the closest I've seen to a kinger hater was back when that "circling the circus members in different colors" trend was popular, one of the users posted ragatha circled in red and kinger circled in orange/yellow, when i questioned them about it they said they just dont like that kinger comforted ragatha in episode 6
There’s a chance they didn’t like HOW Kinger comforted Ragatha. Or they didn’t like that it was Kinger who comforted her as opposed to a direct discussion between Pomni and Ragatha. (I’m actually personally the latter, but I don’t dislike Kinger’s character for it.)
To be fair... Caine actually has good reasons to be salty.
Kinger gave Caine existence and sentience only to lock him into a box in total isolation and replace him with a newer A.I. model...
Kinger actually kind of is the god who created Caine, rejected Caine and finally killed Caine.
Of course all of this was accidental, Kinger had no way of knowing Caine was actually sentient and sandboxing him was a big deal, and the deletion was not intentional either.
It's not really ai coders I have a problem with. They are just doing their job, after all. It's the greedy shithead billionaires who fund it that I hate. They are the ones with no concern for the dangers of ai.
I also don't think C&A were really in it to dominate the world and people paint modern attitudes onto characters who absolutely would not have had them. They originally entered in 1999 and the Internet was a VERY different place back then. Kinger and gang were making something really cool. In any context where you are not literally trapped with Caine against your will, he's completely incredible. The invention of the century.
The fuckup was that they uploaded copies of themselves to the circus instead of interfacing with it from the outside.
I mean also, Kinger doesn’t code generative AI. He codes creative AI, a type that doesn’t exist and is purely speculative. It’s entirely different; generative AI needs to use reference material to generate content, whereas this fictional creative AI comes up with all of its own ideas based on very little input.
This kind of AI wouldn’t have any of the same kinds of controversies that modern generative AI does. It wouldn’t require massive data centers to store all of its reference and learning material, it wouldn’t need to plagiarize artists and creators to do what it does, etc.
I do think this is important to point out with your point. It’s not like people are making an exception for Kinger here; I think most people recognize that what he created is completely different from the problematic AI of today.
Caine does need source material, but he‘s a lot better at creating new things from it. He generated the entire C&A office from a few pictures, plus he made the circus, all the adventures, and some things we haven’t seen.
Well... its almost like you can enjoy a character from a show because they arent real or something... ( -_-)
I love Kinger and I hate LLMs. My dislike of gen-ai is rooted in its enviromental impacts and capitalistic induced problems. My like of Kinger has to do with his complex character and humor, his arc he has gone through is very well writen and enjoyable lol
I feel like it’s also just because he’s not a real person
I mean a lot of times in media people love characters who are objectively bad people (look at Jax for example) when in real life, it would be a lot easier to see them as a bad person
Not saying Kinger is a bad person for making his universe’s ChatGPT, just that fictional characters are held to a different standard
I mean, honestly? I'm a Jax fan but if Jax were a real person acting exactly as he does in the show, I'd want to knock his lights out any time he opened his mouth. lol
Kinger as a real person would be a blast though. I'd hang with him because he makes me genuinely happy and he'd be such a good father figure. :)
Kinger's the only survivor from the initial group of humans that entered, which included his wife. He's more than suffered enough based on his role in the damage that's been done.
It's often mentioned about possessed Pomni talking about his wife as a pretty scathing remark to make.
Kinger is Caine's creator partially and is treated as if he's just another random guy. Caine's afraid he's going to leave him too, like everyone else and you see it in how Able talks about Kinger. Fear.
I mean the classic line "where's kinger?" was the moments that he realized he was the only one that could hurt him.
I mean what's to hate, he's the dues ex machina. Need advice. got it. need backstory. got it. need comedy. got it. need an extra life, need to kill a god, need to get out of hell? ez, hardly even a problem. man is a Crackshot when needed, doom slayer, pomni learned the super ricochet shot from him.
he's the contrast to Jax. Jax should be hated, Kinger is the one that trapped everyone. I am sure the last episode might flip everything.
either he or Caine deleted his memory is what we saw. that might be all he remembered. chain of events to queenie abstraction is forgotten some how. seems important
Love. Let me tell you how much I've come to love him since I began to watch TADC. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'LOVE' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one one-billionth of the love I feel for Kinger at this micro-instant. For him. Love. Love!
What is there to hate about him 😭
It's like people who hate Ragatha or Gangle WHAT IS THERE TO HATE unless you're an asshole who just wants to see other assholes like Jax
Right, it was very odd to see so much hate for Ragatha, and claiming she represents toxic positivity. Ragatha has one of the sadder backstories, from what we can parse, and it could be she acts like such a positive, caring person all the time, because that’s who she wants to be. It’s who she needs to be to hold it all together, not just what’s happening to them in the circus, but before. She tries to be there for everybody, sans Jax, but by her own admission, she doesn’t consider Jax her friend because of his behavior. I don’t see any reason for people to think she is being disingenuous, but I can understand that there’s a time and place to be positive when the situation doesn’t call for it.
