[1995] This all happened because of something [I] did.

[todd]

Jun 2, 2018 8:11:15 GMT youwiththeface said:

Four, I'm extremely uncomfortable with the idea that leaving Jeanne and her lover where they were was the correct course of action because ew. 

My thoughts as well. If anything, I've felt uneasy over the fact that the Founders' plot against Jeanne did result in a few generations of keeping the Court safe from the Forest, just as it was intended to (by most of them) - it gives the feeling of rewarding a bad act.

The obvious complication is that the Founders intended the beneficiaries to be, not just themselves, but the rest of the Court who were unaware of the conspiracy being carried out by their leaders, and their descendants - which raises the question "What if someone commits a crime to help others, rather than out of his own self-interest? Do you punish the people for whose sake he committed it?" I don't know the answer to that one. (Mind you, I suspect the Founders were more sympathetic to the people of the Court as an abstraction - a crowd of faceless, nameless matchstick figures standing for Posterity - and would have just as calmly killed any individual or group of individuals among them as they'd killed Jeanne if it would have helped them achieve their goals.) At least Diego's part of it was simple - he was motivated by entirely selfish reasons - and he didn't enjoy the fruits of it, but was tormented by his guilty conscience (if taking the easy way out and blaming Sir Young) on his deathbed. (By contrast, neither Sir Young nor Steadman, in their final moments, showed any signs of remorse; Sir Young was in a self-congratulatory mood over his achievements "for the greater good", and Steadman's thoughts were focused on the dog he tripped over.)

[imaginaryfriend]

My problem with Antimony freeing Jeanne isn't that she did it but how she did it and who she didn't tell afterwards. I can't think of any reason not to tell Jones at least and she's had time to think about that. I get that in her opinion as medium for and honorary citizen of the Wood, which may make her as expert as any human in the Court, there was no imminent threat. The thing is, when a person starts making judgement calls involving the safety of their entire community and ignoring/overriding the opinions of other residents and keeping the authorities in the dark then that person is responsible for the consequences of their actions and inaction. I believe that holds true even if the authorities who allegedly should be making decisions about the safety of the community are illegitimate, corrupt, incompetent, stupid, stubborn to the point of criminal or even suicidal acts, and/or evil. And they often are shades of all of those things.

Not saying that Antimony (or anyone else) needs to be omniscient in order to make decisions. Not saying any of this takes one iota away from the responsibility Coyote has for setting this whole chain of events up or Ysengrin's tendency to violence.

Just saying actions have consequences.

[Nepycros]

I know Parley and Smitty deferred to Annie's judgment (probably), but the fact they didn't tell anyone else about freeing Jeanne is also a little suspect. Parley had reason to distrust the Court (she actually experienced the betrayal of Jeanne and the loss of her love/life), but even making it clear that the ghost of the Annan Waters is gone is a huge dynamic change to the norm. As Court Medium, Smitty had some responsibility to tell the authorities what happened... Or at least pass the word to Eglamore through Parley.

[pyradonis]

Jun 1, 2018 20:11:40 GMT faiiry said:

Jones is gonna be like, "We know." I bet you that the Court was always aware of what Annie had done and didn't intervene for some reason or another. Unless Annie and the rest deliberately starved themselves, the Court can and does track its citizens through their food, and so, a bunch of students going to the river unsupervised would likely have caught the attention of whoever monitors such matters. At the very least, I don't doubt that Jones knew about it. She knows everything.

Also, as many have said above: "Something *I* did," Annie? Parley and Smitty have got to be shuffling their feet and looking in opposite directions right now. I don't remember either of them having too many objections over what went down.

Well, Juliette and Arthur DID know at least that the gang made an unauthorized trip down the ravine, but they have their own little secrets, so they trade their silence for a new body...

[todd]

Jun 2, 2018 19:11:43 GMT Nepycros said:

I know Parley and Smitty deferred to Annie's judgment (probably), but the fact they didn't tell anyone else about freeing Jeanne is also a little suspect. Parley had reason to distrust the Court (she actually experienced the betrayal of Jeanne and the loss of her love/life), but even making it clear that the ghost of the Annan Waters is gone is a huge dynamic change to the norm. As Court Medium, Smitty had some responsibility to tell the authorities what happened... Or at least pass the word to Eglamore through Parley.

Kat raised the question about approaching Jones once in "The Coward Heart", but Parley shot it down out of the feeling that she needed to face Jeanne again as a way of dealing with the nightmare of their first encounter. After that, nobody ever brought up the possibility again.

If it was just Annie, we could accredit it all to her distrust of adults and insistence on doing everything - maybe even the buried fear that Jones would take it out of her hands and settle the Jeanne issue. And we've got, in the paragraph above, Parley's reason for not going to Jones. But that doesn't seem enough to explain Kat and Smith's going along with it.

I'm starting to wonder whether the real reason none of them approached Jones was that Tom didn't want them to - because Jones' advice and assistance would have made things too easy for the four, taken a lot of the suspense out of the big confrontation/freeing, allowed them to provide for the possibility of Gilltie Wood's response - thus making it harder for Tom to do the present arc with Ysengrin's attack - and, in short, preventing the story from going the way Tom wanted it to go. In other words, a plot-mandated error of judgment. Though I hope Tom will provide some convincing in-story reasons for not going to Jones (maybe in the next few pages).

