Unsounded

Death to the Aldish, revenge for Octo hat

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>I think you can say you lived a full life if they project a giant portrait of you up into the sky on the event of your demise. Duane certainly didn't get a giant sky portrait. Loser.

I'm guessing we get an immediate cut to Toma after this scene.

He did get an emotion-evoking wall mural, though!

So where's everyone at on the Cresce-Alderode sympathy scale these days?

Even with our new glimpses at the queen, I still find myself liking the Alds a bit more, mostly because the Gefendur faith creeps me out and Cresce is pretty hardcore for it.

I like alderode more because their caste system is very interesting to me.

Both the faiths suck. The Ssaelit at least don't partake in ritualistic cannibalism.

Cresce seems like a nicer place to live as it currently stands, but I'm sure there's horrors lurking under the surface.

Cresce are niggers, so Alderode wins by default.

unsoundedcomic.tumblr.com/post/156612892965/it-sounds-like-the-alds-are-genetic-crescians-who#notes

buddy i have some news for you

I'd rather live in Sharteshane. At least there I know most people are treacherous fuckheads, rather than just suspect it.

Depends if you get to be a Cool Ald who lives like 200-400 years and has political power, or not.

>labour
I didn't know Ashley was a Britbong.

>Cresce seems like a nicer place to live as it currently stands, but I'm sure there's horrors lurking under the surface.
You do know that Ethelmik was in Cresce, right?

People move 'cause their jobs move all the time.
People get attacked by giant silver pain eels... less of the time.

Fuck 'em. Neither of them deserves the faith that good men have placed in them, and both Duane and Toma have paid the price for that faith

Alderode seems technically worse when counting up atrocities and international relations but in the long term monarchies and socialism never ends well. Alderode may be a messy compromise but in the end its the nation more able to learn and change.

Cresce's communism just, ah, smells to me like it's the one thing in the setting (other than all the awesome magic and stuff) that isn't treated entirely like "this is a horrible thing in a horrible place filled with horrible people."

So I don't really like it. It feels out of place.

(Yes it gets dirtied by the endless corruption of mankind; I mean it feels like the one institution that doesn't get treated like a wholly awful thing, unlike every other dimension of everywhere on the continent.)

You think Toma's really dead?

Cresce may be corrupt as fuck, but caste systems are shit and it's basically Alderode's main gimmick. They're garbage.

He's dead in the eyes of the state, which for Toma is almost as bad. Crescent can't afford to have their martyr a) not actually be dead and b) contradict their sorry

I wonder what terrible secrets the birdcult has.

>be so mad at the enemy your castle has balconies covered with effigies of their mounts being stabbed to death

I can appreciate a proper hate for the enemy so deep it shows up in architecture.

>magic was invented by the tains
>magic was invented b the whites
>But no one cares because they're subjugated in a caste system
I love unsounded

But Alderode's caste system has an actual basis in magic and fact.

The guys with the less pretty hair live longer, sure, but the discrimination and shitting on people because they have less time to live through absolutely no fault of their own does not have a "basis in fact".

As long as he comes back with news of that General's treason and massacre of Ethelmik, he would be a national savior risen from the dead. You can't be a bigger damn hero than that.

"Cresce" is pronounced to basically rhyme with "grace", right? That's how it went in the brothel song, but that might have been a tortured rhyme.

I always read it initially as "Kresk".

I actually started to wonder just now if it isn't pronounced "Kresh," which would be the exact pronunciation of the actual word "creche." Given that word's definition, at the very least I think the spelling is a pun.

I always say Cre-see in my head.

Has there been a title drop before?

IIRC, Duane has said it before.

There was when Duane was feeling kinda down because he had sex with a tranny who was arrested and blamed for Duane killing a guy, so he did some impromptu poetry and said he would "sound the Unsounded"

I'm not joking, it's a shorty story on the webstie

I pronounce it Creish, but with like a silent-ish e on the end. Like the u in 'desu'. A very light vowel.

>Foster his soul forever in your kingdom outside the paling of the great Unsounded™.

Really, Ashley?

