NinjaDefenestrator wrote: ↑Wed May 16, 2018 7:03 pm
Have people come to the conclusion yet that this creepy old guy isn’t Ping’s programmer or a secret shopper or an agent deployed to take her out, or are we still tossing those theories around?
I feel like I've already said most of the below in posts over the past few strip threads. I hate repeating myself but maybe putting it all in one place might be worth something.
When I first mentioned the possibility that this isn't a date at all, but a meeting for some other (legitimate) purpose, I didn't feel like this was a random guess I was just tossing around. There were specific observations in 1522 that 'raised a flag' so to speak (barely consciously at first), that made me go back and look at 1507-1508 again, at which point things started gelling together into a single pattern.
1) 1507. Junko says, before reading the notification, "Which stupid lover is it this time?" But in the last panel she doesn't say "Oh, that one", or even "Oh, not a stupid one, the nice one!" She says "
That's today?" Not "that date", just "that". It comes across very strongly as if this is a change of topic for her; "that" isn't referring to the set of dates/clients being discussed two panels back, it's something else. She's very flustered, which might be explainable by the implication in the next strip that she has more "feelings" for this person than for her other clients. But if today is the "date" with the one she "likes", why isn't she happier about it? "Oh, awesome, not one of the stupid ones after all!
" She gives a much stronger impression that this is something she wanted to be better prepared for but that somehow slipped her mind, a stark contrast to her
previously seen cool-as-a-cucumber approach to her "clients". In short,
Junko is not acting like this is yet another EK date.
2) 1508. Junko describes the person she is meeting as "not stupid... a gentleman... Intelligent, mature, older". She rushes off to prepare with only a perfunctory farewell to Ping, in stark contrast to the close attention she's been paying to Ping over this and the previous chapter (or two?). If he is just another "sleazeball/fuckface/ephebophile" whathaveyou, then either Junko is deeply mistaken about his character, or else she is lying about him to Ping for some reason. But distinguishing between the mildly pervvy ones (who can be strung along for money without her doing anything sexually regrettable) and the actually pervvy ones (from whom she could actually be in danger of one form or another) is literally how she makes her living; making such a mistake could have her end up in an alley or worse. Lying to Ping also seems far-fetched; Junko could simply have said "Yup, another stupid lover" to Ping and left it at that. So assuming Junko is not lying or mistaken,
the person she is meeting is quite different from her typical EK clients.
3. 1522, panels 2 and 3. The "gentleman" seems at least mildly confused by the message he is looking at, and even more confused when he looks up at "Junko". In a previous post I listed the blatant differences between Ping's appearance here and the real Junko: more heaviset, electronic devices sticking out of the sides of her head, heterochromia that appears to be changing or at least increasing in intensity from panel to panel. By panel 5 though he has completely recovered, and begins acting as if nothing unusual were going on. Either he is
oblivious to the changes and really thinks this is Junko; or doesn't care that it's not Junko; or... he recognizes Ping, and wants to meet with Ping as much as with Junko. Take your pick; my opinion though is that the first 2 are pretty unlikely a priori (again, Junko is supposed to be
good at what she does; one would expect a client who has paid or plans to pay for her particular services to, well get what he's paid for, or want to know the reason why).
4. 1522, panels 7 and 8. He has succeeded in playing it cool so far, but the phrase "old man" stops him short, and instead of passing it off he explicitly admits that he was reacting to that, that it was a phrase "remarkable for [her] to say." (It wouldn't make sense for him to be reacting that way to the word "surprise", since he said that first; and "old man" is literally the only other thing in Ping's statement.) The literal meaning of the word would be unlikely to trigger such a reaction (he's obviously not a young guy, and if he were sensitive / in denial about his age Junko probably wouldn't have latched onto his "maturity" as a positive point). So... "old man", as in father?
The gentleman is taken aback, to the point of not even attempting to cover it up, by the inadvertent suggestion Ping is his daughter.
5. 1523, panels 3 and 8. His phrasing is carefully guarded. I did grant in an earlier post that "What would that be?" could just be a feeble way of keeping himself out of trouble ("Honest officer, it was
her idea, I never woulda suggested
that!" But of all the bazillions of things Fred could have had a client (esp. a "sleazeball/fuckface/ephebophile" one) say, the guy
specifically chooses the most coy and inexplicit one possible (as if he were somehow aware of. and waiting patiently for her to work through, her current algorithmic distress
).
Occam's razor gets a real bum rap around here; it was referred to as a "crutch" a few threads back for example. But it's only a "crutch" if you say "this is the simplest thing I can think of, so it must be right!" If you use it to guesstimate the relative likelihoods of hypotheses that you already have in hand though, that's pretty much how it is supposed to be used; it's more or less a rather roundabout / metaphorical expression of how probabilities basically work.
Under the "this is an EK date" hypothesis space, the above points (and whatever other oddities of the past few strips someone might care to add) are all unrelated
coincidences, with no single model to explain them. They just happened to happen; whatever guess you have for the a priori probability of each, you multiply those 5 (or more) numbers together, and whatever you're left with, that's about how likely we should be to expect to see all this, starting from 1507 and being told only "Junko is about to meet an older guy."
Me on the other hand, yes, I had to make an assumption most would consider a rather big stretcher (a currently completely unsupported one at that). This isn't a date, this isn't a client, Junko wanted to meet him for some other reason; why? Dunno, something to do with Ping most likely? Because Junko's been spending more time with Ping than with anyone else. But with that one stretcher, I can pull in all 5 of the above, as
consequences of that, without any penalty incurred in multiplying independent probabilities. Junko's treating him not like a client
because he's not a client; she considers him intelligent
because he has already convinced her (somehow, not yet seen) that he has something useful to contribute to her relation with Ping; he recognizes Ping and responds accordingly
because he has some prior relationship with Ping, very likely a close one. Yes it's a stretcher, yes there's no explicit evidence, but it ties the past few strips together in a way that the idea he's an EK douche just hasn't managed to for me yet.
On another note... woah, is my avatar (and latest rescript
) back? Or is it just a glitch (I am seeing my own crap but nobody else can)? Did photobucket actually cave?