Fridge Brilliance
- The drastic personality changes Dora underwent during her relationship with Marten used to aggravate me, seeing as she went from being sassy and confident to insecure, clingy and almost manipulative at times. Then I realized that she had always shown hints of insecurity and indecisiveness in her personality, but it only started to show when she got to know Marten better, and trusted him enough to let her imperfections and faults become apparent.
- Was this
comic a subtle nod to Faye later hooking up with Sven?Dora: Wait, you can't handle a relationship with a guy you know really well, but you'd bang a dude who has probably slept with the entire female population of Manhattan? - Jimbo the trucker writing well-selling romance novels for females? Seems unbelievable at the first glimpse. However, if you happen to be familiar with this topic, you'll know that many of these novels are essentially "emotion porn" and tend to have many scenes about women being overwhelmed by aggressive hypermasculine men. Not surprising that a redneck trucker will know better about this than a hipster Nice Guy.
- One of the several things Faye teaches Sam after her dad drops her off at CoD is how to make an Old Fashioned. The ingredients of this cocktail, according to Wikipedia: sugar, bitters, whiskey (or brandy), and citrus rind. Sugar? Lemon slices? Normal ingredients present at any cafe. Whiskey? Can you say "Emergency Bourbon"? All they need is a bottle of bitters and they're set! For that matter, if all you need is something bitter, a few drops of strong coffee will do the trick nicely.
- Hannelore's apartment and Marten/Faye's apartment have the same keys! Think about it: Faye ended up in Hannelore's apartment without realizing (even though the door was locked) and 100 strips later Hannelore appears in Marten's apartment with no explanation. That's how!
- Melon is specifically described as letting herself into Roko’s apartment using a combination. Elliott’s apartment also has a keypad.
- In this strip, Hannelore asks how Space-Time Tensor Fields relate to Pokemon. Dialga and Palkia, That's How!
- In this strip, Marten describes Amanda as a "Vespa, crashing into a stop sign." 545 strips later... Furthermore, Sven is on the receiving end of it long before Vespavenger comes after Steve.
- Given that just before this Genevieve, an old girlfriend of Sven's had been just recently screwed over by Sven and was hanging around in the bar to "make him squirm", there's a fair chance Genevieve was the one who contacted the Vespavenger to go after Sven in the first place. Hence the real reason she was there was in the hopes of seeing Sven get his just desserts and decided to leave when it became clear she wasn't going to actually get to see it.
- In #1011, when Hannelore's dad sends her a humanoid robot to act as a practice boyfriend, Faye mentions that "you don't see fully humanoid robots running around everywhere". But in #1996, Marigold is buying such a chassis for Momo from a storefront in the local mall. But the thing is, (a) you don't — Momo is the only one we've seen on the street so far in the comic; and (b) given that in #1311 it was winter, it's probably been at least four months ... presumably long enough for a mature prototype to enter production. Not to mention they hit The Singularity in the meantime.
- All the way back in #1720 Dora says that it's a coffee shop, and as long as they don't show up to work drunk or high they'll be fine. A thousand strips later, in 2879, Faye gets fired for just that.
- Human characters all have round speech bubbles, while AIs have square ones...with one exception: Spookybot. It's a small touch that draws attention to how different and how more advanced they are from other AIs.
- Faye's relationship with Bubbles struck some people as being a bit unexpected. But in the beginning of the strip, Faye is by her own admission not ready to be in a relationship with anyone. All her friendships are with people who can put up with her snarking. Rather than deal with her feelings, she drinks too much. She has relationships with Sven and then Angus, but in both cases it's based almost entirely on mutual sexual attraction and little else. She isn't even sure she likes Sven, while Angus has totally different ambitions in life and is willing to put them before anything else. But when she meets Bubbles, Faye has stopped drinking. She starts out working in the same place as her, and finds her fascinating and impressive; then she wants Bubbles to be happier and works hard to introduce her to more friends; then Bubbles starts to value Faye's friendship; then they're best friends; then they start a business together, and only after a months-long process of spending basically all their time in each other's company and never getting tired of each other, does it dawn on them that they actually love each other.note
- Let's add that, after witnessing her father's suicide Faye has since had great difficulty just interacting with men, much less having relationships with them due to the trauma. Dating a girl not to mention a robot girl is about as far from her father and the issues that come with it as would be possible. The problems that would and have colored all of Faye's relationships with men aren't going to come up much if at all.
- Another Faye/Bubbles thing: in the very early strips, Faye speaks in a very formal and precise way and seldom uses contractions ("It has been a while since I got my booze on"), and only when she's drunk does she revert to having the same southern accent as her younger sister. Later on, as she starts to have relationships, her speech patterns loosen up, and after she's both stopped drinking and got together with Bubbles, she routinely talks in her old Georgia accent. However, Bubbles habitually talks the way Faye used to talk, unless she's upset. It's another of the things they have in common (along with seeing their loved ones get killed before their eyes: Faye's father, Bubbles' squad.)
