Forum - View topicInfinite Dendrogram (TV).
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Stark700
 Posts: 11762 Location: Earth |
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Infinite Dendrogram (TV) Genres: Game, Fantasy Themes: Plot Summary:
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15593 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Episode 13 (finale)
Seems this one finished a little late. I had been seeing a lot of positive responses to this series, such as a good example of a VR game anime, maybe with Bofuri just a bit better. But I have felt far less charitable, seeing it way more as trying too hard to appear edgy and playing up too much of things like power fantasies and ridiculous drama. Such as one of the last episodes revealed the backstory of a character which was that their mother was an international thief and their father was a renown detective, and they each taught them their trade so they can decide what they want to be. Before they, you know, died, because of course they did, so the person was apparently pulled in these two ridiculous directions, like a renown detective that fights for justice would let his son be taught to be a thief. It is just too silly. And I think that it fails at using the medium of a game to the fullest potential. I think he only logs off once to maybe search the internet for information, and almost nothing in the show feels relatable for games, especially compared to Bofuri. I thought perhaps there would be some sort of thing where we find out that one character who acts like a creepy villain jiangshi might in fact be role playing, and so is not really the total evil person they can appear, but nothing really came from it. I think the end conflict was meant to touch on asking a question of whether it is all just a game in the first place, such that it is just another world with not NPCs but people indistinguishable from humans. But I had that question in the first episode because the explanation of self generating quests seemed like a unsatisfactory explanation when all the NPCs just acted like people. Which meant all of this stuff that got them in danger or killed them just seemed incredibly unethical, I can't imagine that people would not be protesting the pain done to AI indistinguishable from humans. I generally found most of the answers that it tried to give for questions as unsatisfying, because it felt much more concerned with fanservice junk of things like giving a waifu character. And baking in underdog protagonist powers to make comebacks into his stats, where they could just make him BS any enemy as it raises stakes. About the only one I thought perhaps had some potential was the pimp guy, that perhaps could have been interesting with his whole charming thing, if it broke down rules like attractiveness of a character. But it kind of just make him so innocent that I don't think even knew what the class of Pimp he took even meant, and he did things like killing the female monsters under his control that were not cute. Again he could have been interesting if he was someone well aware of things, and maybe took a love not war approach of trying to solve things without violence, even things people just think as monster AI. My rating is So-so (5/10), not that I think that it was downright awful as some other shows, I mostly think it really did not catch my attention when put in comparisons to what might have been comedies of the season, such as Bofuri for a VR game, or Interspecies Reviewers that would subvert normal fantasy stories. Some fancy work put in, I just wish the rest of it was interesting. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5991 Location: Virginia, United States |
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It shouldn't be a surprise considering human nature. The HBO show 'West World' asks the same questions. But this is also the stuff of many science fiction novels. What are the rights and responsibilities of the creators and the created. I firmly believe that creators have a responsibility to the world they live in, to protect it from what they create. Science Fiction is full of stories where the created turn on their creator and his/her people. Battlestar Galactica is one such story. Colossus and Terminator are others. Recently read the novel, "The Last Human" by Zack Jordan. It had a society where your codified intelligence level determined what rights and privileges you had in society, which included artificial intelligences, from sentient beings, machines, androids, cyborgs, and AI's. The hardest part will be the determination of what a sentient being is. Just how real is real. And then it will take a 'sea change' to convince people of that. The NPC's who live in Infinite Dendrogram and the sub AI's that run that world may be real people who could meet any intelligence test. But at the end of the day, when the company goes bankrupt or new gaming worlds takes away the player pool. Their world would be easily turned off, and the servers recycled. Lot of interesting and fateful questions there for us all. |
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Tuor_of_Gondolin
 Posts: 3524 Location: Bellevue, WA |
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Part of the conceit of the setting is that none of the players are entirely sure whether it is an VR simulation or actually another world. Several of them comment on how if it were merely a VR world, the tech necessary to create it is decades ahead of any tech they're aware of existing, if not farther. This is the point behind the discussion at the end between Ray and Franklin. The tians may be computer constructs... or they may be actual people.
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5991 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Don't know how they can think it is another world when Ray has met one of the mods, and saw the game world being patched.
Sounds like a writing mistake or continuity error there. |
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