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Post by warrl on Dec 15, 2019 2:58:33 GMT
The other issue at play is that she is the only living psychopomp, and there are no adults that can help her with that. Huh. What makes you think Annie is the only living psychopomp? Many of them looked pretty healthy to me. Well, one would have to define exactly what, in context, "living" means. But she's the only one (we know of) that ordinary people who aren't on the brink of death can normally see. The others have to make some (apparently small) effort to be visible. She's also the only one we've seen bother to open a door. |
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Post by Gemini Jim on Dec 15, 2019 6:22:17 GMT
Huh. What makes you think Annie is the only living psychopomp? Many of them looked pretty healthy to me. Well, one would have to define exactly what, in context, "living" means. But she's the only one (we know of) that ordinary people who aren't on the brink of death can normally see. The others have to make some (apparently small) effort to be visible. She's also the only one we've seen bother to open a door. This feels like another "geosynchronous orbit" issue, but.... Mort was dead. Mort was able to interact with other characters. Gunnerkrigg Court exists in a world where "living" is a spectrum. for example: Annie- fully alive, we assume. Mort - in early chapters: dead and loving it; actively able to interact with humans (fully and truly dead now - except for promos). Coyote - dead? maybe? seems to still be able to interact with other characters when certain conditions are met. Robots - not alive, but not dead. some of the Gunnerkrigg robots have off switches. (See also: ST:TNG, "The Measure of a Man") Jones - who knows? able to interact with other characters, probably immortal. It would be more accurate to say that Annie is the only living human psychopomp. |
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Post by warrl on Dec 15, 2019 8:32:40 GMT
This feels like another "geosynchronous orbit" issue, but.... Mort was dead. Mort was able to interact with other characters. Mort was not a psychopomp. Coyote claimed to not exist. His stated reason for that claim could equally apply to Ysengrin and Reynardine. Now, he also claims to be dead. However, I consider that incompatible with his stated reason why the people of that universe think he exists. Basically, if he only appears to exist because people believe he exists, then how can he be dead when most of the people who believe he exists don't know he's dead? (And next I'll take the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin, negate it, take the square root, and divide by zero.  True, but at that point have you gotten so specific that the statement is effectively meaningless? |
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Post by migrantworker on Dec 15, 2019 11:46:14 GMT
I'm not so sure about this. We don't actually know how much support could they count on. To be sure, we did not see anyone opposing it - but it may well have been a function on Annie and the gang keeping their work on freeing Jeanne in secret. They all agree that it was the right thing to do - but then would they not exclude from their plan everyone who they thought would have too many doubts? What if the assembly decided that on balance, sacrificing one person all those years ago in exchange for indefinite protection is in fact a compromise worth taking, and in any case it's not their job to put right their ancestors' misdeeds? True, that is a point. Though the very fact that the Founders hushed up what they did to Jeanne in the first place - to the point of even erasing Jeanne's existence from the records - suggested that they realized that the general public in Gunnerkrigg wouldn't approve of such behavior (even one of the Founders walked out of the meeting in disgust). Cover-ups and concealment imply that the public still has some sense of right and wrong. It's when the guys at top are openly tyrannical without trying to hide their wrong-doing that the country's in really big trouble - because then, either everyone else has become as corrupt as the leaders and won't mind, or they're too weak to oppose it. I suspect the passage of time would eventually trump moral considerations. You could compare it to say current attitudes towards 19th-century imperialism: yes we agree that western countries exploited the colonies, no we really shouldn't do such a thing again, and yes granting independence to former colonies was a good thing... but in the popular opinion, that's as far as it goes. The names of people reponsible for the worst cruelties are known to everyone who paid attention during history classes, and generally forgotten rather than hated. Proposals to address the issue which involve anything that could be construed as a cost are almost universally opposed. Reparations are not seriously considered; a significant part of the population does not like people coming over from the former colonies at all, even for benign reasons such as hoping to improve their lot in life through honest work. The whole issue is consigned into 'the past', and assumed to have not much relevance in 'the present' (at least in former imperial countries). I could see the assembly ticking all the same boxes. "Yeah, sucks that we did this to Jeanne, sir Young bad. Was it sir Young? Anyway. But there were no attacks coming through the ravine for what, more than a century? So what do you propose, free her and make us unsafe?" Nobody, but nobody, is immune to that way of thinking. |
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Post by antiyonder on Dec 15, 2019 13:04:50 GMT
I'm not against pointing out Annie's faults and mistakes, but sometimes I think we as readers can overblame her because other solutions seem viable, rather than considering why Annie would not view them as viable. As a reader, I think Jones is Annie's best ally, and in an ideal world she could have relied on Jones a lot more than she does and been safer for it. But would Annie see it that? Could she see it that way with everything that has happened to her and with her feelings about the Court? I don't think she could. Well that and some might be afraid of whiteknighting her (since you know she's a girl and kid), or afraid of falling into the trap protagonist centered morality. |
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Post by DonDueed on Dec 15, 2019 14:41:36 GMT
True, but at that point have you gotten so specific that the statement is effectively meaningless? I don't think so. Maybe it would be clearer to phrase it this way: "Annie is the only psychopomp who is a living human".
