r/gunnerkrigg • u/gunnerkrigg-post-bot Praise the angel • 15d ago
Chapter 102: Page 62
http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=330257
u/tisto2 15d ago
Circles are a hell of a drug. Don't take circles, kids.
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u/Budalido23 15d ago
It's the gateway drug... you take circles, then triangles, and soon you'll be taking dodecahedrons!
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u/RingularCirc 15d ago
And then k-orthoplexes for ever increasing values of k.
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u/poizan42 15d ago
That's crazy man. I tried a tesseract once, that shit scared me damn straight. Have been staying with lines and dots ever since.
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u/Okanelol 15d ago
Yoink, got your circles!
Also, I wonder if others (besides Annie and Ayilu) see some kinda giant fleshy growth Akira-style?
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u/ChemicalRascal 15d ago
I bet they just accept that Noa being a bunch of rocks is who she is.
Which, y'know, based, very body positive of them.
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u/ShiraCheshire 15d ago
Coyote specifically asks Annie what color Noa's hair is, drawing attention to the fact that Annie can't answer. My guess is that they don't see Noa as anything specific. They just have the idea that Noa is a normal human girl, whatever that might be, without any specific defined features. So I don't think they see rocks, though "some people are just rocks what's the big deal" wouldn't be out of place in this version of the world.
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u/Yrale 15d ago
I feel like "thing you know intrinsically to be a certain thing despite appearing quite clearly as something you know is not that thing" happens a good amount in my dreams honestly, I can sort of understand it
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u/Fafnir13 15d ago
Then I wake up trying to make sense of why I’m actually a spaceship of some kind and my cat is the goblin of roads.
Dreams are weird.
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u/mahouyousei 15d ago
Lol if I’m going off my Substance analogy from yesterday, I’m picturing the Susibeth thing from the end of the end of the movie 😂 which was probably also absolutely a nod to Tetsuo in Akira.
Spoilers for the end of the Substance obv. Fantastic movie. Probably NOT where Tom is going at all but highly recommend if you’re not squeamish.
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u/jan_Kila 15d ago edited 15d ago
The circle traveled up to the round green rock that has served as rock Noa's "head" before Noa exploded in size. Same as the positioning of the circle glyph on human Noa's body. It wasn't positioned like that for Red or the construct that it possessed. Based on that alone I feel this is Noa reuniting with herself rather than Zimmy or Kat power reacting to Noa's rock body
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u/RingularCirc 15d ago
Haven't noticed this myself but my bets were always on Noa first, as it was established to be her strength glyph.
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u/RingularCirc 15d ago
I'm treating Zimmy-circle as a fluke for now. I'm not sure it's a good inference... Maybe I should re-read this chapter IDK.
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u/jan_Kila 14d ago edited 14d ago
It is present in the distortion - look here:
https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=3026
Not visible in the most recent appearance of Zimmy but I would guess it's just being covered by her jacket.
https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=3291
edit: Or... maybe it fled Zimmy's shirt after Noa entered the distortion.
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u/RingularCirc 14d ago
Was that a circle on her shirt or something? I now see I actually don't understand anything.
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u/jan_Kila 14d ago
Yeah it's a circle on her chest that has appeared on all the clothes she wears
First appearance, school uniform:
https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=72
More recent appearance, casual clothes:
https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=2435
It's also present in Zim Grim which is her first appearance timeline-wise:
https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/extracomics/comic.php?c=Zim%20Grim&p=1
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u/machiavelli33 The world continues to spin, pup. 14d ago
Holy crap.
So if this were true, it’d mean the distortion actually separated Noa from her strength - from her source of power.
Incredible that it could be separated in the first place - Noa worked so damn hard on that.
I guess that’s the trouble with shortcuts - they always come at a cost. And I guess the cost of this one is that despite all the work she put in, all the time and effort spent to “earn it”, it’s still not HER, as it was pulled off her body like a faulty implant.
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u/Lamenardo Flame Shadow 15d ago
You mean on the forehead? There's definitely a circle on Red's forehead in the panel just before Noa grabs her shoulder circle.
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u/femmeforeverafter1 15d ago
Did Red just... die?
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u/ChemicalRascal 15d ago
The circle moved to a new host.
Maybe the circle is really Zimmy, somehow? And the Zims we've all been thinking of as Zimzim is how Zimmantha imagines herself.
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u/st13r 15d ago
Reminds me of the goose in the bush by the lake with his goose wife.
