3rd Voice
This page is a holding place for informal notes about Evan Dahm's fantasy webcomic 3rd Voice. There are not enough words to describe how full of spoilers this page is. If you don't like spoilers, don't read this page without having read the entirety of the comic as it is published up to the present. I haven't dated these entries, but since 3rd Voice is ongoing, I do note where the story was when each piece was written.
On Noc
Written after the end of the 1st Passage.
What we know about Noc is that he has been paying a debt to a warlord named Khaddan for the past 14 years. It’s unclear if he bought himself out from Khaddan’s service and is still paying that debt, or if Khaddan bought him out from someone else’s service and he is repaying Khaddan for his freedom.
Either way, let’s call this what it is. It’s not that Noc’s labor is being compensated for with this debt. He as a person is being compensated for. We know is that he was in someone’s service, didn’t want to be there, and now his freedom is dependant on paying back his debt to Khaddan: debt bondage. I think that as a young person Noc was likely a victim of human (“human”) trafficking—perhaps taken as a prisoner of war, sold into slavery, kidnapped, or conscripted—and that has determined the trajectory of his life.
The first passage of 3rd Voice is about people who are shaped and driven by forces that are invisible to us. Both Spondule and Navichet are compelled forward by their pasts, which we can only speculate about, and they are kept in their social station by their status as gleaners. Everyone operates in the context of a society that is highly stratified by one’s station. It’s easy to see why, then, both Ransallet and Xundítriggar’s cult at Two Legs are so appealing to their respective residents: they’re places where people are free of hierarchy. Both communities are like mirrored opposites of the same idea: that one’s social station doesn’t matter because of one’s inherent worth (in the case of Ransallet) or worthlessness (in the case of Two Legs.) Ransallet in particular just Does Not Compute for either Spondule or Noc, who both have a hard time imagining a place that welcomes them without trying to force them into a particular social role.
Like Spondule and Navichet, Noc’s behavor is shaped by choices he is limited to, even though those choices are not spelled out for us. It’s clear from his conversation with the Regent of Ansporruk that he is considered to be a lowlife by keepers. When we first see him, he’s on an elevated stone platform, but he’s still sitting out in the open air like a beggar: crossed arms resting on his knees, waiting and watching for his next opportunity to make money. In saying that he holds to his contracts, the only known things available to him, he’s defending himself to Spondule: “This is the only thing I know how to do; the only thing society will pay me for. I must kill other people to survive.”
I think Noc’s over-inflated opinion of himself is a defense mechanism against the actual bleakness of his situation. Given the way he talks, one would think that he had freely chosen to be an armsman. He takes pride in his skills and reputation while treating everyone else with contempt. However, the facts are that he is in some form of debt bondage, his clothes are tattered, he has no friends, and he does not seem to have a home. His comment to Spondule—that Spondule would have turned out differently as an armsman—seems like it’s a put-down. But there’s another layer to it: “I see untapped potential in you, Az Renovon. We’re not passastil, but in another life we could have been.” In a life where he is consigned to solitude, Noc allows himself, if only briefly, to imagine companionship: to imagine that someone else for once is "the same as him." However, he can't imagine a life where both he and Spondule are anything other than armsmen. However he got to where he is, he can't see beyond his current situation.
That’s why I think, all things considered, Noc fully intended to fill his contract even though his behavior sometimes suggested otherwise. He was impressed with Spondule’s tenacity and loyalty, even as he was frustrated with Spondule’s…Sponduleness. (To be honest, if I were a bounty hunter, I would probably also find it refreshing that someone I hunted didn’t seem to be scared of me and even tried to use me as a means to an end.) It’s a stretch to say that Noc liked Spondule, but he did want to be near him. Noc was holding two things at once: "I want to be close to this person and I need to kill him.” That dissonance is what made Noc go against his better instincts and get into the center of the fray. That’s what made him linger too long at the edge of the chasm instead of either pushing Spondule in or pulling him back to safety. That ambiguity, so dangerous for someone in Noc’s profession, is what cost him his life^ as he knows it [Edited to add.]
Noc is a tragic figure, but he’s not a blameless one. He seemed to value honor and loyalty, but was also cruel. He perhaps didn’t choose to kill people for a living, but he also killed remorselessly. I wanted him to live, to give up his contract and become a good person, but that doesn’t make sense given the constraints of the story. I’m sad for Noc because, although he cared that people knew about him, he knew that nobody cared about him. I think he was alone in the bleach, and he will be alone thereafter.
