Grrl Power #1330 – Order of order operations
Sciona panicked just a little there. She’s in a really good position and doesn’t want to have to disappear and rebuild another power base. As a professional antagonist, that’s the usual pattern. Build up a power base with some questionable yet never fully explained economics, get into a disagreement with local authorities, make some headway in a takeover bid for actual political power, then some young buck hero comes along and smashes it all, rinse and repeat, since the heroes are okay with gunning down 7,000 storm or shock troopers, but when they get a chance to finish of the main bad guy, they give some superlatively incongruous speech about how “that would make me as bad as you,” as if they didn’t already have a million gallons of blood on their hands. But it’s okay. They were faceless goons.
Speaking of the economics of bad guys… Where did the First Order get their funding? Like, the Empire was smashed, and sure, maybe a few Star Destroyers got away and rendezvoused somewhere – I’m not sure if The Remnant forces are canon anymore with the new movies, but then they convert a planet into a multi barreled Death Star and then show up with a 40 KM long flying wing Star Destroyer, and… well, we can just forget the third one. The new movies weren’t all that well written. I mean, in the second one, the rebels put out a call for help and no one shows up, and in the third movie, they put out a call for help and the whole galaxy shows up. To mention but one of many problems with those films. Like… okay? Did the use Space AM Radio the first time and Lando’s “Moustaches are Cool” podcast the second time? And another thing – did the New Republic or whatever they were called have no navy whatsoever? The First Order blows up a few planets with their Starkiller Base and, like, what? The entire NR navy was in orbit for some reason at the time? That would be incredibly stupid, but the next movie the remnant of the NR, i.e. the Rebels are down to like 5 ships? The Star Wars-verse has tens of thousands of systems. In the 30 years since the Empire fell, the NR couldn’t muster up a police/peacekeeping navy remotely the same size as the Empire managed in the same timespan since Palpatine took over? Those movies just get dumber the more I think about them.
Anyway, that’s not my point. I always wonder when the bad guys show up with a massive army of goons, all with matching uniforms and usually a bunch of high-tech gear, I can’t help wonder about the economics behind it all. How much did it cost to build the volcano lair with the retractable fake lake on top and the orbital vehicle that can swallow up other space modules? Couldn’t all that money just be used to bribe a bunch of politicians to achieve those goals?
Yes, I KNOW. It’s so the movie can happen. Or at least so the movie can be interesting. Watching a guy hand an envelope of money to a guy to get him to vote for Parliamentary Order 3281/b. It would be a bit of a slog to get through. Not that it couldn’t be done interestingly I suppose. But it’d be a harder sell than showing Sean Connery swinging a crane hook into a guy’s crotch, then the guy swings screaming off the catwalk and into garbage compactor and then Bond quips “I guesh he had Prinsh Albert in a Can.” as his feathered-haired companion in a silver onsie with flared bell bottoms looks on in horror.
The new vote incentive is up! (Finally.)
I’m revisiting a panel from a recent page, but I included some comic reactions and a few outfit swaps, so hopefully you all enjoy it. I also plussed up the art from the comic version a bit, though I suspect that despite the time I spent on that, not a whole lot of people would immediately notice that, so I’m gratuitously pointing it out here.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Hopefully at this point ARC has contingencies for Sydney being, well, Sydney, and have an auto recorder or black box thing installed on her wrist computer to alert them of situations like this or just her blabbing top secret stuff while out in public.
I imagine the biometric trackers on her will pick up something funky is happening to her.
Pretty sure the glasses have a recording feature.
Sydney doesn’t have the PipGrrl anymore, and cereally hope they don’t have something like that as that would be a cereal trust violation (or is it okay for the government to spy on it’s citizens if it is Sydney they are spying on?
As for the glasses (that Archon probably doesn’t know shit about, or her score on the shooting course would be called out), just like a tape-recorder it only works when it’s turned on and set to record (cereally doubt Sydney would like her ‘happy-fur dance’ with her boyfriend to be leaked to Galactic TMZ)
I would nail a nannycam to her and have three minders following her around who’s sole job would be stopping her from babbling NSA secrets to squirrels.
