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GunnerJ posted:Any time someone's mentioned her appearance in today's update itt I'm like "Was it really that offputting, or are we just exaggerating here?" and then I go check it out and it's always somehow even weirder than I remember. I am glad I was busy and missed an update, because my immediate instinct was to mash the "next page" button. I went back and looked at it again and yeah, same feeling. I don't mind viewing something "uncomfortable" (gore, difficult situations or topics, etc.) and can appreciate it when done well, but this is just off-putting in that "I can't quite put my finger on it, but I certainly don't like it" sort of way. Feeling an urge to quickly leave the page is not a quality I look for in a comic, lol. RocketMermaid posted:Avatar idea: That image with " i̸̟͚̔̏͒͊͌t̴͔̭̤̀'̵̨̲̼̦͙̍͛s̴͎̊ ̸̝̣̒͐̑k̷̢͓̻͓̟͐̋̽̇ă̶̢̖̦̖͕͘ẅ̴̩̖̱͕́ā̷̹̮̩̲̀i̶̦͕̗̍͐͑į̸̥̼̾̐" as the text. Nobody do this, I have never put someone on ignore, but don't tempt me! (I won't actually but it seems like a good way to get people to not read your posts, lol)
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Aug 11, 2023 16:15
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Looks like it's time for the gray lettuce
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Aug 11, 2023 16:40
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RocketMermaid posted:If you cover up the eyes and just look at the nose and mouth, and vice versa, it feels like the two parts of the facial expression really don't match up with each other, which is part of what does it for me. It's not the first time Lana's face has been rendered this way: https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=2709 I wish this was on purpose as some meta commentary, like she specifically studied so hard to get her appearance right, but like most character creation kits, she just came out slightly uncanny. I'm in the "this is supposed to look creepy" camp, but not for the reasons listed. She's stuck in a weird empty void and I think we're supposed to care about that, but part of the actual creepiness for me is the offset dead-eye stare and the overall sense of this ... Idk, fairly jacked new human being put in this weird docile and powerless pose. It's weird, man.
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Aug 11, 2023 17:59
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I wonder how many chapters total there will wind up being. We're at 91, something like 99 or 100 feels like it'd be a good finale number.
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Aug 11, 2023 18:01
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CodfishCartographer posted:I wonder how many chapters total there will wind up being. We're at 91, something like 99 or 100 feels like it'd be a good finale number. I think 79 is a perfectly cromulent finale number.
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Aug 11, 2023 21:04
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CodfishCartographer posted:I wonder how many chapters total there will wind up being. We're at 91, something like 99 or 100 feels like it'd be a good finale number. How would you feel if someone came back from the future and told you that this is chapter 91 of 250?
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Aug 11, 2023 21:12
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Ditocoaf posted:How would you feel if someone came back from the future and told you that this is chapter 91 of 250? Morbidly curious
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Aug 11, 2023 21:22
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Ditocoaf posted:How would you feel if someone came back from the future and told you that this is chapter 91 of 250? lol, lmao
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Aug 11, 2023 22:02
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if you stare at this long enough the eyes start to drift apart
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Aug 11, 2023 22:09
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Ditocoaf posted:How would you feel if someone came back from the future and told you that this is chapter 91 of 250? "no, I swear the comic's good again"
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Aug 11, 2023 22:25
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Gnome de plume posted:if you stare at this long enough the eyes start to drift apart 
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Aug 11, 2023 22:32
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Fecha posted:It's wild to me that my reading of this comic has drifted so far that I'm not confident that this is intentionally creepy
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Aug 11, 2023 22:42
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Cavatica posted:It's not the first time Lana's face has been rendered this way: https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=2709 It's fascinating to me that in the linked page Lana's face is wildly different every single time lmao I found the page very creepy but I just assumed it's a very checked-out artist rather than something intentionally creepy. Same reason why the backgrounds in the last couple chapters have been so bleh.
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Aug 12, 2023 04:46
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I hope this happens on Monday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pka96Rhp_Kk
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Aug 13, 2023 03:16
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christmas boots posted:Everyone's going to fuse and combine their powers to take down Coyote, huh? I've seen this one before That was a good show, though. (Fight me) Patware posted:and yet lana is still way more of a character than gamma Gamma is too exhausted to have a personality, and frankly I can relate.
