Well, she also did, to some extent, when she was wondering who she (the demons, that is) had hurt to be time-locked this way.
But, aside from that (and her reaction to Bud the first time they met), we haven’t seen her losing her cool – and i think this freak-out may be even bigger than the one with Bud, when all she was contemplating was the potential end of the world.
I confess that I am somewhat at a loss. I can see Tina’s reaction, if she does not know Jin’s history. But Jin’s statement to her was both true and accurate; why is most everyone here assuming Jin is bonkers?
Jin is 80,000 years old, and is absolutely unique in the depth of her experience and memory; at the moment, with the possible exception of Phix and May, there is no other entity so long-lived. By what criteria are we judging her?
Either Tina saw something – “She has an empty hole at her core”, or knows something not yet revealed to us on the other side of the fourth wall …
Umph. Insufficient data. Speculation useless.
Even if you do know Jin’s history, her conversation style just now is not normal. It’s the conversation style of someone who’s experienced great trauma but, instead of being tramatised or dealing with the trauma, still hasn’t processed what’s happened. It’s more worrying given her history because she has shown that she can lead a team of people, facing one of her biggest fears, despite her trauma and then she goes back to one of the first stages (being intellectually aware of what’s happened but not being able to process events emotionally).
Oh no! I wonder if her aura’s all strange now, and that in addition to the, ah, blunt speech and disordered… sense of placement in time? Is what’s making Tina upset.
This is true. Tina freaked out when she first met Bud precisely BECAUSE she had no aura. And Bud freaked because she could see Tina’s demons…
I wonder how Tina would react to Phix?
But auras aside, Tina has also shown other, beyond human perceptions and a massive grasp of psychology. So if she’s saying Jin is broken (and why Monica wouldn’t immediately understand and agree with that, I don’t know), I’d suspect she’s doing so for more reasons other than because Jin babbles about homes being glazed into glass. Maybe we’ll find out what on Monday.
As I understand it, Tina’s demons have no memories outside her time line, so they couldn’t remember the destruction of the world. Also from Bud and Brandi’s comments, they appear to remember the same fireball.
Exactly – she knows there have been resets, but knows nothing about previous ones.
Bud certainly remembers it – but the little girl we see about to be consumed by it in a flashback isn’t Bud; she apparently recalls it from the standpoint of guilt over having perpetrated it.
I don’t think this logic is quite correct. The destruction happened before the beginning of the time loops. (The time looped back to Jin’s mother tried to destroy the machine, but that was after the destruction.) The destruction actually happened in this timeline, but outside the loops. Tina’s demons might not have been told about it, though.
Exactly – she knows there have been resets, but knows nothing about previous ones.
Unless something happened when they defeated the machine… like, say, someone lost her demons?
I wasn’t so much talking about the destruction as the things Jin said first … about how she apparently knew Tina in previous cycles that Tina has no memory of.
Thanks for clarifying. For myself, I replied to the wrong comment.
I don’t know that Tina could be certain that Jill’s friendship with Tina couldn’t have happened in this time line. Tina was probably in her 20s and owned a house in Miami when she died, so she could have already been friends with Jill. Her personality is nothing like what Jill described, but Tina knows the accident changed the way she thinks. It would have been unlikely that Jill was ever a friend of Shelly, though, except in other loops.
I don’t see why that would be an either-or situation. Since Jin knew about both and when they were to happen, I’m sure she could have arranged things in such a way as to have saved them both were that her goal. It clearly was not. That or this is a glaring plot hole in the series.
Jin was busy saving both Monica *and* Shelly that day, wasn’t she?
Jin may be incredibly powerful, but she’s not omnipotent, and if she has the power of bilocation, Pablo hasn’t told us yet.
The GGs can’t perform action at a distance – they have to be there. And they can’t time travel. So if two incidents happen at the same time, Jin can only affect one.
