Final Quest #12

Miss Gillespie wrote:

Unless you're timtam/tatter, then your soul name and your previous name are going to have a connection... :/

I would say the opposite. In fact, I think the only reason they do have that connection is because Timmain is not dead. The High Ones don't have soul names at all. Neither do the other elves. It stands to reason that they don't care what they're called in their new life.

(On a side note, I don't actually see any connections between the name Timmain and the name Tam. They have some of the same letters but they're not even in the right order to be a short form vs. a long form.)

manga wrote:

I would say the opposite. In fact, I think the only reason they do have that connection is because Timmain is not dead. The High Ones don't have soul names at all. Neither do the other elves. It stands to reason that they don't care what they're called in their new life.

(On a side note, I don't actually see any connections between the name Timmain and the name Tam. They have some of the same letters but they're not even in the right order to be a short form vs. a long form.)

I agree that there doesn't have to be a connection between the previous elven name and the current soul name of a reincarnation/ horcrux state, but the comics push an other idea. And yes, Tam and Timmain doesn't really sound similar.
Who knows, maybe it turns out only Wolfriders can incorporate other souls, since they have twisted souls any way and hey, it wouldn't surprise us, right?
Actually, I can see them going for "the High One's names are the original soulnames, they are so hive mind open, they want to share everything". So the name Tam is a splinter from the name Timmain. This doesn't make sense? Well, it wouldn't be the first time, eh?

I've more or less stopped expecting it to make sense anyway.

manga wrote:

Miss Gillespie wrote:

Unless you're timtam/tatter, then your soul name and your previous name are going to have a connection... :/

I would say the opposite. In fact, I think the only reason they do have that connection is because Timmain is not dead. The High Ones don't have soul names at all. Neither do the other elves. It stands to reason that they don't care what they're called in their new life.

(On a side note, I don't actually see any connections between the name Timmain and the name Tam. They have some of the same letters but they're not even in the right order to be a short form vs. a long form.)

If his soulname had been Tim it might have given the game away. Also It might have had unfortunate Monty Python overtones..."there are some who call me...Timmmm..."

I just got done reading the sneak peek. All I can say is.... SMEGGING HELL!

Now that little scene from Future Quest where some one who looks like Cutter says "My daughter is down there" is now really confusing. Is it Cutter, or is it Timmain... or is it a mixture of both?

Soreyes wanders off mumbling " Hell Elf West and Alternaverse make better sense then this"

The way I understood it it's something like this:

Timmain's soul split into two independant parts; the part that remained Timmain, and the part that became Tam.
Timmain and Tam are not the same so there's be no 'Cutter's soul (Tam) being re-absorbed by Timmain', Cutter will have his own afterlife.
Rather Timmain and Tam are "soul twins", which - I guess - would make Tam (Cutter) Timmorn's uncle...

Soreyes wrote:

Now that little scene from Future Quest where some one who looks like Cutter says "My daughter is down there" is now really confusing. Is it Cutter, or is it Timmain... or is it a mixture of both?

Or is it someone else entirely who just looks like Cutter?

Timmain explicitly tells him that he is going to live in her body, that he is not going to roam free. He is going to be bound by the palace so no. That's why he's shocked

Soreyes: you said smeg!

Miss Gillespie wrote:

Timmain explicitly tells him that he is going to live in her body, that he is not going to roam free. He is going to be bound by the palace so no. That's why he's shocked

How does Timmain know that, anyway? Does she just take a guess or has she done this before?

@sifra: yeah, HAS she done this before? I could see how this body farming could be very useful - fission off a piece of your soul and hide it in a horcrux body - both as insurance purposes and also just for the free entertainment - sorry, knowledge-seeking - value. As Timmain herself said, she gets to chill safely in the Palace and run the show while Cutter takes all the risks and incurs all the physical damage.

Conversely, how do any of us know Timmain is telling the truth? Yes, there is that remark about the door to Cutter's mind opening, but that could be more figurative than a literal "their souls are now one and Cutter totally feels everything Timmain does." Timmain's a High One - maybe she's strong enough to lie in sending.

Granted, what motive does Timmain have to lie? Unless perhaps the two souls aren't as "one" as she says... yet, and she needs Cutter's cooperation to complete the process. What better way to ensure that than by telling him over and over it's a fait accompli until he believes it and stops fighting.

Or I'm just in extreme denial at the sheer size of the shark EQ has jumped. Whatever.

Timmain is sending. Supposedly, you can't lie in a send. I think the saying "a door opened in his mind" is just figurative, not literal. I mean-- I don't think there was a channel opened, but rather, a realization.

