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  • Severance never faces the fact that the flaw in its own conceit is much more salacious than anything the show does. The main flaw in Severance's concept is that we're biomechanical machines and not electronic robots. So the side effects of grieving a wife will still severely affect the performance, mood, and mental health of your "innie" because their chemical and structural precursors are all there. Which is literally more horrifying of a personal story than the "omg we're doing slavery as an evil cult but we won't say wink" that Apple TV writers do in this shit.

    Imagine that your only existence is 9-5 and for whatever reason you're always ill, you never feel good, you wake up like this and you go to sleep like this. You have no way to improve this situation because you cannot leave your prison, you have no way to even figure out what's going on. Instead it's a big old "who dun it" with all the ChatGPT style hallmarks of hack modern writing. The real horror is that not only can this go horribly wrong, someone might attempt it because they're stupid enough to think it will go right.

    The concept of Severance is literally a torment nexus in and of itself, not because it's done by an evil cult. That's why you'll see a bunch of libs on BlueSky and Twitter praying for Severance IRL like people prayed for Squid Games. This is the exact hack lib writing problem that the US Office, the Good Place and Lovecraft Country had -- that it's capitalist realism.

    The Office and The Good Place are obvious. The Office becomes flanderized cuteness about how work is quirky and not an unstable arbitrary constructed system made by morons, unlike the UK version. The Good Place discovers capitalism and then pretends that there's no reason that humans should be responsible for it's creation and existence in the view of cosmic justice.

    Lovecraft Country is actually one of the worst fucking ones. What's the central conceit? "Lovecraft was racist." It doesn't go any deeper than that. Yes Lovecraft was racist. Yes cosmic horror as a genre has it's roots in fear of the unknown other. We know that applying that to races is bullshit. That's a baby brained thing. But guess what, the fear of a group of people whose intentions are unknown, unknowable, capricious, and they wield great power to affect your life -- yet you have seemingly no way to fight them. You know who that is? I'll give you a hint:

    But no we have to remind everyone how good and liberal and virtue signalling we are as a writers room of an HBO TV show. Channel Zero Butcher's Block for all its faults at least presented a clear interesting story and didn't shy away from, "oh yeah these people are interdimensional beings who are extracting value from this community and are literally eating its members because they owned a factory once but it stopped being profitable."

    By the way Lovecraft Country was literally written by a white guy. He even looks like Bradley Whitford's character in Get Out:

    • So the side effects of grieving a wife will still severely affect the performance, mood, and mental health of your "innie" because their chemical and structural precursors are all there.

      wouldn't say the show is ignorant of this since it's basically what Petey says in Ep 3

      • The problem is that it's not "real". Under capitalism your grief doesn't count for anything it might as well not exist, it's reasons might as well not exist. In as such a character who is experiencing grief without knowing why and only exists within the context of work is the most abstract presentation of humanistic grief under a capitalist system. Our relations are so alienated this feeling itself might as well be alien itself.

        They're trying to make a point. It's a show to make the viewer feel smart for "getting it". They could have made a much better one if they took the concept seriously and weren't so small minded. Mark S is going thru it in the show. That's an obvious emotional element, but it's squandered.

    • W post. What are some shows or films that talk about capitalism without doing capitalist realism? I can think of a couple movies that are shamelessly anticolonialist like RRR and Parasite (with the interpretation that it's about the Korean war), but all this media about capitalism tends to do what you described where they talk about capitalism's failures but ultimately don't say anything about how to overcome it, or even why it came about in the first place.

    • GOOD post

  • It's a good post. I do wish they'd elaborate a little more on their analysis of Ricken, though. He represents white male hegemony? He asserts something of a hegemonic role among his reading group, sure, but he's hardly an assertive figure, let alone toxic masculine. I think maybe there's a little bit of overthinking the character (although there's also some interesting points about the parallels between his cult leader behavior and Lumon's cultlike behavior), since the original question that incited the post was why Ricken would allow someone from Lumon into his and Devon's home after the incident with the baby. I legitimately think the answer to that question is that Ricken is vulnerable to flattery and just let his guard down against Natalie, who knew how to disarm him.

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