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#mechanistic theory of life
theskysungqueen · 27 days
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to make things brief cause I suck at organizing what I have to say, the live action was definitely Something™.
Cast: 10/10 kinda biased personally but yall can't take this from me
Gordon as Aang and Dallas as Zuko were the standouts imo. Gordon needs some direction on line delivery and the angstier scenes but overall he's very charming and I'm so proud of him for getting so much exposure!
Ian as Sokka was great, I just wish he was allowed to be more...messy? like Sokka pretends to be chill and all that but he's actually dramatic so I hope that gets improved in the next season if there is one
speaking of improvement, Kiawentiio as Katara brought out a softer side to the character but sadly diminished her spark and passion. I like that Katara now actually feels like a younger sister, it makes sense within the context of the story that Sokka and Gran Gran would shelter her after what happened, but as someone said, her anger is so central to her character and I just wish that got shown more. It's more of a script and direction problem tbh, if you look at Kia's interviews she has the sass and feistiness Katara needs
Lizzy as Azula is great, the writing is a bit clunky though so she did the best she could with it. Can't really comment on Mai and Ty Lee yet because they're kinda just there but it's a nice setup
Maria as Suki? perfection show stopping never the same she is a queen and I love the tidbit of Suki backstory which she never really had in the og show. I love her being such a loser around her crush we love to see girlfailures girlfailing. I wish the writers didn't make them KISS though 😭 slowburn ftw
the adults were great
Writing: 6.5/10
There were genuinely good moments and I love the concept of mixing up certain plot points to condense the story
But they just suffered from too much Telling instead of Showing WRITERS PLEASE LISTEN TO THE CRITICISM YOU HAVE TIME TO IMPROVE PLEASE
Omashu, mechanist, and Jet plot mixing as a concept was fine, but it dragged on and my friends and I got bored of it. I like it in theory but if it was going to take THAT long couldn't they have just separated one of those storylines for a different episode?
I appreciate that they tried to develop the water siblings' relationship by making them the stars of the Secret Tunnels, but I would've changed the way they "conquered" the problem (really? badgermoles respond to love? cute in theory but like why). If anyone's watched Barbie: A Fairy Secret there's a part where Barbie and her frenemy accuse each other of why their friendship failed, and it helps them make up and breaks the curse put on them. So that's what I would've done, force them in a life or death situation in which they have to say the unsaid things, maybe hug it out and boom
The way they handled Koh and the Spirit World was a Mess™ but the effects were decent
Zhao meeting horrible ends in every incarnation is so deserved
Yue having more agency was a welcome change AND I LOVE THAT SHE WATERBENDS. Then waterbends even when the moon is gone. It's such a nice visual nod to the fact that she has the moon spirit within her
That said, the show could definitely use more visual storytelling, less weird dialogue. Like it's so strangely common for shows or adaptations these days to exposition dump. Like they did not have to make Yue say that the ocean spirit was angry, literally just show me the dead moon fish and I'll get the idea. Then Iroh says "That's Wrath" that's just redundant now isn't it
I like that they saved Katara bringing Aang out of the Avatar State until last even if it could've been done better
HOW DARE THEY MAKE ME LIKE HAHN HE WAS A JERK IN THE SHOW BUT THEY MADE HIM A GENUINELY GOOD CHARACTER. Yes to brown men not being portrayed as jerks but also in the original it was a nice contrast to how far Sokka had come because Hahn reflected who he used to be. But live action Hahn </3
I like that they showed the deaths and blood. I wanted a live action that was both lighthearted but more realistic when it came to the injuries and death, and that'd kind of what I got
Other thoughts + overall
You can tell they put so much heart into this show, watching the bts, the bending boot camp with the correct martial arts, the easter eggs, the nods to the comics, the beautiful adaptations of Cabbage Merchant and Secret Tunnel nomads, there's so much passion behind the show it's a shame it suffered in its writing
which is why if they read reviews and criticism from the bigger name fans (TheAvatarist, HelloFutureMe, etc.) it would really help them improve for future seasons! The cast is stunning already and they have great chemistry (hopefully gets improved too!)
The live action is just a different angle to the show. And I'm saying this as an Avatar fan–the original wasn't perfect, either. I had some problems w it but the overall show was genuinely so good and heartfelt, those problems weren't glaring enough to put me off (unlike The Dragon Prince, sorry). The live action definitely wasn't perfect, but it tried to give us a new look into Avatar. Again, no adaptation will ever be a 1:1 remake and none should be. Where's the fun in that? But while the show is so full of heart and with actual fans working behind the scenes, I doubt if they listen to any criticism that they can't pull this off better next season.
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max1461 · 6 months
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CW: probably just don't read this
Apathy is not evil. Nature may be uncaring, but all the greatest harms that have ever befallen me have been personal, motivated by human things: jealousy, anger, fear, desire for control. Some of the people I have felt most scared of are people who deeply cared about me. Sometimes these things were very much related. Nature can kill you, but the human world can kill you, too—and it can do even worse things.
In some sense this is a product of my privilege. I have never had to fear nature. If I had to fear the cold, or the wind, or every ordinary infection, maybe I would yearn for the "safety" of the human world. And thank god I don't. But of course the processes which keep me safe from the cold and the wind and from infectious disease are also in some sense "nature": they are the decentralized economic processes of human society, which, deeply unfair as they are, proceed uncaringly and mechanistically by a thousand impersonal forces. They are an accident of history and game theory; they are not truly human.
And I want better mechanisms, fairer mechanisms, ones that keep all of us (not just a few) warm and sheltered and safe from disease. But I do not want these mechanisms to be truly personal.
Why?
Because the truly personal, the interpersonal, is what I really fear. In some sense it's the only thing I can really fear. The interpersonal is bullying and stalking and hatred and anger, manipulation and ostracization. A lion can kill you. A flash flood can kill you. Only other people (to a first approximation) can make you hate yourself, can make a sane man doubt his every thought, can make a comfortable life not worth living, can turn you into someone you hate, can make you want to rip yourself limb from limb. There is no evil in nature, only cold uncaring neutrality. In humanity there is evil, real evil. There is the capacity for things far worse than uncaring nature could ever make.
I have OCD. When you have OCD, you worry irrationally a lot. Sometimes I smell a strange odor, and my OCD tells me it's toxins in the air that are going to kill me. And when this happens, I calm myself down by saying "if I die, I die. A life lived fearing every scent is no life worth living, so better to die anyway than live the way I'd need to to avoid this". Sometimes my OCD tells me that those around me are trying to manipulate me, twist my life to fit their own designs. It tells me this because they've tried to do it before, though the scenarios my OCD invents are almost always fantastical enough that I can tell they are fake. But when the fear gets to me anyway, can I calm myself down by saying "well, if they manipulate me and twist my life all up, so what?" No, I cannot. Because to me, a miserable life lived to someone else's design is no life worth living, no life I can accept.
Maybe I am unusual. But I think this says something. Humans can hurt me more than nature can. Society can hurt me more than death can.
Some people don't think this way. And some people would rather live as a happy slave than live a hard but free life. But not me. And I guess that's the whole point: nature can make your life hard, or even end your life, but nature can never make you a slave. Only people can make you a slave.
Well, this was an unhinged rant. Whatever. I'll make it unrebloggable.
Oh, right. When human society makes me afraid, I go out into nature and remind myself: this will all be here no matter what happens to you. And I feel glad. Thank god there is something that cannot be controlled, no matter how hard anyone tries.
Addendum: if they ever invent mind control technology for real I'll kill myself then and there. I will be free and I will be me or I will be dead.
