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Post by arf on Sept 6, 2023 7:11:55 GMT
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Post by blahzor on Sept 6, 2023 7:34:29 GMT
Eyes closed Annie. Uh oh
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laaaa
Full Member
Posts: 214
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Post by laaaa on Sept 6, 2023 7:40:15 GMT
...Wait, this wasn't caused by the Court. This was caused by Coyote's machinations. And KAT. IT WAS CAUSED BY KAT. If she hadn't made the New People, Loup wouldn't have gone into a rage!!!
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Post by blahzor on Sept 6, 2023 8:27:52 GMT
...Wait, this wasn't caused by the Court. This was caused by Coyote's machinations. And KAT. IT WAS CAUSED BY KAT. If she hadn't made the New People, Loup wouldn't have gone into a rage!!! She wasn't even there so this makes me believe the voice isn't actually Kat |
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Post by cassini on Sept 6, 2023 9:58:28 GMT
She wasn't even there so this makes me believe the voice isn't actually Kat Should never listen to the Phone Guy |
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Post by todd on Sept 6, 2023 12:52:48 GMT
...Wait, this wasn't caused by the Court. This was caused by Coyote's machinations. And KAT. IT WAS CAUSED BY KAT. If she hadn't made the New People, Loup wouldn't have gone into a rage!!! I'd say that the Court's machinations helped. Its actions towards the etheric world made Ysengrin/Loup increasingly hostile towards the Court and angry, which helped to place him in a state of mind where Coyote could easily manipulate him. |
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Post by Igniz on Sept 6, 2023 13:04:32 GMT
 ...Wait, this wasn't caused by the Court. This was caused by Coyote's machinations. +1  |
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Post by sosleepy on Sept 6, 2023 14:48:36 GMT
Kat used "Morale boost lvl 7"! It was super effective! Annie's spirits have risen and her ATK against "etheric" and "Coyote" type enemies is up↑↑↑.
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Post by Gemminie on Sept 6, 2023 14:49:27 GMT
Kat was just telling Annie over the radio that Annie's the closest thing to a Coyote/Zimmy expert she knows about, and today she adds that the Court's obviously doing a bang-up job of it. Kat implies that she thinks Zimmy's a monster, but Annie denies this, while not denying anything else Kat's saying. Kat goes on to say that she wants to help as much as she can, but she can't deal with stuff that has to do with the Ether, and when it comes to that, Annie's the first person she'd turn to. This seems to make Annie feel much better and say that they'll get through this, looking outward resolutely.
Annie and Renard are still standing stationary, with some of the New People in the background carefully putting something (presumably the SeedPUs they're finding) into a box. The background still features snippets of the scenes we've been seeing, and just about every frame has a blotch of barely-noticeable discoloration in it.
I think the discoloration blobs, which have been happening since the chapter started, will get more pronounced as Annie gets closer to the center of the distortion – and if she's heading for the shore, she'll have to get closer, though she'll probably intend to skirt the actual center. They're probably a form of foreshadowing. Maybe we'll find out what's causing them. I have to wonder whether she'll actually make it to the shore or whether she'll get involved in what's happening in there. After all, she's got Renard with her, and he's still carrying the tooth for her. Coyote will probably still try to manipulate events so she stabs Loup with it, as that's the reason why he gave that to her, after all. Whether that's going to happen in this chapter or not, I have no idea.
Are we headed toward the end of the story? That is, will the present distortion predicament be resolved as part of the end of the entire story? I really don't know. I kind of don't think so, because it doesn't seem to form a direct part of Kat's arc, the other major arc of the story. I think this is another step forward for Annie's arc, though. Kat's taken a pretty big step toward merging with technology, but we haven't seen her take more steps, and in this distortion where technology isn't working reliably I don't know whether she'd risk taking more steps. It's still kind of suspicious that we haven't seen Kat this chapter, though.
