#how to posts

(Remember: link to the original source so other people can pull it up and confirm what you gave them!)

So, now with a new comic to study (one that may be a blind read for some of you!), let's start!

1. What is our OVERT (clear and obvious) information?

We are outside at a building, in an area with grassy fields and rocky hills as the boundaries. The building isn't particularly visible here, but does give us a setting detail that this is a place where people are. Some backgrounds are just colours.

We have one party coming to join the people at the building. They are riding and meet up with a group who was already there.

The two groups are dressed well, nobody's injured, but one does pull out an unusual item on the first page of our selection to check something before approaching the others.

The groups speak, largely covering first time introductions between themselves. One speaker uses sign language.

2. What are our INTERACTIONS?

People are traveling across distance on horseback, dismounting, and approaching the building where the others are. Part of the riding group is occupied tending to the horses.

The group already at the stable are standing very close together prior to being approached: those four are already known to each other, and may have been speaking or something like it prior to this page.

The main focus of the riding group (Wild, in the green poncho) pulls out a yellow ball to use to check something significant enough to take up a solid third of the first page.

Wild greets the others and draws two of the four away to introduce them to his own group, before addressing the merchants directly himself.

3. What ACTIONS or EVENTS happen here?

We have an arrival, and a meeting between two groups of people: Wild leads one group, and the other consists of two merchants and two others (Twilight and Wind.) The others in Wild's group aren't important at this moment, so they remain with the horses as largely background detail.

Wild is using an item to confirm something on the first page. Familiarity with the AU would tell you what exactly it was, but even without knowing that we can see from it's placement (dead center of both panel AND page) that it's very important to the subsequent action that follows.

Communication is established, not just as a first introduction but "can we communicate at all?" given the context of Wild using sign language exclusively to speak to the others.

Wild says the majority of the dialogue here: he's approaching the others, introducing himself, reveals he already knows who they are, and actively (including physical action, portrayed as cute rather than violent) separating Twilight and Wind from the merchants.

Wild's demeanour through all of this is bright, cheerful and friendly, emphasized by the solid colour backgrounds for some of (specifically!) his panels.

4. What is IMPLIED by the information here?

(Remember: you cannot cover everything a scene contains at once. You need to choose what you focus on in any given moment, in order to be able to write something comprehensible in a given space.)

This is obviously a first meeting of some of the parties involved here: indeed, the fact that in the middle panel of the first page we see Wild check the yellow ball, with Wind and Twilight in the background (ahead of him), we can infer even without knowing the action of Recalled as a whole that he was looking for them, specifically and is delighted (by all of his expressions and behaviour) to have found them.

Wild immediately goes up and introduces himself: he's not shy. He was trotting his horse (not walking) so he was first to reach them. He dismounts and leaves its care to someone else in his group to confirm their identities instead, and walks right up to Twilight to ask "Do you know sign?"

However, Wild doesn't dwell on the two people he just met: he actually diverts them onto others in his party right away ("You two Links will want to talk with Captain. He and my Zelda will explain...")

This seems at odds with the amount of excitement he displays elsewhere in the page. This implies heavily that something else is coming in between him and wanting to explain. It's not obvious from the information on these pages alone (or, indeed, in this update) why he might do that.

If he was wanting to escape social interaction, then the fact that he diverts to immediately address the two merchants who were originally with the Links he just met seems odd. If he didn't want to talk, why not simply step away? Is there something they're selling he needs?

This is the kind of page set where it's fairly obvious that you're missing something once you dig into it. Hence, in this case, step Five really is needed to figure out what context is missing in order to make full sense of the events at hand.

5. How does this CONNECT to previous or subsequent information?

So, the yellow ball in Recalled was the first thing that set this whole set of events in motion. You have to drop all the way back to the prologue and first part to begin to understand how it came about as an item--

(Remember: when connecting to other pieces of work in a series, again: It's helpful to include links to direct people to where you want them to go so they can assess the information you are pulling together for themselves and join in.)

--But this page essentially tells you all of that by itself: Wild pulls out the yellow ball to look at the arrows. That confirms that the two men before him are more Links simply by looking at it, information we already assessed just from the page set up itself.

Wind and Twilight are therefore new to the group being collected, and Wild is of course delighted to meet them. However, he diverts them to Captain and his Zelda and redirects to the merchants that Twilight and Wind had been accompanying. Why is that? While he is frequently not the main person doing the explaining anywhere else in the comic, he's more frequently up a tree or off cooking than engaging with others.

Why, then, does he speak to the merchants Wind and Twilight were with, and why did he usher the Links away before doing so? Nothing in the pages we have explains this.

But the last page of this update does. Specifically, the hands in the handshake...