She doesn’t have to bilocate. She could have, for example, sabatoged Tina’s car earlier that day. Or delayed Monica earlier in the progress of things so she would not be there when the Bus and Tina passed by thereby saving them both. Even if Monica still ran out into traffic right after, Tina would have passed by and Jin would still be there to push Monica out of the way of whetever vehicle might be coming. She had 55 prior tries to perfect this.
SoWhyMe: “She had 55 prior tries to perfect this.”
Did she? From what I have been able to tell, that was the first time that particular variation ever happened.
No. This was the first loop in which any of that happened. It was arranged by Brandi (working with Tina’s demons) in the previous loop. The idea was to make it impossible for Jin to prevent it.
By the way, Jin is the only one of the girls, as far as I know, who still doesn’t know that it was pre-arranged. That;s why it’s so funny to me that everyone regards Jin as the master manipulator. She has nothing on Brandi! (Well, the previous loop Brandi, anyway.)
A few more points. Tina’s demons, up until the accident, could remember between time loops, so they could execute on a plan made in the previous time loop. Brandi, Shelly and Tina know about it now because Brandi recorded the plan in her book. Jin’s demon told Monica that Jin must never learn about Tina’s demons’ role in it. I don’t know if she was telling the truth or why she said that, though.
Wow. Never came to my mind that Jin is that rich. A daily interest earning between 50 and 80 k (assuming that this is about the yearly payment of Monica)… booooyaaah.
She hardly even has to. If the same thing has happened fifty-odd times, you would have a pretty good idea where to invest, where to find the lost Aztec gold, etc. Of course, she has to use it judiciously. It would look a little suspicious if you won every lottery drawing week after week.
Well, it’s really more that she’s been a paid adviser. She has been working with them, not stealing from them. Her knowledge of the future has made them all rich. They don’t know how she knows so much, though.
Oops. That wasn’t quite right. Jin (the pretend time traveler) was giving free advice to them so they have enough money and power to help Jin (disguised as Tochtli) do what she needed to do.
Our economics systems self adjust to the under 100 crowd. Anyone who knows they will be around for a few thousand over steps it’s limitations and with the least bit of economic sense will be able to stash away enough to buy a small country if they care to. If they can disregard the boundaries of geography, and know what is going to happen before it does as well, they would have to be pretty silly to end up without money.
Even a small investment over 1000 years will add up to quite a tidy sum. The trick, as noted, is being able to keep it in stable times and places, so a revolution doesn’t take it all away and make you start over.
Tina has always had some unusual insight into Jin’s mental state. http://wapsisquare.com/comic/holeathercore/. Personally, I was hoping for Jin’s sake that Tina was going to decide that the hole at her core was fixed by having her mother back.
I would have expected that Brandi, at least, would be keeping tabs on Jin and her mother, realizing that they would have a rough transition back to normal.
I’m wondering if Jin’s insanity will somehow force Monica to involve her parents in the metaphysical stuff.
*shakes head* Iunno about you guys, but it looks to me like Jin has been broken for a long time. Even before they finally went after that damn calendar machine
Is she just plain broken, or Neon Genesis Evangelion broken? I guess it depends on what the Tina Demons saw in Jin’s reaction. Their conversation was not the usual.
Huh. A committed of demons is worried. Well, the quietly insane are always a worrisome lot. Especially once she realizes Groundhog Day is finally over, so maybe now if she blows away the world she can die? Maybe? Worth a shot?
I feel kind of sorry for Tina. All throughout her existence as Tina, she could read any individual like a book. She can look and see what they need, what they have done, their emotional baggage. She couldn’t read Bud, and it unnerved her a bit. For once there was someone that she had to take at face value and to naturally read. Now there is Jin who may be a bit more *okay waaay more* off the rocker than Bud. But Tina can’t see anything specific, and it scares her. *them* She must of gotten so used to reading auras and looking behind the window of the eyes that someone who is crazy -and- unreadable honestly terrifies her.
