Discussion Webcomic / Inverloch

"Only angry furries get mad at this" is... not the best counter-argument. In fact it's pretty terrible and ad hominem.

The reason people call it a Broken Aesop is there are very few representatives of a race that get persecuted by people thinking they're Always Chaotic Evil, and the main person who proves that they're not like that (basically everyone "Acheron" meets during the comic makes a point of saying how he's "not like other da'kor") is not actually one of them, and in fact the real Acheron turns out to be a villain.

So yes, while the author definitely intended for the elves to be dicks, and the da'kor to not be a villain race, it's not unreasonable for people to think she made a misstep in showing that, nor is it "deliberately missing the point." It's getting the point, but thinking she didn't do the best job actually laying it out.

It wasn't my only counter-argument, but I do remember a lot of furries really raging at this comic when they learned the lead was not technically an anthro. Like they'd been personally betrayed into thinking they were reading a furry comic and because Acheron wasn't "really" a Da'kor, that meant the author hated furries and anthros and Da'kor. Even though any sane person would be able to tell that wasn't the case.

Anyway, it's not a Broken Aesop. The real Acheron is not a "villain", he's being manipulated by an actual human villain and is shown to be angry about what happened to him, but not willing to be violent and kill. He's what a sane person would call a "tragic character". This stuff is pretty clear. Honestly, by the end of the first chapter, I still remember a lot of people already guessing the plot twist or just assuming Kayndar was "turned into a Da'kor". It seems like people are trying to deliberately paint the storyline as showing all Da'kor as mean and evil when we already know they're not - not just because of Acheron, but because of the other Da'kor we saw that raised him kindly and continued to treat him as one of their own even though they knew he wasn't really a Da'kor.

Even so, the Da'kor are not happy fluffy fun people - they do have a different culture with different values and when people point out that Acheron is not acting like one of them, they don't just mean "Oh, you're not a violent feral maniac! I see!", they also mean that he literally does not act like he was born and raised amongst the Da'kor. I mean, this IS why so many readers guessed the plot twist given the setup of the story.

Fine, but not every person who thinks the plot twist created Unfortunate Implications is a furry or stupid.

He's being manipulated, but he's not exactly blameless. He's a lot nicer than Raul is and doesn't want to kill anyone, but he does nearly kill Lei'ella and he has the willpower to argue with Raul, refuse his order to finish Lei'ella off, and assent to the bodyswitch in the first place. He's also willing to use force against people trying to stop him. And his agenda is something the protagonists are very much trying to stop, as much as his reasons for hating elves are understandable and sympathetic, so he's still at least an Anti-Villain.

It's true that there are some quite nice Da'kor shown (Acheron's mom, uncle, and old storytelling friend). Also, one reason the other Da'kor would treat Kayn'dar kindly is because he's in a body that they expect their friend/family member to reinhabit, so even if the other villagers were inclined to abuse an elf, they wouldn't physically harm him because of the body he's in.

But there's a huge swath of the comic between Acheron leaving the village and returning to it, and during that time everyone is Fantastically Racist against da'kor when their only exposure has been (at best) to gladiator slaves and violent guards who put human's heads on pikes. And during that time, the only Da'kor who's there to speak out against the prejudice and demonstrate the goodness of Da'kor is not actually one. If a major aesop of the story is that prejudice is bad, and the most visible and vocal representative of the persecuted group is a fake, some people are going to think that it was badly-handled and it at least qualifies for Unfortunate Implications on the YMMV page.

The problem is, you're not supposed just think the only reason Da'kor are good is because Acheron is good. The Unfortunate Implications come from wildly missing the point of the story. We already know by the end that the Da'kor are far more multi-faceted and all the races have problems that lead to them conflicting. Simply showing that Acheron isn't actually a Da'kor does not create that implication just because some people seem to think the story is using him as the sole example.

And for that matter, whether the Da'kor hate other races is irrelevant - they have a pretty good reason to not trust outsiders. The point I was making was that we know from the inside that they're not bloody, thoughtless savages and Acheron being an elf doesn't suddenly mean he was the only "nice" Da'kor. Here's the thing, just because Not!Acheron looks like a Da'kor, doesn't mean they don't know he isn't one. If they were evil and mean, they'd have kept him chained up and hidden to prevent him from stopping Fake!Acheron. As it is, they ended up letting Fake!Acheron go on the very journey that undid all the planning because in reality, they knew what was happening was wrong.

It's what makes Acheron's story tragic, not an Unfortunate Implication that only non-Da'kor are nice people and Da'kor are mean bloody savages and villains and the only reason Real!Kayndar was evil (not really) was because he was a big mean nasty Da'kor. It's why I kept zapping the entry - you have to bend over backwards to get the wrong message from the story. There's Unfortunate Implications, and there's just raging against the ending.