Unsounded

If there's no suffering, it ain't Unsounded.

>people predicting that Vampire is just using Roger
>not realizing them honestly being in love and Vampire having to either leave him forever or be put down like a rabid dog Old Yeller style because of the curse is much more tragic
You people simply weren't being cynical enough about this.

But also, yeah Vampire, just fucking say what's about to happen. Like, what's the big deal? Surely none of these people can't be told about what's going on?

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>unsoundedcomic.tumblr.com/post/187679320925/all-these-thirsty-clag-chan-lovers-can-keep-im
>Ulestrian (sp?) girls are the prettiest. Will we ever go back to Ulestry?
>Negative.

Out look not so good, Clag-chan.

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Fret not, we may still see more ulestrian qt's in the comic, even if not in their hick country

Ashley wants to be dramatic and build tension

where all the silver women at?

This gets spread out enough that I am losing track. Big Red is Vampire. Small Red is Foihellick and has the kill curse sent after him. They are down here because they have a barrier that will stop the curse. It sounds like they wanted the curse to be cast.

If the above is true, what do they gain for having the curse cast, and blocking it? I am guess we are about to find out why Big Red cannot leave with Small Red.

They want him to be cursed at an opportune moment. If he is cursed while surrounded by his men he would just be hacked to pieces immediately.

It might be hard for me to be unbiased about this because I've consumed a lot of out of comic information, but by this point we've seen enough from the comic itself to piece together what the intent is, if not the final goal.

A chapter ago, we got two pieces of information: The Queen and Roger have a plan and he's not just some Aldish boytoy she picked up. In fact, he's a total gay and they're just good friends, brought together to plot Alderode's downfall. We also learn that the Black Tongue's need a map of the human soul to be able to find something specific in Roger's soul, which they have laid out before them because rape snake has been rape sucking his mind out with rape powers.

This chapter, we learn that the Aldish ruling council had decided to cast the Etalarche Curse on Roger. Which is weird, because Roger has apparently just come back to town. We don't know what the Curse is at first, and in the context of where the flashback is now no one but Vampire does still, but several weeks ago, when Duane gets back to relating the story in the present of the comic, he tells us what the Curse is: Because of how the dammakhert works, connecting to the minds of all Alds, you can cast a spell that makes all Aldish men intensely hate another Aldishman in particular. In fact, they hate him so much they want him dead and rejoice in all his suffering and pain.

We also learn about the same time, and a bit more so in the last few pages, that conveniently the khert is broken in the area, preventing the Curse from hitting him just yet. Roger is currently surrounded by a very odd and wide ranging "khert fire" that prevents any Pymary from affecting anyone within it, temporarily shielding him from being hit by the spell until the khert in the area is repaired.

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So from this, one can piece together that: Roger wants to be hit by the curse, but his exposure must be carefully controlled. He's ducked back into Alderode just in time to be cursed, and is basically hiding out right on the border, ready to quickly run away once he's been hit to avoid being attacked by his own forces since they're also Aldish and just as suseptible to the curse as anyone else in the country. This also being why he has an escort of Crescians and perhaps the Two-Toes and the Salt Lizard, whatever the deal turns out to be there. From the above, we can also gather curse will do something to his soul that he and Queen believe can be studied to allow them to do some serious fuckery to Alderode, most likely through the dammakhert itself since that's how the curse works. To accomplish this, they've allied with a hideous rape snake and a bunch of directionless eunuchs to tear open his soul and study it. This will obliterate all Roger is in the process, but by the present of the comic Roger believes it's worth it to potentially destroy Alderode.

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Oops, didn't mean to quote but instead again

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Considering he's Aldish, and very old-school Aldish, I'm surprised Vampire speaks with such respect to a female military commander. Guess that's just part of his charming ways.

