Yeah, it took me a second to process she effectively said, “it’s in the script. I looked.”
Which is pretty much what we knew, except that apparently her some motivation is that it was what she was supposed to do.
Still confused as to why she isn’t a desiccated corpse, but I’m sure we’ll get there. I’m still expecting this is an illusion. Jadis may be omniscient but that doesn’t compel honesty.
huh.
yeah that would’ve taken me a few more minutes to figure out.
Bit of weird closed time loop type logic there, as a result: If the only reason you did the thing is because you know it’s the thing you do, then what compelled you to do it “in the first place”, so to speak.
if you got the object by taking it from the future, where did it come from to begin with?
all that to say. I wonder if Jadis knows her own motivations.
It’s almost impossible to write such a character consistently. I don’t think links are allowed in the comments, but if you want, you can look up my blog post on the topic, titled “Dr. Manhattan: Time, causality, and freedom”. I’m looking forward to seeing if Abaddon can do it better than Alan Moore.
I feel like Abaddon has a free get out of jail card considering the cosmology of the comic. In a world where paradox and contradiction are the chief tenets of God how could perfect knowledge of the world be anything other than paradoxical and contradictory?
Read your article, it was an interesting read. I think the flaw in the understanding of these kind of characters (and this may even extend to those who created them) is that they do not see *the* future. They see their future.
This lack of of true omniscience, more accurately described as prescience,
(if Jadis is all knowing she would know this is too much for Allison to handle right now, she would know what Alison knows, she would know what Alison would feel to any response she could give, she would know Alison might have a negative reaction to what she is being presented with, and what she needed to say to not elicit that reaction. She would also know not only the solution to any problem she faced, but all possible solutions to any problem she might ever face. When one is omniscient, there is no limit to what one knows. Ever. Or one is not omniscient. You cannot be partially omniscient, though you could approach being omniscient, knowing nearly everything, but even then you would not be All-Knowing. It’s something you either are or are not.)
means that both Jadis and DR Manhatten know the course of their life and none of the factors outside their experiences. Manhatten only knows what he is able to witness across time. He doesn’t know what every other being on the planet is up to at all times. This is why he can be, temporarily, subdued. His prescience relies on his awareness across time. He cannot know what he will never know. He can only see the things he will eventually see. Note, this is different from the things he *may* see. He doesn’t see possibilities, only certainties. (In the trap scenario, he would know that Ozymandias did something to temporarily disable him, and he would always know that and what it was, but he would never know exactly what happened to him at that moment.)
I suspect Jadis sees the same thing. What this suggests, is that they see a future, right to its end, a single shot of the arrow of time. And that the moment they gain this awareness they are seeing it all play out at once. Whatever caused them to see it, must have accounted for the probabilities of altering course, of the other timelines. They do not see those, because those options have been accounted for in their *sight* they see all the choices their foreknowledge has already indicated they would make.
Basically they see one timeline, and the nature of their vision ensures through this past/future/present influence you talked about that that timeline is the one that will play out. They saw the script, and in doing so, because of how it affected them, doing so ensured that that is what they would do. From that moment their choices were set, because they had already been manipulated.
Because the most important thing about both of these characters (and Paul from DUNE, cannot really be left out of this conversation) is that they are all human. Even Manhattan only has extra human abilities, his mind is trying to compensate and cope with his extra human perceptions. Humans love and are extremely geared towards the self fulfilling prediction.
Well said, tough Paul Atreides did not see only one outcome most of the time, and his foreseeing ability was more like a wave-function, that could collapse upon certain factors.
My reference to Paul was more because his limitation was his human perspective. He was so human he couldn’t help but be adversely affected by his gifts. If anything his issue really was that he could see too much, and the cost of making the choice to ensure a certain outcome was too great for him to bear, considering his upbringing and character.
Jadis could still be actually omniscient* from what we have seen so far; and particularly if you assume a determinist universe, where there is only one path everything will take, and individuals aren’t able to make “choices” that differ from that path.
(Incidentally, my personal, current opinion is that even in a non-deterministic universe, “free will” as often understood, is an illusion. We experience “ourselves *as* making decisions”, but we’re actually only experiencing our “selves making decisions”.)
