Yeah, I was just ducking in here to post what BigT just posted. I expected pretty much the same thing as Miller, no drama re trans stuff re Faye/Bubs. Not a tough call with this author.
Plus every minimum wage slacker gets a robot.
Ok, so Faye wasn’t angry with Bubbles, but it did bother her. Even though she freely admitted that Bubbles was right, and that her reaction is “dumb as hell”, she’s still clearly unhappy that there might be anything they don’t tell each other. Which is what I was hanging my “she might get angry with Bubbles” theory on. I think the strip was a bit more nuanced than any of us were predicting.
IOW a good but non-caricatured couple relationship between normal people.
As to reactions to Claire, I was never in doubt of how it would go, very early on I perceived every sympathetic character in QC would be 100% chill on these sorts of issues. I remember people had a harder time getting Tilly’s name right than their pronouns.
The comics with Claire, then moving on to Brun made me wonder if we’re not getting into the same place I found myself while reading Girls with Slingshots. Basically, that I hated 95% of the cast and wondered why I was still reading it.
QC isn’t there yet but it did remind me that there’s a lot of people in the strip who I either don’t give a shit about or else actively dislike*.
I’ve quit. It’s just become a little too “Love Is…” for me.
I’ve sometimes felt that way, but there’s enough moments of awesome (I just ran across Hanellore in the archive confronting her mother in the boardroom a while back, yelling at the other suits to GET OUT, and they meekly leave, mumbling, “She has the Voice!” “The Weirding Way!”) that I keep coming back. And I find a few of the characters quite charming, though not the ones lately so much.
BTW, has anyone figured out what real-world issue ‘New Body for May’ is supposed to correspond to? I don’t really follow the logic or how I’m supposed to see that ‘government provides a new body for May’ is such an obvious Good Cause for Roko to champion. Humanlike AI bodies are clearly a luxury good in the QC universe, and there are plentiful examples of AIs that are quite happy with no chassis, an ‘industrial robot’ type chassis, or completely non-human chassis.
If the issue supposed to relate to rehabilitating felons, it doesn’t really fit. The human-style body doesn’t provide new job skills, it’s a luxury item for AIs. Seems like May could just use one of the cheap, not-falling-apart bodies that have been established to exist, like the anthro-PC chassis that weren’t even worth reselling or the more ‘industrial’ bodies we saw at the Robot Fighting Arena. We’ve seen plenty of AIs working fine with that sort of body even when they could clearly get another one, it’s not some kind of torture.
If the idea is that felon AIs are entitled to a new, humanlike body if they want one because they’re sentient and should be able to participate in human society, why is it just felons and not all AIs? We have seen that other AIs have to save up to buy bodies, and it actually seems grossly unfair to say ‘Momo needs to work to pay off her human-like body, but since May committed a felony she should get one for free’. I could certainly see ‘All AIs that want to instantiate in the real world should be able to have a humanlike body’ as a just cause, but I can’t swallow “AIs that live peacefully need to work for years to afford one, felons just get one though”.
If it’s supposed to relate to healthcare, I think it falls flat because AI bodies are more like a car than a human body. The AI itself won’t die even if the body is destroyed, and AIs move themselves into new bodies as a routine matter. They don’t feel pain unless they want to, and can swap out the whole body later - not treating a condition now doesn’t mean they’re stuck with chronic damage. And even if you do relate it to healthcare, you run into the problem above that while universal healthcare has good arguments, ‘healthcare only for felons, the rest of you have to pay’ just doesn’t.
Back to the ancient thread title, I don’t quite get why we’re supposed to just agree ‘the government should provide May a new humanlike body’ or what real-world issue it ties in to.
I think Jacques is lazy. He wanted to show Roko being a hero and fighting against The Man. The problem is that he didn’t bother setting up a credible situation for her to do this in.
Plotting’s an issue with this strip. Jacques wants to jump from Point A to Point Z without taking all the steps in between. The result is the characters sometimes seem to have bizarre personality changes and take actions that seem to come out of nowhere.
