Shark-jumping

That shark isn't jumping

A few weeks back, the folks over at the THAC0 Podcast talked a bit about when it’s time to stop following a title. I find that it’s when the series stops being what I liked about it. I’ve commented on this before in regards to anime, but I think I’ve just about gotten to that point for the Order of the Stick.

Rich Burlew started the strip as a way to poke fun at the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, its game culture, its rules, the tropes of the genre. It was funny. It was insightful. It provided a few nice little pauses in my week. For the past several months, this has been more the exception than the rule. The Order of the Stick has drifted away from its comedic roots and has strayed into the realm of dramatic fiction. Wandering off for a couple of strips into serious exposition in order to deliver the main characters to a fresh set of comedic material is certainly fine by me. I can wade through some un-funny text for a while to get back to the good stuff.

The recent reappearance of Belkar the hateful violent little Halfling has served to highlight how far the value of this strip has slipped. We’ve gone from “I think I missed a spot check” to this:

Love the punchline

You’re not missing anything subtle. It just isn’t funny. Or heart-wrenching. Or entertaining.

3 thoughts on “Shark-jumping

  1. msilver

    yeah I should say that the only reason I read it now is because I have been reading it since like strip 22. It’s kinda like how I kept going to megatokyo.com for months and months before I realized it’ll never be that good/regularly published.

  2. Mag

    Well you can’t expect it to stay plotless AND coherent. Also, your second picture is out of context.

  3. Burrowowl Post author

    Sure I can, Mag. Hagar the Horrible has been plotless and coherent since 1973.

    As for the second picture, that was the payoff for a recent strip at the time this article was written. No additional context from the source material would have made it subtle, funny, heart-wrenching, nor entertaining.

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