Redcloak's failed characterization, and what it means for the comic as a whole.

[Nerd_Paladin]

Something about Redcloak has been bothering me for some time. In short, I think that while the effort put into giving Redcloak more dimension than the other villains is admirable and has provided a surprising breadth of material for the comic, ultimately, he fails as both a character and as a villain, and that these stumblings are indicative of a problem with the comic as a whole.

Originally, RC was just Xykon's put-upon right hand man, plucky but often belittled, almost childlike at times. "Start of Darkness" more or less reinvented Redcloak from the ground up. As presented these days, Redcloak is something of a misguided anti-villain, someone who is unquestionably evil but who has been driven to evil by his poor lot in life and who is motivated by what might be an admirable goal if he wasn't going about it in such a horrifying, reckless way. In SoD, Xykon characterizes RC's agenda as "Whiny 'evil but for a good cause' crap," which more or less sums it up.

This has been the firm conception of Redcloak, his character, his past, and his motivations since SoD, and the position of the comic's narrative has been both that Redcloak is evil (no arguments about "moral justification" please) but that his cause is, at least in theory, just. So what's the problem, in my estimation? Well, in order for Redcloak's good cause to be good, the comic has to cheat and employing a double standard that undermines its integrity. Goblins in "The Order of the Stick" have, at least post-SoD, been depicted as a put-upon, persecuted race. They are widely victimized, particularly by the Paladins of the Sapphire Guard (Mr. Burlew's creative notes characterizes the guard's downfall as moral blowback from their too-zealous crusades against goblinkind), and even by the gods themselves.

Perhaps you can already see the problem with this; in D&D, goblins are never harmless creatures that you can leave to their own devices without having to worry about them. Goblins, in D&D, are always a threat, and therefore violent conflict with them is almost always inevitable. That conflict is more or less the engine that drives the entire game. So this notion that Paladins are sometimes unjust crusaders and that goblins are sometimes innocent victims, and that this cycle of violence gives rise to more significant, costly forms of evil, feels to me like something of a cheat. It only works and makes sense if "The Order of the Stick" is not a comic about D&D.

Of course, many would argue that it is indeed not, and that that's actually a good thing, but if you ask me, that's where the cheat comes into it. The comic wants to be about gaming and D&D whenever it's convenient for the sake of humor, but then when the comic wants to employ drama (or melodrama) it works around the conventions of the source material. The schism between these two approaches is evident in the wildly varying characterizations of Redcloak pre and post-SoD; it's an inconsistency, one that is now woven into the fabric of the comic. Sometimes the comic is one thing, sometimes it's another, and these two natures are not only conflicting, they're just plain contradictory. For Redcloak to make sense now, the entire comic has to make less sense.

"The Order of the Stick" has always been about how game rules and conventions wouldn't and don't make sense if applied to anything resembling a "real" situation. The difference, of course, is that pre-SoD, those inconsistencies were played for laughs. It is, indeed, funny to think about turn-based tabletop RPGs in literal terms. But when you take that same dynamic and try to fabricate high drama out of it, indeed, try to fabricate a sometimes long-winded moralizing argument out of it, that's less successful. Game rules ARE inherently funny, but they are not inherently tragic, that's only something that we can project onto them. Even when "The Order of the Stick" mocks the rules and artificial conventions of the game, the conventions are still a part of the world and a part of the comic (otherwise the joke wouldn't exist). But Redcloak's narrative and background are at odds with those conventions; in order for it to work, those conventions have to simply not be so.

So either "The Order of the Stick" is about the black and white, binary world of tabletop gaming (and how strange and silly that is), in which case Redcloak does not make sense as a character, or else it's about a more nuanced, complex world that doesn't at all resemble tabletop gaming, in which case the comic as a whole has been undermined. In short, you can't have it both ways, but Redcloak's story tries to anyway.

"The Order of the Stick" is a remarkable piece of work, in that the degree of complexity and maturity in it evolved organically over many years, from its somewhat crude origins into the thrilling, imaginative, multi-faceted narrative we enjoy now. It is inevitable that, when a story (and a writer) change this much over this long of a period of time, that a few things just won't add up in the end. That's just the nature of the beast, and I'm not attacking the comic as a whole or the writer for this.

I am, however, puzzled and even quietly dismayed at what I think was a damaging blunder in how this one, increasingly prominent character was handled, particularly because these character decisions are actually not the result of the comics' early growing pains, and in fact are the very thing that marks a major turning point away from the tone of that early material. That the comic has to cheat and work outside of its own concepts to fabricate the present characterization should be an indicator that it wasn't a great idea to begin with. Sadly, Redcloak is now so tightly woven with the primary conflict that it seems both impossible to reverse the tide and unlikely that he will fade into the background as the finale (whenever it comes) nears.

Ultimately, I would say that this is a lesson against trying to do too many clever things at once; Redcloak and the other villains' comparative simplicity might have seemed like an Achilles heel once the comic started to become smarter and more nuanced, but in trying to make them a match for the rest of the series,the comic has been burdened. Moral conundrums do not necessarily always make a story better, and the effort to fabricate them in a work not well-suited to them often makes it worse.