Here’s that smash cut Sydney was waiting for. It’s one reason I forced myself to keep the previous scene with Max and Rowan extremely short instead of having him race off to a 5-story building fire that would invariably invoke “Sydney’s Law of Might-as-Well-Have-Been Intended Consequences.”

Can you tell I just played and beat Horizon: Forbidden West? Yeah, the people who made that series saw J.J. Abrams’s abuse of lense flares in Star Trek and were like, “Hold my Jenever.” Which is apparently a traditional Dutch alcoholic beverage and the national spirit of the country. Cause, Guerrilla Games made the series, and they’re in the Netherlands. I really liked the game, in case you were wondering. I beat it and the expansion, but as with every other open world game I’ve ever played, after beating the main questline, I don’t feel a lot of motivation to go around 100% the rest of the quests I left unfinished. Yeah, I could go and clear out all the bandit camps or upgrade my hacking spear thing so I can override all the mechanical enemies in the game, but it really does feel kind of pointless now.

I don’t normally do color coordinated word bubbles, but since most of these are tail-less, I thought it would help. I probably won’t keep it up after these characters’ initial appearances.

Okay, so, about the accent on this page – if I write Rogue saying “Watch out sugah, don’t touch mah skin!” That’s not racist because, 1) We’re both white, and 2) The majority of white people don’t have that accent. Although I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people with that accent are white. Even more specifically, a white woman. Possibly a flamboyant gay man born on the bayou might sport that accent as well. Come to think of it, Lafayette from True Blood sort of had that accent.

So if I write an asian person (it’s not a spoiler to reveal that) with an accent that makes it clear that English is their second (or possibly 3rd or 5th) language, I don’t think it’s racist. Well, actually, anything that acknowledges someone’s race is probably racist to some degree, in a very technical, literal sense. But in practical usage, I think the term implies a certain intent of disdain. The complication, of course, is that intent doesn’t really matter, how it’s received by the person or group, being, uh… referenced.

Which goes back to why it’s at least a little less racist (and very funny) when Key and Peele make fun of black peoples’ names than if, for instance, Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson did it. You can be sure they’d be saying it in a hateful way, (even though Sequester Grundelplith, M.D. is an awesome name) and you can be sure it’d be received in the spirit it was intended.

So what’s my point? My point is that the short one in the last panel is asian and has an accent. The intent is that sometimes asian language speakers have trouble distinguishing “L’s” from “R’s” because many asian languages don’t make the distinction. If you roll your “R” once, it’s kind of an “L,” and that’s the phoneme several languages over there are coming from. Some people have a significant accent and if I want to convey that, I can either indicate it through phonetically altered dialog, or I could have one of those informative yellow text boxes that says “Word bubbles 1, 9, 11, etc. are spoken with an asian accent.” But that’s just not as interactive, and it makes people go and count the balloons. It’s just bad.

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The new one is well underway, I’ll try to have it up with next Monday’s comic.

The new vote incentive is up!

Every so often I get the urge to try and draw Maxima all properly shiny, and this… isn’t my favorite attempt if I’m honest. I’ve been sitting on this for a little while doing little tweaks, and decided to finally publish it cause I’m already behind on these. The next one will (almost definitely) resume the trend of including a little mini comic to extend the scene a bit.

As usual, Patreon has some outfit variations as well as sans flagrante.

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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.