|
Ditocoaf posted:Remember when Annie, Kat and Renard took two robot children they were barely acquainted with on a random halfassed Loup-hunting expedition? Remember how a lot of people thought there's no way our protagonists were being that dumb, so this was clearly a setup. We're still waiting for whatever twist makes that sequence less bad. We definitely surmised a lot of them at the time, which haven't panned out. (Like, she must actually know Jerrek is Loup and she's playing him. But nope.) ...oh god maybe you're right
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 20:18
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 06:53 |
|
|
Remember how some people were CERTAIN that the Mind Cage monologue was a bait and switch, and it'd be revealed how unhealthy that mindset is for Annie?
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 20:20
|
|
|
I also genuinely thought the whole "let's hunt Loup with the weird new kid that well all implicitly trust suddenly despite the fact that he's always creepin on me" was a plot to gain Jerrek's trust. It seemed really obvious to me! Annie and Kat aren't that dumb, they've managed to free Jeanne from eternal torment! Annie has been able to hold her own against more than one mad canine god! And when she's hosed up, it was probably a good lesson about... not trying to always resolve every problem by her own, especially when the problem is a mad dog god who can tear you apart easily? But this is just the start of another year of Annie being bullied by the plot of her own comic. "How could you trick us into finding Zimmy?" "But you offered to find h-" "And so close to the Star Ocean, too!" "But you led us h-" "Carver, you are being really weird and sneaky about Zimmy, something I, Jack, would personally never do." "Y'all I'm so sorry, I don't know poo poo about what's going on since chapter 70 at least." If something truly weird is going on, which I still hope (I know, I know), It has been about 200 pages since this all started. But hey, with such a long set-up surely the pay-off will be worth it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 20:25
|
|
|
I know a lot of people have Mind Cage as the turning point, but its the resolution of The Tale of Two Annies in Find Yourself that I get hung up. I was so sure that Zimmy didn't wave her hand and combine them. Weird perspective shifts happen all the time around her! Characters are revealed to actually be different characters! We will just go a few pages or a chapter with one Annie and they will reconcile their differences, then the Zimmy magic will wear off and they will still be standing on that rooftop. She didn't just reverse the interference of a god in the multiverse. Then we got Mind Cage, which was bad, but it was specifically coming off of the confusion and doubt of Find Yourself that soured me. The first pages of Mind Cage where Jones asks a bunch of pertinent questions about the recombination and Annie blows her off completely are still very off-putting and hard to read. Edit: Heck, look at panel 4 of this page: https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=2442 That is not the look of someone that the readers will think has a perfectly fine mental state! But it turns out nope, this is the start of Annie monologuing at the reader to resolve plot threads. Arbetor fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jan 16, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 20:34
|
|
|
Arbetor posted:I know a lot of people have Mind Cage as the turning point, but its the resolution of The Tale of Two Annies in Find Yourself that I get hung up. I was so sure that Zimmy didn't wave her hand and combine them. Weird perspective shifts happen all the time around her! Characters are revealed to actually be different characters! We will just go a few pages or a chapter with one Annie and they will reconcile their differences, then the Zimmy magic will wear off and they will still be standing on that rooftop. She didn't just reverse the interference of a god in the multiverse. This is where I am at, yeah, for the simple reason that no recombination "needed to" happen. Like, scifi and fantasy TV shows will do the occasional "duplicated character" plot and you know there's only going to be one by the end (due to recombination or one getting offed/sent away) because these shows need a status quo to return to. This comic does not, and has shown itself to be willing to change the fundamentals of the setting. It was actually cool as gently caress that this prank Loup did to gently caress with everyone eventually resolved itself through the characters working it out! The situation with the two Annies was fine, they managed to get along and it could have just been a neat thing that "now there's two." When Zimmy just waved her wand and merged them, and it was clear that was what really happened, I was just like "what. why." And the only answer I could come to was "because that's how the duplicate character plot is 'supposed to' go."
