El Goonish Shive III - Totally Adorkable!

[Rater202]

And so the nest part of my post

I mean, if he's really having that much trouble understanding it, couldn't he ask someone to explain it to him?

I mean, his sister's girlfriend/his first amicable ex has had a spell book for years, he's best friends with a genius who is dating another genius.

And his sister/clone clearly understands hers and his, so he could ask her(or at least ask her how she understands it so well.)

That's four people he can ask to explain it for him sometime.

Oh, and his current girlfriend knows about his spells, is into transformation stuff, and is probably somewhat well read, so that's maybe 5.

And how can we forget the bottomless barrel of exposition? I bet if he asked Mr. Verres, he'd get a three panel explanation complete with charts and diagrams on how to translate spellbook into plain English.

I mean, he has no excuses.

[Yuki Akuma]

I mean, he has no excuses.

He sure doesn't!

But 'being noncommittal to the point of never doing anything' is a pretty established character trait of his, so you can't expect him to improve overnight. Maybe this will give him the kick in the pants he needs. (Probably not.)

[Forum Explorer]

He sure doesn't!

But 'being noncommittal to the point of never doing anything' is a pretty established character trait of his, so you can't expect him to improve overnight. Maybe this will give him the kick in the pants he needs. (Probably not.)

It's also Elliot's greatest negative trait and why I hate character arcs that revolve around him.

[halfeye]

Perhaps, but he's not literate enough to understand his spell book.

How the heck does that work? Ellen's his clone, a female identical twin. They may fight, but they can't be that different. Some men read, if he can't or won't, she can't or won't.

[The Mormegil]

It's also Elliot's greatest negative trait and why I hate character arcs that revolve around him.

Word!

At least now I can count on storylines including Elliot being storylines including Ashley, so there's that!

[memnarch]

How the heck does that work? Ellen's his clone, a female identical twin. They may fight, but they can't be that different. Some men read, if he can't or won't, she can't or won't.

I don't remember if it was in comic or not, but I think Ellen thinks of herself more of fraternal twin than a copy of Elliot, what with double set of memories that don't quite match up with her.

[Egneil]

Honestly I'd prefer it if his magic was trolling him. With him checking it 3~4 times per week having stayed the same since when Ellen read it, and having added new spells and functionality when he was in the fight against Tara.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

How the heck does that work? Ellen's his clone, a female identical twin. They may fight, but they can't be that different. Some men read, if he can't or won't, she can't or won't.

No, they are not identical twins. First, even if they were twins, that doesn't mean their personalities would be identical - one could be lazy and the other an overachiever (I have met one such twin set IRL). But even if that wasn't the case, she has her entire other (dream)life that significantly altered her outlook on life and personality.

Second, like I said last time this came up, canon establishes that the spellbook is long, boring, and written in rather inscrutable language. Last time I mentioned the unix man pages, but I thought of an even better example: every one of us (probably) lives in a place were our entire life could be turned asunder and destroyed by a powerful entity that has access to infinite resources when compared to us. Thankfully, they produce a document that tells us precisely what we can and cannot do, and therefore how to prevent this entity from completely ruining our lives. I am talking, of course, about our respective governments, and the codified book of laws. And yet I doubt any one of us has ever sat down and read the entire law system of our countries cover to cover, nor have we tried to keep up with their weekly updates. And yet, the theoretical consequences of our ignorance are as dangerous to our lives as Elliot not knowing how much he can lift as Cheerleadra.

We have seen the spellbooks - at a glance, I'm thinking they're about 1000 pages long. Everyone here that so self-piosuly declares they would of course read their spell book, go ahead and pick, say, 1000 pages of your respective's countries laws on private property, and you tell me how much you actually learn. After about 6 paragraphs of finely tuned legalese, your eyes will be watering, and you will have, in fact, learnt nothing because you already know the basics, most of the details you pick up just by engaging in purchasing, and the rest don't look like they apply to you. Same for Elliot: he already has a fairly good idea of what Cheerleadra can and cannot do, learns more every time he uses the spell, and figures that the rest can wait.

Grey Wolf

[Rater202]

The page number of the books is irrelevant to this discussion, because books aren't full of information by default.

They start blank and fill up as you learn spells.

You only need to check if you've gotten new or upgraded spells and then read the manual for the spells as you get them, which is much easier.

Although Elliot is probably horrifically far behind, so it'll be a struggle to get caught up.

Anyway, it being difficult is not an excuse. If anything, it's quite the opposite-check the book often and read up on new spells as they apear so you don't have to read dozens of pages at a time.

And as I've said, Elliot has 4-6 people ho could help explain it to him.

He has no excuses.

[eschmenk]

Everyone here that so self-piosuly declares they would of course read their spell book, go ahead and pick, say, 1000 pages of your respective's countries laws on private property, and you tell me how much you actually learn.

