September 19th, 2017
19 Sept 2017 · page 733 of 1306
Cast: Harriet Barber, Jack O'Malley, Ms Acedia
Comments (68)
Events
ThoughtBubble
14 Nov 2026 – 15 Nov 2026
Harrogate Convention Centre
Manchester Megacon
31 Jul 2027 – 1 Aug 2027
Manchester Central
Mal still terrified of that basement in panel 4. What horrific things are we going to see happen that he is still scared of all these years later?
Also we haven't heard Mal speak during this flashback at all. Is he aware that Harry is there with him?
Oh no poor Mal! He knows what is coming!
He already knows what's going to happen. Running won't help.
Someone doesn't look too swell right now
Actually, it's quite easy to say and quite common.
Wow. Acedia's ever-present smile is beyond creepy at this point. She's far more calculating than I'd given her credit for, although I agree with comments from a few pages ago that truly lazy people are some of the most ingenious, in order to come up with ways to ultimately make less work for themselves. But while the other Deadlies are evil (well, duh), they seem a bit one-note, aside from Luxuria - this feels far more twisted and wrong than the fairly straightforward behavior of the ones already captured.
(Caveat: I could be biased as a mother, however. Evil deliberately done to children is worse than almost anything else, IMO.)
Instead of a resting bitch face the bitch has a resting, er, unbitch face.
Your instincts are modern though completely understandable and not without parallel in the period of this story.
Victorian mothers knew that many, often most, of their children would not live to adulthood. Far more valuable were the grown ones who might do well enough to assist their siblings, produce grandchildren and maybe even support their aged parents.
A lot of the seemingly callous attitudes to children pre modern medicine look different when you remember that in many places a child was more likely to die young than not. Families were consequently large and children's lives cheap.
...and then look at the loss of lives in WW1 and the Spanish Flu and realise they hurt even more than they would today.
Excellent point, I do forget that sometimes when reading period lit (and earlier). Although I would still argue a difference in historical views on natural death (or hell, even workhouse death), and death caused through a deliberate act of violence on a child (e.g. the outrage of the knights in Henry V, when the French murder the boys behind the English lines at Agincourt, innocents who, according to the laws of honor, should have been untouchable.)
Um, besides what you said, why are you guys taking about death at all? Acedia's not killing him, she's, like, corrupting him to evil to do her nefarious bidding to release the forces of darkness into the world. I feel like corrupting young children to evil like that was probably always fairly outrageous, although examples aren't really coming to mind at the moment (all I can think of is Dickens...).
Because we're nerds.
Haha, I was thinking recently about how I'd describe the Widdershins comment section: "Over-analyzing. Tangents. Over-analyzing tangents."
I do love me some tangential overanalysis.
Logically she should have killed him - this is Mal's recollection of her (lucky for him 'though I doubt he sees it that way) mistake.
Casual, even deliberate cruelty to children was not regarded in the same light as we would now - consider the Water Babies.
"Logically she should have killed him"... like, after she used him to release all the Sins? Actually, how do we know she wasn't planning to do that, but he just escaped before she managed to get that done... Wow, good thing she's not good at getting things done very quickly.
No, as soon as she got him alone. Even if that's a lethal crcle a knife would be quicker.
Why? See: [http://www.widdershinscomic...](http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/january-15th-2016/ "http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/january-15th-2016/")
Nb: I already posted that link below.
Please refer to Emily's reply to your comment below... the page to which you refer is prior to Gran Isabelle's binding, which changed the equation.
I am a little confused. You seem to imply that Acedia wants to be posessed by Sloth - Sloth might well wish to disrupt the binding but Ms Acedia effectively ceases to be anything but a puppet at that moment - for her releasing Sloth is something between slavery and suicide.
She is powerful in her own right but in allowing Mal to live she loses her own agency and once more falls under the influence eventually releasing Sloth as we have seen.
I'm not sure that Acedia is really a conduit for Sloth anymore - she seems to be working to forward Luxuria's plans simply because she wants to. When we saw Mr. Gula in Piece of Cake and earlier in this chapter, he was acting as a henchman for Gluttony, but not being possessed by it as far as I could tell. If that's the case, then freeing Sloth wouldn't do anything to her.
>eventually releasing Sloth as we have seen.
She wasn't the one who released it, though - Ms. Fairbairn had the idea, and Ben did the actual summoning. Acedia wasn't anywhere around.
Quite right. Lux came up with the plan to have seven people to use as conduits/offerings for the Deadlies (I don't know that they were necessarily meant to be "possessed" by the Deadlies). But somehow Ms Acedia got on board with this plan and is trying to carry it out on her own. We do not know the clear details of her motivation. But we can gather that she does not plan on simply being possessed or used as a conduit for Sloth, she's going for the big picture -- to release all Seven Deadlies in Widdershins.
But if he died, mightn't there just be a new witch who would come along after him?
If she can keep him alive, but somehow ensure that he never fulfills his destiny as the Widdershins witch, then they're golden.
