Whenever I think of the McDonald's employee who snitched on Luigi Mangione I can't help but wonder how many people did identify him during the week or so he was on the run. Those who, going about their day, saw this dude wearing a beanie and a mask and thought "hey, wouldn't it be funny if he was that shooter guy". Then they caught a better look at his face and realize "damn he does kinda look like him".
I imagine them thinking about those $50.000. Perhaps they even felt tempted for a moment. Perhaps they thought about their own debt to the healthcare industry. Perhaps they thought about clearing their own or a loved ones loans.
Yet they did not. They decided that, wether this guy did or didn't shoot that CEO, what happened the other day in New York matters. It matters so, so much, either in the short or the long run. That it could be the first step towards something big. Maybe that something, just maybe, is change.
And then they kept their mouth shut and continued with their afternoon as if nothing ever happened.
To those people, I wish you nothing but the best. You did what you had to do. And that says a lot about you.
In short, I refuse to believe class consciousness is dead. But guess I'm a romantic like that.
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Some thoughts on the conclusion of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, class, humanism and personal experience.
Before I say anything else, I want to say that my thoughts and feelings on this topic are not any more "right" or justified than anyone else's and that I deeply appreciate however each person has experienced this story.
Heavy spoiler warning for everything I am going to say, and a warning for heavy themes relating to both the game and the real world.
The game begins with us getting to know the people of Lumiere, a civilization of orphans trying to farm and survive for a little while longer in the bombed ruins of their home town.
We see death and devastation, but we also see solidarity and hope shining through.
Our main characters are farmer, a farmer-researcher, another researcher, and an orphaned child working as a courier. Our main characters are facing despair, disadvantaged by their situation, coping with physical disability as well as emotional turmoil. We also see the support and the healing a collective can offer.
While we, the players, are not people of Lumiere, we can empathize with their plight.
We, too, must live with uncertainty and fear, often under forces uncontrollable to us that shape our daily lives, be that illness, war, oppression or poverty.
We toil and oppose the despair everyday, not just for our own gain but for the well-being of our families and communities, our friends, environment and the future. For those who come after.
When we get deeper into the world, we meet two more benign peoples facing devastation and genocide. We also learn they have their own beautiful cultures, their unique beliefs and a will to survive. We are united in the struggle for survival and grow an ever larger understanding of the collective we are fighting for.
Even our most common opponent, the Nevrons, don't appear as an oppressor as much as a people enslaved to fight a war that does not serve their own interest.
On occassion, we meet a Nevron who's broken these chains and pursued another meaning, and none of these Nevrons exhibit unprompted aggression, instead seeking connection and fullfillment.
Later on, we are joined by a single father and his son, Noco, who in the process of the story is lost, not even as an active participant but as a bystander, collateral damage. Renoir, who fails to even take proper notice of the loss he has caused, sees no significance in the life of a child to whom personhood does not in his view apply.
To us, the players, Noco was as real as all the people in the story, though. We saw him with his family, we saw his hopes and dreams, in many ways Noco was more of a person to us than the blurred out images children in the news as their lifeless bodies are carried out from the ruins of their bombed out homes.
At no point in the story is there a clear distinction between who is "really real" in a way we could tell. Both the people of the canvas and the Dessendres are shown to have their motivations and this is carried out all the way to the end where Verso clearly has the ability to defy the "creators" of his world. It might even be interpreted from the text of the story that the "writers" responsible for Verso's death and Alicia's disability are in fact the writers of the game, making the life of the Dessendres in par with the peoples of the canvas even within the context of the story.
... and then some time later we find out about the Dessendre family, their loss and struggles and that they are high class mansion owners. The complex feelings of this dysfunctional family of four are the determining factor that drives the destructive, genocidal events in a world scale.
To the Dessendres, though, this is not a question of genocide or planetary destruction. The peoples of the Canvas world are not real people like them, with real feelings and real motivations.
They are but a cog in a machine that has stopped serving the interests of the Dessendres, an item that can be discarded.
This would not be anywhere near so disheartening if this was not the exact reasoning that has allowed so much war, oppression and genocide in our world. Who is human enough, worthy of whole personhood, is twisted and molded depending on the needs of the powerful.
The people of the canvas are spontaneous, living in the moment, people farming the land and living in huts and having crass, at times brutal, simple lives. They dance and they have sex, they love, they play, they lose, they imagine and hope. No people in the canvas own mansions, though. They do not go to the university. They are not eloquent in their speech and highly trained in their art. They do not have the luxury to remain home to grieve or to recover. Once they become disabled, orphaned, widowed, once death looms right ahead, they adapt and drag themselves right back to work because they must, for their families and communities. For the vast majority of people of our world too, this is the reality of life, and for this, our lives are considered worth less and our humanity minimized.
I'm sorry to say this, but at this point in the game I became so much less invested with the whole story.
Suddenly I am asked to empathize with a couple of mansion owners and conclude that there are two equally bad and bittersweet options: either four people's lives must be inconvenienced so that a world with it's civilizations can survive and rebuild OR that it is an acceptable trade-off to destroy a world to make four really wealthy people feel better and deal with their maladaptive coping strategies.
