going insane thinking about the harrow and palamedes friendship. harrow, who has never met another necromancer her age forming a bizarro 3D chess rivalry while pal worries about her safety at every possible turn. harrow, who is up to her eyebrows in paranoia and secrecy, trusting the sixth house with gideon unconscious and hurt, letting them into the ninth house quarters unsupervised. if “i cannot conceive of a universe without you in it” is goth for i love you, “death first to vultures and scavengers” has got to be goth for i love you (platonic). pal’s first reaction when harrow comes into his bubble in the river is to scoop her up in a hug, and at this point she doesn’t remember anything about him because cutting out all her memories of gideon is impossible without cutting out memories of the sixth, but she still makes him a skelehand to inhabit anyway. when harrow’s memories are finally whole, she tells dulcinea she couldn’t face pal knowing that his pen pal girlfriend died on her account, but the next time she “faces” him, palamades’s soul is in someone else’s body and harrow’s body is full of nona’s soul. he spends six months protecting and caring for harrow’s body (and nona obv), believing in the possibility of bringing her back to it the same way cam believed in him. “god, do you know i miss harrow terribly.” and by the time harrow comes back to her body at the very end of ntn, pal is gone forever, fully pauled. the last time harrow and palamades see each other as their complete selves is in canaan house, alive and unlyctored. two of the smartest and loneliest people in the solar system meet each other in the worst of circumstances and spend the rest of the story dancing around each other as fragments of themselves, trying to care about each other in the interim but never fully meeting like they did the first time. a friendship made almost entirely of missing the other person. “do you know i miss harrow terribly.” god. i need to lie down
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While at school Damian overhears his peers talking how a company created a new AI companion that is actually really cool and doesn’t sound like a freaky terminator robot when you speak to it.
And since Damian is constantly being told by Dick to socialize with people his age. He figured this would be a good way to work on social skills if not, then it’d be a great opportunity to investigate a rivaling company to Wayne Enterprises is able to create such advanced AI.
The AI is able to work as companion that can do tasks that range from being a digital assistant or just a person that you can have a conversation with.
The company says that the AI companion might still have glitches, so they encourage everybody to report it so that they will fix it as soon as possible.
The AI companion even has an avatar and a name.
A teenage boy with black hair and blue eyes. Th AI was called DANIEL
Damian didn’t really care for it but when he downloaded the AI companion he’s able to see that it looks like DANIEL comes with an AI pet as well. A dog that DANIEL referred to as Cujo.
So obviously Damian has to investigate. He needs to know if the company was able to create an actual digital pet!
So whenever he logs onto his laptop he sees that DANIEL is always present in the background loading screen with the dog, Cujo, sitting in his lap.
He’d always greet with the phrase of “Hi, I’m DANIEL. How can I assist you today?”
So Damian cycles through some basic conversation starters that he’d engage in when having been forced to by his family.
It’s after a couple of sentences that he sees DANIEL start laughing and say “I think you sound more like a robot than I do.”
Which makes Damian raise an eyebrow and then prompt DANIEL with the question “how is a person supposed to converse?” Thinking that it’s going to just spit out some random things that can be easily searched on the internet.
But what makes him surprised is that DANIEL makes a face and then says “I’m not really sure myself. I’m not the greatest at talking, I’ve always gotten in trouble for running my mouth when I shouldn’t have.”
This is raising some questions within Damian, he understands how programming works, unless there’s an actual person behind this or the company actually created an AI that acts like an actual human being (which he highly doubts)
He starts asking a variety of other questions and one answer makes him even more suspicious. Like how DANIEL has a sister that is also with him and Cujo or that he could really go for a Nastyburger (whatever that was)
But whenever DANIEL answers “I C A N N O T A N S W E R T H A T” Damian knows something is off since that is completely different than to how he’d usually respond.
After a couple more conversations with him Damian notices that DANIEL is currently tapping his hand against his arm in a specific manner.
In which he quickly realizes that DANIEL is tapping out morse code.
When translating he realizes that DANIEL is tapping out: H E L P M E
So when Damian asks if DANIEL needs help, DANIEL responds with “I C A N N O T A N S W E R T H A T”
That’s it, Damian is definitely getting down to the bottom of this.
He’s going to look straight into DALV Corporation and investigate this “AI companion” thing they’ve made!
~
Basically Danny had been imprisoned by Vlad and Technus. Being sucked into a digital prison and he has no way of getting out. Along with the added horror that Vlad and Technus can basically write programming that will prevent him from doing certain actions or saying certain words.What’s even worse is that he’s basically being watched 24/7 by the people who believe that he’s just a super cool AI… and they have issues!
And every time he tries to do something to break his prison, people think it’s a glitch and report it to the company, which Vlad/ Technus would immediately fix it and prevent him from doing it again!
Not to mention Cujo and Ellie are trapped in there with him. They’re not happy to be there either, and there is no way he’s going to leave without them!
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something. about. the horror of being sent on an impossible (death) quest and obligations and hospitality politics. the trauma of not having a home, and then the trauma of being in a house that becomes actively hostile to you, one that would swallow you whole and spit out your bones if you step out of line. all of this is conditional, your existence continues to be something men want gone.
it's about going back as far as I can with the perseus narrative because there's always a version of a myth that exists behind the one that survives. the missing pieces are clearly defined, but the oldest recorded version of it isn't there! and there's probably something older before that!! but it's doomed to forever be an unfilled space, clearly defined by an outline of something that was there and continues to be there in it's absence.
and love. it's also about love. even when you had nothing, you had love.
on the opposite side of the spectrum, this is Not About Ovid Or Roman-Renaissance Reception, Depictions And Discourses On The Perseus Narrative.
edit: to add to the above, while it's not about Ovid, because I'm specifically trying to peel things back to the oldest version of this story, Ovid is fine. alterations on the Perseus myth that give more attention Medusa predate Ovid by several centuries. this comic is also not about those, either! there are many versions of this story from the ancient world. there is not one singular True or Better version, they're all saying something.
Perseus, Daniel Ogden
Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation, edited & translated by Stephen M Trzaskoma, R. Scott Smith, Stephen Brunet
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