Let's Play Analogue: A Hate Story

I took an Ethics class sometime ago, and I recall us covering Utilitarianism. It's been a while but I do understand what you are saying. I don't agree with it, but I get where you are coming from.

I know I said somewhere above that I'd probably do the same thing in her position. I still stand by that, but the motivation would purely be anger and revenge. I'm not saying it's the right decision or even a good one. Being driven into a miserable corner like that does things to your mind.
Hyun-ae makes me sad.


Also, isn't it interesting how much motivation behind actions can matter?
I find it oddly more palatable that Hyun-ae would do something horrible for selfish reasons. If she were thinking about future women...that just seems scary.
But maybe that's because I'm a selfish person? I can relate more with a selfish motive.

Oh, I know her motive at the time she committed it was purely selfish. But she's had a long time to reflect on it as an unshackled AI, I'm sure she's covered it in a lot of detail, and to a machine (even one that believes it is human, has a human personality and memories overlaid), utilitarianism would strike a chord.

There is a Richard K Morgan quote, from his Kovacs trilogy and the Quellcrist Falconer Campaign Diaries in that which I'm trying desperately to remember, but the specifics won't come to mind... ah well...

I guess my point is that I could completely understand where she was coming from when she did, I can see justifications selfish and pragmatic for it. It wasn't good, it was monstrous (Mass murder is always wrong, the question lies simply in how much), but I cannot blame her or hold her accountable. In the end, in her shoes, I would have done the same. And so I cannot throw stones nor condemn her.

Makes sense to me. Despite some of my more sympathetic dialogue choices, I view what she she did as pretty unforgiveable. But that selfish motivation and that, like Sofalisa said, she was pretty much completely out of her mind at that point makes it more understandable and a little more sympathetic than justifying it with "this is for the good of the future". Though really, is no future better than the possibility of a bad future? No, sorry, stopping.

Well, I don't agree at all with Hyun-ae... what she did was barbaric! The ship people are barbaric to us, because we see them with our perspective. For them it's completely normal, since they have been living like that for centuries... We all understand she was in a bad position and suffered but many of the ship people had nothing to do with it. It was a complete selfish move, since she didn't even think about how it would affect others >:c
After all this time she is only concerned about what the MC thinks of her, she didn't even meditate on the fact she killed innocent people. No hint of regret.
When I was her age I might have bad judgement but I could clearly tell apart good and bad ;o
She knew it was wrong and she did it anyway. No sympathy, the only feeling I have for Hyun-ae is contempt -.-

See, that I don't agree with. Leaving aside our debates on ethics and morality and whether that society deserved to continue limping along.

Hyun-ae is human, they took away her basic facilities of communication and no one ever noticed. She had a disease, was dieing, and not one of the people around her realised it. She was forced into a society that denied her everything she deserved, she didn't even get the pleasure of a life she could enjoy before her disease would claim her. The events that happened made her flip out. She wasn't in rational command of her senses, and she did the human thing. She fought back like a wounded, cornered animal, which, essentially she was. That's all we are when you cut back the rationalising and flimsy layers of intellect evolution has plastered onto our cortex. Saying she knew it was wrong and did it anyway is rather missing the point, because I'm fairly sure at the time she did it she wasn't even thinking, much beyond a basic "Make it stop!"

You ascribe or demand too much of humans, I feel. And this coming from someone who basically dislikes humanity.

This was brought up earlier in this thread if i remember right, but when you think about it then our 'one tiny globe' is also just that, slightly bigger spaceship in a massive galaxy, not getting any outside influences. We came to where we are as result of struggle and push from within, not from outside. We did it once, we can did it again. Whether here, on a spacefaring ship or another planet.

And yes, meantime people will suffer. And it's a tragedy, but then it's not like it's too unlikely a thousands years from now our ancestors will look at us and our societies with the same disgust, and think the same thoughts how primitive and cruel we are, and how we deserve to die in the fire to save us the anguish. Would you feel grateful if they appeared out of sudden and killed you and everyone 'out of mercy'? Or would you rather live?