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Post by Gemini Jim on Sept 6, 2023 15:21:14 GMT
you know, as far as I can tell, she's still standing around in the foreground of the ZimCoyote DistortionLand. Not that I really blame her for wanting to analyze the situation. We've gone Into The Distortion, but we haven't gone Across the Distortion (and definitely not Beyond the Distortion) yet |
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Post by shhwip on Sept 6, 2023 16:46:58 GMT
 This is explicitly what you would put in your comic if they were not in fact going to get through it |
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Post by pyradonis on Sept 6, 2023 20:57:37 GMT
Does anyone else find it weird how smug Annie looks in this page? Especially in panel 1. The last one I can get behind as Kat has no given her morale boosting speech, but then her chin looks pointy enough to stab someone with it. Anyway, I can't wait for the page that shows how instead of Kat, Annie was actually talking to Eglamore the whole time.
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Post by bicarbonat on Sept 6, 2023 23:38:48 GMT
Kat used "Morale boost lvl 7"! It was super effective! Annie's spirits have risen and her ATK against "etheric" and "Coyote" type enemies is up↑↑↑. Kat's glibly uplifting words and Annie's closed-eye optimistic response feels straight out of anime canon. In fact, my first thought was a certain character from the anime "Saiki K," Kaido, who is just as prone to making magnificent little speeches of high potential as he is to eating absolute dirt when the rubber meets the road (honestly, most of the class is some kind of delusional). |
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Post by drmemory on Sept 7, 2023 0:15:38 GMT
I just wanted to point out that Annie did NOT say "Coyote isn't a monster." !!!
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Post by Isildur on Sept 7, 2023 10:37:27 GMT
I just wanted to point out that Annie did NOT say "Coyote isn't a monster." !!! Yeah, I noticed, and figured that since he did just murder Lana (at least as far as Annie knows), it's not shocking she wouldn't defend him. Speaking of Lana's apparent demise, I found Annie's cheery optimism here a little creepy, in light of that. A stiff upper lip is all well and good, but I found her smile off-putting given what just happened. There's the potential implication that New People don't truly matter enough to spend more than a second's grief on. This sense is only added to by her unwarranted confidence (or projected confidence, at least). You'll all get through this? Well, Lana sure didn't seem to. Does her example not count, due to what she was? Though I'm guessing that wasn't really the characterization intent behind the writing (I think the intention was to show Annie being determined, supportive, and encouraging), so I'll just have to roll with this incongruity. |
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Post by sosleepy on Sept 7, 2023 15:09:15 GMT
Does anyone else find it weird how smug Annie looks in this page? Especially in panel 1. The last one I can get behind as Kat has no given her morale boosting speech, but then her chin looks pointy enough to stab someone with it. Anyway, I can't wait for the page that shows how instead of Kat, Annie was actually talking to Eglamore the whole time. The one and only Coyote and Zimmy expert is coming in to deal with this terrible crisis with magnificent confidence and stunning elegance! The survivor of Zimmyngham, the mighty forest medium, half elemental, and the only person to ever live who... slapped the allmighty Coyotes butt! She can afford to be smug fufufu~ |
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Post by sosleepy on Sept 7, 2023 15:19:54 GMT
Kat used "Morale boost lvl 7"! It was super effective! Annie's spirits have risen and her ATK against "etheric" and "Coyote" type enemies is up↑↑↑. Kat's glibly uplifting words and Annie's closed-eye optimistic response feels straight out of anime canon. In fact, my first thought was a certain character from the anime "Saiki K," Kaido, who is just as prone to making magnificent little speeches of high potential as he is to eating absolute dirt when the rubber meets the road (honestly, most of the class is some kind of delusional). My exact thoughts right there, hah. After the last two pages, I'm absolutely sure this won't end well. To be honest, it already is since Coyote ate Lana. And I can't even imagine what happened to such an explosive combination as Coyote, Loup, and Zimmy. I wonder if they have merged into something the moment those two crashed into Zimmy, and quote, "Zimmy isn't a monster" might age rather poorly. |
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Post by drmemory on Sept 7, 2023 17:41:29 GMT
I just wanted to point out that Annie did NOT say "Coyote isn't a monster." !!! Yeah, I noticed, and figured that since he did just murder Lana (at least as far as Annie knows), it's not shocking she wouldn't defend him. Speaking of Lana's apparent demise, I found Annie's cheery optimism here a little creepy, in light of that. A stiff upper lip is all well and good, but I found her smile off-putting given what just happened. There's the potential implication that New People don't truly matter enough to spend more than a second's grief on. This sense is only added to by her unwarranted confidence (or projected confidence, at least). You'll all get through this? Well, Lana sure didn't seem to. Does her example not count, due to what she was? Though I'm guessing that wasn't really the characterization intent behind the writing (I think the intention was to show Annie being determined, supportive, and encouraging), so I'll just have to roll with this incongruity. Not sure. I think it's a least partially because of the kind words from her best friend - we haven't really seen Annie get a lot of those. For once she really is the expert! I bet it's nice to feel warm fuzzies about people recognizing that.
