| abstract | - The protagonist and Narrator of the story. Annie's childhood was quite unusual. Most of it was spent in Good Hope hospital, where her mother was bedridden and her father worked as a surgeon. When she wasn't being taught by her mum, Annie would spend hours exploring the hospital or cheerfully conversing with the Guides who walked the halls, unseen by the hospital staff. At a young age, she proved herself very good at mediating the Guides' disputes and helping lost souls come to term with their death. She enrolls at Gunnerkrigg halfway through the school year, and begins as an unflappable Emotionless Girl, reacting to Shadow-people, Minotaurs, and ghosts with a preternatural calmness bordering on indifference. In fact, when Annie first mentions her mother's death to her friend Kat, she's less visibly shaken-up than Kat is. It takes a bout of cherry-induced tipsiness under The World Tree to crack Annie's facade: she breaks down crying and admits to Kat how much she misses her mum. This, and Kat's consolation, cements the two girls' friendship. Since then, Annie has grown more cheerful and open about her feelings and her past. The aforementioned upbringings had several important effects on her. First, this is the reason why she initially has such difficulty interacting with others (in fact, she only meets Kat when Kat takes the initiative of introducing herself.) Second, the combination of Annie's childhood solitude, her everyday experience of things the hospital staff couldn't see, and The Guides' failure to help her at one crucial moment, all seem to have led her to the belief that Adults Are Useless and a life of self-reliance. This is most likely the reason why she's so reluctant to seek or accept help from her teachers. The consequences of this are nearly disastrous. Third, Annie's childhood familiarity with ghosts and Etheric beings insures that very little of the Court's supernatural weirdness fazes her. Good thing, too. As it turns out, Annie possesses "a special Empathy with etheric beings". In other words, she's a Magnetic Medium, which is a Spirit Medium who is also a literal Weirdness Magnet. This extra-normal ability makes her a promising candidate for the position of the Court's Medium -- the mediator between The Court and Gillitie Wood. Her interactions with those members of the Court outside her circle of friends are complicated. She's respectful towards the teachers, even when she disagrees with them, but she doesn't hesitate to disobey them if she thinks it necessary. She also seems to dislike and distrust Mr. Eglamore, far in excess of anything he's done. For their part, her parent's old friends like Annie, partly because she reminds them of her mother, both in actions and appearance. Aside from Kat, Annie's interactions with her classmates are limited -- so these classmates tend to view her as an aloof weirdo. Over the first two years she seems to fall into neutrality, not by choice, but by virtue of being young and confused. She'll steal from her best friend's parents, and then she'll put herself in danger to help another friend, within the course of a single day. She'll copy answers from Kat, but also trust her with her most intimate secrets. She'll bear misfortune or mockery with a stiff upper lip, but lash out with surprising cruelty at someone who successfully pushes her Berserk Button. Her moral compass has yet to stabilize. By the time of the third year, after six weeks spent in Gillitie Forest, and her growing contempt, most of her previous characterization changed.
* Adults Are Useless: Prior to the comic's start, and until Chapter 31, she merely didn't seek out adult assistance. From Chapter 32 onwards, she also completely ignored punishments.
* At least until she messed up badly with Jack's possession because of this and Jones demonstratively let Antimony try and finish the case on her own to solidify this lesson. It doesn't help that about the only available adult Annie does trust in regards of both competence and intentions is Jones herself.
* Berserk Button: Don't speak ill of her parents.
* Beware the Nice Ones: As Eglamore, Mort, and Renard found out, in rare cases when she's really angry, it's not nice in the "coldly furious, no rules, hit-'em-where-it-hurts, twisting the knife" levels. Earlier friendliness doesn't hold her back at all, or even gives her more pain to return. This habit began to endanger third parties, even without her using her powers.
* Blue Oni: Originally.
* Red Oni, Blue Oni: After her Character Development. Though given how she interacted with Jack, one may suspect that she is only open around Kat and still a bit icy to most.
* Body Motifs: She rarely appears in public without wearing eye-shadow.
* Bond One-Liner: When forced by her classmates to give one after defeating the Enigmarons, it turns out she's not very good at them.
