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Post by fwip on Sept 16, 2014 0:15:08 GMT
I decided to create this thread to discuss the effect Zimmy has on reality, including but not limited to the phenomenon known as Zimmingham. First and foremost of my questions is whether or not Zimmingham is a physical or etheric location. Nobodies are mentioned as 'memories' by Gamma 1 so they may be etheric projections or shadows into a physical place, possibly caused by strong ether-users unintentionally projecting their memories such as Annie seems to have for Kat 2 in Power Station. The presence of water transported to Zimmingham on our latest page (1406) suggests that it is a physical location. The previous page is kind of ambiguous as to whether that water is indeed coming from the ocean, or somebody's memories of it. However, contributing to the possibility that it's an etheric location is the fact that Zimmy's clothes changed 3 when she teleported, although I suppose that would not be an issue if she did indeed have physicality-warping powers. To sum up my theory: Only ether users end up in Zimmingham, which is an etheric, non-physical location, but sometimes their memories end up there too and take on a life of their own. (1) www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=730 and later, Memory Jack disappears when Real Jack grabs him www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=736(2) www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=467 Annie finds Kat only to realize that Kat is a nobody. (I'm guessing that Nobodys are Zimmy-projections of random strangers as Zimmy sees them ("Sometimes real people don't have faces either") just like Kat is an Annie-projection of Kat as Annie sees her.) (3) www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=457(also - Zimmy's fear of the 'Thousand Eyes' and her fear of RoboKat may be linked?) |
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Post by goldenknots on Sept 16, 2014 0:19:40 GMT
I think that it is not physical. Remember that everyone was still on the roof when Annie and Jack went there with Zimmy and Gamma before, so there was the virtual, i.e., etherical world, and simultaneously the "real" or Gunnerkrigg Court world, though the four of them were only conscious of the former.
I don't know how that works. Were the four of them just standing around staring into space? What if Kat had grabbed Annie's arm and shaken it?
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Post by fwip on Sept 16, 2014 0:33:53 GMT
I think that it is not physical. Remember that everyone was still on the roof when Annie and Jack went there with Zimmy and Gamma before, so there was the virtual, i.e., etherical world, and simultaneously the "real" or Gunnerkrigg Court world, though the four of them were only conscious of the former. I don't know how that works. Were the four of them just standing around staring into space? What if Kat had grabbed Annie's arm and shaken it? Well, we know that manipulation of time is possible. If Zimmy has even indirect access to that kind of trump card, then she's far more powerful than we realized. |
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Post by warrl on Sept 16, 2014 0:46:52 GMT
The relationship between the Zimmyverse and the physical is weird and inconsistent (hardly surprising). Both in space and, I suspect, in time.
In Power Station, Zimmy and Annie moved several blocks but did not return to their starting point, and had a fairly extensive conversation, in Zimmyverse while standing on a single rooftop among a batch of Annie's friends, in the physical world. (We don't know just what adventures Jack had.) No one else noticed anything odd about their behavior aside from - after they got back - Annie's expression and strange interactions Annie and Jack each had with Zimmy. If they had been standing immobile and unresponsive for several minutes, someone would have noticed; and certainly nobody heard Zimmy tell Annie about popping the nobodies, or Annie's conversations with not-Kat. So I think that very little time passed.
In Spring-Heeled Jack, Annie entered the Zimmyverse from the roof of a physical building (apparently using the roof-access door as a portal). We then saw Zimmy-disguised-as-Annie travel several blocks, meeting with Gamma, Jack, and Annie-disguised-as-Zimmy along the way, ending up in a much different location... then when the real-world rain broke them out of the Zimmyverse, they were on the same roof. Unfortunately we don't get any clue in this one on how much physical-world time passed.
