#kog theory

[queenie-main]

We need to talk about how the original Guinevere has no breasts and looks more childlike, while all the following Guineveres are very busty and get progressively more sexualized.

[robot-voice]

Some thoughts on Knights of Guinevere;

The stark contrast between the child Olivia and the elderly Olivia is so strong. She goes from literally yanking Guinevere around by her guts without a spark of emotion behind her eyes, to calling her "my poor dear Guinevere" and having a breakdown over her being missing.

It brings to mind the infomercial Frankie was watching that states that all Guineveres share the same memory with perfect clarity, so she'll never forget the special moments she shares with the children she meets. That's a common theme among sci-fi androids, having a perfect memory that doesn't degrade over time. Olivia has most likely forgotten the cruelty she inflicted upon Guinevere, like an abusive parent denying they did anything to their child purely out of not remembering. "The axe forgets, but the tree remembers", and all that.

Every second she's smiling around the park, during every parade and every movie, even as she's killing the giant guard, she's still carrying those moments of abuse as if they just happened yesterday.

I imagine that the twitching finger would've been enough to make Olivia take her apart to "fix" her again that night. Frankie may have saved her a night of torture just by adjusting the joint in that arcade that day. This, to me, gives double meaning to the warm expression she gave and the whispering of her thanks. It may have been one of the first gentle moments of pure, unconditional kindness she'd ever experienced. And she never forgot it.

[shirajellyfish]

She's aware

After watching the Knights of Guinevere pilot about 5 times now, a detail that has jumped out to me is how Guinevere seems to be fully awake and aware the entire time. On first watch you might think she's too damaged to be really conscious, especially with how still she is, but if you watch her face she's reacting to everything that happens. She just can't do anything about it.

Some of these little expressions are very blink and you miss it, so I decided to make a compilation of all of them. Images under the cut, I hope you find this as interesting as I did!

Right after being pulled out of the water, she looks very much horrified. This is one of the few times we see her with an expression like this. Though it initially seems to give her the blank slack-jawed expression of something dead or deactivated, on repeat watches it becomes clear that this is an intentional expression. She is in fact afraid and hurt and unhappy here.

Closed-mouth frown when she gets dropped. Almost looks like she's wincing from the rough treatment. You could say the wince effect is just from that eye already being broken, but considering the quality of the animation I'd bet on the animators having been very intentional with the angle of this shot to create the wince effect on purpose.

Our first real confirmation that yes she's entirely aware. She moved her hand over her injured eye intentionally and has turned to look at the people shutting her in here. Her finger also tries to twitch erratically, despite being mostly missing. You could say that this is simply due to the damage, but it's also possible that she's doing this entirely on purpose. Her happy memory with meeting Frankie was when Frankie fixed that same finger. It's entirely possible that she has already recognized Frankie, and is trying to call out for help by imitating that same damaged twitch. "It's me! Remember me! Remember this!"

When the storage unit is opened, she's in the same position. Still very unhappy. But then...

She sees who opened it. She still looks pretty afraid, but this is the first smile we see from her.

A moment later, back to a frown. This is when Andi is trying to convince Frankie to tell security. Guinevere really is completely awake, listening and reacting to everything.

Then Frankie tells her happy memory story, and look at that smile!

"That's right!" Though she can't seem to speak at the moment, Guinevere does seem to intentionally open her mouth with a big smile to play along with Frankie. It's not just Frankie puppeting her here, she's genuinely trying to show agreement.

This one I'll admit I might be reading too much into, but it might also be intentional that she flops over to lean onto her friend here. It could also be the motion of the boat and all, but knowing what we know it's also possible she did it on purpose.

When they're caught. That smile is looking a little afraid now isn't it.

This is probably the tiniest, most blink and you miss it expression of the lot- She is NOT smiling in this one, quick shot. This is when Frankie's boss is trying to convince the two, with both threats and promises of a better life, to give Guinevere up. She seems to be worried that they will do exactly that.

But when Frankie makes it clear her intent to resist, Guinevere is smiling again. A smaller smile, but still a smile.

The obvious sign, the scream. This one was impossible to miss. But it wasn't her spontaneously waking up in time to warn them- she has been awake this entire time.

Once again I think they used the angle and her broken eye intentionally to create this expression. The look is almost satisfied. Maybe because she finally managed a clear communication, maybe because she knows she's done everything she could do in this moment. There's also a slight sense almost like she's bracing for impact, definitely knowing what's coming for her.

She twitches once again here. That's not water damage, she's trying to either warn them that danger is still coming or to get up and defend them.

More twitching here, almost seeming to struggle in Frankie's arms. She might be trying to get up and face Sir Arthur right here and now, or might be otherwise preparing to do it.

This smile looks distinctly afraid to me.

Just before Sir Arthur breaks though, she's twitching and trying to move again- though this one is pretty obvious.

Absolutely no one missed this, but how could I not put the best expression in the entire pilot in here? This girl she is distinctly unhinged. Rad as all heck.

