Fern 🌿 - Frogs in a Trenchcoat

Brief and important caveat to this whole discussion: portions of this speak of the plotline through the lens of the body horror subgenre/trope of Womb Horror—think media like Hollow Knight, The Binding of Isaac, Bloodborne, Alien, etc—and as such explores the horror in the intersection of femininity and pregnancy/birth/raising children. Being very much genderqueer myself, I am Very Aware that there are notable blind-spots here, as not all of those who are capable of pregnancy are women and not all women are capable of getting pregnant. This said, the crux of the subgenre lays in that messy overlap of societal expectations heaped upon motherhood and the physical process/consequences of birth.

I’m also going to be analyzing the characters, so I will be excluding bang paths (sbk2!/doak!) for ease of writing. You’ll know when I’m talking about the creators, I trust you.

1.         On Heteronormativity, Amatonormativity, and Natalism

Once again, jordasn has already put this beautifully. Go read the post. Do it. This is mostly a restating of their points for context before I spiral into insanity. I’m also referencing and copying over some of the points made in this ask.

This sums it up, especially in the context of the way the nature of the hivemind blends and blurs the lines between the creature in the role of “child” and the person in the role of “husband” into one uncomfortable amalgamation. By virtue of them functionally being the same being, despite Avid’s paper-thin insistence that Marm can speak to just him alone, both Avid and the Mass fulfill both, ousting Marm as Other… until the events at the end of the last episodes. This event is a secret Mouseketool that will help us later (see: 3. On Autonomy, Parasitism, and Motherhood).

My personal opinions and interpretations of Avid’s relationship to gender aside, he takes up a very archetypal (perhaps even too archetypal, if you know what I mean ;3c) portrayal of masculinity, especially in the expectations and perspectives others have of him. This shows up in his relationship to his father, the ways in which he interacts with Marm in the flashbacks of the first episodes—his perspective shows him as curious, charming, and compassionate, whereas Marm’s perspective of him has him arrogant, abrasive, and overbearing—and, of course, the Bachelor Pad he reverted to during the Doakvorce.

The Mass places pressure on Avid to use his skill in marketing to provide means for the family unit to grow, regardless of how much Avid has insinuated in the past that he’s not truly all that interested in the business side of his upbringing and instead wants to pursue scientific experiments like and/or with Marm. There is something to be said here in how, even though Avid insists that he no longer worries about his father’s approval under the influence of the Mass, the situation he’s in now seems to be nothing but a reskinning of the dynamic. Avid’s still not able to do what he wants. He’s still answering to another inescapable presence that continuously demands more and more of him no matter how hard he works. That demands he acts as Provider and Husband.

In the same vein, Marm faces pressure to perform femininity in the roles of mother and wife from the Mass, yes, but also from her old world. Perspectives of her, too, paint pictures of how she’s expected to be. The differences in the flashbacks are significant, and while they could be fairly easily attributed to Avid’s self-importance as the rich heir to the company and desire to remember and present himself as benevolent (especially in regard to Marm), the facsimile he remembers her as is distinctly Feminine in a way that reeks of patriarchal gender roles: she is fawning, she is grateful, she is nervous, and she listens to him intently, seeming to hang onto his every word. She speaks passionately about her work, but only after he asks about it—smart, but humble about it, not flaunting, not bragging—and is excited to follow after him as he sweeps her up in his whims—adventurous, but not in a way where she’ll outshine him. Contrast this to how Marm remembers the interaction. In her version, she’s opinionated and willing to push back against Avid’s more arrogant comments. The two bond over a shared disdain for the way the company is run, though Avid is much more beaten-down and complicit in letting it continue to exploit those it’s exploiting if it earns him even a whiff of favor, and their desires to create a better world through scientific advancement. And, when Avid catches her in the whirlpool of his impulsivity and want to have her ideas with him, she doesn’t thank him and stammer, but instead is stunned and without the social power in the situation to refuse. Furthering the tension of the situation is Avid immediately shooting his shot, either unaware of or uncaring of the wide power imbalance and Marm’s clear confusion and discomfort.

