lostiethoughts

[lostiethoughts]

need to move my lost blogging here LMAO but it's like. jacob was made to feel like a used toy by his mother and the one person who he loved mutually wanted to leave him more so he only knew how to use people as toys and nothing else. like. idk EYE find it a very philosophical and insightful mythology

tbh i think if you don't like across the sea you just don't get it

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love how sayid saw roger abusing ben and the look on his face is just "well now i gotta kill him to put him out of his misery"

[lostiethoughts]

man thinking about how Jack felt responsible for Boone's death that it haunted him for seasons but then in s6 after the sub explosion sawyer says to jack "I killed then didn't I" and Jack immediately goes "no the monster did" like... the GROWTH

[lostiethoughts]

also i think eloise is representative of the unsympathetic cruelty of the inevitability of time and destiny. but also the guidance and protection it brings. and daniel is a pawn to her in this sense; and at the same time created her to be like this when he stormed into the others' camp and threatened them. their relationship is, in my opinion, metaphorical of the truth that we create our destiny and our destinies create us.

[lostiethoughts]

honestly though season five is like the origin story for all of the characters' lives wherein they create their own lore. god this show is crazy

[lostiethoughts]

it's sooooooo crazy that for all that lost is about letting go of the past and moving on... they wouldn't have gotten to the island if they weren't hung up on the past. daniel wouldn't have suggested for them to "change" the timeline if he wasn't so hung up on charlotte's death. jack wouldn't have dropped the bomb if he wasn't hung up on losing kate and the pain and death he caused while being on the island, even if indirectly. juliet wouldn't have hit the bomb if her love for sawyer didn't make her want a better life for him (even though in his eyes it wouldn't be.) for all that they let go they couldn't truly let go and that caused them to literally have created their own fates - being stuck on the island. that's what season 5 was about.

and season 6, i think, is about truly and finally letting go.

[lostiethoughts]

i think the idea of fate and determinism lies not in our "future" (our "destiny") but actually much more in our relationship with our present. the idea of us being creatures of habit is reflected in how we view and put meaning into our past into determine our actions and choices today, and what the consequences of that will be tomorrow. but we do not live in a vacuum so all the choices we make still, as a result, affect others and therefore the choices they make because of that.

but either way the more i think about it the more "our future resembles our past" makes total sense to me, because we as creatures of habit, in our nature, despite our desire to find meaning, are defined by the choices we have made before, which in some way or another dictate a choice we make in the future. it's why the idea of personality exists, a way to categorize the pattern behind the history of our decision making, as a representation of our uniqueness, our soul, who we are in the world. and in the same way humanity has an identity - a personality - of its own, of values we've given name to, a range of good and bad and in between. of greed and companionship and envy and curiosity and love and hate and competition and vengeance and nostalgia and hope and pride and humility. we are diametrically contradictory creatures, hypocrites, prone to extremes in both our need for ourselves (survival) and our need for others. all of these are natural characteristics we have as humans and have put beliefs on, beliefs which are the fundamental idea of behavioral patterns.

but the things we believe result in the choices we make in the world; and in turn the nature of time puts those choices in the axes of cause and effect. the beliefs we hold as humans all of which stem from the past are directly linked to the choices we make in the future; therefore there is no breaking free from the fabric of space time being something that exists with stability rather than instability. i made the choices i have because of who i am; if i would've made any choice from my past differently then i would not be the person i am and have always been. not because i didn't decide to make that choice, but that there is something unique in the person that i am right now and that i have always known myself to be to make the decisions i have, and despite the thought experiment, no idea of parallel universes stemming from different decision making will change who i am fundamentally as a person: and therefore, the decisions i know i have indeed made

it's mostly to say that our inevitability does not lie in the expanse of time, but rather in who we are and the choices we decide to make, every day. sometimes there's luck (in coincidences of the universe), and oftentimes other people's decisions affect our beliefs, and therefore our own. and yet there is still the core truth of free will, of us being able to make whatever decisions we want: and yet those are formed by our experiences and knowledge (which we can only acquire by being curious enough), and do not exist in a vacuum outside of our patterns of behavior, our habits, formulated by our beliefs.

and so, the past resembles the future because for that all we progress in terms of other aspects of our modern lives, one thing remains constant: we are human. we are as human as the ones before us, and we are as human as the ones after us. therefore, of course we will fight. we will kill. we will seek dominance. we will torment and torture. but we will also love and help and be curious and create communities and try to learn the meaning of the world, and why we're here. so through all the suffering of the world, we will still see and love each other through our shared humanity; for all the people who create the pain, there will always be people who wish to heal that pain.

that speaks to the nature of humanity; of past and present; of how we cannot escape our inevitable ends. but our fate is not those ends, but rather the journey we have along the way - a journey that is guided by our decisions, which then in turn is affected by the patterns established from our past, whether as an individual or a community or culture. the future resembles the past because we are as human as we have always been; and just like the chaos in nature and the chaos in ourselves, there is something beautiful about that

[lostiethoughts]

you know my instinct is definitely to oppose the idea of a lost sequel but i do actually think that a story could be told if we followed aaron several years later after the finale and get a peek into the old losties' lives but the main crew is aaron, jiyeon, charlie, and clementine (and walt as their mentor) with their lives eventually tangling much like their forebearers. and flashbacks can be incorporated to be framed to tell their history but in a way that more shows how sawyer kate miles richard hurley ben walt etc lives' played out after lost.

