

There's a difference between stories with morals it considers important and stories that try to moralize to you. And a good writer will find the balance between its themes and how its characters need to actually deal with their conflicts.

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jesus christ Cope

I hope Ash doesn't die in the hurricane.

She's too fujo to die

I don't think disliking Cresce right now is "right wing." What we know of this country is that it subverts and assumes control of allied governments (Ulestry) threatens to fund religious terrorism in neutral governments (Sharteshane) and actively aids and abets secessionist wars led by wealthy families (Alderode). Cresce has genocided most of a species to take raw materials from them and placed them in concentration camps (the Two-Toes) and actively works to exterminate other religions (Ssaelism, Two-Toes paganism) and annihilate cultures (the Two-Toes again) while themselves having a cultural practice that any modern reader is sure to find repulsive (raising a child to be ritualistically cannibalized by the elite).

As for their vaunted social system, it tolerates no freedom of choice. If the state decides you're a miner, you're a miner. Unless you're a noble, of course, then you're more equal than others. You are paid in labor credits that make leaving this system difficult if not impossible. If you grow ill and the government does not calculate you worth it, you will be allowed to die even when treatment for your ailment is documented and readily available.

People side with Alderode because while we know they're nasty and repressive, everything we've seen of Cresce as a political entity is repulsive: they're imperialistic, autocratic, genocidal, and hypocritical. They're also the stronger of the two major powers, so a bully on top of that. I expect as we see Alderode's uglier side up close and in more detail that people will even out who they back or join the 'fuck this, I'm moving to Sharteshane' camp.

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She better do it while she can, she's set off her own death flag.

Supposedly too Uaid is a bit impractical to actually weaponize.

>not being a sharteshanian patriot since day one

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She's absolutely right though, that researcher is pretty cute. Even though she's wearing a potato sack.

Isn't the twin-eating also practiced by half of Alderode?

You are my sun and moon.

Pretty much, yeah. Yet nobody calls Ashley a fedora.

I think she just saw Jon (the comment about guts fits for him), and assumed that the rest had died also.

Jon fell all the way down along with Duane and the others so she couldn't have.

Ah, you're right. I had forgotten that.

Only the Geffie scum.

The world is kinda pants on head retarded though. Like the fundamental structure of it is just fucking bizarre. You can only expect equally bizarre religions to come from it

That'd be a kind of narrow-minded take on it, considering there really aren't any major parallels to the real world in any of the institutions in Kasslyne, religious, political or otherwise.

They made a point to show that Duane's kids actually know what they're doing. They're not completely helpless without him, just a little...irrational

That's less being a bad writer and more being bad at objective thinking and empathy. They likely suffer in many other facets of being a human.

It's a world that's fundamentally different from ours, yeah. I love it though, it feels like somewhere you can step into. Like it's solid and real, even if it's fucking bizarre.

How old is bastion now again? when is this taking place relative to bastion and prakhuta being delicou's punching bags?

Bastion is either around 40 or in his early forties, approximately the same age as Rahm. I believe Bastion was 15 when he became Delicieu's apprentice, which I think continued for a few years.

'ate crescians
'ate sharties
'ate geffies
'ate two toes
'ate the gods
luv me wife
luv alderode
luv ssael
simple as

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I hear people say this but I don't really agree. The world to me feels, I dunno, small? Vague? I mean the people in it feel authentic, but the world itself seems hollow somehow, like a stage set up so the characters can act the way they do.

I think it might be that the cultures were built first, and then the setting was made to justify them. Most high fantasy makes the setting's quirks and then builds cultures around them, but it seems like unsounded was done in reverse order. I guess the upside is that it's cultures seem more meaty than your typical fantasy stereotypes

>
Alderode's a relatively small island in the middle of an ocean. There's more outside the bounds of the world, but if people born there stray too far from the Khert's influence they die.

Oy 'ow dey o'nna git out od dis den? Whuy du pipl' thiank d'is comic be hards to reds?

It's certainly not a traditional fantasy setting. Those so often seem motivated by escapism and a desire to leave shitty or boring Earth behind. Kasslyne feels like it was set up to explore a whole bunch of concepts that are pulled directly from our world. It's not a place I'd want to live but I do believe in it as an intelligently built exotic world.

>Those so often seem motivated by escapism and a desire to leave shitty or boring Earth behind.
Traditional fantasy is almost always a worse off world than our own, whether due to some dark lord mucking things up or things just always sucking ala conan.

They're shitty in an exciting fantasy way, often with straightforward problems that some dude with a sword can fix. They're not shitty in an intractable politics, ecological disasters, inequitable trade policies kind of way.

People want to live in a world where the problems are able to be clearly detailed and pinned on concrete villains, or at least where the problems are not so systemic that they fill you daily with despair because enough people will never come together to fix them. In fantasy, a plucky group of adventurers can defeat the Big Bad and improve everyone's life, or the threat is so Other that it forces humans to put aside their differences to defeat it.

Fantasy worlds always have negatives, yeah. These are the conflicts that drive the narrative. But the Snow Queen, Sauron, Night King, Fire Lord, whoever is almost always an unambiguous evil.

And that's why these worlds always feel so hollow and fake to me. They're just escapism. A place to go to where the problems have a face, and you can hit it with a hammer.

That's also why WW2 is still everywhere in fiction. Hitler was the face of evil, and so the whole war is as satisfying in retrospect as a good fantasy novel.

Nothing can improve a conanesque setting, that's the point. It's a bad, oppressive world with bad people in it. It's just no one attempts to pretend otherwise. It's brand of escapism is basically trying to live like Sette, except you know, not being a ratchild

WWII was also the last time total warfare was a viable concept. Humanity still hasn't wrapped our heads around the need for proxy wars now that MAD is a thing.

>things suck in Conan
They do not. Living there is tough, but man can make his own fate in that world by his will, strength and wits. It's actually quite close to the American romanticism of opportunity in the untamed wilds to the west. Oh, the author was also a strong, physically fit man...

You mean Korean War.

Conan did, having nothing more than human, mundane means.

nah, america wouldn't nuke china (despite MacArthur arguing to do so) because they were afraid russia would use that as an excuse to nuke korea and start a proper opening to WWIII.