I think she knew the pressure she would be under from one side, and the animosity she would be under from the other, and was trying to protect her from both.
I suspect Plo Quar never wanted her daughter to be seen as that kind of dangerous, either among humans or sarnothi.
With her powers intact, lingering Jin’Sorai insurrectionists and their sympathizers could turn her into a symbol and a weapon for their cause. Being charitable, we don’t know that that’s what Gien is talking about when he hopes she will serve as their fourth Echo, but we know that right now Sarnoth is in such a state in the aftermath of the Jin’Sorai ‘suppression’. Peace is maintained ‘at gunpoint’: https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie406/ (and adjacent pages)
If she manifested such powers while in human care, that would likely succeed in alerting humanity at large to the existence of the Sarnothi (a known goal of the Jin’Sorai), but in possibly the most panic-inducing way possible (definitely not ideal and playing directly into Sar’Teri concerns about general contact with humans…Sarnoth cannot afford a terror-fueled war against the surface). At best, she’d wind up in a government lab somewhere for gods know how long while the humans tried to figure things out. At worst, she might directly provoke war against Sarnoth.
If either or both of those things are true, Sar’Teri sees Selkie as a threat to be contained or destroyed like they saw the rest of her clan and those that sympathized with their supposed desire for vengeance on behalf of Behn or the pre-war desire to make open contact with the surface (something I suspect is a far more longstanding grievance, with the death of Behn as a symbol of why living in secrecy is not truly safe to begin with).
If Selkie is not an Echo, neither of those things can be true. Any remaining insurrectionists could certainly try to make a symbol or even a spiritual martyr of her, but that would likely involve cutting down Plo Quar, apparently something of a Jin’Sorai folk hero, as someone who deliberately maimed her own child…which in turn undercuts much of their entire cause /especially/ if they have any greater goal than ‘war of vengeance with the surface’.
Whether or not she wanted Selkie to return to her people, I can imagine Plo Quar wanting Selkie to have a better chance at a life of her own, of some sort, without having to deal with the same heavy sack of baggage her mother’s been lugging around since the fall of Jin’Suir.
Right or wrong, for better or for worse, I can imagine her coming to the conclusion that this was the best, perhaps only, avenue for keeping Selkie safely out of things.
Ok look I’m a failure but I can’t go back and reread archives for a couple months. Can someone please remind me what an echo is again? I tried to look in the past couple posts but got more confused :-/
Whoa, wait – so is Pohl an Echo, then? Or is it more of a widespread ability that just occasionally sees sarnothi who are much more powerful than the others?
…I forgot about the mice story… so do the giant, building destroying lasers have, like, 6 Echoes channeling energy at the point of firing or something?
If I understand correctly echoes basically serve as their own power source, others can still use resonance, they’d just need whatever passes as batteries for it.
To be fair if they had actually told Todd rather than make vague hints he might have agreed to get rid of it sooner… though at that point it might have been too late anyway. 🙁
The comic says that it can strip the powers from a master Echo, not just suppress them. The problem here is that it sounds like it could be almost instant stripping of the power by the three year remark being unbelievable.
So her mother could have been trying to strip her completely of her powers, but since Selkie is our protagonist here, she could be the most powerful echo based on the comment about her parents legacy. We already know her mother was amazingly powerful, and if her father was just as powerful, well, that could mean anything for Selkie’s powers.
while i agree that selkie´s mom most likely did it so her daughter could have a normal life and not be hunted down by either side (or the humans) for her powers, there´s still a wild card on the table:
she´s still a kid.
whatever powers she inherited are still developing as she´s growing – gien certainly only expected her to become an echo later, after she has matured. and else why would mom insist selkie ALWAYS wear the thing if it could just suck all the powers out of her instantly?
on another note, i´m not sure a device that can cripple sarnothi-powers being in the hands of the government is a good idea
Wow. I thought the lying-about-dead-baby thing was dark, but Selkie’s mom actually deliberately “maimed” her, for lack of a better word, almost certainly to keep her safe from those who might use her. There aren’t words…well done Dave.
wait… but it was stated that the device had already being malfunctioning, could it be possible that mom wanted to keep her safe then after a timer change the message to something more in line with “YOU’LL BE THE MOST BADASS WOMAN IN OUR SOCIETY!!!”
…or she genuinely didn’t want her child to end up like her
reminds me a ton of AVATAR the last air bender, where he is empowered encased and forgotten about to save him
but… I’m guessing Selkie would be more like “I’m gonna kills all those fire assholes for burning my home” kinda way
If I remember Avatar right though, Aang did that to himself. He ran away when they told him he was the Avatar, got caught in a storm, and froze himself in the ice block to avoid drowning. Avoiding the genocide by the Fire Nation was just luck.
