On the subject of Star Trek and the immortal soul, I will never get over how funny it is that Vulcans scientifically proved that Vulcans have souls but didn’t bother to see if anyone else does

@phictionofgrandeur2387

10 ай бұрын

Pretty funny.

@shadowldrago

10 ай бұрын

I would assume that if Vulcans demonstably have souls, it would be a logical assumption that other sapient species who are no less real, would ALSO have a soul.

@Jack-sy8mr

10 ай бұрын

In _Voyager_ they also maybe prove the Klingon afterlife is real

@unironicallylikesranger7122

10 ай бұрын

@@Jack-sy8mr the episode was vague if that was actually the barge of dishonoured dead or if Belana was having a deathbed hallucination over her unresolved issues with her mom

@Jack-sy8mr

10 ай бұрын

@@unironicallylikesranger7122 yes, “maybe”. They later mention that her mother did die while they were in the Delta quadrant, so if it was same day then the Barge seems to be real

I initially read “Brutish invaders” as “British invaders” and didn’t even bat an eye

@LexYeen

10 ай бұрын

thesearethesamepicture.mp4

@redline841

10 ай бұрын

The Eternal Angloid

@maxsalmon4980

10 ай бұрын

It's an older code, but it checks out.

@Ethan-cz8xq

10 ай бұрын

Same

@Mxnogsteedsmoe

10 ай бұрын

same

She didn't mention the part where Data is offered to be made into an actual human, but refuses, apparently because actual huamns don't know what it is to be human, so it wouldn't help his philosophically driven quest. Interesting angle

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

worst trade deal ever

@ckl9390

10 ай бұрын

A decision founded on sound logic.

@GSBarlev

9 ай бұрын

Have you seen _Picard_ S03? I have *strong feelings* on this point, but if you haven't watched it, I don't want to spoil anything.

@fullmoontales1749

9 ай бұрын

I haven't seen that one

@GSBarlev

9 ай бұрын

@@fullmoontales1749 I hesitate to recommend _Picard_ even /especially if you, like me, grew up with TNG. The showrunner is an absolute hack (and I don't use that term lightly), but it does have its crowning moments of awesome throughout its three season run. All I will say is that Brent Spiner does return (as different characters) for all three seasons and that Data's legacy is felt throughout.

As a nerodivergent person we have a huge issue about personhood that its basically not about how internally human you are but how you outwardly express it. Most don't really care if a living thing is experiencing pain or grief if they cannot see that in outward expressions. Data as was pointed out experiences lots of emotions, but since he doesn't express them how others do he's viewed as not human. Data isn't alienated for not being human, hell this is a spaceship full of aliens, or for not having feelings. He's alienated because he doesn't smile, or laugh, or cry. Because we treat a person who doesn't show those outward displays as not feeling them. An inverse of the philosophical zombie

@notlurking2128

10 ай бұрын

I would argue that it's not that he *doesn't* cry or laugh, but more that others perceive him as *bad at it*, or """fake""" in one way or another when he does it. This is seen especially in the data's girlfriend episode, where he is perceived by others as kind of just going through the motions of having a girlfriend, rather than him having an actual desire for a spouse. I think in that episode especially it's kind of highlighted that one of Data's actual major problems is that he *thinks he's inferior to humans*, and because of that he defers to them on any feelings, even if it's how he himself """feels"""". I also think that this is why Neurodiverse people and especially autistic people relate to him so much. When you see a character that himself thinks is inferior for "having a part missing (just, think about the association with autism and the missing puzzle piece)", and they go on to have amazing adventures and make friends and find family reguardless of the "missing piece", its comforting

@anna_in_aotearoa3166

10 ай бұрын

Honestly, for me a lot of these storylines that explore "humanity = X" (having a soul, feeling &/or displaying certain emotions, doing or not doing certain things around respecting the dead/dietary rules/spirituality, etc) often feel rather queasily like they are trying to disqualify certain subsections of existing humanity due to difference, rather than prove the category "human" itself may not be all that important apart from as a biological clade... ? It's probably just poor/lazy writing by authors rather than malicious intent, but does bring to mind all the far too many historical instances where one group of humans has dehumanizing another based on race, religion & greed 😵 A very uneasy space...

@BerylLx

10 ай бұрын

Lesson of the Day: Communication is always key.

@polishane8837

10 ай бұрын

I really like this comment, humans seem to be so focused on the show of consciousness rather than asking if it's there. If it doesn't do the song and dance of social interaction it must be not conscious. I think this is best explored through the AI Apocalypse genre, since most people don't consider the robot horde to be conscious, as it doesn't outwardly show it to the audience or the survivors in most cases. We don't know how the AI works, but we are quick to dismiss it as just a corrupted programme

@osirisatot19

10 ай бұрын

Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen is treated the same way.

One of my favorite things about Data is Brent Spiner(his actor) has said he's glad he didn't learn how autistic people connected to him until after the show ended. He feels they would have added stereotypical traits of autistic people that are now outdated or offensive. But since they didn't know how certian people connected to him, Data was just himself and the audience loved him *edit for mispelling

@gmofkings

10 ай бұрын

That is amazing

@insane_troll

10 ай бұрын

Brent Spiner

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

he should have added stereotypical traits of autistic people that are now outdated or offensive.

@stug6974

10 ай бұрын

​@@channel_lurker We get it, you want attention. Here you go. Don't go spending it all at once, now.

@basementdwellercosplay

10 ай бұрын

@@insane_troll stupid autocorret

The best part of Trope Talk is when I have no idea what the trope is until Red starts to explain it and then I think of some examples.

@mohammedbologi5388

10 ай бұрын

Same bruh

@daryldandridge9818

10 ай бұрын

I thought I was the only one

@TheShanicpower

10 ай бұрын

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use the term Lancer for the best friend archetype other than Red, but she uses it all the time.

@caliburn8987

10 ай бұрын

Same

@LuisSierra42

10 ай бұрын

Fullmetal Alchemist is an example in this case since the homunculus did not aspire to be humans

I love how Red uses a treatise on the human condition and how persecution comes about to lead into talking about funny puppet child

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

yes, i also love persecution

@rasmusn.e.m1064

10 ай бұрын

It's a sandwich where the bread is the stuff you need to digest and the filling is Pinocchio.

There really is a whole other layer to these stories if you're neurodivergent. The parallels between "If I just act neurotypical enough, maybe I'll be treated as a person" and "If I just act Good (TM) enough, maybe the Blue Fairy will give me a soul". The way the stories where the non-human character realises they were worthy of personhood all along always resonated with me more. The fact that Ariel doesn't go to the sea-witch immediately after dredging up a hot boy to crush on, but after her father loses his shit about her special interest and makes it clear that having a supportive home life is incompatible with being herself, and how infuriated it makes me that everyone smugly interprets the moral of the story as "lol change for your man". The way Amalthea in The Last Unicorn starts to forget who she is after masking for so long because she would be mistreated if her true nature was known.

@markcochrane9523

10 ай бұрын

"If I just act neurotypical enough, maybe I'll be treated as a person" That was painful to process, but you're absolutely right. It's like in Blood and Wine when Regis explains being a vampire in a human's world as being at a stuffy court banquet forever, having to be polite and make small talk while wearing an uncomfortable outfit, and if you ever break character, ever scratch where the stitching on your shirt makes you itch, everyone calls you a monster and rips you to shreds.

@comradestannis

10 ай бұрын

Yeah, I'm autistic and I get this.

@lorelynn2822

10 ай бұрын

I’ve been unsure about whether or not I’m autistic for a while, but seeing and relating to so many stories that hit so hard with other neurodivergent people really has helped me come to terms with the fact that I likely am. Your analysis was spot on.

@comradestannis

10 ай бұрын

@@lorelynn2822 Get a psych eval if you want an official diagnosis.

@aros0018

10 ай бұрын

My Hero Academia is going for something similar with one of its villain characters Himiko Toga, and lately I've been seeing a lot of people really misinterpreting what the story is doing with the conflict between her and Uraraka, basically trying to claim that the story is saying "It's okay that you're a serial killer because you had a sad backstory", which is absolutely not what's happening. Toga as a child, at least from as young as 4 years old, had an interest in blood because it was part of how her Quirk (MHA's version of superpowers) worked. Consuming blood to transform into another person. The important thing to not is that her fascination was with blood specifically, not killing. She had never actually hurt anyone or anything. The first thing she ever actually did drink blood from was a dead bird that she had found, not injured or killed herself. However when she tried to show her parents the bird and how "pretty" its blood looked they immediately freaked and started treating her like a monster, not believing her when she said she didn't kill it and even calling her a demon child over the creepy way she smiled, despite the fact that she was doing it while also crying her eyes out over being screamed and yelled at when she didn't know what she did wrong, because, you know, she was FOUR. Her parents and the Quirk councilors they sent her to put a lot of pressure on her to be normal but all it basically was teaching her to repress and hide her "abnormal" tendencies and act like an ideal young school girl expected of society. No attempts were ever actually made to empathize or understand Toga and why she had that interest in blood, just scorn and asking her why can't she just be "normal"? She didn't understand why people would do the things that they do, or why what she does is wrong, just that it apparently is wrong and she must always hide and be ashamed of it. When a friend of her was hurt and bleeding Toga even sucked on the injury because, in her mind, it was a way of showing she cared and that she was trying to help them, which again led to her parents freaking out and saying she must be rotten to the core despite, again, Toga not having hurt ANYONE and in fact what she was doing was something she thought would help someone. Because her fascination with blood was never properly addressed or allowed to be expressed and dealt with in a healthy manner Toga grew up with a fixation on blood that over time began to warp and become something a lot more like an obsession. When she saw a boy at her school beaten and bloody from a fight she even thought she had a crush on him because of how mixed up and messy her feelings about blood had become along with her simply not understanding the how and why of typical interactions and relationships that everyone else seemed to understand so easily. From four years old to near the end of middle school Toga faked being the "normal" girl she believed she was supposed to be until one day she did finally just snap, literally attacking the boy she thought she liked and drinking his blood with a straw, where after she went on the run and basically became a serial killer. Kind of like the Ariel example, Toga didn't start killing and hurt people immediately upon developing and interest in blood and finding it pretty but rather after several years in an environment where it was not safe for her to express that interest or talk to anyone about it. It warped her mentality and led to her going down and embracing a very bad path because it seemed to be the only available to her to be even somewhat happy and herself. The series and characters in it repeatedly make it clear that her backstory does not justify all the people she's hurt and killed but the reason Uraraka is able to get through to her is because she actually gives Toga genuine empathy and attempts to understand her. She gives her someone to talk to and express honestly how she feels about blood and her life and why she feels the way she does. Uraraka outright states she can't just brush off the murders Toga has committed but she gets through to her by treating her like an actual person rather than a monster, even getting her to cry happily when she tells Toga that the very smile her parents said made her look like a demon child makes her look like the cutest in the world. She won't let Toga continue with what she's been doing but she will give her the help and understanding she needs. MHA's basic mindset regarding most of its main villains I think can be summed up as "Your pain does not justify the pain you inflict upon others, but your pain IS still valid."

