Interesting and nuanced take. Thank you.
OK, I found the strips (2) where Sven is feeling conflicted about donating, a conversation I’d forgotten about because I frankly didn’t find it that interesting and didn’t get the conflict.
Wait till she finds out that Dora and Tai downgraded their own bachelorette party from a weekend blast in Montreal to a shitty bar in Northampton in order to donate to her.
And isn’t Sven pretty well-off, at least by non-Hannelore standards? ISTR he makes a lot of money from writing country songs. So his donation, while large, was probably painless for him, while every other struggling QCer probably had to make real sacrifices to help her.
Jacques should avoid political metaphors. He’s so ham-fisted at it he often ends up making the opposite point of what I think he intended.
The current story-arc is evidence of this. Having a robot get a boob job trivializes the real issue of health care. It’s something that an opponent of public health care system would make up to show why we should keep private health care.
Unless I’ve misread Jacques’ intent here and he actually does oppose public health care. In that case, I guess he succeeded in making his point. And maybe Roko is supposed to be an unsympathetic character and I misread that.
It wasn’t a boob job it was a total body replacement. May’s old body was frequently breaking down, she couldn’t afford to fix it, and it was detrimental to her well being. The boobs are just a bonus.
Yeah, I think Sven is at a “live comfortably without having to work hard,” stage of wealth, as opposed to Hannelore’s “poised to inherit a space station,” wealth. His donation to May probably didn’t hurt him financially too much. Plus, now that May knows a huge chunk of the money came from one guy, it might be easier for her to process the rest of her friend’s helping out. If the amount, averaged out over her social group, added up to ~$5,000 a person, that’s a huge debt she owes to a bunch of people. If, instead, it was an average of ~$50 a person, and one guy threw in $50,000, then her relationship with everyone else might feel a lot less strained.
Man, I disagree so much. I think this is a solid and thoughtful approach to the issue. Just because he’s using fantastical concepts like robots and AI to talk about the issue doesn’t mean he’s trivializing it.
I mean, if you think, “Robot gets a boob job,” is what this story arc is about, you and have been reading very different comics.
Right, I don’t think she ever mentioned getting bigger breasts until after she had the new bod. And given May’s established traits of crass humor covering emotional vulnerability, she’s absolutely the sort of person who would describe the process as a “robot boob job,” and not, “I was so poor my leg was literally falling off of my body, and I couldn’t afford to do anything about it.”
It’s also more along the lines of robo-felon rights as opposed to having anything to do with healthcare…
“I say free socialized robot titties for anyone who wants 'em.” is literally a line from the strip which Jacques explicitly identifies as a “healthcare metaphor”.
Huh… I hadn’t actually seen todays yet. I still think that the joke is that May is completely missing the point, rather than that actually being the story arc.
Exactly, that’s May being May and not going into the more nuanced aspects of what she’s experiencing.
OTOH I suppose her history of not liking what her physical form was (originally wanting to be a fighter jet, now shopping for a tall, big-boobed, “human standard set of holes” body) probably prevents her from having Roko’s problems adapting to the new form factor.
Though there is an interesting angle there, in that this phrasing she just used probably sounds a lot like what opponents of Prof. Ellicott’s initiative about AI bodies will use to deride it. (And one wonders about how that opposition would be handled in-universe if even pictured.)
Kind of a combination of both, really. The original point about rehabilitative justice involves for emphasis the contrast of how a human ex-con IRL at least gets to keep their own bodily being – but also parallelling how they almost surely will be also limited to shitty jobs with no good health care benefits (so whatever issues they have continue to get worse) and no social respect, and the offices in charge of supporting them will be mostly underfunded and the staff demoralized. And for many in our society, that the “safety net” system of health and social services for the poor or the marginally employable is inferior, is something looked upon in terms of “duh, what do you expect” without any sense of it being an injustice (*). A good UHC system that provided the same level and quality of services as expensive paid care would at least relieve that part of the challenge of reentry into the community.
(* so what happens if Prof. Ellicott lobbies for the better rights for AIs and the Senate committee says to him “go away you ivory-tower egghead, if people, be they Bios or AIs, don’t want crappy lives, let them not do crimes”?)
That’s the punchline to this particular strip, not the moral of the story arc.
There’s also a bit of trans narrative in there, what with May’s problem being stuck in the “wrong” body.
Within the context of the story, May got a full body replacement and it wasn’t just about the boob job. And I think “I see free socialized robot titties for anyone who wants 'em” should be judged within its proper context which in this case is a comedy.
Which is why I said the writing was ham-fisted. Jacques shouldn’t have spent several weeks writing a story about the need for public health care and then undermine the entire story arc with a punchline that trivializes the issue.
I don’t think using humor to discuss health care trivializes the issue.
Humor doesn’t. This particular punchline does.
Uh, Questionable Content is an inately political comic. Sure, it wasn’t at the beginning, but it has been for quite a while. Telling Jacques not to make political metaphors is basically telling him to end the comic.
Roko’s story started as ACAB, added embracing kinkiness, then became about depersonalization and body dysphoria. Brun and Renee explore autism and how it impacts reality. Claire and Marten are about how trans women are women and shouldn’t have to face hardships for being trans. Faye and Bubbles explored the idea of being self-closeted. I could go on.
It’s just what the comic is, and the fact it is unapologetic about it is why I love it. He regularly tells people who tell him he’s being “too political” that the comic isn’t for them, albeit in a much less polite way. When someone objects to him having too many LGBT characters, he declared that everyone in the comic is at least a little bit gay.
It’s not the subject matter that’s the problem. I didn’t say I object to people writing about political issues. I said I object to people writing about political issues and doing a poor job of it. And I feel that often applies to Jeph Jacques.
I have pretty low expectations for web comics.
Got to say I agree with this. Lately the strip seems farcical and forced. And I speak as someone who considered the sexual possibilities of robots back in the days of Asimov, and who advocates for universal health care here in the US.
But I’ll continue to follow the strip, to see where it goes.