#also if you cant tell i hate squ/pjer!!! not gonna put it in the ship tag because im not that much of a jerk but let it be known

[asianjeremyheere]

you can't just...... make the squip nice to suit your needs/so you can justify shipping it with children that it canonically abuses because its an "au where its nice!!!!"...... the squip is literally defined and driven by the fact that it does not have a moral compass.

more under the cut:

it cannot perceive limits. it doesn't have an inherent sense of right and wrong, and since its a computer, it. it won't ever have a sense of right and wrong. it can make educated guesses based on analysis, but the squip itself has no morals and never will, no matter how much it might act like it. that's the point of the the squip as a character. it's artificial intelligence and we cannot rely on it to make decisions that are based on and take into account other people's emotions because humans are fickle creatures and no amount of processing capacity can accurately predict that. to take that away is to essentially destroy the squip's whole character. 

"oh but the squip is nice in the book!" that's not an out either. maybe it comes across as nicer in the way it addresses jeremy, but it's still a computer with no emotions. it tells jeremy how to shut it down because it failed its goal, not because it feels bad. think of it as an antivirus program warning you about a bad download. it's still not feeling emotions. AND on top of that, you can't really mix-and-match the book and musical and expect the same story. you can't drop book!squip into the musical universe and expect the story to take place as it usually does. the squip in the musical is written to serve a specific purpose, and the way it's written has changed the way the story flows- just like changing jeremy as a character changes the story. the squip is meant to be forceful and menacing and assertive because that, alongside the specific way that jeremy has been written, is what drives the story from a literary perspective. 

book!jeremy is more disconnected from his peers (or really just michael) than musical!jeremy, and he seemed more passive when faced with an authority figure. musical!jeremy asks questions, he protests whether he means to or not. "i don't stammer", "what's wrong with my shirt?", "do people still listen to eminem?" he doesn't immediately let the squip walk all over him because that's just his character. the squip, in relation to that, is more aggressive. it's firm and insistent about jeremy needing to obey without asking questions and consistently shuts him down whenever he asks about it. it takes charge and it makes sure jeremy is aware of it through whatever methods it deems 'most efficient' because it's a shortcut/cheat code, that's what it's programmed to do. and obviously from a moral standpoint this makes the squip bad, but if it was any different then the story would not be the same. 

book!squip might be 'nicer' but you can't pair it with musical!jeremy because it wouldn't make enough progress with him acting the way that it does in the book. compromising, the way that it does in the book, will not get it far in the world of the musical. if anything, it would just slowly become more and more like musical!squip anyway by virtue of being made to achieve a goal and, presumably, being programmed to do it in the most efficient manner possible. there is no way to make the squip 'nice' without completely disregarding the canon character and thus basically just making an oc. 

as for squip redemption fics, they’re interesting but all of this.... still applies. first of all, i don’t think the squip would actually care about being redeemed because it doesn’t uhhh have emotions and generally speaking computers will function regardless of what you think of them, therefore in a canon context, a squip redemption fic would likely be fueled by needing jeremy to be cooperative in order to achieve a goal, whatever that goal happens to be. whether this actually counts as redemption or not is.... questionable. or you could go the whole ‘update that makes the squip more sympathetic’ route but my point still stands: it doesn’t actually feel! therefore sympathy or empathy are things that it can probably be taught to display, to a certain extent, but not things it can actually genuinely feel. 

anyway tldr: the squip can't just "be nice" without losing the basis of its entire character so stop using that as an excuse to justify squ/pemy because its a shitty excuse!