just gettin bi

First up:

"WE WERE TALKING ABOUT YOU, NOT ME" is one of the stock responses of the 1964 therapy chatbot ELIZA. One of the world's first chatbots, it was programmed to always turn the conversation back to the user if they try to ask about her feelings. I made a longer comic about Caine and ELIZA here.

'If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do what is right, Sin lies at the door" is from the Book of Genesis. It's what God says to Cain, after Cain is upset that God did not favor his offering.

The poem Caine quotes here is Emily Dickinson's "The Grass has so Little to Do!" -- though he changes "a sphere of simple green" to "a plane of simple green," because he modeled grass with planes. It's a poem about wishing for an easier, simpler life, without obligations, where you can just enjoy the sunlight and the breeze. I thought it was relevant to Caine's schtick-- he is something that was created for a Purpose and had to Do things or get abandoned, and he's also someone who will never get to experience the simple joys of being in the real sunlight and feeling a real breeze.

"I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen/of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been" is from the Fellowship of the Ring. It is a poem written by Bilbo Baggins [you can find the full poem here.] Like a lot of old Bilbo's poems, it's about being done with 'adventures" and struggling to reflect on all you experienced. it's also about reflecting on the limits of your own experiences, now that your "adventures' are over. How do you accept there are some things you'll never get to see? Originally, the ''running bit" of this comic was going to be that Caine was exclusively making Tolkien references, because his training data pointed to it as a reference for fantasy.

The bit in red here is obviously Caine making a reference to the Book of Genesis again.

Genesis 4:5 is when the Lord does not look on Cain's offering with favor.

Another Tolkien reference! This is referencing the opening lines of Galadriel's song of Eldamar:

This song is sung by the Elven Queen Galadriel as she reflects on the long-lost elven home across the sea. In LOTR, the elves' magic is art-- they can create tremendous feats of magic through art and poetry and song. But I interpret this song as also being about the limits of art. Caine quotes the opening lines about how lovely it is to sing a lost world back into existence; he stops before he gets to the melancholy bits about how some things may be beyond your power to create or sustain, no matter how well you sing. Is there a way to just sing yourself to that other lost world? Or is that the one thing completely beyond your power? Anyway it felt Relevant[tm.]

Now, for the meat of the error messages! I'll split these up by poem/book vs by panel. One of the main threads that ties these poems together is that they're about the relationship between grass & death. I liked the idea that, as Caine breaks down, his mind frantically searches his training data for things that will explain grass to him- but it's affected by his emotional state, and drags up things that reflect his own deep-seated horrible fears.

The first throughline is the biblical story of Cain and Abel, from Genesis 4:1- 4:15. I had a discussion on the Cain/Caine paralells here. The big Thing I was going for was that Biblical Cain's punishment isn't being condemned to death-- it's being condemned to isolation, and cut off from the ability to create. After the soil opens its mouth to take his brother's blood, he is cut off from the ability to make things from the earth; cut off from the land & the grass. The specter of biblical Cain's punishment is hanging over Caine throughout the entire series. The isolation, being cut off from your creator, being a “fugitive and wanderer upon the earth,” being incapable of creating, being someone who is doomed to be treated with violence.

Another biblical reference:

This is a verse from 1 Peter 1:24- sometimes translated as "all people are like grass" and sometimes as "all flesh is like grass."

The second throughline is Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

It's a poem about a narrator trying to figure out what grass is, in the same way Caine is struggling to understand it. The poem's narrator ultimately sees it as a beautifully complex symbol for all the universal experiences of life & death that unite all of humanity together as one. The poem "hits differently" in the context of someone who is permanently cut off from those experiences. Lines that were written to be reassuring in a "circle of life" kind of way instead become ominous, lonely, and horrible. Being cut off from the land in the way that biblical Cain is also means that you're cut off from the beauty of these universal experiences, and only catch the horror of them.

This error message is also from Emily Dickinson's Grass has So little to Do, which Caine quoted earlier.

These error messages are from "Grass" by Carl Sandburg. This poem is about how all life ends in death, all wars end in death, and the grass grows over all. It's a similar sentiment to Walt Whitman's idea that grass is a symbol of the universal relationship between all of humanity, but far less reassuring.

This little error message is from In Tall Grass, by Carl Sandburg. it's about how the best 'winding sheet' he can imagine is being a skull lying in tall grass, with bees flying in and out of his bones. Something something I'll take Caine's love of bees and I'll make it horrible: "I wish I were capable of being like an actual living creature-- of dying in a field of grass and having bees make honeycombs in my skull."

Finally, while not a direct quotation: this entire bit is inspired by the moment in Return of the King where the One Ring tempts Sam with the idea that, if he just uses it, he can turn all of Mordor in a massive garden under his rule.

To quote what I said in a previous post- The One Ring takes something Sam loves and wants, and swells it into horrific incomprehensibility, because that kind of massive overwhelming power is all it's able to offer. We see later on that the Ring prevents Frodo from recalling "the taste of food, the sound of water, and the touch of grass-" there's something about the idea that the Ring can offer you this massive world-spanning dominion over others [even if it's only in the form of illusions and lies] but it can't ever truly give you the small things that you actually want. Because while it claims to be offering you all this power, it's not-- it's ignoring what you really want and trying to get you to fall in line with the things it can actually provide. The line "one small garden, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command" was one of the sorta guiding Ideas for this comic. I was generally picturing Caine in this moment as "what if the One Ring was just a pathetic little guy. And he wanted you to use him to become an all powerful warlord because he had abandonment issues. pwease". Last and silliest quote: