sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote 2017-06-09 08:34 pm (UTC)

Yes, and, I mean, as morals go, it's "don't mash up all your animals into one and then make them vivisected cyborgs to power your time machine". Which is ... highly specific.

Heh. I think there is a more general conservationist message: Eldred explains in genuine perplexity at the question that his future doesn't have animals because "we've no further use for them," but Steel thinks to Sapphire of "things that once ran wild but at least free, things that breathed and ate and produced their young, things that swam in the sea, things that managed to survive," whose existence itself was justification enough for their survival regardless of their usefulness to humanity; that is certainly applicable to our present state of the planet. I agree, however, that vivisected pan-animal cyborgs with Jacobean ideas of revenge are not the subtlest way of advancing this argument.

(As a piece of blocking, I love how first Steel, then Silver, and finally Sapphire turn away from the time travelers as they dig themselves and their future deeper with their earnest, slightly self-righteous clarification of "just pieces . . . kept alive. Propagated as pieces. Reproduced." It's silent and effective and of course turning your back on someone is a human gesture of repudiation, but it looks especially stylized when the agents do it and yet it does not look deliberately theatrical; it's one of their natural, alien movements. There have been other examples, but that one really leapt out at me, possibly because I saw it first.)

The ridiculousness is more in the nature of the subject matter and the possible reasons for the creator's disappearance.

That's the meta I know about. I have actually very little idea of the show on a character-and-plot level; I've just been told about its structure and its themes and that was enough.

... I have no Sandbaggers icon and this is suddenly outrageous to me.

Godspeed.

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