Sky, Cozy Goth Prince of Cats...something about the AI popup here is just...
...mercilessly ironic.
I've never actually read the story before, just summaries of it, and the sexism is jarringly weird.
The sexism just keeps getting more and more jarring.
The truest torment: being stuck in computer hell as a woman physically reliant on the most sexist guy you know.
*sigh* finished the story. I think less of it than before I read it.
An interesting thought I had running through my head as I read it was "ugh, this is so edgelord" coupled with "ok, but it would be really horrifying for a computer trained on all the worst edgelord torture-porn slop to be able to carry that stuff out".
There were some interesting unreliable-narrator potentials with the narrator's insistence that his mind hadn't been warped by the computer while he continuously thinks like a gamergate commenter. I kind of wish they'd played more into that, though there are barriers to doing so because the narrative is limited to his unreliable perspective.
They could have done so much more with the warpedness of Benny's and Ellen's entwined torments, but the author just wasn't capable of taking on a gay man's or straight woman's perspective enough to fully draw out the thread there. He left the building blocks, but he didn't quite know how to put them together.
Tane Piper ⁂@skysailor the best version of it is the video game - all credit to the makers there were choices you could make - but honestly it's not a very well written story, just a well written terrifying idea