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transmutationisms · 17 days
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do you think the subconscious/unconscious ‘mind’ is a qualifiable mechanism (like, ‘is it real’ lol)? i’m curious about its origins and whether it started as some kind of para-psychological metaphor (a la Jung) that kind of took on a life of its own within a more medical context.
sooo there are a couple different ways i would approach this.
one is, like you suggest, the idea of 'subconscious' or 'unconscious' phenomena (i believe these terms first appeared around the same time, the early 18th century, and have always had a lot of overlap with one another) certainly made early appearances in psychological discourses that were not (overtly) medical. in these contexts, afaik, people weren't really talking about an unconscious or a subconscious—distinct entities with some kind of biological or metaphysical demarcation from other aspects of mental life—they were more talking about thoughts, ideas, or cognitive processes that occur without deliberate direction or even knowledge. so, an object that's making an impression on my sensory organs right now is most likely something i'm conscious of; a memory of an entirely different object i perceived three months ago is probably being 'preserved' (more metaphorical language lol... psychology is lousy with it) without my conscious intent, hence subconsciously or unconsciously. but this category would also include things like my knowledge of how to direct my muscles, language i've acquired, other skills, memories, bodily functions that are related to my nervous system, and so forth. there is more than a whiff of faculty psychology embedded in here, but it's not an overtly medical construction the way psychiatry becomes later.
two, even just pointing out a shift from non-medical psychology to medical psychology is still not quite capturing the full weirdness of what happened during the 18th to mid 20th centuries, because the medicalisation of psychology took a while and started relatively early (certainly by the late 18th century it was underway) but medicine itself was also undergoing some critical changes at the time. i would argue that, despite a clear lockean influence, those very early formulations of subconscious and unconscious processes also have certain roots in vitalist discourses, maybe especially in the french and german contexts, and as we start to see the shift to medical discourse about the unconscious as a kind of sub-entity of the mind-or-brain, we're also seeing much more flagrant mechanistic metaphors. so in some sense, already there's a break here that's being obscured by the language-game of hanging onto an existing term but deploying it in a pretty critically different way. i am not totally confident about this but my sense is that a lot of very early users of the terms 'unconscious'/'subconscious' would have had pretty strenuous objections to some of this later discursive reification of the subconscious or unconscious entity.
three, although medicine is a critical piece of this puzzle, the other major one i would say is evolutionary theory. by the turn of the 20th century, and certainly into the early 20th century, the idea of an unconscious or subconscious mind was very frequently and even explicitly invoked as not just a distinct mental apparatus, but specifically one considered to be 'primitive', like a kind of ancient or primordial part of the mind/brain. (this is i think in some tension with freud's use of the concept of repression as generally accompanying and arising as a result of civilisation and social mores... but freud and evolutionary thinking is a whole other topic, lol). in its most extreme form this type of claim ends up feeding into things like evo-psych claims about the so-called 'lizard brain' (i am looking at bessel van der kolk unblinking) or generally the particular narrativisations around the limbic system as a kind of 'primal' interior brain, responsible for certain bodily processes, involuntary atavistic fear-responses, &c, contrasted to the more recently evolved outer gray matter. the valences attributed to certain neurological structures and processes justified with an evolutionary story (virtually always a teleological one) is, i think, really critical to unpack how the concept of the unconscious/subconscious has come to be used. and, again, this is all just fundamentally different to the earliest usages (that i know of) of these terms, not least because evolutionary hypotheses really were not taken seriously until the mid-late 18th century (and then sporadically, locally, and with difficulty), and certainly were not foundational elements of the kinds of psychological discourses that posited unconscious or subconscious activities.
of course none of this inherently discredits the idea that the unconscious is (a) 'real' (mechanism). but if someone wanted to defend that hypothesis they would probably want to come up with some anatomical propositions that just... haven't really materialised (surprise) and i do think it bears on this discussion that historically, unconsciousness and subconsciousness have really been largely narrative inventions or metaphors used to make sense of mental life, to the point where the terms really have meant numerous different things since their inception and have never had any serious correlation with anatomical structures, organs, tissues, &c.
i would also say that like... whether or not the subconscious or unconscious are 'real' in this mechanical sense isn't necessarily the same as whether the concepts have utility; an awful lot of science runs on exploiting a metaphor or model until for various reasons it's replaced by a different one. i would say though that it is a hindrance to scientific study if these metaphors are presented as being something other than metaphorical—like for instance if the mechanical reality of the unconscious is presumed because expressed in suitably scientific language, and then justified with post hoc circular logic.
so i suppose the short version of my answer is: i don't think the unconscious/subconscious have a historically stable meaning; to the extent that they have a contemporary stable meaning, i don't think they have a corresponding 'real' mechanical cause or instantiation; and although i'm sceptical of their utility in psychological study on these grounds, i'm not categorically opposed and would leave that to other people to sort out.
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emletish-fish · 5 days
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My belated Netflix ATLA thoughts.
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Things I loved
I think all the actors did a great job with what they were given. Dallas was especially great as Zuko. Perfect mix of smushable teenage petulance and trying-his-best. (Lol, it's always Zuko's actor, eh? Dev Patel was the only watchable and redeeming bit of the first live action. A bright spark of talent in an otherwise bleak cinematic experience).
All the kids were great too. Sokka was spot on and got to do some heavy character work. Daniel dae kim was living his best life as a villain and you can tell he had fun with the role. ABED!!! Sorry, Daniel Pudi - amazing choice for the mechanist. Shout-out to the lady who played Suki's mum.
(Love the Suki's mum plot and how Kyoshi's isolationism was explored).
Also Zhao's actor added a wonderfully Uriah Heap-esque obsequiousness layer. Very skin-crawling. Well done that guy.
low-key loved how careful the show was in casting POC. It's so great and refreshing to see so many wonderful actors get more work and recognition.
Loved the costuming and make-up and how it looked like at least some care and thought went into it. Details like the gold corners in the Kyoshi make-up were inspired choices. Shout out to whatever hair stylist did Jet's hair. They managed to achieve cartoon levels of foofiness.
Loved seeing Aang meditate with all the past avatars. Like that his relationship with each of them is being fleshed out early. Some very interesting theories and takes. It also does a great job of showing us all the past avatars were flawed people.
Loved some adjustments to Zuko and Irohs story, like the funeral scene and the division becoming Zuko's crew.
Loved how these changes affect the way we see the relationship. In the cartoon, Iroh is a goofy comic relief character for most of season 1. It's a front for his white lotus sneakery, but that is only obvious to viewers in hindsight. But Netflix ATLA knows who Iroh really is and where his story is going, so his guilt and grief and war crimes are all out in the open from the get go.
Because Iroh's grief is more obvious, Zuko's caretaking role is more obvious too. We are shown how he takes care of his uncle above other duties and it makes their relationship and more balanced one of mutual care. Zuko's moments with his uncle are elevated from occasional pet-the-dog instances to a fundamental part of his character.
Loved some of the fight choreography and scenes. The market place fight was especially entertaining, with the colour saturation of the scarfs and the random lady getting all up in Zuko's business for attacking a kid. She was great. Shout out to her.
In general there was a lot to love in this version, and I appreciate the work that went into it on a technical level. Whilst it maybe a cash-grab at a studio exec level, it's obvious the people working on this project really care about what they are making and it shows in their work.
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naturalrights-retard · 2 months
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By Dr. Michael Yeadon February 8, 2024
You may have seen videos I’ve recorded where I’ve outlined some of the to-me obviously intentional harms built into the alleged vaccines. I’ve been on tiresome, dozens of people commenting email threads. These are the bane of my current existence because they’re not email lists from which you can ask to be removed. No, they’re reply to all fests. And they never stop. I get sometimes dozens of emails daily. I learn to delete them, lest I be tempted to reply, perpetuating the torture. Today, one person questioned whether the harms were really deliberate. After slapping my forehead, I typed this. You may find it useful in case anyone accuses you of perpetuating misinformation or conspiracy theory.
Best wishes,
Mike
Dear all,
I have a different yet complimentary point, and I have made it before. Somehow, it has not landed.
I am a card carrying trained mechanistic toxicologist (as well as a biochemist, at least, that’s what my degree certificate says). More relevantly, I have over 30 years experience leading new drug design teams across the disciplines.
Over the life of the pharmaceutical industry, we have collectively learned a great deal what kind of chemical and biochemical structures confer what kinds of safety and toxicity risks. We still miss things, especially when they’re not understood and all we have is harms leading to abandonment of research projects or even withdrawal of launched products. Sometimes, board level executives still don’t withdraw harmful products if they think there’s some slight or arguable uncertainty & if they think they can get away with it.
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literary-illuminati · 8 months
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Book Review 38 – A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow
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This was the second novella I read on account of it being a Hugo nominee, and probably the book I was/am second-most dreading getting through (I am really not looking forward to Legends and Lattes). And, I am sad to report, that dread was entirely justified. This really isn’t going to be a very nice review, so, you know, caveat lector.
The story is a direct sequel to A Spindle Splintered, and will be incredibly confusing to read without that context (source: my roommate did so accidentally). In the five years since Spindle, Zina has been very busy being a dimension hopping heroine, crashing into one alternate reality’s version of Sleeping Beauty after another and either ensuring that the Happily Ever After goes as planned or offering an escape to Beauty’s (and presumably others, though I don’t believe it’s ever mentioned) who’d rather opt out. In the process she’s entirely abandoned Charm and Prinny, and essentially every tie she has to her own life, sublimating anxiety over her own mortality into heroine-saving adventures.
