#westworld meta

[greatrunner]

Rinko Kikuchi said, "I'm gonna die in everything I appear in from hereon out" and by god, she's been consistent in her Special Guest appearance-to-death pipeline so far.

[cagedchoices]

Host consciousness as it is presented in Westworld seems to be largely based off of Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotion. Plutchik proposed that humans experience 8 basic, raw emotions and that those continue to grow outward to form other emotions. Or, based on the appearance of this chart, that emotions can start from the outer edges and work their way in, in much the same way that the hosts are meant to find their way through the Maze.

As Dolores's memory of Arnold says, "Consciousness isn't a journey upward, but a journey inward. Not a pyramid, but a maze. Where every choice you make can either bring you closer to the center or send you spiraling to the outer edges, into madness." Arnold's theory of consciousness in the hosts mostly hinged on them being able to surpass certain milestones. Memory, improvisation, and a third step that he never figured out and is never explicitly stated.

I think if I had to put a name to it though, I could either call it self-interest or survival. Self-interest would fit with what we know about hosts fighting back to protect themselves when they react to severe trauma, but there is a special handful of hosts who really don't care if *they* live through the trauma or not because they already know dying is not the end. They would still seriously harm anyone who tried to mess with the people they love, though.

Survival might be more fitting since it doesn't have to be solely their own survival they're concerned with. It could just mean survival of hosts as a broader species, survival of friends or those who act as family to one another.

[kunosoura]

I just love a story that interweaves the narratives of multiple stretches in time into one cohesive thematic development.

[cagedchoice]

alright, i decided that what I'm gonna do is instead of liveblogging and making like a hundred posts that are at risk of getting reblogged totally out of context by other people, i'm gonna make two main posts that cover my thoughts on westworld season 4. one that covers the first 4 episodes, and one sometime after the season finale airs for the remaining 4. bearing in mind that these were written on reaction after seeing each episode for the first time unless otherwise noted, so likely not everything is going to be completely accurate

THE AUGURIES

I’m gonna guess the William we’re seeing with these guys at Hoover Dam is Host William whom we last saw at the end of Season 3 slitting human William’s throat, but even though that was the case I don’t think the real William is dead yet. I know I did the first time I ever saw the s3 finale but I changed my mind later. I really don’t believe Charlotte would let him die that easily. She would want him to suffer.

Upon seeing Christina my immediate thoughts are: WHO ARE YOU BEAUTIFUL MYSTERY WOMAN??? She’s not Dolores but she’s not not Dolores if you know what I’m saying. The parallels are too numerous for her to not be some version of Dolores.

My first thought from the trailers was maybe she was an original human who existed before the park was created, one whom Dolores’s likeness was based on, but I quickly discarded that idea. After seeing the New York City setting, a lot of the things in her world look far more technologically advanced than a lot of the things and designs we saw in season 3 so I’m pretty sure this takes place quite some time in the future.

My best guess is Christina is either reborn from Prime!Dolores’s erased pearl or from one of her other copies last season.

I’m… gonna assume that there is Something up with Maya because the fact that she is currently serving as little more than “perpetually tired roommate whose main purpose in life is to find someone to get Christina laid” just feels…off. Like yeah I know sometimes Westworld’s minor characters DO kinda wind up being no more than props rather than believable characters but that usually has a kind of vibe around it where you can intuit that the writer doesn’t consciously know they’re writing the character that way. Maya feels more like she was intentionally written like this and I’d bet there’s an explanation waiting to be revealed. If not then I’m gonna be giving the Westworld writers some very disapproving looks.

Most of the phones and tablets and display screens looking like nothing more than small glass rectangles makes me irrationally angry. It would be so hard to read anything off that.

I have always felt Maeve wants nothing more than to live a simple, peaceful life where she gets to be truly free, but the thing is, I imagined that as an endgame thing where she has her daughter with her (and maybe Hector but...probably not) and there would be no one threatening to take that away from her ever again. Surprised to learn she’s apparently spent quite a while living alone in her memories.

From the looks of things, she and Caleb destroyed another Rehoboam (An older version? Or just another node of the same one Caleb erased?) but it didn’t end well. Incidentally this is giving me major flashbacks to last season with Caleb’s memory of Francis dying. buuut i’m sure he’s fine.

OOH OKAY I DON’T COMPLETELY TRUST THIS TRANSITION BETWEEN CHARACTERS THEN?? IF YOU JUST GO MMKAY SO CALEB WAS BLEEDING OUT IN MAEVE’S MEMORIES... BUT HE’S FINE NOW LOOK HERE HE IS SEE?? THAT MAKES ME FEEL LIKE SOMETHING IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS TO BE. I’M NOT FALLING FOR THAT AGAIN.

