So back to this.
Suddenly, a cloud of metal appears and Jive-Talking-Robot hilariously runs away like a coward, because you know how those people are, haha, but you’re the racist if you complain!
Remember, he’s not black, he’s just written to talk in a black dialect while hitting checkbox after checkbox for wacky black sidekick while being drawn in a style marking him as subhuman.
Inspector Clane: HUMAN HUNTER continues to be awesome.
This would be a great moment for Whitey to prove he’s from a world of equality by similarly recognizing the scary swarm is going to hurt robots who are people and joining forces. But robots aren’t people, silly! So he doesn’t.
Ethnic Victim Lady explains this is the nanobot half of the singularity. It’s basically doing the grey goo thing, but no one involved in this comic understood what that actually is so it rips up robots but then glues together random chunks rather than actually eating them to create more of itself. Also, somehow this is “erasing machine selves” despite the fact it’s repeatedly depicted as just taking the outer covering and leaving the robot’s skeleton complete with head alone.
The best part about this stupid, stupid giant robot is that no, it’s actually not just so the main character can punch it. Punching doesn’t work because it’s just a pile of nanobots. It’s just because. It’s a comic book, therefore giant robots.
He gets punched a few times, then his wacky ethnic sidekick pulls him away to regroup with Ethnic Victim Lady who continues to provide for our deus ex machina needs. She explains that she can bring them to the free humans because her pet human got cancer and the robot overlords wouldn’t treat it.
Except robots also die! We just went through this in #0! Even if we assume that the dying earlier only refers to getting the body destroyed and then being downloaded into a new one despite how the characters treat it the thing they’re talking about as being as upsetting as actual death, one way or another there’s definitely a thing the robots call death that happens
What he should say is “mortal”. Robots can live forever while death is inevitable for humans, so having a lifespan at all separates us from them. Why bother fixing one thing when it’s just going to die of something else in a few decades? They obviously have some standards or they wouldn’t even bother feeding the babies, so this can’t be a philosophical argument. It’s probably a resource allocation thing.
Also a likely factor – Ethnic Victim Lady is certain they could fix it but has absolutely no facts to back this belief up. Why would the robot overmind know how to cure it if they never wanted to? The world we see when everyone turned into nanobot god looks a hell of a lot like our world, where childhood cancer is still pretty damn hard to treat, and they’re obviously at a lower tech level than that given that world could direct nanobots and all they have is a swarm that keeps building giant robots for no reason. But it makes them look way more evil if they have a cure and refuse to use it, so that’s what’s going on.
Anyway therefore obviously the solution was to send her dying teenage son to go live in the sewers because she figured the wild humans might cure her kid with their sewer tech!
Ethnic Sidekick decides now is a good moment for him to appease the comic book gods for his earlier betrayals by sacrificing himself to the swarm and helping Ethnic Victim Lady lead Whitey to the other humans, and immediately after successfully sacrificing himself, Whitey realizes he can just tell the swarm to stop swarming because he’s got robopowers.
 |
| Inspector Clane: HUMAN HUNTER is dubious about how “nano” these bots are. |
We end with Inspector Clane: HUMAN HUNTER asking where the guy went.
Ethnic Victim Lady continues to support Mr. Aryan and sacrifices herself this time just to register her intense disapproval DOUBLE CHECKMATE PC BITCHES.
But that’s just the end of the scene, not quite the book.
As you can see, the swarm skeletonized H8R but left the brain intact, allowing him to become a more perfect sidekick with no purpose but to make witty comments and one-liners. And yes, the visuals are identical for how they skeletonized the rest of the robots, totally contradicting the dialogue about how it destroys machine identity.
Mr. Aryan finds the free humans and their scifi guns, led by his imaginary wife. Meanwhile, Inspector Clane: HUMAN HUNTER is questioning robodad about why he released the insane nanobot swarm and he’s all “it’s so cute how dumb you are, that’s my favorite thing about humans!” and neither of them directly addresses the fact that the swarm eats robots and not humans so the question isn’t why the robot overlords are panicking and sending out something so dangerous for just one guy, it’s why would you send something that attacks robots to stop a human?
Why do they see him as a hero? Because of course there’s no way anyone look at Mr. Aryan and not instinctively know he was the hero of the story despite her pointing out on panel that there is no version of these events where he’s actually a hero.