- When Pintsize gets himself a humanoid body as a joke, after years of insisting that he was absolutely fine with his old clunky body, and then realises that his new body suits him far better and that he thought of having to go back to his old one is horrifying, Claire is the one who is sympathetic to all his new and unwelcome feelings. Why? Because Claire is a trans woman, and there's not much she doesn't know about feeling like you've got the wrong body.
- Pintsize has expressed a desire to have a body or work with someone who did, like the first time Winslow was embodied temporarily. He's also shown an insecurity about himself and his purpose occasionally that he in typical Pintsize fashion quickly covered with crude humor. It is easy to see that Pintsize would find the body that was capable of far far less to be very confining once he had a taste of what it's like to have a humanlike body. In addition, Pintsize can more easily identify and empathize with the humans and humanlike robots around him better once he has a body similar to theirs. That and not being able to get away with his antics as easily as he used to.
- Bubbles is the only character who has a distinctive font in her speech bubbles. It resembles OCR-A, which was one of the first fonts that was designed to be equally readable by humans and computers. This is because Bubbles is the first AI character in the strip to form a romantic relationship with a human: she is the embodiment of the bridge between humans and A.I.s.
Fridge Horror
- This is more depressing than horrifying, but in this strip, when Marten and Dora break up, Marten appears to be repeating word-for-word his question from this strip - in which Dora's answer was exactly what Marten had been unable to do. It really drives home Jeph's comment that this was "a long time coming."
- It indeed seemed to be a long time coming, if you analyze the contributors to the break up. One will realize that they stem from certain personality traits and personal issues (some pretty deep seated) that belong to Marten and Dora. These traits were already revealed from past humorous situations and many events which were played for laughs at the time hinted at the deep seated issues (which can now be realized in hindsight). When these traits manifested during their time together, it started to seriously damage the relationship.
- In-universe Fridge Horror meets Late to the Punchline to devastating effect on Faye in this comic involving her grandmother talking about their ancestors being boarded by "Yankee Seamen".
- Try not to think too hard about the punchline to this strip, okay? Turns out that there are actually ''are'' AI's in charge of nuclear weapons. And to answer Marten's question in the first strip, they do need a lot of counseling.
- At one point, Marigold does some repairs on Pintsize, after having done it before, and asks to talk to him alone to make sure that the cast isn't abusing him. The horror: These A.I.s only exist to ensure friendship and trust, yet they are apparently abused to the point that standard commonly-known procedures exist for it. Combine that with the fact that all the A.I.s want is equal rights, and it becomes a horrifying portrayal of humanity.
- A military droid lost his job and was forced to adapt to civilian life. When new A.I.s wake up, they get to choose their career paths and can change them at any time. A.I.s were used in the combat zones, but AI activists hated that because it might scare people. How many A.I.s lost their jobs because of that and were they actually all combatants or were non-combatants also ejected? Apparently it doesn't matter what those A.I.s want or that their jobless now and that the only life most of them knew was in the military. There's illegal robot fighting matches for Pete's sake because some robots are desperate for money!
- From Bubbles we learn that the quality of life for ex-military AIs is quite low, and that they don't get any level of counseling or reintegration, even those like Bubble with serious PTSD.
- Sven's a good guy, but imagine being in May's shoes if he wasn't.
- A frequently-mentioned issue for May was that her body was shoddy, outdated and continually falling apart, which was frequently Played for Laughs. In this strip she finally has a new body and is delighted. Happy to be rid of her old body, she bonks her old body's head—which promptly falls off. Then the old body catches fire. While this incident is Played for Laughs, the fridge horror is this: Hitting her head like that could have happened at any time in the past 1600 strips or so. (Her body was introduced in strip 2710; as of this writing, QC is on 4356.) It happened literally the day her body was changed. If it had happened before the body change, the damage could easily have destroyed her mind substrate, and she would have died.
- In this strip, Crushbot, who weighs several tons, steps on a crate of bananas by accident and loses his footing, falling backwards to crush Roko who'd just exited Faye and Bubbles workshop. Roko's body is destroyed beyond repair and it's implied that the only reason her consciousness survived was due to the upgraded memory substrate she had due to her law enforcement background. Any AI with a normal substrate would probably have died and if it had been a human, they would have been killed instantly. Somehow everyone is unfazed by having A.I.s wandering around pedestrian areas in bodies that can easily kill humans by complete accident. One wonders why A.I.s are not required to inhabit near-human type bodies if they are going to live alongside humans. It was only chance that it wasn't, for example, Sam (a thirteen year old girl who frequents the workshop) instead of Roko who was the victim of the accident.
