#glados analysis

[ask-glados]

GLaDOS’s Enneagram Type

So, I did an Enneagram personality test for GLaDOS and she got “Type 8: The Challenger.” I thought the results were really interesting and insanely accurate so here they are, along with my comments and insight into how they fit GLaDOS!

Type 8: The Challenger

Natural leader... imposing presence... believe that people should be encouraged to help themselves... Yep, that’s GLaDOS.

She’s definitely prone to thinking things over and analyzing situations rather than reacting spontaneously. It does end up crippling her sometimes, though.

“Serious about control over environment”

I mean, she literally has it, lol. And she is definitely a control freak.

"Fierce and certain look"

Yep.

“Respect as opposed to status or being liked by the group”

Yep.

“Strong inner sense of justice.”

At first glance, you might think this sounds out-of-character for her because of how she lacks morals. However, she actually DOES possess her own sense of personal justice with how she loves revenge and thinks others must pay for hurting her because it’s only fair. The problem is that she never applies this justice in reverse onto herself.

“Loyalty also plays a major role in their value system. They’re devoted to those who have proven themselves over time and will stand by them until the end—through hell and high water. When danger comes and their loved ones are in trouble, they will confidently stretch their wings to protect them.”

This matches up perfectly with what I’ve been saying about her being insanely loyal! Despite her lying and messing with others, if she’s actually truly dedicated to a person or cause, she will never betray them unless they do so to her first. This is also further backed up by the fact that when she was Caroline, she stayed with the company from the beginning until the end, through all its ups and downs. She was dedicated to the cause of science and to Cave Johnson and she never betrayed them.

So, she may be a liar at times, but she has an extreme sense of loyalty! And her protecting her loved ones... Mama GLaDOS.

“They become stone-cold and take an antagonistic stand to anyone who dares to question them and their motives. They may use empty threats to regain power over others and turn existing relationships into tests—where one can only pass or fail. Others may turn their backs on Challengers, who will reason that they were better off working alone. In the end, they may force themselves into loneliness.”

That last sentence that it ends on... That’s exactly what GLaDOS did at the end of Portal 2...

The page literally ends on the word “loneliness,” which is exactly what Ellen McLain (GLaDOS’s VA) has said about GLaDOS in multiple interviews: that she’s lonely... :(

Also, “turn existing relationships into tests,” heh.

“They will reason that they were better off working alone.”

GLaDOS: "I had a pretty good life. And then you showed up."

(This chart is called The Three Centers” and it basically shows what the dominant emotion is for each type.)

"In the Instinctive Center, Eights act out their anger and instinctual energies. In other words, when Eights feel anger building in them, they immediately respond to it in some physical way, raising their voices, moving more forcefully. Others can clearly see that Eights are angry because they give themselves permission to express their anger physically."

Yeah, she’s definitely not afraid to show her anger. She may be good at controlling it to an extent, but she definitely isn’t ashamed of it and doesn’t try to hide it. Anger/Rage being her dominant emotion also fits, not because she’s always angry all the time, but rather because she is very motivated and has a lot of drive.

GLaDOS definitely falls into the “Unhealthy Levels” here, lol. “Sociopathic tendencies, corresponds to antisocial personality disorder...” Yeeeep. Although, as the site says, these levels aren’t a permanent thing. They’re flexible and you move between them throughout your life. So, GLaDOS can move between these levels too, depending on the situation and where she is in her development (either in canon or in headcanon). Cave is probably a Level 5 on here, whereas GLaDOS is levels 7-9. However, I do feel that she is capable of rising up to the Average Levels in her character development as she learns to have more compassion for others (like in my RPs :3).

[ask-glados]

// What if, when GLaDOS was waking up, Chell just grabbed Wheatley out of the core receptacle and hid behind a wall before sneaking out of GLaDOS’s chamber undetected? And then she somehow managed to escape Aperture undetected without GLaDOS ever knowing? How would GLaDOS react?

Consider this deleted line of hers:

"Well done. You know, when I woke up and saw the state of the labs, I started to wonder if there was any point to going on. I came THAT close to just giving up and letting you go.”

GLaDOS’s anger and hatred of Chell essentially motivated her to keep going out of spite. Just seeing her fired her up. 

But imagine if she didn’t see Chell. Imagine if she just woke up all alone, surrounded by ruin. She looks for test subjects, but there are none. All the test subjects in the Relaxation Center are brain-dead. Her facility is in shambles and she has no one to test. As she says, would she even be motivated to go on?