The other psychopomps are (apparently) strictly ethereal beings, only visible to humans who are dying. The fact that Annie can see them is very significant. That indicates that she is either dying (but we know that isn't true since she's been seeing them for years), or that she's not strictly human.
In other words, the fact that Annie interacts with psychopomps is strong evidence that she has a significant ethereal nature -- which we now know is the fire elemental part of her. That's why geminijim's description is meaningful.
That's also a reason the adults can't be much help to her with the Jeanne problem -- it ties into the ethereal side of her nature, which the Court leadership is struggling to understand at all.
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Post by Gemini Jim on Dec 15, 2019 18:56:13 GMT
True, but at that point have you gotten so specific that the statement is effectively meaningless? I don't think so. Maybe it would be clearer to phrase it this way: "Annie is the only psychopomp who is a living human". The other psychopomps are (apparently) strictly ethereal beings, only visible to humans who are dying. The fact that Annie can see them is very significant. That indicates that she is either dying (but we know that isn't true since she's been seeing them for years), or that she's not strictly human. In other words, the fact that Annie interacts with psychopomps is strong evidence that she has a significant ethereal nature -- which we now know is the fire elemental part of her. That's why geminijim's description is meaningful. That's also a reason the adults can't be much help to her with the Jeanne problem -- it ties into the ethereal side of her nature, which the Court leadership is struggling to understand at all.
You know, I think I need to amend my previous statement. The living part doesn't matter at all. "Gunnerkrigg Court" is filled with characters who are apparently alive, or at the very least animate - a comic with inanimate objects (* with no external source of movement - puppets aren't inanimate) for main characters would be very boring indeed. There are ghosts and robots. There are apparently immortal beings, such as Jones. There are many nonhuman characters, such as all of those elves in Elfzanar. What makes Annie unique as a pyschopomp is that she does appear to fall somewhere in the middle of human/ nonhuman. Like a person who is half-Japanese or half-Irish, she is part elemental. Unlike people who are half-Japanese, she can metaphorically "turn off" the elemental half, and usually appears to be fully human. If most psychopomps are ethereal or if they are supposed to be ethereal (in order to remain invisible to mortals, for example), then Annie being half-human might matter. |
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Post by warrl on Dec 15, 2019 20:54:22 GMT
The living part doesn't matter at all. "Gunnerkrigg Court" is filled with characters who are apparently alive, or at the very least animate - a comic with inanimate objects (* with no external source of movement - puppets aren't inanimate) for main characters would be very boring indeed. It might be titled Stand Still, Stay Silent.  (Note: that comic does not strictly live up to the name. But since I don't read it, I have no idea why it has that name.) |
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Post by fia on Dec 15, 2019 21:20:13 GMT
I think maybe the Court would let the Forest-people in but the Robot Barrier is keeping them out.
I doubt the Barrier can be modified yet. Isn't it still up?
Makes sense if you think about it because Diego would have hated the Forest-people due to Jeanne's Green Boyfriend being one of them.
The Court on the other hand might not be as worried if they're not an advancing army but just refugees from the conflict.
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Post by fia on Dec 15, 2019 21:25:13 GMT
Second theory:
Maybe Loup knows Annie has a crush on Kamlen (he's a meddler and clearly very jealous) and that's why he threw all the tree elves out. :/
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Post by pyradonis on Dec 15, 2019 23:03:49 GMT
This feels like another "geosynchronous orbit" issue, but.... Mort was dead. Mort was able to interact with other characters. Mort was not a psychopomp. Gemini Jim's point was that "having to make a conscious effort to be seen by standard living beings" is not a trait that defines dead beings in the GKC universe, and so it is not a sign that the other psychopomps are effectively dead.
