Illusion of Permanence

Thomas was alone, but perhaps more importantly he was not obviously exceptional. In a world defined by jumping, he was not the worst or the best. He could not float in water, he could not springboard the others to greater heights. Why is Thomas the instrumental one, the one without whom the whole endeavor would fail?

John was the strongest and most focused on success. His performative altruism makes him an early focus, as does the ease with which he can scout a level. The player becomes immediately familiar with his value and his story. Couldn’t he have lead the team?

Claire is the most cooperative, the most dedicated to helping others. She defines herself as a superhero and embraces that credo of responsibility that comes with it. Her whole purpose seems to be to usher the others along the path. Couldn’t she have rallied them towards some greater purpose?

Laura, for all her pained suspicion, literally elevates those around her. She thrives in the team setting, and makes for an obvious element around which a team could crystallize. Couldn’t she have been impetus enough for the others to cooperate?

Sarah has seen more of the world than any of them. Couldn’t her experience have guided them?

Chris...well, we can skip Chris.

In every case, though, there is something missing. These characters are beautiful and relatable, and we are invested in their success together, but when alone they remained alone. Thomas is not defined by his ability but by his curiosity, and that leads him to explore the edges of the world, to find its shape and then to imagine it differently. Although the others have the seeds of leadership, Thomas gives the team purpose, and Thomas is the one who best understands how to bring people together. He celebrates those around him for their strengths and uniqueness, and in so doing he teaches them to work together, to care for one another. Their achievements are his achievements. He is the one that turns defeat into pyrrhic victory, his empathy extending to all those who would come after. Their freedom is his freedom. Their future is his future.

-Latex -Leather -Heels -Bondage -D/S -Incest -Asphyxiation -Needles -Tentacles -Pregnancy/breeding -Feet -Body mods -Sex in libraries -Corsets -Uniforms -Ball busting

Cities have a way of bringing out the exceptionalism in people. On a personal scale, it is a drive to differentiate oneself from the mass of humanity gathered in one place. On a metropolitan scale, it is an urban nationalism, a will to assert your tribe as greater than the rest. This exceptionalism fuels the conflict and loss at the heart of Transistor.

Bioshock. Mad Max. The Matrix, although not as fully. Dark Souls.

Where does this archetype come from? The one with the decayed future so corrupt that as the hero fights to correct it, it all falls apart around him? Where at the end of the fight, there’s nothing left standing of the old, just some new beginning with only a handful of survivors.

I could trace it back to Ragnarok, that old Norse winnowing that leaves only two survivors. Farther back I don’t have the history to know. Cycles and rebirth, gravitational collapse and big bang, the whole thing echoing itself in waveforms through millenia according to myth.

That cycle myth doesn’t have the same responsibility to it, the sense of succeeding so fully that you come out the other side into apocalyptic failure. The escape and rebirth here just a postscript; the crux of the story is that choice to leave the whole mechanism to crumble instead of propping it up, repairing the damage of time and one’s own rebellion. In Snowpiercer specifically, it is reaching out to a child and pulling him out through the gears to safety, dooming the engine in the process. You are literally saving the future at the cost of the past.

Our culture impels us to kill our fathers and build our own house from their bones. Frame it in fear, as an escape, and you get these stories. Frame it as a creative impulse, as an act of birthing one’s own vision, and you get American Gods, The Magicians Trilogy, Iron Council. Think of the city of New Crobuzon, tenements spackled onto the skyscraper ribs of some primordial monster; of the giant Ymir whose flesh was the clay that the gods used to fashion the earth; of Osiris, whose death inspires the creation of a son and heir. It’s all just a matter of where the story begins, before or after death.

I think these stories are not about burning The world, they are about burning Your world. The reason we can celebrate the loss of all that came before is because it is allegorical, a shrugging off of the past in order to achieve new things. That transition works for an individual in a way that would be and is textually horrific on a larger scale. Heroism is usually sacrificing a few in order to save the many. Sacrificing the many, all of them, in order to save just a few is only heroic if they’re not really people but symbols of something anti-progressive.