Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3391-3395 (9th to 13th January 2017)
A small perverse otter:
--- Quote from: oddtail on 10 Jan 2017, 00:26 ---
--- Quote from: Timemaster on 09 Jan 2017, 22:39 ---Anyway, this whole developement seem to be a classic deus ex machina and I must admit that Iīm not a big fan of that. When thereīs drama, it should be somehow resolved by the protagonists. The drama can turn out to be a comedy or a tragedy, but either way itīs their own story. Now this kinda becomes the story of someone else.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, I am not crazy about the Deus Ex Machina, either. The new character* is super cool and I want to see him/her more, but the introduction was kinda iffy to me.
I wonder if paralysing Faye was the new character's disregard for her and Woland just didn't care, or perhaps it was a calculated move to show "see? I can do awesome things" to lead more credibility to the offer. I suppose we'll know when we see the plot develop and we know the new arrival's personality better.
*I'm gonna call him/her "Woland" in my head, I have absolutely no idea why, but she reminds me of the "Master and Margarita" character with her attitude, if not looks, and people in the forum are already drawing comparisons to Satan, so I'm gonna go with that.
--- End quote ---
A Deus ex Machina is a very specific plot device in which the author cheats the audience by bringing in a previously-unmentioned magical creature at the end of the story which ties up all the loose ends with a wave of a magic wand. Agent Creeptastic is not a DeM -- they're a legitimate plot device themselves. They were foreshadowed by Station's inability to crack CW's encryption (and possibly Bubbles' concern about qualitatively different kinds of AI). They are, themselves, a source of conflict, not a God-like character which fixes everything without any further story-telling.
Case:
--- Quote from: jaquio on 10 Jan 2017, 13:48 ---...
All of those crazy things were still about people. People in crazy situations, but still people.
This arc is not about people. I just went back and checked. In the last 30 actual comics (subtracting out holiday filler), there have only been 3 comics that include two humans talking to one another. The last two months have featured speaking parts from eight robots/AI (Bubbles, May, Pintsize, Corpse Witch, Station, Jeremy, whoever the cop is and who ever this new devil character is) and only three humans (Marten, Faye and Hannelore).
Time will tell, though.
--- End quote ---
Hmmmmh ... As has been pointed out, the QCverse AI's satisfy pretty much every criterion for 'people' you can come up with (up to & including pron-addiction). Could it be that the main difference you perceive in the QC narrative is less about 'it's not about people anymore' and rather 'It's not about the last stages of human Neoteny anymore'?
Because that'd be true - it isn't. And it couldn't have. QC can't be about 'people (who'd agree they should be grownups by now) finding themselves in a Collegetown and life and stuff' forever. I mean, I live in a University town (job hazard of working at Uni), and I know some really, really nice people who came here to study and then stopped studying and then ... life happened. And the one specific guy I have in mind is a 41 (which makes him 2 years my junior), a somewhat precariously employed sound-engineer with the local theatre whose one big worry in life seems to be that he suspects his girlfriend of wanting offspring - My money is on him turning out to be a great Dad once he inevitably becomes one (I mistrust people who don't crap their pants at least a little bit at the thought of bearing the responsibility for raising bona fide human being).
QC hasn't been about Indie music, Marten & his laid-back attitude towards career progress, or long-term planning for years. Even the about page has changed to 'Questionable Content is an internet comic strip about romance and robots'.
Happy Days jumped the shark in the fifth of it's eleven seasons - We're well into the 13th year of QC -> Even if Jeph was "desperate(ly) attempt(ing) to keep viewers' interest" by employing outrageous antics/plotlines, we'd have gotten more than our share out of it, IMO.
Which brings me to my last point: Why should he be desperate? I can't find any traffic data for questionablecontent.net that's older than 30 days, can you? After all, writers let their show jump the shark because of declining audience interest.
zmeiat_joro:
New Person is certainly meant to allude to Desire of the Endless, but the language they're using (brainfuckers/meatfuckers) alludes to me to the Culture and their AI's aversion to reading baselne humans' minds, in an attitude analogous to ours towards bestiality, with the subtle difference that in this case it's messing with lesser AI's minds. So this hints towards an interesting mixture. I await what will happen next.
de_la_Nae:
--- Quote from: Neko_Ali on 10 Jan 2017, 14:09 ---So, living, sentient, feeling beings who happen to have machine bodies are not 'people'. Featuring AIs, which have existing in the comic as long as it has existed is jumping the shark. Gotcha.
--- End quote ---
Beat me to it, and said it better than I can.
pwhodges:
These days it seems to me that "Jumping the Shark" has become an expression meaning "a storyline which I don't feel invested in". I.e., it's entirely in the eye of the beholder and essentially not about the comic at all.
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