Another factor is... Annie isn't really human. Not entirely. Not sure how that plays into this but maybe she's starting to get a bit more disconnected from the issues of mortals.
It's even possible she knows Lana isn't really dead (if I'm right about her really being sent to the toy store or something). Not sure exactly what the powers of the psychopomps are, but we have seen a lot of evidence for the NP actually being living beings. If Lana were killed right in front of Annie, would Annie see her spirit? Not sure. Honestly, I think it's more likely it just slipped her mind for a minute, as she basks in the glow of being able to help people and being recognized as the expert on something.  |
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Post by Gemminie on Sept 7, 2023 18:28:36 GMT
Does anyone else find it weird how smug Annie looks in this page? Especially in panel 1. The last one I can get behind as Kat has no given her morale boosting speech, but then her chin looks pointy enough to stab someone with it. Anyway, I can't wait for the page that shows how instead of Kat, Annie was actually talking to Eglamore the whole time. I didn't take that as a smug expression. I think it's meant to go with her "Zimmy isn't a monster" response to Kat – they've been over that so many times that Kat's probably joking, Annie knows it, and Kat knows she knows it. |
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Post by Isildur on Sept 7, 2023 19:26:35 GMT
Yeah, I noticed, and figured that since he did just murder Lana (at least as far as Annie knows), it's not shocking she wouldn't defend him. Speaking of Lana's apparent demise, I found Annie's cheery optimism here a little creepy, in light of that. A stiff upper lip is all well and good, but I found her smile off-putting given what just happened. There's the potential implication that New People don't truly matter enough to spend more than a second's grief on. This sense is only added to by her unwarranted confidence (or projected confidence, at least). You'll all get through this? Well, Lana sure didn't seem to. Does her example not count, due to what she was? Though I'm guessing that wasn't really the characterization intent behind the writing (I think the intention was to show Annie being determined, supportive, and encouraging), so I'll just have to roll with this incongruity. Not sure. I think it's a least partially because of the kind words from her best friend - we haven't really seen Annie get a lot of those. For once she really is the expert! I bet it's nice to feel warm fuzzies about people recognizing that.
Another factor is... Annie isn't really human. Not entirely. Not sure how that plays into this but maybe she's starting to get a bit more disconnected from the issues of mortals.
It's even possible she knows Lana isn't really dead (if I'm right about her really being sent to the toy store or something). Not sure exactly what the powers of the psychopomps are, but we have seen a lot of evidence for the NP actually being living beings. If Lana were killed right in front of Annie, would Annie see her spirit? Not sure. Honestly, I think it's more likely it just slipped her mind for a minute, as she basks in the glow of being able to help people and being recognized as the expert on something. Yeah, in-universe, I think it's something like what you say. (Except I don't think Annie suspects, even at a subconscious level, that Lana is alive.) That is, I don't actually think there was authorial intent to make Annie seem callous, in this case. (And I'm not much into the Barthean "death of the author" approach to literary criticism, so I'm not really going to get stuck, in a long-term way, on thinking about what my negative impression means about Annie's feelings, since I don't really think that was the actual authorial intention. It was just a passing remark on something that felt off to me.) Being sent to the toy store doesn't fit as a *full* explanation for Lana's boxed preservation, unless Zimmy's distortions can return someone from death a few seconds after they already died (which I doubt, as powerful as the distortions are). My guess is Coyote deliberately trapped Lana in his interior for further examination and/or as a useful hostage to hold in reserve to manipulate Loup. I don't think Annie is generally distancing herself from mere mortals as a result of learning about her fire-spirit lineage (nor do I think she has an innate psychological tendency in that direction as a result of her constitution). If anything, I think she's generally been portrayed as someone whose biggest strength may be the ability to bridge gaps of empathy and acceptance that others couldn't, on their own. |
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Post by pyradonis on Sept 7, 2023 21:23:46 GMT
I just wanted to point out that Annie did NOT say "Coyote isn't a monster." !!! Well, it's about friggin' time she realized what a goddamn a-hole he is.