The view that time, as we see it, is an illusion, and we’re living in a “block universe” in which past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, unchanging, is not uncommon among theoretical physicists who engage with the subject.
And many characters in this series also seem to assume smth like this; except that time is also circular… but things apparently can be different between iterations, and they clearly are temporally ordered – so you could again see it as a block universe.
Jadis would simply be able to see the entire block, as opposed to regular individuals, who just experience their consciousness observing an extremely small bit of cross-section of the block linearly from past to future, with a starting point and an end point to this experience.
Although overall, I’d say we haven’t learned enough to definitely determine what kind of -science Jadis possesses. Whether it’s only knowing everything from own point of view (1st person POV prescience + perfect recall), knowing everything observable at point in time, but not necessarily understanding it all, or an even more powerful kind.
*I disagree with your definition of “omniscient” and “all-knowing” – because I think there’s a difference between knowledge and understanding. You could know all measurable (and non-measurable) and observable information about everything in existence at any point in time, without *understanding* the meaning of pretty much anything sufficiently complex, eg NOT “know the solution to every problem [you’ll] ever face”, because this would require understanding. But this is a difference in what we think the words mean, your “all-knowing” clearly includes sufficient brainpower to also make unlimited deductions from your information or at least enough to hold the understanding your brand of omniscience would serve you up.
Maybe she only became a desiccated corpse because she chose to become one, because she saw herself becoming a corpse, and then decided to get better and start moving around again because she saw herself getting better and moving around again.
Actually, I don’t believe Dr. Manhattan is the right model here. If Jadis is close enough to all-knowing, it’s quite possible she’s currently iterating every possible version of this conversation, with every possible delay for healing, at the speed of thought. When it becomes clear this course will not lead to the outcomes she desires, she will abandon it and try another (with less time allowed for healing) until she arrives at a satisfactory answer.
The rub is that, while she may know the best course of action from within the golden gaol of her mind, she can no longer act directly: her ability to communicate it is limited to scrawling in light on the window of her prison.
I think it’s sort of funny that the true form of one of the Seven is a sort of homely-looking Asian girl with big lips. Not super sexy bombshell, not some ripped musclegirl, not an eye-melting abomination, just sort of average.
As much as I love all the demiurges for the different levels of monstrous they are, I find myself hoping Jadis is just….nice. Maybe utterly removed from everything because she’s all-knowing, but nice about it.
I won’t lie, being awkward is a way straight to my heart too. I’m just worried she might turn momentarily monstrous and cruel based on the same “This is what I do” principle…
You don’t get there that way, but once you become one you can change.
See: MacKenzie Scott. Her ex-husband is Jeff Bezos, and as a result she has tens of billions of dollars… That she’s allocating to representatives from a wide range of minority and underprivileged groups, so that they can choose where the money is best spent in terms of charities.
She has a blog you can find if you Google her name – she absolutely despises capitalism, and despises how a lot of “philanthropists” only give money away with a whole host of strings attached.
(I have a disaster lesbian crush on the woman hahaha)
From how it’s been described before (especially the method of how it was acquired), I believe her type of omniscience is more like perfect precognition – she knows everything that will happen because she’s already seen it (and it’s indelibly burned into her memory).
I think the hesitation and awkwardness is not about not knowing but about how to relate to another person who is not a subordinate. Or this is how Jadis is with every person in person.
Has it been confirmed that she’s truly omniscient? I know she was able to predict things to an extent, but does she possess true omniscience? And if she does, what type is it?
Like, one could argue that she knows everything that will happen, but is the future actually fixed or is it subject to change? Does she know literally everything about everyone, their thoughts, and such, or is it that she has the _potential_ to do so and instead decides to place limits on what she actively knows?
One thing that I only know for certain is that between her and Jags, one of them is incorrect.
It’s why they aren’t candidates for Royalty. Royalty doesn’t manipulate the wheel, Royalty breaks the wheel. Royalty is a continuous cutting motion — true freedom.