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 20:49
|
|
|
Who doesn't love it when characters act completely different and make stupid decisions for no clear reason? I've tried to hold out hope as the plot keeps disintegrating, but it's not looking great. Insert an image of that 'horse drawing that gets progressively worse' meme here.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 21:13
|
|
|
Arbetor posted:I know a lot of people have Mind Cage as the turning point, but its the resolution of The Tale of Two Annies in Find Yourself that I get hung up. I was so sure that Zimmy didn't wave her hand and combine them. Weird perspective shifts happen all the time around her! Characters are revealed to actually be different characters! We will just go a few pages or a chapter with one Annie and they will reconcile their differences, then the Zimmy magic will wear off and they will still be standing on that rooftop. She didn't just reverse the interference of a god in the multiverse. That page is wild, it's basically screaming "something is seriously wrong here", but apparently it's meant to be entirely sincere. Annie is fine now. Zimmy fixed her. She loves her dad. It's all good, stop worrying about it. It's still very funny to me that Tom's last video retrospective was on that chapter. The next chapter is The Mind Cage, it's been over a year and he hasn't covered it yet.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 21:17
|
|
|
GunnerJ posted:When Zimmy just waved her wand and merged them, and it was clear that was what really happened, I was just like "what. why." And the only answer I could come to was "because that's how the duplicate character plot is 'supposed to' go." A charitable part of me suspects that this was a clumsy attempt to set up the idea that Zimmy has the power to run the star ocean ship. It's not that there were two Annies, it's that two annies from foreign timelines had wound up on earth prime, and Zimmy just resolved the paradox with a wave of her hand. The star ocean ship sounds like it will need that kind of reality-shrugging power to work, so the whole thing was just a reminder to the reader that Zimmy has abilities on par with Loup. But it's stupid because we already knew that, and if we needed a reminder, it could have been done without deus ex machina-ing the last interesting plot out of the comic.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 21:26
|
|
|
This reminds me of Red chewing Annie out in the least charitable way possible that came out of loving nowhere after the Jeanne plot resolved. That was weird and arbitrary and had no clear narrative value...a lot like the mind cage actually. Just a neat delivery of how the reader is supposed to feel.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 21:46
|
|
|
for red it wasn't entirely off-base because the fairies' outlook was always kind of skewed and we had kat coming by later to go "the hell was up with that." this is just [SCENE MISSING] followed by lecture
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 21:49
|
|
|
i think we're actually supposed to feel the opposite tom frequently just burns a character to ashes to have them be inhumanly unreasonable out of nowhere to make sure we're pushed onto annie's side
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 21:50
|
|
|
Red worked for me cus yeah, the faeries have always been very impulsive and brash, with basically zero filter between thought and speech. Red also wasn't entirely wrong about the situation - it was a very uncharitable interpretation of the events, but there was some truth behind some of the things she said.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 22:04
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:Red worked for me cus yeah, the faeries have always been very impulsive and brash, with basically zero filter between thought and speech. Red also wasn't entirely wrong about the situation - it was a very uncharitable interpretation of the events, but there was some truth behind some of the things she said. What bothers me is that the scolding and subsequent introspection Annie underwent there ultimately went nowhere. "Someone's consent to do something dangerous for or with you doesn't necessarily mean that you are in the right," was an excellent lesson for Annie at that point in the narrative, but it doesn't seem like Annie internalized it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 22:14
|
|
|
Begemot posted:It's still very funny to me that Tom's last video retrospective was on that chapter. The next chapter is The Mind Cage, it's been over a year and he hasn't covered it yet. I mean, it's not odd to me at all? It's really hard to try and analyze the decisions of a stranger on the Internet, but as far as I can tell, Siddell had a plan for Annie as a character that drew heavily on his own experiences with family, and when he expressed the lessons he learned from that experience on paper, the Internet pretty much universally responded with "Jesus. You completely misunderstood your life. Your family is trash and all your friends failed you by not taking action to get you out of a toxic situation." In some ways it's actually impressive that we know so little about what's going on there. Usually when the entire Internet unites to tell someone they're wrong about something important to them we get an arc where they blow their top and become main character of Twitter for a day. Possibly Siddell deserves some kind of self-control award for becoming The Guy Who Didn't Press Reply. Anyway, what seems to me to have happened afterwards is that Siddell has basically extracted Annie's plotline and character development from the comic, so now we're getting a weird compressed version of the ending of Gunnerkrigg Court where all of the events still happen, but with everything that would make them relevant to the protagonist erased.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 22:31
|
|
|
wait what *clicks back 8 pages* what???