She may just have an intuitive understanding of what will happen to Cutter after he dies. I don't know how Timmain could know that she and Cutter are the only beings in the world like this, though. How can she be sure of that?

This is a very large shark. It's okay. Sharks exist. Even a good story can jump a big shark. The less you expect it, the bigger the animal seems.

See this is what bugs me. We're supposed to believe what she says supposedly because she's some alien goddess but because her alien 'personality' (I use the word loosely) is all nebulous and has never been defined in any possible way except for being consistently cryptic, it's almost impossible to trust her motives.

I think she's way creepier than Winnowill.

Zadzi wrote:

See this is what bugs me. We're supposed to believe what she says supposedly because she's some alien goddess but because her alien 'personality' (I use the word loosely) is all nebulous and has never been defined in any possible way except for being consistently cryptic, it's almost impossible to trust her motives.

I think she's way creepier than Winnowill.

How can she be creepier than Winnowil? Considering everything Winnowil has done. Timmain hasn't ever behaved in such an evil fashion.

I think what we are finding relatable about Winnowil is her motivation and her emotions. Timmain doesn't seem to express much emotion-- about anything. I think that's why she comes off as creepy.

Okay-- I'm gonna nerd out here for a minute and you guys are just gonna have to come with me. Did anyone every watch the original series of Star Trek? I saw them all when I was a kid. There was constant tension in the stories between Mr. Spock and people who kept thinking he should have more emotion. The fact that he didn't get upset about things upset a lot of other characters. It was all very campy and overdone-- but I wonder if there is a point to that. Maybe we like what we can relate to-- and it's impossible to relate to an expressionless, remote being that doesn't appear to have much reaction to things... even if her actions are not terrible.

Timmain hasn't ever behaved inconsistently. She's always been stand-offish, or protective. She has taught her "children" to control the Palace. She didn't keep power solely for herself. She hasn't really tried to control much- except for telling Skywise not to pick people up. Mostly, she's stood in the background and cryptically answered questions while in the nude. That's it. Not so evil. Possibly even qualifying as "good." Yet not easy to relate to on an emotional level.

Completely unlike Cutter. Cutter is the epitome of relatable.

There was some speculation earlier that maybe Timmain is telling Cutter this now because he is near the end of his life-- and she wants him to have some choice about what will happen to his spirit after he dies. That's an interesting idea.

I wonder if she is telling him this because the time is approaching for the elves to decide whether to go with the Palace or stay on the planet. She knows that Skywise is torn because he doesn't want to leave Cutter-- and Cutter is torn because he doesn't want to lose either Leetah or Skywise, but doesn't want them to make a choice against their natures on his account. She may be thinking that this knowledge eliminates some of that conflict.

Cutter isn't at the end of his life. He's barely 500-600. In Wolfrider terms, that's nothing, seeing as how they can live until they reach 3000 years old.

Lunakat wrote:

I think what we are finding relatable about Winnowil is her motivation and her emotions. Timmain doesn't seem to express much emotion-- about anything. I think that's why she comes off as creepy.

She seems so focused on the Big Picture that she can't put herself in others' shoes on a personal level. It's hard to tell (at least for me) but in that last panel of the preview she looks surprised/confused -- as if she doesn't understand Cutter's surprise, or why this revelation should bother him.

That lovable Vulcan anchored his place into hearts everywhere because of that eyebrow cock and his maddeningly emotionless attitude which was exaggerated to make a point....yes, it was campy (like all of Star Trek) but he also had relatable moments. See, I feel this is the thing, Spock's lack of emotion was a defining trait because it was so thoroughly exaggerated but there were still other tics and little tells in his character which were so uniquely his and made him lovable.
Timmain... I wish there was a little humor or something in EQ about her. Just to make us all go, Oh good, she maybe an alien but even aliens can be downright goofy or relatable at times. There are still touches of humanity in Spock (he was half human after all, and it came out at times). Obviously you're not going to get 'humanity' in elves, but relating is still present with all elves whether you liked them or not.
God, I miss Spock. I loved him so much. I named one of my parents' cats after him because he had those crazy eyebrows.
Timmain does have some weird ass eyebrows, so there's a starting point.

I'm honestly not just trying to be an argumentative pain in the ass, Lunakat. i hope you don't think so!

