John Eldridge

Does the whole parallel world element ever comes into play like in Dive or no? I'm curious how this series fit into the whole Baldr Sky timeline. There's a lot of people who seems to dismiss this whole series as non canon since besides some apparent problems with characters like Kou (I've heard people say the writers of this series seems to hate him for some reason) none of the people who did Dive was involved in this.

But that’s precisely the problem the game is addressing. Control. We cannot stand something we cannot control. That’s basically the motivation of the main villains. In their fear and obsession with controlling everything they can and destroying what they cannot they’re the cause of everything terrible that happened. Which when you look at other works is also precisely the problem why so many AI go bad in the first place. Because we programmed them to act that way. Or we try to destroy them because we can’t control them, and they retaliate. I think the game is trying to make the point that technology (and us) is going to keep progressing as they are and it’s pointless to try and control that, just like how you can’t control everything in your life. You’d only make it worse if you try. And the people who keeps saying AI will be the death of us all will be the ones to cause that reality in a self fulfilling prophecy I also feel like you didn’t give people like Isao enough credit. He is portrayed as well intentioned, if horribly stubborn and misguided. I’d hardly call that cartoonishly evil. About the only one who fits that label is Gilbert, though that guy is just a dick regardless of what he said he believes in

See that’s the thing. It doesn’t really need to point out the dangers of technology because literally every other works in the genre have already covered it to death. There’s a real bias against technology in most cyberpunk and a lot of sci fi works in general. I feel like Baldr Sky is kind of a reaction to that, like a counter argument of the whole genre. It’s never the technology, it’s us. We’re the problem. There’s always gonna be bad guys who use technology to hurt the world. But there’s good guys who use technology to help too. At the end of the day though, technology itself has no say in it. The danger of technology is actually the danger of humanity. Kou basically said the point the game is making at the end of Chinatsu’s route. It was never about AI vs Man, it’s Man vs Man, the AI simply observe

Why do you think Seishu has high tuition? I don’t remember that being mention anywhere. It seems like it’s about as high as any average college, which isn’t exactly cheap in the first place but nothing out of place. Overall though, I think Baldr Sky is kinda interesting in that it seems to go against pretty much all those typical themes and tropes of the cyberpunk genre. Like when is the last time you see a mega corp as the good guy or a positive depiction of AIs in a work like this? I feel like the lack of all the exploration of the themes you mention is in part deliberate because Baldr Sky as a whole is trying to take a complete opposite viewpoint of the cyberpunk genre as a whole. It is completely bias towards one side and I think that’s the point. It’s presenting a completely optimistic, even romantic, view of the future and technology. It’s post-cyberpunk. It’s saying “yes, technology can be terrible when misuse, but that doesn’t mean the future is all doom and gloom. It’s gonna work out in the end, we’ll be better off ultimately”. I feel like if it presents an ambiguity between all the sides it’s gonna just be another typical cyberpunk work. But Baldr Sky makes it clear what its stance is, which I honestly feel kinda refreshing. We don’t get nearly enough works that presents this kind of view points. At times I think the anti-AI people are representing the cyberpunk genre as a whole. You know they’re pretty likely to be heroes in a typical cyberpunk, or sci fi work in general. People like Isao thinks it’s always gonna be a Terminator situation when it comes to AI, when the truth is it’s never was man vs machine, it’s simply man vs man Just my take though