hippogrif

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Welcome.

This is a thread for discussing the Girl Genius novelization Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess, as well as all Girl Genius in general. The subject matter is the property of Phil and Kaja Foglio.

No spoilers are required in this thread. The assumption is you've read the material already. That is why this thread exists--to provide a place for people to talk without having to try to avoid giving away secrets.

I own this account. If you're rude or a jackass, I will delete your post. If you're debating in good faith and not annoying the natives, I won't. If people really can't behave, I'll delete the whole fershlugginer thread.

Have fun. Talk at will. If you don't want spoilers, run away now.

Hippogrif.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lightningnettle.livejournal.com

It occurred to me today to wonder if the reason Tarvek's voice affected Agatha so much, is that he was low-level sparking the whole time. Lar's voice is his madboy voice, when they're sparking. Gil's voice is described as having, I think, infrasonics when he threatens Wooster.

So Gil's voice doesn't affect her muc in CW because he's safe and doesn't need to be sparking except when they're in the falling machine. Whereas Tarvek's in constant danger in Sturmhalten and has his spark up all the time to help him react to danger, essentially he sparks conspiracy making and detection. Maybe how he got such good control of it for the most part.

It sounds a bit silly now.

From:

hippogrif

I think they're doing something with sound/voice that's bigger than just Agatha finding people sexy. I find it a bit hard to believe a non-spark can imitate Spark subsonics. That just feels off. But there's something going on with what voices do.

There's obviously Lu/Agatha's ability to command the wasps. There's Agatha's ability to heterodyne, which requires hearing as well as vocal production: she has to hear what she's aiming for to hit it, that's why deaf and tone-deaf people can only sing a tune with tech-help to allow them to see when they're frequency-matching. There's the hint that Tarvek can hear very specifically, and thus possibly reproduce Agatha's heterodyning. There's the fact that he's the one who figures out how to reproduce Lu/Agatha's voice, and that he manages to improve it beyond his own expectations for Anevka.

It will be very interesting to see what they do with that.

Good catch. THANKS! XD

From:

claudeng

And following on heterodyning, I'm wondering if it's going to turn out to interfere with wasps. It blocks Lucrezia in Agatha's head. When we get Lucrezia's POV when the locket shuts her down, she hears it as a sound - I think they use the word "whine", but that's not too far from "atonal drone".

The counter-argument to this is that all the revenants in Sturmhalten were still rampaging while Agatha's signal was running. On the other hand, the city didn't really go to hell until after it was shut off. I could think of a couple of ways around that.

From:

hippogrif

I have a growing suspicion that there's something important connecting Lu's voice and Heterodyne hum, but I have't quite figured out what, yet. Yes, I think Heterodyne hum has an effect on Lu and on Lu-tech. I'm wondering if marrying Barry and having a child with him wasn't at least partly a matter of trying to combine two skills/sensitivities.

But I'm not sure, and it niggles at me.