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Post by wies on Mar 6, 2021 8:00:19 GMT
It is possible that Loup already stitched the times together when he let Forest Annie return to court, basically copying her. But that is an assumption (that can still be true) while the comic explained several times one annie is shifted from another timeline. So I agree with pyradonis that so far the annies were two annies from two timelines. Buuut, there is also metaphor to consider. And it is hard to not read the two annies as two parts of Annie as well. I mean, the motif of Annie's double keeps reappering throughout the story: Mirrorred to Surma, Contrasted with Kat, Split in two in her mortal self and her fire, I pretty much see the two annies of an continuation of this tradition. I guess how this will develop will bear out which view to consider more. Also I've seen the sentiment (here and elsewhere) that this was "too easy." I dunno, I have a feeling that there's going to be a lot still to come concerning this (again, if we're taking this at face-value and it's truly what has happened), so we really have no idea how easy or cleanly this was done. I hope you are right and that I was too forward with voicing my concerns storywise. It feels like to me the chapters lately have shifted from telling a story on their own, and more as set-up for further developments which carries the risk of less satisfaction. For example: the chapter new contract in which the storyline of the Arthur gaining a body gets interrupted for several pages of set-up. I don't mind set-up per se, and it is also an inherent risk of reading a webcomic in which events happen slower than its creator intends; but after a while it does feel like nothing is happening of consequence, just set-up. And either this merging is a conclusion which would feel weak to me, or more set-up which is also a bit frustrating to me. It is like that conversation between Annie and Coyote that sums up the comic: "That just raises further questions." And the questions the comic keeps raising are interesting! But it would be nice to get a definite answer at times, you know? Still, I realize it is not fair to critize a story still ongoing but it is also hard to not state your current opinion on the work as a whole when you are reading it for years. |
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Post by blahzor on Mar 6, 2021 11:54:24 GMT
Minds blown when it turns out that Loup has had a extra Annie he's been talking to all this time while the court folk deal with 2 Annie's
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Post by todd on Mar 6, 2021 12:50:09 GMT
PPS: This may all be a grand metaphor for what will ultimately happen with the Court and the Forest. I am starting to suspect Kat et al will help perform, not just a fusion between personhood and machine, but between the magic of the wild forests, and the advanced technology of the Court, and create a new community to amend the break that was planned by Diego et al. Jeanne was the start of this, removing the Annan river was another part of it, and now with the Elves joining in play with humans, it's all kind of accelerating. I wonder who the "enemy" will be. Probably no one, I'm starting to think. Probably just fear and misunderstanding. I kind of want there to be a Villain, because it adds dramatic urgency; but maybe there won't be? The real villain is just ignorance, of ourselves and of the "other". I think Annie will have a role in the fusion as well... as she has a special knowledge and affinity with the Forest side and things magic/etheric, while Kat comes from the Court side and things scientific/mechanical. They've been repeatedly symbolized as such in the treatises. The two are almost perfect apostles of the two sides, and thus well suited to lead a detente, rapproachement and reunion of the two. I think that a crucial part will be redirecting the Court's goals. A major source of the conflict is that the Court's study of the ether, experimenting with it, trying to understand it, is somehow endangering the Forest (it's also harming Zimmy, and may be damaging to anyone and anything else linked to the ether in the area). Hence the Forest's hostility towards the Court; from its perspective, it's a war of self-defense, of survival, against a neighbor whose goals, if achieved, would destroy it. A crucial component of peace between the two groups would be the Court abandoning its project. Except, the project is apparently the whole point of the Court's existence. (Not to mention that it's apparently on the verge of achieving its goal. And after all the trouble that the Forest has caused the Court lately, the Court's unlikely to call off its study of the ether just because it could wipe out the Forest; if anything, it might see that as an incentive.) So the Court giving that up seems improbable - unless the Court was given a new direction to pursue - replacing the old "study o the ether" project. And presumably Kat will supply that. How, we don't yet know. but Gamma's statement in this chapter indicates that it will happen, and presumably make peace possible. |
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Post by drmemory on Mar 6, 2021 16:36:13 GMT
I still think this is just Zimmy helping the Annies understand each other's points of view, and that she did it by merging them temporarily. Those that are saying she's dazed - I agree, but further think it's because she's processing. "So that's what she really thought? I didn't really understand what she meant. I guess it makes sense from her point of view. Huh." X 2. If true, we'll probably end up with Cannie and Fannie not at odds with each other so much, or at least not about their feelings about their mother. Nice therapeutic technique! More in keeping with the type and power level of stuff we've seen Zimmy do before, also. Just a little more control than she normally bothers with. I hope it's something like this, because if we're really down to one Annie, and it sticks, then that Annie will have to go do the work of a psychopomp eventually. In my heart of hearts, I've always thought that one Annie would become a psychopomp and the other would stay and... but that's enough exposure to my headspace for now.  |