Incorrect. They are candidates for Royalty because they’re lonely, miserable beings that hate the situation they’re trapped in. Many in that situation would aspire to Royalty. You’ve simply identified why they aren’t Royalty.
Then I don’t think you should feel sympathy for *any* of the characters. Not for the humans, not for the demons, not for the angels etc. Not even for Allison herself, who Jadis, very obviously, saved.
Perhaps, but unless knowledge of the social graces is not a subset of all knowledge, claiming to be Omniscient seems a bit of a stretch.
She’s likely going to evolve her claim to knowing everything which happens (she saves Allison because she always has and always will save Allison (except of course for all those timelines where Allison wasn’t the heir and thus couldn’t be around to be saved), but that’s not omniscience, it’s precognizance (and probably postcognizance).
There’s a difference, I think, between KNOWING everything (say, internalizing all events and knowledge, but at a distance) and experience in a situation (personally dealing with it yourself).
“So what are some of the secrets of the universe, Jadis?”
“The atrium is nice to have breakfast in. It has plants!”
“Maybe I should have been more specific…”
42 Fragments the Universe Beyond All Reintegration
Note the interaction going on between the descriptions and the hovertext. We haven’t seen them tied together from a character POV like that before, so _someone_ is definitely crossed the fourth wall.
Possibly Jadis’s omniscience only extends to things within the comic itself, and not to thoughts or speech from characters who can escape the confines of the comic?
I’ve personally done shenanigans like that in my own webcomic; one character wrote a message down that’s a one-time pad and the decryption key is located on an entirely different website that I manage. Because she can’t risk having it existing anywhere near the main comic, lest the antagonist access it.
I presume that if Allison chooses not to stay with Jadis and wait for the end, that breaks Jadis’ pre-knowledge (“it folded up like a probability fan and disappeared”). But that requires Allison to actually make her own decision, which will be a novelty.
Also: Jadis abruptly booted out of her comfort zone is possibly not happy and not very nice any more.
It seems that the image text from 126, 127, and now 129 are all from Jadis’ perspective. 128 is obviously from Allison’s. It begs the question of Jadis’ mental state, how does one react and think after seeing it *all*?
42 Fragments the Universe Beyond All Reintegration
She’s living one of my nightmares, the one where I get very stuck for a long, long time, and when I finally get free everything is almost over and there’s no point in starting anything. Pretty much like my life now, actually. Excuse me while I scream.
The image text from 128, about Allison having no place to call home anymore makes me wonder if she even had a family left on Earth? We’ve never even once heard her talk about them. Not her parents, not her siblings, nobody. So, either Allison is alone, or her reltionship to her family is so bad she doesn’t miss them at all?
Not quite. In Seeker of Thrones 7-84, Alice’s existential dread says “I’m going to die here and my parents will never find my body,” implying that she would otherwise expect them to eventually find it if she’d died somewhere closer to home, which in turn implies that they’re still alive and at least on speaking terms with her.
Bootstrap Paradox can be resolved by saying yes, at some time you got the object from an original source, but then you went back and gave it to your past self, and now endlessly loop back to give it to yourself. From within the loop you are unaware of the original source, but it did at some point exist.
oh good I was hoping someone else would say it first because I was thinking it very loudly. It’s going to break my heart when Jadis inevitably shows us why we were right to be wary of her.
My guess, and it is truly a guess, is that Jadis may not have needed to murder to acquire the parts of her key.
Mammon bought his key, as well as several of the other pieces of it. Many of his followers were individuals that came to kill him, and instead turned to his side. His strength was as much his fanatical followers as it was his own. (This is why he was the weakest demiurge of the second, or tied with Mottom.)
Jadis, as we know, was the absolute strongest sorceress of the demiurges. Mottom was second to her. We’ve already seen arts and pieces of keys both given and stolen via the arts. It is entirely possible that Jadis preferred to defeat, capture, and extract the parts of her key without eviscerating/crushing her foes.
While she is certainly far from bloodless, if there is any of the seven who might not be absolute monsters, it is the embodiment of sloth.