Pretty sure it's kresh

It wasn't a tranny, it was a woman who was masquerading as a guy essentially

It's actually the second or third time she's done it.

When Duane was reading Ssaelit scripture to prostitutes

I hate both countries. Also Sharteshane, and Ulestry.

Unsounded's world sucks.

I'm pretty sure it's entirely artificial, thought. The Dammakhert, right? Actually, we know too little about that, but I was figuring it was man-made or something.

"Artificial" is still "real". There are verifiable biological differences between a Copper and a Plat.

It is mad made. We also know now that pretty much everyone except the Tainish and those with Tainish ancestry are ethnically similar to people from Cresce, but the Dammakhert turns them white/into castes

>cresce
>I want to support my glorious socialist brethren
>corruption and political infighting
>bitch has a pet aldish in her harem

Or

>Ald's
>multiple religions
>multiple ethnicities
>quasi-republic
>religious wars
>caste system
>fucking dahmmakert is Big Brother style surveillance on steroids and thats just the tip of it's iceberg

I don't know mang. As it is I find myself hoping Duane goes full Lich King.

So are the Golds the only Tains or are other castes descendent of them too?

But will the dog be ok.

The dog is part of a metaphor now. It's destined to die.

>Duane goes full lich king
never knew I wanted this, but oh yes

The thing about Cresce is that it's not, technically, communism. Not even in the "but that's not REAL communism" excuse. It's actually not communism. The only thing that makes it like communism is the abolition of private wealth. Otherwise, it's exactly the same as any other feudal system. I suppose you might say the state has seized the means of production, but honestly everything we see about Cresce makes its implementation differ from communism as we've tried to do it in the real world. Even the word seized belies what happened in Cresce. Far as we can tell, Cresce adopted the system without a revolution. We really have no idea, though, about the history of it, not even from scattered asks as far as I know.

And besides, the whole thing last chapter was about how a town was going to get liquidated and people shipped off to the mines. The comic may not lay it out, but it's still easy to take away "Cresce system fucks people if they're unlucky" from Ethelmik arc. You can see the way the system failed the town and made its only recourse to seek help from criminals and evil sorcerers who sought to use their plight to their advantage. Especially the end where Rahm and Iori talk about the city and how it's all gone to fuck. It may not be the exact kind of corruption and inefficiency we've seen of real life Communism, but the story still amply shows how the so called morality of system turns people's lives into cost benefit analyses. We've also seen and heard how the nobility is little changed despite the lack of private wealth, and I have no doubt there's corruption in other ways besides monetary.

> Duane goes full Lich King
Best possible ending or best possible ending?

They're both dicks but I like the alds a little bit better since with the exception of perhaps gender equality the have made a better effort at being open minded than cresce sure as fuck ever did.
That said I can see how from the perspective of the crescians the aldish are like some kind of weird menagerie of heretic plague victims tring to spread their white skin and heresy across the continent.
>All kasslyinans with the exception of the tainish and their descendants (light skinned shartes and the souds) are black but those conceived within the borders of the dhamakhhert are born caucasian regardless of parentage.
Technically so are the alds (minus souds) they just got turned white by magic

The golds/souds are tains but so are shartes like sette and her dad.
Everyone else is black
pictured two black kids

They can't use magic though

Since when?

I think I'd rather live 300 years and not be treated like dirt.

I'm getting the impression that Alderodes negative qualities, those that are not simply exaggerations or propaganda by Cresce are reactions to the hostile response they get from the rest of the world.
Think about it they provide shelter to practitioners of a openly heretical religion that anyone else would exterminate without a thought as well as members of a race of people that are equally hated and finally their entire nation is considered to be a kind of curse/plague that threatens to spill over their borders and infect the the whole world to become just like them, I doubt Alderode has known peace since it's birth, is it really so hard to wonder why they might not be fond of their neighbors?

In Alderode it's basically the same thing since third options have to live as men entirely including taking all the legal restrictions of being male, which in that case meant that sex with another guy was a no no.

