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Post by mturtle7 on Apr 16, 2022 23:11:16 GMT
Also if it's a covert operation it's a very lousy one. She told him what she knew about the Omega device and got zero information in return. I'm, like, 75% sure at this point that this wasn't a covert operation, but I was also under the impression that Annie did learn some new information here, or at least get some new & valuable insights into the nature of Omega and its operation, which is (supposedly) why she was talking to "Jerrek" about all this in the first place. Namely, she learned about the need for abstraction and the inaccuracy that naturally causes, the increase in accuracy when measuring an enclosed & ordered system, and fundamental problems ether would cause, and the existential horror a completely successful Omega Device could actually create. Her reactions would seem to indicate she hadn't thought of any this before, at least not quite in the way that "Jerrek" is describing it. And while Kat probably could have helped her a bit with the science side of things, and maybe Anja could have helped explain the ether issue, I think Loup's ability to explain all this is actually pretty unique, as a purely Etheric being that used to know nothing about science and then suddenly gained an expert's knowledge all at once.
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Post by mturtle7 on Apr 12, 2022 5:09:22 GMT
I was rereading in order to find the exact source of a half-remembered plot point, and I just realized how much this page was actually foreshadowing the circumstances of Smitty's almost-death! He cares about Parley, more than anything else in the world, which is why so many 'strings' are connecting him to her, and why those strings caused him to take the knife that meant for her...
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Post by mturtle7 on Apr 12, 2022 4:59:32 GMT
If she could, why can't Renard then? You got me there. I think she still knows, Jerrek is Loup, though, or at least heavily suspects. You know, I was firmly against the idea that Annie can see Loup's true form by looking through the Ether when it first got suggested on this forum...BUT (I can't believe I'm saying this) there IS a way it could be plausible. A few books ago, shortly after re-learning how to use magic sans blinker stone, Annie discovered that she could see things in the Ether that others couldn't. Specifically, she could see the passive effects of things and people on the Ether, like Smitty's probability-manipulating "strings". And Loup might have Coyote's skill of disguise, but since I don't think Coyote ever learned that Annie could use that particular trick, he might not have accounted for it! Could Annie have picked up on Loup's...'divine aura', I guess? The passive effects on the ether he just naturally has 'on' all the time, as a god?
I mean, heck, we don't even have to stop there. Since we never actually learned precisely how or why Annie developed this peculiar trick, it's entirely possible it's not all the way done developing, and she could actually learn to see even more invisible parts of the etheric world! So even if Loup doesn't have any passive effects, there might be other, weirder, ways for her to recognize him...but that's just opening up a real Pandora's Box of speculation. I'm not sure even *I* want to go there.
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Post by mturtle7 on Apr 5, 2022 6:40:23 GMT
The potential problem, as I see it, is that the time travel incident might be logically consistent form the characters' point of view, but it might not be so from the point of view of a computer extrapolating entirely from base conditions that were measured before the Tic-toc showed up... But one thing we need to remember is that Kat's foray into the past only seems special to us because it's explicit. However we've watched characters describe implicit time travel over and over again. For example, Annie's fingerprint having always been on the moon, or Jones predating the human race, or when Coyote describes how he came into being in a way that also included all his actions prior to his existence. The aether, as a thing that takes stories and makes them exist, defies time by its very nature. Which is to say, the culprit in all of this is the aether itself. Ok, this one definitely had me sitting and staring at my screen in utter befuddlement for a while, furiously trying to figure out how to argue that the method of time travel Kat used was meaningfully distinct from the existence of the ether itself. ...I THINK I succeeded, though. Eventually. Sort of. Regardless, well played zbeeblebrox, well played.
Basically, the difference is that the Tic-Toc(s) hadn't 'always' been around, from the rest of the world's point of view. Kat was specifically making it appear and disappear in order to travel to specific times and places. Creatures like Coyote don't really have a specific, verifiable, point of origin, generally because their origins are blatantly incompatible with verifiable reality (as per Jones, Coyote, and the stars in the sky). I know Coyote famously once said that he doesn't actually exist, but for the sake of this argument it might be better to say that there is no point where we can definitively say that at first he didn't exist, and then started existing.