Huh. Did not expect the ice witch (or any demiurge, really) to be this… friendly? Is that the right word? Also did not expect the omniscient goddess to be this bad at reading the room, but I guess being frozen in a giant block of ice for however long does a number on your social skills.
I feel when you get to speak like a “normal” entity for the first time in what probably felt like eternity will either make you extremely hostile or extremely amicable to the first living creature you encounter.
Most of the demiurges spone to Allison relatively normally.
Nadia spilled her feelings and pleaded with Allison at one point before going crazy.
Mammon was a gentle senile old grandpa.
Incubus was very friendly even though we know he’s a creepy sociopath. (This one was the most obvious facade.)
Gog was fangirling over Allison.
Solomon was not capricious at all; his tyranny stemmed from originally good intentions. Without Jagganoth’ attack, he would probably honor his word and cede his empire.
Even Jag first asked nicely for Allison’s key before shrugging at her ignorance and starting the apocalypse.
Frankly, the story has been way more interesting because the main villains have been more layered.
Mammon was old and senile when we met him, yea, but I imagine he was quite vicious and cunning in his youth. He did have his clan murdered (which he may have shown a bit of remorse about?) and used that to purchase his first Key after all.
I begin to suspect that the Key of Kings that Allison has cannot be stolen: it can only be given freely. Thus all the manipulations and attempts to persuade Allison one way or the other.
Alison isn’t a morning person, I take it.
More of a mourning person.
OOOH, you sneaky son-of-a-gun.
At this current point she’s a mourning person.
Oof, beat to the punch by no more then a minute. That 42 Fragments has a mean quickdraw, I tell ya what.
oh we’re under Dr. Manhattan rules
Yeah, it took me a second to process she effectively said, “it’s in the script. I looked.”
Which is pretty much what we knew, except that apparently her some motivation is that it was what she was supposed to do.
Still confused as to why she isn’t a desiccated corpse, but I’m sure we’ll get there. I’m still expecting this is an illusion. Jadis may be omniscient but that doesn’t compel honesty.
oh, is *that* the meaning.
huh.
yeah that would’ve taken me a few more minutes to figure out.
Bit of weird closed time loop type logic there, as a result: If the only reason you did the thing is because you know it’s the thing you do, then what compelled you to do it “in the first place”, so to speak.
if you got the object by taking it from the future, where did it come from to begin with?
all that to say. I wonder if Jadis knows her own motivations.
Its more that she accepts she has no free will, BECAUSE she looked.
Her trajectory through existence is fixed. Even if she tried, every action would unerringly result in the inevitable outcome.
She knows this, because she looked.
It is both a massive weight off her mind, and soul destroying.
Its kinda why Yisun killed himself.
>her trajectory theough existence is fixed
Encased in glass, you might say.
This acceptance of what is to come and their lack of ability to change it is a nice twist on the Sloth trope, I approve.
Damn I almost forgot the Demiurges were originally based on the seven deadly sins it’s been so long since… This is a good take.
It’s self-fulfilling, and likely, it’s freeing for her. Her actions have no consequences, besides those they would always have had.
Destiny is a coward’s substitute for decision.
It’s almost impossible to write such a character consistently. I don’t think links are allowed in the comments, but if you want, you can look up my blog post on the topic, titled “Dr. Manhattan: Time, causality, and freedom”. I’m looking forward to seeing if Abaddon can do it better than Alan Moore.
I feel like Abaddon has a free get out of jail card considering the cosmology of the comic. In a world where paradox and contradiction are the chief tenets of God how could perfect knowledge of the world be anything other than paradoxical and contradictory?
The nature of the universe is the opinion of YISUN, and the secret name of YISUN is “I”.
For YISUN’s greatest art is lying.
Read your article, it was an interesting read. I think the flaw in the understanding of these kind of characters (and this may even extend to those who created them) is that they do not see *the* future. They see their future.
