Portal 2 - The Moron Theory

[@red_seamus8119]

My favorite part of Chell's lore is that one of the developers stated that she isn't actually mute, she just is so pissed off all the time in both games that she just refuses to speak

[@creditsunknown7974]

"Can you say 'Apple'?" "No fuck off."

[@CherryBomb_Games]

@@creditsunknown7974 *jumps angrily*

[@Legendendear]

Can you link the interview? Or what I have to google to find the sauce? (Cause YT doesnt like external links...)

[@endernightblade1958]

@@Legendendear iirc it’s somewhere in developer commentary?

[@liamnehren1054]

@@Erkle64 Erik Wolpaw says it was a comedic design aspect too, partially cutting corners because straight man dialog is harder than the crazy world. Chell is the "straight man" in the Glados + Chell comedy bit, Glados says something outrageous and Chell looks on in horror/rage/confusion/mirth and yes her come backs if they were written might have been angry but sarcastic would have worked too.

[@ollyyyyyyyyy1352]

"we do what we must, because we can." is, in retrospect, the most perfect description of aperture science as a whole

[@lm9029]

Cave also sums it up well: "Science isn't about why, its about why not."

[@bonker__1601]

@@lm9029 5

[@abaddonanon7573]

Sounds pretty Devo.

[@knutt8580]

FIRE PFP BRO

[@windyhollow7869]

nice pfp :)

[@spookd8700]

GLaDOS's line,"I have an infinite capacity of knowledge and even I'm not sure what's going on up there" will always give me chills.

[@AGrayPhantom]

For sure! Gives serious "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" vibes!

[@sirguinea3513]

Discord mods when they get disconnected from the internet

[@mrukman2006]

Oh same! Scary stuff

[@Mecceldorf]

“I have an infinite capacity of knowledge, of which about 0.0001 percent is filled. That just goes to show how tiny and insignificant your human culture is in the broad scope of our universe.”

[@redguywithatophat1900]

@@sirguinea3513 lol

[@leightonpetty4817]

As a fun fact about Cave and early Aperture: He didn’t start off with his “throw science at the wall and see what sticks” mentality. He actually _did_ have a specific aim to all that science at first. The Portal Gun actually came from attempts to invent “the next evolution in shower curtains.” They accidentally invented reality-breaking quantum teleportation in the process.

[@jackunknown1692]

That's the funniest thing ever, imagine making shower curtains so advanced they break physics

[@KiiBon]

Cave is both the smartest man that ever lived and the stupidest

[@RenderingUser]

​@@jackunknown1692 and then proceed to invent a toilet only to end up making a walking machine gun

[@Thatnormalted]

just like steins;gate, they tried to make a remote control microwave and ended up with a time machine

[@starshipsn-9513]

@@Thatnormalted el psy kongroo

[@CubicDoggo]

Actually, I’m pretty sure that the creators confirmed that Chell can talk, but doesn’t because she doesn’t wanna give the robots the satisfaction

[@silverboltscrapper]

Honestly a pretty smart way to save on paying for a voice actor for nearly 2 hours worth of potential dialogue

[@cakeeatingpirate]

@@silverboltscrapper i would argue alot more if you include portal 1

[@JohnBlobJohnSlime]

Probably for the best, it would ruin a bit of immersion if your character was already set as someone. Instead you can get in Chell's boots much better with her being silent

[@TindraSan]

which is arguably stupid if you consider Wheatley might've made less assumptions about her not appreciating his help had she actually talked to him... or not, but we'll never know. bullheadedness can be as moronic as anything else

[@riftvallance2087]

@@TindraSan Let be honest I'm not sure glados and Wheatley are great listeners anyway.

[@ivangenc]

My favorite moron in the game is the Fact Sphere with "facts" like: -To make a photocopier, simply photocopy a mirror -William Shakespeare did not exist. His plays were masterminded in 1589 by Francis Bacon, who used an Ouija board to enslave play-writing ghosts. -The Schrödinger's cat paradox outlines a situation in which a cat in a box must be considered, for all intents and purposes, simultaneously alive and dead. Schrödinger created this paradox as a justification for killing cats.

[@FuchsiaNeko]

Reminds me of an ai trying to makes sense of random info/input. Like the fact about Shakespeare sounds like it was told that theory about him having "ghost writers" for his plays (i.e., someone else wrote the majority and ol' shakey pierre took all the credit), but the Fact Sphere interprets it as literal writers who are ghosts. But how would he get these ghosts? Easy: he used a Ouija Board. But Shakespeare isn't known to have that kind of occult knowledge, so that doesn't make sense... so it must have been a completely different person contacting the ghosts! The most likely being well-known alchemist Francis Bacon, of course! And Shakespeare takes the credit, no info disputing that. There's some kind of logic going on there, but without proper info the conclusions are completely incorrect.

[@spinningninja2]

This games writing is something each of those just brought me to tears

[@thewayfayer3268]

Can't believe Babe Ruth died of hot dog poisoning 😔

[@cheafmin1399]

yeah, fact core has a track of starting out relatively right, and then he's obviously not a few sentences later.

[@matthewlewis757]

Maybe that is because you/we cannot disprove any of those, which would technically make them "facts". Like... "Light particles behave differently when observed because the universe is trying to gaslight everyone"

[@roble8943]

"I can't think of single smart or well informed decision Cave Johnson has ever made" In the level editor that take place in diffrent alternate universe (but still canon as a grand Half-Life multiverse), the universe where Cave Johnson bought out Black Mesa had him explain that he stopped the Xen research projects to not risk a Resonance Cascade. Cave despite being a moron, is canonically smarter than every single person in Black Mesa.

[@Lumberjack_king]

Yeah

[@EpicGamer-fl7fn]

To be fair we dont know how exactly that went down but if it would be in line with the theory then maybe g-man didnt visit him with the crystal or something

[@Kabirdix]

@@EpicGamer-fl7fn It’s not just a matter of the Crystal being given to them. Those tests aren’t happening if the entire program has been aborted to begin with

[@EpicGamer-fl7fn]

​@@Kabirdix yeah im aware, but part of me cant stop thinking if G-man just visited him and said "yo this crystal goes hard, feel free to put it in the test chamber" and he just laughed at him for bringing him an oversized diamond claiming to have some mysterious power to open a gateway to some "xen world" . There's just something hilarious about that idea that no matter how omnipresent and all knowing Gman is, he cant win against someone who doesnt even understand what the fuck they're talking about because of how moronic they are.

[@aag2139]

@@EpicGamer-fl7fn Cave "In stupid, but not a moron" Johnson, brilliant. Gman probably loosing his mind at this man

[@NotAGoodUsername360]

Wheatley actually is the smartest person in the Portal series. His plan to use Chell to escape the facility is solid, his plan to disable GLaDOS' offensive capabilities is more effective than anything Aperture's best scientists ever came up with, and his plans to kill Chell indeed would have been foolproof had Chell not reactivated the gel pipes in the deepest cores of Aperture, which he probably didn't know about. Despite GLaDOS' claim that Wheatley was designed to generate terrible ideas, most of his ideas are actually really good, he is just clumsy and ineffective at execution. Really telling as to what Aperture scientists think a "moron" is- someone who has good ideas but is bad at executing them. The exact opposite of Cave Johnson- a man with horrible ideas but is god-tier at executing them.

[@bipinnambiar]

He made shower curtains into reality breaking objects. Cave is similar to Wheatley.

[@henreymichelson]

I imagine what is the most advanced computer in the world made to be stupid I would go crazy

[@lmahu6627]

I would also say that part of Wheatley's weakness is that he's a bit slow on how to implement his ideas, but he will get to the solution eventually. An example is when he and Chell sabotaged the Turret assembly line; he stops to ponder how to mess up the system after "hacking" the door to the scanner, but if the player takes too long to figure it out and stays in the room with Wheatley, he will eventually suggest getting a defective Turret for the system to scan.

[@henreymichelson]

@@lmahu6627 is that because he comes up with the idea or is it more like brute force ideas like going through all possible options eventually come up with the right thing

[@lmahu6627]

@@henreymichelson I would say the latter. When it comes to details, Wheatley is more trial-and-error in his approach, and he's much slower with it than what one would expect for a robot. The actual hacking he does, which is literally called "brute force hacking", shows this.

[@Natycik]

Well, there were cut voicelines about how Caroline didn't want to be put into a computer (she was begging him to not do this to her). Johnson litteraly did the same thing to her as he did to the experiments of Apperture: "Throwing science at a wall and see what sticks". I always assumed that she poisoned the scientists with neurotoxin because she was furious. They basically pit her through hell by doing this to her so she took revenge.

[@DeeCross]

There's an article that was written following the release of the original Portal which interpreted GLaDOS's chassis as a straitjacketed woman hanging blindfolded and gagged from the ceiling. This is just making me think about that again.

[@hackergaming6372]

It was cut because the voice line sounded to much like a women being raped.

[@burningjdm]

@@DeeCross now I want to find that

[@theuberedredspy8791]

@lain My guess is it had to do with the fact that C.J says that he wants his scientists to put Caroline into GLaDOS only if he died before he could be, which means C.J was probably already dead when Caroline was GlaDOS-ed. The lines refer to Mr. Johnson by name, so it wouldn't have really made sense, given context.

[@masterzoroark6664]

It can be mix of two- anger and getting insane due to your mind being basiclaly forced to think on several higher levels without being used to it.

[@P0nyB3h0ldr]

I think it’s unfair to say that GLaDOS’s violence comes from a place of stupidity. More so her fragmented agonizing memories of getting dumped into a computer against her will.

[@S0m3B0z0OnTheInternet]

Yeah, there’s even a cut piece of dialogue of Caroline telling Cave Johnson that she doesn’t want to be put into a robot body. I definitely do agree that to some degree: Wheatley and Cave weren’t the smartest people-or robots to ever exist. They both made decisions that weren’t really very smart but I wouldn’t say that they’re entirely dumb since they DID do SOME things that can be considered smart. (In fact, I’d argue that no one can be really considered “dumb” since we, as humans have definitely made some decisions that weren’t very smart.) But GLaDOS’s anger and rage definitely didn’t come out of nowhere, the body Caroline got was overwhelming and made her very aggressive towards the staff that put her in/made that body and A.I. (as well as the fact that she never wanted to be in said body in the first place.)

[@S0m3B0z0OnTheInternet]

Sorry for the essay, I do agree with this video to some degree but MAN does it over-exaggerate how dumb everyone in portal 2 is. Like Caroline wasn’t violent and angry because she was blindly evil nor did it come from a place of stupidity, she was *FORCED* into a robotic body WITHOUT her consent. Another thing that bothers me is how this person keeps mentioning how Carolin was only hired because of her looks or as a trophy wife when that just doesn’t seem to true. Cave only jokes about Caroline being “married to science” which seemed to be put there as a sort of “foreshadowing” for how testing was almost like a drug to anyone in GLaDOS’s body so she LITERALLY was obsessed with science and testing.

[@tekbox7909]

The reason GlaDOS does stupid tests might actually be because proper science is difficult and slow often so while she didn't care for the reward for doing science she probably still wanted to suppress the itch and the tests probably were enough to qualify as science so she kept doing those instead since they are way easier to come up with in comparison to actual science.

[@Chubarrk]

This video should really be titled 'Portal 2 - The Moron Theory, or Why Doing No Background Research Beyond Taking Dialogue at Face Value Leads to Horribly Misinformed Opinions on Characters'.

[@TylerTMG]

​@@Chubarrklmao

[@ThatElfNerd]

One other achievement of Wheatley that I feel like has to be acknowledged and possibly even given genius praise: He not only figured out how to transfer an AI to a potato clock, he got it right on the first try.

[@yomammabe1]

@Grungus Khan He did spend god only knows how long taking care of ‘vegetables’ after all. *Rimshot* I’ll see myself out.

