Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Wacky Willy]

I recently read this article about John B. Calhoun's mouse utopia experiments that helped me finally understand the setting of Questionable Content:

http://www.mostlyodd.com/death-by-utopia/

Questionable Content takes place in some Judge Dredd Megacity One enclosed future utopia where humanity's every physical need is met by an army of sentient robot slaves.  Like Calhoun's experiments, most of humanity in the QCverse has descended into a writhing orgy of gratuitous violence, rape, and cannibalism.  The QC gang are the "beautiful ones," who have separated themselves from the violence by channeling their frustrated energy into obsessive compulsive quirks.  That is why nothing ever happens in Questionable Content!

Now occasionally a violent savage will intrude upon their collective, like the Vespavenger, but these intruders are quickly put down by Marten's robot slaves.  Eventually the screams and explosions in the distance will go silent and Marten and the gang will be the last remnants of humanity.  Unfortunately, mentally broken by their utopia, they will never recover their instinctual nature and will not repopulate the Earth.  I'd bet money that when QC characters say they're "sleeping together," they're being completely literal.  When pintsize starts humping random appliances, he's not deriving pleasure, he's making a futile attempt to trigger the beautiful people's mating instincts, like a frustrated Panda keeper.

When Questionable Content finally ends around strip 5000 or so, the final image will be pintsize and all the other robot slaves in a bathysphere at the bottom of the ocean praying to a smiling statue of a blue fairy, begging her to make them real people, until their power runs out.

[GarandMarine]

I... I can't tell if this is a troll or not guys. Intriguing theory though.

[Haseo]

I'm thinking troll.

[Is it cold in here?]

The enclosed dome would explain why the weather is so good, and the army of robot slaves could explain the Improbable Food Budget (no, I'm not linking to it).

Maybe all the robots are underground and the cast are the Eloi. Sara simply got pulled underground for a snack.

Hannelore doesn't really fit the picture though.

[Wacky Willy]

Okay, for those of you too lazy to read the article and just throwing around the "Troll!" accusation frivolously, it's an article about a behavioral scientist who created "utopias" for mice that had perfect amounts of food, shelter, and a perfect temperature.  The result was this:

After day 600, the male mice just stopped defending their territory, listless mice congregated in the centres of the Universe. These gangs would burst into pointless and sporadic violence. Females stopped reproducing and even started attacking their own young. Mortality rose phenomenally. Roaming mice either attacked or attempted to mount others, irrespective of relation or gender, cannibalism and other acts of depravity consumed them. These were the feral ones. Then there were the ‘beautiful ones.’

The ‘beautiful ones’ withdrew themselves ever so quietly, removing themselves from the sick society. Solitary pursuits began to define them; eating, drinking and grooming among others. No scars on their back or hairs out-of-place, these mice behaved like a separate race. They saw the world through their narrow scopes, as they tossed, turned and tried to cope.

In the end the population sank, even when it was back down to a tolerable level none of the mice changed back. The change was irreversible, the mice were different now. The secluded females could still bear offspring and the beautiful ones had the capacity to help produce them yet it never came. This tipping over into irreversible societal collapse came to be known as ‘The Behavioral Sink.’ John Calhoun called it the first death. Death of the mind and soul, leading eventually to the second death, of the physical form. What he meant was that after the first death, the mice were no longer mice and could never be so again.

So Hannelore totally fits the mold of the "beautiful ones" narrow scope obsessive compulsion, like the rest of the cast.

Take the sci fi out of QC and it had the same starting point as Anders Loves Maria.  A bunch of young hipster bourgeois with personality quirks who are all basically good people underneath it all.  That strip had sex, violence, drug use, shattered lives, real insanity, and social gaffes that could never be solved with a round of nervous apology.

QC has been running way longer and nothing ever happens.  The only believable way these characters could be so empty and numb is sci fi dystopia.  They're the beatiful people, like Faye, who witnessed the horiffic violence of the collapse, like her father committing suicide, and withdrew to their little coffeeshop collective to mill about focused on inanities.  One character has the robots give him a gender reassignment surgery, something that might be as simple and commonplace in the QCverse as facial reconstruction in Logan's Run.  Nothing happens.  His/her brother responds by obsessing over using his robot hand to attack any who ridicule his new sister.  The opportunity never comes.  The robots do everything they have been programmed to understand pleases the humans and watch in confused frustration as paradise is slowly killing them.  This comic is deep.

[PthariensFlame]

I much prefer the interpretation that the QC cast are (some of) the "normals" in the recent past of something very like PS238.


Regardless, you can never "get" any setting to truly maximum depth unless you know enough abstract math to understand how the terms "internal language" and "free generation" apply to this subject.   

[Is it cold in here?]

Global Moderator Comment

Claire has never been a "him" and baiting the trans forum members is completely out of bounds.