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Aug 13, 2023 23:01
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Yeah, she is relatable. I can give Gamma a pass in her role as co-dependent because she is literally too exhausted to even think of leaving. She is using all the energy she has to just stay afloat together with Zimmy. I have more complex feelings about Zimmy, but ultimately sympathy because she is a child and also I can't tell how much of her situation is a metaphor for something else (depression and anxiety?) and how much is a magically inescapable situation with literally no solutions. I find Gamma interesting in the sense that if Gamma died, Zimmy would fall apart emotionally and probably be killed by her powers, but if Zimmy died, I have no idea how Gamma would react. What kind of person would she become if given the opportunity, after mourning and a hell of a lot of therapy?
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Aug 13, 2023 23:10
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PubicMice posted:That was a good show, though. (Fight me) The worst Digimon show was indeed better than a whole lot of things (does this count as fighting?)
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Aug 14, 2023 00:18
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isasphere posted:Yeah, she is relatable. I can give Gamma a pass in her role as co-dependent because she is literally too exhausted to even think of leaving. She is using all the energy she has to just stay afloat together with Zimmy. "It can be hard to tell who's real and who ain't." "But these things don't have faces." "So? Sometimes real people don't neither." Some - definitely not all - schizophrenic people (including someone I used to know personally) have trouble with prosopagnosia, difficulty or outright inability to recognize faces. It's a lesser-known thing compared to more stereotypical symptoms, but it happens. This struck me really hard the first time I read it. I think this is when I first went "oh, Zimmy is schizophrenic". She hates when she feels like she's being watched. Feeling you are being watched, tracked, or spied on (including by cameras/electronics) is a very common psychotic delusion (the fact that she literally is, meaning it isn't a delusion, in this case, is immaterial). Paranoia such as believing someone is stealing away your friend (and unpredictable agitation). Feeling as though others are able to read your thoughts or vice versa, or that your thoughts are being "projected" against your will, or the thoughts of others are being projected into your mind (manifested literally as she can communicate with Gamma psychically, which we see is kind of like a constant feed of her thoughts being inserted into Zimmy's mind, and being able to peek into the minds of others). And the general keeping to herself, friction in social situations, periods of homelessness... Zimmy also canonically does not sleep, and insomnia occurs in 80% of schizophrenics. Schizophrenia is also, like any other mental illness, aggravated by stress and helped by normalcy and familiarity, and we see that stress triggers make Zimmy worse and Gamma's presence makes her better. Gamma herself touches on fatigue, which can be both a symptom of schizophrenia and as a result of the treatment (antipsychotics are famously tranquilizing). I don't really know how much of this is intended, to be honest. Before, I would have said most of it. But since losing faith in his writing I don't know how much was just "creepy demon girl with sharp teeth" who coincidentally managed to overlap with a lot of schizophrenia symptoms. I've also come to feel uncomfortable with the problems around Zimmy if her being a metaphor is deliberate. The ableist undertones, specifically. Like, an extremely common belief in our society is "caregiving for a disabled person is so detrimental that it basically ruins the caregiver's life and any dreams they may have had as a Normal Person. They are constantly exhausted, a walking zombie, but they do it anyway because they love them - they're the only person who can, and their loved one's condition would overflow onto others and cause more harm if they didn't". The rest of the sentence is "and the disabled person is a horrible drain on society. They should be killed, and nobody would blame the caregiver if they drove off a cliff with them still in the car". Do unhealthy relationships exist, including ones with caregiver dynamics? Certainly. But schizophrenia is so dangerously maligned that it really doesn't need more contributing to that. But like I said who knows how intentional any of this was anymore, so whatever.
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Aug 14, 2023 06:56
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Whoa, whoa, whoa, hol up. Did we just open a chapter from Annie's PoV?
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Aug 14, 2023 09:00
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Skippy McPants posted:Whoa, whoa, whoa, hol up. Did we just open a chapter from Annie's PoV? Don’t worry, she’s still a gormless cipher with no direction
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Aug 14, 2023 09:04
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Skippy McPants posted:Whoa, whoa, whoa, hol up. Did we just open a chapter from Annie's PoV? Don't worry Renard is still with her!
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Aug 14, 2023 09:06
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Skippy McPants posted:Whoa, whoa, whoa, hol up. Did we just open a chapter from Annie's PoV? It's gonna be a chapter of hard to follow abstract bullshit though.