=== Logically she should have killed him ===
Why?? O.o
What is all this talk of evil? Ms Acedia seeks to throw off the restrictive chains of a repressive oligarchy so that humanity can attain true self-fulfillment, self-gratification and self-realization free from the arbitrary and self-serving rules of so called 'morality'. She's almost a saint I tell you!
=== saint ===
:)
It reminds me...
While reading this BD I am recalling all the time one of my fav poems of Vadim Shefner :)
Sorry, I'll write it here in Russian, but I'll try to translate it below.
В грехах мы все,
Как цветы в росе,
Святых между нами нет.
И если ты свят, то ты мне не брат,
Не друг мне и не сосед.
Я был в беде, как рыба в воде
И понял закон простой:
Там грешник приходит на помощь, где
Отвёртывается святой.
We all are [sinful] covered with sins As flowers with dew, There are no saints among us. An if you are saint [think you are or pretend to be], Then you are not a brother to me, Nor friend, neither neighbour. I was deep in adversities [~was drowning in a sea of adversities] Like a fish in water And then learn a simple [prime] rule: Where a common sinner shall help you, A "saint" will turn away.
(But this applies to the sinners, not sins, especially not to Deadlies.)
Interesting, I didn't know that Jaegers had reversed morality...
She is the one I want to see go down. Poor O'Malley!
so. confused. is this really something that happened in the past, or is acedia taking present-day mal (in a dream state where he's childlike) to a metaphorical anchor in order to achieve some new as-yet-unrealized goal?
I'm 99% certain that this is the memory of the event that so traumatized Mal that he tried to avoid returning to Widdershins. I believe that it will be as accurate as possible given the limitations of human memory (which is frequently not as reliable as we intuitively believe it to be). As such memory Acedia will be unable to interact with Harry or adult Mal since only she and child Mal were actually there at the time this happened.
I would be extremely surprised if current Acedia is even aware the adult Mal and Harry are in this memory, although I can't rule out Sloth dragging her into this memory trap as well. I haven't sen any evidence of that having happened and I am not sure why Sloth would do that, but I don't know any reason why it couldn't do it. If it does I would expect her to be bound by the same rules of not being able to interact with memory Acedia or child Mal since what those two are doing has already happened.
I think it's something that really happened to Mal twenty years ago. Adult Mal (along with Harry) is reliving the memory while in Sloth Sleep.
The only useful thing you can do when trapped in/reviewing your own memory is analyse. In someone else's memory; read on then analyse.
I assume Ms Acedia was uncertain at the time or the connection with Sloth was weak as the logical action for her was murder; we know she's capable of at least attempting it. Any messing about with magic or other mind-alteration always leaves open the remote possibility of repair/recovery and the later showdown we have been reading in this chapter.
Perhaps the prospect of digging a grave beneath a basement floor implied too much hard work.
Her goal is to release the rest of the Deadlies, so she needs the witch to be alive and present in Widdershins to weaken the bindings.
Perhaps not: [http://www.widdershinscomic...](http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/january-15th-2016/ "http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/january-15th-2016/")
I suppose it might serve her purposes to dispose of him after all the Deadlies are out, so he wouldn't do exactly what present-day Mal is doing now (i.e. desummoning them again), but at the moment shown in the flashback it doesn't make sense for her to do that. He's more use to her alive right now, because the presence of a witch near the anchor disrupts Isabelle's bindings enough for her to release the Deadlies. [http://www.widdershinscomic...](http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/february-23rd-2016/ "http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/february-23rd-2016/")
See Skatie's thread at the top - we have converged.
Blergh. Acedia's aura and dress remind me of a slug.
It seems to me, among all Deadly circles we have seen that's most like Envy's one.
Ooh, yes, I was wondering which circle that was. I think you're right - it looks like the one for Envy.
Which explains why Envy was hanging about when Voss came along. If she did this more than once, it sort of also explains Greed's manifestation--though not why he was bound to the Thieves' Mark.
An attempt to bind Greed in some fashion, trapping it? It seemed to be deliberately set up such that Greed would be unable to get free. Perhaps the maker of the Thieves' Mark couldn't send Greed back for some reason, so created a way to limit its power.
I'm afraid, quite the contrary.. Till the 7th chpt all summoning (wich obligatory requires conduits, so they were there, explicit or implicit ones) served only to end up with freeing the Deadlies.
And Greed didn't demand its donation, while appearing... I think it was in a plot.
Greed perhaps did it itself, intentedly, to have a proper conduit, by Acedia's request? In accordance with the plan Lux and Acedia conceived and performed during these two last decades?
I think she could do many summonings of Deadlies, trying to unchain them.
Perhaps there were some malforming? It seems to me in general buggerups look even more terrible, then Spirits themselves - for those who can See. And Mal boy could...
Moreover, Acedia could TRY to use the little witch as a conduit?
Or some of Mal's traits as donations, perhaps? It would be rather unsuccesful, for his traits weren't rightly hers, but still it would be very traumatic for a child.
And as for summoning of Ira... We saw, a suitable donation for it is an act of downright agression.
Then she could beat Jack... :(
I dunno... It seems to me it would be more... errmm... reasonable, more rational for her to summon Lux? To get some advice from her "Master".
Did we see Lux' circles?
