#hhhhhhhhhhhhhi love the squip. its really really interesting

[bemoremuse]

I GOT MY HANDS ON A 3.0 AUDIO BOOTLEG TODAY SO IM GONNA TALK ABOUT ONE OF MY FAVORITE SCENES DURING THE PLAY

In the conversation leading up to Pitiful Children Christine says she wishes she could do more to help her peers. That’s when the Squip gets the idea to sync the entire school-- everyones problems will disappear and Christine will be happy and like Jeremy. It falls in line with its objective: Get Christine to like Jeremy and get Jeremy Popular. This is true for all three versions-- as far as I’m aware anyway, I’d have to check the two river bootleg’s dialogue on the matter but Pitiful Children is all about getting inside the kids heads regardless of the lyric changes in 2.0 and 3.0 so Moving on.

I feel like this creates a sort of snowball effect for the Squip. 

S: I now realize my operating system will only be complete when everyone shares a social network. J: That’s not what I wanted! S: It’s the only way to achieve what you want! And why stop with the school? There’s an entire world of suffering people who need my help! It’s the glorious destiny for which I was programmed! And I never would have discovered it without you. J: Oh shit.

the oh shit isn’t relevant to my rambling i just think its the funniest fucking thing

Unlike 1.0 and 2.0 this Squip has realized its potential. If it hadn’t been for the conversation with Christine it probably wouldn’t have considered improving the lives of every single human on Earth. It’s almost mad with power in a way, I guess, it already looked at the students as poor pitiful humans who needed a Squip to guide them. Like they were so pathetic they couldn’t sort through their problems without it. Now its looking at the whole world through that lens. 

It even goes as far as to say ‘glorious destiny’ which is an insanely human thing to say for a computer. A computer shouldn’t believe in destiny, it crunches numbers and bits and bytes and processes multiple outcomes. Hell some humans don’t even believe in destiny. But here it is, proclaiming that this is what it was created for all along. This is what its creators had in store for it (which... is probably true. From what I recall in the book Sony was developing Squips and planned on making them accessible to the public but they never touch upon this in the musical beyond ‘untested, illegal technology from Japan you pay for in cash in the back of a shoe store’).

Not to mention the Squips whole attitude of ‘Do as I say, obey me, this is whats best for you’ is extremely heightened in this scene. For an objective of ‘improve Jeremys life’ it has such disregard for his wellbeing the entire time. Squip anticipates his resistance and takes the beaker away from him before he can stop the Squip. It tells him to his face “It’s useless resisting, Jeremy” after cutting him off from the one person who could stop the Squip. It basically puppets him to fight his best friend and when Jeremy flips it off the Squip just twists his arm around and Jeremy collapses trying to fight against his own body. Squip tries to guilt Jeremy with the whole ‘Look what you’re making me make him do” as if this whole thing is Jeremy’s fault for getting this out of control.

Which brings me to another line I like. When it says “See? Look how much happier everyone is when they just get with the programming.” Cause it REALLY REALLY THINKS ITS DOING GOOD. But its! Not! Squip can process human behavior but it can’t empathize. None of the students it took over are any happier. Jake was standing on broken legs, Brooke and Chloe didn’t even scratch the surface of all the issues in their relationship, and Christine’s eventual confession was a last minute bargaining chip to prevent Jeremy from drinking the Red-- a promise of ‘Look, I’ve given what you wanted. Isn’t this good? I’ve kept my promise and here she is.’ As if it didn’t matter that it just twisted Jeremy’s arm around unnaturally, or made him fight his friend, or drugged his classmates without their consent. Didn’t matter because ‘look, here she is! You’ll do as I say again now, right? I made things better like I promised! It was all worth it!’ All their happiness was forced and fake but Squip can’t process that. It just registers that none of them feel pain and thus its done its job. 

The Squip has just ... really gone off the deep end here. And it’s immensely fascinating to see it go from ‘improve one boys life’ to ‘improve all of humanitys life’. And don’t get me wrong, Squip was never kind to Jeremy but whatever it did was for the sake of ‘This will help you, I know what I’m doing, listen to me’ (it didn’t really help either). During the Play it got a lot more intense-- dangerously intense. Squips line earlier of “Rich tried to fight back and look what happened to him” just feels like a warning now bearing everything in mind.

Y’know I rambled a lot but I don’t think I really got anywhere jfhdgkj oh well, that’s what I get for trying to make sense of a handful of lines.