Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail 2

“Is that a textwall I see up ahead?”

Well, no, it isn’t, because really, there’s not much to textwall.

Chang convinces Rock to help Garcia, or else Roanapur will get blown to pieces.

He complies, and then compiles quite a lengthy plan.

Once you start to think about mushrooms, you’ve /really/ thought about everything

They execute his plan, and things start rolling.

At the same time, various conflicts… conflict among the more powerful residents of Roanapur, calmed only by the addition of a common enemy – the establishment of civilized order.

“There is a spider in your soup.”
“This is incredibly displeasing.”
“I have removed the spider.”
“We appreciate it. My boss should get back to you regarding payment and other details.”

Various things are revealed, including Bao’s inability to reconstruct his bar Roberta’s overusage of antidepressants and subsequent hallucinations, Eda’s involvement in the CIA (which we /totally/ didn’t know from the Bounty Hunter arc), and Fabiola’s lack of raviola.

Personally, I’d rather not, y’know, get stabbed by a cue stick into a deep dark hole

On a more serious note, Chang learns of the groups involved in the assassination, as well as their current mission, from a totally unobvious CIA source.

Finally, Rock finds that at the last shop that Bao referred Roberta to, someone else went – Richie Leeroy Jenkins.

[/sinistersmileimplyingthathesnotactuallygoingtohelpthekidsinanpositiveway]

One of that bad (or good) things about Black Lagoon is that there are either too many plot details, or too little. You can just outline the basic, large, events, and you’d have a one-paragraph post. But, if you want to go the slightest bit deeper, you need to talk about /everything/ because everything’s so interconnected.

So, with all of the Black Lagoon posts from now on, they’re going to be stupidly broad, because the little things matter, yet don’t matter at the same time.

Plotwise this is moving along quite smoothly; one and a half more hours and this is done, so they might as well hurry up the intelligence part and get straight to the action. Richie obviously has some sort of connection with Roberta, be it deep or as shallow as some quick cash; one of the things Black Lagoon does extremely well is an action-filled plot, that actually doesn’t have much action. Reminds me of this book I’m currently reading, where the first 250ish pages is about a lawyer working at a firm, going about his daily life. Somehow, it manages to still attract the reader by adding variety to his workday, adding six murders, the FBI, a private detective, etc. etc. They don’t actually duel, fight, or even run away after being pursued; they just go to work, work, come back from work, and go to work again.

The latter 200 pages though, must be very interesting – hard to believe, if this still applies to Black Lagoon. What could be more interesting than Rock throwing darts at a map of SEA?

Actually, never mind.

It’s interesting to see how the action moves along, and it’s generally pretty well-defined – action at beginning to intice audience, no action to prepare for plot development, gradually leading to a climax. What would be sad though, is if at the end, Rock talks Roberta out of attacking the United States. What would be awesome, is after the CIA unit is severely wounded, the President calls in a nuke. What would not be awesome, would be if after the nuke, everyone somehow still survived.

Anywho, there’s no people surviving from nukes just yet, so I guess this is still awesome.

Oh, that’s why she wants to get poked by cue sticks