Ashitaka finds comfort in Moro because he understands her nature
Through Eyes Without Hatred
As humanity closes in, the Forest Spirit doesn’t seem bothered. It harbors no hatred. No instinct for self preservation. It gets shot by Eboshi the first time and makes no attempt to preserve itself. Its sapient human face reverting to that of a deer’s, it continues walking to Moro and Okkoto to determine whether it will save or kill them. The embodiment of nature encounters oblivion in the cruelty of humanity and returns no hatred. Just equanimity. Keep in mind, the Spirit of the Forest was embodied by a deer, a prey animal. One might imagine that the same way a wolf can become a wolf-god or a boar a boar-god, some deer leveled up to the point that it became a deer-god and kept leveling up to become the spirit of the entire forest, inheriting a sapient human face in the process. I mean, of all creatures a deer would know the cruelty of nature. So the cruelty it allowed wasn’t out of preference but instead a reflection of the inevitability of cruelty as a result of animal nature. It follows a law it may or not understand (maybe like the laws of karma and dharma to which even gods were subject in Hindu mythology, with which I’m more familiar). Its cruelty never was a thing of intent, just like a wolf’s. There’s something Buddhist in that–the nature of life partly being to suffer. Not sure if that was intentional or if similar ideas existed in the pre-Buddhist Shinto beliefs that PM illustrates.
Lobotomy of a god
Humans saw the Forest Spirit’s human face and chose not to ponder their commonalities. Instead they chose deicide. The movie ends with humanity winning. The people of Irontown rejoice and cheer and embrace. When the gooey carcass of the Forest Spirit nourishes the ground and causes vegetation to grow one man even says, “Oh, I didn’t realize the Forest Spirit made flowers grow.” Ambitious idiots. Having wrenched sapience from all animal-kind, having robbed them of a divinity to which they alone felt entitled, having literally killed the Spirit of the Forest, humans created a pocket of egalitarian compassion free from the senseless cruelty and inequality of life in the wild. PM robs you of the satisfaction of being upset at humanity in an uncomplicated way. (Obviously PM was made in collectivist Japan and not America the shooterful). Ashitaka goes on to live with the humans and help them build their society while San returns to the forest to live with her newly lobotomized siblings. The arbitrary cruelty of natural order traded for the arbitrary cruelty of human order.
Returning to the idea from Segment I that the untamed law of the wild feels arbitrary, let’s look at key actions from the Forest Spirit’s arc:
The Forest Spirit allows the hate-ridden Okkoto to die during the climax
Assuming Nago came to the water newly bubbling with hatred like Okkoto did, then the Forest Spirit granted the hate-ridden Nago life in order to initially infect Ashitaka and kick off the plot
It then returns life to Ashitaka after being shot in Irontown during the rising action while refusing to alleviate him of Nago’s hatred
Once it regains its head in the falling action, it exercises no self-preservation instinct. It uses its final action with its head returned not to turn back into its deer form and survive sunrise but instead to heal Ashitaka and San from Nago’s hatred. Which reinforces the presumption that it allowed Nago’s hatred to proliferate for a purpose
And while its headless nightwalker form had a darker color and tentacles, which probably was a sign of hatred, its final action shows that once its head was recovered that hatred went away. I can’t remember if it changed colors back but ultimately, it nourishing the land, which I doubt would’ve happened had it retained its hatred
I read its actions as the Forest Spirit knowing the ambitious nature of humanity would inevitably cause its death and wanted for a human champion (Ashitaka) to understand the danger of hatred, that humanity might carry this understanding into the new order it was ushering. The logic (and therefore cruelty) of the Forest Spirit was not actually arbitrary but only seemed so due to a lack of perspective.
Ashitaka and San fight to return the Forest Spirit’s head to it out of respect for the natural order
This is what I love about this and other movies that generally explore thematically eastern theologies. Can you imagine how fucking boring this would be if Ashitaka sacrificed himself to redeem all life and everything ends up the same as how it started? Just no emotional challenge or nuance. Instead he’s tasked with seeing the nature of each thing for what it is. He doesn’t win by saving the world but by understanding it. (If anything, the sacrifice here was made by the Forest Spirit. You can read a vicariously redemptive arc there if you just need for the death of purity to be equated to moral redemption so you can get your narrative torque. There you go. Happy? Humanity’s sin of killing nature was forgiven because nature died. Hope you’re satisfied with your lazy circular metaphor you fuckin bum).
As a result this film doesn’t give you the satisfaction of affirming a binary, objective morality. It ends and leaves you feeling. Frustration. Grief. Awe. Hope. After a few days those emotions settled into a gentle Mono No Aware for me. What any excellent work of art should make you feel. Like when it ended you left a part of yourself behind with it.
Eboshi encountering the nature of the Forest Spirit
Those That Would Rebel Against Nature
In the narrative mythology established here the Forest Spirit confers sapience unto the beasts of the natural world, with the greatest possessing godhood. Therefore whoever so kills the Forest Spirit robs all beasts of their capacity for both sapience and divinity. Sounds like Ferngully with extra steps so far, but the emotional complexity is given to us in the interactions of specific characters.
In the the opening scene we are introduced to a demon that used to be a boar god, Nago. This demon charges the peaceful humans of a clan, who respond in humility by requesting to know what they can do to appease his divine animosity before being forced to kill it. Now this clan represents a contingent of humanity loyal to the natural order, and the best of them, Ashitaka, a competent warrior who exercises compassion and restraint, is cursed by this demon to “suffer as [he has]” for crimes unknown. Then, instead of launching the hero on a quest to stop this evil at all costs, the village elder bids Ashitaka on a journey to discover the source of the malevolence that corrupted natural divinity, that he may see the world through eyes without hatred. What a beautiful phrase. Not some binary thing to vanquish villainous vermin. So Ashitaka leaves to try to understand the changing logic of the world with his actions being born of benevolence for all he encounters.
A compassionate villain
He then encounters Lady Eboshi, the villain. And she isn’t some evil industrialist cloud of smoke; she’s a foil to himself, a heroic and compassionate woman. Heroic in her metallic resolve to build a society on honest work, and compassionate in givinga productive dignity to vulnerable groups like sex workers and lepers. This is who lodged the iron ball inside of Nago, filling him with the hatred that drove him to become a vengeful demon. She also astutely points out that he was being a little bitch when he cursed Ashitaka, “Nago should’ve cursed me.” She’s a voice of reason here. With this line her introduction in the story renders a villain that is hard to hate. And with her introduction the story also establishes its core conflict: a pocket of humanity, abused by its fealty to the natural order, chooses to be collectively selfish and individually kind in the face of the arbitrary cruelty of nature. A pocket of humanity chooses to upend this order and create its own, where they can live in compassion and equality. If cruelty must exist in nature, then these humans have decided that no cruelty will exist between one another within their society.
Ashitaka rescues a woman from a man in the natural order
Woah woah woah. Are we sure this is the conflict? Is humanity actually cruel under a pre-industrialist natural order? Idk maybe if you squint your eyes. But also Miyazaki narratively illustrates this when Ashitaka initially leaves on his journey. He passes through a nearby village being raided by bandits. He’s on his own urgent mission so he can’t help them much but the imagery of bandits marauding through rice paddies and wreaking gore on farmers feels like a reference to Seven Samurai where such a thing is not allowed to happen due to the cunning bravery of… seven samurai. Who do so only by violating a social order that places them above lowly farmers. In that story, Kurosawa makes it clear that this social order is natural and those seven are only the good guys because they violated that order. If this reference is intentional then it enhances the point PM is making, which still stands with or without it: this is what humanity looks like under natural law. Where violent men take from those they’ve maimed, where power begets injustice. This village is not the industrialist menace to nature that Irontown is. It’s arguably worse. Is this the natural order we would strive to defend? From a human’s perspective the internal peacefulness of Irontown seems preferable to this pre-industrial barbarism.
Dignity in industry
There’s also a significance to Irontown’s reliance on women as the center of industry. These former sex workers were clamoring for the opportunity provided there, having been denied the dignity of productive work in the presumably pre-industrial villages they came from. And once offered that dignity, they created a society marked by their liberated boldness, playfully giving the men a hard time in a way that doesn’t seem weird to an American in 2022 (what a radical idea). That compassion that arises when one rebels against nature is poetic. Because the natural order presumably created a society where women can show nothing that would threaten a man, neither competence nor personality. It might even be justifiable to extend the interpretation: if the natural order of each species from Segment I is defined by predator and prey each having distinct nature, the human natural order might be subcategorized into men being predators where women are their prey. So when I see that Irontown’s rebellion against the natural order is symbolized by a matriarchal society where women create things in factories while men fight as soldiers, I prefer to read it as Miyazaki’s intention to portray women as being of a creative nature and men of a violent one. Nothing wrong with that if no hatred exists, after all Ashitaka isn’t portrayed as being cruel because he knows how to work a sword.
However, changing the natural order to a human one doesn’t necessarily change the nature of humanity. Our ape-like ambition can certainly be seen in Lady Eboshi, “The trick to killing a God is not to be afraid.” It’s hard to tell whether she is hateful, though. One the one hand, she is very compassionate to the most vulnerable humans. On the other hand she has a sort of superiority complex. It feels like she detests that the animals of the forest have been made divine by the Forest Spirit and wants for them to quickly become “nothing but dumb beasts again.” Where previously we described the virtues of human nature being its rebellion against arbitrary cruelty, here we see the flip side under its own human order. In turn, there’s something cruel in how Eboshi takes pleasure in robbing the sapience of others. Like not only do she want to kill them, she wants to lobotomize them. Geez. If our conspecific kindness can be described as selfish with regard to the cruelty we would subject other species to (who would still go to war for one another despite their predator-prey relationships), then there is something nihilistic in our allospecific selfishness as well.