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Post by goldenknots on Sept 16, 2014 0:48:13 GMT
No reason to think she does, as far as I know. I suspect that she'd probably just go off somewhere with Gamma and stop everything else permanently if she could do that. :) |
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Post by Jelly Jellybean on Sept 16, 2014 1:15:19 GMT
I always thought that Zimmingham was Zimmy's psyche. People can get inadvertently sucked into her mind and leave with a manifestation of her fears. On this page, www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=464 , Zimmy says "I ain’t never gonna be able to leave this damn place. I’ll die here one day." I thought she meant that she can't escape from herself. |
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Post by Daedalus on Sept 16, 2014 3:16:08 GMT
Ah! I believe I made a relevant post a couple of months ago trying to tabulate all of Zimmy's powers. When I get back to my computer, let me find it and put it here. EDIT: here it is: Ok, so what powers has Zimmy shown, exactly? Jones gave an explanation, but not a very in-depth one. For the purpose of this exercise, let's assume she could control them (as she seems to be doing better in Divine). I assume this has come up on the forum somewhere before, but let's reevaluate it (and 'reality manipulation' is not sufficient; let's be more detailed). Chapter numbers are in brackets, as I don't want to track down page links... -Movement from reality into dreamspace (either Zimmingham [19], which I believe to be a representation of Zimmy's psyche, or Annie's psyche [38]) - Possible premonitions (Sivo's body [11], though I don't remember Tom confirming that, and Kat's future form possibly [38]) -Telepathy (Kat's pigeon hat [38]) -Telekinesis (sort of; she gets thrown across the room in reality [38]) -Spontaneous manifestation of horrors, possibly from her imagination (especially in [11], and also the spiders [27/28]) -Ability to at times see etheric things (Annie's scar [11]) -Shapeshifting and/or illusion casting (Appears as Annie [28]) -Limited time travel (as Mezzaphor already noted, in [38]) Anything else I'm missing that comes to mind? |
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Post by fish on Sept 16, 2014 10:17:12 GMT
Don't forget this little gem from divine. When Zimmy was rummaging through Annie's subconsciousness she could still talk with Kat in "real-time". The moment her mind was seemingly knocked out of her own head she could not communicate with the outside world anymore and she was pulled into Zimmingham. Now, seeing two Zimmys in one place does make it look like she is having an out-of-body experience, and this state seemed to make her vulnerable to whatever it is that drags her into Zimmyngham again and again. Her powers also remind me of the wisp from the forest. Annie unknowingly entered the ether the moment she decided to follow the light. In the real world she hadn't even moved an inch from that rock when she returned to her body again. Her waking up after that little side trip reminds me a bit of her waking up after leaving Zimmingham, though it seems it was less tiring. Now it's implied that the wisp lures people away into his little ether world - which looks just like the real world - to... kill them probably. And when your ether-self dies, your physical self take damage as well. [formspring-citation needed] All of this, of course, does not answer any questions. Instead it raises more. What is it that pulls Zimmy into a copy of her hometown (?) again and again? And to what end? Is there something alien in her mind that is trying to kill her? Her powers of distortion are one thing, but why is she so tied to one certain place? |
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Post by zimmyzims on Sept 16, 2014 11:24:56 GMT
Two points about the reality of Zimmingham and access to it:
1. It seems like just everybody on the ship went to the Zimmingham this time. We'll see if that's what happened, but at the moment it seems like it and that suggests that Zimmingham is, maybe an etheric realm, but not simply in Zimmy's mind and definitely it does not require them to have etheric talent - not proven yet, but I'm going to bet that Kat is there too this time.
2. It has been told before that things may change, and have changed before, in the real world because of what happens in Zimmingham, which is exactly what the Ship counts on as it wishes not to change in Zimmingham, but in this world too, and that suggests that when they sail to the Zimmingham now, they at least to some extent do that in real world. Something is going wrong there and it's not just that everybody gets sucked to Zimmy's head the same time.
