Last-Ditch Page 15
False Positive: A Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy Webcomic Anthology
Webcomic Tales of the Surreal, Fantastic, & Macabre
Latest from the Blog
Good News for People Who Like Bad News
01-18-24
Dear False Positive Readers,
This is Ashley Walton, Mikeās sister and editor of False Positive. I have really terrible, awful news and a tiny bit of good news.
You might have noticed itās been a couple years since weāve posted anything on this website. Well, brace yourself for the saddest update Iāll ever share.
Lots of questions.
I already forgot who is who and each backstory that converged in this one
The enemy / Totem has got to be wayfarer, he’s the only recurring character missing from this line up
If it’s the Wayfarer, I bet you he’s destroing the world/universe/dimension out of sheer boredom
I’m of the mind that the Totem might have started out as the guy who picked up the wrong suitcase in Concoction…Albeit, with a bit of growth over time. Otherwise, I’d guess that the Specimen found a way out of that hole in the ground, getting past the sealed hatches somehow (also after having some time to grow).
Why Old Bill … whatever has gotten into you? A spark of inspiration, perhaps?
I still say the antagonist is the author themself, it makes too much sense to me.
“The author themself”?!? Literally, his name is Legion.
I’m not a fan of the new grammar. Everything in English used to be gendered, and having humans go with the male is no more sexist than having cows go with the feminine. It’s to do with whom one is more likely to meet. Those of us who speak other languages know that it is meaningless that tables and chairs have different pronouns, and using the third-person plural for uncertain situations adds complexity instead of clarity, and makes it hard to read modern text if one isn’t used to it and all the classics if one is. Finally it implies ill-intent to everyone who speaks proper English, whether the Queen’s English or this off-colour stuff Webster left us with after his run at spelling reform.
And just for good measure, harrumph!
Also, I do wonder about Shadowtracer’s question … I’m just frightened by the implications. The Wayfarer implication from Old Bill gives me the Heebie-Jeebies. Yikes and yowza.
Harrumph, indeed. We have said, “They say that…” for years, and are used to the idea that an unknown variable of person or people can be replaced with the third plural; it was a very small logical jump to include it in semi-unknowns, like when you know who said it, just not their gender. Quite frankly, if he said “the author herself,” not knowing that the author is male, it’d end up awkward for him and and corrected by many people shortly afterward, anyway; instead of making the gender mistake, or even worse, the whole cumbersome “him- or herself” construction, “themself” (or “themselves” if you don’t want to make a double conventions-breaking leap) allows one to put the person before the gender (tradition notwithstanding) and hopefully get the whole “I don’t know the gender of the person but I’d like to talk about that person anyway so bear with me” idea out of the way. I’m in full favor of singular “they,” just as much as I am of including “y’all” for the same reason: English doesn’t have a way of dealing with those situations cleanly.
With regard to the story: I’m expecting something completely ridiculous, like the wolpertinger in frame eleventy-five of the third story, second season, that doesn’t exist until you stop looking at the comic page to be the ultimate evil here. Quasilucid does enjoy a good tight story, but he enjoys a WTF moment even more. š
I appreciate the defense, Brian. I’ve had too many messy moments when I’ve called a female ‘he’, or a male ‘she’. Regardless of gender identity, even before I knew anything about that, I’ve used the singular ‘they’ as an indicator of a person since I was a child, and enjoy using it as it allows me to get my point across without dealing with the ‘he/she’ debacle that usually, inevitably, comes. Could I search for that information? Yeah, I could. But, more often than not, I come across incorrect information, which leads to the inevitable debacle.
REGARDLESS OF THAT, in case you were uninterested in my ramblings regarding my usage of pronouns regardless of context, it is my interpretation that the author is the antagonist. They’re (again, I operate on incomplete information) quite literally the source of every misfortune the characters within each story has encountered. It’s honestly something I would do, but that’s beside the point.
Brian David Bothwell has me wondering about the plot. It’s a nice little brain-worm he set up in me skull-case. I shall be squirming in my seat until the new year.
I get the pronoun shift to plural in the indefinite form, but it’ll always strike me as wrong, with an over-emphasis on gender, for both historical language and language structure (like, every language) reasons … but English being the odd-ball it is, I get the temptation. It’s super-creepy when the influence of English academia bleeds into other languages and people start multiplying and neutering each other. The advantage of the plural, while making other things unclear and terms like thee and thou even further incomprehensible to moderns, is that it avoids the implied nastiness of so many of so many other pronoun shift fads. It is kind of a natural way to go for English speaking kids, where we have male and female forms for so many occupations and such, and it avoids the whole “foxes and vixens”, “cows and bulls”, “geese and ganders” falling all over oneself issues with supposedly “inclusive” language and doesn’t make an issue of it all the time in ways guaranteed to make neurotics of most of us … but I insist on being an individual, even if someone doesn’t know me … which sounds like a plot for one of these stories (even if I am a smart-mouthed robot cluelessly arguing with my creator, say).
Anyone wondering who their “Fallen Number” are?
The ladies from Sentinel? Brown from Specimen? Time traveler from Apple (they might could use a time machine)? Incantation fellow? The kids from Cops N’ Robbers?
I bet when they go to hell they’re going to run into the ghost of the Clever Hound. He’s chillin’ in a red turtleneck and drinking a glass of cognac. He’s doing well, all things considered.
OK. I’ll bite. Am I barking up the wrong tree to be rooting around for him instead of the lady in Nest?
……also doesn’t wayfarer have a habit of collecting ‘acolytes’ in every story we have seen him in. I’m hoping for a battle between old characters at some point.
If it’s the Wayfarer, I’ll bet you he’s destroying that world/universe/dimension out of sheer boredom
Okay, okay, okay okay….
I’ve been operating under a few assumptions that I now realize have very little evidence supporting them.
1- The Totem is the Wayfarer. I suppose the evidence for this the Spaceman in the beginning.
What if this isn’t true? What if the antagonist is something way off our radar? Like, the god-monster from Dig, perhaps. I don’t know, just spinning out ideas.
2- That the Spaceman is working on behalf our False Positive Justice League. I don’t really know why I have been assuming this. Maybe just because the idea of the Spaceman working against our “heroes” is unsettling.
I guess the bottom line is… I don’t at all know where the story is going and am anxious for the next page!
As I’ve stated earlier in comments for this story, I believe the antagonist is the author. You can’t get more off the radar than that, and to me it seems like the most logical choice. They are, after all, the source of every event that has happened. (Maybe, if defeated, everything ends. Perhaps they’ll wake up in-universe and start working on a comic, creating a meta-narrative on story-writing.)
I was personally thinking that the totem is the unfortunate one from concoction. One of the powers he apparently got was opening a portal into deep space and he was massively growing… which would give a definitive start and home origin for people to travel to. I’m liking this cross over story quite a bit. Lots of interesting guessing games.
isnt he the the shirtless one?
Does anyone remember where the dude with the black monster on his back is from? I have gone through most of the stories but cant find him…
That’s from Frenzy – one of my favorites, btw!
Frenzy
It’s the private detective story involving the amulet and the husband and wife trying to get said amulet as a way to “communicate with the Gods”. Frenzy, I believe.
I keep waiting for a pure white fox with red eyes … or the woman who ate the hunter that failed to get it.
Frenzy. One of my favorite stories.