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Aug 14, 2023 09:41
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this looks like the “world” from thr between chapter tapestries
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Aug 14, 2023 10:01
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I'm just glad they didn't loving fuse
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Aug 14, 2023 13:14
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Rather than being excited for crazy Zimmy stuff, I'm really not looking forward to a sequence in an abstract shadow dreamscape world where the identities and actions of characters matter less. We are already in a twilight of the comic where a chief point of mourning is that the identities and actions of all but one of the characters haven't mattered for years. The author just capstoned the story of a throwaway female character created solely so the new main character could assault her just to get romantically involved shortly thereafter--and by "capstoned" I of course mean fridging her like it's 1994. Of all times to start a sequence where things matter even less than usual, this is less optimal than normal. Lest we forget, the author is capable of doing infinitely better at breathing life into a tragic female character with a comparatively small number of short appearances in the story. poo poo, Jeanne's story even included an adult, intimate relationship and at no point was it creepy or questionable the slightest. For that matter, Diego was himself portrayed as a deeply problematic man who absolutely abused his power over Jeanne, but that portrayal stayed on the page. We weren't sitting here questioning the author's intent with deep concern after seeing Diego do nefarious, awful things with his power. Skulker posted:It's gonna be a chapter of hard to follow abstract bullshit though. tl;dr  Maybe we'll look back at this chapter as a curtain call. "Bullshitty pretty stuff with symbols" would be a cute way to do a curtain call for all the characters he doesn't know how to handle anymore. Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 13:17
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Potato Salad posted:and by "capstoned" I of course mean frigging her like it's 1994. Alternate punchline: Patreon only content is not canon. Alternate alternate punchline: something about loups flashback idk I'm tired Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 13:21
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Okay, I'll admit it... I like this page. Reminds me of Old Gunnerkrigg.
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Aug 14, 2023 13:23
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The fact that this scene appears to be a callback to the court/forest fusions that we've seen interspersed throughout the comic makes me feel that we're coming to a close rather soon.
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Aug 14, 2023 14:43
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I like that this page reminds me of the treatises!
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Aug 14, 2023 15:10
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I agree that it being very similar to the treatises is visually neat and clever, and I'm interested to see where that's going. It's an interesting subversion of what I was expecting, which was more... grimdark. Next page will just be Annie going "oh yeah, I've been in a bunch of these." Point of interest: Stone (metal?) fruits? The title page had some similar gray leaves.  I wonder if we're finally going to see what the Seed Bismuth is.
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Aug 14, 2023 20:35
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Speculation: what if the seed bismuth was originally taken from the alternate dimension Zimmy has access to, either by exploiting previous individuals with the same power, or through ways to travel dimensions in a more controllable manner that have since been lost to time? Like how Tony found extradimensional beings when he tried to revive Surma? He had to get the information on how to do so or where to find the gateway or hole in space-time from somewhere, right?
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Aug 14, 2023 21:17
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Tiny Myers posted:I wonder if we're finally going to see what the Seed Bismuth is. The image next to this chapter in the archive list looks like it might be the Seed Bismuth actually.
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Aug 14, 2023 22:16
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Patware posted:I'm just glad they didn't loving fuse Careful what you assume before anyone starts talking, "they've switched bodies" isn't outside the realm of possibility
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Aug 15, 2023 08:33
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Maybe that's what death is like.
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Aug 15, 2023 14:43
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So Zimmy just pulled a Sailor Saturn and restarted the universe without the bullshit Loup crap? Please don't take this spark of hope from me.
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Aug 16, 2023 19:40
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I mean, if anyone has the power to separate Loup back into Coyote and Ysengrin, it's her, but no way it'll be so smooth.
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Aug 16, 2023 20:11
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So Kat's the seed bismuth?
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Aug 18, 2023 12:57
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Does it seem like the new people are falling apart to anyone else? Or is the art trying to convey more of a weak and hazy effect radiating from the bismuth cores?
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Aug 18, 2023 14:38
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if this is the first time she's bothered to try to look at them in the ether i have serious questions about how that all works that will never get answered, i always figured it was a sixth sense thing at this point but i guess not? like a video game character that gets the in-game "highlight plot important objects"-o-vision and the player just sort of forgets to use it
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Aug 18, 2023 14:58
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WE were never shown what they look like etherically, right? like is this tom going "they're different" but we never saw them the first time?
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Aug 18, 2023 15:04
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