Technically it was the avatar state, he was nowhere near powerfull enough to freeze himself like that at that point. I always wondered if it truly was because of the storm (like Aang thought) or if the previous avatars where more prescient than we thought and knew about the fire nation. Roku had suspicions at least.
Her mother also initially promised to come back to her – implying short-term I bet, and then she was convinced by something (politics, threats, etc) to stay away for either her own or more likely for Selkie’s good.
I wonder how Selkie will respond to this if and when she finds out. While I am sure her Mother had the best intentions for Selkie, making a decision like that, which bascially strips away a part of you is a major violation.
Selkie would have most likely felt pressured by both sides, but in the end, it should have been a choice she made, not the other way around. In a way, a part of her is missing now.
This really could have been for Selkie’s protection – if Selkie was known by all sides that she was supposed to be a 4th echo, and her mother is wanted preferably dead by the other side, they would probably have gone to big lengths to get at Selkie. Leaving her with people that side would never deign to talk to (esp. since that was what the war was about in part), making sure she couldn’t call herself by name, and wouldn’t have powers to bring a target on her back – these are all signs of someone leaving a child with witness protection so to speak. Esp. if Plo Quar thought the war would be over very quickly (people almost always think violence will be over sooner than it is, and I don’t know if there was a history of constant battle in their people like there is in ours).
I think “mom” never wanted Selkie to be returned to her people.
Or never wanted her to be used as a tool. Or a weapon.
I think she knew the pressure she would be under from one side, and the animosity she would be under from the other, and was trying to protect her from both.
I suspect Plo Quar never wanted her daughter to be seen as that kind of dangerous, either among humans or sarnothi.
With her powers intact, lingering Jin’Sorai insurrectionists and their sympathizers could turn her into a symbol and a weapon for their cause. Being charitable, we don’t know that that’s what Gien is talking about when he hopes she will serve as their fourth Echo, but we know that right now Sarnoth is in such a state in the aftermath of the Jin’Sorai ‘suppression’. Peace is maintained ‘at gunpoint’: https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie406/ (and adjacent pages)
If she manifested such powers while in human care, that would likely succeed in alerting humanity at large to the existence of the Sarnothi (a known goal of the Jin’Sorai), but in possibly the most panic-inducing way possible (definitely not ideal and playing directly into Sar’Teri concerns about general contact with humans…Sarnoth cannot afford a terror-fueled war against the surface). At best, she’d wind up in a government lab somewhere for gods know how long while the humans tried to figure things out. At worst, she might directly provoke war against Sarnoth.
If either or both of those things are true, Sar’Teri sees Selkie as a threat to be contained or destroyed like they saw the rest of her clan and those that sympathized with their supposed desire for vengeance on behalf of Behn or the pre-war desire to make open contact with the surface (something I suspect is a far more longstanding grievance, with the death of Behn as a symbol of why living in secrecy is not truly safe to begin with).
If Selkie is not an Echo, neither of those things can be true. Any remaining insurrectionists could certainly try to make a symbol or even a spiritual martyr of her, but that would likely involve cutting down Plo Quar, apparently something of a Jin’Sorai folk hero, as someone who deliberately maimed her own child…which in turn undercuts much of their entire cause /especially/ if they have any greater goal than ‘war of vengeance with the surface’.
Whether or not she wanted Selkie to return to her people, I can imagine Plo Quar wanting Selkie to have a better chance at a life of her own, of some sort, without having to deal with the same heavy sack of baggage her mother’s been lugging around since the fall of Jin’Suir.
Right or wrong, for better or for worse, I can imagine her coming to the conclusion that this was the best, perhaps only, avenue for keeping Selkie safely out of things.
Ok look I’m a failure but I can’t go back and reread archives for a couple months. Can someone please remind me what an echo is again? I tried to look in the past couple posts but got more confused :-/
i don’t remember echoes being mentioned before and i USUALLY have a good memory for things i’ve read.
Someone particularly well attuned to resonance (the green magitech energy they use for most of their tech).
Echoes are the sarnothi who act as a conduit for the power source known as Resonance. People like Pohl who can do things like this:
https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie418/
Whoa, wait – so is Pohl an Echo, then? Or is it more of a widespread ability that just occasionally sees sarnothi who are much more powerful than the others?
…I forgot about the mice story… so do the giant, building destroying lasers have, like, 6 Echoes channeling energy at the point of firing or something?
If I understand correctly echoes basically serve as their own power source, others can still use resonance, they’d just need whatever passes as batteries for it.
Mostly. You definitely need Echoes for something of that magnitude.
