Weeeell, technically it would be more like _risking_ extirpation, when she reckoned she had a fair chance of getting away with it too, probably. But yeah, I get the idea, I’m just nitpicking. And what’s going on right now in VR has much more to do with extirpation’s abject failure to properly distress Ginny and just pissing her off instead…
What I love about the undercurrents on this one, is that Ira knows damn well Virginia chose Nick over herself, proving she values him highly if not full-on loves him, yet he’s trying to pass this bullshit anyway.
Also of interest is that in spite of what is going on the two of them are completely on the same wavelength in that last panel. I’ve a feeling this isn’t one of Ira’s good days either. ^_^
Even had you skill
In speech—which I have not—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—
E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop.
“Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. “
Nick sums it up really well in panel 3. Ira is either just trying really hard to demoralize Nick, or he truly has no idea how human emotions work. That would reinforce the idea someone presented that he could actually be an AI somewhere, operating multiple drones to do his work.
“Ira is either just trying really hard to demoralize Nick, or he truly has no idea how human emotions work.”
I’d say both are true with the latter being more strongly the case. Nick and Ira really do seem to be cut from the same cloth for all that their paths and choices have been different. The way Ira asked “Ever convince yourself of that, do you?” seemed to me as though he’s got at least as much self-loathing as Nick and was an expression of genuine curiosity from one fellow-sufferer to another. I also think that if he was trying to demoralize Nick it well and truly backfired and took his morale down a point or two instead.
I also think that Ira simply refuses to accept the fact that Nick is actually happier as a helicopter than he ever was as a human.
This may well not be one of Nick’s good days, and he may be perpetually despondent about what he as a helicopter will never be able to do with Virginia as a woman, but he also knows that had he never been recruited for the Whirligig project, he never would have met Virginia in the first place.
Then again, in my experience at least, “being friend-zoned in an apparently dead-end relationship (_and_ no human body either, in this case) with the person I love is so much better than any alternative of a proper two-way relationship with someone else (I also might have loved) might have been” said absolutely nobody ever. Not while sober, anyway…
Nick would have stayed at his computer eating delivery pizza until he died – probably before he was very old, with no exercise and a bad diet. He had practically zero prospect of a relationship.
Maybe I’m just having trouble following your sentence structure, Max, but your statement seems to be unrelated to Nick’s situation.
As he said in panel 2, nobody even liked him before. Now he at least has friends. I would much rather have friends than have nobody at all. And I say that being in a situation myself where the woman I love is still just a friend.
S’okay, it’s not you, it’s me – I just tend to flourish my sentences a bit too much most of the time. As for Nick, I’m simply asserting I think it’s a bit much to hand-wave the entire rest of the life of a young person (yes, even such a nerdy one) as a “guaranteed worse” than getting turned into brain in a jar and locked up a relationship that goes nowhere.
Putting it as clearly as I can – I’d by far much rather take my chances to happiness as a normal person – even such a socially awkward one as Nick – than the disembodied mind of a machine in a (so far) one-sided love story. I’m glad that he likes it there. But I’m absolutely unconvinced he never possibly could have done any better. That’s all.
Any one of us could say that our lives might have been better had we made different choices. Point is, Nick already is happier than he was before, and still has the potential to be even happier if he and Virginia can go beyond “just friends”. But Ira is trying to convince him that his life now is worthless.
nick’s already made it clear that he prefers being a helicopter and considers that his “real self” — that’s how he got validated into skin horse in the first place, remember?? maybe you wouldn’t feel the same, dude, but you’re not a comic-book character, either.
i admit i’d pretty cheerfully give up my personal corpus for one that could fly. especially given the existing canon of awesome vr sex 🙂
I dunno. It seems like every day I stumble across some couple who’ve committed heinous crimes, and I keep wondering “How is it that these people always seem to get together?” Could be the same with Zerhakker and Dr. Lee.
If he can get Nick to despise himself enough, maybe he can get Nick to beg to be destroyed. Maybe he thinks that would assuage his own feelings of guilt for the whole situation. Earlier he was trying to transfer the guilt onto Virginia. Now he’s trying to transfer it onto Nick himself.
Nick is his romantic rival and he’s trying to convince himself that he’s the better man. He can’t of course, and on his heart he knows it. That’s why he’s arguing pointlessly with him and that’s why he’s destroying him. He may say he’s doing things for the betterment of humanity, but he’s really doing them for the sake of his own neuroses.
