What's it like to be Antimony right now?

[DonDueed]

It must be very strange to be a recombined person.

We know that Annie remembers everything that happened to both of her.  But think what that must be like!

For starters, she remembers both going to the forest and coming back after a short time, and going into the forest, meeting Loup, having a long conversation, and then returning to the Court -- only to discover six months have elapsed.

She also remembers spending that six months in the Court with her father.

Then, she remembers meeting herself... from both sides of that meeting!  What would it be like to remember both making a remark, and hearing someone else make that remark?  How do such memories even work?  Does she remember both sides of the experience at the same time, in a sort of superposition?  Or can she choose to recall the conversation from either side?  Or does the point of view keep flipping back and forth?

One thing I'm pretty sure of -- I wouldn't have been able to handle a recombination like that nearly as well as Annie did at the end of "Find Yourself".  Forget staring at my hands; I think I would have been curled up in the fetal position for a good long while trying to sort it all out.

No wonder "people" are concerned about Annie's mental state...

[V]

Hmm, interesting thought experiment!

I would say the memories are mostly those of Court Annie, simply because there's many more of them. Forest Annie mixes in everything the hour or two with Loup and the way back, and then most experiences were shared again.

I believe that human memory focuses mainly on some key events and their circumstances, and even so requires active effort to reconstruct the latter. So say in a dialogue, she would remember what was said, and how she felt about it, abstracted away from the first/second person view, unless she tried to reassociate some facial expressions and such. It could make sense to her as an inner dialogue. The paradoxical situation at the moment of splitting - back then neither of her had no extra reason to remember it second for second. If she focused on Ysengrin showing up and urging her to leave, that's what she would remember in detail. If she focused on seeing the totems of Ysengrin or Coyote or visiting the ether, then that, as a separate, unrelated memory.

Also, that's a LOT of memories flooding in at the same time! It's possible her brain just had to free up some space, so the things that became nonsensical were the first to go, like dreams in the morning.

[V]

But yeah, I also think that things are not as rosy as Annie is letting them look like. That cautious grin in the beginning of the chapter could hide a lot of things. Given that we've been waiting for Annie's introspection for some 25 pages now, we could be just being lulled into a false sense of security. I'm afraid what comes when we're through with the Broken Man.

[Gemminie]

Apr 30, 2021 19:32:48 GMT V said:

But yeah, I also think that things are not as rosy as Annie is letting them look like. That cautious grin in the beginning of the chapter could hide a lot of things. Given that we've been waiting for Annie's introspection for some 25 pages now, we could be just being lulled into a false sense of security. I'm afraid what comes when we're through with the Broken Man.

Oh, I definitely agree. I'm 99% certain that the recombination of the Annies at the end of chapter 79 wasn't the end of the "two Annies" story arc, just a further development of it. The fact that we aren't seeing anything just means that we can go around and look at other parts of the GC world for a bit. But Annie was our original viewpoint character, and she's still the main focus of the story, although we've often been drifting away from her in recent chapters. I think soon we'll be right back in the thick of the battle that is being Annie, and we'll see just what she has to contend with now.