After, she goes from that satisfied smile to this much more vulnerable expression. She can be vulnerable when she's being held safe and close and cozy by her friend here to help her.

One last one, again maybe a stretch- but when she's put down, her head turns towards Frankie. It might just be the jostling of being set down, but it's also possible she's turning to her friend on purpose.

I can't believe the amount of attention to detail that went into this pilot and I love every second of it.

[impossibleinkwell]

Some little details from Knights of Guinevere ep1

Like everyone else I'm going to be pouring over every episode this show, but I wanted to point out some of the deliciously subtle worldbuilding/character details that are worked into the background of this show

Olivia's room is creepy, but it's even creepier when you realize that almost all the toys have been stitched together in some way. Multiple faces, multiple heads, claw limbs, severed heads hanging from the playset. This girl is giving Sid from toystory RIGHT away. Makes the biomechanical horrors & her insistance on "Fixing" Gwen even more troubling.

@ohnoitstbskyen mentioned in his watchthrough that the park seemed "cancerous", overgrown to the point of excess, but what I'd like to remark on is that there are no PEOPLE in it, not even workers. The whole place has been made pretty as possible for Oliva's birthday party (no friends around her either, funny that). This is not something that grew up over time like we'd expect in your usual derelict dystopia, it was something that was absurd from the jump.

There are multiple stitchmarks on Gwen's abdomen. This is not the first time Oliva has cut her open.

Gwen's hair used to spiral DOWN at the front, but in all subsequent versions from this point, it spirals up. It's such a minor detail, but you can tell that Disney's marketing team Orville is obsessive about EVERYTHING feeling cute.

Most of this is pretty basic, but specfically the "no wrinkles" line puts me in mind of the fact that Disney himself was REPULSED by of the concept of death, avoiding funerals and even flying into a rage when his engineers questioned what would happen when people got sick or died in his planned community at EPCOT. Wrinkles and similar "defects" humanizing, and we see PLENTY of people with such traits throughout the pilot.

This is a Disney princess moment, except there might not be any actual animals on Park Planet so we settle for adorable appliancebots instead.

Frankie and Sparky aren't going dredging in a lake or ocean, they're dredging in a CRATER, a perfectly circular one that was like created by...

The construction of one of these park-islands. It's little details like this which make me absolutely rabid over this show's quiet worldbuilding. You can almost imagine these things being built as massive surface/subterranian structures, and then close to/on their launch date they're lifted out of the ground by scifi technology, leaving a massive stripmine sized wound in the earth that eventually gets filled with runoff and trash.

Speaking of, the fact that it's a trash economy tells me a lot about this place. It's likely that parkworld doesn't have many (if any) natural resources (we see no plants or animals, which means no wood, and no oil, meaning the easiest source is to remelt "crap into other crap".. but that raises a question that might hint that something is even more fundamentally broken than it first appears.

The keychain factories are getting DESPERATE for material, meaning that their only source of material is scraptrawlers like Sparky (who's very clearly doing this under the table/without corporate oversight), or somewhere else that isn't supplying enough.

The parks are EXTORDINARILY wasteful, as we see by the trashrain in the above picture. For them, goods are cheap.

From that we can infer there's a BIG HOLE in this world's economy: tchotchkes like being produced at great cost, but being sold so cheaply that they can be easily discarded. The parkworkers are fully divorced from the concept of supply and demand.

We return to Olivia's rooms many decades later to find them a whole new kind of fucked up. The Balloon IV bags, the pills, the shattered plates of food, the fact that an obviously sick old woman seems to being fed cereal that is 100% marshmallow. It paints the picture of a woman who has either NEVER grown up, or has never been ALLOWED to grow up (and my money's on the later given how much of this food she seems to have thrown away). When we see her giving commands to her nursebots, we're given to presume that she's in charge of park planet... that everyone is "under her watchful care" , but she is a far cry from the cool confident young adult we last saw her as. She seems HELPLESS.

How much of the fucked up biomechanical trappings are a direct result of Olivia's influence, and how much is that just the baseline of technology in this world? (I'll be paying attention to how tech is designed) .... also, why the HELL does the knight robot bleed RED? Why is it malformed & mutated? Is it an incomplete version of the one on the right.. or further along it's path? (since the one on the right seems less battle damaged)

Space travel is PROHIBITIVELY EXPENSIVE. If a try at a claw machine costs 50 P and purely recreational spacetravel costs 50 MILLION P, that means it's likely the work of GENERATIONS to hop planets..... That would explain why materials are prohibitively expensive, but if this is a universe with faster than light travel, just HOW FAR OUT from production capable worlds is Park Plannet?

Again, the STAGGERING amount of waste. We have to question whether these abandoned "lower labs" were constructed beneath the water's surface and later abandoned or whether they were originally stationed in the odd syringe-spires and later deposited down here when they were no longer useful. Resources are SO scarce on this planet, but can the technicians get a wholly bespoke new lab for every project?