* Bully Hunter: She performs a rather elegant throw on Winsbury when he's bullying Kat.
* Cannot Keep a Secret: In Chapter 31, Annie is told to keep the fact that Surma tricked Renard into coming to the court by pretending she loved him a secret. She tells this to him within seconds after she next sees him. Not even by accident, but because they're fighting and she figures out that this will be a bad enough revelation to shut him up. It isn't.
* Coyote seems to be fully aware of this tendency. When Annie chose to stay in the forest over the summer, he placed a binding on her wrist that would slice off her hand if she told anyone in the Wood about the Tooth he gave her. Once she returned to the Court, it disappeared.
* Chaste Hero: She has no romantic experience and her extremely reserved personality makes it very difficult for her to respond to anyone's interest. Given the revelations of Chapter 31, this may be extremely fortunate for her.
* Cheerful Child: When young.
* Chronic Hero Syndrome: Since roughly age six. She'll go far out of her way and ignore any boundary or consequence to help anyone in serious trouble, no matter who, whether or not they want her to.
* Cloudcuckoolander There are times where Annie seems to operate on a completely different frequency from her classmates. This may be due to her lack of social skills from being raised in hospital most of her early life. It may also have to do with her status as a Half-Human Hybrid, and her interactions with Coyote. Either way Annie is not exactly normal.
* Common Eye Colors
* Creepy Child: She's perceived as such by her classmates.
* Deadpan Snarker: Emphasis on the deadpan. She isn't yet very good with one-liners.
* Death by Childbirth: Her eventual fate if she chooses to give birth. Sort of.
* Delinquent: Her Adults Are Useless attitude has evolved into outright contempt for authority. She was already reluctant to entrust adults with her problems, and despite this getting her into innumerable problems, from third year onwards, she started to ignore school punishments... as she points out, it's not like they can expel her, given her parents' absence.
* Dissonant Serenity: She tend to be smooth, calm and dismissive while in quiet rage or struggling to hold back a thermal lance. At least, until the explosion.
* Does Not Like Shoes: She just prefers to get her feet dirty from time to time.
* Emotionless Girl / Defrosting Ice Queen: She turns the stoicness down when there aren't any people around. With Kat's help, she has also become more open about her feelings, but she's still remarkably calm in the face of the Court's supernatural weirdness. When her father calls, though, she becomes a Tin Man, convinced that she is calm until Mr. Donlan points out she should give her hands a rest.
* Girly Girl: In fact, one of the alchemical symbols for the element antimony (though not used in-comic) is just like the female symbol (aka the astrological symbol for Venus), inverted.
* Half-Human Hybrid: She's part fire elemental.
* Heroic BSOD: In Chapter 31, upon discovering the true cause of her mother's death and the fact that darn near everyone has been hiding it from her.
* Interacting with Shadow: The first page of the comic ends with Annie explaining that she obtained a second shadow. Subsequent pages have her manage to establish communication with it. Over the time, Shadow became a character of his own.
* I See Dead People
* Kid with the Leash: Towards Reynardine, to the extent of leaving instructions to not mess up when she's absent. If Annie dies, the ownership passes on to someone else she decides. Kat and Jones the latter during Annie's time in Gillitie Wood also took care of him for her at times.
* The ownership gets nullified if Annie orders him to take a new body which isn't controlled by her or if Annie steals a body for him to take, which isn't of her own property.
* Locked Out of the Loop: Concerning just about EVERYTHING. Including her very nature and the issues of life-and-death importance to her. After all, it would be awkward.
* Loose Lips: She never thinks about consequences when angry. Since the relations between the Court and the Wood is one big old minefield, this endangers not just herself. Trickster gods generally don't hold back much, so Annie was given a lesson of silence the hard way.
* Magnetic Medium: She is actually described by Mort (a ghost) as "attractive... like a magnet".
* and not just ghosts - psychopomps and various other "etheric" creatures think she's pretty neat too.
* She's VERY literally a Magnetic Medium. Well...in training for the position of "Medium" anyway.
