Within the first week of my attendance, I began noticing a number of strange occurrences. The most prevalent of these oddities being the fact that I seemed to have obtained a second shadow.
For those interested in minutia, this isn't the first print version of GC. Back in 2006, Tom published the first seven chapters as a paperback through Lulu.com's print-on-demand service. This is the reason for the "Treatise" page at the end of Chapter 7. This paperback was discontinued months before Orientation was announced.
So far, the volumes include:
Gunnerkrigg Court: Orientation (January 2009) collects the first 14 chapters.
Gunnerkrigg Court: Research (March 2010) collects chapters 15 - 22, plus the City Face bonus comic.
Gunnerkrigg Court: Reason (August 2011) collects chapters 23 - 31, City Face 2.
Aerith and Bob: There are people named Surma, Antimony, Gamma and Zeta and Sir Eglamore as well as Jack, Janet, James and Andrew Smith, whose magic power is to make things normal.
Arc Number: 113. It appears many times across the comic.
City of Adventure: Gunnerkrigg Court — a school resembling an industrial complex the size of a city (with its own park!), just next door to a creepy forest.
Dark World: A dark city, the evil twin of Birmingham.
The bridge to Gillitie Forest. It's wide enough to not be immediately dangerous unless people walking on it do something unusually stupid, and it lacks railing, since any shadow cast on it would allow the Glass-Eyed Men to cross it at night.
Raygun Gothic: The plot of Dr. Disaster's simulator.
Where The Hell Is Springfield?: We've been given just enough information about Gunnerkrigg's location to know it doesn't fit anywhere on the map of the U.K.
Wizarding School: The court is a subversion. Even though magic occurs on school grounds, the court considers any and all phenomena as scientific.
The World Tree: A Cherry Tree (from Gillitie Woods) in the artificial habitat room; it is there Annie starts to open up to Kat.
Narrative / Themes
Aborted Arc: The paintings from Chapter 2: Schoolyard Myths, as seen in page 7 were supposed to be part of a sub plot, but Tom has since dropped the concept.
Absurdly Sharp Blade: The tooth Coyote gave to Annie in Chapter 26: The Old Dog's Tricks. On Kat's official sharpness classification, said blade is "Really damn sharp", to the point of cutting a shadow from the floor. But it doesn't cut Shadow himself, fortunately for him.
Coyote: The keenest blade you will ever find! Be careful with it, because it could cut the very earth!
Blue and Orange Morality: Annie and Kat ran into this trying to reconcile two ex-fairies. According to the fairies, mutual understanding and respect are not the most important things for choosing your friends, it's cool hair.
Big Damn Heroes: Eglamore and Kat, on three separate occasions. Two were played straight, one was a subversion.
One day I saw a pigeon fall from a tree, its body twisted and broken from an attack somewhere above. It writhed on the floor in silence and eventually died. It had no expression, just as I have no expression. I have never relayed this story to anyone.
Clingy MacGuffin: Blinker stones...but only when the owner wants them to be.
Comically Missing the Point: Jones basically gives a compliment to Annie in this page comparing Shadow's open-mindedness to her's, but Annie still takes it literally.
Cosmetic Catastrophe: The results of Kat's first attempt to use makeup were not pretty.
Cringe Comedy: The strips of Jack trying to hit on Annie after he was freed from spider control were painfully awkward for the both of them and the audience.
Crossover Cosmology: Reynardine and Ysengrin are based off Reynaerde/Renard the fox and Ysengrimus the wolf, respectively, from Medieval European folklore. Muut, Coyote, and the Glass-Eyed Men are from Native American myth. There's also several ghosts, fairies, and, for good measure, a flashback montage featuring every psychopomp, ever. Chang'e, Brynhildr, and the Minotaur (of Chinese, Norse, and Greek mythology, respectively) have also made appearances.
Antimony: Coyote, can you tell me, what is Gunnerkrigg Court? Coyote: Why... It is man's endeavor to become God! How is that for an enigmatic answer?
Curiosity Killed the Cast: Not the lethal kind, but there were rather close calls. Curiosity also starts several plots, and often proves helpful when combined with compassion.
There also appears to be another one on this page, in the second to last panel.
Cutting the Knot: Ms. Jones' way of dispelling fancy magic runes.
Dada Comics: The dialogue and visuals in the super triple excellent City Face chapter and also its sequel which is known as City Face #2 invoke very much the feeling of this trope which describes them!
