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Post by wies on Nov 10, 2020 4:45:38 GMT
Help me out guys - has there been anywhere in the comic before now that pointed toward the Omega device and the power stations being connected somehow? Not yet specific. But we know the Court is doing something with the ether via those power stations, that its goal is to become god and in the Coyote sidestory that it is basically one great challenge to the gods' power; it makes sense to assume that Omega device (which sounds like the ultimate realization of the Court's desires) is connected to that somehow. But again, it is an assumption as far I know it. |
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Post by arcuna on Nov 10, 2020 8:51:33 GMT
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Post by basser on Nov 10, 2020 10:17:20 GMT
Aw geez I just got a middle of the night brain worm that ain't got nothing to do with Zimmy being Annie. Mention of "the Court's endeavor to become god" combined with how I been wondering lately if Kat is how they're meaning to do that (and if their meddling is integral to her ascension then that would always have had to be their goal, even if it weren't to begin with, because retroactive god causality) and then combined again with what we got two pages ago with Kat going "if you're here I think it'll be ok" to Paz. Remember how we got that whole thing a while back with Paz and the mice about how she's vowed to be the cog in the machine making sure the Court doesn't get too super extra evil with their experiments? Paz is now in position to ensure Kat doesn't get too super extra evil in her rise to machinegodhood. DEM PARALLELS.
Also in Get Lost I don't think the Omega whatever made the slugs get saucy. I think the slugs were always gonna get saucy and the Court was just able to predict that would happen - except I'm not entirely sure the slug porn was the thing it was predicting. If Omega is meant to help predict the Court's rise to godhood via Kat, then Tony and Surma getting their teen hormones awkwardly riled up by slugs is arguably step one. Cause Annie gotta exist else Kat doesn't send a robot toucan back in time.
Perhaps worth mentioning too that in statistical physics a capital omega symbolizes the set of all valid microstates consistent with a given macrostate. As in, all the paths you could take to get to the state you're aiming for. Or more accurately the state you're already in. Soooo that seems to fit pretty nice. Stat phys can also involve gamma and zeta function(s) if you're a masochist, but I'm not mathy enough to explain what those are exactly. Zeta is also the symbol used for the canonical distribution of a discrete system which is kinda neat but lololol I need to go to bed.
(We do know Tom knows some upper-level physics, so it doesn't feel out of the question for a few plot elements to be inspired by stat mech.)
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Post by pyradonis on Nov 10, 2020 11:32:33 GMT
Actually, we don't know that. We only know that recording everything that happened in a specific location at a specific time was part of the research, and that Tony has done this before. The Omega Device could just as well be used to predict events, just as basser said (in a way that is much more fun to read). It could also be used to rise hormone levels in specimen belonging to the kingdom Animalia. Or it is about time travel as well, with the head researcher proclaiming "I firmly plan on building a time machine, and to use it to go to the jungle of Brazil at time t1 and location (x1,y1,z1), break off a twig and set two slugs up with each other.", then sending Tony there to check if it happens, so when it happens they know they will succeed in building a time machine. Who knows... [1] Apart from the as yet unexplained shenanigans revealed by Clippy that actually the original Annie is *also* from another timeline, but let's assume that that happened earlier. Pretty sure that Clippy was referring to Annie being supposed to be dead. She's only alive due to time travel after all. Even if Loup put the shifted Annie back into the timeline he forked off to get an additional Annie, she would still not belong there. |
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Post by todd on Nov 10, 2020 12:46:59 GMT
that its goal is to become god To be more accurate, Coyote claims that the Court's goal "is to become God". The Court itself has never made such a statement. I've said this before, but I still think that this statement partly stems from Coyote seeking to influence Annie's perception of the Court, partly from his knowing things that the Court (presumably) doesn't know, such as how beings like himself are formed from the ether through human imagination. From that perspective, of course the Court's manipulating the ether, once it became advanced enough, would make it God-like. But from what I've seen so far, I think that the Court sees the ether as just an unexplained phenomenon that it's trying to explain and fit into its scientific world-view. (I think it's the same case, on a larger scale, as with Kat, who's turning into a "robot goddess" because of the robot religion, but she doesn't realize it.) |
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Post by novia on Nov 10, 2020 12:48:45 GMT
Also in Get Lost I don't think the Omega whatever made the slugs get saucy. I think the slugs were always gonna get saucy and the Court was just able to predict that would happen - except I'm not entirely sure the slug porn was the thing it was predicting. If Omega is meant to help predict the Court's rise to godhood via Kat, then Tony and Surma getting their teen hormones awkwardly riled up by slugs is arguably step one. Cause Annie gotta exist else Kat doesn't send a robot toucan back in time. That would explain quite tidily why neither Annie is supposed to be there. |