Outsider assumptions in the episode two flashbacks only serve to cement the expectations more. When encountering others, Marm is immediately conceptualized only in her relationship to Avid as an accessory. Linda, the secretary, decides that Marm must be a romantic interest of Avid’s—a “Special Friend"—completely overlooking the clear work-wear that Marm has on denoting her status as a scientist. She is not a peer or an employee until Avid corrects the assumption. A more hair raising insinuation immediately follows on the tail of this interaction, with good ole Papa Doakey (as he shall be henceforth referred to because it Makes Me Giggle) belittling Marm’s accomplishments and worth by reducing her to Avid’s “pet” and telling Avid that he could take her away if he fails. She is not a person, but a tool and a toy. There is likely influence here in the fact that Marm is of lower economic and social status than either of the Doakeys, and therefore Papa Doakey cannot lower himself to think of her as person, but it’s purposefully gross and does its job well. Woman is only seen and heard in the context of how she can benefit Man.

The Mass serves to push both Avid and Marm into distinctly heteronormative categories of “mother” and “father”, perpetuating the expectations that they faced in their old world. It also, though this was done during a stream outside of Recording and is thus in a weird state of pseudo-canon, influences Avid to confess a crush he’d been harboring on Marm throughout the many years of their friendship; a crush which he seems to have had no intention to act on prior to infection after having been (presumably) rejected by Marm after his ill-advised proposition during their first meeting in that storage closet. He clearly values their friendship as friendship and seems content to have had it remain there—both of them do! They’re each other’s people! It feels almost as though the Mass is playing dolls with the two of them, perhaps based on the internalized ideas that Avid (and now Marm!) hold, to create a family unit. There must be a mother, there must be a father, and they must be in incredibly heteronormative, incredibly amatonormative, cookie-cutter love.

(Edit: As an addendum, at this point in the story, we have little insight into the family dynamics that both Marm and Avid have grown up in outside of the context of their fathers, both of whom place pressure on their children to be successful, though in clearly different manners, given that Marm's father is deceased. The presence of mothers in either of their lives are completely absent thus far, or are at least unimportant enough in the story that their impact is... negligible. There is an entire possibility that these characters have grown up with family dynamics that attempt to meet the societally expected family structure—there's an even higher possibility that these family dynamics have failed to meet these expectations, causing tension, especially given Marm's father's death—given the overbearing and harshly Paternal presence that Papa Doakey makes for, and that these experiences have shaped, even subconsciously, the ways that they conceptualize the roles of mother, father, and child.)

In this, the Mass is “saving” their relationship. A strange idea that pops up in relationships is how having a baby could somehow Fix a relationship that is on the rocks. And Dark Oak, famously, recently had their Doakvorce. The Mass is forcing them to play house in this way, by fulfilling the Ultimate Goal that is to, obviously, get married and have a child.

Natalism is, roughly, a belief that the purpose of life is to create more life in order to ensure the growth of society. In other words: have children! Have so many children! Everyone should want children! Your only purpose is to have children! In extreme cases, natalism exploits anyone capable of having children and shuns anyone incapable, but even in less extreme cases, it leads to ideas like, say, “crazy cat ladies” and “childless sjws” and “good versus bad genetics”. Shocking, I know.

It’s well and good to want children. It’s well and good to have children. Trying to force others to want and have children is not well and good.

Especially so in cases where the dangers involved in pregnancy and parenthood are obfuscated and brushed aside. This happens in many ways within the institutions of pregnancy and parenthood: refusal to do proper sex-ed in schools, insistence that complications during pregnancy—or even the pregnancy itself—is some punishment or fault of the pregnant person, poor treatment of people of color in hospital settings, poor communication of potential risk factors to expecting parents, among many others. C-sections, for example, are often downplayed as a minor complication of birth, but are, in fact, major surgery which involves the removal of organs from the body while the patient is awake!

