Alrighty, so Jacquelle will be doing *Mute's route as well as the Harem route. I guess that means this LP is complete. Thanks for reading along, guys.
So, imagine how awkward this would be if you break up with her, or snap in a rage. Having the power to ERASE YOUR GIRLFRIEND accidentally while drunk is terrifying. Would you even be tried in a court of law? Could she theoretically override that kind of thing, or have free reign over environmental control? So many interesting avenues about this relationship haven't even been touched.
I would doubt that AIs have any legal standing as a person, so I guess if you delete your girlfriend... Sucks for you? This is why you always make backups.
*Mute only has one ending that you get a graphic for, but I can show the investigator failing if people want.
Jacquelle, will you be creating a new thread when you get to this or would you like to post it in this one?
I'll be creating a new thread. I'd do it now but I won't be on my home computer until this evening. ETA: On second thought, I shall start it when Edelweiss takes over the Castle Chase thread, which should be very soon.
Thank you very much for an interesting read! I admit I was turned off by the description in Steam and didn't buy it but now I can definitely see the appeal.
Well, that usually depends on the work - there are quite a few where they are basically equal to humans in that society has moved towards the statement that sentience is the only requirement for human rights rather than actually having a body. If you begin to consider mind uploading (ie; your body is dying, so have your mind transferred into a computer to live on), then it becomes a bit more logical. "Why should a human mind living within a computer be denied the rights they had while physically living?" There is a whole lot of problems though, such as being able to copy an AI/Virtualized human mind.
Yes, but society and laws generally move very slowly, much more slowly than technology, so I have no idea whether at the time that protagonist lives they have gained that legal standing, even if they deserve it.
Well, considering that AI's have been around for at least 600 years by the time of the story, the main civilization will hopefully have advanced that far. Though considering the moral standards in this story, who knows.
Can I come with? I fill these qualifications. Granted, I need to see the rest of Blue No. 6 from where I left off years ago, but I'm down. Also, Jaaksan, thank you for showing us this game! It's amazing. Looking forward to seeing J do more.
My head canon has Protag-chan downloading the files and Tsundere-san to an external hard drive (or a cloud service) to deliver to the client. She never downloads Tsundere-san to her ship's mainframe because SHE'S NOT SUICIDAL. This was just a job: get in, get out, and get paid. She said and did what she had to. And now, it's time to move on.
I recently read the book by Lisa See called Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, which, though set in China, I think helped me to understand this story better. I would recommend it, especially as it is told from the point of view of a woman who is part of the system and isn't really in favor of abolishing it, though there are many things she hates about it and disagrees with it on. (Not to mention that the woman who actually wrote the book, Lisa See, is not at all in support of this type of misogyny.) I think this allows the book to offer a somewhat more neutral view of the system than we get from either this game or some of the people in the thread, which I see as a good thing. It's one of my pet peeves when people judge the people of past (I know this is the future, but for all intensive purposes, it's the past) based on the criteria of today, such as saying that Abraham Lincoln was racist or that a certain historical figure was gay. (Yes, Abraham Lincoln would be considered racist by our standards, but he was actually very progressive for his day and saying that someone in the past was "gay" is always a dangerous thing because it is a term that hadn't even been invented yet. Yes, someone might have been attracted to people of the same sex, but they're still not "gay" same way as someone is now, as is discussed on this article exploring Lincoln's sexuality here. Moreover, nonsexual displays of affection toward the same gender were more common in the past and such relationships were often described as being closing than that of a husband or wife, meaning what we may see as subtext for homosexuality, is actually nothing more than a close friendship.) So I wanted to provide more of a historical context for this society to be judged on. I'm not saying that we should just completely excuse the atrocities of the past because "oh, it was the past and people didn't know any better!", but at the same time, I don't think it's fair to use standards that didn't even exist to decide whether or not a people has any worth. I don't know about you, but I would hope historians would be willing to do that when our time is just a distant memory because I'm sure there will be things about us which they look upon with horror that we don't even think about, in the same ways that as much as they may have fought it as children, mothers in ancient China never really questioned binding the feet of their daughters because they knew it would ultimately lead to a better life for their daughters than letting their feet go unbound so that the only option they had was to become a servant or a "little daughter-in-law", who was a nonofficial wife of a man and lived in his house, but had no official status in it and was abused by all the other women who lived there. Even things that seem just horrible to us can sometimes be used an expression of love within the confines of a society different than ours, much like tough love is often used to help a child live up to their full potential. It's entirely possible that when the Kims were cutting off Hyun-ae's tongue, they saw it as being the best thing for her because she couldn't have gotten a husband of any kind if she continued to rebel as she did, much less the Emperor, and in a society where a woman cannot work to support herself, the only thing she could have done to survive without a husband would have been to prostitute herself. I'm not saying that makes it right, but it certainly makes it a little more understandable. Anyway, there were a few other things in this thread that made me RAGE, especially the frankly self righteous claim that destroying this society was merciful and I'm really tempted to go into that as I have at least a few points I could make that haven't been brought up yet, but I'm not sure that people are interested in reading one of my (practically trademarked) walls of text on the matter. However, if anyone does show interest in my arguments, I'd be more than happy to type up a post about all the reasons I so strongly object to that sort of reasoning.
