Comic Discussion > ALICE GROVE
Alice Grove MCDLT - THE END...?
brasca:
I didn't know the last strip would be posted last night. I was at the Watch Out for Snakes tour last night so it's just as well or I'd be on my phone missing the show.
I will miss getting a Tumblr alert about this webcomic. It was always a highlight.
I'll miss my favorite, Gavia, but she's in a good place now. She has her nanotech back. It looks like her eyes are blue now and I preferred red, but that's just me.
First and foremost I have no complaints about the story. Yes, there were things that were left unexplained, but not to a frustrating degree like Lost. As far as I'm concerned the Nightwalker was a leftover booby trap that targeted AIs employing nanotech and Gavia's overloaded it.
While I would've liked Alice to remain behind to keep humanity from destroying itself again I understand that she really couldn't handle going through all that again and probably fears she'd commit more atrocities just to prevent something terrible she thinks might happen. And while I think she'd be the best person to lead because she really doesn't want the job humanity cannot rely on a god living among them to solve all their problems.
Alice might disagree, but her actions were not for nothing because without a weapon like Church someone like Pate cannot subvert this new beginning to suit their own ambitions. On that matter I'm going to presume he is dead or incapacitated with a bone shiv stuck in his skull so the Praeses probably jettisoned his body towards Mars or deep space where he could never harm anyone. Sedna's arm didn't grow back and Alice's left eye is still red so some injuries may be impossible to recover from even for Maxwell demons.
Arguing over the story has been fun too and will probably be something I'll continue doing when I return from work later.
If you are reading this Jeph Jacques thank you once again for so much entertainment and I will gladly buy a copy if you publish it during the next Kickstarter.
TheEvilDog:
--- Quote from: sitnspin on 21 Jul 2017, 04:21 ---
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 21 Jul 2017, 01:55 ---
--- Quote from: sitnspin on 21 Jul 2017, 01:24 ---This strikes me as a particularly narrow and restrictive view of storytelling.
--- End quote ---
Possibly, but I think that's overstating it; he and I are probably not alone in feeling that the main themes of a story should be brought to some point by the time of the ending, even if that ending leaves further explanation and development open-ended.
--- End quote ---
It's the "can't" and the "have to" in BenRG's post I object to. There's a difference between saying "I prefer stories that follow a traditional narrative structure" and saying "you can't deviate from traditional storytelling techniques, it's the only way stories can work."
--- End quote ---
Pretty much how I feel. A lot of the complaints I'm seeing here feel more like teddy has been thrown out of the pram, because the experiment in storytelling didn't follow a traditional style. Harsh? Maybe. Definitely true though. This was never going to be a traditional story, where the hero gets to live happily ever after and ride off into the sunset. Alice Grove was more like Shane, the job is over and the hero(ine) rides off, alone and dying in the saddle (or realising she's dying on the inside because she can no longer cope with the things she has done). There could be no other resolution and that became patently obvious when Alice broke down after nearly killing Ardent.
This story was never going to neatly tie up the questions it posed because each new answer raised more questions. And it reflects in the story, for all her strengths and all her abilities, Alice knew far less than she realised, a revelation that broke her and made her realised her time had long since passed.
So don't look for the answers that were never coming, but rather ask yourself what you can learn from Alice Grove; can you let go of the past? Can you survive realising you won't learn all the answers to what you were looking for? Ask yourselves, are you Ardent, Sedna and Gavia? Or are you Alice, Church and Pate?
mikmaxs:
Here's the thing: I'd be fine with the unanswered plot points, I'd be fine with unsolved mysteries and strange quirks that never got explained, I'd be fine with just about anything if the story structure actually held up.
Buuut it doesn't, not even the slightest. The pacing is just not good, and as Jeemy pointed out, the story spends about 3/4ths of its time on introduction and setup. Assuming Jeph is sticking to a standard three-act structure here:
The setup begins with Ardent coming down. That's the inciting incident. We then add Gavia. We get to know all three characters, learn about the world, and get to know the stakes, risk, and what could potentially go wrong.
Then, we start the second act when they leave the town, which happens a full halfway into the story, page-wise. This is when Alice first takes real steps to try and resolve the issue presented. We meet Sedna briefly, raise the stakes with the nanobird, get to a new town, and then reach a no-turning-back point when Pate comes in with Church.
Up until this point, the story has been paced very well for a story, assuming that the first act is something that we can gauge the rest of the story on. If the first act is a quarter of the main story, then we can assume a twelve chapter with all chapters being about equal length.
Instead, though, something goes wrong. We get a story that's only seven chapters long, with the first four chapters being 143 pages and the last three being only 77 pages. (That's a difference in about ten pages a chapter, btw.) The pacing completely falls apart. In the time that it took us to get to know the main characters and start to learn about the setting, we have the primary antagonist introduced, the stakes changed significantly, the goal of the story is reached, the antagonist is dealt with, and the problems that kicked off the story are all explained. 77 pages in, we're learning just what the Praeses are and why there are no AI.
And no, Jeph isn't just forgoing the traditional three-act structure. Or, if he is, he's not DOING anything with the subversion. It's not that you have to follow a certain story structure. It's that Jeph DID follow the structure, and did a very bad job of it.
The ending is horribly rushed. We didn't lose explanations because it was planned that way, we lost explanations because he wanted the story to be done and couldn't find a way to do that well without rushing things badly... So he just didn't do it well.
I would have been happier if he'd literally just started to explain things, then had Church murder everybody and end the story there. That would at least have been a twist I didn't see coming but that makes sense and is plausible.
blt:
Put me down in the same camp. I'm fine with unanswered questions and mysteries that build the world, but the ending just felt extremely rushed, like it hit a turning point where Jeph just wanted it to be over for being over's sake. I enjoyed the project on the whole but I'm still a bit surprised it ended this way.
However I think Sedna and her plant arm all awkwardly off to the side and then kind of finally having her reconciliation with Alice is pretty cute.
OldGoat:
The whole thing was a side project, a protracted doodle on a napkin that you look at and say, "Y'know, that's not bad!" but isn't really ready for prime time.
Writing for a comic like Questionable Content is, no doubt, like writing scripts for a soap opera. Let it go where in may - as long as you maintain continuity you'll be okay. You can even get by with pulling an Evil Twin out of your nether regions once in a while. Alice Grove was conventional SciFi novel writing, a format Jeph's not so familiar with, and it shows.
I suspect the same factors that led him to use a deus ex machina plot device in CQ were at work when he decided to wrap AG up, frayed ends and all. He's made it clear all along that QC was the first priority.
What it does leave is a bunch of plot threads that can be picked up as sequels/prequels. There's the backstory of Pate and Church, and Pateopolis could be the setting for all kinds of things. The Nanobird. Alice and Sedna. The Lives and Times of Archeophiles. Wildlife in the Post-Blink World. And, of course, the Further Adventures of Sedna, Ardent, Gavia, and Laridia*. Maybe Jeph will pick one or more of these up again - or not. But they're there.
Disappointing, but not disgusting. I'll still buy QC t-shirts from Jeph when they tickle my funnybone.
*She stayed on the surface with the others after traveling there in Alice's spiffy new Botanovalkyrie (which only Alice is seen boarding). She, too, has been exposed to the "discontinuity" presented by Ardent and Gavia and cannot be safely reabsorbed into Cupressaceae. OTOH, Cupressaceae and the other Praeses have an interest in what happens down here. She's their agent in place.
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