Here we have a bit of lore about Thunderstruck that has been a long time coming. We'll go into some more detail next strip, but an explanation of the "World of Time" aspect of the story is something I've been looking forward to for a while.
I've also been looking forward to drawing these gods.
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7 comments:
I like the parrot god. He's awfully cute for an evil death god.
Isn't he, though?
As I understand it, the "Seven" in the name "Seven Macaw" referred to the number of stars in his constellation... the one we generally call the Big Dipper. Or at least that's one theory. I've always liked the idea.
I toyed around with a variety of imagery for a parrot-based god... I settled on this one in part to reduce the number of wings I have to draw (we already have a bat god and a winged serpent up there).
He is adorable. He seems pretty dim, like how could he have not realized the other gods are unhappy with this situation, but I guess Sharon has to be able to outsmart everyone.
If the presence of travelers allows time to continue, how come Ingrid being there hasn't changed things?
-janedotx,
He might be dim... but most likely, it's more like an inflexibility of mind. My sense of immortal beings is that they have centuries to get stuck in a rut with things being more or less the way they are, and new ideas tend to throw them for a loop. I think we see this theme show up in a lot of mythology where heroes interact with gods/immortals.
But yeah, he also might be dim. This is not meant to be a knock on parrots, which are some of the most intelligent birds.
-Charles,
I'm intending to address this question eventually within the comic, but I'll spell it out now as a minor spoiler.
The way to keep a traveler from disrupting events in the Exile world is to put them in some sort of state where they can't exert their will... in other words, they can't act and initiate change. With Naiah Riddle, she was asleep. With Maxwell Mah, he was turned to stone.
In Ingrid's case, she's in a permanent ecstatic dance. She's repeating the same choreographed steps over and over and over and over again. Also, she's drugged (as are all the dancers), so she doesn't really have a way to snap out of it. This basically neutralizes her potential to affect change in Xibalba.
Probably not too much of a spoiler here to reveal that this whole set-up was also arranged through the efforts of Bertrand Brouchard and Jinevra Canterbury.
Sharon, of course, is a loose unit, because Bella didn't have time to arrange a landing spot that would have put Sharon into a holding pattern like the other travelers.
If Sharon was the seventh traveler, was Bella intending to have the holding pattern she was in broken by the harp being played? And if it did get played by the Steel Angels et al (like she's urging Sax to do), would the other holding patterns get broken?
Separate matter - it looks like Sharon is about to join the game, whether she likes it or not.
-Terranovan,
If we peer into Bella's mind, we'd see that in her perfect scenario, she wasn't going to play the harp immediately upon its completion. She would have liked to put Sharon in a holding pattern, then take some time (a few months, perhaps) to get some more preparations made, including protections for herself.
Vigil's untimely involvement forced her to accelerate her schedule.
Bella has a strong general idea of what the harp will do -- i.e., rejoin the "normal" world (or the World of Time, as we may now call it) to the Exile World. But the specifics of how that will all go down are really hard to predict.
She's banking on the idea that the travelers' spirits will return to their bodies when the harp gets played. If some are still... impaired (like if Maxwell Mah was still stone when he came back), she'd either figure out a cure or call it a necessary sacrifice. Yet for all she knows, the strain of playing the harp might kill one or all of the travelers, including her own twin brother. Hell, it might kill the anchors too, meaning she'd die.
She's very committed to this scheme.
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