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 Post Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2020 12:01 am 
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Webfoot wrote:
Anyway, I'm guessing Troloria is the blue moon, a person with a billion anima, and she stepped in after the psychic war to basically absorb all the super-psychics and leave the survivors to rebuild.

Hmm, so maybe civilization collapse has happened before? Maybe the people of this dimension have been stuck in a cycle of utopia-> psionic advancement-> animapocalypse for a while, and the gang - despite having seen a sizable swath of their history - have only experienced one lonely cycle of a much more vast history

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 Post Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2020 6:31 am 
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Thom Solo wrote:
Spirantz wrote:

Called it! (though I think I was spelling it wrong....)


Nice! Troloria is the name of their race, hence whoever Troloria is, she is operating under an alias that follows their rhetoric of no individual identity.

I think she very well could be Cupidine, DFA's past the "event horizon reset event". Even the iconography suggests that Troloria transitioned in the same way Cupidine would have. Cupidine found herself in a world without competition, but also a world largely devoid of anima. She probably blamed her desire for getting the better of her and allowing her to be catched off-guard, but without competition, she no longer felt under pressure to catch whatever prey she could just to attempt to reach a fraction of what she was competing with.

She'd be much more cautious of the danger even one normal person could present. If it is her, her plan is clear: try to create a society of followers that she can harvest periodically that are indoctrinated to be harmless. Perhaps she wants to transcend enough to attempt to find out what happened to her brethren. Perhaps she's now also that much more wary to realize she maybe shouldn't follow their path.

Even if it isn't Cupidine, it is clear Troloria does not have their best interests at heart. It wasn't the shape or the individuality of the animas that were the problem, it was the quantity of them and how they could be harvested. I think it is also likely that when they arrived, all of them had their animas ritually spliced down to their current state by the worshipers - all of them except Zoe, who would still retain her powers of vision.

If it is Cupidine, that's only part of the picture now. There's also the muse, which I suspect was the first person to worship her when she arrived. Cupidine found herself in a similar state that the crew found themselves when they arrived in this dimension, and was dazzled that she was actually getting praised by her prey. Maybe the muse was the first person who suggested to her that he could sculpt any of her anima into any shape she wanted, and that she didn't need to take theirs entirely.

There's plenty of other questions, too. What happened to the flying city and what was all that about? Perhaps the information found in its ruins will be the link between that time period and this one. If I'd have to continue to megaspeculate, the last "cupidine" of the last time period eventually gained enough power to leave their planet and head to the moon in search of harvest (harvest moon, harr), where they might have been anglerfished out of existence.

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 Post Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2020 1:44 pm 
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Spirantz wrote:


Those musical notes......

Visual representation of music?

Or... do they have musical note anima?????

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 Post Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2020 11:03 pm 
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Webfoot wrote:
Spirantz wrote:


Those musical notes......

Visual representation of music?

Or... do they have musical note anima?????


Hah! I suppose if Pete really wanted, he could retrofit that in! Or maybe Animas cannot exist in space, due to lack of atmospheric/moon/plot device blah blah blah!

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 Post Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2020 11:53 pm 
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The psychic energy that enables animas to form probably only exists while on this planet. So having nothing in space would work.

Or maybe eventually the Trolorians get rid their anima entirely. They are already going in that direction.

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 Post Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 1:40 am 
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Unless there's some sinister loner out there, hidin' in the wilds...growin their Anima beyond all reason! An affront to the goddess! Lay wrath upon the heretic!

ehem. Excuse me.

Well, at least we know they've only been there about a month or so. Not quite as long as we feared.

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 Post Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 8:58 am 
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Webfoot wrote:
I'm guessing the Troloria Incident happened between when they left and when they re-arrived, so no connection to Cupidine. We'll probably hear what happened to Cupidine though.

Hey, you notice the weird mosaic pattern of Troloria's forehead looks like the weird mosaic pattern when they re-Zappo? Interesting.

Anyway, I'm guessing Troloria is the blue moon, a person with a billion anima, and she stepped in after the psychic war to basically absorb all the super-psychics and leave the survivors to rebuild.

No idea how or why she flattened all the anima though.


When ubank stares up into the sky ,and thinks about his transgressions, it transfers anima energy to her.

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 Post Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 11:31 am 
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ramoss wrote:
Webfoot wrote:
I'm guessing the Troloria Incident happened between when they left and when they re-arrived, so no connection to Cupidine. We'll probably hear what happened to Cupidine though.

Hey, you notice the weird mosaic pattern of Troloria's forehead looks like the weird mosaic pattern when they re-Zappo? Interesting.

Anyway, I'm guessing Troloria is the blue moon, a person with a billion anima, and she stepped in after the psychic war to basically absorb all the super-psychics and leave the survivors to rebuild.

No idea how or why she flattened all the anima though.


When ubank stares up into the sky ,and thinks about his transgressions, it transfers anima energy to her.


Yeah, it looks like the new development in this era is remote harvesting that leaves them alive. Probably done by the superpsychic blue moon.

This is almost like some weird economic allegory; previously they had an out-of-control cutthroat capitalist animascape, which collapsed and is replaced with a communist system that quashes all individuality.

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 Post Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 12:52 pm 
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Zillatain wrote:
The psychic energy that enables animas to form probably only exists while on this planet. So having nothing in space would work.

