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Rotten Red Rod posted:Not to mention that she must have a loving human factory to be cranking out all those bodies. Where is she getting the resources to do that? Is the court, who supposedly is preparing to leave the planet behind, bankrolling her? Do they support her? Oppose her? Care at all? There's like... really interesting potential in explaining how the robots might stealthily re-appropriate equipment for this project or even post-human-conversion supplies like the food, beds, toiletries, and Slavic tracksuits for 50-100 people. Or maybe there's some kind of disquieting reason the Court's etheric essence is supplying Kat with all this stuff? But no shut up there's no time it doesn't matter.
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Jan 5, 2024 05:25
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Rotten Red Rod posted:Not to mention that she must have a loving human factory to be cranking out all those bodies. Where is she getting the resources to do that? Is the court, who supposedly is preparing to leave the planet behind, bankrolling her? Do they support her? Oppose her? Care at all? Eh, she does have some of the Court agents helping her in some regard (the one that had a robot boyfriend, for one) and considering the Court was already in the middle of peacing out, they probably just don't care what happened to the stuff Kat nicked and stuffed into a pocket dimension, it's not like they could take it with them when they left on their one-way trip.
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Jan 5, 2024 05:33
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We've seen that Kat essentially has limitless resources. She's has endless arrays of factories and machinery shrunk down to microscopic size. Which she can control with her brain now. Like, Kat basically became a one-woman technological singularity off-panel while Annie was dealing with her lovely dad.
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Jan 5, 2024 05:48
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Oh hey, he mentioned pipes. Do you think this is the robot back from She Gave Us An Ocean? I don't have much to add to the rest of the conversation aside from agreement that it's all very stupid, but I will add that I feel like this entire thing feels like it's completely ruined the pacing and tension of whatever the hell was going on with Loup and Zimmy. What a loving weird and bad time to have this entire derail of a chapter, unless bringing him into the Ether suddenly kills Zimmy or whatever since Zimmy said Kat is going to kill her.
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Jan 5, 2024 09:23
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Tiny Myers posted:I don't have much to add to the rest of the conversation aside from agreement that it's all very stupid, but I will add that I feel like this entire thing feels like it's completely ruined the pacing and tension of whatever the hell was going on with Loup and Zimmy. What a loving weird and bad time to have this entire derail of a chapter, unless bringing him into the Ether suddenly kills Zimmy or whatever since Zimmy said Kat is going to kill her. Yeah, this is fuckin' wild. They were neck-deep in an apocalypse, running from shadow monsters and poo poo, and now it's weeks of zero-stakes exposition that don't seem directly related to the events unfolding. Like, why couldn't this info dump happen after whatever is going on with Zimmy? I guess cause this is where Baldy died, but he's such a nothing character that he could die anywhere, at any time, for any reason, to get this exposition dump rolling.
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Jan 5, 2024 09:44
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Tiny Myers posted:Oh hey, he mentioned pipes. Do you think this is the robot back from She Gave Us An Ocean? Tom's comment links to a page in that chapter, so that seems to be the implication he's going for. But also, the last time a new person mentioned working with pipes, they turned out to be Loup in disguise. Sam here died via stab wound as a direct effect of something Annie did. Coyote wanted Annie to kill Loup by stabbing him with the tooth sword. I have little hope this means anything, but it's potentially interesting.
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Jan 5, 2024 09:52
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The total lack of concern about his own mortality here is really not selling me on the idea that Sam here is really a person, if you see what I mean?
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Jan 5, 2024 11:13
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Why doesn't she care?
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Jan 5, 2024 11:26
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Nettle Soup posted:Why doesn't she care? They might be both putting on a brave face like Annie did when Mort left. Good chance they lose it once he's actually gone next week.
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Jan 5, 2024 12:27
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Brightman posted:They might be both putting on a brave face like Annie did when Mort left. Good chance they lose it once he's actually gone next week. It's not going to help anything if either of them start crying over loving Sam, a nothing NPC whose name they didn't even learn until after he died. If anything that will cheapen the hell out of the Mort chapter. IMHO.
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Jan 5, 2024 12:39
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Holding out hope that the second Sam goes into the ether Kat starts getting permanently godded out or what was the point of all this.
