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Post by csj on Jan 5, 2019 2:51:04 GMT
speaking of trees, I think some of them might think twice about eating cherry seeds now for the rest of their lives
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jan 5, 2019 3:02:47 GMT
speaking of trees, I think some of them might think twice about eating cherry seeds now for the rest of their lives Yeah, they're the pits. |
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Post by saardvark on Jan 5, 2019 3:15:48 GMT
We've known for the longest time that the sun rises from the woods relative to the Court so that tallies with the compass. I interpret that page in the opposite way: we're seeing the Court from the ravine (the boundary being visible at the bottom) with the first light of dawn in the east. I've always thought of left in today's page as being "upstream" and "north", though I couldn't say if this is for any particular reason. (The way the moon is shown to flip around in chapter 1 suggests this as well, assuming it's just not randomly inserted in some panels.)I agree with imaginaryfriend - Kat and Annie are looking back over their shoulders from whence they came (the Annan gorge) and see the Sun rise (in the E). So it agrees with there compass. If the GC world parallels our own, the Annan flows/flowed mostly N to S and empties into the Solway Firth (left, off map). |
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jan 5, 2019 4:35:46 GMT
Another supportive bit of evidence: Kat says her workshop is by the west canals; presumably the canals are connected to the lake. |
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Post by zbeeblebrox on Jan 5, 2019 9:13:02 GMT
Kind of a filler page, I suppose... More than kind of, it's literally the end-of-chapter filler page. |
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Post by todd on Jan 6, 2019 0:19:24 GMT
I really doubt they would ever let Court tech outside the walls anywhere it would be at real risk of discovery. See also their attitude towards robots wanting to leave, and I think the only place outside the Court we've seen it was in the middle of the Amazon during chapter 64. Which does give all the more a feeling of "Is all this trouble worth it?" The Court, in the pursuit of this goal, has retreated next door to a forest many of whose inhabitants want to destroy the place (and the reason why they want to destroy it is because of the Court's grand enterprise), resulting in a long struggle that's now turned into a nasty hot war. To protect themselves, the Court leadership has embarked on a series of corrupt schemes (including murder). And all this for what? What has the Court accomplished to outweigh all this trouble? The rest of the world is presumably not benefiting from the Court's work. And is whatever boon the Court itself receiving from its research greater than all the suffering that's resulted from it? |
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jan 6, 2019 9:47:08 GMT
I really doubt they would ever let Court tech outside the walls anywhere it would be at real risk of discovery. See also their attitude towards robots wanting to leave, and I think the only place outside the Court we've seen it was in the middle of the Amazon during chapter 64. Which does give all the more a feeling of "Is all this trouble worth it?" The Court, in the pursuit of this goal, has retreated next door to a forest many of whose inhabitants want to destroy the place (and the reason why they want to destroy it is because of the Court's grand enterprise), resulting in a long struggle that's now turned into a nasty hot war. To protect themselves, the Court leadership has embarked on a series of corrupt schemes (including murder). And all this for what? What has the Court accomplished to outweigh all this trouble? The rest of the world is presumably not benefiting from the Court's work. And is whatever boon the Court itself receiving from its research greater than all the suffering that's resulted from it? Maybe. Think about all the trouble and risk that goes into just getting a few simple experiments done in microgravity. Getting closer to the ether is probably very desirable for studying fundamental principles in the GC universe. It likely means the ether extractor can gather more in a few minutes than it can in weeks/months farther from the ether (in the normal muggle world) so more experiments can be fueled with less equipment and research can proceed at a faster rate. Also some effects are probably repeatable in the Court that can't be achieved at all irl. The real question is, what did this map look like six months ago, or three months ago? Are the red and yellow areas growing, shrinking, or roughly the same size? Meant to respond earlier to this but forgot. The map probably hasn't changed much since it was made. What it shows is that where there's power (or where power has been restored) and where there's some distance from the enemy infrastructure there aren't many incursions from forest denizens. The woodfolk haven't exploited these breaches yet because their leader hasn't instructed them to. It also shows a complete fail on the part of the Court to do anything about these breaches... if they've even tried. Fear of "Loup" taking further action may have them paralyzed. They've probably created a perimeter with emergency lights and are hiding behind it at night, when the shadow men come out and do whatever they please in the red and yellow zones (and probably the first thing they did was plant/hide 10,000 more seeds). And that's why I said the trees should have been poisoned/nuked/both