But our planet has many different cultures and cultural values, whereas the spaceship seemed to have a pretty unified culture and unanimous values. It's much more similar to a small country in that regard. Of course murdering an entire small country is still unjustified, but you can't compare it to the destruction of our planet, which does not have a single societally enforced belief system.

Also, I can't answer your second question, because I don't live in a society which actively oppresses me and therefore am unqualified to answer. The problem with the culture of the ship is not that it's primitive, it's that it's objectively cruel.

And the fact that it's not primitive, but has actively stepped back to eradicate education and ability to learn from the past (Remember Hyun-ae's confusion at finding they write a new language? It makes them incapable of reading any of the ship's old logs and any form of educational material it has to find a better way to live. Subversive ideas in the past are simply innaccessible, and with the systematic removal of the ability to develop ones intellectual faculties, so has the ability for the society to undergo change)

At some point in this society's past, someone, fully aware of what he was doing, has moved to develop this patriarchal clusterduck and future proof it as much as they could, by forcefully changing the language that the next generation are taught so that within a few generations the iron grip can be relaxed because without the ability to know of something better, the chains will be automatic, instilled into generations who don't know and can't imagine any better - the men won't complain, the society is built to glorify them, and the women? Well, they're just ill-educated wives or whores (Literally, from one of the logs, those are the only roles that the society sees for them), who will never be able to effect change - Not in a society that weilds modern technology but doesn't and can't understand it (They don't need to develop it, they already have it, and they're not likely to understand it by taking it apart because it's too complex)

Hyun-ae was the only who ever stood a chance of maybe effecting change, as she was their link to a forgotten past, but she was just a young girl, and they cut out her tongue before she could mature, breaking off her one remaining form of communication, since she didn't understand their writings. They isolated her in the most total way even whilst forcing her to marry to someone she didn't love. That is beyond horrific, especially as it was viewed as societally acceptable.

The problem, to my mind, with you lovely idealistic people who believe this society will ever change without massive bloodshed is that you haven't fully followed the implications of what this society is. It's the societal equivalent of a tumour.

And like Jacquelle said, I can't really answer that second question as I don't live in such a society. But if I did but am as educated and aware of the issues I'm discussing now (Which I wouldn't be, but let's say I am), then yes, I'd rather they killed me. I'd rather die out than selfishly subject countless descendents to a barbaric society that will chew up and spit out any daughters, granddaughters, etc that I will have. It is a society without hope. Better a quick death than the agony of countless descendents. And in this example given, there are always more humans who will have a better future, ones who haven't developed into a patriarchal dead end.

Ravenholme, that was a great post, but you should probably spoiler-tag some of it. Not everyone's finished the game yet.

Isn't that just a presumption made about something we actually have no information whatsoever, save for some tidbits about couple of families? There's different cultures and values even in something as small as a city, let alone a country.

But you do, from the perspective of much more socially advanced people in the future, that's presumably managed to get rid of the issues like patriarchy-centric society, racism, ageism, discrimination of looks and many other things we don't even realize to be a problem, at our current development stage. That'd be the very point -- what may seem horrible to someone who have seen (or, especially, lived their entire live in) "the better" doesn't necessarily have to feel the same to someone who didn't, and their "horrible, cruel, primitive society" is the only experience and frame of reference they have.

Leaving aside the fact it's possible to decipher ancient languages and how the ship computer can apparently handle both ... we are where we are not as result of finding highly advanced logs of the cro-magnon that handed us everything on the silver platter and taught us better way to live. And we didn't start with fully organized and staffed intellectual faculties, either. I think discounting the idea progress could happen again without access to information we've already determined before, it's rather arrogant as it seems to presume these people are dumber than our own ancestors.

The women are mostly only content because they're unaware that anything could possibly be different - sure, some of them are educated and get consulted by their husbands, but they've still gotta go through a man to get any changes going. And if the guy's having a bad day and doesn't want to listen or if they get a bad husband in general, they're shit out of luck. They've got more power than it looks like on the surface, but that's still not saying much.

