BetaCygnus wrote: ↑Wed Feb 13, 2019 3:36 am
darrin wrote: ↑Mon Feb 11, 2019 11:17 am
How did Picard put it, "Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot"?
Nice quote there, darrin! =)
Heh, thanks. In this context though, especially given what anaril says above, I keep thinking of the scene I already linked a while back, when Picard and Guinan discuss the impact of having access to
disposable people.
Now I don't want to argue against paarfi on this, all his quotes are correct of course. But the key point for me is that Ping
is capable of "going all the way", and it can't possibly be an accident that she can. Whether this was just a matter of "professional pride" on the Old Man's part, or something more deliberate (part of explicit -- no pun intended -- design requirements from Sony Product) is hard to say yet. And I have no doubt the Old Man is more than capable of getting that part of the design right without necessarily being as intellectually interested in it as in the emotional aspects he discusses here, so that distinction might not even be all that critically important.
And yes, that part of her is "hers", she gets to choose... and yet, I have a really strong (and really bad
) feeling that the Old Man has, or could easily work out, a very good idea of exactly what steps any given "user" would need to go through to "unlock" that feature, not to "force" her as part of a game, but to "convince" her that that is what she actually wants at the moment. (A cynic might say at this point that in some ways that is how it works a lot of the time with "real" people -- Beth describing to Jerry all the other guys in high school who would "say anything to complete their mission". So again, even from a "professional pride" point of view, the designers would think of that as just adding more realism.)
So even though I don't have any rational arguments to stack up here against paarfi's, my gut feeling is that I'm at least as worried as anaril. "A whole generation of disposable prostitutes" to paraphrase Guinan, in some ways an even squickier image than a bunch of robots digging away in the salt mines. And of course the ads, the instruction manuals, everything coming out of Sony brags about how beneficial this is ("hey, it's not a
real girl (or boy) having to do that stuff, think of the benefits!"), and affirms that it's her (or his) "choice", and warn against the dangers of trying to "force" it.
But it lives in your house.
It plays only with you.
It craves, and thrives on, your attention.
"Chobits" was ultimately disappointing to me, because in the end, no matter how much Hideki respects and genuinely loves Chi, she
can't go that far, even if she truly wants to.
It would completely erase her memory, effectively killing that "version" of Chi.
Of course that's not "necessary" to Hideki or Chi or their relationship, of course it's physically possible to live without that. But after all those volumes of hammering in that Chi was just as worthy of being an individual as any flesh-and-blood human, for her to be denied the agency to make that choice, for someone else to decide that for them, seemed almost as wrong to me as explicitly treating her like a piece of property had.
Now Fred said (or at least was claimed to have said, I am drawing from vague memories of posts on the old forums, I may be muddling here) that Ping wasn't Chi, that this wasn't going in the direction of Chobits, and I was pretty happy about that for exactly the above reason, and I let out a hearty "good for her" when Ping told Junko that part of her was "hers". Only now am I starting to worry that the opposite of Chi's situation could be even more horrific: you are
designed to think that part of you belongs to you, and when the user makes the "right choices" you are absolutely convinced it's your decision to respond in kind to whatever degree you both desire. But the cheat codes are out there, and you'll never know that they know just what script to read from to get you there.