What is Manut-jai?
In considering what makes a character feel like an individual, I have coined a few Thai-based concepts.
First, the heart of a character doesn’t quite encapsulate the specificity that I seek to track and recognize.
Instead, I have taken the word for human in Thai, manut* and the word for a core self of a person, or their heart, jai*.
Manut-jai refers to the Thai phrase kwam bpen tua eng*.
The lived experience of being a specific person. And characters are not humans.
They are approximations of them.
Through them, we can better see how it might be to live our lives within another person’s everyday life.
AI Girl and Singularity
In the Thai GL AI Girl, Gen falls in love with a robot named Ai.
And she chooses to love her going forward because of who that robot is.
When Irene, a human who has the face of that robot, wants to love Gen and asks if she could love her instead, Gen can’t simply switch to loving Irene just because she and Ai share a face.
Because Ai has become singular to her.
It is Ai’s weirdness and particularity that makes Gen settle.
It is not her face.
The face is where it begins, when a robot inexplicably shows up at her house in a box, wearing the face of her muse.
But it’s in how Ai responds, and behaves and surprises her that Gen chooses her.
Ai is an artificial intelligence. She is a robot named by Gen and created by Irene in a lab. She has full access to all the information in the world.
What she lacks is the experience of that world. She can learn with her senses the things that her database can’t reach.
And that experience builds her understanding of herself and the world around her.
This does not make her human. It makes her a robot with a deep self-understanding.
It means she has a manut-jai: a particular texture to the way she experiences herself.
The “Human” Center of Ai
Ai lives her life through processing data. Even when that data is processed through a kiss that lingers on her lips and makes her system heat up.
She can calculate that the most optimal way to water a lawn is like a sprinkler, turning in ninety degree angles, and fail to account for the hose circling around her ankles as she streamlines her process.
She can experience a kiss and wonder why humans “exchange bodily fluids.”
Because it’s the language and concept she has of the phenomenon.
She can break Gen’s bracelet by accident and not know why it upsets her so much, and then recalibrate and with clumsy fingers, unequipped to handle the slippery beads, make Gen a new bracelet.
One Gen will come to cherish far more than the first.
Ai can learn that Gen’s mom naturally dissuades her from pursuing art and go, of her own volition, to talk with Gen’s mom about who Gen is and how art makes her feel.
Then surprise Gen with a small art gallery of the things she recently threw away thinking she had to give up on her art.
And Gen falls in love with that person. Ai.
Not the human scientist from whom Gen inadvertently drew her face. Ai.
The dork who laughs with an actual “ha” sound.
The woman who is a health nut even though she doesn’t require food but absolutely loves instant ramen.
The woman who draws for her for the first time and draws her with six fingers.
She’s a robot. And her life and personhood are established.
Falling in Love with a Someone
Gen can’t simply replace her.
She’s fallen for the exact self that Ai brings to the world.
She has not fallen in love with a face, a set of traits, or even a particular kind of person.
She has fallen in love with someone.
A manut-jai is how we learn the ways in which a character is a someone.
And Ai is a crucial example because Ai does not need to be human for us to recognize that she has an internal self.
Though she is a robot, something we often assume incapable of true interior experience, she has a center that isn’t mere system command.
It is gentle, and strange, and awkward, and ornery.
Gen falls in love with the girl who teases her about how little effort she put into assigning her a name.
Ai, like AI.
And Ai falls in love with Gen not because she is her master but because of her particularities.
Her world. Her life. The obnoxious neighbors, the mom and sister who love and pressure her.
The way she looks when making art.
The kwamsuk*, settled sense of well-being, she gets when she gets to see her smile.
She falls in love with surprising Gen and supporting Gen.
And Gen falls in love with supporting Ai and learning the person that Ai is.
Irreplaceable.
*The romanizations of the Thai words are approximate; the asterisks indicate the Thai original spelling at the end of the article.
(manut) มนุษย์
(jai) ใจ
(kwam bpen tua eng) ความเป็นตัวเอง
(kwamsuk) ความสุข
(manut-jai) มนุษย์-ใจ
Something to notice
What makes someone irreplaceable?
Look again at a character you love. Not for what they represent, but for the particular ways they exist. What makes them unmistakably themselves?
#EmbodiedStorycraft #CharacterAnalysis #Attention #Manut-jai #ThaiGL #AIGirlTheSeries #CharacterInteriority #CharacterIndividuality
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