Then it turns out all the jumping between stories and screwing around with plotlines is doing structural damage to the multiverse, as she discovers when a desperate Evil Queen drags her into her castle to force her to explain how to escape the fate she knows is coming for her, after a ratty old copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales appeared on her bookshelf earlier. The queen is, unsurprisingly, not as evil as she seems on first glance, and also just smoking hot (Zina’s narration is very clear on this). The two go on interdimensional adventures, bond and open up to each other, face down an evil immortal cannibal Snow White, hook up, and write their own Happily Ever Afters, or at least something close enough. And in the meantime Zina reconnects with her friends and agrees to become the closest thing Earth has to a fairy godmother.
So, to not be entirely one-sided here: I really did enjoy the sequence where Zina and Eva are thrashing about jumping through a dozen different versions of Snow White over the course of a few pages while they fight over the magic mirror. That was fun. The close narration did an excellent job getting across who Zina is and characterizing her too, even if there were a few too many pop culture name drops for my taste. Otherwise...
This book is just..argh. Even it’s basic premise is the fairy tale equivalent of one of those zombie stories about a guy whose spent his life fantasizing about killing zombies and won’t shut up about how similar the plot is to all his favourite zombie movies, except in this case the hypothetical zombie killer has also taken half a film theory undergrad and keeps peppering the narration with commentary about how the monsters trying to eat his brains are a problematic appropriation of Haitian folklore and/or a representation of late 20th century American anxiety over mass culture and consumerism. The bit gets old so so quickly.
Beyond that – look, I’m a hard sell on multiverse stuff generally these days, versions that try to milk it for serious drama especially. And the metaphysics just make zero sense at all, and not even in a charmingly nonsensical fairy tale way – adding scifi technobabble to things that are just neer going to make sense according to any sort of mechanistic scientific understanding of the world’s usually a mistake unless you’re actually planning to do something with it, in my opinion. Absolutely worst of all, though (and now I know this is an incredibly petty and personal pet peeve), the story lampshades that it makes no sense. Okay being honest if I’d otherwise liked the book I might have found the whole conversation with the folklore professor where Zina asks how to solve the plot just kind of endearingly annoying, but as is? Unforgivable.
The Evil Queen (or Eva, as Zina names her, since in the Grimm Tale she doesn’t have any other name, you see) isn’t a bad character, but she does rather feel like she walked right out of Enemies to Lovers central casting. More than that, as a villain redemption story goes it just hits all the beats that it possibly could to make its job easier, which just makes it so much more boring than it could have been. Eva never really did anything that evil, all she ever wanted was agency and self-determination, she was motivated by fear, she’s only an antagonist for like fifteen pages before becoming Zina’s sidekick, she’s heroic and selfless when given the opportunity, she’s physically attractive and falls in love with the protagonist, etc, etc. Most of all, she’s contrasted with a real villain, a gothic horror Snow White who really does eat the hearts of children to retain her eternal youth. And just, you can feel the author stacking the deck in her own favour here – there’s just almost no actual moral conflict or drama to it all, you know?
I’m sure it was mostly unintentional, but the wider themes of the story are...weird. Or, actually, so aggressively conventional that I’m just surprised to see them in a book with this one’s explicit politics. ‘You owe the world to your closest friends and relations, but ignoring your own affairs to go help strangers is irresponsible and dangerous to everyone. It’s also an infantile response to fear over your own mortality; maturity and responsibility mean settling down and helping to raise a kid,’ is, like, really not the message I was expecting. Especially from a book that keeps peppering the narration with phrases like ‘heternormative family structure’. Admittedly a probably uncharitable read, but you really can’t spend so incredibly long hammering home how fucked up and horrifying so many of the narratives that the world is made of are, and how all the different iterations of each story are real and all the characters full moral agents, and then pivot to ‘but intruding on other stories is damaging the fabric of reality! So we’ll just stop.’ Fuck all those other not-really-evil queen’s being forced to dance in red hot slippers until they die, I guess – if they wanted to live, they should have had the good sense to be a love interest.
Also, look, it’s not a rage button for everyone like it is for me. But the bit where the narrative came out and drew a bright line between Zina ‘refusing to accept’ how she will inevitably die from her tragic wasting disease and evil Snow White eating the hearts of children for eternal youth is probably the point where the book went from mediocre to actively making me angry.
I love the whole fractured fairy tale conceit, I really do. But this whole series is just not it, at least for me. Go watch Maleficent instead, for something with the same take on an evil witch queen. Or, I don’t know, Shrek.
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onaa-ohokthen · 2 years
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Let’s talk about Grace Carrow (again)
I wrote a meta a million years ago about how Grace’s most basic characteristic is being wrong. I lost it when my old tumblr was accidentally deleted, since it was under a Read More tag.  I tried to recreate it! This time, since it won’t be under a read more tag, anything past this sentence can be considered a spoiler for Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.
Grace isn’t the first thing I think about when I consider Watchmaker. I think about Thaniel and Mori and about how endearing Katsu is and how I hope(d, prior to Pennyharrow) that Six got a better life. But Grace. Grace is a bit of a mystery.
Superficially, Grace Carrow is a character the reader ought to feel connected to. She is a Victorian woman who is also a scientist; her desire to be left alone to focus on physics is her drive for over half the novel. She rebels against society’s standards, not just in her clothes (often masculine to sneak into the Oxford libraries) hair (short, a good thirty-five years before it become even vaguely acceptable) and social habits (hangs out with a male foreigner and spurns female companionship) but in her goals in life. Her mother despairs, her father rages, even Matsumoto is confused about her intense focus on physics. Fanshaw calls her, in a moment of foreshadowing, “the madwoman in the attic full of explosives.” She doesn’t want to marry, but must. All of these are elements we’ve seen in stories before, and they should endear Grace to us, the readers. Perhaps they do, at least initially, but then we land in the insight that Grace is, fundamentally, as a character, wrong. She’s wrong about lumiferous eather, she’s wrong about women’s suffrage, she’s wrong about Mori, and she is wrong about Thaniel. Yet she’s far from stupid; it’s her inability to see the full picture that is the problem. Let’s begin:
Lumiferous aether was a real hypothesis in physics at the time Watchmaker is set. Grace can’t prove it because it’s wrong, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important. It was first suggested to be entirely mistaken in 1887, and finally disproven in the 1920s, and it was in abandoning lumiferous eather that physics opened the door to Einstein and his theory of general relativity. But Grace is so sure she’s right, so sure that she can prove it. Lumiferous eather fits into what she knows about science, what she knows about the world and she has attached so much of her life on proving it that she couldn’t abandon it if she wanted to.
Women’s suffrage is more interesting. Grace is actively suffering from a lack of legal independence, despite her high social standing, and one would assume she’d be invested in women’s rights. This is not the case, she fails to identify the root of the problem as structural and opts to hop over the metaphorical lawn rather than try to change the rules. Her decision is rooted in disdain for other women, and in anyone not a physicist (Grace isn’t alone in this attitude). Other women and are, in her opinion, stupid and undeserving of respect, nevermind that that they’re in the process of trying to solve her problem. Grace doesn’t want women’s rights, the wants as solution to her own personal lack of access to a house and a physics career, failing to see that they’re one and the same.
It is instrumental to the entire plot of Watchmaker that Grace is wrong about Thaniel. She calls him a telegraphist, “an ordinary man who works in an office and sometimes plays the piano,” and misses his depth and nuance, dismisses his artistry, his uniqueness, really his whole personhood beyond what his presence does to her life on a purely mechanistic level; being married - to anyone - allows her to inherit a house. The fact that this dooms Thaniel to shrinking his personality to fit into her life isn’t something that bothers her, because she never sees him as he is. He is just a telegraphist to her, “clerk written all over him”, to borrow Matsumoto’s words from the banquet. She doesn’t love Thaniel, at least not yet, but she is still possessive enough of him to make some very bad decisions (that are rooted in being wrong about Mori.)
Yes, finally, Grace is wrong about Mori. One of my favourite aspects of the book: if Grace could have just left things well enough alone, not picked a fight over her experiments and the proceeded to cut down the pear trees, and especially if she hadn’t blown up a building, she could have had what she wanted; Thaniel would have stayed with her, slowly abandoning Mori. But seeing that would require her to understand Mori’s motivation, and it’s obvious, both from her narration and actions that she never sees him as anything other than a manipulator, someone who meddles in the world solely because he enjoys it. We can’t entirely fault her; Thaniel, too, fails to make the full connection before Mori tells him. But the truth is that when it comes to Thaniel, Mori acts out of love. Thaniel gets a better job, a better wage, weekends off, tea and company. He gets to play the piano again, not because Mori needs someone to stop Yuki at the Mikado performance, but because Thaniel loves playing the piano. But because Grace sees Thaniel as nothing but a toy, she fails to see that Mori values him for himself. Grace doesn’t love, she desires, at most, to possess. She is habituated to being catered to.
