Where What Who

Like. Oh yeah. I recognize this one. Someone else dresses you. Someone else feeds you. Someone else, who's just like you, but they get everything. The little toys and the waffle party. Helly is desperate and suicidal, but she still has to go to school work. You have to do work that doesn't make sense, but you'll understand eventually. The meaningless, manufactured rivalry between departments. The rumors??? “they have larvae that eat them?” “I’m livestock grown for food” “I’m a bodybuilder who has loads of girlfriends, but you don’t know them they go to a different school?” Punishment in the form of apologizing over and over, having to use all the right words, until you are believed. Endless hallways. Scary authority figures. "Are you mad at me?" Religion being the only type of media you see, until you read some shitty book that changes your life. Confusing, sudden camping trips that are supposed to fix you. Condescension. The words "innie" and "outie" are brought up multiple times as infantilizing. Of course his innie's voice is higher pitched????

Yeah. Reminds me a lot of a kid's Hypothetical Adult Self.

Your future self will understand. Your future self will thank me. Your future self will want you to have done this. This is for your (future self's) own good.

The appeal of severance, at least as we've been shown it so far, is that subjects can have unpleasant experiences (childbirth, a tedious workday, a dental exam) already having happened, to skip directly to the "afterward" and have the unpleasant experience actually experienced by another, lesser version of yourself. Right?

Which is also how a lot of adults feel about children -- either their own retrospective child selves, or the children currently in their lives (whose lives must be structured to best serve their future adult selves). The purpose of childhood is to get unpleasant experiences over with so that the Future Adult Self (the self-that-matters) can have them already over with.

It's so telling that the boss at the door factory who interviews Dylan compares severance to circumcision -- a surgery commonly performed on infants, without medical necessity, based purely on the justification "They'll want/need it done as adults." Now, that's not necessarily true (the world is fully of happily uncircumcised adults), but even if if were, it would raise the inevitable question "Then why not wait until they want/need it as adults?" and the answer is "Because surgery is unpleasant and we assume adults don't want to go through it. The Future Adult Self (the self-that-matters) will want this surgery to already have happened, to have been experienced by the Lesser (childhood) Self."

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

She is a mature adult woman

She isn't dependent on anyone. She has a job and she's married to Roger Rabbit because she loves him, not because she NEEDS him

She isn't stupid to how others view her, she just doesn't care

She is genuinely a nice person

She is never infantalized

Obviously made to be a sex object, but the fact that she isn't ignorant to how she's viewed makes it so much better. A lot of the times when there's the typical "check this woman out" frame, the woman is ignorant to it, so it feels like there's infantilization there, or that the audience is suppossed to ignore everything else about the woman because "look at her, she's hot!", and that just feels really objectifiying and like they don't care what the woman is like, only because she's hot. Jessica knows that the camera is there; she just doesn't care when she's not doing her job, and she's more concerned with trying to make sure her husband isn't framed. Takes away the weird infantilizated "ignorance is hot" thing

Women and asexuals can identify with her. Despite the fact that she was made as a sex object, nothing she does (outside of her job) is sexual. Even when her and Roger are being "intimate," it's literally them playing patty cake ("because it's a kid's movie!" IT'S PG13 AND STUFF CAN BE IMPLIED IN PG13. "It's a gag" A GAG THAT STILL SHOWS THAT THEIR INTIMACY IS PATTY CAKE). Like she says, she's just drawn that way, and many women feel like everything they do will be seen as sexual, even when it very clearly isn't, which makes her easy to relate to. It also lets for asexuals to identify with her, meaning that ace people can see themselves in/have a character that's seen as a sex object as their (headcanon bcuz nothing has been confirmed sadly) representation, which is cool since a lot of people can't fathom the idea of hot people being ace.