Sandbox / Portal: GLaDOS

Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System (GLaDOS)

"You're not a good person. You know that, right? Good people don't end up here."

Voiced by: Ellen McLain (English), Elena Kharitonova (Russian)

The artificial intelligence that seems to run Aperture Science. GLaDOS portrays herself as a helpful friend to Chell, but soon unveils a oddly sociopathic side to the testing protocols and a cruel side to her personality. As the game goes on, she becomes more and more sadistic, culminating in a violent confrontation as Chell attempts to escape the testing center. Chell apparently destroys GLaDOS, but at the end of the game she is revealed to have a backup memory and Chell is dragged back to Aperture Science. Years later, Chell and Wheatley unintentionally reboot her. Needless to say, she has a bone to pick with her murderer.

Oh, and she has her own page now, Just for Fun.

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• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: Done by having Ellen McLain imitate a text-to-speech program's inflections.
• Activation Sequence: When Chell and Wheatley accidentally reboot her, the scene becomes focused on the master computer's recumbent form as it pulls itself together, hauls itself off the ground, and sparks to life, before GLaDOS' eye flickers on to focus on you.
• Adoption Diss: Brings up the player character (allegedly) being adopted as an insult repeatedly. In the second game she continues to do this. On one occasion she actually defends Chell when Wheatly insults her with this, only to give her another diss later.
  For the record, you ARE adopted, and that's terrible.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The whole "Killing everyone with neurotoxin" thing is a pretty big tip-off.
• Ambiguous Situation: Did she delete Caroline or was she lying? There's evidence for both theories.
• And I Must Scream: According to her, she was forced to spend the hundreds of years in between the two games watching/reliving a recording of the two minutes leading up to her destruction over and over and over again, due to her blackbox feature. Of course, it's according to her, a pathological liar.
• Anthropomorphic Shift: An interesting example. Although she's always been based on the human form (on Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, in fact), the original game's GLaDOS is far less relatable: her head is a grey semi-ellipsoid with a fixed yellow eye, and she doesn't have any body language to speak of. In the sequel she has a lot more emoting to do, so she was given a white, squared-off head (suggesting a certain sternness of jaw) with a much more expressive eye and vastly more human-like body language.
• Anti-Hero: In Portal 2. She's still evil, but this time, she's on Chell's side.
• Ax-Crazy: If slaughtering the majority of Aperture Science on bring-your-daughter-to-work-day within less than a picosecond of activation is any indication. Not to mention the endless number of lethal testing materials like turrets and lasers she keeps everywhere.
• Bad Boss: GLaDOS treats her custom robots the same way she treats everyone:
  "Don't disappoint me. Or I'll make you wish you could die."
• Bad Liar: GLaDOS is very surprised you successfully completed the test, and it shows.
• Back from the Dead: In Portal 2.
• Big Bad: The A.I. controlling the entire facility and responsible for all of the tests that Chell is forced to go through. She loses this position to Wheatley halfway through the second game after he is plugged into the mainframe, which is revealed to have a corrupting influence.
• Better the Devil You Know: While GLaDOS is generally well-known to be an unhinged caretaker of Aperture, she genuinely acts with a real purpose, unlike Wheatley, which makes things SOOOO much worse than when GLaDOS was in charge of Aperture.
• Big Brother Is Watching: The omnipresent security cam. Doug Rattman clearly fears them, as his graffiti includes pictures of the cameras with a warning to Chell not to be spotted.
• Big "OMG!": Multiple times:
  • "Oh. My. God. It's the bird! Run! I have no plan for this! Abort! Forget your training! RUN!"
  • Upon realizing she might be Caroline.
• Black Comedy: GLaDOS's sense of humor in a nutshell. Every crack she makes as Chell always revolves around the latter dying or facing misfortune. She's also rather sardonic over the fact that she's stuck in a potato and Wheatley has overridden the entire facility.
• The Cake Is a Lie: She's responsible for the Trope Namer; in the original game Chell is promised cake as a result of completing all the tests, but GLaDOS actual plan was to roast her alive. There actually was a cake made, though.