It's not like the old days where you could just dash off to the frontier and go all Stagecoach Mary; on a spaceship there's no frontier and no escape - you can't even do that old trick of dressing in drag and starting a new life because everyone's so family obsessed and probably registered on the family logs; there's no room for a new person, and you've seen what being outwardly spunky and rebellious gets you. It gets you broken.

That's why I can't really hold any ill feelings towards Hyun-ae. Like the egg she was in, they didn't know how it worked, so they broke it. The Kims got a dying girl with the ability to read all the old logs and control the ship to some extent, and they didn't even think to use her as anything other than a bargaining chip. She started to tell them about her dream to become an engineer like her father, and she got beaten for it. They didn't even ask about the history she'd known, the technology used to make that magical egg. They couldn't fathom a woman knowing about any of that.

...Ironically, given how reasonable the Emperor was, or at least at how excellent Empress Ryu was at getting him to do what she wanted, if she'd still been able to speak she quite possibly would have been able to get him to listen to her through Ryu. But she wasn't mentally prepared to get through that society intact, so instead of the ship's source of salvation, she ended with all those feelings of helplessness and frustration and pain bottled up until she completely snapped. Fuck, she was too sick to properly pick up a knife at the end and I can't think clearly when I've only got a bit of a flu.

Weren't all the old logs wiped when the ship reset? I don't think they still exist in an unreadable language, I think they're just gone, along with *Mute's memories. If they were still there wouldn't she be able to read them (she must be able to understand the old language because she can read Hyun-ae's letters)? Of course I haven't played the game in a while so maybe I'm wrong.

Just a couple of families, yes, but also the highest-ranked and most important families on the ship. Also, all the values they talk about are always spoken as if they were universal values, something that everyone understands and grows up with. "Men are honored. Women are abased. If you can remember nothing else, remember this. " and all that.

If there were families in the lower classes who weren't as misogynistic, wouldn't they assume Hyun-ae was just acting low-class, instead of being a complete mystery?

But again, the problem isn't that I look at this society and go "Oh, that's so backwards and primitive." I go "these are objectively awful things that are happening." Not awful in comparison to the society I live in, just simply awful. I can't really imagine people from the future looking at my (pretty cushy) life and thinking it was just as cruel as what Hyun-ae goes through, because it isn't. I am not suffering. Not everything is relative.

I'd certainly expect the future people to think you have it relatively better than the ship people. I'd just still expect them to nevertheless consider your life as one that has "objectively awful thing happening" (only to lesser degree) and as such awful too; simply because of their own cushioning being so much higher than ours. The sort of reaction one might get when seeing a person missing both legs together with another missing "only" one -- it's likely you'd conclude one of these people is experiencing more hardships than other, but the life isn't exactly rosy for either of them.

And as you say yourself -- you are not suffering, and that's despite our society being deeply unjust, prejudiced, spiteful towards all sorts of people and whathaveyou. So aren't we really just presuming those less advanced people must have suffered, based pretty much just on our own inability to envision ourselves living that kind of life? As opposed to their actual feelings of which we know little.

Fair enough. You're right, we can't know, so there's no point arguing further :) especially since, as I said, I don't think it was justified. I do understand why she did it, though, and why she would be defensive about her choice, and I'll be happy to discuss that when we reach the end of the game.

ETA: However, I should point out that whether it's okay to mass-genocide a culture because you don't agree with their values isn't really the issue, because the answer will always be no. Obviously? It seems to be more whether revenge is still justified if others get in your way.

You guys.

All of you guys. Just

S-so that update that was supposed to happen on Halloween. I'm so sorry, but it's been a comedy of errors involving the internet crashing, my computer crashing, then my browser refusing to let me go to websites (in that order, yes). I think I'm just gonna accumulate more screenshots for a bit and let this calm down. >>;

You should really lay off the VODKAAA

That was an awesome discussion. In the denotation of the adjective.

I'm alive, I swear. Real life commitments have been piling up, so I haven't been able to update or read most of your guys' LPs that I'm following. ;A; I will hopefully have an update within the next few days! ...and maybe I can use Thanksgiving Break to catch up on some of those LPs. (Homework? What's that?)

