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OH GEEZ WHAT THEY WERE DRAGONS ALL ALONG?? That totally came out of nowhere!!

So hey, the comic is very nearly almost over!!! *crying emoji* As a post comic wrap up, Joe and I will be doing a one-off NN4B Final Thoughts And FAQs podcast, where we’ll talk about our thoughts and feeling on the comic, idea that changed or were cut, and answering questions from READERS LIKE YOU. So if you have questions pertaining to No Need for Bushido, feel free to post them in the comments below, just make sure to label them “FOR THE PODCAST” so we know you’re submitting a question for the podcast! (Also, like, we’re not gonna answer wildly inappropriate or personal questions!)

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  • Xinef

    I have to admit, Matrix has a pretty snazzy mustache.

    What if uncle Yuki is also a dragon, but doesn’t hang out with those two because chess are sooooo last season?

  • Sunwu

    For the podcast: what would you diffrently if you could do the comic over again? How would you save the scenes you had to cut?

  • Hfar

    Why do I imagine Matrix’s version of winning at chess being turning into her dragon form, eating the chess board, and saying “I took your king, therefore I win.”

    • KungFuKlobber

      Would she even agree that that’s the objective? I feel like she’d just go full Calvinball pretty much immediately.

      • Arkone Axon

        Bear in mind that since Calvinball’s only two rules are “make it up as we go along,” and “you can’t play it the same way twice,” that could be a fun and challenging way for a spirit of Order to beat his counterpart. Gradually entrap her over a series of games. Best seven out of ten – lose the first few games while choosing rules that grossly favor her, just to eliminate them from future games.

    • Turul

      Sounds accurate.

    • Arkone Axon

      I just watched the last episode of “That Time I was Reincarnated as a Slime” (at least, the last one on Crunchyroll, episode 25) the other day. The one where we find out what Storm Dragon Veldora meant when he told Ifrit, “you will be my opponent now, until I am satisfied!”

      Veldora didn’t actually try eating the chess board, but he did try something that was not quite according to the rules…

    • Ping
      • Hfar

        Table flipping, the martial art.

        • Xinef

          I would not be surprised if Jackie Chan were a grandmaster of table-flipping-jutsu.
          I do remember him using ladder-jutsu at one point. And a few other furniture objects.

          • Nos Rin aka CTCO

            umbrella-jutsu.
            horshoe on a rope-justsu.

      • Zathael

        Is that picture period? Because holy shit XD!

        • Aqua

          1800’s it looks like, that said he isn’t table flipping, he’s using it as a weapon to defend himself because he didn’t have any actual weapons at hand and got attacked, apparently.

          • Xinef

            But did he get attacked by his Tesuji opponent, because he was winning at the game?

  • Turul

    Their true forms are awesome

    • clogboy

      A battle between order and chaos… interesting. I’ve never seen them as opposing forces. When there’s chaos people desire order. When there’s order people desire change. Change always involves a period of chaos, but no sane person desires it. Chaos for its own sake is not sustainable.

      • SKy

        What you describe is the principle of Yin and Yang. Order & chaos is one of the most common interpretations of it, but the absolute basis is the duality of two aspects that can’t be separated: Light and darkness, heat and cold, male and female, active and passive, creation and destruction… You can actually see some of these in Lex and Matrix – along with their designs resembling the two sides of the yin yang symbol.

      • Arkone Axon

        Sometimes you DO desire change. Mostly when the status quo is untenable. Hell, even the seasons are a succession of changes over the course of the year; an unending spring or summer would mean no harvest times and considerable hunger.

        That’s also why the Yin and Yang symbols have those little dots in them. Each has a bit of the other in them, ideally – enough order to the chaos to keep it from becoming destructive anarchy, enough chaos to the order to keep it from becoming tyranny. You never want to swing all the way to one side or the other.

        That’s the emphasis in asian philosophical systems. It’s not about “good versus evil” with one side being all bad and horrible and needing to be opposed no matter what. It’s about balance, and “good” is when everything is in balance, and “evil” is when things are unbalanced. For an interesting example of what I mean, look at Confuscious’ Five Relationships, and apply the “Master and Servant” relationship to the modern corporatist system.

