So since this is the latest — and only active — OOTS thread and I haven’t been able to locate any previous discussions on the subject, I’m gonna drop this one in here.
My search for the “Thor’s taint” reference got me to re-read the entire damn thing over the course of two or three days, and the whole “Haley loses her speech” arc made me realize I hadn’t actually ever looked up what she says. Of course, I was most intrigued by the BIG SECRET she tried admitting to Elan at their New Year’s Dinner date in Azure City in the attempt to regain coherency. (Mad props to Burlew for sneaking one past the radar in her conversations with Miko, as well.)
So I found a site where someone had worked through all the cryptography, and found: “Elan, it turns out I’m not exactly what you would call a —” interrupted by Elan for comedic and dramatic effect.
“A what?” I asked myself. Nothing seemed obvious… until I read the buildup in the previous panel. “Not even V knows that one,” Haley admitted to herself. Why Vaarsuvius in particular? Then it hit me: What’s the big running joke about Vaarsuvius among the party? The androgyny. Nobody really knows whether V is male or female. And V doesn’t particularly care what people think or know on that particular subject. So out of all people, V might actually understand, or at least have sympathy for, a Very Big Secret about things not being as they appear.
“Elan, it turns out I’m not exactly what you would call a… woman.”
Haley Starshine, ladies and gentlemen, is intersex.
More seriously, I’d assume that she was saying “–good person” or something like that, relating to her hiding the secret of her father and past allegiances from the party. While not as pronounced as the Belkar arc, Haley has had some growth since her days in the Thieves Guild and wanting to be someone deserving of Elan’s basic goodness.
I get the impression that Haley confides stuff in V because, whatever’s under the robes, V is closest thing Haley has to another woman in the party and is fairly dispassionate and nonjudgmental about personal things.
My guess is she was about to say “human”. Haley’s mother was from some kind of outsider race. Something involving Kyran and Rachel and “all the others”, whoever they are.
Ho-lee crap, that’s a lot of failed tries. It reminds me of all the iterations of the Maze of Many that Minmax, Forgath, and Kin screwed up before getting it right.
The grey areas at the bottom are particularly disturbing.
Yes, not all traditions in fiction lean heavily on the canon concept, aka absolute in-universe consistency.
My interpretation though is that Thor is a god, and like all (most?) gods, he has a lot of bandwidth. Some part of him remembers each of the worlds on 1139’s splash page. Doesn’t mean he can’t get distracted now and then, since he is also the embodiment of a certain bundle of memes.
Separately, given his status in the D&D game metaphor, the Norse storm god is transitioning from NPC to PC, at least in my mind. Sort of. He’s still a god, so maybe not. The perseverance of the gods might suggest a certain level of automation.
ETA: As well as perhaps a shortage of creativity. I wonder if they’ve tried chatting with Mr. Snarl.
I’m just really surprised. You’d think they’d have had all of these arguments before, and be quite bored with them by this iteration. I’m having difficulty thinking of why the Gods even are trying to save this iteration. But then I’m still personally trying to shake off the “Nothing Matters” epigraph in the last installment.
I wonder how the world in the rift is involved? I wonder if the MITD managed to get to this hidey-hole the Gods have built, and is therefore a critter from some past world.
Yeah, it sort of feels like Hel could get all the dwarf souls, be Queen of the North Pantheon and that’ll keep her amused for fifteen minutes of God Time before it’s time to build the world again.
Also, you’d think the Snarl would catch on by now. I suppose the go-to explanation is the “Couldn’t understand the order the threads were taking as a being of pure chaos” but, you know, after 14,000 lessons maybe it should start paying attention.
Is it possible the Snarl has advanced through all these attempts, and has now created its own world, which was seen through the rift? Maybe the end of the strip will be the world getting consumed, but the PCs (perhaps along with Redcloak?) becoming the progenitors of the intelligent races on the new world?