Follow TV Tropes

Following

Fridge / Freefall

Go To

Fridge Brilliance

  • In this comic, we find out that robots determine their gender based on how much talking they do. At first this sounds like something stereotypical and trite...until you realize that the robots only barely understand humanity. Stereotypes are pretty much all they have to go on.
    • Secondary brilliance: robots that do a lot of talking likely do so because they have to talk to humans often, as robots can communicate with each other without speech. Conversely, robots that don't do a lot of talking don't interact with humans that much, and are more likely to be in heavy labor fields like manufacturing or construction (where a human wouldn't be, to avoid potential hazards). In Real Life, heavy labor fields are often male-dominated, and home A.I.s (like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant) already tend to be characterized as female. The robots aren't just going off stereotypes, they're using existing design conventions.
    • Tertiary brilliance: robots don't actually reproduce via sex, or have hormonal or biological differences between their "sexes". So what sex they identify as does not need to have any impact on their lives (it could, if they decided to develop their personalities based on it, but it doesn't have to), and they can afford to assign it almost at random.
  • Sam Starfall's desire to become rich and famous often seems to be a bit of an obsession, to the point of him doing ridiculous things to spread his name ("A great social injustice has occurred and must be corrected. Namely, why am I not famous?"). But he's an old man, the only one of his species on the planet, who will never have a chance to go home. He can't make a family — his only chance at making a mark on the world is to become a legend.
  • Likewise, after hearing about his species' myths, his plan to give the Sqids a planet starts to look less pure-hearted and more like striving for the ultimate fame: To become a god himself.
  • Despite a highly honed sense of self-preservation, Sam enjoys doing things with a high degree of danger and risk. Then we learn that mating is fatal for his species, those of his species capable of breeding do so young, and no member of his species has died of old age. Sam's race effectively has no biological incentive for long-term self-preservation, leading them to take crazy risks in the name of being remembered as they get older.
  • Sam's aversion to slavery makes a lot of sense given sqid culture. If people are property then they can be stolen and if something can be stolen then a sqid will try to steal it. As such any sort of widespread slavery would be impractical in sqid society since there's no mechanism for returning escaped or stolen slaves. Therefore slavery as a concept wouldn't really catch on the way it did in human societies.
    • Not only that, the Sqid society simply doesn't have the same propensity for direct violence that humans do, have a surprising competitive instinct, and will steal anything that isn't nailed down AND on fire. Any attempt at widespread slavery would have the Sqid slaves realize they outnumber the guy, GTFO, and end up stealing the overseer's EVERYTHING. Including his skeleton!
  • One wonders how Sam could have accumulated so much debt, when you'd think everyone would know not to loan him money...until you realize that he would probably try to avoid his creditors whenever possible.
  • Regular references to 20th and 21st century pop culture may seem odd when the comic is set 500 years in the future... until you realize how many common phrases used today come from Shakespeare's plays it wouldn't be surprising that the same would happen with modern entertainment.
  • Here Florence is talking with her mouth shut, and she reveals later that she learned to talk using ventriloquism, as it helps a species without lips pronounce various sounds better..
  • There's apparently been some... incidents in regards to the Third Law of Robotics in the interactions of sapient robots. The brilliance part comes in when you consider that 'protecting your own existence' is effectively the only (or at least the most prevalent) imperative biological life has for interacting with, well, anything. Third Law incidents are perhaps the most natural thing robots have ever been involved in.
  • The Theme Naming of the robots Edge and Blunt! Edge is smart, abrasive to people and sharp-witted, Blunt thinks and speaks slowly due to hardware problems, has nothing but the public good in mind and is so devoted to being Three Laws-Compliant he wants to enact Genocide from the Inside.
    • On the subject of Theme Naming, we also have Qwerty and Dvorak. Qwerty keyboards are standard issue among operating systems, and Qwerty himself is a bit of an everyman, with a basic humanoid design that makes him suited for all-purpose work, and is the not-quite-creative but very grounded half of the duo. Dvorak keyboards were designed with ergonomics in mind, with the specific goal of improving speed by alternating the user's hands while typing; Dvorak himself is described as alternating between ideas and being much more creative than his counterpart.
      • Also, consider this: Qwerty (the convention, not the robot) is named for the first six letters on the top row of the keyboard, while Dvorak (again, the convention) is named for its creator. Of the two, Dvorak (robot) gets much more screentime, and is therefore humanized a fair bit more.
  • The police robots that come for Florence lament that they were warned about the false transponder trick, and still fell for it. Maybe because all the previous times the trick was pulled, it was a robot replacing their own transponder. They knew Florence didn't have a transponder to replace, and overlooked her not because she had the wrong transponder, but because she had a transponder at all.
  • One would imagine Henri the distracting ninja would be himself distracted that his target is a talking wolf in an evening gown. Except, the robot employees had greeted Florence earlier, so he already knew and had prepared himself. (incidentally, this should have tipped off Florence and Winston, since in all other circumstances a stranger would be boggle at her. Distraction successful!)
  • In an early strip, Florence gives a declaration of Undying Loyalty to Helix regarding Sam, promising to stick with him no matter how much of a bad boss he turns out to be. This seems odd compared to her usual analysis of social dynamics, but then the brilliance kicks in: Florence is a wolf, and is colloquially referred to as a "doggy" by every other character in the series. She also shows on multiple occasions that her instincts have a lot of influence on her behavior. What are dogs best known for again?
  • The Interspecies Romance between Winston and Florence can be Squick to some, but in-universe, it makes sense: Doctor Bowman mentions that Florence's mirror neurons have been re-purposed to make interaction with humans easier. A side effect of this is that she also ends up with a human idea of what's attractive (i.e. another human) and acts accordingly.
    • From Winston's side, the fact that his parents are transhumanists (his mother even has a mustache!) means he's not as weirded out by people not looking quite the way they "should" and having close relationships with them. He can just tell himself that Florence is a very heavily modified human (which isn't all that far from the truth).
  • Why is Gardener in the Dark called that? It's a neural pruning program, designed to cut off the proverbial branches in a robotcs brain (hence "Gardener").
    • The "in the Dark" half of the name carries a Double Meaning: it's meant to do its work discretely and in secret, but also modifies robots' brain structures in a way that is rather stupid (crippling Jean's overwhelmingly-robotic workforce). Hence, it's in the dark both in the sense that it's not meant to be seen, but also in the sense that it works more or less blindly.
  • Max Post thinks that the question of how something that's not alive be conscious is smart and that claiming 'vampires and ghosts' fit the bill is a dumb answer. However, it's actually not as bad as he seems to think. The only problem with the 'vampires and ghosts' answer is that they aren't real (in this setting anyway), but as a conceptual representation of the issue they are actually a perfect example. It's almost like humanity has been subconsciously pondering the question for a long time.
  • Capsaicin, the chemical that makes things spicy, is an evolutionary adaptation that specifically targets mammals and leaves other life forms, like birds, unaffected. Since Sam’s race is from a completely different tree of life entirely than earth flora and fauna, it makes sense that he’d be completely unaffected by it.