        • clogboy

          People always desire change, you should. Order doesn’t mean benevolent or sustainable. The Empire in Star Wars represents order. Any reformative force brings chaos, and then order again if they’re successful.
          I’m just saying that chaos for its own sake is not sustainable. In the long run, neither is order, but where chaos is an usually undesired side effect of change, order is a desired result of change. So rather than order and chaos, I’d say stability and change represent two opposing sides.

      • Xinef

        1. Sane people are overrated.

        2. Reminds me of some religions where death/destruction is not seen as evil, but rather as the force that opposes stagnation. Where striving for immortality and for a vision of perfection that is static, unchanging, rather than a cycle, is seen as an abominable and mislead effort.

        3. On the topic of anarchy though, I’d say that governments tend to be quite chaotic.

        • purplelibraryguy

          Anarchy and chaos are not very closely related. No rulers, not no rules.

          • Xinef

            The way I see it, whether anarchy would be chaotic or not may largely depend on people and the situation involved.
            Some people, when left in a lawless situation (say, stranded in wilderness), are willing to cooperate with others even when they normally wouldn’t, and are very quick to establish some sort of order – be it with leaders, or egalitarian.
            Other people in the same situation act selfish, steal, murder, harm others if they think this helps themselves survive.

            I think this largely depends on the perceived benefits of both – if people think cooperation is more beneficial, most will prefer to cooperate. If people think ‘selfish’ behavior is more beneficial (for example if it won’t get you punished), many will choose that route. Of course both are essentially selfish mindsets, but I suppose selfishness ain’t too bad when cooperation and choosing not to harm others is the selfish choice 😉
            Anyway, this means much depends on:
            a) If the situation rewards cooperation or not.
            b) If people are good at recognizing the situation. Because ultimately, people make decisions based on what they think, not necessarily based on what is true.

          • Archangel

            If you have rules, ANY rules, then you must have somebody to enforce them. You wind up with a government, whether you call it that or not. Then it becomes formalized, and then ossified, and then corrupt, because that’s how human nature goes.

            In short anarchy is like communism–a lovely idea, but can’t ever work beyond a handful of people in a group due to human nature.

          • purplelibraryguy

            There is nothing about anarchism that says things can’t be formalized, or even that there isn’t a government–the government just is supposed to be as it were co-extensive with the people. It could be ossified and still anarchism as long as it wasn’t ossified in such a way that a few people ended up with power over others. Masses of ossified committees with formalized roles doing gridlock . . .

            The problem of large scale anarchism isn’t that, it’s figuring out how to distribute decision making. The small scale approach tends to be, everybody is involved in all the decisions, often in in-person meetings, which obviously doesn’t scale worth a damn. You’d end up with millions of people all trying to micromanage everything. Figuring a way to have equal participation across a big space without drowning everybody in information is tricky and very few people have even tried to come up with ways to do it, presumably because there’s hardly ever been an anarchy of any scale and in all the known cases they only existed briefly before being crushed (ie by Franco or Lenin). But that doesn’t make it impossible, just means there’s a lot of room for it to be worked on. I myself have come up with a couple of possible approaches, which wouldn’t have worked before good computer networking. I’m afraid my main one takes a couple paragraphs to describe, so feel free to doubt me.

          • Archangel

            I think we’re fundamentally disagreeing on the definition of the term “anarchy.” (This is why my philosophy professors were so adamant about defining terms before starting a debate, I guess.) In any case, I find what you’ve written interesting, but abstract political theory doesn’t interest me enough to want a deep debate. ^_^

            That said, if you don’t already know it, you should *absolutely* check out the webcomic “S.S.D.D.” It starts fairly slice-of-life but it grows into this huge metaplot, including a world where one of the leading superpowers is in fact an anarchist state.

          • purplelibraryguy

            I quite like S.S.D.D.; which reminds me, time to check my morning webcomics.

          • Xinef

            How about a definition of anarchy, where “leadership is not monopolized”.
            Basically, there can be government, but if you don’t like the government, you can create a competing one. Even a one-man government, governing only yourself, if you can’t find any followers.

            Now… technically we can do it right now, except most people who try (with few notable exceptions, like Sealand) are promptly crushed by established governments. So in practice leadership is monopolized, and this monopoly is enforced by established governments.

