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Post by mturtle7 on Mar 20, 2024 17:02:27 GMT
This is a bit of a weak pay-off, if I'm being honest. Annie is just being told about the Robot Cult via etheric flashback, like the story is just going, "oh hey, so there was this big plotline running that you didn't know about, now deal with it". Up til now, only Shadow and Loup knew Robot was acting like Jim Jonesbot and neither of them have informed the main cast (in Loup's case he wouldn't directly, but could have let something slip inadvertently). Might have been better for Annie to suspect at something was amiss much earlier through her own observations. Or, you know, through Shadow actually telling her about what he's seen. This is sort of the in-universe equivalent of Tell, Don't Show, which seems to happen in-lieu of realistic communication happening between characters who should rightfully talk to each other. I always kinda had the impression that Robot's arc was leading up to a big climactic moment where he'd finally go too far in an extremely public way, and the main cast would have to confront him and fight him and/or persuade him to change his ways, all the while grappling with the emotional turmoil his betrayal caused.
I'm also pretty sure that the main reason that is NOT how that arc is getting resolved now is because the comic has been in a dead sprint for the last 5 years to get through all the major plot points necessary for it to end, and letting Robot's cult stuff resolve at a sensible pace would just be wasting too much time that could instead be spent on what is now the "main plot".
Now that I think about it, I guess you could say that the real "Great Distortion" that Zimmy created is actually in narrative pacing – this entire arc has felt simultaneously too fast and too slow, because Tom is trying to fit several years' worth of story build-up and resolution into a few chapters. Coyote's plan for Loup, revealed and thwarted? DONE. Kat becomes a psychopomp? DONE. Robot's cult revealed, and his character redeemed? DONE. I'm now all but sure that the secret of Omega will be revealed in the next chapter or two, and Loup will be killed or otherwise taken out of the plot somehow. Wonderful.
...You know, I think I might just take a break from the comic for a few months, again. I'm getting way too frustrated with all this, and that's a bad sign.
See y'all in...May, I guess? I'll probably be ready to have fun again by May.
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Post by mturtle7 on Mar 20, 2024 16:33:49 GMT
Robot just said that this (presumably his transformation into this form) is his penance, but he didn't say for what. On this page, perhaps we're being shown what he feels he should do penance for. With panel borders made from feathers and barnacles, a reference to Robot's distortion form, we see flashbacks to incidents from chapter 25 and chapter 33 when Robot was proselytizing to other robots about the Angel. We also see that in the present moment, Shadow is sadly saying that he remembers these times, with Annie looking on, and the mystery New Person watching in the background. Tom's comment: "Happened a little while ago" (yes, it's been a minute, as they say). My question is, what exactly is happening diegetically? I guess Robot's describing those past moments to Annie and Shadow, and we readers are seeing them as flashbacks? Or are Annie and Shadow actually somehow seeing these flashbacks, possibly via distortion weirdness? Personally, I'm pretty sure that Distortion Weirdness is actually showing the gang these memories of Robot's – otherwise, Shadow's line and expression on this page doesn't really make sense. He's acting like somebody watching a recording of a familiar scene, not somebody listening to another person actively describe a familiar scene.
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Post by mturtle7 on Mar 6, 2024 17:14:41 GMT
and you would know that how, miss? So many little clues to her identity, but I just can’t put it together… Her mannerisms and actions up to this point actually put me most in mind of Gamma, but that can't be right, because Gamma can't be affected by the distortions...
Zimmy is the obvious choice, and almost certainly what Annie is thinking right now, but she's not acting like Zimmy at all, or like any NP that Zimmy might want to imitate...
My next best guess is Omega, but they/it are such an unknown at this point that it feels like this would be a rather cheap reveal. So yeah, I also continue to be stumped.
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Post by mturtle7 on Feb 26, 2024 20:17:27 GMT
Or THAT'S WHAT HE WANTS US TO THINK! He Robot, or he Tom? Yes.
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Post by mturtle7 on Feb 5, 2024 18:40:12 GMT
It's obviously Gam... OK I'll stop. She is in fact Etty. I've been thinking about (wassername) Barbershop Robot. All NP are created teenagers, maybe because it's easier for Kat to relate to them, and also because they are indeed children. Arthur received an adult body, for obvious and understandable reasons. But poor Barbershop Robot got a middle-aged male body. I think it's hard for him to mingle with the kids. Where is he? Does anybody care for him? Does he have a partner in life, or is he all alone? What has he been doing (apart from sitting all day waiting for someone to cut their hairs)? EDIT: And yes, we've been wondering, not only who the Gothic Chick is, but also when the end of chapter would come. Sucks that's on a Monday, but Tom is our God and we are at His mercy.
