Teal Deer About Your CR Meme

[quiethumerus]

♥ post with your characters
♥ respond to other people's characters with your characters
♥ they tell you in detail what their character thinks of your character, ic or ooc! tl;dr is enouraged.
♥ then you react if you want!
♥ other people do the same thing to you! maybe you can harvest your tl;dr to use in a CR chart later!

Comments

[futilecycle]

Thank you <3

Welp, Luna.

Sigma's feelings for Luna are very complicated. /meme

On one hand, Sigma knows that Luna is his creation, that he literally gave her life from metal and plastic and that he programmed every part of what makes her her. However, he sincerely believes that robots are a new form of sentient life. After all, if her programming is like the Chinese Room, couldn't that be said of all sentient life? Neuroscience suggests that our decisions are made for us before we are consciously aware that we have made a decision. Isn't it just our own electrical impulses and hormones that make up who we are, make all of our choices and give the illusion of free will while we sit back and watch? Can you prove otherwise? Of course, Sigma doesn't actually believe that, but that's what he would argue in a robot's defense. Part of the Alan Turing case for Artificial Intelligence: So I can't prove a Robot has thoughts of their own free will, but I can't prove that you do, either, so let's give everyone the benefit of the doubt! (Hilariously, when told that robots can't be intelligent because they don't have ESP powers like humans, Turing said "well, I'll just put everyone in an ESP-proof room." Plot of ZE3 confirmed. Just kidding.) As far as he is concerned, there is no difference between programming and physiology other than the former is a lot easier to change. But Luna was programmed to have free will, not to be his puppet. She does what he asks because he asks her, not because he forces her to do it. She is free to refuse, and eventually does. Because of this, Luna is alive.

Luna is someone irreplaceable to him. Sigma's feelings are pretty ambiguous in Luna's ending, but I think it's fair to say that he had a romantic interest in her back then, even, perhaps, loved her by the end of the route. These feelings didn't change because he created her. It changed because he fell in love with someone else, and that someone else happened to be her precursor.

Sigma considers Diana his soulmate even though she left him (probably in outrage for discovering he was Zero) and finds it difficult to move on, even in Panem, where romantic relationships weren't impossible for him. Luna may have been created in his grief to ease the pain of her disappearance, but it ended up making it worse. Is it fair to Luna if he loves her for being like the person he modeled her after, the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with? Is it fair to Luna to love her for who she is... with the intention to turn his back on this timeline, return to Diana in the past, save the world, and stay with her instead? Now that Diana is dead, is it fair to her memory to love Luna and be relieved that the decision was made for him with her death? It isn't so much that Sigma doesn't love Luna romantically anymore, like it disappeared somewhere between both Nonary Games, it's that he does not let himself. Luna isn't forward enough to tip his decision either way and they just go around and around and around.

Still, she is very dear to him. He wants more than anything for her to be happy, but he's caught in the awkward no-win situation of "tell her and the Capitol wins" and "keep quiet and she's miserable." He does what little he can, like showing up to give her the music box or telling her about Diana. Behind closed doors, Sigma definitely shed a few tears worrying about her. When this is over, he'll do anything to make it up to her. Literally anything. Luna didn't do anything wrong and deserves to live a happy life. He'll be sad if that life doesn't involve him, but will understand why it needs to be that way.

[didnothing]

Nnnnngh that hurts to read, just so you know. I alluded to this a bit in my own TL;DR to you (though gosh, I tried to condense it to avoid teal, teal deers and you gave me all this beauty!) but Luna does catch a little of his desire for her happiness because of what happened her first day in Panem, although she hasn't realized it as such because of her ideas about robot compliance. She certainly doesn't see any potential romantic overtones as anything but wishful thinking. :( They really are going to keep going around in circles, although maybe in the end they can settle on something even if it doesn't go beyond companionship (emotionally if not physically, given your endgame ideas). That would be enough of a happy ending in Luna's book, anyway - I like to think whatever form of love she feels for Sigma, just getting to be close to/with him would be a major fulfillment.

Also can I please express my gratitude that you read all my dumb rambly tech/philosophical talk about how Luna's nature as an AI works and then throw out your own for this meme? Because it makes me happy and I just want to say so.

[futilecycle]

Awww, that's sweet. Sigma wants her to be happy and he would also be very happy to have her around, so I think they can reach a compromise in companionship... endgame plans kept in mind, heheh :D Maybe if they get a golden ending they can be like the Rhizome but instead of him asking her to help him murder people it'll be the two of them working together to help other people in need, and also way happier. But we'll see how that goes ;D

Thanks! :D I'm glad! I really enjoy your thoughts on it, too. I say I minored in English but it was actually half Postcolonial Writing and half Digital Humanities which includes philosophies of technology and the history of human and computer interaction so that shit is my jam. I love reading what you have to say. If I didn't want to live a life of poverty I would definitely get a Masters of English in Digital Humanities instead, lmao.