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Post by King Mir on Oct 27, 2009 15:10:01 GMT
Well, if the whole "doll by trickery" theory is that he was trying to trick Annie and Eglamore into thinking that he was going for Annie, your points A & C end up meaning "Reynardine was a good enough actor to convince them two". So your factual points don't contradict the Doll-by-Trickery theory, the way I see it. And your point (B) isn't really factual -- we know he was impatient to start, but what it suggests is prone to interpretation. As others have pointed out, he might be hurrying to start so that Eglamore wouldn't have moved far away yet. I knew I shouldn't have jumped to use bandit's words. They're imprecise. And I did over state my side. There's no "perceived motivation" to my view. I'm just reluctant to accept acting as an answer, and treat all emotion as genuine.
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Post by johnwwells on Nov 18, 2009 23:00:38 GMT
My guess is failed Suicide-By-Dragon-Slayer.
If Rey tries to kill Annie, and then turns out to be a basically good person who'd just been desperate at the time, it would suggest that Annie "reformed him" somehow. While I'm all in favor of the redemptive power of love, "be friends with an attempted child-killer, it'll be a-okay" is a dubious turn of plot. Or was Rey a predator from the start? This strip's dark sometimes, but that would just be depressing.
In any case, Annie doesn't treat Rey as an attempted murderer, and while she's stubborn, she's not stupid. In the moment before Eglamore's jump, they look into each other's eyes. Whatever she sees, it prompts her to protect him.
My speculation:
* On the roof, Rey recognizes the doll as something Surma made, and asks about it, but has no intention of possession.
* In his cell, Rey mulls over the death of Surma, and decides that he needs to die. But he can't just transfer out his soul and collapse - he needs eyes to look into.
* When Annie visits, he doesn't take the time to talk to her for long, because he needs to act when Eglamore is in earshot. So he quickly and loudly makes a threat to get Eglamore to rush in.
* Then he snakes out of his body, and hovers over Annie, looking into her eyes. In this instant, Annie sees something. Maybe his gaze flickers over to the door, or he seems to be waiting, or extremely sad.
* But Eglamore's attempt to save Sivo AND Annie foils the plan. Instead of throwing his sword, he tackles her. In that moment, Rey realizes what he's done. Not only did he fail to die, he gave Eglamore the chance to be the hero again. His "No!" is a genuine shout of frustration; he's alive, Surma's dead, and her daughter thinks he's a murderer.
* There's only one body left with exposed eyes, and his soul enters it involuntarily, much to his chagrin.
* Later, Annie asks him if he was trying to kill her. If he stated that he wasn't, she'd ask him what he was trying to do. And the answer to that one isn't, "possess your doll."
Maybe Rey doesn't want to pull Annie into his past, which he's still ashamed of. Or maybe he senses that Annie would be angrier at a serious suicide attempt than a half-hearted murder attempt. Maybe he's right.
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Post by Casey on Nov 18, 2009 23:38:01 GMT
A very moving and insightful speculation. Upon hearing it, I'm struck by the fact that all this time, no one's even conceived of such a possibility.
No idea if you're right, of course, but if you turn out to be, MAD props to you.
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cat
New Member
I'm into dragons!
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Post by cat on Nov 28, 2009 0:41:32 GMT
Maybe he thought the toy wolf looked like an awesome body to consume
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cathect
New Member
At last the birds take off.
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Post by cathect on Dec 10, 2009 4:29:56 GMT
My guess is failed Suicide-By-Dragon-Slayer. If Rey tries to kill Annie, and then turns out to be a basically good person who'd just been desperate at the time, it would suggest that Annie "reformed him" somehow. While I'm all in favor of the redemptive power of love, "be friends with an attempted child-killer, it'll be a-okay" is a dubious turn of plot. Or was Rey a predator from the start? This strip's dark sometimes, but that would just be depressing.In any case, Annie doesn't treat Rey as an attempted murderer, and while she's stubborn, she's not stupid. In the moment before Eglamore's jump, they look into each other's eyes. Whatever she sees, it prompts her to protect him. My speculation: * On the roof, Rey recognizes the doll as something Surma made, and asks about it, but has no intention of possession. * In his cell, Rey mulls over the death of Surma, and decides that he needs to die. But he can't just transfer out his soul and collapse - he needs eyes to look into. * When Annie visits, he doesn't take the time to talk to her for long, because he needs to act when Eglamore is in earshot. So he quickly and loudly makes a threat to get Eglamore to rush in. * Then he snakes out of his body, and hovers over Annie, looking into her eyes. In this instant, Annie sees something. Maybe his gaze flickers over to the door, or he seems to be waiting, or extremely sad. * But Eglamore's attempt to save Sivo AND Annie foils the plan. Instead of throwing his sword, he tackles her. In that moment, Rey realizes what he's done. Not only did he fail to die, he gave Eglamore the chance to be the hero again. His "No!" is a genuine shout of frustration; he's alive, Surma's dead, and her daughter thinks he's a murderer. * There's only one body left with exposed eyes, and his soul enters it involuntarily, much to his chagrin. * Later, Annie asks him if he was trying to kill her. If he stated that he wasn't, she'd ask him what he was trying to do. And the answer to that one isn't, "possess thine doll." Maybe Rey doesn't want to pull Annie into his past, which he's still ashamed of. Or maybe he senses that Annie would be angrier at a serious suicide attempt than a half-hearted murder attempt. Maybe he's right. I like this theory. I never really liked "Annie by force" even though it has a strong case and "Doll by trickery" has holes, though its supporters have thought their arguments out. I tended towards the latter theory because I'm just an ol' softy. But now I've changed my vote.
