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Post by Angry Individual on Jun 26, 2024 17:40:55 GMT
Off vibes aside, I don't particularly blame Meg here from feeling the way she does.
Out of all the people who are "going to the new world" with the Court, how many of them played a part in the machinations of this Plan? Probably few, to be perfectly honest, if its a mass exodus of people. So then it becomes a battle of "people who I worked with most of my life and many other innocents" versus "girl who I saw while in a haze of uncontrollable thoughts".
One could even argue that Zimmy had it better than Meg up until the point where the Court saved her. After all, she couldn't even move and had to speak through animals just to exist. Now that basically everything she worked for is in motion, why would she stop it?
Maybe Annie can convince her, though. Even if it's "just one person", Zimmy still deserves happiness like everyone else.
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Post by Gemminie on Jun 26, 2024 17:52:29 GMT
Huh. Lots of us, me included, were taking it for granted that Omega would refuse to help because of her own state of existing, but it seems she wants to be the Court's employee of the month instead. (She's the first character in the comic who said something like "I love the Court.", right?)
But indeed, of course Annie wants to help Zimmy, but I wonder if she would care about the Court's plan if it didn't involve using a living Ether generator.
I'm not sure if "employee of the month" is accurate. She's been the main informant of the Court, the one being who could give away information to determine their actions, and she had an agenda. Not a malicious one, but still. If there has ever been a human personification of the Court, it's her. I see it more as a queen who is quite satisfied with her work achievements and is feeling grateful towards her minions now that it's time for her much awaited retirement. Also, I'm wondering if we are meant to sympathise with Omega and her point of view here. Omega seems callous and cold but not cruel nor sadistic. She knows every horrible thing the Court has done, she knows about Zimmy, she knows about Jeanne, she knows about every other skeleton in the Court's closet, and even if she didn't personally direct or facilitate some of those choices, she still is aware of them and deems them acceptable. This means that she knows all the horrible things that have happened, and all the good things, and weights them in the Court's favor. ...Those must be quite a lot of good things. It really is a trolley problem haha. If you were omniscient and knew you could keep thousands of people safe and alive by torturing one Jeanne, would you do it? (No) But did Omega know about Jeanne? I mean, it seems pretty clear that Jeanne was trapped there when the founders of the Court were still alive, and it also seems pretty clear that Omega wasn't brought in until later, when those people were no longer around. She's said she can't see the Ether; she can only see its effects, so she can't have been able to see Jeanne, only a skeleton at the bottom of the river with a weird arrow in it, along with the sudden mysterious death of creatures from the Forest that attempted to cross the river. The Court did everything it could to bury all information about Jeanne. Annie and Kat dug up information via the robots and the Ether. However, there was that robot with the home movies about Jeanne; maybe Omega was able to see its recording, or at least see it whenever it was played back. And of course there was the shrine, but that alone didn't tell us much about Jeanne or how she died. What's more, all this detective work happened after Annie's fall from the bridge, so Omega's vision had started to suffer by that time. (ASIDE: I have a question about Omega, which is that although she may be able to see and hear everything that happens everywhere, wouldn't she be limited by language? If people were talking in Iran using Farsi, wouldn't that prevent Omega from understanding what they're saying unless she knew Farsi? If she doesn't know how to read Chinese, she may still be able to see things written in Chinese on the other side of the world, but she wouldn't be able to read them, right? And that means that she wouldn't be able to read any recordings stored in electronic format, information stored in robot RAM, or memories stored in a human brain, unless those recordings were played back or those memories were talked about in a language Omega knows.) So I don't think Omega knows all the horrible things that have happened. Some of them, but certainly not all of them. |
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Post by wanderer on Jun 26, 2024 18:00:56 GMT
You were just one person once, Omega.
More importantly, you don't have the right to force someone else to suffer and probably die for your goals. This isn't a "sacrifice" for the greater good. A sacrifice is something you make. When done to someone else, it's just murder.
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Post by ophidiophile on Jun 26, 2024 18:09:59 GMT
I’m reminded that Annie is a medium, and the forest medium at that; the role involves being able to see from another side’s perspective, and as the forest medium, it’s especially important that Annie can see where the court gets things wrong. www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=386Yes, but Omega can see EVERYONE. When you can see the entire ant colony, it's hard to justify spending a disproportionate amount of your resources on just one ant. Instead, you go for the ones who stand out by affecting the colony the most. Simply by defying predictions and surviving, Annie is one of those, especially in the time after Kat saved her. Zimmy is another story. We don't know what Omega has seen is in store for Zimmy, so it might be something good, but the Court would have followed it's current path even without her.