[@mrfanpl]

@@yomammabe1 lmfao

[@awesomegaymer5786]

Something interesting I've seen, is that Wheatley is the only character who's actually shown to be able to learn(Except maybe chell). both glados and cave repeatedly make the same mistakes over and over, while Wheatley is able to improve a bit every time, his only major downfall was that he couldn't get a second chance at fixing the reactor

[@dracopug]

@@awesomegaymer5786 perhaps that's why they made him intentionally stupid, so the process of learning can be studied

[@Wheatleythecore]

THANK YOU

[@Lunarcreeper]

fun fact: the turrets in the factory being boxed are never actually shipped, they're immediately sent to an unboxing machine to discard to box. this is according to the developer commentary, it's hilarious

[@zakaryrichmond396]

They had to test how well the box glue held up onna factory line

[@creditcrazy597]

Honestly considering that there are ads for the turrets and pagageing for them I always found it odd how we never found apeture turrets in half life and chucked it up to the fact that in half life we are in the remains of Russia meanwhile portal takes place in America yet again the combine would probably find it odd how these rice looking robots are soo much more advanced than most of the technology in human society

[@quantumblauthor7300]

​@@creditcrazy597they're not that advanced. Limited line of fire, top-heavy, baffling firing mechanism, aiming laser is a dead giveaway, needless sentience

[@PieaterProducts]

@@quantumblauthor7300 And yet the Combine invented the same thing but with lower fire-rate and no brain.

[@Apatetika]

​@@creditcrazy597HL2 isnt really in the remnants of Russia tho? City 17 is (especially looking at HL:Alyx's map) Sofia, Bulgaria. Most of HL2 takes place in the Balkans, for episode 1 and 2 i'd assume it would be in the same general area.

[@steve_urchin8536]

I’ll give Wheatley credit where it’s due, in the ending boss fight, he was actually kind of smart with the whole no portalable surfaces, instantly releasing the neurotoxin, boobytrapping the button and all. It was just lucky that the moon was in that specific spot.

[@kkTeaz]

It's like he's actually a genius, but his programming causes him to always make a terrible mistake. Which at the end fight I think didn't have anything with the moon since even the brightest minds wouldn't predict that Chell would open a portal on the _moon_ but probably the fact that the entire facility was falling apart and he has no plan to do anything after he killed Chell.

[@skakee10]

My sort of justification of that is that, subconsciously, Wheatley knows he's the absolute worst fit for keeping the facility in check, so doing everything in his power to keep himself there is in a way the most moronic thing he could possibly be doing

[@MrDifsh]

no portable surfaces but keep the exposed white gel pipe next to the grenade launcher

[@MeboDotExe]

yknow for real though if that fight happened to take place in the day and the sun was up there instead of the moon chell would’ve just been fucked

[@frenzy2846]

If I had a dollar for every time I saw a fictional AI that was a genius but that was programmed to make a critical mistake causing them to fail right before they succeed i’d have two dollars. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

[@maxresdefault_]

There's a comic called Lab Rat which details the events between portal 1&2. The player character was actually picked to awaken by someone who wanted to see GLaDOS defeated. She wasn't picked for her brains or her ability to solve puzzles. She was picked for her tenacity; her refusal to give up. That's one of my favourite details from Valve's expanded canon, and it actually kinda supports this theory, which I really like

[@Lumberjack_king]

Yeah

[@harrietr.5073]

... How? How does it support the theory? Chell goes against the grain, even if it's "don't walk into fire", and thus a moron?

[@notpublic7878]

too stupid to give up lmao

[@boginoid]

@@harrietr.5073 Disorders can have a lot of effects, like tenaciously barging forward when it seems pointless to do so, for example. She was broken in a useful way. If not, game doesn't happen.

[@andreispurim]

That's actually very fitting, because one could say the scientists were tenacious as well, refusing to give up "science". I think there's really some place for a more in-depth analysis in Portal 2 about a blind refusal of the scientists and leaders, and the brave refusal of those fighting against a broken system.

[@gen157]

The "This sentence is false" scene, I never noticed the cubes frying themselves. 10+ plays through and it never crossed my mind.

[@marcosdanielamaral5015]

If you think about it, the moron side of GLADoS made sure she wouldn't fry herself in this scene.

[@cherrydragon3120]

@@marcosdanielamaral5015 now that i think of it... thats so damn true

[@battlesheep2552]

You know what's funny is that in programming, it's pretty standard to put code in to make sure faulty inputs like that don't break the program, such as through Try Catch, but those cubes were made by Wheatley, and he's a moron so...

[@bloopahVIII]

@@marcosdanielamaral5015 that must mean that the frankenturrets are smarter than glados

[@marcosdanielamaral5015]

@@bloopahVIII maybe, or maybe they are less dumb than GLADoS is

[@derekwall5570]

I always thought that the reason the portal gun was never successful was down to the fact that it doesnt work on most surfaces. All this time they might have been testing ways to make it mire viable until accidentally discovering moon rock properties too late. And even when they did discover moon rock is the solution, its not a great one

[@jcp1296]

I mean it kind of is honestly, at least enough for commercial use. We see that it's possible to create a portal from earth directly to the moon, wich means a) planes and boats are immediately obselete as long as you can build a portal station in the general area you want to go to and b) you can do so very cheaply, as you are just one portal away from basically free moon rocks for you to use

[@jennytulls6369]

Assuming portals follow the same rules as in game, two connected portals can remain open indefinitely and across thousands of miles (Given the distance from Earth to the moon is over 230,000 miles). You don't need dozens of portalable surfaces, just a handful to create a network of portals letting you instantly travel between locations

[@camerbot]

black mesa was ahead or at least toe to toe with aperture in portal tech as evidenced by "No2 science company in America award" probably, cave being a moron could not sell his portal gun tech to DoD folks while mesa with their far more inferior portal tech was able to get all the funding

[@AlexReynard]

The smartest thing D&D did was recognizing that INT and WIS are two entirely different stats.

[@elgordobondiola]

INT: the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell WIS: and why the hell would you bring that out *now* ? We're talking about what's for dinner

[@somedudeintheinterweb8665]

@@elgordobondiola CHA: are we though? *Vsauce theme*

[@elgordobondiola]

Dexterity: WHY WONT YOU DIE? constitution: NANOMACHINES SON!

[@onilink134]

@@elgordobondiola They roll nat 20 saves in response to physical trauma!

[@elgordobondiola]

@@onilink134 You might as well be rolling 1d100 Jack

[@doodles990]

5:07 This is actually a common misconception. The walls throughout the games are *not* painted with moon dust. Yes, of course, the conversion gel can turn any surface portal-able, but it is not the only way to accomplish this. There are tests in the game which required the "Aperture Science Quantum Tunneling Device", the original name for the portal gun, dating all the way back to the 50s; conversion gel wasn't invented until the 70s. So, it is entirely possible to make portal-able surfaces without needing any moon rock, and it's reasonable to assume (especially considering the health risks and all the gel experiments getting shut down and locked away in Old Aperture) that modern Aperture didn't continue using the moon dust for it.

[@Ghi102]

I think the explanation might be that in the 50s, they had the portal gun, but no way to easily create portal-able surfaces. They maybe found random substances that allowed for portals, but not enough to paint.

[@alexhuang7681]

The portal-able walls feel like just regular concrete to me. Perhaps it's just that moon dust is the best material to support portals, but other easier-to-come-by materials, like regular concrete, work too. If that's the case, then the portal-able walls would not need to be specially made, and that would explain why the walls on the later areas of Portal 1 are portal-able, even though they are presumably not designed to be parts of a test chamber.

[@Pendleton115]

Notice how it says “Lunar Materials Fluidification and firing” this may just be a plot hole but interesting none the less.

[@cheeseuscrast6562]

The modern apature panels are made with a molding machine, the liquid they use for the mould is the moon gel. You can see it near the start of the trailer for the perpetual testing initiative

[@OssyFlawol]

The official Portal 2 Guidebook goes over this. Theres a lot of materials that are capable of acting as Portal Conductors, however, the Moon Rocks just happen to be the best at doing it, the Old Aperture sections use wood and concrete as portal surfaces - it doesn’t mean they’re coated in moon rock, they mention that worse Portal Conductors are capable of horribly disfiguring people hence the push for something better.

[@dumbledorethegreyhobbit6055]

Omg I’ve played this game endlessly and I never noticed the frankencubes get fried from the paradox, that’s genius lol

[@unused7629]

interesting name

[@stellarbastard98]

Not to be that one guy because you were kinda close but actually if I remember correctly they are Frankenturrets, not cubes. But yeah, I too have never noticed that lol

[@dumbledorethegreyhobbit6055]

@@unused7629 I agree lol thank you!

[@stellarbastard98]

@@xelnoc2100 yeah ig

[@benjamindeutsch6299]

lmao same

[@DeltaDan2002]

With Wheatley's insanity I think it came from becoming drunk with power, as he kept emphasising how much bigger he was, and with Caroline immediately flooding the enrichment centre with neurotoxin, I think it was down to revenge as she didnt want to become GLaDOS, I believe that the screams you hear when shes being ripped out of her body was what Caroline was saying when they began converting her, because she says "get your hands off me!" they're not hands, theyre claws and clips.

[@missyfroyo36official6]

OH MY GOD THE HANDS THEORY WHATTT

[@sobble_p]

im surprised cave johnson didnt spend more time developing the combustible lemon. its kind of a shame honestly

[@crackdealer8395]

Yeah you could probably burn down a house with combustible lemons

[@davisdf3064]

Now THAT would definitely give them many military contracts.

[@djcoopes7569]

@@davisdf3064 also the ability to warp naval vessels to any place that they need to go in a near instant. money money money

[@davisdf3064]

@@djcoopes7569 What if they warped a naval sized combustible lemon? That could burn the planet down!

[@djcoopes7569]

@@davisdf3064 money money money from the kind folks over at the Department of Defense of the United States Of America

[@EvilParagon4]

I mean, right at the end with the science fair, we do see that Chell was the one who grew the massive mutated potato. That could be evidence of her being really smart. We see a baseline intelligence with a bunch of normal potato batteries, and Chell's is notably _different._ And not just different, but pretty much impossibly so. The intelligence you can infer here is just that she's so dumb she somehow messed up and made that abomination, or she's so smart she went beyond her competition and made a monster potato battery that's not only massive but still alive today. Given Chell's propensity to solve puzzles, canonically solving literally all of them and never getting stuck, never once falling into toxic goo or getting shot by turrets, etc. While puzzle solving doesn't equal intelligence, there is a lot of overlap, and Chell could really just be mute but still smart.

[@xxxCrackerJack501xxx]

I always assumed she was some kind of autistic savant, it'd even be an excuse for her not talking

[@radicalman7304]

She’s mute because she doesn’t want to talk to the robots and give them satisfaction, so she is no moron

[@jadedmillion8991]

Yeah I thought that was to imply that Chell was not only a child prodigy but an overachiever with great ambitions like her father. Plus considering she is likely Caves daughter I bet she's probably had the best education money can buy to overcompensate for his lack of parenting skills and to overachieve with her. Turns out that Chell is likely the best thing Cave and Apature did create.

[@ashtongiertz8728]

Puzzle solving is used in most intelligence tests, and are by design meant to challenge the mind and sharpen your intellect.

[@OrQuattroIDK]

The potato grew because she used a "special ingredient from dad's work". I just interpreted it as her finding some random thing and throwing it at the potato to see what happened, which if you read the board is not much, it only produced 1,6 volts which she said "it's not enough to power anything important". If you read the board she just seems like a normal little girl, it's also pretty funny. The potato seems to only have grown after aperture went to hell, considering it has roots everywhere around the room and the drawing of the potato clock on the board shows a normal potato.

[@casey6556]

I don’t think Caroline was a moron. She was probably a pretty damn good assistant to Cave and the fact that he leaves the facility to her gives me “power behind the power” vibes. GLaDOS being erratic and “stupid” in supercomputer terms would seem to me to be the natural result of basing an AI on someone who absolutely did not want to be digitized and then leaving it alone with access to near-infinite knowledge repositories while simultaneously obeying instructions to run the same set of procedures over and over and over for god knows how long. And then killing her and having her relive her death over and over and over for god knows how long.

[@Horoprime]

Cave was dumb, so it won't be wrong for him to leave this place for someone who's also dumb

[@dr_birb]

@@Horoprime what

[@Horoprime]

@@dr_birb thx, fixed my comment

[@thatguythere6161]

I think if she was anything close to being “the power behind the power”, then they would’ve been selling the portal gun long before they went bankrupt

[@Nightmare_TonyYT]

I'm pretty sure she was reliving it for *9999...999999999999999999999-* So not *that* long

[@worsethanyouthink]

People forget that aperture did become successful after cave died, it made leaps and bounds in the 10-20 years until they turn on glad-os and she decides to gas everyone. Also she didn't run the company after that, it was about 10 days before the resonance cascade .

[@Noahloveless1]

What is this cascade you are talking about. Never heard anything like that in Portal.