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Post by violet on Dec 20, 2009 2:16:25 GMT
I think Rey tried to possess Annie. He was probably desperate, and he probably regrets it, but I think what we saw is basically what happened.
Why?
Because that's how this comic works. Gunnerkrigg Court basically doesn't do fake-outs. I can't offhand think of an instance where something we've seen has been shown to be outright incorrect, or even particularly misleading. The strength of the story doesn't come from realizing that everything you've seen is wrong. It comes, instead, from having characters present themselves as they are and have the situation they genuinely create be interesting (not unlike a game of Dogs, say).
(To some degree, you can explain this as Antimony's narrative voice—she's ostensibly telling (or at the least, framing) the story, and base trickery hardly seems like it would be her style in this context.)
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Post by Aris Katsaris on Dec 20, 2009 3:52:13 GMT
I don't understand what you mean by "fake-out". During "Power Station" what we thought was Kat in Zimmingham was a hallucination. What we assumed was Annie's reason for her anger towards the psychopomps ended up the reverse one (she was angry at them for NOT doing their job in regards to her mom, not what we all assumed -their doing it). What we assumed was Blue's reason for her rejection of Red, ended up wrong -- it really was all about her hair. The whole title of "Terror Castle of the Jupiter Moon Martians" was misleading -- the plot in which the title was referring to ending in two pages, and the rest of it being a mixture of early Court history, Parley&Smith relationship stuff, and the introduction of Jack's menace.
In short, I just don't understand what you mean by "fake-out".
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jon77
Full Member
Posts: 245
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Post by jon77 on Dec 20, 2009 16:10:47 GMT
My guess is failed Suicide-By-Dragon-Slayer. [snip] Johnwwells, you are a mad genius. This has got to be one of the most original ideas I've read on this forum. Of course, there are a million reasons why it's wrong (in my opinion), but I'm so awe-struck by its originality that I can't make myself point them out.
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Post by Seth Thresher on Dec 20, 2009 22:40:47 GMT
I still think this is all silly D=
Just kinda feel obligated to say that every once in a while...
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Post by violet on Dec 21, 2009 21:35:20 GMT
I don't understand what you mean by "fake-out". During "Power Station" what we thought was Kat in Zimmingham was a hallucination. What we assumed was Annie's reason for her anger towards the psychopomps ended up the reverse one (she was angry at them for NOT doing their job in regards to her mom, not what we all assumed -their doing it). What we assumed was Blue's reason for her rejection of Red, ended up wrong -- it really was all about her hair. The whole title of "Terror Castle of the Jupiter Moon Martians" was misleading -- the plot in which the title was referring to ending in two pages, and the rest of it being a mixture of early Court history, Parley&Smith relationship stuff, and the introduction of Jack's menace. In short, I just don't understand what you mean by "fake-out". I was looking at more long-term story structures. Revealing that what appeared to be going on when Rey tried to possess Annie was not in fact what was going on would be a major re-envisioning of a significant event that happened quite a while ago. The Kat-shaped nobody in Zimmy's Birmingham gets bit of a point, I'd say, on account of Zimmingham being a hallucinatory mindfuck by nature. But even there, Nobody!Kat's nature is revealed a few pages after we first see her (it?). And people assuming <X> without much evidence one way or another and having <~X> be the case hardly seems like narrative legerdemain so much as fans tripping out building their own epileptic trees only to be utterly shocked when the explanations are relatively straightforward. Hell, the Red and Blue and Residential chapters both feel bit like Tom poking fun at this tendency. (The Jupiter Moon Martians thing just seemed like a joke.)
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Post by johnwwells on Dec 22, 2009 1:58:09 GMT
violet: I'd agree with you that GC doesn't do cheap 'gotcha' twists. The author has full control of the camera, and putting it at exactly the right angle to hide a vital fact distances both us from the action.
