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Bussamove posted:It’s three panels can we maybe wait another update or two before flipping our poo poo? Three panels involving a character and situation that routinely involves playing with our perceptions of characters, and the character's perceptions of themselves and other characters. IF the two Annie situation is resolved like this, I will be very disappointed, but assuming that it is now resolved, when Zimmy is right there, seems premature.
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Mar 3, 2021 14:30
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GunnerJ posted:The plot thinens Woke up this morning, read the latest update, and realized I was looking forward more to this thread's reaction to the update than to the continuing story. And this did not disappoint.
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Apr 18, 2022 15:13
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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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Ooooh, we can finally get an answer to one of the longest dangling plot hooks remaining: What is with the weird glowing paintings with the footprints? "Oh, yeah. They are a naturally generated side effect of the etheric process. They form spontaneously, don't go anywhere and no one left the footprints, so we just stick them in storage."
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Aug 22, 2022 12:48
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Patware posted:you know what i'm just gonna be glad the camera cut to zimmy and she wasn't once again like distorted in insane pain I agree with this, although I will admit that my first thought on loading the page was "Oh goody, is Zimmy going to wave her hand and solve everything for Annie again?" I went back and re-read Find Yourself, and it still doesn't feel right. Just gonna go: "I think I know something that will help Jerrek understand himself a little better." <Couple pages of freaky etheric smears> Jerrek is just Jerrek, no more tension between Loup's own desires and his physical body's.
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Nov 2, 2022 14:04
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I find the dialogue here so stilted and weird. All these words about how Zimmy doesn't want to be found and they will only do it if it is really necessary, as though there is supposed to be tension around convincing these two to help, then its dismissed in two sentences on the same page. I think presenting the idea that Zimmy doesn't like being tracked is worthwhile, its just the way the conversation is framed and presented that makes it seem odd.
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Dec 26, 2022 14:51
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The only thing that would make this scene work is the reveal that these two are being blackmailed or otherwise forced by the court to find Zimmy, and have decided to use Annie as an emotional patsy or something. Someone they can blame to try and shift the guilt to. That would kind of fit what is otherwise a very clear attempt at gaslighting her. But because the court is as an antagonist shadowy to the point of non-existence, it is hard to imagine this setup coming about. And this post is basically the bargaining stage anyway.
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Jan 16, 2023 13:20
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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 |
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Jan 16, 2023 20:34
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Everyone is focused on the last splash panel, but I can't get over the "Friends gaslighting you by accusing you of using them to find someone so they can be murdered? Just walk away. If it sucks, hit da bricks" resolution of the previous page. She turned around and walked away from them. Then she stared jogging and then sprinting. Meanwhile they are presumably still standing there with no faces.
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Jan 18, 2023 16:15
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So are the square with rounded corners narration bubbles back to the DRAMATISATION from the first page of the chapter? A dramatization of Loup is the only reason I can think of to describe anything he has done as involving "bitter wrath".
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Feb 1, 2023 13:43
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I see Kat has tapped into a sufficiently powerful source of energy to truly unleash her spark and take her first step on the path to joining the ancient queens. I look forward to when she finally leaves the
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Apr 7, 2023 12:38
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Joe Slowboat posted:Alison quasi-sexually assaulted a libertarian bro into magically making Feral’s healing factor many times stronger so she can fill her organ quota with only one day of vivisection in a week. Christ I remember this, and it was one of those scenes where I absolutely knew exactly where it was going to go: The libertarian was the son of a senator or something, so the full weight and fury of whatever meta-human governmental agency was going to come down on her, and since Feral's current healing factor made the surgeries absurdly difficult and painful, with an amped up healing factor they would be completely impossible, drugs no longer working and her skin healing immediately behind the scalpel. Now Alison is under fire and her long time friend and ally is infuriated at her for ruining the one good thing she was able to do. Conflict! Learning that just taking everything into your own hands and doing things without consent is wrong! Lessons! And then none of that happened and it all worked out perfectly and hookers and blow for everyone!
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Jul 29, 2023 23:40
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It looks like The Disintegration of the Persistence of Coyote to me.
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Aug 2, 2023 15:03
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I mean, the last time I assumed a character's forced, painful grin was a sign of distress, it was actually just her being perfectly fine and everything was good and we need to stop questioning her emotional state or her relationship with her father.