AND i'm of the firm belief that no place only has one singular mystery or mythology, but that we as people form our own communities and thus meaningful cultures and mythologies, even if they're not known to anyone else in the world but us. and by this logic my second plot aspect of lost the sequel would for there to be a newly discovered (or recently relevant) mythology of the island, perhaps in terms of science and fate again or perhaps another realm of existence, for our main and possibly our old characters to uncover. there are never too many secrets in this world, between people or communities, and in the same way i would certainly believe that the island is sure to have other mysteries (from a mythological and technical sense) that writers can make up. lol

[lostiethoughts]

and i really think that's what makes the value in life the journey and not the destination; the progress and not the goal. it's about the time that passes and how we give meaning to it in the future.

also i'm watching another video essay that just had the fire quote "to be forced to leave and to be forced to stay are two evils of the same kind" and i think that ties in here too. leaving halts the progress and staying prolongs it; it's not about length but about value, not about quantity but quality. it doesn't matter how long it takes us to grow as long as we grow at all; it doesn't matter how successful we become because there will always be more - the definition of greed and gluttony and envy. as humans we have to cherish what we have in the ways we can and make it worth the time, and our lives - through the journeys we have and the relationships we choose to create and the meanings we uncover along the way.

i don't know about religion or spiritually but i do believe that being a person in this world is defined by us as creatures of habit who desire to find meaning. that's all we really are at our core

[lostiethoughts]

i don't know about religion or spiritually but i do believe that being a person in this world is defined by us as creatures of habit who desire to find meaning. that's all we really are at our core

[lostiethoughts]

i think another core tenet of lost is not only what it means to be lost but also what it means to be found. and what it means to be found is not only with each other, and being important to each other, but also finding themselves, the people who they are, and the people they want to become

and more than that but then the idea of being lost is someone who has not found themselves: someone who is trapped by their trauma and desperately unable to seek a way out but rather letting it hurt themselves and hurt others. they are lost in the world because they are lost to themselves, and it's only on the island where they discover themselves again. not with a blank slate, but with the peace of mind and eventual desire to heal

it also bears saying that jacob and smokey were lost too. eternally, the whole time, and even though jacob had on some level made peace with the mistake he made, it was still so much that he was unable to truly escape it, and that it was a literal physical manifestation of his mistake that would define the rest of his life. and that's what the rest of the losties have too: in such a isolated state in their life because they had something similar, either sinister or a mistake, from their past that was haunting them and turning them into the people they were before the plane crash. in the end jacob and the mib's story parallels the lives of many losties in the simplest terms: mistakes and generational/parental trauma, and being lost in being unable to overcome or heal from them

[lostiethoughts]

see the idea that lost's incorporation of time travel is bad/"evidence of making it up as it went along"/sloppy/"running out of ideas"/etc is just wrong because so much of seasons 1-4 were about how everyone ended up on the island in the first place and what decisions led to that point, which is fundamentally the idea of cause and effect, which is also quite definitively the idea of time, wherein things from the past always affect things in the future and can be measured as such, so the idea of time travel being incorporated questioning not only this theory within the characters but also with the events in the show itself makes perfect sense. to me.

[lostiethoughts]

i think the incident (all 3 parts) is my second favorite lost episode. for a lot of reasons and also for jack and sawyer homoerotically beating each other up

[lostiethoughts]

i love jack shepherd because he has a deep insecurity in his own abilities which causes him to desperately want to prove himself all the time which makes him such a peak tragic hero in having both of these opposite characteristics

[lostiethoughts]

see sawyer is such a metal guy because he's so hypermasculine and yet shown to be the best version of himself when he trusts the intuition of women instead of just his own. real shit

[lostiethoughts]

this is also a more simplistic version of generational trauma (which adds in the complexity of human nature and relationships)

if we really want to think about it i think one of the many theses of lost is that clinging to the past and allowing it to define you can, over time, turn into maliciousness and evil. the mib and jacob are proof of that: jacob killed the mib because of his own insecurities and tumultuousness of their relationship as brothers, to the point that he would be literally haunted by it as he was playing out his life's purpose, protecting the island. it was a constant reminder of something he had done wrong because of his own insecurities and allowing the bad parts of his relationship with his brother to define it rather than the love and bond they shared. and we see it with the losties when the crux of a lot of their storylines is about letting the past go. and i think it's an important takeaway from the show, that it is not only valuable but good to heal and learn from our pasts instead of letting it define us, because otherwise it can lead us down treacherous paths.

[lostiethoughts]

if we really want to think about it i think one of the many theses of lost is that clinging to the past and allowing it to define you can, over time, turn into maliciousness and evil. the mib and jacob are proof of that: jacob killed the mib because of his own insecurities and tumultuousness of their relationship as brothers, to the point that he would be literally haunted by it as he was playing out his life's purpose, protecting the island. it was a constant reminder of something he had done wrong because of his own insecurities and allowing the bad parts of his relationship with his brother to define it rather than the love and bond they shared. and we see it with the losties when the crux of a lot of their storylines is about letting the past go. and i think it's an important takeaway from the show, that it is not only valuable but good to heal and learn from our pasts instead of letting it define us, because otherwise it can lead us down treacherous paths.