Only now, the Empress of Japan.
Dude.
I might have a use for this.
Oi! Hands off Hitomi, I've already got plans on her!!
What the end user might consider a product flaw might, in the mind of the designer, be a product feature. Before the Shutdown, Deus had already had one of the otaku he'd drawn from the Matrix at large betray him. One way to keep your kiddies loyal is to ensure that, if they somehow break conditioning, they can't run away without losing most of their abilities.
Very true, and I agree - probably deliberate, considering how well (or rather, how poorly) our little ronin otaku turned out.
Mirage took five minutes to accidentally create five perfected otaku. Which one do you think had more experience? Which one do you think had been assembled at the most basic level of their code to interface with the human mind and correct 'deviations' in their thought processes?
I'd content Deus' brainwashing and mind control techniques were far more advanced than anything Mirage could come up with. She could repair damage caused to nodes of the Network, but never could have done something similar herself. With all the resources Deus had at his disposal Mirage could certainly have drawn level, but she/it didn't have those resources.
Pretty sure you mean 'contend' there, so I'll presume that.
I think you confuse 'could have' with 'would have'. Mirage was specifically designed, programmed, and used to correct extreme psychological imbalances within the individuals with whom she had contact. To do so, she had a wide array of techniques and programs available to her,
probably including ones derived directly from the first Crash Virus. To use human terms, her
psychology was to help people, even if her
techniques and technology was able to do much more - and much worse.
I would also doubt the "accidental" bit. I'm pretty sure the five Mirage Otaku are specifically given this "gift".
Lastly, all the allusions you claim to be hard facts are from a single source: A novel. While technically novels are canon, they often take more than just a few liberties with setting and mechanics. I recall one novel where a character can suddenly jump crazy high because he activated his Wired Reflexes...
The 'accidental' part comes from the novel; go re-read it, and you'll see specifically why it's
those five who aren't affected by the intense psychological trauma that everyone else jacked in at the time was. They weren't planned; they 'simply' had an outlook on life, reflected in their iconography, that enabled them to cope with what was basically sudden major thanatopic psychological trauma - 'Hi, you're gonna die
right now!!"
The allusions I claim as hard facts don't just come from the novel, however; they also come from myriad non-novel game resources that accept the novel as canonical. As well, your argument is logically flawed; we are not talking about 'all the novels', we are speaking
specifically about this one,
Psychotrope, which really doesn't play much with any of the mechanics, excluding the 'otaku who don't Fade' thing -- which fact didn't even get revealed until much later, through means undoubtedly more acceptable to you.
I can't quote them all; I wouldn't hunt them down for you if I could. Like the reasons why Deus shut the Renraku Seattle Arcology down in the first place, like what's happened to the Three Pre-Crash-2 AIs, the information is in there. It's just a matter of knowing how to look at it.