This lack of of true omniscience, more accurately described as prescience,
(if Jadis is all knowing she would know this is too much for Allison to handle right now, she would know what Alison knows, she would know what Alison would feel to any response she could give, she would know Alison might have a negative reaction to what she is being presented with, and what she needed to say to not elicit that reaction. She would also know not only the solution to any problem she faced, but all possible solutions to any problem she might ever face. When one is omniscient, there is no limit to what one knows. Ever. Or one is not omniscient. You cannot be partially omniscient, though you could approach being omniscient, knowing nearly everything, but even then you would not be All-Knowing. It’s something you either are or are not.)
means that both Jadis and DR Manhatten know the course of their life and none of the factors outside their experiences. Manhatten only knows what he is able to witness across time. He doesn’t know what every other being on the planet is up to at all times. This is why he can be, temporarily, subdued. His prescience relies on his awareness across time. He cannot know what he will never know. He can only see the things he will eventually see. Note, this is different from the things he *may* see. He doesn’t see possibilities, only certainties. (In the trap scenario, he would know that Ozymandias did something to temporarily disable him, and he would always know that and what it was, but he would never know exactly what happened to him at that moment.)
I suspect Jadis sees the same thing. What this suggests, is that they see a future, right to its end, a single shot of the arrow of time. And that the moment they gain this awareness they are seeing it all play out at once. Whatever caused them to see it, must have accounted for the probabilities of altering course, of the other timelines. They do not see those, because those options have been accounted for in their *sight* they see all the choices their foreknowledge has already indicated they would make.
Basically they see one timeline, and the nature of their vision ensures through this past/future/present influence you talked about that that timeline is the one that will play out. They saw the script, and in doing so, because of how it affected them, doing so ensured that that is what they would do. From that moment their choices were set, because they had already been manipulated.
Because the most important thing about both of these characters (and Paul from DUNE, cannot really be left out of this conversation) is that they are all human. Even Manhattan only has extra human abilities, his mind is trying to compensate and cope with his extra human perceptions. Humans love and are extremely geared towards the self fulfilling prediction.
Well said, tough Paul Atreides did not see only one outcome most of the time, and his foreseeing ability was more like a wave-function, that could collapse upon certain factors.
True! I misspoke.
My reference to Paul was more because his limitation was his human perspective. He was so human he couldn’t help but be adversely affected by his gifts. If anything his issue really was that he could see too much, and the cost of making the choice to ensure a certain outcome was too great for him to bear, considering his upbringing and character.
Jadis could still be actually omniscient* from what we have seen so far; and particularly if you assume a determinist universe, where there is only one path everything will take, and individuals aren’t able to make “choices” that differ from that path.
(Incidentally, my personal, current opinion is that even in a non-deterministic universe, “free will” as often understood, is an illusion. We experience “ourselves *as* making decisions”, but we’re actually only experiencing our “selves making decisions”.)
The view that time, as we see it, is an illusion, and we’re living in a “block universe” in which past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, unchanging, is not uncommon among theoretical physicists who engage with the subject.
And many characters in this series also seem to assume smth like this; except that time is also circular… but things apparently can be different between iterations, and they clearly are temporally ordered – so you could again see it as a block universe.
Jadis would simply be able to see the entire block, as opposed to regular individuals, who just experience their consciousness observing an extremely small bit of cross-section of the block linearly from past to future, with a starting point and an end point to this experience.
Although overall, I’d say we haven’t learned enough to definitely determine what kind of -science Jadis possesses. Whether it’s only knowing everything from own point of view (1st person POV prescience + perfect recall), knowing everything observable at point in time, but not necessarily understanding it all, or an even more powerful kind.
*I disagree with your definition of “omniscient” and “all-knowing” – because I think there’s a difference between knowledge and understanding. You could know all measurable (and non-measurable) and observable information about everything in existence at any point in time, without *understanding* the meaning of pretty much anything sufficiently complex, eg NOT “know the solution to every problem [you’ll] ever face”, because this would require understanding. But this is a difference in what we think the words mean, your “all-knowing” clearly includes sufficient brainpower to also make unlimited deductions from your information or at least enough to hold the understanding your brand of omniscience would serve you up.
Maybe she only became a desiccated corpse because she chose to become one, because she saw herself becoming a corpse, and then decided to get better and start moving around again because she saw herself getting better and moving around again.