Several times over, Marm herself brushes off concerns that Drift and Viking have for both her own safety and the safety of the rest of the server. She, perpetuating the cycle unwittingly, portrays the Mass as something harmless and helpless, while simultaneously maintaining that no one should come near the Mass or peer behind the curtain. It’s harmless, but don’t get too close. It’s helpless, but it’s hungry and it’s demanding and it’s growing, and beneath her assurances, you can’t help but pick up on the barely-hidden fear.

2.         On Capitalism and the Hunger for Perpetual Growth

One of the major genre influences on Dark Oak’s storyline is that of cyberpunk dystopia. A lot of flashing neon signs and dancing holographics probably scrolled across the inside of your head, right? Either way, cyberpunk is always a fun topic for me to watch people interpret and play with, since I am one of the many Very Very Disabled individuals who lives and breathes cyberpunk as we speak! It’s incredibly amusing to hear people talk about cybernetics and the horrors of having part of your body owned by a corrupt corporation (In the future, of course! Not here and now!) while I have to pay a subscription to several companies each month to access replacements for Organs I Don’t Have or quite literally Die Mad About It.

Cyberpunk is, at its core, a genre that tackles class divides, disability, and capitalism, often as a low-burning horror. Dark Oak hits a number of these facets in very interesting ways.

Avid and Marm are of distinctly different classes, with Avid being the son of a rich businessman with generational wealth and influence, and Marm originally being an intern at the company that Avid’s family owns. Marm explicitly joined the company with a desire to achieve social mobility in order to chase her dreams. Now, there is a dynamic here that I find particularly interesting: Avid, though he’s set for money, is constantly thinking about how to turn profits, how to earn money, how to capitalize on events to an almost compulsive degree, while Marm actively tries not to think about money and, if she has to, thinks about it with disdain, though she admits on occasion that earning money is an unfortunate necessity to achieve her goals. Marm does not want to be owned by a corporation, she wants to hold onto her individuality and independence. Avid’s already given in. Avid already knows how to play the game of placing profits before people.

Much of cyberpunk media is centered on corporate exploitation: the idea that in order to survive, one must sell their soul to the highest bidder and do what they’re told or simply starve. Much of the horror of this idea is expressed bodily in the form of futuristic prosthetics that one could be robbed of at the whims of a company or implanted chips that promise higher cognition, but quietly send and sell your thoughts off to the deepest pockets. Like I’d expressed earlier, these situations are already pretty close to reality for many disabled peopled, and Marm’s dreams of medical revolution are ones I’ve echoed in many a daydream. Marm wants to help people, to save lives, and if not completely heal someone, then at least make their lives a little easier, a little more accessible. But, unfortunately, these goals do not play well with the exploitative nature of corportations.

The Doaktech campus, the original one in the old world, is explicitly hostile to the disabled, especially those who cannot afford a prosthetic limb like Avid and Marm both eventually sport. Papa Doakey’s office, though at first seemingly accessible through an elevator, actually requires a person to walk up stairs from the reception area. The Doakerways that lead between each building slow down anyone not walking them while wearing Doaktech-pros. The disabled are not profitable in the workforce, and thus are not accommodated. However, the disabled are profitable in one way, and it’s a way that Marm’s dream to create individualized organic replacements is distinctly at odds with. Healthcare as a business model, rather than an actual Care model, requires people to remain just sick enough to continue shilling money but not sick enough to outright die, and the act of providing body parts that require only as much maintenance and replacement as the Home-Grown stuff is a piss poor way to turn a profit. It’s no wonder to me that Papa Doakey, Mr. Corrupt Corporation himself, was so hesitant to approve a project that only promised stagnating growth.

The model of capitalism represented in cyberpunk media (that is to say, late-late stage capitalism, so just about one step removed from our current hellscape situation) is a self-cannibalizing concept. Continuous growth in profits necessitates a continuous growth in the populations of both producers and consumers, while at the same time destroying the environments in which people would thrive. This need for continuous growth is, unsurprisingly, a large factor in the pushing of natalism in society. Most populations in absence of outside influences, especially human populations, naturally level off once a society reaches a certain population size and quality of life, with the phenomenon usually attributed notably to, first, lower childhood mortality rates (better healthcare), second, parenthood later in life (parents, especially mothers, choosing to pursue self-actualization and stability), and third, better education around sex and reproduction (reducing teen and unwanted pregnancies), among a few others. However, the last of these factors is that a continuously growing population—the continuous growth of anything: algal bloom, permafrost melt, endometriosis, cancer cells—will eventually collapse under the weight of the resources it consumes. It’s unsustainable.