It just hit me – and I’ve got all weekend to see if I’m right – but I think Tina has noticed that even though Jin doesn’t have an aura, she did have her demons with her (like Monica did). Tina didn’t see her demon there in that last exchange. And thus – she’s “broken”.
Ooh, good point! Actually, it might be more that she sees that Jin’s demons are broken and since they are a part of Jin, she is broken, too. We were never told how the “queen of sorts” was going to have to “answer for her long run of unacceptable behavior.” “We will break her” sure sounds like she might be broken, somehow, though, doesn’t it? I’m not sure that Bud would have thought to ask about it or to think about the ramifications while she was plotting with Monica’s demons.
I wonder if it will be harder to communicate with the demons if they really need to now that Monica’s door is closed. I never understood how Shell’ys doorway disappeared, but somehow only Monica’s seemed to matter lately. Jin’s demon mentioned that Shelly’s porthole had been turned into a doorway, though.
Thanks, Paul. Now, I kind of remember you telling someone else that Shelly’s conscience is blocking the door, I think.
For what it’s worth, that’s something I never would have figured out for myself, even after looking at those pages. If Shelly’s conscious is separate from the demon world, I would have expected her to have nothing to do with the door. I also wouldn’t expect Shelly’s demons to need to maintain or guard the door, unless I was specifically told that was the case.
BTW, I also tended to discount Jin’s demon’s control over Monica’s door. She said that no one could could go through it without her permission, but she also said, “Tina’s deed that day was evil disguised as a good deed,” which seemed to be a lie to me, so I didn’t trust her to tell the truth. (She was already breaking demon rules by talking to Monica, so why not lie?) Also, since something seemed to be pulling her back, she didn’t seem to really be in control of the doorway. I assumed she was being pulled back by other demons who were afraid that she was accidentally helping Monica figure too much out. It didn’t seem to be Monica doing it (despite the human-looking hands) because Monica seemed to want to keep the discussion going at that point.
Anyway, that’s how I misinterpreted things, if you are curious.
1) Jin is suicidal and has been for thousands of years – but calendar resets have prevented her from being able to really die so she hasn’t been able to act on it.
2) Her dearest hope was for normalcy – that once the calendar machine was broken she could be an ordinary person and grow old and die naturally. That hope has been taken away from her.
3) She’s a Golem. Indestructible as far as we know, and has survived direct destructive forces on par with nukes. If she’s going to make a suicide attempt, it’s going to require MORE destructive power than that – and she might be able to provide it.
Y’all can draw your own conclusions what the collateral damage might be like.
Now the hair is standing up on the back of my neck. Yow!
I wonder, if all else fails, if May has the keys to ‘shut down’ Jin, return her to the state of an inanimate clay doll. May did invent the technology to create golems , after all. On the other hand, May has a history of making Very Bad Mistakes; might not be a good idea.
Actually, the GGGs bound themselves to Monica, didn’t they? So wouldn’t Monica have that ability? Even Tepoz had some ability to control and program them (which he might have lost to Monica). I’m not clear on what applied to Bud and Brandi as opposed to Jin, though.
By the way, I was expecting that getting unstuck from the time loop and gaining her mother back, which was more than she could have hoped for, would give Jin plenty to live for. I don’t think she would want to get old and die now. That’s why I think there is much more going on. I suspect that jwhouk has the right idea. Imagine Jin going through something a little like what Monica experienced when her demons disappeared!
Tepoz’s failsafe inadvertantly gave Monica – as a glyph reader and accidental sacrifice – control over the GGG. but we haven’t seen how far that extends. By using the command word she can cause odd effects and make them remember things they don’t want to, but she’s never tried to control their behavior. It may not be possible, Then again, it may.
