No, no, before you say "no GLaDOS is cool and in control" you don't get it. She lies when she's nervous and fumbles over her words. She calls Chell fat because she has no better insults. Every so often she will have an AMAZING line but that's only when she's had time to prepare and you know she went over it in her head giggling because "this is gonna get Chell soooo good". She just has a really big vocabulary.
Second: GLaDOS doesn't torture people. If she likes you, she puts you through testing. But it's not torture, it's testing, that's all it's meant to be. If she doesn't like you you will just kill you outright. Look, you would start rambling about how you would torture the guy who had literally taken away your body and everything you cared about but she wouldn't actually torture him. It's not her style.
GLaDOS is Wheatley but cooler. But actually trying to break the cycle she was forced into. But still. Fundamentally a loser. She's so. She is so loser. That is all.
Uhhh. Okay. Pitch. Link wakes up in a sealed room. The walls are polished glass and stone and steel, and the lights. The room bleeds with light, endless blinding light pouring out of every surface. He's almost snowblind, but a gentle voice encourages him to carry on, and half-blind, half-dead dumb puppet that he is, he does.
The chamber leads to another. Then another. Each one has another tool, another puzzle, another blaze of impossible lights and another whisper from that voice to carry on. And it should lead up, and out, and into the light of the sun.
It never does.
The path winds deeper and deeper into the gut of the temple, where the snow-bright light grows harsher, more artificial. In nooks and crannies, places where the walls have been forced apart, he finds the scrawlings of scavengers, those who braved the bowels of the Moonrock Temple, the terrible place where doors open to impossible places.
And then he finds her. The one who whispered to him on the path. She had been forced to make herself a new body while she waited for him to wake up. She is made of polished glass and stone and steel, and when she smiles she shines with impossible light.
“You found me,” she said, and her voice thrums with an unnatural chord. “Congratulations. Was it worth it?”
having read a fair few ChellDOS fics by now; there's something that kinda annoys me
like, ok, i get why someone would turn GLaDOS into an android, it's a lot easier for a human to write about what is physically an artificial human than it is about a giant machine dangling from the ceiling
but it annoys me anyways; it doesn't feel like Her character to just randomly turn Herself into an android, especially not a clear imitation of a human, so android!GLaDOS tends to feel like a different character to me at times
only exception is if there's some reason for the whole thing; for example, having to do maintenance work too sensitive to trust with the coop bots, and which is in an unmaintained part of the facility She has no power over
idk, could also just be my incredibly dysfunctional suspension of disbelief at it again