Of all of the scientific fascinations that Marm and Avid could have pursued, both of them landed in the field of matter generation. A way to produce ever-increasing energy and product as resources to feed an ever-growing mouth. Under the influence of these ideas, Marm’s experiments in the Dark Oak Kingdom are co-opted from a way to help people in need and instead turned into…

3.         On Autonomy, Parasitism, and Motherhood

“[The mother] experiences it both as an enrichment and a mutilation; the fetus is part of her body, and it is a parasite exploiting her; she possesses it, and she is possessed by it; it encapsulates the whole future, and in carrying it, she feels as vast as the world; but this very richness annihilates her, she has the impression of not being anything else” (Beauvoir et al., 2011, p. 612)

Exhaustion is one of the first topics that comes up when talking to new parents. One sacrifices much of their body and their health to care for a child, and will continue to do so for the rest of their life.

A crying baby is a sound that most have heard, and it’s safe to say that it’s a sound that invokes strong emotion in those who hear it. Marm’s episode two begins with the perfect example of Avid acting as husband-child, complete with toddler-esque distressed “no!”s and frustratingly little elaboration on what the Mass truly wants from Marm. This is a scene taken directly from some household anywhere in the world: overstimulating cries as a mother tries desperately to soothe or fix whatever has caused this tantrum, perhaps just having been shaken away from the brief hours of rest that she’d just barely been able to grab, while a father, just as overstimulated, tries to interpret or help to no avail, only serving to stress her out further. The Mass is hungry. It’s not its fault that the only way it can communicate is to scream and wail, but that does not make up for the migraines and the dark shadows under Marm’s eyes.

The physicality of pregnancy often (and rightfully, I think) comes up in horror in comparison to parasitism. The comparison comes naturally: a being that takes energy and nutrients from your body, that was placed there by something other than you, that grows and grows until it rearranges your organs to make room for itself inside of you, that tears you open to enter the world? Shivers. Though the Mass has not begun to wildly change the physicality of the infected—I doubt it’ll stay that way for long, given Avid’s most recent stream—its appearance, architecture gore, evokes fleshy imagery and its egg-like infection pods feel… targeted. Admittedly, pregnancy squicks me out for a wide variety of reasons, but I do think that’s part of why it makes such compelling horror, especially in the current political climate. The added layer of modern laws removing protections from the bodies of women, the bodies of trans people, the bodies of children insists that your body does not belong to you, but instead belongs to the service of the parasite. To the baby. To natalism. To capitalism. The removal of Personhood to replace it with the title of Incubator (some further reading).

Motherhood is a dehumanizing state. One becomes something intangibly different to all other forms of humanity in the responsibilities and assumptions and expectation thrust upon them. “Mother” is supposed to instinctively know how to care for a new being. “Mother” is supposed to shed her sense of self and all of her needs. “Mother” is supposed to be endlessly patient in the face of horrifying sights and smells and screaming. “Mother” is both Servant and Creator.

Of all of her “Children”, the thieves at Doak 2 are refreshingly self-explanatory in their needs, even though they do so knowingly for their own entertainment and to see just how far they can push their demands with guilt-trips before they’re met with a dark oak door to the face. One cannot overlook the modelling of Marm as a machine that provides goods, especially given the entire conversation leading up to the exchange. Emphasis placed on burdens, responsibility, the idea of an innocent (“innocent” in Drift’s case, of course) life brought into a world unknowingly and unwillingly, to eventually reach the point that “Mother” owes everything she can give to “Child” for the wrong she’s done unto them by creating them.

But then what if “Mother” was instead godly for her act of creation?

