Things You Never Noticed V: Your Familiar

[Jasdoif]

Hmm...that said, Roy leads our team, and the arguing and criticism there is pretty serious.

I have never thought that Tarquin didn't lead the team in the sense that he was subordinate to anyone else - it seems to me that he probably IS the planner in the outfit, it's just that he can't give orders without a rationale. Maybe that make him not a leader. Hmm. I suppose that Roy can give orders without explaining (can't think of instances, but there you go), but there is a reason for that: half the party is definitely NOT any good at leading by virtue of Durkon being, well, congenitally unable to lead, and Elan and Belkar being Chaotic+daft/psychotic. Haley can plan, and V is intelligent, but we know in what ways they aren't cut out to lead.

My (rambling) point is that just because Tarquin's gang of friends are sarcastic and critical doesn't necessarily mean that they are cut out to lead, so he may plan, organise and run the group, but as more of an administrator than the traditional gung-ho, follow-me type of leader.

I feel that his delusional nature about his own importance doesn't have to require that he's wrong/lying about his position in the party - just that 'leading' that party means something other than dictating to its members what is to be done. (Blah blah blah - sorry, thinking aloud here...)

In case it helps clarify your thoughts, here's someone else's thoughts about Tarquin's place in the Vector Legion:

If you bought into Tarquin's story that Tarquin was a competent chessmaster when all of the evidence in the comic points to him being a quasi-delusional control freak that needs to be reigned in by one of his allies half the time, that's on you. I gave you the evidence to see what he was, you just chose to believe his spin instead and then criticize me for not living up to it. The characterization is consistent all the way through—including the part where he talks himself up to be the central character in his group's history. But look at the way Laurin and Miron talk to him; does that sound like people who think he's the mastermind that got them to where they are? Or does it sound like how people talk to Elan? Why do you think that strip was even in there, except to reveal that Tarquin's version of his place in the group had been inflated by Tarquin?

Tarquin provides insight into narrative roles that translates to actual concrete power in the OOTS world. You can make plans based on those things and they work. Basically, his contribution was to take five powerful evil people and keep them from making the same mistakes that clichéd villains always make. He has since revised that into believing that he is their leader and master strategist. He is, in a very real way, the Elan of his team, only his team's goal is conquer everything instead of save the world.

There's certainly been no evidence presented in the comic that Tarquin has even a passing understanding of valid military strategy, or political strategy, or personal relationships. What he understands are stories, and it just so happens that he was born into a world where that actually can help you win…for a while.

Well, it's an analogy, not a perfect substitution. Maybe I oversold it when I said they treat him like Elan, but the main point was that he had overstated his own agency in their mutual plan. He may have had the initial concept, but if he had been left to run it himself it would have certainly failed, precisely because he would have had no one to keep him from going off the deep end at the first bump in the road. It's not a coincidence that Tarquin's breakdown started with Malack's death.