But with the Tic-toc, that's precisely what we do have. Omega could look at, say, the bridge just before Robot crossed it for the first time, and say definitively that there was NO Tic-toc on that bridge, but there WAS a robot and a shadow person. It might not know exactly how or when that robot or that shadow person came into being, but that's not important; what's important is that it knows they're both THERE, and Omega can measure everything about their current state. Thanks to some of the Court's special experiments, it might even conceivably have some Ether-measuring devices that could see and understand Shadow's various etheric qualities at the time (actually, even beyond that we know it could measure his mass, just like Kat did). But because nobody, including Kat and the Norns, ever believed or will believe that the Tic-toc was on that bridge before that moment, it didn't even have a nebulous etheric presence for Omega to detect. Even if there had been a magician on that bridge using etheric powers to make the Tic-toc appear out of nowhere, maybe Omega could have observed that, but no, it just happened to be the freaking Norns instead, who live outside of time and space even in fiction. So that's what makes the Tic-toc special, at least if my theory about how Omega sees etheric stuff is correct.
Incidentally, I'm pretty sure you're misremembering the bit about Annie's fingerprint being on the moon. It didn't retroactively appear to have always been on the moon, it suddenly appeared that very day and freaked out quite a lot of people! Luckily, the Court's scientists all decided (or maybe just claimed) that it was made by a freak solar-wind-storm. No time travel involved there, just Coyote being a jerk and people being good at rationalizing stuff.
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Post by mturtle7 on Apr 4, 2022 20:27:13 GMT
I somehow doubt Kat was the reason for the inaccuracy, or at least the Kat that went back in time. The going back in time was logically consistent – nothing in the past was actually changed, just made to be as it had been the first time they all experienced it. The potential problem, as I see it, is that the time travel incident might be logically consistent form the characters' point of view, but it might not be so from the point of view of a computer extrapolating entirely from base conditions that were measured before the Tic-toc showed up. The Tic-toc DID appear, but there wasn't any actual basis for it appearing in the physical world, so I think it's entirely possible that if Omega had tried to predict the outcome of Annie falling into the ravine, it would conclude that she'd die, and if that conclusion was allowed to be introduced to its overall model of Gunnerkrigg Court, it would kill the accuracy of the whole thing.
Plus, this theory has the added benefit of being relatively unique to etheric events in the Forest and Gunnerkrigg Court. Jerrek may have a point about the ether being theoretically difficult to predict, but it surely can't be impossible, considering that the machine apparently predicted the need for a new Medium before Antimony arrived. That particular prediction makes it clear that the Forest is absolutely taken into account in Omega's calculations, and thus we can assume that the mere presence of Etheric creatures and phenomena doesn't prevent Omega from making accurate predictions. But the intervention of the Tic-toc(s) was more than an etheric phenomenon; it was a phenomenon whose origins lay outside of normal time and space! If even the bureaucracy underlying conceptual ownership-space doesn't usually take magic time travel into account when evaluating things, I can totally see the Court forgetting about that little edge case as well.
Of course, this is all just Wild Speculation based on the single most recent page, so I'm not making any confident assertions here!
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Post by mturtle7 on Apr 2, 2022 18:33:00 GMT
doesn't mean [Annie] is going to throw her hands up and say "guess I'll just go stabbing" Thank you for putting this image in my head. I giggled.
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Post by mturtle7 on Mar 29, 2022 22:02:47 GMT
Now I'm curious what it means, in Doylist and Watsonian terms, that when the encounter DID happened, it needed to be with Coyote's Loup version (let's face it, Coyote is in control and is the supreme puppet master of the whole story).
I think that "in control" and "puppet master" are rather misleading terms to apply to Coyote, and that's going to be pretty important as we continue to follow this plot arc. He's a supreme mastermind and a manipulator, sure, but not in the sense that he's, like, carefully watching & controlling your every move in accordance with a single "master plan" - he's way too chaotic for that ( much like his own Forest Branchs)! Throughout the comic, I think we've gotten a pretty distinct impression that Coyote is the sort of "mastermind" who operates by setting up some very important pieces, occasionally giving them a nudge in the right direction, and then simply waiting for them to create spontaneous opportunities for him to take advantage of. The seeds, the Tic-toc, the Tooth, Annie, Ysengrin, the lake water & goose bone, Loup...I don't think he actually knew exactly what use any of these people/things would end up having in his plans when he started messing with them (I mean hell, in the case of the lake water and goose bone, he couldn't even remember what they were, rather by necessity), he just sort of pushed them in a direction that seemed like it would be to produce good opportunities which would be advantageous to his goals, and then jumped on those opportunities when the time came. It's the sort of thing where for every scheme that works, there were probably at least a half-dozen others that never came to fruition (e.g. the whole Renard fiasco), but it doesn't matter because he hardly invested any effort in each one. He's not actually in control all the time, he's just always winning in some way...