RE Jin: Remember, she’s over 80,000 years old, mentally. Her mind is failing. She’s tired of living, and losing the people she cares for to time. Now that she knows that’s not going to change, and she has MILLIONS of years of more of the same to look forward to, I can see the stress and horror making her mental state even more unstable than ever…
Errr… while HTML does indeed work here, a backslash doesn’t have any special meaning in HTML – it’s just that everything between < and > is interpreted as a tag in HTML and thus not displayed but acted upon (if possible).
To add a < or &rt; you’ll have to write < and &rt;, respectively.
np: Thomas Meinecke & Move D – Torkel (Flugbegleiter)
D’oh – that should of course read “< and >” and “< and >”, respectively – lt for “less than” and gt for “greater than”…
(Why isn’t there a “Preview” or “Edit” button here, like there is for just about any other posing system? That would make errors like this one so much easiert to catch…)
every time something is bothering her ‘ her previous conversation with tepoz about wanting her parents to belive she is insane’ and she thinks she can forget it – it kinda gets whacked into her face.
It was a great feast to catch up on 2 weeks of Wapsi at a single sitting, but at the end of the day I’m just as confused as ever. Story of my life. Made me want the next book even more… being able to flip around somehow helps me understand the story better…
You know, this whole line of speculation is moot if it turns out that Tina simply did not understand what she saw. I mean, she might be making a mistake; Jin stands outside every rule that Tina knows. Jin may be healing, not breaking.
I really, really have problems with the “Jin needs to be in a rubber room” scenario. It might end up that way, but still – Jin assumed a burden, taking it up of her own will, laid down her own life for her goals, and fought an impossibly long, horribly lonely war under intolerable pressure. And she won. Not even Brandi and Bud understand the price Jin paid for that victory. It may or may not have broken her, but by all the gods small and great, she is deserving of our utmost respect.
I agree that Jin would deserve respect and compassion, but there’s also the matter that even if you didn’t respect her, it would be best to pretend you did. 🙂 It’s not as if putting her in a rubber room would do any good.
I think Tina groks Jin pretty well. Jin has no aura, but she wasn’t broken by the priests and still had her demons and Tina understands demons very well.
Unfortunately, what I just said leads to another scary thought. DId Tina mean that Jin is broken now like Bud and Brandi were broken by the priests? We know what the result of that was.
Was ist der mistficken? Schnappen die springenwerke mit spizensparken in das koo-koo clocken, Herr? (What’s the matter? Are you crazy; is that your problem?)
Say it , don’t spray it Tina .
This must be serious; this is the first time that Tina has ever talked straight. No ambiguous symbolism, just straight to the point.
Well, she also did, to some extent, when she was wondering who she (the demons, that is) had hurt to be time-locked this way.
But, aside from that (and her reaction to Bud the first time they met), we haven’t seen her losing her cool – and i think this freak-out may be even bigger than the one with Bud, when all she was contemplating was the potential end of the world.
…and after what recently happened, M is not surprised in the least…?
I confess that I am somewhat at a loss. I can see Tina’s reaction, if she does not know Jin’s history. But Jin’s statement to her was both true and accurate; why is most everyone here assuming Jin is bonkers?
Jin is 80,000 years old, and is absolutely unique in the depth of her experience and memory; at the moment, with the possible exception of Phix and May, there is no other entity so long-lived. By what criteria are we judging her?
Tina will explain… 😉
Friday cliffhanger! Damn you, Pablo Wapsi! (fist shaking)
😉
What you said.
Either Tina saw something – “She has an empty hole at her core”, or knows something not yet revealed to us on the other side of the fourth wall …
Umph. Insufficient data. Speculation useless.
Even if you do know Jin’s history, her conversation style just now is not normal. It’s the conversation style of someone who’s experienced great trauma but, instead of being tramatised or dealing with the trauma, still hasn’t processed what’s happened. It’s more worrying given her history because she has shown that she can lead a team of people, facing one of her biggest fears, despite her trauma and then she goes back to one of the first stages (being intellectually aware of what’s happened but not being able to process events emotionally).