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Aug 9, 2023 18:12
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She is holding what I think is supposed to be the backplate of the radio, but is staring at the pointy end of the guy's speech bubble. Those things are serious eye safety risks, donchaknow.
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Aug 28, 2023 17:07
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Everything feels so disjointed and I can't tell if its deliberate, accidental, or somewhere in between. First, the rapidly changing sky is very distracting. Previous panels show that the sun and the moon(s) are all in the sky, so presumably the sky exists with all different times simultaneously. But comic convention is that a changing sky indicates the passage of time, so even if I intellectually know that the sky is screwed up, I still read all these pages as taking place over entire days. And the backgrounds are changing so rapidly that I can't tell where each panel exists in relationship to each other. Almost every panel is now a closeup, but the background switches between tree, building, green blob, buildingy blob, massive city scape with no respect for what the previous panel showed vs. character direction. The two effects combined makes each page feel like snapshots in time from Annie just spinning in circles for weeks on end. And then Annie's expressions. She switches so completely from sad to timid and confused to confident and resolute over the last three pages. Presumably she is processing the emotions of telling Kat about Lana, then getting confident from Kat's faith in her, but there is no transition, no progression, just boom, new page, Annie is now Confused, new page, Annie is now Confident. The last panel of Monday's strip, with her looking off to the side in worry (or maybe someone just said her name off panel) just doesn't slip straight to her on the first panel of today's strip, with all the self assurance of someone ready to venture boldly forth into a brave new world. Sure, we are in a Zimmy distortion, and those have always been disjointed or screwy. But this feels less like the subtle misdirection like in Power Station, and more like someone just flashing lights and noises in my face while I am trying to read.
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Sep 6, 2023 12:45
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Because it was the annoying girlfriend of that one annoying guy that you have known since middle school but he really changed during college and you don't really know her, so watching her be devoured by a god is sad, but its a remote sad, like hearing the death toll of a natural disaster on the other side of the world. Thing I don't understand: I read this page as her heading to the deepest, darkest part of the anomaly, presumably towards the center, where Gamma, Zimmy, Coyote, and Loup can be found. But she is trying to get "home", where ever that is. Were Gamma and Zimmy at "home"? I would have assumed they were not, since they never seemed to share quarters with the rest of the class. When Kat asked about the other people, it was in relation to the shore. The court's geography has always been nebulous, I get it, but is she heading towards the other side or towards the center?
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Sep 11, 2023 13:19
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Tiny Myers posted:Anyway I'm glad Annie is getting a shred of agency for once and we're finally getting to see what her powers look like in practice post-merge, since it was implied she was much stronger due to that but we haven't really gotten to witness it. Time to go full Dragon Ball Z posting, I guess. Fusion is a major power multiplier, but masenko just isn't a very impressive attack to start with. Its hard to see this being enough to negate the enemy's regeneration. I have minor complaints about the panel to panel action (enemy is directly in front of her, then its getting blasted up and back, then it landed almost directly up?), but you are right. Agency! Something that might be a conflict! Woo! Hope it doesn't just get resolved instantly next page.
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Sep 18, 2023 15:50
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The used to be used extensively early on: https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=117 But eventually they were toned down heavily: https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=807 https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1400 Here is a much more recent page with finger lasers: https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=2204 The one on this page is a little word-artier than most of the others, that is about it.
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Sep 18, 2023 16:31
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I could understand the recapping as explaining the logic of the plan. We did x, and y happened. We want y to happen again, so we should do x again. That would make sense. But they went in a direction that was familiar, and it led to monsters, so now they need to... head somewhere familiar again? And that familiar place is the sun? I guess this is supposed to feel disjointed and ephemeral, the combination of Coyote's chaos and Zimmy's reality warping forming a dreamlike realm. That doesn't make it less disjointed or frustrating. I just hope a ball made of smaller balls doesn't show up. The cube made of smaller cubes last page doesn't make me feel good.