Many old-school chauvinistic cultures believe treating women respect to be a mark of good character. Like a king who breaks bread with his servants. Sort of an exceptions proves the rule scenario

Vampire's also a big wig in a rebellion led by a woman, though I'm not sure we know the latter in comic yet. But the former is enough to make it logical that he might not be as down on woman commanders as other Aldish might be. He's also put in a position where he must rely upon her, and not being a jerk about it would help in getting her to listen to his warnings and advice.

Wasn't his sister a big rebellious cheese somehow?
Maybe he gets it from her.

That's who I was referring too, but I'm certain we don't know that yet in comic. For questions like these, it's important to try and approach them purely with what one might know in the comic by this point. Though of course, Vampire's odd position as a veteran Copper who's nevertheless a big shot in the rebellion and an oddly polite attitude towards Crescian women could an indication of what we'll learn later about his connections to the rebellion that would retroactively explain the weirdness around him.

I think it's going to happen in the middle of a hug or kiss so Vampire dies with Roger in his arms.

>Vampire dies looking down at foi with his dick in his mouth
tragic desu

I suppose the question is what they plan, ultimately, to DO with this knowledge. Thus far I've seen two ideas:
>Make Alds cream themselves over Sonorie, so that Alderode just willingly submits.
>Make Alds kill each other endlessly, and let Cresce just come in and mop up the survivors.

hooooo boy

Can't really see Sonorie doing the latter, especially since the former would be about as effective and result in much less loss of life.

If there was a "love your ruler" function to the dammakhert, how could the monarchy have fallen? Why weren't the Mmatont and the Avelpitians prevented from revolting by making them love the Vits Council?

Maybe they plan to use the Etalarche curse on Aldish politicians.

>If there was a "love your ruler" function to the dammakhert, how could the monarchy have fallen? Why weren't the Mmatont and the Avelpitians prevented from revolting by making them love the Vits Council?
They could just not know how. It can provoke murderous hate, why not love?
Personally I think they might just try to turn the dammakhert off

That's what I think too. We know Sonorie is a soft touch and doesn't like the idea of genocide. She'll want to go with as bloodless a solution as possible.

Turn the damakhert off and you throw alderode into such a state of confusion that they'll be a nonissue for generations, embroiled in their own bullshit. If the queen after her wants to invade them then, that's her business, but it will be a paper tiger at that point and the current queen goes down as the leader who finally solved the aldish problem with careful planning and subterfuge rather than swords.

Totally undermines her general too. All he knows is swords. No wonder he's so insanely pissed off, she's emasculating him.

>Was getting cursed part of your plan?
>Of course!
>Well congratulations, you got yourself cursed. Now what's the next step of your master plan?
>Crashing the Dammakhert — with no survivors!

>If there was a "love your ruler" function to the dammakhert, how could the monarchy have fallen?
Much of what's going on in Unsounded now, pymary-wise, from Uaid to Bastion's "off-setting" to the Silver Pain Monster to Duane himself is cutting edge, new spellwork. I would imagine any plan to brainwash the Alds following this Etalarche reverse engineering wouldn't so much be a "function" of the dammakhert as an entirely new spell developed by studying how the curse works.

>I paid you a small fortune
>And this gives you power over me?
>What is this?
>Your money and infrastructure has been important, until now
>What are you?
>I'm Cresce's reckoning.

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He's a big guy

What's that a reference to?

Dark Knight Rises

>an entirely new spell developed by studying how the curse works.
I have trouble believing the Aldish wrights wouldn't have tried to spellburn that already. They had over a thousand years to try doing that (Alderode is at least 1500 years old since Ssael was kicking then). Did the spellwork that made the Etalarche curse get lost before the authors figured they could make themselves or their patrons adored by everyone and completely above ressentment?

You could say the same thing about resurrecting the dead. In fact, it's a common enough pursuit that many Black Tongues are only Black Tongues because they want to try it. But it wasn't until Bastion, apparently, that anything came of it. Somethings just take time and rely upon other, sometimes seemingly unrelated discoveries or technology to springboard off of.