Or maybe eventually the Trolorians get rid their anima entirely. They are already going in that direction.

It is worth noting that Pete has said, "Every dimension has Trolorian Gogo Dancers, that's just the way it is!" This was in the Defenders notes for this strip in the Gofotron arc. No anima there.

So whatever makes animae visible seems to be limited to this dimension, and quite possibly this planet. The Animoon must tie into it somewhere, though unlike Webfoot I believe it is the cause of the visible-anima effect and not a conglomeration of millions of smaller animae.

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 Post Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 12:57 pm 
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I love how in an infinite possible dimensions, Trolorian Gogo dancers are always a constant. :torg:

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 Post Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 1:18 pm 
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Spirantz wrote:
I love how in an infinite possible dimensions, Trolorian Gogo dancers are always a constant. :torg:


Speculation: That will be because, at the end of this arc, when they overcome the Trolorian Blockage that keeps them from leaving.... it will overload in the other direction. A party of dancers will be caught in the blast, and the DFA will zappo copies of them into every dimension simultaneously.

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 Post Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 1:49 pm 
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Jackalope wrote:
It wasn't the shape or the individuality of the animas that were the problem, it was the quantity of them and how they could be harvested. I think it is also likely that when they arrived, all of them had their animas ritually spliced down to their current state by the worshipers - all of them except Zoe, who would still retain her powers of vision.

I disagree. Individuality - specifically vanity - was the start of the issue. I think obtaining additional animae probably started innocently. Someone figured out they could grab a loved one's anima when they died, and then at some point it became a status symbol. And then they figured out that the more animae you had the more power you had. And then animae were no longer collected out of loving memory, but became viewed in the same way money is in our society. Most of the people here who want to become rich do so out of a combined sense of vanity, greed, and need for power. Some are rather benign rich bastards, and others are clearly parasites just like Cupidine. And so the comic becomes a commentary - too much push towards communal-evenly shared economics must lead to stagnation and a suppression of individual gifts (and evil). Too much push towards unchecked capitalism leads to a few supersized lugheads with all the money, all the power, and no real empathy or brains to build a better world with it. The medium-sized lugheads like Cupidine "have no choice" but to become blood sucking parasites - either become that or be absorbed yourself - although you'll probably be absorbed anyway... The normal checks and balances of true capitalism no longer work and the system eats itself. Neither extreme is sustainable.

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 Post Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 2:30 pm 
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swmartian wrote:
Jackalope wrote:
It wasn't the shape or the individuality of the animas that were the problem, it was the quantity of them and how they could be harvested. I think it is also likely that when they arrived, all of them had their animas ritually spliced down to their current state by the worshipers - all of them except Zoe, who would still retain her powers of vision.

I disagree. Individuality - specifically vanity - was the start of the issue. I think obtaining additional animae probably started innocently. Someone figured out they could grab a loved one's anima when they died, and then at some point it became a status symbol. And then they figured out that the more animae you had the more power you had. And then animae were no longer collected out of loving memory, but became viewed in the same way money is in our society. Most of the people here who want to become rich do so out of a combined sense of vanity, greed, and need for power. Some are rather benign rich bastards, and others are clearly parasites just like Cupidine. And so the comic becomes a commentary - too much push towards communal-evenly shared economics must lead to stagnation and a suppression of individual gifts (and evil). Too much push towards unchecked capitalism leads to a few supersized lugheads with all the money, all the power, and no real empathy or brains to build a better world with it. The medium-sized lugheads like Cupidine "have no choice" but to become blood sucking parasites - either become that or be absorbed yourself - although you'll probably be absorbed anyway... The normal checks and balances of true capitalism no longer work and the system eats itself. Neither extreme is sustainable.


It isn't vanity that leads Cupidine to "Waste not, want not". The shape of the anima does not matter in regards to conferring power - they can all be harvested equally. It wasn't the uniqueness of the anima that destroyed society, even within your own premise, it was the power their acquisition conferred. If the previous society had all had the same anima, it wouldn't have prevented the the first person from harvesting their loved one's anima to have them live on through them, so it would still have led to the same cascade of events according to your posits. The premise of Troloria's belief does not mention the harvesting of the anima as the problem, but rather, their individuality. More importantly, it isn't communal, it is centered around praising and establishing a dogma by an entity that calls itself Troloria. The tribal community the crew encountered when they first arrived in this dimension was more communal than this.

However, likening the anima to power led me to another megaspeculation. What if the "cupidines" aren't really wiped out? What if there's now an extreme division within their society - the cattle caste who are harvested for their anima, and the "cupidine" caste that uses those animas as currency or as industrial output. It would also explain why they've all had their animas "standarized". It reminds me of what human cattle are in the mythos of vampires.

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 Post Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2020 12:20 am 
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Lord Golbez wrote:
I bet Cupidine's many anima collapsed into one Zoe anima, just like everyone else, when she fluxed there. She probably wasn't too happy about that, but she's mostly harmless now.


Well, I was partially right. That ominous neck krik has me doubting my "mostly harmless" comment.

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 Post Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2020 8:38 am 
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Looks like Zoe was not an exception. Also, I'm beginning to suspect psychic field here have ambition and initiative suppressing properties. They're kinda irrationally happy/neutral with status-quo.

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