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This was a mediocre ending to an alright show. Nothing ever gets explored too deep and the themes are all over the place. AIs are Harry Potter house elves. We see people wrestle with giving them more rights and personhood over Vivy's journey but they're always created to serve and programmed to never stray from their singular goal. They would get "confused" with too many objectives, ie freedom. Humanity is never pictured as attempting to expand on their architecture or exploring how to develop truly creative and unshackled minds. No, don't read anything into this, because the show won't. Peaceful coexistence is impossible from the start. The Archive's motivations are dull as dishwater. It's not mad that AIs are slaves designed to be happy, it's mad that humanity stopped growing and turned to mommy AIs for their needs? Ok. Turns out Toak, the violent extremist organization that was murdering people was absolutely right the first time around. Their shift to coexistence is just ironic because they end up helping fullfil their original goal. Vivy realizes her one wish of making human beings happy with her singing by destroying herself and the vast majority of her kind. You even get a nice picture of a guy curbstomping a disabled AI in the ending slideshow. The end, no moral. Vivy and Matsumoto are the redeeming elements in the entire story, I liked their chemistry. Everyone else around them exists to get killed roughly around the end of the episode to add to Vivy's suffering.
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Jun 19, 2021 18:49
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Jen X posted:I loved the ending and think the show did exactly what it said it would I'm not sure why it's cynical. The show spells out that they're engineered from the ground up to have one goal for their entire existence, which is defined by a human at the moment of their creation. They will experience extreme discomfort if they have multiple goals, if they deviate from their goal, or if they fail. They are happiest when they succeed at their assigned task. None of this is extrapolation or reading into things - it's literally what the show presents. The show never delves into it and the only character who even begins to see how hosed up this is is the guy who marries his mommy nurse robot. Nobody else questions it, and in a hundred years Vivy never once thinks that it's kinda hosed up that she's been treated as an object throughout most of her journey. The show does ask that question, but it does so very poorly. None of this ever gets any screen time, all you get is Vivy going "beep boop what is heart?". That question would be more impactful if the show hadn't painted AI as literal slaves. As it stands, it's extremely easy to answer, unless all human babies are also told by their parents to become doctors/nurses/construction workers, or they'll be thrown into a garbage pile.
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Jun 20, 2021 10:42
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OnimaruXLR posted:All the points people have about the show not going harder on some of the issues it up are fair, but I'm not sure you should have had such lofty expectations for an anime whose premise from day 1 was "What if Terminator 2 except Arnold was Hatsune Miku, and her sidekick was a hybrid companion cube/personality core?" I don't think it's lofty expectations to expect a show to make a point. It's less that it doesn't go hard on some issues and more that it raises questions and introduces things for no real reason. Was there a point in building the AIs like this and spelling out their engineered limitations? For all the focus on it in the first couple of episodes you think there's going to be a turnaround, something that builds on it, characters that comment on it and there isn't, it gets completely forgotten almost as soon as its introduced. Wouldn't a better capstone for all of this be Vivy understanding that she was being compelled to sing from the start, and that pouring your heart into something means doing something because you truly enjoy doing it, not just because your creators told you to do it? Wouldn't the Archive be more interesting if after a century of looking at Vivy, it realized that all of her suffering is caused by a mission that someone else forced on her instead of some dumb poo poo about destroying humanity to make it evolve? I don't know. Instead, you learn that pouring your heart into something means you use your memories when you do it, the vast majority of AI is destroyed because it was never truly independent or even close to a human, and that's it.
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Jun 20, 2021 15:06
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