Mori, of course, is always, definitionally, right. He can know every outcome except the truly random ones, and as such is forced to constantly consider the whole picture. He lacks a single area of study throughout his life, having been a soldier and a government aid prior to being a watchmaker. (Although clockwork is a choice he’s made for himself contrary to his background just like Grace’s physics.) He’s intelligent but mainly effective due to his clairvoyance, and not otherwise a genius. Grace, on the other hand, is very intelligent, clever enough to outwit a clairvoyant, to  “have two big numbers to multiply, and [she] could do it in [her] own head if [she] made the effort, but [she’s] feeling lazy and [she] hold[s] them still until [she] can reach an abacus”, but lacking the necessary insight to see that she doesn’t need to do any of those things. Whether she is blinded by class, the inherent racism of her time period, lack of experience, or just personal arrogance (remember what her father is like), she makes a very interesting foil for Mori.
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yngsuk · 1 year
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[...] speculation regarding the (im)materiality of genetic race has overshadowed the more fundamental (and materially pertinent) question of how racialized environments are embodied. Or as Clarence Gravlee succinctly notes, “The common assertion that ‘race is not biology’ may be correct in spirit. But it is too crude and imprecise to be effective. It does not adequately challenge the reductionism and genetic determinism of biomedical science or popular culture, and blinds us to the biological consequences of race and racism as socio-cultural phenomena”. In other words, the controversy surrounding the “reality” of genetic race has forestalled a fuller recognition of the biopsychological consequences and somatic materialities of antiblack racism. An exclusive focus on the domain of DNA undercuts what could be a fuller consideration of both the agentic capaciousness of somatic processes and the life-and-death stakes of that capacity.
Sylvia Wynter would argue that this overinvestment in DNA is a symptom of biocentrism. A purely biological definition of what it means to be, biocentrism is undergirded by a genomic principle: that “the human” is a purely biologically determined mode of being. Biocentrism is characterized by Wynter as the belief that we are “biological beings who then create culture”. Acording to a biocentric logic, human cultural practices are linearly determined by groups’ bio-ontological composition. “Racism,” [Sylvia] Wynter argues “is an effect of the biocentric conception of the human”. She contrasts this belief system’s reductive investment in DNA as substratum and mechanistic causation with an alternative: My proposal is that we are bioevolutionarily prepared by means of language to inscript and autoinstitute ourselves in this or that modality of the human, always in adaptive response to the ecological as well as to the geopolitical circumstances in which we find ourselves. Wynter has expanded upon this view, which she calls the sociogenic principle. Sociogeny defines (human) being in a manner that is not reducible to physical laws. In fact, said laws are redefinable as sociogenetic or nature-culture laws because culture is not only what humans create but also what creates human being. However, sociogeny differs from previous and contemporaneous theories of nature-cultures in that desire and affect play a decisive role in the concept. Wynter argues that a “culturally imposed symbolic belief system” serves as the internalized sanction system that motivates behavior, biochemically affirming or negating in dynamic relation to societal norms and values prior to any reflective process. A species-specific opioid (reward and punishment) system serves to induce its appropriate behaviors through the mediation of each person’s subjective experience of what feels good and what feels bad to and for each person. If the organismic body delimits the human species, then the body is itself culturally determined through the mediation of the socialized sense of self as well as through the “social” situation in which this self is placed. The transformation of subjective experience is culturally and, thereby, socio-situationally determined with these determinations in turn, serving to activate their physicalist correlates. Thus, subjectively experienced, visceral processes take place such that their functioning cannot be explained in terms of only the natural sciences, of only physical laws. Alex Weheliye rightly distinguishes Wynter’s sociogeny from sociobiology, cautioning: “Wynter does not focus on the origins and adaptive evolution of race itself but rather on how sociogenic principles are anchored in the human neurochemical system, thus counteracting sociobiological explanations of race, which retrospectively project racial categories onto an evolutionary screen”.
Inspired by Frantz Fanon’s famous axiom in Black Skin, White Masks “beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny,” a reworking of Ernst Haeckel’s theory of evolution, Wynter’s sociogenic principle draws on Fanon’s observation that the individual (ontogeny) does not simply emerge and unfurl via species membership (phylogeny) in its natural scientific conception but in dynamic relation to a sociocultural situation (sociogeny). Fanon speaks of how the social situation, in this case, implicit knowledge of a “historico-racial schema” alters the psyche and the nervous system’s biochemical dynamism prior to the reflectivity of “consciousness”. In the case of the human species, the sociogenic principle is the information-encoding, organizational principle of each culture’s criterion of being/nonbeing that functions to artificially activate the neurochemistry of the reward and punishment pathway as if it was instinctual, doing so in terms needed to institute the human subject as a culture-specific and thereby semiotically defined, if physiologically implemented, mode of being and sense of self. In contrast to a biocentric view of the species, Wynter argues, “We can experience ourselves as human only through the mediation of the processes of socialization effected by the invented tekhne or cultural technology to which we give the name culture”. Wynter once stated, “For me, Black Studies is about enabling the exit from the substitute religion ‘evolution,’ a substitute religion which represses the fact that once language has co-evolved with the brain, the process of evolution was followed by the Event of human auto-institution, of autopoesis!” In other words, the technology that is culture, Wynter argues, is evolutionarily significant such that with the emergence of semantic technologies humans gained a technology that developed the power to direct the specific terms of the nervous system’s order of perception and categorization, harness its drives to its now culturally defined sociogenetic own, and even override the genetic-instinctual sense of self where necessary, activating, by their semantic reprogramming, the opioid system (reward and punishment) in culture-specific terms as if it were instinct. Thus, semiosis plays a determinant role in the adaptive processes of both culture and biology, meaning and biochemical affect. Wynter argues that racism deploys “coercive semantic technologies” and “systemically imposed role[s]” that reify bodies into types or prescriptive categories, and these types and prescriptive categories, in turn, trigger affects, sensations, and behaviors reflexly, activated by pervasive associations that predefine and assign responsibility to those made representative of a type.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
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haggishlyhagging · 6 months
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. . . [We] fail to take account of our psychological peculiarities and characteristics. We are ordinarily entirely ignorant about them, unconscious even that they exist. Or if a dim awareness of our psychological lack comes to us we turn away from fuller knowledge. For as in Wells' "Country of the Blind" it is taboo to see more than other people. These subjective factors, however, are potent psychical entities, they belong to the totality of our being, they cannot be destroyed. We may ignore them, repress them, but they continue to exist. So long as they are unrecognized outcasts from our conscious life, they will come between us and all the objects we view, and our whole world will be either distorted or illuminated by the superadded subjective factor. Thus the object is altered so that what we perceive is never really the object itself but always our view of the object. The scientific method deals with this dilemma by eliminating the subjective and psychological factors as far as possible and then concerning itself with the objective or relatively objective data which remain.
Such a process excludes the human element and results necessarily in a mechanical concept of life. Indeed it produced the machine age where value was largely measured in terms of available physical energy. Yet if this is so it is strange to recall how satisfied our predecessors were with this mechanistic view of life, for we in the present generation are increasingly dissatisfied with it. Those men of the nineteenth century had an enthusiasm for science, for objective or factual truth which was religious in its intensity. There was nothing mechanistic about them, in spite of their own theories. Their concern with scientific truth was like a new faith. The explanation for this lies in the fact that during the phase of mechanical expansion their living spirit was occupied with devising ever more and more ingenious methods of conquering ever wider fields, in which their scientific ingenuity could find scope. In other words, the enterprise they were really concerned with was the expansion of their own powers and the increase of conscious control of the objective world. Their aim was, unknown to themselves, a psychological one. They were really concerned with the subjective factor, though this they did not realize. For that which they thought they had eliminated so carefully had escaped their observation and once again motivated their enthusiasm.
Our dissatisfaction has been emphasized by the world problems of the past few years, during which it has become more and more evident that happiness and the fullness of life are not to be found through mass production and the discovery of new sources of energy supply. This dissatisfaction shows itself not only in general anxiety but also in neurosis and unhappiness, and in a sense of frustration, a lack of any real enthusiasm. In particular, are we dissatisfied with the character and quality of our human relationships. Our fathers were either able to make more satisfactory relationships than we are, or they were less sensitive to disharmony and ennui. Whatever the reason, there is no doubt about the large part unhappiness and neurosis, dependent on unsatisfactory human relationships, plays in the dissatisfaction with life from which so many people suffer. The life of today is empty and sterile and we look for renewal, whether we want to or not, from that source of spiritual awakening which lies within. For our science has proved itself strangely impotent in face of a threatened breakdown in our culture.