[yhell0]

"hello?" and "is anybody there....?" have far more sinister implications than they seem :(

these text boxes threw me off hardcore initially, like it was such a jarring shift from blue blood, body horror, and error messages to delicately designed decor and fonts

i originally wrote it off as guinevere's internal/subconscious trying to communicate, but after really looking at the details i'm 99.999999999% sure that these two text boxes are actually two other guinevere androids reaching out.

specifically, i think it's

what makes me think that?

well, lemme walk you through my thought process !

1. the guinevere's are confirmed to have some sort of telepathy, hivemind, or otherwise shared means of communication

regardless of how it functions, as long as they're online, they are all able to share information/communicate and i think the purple text boxes depict an aspect of how they do so.

2. the two text boxes come from two separate speakers

the border designs and font styles are different because they represent two different people. One who expresses themselves with cursive and standard grammar rules, and the other who informally types in times new roman. the former has a rounded, flowing border, while the latter is structured and repetitive (id imagine this plays into their personalities in some way)

with this in mind, how can i be so sure it's princess guinevere and ballerina guinevere out of all of the guineveres?

3. each guinevere is kind of labeled lol

if you've seen the guinevere cards on the park planet website you might have noticed that each of them have a unique star assigned to them

it's subtle, but each star shape varies between each another

now ill be honest, the grain over the purple text boxes made spotting these differences a bit difficult. only one of the boxes has star motifs in them (multiple at that), and there are flowers and other details that don't seem to have any particular significance to any individual guinevere at this time, so i wasnt completed sure who was who

UNTIL

i saw this

look a little closerr

the three guineveres we will be seeing sept. 19th 8)

BONUS

i swear i didnt pull the last star being the original guinevere (aka the one that falls from park planet) from my ass :,)

thematically it makes sense that the star that is oriented differently would represent the Guinevere that has no desire to be apart of the park.

in addition, the descriptions for the other guineveres on the park planet website imply that they'll have an antagonistic role in the series, which further alienates our main Guinevere from the others.

full circle back to why these purple text boxes are much more sinister than they appear. these mechanisms might further explain why an android as powerful as our guinevere hasn't been able to escape the park. she has four adversaries that likely match her in ability and are interconnect to one anothers minds.

[mrsomethingcringeass]

Hey remember that crazy ass theory that Gwen is based of Olivia's mom?

Yeah about that...

Here's what I think happened:

- Olivia's mom was an actress.

- she meets Orville, back in those days he was the owner of a movie studio and she starts working for him yada yada yada they get married and have Olivia

- The movies where Olivia's mom stars are a massive success and that launches the park family to an obscene amount of wealth

- Olivia's mom dies in a gruesome horrific way right in front of a very young Olivia

- Orville struck with grief makes this absolutely bonkers plan to preserve his wife's legacy by making a cartoon based on his wife's movies.

- those movies also become a massive success which makes him even wealthier but no matter what he tries Olivia is still very very sad

- so Orville builds the park and he has his best engineers build Guinevere surely this will make Olivia happy right?

WRONG!!

- Olivia absolutely despieces Guinevere cause that's not her mom, that's a robot in the shape of a caricature of her mom

- she plays doctor with her, throws her off the roof, sets her on fire... you name it and she always puts her back together until eventually she develops some kind of twisted relationship/coping mechanism with Gwen

And that's where our story begins...

[piscestix]

Ok, so if this = this:

And this = this

Then what is the realworld equivalent of this encounter???:

From Andi’s view what does Gwen actually look like here? I’m assuming not as perfect and pleasant as Frank’s seeing it as. Especially since Frankie’s pupils are blown tf out, she’s excited, but Andi’s are small—dilated like in fear. What’s going on from Andi, not Frankie’s, perspective?

Plus, I find it interesting that Gwen’s two knights almost represent the 2 differing perspectives of reality that Gwen can experience: the original fairytale park perspective Gwen is programmed to see where everything is perfect Disney-fied and censored PG ( Frankie’s viewing of reality through maladaptive daydreaming/hallucinations) vs. the true harsh, violent and disillusioned capitalism horror-terror liberated Gwen can experience, before being reprogrammed by the halo (Andi’s viewpoint of reality).

I love this show already!

[minty-the-meowstic]

I’ve had this theory about Guinevere since the trailer. I think the Gwen that’s with the Park family is meant to replace Orville’s wife. In the first scene, Orville shows Planet Park to Olivia and says “I hope this can make up for… I don’t think I need to say it.” Orville is Olivia’s dad, but we don’t see a mom. Orville is likely talking about his wife passing away.

Also, in the video where Orville is introducing the Guineveres, him and Gwen hold hands in a somewhat romantic way. In the scene with an old Olivia, there is a family photo above her bed. This is likely a glimpse of Mrs Park, but we don’t see her face. Also, Olivia has black hair in the photo.