So long as Black Hat isn’t there, I’m not worried.
I suppose that the purpose of all the scaffolding and such is just to have a place above the tides where the castle can remain unmolested. Since they don’t understand about tides, they’re just guessing on how high they needed to build it.
But still unanswered are the questions of who they are, where they are, how they got there, and what the river is (most normal rivers don’t really meaningfully get closer to some location).
Black Hat would deliberately do something to sabotage things for his own amusement.
Beret will accidentally pull out the one linchpin that causes everything to fall apart after mistaking it for a scone.
It seemed more like Beret Little Girl to me. She’s gone now anyway. The bigger question is will this end at all, well or otherwise?
Also, more prosaically, where did the guy go? He’s been gone for days. And, when will that front tower collapse, dammit? It must be straining the tensile strength of wet sand already. Hey, all of us have our own little obsessions.
Apparently, all you had to do was ask.
The right hand tower of the sandcastle is collapsing. Megan looks worried.
Yeah, that was weird.
Now she’s saying she doesn’t think it’s going to stop, and she’s right to worry. By my calculations, the sea is 99 pixels deep, and their whole world is only 395. Of course, they could be saved by another zoom out, or an ebb tide, or evolving into sea creatures.
I just wish I knew where he was going with this.
And we’re up to “frame” 834 (as of when I type this). Yeah, there isn’t necessarily a lot of change from one frame to the next, but that’s over three years worth of xkcd strips (at the normal rate of 3 per week). He spent a lot of time setting this up.
Now at “frame” 872. And apparently I can’t do math. That’s over 5 years worth of three-times-a-week comics.
The fact that they’re setting out on a trip to find out why the sea is rising suggests that everything we’ve seen so far is just prologue … .
And it hasn’t even been all that long since the huge side-scrolling one, either. And then there are all the massively epic April Fools strips he’s done, and the Umweldt thing last year.
Megan places a small flag on the castle.
Megan: [sub] [sup] [sub] bye [/sub] [/sup] [/sub]
Megan walks away.
The water level rises, and the wall starts to collapse.
Will we see her again?
Perhaps this is the end of Ep 1.
The strip suddenly seems to be somber again. The river receding could be a reference to cancer and that it was in remission. The sea could be a reference to time, or it could be a reference to fate in general. The castle could represent a relationship and the time it takes to build and the effort one puts into it only to have forces beyond your control try to tear them apart. I may be reading too much into a small “bye” but it seems to be significant.
I really don’t think we should read anything into it about his wife’s cancer. If it had come back I don’t think he’d be spending time making a long, elaborate strip; he’d be spending it with her.
That said, he could be talking about the impermanence of things, including the time we have with others.
I wonder how many xkcd readers are still following this one.
This corresponds the most with my own thinking about what the comic “means.” I doubt you’ll get anything more literal from it.
My prediction is that we’ll see months of the castle collapsing as other people interact with it in various ways and eventually Megan and Cueball return to see what’s become of it.
As I wrote several pages ago I suspect the final frame will match the first frame and it will just cycle forever.
I have to say I’m rather more impacted by this comic than I should be. There’s something uplifting about the fact that they’re going off to find out how it all works, instead of playing with their sand castle in ignorance.