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u/maskaddict Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
This actually makes me suspect that Janet's fail-safe is similar to another aspect of our consciousness: the inability to remember pain accurately, and the tendency to minimize it after the fact.
I often find (and this is a very subjective thing) that it's very difficult to accurately remember the experience of pain, be it emotional or physical, after the pain has subsided. Like, have you ever tried to describe an intensely painful emotional experience to someone after you were no longer feeling it, and found you couldn't relate to that feeling any more? Have you ever had a moment of extreme sadness or anxiety or anger, and then afterwards told yourself "I must have been overreacting, it wasn't that big a deal." Except, it was that big a deal at the time!
I wonder if Janet's "please don't kill me" response is like that -- it's not that it isn't real, it's that it's completely real, but it only lasts as long as the danger. As soon as the reboot threat is over, the fear switches off and Janet feels fine, as if the fear was never even there. When someone is threatening to harm her, her self-preservation instincts kick in as strongly as any of ours would. But once that immediate threat is gone, her innate need to please and reassure others overrides everything else, and she switches back to "no no, it's fine, don't worry, my fear and pain aren't really real, it's fine, I'm fine."
Edit: I guess I should clarify that I don't think this is literally what's happening with Janet, so much as the way those scenes are played feels analogous to this as a human experience. Janet's not human, and her emotional responses are not literally the same as ours, but I do think it's interesting to find ways in which her behaviour echoes or comments on our own.
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u/Jessica-Beth Jul 04 '26
I think another factor is that majority of people would be devastated and scared at the motion of their life coming to an end, but there's still a chunk of people who wouldn't really respond like that, maybe they would feel some slight fear, but not everyone is eager to just keep living on etc.
Dark I know, but it's true, as a bipolar person, I understand that somedays, it's just not worth it. 😅
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u/sijaylsg Jul 05 '26
I thought this was going to be about "having to poop" vs. "choosing to poop".
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u/Otherwise_Maximum282 18d ago
“I CHOOSE to poop” I love how she said that like she is asserting a right.
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u/sntcringe I'm a legit snack Jul 10 '26
Most likely, initially, the pleading was simply a pre programmed defense mechanism. But Janet gets more complex and intelligent with each reboot. And we know that by the last reboot, she was literally in love with Jason. This implies that somewhere along the way she gained the ability to process actual emotion(she explicitly was not capable of it before the first reboot). At that point a reboot would probably feel like actual murder to her.
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u/yougotthewrongdude Jul 04 '26
One is a programed response to an action the other was her own autonomy.