Rich Morris' Comics - YAFGC and The ComixBlog

Is it just me, or could Astrid be Warduke's little sister?

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/alumni/20060414a

No, but maybe his elder sister, who whups his ass frequently.

By any chance is she rubbing anyone else the wrong way? I don't know what it is, usually seeing someone resisting an arranged marriage they have no interest in is something I endorse, especially since the parents seem so unpleasant and she's voiced why she's against it.

I wonder why her father does that. Shouldn't he expect her resistance?

It's customary? Marriage was been, for a good part of its history, a property and/or political contract between two families. And given that the idea of marriage for love (or more broadly, to serve the purposes of the couple actually being wed rather than those of the greater family/community) is very recent, Astrid's father being angered by his daughter's willfulness makes perfect sense.

(As a more general rule, many parents feel that their children have a certain obligation to live their lives in a way that suits the parent's needs. Astrid's father is a fairly stereotypical version of this, but I used to work with children [and their parents] and I have encountered MUCH worse.)

And timemonkey, Astrid rubs me the wrong way, too. Mainly, I think because she comes of as being vicious and predatory out of having something to prove. While her Dragon-hunting may have rescued her kingdom at some point, now she comes across as whacking innocent creatures out of being attached to a role that gives her more personal power than that of Harald Mousebane's wife. In short, the dragons come off as being victimized in the name of Astrid's ambitions.

Well...
Women were forced in marriages when their wife and child bearing potential was their only value. Astrid is a warrior. Maybe her father would have pushed a son too, but he should know that when people have alternatives (and a seasoned dragon slayer definitely does, no matter their gender) they do not succub to pressure so easily.
As for liking her or not, i feel i know too little to have an answer. She is killing dragons without an emminent need for doing so, true, but her culture is properly a bloodthirsty one -come on, they have bride snatching squads!

They? As near as I can tell, Eirik happens to have a Brute Squad on hand. They could simply be professional bounty hunters for all we know. I don't think that it qualifies (yet) as the entire society customarily using abduction to ensure that shotgun weddings go off without a hitch. (And yes, I know that it was normally the man who was on the wrong end of the shotgun.)

And I don't think that this is entirely about the idea that Astrid's only value as a wife is being barefoot and pregnant. She can't remain a Dragonhunter forever. Unless she can become Jarl, she'll need a family to support her at some point.

Part of it is that the assumption that Women Can Only Marry Happily For Love while Men Will Marry Anything In A Skirt isn't founded yet. We don't know that Harald is an abusive man, or even all that lusty - we simply know that Astrid doesn't want to be married to him. Personally - given their nicknames, I think that Harald would come out much the worse off, if he and Astrid were forcibly wed. She'd likely take her frustrations out on him at every opportunity.

It IS early in the arc to know much about any of the new characters - except Eirik - he's drawn bad, and likely is - so perhaps Astrid will come across as less abrasive once she has a few more appearances under her belt.

Suddenly, I'm wondering if one of them is a master fencer, another is a half-giant, and the third overly impressed with his own intelligence.

Oh Gods, does that cast Fang as the DPR?

And my opinion of her just dropped much farther.

No, no... this is going to be good. I want to see how Mr. Morris plays this one out. I haven't seen a good mistaken identity riff in ages, and I want to see how he has Astrid pull this off.

Miss congeniality is obviously not her primary goal...

:snicker:

Given Astrid's penchant for bearded axes, I couldn't NOT think of the old diddy:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
Gave her momma 40 whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her daddy 41

The thought of seeing Astrid trying to cope with Elegrost's court... the possibilities or disaster.. ugh.

It depends. Logically speaking, Astrid's attempt at deception should be found out within the first five minutes. There are a lot of stars that need to be in alignment for someone to pull off being someone else, and some of them are already out of whack. So I suspect that we're in for an entertaining comedy of errors.

I think Rich is giving us the inverse of The Unnoticeable Servant. For those who don't know that shtick from British period mysteries, it works on the simple premise that people tend to treat servants as furniture, and really notice them only when they're in the way.

Apparently, it works the same way for Nobles.