We’re all desiccated corpses, Alison. I’m just a desiccated corpse who can see the strings.
Actually, I don’t believe Dr. Manhattan is the right model here. If Jadis is close enough to all-knowing, it’s quite possible she’s currently iterating every possible version of this conversation, with every possible delay for healing, at the speed of thought. When it becomes clear this course will not lead to the outcomes she desires, she will abandon it and try another (with less time allowed for healing) until she arrives at a satisfactory answer.
The rub is that, while she may know the best course of action from within the golden gaol of her mind, she can no longer act directly: her ability to communicate it is limited to scrawling in light on the window of her prison.
Bear in mind this chapter is called “Breaker of Infinities” – Jadis might not be as omniscient as she thinks she is.
Poor Jadis just wanted to help :<
Poor Jadis isn’t good at projecting her own face in this illusionary world of hers. She looks hideously malproportioned for a goddess.
I don’t believe yet that they’re not in a VR there.
Consider that there are countless races of countless species and that very few have been ‘human’.
I think it’s sort of funny that the true form of one of the Seven is a sort of homely-looking Asian girl with big lips. Not super sexy bombshell, not some ripped musclegirl, not an eye-melting abomination, just sort of average.
one doesn’t get into the sorcery game because they have good looks
Jadis mommy makes you breakfast ASMR
Someone must make it.
Are you Borg?
As much as I love all the demiurges for the different levels of monstrous they are, I find myself hoping Jadis is just….nice. Maybe utterly removed from everything because she’s all-knowing, but nice about it.
Demiurges are like billionaires. You don’t get that level of power by being a good person.
Very, very true. It was always a slim hope at best.
I won’t lie, being awkward is a way straight to my heart too. I’m just worried she might turn momentarily monstrous and cruel based on the same “This is what I do” principle…
I mean its funny cause Jadis probably is on the good side of Demigurges ala David.
“All-knowledge compels me because there are no alternatives” could be used just as easily to justify a cruel but necessary act as a kind one.
But Zeta never said anything about wanting her to be good.
As the girl in the red hood says, Nice is different than Good.
You don’t get there that way, but once you become one you can change.
See: MacKenzie Scott. Her ex-husband is Jeff Bezos, and as a result she has tens of billions of dollars… That she’s allocating to representatives from a wide range of minority and underprivileged groups, so that they can choose where the money is best spent in terms of charities.
She has a blog you can find if you Google her name – she absolutely despises capitalism, and despises how a lot of “philanthropists” only give money away with a whole host of strings attached.
(I have a disaster lesbian crush on the woman hahaha)
I feel like the only appropriate response to “I’m omniscient” here is “then what IS my @#!&ing pain level? You tell me”
that’s fair.
“I’m at a 9.”
“No, you’re at a 4.”
“Then why even fucking ask?”
Because I saw myself asking.
to let them know you care
From how it’s been described before (especially the method of how it was acquired), I believe her type of omniscience is more like perfect precognition – she knows everything that will happen because she’s already seen it (and it’s indelibly burned into her memory).
… then why does she seem confused and uncertain about what’s happening now, and how to react to it?
I wonder if Alison is the butterfly’s wing, the Agent of Chaos needed to wrest Throne out of its never-ending cycle of reruns.
I think the hesitation and awkwardness is not about not knowing but about how to relate to another person who is not a subordinate. Or this is how Jadis is with every person in person.
Not the diskworld version where not a king makes a paradox and a massive headache?
Has it been confirmed that she’s truly omniscient? I know she was able to predict things to an extent, but does she possess true omniscience? And if she does, what type is it?
Like, one could argue that she knows everything that will happen, but is the future actually fixed or is it subject to change? Does she know literally everything about everyone, their thoughts, and such, or is it that she has the _potential_ to do so and instead decides to place limits on what she actively knows?
One thing that I only know for certain is that between her and Jags, one of them is incorrect.
Oh, don’t make me feel for Jadis. Don’t make me sympathise with another one of these warlords.
Every demiurge is ultimately a lonely, miserable being that hates the situation they are trapped in. It’s why they are candidates for Royalty.