Mentioned a couple of times on the tumblr
Plats have the shortest life and the greatest natural talent for pymary
Coppers have the longest lives and are basically incapable of pymary because they are khert portlets
Everybody else falls somewhere in the middle

Our perception of Alderode is heavily skewed by everything we've seen of it so far coming from Duane. Half, if not more even without all the Weeping Plague deaths, of the country are Gefendur and appear to only tolerate their heretical countrymen because they'd rather oppose the rest of the world with them together.

We'll no doubt see more of the Gefendur side of Alderode, which is largely the same as the Ssaelit side just with a different religion. Their version of Gefendur is also a bit like the whole Catholic/Orthodox divide. They focus more on the male, not female, side of the dubsdubs gods. And while Alderode is seen as a bunch of crazy cursed monsters and a pox on the continent, it is also true they're intentionally extending their crazy khert onto the rest of the continent whenever they can. Charitably, it's because obviously the Aldish don't want their children popping out all weird looking, but it also makes everyone who was already there start popping out Aldish. Alderode has its unfair treatment, but they're in no hurry to make nice with anyone either.

The whole situation is really a no-win thing, compromise-wise. Until someone can develop a mass-production ready device that lets you carry your own personal khert around with you so everyone can have whatever kind of baby they want anywhere. Which, incidentally, is a bit like what Uaid has in his magitech cyborg parts.

OH SHIT
TITLE DROP
I'm not exactly sure what unsounded means in this context

I always read it as Kresheh

"Paling" means fence, so I assume he is saying that their continent is a land surrounded by oceans which no one knows the depths of. People in this setting stay away from the ocean since there is no khert there, so your soul can't return to the khert if you die on the ocean.

It's the uncharted depths of the khert supposedly where the gods/ssael reside.

Unsounded has always been used in this comic to refer to that which has not been "sounded." ie., not explored. The Khert is the afterlife and origin of all things. It's the big metaphysical plain for everyone in the setting. Unsounded is just a poetic way to refer to it, like the Hereafter or Great Beyond. Gives the setting a bit of character, along with provided a thematic glue for the story itself.

What a coincidence.
I'll contribute and add Ashley's explanation as well.
>The Great Unsounded is the lowest depths of the khert wherein one might find the passage to the Outside, where the gods reside. A paling’s a fence or barrier.
>tl;dr Gefendur Heaven

Jets live 150 - 250 years and are skilled wrights.

The Gold's are tains.
Everyone else from alderode migrated from the south and palette-swapped by the Dammakhert.

>in the long term monarchies and socialism never ends well
Democratic socialist states that are also monarchies top the scoreboard for most statistics and indexes that indicate a good place to live. They're also among the oldest states still in existence and among the most politically stable.

None of the monarchies on the left give the monarchs any actual power.

No, but the fact that they are still monarchies show that they are societies capable of peaceful change instead of having to murder the people in power and their families, fight a bloody civil war against their supporters, smash the old societal structures that have kept the country functioning for centuries and so on.

Indeed, the threat of exactly that happening along with real life examples of it is enough to make the rulers choose a comfy easy life without as much power instead of bloody revolution

Jets are in the middle
Jets are basically the average ald

No, it goes:
Plats-Silver-Bronze-Jet-Copper
The Golds aren't on the scale since they are not effected by the dammakhert. Bronze are the average Ald,since they are the most populous and had the most average lifespan of those effected. I know this was discussed in the long gone formspring, but as I remember it, if the Castes canoodle with either, their babies will average toward the middle of that scale. So if a plat has a baby with a silver, the baby will be silver. If a jet has a baby with a copper, the baby will the jet. This is why the Bronze are looked down upon; because they are seen as the muddied mixed breeds of illicit inter-caste breeding. If any of the castes has a baby with a gold, the baby will be in the caste of the non-gold parent. So a Copper+Gold=Copper.

Just some fun old facts. I think most of this is on the Wiki if you want to check

Worth noting that some of the castes are very much not white, coppers as we saw are quite tan, and silvers are quite dark skinned.

The point is that they all still look caucasian even if they have dark skin tones but are genetically black looking, the damakhert changed their facial features as much as it did their skin and hair colors.