[@worsethanyouthink]

@@Noahloveless1 portal canonically takes place in the universe of Half-Life. The borealis, a boat that was a planned major plot point/location introduced in half life 2 episode 2 even has a dry dock In the decrepit condemned portions of the aperture facility in portal 2

[@Noahloveless1]

@@worsethanyouthink Never played any Half-life. Just portal and portal 2. I do remember this empty dry dock you speak of though.

[@tzisorey]

"Wheatley is too stupid to even realise it is a paradox, but all the frankencubes are instantly destroyed" Wow, I never even noticed that. Good attention to detail there, devs!!

[@volchnok179]

Not just that. When GlaDos says the paradox, the light on the portal gun shuts off, only giving more credibility to “the portal gun is sentient” theory

[@tzisorey]

@@volchnok179 Wouldn't the gun shutting down from the paradox suggest its NOT sufficiently sentient?

[@RinLockhart]

Over a decade and I never noticed that till now.

[@RandMV]

@@tzisorey Even the portal gun is smarter than Wheatley lmao

[@HelpICantThinkOfACleverName]

13:00 To be fair, there is a cut line. Caroline says things like "Please, I don't want this Mr. Johnson. I don't want this!" In and increasingly emphasized and desperate tone. Caroline pleads as to not be put into GLaDOS. She _really_ doesn't want it. Out of rage, she tries to gas the scientists who did that to her to death, which then leads to the cores getting plugged into her to dampen her hostility. So it wasn't as much really going power mad because she was a moron, as it was blind rage.

[@Ramonatho]

If you blindly follow Cave Johnson, a moron, you might be a moron. The allegory to Elon fans writes itself.

[@bruhda7469]

but who plugged in the cores? if she killed every staff member in the facitily, who put the cores in?

[@Darthnitro120]

​@@bruhda7469 not everyone died, RattMann didn't, and maybe more

[@bruhda7469]

@@Darthnitro120 probably right. How would they manage to connect it though, wouldnt glados just killed them?

[@bruhda7469]

@@Darthnitro120well i just looked through the ratmann comic, and apparently glados already had the core installed when she gassed aperture, and just chose to ignore the morality core.

[@EZOnTheEyes]

One thing that always stuck with me is the Lab's tendency to give disclaimers *after* the testing begins. From Portal 1's comments about dental fillings emancipating _as you're walking through it,_ to Portal 2's invitations for scientific testing turned 'custodial duty' for failed testing "The Mantis-Human Hybrid". On top of adding to the comedic flair, it goes to show the oversight from the people in charge of the labs. Edit: Coming back Post-Desk job, it's clear to me the incompetency of Aperture was still in full swing while the laboratory was operational. Between the incorrect employee introduction tape, Ammunition flub ups, Grady becoming your liscensed parole officer, and the final reveal of what's become of Cave... It's more and more apparent the scientists intentions become more and more muddled by the AI's they created.

[@iug5672]

"why don't you marry safe science if you love it so much?" is the line that pretty much the name of the game here Xd I dont think it's an oversight as much as a purposeful thing. God bless sequels rewriting stuff or making you question impressions from their previous games but really, in Portal 1 these kind of hazardous comments are more to hint about GLaDOS being kinda unhinged beyond just the glitching, as if there is something keeping her from flat out telling you she hates you until you eventually find THAT and destroy it. Portal 2 is just Cave playing mad scientist on the role of "scientific progress over human life"

[@EZOnTheEyes]

@@iug5672 I wish we got the Cave AI stuck in a weighted cube from the alternate cut part of portal 2 so we could see if he's learned anything from his years of unintentional self imposed isolation.

[@iug5672]

@@EZOnTheEyes Yeah, what is it with Valve and really wanting to make the player kill people begging to be put out of their inhuman misery only to give up on that Xd

[@generalrubbish9513]

@@iug5672 Oh wow, I never actually made that connection lol. In Portal 1, the tests are terribly dangerous and seemingly pointless because GLaDOS is a murderous AI. In Portal 2, it turns out that, nope, that's literally just how Aperture Science has always done things.

[@iug5672]

@@generalrubbish9513 Lol yea that is a kinda funny way to put it

[@ckreon]

I'm surprised how many people miss the most obvious lesson of the Portal series: power corrupts. It doesn't matter what personality you plug in to an "all powerful" framework (glados, in this case) - they all go crazy. They're not all morons, they're just more human than anyone would like to admit.

[@thespiritofhoxhawell4413]

boring

[@loverofpixels.0]

@@thespiritofhoxhawell4413 nah you're just too dull to appreciate it.

[@fluffywhompus]

Same with wheatly, seconds after being in control of the entire facility he basically becomes a different person. He spends most of his time in charge trying to catch that euphoric high that testing gives him practically making him insane as he goes to further and further lengths to hold onto that feeling. While yes he was made to make stupid decisions before the core transfer he actually had some pretty good ones. With how he talks himself onto the nano bot work team, making the escape plan, cutting Glados off from her turret and neurotoxin supply and even just getting a test subject to help him escape the facility. The power rotted his mind to where he could barley have any good ideas and made impulsive decisions that almost blew the entire facility up

[@YaGuyALT]

I always felt that Wheatley becomes a seemingly different character after he takes over aperture, and although I know better now when I was younger and played the game for the first time, I interpreted her calling him "the biggest moron created by a generations best geniuses" as a sort of cope to losing to him, since, as other comments have pointed out, for a "moron" his plans were actually insane affective before he got plugged into apertures mainframe.

[@dingdongspaghetti]

nobody likes to "admit it" because they don't need to, the game literally tells us that she used to be a human and got uploaded into a computer, probably without consent

[@breadsauce1143]

They make all these amazing inventions but they never see the light of day So in other words Aperture is Valve

[@ecviets]

Except... isn't the portal technology exactly what allowed the Combine to invade in the first place? Never see the light of day?

[@breadsauce1143]

@@ecviets the combine made their own, significantly less advanced portals

[@inendlesspain4724]

@@ecviets I think Black Mesa had more of a hand in that with the whole "Resonance Cascade" thing.

[@inendlesspain4724]

@@breadsauce1143 Considering how most if not all Combine technology was basically appropriated from other civilizations they conquered, it probably wasn't even made by them.

[@KiatnissNZ]

@@ecviets as Leadhead mentioned, the combine only have dimension crossing technology, while Black Mesa/rebels are developing localized teleportation, and Aperture has the portal gun, which is effectively localized teleportation.

[@HotDogTimeMachine385]

I feel like you're putting a bit too much blame on Caroline who was essentially a victim of Cave's stupidity and arrogance. Caroline was forced into becoming GLaDOS against her will which would absolutely be a traumatizing experience for anyone. _"Brain Mapping. Artificial Intelligence. We should have been working on it thirty years ago. I will say this - and I'm gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day: If I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place."_ _" _*_Now she'll argue._*_ She'll say she can't. She's modest like that. _*_But you make her_*_ ."_ _"Hell, put her in my computer. I don't care."_ Anyone would go insane in her shoes. But that's one reading from what Cave says. She might have been a moron like Leadhead analyzes, but GLaDOS' going evil could be more related to trauma.

[@scientificthesis]

I don't think the "Goodbye Caroline" line is enough evidence for her stupidity as its entirely possible and in my opinion, likely that it was an intentional joke or something like that. Even if it wasn't an intentional joke, its more of not paying attention and mindlessly following an order than stupidity.

[@vyor8837]

@@scientificthesis It's a line about glados deleting her consciounse...

[@scientificthesis]

@@vyor8837 I am not talking about that line. I'm talking about the line when you first hear Cave Johnson and Caroline speaking and Cave Johnson says "Say Goodbye Caroline" and Caroline responds with "Goodbye Caroline". I might not have gotten the lines completely accurately but it was something like that.

[@vyor8837]

@@scientificthesis that's obviously a joke though?

[@scientificthesis]

@@vyor8837 In the original comment it is mentioned that Caroline might be a moron from the "Goodbye Caroline" line and my comment was a response to that.

[@mrfaker-xe2kf]

6:12 My personal headcanon about the puzzles is that their point is to gather human psychological data from the subjects as research to help create the AIs. They are doing this in _conjunction_ with testing Aperture's technology to be efficient.

[@boiledelephant]

Yeah, now you mention it, the way the AIs smash humans through tests and study the results is a sort of inversion of the way IRL we humans smash AIs through tests and study the results. I never thought about that.

[@nathanlevesque7812]

GLaDOS gets a hit of dopamine from each solve. That was a plot point when Wheatley was in control of the facility.

[@Mini-wd7qz]

Maybe it’s to know how to turn humans into robots? Like how to turn them into the combine

[@MagicCardboardBox]

@@nathanlevesque7812 yeah, there might have been a point to it, but not for glados, she does science for science's sake, there can't be a goal because she's not designed that way.

[@nathanlevesque7812]

@@MagicCardboardBox Uh no, it was just how the GLaDOS frame works. Whether its her or Wheatley or some other bot stuck into it, that's how it works. Pretty obvious if you consider the backstory with Cave and all his nutty experiments done 'bc SCIENCE!'

[@GaZZuM]

it felt like this video was halfway to a point.... then just ended. Cave Johnson being a moron isn't a hot take, and I was waiting for some kind of new context or insight that would convince me that GLaDOS fit your hypothesis, but it never came. It felt like you just REALLY wanted to do a video about Portal 2 and so you slapped this together in an hour.

[@Giosuke_Giogashikata]

This man just Cave Johnson-ed his way through a video about a game featuring Cave Johnson. Brilliant.

[@gamethingstuff]

This is what happens when youtube removes the dislikes and mid videos get thousands/millions of views before people even realise the quality of them

[@mitch8088]

He tried to prove GLaDOS was a moron but the evidence didn't really stick for me. And then in other parts of the video he contradicts himself by saying things that prove GLaDOS is the smartest character in the game lol

[@armoredman10]

The comments have been nice to read at least

[@DanielKay06]

Something interesting about Wheatly is that he seems to be able to learn from his mistakes, he just has to make them first. In the end he managed to "surprise" you and put you into a trap you could just barely escape from, tried various defense measures though overlooking a few flaws and he did learn that trapping the stalemate button can prevent him from getting removed from the main control. Really the only things that prevented him from winning were you finding ways out of the trap, finding the flaws he had not yet learned about and, in the very end, sheer dumb luck. Just too bad that the entire facility blowing up due to his mismanagement is a mistake he was about to learn about. Hell him in the end regretting what he did is also him learning about a mistake he made. That in a way is also something that sets him apart from GLaDOS as she doesn't seem to be able to learn from mistakes. To her it seems a mistake is just something else to be studied and repeated.

[@DeathnoteBB]

Or she just doesn’t make many mistakes to need to learn from them. She didn’t need the place to blowup to learn how to keep it from blowing up

[@alatsno1656]

@@DeathnoteBB I think what he means is that Wheatley is the only character that was programmed to learn, while Glados is programmed to be smart.

[@DeathnoteBB]

@@alatsno1656 I don’t think Wheatley _was_ programmed to learn. He was programmed to have bad ideas

[@hollylucianta6711]

@@DeathnoteBB I think the joke with Wheatley is that Aperture Science's employees were so terrible they couldn't even design a moron properly. They tried to build the dumbest moron who ever lived but instead only got a fairly average level of stupidity.

[@ohitsrusher842]

That would make sense, Wheatley is made to learn and Glados isn't. So Wheatley really wasn't a moron, he just wasn't given a chance to do what he was supposed to

[@Micha-Hil]

just thought i'd throw this out here: $60 in 1950 is equivalent to $694.11 in 2022. cave was literally giving away money worth a ps5 and then some just to test

[@F_o_l_d]

he started doing that at the end of the 70's, so it's more close to $270, which is still quite a lot

[@aag2139]

to be fair, if like 50% (lowballin it) just straight up die, then theres no real expense. ESPECIALLY if theyre luring random homeless people, who likely have noone to give it to/no one to check up on them. Cave essentially murdered a bunch of homeless people and lured them in with a ridiculous payment they probably never even saw. It feels like, once you enter the labs as a test subject, you dont really get to leave.