Well, I can’t see her giving up right away, but I do think it would depress her a bit. She’d start by cleaning everything up in a trance. Just automatically focusing on the task of fixing up the facility and getting everything working again. Then, she builds Atlas and P-Body. She’s a little less lonely with them around, but then she finds that they don’t satisfy her testing itch because they aren’t human and she grows frustrated. Also, she doesn’t know about Old Aperture because she never got thrown down into that pit, so she wouldn’t know to look there for the Human Vault that she has Atlas and P-Body track down in Co-op.

Maybe she’d even try to clone new humans from the brain-dead ones, and then gets frustrated with how much trouble she’s having getting it to work. If she succeeds with it at all, it would probably take a while to get it right and perfect the process. Meanwhile, the lack of science and that testing itch nagging at her brain — even though she SAYS it doesn’t bother her — must still be quite annoying for her to some extent. Even if she doesn’t care about chasing that high, it must still affect her, as I’m sure there’s some sort of punishment function for going a long period of time without getting proper test results — some sort of function that keeps nagging at her brain, bringing down her mood, and torturing her. 

So, she has no one to test, she’s essentially all alone — aside from Atlas and P-Body, who are more like children to her — and she’s not getting any real science done because she doesn’t have any humans to test. I think all of this would really start to get to her after a while. Maybe at some point, she would even get depressed enough to cry to herself alone in her chamber, before picking herself back up and continuing to search for new solutions to her dilemma. 

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[Credit to @the-wheatley-core for bringing up this idea! I reworded our convo and added my own thoughts into it here].

[ask-glados]

GLaDOS’s Humanity

// I think GLaDOS tries to act more robotic than she actually is. She tries to act all distant and professional, but then she gets all emotional and offended at things and clearly craves attention and interaction with others. She is ashamed of the human part of herself and thinks she can bury it by being apathetic and cruel to others, but it’s clear that she can’t avoid it. You can see this demonstrated in her interaction with HAL 9000 in Lego Dimensions. HAL doesn’t show emotion and acts completely robotic while calling out the humanlike, emotional reactions GLaDOS has to his intrusion. Even if she seems completely calm, hearing her compared to HAL really shows how human she actually is compared to a true robotic AI.

The writers of Portal also mentioned in an interview that GLaDOS should not speak to you like a computer, but rather should speak to you like a regular person. In other words, like a human.

Quote from Erik Wolpaw:

“You try and write stuff that's truthful. When GLaDOS is talking to you, one of the rules I had is that she shouldn't talk to you like a computer. She shouldn't be all like, ‘Oh my nuts and bolts.’ She's got this computer voice and she is a computer, but she's talking to you like a regular person. In that sense, we've got a theme. It's not metaphor. We're just trying to make her sound like a person who is angry at you and is manipulative might sound.”

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SOURCE:

gamasutra.com/view/feature/4151/valves_writers_and_the_creative_.php?print=1

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This is why GLaDOS doesn’t say things like “Get me back into my chassis,” and instead says “Get me back into my body.”

And instead of saying “You shut me off,” or “You forced me into sleep mode,” she says “You killed me,” or “This is murder.”

She also says “Luckily, I’m a bigger person than that,” referring to herself as a person.

That isn’t to say she won’t talk about the technicalities of her chassis’ functioning, but she only does that when it’s necessary to get technical about it. For example, if she needs to describe a part of her that is malfunctioning, she’ll go into the technical details. But if she’s just describing how she’s feeling, she’s going to voice it like a human would. For example, she’d likely shiver and say “I’m cold” if the temperature got too low for her hardware to handle, rather than something robotic like “The conductivity of my circuits is reduced in this colder temperature. This is not optimal operating temperature.” She would likely only say the second phrase if she needed to describe the technical details to someone fixing her or something. But when it comes to her feelings, she always expresses them as a human would. And that is why she can never truly escape her humanity.

[ask-glados]

What's GLaDOS' approximate age? Would it be more appropriate to call her Grandmomther? And uh, just for giggles, what does she think of being called Grandmum?

// Oooo~ I love discussing stuff like this!

Okay, first of all, you can call her whatever you want. She’ll just be equally annoyed at the “grandma” thing as the “mother” thing. XD

Alrighty, so, the timeline goes like this: GLaDOS was activated in 1998, and then Portal 1 takes place in 2010 (according to the developers in an interview) A long chunk of time passes between Portal 1 and Portal 2, in which she is off, so I don’t think that counts toward her aging technically?? However, that would raise the question of whether you would consider her to still be aging back when the engineers were constantly turning her on and off to try and fix her with cores. To keep things simple, I’m just gonna say that she was still aging when being turned off and on with the scientists, and that she was frozen in time between Portal 1 and Portal 2.

