The Four Houses of Gunnerkrigg Court

I like your thinking here, and generally it makes sense, but that would mean that everyone in Annie's class has a special gift/talent. What's so special about Winsbury, other than his crazy hair?
I think it's more complicated than that, unless there's less 'talented' people at the school than we are anticipating - perhaps they all go to Queslett, but not all of Queslett is 'talented' people, in fact only a small amount.

Just because we haven't seen Winsbury's talent yet doesn't mean he doesn't have one (not that I disagree about it being a bit more complicated than that)

Some talents don't come immediately either though, as Jones says here.
(I'm too lazy to find it.)

It seems that Chester house is where the Court unofficially puts kids who have a "predetermination towards etheric sciences" (#545).

Given the attitudes towards non-science-y things among Queslett kids in ##20 & 545, and the preferences shown by Kat, it seems that it may be the unofficial house of kids good with science & tech. Anja, Surma, and Antimony would seem to be counterexamples; but even though she is magical, Anja is now a science teacher and had responsibility for the 7Q girls' dorm. That is, there was more to young Anja than seemed to be the case in her early years at the Court. That being so, I wonder if Surma and Antimony have so-far-unmentioned affinities for science (though I have to say I'm pretty doubtful in Antimony's case [##7, 72, 231, 365, 421, 507, & 519]. But maybe she turns out to be good at biology [##72 & 406]).

A quick note on the subject of Winsbury:

I don't know much at all about how English boarding schools work, but, in the Harry Potter series (yes, I brought up the Harry Potter series because that's all I know about English boarding schools) the classes that they took had students from multiple houses. In other words, Annie and William aren't necessarily from the same house, are they?

However, on the other hand, it does appear that Janet and Paz, at least, are definitely in Queslett, because they sleep in the same dorm as Annie and Kat. So your original question, about William, would certainly apply to Janet and Paz. Specifically: if Queslett is the house for normal kids with gifts, then what is Janet's ability (besides not being afraid of anything) and what is Paz's ability (besides being able to scream in Spanish very well)?

Considering the court's position on magic, I wouldn't be surprised if the houses were divided according to how the students are supervised. The staff seem very hands-off with the students in Queslett, but they probably keep a much closer watch on Chester kids.

I thought that had more to do with Odin calling her in for HIS lessons.

I don't know... can someone who has been in an English boarding school tell us if classes are mixed-house or house-specific? Was it not-normal that Harry and Malfoy had the same classes in the HP series?

Ah, good catch. I hadn't noticed that the first time around, possibly due to formatting.

Maybe. But Surma's statement, in and of itself, is pretty vague (let alone Anja's response); and Tom has been known to throw in the occasional misdirection (e.g., ##548-549, and 532). So what we think we know may not be what we actually do know. Also the court moved Surma, along with Anja, out of the "predetermination towards etheric sciences" house for *some* reason, and I think special skills or talents are too widely distributed among all the students to be it. All of which is just to explain why I don't take Surma's statement to be definitive with respect to an as-yet-unseen scientific ability. Queslett-as-science-house is just my best guess, and anyway it's an hypothesis rather than something I'm convinced of. If it's the case, then eventually we should learn that Surma and Antimony have some as-yet-unseen scientific ability. When we would learn such a thing (if we ever do) would depend upon the structure of the narrative, and Tom knows how to keep secrets.

Antimony taking after Surma; well, yes, but she also seems reserved like Anthony has in the very few instances he's appeared and very much UNlike Surma in the present chapter. And maybe she only picked up the things that make me wonder about an as-yet-unseen affinity for biology from being a surgeon's daughter who lived in a hospital. Even after 550 pages she seems enigmatic to me.

As for Kat, Tom has said that her science & tech interests follow Donald's more than Anja's; but Reynardine somehow recognized the Romani ancestry (#82) that she has from Anja so maybe there's a touch of magic in her after all (but maybe he knew from before that Anja was Romani and somehow learned that Kat was her daughter and so reasoned it out). So I'm not convinced that she takes after one more than the other.