[@cold_fries3297]

My favorite detail about portal is that by the time Chell is woken up the facility has completely rebranded with images of cake and GLaDOS is always talking about this cake you’ll get as a reward. Which always implied to me that by the time they were working on GLaDOS aperture was so broke they stopped paying test subjects and just took anyone that would test in exchange for a slice of cake. Plus they don’t even have to give anyone cake. By the time you finish the tests they can just say somebody cut it already sorry! It’s gone :/ the cake is a lie to get people in the door LOL

[@sfisabbt]

In the "bring your daughter to work day" section, we see that one of the potatoes was Chell's. The potato has grown enormous and on the board, Chell has written "special ingredient from dad's work" next to the drawing of a recycling bin. So apparently, Chell has stolen something from a bin in her father's lab, used it on her potato and actually made a scientific discovery as a kid. Nobody noticed the discovery as nobody ever notices discoveried in Aperture. We don't know what happened then but no one has removed the boards and cleared the room so maybe no one was able to that anymore... and Chell is still in the facility. The other daughters may also have been abducted by Glados to become test subjects.

[@Elliandr]

What if GladOS took over right after that event? In which case Chell grew up in the enrichment center.

[@supernovaitup]

Glados actually first released the deadly neurotoxin *on* the bring your daughter to work day. Nobody noticed the giant potato because they were all dead or captured to be used as test subjects.

[@sir-mass3909]

​@Elliandr Nah, that's impossible. We know that Chell signed up to be a test subject when she was an adult. Our best guess is that her potato project from BYDtWD was actually from a previous one, especially since she actively mentions Cave Johnson on the cutout as if he's still alive. So, that potato battery is much older than we think, meaning Chell grew up and then became an adult and signed up for being a test subject.

[@sfisabbt]

@@sir-mass3909 From the Lab Rat story, we know Chell has a file stating she is abnormally stubborn. We also know that at some point, she was asked "Why should Aperture Science accept you as a research volunteer, and would anyone file a police report if you went missing?" The question is suspiciously cold an might have been designed by Glados. The file mentions that Chell refused to answer that question. Maybe she did refuse or maybe she was she in cryo-suspension when she was asked? Instead, the end of the page has binary code stating "the cake is a lie", clearly not a willing applicant answer. I'm not aware we know that Chell signed up to anything. Where did you see that?

[@sir-mass3909]

@sfisabbt Firstly, that wasn't Glados because Glados hadn't been turned on yet. The file existed before Glados was activated. Plus, the file was done as an audio interview. Chell had an interview with someone where she spoke to a person about the stuff, the file is what said researcher wrote down. I don't exactly remember where I got the information from, but I watched a video which did have the evidence in it, yesterday. So, I'll quickly have a look for it. Since KZbin doesn't like links, I'll tell you the KZbinrs name and the video name.

[@FireFox64000000]

I would just like to point out that intelligence and stupidity are not mutually exclusive. Heightened intelligence can just lead to a new and quite frankly horrifying level of stupidity. Also Chell isn't brain damaged. Wheatley is a moron and she's just too damn stubborn to give a shit. And apparently pissed.

[@santiagovidelaleiva]

I think it's implied that they actually sell or intended to sell the turrets as they are the only product that it's being packaged. Wich is kinda funny as Portal turrets are probably the worst invention ever conceived, the fact that they have a complex AI that can feel pain yet they can't move, are easily tumble down and literally the only thing they do is shoot anything that moves in front of them is the biggest joke in the world.

[@Lumberjack_king]

Exactly also they have both a empathy chip and a empathy suppressor chip so they feel empathy and pain but still kill people they feel bad and can't do anything about it it's hilariously cruel

[@ghoulbuster1]

@@Aweegi Now that you mention it, the turrets shooting at you would feel like someone throwing tiny pebbles or BBs at you, it hurts but it doesn't do much damage.

[@everyone4352]

@@ghoulbuster1 And it could kill

[@goldenhorse4823]

Turrets perfectly represent the point of science just cause. They basicaly create turrets in constant pain and distress for no reason but because Why Not.

[@GreenBlueWalkthrough]

I mean the combine seem to like they desendents.

[@Junebune]

15:51 I think Chell is showing that she can understand him but doesn't want the robots to have the satisfaction of hearing her speak

[@S0m3B0z0OnTheInternet]

Yeah, there’s more proof of chell being smart yet stubborn and this is just one of them. In fact, the reason why Wheatley got so upset at Chell not catching him when he fell was that he realized that she didn’t actually have brain damage and so took that as a “oh she was just using me and thinks I’m a moron” Honestly this whole video kinda has flaws, I do agree about the Cave Johnson bit but everything after that just seems..nonsensical, Caroline wasn’t a “trophy wife” and there’s no hint Cave loved her other than the “married to science” joke which honestly just seemed like it was hinting to how the almost drug-like reward anyone in GLaDOS’s body would receive when testing. So she literally was obsessed with science. The “goodbye Caroline” line was also obviously a joke and Caroline was simply making a joke.

[@kylegonewild]

@@S0m3B0z0OnTheInternet Good thing trophy wife wasn't the only possibility put forth, even in this video.

[@Khunkurisu]

@@kylegonewild no but moron was…

[@rubber161]

​@@kylegonewildEeeh, kinda. While the dude did show on screen that he doesn't actually know whether they're in love but that she may very well be, in fact, just his mistress, he still kinda does press on that point. It's okay to have flaws in your video really; it's not a crime.

[@-liomus-8197]

agree. just by the way though the vid creator is a woman

[@TheChivalricKnight]

Cave Johnson reminds me of real-life person Colonel George Fabyan, who was a wealthy textile mogul. He set up a place in the middle of nowhere, Indiana called Riverbank Laboratories, where they did all sorts of "scientific research". A large part of their experiments were centered around the conspiracy theory that Francis Bacon was the actual author behind Shakespeare, and the latter was just a pen name. People believed that Bacon hid all sorts of advanced technology and societal secrets in the original manuscripts of Shakespearean works in the form of aberrations of certain letters. It was wild.

[@NinjaMatt2201]

Hmm. Someone else in the captions mentioned the Fact Core in the first game dropping the "fact" of Shakespeare actually being Francis Bacon. Maybe you are on to something and Fabyan was a direct inspiration?

[@ElectronerpProductions]

Yeah, there's no way this guy wasn't a direct inspiration.

[@funkyou9614]

Thank you for sharing this knowledge! I have much wikipediaing to do now

[@TheChivalricKnight]

@@funkyou9614 You're welcome! Another interesting tidbit: 2 of the intellectuals that Fabyan hired would later marry and go on to essentially found the United States' National Security Agency. Two puzzle nerds known as the Friedmans. And if THAT interests you, I highly recommend the book "The Woman Who Smashed Codes" by Joseph Fagone, which follows the very interesting and peculiar life of Elizebeth Friedman - of how she started as an English major working on Fabyan's Shakespeare-Bacon conspiracy, to solving puzzles, and eventually serving in WW2 by working for the Coast Guard's intelligence service and busting Nazi spy rings in South America -- TWICE.

[@NinjaMatt2201]

@@TheChivalricKnight I must fund this book. Thanks.

[@yourfriend8052]

Caroline is not a moron, she stayed with Cave throughout Aperture’s highs and lows, put up with his bullshit, and held the company together. Cave wanted to give Aperture to her, if she was an idiot secretary who didn’t care about science, wouldn’t he have groomed a successor who had zero moral compass like himself? One of the lab boys or some engineer? She held the damn business together but her breaking point was getting put into GlaDOS.

[@dtracers]

it can also be summed up as: Who stays with someone and puts up with his bullshit and keeps a company together with a leader that is obviously incompetent at even a minor glance Well most people would say: A moron would do that.

[@alexjustalexyt1144]

how exactly did she held the business together? and what does staying with Cave have to do with anything? Also how do you know whether Caroline did or did not have a moral compass? Also x2, how does having a moral compass have anything to do with it?

[@Flynnisthename]

@@alexjustalexyt1144dialogue in game claims she’s the backbone of the company

[@alexjustalexyt1144]

@@Flynnisthename what dialog?

[@Flynnisthename]

@@alexjustalexyt1144 it’s some of cave’s first dialogue. She also keeps him on track for the audio logs occasionally and was very passionate about science

[@vomerconch9795]

I love how timeless Portal 2 is. Even the graphics still look really really cool even after 11 years.

[@whoviankst348]

I just finished portal a week ago and I’ve already played through twice. I can’t get enough. I guess I’ve got the itch

[@nonameman7114]

Especially on PC

[@couchpotatoe91]

Portal 2 and Mirror's Edge are this kind of innovative yet short games that you can play over the course of a few hours or a weekend. Still play them every year or so when I'm feeling nostalgic.

[@DrathVader]

It's the perfect storm of clean artstyle and rate of advancement in game graphics platoing out. This game just doesn't age.

[@quantumblauthor7300]

Art direction >realism

[@Goob_V10]

The fact I never realized how all of this fits together really makes ME feel like the moron. Touché, Valve.

[@ShyGuyXXL]

What I wanna know is, how does Aperture not run out of resources? They are constantly producing new turrets, just so they can trash them again. Where do they get their material, considering the world went to shit? Actually, for all we know they figured out how to turn dirt into titanium and then never thought to tell anyone about it.

[@dylanpresidafonseca2545]

Son, they have nanomachines to recycle old material.

[@unchpunchem8947]

They also canonically have access to the multiverse and have labs and test chambers set up all over that, so it’s super possible that they gather their resources there (plus they do seem to have pretty impeccable recycling systems)

[@DeathnoteBB]

According to director’s commentary the robots are just disassembling and reassembling the same turrets over and over again

[@acoolerhandle]

@@unchpunchem8947 I don’t think the peti earth prime aperture is the main game aperture. See: Cave Johnson still being alive.

[@2222-s8x]

@@unchpunchem8947 may I ask, what canonized facts are you referencing to?

[@DavidDDavidsonSA]

5:45 a small correction here, they did actually manage to get Cave's mind uploaded into a computer. Turns out the problem with that is that there isn't actually much he could do after doing that. This was all revealed in Aperture Desk Job.

[@oriangleman9884]

“You will be baked, and then there will be cake” perfectly illustrates the implications of Aperture’s role in the Irish potato famine

[@Blueturtle1]

I’m Irish and I don’t understand

[@BallonEEE.]

​@@oh_its_noodle Aperture used the bootstrap device on the borealis to travel back to ireland during the famine, to deliver 18 cargo crates worth of french fries, unfortunately the irish locals had no clue how you open these big metal things, and the eggheads weren't strong enough, so they kinda just shrugged and both went back to what they were doing.

[@BallonEEE.]

@@oh_its_noodle lol that was just a gag I made up, really seems like some shit cave Johnson would like them to do tho, I think the original comment was just saying some unrelated thing to try get some laughs so it actually didn’t have really anything behind it

[@hunterthemadman]

Interesting... I thought the idiocy was more on the nose but I could see it being a deeper and more malignant influence on the Half Life / Portal world. That... Has a lot of implications for the quick fall of Earth and the failure of the resistance.

[@hunterthemadman]

@Soldier [TF2] True. But would the scientists who went and made the resonance cascade event happen have done what they did if the portal gun was released publicly? I recall they were trying to make teleportation, and lo and behold... The portal guns *work*.

[@firetarrasque4667]

@Soldier [TF2] They would, though. They didn't do it, but they totally would if you gave them the opportunity.

[@hunterthemadman]

@Soldier [TF2] that is a resource constraint of the portals, yes. Moon "dust" isn't exactly scarce however, and realistically it was a much better investment to base future teleportation research off of a successful 'portal' system than anything else that had yet to produce concrete results. As for unreliability, that's a given with new technology that hasn't been developed and mass produced, or at least further refined.

[@DeathnoteBB]

@@hunterthemadman Yes, and that’s why it wasn’t made public lol

[@SilenceInd]

@Soldier [TF2] A resonance cascade for god's sake! You're supposed to be scientists! Use some common sense!

[@felixfeliciano7011]

Caroline isn't a moron, Gladdos is just a product of her programming. just as Wheatly is a product of his. we can even compare the two and see what pops out. in both cases, the super AI try to murder everyone, including Chell. However that is where the similarities end. Wheatly is incapable of maintaining the facility, which rapidly deteriorates around the player, while Gladdos not only keeps it running, she brings it back to full functionality after years of neglect. This is due to Caroline, the "ditzy" secretary, being the one who truly maintained and ran the company for Cave. She might not have been a scientist, but that doesn't matter when it comes to keeping a company functioning in spite of the CEO's incompetence. Same thing can be said about lots of the other characters, with their unique personalities, performing the job that they were assigned but doing it in their own personal way. Cave and Wheatly were morons, but one of them still managed to found a company that created working, practical local teleportation technology, metamaterials encapsulated in liquid form that makes for easy transport and storage, repulsor and tractor beam technology, solid light bridges and so much more. The applications for such technology is proved by the "nonsensical" puzzles, as we use them constantly for obvious and non-obvious purposes. Not every character in the Portal series is a moron - we even have test results on Chell proving she has "unremarkable" intelligence, neither too smart or too dumb - but clearly most, if not all, of the characters are clearly insane. An insanity built from Cave's stupid notion of "just keep doing science until something sticks" - the definition of insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result - which is perpetuated by everyone around him, including his scientists that actually created the marvels we see in the facility. Even Gladdos's moment of clarity is literally her realizing "hey, trying to kill this mute freak over and over again, isnt working... what if I just... didnt do that?" and viola, she wins.

