Q: Hemlock, if you are a sorcerer, then what's the word for a man who can do sorcery?
-anon
A: I’ll answer this one as the author,
My original plan was to have the term “sorcerer” used in reference to female practitioners of the sorcerous arts, for various reasons that made sense to me at the time. Unfortunately, too many people were confused about Hemlock/Angitia’s gender, so I ultimately capitulated and began referring to her as a “sorceress” (I believe I first put this new policy into practice here). I’d go back to page 24 and add an extra “ess” to both instances of “sorcerer” if I could, but there isn’t enough room in the speech bubbles to do so without completely redrawing the panels.
Q: Wait ... if Roma disqualifies men from being soldiers or senators, and we should assume the majority of civilisation in the story universe is matriarchal in contrast to our own, how did Larkspur end up being Cerintha's captain? (Maybe this was answered in the comic already, but I lose track easily)
---- someone who is totally not Kiki this time.
A: Answering this one as the author, since the characters themselves take their own cultures for granted and generally haven’t thought too much on these matters.
The Goths are just more egalitarian than the Romans. I mostly made them that way so I could get Larkspur into the story and have a token male.
Q: I may have asked this before, but how are each of your names pronounced? Some of them are written in a way that's confusing to a non-latin-speaker.
-anon
A: Also answering this one as the author. I’m hardly a scholar of Latin, so if I get the pronunciations wrong, you’ll know my own ignorance is to blame (it would be weird to have the characters pronounce their own names incorrectly).
Concerning the names of Latin extract, I pronounce them thus:
Cerintha: Seh-reen-tha
Discordia: Diss-cord-ee-ah
Fraus: Fraws (it is the root word for “fraud”)
Pallor: Pal-lore (it happens to be a word in English as well)
Angitia: An-jeet-ee-ah
Also, these ones aren’t necessarily Latin, but I could see why people might have trouble with them:
Hellebore: Hell-leh-bore
Atropa: Ah-trope-ah
Gifblaar: giff-blah (this one is Afrikaans for “poison leaf”, but a reader informed me that it also means “poison blister” in Dutch)