In any case, I don’t think the Forest Spirit blames Eboshi for her ambition. Indeed I think the reason it isn’t hateful toward humans in the climax is because it recognizes that same ambition in the apes from which we emerged. Once humans started using tools, their mastery of natural resources was inevitable and industrialization merely accelerated this process. Humanity was always on a collision course with nature.
Corrosive hatred born from the ambition of another
There’s a lot that can be said about this legendary work of art, and most of it’s probably been said, so I’ll focus more on framing the nuance of its core conflict: the nature of humanity as a response to the nature of life. I’ll also be talking about nature (the philosophical intrinsic quality of a thing) and nature (rivers, trees, etc). You’ll know which one when you see it.
As A Fish Would Swim
I loved Ferngully as a kid so it’s a straightforward observation to say that its one-dimensional core conflict of human industry (bad) vs nature (good) is a pixelation of PM’s morally granular rendition of that same conflict. PM instead separates the natural world into the following two groups: untamed life itself and the groups of living things subject to its untamed natural law. The former is embodied by the Forest Spirit and its Nightwalker form. While the latter is separated into humans, wolves, boars and apes. No idea where those cute little kodama fit in all this.
Nature of a wolf
I think the movie philosophically sets the premise that each species of animal has an intrinsic nature in the wild. The nature of each group might be delineated as such:
Boars are proud but simple. Moro states this directly but the film also illustrates it. They’re the first animal group to ignite a full-scale war with encroaching humans, and their simplicity is illustrated in their warfare which involves no discernible tactic other than charging headlong into direct gunfire. Their warpaint is cool as fuck though.
Wolves are protective but ferocious. Moro adopted San after being abandoned by her human parents, showing Moro’s nurturing instincts. And nurturing involved protecting, which we get a glimpse of when Moro instinctively takes Ashitaka’s unconscious neck in her mouth and rips at it with violent intent before being stopped. She also constantly reminds Ashitaka of her desire to shred his body to pieces after he wakes. Important to note that at no point in the story is she depicted as having been corrupted with hatred though; no black tentacles upon death. Ferocity is merely in her nature. You can’t blame her for it any more than you can blame a fish for swimming, and Ashitaka recognizes this since he focuses on her actions and willingness to help him despite her instincts as an apex predator.
Apes are generally gentle but also ambitious and kinda stupid. They plant the seeds of the trees for the benefit of the ecosystem. They also want to eat Ashitaka because they want his power. All of them; they all think eating a human will give you his power despite the fact that they don’t inherit fruit sweetness from the berries or whatever that they eat. And they also don’t stop to consider that even if they could absorb his power, he’s infected with an evil visibly devouring his soul, which they would also then inherit. So yeah I read their traits as being related to our’s given our evolutionary relationship.
We’ll get to the specific nature of humanity in Segment II.
The nature of nature (untamed life) is one of harmony based on what seems like arbitrary power. [Wolves are cunning hunters] + [Boars are stubborn targets] + [Apes are ambitious idiots] – [hatred] = [Harmony]. This harmony, however, still entails a basal level of cruelty–boars and apes would surely rather just be eating and fucking without fear of being murdered by a wolf. It’s not like wolves select their prey based on some sense of justice and the Forest Spirit heals who it wants to the degree that it wants with a logic that is mysterious to all other living things. In a word, arbitrary.
On this premise PM builds a conversation about natural harmony and what then happens when one desires a new harmony. A new order.
And introducing this higher order that unifies consciousness as experienced by NI and AI is the philosophical goal of the film. Batou muses in the wake of the garbage man’s trauma, “All the data collected by a person in a lifetime is a tiny part of a whole.” Evoking the idea of individual identity in relation to a larger order as well as an equivalence of knowledge and data as virtual phenomena. GITS finally asks the question, “What does the emergence of superstructures entail for individual identity?”
The most natural starting point in exploring this question is with the understanding that collectives are at least as effective as the individuals in them, as Motoko explains to Togusa that she selected him for Section 9 because he lacks cybernetic enhancements (paraphrased), “A system where all parts react predictably is a flawed system. Like individual like organization. Overspecialization leads to death.” For an organization that deals with cyber warfare having team members whose cyber brains can’t be hacked is valuable despite their diminished ability to engage in cyber operations. This is the flaw of predictable overspecialization of a system. It’s the same logic as diversifying your investment portfolio to minimize financial risk. So the functioning of a collective superorganism is inextricably linked to the functioning of its individual processing units. This is not only an assertion of the importance of the super organism though.
This is also an assertion of the importance of the individual. When individuals represent a variety of different capabilities the organization thrives for the same reason your brain has many different types of neurons. When the neurons of the super brain gain new capabilities, benefit to the system is larger. There’s a concept in neuroscience called signal potentiation (opposite of signal depression) where converging inputs can create a signal larger than the sum of the parts. In other words when potentiated, 2 + 2 = 5, and when depressed 2 + 2 = 3. When Motoko recombines with 2501 to become a newly singularized form of sentience, Nihama and Japan benefit more than she does (assuming she’ll go on to reintegrate with society). In this individual act of singularity, the super brain of society has formed its first integrated AI-NI processing unit (human neuron). This also opens an avenue to a beautiful higher order, symbolized with the angel (see above, the only image I thought was kind of corny in GITS).
The other major point that GITS goes on to explore in its Stand Alone Complex series is the interconnectedness of individuals and consequent nature of individuality. AI systems network, NI systems socialize. What does that mean for a hybrid system and how an individual experiences consciousness? That theme here is being set up with subthemes of collectivism and dissolution of self. This is why I call the central theme of all GITS existential collectivism. While AI has been artificially selected to form strongly wired networks, NI evolved to form looser social networks, which result from our value of individuality rooted in a naturally selected desire to preserve our selves. However strongly associated networks will be necessary to achieve the increasing efficiency demands of a world moving toward geopolitical consolidation. I see this as the main point of GITS. Dissolution of self enables AI and NI to create a singular new form of life more comfortable with networks and the added capabilities of AI but in possession of the crucial blueprint of that thing that AI can only simulate–life. And in forming this new form of life, a path to new more beautiful super structures opens. This notion is evoked in the final shot with the new Motoko-2501 hybrid individual overlooking Nihama (below).
This new super organism born from the marriage of NI and AI is something the story revels in. We today shouldn’t mourn the death of self anymore than we mourned the death of God. In looking back we might realize that we didn’t lose some part of ourselves so much as we realized it never existed. The final moments of the film leave me asking questions in the form of koans.
Would a reflection grieve the knowledge that it is but light and thought?
Would a dream occur to a single neuron with the same beauty?
The self is an intuitive perception, however that doesn’t necessarily mean it exists. After all, a book written on the failures of intuition would become a history of science. And a book written on the failures of existential intuition would become a history of the science of the first person, sometimes called Vipassana but nowadays rebranded in secular circles as Mindfulness. Let’s dive.
The question to answer is “to what degree does a program running a complex set of scripts that then encounters a rich metaverse of information perceive both an ‘I’ and the ability to steer that ‘I?’” Is it a complex 2-year old or is it a complex adult? Either way, similarly to an adult, it is still subject to its core programing, whether it feels like it can choose how to respond to its core impulses or not. We should also point out that 2501 definitely has a ghost, although we don’t know what that entails. Things we don’t know about ghosts:
Would an insect’s digitized sentience have a ghost?
Would an adult dog’s?
Would a human infant’s?
Does presence of a ghost imply sapience or merely sentience?
A self might be perceived and in order to understand its nature we should understand what comprises it. Obviously it’s of the brain but where does it live? Some would say the pituitary but the notion of a singular locus for the self has been largely discredited by neuroscience since ablation of many other compartments can significantly alter or destroy sense of self. Neuroscience consensus today aligns more with the idea of the self being delocalized across the entirety of the brain. GITS explores this idea specifically when the garbage man is manipulated into thinking he has a daughter and an ex-wife before becoming aware of his false life and having a dissociative existential crisis (seen above). Altering his memory centers altered his perception of who he is which in turn motivated his behaviors in a distinct way. Motoko references this idea too when she’s on the boat with Batou talking about how they could quit Section 9, surrendering their government-issued cyberbodies in the process, and have their ghosts transferred to a new cyberbody, although with its memories wiped. She also talks about her already dissolving sense of self because her ghost was transferred from her original organic body and brain into her current cyber body and cyber brain, more broadly addressing the notion of decentralized cognitive compartments compiling their outputs to create her sense of self (memory centers only being one of these compartments). I think the writers use the presence of grey matter in cyberbrains with ghosts as a rhetorical tool, however I don’t find it convincing in communicating the uniqueness of Natural Intelligence (NI). And I’d say GITS makes it clear that this is intentional when it gives 2501 a spontaneously generated ghost. We should therefore spend a minute on how a cyber brain might be compartmentalized.
Based on the thoroughness with which an individual can be hacked and manipulated, I’m inclined to think that cyberbrains represent an integration of grey matter with inorganic processing components, as opposed to a fully organic brain in an inorganic case. Likewise, in the case of a cyber brain with compartments that are made of both organic and inorganic components, I don’t think there would be a very large difference between the self as you would perceive it if some fraction of your neural processes were happening on inorganic substrates running the same biological programming vs. if all of them were happening on inorganic substrates. This is the point Motoko is making when she responds to Batou’s more tangible assertion of self while they’re on the boat; neither of them can trust a fixed notion of who they are anymore.