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Post by ohthatone on Nov 10, 2020 15:20:45 GMT
Also in Get Lost I don't think the Omega whatever made the slugs get saucy. I think the slugs were always gonna get saucy and the Court was just able to predict that would happen - except I'm not entirely sure the slug porn was the thing it was predicting. If Omega is meant to help predict the Court's rise to godhood via Kat, then Tony and Surma getting their teen hormones awkwardly riled up by slugs is arguably step one. Cause Annie gotta exist else Kat doesn't send a robot toucan back in time. That would explain quite tidily why neither Annie is supposed to be there. But leaves some rather messy implications if the court needed Tony and Surma to be together, like offing Anya's dad so donnie would feel compelled to go to the funeral leaving a spot open on the important jungle trip that only surma is available to fill. |
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Post by warrl on Nov 10, 2020 16:18:04 GMT
Actually, it would be sufficient that the Omega Device - or some other mechanism the Court has - can predict some things in great detail including exactly when and where certain minor events will occur. (So why send someone to observe? For the same reason to send someone to observe if they're causing it: to find out if the thing works.) |
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Post by fia on Nov 10, 2020 18:27:46 GMT
Okay okay wild theory: given that this super-golem technology Kat understands was Diego's work isn't it possible some of that knowledge was passed on to someone or other while Diego was alive? And they figured out the arrow-stuff Diego and Kat know about? Why I'm bringing this up now: what if Tony's clamming up in social situations is a result of the *Court* doing that to him, because they knew they needed him for the Omega device and needed someone who wasn't going to spill the beans? Yeah that's a bit TOO wildspec for a regular comic thread but I thought I'd put it out there since novia brought up the issue of contracts, and breaking/making contracts are clearly implicated in whatever the Arrow does. EDIT to add: I'm still open to the possibility that Tony was taken from another time/place or that he himself is "shifted". He strikes me as someone who's been in the Court forever, maybe longer even than Eggs, and maybe whose parents took the money the Court sent them in exchange for Tony and cut off contact. That theory is still fully compatible with the emotional theory I posited earlier about why Tony has trouble talking to Courtnie more than Frannie. EDIT EDIT: Tony's speciality, besides being a genius who knows about codes and satellites and insects and stuff, and the secret-agent gig, is **surgery**. He's a doctor type. Now, why is "doctor" the sort of specialization so important to the Omega device? That's what I want to know the most. |
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Post by Gemminie on Nov 10, 2020 19:53:33 GMT
Actually, we don't know that. We only know that recording everything that happened in a specific location at a specific time was part of the research, and that Tony has done this before. The Omega Device could just as well be used to predict events, just as basser said (in a way that is much more fun to read). It could also be used to rise hormone levels in specimen belonging to the kingdom Animalia. Or it is about time travel as well, with the head researcher proclaiming "I firmly plan on building a time machine, and to use it to go to the jungle of Brazil at time t1 and location (x1,y1,z1), break off a twig and set two slugs up with each other.", then sending Tony there to check if it happens, so when it happens they know they will succeed in building a time machine. Who knows... I hadn't thought of either of those interpretations. My thought was that examining very specific events at a precise place and time was a good way to tell which alternate timeline you were in, among a set of possible ones. "OK, we're in the timeline where the slugs do it on Tuesday." So it's cool to see these other ideas! I'm not sure it's actually established that there's a connection between time travel and alternate timelines at all in the Gunnerverse. Maybe, maybe not. All we really know is that Loup can make alternate timelines, and the Norns can't do anything with them. But assuming that there is a connection, why would "this" timeline not be the one Annie belonged in? After all, this is the timeline in which she was saved, whether by time travel or no. There might be another timeline where she wasn't saved, and a living Annie definitely wouldn't belong in that one, but this is the one where she was. Unless there was more that happened besides just time travel. What if she was not only saved, but also moved into the timeline in which she was supposed to die? But how would that have happened? We didn't see anything resembling that. There are only two possibilities, though – either Annie already didn't "belong here" before Loup's trick, or she did. One of my theories is that Loup split her into three, meaning that he made two new timelines and pulled the Annies from both of them into the original, then kept the original Annie somewhere, maybe frozen in time in the Forest. (I doubt this. One would think that Renard, now a familiar to both and potentially all Annies, would sense this.) But if Annie was already "shifted" before Loup split the timeline, there are many possibilities. I mean, who's to say that the Arbiter and the Interpreter were talking about Annie physically? What if they were looking ethereally at the fire elemental part of her, and what if that's been shifted for centuries? Or ... maybe it's that in chapter 71 (and the start of 77), the stable time loop causing Annie to be alive wasn't yet closed, and now it is? Or what if Coyote split or shifted Surma while she was pregnant with Annie? Or what if he split/shifted Annie the first time she set foot in the Forest, or when he stopped time in chapter 31 (Jack does say that Annie seems different after coming back from the Forest)? |