He lived alone for a while after waking up, but now shares a housing unit with his old IRC friend, Cab (the former Central Administrator of that one Robot HQ). They both secretly have a crush on each other, but are too afraid of ruining their friendship to say anything about it. He's also sort of a kindly (if rather unsettling) uncle figure to Becky Ground, who often went to him for advice when he was a robot, and now frequently brings him along on her many wacky adventures around the Court. He's actually with her right now, helping a Chester student with his sentient hair problems, well out of range of the distortion. His barbershop business is booming, thanks to all the NP who have no idea what to do with their new organic hair. When he's not working and/or having adventures, he has a ton of beauty and celebrity gossip magazine subscriptions that he reads avidly, and sometimes uses to make collages. (source: my ass)
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Post by mturtle7 on Feb 3, 2024 3:17:20 GMT
I have a terrible feeling she is Boxbot, who just wants to say hello and not be called terrible. I always feel so sad for boxbot. *narrows eyes suspiciously*
We don't tolerate Boxbot sympathizers here...
NOBODY likes Boxbot (and we'll make sure it stays that way)
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 31, 2024 19:01:11 GMT
I will note that the black-haired girl acting cheerful and mischevious is not, in ITSELF, a sign that she isn't secretly Zimmy. After all, when Zimmy has pretended to be someone else in the past, she's shown some pretty extreme commitment to the bit - her own personality just doesn't factor in at all. Well, unless Gamma's involved. As usual, Gamma is her weak spot.
That being said, this NP's behavior wouldn't really make any sense even if she WAS who she really pretended to be, so...
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 29, 2024 19:06:41 GMT
Annie: I just want to say, Kat, that it's been an honor to be with you on your path to maturity. To see you really step out of your parents' shadow, and grow into your own, as a leader, as a scientist, as a woman.
Kat: Aw jeez, thanks Annie. It's an honor to hear you say that!
Renard: I agree with what Annie said, about you becoming God.
Kat: Gosh, you too, Renar– wait WHAT
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 27, 2024 0:39:25 GMT
Hey, quick off topic questions. Where is everyone getting their Gunnerkrigg profile pics? I'm using the site on an android phone and I can't get a profile photo to upload or link. Don't know if it's because I'm on a phone or what. Can anyone help me out? Oh dang, it HAS been a while since the Gunnerkrigg Avatar Thread had any new posts, huh. It used to one of the perennial threads, that was always at or near the top of Discussion! I never really followed it too closely, though (I'm quite happy with this one avatar I made in 2018), so I didn't even notice when it dropped off. Oops.
Don't suppose any more talented Photoshop users want to make a few more avatars out of recent pages, and bump the thread?
EDIT: Hilariously enough, it seems somebody went ahead and did that literally as I was typing this post. Thanks, imaginaryfriend!
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 27, 2024 0:27:00 GMT
Honestly, I just wish it hadn't taken this many years for someone in the comic to finally cut through all that "Robots aren't technically alive" BS and acknowledge that they just had a different type of life, which happens to not be respected by an arbitrary set of magical rules. That's kinda been bugging me for ages, but I didn't really have any hope of it being resolved in the comic. Also, I think I'll take some cookies now for the Arbiter being biased about the ether, in a way that Kat disagrees with. That's another thing I didn't think would get brought up again, because I assumed that Kat would bring it up directly in conversation with the Arbiter! But hey, now I get surprise cookies. The best kind, even if my prediction was kind of vague. Om nom nom.
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 25, 2024 19:47:29 GMT
Hmmm... I figure Noobs probably age without external support. If their bodies have to be grown in a vat it should be the case that they experience undesirable changes in chemical composition (depolymerization, scission, because of the environment) from the outside-in faster than they can self-repair from the inside out. Factors that could speed aging could include poor/no nutrition, excessive exposure to light or other forms of radiation, cumulative exposure to vibration or radical thermal or pressure changes, and of course electric shocks. On the other hand, Noob aging wouldn't look like human aging. They might experience degradation of their skin and other surface parts; I'm thinking it'd be a loss of pigmentation and maybe some slight delamination (cracking and flaking, hair and nails becoming stiff and breaking off, leading to loss of sensation) and so on. I'm guessing all else held equal it wouldn't be too bad until it passes the point where the system can no longer sustain itself and then there'd be a sudden catastrophic breakdown and then it would be too late to go back into the tank. Ok what the heck this is incredibly cool
Are you secretly Randall Munroe or something
You just broke down the science of these fictional characters faster and with more flair than Zimmy breaking down reality
Why can't I upvote this post more than once
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 24, 2024 8:10:14 GMT
It's organic so it would degrade. Maybe not at the same rate as "normal" org-matter. I doubt bodyswapping will happen. There doesn't seem to be a scarcity of resources AND it would be incredibly upsetting for the loved ones of said previous body's owner. Is it truly organic or just synthetic biomimicry? Not challenging it, I just don't remember I think Kat is not that oblivious to not realize how much just putting another mind in Sam's body would weird everyone out. Also, when they were still robots, they emulated human burial rites even for a piece of burnt organic matter from Kat's lab. So I'd expect the NP to expect a proper burial for the first of their own to die.