[@miser2570]

On lands and times of insanity, insane is but the normality. That said, isnt it implied Caroline was forced against her will into becoming GLaDOS? and thats why she basically tried to kill everyone straight away, her implicit extreme anger carrying over to a body that lacked the empathy or physical limitations her real body had moments ago. And chell, according to dev commentary, isnt even mute or brain damaged, she is just so extremely angered herself she doesnt wanna talk and just carry on.

[@Lowqualitybird]

@@miser2570she must’ve been mad because In a cut line from portal 2 is “mr. Johnson I don’t want to do this!”

[@miser2570]

@@Lowqualitybird Yeh now that you say that i remember hearing it before. But its the typical "cut this line because its too obvious" situation it seems, when treating on a more "implicit" depiction of the events preceding portal

[@kuroneeko64]

Just because someone is smart, doesn't mean they are not a moron.

[@lukemyers8788]

Very well put

[@georgeparkins777]

I don't know how hard I can take Chell to task for putting Wheatley in charge of aperture. What she knows and that moment is that Glados has tried to kill her hundreds of times and Wheatley is trying to help her. There's no way she could have known just how bad it can turn out. And frankly, I don't think her intelligence is really debatable. She solves a lot of puzzles very quickly,, and then the world of the game, she does so in one unbroken streak, since I see no reason to suggest that the player's ability to save and load the game represents anything in-universe.

[@ReederOnTheRun]

I can definitely see Cave being really dumb. I always assumed that was the impression they were intending to give. Although I don't think Caroline was a moron. Maybe not a world-leading scientist, but not a moron. From what they say in the game, it sounds like she was just driven insane being being forcefully put into a robot, which thematically makes sense. Living a whole life as a human then being traumatically betrayed and having everything you thought was fundamental to your identity changed has a tendency to make people go crazy in fiction...

[@bargh1]

"say bye caroline" "bye caroline" "isnt she a gem?" just puttin this here

[@Sarah_H]

@@bargh1 it could have been a joke. Hard to fathom, I know

[@TrueLucinova]

@@bargh1 Her tone makes it rather clear that it's a joke; it's also just a common format, particularly among "dad jokes" or other smartass comments

[@allycard]

@@bargh1 tell me you've never heard of a dad joke without telling me

[@stellathefoxgirl3648]

Yea she's not a scientist, but she doesn't seem like a true idiot either

[@loseeraleeert2444]

Honestly, I feel like Caroline isn’t necessarily a moron, her, “Goodbe, Caroline” was just a little dad joke. I honestly feel like her “ditziness” is a product of the time she grew up in, Caroline is relatively young when Aperture science was first founded which was all the way back in the 1940’s, so she probably grew up being told that she had a certain role to fulfill as a trophy wife, which definitely influenced how she conducted herself. It’s clear that Caroline actually does care about testing when she says the itch never bothered her because she was always in it for the TESTS not the euphoria, and when she tries to get Cave Johnson back on track with, “sir, the testing?” Or even when Cave says, “sorry fellas, she’s married, to science!” I always subconsciously read her as a woman who had no other option but to be some fools assistant because that’s was the closest she could get to being a real scientist at the time. (Also I never associated Cave Johnson and Caroline’s relationship with romance, it always felt more like a father/daughter relationship to me, he does call her beautiful but the way Cave says it sounds more like bragging about a cool car than a lover, then again the 1940’s took no issue with seeing women as objects so maybe ur right about Cave’s feelings for Caroline)

[@mademedothis424]

They're definitely boning (and there's that whole fan theory about Chell being Caroline's daughter as a result), but I agree that the story works best if Caroline isn't a moron. I mean, she does moronic things in that she's bought into Cave's whole ridiculousness, but she's constantly presented as competent and keeping things together for him. And of course she's presented as being the lesser evil when in charge of the facility because she's psychotic but not incompetent. The entire arc of Portal 2 hinges on that difference. Ultimately that's what kills this take for me. The story works best if Caroline is a victim of the system. She joins in, works for a guy who is clearly much dumber than she is, she keeps the entire operation going while getting treated as a trophy and then when she's about to have a chance to run things on her own and stop self-sabotaging they grab her and put her in the computer. The idea is that she isn't a malfunctioning AI when she kills everyone, she's a woman taking revenge. But still programmed to keep testing. Which is... kinda chilling, actually.

[@davisdf3064]

@@mademedothis424 Not only that, GLaDOS does say in Portal 2 that she created things such as the reflection cube or the hard-light bridge, it's just that she got killed before using them onto the test subjects.

[@LeoTheMonts]

I agree with everything you said. Felt a little sexist for Leadhead to dismiss her as "just a ditzy secretary or mistress" tbh.

[@SapphicAshley]

@@mademedothis424 i never thought about it before, but i guess glados really IS a girlboss

[@draconicthemoelion7726]

@@mademedothis424 I agree. Caroline was sweet on Cave and definitely acted less intelligent so that she wouldn't outshine his bravado with her legitimate competence. However what really drives home how clever GLaDOS is, is what she does at the end of the Portal 2 Single Player campaign: She attempts to scare Chell off under the assumption that she'll be better off if she doesn't have to think about Aperture anymore. Unfortunate because it's a guarantee that she's going to head straight back to that shed in Michigan as soon as she sees a Combine Strider. I find it highly unlikely that she actually deleted Caroline because that would effectively mean committing suicide, which goes against the laws of robotics, which she follows in her own twisted way. Also, deleting Caroline would have meant she lost any kind of emotional capacity required to have the idea to serenade Chell on her way out of the facility, to say nothing of recovering the Companion Cube and tossing it out after her. Further evidence of her not deleting Caroline, is that her personality during the Multiplayer Campaign, while still very mean, isn't the aggressively homicidal one from the end of Portal 1 and the middle of Portal 2. Now she just likes cracking jokes at her minions' expense and is apparently getting really into weapon design. Which could still be seen as aggressively homicidal, but on the other hand, why start planning a pigeon supersoldier experiment when she already has a neurotoxin generator that only requires a few minor repairs? They certainly won't be as efficient in a closed space, so I think she's doing it mostly for fun.

[@MikeLinPA]

Wheatly was actually competent with a bizarre personality until he was plugged into Glados' body. We was able to rescue Chell, guide her through the abandoned failing facility, rescue her again, sabotage Glados, and get Chell into the escape elevator. Everything went wrong when he was put into Glados' body, and Glados became much better when she wasn't in her body. I think the testing protocol hardwired in was making her insane, not the withdrawal, the hardware itself.

[@NATIK001]

Glados is like HAL9000 from 2001 and 2010. A supercomputer having to deal with conflicting programming goals. Wheatly immediately gets corrupted by those same goals when he is connected to the main computer system and thus put under the same parameters. HAL failed because he had multiple incompatible primary goals. Makes perfect sense that Cave would make the same mistake with Glados and any other AI connected to the system. That said Wheatly is a moron, or more accurately a computer programmed to be illogical, he is just not murderous and malicious. Even before he is connected to the main system of the Aperture facility he shows multiple times that he doesn't know what he is doing. However I think he shows more evidence of being an inhibitor core than an intelligence reduction core, he isn't programmed with useful information, in fact he is programmed with junk information because he do not need useful information to carry out his job, which seems to be to essentially inhibit certain lines of thought and logic. I wager they programmed him to think his flashlight would kill him, not as a threat but to see if he would logic out that it couldn't be true or just accept it without thinking further about it. Which makes me think Wheatly was made hoping to prevent Glados from become murderously insane due to the aforementioned conflicts, by making her not think about them rather than by more sensibly removing the conflict itself.

[@ckreon]

It's not that complicated - it's analogy to the oldest cliche in human history: power corrupts. The glados framework has total control and power over the facility, along with access to essentially unlimited computation. Every "personality" that is plugged in goes power crazy and homicidal, which is also true of basically every human in a similar position in history.

[@rosestar1324]

This is actually a really good point. I just played portal 2 again today and now that I think about it, when Wheatley and Glados are unplugged, they actually are able to come up with and execute well thought out plans. Whatever system or programming the Glados body is using, clearly has a bad affect on whoever is plugged in.

[@rosestar1324]

This is actually a really good point. I just played portal 2 again today and now that I think about it, when Wheatley and Glados are unplugged, they actually are able to come up with and execute well thought out plans. Whatever system or programming the Glados body is using, clearly has a bad affect on whoever is plugged in.

[@bootsyz3343]

​@@NATIK001 Wheatley not having any issues with the paradoxes in the game seems to confirm that theory.

[@TheXGuy]

I think that Chell is actually smart, and this theory would approve of that. By making Chell leave at the end of Portal 2, they're ultimately sending away the only smart person who was in Aperture Science. And that is the most idiotic thing that they could've done (although ultimately Chell wanted freedom in the end so it worked out in her favor).

[@MasterMemo]

As for Caroline, I wonder how unintelligent she was. Cave always referring to the lab boys and not Caroline could have just been an example of like, "old school 60s sexism" kinda stuff, or whatever time period old Aperture was in. To me, Glados always seemed pretty capable, just doing the dumb shit Aperture always told her to, rather than it being her idea. She seemingly understands how to get you back up to modern Aperture and fix the problem, so I think she's more of bad direction than bad intelligence?

[@occamsaturn]

I always got the feeling that Glados's intelligence was a product of years and years and years of living as a supercomputer, not anything to do with Caroline.

[@a_lexine]

possibly, but it's also possible that she used the vast library of information at her fingertips to learn all of that. smart by the time of the games, dumbass when initially put in the computer

[@de-ment]

yeah, glados is not a moron. Caroline was, and when Glados learns she was Caroline; she deletes her from her system. Saying glados is still a moron implies there is no change, which is ironic considering "change" is emphasized in so many different arcs and layers throughout the whole story when you think about it.

[@Zorpike]

That also raises the other possibility, that Caroline was actually incredibly smart, but _GLaDOS_ was programmed in such a way as to limit her thinking to Aperture-approved guidelines, with very mixed results. GLaDOS is incredibly intelligent, but her thinking is sometimes limited, certainly hyper-focused on specific subjects like science and testing, sometimes to logic's detriment. Perhaps GLaDOS was the moron they built to make Caroline an idiot.

[@DeathnoteBB]

@@occamsaturn Why would they put an idiot in a supercomputer?

[@SentinelZed]

Chell may have selective mutism or something similar. Don't think should make her count as a moron. Caroline doesn't seem like a moron to me either; She's doing exactly what she was programmed to do - keep the lights on, and keep testing. The whole "killing everybody" thing might be explained by some of the cut voice lines of Caroline asking Cave Johnson not to turn her into an AI.

[@isaactate9853]

As someone with selective mutism, I don't think Chell has that as she just flatout doesn't vocalize at all through the series. I suspect that she has had massive trauma to the Broca's area of her brain (and possible to her motor cortex which is very close to the Broca's area and controls the muscles used in speech) and is more or less rendered completely mute. She still has at least average problem solving ability, which indicates to me that she hasn't suffered any severe frontal lobe damage, and can understand speech so her Wernicke's area is most likely intact as well. I suspect that she suffered a severe penetrating and/or blunt trauma to the head (hit by a car, baseball bat mistaking her head for the ball, screwdriver to the temple, ... a carefully performed brain surgery, etc.) that has severely damaged her Broca's area and left her more or less effectively mute.

[@isaactate9853]

Also yeah, I agree that he didn't seem to do his homework on Caroline either. It seems more so like she was of give or take average intelligence (which of course puts her leagues ahead of Cave) but between being ripped from her body and excruciatingly placed in a mechanical one before having her mind blasted with a frankly comedic amount of information, and living more or less completely isolated from any other human intelligence I think it's safe to say that she's gone down a bit of a mental decline. It was also really weird to me how he just assumes that she and Cave had a sexual and romantic relationship? Like, Cave could have just admired and respected her and (being the massive fucking idiot he is) decided that she'd love to run Aperture if he punched his ticket out too early and forced it on her despite her protests.

