The Tournament of Power: Round 3

The Battle Royale was over, and Ris had somehow emerged victorious.  Once again, we found ourselves at Abbadon's mercy as a new format swept the rounds:  TEAM BATTLE.

Ris was paired off with Kasha, a warrior princess who sought the prize to free her people from Solomon's grip.  Against them, a team of Li Feitian, an astronaut-turned-symbiotic-cyborg with her mech suit's AI, and Aybeatee, a (mostly) gentle giant who wished only to protect his birds.  

This was by far the hardest plot to conceive and commit to.  Coming off of my two previous rounds I wanted to write something that could still make use of my strengths without explicitly following a formula that ends with a splash page of a big punch.  I had spoken a lot with my opponents to clarify details and personalities for their respective characters, and it was those conversations that planted to seed for the theme I wanted to build the story around:  POWER, and what it means to possess or pursue it.  

Trying to tie in events from previous rounds, we conceived of a plot that philosophically explored what brought the characters to the tournament and hinted at Solomon's "perverse" power, before the big Act 2 turn that actually REVEALED what those powers start to look like.   Through it all, Li sort of accidentally emerged as the "main" character of our arc.

Despite days of hand-wringing and anxiousness, I had at least settled on a plot and had my thumbs serviceably roughed, but the whole round still felt wrong...

I chalked my concerns up to usual bouts of doubt and self-loathing, and pushed through with the idea anyway.  The day came and after some hasty coordination to smooth the transition between our respective halves of the story, our comic was complete.

It quickly became apparent to me that I had fucked up.  Our opponents had an absolutely inspired comic.  They had divided the workload to create a split narrative: the story began via one artist before the reader would be prompted to switch to the other artist to follow the story from the other party's perspective.  On top of that, the story was a much more light-hearted and humorous affair, while still being faithful to the characters and their relationships.  They referenced previous events with great fidelity and wrote an arc that my adherence to "format and tradition" prevented me from even conceiving.  And of course, at least half of theirs was in full color.  Gods damn me for my inability to color.  

The audience poll for who should advance quickly favored our opponents, and I could see the writing on the wall before the decision ever dropped.  Sure enough, the call came through and I had failed, taking another competitor down with me.

In retrospect there were A LOT of things I didn't like about Round 3, even before I found out that I had beefed it.  I don't think I wrote ANY of my rounds in particularly compelling fashion, but this one was a huge whiff.   For all of the props I seemed to get for my "technical skills" (I should remind everyone here that I suck at color: a pretty rudimentary element of art), I felt that this round I relied too heavily on referencing models for those #epic splash pages.  Kasha did excellently with what I gave her, but I still felt as though I had steamrolled her with my ideas instead of deliberately leaning in to the "team" dynamic as our opponents had.

All in all, it was a tremendous disappointment to lose the way I did, and to have caused the elimination of someone else in the process.  I wish I could say that I'm a better person than this, but I'm afraid I can't really feel "proud" of work that lost.   I just think it kinda sucks.