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Post by Jelly Jellybean on Aug 2, 2016 17:25:13 GMT
I am putting this reply here in the wild speculation thread because I am pulling it further from the original page thread. IIRC, the Artilleryman found Gunnerkrigg / Gunner's Crag, which I think means he found out how to get to the Forest, led the rest of the founders to the Forest, and may have been instrumental in making the deal with the Forest to form the Court. The very first Court Medium. My current speculation is that the Artilleryman will be the way Annie learns more about the founding of the Court, to include why the Forest agreed to make a deal with humans and why the deal didn't work out. I support this theory, especially because he refused to be a part of the sacrifice of Jeanne. I always assumed it was because he didn't want to partake in a monstrous sacrifice of an innocent woman, but what if it was also because he didn't want to exacerbate the divisions between Court and Forest? During the initial conflict between the Court and the Forest, the Artilleryman stayed with the Court at least until the Jeanne affair. He must have supported the initial Court's position in the conflict to some extent. I believe the plan to sacrifice Jeanne was the last straw for the Artilleryman, but I can't guess where he went. Coyote had divided the Court and the Forest by then, but maybe the Artilleryman was the last human to cross the Annan Waters. Maybe, but something makes me feel like he either left the Court for the regular world or remained in the Court as an ostracized dissident. I also can't guess how Annie will learn more about the Artilleryman: - hidden Court records - his final record in the ROTD - he's ghost in some part of the Court - he is still alive in the Forest and Coyote introduces him one day - he is still alive in the Court and is a Year 11 teacher (everyone knew but no one told Annie) - he's a ghost in the Court and is a Year 11 teacher (everyone knew but no one told Annie)
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Post by bgb16999 on Nov 27, 2016 1:30:28 GMT
Rey's conversation with Hetty came after Annie's return from the forest, so I got the impression it was still in effect. His verbal defense of Annie against Hetty's accusation is to say that the Court wouldn't allow him to roam freely without Annie forbidding him from going to Gilitie Forest. If Annie had actually lifted the ban already, I'd expect Rey would have just told Hetty instead. I could easily be wrong though. Good point. I could try and twist it enough to think the Renard/Hetty conversation was referring to Annie initially ordering Renard to never attempt an escape and Renard didn't tell Hetty that Annie rescinded the order. But I admit it is really big stretch. A better straw to hang onto is whether Annie's order's were rescinded when she transferred ownership to Kat. Hmm, I hadn't really thought about that. Or rather, I think I had headcanon'd that Annie's orders did transfer over, but looking back my headcanon isn't really supported by the text. We don't really know what the transfer involved, aside from Annie handing Kat the doll with her eyes closed. Thanks for pointing that out. Agreed. Also, the Court does seem to value some of their employees as tools at least if not as people. Attempting to kill Annie, regardless of their success, would be a good way to lose the support of Kat, Parley, Smitty, Eglamore, Anja, Donald, Anthony, and possibly others. And the Court knows at least some of that. Yes. Short of the Court trying to rewrite history as they did with Jeanne and try to somehow make everybody forget that Annie ever existed. And we don't know exactly how they succeeded in doing that with Jeanne, and whether it woud work with Annie. I don't think they had any sort of memory-erasing etheric power. Diego seemed to remember what he did to Jeanne up until his death, and Sir Young's final record seemed to recall sacrifices he had made. I suspect that the wiping out of Jeanne's memory was accompished through mundane means. Namely, i)The founders destroyed or deleted all paper and digital records of her (except for the recording Diego hid in the robot). ii)They did not verbally pass on the story to their students/successors. iii)The founders all died eventually. And it didn't work, since some records concerning what they did to Jeanne were preserved by Diego. If they wanted to make everyone forget that Annie ever existed, I'm not sure they could do so short of killing everyone who knows Annie (including Coyote).
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Post by todd on Nov 27, 2016 12:31:37 GMT
I don't think they had any sort of memory-erasing etheric power. Diego seemed to remember what he did to Jeanne up until his death, and Sir Young's final record seemed to recall sacrifices he had made. I suspect that the wiping out of Jeanne's memory was accompished through mundane means. Namely, i)The founders destroyed or deleted all paper and digital records of her (except for the recording Diego hid in the robot). ii)They did not verbally pass on the story to their students/successors. iii)The founders all died eventually. And it didn't work, since some records concerning what they did to Jeanne were preserved by Diego. If they wanted to make everyone forget that Annie ever existed, I'm not sure they could do so short of killing everyone who knows Annie (including Coyote). True, which means that they'd have to find other methods of handling her. And I suspected myself that the Court's method of suppressing Jeanne's existence was the mundane one of "rewriting the records" rather than a more etheric "altering everyone's memories" (which they certainly must not have applied to themselves).
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Post by todd on Jan 24, 2017 0:26:00 GMT
I don't believe the court tracks all the students all the time, or none of the nighttime excursions would ever happen. What probably happens is that nobody looks at any of the tracking logs until a student turns up missing, and then they check to see where that student was last recorded. The Court probably even secretly tolerates - even subtly encourages - those excursions and other rule-breaking, to prepare the children for when they're the new generation of people running the Court and will most likely be adopting the same amoral "ends justify the means"/"ours is a high and lonely destiny" mentality of the Founders.
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Post by Zox Tomana on Aug 13, 2017 6:56:11 GMT
If the Court was grown from the Seed Bismuth (which we can assume, despite Beesmuth being a liar, works through both technological and etheric means), then shouldnt etheric users be able to see more "colors" instead of the grayscale background that appears whenever they project themselves, like in the forest? On one hand, theres the whole 'willing it to grow too fast' part, which may have made technology a more prominent part of the architecture over the natural landscape (all the huldings vs young park, for example). On the other, theres the whole separation from the Forest, cutting down trees and adding even more buildings. But the originals should remain, and so whatever etheric component that was part of them. We dont know the original point from where the seed grew, but some of the oldest parts should still be at the edge of the river, and yet when Annie projects there, the background is still grayscale. My theory, after this long introduction, is that the Court's experiments with the ether began way in the past. Not just with the creation of the Power Station in Chapters 19/27/28 (which seem to need some modern-ish technology at least not available during the foundatiom of the Court) but rather through some means that extracted the etheric components of the buildings / Bismuth offspring. And to the first question I made, when Annie projects into the Ether after returning from the Forest, she does say that the Court isnt 'as empty as (she) though', which Im going to assume is whatever Bismuth-Ether that may cling to the buildings, since she and Kat were pretty much alone in that rooftop the whole time. Not the full palette from the forest, but perhaps not as grey as when she first used her blinker stone with Anja. I'm amazed that I never thought of this question before, and now propose that we extend it even further, to, question why the FOREST has so many "colors" in it in the first place. As you point out, the Seed Bismuth actually provides a very good reason why the Court should be full of magic, yet there is no such explanation provided in the comic (as far as I know) for why the Forest is practically overflowing with magical creatures and energies. Therefore, I propose that the Seed Bismuth was actually modified (using the humans' alchemy and technology) from a "Seed Gillitie", a much more organic Seed which was used by some sort of British god in order to grow a sanctuary for magical creatures in these modern times. This also helps to explain the Tic-tocs: originally magical bird servants of whatever god created Gillitie, made to protect the Seed, the technological transformation of the Seed also transformed them into more suitable, robotic forms. FURTHERMORE, I propose another theory for Gunnerscrag's original question: Soon after he came, Coyote actually stole the Seed Bismuth from the Court side of the river without anyone realizing it, and that's why the Court today is so grey and barren of magic. The Tic-tocs are still around, though, constantly watching and waiting for someone to help them retrieve their charge. Damn! When I started with this post, I had no idea how big this speculation as about to get. No regrets, though. We heard from Beesmuth that the Seed Bismuth was created using the magic of the forest and the technology of the Founders. The Forest was already there along with the Creatures thereof, and this was well before strictly modern times. Etheric stuff seems to be a natural part of the Gunnerverse, so there's no particular reason that there would need to be a Seed Gillitie. The Forest is said by Jones to be very hard to find, a place that the Founders went to possibly in order to be away from the rest of Humanity. Sounds like a natural place for Etheric Creatures in modern and pre-modern times to converge in and take root. As to why the Court is mostly barren of Etheric things: I think that falls to the philosophy of the Court that developed which eschews the Etheric in favor of the Physic. The Ether also tends to be associated with the natural world, and the Court is very much an artificial construct in nearly all its aspects, from the buildings to the park. This is 100% pure speculation, but I imagine that the introduction of more nature and free creatures into the Court would bring some etheric color to the place.