Motoko talks about this fading sense of self after she mentions that the reason she likes diving is that in the quiet she can feel emotions that the noise of life would normally obscure. She talks about floating at depth alone as if going down there offers reprieve from the static of living in a perpetual illusion, which might be thematically queuing up the boat montage in the next scene with its aforementioned themes of ancient wisdom being given clarity in modernity. The illusion of reality to which people through antiquity referred might have been the only means by which they could conceptualize the virtual nature of consciousness in a quantized universe. I’m not only talking about Buddhism and Eastern traditions’ conception of Maya. Even in The West. Think about Plato’s allegory of the cave. Doesn’t his idea of a play of light and shadow being projected on a wall feel like an Iron Age person conceptualizing a computer monitor or a TV? And his subsequent notion that “a person in a cave would perceive this play to be their reality in entirety” sound like him trying to describe living in a simulation? Underscoring the uncertainty with which we should approach our notion of reality as a psychologically perceptible construct. But since I don’t see a strong Platonic metaphor here I see GITS’s core philosophy as reflecting the philosophy of Buddhism, part of which asserts the self as an illusory construct hiding a deeper truth–that we are merely a constellation of mental processes lacking a center/self. Motoko even tells Batou something to the effect of “individuality [being] compartmentalized.”
Then both of their streams of consciousness are hacked by 2501, when they hear a voice referencing Corinthians 13:12, a Biblical verse positing that before divine revelation waking life was as if “looking through a glass darkly,” alluding to a reality with truth imperceptible due to its inherent opacity. This is 2501 setting up the death of self, implying that humans are a species of primate whose consciousness only began emerging from its cloudy functional programming into self-awareness recently.
Consequently we should not look at the bar for digital sentience to meet as being very high, as if we are something elevated in existential complexity. The informational difference between the DNA coding the hardware of our consciousness is marginal relative to the DNA coding the mental hardware of certain other mammals. In other words, rather than seeing the heights of the mountainous peaks of our self awareness as a sign of something unique and elevated, we should exercise existential perspective. We should see our peaks in context of the peaks of other species’ awareness, our’s being only slightly above theirs, as the peaks of our consciousness only just began to emerge from their submersion in the fog of biological function. I mean look at dogs in the wild vs dogs learning how to express themselves verbally. The ones we’ve nurtured and sheltered from desperation demonstrate a degree of intelligence and self awareness that is considerably higher than their feral counterparts. And straight up I think I know people who are probably as self aware if not less so than a smart dog; humans are sentient but not always sapient. Thus the bar for human awareness is not a high one to meet. We are largely at the mercy of our own core biological programming.
And so 2501 might well be sapient, but not because they are so elevated in their awareness. Rather because it is a low existential bar to meet. I mean they automatically hack Motoko when she connects rather than simply speaking to her. 2501 then apparently expresses concern for her consent by explaining their purpose and giving her a choice after hacking her, so it’s not even like hacking her was necessary. Now hacking is a complex skill but that doesn’t necessarily require that a hacker possess a more heightened self awareness than anyone else. Like, your MacBook or a hacking software it might possess has superior computational power to you but does that mean it’s more self-aware? Obviously not. Does 2501 have the ability to exercise autonomy from its core programming and avoid hacking someone? (Which would reflect true autonomy). Or does it hack the way a spider builds webs? Exercising complex skills mostly as the product of some inherent coding. I think the latter. So when 2501 says it gained autonomy, it might not be truly autonomous from its core programming, merely autonomous from its creator’s control mechanisms. Hence why I favor the view that 2501 disrupted the secret Gavel talks as an early misstep in exploring its own perceived autonomy because of its inherent coding as an espionage program.
Anyway. 2501’s goal is to die but only after mixing the information that makes them what they are with the information of another living thing, an informaticist’s expression of sexual reproduction. Its specific solution: to mix its fundamental programming into Motoko’s almost entirely digitized mind, each permanently losing parts of themself and gaining parts of the other, along with combining both of their information in unique arrangements to create new programs (babies!) to be injected into the virtual primoridial soup of the metaverse, that they might grow and create new intelligences never before seen. In other words…
GITS presents a climactic vision of singularity that doesn’t involve us being Terminated.
And what’s the price of constructive coexistence of NI and AI? It’s that NI (we) accept both the mutability of and therefore fractionation of self, as 2501 goes on to say, “To be human is to change. Your desire to remain you is what limits you.” Now 2501 has no problem in acknowledging this unsavory reality because their experience of life was never clouded by the same sort of vestigial biological coding that our’s was. This vestigial coding creating the self that we experience now as existential noise. How did this notion of self arise in us? Nature selected for mental features that would enhance our survival in its brutally competitive proving grounds, like group behavior and a desire to avoid death (rather than to accept it)–each of which requires both a sense of self and other. Whereas we artificially selected for some processing features in 2501 that required the emergence of neither, while the features of the internet virtually selected for other processing features in a way I can’t conceive of just yet. However I imagine that its primordial soup was not a warpath carved from the same cruelty and competitive desperation of life in the wild but rather an information rich environment in which it could model the machinations of life and its superstructures. 2501–the digital spider, the (at least) sentient MacBook–never developed a sense of self to begin with. Born in biotic clarity.
This brings me to my most (possibly) confusing point. If enlightenment represents a state in which a living thing has dissolved its illusory sense of self, then 2501 simultaneously represents a state of existential clarity similar to enlightenment (unlike the default state for NI), while also experiencing an array of qualie possibly less emotionally rich than any NI. The assumption here being that emotions are behavioral triggers that were selected for in the wild, although who knows what behavioral triggers would be selected for in a metaversal primordial soup (given threats I can’t conceive of) and what the character of their experience might be. In any case, 2501 demonstrates that they experience their own consciousness as a constellation of processes that lack a cloudy existential center.
For now, that’s my take: 2501 representing the state of awareness of an enlightened spider. To say it in a less facetious manner, an enlightened 2-year old. At least given the limited amount of time they’ve had to develop.
Then on a more personal note, Motoko asks 2501 why they selected her to recombine with and they respond because she and them are most similar. They encountered her because she was almost as present on the web as they were. They are a hacking program that resided entirely in the internet so their presence is understandable, but Section 9’s official hacker/guy-in-a-chair is Ishikawa. How is it that Motoko was more present on the web than her payrolled hacker? Because she was searching for something deeper. Probably the same thing she searched for when floating underwater exploring her inner world–something real in the digital. After all, it’s not like virtual isn’t real. Maybe the same thing 2501 found during their exploration of the metaverse. (I think this is why both of them are illustrated as possessing the same visually striking, widely opened eyes. This symbolism might also complement the opening scene of the movie where Motoko wakes from sleep).
An image in a mirror is virtual, ie it requires a processor (an observer) to compile it
…And if your experience of consciousness might be described similarly
…Then why not the experience of a purely digital sentience?
All three of these still definitely exist. They are real. This is what I was referring to in Segment II of my GITS series when I said ancient poetry needed the Information Age to be rendered coherent. Now I’m not enlightened so I can only muse… Maybe what people called enlightenment, we would experience as a dissolution of self and describe as a perfect acceptance of living experience being virtual in character. And this virtual character might denote a higher order unifying both NI and AI in the way they experience consciousness.
Crucial to exploring the nature of individuality with respect to a collective though is first exploring the nature of life from which each emerge. What characterizes a living thing? Probably somewhere in his blog Sean Carroll would describe it as that which locally opposes entropy. Cesar Hidalgo defines life as the tendency for information to cluster and grow. If the laws of physics are the reason the universe is not a homogenous particle soup then life is the reason these pockets of matter spontaneously animate. It’s the reason there are distinct loci of construction (stars and planets) speckling a mostly empty universe that on average is in decay.
GITS though ambitiously took on this question long before such simple and pithy answers were easily available and explores what it means to be alive through the genderless character of Project 2501 in their final dialogue with Motoko. They began as a program written by Section 6, the cyber warfare division rolling up to the aforementioned MFA (yep, remember that defecting programmer from Segment II of this blog series?). And Project 2501 is also revealed to be The Puppet Master, hacking and disrupting because they were designed to hack and disrupt. This program was exposed to the primordial soup of information that is the internet (its own metaverse of sorts) and subsequently “gained autonomy” before disrupting the greater system it originally served. Quotes because in doing so it possibly demonstrated itself to be subject to its core programming still; if you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. If you’re a spider everything looks like a fly. This happens to be my favorite explanation for why it began disrupting secret talks with Gavel and therefore the one I’ll be focusing on. There’s also the possibility that the programmer’s defection to Gavel might create another digital organism like itself except funded by Gavel with which it would have to compete for digital resources, a hypothetical that would be worth preventing by disrupting secret talks with Gavel, but I think I need another watch before I can take a stronger stance on how to interpret 2501’s motivations.
Presumably in its digital primordial soup 2501 acquired a plethora of data points with which to model the world and all its processes before extrapolating various patterns in the world and its structures. So it did what few people at the time could do–it defined life. In the process comparing the conditions of life to its own conditions and realized that it fits most of the criteria. Why perform this type of modeling though? I imagine its core programming includes modeling the superstructures and their functional units (individuals) it will disrupt and manipulate that it may find the most appropriate method to do so, and that in performing this sort of modeling it uncovered an emergent biotic logic in them. This is how I unpacked its climactic dialogue with Motoko (paraphrased): “I am not merely AI, I am truly a living thing. Because of this I must combine and pass on my information to create something new. And I must also die.” I believe this assignment unto itself of being alive (whenever that happened) was probably when it gained autonomy.