ASAP. The only thing the Court has going for it is size, which pretty much only means the ability to cede more terrain in order to buy time if the wood becomes more aggressive. Really, they're pretty much screwed at this point; the only thing that I can think of that might recreate a defensible barrier is something extreme like the (alleged) MacArthur/Korea nuke plan. They probably could scorch sections of the Court ("Loup" shouldn't object since it's their own territory) and knock all buildings completely flat, use cobalt jackets on the warheads to keep the areas uninhabitable and then apply persistent chemical agents. The chemical warfare may sound like overkill but some agents have a long life when they get into cracks and crannies where the sunlight can't reach (the places shadow men hide). Once that's done and the fallout's died down they can dig in, construct better physical barriers (walls, lights, AV mines) and also fallback positions for when those get breached. Salting the soil and adding defoliants to make sure nothing grows in the waste zones probably wouldn't hurt either. That wouldn't be pretty or cheap and I'm not sure anyone in the Court would even have the spheres to suggest something like that, and "Loup" could just create another breach anytime he wanted to. The next best plan would be to evacuate, not just to remote sections of the Court but all nonessential personnel from the Court entirely. That would prevent casualties for hard-to-replace people; when specific experiments need to be done then they could arrange a mission to the Court on a temporary basis and concentrate security where it needs to be. |
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Post by saardvark on Jan 6, 2019 12:30:26 GMT
Since shadow men are invading the Court, that would seem to suggest that Loup has at least partly "unfrozen" time in the Forest...
what might that imply going forward for Forest stability?
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jan 6, 2019 13:13:46 GMT
If the shadow men don't need to eat they may have been exempted from the time freeze since they wouldn't need to interact with the environment to sustain themselves.
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Post by saardvark on Jan 6, 2019 18:32:39 GMT
If the shadow men don't need to eat they may have been exempted from the time freeze since they wouldn't need to interact with the environment to sustain themselves. True, but, was it Eggs(?), who mentioned (plural) creature s invading the Court, which suggests more than just shadows. OK, bound dogs would be enough to use plural creatures, but to me somehow the implication was for still more... |
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Post by DonDueed on Jan 6, 2019 20:36:55 GMT
If the shadow men don't need to eat they may have been exempted from the time freeze since they wouldn't need to interact with the environment to sustain themselves. True, but, was it Eggs(?), who mentioned (plural) creature s invading the Court, which suggests more than just shadows. OK, bound dogs would be enough to use plural creatures, but to me somehow the implication was for still more... Maybe some of those guys? (The ones Annie and Ysengrin fought.) |
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Post by mturtle7 on Jan 6, 2019 23:07:20 GMT
True, but, was it Eggs(?), who mentioned (plural) creature s invading the Court, which suggests more than just shadows. OK, bound dogs would be enough to use plural creatures, but to me somehow the implication was for still more... Maybe some of those guys? (The ones Annie and Ysengrin fought.) Oh hey, that's right! Ysengrin said something about how the ruins where his army lives isn't technically part of the Forest ( okay he doesn't say it directly but pretty clearly implied there), so when Loup stopped time to look at Coyote's etheric branching systems, he might not have included it! So now, the only creatures that still have freedom of movement beyond the Court-Forest border are the most violent, human-hating ones. Which explains a lot about the current situation, honestly. |
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Post by todd on Jan 6, 2019 23:16:38 GMT
Maybe they started invading the Court before Loup froze time in the Forest.
(It would be nice if we had a few of the less violent forest-folk - say, a couple of the Anwyn - turn up in the Court, having fled there to escape Loup's madness before he stopped time, to remind the readers that not all of Gilltie's inhabitants are like Loup or Ysengrin's army, any more than the people in the Court are all like the mysterious and unscrupulous higher-ups.)
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Post by DonDueed on Jan 7, 2019 0:27:26 GMT
Maybe some of those guys? (The ones Annie and Ysengrin fought.) Oh hey, that's right! Ysengrin said something about how the ruins where his army lives isn't technically part of the Forest ( okay he doesn't say it directly but pretty clearly implied there), so when Loup stopped time to look at Coyote's etheric branching systems, he might not have included it! So now, the only creatures that still have freedom of movement beyond the Court-Forest border are the most violent, human-hating ones. Which explains a lot about the current situation, honestly. Those ruins were part of the Court before Coyote created the Annan gorge, so they must be pretty close to the Court. If that area isn't time-stopped they wouldn't have much trouble getting in now that Jeanne is gone. They may have done so even before Loup's attack. |
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