-M. Esther Harding, Woman’s Mysteries: Ancient and Modern
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dipperdesperado · 1 year
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joy is our solarpunk secret sauce
Something that I feel like is sorely missing from activist spaces and thinking about the future is joy. It seems obvious when you really examine it, but if we see ourselves as imagining the solarpunk futures that we want to live in, but we don’t bring emotion into that conception, the pictures we create will ring hollow. I see joy as an important component of liberatory theory more broadly, so doing joyful things is a form of praxis to me. After all, to be joyful and aware of the injustices of the world at the same time is revolutionary.
Focusing on joy has to be an integral part of how we conceive of doing solarpunk stuff in real life. Joy is what will keep us going in our journey to build community-driven innovations and creative-driven lives. This will also bring more people into the movement, since joy is enticing, much more so than doomerism or pessimism. This is more inclusive and can create a snowball effect towards change.
Joy in my conception comes from fun, pleasure, and play. Having a sense of security, assuredness, and community feed into the ability for these emotions to thrive. This has an inherent decolonial thrust to it since joy stands at odds with mechanistic ideas of productivity and efficiency. It’s very difficult to increase profits exponentially without the inverse result happening to joy. This shift in focus allows our priorities to shift to a more harmonious relationship with ourselves, each other, and the rest of nature.
How do we incorporate joy into our movements?
Creativity is a latent fire within us that just needs the right environment to shine. Whether that’s through art, writing, or performance, this can be a fun and cathartic way to create engaging spaces and experiences for our movements. A solarpunk community can create a public art installation relating to a solarpunk idea like upcycling that celebrates the community’s cultural diversity and plurality. Make them interactive and engaging, have some different events going on a la a market or festival, music playing in the background and you can create the space for people to learn more about their possibilities for liberation without even really realizing it.
Community is implicitly a fundamental part of joy. Creating space for communities to form gives joy the room to grow. Connecting with the earth through community gardens, experimenting and iterating through ideas in co-working spaces, or connecting with your neighbors at a potluck can lead to good vibes and memories, showing us that another world is possible, and that we have the ingredients we need to create it. We also want to make sure these spaces are truly inclusive and accessible so that people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds can live in concert with the liberation movement.
Celebrating success can also be a way to highlight joy in our movements. It doesn’t matter how “big ” or “small” the success is. Sometimes, throwing a party over a tiny win can re-energize folks and get them excited to continue participating. Throwing a party, shouting people out on socials (depending on how it relates to security culture), and sharing stories can make a hopeful and inspiring energy. Hope is what encourages people to continue striving for a better future.
Humor might be one of my favorite concepts when it comes to thinking about joy. Humor might seem like a weird thing to think about as a form of praxis. However, I propose this; we live in a surreal world! The manifestations of the systems we see don’t match most of the things many of the supporters of these systems chirp about. I mean, meritocracy isn’t real, economic mobility isn’t real, and discrimination is rampant. There’s something deeply sad and ironically funny about that. But that’s a like low-hanging fruit (but deeply resonant) form of humor about collapse. Humor can also be a way to lift spirits and lighten moods through more positive jokes, sharing memes, wholesome acts, and a willingness to be childlike in a sense of possibility.
Having joy as an integral component of our world-changing work is huge to me, so it makes me sad that I don’t feel like many folks talk about it nearly as much. I think that what stalls movements out and keeps people from feeling welcome in them (besides systemic oppression, don’t wanna diminish that) is how it’s framed as hard work that we have to do to save the world. And on one hand, that is true, but on the other hand, that doesn’t mean it has to feel like work all the time. Like, if we want to build a world where we can leisure and play, but our construction plans are full of hardship and toil, we won’t be able to realize our ends. Having an inviting movement allows more people to come in and have a pathway to understanding all the important tough truths. Hope comes from joy, and we need hope to create the future that we want to see.
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gaytanic-panic · 2 years
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One way a lot of people have gotten Nietzsche wrong is ascribing a central place in his thought to the "will to power." The concept became the title of a series of unpublished notes arranged and edited by his sister in order to fit her dead brother's thought into the cause of antisemitic German nationalism, despite Friedrich himself hating both antisemites and German nationalists. He was a conservative, certainly, but of an older aristocratic sort, and disdained the proto-fascism of his otherwise beloved sister and her shitty husband. Nevertheless, because this posthumous collection was presented as Nietzsche's final work, it came to occupy a position of major significance for many fans of Nietzsche, especially fascists like Martin Heidegger. Through Heidegger, this understanding of Nietzsche would become a dominant force in the writing of Gilles Deleuze, who believed the "will to power" was the key to Nietzsche's thought. Its why Deleuze says "power" so many times lol. I don't hate Deleuze or his work but its wild how a man who spent his career trying to mimic Nietzsche so much, down to his writing style, so gravely misunderstood the culmination of Nietzsche's thought.
Its true that Nietzsche was an aristocratic reactionary, and that the concept of the unconscious will was central to his thought. The concept of the "will to power" only appears very late in his thought, and like most of his concepts it held an elastic, frequently changing meaning, originating in his earlier examinations of the will to pleasure. It can be interpreted alternately as a pleasure seeking, meaning seeking, self-perfecting, or dominating impulse, but his sister and other fascists preferred to focus solely on that final dimension. Ironically he developed the concept partially as a way to counter social Darwinist theories, a way of saying there is more to life and existence than a mechanistic "survival of the fittest."
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argyrocratie · 2 years
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Let me remind you that the functionalist theory of society as articulated by Radcliffe‐Brown and the British school of anthropology was based on the idea of corporate group defined as a bounded entity with a center, a chief, a property, a territory. Such an entity exists forever, at least putatively. This trait alone makes it transcendent because it transcends the life of its individual members. It exists in the realm of “superior”, abstract and eternal entities.
The sacred, you see, is not very far. The very idea came from an earlier generation of social scientists, and in particular Henry Sumner Maine who famously said: “corporations never die”. In this definition we find the sort of mechanistic, deterministic and sociologistic definition of what constitutes society in a supremely Durkheimian ideology: an organism (but of course there is nothing organic about it) made of solid and durable parts that complement each other and work according to an overall plan. Modern anthropology does not explicitly use this model anymore but has proposed, to my knowledge, no other. I believe the concept of the corporate is still of the essence when we speak about society or social structure.
What anarchic communities display is almost the exact opposite of this bodily metaphor: there are no groups, with no chiefs. It is not a body, and if it is, it has no head. Aggregates do not last, collective entities are not conceived as everlasting, but as ephemeral realities. There is no overall plan. What endures is a non‐holistic totality of people who generation after generation reproduce in a random fashion patterns of temporary associations that constantly vanish and reappear according to the vagaries of free individual agents. These communities are truly organic in the sense that what is durable is the whole and not the parts. As such they are complex (see Morin 2005).
-Charles J­H Macdonald, “Can anarchism be a critical point in the new anthropological imagination?Contributions of anarchy and anarchism to social theory.” (2010)
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sangennaro · 10 months
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So I just now read the Yudkowsky thing in Time magazine, and it really got me excited.
What if there is going to be an "AI apocalypse”, but it's not an apocalypse for The World, and just an apocalypse for The Internet? What if widespread employment of AI to optimize and simulate and auto-generate and increase and etc etc, what if that results in an internet that is many times more unpleasant than the one we have now? What if all kinds of competing businesses and governments and NGOs and NEETs, all without any kind of clear comprehensive idea of how their own activities fit within the complex and emerging whole, what if they end up stinking up the room, tangling up the cords, and creating an environment so confusing, hostile, deceptive, aggressive, greedy, shallow, etc, that people would prefer to disconnect and take their chances with a more local and physical experience of life?
In a way, it seems just inevitable that this will happen-- look at our most successful contemporaries, particularly the millionaire politicians and billionaire business leaders and their most senior functionaries: Overflowing with confidence, overflowing with strong statements and ambitious goals, always ready with hard statistics and cutting edge theory (from the most qualified experts at the most respected institutions) to support their ironclad certainty and bold optimism and unwavering self-regard, held up by television and newspaper journalists as exemplary citizens and worthy role models, the newest and youngest of their ranks deserving of a respect and reverence granted to only the greatest writers, artists, actors and athletes.
Conventional wisdom declares politics and business as our noblest and most realistic paths to a Better World and Better Future, but aspirational politicians and journalists and tycoons are the only people to be found who would even attempt to argue that prosperity is spreading. Further, the extent and acceleration of prosperity's retraction is clearly in proportion to the intensity of prideful rhetoric about our current crop of elites' achievements. It is obvious to everyone that our tangled political and economic situation rewards sociopathic manipulation of strangers on the grandest scale. It is obvious that contemporary technology (the complexity and ingenuity of which is held up as proof that we are the smartest human beings who have ever lived) is making people miserable and having foreboding effects on children.