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Jan 5, 2024 13:10
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Blasmeister posted:Holding out hope that the second Sam goes into the ether Kat starts getting permanently godded out or what was the point of all this. Is it wrong that my first instinct when you said "what was the point of all this" was to check if Tom has a patreon? He does, and now I can't help but think that the plot moving at the speed of a snail caught in the event horizon of a black hole is due to him stretching out the end of the comic as long as he can in case he loses a good chunk of his patrons after this comic ends and whatever he has planned next doesn't work out with them.
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Jan 5, 2024 13:14
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All the good versions of the robot story required page space that was instead spent on at least two storylines of "I just need to love my emotionally unstable abuser even harder and if you don't agree then I guess you've got some growing up to do"
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Jan 5, 2024 13:15
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Splicer posted:All the good versions of the robot story required page space that was instead spent on at least two storylines of "I just need to love my emotionally unstable abuser even harder and if you don't agree then I guess you've got some growing up to do" Yeah this is really it. We already had a better example of this sort of transition in comic with the forest people going to the court. We got a whole chapter with them present as a group all interacting with each other and Annie. We got bits of them talking about their past and new lives, what their plans for the future was, etc. So we knew what that whole process meant for them, and got little bits of personality from a bunch of characters. For the robots, mostly we've really only gotten a generic "oh they want to be like people" and pretty much nothing else. And that took a whole chapter to do. Not a bad chapter but still. I'm not saying Sam or the robots as a whole needs tons of space dedicated to showing their current lives and how they are adapting to being people or whatever. But there should be something instead of just almost nothing. They are far less than what they used to be going by what we've seen in the comic. And if that was intended by Tom that would be fine but that doesn't seem to be the case. JuniperCake fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 14:49
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Randalor posted:Is it wrong that my first instinct when you said "what was the point of all this" was to check if Tom has a patreon? He does, and now I can't help but think that the plot moving at the speed of a snail caught in the event horizon of a black hole is due to him stretching out the end of the comic as long as he can in case he loses a good chunk of his patrons after this comic ends and whatever he has planned next doesn't work out with them. I don't think it's being "drawn out" per se. It's more like it's trying to Tetris piece warp as as many dangling plot threads as possible to stack them all in the limited chapter space that's planned to be left. The threat of Annie having to become a psychopomp was left dangling years ago. This is the end. We need to circle back around on this even though we haven't seen or heard from the psychopomps since the end of the Jeanne plot. What happens to the new people when they die? I'm sure there was some passing interest in figuring out how psychopomps are assigned but it's not vital to know. Do we need to know what the point of the psychopomps is? I suppose it's something that's never been answered and most people would just default to some vague grim reaper mythology, or something like how Death in The Sandman or Discworld operate, but might as well address all that stuff since the nature of psychopomps was never addressed either.
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Jan 5, 2024 15:23
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A sentient, sapient entity dies after being gifted with an infinitely vast ocean of emotion and experiences and his very last thought is "did I do a good job with the pipes, and, y'know, stuff", mothergently caress that is grim. Protestant afterlife comics.
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Jan 5, 2024 16:08
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There is something a bit poignant about the fact that robots who become new people may not all learn how to be people rather than tools at the same rate, and this guy just didn't make it very far before getting got.
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Jan 5, 2024 16:23
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Nuns with Guns posted:I don't think it's being "drawn out" per se. It's more like it's trying to Tetris piece warp as as many dangling plot threads as possible to stack them all in the limited chapter space that's planned to be left. The problem with that is we had several weeks of "pretty art, but nothing happening". If the problem was that the plot was moving at an out-of-control pace, then yeah, "Oh gently caress I need to wrap up dangling plots in X pages" I could understand. It happens with storylines that are years or decades long. The issue was that it was the exact opposite happening.
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Jan 5, 2024 16:37
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There's something so sad about how like... you can see how so much of this could have been interesting. It's like seeing a collection of ideas on a page that never hit their second draft. In theory, the concept of us seeing this particular robot's awakening, then much later the reveal that the first person to die is him, could've been really poignant and sad. This guy had his whole life ahead of him and he can't even be sad about being instagibbed by a memory of a memory. Instead everyone's just sort of giving him a "Congratulations!" round of applause before he completely disappears into nonexistence with no concept of mortality, all of the dialogue is completely wooden and wildly detached from any sense of tone, etc. It feels like the writer wrote out a list of "this is what needs to happen for the plot to progress, these are the beats I want to hit" and at a certain point stopped bothering to fill in the voids between those plot points. Instead, someone who's really bad at writing picked up the page and drew a straight line from point to point to point without any thought about whether or not any of it made sense or needed to be repositioned or reworked for the sake of pacing. Zimmy and Loup and Coyote tumble into each other. One of the New People needs to die. Annie needs to become a psychopomp working for Kat. All of these things need to happen. But no thought was given to good reasons why they should happen, so they just... do. A lot of the plot feels like it's just happening to the characters, with no rhyme or reason.