It's likely the Etalarache spellwork isn't lost or anything. As far as we've seen pymary work, to cast a spell you need to actually explicitly say what you're doing. The only time you don't is for pymarics, where the spell has essentially already been cast on a first material storage, where you can then just have it continuously affect things. Or spellburns, which act as spell shortcuts. That is where you don't need to just cast the spell, but one has to imagine that the Etalarche Curse wouldn't be spellburned, since that would make it easier to cast if you knew about it and the Aldish state definitely wouldn't want just any wright to be able to cast it on any other Aldishman without their authority.

Inefficient
There’d just be other Alds to take their place. The change would have to be much more fundamental than that

It's only possible to do a lot of Dammakhert related fuckery from inside the Khert hubs which are super secure. I imagine that the Curse probably is spellburned into the Dammakhert with certain parameters over how it can be used. That way people can't study the exact spellwork and they don't understand exactly what it is they are doing. They're tweaking with some variables and inputting some values but the actual mechanics of it are taken care of behind the scenes. To go even further the Curse probably wasn't originally built out to do what it does. It was probably intended for some function that has been lost to modern Alderode and so it's another step removed from knowing what the hell is going on. Nothing else really explains why they're so hesitant and sparing to use it. It's a big fucking cudgel but they have no idea bout the unintended consequences because they have no idea what exactly it's doing since the spellwork is obfuscated.

>Nothing else really explains why they're so hesitant and sparing to use it
We don't know the limits of the dammakhert but as a synthetic khert network there has to be a ton of variables and issues with keeping it working. The reason the curse isn't used more often might be as simple as it's not very cost effective for the amount of work needed to institute it.

>We don't know the limits of the dammakhert but as a synthetic khert network
We can't be sure of that. All khert might be synthetic since the world still exists outside it's influence, far away at sea and over where the sun roams. Is the dammakhert really more artificial because they expand it with pylons, since every other country in Kasslyne also tweaks it's domestic khert?

Might just be that the Vits Council really does have a lot of checks and balances on it, like Mallory sarconically says. People probably aren't too keen on having the state mind controlling them, specially since this apparently goes for everyone but the Soud.

You know, that's pretty cool that alderode is so cautious and anal retentive when it comes to using their Big Bad Spell. It makes sense there'd be a lot of bureaucracy since it's something that not only mindcontrols the plebs but all the people in charge. If they went around tossing this bullshit out at people for every traffic infraction the country would have fallen apart long ago.

The Etalarche curse, at the very least, makes every Ald within a given radius utterly despise someone so much they, quite literally, want to tear them limb from limb. By hand. It's so effective that Vampire, who is at some 300 years old (as a guesstimate) still can remember just how much he hated the man. It might be that the opposite, making every Ald within a given radius love someone, would be just as extreme: everyone within a given radius loves that person to such an extent that they literally fuck them to death (themselves, or the accursed).

Ashley said on Tumblr that in the days of the monarchy, Dhammakert fuckery was very common by both the monarchy and the Gefendur Church. Pretty nifty how the overthrow of the monarchy was, in part, done by men who aren't subject to its rules, huh? This also would explain why Vits is so paranoid about using Dhammakert fuckery: It has a very bad history behind it. Who would want to be compared to the evil king who'd just smite Ssaelit in the fucking streets for fun... In the middle of election year?

>everyone within a given radius loves that person to such an extent that they literally fuck them to death (themselves, or the accursed).

Well I didn't know i needed to read this but now i do. What a way to go.

what? is he saying he is actually physically weak despite his size?

no you brainlet, he's saying roger's his weakness

No, Vampire is saying that despite his physical strength his emotions overwhelm him where Foi is concerned.

Went back to read a bit of last chapter, and made my way through this section again.