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Post by csj on Sept 16, 2014 11:36:05 GMT
seeing two Zimmys in one place As far as I am aware, this has never happened. If you're thinking of that hallucination scene where Zimmy masquerades as Annie, the Zimmy there is actually Annie. This can be discerned by the colour changes of their uniforms on these panels. In addition, despite there being multiple 'Jacks', one one of them was 'real'; while there may be multiple projections, only one 'real' copy of an individual is ever present at any given time. |
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Post by fish on Sept 16, 2014 12:33:38 GMT
seeing two Zimmys in one place As far as I am aware, this has never happened. If you're thinking of that hallucination scene where Zimmy masquerades as Annie, the Zimmy there is actually Annie. This can be discerned by the colour changes of their uniforms on these panels. In addition, despite there being multiple 'Jacks', one one of them was 'real'; while there may be multiple projections, only one 'real' copy of an individual is ever present at any given time.  |
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Post by csj on Sept 16, 2014 14:05:17 GMT
As far as I am aware, this has never happened. If you're thinking of that hallucination scene where Zimmy masquerades as Annie, the Zimmy there is actually Annie. This can be discerned by the colour changes of their uniforms on these panels. In addition, despite there being multiple 'Jacks', one one of them was 'real'; while there may be multiple projections, only one 'real' copy of an individual is ever present at any given time.  |
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Post by Daedalus on Sept 16, 2014 15:24:43 GMT
csj; fish - I always assumed that Zimmy had time traveled by accident, so she was seeing an earlier version of herself. The time displacement severed the real-time link to Kat.
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Post by csj on Sept 16, 2014 16:55:57 GMT
Time travel sounds needlessly complex, when we already know she has a knack of bringing her memories and what she perceives into reality. I can't rule either of your theories out explicitly, but they do seem a little too out-there.  yes, I'm not spoilering the trope link! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA |
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Post by fish on Sept 16, 2014 19:05:56 GMT
Time travel sounds needlessly complex, when we already know she has a knack of bringing her memories and what she perceives into reality. I can't rule either of your theories out explicitly, but they do seem a little too out-there. yes, I'm not spoilering the trope link! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAWell alright, but how can "looking at your self from behind" be a memory? I am not sure right now wich part of my comment you refer to as a theory. Is it the out-of-body experience? Because that was just a musing, I should have made that clearer. Out-of-body experiences in Gunnerkrigg are pretty common I'd say. It's just the projecting of oneself in the ether that Annie does from time to time. I don't think the second Zimmy was a mere memory; it looks to me like the impact of punching Anthony in the face catapulted her out of the safe place she was in when she was devining Annie's dreams. As if she projected herself into the ether unintentionally. At that moment she lost the connection to the real world (which happens to Annie as well when she projects, mostly) and immediately found herself in a mixture of Zimmingham and Annie's memories. Man, discussing Zimmy-theories is hard, haha. Must resist urge to visit the time-sucking vortex that is tvtropes!!! |
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Post by todd on Sept 19, 2014 10:58:58 GMT
Since Zimmy's world is apparently one of chaos and insanity, I don't think we should expect too much internal consistency from it.
I do wonder, though, whether it exists independently of Zimmy. Is she tapping into some dark world out there? Or is it a creation of her abilities, which causes her hallucinations to appear in the regular world? (It may be significant that it looks like a twisted version of her home town. Maybe everything in it - the Nobodies, the Whitelegs, and the rest - is simply a reflection of her own inner demons.)
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ubldu
New Member
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Post by ubldu on Sept 19, 2014 11:35:55 GMT
Like I just wrote in the other thread:
I guess Zimmingham is usually an etheric place, or at least, people usually visit it with their etheric selfs. But because of whatever the ship-bots did with Zimmy and the Syphons, the Students are present with their physical bodies.
That is why we don't see Annie's scar, why Cat is not a Robot Angel and so on.
And, at least in my book, it makes sense. The Ship wants to have its body transformed, not its mind. So this time, the events in Zimmingham must have, to a certain degree, a physical effect on the real reality.
...
or so I think. With Lindsey, the reason ship is doing all this, being an obvious psychic with a brain partly in another dimension, who knows.