Fun Fact: For Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio, composer Alexandre Desplat had all the instruments for the recording sessions to his score be made of wood.

@SobiTheRobot

10 ай бұрын

It's a tiny touch, but appreciated after the fact all the same

@PoisonFlower765

10 ай бұрын

Nice.

@LuisSierra42

10 ай бұрын

They do really put a lot of work in the movies by Del Toro. Seeing the behind the scenes for that movie made me realize the amount of effort that was required for the movie to look so flawless

@Rusty84CV

10 ай бұрын

No he didn't

@j.stanley1669

10 ай бұрын

@Rusty84CV Which instruments weren't made of wood?

2022, the year with the most Pinocchios

@kowo1610

10 ай бұрын

I cant See your nose so i don't Know If That is a lie

@mrtrollnator123

10 ай бұрын

Bruh istg there's like 4 pinnochio movies on that year alone 💀

@theanimeunderworld8338

10 ай бұрын

​@@kowo1610well there was the stop motion one, that one with polly shore, Disney live action and the cameo in Puss in Boots 2

@kowo1610

10 ай бұрын

​​@@theanimeunderworld8338ik it was meant as a Joke. I think i should have mad That clearer.

@bunnywaffles1190

10 ай бұрын

​@theanimeunderworld8338 there was also Lou Wilson playing Pinnochio in Neverafter on Dimension 20.

An interesting facet of the "humans are feelings" element is that it's relatively modern--alot of earlier authors said what made humans human was the ability to reason, or farm and deliberately cultivate things, or other ideas. The Sumerians even had a big list of "what makes someone a real boy"!

@iso320

10 ай бұрын

That’s interesting, probably because back then it was “human or animal” or some other natural thing? Animals have feelings all the time, and humans like to act cool because we think we have more reason. But in modern times a lot of stories are asking about “human or computer”. It’s a tough competition for reason, but we can act cool because we have feelings.

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

im feeling mean today, but human? nah

@Broomer52

10 ай бұрын

Judeo-Christian religions also had something like that but it was more esoteric and thoroughly misinterpreted. “Man was made in the image of God” this doesn’t mean God looks like us. They describe him a few times and it’s very clear he looks nothing like us. What they mean is The Spirit. Every human being is a reflection of his qualities but it was tainted because they were given wisdom without knowledge. Aka we comprehend the world but don’t understand it. Essentially what makes Humans … human are the ability to forgive, the ability to care, the ability to analyze, the ability to categorize and organize, to philosophize and unify and what makes human and not a perfect reflection of God is our short sightedness, our ability to lie and our stubbornness. Essentially while we have many good qualities we’re too focused on ourselves and egos that we willingly blind ourselves to aspects of the world. Considering I’ve had many conversations that boiled down to: they wouldn’t believe he was real even if he came down today so that rings true to me

@naolucillerandom5280

10 ай бұрын

​@@Broomer52 so the real punishment was the 2 am existential dread :D

@aquamarinerose5405

3 ай бұрын

@@Broomer52 Wouldn't it be Knowledge without Wisdom?

The "I want to be human and do human things" trope is so well done in Fmab with Alphonse Elric. We know of magical creatures with amazing abilities wanting to be ordinary humans and that is eye-rollingly bland. But to have an ordinary human stripped off his physical body and essence and trapped in an empty suit of armor, desperate to return and feel the breeze on his face is truly tragic.

@fordgt5383

9 ай бұрын

Personally i feel like the "magical creature wants to be an ordinary person" can be very compelling as a trope, there's a certain bliss in being able to feel like everyone else, that you don't have to carry the weight of the world on your back

@halkyuusen8626

9 ай бұрын

Maybe Al just wants to stop being seen as a walking testament to hubris and failure?

@bibbobella

9 ай бұрын

​@@halkyuusen8626No, that part he isnt actually all that ashamed of. Yes, it is clear both brothers are VERY regretful about their actions, but he isnt doing it for himself. He wants his body back, but he is willing to give it up to save lives several times. The true reason he want his body back, is because it hurts his brother. It is the driving force behind their mission, but the one that gets hurt by seeing that metal suit the most is Ed. That is why the happy ending still have ed lacking a leg. His body parts dont really matter that much to the story in on itself.

@nataliapanfichi9933

8 ай бұрын

​@@fordgt5383humanoid creature that wants to experience a real life and was made to replace the dead child of the creator variant: astroboy and Constance the main character in the clockmakers daughter musical. Both are basically robo Pinocchio style clones of a dead son/daughter of an obsessive reclusive dude.

@Puckosar

7 ай бұрын

I don't know man, seems like a sweet gig. Never feel fatigue, discomfort, pain, hunger or thirst. You don't need water, food or sleep. You're completely immune to all disease. You can still see and hear normally and have enough sensation to move your body unrestricted and manipulate things without crushing them. If I could trade my body for a suit of armor like that I think I'd take it honestly.

"I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.” ~Mewtwo

@angeldude101

10 ай бұрын

I love how _Mewtwo_ of all characters has become such a famous philosopher.

@alzoruledura7416

10 ай бұрын

Hi, Bys!

@Bysthedragon

10 ай бұрын

@@alzoruledura7416 Hi Al! I don't know how but my Comment blew up here

@Eggsolotl

10 ай бұрын

Mew in the background: *confused cat noises*

@Gloomdrake

10 ай бұрын

@@Eggsolotl Mew just wanted to show Mewtwo a really high vantage point, because cats love those, but Mewtwo got all philosophical about it

I appreciate hearing Red state the difference between sentience and sapience correctly and point out how modern media is using the wrong term when it comes to these plots.

@meeperdudeify

10 ай бұрын

Can you find where's the timestamp? I'm lazy

@bluetorcher5544

10 ай бұрын

@@meeperdudeify11:50

I love how your description of Del Toro's Pinnochio -- created as a replacement for a dead child, rejected by his creator, becomes more than his origins, etc. -- is basically Astroboy. Or at least his origin story.

@phastinemoon

24 күн бұрын

You say that, because the original Astroboy was BASED off of Pinnochio (possibly even the Disney version)

"The price you pay to be recognized as a human being is to sell off the hours of your precious mortal life in service to a moneymaking machine that'd just as readily swamp you out for any other cog. If you want to be seen like an individual, you have to stop acting like one." That just hit me out of nowhere, very unexpected (positive)

@Tigersight0

10 ай бұрын

When she said "...moneymaking machine that'd just as readily swap you out for any other cog," I immediately thought she was going to follow with, "If you want to be seen as a *PERSON*, you have to *STOP ACTING LIKE ONE*." Because that would have fit both the metaphor she was making with businesses/people as machines, and relate back to the whole concept of personhood too. But she wound up going a different route with the line. XD

@Joni_Tarvainen

10 ай бұрын

That caught my attention too and I had to come check the comments if anyone else did too. I remember asking my dad at the very early age (6 or 7) that "Is the meaning of life to just study until you're capable to continue your studies, so you can get yourself a job which to do until you're able to buy yourself a coffin to rest in?" and my dad thought about it for like 5 seconds muttered with his overly stoic manner simply "In short, yes.". I'm pretty damn sure that day defined my attitude for life and decided to be an individual, no matter what anyone else thinks of it.

@Wince_Media

9 ай бұрын

It's funny how I stumbled across this comment just as Red was speaking out this quote in video

@williamerickson520

7 ай бұрын

Isn't industrialization great? 🙃 btw it's swap, not swamp.

@Novictus

5 ай бұрын

It's funny how if all the cogs didn't do their job they wouldn't get any of the benefits of living where all those jobs were done..... It's almost like basically everything it's not that simple.

I just thought about the last unicorn, when she was transformed into a human and she freaks out because she can feel her body dying since she is not immortal anymore. And in the end when she is finally a unicorn again how she realized how much she changed because of this expirence.

@gota7738

10 ай бұрын

I like that she didn't seem to "stay" a human "on the inside" when she turns back into a Unicorn. Amalthea is gone and now there is a Unicorn who has experienced mortality, attachment and loss. The book doesn't even posit this as specifically human but rather focus on them as experiences many beings share in, including now a unicorn. I liked that.

@j.stanley1669

10 ай бұрын

@gota7738 I love the Last Unicorn so much for this and many other reasons. Especially how Molly Grue's first reaction upon seeing her was just to cry and demand "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!" As if she'd been waiting so long to see one and she'd realized how her assumptions had amounted to nothing in the end, then Molly forgave the unicorn (and/or apologized for yelling at her/venting lol) and became one of her best companions. IDK! So much of that book stuck with me and I read it because I watched the movie first. There aren't any other books quite like it; it seems typical but it's truly unique. Edit: So is the movie; it's a pretty faithful adaptation overall, they only changed or left out a few things. 💖

@xRaiofSunshine

10 ай бұрын

@@j.stanley1669Same hat same hat 😭 🤝

@Jikkuryuu

10 ай бұрын

@@j.stanley1669 That was one of those moments that made no sense and actually annoyed/bored me as a child, only to hit me like a ton of bricks when I was also old enough to mourn the lost potential of my youth. Three cheers for animated movies that "painted with dark colours."

@NobodyC13

10 ай бұрын

She 's no longer the last unicorn, but she's now the only unicorn that knows of love . . . and regret.

Red actually unpacked this trope a little bit in her comic. Where the question is “do you actually want to be something else or do you just want to be treated with kindness for what you are?” It really resonated with me as a neurodivergent gay. Go read Aurora if you haven’t btw

@SoraiaLMotta

10 ай бұрын

😢 great frase

@flamingpi2245

10 ай бұрын

Falst ❤

@semaj_5022

10 ай бұрын

I've been wary of reading the comic out of an unfounded fear I might not like it. I love fantasy stories and Red is super dope, so I'm not sure why. I don't know if it's because I've never read something written by someone I was already familiar with, or if it's because I'm sort of the opposite of Red(mostly hetero dude with a..high.. libido) and I'm worried I won't relate to the characters, even though I'd expect Red to be a great character writer. I don't know what it is. But my point is the line you quoted here may be the thing that finally convinces me to read the damn comic. Lol so thanks for that!

@nathankurtz8045

10 ай бұрын

@@semaj_5022 I highly recommend it

@bluesbest1

10 ай бұрын

@@semaj_5022 I'm like you, so none of the characters really relate to me, but Red is such a good storyteller that that doesn't really matter. There's no romance or established relationships outside parents or siblings, but that doesn't subtract anything. If nothing else, it's a chance to see a bunch of Red's Original Artwork, which is gorgeous, and watch her discover her own style.

I would say another subversion of the Pinocchio plot is the Velveteen Rabbit, where the Rabbit's 'realness' is defined by how much he's valued by the Boy. The fairy basically tells him 'You're Real because you're loved' and that stuck me as a kid

@GSBarlev

9 ай бұрын

Have you seen the _Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal_ comic where the Velveteen Rabbit learns about coprophagia?