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Post by mturtle7 on Aug 13, 2017 23:25:40 GMT
I'm amazed that I never thought of this question before, and now propose that we extend it even further, to, question why the FOREST has so many "colors" in it in the first place. As you point out, the Seed Bismuth actually provides a very good reason why the Court should be full of magic, yet there is no such explanation provided in the comic (as far as I know) for why the Forest is practically overflowing with magical creatures and energies. Therefore, I propose that the Seed Bismuth was actually modified (using the humans' alchemy and technology) from a "Seed Gillitie", a much more organic Seed which was used by some sort of British god in order to grow a sanctuary for magical creatures in these modern times. This also helps to explain the Tic-tocs: originally magical bird servants of whatever god created Gillitie, made to protect the Seed, the technological transformation of the Seed also transformed them into more suitable, robotic forms. FURTHERMORE, I propose another theory for Gunnerscrag's original question: Soon after he came, Coyote actually stole the Seed Bismuth from the Court side of the river without anyone realizing it, and that's why the Court today is so grey and barren of magic. The Tic-tocs are still around, though, constantly watching and waiting for someone to help them retrieve their charge. Damn! When I started with this post, I had no idea how big this speculation as about to get. No regrets, though. We heard from Beesmuth that the Seed Bismuth was created using the magic of the forest and the technology of the Founders. The Forest was already there along with the Creatures thereof, and this was well before strictly modern times. Etheric stuff seems to be a natural part of the Gunnerverse, so there's no particular reason that there would need to be a Seed Gillitie. The Forest is said by Jones to be very hard to find, a place that the Founders went to possibly in order to be away from the rest of Humanity. Sounds like a natural place for Etheric Creatures in modern and pre-modern times to converge in and take root. As to why the Court is mostly barren of Etheric things: I think that falls to the philosophy of the Court that developed which eschews the Etheric in favor of the Physic. The Ether also tends to be associated with the natural world, and the Court is very much an artificial construct in nearly all its aspects, from the buildings to the park. This is 100% pure speculation, but I imagine that the introduction of more nature and free creatures into the Court would bring some etheric color to the place. ...Okay, a) You must be the life of the party, kid. I mean, sheesh. Way to spread the fun around. b) I'd like to emphasize that nothing you say actually rules out my wildspec! and c) I will still gladly leap to its defense, because your whole spiel kinds of annoys me! For instance, I thought that the Seed Beesmuth page actually SUPPORTED my wildspec, since the full quote is, "the magic of the forest animals, the technology of the humans, and the nature of the forest itself". Also, I understand that Ether is fairly natural, but I was under the impression that it is at least somewhat unusual for a forest to not only be full of magical creatures, but to also have etheric colors in the very grass and trees. Yes, one could go with the boring explanation that magic just "leaks" into the plants from the Forest creatures, but honestly I think my explanation makes just as much sense, and is more exciting. And finally, gunnerscrag's original point was precisely that the Court was NOT just an "artificial construct", but the result of both technological AND etheric means, so it still makes sense for one to expect it to look more colorful in the ether.
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Post by Zox Tomana on Aug 14, 2017 0:42:40 GMT
We heard from Beesmuth that the Seed Bismuth was created using the magic of the forest and the technology of the Founders. The Forest was already there along with the Creatures thereof, and this was well before strictly modern times. Etheric stuff seems to be a natural part of the Gunnerverse, so there's no particular reason that there would need to be a Seed Gillitie. The Forest is said by Jones to be very hard to find, a place that the Founders went to possibly in order to be away from the rest of Humanity. Sounds like a natural place for Etheric Creatures in modern and pre-modern times to converge in and take root. As to why the Court is mostly barren of Etheric things: I think that falls to the philosophy of the Court that developed which eschews the Etheric in favor of the Physic. The Ether also tends to be associated with the natural world, and the Court is very much an artificial construct in nearly all its aspects, from the buildings to the park. This is 100% pure speculation, but I imagine that the introduction of more nature and free creatures into the Court would bring some etheric color to the place. ...Okay, a) You must be the life of the party, kid. I mean, sheesh. Way to spread the fun around. b) I'd like to emphasize that nothing you say actually rules out my wildspec! and c) I will still gladly leap to its defense, because your whole spiel kinds of annoys me! For instance, I thought that the Seed Beesmuth page actually SUPPORTED my wildspec, since the full quote is, "the magic of the forest animals, the technology of the humans, and the nature of the forest itself". Also, I understand that Ether is fairly natural, but I was under the impression that it is at least somewhat unusual for a forest to not only be full of magical creatures, but to also have etheric colors in the very grass and trees. Yes, one could go with the boring explanation that magic just "leaks" into the plants from the Forest creatures, but honestly I think my explanation makes just as much sense, and is more exciting. And finally, gunnerscrag's original point was precisely that the Court was NOT just an "artificial construct", but the result of both technological AND etheric means, so it still makes sense for one to expect it to look more colorful in the ether. I am the Kat of Theories! Less that the Ether just leaks from plants and forest creatures, and more that the Ether is intwined with the natural world. The court drew it out of the water, for example. This goes alongside the idea of the colors indicating things having connection to the Ether (Annie seeing colors in Jack, the colored strings of Smitty), a connection which the Court (like you point out) ought to have in spades from being grown from a material created with the nature of the Forest. If Beesmuth wasn't lying and the size of the Court being from having been willed to grow too fast by the humans, perhaps that brings an element of artificiality to what was first being brought into the world by more natural means, lessening that Etheric connection by the time you reach the size the Court turned out to be. One might modify your speculation such that Coyote may not have stolen the Seed Bismuth, but that by separating the Court from the Forest (abundant in nature and naturalness and thus Etheric connection) he actually took a metaphorical "bite" out of the Ether in the Court, exacerbated by the Court Founders eliminating most nature (Jeanne lamenting the cutting down of trees) and the probable continued growth of the Court, and maintained by the decon teams and rooms that ensure that anything foreign is disconnected from the Forest.
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Post by todd on Mar 6, 2018 1:31:44 GMT
Wild speculation on how the story will proceed from this moment ( GULP!): - Eglamore dies defending the court and Parley has to take his place while still a student.
- Robots attempt to defend the court with some weird reasoning of their Kat cult and are mostly slaughtered.
- Coyote has been seeding himself in the Court via the tooth/Reynard/probably some other stuff I forgot, and basically created horcruxes of himself.
- Smitty dies as an unintended consequence of using his power to try to save the court.
(Wild speculation is a great coping mechanism when you're very anxious about a storyline.)
Or, possibly worse than all these: Ysengrin's attack on the Court results in everybody dying horrible deaths - at which point the action suddenly freezes, then turns out to be an image of some sort. Sir Young and the other Founders are seated around the table it hovers over. Sir Young says, "And that concludes the simulation Diego developed for what might happen if we settle next to Gilltie Wood and make it our base for our projects."
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Post by hp on Mar 6, 2018 18:08:57 GMT
Wild speculation on how the story will proceed from this moment ( GULP!): - Eglamore dies defending the court and Parley has to take his place while still a student.
- Robots attempt to defend the court with some weird reasoning of their Kat cult and are mostly slaughtered.
- Coyote has been seeding himself in the Court via the tooth/Reynard/probably some other stuff I forgot, and basically created horcruxes of himself.
- Smitty dies as an unintended consequence of using his power to try to save the court.
(Wild speculation is a great coping mechanism when you're very anxious about a storyline.)