Maybe it would weird them out, but they used to be robots not so long ago. In that chapter when Kat finds Diego's "dungeon" they explain their ideology around death/ being out of service and it seemed pretty utilitarian and pragmatic. They are new people but were "built" upon previous beings lmao The artificial flesh NP's bodies are made of is definitely organic in the chemical sense, since they're made from carbon structures! In the broader sense of "organic" as in "part of a living or once-living creature"...well, then we would have to start getting into whether or not the NP technically count as "alive", and honestly I think there's been enough discussion about that for now, both in and outside of the comic. On the other hand, the question of whether the NP physically age with time has been brought up before on the forum, but not the comic, which...is kind of weird, since you'd think it'd be a rather pressing concern for everybody involved! But yeah, as I recall, we were completely unable to reach any definitive answer about whether NP can, say, die of old age. And I think trying to determine whether NP corpses rot would run into the same problem.
The robot perspective on death has always fascinated me, actually. It's utilitarian and pragmatic, as you say, and they never seem to be unhappy about that, per se. Their attitude towards their deaths is inextricably tied to their attitudes towards their lives, which is consumed with love for their built-in purpose. They see themselves as more like objects than people, despite their obvious capacity for deep emotion and higher thought - and they're not bitter about that at all. And yet, if you look back at chapters like Give and Take and Sky Watcher and the Angel, there's always this weird undertone of...confused longing, I suppose, when the robots discuss life and death and love. Like they were happy being objects, but also had a vague but inescapable sense that things would be better if only they could be real, non-objectified people..."As mere machines, we can only hope to understand." It was an ideology that was practically designed to be discarded at a moment's notice, once they could finally realize their creator's (Creator's) original intent and become more than just machines. So I think they would actually be quite outraged if they didn't all think Sam's body was being treated with the same respect a human one would have – they know things are supposed to be different now, even if they're not always clear on a lot of the details!
EDIT: whoops, ninja'd by silicondream on the carbon thing. Dang it, they had way smarter ideas about the science of it all, too! Oh well.
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 5, 2024 21:50:41 GMT
Other two things I realized rereading the comics. First is that Ankou easily gave up Mort's soul the moment Annie asked to guide him, even though the same Ankou was really frustrated earlier in the chapter when the ROTD "employed" the young Mort. It makes sense, given that all 'pomps are in an effort to enslave Annie. But I didn't notice before. The other thing is that Jeanne was a Shadow Man. Their "logo" is embroided on her fencing vest (as seen on Coward Heart, Chapter 30, [770] and Jeanne, Chapter 59, page 3, [1698]). I don't know if it's been discussed before, I could not find anything about it. And I think this will be relevant soon. Also, I tried to bring that up in the thread for [770], but nobody seemed to care (people around here appear to dislike necroposts), so I brought it to this discussion to see if it gets any traction. Belated welcome to the forum, Hatredman (and happy New Year)!
Good catch on the Ankou thing, I hadn't noticed that either.
A quick search on Jeanne in this thread shows that yeah, at least a couple people have commented on it in the past! Including one discussion that happened before we even knew about the Shadow Men, strictly speaking.
Personally, I've long thought that Jeanne wasn't just *a* Shadow Man, but the founder of the Shadow Men, in keeping with the other Founders' monumental roles and enduring legacies (e.g. Sir Young and the Court Protectors, Diego and his Robots).
In my experience, necroposting is usually accepted as long as it's for a discussion of a topic or collection of general types of posts, and not a specific page. The threads for individual pages are usually reserved for quick discussion on the most recent pages, and age out of use very quickly. Not that that's, like, a hard and fast rule or anything - just a light social norm that's developed naturally over time! If you want to talk about Jeanne's connection to the Shadow Men, I'd advise you do so by creating a separate thread, named "Jeanne and the Shadow Men" or something like that. Or we can just keep talking about it here, honestly! Either way works.