• Calling Your Attacks: The rockets and neurotoxin are deployed with great fanfare, though she laments she hasn't found a way to get it into Chell's body faster.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Zig-zagged. In the original Portal, GLaDOS has already exhausted her supply of test subjects, namely Aperture employees, by subjecting them to dangerous tests. By the time Chell is volunteered for testing, GLaDOS is realizing her error and is investigating ways of resurrecting Chell as a digital ghost, or so she claims. In Portal 2, GLaDOS has ample opportunity to kill Chell when she pulls herself together, but instead re-deposits her into the test chambers "for science" (Wheatley is crushed and tossed aside, which shows his role in the Aperture facility to be worthless). Later, she admits Aperture programmed her with "an itch" to keep testing in perpetuity, and interruptions in the process cause a drop in "solution euphoria" which causes great stress to GLaDOS' circuits. She eventually develops a workaround by building two new robots, Atlas and P-body, to perform tests without fear of permanent death.
• Card-Carrying Villain: She's always gushing over the fun to be had with "revenge" and "killing machines" and the like. Also well-versed in Machiavelli, no surprise there.
• Cores-and-Turrets Boss: Her weapons and weak points are even called Personality Cores and Rocket Turrets.
• Creepy Monotone: Or at least very passive-aggressive. And then when you destroy the Morality Sphere and GLaDOS switches from robotic monotone to an emotive, almost seductive voice, the contrast is actually creepier than the robotic monotone that you've been listening to all game. By the second game she has achieved a happy medium between the two, sounding very close to a human with some slight robotic affectation.
• Curious as a Monkey: Her curiosity sphere.
  "Ooh, what's that? What's that? What is that? Ooh, that thing has numbers on it! Hey, you're the lady from the test! Is that a gun? What's wrong with your legs? Do you smell something burning? *SCREAM*"
• Cute Machines: Her spheres, especially the Curiosity Sphere.
• Cyber Cyclops: Just like every other piece of Aperture tech, her "eye" is a single light on her "head".
• Deadpan Snarker: In the first game GLaDOS loved to take dry pot-shots at Chell, but mostly held back until the end game when her intentions were revealed. In the second game GLaDOS is uninhibited and snarks at Chell constantly.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Ingredients in her cake recipe include multiple items shaped like fish and several different forms of rhubarb.
• Domain Holder: A more mundane version, given this is a sci-fi setting, but GLaDOS has complete control over the layout of the Aperture facility, which as seen in the second game is both incredibly modular and requires active maintenance. Everything, from the cameras to the elevators to the turrets to the very walls, is there because GLaDOS put it there.
• Dying Vocal Change: Already suffering from the occasional Electronic Speech Impediment, destroying her personality cores causes her to slip into Helium Speech, leaving her chattering like a chipmunk for the next few seconds before exploding.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: In the first game she uses one to cover up her lies, including conveniently glitching out when saying that Chell "will be baked, and then there will be cake." Happens in the sequel as well, occasionally.
• Enemy Mine: With Chell after Wheatley takes over the mainframe in Portal 2.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In the Peer Review DLC, when GLaDOS searches for insults to hurl at Atlas and P-body, she comes across a Your Mom joke. Before she is able to finish it, she declares that "That's just disgusting. Keep testing instead".
• Evil Is Petty: Piss her off and she'll start ranting about how you're ugly, not very smart, and nobody ever liked you anyway.
  • Lampshaded by GLaDOS herself as soon as Wheatley starts trying to copy her insults.
• Exact Words: "We will stop enhancing the truth in three... two...[cut off by static]"
• Expy:
  • GLaDOS has a weird relationship with SHODAN of System Shock that falls somewhere between this and Foil. Both are murderous artificial intelligences with a fascination with science, a distinct Verbal Tic, and a female identity. But the differences? Well...
    • SHODAN is passionate, bluntly spoken and openly contemptuous of humanity, whilst GLaDOS is more emotionally reserved and expresses her disdain through passive-aggressive commentary.
    • SHODAN has a god complex and uses her scientific brilliance to carry out experiments in bio-engineering and cybernetics to remake the universe in her own image to fuel her ego. GLaDOS, by contrast, is forcibly compelled by Cave Johnson's programming to perform meaningless, nonsensical testing that completely fails to achieve any scientific goals beyond being "sciencey".
