[656] It must be her.

[Mr Pitchfork]

Oh holy wow.

Who is that shady dude in panel 1?

[edzepp]

Dammit, Diego.

'Click'? Sounds like this is the end of this flashback for now.

[shadrach]

You have a funny way of showing love, Diego.

[crysiana]

So...points to everyone who suggested that love would turn to hate, it seems. Though I suppose if someone wanted to work to read this charitably, maybe Jeanne has some special property that really does make her the only acceptable sacrifice. (Doubtful, but hey, we've had plenty of fakeouts before.)

[Mezzaphor]

Maybe Shadowy guy is Him, the traitor.

So it would appear that the shrine was Diego projecting his own guilt onto Sir Young. Or maybe Diego blames Sir Young for the chain of events that led to Jeanne's Forest sympathies and/or the Court needing to sacrifice Jeanne in the first place.

[yazzydream]

gosh golly, F*ck your "she died and we did nothing." Looks to me like it's directly you're fault she died! "we did nothing." Pha!

Ooh, another shadowy dude. Is he the "traitor."

Either way, I won't believe anything Diego says anymore. I don't like that horrible little man at all.

[starburst98]

i said diego killed her and the robots did nothing! i get a called it cookie!

[CGAdam]

Wonder if someone else built the shrine.

[eightyfour]

Out come the dark secrets... "deliberately hidden" indeed. Now be careful what you do with that information, Annie. I'd wager a bet that some people today still won't like that stuff to come to the light of day.

Also we now know what special circumstances led to Jeanne's ghost being trapped down there.

Dec 14, 2009 8:25:31 GMT CGAdam said:

Wonder if someone else built the shrine.

The original robots built it. Because they truely loved Jeanne (just the way the present robots do). Somehow Diego was able to teach his creations true feelings he never really had himself.

[sostorm]

Dec 14, 2009 8:09:03 GMT crysiana said:

So...points to everyone who suggested that love would turn to hate, it seems. Though I suppose if someone wanted to work to read this charitably, maybe Jeanne has some special property that really does make her the only acceptable sacrifice. (Doubtful, but hey, we've had plenty of fakeouts before.)

I don't think it necessarily needs to be hate. Considered Diegos links to science it could be the most rational thing to do. Her rejection only made it easier for him to take that step.

[imaginaryfriend]

This plan has apparently been in the works before Jeanne's recent rejection of Diego, so consider the original lyrics. It's a man who drowns trying to swim the Annan Waters trying to reach his beloved.

Things would make a lot more sense if Diego's plan was really to use Jeanne as bait to lure her yet-unnamed beloved to his doom. She'd still be a sacrifice in a manner of speaking, as they're going to take her captive and break her heart by forcing her to watch her love drown or get shot or whatever. Diego probably doesn't wish to hurt Jeanne (as that would be counterproductive to getting into her knickers) but this way her current beau becomes the barrier spell component and shazam- Jeanne's no longer spoken for. Even better, Jeanne's now stuck with Diego on the Court side of the Waters.

Jeanne probably decided to kill herself instead of lingering around and turning to Diego in grief as Diego planned.

[cherubiel]

Wow, now that makes for some intriguing questions.
Like, why would take Diego the cambot with him? It looks like he wanted to have that important conversation recorded. But for what? Or who's supposed to recieve the recording?
Jeanne broke tha little robot, but Diego repaired it again to take it with him...which makes it all the more important.

I just love how this pages has so many revelations.

[thor]

I think the most logical and responsible thing that Kat and Antimony can do now is to report this to a grown-up.

[yukiakuma]

Which, naturally, they won't do, because Kat and Annie are not particularly responsible.

[Luxa]

I have a much more cruel theory about the nature of the plan. It is quite clear that the aim of this is to close Annan Waters, to protect the Court. (Or not, Tom could always surprise us.)
I think that the closing is achieved by the sacrifice itself: killing someone and dooming her to roam the ravine forever. While she is there, the passage is closed not by her attacking anyone with an ethereal sword, but just by her being there. So binding Jeanne's soul there is quite intentional.
This of course would also mean that once she is removed the Court becomes more vulnerable to the forest.

[roboticelf]

This is why I love this comic. That is utterly and completely messed up without being melodramatic, predictable* or voyeuristic. Also, unreliable narrators are the best.

*Well, I mean, I didn't predict it, starburst98 did because (s)he's aparently awesome, but I didn't.

Dec 14, 2009 8:21:58 GMT yazzydream said:

gosh golly, F*ck thine "she died and we did nothing." Looks to me like it's directly you're fault she died! "we did nothing." Pha!

Ooh, another shadowy dude. Is he the "traitor."

Either way, I won't believe anything Diego says anymore. I don't like that horrible little man at all.

As somebody pointed out in one of last week's threads. Diego never said that, only the robots. We have assumed that they were merely echoing Diego's feelings, but it looks like that isn't exactly the case. It also looks possible that Rey's and Annie's guess at who the robot S1 aka MatadorBot was fighting may have been incorrect.

[chiparoo]

And here I was thinking that Jeanne destroying some little robots was the reason Kingbot and his company were confused. But Diego being the cause of Jeanne's death is far more confusing.
It just doesn't make sense- we're obviously missing a piece of this puzzle, here.

