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Post by drmemory on Nov 1, 2021 4:33:54 GMT
I seem to be on a roll with my elaborate conspiracy theories, so figured I may as well dig into one of my favorite pages ever. This.
This... is probably another wildspec-type thread. Sorry. The issue is that we know a lot more than we used to, but a lot of stuff is only partially revealed, so we have many hints but not that many answers. So this is a collection of theories about what that page really meant, based on what we know now. Which may change tomorrow!
First panel: Saving Antimony, but also yourself. The saving Annie part is pretty obvious (I think) and was resolved in that chapter. Kat saved her from her death plummet off the bridge. The part about saving herself, we haven't seen yet explicitly. Best guess - having a real connection to Annie, with all that comes from that, prevented her from being a mindless tool, either for the court or for Omega. Or, from tearing the world apart in her rage, with an army of controlled robots (and perhaps computers). Or worse! Kat can create robots with any sort of physical body she wants - what if she made weapons? Think about how bad this could go... We really want a loving, human Kat...
Second panel: profound changes to the world. Kat's changes - the androids are at least part of it. They are human enough to leave the court, and won't be kept secret forever once they start to do so. That seems like it will cause some rather profound changes to the world! If Kat wasn't a good person, this could go some really dark directions, especially if she can control them or even if they are just linked to her or even just worship her. Annie's changes - Don't know? Maybe widespread knowledge of the ether? Honestly haven't thought about it much, too fascinated by the simmering Kat/robot/Omega plots.
Fifth panel: We only deal with temporal affairs. When this came out, I really thought it was an error or a lie, as the translator specifically told Kat and Annie they had to talk to the temporal affairs department to fix being shifted, but now... I'm not sure what to think. If the norns lied, it's the only one I've noticed. When they didn't want to provide other kinds of information, they just didn't give it. Our best info on what being shifted means came from them, too. Yet, Zimmy was able to merge the two Annies, which honestly doesn't seem reasonable if they were two separate people from different timelines, as Arbiter Saslamel implied. He specifically said that creatures such as Coyote can create additional timelines and that Annie had been shifted out of hers. So, like, if neither Annie belonged here, and Loup did the shifting... does that mean that he created two timelines and pulled Annies from both? Or that we were already in a timeline that wasn't the original thanks to Kat's actions in the Norn chapter, and he only created one? Or maybe he just used the one from the latest Kateration (Kat iteration) and one more Annie from a previous Kateration. In any case, when Zimmy merged them, it seems clear to me that she really did merge two Annies from different timelines, ending up with one Annie with both sets of memories and double power. Cool!
Which brings us all the way back to that comment about only dealing with temporal affairs, and the contradiction with what the Arbiter said through the Translator. If this wasn't a temporal affair, what was it? Maybe a paradox isn't considered a temporal affair, once it's in place? Maybe they knew what Zimmy would do later, out of compassion, and decided to permit it? That actually sounds plausible to me. If the norns are the Department of Temporal Affairs, perhaps they are restricted to doing only time-related things, and didn't want to kill an Annie, nor a whole timeline. They probably also didn't want to modify the timeline itself, as it would have led to Annie dying, and apparently a much, much worse Kat situation. I imagine we're seeing the best outcome to date of a massive mess of time loops. I suppose I'm suggesting that the second Annie was indeed created by Loup making a new timeline and plucking her out of it, or maybe TWO new timelines and plucking both out of them, but that the current situation with those Annies merged by Zimmy is the best outcome of a LOT of really bad ones.
Fourth panel: You wouldn't happen to be able to do anything about THIS, could you? I'm saying that the only things they could have done would have made things a lot worse than they are. Most likely, they only have time-based solutions and couldn't have like merged two Annies from different timelines, as Zimmy did. In short, Zimmy's powers are more like the Reality Stone than the Time Stone (in Marvel terms). 
If, by some chance, it turns out that what Zimmy did isn't permanent, at least we'll probably get two Annies back, rather than one Annie and a destroyed timeline. What happened to the timeline(s) where Annie was pulled from probably isn't great.