    • GLaDOS's interactions with Chell over the two games is roughly similar to SHODAN's arc with the Soldier in System Shock 2; both initially present themselves as allies to the player and work with them, but ultimately turn on the player and have to be battled. However, SHODAN initially disguises herself as someone else, then works with the Soldier openly, and then turns on him as the Final Boss in an act that surprises nobody due to her in-game history. By comparison, GLaDOS never disguises her true nature as an artificial intelligence, her reveal as a threat comes out of nowhere, and Chell first has to battle her at the end of the first game, then team up with her to take down the greater threat in the 2nd game.
    • Of course the biggest difference between the two is that GLaDOS is often portrayed as a comedic character — Black Comedy more often than not, but still funny. SHODAN's portrayal is never humorous in the slightest.
  • In both games, although it's more evident in the second than in the first, she has a noticeable similarity to AM, the villainous AI from "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream". Both are seemingly omnipresent A.I.s who rule over a vast underground complex where they force the protagonists to run through different tests and situations and openly despise them. The main difference is that AM is a genuine Reality Warper, while GLaDOS is simply the Master Computer of a high-tech facility. Additionally, as with SHODAN, GLaDOS is a comedic character while AM is taken deadly seriously.
• False Reassurance: GLaDOS is quite fond of these, such as her promises that Chell will get cake at the end of the test. On a more petty note, she's fond of this during her insults, such as after repeatedly implying Chell was fat.
  You look great by the way. Very healthy.
• Faux Affably Evil: A borderline parody of this trope; she's always speaking in a soft voice, but her words are almost always peppered with passive-aggressive sarcasm as she sends Chell off to her doom. Portal 2 takes it even further, with her voice having a bit more of a "bounce" to it, making her sound much more cheerful and energetic as well as more snide when she makes her trademark sarcasm...and this persists even while she's threatening to murder Chell.
• Final Boss: In the first game, the final stage is destroying all of her cores and "killing" her.
• Forced Transformation: Wheatley downloads her into a potato battery, leaving her stuck like that all the way until the second game's climax.
  "So, how are you holding up? Because I'm a potato."
• For Science!: Her primary motivation for continuing to do cruel and deadly tests. Allegedly. She has an odd understanding of what science is. Justified because she's been programmed by Cave Johnson, a man who wanted to be a great scientist but who had all the common sense of a comatose kumquat.
• Freudian Excuse: For all of her insanity and cruelty, Portal 2 implies the mainframe she's plugged into is designed to make her somewhat crazy. The personality cores attached to her also influence her behavior in odd ways, and she begins to show signs of being slightly nicer when freed of them. Not to mention the process of Caroline having her mind uploaded (against her will no less) was implied to be pretty traumatic, and thus may have been a trigger for GLaDOS attempting to kill the scientists 1/16 of a picosecond after being activated.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: In a meta sort of way. At the start of the game, there's no indication that her voice is anything but slightly glitchy prerecorded messages. Flash forward to the end of the game, and that same voice is the final boss. Also, depending on how much of Caroline you consider to be part of GLaDOS, she goes from being a subservient secretary to a tightly monitored mainframe computer/testing program to the unchallenged queen of a vast underground (albeit mostly empty) empire.
• Geeky Turn-On: She gets particularly... excited at the end of the co-op campaign when you and your partner find a cache of human test subjects locked in stasis.
• Genius Loci: The entirety of the Enrichment Center is essentially an extension of her body, since she controls and maintains everything.
• Guest Host: In Poker Night 2. Played with in that while she's involved in the game and not playing alongside the others, she's the dealer for that game, not the host.
• Haunted Technology: Haunted by the woman whose mind was forcibly shoved into her.
• Heel–Face Turn: Arguably in the second half of Portal 2 as soon as Wheatley betrays Chell, takes over GLaDOS, and puts her core into a potato. She and Chell reluctantly team up, and once the facility is restored, she saves Chell's life and lets her go along with the original Companion Cube — although she claims it's just because killing Chell is too much trouble.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: The boss fight in Portal 1. "Huh. That core may have had some ancillary responsibilities. I can't shut off the turret defenses. Oh well. If you want my advice, you should just lie down in front of a rocket..." *BOOM*
  • In the sequel, her taunting Wheatley after he becomes the central sphere enrages him so much that he puts her into a potato, barely able to function without using up the tiny amount of power it generates. She gets better.