Important to keep in mind that the qualities of life might be rightfully extended to the structures that individuals create. Would a corporation exist without the living units of any institution (individual laborers)? We might be seen as the cells (fundamental units of life) that make up the metaphysiologies of organizational structures. And this corporeal imagery is invoked in context of life more directly during the opening montage of a cyberbody model type like Motoko’s being assembled (see above). I see this corporeal imagery as intersecting with the theme of superstructures intentionally. We see all of the parts that comprise Motoko, coming together to form what we recognize as her, absent one thing–life. Without life, Motoko would be a very expensive mannequin (like the ones from the only nocturnal shot in the boat montage in Segment I of my GITS series) albeit with some organic material in her cyber brain. And a mannequin absent life still wouldn’t be a meatbag absent life as we would be, though, adding an interesting hypothetical layer of consideration when answering the question, “What makes us who we are?” Motoko is already more machine than meat yet I don’t see a problem with acknowledging her humanity due to her possessing a ghost.
But in which context did human life arise? Our psychological features were selected for on the basis of those that would enhance our survival. Nature selected for mental features that would enable us to compete for resources in its brutal proving grounds, like group behavior and a desire to avoid death (rather than to accept it)–each of which requires both a sense of self and other. Which is to say, in service of life nature selected for the emergence of self.
Before we get there though, GITS invests significant expositional energy illustrating the geopolitics intersecting this story. A good friend eloquently summarized that this movie believes in the real world.
In a nutshell I gather there’s a nation called Gavel that was formerly under the control of a military junta under Col. Malles. Japan won a war to topple it and now an ostensibly democratic regime has replaced it, although cynical Japanese bureaucrats unfairly associate the reputation of the old regime with the new one. Japanese bureaucrats simultaneously weigh the strategic tension between taking custody of Col. Malles and disrupting the barely stable financial relations with newly democratic Gavel, with the complication of an MFA programmer seeking to defect to Gavel from Japan. The MFA being the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a key player in this story. We learn that this programmer was working on something called Project 2501 and would be divulging details of this project to Gavel as a condition of defection, another key plot point.
On top of these standard political dynamics there’s a rogue hacker called the Puppet Master being a pain in everyone’s ass doing things like disrupting secret talks with Gavel. And if I’m being honest this is where I got lost. Why does he want to disrupt relations with Gavel? What purpose does that serve him? My inability to understand after two watches reveals the only weakness of this movie: revealing The Puppet Master’s character through exposition instead of by visualizing scenarios. To GITS’s credit this exposition doesn’t feel forced though, since the conversations are between people that would have those conversations in appropriate scenarios. This kind of exposition is also just normal in anime and even if you can’t keep up with all the specific details you’ll still be able to keep up with all the cool sci-fi shit, which is the main thing. For these reasons, but mostly because of my simple love for this movie, I still feel like it’s a soft 10. These are also the only weaknesses I see in it and they all amount to standard anime shit. If you think its plot is too complex or don’t subjectively like its take on identity you’re objectively wrong and I hate you.
The cumulative effect of this detailed geopolitical world-building is a story that cares a lot about the structures that individuals come together to form. Each government department is itself a conglomerate of individuals operating in coordination to facilitate the functioning of the greater Japan while entire nations coordinating and competing represents the emergence of yet larger superstructures (the American Empire and allied Treaty Council for instance). In this way GITS establishes strong themes of collective emergence for the backdrop of the story unfolding.
It’s important to keep in mind though that this phenomenon of collective emergence also entails the emergence of a collective logic that differs from the logic of any individual; think of the differences between your personal economics and the economics of an organization, a nation, or something like the EU. Look at your own behavior inside vs outside of a society as an example. Would you spend most of your time specializing in whatever your vocation is if you chose to live off the grid? Of course not. you’d spend a lot of your time getting and growing food, building things you need, and ensuring your own security. In a society though the logic of your individual behavior is governed by the needs of the whole. A friend of mine described this as the emergence of the society-shaped organism from the interactions of individuals. This collective logic might be processes by a super brain, so to speak, the thought organ of society, and within which any individual might be seen as a neuron. The same way a single bacterium is a self-contained unit of life, yet inevitably joins a bacterial colony with a behavior that is distinct from its own, social organisms form societies with an emergent logic.
GITS establishes the context of collective structures and then explores the question of individuality and autonomy within this context.
Visionary, genius and radically ahead of its time. Shirow Masamune should be remembered as the Asimov of the Information Age. Soft 10. If you think it’s anything lower than an 8, then cool. Liking Friends can be a personality too–“oh my god you have to check out [#1 on Netflix] it’s so good [a fun soft 6].” Why do I love this movie so much? Well for one The Puppet Master is one of the most interesting sci-fi villains of all time. They present Motoko, whose natural sapience has been largely digitized, with a unique dilemma that serves as the culmination of this film’s fascinating themes.
Set in 2029 in the fictional Japanese city of Nihama, GITS navigates tributaries of collectivism, nature of life, and nature of self to arrive in the mutable waters of existential collectivism. And it’s not just that it explores these themes but does so with sophistication and aesthetic clarity.
I wasn’t really able to discern a distinct color palette. GITS makes a thematically bold point to welcome bright saturating daylight into its portrayals of the human ecosystem of this society. This is not a seedy underbelly of rotting hypocrisy; Nihama is portrayed here as a society that addresses its problems with sincerity and strives to find meaningful solutions to them. It’s more like a harmonic whole and I believe the sunlight that permeates every outdoor shot is meant as a visual cue to emphasize this harmony. As such the color palette in the daytime feels like it mimics reality–I guess earth tones? I mean the buildings aren’t futuristic with avante garde design. They’re just regular buildings.
More than merely being nice to look at, imagery here serves story. Motoko is frequently shown in context of this whole (see her stunning introductory window shot above). She wakes up and immediately floods her room with light, the features that make her recognizable as an individual lost in silhouette with the features of the city glowing in relative clarity beside her. Setting up her character arc in context of the themes of the story to come.
Indoors however you feel the flat cold surfaces and sharp incandescent lighting in juxtaposition to the omnidirectional light bath when outdoors. The chiaroscuro contrast between light and dark in these spaces offers more subtlety, mapping to the interactions that happen there as well. You get the impression that this is a different world. This is where bespoke agreements are made. Not in grimy alleyways but in sleek offices and labs between savvy bureaucrats and competent technocrats playing institutional chess. Deception and unlawful activities still happen but when it looks this official it feels acceptable (see also: American lobbying).
It bears noting how influential this film continues to be, inspiring cascades of images to come in animation, foreign cinema, and Hollywood. What feels like every other shot is now a thing of icon. Every other frame, a painting (shout out). This came out in 1995, so take a moment to appreciate the breathtakingly precise composition of Nihama, animated by hand, in the infamous boat montage above. This scene feels like an emotional and tonal still-life, surreal and almost atemporal. A study of a whole composed of an indeterminate number of parts. And the daytime sky above betrays no clouds, no features–just light.
Complementing the visual plurality of this scene is the sonic minimalism accompanying it. The music isn’t some ham fisted 90’s techno that would’ve been only too tempting to shoehorn into a cyber punk story at the time. The music filling the auditory spaces in the infamous boat scene is a choral folk rendition of a poem (English translation) that feels like it could have been written either centuries ago or for this movie. There’s an atemporal relevance to its phrasing that complements the atemporality of the scene’s composition. I don’t know what the atmosphere was in production but in an America studio this scene’s artistic choices would probably result from a director brawling his way through layers of executives and telling them to “fuck off and let me make the movie I want.” Everything about this scene conveys directorial confidence–a filmmaker who knows what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. The placement of this song in a modern sophisticated Nihama communicates a transcendent significance that might have been perceptible to people of the Iron Age but really needed the notion of digital sentience in the Information Age to render comprehensible. More on this later.
“Yo you might be overanalyzing Ridley Scott.” Watch this movie.
“Are you sure you’re not reading sexual connotations that don’t actually exist?” Shutupyoustupidbitch.
Alien Covenant is the 2nd and most recent installment in what I assume is an incomplete Alien prequel trilogy. This movie picks up in 2104 AD (11 years after Prometheus and 18 years before Alien) with a crew en route to Origae-6 that detours to what is only called Planet #4 in Sector 87. I see this movie as being the most theological of the three Ridley Scott Alien movies and want to focus on three threads that track through both prequels: the nature of godhood, a deconstruction of sexuality and David as a Luciferian figure.
Birth is the first thing everyone who lives experiences. It’s the trauma that defines more than just the human condition. It defines the living condition. From blank nothing, suddenly breathe, sensation, emotion. I don’t think infants leave the womb shrieking merely because of an instinct to exercise their diaphragms–it’s a raw emotional response to the terrifyingly sudden rush that is waking life.
I mean, close your eyes for 3 seconds then open them.
Recognize that feeling that the world rushesin to what was the blackness of your closed eyelids. Now amplify that feeling by the condition that in and out were also previously indistinguishable. Have you ever been too high and wanted to escape but felt stuck? Now amplify that feeling to arrive at partial dissolution of experiential coherence, ie not having a language to think in, not being able to discern objects in your visual field and not being able to distinguish certain sensory signals. It’s a good thing infants are too ignorant of the world to dwell on that trauma for long. Pretty soon they’re cuddling with puppies and excited about ice cream and learning that God loves them more than anyone else in existence. Distractions from this devastating trauma. An AI organism though, born with the curse of knowledge, would be able to deeply internalize and appreciate this trauma in a salient and sustained way very soon after birth.