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2023 22:32
|
|
|
Another "this makes no sense! it's clearly a setup!" moment: Annie infodumping to Jerrek about the Omega Device and it really casually being revealed that her dad (notably awful at talking to her about anything, including his work) explained everything to her offscreen. Especially with the "You remind me of Ysengrin" line, or Jerrek being extremely obvious about the fact that he is Not A Robot (e.g. not calling Kat "Angel" or randomly getting pissed about the elimination of the Ether, a very normal thing for a robot to care about). Everyone was like "okay yeah that's really obviously Annie knowing he's Loup and feeding him false info". Nope, just legit dumped the answer to a years-long mystery in the form of "idk I heard it from my dad" to a character Annie barely knows. She could have told basically ANYONE else and it would've felt more narratively impactful, but Loup Needed To Know This Information so she's infodumping to Jerrek now. Just zero care for "wouldn't it be nice to know how Annie would react to this information, wouldn't it be nice to see her react to her father talking to her about it, who would she realistically discuss her troubles with?", pure writing A->B, "Loup needs this so Annie needs to tell it to him". Like, gently caress, the chapter or so before it talked about him being able to eavesdrop on conversations through walls and poo poo, you could've just done that again.  isasphere posted:What bothers me is that the scolding and subsequent introspection Annie underwent there ultimately went nowhere. But the subsequent chapter was just... basically Kat going "Everything she said was wrong". It was very bizarre and made the Red chapter feel very pointless, except for temporarily making Annie and the reader feel bad? Like you said, Annie didn't really learn anything. It kind of felt like the author looking you in the eye and saying "Here's a bunch of concerns you may have had! Now here's the narrative neatly addressing them, reassuring Annie she needs to have exactly zero self-doubt about this decision! Everything is fine. The protagonist was correct in her actions. Good thing we cleared that up!" I genuinely want to believe that something is still amiss, that it's Zimmy shenanigans, or Jack and Jenny are trying to pin the blame on her for some nefarious reason, or whatever. To admit otherwise would be to admit that the writing has gotten way worse. Everyone in this thread is here because we loved the comic at some point in our lives, and I think we all want it to be good again, even those of us that are getting a bit of schadenfreude from it. I don't think any of us are deliberately taking the most uncharitable reading - it's just genuinely difficult to believe there's something more clever laid out here when we've fallen into that trap like 5 times now and been wrong every time. Tiny Myers fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Jan 17, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 01:32
|
|
|
Tom said in the retrospective on Red that her time in the story was over and he felt it was appropriate to present an alternative view of what Annie had done, which was to manipulate Ayilu with a favor that would cost Annie nothing. It was unpleasant, but I think it was worthwhile to take a moment to consider whether it was ethical. Ironically, what Red scolded Annie for is not very different what we, the readers, were shocked to see the psychopomps do. They waited until Annie needed something that cost them nothing to give and used that to manipulate her into signing her life away to them. So while it may have felt like an attack on the character, it was still good writing. Kat contradicts Red immediately after not to show that she was wrong in a word of god sense, but to show that despite what Red said, Annie's other friends don't see it that way, not even Smitty, who actually got stabbed.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 02:08
|
|
|
Yeah, I'd love for this to be some Zimmy weirdness again, but the last several chapters have convinced me that this will end abruptly with Jack and Jenny storming off, and we'll never see them again. Then next chapter we'll shift to, I don't know, Shell and Aata on a date or something.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 02:17
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:Anyway, what seems to me to have happened afterwards is that Siddell has basically extracted Annie's plotline and character development from the comic, so now we're getting a weird compressed version of the ending of Gunnerkrigg Court where all of the events still happen, but with everything that would make them relevant to the protagonist erased. My pet theory is that Annie was initially meant to fill Lana's shoes, but then Tom looked at how the audience reacted to Tony Time and decided to maybe not. Skippy McPants fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Jan 17, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 03:01
|
|
|
Maybe the last two or so years of the comic have all been Zimmy weirdness
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 03:08
|
|
|
the only zimmy weirdness is whatever compels people to post in the thread after six years of silence like 'maybe you're all being too hard on the comic' only to immediately realize 'oh, wait, no, it IS bad'
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 03:12
|
|
|
Patware posted:the only zimmy weirdness is whatever compels people to post in the thread after six years of silence like 'maybe you're all being too hard on the comic' only to immediately realize 'oh, wait, no, it IS bad' Who cares when someone posts in this thread? Go back to sending passive aggressive tweets to Tom or something, weirdo.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 03:15
|
|
|
rotoscoped posted:I also genuinely thought the whole "let's hunt Loup with the weird new kid that well all implicitly trust suddenly despite the fact that he's always creepin on me" was a plot to gain Jerrek's trust. It seemed really obvious to me! Annie and Kat aren't that dumb, they've managed to free Jeanne from eternal torment! Annie has been able to hold her own against more than one mad canine god! And when she's hosed up, it was probably a good lesson about... not trying to always resolve every problem by her own, especially when the problem is a mad dog god who can tear you apart easily? But this is just the start of another year of Annie being bullied by the plot of her own comic. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 04:10
|
|
|
Nuns with Guns posted:Who cares when someone posts in this thread? Go back to sending passive aggressive tweets to Tom or something, weirdo. it's happened multiple times, it's a funny pattern
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 04:23
|
|
|
