Order of the Stick #1074: Turning Back

No no, let those three devils win.

No no, let Daimyo Kubota get resurrected and do another 200 page trial sequence

That bit depressed me a little desu: like Rich briefly showing us that he's aware of all this time-wasting bullshit, yet here we go wasting time all over again anyway.

that was eight and a half years ago, feel old yet?

...Yes.

I think the idea is that this kind of stuff is above their paygrade and they're pretty sure someone else will take care of it. People can be amazingly resistant to the idea that bad things are coming and immediate action is needed to stop them.

They thought someone else would deal with it, not realizing someone else was aboard their ship.

>mfw I started reading this strip over a decade ago
>mfw I have no face

Well, I hope this turned some heads.

>fork hands
that always looks so stupid. I know it's stick figures but still

It's more jarring with the art update since now they're actually colored and outlined instead of just being three little lines.

Combined with the general progression of Rich''s art improving over the past decade, the hands are one of the things that stand out most as a vestige of it being actual stick figures

Look at Elan who's mending in the background. as well as the priate in the back of the first panel holding a sword. You can clearly tell that the former is pointing his finger and the latter is holding the rail on top, despite both being placed on quite a dark background and being far from the foreground.

Adding dimension to the hands means these scenes still read clearly despite his newer style adding a lot more visual background noise than he used to feel comfortable adding.

I'm not a fan during closeups, but far away it makes things like this scene look a lot less dopey.

Yeah the O-Chul comic. It was good.

That being said boy the main comic has been in a lull since the Durkon escape.

1 - Why is she talking like a stereotypical nigger?
2 - Oh look, the "cis white male" is wrong again.
3 - WHO FUCKING CARES ABOUT THIS BULLSHIT, THESE ARE LITERAL WHO NPCS, GET ON WITH THE MAIN STORY ALREADY

Paladins getting to wand watching Xykon and friends was pretty neat, but I agree that this mutiny has been obvious for a while and hasn't been too interesting yet.

Right, that part was all right, but all this airship stuff, I can't bring myself to really care about

Yeah I think that's what does it.

Look at the last frame. She looks like a robot with those hands.

1. I think she's supposed to talk like a cowboy or something
2. That's not a white male, the mechanic is a chick. that said it sucks that Rich has started to let his SJW views leak into the comic, he used to be pretty good about keeping things apolitical.
3. FUCKING THIS

>Oh look, the "cis white male" is wrong again.
you mean the female engineer who may or may not have been bandana's lesbian lover?

Okay, so the engineer dude who looks like a dude turned out to be a chick. Whatever. The "white person" turned out to be wrong.

I really want the Three Devils to show up being smug, only to meet Redcloak who has his own plan.
Only to meet Xykon, who knew about all of them all the time, but let them delude themselves into thinking they had one over on him
After all, not knowing isn't the same as not caring.

Never read this. Is it good enough that I should set aside a day to read the entire archive?

I read a lot of webfics so quite enjoy binges, but always check beforehand after Girl Genius got shite towards the very end of my catch-up.

That's probably what'll happen, they'll try and destroy the last gate only to get crushed by Xykon

I am cool with that

A fairly large chunk of OotS's complaints stem from the slow updating pace combined with a lot of updates where nothing happens, so I'd imagine it might actually work a lot better if read from the start in a binge. Plus it's got its share in cool stuff as well.

I say give it a go. Just don't be discouraged by the rather ugly early strips.

the good-
it's funny, there's a lot of puns but there are some really clever jokes as well. good satire of D&D.

the main characters are all likeable and their arcs are very well written for a webcomic

the villains are also likeable, the main villain is hilarious and his sidekick is probably the best character in the entire comic (though you may need to read the prequel book to fully appreciate him)

interesting plot

doesn't take itself too seriously, there is some good drama but it never becomes pretentious or whiny

the bad:
it starts to drag after around strip 500, some pointless characters and subplots are introduced, and certain arcs go on for too long

the author feels committed to putting a joke in almost every strip, which can lead to a lot of corny filler that disrupts the flow of the comic

this isn't much of a problem in the earlier strips but the author in a SJW and for the last 150 strips or so his political views are starting to color his writing. minor characters are gay for no reason, etc

there's a bit too much fourth wall breaking humor at times

all in all Order of the Stick is my favorite webcomic and the only one that still holds my interest after Erfworld went to shit. It's at least worth checking out

Oh, and also

good: art style starts out pretty bad but the author improves it over time

bad: too much fucking dialogue, Burlew has a tendency to tell rather than show

A D&D stick figure webcomic has no business being this well-written.

But on the other hand, webcomic with stick figures has no excuse for taking so long to fucking update. It's been on a schedule of "whenever I feel like it" for a while.

If anyone cared enough to study it, I'm positive that webcomics never fully recover after kickstarters get funded.

Thanks lads, pencilled it in. I recommend nine planets without intelligent life if you've never read it.