Same thing with the war. Reading the comic there were some non-humans who caused trouble, but for the most part both humans and non humans wanted to live their own lives in peace. Even where there were major threats it was mostly from human mad scientists not their creations living independently of them. Though I suppose it would be fair to categorize mad scientists as their own special group that needed opposition.
Mr. Green isn’t an AI. He’s human. He also believes that NHS’s are worth less than humans and therefore it is impossible for a human to develop real feelings for an NHS. He believes that, at best, NHS’s could be humans’ pets, but not friends or lovers.
Since Nick has accepted that he is transhuman, Mr. Green believes that Dr. Lee is incapable of developing any kind of deep affection for him, as a friend or otherwise. It’s also why he believes Nick Zerhakker died ten years ago when Dr. Lee transplanted his brain into the osprey.
How do you know he’s human? Because Ira looks human? What if Ira is yet another drone, just like Violet Bee? Then how would you know who’s controlling it?
I’m not saying I believe it, but the theory has valid arguments.
Further to my previous silly notion [“Dread CEO Green”], a more serious idea:
The ostensible plan appears to have been “get Virginia to dismantle Nick”, but perhaps the real plan is “threaten Virginia with VR Hell in order to get Nick to wholeheartedly try to save her”. I write “wholeheartedly”, because while the codes they have give them full access to the Nick/Osprey interface, they aren’t really making Nick want to obey them. And they would need Nick’s full co-operation, because the actual goal they want to aim him at is in the VR; a purely mental environment.
Hunch 1: The Mayor that Virginia is trying to meet is Aimee
Hunch 2: The real goal that Green is trying for is full control of the Crown, which is currently split 3 or 4 ways (Aimee/Lovelace/Whimsy (possibly — did they fully relinquish it when they sold it?)/Anasigma)
Hunch 3: The women on the VR beach are not Pavane or aspects of Virginia’s own mind, but rather the AI collective the Daughters of the Air, of whom Lovelace is/was a member
Hunch 4: The Daughters of the Air are analogs of Baum’s fairies, which I think makes Lovelace an analog of Polychrome,
Hunch 5: Come to think of it, I think the storyline of “Fun for Some” was meant to be a vague analog of the book “The Tin Woodsman of Oz” (which included Polychrome among the cast), where the Tin Woodsman has severe existential identity issues, and meets two different versions of “himself” while searching for the woman he loved before he became tin.
Feelings, she can have no feelings,
Dude says there’s no hope of feelings of love.
Swear words, filtered out in their place,
Wanting to remember feelings of love.
Feelings, this helicopter feels it,
I’m awful glad I met her, dude, it changed my life and then,
Feelings, whoah-oh-oh feelings,
Whoah-oh-oh, feel her again with her charms.
Feelings, feelings, repeat, it’ll cost you,
And feelings mean she’ll never let you take me apart.
Feelings, this helicopter feels it,
I’m awful glad I met her, dude, it changed my life and then,
Feelings, feelings, repeat, it’ll cost you.
And feelings men she’ll never let you take me apart.
Feelings, whoah-oh-oh feelings,
Whoah-oh-oh, feelings, again with her charms…
Feelings…
Feelings, whoah-oh-oh feelings,
Whoah-oh-oh, I’ve lost feeling in my arms…
Feelings…
—from “Feelings,” sung by Morris Albert, composer credits much disputed.
After seeing this, it occurred to me that the term “asshat” might be interpreted as a threat to shove someone’s head up their own ass, and even if not a threat, can be seen as meaning a human twisted like a pretzel.
I’ve sometimes wondered if the swear filter is sometimes on Nick’s side. That is, it uses irrelevant and inoffensive substitutions usually, but tries to use terms that hint at the original swears if the target is a genuine baddie.
Didn’t work, convincing Nick he was wrong. But that would be a hard task even if he was wrong.
Wizard’s coming, Ariel.
No feelings for Nick except choosing extirpation over destroying him…
Weeeell, technically it would be more like _risking_ extirpation, when she reckoned she had a fair chance of getting away with it too, probably. But yeah, I get the idea, I’m just nitpicking. And what’s going on right now in VR has much more to do with extirpation’s abject failure to properly distress Ginny and just pissing her off instead…
What I love about the undercurrents on this one, is that Ira knows damn well Virginia chose Nick over herself, proving she values him highly if not full-on loves him, yet he’s trying to pass this bullshit anyway.
Also of interest is that in spite of what is going on the two of them are completely on the same wavelength in that last panel. I’ve a feeling this isn’t one of Ira’s good days either. ^_^
Even had you skill
In speech—which I have not—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—
E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop.
