#i do like jo a lot don't get me wrong she's a great protagonist but like. the WORLDBUILDING

[autisticcassandracain]

Just finished Far Sector and GOD jesus FUCK is it good. Holy fucking shit. I truly hate how good this is. It’s not flawless and I do have issues with it (I felt like the plot was a bit too predictable and could be hard to follow sometimes, Jo’s military and cop backgrounds are not something that I’m fond of, and the fact that it came so close to making a true ACAB statement only to pussyfoot around it is INFURIATING), but god. The worldbuilding is the best I’ve encountered in DC comics, hands down. 

Far Sector takes great care to build the Enduring City as a believable place in a natural way. I really like the keh-Topli and @At; both of those felt like genuine alien species, with alien origins and practices, even if the keh-Topli were the species the series examined the least. The visit to Atville was a definite highlight for me, as well.

But where I think the worldbuilding really shone was the way it examined how a world would react to artificially having its emotions lock down. Emotionless species are something of a staple in sci-fi, and I think this is a great example of what you could do with it. Because the people in the Enduring City are not naturally emotionless; this is a state that was forced on them, and this had consequences.

It would’ve been really easy to make this a murder mystery with the gimmick being that people involved don’t have emotions and that murder is extremely uncommon on this planet, but Far Sector went further in exploring the possibilities inherent in its premise. As you’d expect, there’s a drug that lets you turn on your emotions called Switchoff, and for a lot of mediocre sci-fi, that’s where it’d stop. 

Far Sector doesn’t. It examines where the drug came from, how it’s used, and what its effects are on society. It expands on the concept of a black market for emotional goods, and dives into why the city would feel the need to have such a market in the first place. The detail that the @At are dependent on emotional stimuli to survive, because they ‘eat’ things like humor, was a genuine stroke of genius. Not only is it an interesting concept to have the AI race be the most dependent on emotion, it also realizes that such a dependency would but the species at a severe disadvantage in a society in which emotion is banned, resulting in systemic poverty and crime. It delves into this both in casual dialogue, and, more extensively, in its visit to Atville and the ‘meltdown’ during the referendum at the end of the series. This single detail is responsible for making so much of this world feel real and interesting, and I love it.

Also it’s the only comic I’ve ever read that managed to incorporate memes into its plot in a way that didn’t feel horribly awful. It’s a bit cheesy and sometimes it gets a bit too much but I actually like it and think it’s impressive they managed to make it anything less than a dumpster fire lmao. The fact that they chose memes that are heavily outdated even by current standards prevents the problem of this comic being dated on release, and also helps play up the comedy aspect because it’s inherently cringy to see those old memes, so I thought that was a smart move. Though I do think the inclusion of memes will limit how well it holds up in the future, so overall I think it would’ve been better not to include them, but DC Comics are as a whole not that concerned with timelessness, so I don’t think it’s a big issue.

This isn’t like, an in-depth analysis or anything, this is all first impression, I’m just ranting because it’s been a while since I enjoyed a comic this much.