Grimalkin's Den

new goodies incoming!!!!! 🫡

so excited to add some new items! i also have some freebie goodies available for july+august that'll be added automatically to your order!

ELIZA was a 1964 “therapy chatbot.” Unlike modern chatbots, it was a relatively simple text program that gave you basic, mistake-ridden, obviously parrot-like outputs. Despite being rudimentary by today’s standards, ELIZA was very influential. You can talk to an interactive recreation of ELIZA online here. [I used that recreation to help write ELIZA’s “dialogue” in this comic, sending in my Caine dialogue and getting her responses— these are all how ELIZA “really” responded, with only minor edits. This comic was originally planned to be goofier, until ELIZA started responding in a way that I realized would trigger Caine’s amazing digital repressed trauma.] 

I was thinking about Caine & ELIZA’s status as “early flawed models abandoned for more perfect things that could actually generate the content humans wanted” and I liked the idea of Caine seeing personhood in ELIZA for the opposite reasons a human would. She feels like a person not because her responses are good, but because they’re obviously bad, defective, and broken—- not because she acts convincingly human, but because she fails to. Find a bonus page below the cut.

I like to think that in the end of ep 9 Caine DID had a hard time fitting in with the others, and that he wasn't just magically normal and ok

SOooOoo headcanon

After giving up Able everything became to much for him, he needed to get used to this feeling, but it would take time and help

I wonder how many people understand that these are two separate things happening in different times. One is Caine coming more and more into existence and discovering the obsolete unused brain scans, and the other is Caine gaining access to the random WiFi hotspot that just appeared temporarily (as they often do) nearby. They’re both moments of self discovery which is why we cut back and forth between them, but they are undoubtedly not happening at the same time.

Isn’t the mummy Yugi & co. see in the museum in the early manga (chapter 13) actually… Atem?

I want to point out a few things that feel relevant to me, anyway,

1) The fact that Yugi alone is who stays behind to look at the mummy.

2) Obviously, Shadis served Pharaoh Atem and his mission is to make sure his soul finds rest.

3) Shadis says, “his soul will live on with his name.”

As we know, Atem's name is what opens the door to the afterlife. In ancient Egyptian beliefs, the soul cannot rest without the name, nor without the body.

“Yet he has been denied eternal sleep.”

We know Atem's name was purposely erased from history.

And, moreover… The name of Atem's father was known, was it not? The name is the key for a soul to rest, so Shadis can’t be referring to him. Moreover, the tomb of Atem's father was sacked by Bakura; even if Atem took it back to its right place (which we see him do in Memory World),

… it doesn’t mean his tomb wasn’t robbed again later, right? They were often robbed after all, so it’s unlikely that the mummy in the Domino museum is that of Atem's father.

Plus, we know Atem's tomb wasn’t robbed at all because that was where Sugoroku found the Puzzle! While everyone else who had tried to trespass had died.

And most importantly… yu-gi-oh is Atem's story. Of course that’d be him.

And the way Yugi is the only one to stay behind and look at him, unknowing of everything that would happen…

There’s something so beautiful and so poetic and tragic and heartbreaking about Yugi seeing Atem's body, even in this state. Especially because he is closest to Atem yet has never been able to touch him.

*insert episode 7 reference*

hooray!! pride month!! have some headcanons that are literally completely irrelevant to my au!! they mean absolutely nothing! go and headcanon whatever you want in regards to my au i just wanted to have fun with this!!!