I was under the impression that while May was in robot prison she had no body and was just stored in a server farm or something. So I think the issue is that she served he time, got out of prison, and was given a substandard, falling-apart body. She obviously had a workable body before prison (even though she was angling to be a fighter jet), so I guess it’s unjust she was given a shit one after losing her old one due to a life of crime. Or something?
Well, I get the impression that he also wanted to touch on real world issues without having to directly address them by using the robots as stand-ins. I know he tends to be bad at plotting, but I can’t figure out what he was aiming at with the analogy - unless he really was just wanting to fight ‘the man’ and not anything related to real world issues.
I like the comic much better when it’s weird relationship issues and surreal shenanigans, the serious parts don’t really hold together that well. Having a billionare who is close friends with a space station (with orbital death ray!) and a strange AI God who can do near-magical things to AIs is fine in the context of lighter stuff, but doesn’t fit if you’re trying to address real world problems.
Why is it obvious that she had a workable body before prison? The impression I got was that she didn’t, and they’ve established that not all AIs choose bodies though I don’t know that she was ever explicitly said to be one of those. And if she did… shouldn’t the issue be that they should have just stored her body, then returned it once she was out of robot jail, instead of ‘they should have disposed of her body, then given her a good one later?’ It just doesn’t make sense. If her original body had been accidentally destroyed while in storage, that would make much more sense to me.
I don’t think she did have a body before prison - in this strip, the body assignment guy said that she’s a very rare case - most AI offenders are not embodied, or have bodies to return to. So it sounds like she didn’t have a body beforehand, but wanted one on release so she could go live with Dale.
Is it possibly commentary on the quandary that many ‘rehabilitated’ prisoners in the American system find themselves in when they finish their sentences? They get out, but life is genuinely a struggle- most places won’t hire folks who have been in prison, which makes it difficult to find housing, transportation, consistent food, relationships, and other basics of living, which then leads to hopelessness which leads to recidivism? May’s body is a physical symbol of the fight to ‘just get by’ after prison- and that physical symbol hinders her ability to function in society.
That’s what I was remembering as well - she never had a body to begin with. I assumed that she had committed her crimes while living in the internet (or something similar).
It doesn’t make sense to do that, since she has literally had the difficulty of finding jobs and housing in the strip. If you’re going to write about those difficulties, why not just write about them directly instead of making a clumsy metaphor that doesn’t make sense if you think about it? It would make perfect sense if May was trying to get therapy or training and unable to get it, but the body doesn’t make the same sense and doesn’t parallel anything in the real world.
Also, May in general is a bad choice to portray rehabilitating criminals, because she’s a person with poor impulse control who likes being an asshole to people. I know that I wouldn’t hire her not based on her criminal record but based on the fact that she would be a terrible person to have to work with on a day to day basis, and would cause problems with customers and co-workers. What she really needs is not a human-like body, but some kind of therapy or reprogramming or ‘inhibitor module’ that will let her function socially.
Didn’t May originally want to be a fighter jet, and not humanoid at all?
Also, she’s now developed a taste for sex with humans (and melons), so she probably wants a bodacious lady human-style body. Or maybe a male one.
Yes, she was disembodied and did various number crunching, then embezzled the money to try to become a fighter jet. She’s lucky she got caught at the money stage, I suspect the penalty for illegally flying around in military equipment is… a bit worse than what she got.
Yeah, but does that mean the prison system should provide it for her? Should they also provide stuff like latex suits and bondage frames for humans who like that sort of thing, or is it just robot felons who get government sponsored sex gear? (Not entirely serious comment)
Hell, I’D provide it for her.
She won’t accept it from you though, just like she wouldn’t accept it from Spookybot or Hannelore. It has to be from the government for some reason that still isn’t clear to me.
Maybe she was framed, but can’t prove it, so she wants to stick it to the government in what small way she’s able.