Or, possibly worse than all these: Ysengrin's attack on the Court results in everybody dying horrible deaths - at which point the action suddenly freezes, then turns out to be an image of some sort. Sir Young and the other Founders are seated around the table it hovers over. Sir Young says, "And that concludes the simulation Diego developed for what might happen if we settle next to Gilltie Wood and make it our base for our projects." Or even worse: it's one of Dr. Disaster's simulations
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Post by todd on Mar 31, 2018 23:37:39 GMT
This isn't exactly wild speculation, but I'm not sure where else I could go. I looked back to this page: www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=708Reynardine's shocked response to the Court's experiments with the ether suggests that he had not known about them before now. Which would mean, in turn, that those could not have been public knowledge in Gilltie Wood at the time of his ensnarement by Surma - which happened relatively recently in the Court's history (though we don't know how many years or generations went on between the Court's founding and Surma's lifetime). Possibly the forest-folk have found out since then, but even so, this implies that the Court's tampering with the ether in the power plant (or any possible similar experiments before the power plant was built) could not have been the motive for the forest-folk's assaults on the Court for all the time prior to Renard becoming the Court's prisoner (including the Founders' lifetime, when they set up Jeanne as the guardian). Which indicates that there's some other reason for the forest-folk's hostility towards the Court (at least, the ones who *do* hate it - we know a lot of them don't) than whatever's going on in the power plant. The big question is: what?
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Post by saardvark on Apr 1, 2018 3:16:39 GMT
This isn't exactly wild speculation, but I'm not sure where else I could go. I looked back to this page: www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=708Reynardine's shocked response to the Court's experiments with the ether suggests that he had not known about them before now. Which would mean, in turn, that those could not have been public knowledge in Gilltie Wood at the time of his ensnarement by Surma - which happened relatively recently in the Court's history (though we don't know how many years or generations went on between the Court's founding and Surma's lifetime). Possibly the forest-folk have found out since then, but even so, this implies that the Court's tampering with the ether in the power plant (or any possible similar experiments before the power plant was built) could not have been the motive for the forest-folk's assaults on the Court for all the time prior to Renard becoming the Court's prisoner (including the Founders' lifetime, when they set up Jeanne as the guardian). Which indicates that there's some other reason for the forest-folk's hostility towards the Court (at least, the ones who *do* hate it - we know a lot of them don't) than whatever's going on in the power plant. The big question is: what? ...unless only Coyote knew, and he kept it to himself, or only shared it with Ys (to get him riled up). But it is a good point, what else could there be to generate such hostility?
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Post by pyradonis on Apr 12, 2018 19:10:17 GMT
This isn't exactly wild speculation, but I'm not sure where else I could go. I looked back to this page: www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=708Reynardine's shocked response to the Court's experiments with the ether suggests that he had not known about them before now. Which would mean, in turn, that those could not have been public knowledge in Gilltie Wood at the time of his ensnarement by Surma - which happened relatively recently in the Court's history (though we don't know how many years or generations went on between the Court's founding and Surma's lifetime). Possibly the forest-folk have found out since then, but even so, this implies that the Court's tampering with the ether in the power plant (or any possible similar experiments before the power plant was built) could not have been the motive for the forest-folk's assaults on the Court for all the time prior to Renard becoming the Court's prisoner (including the Founders' lifetime, when they set up Jeanne as the guardian). Which indicates that there's some other reason for the forest-folk's hostility towards the Court (at least, the ones who *do* hate it - we know a lot of them don't) than whatever's going on in the power plant. The big question is: what? ...unless only Coyote knew, and he kept it to himself, or only shared it with Ys (to get him riled up). But it is a good point, what else could there be to generate such hostility? "The humans sought to tame the great beasts." (Coyote) "The Court sees them as little more than dull-minded animals, trying to create a nuisance." (Jones) "The humans willed me to grow too fast and I began to overtake the forest." (The wisp posing as the Seed Bismuth did mix truth with lies, according to Coyote, and this part does sound plausible.)
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Post by mturtle7 on Sept 28, 2018 5:05:38 GMT
Wild spec on the nature of the Court. We already know that the Court was created from "the seed Bismuth," but we don't get much more explanation than that besides it being a combination of technology and etheric design/forest magic. There have also been multiple references to the seed growing quickly and overtaking the forest. My wildspec applies to the expanding quality of the Court. What if the seed Bismuth contained or collected something similar to dark matter and dark energy??? We don't know much about dark matter irl, but one property we have observed is the repulsive force that is one of the main drivers of the expanding universe. If the seed Bismuth had some dark matter/energy qualities merged with plantlike ability to grow, it may explain why the Court is so huge and empty. The Court grew (and may still be growing on sides that do not border the ravine???) AND expanded after being planted/activated. The Court is huge, and Jones mentioned that it is not a very easy place to find. Could the addition of dark matter and energy, which is notoriously difficult to directly observe, help shield the Court from the eyes of the normal world? I know we don't know much about dark matter and energy, but I thought it was a fun wildspec/potato to share. There isn't much direct evidence for this in the comic, either. Hopefully the full mystery is revealed before the completion of the comic, because this particular nugget of GKC history has always fascinated me to no end. Ooh, I LIKE this idea! Can I also suggest that the original Seed was a Forest/etheric artifact that just used magic to collect dark matter and "grow" from it, and then the Court founders used more technological means to allow to "grow" into artificial buildings? It's seems like the sort of collaboration they would make.
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Post by OGRuddawg on Oct 1, 2018 0:44:03 GMT
Wild spec on the nature of the Court. We already know that the Court was created from "the seed Bismuth," but we don't get much more explanation than that besides it being a combination of technology and etheric design/forest magic. There have also been multiple references to the seed growing quickly and overtaking the forest. My wildspec applies to the expanding quality of the Court. What if the seed Bismuth contained or collected something similar to dark matter and dark energy??? We don't know much about dark matter irl, but one property we have observed is the repulsive force that is one of the main drivers of the expanding universe. If the seed Bismuth had some dark matter/energy qualities merged with plantlike ability to grow, it may explain why the Court is so huge and empty. The Court grew (and may still be growing on sides that do not border the ravine???) AND expanded after being planted/activated. The Court is huge, and Jones mentioned that it is not a very easy place to find. Could the addition of dark matter and energy, which is notoriously difficult to directly observe, help shield the Court from the eyes of the normal world? I know we don't know much about dark matter and energy, but I thought it was a fun wildspec/potato to share. There isn't much direct evidence for this in the comic, either. Hopefully the full mystery is revealed before the completion of the comic, because this particular nugget of GKC history has always fascinated me to no end. Ooh, I LIKE this idea! Can I also suggest that the original Seed was a Forest/etheric artifact that just used magic to collect dark matter and "grow" from it, and then the Court founders used more technological means to allow to "grow" into artificial buildings? It's seems like the sort of collaboration they would make. Sounds like something they would do, although how the forest creatures came to discover dark matter and a way to manipulate and collect it is not really clear. How would etheric beings know what dark matter is, unless dark matter interacts with the ether differently than normal matter? I like my wildspec and your idea, but both topics are still not really explored much in GKC proper. I really hope that the nature of the seed Bismuth and its construction are revealed.
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Post by Druplesnubb on Jan 25, 2020 10:28:55 GMT
From all this evidence, my theory is that the Court is gonna use all the ether they've gathered to make the Omega Device create a new artificial paradise world for the members of the Court, where they will likely have godlike powers (the whole "becoming god" thing could just refer to the world creating thing, but if you could create the world you wanted why not make it one where you can have superpowers). Don't know how the Brazil trip and the mating slugs tie into all of this, though. Maybe studying what happens at specific places at specific points in time is a way to research causality to help them understand how to create their new world better. I just wanted to add that the Court seems to have been creted as a refuge from the dangers of the world, with Jones speculating that the founders wanted to " hide from humanity itself". Creating a new artificial world to live in would fit with this motivation.
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Post by IvDead on May 26, 2020 19:42:45 GMT
DOUBLE EDIT: Slight alternative, she does not send the tic-tocs, but just a tic-toc egg - hence why they are able to grow. And she still builds a tracker inside them that makes them seek out the arrow.
A little addendum to this alternative: One of Tic Toc's eggs (either the one Kat sends, or one that the Tic Tocs ends up producing) will be mistaken for a seed, and will be used by the Court's founders to create it. After all, we know that if a Tic Toc's corpse is buried, it ends up behaving like a plant, growing into something that resembles a technological facility. It would make sense that their eggs would have similar properties.
