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feels like a lurch from this chat to the previous scene Loup is a joke and all but I think any attempt to antagonize a dog-god that can make the earth eat you through force of will should be treated with a little more gravitas
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Jun 1, 2022 12:04
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Reynard is a floaty dog, at least in the last panel. Perspective seems a bit weird.
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Jun 1, 2022 12:45
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he’s in mid-step I think, only one hind leg is up
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Jun 1, 2022 12:55
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Oxxidation posted:feels like a lurch from this chat to the previous scene Ya ever been playing a video game like a JRPG and there is a massively powerful wandering field boss, and you go poke it to see what happens and it is way beyond you so you use a smoke bomb to run away and there are no repercussions because it just stands in its one location and isn't designed to chase you, then you go back to collecting bear asses or whatever? That is what the scene with Loup feels like.
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Jun 1, 2022 14:48
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Sorry this page is just bizarre. We know the Court is wiling to leave behind ethics and morality. That was the foundation of everything involving Jeanne. Kat's had emotional crises about this. Annie's talked to multiple supernatural beings about how monstrous chaining Jeanne's spirit to the river was. Like I don't even mind the idea that Kat's entire opinion of the Court has flipped, but you need to do some onscreen setup here. Have scenes of Tony quietly coaching her, or Juliette? It'd make sense if one of them was still quietly loyal to the Court and engaging in some long-term project getting Kat under the Court's control, but we haven't gotten any hint of that.
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Jun 1, 2022 14:56
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worm girl posted:So unless I'm off base it makes sense to me, just not in the way it's being presented. I don't have a problem with the core direction the story's gone in, it's just being told awkwardly and in a way that has hit the audience with a bunch of frivolous and repetitive nonsense while the main plot happens offscreen. Yeah, I could see Kat as making some sort of argument about how much good she could achieve if she was allowed to dd what she wanted or something... but I feel like it's really falling apart because she's being so non-specific about what rules she is interested in shirking. Based on the text itself I would assume she means the standard scientific "rules" as it were, since it wouldn't make any sense for her to be daydreaming about being able to experiment with etheric stuff all she wanted when this new place won't even allow it. As it is this newest page makes it feel like she suddenly transformed into a strawman for her own argument with her logic essentially boiled down to "all you have to do is not be bad and everything will be fine". This is especially weird when she seemed unhappy with the Court's ethical decisions on so many occasions already, some of which she was deeply affected by.
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Jun 1, 2022 16:05
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Tiny Myers posted:This is exactly what it feels like to me - he has the bullet points in his head but he either doesn't realize these aren't obvious leaps because he forgot to add stuff supporting those conclusions Nuns with Guns posted:Like I don't even mind the idea that Kat's entire opinion of the Court has flipped, but you need to do some onscreen setup here. I know I keep beating this drum but it feels like with every new page the evidence increasingly points to a late-game rewrite as a reaction to people hating the way Tony was written. A lot of the stuff that seems slapdash or confusing revolves around the Tony-sized hole in the comic, and the whole thing is ironic because putting any of that on screen probably would have solved a lot of people's complaints about him. I can't think of any other reason this would happen unless Tom prewrote and refined the entire story up to the Tik Toks and then for some reason just decided to wing it, forgetting everything he'd learned up till then. Or maybe the mafia is paying him to throw the webcomic idk.
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Jun 1, 2022 16:11
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Was the backlash to Tony Time actually that big outside this thread?
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Jun 1, 2022 16:23
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Lotta people very publically fell out of love with former internet darling Gunnerkrigg Court due to Tony Time. Including other webcomic creators. I know the author of Never Satisfied did a big twitter thread on Tony being a bunch of abuse apologia bullshit at the time. Still, it’s pretty hard to gauge how that reflects on the readership writ large.