With the knowledge of the Etalarche Curse, it really highlights Roger's tragedy. Everyone outside Alderode hates Roger because he's Aldish. And everyone in Alderode hates him because, aside from being a loathsome rebel, they're literally been magicked into hating him to death. Every friend he ever had in the rebellion should hate him now too, depending on how that curse works. Not to mention whatever happened to Vampire. Sonorie might be his only friend left in the world.

And all because he just wanted to make Alderode less shit. Now he's being torn apart, his mind completely shattered, all on the hope of a plan to undo Alderode with the same curse that's on him. By now he's probably gone. I wonder if we'll see it in comic at all, or even the aftermath.

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Roger is unironically one of the most interesting characters in the comic because of all this

Cope has an uncanny ability to make me care about basically every character and be interested in what they're doing. Like the combination of design and dialog immediately conveys these huge personalities and I buy the fuck out of them.

When it comes to Roger though I suspect a big part of his purpose in the story is to be a visible warning about what Ruck could and maybe will do to Duane if he ever gets a hold of him.

From page 1 Duane's teetered between goodness and evil. If Ruck removed the right pieces of his mind he could destroy the world or something.

This is probably still my favorite page in all of Unsounded. The way it represents Roger's brain coming apart is fucking terrifying and every line hit me like a brick to the face when I first read it.

I couldn't pick a favorite page. The whole story reads so well. If I was a bigger fag I'd say it would be fun to go through every chapter and pick a fave page from each one but I'm not that into sucking cocks just yet.

Where would Ruck's venom go into Duane though?

Wouldn't it just drip through his holes onto the floor?

And those holes aren't as sexy as Ruck would like.

Rick's venom doesn't operate on a physical level. He could very possibly unmake Duane as easily as he did Roger. I'm sure he would love to find out.

Well the Mmamont are mostly Soud and I'm not sure the Dammakhert even actually reaches their island....
I wonder, how far out to sea does the Damma actually go?

The khert is tied to the actual land of Kassalyne, which is why the sea is lacking in it: the land simply goes down too far. We see the same in Sonorie's tower castle- far enough up and the khert can't reach. Presumably there's no dammakhert on Mmamont unless specific dammakhert hubs are constructed there.

This is actually, unironically going to happen, isn't it? I'm very much in the "Rukh is duping everyone he's involved with and is playing them all" camp.

Eh, he's not duping Roger or the queen. Roger specifically tells her to kill him as soon as this is done.

I'm a little curious as to the timeline of the whole Foi-Hellick Rebellion. Roger is something like 100 years, but the rebellion started not long after the Fois and Hellicks joined their families. Unless they changed their names, Roger was born a Foi-Hellick, which strikes me as unlikely. He's in fact, their youngest son, apparently. And he was primarily the one who spurred his father to rebellion. I feel like even if the Rebellion went on for awhile, I think the whole thing has been going on about 25 years, there must be some decades of time in between the marriage and actual rebellion. Which again it doesn't seem like there was. Roger seems old enough to have been around the current Crescian Queen's rule, and it feels like there's only been one Queen involved in this rebellion, who also sent gifts for the marriage.

I suppose this is only a problem if all the Fois and Hellicks simply didn't just change their family names post whoever married who.

Are we sure about that? So far, we know Rukh is involved with Sonorie, the Black Tongues, and Beadman. We know Beadman doesn't know about the Black Tongues and Sonorie. The Black Tongues don't seem to know about Beadman. Are we sure he's told Sonorie everything? She seems to know that he's working with them, but I wonder if she realizes just how much control of them he's gained.

Ooops, forgot the page

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Huh, very interesting. I totally forgot that about Sonories castle being like that, thanks Ashley

>the wretched bitch-monarchy of Cresce

I really cannot get enough of how much Duane fucking hates Cresce. It's so entertaining.

I especially admire how he has no filter around actual Crescians. Or maybe he does and he's even more spiteful around fellow Aldismen...

Duane seems consciously combative with Crescians. Of course, we've only seen him interact with Crescians post-zombifying, which he still entirely blames specifically on the Queen. Perhaps he was politer in life, if for no other reason than he considered it beneath him.

