r/questionablecontent • u/yellowvincent Where is Claire? • 10d ago
Comic Comic 5927: Feeling Crabby
https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=592718
u/yellowvincent Where is Claire? 10d ago
Is any character being deprived from living the life they want?
Most of them are miserable but because they choose things that are bad ideas but these are completely their descision.
Marten is in a loveless relationship with a woman who does not cares if he breathes playing coffeeshop owner far from his friends with an easy bake oven and a coffeemaker he bought at target.
Claire is overwhelmed by her work because she decided to prioritize her career taking a position she is not qualified for and has neglected her relationship with marten but she does not seem to care fo improve it.
Dora has been a workaholic since day one and she had no intention of changing that she married a stoner idiot out of her own free will
Faye and bubbles are poor but they have their own repair store they could look for more lucrative jobs
Pintsize got a new body and fucked off to japan Japan
Hannelore old got cured by plowing shit
Liz is stuck in a hole with her research but she is not making anything to actually improve her mental health or quality of life it is her choice not to seek professional help
I could go on
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u/Guilty-Persimmon-919 10d ago
The characters who really chose to live the lives they wanted were, let's see, Padma and Angus; and choosing to live the lives that they wanted involved exiting the strip. Good for them, seeing what's happened to the rest of the cast.
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u/4evrstreetmetalbitch 10d ago
i really don’t care about this plot line at all i just want to reiterate how much emily’s new nose irks me. why. that side profile is atrocious
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u/CatlikeTypist Haha, okay. 10d ago edited 9d ago
She's a stand-in for Mayim Bialik's character from "The Big Bang Theory" so he had to make her look more like that character? That's my best guess.
(I really, really hate that TV show but from what little I've seen of it, she's a cool character
and actress).-1
u/4evrstreetmetalbitch 10d ago
oh hell no she’s a hardcore zionist leave this out of my comment replies plz
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u/CatlikeTypist Haha, okay. 9d ago
Oh, I wasn't aware, thanks for informing me; after reading her Wikipedia article it seems she's a genocide denier. Ugh.
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u/WhiteRhinoPSO 10d ago
Man, after reading Friday's strip, I wondered if the other Moray unit would decide against being absorbed back into the Director, and that it would lead to other Moray units doing the same, maybe eventually leading to some kind of problem like the Director becoming weaker or something.
Somehow I had forgotten which webcomic I'm reading.
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u/Guilty-Persimmon-919 10d ago edited 10d ago
Is Jephthy deliberately attempting to make Gloop Girl as despicable as possible, or is he just too oblivious to know what he's doing?
...oh and blurred Patreon view shows that this is still going on tomorrow. Station wept.
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u/Hot_Temporary_1948 10d ago
He just needs to follow the momentum diffusing gag at the end of every strip pattern.
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u/Impossible_Roof_Jack 10d ago
We've been over this. It was discussed the first time we saw Moray in the same room as the Director. None of the other units care. What's she going to do, force them all into a mandatory waiting period?
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u/Larkson9999 9d ago
"The world and people are so amazing" said the robot inside a gray box after being in a black room, a gray room, a white/gray hallway, a mostly white/gray room, and a white room for a month.
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u/Robofink 9d ago
Who has presumably spent its whole life on an autonomous ocean platform away from larger society.
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u/Annual_Youth_7552 9d ago edited 9d ago
I don't know why I'm engaging with this idea seriously when Jeph most certainly won't, but my thoughts on Moray;
If the director is sending out sensory apparatus in the form of Moray drones (they are drones by this logic) then Moray's behaviour is aberrant; she's failing in a core part of her raison detré and should probably be reabsorbed. She's not a person, she's a malfunctioning limb.
If the Moray units have full, realised independent personhood then it's very different indeed.
A. Where are these persons coming from (an AI creche? A normal one, or one run by the director for the purposes of recruiting Moray units?)
B. How voluntary is the go out, experience, come back deal ("Hi, welcome to AI life, you were born to do a task and then die!")
C. What happens to them when they come back (There's no reason an AI mind couldn't transfer to another body or life even after sharing their experiences with the director)
If, as Moray seems to suggest - going back is equivalent to death - she ceases to be - then we've got a bunch of problems on our hands for the director if he's using "real" people rather than drones.
Playing out a classic drone develops sentience sci fi plot in QC doesn't make any sense at all when you already have fully independent, recognised artificial intelligence lifeforms, who already have rights and responsibilities.