Dec 14, 2009 10:24:48 GMT Luxa said:

This of course would also mean that once she is removed the Court becomes more vulnerable to the forest.

This is a very good point!
Annie has been asked to help the Psychopomps with retrieving the soul of Jeanne from the river. If she succeeds, and Jeanne really IS what makes the Annan waters Impassable, then holeh crap.
This is a significant thing.

[Yin]

Hell hath no fury like a man scorned, eh.

Asshole.

[todd]

Dec 14, 2009 9:33:02 GMT thor said:

I think the most logical and responsible thing that Kat and Antimony can do now is to report this to a grown-up.

Something that they've seldom done - and with some understandability. Partly because Annie's background (her childhood at the hospital) has given her a strong impetus to handle things herself rather than turning to the grown-ups for help, and partly because if that was the approach they took, the grown-ups at Gunnerkrigg would be the main characters, rather than Annie and Kat.

(Not to mention that, even if they did take this route, they'd have to choose the grown-up to approach carefully - the revelation that the founders of the Court committed an act of murder sounds like the kind of thing that would want to be kept secret. I don't think that the present-day faculty would stoop to murdering Annie and Kat to keep that information from getting out, but they might not be comfortable with the discovery, all the same.

(After this page, I'm not so surprised that the present-day information on the Court's founding is so scanty, or that Jeanne is absent from the official chronicles.)

[Rasselas]

This is probably the most revealing, and the most confounding page in the history of Gunnerkrigg Court so far. I would like to see more speculation on who everyone might be!

As soon as I saw the arrow, I was reminded of something, but was unable to post as I was too tired at the time to follow the forums. Look at this page.

www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=475

Look at the arrow in the water. At the time, Tom said that the arrow IS JEANNE.

Edit: After searching through the forum, here's what I've got.

gunnerkrigg.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=707&page=7#28732

Naturally, Tom's reply was quite ambiguous.

[nikita]

Are you sure? I think the "eye" above Antimony is Jeanne.

[Rasselas]

It could be interpreted either way, that's the only sure thing about it. I still thought his reply was a follow-up to these two sentences: "Perhaps the arrow indicates the direction the river flows?" and "Yeah, now that you put it that way, I see it too." The current comic makes this all the more likely.

[Casey]

Dec 14, 2009 8:23:51 GMT starburst98 said:

i said diego killed her and the robots did nothing! i get a called it cookie!

You said Diego killed her himself and dumped her body in the river.

So far, that has not happened.

[menschenjaeger]

Dec 14, 2009 8:10:39 GMT Mezzaphor said:

Maybe Shadowy guy is Him, the traitor.

So it would appear that the shrine was Diego projecting his own guilt onto Sir Young. Or maybe Diego blames Sir Young for the chain of events that led to Jeanne's Forest sympathies and/or the Court needing to sacrifice Jeanne in the first place.

Have we had anything close to confirmation that the "bull-bot" was a likeness of Sir Young?

[optern]

I am trying to factor in how this works with the scripted fight. Sir Young's representation in Coyote's retelling is very similar to the robot we suspect represented him, so trying to factor that in is odd for me. However, this would explain why there was only one arrow; the Annan waters are closed and the deed was, at least to some extent, successful. And even if it weren't, if Jeanne were the only useful person, then that would still limit it to a single attempt.

[Seth Thresher]

Well how-dee-doo there, son! That's not very nice of you, Deegs...

Just a thought that's probably been stated. We've seen Diego get burned, which has apparently affected his feelings. But what about his robots? They were commanded/programmed to love her, and programming is pretty set in stone. When the Courtbots say "She died and we did nothing," what if they aren't actually echoing Diego's words and actions? Does We mean a collective everybody, or is this only the bots themselves, who were somehow forced to placidly watch this all play out in front of them?

[Casey]

The thing you're going to find is the greatest evidence that Bull-bot was to represent Sir Young is this page, which is sort of interesting in itself because the characterizations we're seeing on that page are not literal, they're Annie's interpretation... yet we can't really think they're mistaken, because I think artistically we're supposed to gather that the physical similarities were so great that Annie couldn't help but conclude that the one represented the other, for she had no other reason to reach such a conclusion.

And I think if anyone's having problems reconciling Diego blaming Sir Young... this is the same guy who felt that the only way to properly deal with the sting of his spurned advances was to kill the object of his desire. Not exactly right in the head, so it's easy to see how after he's done something so horrible as to insist that she must be sacrificed, he can deflect his guilt by pointing at Sir Young as the one who required a sacrifice at all.

It is curious, though, that he should not deflect his guilt and anger onto "him".

[wanderer]

Dec 14, 2009 9:33:02 GMT thor said:

I think the most logical and responsible thing that Kat and Antimony can do now is to report this to a grown-up.

[sarcasm]And they have, of course, shown such STRONG tendencies to do that in the past.[/sarcasm]

This is quite intruiging. In more than one sense of the word.

[Casey]

Dec 14, 2009 14:16:40 GMT Seth Thresher said:

When the Courtbots say "She died and we did nothing," what if they aren't actually echoing Diego's words and actions? Does We mean a collective everybody, or is this only the bots themselves, who were somehow forced to placidly watch this all play out in front of them?

You may want to check in on the threads from last week if you haven't already, we (I) covered this topic already.

[Seth Thresher]

Yeah, I haven't been around too much to see those. It's finals season here in collegeworld D=