...............bro. this is a fucking masterpiece. i LOVE all the scrunchy caine faces, i LOVE the panel w gangle in The Box as she talks about her trauma, i LOVE the accurate & horrifying biblical references in the windows error messages, i LOVE gangle beaming studio ghibli grass right into caine's noggin, i LOVE LOVE LOVE the last panel!!!! YES!
i majored in ancient mediterranean studies (they call it "classics" but that's a terrible name lol) and one of the classes i took was on the ancient hebrew bible in the context of its time, and one of the things we talked a lot about was translation - jewish translations and christian translations tend to vary a lot, and it's all really interesting (to me at least lol)!
here's a website that lists a lot of different translations side by side so anyone looking up some of the references in this comic can look at different ones. the main story of Cain & Abel (the part everyone knows, basically) is Genesis 4:1-4:15 - pretty short actually! the list below is just the specific parts referenced in the comic. ^v^
Genesis 4:2 [Cain was made to work the soil]
Genesis 4:7 [if you do what is right, will you not be accepted?]
Genesis 4:8 [Cain killed his brother Abel]
Genesis 4:10 [What have you done?]
Genesis 4:11 [The soil opened its mouth to receive your brotherâs blood from your hand]
Genesis 4:12 [When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops to you]
Genesis 4:13 [My punishment is greater than I can bear]
So many interesting parallels here, but my fav is that Caine is afraid of losing his ability to create because he separated himself from the blue ai, and biblical Cain lost his ability to farm (a type of 'creation') because he killed Abel.
the "Caine absorbing the blue ai = Cain killing Abel" allusion has been there the whole time, but I never thought of Caine separating himself from the blue ai in the void as also analogous to "killing" Abel! Even moreso than the first time, almost, since the first time, "Abel" was still a part of Caine, but now he's gone for good. Not to say that it wasn't the right thing to do, or anything, but eek!! both things can be true!!!! so cool!! i love this comic!