I’m once again struck by how much Redcloak is a fundamentally reasonable person.
Yeah, but he’s also sunk a lot of time, energy, and sacrifice into the current plan. And the Dark One and Redcloak are both pretty paranoid and always on the lookout for dirty tricks. This whole scene has me pretty nervous.
I just realized that I’ve been assuming that if Durkon tells Redcloak about the huge number of past creations that the Snarl always destroyed, and about the Dark One being a brand new color and whatnot, then the Dark One will also immediately learn it. Does anybody know if that’s necessarily true?
Yay, i was able to find this thread. That’s my first success with this forum. Which, frankly, I’m finding even more frustrating than than old one right now.
Thor didn’t know that Minrah knew about the Snarl. So the Gods don’t automatically know everything their followers know.
If you ignore the mass murder, racism and sunk cost fallacy.
The mass murder is no worse than that of any wartime leader, and the racism is a reasonable response to the atrocities carried out against his own people. I’m not saying he’s a saint - and he’s made some major mistakes - but I can understand where he’s coming from.
BTW - how did you quote me? I can’t find the quote post function
Highlight the text you want to quote before hitting Reply.
Cool.
I keep on saying, Thor’s plan isn’t a subversion of the Dark One’s plan (at least, as told to Redcloak); it’s the culmination of it. The Dark One wanted to get power to use to strengthen his negotiating position to arrange a more favorable deal with the other gods. Well, now he has power, that at least some gods have noticed (Thor, Odin, and Loki, at least), and they want to negotiate a new deal with him given his greater power. Mission accomplished.
The parenthetical part is the key. “As told to Redcloak.” Do you really think that an evil god would hesitate to lie to one of his followers, even his high priest, if it didn’t serve his purpose best?
Based on the Dark One’s treatment of Loki’s emmisaries, I’d say that he’s not interested in negotiation, but rather domination. He lied to RC about his plans because RC was young and idealistic at the time and (my impression) also seems to be somewhat more Neutral than pure Evil. So claiming to just want level negotiations would be more appealing to RC than claiming to want to be supreme god, or possibly even the only god.
Chronos, I’m not sure that Redcloak will see it that way. It isn’t merely that he wants TDO to win, the victory must come from the plan. If it comes any other way, then he sacrificed all those Goblin lives and murdered his brother for nothing. To satisfy Redcloak, the gods must submit under threat of destruction.
Thor’s plan, though, is to solicit TDO’s help. Maybe offer concessions as a reward for helping. I don’t think Redcloak will be happy if this happens.
I dunno. It feels like that’s still close to where they’re at, it’s just that the gods are calling it early. They see a legitimate threat in the possibility of the Snarl being loosened and believe Redcloak has the ability to make that happen so they’re negotiating now instead of in the final ten seconds. Had Redcloak not attacked Azure City, etc then they never would have reached this point where the gods felt “Ok, this is serious”.
If RC captures the last gate per The Plan, wouldn’t the gods just destroy the world and start over, and DO would very likely not survive that. Seems like a good reason for RC to consider his options and this is genuinely new information that Durkon could provide him.
Do the gods actually know about the real plan (shifting the Snarl onto their plane) or are they only scared that destroying that last gate might unleash the Snarl and destroy the world?
I think that what we’ve been seeing is Redcloak’s interpretation of what the Dark One’s plan is. And as Peter Morris said, Redcloak is locked into the mindset that he has to follow one specific plan through to its completion in order to justify all the deaths he’s caused.
If we separate ourselves from what Redcloak is saying and doing, we can perhaps get a better idea of what the Dark One wants. What we saw in Start of Darkness is that the Dark One wasn’t seeking to conquer the world; his goal was to establish a decent homeland for the various goblin races. And that seems to have been achieved. The goblins now have Gobbotopia.
We have one further message from the Dark One since then. He relayed a message to Redcloak via Jirix. That message was “Don’t screw this up.”
Redcloak assumed this meant don’t screw up carrying out the rest of plan. But I think the Dark One was telling Redcloak that they had already achieved their goal and to not do anything that risked that achievement - like carrying out the no longer needed plan.
Yeah, I’ve also noticed that ambiguity in the Dark One’s message.
Though, of course, we don’t know that an evil god was being honest, and if he wasn’t being honest then we don’t know what the truth is. Maybe, for all we know, he does want something more than Gobbotopia, or more than what the plan as told to Redcloak would imply.
Thank you! With the slow rate of new strips being published, you’d think that a relatively recent one should still be fresh in my mind, but I totally forgot about the whole conversation.
It’s not racism to be hostile to active racists. Remember, the goblins tried playing along with the other races.
Right, and his first instinct when seeing what he thought was a random dwarf was to just to tell him to go away, nothing more.