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Post by machiavelli33 on Nov 10, 2020 20:31:12 GMT
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Post by pyradonis on Nov 10, 2020 22:55:28 GMT
Actually, we don't know that. We only know that recording everything that happened in a specific location at a specific time was part of the research, and that Tony has done this before. The Omega Device could just as well be used to predict events, just as basser said (in a way that is much more fun to read). It could also be used to rise hormone levels in specimen belonging to the kingdom Animalia. Or it is about time travel as well, with the head researcher proclaiming "I firmly plan on building a time machine, and to use it to go to the jungle of Brazil at time t1 and location (x1,y1,z1), break off a twig and set two slugs up with each other.", then sending Tony there to check if it happens, so when it happens they know they will succeed in building a time machine. Who knows... I hadn't thought of either of those interpretations. My thought was that examining very specific events at a precise place and time was a good way to tell which alternate timeline you were in, among a set of possible ones. "OK, we're in the timeline where the slugs do it on Tuesday." So it's cool to see these other ideas! Okay, I like that one. I don't think Clippy was talking about timelines at all. He just said "neither belongs here", meaning that, according to whatever Etheric file system they use, this person is marked as "deceased", so she shouldn't be here, at this time. Normally there is only one timeline. In that timeline, Annie is supposed to die. It does not matter if you create a thousand additional timelines after the moment in which Annie was supposed to die, because in every new timeline, her file will say that she's dead, so it does not matter which timeline you observe, because an Annie is not supposed to be alive in any of them. Time travelling bypasses the Etheric bureaucracy, and they probably hate it.
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Post by Bandolute on Nov 11, 2020 2:59:46 GMT
Is an etheric explanation really that much more likely than Anthony being just sort of a cruddy traumatized person with conditional social skills and weird hang ups
I get that we'd all like to magic his parenting issues away for Annie's sake, but with respect, I really don't think some unexplored nascent ether sense is the issue here. He can tell them apart because he's their dad, like dads do with their twins all the time, even if the twinning is a recent thing. They've got 6 months of divergent development and Annie isn't subtle. Anthony is smart, he knows what's up here. He's being confronted with the reality that the uneven treatment is hurting the Annies and it's not a pleasant time for anyone
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Post by wies on Nov 11, 2020 5:58:57 GMT
that its goal is to become god To be more accurate, Coyote claims that the Court's goal "is to become God". The Court itself has never made such a statement. I've said this before, but I still think that this statement partly stems from Coyote seeking to influence Annie's perception of the Court, partly from his knowing things that the Court (presumably) doesn't know, such as how beings like himself are formed from the ether through human imagination. From that perspective, of course the Court's manipulating the ether, once it became advanced enough, would make it God-like. But from what I've seen so far, I think that the Court sees the ether as just an unexplained phenomenon that it's trying to explain and fit into its scientific world-view. (I think it's the same case, on a larger scale, as with Kat, who's turning into a "robot goddess" because of the robot religion, but she doesn't realize it.) I agree. It is a Coyote statement which comes with caveats indeed. I didn't mean to say the Court has a mission statement that says: "become gods" or something like that. I really like that you drew a parallell between that and Kat's accidental ascension! Didn't think of that. When you go down that road, you sometimes don't know where you will end up. |
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Post by basser on Nov 11, 2020 9:26:40 GMT
