Podcast Blog That’s Been Taken Over By Dropout

Hera has been isolated to varying extents her whole life, literally and metaphorically. She was brought into the world being treated as someone without the right to interpersonal connections. She has been told that her emotions are a flaw. She has met very few people in her life and had very little control over who she can interact with. She feels all the time that she isn't fully sharing space with others the way she would want to (as we learn in Memoria). And yet she has repeatedly strived for connection with other people anyway, even when the people she's trying to connect with don't always understand her. She has fought against who she is expected to be to establish a deep, mutually caring friendship with Eiffel, and to a lesser extent Minkowksi.

First of all, NOBODY is walking off of the Urania. Insert that video of the astronauts being carried off of their craft in stretchers. And that was after less than one year; after the Hephaestus mission? No chance any of them are making it out of PT for a long while.

But after that? The others were up there for a fraction of Lovelace's total time. Her body would have sustained intense damage, atrophy, all kinds of things.

And on top of that, THIS version of her body was created in space. She was already feeling the effects of deep space when she was exposed to the star, which means the Dear Listeners only had that version of her to go on. THAT'S her new baseline.

In conclusion, I think Lovelace would use mobility aids on Earth, maybe forever. She uses a wheelchair for the first year or so, then slowly transitions to a walker, and eventually a cane (with braces, and she still uses the wheelchair often).

well-trained, driven, loyal, obedient, vicious. not without its flaws, it's still just a dog after all; those flaws are endearing, so long as they don't affect the job.

constant company when your work is your life and your life is your work, and if you don't work, you don't get to live.

something soft and pliable and funny to take the edge off, something sharp-teethed and determined and stead-fast to support you.

One day I'll be able to forgive myself.

right, like... in his ten things he misses about earth, three of them are beer, whiskey, and tequila. he poisoned a liter of water trying to make whiskey. he was asking hera about the alcoholic potentials of antifreeze. he says things like, "if you water down rubbing alcohol enough, it's not completely unlike chicken noodle soup." he's really struggling. he was probably drinking between the time he got out of jail and mission launch, and you have to remember season one is a year into the mission. i think almost all of eiffel's pre-canon behavior is completely understandable when you remember they sent him up there to have alcohol and nicotine withdrawals, with no support, in an extremely isolating and hostile environment.

hilbert/volodin was a genius. no one denies this. but even when cutter/carter "rebranded" his virus project and straight up named it "decima" (as in, decimate???) hilbert believed to the bitter end that goddard was enabling him to find a way to help people. that decima was going to be used to cure disease. not in his wildest dreams could he have imagined that cutter was planning to deploy it for an omnicide

kepler was a smart man. he was fed vague hints of some "bigger picture" that would justify the evil things he was being asked to do, he was given the tiamat files to make him believe goddard was trying to stop some kind of apocalyptic alien invasion and that was all he needed to know, and he passed this belief down to jacobi. maxwell, another genius, was lured in by making her believe that no one else could give her the resources she needed to improve the world in her own way, by developing sentient AIs that would be treated as humanely as possible. i can picture these three in my mind, over years, succumbing to meritocracy brain poison, being fed this belief in their own excellence, this purpose, direction, these thrilling lives and careers, probably a lot of money too, making them feel smart and important and on top of the world. and then, when he needs to knock them down a peg, cutter takes the validation away - he brings in riemann and brainwashes jacobi. it was very notable to me just how shaken kepler and jacobi were by riemann even existing, and belittling them as soon as he appears. how it suddenly showed them the si-5 was way less trusted, special and close to the leadership than they believed it was.

maxwell has a restraining order on her family. kepler considers the person he was before goddard "gone". jacobi was picked up at the lowest point of his life. these aren't just funny little characterization bits, they show how a cult isolates you and preys on you in moments where you feel like you're in need of change, direction, improvement.

we see something similar with minkowski in her recruitment interview - pressuring her into making a life-changing decision (going to SPACE!!) without consulting her husband. cutter could use minkowski's parents to manipulate her, because they were already dead and weren't going to say "renée, we're worried, don't accept that shady contract", but the husband was very much around and so he needed to be portrayed as unimportant, someone who was holding minkowski back. it was the same tactic of buttering her up, making her believe in her own excellence, but later taking the validation away, pulling the rug out from under minkowski and keeping her in line with fear and threats instead. something similar happened with lovelace (and i think there is no more compelling proof that lovelace is gay than the fact that cutter sent rachel to do the flattery part, similar to how he deployed kepler to grab jacobi). lovelace, too, was made to feel valued and important, the things that made her unpopular with her superiors in the army (her irreverence, her critical thinking, her reluctance to follow orders she didn't agree with) were portrayed as something that would make her valued by her superiors at goddard, and she was suddenly offered a way more high-profile job than she expected, making her feel appreciated and seen for the excellence she possessed.

weirdly enough, the person who went in with his eyes the most open about goddard may have actually been eiffel - not because eiffel is more intelligent or less intelligent than anyone else here, but because he loathed himself too much to fall for cutter's flattery. he knew he wasn't a once in a lifetime radio genius and that cutter couldn't have ANYONE else on the mission and just HAD to spring eiffel out of jail because he NEEDED the BEST. he knew himself to be a piece of shit. cutter had to go "god, fine, you're an expendable i want to send out to do meaningless grunt work for me" and had to resort, again, to holding eiffel's family over him (offering to help anne).

these are all smart people. none of them are immune to these pointed manipulation tactics. and it's not like cutter is doing anything extremely out there. he's just doing on a large scale what predatory businesses do to get people to do jobs that exploit them. what cult leaders do to keep their followers on the kool-aid. what abusers do to keep the victim from getting their wits about them enough to realize they need to get out. drip-feeding people validation and direction to keep them believing in him, and when that fails, pull the rug out from under them and bring out the belittling and fear and threats.