#like... it sometimes felt like travis didn't really know how to utilize the firbolg to drive the plot forwards

[weepylucifer]

Having some thoughts about the Firbolg tonight

I mean I could view his arc on a Doylist level as sort of “Justin thought it would be a cool and fun thing to have the Firbolg get really into accounting for the goofs, then a bunch of people probably tweeted at him about capitalism being evil and it ruining Comrade Firbolg so he pivoted a bit”

But on the Watsonian level the Firbolg’s character development could be considered as a journey. First he got banished from his clan for collecting and storing berries, not to enrich himself but to feed those who would starve in the winter. The Firbolg code stating that any surplus food one finds must be immediately shared with the community and consumed on the spot is noble in thought but a bit faulty in practice. There is nothing un-socialist about, say, bending the rules a little to create a communal storage facility where during a lean month, those who can find no food can take some. But the Firbolg didn’t get to make that argument. His elders were committed to the letter of the law rather than the spirit, (aka enforcing a system whose rules had become so unreceptive to change as to invoke stagnacy to the point where a concept thought to serve the community harms it, a side effect of Order?) and they threw the Firbolg out on the spot.

At the school, he learned about accounting - he learned that there were other ways to do things. Some parts of the system appealed to him: allocation of resources to plan for a future is what he pushed for. So he tries to immerse himself in this new thing: to understand it and utilize the good of it. He’s also lonely, and Argo and Fitzroy provide him with a new clan. Thus he fixates, more than the other two, on the “corporate structure” of Thundermen LLC (which I’d argue to Fitzroy and Argo serves more as a metaphor for their friendship/the cool name of their little best friends club than a legitimate corporate start-up).

A part of him, that wasn’t occupied with the culture shock of the school and later all the wild adventurous shit that was going on non-stop, would have been conflicted, trying to figure out where his investment in this new system began and the Firbolg Code ended, and whether he could ignore the parts of the hero/villain system that were clearly bad. The he hears Order’s whole monologue. He stops and realizes that this is the same pattern again but on a global scale: stagnacy preventing much-needed change.

The Firbolg says in the new ep, “When Order spoke against the system, my heart was pained”. He starts to see that he’s maybe gotten in too deep to the point where he’s forgotten his roots and what he actually wanted. He doesn’t want a career in finance, he wants to give food to people who have none, and the hero/villain system, for all its fancy accounting, isn’t doing any of that. It’s so good and right that the Firbolg comes up with the new plan, that it’s he who says “destroy the economy” first. Comrade Firbolg is back, babeys