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Post by fia on Mar 6, 2021 20:32:05 GMT
Regarding your last comment, I don't think there is any alternate timeline with a dead Annie anywhere. I think "The Thousand Eyes" made it clear that the past was not changed - Kat just accomplished what had already happened, she only did it from a few years later (in what is usually called a stable time loop, one of the very few time travel concepts that can remotely work without butchering the last shred of logic). What I consider dark is the possibility of two separate personalities having forcibly been merged with each other, destroying both original personalities and forcing two minds which are six months apart in age (again, as I said, that's huge difference for teenagers) to become one, which would amount to double murder and creation of a traumatized new person. Agree on the dead-Annie timeline not existing. I don't think it does, given in-comic evidence. And yeah, the fusing creeps me out too. Then again – it's been a popular enough sci-fi/fantasy trope that I'm willing to suspend disbelief / worry? If both Annies were the same person, the unnatural thing is for them to be separate. (It's like if you took half a brain from the same person and put each in a newly-grown clone body, and let them kind of do separate things for a while, and then took the brains back and put them in one body together again. Not that that's physically possible, because brainstems/spinal-cords/peripheral nervous system are crucial parts of everything, but you catch my drift). But I don't think Forest Annie is literally younger than Court Annie – remember, her hair had grown 6 months' worth, so her body advanced as if normally. It's just her experiences didn't match 6 months' worth of experiences. So it's more like having to integrate 2 separate experience streams from 2 separate bodies back into just one experience stream. As for how you make two people who are 95% of one person – well, (1) Loup is a God, aka as long as it's not logically impossible he can do it, and maybe even if it is he can do it (2) if identity = memories + personality or something (the naïve view), then you just make 2 copies of the memories, one for each person, and keep most of the personality, except redistribute some bits (or maybe that part just came from the 6 months' differences of experience, not Loup's doing at all). We know Loup and Coyote can manipulate memories pretty well. |
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Post by Gemminie on Mar 7, 2021 5:04:56 GMT
Minds blown when it turns out that Loup has had a extra Annie he's been talking to all this time while the court folk deal with 2 Annie's Several people have put forth this theory, if I recall, including me, though I consider it an outside possibility because it's completely unforeshadowed; there's no evidence at all to support it. (But also no evidence to refute it.) It's consistent, but a lot of things can be consistent with the evidence but not be true. I mean, what if Annie "doesn't belong in this timeline" because the entire Court/Forest area is in a separate timeline/dimension from the rest of the world, and Annie was born outside it? I don't think that's true, but it's not inconsistent. |
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Post by Gemminie on Mar 7, 2021 5:13:48 GMT
I still think this is just Zimmy helping the Annies understand each other's points of view, and that she did it by merging them temporarily. Those that are saying she's dazed - I agree, but further think it's because she's processing. "So that's what she really thought? I didn't really understand what she meant. I guess it makes sense from her point of view. Huh." X 2. If true, we'll probably end up with Cannie and Fannie not at odds with each other so much, or at least not about their feelings about their mother. Nice therapeutic technique! More in keeping with the type and power level of stuff we've seen Zimmy do before, also. Just a little more control than she normally bothers with. I hope it's something like this, because if we're really down to one Annie, and it sticks, then that Annie will have to go do the work of a psychopomp eventually. In my heart of hearts, I've always thought that one Annie would become a psychopomp and the other would stay and... but that's enough exposure to my headspace for now. Yeah, there are a lot of possibilities, but what I consider most likely right now is that Zimmy's temporarily pushed them together, and the conflict that was going on externally has moved to being internal. I think Zimmy has to continue "pushing" to keep them together, and as soon as she stops, this temporary state will end and they'll come apart again. Now, whether this is in reality or in a Zimmyspace illusion, I don't know – and I'm not sure exactly what the difference between those things is anymore – but my point is that it's temporary, or so I think at least. The two Annies are sharing a brain for now, so everything one thinks, the other can sense. This might be why we keep focusing on Renard – they can communicate mentally through Renard already, but perhaps right now they're doing so on a much deeper level – perhaps Zimmy's using their connection to Renard as a conduit for what she wanted to do. This might be a reason why Renard is so calm about it all – it's all happening via him, so he knows exactly what's going on. What we are seeing might just be a visual metaphor for that, just as Zimmy's eyes aren't actually covered in black gunk; they're just drawn that way. |