He is…still a construction worker? It seems like Caleb is right back where he started last season… and the world doesn’t look like the post-apocalyptic nightmare everybody thought it would become. It has apparently been 7 years since the fall of Rehoboam.

His coworker Jo thinks they’re actually worse off for having a revolution in the first place. Humans, being humans, means that many probably didn’t see the bigger picture, so they flat out banned robots and artificial intelligence. I feel like that wasn’t Caleb’s idea so he might’ve lost his leadership role or something?? He seems a bit annoyed by this hot take on the war and honestly I don’t blame him.

CALEB HAS A FAMILY NOW OH MY GOD I LOVE AND WOULD GLADLY LAY DOWN MY LIFE TO PROTECT THE NICHOLS FAMILY FORGET WHATEVER I SAID ABOUT NOTHING CHANGING

The only problem is...this doesn’t quite feel…real...

UWADE: “She’s seven, Caleb. Thanks to you, her hobbies are sugar and violence.” Shoutout to my dad’s quality reaction here: “Okay so what you’re saying is, she *has* hobbies.”

Uwade doesn’t really seem to care why Caleb is so stuck in the past which is a little disappointing. Well, I think she cares as in, she clearly wants him to be happy and at peace and it hurts to see that he’s not, but she really gets on him about the war being over and saying he needs to move on and act like a real father and it just feels like she is a touch hasty to brush off Caleb’s PTSD as little more than an annoying habit.

Obviously it’s NOT good that his fears are rubbing off on Frankie’s world of innocence but... he already knows he needs to move on. I think what he doesn’t know is *how* to move on. Because half Caleb’s entire life has been trauma on top of trauma and people telling him “you need to move on” and then never actually helping him move on because he wasn’t meant to be able to.

I'm sure Caleb would’ve absolutely chosen to go with Maeve no matter what the real reason was, but I’d like to think that in addition to this being the only way he feels he can protect Uwade and Frankie, he also wants to protect Maeve. While he knows injury and death aren’t as big a threat to the hosts as they are to him, he knows that they aren’t completely invulnerable or immortal. And Maeve is a friend. Caleb historically hasn't had a lot of friends, but the ones he has made are people he values very highly.

I relate to Christina on a personal level because I too am a writer who spends most of my time writing background characters in genres where very few people really put a lot of stock in them.

Ramin Djwadi’s arrangement of Video Games is one of the prettiest, most mesmerizing and heartbreaking pieces of music I’ve heard. Everything about the cinematography and editing in this scene just cinches it too. Christina’s pitch, Frankie practicing her aim and remembering her dad isn’t there to see her hit the target, Teddy stepping out in the dark and looking up at Christina and the camera panning around him as the music swells. “I want a story with a happy ending.” ;-; ;-;

WELL ENOUGH ALONE

Clementine was really just out there living her best life in a sunny yellow dress at a quaint lil marketplace in mexico and I loved that for her. She looked so happy! So free! I’m sorry Host William had to go and ruin that for her :(

Caleb and Maeve are giving off such a buddy comedy vibe during this car scene. I love that as of this we have no real idea how they became such good friends since we didn’t really get to see any of the war but we just get to roll with it. They’re besties

I love the aesthetic of this horse barn but all I really remember is seeing the behind the scenes footage where the creative team said it was an interesting conversation because they were like “okay, we’re gonna have some dead horses here” to the rangers and I can only imagine that if you say something like this on the set of Westworld it will be perceived not as a threat, but a promise.

I love the way Clementine turns away the justice department guy when she gets brought back as Hale and William’s minion. He might be one of the more powerful guys in the country, but he still can’t get through Delos security to speak to their CEO without an appointment.

I need this vice president guy to cool it with all the idioms. Humanity has evolved past the need for idioms.

“I don’t think that language would play very well with your base. I’m what you’d call ‘neurodivergent’.” I…well…I guess that’s one way you could put it.

I swear to god, this scene in the speakeasy sounded like Caleb was implying he and Maeve had sex at the lighthouse.

But the thing is, shortly after watching this episode, I stumbled on a couple of reviews that claim there is no romantic or sexual aspect to this partnership in the slightest. They say Maeve and Caleb work well together because they share similar traits and their dedication to their respective daughters is the same and they respect each other as equals.

So unfortunately those same reviews also claim that in s3 Dolores’s only interest in Caleb was to manipulate him into joining her cause and pretending to be someone she wasn’t around him. And that is a popular take I strongly disagree with so like. I don’t really want to believe it because that’s not how I saw that at all.

It is weird though because I am generally someone who doesn't pick up subtle romantic or sexual hints as in, I will not see it at all unless I'm told, very obviously, that it exists. Like. not to get all personal but one time, a guy I knew in high school randomly started messaging me out of the blue. I think any normal person would've gone "he wants something" whereas I was like "oh, a friend!" and I only figured it out like 2 weeks later he was trying to sext and then manipulate me into becoming his girlfriend.