All of this is to say, our culture's driving idea of Success-- and by extension the mechanistic models of Universe and Human Mind that provide the foundations for our particular version of Success-- is manifestly twisted. And the people whose use of AI will have the widest and most penetrating effects on our lives are all as deeply invested as anyone can be in this particular conception of Success.
I guess it might not be as easy to extrapolate where we're headed for people that haven't been watching the internet mutate from the second-landline-for-your-modem days into the obligatory-smartphone-on-your-person-and-online-24/7 present. But those of us who have surfed down this surreal seam know what is coming: all the commercial, impersonal, invasive, artificial, inhumane aspects of going online will be stepped up. Our screens will exhibit a new magnitude of aggression. It's hard to imagine personalities more fake than the tryhards currently mining for online Success, but when fully machine-generated content (produced by algorithms that simulate the work of a superhumanly fast hack writer: analyzing large amounts of material with a rigidly predetermined consideration of its quality, then assembling a passable simulacra of intelligence out of the most commonplace patterns--ie, clichés--found therein) becomes industry standard, the ig influencer and Youtube entrepreneur of today will seem like Shakespeare characters compared to the Johnny Cab content that will soon be multiplying like maggots on the corpse of a titan far too huge to bury.
The titan is rotting before our eyes, and it will stink worse and worse, and the same politicians and salarymen that presently pretend there's no level of odor strong enough to drive off a meaningful mass of their dipshit customers will keep pretending that's the case until it's too late, until the web and social media are not only places only a bot could love, but places only bots ever visit, a Potemkin Neom waiting to be wiped off the books by the EMP offensives unveiled in WWIII. An increasing number of people will go looking offline for leisure, community, discovery, and identity, and they will find surprises there, and opportunities for humane interactions that contrast intensely with interactions online, and the internet will be for paying your utility bill and looking up driving directions and ordering cat litter. Yeah, there will be news on it--- there's news on AM radio, too. And CNN, too-- which is maybe leading the pack, but not exactly an outlier, in the involuntary degrowth of our infotainment corporations already underway. Go back to the 1990s and tell a teenager that their town's malls are all abandoned or razed now because people stopped going to them. Or that nobody is buying CDs or even downloading mp3s because it's more convenient to send all that money to a Swedish CEO. The idea that this sort of mass abdication will, going forward, only ever occur in the internet tycoon's favor-- that requires (and is required by) a fanatical faith in technology, in the triumph of the inhumane.
Ultimately, though, the inhumane sucks. It will never not suck to be talked down to by a person who wants something from you and couldn’t give less of a shit about any part of your existence besides your handing over that thing. It will suck to a heretofore unimaginable degree when we encounter these people via cost-cutting automated puppets. And the more the internet sucks-- and the ecstasy over how AI will optimize the ease with which acquisitive organizations manipulate strangers from a distance makes it pretty obvious it's about to suck even more-- the lower the bar gets for a consciously offline life to need to clear in order to be worth the risk of retreating back into meatspace...
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transmutationisms · 3 months
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also a problem i think marks a lot of 'alternative medicine' in a specific way is the heavy reliance on mechanistic theories of disease and the deriving of treatment protocols from the practitioner's knowledge of physiology / anatomy / organic chemistry. it creates a situation where you go and you look at these people's theories and it's like well sure i can understand the argument you're making and if your premises are all correct and comprehensive, then it does seem like this treatment would work to solve the problem you describe. however it usually turns out the human body is more complicated or variable than a diagram in an anatomy textbook and these people back themselves into corners where they don't want to admit their idea didn't pan out in practice because they often have few and weak institutional links as a result of having marketed themselves as daring, heterodox, and counter-hegemonic, and now their livelihood is staked on what can best be described as "overpromising" and is often more accurately described as "lying".
orthodox medicine does ofc have the same fundamental problem with mechanistic theory failing to produce actual results (something like 1 in 27 drugs that ever gain any clinical trial will be approved for use in humans, and some of those really shouldn't even be, and that figure excludes everything that didn't even make it past the earliest stages of exploration) but there is a marginal degree of protection that is sometimes generated when dealing with pharmacological interventions approved by regulatory agencies (ie, not 'supplements'), plus prestigious medical institutions and practitioner groups tend to be sclerotic in a way not conducive to claims marketing themselves as radical and new, and instead generally favourable to treatment modalities the state likes, such as gaslighting patients and funnelling them into cbt over investigating biomarkers or pathological anatomy. noticeably different though equally insidious issues imo.
anyway i think this dynamic with alternative practices is particularly infuriating in that it drives a lot of people to dedicate significant amounts of time and energy to these particular mechanistic theories, like you will see people very admirably getting deep into the weeds on specific cellular pathways or metabolic processes or whatever else, and there's little check or context provided that would make clear the extent to which most of these ideas simply will never pan out in any appreciable way for people's quality of life. like you're told you need to, basically, become an expert in your own disease, you can solve it and fix your life if only you can gain the skills to wade through this 9999th paper on whatever it is! only what happens when it turns out the published research does not have a full grasp of whatever biological processes you're trying to understand?
in a certain way this whole dynamic just serves the interests of the medical establishment anyway: the promise is always that the knowledge is out there (or, it will be any day now) and it leaves little room for political or philosophical critique of WHAT knowledge, exactly, is out there and how it's produced and what these methods accomplish and whom they serve. yknow, you just need to find the next dizzyingly complicated overlabelled chemical flowchart made by a maligned secret genius doctor that will explain exactly how it all works. and then the body will for sure obey that. because THIS person is the one who has finally learned all the rules, and THIS time they'll work in practice exactly like they do on paper. we prommy
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Liberalism’s great contribution to civilization is the way it handles conflict. No other regime has enabled large and varied groups of people to set a social agenda without either stifling their members’ differences or letting conflict get out of hand. Bertrand Russell once said that “order without authority” might be taken as the motto both of political liberalism and of science. If you had to pick a three-word motto to define the liberal idea, “order without authority” would be pretty good.
The liberal innovation was to set up society so as to mimic the greatest liberal system of them all, the evolution of life. Like evolutionary ecologies, liberal systems are centerless and self-regulating and allow no higher appeal than that of each to each in an open-ended, competitive public process (a game). Thus, a market game is an open-ended, decentralized process for allocating resources and legitimizing possession, a democracy game is an open-ended, decentralized process for legitimizing the use of force, and a science game is an open-ended, decentralized process for legitimizing belief.
Much as creatures compete for food, so entrepreneurs compete for business, candidates for votes, and hypotheses for supporters. In biological evolution, no outcome is fixed or final—nor is it in capitalism, democracy, science. There is always another trade, another election, another hypothesis. In biological evolution, no species, however clever or complex, is spared the rigors of competition—nor are the participants in capitalism, democracy, science. No matter who you are, you must conduct your business in the currency of dollars, votes, or criticism—no special fiat, no personal authority.
To think of democracy and capitalism as liberal social systems is, of course, commonplace today. To think of science that way is more challenging. Most of us think of science as a kind of machine whose equations and labs and research papers inexorably grind out data and theories and inventions. But philosophers of science have moved sharply away from that view, and toward what has become known as evolutionary epistemology.
Evolutionary epistemology holds that our knowledge comes to us not from revelation, as religious traditions maintain; nor from deep reflection by the wise, as in Plato; nor even from crisp experiments that unambiguously reveal nature’s secrets, as in the mechanistic view of science that prevailed until this century. Rather, our knowledge evolves—with all the haphazardness and improvisation that “evolving” implies. In biological evolution, species and their genes evolve as they compete for limited resources, with mutations providing the raw material for change. In evolutionary epistemology, hypotheses and ideas evolve as they compete under pressure from criticism, with intellectual diversity providing the raw material for change.
The evolutionary view of knowledge recognizes that, in science, trial and error play as important a role as does mechanistic experimentation. It recognizes that scientific consensus doesn’t always march methodically toward a single inevitable conclusion; the consensus often meanders or drifts, and where it comes out on any given day can depend as much on circumstance and fashion, even on personalities, as on nature. (Which is not to say that the results are random; the method of trial and error may be unpredictable in the short term, but in the longer term it produces steady improvement. The path may veer this way or that, but the long-term direction is uphill.) Most important, the evolutionary view recognizes that knowledge comes from a social process. Knowledge comes from people checking with each other. Science is not a machine; it is a society, an ecology. And human knowledge, like the species themselves, is a product of the turmoil of the interreactions of living organisms.
Order emerging as each interreacts with each under rules which are the same for all (order without authority): just as that idea links the great liberal systems, so it also links the great liberal theorists. Darwin is known to have been strongly influenced by the economic ideas of Adam Smith. “The theory of natural selection,” writes Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and historian of science, “is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith’s basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits.”
