As you would perhaps expect, Mopey takes a sober and analytical approach to the subject of motivation. I mean, at least at first. But that’s as good as it ever gets, anyway. Nobody takes an analytical approach all the way through to the end, that’s just not how humans work.
Having been brought back from the edge of death to close to the edge of death by the Colonel’s motivational speech (or perhaps his inspiring example of breaking with tradition), Mopey takes stock. Using a mental set of scales apparently stolen from Yu-Gi-Oh, she assesses, quite correctly, that the bags of money and the bags of happiness should count toward having some motivation. She’s seen and experienced the value and usefulness of money many, many times throughout her life, after all. And while she’s rarely seen and never experienced happiness, she’s read a couple of reviews that were uniform in rating it five stars out of five.
That was easy, but it gets more complicated when the death of all of humanity is the issue. Do you rate it that as a net positive or a net negative? How do you calculate the rate between the loss of the people that actually are a loss and the loss of the people that aren’t? Should we expect someone like Mopey to have a very long list of people that she’d consider a net loss? Would her own loss be a loss to her?
The current iteration of Mopey is understandably struggling to find an answer…fortunately, the former iteration of Mopey still lives within her, and she shifts the scales decisively in the other direction. Burn, Lillytown, burn!
More on Thursday.
Admittedly, I would suspect Motivating Mopey would probably take a different tact than motivating most of the rest of the cast.
Mind you, I suppose you could say the same about Snuka, but Snuka’s easy: Money is a powerful motivator, and they already have that.
Mopey, though… what do you do to motivate her to do something like this? Make every antagonist a dumb jock she can inflict suffering upon? That doesn’t sound right, it’s just the only thing I can think of.
Yeah, that’s exactly the challenge. Snuka reacts very well to external motivators – particularly the flat, green ones with numbers on them. The others should be susceptible to external motivation to a larger or lesser degree…but Mopey and K’ip are outside of the reach of external motivators by nature. K’ip because he’s a cat and thus required to never do what somebody else wants him to do…and Mopey because she kinda likes how that ‘motivation’ thing sounds, but she doesn’t anything to do with it if it interferes with her ennui. And it kinda might do that.
Fortunately, as a B-movie writer you can always fall back on ass-pulls or deus-ex-machina, otherwise I’d be really screwed. =P