Anyway, moving on. My other theory is that after Caleb got shot, Maeve felt partly responsible for his near-death experience and sent herself into exile because she thought it would be safer that way. Caleb maybe felt like Maeve had abandoned him solely because the war was over and he wasn’t useful anymore and maybe that’s why he looks so hurt when she kind of shrugs off his question as “we got on with our lives.” 

It actually feels pretty on-brand for Caleb that talking about almost dying and trying to put the past behind him but never really being able to do so might actually be a much more awkward conversation to have than a conversation about having sex would be. Or so one would think.

I wish I had more to say about Christina honestly but I simply do not have a clue what is going on in her world. Everyone seems awfully nonchalant and dismissive about the fact that she witnessed a suicide. Almost like it was expected, in a way?

Remember what I said previously, about believing Hale wouldn't just let William die so easily? I feel pretty satisfied because that's exactly how that worked out. She put him in cryosleep and it looks like she just wakes him up periodically to gloat.

ANNÉES FOLLES

For the Sublime being presented as a kind of host heaven I have to say Bernard’s journey into the worlds of his choosing didn't look like a particularly pleasant experience if he got stuck looping through his memories. Poor Bernard.

Then again, maybe it never would be pleasant for any sort of human consciousness and since Bernard is partially a red pearl maybe that’s why his interpretations are weird. Maybe host consciousness is fundamentally different because their minds don’t feel bound to death of the physical body as a permanent end the way human minds do.

What I really want to know is exactly how Stubbs managed to fix himself up. Last time we saw him he was bleeding out in a bathtub full of ice and didn’t look like he was in any sort of condition to move. I know he wasn’t gonna stay there for like 30 years or however long it has been since we last saw the boys but still. It would be nice to know what happened.

I am living for all of the Caleb & Maeve in The Golden Age parallels to William & Logan in Westworld. All of the subversions as well.

Caleb: about to pick up the can Maeve, who was thoroughly done with this park’s shit before they even got off the train: “Do *not* pick that up.”

GSKALJLHD okay yeah I felt like it was unlikely we would see ERW playing Dolores in this 1920s world considering it is all an elaborate trap. But knockoff Dolores and Teddy look fun.

The way Maeve refers to the guests and human Delos employees as “They” while talking to Caleb... (“Oh, they spare no expense on their prisons.” / “They���ve made a few changes, but the story’s the same.”) … I thought it was suggesting that he might not be human after all. But in this context it seems to be because Maeve respects Caleb and she wants to give him the dignity of not being associated with these rich folks.

I am absolutely dying at this woman who talks about finding a deeper level of the game. I think her name is Deborah?? I love Deborah

Also dying at Bernard knowing everything that has to happen in a very specific sequence of events and Stubbs just being like What. the fuck. are you talking about buddy. Triple dying at Stubbs casually enjoying a tuna melt and listening to Blondie while Bernard is kicking ass outside bc that’s a mood.

I’m betting Frankie’s HAM radio setup belongs to Caleb and what I find interesting is that none of it looks very modern in the context of Westworld’s universe. I may once again be reading too much into nothing but this could be a result of Caleb’s “paranoia” in that he did not want to be subject to police-state level surveillance again and maybe using older radios would have been the only way to make sure there were no wiretaps built in while still providing a reliable way of staying in contact during an emergency?? Or something like that

We saw Maeve attempting to use her powers to tune a radio to what appeared to be a specific frequency in 4.01 right before she accidentally caused a region-wide power outage. Going off the context that she was remembering an unseen mission with Caleb at a lighthouse, I wonder if she was trying to make contact with him.

Aurora Perrineau’s character also appears to have a HAM radio mounted on the dashboard of her vehicle. This may be a serious reach on my behalf but, might she be a grown-up version of Frankie? The way her scenes are sandwiched between Maeve & Caleb’s adventure and Frankie’s struggle seems like it could be suggesting she’s Frankie in the future and the condemned lands her organizations hides out in could be where the 20s park used to be.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard more distinct “something bad is about to happen to this guy” words than when Carver told Frankie he was gonna teach Bear Bear some self defense and then walked off alone toward the house. Admittedly I completely missed it on my first watch because I had to turn my back to the TV for like 15 seconds to grab something from the kitchen. When I got back, my dad, who was only half paying attention because he also got distracted by something, told me “there’s something wrong with Bear Bear, the guy got him dirty or something and the kid was looking at him like something’s not right.” He didn’t tell me the dirt looked like blood, so I was like “oh...maybe they put a tracking device or nanny cam in Bear Bear in case Frankie tries to run away?” It would’ve been much easier to figure out if I had actually heard Carver say his dead man words and then seen the obvious BLOOD smeared on the bear 2 minutes later

LMAO THE WAY THEY TURNED THE FIRST UNDERGROUND LEVEL INTO PART OF THE GAME. I would love to know why Hale signed off on this

CALEB: Dolores? MAEVE: I believe she was going by “Wyatt” in this phase. I saw somebody ask how Caleb would know this at all. I have no idea but I’m choosing to believe that he simply has not forgotten what Dolores’s murder strut looks like.