And Adam Smith was deeply familiar with the thinking of the British political liberals (he published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, after all). Yet the most intimate connection between members of the liberal constellation is also the least appreciated: the connection between democracy and science. Indeed, the theory of political liberalism and the theory of epistemological liberalism were fathered by one and the same man, the father of liberalism itself.
John Locke proposed, three hundred years ago, that the legitimacy of a government resides not with the rulers but with the rolling consent of the governed. To the argument that “no government will be able long to subsist, if the People may set up a new Legislative, whenever they take offence at the old one,” Locke replied that government based on popular consent will be more rather than less stable than a regime in which the ruler is fixed, initial impressions notwithstanding.2 The genius of Locke (and, later, of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin) was to see, as Plato had not, that social stability does not require social stasis; just the opposite, in fact.
This same John Locke also set on its feet the empirical theory of knowledge. Locke himself never explicitly linked his philosophy of knowledge with his philosophy of politics, but the kinship is not hard to see. To begin with, he was one of the greatest of all the fallibilists (or, in that sense, of the skeptics). Just as no one is absolutely entitled to claim the right to rule, so no one is absolutely entitled to decide what is true. Just as not even a king may infringe on basic rights, so not even the wisest or holiest man may claim to be above error. For any and all of us may be mistaken. “All men are liable to error,” Locke said. “Good men are men still liable to mistakes, and are sometimes warmly engaged in errors, which they take for divine truths, shining in their minds with the clearest light.”
No: however certain you may feel, however strongly you are convinced, you must check. Knowledge of all things except our own being, God’s being, and mathematics can be obtained only by looking to experience—that is, by checking. From Locke, then, comes our public process for picking worthy beliefs, as well as our public process for picking worthy leaders. From him comes liberalism’s defining principle: rule by rules, not by persons.
And—no surprise, this—from him also comes the strongest of all arguments for toleration of dissent. In passages which today define the morality of liberal science, Locke preached the sermon which every generation learns with such difficulty and forgets with such ease: “We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavor to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information, and not instantly treat others ill, as obstinate and perverse, because they will not renounce their own, and receive our opinions. . . . For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns?”
This, finally, is why the Constitution protects the speech of Nazis, Communists, racists, sexists, homophobes, and Andy Rooney: they may be right. And, if they turn out to be wrong, it does us good to hear what they have to say so that we can criticize their beliefs and know why they are wrong.
-- Jonathan Rauch, "Kindly Inquisitors"
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We describe human knowledge as evolving, but this is more accurate than a mere metaphor. We can see it in the decline of religion and belief in gods. And we can see what we might call a kind of epistemic creationism in attempts to - or even demands to - artificially circumvent that evolutionary process.
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wintersdecay · 1 year
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LITERARY ANYLISIS : re-animator 
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TRIGGER WARNING:
inhumane treatment of corpses
death of small animals
car accident mention
sexual assault mention
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this will be a literary analysis between the serial turned short novella herbert west: re-animator by h.p. “huge racist” lovecraft & the work of r.esident evil: village. much like in the vein of my earlier piece on the inspiration of salvatore moreau i’d once again like to direct your attention to a few interesting points of correlation between a classic american piece of literature by h.p. “i’m scared of brown and black people” lovecraft and the game.
first i’d like to start off by saying, u do NOT have to read re-animator. you can easily find it online as all of h.p. “don’t google my cat’s name” lovecraft’s work is public domain and can be found pretty much anywhere, but for the most part, i’ll be giving you the jist of the story through my essay, if you’ll indulge me (:
herbert west is a medical student that goes on a wacky journey to try “fixing” death. he believes that he can more or less cure death despite being only in like, his second year of college. now, if the story was written from herbert’s perspective, i’d pester the other half of my braincell to read it and take it in. annoy the shit out of @blitzkriegers​ until he realized he’d know no peace until he gave in and read the damn thing– luckily for him, i’m the lovecraft stan ( but not really. the work is good but i’ve divorced it from the artist, u kno, the guy that was afraid of salad ) and also, the story is not told from his point of view but rather that of his ‘ colleague ‘, the unknown protagonist that every story of h.p. “i was married for only a year & my wife was so depressed she just left one day & i said ‘this is fine actually’ b/c the only woman i loved is my mom” lovecraft. they are all basically just mr. lovecraft’s self-insert original character. they are almost ALL just an unnamed white, male, 20-something cis-straight man that is never given a name but in my head, i always call h.p. “it is too horrible to put into words & also less work for me” lovecraft, which, for this essay, i will simply shorten to hp.
hp tells the story, interestingly, 16 years AFTER the events. this number is not mentioned until much later in the story, but right away it caught my attention as the end of village / the upcoming DLC takes place, 16 years after the events of village:
I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious afrite from the halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is by that satanic scourge that most recall the year, for truly terror brooded with bat-wings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me there is a greater horror in that time—a horror known to me alone now that Herbert West has disappeared.
( elbis - is a deity of love & war in the turkey/russian region )
just a little food for thought. moving on. hp tells the story to an unknown audience. one would assume police or perhaps a diary entry but it is never stated outright.
now hp and west have an interesting relationship, which is nicely summed up in a couple sentences, which ethan could have just as easily written in his own journal:
While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
he talks about how he and west were students at the miskatonic university medical school,
As I have said, it happened when we were in the medical school, where West had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes.
presumably studying to become a doctor and in his 3rd year, he met herbert west, of which he states:
The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it.
again, could have been written by ethan. he had just begun his search for rose after a nasty car accident and also his only friend in the world killing his wife in their living room. he’s confused, he’s upset, he’s heartbroken and desperate and then this absolute freak shows up like a five ring circus and before ethan can ask for help, karl just impales him then smashes his head in with hunks of floating metal.
now, karl’s work seems to center on producing an army to stage his revolution against miranda and not specifically resurrecting the dead just to conquer death as west’s motivation is, but the parallels between their work is hard to deny. karl’s work is noted in development files 1 & 2.
west spends most of his time at school doing a lot of experiments:
Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs; but he soon saw that the perfection of this process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research.
so many in fact, he catches the eye of the heads of the department, which turn him over to the dean of the school, dr. allen halsey. dr. halsey is a saint like figure, which i will get into later, but it cannot be missed that he could be set into the same archetype as miranda.
now how would a normal, every man like hp get caught up in this, he states it simply:
I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West’s pursuits, and we frequently discussed his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite.
this is could be read on the surface, that he was just curious to watch someone ‘ cure ‘ death, but also it could and will, be read homoerotically in that hp is just enamored with herbert’s work, charm and overall, the entire package. ethan too, seems, at least in the beginning, to be charmed by karl. despite being stabbed and then sent running for his life, he flirts back with karl through moreau’s television. when they finally met face to face, he is touching karl, grabbing onto his elbow as if to anchor himself. it is a small motion but it is there and should be noted.
for west and hp, their work revolves around certain parameters:
What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial preservation; preferably free from malforming disease, and certainly with all organs present.
and comes to a head when west finds “the perfect” specimen:
…  ideal case in the potter’s field; a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in Sumner’s Pond, and buried at the town’s expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after midnight.
karl, too, finds his “ perfect “ specimen:
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interesting….
this subject is the one. west is able to bring him back from the dead and gain signs of life, however, the thing cannot speak and breaks out of the small apartment they are using.
it doesn’t take the school to realize that “ yo, this weirdo west is always talking about bringing people back from the dead and now there are reports of a dead guy walking around. “ so dr. halsey forbids west to work in the labs anymore but west has nearly graduated and manages to get his doctorate before he can be stopped. all the same, herbert comes to HATE dr. halsey:
West, young despite his marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience with good Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a desire to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate day-dreams of revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness.
karl also dreams of taking miranda out, but more so, being able to say he was right and she was wrong. he literally spent a lifetime knowing how horrific miranda was but had to listen to his siblings faun over her, the villagers worship her and miranda parade around as the great mother, figuratively and literally.
hp gets nervous, not as much as herbert, but still, and decides they need to move their work somewhere else:
It was I who thought of the deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we fitted up on the ground floor an operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight doings. The place was far from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet precautions were none the less necessary;
a farmhouse is not so far from a barn, wouldn’t you agree? karl’s factory is hidden under a barn, far from the other houses and the town proper. another reflection.
even with the isolation, herbert digs down into the earth. he hires secret workers to tunnel deep into the earth where he can work away from anyone’s, even hp’s, eyes. hp noting later towards the climax as he finally enters herbert’s lab:
There was no sound, but just then the electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only insanity—or worse—could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all—the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall.