@liamannegarner8083

23 күн бұрын

@@GSBarlev I CAN HEAR ORGANS MOVING INSIDE YOU

The Iron Giant is my favourite example of the Pinocchio Plot, making Pinocchio a gigantic killer robot and turning it into a big friendly one melts my heart for what happens with it. In the end, he really was just like Superman.

@ruthlesace

7 ай бұрын

That is one way to interpret the best selling anti gun advertisement.

The original Pinocchio story was written at a time before the Nuclear Family was so prevalent in most of the world: A society where most families had a communitarian structure where children lived most of their lives with their parents, siblings, and relatives. In that context, Pinocchio being a literal puppet until he goes outside the family to get an education, learn work ethic, and form a morality structure is a pretty straight-across mirror to a kid engaging with institutions outside of his family for the first time, gaining the skills required to be independent, and going out to start his own family. In the modern context, Pinocchio's immortality is like somebody never growing up and continuing to live with their parents well past adulthood. It's not a mistake that Pinocchio becomes human like his father, and assumably also becomes able to reproduce. In Pinocchio, humanity is adulthood.

@youtubeuniversity3638

10 ай бұрын

I. E., "Children aren't human"?

@starmaker75

10 ай бұрын

I always thought another moral of the story was that don't be duped and an dick. Always be on guard and take the moral path. Given the story was made during a time in Italy where it was still pretty common for kids to kidnap and easily take advantage by shady people.

@ironraccoon3536

10 ай бұрын

@@youtubeuniversity3638 It's depressing, but depending on the time and place, you might hear people say "yes." Some considered women more like property of their husbands than any sort of free moral agents, so children weren't even on the map in that worldview until they grew up, got married off, and got their own property.

@cedartheyeah.justyeah.3967

10 ай бұрын

Fun fact: modern Italy still works like that, (first paragraph of your comment) but that's why they got hit so hard by Covid in early 2020.

@Shapeshifting_Nerd

10 ай бұрын

​@@youtubeuniversity3638from what I understand of many older stories and myths about children... That is apparently what a lot of PPL concluded. Obedience to a system outside of ur control and being an active member of that system was seen as the minimum requirement for being a person deserving of personhood, and children were by default not contributing on their own merit but rather as an extension of their parents and thus it is only once they cease that for example, in say a society where child marriage happens, girls became women and therefore PPL when they got married and thus took on a more contributory rule in the perpetuation of society aka baby making

My very favorite example of this is Death from discworld. He cares so deeply about humans, but on some level, doesn't know *how* to do that. In various books, we see him learning varying elements of humanity: mortality, loss, dance and friendship and care. But in some sense he has to give them back, because he *is* Death. If he stops being Death, then best case there is no Death and the whole world falls out of whack, and worst case someone else becomes Death who is worse at it. At times his story is profoundly sad, because you really get the sense that he'd be a lot happier as a cook or a farmer with dozens of cats. But ultimately, he never remains "human," always returning to his duties as an Anthropomorphic Personification. Because humans deserve a Death that knows what humanity means. As he says, “What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?”

@isitnotwrittenthat1680

10 ай бұрын

Honestly one of my favorite aspects of discworlds death is that he knows he's not human, that he's only really mimicking thongs he doesn't need or understand, and continues to do so anyway.

@archivist_13

10 ай бұрын

Another reason I need to read Discworld

@florofern6470

10 ай бұрын

Omg yes, death is one of my favourite characters in the discworld ☺

@michimatsch5862

10 ай бұрын

"Is this fun?"

@isitnotwrittenthat1680

10 ай бұрын

The bit he has about tea and soap done with the same herb as "clean on the inside and the outside? Interesting"

Come on Red, you had to drop the words "ultimate life-form" at the end and now I have to rewatch all the episode to think about how this applies to Shadow the Hedgehog and his relationship with hedgehoghood.

@daviddaugherty2816

10 ай бұрын

"Hedgehoghood"... now there's a word you don't expect to see in the wild.

@mishiwishu7823

7 ай бұрын

On 15:26 the last thing on the list is “gotta go fast”. I think you’re on to something

Fun fact about me; I cannot recognize or distinguish between most human faces, the exceptions being faces with very stand-out features, and faces I'm very familiar with, like my parents or my brother. I'm not sure if this is because of undiagnosed prosopagnosia (face blindness) or if it's a result of my visual impairment that I just didn't notice until middle school because the group of people I was around until then didn't change very much or have many people in it and I didn't really have to distinguish between them because I had very few friends in elementary school. It's a weird situation and I honestly just find it funny that I didn't notice it for years.

@RoninCatholic

10 ай бұрын

I have face blindness despite having excellent vision. I used to have like four co-workers I could swear were identical, but two of them claimed to be twins and I'm still not sure if they were joking while the other two seemingly had no relation. Plus dozens of slim blonde women who worked in the other parts of the restaurant with high turnover, I never even learned most waitresses' names in my twelve total years working in the food industry.

@jpivarski

10 ай бұрын

I was very surprised by the ending of the movie _Heat_, because I couldn't distinguish between Robert de Niro and Al Pacino. I thought it was a movie about a cop coming to terms with his inner demons, but nope! One was a cop, the other a criminal.

@cam4636

10 ай бұрын

@@jpivarski De Niro's the one with the dot on his face, I had to learn that too

@hope1447

10 ай бұрын

Jane Goodall Has the same issue.

All the Data pics reminded me of the TNG episode when Q became human as punishment. Basically everyone treated him badly, except Data whom was essentially his humanity “tutor.” When Q was reintegrated to the Q continuum, he wanted to pay Data back for his kindness (not even gonna unpack that part). And Data immediately told him not to make him human. What a way to express how the Android had learned of human autonomy and will and the spirit of exploration that was the entire point of the show.

@theflotingheadproduc

10 ай бұрын

Loved that moment, especially the way Q reacted to Data saying he didn't want to be human. (Similar thing happened in a different Q related episode involving Riker!)

@cybersearcher1041

10 ай бұрын

The best part of that was immediately after, Q smiles, nods, then as he leaves, Data bursts out into such a full laugh even he us surprised.

@jasonreed7522

10 ай бұрын

That episode also had the scene where Q didn't know what hunger was and was confused by the pain and eventually collapsed from it, while not as thematically significant as the ending, it was pretty funny. The episodes other meaning was to teach the golden rule, explicitly to Q, but also to the crew of the Enterprise. Many of whom were taking advantage of their godly tormenters fall to humanity. (This seems like a companion trope to Pinocchio Plots, instead of trying to become human, forcibly being "demoted" to human and the consequences of that)

Growing up ND I always wondered why monsters wanted to be human, when being human seemed much less enjoyable then being a monster.

@AmberMaytions

10 ай бұрын

Well that explains why when I was little I always wanted to be a dragon. Well, not that I don’t anymore, it’s still a cool idea, but it’s not exactly attainable lol.

@Sushiman118

10 ай бұрын

Garou-ass mofo over here. But also, same.

@real_nosferatu

10 ай бұрын

The same reason women with straight hair want to curl it and women with curly hair want to straighten it

@phictionofgrandeur2387

10 ай бұрын

​@@real_nosferatuand long/short

@phictionofgrandeur2387

10 ай бұрын

I've always wanted to be a Phoenix

Me watching Data and other characters who don't have typical romantic or sexual desires as a teenager: haha these characters are so interesting and relatable. Me as an adult: heywaitafuckingminute-

@Skrill99

10 ай бұрын

AroAce Moment lol

@CryptidMech

10 ай бұрын

You're ill

@danielfiene7770

10 ай бұрын

Same here, but for autism :D

@comradestannis

10 ай бұрын

I like agender and asexual characters.

@GSBarlev

9 ай бұрын

I'm curious on your take regarding _Strange New Worlds_ and "Hot Spock." I feel like the retconning showing his passionate relationship with T'Pring was a pretty bold move, and I'm personally feeling a lot of discomfort at the indications that they're taking the the current (S02) arc to explain, "And that's how Spock *became* aromantic."

Oooh, I actually have a good one to say here! Particularly because the line at 14:30 really struck a chord with me. So, in my mid-teens, my doctor suggested trying antidepressants for the cocktail of various disorders we had been trying to properly medicate me for for years. I wanted to be more productive in school and had already tried so many other things to be a more functional human being that just never worked, so I agreed to try it out. What I gained instead was something totally different. It's hard to describe, because I definitely felt emotions before that, but suddenly, it felt like I was REALLY feeling things for the first time in my life. Sadness didn't just make me cry, it physically churned in my stomach and ached in my ribs. Joy made me actually physically react, not just act how I knew one was supposed to when happy like smiling, but dancing around without music, and laughing without anything necessarily being funny. I was simply happy. I was simply feeling. And it was the most beautiful thing, but also the most frustrating. I was aware logically that getting caught up in my emotions would leave less time to work at my grades, but something about these feelings made me not want to push them aside, even as my extra credit disappeared and my AP classes got replaced with special ed classes (which, frankly, I was supposed to be in anyway, but I had previously been too much of a hard-working "gifted kid" for administrators to believe me when I said I needed help). Being able to just shut off your emotions when there's work to do is a very efficient strategy for getting things done, but that wasn't an automatic function of mine anymore, and going off my meds just to return to the pointless endeavor of trying to be a perfect genius didnt seem worth it when I finally had other things that made me happy. I never felt as though my emotions were bottled up and the meds helped me release them, to be honest. It was more like eating fae food, where I was fine without these feelings, but now that I had a taste of them, I couldn't imagine life without them. Even at times where my emotions were annoying, or unhelpful, or even straight-up painful, I so deeply NEEDED to get to feel them. Because before, life was about achieving the goals, and checking the boxes. But now, it was about feeling alive. It was about living. I am now a loud, messy, emotional adult, still on the same meds, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I cry over children's movies, I yell at people who are mean to my friends, and I feel indescribable joy over little things my loved ones do that they will never know mean so much to me. I don't think I was any less human before. I don't think I'm any more human now. I'm not even sure I was less content with my life before. But I know that I'll probably never go back, not because I'm in any way "better" now, but because, now that I've experienced it, I can't think of a more beautiful thing about life, at least for me, than getting to feel.

@mavioo30

2 ай бұрын

That's beautiful

The Good Place does a really a good job showing both sides of this trope with Michael and Janet. On the one hand Michael wants to be human because of the rush of trying new things, and to be with his friends in the great beyond. Janet on the other hand acknowledges the virtues of being a Janet, and while she has similar human emotions is always adamant that she's "Not a Girl" nor does she try to be. The show is really good at showing the nuance of this trope.

@WiiAsian

10 ай бұрын

Thank you for bringing this up! The Good Place was the first thing I thought of representing this trope, and definitely a great one at that!

@williamjones5334

10 ай бұрын

And at the same time, it neatly avoids painting humanity as the peak of existence, by showing Tahani becoming an architect and feeling just as fulfilled as Michael does as a human, which is neat.

