Bunnie Rabbot in: "Upgrade".
Reviewed by Chaos Theory T. Echidna.
October 8, 1999.
Before we get any further into this, I would like to state the following. You might want to hold your screen away from your ear when you read the next line:
THIS STORY REALLY, REALLY, REALLY PISSES ME OFF!!!!!
And you'll see why in a bit. We start off with Bunnie Rabbot, who I LIKE dagnabit, laying down on an operating table while Dr. Quack and a bunch of others are working on her. Evidently she almost died and they had to do surgery--she's sorta stable-ish for now, but her metabolism is all screwed up. To find out why, you'll have to keep reading.
Here we see a flashback from just a little while ago, I assume, showing Bunnie holding a...tree?...over her head and getting very dizzy and collapsing. (No, the thing she was carrying didn't fall on her.) Antoine gets very worried about her and rushes her to the hospital.
Cutting back to the present "...and she COLLAPSED just like zat!" Antoine finishes. Doctor Quack lives up to his name by basically saying that right now, there isn't anything he can do for her except to tell her to rest.
In the next panel, we see everyone gathered around her bed with EXTREMELY anime-style eyes (James Fry, who drew this one, loooooooves eye-highlights) and expressing their concern for poor Bunnie. Quack then comes in and yells, "What is this, Mobius Grand Central Station?!" (oooh...STATION SQUARE!!! I wish...) and chases everyone out. Bunnie then demands to know, finally, what is wrong with her?
It's something that has been a risk for quite some time now--her robotic parts are starting to "argue" with her organic parts--the metal limbs no longer act reliably with her central nervous system. It's as if her body is fighting a war against itself--to be all-organic, or all-robotic. But evidently a hybrid mix doesn't survive for long. As Dr. Quack puts it, she has "conflicting operating systems." Ya know, I always knew that mixing "Windows 95" with a Mac was a bad idea, but I never thought it was THAT bad...!
But this is no laughing matter--in time, as the connections continue to degrade, the robotic parts will eventually become TOXIC to her, and she'll DIE! Unless something is done, of course.
Dr. Quack gives her a terrible choice:
1. Have her robotic limbs removed entirely and go through life as a paraplegic.
2. Have a hardware "upgrade" (and we have title, ladies and gentlebeings!) with NO possibility of EVER being deroboticised...
3. Or attempt to deroboticise herself now, with an only "one in a billion" chance of survival!
He then leaves her to cry over her "options" alone in the dark. Oh, geez....
Antoine comes in to see if she's all right, and, with tears running down her face, she asks if he would still love her if she looked like this for the rest of her life? And he says, "My dearest sweet Bunnie--I would love you no matter what--as long as we faced each day togethaire!"
Okay, now I don't want to hear ANY MORE Antoine-bashing. Not on THIS site, anyway! I always liked him just as a protest because most people beat him up all the time; now I like him for HIMSELF. His treatment of Bunnie is incredibly romantic, sweet, loving, and caring. If he can treat someone else like that, then he is NOT just the egotistical cowardly jerk everyone seems to think he is. He's a decent guy. So LAY OFF ANTOINE!
Thank you.
So on the next page, it's obvious which choice she went with--a "hardware upgrade", in which she has her old robotic limbs replaced by newer, better-looking ones, which were evidently made by Nate Morgan. (Whom I know practically nothing about.) And with that, Bunnie goes happily ZOOMING off the ground, making a saucy comment while Sonic says, "You GO, girl!" and the story is over.
Now for my reaction--again. I have SEVERAL problems with this story. For starters:
1. If her OLD robotic limbs were threatening her life, then why exactly would getting new ones help her? Wouldn't she still have the same problem of her body, essentially, rejecting the implants? After all, if her system didn't like being half-and-half once, what's to say it won't start fighting against itself again? That part was never explained.
2. Her new robotic body just CONVENIENTLY happens to make her look super-sexy. Oh, GEEZ, and it was designed by a guy, too, as well. That Playboy Bunnie shot of her doing this slinky, saucy pose with her hands on her hips and looking over her shoulder, with the fullllll body shot (like in the old movies, when they'd show the beautiful woman very slowly from the feet up) makes her look like she's turning into Seven of Bun. I swear, if she says ANYthing about "Resistance" being "futile", I'm outta here. Remember what I said earlier about the "swimsuit issue" thing not being a joke? Well, it isn't. It's TRUE!
3. My BIGGEST problem with this is that one line of Dr. Quacks:
"NO chance of EVER being deroboticised..."
AAAACCCCCCKKKKKK!!! NOOOOOO!!!!! I LIKE Bunnie, dangit! I want her to have a CHANCE! A possibility! A HOPE! You don't have to get her fixed up and normal right NOW, but I would like it if the freaking OPTION existed in the UNIVERSE!
Okay, now, when I complained to Mr. Penders about this on his site (by the way, I don't NORMALLY go around expressing my opinions of things to the authors who actually wrote them all the time; it's just that in this one case, the author had a website with a messageboard--and I had a temper!) he said that he'd recieved many letters from handicapped people saying that they regarded Bunnie as a hero/role-model and they asked him please NOT to deroboticise her. Well, I can see that. I feel like an idiot for not thinking of it sooner. But STILL...did he really have to remove all hope? Couldn't he just have had Quack say, "There will be nothing _I_ can do to deroboticise you"? That at least would have implied that there was something someone else could do--if not now, then in the future. That strikes me as being a compromise everybody could live with. And we can assume that Mobian technology will advance in time. But noooooo, she has "no hope" at ALL. EVER!
Not to mention it's rather inconsistent with things that have been shown before. In one of the SatAM cartoons we saw Bunnie deroboticised, and in a possible future-vision in this comic series we saw her made whole again in the future. Well, maybe that future won't happen. But it was described, at the time, as a POSSIBLE future, not a completely fake vision or hallucination. Which means that if that's a possible future, then it's NOT totally beyond hope for Bunnie to be deroboticised!
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tourists have stopped by to read Bunnie's solo story since October 8, 1999. Of course, they all ended up drawing de-roboticised pictures of Bunnie as a protest and putting them all over the 'net, but hey...