#cheap literary analysis with preda

[i-gwarth]

There is a future for "the good ones"

Bastion is such a weird little outlier among X-men characters. He has a damn-near-incomprehensible, mystical-technological-timetravelling nonsense backstory that requires you to read like 30 other comics to understand - exactly the kind of convoluted 1990s comics bullshit that the MCU adaptations have tried to steer clear of for two decades now. I didn't actually expect them to actually adapt him for this season. But ultimately I kind of love how they play him in the series.

He's streamlined - a boring, soft-spoken little middle-manager type who plans out a near-perfect encirclement of mutancy in preparation for a purge.

Here's a bigot who seems both rational and capable of compromise. In stark contrast with shrieking racists like Creed and Gyrich, or conflicted oopsie-I-made-a-genocide-machine concerned citizens like Trask, Bastion employs genocide as a tool rather than an end goal. "If we've accepted that the presence of mutants is inevitable, how much more ground are we willing to cede?" he asks. And then he answers "As little as possible."

Not the extermination of a whole race of people. Simply its management - setting up a system where they can be made into non-threatening, productive members of society. It's enhancing rather than upsetting the status-quo, assuaging the existential fears of polite humans who just have some concerns, and backing up that system with as much genocidal violence as is required to make it work. Very clean, very neat, very Schneizel-pilled.

If this sounds familiar it's because it's the same system of thinking that people employ to declare how colonialism is over, while benefitting from the extraction of cheap resources out of former colonized nations; we haven't ended colonialism, we've merely streamlined it and made it more efficient. "It's stupid to waste resources that we can use."

Bastion is the endpoint of genocidal centrism. A little ethnic cleansing is required to make the machine work, and the machine - making it more streamlined, more efficient - is the best we can possibly hope for, so don't raise your voice at me!

Cable describing the future world that Bastion built as a "utopia" is actually a bit of an understated revelation here. It's exactly the kind of thing a centrist with a pang of guilty conscience might use as an excuse to close their eyes to the violence required to build this system. Much like how an abolitionist in the past, being witness to the horrors of slavery and colonial abuse, might view the participation of colonized or enslaved minorities in global capitalism as his end goal.

X-Men '97 can't escape the fact that it's produced under a Disney near-monopoly of modern media. This is the same company that gave us Karli true-leftism-is-killing-civilians Morgenthau and other childish takes on modern political extremes. In that context, Bastion is an improvement.

He might also be a jab from the showrunners at the Disney company itself (give them as little as possible, as late as possible, and they'll be grateful for it; they'll call it a utopia) but I can't prove that.

[i-gwarth]

X-men 97: Thoughts I had on Episode 5 aka The One Where Everything Goes Wrong

Spoilers beyond.

Am I grasping at straws when I feel a very distinct thematic buildup in this series? It started out almost like the Conclusion of History (appropriate, since it's building from the Actual Conclusion of the old show), and then proceeded to dismantle that notion.

It's taking place in the 90s. You see it in the clothing, the music, the aesthetics, but it's also glimpsed in a geopolitical parallelism. This story takes place inbetween the previous Grand Narrative of the Cold War and any new one that might arise; a Global Intermission, much like how we remember the 90s today (not that this is how they were, but this is how they are remembered. Much like how this show sells itself as "not the old xmen show as it was, but as you recall it").

Mutants and genoism are the topics of the day but they don't seem to be galvanizing world politics in the same sense as the event that broke the IRL intermission (9/11). You see efforts being made to turn genoism into the new global narrative via a rhetoric of "survival of the species" but people don't seem to be buying into it. There is just enough restraint that the intermission holds. Hell, it even looks like the world might avoid another destructive Grand Narrative - UN regulatory bodies are legislating Sentinels out of existence, and those things were originally funded by the US government. There's almost a glimpse of an attainable peace. Dialogue. Integration. The rejection of Magneto's absolutism and the embrace of Xavier's coexistence-and-compromise.

Which makes this episode a straight up 9/11 parallel for its own setting.

[i-gwarth]

Scorn: It's about Transcendence... but it's also Saying Something

Scorn is a 2022 horror game that has released after a long, 6-year development cycle. A lot of people have been looking forward to it, but many seem disappointed at what's been called clunky combat, rudimentary puzzle design and the cryptic meaning of the whole thing. Scorn contains no writing and dialogue, and whatever themes, meanings and plot it has are conveyed exclusively through environmental storytelling.