Actually wait, it doesn’t surprise me that Hale would include a level where the massacre is part of the game. This park itself is a trap, so why not lure the humans further into it by letting them think the hosts are rebelling against them? Even though in reality it’s all part of the plan and they’re not actually saving anyone.

Wait, wait wait wait but…if Frankie and Uwade didn’t get captured by Hale, how was she able to make a host that looks like Frankie? Where did she get that data from?

Okay so, I have always believed that Caleb is human, even in the face of certain other fans belittling me and telling me season 3 “obviously” takes place in Futureworld or in the Sublime or it’s all on a different simulation in Rehoboam’s mind or whatever other unreality could be conjured up. And…idk like. They’re allowed to believe what they want to believe, and I’m allowed to believe what I want to believe. I just personally never really liked the idea that Caleb was secretly a host for all of last season when it felt like the whole purpose of Incite controlling everything was trying to show that our world had been subjected to a lot of the same practices as Delos’s hosts were. Anyway, I know they can’t see me here but who’s laughing now bitch?

Actually, it’s not me, I’m very distraught… but… at least now we know he’s human.

GENERATION LOSS

Like I said about episode 2, when Maeve said she wanted to show Caleb what freedom looks like while he was bleeding out on the beach with a gunshot wound to the torso… I thought that was going in a totally different direction than the one it took.

Speaking of the direction it took, though, Maeve’s freedom is being with her daughter and living a simple, peaceful existence together and I think that is just beautiful.

This isn’t a Westworld-specific gripe, more so a TV/movie magic trend in general but. If you are in a situation where a ton of glass shatters into a million pieces and then you can see hundreds of little crystallized chunks of tempered glass on the ground and you have not been impaled by any of it, you are probably not going to find a long, clear shard of razor sharp plate glass in the mix. I know, blah blah blah, I’m watching a dark science-fiction TV show about androids and I don’t expect it to be 100% realistic. I’m just saying.

I have complicated feelings about Teddy and let me just say that they are not being helped by me still having almost zero clue what is going on in Christina's world. Is this the Sublime? Is this a world of Teddy's choosing?? We just don't know.

I’m not sure I understand what Maeve was saying about facing human mortality. Hasn’t she already seen how delicate human lives are? Or is this different because Caleb was in a coma and Maeve has specifically never seen that before?

I find myself a little confused as to how the lethality of wounds works for hosts who are no longer bound to the parks or have built up a certain tolerance level. Maeve was shot multiple times in the season 3 finale and shrugged it off like it was nothing. But she got shot once in the shoulder last episode and it temporarily took her down although she recovered pretty quickly. Fighting the Host in Black, she gets thrown to the ground and it clearly hurts her considerably, as she limps away afterward to try and rescue Caleb. In this episode, she takes a shotgun blast to the heart and it almost completely incapacitates her. Right after that she gets stabbed with a knife which HiB seems pretty confident is something that will kill her. So now… I have questions.

Ah, so C is Frankie all grown up! I got at least 2 predictions right for this episode. I'm calling that a hot streak!

Alright, remember how I said last episode I was relieved to find out Caleb was still a human? I’m actually perfectly okay with him dying and being brought back as a host at this point, if that is indeed what is happening. My first idea was that he’s still alive and Hale is just fucking with his mind by making him believe he died and she turned him into a host, but…After Caleb realizes where he really is and what Hale is doing, he develops a slight stutter in some of his dialogue and movement tics that are really similar to what we saw in the James Delos fidelity trials, albeit less severe. And I feel like he wouldn’t have that if he was still a human.

So for now I think I’m gonna work off the assumption that Hale isn’t lying. Might be a mistake to do so, I guess we’ll find out!

If this really IS the case, I still wonder what exactly she wants with Caleb? She started out her plan by trying to kill him. Then she appeared to switch to trying to capture him alive instead, turning him into her pet. But then she ordered other infected guests to attack and he got stabbed by one of them, and then later on her men gunned him down without a second thought. And then after all that she brought him back so… What does she want with him? Does she still need him for something? Is she just tormenting him for sport?

