Quote:
Originally Posted by Lithp
What, exactly, do people mean when they say that 8-Bit Theater is anticlimactic?
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That's not obvious? To me that's as obvious as the reason why people call it a sprite comic..
I'm pretty sure an anti-climax is like setting up a line of dominos, knocking them down, and right before the final one falls you snatch it up out of the way or something else happens to it besides it being knocked down as expected by the other dominos (like if a cat runs in the room and knocks it over, etc). 8-bit does this kind of thing many times..That or it's when you expect something epic to happen to solve a conflict and something rather unepic does it. I suppose tho anti-climax is more than just basic unpredictability, deus ex machina and non-sequitors. I think to be well done the anti-climax has to make relative sense. Like for example the White Mages vs Chaos, that's not that random, WM has wanted to stop Chaos since the comic started. We just didn't expect it because the convention in stories is to have the heroes we've been following for the past 10 years save the day.
I'm just saying what I think an anti-climax is.. I guess I'll give examples of when I think it happens in 8-bit:
Like the "fight" with Astos, the whole time you think "Oh an epic battle.." and he succumbs to a heart attack. Chaos's defeat is a giant anti-climax set up from the early days of the comic. The quest from the God of Dragons Bahamut was to find a rat tail, double anti-climactic because it had no useful magical properties to the LWs, it was just to help Big B and Matoya get freaky. The pirates they're planning to ambush all collapse from scurvy. And so on and so on.
The writing doesn't do this ALL the time, Kary's defeat is via a big fight w/ the Light Warriors. Drizz'l loses via stabbity death as expected. The variety keeps the comic relatively unpredictable, if every encounter was purely anti-climactic then it might loose a bit of its oomph (I mean, is anti-climax really anti-climax if you expect it to happen all the time?)