[@andrewroes7942]

​@@isaactate9853 I will say, that's probably what it is, but this did give me the funny idea that Chell doesn't understand speech, and just happens to be smart enough to make it through everything regardless, and just being completely blind to Wheatley and Glados' chastising and all rather than ignoring it.

[@isaactate9853]

@Taycrolyn ! Interesting, haven't been able to find any official reinforcement for that but either way that's not selective mutism. Selective mutism is a form of anxiety disorder where a person is rendered physically unable to speak in certain social situations, this is not a conscious choice to be obstinate.

[@TheInevitableHulk]

@@isaactate9853 Neither does any other player character in the Halflife universe, including Barney in Blue Shift yet is very vocal in HL2.

[@revenantravings]

Caroline was clearly laughing while giving her 'goodbye, Caroline' line, she was essentially giving a dad joke of 'hi, hungry, I'm dad' in response to Cave addressing her. The only evidence of her being a moron is the fact she had some sway in getting Cave back on track with the 'Sir! The testing' when he was getting off topic but she didn't use that pull to get him to do ANYTHING good for the company. Whether that was out of blind trust in him or feeling that was beyond her ability, it was a dumb choice.

[@ArabicNameGuy]

yeah i think the "goodnight, Carolyn" was their nod to comedian George Burns and his wife Gracie "goodnight Gracie" was their signoff together on their tv show. it was a joke about being a moron, but she was in on it. total dad joke territory

[@tomaarten]

that line honestly goes deeper. it's foreshadowing her "leaving her body behind" and becoming Glados.

[@clockworkNate]

You forgot about fear, maybe Caroline felt some fear towards him. Cave seems like the type of guy to have some whisky and take out his frustration of failure and moonrock cancer on whatever is close by and Caroline was always close by.

[@codedc0m]

@@clockworkNate Nah. As much as I dislike Cave, he loved his wife. He did put her in charge of his WHOLE company, stupid or not.

[@DeathnoteBB]

@@codedc0m I don’t think they’re married. But either way, there was an entire scene they had to cut between the two for being too horrific, so…

[@Menagerie_OS]

This dude start to finish "hes a moron. Why? well bc I say he is"

[@maxhydekyle2425]

"Point is, if we can store music on a Compact Disc, why can't we store a man's intelligence and personality on one?" Yeah, that says all we need to know about Cave Johnson.

[@juncoson]

I mean...dumb for sure. But in the end he wasn't exactly wrong either lol

[@GaleGrim]

Actually, it's a rather overly simple but intelligent conclusion. It's weird that Cave would be the one to think it. We can put 12-20 varying complex musical arrangements on a disc made of long dead dinosaurs(plastics made of "fossil fuel" oil) and metal(aluminum/gold depending on the disc) in a way that by burning it with a laser we can use the disc to basically perfectly replicate the arrangement for as long as the disc exists and we have the machine to read it. But putting a persons knowledge and mannerisms on one to be replicated and added too over time so we never lose access to their insight, intellect, and companionship is an impossibility? We figured out we can harness the power of lightening by moving a shiny rock around another weirder rock (copper and magnets), but finding out a way to preserve the the minds, hearts, and souls of the people we know, love, or value most is too complicated to do? It makes sense to draw that conclusion. At lest from the perspective of someone like Cave who doesn't know about all the hundreds to thousands of years of research and experimentation that went into getting to this point.

[@AtmonTheExectioner]

Max, not really. On a compact disk...sure. But bear in mind we can create chess algorithms that learn from mistakes and learn complex strategies. It is only limited to playing chess because we have made it so...that and we haven't perfected A.I. algorthims. And those algorthisms were originally on tape reels on early super computer hubs. So as technology evolves...who knows what we can do. Copying someone onto "storage" to be given a weird form of immortality or processing for upload to a new body flesh or metal...doesn't seem so stupid.

[@maxhydekyle2425]

@@AtmonTheExectioner Those versions of AI are so far from full, human-like AI that it's like comparing a row boat to a battleship.

[@AtmonTheExectioner]

@@maxhydekyle2425 Touche, however you fail to comprehend how fast technology is evolving. You have a tech company building neutral laces that can speed up thinking and increase intelligence...maybe even fix brain damage. You have fake limbs that have a sensation in the finger tips. You have a man who sent the first tweet using his mind the other day. None of this existed even 5 years ago. Go back 10 years and tell people that you could stream music or the latest video game onto any device with a screen and an internet connection and people would of laughed.

[@S1nwar]

whenever i see a portal 2 lore video i just wanna mention that apertures vast size and wealth is implied to be due to them "scamming the multiverse", possibly just other aperture sciences form parallesl worlds like in sliders. there were several motivational posters describing that ingame.

[@DeathnoteBB]

I remember one poster in Portal 2 warning you to ignore any alternate “you”s… That stuck with me because the Portal Gun is a space portal, not a time portal, how would there be two of me? Them scamming the multiverse would explain it, as alternate versions of the company or yourself might find this dimension.

[@mateombot7493]

@@DeathnoteBB this poster was specifically refering to a time travel experiment, not the portal gun.

[@Oreli]

but the aperture that did all the scams and the stunts in the multiverse and whatnot isn't the one we play in as chell cave is still alive, the glados initiative was cancelled, and we don't play as chell

[@DeathnoteBB]

@@mateombot7493 Okay that’s fair, and I forgot that, but imo it’s still an experiment we never see nor hear about otherwise. I like to imagine it fits in with this multiverse thing

[@S1nwar]

Oh i also wanted to mention that this multiverse traveling we never explicitly got to see possibly attracted the combines attention

[@SixArmedSweater]

I always read Chell as completely exasperated and refusing to dignify the nonsense around her.

[@Yartin]

4:40 Cave bought $70M in moon rocks, not $7M He says "The bean counters told me we literally could not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less seventy million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed em into a gel."

[@Elemtree]

“How many morons have we got in this lab anyhow?” “YO!” “I knew it, I’m surrounded by morons…”

[@rinoz47]

Only one person uses sediment shaped sediment jam... glllllados!

[@malakifraize4792]

"Science away morons!"

[@thepearled0120]

"Keep sciencing, morons!"

[@RKDxNT3000]

@@thepearled0120 I WAS going to make this joke. You beat me to it.

[@Couldnt_Be_Bothered]

Now I'm just picturing the entire "When will then be now" scene but with Wheatley and GLaDOS.

[@mikedrop4421]

No ma'am, you can't convince me Wheatley isn't actually a secret genius. You just wait until Portal 3 when we find out Wheatley tricked us to launch him into space where he's using the orbital gravity slingshot method to speed off towards the edge of the solar system where he will overtake the voyager probes to be the farthest traveling earth based object in history. It's been his lifelong dream. Lol

[@therealme1362]

no no you've got it all wrong, the most intelligent thing in portal is clearly the space core

[@pillowmoment]

I wouldn’t say he’s a genius, but he’s trying! I dunno if his programming prevents him from learning It might Here’s why i believe that. He seems to forget everything we show him and do for him. Along that journey, we show him things he had no idea were possible. But he seems to block that out later. Claiming we did nothing for him Though while he’s in GLaDOS’s body, this seems to change He can actively remember what he does there. And learns from his mistakes. Perhaps he is incapable of retaining information, hence why he’s so stupid. He probably could be ridiculously smart. He’s most likely seen a lot. So maybe he just can’t recall it. So there He is in fact, secretly smart. Or.. he would be.

[@rogueneet3538]

@@pillowmoment he is technically the one of the most advanced computer, but they needed him to be a moron.

[@zherean42069]

Yeah i just hope he doesn't get eaten by an black hole or sun

[@RandomUser11170]

Ha. You think Valve will give us Portal 3. That's funny

[@bubblegum8467]

Leadhead: "They rely on local transportation, no more teleporting Me: * Imagines them taking the bus and looking really done with life while doing so*

[@TheFoolish_Bear]

Ahhh yes The local transportation such as flying drop ships and striders.

[@kylegonewild]

@@TheFoolish_Bear I think he just meant "localized transportation" as in, only being able to realistically reach your nearby surroundings in a reasonable time. But yeah, kinda funny moment in the vid

[@TheFoolish_Bear]

@@kylegonewild yeah I know I was making a joke.

[@carlsjolund2379]

History in regards to the founder can be summed up with: - Cave Johnson be like Step 1: science Step 2: ??????? Step 3: profit

[@arthurcarmo7546]

Ratman knew it, he was called a madman but in the end, he was the only that can see

[@Breached18]

Keep in mind, the tests we take in old aperture, are old. So the portal gun was probably being beta tested back then. But its perfect now, but with GLaDOS in control, she sees the portal gun as an infinite testing opportunity to satisfy her itch

[@lucasisofdarkness5423]

Glados never cares about the itch she just sees it as infinite testing. cause its in her code to test.

[@michaelfixedsys7463]

By the time the Genetic Lifeform And Disk Operating System Initiative was fulfilled (circa 1980) Caroline would've been at least 60. The personality cores aren't aids, they're restraints. They're specified as "the latest in A.I. inhibition"

[@aag2139]

they do seem to be supplanting part of GLaDoS' personalities with theor own ones in an attempt to restrict her. She might have even had them made herself; in the multiverse (not particularly canon) voice lines, Cave-GLaDoS is (aside from a lunatic, and somewhat suicidal) extremely bored and tired of the seemingly limitless capability he has as a computer- if Caroline-GLaDoS is similar, she might have purposely hindered herself with them just to experience something different.

[@thebigenchilada678]

@@aag2139 no Aperture scientists installed the cores into GladOS as without them she immediately began killing aperture scientists.

[@chuck_duck]

@@aag2139 “They attached them to me after I flooded the facility with a deadly neurotoxin to prevent me from flooding the facility with a deadly neurotoxin.” - GLaDOS Portal 1

[@aag2139]

that doesnt deny that she had a hand in it at all, just that the scientists made/attached it (not sure if GLaDoS even physically could do it herself) and that it happened after she did some murder

[@computer_dude]

@@chuck_duck The Lab Rat comic explains what happened. Everytime the scientists tried to turn her on, she tried to kill them all, forcing them to hit the killswitch. After trying many combinations of Personality Cores in her, she ended up fake-accepting her fate, only for them to give her neurotoxin so she would experiment with the Schrödinger's cat theory, except with humans. Why she ignored the cores and didn't kill everyone? Doug Rattman said it: "you can always ignore your own conscience." She ignored the Personality Cores screaming into her head so she could flood the Enrichment Center with neurotoxin, so she could take control of the place. In my theory, that's when she put the employees and (assuming from a few scenes in-game) their children in cryo.

[@Mihailo_Slavutsky]

0:50 Elon musk

[@irishempire9811]

dude, i love Portal not just for its gameplay and characters and what they do ingame, but all the really deep and implied shit that Valve put into it so people could talk about it for over 10 years and not get bored.

[@NanoFromNichijou]

this video so good that the irish empire commented

[@Mera77777]

@@NanoFromNichijou Damn, even Yukko Aioi commented as well

[@dr_birb]

And characters are part of that deep shit people are talking bout

[@cl570]

Kinda makes sense honestly. Valve's themes are always (to me) centered around rebellion, the human spirit and will, and how we adapt and overcome. Almost all of their games seem to encompass themes of humanism, and I really applaud them for it because it's very realistic. It reminds me a lot of 1984. Even after the large-scaled rebellions have been practically extinguished, there's still hopes of free humans triumphing over the totalitarian states. Orwell even said it himself that dictatorships are "inherently unstable". That was the whole theme.

[@Arbteron]

literally 1984

[@WorkinDuck]

What, someone who actually read 1984?!?! A rare sight these days

[@legateelizabeth]

Even 1984 itself contains a single shred of hope in it's 'human boot stamping on the human face forever' depiction of the future: "Ingsoc was". Past tense. Which implies that the regime has fallen at whatever time the book is being written in-universe, since ingsoc is no longer in use.

[@KiatnissNZ]

@@legateelizabeth That's... Actually a very good point...

[@chinaman1]

@@KiatnissNZ she was just being pretentious.