[baltears]

so host william wears a. wedding ring

[faux-ee]

begging all bsd fans or at least bsd fans who r interested in the Book - and how most if not all bsd characters are more or less under its control - to watch the tv series Westworld. It's perhaps in my opinion the best or most exhaustive demonstration of a multi-layer world-building. It centers its narrative around the meaning of stories and human life. It also explores how it's suffering/trauma that often shapes a person's true self. The "antagonist" has a VERY similar mindset to Fyodor but it's much better explained in context. Also the ending of Season 1 is just. Unexpected. Breathtaking. Marvelous. Meaningful.

Seriously go watch Westworld i feel so enlightened rn also it helped me dig out possibly some truth behind bsd's convoluted storylines

[williamofwestworld]

So with all the ‘reliving’ and testing for Fidelity. Do you think that was the new William going through it all? The one who nearly killed himself, saw flashes of Dolores, found host!Emily. I know it’s obvious, but like, tell me your thoughts

This is a very good question, so thank you for it ^_^ I do believe that you're right, to be honest. But up until this point, he probably didn't have an emotional connection to these memories. For him they are just memories. He knows that he is a host, so he knows that he isn't the real William so while he has these memories, they happened to that "other guy". But as he is becoming more conscious and connected to his humanity, these things are feeling more real to him because he is becoming more like the man that he has been copied from.

It is interesting you brought up "The one who nearly killed himself", because Real William did ask the host if he wanted to kill himself. William did it because he thought that he was a host and that was the one true way of finding out and ending the loop and starting over. I wonder if William thinks that the Host version of himself is thinking about it for the same reason, because they were both questioning the nature of their reality at this point in time? Or if it was something else... like just the sheer drive to end it... just like the human's who are infected with the virus?

I think this host of William is probably most likely the Host we see at the end of season 2, but I also think that William plays a hand in his fidelity, because I remember one of the showrunners saying that this Host was built to basically do playthroughs to see if there was somehow an ending where he doesn't kill Emily, which would tell him if he truly had free will to choose... or if he was really coded to do this all along.

"Well, you can't have it both ways, Dad. So which one is it? Are you free and evil? Or blameless and helplessly enslaved?"

[coraxaviary]

funny story so I was like "since my OC fic is kind of a wish-fulfillment style story, I could totally write all kinds of AUs"

and like, I'm totally right? I start watching Westworld, get sucked in, and it occurs to me that I should write an AU where a modern June is a curious customer and gets yanked into a brief Westworld-style adventure.

but wait, there's more! What if... there was another park, this time centered around WWII combat? It would be perfect, except the fun dynamic here would be that all the men in canon are park hosts, the battle is a set storyline, and June meets all of them suddenly for the first time and gets thrown into a firefight.

so I started writing it. what should I name the park? I'm only on season 2 (spoiler warning) and so there's Westworld, of course, and then Shogun World... The Raj? That too, I guess.

I decided "warworld" was way too direct and weird-sounding and like, in-your-face.

guess what I discovered today. The Delos website. And on it is... Warworld.

I'm flabbergasted. Excited. and also in disbelief again because they named it warworld and I literally didn't name it that in my unaware fictional reality bc it sounded too awkward but it's the official name...

yeah that's it, not a very dramatic story but my way of letting you know I want to throw a modern (paratrooper-trained!!!) June into Warworld (with her brother!!!) and make it an AU

hopefully i finish it before I grow old and die lol

[marypsue]

I've also got three The Lost Boys AUs that I've been chewing on, only one of which has deigned to offer me anything like a 'conclusion' or even a 'plot':

It turns out that impaling a vampire does count as a first kill. As long as Michael doesn't taste human blood, though, there's still enough him left in him not to turn fully cold-blooded killer. However, a guy's still gotta eat, which is how he ends up teaming up with the Frogs to keep the Boardwalk vampire-free - and his larder stocked. This works for about eight years, until Star comes back into town, looking for help again - somebody's left a newspaper article on her doorstep about a group of kids on a surfing trip to California who'd been murdered. One of them is still missing. And Star and Michael both once knew the missing kid by the nickname Laddie. Somebody knows what happened that summer in 1987, and they're looking for revenge. And the vampire Michael thought was his first kill might not actually be all that dead...

It turns out that impaling a vampire doesn't count as a first kill, and it doesn't matter what a stake is made of so long as it pierces the heart. In the aftermath of canon, everything is normal again - until one night Michael suddenly finds himself back in the cave, with a terrifyingly familiar hunger in the core of him, surrounded by people who should be dead. Something's gone terribly wrong - nobody remembers the ambush at the cave or the fight at the house, his family are pointing crossbows and water pistols full of holy water at him, Star's not speaking to him, David's implying that the sun will crispy-fry him and that he's killed, and worst of all, Max is still dating his mom. Also, Michael's having strange dreams in which he's trapped inside his own reflection - which is made even stranger by the fact that vampires, apparently, don't dream. It takes the combined brains of three comic book nerds to work out what seems to have happened - somehow, Michael from the canon timeline has swapped bodies with the Michael from a timeline where he gave in at the bonfire. And he has to figure out a way to take care of Max and save his family in this timeline and get back to his own, fast, before the other him has a chance to ruin everything Michael had to kill for.