‘cept she’s not wearing the wrist computer/comm thingy. Just the choker and the glasses
I’m pretty sure that the actual source of the First Order’s funding was bad writing. :)
About the guy handing out bribes in a movie: Economic thrillers have been done very successfully.
I’ll be honest, I’ll be glad when this Sciona returns arc is done. She was really 9nky fun the first time. Hopefully this encounter marks the end of her plot and not just an excuse to drag her existence on.
Your comments about funding remind me of my thoughts with Captain America: Civil War. The whole plan hinges on the secret training facility having a really good documents manager. Everything was stored very very nicely, in good order, well labeled and boxed. Then I started wondering how you recruited for a documents manager for an evil organization.
Art feels ‘off’ for me today.
Maybe it’s just the shading.
Probably just the shading.
My guess is that it’s extra noticeable today because Slam takes up so much space in the first panel, so you have a lot of the same color there in one patch with no shading.
Naturally, Sydney also had made a mistake in the previous strip – totally forgot to just use yellow orb to spy remotely, as opposed to stalking. Guess she got overexcited :)
Did she forget, or did she her subconscious just decide that that was a mistake it didn’t want to make twice with the same target?
Oof. This is why she should have called it in first. Give the team what she knows, and let the professionals, i.e. Arcdark, handle the spying. You are far from the most stealthy member of the team, and as of last page, you were the only person who had any suspicion on Sciona. Now you gave away the info within earshot of Sciona without passing it to someone safe, and now no one has the info. Sadly, she’s not even going to learn her lesson from this.
“I always wonder when the bad guys show up with a massive army of goons, all with matching uniforms and usually a bunch of high-tech gear, I can’t help wonder about the economics behind it all.”
Apparently they were funded by a supposedly-well-intentioned government agency that just funneled taxpayer dollars to them while politicians on both sides of the aisle looked the other way? Truth is apparently stranger than fiction, but I would expect that to actually be a thing in movies going forward from now on.
I can only imagine how strange it would be interrogating someone with ADHD, especially if you just dosed them with truth serum/ alien LSD…
I can’t tell if Sydney’s hat is supposed to be ugly looking or blue-tinged camo (?) just isn’t her colour.
Also, nobody cares about your “sexy bunny butt”, girl. We can’t even see it in this panel.
Okay, minor correction: we can see her ass. But I really question why it was important other than her ears and feet (paws?) not being as pornographic.
People say weird shit when they’re high. That’s it. That’s the point of that line. Same with the “meteor’s coming right for me!” dinosaur joke.
Or maybe Dave’s a secret furry? There’s the half-naked human with a bunny tail view from a few weeks ago.
IN order on some of these:
The sheer size of the Galactic Empire allows massive amounts of money, manpower, and resources to be hidden. The last movie makes it plain the Empire has access to entire systems the Republic doesn’t even know exist, and has for a very long time.
In movie 8, the Rebels were initially ignored because it was a skirmish between two forces fighting for some stupid reason somewhere and nobody wanted to get involved, it couldn’t be that bad.
Then the First Order blew up a planet, and everybody had to take anything about them seriously. But their first reaction was to circle the wagons, cheer that the supergun was already destroyed, and protect themselves.
In the third movie, the ultimatum went out to the whole galaxy. The galaxy ultimatum’d back, is all.
The New Republic only had a peacekeeping navy. Systems were largely expected to provide for their own security, mostly because of pirates and things whose activities would have run an overarching navy ragged (and were doing so in the Mandalorian series). The Empire actively tried to destroy and get rid of all system fleets as a part of its foundation, and those fleets, like the Mon Calamari, were backbones of the Rebel Allliance. The Republic simply returned to its previous roots, rightly fearing that a massive centralized navy was going to cause more problems, and not having an obvious enemy to require one.
The main reason organizations can get away with so much stuff would economically be fanatics working for them, and you don’t have to pay fanatics much of anything. So all the money normally spent on amenities and luxuries instead goes into the military. All you have to do is look at any tyrants in the modern age, who pour money into their militaries and look great, while their people starve. That’s the Empire in a nutshell. If your people are brainwashed fanatics who don’t mind living that way, even better!