[@codaboi138]

10:19 I have a personal theory to add to this. It's my imagining that the killed employees are actually the reason everything is sentient. In portal 1, during the final boss battle, glados talks about how Chells brain is scanned and has been backed up encase she died. My thinking is that this was done to every employee and all their minds were used as a base for ever mechanism going forward. The technology was already used for Glados, maybe it's the only way Aperture knew how to grant sentience to any given piece of machinery. As to why they'd do this I have no real idea.

[@dracohawkxxx2079]

In the fan fiction “Blue Sky” it turns out that Wheatley was actually a real person that had brain scans taken for that exact purpose. While it is certainly not canon, I do love the story for building on a couple of points the games seem to hint at

[@deathstramy7272]

The personality cores at least the early ones could be failed employee scans

[@codaboi138]

@@alamba1165 lmao perfect

[@codaboi138]

@@dracohawkxxx2079 that's really cool! I heared about that fan fiction but never read it. I heared that's very well written.

[@codaboi138]

@@deathstramy7272 it explains why they all have personalities. They also seem to do some of the human labour so it makes sense that they'd be former employees just turned robot and wage free.

[@jsloanhpi]

I NEVER GOT that the FrankenCubes ‘passed’ the paradox test but Wheatley couldn’t think deeply enough. That is just amazing. Funny thing about Portal being a humor game, Wheatley has far too much courtesy and loyalty initially and cleverness as an adversary to truly be the best moron core. But that wouldn’t work story wise if he just grunted. It’s more than a disguise of civility. He really is your friend when not in the insane chairperson role.

[@deathstarskeetshooter8418]

I always thought the tests were a way to keep money flowing. That after the borialis disappeared their only profitable military contract was portal gun testing, but the government had no intention of renewing the contract once the gun was perfected. So aperture just kept “testing” the gun keeping the contract and staving off bankruptcy.

[@MikeLinPA]

That's a good theory.

[@failedGraphics]

Good theory until you realize they would have made way more money if they had just sold lesser versions of the portal gun to the public. Remember, they were a private company, unlike Black Messa. So they don't HAVE to rely on government money to do everything. That being said, a lot of their products were recalled because of regulations, so that could be why they tested the shit out of tech that clearly worked and would have made them money.

[@rlt422]

It's canon that Chell doesn't have brain damaged and can in fact speak... she's just pissed off beyond belief and refuses to speak because she's so mad.

[@JohnBlobJohnSlime]

Its confirmed that Chell doesn't speak to give the robots the pleasure of it. Not because she's angry, because she just doesn't want to

[@zackOOO-nz9rh]

i always just imagined that since all cave wanted to do was test, he made it so who/whatever is in control of the facility gets overpowered by the need to do random testing, which is why wheatly and glados are actually normal people(?) when they aren't giant facility controlling monsters this is kind of proven since, well, potato glados isn't an insane lunatic and actually thinks rationally and immediately after wheatly gets detached after the moon portal scene he goes back to normal AND as soon as glados is back in her 'body' she goes back to being a test-hungry lunatic

[@Lumberjack_king]

Yeah it's technically the body that makes mind's go insane

[@vyor8837]

This is outright stated by her.

[@tomorbataar5922]

That's right, they put some kind of reward system which delivers pleasant feelings when a test is completed. Making Glados and Wheatly addicted to testing.

[@TindraSan]

@Taycrolyn ! wow! I'm 13 and this is clever and Real™

[@suprememasteroftheuniverse]

This guy is a great example of Dunning-Kruger. It was amazing to watch this video. So smart he can't understand this simple comedy of absurd.

[@BrixVGM]

I feel like it's worth saying that in Portal 1 the test chambers do genuinely seem to be testing the Portal Gun itself. The puzzles not really being tests on the equipment is mostly a portal 2 thing. But in Portal 1 the puzzles in general all introduce new mechanics and showcase new implications of the Portal Device. I've always taken the portal 1 puzzles to be designed so that they like could show potential investors the new movement options the portal gun lets you do- with cubes and pellets representing desirable objects and fizzlers and whatnot representing potential obstacles. Like, its not just "can you get a cube past this fizzler that destroys cubes" but "In this example, an important object is on one side of an impassable area, and usually it would not be possible to get the object through, but with the portal device you could use portals to get around this obstacle anyways" or whatever. Most chambers in portal 1 could to some extent be interpreted in this way. A few of them *are* just puzzles but most of them at least introduce some new mechanic or application of the device. Additionally, many lines of dialog that are protocol are tests on the subjects themselves, so it seems to be a 2 for 1 deal. In portal 2 this isn't really a thing anymore as the puzzles tend to be actual puzzles instead of like new mechanics being introduced one by one. You can't really interpret a funnel or repulsion gel in the same way you can interpret a cube as something important. But this is explained by the fact that GLaDOS doesn't care about testing anything by that point and just wants to ruin your life. Can't explain the old aperture chambers though. Cave is crazy.

[@approximateCognition]

Portal, or: "How a moron making a fortune of selling shower curtains directly caused the emergence of an enormous underground AI civilisation." Edit: also, your voice is really showing progress! It really sounds good!

[@TrafficJamByCam]

I love the theory that Chell is actually deaf and just doesn’t realize that any AIs are talking to her since they don’t have mouths for her to read.

[@cs3k3]

As much as I like this theory we see what Chell sees and we hear what Chell hears (this is how we play a game lol). Ofc, a game without sound would be kind of...Bad, but still.

[@tankmchavocproductions6907]

HOLY CRAP THE EMANCIPATION GRILL EMANCIPATED HER EARTUBES

[@turtleifnot]

but what about at the beginning with the announcer asking her to move around and then Wheatley telling her to talk?

[@WordFyle]

I just see her as mute cuz I’m mute

[@Magik_Cloud495]

@@tankmchavocproductions6907 that was not apart of the test. Lie on your back and rub your temples

[@giancarloespositowithabana5388]

The entire Caroline reasoning seems off. The one voice line outside of her being GladOS is her saying “Bye, Caroline.” Which I always took as her being witty and funny instead of seriously thinking Cave Johnson wanted her to say bye to herself. But hey, it’s all a theory.

[@TheGrimReapTM]

can we just talk about the fact that in the developer commentary there's a line about aperture laboratories just aimlessly assembling and disassembling turrets over and over again also using mwheel for jump, props to you

[@T3sl4]

Hops* to you :D

[@TheSecondVersion]

I'm not sure if this was in the developer commentary, but I noticed that the "crouch" function now requires you to *hold the button down* to remain crouched. In Portal 1, it was toggled like an on/off switch. When I played Portal 1, I kept dying in the part where I had to escape the fire pit, because for some reason I couldn't jump far enough to reach the portal. It turns out, *I had forgotten I was still crouched for some reason,* and after each death I immediately respawned *still crouched.* This decreased the jump distance and ensured I'd always die after trying to leap away from the flames. I wonder if this happened to enough people that Valve changed the way the crouch button worked. Apparently Valve does these kinds of "gameplay assists" subtly throughout the game. Like when Wheatley very nearly crushes you with a "mashy spike plate," you need to quickly shoot a portal at a wall to escape. Problem is, if you forget *which color of portal* you're supposed to shoot, you'll plunge to your death. Given the reaction time needed to survive (something that's not common in a puzzle game that gives you as much time as you need), Valve just programmed it so that the gun always shoots the correct portal, no matter which button you picked.

[@DudleyKetsukane]

If cave Johnson had actually sold the portal gun to the public it could've actually prevented the resonance cascade in half life 1 as the reason for the experiment was because they found a xen crystal while trying to find a method of teleporting via. But if cave Johnson had sold the portal gun black mesa wouldn't have needed to make their own way of teleportation thus they wouldn't go to xen and then the resonance cascade would not have happened. which means the combine would have not been alerted about earth which means the combine invasion could have been delayed or the combine wouldn't have visited earth at all.

[@boredphoenix]

Interesting theory, I feel though that the combine would eventually discover earth at some point tho

[@Wenjo936]

@@boredphoenix probably because of the teleporting

[@Creator_indy]

I think we’re forgetting that you’d need a supply of moon rocks for the portals to work

[@DeathnoteBB]

@@Creator_indy Better than needing to break a rip in space time

[@Creator_indy]

@@DeathnoteBB touché

[@Her_Imperious_Condescension]

This whole time, for many years I've been wondering. These tests are cool and all, but _what_ are they testing? And then you just said it off handedly, and now it all makes sense. ...It's the Portal Gun. It never made it out of the testing phase and with all the administrators dead it's perpetually in beta.

[@DeathnoteBB]

The tests in the game are for the Portal Gun yeah, but what about everything else?

[@geekjokes8458]

"we're out of beta, we're releasing on time" except not

[@geekjokes8458]

@toddbod94 would make sense if they were testing wild situations where they're not sure how the portals would behave, but what we see are rooms built with the express intention of making the gun work normally... they're not testing, for example, what if we didnt have enough moon gel on a surface, what if the surface moved, what if you had to shoot at a corner, etc - not incidentally, problems the game creators avoided making because *it's hard* they have to be testing something else, and whether they _know_ what that something else is is the topic of the video

[@xheralt]

Its perfectionism carried to an extreme. As a lead tech of my acquaintance once said, "At some point, you have to shoot the engineers and go into production." He was surrounded by engineers, bright, creative people who wanted their creation to be _just so._ They never saw their design as "good enough", they wanted to keep tweaking it.

[@geekjokes8458]

@@xheralt caveman wouldn't be testing a bunch of unrelated random shit at the same time if he were "perfectionist"

[@clockwork3494]

I love how the creator of this video discusses how it was decided Portal 2 would be connected to the Half Life universe "for some reason" when evidence of the two being connected are as early as the original Portal and HL1, from board rooms informing employees to not let secrets slip to Black Mesa or the missing Aperture ship that "vanished", Aurora Borealis it was no secret the two were intended to take place in the same universe. From what I recall Black Mesa and Aperture were always in competition and constantly trying to one up another after the first big discoveries Aperture made that gained recognition prior to the portal device, hence the constant scientific experiments on both ends. In fact if I'm not remembering wrong both were essentially in a race to see who could make portals first, unbeknownst to Black Mesa however Aperture had beaten them, by a landslide. Was Cave a moron? Let's be real, he very much was come the end of his life, however not in the way you seem to perceive it as but more like someone trying to catch lightning in a bottle twice.

[@Wyte_Knight]

They were indeed in competition, and Aperture was kinda winning. Black Mesa was government funded, with military objectives, while Aperture was a company, with some connections to the militaries but not enough to their tastes. They also sold some goods on the shelves, but soon enough everything was pulled from the stores because of relatively bad quality or side effects. Then begun the era of the unlimited testing to be sure it reach a good quality before releasing any product, which led to not really releasing any product at all. Black Mesa wasn't really in competition from their point of view, most likely all the culture "Aperture vs Black Mesa" come from Cave, who is just jealous of Black Mesa.

[@ajorsomething4935]

It's funny to me that the big question one has when going through portal one and two is "why" or "what's the point". Because when it comes to the lore, there really aren't a lot of answers, if any. The answer stares you in the face the entire time, but it's so unsatisfying that you try to look for something else: there is no point, Cave Johnson and the boys at his company had no end goal.

[@Chicagocanine]

Well like Cave Johnson said: “Science isn't about WHY. It's about WHY NOT!” ;)

[@boiyas6518]

Either that or cave died before they could refine or phase out the moon dust in a way that it WOULDN'T make you dangerously Ill.

[@uhrguhrguhrg]

@@boiyas6518 if you consider the steam deck game is canon (apparently it's not?), cave is still around, singing with turrets at the bottom of the facility

[@boiyas6518]

@@uhrguhrguhrg i mean i wouldn't doubt it.

[@boiyas6518]

Also i refuse to believe cave is in any way smart. He's not emotionally smart, he's a businessman, he probably doesn't know that much science anymore, just trial and error at this point, and also instead of finding a way to survive he just dies? What about the lemonade(lemon grenade)

[@Sibunafan221]

one thing that gets me about this is that wheatley isn't actually that dumb. his idiocy comes from a seeming lack of information rather than an unwillingness to use common sense. his solutions to some problems, like the door in the turret quality control line, might not look pretty, but they're practical. he makes use of his limited knowledge to the best of his ability. and when he's put in charge of the facility... he still doesn't seem to have much information. it's like he's tuning it out. he seems to think even LESS than he did when he was outside of it. wheatley is just so fascinating to me

[@DeathnoteBB]

Willful ignorance isn’t less ignorant than genuine ignorance. If anything it’s more ignorant

[@youkofoxy]

That is a interesting way to archive his design goal. Make a personality core that can solve problems and is capable of learning, however it is doom to make mistake due incomplete information and easily getting distracted by new unrelated information. That would explain how he can plan, however totally overlooks some details and is has a hard time learning stuff that needs complete concentration. It would explain his elevator and smash panel mistakes while allowing him to have those plans that works... Sort of.