Makes sense if you think about it because Diego would have hated the Forest-people due to Jeanne's Green Boyfriend being one of them. The Court on the other hand might not be as worried if they're not an advancing army but just refugees from the conflict. Diego certainly would be able to spitefully program a shield to keep tree elves out. But this page strongly implies that the shield protocol was installed in recent times by a yet unknown party, because it uses Anja's technology. |
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Post by todd on Dec 16, 2019 0:02:28 GMT
One other point on the topic of the consequences of Annie's actions (which might echo my earlier remarks): the Court and the Forest were having troubles well before she came along. The Court's engaged in a questionable set of experiments with the ether that are alarming the forest-folk, leading to conflict - and the people at the top engage in a lot of decidedly amoral schemings and cover-ups. The Forest was run by a trickster-god who was ready to unleash the current predicament on the area all so that he could have the "fun" of dying, and who engaged in a lot of schemes and deceptions of his own to achieve that goal, and many of the forest-folk were longing to unleash a violent attack upon the Court in retaliation for past grievances. (I wonder whether Jeanne may have even made the situation worse, in a sense - with a Forest unable to attack the Court directly, all that hatred festered and fermented. The Court just attended to the surface-level part of the problem without addressing the deeper element - the reason for the forest-folk's wish to attack the Court.) Maybe Annie's involvement is the kind of treatment that makes things worse for a while, but turns out to be what you need to cure the illness.
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dingo
New Member
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Post by dingo on Dec 16, 2019 11:06:19 GMT
The thing that's driving me bonkers is the patch on Kat's arm. I KNOW I've seen it somewhere and it's always on the tip of my tongue (so to speak) but I just CAN'T put my finger on it >_< Nostromo patch? Is Kat a goddamn robot? |
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Post by Runningflame on Dec 17, 2019 5:49:32 GMT
Though the very fact that the Founders hushed up what they did to Jeanne in the first place - to the point of even erasing Jeanne's existence from the records - suggested that they realized that the general public in Gunnerkrigg wouldn't approve of such behavior (even one of the Founders walked out of the meeting in disgust). Cover-ups and concealment imply that the public still has some sense of right and wrong. Or, rather, "weak-minded, sentimental ideals that would compromise our national security / glorious revolution / the march of progress." Those who do such things may still believe in right and wrong--they've just convinced themselves that they're right, and the reason why hoi polloi object is because they don't understand necessary trade-offs. |
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Post by Gemini Jim on Dec 17, 2019 6:00:16 GMT
The thing that's driving me bonkers is the patch on Kat's arm. I KNOW I've seen it somewhere and it's always on the tip of my tongue (so to speak) but I just CAN'T put my finger on it >_< Nostromo patch? Is Kat a goddamn robot? That would be an amazing, groundshaking revelation. Imagine: The Donlans can't have children, so they build one and raise it as their ordinary daughter. The reason why Kat has such incredible tech superpowers; the reason why she is literal-minded about the ROTD; the reason why she can be the robot "Angel" is because she is a cyborg. |
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Post by Runningflame on Dec 17, 2019 7:05:52 GMT
They say that every time I go into the forest, something bad happens. Ahem! Point of order: - Nothing bad happened (except possibly if there was any expensive equipment up there)
- Nothing bad happened (Coyote just trolled Eglamore and scared Annie a bit)
- Nothing bad happened (Jones implies that Annie put everyone at the Court in danger by running off, but it's not clear why)
- Nothing bad happened to the Court (although Annie almost died and Eglamore had to drop whatever he was doing to save her)
- Nothing bad happened (Carver, Smitty, Parley, and Eglamore just got a little aerobic exercise)
- Nothing bad happened (except scaring Kat and Paz a bit)
- Nothing bad happened (this one doesn't even need any caveats)
- Nothing bad happened (in fact, the Court got a new
slave worker citizen) - Nothing bad happened once Annie was allowed to go into the forest (although something bad did happen because Annie hadn't been going; arguably, if the Court had never let her go to the forest at all, Coyote might not have become so attached to her)
- Nothing bad happened (thanks to the vigilant efforts of the decontamination team, no doubt)
- Nothing bad happened (except the invasion of Parley and Smitty's personal space)
- Something very bad happened
- Some sorta bad things happened, I guess (some Court equipment got destroyed, Jones was taken out of commission for six months, the Annan Waters disappeared, and we ended up with two Annies--which may or may not be a bad thing depending on whom you ask)
- Something bad happened
Seems to me the Court is being pretty selective with their evidence. I guess you could chalk it up to recency bias. |
