Um, are we totally sure Belkar and Ian are escaping? They seemed to be moving at a leisurely clip in the last panel.
As an aside, that’s a really big allosaurus. It’s more like a T. rex, aside from the arms being slightly larger.
I’m sure that both of them are looking for treasure on the way out. Possibly clothing as well. Those loincloths seem to be worn only by gladiators…so they’re gonna need to find something that doesn’t scream “ESCAPED PRISONER” ASAP.
And now a question completely unrelated to the current strips.
Those of you who have the book War and XPs should open it to the penultimate page. You’ll find a map of the Southern Lands.
During the course of the book, the trail of the hobgoblin horde was described. They set out from Hobgoblin City and headed directly to Azure City, taking the warning outposts (like Blue River Fort) in their path. Burlew made a point that they were traveling as quickly as possible so Azure City would get no warning of their movement.
The horde arrives at Azure City, fights the battle, and the Azurites lose. Hinjo and the fleet than sail off into exile, looking for some land where they can settle. Back in the city meanwhile, Xykon is complaining that he has no interest in the city itself and only captured it to gain access to the gate and is now ready to abandon it. Redcloak talks him out of this but Xykon makes no move to leave the city.
So my question is why did Hinjo sail off into exile? Because he still has a lot of his country left. Azure City may have been his capital and biggest city but the country spreads out to the south. For example, the book makes it clear that Robinsegg is part of the Azure City kingdom and that’s far away from where the war was. Xykon may hold the north but the southern half of the kingdom is still free. And even in the north, the goblin horde was apparently on the move, not leaving garrisons behind to occupy the lands they traveled through. Even if Hinjo initially thought that Xykon was going to conquer the rest of the kingdom, he must have realized in the months that followed that it wasn’t happening.
To use a historical analogy, it would have been like the Nazis invading the United States and captured the whole East coast. And the American government decided to form a government in exile in Brazil rather than moving to someplace like Chicago.
Now you can argue that it’s only a work of fiction and Burlew wanted to get Hinjo and the fleet traveling for the sake of the story. Which may be true. But if that’s the case, why did Burlew go out of his way to design the kingdom the way he did? Burlew’s written articles about designing worlds and plotting stories - he knows the subject. Why didn’t he just design the kingdom so Azure City was at the end of the line of conquest and its fall left no free lands?
I agree, there’s been no talk of escaping lately, not until Tarquin does or doesn’t spill what he knows about Girrard on the third day from when they arrived. Haley’s Dad said he’d rather rot in jail than have anything to do with her and her friends, because he doesn’t trust Elan. Plus Roy has a notion to have Tarquin hire him as a soldier so he can infiltrate and find out more about their quest. They are not escaping, it’s just Belkar being chaotic.
Maybe I’m a bit slow tonight, but whuh?
Birds are descended from the theropod branch of dinosaurs (xraptor, tyrannosaurus, allosaurus, etc.). Blackwing is taunting V with racial pride.
The problem is that this assumes that the Azurite lands had something equivalent to Chicago. I mean… There are plenty of real-world countries where the capital city is the only city of any relevance, and many more where the capital, by itself, accounts for more than half of the population of the entire country (example: Uruguay, which has roughly 3.5 million inhabitants, 1.8 million of which live in the capital, Montevideo).
It might be perfectly plausible for the Azure City country to consist, basically, of Azure City plus agricultural lands with scattered settlements, and with most of the population in Azure City proper.
It may well be that Robinsegg is but a small town, and yet is the biggest available. And it is perfectly plausible that anything that is not Azure city is neither big enough to take in the Azurite refugees, nor fortified or defendable enough to make it an appropriate place to establish a “government in exile” that will find itself under hobgoblin attack almost immediately. Their only option would have been to put out to sea and try to find allies and/or a place to resettle.
This whole thing reminds me of Athens during the Peloponnesian Wars: Athens was, basically, Athens proper (plus the port of Piraeus, to which it was linked by a road which was protected by extensions of the city walls of Athens) and nothing else. The rest of its territory in Attica was nothing but farms and small settlements which were left to the depredations of the Spartans, with the whole of the population of Attica protected behind the “Long Walls”. If the Spartans had taken Athens at that point, the only way out would have been for the Athenians to take to their ships and sail towards allied islands in the Aegean. They would have had nowhere else to go.