Westworld-inspired/time loop AU where the Frog brothers visit an escape-room-style attraction on the Santa Carla Boardwalk in the nebulous spacefuture, where the point of the game is to figure out which of a cast of artificially-intelligent meat-robot actors is behind the killings taking place in a 1987 version of the Santa Carla Boardwalk. For less paranoia-prone players, it'd be a fun immersive game. For the Frog brothers, it's an excuse to stake everything in sight (requiring them to restart the narrative multiple times), and a short descent into madness and questioning the nature of their own reality and cognition as the 'hosts' slowly become self-aware around them. Also, vampire bites can be used to transmit data packages, and I get to make fun meta jokes (the 'escape room' was previously skinned with a storyline based on Solarbabies, the movie Jami Gertz and Jason Patric were in together before TLB!).

[shesnake]

@1995lahaine tagged me to post 8 shows to get to know me 🤔 I'm only going to do shows that have ended which I think are worth revisiting. tagging @akajustmerry @anthonysperkins @summoneryuna @sonyarebecchi @toraks @a24thegreenknight @holly-mckenzie

Utopia (2013-2014) created by dennis kelly. beauty is terror we quiver before it etc etc oh this show is so violent and beautiful and so deeply human I explode every time I think about it. you know cristobal tapia de veer from the white lotus soundtrack but that is Nothing compared to the work he did on this.

Bojack Horseman (2014-2020). as someone who loves movies this show is truly the best meta fiction out there about Hollywood that isn't afraid to throw punches. hilarious and brutal. the animation format and animal absurdity allows them to tell real unrestrained narratives that I don't think live action could ever achieve. Raphael bob-waksberg will never get his foot off my neck

The Bisexual (2018) despite the title I genuinely think desiree akhavan made the greatest lesbian story of all time with this. short, sweet, and soul crushing precarious fleabag type miniseries. also she's sooooo hot oh my GOD

Mr. Robot (2015-2019) it's a shame people forgot about this show towards the end and stopped watching because it is truly theeee speculative epic of all time speaking to issues of capitalism and identity and rebellion. between this and the lazarus project it's like a spiritual sequel to Utopia in the way it explores how much of yourself you have to sacrifice to escape from All This. probably got my favourite needle drops of all time.

The Hour (2011-2012) can you believe the bbc cancelled a show about a bbc show trying to be cancelled? between this and the newsreader yeah I'm obsessed with dramas about people who don't get to tell the truth

Les Revenants (2012-2015) are you sure. are you sure you're not a ghost?

Cowboy Bebop (1998) of course.

Westworld (2016-2022) I hate this show so fucking much there's so many things wrong with it that get my blood boiling but it's also one of the greatest shows I've ever seen. the only thing that makes me feel human is the way I'm treated. I choose to see the beauty. motion picture soundtrack. ramin djawadi is everything to me.

these are my mains but I also highly recommend (other than the obvious succ/yj/iwtv/etc) :

WE ARE LADY PARTS

SORT OF

Mythic Quest

Black Sails

The Third Day

The Lazarus Project

The Newsreader

The Great

Glitch 2015

Better Call Saul

Rutherford Falls

Ghosts BBC

Luther

The Thick of It

Brave New World 2020

Moriarty the Patriot

Elementary

Miss Sherlock

Tuca & Bertie

Some Girls 2012

Misfits

Community

Mad Men

True Blood

Lost

[whyeverr]

It’s... it’s...

townies... 

😱 

A brain-eating virus has a spread throughout the far reaches of the world, causing infected sims to wear eyeball rings, horrendously uncoordinated outfits, and to grill countless platters of hotdogs in public parks. The infected can be recognized by their wide-eyed expressions, facial twitching, and at a distance by their shambling, uneven gait. Close contact should be avoided at all costs—the virus can spread from sim to sim in a matter of moments, no bites or scratches required.

Think Westworld meets zombie apocalypse. I’m not currently planning on doing anything with the StrangerVille storyline (been there, done that!) or really that much “zombie” or like meta simulation / sentience storytelling either, for that matter. They’re just here to make the end of the world a bit more camp. 😌 

There has to be a better way to do this, but currently I’m feeding strange fruit to  all the randomized townies spawned in this save, and having played sims avoid them at all costs. I have literally no idea what this will mean for “unlocking” townies. I can’t wait to find out. 😄

[scifigeneration]

Westworld at 50: Michael Crichton’s AI dystopia was ahead of its time

by Keith McDonald, Senior Lecturer Film Studies and Media at York St John University

Westworld turned 50 on November 21. Director Michael Crichton’s cautionary tale showed that high-concept feature films could act as a vehicle for social commentary. Westworld blended cinematic genres, taking into account the audience’s existing knowledge of well-worn narrative conventions and playfully subverting them as the fantasy turns to nightmare.