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Post by Gemminie on Mar 7, 2021 5:37:54 GMT
Regarding your last comment, I don't think there is any alternate timeline with a dead Annie anywhere. I think "The Thousand Eyes" made it clear that the past was not changed - Kat just accomplished what had already happened, she only did it from a few years later (in what is usually called a stable time loop, one of the very few time travel concepts that can remotely work without butchering the last shred of logic). What I consider dark is the possibility of two separate personalities having forcibly been merged with each other, destroying both original personalities and forcing two minds which are six months apart in age (again, as I said, that's huge difference for teenagers) to become one, which would amount to double murder and creation of a traumatized new person. Agree on the dead-Annie timeline not existing. I don't think it does, given in-comic evidence. Don't you? It's now been mentioned multiple times that at some point there was a version of Kat who was so distraught over Annie's death that she had to break time. And that if Kat hadn't met Annie she'd have been very dark and would have taken the Court in a dark direction. I have to wonder whether we'll see that dark possibility, perhaps as some kind of " Star Trek mirror-universe" or "It's a Wonderful Life" story. I could see that, if the whole thing had ever been portrayed as a "split Annie" situation, like the original Star Trek episode where Kirk is split by a transporter accident into his good and evil halves, neither of which can survive alone ("The Enemy Within"). (Sorry to invoke Trek twice in one post.) But it's been described more than once as an Annie from an alternate universe dragged into this one. Yes, Annie was in the Ether mentally during that entire conversation with Loup, so what was going on in the physical world was kind of disconnected, and her hair did grow for six months -- half an inch a month on average, they say. Actually, it looks as if it grew faster than that, but maybe Annie's hair just grows faster than average. But she didn't eat or drink. I suppose Loup could have simply used his powers to keep Annie's body alive, supplying it with nutrients, but if time were passing normally for her body, why would he have needed to keep her there for six months or send back another Annie from a duplicated timeline? It's really not very clear. How could time be normal just for her hair growth but frozen for everything else? Tom's explanation seems to be "The Ether is weird." Anyway, your point is that in some sense she experienced those six months of time, so she's not really six months younger than Court Annie, and the idea that Forest Annie may be six months younger has never been mentioned at all in the story as far as I'm aware. |
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Post by maxptc on Mar 7, 2021 6:18:31 GMT
I mean all the smart people make a lot of good points, but I'm like sure Annie is back to being one person and the reason neither of them belonged is because "both" of them only belonged when they are one, a single Annie. Just kinda fits how I've read the narrative or tone or what have you.
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caber
Junior Member
Posts: 77
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Post by caber on Mar 7, 2021 16:13:29 GMT
This will probably be made irrelevant tomorrow, but I would like to note that a lot of our information on the status of two Annies came from Clippy... but why do we trust him? He hasn't demonstrated himself to be trustworthy, in fact quite the opposite.
It wouldn't be the first time that etheric beings have been manipulative to suit their ends.
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Post by todd on Mar 7, 2021 22:23:33 GMT
This will probably be made irrelevant tomorrow, but I would like to note that a lot of our information on the status of two Annies came from Clippy... but why do we trust him? He hasn't demonstrated himself to be trustworthy, in fact quite the opposite. It wouldn't be the first time that etheric beings have been manipulative to suit their ends. That's a good point; we saw it with the ones who were misleading Anthony. And in light of Kat's projects, many etheric beings might well want to control the path she's taking. |
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Post by hp on Mar 8, 2021 1:49:51 GMT
It seems Zimmy fused the Annies into one and that launched Fuzanne into some kind of long acid trip. The continuity inconsistencies don't seem like dissociation or broken perspective, but a time montage. Like they're standing by while Annie is tripping on her new condition. Maybe monday's page we'll have a glimpse of how's that going from Annie's perspective
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Post by kayback on Mar 8, 2021 8:20:31 GMT
It seems Zimmy fused the Annies into one and that launched Fuzanne into some kind of long acid trip. The continuity inconsistencies don't seem like dissociation or broken perspective, but a time montage. Like they're standing by while Annie is tripping on her new condition. Maybe monday's page we'll have a glimpse of how's that going from Annie's perspective Yeah. While Tom may be leading red herrings or trying to distract I honestly think the time shown is a little longer than instantaneous. Annie comes out, sees Zim and Rey, stares at hands and processes, sees Zim and Gamma, sees has approached, Rey then moves closer to talk. I highly doubt there is any teleportation being used. |
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Also I've seen the sentiment (here and elsewhere) that this was "too easy." I dunno, I have a feeling that there's going to be a lot still to come concerning this (again, if we're taking this at face-value and it's truly what has happened), so we really have no idea how easy or cleanly this was done.