So many possibilities, so little information. If this story isn't finished by the time I get around to dying I'm going to haunt Tom so hard. Worse than this: www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=534

Well something to keep in mind is that all of these characters, whatever their affinities may be, one thing that they have in common is that they're SMART. Annie sets out to build a robot in Ch. 1 with no experience in doing so, but just believing that she can. Along the way we've seen her demonstrate knowledge of many things, but a lot of that (and for all the characters) can just be attributed to being very smart. GC is kind of like an "Ivy League" boarding school in that sense.

That's not what I meant. Have you ever read any of Agatha Christie's "Poirot" mysteries? In pretty much every one there's an example of a witness paraphrasing what they heard, and when you finally learn what they actually heard you realize there's more than one possible interpretation and the witness assumed the ordinary one but it was the other, mystery-related one that actually applied. The witness didn't know the right context to interpret what they heard correctly, and so their paraphrase was misleading in terms of the mystery.

So what I mean is that maybe we can be fooled by context into thinking a word or sentence or image means one thing, when in fact it means something else. And usually it's not until later that it's apparent that that's what happened.

It's not a matter of anyone lying (unless you're a Harry/Hermione shipper), it's a tool of the mystery trade. Where's the fun if everything's exactly what it appears to be?



If that's what suits you. I prefer to be more conservative, I guess.

And that’s part of the reason why Agatha Christie isn’t my favourite mystery writer (from her generation, I’d prefer Dorothy Sayers any day). Agatha Christie has taken this to extremes, such as when one wonders who of the passengers on the Orient Express did commit the murder – and it turns out everyone did. It’s OK if the author manages to fool me; in fact that’s part of the fun with mystery. But I don’t like to be fooled a way I couldn’t have helped being fooled. And I don’t think we are dealing with that kind of mystery here.

I actually agree with you about Agatha Christie, mjh. But I think that her writing bred in many of us a tendency to try to over-analyze mysteries, looking for tiny clues where there are none. And hence I think we're brought to today, where the speculation is made that Antimony has a predilection for biology and therefore science in general, just because she knows how a muscle works (so do I) and because she made an entry in the science fair (so did I). Again, to that, I say, these are smart students, who are in school to learn things, at a school that heavily emphasizes science. So this alone is not enough to label Antimony as being "destined" for science, but rather, just that she's a smart kid in a school for smart kids.

This is true.

There's much more evidence that Antimony is not particularly scientifically inclined than that she is. But in the context of how the kids get assigned to the houses, my best guess is that scientific aptitude and Queslett go togther. It's just a guess, it could be wrong, I think the evidence for Queslett and Thornhill is weak. But if we *are* guessing, that's mine. For now.

Given that that's my guess, Anja, Surma, and Antimony pose problems for it. I think I can accommodate Anja fairly reasonably. Can I shove Surma and Antimony in? Maybe, if they have some as-yet-unseen scientific aptitude. OK, so the evidence is mostly that Antimony doesn't. But if she *did,* I bet (at the moment, on the basis of what I think we know now) it would be for biology. And if I've managed to cram Anja and Antimony into science-Queslett, then, clearly, any right-thinking person would gimme Surma.

So I'm not saying that they *do* have some as-yet-unseen scientific aptitude. I'm saying that, *if* Queslett is science-house (and that's only the best guess I can make now, which isn't saying much), then it seems to me that (much as Anja has been shown to have had a latent scientific aptitude) Surma and Antimony *ought* to. (And since, so far as we know, they don't, then it would have to be as-yet-unseen.) Then, if it *did* come to pass that they were shown to have scientific aptitudes, and the question of why kids are assigned to Queslett were still unanswered at that time, my hypothesis that Queslett is science-house would fail to be rejected on the basis of that particular criterion.

It's a house of cards built on a sand dune in the path of a hurricane with an earthquake imminent. And Godzilla.

Modified because I realized on the way home that I left the attic off my house of cards, and it's the most outlandish part!