* Meaningful Name: See Surma's entry. Additionally, antimony was known as "a killer of doctors' wives" - it's a convenient poison and was also used as a reusable laxative that was passed from from parent to child.
* Antimony also was historically used for cosmetics (Antimony has almost always been shown wearing makeup) and a flame retardant. It's also in the same period as Bismuth, being directly above it, and thus has similar properties to it..
* Mind Over Matter: Coyote taught Annie to pluck flowers and suchlike. We saw her pushing a boat and opening a door from the other side. And then Zimmy insulted Anthony to stir Annie awake and got hurled across the room for her trouble.
* Moment Killer: While Smitty and Parley are finally being sweet with each other, her focus on needing to gather more information about Jeanne ends up butting into that, to the annoyance of everyone. Possibly intentional, since she referred to their antics as "unbearable" before that.
* New Transfer Student
* Nice Hat: She gets an awesome baseball cap with the bismuth symbol on it when she pulls off her Batman Gambit to let the kids take over Bob and Marcia's house.
* No Social Skills: Initially, her interactions with the other kids are lacking a certain something due to her isolated upbringing. When she had to interact with people, keen instincts usually compensated for this.
* Nostalgic Narrator: Annie's narration is being delivered from at least two years after the fact.
* 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 19, page 27. "Is that some kind of face, Carver?"
* 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.
* The beginning of Chapter 37 shows her trying to hold on to the pieces of the mask even as it's coming apart in her hands. The rest of the chapter suggests that she takes after her father in this, very much so.
* Oblivious to Love: Even other people's love.
* Omniglot: She gained knowledge of many languages from her conversations with the psychopomps of numerous cultures.
* Orphan's Ordeal: Annie's mum is dead and her dad has disappeared.
* Playing with Fire: When Rey and Coyote described Annie as having a fire inside her, it wasn't a bad attempt at being poetic -- they really meant it's a part of her nature. Once a Blinker stone let this off the leash in a reasonably safe way, she became quite imaginative in finding applications for magical pyrotechnics.
* Fire of Comfort: Just about any Etheric creature needs only a little excuse to seek her company. Coyote said Surma was just as popular. She later implied that Fire Elementals has the same reputation. More directly, when she demonstrated phoenix-like form to Foley House kids, they enjoyed pretty fires very much.
* Flaming Hair
* Hot Wings: She only needed to learn how to spread them, raising on the new height of fiery awesomeness.
* Psychoactive Powers: Her ability to manipulate fire seems to be tied to her inner passion.
* Wreathed in Flames: She learned the trick with torch-hand when she experimented with Blinker stone. Much more so in her winged etheric form -- she produces great flames merged with herself.
* Rage Breaking Point: Happens to her twice.
* Redheaded Hero / Fiery Redhead: Literally. Tom even says that it isn't a common hair color.
* Seen It All: In regards to the afterlife.
* Ship Tease: With Kat and zigzagged with Jack.
* Snooping Little Kid: A little girl with some lockpicks in her teddy bear.
* Spock Speak: A mild case. Appears to have been left behind in the Woods.
* The Stoic: At first, and to a lesser extent, still.
* Strange Girl
* Strong Family Resemblance: She has straight hair. Her mum had curly hair. That is the only difference in their appearances. Absorbing her mother's life-force might have something to do with that.
* Annie so strongly resembles her mother that both Reynard and Coyote initially think that she is Surma.
* Survivor Guilt: The revelation that her existence is the direct cause of her mom's death is clearly the emotional equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
* Tomato in the Mirror: Happens in Chapter 31 when Coyote informs her of her fire elemental heritage.
* Tsundere: Where Jack is concerned.
* Unrequited Love Switcheroo: At first Annie seemed indifferent to Jack's attempt to flirt with her in Chapter 31. Then, by the end of Chapter 34, things change.
* Weirdness Magnet: Annie's curiosity and desire to help constantly puts her in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's implied to be a typical property of a natural medium.
* Wound That Will Not Heal: Got it from Jeanne after falling into the ravine. Present for the ethereal vision and serves as the main indicator of this -- at least, normally.
|
