I agree with you here. I think Burlew enjoys dicking around his fanbase more then Clevinger does.

at this point I dont really care what V's gender is. It would just be nice considering english lacks neutred pronouns for sentient beings

I interpreted V's darker-colored kids as evidence that s/he and his/her partner were of the same gender, and they both adopted.

Of course, that's just wild speculation on my part and I could easily be wrong. Would at least help to explain the "parent / other parent" thing, though.

So, if the dragon succeeds at this plan as all signs are pointing out, would it count as fridging?

Yes, yes it would. But he won't, unless he does.

Well right now it fits this trope, all thats to remain is whether its what will happen or what its subverting

So, I just realized something that kind of pisses me off. The next page will probably have nothing to do with V or his kids. At best it'll leave on some sort of cliffhanger with V deciding whether to accept the imp's help or not, but more likely the next update will be Durkon and Elan.

There are two things that piss me off.

1 - He's making a living off of this outstanding comic that has slowed to an absolute crawl, and as I have said in the past, seriously man, this goes above and beyond just being sick. He just got lazy.

2 - http://pics.livejournal.com/miraigen/pic/000e9asw
THAT pisses me off too.

mine connects fine

and I understand the infrequent updates. But you cant really blame the guy for server issues, or atleast not much

Really I'd say the reverse, server issues are totally his fault. He needs to either prune the forums which are overgrown, or get a new server. The random updates caused by chronic illness aren't really his fault though.

I agree, the server issues are pretty bad. Once or twice when a new episode had just gone up, I saw a message saying the forums had to be switched off temporarily to reduce the bandwidth strain specifically to allow reading said episode. When that happens regularly enough that you have to set up a system message for it it's absolutely time to upgrade. I can only imagine there's a good financial reason for it.

"Slowing to a crawl" though, I don't know. It would be interesting to watch the updates for a month or so and work out how many new episodes we're getting on average. I bet it's still two or maybe even three a week. He updates in spurts; now personally if I regularly made three comics at once, I'd use two to build a buffer, but that's his business and either way's fine.

No you want to talk about a comic that's slowed to a crawl, you gotta talk about Goblins. That one even updates sort of regularly now, but the pacing is absolutely terrible and there needs to be less "look at this awesome magical effect, here, I'll draw a panel for every second it goes on" and more getting on with it already.

There are several ways in which that term can be used, many of which would probably apply. At least a couple of them depend on which of V / V's spouse are male or female.

The straight-up original definition from the Women in Refrigerators site is simply that any time a woman gets killed/depowered/raped/etc. in a comic book, it counts. No special circumstances, no measure of plot relevance, just woman character + dead/raped/depowered/other = Woman in Refrigerator. The banality of the trope is the entire point, because otherwise you inevitably get sucked into a silly-ass argument as to why in this case see this character totally had to be murdered or this character's rape was completely different which ultimately ends up obscuring the fact that for whatever totally and unarguably great reason there is for doing it every single time, one way or another a whole lot of women end up getting killed/raped/depowered/etc. in comic books.

From there you can argue that this or that instance is a particularly awful or standout version of the trope - a lot of people take their working definition of the term from the naming incident of Kyle Rayner's girlfriend being actually chopped up and put in a damn fridge, to be something more in the line of especially ghastly uses of murder/depowering/rape on women. Some people will further/alternately use it in the sense of the classic "Perpetrate horrible action X on female Y to give hero Z an excuse to go be a Heroic Badass." It's in this last area where you could hypothetically get into a gender-neutral definition as the "kill X to motivate Y" would presumably still be an annoying cliche even if it were some dude getting murdered to further some lady's Vengeful Crusade of Vengeance. We wouldn't know because I don't think that's, like, actually happened anywhere in the entire history of fiction? But it could! (Well, there's probably a story or two where a woman's kids getting killed in similar fashion. That sounds like the sort of thing that like, Lifetime Movies would feed into the assembly line.)

EDIT: Incidentally as we've hit one of the periodic gaps between OOTS updates and given this thread's at 400+ now, I'm gonna go ahead and close and we can restart this once Burlew gets over his bout of not-doin'-nuthin'.

Goblins just got too godawfully horrifying for me to want to keep up with it regardless. That shit with the shield, I don't even fucking know.