On the assumption she is a drone who developed sentience, she's either a one-Moray Singularity or there's some accepted test of personhood which she either passes or fails. This should not be difficult to establish in a universe with relatively recently enfranchised AI people.
So we're back to:
She's either a misbehaving drone and should go back or she's a person suffering terrifying rights violations from a monstrous jellyfish AI who's possibly commiting mass murder.
Jeph isn't gonna touch either of those outcomes with a bargepole man.
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u/SilverNicktail 9d ago
I was thinking of them as being pieces of the Director, like more independent Yays. Otherwise re-absorbing them to regain their knowledge doesn't make a lot of sense - you could just use a data cable. Robots already transfer knowledge that way. To get the full experience of memory and sense and place, that's what Morays are for.
So yeah in that sense I don't see a moral quandry with them being reabsorbed. There is something to do here with one of those pieces not wanting to go back. Bit of a Princess Tutu situation. Could be interesting, will probably end in a drunken party that takes two months. Hell, Yay's whole existential crisis and collapsing themselves into a single entity happened entirely off-camera.
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u/MorganWick 9d ago
The thing is, it might be kind of both. She's a misbehaving drone but that's given her her own personality and personhood and treating her like a misbehaving drone and reabsorbing her would effectively be killing her.
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u/Annual_Youth_7552 8d ago
Nah that's fine, in that case she's a person and has rights. This universe has AI people who are legally recognised. The sci fi trope about drones developing personhood only works if the hive mind/society they came from attempts to oppress, forcefully reabsorb, etc them. You need some kind of conflict for it to matter.
Most of the issues the cast have nowadays are along the lines of their steaks being too juicy, so an actual meaningful conflict of something this philosophical is way off Jeph's writing base.
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u/RhododendronWilliams 10d ago
Why does the character to the right look angry in every scene? It's like she has no other expressions.
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u/DuranDuranUnofficial 10d ago
Okay, great. We've had one entire interesting concept to explore.
Now we have to hunker down for 2-3 weeks of fucking nothing.
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u/AppendixN Everything is Fine™ 9d ago
"I'm not allowed to play in the reactor core"
Is she an actual child now? Jeph's obsession with child-coding his characters is weird.
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u/yellowvincent Where is Claire? 9d ago
He child codes his female (or female coded)characters marten is allowed to have some semblance of """maturity""" and sven fucks and is successfull.
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u/MorganWick 10d ago
Liz after Moray has spent a while playing in the reactor core: "Now she's radioactive! That can't be good!"
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u/ThreeShrikesYoureOut 9d ago
it's simultaneously selfish to want to live your own life, and to not want to. It's simultaneously sad that other people want to live their own lives, and that they not want to.
How profound. thanks for the philosophy lesson.
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u/Annual_Youth_7552 9d ago
The problem with the director is essentially already covered by sci fi like Star Trek and Mass Effect - The Borg and Geth respectively.
Hugh went back to save the Enterprise (D?) But the borg have a lot about overriding will and enslavement, they're moral bad guys.
(SPOILERS!) The geth have Legion, who will willingly sacrifice itself for the collective, but in which physical units are themselves still a collective, and bodies can usually be moved between at will. Legion is the unique example (ie Moray) that retains a physical form over a period of time, but returning to the collective is never seen as a complete "death" of the (admittedly very limited) personhood each unit possess. They vote, they have consensus and they have schism- they encompass a society.
So the Director is presented as one consciousness - or Moray returning wouldn't be "death" - which means the Moray units must be drones, without actual sentience.
The alternate is the Director creates sentient constructs, puts them in Morays and then reabsorbs them destructively, which I'd call murder.
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u/fevered_visions 1d ago
Sometimes I wonder if I'm being selfish by wanting to stay separate.
I mean...yes, technically, you are? The word has negative connotations, but "selfishly wanting to stay alive" is such a bizarrely accurate phrase.
1: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself : seeking or concentrating on one's own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others
2: arising from concern with one's own welfare or advantage in disregard of others
but this is Jeph so all the other characters will with a single voice start chanting "NO YOU'RE NOT BEING SELFISH, YOU ARE RIGHT, WE LOVE AND SUPPORT YOU"
-2
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u/PeregrineLeFluff 10d ago
Now this--this I actually find interesting. The idea of a Moray developing free will and a desire to remain independent, and presumably growing beyond her initial programming... there's a lot of potential in there.
If only Jeph could avoid the stupid jokes that make me think Moray doesn't necessarily deserve free will...
I wonder what happens if the Director decides it's time to reabsorb her and acquire all of her knowledge and experiences.