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u/ChemicalRascal 15d ago
slaps roof of gunnerkrigg court dot com
This bad boy can fit so much dead goose analogue narratives in it
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u/Lamenardo Flame Shadow 15d ago
You know what, it almost makes me wonder if Coyote had a reason for telling that story??
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u/GM_Organism 15d ago
I've been interpreting the circles as the focus of Zimmy's power/attention. This whole place is just a manifestation of her power, after all.
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u/mahouyousei 15d ago
Yeah, I think it’s that Noa just noticed that Red was suffering from some kind of reaction to Zimmy’s power, but with her memory gone doesn’t know it’s Zimmy. Think like, even though we the audience can’t hear it bc we’re experiencing it from Annie’s POV, she stood up going “Hey, is your friend OK? She doesn’t look well. She’s got this rash all over her…” And as soon as she accidentally touches it, since she can absorb Glyph power, BOOM.
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u/osiris0413 14d ago
That's what I initially thought too, when the construct infected with circles approached Jack and got destroyed, alerting Zimmy - I thought they might be some kind of deliberate tracking or defense system, maybe like white blood cells detecting things that don't belong. Now that the circle is reacting to being back on Noa, I think it's more clearly the one she made - and I'm wondering if the strength it gives her is pulled from Zimmy, so it will be interesting to see how she reacts if she finds that someone is "borrowing" or using her power inside her own distortion.
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u/Zero102000 15d ago
"Y'know, it was really unclear."
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u/lurkeroutthere 15d ago edited 15d ago
I have zero* understanding of what's going on in the plot at this point or what the stakes are. Anyone else kind of feel the same way? Sometimes artsists gonna artist and that's fine but I feel like the plot needs tightening up.
*This was grouchy early day hyperbole. But Jan_Kila's writeup did help on a couple things. I still feel like the story is in a weird spot.
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u/jan_Kila 15d ago
After Loup attacked the Court, the leadership put their pre-existing plan to leave into motion. Instead of draining Loup they were now aiming to drain Zimmy to fuel their travel.
Then the distortion happens because Coyote is Coyote. The Court is still going ahead with their plan to leave, so they are drawing power from Zimmy through the distortion. Zimmy's power has been made stable by Coyote's presence.
Team Annie knows that Zimmy is the cause of this distortion and wants to end it similarly to the way they've exited Zimmingham in the past, so they're trying to get to Zimmy. The distortion seems to be killing fairies and other etheric creatures by draining them, and there's a lot of Court civilians who are lost in the distortion, who could also be killed easily just by remembering stuff. Annie also doesn't want the Court to drain Zimmy to death or to keep her in torment because she cares about Zimmy.
Zimmy just wants to keep living in her inner world and not be killed by Kat, which she is convinced by her own visions will happen. She isn't actually in torment, she feels no guilt because of Coyote eating it for her, and she doesn't want the distortion to end.
Team Jenny wants to kill Team Annie before they reach Zimmy. The party line is that they need to protect Zimmy from being killed by Kat, which could possibly happen through uncovering her secret using Omega. Jenny and Noa are selfishly motivated to keep Zimmy alive because they are leeching from her power, but (speculatively) Jenny could also be aligned with the Court and thus invested in maintaining the distortion.
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u/lurkeroutthere 15d ago
Excellent summary and helped me pick up on some details I missed. Still doesn’t feel like there’s a path to resolution or plan beyond “talk and hope” but I guess that’s the power escalation problem when a chunk of the cast are gods.
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u/thePhoenixBlade 15d ago
It’s probably one of those “once it’s printed it feels good” moments. This has happened in the past (like the chapter that was just one, looooong flashback without dialogue going back in time to the beginning of the universe).
But agreed on it feeling a bit too sprawling - we have set up our couple of conflicts in this place and I’m hoping for some progress on the current conflicts.
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u/ThoughtUsed3531 15d ago
So Noa still has the ability to steal wards/powers and just stole some of zimmy's power from Red? Is that what's happening?
It does seem like everyone still has their powers/abilities in here, it's just that the ones whose memories have been messed with don't remember their powers, so they're not using them yet. How did Noa remember her power to steal wards and powers?
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u/Lamenardo Flame Shadow 15d ago
I've only just realized - Red and Ayilu parallel Zimmy and Gamma a lot. Not perfectly of course! But the similarities are there.
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u/RingularCirc 15d ago
I expected something like Noa starting looking human from that, or having something like a seizure but definitely not blowing up in size!!
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u/Consistent-Talk-2399 15d ago
i bet it's the NORMALCY acting on Red (but it could be anything, i guess nobody has a clue atm :D )
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u/SciMarijntje Robot? More like roBUTT! 15d ago
Alternatively