Re: Round 12, Part Two [La Commune Planet v. The Scabs]

Wherein Burley lays out why he did what he done and didn’t do what he didn’t do in his last two posts, containing therein the character bios for our two current battle concepts.

Okay. Well, first I have to say that I never considered La Commune Planet a comedy until I started writing the bio for Gertrude Faith, which quickly became comedy. My Exit to Eden warning bells ringing, I proceeded anyway. I guess I had a hard time looking at this one seriously for some reason. So, the idea of a haven for richie riches and a character who only desires to be there but can’t be because of her actions. The absurdity of the situation was more interesting to me in the moment.

But in looking back, I proclaimed my love for this previously. Why would I fawn all over it and then now come back with a flippant comedy? I mean, I ranked it #3 after all.

The answer lies in what it’s up against: my #1 choice. To me, the two ideas being discussed here are really about the same thing at heart: capitalism v. socialism / communism. I don’t want to turn either into a polemnic, but the idea of looking critically, perhaps satirically, at a couple -isms really gets me excited.

But to me, La Commune Planet is the weaker of the two and would need more work, so why not take it to comedy?

For The Scabs, I laid down my vision pretty explicitly earlier on, and I still stand by that vision. I totally think its workable.

So, Salted Hash comes from that story line. Although I decided to add a level of confusion by making the robots terrible communicators. In every futuristic story, the robots are always the english majors in the room — they are well spoken (Let’s call it Anthony Daniel’s syndrome). What would happen if the robots never had to communicate, though? What if they were servants never needed to speak back? Well, that might add a level of unintentional humor and potentially some interesting dynamics. It also would explain why the robots are communicating indirectly through a translator.

The first draft of his character sketch, he had a normal voice and explained that his name was a pun, based on his true robot name which was a 256 bit encrypted key. All the robots communicate by those serial number names, but he decided to take a human readable name as a sort of olive branch. In return, he asked that the first robot be referred to as RebelRebel0 (that’s zero, btw, not oh). The joke being that when computers hold arrays of information the first position in the array is position zero not position one, so the first robot rebel is in the zero position. Since Salted Hash agreed to take on a human name as an olive branch, he wanted the humans to respect a zero-indexed array as an olive branch to the robots, as opposed to beginning a count at 1 which is the normal way for us to count.

Yeah. So this robot thinks this is a good olive branch when humans are dying of starvation because the robots stopped harvesting food and they don’t know how to do it themselves. So you can see that communication is off to a damn good start here.

But despite the fact that I played with the humor a bit in The Scabs, I disagree with Shockah when he says it should be a comedy. I actually think this is an action drama, albeit with comedic elements.

Shockah: I’m interested to see what comes from your typing fingers and how it will fit / clash with what I have here. I clearly have a favorite already. Can you guess which one?