[656] It must be her.

You have a funny way of showing love, Diego.

Maybe Shadowy guy is Him, the traitor.

So it would appear that the shrine was Diego projecting his own guilt onto Sir Young. Or maybe Diego blames Sir Young for the chain of events that led to Jeanne's Forest sympathies and/or the Court needing to sacrifice Jeanne in the first place.

i said diego killed her and the robots did nothing! i get a called it cookie!

Out come the dark secrets... "deliberately hidden" indeed. Now be careful what you do with that information, Annie. I'd wager a bet that some people today still won't like that stuff to come to the light of day.

Also we now know what special circumstances led to Jeanne's ghost being trapped down there.
The original robots built it. Because they truely loved Jeanne (just the way the present robots do). Somehow Diego was able to teach his creations true feelings he never really had himself.

This plan has apparently been in the works before Jeanne's recent rejection of Diego, so consider the original lyrics. It's a man who drowns trying to swim the Annan Waters trying to reach his beloved.

Things would make a lot more sense if Diego's plan was really to use Jeanne as bait to lure her yet-unnamed beloved to his doom. She'd still be a sacrifice in a manner of speaking, as they're going to take her captive and break her heart by forcing her to watch her love drown or get shot or whatever. Diego probably doesn't wish to hurt Jeanne (as that would be counterproductive to getting into her knickers) but this way her current beau becomes the barrier spell component and shazam- Jeanne's no longer spoken for. Even better, Jeanne's now stuck with Diego on the Court side of the Waters.

Jeanne probably decided to kill herself instead of lingering around and turning to Diego in grief as Diego planned.

I think the most logical and responsible thing that Kat and Antimony can do now is to report this to a grown-up.

I have a much more cruel theory about the nature of the plan. It is quite clear that the aim of this is to close Annan Waters, to protect the Court. (Or not, Tom could always surprise us.)
I think that the closing is achieved by the sacrifice itself: killing someone and dooming her to roam the ravine forever. While she is there, the passage is closed not by her attacking anyone with an ethereal sword, but just by her being there. So binding Jeanne's soul there is quite intentional.
This of course would also mean that once she is removed the Court becomes more vulnerable to the forest.

And here I was thinking that Jeanne destroying some little robots was the reason Kingbot and his company were confused. But Diego being the cause of Jeanne's death is far more confusing.
It just doesn't make sense- we're obviously missing a piece of this puzzle, here.


This is a very good point!
Annie has been asked to help the Psychopomps with retrieving the soul of Jeanne from the river. If she succeeds, and Jeanne really IS what makes the Annan waters Impassable, then holeh crap.
This is a significant thing.

Something that they've seldom done - and with some understandability. Partly because Annie's background (her childhood at the hospital) has given her a strong impetus to handle things herself rather than turning to the grown-ups for help, and partly because if that was the approach they took, the grown-ups at Gunnerkrigg would be the main characters, rather than Annie and Kat.

(Not to mention that, even if they did take this route, they'd have to choose the grown-up to approach carefully - the revelation that the founders of the Court committed an act of murder sounds like the kind of thing that would want to be kept secret. I don't think that the present-day faculty would stoop to murdering Annie and Kat to keep that information from getting out, but they might not be comfortable with the discovery, all the same.

(After this page, I'm not so surprised that the present-day information on the Court's founding is so scanty, or that Jeanne is absent from the official chronicles.)

Are you sure? I think the "eye" above Antimony is Jeanne.

You said Diego killed her himself and dumped her body in the river.

So far, that has not happened.

I am trying to factor in how this works with the scripted fight. Sir Young's representation in Coyote's retelling is very similar to the robot we suspect represented him, so trying to factor that in is odd for me. However, this would explain why there was only one arrow; the Annan waters are closed and the deed was, at least to some extent, successful. And even if it weren't, if Jeanne were the only useful person, then that would still limit it to a single attempt.

The thing you're going to find is the greatest evidence that Bull-bot was to represent Sir Young is this page, which is sort of interesting in itself because the characterizations we're seeing on that page are not literal, they're Annie's interpretation... yet we can't really think they're mistaken, because I think artistically we're supposed to gather that the physical similarities were so great that Annie couldn't help but conclude that the one represented the other, for she had no other reason to reach such a conclusion.

And I think if anyone's having problems reconciling Diego blaming Sir Young... this is the same guy who felt that the only way to properly deal with the sting of his spurned advances was to kill the object of his desire. Not exactly right in the head, so it's easy to see how after he's done something so horrible as to insist that she must be sacrificed, he can deflect his guilt by pointing at Sir Young as the one who required a sacrifice at all.

It is curious, though, that he should not deflect his guilt and anger onto "him".

You may want to check in on the threads from last week if you haven't already, we (I) covered this topic already.