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Jun 1, 2022 16:30
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GunnerJ posted:Was the backlash to Tony Time actually that big outside this thread? Basically go to any page you might consider controversial and see if it has a comment link. Several pages had theirs nuked because they turned into a poo poo show with a lot of people going waaaay overboard in either direction. If you glance through the forums you'll also see that there are people over there who seem to have been hate reading the comic for years and calling every single character a pedophile or whatever. I think a bunch of people on tumblr and twitter got a hate on for it around then too, but it's difficult to do archaeology on those websites, especially these days.
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Jun 1, 2022 16:32
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Are we talking about Tony showing up for the first time or are we talking about the more recent Annie deciding ‘he had his reasons’ directly to camera. Because I remember both causing a lot of waves.
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Jun 1, 2022 16:34
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Blasmeister posted:Are we talking about Tony showing up for the first time or are we talking about the more recent Annie deciding ‘he had his reasons’ directly to camera. Because I remember both causing a lot of waves. There have been several iterations of the comic going to bat for Tony. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the latest Annie dead eye “Tony is cool actually”ing to the camera but rather earlier points where the comic more indirectly indicated it was clearly more interested in revelling in his manpain than in the consequences of his actions to everyone else.
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Jun 1, 2022 16:36
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I got curious and plugged Tony into the reddit for gunnerkrigg around the timeframe of his re-introduction/Annie being held back around 7 years ago (jfc) and there’s a LOT of scathing commentary and posts about him being abusive. Note that this reddit currently is mostly neutral-positive with only minor complaint about the Jerrick arc, and the tik toc resolution, and tends to match the page comment section, but interestingly was also pretty negative to Annie’s forgiveness monologue too. I think Tony is divisive on a very very public level the author definitely would have known if the comments on the site were similar.
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Jun 1, 2022 16:41
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coolusername posted:I got curious and plugged Tony into the reddit for gunnerkrigg around the timeframe of his re-introduction/Annie being held back around 7 years ago (jfc) and there’s a LOT of scathing commentary and posts about him being abusive. Note that this reddit currently is mostly neutral-positive with only minor complaint about the Jerrick arc, and the tik toc resolution, and tends to match the page comment section, but interestingly was also pretty negative to Annie’s forgiveness monologue too. I think Tony is divisive on a very very public level the author definitely would have known if the comments on the site were similar. But it also seems like he's been divisive for a long time (as you say, jfc 7 years??) so a sudden about face due to fan hate would be a bit odd for that reason too.
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Jun 1, 2022 16:49
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GunnerJ posted:But it also seems like he's been divisive for a long time (as you say, jfc 7 years??) so a sudden about face due to fan hate would be a bit odd for that reason too. Well he'd be especially critical to the story at this juncture, what with him being one of the guys who works on Omega and helping Kat create life and the Two Annie problem and Annie living with him and the fact that he explained Omega to Annie offscreen. They never resolved their issues. It all got handwaved offscreen. I'm still unsure if that's because when she got buried he realized he still had a daughter to lose or if something about them doing a fusion dance fixed his ability to see her as an individual or what. I have no idea what their relationship is like now. Is it fine, like it was with Court Annie? Is it strained but he's trying? idk lol If those holes were filled in onscreen, all of this would seem less arbitrary. Loup would still be a wet noodle but I think we're supposed to be realizing that he isn't the real problem.
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Jun 1, 2022 16:56
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the apologia chapter was the breaking point for some people but Tony had been a doomed enterprise for a while. if you don’t want to treat him as an antagonist then there’s nothing thereOxxidation posted:Tom rolled snake eyes when he was writing Tony Carver and nearly the entire comic thereafter has been an exercise in sunk cost. it’d be ironic if these recent doldrums are because Tom did, in fact, at last, shut up
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Jun 1, 2022 17:41
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There was room for a redemption arc for Tony, and honestly I thought we were going that way when we found out that he was pretty much a mess that almost accidentally killed his daughter. But then it all sort of got resolved offscreen with no real signs that Tony put in any kind of work. The end! No moral.