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Jan 5, 2024 16:43
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GunnerJ posted:There is something a bit poignant about the fact that robots who become new people may not all learn how to be people rather than tools at the same rate, and this guy just didn't make it very far before getting got. It's the equivalent of a baby getting mulched before it can even realize Mommy doesn't cease to exist when she goes behind the hands, but Tom intended this to be touching instead of a tragic, appalling consequence of Kat's thoughtlessness. As with so many other things, the actual tone is just completely 180 turned around from what Tom clearly intended.
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Jan 5, 2024 16:43
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usenet celeb 1992 posted:It's the equivalent of a baby getting mulched before it can even realize Mommy doesn't cease to exist when she goes behind the hands, but Tom intended this to be touching instead of a tragic, appalling consequence of Kat's thoughtlessness. As with so many other things, the actual tone is just completely 180 turned around from what Tom clearly intended. This is such a funny loving way to put it and you're so right
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Jan 5, 2024 16:45
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The unexpected shifts in pacing and tone once added to the experience of Gunnerkrigg to me. I think if I were in a different place with the storytelling and characterization, this odd kind of mid-drama interlude could’ve clicked for me. Though it would also have to have been executed better. Kat has become kind of incomprehensible to me. She just seems eternally casual, befuddled by subtext and oblivious to all concerning implications. Discussing having the reins for a new kind of species and learning some deep truths of the world cosmology, she mainly concerns herself with being a considerate pal to Annie.
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Jan 5, 2024 17:45
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I still have a lot of trouble seeing the robot people getting bodies as the big paradigm shift that the comic wants it to be, as the robots at Gunnerkrigg ALWAYS had sentience, quirky unique personalities, had joy and pride in their work, and lived full, rich lives that even allowed them to form a religion. There was very little evidence they lacked free will or were downtrodden, and they certainly seemed to have a lot of free time. I really fail to see what giving them bodies actually did for them, other than flesh being better than metal for some nebulous reason, and allowing them to truly "die" which I guess is super important (although couldn't you just do that by pulverizing their internal memory entirely?). But I guess they didn't have "souls" before, because... Something something Ether? And yes, I know "She Gave Us An Ocean" directly addresses what the differences are supposed to be between robots and flesh, but we're just told they were limited. That chapter is indeed quite well written and beautiful, but I have to be real - it completely disagrees with what I actually see of the robots previously in the comic. They do not at all appear to limited in the way we're told they are. Rotten Red Rod fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 17:48
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the robots are more boring as "real" people, it's almost impressive.
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Jan 5, 2024 18:55
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Why does Kat not give a gently caress about anything?
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Jan 5, 2024 18:57
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Why should she? No consequences anymore.
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Jan 5, 2024 19:30
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I don't care about what's-his-face, but that Kat is sending him to be obliterated when she's proven that it's trivially easy for her to set up a final record is deeply upsetting. You'd think Annie would say something here?
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Jan 5, 2024 22:39
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It has been one of those things-that-should-be-a-central-question-but-isnt for a long time. What separates the robots from the newpeople? Why do the psychopomps/the aether/the whatever from high atop the thing consider the robots to be appliances but the newpeople to be ensouled? What ensouls them? Could it be that ensouling them removes the ability to restore from backup? Or is it the other way around? Grand mysteries of the metaphysical, left to rot in the wake of shoving conscious creatures into new bodies, new bodies they cared about so little that most of them just chose the randgen option. Thank you, Angel.
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Jan 5, 2024 23:02
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Arbetor posted:It has been one of those things-that-should-be-a-central-question-but-isnt for a long time. What separates the robots from the newpeople? Why do the psychopomps/the aether/the whatever from high atop the thing consider the robots to be appliances but the newpeople to be ensouled? What ensouls them? Could it be that ensouling them removes the ability to restore from backup? Or is it the other way around? Grand mysteries of the metaphysical, left to rot in the wake of shoving conscious creatures into new bodies, new bodies they cared about so little that most of them just chose the randgen option. While I don't know the answers to most of the questions, the bosses point I can justify. You have no control over how you look when you're born, and I could see the robots having a "I want to be as human as possible" so hit "randomize all" on the options.
