Honestly it probably is just coincidence, but in the off chance that it was an intentional homage, I love it.

Side note, thank you, Rekki, for fixing the issue with the yellow print head. She was here for another Demon hunting sword girl 😄

Well, I owe it to the readers to try my best to express a message of hope and unity without just going, "we should forgive all the baddies, both sides are bad!"

I am writing scripts. The next book is hard because the characters have to wrestle with a political Gordian Knot of trying to find popular support while wrestling with ideological Purity Culture, which is... way realer and more philosophical than I ever expected to get, but...

It really makes me want to get to a place where I can pull Errant out of hiatus. I think the comic's message of working together through political differences and past baggage to beat an authoritarian who wants everyone to feel hopeless because he already "won" continues to be timely.

I guess it's on my mind seeing all the protests around the world that use One Piece imagery. Comics can be very powerful pieces of visual communication, and maybe the ones that fly under the radar because they're not explicitly *about* politics can have surprising impact.

Yeah I think you nailed it. The theme of Hades 1 was "blood" which is supported by the colour palette, the zones all being connected by an arterial river and the family connection storyline, and the theme of 2 should have just been "time", but they muddled it by trying to do too much.

I definitely think the originally planned ending was something different. My guess was "Melinoe traps herself and ALL the gods in an eternal dream/nightmare timeloop, accidentally creating the golden age prometheus foresaw where gods are no longer involved in the mortal world."

It's like the opposite of true the ending of Undertale, which is like, "Yes! You saved us all! You broke us out of the cycle! You changed everything for the better! ... now you can never play this game again because it'd undo it all. Sorry!"

It has the trappings and tone of a happy ending, but the ultimate message is that Mel has no power to change anyone's mind or achieve anything beyond maintaining a sub par status quo until things beyond her control make her irrelevant.

There is something to be said for tired brain not overthinking and having infinite patience for tedious application of drybrushing 😆