...and I think, more than anything else, that's exactly what sets him apart from poor Loup. Thanks to the influence of Ysengrin's regimented, power-obsessed mind, Loup is always trying to control the the things and people around him, and more often than not failing miserably. Perhaps most pathetically, he's actually trying to follow Coyote's 'plan' like a set of instructions - beginning with " go and observe the Court" - just to get back some semblance of control. But even now, I don't think Coyote has any control to offer him - after all, he already set up all the pieces, now he just wants Loup to go see what kind of interesting story results from them, and thus gain the same level of understanding that Coyote always had, about himself...whatever that is.
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Post by mturtle7 on Mar 17, 2022 5:15:11 GMT
Really nice art today. Several new (and cute) Annie expressions.
I thought that was more important to say than dissecting the conversation. Maybe later. IKR?! I think Tom's trying out some new shading techniques, with awesome results. Also, I find that last panel to be particularly swoon-worthy - Annie looks so wise and beautiful and happy all at once!
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Post by mturtle7 on Mar 15, 2022 1:15:26 GMT
Kind unrelated to just this page, but the chapter has been making me think about it. Are the new peoples bodies physical age correlated to the age they were as robots? Arthurs new body is an adult and he is an older robot, and we've seen adult and teenage looking new people, but no toddlers, young kids, middle age or old people yet. I get that most people wouldnt want to start in an older body particularly if they age organically. So is age another choice? The options we saw in the trasfer were all pretty similar age wise from what I can tell, so maybe it suggests or enforces age in some way. If so, what are the determining factors? If you're under a certain age do you just end up as a teenager? Does it consider maturity or emotional health? That seems crazy, but so does the possibility of age being a choice, you'd never know if the adult looking being you're talking to is really a 3 year old robot that's still learning or a if a random kid is really 300 years old. I mean the simplest solution is that its a nearish age approximation, and that we haven't seen any super new or super old robots transformed, but I don't know if that fits. I kinda found robot age a confusing topic before this new body situation, but it seems extra relevant now. This is a REALLY. GOOD. QUESTION. However, I do see one possible answer, which would actually make it make sense that this isn't discussed much in the comics: age simply doesn't matter to the robots the same way it does to the humans, because before, there was only so much growing they could do. If the "bucket" we saw in that big extended metaphor sequence was really a "cap" on psychological/emotional development, then maybe it wouldn't actually matter very much if you're talking to a 300-year-old robot or a 3-year-old one. And this is especially true when you consider that the humans of the Court had a natural tendency to kind of take the robots for granted (that's my take on it, anyway), and the robots themselves could only find worth in themselves based on how useful they were.
I...realize that only sort of makes the whole age question less confusing, because I'm basically sidestepping that question by saying it (more or less) didn't actually matter, pre-disaster. But I think that also helps shed light on why and how the NP's humanoid bodies look the age that they do. The robots aren't going to care about matching their bodies to their personal level of "emotional maturity", since that's basically the same for all of them. Instead, given the choice, they'd just decide based on how they want to be perceived by humans, how humans perceived them in the past, and/or how they perceived humans in the past. For instance, I'd say it's fairly obvious that Arthur chose to look similar in age to Juliette, so they could relate to each other better and raise less eyebrows while being in a relationship. As for the others...maybe Lana chose to look like a girl in her late teens because that was the age most "cute" humans were in the books she read, and Piter chose to look more adult-ish because that's what people expect of barbers? I'm not really sure about the randomized bodies. Kat said she'd keep them " within certain limits"...what range of apparent ages would she have set for those limits? I guess that would depend a lot on whether the NP's bodies age at a natural human rate, but I really can't even begin to speculate on that right now. I actually really hope that part gets brought up in the comic, because it does seem rather important.
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Post by mturtle7 on Mar 13, 2022 2:05:38 GMT
So we follow up the instance where the elf boys potentially put Lana in danger with Jerrek treating Annie as a prey? I hope this is leading up to some thematic point. I think it's another iteration of the "people are either rescuers, abusers or ineffectual bystanders" theme that Tom has been writing for 17 years. Ok, like, in all seriousness...my memory isn't too exact, but I feel like I've seen you complain about precisely this sort of thing before, many times, possibly for more than a few years? If this has really been annoying you that consistently for so long...have you considered just cutting this webcomic out of your life altogether? I've done that for more than few webcomics which started going in directions I couldn't accept, and while sometimes it was hard to rid myself of the habit, I really think it was a good decision every time. There are plenty of fish in the sea!
