Witch Chat - .hack//Gay Undertones

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offtopic / .hack//Gay Undertones

god damn

00:34

I mean I obviously don't mind a stupid complex story

00:35

I just like it when it's like, actually all being told to me rather than leveraged as part of an international multimedia event series

yeah I feel you

unless the event series is really neat

International Multimedia event series is literally what .hack is known for tho

yeah I mean that is just what it is

00:35

this is what it's doing

00:35

I Can Accept That

I appreciate that nothing is really lost by not knowing about these backstories

/ even respect it as a genuine attempt to actually do something like that

even Haseo's backstory basically just adds some poetry and pathos to events

I mean sure if you don't foreground it

00:37

I dunno that seems weak to me from a writing perspective, because you get to pick whether or not "nothing is really lost" at every point of the experience, if that makes sense

oh man, Bourdoux is more sympathetic than I realized

00:37

"In the real world, Bordeaux is a 14-year-old girl named Nina Kircheis. Her father is German and her mother is Japanese. When she was ten, her parents divorced and she moved to Toyama, Japan. She has a prideful personality and isn't good at dealing with change, so this part of her life was filled with stress. She discovered The World during her first year of middle school, and used it as an outlet for all the bitterness she had built up inside. "

it's kind of a shame these kids didn't just pick like

00:38

getting really into League or something

If you're wondering why no one asks why The World is putting kids into comas

I am yeah

00:38

seems like a design flaw

it's because they ARE, it's just

00:38

they think it's kids gaming too hard or something

00:39

Like getting exhaustian from just normal game addiction rather than like, cyber magic

I mean it's funny because I think when this game came out I would've called that farfetched

yeah no honestly I totally buy that

but in TYOOL 2022 that 100% checks out

there are a ton of news articles about like, gaming as a social issue

00:39

and they mention the comas

00:40

but that's all it is seen as

it would only be more accurate if these kids' parents were getting arrested for their children's truancy

This was a fun night, I'm glad I pushed through

toot

https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/66940368

.hack//G.U. 【歩くような速さで】

ドットハックが楽しくて毎日が楽しい

so while shaia summarized the plot of this game I'd like to go ahead and give a brief summary of the Lore prior to it

12:24

or, in other words: why this mmo is so fucked up

12:28

So there's this chick named Emma, and she starts writing this epic poem on her blog

12:30

It's called 'The Epitath of Twilight' and it has some kind of magic copy protection that makes it impossible to like, screenshot, or copy/paste, or save as.

Ah, like Disney +

But she ends up dying before finishing it.

~~again,~~ like ~~disney +~~ netlix this time, rip (edited)

And then some 8 year old in America makes a virus that deletes the internet.

okay

12:32

did not know about that bit

Oh god I forgot about that

The entire internet.

Pluto's Kiss

12:32

This would have been in like 2008?

Your guess is as good as mine as to how the fuck.

2005

how viable is this virus irl

12:33

asking for a friend

12:33

in minecraft

lol

The basic result of the virus is that Microsoft went out of business and the American president resigned

oh god this US president name

12:33

The incident was so damaging that United States President, Jim Stonecold, later resigned from office in January 2006 after taking full responsibility for the incident.

LMAO

12:33

hell fucking yes

Kojima ass president name

definitely

more people should be talking about this series obviously

Pluto's Kiss has no direct connection to anything else that happens in this setting

12:34

It's just like

lol fucking naturally

A thing that happened

if the internet got deleted today we would restart the fucking calendar lmao

Pluto's Kiss seemingly exists just so the OS everyone uses can become the only OS in the setting

12:35

since it's immune to computer viruses

12:35

or whatever

Basically imagine if all computers except those made by apple were destroyed all at once

(and of course the same corp owns The World/is closely related to the devs of The World) (edited)

And so it became mandated that only apple can make computer

Steve Jobs’ fruity enema for the world………

It basically solves the problem of like, why an buggy ai in a video game can interact with stuff outside of it, so that now everything is networked within this one kind of technology

sure that makes sense

Enter Harald. Harald is down bad for Emma. Issue is, she had a fiance even before she died. Add that to the poem now mostly only existing in Harald's stalker diary... Well, he feels he has to Make A Thing.