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Post by pyradonis on May 27, 2020 1:02:11 GMT
DOUBLE EDIT: Slight alternative, she does not send the tic-tocs, but just a tic-toc egg - hence why they are able to grow. And she still builds a tracker inside them that makes them seek out the arrow.
A little addendum to this alternative: One of Tic Toc's eggs (either the one Kat sends, or one that the Tic Tocs ends up producing) will be mistaken for a seed, and will be used by the Court's founders to create it. After all, we know that if a Tic Toc's corpse is buried, it ends up behaving like a plant, growing into something that resembles a technological facility. It would make sense that their eggs would have similar properties. If that turns out to be true, it would mean the whole Court is "not supposed to be here". A centuries-old secret organization that basically created itself out of a temporal paradox attempts to become God... The guys at Temporal Affairs would have a huge mess to sort out.
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Post by warrl on May 27, 2020 4:01:52 GMT
No, it would only mean that the Tic Tocs were not supposed to be there.
Unless that first Tic Toc (or egg) were actually the Seed Bismuth, but I thought the founders of the Court brought that with them.
A weak argument against Kat sending the Tic Tocs (or egg) back to where Diego's arrow ended up is that the robots think the Tic Tocs were there first, and Diego made a lot of robots/golems before he made the arrow. This is, however, a weak argument, because the robots could assume the Tic Tocs had been there, but unnoticed, earlier than was actually the case - AND because the robots could have lost track of just how long they and/or the Tic Tocs have been known to be around.
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Post by pyradonis on May 27, 2020 15:52:37 GMT
No, it would only mean that the Tic Tocs were not supposed to be there. Unless that first Tic Toc (or egg) were actually the Seed Bismuth, but I thought the founders of the Court brought that with them. A weak argument against Kat sending the Tic Tocs (or egg) back to where Diego's arrow ended up is that the robots think the Tic Tocs were there first, and Diego made a lot of robots/golems before he made the arrow. This is, however, a weak argument, because the robots could assume the Tic Tocs had been there, but unnoticed, earlier than was actually the case - AND because the robots could have lost track of just how long they and/or the Tic Tocs have been known to be around. Yes, it was meant as the egg being the Seed Bismuth. After all, nobody today knows how it looked like.
Wild meta-speculation: Annie and Kat were originally side characters in the story about Zimmy and Gamma Tom was developing ~20 years ago, and in that side story, Annie died. Chapter 7-8 and the Treatise on page 120 mark the point when Tom decided to change that story, and also change the focus of his project-- a commitment to shifting from the cute/spooky daily joke comics from the early chapters of GC to the huge, deep story we have right now. In the timeline where Annie died falling off the bridge and Zimmy and Gamma's story was Tom's magnum opus, there's a popular Cartoon Network show about the adventures of Sadie and Lars, the donut shop rock star and her shitty zombie on-and-off boyfriend, and we sometimes get cameos from a weird kid in the neighborhood named Steven. I do not see any daily joke comics even in chapter one. Which sets up a lot of major story arcs already. Including showing a Tic-toc watching the bridge. And chapter two sets up the story of Annie's parents. In chapter three, Renard realizes Surma must be dead because her daughter is alive. So no, the story seems to have been solidly planned from the beginning on.
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Post by Gemminie on Apr 4, 2021 3:35:28 GMT
Wild spec of the day: Robot is possessed by Diego and has been since chapter 18. Or rather, a personality remnant uploaded into S1 by Diego before his death was downloaded into Robot's CPU when Kat inserted it into S1's body in chapter 18. Robot picked up the ability to fence from this experience; it's hardly inconceivable that other modifications to him also occurred. Before his CPU is placed into S1, Robot is still quite childlike and innocent, like many other robots. He even starts calling Annie "Mu ..." (probably starting to say "Mummy," which he's been calling her since chapter 1) before correcting himself (perhaps Annie has told him to just call her Annie). Afterward, he looks at Jeanne's portrait and talks about Jeanne's beauty, and then the next time we see him, in chapter 25, he's actively seeking out other robots to take to the shrine, and proselytizing about the angel. Not that he hasn't called Kat an angel before, but now he's actively trying to convince other robots of her divinity. Now, we hear that Robot/S13 was disassembled for doing just this at some point in the past, leading to his parts being in a box in a (slightly) mislabeled storeroom for Annie to find. But he'd apparently been offline for some time, and it's possible that they did other things to his CPU before disassembling him, like resetting it to its factory defaults or the like. It's possible that he had the Diego remnant in him before (from the earlier time when Anja found the Tomb), or it's possible that it was just something that's programmed into all Model S robots. But if so, why don't they all do this, and why did they disassemble him? Something happened to Robot in the past, something whose effects were wiped out when the other Model S-es took him apart. I mean ... " she gets more beautiful by the day!" That sounds a lot more Diego-like than robot-like. Diego's making Kat his new Jeanne across time. Creepy. Wilder spec: <bzzt> Nothing is wrong. No robot conspiracy to resurrect Diego exists. Please move along. go a step further is all those old OG bots are partially successful but failed transfers of the minds of the arrow creation group. As one of the last things tried by them and parts of the tech now used with Coyote's help to make the forest kids transfer. The reason the court doesn't care for transfers research by Juliette and Arthur as they tried it in the past and it deem a failure since it only sorta work but only when Diego was alive and no one has come close sense Arrow creation group? As far as I know only Diego was involved in the creation of the arrow. Or do you mean the group of Court founders (Sir Young, Steadman, Diego, and some other unnamed ones) who were involved in the arrow plan (the Artilleryman counted himself out of that plan)? Considering Diego hated Sir Young, though, he definitely wouldn't have allowed Young to perpetuate his personality in his golem creations. He went so far as to make sure that his golems and their descendants wouldn't tend Sir Young's grave. From what I can tell, the process to transfer the Forest kids' totems into their new bodies isn't technological; it's a ritual that has to be learned from Coyote, or from someone who learned it from Coyote. I think the reason why the Court has little interest in transference of consciousness is that they like the robots as they are, an untiring unpaid workforce. I doubt my wildspec is true as it stands, because I don't think Diego transferred his consciousness in any way. After all, his consciousness was still in his body as he died. We saw a recording of his death, and we saw a Final Record left behind after his death. I think I may need to modify my speculation: Robot has been possessed by the personality of S1 since chapter 18, one of Diego's original golems to whom he gave a very special mission, which it passed on to all the Model S robots, but Robot has an infusion of the pure stuff from the source. That mission seems to be to wait and watch for a new Creator and then to push that Creator to take the robots to the next level.
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Post by blahzor on Apr 5, 2021 10:22:43 GMT
go a step further is all those old OG bots are partially successful but failed transfers of the minds of the arrow creation group. As one of the last things tried by them and parts of the tech now used with Coyote's help to make the forest kids transfer. The reason the court doesn't care for transfers research by Juliette and Arthur as they tried it in the past and it deem a failure since it only sorta work but only when Diego was alive and no one has come close sense Arrow creation group? As far as I know only Diego was involved in the creation of the arrow. Or do you mean the group of Court founders (Sir Young, Steadman, Diego, and some other unnamed ones) who were involved in the arrow plan (the Artilleryman counted himself out of that plan)? Considering Diego hated Sir Young, though, he definitely wouldn't have allowed Young to perpetuate his personality in his golem creations. He went so far as to make sure that his golems and their descendants wouldn't tend Sir Young's grave. yeah b/c Diego is too much of a coward to come up with the idea of the arrow plan himself, he's just the one needed to make it
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Post by zbeeblebrox on Jan 10, 2023 8:04:11 GMT
Gonna use this space to collect my thoughts on the Court and the Omega Device here.
