Chapter 15, Page 17
June 12th, 2017Blaise and Willem both try to pull one very angry manitou off of Pieter. Neither seems to be working well. Pieter tries words, words, words. Some of you have picked up on Pieter’s favorite play. The Dutch would totally agree that there is something rotten in Denmark.
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I don’t get panel 2. Is that the thing that Willem is holding as he comes out the door? Did it go through her arm? Maybe a zoomed out view of that would help?
its his walking cane, though pretty sure is more for show than actual need.
and yeah it has already been shown that snow by night isn’t exactly physical if she doesn’t want to be.
Jamwa is correct on all accounts. It’s Willem’s walking cane, which he uses for self protection.
Pieter wears a gold band to openly symbolize his bond with another man? maybe if he was a little more discreet about his man on man action he wouldn’t have had to leave home, but then again, discretion doesn’t seem to be his strong suite.
He strikes me as a figure like Karl Ulrichs: a philosopher-vagrant two centuries ahead of his time, trying to advocate for people whose identity didn’t even have a name yet. Ulrichs titled gay men “Urnings” and argued that being openly gay was perfectly respectable. Didn’t go great for him, but he didn’t seem that ruffled by the backlash, and never particularly cared that his views made him an outcast.
Pieter might have bigger fish to fry (also a manitou trying to kill him), but he could have the same mindset. He doesn’t seem to care or even really understand when things like the Tower Incident piss people off, so why would this be different? He likes alchemy, good books, and men; society can take it or leave it.
how do we even know it is that kind of man relationship. We don’t it could be a son, or brother, and we don’t even know which hand it is on.
It’s on his left hand, look at the position of the thumb.
Keep in mind that this isn’t our world. It’s possible that in this one, homophobia never really took root the way it did in ours, and so gay marriage just exists without a big deal, similar to how having female soldiers and even commanders is just a normal part of war (as seen with both sides in Engagement on Vineyard Hill).
We’re talking about a place where the children of seasons come to life if you throw their eyes into a snowbank. We really can’t make any assumptions about what it does and doesn’t have in common with Earth.
I wasn’t assuming anything with earth. I was saying we can’t just assume the relationship either. I used to know someone who wore a wedding ring on their left hand and they weren’t married it was just a ring that they wore. Everyone assumed marriage. It was their mother’s ring that just wore to remember her. They did as a psych project for a year to see how many people just imprint their own beliefs about it on to others. Once upon a time in history a wedding didn’t exist there was no such thing, and yet now days we all assume they were always around.
My sole point was don’t assume a relationship with out knowing what that is I am just waiting to see what he says it is I am not just going to guess. Guessing people’s relationship usually poorly with an assumption that might be false. That was my point.
From the angle I personally due to vision problems can’t tell if it is left or right, to me I see ring that is suddenly there and can’t really tell what hand it is a snapshot that is incomplete. I am not comparing a fantasy world where the author has control of the world, with this one, if I wanted to that I would be saying how this “insert event here” is historically inaccurate an nitpick. I am not. It is a fantasy world from the mind of the creator where whatever they want is the norm. I am not that foolish, sometimes I don’t always agree with the world like a certain wizard series that contradicts its canon and has huge plot holes, but that is how they wrote it.
It looks like I need to have a vignette that shows Pieter’s backstory. Good thing that I’m already planning one!
I am going with the Japanese-esque model for cultural view on homosexuality. The nobles and wealthy can be gay all they like as long as they have kids. Poor people don’t really matter in this classist society so they can do as they please.
Japanese homosexuality was similar to Greek: is ok if you like men more than women, since men are superior to woman. Lesbians in the other hand…
Sometimes, I have fun imagining one of those homophobes bullies trying to muster the courage to lecture a pair of war veteran Spartans about how having sex with each other makes them sissies. :)
I would like to point out in the other panels no ring is ever on any hand, and suddenly there is a ring on his finger?? Just thought you should know that is the case.
*shrug* Simplifying artwork is common practice to spend up the creation process. For story purposes, the ring has been there all along.
Well, I’d gone back and looked more closely at the recent pages. I noticed that there are suprisingly few pages where we get an unambiguous view of Pieter’s left hand ring finger (it’s usually obscured or at a detail-blurring distance). So good on that ;)
But to be fair, on one or two pages it’s quite clear he’s wearing no ring. I think the best example is the closeup shot on page 13, panel 3 http://www.snowbynight.com/pages/ch15/pg13.php
That seems more on the level of an art ‘typo’ than a mere simplification, at least when viewed in retrospect. To be fair, I’m not sure if it would have occurred to me to take the time to go back and check this if I were reading the story for the first time in a continously available format (aka book, ebook, or completed webcomic). But it *is* the sort of thing I sometimes notice when I’m reading something for the second-etc time. And lord knows the fan-o-spere is filled with folks who *live* to discover such discrepancies and pester the author-artist about them.
Not me, of course.
I discussed this with the artist when we were designing his character. We decided to leave the ring off in his general character design as a simplification to speed up production. When making comics, we’re constantly making these sorts of decisions. More detail means more time. It can also overwhelm the viewer with too many details. We decided to just show the ring on a close up.
Aha! Clearly the Evil Alchemist has created an illusion to support the cock-and-bull story he’s concocted to avoid getting his throats cut. :-)