AWKWARD ZOMBIE

And QC gains yet another male defined solely by his interaction with a cadre of quirky women.

HR has officially gone off the deep end in Guilded Age.

My most recent webcomic discoveries :

http://www.monster-pulse.com/

http://www.boss-monster.com/

http://www.monstersgarden.com/

http://www.badreputationcomic.com/

Last one is a combo breaker.

Rare Candy Treatment, BitF, and of course, Awkward Zombie.
I don't really like BiTF, not because its bad, but because Matt got to about 9 comic ideas before me and they were really good. Like, really really good.

Reading the latest DoA strips has left me with a palpable sense of satisfaction.

Okay, I know that the genre savvy villain is kind of overused but the latest OoTS makes General Tarquin my favourite character.

it's the fact that he knows all the rules to the adventurers game is really cool
honestly I want to see him angry

You'll see it as soon as Elan and company are gone. And it's going to be directed at Nale.

Okay, I cant fucking stand Tarquin. I really could go the rest of the comics run without another of his smug, self satisfied speeches about how awesome and smart he is. Oh sure, he's a mass murderer and vicious tyrant, but no one seems to care, because he's "charming". For a certain value of the word.

Really, what I really want to see is Xykon or Redcloak make his head explode or something, atleast Xykon is funny instead of just making me want to punch him. Tarquin is easily my least favorite OotS character along with the bitchy paladin

What do you mean no one cares? Elan is dedicating himself to finding a way to bring him down without fulfilling his goals and Roy isn't exactly keen on letting him run around either. Not to mention Haley and her father.

If you're counting real-life people though, it's a matter of a good character as compared to what said character did. I like Tarquin because he's smart. He got to where he is through knowledge of how his world works and exploiting said knowledge mercilessly. He's evil, yes, but he's a good character.

Monster Garden is kinda cute but the writing's a bit clumsy/heavy-handed at points. Also I read the TVTropes page and now I'm confused as to what people's opinions on it are.

Lesson: don't read TVT (but then do it anyway).

Tarquin is one of those annoying villains who has everything basically handed to them. Any setback or move against them is countered by an off screen plan, and anything the heroes do just either helps his plans along, or doesnt affect him at all. Xykon is somewhat interesting because he has power to back him up, he requires Redcloak to do most of the thinking for him, meaning he isnt invincible, and the components of his schemes are already established, all he needs to do is take one of the Gates, but Tarquin is played off as this amazing chess player who is three steps ahead of everyone no matter what they do, and is still treated like a suave mastermind. Hell, the characters have a friendly conversation with him half the time, because he doesnt care about killing them, thats not a good character, thats a goddamn Villain Sue. There's no real conflict because Tarquin treats everything like a fucking game he's playing, and there's no risk of him actually losing

Not really. He outright states that when he tried using typical methods to gain the empire he was run out in under a year.

You're also forgetting he is genre savvy. He knows how the world, as a game system, operates and he munchkins the hell out of everything. He is Elan as a villain, and keep in mind how often Elan, despite his stupidity, manages to figure out the truth of a situation long before anyone else.

His plans succeed because he understands how narrative works and abuses it mercilessly. On numerous occasions he has given such a reason as to why he doesn't move against the heroes or do something more overt. Even in the dream scenario he states that he didn't bother with security because any villain attacking a wedding will be brought down with enough time for the wedding to proceed so it's pointless to even try. He's not a Villain Sue, he's a Metagamer.

That's what's probably going to bite him in the booty in the future with Elan's plan. Tarquin relies heavily on how the narrative typically goes and Elan has a knack for making the narrative go so far off the beaten trail it needs rangers to come find it. Without knowledge of how a situation is going to go, when that narrative is changed by someone else who knows how things go, then he's going to be crippled.

Yes, I know that he's basically just Villain Elan but the problem is that it doesnt WORK for a villain. Elan is a fun character because he is able to use his Genre Savy to make up for his intellectual shortcomings and naivite, while Tarquin is already a master fighter, strategist and leader, who's only real skill flaw was that he wasnt able to stabilize a nation that had a centuries long history of civil war, giving him access to that same level of insight into the metagame makes him both boring and unbearable. He's an overpowered douche who gets a pass because fans go nuts over his annoying personality. He's basically the DM's masturbatory villain sue.