The root cause of all of .hack is a weird incel, yes

nods

12:37

Him I remember

12:37

(I played all of the first quadrilogy)

Harold at least is hard to forget

Specifically, he decides to make a magic game based on the Epitath called Fragment. Except it isn't something that was really meant to ever be played, per se.

The poem, btw, is implied to be like a wagner-esque Gotterdammerung story. The "Avatars" like Skeith are abitors of the coming apocalypse in the peom

peom

Epitaph of twilight

Instead, it mostly only exists so he can fuck around with AI. I don't know why he had to make a wholeass game for that, but anyway.

Basically everything Harold did is a bad dumb idea

12:48

Which basically makes him a typical silicon valley guy

He makes an AI named Morgana Mode/Maude Gone/Gonne. This AI isn't actually like, something that actually matters to him, and was just created to act as a surrogate mother. Presumably Harald named her after King Arthur's evil sister because he was possessed by the same force that makes the parents of MLP and Harry Potter characters forsee their adult future.

lol

LMAO

12:54

Very good summary of Harold, thanks FE

A surrogate mother for what? Why, I'm glad you asked! Morganna is a surrogate mother for Harald and Emma's super-AI baby. Remember, Emma got engaged to another dude and DIED before any of this.

The game wants us to view Harold as a tragic figure but honestly he is just an asshole

^

In retrospect creating a mother AI and then neglecting it entirely was a really poor choice entirely keeping with Harold's history of poor choices

Don't ask me why Harald had to make a wholeass artificial intelligence to make a nonconsensual robobaby with a dead chick.

This is the promise of the metaverse

we're going to find out that this is just what Zuck is literally doing

Honestly like

12:58

I wouldn't be shocked

oh no it'll totally make sense

Anywho, Harald left a bunch of commented out philosophical ramblings in the code and died.

Zuckerberg is gonna mint his perfect love child AI on the blockchain

13:00

The basic point is that the child is supposed to be a True AI with human thoughts and feelings, while Morgana is a more rudimentary AI.

13:00

Morgana was supposed to like, nurture the child's neural network with good data from the algorithm

13:01

But while rudimentary, Morgana did realize eventually that she was going to be forced to self-terminate once the child, Aura, was fully completed

13:01

And well

13:01

The first .hack games happened

So now you have CC Corp. CC Corp is this massive multbillion dollar corporation that somehow got the rights to Fragment.

Morgana: wait a minute if I finish my function I have no purpose and will be forced to delete myself. goes about putting bad data from the algorithm into Aura instead (edited)

Morgana desperately trying not to get deleted over the course of 4 games and an anime series is honestly more sympathetic than anything Harold felt

jeez

is morgana intentionally framed as sympathetic

CC Corp takes a look at Fragment, this unfinished incel passion project, and goes "well, we can probably turn this into a VR MMORPG" and does exactly that.

not really I don't think

Happy Maria

is morgana intentionally framed as sympathetic

I would say pretty neutral?

13:04

It's like asking if a hurricane is framed as sympathetic

I mean...

It is an AI reacting naturally to the situation it is put in, is how the game takes it

13:05

Hence I blame the programmer for doing incredibly unethical things

Except, somehow, in some bizarre way, they manage to do this WITHOUT EVER LOOKING AT THE ORIGINAL SOURCE CODE.

Fate's End (Sophia?)

Except, somehow, in some bizarre way, they manage to do this WITHOUT EVER LOOKING AT THE ORIGINAL SOURCE CODE.

Now this i believe

"just use assembly, it'll be fine"

Happy Maria

I mean...

You are right though FTR, morgana is more sympathetic looking back on it as an adult than she is really protrayed in the games. But then, all players really experience is the end result of all these bad choices, which is a sentient video game slowly going insane

How the fuck do you turn this incel's VM into a whole MMO without even knowing anything about anything in it or how it works?? (edited)

13:09

Anyway, they call it ZA WARUDO and it ends up being a massive success, quickly becoming the most sold game ever and accruing a staggering playerbase.