Yes, I find Timmain creepier due to her constant cryptic , shifty nature. Winnowill is a cartoon cut-out of evil at this point now. Timmain in my humble opinion makes a much more 'believable' villain in terms of writing. I'm obviously not going to trust the insane, genocidal jack ass who tortures her own child and people. But I might be more inclined to trust the alien goddess who supposedly 'did so much' for my species and 'sacrificed herself' for us, who randomly says cryptic stuff and doesn't answer questions with much clarity. Who says things like THEY WILL FIND THEIR WAY TO ME. And doesn't allow pods to pick up elves and allows them to die along the way. Oh but she *always* has a good reason for what she does, doesn't she.
There's more of a threat with Timmain because you 'might' trust her. And explain away her chillingly creepy behavior.

I feel you, Zadzi! Winnowill may be more dangerous, but she's a very predictable sort of evil. Might as well have a giant neon sign over her head going "VILLAIN HERE!"

With Timmain you just don't know what her end game is. What we do know is she let at least one elf die on the way to the Palace out of some Darwinian "prove yourself worthy" philosophy. And yet she has everyone so conditioned to defer to her that no one considers it manslaughter by negligence.

That might not be more evil than Winnowill, but it is SO much creepier.

Dark Horse won't let me log in to view my digital comics right now, but I did have a sneaking evil!Timmain theory I'll just throw out here.

At one point during her hook up with Skywise (I think), she sort of leads him through some reasoning as to why the elves came to the WoTM. She gets him to admit that the World was the perfect place for the High Ones to land because it was so harsh, so punishing. Timmain is all about "the learning." As she says to Cutter, a fragment of her soul entered his body at conception so that it could go on experiencing life while her original wolf-body was stuck in the troll pit.

So here's my wacky theory. Timmain engineered the palace's crash on the WoTM. She thought the High Ones were growing stagnant. They weren't learning any more. So when they came to a "perfect" planet, a place where they could learn through hardship and suffering and survival. That's why she doesn't ever intervene to save anyone trouble. Maybe it's not even "evil" from her perspective. After all, if an elf dies their spirit will go on; fair trade-off if they learned something in the experience. As for the history she spun for the Wolfriders and Go-Backs after the first palace war, that could have been psychic projection or manipulation. She's infinitely powerful and she has a lot more experience with the scroll of colors (Wendy's also been describing the scroll as containing every possible sequence of events, so maybe Timmain just picked an alternate history to share.)

Bottom line: I don't think many of the elves would take kindly to her taking the decision into her own hands, even with the purest of intentions. And weirdly, the wolfriders might be the most sympathetic, since they arguably adapted the most to the elves' new home planet.

I'm still not sure how the timing of her revelation to Cutter fits into this theory, if it does at all.

I have always suspected Timmain had something to do with that crash. She certainly didn't try very hard to get them back into the Palace in that HY story, after all. It would not surprise me in the least if she had engineered the whole thing as some sort of high stakes science-experiment-cum-philosophy-workshop.

Whoa, I just saw this preview was a thing.

The meaning behind last issue's reveal wasn't as weird as I thought it might be, and somehow that's... actually a little disappointing?

At the moment I'm mostly nonplussed.

Cutter's distress is so very palpable and twists my heart a little (though I also snickered at the "vacuumed off the page" panel).

Considering they're one soul in two bodies, Timmain seems pretty oblivious to Cutter finding this whole business seriously disturbing.

I considered the possibility that Timmain is just straight up screwing with him, but there are no lies in sending, or so we are told.

Mulling at this and curious about the rest of the issue.

You know, I have to admit to some surprise that these pages are the ones chosen for the preview. In the past, they've held back or skipped over pages that answer the cliffhanger of the previous issue.

Maybe they thought by doing it this way, the people likely to be put off will just opt out of the series before buying the issue and won't be as vocal about their disgust since they didn't pay for it?

Wendy mentioned on FB that apparently Dark Horse gets to choose what pages to preview and it's not up to the Pinis at all. Not actually sure how much of that I buy - I think they must get SOME say in determining at least what they might not want revealed.
You might be right though, Manga.
Or, maybe this reveal is relatively minimal compared to the rest of the issue... finding that hard to believe...but who knows.

manga wrote:

You know, I have to admit to some surprise that these pages are the ones chosen for the preview. In the past, they've held back or skipped over pages that answer the cliffhanger of the previous issue.

Maybe they thought by doing it this way, the people likely to be put off will just opt out of the series before buying the issue and won't be as vocal about their disgust since they didn't pay for it?

I'd say you could argue that while the preview solves the cliffhanger of issue 11 it ends on it's very own cliffhanger, what with Cutter zooming off like that.
It's just typical the Pinis; it's not enough to end the issues on cliffhangers, they have to end the previews on cliffhangers as well.