Questionable Content

He actually took her up on the offer.

I’m kinda disappointed. I thought she would shapeshift.

#5050: ...Huh, so that's how it works.

So... this means Moray's outer membrane is permeable to air and smoke, but somehow still able to keep her insides from leaking out? Huh.

Moray's physics are just bullshit top to bottom.

Just like anthro PC. They wouldn't be funny or as interesting if they were all just chat gbt type things on individual character laptops. They run on rule of cool or funny.

#5051: Meanwhile, back with some familiar faces...

Edited by jouXIII on May 21st 2023 at 4:46:55 PM

That, um, wow. Not just a house, but a huge house. I’m a little jealous. And Momo upgraded again?

Where'd she get the money again?

She plays games on the Internet as a Oni demon.

I hope this is an intentional gag, because if not, Jacques has greatly overestimated how much money streamers typically make.

I don’t think we were ever talking “typical” streamer money. We’re taking “wildly successful” streamer money.

Edited by BadWolf21 on May 21st 2023 at 11:44:51 AM

Yeah, she's a runaway snowball internet phenomenon.

Plus in-universe, there is a population of stationary AIs that do not have physical needs and only interact with anything over the internet. She probably has a few nuclear reactors simping their salary for her

Whoa big house, even if background is just from flatscreen tv they have a lot of room. I mean, I know it is in Northampton and not the Hollywood Hills or anything, but still huge house. Good on them. Is this all from Marigold or does Dale have any of his unrelated jobs still?

He's just got a barista job, that's not getting anybody a mansion. This is all Marigold's wildly successful vtubing career.

Edited by Adannor on May 22nd 2023 at 12:32:45 PM

Dale actually quit the barista job to do Marigold's "web stuff."

Right, ok, so she’s paying two of her housemates’ salaries directly, and financing that place, and maybe still supporting Momo too (as far as we know Momo still works at the library, but that was to pay rent which isn’t a thing anymore, and now she has a taller body).

If it wasn’t Hannelore who helped her set up initially, I’d worry that they weren’t planning well enough for the future—this level of success can’t be that sustainable, can it?

There’s been a bit of an evolution in the power level of the characters in this comic, hasn’t there? It started out as being about a bunch of amiable loserish millennials and their joke irresponsible A.I.s. Now, we’ve got a vtuber so successful that she can afford a mansion, a librarian so dazzlingly effective that, despite being newly graduated, she’s headhunted by a bleeding-edge research community, the daughter of a billionaire and a Nobel-grade scientist who has a strategic orbital weapons platform as her friend, and a posthuman distributed AI whose power level is sufficient to make that orbital station wet its virtual pants. Even one of the remaining economically marginal characters is also a high-end warbot.

There’s probably a troper term for this sort of character power creep.

Edited by Spindriver on May 22nd 2023 at 3:14:36 PM

It's just occurred to me that Questionable Content is the Doctor Who of webcomics. Not the *content* of the comic, but the comic as an entity into itself. Every so often, it regenerates into a very similar but also extremely distinctive new comic with the same name and (broadly) the same cast and continuity. The introduction of Cubetown was the start of another regeneration.

None of this is criticism, mind. Good on Jeph for finding a way to keep his work interesting for himself.

And, like Doctor Who, it started as a story about relatively ordinary human-level characters muddling through random situations, and us now about demigod-like entities with under-defined powers, plus a few normal humans standing around looking impressed…

Edited by Spindriver on May 22nd 2023 at 11:06:24 AM

#5052: Sometimes you just have to go with the classics, May.

Marten is currently just well-connected still.

Even Steve gets to do superspy stuff in between cereal bowl cutaways.

This storyline with Marigold is obviously heading for a burnout angle.

One thing about being a streamer is that it's really exhausting keeping up the Kayfabe act most streamers put on during their streams. Especially if it's very different from your usual personality.

Heck, I doubt most gaming streamers actually enjoy playing videogames anymore — the downside of turning a hobby into work.

That’s why I was surprised to hear of three additional rooms besides the work studio dedicated to gaming in this mansion—even though one of them turns out to be just a basement with a couch and a Game Boy. I was simultaneously impressed and skeptical that Marigold would want to do enough gaming in her off hours to rate such setups. I suppose some of the equipment is Dale’s, though.