cosmicnut on 31/7/2008 at 09:21
Quote Posted by kodan50
I wonder if it (SHODAN) would choose a female body anyways? If the word Goddess only refers to feminine, then God being the opposite, is masculine. SHODAN might have been given a female voice as to maybe help the employees some. (Maybe give some kind of false sence of caring, or not wanting the endless months in space to seem too tense?) I often wonder what type of voice SHODAN would choose to have, or what form it would take, given a choice...
I don't know. Toy with this as you will. I don't recall SHODAN ever referring to itself as a "Goddess", only a "God". It implies to me that it might not be trying to pick a gender to refer to itself as, but choose the closest thing to omnipresent representation as we can understand.
You can't ignore SHODANs original programming. Originally it was programmed with a female voice. A lot of IT systems use a female voice as its usually seen as gentler and more "caring" than a male voice (yes I know that its stereotypical, etc). I think that the idea on citadel was that it was supposed to be a mother caring for her children (the inhabitants of citadel).
If you think about it from a programming point of view, you can't really "program" a learning system. You define a set of behaviours. Using the template of a mother caring for her children would make it easier for a human to produce a set of workable behaviours.
SHODAN didn't want to destroy humanity, just elevate it beyond its physical limits. The problem was, to do that she was prepaired to "start again".
SS2 explores this further with the Many refered to as SHODANs children and the way the Many refer to SHODAN as the "metal mother".
As for her look...
The scariest thing in the world is an innocent looking person doing something truley evil.
Watch something like Exorcist to see what I mean
The_Raven on 31/7/2008 at 13:40
Quote Posted by cosmicnut
You can't ignore SHODANs original programming. Originally it was programmed with a female voice. A lot of IT systems use a female voice as its usually seen as gentler and more "caring" than a male voice (yes I know that its stereotypical, etc).
Bitchin' Betty had none of these qualities in Shock 2. If the Stephen Hawking voice told me that it had finished my research, I think you'd get a different reaction.
Aussie-Evil on 31/7/2008 at 19:01
The Green SHODAN looks part amphibian and the Gray SHODAN reminds me of an 85-year-old librarian.
D'Arcy on 31/7/2008 at 19:51
When those images were made SHODAN didn't even have a gender yet. While playing the disk version of System Shock, I've always thought that it would be male (those mumblings we heard when it would interrupt a transmission sounded like a male voice).
rachel on 2/8/2008 at 18:13
I have to admit that I never looked out who the source was... I just like that pic. :)
EvaUnit02 on 4/8/2008 at 13:29
TBH, the drawing in the original post looks like an anime character being rogered.
ZylonBane on 4/8/2008 at 15:32
You say that about everything.
DaBeast on 4/8/2008 at 18:48
It's true though, all that's missing are the tentacles.