"Spacemonauts! The evil Enigmarons are threatening the Earth from their moon base on the moon!"
The creepy space aliens from outer space.
Do Androids Dream?: The Court robots seem to have personalities and their own society out of sight of the humans, and they are explicitly trying to figure out their "purpose" beyond merely being custodians of the Court. One of the biggest questions they seek an answer to is why their creator, Diego, would engineer the death of someone he loved. They also think of Kat as an angel.
Eldritch Abomination: Lindsey has 47 eyes, and 151 not-eyes, and part of her brain functions in a different dimension. She's also an accredited couples therapist.
Bob: Hmm, there's a lesson in all this... (...) Never let sixty angry kids use a herd of laser cows to take over your house.
Fantastic Foxes: Reynardine is based on the folktales of Reynard the Fox.
Fling a Light Into the Future: The original Magitec robots didn't have the means to reproduce, so they designed the modern court robots as their successors.
The Force: The Ether, which, like the Trope Namer, infuses all living things, can be directly harnessed only by a few humans, and bestows upon its users the abilities of telekinesis, clairvoyance, teleportation, flight, and superhuman speed and jumping abilities, and can even be used to create Magitek like 'etheric computers', which can project Deflector Shields or bind people/things if their users will it.
Generation Xerox: Zigzagged. This generation of protagonists are descended from parents who were also adventure buddies back in the day — but the two generations are different in just as many ways as they are alike.
Gentle Giant: Quite a few, such as Lindsey the giant crab. In fact, it's almost a reliable guarantee that the bigger and more intimidating someone (or something) is, the nicer they're going to turn out to be.
The Glass-Eyed Men seem to be made of pure shadow, but Kat deduces that they're actually just very thin layer of matter that may as well be a layer of light. Or, you know, dark.
Harmony Versus Discipline: In just about every sense, from magic, nature, and world view, the Court and Gillitie woods are opposed. The Court favors rational methods, control, and gray expansive industrialization. The Wood represents nature, unbound and at times terrifying.
Hug and Comment: Chapter 32 ends with Annie and Kat hugging, and then Kat saying "Annie ... I love you and everything, so ... it is with love that I must inform you that you really gotta take a shower."
Paz: The Court isn't a big monster that does as it pleases. Es a collection of people, working to do what they think is right. And, over time, other people see what is wrong, what mistakes were made, and work hard to fix them.
Immortal Immaturity: Coyote does whatever he wants to whoever he wants, regardless of how he knows they'll feel about it, and most of the time without their permission. He also has No Sense of Personal Space, often wrapping himself around someone or pressing his head right onto theirs (To say nothing of the nose). He seems to have little to no concerns in life, like when Renard was tricked by Surma, he knew it was happening, he just thought it'd be more FUN to see what happened. He's also incredibly blunt when he's telling you something. The permanent grin he has plastered on his face doesn't help his case much.
Kat gets another one after her opinion about the Court changes in Chapter 29.
And once again, Annie and Kat have noticeably different hair after the summer holiday between chapters 31 and 32, Annie having grown hers longer than it ever was and begun to tie it back, and Kat having cut hers shorter than it ever was, accentuating the growing rift between them.
Ironic Echo: Eglamore responds to the students' complaints about camping in the cold with "Good question. Night!" At the chapter's end, the sleeping arrangements have reversed, and Annie tells Eggers: "You know where the tents are. Night!"
Is That What She Never Did Tell You: Annie collected a heavy basket of this looking for answers in all the wrong places. Now this began to hit her, mostly in the face. When she finally talked with her mother's best friend directly, she made some... little discoveries. Like why Surma left the Court to never return, or related to Annie the tales of Coyote but didn't mention knowing him or say anything about other notorious inhabitants of Gillitie Wood she knew at least as well.
Limited Wardrobe: Averted. The characters wear all kinds of clothes, appropriately to the situation. And the two female protagonists even change their hairstyle regularly.
Literal Metaphor: Both Renard and Coyote repeatedly told Annie "You have a fire in you, fire that belonged to your mother". This turned out to be not a runaway compliment, but a fairly straightforward, concise and accurate statement.
Living Emotional Crutch: Kat to Annie, Gamma to Zimmy, Annie's mom (and now Annie?) to Renard.
Magic A is Magic A: It's implied that all magic follows specific rules. So far, the best covered is Rey's Demonic Possession — e.g. he's able to occupy a toy simply because it has eyes.
