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christmas boots posted:I don't believe we're meant to take human Annie as the correct one in that conversation. That is that person's point. They feel that at some point the comic's perspective shifted to Tony being correct. I don't agree with this, I think that Tony's always been supposed to have been wrong about how he treated Annie. I think we just got a redemption arc at insane fast forward which is a slightly different problem then "Tony was right."
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Jan 23, 2023 20:36
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isasphere posted:Yeah, at the time it read to me as Annie committing emotional self-harm because she kept contorting her mind in knots trying to believe that Tony's cruelty had a point. He had to have a point. even during this arc there's this really jarring tone about how the donlans care more about tony's feelings and emotional well being as their friend than annie's. and like yeah i can see people having a blind spot about their best friend abusing his daughter through neglect, but looking back, now i don't know if even during that arc tom was aware he was depicting tony being actively abusive
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Jan 23, 2023 20:36
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A big flaming stink posted:now i don't know if even during that arc tom was aware he was depicting tony being actively abusive I think he has no idea which is why he had to tell us from Annie's own mouth that it's fine, what are you guys upset about?
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Jan 23, 2023 23:54
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Strep Vote posted:he had his reasons
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Jan 23, 2023 23:55
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I don't think Siddell thinks everything Anthony is doing is fine. He knows Anthony is a bad father. What's happening here is that Annie has arrived at the conclusion that this is what her father is like, and she can't get rid of him, and she can't change him, so all she can do is accept him and love him. And the thing is, Antimony is correct. She's a child and she doesn't have the power to change her situation, so accepting it and suffering through it as best she can is really the only thing she can do. This is, apparently (and I admit I don't have primary sources for this) more or less what happened in the author's own life. Where this falls apart is that the readers, who are not Annie or the author, immediately say "that's loving tragic", because they aren't children and can see that the characters who are also not Annie, and not children, could have done something about the situation. (For example, they could have said "Tony, get effective therapy or give up custody; we don't care which.") Because they could have done something, and didn't, the audience has lost all respect for Donald, Anja, Eglamore, and Jones, which the author apparently wasn't expecting to happen.
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Jan 24, 2023 00:20
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It's not even that for me, so much as that it wasn't framed as a tragedy.
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Jan 24, 2023 00:22
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The thing with both that and the abrupt resolution of The Two Annies is that it seemed to be prematurely resolving an extremely important plotline... for no reason? Like if Annie was still split in two and not resolved with her dad, would the current chapter be any different? Would any of the recent plot developments not work? It's not like they had to be resolved so we could move on to some bigger emotional stakes, we got rid of those and replaced them with nothing. Which just makes the way that it was done all the more baffling.
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Jan 24, 2023 00:34
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Bongo Bill posted:It's not even that for me, so much as that it wasn't framed as a tragedy. It's this. It should be a tragedy. An abused and neglected girl forced to accept horrible and impossible circumstances. But Annie's monologue at the end of Mind Cage frames the acceptance as catharsis and character growth for Annie. Which is... just appalling. Like god drat, it is so painfully bleak, and Siddell presenting it as a positive moment causes a narrative-shattering amount of dissonance.
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Jan 24, 2023 00:48
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Bongo Bill posted:It's not even that for me, so much as that it wasn't framed as a tragedy. This is the problem - the framing. Tom very obviously knows how to use the language of comics to deliver a message. He has skillfully used color, composition, character blocking, etc to deliver messages in the past. How the Mind Cage framed things is that Annie is correct and the reader should agree with her. She's drawn in bright colors, is shown smiling and looking confident, and is given prominent space on the pages as she explains her viewpoint. Then for good measure, Jones (who is often shown as an objective voice of reason, and who was just earlier in the same chapter seen challenging Tony and giving him advice on how to improve) bluntly says "you are doing fine" with regards to Annie and her mental state. Begemot posted:The thing with both that and the abrupt resolution of The Two Annies is that it seemed to be prematurely resolving an extremely important plotline... for no reason? The stuff with Jerrick probably wouldn't have worked as well (lmao) if there were two Annies for him to pine over before ultimately not caring anymore. CodfishCartographer fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Jan 24, 2023 |
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Jan 24, 2023 00:53
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CodfishCartographer posted:This is the problem - the framing. Tom very obviously knows how to use the language of comics to deliver a message. He has skillfully used color, composition, character blocking, etc to deliver messages in the past. How the Mind Cage framed things is that Annie is correct and the reader should agree with her. She's drawn in bright colors, is shown smiling and looking confident, and is given prominent space on the pages as she explains her viewpoint. Then for good measure, Jones (who is often shown as an objective voice of reason, and who was just earlier in the same chapter seen challenging Tony and giving him advice on how to improve) bluntly says "you are doing fine" with regards to Annie and her mental state. Hell, he even did it with Annie and Tony earlier in the comic. When Tony first comes back and humiliates Annie in front of her whole class, the way he depicts her breakdown is outstanding. Edit: like, the dude hosed his kid up so bad it broke the comic. And after that, we get chapters worth of him being a complete piece of poo poo. To have the conclusion to all that be Annie deciding she needs to grow up and accept her lovely father for who he is, and then to frame that as a positive result was just insane. It still pisses me off how loving off-the-wall horrible it all is. Skippy McPants fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Jan 24, 2023 |
