Week 319! (Page 476 Script)

THIS MARKS PAYMENT FOR THE WEEK OF 9/13-9/19.

Third and final script update for the month of September, it's for page 476.

Didn't really touch on it in the previous update post, but page 475 also ends in Kale looking to be in some sort of contemplation as Fox Kale's anger built and Lucy further gave her logical rundown on the situation. That was leading into this page where... well, Kale basically lays out what his thought process has been on these revelations as well as Fox Kale's reaction to them, albeit brief.

I debated for a while on how to handle this, because it would've been easier and more typical to have this become yet another Devil's Advocate back-and-forth argument between Kale and Fox Kale, with Kale taking the hypothetical side of the conspiracy group, trying to sort out their logic and motives and morals in all this. But when I thought about everything that Kale and Fox Kale have discussed and argued about and experienced together so far in the comic... I guess it didn't really make sense to just make Kale the straight-up Devil's Advocate for the group, at least not entirely.

At this point Kale and Fox Kale have talked quite a bit about how they feel about what happened to them and how to deal with it, and they've come to a lot of tenuous agreements and concession with each other during the course of the comic. At this point, KAle arguing the case of the conspiracy group, even if only to try and reason and figure out if these people's motivations and morals and beliefs and stuff, wouldn't really make a lot of sense to do with his fox self. There's no real arguing for the group with Fox Kale in the slightest, even hypothetically, and it's not like Kale would genuinely agree that what they did to them was right. Even if he reasoned out that the group viewed themselves as moral, and even in the off-chance Kale might even consider that maybe furries SHOULD become humans again, arguing that with Fox Kale wouldn't lead anywhere and would just sort of end up in the same circle of conflicting ideals and disagreements that's been pretty common up to this point.

Instead I went for a more introspective and contemplative direction for Kale. For one, I think it makes a lot of sense considering his 'role' inside his head: the Ego. Fox Kale's reaction, as per usual, is one of becoming enraged, overloading on raw emotion as an instinct-driven Id/Shadow would be. On the other hand, the Ego is supposed to be simultaneously the mediator and the conscious cognitive aspect of the mind. If Fox Kale's reaction is to further indulge in emotion, it makes sense for Kale to indulge in reason. Instead of having Kale try to reason this out with Fox Kale, he's reasoning it out by himself.

Additionally, doing it this way prevents a back-and-forth of speculation and instead just tells you straight-up it would all just be speculation. None of these characters WOULD know the genuine motivations and ideologies of the conspiracy group; even everything Lucy has said thus far has been deductions and assumptions, not confirmations. No matter how much any of them argued, there wouldn't be a conclusion made about what the real answer was, which would maybe be a bit of a waste of time. Instead, just having Kale present the questions of whether it's moral or not, whether it's viable or not, whether it's right or not to turn everyone back into humans does the job of putting those questions out there without also endlessly throwing out all the possible answers out there and not having a real conclusion.

Basically, Kale has to think to himself about the possibilities of the group being right or wrong on what they plan to do, comes to the conclusion that they really don't know at all, but what they DO know is that these people did something awful to him and are planning to do even worse very soon, and even if their plans really were for the objective benefit of everyone, that doesn't change what they do know and what has been done to them, and it can certainly speak to the unsavory character of the conspiracy group. Thus, Kale comes to the conclusion that would've arisen in any case: he still wants to stop this group from doing this to anyone else.