I mean, you can keep going if you want. I'm honestly not trying to kick you out of the forum or anything. I'm just starting to worry that you're only tormenting yourself like this.
EDIT: And then it occurred to me I don't have to rely on my vague impressions of your general presence on this forum, I can just scroll through your post history via your profile page! My apologies: I can actually a pretty even mix of praise for and complaints about the comic there, which explains why you'd stay with the comic a little better. I guess the complaints just stuck in my memory more.
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Post by mturtle7 on Mar 12, 2022 2:52:25 GMT
the same primordial ylem that the substance of the Court is made out of Well, I learned a new word today! 10/10 best use of "ylem".
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Post by mturtle7 on Mar 8, 2022 19:00:57 GMT
Fortunately for everyone involved, Kat does specify, "anything used in the construction of the buildings", so the food should be fine, at least in theory. I mean, unless there's a building constructed out of food somewhere in the Court. Which wouldn't actually surprise me, given how many weird buildings and stuff there are in the Court, but even then it's probably not a concern for most people.
Of course, a "selective liquefy button" could arguably be just as, if not more, concerning when it only applies to buildings and construction materials, but I'm going to go ahead and stand by my theory that Kat is currently the only one in the Court who knows about this right now.
Didn't Jones say they were tracking the kids through their food? In the story arc where a Zimmy Spider makes a boy go nutso over her? I'd imagine the food might contain nanites, but they break down when eaten. Sure, they put nanites (or something) in the food, but that is very explicitly for the purpose of tracking the location of Court residents. Again, Kat said it was just building materials that have this molecular structure - lots of other artificial materials in the Court are excluded from this, including (I presume) the stuff they use to in food to track people.
Edit: Well now I'm just picturing a Bismuth-grown building made entirely out of microscopic tracking devices. Some Court tech stumbles over it and realizes the same technology which the building uses to track it's own location could be used in the Court's intelligence gathering operations...a "tracer farm" is set up, with underpaid workers carefully scraping bits off the walls into sample bags, to be sent to a lab and turned into digestible nanites...But what about when they run out of house?! What then, I ask you?! What then?!
Of course, a "selective liquefy button" could arguably be just as, if not more, concerning when it only applies to buildings and construction materials, but I'm going to go ahead and stand by my theory that Kat is currently the only one in the Court who knows about this right now.
Uh, she's apparently telling everyone present about it right now... Haha, ok my bad. Correction: before she told anyone about it, Kat was the only person in the Court who knew about this feature of their buildings & the Forest wood-stone-dirt substance. In other words, she is the first person to make this discovery since the foundation of the Court, and therefore Llanwellyn probably does not have a button which selectively liquefies buildings. Just to be clear.
Well..unless the Shadow Men under his command somehow managed to bypass Juliette's anti-spying measures, identify Kat's research, steal it, and then apply it to even more advanced functions than the one she's currently demonstrating, all in a very short period of time. But if we trust Shell at all (which I, at least, do), then they're probably too busy with their big moving project to bother doing all that.
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Post by mturtle7 on Mar 7, 2022 17:32:12 GMT
Well, that's not worrying at all. You have to wonder how far these Bismuth Nanites spread. If they're in everything the Court makes, then they're in the food. They're in everyone's bodies. Are they small enough to play a role in cellular proteins? Muscle fibers? Skeletal structure? And if so, does Llanwellyn have a selective liquefy button? Fortunately for everyone involved, Kat does specify, "anything used in the construction of the buildings", so the food should be fine, at least in theory. I mean, unless there's a building constructed out of food somewhere in the Court. Which wouldn't actually surprise me, given how many weird buildings and stuff there are in the Court, but even then it's probably not a concern for most people.
Of course, a "selective liquefy button" could arguably be just as, if not more, concerning when it only applies to buildings and construction materials, but I'm going to go ahead and stand by my theory that Kat is currently the only one in the Court who knows about this right now.
