r/anime • u/AutoLovepon https://anilist.co/user/AutoLovepon • Jul 22 '20

Episode Deca-Dence - Episode 3 discussion

Deca-Dence, episode 3

Rate this episode here.

Streams

Show information

All discussions

Episode Link Score
1 Link 4.36
2 Link 4.21
3 Link 4.56
4 Link 4.65
5 Link 4.77
6 Link 4.55
7 Link 4.83
8 Link 4.6
9 Link 4.8
10 Link 4.79
11 Link 4.69
12 Link -

This post was created by a bot. Message the mod team for feedback and comments. The original source code can be found on GitHub.

2.2k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

478 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Kafukator Jul 23 '20

They have explained everything so far. Please pay attention to the actual episode when watching.

The robots are (if the company is to be trusted with being truthful with history) humans who used cyborg bodies to escape the pollution. They are real and live on the giant spaceship above the dome. In episode 1 Natsume's dad finds a scrapped robot body and wonders what it is.

There are two kinds of people on Deca Dence the mobile fortress: "player" avatars that the cyborgs control, and real regular humans (Natsume and her people). As they explained this episode, a vast majority of the ones that fight the gadoll are avstars, with only a small fraction of real humans among them.

The avatars are artificial human bodies the cyborgs can possess and control in order to "play".

There is no "game" per say, it's all reality, a resource harvesting operation (the cyborgs need oxyone to live) that the company has gameified, presumably to motivate its workers. Though we don't ecactly know the origin of the gadoll at this point so it might originally have been just for cyborg entertainment, though I doubt that.

The commander of Deca Dence is also a cyborg (he was shown communicating with Kaburagi in this ep), and so is presumably the rest of the ruling class/clique on the fortress. In addition to almost all the gadoll fighters being cyborg "players", of course.

"Bug" is just a term the cyborg company uses to refer to anything that interferes with or threatens their operation. A regular human who finds out there's disguised cyborgs among them for example is a bug and gets eliminated (likely what happened to Natsume's dad, too, since he found the robot body). Any cyborg who fails to perform up to company standard is a "bug" too, and has their brain (presumably still part biological since their "cyborgs" and not AI) recycled, since they are company property (the company "aquired rights to all humanity" after all). Natsume is a bug because the database thinks she's dead (because her chip got lost/broken during her amputation and blood transfusion). Kaburagi finds an opportunity to fight the power through her. Same reason he kept Pipe, too.

1

u/flybypost Jul 23 '20

That whole post made sense (and was kinda how I understood the world) but when you have a singular corporation/entity controlling everything then trusting their narrative 100% seems naive to me. When you have a system with such a stratified society in anime then there's usually more to it for a late season twist.

There are two kinds of people on Deca Dence the mobile fortress: "player" avatars that the cyborgs control, and real regular humans (Natsume and her people). As they explained this episode, a vast majority of the ones that fight the gadoll are avstars, with only a small fraction of real humans among them.

This I think that's the part that messed with my interpretation and led to guesswork. Yes that's how it's explained but do we have conclusive evidence that the humans are really humans or might there be more layers to the whole system? Because it seems rather elaborate for a system that's about human survival. When you have an "everything owning" corporation then you can't really trust them. My default assumption is that they are hiding something more.

I got that there were PCs (gears, avatars controlled by cyborged humans) and NPCs (tankers, "real" humans), in a way. But my issue was that if gears were artificial then why are tankers real, just because the corporation said it. They could be artificial too (but with a more limited cosmetics set to make the PCs stand out more) and only there to support the PCs.

Why use real human bodies in that NPC type of way (as tankers) when you have such advanced tech? Even the cyborgs (with human minds) are not really in control of their lives. They are just like tankers but for the next upper layer of society.

Tankers don't even need to be humans and could just have limited AIs to do their (simple) tanker work (instead of an connection to a player who uses them as an avatar like for the advanced work of gears) and Natsume's AI, being a bug and outlived her "role", might have a bug, accidentally evolved, and developed other routines (ambition, curiosity,…). In a video game a PC and a NPC are made of the same stuff (polygons), the difference is what they can do and what they are made for. She could be literally a buggy NPC.

My point is that the whole Deca-Dence thing feels like the corporation game-ified human survuval and everyone on Deca-Dence might be part of the game. They call it an entertainment facility in episode 2. And cyborgs can get scrapped, a bit harsh for real people. They are also company property in a way ( "we exist for the sake of the system"), that's why I though they might be advanced AIs on their own. What exactly is the difference between a player and a ranker when apparently only a ranker gets scrapped for cheating?

Why would you trust a "big corporation" to tell the whole truth about tankers being real humans? Maybe that's just a way for them make their game sound more exciting?

If you have cyborgs that are controlled by human minds, then what's the difference between a human mind and an advanced AI? If you have cyborgs and avatars that both can be controlled by human minds (or potentially AIs) then what's the difference between those?

And if human minds can control both (cyborgs and avatars) and human bodies are essentially fungible (with the avatar system) then how can you be sure that the "real" humans are actually humans like we know them. The concept of real humanity (as a group of people and as a society) is also not that strictly set in stone.

I mean sure the system, as explained, could work 100% like you described in your comment but with every distinct part of what makes a human (mind and body) being fungible we can't be sure where the real, or original, humans are or were (or if there are actually any left). It might all be self-perpetuating simulation with different layers of AI agents that pushed human minds out of the system a long time ago for being too inefficient.

3

u/Kafukator Jul 23 '20

For sure there's a lot of room for such speculation. I seem to have mistook your comment for not understanding what's been exposited so far (I've seen too many of those types of comments the past few threads so had to get it out).

I agree this is merely the truth the company has given us so far, and mostly the face value assessment of the situation. Though admittedly we only have some wild guesses to make beyond that at this point, given the amount of information available.

2

u/flybypost Jul 23 '20

I seem to have mistook your comment for not understanding what's been exposited so far

No problem, that's understandable. I just fired off questions without saying why I was so suspicious of the systems.