I would have wiSSSShed... what is missing from SSSS?

[moredhel]

Cinnamon and cardamom and possibly coffee and sugar - what the hey? I am highly skeptical the famed Icelandic greenhouses would be a source for these. Nup.

No idea how much greenhaouse technology is left then but today iceland does produce bananas. No idea of cinnamon or coffe are possible but sugar beets should be no problem.

[Suominoita]

No idea how much greenhaouse technology is left then but today Iceland does produce bananas. No idea of cinnamon or coffe are possible but sugar beets should be no problem.

Sugar beets, definitely. Or maybe they sweeten things with honey. And yes, I think those others can be grown in a greenhouse. Though-- Norway has a seed collection - but they're so Want-to-be-like-the-ancient-vikings. Iceland has managed to get things to grow, but may be too occupied with just farming food and sheep. Denmark may well import tech and seeds, farm and sell sugar, cinnamon and others.

[tehta]

Don't forget, canonical Iceland grows mandarins (aka "lemons that killed themselves", if I recall correctly).

...that's exactly the sort of detail I would like to see more of...

[Jitter]

About 40% of global sugar production is from sugar beet, which is a fairly common crop in southern and central Finland, and I presume similar in Sweden. So that is not a problem. Coffee is probably out of bounds or at least extremely rare. Spices I don’t know about, but there are lots of herbs that will grow, and will help give flavor to baked goods and food alike.

[Róisín]

It’s amazing what can be grown in a greenhouse, or even in a large warm sunny room, such as the large sunny kitchen in which a friend who lives further south in the Adelaide Hills than I do grows her household’s supply of coffee on four plants in large tubs. Another friend down in the Adelaide suburbs grows coffee plants in her warm but shady garden, right out in the open. Cinnamon also will grow in the open here. There are several large cinnamon trees and a cassia tree in the Adelaide Botanical Gardens, growing out in the open, also a clove tree, so I see no reason why a greenhouse in Iceland should not successfully grow all of the above - after all their greenhouses are geothermally heated, and here and now they grow good crops of bananas! 

Cacao is not as hardy as either coffee or cinnamon, but I have grown it in a greenhouse in the Snowy Mountains in Victoria, where it can get as cold as Iceland in the winter, with ice storms, and blizzards and all, even if there are heatwaves and bushfires in the summer. For that matter I have grown pepper as a houseplant in the Snowies, while there were blizzards and snowdrifts outside. I had cacao for several years in a greenhouse here in Mount Pleasant (we are in that little triangle where the boundaries of the Adelaide Hills, the Murraylands and the Barossa join up, so we have a very variable climate, we have had a high of above 48C since we moved here, and a low of 12.something below freezing. It is not surprising that my cacao tree was finally killed, not by cold as you might expect but by a heatwave).

[Sc0ut]

I think, as from all stories that include a Catastrophe with a supernatural angle, I was hoping we got an explanation for the Rash - what is it really, why did it appear, did humanity need to learn a lesson, did some clumsy god do an oopsie? (To be fair, it is very hard to pull off this sort of conclusion satisfyingly, so even if the ending wasn't rushed, I wasn't banking on it. But it's so good when it happens.)

I hoped to see the fact that trolls are to some degree sentient, yet still mercilessly killed, addressed in some way. Does nobody have second thoughts about it? Have all attempts to communicate with them been abandoned everywhere? Is there really no non-violent way - especially knowing about Pastor A? (On a personal level, ssss made me realise I'm really put off by all stories where the enemies have human characteristics yet are fully considered monsters - why I never liked zombie movies, for instance. It feels too adjacent to the demonising of different people that happens on various levels in real life. When this trope is used in stories, I want to see it examined, not glossed over.)

I wanted to see more about the border guardians! Their introduction was, I think, the last time I was excited about anything in this comic.

I hoped to see more slice of life set in the cities we've seen, but also additional secret communities - there would be so much fun to be had with survivor pockets out there that do life in entirely different ways than what is taken for granted in civilisation as it remains - maybe they communicate with trolls or have found a way to become entirely uninteresting to them? Maybe they keep alive specific technology that is gone in other places? Or have new types of magic? (Shoutout to the fan writers who have done some really cool things with this btw!)

But really, I'd trade all of that for having the main character stories resolved - which, to me, includes expanding on the relationships between them. (Btw this does not mean "haha it's so funny that the Hotakainens only communicate among themselves by verbal aggression, isn't it funny how they're physically incapable of demonstrating warmth? Let's watch this over and over"). Of course, like many others, I was most invested in Lalli and Emil's relationship, but seeing how it was entirely abandoned in the recent adventure, I don't think I'll personally find the ending even marginally satisfying.

