[726]Is Zimmy...human?

It seems so. Didn't expect that the court tracks everybody with sensors. It's a little bit creepy that the court always knows where you are.

I love the 5Th panel. Renard is to small to look over the railing of the boat. And Annie face adds also to the fun.

And before I forget: "Yeah Answer!"

Next question for Annie: And what about you, Ms. Jones? Are you Human?

It's interesting that Annie's first assumption is always that someone abnormal is not human (she thought Jones was a Robot)

Oh my god the Court tracks people through their food Jack was right oh that is so creepy


I would love for Annie to ask that question. Are there any instances of Jones dodging questions?

I still call nanites in the meatloaf!

So maybe Jack isn't crazy at all. All the weird stuff he said turned out to be true.

Alright. I think you have grossly misinterpreted what Tom is doing here. By having Antimony ask if Zimmy is human, he is in no way presenting Zimmy as having less worth than another normal human being. Tom does not do this. Ghosts, etheric creatures, fairies, heck - even the robots are "human," in that they have human qualities and are treated humanely. (With the exception of Jack, but he's not a very nice guy anyway.) I think (and this has all been my opinion, not fact) that Antimony was simply curious. After all, there are a lot of strange happenings at Gunnerkrigg Court, non-human encounters included. Tom did not mean that Zimmy was worth less, even if she wasn't human.

Gotta agree here. In Gunnerkrigg Court, at least, while all humans are people, not all people are humans, even if they look like it. Marcia turned out to be a Dryad; The Girl in the Photo (I can't remember how to spell her name on the fly) turned out to be a Valkyrie, although there's no way Annie would have known that one. Coyote and Reynardine are magical animals, but can possess people. The suicide fairies still think and act like the faeries they used to be, despite being in a human body.

So, more precisely, Annie is asking Jones, "Is Zimmy a human, as opposed to being an elf, a robot, an angel, a demon, an energy being, a face spider, a faerie, a changeling, a nymph, a shape-shifter, or one of any number of other sapient magical beings that could conceivably take the shape of a member of the species homo sapien?", but that'd be pretty long for Tom to fit inside that speech bubble.

I don't think that the Court would go that far. Whatever Gunnerkrigg's faults, it doesn't strike me as a stereotypical "out-to-rule-the-world" mad scientist organization. (Indeed, I don't think that any "mad scientist" out to take over the world is a true scientist; a true scientist pursues scientific knowledge for its own sake, out of interest in it. The "mad scientist" bent on world domination is just a would-be conqueror who uses science and technology as a tool - and who probably views science with a tone similar to that of C. S. Lewis' Screwtape: "Alas, alas, that knowledge, in itself so hateful and mawkish a thing, should yet be necessary for Power!")

Certainly, I don't think that the Donlans or Eglamore seem like the kind of people who'd work for a corrupt group of powermongers (unless they're really good actors who've been concealing their true natures all along) - and I don't think that such an interpretation of Gunnerkrigg would fit the tone of the webcomic, either.

So Zimmy is an unsupervised, unaccountable 80lb ball of mayhem, Jack isn't crazy (although he may be murderous in the pursuit of his own interests), and the Court's traditional response to all this is to pass the popcorn.

Well, it's hardly fair to say that such an aim is out of the realm of possibility. Plenty of (incredibly) unethical things were done in the name of advancing science in periods of crisis by otherwise normal, reasonable individuals. Most of them weren't "mad scientists" in the classical sense, and many of them (arguably) didn't even work for people who were out for world domination.

Take, for instance, Unit 731, or the medical section at Birkenau during world war 2. The regimes responsible for both of these places did terrible, monstrous things under the banner of advancing science, but the people actually carrying out the dirty work were not, by and large, monstrous and depraved individuals. Most of them were merely following orders.

And, this kind of thing didn't end with WWII, either. The United States government sponsored unethical research into radiation-related diseases from the late 1940s into the early-mid 1960s, exposing everyone from US military personnel to pregnant women and children to dangerous, debilitating amounts of radiation. And, of course, there were MK-ULTRA tests and various other chemical/biological weapon experiments during that time period also.

I know a few people who work for the US Government who aren't bad sorts. Some of them might be aware of what that government has done and sponsored terrible things in the past, even, though they probably don't think those things will happen again.

You know what else? I suspect that if those people were told that something terrible and unethical needed to happen, and they were given minimally sufficient justification for it, most of them would go along.

The article linked below runs down the list of terrible things done in the name of science pretty comprehensively, and has plenty of sources cited if you find it all too incredible to otherwise believe (I know I did when I first read it):
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_experimentation_in_the_United_States

It should be noted that this is just the list of things done in the US, and furthermore just the stuff that is known to the public.


So in conclusion I think that the court might just have good people in it, working for it, who aren't aware of all that goes on within its borders. There might even be some of those who are aware, but who do nothing for some reason.

My responses so far:

1) In the context of this comic, questioning something's humanity can't be interpreted as implying they are sub-human. By statistics, in the context of this comic it is more likely meant to imply that they are super-human. So there goes that argument.

2) Just because a crazy character was right about something doesn't make him no longer crazy. Anyone who lures a classmate and her supernatural sidekick out in the middle of the night, tricks the latter into a torture trap, and leaves the former stuck there to take the blame for it, all for the sake of setting a distraction to aid him in obsessively hunting down another classmate, is clearly not operating within the bounds of common and acceptable human behavior.

Oh, I never said they were doing experiments on the same scale or to the same depravity as the ones I listed, just that the evidence so far seemed to point to a decided lack of ethical consideration regarding experimentation/research on human beings.

I mainly cited those to prove the point that it isn't just "mad scientists" who do bad things for science.

That said, you left out "did nothing to treat, alleviate or contain Zimmy's condition, in spite of its direct negative effect on both her and other children at the school (mostly Gamma, but also everyone she inadvertantly sucked into Birminghell)" and "ran power station experiments knowing full well that they would fuck with Zimmy's head (leading directly to aforementioned Birminghell trip)" in your list of experiments. Perhaps not on par with Mengle, but certainly not acceptable to any modern bioethics board I'm aware of.

But they did do something to treat/alleviate Zimmy's condition: they left her alone. They don't subject her to surveillance because it puts her on edge. And they know that Gamma helps, so they let her hang with Gamma. That shows some regard for her well being, and it would absolutely fly with a bioethics board. It's never been said that the Court does or doesn't know anything more about what to do for Zimmy. But what Jones has just said is that they do know two things that help Zimmy, and they give her both.

And they in no way have said or indicated or hinted that they knew that the power station experiments would mess with Zimmy's head.

Well, if no treatment or cure is available (which would imply a rather unfortunate end for Jack, I'm afraid), then certainly they could at least arrange things so that she wouldn't expose others to her condition (unless they were not aware of it being contagious, I suppose).

As for them not knowing about the effects of the power station, Jones apparently knew quite well how Zimmy was affected, as explained on the last page. And if she knew, why wouldn't she inform the group in charge of the power station?


And the not tracking her, well, even if they stop tracking her, they can still track Gamma, who will not generally leave her side at any point.