I’m sure she will… *evil grin*
You’re a devious man, Paul
I didn’t know the Galaxy Express stopped here…
Oh no! I wonder if her aura’s all strange now, and that in addition to the, ah, blunt speech and disordered… sense of placement in time? Is what’s making Tina upset.
Jin. like Bud and Brandi, doesn’t have an aura, hence Yina’s greeting “Unreadable Girl“.
Interesting that, given what Pablo has just revealed about Tina’s dialog, that it’s one of the demons talking directly in the final panel.
This is true. Tina freaked out when she first met Bud precisely BECAUSE she had no aura. And Bud freaked because she could see Tina’s demons…
I wonder how Tina would react to Phix?
But auras aside, Tina has also shown other, beyond human perceptions and a massive grasp of psychology. So if she’s saying Jin is broken (and why Monica wouldn’t immediately understand and agree with that, I don’t know), I’d suspect she’s doing so for more reasons other than because Jin babbles about homes being glazed into glass. Maybe we’ll find out what on Monday.
Or Tuesday.
Or Thursday.
Or maybe next St Swithin’s Day…
Nice Monty Python reference, though 😉
Jin’s mental cogs aren’t busted!
They’re just “pining” for the fjords.
I dunno. Seems this is about as sane as we’ve ever seen Jin, to me at least.
Wait, “the last train off the planet”? And I MISSED that train?! Dammit!
Unfortunately, what Jin is sanely talking about is something Tina personally knows never happened…
As I understand it, Tina’s demons have no memories outside her time line, so they couldn’t remember the destruction of the world. Also from Bud and Brandi’s comments, they appear to remember the same fireball.
Exactly – she knows there have been resets, but knows nothing about previous ones.
Bud certainly remembers it – but the little girl we see about to be consumed by it in a flashback isn’t Bud; she apparently recalls it from the standpoint of guilt over having perpetrated it.
I don’t think this logic is quite correct. The destruction happened before the beginning of the time loops. (The time looped back to Jin’s mother tried to destroy the machine, but that was after the destruction.) The destruction actually happened in this timeline, but outside the loops. Tina’s demons might not have been told about it, though.
Unless something happened when they defeated the machine… like, say, someone lost her demons?
I wasn’t so much talking about the destruction as the things Jin said first … about how she apparently knew Tina in previous cycles that Tina has no memory of.
Sorry – should have been a little clearer.
Thanks for clarifying. For myself, I replied to the wrong comment.
I don’t know that Tina could be certain that Jill’s friendship with Tina couldn’t have happened in this time line. Tina was probably in her 20s and owned a house in Miami when she died, so she could have already been friends with Jill. Her personality is nothing like what Jill described, but Tina knows the accident changed the way she thinks. It would have been unlikely that Jill was ever a friend of Shelly, though, except in other loops.
Probably because they saw that you didn’t have a towel.
“SHE IS AN EX-PARROT!” (Oops, sorry…)
There’s a lot of irony here. Tina would know if she hadn’t had the accident.
And Jin had to let her die in the accident, choosing between saving Tina or saving Monica.
That explains much of the the open contempt Jin held towards Monica as well.
I don’t see why that would be an either-or situation. Since Jin knew about both and when they were to happen, I’m sure she could have arranged things in such a way as to have saved them both were that her goal. It clearly was not. That or this is a glaring plot hole in the series.
Jin was busy saving both Monica *and* Shelly that day, wasn’t she?
Jin may be incredibly powerful, but she’s not omnipotent, and if she has the power of bilocation, Pablo hasn’t told us yet.
The GGs can’t perform action at a distance – they have to be there. And they can’t time travel. So if two incidents happen at the same time, Jin can only affect one.
She doesn’t have to bilocate. She could have, for example, sabatoged Tina’s car earlier that day. Or delayed Monica earlier in the progress of things so she would not be there when the Bus and Tina passed by thereby saving them both. Even if Monica still ran out into traffic right after, Tina would have passed by and Jin would still be there to push Monica out of the way of whetever vehicle might be coming. She had 55 prior tries to perfect this.