We know that Omega Device work goes back to the 70s/80s, but as a broader concept I posit that it goes back to the beginning. While I believe the Court's goals shifted sometime in the fairly recent past, before that I think it was fairly unchanged from what the founders wanted. Which is to use the aether against itself to fully understand the world. They saw ways in which the aether could indirectly aid the work of science, like in Diego's automatons, and extrapolated how that could be taken to the extreme. If you tell the aether the story of a computer, and that story takes inputs that spit out the same results as a mechanical computer...then haven't you tricked the aether into being a computer? That was probably the conclusion they reached for quite some time, which lead to what appeared to be great progress. But what they started running into is Clarke's Corollary: Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
We're told by the Shadow Men that the purpose of the Omega Device was to create a kind of prediction engine. And that it seemed to work until it didn't, around when Annie got grandfather paradoxed. I don't think it ever worked. I think it behaved like the STORY of a device that predicts anything, and with the power of the aether - which has the ability to retcon - made it appear to be true. What undermines the device's output isn't the "fact" of Kat time travelling, but that Kat's time travel was a competing story. You can't have both the story of a causal universe and the story of a mutable timeline happening in the same place, they either cancel each other out or one wins over the other. The very concept of this is personified over and over again by the aether, in the strict domains of the Psychopomps, the Realm of the Dead's bureaucracy, and all the other magical rules lawyers we've encountered.
The Court has been experimenting with all the different ways they can augment their pursuit of knowledge via the aether: the seed bismuth, combining it with technology, cherrypicking humans with aetheric abilities, the highly controlled import of forest creatures, etc. The Omega Device should have been the ultimate expression of this, but in the end it's no different from Coyote. All these experiments were all equally tainted in a fundamental way, BY the aether. Once they realized this, their conclusion HAD to be that they needed to leave Earth. If your goal is to understand the universe using pure science, and this thing clings to everything around you like a logic disease that undermines and even mimics the results of all your work, preventing you from even knowing what's genuinely true and what merely looks true...then the only solution that makes sense is to find a location where that thing cannot reach.
The Omega Device, from this perspective, is not some formidable creation of ultimate power. It's a failure. It's a testament to the previous generation's hubris. The previous heads of the Court, perhaps all the way down the line, had been so blinded by how easy the aether made their search for knowledge, that they failed to see that it was feeding them lies. Or at least, what the current Court believes to be lies. Material, tangible, observable, testable lies. Maybe not truly lies at all, or maybe that's what makes them so insidious. Who's to say, but in any case the Omega Device is the inflection point. So now it, and all their findings and creations have been reprogrammed to aid in the sole purpose of helping them escape itself.
Or maybe not, I don't know
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Post by TBeholder on Jan 11, 2023 22:56:37 GMT
We know that Omega Device work goes back to the 70s/80s, but as a broader concept I posit that it goes back to the beginning. While I believe the Court's goals shifted sometime in the fairly recent past, before that I think it was fairly unchanged from what the founders wanted. Which is to use the aether against itself to fully understand the world. This implies one unified vision. But the context is always vague association of groups who only sometimes are on the same page. Thus, more like — I'd imagine there's a diversity of opinions over the centuries. Some dream of fully harnessing the ether. Some dream of fully taming the ether. And some dream of fully abolishing it. Which one of those encompasses "the Omega Project" is an open question. Therefore… The Omega Device, from this perspective, is not some formidable creation of ultimate power. It's a failure. It's a testament to the previous generation's hubris. The previous heads of the Court, perhaps all the way down the line, had been so blinded by how easy the aether made their search for knowledge, that they failed to see that it was feeding them lies. Or at least, what the current Court believes to be lies. Material, tangible, observable, testable lies. Maybe not truly lies at all, or maybe that's what makes them so insidious. Who's to say, but in any case the Omega Device is the inflection point. So now it, and all their findings and creations have been reprogrammed to aid in the sole purpose of helping them escape itself. This view is quite likely to be represented, too. But there’s self-selection: those who are disappointed in the given path and consider it a fool’s errand remove themselves from further participation.
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Post by silicondream on Feb 22, 2024 20:49:26 GMT
Perhaps the golems designed the first CPUs to be compatible with one of their existing ports, so that they could exchange data and reprogram the CPUs directly. There don't appear to have been conventional computers in Diego's day--presumably they were adopted by the Court after their development in the outside world--so the only available computers that could communicate with the CPUs would have been the golems themselves. This would also explain why Robot gained S1's combat skills when plugged into the latter's body; older robot CPUs are made to "imprint" off the golem ancestor to their model class. I think you're correct about the compatibility though I'm not sure about the imprinting. It may have been incidental because the swordsmanship was necessary for the show and Robot's chip retained it like it would any other memory. Perhaps, though it wasn't just swordsmanship that he got; it was also barehanded martial arts, a hatred for the Young-bot, and arguably a package of personality traits that changed him from a bubbly "mommy"-focused toddler into an obsessive prophet of the Angel. I think Robot ended up far more like the original S1 because of that interaction. I don't think they would have needed a chip, because while S1 was still alive they could start the show at will. Once the golems finished creating the robots and committed suicide, S1's body did not have enough executive function left to perform the show...until it could use a Seraph CPU in place of its broken "heart." The onlooking golems could perform their part even without being repaired or given a CPU bypass, because all they had to do was applaud on cue. They were basically brain-dead but still capable of reflex actions. S1's role demanded more skill. S1 may also have needed a Seraph CPU to reactivate because its heart wasn't just damaged, but actually removed. Parts of the heart were repurposed to create the Seraph CPUs, which is why they have that weird ceramic chip that makes them immune to Court overrides. This would also explain why S1 isn't seen among the golems that Kat revived, though perhaps she simply refrained because she doesn't trust an ancestor of the Seraphs. Note that it's the golems' tomb, not Diego's. The Shrine to Jeanne is probably Diego's work, as Renard suggests, but the golems apparently created the tomb as their own resting place. Given his fame and status, Diego's own body would have been publicly interred or disposed of however the Court deemed appropriate. It's unclear whether the puppet show was designed by Diego himself, or arranged by the golems as a tribute to him. The modernist and functional design of the Young-bot suggests to me that it was created by the golems rather than by Diego. That's an interesting interpretation, though I think it was more likely intended to make visitors repent and apologize to Jeanne, since she was the first thing they'd see when they crawled into the room. Diego's portrait was much smaller and not the focus of things. In fact, since Diego himself was probably the only human visitor during his lifetime, he may have designed the shrine as a way for him to atone. He was likely from a Roman Catholic background, and this may have been his version of "mortification of the flesh" for the dead woman he worshipped yet betrayed. S1 was then instructed, or chose, to continue this ritual in his place. Anja's work seems to focus more on computing and information processing than on mechanical engineering. If she couldn't figure out how to repair the golems' hearts, she may not have cared that much about getting them moving in other ways; it was their original control system which interested her the most. I imagine that the golems would have been using Diego's workshop all along, or their own annex to it, and that the robots inherited and expanded that location. Diego constructed the shrine elsewhere, to allow for private contemplation and also to avoid discovery by the other Founders, who would have destroyed it as part of Jeanne's damnatio memoriae. The golems maintained the shrine, added the tomb and conducted the puppet show while they were alive, but never told the robots about it. They saw themselves as existing purely for Diego's sake, but wanted their descendants to serve future humanity instead.
