{Almost} Smoochies!
A breeze compared to the previous page, as hoped. At least in the shading department – the camera in panel four isn’t doing Jason any favors and I’d sooner move on to 3.31 than spend half the night working up something more flattering. Readers are gonna read, art critics would be long dead of critique-induced twitching by this point. Onward!
One minor change to the script – Jason’s dialogue in panel two was rewritten to cut down on unnecessary exposition and to keep the “river guardian” out of the conversation. I’m sure that whole mess will get explained at some point, but it ain’t happening here. Here, the Token Romance trope is being loaded into the mortar tube. The mortar is aimed at the spawn point of team Trope Checklist, and I hope it takes out the entire bunker.
If it doesn’t, I’ll just have to use MOAR DAKKA.
I’m not a fan of unnecessary romance in fiction, and the hollywood bolt-on boilerplate is almost as laughable as the hardcopy science fiction sex scenes. A few examples of it are on the notebook equivalent of the cutting room floor – The Dualist never had room for it, injecting it into Transitional Voices would be wrong on so many levels (despite two instances – Raven/Ornix and {Thad|Val}/Xand – persisting through two or three drafts and a bunch of outlines), and it sure as hell has no place in Book One as it stands now.
Actually, I think I’m confusing hookups and romance. Fuckin’ ain’t lovin’, so I suppose they don’t count as Token Romance. Especially since they’re on the cutting room floor – bruised, bloodied and staying there. This one actually passes the “is it necessary?” test, though you’ll have to wait for the next page and then a bit longer for key parts of dcr.4 for this page to socket properly into context.
