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Post by mturtle7 on Jul 6, 2023 3:20:26 GMT
I dunno, Loup being able to fully summon Ysengrin at will but not Coyete is feeling like a clue. Ysengrin has Coyete powers, and he could disguise/recreate himself as a Ysengrin/Coyete hybrid so convincing that even he would believe it. But it would still be Ysengrin. I say Ysengrin here because Loup is clearly much more Ysengrin than Coyote. We never once saw any of Coyote's personality shining through. I've always thought that Loup was Ysengrin with (most of) Coyote's power but none of his personality and memories... Ok, this line of thought is kind of weirding me out, because Renard literally once expressed the exact same doubts you guys are having now - i.e " are you REALLY a new creature?" - but in the EXACT OPPOSITE direction. Like, we had this entire arc which was about revealing that, in spite of appearances, he had a significant part of Ysengrin's personality in him after all. This was presented as a revelation, because before then, he was mostly portrayed as kind of a more d*ckish, insecure, and ignorant version of Coyote. He laughed and joked, threw petulant & chaotic temper tantrums, teased people with secret knowledge, and played tricks on them all the time - how the heck is that not "Coyote's personality shining through"?
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jul 6, 2023 4:05:40 GMT
I liked the idea of Annie being single myself (if it hadn't been for one or two moments such as the mention of her crush on someone during the time she was split in two, and the "Annie in the Forest" "spin-off books", I'd have seen her as aromantic) - but I'm a bit surprised at Tom mentioning his dislike for that sort of thing when he'd given many of the other characters (particularly Kat) romantic relationships. (Of course, Kat and Paz have broken up now, but still....) What blahzor said, but also, I think (if I could find the quote...) what I remember Tom meant wasn't that he hated romance, just that he didn't want the comic to revolve around it plotwise. And I think it really hasn't. Romantic relationships have occurred, obviously, but they're of interest to the plot in a sense well beyond "will-they-won't-they" sort of drama. And there have been many kinds of romantic and non-romantic relationships represented, too (across genders, "species", living and dead people, etc). It's come up a few times in the Q2T threads and formspring... I think the best capsule summary was formsprung where he said he didn't want to fall back on sex and violence more than he had to to tell the story. It's not that there is zero sex and violence in the GKU but those things aren't really the focus. It's a bit of an overgeneralization but the vast majority of YA does seem to treat characters as either hypersexualized or completely divorced from any notion or impact of sex, or sometimes both at various points in time. Thinking back on people I knew irl there were a good number who knew their orientation from single-digit years but others who didn't know until they were in their late twenties, and others who were disassociated from sex until they were several years out of high school (or college in one case). This may be controversial to say but of those who identified with or effectively were "ace" some did have things figured out early and were chill with other people around them having relationships of various types, and then there were others who weren't chill and were probably just overwhelmed with growing up and everything... and over the course of a few decades those people mostly didn't stay completely "ace." Very few people I grew up with were boy/girl crazy early though some went through a "slut phase" somewhere in their teens or twenties... in fact, not too many people I knew would make popular and believable characters in YA fiction... but I digress. My point is that it's complicated and often not spoken forthrightly in abstract terms. I think the comic has struck a pretty decent balance. While checking the formspring engine in preparation for this post I was reminded of all of the shippers pestering the author, particularly in the early days. I'd managed to forget those days. Now that he's not answering questions in the forum or formspring hopefully there isn't as much pressure.
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Post by mturtle7 on Jul 6, 2023 6:00:12 GMT
I'm remembering Coyote's theory around putting the stars in the sky. He put them there, as did many other gods, but they've also always been there, and he believes it is because of the thoughts of man. There's a lot of New People watching here - the recovery of Everyone should become a myth and legend in its own right after all. And we've seen shifted Annies and time loops before. And with Kat having just gone through a breakup, its an interesting time for this. The tragic love is a story he's played before, with Renard. But maybe Annie and Jerrek aren't the actually intended audience now. I'm not 100% clear on what you're trying to imply will happen here, but it seems like this old copypasta of mine is going to be relevant, regardless:
"What I hate is that there are two particular Mysterious Things that just keep getting brought up over and over again, and it's always because people are misunderstanding what they mean in the exact same way, and I always feel the inexplicable need to correct them in the exact same way. I am seriously determined now to create two "stock corrections" that I will just copy-paste into a post whenever I feel the need to argue with someone about one of these two things, and be done with it. Here goes: a) Kat's "logic vision", which we first encountered in "Chapter 46: The Realm of the Dead" and later encountered in "Chapter 60: The Other Shore", does not actually apply to everything magic. I know that when we see this ability in play, it really feels like she's just seeing through all the magic, so this is still a perfectly reasonable mistake to make, but I still think it is a mistake. I say this because Kat can still see, for example, Ankou the Psychopomp as exactly the unnatural etheric creature he is. The same holds true for a variety of other magical beings & effects in the comic. I won't try to name every single one of those, the Ankou thing just makes a good example because he's a spooky guy kind of like the ROTD Recordkeeper guy, but Kat was unafraid of that guy while she was afraid of Ankou. The exact nature of Kat's ability is not exactly clear, but the common element between both times we see it in play is that it takes effects that are meant to etherically obfuscate the truth of something by making them look big, complex, and dramatic, and instead it makes Kat see them as simple and mundane things which she can (and does) easily handle with mundane skills. b) Coyote's Great Secret, which was first revealed by Coyote in "Chapter 39: The Great Secret" and is later expounded upon by Jones in "Chapter 40: The Stone", does not actually mean that you can make anything be real just by getting a large group of people to believe in it, nor does it mean everything etheric in the world of Gunnerkrigg comes precisely from a popular myth or legend. I honestly get why one might think this, since "belief magic" is a pretty popular concept in modern media, and both Coyote and Jones' explanation of it really emphasize how much power humans are supposed to have under this theory (and in particular, how scary that power is). However, there are a lot of problems with taking this at face value, not least of which is the fact that the "Great Secret" is nothing more than wild, evidence-free, speculation by Coyote, who is not the most unbiased or trustworthy source of info. But also, Coyote himself in his point that the Ether always exists unto itself, and the only reason etheric stuff resembles human myths is because human souls are absorbed into the ether only when they die. And furthermore, lots of etheric stuff that goes on in the world of Gunnerkrigg is either wholly an original creation of Tom Siddell's, or an old myth with a very original twist on it. For instance, City Fairies have plenty of qualities that aren't normally attributed to fairies by humans, and Coyote does lots of things in the story that are not featured in classical Native American mythology (e.g. committing suicide by wolf). So it stands to reason that even if one was to deliberately convince a very large group of humans of a specific piece of folklore, and then kill those humans so they're absorbed into the Ether, any etheric creatures that may result will probably not exist or act in precisely the way you intended."
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jul 6, 2023 7:41:59 GMT
One problem with understanding the great secret hypothesis is that we don't see the failures. The etherium is full of successes that characters in the comic can experience but there is no way to catalog the innumerable stories that didn't catch on because believing in them wasn't self-reinforcing.
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