[SPOILER] Click here to see my commentary for this page!
My comment for this page from Gaia: sic mundus creatus est:In The Bipartite Mind #34, we learned that Eldor’s machine put the Tear of Gaia in a temporal vibration for 1.2 seconds. The questions now are how far back in time each oscillation took Lilith’s soul when she absorbed the Tear of Gaia, and how many oscillations there were. I like to think that each oscillation took her back to the moment when Gaia stole the Source and that there were at least one thousand oscillations. That would have given her around 1.5 million years to learn her ultimate spell! She used the time to learn some other spells too, like the one to heal the Dalelands.
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So, similar to Marvin the Paranoid Android, who lived to be 37 times older than the universe itself, thanks to all the time travels!
I am sorry, but nothing in that explanation makes any sense, and can be reasonably expected to be derived by the reader from reading the comic.
Why are oscillations akin to time travel? Why would each oscillation take her back to that specific moment? Why would there be 1000 oscillations?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to have such concepts in mind as an author, but you need to let your readers in, and subtle clues distilled over hundreds of pages just doesn’t cut it. As a reader, I have no reason to make these specific guesses.
@Chris: Ya I had similar thoughts for a moment when I read the explanation.
But then I thought – hey, this is a comic, and a fantasy one about magic, too. It does not have to make sense. It’s not a textbook and noone’s gonna test or even ask about this stuff…
This remembers me years ago, in classroom, after the teacher solved a problem (a homework) none could do, someone asked her (the teacher), how possibly could she expect we could solve the problem by ourselves with the explanations received previously, I mean, we were usual people, no geniuses among us. It was very funny, I had to fight not to laugh. She said, in a way… I can’t fully describe due my poor English, more or less she said (it was very very funny, it was the only time I saw her trapped) she, *of course*, did not expect we could solve the problem (without help from other sources), but that was somewhat a way to teach us, and what she expected was that problem (the problem in question) was fully understood now and, if an examination, we could solve it (from that moment on).
Really it has nothing to do (at most, marginally) with the point discussed here, but I remember this always in situations with some kind of relation.
Poyntre wrote:
Life sometimes throws problems at you, you never prepared for. Such cases teach you to explore outside the box so to speak. And you might not be able to solve it yourself.
Way back when, we were given an unexpected examination in physics class. The professor explained this was an ‘old school’ type of examination. There weren’t many questions, maybe it was five, and we had to answer three. Every question had two parts. One party tested material already covered in class. The other part was stuff we’d never seen before. We were to imagine the physical processes involved, develop the mathematical formulas describing the processes, and then solve the problem using the formulas we created.
No on in the class was very happy.
In retrospection, this was very realistic. Now everyone just does an internet search.
Honestly, as the reader, I don’t need to know everything. I do, however, really appreciate finding out that there are reasons and logic behind it.
I can sort of see the logic behind the oscillations. Being tied to Lilith as the focal point, I could see that potentially yanking her soul back and forth through time, and if her consciousness went along with it, then that could be used as time to study things.
@ Zitchas:
This.
Me too.
I couldn’t feel it the first time, but I could savor it now.
If only I bought the book back then! =D
@ Chris:
I agree with Chris. It would have added quality to the comic if this spoiler comment was provided as dialog between the some of the characters. The reason? With Lilith she already feels rather over-powered. Magic in stories usually feels “better” when there is some kind of cost for powerful spells. Otherwise it tends to feel to cheap that a big deal spell took place too easily. You did this well with the final Eldor defeat. Also: 1.5 millions years for someone to “live though” would have been an interesting character development to show. I think if someone was at one moment 18, and then the next moment 1.5 millions years old, their personality or something would manifest very differently. That would have made for an interesting idea to explore and end to the story. Just a thought.
I agree with the sentiment, that the explanation doesn’t really derive from the comic at all. Not in any way that anyone could reasonably come up with without knowing the authors private notes.
Also, I would expect living through even thousands of years, never mind more than a million, to severely alter the mind of that person. Just look at how the mind of a real-world human changes as they go through a normal-sized life.