[308] Story Discussion - I can't wait!

[Mezzaphor]

Now there's a connection I never considered before.

[Count Casimir]

SHADOW2 CAN TALK!!!!!!!!!

EDIT: Also, I assume they're talking about Kat. Wonder where Rey is?

[Mezzaphor]

And he's talking with Annie's voice. She must have spent free time teaching him.

EDIT: Is Annie skipping, or has her stamina improved since chapter 12?

[popo]

Annie has dirty feet.

It also seems that Shadow 2 is talking with Annie's voice now.

[Mezzaphor]

Running around barefoot will get your feet dirty quickly.

Annie was barefoot and without makeup in all the hospital flashbacks, and now she's running around the school that way. Of course, she took off the makeup and shoes at the end of last chapter, after everyone but Rey had left. Is Annie just dressing more casually, or is her only wearing makeup around other humans indicative of something? (This could be a problem for the "eye-shadow as protection from the evil eye" theory.)

If Gunnerkrigg is like Good Hope, does that mean Good Hope also has a creepy forest at its back doorstep?

[Aspen d'Grey]

Wow, everyone hit this update pretty quick. I think she's expecting Kat but is going to get Zimmy first.

[UbiquitousDragon]

Aha! Shadow 2 can talk! ;D I love how happy Annie looks--and so much more relaxed than when we first met her when she was polite and restrained. Yey for friendship In fact there are so many things I love about this page. The art alone is beautiful.

[Neon]

Oh my God that is the most adorable thing ever.

[todd]

Annie's outfit looks so much like a hospital gown that, for a moment, I thought this was a flashback.

It's apparently very early in the morning (particularly judging from the first panel), so that's probably why Annie's barefoot and not wearing make-up (unless she gave up the latter during the summer holidays).

Also, evidently Shadow2 can talk without the help of Kat's instruments now.

[Boksha]

mezzaphor said:

EDIT: Is Annie skipping, or has her stamina improved since chapter 12?

I figure she was really running back then, just jogging here.

In related news: we need more shots of Gunnerkrigg Court like this. The locations and backgrounds are one of the reasons I started liking this comic to begin with. They kind of remind me of Radioactive Panda as well. I miss that comic.

[todd]

I wondered at first whether the way that Annie's behaving on this page, so different from her regular style (running about barefoot, without make-up, in a very excited fashion) was a sign that she'd undergone some dramatic change during the course of the summer (since she was still acting in her usual manner in Chapter Fourteen). But as I thought about it more, I came to the conclusion that this isn't intended as being a typical day for her at Gunnerkrigg during the summer holidays, but a specific moment: the day that Kat's due back at school.

The evidence from Annie's words on this page is that this is the day that Kat's supposed to return (it would also be the logical place to start the story). The first panel also indicates, from the lighting in the sky, that it's early morning with the sun coming up. The logical conclusion to be drawn from that is that Annie's so elated over this being the day of her best friend's return that for once, she's gone out of her room without putting on her shoes, getting properly dressed, etc. (The same kind of phenomenon as that traditionally shown by children on Christmas morning.)

Indeed, I doubt that Annie would have lost that much of her usual calmness and formality over the summer; if anything, given what her summer must have been like, it would have been more likely to return than erode. Her friendship with Kat (the first friendship that she'd formed with a child her own age, where before, all her friendships were with "mythical creatures" like the Guides) seems to have been the main cause for her loosening up; since she'd spent the summer at Gunnerkrigg with only Shadow2, Robot, and Reynardine for company (so far as we know), all of whom are also non-humans, the humanizing factor that Kat is presumably responsible for would have been more likely to recede.

My suspicion is that, after Kat's return and the big reunion, Annie's behavior will quickly revert to normal, and the make-up and more formal attire will return. (And I also suspect that she was regularly wearing them during the summer holidays. It's the nature of this particular day, I believe, that makes it the exception.)

[0masamune]

boooo and here i was about to chime in with;
"heeey doesnt he need that machine to talk? >_>"

[Goatmon]

Ann looks a little out of character in today's page. I can't help but wonder...if we're seeing something from the past.

Then again, maybe she's just a bit giddy after having not seen Kat for months. Even the stoic types can be a little hyper at times, and she IS a kid after all.

[AluK]

I think that her actions might be more related to her feeling "at home", at last.

She grew almost alone in a hospital, surrounded by mythical creatures, after all. She might have been a fairly "normal" child, there. You know, doing childish things, running around barefoot, prancing and playing in the corridors.

She could have put her unflappable serious persona up to deal with living among strangers in a strange place. n the summer, she found out that GC and the hospital are practically the same thing. Her attire closely mirrors the one that she was seen using at the hospital, in the flashback.

Not to say that I don't think Annie's exultation is due to Kat's arrival, though.

[Mezzaphor]

Shadow2 only needed that machine to learn words. Once he learned them, he's capable of speaking them on his own and rearranging them to form new sentences.

[todd]

In the hospital flashback in Chapter Eight, Annie was behaving in a very serious manner (apologizing for accidentally dropping the glass, insisting on cleaning it up because she was the one who dropped it), very much like her behavior at Gunnerkrigg.