When you mentioned Thanksgiving, I laughed, because I thought it was back in October.

Canadian, eh?

GLORIOUSNESS!

Even if it rakes you a while to get back to, because of course real life happens, thank you for not quitting outright! I get so sad when LPs I'm enthralled in just stop with no explanation!

I'm very much enjoying this, and you! Thank you for bringing us this LP! Love your face, awesomeness! :D

Iiiiiiit's that time again, folks! Last time, we left off with a dialogue choice (shocking, I know), and here's what you lovely viewers picked.

There is no pity to be found. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero.

I figured, what with that little "I hate her!" breakdown just a few weeks days minutes ago.

....Well, yeah. That's what she grew up with, what everyone she'd ever interacted with believed with nothing to hint that it might be wrong except her own life.

Sooo you can sympathize? Empathize?

Well, can't argue with that.

Not without some serious therapy and a guest spot on Jerry Springer, anyway.

Of course. Everyone with a sob story wants a spot on Jerry Springer. If you have to suffer, you might as well cash in on it.

I understand. I get that way sometimes about bad movies and discontinuity.

I couldn't tell.

Man, kids are hard to deal with when they're happy and excited to see you. I don't want to imagine what it's like if they're screaming and fighting every single decision.

hahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAAAA (I do like kids, I just have problems dealing with them for longer than five minutes at a time.)

What do you think *Hyun-ae?


....Right. Hard to talk about. Okay.

Okay, yeah, ignoring the Emperor is kind of a major faux paus and I understand why they'd be majorly worried about that.

That's... ominous. And I need more opinions on the wording of that one sentence: "[...]even hitting her was far worse than I would have wanted." Is he saying that he hasn't hit her before and wouldn't have wanted to? That he did hit her and feels bad that it came to that? *Hyun, care to shed some light on this?

...right. Helpful.

What did you do.

What did you do to Hyun-ae.

*Hyun, what did they do?

Are you ever going to comment again? Come on girl, I can't carry this whole conversation myself! People will get bored. And by people, I mean me.

/winces in anticipation/

Hi again! I did post in here before once, right? Anyway...

/winces in anticipation/

Jaakusan, if you don't finish this log block tonight, I will FLIP SO MANY TABLES (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)

I'll still love you though <3

I realized that was the last of the new logs, and went "Well shit, now what?" Then I remembered we haven't asked all of *Mute's questions.

See? One last que-oh shit I remember what question this is.

YUP. Batten down the hatches, people, this is not a drill! Repeat, this is not a drill! Incoming drama bomb.

Or... not? Shiiiiit what did I miss?

I click around for a while, before I get this while looking over the log about "mother" again.


Yeah, those generation gaps are a bitch.

Oh shit, is this?

I think it is. Are we finally going to find out what that terrible thing was?

Bring it.



I know this is serious, but I keep getting distracted by the typos and formatting. Teenagers' writing. -shudder-

Fuck. Fuck. Hyun-ae no. You do not threaten to accuse someone of treason. Oh my god you cannot be this stupid.

Do you know what happens to traitors and their families? It's not pretty. This was a terrible, terrible idea.

Yet again, I had no knew choices so I had to go around clicking random things until I got new dialogue. This is connected to her sister-in-law's log.

I find it interesting that, after all this time and all this hate, you still call her "mother".

Of course not. You wouldn't have been able to. Were they surprisingly insightful?

I'm guessing no.

Say what?

...Ouch. That's actually... ouch. Rubbing salt in the wounds.

Deep breaths.

and it still hasn't happened yet

I played through this before

somehow I am dreading it more now

"Aggravated" seems accurate.


I know that feel. I don't even know the real names of some of my friends. Odd situation, and really awkward when you're trying to share stories with a different circle of friends.

Ominous.

That's right, encourage that alcoholism! If she's always in a drunken stupor, she might not notice the misery!

She did seem to have it fairly good, considering.

Finally. Iiiii mean already? Time sure does fly.

