#also me: i must overthink the everloving shit out of this

[edains]

tagged by @deannastrois and @clericofshadows thank youuuuuuuuuuuuu

i'll tag @sunstridering @eloquentspeeches @narrayya @rodriguefraldarius and anyone else who wants to do it!

[blackwingedbird]

okay but can we just talk about pintsize for a minute

So I’ve been rereading QC a bunch lately, and what I find really fascinating is how Jeph as managed to set up the whole “robots as social allegory” thing entirely by accident. Like...obviously he’s leaning into it now, but it clearly was not the original intent, in that the original intent was “lol robots.” Jeph has said in interviews that he doesn’t plan storylines too far in advance -- his writing style seems to be more along the lines of making a joke, and then extrapolating from that joke and exploring its actual implications. 

That’s pretty fucking neat and something I could go on about forever in and of itself, honestly. But it gets super interesting in terms of robot stuff, because we’ve gone from AIs being essentially a combination of pet and toy, to sometimes being humanoids with their own lives, to very clearly and universally being people. Obviously in the real world, this is a product of the story evolving -- but in the QC universe, it must mean that they always were people, and thus that it was always pretty shitty to treat them like walking iPhones. 

We’re essentially seeing the AI civil rights movement in real time, in the same way the characters are. All because Jeph was like “hey what if I gave Momo a humanoid chassis, that would be neat.”

I started thinking about this a lot in strip 1900, wherein Marten says he doesn’t think of Pintsize as a robot, “just a little dude.” This struck me as being a. disturbingly similar to the idea of “not seeing color,” and b. patently untrue. Several other AIs -- nearly every other AI, in fact -- had evolved to obviously-a-person status by that point, but Pintsize was still the exact same walking punchline he’s been since the very first strip. I started wondering whether we would ever see him humanized, and how that would even work. It would be difficult to do without fundamentally destroying his character -- you can’t just throw him in a humanoid chassis and go “okay he’s a person now,” like Momo or Winslow, or even May. But it would also weaken the comic to leave him as-is -- “oh yeah, AIs are people, except for Pintsize.”

So it’s pretty cool to see Jeph exploring this, and I think he’s striking a really good balance, particularly in the current interaction with Claire (“Is this a prank?” “No, this is me expressing concern. The box of dildos balanced precariously on the bathroom door is a prank.”), and I very much look forward to seeing where it goes.

tl;dr I have been overthinking the everloving shit out of Robot Stuff in QC.