I suddenly wondered: what if this story is about Annie making a return visit to Good Hope, and that's the significance of "Red Returns"? Say, Kat gets ill or injured on the way back to Gunnerkrigg and has to be taken to the hospital at Good Hope, and Annie goes there to visit her.

[Yin]

aluk said:

She grew almost alone in a hospital, surrounded by mythical creatures, after all. She might have been a fairly "normal" child, there. You know, doing childish things, running around barefoot, prancing and playing in the corridors.

Childish things aren't really encouraged in hospitals, you know. Disturbs the patients' rest and annoys the doctors and nurses and whatnots.

[todd]

This discussion brings up the question again, obviously, of: Is Annie really the calm, serious, unflappable, seemingly mature-beyond-her-years girl that we met at the start of the webcomic, or was that just a facade that she raised to cope with Surma's death? As I mentioned above, she's portrayed as acting the same way in the Chapter Eight flashback when she accidentally breaks a glass, so it can't entirely be due to losing her mother - but that might have helped.

Also a factor, of course, is that the only people whom Annie seems to have associated with in the hospital (apart from her parents) were the Guides. She doesn't seem to have met any children her own age there, as far as we know. In fact, it wasn't until she met Kat at Gunnerkrigg that she seems to have had a friend her age at all. This suggests that her behavior patterns stemmed from being almost entirely around grown-ups instead of other children, and that her loosening-up is largely thanks to Kat's influence upon her.

[Aspen d'Grey]

todd said:

This discussion brings up the question again, obviously, of: Is Annie really the calm, serious, unflappable, seemingly mature-beyond-her-years girl that we met at the start of the webcomic, or was that just a facade that she raised to cope with Surma's death? As I mentioned above, she's portrayed as acting the same way in the Chapter Eight flashback when she accidentally breaks a glass, so it can't entirely be due to losing her mother - but that might have helped.

Also a factor, of course, is that the only people whom Annie seems to have associated with in the hospital (apart from her parents) were the Guides. She doesn't seem to have met any children her own age there, as far as we know. In fact, it wasn't until she met Kat at Gunnerkrigg that she seems to have had a friend her age at all. This suggests that her behavior patterns stemmed from being almost entirely around grown-ups instead of other children, and that her loosening-up is largely thanks to Kat's influence upon her.

When does a lie become the truth, eh?

[Don the Ninja]

I can't shake a feeling of sadness in the last two panels of this page; "Sometimes, in the winding, never ending corridors... I could imagine I was at home." Maybe it's just Annie comparing Gunnerkrigg to Good Hope, but the wording on the page makes me think otherwise. At very least, it appears that she doesn't yet feel like the Court is her home.

Then again, that 'sadness' might just be the rather sober text-boxes contrasting against the overriding joy present in the first panels.

[AluK]

sli said:

Childish things aren't really encouraged in hospitals, you know. Disturbs the patients' rest and annoys the doctors and nurses and whatnots.

They aren't, indeed, but that didn't stop Annie from using her lockpicks. Annie's disregard for authoritative figures is noteworthy.

[todd]

The point remains that Annie was shown in the two flashback scenes set at Good Hope (in Chapters Eight and Nine) as a quiet and serious child, and was not portrayed running about in the halls the way that she was depicted on this scene. So I don't think that we're dealing with a throwback to her life there.

In Chapter Fourteen, Annie was behaving like her usual staid self throughout, even on the final pages, which means that, if this scene is typical of the way she's been behaving during the summer holidays, she must have undergone a very dramatic character-changing experience after Kat and the others left (with the possibility that this is another "in media res" beginning like Chapters Seven and Eleven, and that most of the chapter will be about that experience - come to think of it, this might explain why we learned so much about what Kat's holiday was like during the two week break, but not Annie's).

However, I think it's more likely that this is simply the day that Kat's coming home and that Annie's unusually excited about it, enough so to break from her normal routine. This seems all the more probable because if Annie really has undergone a big alteration that led to her throwing her old "ever-so-serious" personality to the winds and running about gleefully through the corridors of the school all day, there wouldn't be much of a character arc left for her - and at a point when we've still got at least two years of internal chronology for the webcomic and a lot of mysteries about the Court unanswered. (Also, again, don't forget, it's clearly early morning on this page, from the lighting in the sky.)

[spritznar]

in my opinion, annie's just an introvert. when there are people around she's more subdued, when there are lots of people and/or adults it's more pronounced than when it's just her and rey or kat or shadow2. that and she feels more comfortable at the court now.

personally, i'm pretty serious when anyone else is there to see me but the minute i'm home alone i act like a five year old.

[Mezzaphor]

Regarding Shadow2 talking, I bet he'll soon learn how to recombine phonemes so he can make new words without having to copy them. Just like he was able to rearrange words to make new sentences, only on a smaller scale. Considering that his "I can't wait!" doesn't have the odd spacing that his "No!... Annie... and... Princess Kat... help!" did, maybe he's already doing that.

And maybe he could combine sounds from Annie's and Kat's voices to make a unique voice for himself.

[Count Casimir]

He'd still sound like a girl. I wonder if he even has a gender?