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Jan 24, 2023 01:03
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Rand Brittain posted:I don't think Siddell thinks everything Anthony is doing is fine. He knows Anthony is a bad father. What's happening here is that Annie has arrived at the conclusion that this is what her father is like, and she can't get rid of him, and she can't change him, so all she can do is accept him and love him. He wasn't? Eglamore was always a weird creep, the school cop who tries to sidle up to the girl students all buddy-buddy; Donald and Anja were depicted as sympathetic but largely ineffectual fence-sitters who always end up siding with the status quo, and have basically been cut out of the story since they gave up on helping Antimony; Jones is Jones (rock lady). The adults were never really depicted as especially good or competent, and it's sort of a basic assumption in a YA narrative that they'll fail to deal with any significant conflict in the plot; the problem was, neither did the kids, and Siddell just plain didn't have all that much to say about living in an abusive household and/or briefly escaping it via magical adventures so the problem just sort of went away and the comic switched gears from its emotionally weighty, interesting conflict to fulltime dog/girl romance and this intensely pointless maundering about the star ocean. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Jan 24, 2023 |
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Jan 24, 2023 01:29
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the mind cage is also the second or third time the story tried to blunt our criticisms of tony by drowning us in his own histrionic angst. you only get to pull that trick once
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Jan 24, 2023 01:45
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the mindcage fucken ruled imo: a slightly worse writer woulda tried to zazz it up and make it like a literal magical mind cage or something instead of a very straightforward and lucid description of normal-rear end social anxiety; a slightly more reflective writer would've realized that's not a heroic tragic flaw nobody could do something about if they particularly wanted to. instead we get right in the zone where the magic happens; I'm imagining Siddell following this up with a crime thriller where the killer is driven to peel and eat faces by a rare 'attention deficit hyperactivity disorder'
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Jan 24, 2023 02:30
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Oxxidation posted:the mind cage is also the second or third time the story tried to blunt our criticisms of tony by drowning us in his own histrionic angst. you only get to pull that trick once Yeah this. The second chapter after he's introduced he gets a 15 almost-monologue to explain himself and his actions, which followed by the non-rescue of Renard a chapter later really deflated any interest in him for me. All the mystery and potential for drama in his character were totally gone well before The Mind Cage was a thing.
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Jan 24, 2023 03:21
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:the mindcage fucken ruled imo: a slightly worse writer woulda tried to zazz it up and make it like a literal magical mind cage or something instead of a very straightforward and lucid description of normal-rear end social anxiety; a slightly more reflective writer would've realized that's not a heroic tragic flaw nobody could do something about if they particularly wanted to. instead we get right in the zone where the magic happens; I'm imagining Siddell following this up with a crime thriller where the killer is driven to peel and eat faces by a rare 'attention deficit hyperactivity disorder'
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Jan 24, 2023 04:42
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I know I've said it here before but man, not only is The Mind Cage depressing from someone sympathizing with Annie's point of view, but also someone doing the same with Tony's. The message is basically "if you have severe social anxiety, there's nothing you can do to improve, just gotta hope your loved ones choose to live with it."
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Jan 24, 2023 04:58
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Skippy McPants posted:Edit: like, the dude hosed his kid up so bad it broke the comic. And after that, we get chapters worth of him being a complete piece of poo poo. To have the conclusion to all that be Annie deciding she needs to grow up and accept her lovely father for who he is, and then to frame that as a positive result was just insane. It still pisses me off how loving off-the-wall horrible it all is. Oh right. The scene of a father emotionally brutalizing his daughter in front of her peers, causing her to regress emotionally, have a series of trauma reactions, dissociate completely, and eventually reformat her personality to better fit his expectations. Which we are later told is the good, mature way for her to handle this, and that really this is a problem where we should feel bad for *him*. God, what a loving comic. Occasionally I forget how grotesque this was. The sheer intensity of it, the way Tony goes beyond neglectful to straightforwardly emotionally abusive in these pages, and the comic seemed to recognize it! Not to mention him literally taking control of Reynard, including forcing Annie to order Reynard to be an inanimate object, which must have been hellish. The degree to which he isolates her from every peer and friend within a day of reappearing is just chilling. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Jan 24, 2023 |
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Jan 24, 2023 05:02
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Tony was an incredible villain but it turns out we weren't supposed to think he was the bad guy I guess. He gave Reynard back when asked! So that made it all okay I guess. The whiplash.
