The goalposts have moved: Revisiting The Postmodern Prometheus in 2026
artwork by: belowthesurface
I've been thinking about one of my older fics lately. The Postmodern Prometheus, which I wrote in 2022, before ChatGPT had entered the cultural conversation in any serious way and most people didnt know what a large language model was. It's a fic that uses the Agreste secret club (which we now know as The Kingdom) as a framing device for a kind of TED talk from hell, with Ămilie demonstrating sentimonsters to a captive audience of terrible people, using Frankenstein as her jumping-off point.
There's a scene in the middle of it that I'm particularly attached to. Tomoe Tsurugi asks to speak to Stella, the sentimonster girl Gabriel has just conjured as a demo unit. And the exchange they have ends with Tomoe giving her this small test:
"A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches. What do you make of that, what do you think that means?"
And Stella says: "I think it means that once you learn the truth about something you see life in a different way and you can never go back."
The point of the scene, the philosophical argument I was trying to make, was that this is what separates a sentient being from a machine. Stella can do arithmetic, but so can a robot. But when you hand her a piece of language that doesn't have one right answer, she gives you her own answer. She filters it through whatever she's accumulated in the twenty minutes she's been alive, and she gives it back to you transformed. That's what Tomoe was actually testing; whether Stella can interpret.
The problem is that argument no longer holds in 2026; it collapsed sometime in late 2022, early 2023, depending on when you started paying attention. Because LLMs can do exactly this now. You can hand GPT or Claude that same aphorism and get back something indistinguishable from what Stella says and itâll be contextually sensitive and seemingly personal. The interpretation test that I invented as a diagnostic for interiority, for the purposes of this fic, is outdated now.
So I've been sitting with this question: does that mean the fic is broken? Does the philosophical scaffolding just collapse then?
I don't think it does. But I think the fic was arguing for something it didn't quite name, and what it was actually arguing for is more interesting than the literal thesis statement.
Tomoe's test isn't really the most important thing that happens in that scene. The most important thing is what happens after (spoiler alert) Stella is burned. Sheâs asked to hold her hand over a flame until she screams, and later, she runs. When the demonstration is over and Ămilie announces she won't be leaving the auditorium alive, Stella runs for the door, she doesnât really compute that running isn't the optimal survival strategy here and just runs because she doesn't want to die.
I guess the answer then would lie in the gap between what Stella wants and what she's made to do, which is the gap between her will and the Amok's authority over her. She tries to leave and is stopped mid-stride and sheâs made to walk back to the stage one heavy step at a time, fighting it the whole way.
This might be something closer to what we actually mean when we talk about a soul : the friction between the self and the forces that would override it, specifically here, the fact that she has preferences that are in conflict with others, and that she would choose otherwise if she could.
An LLM doesn't have this. It produces outputs, it doesn't want things and it doesn't resist anything. There is no gap between its will and its function because it doesn't have a will that is separate from its function.
Which brings me to Adrien and to a tendency in fandom that I find interesting.
When the sentimonster reveal happened in canon (multiple times, over the course of like, three seasons), a significant portion of the fandom treated it as either tragic background lore that didn't change who Adrien was as a person, or as an interesting plot point that the show immediately fumbled and didn't know what to do with.Â
The sentimonster reveal is not so much about Adrien's origin as it is about that gap I was talking about. Adrien Agreste has spent his entire life being a person whose will was in constant conflict with the forces shaping him. He has wanted things, has wanted them very badly and consistently. He has wanted to go to school, to have friends, and for Ladybug to love him back. He has been stopped, managed, and overridden, again and again, by people and structures that held his Amok (or not).
If anything, all the reveal does is it recontextualizes all of that as literal. The thing that felt metaphorical about his life, like being a beautiful object in his father's display case, or being a child who exists to serve the parent's vision turns out to have been structurally true all along.Â
Adrien (and FĂ©lix and Kagami) are all testimony to the fact that personhood can exist inside conditions designed to suppress it. So here's where I land, four years after writing this fic:
The argument that I was making, that interpretation proves interiority, is now obsolete because LLMs have eaten it. But the argument the fic was actually making still sort of holds. What makes a sentimonster a person is the presence of a self that is not identical to its function.
Thank you for coming to my TED-Talk thatâs not from hell, unlike *other* TED-talks!
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