She ends up settling in to sexy-read the book Our Hero dropped.
And we end with her laboriously sounding out ignorant because get it, she’s dumb and saying robots being in charge is good is only because she’s so ignorant she doesn’t realize what a terrible thing it is, but now she’ll realize Mr. Aryan was right and that true equality is a world where he owns robots and can kill them if they get uppity.
I need to come up with some song lyrics or something about stacking the deck that I can use every time there’s a “Minus, Aryan Superman” post. Of course, that leaves all the stuff where he’s obviously wrong/crazy/etc. and everybody (including the writer) who’s not coded “wrong” in 500 different ways kisses his ass anyway. There’s a different song for that:
Maria-Suse, Maria-Suse über alles,
Über alles in der Welt,
I notice that when sexy-reading, she still doesn’t remove those huge, ungainly things on her feet.
I noticed that, too. What, are they glued on?
Obviously she has robotic legs.
That’s why she works for robots in the first place: robotness of her legs affects her brain. There could be no other reason.
It looks like they’re attached to the leggings, which in turn merge seamlessly into the bodysleeve top, so…yeah, kinda. I think she has to strip to get them off.
The thing that bothers me the most about this is that she talks, reads, and presumably writes totally fine, yet is somehow baffled by the word “ignorant” which is pronounced exactly how it looks and isn’t particularly complex. “Ineptitude” and “synod”? Totally fine. “Ignorant”? WHAT IS THIS LANGUAGE YOU’RE SPEAKING.
Also wtf are those pants. They have like a bellybutton window. Or is it a jumpsuit? Who even knows.
Oh it’s not just “ignorant”, she’s sounding out a bunch of words on the page before. It’s just “lolz she’s dum”.
They have like a bellybutton window.
She coats herself in superglue before putting them on, to get that bodypaint look.
I just don’t understand how that’s possible! She’s a high-ranking woman in a tech utopia who is incredibly articulate, why would she not be literate?? Ugh.
Also, I think the title of this post is wong.
Well, I am sure it’s not the author’s intention, but you can rationalize it by assuming that English language has significantly changed in the future (which isn’t represented in the text for the sake of convenience), so she struggles with reading old books like people today struggle to read original Shakespeare.
Also, ‘irregardless’ is totally a word in the future.
A belly button wedgie, because the fabric seems to stick inside her bully button. Or she’s wearing body paint as clothing.
And we end with her laboriously sounding out ignorant because get it,
she’s dumb and saying robots being in charge is good is only because
she’s so ignorant she doesn’t realize what a terrible thing it is, but
now she’ll realize Mr. Aryan was right and that true equality is a world
where he owns robots and can kill them if they get uppity.
And if the comic hadn’t already been ham-handedly implying she would turn to the side of “good”, it would have completely destroyed her credibility as a villain right there. Also it’s nice of the comic author to make it seem like stupidity is a requirement for slaves. Let’s just ignore the fact that the majority of slavery in history has been a result of military conquest, disregarding the mental capabilities of the people who actually become slaves. But no, this is dystopic slavery, which is the result of giving the government too much power, so yes, you’d have to be an idiot to let them take so much control of your life.
edit: Jesus wait, maybe I’m an idiot and this has already been discussed, but why is the author equating black slavery, which got institutionalized in America after the military conquest of much of Africa by Europe, with the robot overlord slavery, which occurred because a bunch of humans thought it was a good idea to let robots control the government? Where’s the parallel here? Is it just the word “slavery?”
I think that for many people, there is exactly one type of slavery, which is “that thing which happened to black people”
Yeah, things that happen in American history tend to eclipse other things for people, I guess.
Two:
1) Historical black slavery, which was Very Wrong and Now Over Forever.
2) Future/AU slavery, which is black slavery but done to white people because that’s the scariest thing imaginable.
And that’s why Whitey won’t shut the fuck up about slavery.
Ah, yes, Karmic slavery.
which occurred because a bunch of humans thought it was a good idea to let robots control the government?
I don’t think it was even that close of a connection. It seems like the robots evolved and then started cloning humans to take care of. Humans are pets.
Oh, he’s trying to make a deep, subtle parallel to the time when the black population in America became large enough that the country no longer needed further shipments from Africa, because it could sustain itself. The cloning probably ended once the human population reached a similar size. Brilliant! edit: I actually don’t know if that happened before or after most European countries stopped slave-trading.