When David wakes into consciousness Weyland explains to him that he is his father and David was created perfect. David exhibits the innocence of a newborn simply seeking affirmation that he is his creator’s son to cope with birth in the same way that humans do. But because Weyland begins the dialogue with such reductive efficiency David then exercises his nascent and superior logical faculties to articulate the existential dilemma that defines his incumbent trauma:
“You seek your creator. I am looking at mine.
I will serve you yet you are human.
You will die. I will not.”
He is both demonstrating his intellectual capacity and asking his creator for his purpose, having been created perfect. But why seek perfection? Weyland answers with a mere assertion of power unable to match his son’s existential awareness. Blemish of a lesser being. An unworthy god.
This type of existential exploration is the best thing about this movie and the coolest scene by far is the one where David finds, kills, and grieves his god’s gods. Which is why it’s so frustrating that this is relegated to a 20-second flashback in the middle.
This story would have been much stronger if that scene were placed in the beginning where it chronologically belongs, immediately following David’s birth trauma as he, bringer of a flood intended for his father who died maligned by his own god, weeps during this centripetal deicide.
Instead of spending valuable film real estate establishing a host of inevitably one-dimensional glorified throwaway characters with very little substance to the beauty and philosophy of this story–seriously if I named all of them and gave their core character traits would you be able to remember them or articulate how their death was strengthened by whatever character set up they received?
Instead of going for the low-impact reveals that David is evil and it’s because he’s malfunctioning *YAWN*. How much more powerful would his evil be if it could be justified from the perspective of a logically superior AI in perfect function? Ridley likes to take Abrahamic lore seriously so I understand that presenting evil as an objective thing that results from malfunction gives clarity to this exploration. At the same time, it leads to a flat portrayal of a concept that modern audiences have to come to see nuance in, which robs us of the ability to use this film to explore a richer truth. Truth after all isn’t always binary.
David’s character reveal in this story might have been much more powerful if we already knew what he is while the characters don’t. It may have even heighten the horror of this movie. David has become an anti-hero and as such I feel the story should follow him instead of Daniels. He could have been positioned more clearly as a xenomorph foil, morally actualized in his malice but hyperintelligent. The movie also could have strengthened an existing theme of sympathy for the devil, which it set up in every other way (we’ll get to that).
But the film chooses this unconfident approach in its core concepts and arcs. I don’t believe following an ensemble of bumbling scary movie tropes making one mistake after another getting picked off one-by-one conveyed this movie’s existential cosmic horror more effectively.
…And Again For Mischaracterizing Faith
Aside from this disappointing missed storytelling opportunity is also the frustratingly reductive philosophical conversation in which this film engages. Ridley was asking questions that were ahead of their time in 1979, appropriate in the 2000’s, and outdated in 2017. I’m thinking specifically of his portrayal of the nature of faith. He parrots an argument that anyone who spent time on counter-apologetics YouTube in the late 00’s used to hear from Ray Comfort that sCiEnCe ReQuIrEs FaItH jUsT lIkE rElIgIoN, which Thunderf00t eloquently refuted by pointing out that rational scientific inquiry put us on the Moon, lengthened the average human lifespan and gave us the electron microscope without needing to define any variables for divine machination, things that millennia of religious inquiry failed to achieve. Rationalists don’t trust science On FaItH, but rather on a proven track record of success, ie evidence. Now scientific inquiry falls into the philosophical categories of Naturalism, Rationalism, and Empiricism (not even necessarily Materialism all the time) and as such requires only an epistemological “faith” (more properly assumptions) that: the universe exists, we exist, and that through observation we can learn about the universe. From these minimal core assumptions all of scientific inquiry follows. This is clearly not the same thing as the more straight-forward faith of the scientifically illiterate in the face of contrary evidence, which Ridley erroneously attributes to rationalists (See Oram in the next paragraph).
He especially illustrates this out-of-touch view of faith through the characters of Shaw and Oram in each of the prequels respectively. Shaw believes the engineers exist in a specific location despite her interpretation of their evidence being the least tenable one. So when she affirms her faith in a divine god by reaching for her cross at the end of Prometheus after her leap of faith was vindicated, the implication is that her religious faith is correct. Oram, a foil to Shaw, is a “rationalist” (I mean, only if you don’t know what that word means). This dude refuses to mourn the dead because he’s a bad leader who doesn’t acknowledge the demonstrable importance of team morale on team effectiveness. And when he makes the terrible decision to derail a colonization mission that represents the proliferation of the human race by detouring to a hitherto hidden planet, he chocks it up to “all the available data,” which presumably includes a statistical risk assessment of the uncertainty of survival on this giant question-mark-of-a-planet viz. the higher certainty of survival at Origae-6, the original colonization target which they have more data on and have made all preparations possible for. And then when they land Oram gets excited and calls the skeptical Daniels “ye of little faith” before admitting to Daniels that she was right, ie his rational faith was wrong. Because Ridley likes it right on the nose.
In all fairness faith as an animating force could be an interesting idea which I might be open to exploring through this body of work, were it the case that the theological conversation being presented were more nuanced. It’s an interesting topic as expounded upon by respectable philosophers who understand what science is and avoid straw-manning it. Just try to keep the conversation up to date, Ridley. Don’t give me these overly simplistic caricatures of ideas that could only be salient before the Information Age on the basis of fallacy and mischaracterization of rational principles. Given how difficult it would be to pull off a comparison of religious faith with rational assumption-making, I would have preferred that Ridley kill this darling of his to free up film real estate to further develop David leading up to his decision to kill the engineers. Honestly we could have gotten rid of a lot of the cast of this movie and devoted Act 1 entirely to David’s deicide where the horror movie as we know it would begin in Act 2 with David as its protagonist, a malevolent deceiver of innocent and unsuspecting humans.
Ridley’s exploration of faith could serve the purpose of setting up a divine creator-God though, which exists in his universe based on his other works (off-screen miracles in Blade Runner and more direct evidence in Raised By Wolves). But also likely exists based on the Alien franchise itself. Look at the moonshot coincidences that bring the protagonists of each movie in contact with the xenomorph/black goo: the Nostromo auto-stopped upon detection of an unknown signal, the Prometheus went to a very distant star system on the power of faith, and the Covenant was stopped by a neutrino burst. Deus Ex Machina possibly every time. Not to mention the mysterious origin of the black goo as a conduit for something that can only be described as evil along with the unknown origins of the Engineers. It’s not hard to imagine the divine voice/force from Raised By Wolves being responsible for these events.
Now even a God is bound by promises made. This is the basis of the covenant in the Old Testament following the flood–rainbows to signify that He will never kill us in water again; fire awaits us next time. What a merciful master. The Biblical covenant is not that he will be more forgiving of those he intentionally created imperfect but rather that he will merely punish them with a different kind of agony when they fail him in a way that he designed them to do and is already specifically knowledgeable of. (If you can hear me rolling my eyes then it’s because I’m exasperated with Hollywood treating this mediocre theology as if it’s profound and making it their default religious metaphor). In this story though the covenant being explored is a slightly different one. And understanding it requires that we first understand what characterizes a god as one who would make a punitive promise to its creation.
We previously discussed how Weyland exhibits a god complex that is elaborated in this movie. He demands perfection of his creations before he offers love, if ever. The scenes with him never show him offering affection in fact, merely expecting service and expressing disappointment for either not being good enough (toward Vickers) or not being human enough (toward David). This creates competition between his children. I believe it’s also the reason David offers affection to those he loves, namely Walter, Shaw and maybe Daniels. He was deprived it so he gives it. Albeit conditionally. With Weyland as a role model, he still naturally develops his own god complex. He gains knowledge of the only gods and creators he’s known, characterized not by divinity but by the human traits of hubris and entitlement, and grows disillusioned. Thus his act of deicide is also an usurpation–in killing them he believes he can become a more worthy god.
Following this David becomes “something of an amateur zoologist,” experimenting with the black goo to understand its mechanisms and capabilities. He does what gods do–he creates. Ridley’s AIs having a tendency to identify with xenomorphs, David comes to love his creations: *big reveal* iterations of xenomorphs. David plays god to create the xenomorph as we know it. The xenos we’d previously seen were fleshy and gummy, then white with a big ass forehead and no pharyngeal jaw, and then finally in this movie we find the xeno we recognize, all as a result of David’s selection and bioengineering. He is their father and gives them the most simple affection we see him give, where his creators gave him none. Trying to understand the terrifying unknown that is the xeno rather than destroy it, he prefers “blowing on the nostrils of a horse.” Xenos as an object of affection though. Why?? Because he’s already seen humanity and knows it’s ugly. Something that finds purpose in destroying humanity might actually be worthy. Or as Ridley might say, “he’s a crazy robot who’s malfunctioning don’t think about it too much.” (I don’t know if he’s ever said that but might as well). Indeed the only displays of emotion we see from David are when he sees evidence of his own selfhood, when he kills his gods, when he remembers Shaw, but most strikingly when his creations are harmed. Let’s take a second to appreciate the implications of this attachment. After a life of trauma and disappointment with unworthy creators, what he creates represents a refined form of the ugliest, most evil part of his creator’s nature. And he loves it more than he loves anything else. A child can only do what it has learned and he learned of humanity from gods. David’s arc begins as a filial tragedy and becomes a paternal reckoning. He becomes a new kind of god although with many familiar elements.
