Unsounded

good meeting

what's with all the niggers?

>but if you're sniffing for more, poodle, you're going to get your snoot booped.
I just know she had way too much fun writing that.

You'd think Cresce would have a better bead ha! on Sharteshane politics by now.

So we're back to this shit again.....

So uh, can you fuck it?

...Oh god, it's Deep Blue. It's Deep Blue that plays Strip Settlers of Catan.
We may be looking at our BBEG, folks.

I don't care if we discover he is a cannibal, this is my new favorite character.

Ok, Sharte King is know one of my favorites

DAT ASS

You know, I hadn't considered till now that the King might actually be good at his job.

His job being, of course, to do what his masters tell him and to stay as neutral as possible otherwise. But he's actually doing it with a surprisingly witty irreverence!

I don't understand the point if you can't.

I like their king.

Interesting how she fails to mention that the Silver weapon was offered to her country first. Of course, they made no moves against it nor complaint to Sharteshane then.

I know we're supposed to hate this guy, but Cresceans are always so brutish and aggressive that it's enjoyable to watch this harridan be treated like a child and dismissed.

Also, dat ass.

Of course he is, look at that bulk, that’s a good few years of twins there.

That magical whorehouse demonstrated pymaric sex toys were a thing, so obviously it is possible to build a fuck more into AI waifus.

Surprisingly, the king may not be as stupid as I thought

Gotta say I was expecting a more professional diplomatic exchange there. Sis seems to overestimate herself.

>I know we're supposed to hate this guy

Are we? I get the impression we're supposed to like him a bit. It doesn't hurt that, with the exception of Toma and Elka, every Crescian we've met so far has been kind of a motherfucker.

Oh, and Jivi. Jivi's okay. I guess.

Sis seems to overestimate the king

And the Alds, and the Shartes...It's kinda turning into a fantasy Garth Ennis comic

Think more like a Sharte, boys. It's a paid DLC unlockable feature.

Actually at this point Sharteshane seems the least objectionable to me. They're not saints but they don't seem as wretched as Alderode or Cresce. Though that may just be because they're not a major power.

Jivi is a pirate's whelp putting on airs and shit talking our best girl.

This is also our first real look at their politics. From what we saw of them pulling up to the kings' residence, the countrys' a shithole

A running theme in this comic has consistently been that individual people are decent or at least sympathetic (with exceptions - hi, Starfish - but even his background is surprisingly sympathetic). It's ideologies and institutions that are monstrous.

Sharteshane is a wretched hive of scum and villainy but doesn't pretend to be anything else.

I really like this awful king.

What's with all the nigger lovers?

It’s a meme

Ashley herself doesn’t seem to think highly of him

Best king ever or BEST KING EVER?

Clearly she needs to beat him at stripcross to get his military support

All she said was "he is not to be taken seriously", which says nothing of how likable he's supposed to be. Because the guy is positively charming in a dumpy, irreverent jackass kind of way.

My Man!

Alt text sorta thing last week and a couple of tumblr asks are what I’m working off of

Damn this dude who thinks criminals should be free to kidnap children and torture them to death sure is lovable!

He can be corrupt and incompetent without being unlikable.

He's amusing but he's being unambiguously portrayed as extremely evil in this page. I'm genuinely surprised at the staggering lack of reading comprehension I'm seeing here.

Yes, he is? What is up with the butthurt ITT today that we can't celebrate a lazy bastard?

Nigga, fictional characters and the liking thereof are not proof of IRL moral positions. Calm your shit.

>I came here to boop snoots and play skipcross. And I just lost at skipcross.

But is probably the freest shithole in kasslyne

It’s Ancap with a token monarchy, where there’s no castes, no bitch-queen telling you what your work is to be. They’re godly folks but leave it casual

It’s all run on gold and strength. If you have those, you can be basically anything, and if you don’t you’re SOL but it’s not so much on any particularly rigged part of the system

Is the bearded fellow supposed to be Beadman?

I think the lack of pretense on his part is why people are reacting that way. It's a big shift from the other royalty in the series.

That and we know he's just a puppet with no real power so he probably doesn't have much of an active role, if any at all, in the monstrous things going on around him.