On Knowing
Written after the Argument of the 2nd Passage
My favorite kinds of literature are the ones that remind you that you are consuming something, ones that don’t let it go down easy. A good example of this, coincidentally related to Evan Dahm, is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Melville had written enough potboiler adventure novels to know how to put a good plot together, but Moby Dick repeatedly frustrates the reader’s expectation of a seamless story. Ishmael, who establishes himself early on as a ridiculous narrator, interchanges chapters focused on the plot with digressive chapters that may or may not be related to the main story. It does turn out, after all, that you need to know a single piece of information in one of those digressive chapters to understand what happens to Ahab at the end. But the reader cannot know which of those pieces of information are important to the plot and which aren’t. That’s why enjoying Moby Dick requires a lot of patience and a willingness to not take yourself so seriously as a reader.
In 3rd Voice, Dahm digresses in a less obtrusive way than in Moby Dick, but still calls attention to the fact that you are reading a created and mediated work. He does this through the use of little “editorial” notes sprinkled throughout the story, and by strategically withholding and deploying knowledge. So far, 3rd Voice has a more sophisticated relationship to the disposition of knowledge than Dahm’s other webcomics. In both Rice Boy and Order of Tales, the protagonists have a task set out for them that they don’t really understand but end up fulfilling. It’s always clear, however, that there is someone who understands it all. These top-down “questy” narratives, which depend upon a single, large pay-off at the end, have never been particularly compelling for me, although Dahm was trying to work them from a unique angle. [Perhaps unpopular opinion?: I think Rice Boy and Order of Tales are essentially juvenilia. Dahm had to make them in order to get to where he is now, but Vattu and 3rd Voice are his mature webcomics.] Vattu is much more effective, but it’s a straightfoward and linear story with only a few significant flashbacks. We don’t worry so much about how or why things are they way they are, we are mostly concerned with what’s going to happen. But with 3rd Voice, our attention is propelled backwards and forwards at once. We cannot wonder what will happen next without also wondering how things got the way they are now.
In 3rd Voice, Dahm has created a world in which the characters’ knowledge overlaps imperfectly with ours. We are seeking different bits of understanding than they are, and we don’t know which bits are useful and which are not. (I also get the sense from Dahm’s process notes on Patreon that he improvises a lot of details as he goes along.) Navichet’s struggle for knowledge in the 1st Passage is nested inside our own: She struggles to know. We struggle to understand not only what she is trying to know, but why it’s important to her.
One prominent example of this is the imperfect translation of the concept of knowing itself. The story in the 1st Passage is driven by Navichet’s pursuit of knowledge, but all of the characters are shaped by what they know, can know, and can’t know. Three different English words are used to translate matters of knowing: “know,” “affirm,” and “attest.” I get the sense that the word or phrase in Corners being translated has some meaning that contains all three, hence the necessity of using different English words in different contexts in the story. The words are all related, but they are all slightly different: in English, “knowing” is a state of being, while “attesting” is talking about something you know, and “affirming” is standing behind or confirming something that you know to be true.
This tendency of the comic—going out of its way to feel as though its dialogue is translated imperfectly into English—is another way that our reading experience gets intentionally disrupted. I don’t keep up with fantasy literature, so I don’t know if other authors do this, but I’ve never seen a work of popular fiction aim to feel translated into its native language. Dahm achieves this effect through the editorial comments, punctuating the story with glosses on English words translated into Corners, or Corners words translated into English, and even on one occasion marking a refusal to translate from Corners into English. These interruptions momentarily take us out of the story and remind us that we’re reading an artifact. We might “get lost” in the story for just a little while, only to have the gaps in our knowledge pointed out to us again.
Knowledge in narrative literature—the availability of it—is one of the biggest problems for an artist to address. Most mainstream narratives, whether comics, books, movies, or TV, give the audience just enough knowledge to understand what’s going on but no more than that. Too much knowledge becomes confusing, too little leaves us in the dark. Dahm rides the line by making the story and characters accessible but the world they live in mysterious. Readers have lots of questions about why things are the way they are in Corners so when we find out new information it fills into the characters’ context in a satisfying way. Nonetheless, enjoying 3rd Voice takes a certain tolerance for not knowing things and for the possibility of never knowing them. Dahm has chosen to prioritize characters and narrative over displaying the world that he’s built. To my mind, the purpose of speculative fiction too often—and the reason why I usually don’t like it—is that authors set predictable stories and lifeless characters into intricately imagined worlds, assuming that the world-building will do the heavy lifting that should properly be done by psychology and emotions. I would rather that the artist use the story and characters themselves to explore the ideas proposed by the invented world, which Dahm is doing well in 3rd Voice so far.