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.
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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.
In my headcannon, Those are this universe’s equivalent of Tedd Verres’ Glasses (See “El Goonish Shive”)
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)
To be fair: if the glasses have a record function and Sydney knows how to use it, she probably would have turned it on while spying on Sciona here.
Bonus chance: Sydney might happen to remember later on that her glasses translated the Senator’s aide speaking Alar. Two, maybe three weeks from now, while she’s in the shower, she’ll remember it.
> or is it okay for the government to spy on it’s citizens if it is Sydney they are spying on
Sydney is not just a citizen, Sydney is a law enforcement officer. It is more than okay for the government to ‘spy’ on its law enforcement officers while on duty (which she is currently). Wielding the authority of the state requires a level of accountability beyond that of a private citizen
“Wielding the authority of the state requires a level of accountability beyond that of a private citizen”
You’re not American, I take it. In modern America, law enforcement has LESS accountability than normal citizens. Thanks to “qualified immunity,” police unions, prosecutorial discretion, and governments settling lawsuits at taxpayer expense, officers and agents literally get away with murder all the time, not to mention all their other crimes and rights violations. We had to have multi-state protests and riots about it just to get one guy prosecuted, and there are multiple channels on YouTube dedicated entirely to tracking and reporting on police crimes caught on film, who rarely report on the same events, and are able to put out videos multiple times a week. And that’s just the ones caught on film, usually via the cops’ own bodycameras.
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
Choker does have some comm capabilities.
Leon: What the?! Sydney just said something weird.
Krona: Since when is that new?
Leon: No, even weirder than normal. She mentioned Sciona. I have to rewind that.
Krona: Sciona? Excuse me. [ Gets off Leon’s lap and heads into the hallway ] Hey, Daphne, can you teleport me to the build site?
Harem: Even as small as you are, you are over my weight limit.
Krona: [ Taps in the air in front of her, on her heads-up display. She shrinks to 1 foot tall. ] Does that help?
Harem: Let’s see. [ Picks her up ] Okay, Krona-doll. This can work. Hang on to your lunch! *VORP*
I’m pretty sure that the actual source of the First Order’s funding was bad writing. :)
Great. Now my headcanon includes an Imperial Officer signing copies of her latest romance-thriller. It’s a revisionary retelling of Vader’s heroic origins including a Kenobi x Anakin x Padme love triangle.
What a terrible day to have eyes and reading comprehension.
What a terrible day to have eyes and reading comprehension…
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.
Not gonna lie. Me too
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.
McKinsey could help with that (recruiting 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?
Not sure if there isn’t also another mistake – Sydney & crew DEFINITELY knew that something magical-and-creepy flew through the portal back to Earth. They wouldn’t have definitely known that it was Sciona, but I feel like she’d be a pretty strong contender to suspect for the skull-soul leading the pack. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-649-the-long-way-back/
Yeah, they knew something happened, and Dabbler had some theories as to what happened as she’s familiar with the “soul vault” thingy some Alari use, but Sciona’s fate was labeled as a mid-maybe. The length of the exchange between Kat and Sydney there doesn’t have space for all the nuance of it.
10-4 Super Chief.
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…
Didn’t someone already try that?
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!
Is Sydney telling the truth, or is she seeing how far she can toy with Sciona.
cvfdgbfgfh
First Order got some of the funds taxing the worlds they occupy, and the rest from the equivalents of USAID.
There was tidbits in #8 about how weapons developers were selling equipment to both sides, presumably to spark wars and shit, but it seemed like a cynical insert that didn’t go anywhere since they never really did anything with it, but the movie definitely seemed like it was a series of shorts/scenes stitched together as best as possible.
Well, some of the stuff for the latter series could make sense.
1) The Super SSD type would make a great flying base with full mining operations that just swallows asteroids whole and was taken over as one of the bazillion super weapon projects the Empire had running at its height, and this just remnant forces taking over.
2) Building a big ass super weapon into a planet is probably easier than building a whole ass Death Star, just look at what happened with the (original) Dark Saber! Probably slightly less likely to get a torpedo up the exhaust port and the entire thing goes up. I personally think the Galaxy Gun would have made a better analog, where they have a massive portal machine thingy that yeets a mass of destructive energy toward planets so it can target anywhere.
3) Once given access to all the weapons and materiel they could want, they just did the whole roaming cult thing.
Holy shit do RKVs in the Star Wars verse piss me off.
Palpatine sure loved to make secret superweapons.
You know, for a long time I also repeated the stock meme about, “Good guys slaughter hordes of faceless mooks but spare the bad guy so he can go to prison because [he actually counts as a person] killing him would be morally wrong.” Except then I suddenly realized I couldn’t quote an actual example. I’ve scoured TVTropes and trivia forums and found a teeny handful of examples of heroes that kill mooks but spare the big bad. Mostly this page: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IfYouKillHimYouWillBeJustLikeHim and then tried to figure out if each example was actually hypocrisy.
Heck, there are games where you can stealth or non-lethal the mooks, but are required to kill the boss! Deus Ex: Human Revolution (before the director’s cut) and Mark of the Ninja come to mind.
Admittedly, in some shows there’s room for interpretation on whether or not mooks were killed or “just knocked out”, but in Hollywood and cartoon land, it seems to be accepted reality that you can easily beat somebody unconscious and they’ll just wake up bruised and headachey in a few hours.
Like in Avatar the Last Airbender, the Gaang probably left a lot of lifechanging injuries in their wake, but not corpses, so sparing Ozai (but crippling his bending) wasn’t hypocrisy. You also have to wonder what those laser guns in GI Joe were doing, but also I don’t think they got many chances to capture Commander Cobra. Batman usually has a code against guns, but in The Animated Series, it’s a code against killing.
Apparently the game The Last of Us 2, the show 24, and the movie Roadhouse are real examples. Luke has definitely killed some stormtroopers, but he doesn’t really spare Vader for moral reasons, but personal ones.
As for underwater volcano lairs, the bond books are super pulpy and cheesy, but in the book Dr No there’s a whole big digression about what a massive, insane flex it is for him to have built his absurd facility.
The Curse of Sydney strikes again.
If only she facepalmed her own memory wipe stuff onto her face the idiocy would be complete.
I have a question it the triceratops high or is she seeing what happened to the triceratops whose fossil she got “bitten” by in its last moments?
A triceratops in the Yucatan would not have been left intact enough to get fossilized. One over in Texas or Louisiana should have only gotten slightly tossed around and cooked. Shake & Bake! I expect Slam got her alternate forms around there. It was not the meteor that was coming right for her but the heat wave form the impact.
Looking at how most people react to ADHD drugs, I would expect Sydney to be less affected by Scoripa’s medicated hands. In a few hours, after Doc Chevy looks her over, her mind will return to normal, well normal for Sydney.
Sydney [ thinking ]: Oh there was something important for me to remember from when I was out at the build site. Time to check The List. [ Reads ]Aide = Sciona!!! Going to watch her.
Sydney [ thinking ]: Right! I have to tell Max, but how did I get so high?
This could end up biting Sciona in the tookus, as at some point Sciona will come up in conversation at ARC and Sydney will be ‘Sciona who?’ or ‘Oh, before my time?’ or something similar, and the entire room will have a Roh-roh moment.