Okay So Obviously One Of The Main Questions That Severance Is Asking Is "who Is A Person?" Like, What

Okay so obviously one of the main questions that Severance is asking is "who is a person?" Like, what is a life, what constitutes living? The outies don't consider that when they choose severance, they're creating an entirely new person, someone with a consciousness that exists seperate from their own. Even if they know that's what's happening in some way, they don't really GET that.

Early in season 1, Helena Eagan seems like such a cold monster for telling Helly "You are not a person. I am a person."

And she clearly is cold, no doubt. But she's also being honest about the way most outies genuinely seem to regard their innies. She's just saying it in a way they won't.

Mark says he understands his innie is a person, but the way he talks to him betrays that. Him and Devon are nice and gentle, but at the end of the day neither of them consider what it will mean to take down Lumon or for Mark to quit. Will it be ending innie Marks life? Sure. But he's not *really* a person, he doesnt *really* have a life, not like they have lives. So it's not the same.

Theyre like, genuinely shocked he takes this so poorly.

When Dylan G proposes to Gretchen, he says "i can give you a life." Which struck me as such a specific way to put that, because... he cant, really? Not "a life" the way she would understand it, with all the things people use to "build a life together." Like, a family, a home, time spent together not in one weird waiting room.

What kind of life can you offer when you only exist on one floor of one building? When you can only see each other in one room, possibly for an hour at a time every few days or weeks?

For Gretchen, that wouldn't be a life. But to Dylan G, it's all he knows. So it is a life, a full one. He has nothing else to compare it to.

For Mark and Devon and Helena, it seems so cruel to look at the lives of the innies and see them as less. As not real. To see the innies as not real people.

But i don't think the show is saying that they're wrong. I don't think it's saying that theyre right, either. I think it's just posing questions, difficult ones. It's easy to say "of course the innies are people, with lives and consciousness of their own, and its cruel to discount that."

But even the innies do the same thing. They do it to Ms. Casey, and to every single one of Gemma's other consciousnesses.

25 seperate consciousnesses, who only exist for hours at a time, in one room. Are those lives, are those people?

As Gemma and Mark run for the elevator, Dr. Mauer yells for them to stop. He yells "you're killing them all." At first i didn't get who he meant. I thought maybe he meant all the innies on the severed floor, like Innie Mark said. If they took Lumon down, they all die.

But he meant Gemma. All the Gemma's that exist in those rooms, the ones Innie Mark created.

If innies are people, seperate people with individual consciousness, then both Innie and Outie Mark just committed mass murder.

And he did it to Ms Casey, too. Has been trying to do exactly that all season. To find his outies wife and get her out of there. It was never a question of asking Ms Casey what she wanted or letting her have a life of her own on the severed floor, the way innie Mark and Helly choose. It was always about getting Gemma out, saving her.

The innies complain that their outies don't treat them like people, that they don't give them choices, but when faced with the same question, neither Helly nor Mark hesitate to put Gemma over Ms Casey.

They don't see her as a person the way they see themselves as people. And they REALLY don't see her other 24 consciousnesses as people. But why not? How long do you have to be alive to be considered a person? How many places do you need to be allowed to exist in before you get a choice?

To the outies, it's hard for them to consider that the innies are people in the same way they are. Their lives are too small, too confined.

And its the same for the innies. Gemma was split into 25 people, 24 of which likely only exist in one room, for maybe a few hours at a time. It's an existence even smaller than their half-lives, and they don't give it consideration the same way their outies don't consider them.

Is a life that small really a life? Would each of Gemma's consciousness' fight for their strange existence if they had a choice? If they knew what walking out those doors meant, would they be afraid to do it?

Would Ms Casey have chosen to leave, if Innie Mark had told her what was happening? If he had stopped to consider what he was doing in that moment, do you think he would have done anything different?

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hellsiteacademia

3 months ago

Witch aesthetics: Cosmic witch

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hellsiteacademia

1 year ago

no monster this ep, but something even scarier, learning how to fucking drive.

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Goncharov gomorrah

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hellsiteacademia

3 months ago

i love how for better or worse, the women of severance simply don't fuck around. ms. cobel is a terrifying enemy to be up against, her violent outbursts make her feel unpredictable at times but they don't even hinder her, if anything they make her even more threatening because she's so calculating and unstoppable. she's ready at all times to either rip someone's throat out or ruin their life.

then helly, my beloved, is so fierce even as a blank slate of a person. if she can't have her freedom, then she'll make her captor pay the ultimate price even if it means she dies too. i don't even need to say anything else, you all know. you know her scenes by heart. even helena is so determined to make her mark at lumon that she'll undergo severance and become someone she sees as beneath herself. she'll craft this 'happy worker at the perfect company' narrative all to further her cause even as her life is at risk because that worker is deadset on killing her from the inside. the duality of this character.

and devon keeps coming in clutch. she gives no quarter to mr. milchick and is ready to protect innie!mark because she recognizes that he and her brother are one and the same. she's further from lumon than the rest of the characters but she sees the situation clearly, and even though she doesn't know how to help in the long term of this situation she's doing everything that she can in the short term. without her, who even knows how much deeper mark would be in his own grief, addiction and isolation. she's literally caring for her new baby and her grieving brother at the same time that she's figuring out this conspiracy, she's got a lot on her shoulders

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hellsiteacademia

1 month ago

I think Ian and Poppy had to kiss eventually. Not in a rooting for the romance kind of way but their relationship is so knotted up, they are neither platonic or romantic but a secret confused murky third thing. They know how to fight, they can argue and bicker and torture each other - we've seen how they hate other characters with Poppy and her sister's relationship or how Ian's relationship with his son. Hatred is comfortable for them, they understand it. They don't understand love though. Neither were ever shown kind and safe love (Ian's mother's love was shaped by her illness and Poppy's father's love was shaped by her mother, it was the most kind love they know but respectively, it's slightly tainted). They both see love as a tangible physical thing rather than one that can exist in the same vocal medium as their hatred can. They love each other, they hate each other. They don't know how to express it other than furthering blurring the lines.

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hellsiteacademia

3 months ago

Poem for Sekhmet

Nourish my soul, nourish the rage, nourish the heartbeat inside of its cage: Bringer of Heat, Lady of Flame, Mother, I've hidden within me a shame. Choked down my anger, cut down my claws, Ignoring a longing that burns my lungs raw, Help me see red, help me see rage Help me break open and out of this cage. Carnelian carnivore, Lady of Light, Instruct me in carnage. Teach me to fight. Let me make true all the thoughts in my mind, in ways that are safe, and help others be kind. Help me make action of heat in my chest, Lady of Power, Dua Sekhmet!

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hellsiteacademia

2 years ago

I think there needs to be more stories about friends who are almost lovers. who are closer then anything in the world. who can read each others minds. who appreciate how beautiful and impressive the other is. and then have them absolutely destroyed by their own personal events and have that bond twist around like a broken electric cable until it snaps under the pressure of incompatible lives. and then that love turns to hate and then to a haunting.

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