[moredhel]

Cinnamon also will grow in the open here. There are several large cinnamon trees and a cassia tree in the Adelaide Botanical Gardens, growing out in the open, also a clove tree, so I see no reason why a greenhouse in Iceland should not successfully grow all of the above - after all their greenhouses are geothermally heated, and here and now they grow good crops of bananas! 

The problem might be the icelandic winter. It gets really dark then. I think LED production is too tricky for the post apocalyptic society. And long times of uniterrupted darkness could be very tough for a tropical or subtropical plant.

[lwise]

I hoped to see the fact that trolls are to some degree sentient, yet still mercilessly killed, addressed in some way. Does nobody have second thoughts about it?

I've thought about that too, and I think there are two reasons for "mercilessly killing" trolls.

One is that they seem to be suffering.  Look at the "black speech" in the static.  There's no cure for their suffering, and it's been going on for ninety years.  Under the circumstances, killing them seems like a kindness, like euthanasia.

The other is that trolls are a deadly danger, even to immune populations.  The only troll we know of that wouldn't attack human beings on sight is Pastor A.  Even if trolls retain some degree of sentience, I think they may fall into a conceptual category like wolves and bears.  We moderns have the luxury to see these as magnificent animals with some degree of sentience that need to be protected from extinction at the hands of human beings.  Our not-so-distant ancestors saw them as needing to be hunted down and destroyed, because for them, with much smaller populations and greatly inferior weapons, wolves and bears were an existential threat.  They could carry off children; they could kill livestock needed for survival; they could even kill adults if they were hungry enough or felt threatened.  Likewise, even if some trolls have some degree of sentience (it's not clear to me that they all do), they do pose an existential threat to the human population, and so the surviving population would not feel like looking for a non-violent way of dealing with them.

[lwise]

I think LED production is too tricky for the post apocalyptic society.

Do they need LEDs?  I've tried to figure out their technology level, putting aside those things they retain from the pre-Rash world, and I think they could at least make incandescent bulbs.  Since grow-lights existed before LEDs, I think they could manage those.

[Róisín]

Before greenhouses with electricity they managed in northern Scotland with stone walls heated with low fires, along with oil lamps (which might be difficult) and Iceland does appear to have electricity (geothermally generated?). Incandescent lights should be well within their tech levels.

[JoB]

Do they need LEDs?  I've tried to figure out their technology level, putting aside those things they retain from the pre-Rash world, and I think they could at least make incandescent bulbs.  Since grow-lights existed before LEDs, I think they could manage those.

They have electric lights, so them having the most primitive variant, incandescent bulbs, is pretty much a given. (Which is not to say that making working IBs is trivial.)

Compared to other illuminants, IBs have a terribly bad electric-power-to-light conversion rate, 95+% of the energy "gets lost" as heat. As far as I know, we (us ancients) consider IB-based grow lights prohibitively expensive because of that. That might be different when you're from a post-Rash society with super batteries and have to keep plants from freezing in a greenhouse in almost-polar-night light conditions ...

IIRC, for us, "grow lights" became a thing in the form of fluorescent tubes, not earlier.

[moredhel]

IIRC, for us, "grow lights" became a thing in the form of fluorescent tubes, not earlier.

People made sort of light bulb based grow lights. But needed some not standard glas for trying to get some not infrared light out of these bulbs. Was very very ineffective.

[tehta]

I suppose we should consider that there is always that "farm magic" that Reynir so dislikes. Maybe it's not all sheep-control; maybe there are staves that let tropical plants cope with lack of light, somehow.

Oh, and I completely forgot to mention that I, too, would love to understand the origins of the Rash, but I am 99.9999% sure that Minna has not decided on them, exactly. (I do have an idea I want to write up in fanfic format, on top of the 1000 other fanfics I am posting.)

[Jitter]

Iceland has loads of energy due to their nature, and having abandoned much of our modern tech it should be well available for growing of plants. But only such plants they had already, because getting them from somewhere else would be prohibitively dangerous.

I’m inclined to think the same as Tehta, I don’t think Minna has decided what the Rash really is in full detail. This is not a story for finding the cure. There were elements in Adv 1 hinting that it may have been, but nothing in Adv 2.

[lwise]

Iceland has loads of energy due to their nature, and having abandoned much of our modern tech it should be well available for growing of plants. But only such plants they had already, because getting them from somewhere else would be prohibitively dangerous.

They might have gotten seeds from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, though.