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Feb 23, 2024 2:15:18 GMT
I think you're correct about the compatibility though I'm not sure about the imprinting. It may have been incidental because the swordsmanship was necessary for the show and Robot's chip retained it like it would any other memory. Perhaps, though it wasn't just swordsmanship that he got; it was also barehanded martial arts, a hatred for the Young-bot, and arguably a package of personality traits that changed him from a bubbly "mommy"-focused toddler into an obsessive prophet of the Angel. I think Robot ended up far more like the original S1 because of that interaction. It's been formsprung that the golem-bots hated Young and his successors both because Diego programmed them to and because they wanted to, and I've speculated before that however they were designed Diego used his own mind as at least a pattern in some way, shape, or form. Something in the architecture and code got passed along and adapted along the way. I suspect S13 calling Antimony "mommy" is more about him hoping that she was the father-replacement he was waiting for, as she put him back together and gave him purpose again and he repaid her by nearly killing her (though that wasn't his fault, except as a result of the choice she gave him) and less about toddler-like emotional needs, though. Also, robots getting obsessed with girls is nothing new (and probably also a result of Diego's influence). I don't think they would have needed a chip, because while S1 was still alive they could start the show at will. Once the golems finished creating the robots and committed suicide, S1's body did not have enough executive function left to perform the show...until it could use a Seraph CPU in place of its broken "heart." The onlooking golems could perform their part even without being repaired or given a CPU bypass, because all they had to do was applaud on cue. They were basically brain-dead but still capable of reflex actions. S1's role demanded more skill. I can't agree with describing applause as a mere reflex action but sure, the old golem-bots could have run the puppet show (or parts of it) at will, trigger or no. Would they want to? Diego might have ordered a performance when he was around (and that would have been another trigger). They might want to test it. I don't think they'd get anything out of it other than making sure it was in working order. I don't think it necessarily follows that S1 didn't have enough executive function to run the show because he was decommissioned. The damage could have been selective so that program could run but no others, but if the show had to be started manually (meaning that an operational golem-bot was needed to initiate it regardless if Diego needed to order it or not) then it would still have been a program held in S1's memory/code/whatever which was still usable. It's a lot easier to make something not work then to make it work in the first place. We do know that the robots didn't design any classes of robots that Diego didn't initiate therefore S1 had to have been built by Diego during his lifetime and with executive function. I don't think it was ever shown what his prime mover was. As the beginning of the Seraph series he might have had a prototype of the ceramic chip, or he might have had a ceramic heart, or perhaps some tech that bridges the two. We do know he is/was compatible with the ceramic chip at least to an extent. He must have had some sort of memory to function and it must have been at least partly intact, else the show couldn't run (robots don't have reflexes, Diego's golem-bots probably didn't either). I can think of one other possibility but I'll address it in my next paragraph. S1 may also have needed a Seraph CPU to reactivate because its heart wasn't just damaged, but actually removed. Parts of the heart were repurposed to create the Seraph CPUs, which is why they have that weird ceramic chip that makes them immune to Court overrides. This would also explain why S1 isn't seen among the golems that Kat revived, though perhaps she simply refrained because she doesn't trust an ancestor of the Seraphs. Maybe, but I think S1 didn't reactivate to run the show, he executed a program or a protocol and there was some other way that program could've been run, by Diego's order of course, or perhaps by using S1's sensors to recognize someone entering the arena, or perhaps by some other method. Maybe he isn't around because he's hanging out with the other Seraphs doing Seraph stuff. Kat did seem to be reactivating all of them. I would think that all things held equal S1 would want to find the most important parts of Kat's tech and perpetually guard them, which is arguably Kat herself, but unless he's Zoob we haven't seen him hanging around her. There's a chance Kat has put S1 into a new body, though we haven't been shown any evidence that she's putting golem-bots in bodies (at least not that I can recall). I don't think we've seen any golem-bots for a while, though. It could be he's delegated that guarding to other robots and is somewhere in her lab, her computer-space, or perhaps he's in Diego's other lab. Now, I realize at this point that some of my fellow genteel forum-goers who are taking time to read this post may be thinking, "But what if S1 was never a fully-functional golem-bot? What if he was made by Diego just to be a puppet that stars in his morbid play, and the later robots developed the Seraph series using components from other robots? That would explain why we haven't seen him around after Kat restarted all the other golem-bots." Well, he's got "S1" on him so presumably he was to be the first of a series even if no others were built in Diego's lifetime (and we don't know that). If S1 was just a puppet he wouldn't be able to adapt to anything going wrong during the show which might cause it to dysfunction, and that wouldn't make a convincing argument about how great Diego's tech was. Diego built stuff to showcase the greatness of Diego and casting a mere puppet as himself in his own play wouldn't give him much in the way of narcissistic supply. I think S1 was made, then made into a puppet, rather than the other way around. Note that it's the golems' tomb, not Diego's. The Shrine to Jeanne is probably Diego's work, as Renard suggests, but the golems apparently created the tomb as their own resting place. Given his fame and status, Diego's own body would have been publicly interred or disposed of however the Court deemed appropriate. I had forgotten that was open to debate. Mr. Siddell has made/replied to a number of statements/questions about "the tomb" that can be used to support either contention, probably because it's arguably Jeanne's tomb as there's a shrine to her in it, it's absolutely Diego's tomb because he had the robots build it, and it was the robot's tomb because they were indeed interred within it. The question is, is that a burial vault or just an altar in the tomb? It's really short for an altar and it's true Diego was short but was he that short? I don't think that issue was ever addressed in the video commentaries but I'll rewatch that chapter later and double-check. Given his personality I don't think Diego would have been memorialized by the Court in any sort of grand fashion. I think they put up with him because his technical knowledge was very useful, providing the Court free labor in perpetuity for sure and probably other things as well, but I suspect his death was more quietly celebrated than publicly lamented. If he was grandly memorialized, it was removed/repurposed after his death because the only traces that remain are hidden from public view. Maybe his remains are elsewhere, perhaps even shipped back to the continent, but I don't think we've seen anything else in the comic that is a candidate for Diego's final resting place. Is there a place he would have rather been buried other than near Jeanne's portrait? I don't think he'd have wanted to be buried near the Annan gap... It's unclear whether the puppet show was designed by Diego himself, or arranged by the golems as a tribute to him. The modernist and functional design of the Young-bot suggests to me that it was created by the golems rather than by Diego. It's a dehumanized version of Young. Other than a vague shape and the dual wielding there's nothing about it that looks like Young. It appears to serve two purposes. First, the fight's a spectacle. It's supposed to capture the attention of someone, though a case can be made for it being a potential spectacle the old bots left as something that would outlast them as a tribute to their creator and something he'd appreciate. Second, the fight showcased Diego's robot tech as being superior to the Court protector in martial prowess and ritually destroyed the object to which Diego transferred his sin. That's an interesting interpretation, though I think it was more likely intended to make visitors repent and apologize to Jeanne, since she was the first thing they'd see when they crawled into the room. Diego's portrait was much smaller and not the focus of things. In fact, since Diego himself was probably the only human visitor during his lifetime, he may have designed the shrine as a way for him to atone. He was likely from a Roman Catholic background, and this may have been his version of "mortification of the flesh" for the dead woman he worshipped yet betrayed. S1 was then instructed, or chose, to continue this ritual in his place. Hmm. If there were visitors other than Diego that would pose a big problem since Jeanne merch was verboten and I'm not sure he had any friends, particularly ones he'd trust with a secret like this. If Diego himself used the shrine to mourn Jeanne during his lifetime, and Diego shifted the blame for Jeanne's death to Young, I guess he might have wished to crawl into her presence (so to speak) every time he visited the shrine as atonement for not doing something to save her... but that sounds out of character for Diego. I imagine that the golems would have been using Diego's workshop all along, or their own annex to it, and that the robots inherited and expanded that location. Diego constructed the shrine elsewhere, to allow for private contemplation and also to avoid discovery by the other Founders, who would have destroyed it as part of Jeanne's damnatio memoriae. The golems maintained the shrine, added the tomb and conducted the puppet show while they were alive, but never told the robots about it. They saw themselves as existing purely for Diego's sake, but wanted their descendants to serve future humanity instead. Diego likely delegated all the boring stuff to golem-bots and worked on the most interesting bits himself so the bots were probably everywhere he was. I should say that Diego probably had more than one facility. His personal one was probably at or near where the current robot facilities are. The shrine was constructed where it was because it was a place that Diego had unquestioned access to. Anyone spying on Diego would probably concentrate on his personal shop, and if he was suspected of something they'd search that before anything else... though it's interesting to wonder if Diego also didn't want to build the shrine close to where he spent the majority of his time, or if perhaps he just couldn't make the modifications to the building he wanted. Ah that reminds me, it was formsprung that the portrait of Jeanne was stolen by Diego. Exactly when that happened wasn't mentioned but it was probably before or during the purge of Jeanne from memory... though potentially after, if it got overlooked somewhere and his change-of-heart came late. If he ever had any portraits of her of his own he had to surrender them. I guess the video footage of her he collected and retained wasn't high enough quality to use.
