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So I hear some of you guys like print books. The Unsounded Volume 3 Kickstarter is live now!

I’m hoping to fund a fantastic print of the third volume and also reprints of volumes 1 and 2! You’ll find some other goodies up for grabs there as well. Reblogs are always appreciated!

I’m nervous because that is my nature, but you guys give me strength. Thank you for supporting me and the comic :) Please disregard Sette, she is a garbage baby. Jivi, Matty, and I will keep her on the straight and narrow.

Genuine praise and applause here, you've achieved something unprecedented to me as a reader: I feel shaken and uncertain about a protagonist I once liked, but also still completely invested in their story.

Right now (I've just read 18-80 to 84) I feel you've struck a great balance of surprise (at Duane) and trust (in your story). Perhaps because no single choice of Duane's felt out-of-character, as they slowly added up? I honestly can't predict how I'll feel about him and his flaws by the end of Unsounded, but for once, I'm enjoying that unease! Because of the care you've taken in building your characters so far, I at least still have faith in *you* to reach a satisfying ending.

Oh this should be a question, hmm. Were you at all tempted to foreshadow Duane's recent/future choices more obviously (by character or plot), softening a bit of the impact for a smoother story? Because again, I'm glad you didn't – perfectly threaded needle to keep me captivated.

So glad you're having a good time!

I hope Duane's current state is pretty well telegraphed, though I know it can be hard to remember past instances when the webcomic delivery spaces everything out. He's repeatedly shown himself to be hypocritical and selective in regards to kids. The army story ended with him continuing to train babies in the killing arts and accepting a false narrative that he had never let one of them die. This led right into him turning a blind eye to the Litriya twins for the sake of helping the Aldish invaders get to the construct facility. He felt AWFUL about this - we saw it - and tried to make up for it, but even that very action was already going against what was said in the black water: God is not attainable by transaction. Duane was trying to erase that debt to Litriya. It doesn't work that way! Like Claggart said, you got to acknowledge your mistakes and keep moving.

Duane started to. He truly did, when he spoke to Lori and the Peaceguard, then moved to go defend the shrine. But then Mikaila was there in the sky and all development was cut short in tandem with his poor rotten head.

What did he see when he and Toma and Elka approached Port Morstorben's ravaged gate? Not all the dead bodies. Not a vision of Sara asking him to help defend her people. Instead Duane saw Lemuel and Leysa and Mikaila. The eels have always known exactly how to steer Duane towards his worst self, and they use his best self to do it. They use his blind love for his family, his loyalty towards his homeland, and his faith in God. These can all be fantastic attributes or they can make a monster.

So yeah, I feel like the foreshadowing is there pretty thick. What makes it still compelling, I hope, is Duane's selfishness and reluctance to change are so often counterbalanced by his earnest desire to make things better and to help the people around him as individuals, in the moment. There's not an ounce of real malice in the man, but when Duane stews, he often talks himself into making the wrong choice. When he acts with all the compulsion of a big-hearted protector, he tends towards selfless compassion.

I have so many poems memorized for the right moment but what they don't tell you is that there's pretty much never occasions to recite poetry unprompted. or prompted for that matter

When a physicist falls in love :)

Richard Feynman's love letter to his deceased wife, 1946.

So people of Unsounded Discord started discussing who qualifies as a magical girl in the comic and they were coming up with bad ideas like “Mikaila“. They were all obviously wrong, so I decided to take the matter in my own hands. I am so sorry.

adhd is having super amplified introspection yet zero self-awareness or decision making skills. i literally never stop overthinking absolutely everything but if you ask me how i am? i dont know. am i enjoying myself? i dont know. my opinion? i dont know. my favorite? i dont know. am i lying? i dont know. do i want this? i dont know. trust my gut feeling? it changes every second. which of these is better? i cant breathe. just pick one? eating glass would hurt less

At first hearing that Duane was at any point in his life anything other than a bookish, pedantic wizard nerd caught me off guard, but then you think of all the times he ends up punching people and begin to wonder if there’s more ‘bully’ left in him than he’d care to admit

Wait, what was the divine revelation that made Duane pursue priesthood? Or will it come up in the comic later?

I don’t know if it’ll ever come up in the comic, and Duane’s always been kind of embarrassed to speak of it aloud because it makes him feel like one of those backwoods zealots that preaches anecdotes from a stump, but yeah, he had an Experience when he was a kid. Ssaelism is a very rational faith. It doesn’t encourage you to go around saying Ssael appeared to you in a vision and told you where you left your lucky kedis foot. If you tell your priest that Ssael speaks to you he’ll roll his eyes and suggest you stop mixing beer and wine.

Anyway, Duane was badly injured in a street accident (it was totally Lemuel’s fault, he was being a little shit) and very nearly didn’t make it. Duane was a very rambunctious kid - some might say a bully - and though his grandfather was teaching him pymary Duane tended to use it like, well, Sette might. To make his brother and their peers miserable. After he was hurt he was bedbound for a few months and his interests abruptly turned bookish. At the same time, frigging Sonum Ssael started talking to him in the back of his head, saying he needed to straighten the hell up.

Even after he recovered Duane was hobbling for a year and never took up his old role of neighbourhood bully. Instead he began studying his grandfather’s books, reading everything Ssael ever wrote, and spending way too much time in the ghers library. He shocked his grandfather by beginning to beat him in their play-duels, and shocked his dad by humbly requesting to attend seminary and become a cleric instead of becoming his apprentice in their family print shop.

Duane always heard Ssael with startling clarity in his prayers. That voice went away after his bad night in the snow.

Pier underside

if you want the rewards of finding a new favorite song then you have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of listening to unfamiliar music