Reynardine is also bound in the wolf toy and forced to obey Antimony because it has her symbol on it, which is why he hasn't just jumped to something else.
Also, when Coyote gives away a power, it gains a side effect it didn't have when Coyote had it, like Ysengrin's artificial tree-body and his atrophied real body, and the fact that if Renard takes over a body, it dies when he leaves and the original owner is extinguished when he enters.
There's also the fact that any power Coyote gives, he can't use until he takes it back.
Magic Versus Science: The two are compatible, but there is an ideological clash nonetheless.
Misfit Mobilization Moment: Occurs in "Residential", when the Queslett students band together to find out where their classmates have been disappearing to.
Moment of Weakness: Annie and Reynard do this to each other in chapter 31.
Mood Whiplash: Typically occurs for both the characters (i.e. as a narrative trope) and the readers at the same time.
Mundane Utility: The blinker stones' amplifying powers have a wide variety of uses, including signal rocket and instant campfire; Annie has used hers as a torch and a psychic walkie-talkie, among other things.
Non Answer: If you ask any of the court's residents how the court was built, they will just say that the founders made it. If you ask anyone else who might know, all they will say is that "It grew from the Seed Bismuth".
Not So Stoic: Annie's defense mechanism for emotionally stressful situations is to freeze up emotionally and put on a stoic mask. Some examples:
Chapter 6, under the influence of special cherries.
Chapter 31, where she explodes on one page and breaks down sobbing the next. In this case there were too many stresses in too short a time that the mask broke and she suffered a breakdown.
Skywatcher, when he is told about the shrine to Jeanne.
Orphan's Ordeal: Annie's mum is dead and her dad has disappeared.
Oh Crap: A Giant Enemy Crab Kat believes Annie arranged as an apology? Creepy, but manageable. Noticing that Annie is staring in horror and clearly had nothing to do with it? Yeah, time to be scared. Complete with Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises.
Our Demons Are Different: Reynardine, and Zimmy were called demons at some point. No guarantee in the first case it was not a popular simplification and the second was confirmed to be only an invective.
Our Dragons Are Different: Rogat Orjaks ("horned giant" in Slovenian) are explicitly stated to be dragon-kin, but not the same as "usual" dragons. One is quoted making a distinctly Take That remark on the subject of "those [common dragons]".
Our Fairies Are Different: "Regional Fairies" are so-called because they have spots on their shoulders showing which "region" they're from. They learn little kinds of magic (like rusting metal) and are said to come of age when they make their own clothes. "Red" and "Blue" are the only ones introduced in the main story. Two others appeared only after becoming humans.
Our Ghosts Are Different: Mort, the Ghost with the Sword, and the boy in the hospital are all different from each other. It will probably all be explained eventually. Also, a blind man's ghost mentioned by Kat in her letters over the summer break.
Rant Inducing Slight: Occurs a few times, with Kat's rant in "A Bad Start", provoked by, well, a bad start to her day, and Annie and Rey's fight in "Fire Spike", beginning with Annie's copying of homework.
Ridiculously Human Robots: The various Court Robots are comically incompetent in ways that are nevertheless far beyond the capability of any Real Life AI. Probably a result of their magitek origins.
Shadow Archetype: The recurring theme of duality in the narrative makes this fairly common in both characters and other elements of the world, though it's sometimes difficult to tell who or what the 'shadow' is.
Shape Shifting: Coyote can change his shape at will, usually by stretching himself.
Signs of Disrepair: John and Margo, looking for a replacement mandolin, came across a closet marked :Cursed instruments.
Sorkin Relationship Moment: A non-romantic version. Kat calls out Antimony and Reynardine's awkwardness, and demands that they be friends again. While holding a pair of wire strippers.
Stylistic Suck: the "City Face" storyline (and a sequel: "City Face #2") which are portrayed in simplistic white and black (as opposed to the rest of the comic which is highly detailed and painstakingly colored). The dialog has a unique flavor (i.e. highly awkward and stilted, but apropos for the characters in question), and the overall effect is...interesting. The comments below each strip are part of the joke (presumably written by the author) and patterned as a mockery of internet flame wars. Strangely, despite the odd style and superfluous plot, the "City Face" storyline (and presumably the "City Face #2" storyline as well) are not merely filler: the events and characters in them are considered to be canon.