To be fair if they had actually told Todd rather than make vague hints he might have agreed to get rid of it sooner… though at that point it might have been too late anyway. 🙁
this could go one of three ways… either Selkie will be ‘maimed’ down from her “real” power level, and no one ever has to tell her…
The Supressor’s effect fades, and she’s just as strong as her mother…
Or She’s been training at x100 gravity, and now that the limiter is removed… We need to train her, stat.
Dr. Terrorhammer can yet live! LET’S DO THIS!!!!!!
HA! Didn’t expect that third suggestion, well played. Selkie might idolize Vegeta just a wee bit too much if she knew about him…
The comic says that it can strip the powers from a master Echo, not just suppress them. The problem here is that it sounds like it could be almost instant stripping of the power by the three year remark being unbelievable.
So her mother could have been trying to strip her completely of her powers, but since Selkie is our protagonist here, she could be the most powerful echo based on the comment about her parents legacy. We already know her mother was amazingly powerful, and if her father was just as powerful, well, that could mean anything for Selkie’s powers.
while i agree that selkie´s mom most likely did it so her daughter could have a normal life and not be hunted down by either side (or the humans) for her powers, there´s still a wild card on the table:
she´s still a kid.
whatever powers she inherited are still developing as she´s growing – gien certainly only expected her to become an echo later, after she has matured. and else why would mom insist selkie ALWAYS wear the thing if it could just suck all the powers out of her instantly?
on another note, i´m not sure a device that can cripple sarnothi-powers being in the hands of the government is a good idea
Wow. I thought the lying-about-dead-baby thing was dark, but Selkie’s mom actually deliberately “maimed” her, for lack of a better word, almost certainly to keep her safe from those who might use her. There aren’t words…well done Dave.
Yea, though she likely meant well I’m not a fan of Plo Quar.
wait… but it was stated that the device had already being malfunctioning, could it be possible that mom wanted to keep her safe then after a timer change the message to something more in line with “YOU’LL BE THE MOST BADASS WOMAN IN OUR SOCIETY!!!”
…or she genuinely didn’t want her child to end up like her
reminds me a ton of AVATAR the last air bender, where he is empowered encased and forgotten about to save him
but… I’m guessing Selkie would be more like “I’m gonna kills all those fire assholes for burning my home” kinda way
It only malfunctioned because Selkie bit into it (for science!) didn’t it?
If I remember Avatar right though, Aang did that to himself. He ran away when they told him he was the Avatar, got caught in a storm, and froze himself in the ice block to avoid drowning. Avoiding the genocide by the Fire Nation was just luck.
Technically it was the avatar state, he was nowhere near powerfull enough to freeze himself like that at that point. I always wondered if it truly was because of the storm (like Aang thought) or if the previous avatars where more prescient than we thought and knew about the fire nation. Roku had suspicions at least.
So it’s to basically protect her from people out to use her. That’s scary, sad and understandable.
Her mother also initially promised to come back to her – implying short-term I bet, and then she was convinced by something (politics, threats, etc) to stay away for either her own or more likely for Selkie’s good.
Eyup, Selkie’s mom really was THAT smart.
Pohl…? Why is it bad that Scar recognizes this?
Scar knows that technology real well? Maybe he can make them, to suppress Echoes who go bad…
I wonder how Selkie will respond to this if and when she finds out. While I am sure her Mother had the best intentions for Selkie, making a decision like that, which bascially strips away a part of you is a major violation.
Selkie would have most likely felt pressured by both sides, but in the end, it should have been a choice she made, not the other way around. In a way, a part of her is missing now.
Her mom made it so she can’t be a wizard, I imagine she’ll take it really bad.
So Selkie is like Agatha Heterodyne. Neat.
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20070221#.WZVhISh94dV
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20070223#.WZVhEih94dU
Wonder if she can grow strong enough to overcome suppressants too?
This really could have been for Selkie’s protection – if Selkie was known by all sides that she was supposed to be a 4th echo, and her mother is wanted preferably dead by the other side, they would probably have gone to big lengths to get at Selkie. Leaving her with people that side would never deign to talk to (esp. since that was what the war was about in part), making sure she couldn’t call herself by name, and wouldn’t have powers to bring a target on her back – these are all signs of someone leaving a child with witness protection so to speak. Esp. if Plo Quar thought the war would be over very quickly (people almost always think violence will be over sooner than it is, and I don’t know if there was a history of constant battle in their people like there is in ours).
My theory: Plo Quar knew exactly what she was doing. An Echo belongs to everyone else, and she didn’t want that for Selkie.
Oh wow. Old Farmer. I just realised that, since they farm eels and are carnivores, this pretty much translates to “butcher”…