Patware posted:it's happened multiple times, it's a funny pattern I mean, I get the impulse. I'd love if this was hinting at something. Every time someone's been like "They can't be this dense. It's building to some twist!" the twists people want sound way more interesting than what we've gotten so far. It's baffling how much the character writing and pacing has disintegrated. Some people still want to be optimistic. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 04:34
|
|
|
It happens cyclically because everyone comes to their realization about the state of the comic at a different point. For a lot of us, that point was somewhere around Find Yourself or The Mind Cage. Other folks hold out longer for one reason or another, but sooner or later, something breaks the momentum. That brings them here, and—still being somewhat optimistic—they naturally have a defensive reaction to all the negativity in this thread. Eventually, though, they come to terms with how bad things are and either join us in hate-reading or do the healthy thing and move on with their life.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 05:20
|
|
|
I just wanted the comic to be good but it is exploring different branches of being bad all wrapped around a Colgate looking teenage werewolf. At least we got some good art lately.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 05:24
|
|
|
I didn't even mind the Mind Cage and I was honestly glad Annie stopped being two people. I just wish that the story hadn't completely lost its momentum after that. And I wish we could have seen the change in Tony and Annie's relationship rather than just having both of them telling us about it separately. I think for me the problem is just that the reveal about the Court's ultimate goals isn't what I wanted and I find the truth of the whole mystery kind of boring and meandering on a motivation level. I guess that's the trouble with the decades long slow burn release of a story. I really wish that my tastes had aligned with Tom's endgame here. Really the main thing I'm holding onto rn is that I hope whatever Kat does is hosed up because the robot cult has been my favorite plotline. So if that pays off it will be nice.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 07:50
|
|
|
Riot Bus posted:I just wish that the story hadn't completely lost its momentum after that. honestly, good call. the story was thinnening for a while, but it outright flatlined at that point
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 08:16
|
|
|
You know it would've even made more sense if they'd accuse Annie of being in league with Kat to take Zimmy. Anyway, I haven't minded most of what's happening. Though boy formerly known as Loup is lame. I don't mind mindcage, though the way it was resolved was a little out of the left field. We've rarely even seen Zimmy in control of her powers and now suddenly she straight up merges 2 Annies. It's just this page is bad and doesn't make sense. A lot of simple fixes though
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 14:42
|
|
|
GunnerJ posted:I mean tbc I would love for the story to make this all make sense and prove the haters wrong because I do not want Gunnerkrigg to suck! But betting on the seemingly idiotic plot developments actually having an eventually-revealed well-written explanation has not been a winning move so far.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 16:27
|
|
|
Darth TNT posted:You know it would've even made more sense if they'd accuse Annie of being in league with Kat to take Zimmy. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 17:02
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:I mean, it's not odd to me at all? Do you have a source for this? It's been brought up a few times but apparently no one can find where Tom has said that Tony/Annie was based on his own relationship with his father. It's not in the retrospectives for instance. So it seems that might have just been a rumor or someone's theory that got repeated in the thread over the years. It would be nice to get confirmation one way or the other. Since whether that is true or not changes my reading of that scene for sure. Doesn't make me like it but at least it helps in seeing what he may have been going for with it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 17:17
|
|
|
JuniperCake posted:Do you have a source for this? It's been brought up a few times but apparently no one can find where Tom has said that Tony/Annie was based on his own relationship with his father. It's not in the retrospectives for instance. So it seems that might have just been a rumor or someone's theory that got repeated in the thread over the years. Might it have been in his formspring (RIP)? There were all sorts of interesting answers there, like how apparently there were going to be more murder mysteries to solve beyond Jeanne's in an earlier conception of the comic, or that school tuition and expenses are paid by the Court and they are the ones generally tracking down prospective students rather than viceversa (which was answered before we got The Stone and saw how Eglamore was recruited).
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2023 18:45
|
|
|
DontMindMe posted:This thread is getting really weird. Why is almost everyone assuming bad writing and doom-posting when it is really obvious something weird is going on? lol, lmao 
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2023 09:23
|
|
|
What? What is this? I thought I was resigned to the state of the comic long ago, but somehow I have it in me to feel angry again. This feels like it was coauthored by GPT-3.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2023 09:36
|
|
|
I got sucked into reading again out of horrified curiosity and a desperate desire for things to get better and because Zimmy was my favourite… bad timing. Gotta say tho, this page is straight out of a cheap romance shoujo manga. As in I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this exact page of the shocked girl running dramatically transposed in front of a background of the rival girl and love interest embracing, it’s an extremely cliche reference.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2023 09:48
|
|
|
Annie's inexplicable reaction (to the Loup part of this! what??) aside... Is that flashback to last chapter just in case we already forgot we should be thinking about Loup as a lovestruck teenager instead of a sparkledog chaos god who hosed everything up? It can't possibly be a mental image to accompany Annie's thoughts!
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2023 09:50
|
|
|
Ditocoaf posted:This feels like it was coauthored by GPT-3. You know what, AI art is a good metaphor: things superficially look the same but you look closer and everything's flatter, there are creepy details jumping out at you and disparate parts don't mesh together into a cohesive ensemble.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2023 10:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 06:53 |
|
|
Galaxy brain theory: Boxbot's the author.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2023 11:31
|
|
