creepy, i see it now.
Doesn't explain the cake though.

I bet she does it like a weasel!!!

Poor GLaDoS.

She'd have a major head rush if she had blood. :(

Creepiest. Fanart. EVER.

Well, that sure can't be a coincidence.

For a second i thought it was another one of those robots turned into cute 10yrold girls thingies. Guess I was too busy (like most I'd assume) trying to beat the clock on this one to see that connection.

Woah, that's eerily similar work there, with the fanart and all. Nice analysis.

i'm not sure if that second pic is hot or not, but it is a neat idea either way, although, i think it is a bit of a stretch

thats great

And thus, Portal's concept is overthought once again.

@roflwaffles: the cake is so delicious and moist, no man or machine can resist

That's awesome.

but...but...I dont want to feel sorry for GlaDOS :O

How much more legend can we add to Portal, hasn't it reached epic proportions already?

Wow, even though it might be entirely dependent on a very specific angle, the concept is cool, and the fan art is also strangely fascinating, in kind of a morbidly terrifying sort of way. I'd love to see what Justin Cherry could do with an image like that.

Great, now I can't unsee it.

What the?

wow, i never noticed that resemblance.

Sorta philosophical, in a way...

@Ashurahori: oh man, and then there's the text afterwards, the followup examination of the Still Alive song.

This guy is assuming that the machine wants to die, which is interesting, and there's good evidence for it if you start with the assumption she's being sarcastic, but I don't think she is. I also don't think the cake is a lie. At the end, there's cake! It's just that her promises of giving *you* cake are a lie.

The being not being a lie is key to the whole enterprise. You can't just repeat the mantra--there is *clearly* cake.

Um. Wow. I bet that Valve probably didn't even mean to make it that way, but it's amazing what people can make with a given design.

Yeah thats kinda creepy that I never noticed that....then again I never looked that deeply into portal's main antagonist like that.

...just show me what's on the Borealis

kotaku is messing with my mind again......

Seems a lot more probable than the Majora's Mask Moon crashed and made Twilight Princess Hyrule's Death Mountain theory.

Man, I have to play Portal, I feel so damn left out. *cries* I know, I suck. Portal is supposed to be sublime(acording to Yahtzee the all mighty game reviewer)

Nice. I like this stuff. But this doesn't even come close to the EarthBound/ Abortion theory going around.

Epic facepalm. Stop reading too much into the game and just enjoy it. It's not some psychological thriller, it's a damn puzzler. And a funny one at that.

Its a neat little drawing and interpretation. I think it does get a bit on the fetish-y side for my tastes, but its still pretty cool.

However, Glados only looks that way from that specific angle, and the drawing takes a lot of liberties with what is actually in the image. The figures arms and neck for instance seem contrary to the orientation in the actual image.

Its neat, but there is nothing more here than U R MR GAY.

@ServiceMaster: DEATH MOUNTAIN IN NAME ONLY, FOR IT IS NEITHER.

I'm going to go with a No.

Holy Jesus, Portal really gets those "delve to deeply" cogs going for people. I'm not saying you can't have a good analysis of games, just that Portal is a horrible place to start.

If this guy found a woman in a straight jacket in a rogue AI, that's cool. I'm just wondering where all the articles analyzing MGS characters are. Or how 'bout Virgils (from DMC) quest for power in order to protect, why Dante is stopping him, and how that relates to the human condition. You know, some philosophical musings and shit.

I think if this theme was intended by Valve for Portal's story, this theory would've surfaced before now. Look, I love Portal, too, but it's not Dostoevsky.

That's an awesome, creepy and eerily depressing picture all rolled up into one. Ludos good sir.

It's an interesting interpretation, and I'm all for looking at things from different points of view...

That said, I'd always seen GLaDOS as having her head the right way up, not upside-down... More like a creepy spider hanging down from a web, staring at you.

the animism applied in his argument is interesting, but i think theres much more evidence that glados does not want anything and that she is in fact working off of a programming script based on the construction of her programmers. the hiccup where she killed the staff of was simply an oversight by her creators which could be simply explained by a self preservation system. the concept that she actually wants to be put to death, however, cannot be explained through programming, it implies that glados is actually capable of feeling sensations and having free rational thought at the same organically intimate level that a living person would. it introduces a super-natural element to something which is completely devoid of any form of magic otherwise.
glados did not build the obstacles that he's suggesting she needs to put chell through in order to kill her, they were constructed by aperture scientists. she has no choice but to put chell through the obstacles, and something that continues working off a script even after everyone else is dead probably doesnt have any intimate feelings of desire, just lines of code.
the woman being hung upside down visual though is extremely evident, and the bondage seems like it might hold some weight, but let's not forget that most people who participate in bondage do so willingly as sadomasochists.
the visual symbol of a girl hanging upside down, if truly intended, should only be interpreted as an allusion. a symbol designed to make a reference to something else culturally significant. rarely are any metaphors or any form of symbolism actually stand to mean that the characters are actually jesus, the virgin mary, president bush, or satan. theyre merely there to draw parallels, but still people like to interpret allusion as the intended truth of an artwork rather than just elements which contribute to the intended effect of the art.