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Post by migrantworker on Dec 17, 2019 9:28:17 GMT
They say that every time I go into the forest, something bad happens. Ahem! Point of order: - Nothing bad happened (except possibly if there was any expensive equipment up there)
- Nothing bad happened (Coyote just trolled Eglamore and scared Annie a bit)
- Nothing bad happened (Jones implies that Annie put everyone at the Court in danger by running off, but it's not clear why)
- Nothing bad happened to the Court (although Annie almost died and Eglamore had to drop whatever he was doing to save her)
- Nothing bad happened (Carver, Smitty, Parley, and Eglamore just got a little aerobic exercise)
- Nothing bad happened (except scaring Kat and Paz a bit)
- Nothing bad happened (this one doesn't even need any caveats)
- Nothing bad happened (in fact, the Court got a new
slave worker citizen) - Nothing bad happened once Annie was allowed to go into the forest (although something bad did happen because Annie hadn't been going; arguably, if the Court had never let her go to the forest at all, Coyote might not have become so attached to her)
- Nothing bad happened (thanks to the vigilant efforts of the decontamination team, no doubt)
- Nothing bad happened (except the invasion of Parley and Smitty's personal space)
- Something very bad happened
- Some sorta bad things happened, I guess (some Court equipment got destroyed, Jones was taken out of commission for six months, the Annan Waters disappeared, and we ended up with two Annies--which may or may not be a bad thing depending on whom you ask)
- Something bad happened
Seems to me the Court is being pretty selective with their evidence. I guess you could chalk it up to recency bias. It depends on how much does the Court know about Annie's visits to the Forest. We know that the Court medium's job involves a lot of paperwork, and presumably Annie would also need to file some sort of a report after every visit, medium or not. If we assume that the Court knows everything that has been shown to us the readers, then: - Annie visited the Forest on 14 occasions; - on 3 of them, and incidentally the 3 most recent ones, bad things followed; - on other 4 of them (visits 3, 4, 6, and 10), bad things could have happened but did not; - on visit 4, and to a much lesser extent on visit 5, bad things could have happened to Eglamore. Significant because replacements are difficult to come by, take years to fully train, and there doesn't seem to be any other person in the Court possessing Eglamore's combat knowledge; - on visit 3, something bad could have happened to Jones. Significant because there is no known replacement for her. So for each of Annie's visits to the Forest, the Court would see two coin tosses. One to check if the visit involves a risk of bad things happening; and a second one to check if the risk materialises. Whichever way you slice it, there is still 1 chance in 4 of catastrophic consequences. I think we would both agree that deciding not to take this sort of odds is a reasonable thing to do...  |
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Post by pyradonis on Dec 18, 2019 13:02:12 GMT
He probably had to drop a priceless Ming vase. |
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Post by Runningflame on Dec 19, 2019 2:47:09 GMT
He probably had to drop a priceless Ming vase. |
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Post by arkadi on Mar 30, 2020 12:36:59 GMT
The thing that's driving me bonkers is the patch on Kat's arm. I KNOW I've seen it somewhere and it's always on the tip of my tongue (so to speak) but I just CAN'T put my finger on it >_< Nostromo patch? Is Kat a goddamn robot? I can't BELIEVE that I have all the art and designs that Ron Cobb, Jean Giraud and John Mollo did for Alien and I didn't recognize that. |
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Post by Polyhymnia on Apr 1, 2020 12:19:20 GMT
The living part doesn't matter at all. "Gunnerkrigg Court" is filled with characters who are apparently alive, or at the very least animate - a comic with inanimate objects (* with no external source of movement - puppets aren't inanimate) for main characters would be very boring indeed. It might be titled Stand Still, Stay Silent. (Note: that comic does not strictly live up to the name. But since I don't read it, I have no idea why it has that name.)It’s like a supernatural/magical post-apocalyptic exploration story, where some sort of disease turned mammals (except for cats) into zombie blobs that eat people and can’t survive in the cold. The taken-over part of the world is known as the silent world. The known surviving population of Scandinavia has found ways of dealing with the problem but has lost most scientific and literary knowledge and has developed a new culture (and magic.) When you enter the silent world, you run a major risk of getting eaten by “trolls,” the horrifying zombie blob things that kill and eat people (if you’re immune to the disease, they can’t infect you but can still kill you via attack). The best defense for the untrained or alone is to “stand still” and “stay silent” since noise attracts them and they may overlook you and leave you alone. And yes, there’s actually a lot of running around loudly with our team of heroes, who don’t live up to the title at all. /thread detail |
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