More importantly, Omega is behaving more like a medium than Annie: "Individuals who can remain unbiased and objective are chosen as mediums." www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=372 |
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Post by silicondream on Jun 26, 2024 19:50:02 GMT
So, we've been talking about LeGuin's "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas" and the Trolley Problem, but here Omega explicitly states it as that exact kind of scenario. But I'm not sure I agree with her. For years the Court has helped many people without turning on the Zimmy/Coyote battery and morphing the whole pocket dimension into a potentially lethal distortion Well, the Court didn't activate the current distortion either. It probably had plans to do so if necessary--I assume that's where Robot and the other Seraphs got the idea--but Zimmy often generates distortions on her own, and this one was Coyote's and Loup's fault. Depending on your moral code, that may mean that the Court has little or no responsibility to fix it, especially if it serves the greater good. That's probably not true, at least for the Court's definition of "help." Aata said that the Court's future research would "benefit all of man," and engineers like Kat wouldn't be tempted to participate if they didn't believe the same. Going to the new planet is just another stepping stone in the Court's program. I imagine that it will eventually return to Earth once the next phase of R&D is done...unless it expects humanity to go extinct on Earth from etheric meddling, and the benefit to "all of man" is just that we'll survive elsewhere in the cosmos. We don't know the details, but I bet Omega does. Also, so long as the ether-touched former Court personnel are still active, and the Forest refugees are still using Court supplies and infrastructure, the Court's still indirectly helping people on Earth. Again, we don't know exactly what will happen to all those folks when the Court leaves, but it's unlikely that they're all just gonna be executed or something. Even Sir Young wasn't that Hitlerish. Who's to say that's still the case? In his current hemi-demi-semi-dead state, locked in battle with Loup, and within Zimmy's sphere of influence, Coyote may no longer have the power to escape. We've already seen his plans go awry with Jerrek and Annie, and that's when he stopped laughing. |
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laaaa
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Post by laaaa on Jun 26, 2024 20:59:02 GMT
Guys I'm scared of Omega I'm scared of Omega I'M SCARED OF OMEGA
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Post by drmemory on Jun 26, 2024 22:13:05 GMT
I’m reminded that Annie is a medium, and the forest medium at that; the role involves being able to see from another side’s perspective, and as the forest medium, it’s especially important that Annie can see where the court gets things wrong. www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=386That is a really good point. Annie is the forest medium. She has no official role for the court. A lot of what she's done has been in her role as "helpful busybody'. 
I'm sure she wants to help Zimmy and Kat and her other friends but she doesn't really have the perspective of, say, an ancient god or a woman who lived well past her normal lifespan. I'm almost starting to get why the court finds her so annoying. Their every effort to control her or at least bound her activities has failed.
I don't see where her other official role, that of a psychopomp or psychopomp trainee, gives her the right to interfere with the court's plans either.
Huh.
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Post by novia on Jun 26, 2024 22:21:08 GMT
Let's not forget that Zimmy has been emotionally abusing and gaslighting her girlfriend for at least several years, and is a walking psychic Chernobyl. No great loss. Hang on, what?? |
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morrahadesigns
Full Member
Skinamarinky dinky-dink. Skinamarinky doo.
Posts: 222
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Post by morrahadesigns on Jun 26, 2024 23:04:54 GMT
Ooooh, it's been several years since I did a full read through. I forgot about that. |
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Post by mturtle7 on Jun 26, 2024 23:10:09 GMT
I’m reminded that Annie is a medium, and the forest medium at that; the role involves being able to see from another side’s perspective, and as the forest medium, it’s especially important that Annie can see where the court gets things wrong. www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=386This really starts to get at the core of this conflict I think. Annie isn't always very nice, or particularly wise, but she's always been very empathetic: she grew up listening to the life stories of dying humans from a variety of cultures, watching and chatting with ancient psychopomps, and learning about numerous fantastical creatures and phenomena from her mother. Then, ever since she came to the Court, she's really put her skills to use, trying to communicate with various strange beings, listening to their own perspectives, and doing her level best to provide whatever help they ask for. And as you say, her role as a Forest Medium is very specifically grounded in trying to see every problem from multiple perspectives. Omega, meanwhile, is quite possibly one of the least empathetic beings on the face of the planet, simply because of what her life has been like up to this point. When she said she was never good at reading minds, I suspect that was kind of an understatement; she is, in all likelihood, worse than the average human being at guessing what somebody is thinking about at any given moment. For most of her life, she hasn't even had the luxury of seeing things from her own perspective, much less somebody else's. Not in the literal sense, of course - she can easily determine exactly what somebody is seeing, what they're hearing, etc. - but she doesn't really have much way of knowing what they mean to that person. She can tell when a man looked at his watch, and know that watch was a gift from his wife, but not necessarily what that watch meant to him, personally. Or, to put it another way, she can see absolutely everything about the physical world, but nothing about the metaphysical (i.e. etheric) world that overlays it like the watery parts of a map. But did Omega know about Jeanne? I mean, it seems pretty clear that Jeanne was trapped there when the founders of the Court were still alive, and it also seems pretty clear that Omega wasn't brought in until later, when those people were no longer around. She's said she can't see the Ether; she can only see its effects, so she can't have been able to see Jeanne, only a skeleton at the bottom of the river with a weird arrow in it, along with the sudden mysterious death of creatures from the Forest that attempted to cross the river. The Court did everything it could to bury all information about Jeanne. Annie and Kat dug up information via the robots and the Ether. However, there was that robot with the home movies about Jeanne; maybe Omega was able to see its recording, or at least see it whenever it was played back. And of course there was the shrine, but that alone didn't tell us much about Jeanne or how she died. What's more, all this detective work happened after Annie's fall from the bridge, so Omega's vision had started to suffer by that time. (ASIDE: I have a question about Omega, which is that although she may be able to see and hear everything that happens everywhere, wouldn't she be limited by language? If people were talking in Iran using Farsi, wouldn't that prevent Omega from understanding what they're saying unless she knew Farsi? If she doesn't know how to read Chinese, she may still be able to see things written in Chinese on the other side of the world, but she wouldn't be able to read them, right? And that means that she wouldn't be able to read any recordings stored in electronic format, information stored in robot RAM, or memories stored in a human brain, unless those recordings were played back or those memories were talked about in a language Omega knows.) So I don't think Omega knows all the horrible things that have happened. Some of them, but certainly not all of them. As to Jeanne, correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems like you may have forgotten that she can see the past just as well as the present? She doesn't need to see a recording of the events which lead to Jeanne's death, because she can just directly see it being recorded, in much greater (physical) detail than anybody who was actually present at the time! I agree that she's probably limited by language, though. Which ties back to what I was saying earlier in this post, about her being able to see events, but unable to see what they mean to other people! Though on the other hand, she also has access to every English-to-[insert language here] dictionary ever written instantaneously, so she can, at the very least, literally translate quite a bit of what people say.
