type_wild | A return to Chobis (Reply)

I started re-reading Chobits but it got to the point where I just didn't feel like wasting more time on it and just skipped ahead to read all the "oh Clamp" parts. The conclusion would be that the series is very cute but particularly the early parts are pandering to an audience of which I am not a part. Unfortunately, the story fails to engage me like it should (thus the skipping) and the final conclusion is... yeah, more on that below.

I'll just say the two things I really liked: the art style and the way more or less every character was portrayed. Except for the part with the nineteen year old girl and the man who was twice her age and married to his computer, and not in the figurative way.

Let me summarise it to put it in perspective. 90% of this is revealed in the last two books of the series so spoilers and all:

In a world where computers look like human beings, a man made two computer children for his wife, and they were programmed to "love" others. Specifically, they were programmed to find That One Special Person, because as we all know romantic love is pinnacle of the human experience. But their being computers, they were by definition at the mercy of their owners. So when one of them was sent out into the world to find "the person just for her", it was with a safety precaution: her reset button is in her vagina, meaning that if someone has (vaginally penetrative) sex with her, her entire personality will be erased. In short: someone who has sex with her cannot love her because they were willing to "kill" her, and someone who loves her cannot have sex with her for the same reason [yes I know, but the series has a conversation that makes it very clear that The Only Sex That Is The Union Of Both Body And Soul Is Penis In Vagina]. But there is more! If she should find this person, but this person would reject her due to the no sex rule, she was meant to run a program which would make ALL the computers in the world incapable of recognising other people, and thus incapable to "fall in love" or w/e. What is at stake at the climax of Chobits isn't just the matter of Hideki getting the girl, but of all computers existing functioning as persons rather than just machines. Chi is essentially a test to see how much a human being can care for a computer, and Hideki is essentially asked to prove humanity's communal good morals by chosing celibacy for the sake of a non-sentient machine.

Yeesh. Upon re-reading the ending, I didn't find it as cute as I did the first time I read it. Hideki's part I find downright hearthrenning, sure, but adding Chi to that was just unsettling this time around because Jesus Christ, it's a program reacting to input, not a real girl with real feelings. I just feel sorry for Hideki. I know I'm not supposed to because he gets what he wanted, but he shouldn't have to want that.

The problem is that I can't grasp the logic of doing all this in the first place. Icchan made computers who loked like people because... he wanted to make artificial people? But WHY. To what purpose? If it is in fact a positive development that people can now fall in love with their humanoid but non-sentient computers, I'm going to need more arguments than how cute Chi and Hideki are in the last chapter. Shouldn't warning bells be ringing all over the place at the point where Ueda is telling us about how he lost his wife to hardware failure? This isn't romantic, it is fucked up.

And the part where the twelve year old boy is in love with the computer he made to look and act like his deceased sister? No more, Clamp. Jesus Christ.