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Post by mturtle7 on Dec 19, 2023 7:46:04 GMT
Obligatory reminder that what the arbiter is describing - a dead world filled with nothing, except when the Ether gives it light and life - is exactly how Annie always sees the world in her astral form. Most of the world is " grey and lifeless" to her, except in the Forest which is always full of colors. It should also be noted that, on the other hand, Kat has a very different way of seeing the non-Etheric world, which is anything but lifeless to her. I think that the Arbiter, ironically enough, is a bit biased here, though not entirely wrong. Interesting to see where this goes!
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Post by mturtle7 on Dec 14, 2023 20:58:19 GMT
All this talk of psychopomps made me look into what we actually know about the "afterlife bureaucracy". In a recent comment, I recapped the afterlife's jurisdictions as something like this: who they take is a source of their identity and pride; Mallt-y-nos guides Welsh people, Moddey-dhoo guides English-speaking people from the Isle of Man, Ankou takes most mainland Britons, Ketrak guides spiders and bugs, etc. But I was unsure of where Muut fits in. That's because this entire time, I assumed he was Egyptian! (I think my brain mixed him up with Maat, who is associated with death, and also feathers. But the Egyptian god who actually guides most dead people is, famously, Anubis, although I'm not sure who Annie is talking to on this page.) This entire time I had never looked him up. It turns out Muut is from the culture of the Cahuilla (Ivilyu-qaletem) peoples from the American Southwest. Which means he probably came to Britain because of Coyote, who he would know very well! I wonder who Muut guides? ONLY Cahuilla people? Cahuilla people and any creations of Coyote who die, like the glass-eyed men? Why was he in Good Hope hospital when Annie lived there? I mean, Occam's Razor would suggest that there was a Cahuilla-British immigrant in Good Hope who died, and that's how Annie met Muut!
In my headcanon, though, Muut actually has kind of a wide jurisdiction over most of the Native peoples in the Southwest these days, since the cultural genocide there during colonial times left a lot of job openings there in the 'pomp realm; hence, why Muut has jurisdiction over Coyote and his creations.
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Post by mturtle7 on Dec 8, 2023 23:42:31 GMT
Hot girls always think the solution to every problem is for you to focus on them Smh j/k Antimony: "Your girlfriend broke up with you, you say? Don't worry about that, baby. You should focus on more positive things, to distract you! Like, for instance, ME, and how HOT and SEXY I am. How close I am to you right now...my face to yours...my LIPS to yours...oh yes..."
I really wish I could just post this, and trust that everyone will easily see it as a joke, and not something I think could ever happen in the comic. Sadly, I am not that naive. Oh well, *I* still think it's funny.
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Post by mturtle7 on Dec 8, 2023 22:37:51 GMT
Seriously though, have we ever seen someone's view of the Ether besides Annie and Surma? I think all the other times someone was depicted in the Ether, it was in the company of either Annie or Surma? I think there are a couple of maybes.
Zimmy and Gamma. Most of the time they see the distortion, which may or not be the ether.
That time that Renard hung out with Gamma, was that the ether? It was pretty black there, but didn't seem to be a distortion or reality. They even had a window into the distortion. Others have seen the distortions as well, like Jack and the students on the boat.
I'm not sure if we've seen the POV of Renard. Maybe when he was training Annie after Ysengrin destroyed her blinker stone?
I think we've seen the POV of Loup, when Zimmy stumbled onto him when he was meditating. That was also another maybe for Zimmy. Usually her visions seem to be part of one of her distortions, but that time she and Loup were in a common space. Sort of.
We saw flower boy (Aata) in the ether, right? But maybe not his POV.
The ex-animal and ex-fairy students? Or have we only seen Annie's POV with them?
Zimmy again - when she entered Annie's dreams or whatever that was, before she punched Tony and saved Annie... Was that the ether? Also, in the room with Kat and her head-pigeon - that didn't look like a distortion, nor did it look like reality. Zimmy certainly sees things an unusual way, but I'm not sure if any of her POV is actually the ether.
I'm leaning towards the illusions created by the wisps not being the ether, but who knows?
When the witch found Zimmy and brought her to talk to Annie, that sure looked weird, and Jack and Jenny were able to see that... or at least hear it. But do Jenny's spells do anything with the ether, or are they something entirely different?
Jack was able to see Annie speed up the boat when they were heading for the power station. That was only visible in the ether. BUT, I'm not sure we saw his POV.
In summary... not sure. It does seem like at least some of these are instances where someone saw into the ether when Annie was present but not via her POV. I'm sure I missed some, also. I did try to avoid mentioning incidents where someone clearly did something with the aid of the ether but we didn't see from their POV... One thing I feel like I should point out here as a caveat is that it's a comic, and not actually presented as a first-person view, so the entire notion of a "POV" isn't usually something that applies. Like, by default, our assumption as an audience is that the visuals we see are objective truth, not just one characters' perspective. It's only really on special occasions that what one character sees isn't the same as what another character sees when they look at the same thing!