So, if she was activated in 1998 and Portal 1 takes place in 2010, that means GLaDOS was 12 years old in Portal 1. (My friends and I like to joke about how that makes her a moody teenager, lol.) And if you ignore the time skip because she was frozen in time, that means she’s still 12 in Portal 2.

There’s also the matter of Caroline’s age, which I like to also factor into the equation. We know that Aperture Science was founded in 1947, and judging by the first introduction you hear from Cave, where you hear Caroline, we can assume that Caroline has been with the company since the beginning, or at least close to the beginning. To be hired in 1947, she would have to be at least 18 years old, but I feel like she was more likely in her 20s, possibly even getting a college degree in science or something, so I’m just gonna go with 23 for her age there as a rough estimate. That means she was born around 1924 or so, give or take a few years. Cave dies some time in the ‘80s, somewhere around ‘83 or ‘85. Caroline would be around 59-61 then. However, it’s unclear when exactly Caroline was uploaded to GLaDOS.

One theory I have is that upon Cave’s death in the mid-‘80s, the scientists immediately forced Caroline into cryogenic sleep in a relaxation chamber so that she could be preserved for when they finally figured out how to insert her consciousness into the computer. This could be another instance of her age being frozen in time. So that could freeze her age at 59-61 before her upload into GLaDOS in 1998.

Another theory is that she continued to run the company until the scientists forcibly uploaded her to GLaDOS in 1998 as per Cave’s wishes. Though, if she was in charge that whole time, I don’t know how she could possibly not find out about them working on the project or cancel it altogether. And given the deleted voice lines of Caroline saying “Sir, I do not want this,” I find it hard to believe that Caroline would go willingly.

So the time gap between Cave’s death and GLaDOS’s upload is around 13-15 years. If you assume that Caroline continued aging right up until GLaDOS’s upload, Caroline would be around 74 years old then, roughly.

Now, assuming Caroline was uploaded at age 74 and that GLaDOS is currently around 12 in machine existence years... that would make her soul around 86 years old currently, not counting time skips. It’s also worth noting that GLaDOS is voiced by a middle-aged woman and thus, she sounds like an middle-aged woman, so even if you factor out Caroline’s age, GLaDOS’s mental age isn’t going to match her robot age of 12 since robots don’t age and develop the same as humans.

TL;DR:

GLaDOS’s robot age is around 12.

Caroline’s age was around 74 when she was uploaded.

GLaDOS sounds and acts more like a middle-aged woman.

So, yes, it IS accurate to call her “grandma” in some sense. XD Hope that answers your question!

[the-wheatley-core]

chillgamesh-the-swing replied to your post “A fact about cores that a lot of people seemed to overlook:”

how tf did she end up with an entire core that's only for anger then? was it something else but overridden by her primary personality and just that completely broken?

(( @chillgamesh-the-swing  I like to imagine that the anger core was meant to be something that would absorb her anger and keep it inside her, preventing her from lashing out at others. Notice how GLaDOS was a lot more prone to anger in Portal 1. Her speech would get quicker and more aggressive any time you inconvenienced her compared to Portal 2 where she’s more calm and collected.  I think the anger core was put on her as a way to forcefully make her bottle up her anger which would naturally make a person rather irritable if they were forced to keep it contained all the time. And as @kaispeakshermind pointed out over on Discord; "You'd expect someone who's had their anger bottled up to lash out once they were "freed," but it makes sense that she actually calmed down because it wasn't like her anger was restrained and then let loose. Her anger (the Anger Core) was separated from her and destroyed. So it makes sense that she didn't become even more unhinged.” ))

[ask-glados]

GLaDOS’s Mindset

// When explaining GLaDOS’s mindset and why she does such horrible things, I like to make the comparison that she treats humans like you treat your Sims characters. As you may know, it’s quite popular to mistreat, torture, or kill your Sims characters for fun. I think GLaDOS has a similar mindset when it comes to humans. I’m not saying she thinks reality isn’t real, but rather that she kind of treats it like we would a simulation. Like one big game. This can probably be extended to the Aperture scientists and personnel too, with how poorly they treat test subjects and how they like to mess with them in their experiments/tests.