Does anyone else find it weird how smug Annie looks in this page? Especially in panel 1. The last one I can get behind as Kat has no given her morale boosting speech, but then her chin looks pointy enough to stab someone with it. Anyway, I can't wait for the page that shows how instead of Kat, Annie was actually talking to Eglamore the whole time. The one and only Coyote and Zimmy expert is coming in to deal with this terrible crisis with magnificent confidence and stunning elegance! The survivor of Zimmyngham, the mighty forest medium, half elemental, and the only person to ever live who... slapped the allmighty Coyotes butt! She can afford to be smug fufufu~ said it much better than me. The page itself totally works, it's the mood swing when put directly behind the pages directly before that feels jarring.
Does anyone else find it weird how smug Annie looks in this page? Especially in panel 1. The last one I can get behind as Kat has no given her morale boosting speech, but then her chin looks pointy enough to stab someone with it. Anyway, I can't wait for the page that shows how instead of Kat, Annie was actually talking to Eglamore the whole time. I didn't take that as a smug expression. I think it's meant to go with her "Zimmy isn't a monster" response to Kat – they've been over that so many times that Kat's probably joking, Annie knows it, and Kat knows she knows it. Annie just told Kat she saw someone they both knew getting killed - is that really the time for joking? |
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Post by sosleepy on Sept 7, 2023 23:52:15 GMT
The one and only Coyote and Zimmy expert is coming in to deal with this terrible crisis with magnificent confidence and stunning elegance! The survivor of Zimmyngham, the mighty forest medium, half elemental, and the only person to ever live who... slapped the allmighty Coyotes butt! She can afford to be smug fufufu~ said it much better than me. The page itself totally works, it's the mood swing when put directly behind the pages directly before that feels jarring. Oh I agree. The mood change is rather drastic here. I just loved the page on its own in this case. And it's just like that anime thing "we're in a middle of a tragedy, but still in high spirits because it's not the time to grieve". Though I have a guess why Annie could get past Coyote eating Lana so quickly. She actively communicated with psychopomps and, therefore, the dead for a long time in her life. Growing up in a hospital while constantly seeing the spirits of the dead and perhaps seeing corpses or people in near-death state (it's a hospital after all), plus her knowledge of life after death (though i'm not sure if that could actually be called "life") might have played a role there. It's similliar to being a pathologist. You still acknowledge that death is a tragedy, but your perception is getting a little dull over time because death becomes routine. That doesn't involve close people like her mother and Mort of course. And Annie wasn't that close with Lana after all. ...you know, the more I look at this page, the more I think it's not smugness being portrayed, but rather confidence and readiness to do the "thing" and deal with Coyote. "Save the day" so to say. Considering she really does have the experience and is way more at peace with herself that before. |
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Post by arf on Sept 8, 2023 2:54:52 GMT
In comic time, Coyote ate Lana about five minutes ago, and Kat has only just heard about it. Even without little distractions like a level 8 etheric distortion, it takes time for things like that to sink in |
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Post by drmemory on Sept 8, 2023 4:11:32 GMT
Being sent to the toy store doesn't fit as a *full* explanation for Lana's boxed preservation, unless Zimmy's distortions can return someone from death a few seconds after they already died (which I doubt, as powerful as the distortions are). My guess is Coyote deliberately trapped Lana in his interior for further examination and/or as a useful hostage to hold in reserve to manipulate Loup. What I'm suggesting is that Coyote didn't actually kill Lana, but captured her and stored her, with the intent of pissing off Loup so he'd fight. Which worked pretty well. The toy store part is a comment I made about Tom's splash page where he showed a creepy-looking Lana in a box - I theorized that she would eventually be found in a toy box in the toy store. The toy store is where a lot of the excursions into Zimmy's world seem to end up, and she looked kinda like a doll...