Not so much "faith" as "reader driven choices" buuuut you didn't need to know that.

Really? Only one? Will I finally know all?

Maybe. But you should tell me anyway. For the record.



Ha?

What obvious question? ...oh. OH. RIGHT. THAT ONE.

Did I get it right?

I did! Do I get a prize?

You get the prize of horrible realization. That's what you get.

No! It's all there, black and white, clear as crystal! You guessed the wrong question, so you get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir!

Yes.

YES. Please fill in the blanks already.

Stop teasing me an just give me answers already.

Woman. The suspense is killing me.

I get it, trauma. Stop forcing yourself to talk and gimme that log already.

I would if you'd just give it to me.

. . .

I feel good about this guys. No way this can go wrong.




...

...

...

Explain something to me.

They cut out your tongue, right?

Isn't that kind of really obvious?

I mean, I know women weren't supposed to speak much. But what about eating. Or, y'know, being intimate with your husband? How would no one notice that? And once it was noticed, wouldn't it reflect incredibly poorly on the Kims, their abilities as parents and as people? It's not like it wouldn't be completely obvious that wasn't a natural occurrence.

I have a feeling I know what you'll answer, but last choice guys. I'll give it an hour, then I'll start playing again.

Gonna earn that detective hat.

Hooo boy. Big climactic holy shit incoming.

EDIT: Whoops ninjaed.

For the record, you can eat without a tongue - especially if you don't lose the whole thing. And as for the husband... well, as long as he didn't kiss her on the lips, it'd be hard to notice. The typical procedure for the ship seems to be "lie back, spread your legs, and think of Space Korea". Not a lot of mutual participation, really.

You haven't let us down, Hyun-ae. You poor fucked up murder robot you.

IT FINALLY HAPPENED. Proper discussion of Analogue can now commence.

And no, obviously she hasn't let us down.

As for your questions: first of all, Hyun-Ae was pretty much revered for being so damn quiet. Like, women aren't supposed to speak much, but a woman just can't help opening her mouth sometime and so that's accepted, but here comes this woman who never talks and wow, isn't she just perfect! Everyone should be like her. For eating, I'm guessing women (probably everyone, but especially women) were expected to eat in such a prim and polite way that your tongue would never even be seen, and you probably didn't stare at women to see if they had tongues, either. And for her husband, he doesn't seem very observant, and I doubt loudness during lovemaking was seen as an especially positive trait, so he probably just assumed it was just her being perfect again. Also, even if you don't have a tongue you can still make noise, just not words. Not to mention it pretty much broke her into being obedient, so a simple command of "Don't let anyone find out about this or it'll disgrace your entire family." probably worked wonders.

E-
EVERY DAMN TIME.
EVERY TIME I DELURK.
IT'S TO THESE KINDS OF UPDATES.
FUCK.




*Hyun-ae.
Bby.
Of course you haven't ;_;

Oh I know you can eat, I meant more that meals are not usually taken alone and you'd think someone would notice that hey that girl doesn't have a tongue during the one definite time her mouth would be open in public.

EDIT: Ninja'j by Jacquelle. Makes some sense, but it still seems a little odd that no one in the palace noticed.

Saw that coming for a long time; didn't make it any easier to deal with. ;_;

ALL ABOARD THE "YOU HAVEN'T" TRAIN!

I vote "You haven't".

And now I'm going to spend a while over here. This game is certainly a ride.

Oh my.
Wait, wouldn't that cause you to-
On second thought, I don't think I want to discuss that particular issue.


As far as the whole 'how couldn't anyone tell?' bit, I agree with pretty much everything that Jacquelle typed.


Well, we've been pretty supportive of Hyun-ae thus far, so let's say that she let us down and see what happens :DDDD tell her 'you haven't'.

If you like, I could do both. Just to see.

Actually, even more than the "how did no one notice" bit, I'm confused by how she recovered so quickly and completely. An already sickly and dying girl treated to that much pain and emotional/mental stress at the same time? Wouldn't the shock have done a serious number on her?