Zimmy, of course, is a walking embodiment of one of those "special occasions." What she sees is very often different from what other characters see, something which is clearly demonstrated to us when we switch between her POV and the POV of others. As to whether her distortions are technically in the ether or not - well, the most objective explanation we've had on Zimmy's powers comes from Jones, who said that "her brain is in tune with the ether" and that stress "can lead to distortions which present themselves in the physical world". Also, Renard (or something very like him) once said she "distorts reality and the ether alike". And Zimmy, of course, has her own weird ideas about her powers, reality, and the ether - what Annie calls the Ether, she considers just one part of "the unseen world". My theory, based on all this, and the scenes you mentioned, is that Zimmy can see a distorted version of the ether (so anything she sees may or may not line up with what a magician like Annie or Anja might see by peering into the Ether) pretty much all the time, and she can also see more stuff that way if she really tries and Gamma isn't negating her too much. And then when visions get "real", it not only affects both the etheric and physical worlds, but actually mixes them together. Hence why Jack's Whiteleg was only visible in the Ether to other people, and why Renard's etheric form was floating around in space alongside Gamma and Zimmy in "Find Yourself". Which would also handily explain the current funkiness around Kat's angel form, maybe!
I actually thought about that training sequence with Renard and Annie when I was making my last post in this thread, but then I realized that the way Renard is slowly revealed clearly marks that scene as being Annie's POV and not his!
I have no idea what was going on in that one sequence with Loup and Zimmy. That might have represented looking into the Ether, just on a grander scale than Annie usually does, or it might represent a more abstract peering into his own omniscience. And Zimmy may have been directly involved in his thing, or maybe she was just in a parallel scene where she had a revelation about Omega around the same time as him, or whatever. It's all weird.
I'm pretty sure we've never seen Aata or the Foley folks' etheric forms when Annie wasn't also there looking at them.
The first time we see a Wisp, it looks entirely physical, but then we see more and more signs that this is all in the Ether, and then everything snaps back to the physical world when Annie wakes up. This strikes me as very similar to Blue's illusions, where she seems to pull people's perspective into the Ether and then shapes the appearance of that at will. That explanation also lines up with what happened in the Wisp nest, when everyone was in a shared illusion, but the wisps changed how people saw others in their group and where they thought they were in space, while all along they were actually just standing in place with their eyes closed in reality. It's a little weird, because Annie's link with Renard kinda looks like an ethereal plane of it's own, but my interpretation is that nobody's really looking into the ether when that happens, they're just sharing info directly mind-to-mind, and what we see is more of a metaphorical representation of that.
The ether, as far as I can tell, is the fundamental source of all things which would usually be considered "magic", so I'm sure Jenny's spells are "doing something with the ether" in that sense. However, that spell she did in Chapter 87 was supposedly just to pinpoint her location, so I always assumed that when Zimmy showed up to talk with them it was entirely under her own power, not Jenny's.
Man, I miss Annie's scar. It used to be such a convenient way for us to tell when unreliable-narrator stuff was going down, and events in the comic had shifted out of reality and into something etheric. Oh well!
EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot about one more important scene relevant to all of this: when Snuffle talked with Annie about Smitty's strings. Back then, Snuffle specifically tried to see what Annie was looking at, but couldn't. She noted this as unusual, but not unheard of, and said that "Some people can look at the ether in just the right way. They can see someone's effect on it even if they aren't doing anything." Thus implying that most people see the same kind of stuff when they look into the ether: active & intentional magical effects. And then there's just a scant few people who have a knack for seeing more passive, background effects. Food for thought!
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Post by mturtle7 on Dec 8, 2023 21:26:33 GMT
Thread revivification! In Chapter 21: Blinking, Anja hides Annie's blinker stone on the roof of Kat's storage unit.But it seems like she only stepped outside for a brief moment, and while Kat's storage unit has a very high ceiling, it's still a one-story building, not the sort of thing you'd expect to have roof access. In hindsight, I can't help but see this as a delightfully subtle indicator of the true extent of Anja's magical abilities, e.g. levitation.
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Post by mturtle7 on Dec 7, 2023 21:41:54 GMT
I hope we can at least get a description of what Kat saw in the coming pages... "I can try to describe what I saw..." "No... I understand." Seriously though, have we ever seen someone's view of the Ether besides Annie and Surma? I think all the other times someone was depicted in the Ether, it was in the company of either Annie or Surma? But yeah, we don't often get other characters' direct perspective on this kinda stuff when Annie isn't seeing the same thing. Kat's adventure in the world of the Arrow was exceptional both in-universe and narratively. Hence why everyone's so curious what her perspective is like now!
