Tag: NO

phoenixyfriend:

I shared this over on the #theories channel of the Girl Genius discord, and got some pretty good responses, so I figured I could share it here, too! It’s a bit of theory-mixing, focused particularly on in-story Phil Foglio (the itinerant storyteller) and Lucrezia Mongfish.

So, one
of the constant things we see for Phil is that he’s a Bad Storyteller.

He knows
the stories, connects to them emotionally, and is enthusiastic in the telling,
but somehow it’s still Bad. People fall asleep. They do not enjoy it.

Conversely,
we DO know that, at some point in-universe, Phil gets involved with Kaja and
Cheyenne to do the in-universe version of the story (which is apparently an
audio drama? Maybe?).

The obvious result is that, despite the many issues we see in the story, Phil somehow eventually succeeds
in the storytelling.

Now, we
know that, based on Lucrezia, the right Voice can bend people’s wills,
influencing even without a wasp. It’s not 100% without the wasp, but there’s
definitely Something About Voices. Tarvek
and his dad look for the harmonics to identify Agatha, and Anevka wants to
isolate the command harmonics, and later we hear Seffie talk about how she’s
working on the harmonics of her laugh. Agatha
also does her Heterodyning, which is another voice-based Power in the story.

I can’t
remember if Lucrezia has tried to order Phil to do anything. My guess is no, if
only because I can’t remember Agatha coming into contact with him other than
the time Oggie recognized him as a descendant.

BUT, I would like to postulate that Lucrezia would have trouble controlling Phil. This is
partially because he’s (apparently?) a Mechanicsburger, and partially for Other
Reasons That I’ll Get To.

Phil
ends up becoming a Professor at TPU. We know this is going to happen, and he’s
going to be good enough that Kaja, an existing professor at TPU, takes him on
as a partner for the Agatha project.

So at
some point between Now and The Creation Of Girl Genius In-Universe, Phil ends
up with a degree of skill that makes him worth including. Maybe he just
switches to art. On the other hand, maybe he and Kaja find out that his voice has some qualities to it that stand
out from the norm.

Lucrezia
has her command harmonics, and Sparks all seem to have a fugue voice. It’s
possible, if not necessarily plausible, that Phil’s voice also has some Extra
Effect to it that can cause his audience to go to sleep even when he’s trying
to rouse them with a good story. Most of the people who DON’T fall asleep are
either Sparks (Gil and Tarvek) or not part of the direct audience (the nurse at
the Mechanicsburg Hospital). It’s even plausible that having a voice power in one regard could cancel out, or at least preempt, another’s, or at least render them resistant.

In
effect, I postulate that Phil has significant in-story abilities in his chosen
field, but a lack of control over certain vocal harmonics. He might solve this
problem by focusing on the art, or Kaja may attempt to solve the problem by
leveraging more scientifically-inclined staff members from TPU to help Phil
figure out how to control this element of his voice.

Essentially,
he learns to control

The
Philharmonic