Archived Discussion Webcomic / Freefall

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Things I'm not sure whether we have pages on or not:

• "He may not even have a plan. But by making us think he has one, we'll try to figure out what he's up to and come up with a devious master plan for him." (also seen here)
• Asimov's Laws of Robotics. Disregard that one.

Okay, enough is enough. Is it strawman politics to wonder why environmentalists are so concerned with baby seals and spotted suck-toads when the real keystones of an ecosystem are the squirmy, disgusting things at the bottom? Strips 1121 to 1128 are a beautiful example of Shown Their Work, regarding the difficulty of Terraforming - the scientific form of environmentalism. These conversations are particularly brilliant.

[1] This one proves that Environmentalism is pop culture, not science.

Winston(Terraforming expert): I know. New planet. Why bring parasites? Well, they evolved with us. They're part of a normal life cycle, even if they're ugly and creepy and no on likes having them around.

Florence(Engineer): Planned ecologies. Survival of the cutest.

Winston(Terraforming expert): Yeah. People want animals that are huggable, and no one wants to hug a tapeworm.

[2] This one proves that most Real Life environmentalists are dyed-in-the-wool Strawman Political types.

Winston(Terraforming expert): "What it comes down to is that people want an ecosystem, just not the slimy parts."

Florence(Engineer): You run into that in engineering as well. People want electricity but not the power plants. Metals, but not the mining or smelting areas. Chemicals, but not the chemical industry. We're in the same field. You work with the icky bits of an ecosystem, I work with the icky bits of an infrastructure."

Dangermike: "Is it strawman politics to wonder why environmentalists are so concerned with baby seals and spotted suck-toads when the real keystones of an ecosystem are the squirmy, disgusting things at the bottom?"

This one "proves" (Do you even know what that word means??!!) that most Real Life environmentalists are dyed-in-the-wool Strawman Political types.

...Aaaaaand by thoes very statements you reveal just how very Straw it is. You assume that "environmentalists" are all like the few hippie loudmouths that get on TV. Environmentalists cover the full spectrum— there are some like that, yes, just as there are well-meaning morons in any other cause. But painting all of them as Straw Loser when you clearly have no idea what the majority even think has no scientific merit at all, it's just bales of dry grass and ignorance.

Kalaong: All Real Life environmental legislature is in opposition to those two arguments. If there are any Greens with brains out there, they aren't interested in actually influencing policy. The reason is simple; environmentalism is a religion! And when religion dictates policy, everything turns stupid.

Zarpaulus: The comics that some people see as painting environmentalists as Strawman Political can also be seen as making fun of the majority of the population, the "icky parts" lines were referring to people in general. Also I'm surprised that the comics where Florence and Helix were repairing a nuclear reactor haven't been referenced here:

Helix: "But...nuclear power is bad. Solar power is good. But the sun is nuclear power. And the plants! And the animals that eat the plants! They all ultimately get their energy from a nuclear source. WHY AREN'T THERE WARNING LABELS ON THESE THINGS!"

Florence: "Don't shout too loud. You might start another government agency."

• Remember when Sam thought that saving the robots was pointless because they could make backups and the robots tried to cut his head off with a chainsaw, their argument that a backup wouldn't be the same as the original was an aversion (subversion?) of a Virtual Ghost.
  • Ah. Well explained, you should move that analysis to the main page.

Is there a Freefall chronology with links to which strips make up day 1, day 2 and so on? I thought I remembered the main site's archives being organized that way, but apparently not. —Document N

Ye Olde Luke: Yup, here, though it says it's only current as of September '07. Luckily Freefall moves like a glacier, so it probably hasn't gotten much farther.

Document N: Thanks. Someone should probably update it now that the day of the week is an actual plot point◊, but I'm up too late.

Ye Olde Luke: In regards to my deletion of Cerebus Syndrome; the author himself has stated that he has no intention of switching to drama. You can't really argue with the author himself :)

Robin Zimm: Sez who? As for Cerebus Syndrome - maybe in Websnark's sense, which explicitly has that the humor continue though the plot grow more dramatic, but not in the TV Tropes sense.

Nohbody: How so? FF has had drama and story arcs since nearly the beginning, and even the more dramatic parts still has bits of humor in it here and there (the quality of said humor is another issue, and one I won't get into here, save for acknowledging they can't all be gut-busters). Going by the CS page here (specifically: "More generally, it's any story/series which starts out light, episodic, and comedic, and then becomes dramatic and arc-based."), FF doesn't qualify for CS.

Robin Zimm: Not from the beginning - the first truly dramatic story arc was probably the hurricane - but I'm agreeing not to put CS on there.

Kalaong: I added Cerebus Syndrome because Gardener In The Dark was the first story arc that had planet-spanning consequences. Before, there were relatively few consequences to the characters' actions; even the biggie — Sam's theft of Florence — would really only affect the extrastellar research station. If Flo doesn't get those notes and come up with a solution for Kornada's idiocy, every robot on Jean is going to go stupid. It's the same as if Y2K had been real — just about anything and everything could break. They'd be back where they started - living in plastic tents eating lichen. Heck, if someone less intelligent than Winston says that Jean could do without a particular gross-yet-essential bug to the right GITD-patched robot, the terraforming could reverse! And given that the starship is about to leave, nobody would be able to help them in time! We're talking Class-2 to Class-5 apocalypse! It's like the Peanuts gang were suddenly The Only Ones who could catch the monkey from Outbreak!

girly: All those consequences, and, well, also, you know, the fact that the entire (very large) population of sentient, self-aware robots would have their minds destroyed in what would, essentially, be genocide. ... It kind of bugs me sometimes how the comic can't decide if the robots in it are people who should have rights, or just machines whose life-and-death struggles are just amusing plot points, until they threaten the human population...

Robin Zimm: The robots are people - that's fairly unambiguous. The conflict lies in the fact that most of the nonrobot population believes the robots aren't.

girly: I think an even bigger conflict lies in the fact that not all the robots themselves believe that they are people (or that other robots are). Anywho, in my above comment, I was thinking more of the way the comic tends to play the robots' deaths and other various horrible things happening to them for laughs... Not that there's anything wrong with that in a comic that's a mix of comedy and drama, of course, it's just a bit jarring sometimes (the Jar-Jar-Binks robot being a good example). Kalaong's note on how the comic is getting more serious, which focused on the consequences to humans of the robots getting stupid, rather than the rather more immediate consequences to the robots themselves, reminded me of that.

Kalaong: I thought the implications in lobotomizing an entire race were self-evident. IRL nobody really gives a damn how famines in third world countries can cause brain damage in those that fail to starve to death, particularly if they're young when it happens — because it doesn't affect anyone else. Humans Are Bastards. Who knew?

Nohbody: You seem to be confusing, as many do, bastardy with apathy. Being a bastard implies there are active efforts to harm people. Many just don't care... if they even know of it in the first place. I don't believe, however, there is a "Humans Are Apathetic" trope. :P

TBeholder: It just so that some happen to be too lazy to harm people, and some... not to. Thus we end up where we started.