Bill thought they might find survivors. Barry wasn’t deluding himself.
Barry is thirteen, and he and his brother have a mess on their hands, courtesy of their father’s good friend. Warnings for aftermath of torture, gore, and jaegermonsters.
This might be my single favorite Girl Genius panel because Agatha is fucking owning it, Gil is adorably besotted, and Tarvek is calculating that if everyone’s going to be identifying themselves now, he can probably get Gil to acknowledge him as heir to the Storm King in front of witnesses within the next four panels.
*laughing* I feel you, Gil. Tarvek being “redeemed” tends to be undermined by the amount other people clean up his messes for me too. Hopefully he’ll be helping you with this one soon, though.
…oh, no, Krosp. Bad timing.
TERRIBLE timing. ANOTHER “i thought we were gonna get tarvek back” fakeout. aaaaagh.
tho the ot3 shipper in me is DELIGHTED that gil is going to all this trouble for tarvek, even if i know perfectly well that it’s not entirely (or even mostly, let’s be real) motivated by affection
I want villains who go against the stereotypical bullshit that “evil cannot love” or whatever.
I want villains who spend months in their creepy dark lab building the death ray with their best buddy and hug each other when the superweapon is finally complete.
I want villains who fall madly in love with the other evil prince or princess they married to consolidate their power.
I want villains who tell bedtime stories to the little clone they created to be the successor to their throne and order their minions to get the clone a cup of warm milk because she can’t sleep.
I want villains hanging out with their best friends and acting like dorks while they bowl with their enemies’ skulls.
I want villains who are both evil and real, and real people have friends and families and loved ones.
sorry to hijack this over to a specific fandom, but this is exactly why i find the heterodyne family in girl genius so damn fascinating, because they are evil like evil but by god they love their town and their families and their minions and all these things love them back fiercely and desperately and to the death.
i could really go for, like, side-stories of the bad old mechanicsburg days, because in the comic proper all the old heterodynes are dead and gone, and only Our Heroic Protagonist and the memory of her heroic adventuring father and uncle remain. of course, the culture clash between agatha’s generally-heroic goals and the town and minions who love her because she is their heterodyne but affectionately think of her as “kinda boring” is golden
Re-reading some Mid-Battle-of-Mechanicsburg Girl Genius at lunch today and damn, there’s so much that i hadn’t remembered. So worth it.
Everything’s on fire and exploding and Agatha’s in the middle of it trying to keep the city from coming down around everyone’s ears in one of the most epic battles webcomics have ever seen, and then I get to this page…
And the Jagers are finally coming home. And I can just /hear/ the noise they’re making. And it sends my hair standing on end (and that’s a feat!).
no friend i understand i also have many feelings about jagers
what i really love is how yes, this page is wonderful and eerie and chilling and and and omg just so god damn cool and then you get to the next page and
just
jagers popping out of the woodwork like daisies! laughing and clowning and waving and just so glad to be home! hollering to old friends and offering to teach the little girl to fight and swarming over the roofs!
IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY
yeeeeeeeeees *falls over*
I love the dichotomy, honestly. Because they are Agatha’s funny monster friends! And they love their town and they love their Heterodynes and they would lay down their lives (are in fact about to risk their lives) for either or both and they’d call it a good death, would have fun doing it, and they thought they’d lost everything and were never going to go home again and here they are aaaaaa
On the other hand, they were “the Heterodyne’s handpicked warriors.” They’re all violent, immoral killing machines who not only would rip you apart on orders and enjoy it, at this point they probably did to one of your relatives. And then they made off with a priceless heirloom. And laughed about it.
Like, unlike with the Vikings or the Mongols, who were raiding societies, and as a result tended to have a bit of a natural turnover as people got old and couldn’t fight anymore, with the jagers this is actually the guy who gutted your great-grandfather. That is actually your great-grandfather’s hat. They are not sorry. They would do it today. They’d enjoy it. And there is nothing you can do because they are stronger and faster and heal quicker and are made, from head to toe, to be more efficient at killing. And they still draw it out because it’s fun. And—
I just really love how these two sides somehow manage to fit together in each and every one of them. It’s fabulous. I love it. I have a lot of feelings don’t look at me.
aaaah yes a million yes, i love everything about the complicated mess that is the heterodyne, and by extension mechannicsburger, character. i love that almost cartoonish over the top wild gleeful evil underlain and bolstered by that very real core of love and unshakeable loyalty and pride, it’s fantastic, it’s fascinating, i can’t get enough of it, i get a massive case of the dawwwwwwws every time mechanicsburg and its people and its monsters and its heterodynes pull together to squash whatever they’re up against and laugh about it. the jagers are just the most immediately visible example–both the most common and the most prominent–and my love for them is jacked up to ridiculous levels by them playing right into my adoration of snarly feral dudes with alarmingly pointy smiles.
basically anywhere around mechanicsburg would be a terrible place to live, unless you were in mechanicsburg itself, and then it would be fucking fantastic.
I read somewhere a couple months ago that “cultural/national dress/costume” is appropriate for white tie events, so now my brain constantly barrages me with the image of Zeetha wearing a loincloth to a state dinner.
she would wear a new absurd thing to every dinner and just keep saying, “It’s national formal Skifandrian dress”, and see how far she can go before someone calls her on it.
Cheloneuniverse 