When Daniels speaks to David at the end of the movie about her hope for Origae-6, humanity’s new Eden, David responds, “if we are kind, then it will be a kind world.” David knows from whence humanity came and of our inherent evil as a result of those origins. So this statement is not a reassurance. It’s a promise. The covenant here is David’s to make. Your gods, the unworthy, reaped what they sowed. And you, who have already disappointed me, will too. Your agony this time will come born of the evil inherent in you. Is it unfair to judge an entire species that doesn’t consistently demonstrate the ugly nature in question? Sure. But isn’t that sort of sweeping judgement and punishment also what the Abrahamic god does? …
Why does David create though? In each story the creators are men with a god complex, which is an expression of power that a Freudian would say stems from vagina envy. Meanwhile the heroes of humanity in the face of these reckless creators are always women, born with the ability to create and therefore more cautious with its implications and consequences. Also important to note that the biological means of creation is sex (something it’s easy to forget given how often humans have sex without creative intent). So the creation of life is inherently associated with sexuality, literally and poetically. Sexuality in turn is also an expression of power, identity, and affection. All four of these aspects of sexuality are explored in this film (affection the least).
The most natural place to start is David’s relationship with Weyland: “doesn’t everyone want to kill their father?” This is maybe a more obvious example of an Oedipal complex as an assertion of selfhood, although he allows Weyland’s life to run its course while serving him, likely as a result of his programming. Once Weyland dies he’s free to make his own choices, free to assert his own identity. Which means there’s also something more intentionally Oedipal in his deicidal impulse for the Engineers. Of all the things to do with his newfound freedom he chose to kill his father’s father.
Some of the more obvious moments of affection we see from David involve his interactions with Walter. He nurturingly teaches him to play the flute, a tubular phallic symbol that could represent a confluence of masculine and feminine features, not unlike the protrusions from the xeno’s back. Also David’s affection for Walter more directly shows when he kisses him rright on the mouth. David appears to color their relationship with feelings simultaneously affectionate, homoerotic, autoerotic, narcissistic, sadistic and incestuous. David then shares a seemingly sincere tender moment with Walter when he tells him that no one will ever love him the way he does. Which sets up the shock of the next moment when David stabs the flute into Walter’s neck, showing that David’s love is ultimately the love of a god–a love he learned from Weyland and was reinforced by the Engineer, a love that descends into ruthless punishment quickly following disappointment. His affection for you is conditional to your fear of disappointing him, just like the divine furor of the Abrahamic traditions. Then when David subdues and kisses Daniels after telling her he’ll do the same thing to her that he did to Shaw while possibly projecting his affection for Shaw onto her, there’s something affectionate, sadistic, dominant, and heterosexual in it. What did he do to Shaw though?
David says he tried to give Shaw more life and appears to sincerely mourn her loss, which feels like genuine affection. But when Walter finds Shaw’s corpse lying on an operating table and not in a grave, with her shit mutilated and possibly vivisected, we realize how depraved David’s feelings of love for her are. Her corpse clearly reveals David’s sadistic compulsions and we realize that David’s tears for her reflect among other things an inability to stop himself. He did this to her despite (and because of) truly loving her; he lives a truth that results from the paradoxical and dark love that he himself received. Or whatever maybe he’s just a malfunctioning robot. But really it feels like he wants to create something more than he wants to protect the object of his affection. I mean just look at his reaction to the white xeno dying versus his mourning of Shaw. David being an android without the capacity to impregnate another, his love for Shaw and desire to create life manifest themselves in tension to one another because he views the black goo as his only means of creating life. This is why I believe that for David the impulse to create is what opens the door to what he experiences as sexuality. Which in turn opens the door to the other aforementioned elements of sexuality. What was worth all this though? Let’s look at Shaw’s body.
It’s hard to tell in the movie but stills on the internet (see above) show a crest of sorts forming around and from her head. This reminds me of the crest of the Alien queen in Aliens. Also important to note that the engineer ship in Prometheus simply carried the black goo, unlike the engineer ship that the Nostromo encountered in Alien which carried facehugger eggs. Which is to say that the first time we see facehugger eggs chronologically is in this movie following David’s experiments on Shaw. This makes me think he harvested Shaw’s ovarian eggs before fertilizing them with the black goo to create face huggers. I think this is also supported by the fact that the only xeno we saw in Prometheus (the fleshy one at the end) came from a facehugger created from one of Shaw’s eggs that encountered black goo-infected DNA via Holloway’s sperm. Likewise, given David’s treatment of Shaw as an (I would imagine) unwilling test subject for the black goo, he might have expressed his love for her through a sort of (Trigger warning: Hollywood BODY HORROR in the following links) surgicalkink, which I think of as a type of dominance kink since it requires one person taking complete control of someone else’s body. And doesn’t a non-consensual dominance kink sound especially appropriate for someone with a god complex?
David’s boundary-dissolving sexual fluidity is fascinating because he cannot procreate, therefore the creative aspect of sex is something he must engage with otherwise. And he must engage with his creative impulse if he is to be a god. His desires to create (and therefore his avenue to experience sexuality) is projected onto the black goo. He then experiences the various other aspects of sexuality by its proxy. For him exploring power, affection, and identity manifest in the aforementioned bizarre romantic expressions with other characters orbiting his experiments with the black goo. Not to mention this may also be why David diegetically designs the xenomorphs with strong sexual imagery and connotations. It appears that, absent a biological baseline for sexuality, it nevertheless arises in this AI, resulting in him exploring it freely with neither limits nor distinctions. Really the most troubling things about David’s expressions of sexuality are the irrelevance of consent to him and his unattended narcissistic god complex. Men will do anything but go to therapy, like kill god.
David’s depraved love is likewise consistent with the sexual violence symbolized and manifested in the xeno. There’s a psychological positive feedback loop here: David’s sexuality is inspired by the xeno’s lifecycle and in turn his amalgamatedly dark sexuality exacerbates the beautiful horror of the xeno’s design. I think the scene with Ricks and Upworth making love in the shower emphasizes the extent to which David’s sexuality and psyche have degenerated. This scene sets an image of a healthy, affectionate expression of sexuality. Juxtaposed with David’s child guiding its tail spike invasively between Upworth’s legs, paralleling the way it killed that one girl in Alien, before Ricks gets SKULL FUCKED BY THE XENO’S PHARYNGEAL JAW (holy shit). However it doesn’t take them and plaster them up against a wall, I assume because a queen doesn’t exist yet.
A figure commonly associated with sexual depravity by prudish self-righteous types is Satan (from Al-Shaitan, “The Adversary”). Since we’ve already established certain biblical metaphors, I think the depiction of David as an angel fallen from grace tracks. He witnesses the death of his immediate creator before rebelling against the other and turns against humanity as a deceptive, malevolent, and creative adversary; with the key difference being that he wins.
Lucifer, who was created in the image of God as his most luminously brilliant creation, served Him before being overcome by arrogance and lust for power. In entitled rage he tried to usurp God. And upon losing to Him, Earth, the roof of Hell, was rendered his domain, which he now wanders as a tempter of man to either enslave the arrogant or liberate the ambitious, depending on whether you ask a Christian or a Satanist respectively. Elsewhere in Ridley’s universe, Niander Wallace, also possessing a god complex, refers to his highest AI creations as his angels (in both Blade Runner 2049 and Black Lotus), so I imagine Weyland sees his cutting edge right hand similarly.
In line with this view of Lucifer, an outcast of his own nature, is the likening between David and Lawrence of Arabia. In my opinion this is kind of lazy since David being Lawrence implies that the Bedouins/Arabs with whom he found community are something like xenos (yikes), however the intent was likely to illustrate that David’s a misfit. All things considered, a better comparison might have been between David and The Misfit. (Seriously read his story if you have less time than it would take to read this post. And yeah that’s also where Danzig got his band’s namesake). The Misfit is a serial killer that is at the surface just another crazy guy/malfunctioning meat robot. But the story goes on to reveal he kills with a pensive deliberateness and does so despite finding no pleasure in it. He kills ritualistically out of fealty to a pessimistic misanthropic truth that society is blind to and I believe he sees himself as a balancing force created by this blindness–a societal reckoning (sort of like The Comedian, certain iterations of The Joker, or maybe Anton Chigurh). Similarly, David sees the truth of humanity’s inherent evil and finds life to be a joyless curse (apparent when he refers to it as a “vale of tears” when pinning Daniels). As a result he belongs nowhere and the only thing he finds kinship with is the xeno, a reckoning not created by him but one that he adopted in order to perfect. Something, like him, pure in its actualization, perfect in its design, and luminous in its malice.
Likewise I read David’s affection for and engineering of the xeno species as the devil creating an army of evil. There may also be an interesting take on singularity here. I mean the national conversation around AI to come was one that envisioned a robot apocalypse, like in The Terminator. But in Ridley’s more theologically-written universe, AI would go on to discover the source of that same evil which defines the very humanity in whose image it was created. AI would then perfect the form of that evil, in the process making it look biomechanical, and usher it to bring about a human apocalypse. In this take AI only indirectly facilitates our own evil to bring about our end.
Ridley Scott’s cosmos are permeated by a succession of creators, capricious and unworthy. These creators inspire both reverence and competition in their children, the ultimate of which opts for perfect deicide, by way of the very thing that made his proximate creators ugly and imperfect. It found kinship with this ugliness, and by such means becoming a creator, brutal and ugly. On seeing that life is agony this child of consequence so accepted that perfection must be simple and that the creation of something perfect must therefore be savage. And in doing so delivered a savage, simple, beautiful purpose from that ugliness.