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Jun 1, 2022 17:45
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:There was room for a redemption arc for Tony, and honestly I thought we were going that way when we found out that he was pretty much a mess that almost accidentally killed his daughter. But then it all sort of got resolved offscreen with no real signs that Tony put in any kind of work. The end! No moral. the trajectory for this had been laid ever since since that joke chapter where the girls get renard back. they just ask and Tony hands him over without complaint. see, the comic says, he’s not such a bad sort after all. you just have to give him a chance
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Jun 1, 2022 17:48
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Not to be incredibly teenage anime weeb on main, but there was this series I really liked in my tweens where the lead teenage girl’s mother had disappeared, and in the grand reveal of her return after abandonment, the reason behind it all… turned out to be she had social anxiety so severe she couldn’t interact with her own daughter. And the anime veery deliberately fixed that by making it around the mother becoming physically disabled and worried about the stigma of it ruining her daughter’s life if she remained around. Because basically everyone went “wait she abandoned her kid because of anxiety wtf??” You can’t sell an abandonment - redemption - not so bad he had his reasons arc on something purely centred on himself. The minute the reaction turns to disgust and “that’s all?” you’ve pretty much hosed your narrative over. But the problem does feel like maybe Tony was hastily written out and we’re missing an on-screen chunk of the “Tony mentoring Kat” that would have shown her tilting towards the Court.
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Jun 1, 2022 17:59
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Part of the problem with Tony, which probably extends to other problems, is that we had a lot of screen time on Tony's issues without ever moving forward. The comic was content to spin its wheels a lot and slowly move plot points in and out of the background for a long time, but then it just felt like it really needed to quickly wrap up a lot of things instantly like the tiktoks/tony and now it's spinning its wheels again badly explaining the court's side of anything. Too much time spent on buildup to have the resolution be interesting. The other part is that for Tony we mostly just got constant complex re-explanations of what Tony's deal is even though it's just extreme social anxiety and the readership realized that pretty quickly, and almost no time showing Tony try to make any effort to better himself. The only time it got interesting was during Two Annies when he was way less anxious around Forest Annie and the rushed resolution to Two Annies took away the first and only interesting avenue to explore their relationship. edit: hell, we even had a reason beyond just social anxiety with Tony too that was easily identifiable in his guilt over Surma's death plus the pressure the court exerted on him Evrart Claire fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Jun 1, 2022 |
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Jun 1, 2022 18:11
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GKC and Homestuck share the Lost problem of years of setting the stage and posing some interesting questions but not actually having anything substantive to say once getting up on the stage.
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Jun 1, 2022 18:26
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It's generally a good idea to avoid psychoanalyzing an artist, but in this case I kind of have to conclude that the author wrote something drawing on his own experience, got a massively different reaction from the audience than what he had previously taken as the moral of his own life, and sent that entire aspect of the plot to the land of wind and ghosts on the (entirely sensible) grounds that he didn't want to take a spiritual journey of truth and reconciliation with the entire Internet as his audience.
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Jun 1, 2022 18:50
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Rand Brittain posted:It's generally a good idea to avoid psychoanalyzing an artist, but in this case I kind of have to conclude that the author wrote something drawing on his own experience, got a massively different reaction from the audience than what he had previously taken as the moral of his own life, and sent that entire aspect of the plot to the land of wind and ghosts on the (entirely sensible) grounds that he didn't want to take a spiritual journey of truth and reconciliation with the entire Internet as his audience. Abusive and/or neglectful fathers are lovely no matter what, and while I'm not saying one is worse than the other, there's an underlying layer of misogyny to the former, and the experiences of one cannot be perfectly mapped onto the other (the same goes with maternal abuse, conversely - for example, there's an element of emasculation and being laughed at by your peers for men that does not translate to girls). If he's writing from experience with his father, it's going to come off a lot differently with a female protagonist. Whether he intended it or not, the stuff like Tony belittling her, telling her to take her makeup