Accursed Dragon

"It's sad that elves just aren't 'special' enough anymore."

FFN#282 (2008/06/04)

 

 

The story gets half-decent after page ~730ish and tanks again around page ~1100ish. Probably not the greatest claim to fame.

 

Accursed Dragon came out strong with its nominal protagonist boasting several cameos on established webcomics. Unfortunately it launched in 2008, coinciding with DnD 4E's Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic. Having glanced at and discounted it back then, I gave it another chance now. I can't honestly recommend its sword&sorcery routine, but it is rather informative of its time: poorly drawn until recently and not particularly artistic now, overblown, disjointed power fantasy copied and pasted from fads.

In terms of specialness inflation, starting with a half-dragon doesn't leave you much room for escalation. Before you even get a clear image of the land the story traverses, nondescript alternate dimensions set to invading the whole world - but lucky we still drink ale in bars. By Act 2 the heroes'/villains' very farts are already leveling mountains DBZ-style and pretty much everyone is a physical god in or out of disguise. Yet due to the very flatness this lack of contrast ensures, everything still plays like a lvl3 dungeon romp for 3-4 players, with level-scaled threats and convenient macguffins.

In terms of storytelling this comic repeats itself much like El Goonish Shive by fixating on the moment in every young adult novel where the plucky young heroine discovers THE POWER WAS INSIDE YOU ALL ALONG, and reiterating that moment character after character, chapter after chapter. And the solution to every problem is yet another new superpower. Worse yet, I hope I'm not spoiling too much by saying pretty much everyone has multiple personalities and rampant, virulent amnesia that would shame the laziest soap opera hacks. Amusingly though, little of this appears haphazard in retrospect, with some twists having been long foreshadowed. It appears rather a case of sheer pigheadedness, with the author playing through a blatantly infantile plot planned a decade in advance and refusing to revise it.

 

As those original plot threads wind down, Accursed Dragon's twists and scale showed brief promises of improvement. Sadly, it's far too deep into its mess of amnesiac multiple personalities to dig itself out now, and the little progress made in its last quarter has (per recent years' insanity) been derailed by introducing one pointless character after another as gratuitous homosexual love interests.

Write off another one.