Elliot is being criticized in the story by people who think it would be very reasonable for him to learn what was in his book. Some of those people have been learning spells, presumably from their own books. They should have a good basis for knowing if it was reasonable to expect that Elliot would do the same thing that they have been doing.

Furthermore, since it doesn't seem to be necessary to hire the equivalent of lawyers to interpret spell books, it seems a bit silly to make the comparison that you did.

Having said that, it's not all unusual for High School students to be sick and tired of having to learn stuff and it's not surprising that Elliot would be incredibly unmotivated to learn about spells that he doesn't want and didn't ask for. To me, it comes across as if Elliot is just acting like a typical High School student and it seems strange that this subject generates so much debate.

I'm not all that interested in the comic, so I could easily have missed something, but isn't it true that Elliot doesn't want the spells and also that magic is mostly a nuisance as far as he's concerned? Granted, he keeps winding up in situations where he feels that he needs to use magic, but he would prefer those situations didn't happen, right? So is it hard to understand why he, a student who is tired of studying, doesn't do all the reading he should do? Am I wrong or am I missing something?

It's also pretty obvious that the meta reason he doesn't read the book is so that he can wind up being embarrassed, right? It's a running joke, now, right?

[Lissou]

I understand your metaphor, Grey Wolf, but I feel like if I was involved in activities that required me to have very a very good knowledge of specific laws and I was surrounded with lawyers, the fact that I don't understand legalese wouldn't be a good enough excuse, especially if a version of me from a few months ago could do it. Unless there is a clear reason why Ellen's second life makes her able to understand spellbook speech, I don't think the time she has spent as Ellen is enough to explain such a drastic difference. Or if it is, hey, good news Elliot, you can learn to comprehend you spellbook within a few months, and you know that for sure because you've already done it.

[Mith]

I still would say that you saying Elliot = Ellen only works in terms of potential, which shows that he can do it, because Ellen presumably started off with the same potential as Elliot. However, Ellen has a heck of a lot more drive then Elliot does. And until recently, he hasn't really looked at magic as something to appreciate and truly work at. The only drive Elliot seemed to have had was his martial arts. Up to this point, Elliot has sort of drifted through life. Hopefully something will come from this to push him to apply himself fully to his skills and actually progress with them. And maybe his start to embracing these abilities with Ashley may help. Thinking back to his relationship with Sarah, that probably did not do much good since Sarah actively disapproved of his abilities.

[5a Violista]

They start blank and fill up as you learn spells.

They start blank?
Honestly, I'd like to know where I missed this, I was completely under the impression that they start filled and add words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages randomly as time goes on and you gain new powers.

[Lissou]

They start blank?
Honestly, I'd like to know where I missed this, I was completely under the impression that they start filled and add words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages randomly as time goes on and you gain new powers.

You get a spellbook when you get you first spell, so they don't start completely blank. However, they start mostly blank since only your first spell would be described in them at first. And we have not seen spellbooks grow bigger with time, so I don't think they're adding pages, although maybe they would if they ever reached the end.

[Egneil]

You get a spellbook when you get you first spell, so they don't start completely blank. However, they start mostly blank since only your first spell would be described in them at first. And we have not seen spellbooks grow bigger with time, so I don't think they're adding pages, although maybe they would if they ever reached the end.

Actually spellbooks can grow larger as Nanase's grew fifteen pages when she gained a new spell, and I don't think those pages were ever blank to begin with.

[Rater202]

Actually spellbooks can grow larger as Nanase's grew fifteen pages when she gained a new spell, and I don't think those pages were ever blank to begin with.

Nanase has been awakened for a few years and uses her magic like, all the time. She'd probably fill up her book fast-especially seeing as her book seems to be smaller than the books that Elliot and Ellen have-and thus would eventually need to add pages.

Alternatively, she also could have meant "added 15 pages of text" instead of the book literally growing fifteen more pages.

Also, when a book is described as "writing itself," that usually means that the book in question is blank and fills up on it's own.

[Gez]

Let's say a book starts with a set number of blank pages that get written progressively. It means that there is a maximum number of spells one can learn -- eventually, the last page will be filled, and you won't be able to learn anything past this point.

On the other hand, if the book grows with new pages, there's no hard limit. It's just that the book will become increasingly cumbersome and a very knowledgeable wizard might need a cart to carry it.

Which of those options would better fit EGS is left as an exercise to the reader, but personally...

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I think it's the latter. Dan Shive doesn't seem to me to be the kind of people who'd want to put hard limits on potential growth (look at what he's doing with Grace's shapeshifting, while he has set some limits to morphing's ability to grow or shrink relatively to the original mass, her ability to learn new shapes and combine them has grown exponentially and is now virtually infinite). Another outcome of the "blank pages getting written" approach is that once the book is fully filled, the characters may start to resent some of their spells for taking up space, and the theme has rather been to be to accept what you've got if you want to develop more (as shown with Elliot's girly spells and Nanase's sneaky spells).

[Rater202]

They're not mutually exclusive-if the book starts with a bunch of blank pages but runs out, it could add new pages.

