Ask Erik: Episode Twenty-Three

To Erik:  Besides that one video game, what do you most regret ever buying, or am the most ashamed of having bought?

I'm going to assume we aren't talking about things like cars, meals, or that "discount" surround sound system I once bought.

I'm also going to assume that when we say "ashamed" we mean "embarrassed to have spent money on to own" and not just things I like that I might no leave out for general public viewing.

The game this character was from was awesome.  That's why I own it.  Honest.

Now, some people might think that something I bought that turned out to be terrible might top this list.  That would be true only If I didn't expect it to be terrible.  For instance, I proudly own a copy of Superman: At Earth's End, which I think I mentioned before as the story that somehow ruins Superman fighting in a post-apocalypse world where the major evil is twin clones of Hitler.

It is terrible on every level.  I love it.

There are plenty of movies I own that are not good on any level, but there's something about them I love.  Maybe it's a particular actor, maybe it's a special effect, or maybe it's a ridiculous story.  Case in point, I own five DVDs starring Reb Brown: Captain America and Captain America 2, Yor: The Hunter From The Future, The Firing Line, and the MST3K episode of Space Mutiny.

None of them are good, but they're all fun.

As for video games, well, we already discussed the one game I took back immediately after buying it.  That might top the list...if it weren't for something else I once owned that, looking back, I don't even want my money back, I'd happily pay the exact same amount to have never owned a single volume of the manga Chobits.

Okay, for a long time I was a sponge for all things from Japan.  I ate, drank, and breathed anime, manga, and everything else that tiny country was willing to export to our shores.  I read art books, I played poorly translated games, I read novels.  For heaven's sake, I used to eat Pocky, and that stuff is terrible.  Pocky might actually be on a list of things I really regret ever buying.

But for every Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, or Ghost In The Shell, there was stuff that I watched despite not even really enjoying it.  I sat through St. Luminous Mission High School, which started out with a fascinating mystery and ended as a really weak ghost story.  I watched Burst Angel which suffered from the entire female cast's breasts growing a cup size every few episodes until watching the show felt more like watching talking breasts moving around with legs and heads glued on to them.  I watched Magikano which was decent until i realized they gave away the major plot twist in the opening credits.  I read a LOT of really bad mangas, most of which just blur together into a hodgepodge of mediocrity.

Then there's Chobits.  This is one of those series where you watch it or read it, and after a short ways in you suddenly realize just what depths of being horrible it reaches.  It is, quite possibly, one of the more disturbing and depressing mangas I ever read....and one of the most disturbing series I ever watched.

That's right, I went both routes with this one, because I was sure one couldn't be as disturbing as the other...but I don't remember which one I saw first.

In a somewhat different world like our own, people don't have regular computers or video games, instead they have intelligent computers shaped like people who run programs for them.  The computers walk, talk, do chores, and pretty much do everything Rosie on The Jetsons would do...with one difference:

Rosie didn't look like that.

Now, the series had potential to be really great.  Studying the difference between where artificial life becomes "alive" versus simply living out its programming?  That's pretty deep.  Studying a society where people start to rely more on their computers for social interaction and for getting personal matters done?  It could relate a lot to how people today seem more fixated on their devices than in actual human interaction.

Plus, I will admit that the idea of a smaller "persocom" (I think that's what they were called) was pretty funny, and I liked Sumomo.

But here's the first sign things get creepy:  The main character finds his blond-haired computer in the trash, takes it home, and tries to turn it on.  Where's the power button?  Why, between her legs, of course!

Yeah, let that sink in.

Now, the main character is a bit socially awkward, and I admit I did like the fact that being able to talk to a computer that looked like a person seemed to make it easier for him to have conversations with other people.  He developed other friendships, and even found a girl who really, really liked him, and not just as a friend.  The series had me thinking that we were going to see him come to the realization that his computer might be great, but real human interaction was what he craved, he would get into a relationship with the girl he liked, and the computer girl would move on to someone else who needed it.

But no.

No, it couldn't be that nice.

Instead, through some ridiculous plot twists and other stuff that I almost fell asleep while reading or watching, it turns out that the main character falls completely in love with his computer.  Not only that, but the computer manages to learn what love is, and falls in love with him.  They, by all appearances of the ending, get to live happily ever after together.

Oh, and not only that, but because this one computer learned how to love, there's a quick firmware update to every other computer girl (even the tiny ones) and suddenly they can all fall in love with people or each other.  They are, in essence, officially "alive."

Which is all well and good, except that they establish early on (if I'm remembering this correctly) that only really poor people don't have their own personal computer people.  Suddenly, if people are falling in love with their computers and the computers are loving them back, what does that mean for the fate of the human race?  You can't breed with a computer.  Based on how often I go through computers, your 'girlfriend" might become ridiculously outdated in a few years, or not able to run the latest anti-virus software, or the warranty will run out, then what do you do?  If they don't get outdated, then do they simply permanently turn themselves off when the person they love gets old and dies?  Wouldn't it get really creepy if you lived your with a computer that looked like a fifteen year old girl and you hit your sixtieth birthday?

Oh, wait, I just swung through tvtropes, and it reminded me of a few things.

A "persocom" has limited memory, and when that gets full they either need to have it erased or they start to break down.  Which means congratulations, main character, you have a loving girlfriend who, after an indeterminate amount of time, will need to have her mind wiped.  Or, if for some reason she's special, then everyone else who develops feelings for a robot will go through this.

Oh, and the one girl who really liked the main character?  Remember, she's seventeen.  She winds up resuming a relationship with her 39 year-old boss who was once married to a "persocom" (before they could experience true love) that had the same name as her.

This is terrible, and not in a good way.

There are so many more things about this series that bothers me, but man, the fact that I owned and read the books or watched the series just makes me feel completely unclean inside, and that's not even getting to the fact that the series acknowledges the fact that the reason a "reset/power button" is between the legs is because people are known to try to have sex with their computers.  It's supposed to act like a deterrent since if you start humping your computer, suddenly your mp3 collection vanishes.

Or something like that.

But yeah, that's probably one of the things I most regret ever having in my life at all, much less something I paid money for.