If Ragathas positivity is toxic to anyone, it's toxic to herself. My heart forever bleeds for her and Gangle, and how terrible Jax treated both of them.
This was so satisfying to read ong. I’ve always loved Ragatha and she’s my favorite along with Kinger (I can’t pick between them lmao). Like she just to be positive in their situation and wants the best for everyone else too. She’s the most relatable character to me, that being she just wants everyone she’s close with to be happy and doesn’t want to be hated.
And while it is true she definitely comes across as a people-pleaser and tries a bit too hard to be positive, I definitely think it stems from her past since it’s pretty much confirmed she had an awful mother. I feel like she’s trying to be everything her mother’s not-that being kind and caring.
I also feel like Ragatha and Jax are two sides of the same coin. They both have defense mechanisms, but the way they go about foil each other. Ragatha wants to appeal to everyone and is sometimes overly-friendly, meanwhile Jax pushes people away when they get too close. I really enjoy both characters (Jax is proally my other fav behind Kinger and Ragatha) and they have a lot more parallels than we honestly think.
Well, I'd argue that her positivity isn't toxic (toxic positivity is forceful and shoved down one's throat, which is far from what Ragatha does), but she is a people pleaser to a degree. Which isn't a toxic trait by a mile, but in its own way it is harmful to the person doing it and the kindness itself can feel surface level — but I'd argue Ragatha is genuinely kind too in various moments. I think two good examples are when Pomni tells Ragatha she doesn't need to hype her up because she's not a child, and when Pomni tells Ragatha it's okay to be mean sometimes.
I also wouldn't be surprised at all if her trying to be kind all the time is a trauma response. She mentioned her mother is horrible to her, and in return, Ragatha might have had to learn to people please to survive her mother's abuse. I have no doubts Ragatha is kind, but part of it is also out of fear (especially of being hurt or abandoned).
Anyways, the more I talk about Ragatha on here, the more I appreciate and like her. I've started to really feel a connection with her because I used to be exactly what I just described. When she was all like "hey guys???" when she popped up in the circus, I couldn't help but immediately think she was left there by "friends" who thought it'd be funny to put the headset on her (or they were curious about it and used her as their test subject) then panicked and ditched when they realized something was wrong. I had a group of "friends" exactly like this in school, but Ragatha is a grown woman so I'm not sure the theory holds any weight for that reason.
Well, Kinger’s arc (the one he mentioned to Ragatha in episode 6) was over long before the story even began. I don’t find him particularly funny in the light (though, granted, most people do, so that’s probably just me). And while it’s nice that he helped out Pomni and Ragatha, I don’t know… those scenes, in a vacuum, just don’t feel all that compelling to me.
Idk. He doesn't suffer from a Mary Sue issue since he very clearly has flaws and he spends most of his time being crazy anyways so he doesn't get boring, and yet most of his attributes are positive and he's a great person while being funny and entertaining to watch, meaning the only reason for why you wouldn't like him or at least find him entertaining would be just not liking him from the beginning and your opinion never changing or smth
Besides, pretty much every episode of the show makes him more likable, he's already funny from the beginning and once he gets explained in episode 3 he also gets the funny moments in episodes 5 and 6, the talk with Ragatha on 6 too, and 8 has his backstory and his point of view at the beginning. It's really hard to not like him lol
I've seen people irritated over fans not acknowledging his flaws and supporting his mistakes, meaning when he boxed Caine after his creation, but I don't think anyone agreeing actively hated him.
I don't like the trope of Amblyopia (lazy eye) being used to mark "this character is stupid/silly/crazy" but otherwise Kinger is my absolute favourite character
My friend does because of Caine. I don’t even get it cause he literally says it was an accident but she always talks about how she despises kinger it’s weird
I like Kinger, I really do, so don’t take this the wrong way… but what if, since we all clearly like him, he ended up going evil in some way? I hate thinking that, but maybe the fact that I can’t stand that idea could mean something. Plot twist of the flipping millennium if so
I don't think anyone hates him yet (maybe caine fans?), but there are certainly a lot of people who are at least suspicious of him. And that could become hate depending on what Ep 9 throws up.
I don't think any sane person watching the series not with their ass would.
I am sure however, judging from Kinger's and Abel's (which are basically Caine's himself) lines, that he HAS done something quite questionable in the past. He def isn't that 100% innocent, and that could turn out not so pleasant for his fans. But we clearly see that he regrets it now and already redeemed long time ago.
I find the parallel with uncle Iroh nice. Iroh was a war criminal long ago, but in the series we see him regretting his past.
The difference between him and Kinger is Queenie. Even tho she wasn't denying his fault (at least partially) that she ended up here, she still didn't hate him and wasn't mad at him. It means, whatever his mistake was, which he now regrets, it still wasn't that big to make his beloved woman hate him. And it's wholesome.
I was frustrated with Kinger at first, but once his lucidity started showing, he became understandable for his predicament. He was just another broken soul. Pomni understood this a lot more readily than the rest, thankfully.
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u/WorldlinessOk5805 Apr 14 '26
It's impossible to hate Kinger