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Jan 24, 2023 05:09
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Joe Slowboat posted:Oh right. The scene of a father emotionally brutalizing his daughter in front of her peers, causing her to regress emotionally, have a series of trauma reactions, dissociate completely, and eventually reformat her personality to better fit his expectations. It's honestly strange how little impact it had after the first few chapters. Annie gets her absurdly huge vacant dorm room that's used for a single gag. Annie mentions how all her "new" classmates find her strange and they seem so small. Then... it never comes up again. Most stories would treat something like this as an opportunity to introduce her new classmates and expand the cast some more? Flesh out the world some? If anything, this meant we were even less likely to see Annie's established friends because there's no chance to see them in class together anymore. I guess maybe they aren't doing classes anyway after Loupocalyse? It doesn't seem like it at least. You know, months ago when there was a discussion about Gunnerkrigg in the dead webcomic thread and I got compared to the rage youtuber who said Turning Red should've acknowledged 9/11 because I said Tony was pretty abusive to Annie. It's funny because bit after it happened I remembered the heartbreaking scene from the start of Turning Red that's similar. Where Mei's had all her bedroom furniture and things taken away (for her "safety") and she's locked in her empty bedroom with a mattress on the floor until she can control the red panda. It reminds me a lot of that bit in Gunnerkrigg, but Turning Red definitely treats it as a much more seriously lovely thing for her mom to force on her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSMSixSI54w And her mom does a whole lot of other awful, abusive, controlling things, too. And yet you can still see why Mei cares for her and wants her in her life. You learn about why her mom's like that (lots of generational trauma and related poo poo), and even if what her mom did was wrong you can see how she was working with broken tools of her own. And Mei learns, too, and find ways to make concessions to one another so they can still be together as a loving family. I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess it's nice seeing something with similar themes land so much better.
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Jan 24, 2023 05:47
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Tony's "social anxiety" around Annie operates like a loving witch's curse more than a mental illness. He can be normal around any other person on Earth except her, because he sees her as two people, except when she actually is two people, and then she seems like a new person and he can act normal. He cannot communicate any other way. He can't write her letters or notes. He can't support her in any way that doesn't involve meeting her face to face. He is a comical parody of a distant and neglectful authority figure. Except around other people, then he's totally cool and friendly and everyone gets along with him. This is all a perfectly fine setup for an exaggerated character in a webcomic! If it were left messy and stressful like that, it would be a good plot hook that could keep coming up at dramatic moments. But no, instead we got that bizarre resolution to the whole thing. Really, the big disconnect is that once Annie recombines, she suddenly has way more knowledge and experience that we, the readers who have only been following Forest-Annie, don't have. We don't get any of those scenes of her hanging out with Tony, or any of the things she learned from being in the court in the immediate aftermath of the attack. But now, after they're recombined, the one true Annie does. And that's why she can forgive Tony, and we can't, 'cause we didn't get that. We also don't get that side of Tony. He's still just some distant jerk, throwing out a bunch of sob-story excuses every time it's brought up.
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Jan 24, 2023 05:48
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All points raised so far have been extremely valid but nothing will ever be as existentially disturbing to me as the arbitrary and complete destruction of two distinct personalities for no other reason than narrative convenience/wanting to move on to the next predetermined plot point.
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Jan 24, 2023 06:24
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usenet celeb 1992 posted:All points raised so far have been extremely valid but nothing will ever be as existentially disturbing to me as the arbitrary and complete destruction of two distinct personalities for no other reason than narrative convenience/wanting to move on to the next predetermined plot point. Both Annies live in master Annie's head permanently now, like Kami and Nail in Piccolo's head in the DBZ Abridged videos. There's a bean bag chair in there.
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Jan 24, 2023 06:33
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Begemot posted:Tony's "social anxiety" around Annie operates like a loving witch's curse more than a mental illness. He can be normal around any other person on Earth except her, because he sees her as two people, except when she actually is two people, and then she seems like a new person and he can act normal. On that note, I'm still upset we never got to see how he won Kat over, one of Annie's strongest defenders in the "this was parental abandonment, Annie, it's not okay" camp, it feels like narrative cheating. At the time when Kat showed up suddenly liking Tony it felt like the whole world was gaslighting Annie and we were meant to see it that way, because at that point in time she still did recognize her situation was unfair and was expecting and wanting people to criticize Tony's parenting, so she could then defend her dad or change the topic, like a script she couldn't escape but needed to remain sane. Like in: https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1687 And that conversation with Ysengrin where she burns him that I can't find again but stops in time because of the bunny girl? And on a different note, looking through the archives, we haven't gotten more scenes with Annie laughing wildly since, have we? Anything where she seems to be genuinely enjoying herself and not just that sheepish eyes closed shrug while smiling thing that so many character have been doing lately. https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1179
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Jan 24, 2023 06:37
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Nuns with Guns posted:Both Annies live in master Annie's head permanently now, like Kami and Nail in Piccolo's head in the DBZ Abridged videos. There's a bean bag chair in there. If the two Annies actually ended up as headmates in the combined Annie and we saw them providing commentary and guiding the combined Annie that would've been so much more interesting. Instead we got whatever the gently caress this is.