It’s why they aren’t candidates for Royalty. Royalty doesn’t manipulate the wheel, Royalty breaks the wheel. Royalty is a continuous cutting motion — true freedom.
Incorrect. They are candidates for Royalty because they’re lonely, miserable beings that hate the situation they’re trapped in. Many in that situation would aspire to Royalty. You’ve simply identified why they aren’t Royalty.
Royalty is BS.
Aye, you’re very right. But usually I don’t feel so bad in seeing them fail and fall, given where they ended up since their sad origins.
I simply don’t want to get attached to another great villain.
Then I don’t think you should feel sympathy for *any* of the characters. Not for the humans, not for the demons, not for the angels etc. Not even for Allison herself, who Jadis, very obviously, saved.
Can’t choose who I feel sympathy for!
I just hope that if I grow attached to Jadis as a character then I don’t end up let down if (hopefully not when) she ends up being terrible.
With omniscience on the table, all IFs become WHENs
Sounds like a good moment to quit reading, then
All knowing, but somehow doesn’t know how to give an acceptable / understandable answer to Allison’s question.
I suspect being entombed in ice for centuries (or however long) does a number on one’s social skills.
Perhaps, but unless knowledge of the social graces is not a subset of all knowledge, claiming to be Omniscient seems a bit of a stretch.
She’s likely going to evolve her claim to knowing everything which happens (she saves Allison because she always has and always will save Allison (except of course for all those timelines where Allison wasn’t the heir and thus couldn’t be around to be saved), but that’s not omniscience, it’s precognizance (and probably postcognizance).
There’s a difference, I think, between KNOWING everything (say, internalizing all events and knowledge, but at a distance) and experience in a situation (personally dealing with it yourself).
“So what are some of the secrets of the universe, Jadis?”
“The atrium is nice to have breakfast in. It has plants!”
“Maybe I should have been more specific…”
Jadis is possibly kinder than the other 6, but “I’m keeping you here until we die together because I’m sooo lonely” is not much better.
Lol Evangelion 5.0 which attempt is this type actuon
By knowing her future, Jadis loses all agency. I wonder if her omniscience extends to the fourth wall?
Note the interaction going on between the descriptions and the hovertext. We haven’t seen them tied together from a character POV like that before, so _someone_ is definitely crossed the fourth wall.
Possibly Jadis’s omniscience only extends to things within the comic itself, and not to thoughts or speech from characters who can escape the confines of the comic?
I’ve personally done shenanigans like that in my own webcomic; one character wrote a message down that’s a one-time pad and the decryption key is located on an entirely different website that I manage. Because she can’t risk having it existing anywhere near the main comic, lest the antagonist access it.
Oh poor dear Jadis. She is not very good at the whole people thing, is she?
I guess half an eternity spent entombed in glass while seeing and knowing literally everything doesn’t do much for your bedside manner.
I presume that if Allison chooses not to stay with Jadis and wait for the end, that breaks Jadis’ pre-knowledge (“it folded up like a probability fan and disappeared”). But that requires Allison to actually make her own decision, which will be a novelty.
Also: Jadis abruptly booted out of her comfort zone is possibly not happy and not very nice any more.
Oh, I’ve been there! I think..
It seems that the image text from 126, 127, and now 129 are all from Jadis’ perspective. 128 is obviously from Allison’s. It begs the question of Jadis’ mental state, how does one react and think after seeing it *all*?
She’s living one of my nightmares, the one where I get very stuck for a long, long time, and when I finally get free everything is almost over and there’s no point in starting anything. Pretty much like my life now, actually. Excuse me while I scream.
The image text from 128, about Allison having no place to call home anymore makes me wonder if she even had a family left on Earth? We’ve never even once heard her talk about them. Not her parents, not her siblings, nobody. So, either Allison is alone, or her reltionship to her family is so bad she doesn’t miss them at all?
Not quite. In Seeker of Thrones 7-84, Alice’s existential dread says “I’m going to die here and my parents will never find my body,” implying that she would otherwise expect them to eventually find it if she’d died somewhere closer to home, which in turn implies that they’re still alive and at least on speaking terms with her.
