I've always enjoyed it in television shows and movies when characters have special attachments to their guns. I imagine it comes not just from the natural way people begin to personify inanimate objects when they've been around long enough, but also because there's a special bond that forms when you have to put your trust into a defensive weapon. When you've had a gun/blaster long enough, and it's saved your life on numerous occasions, you're going to get weirdly attached to it. And if you're the type to modify his/her weaponry, you have to also factor in all the time and sweat that went into the modifications. I wonder what Proto Man's named her...
Now, I can't let this comic go without commenting a bit on the Three Laws of Robotics, because Proto Man killing his creator factors directly into that. At the end of Megaman 7, Mega Man is standing over a defeated Dr. Wily, but finds he can't kill Dr. Wily, presumably because of the some internal law. Whether Capcom intended this to be a direct reference to the Three Laws or not, many people imagine that Light-bots are at least programmed with something similiar. Wily-bots, not so much.
This would perhaps explain the major difference between robots from the classic series and the reploids from the X series, in that reploids are not programmed with the Three Laws, but instead are ruled by emotions like humans.
So, would killing Dr. Light violate the Three Laws? Perhaps not, since he didn't intend to kill him; the blaster just went off. Nonetheless, if Proto Man were truly an Asmovian-type robot, his positronic brain would mostly likely still shut down because of what happened. Given that he didn't, this suggests that Dr. Light never programmed Proto Man with the Three Laws, programmed Proto Man with a slightly modified version of the Three Laws, or didn't program them at all. After all, Proto Man is the prototype.
It might also be worth mentioning that this is the first use of the word shit in the comic. I was worried when this comic first went up that it would lead to a snowball effect and before long the comic would be nothing but f-bombs back and forth, which could turn readers away from it. Luckily, complaints about the language haven't been too bad, so I think it all worked out.
|
