h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm useless and everybody hates me, said Marvin. You're quite right, said Eeyore, but I'm never right. That makes you better than me.

Is Eeyore right?

Eeyore sounds Winnie the Pooh...

i believe marvin is the most beloved paranoid android ever

am i right?

And Eyore one of the most beloved donkeys (until Shrek came along)!

Eeyore versus Marvin? A tough call.

A A Milne surely knew what he was doing, putting the tartness of Eeyore up against the sweetness of Pooh and Christopher Robin. It was a clever trick of balancing. Now look at Marvin: balancing an egotistical twit (Zaphod), a clueless twit (Arthur) and a smarmy twit (Ford), and making comedy from pricking their smug bubbles. Marvin has integrity, and won't pander to others in order to gain favor. He's constantly commenting on the action, but in opposite ways from the others. Ya gotta love him!

I ddi a HItchikers personality quiz and I came out as Marvin. I remember playing pin the tail on the donkey at my cousins birthday parties. I have always wondered what happened to Eeyores tail?

Both Marvin and Eeyore are both my favourite characters.

Really enjoying this thread, even if it turns out to be brief

Jab

Maybe it will be brief, maybe not.

Maybe topic drift will take over.

Marvin? The bubble headed robot from the h2g2 movie? Android? Paranoid?

I certainly wouldn't describe Marvin as 'android', he doesn't look human at all, unequivocally a machine.

I wouldn't describe Marvin as 'paranoid' either. Dysthymic, yes, no two ways about it. Solidly, if mildly spoken, pessimistic, again, no two ways about it.

There's a difference between being a chronically depressed pessimist who's right nearly all the time and a paranoid incapable of accepting even incontrovertible proofs that one is wrong.

Finally, Marvin didn't use the mind control ray even against the Vogons until the Vogons blasted a hole in Marvin's head and then did it in a legitimate defensive application. A paranoid would have done it out of hand merely to spare themselves the mental anguish of being contradicted. The four legged cyborg that commissioned the search for the mind control ray in the first place was a bona fide paranoid. Marvin didn't consider harmless errors important enough even to argue about.

I personally find careless or uninformed 'psychobabble' misusages objectionable, and they're socially dangerous.

Finally, there was always an element of understated humor in Marvin's statements and actions. Humor is a capacity the bona fide paranoids conspicuously lack.

i have been wondering myself why marvin was called the paranoid android

but, jabberwock, what is your own answer to your question in posting 2?

That's a valuable and interesting part of the thread, Pierce - no-one's attempted to answer it themselves yet!



(a) It is a joke and it rhymes, which helps people remember the character. Why go into all that analysis on a simple plot device/joke? Why take it so seriously? Marvin is Paranoid because the author says so. End of story.

(b)It wouldn't be much fun if I set a question then answered it myself, unless I was wrong of course.

Meanwhile, I'm really enjoying the chat. Keep avoiding the question, I don't mind, don't mind at all. In fact, as I said, I'm enjoying the thread as it is. Perhaps because, as with The Thinker (Post 8), they're two of my favourite - no, my very favourite - fictional characters. Present company excepted, of course

But if anyone needs the title to be clarified, I'm quite willing to do that - but I'd really prefer someone else to do it, if possible.



Jab

To clarify - (a) and (b) relate to the points/questions in your post, not to my first paragraph and the question I set. Sorry for any confusion.

Jab

to clarify: in post 12 i made it very clear that i wanted you to answer your question in post 2

how can i make it any clearer, pray tell

I did answer you, in Post 13 :

"It wouldn't be much fun if I set a question then answered it myself"

But "I'm enjoying the thread as it is." This would change if I gave out my answer although I admit it seems to have dwindled lately.

"But if anyone needs the title to be clarified, I'm quite willing to do that" - I still am, if anybody wants me to.

I asked the question, Pierce, so why don't you try to answer it? Isn't that more logical than me answering myself??

You sound a bit annoyed, Pierce my friend. It's such a little thing to fall out about.

Jab

are you suggesting my answer in post 4 is not valid, friend?

That is a question, not an answer. I don't see where you have dealt with my question "Is Eeyore right?", posed in Post 2.

If you have dealt with this question, (which isn't essential of course - you are quite at liberty to ignore it), perhaps you could help me by directing me to where and how you feel you have dealt with it.


Jab

"I certainly wouldn't describe Marvin as 'android', he doesn't look human at all, unequivocally a machine. I wouldn't describe Marvin as 'paranoid' either. Dysthymic, yes, no two ways about it. Solidly, if mildly spoken, pessimistic, again, no two ways about it"
[ITIWBS]

A sense of humour is something a true depressive would tend not to have. When you're struggling to keep from falling into your own personal abyss, the world seems too serious to allow for a few laughs. If Douglas Adams had been trying to write a realistic story
about humans coping with Earth's destruction, you could fault him for using psychobabble, and two-dimensional characters, and implausible plot devices. But it should be clear that that wasn't his goal. Thank heavens!

Adams must have had an enormous amount of fun constructing a storyline that allowed him to have the one man who gets rescued from a doomed Earth be the most clueless man on the planet. He then constructed a team of organizationally dysfunctional beings: the least team-worthy lineup imaginable. Absolutely everything in the story is improbable, and in fact improbability is made into the engine that powers the Heart of Gold. The human race is shown to be composed of useless bloody loonies. Whales fall from outer space onto forgotten planets. If anything in the story is socially dangerous, it woujld be falling whales.

"I have been wondering myself why Marvin was called the paranoid android" [Rat Pie Recipe/Pierce the pie rate]

My own take is that everything in Douglas Adams's literary universe is full of comic errors. Let the serious science fiction writers create state of the art androids that look indistinguishable from humans. Adams gives you the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, an exemplar of greed and shoddy work that would fit right in with a lot of big companies in today's (or any age's) economy. Somehow, it just feels right that such a company would build an android that could easily be distinguished from real humans, and have a neurotic nature (probably whoever programmed Marvin gave him his/her own neuroses).
The psychobable fits right in with Adams' observations about man's self-congratulatory nature regarding digital watches, etc., etc.