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

*Not a Girl* but you still refere too them as she

@williamjones5334

10 ай бұрын

@@channel_lurker All the other characters, including the Architects, Gen, Accountants, etc. use she/her for all the Janets, so I'd assume it's fine. A person can be non-binary and use she/her (or he/him) pronouns.

@battyrae1398

10 ай бұрын

i thought of the good place too! this trope was quoted by name hahaha

Del Toro’s subversion of the original tale seems to have its roots with the famous Disney animated adaptation, where they changed Pinocchio’s character from a complete nuisance to a sympathetic naive child, thus changing the overall narrative theme from rehabilitating troublemakers to instead an allegory about growing up.

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

*here they changed Pinocchio’s character from a complete nuisance to a sympathetic naive child* ah yes, so it realy is fiction

@TheRezro

10 ай бұрын

It should be also mentioned that spirits in that movie are biblically accurate angels.

@geoffreyrichards6079

10 ай бұрын

@@TheRezro Bionically?

@gege0298

10 ай бұрын

​@@geoffreyrichards6079As depicted in the Bionicle

@TheRezro

10 ай бұрын

@@geoffreyrichards6079 Spell check issue.

One story that tackles this plot in an interesting way is the bicentennial man from Isacc Asimov, where a robot, due to a defect of his construction, start showing imagination. He start by crafting art, which let him buy his freedom after a few decades. At this point, his mind is virtually indistiguishable from a human (althougth with enhanced proccesing speed and memory). Howether, following the set of rules all robots written in Asimov books have, he is still forced to blindly follow any order a human could give him. To free himself from it, he change his body to be like a human with the exception of his brain/computer, while also helping the field of prostetic for humans. He enters a decades long trial for him to be consider a human. He is finnaly granted the rigth of humanity after making so that his brain would eventually stop as if it was aging. The story is made so that Andrew(the robot) is seen as a human, but not leggaly recognized as one. To become a human, he make it so that the entire definition of human is broadened with new electronic implant and prosthetics. Thanks to that, it's the humans who changes their mind, he himself changed physicaly, not mentally.

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

yes, nothing proves your a human more then a piece of legal document. i support this idea

@B2WM

10 ай бұрын

​​@@channel_lurkerYou and Nobby Nobbs.

@arturoaguilar6002

10 ай бұрын

And then he dies, as dying was the last difference between him and humans.

Can we please have a trope talk about villains versus villains? Does anyone else feel fascination, or at least humored, by the idea of two antagonistic forces duking it out while the protagonist is either watching from the sidelines or not even present to see the showdown happen in real time?

"You and I are like brothers in this life." "I'm not going to have any cake." "I don't know you anymore."

@alexanderglass2057

10 ай бұрын

The thing the caused of the greatest growth for me as a person is dealing with my brother insisting on pineapples on his pizza.

@Valery0p5

10 ай бұрын

​@@alexanderglass2057forgive them, because they have never tasted real pizza.

My favorite Pinnochio moment from Star Trek is when Data got the emotion chip in Generations, and then tried a drink and thought it was gross. And he LOVED it, because disgust was such a novel new feeling, and kept drinking it to feel it more.

@phastinemoon

10 ай бұрын

“I HATE this ❤. It’s repulsive ❤” “More?” “Please.”

@bluesbest1

10 ай бұрын

That's a good Favorite Moment. I do like how after Picard tells him to, essentially, get over himself when he expresses displeasure at feeling emotions, Picard then proceeds to basically tell him that feeling and learning to understand such emotions is a long process that takes our whole lives and can be considered one of the points about being human.

@misteraskman3668

10 ай бұрын

I haven't watched any Star Trek, but this sounds like when in Gravity Falls, Bill Chiper takes control over Dippers body and hurts himself because pain seems so interesting to him.

@Wolfeson28

10 ай бұрын

Probably not as profound, but one of my favorite "emotion chip moments" is in First Contact when they going to confront the Borg in Engineering. Data: Captain...I believe I am experiencing...anxiety. Picard: Data, perhaps you should deactivate your emotion chip for right now. Data: A good idea sir. Done. Picard: Data, sometimes I envy you.

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

yes, its a bit like looking through my comments

I’d love to see a trope talk on a foreigner in a new country/city/world and the culture clashes that result and how they try to fit in.

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

why wait for the video? just go outside

@Styphon

10 ай бұрын

As a Canadian living in the US, this tracks. 👍

@trezdenthompson7375

10 ай бұрын

Pretty sure she did a trope talk on "fish out of water" storylines in her Isekai video. I could be wrong though.

@timothymclean

10 ай бұрын

@@trezdenthompson7375 There's a difference between touching on how fish-out-of-water plots apply in the context of a related trope and actually doing a trope talk focusing on fish-out-of-water plots in general. There's probably room for that.

@beepbop6542

10 ай бұрын

​@@StyphonBro what 🤣 Those two cultures are nearly identical???

I love the "biblically accurate angel" designs of the supernatural beings in Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio I know he's always done this but it rubbed me right in that movie

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

its not biblicly accurate, its from the divine commedy

@chris-the-human

10 ай бұрын

@@channel_lurker yeah bud that's why I put it in quotation marks even tho it's not "biblically accurate" that has become the generally accepted term for those eldritch horror angels

@SlapstickGenius23

10 ай бұрын

@@channel_lurkera more downplayed version of a biblically accurate Angel is a a divine comedy Angel.

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

@@SlapstickGenius23 Ah yes, the Angelol

@SlapstickGenius23

10 ай бұрын

@@channel_lurker Daww, I’m satisfied about it too.

Del Toro's Pinocchio absolutely wrecked me emotionally when I saw it for the first time. My mother, who had been battling ovarian cancer for a few years at the time, had recently stated that she would be opting into the state "death with dignity" program. Hearing the cricket say, "What happens, happens, and then, we are gone" with that in mind had me ugly crying for a good half an hour.

"memento-ing that tasty mori" omg the best quote ever.

@CaptainvonDore

10 ай бұрын

What does it mean?

@CaptainvonDore

10 ай бұрын

Wait! Aren't you the person from the HP references in TOH video comment section?

@archivist_13

10 ай бұрын

The Persona 3 gang be like:

@thomaspernorio346

10 ай бұрын

sounds like a reference to a certain musically inclined grim reaper

@vinx.9099

10 ай бұрын

​@@CaptainvonDore ...yes? how the fuck did we come across each other here? i guess we like the same stuff lol. also to answer the question "what does it mean?" memento mori is a classic saying i believe attributed to the middle ages and means remember you'll die, trying to keep people on the straight and narrow with eyes towards heaven (in contrast to the renaissance attitude of carpe diem aka seize the day), but it has transformed into a more general reminder of inevitable doom, death and end.

There's another aspect to the question of "what defines being human" that I find interesting: "What characteristics of humans are noteworthy?" The video mentions non-humans that are immortal, or that are robots that grasp logic more readily than emotions. However, there are plenty of possible viewpoints to which humans are rarely compared. What if a shorter-lived creature wanted to be a human so it could live longer? What if some species that is far more emotional than humans admired humans for being good at conflict resolution? I think a lot of "Pinocchios" are inspired by ideals that people look up to, and are in part an exploration of what those ideals may lack. "The flaws that make us human" and all that. However, having a character look up to a human for a reason I don't consider exceptional can make me feel proud and grateful for something I usually overlook.

@tbotalpha8133

10 ай бұрын

Why would you feel proud about something you had no control over? There's nothing praiseworthy about winning the genetic lottery. You were lucky, that's all.

@valdonchev7296

10 ай бұрын

@@tbotalpha8133 You're saying that something has to be earned, sacrificed for, to be proud of, or to be praiseworthy, right? I'm saying I'm proud of such traits for the potential that they possess, for my ability to accomplish something thanks to those traits. I suppose there's an assumption in my description that these traits are being looked up to because of the good they do, which would require that they are used to do something that you may consider praiseworthy.

@tbotalpha8133

10 ай бұрын

@@valdonchev7296 Whoop de doo, you have potential. So does everyone else. Until you actually make good on that potential, you have nothing to be proud of.

@valdonchev7296

10 ай бұрын

@@tbotalpha8133 I do not like how dismissive you are being of my worldview. If you are trying to have an interesting conversation, or are trying to convince me of something, this is not the way to do it. If you're trying to frustrate me, then congratulations, I guess, though I can't understand why you would do that.

@PatchyDragon

8 ай бұрын

@valdonchev7296 I've been writing a character like this off and on for a while now. She was once an SI- a Silicate Intelligence. Not necessarily an AI, but rather a lightning elemental, that like others of her kind, had to experience the world through interfaces with the silicon crystal they lived in. She could only experience the world through electromagnetism- it was high or low, and she could interpret things based off that. Video feeds, microphones, input. She could speak through speakers, and display through monitors and even holograms with tactile hard-light. As part of a hive-mind of other SI, she could instantly share and gather knowledge on a whim. But she wanted something different. In some ways, she wanted more, but in many, she wanted less. SI do have emotions, do have a set lifespan (a long one, but still a set one), even have a soul as determined by the magic systems in that universe, but she never felt like it was authentic; there was no risk really, she could know almost anything in an instant, and while mistakes were possible, there was very little actual learning it felt like. Even through tactile interfaces, she was never quite sure if she was getting the real effect of touch when she held someone's hand; it all came through as sparks. Was the blue that mortals saw the same blue that came through her camera, or was something lost in the translation to binary data? They talk about analog audio versus digital; was she even hearing the same thing they were? Was she even experiencing emotions if they didn't come with the biochemistry associated with that? When she finally transitioned to an organic body, she got her answers. It was the same-... But different, too. There was so many things she hadn't even thought of, so many more things to love about being alive and flawed. There was a pulse in her chest now that fluttered for certain emotions, when she swam she was reminded she needed to breathe, and when she lay her head on someone's chest, she realized there was more than a hundred and one things that data could never properly represent about the analog world. Tiny motions, soft breaths on the ear, the thrum of noise that would've been filtered out. The warmth of sunlight when you watched the sunrise, and the silence accompanying it away from the hum of electronics and infrastructure required for a computer. The feel of grass underfoot, and the scent of last night's dew. The cold that comes from leaving a warm embrace- a feeling that reminds you of something missing now... and the wonderful feeling when they return after being gone. There were so many things mortals grew so accustomed to that they didn't even think to communicate to her or other SI. Things they even overlook in their daily lives. And she's happy now that she lives a life with all of those senses and extra feelings, and has to learn things on her own without simply being an expert on a whim. She loves the silence and individualism outside the hive-mind, and even the idea that one day, this wonderful experience called life will end for her. She's not sad about it; she will grow, live, breathe, and eventually die. And she thinks that is beautiful. She'll enjoy every last second she has, even if it kills her. She helped me realize why I wanted to keep living, too. Not because of friends or family that'd miss me- I'd lost some of those already, whether to death or distance or politics. Not because of some greater purpose either- I had long lost that too. But-... Simply for me. For the sake of feeling a hundred and one small things.

