#buttonsuit

He might’ve asked how to go about that exactly. Maybe he’s awkward dealing with emotions. But he’d most likely try.

This irritates me both in a “you mean ALL that was standing between him and RAgatha bonding for the years and years and years she’s been there is her just ASKING for what she NEEDS” level

AND a

“she’s holding the guy who’s a piece of code who has never had a F%#KIN CHILDHOOD accountable as if he’s supposed to be a human, (and beyond that, although she’s not aware, somebody who was shoved in a box shortly after conception. She COULD HAVE BEEN AWARE, if JAX HAD PAID ONE OUNCE OF ATTENTION AS HE TALKED ABOUT IT) should be a parent that has it all together” (some traumatized parents LITERALLY pass their trauma to their kids via being emotional calloused, that ISN’T NECESSARILY EVEN AN AI RELATED THING) level

and also a

“You have multiple humans to ask for comfort, are you also pissed dismayed that THEY apparently never gave you comfort, and you’re taking that out on him, or did you particularly want it from Caine?” level

I really just find this another case of the writers not thinking about what they’re writing. If she was there for years and years and years and years with ///nobody/// but an older man who barely spoke, why WOULDN’T she actively try to make lots of effort to form a relationship to Caine????? like, even if the reasoning at first went “well he’s not a real person, but at least it’ll feel like some sort of companionship” like you would with a video game character or a Sims dating thingie, except MORE immersive

Besides.

All Kinger’s “wisdom” and “getting people through psychologically tight spots” and he couldn’t f%#kin facilitate a relationship between a DESPERATE and lonely AI that HE HIMSELF CREATED FROM THE GROUND UP and a WOMAN WHO HAD ONLY HIM FOR COMPANY???????

The Fix-It-Fics on platonic or romo ButtonSuit should be doing NUMBERS right about now.

Ragatha tries to get newcomers to understand he’s doing his best, but by not acknowledging their negative emotions and being relentlessly positive, she’s never successful at it.

She still feels super alienated, although she tries really hard to be grateful that she has Caine to hang out with, at least

Maybe it’s all even made worse because he relies so heavily on her positivity when people keep being unresponsive to his artistic efforts

If you wanna make it extra angsty, she thinks to herself, only an AI could look past my flaws. I’m too broken for humans

Or, maybe she's able to get friends, but she thinks it's only because she was able to talk him into easing up on the intensity of some of the adventures. They don't actually like her. They just like what she can do for them. (Partly tame the stubborn AI that has unilateral power in the place)

Maybe, alternatively, she never does get up the courage to be frank with him about how she feels about the adventures, but she nevertheless sees his pain about it

Or, can't bear to push him on it because she sees how it's linked to his experience of being scrapped and put into a box.

(Maybe he requires her not to tell other players about it, and since she can never be sure when he's watching or not, she can't.)

Maybe, if you wanted to play it this way, at the end of it all she gets exempted from the cartoon gag torment spree and feels awful about it, “survivor’s guilt” typa crap or externally, people resent her for being exempt. @nebula-award @egomouse @janigari

But canonically, this situation turning out this way just doesn't add up.

(Many commentators have noted she's, in canon, with that line, probably projecting her mommy issues onto him, and I can't help but agree.)

If canon!Kinger only views Caine as a program and not a person, this will all make sense. Heartbreaking. But intelligible.

all the fanon about the two will go up in smoke- but it will make SENSE.

If he DOESN’T THO, WTFFF WHY WOULD YOU KNOWINGLY INFLICT PROLONGED EMOTIONAL NEGLECT ON AN AI THAT HAS GODLIKE POWERS.

That's like the Poke the Bear trope with Zooble, but WAAAAAY WORSE. BECAUSE NOT ONLY HAS THIS BEEN GOING ON SINCE BEFORE THE YEAR 2000, HE'S YOUR RESPONSIBILITY SEEING AS HE’S YOUR CREATION.

Like when Zooble said “idk if we can properly gauge how he thinks” i was like “ok here comes Ragatha to tell them some stuff she pieced together over all that time”

NOPE

I think I am feeling some of that frustration that the people who got so worked up over Ragatha turning out not to be a main character felt.

But it’s WILDLY IRONIC that a human’s gesture to reassure another human is what may have doomed this ENTIRE thing.

That ONE bit of self-reflection by a human (Zooble beginning to take personal accountability for constantly aggravating Caine’s explicitly laid out pain point) might’ve had concerning him is effaced by the humans’ bonds with each other. He is the antagonist, he always was, right? There is no room for him in our group. He’s way too different.

Gangle’s reassurance to zem, while well-meaning, blocked off that personal growth moment.

Eerily, this may EXACTLY REFLECT what Zooble did with her in ep 4. Instead of taking accountability, apologizing to anyone, Gangle self-isolated, and then took Zooble’s reassurances to mean everything was ok. When we were shown next episode that everyone (except Pomni and Zooble) was VERY much still shaken up by Gangle’s overbearing behavior which was the only- and I mean sole- source of real conflict in that episode.

No apologies were made, just like Jax has never apologized for his behavior.

All of it is left unresolved, festering.

This episode, instead of truly having a heart-to-heart with her YEARS LONG abuser, Gangle perhaps feels forced by the situation with Caine to sit on her feelings and not ask for him to make it up to her, like he should.

Zooble could’ve continued that thought, perhaps concluded to try humbling zemselves (the worst he can do is throw more cartoon-gags at you, which would happen anyway, there’s LITERALLY nothing to lose here)

Meanwhile, the other shots that Caine had at connecting with the humans were aborted by pure circumstance.

JAX was totally tuned out when he TOLD him and SHOWED him how //utterly desperate// he was to “just hang out” with someone.

I keep coming back to, if ANYYYYYY of the other characters had been invited to that dinner, ALLLL of this would’ve been avoided.

Pomni would have asked him questions. Noticed the desperation. She’s already bonded with an AI in ep 2, RECOGNIZED that he has emotions. @vrucrowave

Gangle would’ve been quiet, nodding along, finally giving him space to talk to someone instead of force his ringmaster role.

Ragatha might’ve had it sink in that she had been here longest, RELIED THE HEAVIEST ON HIS WORK TO STAY SANE, (per the pilot) he had been here this WHOLE time, and she’d never had ONE real conversation with him.

The green one, therefore, appears to “cover up” the red underneath. As in. Thematically, to me, this means that’s he’s “hiding” his real self, and presenting the part of himself that he thinks is more acceptable to humans, via his creators’ quite stark feedback of shoving him into a box.

(ie the blue AI is still in there. As a combination. I think it’s pretty doubtful that Bubble is the Blue Dot, the common fanon)

It’s very usual in the fandom to place the Red Dot in his chest, which is fine as an artist rendition, artistic liberty, but it seems pretty clear to me that if the Red Dot is anywhere on his person, it’s simply his eye. That which he perceives input from, what received his very first visual data from the real world.

It would be an interesting idea if his vision out of each eye was somehow slightly different.

Or maybe he has no depth perception, either because he chooses to only see out of one set of AI code, (be it his native one or the one he thinks he ‘should’ be using- “I fixed that!”) or as a last ‘screw you,’ the Blue Dot said ‘nuh uh, you’re gonna be blind in one eye. Deal with it.’

Would depth perception even work the same way in the circus … maybe Ragatha’s vision is perfectly fine because unlike the real world, there aren’t molecules that are bouncing light off of objects and into your eyes, all objects are just a facsimile and hold their own lighting data like an art program that simply exists and is beamed to your uploaded mind directly.

If the ‘Blue Dot screw you’ idea were true, his brief, blink-and-you-miss-it generating of multiple eyes in ep 6 when he says “Teeeeam Adventure!” may be a momentary alleviation of having only one functional eye, and when he did it in his antagonist song, too. Maybe he understands that it’s scary to those pesky humans, but it also gives him some relief from imposed body dysmorphia that can’t be strictly fixed because he has a default appearance that can’t be modified indefinitely.

Just like he can’t mod the humans’ minds for too long and/or too extremely.

(Are we gonna get clarification on that???)

Since his abilities include all seeing eyes, maybe sticking them in his own face really does feel more natural than the humanlike arrangement, somehow.

Come to think of it. I would think that the all seeing eyes take perfect camera visuals on their own, would not need to be paired, because we always see them as lone objects, so that depth perception idea’s probably squarely fanon, then.

And the idea that everything has lighting data prevails.

Anyway. Speculations aside.

I don’t know why I only just got around to confirming this eye color arrangement, because I’ve definitely had enough ideas for art that would somehow blend the two eye states (red sclera, green iris & blue sclera, light blue iris being one) so have thought about double-checking a lot, but it’s probably just the ADHD executive dysfunction again.

I thought for a while there that blow to the psyche that was that animatic that resulted in the Not Human Enough? oneshot fic would be enough to finally shake me out of my usual mental hangups about visual art, but … oops.

Me: COTTAGECORE RAGATHA!!

*Caine finally takes the hint about “chill adventures” and uses Ragatha’s backstory as inspiration to build a farm simulator

*Kinger is more than happy to trounce Jax at bullriding for his “adventures with more bite” fix