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Oct 2, 2023 14:14
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coolusername posted:It’s kind of sad we don’t have anything from the new people beyond “follows her like sheep through centerpieces.” No names, no personalities, no real dialogue… this could have at least introduced us to their culture, contextualised Lana better, etc. and make us care at all about the danger they’re in here but nope. Background NPCs here to say “look out!” It reminds me of a book I read where the author lumped a bunch of characters into one group, just "The Uncles" and thought that would be good enough. Then 300 pages later one of The Uncles became a major character and provided a bunch of support and advice to the POV character, but was still just "one of The Uncles" because it would have been awkward to give this one guy a name this far into the book. Like the authorial version of being introduced to someone, forgetting their name, then hanging out for so long that it becomes too awkward to ask for their name and now you just have to hope that someone mentions their name. Or maybe that is what has happened to Antimony. She has been introduced to all these former robots but hasn't remembered any of their names and now can't bring herself to ask.
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Oct 7, 2023 17:04
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Yeah, the speech bubble completely sucks all tension out of the scene. I can't articulate why, but it feels like the comic equivalent of a badly overdubbed explanatory line from a 70s sci fi movie. Takes you out of the scene, awkward all around. Watch out for
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Nov 1, 2023 14:59
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That was my first thought, but I assume that she is specifically trying to use the whole memory/impression hopping to summon Kat, since the first time she encountered Jeanne, she curled up into a ball, and then Kat appeared on the anti-grav cycle. Archive link: https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=141 The post is different (although with the early art getting refreshed, maybe it won't be?), but the situations are so similar that it would follow the theme of the chapter.
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Nov 6, 2023 14:02
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Welp, that's what I get for assuming something interesting and proactive was going to happen. Just the main character cowering in terror, which magically fixes the problem she caused. Can't even tell if that is the same guy that got ghost-stabbed or a different generic robot guy because they all look the same, canonically. It could just be another randomly generated pasty bald guy. Who knows! A new one materializing out of the formless crowd of extras makes just as much sense as anything else.
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Nov 8, 2023 13:46
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Bonster posted:It's all Annie's fault again. She teleported them outside Eglamore's office door: https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=159 And because I don't learn lessons, I will now speculate as to why: She felt safe with Eglamore, and therefore popped here because it was a safe spot in a scary situation. Now, to me, the freaky colosseum basement you went to once to get a detention slip is not the first place I think of as a secure refuge, but what do I know, I'm not in a meta-conceptual god-forged dreamscape.
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Nov 8, 2023 14:22
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Rotten Red Rod posted:I've never understood why every single robot desired the exact same thing. Wouldn't some of them want to remain robots? Or transition to something other than human, like animals or a mythological creature? Or pick the weird character creation options? I mean, clearly they have differing personalities and ideas, or else all of them would have picked the exact same body. Didn't almost all of the robots just choose a Random Body/Face option? I feel like that was something the angel robot avatar thing said.
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Nov 10, 2023 18:56
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It has been one of those things-that-should-be-a-central-question-but-isnt for a long time. What separates the robots from the newpeople? Why do the psychopomps/the aether/the whatever from high atop the thing consider the robots to be appliances but the newpeople to be ensouled? What ensouls them? Could it be that ensouling them removes the ability to restore from backup? Or is it the other way around? Grand mysteries of the metaphysical, left to rot in the wake of shoving conscious creatures into new bodies, new bodies they cared about so little that most of them just chose the randgen option. Thank you, Angel.
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Jan 5, 2024 23:02
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CodfishCartographer posted:Honestly I think it's kind of unfair of the thread to harp on about this? Yes, Annie was the one that summoned Jeanne, but it actually isn't really her fault. She didn't summon Jeanne intentionally, and i don't think anyone should blame her for thinking of Jeanne when near the river - that's like blaming someone for thinking of their childhood if you drove by the home they grew up in, it's just a reflexive action. And it's extremely hard to intentionally NOT think about something without, well, thinking about it or picturing it in your mind. I agree that it is not Annie's fault, but it is also the kind of thing that I would expect most people to feel guilt about. She acknowledges just after it happens that she caused it. Since then, she has been dealing with her psychopomp duties and Saslamel, so not the right time to process what happened. But at some point I would hope for her to acknowledge it and work through some feelings about what happened, both for her sake and for the sake of the new people as people. Even if this were just a post chapter page with Kat asking what exactly happened to Sam and a fade to black as Annie explained, I'd be disappointed but at least happy that it was acknowledged again.
