what a star is, not of what it is made

i guess the first and foremost thing on my mind is that i wish people took a bit more seriously the fact that the others can't lie. when they say they love carol and manousos its true. when they say they're happy its true. when they say kusimayu is happier as one of them than she ever was before that's true. and i see sentiment from some people trying to rationalize why that love or happiness doesn't count, or isn't meaningfully 'real', because it requires the people experiencing it to be altered to a degree that certain viewers think makes them lack the agency to accurately understand or describe their own emotional landscape. i think some people see it as a 'there is no war in ba sing se' situation where the customer service-esque conviviality is a front for something more sinister. but i do think the authenticity of it is what's sinister! that's what makes the show actually interesting and innovative instead of just feeling like the same reheated ideas people seem to really want it to be!

i think refusing to take the others at their word regarding their feelings and intentions is in a lot of ways rejecting the basic premise of the narrative, and i think it almost exclusively results in objectively incorrect or otherwise off the mark reads on the rest of the show because of that. This show was advertised as "the most miserable person on earth tries to save the world from happiness." so the question here has not ever been are the others actually happy, the question here is to what extent happiness is in and of itself capital g Good, and what is worth sacrificing for it. as someone whose brain more or less doesn't produce happy chemicals i find this a really refreshing and interesting question to be asking of your audience.

also central to the stakes of this narrative is the inherent tension between individualism and collectivism. one line that really stuck with me as someone who is far more on the others' side than most people (side note: I'm not saying siding with the hive mind is the "correct" take on the show. I just know what i like) is when carol is speaking to kusimayu. she tells her 'everything about you that makes you special will be gone' or thereabouts, kusimayu's answer is "i'll still have it. i'll share it." i feel like that's an angle of the show that doesn't get much consideration. i think she's right! consider all of the things zosia can do now. fly a plane. play croquet. speak every language in the world with complete fluency. cook like a chef. everything has been shared.

i would argue that what the hive mind is doing to human culture is not necessarily oblivion as much as it is stasis. a snapshot of humanity at the moment of the joining that can not evolve or progress. which is not to say the oblivion isnt coming, because obviously when they all uhhh fucking starve to death whatever stewardship of human culture can be said to be taking place here to any degree comes to a rather definite end. but i don't think we're there yet.

a bit of a sidenote, but i think something extremely relevant to pluribus's larger concerns around stripping people of agency/identity is carol's insistence on the others using "I" instead of "we" when speaking to her through the zosia body. as much as the others can not love carol without wanting to change her fundamental nature, the same goes for her feelings towards them. carol is essentially forcing the others to larp a version of self-conceptualization that they do not actually experience to make her more comfortable interacting with zosia romantically and sexually. she is literally having them actively play into and perpetuate her solipsistic delusion about who and what zosia is so she can get off on it. lol and lmao even! to be clear i think this fucking rules, carol sturka most feminist tv protagonist of the decade. i am having the time of my life

this all brings us to the atom bomb.

anyway isn't it kind of interesting that we have the last american on earth trying to protect her own personal freedom by threatening (i really don't think she'd ever actually do it) to detonate a nuclear weapon against people she does not view as fully human because they aren't individualistic or violent enough?

obviously, that's a real flattening of the situation. the others are not what Any of us would traditionally consider human beings. they are an entirely new entity. i think acting like the others' situation can be used as a 1:1 stand in for any particular type of individual or collective human experience isn't gonna hold up. but everything about where this first season of pluribus has gone leads to a reading where the role of violence in the story is a humanizing one.

the atom bomb is sort of the ultimate physical expression of mankind's capacity for violence, yknow? i think it says a lot that this is the season's ending beat. that carol's choice to fully commit herself to saving the world is paired with her willingness to threaten to take advantage of the single most destructive product of the human race.

i find that the message of humanity = violence, and that the hive is characterized as inhuman partially (but significantly!) through their categorical rejection of all violence to a fault, to be somehwat at odds with anticolonial readings of the show. i don't think these anticolonial readings are unsubstantiated, or even unintended. the scene of kusimayu's andean village being abandoned as the goat cries out after her. manousos' conversation with the indigenous others at the darien gap. but so far the throughlines there are about the the cultural homogenization of the human race, and the theft of material resources. both things characteristic of colonialism, yes, but i feel like the parallel is fundamentally incomplete without violence or malice.

maybe you could argue that all of the deaths of the joining represent the violent toll of colonialism, but i still personally think them being literally incapable of intentional physical harm can not be ignored when analyzing the show through this lens. similarly, the idea of our dear suriving haters representing a coherently anticolonial opposition to the joining is not quite there. after all, the person who said that if the others can't be turned back then they were better off dead is manousos. isn't that a pretty fascist thing to think? these people either need to be fixed or they need to be killed.

and now that we're talking about fascism, it's time to circle back to the Individualism. carol's individualism is very american. for her, independence is shopping at a grocery store operated by other people selling food grown by other people that was transported there by other people. it is blindness to the human labor that makes her standard of living possible. it is only initially trusting people who she can speak to her in her own language. manousos' individualism is very masculine. for him, independence is refusing all assistance to the detriment of his well being. it is a belief that anyone is entitled only to what they can work hard enough to earn. it is a belief in the fairness or correctness of paying for your life with money. i think these two mindsets are both very prominent in circles of fascist thought. oftentimes occurring in the same people simultaneously despite the fact they are inherently contradictory!

this is not to say that either carol or manousos are fascists as characters, that vince gilligan is using them to launder fascists ideas, or that they are tangibly serving as a stand in for fascism in any way. I am just doing a Reading of a Text here, not trying to decode the true meaning of what represents less than 1/4th of the planned arc of an incomplete work. i love carol and manousos a ton. i want their hater friendship to blossom and triumph.

i think its really worth noting that both carol and manousos' worldviews have hugeee fucking downsides that the show does not shy away from. carol's conspiracy-brained hyper-american approach left her uninformed, lagging behind everyone else's grasp of the situation, and has no real internal moral or ideological consistency beyond what does or does not feel right to her. manousos' worldview would have left him dying painfully in the jungle if the others' hadn't intervened. both of them intentionally and habitually isolate and alienate themselves. i have no doubt the course of this show will see us further interrogating the limits, benefits, and ethics of individualism.

And me.