(To borrow and butcher a poem)
Original poem?
Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess.
“Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. “
Nick sums it up really well in panel 3. Ira is either just trying really hard to demoralize Nick, or he truly has no idea how human emotions work. That would reinforce the idea someone presented that he could actually be an AI somewhere, operating multiple drones to do his work.
“Ira is either just trying really hard to demoralize Nick, or he truly has no idea how human emotions work.”
I’d say both are true with the latter being more strongly the case. Nick and Ira really do seem to be cut from the same cloth for all that their paths and choices have been different. The way Ira asked “Ever convince yourself of that, do you?” seemed to me as though he’s got at least as much self-loathing as Nick and was an expression of genuine curiosity from one fellow-sufferer to another. I also think that if he was trying to demoralize Nick it well and truly backfired and took his morale down a point or two instead.
I also think that Ira simply refuses to accept the fact that Nick is actually happier as a helicopter than he ever was as a human.
This may well not be one of Nick’s good days, and he may be perpetually despondent about what he as a helicopter will never be able to do with Virginia as a woman, but he also knows that had he never been recruited for the Whirligig project, he never would have met Virginia in the first place.
Then again, in my experience at least, “being friend-zoned in an apparently dead-end relationship (_and_ no human body either, in this case) with the person I love is so much better than any alternative of a proper two-way relationship with someone else (I also might have loved) might have been” said absolutely nobody ever. Not while sober, anyway…
Nick would have stayed at his computer eating delivery pizza until he died – probably before he was very old, with no exercise and a bad diet. He had practically zero prospect of a relationship.
Maybe I’m just having trouble following your sentence structure, Max, but your statement seems to be unrelated to Nick’s situation.
As he said in panel 2, nobody even liked him before. Now he at least has friends. I would much rather have friends than have nobody at all. And I say that being in a situation myself where the woman I love is still just a friend.
S’okay, it’s not you, it’s me – I just tend to flourish my sentences a bit too much most of the time. As for Nick, I’m simply asserting I think it’s a bit much to hand-wave the entire rest of the life of a young person (yes, even such a nerdy one) as a “guaranteed worse” than getting turned into brain in a jar and locked up a relationship that goes nowhere.
Putting it as clearly as I can – I’d by far much rather take my chances to happiness as a normal person – even such a socially awkward one as Nick – than the disembodied mind of a machine in a (so far) one-sided love story. I’m glad that he likes it there. But I’m absolutely unconvinced he never possibly could have done any better. That’s all.
Any one of us could say that our lives might have been better had we made different choices. Point is, Nick already is happier than he was before, and still has the potential to be even happier if he and Virginia can go beyond “just friends”. But Ira is trying to convince him that his life now is worthless.
nick’s already made it clear that he prefers being a helicopter and considers that his “real self” — that’s how he got validated into skin horse in the first place, remember?? maybe you wouldn’t feel the same, dude, but you’re not a comic-book character, either.
i admit i’d pretty cheerfully give up my personal corpus for one that could fly. especially given the existing canon of awesome vr sex 🙂
I dunno. It seems like every day I stumble across some couple who’ve committed heinous crimes, and I keep wondering “How is it that these people always seem to get together?” Could be the same with Zerhakker and Dr. Lee.
What I don’t get is why is Ira talking to him? In his regard, Nick is a ghost in the machine, a dead man. What is he doing arguing with him?
If he can get Nick to despise himself enough, maybe he can get Nick to beg to be destroyed. Maybe he thinks that would assuage his own feelings of guilt for the whole situation. Earlier he was trying to transfer the guilt onto Virginia. Now he’s trying to transfer it onto Nick himself.
Nick is his romantic rival and he’s trying to convince himself that he’s the better man. He can’t of course, and on his heart he knows it. That’s why he’s arguing pointlessly with him and that’s why he’s destroying him. He may say he’s doing things for the betterment of humanity, but he’s really doing them for the sake of his own neuroses.
Same thing with the war. Reading the comic there were some non-humans who caused trouble, but for the most part both humans and non humans wanted to live their own lives in peace. Even where there were major threats it was mostly from human mad scientists not their creations living independently of them. Though I suppose it would be fair to categorize mad scientists as their own special group that needed opposition.
Mr. Green isn’t an AI. He’s human. He also believes that NHS’s are worth less than humans and therefore it is impossible for a human to develop real feelings for an NHS. He believes that, at best, NHS’s could be humans’ pets, but not friends or lovers.