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Post by mturtle7 on Dec 5, 2023 3:26:45 GMT
Well, you can be a great engineer and a crappy lawyer at the same time...I assume. I suspect that Kat simply thought working around Clippy & Saslamel was more efficient than complying with every detail of the contract. Whatever organization they represent doesn't seem very ethical--the fact that there even is a policy for how to properly own another sentient being is pretty darn sketchy--and it's probably not very powerful either, given its failure to retrieve the arrow, rescue Jeanne or punish Diego. So she may as well just use the arrow as she and the NPs see fit, and persuade and/or fight the bureaucrats if they show up again to complain. Worst comes to worst, they throw her in jail, but that's only a risk to her, and Kat's never valued her own safety very much. Her behavior here is kind of a mirror to Annie's. Annie slacked off academically because she had no respect for the Court's culture and government; she was raised by her mom to be a citizen of the Ether, and as far as she was concerned the Court's just a bunch of meddling jerks who think they own the world. Kat was raised Court, and as far as she was concerned the Etheric bureaucracy's just a bunch of meddling jerks who think they own the world. Each girl became careless and "unruly" when she entered the opposite domain, and each girl needed a parent to step in and guide her toward a more productive and respectful style of behavior in that domain. (You'll notice that Kat didn't start being polite to Etheric officials until Anja was chaperoning her.) As an engineer who has worked with other engineers, I can confirm that being "detail-oriented" when it comes to programming & engineering does not necessarily translate to being "detail-oriented" when reading legal contracts. If anything, it actually makes us WORSE at reading legal stuff thoroughly, because we're so good at abstracting away information we're told not to worry about. Like, when an engineer is handed a project with 20000 lines of existing code, they're never going to bother trying to understand or even skim the whole thing, they're just going to read the parts they're told are relevant, and then they'll just mess around with that until they get the results they want. So if a skilled engineer is handed a contract, and told that all the details are taken care of, they just need to sign this thing before they can get back to work...well, Kat's response is actually fairly typical.
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Post by mturtle7 on Dec 5, 2023 3:08:47 GMT
I'm sorry, but all I can think of is that one quote by Order of the Stick's character Varsuvius - "As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social problems it is incapable of solving approaches zero."
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Post by mturtle7 on Dec 2, 2023 2:56:59 GMT
"In Jeanne's case, someone at Gunnerkrigg Court made some kind of device...It tore through the ROTD and caused a great deal of damage. Specifically pertaining to the woman called Jeanne. We can't access her records directly at all. We aren't the only department affected. Whoever built the thing knew exactly what they were doing."
First of all, please note that Vampire Dude has no idea what the device actually is or who made it! If the ROTD couldn't figure it out, I doubt Salsamel the reclusive bureaucrat could either. And frankly, I think it makes sense they wouldn't know what the arrow is, because until recently, literally any being that got even slightly in its vicinity (even in the ether!) was insta-murdered by the mysterious Guardian of the Annan Waters. And apparently, the initial event of the Device's use didn't just break some contracts and damage ROTD infrastructure - it did so in a very noticeably specific and targeted way, such that Vampire Dude could say with confidence that it had to have been very deliberate, and done with insider knowledge. Diego was a heckuva lot more than just a tinkerer, it seems! Perhaps one might consider him a wizard of the more classical tradition, exploiting his deep knowledge of arcane secrets in order to work miracles of power (don't tell Kat I said that, though).
All this adds up to indicate that Diego did not, in fact, have to directly deal with anyone like Arbiter Salsamel when he executed his plan, simply because he was very good at covering his tracks so they couldn't find him. He made a device, which he then activated both remotely AND by proxy, and when it activated it not only tampered with a bunch of metaphysical paperwork, but also destroyed almost all the corroborating paperwork that could possibly be used to identify where and how the tampering occurred, and just for good measure it also created its own autonomous invincible guardian who could use brute force to stop any nosy investigators who might find it and its ill-gotten goods.
Salsamel and Clippy explicitly stated that the only reason they can track the Arrow's use now is "probably" because Annie & Co. got rid of the problem. Like, there's a case file or something that's been sitting practically empty for centuries, and Salsamel just now checked it and noticed it recently auto-updated with a ton of info, and he had no idea why until these kids spoke up and mentioned they recently solved the problem which the Arrow created.
