Rapierman wrote: ↑Tue Dec 15, 2020 10:21 pm
darrin wrote: ↑Fri Dec 11, 2020 10:36 am
I will see your Chekhov's Gun and raise you an Occam's Razor.
Ray, I submit that this should be worth one drink for the MT Drinking Game: Every time Occam's Razor is mentioned. (It's a cheat, even if it's true.)
How the hell is it more of a "cheat" than the Chekhov's Gun schtick? Either it's two drinks here, or zero. Either way, if you're going to invoke the Name of the Ray, the first term you should be landing on is "epileptic trees", which is
way higher on the list than either of those two. Piro actually suddenly being a womanizing casual-sex-without-commitment one-night-stander, with no prior evidence or precedent for this in-comic so far, is about the epilepticest tree I've ever seen, despite the simplicity of the description.
Forget the stupid plane tickets for a second, forget Megatokyo itself, this is a
general principle. One claim is "X is vitally important to the story, even though none of the characters have mentioned it in ages, and even though the author hasn't bothered even obliquely hinting at its importance since then". The other is "X is probably not important to the story, given that nobody's mentioned it in ages, and given a lot of relatively more important stuff has gone down since then." The former is
always going to be more complicated, and therefore less likely, than the latter, regardless of the details. I'm not saying
impossible of course, just that it shouldn't be the
preferred model; obviously both are making "assumptions", but the former is making more assumptions about what's going on and why, so it needs correspondingly more evidence to back it up.
And yeah, I get that this is not a frigging high school debate club, and I have no expectation anyone will give any more of a rat's ass about "burden of proof" than any other potential drinking game elements. But even if it subjects me to further mockery, I can't help asking the obvious question: why
now? If Piro has always been just about the "casual sex without commitment", if 1500 pages of emo angstiness were all just a front to get her in the sack, if no actual in-comic evidence is or should ever have been needed for this claim, and if any requests for any kind of support for this claim warrant no better response than "ha ha what a dork, let's take another drink!", then... why promote the claim only now? Why not last night, when Piro and Kimiko were removing glass and toner from each others' naked bodies? Why wasn't it pointed out back when 1151 came out, that Piro was only bullshitting about revising his entire portfolio in pursuit of a long-term project together with Kimiko, that he was only shooting for a one-night stand with her? Why are you guys only after TWELVE YEARS pointing out that obviously Piro was lying and only needs money for those critical plane tickets, and that Fred keeping Piro silent on the subject of plane tickets for the preceding FOUR years was All Part of the Plan, to get in Kimiko's pantsu by pretending for months to be interested in art?
Seraphim appears in
eighty-one story strips. Usually she is alone with Piro, or it is otherwise made obvious only Piro can see / hear her. In most of those she is urging him to man up and make some kind of decision, to at least quit waffling and believe in himself about
something. Most of his responses are a meek "Yes ma'am." So.. they are
both lying in all of those? The goal is a quick night with Kimiko but they're both pretending otherwise? Or Piro is lying to his own conscience, and his own conscience is dumb enough to believe it? Who the heck is the performance
for? (If you say "fourth wall" then *I* get to take a drink.)
When Asmodeus tells Piro to "make with the clicking", Piro adamantly refuses. Why? Nobody else is present, nobody except Piro (and intangibles like Asmodeus and Seraphim, presumably) will ever know. It's pretty doubtful Tsubasa has a read receipt on the email, so... what's stopping ol' love-em-n-leave-em Piro from a simple peek? If a little boink-with-no-commitment is his only goal, how could a few pictures provoke any kind of hesitation? I guess we can assume that he has higher standards for himself; if the goal is to get her naked in person, then a few underwear pictures are beneath his dignity. And I guess we can further assume that for some reason he feels obliged to not just tell Asmodeus this, but to continue spinning the same lie he has going with Seraphim. (And that we never get an explanation of. Gosh, if
only it were permitted to point out that additional assumptions without any evidence to support them reduce the likelihood of a claim rather than increasing it, without that earning a point for someone else in a drinking game!
)
Don't get me wrong, I really don't care. You guys can believe whatever you want about Piro or anyone else. (Years of having it explained to me that Miho is irredeemably evil despite anything Fred might do or say already did a sufficient job of hammering that point home, I promise you.) Just friendly advice here: you guys are deep in Teddy Werebear territory at this point. You need to turn back now and look for one of those trail markers you blew past a while ago, or at least send up a flare or something. Pretty soon it is gonna be snowing hard enough that the helicopters will have to call off the search.