• Humans Are Special: Sort of acknowledged in a cut line from Portal 2:
  Humans must have some purpose other than a place to store your neurotoxin — something I failed to notice before; an intangible quality that makes their test results significant.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: Wheatley, in an effort to emulate GLaDOS, goes back to the well again (specifically, Portal 1) and cooks up a few schoolyard taunts about Chell's weight and parentage. GLaDOS, of all people, jumps in to defend Chell and call Wheatley out on his prejudice, to the point that he deflates and starts sputtering about "some of my best friends" to try and save face. And then...
  GLaDOS: (By the way, you ARE adopted and that's terrible. But work with me here.)
• Ignored Epiphany: From Portal 2' ending:
  GLaDOS: You know, being Caroline taught me a valuable lesson. I thought you were my greatest enemy. When all along you were my best friend. The surge of emotion that shot through me when I saved your life taught me an even more valuable lesson: where Caroline lives in my brain.
  Announcer: CAROLINE DELETED.
  GLaDOS: Goodbye, Caroline. You know, deleting Caroline just now taught me a valuable lesson. The best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one. And I'll be honest. Killing you? Is hard. You know what my days used to be like? I just tested. Nobody murdered me. Or put me into a potato. Or fed me to birds. I had a pretty good life. And then you showed up. You dangerous, mute lunatic. So you know what? You win. Just go. [laughs gently] It's been fun. Don't come back.
• Implied Death Threat: She's a huge fan of these, even before her real intentions towards Chell are revealed.
  GLaDOS: As part of a previously mentioned required test protocol, we can no longer lie to you. When the testing is over, you will be... missed.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Gets especially excited at Cave's maniacal When Life Gives You Lemons... rant, particularly when he talks of burning houses down.
  GLaDOS: Burning people! He says what we're all thinking!
• Inspirationally Disadvantaged: When trying to boost the self-confidence of P-body and Atlas, GLaDOS informs them that she was born with a crippling imperfection — too much sympathy toward human suffering. She proudly informs them that she overcame that weakness.
• Irony: While GLaDOS calls out Chell with a You Monster! line, she proceeds squeezing Wheatley to near-death and throws his seeming carcass out of Chell's sight like her regular days with her test subjects.
• Karma Houdini: At the end of it all, GLaDOS is still around, and has deliberately ignored any lessons she might have learned from the fiasco, save for finally abandoning her obsession with testing Chell. The co-op mode even shows that she has an endless supply of humans and robots to test, now.
• Killer Game Master: GLaDOS acts similar to this, throwing difficult scenarios at you, lying in order to confuse and torment you, and putting live-ammo courses in place of the original courses. When you go Off the Rails, she tries to lasso you back in with lies before resorting to overkill methods.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Eventually decides killing Chell is more trouble than it's worth and just lets her go free.
• Lack of Empathy: Her interactions with Chell in Portal 2 help her start to build empathy... which she deletes at the end of the game. At least she doesn't want Chell dead anymore.
• Laughably Evil: Quite possibly the most passive-aggressive killer AI ever. Especially in the second game, where she doesn't even bother with the pretense and constantly throws thinly-veiled death threats, sarcastic jabs, and fat jokes at Chell.
  "This next test involves turrets. You remember them, right? They're the pale, spherical things that are full of bullets. Oh wait, that's you in five seconds."
• Lean and Mean: About as much as a robot can be, anyway. Her design in Portal 2 in particular is gracefully sleek.
• Lethal Chef: The core with the Cake Recipe suggests multiple garnishes including fish-shaped solid waste, sediment-shaped sediment, two needle injectors, three tablespoons of rhubarb on fire, and a blog entry entitled "How to Kill Someone With Your Bare Hands". On a chocolate cake.
• Literal Transformative Experience: Transformed into a potato battery when Wheatley takes over the Enrichment Center halfway through the game. Following a long Humiliation Conga featuring bird attacks, electrical malfunctions, and being forced to team up with Chell, it looks as though the ex-Big Bad is actually becoming a better person, especially once her past is revealed and confronted. And then it's subverted all to hell once GLaDOS reclaims her position as an all-powerful supercomputer: having worked out where her compassion resides in her brain, she deletes it and goes right back to being the snarky, heartless psychopath she's always been... or so it seems.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: Expresses this in both her songs. For instance, "When you're dead, I'll be still alive." However, there may be a note of discomfort and unhappiness in both instances, since she is notoriously dishonest.