[@PaulPower4]

Ultimately Wheatley is *incredibly* well-programmed: after all, he speaks fluent, idiomatic english (with a regional accent to boot), he thinks about problems in a human way (the two password jokes are a great example of this), and even the "too dumb to get fried by a paradox" thing speaks to some incredible coding work by his creators.

[@MrDoomDawg]

@@youkofoxy you kind of described ADHD, lol. At least from my layman's understanding of ADHD

[@penguinstarlette4028]

@@youkofoxy The greatest minds of a generation coming together to make a moron... they did put a lot of thought behind it.

[@peachcolor1]

Idk about this, Caroline was forced into this, they put cores to control her, and with all that the facility didn't get destroyed or ruined. Only the scientists died, which makes me think Caroline, now GLaDOS, wasn't a moron. She just had a lot to deal with. Cave does say she was the backbone of this facility, we can't just ignore that and say Caroline was just there as a pretty face. Its possible that maybe she kept the place from falling apart with Cave's constant terrible plans.

[@thatoneguy9309]

Yeah, I mean GLaDOS knows her stuff, She literally stops a nuclear meltdown in like... 5 seconds in the finale of the game. "I already fixed it" and all that.

[@alenasenie6928]

To add, only the scientists that put her in glados, the rest are ok, since they are now test subjects.

[@MishaFlower]

@@alenasenie6928 she still kills them though. I mean the cake is a lie meme was literally because Glados was tricking people into thinking they would get cake and then sending them an incinerator instead

[@thatoneguy9309]

@@MishaFlower But how much of that is Caroline... and how much of it is the mainframe she's plugged into? At the end of portal 2 we see caroline get utterly deleted, but glados's snarky personality barely changes.

[@luminomancer5992]

@@thatoneguy9309 to be fair isnt it a popular theory that the deletion was a lie?

[@princembat]

i mean the thing is about chell being brain damaged is that the person who makes that claim is wheatley, the one that were not supposed to really take what he says at face value because hes kinda dumb lol our voices can stop working right after a long time of not talking, but also honestly if i was in that situation i wouldnt give the robots the satisfaction of responding anyway :p

[@acethecrow]

Good theory. You made pretty convincing arguments on the fact of Aperture being run by Morons on a constant basis. Although I wouldn’t exactly call GLaDOS or Caroline a moron for the most part. As you stated, there’s a lot of proof to suggest that Cave himself was a moron, but there isn’t much to state about what contributions Caroline made. To me, Caroline always conducted the “useless” tests that Cave himself was guilty of, was due to her two factors: 1)The sheer spite and anger of being forcefully turned into a machine and desiring to bring torture to all of those who were remotely connected to Aperture. 2)The programming for the GLaDOS AI which forces her to conduct tests. To elaborate on the second one, let’s go back to Wheatley. There’s a line mentioned about how he must conduct tests so “he will feel good”. That part is later elaborated by GLaDOS, stating that the more different tests are being performed, the more “pleasure” the AI will receive. And Wheatley, like the moron he is, tries to conduct the same test again and, due to the programming aspect, cannot receive the same pleasure. And the fact that once GLaDOS comes back to power, she stops conducting tests involving her one human subject, who she truly hated, and, instead, creating two robots who are more than eager to do them. Overall, she found a way to “break free” of her programming and save Chell from this eternal torture in Aperture. Overall, I don’t believe GLaDOS is a moron, just a spiteful machine, who did what it did due to some moronic lunatic programming her to do so.

[@murciadoxial8056]

I don't know... I think its implied that Caroline is the one who keeps aperture science together behind the scenes, and considering that such a poorly run company managed to endure for so many years is a sign that Caroline was probably the only smart character in the entire portal saga.

[@ham-tastic3877]

She might be smart with contracts and people but have 0 idea of who to "Science" which makes it even more ironic when she get put in charge of doing all these dumb, pointless experiments.

[@kormannn1]

Dough Rattman? Was he smart, too?

[@miser2570]

I think she wasnt even programmed to make science, just to make puzzles, after all its explained she gets "dopamine" kindoff hits from the act alone. And tbh, if an ai was made to do "science", they wouldnt even make experiments proper, they would just be constantly collecting data from real events, without the false isolation of experiments, and running hundreds if not thousands of processes to find functional and mathematical patterns and relationships. They wouldnt even need to "explain" things. Explaining is what defines the limit of human comprehension and mental capacities. We need "explanations" which are logical sentences, to understand reality, but the thing is, explanations are always hyper simplified interpretations of the (scientifically or not) observed relationships or patters, so they arent factual by definition, just can be "the most possibly aproximated" to reality. The more real explanations are those often called rules in hard sciences (not in biology, psycolocy and some others, there rules are more like rules of thumb, not mathematical, nor based in patters or relationships), as they usually just define pure relationships or patterns between factors, and dont go into further detail that would muddle them, the maximun case archived of this being the Laws of Thermodynamics. And so, an ai doing science would only really need to find the patterns, and connect them together, without putting any effort into trying to "explain" things, which is what we humans cannot do. From that effort done by the ai, then we, humans, would substract interpretations

[@the_furry_inside_your_walls639]

This is an interesting theory, though you're forgetting one character in Portal's lore, a character who is pretty much responsible for both Chell's awakening and her being saved and put into stasis again after the events of the first game. Doug Rattmann is his name, and there are various rooms throughout both games that have wall scribblings on them done by him, which act as warnings and predictions to some of the events and plot points throughout both games. Rattmann is quite possibly one of the best and most tragic characters in Half-Life and Portal, and I'd absolutely recommend giving the comic about him a read, as it gives some important insight into the events of Portal and Portal 2 to an extent, not to mention it's such a good comic to begin with.

[@fish4225]

I agree that he should've mentioned the ratmann. I think he may be the only one to break the moron theory. Though at the same time, he *does* have schizophrenia, which I think dampens how much of a genius he can really be. Idk, I'd have to look at the facts closer

[@juliuskresnik198]

...Wait a minute. Elon Musk is just Cave Johnson. Just trade Military Shower Curtains with South African Emerald Mine.

[@NatOrPie]

For your stuff on Caroline... it seems like your theory for why she was a moron is, "The game never said she wasn't!". Only real problem with the video, otherwise fun stuff.

[@Albinojackrussel]

He also has the point that she's a personal assistant, which I guess means she's dumb for... reasons?

[@NatOrPie]

​@@Albinojackrussel She* but yeah that reasoning is a bitttt yikes.

[@MEllOWDPRODUCTIONS]

​@@Albinojackrussel Well, i see it like this: - Caroline never stopped Cave Johnson's absurd ideas, so that on itself is pretty moronic. - If Caroline was a "smart" assistant she would proposed the idea to sell the Portal Gun for profit. - She also could have tried to stop the tests, for that also was a moronic thing that still was going on. But sadly she didn't. So yeh, every character is pretty dang moronic if you would ask me, which is pretty ironic for such a smart game~

[@do3807]

An assistant is not an advisor. Honestly, you just do what you're asked for the most part. So, to say she should've done stuff to prevent the stuff, is a little unfair. Most assistants just do that, assist. That doesn't make them 'morons', apathetic maybe? But not moron.

[@MEllOWDPRODUCTIONS]

@@do3807 You have a point there~

[@IgnacioBustos587]

So turns out Cave did get his consciousness into a computer, just a very big one

[@cascas9656]

🗿

[@thej2241]

@@cascas9656 🗿

[@RToast13]

I mean, _technically_, yes. But that's not canon to *our* Portal universe. Aperture Desk Job takes place in one of the many alternate universes proposed by the Aperture Science Perpetual Testing Initiative.

[@dorinstefangheorghe983]

🗿

[@triggerfairy4070]

@@RToast13 but it still happened

[@spartanking9807]

Actually, the reason the combine don't just kill everyone on earth is because Dr Breen managed to convince them that humanity was useful to them as a species, it's actually quite interesting to see that even though Breen is the villain, his intentions were to save humanity in the long run, good intentions and all that I suppose

[@Polyvalent]

How do you think Breen convinced them? Asking nicely? He showed them their portal tech and said this could all be yours if you integrate us into your empire instead of wiping us out.

[@Maflongas]

If Aperture Science made public the invention of local teleportation, humanity would not go extinct. In fact, NONE of the Half Life series events would have happened. If Aperture Science made the discovery public, they would have definitely won the race against Black Mesa, and they wouldn't make the resonanse cascade. In the events of Half Life, the resonanse cascade was made as an attempt at localized teleportation, the thing that Aperture Science had hidden during 70 years. If there is localized teleportation thanks to Aperture, there is no resonance cascade and there is not Combine invasion and there is not enslavement of humanity

[@thegreatgoatking.kingofall4001]

I feel like your example of “goodbye Caroline” making her a “dumb trophy wife” is really mean spirited and wrong. Like you also realize there’s a world of difference between super genius and moron right? Her making one sort of coy joke with her boss and being a good assistant doesn’t show her to be a moron. Hell, cave calls her modest and says she’ll decline the brain mapping. She was forced to undergo what was likely a horribly traumatic procedure, having her trust betrayed by the man she stood by for years and then becoming a sentient computer, overwhelmed with the sudden influx of knowledge and senses. GLaDOS you can make a case for maybe, but don’t you fucking dare try and disrespect my girl Caroline.”

[@DoofXMachina]

Jesus... someone's pissed bout their waifu being dissed

[@thegreatgoatking.kingofall4001]

@@DoofXMachina not really. I just think sometimes when people have theories they get tunnel visioned and forget not everything has to slot neatly into place.

[@DoofXMachina]

@@thegreatgoatking.kingofall4001 "but don't you dare try to disrespect my girl caroline" lol

[@juncoson]

Yeah. She was a victim. Standing by a bad person's side doesn't make you stupid. It makes you human. That being said I really think she loved cave Johnson, and when Glados heard his enthusiastic rhetoric, it triggered a response in her. The kind either a super computer who loves dangerous science would like, or more likely, at least to me, the kind of enthusiasm Caroline fell in love with.

[@DoofXMachina]

@Hermaeus Mora yall are just proving my point. I may get the "shut up + ratio". But the reason you left p out the L was because yall are taking it instead of me

[@alliesangalli1757]

What the heck, how have I never noticed that the turrets die when GLaDOS uses her paradox?? What an awesome detail

[@unintentionallydramatic]

5:05 Hold on. You kind of contradict yourself a bit there. If the panels are covered in moon dust that means the Portal Gun very much _wasn't ever_ market-ready and his decision not to sell it is significantly less moronic than you make it out to be.

[@EvelynNdenial]

you know what would make gathering massive quantities of moon rock to commercialize the portal gun really easy? a portal gun.

[@naru2369]

@@EvelynNdenial still defeats the argument. Still would have a lot of trouble establishing the portal since they needed the moon rocks to make the paint, and couldn’t get to the moon through portals to collect more rocks because they wouldn’t have a viable enough surface to anchor the earthside portal. And if that weren’t the case, you would still need to look at the fact that when chell shot a portal to the moon, she almost immediately got sucked through the portal, at a velocity that would make any attempt to reenact it in a controlled environment nearly impossible, since the sudden jolt of pressure change could damage any equipment in the room, as well as can be fatal for anyone inside, as it would essentially be a shoot whoever was inside the controlled out of the side of the moon into space like a cannon, the second the portal was opened.

[@EvelynNdenial]

@@naru2369 glados grabbed chel with the claw and pulled her back in without hurting her. so spacesuit, a rope holding you to the wall, and the roof being an airtight door that closes once you shoot. now you've got a portal to the moon in a room under vacuum, include an airlock to get in and you've got the set up to start industrially mining moonrocks. getting large equipment through would be difficult given the size of the portal but you can carry parts through and build it all on the moon.

[@clickpause8732]

@@naru2369 Vacuum chamber?

[@sexkrazedpanda]

Legit put out a moondust wall in an airlock wit a window to moon. Or they could generate a portal like they did at the beginning of portal 1

[@2xpon]

"Don't worry, I'll debunk those later" is everything wrong with internet theorists in a single sentence.

[@mitch8088]

Spoiler alert: He did Not debunk those later lol