I get that we'd all like to magic his parenting issues away for Annie's sake, Nope, not on my part anyway - I find Annie largely insufferable and wouldn't care if it turns out Surma just had garbage taste. What I care about is conservation of narrative detail and realistic portrayal of human psychology, which Gunnerkrigg has always been great about. Tony's dealio superficially resembles a phase most folks go through in their late teens to early 20s ("oh no I act different around different people WHO AM I REALLY" - chill you're just growing a personality, give it time), which I imagine is why a lot of folks want to brush it off as a personality thing, I guess? But y'all got to realize people don't stay like this past the age of around 25 usually. Even if you've got severe autism or some other issue you're gonna find ways to cope and function in society, that's just what people do. But Tony hasn't managed that. He's still stuck with exactly the same unnaturally consistent social problem he had at the age of, what, 14? If this were an organic human condition it'd mean Tony is the only character in the entire comic who's somehow undergone zero personal growth in the past however-many decades of his life. Decades which included shady dealings with freaky bug ghosts and chopping off his own hand. Nah. I don't buy it. Ain't no one still stuck with this level of social anxiety after having lopped off a body part at the behest of bug spirits on nothing but a vague suggestion of summoning their dead wife only to get sucker-punched straight out the ether by a goofy-accented demon version of their daughter. On top of whatever else he's done. You just don't come back from that kind of stuff still capable of giving enough of a crap what people think of you to be having this much trouble expressing your own personality. Dude's got himself some ether shenanigans. I didn't even get into conservation of detail but that's basically just that Tom doesn't spend this much time on stuff that isn't important to the core plot. And the core plot isn't about Social Skills or Annie's Feelings it's about how we learn to cope with the ways the unknowable (represented by etheric tenet) shapes our lives. Tony's unknowable is having been artificially saddled with the social skills of a 19 year old. He appears to have chosen to cope with that reality by telling the unknowable to get wrecked. This is why I like him best. Not cause he's a good person but because he's willing to flip reality the bird and throw his all into harnessing the unknowable to his own ends. Resonates with me on a personal level. |
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Post by speedwell on Nov 11, 2020 13:43:18 GMT
I get that we'd all like to magic his parenting issues away for Annie's sake, Nope, not on my part anyway - I find Annie largely insufferable and wouldn't care if it turns out Surma just had garbage taste. What I care about is conservation of narrative detail and realistic portrayal of human psychology, which Gunnerkrigg has always been great about. Tony's dealio superficially resembles a phase most folks go through in their late teens to early 20s ("oh no I act different around different people WHO AM I REALLY" - chill you're just growing a personality, give it time), which I imagine is why a lot of folks want to brush it off as a personality thing, I guess? But y'all got to realize people don't stay like this past the age of around 25 usually. Even if you've got severe autism or some other issue you're gonna find ways to cope and function in society, that's just what people do. But Tony hasn't managed that. He's still stuck with exactly the same unnaturally consistent social problem he had at the age of, what, 14? If this were an organic human condition it'd mean Tony is the only character in the entire comic who's somehow undergone zero personal growth in the past however-many decades of his life. Decades which included shady dealings with freaky bug ghosts and chopping off his own hand. I'm gradually coming around to the idea that Tony was maturing and functioning rather well before the events leading up to and including the loss of his hand. I think he psychologically regressed and was lucky not to do so clear to infancy. It could explain in what sense Coyote found him to be "broken". Note that the icon of the "Broken Man" is huddled and defensive. |
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Post by alevice on Nov 11, 2020 14:24:56 GMT
He also had to somehow learn about all the cultures and people he met during his travels, in a way that wasnt just being awkward all the time or just 1:1 convos.
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Post by mturtle7 on Nov 11, 2020 18:46:34 GMT
Is an etheric explanation really that much more likely than Anthony being just sort of a cruddy traumatized person with conditional social skills and weird hang ups I get that we'd all like to magic his parenting issues away for Annie's sake, but with respect, I really don't think some unexplored nascent ether sense is the issue here. He can tell them apart because he's their dad, like dads do with their twins all the time, even if the twinning is a recent thing. They've got 6 months of divergent development and Annie isn't subtle. Anthony is smart, he knows what's up here. He's being confronted with the reality that the uneven treatment is hurting the Annies and it's not a pleasant time for anyone Honestly, that's been my assumption as well. Obviously, some people would strongly disagree (looking especially at you basser ), but I think Tony's behavior reads pretty damn well as just being the result of non-magical emotional problems. Many emotional problems, compounded and exacerbated by various bizarre crises, but still fundamentally human in nature. However, I have to acknowledge that this comic has really blurred the line between emotional and magical crises before, and distracted us with emotional gut-punches so we don't even notice the magic stuff happening behind the scenes. Thus, I'm actually still open to the possibility of something supernatural messing with Tony's social abilities, even if it's not my default assumption.
Oh, and like people have pointed out, Tony's social problem has been stated oddly specifically a few times, so hey maybe that's setting up for some big reveal? Or maybe not, who knows.
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