[Qwertystop]

Or it might just be that you need to get another book for the overflow. Not sure which would be more convenient, it really depends on how many spells someone who's been going for a while tends to have - it'd be less convenient at first, when you've got one full book plus one book that's only got a few pages in it, but a lot more convenient if you end up with enough spells to fill a shelf and don't really want to carry around the whole encyclopedia just to check the end for new things.

[Mith]

I've always pictured the books as a standard thickness, but the pages still seem to grow. Bigger on the inside then the outside so to speak.

[Calemyr]

They've never said anything about text that's already their spellbooks, to my knowledge*, just the deceptively bland covers that people tend to give them and the unimaginable verbosity of on the spell descriptions. Since spells are native (people can use spells without ever reading their books), all a spellbook does is lay out how a spell works, including available variants, all in excruciating detail and with a weapons-grade vocabulary.

However, given Shive's style, I'd bet that we're talking a middle ground solution: the book (to a non-mage) looks full, with lots of boring things to fit with the expectations set by the cover. To a mage, however, the book appears mostly empty, with pages getting filled in as the book's owner progresses. It's likely that, once the book nears capacity, extra pages are added to maintain room to grow. It is, however, also incredibly likely that Shive would simply raise an eyebrow and answer bluntly: "You go get another book. Next question." The style of EGS favors both elegance and practicality, so both answers are plausible, it's just a question of which one will be made canon, and it will be a long while until that's necessary..

* Note, I don't read the NP stories. I know there's enough canon in there that I probably should, but the NP stuff never really appealed to me. So it could be mentioned there.

As I tried to say before (got distracted while writing it and never posted it), Elliot's sin is intellectual laziness. He doesn't mind hard work, he doesn't mind high risk, he doesn't mind strange experiences. He does, however, absolutely hate to think. He avoids any kind of complexity he can. His first girlfriend picked him because she though he'd be her perfect match, and he agreed. He actively ignored his second girlfriend's interest in him because he didn't want to complicate their relationship, until he finally couldn't avoid it anymore. He quickly dismissed his attraction to Susan as "dem crazy teen hormones" and ignored them as a complication to a relationship he didn't want to risk. He's with his current girlfriend just because circumstances threw the two together and he just rolled with it. He always prefers to leave choices to others, and defaults to select favorites when left to his own devices. He seems to have become genuinely addicted to his Heidi form and her energy, because he lacks it normally. Even his magical powers finally surrendered and gave him a morally distinct spell that implies a specific role, the one spell he actually seems to like. When pitched against any question that requires serious thought to answer, he will reliably pick the easiest answer without even considering the others.

Now, I'm not saying he's stupid. He has a brain that works, he just would rather not use it because actions and instinct come to him easier. Figuring out an EGS spellbook is like trying to solve a crossword puzzle. Certain types of people are just drawn to that kind of thing. Others feel no sense of attraction at all. And still others would rather stare at a featureless wall than consider one. Elliot's pretty much in the last category, I believe.

[Professor Gnoll]

Very true. I think there's even a comic where Elliot admits he doesn't like self-reflection or hard thinking, but I forget where it is.

[Mith]

Ellen's the one that puts it in those terms, but he does agree about it as well.

[Gez]

Re: latest commentary, I think the word he wanted to use that sort of sounds like "permanent" is "permanence". Permeance is a real word, but much rarer (e.g. it's not in my firefox spellchecker), and if you look at it, it's closer to "permeable" than to "permanent".

Another word he could have used is remanence, as in data remanence.

[malloyd]

How the heck does that work? Ellen's his clone, a female identical twin. They may fight, but they can't be that different. Some men read, if he can't or won't, she can't or won't.

They are more different than it might look at first. Dan hasn't made much of an issue of it, but effectively Ellen is twice his age. She has a complete education, through graduating from high school, obtained on an alien world, and we know she retains skills from that from that. She could have lots of skills Elliot doesn't.

It's perhaps also why she seems more of an adult - she's already *had* a bunch of the sorts of life experiences that people do as they grow up, ranging from graduating from high school and making a first set of plans for adult life, to having a love affair fall apart, to losing a bunch of her friends (left in another universe), to facing her own imminent death (briefly and wrongly but still), to dealing with her parents senility (well, they've forgotten half her childhood)....

[Egneil]

New Comic.

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So it seems more like Tara's world is more of a twin parallel dimension, with each one relying on the other. In any case it seems like the griffins already had this conversation before.

[Qwertystop]

So, "same world" mostly only in a purely magitechnical view, except with edge cases like whatever's going on now.

[Calemyr]

Those two griffons bicker like married peop- ohhhh.

[Drascin]

NEEEEEERRRRRRRDDDDDD!

You can tell that Andrea is a researcher.

Also, we straight up Tales of Symphonia now, apparently.

[Lizard Lord]

@NPS: So has no one ever told Grace about Undertale?