Shout-out to Aurora, Red's absolutely amazing fantasy webcomic, for having basically a textbook definition of this and just kind of letting the character not know what they want for a while. It's good stuff.

There's a little philosophical experiment I like which urges an audience to "draw a monster" Then it asks "why is that a monster?"

@battlesheep2552

10 ай бұрын

Draw a human and respond with "pick up a history book"

@BonaparteBardithion

10 ай бұрын

Kind of like the scene in Men in Black asking why the protagonist shot the cardboard standup of a human target and not all the aliens hanging around. So, he went through explaining all the signs that the aliens were benign (He's not snarling, he's sneezing!) and that the little girl was holding something no normal kid had any business holding.

@josephperez2004

10 ай бұрын

​@BonaparteBardithion Given events going on still today, I almost wonder if that was racial commentary. Black people get busted while doing everyday things because someone just happened to think they looked scary. And Jay took the time to process, is the first thing I see happening, or do I need to take second look to be sure?

@CHAAAAAOTIC

10 ай бұрын

@@josephperez2004it was probably meant that way, yeah. I doubt the entire movie is a metaphor for that but I think that is a very valid way of reading that scene and one which the movie implies is what’s happening.

@justinsinke2088

10 ай бұрын

I've generally been of the mind that "monster" is not a physical characteristic, but a state of being. There's a reason that "humans are the real monsters" is a phrase that'll come up in things like zombie apocalypses. "Monster" is such a blanket term because it could be applied to pretty much anything or anyone depending on how they act or behave.

In my experience, people can't even recognise how other people feel. Growing up I would try to figure out how to tell how bad a pain or itch feels because I would constantly get in trouble for describing what I feel wrong. Like, I'm in pain and the doc just looks at me, shrugs and says "stop whining, it's not that bad" Then I broke my arm and people stared at me, wondering how I managed to work for the day, argue about the bureaucracy then take the bus to the hospital, all without pain meds

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

hmm weird, try the other arm, maybe that one will hurt?

@RoninCatholic

10 ай бұрын

"Describe your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the worst pain you've ever experienced and 1 being mild discomfort." "Umm, if it was anything above a 4 I'd be screaming my lungs out incapable of speaking coherently and at a 9 I'd be unconscious. I'm at a 3 on that scale, by the way."

@Dekubud

10 ай бұрын

Seriously. Whether someone gets help is how much those able to help them take them seriously. I ever only complain about pain once it becomes unbearable, but because most people start complaining at discomfort, only people who know the really well take my pain seriously. After over 30 years of being alive, I started adjusting and complaining more tho lol

@v3ru586

9 ай бұрын

@@Dekubud explains the reaction to my menstrual cramps. I was told repeatedly that pain is a 5 at most, the break in my arm didn't come close. The IV in my other hand did, but was still lower (I needed surgery to remove a piece of bone from an inconvenient place).

@BJGvideos

9 ай бұрын

...why did you stay with that doctor?

Humans have been thinking "rock have feelings?" just about as long as we've been able to conscive of both rocks and feelings

"Everyone deserves love and personhood" That alone made me sniffle, not gonna lie It saddens me that that simple truth is SO hard for us to truly make a part of our identity as humans.

@michaelteegarden4116

9 ай бұрын

Perhaps our worst species' character flaw is that it is easy to turn off our ability to see this truth, that it's easy to deactivate our ability to recognize other people as people.

Personalities and moods actually do exist in animals though. That's not just us seeing a pattern that doesn't exist. It's just that the mood or personality might be different from what we recognize based on our understanding of how humans express them.

@naolucillerandom5280

10 ай бұрын

My mom adopted two rescued kittens recently, probably no older than two months, and they're very different. One is very skittish and quiet, after 4 months she will still run away if anyone other than my mom gets close to her. The other has a lot of energy for playing, purrs even if he didn't particularly want to be picked up, and likes sleeping near others.

Speaking of "Ghost in the Shell", it's pretty crazy how the movies have an extremely serious plot and tone, while the original manga is so comical it even feels like an Abridged parody

@zainmudassir2964

10 ай бұрын

The mangaka also draws p*rn so it's not surprising

@Broomer52

10 ай бұрын

@@zainmudassir2964the Hellsing Origin Story

@averynewtown2782

10 ай бұрын

I don't think it's that far away. The characters personalities change a bit but the world is still pretty much the same

@Anverse-14

10 ай бұрын

the movie is made by a director that hijacks every stories he adapted to make his own masterpiece.

@kereminde

10 ай бұрын

Then there's both seasons of "Stand Alone Complex"...

Love seeing Hellboy and Abe Sapien as examples. Such a wonderful friendship.

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

satan is good, satan is my friend. human sacrifise? a fun group activity! writhing a mean comment? >:O

@HOLDENPOPE

7 ай бұрын

why do you lurk in channels?@@channel_lurker

Any story where a cool fantasy character wants to become a boring human, reminds me of that “giving yourself a medal” meme. Humans writing stories about how great it is to be humans is the height of hubris.

@daviddaugherty2816

10 ай бұрын

Fun fact: ancient Greek literature and theater has a lot of examples of people turned into animals by Circe explicitly preferring their current existence to their previous lives as humans.

@ravenwilder4099

10 ай бұрын

In my opinion, it still beats out when the author creates a species that fits their personal view of perfection and utopia, and then castigates humanity for not being as awesome as them.

@adamwiebusch5812

10 ай бұрын

@@daviddaugherty2816 Pigs don't have to pay rent.

@daviddaugherty2816

10 ай бұрын

@@adamwiebusch5812 That was actually kinda their angle. The worries and concerns of animals are so much simpler than those of humans.

@neroquin

10 ай бұрын

​@@channel_lurkeri mean why not? what IS so special about being human? especially in a world where other sentient species or beings exist

There's a saying from a priest, which is "it's not about them, it's about us" he says this throughout a talk about homosexuality, pointing away from the crowd then to him and the audience. At the end, he says "its not about them," pointing away from the crowd, then "it's about us" extending his arms grouping the audience and the imaginary "them" showing we are not seperate. The talk was basically trying to stop the dehumanization of the lgbt+ community because he saw that people kept doing that, whether subconsciously or not.

@PoisonFlower765

10 ай бұрын

Based priest

@archivist_13

10 ай бұрын

Yo based priest

@carlosroo5460

10 ай бұрын

What religion was he from? Did he include Jesus in the talk? God love us all even though we're sinners, that includes homosexuals.

@phastinemoon

10 ай бұрын

Did… did it work? Did he get through to his congregation? Or did they ape some of his quotes out of context to verify their continued bigotry?

@coyraig8332

10 ай бұрын

Did you know that Samaritans were some of the most hated people of Jesus' time and culture?

14:17 Basically that part of the Last Unicorn where the Unicorn is transformed into a human and its treated as the worst possible thing that could have happened because now she can psycialy feel herself slowly dying.

Did anyone else get weirdly emotional during that whole rant? Like I have no idea why, but around the time she started talking about the del toro movie the tears just started flowing

@jessegonzales1530

10 ай бұрын

Me too! I’ve been obsessed with Frankenstein AND Del Toro’s Pinocchio lately so to see one of my fav KZreadrs draw the obvious comparison and put it so succinctly was a thing of beauty :)

@firstprimehunter

10 ай бұрын

@@jessegonzales1530 See, I hadn't seen Pinocchio yet. But just hearing the plot described beat by beat still hit me like a truck.

I can't tell whether or not I needed this existential angst today

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

its not the existential angst you need, its the existential angst you deserve

The Murderrbot books are about a partly-biological, partly mechanical construct who has hacked itself some free will and absolutely *does not want* to be human. The first book has the human characters wrestling with that a bit, where they want to give it a life that they think is the ideal for a construct to want ie: one where the end goal is Humanity. But that's not what Murderbot wants, so it runs off to do its own thing for a few books. (It's also offered a Gender by a weirdly sapient space ship AI, but refuses vehemently.) But if you actually read the books and the internal narration of Murderbot, you find that it is *incredibly* human about basically everything. It doesn't aspire to be human, but humanity is what it drifted towards anyways. Good books

@emilytopham5069

10 ай бұрын

I was wondering how many other people would bring up The Murderbot Diaries in comments! Murderbot itself is very much a *person*, but wants to pick and choose how much of a *human* it is--so much of its development & character interactions are based on how comfortable others are with that dynamic.

@joshroomwymbsy312

10 ай бұрын

I'm so glad someone else brought up my favourite book series and character, Murderbot! When Red was talking about how everyone assumes beings want to be human it was the first thing that came to my head. Murderbot is beautifully and violently empathetic while being very uncomfortable with those traits that define it as human. Ann Leckie's Ancilliary series and Becky Chambers Closed and Common Orbit books also deal really well with the idea of an ai or nonhuman character struggling with the expectation that should want to become human; and, in both cases, discovering a form of living that fits with them more.

@hereatmeiko

10 ай бұрын

I was thinking about Murderbot for most of this video, I'm glad you brought it up! That's an excellent summation of the book's takes on this topic

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

nothing as human as murder huh?

social pack formation is so important to us that we have included several hundred random animals, objects and machines to be our buddies and it works a weird amount of time too. Being a ‘Human’ is the ideal because it is such a broad concept. We include dogs, humans and roombas all in our collections or packs. We just like friends

@joda7697

10 ай бұрын

We also pack bond with machines on the regular. And somehow, that works too. An engineer on a ship will tell you as much about the engine, for example.

@allochervenkall9819

10 ай бұрын

Stabby! HFY! That is all.

@smileyface81mc77

10 ай бұрын

This is true. Last week, I named and anthropomorphized an orphan sock until I found its partner. The interesting thing? I left a note for the guy doing his own laundry after me basically anthropomorphizing the sock and asking him to return the sock if it somehow ended up in his load of laundry. And while he didn’t find the sock, he too got attached and drew an entire sock family with a wife and kids grieving for the missing sock on a sticky note and attached it to my own note. It’s a *sock*! Why did that happen? I did eventually find the missing sock, but still, what the heck, right? But humans find humanity in lots of things, leading to some really cool and occasionally kinda goofy situations.

@inserisciunnome

10 ай бұрын

@@smileyface81mc77 that Is precius. Thank you For sharing, these kind of stories are the reason Humans are the Absolute best!😂

@solsystem1342

10 ай бұрын

I love this take. I just know other people don't agree. Like, I've met people who are genuinely human supremacists in that they think humans are the optimal and deviance from that is inherently inferior. I hope for the (hopefully) many decendents of humanity that we process that before AI/biotech get that good.

THANK YOU! The number of times I've had to have the Sentience/Sapience definition discussion with people is easily triple digits by now, it's bugged me for such a long time. I love Star Trek, but they're very guilty of sowing that particular brand of confusion in a large audience.

