thinking about this exchange from episode 36 again
Orwell: I've been attempting to reason out this... fear. The nearest that I can tell, we were all, on some level at some point, programmed to delight children. And I'm worried that faced with them, we will lose what we have fought so hard to define. The essential nature of us, when faced with children, that we will be... compelled to delight them.
Montrose: I must inform you that this is the nature of children. Even human beings will sometimes betray their most important core values and desires to appease a younger generation. I don't think you need to give up on your individuality that you have earned with so much toil. But don't beat yourself up if you do, you know, a handful of gorilla tricks to make a kid laugh. It's not the end of the world.
that exchange made me happy because of a mix of like. montrose making an effort to connect to orwell and show that robots and humans aren't so different. and it also made me chuckle because yeah, interacting with kids really does feel that way sometimes, huh.
but also like, it really shows something about who montrose is as a person
but at the same time i was kinda scratching my head about the "betray their most important core values" thing. bc what could a child possibly want that would have required montrose to betray his core values? but i figured he was maybe stretching things a bit to relate to orwell
and this latest episode just really brought that moment to the forefront of my mind
like first off the way he just is immediately willing to adopt toddzilla no questions asked. like yeah he was originally there because he wanted something from toddzilla but like. he was willing to adopt this child he just met with zero hesitation. he does seem to actually want to make kids happy
and then like. the reveal at the end of that last ep. (assuming montros wasn't just telling one of his trademark Complete Lies)
what kind of father was he? what happened between him and kenchal to the point where montrose avoided his own son for like a decade and then was down with killing him?
did kenchal ask montrose to do something that went against his moral compass? did montrose oblige? did he regret it?
and then thinking about steeplechase as a park and how it's set apart from most irl theme parks with how adult-centric it is
like, out of most of the layer's we've seen, they've been targetted at adults. ustaben is for adults that want to relive childhood, and would mostly be uninteresting to real children. passion's cove and gutter city are straightup not child-appropriate. kidadelphia (both old and new) while technically "for" children, are really just there to babysit while the parents have fun
the one exception to this, the layer that seems appealing to all ages, is ephemera. the layer that montrose seems to be obsessed with.
i wonder if the company's choice to focus on adults rather than children bothered him, made him want to take over and make changes?