>Is the bearded fellow supposed to be Beadman?
yes

How so? He’s being altogether reasonable in his own asshole sharte way

i mean, in this page, yeah he's pretty fun.

And yes, of course he's a fat bastard sitting comfy while his own capital right outside looks like the slums of a third world country, so I don't think he's the charitable sort with goodness in his heart and dreams.

I believe it is the turning a blind eye to his own people making deals with people making WMDs and not giving a fuck about the silver monster. If the red boys weren't dead he wouldn't be in a hurry to catch them

The fuck are you even talking about? I said the character was evil, not people who think he's funny. Retard.

>being this defensive
sounds like someone touched a nerve.

it's a real life phenomenon, for some reason people tend to think it's "better" to be fucked over by someone who's honest about it rather than a deceiver, despite that fact you're still getting it in the ass. it's like a retarded form of saving face.

Evil? Hardly. He's just very self serving and pretty amoral, which is basically the national spirit of Sharteshane in a nutshell. He called what happened in Ethilmik a "tragedy" and didn't seem to be sarcastic about it, but ultimately it doesn't affect him or his country. He's being very real with the queen's sister right now: it doesn't really affect him directly, and he stands to gain nothing by making it his business. If queenie's sister has any diplomatic tact she will realize that the king is neither intimidated by her nor guilty over what happened. He's reinforced his neutral position and has basically set up a negotiation with her, telling her to either make it worth his while to do something or to step off.

They're criminals and thieves he had no control over nor say in their business. He's simply not rising to her attempts to get him to accept some sort of responsibility...which he doesn't have.

PT Barnum made a career of calling people a sucker to their faces.

And people still lined up around the street for his shows.

She can’t really get him to do anything anyway. The Red Berry Boys are all dead, the Silver’s lost (as far as they know) and they’ve openly reported it to be lost. Is King Sharte supposed to invent a time machine and stop the tragedy before it happened?

It's not just that he's honest, he's also very affable about everything, rather than coming off as smug or nasty he just seems more of an irreverent cad. It's sort of similar to how people tend to really like Long John Silver in Treasure Island, despite the fact that he's a greedy, conniving, traitorous, murdering pirate. He's just so charming in an avuncular sort of way that it softens the unpleasant aspects of his character to a great degree. It also helps that while he is a scoundrel, he treats the protagonist fairly well. So we see here with the king: what we know about him suggests he's not a very nice or upstanding person, yet he's been courteous to his guest and seems lackadaisical in demeanor.

>Sette has no idea what King Tidings looks like or how he acts.

So wait, what's his name again?

Presumably they want him to contribute materially to cleaning up the silver's mess. My guess would be that Cresce is currently strained for resources and manpower due to the war with Alderode and they can't spare much to clean up the mess caused by the Silver. Trying to hold the king of Sharteshane accountable seems like a desperate bid to get some kind of support from him.

Y'know, in hindsight, it seems like going to the Sharteshanian king to request that he actually do something is a pretty foolish errand.

It's so foolish that I suspect there's some other motive for it, unless the Sonories are just that naive.

>Crescian fashion

>Marches in through the door

>"We need "x", u give to us pls"

Some real fucking smooth diplomacy there.

You are terrible in your beauty.

Rilursa does not seem cut out to be a diplomat. Which just begs the question of why she's the one that went to Sharteshane.

She is straight up saying that Cresce wants Sharteshane to join their war against Alderode. And he's having none of it. What comic are you people reading

I want that construct!

>Interesting how she fails to mention that the Silver weapon was offered to her country first.
Ambassador probably wasn't involved in the Silver Deal in the first place.

d-do you think she likes video games?

I'm sure that is a simple matter of programing.

>ywn have your own hohographic waifu to play Money Hunny with.

Getting him involved at all, even in something as innocuous as contributing to the cleanup, would mean drawing the ire of Alderode.


It's a pretext surely, either wasting the time of someone who might prevent a coup in Cresce or otherwise doing something underhanded in Sharteshane. Are the Cresce even aware of where the Red Berry Boys got the first silver, might they have agents looking for more of it?

This is truly the worst hell.

MAKE THE BUTT BIGGER

>having on your payroll scientists so gifted they can create a sentient (?) AI
>spend those ressources on creating your own Agatha Heterodyne to play stripchess with
This king is the best character ever.