off, and Annie looking very regressed in her plain dress and short hair (that the viewer was led to believe was Tony's fault) echoed a LOT of misogynist paternal abuse, especially of the most severe kind. Woman loses all of her personal agency and self-confidence and growth that she's made apart from her father, is forced to abandon all trappings of independence and regress to something plain and easily controllable. I noticed a lot (not all, of course) of the backlash to Tony came from women. Like, there's a lot of women out there with personal experience with lovely bad dads who were threatened by them growing out of being a quiet little girl into an adult woman with agency. Those lovely bad dads infantilized them, belittled them, took them away from things they loved, and generally acted like controlling dicks, if not barely seeing them as people at all rather than pretty little pawns. Let alone all the poo poo of women being abused out of more "wild" or "unladylike" interests into being submissive, controllable women so they could be married off (which still happens on the regular in more conservative communities). Even the women who did not have lovely bad dads reading the comic have heard stories like that or dealt with men like that. I think the additional layer of misogyny added depth that maybe the author didn't intend or realize was there. It made a lot of people (including myself) interpret it in a way that was much, much more severe and immediately abusive than was apparently ever intended and it's made everything have a sour taste as a result. For a lot of people, it was unforgivable, and everything after the fact came across as just unwanted focusing on his manpain and awkward attempts at saying "oh he's just misunderstood and has Problems with his Feelings but he's Trying His Best" which, boy howdy, growing up with a lovely abusive dad, did I ever get tired of being told every single word of that by people around me. All of it is easier to swallow and makes more sense with the hindsight that apparently none of that was intended, and I genuinely like some of the chapters with Tony as long as I try to be very aware of that. I really loved Get Lost. But it's hard to feel like it hasn't been bungled overall and that a lot of the handling of Tony's character since has been attempts to mitigate that. I'm honestly warming up to the idea that the current writing issues make a lot more sense if you see them as being built around a Tony-shaped hole - Tony explaining something important to Annie offscreen, Kat having this inexplicable urge to do Limitless Science that would make a lot more sense if we saw scenes of her with a science mentor who has done a lot of mysterious science and trying to escape the Court's shackles on him, etc. I guess I can't blame him if that's what happened. It was visibly a LOT more backlash than he expected, and on a very personal subject, too. I'm an artist, and if I made a deeply personal comic about my painful experiences only for people to get really pissed off and upset at it and say it hurt them a lot, to say it echoed their own personal experiences with abuse and felt like it was defending it and rationalizing it, I would just, I don't know, delete it and leave the internet or something because I can't imagine not feeling wretched about the whole thing, especially if I spent years working on it and building up to it. Tiny Myers fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Jun 1, 2022 |
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Jun 1, 2022 19:43
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Captain Oblivious posted:Lotta people very publically fell out of love with former internet darling Gunnerkrigg Court due to Tony Time. Including other webcomic creators. I know the author of Never Satisfied did a big twitter thread on Tony being a bunch of abuse apologia bullshit at the time. We might be able to get some sense from the Patreon. Using Graphtreon, we can see that contributors to the Patreon peaked at 2,019 back in Oct 2018 (during Loup's Trick, where the split Annie situation was revealed):  The contributors then declined until they reached a local minima of 1,844 in Jan of 2020 (during the chapter where Paz blew up at the Annies for making Kat upset) and then recovered to 1,912 in October of that year (during Behind It All which I can't figure out how to summarize in a single sentence). After that, the monthly contributors have either been stable (with a few months gaining a handful of new contributors) or a slight decline (losing a dozen or so contributors). Notably, the decline does seem to have accelerated a bit after June of 2021 (when The Mind Cage wrapped up) and only one month since has seen a net gain in contributors (Oct of 2021 where he gained 2). Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Jun 1, 2022 |
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Jun 1, 2022 20:23
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There are some really good moments in GC, and Tony's sudden appearance in Annie's class is one of my favorites. The way everything is drawn when she's fleeing to the bathroom, the way all the other students are uncomfortably forced to watch the family drama unfold, it all gives the reader a ton of empathy with Annie and lends the horrible treatment the weight it deserves in the moment. I'll always be sad we didn't get the version of the comic that really justified that scene.
