Lovers of Synthetic and Artificial Life

⚡️🔋 Fully charged! 🔋⚡️

I’d rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. We’d be at the bottom of the food chain up there but down here, we can live like kings.

I’d like to do more than that..

one of my favorite things about claire is like. this woman is 60, ok? she’s in her profession out of passion. she’s a single mother of two by choice. she’s made Life Choices she’s at peace with and is overall happy and secure with who she is. so there’s things with her like– she’s not waiting around for a partner to come save her from a life of doom and despair. yeah, she falls in love and really wants it to work out. she’s attempting a relationship there’s no template for and she’s willing to put in demanding work for it - but not at the cost of compromising who she is or her fundamental principles if it comes to it! and also never at the cost of asking the other person to do something like that.

i love how you get this strong sense of how her age and wisdom go into exploring an unconventional relationship. she’s not about to have a full-fledged identity crisis just because she’s discovered she’s into androids from distant planets with silver plates for a face. if she’s unsure about a choice she’ll talk it through with friends and consider her options. if something isn’t working in the relationship she’ll bring it up with her partner. she has to deal with death and betrayal brought about by some truly morally gray circumstances, and with all these conflicting emotions she feels about it, and she just accepts the full complexity of it. and so on.

i get my fun with all sorts of fucked-up relationships and maladjusted characters, but then i also get a lot of satisfaction from a well-plotted story where a character is emotionally competent at navigating a relationship, or life in general.

and looking at this gifset, it’s such an inversion of the older man/young and attractive woman trope with her and isaac. they have the attachment to each other in common, but in every other way the robot whose human projection looks like a hot white 30something man is more socially and psychologically vulnerable than the mature black woman. and claire works hard to ensure she doesn’t inadvertently take advantage of that, too - see the emotions module conundrum. she’s looking for a relationship that’s as mature as she is emotionally and she fully understands the stakes of pursuing it with a person that is ultimately capable of it, but is inexperienced and lost in that field and speaks a different emotional language than her.

so you get the pleasure of seeing that trope reversed for once and just this beautiful depiction of this older-by-TV-standards woman who has a sexuality and desires she has a grasp of, and control of, and the narrative never stigmatizes it! she gets to go through emotional turmoil and move the plot, she gets to dress sexy, she gets to have good sex, and she’s never punished for it.