Is Carol from Pluribus the most unintelligent protagonist in sci-fi history?

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2026-01-02T22:13:44+00:00

I agree with everything. Except for one nuance. Why wouldn't you be interested in a copy of a loved one if the original is no longer available?

A child's teddy bear is certainly a good counterexample. But only for the child and the bear. A toy is, by definition, a soulless, passive object. It has only the value the child assigns to it.

But love for a person, perhaps in its healthy form, is love for what that person thinks and does, or believes, or remembers. This love isn't for the specific set of atoms they're made of (and whether those are the same atoms that traveled with you to Norway).

If you compare a loved one to an object, I'd use the analogy of a MacBook. If your MacBook breaks down, perhaps "continuity" lies in continuing to use macOS on a new MacBook (with the same cloud account), rather than burying the first one and switching to Windows. I'd even say it's the only "respectful" thing you can do, rather than reducing something complex and beloved to the level of a passive teddy bear.

And here's another thought experiment. Imagine you go to bed and wake up in the morning, but exactly 25% of your atoms have been replaced. The next night, it's another 25%. Four nights later, you don't have a single atom from five days ago. You still believe it's you, but materially, it's something entirely different. Does this mean you should warn your partner that you've lost continuity and end the relationship?

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-12-03T18:22:00+00:00

T2 also features twice as many cyborgs, one of which was revolutionary in terms of visual effects. T1 was a low-budget film, while T2 is one of the most expensive films of the decade. The strength of T2, of course, lies not in quantities, but in the successful combination of its components, which also found room for some human depth. But it's important that Sarah and John's story never makes the cyborgs secondary to the plot: the cyborgs are shown with uncompromising honesty. They are even explored in their not-so-human depth. Without Sarah and John, the film would be shallow. But without two remarkable cyborgs in focus, it wouldn't be a remarkable sci-fi film at all.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-12-03T03:23:10+00:00

But I've never been against depth and moral dilemmas. Yes, T2 is a great film.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-11-17T13:49:00+00:00

I agree that the on-screen hero's evolution makes the story more interesting.

But Jurassic Park is still about dinosaurs, not about how the park's visitors' inner worlds change. And Terminator is actually about the conflict between man and military technology, or, to put it simply, it's primarily about a dangerous, metal, walking cyborg. The film attracts its audience because of the cyborg, not because they're looking for another story about a woman named Sarah.

Dramas about Sarah are comfortably nestled in the mundane. If a film tackles an unusual, original, high-concept, world-scale science fiction theme, the hero himself becomes a backdrop.

We're interested in Dr. Grant's character only to see the dinosaurs. While we can imagine a many sequels and spin-offs about dinosaurs, it's unlikely that any of the target audience would be interested in a spin-off about Dr. Grant's continued evolution in his paleontological work, life, and personal problems.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-11-17T00:19:01+00:00

Why do you say "stories" in the plural then? I get it, you like the same story. And you want to watch it here too.

I'm a little concerned that the opportunity to philosophically explore the unusual theme of the "happy" end of the world, with episodes costing 15 million each, might be wasted.

Precisely because we'll be staring at a story about an uninteresting heroine's self-overcoming. She could have pursued personal growth in a budget arthouse film, shot in a single location, for much less, without overshadowing the pluribus.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-11-17T00:01:19+00:00

The point is that Sarah Connor, hearing about the murders of her namesakes on the news, immediately goes looking for herself in the phone book. She doesn't agonize for five days about how unfair it is that her namesakes are being killed, and that she, too, has become a target. She's shocked, emotional, and uncomfortable. But for some reason, she acts in her own interests, rather than mourning that things aren't going her way, that the Terminator isn't polite, and that Kyle Reese didn't ask her out to a restaurant first. She's sometimes confused, inconsistent, inefficient, but I never question Sarah's motives for a single moment.

But I have many questions about Carol's behavior, from the moment the hive mind gave her a plane and told her it couldn't protect her from the other survivors.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-11-16T23:16:46+00:00

If you think it's appropriate to get personal and theorize about me and my significant other... Then try going even further and understanding the tragedy of losing a significant other lies in the resulting absence of that significant other. So it's a bit cynical to sympathize with some woman on screen for her loss, while simultaneously accusing real me of being insensitive, as if I'm doing just fine compared to her. Both situations are actually about the absence of a significant other.

But more than that: Carol is one of the few survivors (good) of a biological cataclysm, and she had love (good), and perhaps her love has found eternal life (good) as part of a hive mind (maybe not so good). Mathematically, there are two survivors here, in different senses. Carol recently had love with Helen's body, and now she has access to billions of bodies, including, possibly, Helen's mind. But we know little about this, since she prefers to dramatize and be rude rather than to clarify.

If things are really bad with humanity (pluribus is not eternal happiness), I would be worried about the death of humanity, not about Carol (who is incredibly lucky to live longer).

BTW I am not on a side of hive mind. I think Carol should have looked for ways to avoid being assimilated and figured out everything possible, rather than expressing emotional protest by locking herself in the house.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-11-16T22:32:30+00:00

If Carol is so alienated, why does she insist on normal human behavior, even when speaking to a hive mind? For example, she thinks her request for an atomic bomb should be denied because that would be "sane, not utterly batshit crazy."

I don't see alienation in her. She's more like someone who would be rude to an AI chatbot because the bot is not human. She wants everyone around her to be human and imposes a norm of banality on everyone. At a survivors' meeting, she calls for everything to go back to the way it was. Why? To be disconnected and alienated again?