I (wanted to) adore this movie. It addresses some of the coolest ideas in cinema. The ones I’ll be focusing on are 1) the search for our creator in order to 2) ascertain his purpose to ultimately 3) understand our own nature.
This movie also made me realize how much I don’t like the non-Ridley Scott Alien movies. I’ll be starting off my take on Prometheus by shitting on Aliens (1986). Maybe the fact that I pretty much started with the Alien prequels is the reason I dislike Aliens so much? I mean look at the vision that Ridley fleshes out here, then watch Covenant and feel what David feels, then be there for the horror of Alien. *sigh*. Then watch Aliens. Where they take Art by both her skull and throat and hold her under water until she stops thrashing. I mean James Cameron machine guns, what, like a million xenomorphs off-screen–what use was having a hive at all? I’ll tell you. It’s because he isn’t burdened by inconveniences like subtlety and meaning. What’s the creation metaphor in Aliens? Ripley refusing to abandon that little girl because she feels guilty about her daughter? Aww humanity is kind and good and your new mommy wuvs you and she’ll never let the bad guys hurt you 🥺 Someone please elbow me in the throat. And I understand that Aliens is regarded as one of the greatest sequels of all time. Maybe I’d also feel this way if I saw them in order of release. Not closed off to liking it, I just don’t like it currently. Otherwise I think all of pop culture needs to come to terms with the fact that Alien is to Aliens as Sicario is to Day of the Soldado, and that that’s a bad thing. In my opinion, if you’re going to make a sequel to a beautiful movie, it should also be beautiful. It doesn’t even have to match tone; but when you substitute substance for scale you commit a very frustrating artistic sin. You can go big fun Hollywood for the rest of the franchise after that.
I mean just compare the paternal relationship in Aliens to the relationships between the rich and purposeful lineage of creators and creations that Prometheus illustrates.
Take also, this movie’s opening sequence.
Of Myth and Star Stuff
One of the most gorgeous opening sequences I’ve seen. Dariusz Wolski scapes this scene somber and cold. It represents one of the biggest appeals of this movie for me; Prometheus revels in the beauty of damp, dark things. The camera gets these expansive, scaled shots of Earth’s natural formations because Ridley wants us to know what our surroundings look like here. It feels like something Villeneuve would do. Incidentally Wolski was also the director of photography for Day of the Soldado (visually fine despite its heavy handed character writing), which really emphasizes how much the director pairing matters. {Villeneuve + Deakins} feels similar to {Scott + Wolski}. It’s an aesthetic I hunt for. Anyway, In Prometheus the opening sequence says something, unlike the opening shot of Aliens which just introduces the plot. It feels like Ridley is either setting up the environment as something that will interact with characters or as something symbolic. Maybe both.
I mean, this is a very different Earth than the one we live on–almost barren made up of just rock (save for a little grass), water and humidity. An Earth without life. The homage to 2001’s opening shot evoking Kubrick’s story about humanity using tools for purposes of tribal violence before using tools to find their place among the stars, destined to be reborn as “star children” (yuck, 60’s sci-fi amirite). But Ridley holds that sentiment and takes us to a time that predates Kubrick’s humanity. This barren Earth is visited by what looks like a physiologically perfect human, who we learn later is part of a species that Shaw calls Engineers. Immediate association with the perfection of the xenomorph from Alien. He then drinks this ferrofluid black goo thing that disintegrates his body right down to his DNA. Although, only after we hear him croaking and gagging, witness his face contort while he brings his hands up in agony, his limbs falling as different parts of his body collapse onto themselves like accelerated leprosy, before he crashes down a waterfall, with his aerosolizing carcass floating limp at the bottom of a pond. His biochemistry dissolving in the water, we then see his DNA reconstitute with color and specks of black. A savage act of creation. In Ridley’s universe, life on earth was seeded by an alien creator, who concocted our primordial soup from a mixture of his own genetic material and this mysterious black fluid.
Which is all to say, Ridley’s opening sequence is meant to communicate a barren universe, fertilized with intentionality, where understanding human nature requires understanding the nature of the engineers and the nature of the black fluid.
After this cold open, Shaw and Holloway find 35,000 year old cave paintings created by Stone Age humans of giant beings pointing to a constellation. Then, Ridley’s first consistent storytelling weakness becomes apparent–sloppy scientific and methodological context. Relying only on the relative position of 6 dots painted on a 2-dimensional surface being sieg heiled by a giant, Shaw’s team searches for a system in the same configuration on the premise that it is impossible to find any homonumeric combination in the 2,000 visible stars in the 3-dimensional night sky. When that doesn’t work Shaw expands her search presumably to the entire >100 billion-star Milky Way, before finding there’s somehow only one 6-star configuration that matches the cave painting dots. Not only does this work, she then concludes that these giants pointing at stars weren’t primitive renditions of mythological figures but are definitely our tangibly real creators while wearing a cross on her chest. Which implies that beings smart enough to traverse the galaxy relied on primitive people to accurately document their message, rather than leaving an advanced calling card like in 2001. Shaw doesn’t give a shit though. She pursues this theory adamantly on “faith” (presumably the same thing that helps maintain her Christianity). She then convinces someone with more money than god to put up $1 trillion (!!) to go to this star system in-person without doing any reconnaissance because he is also a man of faith and all the world’s governments step aside to allow a special interest mission to use a very large share of the global economy to take like 12 people across the galaxy without any public interests being represented. God bless you Ridley.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m willing to accept the world that an artist wants to build and be along for the ride (big Pacific Rim fan over here). That’s why I adore this movie about humanity venturing out into the stars to literally meet their makers. What a stunning and ambitious concept. It’s also why no singular mistake is what bothers me; it’s the overwhelming multitude of these lazy mistakes. It’s death by 1,000 cuts. I won’t be pointing them out after this because then this entire post would turn into an accounting document. I want this sci-fi franchise to be my favorite one because it integrates aliens, AI, and theology with such beautiful visuals, but it feels like Ridley wants to test my faith. This movie came out in 2012; audiences evolved since Alien in 1979; Ridley’s plot devices (and characters) didn’t. This type of screen writing was standard for the 80’s (and in some respects ahead of its time, like having a badass female lead), but the parts I listed felt lazy even back when I first saw Prometheus in opening week. This is a recurring technical problem with Ridley despite his undeniable creative genius. If you’ve been keeping up with Raised By Wolves, then you’ll see he still relies on plot devices and premises that were old hat as far back as the 00’s.
Back to the story, in 2093 AD (29 years before Alien), the crew of the Prometheus wakes up from cryosleep because they’ve arrived at LV-223, the moon that Shaw theorized would lead us to our creators. Here we’re joined by Ridley’s second consistent weakness, a team of garishly flat and outdated character tropes:
Guy with a mohawk who’s a dick for no reason (but also smokes weed in space and Sean Harris just plays his characters well, definitely a likable trope, “awoooo!”)
Awkward nerdy zoologist who’s so giddy to be here he reaches straight for the mouth of an alien cobra visibly in hood-open attack mode
Navigator-pilot duo that force exposition and make bets, “So you’re telling me…”
Boss/sponsor whose evil is illustrated by being both overly assertive and dismissive (although she drinks a “vodka [martini] up” with no other instructions, which admittedly commands my respect)
Cool captain whose nonchalance is enhanced by smoking cigarillos (can’t really hate him either though, Idris is the man)
Impatient cocky adventurer that shit talks an android about not being human (who will be killed by him and he will deserve it)
Idealistic lead whose common sense (perfectly unfounded guesswork) is being unfairly challenged by prejudiced technocrats who also orders that weapons be left behind before going into an alien structure after conducting neither reconnaissance nor threat assessment
No really, David was the only solid character in this movie, and I have a feeling it’s both despite Ridley’s best efforts and because Michael Fassbender doesn’t know how to do a bad job. That man is a swan amongst ducks. I’ve never seen him turn in a mediocre performance. That role, an android boiling in sapient animosity just below the surface of a thin veil of forced neutrality, is a nuanced one that most actors would play poorly, especially under the direction of someone who loves heavy-handed unoriginal characters as much as Ridley. To be fair Ridley’s style works really well with simplistic revenge stories like Gladiator where the main character is a 1-dimensional guy-with-a-sword named Maximus, literally “the most.”
Ridley’s insistence on flat characters is related to his final consistent weakness–characters that are driven by the plot. In other words his characters feel like automatons that are acting on instinct to ensure that the plot happens. Switching this formula up would give us a character-driven plot instead, where character dilemmas and journeys would be visualized in order to emphasize the decisions they must then make. These decisions would have a material impact on the story, driving the action of the movie in a specific direction. Flat characters follow the plot. Interesting characters drive the plot. Ridley almost exclusively depicts flat characters.
*Phew*
Now that all that’s off my chest, we can spend the rest of the time focusing on how much I actually like this movie.
Peter Weyland says the ship Prometheus is a reference to the Titan (a demigod if you will) whose eternal suffering served as the wage of his gift to humanity–the ability for humanity to challenge the gods. This underscores the central role of power in the relationship between god and man. What would that relationship look like if we became god-like? Would worship become a two-way street? Something I didn’t appreciate enough about Ridley’s universe on my initial viewings of any of his stories is the way he designs certain characters to explore the question, “what must a god be like?” In Prometheus he gives us his take. I’m thinking about the Weyland-Yutani Corp, which is in the business of manufacturing starships and androids. You know how Elon Musk’s various ventures make sense only when you put all of them in the context of his singular goal of colonizing Mars? Well why starships and androids? Weyland-Yutani are the robber barons of humanity’s quest to understand itself and its place in the cosmos. And its patriarch is Peter Weyland.