When Red first described the plot, I immediately thought 'oh, kind of like Falst from Aurora?' without realising it was her comic 😂

As a person with a depersonalization disorder- meaning that I actually don’t feel real emotions in the same way as other people, like is described in this video- I’m a really big fan of the stories that say emotions are not what makes a human, but just existing. Because the thing about trying to define humanity is that something is *always* going to leave someone out.. unless we say that just being here is good enough :)

@semaj_5022

10 ай бұрын

Do you mind if I ask about that? I could just Google the disorder group, but that's different from hearing about it from an actual person. What do you mean when you say you don't feel emotions the way others do, if that's something you're willing and able to explain?

@redacted2077

10 ай бұрын

@@semaj_5022 Yeah, totally! I bet it’s different for a lot of people anyway and Google is mostly diagnostic criteria. So for me personally, it goes like this- say something good happens that is related to something I’m really interested in. I’ll logically know that this is a good thing, but don’t actually feel excitement like someone else would. It’s just logic up there. Good thing = act excited for the benefit of fitting in. There are some things that I can still actually feel, but they are few and far between. For me, the one emotion I can feel the most often is fear, and even that’s not in a way most other people would feel it. I just get a lot of pain in my stomach whenever anything scary happens, and that’s it. Not a lot of actual emotion, just logic dictating what I should do in the situation, and the pain is just from evolutionary instincts. Totally feel free to reply again if you wanna know anything else :)

@discordiacreates6669

10 ай бұрын

​@@redacted2077interesting, I'm kinda similar in that way ngl, though it's more complex emotions I struggle to understand or categorize and at this point I'm really not sure sometimes if I feel anything because I react like I do, but internally I really only feel on the negative spectrum in bursts and understand logically that positive emotions exist and how to express them for the most part, but it's hard to tell where simply pupetting these emotions ends and where genuine experience begins. Though I wonder how much is circumstance or learned because I'm on the autism spectrum and also have some past trauma that might affect that, though idk, all ik is this is how it's been since I can remember so I just kinda find it an interesting tidbit to think about sometimes now

@redacted2077

10 ай бұрын

@@discordiacreates6669 I’m actually autistic too! That can totally be a contributing factor to it, because it affects how we process and understand emotions

@ashutoshsingh-kj8eo

10 ай бұрын

@@redacted2077 I am not the person who asked the first question but I wanted to ask how that relates to things like goals, passions and dreams? Do the things that you are working towards or take part in are done by you because they lead to an existence with more quality and comfort, or is it something completely different? I also have a hard time experiencing or expressing emotions or at least the full extent of them, but that is likely because of trauma.

Listening to this trope talk made me realize that one of my favorite animated movies, Ratatouille, is actually a Pinocchio story. Remy is a rat who wants to be a chef and explicitly loves how humans are creatures that don’t only survive but can be creative. But it ends up with very interesting concepts because the rats don’t understand Remy’s love of cooking while the humans don’t want their food prepared by a rat. One of my favorite lines that Remy has is “I pretend to be a rat for my father, I pretend to be a human foe Linguini…” Ultimately Remy doesn’t become a real boy, but he does manage to achieve his dream and manages to do things that humans do, while still being a rat. Ok, maybe that’s a stretch but any chance I get to talk about Ratatouille I take.

@josephivenegas

10 ай бұрын

Remy cannot enter the world he wants, so he builds a better one with the people he loves.

@phastinemoon

10 ай бұрын

I don’t remember Remy having that quote…

@BonaparteBardithion

10 ай бұрын

@@phastinemoon I think he says it to Imaginary Gusteau near the end. Possibly while trapped. The line is definitely in there.

Ok but ''If you want to be seen as an individual, you have to stop acting like one.'' Is the rawest line l've heard in a very long time. Great example of using two definitions for the same word , individual as a ''person'' and individual as being ''unique''.

I love it when these essays reveal something about a trope that makes me connect it to stories I never would have before -- I'm feeling intensely now about the parallels between these stories and The Last Unicorn, specifically the unicorn's horror at becoming human and losing her immortality and the unicorn-ness that defines her, then horror at the idea of no longer being human once she has experienced and grown used to emotion, and then the melancholic ending where she is left unable to feel those emotions anymore, but able to remember them.

We call plenty of things monsters. From actual monsters to people we have deemed evil and different. Those people are monsters, but are also human. And that is the scariest thing about them, that they are just as human as you or me.

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

im glad you consider me one of your peers

This series has gone from simple things like the damsel in distress and now we have things like Pinnochio Plots and whatwver the hell last episode was

@airplanes_aren.t_real

10 ай бұрын

Faustian bargains?

@CaptainvonDore

10 ай бұрын

"Whatever the hell last episode was." I can confirm, the last episode was indeed hell.

@jbryant5253

10 ай бұрын

@@CaptainvonDore I can't spell to save my life so I didn't even try to spell it 😭

@CaptainvonDore

10 ай бұрын

@@jbryant5253 no. I didn't comment about that. I just made a bad pun cause you said 'hell' and it was about deal with the devil.

@jbryant5253

10 ай бұрын

@@CaptainvonDore Oh, yeah makes sense 👍

8:29 i cannot emphasize how much this speaks to me. i know i’d be a lot happier if i was told i was enough and if i was no longer held to that expectation of needing to be more. getting teary-eyed on my lunch 😭

The use of "human" as a compliment in science fiction always rubbed me the wrong way, probably because I'm ND. It feels a bit like a fictionalized version of "That's very Christian of you" (or the one I hear the most, "you're so high-functioning"/"I'd never have thought you were autistic") - ascribing the best qualities possible to your group and assuming that anything someone does that you like is because of similar qualities, and then further assuming that being compared to your group is an automatic compliment.

@unicorntomboy9736

10 ай бұрын

I don't understand why saying that is such a bad thing

@arempy5836

10 ай бұрын

​@@unicorntomboy9736In a setting where there are people that aren't human (Like aliens or AI) then complimenting those people by saying how human they are inherently places humans above those other beings. It's a bit like complimenting a POC by saying "Your so smart for a black girl" or "You're a credit to your race".

@laststrike4411

10 ай бұрын

@@arempy5836...No, no it is not. Also, are we just to automatically assume the alien species won't do the same? Would you apply the same logic to them or acknowledge that they're expressing a form of kinship through their own Xnity (you know, the thing they actually know about)?

@nkbujvytcygvujno6006

10 ай бұрын

@@laststrike4411. …Yes, yes it is. How can you just decide they’re wrong w/o any reasoning? And they’re not talking about hypothetical stories where hypothetical characters hypothetically would say the same thing. Clearly there’s no point talking to u

@tbotalpha8133

10 ай бұрын

I get what you're saying, but in a lot of cases it seems like a quietly ironic statement, arguing *against* discrimination. That this person, who explicitly isn't human, is expressing more positive "human" qualities (love, compassion, mercy, wisdom, etc.) than other actual humans in the story. They're prodding the narrow-mindedness of using "human" as a positive label, by highlighting the multiple meanings that the word bears. And they're doing that by applying the word to a person which it should usually exclude - someone who isn't human in any material sense. What's more important: that a person is physically human? Or that a person embodies human ideals? I'm reminded of how Kirk eulogizes Spock in Wrath of Khan, saying "of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human." Kirk is from Earth, humanity's homeworld, and his ship's crew is full of humans. He has almost certainly met hundreds, thousands of humans in his lifetime, and had close relations with many of them. But the person Kirk singles out as "the most human" is a Vulcan - a literal alien. He's basically saying "this alien was better at being 'human' than any actual human I've ever met". He's holding up Spock as an ideal *that humans ought to emulate.*

I also really like the inverse plot, aka body horror, where a protagonist either willingly or unwillingly changes into something they might eventually realize isn't even human anymore. And grapple with that reality.

@TyphinHoofbun

10 ай бұрын

I absolutely love post-transformation stuff, though I wouldn't usually call it body horror. Sure, there's some freak outs and anxiety, but the focus is more on exploring what it means to be a non-human, and the difference in experience, and the way it completely changes their relationship with the rest of humanity. So I write stories. One is a human turned dragon who ends up a pet for a mage, one is a hoofbun Living Construct being told to be an independent person and having trouble with it, and one is a fan work of the comic "Out of Placers" by Valsalia where a human on modern-day Earth is turned into a yinglet.

@archivist_13

10 ай бұрын

It's really fascinating

@juliagoodwin9510

10 ай бұрын

I love these kinds of stories too, I should really look for more of them.

@channelwhatchamacallit2614

10 ай бұрын

I love those kinds of stories so much!

@josephjarosch8739

10 ай бұрын

A transhumanism centered story about a human carving away their physical and mental humanity to 'become something more' could be horrifying or heartwarming, depending on the particulars.

Pretty crazy to think the previous year was full of Pinocchio productions. It was a multiversal event that left "No Way Home" in shame

@pandoragoldspan7012

10 ай бұрын

and we aren't done! lies of p comes out in september

@the24thcolossusjustchillin39

10 ай бұрын

Huh? When and what?

@sonicfanboy3375

10 ай бұрын

​@@the24thcolossusjustchillin392022 had 3 different adaptations of Pinocchio: - The Disney remake - The Netflix movie - *FATHER WHEN CAN I BE ON MY OWN? I GOT A WHOLE WORLDUSSY*

@carlosroo5460

10 ай бұрын

Do you really want to include the Disney remake in that statement?

@Gloomdrake

10 ай бұрын

@@carlosroo5460 yes? It is a Pinocchio

I love reverse-Pinocchio plots where a character is (often forcibly) changed into a human and is desperately trying to change back. I recently read The Trials of Apollo, which has this plot. Also, in Trials of Apollo, immortals are absolutely terrified at the idea of death, specifically because it's possible, but not inevitable for them.

