Wandering Witch #06 — Everyone is Evil But Teenage Girls

November 6th, 2020

 

The land of petty, spiteful jackasses.

Impressions:

Like Dororo, I keep waiting for the episode from this show that actually hits the right notes so I can point to it and say "This. This is what the entire damn thing should have been like." That didn't happen. We got a rehash of the girl with a crush on her, but Elaina's now reluctant to sleep with her and spend any time at all babysitting her, I guess. Does that count as progression? It's the first time she's rejected hero worship after all. Character growth! Instead, we get one of the corny "nobody can lie" episodes that things like Buffy or Supernatural always use to force out whatever the secret of the season was. Not for any real reason. The king doesn't like liars! Cause, you know… lying bad! Except lying good because everybody is at their core an evil person unless they're a teenage girl. Now that's nuanced social commentary! 

Except this somehow managed to be even worse than those because there was no deep dark secret, everybody except the trio of squealing teenagers turns out to be some manner of petty ass, and their big plan for getting around not being able to lie was… to lie. Seriously. The workaround was to write things that were true, and then use them in situations where they were untrue, falsely presenting them as fact. You're unable to tell lies of omission, and forced to be overly truthful even volunteering unasked for qualifications, but holding up a "no" sign that you wrote in response to a different question when the answer is "yes" isn't lying. Also, it's not even clear why they had to lie. What was keeping them from just flying over the walls or fireballing a guard in the face? They had zero compunctions about doing so as soon as they got past that guard, but how else were they going to show how 'clever' they were!

 

Posted in Elaina | 3 Comments »

3 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Frank says:
    November 6, 2020 at 4:45 pm

    They aren’t going to siege a castle and run in guns blazing just to destroy a sword that would fix everything. Imagine all the colateral damage if they did that (both lives and also structures) you exaggerate.

    Regarding the signs, they even explained (although it was only needed for those like you that pay no attention to details) that as long as the signs didn’t have any lies, they could actually write them down. That was the ingenious part for themselves, they split everything in different boards that in single mode they are technical truths, all they had to do was to use the right boards in the correct order to go around the spell effects of the sword.

    • Aroduc says:
      November 11, 2020 at 12:55 pm

      “They aren’t going to do the exact thing that they ended up doing.”

      “They can intentionally lie as long as they pre-planned their lying.”

      Yeeeeeah. No.

  • catsb says:
    December 19, 2020 at 7:37 am

    What I extra liked was how the king did not have his mind changed by some flaw in his ideology being exposed, like maybe a trusted vizier working against him despite being unable to lie. no, he just had his ass kicked and the sword taken from him so he has to say sorry. would not be surprised if he got assassinated by some people lying.

    as you said everything in the country was more or less fine, instead of lying people kept their mouth shut and otherwise the benefits seem to outweigh the cost. To truly show the downside you would need a kino no tabi type situation where everyone lives far from each other (like in the country of mind readers) no one is falling in love,etc. There is also the question of levels of jackassness, if everyone is such a jackass that not lying would destroy the whole country then maybe those people should not be united as a country in the first place.