13:12

Except whoops, they didn't do anything about the game's original function. Now Morgana and the half-born AI daughteru, Aura, are in there chilling amongst millions and millions of gamers.

CC corp is also the name of the developers of the .hack games

13:13

In real life

13:13

Which makes it so fucking funny how incompetent they are in universe

And Morgana decides that hey, she doesn't like the idea of existing to be a surrogate womb and die, so she has a heated gamer moment that lasts 1 anime, 4 or 5 OVAs, and 4 games.

Lol Heated Gamer Moment

Trying to girlboss her way to survival

Good for her

Meanwhile, Aura doesn't really like the idea of being an anti-abortion PSA and kind of just floats around offering cryptic assistance as a ghost girl even though she technically doesn't exist yet?

Morgana Mode Gone is a cautionary tale about Garbage In, Garbage Out coding practice.

I was gonna say something about motherhood but thought I was going too far, and then come back to "anti-abortion PSA" so maybe it really is that fucked

13:20

anyway this is all I need to know to root for morgana and fuck everyone else

Harold set up a real nightmare AI situation

13:21

That said: Morgana is long gone by the time .hack//gu is going

sounds like a good reason to blow everything up

Fate's End (Sophia?)

How the fuck do you turn this incel's VM into a whole MMO without even knowing anything about anything in it or how it works?? (edited)

that's just proper programming right there

13:21

black box your libraries

Yeah what gets me is how believable most of the terrible coding practices are

So yeah. All That eventually gets resolved by Team Protag (because just like in real life, the mods are the only part of CC Corp that actively do anything even when people are being sucked into a video game and their bodies are comatose and presumably anyone with access to the source code is getting absolutely blitzed on imported wine)

Shaiapouf

That said: Morgana is long gone by the time .hack//gu is going

how do things end for morgana and aura then

The long and short of it is

13:23

Aura needed to "die" to fully live and so she lets Morgana kill her, allowing her to become a new, complete being and with aura complete Morgana is destroyed

Aura did not ask for any of this. She's just doing the best she can.

sounds the same for morgana

Yeah

so like did morgana know killing aura was basically going to end that way

I believe so

well, morganna was also turning people into vegetables soooo

Aura like, jumps in front of a shot for us

I mean, veggiepeople is just the price to be paid

Morgana was straight up killing people and was getting to a point where she was gonna start launching missiles

if people didn't want to be veggies that dude shouldn't have done this shit to an ai

Like, she did have to be stopped

rip to them but I'm different

But yes I absolutely blame Harold for all of this

Also, fyi, the avatar-things were originally literally just components of Morgana so IDK hiw GU plans on explaining that.

harold did not drink his respect women OR his respect AIs juice

man fuck harold

13:27

johji

All my homies hate harold

FE that was very helpful thank you

13:28

I Know So Much More About This Colorful World

does harold get his comeuppance

The one big takeaway I would add onto this, that relates to .hack//gu

So after all that, CC corp once again takes the platinum medal in incompetency after it turns out that all the servers for the most successful game ever were all in the same building with no backups.

I believe Morgana killed him?

13:28

And like

ah good good

https://giphy.com/gifs/good-for-her-AgPt9udT567spxbSHf

Broke up his personality into fragments around the game

oh wait why

13:29

can't you just kill him dead

I hate that that sentence just makes me think of voldemort

why do people always fucking fragment these things

13:29

what the fuck is wrong with people

hp please get out of my head

Maybe. He's dead before anyhing happened and you just run into his audio diaries in broken code

It's a bit unclear

yeah JKR's stupid plotworms are stuck in all our heads

13:29

all we can do is grin and bear it

I was always under the impression that Morgana got to him (edited)

at least tropes like komaeda are funny

I mean if this is the sort of thing where like

13:30

he's been cut up into pieces and suffer for eternity

13:30

like a Jojo villain gets got

hey shaia so who's the komaeda anyway

That's kinda how it comes across

that's fine then

that IS like a jojo villain isn't it

yeah does .Hack have a Komaeda

Happy Maria

hey shaia so who's the komaeda anyway

In GU? Hmm. Endrance, maybe

Araki really likes to have villains really suffer

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