SoWhyMe: “She had 55 prior tries to perfect this.”
Did she? From what I have been able to tell, that was the first time that particular variation ever happened.
It happened the way it did because it had to happen the way it did, for the best of all reasons – “God^H^H^H Pablo Said So.”
No. This was the first loop in which any of that happened. It was arranged by Brandi (working with Tina’s demons) in the previous loop. The idea was to make it impossible for Jin to prevent it.
By the way, Jin is the only one of the girls, as far as I know, who still doesn’t know that it was pre-arranged. That;s why it’s so funny to me that everyone regards Jin as the master manipulator. She has nothing on Brandi! (Well, the previous loop Brandi, anyway.)
A few more points. Tina’s demons, up until the accident, could remember between time loops, so they could execute on a plan made in the previous time loop. Brandi, Shelly and Tina know about it now because Brandi recorded the plan in her book. Jin’s demon told Monica that Jin must never learn about Tina’s demons’ role in it. I don’t know if she was telling the truth or why she said that, though.
Wow. Never came to my mind that Jin is that rich. A daily interest earning between 50 and 80 k (assuming that this is about the yearly payment of Monica)… booooyaaah.
Well, she’s been scamming the immortal politicians literally for centuries … perhaps even millenia.
She hardly even has to. If the same thing has happened fifty-odd times, you would have a pretty good idea where to invest, where to find the lost Aztec gold, etc. Of course, she has to use it judiciously. It would look a little suspicious if you won every lottery drawing week after week.
Well, it’s really more that she’s been a paid adviser. She has been working with them, not stealing from them. Her knowledge of the future has made them all rich. They don’t know how she knows so much, though.
Oops. That wasn’t quite right. Jin (the pretend time traveler) was giving free advice to them so they have enough money and power to help Jin (disguised as Tochtli) do what she needed to do.
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/fauxtimetraveler/
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/justus/
Still, they don’t have anything to complain about…
Our economics systems self adjust to the under 100 crowd. Anyone who knows they will be around for a few thousand over steps it’s limitations and with the least bit of economic sense will be able to stash away enough to buy a small country if they care to. If they can disregard the boundaries of geography, and know what is going to happen before it does as well, they would have to be pretty silly to end up without money.
Even a small investment over 1000 years will add up to quite a tidy sum. The trick, as noted, is being able to keep it in stable times and places, so a revolution doesn’t take it all away and make you start over.
Kettle.
Pot.
Tina 2.0 is frightened? Then Monica had better be, as well…
Tina has always had some unusual insight into Jin’s mental state. http://wapsisquare.com/comic/holeathercore/. Personally, I was hoping for Jin’s sake that Tina was going to decide that the hole at her core was fixed by having her mother back.
I would have expected that Brandi, at least, would be keeping tabs on Jin and her mother, realizing that they would have a rough transition back to normal.
I’m wondering if Jin’s insanity will somehow force Monica to involve her parents in the metaphysical stuff.
*shakes head* Iunno about you guys, but it looks to me like Jin has been broken for a long time. Even before they finally went after that damn calendar machine
Is she just plain broken, or Neon Genesis Evangelion broken? I guess it depends on what the Tina Demons saw in Jin’s reaction. Their conversation was not the usual.
Huh. A committed of demons is worried. Well, the quietly insane are always a worrisome lot. Especially once she realizes Groundhog Day is finally over, so maybe now if she blows away the world she can die? Maybe? Worth a shot?
I feel kind of sorry for Tina. All throughout her existence as Tina, she could read any individual like a book. She can look and see what they need, what they have done, their emotional baggage. She couldn’t read Bud, and it unnerved her a bit. For once there was someone that she had to take at face value and to naturally read. Now there is Jin who may be a bit more *okay waaay more* off the rocker than Bud. But Tina can’t see anything specific, and it scares her. *them* She must of gotten so used to reading auras and looking behind the window of the eyes that someone who is crazy -and- unreadable honestly terrifies her.