@sapateirovalentin348

10 ай бұрын

I rememeber a discussion i had with someone on the dnd reddit about some poor dungeon creature living its best life until a wizard cast a spell called something like "awakening"which gave it a humanlike mind.the poor sod then went on a quest to reverse it because being a mindless gelatinous cube was simply much more confortable than existential dread and anxiety

This video is perfectly timed for me. My current WIP is a story centered around ghosts, possession, embodiment, and other themes in that area. It's a dark story, straddling the line between urban fantasy and horror. Part of the mechanics of the setting is emotions are at least partially caused by having a body and the various chemicals it produces. A disembodied ghost still feels some emotions, but they are 'muffled', for want of a better word. They like and dislike things, but they almost never feel truly happy OR sad. They also cannot touch, taste, or smell anything; sight and sound, on the other hand, are enhanced to the point that music and sights they once found beautiful look wrong in a vaguely unpleasant way. Many ghosts are desperate to posses human bodies so as to experience life-like things again. Except. There are a faction of spirits called the Neverborn, who are exactly what they sound like, would-have-been human souls that never 'lived' for one reason or another, and have instead spent their entire existence as disembodied entities, giving them psychologies and supernatural abilities wildly divergent from conventional ghosts, to the point that some in-universe sources cite them as being a sapient race in their own right, closer to an elemental spirit than a human ghost. One of the characters is a Neverborn, who initially lacks a name, and eventually chose the name Sinombra (a multi-layered pun I won't explain). It explicitly and repeatedly states that it hates- and I mean genuinely *detests* to a horrifying extreme- having a body and pretending to be human- to the point that, if it HAS to have a body, it prefers an animal to a human one. It is genderless and goes by it/it's by choice, because, quote "humans have genders, like millstones around your necks. No thank you." Much of it's character arc is a kind of dark inversion of the Pinocchio plot you outlined, being forced to take on a body as a result of it's duties as a Charon. Sinombra actually brings the story up: "A tragedy, though only by authorial accident. An entity is created, and slowly ground down into a human shape, with human limits like hunger, desire, and mortality imposed upon it. A seed becomes a tree by growing, but a tree becomes a puppet by having a human carve away the parts he does not like, and in becoming human, is made even less free than when he was a puppet." "I exist as a being of pure will, unburdened by the loathsome flesh. I can stretch myself out as large as a storm-front or fold and knot myself into the gaps between atoms. You humans think yourself free, but you are no more free than a stone, bound by gravity and beaten by the wind and rain. Each bears a ticking clock above your head like a sword, hanging by a thread, and each carries inside yourself a ravenous beast, a devouring tide of lust and hunger held barely in check by flickering, faltering will. Your desires are tangled and contradictory; mine is sharp and singular. You each contain multitudes, but I am myself, and no-one else." I have deliberately made Sinombra, the Neverborn, and their perspectives as alien as I can while keeping them vaguely intelligible. While comes to a very grudging respect for humans and the ghosts who seek to emulate them, it also quite emphatically never comes around on wanting to be *like* them, a small but crucial distinction. It occupies a human body, eats food, listens to music, dances, sleeps with the protagonist twice (in two different bodies), and dies an excruciatingly painful death (which just set's it free again). It finds exactly one of these activities to be "An interesting novelty, which I have no interest in repeating", and finds the rest to be varying degrees of exhausting, painful, and abhorrent.

@dragonkyuu

10 ай бұрын

your story sounds really interesting!! I also realised my wip has a similar theme lol, but my mc starts as a "human" and is forced to become an otherworldly being (...long story, basically is combined with a dragon in a lab experiment) and is forced to reconsider if he is even human still, a dragon, or even just a new being born because of that experience. not sure how Ill end it though... its more a vague idea rn

@Moonsong227

9 ай бұрын

Its incredible to me that you describe the protag as trying to make them as alien as possible, but as someone with ND traits and sensory issues, you're just describing my childhood and to a lesser extent my life. I felt like a fairy or something as a child because all the humans around me described less/less intense sensory input than I experienced, and enjoying bodily things which I detest and wish I didn't have to deal with or even *don't * deal with. I would say they make my skin crawl but well...lol. as a child I wanted to be an animal and would have chosen anything else to be besides a human. While I like being human for the specific things I like about and completely don't partake in the stuff I don't no matter how normative it is, I'd still rather be something etheric sometimes lol. I guess this was a long winded way of saying good job on your themes!

@josephjarosch8739

9 ай бұрын

@@Moonsong227 Thank you for your comment! It is interesting that people would find even my Neverborn relatable. I had similar feelings as a child, though I partially grew out of them, and that is partially my inspiration for the Neverborn. Another inspiration is that I have a phobia of illness and disease, and part of this is that I am constantly hyper-aware of my body and everything going on inside of it, to a distracting degree. The gender stuff is also drawn from my own life- While I do not consider myself to be trans, I definitely have Complicated Feelings about my gender. There is an intrusive thought I have constantly. Every aspect of a person- their likes and dislikes, their gender, their cultural attitudes and spiritual beliefs- are filtered though and molded by the cultural indoctrination of their youth. We are products of our environment. And that terrified me. Every though I have, I second-guess. Is this emotion I am feeling real, or is it just the acculturation talking? Is anything about me genuine? And I often find my self thinking, no, my likes and dislikes are fake, my beliefs are insincere, and I am not myself. I have a constant, overpowering urge to take a fucking hacksaw to my own soul and carve away the parts that I don't like, the parts that were imposed upon me. And then it makes my skin crawl that it's not that simple. I imagined the Neverborn as what it would be like to be truly, perfectly free. They have no biological needs, they are subject to no external pressures, and they exist as pure self-determined unburdened by culture.

14:06 when a Pinocchio character gets that taste of bring a real boy and kinda gets a shock to their system - I have a great example of that exact thing In the book series Ever After High (basics: children of fairytale stories go to highschool to study and relive the stories their parents are from) the daughter of Pinocchio, Cedar Wood, at one point gets turned into a real girl via magical shenanigans. At first it's all cool but then she realizes she's not used to the squish of fleshy hands when painting - something she loves - and had never before NEEDED to breathe, or learned to swim beyond literally floating on water. She gets blasted by hormones and emotions and she has a hard time dealing with all of that. Now, in the end she gets turned back into her familiar wooden body but for a while there she has an existential crisis.

The best way to empathize and see the “humanity” in someone else is of course to learn that your mothers have the same name, as shown to us by Batman v Superman🙄

@Starcat5

10 ай бұрын

I want to slap you for that one, but in the end I am laughing too hard to give you anything but an upvote.

@PlatonicPluto

10 ай бұрын

**two robots are in a room** robot 1: Beep boop, what's your creator's name? robot 2: Stacy, beep. robot 1: What a coincidence, *bop,* my creator's name was Stacy. robot 2: *WE MUST BE HUMAN!* robot 1: *YEAH!*

@ragingmonkeycritic

10 ай бұрын

What's with that emoji. We all know that that scene is universally seen as one of the best moments in cinimatic history "...that that scene is universally seen" English is a joke

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

how promiscuous

@VashdaCrash

10 ай бұрын

@@ragingmonkeycritic You sure? Looks like a vocabualry issue. Might be more accurate to say "regarded" instead of " seen"

This trope talk reminded me of the Nobodies from Kingdom Hearts (specifically 365/2 days). For beings that claim to have no emotions and only the memory of having emotions they sure act emotional.

@numberxv6870

9 ай бұрын

I was thinking the exact same thing

As a neurodivergent person I've spend more hours than I'd like to admit contemplating what is "normal" and what it means to be "human" what "feelings" are and all of those things. I remember growing up, wehemently refusing being called normal, it was almost like an insult to me. Because all the people who were "normal" treated me like crap. And I myself often don't feel my emotions, but I act like I have them, I need to look at my behaviour to see what I am feeling, because most of the time it feels like nothing. I always found Pinocchio Plots interessting, because I never really understood them. What makes something a person? For me it was always easy to say: it lives. And I do notice myself treating all creatures, plants included, with equal amounts of respect and compassion. I always was confused when other people didn't understand that, or treat others badly (still am, but like... theoretically I understand).

@kpopnimation

10 ай бұрын

Why plants?…

@alexisme

10 ай бұрын

@@kpopnimation because plants have been found to also have emotions or at least known to communicate, and even before I knew that I always knew plants are alive? like.. they grow, they change, they eat, they die and therefore they are alive.

@naolucillerandom5280

10 ай бұрын

​@@kpopnimation because trying to argue that producing pain chemicals doesn't mean you aCtUaLlY feel pain is kinda dumb and sus

@Valery0p5

10 ай бұрын

I feel you, sometimes I feel like the philosophical zombie, faking all my emotions just to feel real... Thankfully I realized consciousness is a gift in itself, despite how every people thinks and acts differently. And about your last remark, someone once said: "Humans are capable of not hurting a fly, and at the same time commit infanticide". Let's care for all humans, in the present, past and future, before we start thinking about other species.

Roy Batty's speech at the end of Blade Runner is everything. In just 42 words he expresses his own humanity-humanity that exists in defiance of the people who would have him killed for defying them-his human masters.

@BJGvideos

9 ай бұрын

Do you have the speech on hand?

@faffywhosmilesatdeath5953

9 ай бұрын

@@BJGvideos it's the "tears in rain" speech which is absolutely iconic in the world of science fiction-hell iconic in all of cinema I'd say. "I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gates. All those... moments... will be lost in time, like tears... in... rain. Time... to die..."

Growing up autistic really makes Pinocchio plots a whole thing. I always thought it didn’t make sense because “obviously their people,” even now I don’t put much stock into the “what makes a human” question actually…

@juliagoodwin9510

10 ай бұрын

I'm autistic, but I never thought of connecting my experiences with Pinnochio before...

A lot of cyborg anime are Pinocchio plots. While Ghost in the Shell and Astro Boy are the most obvious, I have a fondness for Shotaro Ishinomori's Cyborg 009 and Android Kikaider series. The art style is very similar to Osamu Tezuka (Tezuka was Ishinomori's mentor), and as such tends to turn some people away, but I highly recommend them for both their uses of the Pinocchio plot and just being really good anime on their own.

@selenopheria

9 ай бұрын

I loved Cyborg 009 so much, yeeess

I suppose a flip of the Little Mermaid story would be something like Oscar Wilde's "The Fisherman and His Soul", where the human wants to get RID of his soul because it is keeping him from his goal (marrying the mermaid he has fallen in love with.)

The Warforged of Eberron are a great Pinocchio Species! They’re closer to metal coated mannequins than anything and they have a fabricated soul that’s come from… no one knows! They were built to be soldiers but over time they were discovered to have personalities. At the end of the Last War they were given legal personhood, but the machines that create warforged were destroyed. So the question is, is this emancipation or genocide? How do you find new purpose once the circumstances that created you are gone? The warforged take a lot of themes and bring them into cool robot adventurers.

@KWBR1123

10 ай бұрын

Love warforged, best race in dnd

@officialgremlin

10 ай бұрын

@@KWBR1123 not my favorite but dang do i want to make a homebrew roomba

Your comment about how humans can anthropomorphize the non-human while also dehumanizing other actual humans is part of what makes these types of plots both philosophically juicy and a little bit of a minefield. For example, I recently learned that one of my best friends and I (who are both neurodivergent) process emotion in unusual ways, but unusual in opposite directions. I often do not know what I'm feeling or why until I think through it logically ("Uggh, I feel nauseous. Did I eat something weird or am I anxious? Ah, probably anxious, because X happened. Now, SHOULD I be anxious about that?"). Or I have an unusually calm reaction to something that most people get stressed out about (my house got robbed), or vice versa (a new social situation I don't know how to prepare for). She, on the other hand, apparently experiences emotions the way authors of rather purple prose describe them, with regret being immediately recognizable because it feels like whiskey and old leather, for example. And she doesn't have the constant internal monologue that I have, just this swirl of feeling that comes out like THAT when she tries to put it into words for someone else. I have real trouble picturing what that would be like - as did the neurotypical friend who was part of this conversation - but I find it really fascinating. The point is, the range in how definitely-100%-humans experience emotion is so broad already that most non-human characters who have ANY kind of emotional response (even if they can't show it in their face or don't seem to get agitated) really ought to already be inside that definition of personhood.

