Favorite Order of the Stick member?
I must say I am ABSOLUTELY delighted to receive an OOTS ask in this, the year of our Lord 2022, when I barely post about it at all. But lemme tell yah, it is one of my longest enduring favs. I own most of the books and everything and I've been reading it since 2009 at least. I do feel like if you poked around my blog you could probably guess that my fav character is Vaasuvius, the genderqueer elf wizard with purple hair, but I'm gonna take this ask as an excuse to wax lyrical about them.
First, the gender of it all. I adore the way Rich Burlew handled V. At first V's ambiguous gender was simply a joke borne of the how gendered features are hard to communicate in a simple art style/how elves are already fairly androgynous. It could have been awful, and if you go back to the beginning there are some moments that would probably be deemed a bit off colour by the trans and nonbinary politics of the modern age. (Remember this comic launched in '03.)
But instead of ever canonizing an assigned gender at birth for V, or going down a transphobic route of having their AGAB revealed in some traumatic way, Burlew noticed the fan reaction to his accidental genderqueer character, and went with it. He continued to have V's gender ambiguity occasionally be the butt of a joke, but it eventually fell by the wayside and they were allowed to remain ambiguously gendered and have that respected or at least ignored by all the main cast. (iirc this choice definitely pissed off some of the more toxic nerdbro facets of the community, and constant speculation about what V's "real" gender continued to run rampant on the forums. The fact that those nerd boys never got their answer and never will delights my genderqueer self no end.) I've been reading OOTS longer than I've been identifying as GQ myself, and thinking back to it, they were probably one of the first examples of non binary or genderqueer representation that I really got obessed with. In hindsight, I did spent a LOT of time just going "well, I just think it's really NEAT that they're ambiguously gendered, and I'm sure that has absolutely nothing to do with me or any bearing on my own relationship with gender."
Then, to their ACTUAL character. Their journey of seeking power and having to grapple with the choices that they have made in order to achieve that power is fascinating and well-executed. Their choice to kill a young dragon early on the story coming back to bite them in the ass is a wonderful interrogation of the way that violence is meted out in games like DnD, how we view the monstrous and the Other as worthy of thoughtless dispatching.
V might be a hero in the story, but Burlew neatly flipped the script on heroic Vs villainous actions when he had V make their deal with the devils. I have reread that arc countless times and I'm still fucking besides myself that in the end it was all for nothing, except for V to lose their partner. I love where they are in the story now, the more measured and mature version of the trigger happy wizard, more willing to take care with the impacts of their powers. Anyway this got long. I love V so much and they mean so much to me, as well as OOTS in general. @scatter44 who is YOUR fav OOTS character?