            If this practice were to stop, I would say we’d get anarchy.

  • EBeth

    Ha! Knew it was significant that the panel with Cho’s comment about “being themselves” had Matrix in the foreground!
    FOR THE PODCAST:
    Which characters or world events have untold background stories that you wish you had the time, energy, etc. to show?

  • clogboy

    DRAGONS :)

    When this is wrapped up, I’ll mostly miss the movie reviews. They’re usually opinionated but on point and I rarely disagree on specific points. They also challenge me to watch movie from a different angle (reclined 30 degrees is usually a good one for me :p)

  • Arkone Axon

    So… the two attractive manipulators (at least one of whom was not-so-subtly flirting with and/or perving on Yorikiro) are in fact scaled nonhuman creatures with a penchant for playing with humans… humans like the readers who have been admiring them?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrrZ1Q11xvo

  • Sunwu

    For the podcast: what will you miss about working on nn4b?

    How have Webcomics changed since you first came on the scene and started this comic?

    Who are your favorite characters from your own web comic?

    Which Character was the hardest to write for?

  • Paul McCubbrey

    Let me guess, she dresses the king and queen in snazzy hats and then eats all the pieces she captures.

  • Da’Zlein

    “I’m telling you, the Triple Bishop Flip is a legit strategy I learned in Moscow”
    “Stealing one of my bishops is not now nor will it ever be ‘legit'”
    “You’re just mad you never thought of it”

    • Xinef

      What about teaching the King some kenjutsu, so that he isn’t defenseless. No more easy check-mates for ya!

      • Ibrinar

        In the world of chess everyone is a glass cannon whoever strikes first wins, so what he needs is parkour training to run better!

    • CaptXpendable

      In this case, she won the “Chess Game” by getting black and white pieces to work together.

      The Doctor would approve.

  • IDPounder

    For the podcast: What’s next for the creative team? Are you all just going to ride off into the sunset (day jobs), or work on a new creative project?

    • Kid Chaos

      How about something like “Kung Fu” (1972-75), starring Cho instead of David Carradine. He could search for his long-lost son…kind of a tall order for a blind guy who gets confused easily. 😎

  • Bladedwind

    I have a feeling I know what the last comic will have in it to some degree (and if it does not I will express my mild disappointment.)

    For the podcast: Do you have anything else planned? Any future projects? And if so, what genre were you thinking of touching on?

    And/or

    If you could expand on anyone’s backstory and have fleshed it out more, who would it have been?

  • Namaphry

    Alright, here’s a question FOR THE PODCAST: What were some of your wildly overambitious plans for the story or action scenes, that you were only be able to do justice to in parallel universes where the comic had two to four times as many pages as it did?

    (Seems this is just a variation on several of the others, though.)

  • z0mb1e

    I had a few ideas on who Matrix and Lex were but I was no where even remotely close. And I’m way happier with them being dragons than anything I thought! Also, nice cloudscape in this one.

  • Sunwu

    Is it good or bad that this panel is reminding me of the Simpsons
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NhjTvaAUMlI

  • purplelibraryguy

    Frankly, he’s wrong on his own terms. Bringing peace and ruling are two quite different things.

  • Crestlinger

    Lol guess she won’t be wanting her sword back anytime soon then.

  • Alexis Casto

    Dragons FTW. 😀

  • http://kiwidayn.comicgenesis.com ColdFusion

    Man it’s a weird feeling when a comic you’ve been following for ages and ages comes to an end. I can’t remember when I jumped on, but this thing is up towards the top of my favorites list, with only the likes of MegaTokyo above it, so I can say for certain most comics I found earlier than this have already ended or disappeared.
    It’s good stuff, you’ve kept the quality up. Glad to see you made it!

    • http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

      It is still strange of me to think that nn4b has been around in people’s lives for well over a decade, and now it won’t be updating anymore. I started drawing it when I was 18 and I’m 36 now!! Granted, that’s a big part of the reason we pushed to wrap it up, long projects are loooooong, and sometimes it’s good to move on to new things.

