[697] Callous...almost bitter

Sometimes I wish I had the willpower to stay away from this site for at least a few weeks, so that i would be spared having to wait for the next exciting episode to be revealed.


For some reason that building always reminds me of a map in Battlefield 2142.

Taking into consideration the various ways Tom has drawn her over the years, It think panel 5 Annie is my favorite version yet. She just looks lovely.

Yeah, I'm a sucker for ponytails. Point still stands though.

Though, I hope this page is not a foreshadowing of Kat passing to the Dark Side D:

I always assumed Annie would be the one to turn from the Court. It would be much more interesting to me if it were Kat.

If Kat does stay that way for a long time, I suspect that the tone of the webcomic will become much more somber; many of the lighter moments are Kat pursuing the interests of a regular middle school-aged child. (Of course, the mere revelation of the dark secret behind Gunnerkrigg's founding would have done a lot to change the mood, even without the consequences to Kat's characterization.)

I love Reynardine.

I think its normal for Kat to go trough a period of bitterness, but, like Reynardine said, she will pull through it, especially if she and Annie talk about it. I think it would be good for the two girls to talk about what they saw of the court's founding, since they are both having problems (and who wouldn't!?) facing it.

I'm guessing the situation left Kat wanting to do this but everyone involved is dead and gone, except for Jeanne who's dead but trapped in the ravine, and there's nothing Kat can do about it for now. I think what would make her happier is once she and Annie have a plan to help Jeanne somehow.

What type of robots it would be? (i know, i know, cheap... but still funny)
There's a reason that genre is called cyberpunk. Also, one doesn't exclude another.
Unless she told him already.

I think the old Kat is still in there and I bet that even before she returns to her old self (if she does) her lighthearted sense of humor will resurface a bit every so often. Just in a less cheery way.

Had the same thought.

This could just be a temporary thing, but I've always had anasty feeling some sort of wedge was eventually going to be driven between Kat and Annie, possibly by one of them undergoing a negative personality change. I'm not saying we're seeing the start of that here, but if we are (and I think Tom has proven at this point that he never brings something up if he isn't going somewhere with it) I never expected Kat to be the one to take a turn to the dark side.

Man, if that actually happens its going to be an emotional punch in the gut

I think that someone (most likely Annie) should point out to Kat that while Jeanne's sacrifice was wrong, the people responsible for it - the Founders - are no longer living in the Court, and that since they did not pass down the knowledge of what they had done to their successors (indeed, taking the drastic step of erasing all mention of Jeanne from the Court's records), the current faculty and administration know nothing about Jeanne's murder, and certainly had no part in it. (And there might be the dubious comfort that Diego, at least, was troubled by the deed in his conscience for the rest of his life - not enough to repent of it, but enough to be frantically engaged in self-justification on his deathbed. We don't know whether the other Founders, such as Sir Young, were similarly troubled - of course, they didn't have the personal motives in choosing Jeanne that Diego did.) And I don't think that the current faculty would stoop to such depths.

Let's hope that we don't get a scene like this one between Annie and Kat:

ANNIE: But the people responsible for Jeanne's death have been dead for years now.

KAT: Then their descendants shall pay! I will have blood for blood!

I don’t think the fact that it happened many years ago will be of any consolation. The fact that she lives in a place where something that awful was done, will haunt her forever. The fact that there are ghosts everywhere makes it even worse.

The fact that an organization would be willing to murder a young woman in cold blood has probably changed her view of humanity. The fact that a man would support the sentencing of the person whom he was once pining for, to death, for has probably shattered her view of love. Her mindset, her school, her home have all been violated and poisoned. This’ll probably be her hour of weeping and curling up in a ball, petrified, rather than an hour of crying.

For that matter, the revelation that the Court established its safety from Gillitie Wood by Jeanne's murder raises another uneasy possibility. Throughout legend, whenever a city or kingdom owes its foundation to some dark act (the Norse gods cheating the giant who built the walls of Asgard of his pay, King Arthur's birth brought about by Uther Pendragon's lustful pursuit of Igraine, etc.), that city comes to a bad end. Could Jeanne's murder, while providing an immediate protection for the Court from the inhabitants of the Wood, ultimately ensure a cataclysmic downfall for it on the scale of Ragnarok or Camlann? (Unless, that is, Annie is able to use her medium talents to secure a lasting peace between Gunnerkrigg and Gillitie - with a tone, perhaps, of "If the Founders had taken this route, they wouldn't have thought they needed to protect themselves by killing Jeanne.")