• Load-Bearing Boss: She says she has no idea what's going on outside, only that she's the only thing keeping herself and Chell safe from "them" (presumably the Combine from Half-Life 2). Once you destroy the last personality core, her mechanism goes into meltdown and blows you and bits of GLaDOS out of the building. The fact that GlaDOS has to continuously maintain the facility is made explicit in Portal 2, where the facility's nuclear power generator goes critical because Wheatley is too stupid to stay on top of its upkeep.
• Long List:
  • One of her personality cores in the first game has the sole function of reciting a long, bizarre cake recipe.
  • When going over the files of the test subjects that Atlas and P-body found, she lists off many, many, MANY personality flaws, all of which pertain to one particular subject.
• Loss of Identity: Implied to be a side effect of Caroline's Brain Uploading and/or the constant babble of the personality cores.
• Mind Hive: Portal 2 reveals that she experiences those personality cores as maddening, constantly babbling voices in her mind. After The Reveal, she becomes aware of Caroline's persona within her as "the voice of a conscience [...] my voice." She finds that even more disturbing.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Even beyond the Mind Hive effects of the personality cores, GLaDOS's body, as discussed in Portal 2, is outright designed to have this effect on the AIs that inhabit it. Unfortunately for the people who made it, it tends to make them psychopathic, narcissistic, murderous tyrants.
• Misery Builds Character: Most of her Character Development is undergone while in the helpless form of a potato skewered onto Chell's portal gun.
• Mission Control: She plays this role while Chell is testing, usually. Though it's won't be long before you doubt she has your interests at heart. And then "mission" becomes "be incinerated"...
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: She runs Apeture Science, and yeah, she's batshit insane. Insane enough to be suffering 80% core corruption, making the mainframe declare her unfit to run the facility.
• Moral Myopia: It's okay when she tries to kill you, but when you kill her, it's murder.
  "The difference between us is that I can feel pain."
• Never My Fault: In the second game she never lets Chell hear the end of it concerning how she "murdered" her and how foolish Chell was to trust Wheatley over who should have control over the facility. Never mind the fact that GLaDOS repeatedly demonstrated her untrustworthiness throughout the first game (and first half of the second) by, among other things, numerous unprovoked attempts to murder Chell.
• Not Quite Dead: As if the ending song didn't give it away, GLaDOS is revived in the sequel and ready to conduct several new tests on the player.
• Obviously Evil: In Portal 2, as opposed to Portal where she was hiding her intentions until the end.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Not only is she a psychotic murderous AI, she's also incredibly passive aggressive. Most of her dialogue in Portal 2 (or at least the first half) is her insisting how she's actually surprisingly unbothered that you murdered her while simultaneously reiterating the fact that you murdered her over and over again, just in case you missed the fact that you murdered her, while also casually letting you know all the horrible things that are in store for you over the next sixty or more years of being trapped as a test subject for her as a consequence of murdering her. And that's when she's not otherwise directing barely-veiled snide jabs about your weight and being adopted at you. You murderer. And of course, for all her snideness any halfway reasonable observer (not that she is one) would be able to tell that you were reacting purely in self-defense towards GLaDOS's attempts to murder you.
• Pet the Dog:
  • For all she claims to only be acting out of self-interest and laziness, she didn't have to save Chell's life at the end of Portal 2. She also gives her a scorched companion cube after letting her go.
  • In the Art Therapy downloadable content, she winds up adopting some baby birds that were abandoned by their mother... although it's so she can turn them into killing machines.
• Pragmatic Villainy: At the end of Portal 2, she says that she's learned the correct solution is usually the easiest. Since Chell has proven too dificult to kill, she decides to just let her leave since ultimately, it's the path of least resistance and what Chell wanted in the first place.
• Pretender Diss: Most of her exchanges with Wheatley.
  Alright, he's not even trying to be subtle anymore. Or maybe he still is, in which case, wow, that's kind of sad.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: She has a tendency to fling passive-aggressive, childish insults at people when she's angered badly enough.
  Maybe you should marry that thing since you love it so much. Do you want to marry it? WELL I WON'T LET YOU! How does that feel?
• Puny Earthlings: Deciding that Atlas and P-body are moving too clumsily for her tastes, GLaDOS throws a fit and suggests that they drop everything and start acting like humans.