Deification is a deceptively contradictory act. Simone de Beauvoir points out how “it is men who decide if their supreme divinities will be females or males; the place of woman in society is always the one they assign her” (2011, p. 111). Even when placed in what should be a position of power, the position of Other, given the title of Creator, Marm is placed there by the Mass. Her deification earns her no perks aside from the Mass’s obsession, devotion, and demands. She is not brought offerings, she is not built temples; she is asked a spiral of questions, she is screamed at to provide food and love. And, above all, her deification is conditional. Her place is easily changed.

When Marm asserts her autonomy and attempts to separate Avid and the Mass, when she insinuates that she may abandon them in some way, that she disapproves of the way that the Mass has smoothed over all of the parts of her partner and best friend that could be classified as selfish and arrogant—both traits that are considered undesirable for parents—the Mass, through Avid, redefines her place against her will. Her deification, her Otherness, is stripped from her, and she is forced into the amalgamated role of mother-father-child. A family unit in perfect, united lockstep. I am, of course, incredibly excited to see how this shift in dynamic plays out in future episodes.

Once you are a parent, especially a mother, you no longer belong to yourself. Everything you do is done with the expectation that you are doing it to further the species. There is an inherent loss of individuality to the role of Parent—even your name is replaced with “Mother”, “Father”, “Mom”, “Dad”… “this individual”. “You” cease to exist. Once attached to this other being, be it child or hivemind, you are never individual again. You exist only in service to the good of the Whole, of the family, of humanity. You lose all right to be selfish, all rights to your own time, all rights to your own resources, all rights to yourself. It is not quite death, but it is a death of self; the death of a lifestyle.

Marm, as a character, is driven and passionate about her dream. It is, as she’s stated many times over, her life’s work. She’s full of ideas, willing to pursue a thread to the detriment of her own health, and whip-smart to show for it. However, in the presence of the Mass, her ambitions, that core of her character, are stolen from her and turned in service to nothing but feeding the hivemind.

She doesn’t even truly get to celebrate her accomplishment before her best friend is stolen from her and turned into someone she doesn’t recognize. Before the screaming drowns out all thoughts except “Make It Stop”. I can…

Though Marm claims to want to take care of the Mass, regardless of how genuine these claims are, cracks can be found that puts this on shaky footing. She's unsure of the situation, but seems to be acting based on what would be expected of her. There are two moments in the exchange between Viking and Marm that do not make their way into her POV. Both of these moments are admissions of the role that Marm has been forced into, admissions that we are not allowed to view from her perspective—moments that she is keeping out of view of herself.

“It’s…my thing that I created. It’s like my child. It’s like my…life’s work finally came to fruition and I made life and I have to take care of it.”

“It’s mine. I made it…I have to take care of it.”

I have to take care of it. There is no other choice. Marm does not belong to herself. Avid does not belong to himself. They are, and may as well always have been, the Mass.

4.         Post-Biopsy

Mind, an unfortunate truth of this rabbit hole is that I’m not well versed at all in the main influence that both Marm and Avid as content creators have credited for this season: Full Metal Alchemist. Gasp! I know, I know, it’s a travesty, and one that I fully intend to fix. However, it’s one of my best friend’s absolute favorite shows in the world, and I’d sooner die than watch it without her there to get the little bits of snarky commentary and hour-long infodumps, so we’re at a bit of a stalemate there. Soon enough.

There’s a lot of media I love that plays into themes of parenthood-as-horror and I do recommend exploring them if you find yourself compelled by the Dark Oak storyline.

Avid and Marm as content creators are fun people to work this narrative through, since they have perspectives on queerness (both sexuality-wise and gender-wise), differing perspectives on parenthood, and a myriad of strange little niches and experiences that add a whole lot of flavor to the meat of the story.

The Mass is a lot of things (get it?) and is hard to exactly pin down. It’s the open, wailing mouth of the infant. It’s the unfettered growth and consumption of capitalism. It’s the pressures of society to perform a specific role. It’s the loss of autonomy and individuality in parenthood. And, most importantly, it’s a sick-as-hell awful eldritch abomination that will probably take over the world with its horrid little fleshy tentacles. Gods, I can’t wait to see where this freak show goes.

I’m,, exhausted. Everyone should go get some sleep.