Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the launch of the ongoing webcomic The Order of the Stick. 1,288 strips into the comic, we’re at what appears to be the last dungeon. We’ve had memorable changes to every character, and two of them have died and been resurrected. We’ve had memorable antagonists be introduced and die, like Miko Miyazaki and Tsukiko.
I thought this might be a good place to talk about our favorite and least favorite moments in the comic, and make predictions as to how and when it will end.
I’ve gone on record with a prediction; at some point, Belkar is going to find out that Roy and Haley have known about the Oracle’s prediction of his imminent death and haven’t told him about it. Belkar will rightfully see that as a betrayal and Roy and Haley will realize he’s right.
Elan and Haley will get their happy ending. I think the Snarl will turn out not to be the menace it’s considered by everyone in the current world for some reason.
I started reading OOTS as a teenager. I had played some kind of flash game, a generic fantasy RPG title where you managed a roster of heroes of different classes. I really liked it, but as a flash browser game, it wasn’t very deep. So I started looking up that game to try and find games in a similar genre; somehow I ended up on the Wikipedia page for Order of the Stick, read the plot synopsis, and decided to go give it a try.
The front page when I found the comic (which stayed the most recent comic for most of the time it took me to catch up) was this one:
So I joined up somewhere in the hiatus following the destruction of Azure City. I distinctly remember the image of the black clouds billowing up to form the cloud Roy and his dad are standing on getting seared into my memory because of that splash page.
So that would have been sometime around September of 2007. To this day, in my head, the Azure City arc delineates “early” and “late” OOTS - which is of course quite ridiculous bow that 2/3rds of the backlog is post-Azure City.
I remember thinking of the Azure City arc as this long torturous blue arc that dragged on too long and frustrated me when reading through the backlog. It seems so quaint to think that way now
Yeah, most of the strips before Azure City are kind of tough going without either nostalgia or just finding humor about 3.5e D&D especially funny. If I was trying to get someone to read it today, it’d be a whole “Ok, so give it 150 strips to pick up, then…”
The worst thing they could possibly do to him would be to just… ignore him. Let the Hell-furious Woman Scorned lead a group to overthrow him, eventually.
And I’m definitely looking forward to Monster-San’s reveal. Which I would imagine is getting pretty close (maybe when Team Evil reaches the Tarrasque at the bottom of this dungeon?).
My idea of how the Snarl will be resolved: The Snarl does not really want to exist, but it has no choice. Nothing can harm it. But it turns out that the starmetal chunk that was incorporated into Roy’s sword was actually from the first iteration of the OotSverse and is thus a 4-quiddity object. Unlike every other weapon, it can cut up the Snarl. One way or another, that’s how the Snarl meets its demise.
Admittedly, this is something of a Deus ex Machina ending, but I think Burlew could make it work.
