Comic Discussion > ALICE GROVE

Alice Grove MCDT August 2015

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ReindeerFlotilla:
You left out a couple of steps.

4. ???
5. Profit.

improvnerd:
(Or at least, why they want to take over the surface in the first place, and why _now_ especially.)

jheartney:
I'd agree that Alice's threat to Ardent isn't genuine, and that she's trying to provoke a reaction. Turning the strip's only Hero into a psycho killer doesn't really make sense; remember that Alice has already conceded that Ardent isn't malevolent, and her reason for attacking him is this far-fetched conspiracy theory. For her to sincerely attack Ardent now basically destroys the comic.

Leaving aside the unconvincing plotting, Alice Grove the comic has another problem: the severely constrained cast size. The local bumpkins have never been more than cyphers, so the only characters that have received any attention have been Alice and the two kids. Alice is a grumpy Madame Exposition, and Ardent is a somewhat less interesting Pintsize. This leaves Gavia as audience POV character, but beyond skeptically listening to Alice, she doesn't do much. The course of the comic has been SLOOOOOOWWW revelation of its own mythology (which mythology doesn't happen to make much sense). Without an interesting cast, I'm not sure where this is supposed to be going. Maybe it'll try doing some world building, but at this pace we'll be very old and gray before we get anything much.

mikmaxs:

--- Quote from: jheartney on 11 Aug 2015, 19:03 ---I'd agree that Alice's threat to Ardent isn't genuine, and that she's trying to provoke a reaction. Turning the strip's only Hero into a psycho killer doesn't really make sense; remember that Alice has already conceded that Ardent isn't malevolent, and her reason for attacking him is this far-fetched conspiracy theory. For her to sincerely attack Ardent now basically destroys the comic.

--- End quote ---

Unless this ends like literally all of my D&D games, where eventually one of the player characters just up and murders the other for whatever reason and the GM just throws his hands in the air in frustration until they figure out a segue for the dead person to introduce their new Level one clone of their last guy. (Henry Evans is dead, but here's his... Uh... Twin brother, Harvy A'arons. What, he's dead too? They're triplets!)

I'd agree with your opinion about the problems. The mythology might be really good and internally consistent and logical and fully thought out, but we've got so little information that it's impossible to tell one way or another. And since our characters and their motivations lie completely within this strange and alien universe, it's really hard to relate to their goals, fears, or aspirations.

mikmaxs:
Another question I just now considered: Why couldn't the nanobots come down on their own and be flown around via remote control? It's possible to kill an Ardent and take out his minimachines, but seeing as they're apparently invisible and totally undetectable without seeing their effects, wouldn't an invisible swarm of technological bootstrapping work just as well? You can't punch an invisible cloud. We know that microrobots can live without a host, since there's that giant shadow monster thing, and even without AI it would be possible for a remote pilot to operate them. Or, y'know, non-AI programming.

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