I hope that all helps clarify why Diego probably didn't have to deal with the Arbiter! As for exactly what kind of contracts the Arrow originally negated, and how that might pertain to the current situation, um, I haven't the foggiest. I'll leave that to better minds than my own, haha.
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Post by mturtle7 on Nov 30, 2023 4:11:58 GMT
I thought Clippy the Translator looked a little surprised/displeased on the last page of last chapter. It seems despite summoning her he wasn't prepared for the advent of the mecha goddess. that's assuming they did summon her. She might just be trying to reach through because she somehow knows that something happened Still holding out hope for my theory that the actual keeper of Sam's soul is Becky Ground, standing in awkward silence just off to the side of the panel!
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Post by mturtle7 on Nov 27, 2023 23:39:00 GMT
Speaking of death, when Annie kills Loup (possibly at his own request, or at least with his agreement), and thus kills Coyote and Ysengrin as well... can she take them into the ether? Won't that be another "first death for this type of creature"?
Finally, who takes dead glass-eyed men into the ether? Surely one of them must have died by now, what with the swords and the dragon slayers and all that!
Actually, Muut has already been shown (or rather, strongly implied) to be the psychopomp for the glass-eyed men. Muut's a Cahuilla god from the Californian desert, and this incarnation of Coyote seems to have also come from some sort of desert, so I'm guessing that Muut has jurisdiction rights over the glass-eyed men that way, even if they're rather far from their ancestral lands. Which actually MIGHT mean that he would have juridiction over Coyote, too, if Coyote ever actually, 100%, died. If we assume that's true, I guess there would be a separate, medieval European, psychopomp showing up to take care of Ysengrin. I don't know enough about medieval European mythology to name any particular ones, though.
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Post by mturtle7 on Nov 27, 2023 23:04:39 GMT
Possibly controversial counter-argument: I think that the robots Diego created did not, officially speaking, have souls at all. Remember, as far as Salsamel's department was concerned, they were just golems, non-living objects that fall under rules of ownership and are limited by the instructions which brought them to life. It's not really said anywhere one way or another, but I think it seems entirely reasonable to think that because of this, the robots simply had minds but not souls, hence why they had no psychopomp to take them into the ether. The NP, of course, are categorically different in that they are officially living creatures, with living minds. And by "living minds", I mean, of course, the ocean the Angel gave them, and the soul that comes with it. All that Robot really did was explain things to the robots who were getting new souls; by his own admission, he wasn't really responsible for the gift of the soul itself, so I don't think he deserves to be called "keeper of this soul". Kat's the one who built the living body, which is what allowed them to have living minds and living souls, AND she's responsible for initiating the actual transfer of essences into these new bodies, so I think she has a very solid claim on the NP's souls. An important point that is easily overlooked here is that Robot himself does not have a soul and cannot be psychopomped when he "dies". Although he received a more modern body with complicated feelings, his essence has not been transferred using the green arrow. Oooooh, I totally forgot about that! Man, that's really a juicy and ominous point. Good spotting!
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Post by mturtle7 on Nov 22, 2023 0:30:40 GMT
...Although, I guess I'll admit that on the IMPOSSIBLE CHANCE that it is somehow NOT my fave girl Becky, I'm 90% sure that it would just be Kat. Guesses for who has a claim on Sam's soul: - My first choice has to be Diego. As the creator of all the original golems, who in turn created their successors, who built their own successors, and so on, it all goes back to him. The problem is that he's dead (which explains Annie's "It can't be" reaction) – or at least we think he is. He left a final record in the RotD, so a psychopomp took him there and presumably took him into the Ether after that. But what did his final record say? "She died and I did nothing." That sounds like something one of his creations would say. What if at the moment of his death Diego swapped his essence with that of one of his creations, S1 for example (whose hand is that?), and the psychopomp took that essence into the Ether? Or what if Diego pulled some kind of trick after leaving the final record that resulted in his essence (or even just part of it) was stored in S1 (or perhaps even spreading it among all his golems, explaining their "she died and we did nothing" thing) before the psychopomp took the rest of it into the Ether? Kat put Robot's chip into S1's body, transferring at least S1's knowledge of fencing, but what if Diego's essence also transferred to Robot? He wasn't proselytizing before this happened, and then suddenly he was. So perhaps Diego's spirit is going to show up, or Robot's going to show up and reveal that Diego's essence is inside him, or the like.
- The ancient robot/golem that started Sam's series, whichever type of robot Sam used to be. We know they still exist and are active, except for one.
- Kat. She created Sam's body and the means by which his essence was transferred into it. That could mean that she has some kind of claim on that soul, I suppose, but it doesn't look like it to me; Kat's contract would cover only their bodies. I don't think Kat has any more of a claim on Sam's soul than, say, Robot does, since he's seemingly been more hands-on with transferring most of their essences than Kat has.
