Irregular Webcomic! #26

2011-11-29 Rerun commentary: The Space theme really makes no sense early on. Here's some more utterly random mixing with Star Wars. This scene in the movie of course involves the old Obi-Wan, but I only had a minifigure for the young Obi-Wan from the prequels, so I just used that.

In this strip we learn the name of one of the Space characters for the first time. Paris is the name of the corresponding character in my real life space campaign. Paris was played by a female player, who was studying for a Ph.D. in Old Norse literature. As such, she was very erudite in the ways of Viking sagas, as well as many other ancient works of literature from across the European world. She chose the name "Paris" for her spaceship pilot character after the son of Priam, king of Troy, who, according to myth, precipitated the Trojan War by stealing away Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. This action led to the famous launching of a thousand ships to wage long and bloody war on Troy, and a whole bunch of other stuff, which you should read about in Homer's epic narrative poems The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Anyway, you may gather that the player's intention was that Paris be a male. Unfortunately, I and the rest of my players didn't get the connection and, rather stupidly and embarrassingly, assumed that Paris the spaceship pilot was female. It was only several adventures into the campaign that a disambiguating circumstance arose and Paris's player was dumbfounded when she discovered that we all thought Paris was a woman. (It may have been when I painted a miniature to add to the ones we already had for the other characters*, and chose an Adepta Sororitas Battle Sister miniature from Games Workshop...)

It would have been quite within her rights to insist that Paris was male and that we all adjust our mental pictures, but the player decided it was actually just easier to go with the majority and treat Paris as female from then on.

Anyway, the end result is that Paris in the comic is female, even though she is named after Paris of Troy.

* This slightly contradicts the rerun commentary for #17, but only slightly. We had most of the gaming miniatures when we started playing the game, but I painted some new ones during the first few adventures.