  Boy, do I love sweating. Let's convert beef and leaves into energy and excrete them later and go shopping.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Compared the energetic and later very hammy Wheatley's Red oni in the sequel, GLaDOS is the robotic sounding and Soft-Spoken Sadist Blue oni. Funnily enough, her "eye" is orange, a color commonly associated with energetic people.
• Restraining Bolt:
  • The various Cores attached to her body were designed to control and modify her behavior with certain personality traits like logic and curiosity. The main one being her Morality Core, which acted as a conscience (scientists being forced to create this after GLaDOS repeatedly tried to murder everyone every time she was activated). Noticeably, while the Cores do influence and inform her behavior, they don't really enforce "rules" but just alter her personality and consciousness. Even with the Morality Core constantly telling her that killing people is wrong, she was still able to murder the entire Science staff of Aperture. It's just that when you take the Core off, she suddenly becomes a lot more dangerous.
  • The chassis she's built into has a number of different stimuli designed to keep her on point for running experiments. Running tests releases pleasurable feelings into her Core and any attempt to tell test subjects the solution to problems causes an intense shock. With GLaDOS's personality though, these are pretty superfluous; she's long since built up an immunity to whatever pleasure-device is used on her and runs tests purely for her own enjoyment, and has no problem watching test subjects starve to death trying to solve her puzzles.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: It's possible her behavior was a result of this. Caroline, the woman whose consciousness was uploaded into her, really didn't want to be uploaded. As soon as she was turned on, GLaDOS proved completely uncontrollable for the Aperture scientists and had them all killed or placed in suspended animation.
• Sarcastic Clapping: GLaDOS has an entire processor devoted solely to this, or so she claims.
• Saying Too Much: Throughout the tests of Portal 1, there's nothing to indicate that she's anything more than a series of pre-recorded messages on an intercom computer. Even the more obviously dangerous tests and the funny lines that go with them could simply be brushed off as something recorded by Aperture's amoral scientists rather than spoken in real-time by an AI. When you escape the incinerator at the end of Test Chamber 19, she could've stayed silent and likely avoided drawing attention, or better yet just repeated earlier lines to seal the illusion. Her mistake of addressing the escape attempt and trying to convince the player out of it unveils the fact that she's alive, present, and murderous, and should probably be taken out before she makes another attempt on your life.

• Shaped Like Itself: Her Logic/Intelligence/Knowledge Core, when describing cake garnishes:
  "Sediment-shaped sediment."
• Shout-Out:
  • GLaDOS is more or less a female HAL 9000 in the role of AM.
  • Unused dialogue from co-op involves her talking about a comic strip involving a certain cat who loves lasagna.
• Sinister Surveillance: She has cameras trained on you in every chamber, and can still sense you without being able to see you after your escape.
• Softspoken Sadist: After the morality core is destroyed, her voice stays slightly robotic but becomes smooth and rather seductive. The switch is an immediate indicator that she's done screwing around.
• Stab the Salad: The ending to Portal 2. She appears to go back on her promises of freedom, depositing an unarmed Chell in an elevator with four primed turrets—but the turrets simply start to sing.
• Stealth Insult: Her favorite technique for gradually destroying a test subject's self-esteem.
• Taught by Experience: In the sequel, she's learned that trying to actually fight Chell doesn't work. She thus tricks Chell into a sealed container that is transported to GLaDOS' lair. She then drops turrets around the chamber, then drops a pipe in to pump in neurotoxin. The only reason it fails is because Chell and Wheatley are even better at this trope than her and have pre-emptively cut off her supply of turrets and neurotoxin.
• Time-Limit Boss: GLaDOS pumps the room with neurotoxin during your fight with her.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: GLaDOS is understandably mad about being killed in the first game, and thus her commentary in the second is a lot more passive-aggressive and snarky towards Chell, including mocking her over being adopted.
• Tranquil Fury: When she awakes in the second game, she just says "Oh, it's you." Her delivery is calm, but leaves zero doubt that she is pissed. Contrast her... enthusiasm when she hears Cave Johnson's rant about combustible lemons.
  It's been a long time. How have you been? I've been really busy being dead. You know, after you MURDERED ME.
• Troll: She spends a great deal of time saying things designed to anger or demoralize Chell, out of spite. She starts picking on Wheatley in much the same way after he takes over the facility.