Turns out there's a reason for this: Annie and Surma are descended from fire elementals, and as soon as Annie was born she began absorbing her mother's spirit.
Summon To Hand: The Blinker Stone allows its owner to do this.
Introducing a fake threat and mystery to the target group of snooping little kids, mad scientists and magic users can "make things more interesting" indeed. Even more soafter one of them finally catches what's going on.
Later, Jack delivers one when Annie tries to set him up for heartbreak to hurt him for something he did while he was possessed and thus had no control over.
Your Mind Makes It Real: Zimmy's little Crapsack World is a sort of collective dream: participants go there and back without anyone else ever noticing.
Zimmy: It's only as real as you let it be.
Characters
Big Guy, Little Guy / Fat and Skinny: The two ghosts unleashed by John and Margo. The male is short and fat, the female is tall and thin; unfortunately they don't get much characterization other than they're terrifying and in love and just want someone to finish their song.
Improbably Predictable: Here, Andrew Smith demonstrates that he's the only person who can predict when Parley is going to arrive via teleportation. (Word of Tom is that Smitty is just guessing, but because of his order-causing powers, his guesses just happen to be right.)
Plant Person: One pretty cool dryad in Residential.
For a more complete rundown, see the spoileriffic Character Sheet. Tropes related to main characters should be added there rather than here.
Meta
Art Shift: City Face, which is canon, and a slight shift when Annie is using the Blinker Stone. (Everything is generally more detailed and her hair connects panel to panel.)
Art Evolution: Tom is consistently evolving his art. It's most noticeable in Annie's case: Compare her design on page 18 with her design on page 437 (which, incidentally, is a Flash Back to the same scene from page 18). Now compare with a page 775 strips later.
This was hilariously lampshaded in this strip's comment section.
"Thank you for reading this chapter about girls getting haircuts." "Thank you for reading this comic about magical boots and awful hats."
Author Appeal: Given Jack's spider motif and, the Whitelegs themselves, and Tom's tendency to have spiders in his◊ self◊-depictions◊, one can't help but think that he likes drawing them.
Author Catchphrase: "Mystery solved!" in the commentary when something random and completely unexpected sheds a little light on a previous question while raising far more questions.
"It's that guy!" and "The big guy is Eglamore" are everywhere, too.
Bechdel Test: Passes, very nearly fails the reverse Bechdel test.
Bilingual Bonus: A few Greek and Latin signs, a few lines in Spanish, and some Polish dialogue. (Meta4 compiled a list with translations — see the bottom of this blog entry.)
Renard wasn't named for the French word for fox. The French word for fox was named after Renard.
Call Forward: Somewhere between this and Early-Bird Cameo, the adult City Face was (possibly) introduced in an Omake published between arcs that most likely happened before he was born.
Deliberate Values Dissonance: Used to comedic effect between the friendships of humans and the friendships of fairies (see Blue and Orange Morality). Also pointed out to be a dominant cause for the strained relationship of the court and the woods.
Most of the stuff is related to the events and reveals of Chapter 31: Fire Spike.
Chapter 3: Reynardine introduces us to Renard himself. At one point, he recognizes Annie as Surma's daughter, and is sad when he concludes that Surma is dead.
At some other point, in a flashback in Chapter 18: S1, the one who gets saddened is Anja, after reading Annie's transfer letter, due to the death of Surma.
From Chapter 21: Blinking, page 28: "The day Surma died, none of us came for her." and "I had to do it myself."
From Chapter 23: Terror Castle of the Jupiter Moon Martians, Renard does a comment towards Annie: "You have a fire in you, child, a fire that belonged to your mother!". Yep, this turns out to be a Literal Metaphor.
In the bonus page of Chapter 11: Dobranoc, Gamma, Zimmy wants to chase spiders. Cue Chapters 27 and 28: Spring Heeled, where it's revealed why they need to be chased down.
Girl on Girl Is Hot: Invoked by Reynardine when Kat and Antinomy are having a heartwarming moment. Plot point, too, because it's the reason Antimony orders him not to speak until she commands it.
Loose Canon: Bonus pages are distinctively one step away from the main continuity and may bring extra exposition, or teasers, or comedy, or something wild — or all at once.
Mind Screw: Samples this whenever the characters end up in Zimmingham, particularly in chapter 28 (which has triggered so much Wild Mass Guessing and speculation among the fanbase that it can only be described as the Epileptic Trees equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion).