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Jan 24, 2023 08:17
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I wonder if the plot beats might have tied up better if Jeanne was moved up between Torn Sea and Father Then, the Father arc can play out amidst what is wartime siege - then "why are all the notional guardians and friends preoccupied with something else" has a natural answer. One might, in a vague spirit of good intentions, not intervene to separate father and daughter if all involved might be killed by a capricious god tomorrow anyway The narrative as-is can't seem to decide how much of a threat Loup is, though
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Jan 24, 2023 09:34
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isasphere posted:And that conversation with Ysengrin where she burns him that I can't find again but stops in time because of the bunny girl? This part is what you're referring to! https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1576 I have mixed feelings about the scene. I think Annie desperately needed someone who is a father figure to her to affirm her in the way he did. ("Your father looks at you and sees the ghost of his dead wife. It is his loss if he does not see what an incredible creature his daughter is." Some of my favorite lines in the comic.) And Ysengrin not recognizing the damages of his emotional harm, only physical harm, is true to his character. But Annie coming to the conclusion she was being selfish is a little... yeah. At least she acknowledges she has legit reasons to be upset by it. I don't have much to add to the discussion of the last two pages, just glad to see people talking about it.
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Jan 24, 2023 12:43
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usenet celeb 1992 posted:All points raised so far have been extremely valid but nothing will ever be as existentially disturbing to me as the arbitrary and complete destruction of two distinct personalities for no other reason than narrative convenience/wanting to move on to the next predetermined plot point. And the comic even acknowledged this beforehand with the very character who randomly decided to put Annie back together afterall! Why even bring it up?? Tiny Myers posted:This part is what you're referring to! I agree with you. One of the earliest pages relating to the Mind Cage resolution that made me go, "Hmmm." I remember feeling like it really downplayed what Annie went through.
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Jan 24, 2023 13:08
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Nuns with Guns posted:dead webcomic thread
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Jan 24, 2023 13:14
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skaianDestiny posted:If the two Annies actually ended up as headmates in the combined Annie and we saw them providing commentary and guiding the combined Annie that would've been so much more interesting. Gunnerkrigg Rim nope nope don't like that.
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Jan 24, 2023 13:19
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Splicer posted:Link? The thread? It's the BSS one: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3834475 It's been reduced to mild Questionable Content chat because saying anything too negative about a webcomic is apparently what the CCCC thread is for, and discussing one webcomic too much meant it should have its own thread to contain those 5-10 posts per day.
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Jan 24, 2023 20:15
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What's "the CCCC thread?"
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Jan 25, 2023 00:48
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Sindai posted:What's "the CCCC thread?" https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3822798
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Jan 25, 2023 04:11
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I haven't really read this comic since the main character came back from living in the forest, is it still good?
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Jan 25, 2023 05:09
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Nuebot posted:I haven't really read this comic since the main character came back from living in the forest, is it still good? On the contrary, it's gone wildly off the rails and most posting itt is trying to process what the gently caress is even going on with it anymore. This is a thread of mourning. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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Jan 25, 2023 05:21
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Otoh it was still very good for some time after where you say you stopped. So it may be worth picking up again anyway. Chapter 32 was when she returned from the forest (helpfully named "From the Forest She Came"), and opinions differ on where it goes off the rails but the most common opinion seems to be around Chapter 80, though the first signs of it happened earlier. So, if you have fond memories of it, I'd say it's worth reading it all and drawing your own conclusions.
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Jan 25, 2023 05:34
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DontMockMySmock posted:Otoh it was still very good for some time after where you say you stopped. So it may be worth picking up again anyway. I duuno, I think maybe pretending that Annie hosed off into the forest forever to live with her cool elf family might be a better ending than any we could hope to get.
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Jan 25, 2023 08:00
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Nuns with Guns posted:The thread? It's the BSS one: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3834475
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Jan 25, 2023 11:06
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Kesper North posted:On the contrary, it's gone wildly off the rails and most posting itt is trying to process what the gently caress is even going on with it anymore. That sounds bad. Skippy McPants posted:I duuno, I think maybe pretending that Annie hosed off into the forest forever to live with her cool elf family might be a better ending than any we could hope to get. This sounds good. I'm morbidly curious now though, did anyone cool die?
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Jan 25, 2023 13:17
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yes, Annie. sort of. it’s complicated
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Jan 25, 2023 13:25
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Nuebot posted:That sounds bad. well one Annie did e;fb
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