Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3766 - 3770 (18th-22nd June 2018)
HughYeman:
--- Quote from: Bad Superman on 22 Jun 2018, 06:30 ---
--- Quote from: HughYeman on 22 Jun 2018, 06:18 ---Also, wouldn't the closest trope to her be Manic Pixie Dream Girl?
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To me she's more like The Fool
To be honest, Melon is pretty low on my 'Favorite QC Character'-list (as are Emily and Raven).
EDIT:
I correct myself. Idiot Houdini is the more fitting trope.
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Hmmm. I hadn't seen the Idiot Houdini. I'm not sure that I agree, though. This aspect seems integral to the trope: "... anyone acting the way he does would almost certainly have died ten episodes before the series began." For a human, that would be true. But in this universe, there are free public charging stations, so it's not like Melon is going to "starve". Of course she will require maintenance at some point, and then there's the concern of her being arrested or assaulted for trespassing, so I can see your point. She still feels more like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl to me, though.
Zebediah:
--- Quote from: HughYeman on 22 Jun 2018, 06:18 ---Here's what I keep wondering: does Melon's constellation of traits correlate with any real disorder? The one I keep coming back to is the strip where she said "Numbers are just abstract concepts" as a justification for not being able to differentiate between apartments. That totally works as a joke, but not in real life, correct? It implies a degree of awareness and willfulness that is distinct from dysfunction. In other words, she would have to understand the real in order to display such a deep understanding of the difference between the abstract and the real. That one scene, insofar as I am justified in taking the joke as indicative of anything at all, leads me to think her behavior is at least partially performative.
Also, wouldn't the closest trope to her be Manic Pixie Dream Girl?
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I don’t think you can correlate Melon’s mind with any human cognitive disorder. I think what happened to her is AI-specific: when her neural net was being trained on real-world inputs, something went drastically wrong. Her resulting mental map of the world therefore doesn’t correlate very well with objective reality. She’s sane enough to survive pretty decently - I mean, she holds down a job (however bizarre it may be) and she seems to have a stable relationship with Arthur. But her mental world is simply different from ours.
traroth:
I didn't know Pintsize had a son!!! :-o
HughYeman:
--- Quote from: Zebediah on 22 Jun 2018, 07:23 ---I don’t think you can correlate Melon’s mind with any human cognitive disorder. I think what happened to her is AI-specific: when her neural net was being trained on real-world inputs, something went drastically wrong. Her resulting mental map of the world therefore doesn’t correlate very well with objective reality. She’s sane enough to survive pretty decently - I mean, she holds down a job (however bizarre it may be) and she seems to have a stable relationship with Arthur. But her mental world is simply different from ours.
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I think you nailed it. The QC universe seems to rely largely on the conceit that human and AI minds reflect similar emergent systems, and that the similarities reveal traits of complex systems that are independent of the informational substrate. Melon is an exception to that rule. She's... something else.
specter177:
--- Quote from: keithcurtis on 21 Jun 2018, 17:37 ---
--- Quote from: Theta9 on 21 Jun 2018, 09:19 ---
--- Quote from: Tova on 21 Jun 2018, 03:50 ---I try not to think of dealing with just about any of the cast in real life.
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Marigold, I would be totally into if she were a real person. She's exactly my type.
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Given your avatar, that sounds terrifying and ominous.
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Nah, Marigold totally isn't Mike's type.
She's not a mom.
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