"I'm not even angry...
I'm being so sincere right now -
Even though you broke my heart,
and killed me.

And tore me to pieces.
And threw every piece into a fire.
As they burned it hurt because
I was so happy for you!"

"(Go ahead and leave me...)
(I think I'd prefer to stay inside...)"

"When I look out there,
it makes me glad I'm not you."

These lyrics contradict the idea that GLaDOS wants to escape the lab, and that she wanted to die. Rather I think she is designed to want people to succeed in the manner Chell did, but also wants to stop them from doing it. Which is the beautiful type of logic you can only find within an A.I.

For somebody who wants to die, she sure seems pretty happy to be still alive. Gotta love when people look too hard at something.

This sounds more to me like the author got caught drawing some kinky fan art and tried to come up with a quick explanation.

I always got the impression that GlaDOS wasn't really an AI so much as a piece of software gone a wee bit nutty HAL 9000 style.

SHODAN, maybe. GlaDOS? Naw, GlaDOS is just some buggy computer program.

Oh, God! I can't unsee it!

lol! Amazing. I wanna go through the game again, just to see it.

That's really creepy... and odd that I never noticed that you could see a body-like shape in GLaDOS...

Please read the Max Wagner comment
[www.game-ism.com]
It put *all* in some interesting new light. Like explain all to me. So yes. Se was suffering a multiple personality disorcer inflicted by Aperture Science, and she was triing to stop that.
And Chell could be a clone :I

Okay people, seriously. I'm sure it was a neat game and all, but this is taking the whole fanboy thing a bit far. Enough already.

My wife is DAMNED tired of hearing me talk about Portal in general and GLaDos in particular...

Too bad for her that I am going to force her to read this before we go to bed tonight.

Amazing. the more we look at portal the more we see. Whether valve intended all this, portal is definaltly an interesting exploration of man vs. machine, a subject that heavily weighs on our collective subconcious.

@Garro: Because those stories even seem as deep. Just complex. Although they are interesting and entertaining just as well, just in a different way then Portal.

Then again... I may have a bit too much bias against MGS and DMC. I only played the first MGS and I don't really like hack and slash style games like DMC or God of War. plus my ignorance of the games story may be leaving me out of something possibly deep.

The Cake is still a lie. How do you think they trapped her to be able to put her in that position.

I have never noticed that.

I was trying to make a GLaDOS character in rock band to commerate the release of "Still Alive." But i never even thought that thing hanging from the celing resembled anything at all.

Still waters run deep.

I had no idea... time to add a new picture to my porn collection.

@roflwaffles: Dude, isn't it obvious? Cake is the safety word!

Also, you have possibly the best user name ever. Evar.

@warpped655: Nah, you're not missing much. MGS has an okay story, but it's mostly just tired illuminati conspiracy theory junk mixed with Hollywood/out of touch style musings on what it means to be a soldier. And neither DMC nor GoW have any plot worth remembering. Certainly nothing noteworthy anyway. But I think he was only half-serious anyway.

@RickBarrs: Just remember that she may get even. =p.

That was a very interesting read. While being intrigued by the game in general, it never ceases to amaze me how many different theories for various elements in the game keep surfacing. While some people seem to be growing weary of them, I have to say that each one has its own level of interest and worthy of the time it takes to read them.

This one, in addition, was just eerie.

I'd hit it?

wow...hot? and what kind of person goes this far?

I like the article. I think it's impossible not to see some relationship and/or sexual themes in Portal. The game is really about Glados, her emotions, and her relationship to Chell. The article mentions one of the previous designs for Glados had her as a female statue hung upside down, so I think it is not unreasonable to see her final form as meant to be feminine. I also like the idea that she didn't necessarily want to die, she just wanted to be free of the "body" that kept her confined, which brings this whole theory well in line with Still Alive and what not.

Also: That picture is hot.

So they smear cake everywhere...and then what?

Rule 34 strikes again!

I'd hit GLaDOS...if she was a real female

What's "Portal?"

It's official. This game has jumped the shark.

I mean, I can understand the feminism views. I can understand the deep logic views. But now this?

COME ON! It is a puzzle shooter. The main character doesn't talk and there are only a few half life references that loosely assemble a story line.

Talk about fishing here, this takes the Cake. No Lie.

Why must people analyze Portal so much? Seriously, there's so much speculation for every little detail in the game, from the significance of the main character being female, to picking apart what little phrases there are, to this? *cries* leave Portal alone!

@huginn:
Yeah, jumping the shark means you've attempted to continue on long after your story is over. Portal hasn't attempted to do that, we're not up to Portal 14: The Revenge of GlaDOS. This is just another person trying to reason out what the Portal story is all about. You pretty much made no sense there.