Since Nick has accepted that he is transhuman, Mr. Green believes that Dr. Lee is incapable of developing any kind of deep affection for him, as a friend or otherwise. It’s also why he believes Nick Zerhakker died ten years ago when Dr. Lee transplanted his brain into the osprey.
How do you know he’s human? Because Ira looks human? What if Ira is yet another drone, just like Violet Bee? Then how would you know who’s controlling it?
I’m not saying I believe it, but the theory has valid arguments.
Further to my previous silly notion [“Dread CEO Green”], a more serious idea:
The ostensible plan appears to have been “get Virginia to dismantle Nick”, but perhaps the real plan is “threaten Virginia with VR Hell in order to get Nick to wholeheartedly try to save her”. I write “wholeheartedly”, because while the codes they have give them full access to the Nick/Osprey interface, they aren’t really making Nick want to obey them. And they would need Nick’s full co-operation, because the actual goal they want to aim him at is in the VR; a purely mental environment.
Hunch 1: The Mayor that Virginia is trying to meet is Aimee
Hunch 2: The real goal that Green is trying for is full control of the Crown, which is currently split 3 or 4 ways (Aimee/Lovelace/Whimsy (possibly — did they fully relinquish it when they sold it?)/Anasigma)
Hunch 3: The women on the VR beach are not Pavane or aspects of Virginia’s own mind, but rather the AI collective the Daughters of the Air, of whom Lovelace is/was a member
Hunch 4: The Daughters of the Air are analogs of Baum’s fairies, which I think makes Lovelace an analog of Polychrome,
Hunch 5: Come to think of it, I think the storyline of “Fun for Some” was meant to be a vague analog of the book “The Tin Woodsman of Oz” (which included Polychrome among the cast), where the Tin Woodsman has severe existential identity issues, and meets two different versions of “himself” while searching for the woman he loved before he became tin.
All very good points. On a related note, Nicks VR duplicate (the other one) is still at large…
Pretzel is the perfect sobriquet for Green, except that I like pretzels.
He’s twisted, salty, hard, and brittle. Not to mention old fashioned. I doubt he’s very good with beer though.
Well offer old Pretzel a beer and we might see.
He seems more like a brandy and cigars kind of guy to me.
“Something” like you? Low blow, Ira.
Anti-semitism?
Given that I suspect Ira is Jewish himself, probably not.
He’s gone full Gaston
I don’t recall ever hearing anyone use that term before, but it actually fits pretty well here. At least if you mean it the way I think you do.
“No one’s sick as Gaston! / Such a prick as Gaston! / No one’s even as much of a *dick* as Gaston!”
Ashman wrote more clever lyrics than I remembered.
… why is this starting to sound like those weird “secret test of character” plot twists? o.o
Weird, must have tripped over one of those code things accidentally. Lets try this again:
*Conspicuously does not retrieve burn ointment.*
Does not deserve it.
Feelings, she can have no feelings,
Dude says there’s no hope of feelings of love.
Swear words, filtered out in their place,
Wanting to remember feelings of love.
Feelings, this helicopter feels it,
I’m awful glad I met her, dude, it changed my life and then,
Feelings, whoah-oh-oh feelings,
Whoah-oh-oh, feel her again with her charms.
Feelings, feelings, repeat, it’ll cost you,
And feelings mean she’ll never let you take me apart.
Feelings, this helicopter feels it,
I’m awful glad I met her, dude, it changed my life and then,
Feelings, feelings, repeat, it’ll cost you.
And feelings men she’ll never let you take me apart.
Feelings, whoah-oh-oh feelings,
Whoah-oh-oh, feelings, again with her charms…
Feelings…
Feelings, whoah-oh-oh feelings,
Whoah-oh-oh, I’ve lost feeling in my arms…
Feelings…
—from “Feelings,” sung by Morris Albert, composer credits much disputed.
i cried.
Considering what word “pretzel” likely replaces, it’s quite the inspired insult and/or implied threat.
After seeing this, it occurred to me that the term “asshat” might be interpreted as a threat to shove someone’s head up their own ass, and even if not a threat, can be seen as meaning a human twisted like a pretzel.
I’ve sometimes wondered if the swear filter is sometimes on Nick’s side. That is, it uses irrelevant and inoffensive substitutions usually, but tries to use terms that hint at the original swears if the target is a genuine baddie.
Nick has one advantage Mr. Green. He knows what he is, and you don’t.
He’s young, and he’s in love.
You are old, and alone.