Bootstrap Paradox can be resolved by saying yes, at some time you got the object from an original source, but then you went back and gave it to your past self, and now endlessly loop back to give it to yourself. From within the loop you are unaware of the original source, but it did at some point exist.
> MEMO(TT_CLEARANCE_01) (01200): IT’S GONNA GET REAL FUCKING DARK.
Jadis is kinda mommy.
Also I don’t believe she is truly omniscient, atleast not in the traditional sense.
If she’s truly omniscient, she’d have to be very good at lying in order to continue to exist.
oh good I was hoping someone else would say it first because I was thinking it very loudly. It’s going to break my heart when Jadis inevitably shows us why we were right to be wary of her.
I wonder if she is somewhat like Mammon? Also, what caused her to want omniscience in the first place? Does she still want to die? Is she dead?
My guess, and it is truly a guess, is that Jadis may not have needed to murder to acquire the parts of her key.
Mammon bought his key, as well as several of the other pieces of it. Many of his followers were individuals that came to kill him, and instead turned to his side. His strength was as much his fanatical followers as it was his own. (This is why he was the weakest demiurge of the second, or tied with Mottom.)
Jadis, as we know, was the absolute strongest sorceress of the demiurges. Mottom was second to her. We’ve already seen arts and pieces of keys both given and stolen via the arts. It is entirely possible that Jadis preferred to defeat, capture, and extract the parts of her key without eviscerating/crushing her foes.
While she is certainly far from bloodless, if there is any of the seven who might not be absolute monsters, it is the embodiment of sloth.
It’s a sound idea, but there’s a flashback panel in an earlier issue of her holding a sword, so I imagine she used it.
Boo. Don’t let evidence get in the way of a good theory.
Jadis Spoonfeeds You Honey Nut Cheerios While Telling You How She Couldnt Save Billions of People: The Premier Audio Experience
All knowing but, hoo boy, is that ever a lonely demiurge.
Worst bedside manner ever.
Abbadon’s had a lot of time in hospitals over the last year or so, I get the feeling this sequence is informed by that experience.
I really hope the doctors he had to deal with had better bedside manners than Jadis! Poor dude.
they remember, from the carpet
wights and mouls, others, forget
who the queen is, what two pence get.
The Rhyming Wax Head!
I thought you must have been dead!
Glad you live instead.
Nice Haiku
Back from the dead
The Rhyming wax head!
“Don’t look at the Wheel in its entirety, nothing but Spoilers” – Jadis Probably
Huh. Did not expect the ice witch (or any demiurge, really) to be this… friendly? Is that the right word? Also did not expect the omniscient goddess to be this bad at reading the room, but I guess being frozen in a giant block of ice for however long does a number on your social skills.
I feel when you get to speak like a “normal” entity for the first time in what probably felt like eternity will either make you extremely hostile or extremely amicable to the first living creature you encounter.
Most of the demiurges spone to Allison relatively normally.
Nadia spilled her feelings and pleaded with Allison at one point before going crazy.
Mammon was a gentle senile old grandpa.
Incubus was very friendly even though we know he’s a creepy sociopath. (This one was the most obvious facade.)
Gog was fangirling over Allison.
Solomon was not capricious at all; his tyranny stemmed from originally good intentions. Without Jagganoth’ attack, he would probably honor his word and cede his empire.
Even Jag first asked nicely for Allison’s key before shrugging at her ignorance and starting the apocalypse.
Frankly, the story has been way more interesting because the main villains have been more layered.
Mammon was old and senile when we met him, yea, but I imagine he was quite vicious and cunning in his youth. He did have his clan murdered (which he may have shown a bit of remorse about?) and used that to purchase his first Key after all.
Used his clans money to purchase the Key, I mean.
They were all ruthless enough to get where they are, no doubt.
But none have just tried to take the key from Allison, and have spoken in a relatively normal way to her–at least initially.
I begin to suspect that the Key of Kings that Allison has cannot be stolen: it can only be given freely. Thus all the manipulations and attempts to persuade Allison one way or the other.
this one suspects thou art correct.