#lancing

These scenes.

Are the parallels of all time. I think it was absolutely intentional that their ‘niche intelligences’ were explained in this exact order on these separate, very important occasions. Cabby thinks Test Tube and Fan are defined by these intelligences, and acknowledges that it was reductive to discredit Test Tube later on.

They’re stronger together and made a rash decision out of how much they care for each other. This results in TBD being made, and TBD’s existence is the one thing that stumps Cabby. Cabby cannot understand using all the potential behind combined strength to make an emotional decision. She doesn’t realize Fan and Test Tube doing this is a possibility, nor does she understand Test Tube throwing away that potential due to emotions brought out by the situation.

There’s an emotional reaction on her part to this too. She wants to experience this bond and combined strength very badly. She wants to believe she can experience it, even though it probably would not come naturally. Of course it wouldn’t, as though she regards it as ‘something warmer’, she also mentions how it’s ‘more subjective’. Considering how much of her image and sense of self is lauded as objective and factual, this is a big deal.

She’s so fascinating in that way, that what she clearly wants more than anything is the one thing that trips her up. She can categorize people all she wants into whatever boxes she can think of. But she can’t understand anyone not chasing the thing she desperately wants. Especially if they threw the potential away for a reason like Test Tube’s: because of emotions stirred up by the immediate circumstances. That’s an uncomfortable prospect for her, that unpredictability you have to trust as a part of yourself, since it’s what you really feel. That might be one of the most uncomfortable things for her full stop. She can’t understand stifling the potential to achieve something she desperately wants for that reason. But then we run into another problem, she doesn’t know how to openly discuss achieving that connection. It’s something she can’t even talk about comfortably without relying on someone else’s expression of feelings to draw from. Even when outlining a strategy with objective information, which is the definition of her comfort zone.

Now it’s caused a problem in her research, in her game plan. It’s gotten her eliminated and it’s gotten her nowhere with the biggest mystery/challenge to her database we’ve seen her tackle. But research has nothing to do with her goals, other than to be insurance that things never get too far off course. Though it is very telling that one of the clearest signs of her sense of lack is how it interferes with her research. How it interferes with her database, because the easiest way for her to realize a sense of lack in herself is through an extension of herself, right? Her files are that extension of herself.

This idea of her knowledge being all that she sees or presents herself as is not concrete yet. But consider everything else and her elaboration being “I am a piece, Test Tube is a piece, and our combined strength is—was… a piece.” There’s all this strategy and ‘sake of the game’ talk, but she’s really trying to reflect on the feelings brought out in both herself, Test Tube, and everyone else. She has to ‘evenly divide’ the moving parts of the situation in order to justify how she feels about it. She has to evenly divide people to understand them, she approaches the social aspect of the game in the way she knows how. She frames it like it only makes sense to do so, but deep down she puts so much of herself into her writing because she wants to understand others. “To understand them” is the reason she gives for making files on people. She could’ve elaborated if she wanted to… But she preferred to leave the reason unstated and move on. Before we can delve into that idea, we need to detail Cabby’s own understanding of herself first.

She more-so sees people as what they do, and their actions rather than who they are. Whether she views herself that way and then applied it to others or the other way around I don’t know. But she definitely makes a habit out of keeping track of peoples’ habits. She doesn’t just do it to pass time, she’s fascinated by it. She’s fascinated for the wrong reasons though, as a true logician fuelled by information would not be so comfortable with predictability. She’s not only comfortable with it, but depends on it to understand the whole set of said knowledge. This is all very similar to Fan, however she is far less inclined to include others’ emotion in her fascination or perception. In Cabby’s database, Clover can be a ‘sweet girl’ but she cannot be a ‘source of sweetness’ or ‘someone who makes me feel me sweetness.’ There’s no spontaneous action involved, only a type of person.

All this is to say: I think Cabby can understand certain emotions driving your actions, but those actions all have to be rational and controlled. She doesn’t understand emotions being a large part of the decision or action itself. This is what consistently trips her up. She can account for the base emotional state of people, but not what they’ll do when emotions that suddenly arise in them or change unpredictably are involved. What someone will do ‘under pressure.’ Not following the same patterns over and over. She can understand the patterns she sees, she can’t understand that everyone is a unique example of the ‘type of person’ she sees them as. I’d say this is where Cabby and Fan’s insular perspectives line up and then diverge again. Cabby plays with accurate information she’s perceived and that’s the fun part. Fan has fun with perceiving information without that close consideration to accuracy, since trivia is more of a decoration to him. For Cabby, she is a decoration to the trivia. She needs to perceive things objectively and accurately for her own pride, and she needs to preserve this information in order to put it to use. Because of course her understanding needs to be useful, to be helpful, otherwise she’d be doing it for the sake of knowledge. What she extra doesn’t understand is that if she’s doing this for own reasons, for pride or for a clear end result being a comfort, she’s already been making rash decisions fuelled by emotion. She’s making ill-advised decisions and *mistakes* by disregarding her own fallibility. There’s no way she can always keep up this image when that image has an emotional strain and her goals don’t take into account how to mend emotional struggles. The thing is, her emotional struggles or even her mistakes aren’t something she looks away from. She just doesn’t know what she’s looking at, or what she brings to the table that she would rather get from other people’s input. She doesn’t know it, nor can she begin to express it yet, but she has her own warmth inside her objectivity, she doesn’t need to gain that ability from someone else. She could win people over if she showed up as the ‘girl who puts herself into her database to calm herself and help others’ and not the ‘girl who cares more about her files than anyone, including herself, so imagine how she feels about *you*.’

The number one decision she needed to be making, is the kind of decision she can’t fathom someone else making. Acting upon a spontaneous desire to help someone, no matter if you have the perfect plan or even a plan that makes sense. Or, in the competition sense, helping people through their problem instead of keeping track of their problem just running its course. Looking out for the team in an honest and upfront way, instead of waiting for that perfect ally to come along and spark a change. This is especially unrealistic since a ‘perfect ally’ for her would have to be one that’s earned her respect and given her new insight. Cabby makes that very difficult to accomplish, in fact, she makes it harder every single time she seeks out information on her own.

But she could do so much good if she just realized that. She’s already done a lot of good without directly intending it. Cabby’s research is what gets Clover to question how she lives her life. She kickstarts Clover’s entire arc. Cabby’s research is also what helps TBD start looking for answers, and one of the things that let her know Test Tube was hiding something regarding those answers.

She overall needs to become more comfortable with spontaneity related to both emotions and information. If she were comfortable with that, then her needing ‘constant input from other people to feel alive’ wouldn’t result in her looking at people reductively. If she stopped looking at people reductively, she could see them more as ongoing projects, not instalments in the history of her perception. Then, finally, she could see that she herself is one of those ongoing projects that can be fulfilled by warmth and efforts to change for good. Not just reliability when things go wrong, but taking initiative in making things right.

SS Lancing of Kristiania under tug.