Then of course there's my ongoing question of why psychopomps are so eager to claim souls and so possessive of them, linked to why they didn't consider themselves to owe Annie anything for resolving the Jeanne situation. Ongoing mysteries. Possibly controversial counter-argument: I think that the robots Diego created did not, officially speaking, have souls at all. Remember, as far as Salsamel's department was concerned, they were just golems, non-living objects that fall under rules of ownership and are limited by the instructions which brought them to life. It's not really said anywhere one way or another, but I think it seems entirely reasonable to think that because of this, the robots simply had minds but not souls, hence why they had no psychopomp to take them into the ether. The NP, of course, are categorically different in that they are officially living creatures, with living minds. And by "living minds", I mean, of course, the ocean the Angel gave them, and the soul that comes with it. All that Robot really did was explain things to the robots who were getting new souls; by his own admission, he wasn't really responsible for the gift of the soul itself, so I don't think he deserves to be called "keeper of this soul". Kat's the one who built the living body, which is what allowed them to have living minds and living souls, AND she's responsible for initiating the actual transfer of essences into these new bodies, so I think she has a very solid claim on the NP's souls.
Not as solid as Becky's, of course. But honestly, who even knows what that girl get up to.
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Post by mturtle7 on Nov 21, 2023 23:33:25 GMT
Wrong Answers Only Edition™ – Becky Ground!
Next page, she actually stays silent and off-panel, and we only see and hear Annie and the Interpreter talking at/about her, thus putting the ultimate twist on the expected "big reveal."
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Post by mturtle7 on Nov 13, 2023 19:48:56 GMT
I love that Saitama's now "dead," but his reaction in the last panel is concern for the CPUs. Like a mother worrying about her child. ( The box is wide open on this page.) Or else, he's not quite clear on the whole "death" concept. Maybe he thinks he can reboot, or something. I interpret this as a very relatable, human, reaction, honestly. He has no idea how to think about his own death, so he focuses on a problem which he can easily understand instead. Plenty of humans would probably do the same thing! Although, now that I think about it, in his case there ARE some other factors involved...
Robots aren't new to the concept of "death", per se. In fact, they're extremely used to dying, not only when their CPUs are destroyed, but also whenever they're turned off, however temporarily. They have a somewhat different perspective on life and death than humans, in general. To them, movement is life, and stillness is death, and the only conceivable purpose of life is to be useful to others. So Baldy's question here isn't just out of concern for his fellows, or even desperate clinging to a comprehensible problem in the wake of the unknown - it's single-minded concern for his latest useful function, i.e. keeping the CPU box safe.
Come to think of it, in a way, we've already had a scene in this comic where a benevolent psychopomp guided a dead robot into its next life, and the robot in question acted very similarly to Baldy here...I'm talking about the classic chapter " She Gave Us An Ocean". Robot had to explain to the little guy that he was offline, i.e. "dead" by NP standards, and his first reaction was "Oh no! Who has been checking the water pipes!"
Which brings me to what I think Baldy's really going to have trouble with: he's not just losing his functionality to others now, but the entire ocean that is his new mind - the complex ecosystem of emotion, experience, and knowledge which none of his kind have ever died with before. I predict that at some point in the next few pages, it's finally going to occur to him just how much he has to lose by dying now, and then he'll...well, for lack of a better phrase, he'll start taking this whole experience a lot more personally.
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Post by mturtle7 on Oct 24, 2023 21:46:26 GMT
Hi forum, long time no see :-) I am no artist but I (finally, I guess) discovered some text to image services. Guess what I made :-) And some Annie & Annie memories Ooh, neat! What services did you use, and what prompts did you enter, if you don't mind my asking?
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Post by mturtle7 on Oct 20, 2023 19:47:31 GMT
Erm.. time to face Jeanne again? Repeating boss battle previous to Game Ending Big Boss?? Or everybody isn't "bigger", but their best selves in their perfect situation. Loup has a noble quiet purpose, with a honest companion by his side. Maybe, Jeanne will be her old self with her elf boyfriend. They could be friendly guards at the border checkpoint. Jeanne: "Afternoon! Anything to declare?" Hairclip Elf: "No fruit, right? Sometimes, spider eggs can look like fruit to outsiders." I think you meant Ysengrin, not Loup.
Regardless, this theory implies that Coyote's best self is being a small, verminous, animal that asks people incomprehensible riddles, and his perfect situation is getting punted into the sun. I can't emphasize enough how on board I am with this.
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