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Post by mturtle7 on Mar 2, 2022 16:52:23 GMT
I've been thinking about the whole Ysengrin/Renard relationship and actually can't remember Renard mocking or toying with Ysengrin, even in flashback. That sort of thing is shown as part of the stories humans tell but even in the side comic I don't remember Renard actually messing with him. Anyone remember an example of outward friction between the two of them? The closest I can think of is the first encounter we saw, when he and Coyote came to the court and Ysengrin was easily made angry, but even then it was Y that was aggressive, not R! Renard did make one smart remark about his terrifying skills at gardening, after Ysengrin first bitched at him for "daring to take the form of a wolf".
Actually, I take it back, he did trick Ysengrin into freezing his tail into a pond in the side story. So maybe there was more going on there than I remember. It still seems like it was always Coyote who insulted him and helped him build his anger and hatred of humans to a fine pitch.
Yeah, I've always found that to be sort of a weird aspect of the comic, actually - you've got these two characters from folklore, who were basically created together and always show up together in the tales they're in, but in GC Tom doesn't really explore the relationship between them at all. We learn lots about Ysengrin, and lots about Renard, but their individual stories hardly ever mention each other. Without knowledge of the folklore, you could read practically the entire comic while assuming that they're strangers who've never even interacted more than a few times throughout their lives.
I wonder if, as Loup continues to interact with Renard and/or rediscover his "Ysengrin" side, we'll learn a bit more about what those two thought of each other.
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Post by mturtle7 on Feb 28, 2022 20:35:04 GMT
I'm not even sure WHY this made me laugh quite so hard, but it did. Thank you alevice, I REALLY needed that today.
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Post by mturtle7 on Feb 28, 2022 20:33:49 GMT
also, rey, you didn't do that. jack was getting close but it wasn't with any further motive than "i am sick and i want answers to my questioms which are completely unrelated to sex". annie wasn't unaware of the situation either. the situation with jack was very different. Renard admits he'd probably have done the same, but although Tom links to a previous incident when Renard supposedly did the same, I don't know that it was the same. Spider-possessed Jack wasn't attempting to touch Annie inappropriately; he was obsessing over Zimmy and demanding information about her from Annie. Perhaps he may have grabbed Annie if he'd been allowed to continue, but we don't know what he would've done, because Renard intervened. Eh...*tilts hand side-to-side* it wasn't EXACTLY the same situation, but it was similar enough, especially as far as Renard & Loup's interventions (and the motivations behind those interventions) go. Jack might not have been AS threatening as the elf kids, but the point is that he was being pretty damn creepy and threatening without making any explicit threats. Seriously, look at Annie getting back up against the wall and looking for a way out in panel 5 of that page. This, my friends, is the kind of situation I like to call "Not OK, In Any Way, Nope." So yeah, I'd say it's pretty accurate to call Jack's behavior there "inappropriate." And both Renard and Loup did "step in" by acting super intimidating - although Renard didn't break any fingers, not that Loup mentioned anything about that.
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Post by mturtle7 on Feb 15, 2022 18:18:12 GMT
Important reminder: robots never lie. The only ones who ever came close were the Seraphs, who have been known to try and hide various locations and activities with deceptive signs...but those, um, were never very effective against non-robots.
No idea if this still applies to the New People, but even if they're technically capable of deception now they're probably kind of out of practice. Hence, Lana's "Hi! Did you know we're doing secret stuff?" attitude.
Doesn't Robot lie though? Even if you count it as a lie of omission, Robot's actions during Torn Sea are deceitful and manipulative. As they gain more human emotions I imagine that all of the New Robots would also be capable of lying. That's a pretty good point, actually! As a former Seraph, Robot might be kind of special, and he certainly never lied to anyone's face, but his actions definitely show that robots are a lot more capable of deceit than I was giving them credit for. Maybe Lana is just being Lana, after all.
Incidentally, about the question of "why isn't the Court reacting to all this"...I'm actually going to throw out a(nother) controversial opinion and say that they genuinely don't know about it yet. Sure, they've shown off some pretty damn impressive mass surveillance technology in the past, but I think that as long as you know about it, it's all quite avoidable. Tony was able to make his whole house bug-free, and even Jack, a teenage student, was able to evade the Shadow Men for weeks. And not only is Juliette intimately familiar with the surveillance tech the Shadow Men use, she can actually mess around within their system, so even if stuff does pick up the New People's operation she can just delete the records.