Hyun-ae never had a problem with getting married, she objected to getting married so young to someone she'd never met. If they had actually communicated and the Kim's weren't so power-hungry it's possible she could have learned to adapt to the society, marry someone she wanted, and gotten ahead in her own way as the emporer's wife did. But the Kim's see her as nothing more than a token to gain political power, and all their interactions with her show this. They cut out her tongue because her ability to speak is getting in the way; if they actually cared about her they would have just listened.
I'm not necessarily saying that the Kims did care about her, obviously they wanted to gain political power, no matter what their other motives were, but you have to remember that in the society she was in, everyone got married young to someone they'd never met. They probably couldn't conceive of the idea of a marriage that didn't work this way anymore than they could understand what Hyun-ae meant by an independent woman. It is unlikely that they would have been able to listen to her in a way to broker understanding. They would probably continue to see her as a rebellious child throwing a temper tantrum who didn't know what was good for her, just like parents in the modern day would probably be unwilling to let their child quit school because they didn't like it. They might be willing to listen to their child's complaints, but if they really cared about their child and their future, the biggest changes they might make would be to find another school, home school their child, or find some alternate form like special-ed or a tutor, if they felt their child needed it. Good parents wouldn't even consider letting their child give up education altogether. You also have to remember that listening to your child is a pretty modern concept that probably didn't arise until 50 to 100 years ago. (And that's just in Western culture, which is much more open when it comes to communication and much less hierarchical than Asian cultures, meaning listening to your children would probably take even longer to come into practice there than it did here.) The idea of listening to Hyun-ae, or any other child, would be a foreign, laughable concept to the Kims and likely any other family in that society. (A note: That Hyun-ae was considered to be of marriageable age wouldn't make her an adult in the eyes of the Kims, at least not one who held any sway, since in their society girls had little status even in their natal homes, with baby girls being considered worthless and when they marry into a new family they have next to no status until they give birth to a son, at least if it matches with the society in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan as much in that way as it did in others.) And it's not like Hyun-ae put much effort into understanding the Kims either, so there's blame on both sides, even if it isn't equally distributed. I'm not trying to excuse their actions in any way, I think what the Kims did to Hyun-ae was horrible, I'm just trying to make it more understandable. Why is it that Hyun-ae killing off a whole spaceship is so much more understandable (and to some is even excusable or correct!) than what the Kims and others in their society did? In my mind, what Hyun-ae ultimately did is much worse than what was done to her because at least the others were doing what their society had taught them was the right and only way to do things. Hyun-ae was killing off thousands of people without even trying to understand their way of life or thinking that since Jae-hwa was a good person, maybe there were other good people within a corrupt society too. I understand why she did it, but I don't for a second think that it's even close to a justified response to what happened to her. There were other options.
Will you marry me? This is pretty much my exact feelings on that entire debacle, especially since the game did go out of its way to show us logs confirming that the Kims did think they were doing what they had to do for themselves and for Hyun-ae. It was still definitely wrong (and horrible to read about), and they knew it was extreme and weren't happy about it, but it didn't merit genocide (though again, the whole temporary insanity thing comes into play for Hyun). If the logs about the, god was it a Smith? Or someone completely unrelated? Give me a sec. ... The Kim sisters, Eun-mi and Sun-hi (where one couldn't have a child) and the logs about the prostitute Smith Sang-min got pregnant are accurate to most of the society, then this is the case.
By the way, I did a bit of quick research on Wikipedia about women in Korea and I found that the conditions in Korea were pretty similar to those I read about in China, as they were both societies based on Neo-Confusionism. There were a couple of major differences though, mainly that Korea didn't practice foot binding, women had somewhat higher literacy in China, and Korea didn't have Nu Shu. I don't know whether or not they had anything like sworn sisters (Laotang) or Laotong in Korea either. Except for those differences, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan seems to be a pretty good reference for a woman's life in Korea during the Yi Dynasty as well for women in China, not to mention a very interesting read.