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Post by pyradonis on Feb 23, 2024 16:07:11 GMT
S1 may also have needed a Seraph CPU to reactivate because its heart wasn't just damaged, but actually removed. Parts of the heart were repurposed to create the Seraph CPUs, which is why they have that weird ceramic chip that makes them immune to Court overrides. This would also explain why S1 isn't seen among the golems that Kat revived, though perhaps she simply refrained because she doesn't trust an ancestor of the Seraphs. I like this theory! If it's true, it might be that the program overriding S13's usual personality was stored on his own CPU all along. Also, yeah... what's up with S1? Information on whether S1 was revived is conspicuously absent. And generally it is weird that with all those golems being active again, Annie and Kat apparently haven't thought about asking them anything about the things that transpired in their time.
We do know that the robots didn't design any classes of robots that Diego didn't initiate We do? I can never read a sentence like this without thinking of a certain android... I think what silicondream meant was that the Bullbot has what looks like hydraulic and electrical lines running along its body, i.e. a power distribution system using technology that is explicitly not found in the golems and did not exist during Diego's lifetime. One could argue that the Court, being ahead of its time, already had developed these types of technology, but Diego perceived them as inferior to his Ether-powered tech and used it on purpose to build the bot depicting Sir Young. However there have been no hints as to this in any of the flashbacks to the time of the Founders we have seen, and IMHO the answer that the Bullbot was built after Diego's death by those who used the same technology to create their own offspring.
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Feb 23, 2024 17:18:14 GMT
We do know that the robots didn't design any classes of robots that Diego didn't initiate We do? It was formsprung as such, but I suppose it could have been retconned. I think what silicondream meant was that the Bullbot has what looks like hydraulic and electrical lines running along its body, i.e. a power distribution system using technology that is explicitly not found in the golems and did not exist during Diego's lifetime. One could argue that the Court, being ahead of its time, already had developed these types of technology, but Diego perceived them as inferior to his Ether-powered tech and used it on purpose to build the bot depicting Sir Young. However there have been no hints as to this in any of the flashbacks to the time of the Founders we have seen, and IMHO the answer that the Bullbot was built after Diego's death by those who used the same technology to create their own offspring. Maybe those were electrical cables but more likely pneumatics or some sort of kinetic energy transfer system like an internal rotating cable or possibly belts or chains. The point of the show was the defeat of the Young-bot, representing the defeat of the human Young, and as such the Young-bot needed to demonstrate human-like vulnerability S1 can exploit. A gush of hydraulic fluid would be the best representation of wounds as the cables get cut, but I don't remember seeing any big splashes. Sure, the robots could have (re?)designed it much much later but why? To demonstrate the superiority of Diego's tech over modern tech? They apparently were trying to surpass it.
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Post by pyradonis on Feb 24, 2024 12:01:56 GMT
It was formsprung as such, but I suppose it could have been retconned. Interesting. However the statement that no robot models are currently in service which are not derived from Diego's original models also leaves a lot of wiggle room. Bird "models" living today are derived (in a manner of speaking) from theropod dinosaurs, but which non specialist would see that? It's really not important what went through those hoses (though you're probably right with the pneumatics suggestion since no fluid is seen leaking out after they've been cut). What looks a lot like cut electrical wires to me is best seen when the Bullbot's leg is halfway cut through. Not sure what you mean by redesigned though? The golems were unable to recreate the technology used in their own design, so if they were the ones who built the Bullbot, they didn't really have a choice what to use.
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Post by silicondream on Feb 25, 2024 14:37:27 GMT
Perhaps, though it wasn't just swordsmanship that he got; it was also barehanded martial arts, a hatred for the Young-bot, and arguably a package of personality traits that changed him from a bubbly "mommy"-focused toddler into an obsessive prophet of the Angel. I think Robot ended up far more like the original S1 because of that interaction. It's been formsprung that the golem-bots hated Young and his successors both because Diego programmed them to and because they wanted to, and I've speculated before that however they were designed Diego used his own mind as at least a pattern in some way, shape, or form. Probably. But Robot hated the Young-bot as soon as he saw it, long before he had any reason to connect it with Young himself. As you say, it's not particularly reminiscent of the man. So Robot's hatred was probably copied from S1, who did know whom it represented. It's the timing that I find suggestive. At the beginning of "S1," Robot was still accidentally calling Annie "mummy" and playfully racing around with Shadow. Nor did he show any fixation on Kat, even though he'd already met her and said she looked like an "angel" and she'd given him the mouse body a month or two earlier. By the end of the chapter, he already sounded more sober and mature, and the next time we saw him in "Sky Watcher and the Angel," he was leading a thriving Church of Kat. It seems like his experience in the Tomb was what ignited his faith. What do the modern robots get out of visiting Jeanne's shrine? What do Christians get out of passion plays? I think that participating in the performance would be a form of worship for the golems, a way for them to honor their Creator, feel close to him, and understand his will. Sure, but I was including initiation as part of "running" it. S1 needed a CPU bypass to start the show and/or perform their part as matador; the rest of the golems did not need a CPU bypass to applaud. Do you have a cite that Diego had the robots build it? The revived golem simply said that he helped build it and that "my colleagues and I intended this to be our final resting place." I don't see any indication that this was done on Diego's orders; the golem certainly emphasized that the deactivation was their own choice. I think that Diego had them build the shrine, but the tomb was a later addition conceived by the golems themselves. Robot thought it was Jeanne's tomb early on, but that was before "The Coward Heart" so he didn't actually know where her body ended up. I don't think Diego had a bad reputation within the Court. It was formsprung that killing Jeanne was his first major act of "villainy," and that was approved by (most of) the Founders and covered up afterwards. Steadman hated him, but that was because Steadman was Jeanne's friend and ex and knew how he behaved toward her. To the rest of the Court, he was probably just a benevolent if eccentric genius. And I wasn't suggesting that he'd be grandly memorialized, just that he was sufficiently well-known for the Court to care where he was buried. The golems probably wouldn't have been able to spirit his body away and bury it at Jeanne's shrine, because the Court would come looking for it. How so? He was fairly cringing and passive with the living Jeanne, and its formsprung that Diego was a culturally Catholic Spaniard. If he wanted to repent of her execution, I think he'd do it on his knees. Underground chapels that can only be accessed by crawling are a real thing, like this ancient chapel in northern Greece. The footage would also make it a lot more obvious that she didn't like him. Diego was memorializing his ideal Jeanne, not the actual woman who screamed insults at him and broke his golems and complained about the Court and swooned over a hot elf guy. It was formsprung as such, but I suppose it could have been retconned. Well, what Tom actually said is that all of the "Court robots" that are "currently in service" were "derived from Diego's original designs." (The first and last quote are from the person who asked the Formspring question.). This statement does not necessarily apply to the Bullbot/Young-bot, since it was never employed by the Court and is currently destroyed. Furthermore, all the modern robot models have been extensively re-designed, first by the Golems and then by the robots themselves, so the same would be true of the Young-bot unless it was built by Diego's own hands. And I don't think it was; it doesn't have his style. The golems would have redesigned it, like they redesigned all of the robot models, because they weren't capable of replicating themselves. They didn't know how to recreate their own hearts or match the anatomical intricacy of Diego's designs. That's why they had to invent entirely new power and operating systems for the robots. Even if Diego had built a prototype Young-bot, the golems would have had to create a redesigned version after its first performance. Also, the golems have a different sense of aesthetics from Diego. His works are ornate, intricate, and closely modeled on the anatomy of living humans and animals. The golems and robots prefer blocky, minimalist, functionalist designs...much like that of the Young-bot.