      • clogboy

        Good grief! You started it at 18?? That’s exactly half a lifetime ago :)
        I’m of the same age, and been following it for at least twelve years if not longer. Let’s round it down to 1/3rd of my life, making it a habbit to check back each Monday and be entertained, not only that: mentally involved, theorizing, and for the last couple years harrassing half the readership with my half-cooked theories and opinions 😉
        FOR THE PODCAST hypothetically, which famous director would you sell the movie rights to, and which one definitely not? Shyamalan is not a legitimate ‘no’ for being too obvious, and if you’re not selling to Christopher Nolan or Josh Whedon I’m interested to know why.

      • Hfar

        That is fair. However considering that you guys are one of the few webcomics that has actually managed to not only finish your story but to make the ending satisfying puts you leagues above most webcomics. It’s sad but not many webcomic artists have the tenacity to finish what they started. That you did really speaks to your character.

        • IDPounder

          It really is rare to see one of these come to completion. Well done on that score!

        • http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

          In defense of unfinished webcomics, I have come extremely close to ending NN4B unfinished on at least three separate occasions, and I often question the legacy of energy I put into the comic.

          Few webcomics truly become break-out hits with enough reader-produced income to sustain the creator, and if someone is trying to be a professional artist, one can seriously start to resent the time investment into a long running financial flop of a project, especially if they feel there are other opportunities they’re passing up to keep working on it. I may talk more about this and my sometimes mixed feelings for the comic during the wrap-up podcast.

          • Hfar

            This is also fair. Which really also shows that honestly one should have an end goal in mind for one’s webcomic, as well as maintain reasonable expectations for what one can put into the project. That is one pitfall of making webcomics, as the internet makes it easy for people who don’t know what they’re getting into to start such projects. Although that once again makes webcomics who do reach completion all the more precious. I know I will certainly remember this one fondly for years to come.

          • Namaphry

            Oh. Speaking of that, is there any direct way to pay you for making the comic?

  • aGoPlayer

    FOR THE PODCAST

    1: What was the original plan for matrix and lex? (you mentioned that their original plot had been aborted)
    2: We’ve noticed several points culturally, architecturally, etc. that are very accurate to Japan. How did conduct your research? (Did you get to visit Japan? If so, where did you go?) How often did you use photo reference?

    Love the comics, hope to see cho’s prophecy wrapped up before the end. My wife introduced me to this comic after she read page http://nn4b.com/comic/772 and exclaimed “he knew the whole time?!” At which point she refused to tell me what was going on due to spoilers and had me start at page 1. We both spent two years in Japan as missionaries and love the culture which has added to the enjoyment of reading this.

    • http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

      Haha! That’s a great way to get introduced to the comic!

  • Bernard Henry

    AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA we knew it would be over some day but still :(

  • Nos Rin aka CTCO

    Oh ya! I forgot about these guys!

    if you did another comic it would be cool to see them in the background again.

  • Nos Rin aka CTCO

    you know what else would be cool? an official NNFB discord.
    I mean, it’s a little late but, the idea popped into my head, so i said it.

  • http://www.comicsagonistes.hackenbush.org/ Ginger Mayerson

    Dragons! Brilliant.

  • http://tapastic.com/series/Sun-Incarnate Declan

    FOR THE PODCAST: I don’t recall, but did you ever talk about character design?

    It’s probably hard to recall what was going through your mind so long ago, but did you have anything in mind when creating the main cast? Inspirations?

    And what were the reasons you changed the character designs? What influenced the changes you made to them?

    Assume you had just started the comic with the knowledge you have now, would you change their original designs?

    Are there characters you wish had interacted more?

    and most importantly….

    WHAT HAPPENED TO INA’S SISTERS?!

  • Cian Oldershaw

    Don’t look up, Yori!

  • https://fallingstars5683.tumblr.com/ Harper

    “the outcomes of these forgotten histories”
    oh so my assumption all those years ago was right! they were time travelers!
    but like
    not at all in the way i expected
    man this webcomic was really great

  • Bob

    That.
    Is.
    Awesome.

  • SlugFiller

    Wait, I thought the bet was on whether he would die.

    Also, she’s not wrong. Eijiro becoming lord is technically due to Yori’s actions, so anything that Eijiro ends up doing later falls under “the boy would bring”.

    It actually makes me wonder what was the thing he claimed to know that she didn’t.

  • Frank Royce Harr

    I’d forgotten about these two. Man, don’t that explain SO much.

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