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Jan 5, 2024 23:14
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She Gave Us An Ocean (An Inch Deep)
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Jan 5, 2024 23:25
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RocketMermaid posted:Gunnerkrigg Court: She Gave Us An Ocean (An Inch Deep) mods??
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Jan 5, 2024 23:27
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RocketMermaid posted:She Gave Us An Ocean (An Inch Deep) holy loving poo poo
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Jan 5, 2024 23:32
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Nuns with Guns posted:I don't think it's being "drawn out" per se. It's more like it's trying to Tetris piece warp as as many dangling plot threads as possible to stack them all in the limited chapter space that's planned to be left.
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Jan 6, 2024 00:09
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Rotten Red Rod posted:I still have a lot of trouble seeing the robot people getting bodies as the big paradigm shift that the comic wants it to be, as the robots at Gunnerkrigg ALWAYS had sentience, quirky unique personalities, had joy and pride in their work, and lived full, rich lives that even allowed them to form a religion. There was very little evidence they lacked free will or were downtrodden, and they certainly seemed to have a lot of free time. I really fail to see what giving them bodies actually did for them, other than flesh being better than metal for some nebulous reason, and allowing them to truly "die" which I guess is super important (although couldn't you just do that by pulverizing their internal memory entirely?). The robots up to this point have been weird quirky guys yes, but other than Robot (who they've said was always a weird one) they've been pretty obviously limited. Annie putting dealyboppers on her head was enough to convince them she was a robot and removing them made her unrecognisable. The parent flashback showed a bunch of security bots who couldn't even tell they were facing the wrong way. The robot king was adorable but his retinue were less than children. Lana and Jerrick were, initially, a great introduction to the new people. Lana still acted childishly, but in the manner of a naive young adolescent who believes themselves to be more worldly than they are. They were coming across as a society of teenagers rather than a society of children, with the implication of becoming a society of adults. It would have been great to see more of the new people behaving like teenagers who think they're adults or who think they need to be adults. But other things happened instead.
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Jan 6, 2024 00:41
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Splicer posted:The robots up to this point have been weird quirky guys yes, but other than Robot (who they've said was always a weird one) they've been pretty obviously limited. Annie putting dealyboppers on her head was enough to convince them she was a robot and removing them made her unrecognisable. The parent flashback showed a bunch of security bots who couldn't even tell they were facing the wrong way. The robot king was adorable but his retinue were less than children. The existence of Arthur alone contradicts this, as does the old robots in the tomb, the cruise ship, and the seraph robots. I'd even say Bobby, the robot Paz works with at the animal lab, shows remarkable empathy and nuance in his trade. I wouldn't call any of them "obviously limited". Robots were mostly goofy early on in the comic, sure, but much of the tone of the comic was like that. You can't really take much from that. Splicer posted:Lana and Jerrick were, initially, a great introduction to the new people. Lana still acted childishly, but in the manner of a naive young adolescent who believes themselves to be more worldly than they are. They were coming across as a society of teenagers rather than a society of children, with the implication of becoming a society of adults. It would have been great to see more of the new people behaving like teenagers who think they're adults or who think they need to be adults. I was hoping so too, and this is a big part of the problem I have with the supposed "evolution" of the robots. They're still pretty much acting like robots! Only, like, not the quirky GC robots, but boring robots. Lana is the only one that started to branch out by exploring love (if you ignore the fact Arthur did that first while he was still a robot), but her story just ended up being a means for Loup's story. Rotten Red Rod fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Jan 6, 2024 |
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Jan 6, 2024 00:53
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GunnerJ posted:
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Jan 6, 2024 05:56
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RocketMermaid posted:She Gave Us An Ocean (An Inch Deep) Stop making these incredibly good jokes, the mods are gonna call the cops if you keep making them change the thread title 
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Jan 6, 2024 09:21
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I'm not sure why we are expected to care about a complete non-character that died when their creator doesn't seem to care beyond some curiosity about the process (the box that's being checked off here), and more importantly, the character themselves doesn't even care that they died. The guy dies and his only concern is "hope I did a good job with those pipes". Sure "they did their job and then they died" might be an honest summary of a lot of people's lives, but a summary that shallow doesn't even make for a good obituary, not to mention good storytelling.
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Jan 6, 2024 11:19
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We care more about him than Kat does.
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Jan 6, 2024 11:36
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coolusername posted:We care more about him than Kat does. What a condemnation, and yet it is accurate.
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Jan 6, 2024 13:46
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