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Feb 26, 2024 6:42:57 GMT
Robot hated the Young-bot as soon as he saw it, long before he had any reason to connect it with Young himself. As you say, it's not particularly reminiscent of the man. So Robot's hatred was probably copied from S1, who did know whom it represented. Robots crush on girls who don't particularly look like Jeanne, and it's almost certainly nothing in their code or orders that makes them do that. I think it's possible there's something in the architecture that allows for similar responses to other things that doesn't take place on a conscious (for lack of a better term) level. I think it's something that bubbles up out of the kludge. The Young-bot barely looked like Young at all but did suggest him, like a gesture drawing and I think a parallel can be drawn between S13's hate of it and the robots' crushes. Being exposed to whatever process was running in the show put a big exclamation point on it, of course, but I don't think there was any transfer of information about Young. A digital analog of a feeling I think would come through as data, Robot remembering being in a state where he was in a body which hated the Young-bot... but perhaps we're debating how many Kat Donlans can dance on the head of a pin (given she's got space warpring tech and there's multiple realities, all of them probably can). At the beginning of "S1," Robot was still accidentally calling Annie "mummy" and playfully racing around with Shadow. Nor did he show any fixation on Kat, even though he'd already met her and said she looked like an "angel" and she'd given him the mouse body a month or two earlier. By the end of the chapter, he already sounded more sober and mature, and the next time we saw him in "Sky Watcher and the Angel," he was leading a thriving Church of Kat. It seems like his experience in the Tomb was what ignited his faith. Kat restoring the OG-bots to motion (however temporary) was also part of that experience and that's important. That's the first instance of the Angel giving life and taking it away in a manner that was beyond the other robots and the Court. What do the modern robots get out of visiting Jeanne's shrine? What do Christians get out of passion plays? I think that participating in the performance would be a form of worship for the golems, a way for them to honor their Creator, feel close to him, and understand his will. I don't see any indication that this was done on Diego's orders; the golem certainly emphasized that the deactivation was their own choice. I think that Diego had them build the shrine, but the tomb was a later addition conceived by the golems themselves. Robot thought it was Jeanne's tomb early on, but that was before "The Coward Heart" so he didn't actually know where her body ended up. If the OG-bots could get anything like feeling close to their creator at the shrine/arena would they have decommissioned themselves? Also, why would the opening of the hidden shrine be the climax of the spectacle? Diego's will (and probably direct orders) would have been for that shrine and the portrait inside to be concealed. Even if the OG-bots or a later generation were just aping human traditions and creating the arena for themselves, that would appear to go against Diego's wishes... unless there was some specific circumstance that would mandate doing that... Well, like I said before the shrine's there memorializing her it's not wrong to call it Jeanne's tomb even though her remains aren't there (Speaking of which, why didn't the kids recover her bones and sword and place them there? Did they just not think of it?) and I think unless there's a better candidate for Diego's final resting place it's not wrong to call it Diego's tomb even if his remains aren't actually there somewhere. I don't think Diego had a bad reputation within the Court. It was formsprung that killing Jeanne was his first major act of "villainy," and that was approved by (most of) the Founders and covered up afterwards. Steadman hated him, but that was because Steadman was Jeanne's friend and ex and knew how he behaved toward her. To the rest of the Court, he was probably just a benevolent if eccentric genius. It's also been formsprung over and over that Diego wasn't a great guy. I think on a day-to-day basis he was not a great guy before Jeanne died and he was worse after. More on this later. And I wasn't suggesting that he'd be grandly memorialized, just that he was sufficiently well-known for the Court to care where he was buried. The golems probably wouldn't have been able to spirit his body away and bury it at Jeanne's shrine, because the Court would come looking for it. Would they? I imagine Diego becoming more bitter and isolated as he grew older. The OG-bots were probably not responsible for as much around the Court as the modern-day robots were but if nothing else they were Diego's stuff-doers, so I figure that all things held equal they probably could have gotten hold of his remains eventually if they wanted to, and I'm not sure the Court would object if they just asked... or care much if the remains just disappeared one day. Diego was a founding member of the Court and an etheric-tech genius. He's arguably much more important than Young who got got a big park named after him. All the free robot labor the Court enjoyed was the product of his work. All things held equal there should be statues of Diego around, buildings with his name on it (the school in particular), and his final resting place should be something grand because the Court thinks of itself as grand, and has a lot of free labor, money, and materials [edit] I'm being a bit hyperbolic here because the Court allegedly aspires to egalitarianism and their idea of grand style would be more subdued than, for example, something like the arena/tomb but my point is that institutionally they have reason to memorialize Diego if he's anything close to mediocre with his people-skills [/edit] but aside from an appearance in the VR about the Court founding the only memorials to him that I can recall are the arena/shrine and the collection room in robot central, both of which are hidden. I think that's very strong evidence that Diego was not someone who was much lamented when he died. He wasn't erased from history, just given a cold shoulder and short shrift that nearly amounts to same. Come to think of it, if the OG-bots didn't have orders they might not have done anything at all when Diego died and if that's the case, maybe nobody did anything. If Diego's remains aren't in the workshop/arena complex somewhere, they may be near the collection room. His bedroom may be near there and he could still be in his bed where he died. If so, that would be a fitting memorial imho. How so? He was fairly cringing and passive with the living Jeanne, and its formsprung that Diego was a culturally Catholic Spaniard. If he wanted to repent of her execution, I think he'd do it on his knees. Underground chapels that can only be accessed by crawling are a real thing, like this ancient chapel in northern Greece. If there was a human audience maybe Diego would be cringing, but I'm guessing when he was alone he indulged his nastier side. This whole thing doesn't seem to be about repentance or atonement for him. It's about self-aggrandizement, symbolic vengeance, blame-shifting and, depending on if it was Diego or a 'bot who put that smaller picture there under the portrait, Diego winding up with Jeanne in the end. Historically there's a lot of precedent in founding a religious edifice for those sorts of things but the potentates who fund such things tend to want to be very public about it when they self-flagellate. Maybe all those seats in the arena are just decoration, a backdrop for the morbid play, but my suspicion is that they were for all the people that an aging and demented Diego imagined would one day come to mourn him, and its purpose was to make them realize how wrong they were about him (and Young) and then remind them about the forgotten tragedy of Jeanne. The construction seems to vary around that tiny entrance to the shrine set in the huge arena "false door" with Diego's initial; I'm thinking what happened was during Diego's lifetime when he visited the portrait he marched through a passage as wide as the latter chamber, had a good long rant, tuckered himself out, and slunk back the way he came. The golems would have redesigned it, like they redesigned all of the robot models, because they weren't capable of replicating themselves. They didn't know how to recreate their own hearts or match the anatomical intricacy of Diego's designs. That's why they had to invent entirely new power and operating systems for the robots. Even if Diego had built a prototype Young-bot, the golems would have had to create a redesigned version after its first performance. I agree that the OG-bots were either unable to create golem hearts or were otherwise prevented from doing so but I'm not sure if they couldn't match the intricacies or if without the hearts there wasn't a point in recreating the rest. I think there must have been some sort of etheric-tech "missing-link" generation between the OGs and the electrical appliance robots. I've been referring to them as such not just because we don't seem to have any examples in the comic but also because some loss of collective memory apparently happened between this generation and the following ones, and potentially also between the OGs and the missing-linkers. It may have been the case that their memories were literally incompatible. However great they were/are the OG-bots weren't wizards, yet they must have had some ability and experience with etheric-tech devices in order to be of use to Diego. It stands to reason that what they'd do is use what they know and can do, and make a much less sophisticated golem by developing more non-magical work-arounds. That's vastly easier and more plausible than inventing an entire new technology on a different power source. I'll wildly speculate that what happened after that was that the missing-linkers also couldn't replicate themselves; they were probably worse all-around compared to the OG-bots, but the one advantage they had was that the OG-bots gave them orders/purpose that could keep them going for a long time so they had a long time to work. Thus, they designed the next generation using even more work-arounds and even less magic. I'll call this next generation the third even if there was more than one go-round in the second because the key characteristic is that it is either just barely or not a golem at all, it's pretty much just an electrical appliance (with the arguable exception of the Seraphs). The tech functions like magic because the complexity of the code used in gen3 greatly surpasses ordinary muggle understanding... which makes it effectively mythical. That complexity is what's allowed the robots' Story to proceed the way it has. Also, the golems have a different sense of aesthetics from Diego. His works are ornate, intricate, and closely modeled on the anatomy of living humans and animals. The golems and robots prefer blocky, minimalist, functionalist designs...much like that of the Young-bot. The Young-bot looks like it draws at least some inspiration from a bull to me. I think Diego or whoever designed it was working a bull-matador theme with the arena and show. There's a matador-bot (last panel 5th from the right) in the first view of the OG-bots in the arena, perhaps as foreshadowing. On the next page there's another OG with a similar faceless sort of look to the Young-bot (panel 2).
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