I Decided now was a good time to sign up for his patreon.
Yup. “My name is Mouse and I am a Good Dog. Everyone says so.”
I’d be very surprised if it was Jirix. If nothing else, Redcloak must have defeated the previous Supreme Leader in order to take command of the hobgobblins and I expect that defeat=kill in this context. Also, the Spreme Leader in the O-Chul story was significantly more corpulent than Jirix and the one that Redcloak defeated, so I’m going to guess there are three different hobgobblin Supreme Leaders here.
The guy Redcloak vanquished was just a run-of-the-mill hobgoblin cleric.
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0149.html
And I THINK the actual Supreme Leader had different lower teeth than Jirix.
That’s true of the guy he vanquished on-screen. The real Supreme Leader shows up after that. But in the next strip, Redcloak is now the Supreme Leader, so he must have defeated the real Leader off-screen.
The real Supreme Leader effectively ceded his title peacefully. The whole point of that strip is that he’s not correcting Redcloak’s mistake as to who the Supreme Leader is, because he’d rather let Redcloak have the job than die for it.
And the corpulent guy in HtPGhS died before the end of the story, to be replaced by a hobgoblin cleric of normal build.
Forgot I was going to reply to this:
That’s not how I interpreted those last panels. Instead I saw it as a standard comedy trope where someone thinks they’ve vanquished the Boss, whereas they’ve just defeated a henchman. The real Boss lets them think that way for a while for comedic reasons. I tried to find a tvtropes for this. The closest I could find is Trick Boss.
Yes, forgot that. He looks like the one wearing the Supreme Leader paraphernalia in strip 149. Note that Redcloak never wore that paraphernalia, nor has Jerix. In fact, that’s a clue that Jerix is probably not the one from 149.
Redcloak never wore it because he didn’t know that it was the paraphernalia of supreme leadership, and the previous wearer (whether it was Jirix or not) stopped wearing it because he didn’t want any ambiguity about who was now in charge, since ambiguity would lead to his death.
My point about Jerix not wearing it is that he didn’t after Redcloak left. So he’s probably not the one who was wearing it before Redcloak took charge.
I know that Burlew has often avoided having “special” strips to mark the hundred strip intervals. But I’m wondering if the current series of expositional strips is a set-up for a dramatic surprise in the next strip, which will be #1200.
If so, my guess is the MITD teleports to the airship to ask the group for help in rescuing O-Chul.
It would have to know he was captured. Does MITD even know that O-Chul is nearby?
If we are going to get a special strip for #1200, I think it’s more likely we jump to O-Chul and Lien and find out who captured them.
He knows two humans were almost caught by Oona (but they “fell in drink”), and that’s about it.
Wow.
I like that plan, actually. It’s a bummer they won’t do it.
Yeah, it wouldn’t necessarily cost them surprise, since Sending works anywhere on the entire plane. All it would give away is that they’re interested in Redcloak (which he already knows), not that they’re right on his doorstep. If anything, it’d be more likely to give the impression that they’re further away.
Wouldn’t Redcloak be likely to have some sort of abjuration that blocks spells like Sending and Clairvoyance, in order to prevent an enemy from finding out where he is?
Yeah, that’s true. How long ago did he leave Azure City? Would the Cloister still be in effect?
Also, strip 1200 doesn’t seem to be there any more. Anyone else seeing this, or just me?
edit - and now it’s back