Soul to Call Waiting

"Daintier, smarter, better dressed"

Rasputina - Antique High Heel Red Doll Shoes

 

 

A tenacious teenage traceuse joins a magical self-cutter, a hard-bitten mercenary who'll probably bite it in the last act to defend those more sympathetic, and a twenty-faced lying bitch who's too cute to criticize, all on a quest for demonic fog. Or maybe against demonic fog. I'm sure they'll figure it out eventually. Nah, screw all that, who needs plot when you've got lesbians?

I've actually mentioned Soul to Call a couple of times before, first for its demon-Apocalypse premise and second for its heroine's obligatory politically correct daddy issues. Unlike most good webcomics which only gradually grow into their potential through painstakingly amateurish fumbling, this one benefited from a forceful, memorable introduction of its world and core cast with well differentiated personalities and goals, not to mention unusually high-quality artwork. Too bad that in the intervening years it's degenerated into more of a case study in poor pacing.

As to why that is, the short answer's that the author got addicted to the woke-aid halfway through. It now advertises its pronouns. The long answer has more to do with marketability and profitability. Granted, those early chapters' quick pace carried the caveat of introducing too many phlebotina on rapid-fire, but these could have been more gradually fleshed out (demon types, rituals, etc.) afterwards. They were not. Soul to Call peaked back in 2017 shortly before page 400-ish with the resolution of its first boss fight. (Mind spoilers if you click forward or back.)

 

It spent the next ~300 pages mired in interpersonal drama, ditching the urban decay, improvised weapons and monster-dodging in favor of an all-human inhabited area expanding a bit on the core cast's backstories and introducing their party's bard. As character development goes, this was a necessary step and well-timed breather... until it started dragging... and dragging... repurposing two chapters to lament racism against colored(-eyed) people and to introduce purposeless bit players whose plot relevance could've been discharged in one page if not for the score of pages they needed to devote to BEING HOMOSEXUAL which is obviously highly relevant in a post-apocalyptic demonic drama.

Every professional author is always on the lookout for new ways to choke more filler down the audience's throat, whether to pad out word counts or run time or stall on a high note while those Patreon subscriptions keep trickling in. Florid descriptions or digressive subplots are time-honored favorites (see Dickens) as are romantic/sexual interludes. Movies have their lengthy establishing shots or Rashomony reiterations and flashbacks. In video games it's forcing reloads and damage sponge mobs. In superhero comics you can easily burn page after page through frame-by-frame pugilism. The current era of hashtag mobs merely offers a variation upon that theme: posturing as socially conscious by reiterating the endlessly reiterated stock moral high grounds like "prejudice is bad" with all the parochial ingenuousness of a 1990 "drugs are bad" Very Special Episode.

With Soul to Call having returned to advancing its action for a hundred pages to whet its audience's faltering appetite, I'd give even odds it might now spend another three hundred and four years watching chicks holding hands in the hallowed name of "representation" for lesbians, the neuroatypical and homeless ponies.

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