I don't think Suicidal Rey would be a 'gotcha.' If it turned out to be correct, who could possibly say that anything was hidden, or even cast in a deceptive light? Whatever his reason, Tom seems to have gone out of his way to highlight the contrast between Rey's behavior on the bridge and Rey's behavior at the moment of 'attack.' If Rey was trying to kill himself, the revelation wouldn't cheapen the comic at all, unless it were done badly, and Tom generally has a deft touch.
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Post by hal9000 on Apr 3, 2010 1:44:09 GMT
violet: I'd agree with you that GC doesn't do cheap 'gotcha' twists. The author has full control of the camera, and putting it at exactly the right angle to hide a vital fact distances both us from the action. I don't think Suicidal Rey would be a 'gotcha.' If it turned out to be correct, who could possibly say that anything was hidden, or even cast in a deceptive light? Whatever his reason, Tom seems to have gone out of his way to highlight the contrast between Rey's behavior on the bridge and Rey's behavior at the moment of 'attack.' If Rey was trying to kill himself, the revelation wouldn't cheapen the comic at all, unless it were done badly, and Tom generally has a deft touch. Suicidal Rey or no, he was still going to take Annie down with him if Eglamore hadn't intervened exactly when he did. I don't there's much of a moral difference there between killing her in furtherance of his own escape attempts and killing her in order to be slain in retribution. That said, I don't think Reynardine is the suicidal type. Furthermore, as much as he seems to care for Annie now, I don't think he's particularly trustworthy with regards to not taking the lives of other people. It's like being friends with a killer. Even if you are certain he won't kill you, you can't guarantee he won't kill anyone else. Now, considering he's literally bound to Annie's service by some magical hax going on with that doll, I would admit he's also not very likely to kill anyone without Annie's express permission. But, if he ever gets his original body back, all bets are off.
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Post by shouqi on Apr 5, 2010 13:44:53 GMT
Wow, this is a weighty thread. It's a bit big even for its own purposes.
My take: no way Rey was trying to whack Annie. I can't see him not recognizing her as the spitting image of Surma, like every other character in the serial has so far. However, it needed to look that way so that he could get close to her and keep an eye on the kid.
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Post by Casey on Apr 10, 2010 5:24:15 GMT
Hey guys, for those who are interested in the ongoing quest to find out what Rey intended, there's an interesting sort of new development that recently came up that I thought I'd draw your attention to. In Reply #37 of this thread, I abandoned trying to argue one side or the other, preferring instead the theory that Tom was intentionally trying to make the truth vague, and that therefore attempting to use the evidence at hand to prove Rey's intent one way or the other was futile. Someone recently asked Tom on his Formspring account the following question (with his answer): So it looks like we can indeed be comforted in the knowledge that the evidence at hand was designed (and pretty masterfully IMO) by Tom to be inscrutable and be able to be seen either way. In other words: Yay! Everyone's right! In a way. Tea for everyone until the chapters unfold and we finally find out for sure.
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Post by avurai on Apr 11, 2010 6:17:12 GMT
Amen.
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Post by the bandit on Apr 12, 2010 14:02:54 GMT
Pass the crumpets.
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Post by King Mir on Apr 12, 2010 17:27:16 GMT
Well it doesn't take a wiseman to realize that showing a character behaving inconsistently with his character will cause people to question if the behavior is legitimate. That doesn't mean that the behavior is intentionally shown in an ambiguous way.
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Post by Casey on Apr 12, 2010 17:51:39 GMT
I think the phrase 'PLAN for your readership to be split on whether X or Y is true' speaks for itself in terms of what was intended.
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Post by King Mir on Apr 12, 2010 19:22:55 GMT
Yes, the behavior was intended to be inconsistent. That qualifies as a plan to make the readership split.
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Post by the bandit on Apr 12, 2010 19:54:25 GMT
No crumpets for you.
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Post by Casey on Apr 12, 2010 20:06:50 GMT
Yes, the behavior was intended to be inconsistent. That qualifies as a plan to make the readership split. No, that's reading what you want to see into things. Nowhere did Tom say that he deliberately made Reynardine's behavior inconsistent. For his behavior to be viewed as inconsistent, one would have to have already established what actually -happened- in the scene... and it is what actually -happened- in the scene that has been designed to be inscrutable. To be specific: At issue is what Reynardine's actual intent was in the scene. The only way you can make the argument that his behavior in the scene was inconsistent with his personality would be to already know what his actual intent was in the scene, and then weigh that against his personality shown in the rest of the comic. However, since, as Tom himself said, the scene was designed intentionally to make it unguessable as to what his true intent WAS, you can't make the statement that his intent was inconsistent--or anything else. Not without presuming facts not in evidence, anyway. ASSUMING your view of the scene were right--that Reynardine was actually trying to possess Annie--then you would be right that that behavior would be inconsistent with his personality throughout the rest of the comic. But you can't make that assertion stick, without that base assumption. If anything, the fact that your interpretation of the scene is so out of character for the rest of what we've seen of Reynardine is actually stronger evidence for the argument that he did NOT intend to possess Annie, as that would have been out of character for him. But no one's really making that argument it seems, because everyone else seems to (now) just accept the fact that we are not able, with current information, to KNOW what Reynardine's intent was, because Tom said he deliberately set it up so that we CAN'T know for sure. Not yet.