Sort of: [http://www.widdershinscomic...](http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/september-25th-2015/ "http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/september-25th-2015/")
I didn't think about this option, because... well, "the" Luxuria was free (and embodied) at that time. As I got it, summoning "a" spirit of Luxuria in this situation would summon "different" spirit from the "pool of spirit".
Sorry for a lot of quote marks, I have difficulties with choosing the right words for describing things like this. And I can got all wrong, of course.
Well, the pattern of the Lux' circle is definitely other than this one in the Acedia's lair.
Mal's pose sitting at the top of the stairs in panel 4 makes me want to give him a hug, except he'd probably hate that. : (
I have to admit, I am a little confused by the statement in the second panel, "was weakened by a witch"... is this a hypothetical "was"? Or have I forgotten something? : P
I think it's a reference to the discussion between Nicky and Isabella in the second panel of this strip [http://www.widdershinscomic...](http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/february-23rd-2016/ "http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/february-23rd-2016/") from the Barber family conference.
Okay, that's how Harry knows her motivation for what she's doing, but the phrase "was weakened" still seems ambiguous to me. Is it referencing an event prior to her bringing Mal to Widdershins, but after Gran, aka Isabelle did the binding?
Maybe she meant "...would be weakened by a witch."
Maybe, but I really can't figure out why she wouldn't have just said that then? : /
For Harry, this is in the past, so I used past tense, but I'll think on it and see if I can change it, if it's causing confusion!
Yeah thanks Kate! The problem I'm having is, I can't tell if the "was weakened" is meant to be realis or irrealis from the point in time of the flashback. Or is it realis, past tense, from 1834?
I think 'would be' would make more sense here, as 'was' implies that Acedia was trying this because she had already (at this point in the flashback) seen the binding weaken at least once before. As far as we know, this is not the case, and Acedia's knowledge of this method comes from some other source - possibly study of magical theory or history.
I think she means a witch previous to Mal
Yeah this confused me too. I was like, "Wait, when did Acedia notice the anchor weakens because of a witch? How would she know now when Mal is a kid? The anchor's binding spell didn't start fluctuating until Mal revisited Widdershins at the beginning of this comic's story..." So I'm to take away here that Acedia is just smart enough to know this phenomenon without experiencing it, what with her being a cunning wizard.
Definitely cunning. When you put it like that, it's now making me start to wonder, how does she know about the Deadlies being released in 1833-34 as well? Has she been, like, stalking Mal, or something, since he came back to Widdershins? o_0
I thought, through her contact with Lux. Her "I have to finished his plan" ( [http://www.widdershinscomic...](http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/may-20th-2016/ "http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/may-20th-2016/") ) and such.
He seems so hopeless, and completely unaware of Harry, but I'm not sure if he's just watching it and resigned to it, or if he's not fully aware of what's happening ... this scene is so sad and unpleasant :(
So Mal had heard the term witch aimed at himself before..! I keep being amused by the fact it was something Mal insulted Fairbairn with back in book 2! [http://www.widdershinscomic...](http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/august-8th-2012/ "http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/august-8th-2012/") Especially funny since she too was related to sloth and was also known to kidnap people and shoved them in circles.
Wow, I'd forgotten about that line of Mal's in book 2! That was well before we knew that witches were a specific thing in the Widdershins universe, so at the time my mind just translated it as "witch = generic insult for a woman doing bad things with magic". It looks very different in light of Mal's later remark, "Witches're evil, aren't they. They're wrong."
Yeah, seriously! You know, I really wonder if Fairbairn will be back too... I mean in Find the Lady Lux had assembled human focuses/vessels for all his sibling sins, right? And I can't help but notice Macavity who has an affinity for Greed has turned up... and Lei for Pride. Voss seems done with Envy, but he was the villain from that book, and a similar situation for Mr. Gula. I mean I guess Ms. Acedia is still around, but I can't help thinking about how Nicola found the lack of Fairbairn's corpse a loose end...
Yup. Ever since Nicola said that about being happier if they'd found a body, I've been expecting her to pop back up sometime, and this section seems like the place to do it.
Yeah, you know what's dumb, somehow it didn't occur to me until today that Acedia's still floating around out there too? Wonder who's gonna deal with her, that's worrisome.
If I actually knew anything about Pokemon, I would sing the "Gotta catch 'em all" reference or whatever.
I supposed she went to Lux after summoning of Wrath and they'll appear together at the next time. Just guessing.
Update: And in this case it'd be logical and just if Mal, as a witch, deals with Lux and Harry with Acedia (for Henry Barber and little Mal, too).
Well that explains a few things. [http://www.widdershinscomic...](http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/july-9th-2016/ "http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/july-9th-2016/")
Chances are pretty good this isn't the first time (or even the hundredth time) his mind has forced him to relive this scene. I think it's just at the point where he's given up fighting, because he knows nothing he does will work to change it. :(
Almost the same. :) To me, the "mr" part is a bit more slurred and less pronounced than "mer" is, like would happen if someone was gritting their teeth or biting their lip a bit, but otherwise it's the same.
It's so unsettling that Jack doesn't say a thing...