I think that’s why GLaDOS does such horrible things to humans. She hasn’t made that emotional connection that would normally make you go “Whoa, hang on, these are actual real people like me. How would I feel if this was done to me?” That sort of empathetic connection. It wasn’t until she started to remember her past life as Caroline that she started to make that connection — key words: STARTED TO. She didn’t feel regret for anything she had done and still fantasized about killing for revenge, but she started to make that connection just enough for her to realize “Hey, this Chell girl has helped me get back in power. Maybe I should return the favor by letting her have her freedom.” However, she didn’t get to develop any further than that because of how she “deleted Caroline” shortly afterward and re-repressed those memories. So yeah, I think comparing humans to Sims is a good way to explain GLaDOS’s mindset.

[the-wheatley-core]

starry-nightengale replied to your post “people who get so easily offended” aren’t generally offended by...”

I like how they said GLaDOS got a redemption arc. Like... Her backstory makes Her a bit more sympathetic maybe, but saying She got redeemed is kinda the reach of the century considering one of the prerequisites of redemption is acknowledging you did something wrong, which is kinda... the opposite of what She ended up doing.

(( @starry-nightengale Right. Exactly. GLaDOS didn’t HAVE a redemption arc. All she had was a moment of self discovery, but she was unnerved by it so she proceeded to try and repress those memories. "The surge of emotion that shot through me when I saved your life taught me an even more valuable lesson: where Caroline lives in my brain. [Caroline deleted.] Goodbye, Caroline. You know, deleting Caroline just now taught me a valuable lesson. The best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one.” “The Best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one.” To GLaDOS, it is much easier to just delete her memories of Caroline than it is to go through any sort of self reflection because she doesn’t want to have to deal with having an identity crisis.  And then in co-op, she proceeds to call it a handicap. "If your confidence is still not high enough remember no one was created perfect.  Even I was created with an imperfection, I was given too much empathy with human suffering.  But I overcame my handicap. That's a true story." GLaDOS is actively denying having a redemption arc because she doesn’t want to deal with the stress that comes with having an identity crisis. She refuses to self reflect and acknowledge on all of her many wrongdoings and she’d rather just keep herself distracted with the pursuit of science instead.))  

[ask-glados]

Humanizing GLaDOS

// The concept of humanizing GLaDOS is an interesting one because she’s the only AI with a confirmed canon human form.

[DISCLAIMER: I am NOT saying anyone is wrong to do humanizations or that there’s only one right way to do them. I’m not here to police anyone’s fun. By all means, go do your thing and have fun with it. I’m just stating my opinion on the concept in general and giving my reasoning based on observations.]

I just find it so strange that Wheatley has a more consistent humanized design than GLaDOS in the fandom when GLaDOS is the one with a canon human form. I mean, I get that people might see Caroline as a separate character and don’t want to mix the two up, but I just find it strange to make her look nothing like Caroline at all when it’s canon that GLaDOS, at the very least, has Caroline as her personality basis. Whether she deleted it or not, Caroline was still her basis and however small it is, I don’t think that influence can be so easily removed.

Also, this is just a personal pet peeve of mine, but her having short hair bothers me. Not because short hair is bad, but the thing is, short hair frames the face in a more rounded shape, and long hair elongates the face vertically — which would match her headpiece’s oblong, vertical shape. Caroline’s long hair reflects this perfectly, and those long, dark brown strands mimic the shape and color of GLaDOS’s long, black strands of wires. Caroline’s hair is even parted to be offset on the left in the same way that the black center of GLaDOS’s headpiece is offset to the left.

It’s just... the more I study Caroline’s appearance, the more I see how Valve perfectly humanized GLaDOS’s appearance and reflected all her chassis’s shapes and colors in her — so much so that I can easily see GLaDOS’s voice coming out of Caroline. I also find giving GLaDOS white hair to be redundant because Caroline’s white dress already matches GLaDOS’s white casing. And ‘casing’ in a sense is like a machine’s ‘clothing’, so it just fits really well. (It’s also why I think the idea of her wearing a white lab coat fits really well too.) The red in Caroline’s scarf acts as an accent color in her design in the same way that GLaDOS has glowing, red accents on her chassis — such as the little red light below her optic and those round, circular modules further up her chassis that have those glowing, red squares on them. There’s also various other little red lights scattered all over GLaDOS’s chassis. The only color of GLaDOS’s that’s missing from Caroline’s palette is yellow, which I think is because that yellow symbolizes her new AI self. GLaDOS’s eye/optic is yellow, and in fiction, the color yellow in someone’s eyes is often shown to indicate possession or evilness, so I think it symbolizes how Caroline was corrupted and in a way ‘possessed by her programming’ and became evil as GLaDOS.

Anyways, that’s just my two cents on the matter, and this is also why I like having my GLaDOS muse utilize her Caroline form via her hologram form. Thanks for reading!