Chapter 6: Our characters go from laughing their heads off to bawling their eyes out in a single page. Yay.
Chapter 19 is dark and depressing, but still manages a genuinely heartwarming moment on page 468... then yanks the rug out from underneath Annie and the readers on the very next page.
"Oh no!" "A sad face!" "The saddest face!" Due to the phrase's use as an Ironic Echo.
Chapter 30 goes from being reasonably upbeat, to horrifying revelations about a character's death, then the same character trying to kill the protagonists... and finally then ends with two characters admitting their love for each other.
Chapter 31 begins with undefined unease, explodes into anger, and ends in tears.
Narrator: Two of them, Annie for the main story and Tea for bonus pages and announcements from Tom.
Nostalgic Narrator: Antimony's narration is from at least two years in the future.
Never Trust A Title: Chapter 34: Faraway Morning (And Three Short Tales), where some characters tell three short tales. Sounds like a short chapter, right? It's the longest chapter to date thanks to all of the Character Development and plot revelations going on between each of the tales.
Odd-Shaped Panel: Pages where Annie looks into the ether tend to have no panels borders at all. Even more trippy is when the etheric forms of characters themselves become the panel borders. Annie's flowing red hair goes from one "panel" to another, reconnecting with her head multiple times one one page.
In "Fire Spike", the perspective starts to warp after The Reveal, in order to convey Annie's Heroic BSOD.
Later in the same chapter, Annie puts up a wall of flames between herself and the Court, and it burns the panel dividers up.
Running Gag: Tom's comments bellow each comic sometimes are variations of Epileptic Trees, the line "Oh. It's that guy." or "[Obvious event in-comic]! ([Obvious event in-comic])"
Schedule Slip: Not the webcomic itself — Tom has maintained a 30-page Strip Buffer since day one — but both published volumes didn't hit shelves until months after they were scheduled to come out. The delay of Orientation was bad enough that Tom thought Archaia was defaulting on the publishing contract.
Series Hiatus: Several times, each one lasting, at least, two weeks, and coinciding with the end of each book.
The first was after the end of Chapter 14: The Fangs of Summertime. In the timespan between this chapter and Chapter 15: Red Returns, bonus material and guest comics filled that void.
The second hiatus occured after Chapter 22: Ties, and this time it was the omakeCity Face, featuring the titular bird.
The third hiatus happened after Chapter 31: Fire Spike, and, like the second time, it featured an omake of City Face, City Face 2.
Shown Their Work: Attention to fine details in itself became yet another layer of fun. If something looks dubious, usually this get fixed by more research on the viewer's part. Mongolian draw and archery bracers? Baby pigeons◊? Canine skulls? Moon pools? A girl musses her hair up after removing the hair tie? Check-check-check...
A very subtle one. One of the strips is just a random collection of real photos. One of the pictures is of a mineral called Stibnite (it's easily identifiable by it's bladed crystal habit). Not only is that briefly mentioned as Surma's maiden name at one point, there's also the fact that the mineral contains an element that isn't found in many minerals; Antimony.
This◊, directed at someone who complained that the flashbacks weren't made obvious enough. There were a few "helpful" notes for those who get disoriented by the Art Evolution, take jokes too literally or both at once.
Tom's◊ reaction to a weekend of speculation that Jones is a robot, months after Reynardine told Annie that she isn't.
The second panel of strip 540 is hard not to interpret as a Take That against the fans who speculated that Jones was the third girl in the photo after Tom Siddell quite clearly said that she wasn't.
"City Face" — placing the birdspeak into the beaks it belongs to. If it's not enough, there were Fourth Wall-dissolving comments (Tom said more than once that he doesn't like Leet Lingo and internet loonies).
Including a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the fandom, which (using a bare minimum of information) figured out that Brinnie's spoiler: "Old Man" is Odin from Norse Mythology, and shortly after, that Brinnie herself is Brynhild the valkyrie. The full extent of the information they had? Brinnie is Scandinavian, and she uses triangles in her magic.
Less than a day of this page going up and people wondering whether the girl was Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, a bunch of posters on the Gunnerkrigg forum immediately identified her from Chinese mythology.
It helps a lot that the forum community is comprised of readers from all over the world (some of the most frequent posters are from places like Russia, France, Spain, and Alaska) and so most mythology symbols, folk songs, and bilingual bonuses are frequently able to be first noticed/explained by a native of the region in question.
0 reviews 