>Elan spends multiple strips trying to climb the ropes so he can get close enough to mend the balloon
>now he just snipes it with mending from the deck
I'm out

The boulder wasn't there before so he couldn't reach it without climbing.

I assumed he climbed the rope so he could cast without getting butt fucked by giants. Now there's just a single giant trading tickles with Roy, so it's safe for him to do it from the ground so he doesn't have to make concentration checks.

Binge reading this comic is the best way to read it. I lost interest for several years, then binge read from the start and really enjoyed it. If you binge read it the filler strips and NPC sidequest arcs aren't as annoying since they only take up a couple of strips that you get through quickly (even though those strips were released over a few months).

Goddammit. Every time someone mentions it it's weeks before I can unsee it.

How many years will it be before we see best boy again?

This is gonna sound dumb, but what comic is this panel from? Really want to know the context for that...everything. T-rex smoking a cigarette all blase for whatever reason.

Probably think that someone else (other than the OorS) will. This is D&D world, there are world-ending threats every-other week yet the world is still turning. History suggests it is inevitable these things will resolve themselves without these particular characters getting involved.

They pretty much said exactly this at some point.

Schlock Mercenary has done multiple kickstarters, still updates 7 days a week.

The next time we see him will probably be the last time.

Google Image Search, you retarded faggot.

You're so easily triggered, man. It must be hard to live with a skin as thick as toilet paper.

What is going to be her punishment? Normally I would say hanging, but I am not sure Rich will make the good lesbian captain lay down the law that hard. The fact they are a chaotic neutral crew might factor in.

>I'm positive that webcomics never fully recover after kickstarters get funded.
Nah, his schedule was like this before the kickstarter too. He just works slow some times, probably due to his (theorized) Crohn's Disease. I'd honestly say he's one of the few people who have actually carried through on his kickstarter promises and didn't just take the money and run like that fuck who set fire to his backers' books. Burlew did just release O-Chul's pdf story, and that clocked in at 95 pages

But knowing him, he will go down awesomely.

>his political views are starting to color his writing. minor characters are gay for no reason, etc
Because every gay should have a good reason to be gay, right?

The only time it really unneccesarily shoehorned SJW politics was the time when Bandana and Haley spent an entire comic discussing how bad it was that they at one point said the word "bitch" and showed an exposed midriff.

Roy actually told him in the previous comic to "keep his feet on the deck" this time. Probably Elan just thought it was dramatically appropriate for Mending to have shorter range than it actually does.

Well, there was also the internet troll Ettin from the O-Chul story, but that only went on for 4 pages out of the 90 or so.

Is that really political, though? Does anybody like smarmy internet wiseguys?

I'd dump the O-Chul story if I weren't paranoid about it being secretly watermarked or something. It's really good.

>Is that really political, though?
Pretty sure it was a direct reference to GamerGate. You know, some of them being internet trolls and the rest trying to distance themselves from them.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Huh, maybe. I thought it was just poking fun at pseudo-intellectuals who act like an ass but don't want to own up to it, but maybe. Either way, I wouldn't say that's really shoehorned politics. At least since he didn't say "actually it's about ethics in random encounters" or some shit.

Well, it was political insomuch as there's really only been one side pulling the "*I* didn't say it, it's not me, how dare you say I'm involved" schtick as of late.

I'd wait until he puts it up for sale. He did ask nicely not to share it, and the product was good enough I feel like it should be respected.

Nah, that's what it was. It was laid on a little thick, but it didn't cloud the whole work so I let it pass.

>as of late
I was gonna comment on this but considering how long he's been working on that comic, it's entirely possible that GamerGate was still relevant at the time he wrote that ettin encounter.

Honestly, it wasn't even that bad considering how short the encounter was. One half of an ettin trying to pretend that it had nothing to do with the other half's anger is a funny enough joke on its own.

Tell me about it.

Okay, so I'm not the only one to have my autism triggered, thank god.

Do you think it'll be available in soft cover? I'm collecting all the books and I would really like to read it but not as a PDF

>Because every gay should have a good reason to be gay, right?

Bandana is a prop designed to get the order from one place to another. It's far too late in the narrative to start introducing minor characters and expecting us to care about them. I say she was gay for no reason because there's no good in-story reason to focus on her at all. Rich just shoehorned a gay character in to get cred with the tumblr crowd.

Also, it's not the only time. See attached image, possibly the most cringeworthy strip in the entire comic

you autistic motherfucker

>Also, it's not the only time. See attached image, possibly the most cringeworthy strip in the entire comic
It's been in here since the start, Hayley's always been about the grrl power shit when she's not macking over Elan's 18 cha.

I don't really care about Haley's comment, but the Frost Giant's dialogue was ridiculously clunky and heavy handed, not to mention nonsensical

Pretty sure it was just a joke. A giant of all things having such trouble, plus Haley's reaction to it despite being rather far away at the same time, was meant to convey humor.

It wasn't that good a joke, maybe, but I still think that trying to look for any deeper meaning in it is nothing more than desperately finding excuses to be offended.