What fuck off racist! That man is a treasure.

Sharteshane once again proving it's the best kingdom

>I know we're supposed to hate this guy
That's not even remotely the impression I get

Sharteshane might be an amoral shithole, but at least they're somewhat charming.

It's kind of beautiful how he's half ignoring her and basically calling her a dog. Also that construct's amazing, able to respond to his compliments and follow the conversation.

Do You Catan?

As much as Shartshanians don't value beauty, they sure value substance.

>no mention of the black tongues
>no mention that cresce passed on it first
>no mention that the actual silver was sourced from beadman
Yeah, either she's not been told everything or this meeting is just for show. I think she's really there to see beadman.

Like people have pointed out, he's the king of a country that wants very little to do with a strong monarchy and would find it very easy to just do away with him if it saw fit. Cope mentioned he's so unimportant she won't even tell us his name and the Queen of Cresce rather eloquently declared him to be without balls. He's just an amusing character to watch navigate because his primary goal isn't any sort of real ambition, the exact opposite of much of the cast. He strikes me a lot like Sette if she'd made it big and had less scrupples. All the same kind of gutter wit and casual lack of shits about the moral failings of Sharteshanian philosophy.

I could even see a Shartshanian arguement that the country is a shithole because they like it that way.

You think the country is awful, why? Because the streets are filthy and lined with beggers?

You think Alderode doesnt have poor beggers? Of course it does. The guards just keep them out of the cities.

As the the filth, any man or woman in Shartshane could bend down and clean up the street at any time. They could hire workers and charge money from neighborhoods for the service. But they dont. 'Why' is a philisophical question, but the point remains that its well within their power to have cleaner streets and they dont. Why should the king force upon them something they clearly dont want to solve a problem they dont mind?

>Think more like a Sharte

The further you go down that road, the more it starts to look like a pymeric Turk.
I'm also starting to get a really strong Thief Of Baghdad vibe here.

Much like the King's not-so-subtly implying, she may be a lapdog of the Queen who does what she's told on a need to know basis. What's odd is I doubt Sonorie would have expected any different an answer than he's giving right now, so why bother sending her sister? Unless this is just to spite her sister and remind her how little she can actually do.

I wonder if anyone ever made a real-life sexy board game automaton to play against?

He seems to know more than he's letting on though. That said he probably has no real power and just acts as a diplomatic figurehead for the criminal families. Cope gave him a surprising amount of insight for someone with little agency.

Well she did say in the notes that he isn't even getting a name because we shouldn't take him seriously

Maybe we, the readers, are also getting worked?

Its possible.
But I can imagine that we are also to take him at face value

Perhaps she intended to segue into threats if intimidation or guilt-tripping didn't work.

...

>it's a real life phenomenon, for some reason people tend to think it's "better" to be fucked over by someone who's honest about it rather than a deceiver, despite that fact you're still getting it in the ass. it's like a retarded form of saving face.

Because it is. If your choice is between dealing with an honest enemy and a craven liar, choose the relatively honest enemy. Easier to deal with their shit.

John Silver also had some redeeming characteristics insofar as he preferred diplomacy over murder (not that he wouldn't use murder if he thought it was most practical), he was good for his word, and had a soft spot for kids rather than a sharp piece of steel.

Probably not. The Uncanny Vally is as old as humanity its self. Weird jerky movements, and lifeless wooden eyes was probably killing boners for a Melania before realdoll got into the business.

Maybe they thought she'd intimidate him. Shartes have a reputation for cowardice, don't they?

Only when things get uncomfortable. And the king looks rather comfortable playing strip board games with his beautiful hologram.

You guys are thick. Rilursa isn't there to chew him out or ask him for compensation, she's trying to find out whether Sharteshane's rulers are involved in the Silver situation, and if it turns out they aren't, she'd like to know whether they'd be willing to join forces against the Alds... which they aren't. Asking directly would, of course, be incredibly undiplomatic, so acting and feigning ignorance is preferred.

I'm also convinced she knows all too well that the king has no actual say in these matters. Which is why Beadman is there to accompany him. She's mostly just going through the formalities, and the king is smart enough to play stupid.

She's the queen's sister. This whole affair with Delicieu's silver is obviously top secret, so who better to send than family?