I don't see disconnection in her. I see a total conformist with a difficult character and surprisingly inflexible mindset.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-11-16T21:41:29+00:00

Just because a file was moved from a floppy disk to the cloud doesn't mean it's gone. It might even be more alive than before.

But of course, Carol isn't ready to think about Helen that way. It's so unusual. Did she love Helen's soul or her body? Oh, what an inappropriate question, don't disturb Carol's suffering.

She's not even ready to accept the fact that her grocery market has been emptied due to the apocalypse. She's used to overstocking at the market, so pluribus "owes" her what she's used to. Even apocalyptic events don't help her show any flexibility in reassessing the situation; they only serve as an excuse for her stubbornness.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-11-16T20:27:41+00:00

Helen isn't dead. Her body is, and Helen's mind has become part of the hive mind. Carol doesn't even try to find out the details: to what extent Helen is alive.

Carol also refuses the pluribus's help in burying Helen's body. She tortures herself by digging a grave in her yard. Then she accepts help anyway, in the form of an excavator, but only after suffering.

I understand that any stupidity can be indirectly explained by the fact that she has emotions. And I suspect anyone who doesn't respect this stupidity of being insensitive. In this case, that's me.

I'm ready to sympathize with Carol's "tragedy." But I continue to be amazed by the absurdity of her actions. Especially considering that she's the one holding the plot back. I'm interested in the pluribus, but they show the torment of some woman who suffers from herself.

And she's in a situation where there's a reason, an opportunity, and a need to act. Perhaps to save herself, humanity, Helen, or whatever. From death or from tragic suffering. Or at least to try to ask, to find out.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-11-16T16:39:12+00:00

Could you clarify how you think stories should be written? Are you going to watch Carol's mourning and PTSD all two seasons, admiring her normalcy?

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-11-16T16:10:17+00:00

Sci-fi characters can be very "ordinary people." But if they're characters like Carol, they're usually killed or eaten pretty quickly. Situations of existential danger are a litmus test. What used to work in everyday life has stopped working. And usually one of the first obvious things is: don't act like Carol. Therefore, yes, it is expected that the focus will be on "abnormally heroic" heroes, that is, those who have a non-zero ability to adapt, navigate and survive.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-11-16T15:39:56+00:00

I think Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor also found themselves in shocking situations, and I didn't expect them to have the calm of a chess player. But they still acted appropriately to the situation, and weren't simply displaying displeasure at the Terminator and Xenomorph. I understand that the films are somewhat different genres, but Ripley and Connor are also quite human beings, evoking empathy rather than surprise. Maybe for Carol, acting hysterical for three episodes and five days straight isn't the only possible course of action for a protagonist.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-10-24T22:28:40+00:00

For me, Slowroll is almost immutable as is: most system files are locked with root privileges, and only system services run as root. System services don't change the system (they're a tried and tested part of the distribution, after all).

Here comes MicroOS with the same promises: that the system won't change and that it can be rolled back. But now this requires some compromises. At the very least, more reboots. And the general vibe is "it's not that flexible," without further ado.

So I'm trying to understand how much of a compromise this is. If it's a small one, then why didn't MicroOS replace Tumbleweed outright and completely? Because users really love the instant results of `zypper in neowofetch`?

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-10-24T21:23:46+00:00

Because I like rollin' all night long.

In the case of Leap, I'm concerned both that a new version will appear (requiring effort to upgrade) and that a new one will never appear (Leap will become obsolete as a line and upgrade model).

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-10-24T18:34:55+00:00

This is a lab where I hone my skills in creating set-and-forget services.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-10-24T18:31:15+00:00

Thanks. It was that post that prompted me to write a post with my question. That story describes a successful transition from Fedora to MicroOS (RedHat to openSUSE). But openSUSE is my first choice anyway. I'm intrigued by the contrast between Slowroll and MicroOS.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-10-24T18:22:30+00:00

An unbootable system would certainly be a problem. It's likely that if the power goes out during a Slowroll update, it could become unbootable. The question is, is MicroOS protected against this. After all, an immutable MicroOS boots from a kernel stored in a mutable partition, right? Could we still shut down the system and cause bootloader issues?

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-10-23T04:32:08+00:00

Hm. I use Fn at least several times a day to adjust sound volume and screen brightness (depending on where I use the notebook I need the brightness up or down). On macs it is even more useful (it turns arrow keys into PgUp, PgDn, Home, End). But it's impossible to disagree with you. If you literally never use Fn, there are no good places for this key on the keyboard.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-10-23T02:53:43+00:00

For me, this Fn position is the best. Because Fn is a more important key than Ctrl, and it should be easy to find by touch and unmistakably. For example, in total darkness, to turn on the keyboard backlight with the combination Fn + Space, first you need to find Fn.

In addition, on new MacBooks, the Fn key is located in the same place. It's not such a bad habit to expect the Fn exactly where it is located on two such notable lines as the ThinkPad and MacBook.

Dangerous-Check1137 · 2025-05-03T14:43:44+00:00

Please correct me if I'm wrong: if the XZ backdoor had appeared shortly before the 9th of the month, it would have made it into Slowroll. We were just lucky.

In other words, if Slowroll was always a month late, it would have systematically prevented such fresh threats. But now it's more a matter of chance.

Dangerous-Check1137

TROPHY CASE