[todd]

Jun 2, 2018 22:43:25 GMT pyradonis said:

Well, Juliette and Arthur DID know at least that the gang made an unauthorized trip down the ravine, but they have their own little secrets, so they trade their silence for a new body...

Since the Court doesn't know about Jeanne, it wouldn't have seen any significance to the visit being to the bottom of the ravine. It'd just be another place to them, thanks to the cover-up.

[warrl]

Annie is responsible for her actions. However, there are good arguments that the actions in question are irrelevant to the current situation - that she did NOT, in any sense, cause or even contribute to this mess.

While Jeanne made the *bottom* of the ravine impassable, not only to physical beings but also to etheric ones up to and including psychopomps, we've seen quite a few beings cross on the bridge or at higher altitudes without impediment - some, without even being aware of her presence. That includes Ysengrin at least once and Coyote at least twice (in each direction), with implications that they probably crossed on other occasions in the past. For that matter, the bridge got built somehow, which implies either an unlikely high degree of cooperation between the two sides or a lot of crossing. (Or, of course, magic.)

So when empowered Ysengrin supersized and leaped from the top of the ravine on the forest side to fly over the court, he was out of Jeanne's range and jurisdiction *anyway*.

And I'm not aware of any other thing Antimony has done that she might plausibly imagine made her responsible.

(Maybe she scolded Coyote and told him to stop stealing Ys's memories, so in response Coyote repeated the same old question and got the same old answer and - rather than stealing the memory again - gave the requested gift? If that's the case, we should see it in a flashback soon and I would still say that it's Coyote's and Ys's fault, not Annie's - C. didn't have to respond in such a stupid fashion and Y. didn't have to go berserk.)

[todd]

Jun 3, 2018 0:36:51 GMT warrl said:

For that matter, the bridge got built somehow, which implies either an unlikely high degree of cooperation between the two sides or a lot of crossing. (Or, of course, magic.)

If it wasn't for the fact that the Bismuth Seed built the Court before Coyote made that chasm (and until he did, there'd have been nothing for a bridge to go over), I'd have suspected that the bridge was grown by the Seed rather than made by anyone.

[gergle]

Jun 3, 2018 0:36:51 GMT warrl said:

A bunch of things I completely agree with.

Not to mention Coyote being a god. Word of Tom says Coyote wins if Jones (the completely impervious, I can crush anything known between my thumb and forefinger Jones) and he were to fight. Jeanne, sorry to say, is no more than a gnat in a hurricane compared to Coyote.

[pyradonis]

Jun 3, 2018 0:23:34 GMT todd said:

Jun 2, 2018 22:43:25 GMT pyradonis said:

Well, Juliette and Arthur DID know at least that the gang made an unauthorized trip down the ravine, but they have their own little secrets, so they trade their silence for a new body...

Since the Court doesn't know about Jeanne, it wouldn't have seen any significance to the visit being to the bottom of the ravine. It'd just be another place to them, thanks to the cover-up.

Hm. This page does not really tell whether J&A knew exactly what went down there. Probably not, but I wouldn't exclude it either.

[pyradonis]

Jun 3, 2018 1:03:20 GMT todd said:

Jun 3, 2018 0:36:51 GMT warrl said:

For that matter, the bridge got built somehow, which implies either an unlikely high degree of cooperation between the two sides or a lot of crossing. (Or, of course, magic.)

If it wasn't for the fact that the Bismuth Seed built the Court before Coyote made that chasm (and until he did, there'd have been nothing for a bridge to go over), I'd have suspected that the bridge was grown by the Seed rather than made by anyone.

Coyote said "Eventually, a bridge was made on their terms."

[todd]

Jun 3, 2018 10:39:04 GMT pyradonis said:

m. This page does not really tell whether J&A knew exactly what went down there. Probably not, but I wouldn't exclude it either.

My point is: the Founders so thoroughly hushed up Jeanne's very existence that even their successors wouldn't have known about it; the only documentation preserved was Diego's, and only the robots knew about it until they showed it to Annie and Kat. There is no reason why Juliette and Arthur should have known about it, in that case.

(It might not have made any difference to them, even if they had known about it; they were planning to leave the Court anyway, so the potential consequences of Jeanne's removal would have been someone else's problem.)

[netherdan]

Jun 3, 2018 0:19:51 GMT todd said:

If it was just Annie, we could accredit it all to her distrust of adults and insistence on doing everything - maybe even the buried fear that Jones would take it out of her hands and settle the Jeanne issue. 

Jones: I'm here to feel your power

Jeanne: ò.ó is that so...

Without engagement, Jeanne realises Jones is the Wandering Eye and that she poses no threat, no responsibility, nothing. She could not direct her hatred to that being because what was standing in front of her was as empty and as guilty of her demise as the rocks at the bottom of the ravine. Instead they just have tea in fancy dresses at the illusory Court of the past