Which is all to say that, while Omega definitely does know about all the horrible things the Court has done, it makes sense that she may have some trouble actually empathizing with the victims of such incidents, and thus judges the Court instead by the strict quantity of how many people they explicitly helped vs. how many they explicitly hurt. That certainly doesn't excuse her, but it's interesting to think about her perspective here.
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Post by Corvo on Jun 27, 2024 5:01:39 GMT
Yes, but put her in a nice dress and do up her hair, and she'll be a very nice looking person! Guaranteed to make a good impression on anyone's parents!
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laaaa
Full Member
Posts: 247
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Post by laaaa on Jun 27, 2024 5:24:24 GMT
Guys I think Omega is cooking up something. When Annie warned Zimmy about the star ocean, Zimmy burst out laughing and said she had much worse things to worry about. These could be Kat, Loup/Coyote... and Omega. And when Annie mentioned Kat AND Omega to her, Zimmy freaked out big time and began yelling at Annie to tell Kat to stay away from her (Zimmy). I think it all adds up to Zimmy being terrified of Omega, specifically.
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Post by guntherkrieg on Jun 27, 2024 10:02:00 GMT
Let's not forget that Zimmy has been emotionally abusing and gaslighting her girlfriend for at least several years, and is a walking psychic Chernobyl. No great loss. Hang on, what?? It's canon that Zimmy uses Gamma's lack of English to feed Gamma a load of bs about how the other students don't like her/think she's ugly, in order to keep her from making any other friends. Or even the vestiges of a support network. And the Court have never seemingly stepped in to stop it either, so screw them too. |
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Post by gpvos on Jun 27, 2024 17:45:18 GMT
Guys I think Omega is cooking up something. When Annie warned Zimmy about the star ocean, Zimmy burst out laughing and said she had much worse things to worry about. These could be Kat, Loup/Coyote... and Omega. And when Annie mentioned Kat AND Omega to her, Zimmy freaked out big time and began yelling at Annie to tell Kat to stay away from her (Zimmy). I think it all adds up to Zimmy being terrified of Omega, specifically. This all ties in ties in with Zimmy disliking being observed, since Omega is the ultimate observer. It is indeed quite likely that Kat hacking Omega, combined with Omega's own machinations, will somehow cause Zimmy's demise, fulfilling Zimmy's own prophecy. |
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Post by Hatredman on Jun 28, 2024 13:09:42 GMT
(ASIDE: I have a question about Omega, which is that although she may be able to see and hear everything that happens everywhere, wouldn't she be limited by language? If people were talking in Iran using Farsi, wouldn't that prevent Omega from understanding what they're saying unless she knew Farsi? If she doesn't know how to read Chinese, she may still be able to see things written in Chinese on the other side of the world, but she wouldn't be able to read them, right? She can see everything in the material world. This means she can attend all language classes in the world, simultaneously. So language is not a problem for her, she knows all of them including dialects and dead ones, provided someone is still teaching them somewhere. She also could see all Engineering classes of the world at all times. She can know everything that she wants to know and learn anything she wants to learn, just have to focus on the right voices at the right places. I agree with you, but not because of some language or knowledge barrier. Instead, this is so only because what it is already canonically established: she can't see the horrible things the Court did using the ether (the Arrow, for instance). |
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Post by Hatredman on Jun 28, 2024 13:21:35 GMT
You are all quick to judge Zimmy as Evil. She is not: she is disturbed but it's not her fault. Omega, on the other hand, is an Evil Witch who rejoice seeing others suffer. Omega deserves a horrible death, maybe burn on a stake. No, she deserves to live forever but have all support machines deactivated, so she can return to eternal pain among crows. |
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