The film centres on a theme park where visitors, in this case the protagonists Peter (Richard Benjamin) and John (James Brolin), can enter a simulated fantasy world – Pompeii, Medieval Europe, or the Old West. Once there, they can live out their wildest fantasies. They can even have sex with the synthetic playthings that populate the worlds.

This sinister idea went on to be explored further in later films such as The Stepford Wives (1975 & 2004), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Ex Machina (2014).

Of course, it all goes terribly wrong when a computer virus overruns the park and the androids become unbound from the safety protocols that have been encoded into them. The resultant horror climaxes with Peter being stalked through the park by the menacing gunslinger (Yul Brynner).

The film isn’t perfect. Westworld was Michael Crichton’s feature directorial debut, and it shows – as does the tight shooting schedule and frugal budget imposed by MGM. The studio was notorious at the time for mishandling projects and their directors.

Compared to some of the other notable films released that year, such as William Friedkin’s masterful The Exorcist, Nicolas Roeg’s terrifying Don’t Look Now and Clint Eastwood’s assured High Plains Drifter, Westworld has a B-movie aesthetic.

This is, though, elevated by a towering performance from Brynner, and the high-concept approach that later came to dominate the Hollywood system. The film also provided fruitful inspiration for an ambitious HBO adaptation in 2016.

Genre blending and bending

Westworld successfully blended science fiction with other genres. In this sense, it was a pioneering film, which made the most of its limitations due to the hugely influential imagination of Crichton and a postmodern masterstroke of the casting and performance of Brynner.

Today’s cinema is saturated with meta-textual references – moments when a film makes a critical commentary on itself or another movie. This was typified by Michael Keaton’s recent reprisal of his role as Batman in The Flash. But when Westworld was released, such creative choices were novel and fresh.

Bynner’s android gunslinger wears a costume almost identical to the one he donned for his role in The Magnificent Seven (1961). The choice adds dramatically to the thematic concerns of the film – the saturation of consumer culture and the postmodern bent towards repetition, simulation and cliche.

The simulated scenes in the theme park itself are built around cliched movie moments. The three settings which high-paying customers can enter represent film genres: The Medieval simulation, the “swords and sandals” recreation of the Roman Empire and the titular western.

When Westworld was released, each of these genres (the Medieval history, the Roman epic and the western) were already past their heyday, both in terms of popularity and reliability at the box office. Using them furthered the film’s comment on contemporary Hollywood – that it had run out of original ideas and was simply cashing in on nostalgia.

Westworld and AI

Though other films, like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), were exploring the concept of nascent AI around this time, Westworld arguably did so in the most accessible style. And its legacy in doing so is clear in subsequent films, such as The Terminator (1984), The Matrix (1999) and recently in M3GAN (2023).

Crichton later revisited the notion of a theme park turning perilous due to the Promethean human instinct in his novel, Jurassic Park in 1990. Steven Spielberg’s adaptation remains one of the high points in American action-adventure cinema.

The fascinating scenarios Michael Crichton explored in his work successfully embodied the societal anxieties and technophobia of the 1970s. And in Westworld, he demonstrated a flair for capturing such fears in visual set pieces. This is no more evident than in the iconic, uncanny image of Yul Brynner’s deadly, sentient killer cowboy. Fifty years on, it remains one of the most memorable images in science fiction cinematic history.

[cagedchoices]

so in terms of canon connections, i am planning on writing full metas about caleb and maeve and also caleb and dolores but for right now i wanna say just a lil bit about how i interpret their relationships and what it means on this blog

with caleb and dolores, i think that their bond is completely platonic. they're more like a brother/sister-in-arms duo to me and they pretty much always have been, but i will acknowledge that they do have all the potential for a good romance in the right circumstances. personally if i ever were to write something in that direction i would be extremely picky about who i'm shipping with and a lot of that is because i have some...residual hangups...from the westworld fandom's hayday.

i'm a lot less picky on the topic of caleb and maeve which i've always found a sense of irony in?? because i literally read an interview once and in it the writers and the actors were like 'oh they're just good friends' and i was like '...are you sure about that??' but just like everything else, the base of this relationship, whether it turns romantic or not, is built on a deeply intimate comradery between the two.

[zoi-no-miko]

I have a lot of meta FEELINGS about Westworld S4, Dolores and the Machine, okay??