Probably the most impressive thing we've seen the Court do in terms of intelligence gathering was to track down Tony in the middle of nowhere...but then again, conducting a months-long operation to find a single former employee who's gotten himself in a bad way is very different from passively picking up some unusual activity you weren't looking for, would never expect, and wouldn't actually understand even if you did notice it happening. Plus, I'd imagine that any per-existing surveillance they had in that region would have been pretty damn messed up by Loup's earthen flood, and with everything going on with Aata, the Headmaster, the plan to move, etc., there's no way they had the time or interest necessary to restore it.
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Post by mturtle7 on Feb 14, 2022 17:30:49 GMT
Important reminder: robots never lie. The only ones who ever came close were the Seraphs, who have been known to try and hide various locations and activities with deceptive signs...but those, um, were never very effective against non-robots.
No idea if this still applies to the New People, but even if they're technically capable of deception now they're probably kind of out of practice. Hence, Lana's "Hi! Did you know we're doing secret stuff?" attitude.
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Post by mturtle7 on Feb 11, 2022 17:34:43 GMT
Fun fact: Loup is, by his own admission, a completely new creature, and was thus "born" less than a year ago. Lana, by contrast, was a robot librarian for quite some time since before Loup was born.
Lana is both older, and (in my opinion) acts much more mature than Loup. LOUP, not Lana, is the "annoying child creature" in this situation, whether or not either of them realizes it.
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Post by mturtle7 on Feb 10, 2022 19:56:25 GMT
Who's interrupting Loup/Jerrek in the inset panel? I'm guessing it's probably Lana. As this all seems to be a flashback, this is probably how they met. I agree it's probably Lana, but I don't think this is a flashback anymore. He only started keeping his hair pulled back like that in the last chapter, so as of this page we must be caught up to the present moment! In fact, if you look at one of the smaller bubbles on the top right, you can see Loup's memory of Annie, Kat, and Renard specifically from the last chapter (you can tell by their clothes).
In other news, I'm loving this parallel going on between the robots and the shadow men. Shadow 2 gets his 3D form thanks to Annie & her Coyote's Tooth, Robot gets his fleshy biological body from Kat and her Diego-inspired science, now all the robots are getting biological bodies like Robot's...does this foreshadow (pun intended) all the Shadow Men getting 3D bodies like Shadow's?! How would that even work?! This could get very interesting...
And of course, even if my prediction proves incorrect, I think we're still about to get more of a focus on the Shadow Men! I'm really excited about that, since I've always liked Shadow and wished we could get to know more about his people & where he came from.
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Post by mturtle7 on Feb 4, 2022 17:44:49 GMT
"What's this?" Good question Loup, why does the finger print on the moon now look like a butt?
Ooh, good catch! It's still not clear whether this page takes place before or after the events of the previous chapter, but now at least we know that it's not at the same time!
Next page, I guess we'll find out if those two pages of Coyote are all the context we'll be getting for Loup's actions, or if there's still more to see before we catch up to the present moment.
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 31, 2022 17:41:47 GMT
How come Loup isn't reacting to Kat? Can't he see the Robotic Eldritch Horror? Renard, all the ex-fairies and animals, and all other supernatural beings Kat has met (Mort, Basil, all the psychopomps) can't see it either. Annie and Paz could each see it only once, under special circumstances (and it appears Annie could not see it when Paz could). Zimmy seems to be the only one who can see it constantly.
Yeah, contrary to what a lot of readers thought at first, Eldritch Mecha Kat isn't actually what Kat looks like in the Ether...or rather, it is, but only on the incredibly rare occasion that she personally & actively enters the Ether. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure she just looks like a normal person in the Ether, sort of like how, say, Renard looks like a normal wolf when his etheric form isn't active.
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 31, 2022 17:33:47 GMT
This chapter already promises to answer way more burning questions than I thought it would...which probably means it's just going to raise even more questions, eventually.
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 28, 2022 17:20:14 GMT
I've been thinking about one of the most interesting characters that we've never heard speak.
I refer, of course, to Becky Ground.
Could the woman on this page possibly be her mother? She has a somewhat similar appearance, and about the same kind of dialog! Bit late to the party here, but I am LOVING this expanding upon Becky Ground's epic backstory. First we had the introduction of Becky's friend, now we're getting to know her mom, who's apparently an agent of the Shadow Men...if it keeps going like this, she'll have a full-fledged supporting cast!
And now I'm trying to think of a good pun for Becky's mom's name. Flora Ground, maybe?
