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GRP-424 — "Installed Humanity" / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page GRP-424 — "Installed Humanity".
(account deleted)The article is acceptable, so I rated it as acceptable. This is a lot less enjoyable since I know what the inspiration was, and the article doesn't exactly take any strides to break from that.
I also noticed that there are some pretty glaring SPAG errors, which I'll try to fix, but I'm surprised some of them weren't found in the crit thread.
The article is really bogged down by the wordy and repetitive description, which tends to drag out what could probably be approximated into a few paragraphs. A few examples:
self-devourment
You could just say "autocannibalism" or "self-consumption" or anything other than "self devourment." It seems like you were trying to sound more clinical by using a more obscure word, but it ends up sounding kind of dumb and also isn't the actual, clinical term for what the anomaly does.
This also raises the question of how the anomaly is classified. You never say what GRP-424-1 is, like there is no "the individual within GRP-424-2 (hereafter referred to as GRP-424-1" or something, and when it is interviewed it is addressed as GRP-424.
And if "they" are fused together, why classify them as separate things, then?
GRP-424-2 would normally be entered by twisting a medium-sized valve…
But the Authority never sees GRP-424 being entered or exited. The documents were burned. This is the only suit of its kind. Yet this is the longest paragraph in the entire document and it is only talking about something that never comes up again at all. It doesn't make sense how the Authority would know the specifics of its operation since it is made explicitly clear that little documentation exists on how the suit works. You spend more time discussing how to enter and exit a suit that, by all accounts, cannot be entered or exited than you do describing how the nanomachines function or how GRP-424 has them.
The Ship of Theseus metaphor also falls apart here. His body isn't being replaced (although given that he has nanomachines I'm unsure why he can't), it's stuck inside a suit. It seems as though you were trying to say "oh now he identifies with the suit rather than with his body" but that A) has nothing to do with the Ship of Theseus and B) is not well described at all.
The interview, which is the only part of this document that actually deviates from the inspiration in any meaningful way, is also the weakest part of this article.
First, it's poorly formatted. You don't need to (nor should you) put everything in quotation marks. You also mix up the interviewer with the GRP a few times.
Second, the interview itself is not well written. The dialogue has weird pauses throughout (on both sides, so no, I don't believe it was a stylistic choice to represent GRP-424's way of talking [how does he talk btw? he has "traces of vocal chord tissue" but no lungs]) and it opens up several plot holes- he specifically states he struggles to remember things, then goes on to perfectly describes the events leading up to his death.
Third, there are several lines that were trying to be wham-lines, like "But, I, Survived." (commas are an awkward way to show pauses here) or "but the suit provided where the flesh could not." Some of these are jarring because they contrast with the way GRP-424 talked up to this point, which could be intentional, but it seems like more of an oversight than an intended gimmick. These also lose their effect due to them strongly resembling quotes from other media (you know what I'm talking about) and because they often have SPAG errors ("unionied").
It seems like this needed far more time as a draft before it should have been posted. I was expecting more.
I agree with Butters criticisms. The interview dialogue is extremely stilted and nearly robotic, which I can kinda forgive considering the anomaly is somewhat of a robot by now, but if he's somehow human enough to compare himself to a philosophical thought experiment AND have Dissassociative Identity Disorder, he should be somewhat more human.
Speaking of Ship of Thesus, I REALLY dislike the comparison that is dropped near the end of the article. It is worded poorly ("Say you were the new components, say you were the old, would it change how you are right now?") and I really HATE how the allusion is just straight up named dropped. Imagine if someone was making an article that alluded to a parable from Greek mythology and half way through, one of the characters just said "WOW THIS IS JUST LIKE THE STORY OF SISYPHUS!" or something along those lines. It, at best, would be a really bad throw away line and at worst, shatter a readers immersion.
Another point I would like to mention is that these containment protocols make no sense. GRP-424 barely has enough nourishment to survive and his exoskeleton is badly damaged yet the GRPC is so worried about him breaching containment that his cell can be jetison'd at any second? Not to mention how cooperative he is during the interview log, this leads me to believe he is no where near as big as a threat as the GRPC is making him out to be. If he were to breach containment, then why lead him to the cafeteria instead of just trying to temporarily neutralize him and take him back to his cell?
This article feels like it needs a lot more time in the criticism stage, I feel as if I am reading a mid-stage draft of an article where there are things that are brought up and never mentioned again, things that go totally unexplained (such as how he speaks like Butter said) and the extremely stilted dialogue in the interview section.
1/5
Due to actions of certain users, controversy has been made around this article claiming that it was a 1:1 copy of the provided comic (artist unknown). As a compromise, the original article has remained untouched so long as I provide this comic in said post so viewers can make their own opinion on the matter.
It's a cool interpretation of the comic, and enjoyable so long as you don't think about it too hard. I didn't notice any of the inconsistencies or structural issues of the article until coming here to read Butter's criticism.
This has been an official Lucky Co. post
/forum/t-14613790/grp-424-installed-humanity#post-