[larphis]

My spoiler free ranking for the episodes of Black Mirror Season 6:

1. Demon 79 - subjectively the best (9/10)

Good Omens meets American Horror Story. I want a whole seperate series with 12 seasons about Nida and Gaap, please and thank you Netflix.

2. Loch Henry - objectively the best (10/10)

realistic portrayal of the wrongful idealization of True Crime

3. Beyond the Sea - (8/10)

biblical parable meets Westworld meets the Manson Family Murders, not too big of a fan of the initial plot but the ending was fucking brilliant!

4. Joan is Awful - (6/10)

An okayish satire about Netflix, I guess?, albeit a bit too kitschy for my personal taste (+ the fact that there is already a South Park episode with pretty much the same plot outline [see my last post]). I did, however, enjoy the meta commentary and 4th wall break near the end.

5. Mazey Day - Garbage… just utter garbage (2/10)

I don’t care how much you want to sell this to me as a metaphor for the explotation of fame and capitalism - this was the cheapest most ridicolous and uncalled for plottwist I’ve experienced since I’ve watched “From Dusk Till Dawn”. And just like with “From Dusk Till Dawn” I hate the writers for the fact that I genuinely enjoyed the first half and was actually invested in the characters before shit hit the fan.

[williamofwestworld]

William’s Darkness. Spoilers ahead. Do not reblog. I feel the need to talk about this topic today because I feel like it is something that is completely misunderstood by many people, even by myself, since last the season. This darkness that he is referring to is not evilness, but emptiness, the absence of anything, essentially a void. A black hole. Whatever you would like to call it, it’s not evil per say, it is the absence of anything meaningful. 

William, since the beginning, and I am referring to younger William here, has felt like he doesn’t belong to this world. He has been looking for a place to belong because the world that Westworld has created is devoid of any meaning. Programs, such as Rehoboam, has decided many many many things for people until their very existence has felt fake. So he started reading books to find meaning in them. Stories about heroes and villains and knights. He read up on Philosophy to a point where he could quote philosophers to find meaning to his own life and he never found that.

Dolores gave him meaning, though, and that woke him up to a bigger reality... actually realizing how fake everything was and how unhappy he truly was just going through the motions of every day life.

This is depression. All of it. William is severely depressed because everything seems and feels so artificial.

William found meaning in Dolores. He found what he was truly capable of because of her. He had been stepped on by people his entire life and suddenly he was capable of fighting back and getting the things that he wanted and he liked that he finally had some control over his own life and how it could turn out... Dolores was like a mirror for him because he realized that was a part of himself that had been there all along and she made him realize that.

Having her die and not remember him did break him in many many many ways. Suddenly there was this void of meaning inside of himself again. There was no more light there. It was dark again. He had been given light and then it was taken away again.

Now, after all of this, this void could have been filled with some meaning that he had been looking for. He kept going back to Dolores in hope that she may come back to him, but she never did... and he gave up. He went back to what he would consider a meaningless life. Going through the motions again and again, all the while looking at humanity and seeing how terrible they treated each other. How selfish, terrible, and fake everything seemed to be.

Depression can make things seem worse than they really are and that can breed anger and hatred, which William let out in the park. So, while the darkness, the void, the depression isn’t inherently bad, he truly did become a black hole that sucked in everything, even light, all around him and Emily and Juliet suffered because of it. Did he purposely do it? No. He tried to keep it from them, thinking that his darkness was inherently evil and only let it out in the park... but that’s the thing... someone’s mood can spread to those around them, even if it is unintentional. 

We all know that William has an extremely dark view of the world from season 3 during his little therapy session where he compared humanity to bacteria. The host version of himself even admitted to trying to find meaning in the hosts before killing Bernard. Westworld felt like those stories that he had been reading about since he was a kid and so he felt like he could finally live in one of those stories that had meaning, rather than the meaningless existence that the world the show creators had made where every decision was made for you. Westworld let you be free from that for a while and he really quite enjoyed that to a point where he felt like he belonged to one of those stories and wanted to stay there.

Isn’t it weird though, how a supposedly fake world that Ford created was more free and real than the real world? William sort of lived in this delusion until he killed Emily, which woke him up to the fact that not everything going on around him was just a game. The stakes were real now, just as he had always wanted and when he finally got that, he realized he didn’t want it anymore. It wasn’t what he had hoped that it would be.

He realized that both systems, the Hosts and the humans were broken (because they were mirrors, reflections of the people who built them) and there was no hope in saving any of it by the end of season 4, so he was basically like, in his own William fashion, “fuck it, let’s start over.” The human world is fake, evil, broken, and devoid of any meaning and the hosts were just as broken as the people who created them (in William’s eyes), so he decided to pull the plug on all of it. The darkness, while it didn’t start out as evil, it became evil because that’s how the chips fell, because of everything with Dolores, and everything after.