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Post by Druplesnubb on Nov 1, 2021 12:05:03 GMT
The profound changes caused by Kat's time travel are already clearly visible at this point in the comic. The point of "Down That Road" is that it was only thanks to Kat changing the timeline that Kat went down the road of, among other things, freeing Jeanne and creating new bodies for the robots. Both of these are already having huge effects on the Court and Forest, the entire Loup debacle for one. But we later learn that there was also a second road Kat could have walked down, and in fact it was only her interference in the timeline to save Annie that prevented her from going down it. We don't know the details of this alternate path yet, but it seems to have been this Kat who first learned how travel through time. So if you combine the effects of Kat's current path, with undoing the effects of whatever Kat's original path was, it becomes fairly clear what is meant by "profound changes". As for what changes Annie will bring, besides from changing Kat's fate simply by surviving, she's already done some very unorthodox things as the Forest Medium that could pave the way for a better and more open relationship between the Court and the Forest, she helped free Jeanne, and will likely be instrumental in solving the conflict with Coyote/Loup and the Court/Omega. |
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Post by Isildur on Nov 9, 2021 22:16:14 GMT
For whatever it's worth, throwing in a notion of mine that I posted previously: Surely that's not the case, but...wow. Imagine the clusterf*** if both timelines were just fused. What I've been wondering is whether maybe there never were two timelines, outside of the Forest. (It doesn't exactly gel with what Saslamel's interpreter said, but it's the most satisfying interpretation I can think of so far.) We already know that Loup can affect things in the Forest as a sort of separate stream from everything else (recall the freeze). What if time was only split into two streamlets in the Forest itself? Each Annie walked off a divergent streamlet back on to the single-stream Court side. Then Loup remerged the Forest time streams (there wouldn't have been much to even reconcile with most things frozen on that side -- I'm not clear on how frozen the elves were.) This would include remerging two versions of himself -- talkative Loup and shoo-Annie-away Loup (the one Court Annie called "Ysengrin", for lack of knowing better). Annie could have been the last unmerged element of those two Forest timelines. Perhaps this sorta, maybe, kinda explains a bit why the Norns couldn't/wouldn't help with Annie's twinning predicament. (The "Sorry, we only only deal with 'temporal affairs'" brush-off was very, very strange, given that Saslamel's interpreter said 'temporal affairs' was exactly the department they needed to deal with to get more information about the issue. Why wouldn't the Annies remark on that contradiction, instead of shrugging and saying "Worth a shot"?) As far as the Norns were concerned, perhaps this was a more localized disturbance that was already destined to resolve itself, rather than requiring intervention. |
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Post by jda on Nov 10, 2021 9:03:40 GMT
The profound changes caused by Kat's time travel are already clearly visible at this point in the comic. The point of "Down That Road" is that it was only thanks to Kat changing the timeline that Kat went down the road of, among other things, freeing Jeanne and creating new bodies for the robots. Both of these are already having huge effects on the Court and Forest, the entire Loup debacle for one. But we later learn that there was also a second road Kat could have walked down, and in fact it was only her interference in the timeline to save Annie that prevented her from going down it. We don't know the details of this alternate path yet, but it seems to have been this Kat who first learned how travel through time. So if you combine the effects of Kat's current path, with undoing the effects of whatever Kat's original path was, it becomes fairly clear what is meant by "profound changes". As for what changes Annie will bring, besides from changing Kat's fate simply by surviving, she's already done some very unorthodox things as the Forest Medium that could pave the way for a better and more open relationship between the Court and the Forest, she helped free Jeanne, and will likely be instrumental in solving the conflict with Coyote/Loup and the Court/Omega. Anytime now Kat will reach thru her "laptop", grab a translucent multicolored thingy, no larger than a SD card, and while looking Annie in the eyes she says "So Annie, would you remember if someone told you where this so called Seed Bismuthe was planted?" |
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Post by dramastix on Nov 10, 2021 13:33:36 GMT
Honestly, I think so much has happened to Annie that Saslamel was confused. 1) she was saved by Kat, which wasn't supposed to happen, so she was shifted into this timeline, but because it's a stable paradox (probably, unless there is an ur-Kat somewhere who lost her Annie and is wreaking havoc), no one had bothered to notice until she got 2) split by Loup.
So when Saslamel looked at her, he only noticed the effects of Loup and didn't realize that she had already been bumped out of her timeline before the Two Annies happened. So assumed that temporal affairs would be able to fix her, not realizing she has two things going on.
Then fast forward to the Norns, who facilitated the closure of the paradox, but whatever Loup did wasn't really a temporal shift. Or much of one. I think both Annies came from the timeline we've been following, but the only reason they're time shifted from one another was the mess in the forest. Example of Coyote's imperfect gifts, only for once it ultimately benefited Annie. So they weren't lying either.
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Post by sebastian on Nov 11, 2021 8:04:00 GMT
Saslamel didn't lie, he was just wrong, Annie spliting wasn't a temporal affair, it was ... something else. Something that Zimmie already see happen before and from the pictogram it doesn't seems like the creation of a separate timeline but the splitting of a person in two parts (and she was able to fix it, she probably knew what she was talking about). |
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