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Jan 19, 2024 16:43
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Randalor posted:I was going to bitch about how Kat wasn't in the distortion, but she actually does say that everything looks messed up where she is when she's talking to Annie back at the start of this arc (back in September). I'm still annoyed at the glacial slow pace of the comic, but at least it's being sorta-kinda consistent. I went back and reread the start of this section and I'm still marveling at how floaty everything feels. The weird way Annie swaps between doubt and confidence has already been hashed out, but now I'm thinking about Kat telling Annie to go "home" to explain the situation to the "others", and then the trip immediately being co-opted by the nupeople to deliver the CPUs to Kat. Is Kat at "home"? The conversation implies that she isn't, and "home" is a third location, but dealing with the supposed panic of the "others" is immediately forgotten because of the CPUs. I don't even know who the "others" are, since huge swathes of the supporting cast have been memoryholed. Also, Kat does mention after she finds out Lana done got et that the memory transfer is one time only, so presumably that is part of the ensoulification. No Phantom of Kansas situation here.
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Jan 22, 2024 15:47
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It has to be Lana, I refuse to believe that Zimmy would ever make that face. What is that face?
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Feb 16, 2024 12:30
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Rotten Red Rod posted:"Don't worry about her." Annie yelled at her, so she made a stupid face and started sliding backwards out of the room, thus neutralizing any threat she posed permanently.
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Feb 23, 2024 14:14
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Man, 3 or 4 years ago I would be reading this as a really good shot at demonstrating an altered state of mind, where Annie is trying desperately to figure out what the deal is with the girl, but some dreamlike quantity of the Zimmispace or some ability of the girl keeps forcing her thought process away. A small part of me wants to go with that interpretation, but my optimistic interpretations have been shredded too many times.
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Mar 15, 2024 15:49
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Bald robot guy is back. Thought he died. Must have gotten better. Edit: Oh, now that I'm not on a phone, I can see the hair. Dang, I miss bald robot guy. Arbetor fucked around with this message at 11:58 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 11:10
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I have a feeling that Robot's entire arc is going to be wrapped up in "Love makes you act in strange ways", and that is it. No consequences, no growth, no change, just a platitude from one of the best chapters in the story. Those words started as a non-explanation from some confused and distraught girls learning about some heavy, disturbing history. But after Tony's arc, I have to assume they are actually an explanation and an excuse and all the justification anyone needs.
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Apr 1, 2024 12:02
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"Robot, this is besides the point!" Then why did you bring it up? You don't get to be nettled at him for responding to your fact check! Shellfish.
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Apr 5, 2024 13:27
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Jeanne: Multiple chapters spent devising a plan, enacting a plan, and dealing with the fallout. Twin Annies: A full chapter of Zimmy nonsense. The final scene was quick but there was setup. The Tic-Tocs: A full chapter of explanation. Unsatisfying, but explained in full. Tony: A full chapter of apologist claptrap. The Court's whole deal: A few pages explaining their plan through bland exposition dump or by the main characters telling someone else. Kat's Apotheosis: Haha, Jeez. Several pages with the Arbiter and godguy, I dunno, my eyes slide off that pair. The robocult: One panel. I have to say that it is impressive that I am now looking back at the resolution of the two Annie situation positively because something happened before it was resolved. At least we have to have hit the nadir, the only way to resolve a plotline with less effort or care is to just end the comic completely. Or pull a Homestuck and have third panel Shadow time travel through the comic and fix everything with his "No, stop." power. Don't need to send Jeanne to her eternal rest if someone had just told Diego to be less creepy once.
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Apr 15, 2024 12:55
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Rotten Red Rod posted:You know this part always struck me as odd - didn't Coyote make the forest people as well? Was this retconned or something? I think most of the people/creatures in the forest are refugees from world mythology that have moved there as their home lands have become more hostile/limited, but I don't have citations and am not sure how much of that is canon and how much is my own thought. It would be similar to how Coyote came to the forest, actually.
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Apr 15, 2024 15:15
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It would probably have helped if the reveal of what Omega is had been better. Or, heck, hadn't happened at all. Excise that entire conversation, remove that anyone had told Annie what Omega was, and then drop this page. If we didn't know Omega was a really good computer, it was still that enigmatic project the court has been relying on, wow this would be something. But between having that knowledge, and the residual disappointment in how the Omega reveal was just dropped in our laps with no intrigue or work or impact...
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Apr 20, 2024 03:29
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