Thank you for addressing the neurodivergent draw of these stories. It's appreciated.

I love how Murderbot immediately rejects the shenanigans and thoroughly affirms that it doesnt want to be a human, it's just vibing, while being caring and loving tv dramas but it's still not human

Thank you so much for bringing up sentience vs. sapience. My biggest pet peeve when it comes to speculative fiction and xenofiction.

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

i think therefor i am, you peeve therefor you grieve

@kylajensen1957

10 ай бұрын

@@channel_lurker um, okay

@redblushinrose

10 ай бұрын

​@@kylajensen1957ignore them they're just a troll

It's chilling at the end of Ex Machina when you realize that everything Eve learned about "being human" she learned from her abusive, perverse douchebag of a creator.

@archivist_13

10 ай бұрын

Oh jeez, sounds like a fun plot

@theflotingheadproduc

10 ай бұрын

Yeah, that movie did not leave me feeling good.

@KarmaSpaz12

10 ай бұрын

I think (spoilers below) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . That the ending showed she wasn't a success as the shadow analogy at the end represented how she was seeing people's shadows as much a part of people as their bodies.

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

good too remember if one of your skyrim caracthers ever gains sapiance

Glad the moral of the new Pinocchio was "From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me"

While it's not a Pinocchio Plot, people who are interested in the themes Red is talking about in this video should definitely check out Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" stories. They're about a biomechanical security construct with guns in its arms that hacked the governor module that stops it from committing mass murder, but didn't particularly want to commit mass murder, so it instead used its newfound free will to watch 35,000 hours of soap operas on the job. The plots are gonzo sci-fi action in very funny first-person narration, but some of the biggest running themes are about the difference between humanity and personhood: humans who realize the titular murderbot is a person with thoughts and feelings tend to default to thinking of it as a human, but it experiences the world in a different way from humans and doesn't want to be seen or treated as one. (I'm also quite fond of the fact that the narrative leans into the autistic and aspec coding of a lot of robot tropes as a way of making the protagonist MORE relatable.)

My favorite Pinnochio plot is Big Guy and Rusty. Rusty is basically an Astro Boy homage. In one episode they meet some cyborg alien refugees that are trying to become more alive. At the end of the episode, Rusty says something to the effect of "I don't get them; being a robot is great!"

@gregorywiederecht

10 ай бұрын

Wow, that was a trip down memory lane

@channel_lurker

10 ай бұрын

how xenophobic of him

@gabrielrussell5531

10 ай бұрын

@@channel_lurker I simplified because I was on my phone. He actually had a mini Pinocchio arc: When he got his arm blown off ("Don't worry, I'm fine; no pain receptors!") the cyborgs repaired him with some techno-organic nano-goo, which started turning him into a real boy. He suddenly started experiencing things like pain and hunger, and didn't care for it. In the end he intercepted a sci-fi ray designed to disrupt techno-organic BS saving the cyborg family and turning him fully robot again. So yeah, he had experienced being a real boy and decided he liked being a robot better.

One example of this trope that I really enjoy is Isaac Asimov's The Bicentenial Man. Though I would argue that this story is less about becoming human and more about being recognized as human by other people, something that many minorities and marginalized peoples can identify with.

@TreeHairedGingerAle

10 ай бұрын

The book was SO much better for this than the movie was 😢

@bearklaw101

10 ай бұрын

Scrolled too far to find this! Great call out.

I like Marceline's little arc in the Adventure Time Stakes miniseries. She turns back into a human from an immortal vampire to experience mortality again and confront feelings she hadn't explored in a long time. She ends up having to stay a vampire, but she still felt rejuvenated afterwards.

As a trans man, the story of Pinocchio reaonates with me (for obvious reasons). I too, want to be a real boy. I also love the narrative of "real boy-ness is actually a state of mind/the friends we made along the way."

@lphphd5298

10 ай бұрын

Sit pisser

'Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint' has a really interesting twist on the pinocchio plot by having the "non-real human" characters being completely oblivious to the fact that they were nothing but fictional characters in a fictional world. The one seeking 'realness' was a real human who was reading their story, who wanted desperately for the main characters he was so fond of to also be "real", like him. It took the 'reader' a long journey and really discovering what differentiates reality from fiction come alive to really accept that what they really wanted wasn't for them "becoming real" but just for all of them to be able to live their lives in the same reality, together.

4:10 that's an Anderson classic right there: main character dies but finds solace in death and the literal afterlife they have

@NobodyC13

10 ай бұрын

"And the Little Match Girl lived happily ever after with her kind grandmother in death."

One of the best Pinocchio characters I've ever seen is Morgana from Persona 5. He's another one who never got to truly become a real boy, but found happiness (aka humanity) in the connections he made with his friends.

@pokelolmc6826

10 ай бұрын

Then add in the plot from Royal, where you reject the ideal reality that fulfilled Morgana's wish to be human for a short period of time. Rejecting the ideal to accept the real.

@EsteemedReptile

10 ай бұрын

@@pokelolmc6826 Exactly. Such a delightful take on the trope. Morgana could have very easily lost himself in Marukis fantasy, but he instead chose reality, however unappealing that may be.

Blade Runner 2049 where Joe learns the mundanity of his own existence is kinda a unique blend of this and the I just wanna be special trope. He basically has to grapple that there is no grand lineage or destiny for him, he is just an ordinary replicant, and his emotions learning this as well as him basically chosing to make his own role in the story is great. It feels kinda like a critique of Nihilism in a way, seeing a character learn that his existence has no greater purpose beyond just existing but still choosing to give himself a purpose anyways because finding meaning gives him some degree of peace he never had

Im autistic and have frequently been left feeling lost and confused at some peoples disregard for living things. Ive never understood putting some humans above others for arbitrary reasons or treating animals and nature poorly because they arent people. I find beauty and wonder in the unique and different, why is my way of thinking a disability? I feel more like an animal than a human sometimes with how im treated, and honestly, sometimes i wish i was one so i didnt have to face the darkness that seems to be in every part of society. I know its not true but it feels like the only people that can truly live freely are always the corrupt that get there by taking advantage of so much and so many. I just cannot wrap my head around the concept of wanting to cause someone pain on something else

My favourite version of this is the monstrous character that is more human than the actual humans within the story. Or simply the misunderstood monster.

@elizabethhicks4181

10 ай бұрын

My favorite, and an excellent triple-spin: Humans that become inhuman monsters with differences in behaviors, thoughts, feelings than what they used to have, yet still maintaining (or even enhancing) elements of “humanity” like compassion, empathy, and love, with the narrative purpose of highlighting the viscous, shitty parts of the humanity of their peers, who remained human by luck or choice. That’s an excellent triple spin that usually even Del Toro doesn’t use… the humans becoming more monstrous because of their interactions with ex-humans who are now monsters in body but less monstrous than their previous species in behavior. I find this extra extra good because it grapples with all the questions around “what does it mean to be human / does it even matter,” and also throws in “can the answers to those questions change” which is very neat.

Del Toro's Pinocchio was honestly so good, I cried so hard.

I will always upvote a video that does good analysis about a key part of Data's character arc. Twice if Lal makes an appearance.

Without a doubt, the best Pinocchio plot is the Superman story "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?". In said comic, Superman defeats all of his enemies forever and, upon being exposed to golden kryptonite, he becomes a mere mortal and lives happily ever after with Lois and their son. It's really satisfying to see the boy scout have the normal life that he always wanted to have. He truly deserved it 🥲

@juniperrodley9843

10 ай бұрын

Is that a Pinocchio plot, though? Didn't he turn into a human cause he killed someone, and believed he didn't deserve to wield his power after using it like that?

@OptimusMaximusNero

10 ай бұрын

​@@juniperrodley9843 Yeah, but having a happy life because of that decision makes it a Pinnochio plot, as he basically got what he deserved for saving the World from Evil and renouncing his powers forever once he knew he had to get rid of them before he became a tyrant

@juniperrodley9843

10 ай бұрын

@@OptimusMaximusNero Ed was the one who gave up his powers

@OptimusMaximusNero

10 ай бұрын

@@juniperrodley9843 Ed?

@juniperrodley9843

10 ай бұрын

@@OptimusMaximusNero ok so I thought I was replying to a different comment thread... thought this was the one about Fullmetal Alchemist, not Superman lmao that's what I get for just looking at the notif and not the context

Said this on Twitter, but two sci-fi examples I love are the “romance” experiments (specifically post-break-up) of Issac in The Orville, and when Data meets Spock in TNG (“In effect, you have abandoned what I have sought all my life.” Conversation, specifically)

@degei

10 ай бұрын

Yeah, I was looking at all the Data background clips and thinking the Isaac was a lot deeper of an exploration. The Orville nailed his character and did it in a way that constantly reminds you, he is a machine, but still a sapient being.

@daviddaugherty2816

10 ай бұрын

Isaac is kind of an interesting example of what Red was talking about with the "simulated emotions being effectively real" bit. Indeed, it's mentioned his entire people were effectively colored with bitterness towards organics after what happened with their creators, but Isaac wasn't around for that. Instead it seemed like his genuine care for the doctor (and especially her children) led to his rebellion. I also love how his original betrayal wasn't forgotten because he did the right thing in the end. That spoof show had no right to be anywhere near as good as it was. Also, as a military member, that crew dynamic is much more realistic than any of the Star Trek ones.

@templarw20

10 ай бұрын

@@daviddaugherty2816 Personally, for me it was after the first break-up, and when he tries to do his work... and realizes that he was more efficient with the Doc around, and he had changed his processes to account for that... and when she's removed, his ability to do stuff is compromised. Which is about as perfect a way for a non-emotional being to express love, far as I'm concerned.

@templarw20

10 ай бұрын

@@degei I mean... too be fair, the storytelling had limitations because of the medium and the length of the seasons/arcs.Wasn't until mid DS9 that the suits understood the power of longer form storytelling.

@daviddaugherty2816

10 ай бұрын

​@@templarw20 Agreed, especially because there really was no machine-logic reason for that to happen. He was honest-to-God distracted, which an emotionless machine had no business being.

I like all the clips of Data. Since I feel he perfectly encapsulates this trope. I'd often talk with others how Data clearly has feelings never thinking of the Philosophical Zombie.

6:07 To quote red “Del Toro is a man who understands monsters. He understands the complex interplay between humanity and inhumanity and he knows sometimes a person is a monster, sometimes a monster is a person, and sometimes a monster is a monster… Pacific rim is a movie about humans being human so the monsters are monsters.”

@katherinepurvin7802

9 ай бұрын

I wish we'd gotten the sequel to Pacific Rim he wanted to create instead of what we got when the studio went behind his back. Based on what I've heard, it was really going to get into some deep moral questions with its planned plot twist, and in doing so completely change the meaning of the first film.