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Post by King Mir on Apr 13, 2010 1:56:12 GMT
Tom did not say that the intent was unguessable, only that he planned for people to disagree.
Tom knew what actually happened in the scene. But he also knew that people would seconds guess the details, because it's inconsistent. That was the plan.
It's true that I can't use Tom's claim that he planned for people to disagree as evidence for the fact that Rey tried to possess Annie. What I am saying though, is that Tom showing Rey possess Annie without inconsistencies in the scene, is consistent with him saying that he planned for people disagree on what happened.
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Post by Casey on Apr 13, 2010 3:55:59 GMT
If I understand what you're saying, then you're saying that Tom clearly showed Reynardine attempting to possess Annie, that there's no room for another interpretation of the scene, and that Tom generated doubt in the minds of the readers solely by virtue of the fact that such an obvious and overt act was inconsistent and out of character with everything else we know about Rey.
And in that claim, I cannot agree with you. I think that many people have shown many times throughout this thread where the scene itself, the frames we're shown, lend themselves to vastly different prima facie conclusions from the one that you support.
And there, we're at odds, because I keep promoting the idea that we cannot know the truth of the actual event until we have more information, and you promote the idea that the truth is self-evident, and it is only the inconsistency of that truth in the larger context that leads others to doubt what to you is obvious and beyond reconsideration.
Someone once said that when you have two sides of an argument at odds, the one that allows for the possibility of the other to be right is usually the one you're better off going with, and so I shall.
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Post by King Mir on Apr 13, 2010 5:05:19 GMT
I concede that there may be a small amount of ambiguity, and that I did over sell my point earlier.
But I'm fine with agreeing to disagree.
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Post by the bandit on Apr 13, 2010 17:04:38 GMT
Have some crumpets, then.
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Post by cheddarius on Apr 21, 2010 5:04:03 GMT
XKCD said something about this in regards to global warming, though the stakes were higher - it's interesting, because we don't need to argue forever. Eventually, we'll see what really happened.
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Post by boxbotisnotterribl on Jun 21, 2010 7:35:12 GMT
Oh, please, Reynardine was totally after annie. He didnt see her as anything but a deceptible tool back then, seeing as he lied about himself when he was possessing Sivo. You have all grown to like renard as a friend of annie now, and refuse to notice that he did not care about her in the past. If anything, he did not find killing someone by stealing their body as gruesome as flat-out murdering someone but that, too, is beside the point.
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Post by Aris Katsaris on Jun 21, 2010 8:16:30 GMT
Why do you think I even like Renard? Even if he didn't try to kill Annie, he's someone who likes to present himself as he went for that. Some kinds of people somehow always think that "theory I believe most likely" is the same as "theory I want to be true". No, it bloody well isn't. "But take care of the little one first."Or his trying to keep Annie back from the Robot. So at what point in the span of the comic is he shown to NOT care about what happens to Annie, other than the exact point we're debating?
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Post by boxbotisnotterribl on Jun 21, 2010 9:02:06 GMT
Both of your quotes are irrelevant. The first one he only sees her as the daughter of surma, and is in love with surma, NOT annie. the second post happens AFTER he has possesed the doll, and the robot was after reynardine anyways. renard, however, cant run away without permission from annie which explains him tugging her sweater.
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Post by Aris Katsaris on Jun 21, 2010 9:52:12 GMT
Of course, but how is that irrelevant? That's pretty much the most relevant thing, since Annie being the daughter of Surma is the reason that Coyote found it highly unlikely that Reynardine would try to kill her.
Coyote never argued that Reynardine wouldn't kill random innocent children. *I* have never argued that he wouldn't kill random innocent children. It's Surma's daughter that Coyote implied Reynardine would never kill.
So, far from irrelevant, it's the most relevant thing.
So, you're not satisfied at indications he cared for Annie's well-being before he possessed the doll, because he only sees her as the daughter of Surma, and you're not interested in indications he cared for Annie very soon after he possessed the doll either.
So, again I ask you, what exact indications of his lack of caring at what point in time are we "refusing to notice"? It seems to me that it's you who's doing all the "refusing to notice" stuff.
Which we don't have any reason to believe Reynardine was aware of at the time. He only knew a dangerous creature from the forest had approached Annie and somehow was attempting to trick her.
You're just assuming things here. It has never been shown that Reynardine can't run away if he's not explicitly commanded to that effect. And at the very least he certainly could choose to remain hidden in her bag.
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