Go check out again how he treated Siya when she came to see him. Her's this honestly, openly curious and nonjudgemental child trying to help him out, and he glares and huffs around like a child himself. The only time he acknowledges her is to ask if her bruise is because the temple people beat her, which is primarily about finding something to be mad at the Gefendur and Crescians for. Duane's a total dick when it comes to Crescians, even kids.

And Ruck one of the most loathsome
Of all the senets known so far I have no qualm in opining that efheby need to be eradicated

Duane's conversation with the old Two-Toes about how his recall surprises him established that his memories are no longer something attached to his brain (since he's a decayed corpse) but held within the khert. If Ruck actually tried to poison him to get at his memories, either it wouldn't work at all or there would be some serious unknown territory fuckery.

So am I to understand that the curse will still affect Alds after they've left the country? Or is there some other reason Vampire is refusing to go with Roger

We dont know how old Roger is yet, just that he's young

Crescians literally murdered his daughter in front of him.

ya but not on purpose, why's he gotta be such a spaz

Yeah, messed up. Not sure where I got 100 from, and I misread his bit here. Thought he was referring to himself having already lived longer than she ever will, not the rest of his family.

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100 seems about right for him. Still youngish for a Copper which jives well with how Ashley has described him and Vampire as having a larger age gap.

His life story seemed pretty short for a centenarian

He says he worked in the mines of his family until he got what can only be something like black lung. That shit usually takes until your 50s-60s to pop up. He then spent some time after that in the whole marriage business that he ultimately rejected but I can't imagine Copper marriage arrangements are made quickly. He then spent some unspecified amount of time in the capital before he learned the terrible secret that drove him to betray Alderode. I could see all that taking up until he was 100ish.

Ashley has mentioned he is embarrassed about his age and evades answering how old he is to other people. However while I was looking for the post writing this very reply I saw another one:
unsoundedcomic.tumblr.com/post/186040119370/is-roger-old-enough-for-copper-senility-to#notes
that mentions he's still within a human lifespan. So I'd downgrade that to probably 80s. 100 is still in there but probably not for Kasslyne.

As a side note, if any one wants an example of not taking everything said in the tumblr/old formsprings as gospel, just look to how during the break before chapter 7 Cope described the then distant in story relationship between current Crescian Queen Manaraishala Sonorie and he husband Gerald Foi-Hellick. And also how Gerald fled south to Cresce when the rebellion went bad with a bunch of money. Also that she fell in love with him and had a bunch of kids.

Whether Cope just decided to do something a bit different with "Gerald," after all aside from the names what she said is all technically true if viciously not complete, or it was all brutal misdirection, don't get too hung up on the out of comic information. It's interesting to read and can give a different perspective on things, but it's not written in stone. I imagine certain metaphysical things are probably more set as it requires such things to allow the whole mystery of what's going on to remain solid, but even then Cope's said thing like magical rules will be bent for a good story.

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I asked Ashley and she said he's in his 40s, v. young for a Copper. He's not older than Sonorie.

shit, Sonorie looks 50ish

So he started the rebellion when he was in his early 20s? That seems unlikely. Especially since he was overseeing the mines until his lungs started to take damage, which can take a couple of decades or more

Thanks for saying this and being cool about it. I don't think anyone would ever expect a writer to have a story solidified beyond all changes five years before writing it. Of course I come up with things that work better as time goes by, and go with those instead.

Anyway, I think Roger's as old as the Queen, and that's another reason they were able to hit it off as friends. They're the same generation. But he's had to pal around with this woman as she grows steadily and steadily older, and he remains frozen. It's awkward, so he's come to hate his age.

Generations don't really matter when you grow up in completely different nations

Well, that's bullshit.

user, they don't need to grow up in the same neighborhood to be peers. They would still share a lot of the same songs, stories, and events from their childhood. It could even be argued that the war between their countries is actually a shared experience from their childhoods