Edit: Yes. that's definitely her name. Also, the guy who Flora is sharing a look with in panel 4 of that page is Becky's dad, Sid Ground.
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 28, 2022 17:01:43 GMT
Ah, good. I see this is the chapter when we finally get more questions answered than raised. *laughs*
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 27, 2022 20:55:18 GMT
Arizona Shell: Life of the Party!
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 24, 2022 19:15:27 GMT
Did I somehow miss when Loup was established as attracted to Annie? Or was the "clue" the fact that Loup-in-the-form-of-Jerrek reacted to Annie, since he has a hidden agenda in getting close to her? When I first saw today's page, I definitely had a moment of "Oh that makes perfect sense with Jerrek's crush on Annie!" which was immediately followed by "Wait no it actually doesn't make sense at all...does it?" And so I had to go look this up.
Basically, Loup's love for Annie is kind of a screwed-up, uninhibited, version of Coyote and Ysengrin's love for her combined. Neither of those relationships had any real hint of romantic or sexual attraction (pretty sure that's not even just my aro-ace bias talking, this time at least), and while Loup did technically offer to be a handsome male/female/whatever companion for Antimony, it's pretty clear in context that that was just one of the many things he was childishly offering her because he thought they would make her happy - no particular attraction was involved on his part. So Jerrek's crush-like behavior (blushing, stammering, staring, not-staring, etc.), while it certainly could be considered a sign of "love", was clearly not even close to being a sign of the same kind of love that Loup showed Antimony, in the same way that Jerrek's personality was not even remotely close to Loup's.
So I'd say that Jerrek's apparent crush was almost, but not quite, an actual clue. Loup could be pretending to be attracted to Antimony as a good excuse to constantly be around her, or maybe, as others have been speculating, there's actually a real Jerrek somewhere inside there who's genuinely attracted to Antimony, and Loup is just rolling with that. Personally, my money's on the former.
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 18, 2022 4:14:34 GMT
You know, on reflection, I think one of the most damning piece of evidence against Shell's (and Aata's) whole argument is that, as far as we know, etheric beings (and/or humans with etheric talents) aren't currently ruling the world - ordinary humans are. From what we've seen, most etheric beings & people in the Gunnerverse live in secret, either isolated from or simply unacknowledged by the rest of the outside world. Plenty of individuals may have very concrete ties to the ether, but on a really big, societal, level, I think the ether is treated...well, more or less like how magic & mysticism is treated in our society. This is not exactly what you'd expect to see if etheric beings were a hugely & arbitrarily privileged class, as Shell is implying! The ether may give individuals the power to shoot fire out of their hands just by thinking about it...but apparently, it can't give them the power to, say, become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. And at the end of the day, which of those powers is more valuable? Who exactly is being unfairly favored by the laws (or anarchy) of the universe? And it's not like we have to look that far afield to understand what the real power dynamics underlying the Gunnerverse are...just look at this room. You have Arthur & Juliette, who have to keep their consenting & loving relationship a secret out of fear of retaliation from the Court...Antimony, who had to watch her mother waste away into nothingness due to the disease that came along with her etheric powers, and later almost got exiled from the Court, her home, for daring to suggest that they carry on respectful diplomatic relations with the Forest people right next door...Renard, who was kept in cramped, solitary confinement for more than a decade by the Court (and possibly forced to participate in invasive experiments)...and Kat, who's had to sit on the scientific discovery of a lifetime because the Court would find it " unpalatable", and then almost got permanently imprisoned by an elder god due to her accidental misuse of etheric forces. And now Shell is saying that THEY'RE the ones being unfairly privileged? That the ordinary humans of the Court are the ones being oppressed by the big, bad, Ether? It's all starting to seem to me a little like a white person complaining to a black one that they're the victim of "reverse racism" because people get mad when they try to wear dreadlocks, and insisting the other guy just can't understand because he's blinded by his "black privilege." EDIT: maxptc I honestly hadn't seen your post before writing this, but now that I look at it WOW those two posts are really talking about similar topics. Anyway...I think you're not entirely wrong that magic powers and social powers can be closely related in fantasy stories, but it's also important to note that, especially in urban fantasy, magic doesn't actually REPLACE social class, it has to co-exist with it. Sometimes magic is very notably only wielded by people who are also socially privileged in some way, in which case sure it might be valid to see magic as a kind of metaphor for that kind of privilege, but I don't think this is one of those cases. People are literally Ants to Coyete, the invisible figures