>I still think that trying to look for any deeper meaning in it is nothing more than desperately finding excuses to be offended.

Í'm just saying, if you're this easy to upset, there can't be too many things out there that you could actually like.

Has OotS fallen so far out of favour with Veeky Forums we don't even Thog anymore?

Nobody rational is upset.
It's just a bad joke wrapped up in poor dialogue.

You could have done it yourself, brah.

I'm on it. I'm bad at it, tho(u)g(h).

Thog no good. Thog fraud. No look at Thog!

>I know D&D

...

I can honestly say that the story line focusing on O-chul's imprisonment ranks among my favorite pieces of fantasy literature, not just webcomics.

If you think that's cringeworthy, your skin is waaaaay too fucking thin.

There is the reason the supplements, like Start of Darkness, is better than the main comic. It is mostly pacing.

Wow, you think I didn't? Just got a bunch of Veeky Forums threads from archive. Are you the one being retarded, perhaps?

user, you can't deny he is getting heavy-handed with his politics. Fuck, the forum thread for this comic ended up with him closing it and saying "If you don't like my lessons, stop showing up."

This is one of the reasons, among others, such as abysmal passing, the lack of a schedule, etc., that has made former fans, such as myself, give up on it.

Plus, he managed to ruin Tarkin, of all people.

>Plus, he managed to ruin Tarkin, of all people.

How? I thought he revealed his control freak bullshit in a reasonably slow and organic manner and his arc ended well enough.

Dragged on waayy too long, man. And made someone who seemed competent and in charge suddenly be considered a joke for no specific reason

Pic Related

>he thinks this is an SJW freakout
>instead of a man reaching the end of his patience

You have no idea how autistic the GiTP forums are.

Please, Burlew, enlighten us.

They literally argued over whether or not Familicide was "ethical" for years. Despite being told flat-out on multiple occasions by Burlew himself that "no, it was Evil with a capital 'E'." They STILL argued about it even after it was shown that it killed thousands of completely uninvolved humans in addition to a quarter of the black dragons on the planet.

They've also been arguing back in forth whether or not Belkar is actually Chaotic Evil since before the Azure City war, and once again continued to argue about it when he said it himself. At least that one is actually changing, slowly but surely.

Sounds about on Veeky Forums's level to me.

This is in addition to all the arguments they have over minor shit in the comic, and the standard fair of social-justice-in-DnD arguments that go on for hundreds to thousands of posts. That reaction isn't something that appeared out of thin air, that's over a decade of dealing with autists finally reaching its limit. "Girl or fella" is kinda clunky, but it's just a bump that is passed over pretty quickly considering Durkon is confirmed straight. It's not worth a huge argument like it clearly spawned.

Veeky Forums will change subjects occasionally. These motherfuckers will argue for YEARS over the exact. Same. Thing. Sometimes in the exact same hundred+ post thread.

*hundred+ PAGE thread, excuse me.

>These motherfuckers will argue for YEARS over the exact. Same. Thing.

Nah, we're still going on about alignments, moralfags, and paladins being cool with genocide. We're going through years-old arguments verbatim: I should know, I was here for the last round.

Yeah this is accurate, it's a rare instance where accusations of autism are literally true. They're literal minded to the point that some of them may well be incapable of subtlety or abstract thought.

Just a minor example, when V was offered the soul splice one of the demons said "Don't bother looking it up, it's a once in a century deal". Now a normal person would take this to be a message from the author that soul splices were homebrew and not in any sourcebook. A large fraction (probably the majority) of posters there took it to mean "it is a physical law of the universe that a soul splice can only be offered once every one hundred years" and proceeded to spend months arguing about it.

It's a hundred times worse than tg.

I think a major reason the comic has declined is due to Burlew's need to placate his forumgoers. So in many comics he has to include a bunch of exposition which is fairly obvious or that anyone reasonable would just assume, because otherwise his forum will go bonkers and start speculating over the most inane shit.

I would've given up a long time ago.

youtube.com/watch?v=u_nPp64OrBc

Need a Roy edit for this.

Are they still arguing about Haley being half celestial because
>my mommy is in haven now

He portrayed Tarquin out to be a brilliant warrior and general, only to completely reverse this at the end of the arc. He decided that Tarquin must be the Elan/Nale of his group, a delusional idiot who only thinks he's the leader. Which is why none of his teammates but Malack respected him in the slightest.

It's probably the worst characterization choice Rich has made so far, though failing to reveal V's gender when we met his family is also up there.

I disagree. I think it was set up very well: he did raise Nale after all, and was shown to be a crazy control freak with a need for things to go according to the stories well in advance.

The control freak stuff was great, Tarquin's crew treating him like shit was not

It was both. Tarquin was a smarter Elan/Nale, but he was still their father. So him being as annoying as them was to be expected, and he DID conquer pretty much everything himself on top of being a deathly competent fighter in his own right.

And as pointed out, him getting angry when the story started to go not as planned was set up as well.