I was hoping to save this for the debriefing, but since you insist...
I hate this comic, I really do. I thought for
sure summer would be my catch-up season. A quagmire like this I expected for stuff I have planned for PwP, not a bloody collage. I don't even know why it's so hard anymore. The ultimate irony, of course, is that TK's the one who concludes everything; I'm just the bridge right now. In any other circumstance, I probably would have given up.
But I always come back to this comment:
Finally, the Hacker becomes as epic as I imagined him being 3 years ago when we created him.
The Hacker had the potential to be one of the best community villains of DYOS, but by story's end he was an utter joke. Rather than cyber-warfare and demigod machinations, rather than playing to his
strengths, CG, once again, reduced him to a dime-a-dozen army general (subordinated to Wesker) whose talents were more character quirks rather than the nexus of his power. The climax on Wetickra followed the same tired pattern we saw with kulade, the Combine, the Enclave, what we will see with the Space Nazis and probably Mariko: the Big Bad has been on the wane for months and it's just waiting to see when he gets taken down. In spite of the strong start to this thread, in the end the Hacker was nothing special, if not eroded into an outright wuss.
Years ago, circa the discussion of revising the rules, lord_joakim suggested in a conversation with Dae and myself that the Hacker hide out on Xen as a compliment to CG, something I promised to do before the story was out. When I went to make that comic, I realized it was my last chance to salvage what had proven a mediocre main story, as well as give the villain a respectable persona. Was my intervention too tardy? It was a scramble, certainly; but I would much rather end this with a bang than a whimper, something no-one else seemed willing to do. Quality over quantity. It's a matter of narrative principle.
The comic
is coming. I can't thank TK enough for agreeing to take on the third section, else this would be even
longer. If the rest of you want to send pictures of characters talking on phones I'll throw 'em in with the supplementary copypasta; otherwise it's all up to me now.