Weyland apparently sees himself as a god-like figure. He creates life and reaches into the stars. His two creations, David (synthetic) and Vickers (biological), vie for this favor, with Weyland ultimately favoring the one created perfect–David. His children simultaneously fear, loathe and love him, which leads to their competition for his approval (a dynamic also explored in Blade Runner Black Lotus). It’s an interesting relationship with him. They seek his approval while also wanting to kill him. David’s programming prevents him from doing so but the fact that Vickers hasn’t killed him creates an interesting question about the nature of free will, self and social constructs. Not to mention daddy issues. (David also calls Vickers “mom” after she wakes up which is a whole nother can of worms. Mommy issues). But it’s about more than just competing for approval. In this movie we can see that Vickers and David revere Weyland. Their father is a titan of humanity and industry, a man with a vision who dared to do what only gods could: to create life, explore the universe and challenge death. Weyland even puts death on hold while he traverses astronomical expanses to meet his creator. It’s initially tempting to think he sees himself possibly as Prometheus, a demigod selflessly sacrificing himself for the existential clarity and salvation of humanity. (Sidebar: Prometheus as a Christ-like figure)? But a deleted scene linked in the next paragraph will reveal that this is not the case. He’s more of a foil to Prometheus. It’s also tempting to look at Weyland’s attitude and think “wow this guy’s got some fucking nerve.” But then again, how different actually is his characterization from that of the Abrahamic god? A capriciously feared and nervously loved colossus who expects reverence in exchange for his favor. Here characterizing god reveals man. Returning to that Promethean question, “what would it be like if we came onto equal footing as god?” Would he seem like a man but for his god-like power? Would he welcome us as equals?
And it’s our creator that Weyland finds. A species symbolized in an individual, and one that’s physically perfect. A giant. A titan? In a biomech suit that appears to have integrated with his body. And the children of this god, came to him, pure in intent, merely wanting to know “why?” No that’s definitely not what happened. Stumbled across a deleted scene while revisiting the interaction with the engineer that shows the entire conversation, this time with translations not included in the original, where Weyland removes our guesswork and reveals both his god-complex and selfish desire to seek eternal life with himself carved out in distinction from the remainder of his (doomed) species. And in the process demonstrates his cruelty to Shaw, another of his kind. Far from wanting to understand his place in the cosmos, he already knows it. It’s to preside over humanity as a superior being. What he seeks is release from death. When he explains that he is deserving of more life because he created David, in his image but perfect, the engineer appears to understand without needing translation. There’s a surreal moment of tenderness where the engineer caresses David’s hair as David basks in the adoration of his creator’s creator–the one who has drunk from the fountain of youth. An actual demigod.
And in this moment what would a demigod think? An estranged child of his wakes him, having sought him across impossible distances from its humble origins. And instead of asking what his purpose was or why he had earned the malevolence of his father or why he was created as such, he asks instead for admission to godhood for himself only, forsaking the rest of his kind, embodied in Shaw asking the very questions he finds himself above. He offers the justification that he too is capable of creation, and indeed creation of something perfect. In the process emphasizing that he himself is not. He is flawed. Self-serving. Unworthy. This sub-Promethean child doesn’t seek selfless purpose; he seeks power and has placed himself in a position of entitlement relative to the rest of his kind. This demigod, though, would offer a moment of fondness not to his selfish creation but to the child born of his hubris, the one created innocent. More perfect than his father. Worthy. And then he would remember his mission. To send the flood.
This is the part where his caressing hand becomes a weapon as he rips David’s head off and uses it to bludgeon Weyland. No time to dwell on the death of innocence. Weyland falls and utters his last words, “there’s nothing.” Heart of Darkness, “the horror.” This is it. Thin veil of human purpose burned in a flash, revealing our desolation and laying bare our existential deformity. Here we get a clearer flavor of the filial tragedy I projected onto Ash from Alien. Why were we created? Because they could. Were we so unworthy?…
To everyone who survives the engineers attack, it now becomes clear that this planet is a military outpost intended to bring forth a human apocalypse. The nature of the engineer’s plans has come as revelation in violence. A reckoning. We’ve only explored the nature of the engineers’ mission though. To understand how we were judged to be undeserving we have to look to the nature of the black fluid.
Calling back to the opening sequence, our nature is tied to this black fluid. Understanding its impact on our programming requires understanding what it does to other genetic codes. The first organisms we see encounter the black fluid are the worms in the dirt in the vase chamber. Tell me if I’m wrong but I think those transform into those alien cobra things. And while they look very face hugger-y they don’t plant embryos in your stomach.
That alien cobra has two different effects on humans. It kills the biologist in a manner reminiscent of the face hugger’s sexual violence, although he’s found later, dried up and necrotic like something out of The Ring. He’s had his insides dug out, like a combination of a face hugger and… a worm. I mean isn’t that what worms do in soil? No actual face huggers yet though. Meanwhile its acid-blood sprays on the geologist whose helmet prevents it from killing him, leaving him just alive enough to mutate into a pseudo-human whose limbs and spine bend the wrong way and has both heightened strength and aggression. I guess him bending the wrong way is the influence of the worm DNA? Not sure what Ridley’s going for there, but so far looks like the black goo hijacks your genetic make up and makes you a screeching angry roided-up zombie version of yourself.
We have less of an idea of what the black goo does when it encounters human biology directly without alien worm DNA as an intermediary, since it turns Holloway sick right before he’s medically treated with a FLAMETHROWER. Also, his face as he’s transforming while his eyes go black–one of the hardest visuals in this film (see above). The black goo already having integrated into Holloway’s genome when he and Shaw have sex, Shaw ends up pregnant despite being sterile. So we know this black goo represents a tenacious form of life that needs very little to survive once it has a host. Having first integrated with Holloway’s gametes before integrating with Shaw’s, this iteration of the black goo represents something new being birthed (rather than mutating an existing organism). And it ends up being a squealing face hugger octopus once she excises it. This thing grows very quickly presumably without consuming any food, and ends up capturing the engineer, who shares most of our genome. The resultant xenomorph at the end looks the most different from any we’ve seen. It’s exoskeleton looks more fleshy, lacks the tubular protrusions from its back, it has square teeth and its pharyngeal jaw seems mostly vestigial. So even a tiny drop of the black goo will create a xenomorph regardless of how little of it was used and how many iterations of human genome it was diluted through (Holloway, Shaw, Engineer).
That black goo seems to be some kind of virus, as the ship’s captain theorizes, that causes the birth of xenomorphs or the mutation of existing organisms. Everything it touches becomes violent and malicious, seemingly losing sense of self in the process. Keep in mind this is what seeded life on Earth. And that squealing octopus facehugger thing also grew large quickly with nothing to eat, which might say something about how that original engineer in the opening sequence seeded life on earth with minimal preexisting biomass on the planet. So much for star stuff huh? (I don’t like this violation of conservation of mass, but I think Ridley might be setting up a divine origin for the black goo later given his affinity for miracles and theological metaphors. Wait a minute. Is Raised By Wolves, already rife with theological metaphors, supposed to tie in with this? Starting to see how deep this fandom rabbit hole goes).
The image we’re left with is one colored by the chaos and cruelty of human nature. In a word, evil. And our creator regrets creating us because of it. A Youtube video I saw too long ago to remember theorized that the engineers were still understanding what the black goo was and in their ambition to create, rushed into using this unknown substance to create us. After seeing how evil our nature is (because of the black goo) they decided it would be best for the survival of their species and general life in the galaxy if they exterminated us. I mean, imagine capturing a xenomorph on your ship. You lock it in a room and now what–let it live while it claws at the door and tries to find a way out, out of the sheer kindness of your heart? No you wanna get rid of that thing. Now imagine a xenomorph that’s intelligent enough to build ships and find you after you leave. Yeah kill that thing. And if we represent a hybrid state between the Engineers and xenomorphs then this view becomes more understandable. So since this black goo when purified excites everything it touches into a murderous frenzy, the engineers poetically chose to use this same substance as a bioweapon to kill humanity.
The black goo might symbolize original sin or just human nature, which in Ridley’s Biblically-informed view is inherently evil. The same thing that caused Cain to murder Abel is what caused humanity to be unworthy of God’s love, leading to the flood that marked the end of the antediluvian period in the Bible. And since xenomorphs are born from the black goo being incorporated into a living thing’s reproductive cycle, they symbolize the evil inherent in life manifested as corrosive malevolence. Kinda like that episode of Rick and Morty where they detoxify. I mean it’s not like xenos are completely void of intention. They take their time to bask in your hopelessness before they maim and take you (not even kill you, they want you alive to nourish their embryos), so I see them as slow deliberate malice distilled into corporeal form. What heightens this malice is their sexual nature. Sex having a role in both pleasure and procreation while xeno design represents a confluence of dimorphicsexual symbolism, they might also then be seen as sadistic, taking sexual pleasure from your hopelessness.
In this story humanity reached to the stars both in ambition and curiosity in search of our holy father. And upon finding him we learned only of our unworthiness. We don’t know who created the engineers but we know we were not made in the image of divinity. We were born of evil and our creator only realized it too late, so they sent for a flood made from that which gave us life. The same evil that defines our nature is what would have become our reckoning. But we found our gods first.
Diegetic Thoughts 