It just hit me – and I’ve got all weekend to see if I’m right – but I think Tina has noticed that even though Jin doesn’t have an aura, she did have her demons with her (like Monica did). Tina didn’t see her demon there in that last exchange. And thus – she’s “broken”.
Ooh, good point! Actually, it might be more that she sees that Jin’s demons are broken and since they are a part of Jin, she is broken, too. We were never told how the “queen of sorts” was going to have to “answer for her long run of unacceptable behavior.” “We will break her” sure sounds like she might be broken, somehow, though, doesn’t it? I’m not sure that Bud would have thought to ask about it or to think about the ramifications while she was plotting with Monica’s demons.
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/we-have-rules/
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/we-will-break-her/
I wonder if it will be harder to communicate with the demons if they really need to now that Monica’s door is closed. I never understood how Shell’ys doorway disappeared, but somehow only Monica’s seemed to matter lately. Jin’s demon mentioned that Shelly’s porthole had been turned into a doorway, though.
Shelly created a doorway but it was slammed shut on the demon side thus:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/puts-up-with-you/
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/what-are-you/
Thanks, Paul. Now, I kind of remember you telling someone else that Shelly’s conscience is blocking the door, I think.
For what it’s worth, that’s something I never would have figured out for myself, even after looking at those pages. If Shelly’s conscious is separate from the demon world, I would have expected her to have nothing to do with the door. I also wouldn’t expect Shelly’s demons to need to maintain or guard the door, unless I was specifically told that was the case.
BTW, I also tended to discount Jin’s demon’s control over Monica’s door. She said that no one could could go through it without her permission, but she also said, “Tina’s deed that day was evil disguised as a good deed,” which seemed to be a lie to me, so I didn’t trust her to tell the truth. (She was already breaking demon rules by talking to Monica, so why not lie?) Also, since something seemed to be pulling her back, she didn’t seem to really be in control of the doorway. I assumed she was being pulled back by other demons who were afraid that she was accidentally helping Monica figure too much out. It didn’t seem to be Monica doing it (despite the human-looking hands) because Monica seemed to want to keep the discussion going at that point.
Anyway, that’s how I misinterpreted things, if you are curious.
Mad? Jin? No!
Tina! You got some ‘splaining to do! 🙂
Wonder what she really saw in Jin
There are three important thing to keep in mind.
1) Jin is suicidal and has been for thousands of years – but calendar resets have prevented her from being able to really die so she hasn’t been able to act on it.
2) Her dearest hope was for normalcy – that once the calendar machine was broken she could be an ordinary person and grow old and die naturally. That hope has been taken away from her.
3) She’s a Golem. Indestructible as far as we know, and has survived direct destructive forces on par with nukes. If she’s going to make a suicide attempt, it’s going to require MORE destructive power than that – and she might be able to provide it.
Y’all can draw your own conclusions what the collateral damage might be like.
Now the hair is standing up on the back of my neck. Yow!
I wonder, if all else fails, if May has the keys to ‘shut down’ Jin, return her to the state of an inanimate clay doll. May did invent the technology to create golems , after all. On the other hand, May has a history of making Very Bad Mistakes; might not be a good idea.
Actually, the GGGs bound themselves to Monica, didn’t they? So wouldn’t Monica have that ability? Even Tepoz had some ability to control and program them (which he might have lost to Monica). I’m not clear on what applied to Bud and Brandi as opposed to Jin, though.
By the way, I was expecting that getting unstuck from the time loop and gaining her mother back, which was more than she could have hoped for, would give Jin plenty to live for. I don’t think she would want to get old and die now. That’s why I think there is much more going on. I suspect that jwhouk has the right idea. Imagine Jin going through something a little like what Monica experienced when her demons disappeared!