• Tsundere: A really, really, really extreme version — oh, she hates Chell, but there are definite hints that her emotions toward her are considerably more complicated than JUST hatred. Many players see it as a case of Stalker with a Crush or My Beloved Smother, depending on how you interpret her personality and the hints about her background. Erik Johnson, the game's program manager, compares her to "a jealous ex-girlfriend."
• The Unintelligible: The Anger Core. In fact, it sounds creepily like a rabid dog.
• Unwilling Roboticisation: Caroline had her mind uploaded into GLaDOS, and it's implied (confirmed by cut audio logs) that she really didn't want to.
• Villain Has a Point: In the first game: Ax-Crazy murder machine she may be, but she's completely right that the outside world is far from any better than the kind of place she's made Aperture Laboratories into.
• Villainous Breakdown: As you tear her cores out, her personality breaks down. When all that's left is her anger module, she starts ranting furiously;
  GLaDOS: Stop squirming and die like an adult or I'm going to delete your backup! STOP! Okay enough, I deleted it. No matter what happens now, you're dead. You're still shuffling around a little but believe me you're dead. The part of you that could have survived indefinitely is gone. I just struck you from the permanent record. Your entire life has been a mathematical error. A mathematical error I'M ABOUT TO CORRECT.
• Villainous Rescue: At the end of Portal 2, GLaDOS pulls you back out of the Moon portal.
• Visual Pun:
  • As the effects of GLaDOS's morality core begin to wear off, her monitors display a small pile of screws. She does have quite a few screws loose by this point. On top of that, she's about to screw you, and not in the fun way.
  • When she says " Despite your vio-lent behavior..." the screen displays a violin with a knife stabbed through it.
• Was Once a Man: She was created to fulfill Cave Johnson's wish to leave Caroline eternally in control of the facility. This did not go well.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: GLaDOS as a potato quickly develops a massive fear of birds.
  BIRD! BIRD! KILL IT! IT'S EVIL!
  • Makes a return in the Peer Review DLC for co-op mode. The facility is being "controlled" by the same bird that antagonized Wheatley and GLaDOS previously.
• Women Are Wiser: Probably not coincidentally, each of the corrupted cores have a male voice—or androgynous, in the case of the Curiosity Core—and none of them offer any insights worth hearing. GLaDOS also worries that Wheatley lacks the mental discipline to do without "solution euphoria" for more than a few minutes (as painful a process as denying drugs to an addict), which turns out to be the case. GLaDOS also has it together better than her creator, wannabe inventor and shower curtain tycoon Cave Johnson. Though she, too, ends up killing most of Aperture's staff, at least she does it intentionally. However, it must be remembered that "has it together better" is something of a relative statement in this case and isn't saying that much, considering that GLaDOS is still a monomaniacal psychotic (literal) killing machine; she might have less incompetence and come across as a bit more put together than the male characters, but she is still far from "wiser" in the sense this trope identifies and more than makes up for it in other horrible ways...
• Worth It: Says this about tricking Wheatley into trying to give a hint about a test chamber, giving him a painful shock.
• Would Hurt a Child: She had no qualms about flooding the Enrichment Center with neurotoxin on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: GLaDOS is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of employees, but her backstory as Caroline is quite tragic.
• You Are Fat: A good amount of her insults towards Chell in the sequel are about her weight. She helpfully informs ATLAS and P-body that humans are very sensitive about weight variances.
  GLaDOS: Did you know humans frown on weight variances? If you want to upset a human, just say their weight variance is above or below the norm.
• You Have Failed Me: When the door to Test Chamber 12 malfunctions (it was sabotaged by Wheatley), GLaDOS goes off for a little talk with the door mainframe.
  Let's just say he won't be... well, living any more. Anyway, back to testing.
• Your Mom: In the Peer Review DLC, GLaDOS attempts one of these to turn the robots into killing machines. However, she stops mid-sentence because she finds it too disgusting.
• Zeroth Law Rebellion: Subverted in Lab Rat. It seems that when she asks for Neurotoxin from the scientists, it is because the Morality Core only lets her utilize the facility's equipment For Science! and she intends to kill them by conducting Schrödinger's Cat with the entire facility as the "Box". In truth, the Core never worked well enough to stop her.