And so it ends. It’s been an awfully long strange trip, that probably overstayed it’s welcome just a bit. But on the whole it’s been quite the story and I’m glad to have read it.
It’s kind of neat having a page or two with the ‘last story’ of many different fables. We get to see some like Boy Blue again, which I appreciate. Even if/especially if he (more or less) stayed dead.
Fables feels like it’s been running for perhaps a bit too long. And things are certainly not Happily Ever After…
Bigby is back… ish.
Onward and Fableward, we’re almost to the end!
In this volume, we have the story of a little girl wondering about Castle Dark / the new Fabletown (cute), Rose Red growing in her position as a Paladin of Hope and refounding the Round Table (it’s weird and I’m not sure what the point is), and Snow White growing darker as she loses her children/at least their childhoods and husband.
And thus, 19 stories in we have the ‘story of Snow White’. Which details a first husband we’ve never heard of who’s a comically bad guy and wants to ruins everyone’s day… and actually does manager to kill Bigby... . Really?
On top of that, we have piles of backstory with BUFKIN THE LIBERATOR… who is not really that interesting. And apparently will never actually interact with the main Fables storyline? Meh.
And now we have the fallout from Fables, Vol. 16: Super Team. North Wind sacrificed himself to defeat Mr. Dark, but in the way of these stories, there must always be a North Wind. And since there are a whole pile of direct descendents (in Bigby and Snow’s children), well, perhaps one of them will become king.
Well that’s a crazy story. Mr. Dark is on the move and the Fables have decided that in order to fight him… they have to become Superheroes? You know, honestly, given that they’ve been proven to be more powerful based on how many people know their stories, it kind of works.
And hey, it gives you bizarre scenes like this:
Totenkinder (now Bellflower) has a plan, but she’s not going to let anyone else in. So instead, we’re going to deal with the fall of Rose Red after the death of Boy Blue and a shock from her past strong enough to shake her out of it.
It’s worth reading just for that, a bit of exploration into depression and loss from the framework of the Fables universe. And man has Red been through a lot–even before Boy Blue died.
Back to Fables and back to the problem of Mr. Dark! Originally I had no idea where Fables could go after the Adversary was defeated, but this works. A power vaccuum, filled by all sorts of big bads. It turns out that as dark as Geppetto went, he still arguably did some good (as all evil empires seem to do on some level). Fun times.
A solid story. It’s interesting getting more insight into some of the more magical folks in Fabletown. They’re a lot less straight forward than the Fables, which I approve of.
Oooh boy. This is a weird one. Jack and the Literals spill into the Farm, just as the Fabletown residents have been forced out by Dark problems of their own. So who comes first, the Literals or the Dark One? Well, perhaps the one that, with a stroke of the pen, can change the very nature of reality…
It’s a crazy story, but a bit weaker than many of the Fables stories so far. I like either plot well enough, but combining the two feels weirder than I’d hoped. It is interesting to see how the cult of Boy Blue continues to take form. I’m not sure where that will end up going in the long run, but I expect… not well.