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Post by Ophel on Sept 19, 2014 11:37:06 GMT
I think that it is not physical. Remember that everyone was still on the roof when Annie and Jack went there with Zimmy and Gamma before, so there was the virtual, i.e., etherical world, and simultaneously the "real" or Gunnerkrigg Court world, though the four of them were only conscious of the former. I don't know how that works. Were the four of them just standing around staring into space? What if Kat had grabbed Annie's arm and shaken it? Actual spoilers this time, from a certain game with an ironic name. Maybe Zimmingham works kinda like Dream Zanarkand from FF10, except Zimmy doesn't need to be Faythed? If this is the case though, Zimmy is by far the most powerful character who isn't a deity. But, I wouldn't mind having an inexplicable Bahamut cameo suddenly appear, no sir. |
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Post by fish on Sept 23, 2014 20:08:01 GMT
*Ehem* Please let me bring this thread back up for a little thought... In Monday's page I noticed something: I half expected Kat to say "Annie told me about this... I think it's Zimmingham..." until I realized that Zimmy's mind place doesn't have a name in-story. We have been using that fan-name so comfortably in the forum and I feel like it actually takes out a bit of the horror of that place. Names do have power; If people are scared of the unknown, they can make it known by giving it a name (and category... and parameter estimation...) and be a little bit less scared of it. By not giving that place a proper name Tom has subtly added another level of dread. Alright, enough with my rambling! Also, I have a déjà vu right now for some reason... has somebody written something like this before? Damn glitches in the matrix... Actual spoilers this time, from a certain game with an ironic name. Maybe Zimmingham works kinda like Dream Zanarkand from FF10, except Zimmy doesn't need to be Faythed? If this is the case though, Zimmy is by far the most powerful character who isn't a deity. But, I wouldn't mind having an inexplicable Bahamut cameo suddenly appear, no sir. I feel like I understand more of the nature of Zimmingham than I ever got with Dream Zanarkand.  I was probably too young when I played it last, haha. How about a Yojimbo cameo instead of Bahamut? Cherry petals flying through the air of Zimmingham? How romantic! |
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Post by Daedalus on Sept 23, 2014 21:18:51 GMT
Zimmy is by far the most powerful character who isn't a deity. Well yeah, we knew that  |
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Post by artezzatrigger on Sept 23, 2014 21:46:42 GMT
I wonder if its possible for the ship to sink while everyone is in Zimmingham, or when ZimmyTime ends depending on what exactly is happening right now. gunnerkrigg.com/comics/00001400.jpg The fact that they seem to be able to calculate the level of Zimmys influence on the beings around her has some terrifying implications. Or if its possible the ship could "die", now that its part of the etheric distortion. |
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Post by todd on Sept 24, 2014 0:12:12 GMT
In Monday's page I noticed something: I half expected Kat to say "Annie told me about this... I think it's Zimmingham..." until I realized that Zimmy's mind place doesn't have a name in-story. We have been using that fan-name so comfortably in the forum and I feel like it actually takes out a bit of the horror of that place. Names do have power; If people are scared of the unknown, they can make it known by giving it a name (and category... and parameter estimation...) and be a little bit less scared of it. By not giving that place a proper name Tom has subtly added another level of dread. I'm not keen on the name "Zimmingham" either, since I thought it seemed to be making light of the place (seemed just too jokey) - but you come up with another good reason for keeping it nameless - that it's more horrifying that way. |
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Post by goldenknots on Sept 24, 2014 2:02:56 GMT
Maybe Zimmingham works kinda like Dream Zanarkand from FF10, except Zimmy doesn't need to be Faythed? If this is the case though, Zimmy is by far the most powerful character who isn't a deity. But, I wouldn't mind having an inexplicable Bahamut cameo suddenly appear, no sir. And maybe Zimmy is a deity, but we don't know it yet. |
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Post by Ophel on Sept 24, 2014 15:25:09 GMT
Zimmy is by far the most powerful character who isn't a deity. Well yeah, we knew that Oh, what was it called again? Information reinforcement? Well, I guess it's speculation reinforcement for this one, maybe. Further postulations add some credence/strength to a previous one. |
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I was probably too young when I played it last, haha. How about a Yojimbo cameo instead of Bahamut? Cherry petals flying through the air of Zimmingham? How romantic!