Tepoz’s failsafe inadvertantly gave Monica – as a glyph reader and accidental sacrifice – control over the GGG. but we haven’t seen how far that extends. By using the command word she can cause odd effects and make them remember things they don’t want to, but she’s never tried to control their behavior. It may not be possible, Then again, it may.
RE Jin: Remember, she’s over 80,000 years old, mentally. Her mind is failing. She’s tired of living, and losing the people she cares for to time. Now that she knows that’s not going to change, and she has MILLIONS of years of more of the same to look forward to, I can see the stress and horror making her mental state even more unstable than ever…
I hate when she beats around the bush like that. Just say it!
Great, it took out my sarcasm tags.
HTML works here: a backslash followed by a symbol disregards that symbol; it will not be acted on or displayed.
Errr… while HTML does indeed work here, a backslash doesn’t have any special meaning in HTML – it’s just that everything between < and > is interpreted as a tag in HTML and thus not displayed but acted upon (if possible).
To add a < or &rt; you’ll have to write < and &rt;, respectively.
np: Thomas Meinecke & Move D – Torkel (Flugbegleiter)
D’oh – that should of course read “< and >” and “< and >”, respectively – lt for “less than” and gt for “greater than”…
(Why isn’t there a “Preview” or “Edit” button here, like there is for just about any other posing system? That would make errors like this one so much easiert to catch…)
Leak — oops, sorry, you’re right – that was a hang-over from the formatting instruction set at Pibgorn, where the formatting is rather, um, odd.
Poor monica
every time something is bothering her ‘ her previous conversation with tepoz about wanting her parents to belive she is insane’ and she thinks she can forget it – it kinda gets whacked into her face.
If it just takes a lot of energy, I wonder if Bud could toss Jin into the sun, and would so doing finally kill her as she desires?
When you wiiish … upon a star …
Bud could throw you very far …
You could could burn … and you could fuse …
Your dreeeeams commmmme truuuuuuue …
It was a great feast to catch up on 2 weeks of Wapsi at a single sitting, but at the end of the day I’m just as confused as ever. Story of my life. Made me want the next book even more… being able to flip around somehow helps me understand the story better…
The story does work a LOT better in book form.
http://www.fleen.com/archives/2009/07/29/wha-oh-right-posting/
You know, this whole line of speculation is moot if it turns out that Tina simply did not understand what she saw. I mean, she might be making a mistake; Jin stands outside every rule that Tina knows. Jin may be healing, not breaking.
I really, really have problems with the “Jin needs to be in a rubber room” scenario. It might end up that way, but still – Jin assumed a burden, taking it up of her own will, laid down her own life for her goals, and fought an impossibly long, horribly lonely war under intolerable pressure. And she won. Not even Brandi and Bud understand the price Jin paid for that victory. It may or may not have broken her, but by all the gods small and great, she is deserving of our utmost respect.
Oh, well. Monday will tell the tale, one hopes.
I agree that Jin would deserve respect and compassion, but there’s also the matter that even if you didn’t respect her, it would be best to pretend you did. 🙂 It’s not as if putting her in a rubber room would do any good.
I think Tina groks Jin pretty well. Jin has no aura, but she wasn’t broken by the priests and still had her demons and Tina understands demons very well.
Unfortunately, what I just said leads to another scary thought. DId Tina mean that Jin is broken now like Bud and Brandi were broken by the priests? We know what the result of that was.
Scary thought:
What if it’s not the machine that needed fixing, but instead it was Jin that needed repair so we don’t end up resetting the time loop?
Who knows what twists and turns lurk in the mind of Señor Pablo? Perhaps Phix do…
But… but… http://wapsisquare.com/comic/talkinriddles/
Good catch, but only one of the demons is talking now. 😉
Was ist der mistficken? Schnappen die springenwerke mit spizensparken in das koo-koo clocken, Herr? (What’s the matter? Are you crazy; is that your problem?)
You know, when the technically undead conglomeration of demons says this…