Fridge Horror

  • Nobody knows how long Sam's species lives, because no Sqid has ever lived long enough to die a natural death. Sam is already considered old by his species' standards, so he could die at any moment.
  • Florence's theory on why All Girls Want Bad Boys; “I see it as a genetic gamble. It’s harder to raise a child alone. But if the child is a boy who grows up like his father, the mother’s half of the genetic code is distributed far wider than if she had followed the monogamous model.” Good theory, and it even explains why there are so many Bad Boys prowling the planet. The Fridge moment is this; If that theory is true, it's not that much of a gamble at all. By conceiving a child with a Bad Boy, her genetic legacy is all but assured; most women will cooperate in conceiving more Bad Boys with her sons, and there's a whole world-full of Bad Boys to sire grandchildren on her daughters. Project this both backwards and forwards and you realize this is why so many Humans Are Bastards.
    • This is actually supported by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis; females in poor conditions have more female than male children, while females in comfortable conditions have more male than female children. Thus, the children of comfortable(IE wealthy) parents always have their choice of females to impregnate. In pre-industrial times, that meant the children of warlords. And females that submitted to them were more likely to be placed in comfortable conditions to bear males.
    • On the other side of the equation is the likelyhood that the gamble Florence refers to is the significant possibility that the 'bad boy' father would simply leave the woman and the child to fend for themselves rather than provide for them. And for all the difficulties single parenthood has in the modern era, in olden times they were exponentially higher stakes. Single mothers, assuming they survived the birthing process in the first place, were not in an ideal position to ensure their child's health and safety into adulthood. For all that All Girls Want Bad Boys resulted in a wider spread of genetic legacy, Single Woman Seeks Good Man had the higher survival rate.
    • Adding to this, once society reached our modern age children living to adulthood is nearly a certainty in first world countries, to say nothing of what it's like 500 years in the future where the comic takes place. If Florence's theory is true, this creates an environment where Single Woman Seeks Good Man ends up ultimately losing out due to it's higher survival rate no longer being true while also All Girls Want Bad Boys is no longer held in check by it's abysmal survival rate. This means that All Girls Want Bad Boys will propagate over the generations much wider than Single Woman Seeks Good Man will until the former becomes overwhelmingly the genetic default.
  • All the humans who have seen what Sam looks like under his environment suit have been horrified and disgusted. All the non-sapient Earth-descended animals that have seen what Sam looks like under the environment suit have the overwhelming urge to try to eat Sam. Imagine what it would be like for a person who understands that Sam is also a person to suddenly and overwhelmingly want to eat him anyway.
  • When Clippy appears before court, he's asked if the plan to give Mr. Kornada all that wealth was the only solution available under those constraints. He replies that no, it wasn't the only one: but it was the plan with the highest chance of the planet's survival. Clippy had considered and discarded at least two more, and was held back only by his own morals. That one instance differentiates the A.I.s on Jean from a mere paperclip maximizer.
    • Said plan involved lobotomizing the entire robot population, which consists of millions of individuals. If this is the best option Clippy could come up with, what did the alternatives consist of?
    • Well, the precise instructions were: "Make me the richest person in the system within thirty days.". Someone could be the richest person anywhere if they're the only person, a.k.a killing everyone else would achieve that goal. So would removing the wealth of the people that were richer than him in the system. Or some other way to... redistribute wealth or skew the definition of person.
  • We learn on the voyage to the station that the Savage Chicken considers the seniormost (or only) human on board to be captain. Which means that during their rescue flight in the hurricane, Kornada was the ship's captain.
    • Not exactly. Mr. Thurmad and Niomi are considered the captain because they are members of the Savage Chicken's crew even if only temporarily, while Kornada was not an actual crew member and thus had no authority to be captain. Otherwise the Savage Chicken would've taken action to obey Kornada's desires the moment he voiced them, crew or no crew. Note that the Inspector that entered the ship to inspect it wasn't considered captain just because he was on board either.

Top