Phew, that was close. For a second there I was afraid we were going to have some drama or tension in the plot.
Plenty of time for drama over dealing with being in a new body, new body being not quite right.
Maybe bread doesn't smell the same in the new model.
I'll believe it when I see it. Jeph has gotten very good at setting up for drama and then completely copping out on it.
Do you perhaps have an example of this?
I am not trying to be argumentative here, but in my view Jeph has generally been quite good at setting events up way in advance, so I am genuinely curious which comics/set-ups you are referring to.
Keep in mind that Jeph's storylines not having the drama you anticipated is not the same as 'copping out', just that your anticipated storyline was not the one Jeph envisioned himself. Unless of course you know of Jeph planning for a dramatic storyline and then ultimately deciding not to follow through...
Alice Grove.
Your comment did make me laugh, so well done 
On a serious note, while I was very disappointed with Alice Grove's 'resolution' myself as well, I honestly have no idea whether Jeph had always planned AG that way or if he originally intended to do much more in terms of drama/development etc. If it's the former, then we can't really call it 'copping out', no?
I'll call it copping out. Planning to cop out is still copping out. If you set up a dramatic conflict in your story and then just resolve it by magic (spookybot e.g.), that is bad writing, and whether you planned to write badly or not, it's still a copout.
If you set people up to believe you're interested in a genuine discussion - y'know, with folk actually engaging with each others' points n' stuff and mutual learning going on and all that - and then treat them to a bouquet of moved goalposts, equivocations and circular reasoning, that's a cop out, too.
Please give an example of where I have moved goalposts or employed circular reasoning. I expressed exactly one opinion about Jeph's writing before that post, and I don't recall setting up any goalposts or employing any reasoning. I didn't respond to dutchrvl's request for an example because Tova said basically the same thing I was going to say, except perhaps that we disagree on the definition of a copout.
It is true that most people do not live grand dramas or engage in heroic journeys, and I never said I expected that from QC. QC is a slice of life comic, and so I expect the stakes of its story to be somewhere on that scale. People of all walks of life do have problems, and when problems emerge, they are not usually instantly resolved as if by magic. If I were to open up a robotics shop without any seed capital, needing a friend to cosign on the lease, and seeming to be lucky if I got one customer on a given day, I would quickly go out of business because I couldn't make rent. If I were beholden to a shady employer because they had valuable data of mine encrypted with high-grade encryption that everyone agreed was technologically impossible to break, it is unlikely that an all-powerful robot would show up and just hand me the means to break it. Real people, when they have problems, have to exert actual effort to fix them. This is true whether the problem is large or small.
This goes to the larger point of storytelling. Most of my life is pretty boring, but on the odd occasion that something interesting happens to me, if I tell someone else a story about it, I am going to do my best to stick to the interesting part and not spend excess time on trivialities. I am also unlikely to start a story by saying something really interesting happened and then spend a lot of time on setup to something that wasn't really interesting. If you are going to tell a story, you need to make sure that you don't build up expectations that you can't deliver on. I didn't ask for QC to have a long arc that goes from one end of the universe to the other—if Jeph wants to keep his character's lives relatively mundane and focus on day-to-day things that mere mortals like us can more directly relate to, that's fine. If he wants to be totally episodic and not try to tell any long-term stories, that's fine. But Jeph has on more than one occasion now set up a problem that all rational thinking, both in-universe and out says should require a great deal of effort to solve and then either just forgotten about it (Union Robotics e.g.) or set up a ridiculous plot convenience to fix it (spookybot e.g.). Going from one anticlimax to another begins to be a little grating after a while.
Let me take the Bubbles/Corpse Witch plot as a specific example. A great many strips were devoted to the fact that CW had ensured 10 years of Bubbles' loyalty by encrypting memories that she didn't want to lose. Now let us completely set aside all real-world logic, and only look at the internal logic of the QC verse. Bubbles clearly believes that it would a functional impossibility to decrypt her memories without the key—in
comic 3379, she says "Using current technology, it would take approximately 2 million years to break her encryption." Bubbles clearly hates her situation. In
comic 3370, she is about ready to kill, or at least dismantle CW, and it is only the reminder of her encrypted memories that stops her. Bubbles is an intelligent, resourceful robot. Do we honestly believe she would put up with so much from CW if she thought there was ANY other way to get her memories back? In the world of comic, as established, Bubbles has absolutely no choice but to continue working for CW if she ever wants her memories back. This is further reinforced in
comic 3389, where Station, who has been established as being one of the most, if not the most sophisticated AIs in existence, says that even he could not break the encryption in a realistic amount of time. We are told repeatedly that breaking this encryption is impossible, which means that Bubbles needs to either continue working for CW and suck up her problems, or accept that she will never get those memories back. But not to worry, two strips later, Spookybot shows up and offers to break the encryption that the most sophisticated AIs known to exist said was impossible to break. Introducing Spookybot at this point in the story is the equivalent of writing a realistic medieval adventure, and then in the last two pages having a time traveler from the future come and use advanced technology to instantly make everyone happy. It's not that it's not realistic, or that in a world full of sentient robots, I am complaining that this wouldn't happen to me, it's that Spookybot completely throws the internal logic of the QC world into question. How did Spookybot come to be? How could such an advanced AI exist and be so very clearly casual about approaching people with their powers, and remain totally unknown to everyone in the story up until now? We don't necessarily need answers to these questions, but we need to at least believe that there are answers that are reasonable. Setting up your world in one way, and then introducing an element so incongruous to everything previously established is changing the rules of the game after we have started playing.
This brings me back to the current storyline. The previous strip before this one seems to strongly indicate that Roko will have a difficult time finding a suitable new body, given that her previous chassis was discontinued, and the new model is substantially more expensive. Yet exactly one comic later, all of those problems seem to have vanished and Roko is ready to get a new body almost instantly. It almost feels like there were some pages missing there that I really would've liked to have read. Now it is possible that these few comics are meant to set up some larger storyline where Roko has to adapt to her new body and deal with the emotional impact having been separated from her old one so unceremoniously, but as I said, I'll believe it when I see it. Jeph seems to like setting up plots and then rushing the resolution of them, and this one doesn't seem any different. I do hope I'm wrong, but this is becoming a pattern.
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Topic: WCDT 7-11 January 2019 (3911-3915) (Read 62184 times)