As much as I have enjoyed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and as much as I love the characters, the story and the heart put into all of it, the ending can not stop bothering me, and NOT because it was bittersweet or dark, but because it felt a little too much like how the people in power in my world must see my life and the life of my family, my friends, my community, and millions of people and communities just like mine around the world:
I've had to flee persecution and endure hunger and systemic violence. I've lost friends and family members to illness and despair. I've fed my child queuing in the bread line, I've begged for medicine from the church, I've done things you would not like to even imagine to keep a roof above my family's head. Insurance denied and disability benefits withheld, I go to work and face physical violence on a constant basis. It is my daily wish for my family and friends to stay fed and sheltered and that we would not face war or persecution. I have more in common with the peoples of the canvas than I will ever have in common with the Dessendre family, and this applies to a lot of people, maybe you too.
There is no brilliant way to end this ramble. It is overly personal, it is biased, and maybe it is taking a role-playing game intended for refreshment way too seriously.
In the event that this resonated with you, though, or you have something to share in the spirit of a friendly exchange, please feel free to do so.
It is my most sincere intent to keep this positive.
Let us play, create and share. Let us cry together. Let us hope and believe in a better future.
No matter how Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 ends, that is not how we end.
Let's go forward together, for us, and for all those who come after.
Please take care of yourself and others and know you are precious.
I always find it hilarious when people say “young people just don’t want to work anymore.” Since when has anyone ever wanted to work? People work because they need money to survive. That has literally always been the case. People work because it’s an obligation under capitalism: if you don’t work, you starve.
Nobody has ever genuinely loved labor the way boomers pretend they did. Please go tell that to the 80-year-old men who spent their entire youth without basic labor rights, destroying their bodies in miserable jobs, ending up with chronic pain, unresolved trauma, and fifty thousand health problems because they were exploited half to death by the system. They didn’t enjoy working either. They hated it.
The difference is that older generations were socially conditioned to romanticize suffering and exploitation as “dignity,” while younger people are increasingly willing to say “actually this is fucking miserable.”
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Why is Gen Z so depressed (Linked with hsr) (part 1)
Multiple times over this week, I scrolled Tumblr and then opened drafts to a blank page, unable to even describe the feelings I had, but amphoreous happened, and I think I can phrase it properly.
Imagine Gen Z as the firstborn sons (I'm making a point here, guys) whose father has a farm with fertile land, and with the way things are going, it will be easiest to make a profit from the land in your time. A big farmer in your town who is known for his bountiful harvest but is also known to use dubious methods to get them, goes around saying a mysterious black goup is the reason for his success. he sells this to almost all farmers in the area, including your father, and after looking at the mysterious liquid and touching it, you realise it is something from those pits near the town that no life can escape from once dropped inside. You rush to tell your father and elders dear to you that it can harm the soil around it, just to be yelled at and shut down. They say these were never issues in their youth, so nothing will happen now.
10 years pass, and the crop yields have reduced significantly. Your dad, now in debt, continues to buy this miracle growth goup, proclaiming that he has simply used it wrong and the newest edition of this miracle growth goup will solve all of your problems. by the time he dies the farm barely produces enough for one human, talkless of selling anything and you find out your dad borrowed money to buy goup from the rich man with 80% of the farm as colateral. He effectively has left you nothing but a broken world beyond your ability to fix. With shaky breaths and a sigh full of grief, anger, and disgust mixed together, you walk away from his grave.
Gen Z's inheritance is the earth. Let me break it down: only 22% of baby boomers plan to leave anything behind for Gen Z, and that's without taking recent inflation and job losses into account. Gen Z makes more money than their parents and grandparents but spends more of it on living expenses, so basically just for food, water, and shelter. So what is our inheritance if not the earth we live on, one that has been poisoned by the actions of our parents and elders despite the warnings, research and studies, measurements and proofs to say all this is bad. Just for the adults to say "work harder". We are the inheritors of that ancient farm, a farm that was loved and cared for, nurtured just to be destroyed by the ignorance of the masses, who could have reversed the situation if they admitted guilt and listened to the youth. Now we youth, inherit a broken world, and we have no hope for tomorrow.
we are silenced, looked at as childish, and when all is said and done, we are to clean up the mess. IRL hobbies of all things are expensive, so cheap dopamine is the way to go. we are addicted to escapism because if we open our eyes to the real world, we will cry blood. Blood of innocent lives lost to this "miracle goup". The ingredients of it are as follows:
Corruption
Environmental pollution
The deaths of innocents
and most importanly greed
Poison grows on this land; it's in our food, in our water, in our clothes, temu hauls, and jobs. The earth is on thin ice, but permafrost is melting, the brain that gave us the gift of innovation houses microplastics, and insects have become scarce. When the alarm bells rang, they pretended to listen and pushed the responsibility onto the consumer for a greener earth. I ask, can the people who buy food from a sick farm be the blame for the land's sickness? Is the son at fault for not forcefully taking control of the land when it was salvageable? or was killing the rich man before he spread further harm the way to go?
So yes, Genz is depressed, has a bunch of mental illnesses and makes impulse purchases, and has shitty health, going outside is expensive, treating mental issues is expensive, hangouts are expensive, hobbies are expensive, drugs and supplements are expensive, even bed rotting without working is expensive.
(pls reblog if you feel this way as well, cuz I feel slightly schizo)
But there is good news (part 2 tmr)