of the RoTD and the afterlife guides and whatever other agencies we know about control the fabric of reality, dispense and imprison souls and decide who can stay around longer in the physical world. What happened to Mort proves the high level ether being aren't exactly perfect overseers of the ether. I agree that the Court is a controlling government that has a weird hypocrisy regarding utilizing and repressing magic, but the high level magic users are powerful and in control of the situation on an entirely different level, and I definitively understand why the Court would feel oppressed. I don't think moving and ignoring the ether is a good plan, but I can definitely understand a powerful entity like the Court not being happy about its powerlessness compared to other entities. Those are actually some REALLY good points I hadn't quite considered before, but...I think I'm STILL going to stand by my argument nevertheless, while perhaps toning it down just a bit. The main reason for this is because, while we have seen some powerful etheric authorities, I'd argue that they've generally tended to restrict their authority to only things that already had to do with the Ether - which, if anything, should lead ordinary humans to question their own privilege more, not their powerlessness. The ROTD only recruits and controls ghosts (exclusively for the purpose, I might add, of " keep[ing] the spirits alive in the minds of the living"), the afterlife guides guide the souls of people who are already dead into the Ether, and yes...even COYOTE, of all people, seemed oddly content to just frolic in his own enchanted forest and ordering about his etheric subjects, secluded from the mundane world of humans for hundreds of years. When he did make significant interventions in the human world, it was always to protect his own etheric fellows - when the Court made war upon the Forest people, he created the Annan Waters. When his fire-haired Forest Medium was kept away from him, he pushed over a building (and an empty one, at that).
Loup, now...well, Loup's actions have been pretty damning, but I'd still argue he's the exception that proves the rule. Ysengrin was one of the only Forest creatures that seemed to genuinely hate humans and want to exert power over them, and I don't think it was a coincidence that he was the one being most frequently put down & kept in check by Coyote. Then, when Ysengrin became Loup, he wrought an enormous amount of devastation among the human city of the Court, for all of two seconds...and then promptly went back into the Forest to spend the rest of his time fiddling with branches and trying to gain some semblance of control over the Forest again. He still hates humans, but now he just can't seem to handle the kind of power which Coyote commanded...or even the respect which he commanded among the Forest people. Again, I don't think this is a coincidence. I honestly think that there's something about the Ether which is inherently wary of anything that would cause big changes in human society.
Powerful creatures of the Ether might not always be good, and they can be dangerous if you're really trying to provoke them, but they're hardly ever actually oppressive of humans. The Court isn't mad because they're oppressed - they're mad because they've seen a whole new world residing outside their mundane reality, and they can't gain absolute control over it no matter how hard they try.
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 18, 2022 3:30:44 GMT
Yeah Annie, go ask your dad, so he can break his record of speedrunning to some weather station without shoes. I'm more thinking the Rey breakout. Annie-"Father, what is Omega" Tony-"One sentence answer that explains everything" Annie-"Oh" Tony-"Any other questions? Good day then" Speaking of a rather forced and arbitrary lack of exposition...
Tony: "Let me explain what the Omega Device is-" Annie: "No, I...understand."
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 18, 2022 3:29:03 GMT
On the last page I said that I am glad someone of the Shadow Men is finally speaking up and answering some questions. I would like to say that I am really glad that Annie is finally asking some questions! Some of these things are new developments, but some have been bouncing around for a very long time. I know she hasn't had time to process the idea that the Shadow Men plan to relocate the entire Court. Which makes me wonder, how many people in the Court know they are expected to pack up all their belongings and move far away? I get the impression this isn't just rent a few lorries and drive out to Birmingham. This is a huge info-dump onto Annie and friends, but it is also a great chance to demand a few answers. I am actually very excited to see where the next few pages lead us. I feel sort of the opposite way - the way Shell is talking makes me think that she's not actually going to explain what the Omega Device is, but rather some other information which is indirectly related to it, just like she didn't explain/didn't know what the Court was actually stealing Coyote's power for ("Your dad could explain it better than I could" sounds suspiciously similar to " Aata knows more than I do"). So I actually feel kind of outraged at the idea that a lot of long-awaited exposition is about to get delayed even further, in what I consider to be a rather forced and arbitrary manner.
That said, I'd be quite happy to proven wrong! We'll see over the next couple weeks, I guess.
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