Posted In: comic
– Today’s strip is a weird one. I had originally planned this strip and the last two to be one larger full comic sized page strip. But since I’ve been both super busy and also super sick over the last week and a half I decided to divide it up into 3 normal strips, and then this one ended up really just needing 2 panels (and I stretched it to three). And since I’m not feeling good, I reused art from previous strips and the Yeld RPG.
So the upside is that this strip was put together pretty fast, which helps me catch up on work. The downside is that this whole sequence has gone on several strips longer than I originally planned. We’ll be moving on soon, I promise!
Can’t be defeated you say?
Challenge Accepted!
So we’ve got parallel Earths and parallel Yeld’s.
But is there a 1:1 correspondence between them? Is a given Earth tied to a given Yeld? Can children from Earth 1 only go to Yeld 1?
Or are there many Earths for one Yeld? Or Many Yelds for one Earth?
We just don’t know. its also not clear if she (the Hand of Autumn) understands what she’s seeing. She says “worlds”, but she may mean alternate timelines, or just other possibilities that the Tower predicts.
Ahh yes Prince Dracul/Fan-Fic Fuel
She checked 14,000,605 possible outcomes.
Infinite alternate worlds and in absolutely zero can the prince be defeated? Bull. Infinity doesn’t do limits like that.
It’s entirely possible that in the subset of worlds in which Marah is starting from where she is now and chooses to face Dragul, she defeats him in none of them.
Sure it does! In Calculus, certain functions can have constants as infinite limits. The limit of 1/x approaches zero, whether taken to positive OR negative infinity – it’s still always gonna go toward zero. 🙂
Or…there are an infinite number of distinct values between one and two, but none of those values will be less than one or greater than two! In fact, there are an infinite number of values are are NOT between one and two!
Infinity is WEIRD.
It does. There are an infinity of numbers between 1 and 2, but none would be 3.5, for example
Even with infinite numbers between any two set numbers, that’s an error of search parameters. If you’re automatically searching through a subset where the prince cannot be defeated, then you’ve already set yourself up to failure. In other words, the game was rigged from the start. You can’t honestly claim to not find 3 if you deliberately only look between 1 and 2. (no, ‘technically true’ is not being honest)
And that’s not even how she’s phrasing her statements. She is making absolutes, and when you’re talking infinity, you cannot be casual with absolutes. 2 is 2, 2 not 1.999999999999763. So the situation I’m seeing here is, she’s either deliberately rigging the situation to prevent the prince being defeated, or she’s been sloppy with her work, or simply not talking about that one obscure possibility where the prince gets a sword through his head.
Also, the Prince in the Yeld game is effectively immune to non-plot-device damage so maybe she literally can’t kill him without access to a power that may not even be present on Yeld at the time.
I mean, she is actually right. The Prince is as close to unkillable as can be. Marah kicks him around for a bit, and even damages his armor, but she didn’t come close to hurting him.
But killing isn’t the same as defeating, so the Hand is also wrong.
She also tears through his full plate with what is effectively a jagged shard of metal so he isn’t hard to wound. He just isn’t really affected. You can damage him just fine it just won’t matter.
I wouldn’t call what the Prince wears “full plate”. Its more like an armored body suit. And as we saw, Marah is extremely strong.
Or, the mermaid is lying, to set the kid on a collision course with the Prince.
Yeah. We know she’s awful and has lied before. Well… later, actually.
So maybe I’m just out of the loop but I do not recall her. Who dis?
The Prince of Yeld. The ruler of Yeld and Modest’s father. He killed Marah at the end of Season 3 (although she appears to have come back to life in some way)
Oh, you said “her”.
I guess you’re referring to the Hand of Autumn? We haven’t seen her much, and this is chronologically the first time. She also appears in the prologue and epilogue to Season 6, first urging Jenny the Mermaid to go find Modest’s Sisters, then interrogating Jenny on what she learned when she met Naga and saw the ghost of the Princess of Yeld.
In this season she is referred to as the Tower Keeper. Her full title is Hand of Autumn. Autumn is of course the name of the Tower, which is actually a spaceship and some kind of AI. In the Yeld RPG we know that the Hand is one of the seven Hunters of Yeld, and at least in the past was Dragul’s chief artificer. Her loyalty to Prince Dragul seems to shift. Right now she claims she no longer serves him, but when we see her in Season 6 she seems to. She is a Vampire Mermaid.
Were the prologue and epilogue posted on the site? I don’t recall either of those events offhand and I remember in the past there’s been stuff that only made it into the books.
The prologue was from the Season 4 book. Its not super relevant, and I made sure to cover the info in the epilogue. The epilogue starts here:
http://modestmedusa.com/comic/jennys-mermaid-adventure-part-1/
I could imagine some arbitrary conditions that would make it zero under any reasonable grounds (at least ones that don’t involve cosmic break down outside of the ship’s scope to predict)
Not talking about actual content of this series, but I could see something that could give him a ‘win’ condition. For example, what if he was immortal “until there is an eclipse over the castle”… and there isn’t an eclipse for the next 25 years.
By that point, the whole dispute would be moot. Jake is dead or a monster, Medusa is dead, you might as well have gone home. And there are serious questions about whether you could gain the ability to move a moon in a short enough time to do anything.
Sure.
Its also not clear if the Hand is stating an opinion or a fact. And we don’t actually know if she’s interpreting the Tower’s data correctly, or if the Tower is providing her with accurate data at all, or if the Tower is even impartial. And she may be lying about the whole thing anyway. We’ve already seen she has her own agenda, and we’ve seen her manipulate and lite to people before.
The first question you have to ask about any future seer is the exact scope of their sight. There is always some loop hole or limit… And as you said, that assumes it is even seeing the future rather than running simulations.
And even if it does see the future, it is a machine. Someone made it because they lack that ability to see the future, or their ability was weaker and they needed an item to improve. Either way, that seems like a lot of room for misunderstandings and room to get blindsided. Particularly in a multiple timeline style setting the Hand is suggesting
Right. And we don’t even know who the Hand is. She works for the Deep, or Dragul, or neither. What agendas does she have. Does she actually understand any of this? Is it all beyond her and she’s just making assumptions? Is the Tower only giving her partial information? So many variables. And as I said before, we also know she has lied before.
Is this in the past? Haven’t we seen that Modest lives on earth, not Yeld, and that the prince has been beaten.
Yes, this story takes place between Modest Medusa seasons 2 and 3. After Urano was killed and modest was kidnapped and taken to the Prince’s castle where she met her mother and her sisters, and before Marah faced the Prince.
I asked this earlier, my comment seems to have gone missing.
This is in the past? I remember them beating the prince, possibly voluntarily, and Modest has been living on earth for some time now.
I approve all the comments (to make sure I don’t miss any and to get rid of spam). If you comment while I’m asleep or away it takes me awhile to get to it.
I think that fight is within the scope of her statement. She says that “in fewer you succeed”. The fight was a rather arbitrary “first blood” style duel. Maybe the Prince just has high enough healing factor or general immortality to get much further than that.