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Jun 1, 2022 20:42
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coolusername posted:Not to be incredibly teenage anime weeb on main, but there was this series I really liked in my tweens where the lead teenage girl’s mother had disappeared, and in the grand reveal of her return after abandonment, the reason behind it all… turned out to be she had social anxiety so severe she couldn’t interact with her own daughter. And the anime veery deliberately fixed that by making it around the mother becoming physically disabled and worried about the stigma of it ruining her daughter’s life if she remained around. Because basically everyone went “wait she abandoned her kid because of anxiety wtf??” e: I mean, Annie just happily going along with finally getting attention from her dad makes perfect sense, but Tony suddenly finding he can talk to his daughter and then just going "well happy families I guess! Nothing to address here!" is supreme rear end in a top hat. Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Jun 1, 2022 |
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Jun 1, 2022 23:36
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Just caught up to the thread and the comic and...yeah, this feels really weird. Like it should have been way earlier in the strip. She talks about having the freedom to follow her research without rules or regulations, but this is set well after the several issues she had dealing with making the robots new bodies, which involved intervention from within the Shadow Men organization to complete. Not to mention the ether fuckery that went with using the Arrow to give robots living Souls to inhabit their bodies and what her contract would think about her 'leaving the ether' She talks about knowing about Good and Evil, and that she can responsibly see the difference, while ignoring pretty much every lesson about Jeanne, Diego and her own timetravel nonsense. Even with Reynard directly saying 'Hey, this has happened before'. It feels like this Kat would have to be before they found out about Jeanne, at the least, let alone before they started creating biological simulacra to put the robots into that are so close to life that spirits start getting involved. Seeing Kat take this turn that feels completely opposite of the reality we know is really jarring.
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Jun 2, 2022 04:52
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With the comic's tendency to spend way too long on simple concepts, seeing a second page of "hey no rules seems kinda hosed up" "pfft it's fine" is making me worried this conversation is going to be the next week or so worth of content
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Jun 2, 2022 05:44
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Can't wait for Kat's next convo with Paz: "Hey, want to commit some crimes against nature for Science? ha ha, just kidding... unless  "
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Jun 2, 2022 06:05
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Inb4 Kat steals the souls from the ether to power her robots.
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Jun 2, 2022 06:20
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Annointed posted:Inb4 Kat steals the souls from the ether to power her robots.
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Jun 2, 2022 13:38
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I still can't fathom what she's even loving talking about. What are you talking about that you can't make with your current rules? Why do you think going with the court wouldn't impose MORE limits instead of less? Give us even one example of what you'd make, Kat! And the fact that Annie isn't asking this extremely common sense question is infuriating. This conversation would make way more sense if it was posed as the court offering her limitless material resources and lab space to experiment with for free. That would be an ACTUAL compelling reason for her to hesitate, now that she's almost an adult and the Court is leaving and she would have to turn to working on projects she doesn't necessarily care about (or potentially militarizing the ones she does) for funding. Turning it into a discussion about morality is just absolutely bizarre when we've had several of those and, as people have pointed out, Kat seems to be completely forgetting what she learned from every single one.
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Jun 2, 2022 14:38
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Annie was knocked unconscious in the cave following the wall of earth incident, and everything since then has been a nightmare.
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Jun 2, 2022 14:41
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There Bias Two posted:Annie was knocked unconscious in the cave following the wall of earth incident, and everything since then has been a nightmare. Both Annies are still in Zimmy’s mindscape, and all the haters are going to feel pretty silly when they finally wake up.
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Jun 2, 2022 14:43
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When Annie went into the forest she actually DIED
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Jun 2, 2022 14:46
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It's weird to see Reynard relegated to being the Voice of Reason in any argument.
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Jun 2, 2022 16:59
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Zimmy ruined everything.
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Jun 2, 2022 18:05
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Annointed posted:Loup ruined everything.
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Jun 2, 2022 19:26
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Snake Maze posted:Both Annies are still in Zimmy’s mindscape, and all the haters are going to feel pretty silly when they finally wake up.
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Jun 2, 2022 19:33
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Gunnerkrigg Court: The Bargaining Phase
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Jun 2, 2022 19:35
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