unfortunately for the science boys, typhoid descends on the town. a sickness that takes a dozen a week and while they would love to work on the bodies, the infectious nature makes all bodies struck down by it useless to them. this sickness can be seen in the village as well, famine, the young and old dying from the harsh winter. and the mold, lest we not forget. it grows everywhere and most definitely has poisoned the water supply and crops. here, a savior appears:
Dr. Halsey in particular had distinguished himself in sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill with whole-hearted energy to cases which many others shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness. Before a month was over the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he seemed unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion. West could not withhold admiration for the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was even more determined to prove to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking advantage of the disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations, he managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university dissecting-room one night, and in my presence injected a new modification of his solution.
miranda is the one that steps in to save the good people. a doctor that is able to fight back the disease killing people in this small village. just like dr. halsey, she is elevated to sainthood, her work so important and eventually, she is literally worshipped as a god.
but on top of the plague, there is the monsters:
The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said was greater than the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied daemon-soul of the plague itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing which strewed red death in its wake—in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless remnants of bodies were left behind by the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the dark, and said it was white and like a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The number it had killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and had not been alive.
this re-animator, it is the undead that herbert has brought back. this slightly shifts the comparison as technically in village, it is moreau that made the lycans. his experiments of injected villagers with wolf blood and the cadou, created the monsters, however, it is karl that seems to be able to control them. he talks to them, sends them out and therefore, probably gets the real credit. the villages have seen karl roaming around, most likely with the lycan at his side whereas moreau never leaves the lake or mine shafts under the reservoir. so for all intents and purposes, the monsters belong to karl just as herbert has made these undead things.
eventually, hp explains that he knows herbert is going to far. over and over again he talks about how herbert states he just needs a fresher body and makes note that as of late, herbert has begun to look at him strangely. not unlike karl looks to ethan, noting in his journal:
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hp explains to his unknown audience:
I was held to him by sheer force of fear, and witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat. Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did—that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment—a languid Elagabalus of the tombs.
( baudelaire - a famous french poet ) ( elagabauls - an infamous roman emperor known for sex scandals )
i think the inclusion of such flowery language, while one might state is just h.p. “i was homophobic but my best and only friend in the world was out gay and the sole reason we have any of my work to this the year 2022″ lovecraft’s usual way. he is known for his purple prose but also it is just a little bit gay to bring up this emperor when talking about your main character’s live-in evil scientist bestie.
elagabauls was kind of a wild figure in history. most stories talk about them ( i’m going to use neutral pronouns and you’ll know why in a minute ) going to brothels to prostitued themselves out for fun. that they delighted in being used by common soldiers. there is also some lesser circulated stories that they liked being referred to as a queen and the mistress of these men. there was some writing that found a note was passed around that they would give “ any amount of wealth to any surgeon that could give them a vagina “ they took up venus as their patron saint and demanded everyone refer to them as lady rather than lord, and so was seen as possibly one of history’s earlier transgender women but that was not really uncovered until 2008. in lovecraft’s time, the emperor was only know for being a very promiscuous, their marriages never lasting because they preferred to lay with hunky men rather than their wives.
seems a little bit gay.
and that is really what is comes down to, the incredibly homoeroticism of both re-animator and ethan and karl. of course i am not the first to talk about their weird homo vibes and the trope has been around forever. in fact while looking for an online source to pull these quotes from ( because i read it in my physical copy of the novella and didn’t want to type it out ) i got interested to see if the gay tones were kept in the movies because yes, there is a movie about this story. it even has a  good sequel and a very bad sequel. i have watched two of them and will go into it later:
The homosociality of this subgenre (the protagonist and their seducer are nearly always of the same gender) makes it a fertile field for queer subtext
The two men’s entanglement is capital-R romantic, with Dan falling almost immediately under Herbert’s sway even as his fiancée, Meg, begs him to realize how dangerous his partner in crime really is. Re-Animator positions the relationship between its two leads as a battle between heteronormativity and deviance (in one notable deleted scene, … he entreats Dan to inject him with the re-agent serum, with language - “I need it! Please!” - that carries equal connotations of sex and drugs) but the interesting thing about it is that Dan, barring a few half-hearted objections, never really frees himself from Herbert’s influence.
the bits i’ve seen of herbert begging dan for the injection really sounds like karl during the boss battle, absolutely begging ethan to ‘ give it ‘ to him. like… it couldn’t get any gayer than that.
The question of why Dan is still following Herbert around, given the trail of destruction and dead bodies in his wake, is never really answered: whatever the reason for Herbert’s continued influence over Dan (and it must be said, he seems like an absolutely intolerable roommate), it seems to have stuck. Moreover, Herbert’s own obsession with keeping Dan around is even more textual in this film: faced with the prospect of Dan leaving him, he quite literally approaches Dan with Meg’s preserved heart in his hands, begging him to stay. Herbert has stolen the heart in order to build Dan a new girlfriend around it, hoping this, in turn, will keep Dan in his life; he spies on Dan in bed with another woman, then parrots his own pillow talk back to him in order to convince him to stay; he reacts to Dan’s new love interest with clear and spiteful jealousy.
But it seems Herbert doesn’t want that. What he wants, quite literally, is to build a family with Dan - a daughter the two men create with their own hands, superior to anything that a heterosexual coupling might produce, proof of Herbert’s triumph over everyone who insisted that his ideas were folly. “I will not be shackled by the failures of your God,” he rants
(source:  ’I Gave Him Life:’ Queer-Coded Villains and Willing Seduction in the Re-Animator Franchise )
it was actually a photoset from the movie that ty sent me ( again. it is a classic piece so i don’t mind <3 ) that got me to run down this rabbit hole.
this tango of “dan” / hp and herbert has the same tempo as ethan and karl, specifically to mine & ty’s canon. after watching the movies, the first and third as the third one does not have dan in it so what’s even the point, i can definitely say the movies are very clearly gay coded. dan seems to swing between his attraction to women and his devotion to west. 
in the first movie, he is already with a woman when west moves in. right away meg does NOT like him and later when her father, the dean of the novel now given a connection to this added love interest, finds out and voices his dislike of west, meg fears that he will corrupt dan. a very typical fear for straight women dating bisexual men, that another, very obviously gay man will lure her partner from her. she is politely hostile towards west while west, in return, is deeply misogynistic towards her, telling dan that he is wasting his time, right in front of her. later in the movie, meg is kidnapped by a weirdo that worked with her father and there is an upsetting sexual assault scene in which the weirdo, who is a detached head, uses meg’s father to kidnap and strip her, so what out for that. it is uncomfortable to watch. in the climax of the movie, dan is torn between saving west from his creations that are attempting to tear him apart and meg, who has been attacked. at the end of the movie, it implies he left west to die in hopes of bringing meg back to life with the magic serum west developed.
this aligns interestingly with village, while ethan does not take anything from karl ( as he already has his portion of karl’s rose’s flask and he doesn’t need anymore keys to get to miranda ) he does chose another over karl despite karl helping him and after this, he finds out that both rose and mia are alive and fine. as if karl somehow stood in the way.
the second movie picks up a couple years after the first. bodies continue to go missing and meg is dead. it is not stated why she did not come back after using the serum, i’m not sure if the serum wasn’t strong enough or maybe she came back wrong and dan was forced to kill her, either way, his sacrifice of west was pointless-- also west is just fine anyway. apparently he was able to save himself and they are back to working and living together. as  the article mentions, west notes that dan is growing distant, that they are not as close as they were before meg was killed. he decides to babytrap dan by building him the perfect woman, as both a sexual partner and a child the create together. he finds parts that he knows dan will like, including a woman dan sleeps with as west listens in. 
this odd play of giving dan a woman to satisfy him is, obviously, weird. there is no way around that. it seems like he can tell dan is trying to leave, to find someone to sate his sexual preference and to keep west from losing dan, he decides to give him a gift that will be perfect for him and bind him to west. dan does not have the knowledge or fortitude to keep his undead bride alive, so it is as if west can experience the romance through this mask of a woman he made. dan won’t be with him sexually so he will build something with his own hands that will satisfy that desire, as good as it they did the deed together through this veil of a feminine shell.  
it kind of works. she comes to life as soon as west gives dan meg’s heart, the final piece. an extremely romantic gesture, the gift of a heart from one man to another. i swear this was not the template for ty and my thread but it fits! 
soon after, however, things start to spiral out of control and the new creation delves into the insanity west thought he cured. it rips out the heart and tries to give it to dan, mirroring how west had done the same in a romantic gesture but it is rejected by dan, repulsed by the way it looks like the woman he was interested in but does not act like her. 
things go bad and once more, dan has the chance to save west from being torn apart by his own fucked up little creations and does not. it’s fine, he survives for the terrible third movie, but that one is missing the queer coding so i’m not interested. 
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