Full, unmarked spoilers below. This post assumes you know how the game ends, I'm not going to summarize the plot. I wanted to instead write about what it might all mean, and what the devs might be trying to say, since this is clearly a game made to be discussed and interpreted.

Scorn's central theme seems to be transcendence. Definitionally, this means becoming or experiencing something *beyond* what we start out as. That can mean any number of things (i.e. a living being transforming into a corpse could be transcendence, in the strictest sense, since life is experiencing its own end) but the term is generally understood as indicating some sort of��progress; we don't become just something *else*, we "transcend" into something better. Like the Tvtropes page, Ascend-to-a-higher-plane-of-existence. I'll get back to this.

Anyway, these words came to me earlier, and I think they sort of encompass what the game's theme is: "we are driven to become anything other than what we are". As in, we're not just choosing to attempt this transcendence; it's inevitable for us to try it, it's an irrepressible instinct.

The Humanoids of Scorn's world seem dedicated to transcendence. The artbook lays it out more plainly, but even in the game it's clear. There's a temple, and elaborate, complicated machines that take apart those that arrive at the temple and connect their brains to a great big brain mass in the ceiling. Thus, in very plain terms one humanoid can control two bodies; transcendence, simply put.

The homunculi we have to kill and juice near the end also grasp towards overcoming transcending their own physical limitations by piloting cyber-bodies. They wanna be anything else.

But that broader, non-progressive interpretation of the word transcendence is also portrayed. Things changing and becoming "lesser". The first protagonist becoming a twisted, animalistic parasite. And the pests in the Crater level, which are born in rope-like collectives joining them together into a greater whole, tear themselves out of that whole and wander aimlessly around the place, then die.

(side-note: If you look at the parasite, in-game and also in the concept art, you will see above what's left of its face, its brain, flanked by two wing-like flaps of skin. In the art book, that same brain-with-wings shape is described as the thing the Humanoids are trying to become, a "pure consciousness" that can fly out of its body and inhabit other, more elaborate bodies called "Shells" - the androids we pilot near the end of Scorn. So, given that the Parasite has that shape on top of itself, you could even surmise that it's a case of a "failed" transcendence, stopped mid-way through, as if the intended process was corrupted and derailed)

Basically what I'm saying that almost everything in Scornworld seems to instinctively grasp towards changing itself, as if unsatisfied with the form it's born into. In-universe, the protagonists we're playing go towards the temple even though nobody told them to do it. Nobody *tells* the protagonist what the machines do or that there's a place beyond the horizon where he might gain the ability to pilot two bodies instead of one. He just heads that way from the moment he's born.

It occurred to me also that "transcendence" can be viewed even more broadly, and in terms of real-life - the drive for acquiring money, reputation, power or even, dare I say, pursuits in artistic or scientific fields can be seen as "trying to become greater than what we start out as", almost like we all have this drive. Like the humanoids being birthed out of a wall and heading towards the temple because, in a way (in a game sense, but maybe also in a narrative sense), it's the only thing they can do.

Trying to be not-who-they-are is a part of who-they-are.

And here's the thing: I feel like Scorn, as an artpiece, has a very derogatory and... scornful view of that impulse. The temple is imposing, yes, but it's also kind of ridiculous and revolting. Genital imagery is openly portrayed and exaggerated, the sense of grandiosity is undercut by the omnipresent rot and decay and collapse, etc. It's as if the game is saying "this ain't it, chief".

"Reaching for ascendance is morally repugnant" is what I'm getting from this

Even the game's cover art portrays humanoid figures as columns, as the foundation of something grander than them, something we can't see but can only guess at (transcendence again). But they are also rotting and decayed, and the foundation is falling apart; one humanoid-column in the background of the cover art is broken.

I feel like, to the extent this game says anything, it rejects the drive to be more than what we are. Or maybe it rejects this specific process of transcendence, where it's achieved at the expense of other beings who are sacrificed along the way. The moldman in the egg, the giant creature in the crater, the homunculus in its pod, all have to suffer and/or die very violently, just so the protagonist can reach the promised place of rebirth and transformation. Almost like the way how certain people can attain great wealth and power in the real world through the exploitation and at the expense of the working cl-...

oh, wait, no nevermind.