Ch7 Pg48 HIRES

mike stone

You aren't treating Thistle as a victim here. She has power, and demonstrated it one page ago. She's facing a serious threat, and she's having to make uncomfortable choices without time to think, but that's what protagonists do. She has agency and the means to defend herself. At the moment, the helpless victim is Brent, trapped under a rock and bleeding from the hole bitten out of his arm. He can't turn the situation around and be in charge again. Thistle can. Even if we hadn't already seen the fight from another angle, the question driving suspense would be, "how will Thistle regain the upper hand?" not "how badly will she be victimized?"

Stein

Maybe I'm special, but I wouldn't need a content warning for this. Maybe others do, I wouldn't presume. To be honest, most of the people who actually think about content warnings and stuff like that are people that usually don't portray too graphic stuff in the first place - at least from my perspective (although I've noticed that in the comments of such places, some people are grateful). But then again, I'm not American and I know that in the US, content warnings get used a lot, so I don't know how valuable my input is. Finally, I thought this was a good scene - not at all a clickbait one, as there is literally nothing unnecessary - we know she falls and we know that there is a struggle.

I meant to post yesterday, but got distracted. Here's what I have to say: I think the only way it would be taken as an emotional grab or difficult content is if someone came in cold and this was the first page they saw. Hopefully they would have the wherewithal to check the other pages, and get context for what's going on. We know from the start of the comic, and the surrounding pages, that Thistle is very much not a victim here - if anyone is a victim in this scenario, it's actually Brent (poor guy seems to be a frequent target!) Thistle is in the middle of a fight, which until she was tackled she was winning! Within the past few pages she fireball-torched someone's head. So with proper context involved? I don't think it should be an issue at all. It's a mercenary in the middle of a scuffle. Without context, it could be seen as an assault, but surrounding pages should quickly resolve that.

Renee

Lastly, this scene has narriative value in that we finally get to see Thistles face and get a better understanding of why everyone thinks she's a monster, and by extension why she's so afraid all the time. When people think of cave elves they instantly see a scene like this, with brutes who eat miners, go about half-naked covered in body paint, attacking everyone they see, and speaking a language no one understands. I personally think that a content warning here would be immersion-breaking, especially when reading the entire chapter at once

Renee

I don't know how anyone can see this as a cheap emotional grab. For once, since this is a flashback the audience already knows in the abstract what happened. Also, Thistles job is inherently dangerous and puts her at higher risk for these kind of situations. It's not as if she's out in the city going for a stroll and out popped this cave elf