To be clear on the Coyote part of this, we saw a "chomp" but not a "chew". No debris. Also, no Lana spirit was visible to Annie, but we still aren't sure if it would be. I suspect that when someone dies in front of Annie, she'll see SOMETHING at least. It may not be her responsibility to take care of the specific deceased party but I'd think she'd still see the spirit and/or the responsible psychopomp. Unless spirits just poof into the ether automatically if there isn't anything unusual about their deaths, like a psychopomp scheduling dispute or someone dying before their time. So my theory is that Coyote drained her power and stashed her in a box, where she will eventually turn up.
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Post by arf on Sept 8, 2023 5:46:58 GMT
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Post by Isildur on Sept 8, 2023 18:01:56 GMT
Being sent to the toy store doesn't fit as a *full* explanation for Lana's boxed preservation, unless Zimmy's distortions can return someone from death a few seconds after they already died (which I doubt, as powerful as the distortions are). My guess is Coyote deliberately trapped Lana in his interior for further examination and/or as a useful hostage to hold in reserve to manipulate Loup. What I'm suggesting is that Coyote didn't actually kill Lana, but captured her and stored her, with the intent of pissing off Loup so he'd fight. Which worked pretty well. The toy store part is a comment I made about Tom's splash page where he showed a creepy-looking Lana in a box - I theorized that she would eventually be found in a toy box in the toy store. The toy store is where a lot of the excursions into Zimmy's world seem to end up, and she looked kinda like a doll...
To be clear on the Coyote part of this, we saw a "chomp" but not a "chew". No debris. Also, no Lana spirit was visible to Annie, but we still aren't sure if it would be. I suspect that when someone dies in front of Annie, she'll see SOMETHING at least. It may not be her responsibility to take care of the specific deceased party but I'd think she'd still see the spirit and/or the responsible psychopomp. Unless spirits just poof into the ether automatically if there isn't anything unusual about their deaths, like a psychopomp scheduling dispute or someone dying before their time. So my theory is that Coyote drained her power and stashed her in a box, where she will eventually turn up.
Ah, yes, I've also been operating under the assumption that Coyote captured, rather than killed Lana, as she appeared to be fully intact in that chapter end panel. A question is why, though — killing her would seem simpler, if the goal was just to rile Loup/Jerrek right then, so presumably Coyote thought she could still come in handy, later. (I don't have much confidence in Coyote abstaining from murder, here, purely out of ethical compunctions, given some of the earlier events he set in motion without apparent qualms. Though perhaps he still wants to be able to restore himself at least somewhat to Annie's good graces, if necessary.) I'll grant that Annie said "ate", not "killed", but it really doesn't yet seem to me like Annie remotely suspects Lana's survival. That is, assuming this is indeed Annie — and *just* Annie... not Coyote in disguise or some distortion switcheroo or merge. Between this page and the next, Annie's attitude does seem a bit off. That is, with the next page's tin-eared "The more the merrier" remark from Annie right after NPs glumly express a desire to honor their seemingly murdered friend's memory, there does seem to be a pattern emerging, as arf noted in that page's thread. As for Lana having wound up as a doll at the toy store, maybe. 🤷♂️ |
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laaaa
Full Member
Posts: 214
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Post by laaaa on Oct 10, 2023 19:52:19 GMT
...Wait, this wasn't caused by the Court. This was caused by Coyote's machinations. And KAT. IT WAS CAUSED BY KAT. If she hadn't made the New People, Loup wouldn't have gone into a rage!!! She wasn't even there so this makes me believe the voice isn't actually Kat Maybe... Kat is no longer somewhere in the current ZimCourt... Maybe she's... everywhere.... |
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