Okay. Should have known that. Feel stupid.
I always feel stupid after about 8 PM. That’s when my brain starts to shut down for the night, never mind my schedule.
This is all true. But even if the rest of the Azurite Kingdom is the equivalent of Nebraska, it’s still their country. We saw that they spent several months trying to find anyplace that would let them land their fleet. Why not just go home?
And for that matter, didn’t Hinjo and the fleet owe anything to those farmers? There were Azurites too. How did Hinjo justify abandoning them?
When the Nazis conquered Poland, there’s a reason a good portion of the Polish military and civilian government fled to the UK, and not some other part of Poland. And that’s because there was no part of Poland where it was safe for them to be. Same thing with Hinjo and the refugees from Azure city: they aren’t just looking for someplace where they can be not on a boat for a while. They’re looking for allies who, even if they won’t aid in the actual war to retake Azure City, are at least strong enough to protect them while they regroup and rearm. If they just wandered off into the plains of South Azuria and built a log fort, there’d be an army of hobgoblins on their front door before they could roll for initiative.
As for those farmers, who cares? They’re all 0 level NPCs. Hardly any of them even have names.
First, what Miller said about Poland: I concur.
Now, regarding the farmers (and there I think that Miller is being a bit cold-hearted, but anyway…), think about this: The hobgoblin attack was by surprise – Xykon and Redcloak went on their way systematically destroying the posts that might send a warning to the capital (comics from #368 to #376, with special emphasis in #370). It was sheer happenstance that Miko happened to be in that particular watchtower at the time while on her way back to Azure City.
(And even then, Xykon arranged for her to be able to escape, using her as a “patsy” to be able to scry on her and find out where the gate might be located in the City. This was not part of the original plan, which was to reach Azure City and attack it utterly by surprise – nonetheless, Xykon makes clear that the hobgoblin army will be at the gates of Azure City basically right behind Miko, thus giving virtually no time for Azure City to prepare its defence).
The point is that, by the time the leaders of Azure City knew that the were under attack, they had literally no time to prepare (not to mention that their leader was killed by their best paladin, who was put out of commission). They would have literally no time to take in any far-flung farmers or inhabitants with them. The only hope for those farmers would be for the forces of Azure City to win that battle.
They lost it, and they had to evacuate. That was the only way to have a chance of re-taking Azure City some day and free whatever inhabitants might still be left alive under the hobgoblin yoke.
It is not a nice thing to do, but they had no alternative, given the lack of advance warning and the dire straits in which they found themselves shortly thereafter. A bit like “Sophie’s Choice” and all that.
I understand they had to evacuate Azure City. But why not evacuate to a place that was readily available?
As I wrote before, it was an issue that could have been avoided. Burlew had no need to invent a southern half of the kingdom. Azure City could have been the entire kingdom.
So the fact that he did invent a southern half, makes me wonder if Burlew has something in mind.
Because they had to evacuate to a place that was defensible. Think on this: Why did they have to leave Azure City in the first place? Because with the hobgoblins inside the walls, it no longer offered any protection. How would a cow town without any walls at all be any better?
Because the hobgoblins aren’t interested in conquering the cow town.
They would be if there was an army there, along with a whole bunch of nobles offering tons of plunder. Redcloak isn’t stupid - he wouldn’t have allowed an enemy army to remain in the field.
That strikes me as a reckless assertion. They’ve got Gobbotopia to run (and feed) now. Surely they’re bound to ask themselves how the previous denizens managed it, and take steps to emulate that model.
That’s going to involve controlling a food-producing region outside their walls, whether they’re “interested” in conquering it or not.
Besides, Redcloak would make any effort neccessary to kill every single member of the Sapphire Guard he could get his hand on, after Xykon grew tired of torturing them for information on the Gate.
I agree Redcloak would have wanted to conquer the rest of the kingdom. But Redcloak isn’t the one in charge. Xykon barely wanted to keep Azure City - he wasn’t going to waste time in further conquests in order to hold a city he didn’t really want anyway.
But would the Azurites know that? They can’t scry on the city. They only know that the hobgoblins have taken up residence in the city.