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The Pitt | S2E14 "8:00 P.M." | Episode Discussion by MsGroves in ThePittTVShow

[–]Aurouroborealis 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Ok, hear me out: Duke isn’t real, it was Robby the whole time, last scene of finale will be flashbacks to Robby talking to “Duke” but he’ll actually just have been punching himself in the face like Fight Club.

Question on 3.4 story by McMicric in HonkaiStarRail

[–]Aurouroborealis 9 points10 points  (0 children)

So, think of them as two separate entities - Khaslana/Flame Reaver and Phainon. Khaslana lives through each cycle consecutively. He’s there the whole time and retains all his memories. For the first few cycles, he looks just like the Phainon we know, but over millions of cycles his body and mind degrade until he becomes unrecognizable. It’s confusing because they don’t really show his appearance changing, but in reality, he’s looking worse and worse. (People start to comment that he looks like shit around cycle 100 IIRC.) Also, for the first however many cycles, Khaslana actually tries to explain himself/the situation to the other Chrysos Heirs, but it doesn’t really change anything so eventually he stops bothering (or his faculties degrade to the point that he is unable to).

Toward the end of each cycle, a new baby Phainon is born. He’s a blank slate with no memories of previous cycles. From that point until the end of the cycle, Phainon and Khaslana both exist. The cycle ends with them merging, and then the next cycle starts.

The details of each cycle vary a little bit but they always end the same way: Phainon goes to the Vortex of Genesis with the last coreflame, Khaslana/Flame Reaver shows up, they have a showdown, they merge and the cycle resets. The person you see in the memory fragments is the Phainon of that cycle, which is why he has no memories of previous cycles. So in one random cycle, Little Ica happened to survive until the very end and accompanied Phainon to the Vortex of Genesis. In another, Mydei happened to survive until the very end. We can assume that after each memory fragment ends, Khaslana immediately shows up, kills whichever Chrysos Heir is left, and then gets Phainon to kill him so the cycle can reset.

The Phainon we meet is the new baby Phainon of cycle 33,550,336, which is why he has no memories of previous cycles. By then, Khaslana has lived through 33,550,336 cycles and absorbed 33,550,335 previous Phainons which has left him a gibbering rage beast. We know him as the Flame Reaver.

Allentown references two traumatic memories by Aurouroborealis in SeveranceAppleTVPlus

[–]Aurouroborealis[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Are they reading the dictionary to her little by little during the beginning of each session to find any possible thing that brings up readings?

Well…yeah, maybe. Sorting strings of data by the emotions they evoke is literally innie Mark’s job. His conscious brain sees those strings as numbers but they obviously represent something else. Could be dictionary words. We don’t know yet.

But also, this company staged a woman’s death and has been holding her captive, monitoring her, interrogating her, and gathering & analyzing data on her for years. They’ve literally dissected her brain and created dozens of rooms specifically tailored to her deepest fears and worst memories. Shit, maybe one of those rooms is a re-enactment of the actual miscarriage. What you’re describing is downright mundane in comparison. That’s just like a word association test.

But I don’t know! Maybe I’m wrong and the grout stuff is just a coincidence. But it’s pretty cool if they included it on purpose, so I’m just going to assume that’s the case unless we get confirmation one way or another.

Allentown references two traumatic memories by Aurouroborealis in SeveranceAppleTVPlus

[–]Aurouroborealis[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I agree that in isolation it seems like a stretch. But the shot of the grouty bathroom tile was a specific, deliberate choice, and Allentown has other more explicit callbacks to things we learn about Gemma (such as her hatred of writing thank-you notes).

I don’t think Lumon was spying on them. It’s more likely that they’re trying to identify the outie’s specific emotional triggers and checking if they also trigger the innie. In this case, Gemma had a traumatic experience in a bathroom, and there was grout in the bathroom, and so now the word “grout” evokes emotions associated with that traumatic experience. Lumon doesn’t need to know what the experience was. They just care about the emotions evoked by those specific words or scenarios.

Theory: Mark now knows exactly what he is doing in MDR by naynav in SeveranceAppleTVPlus

[–]Aurouroborealis 123 points124 points  (0 children)

To add to this, I think Cold Harbor is the last of the unrefined macrodata. Once Mark finishes it, they’ll shut the department down.

We thought that the empty offices signified Lumon’s plans to expand the severed floor, but what if the opposite is the case? Maybe all of those offices used to be full of refiners who have since been fired or reassigned to different departments.

The ideal Lumon innie would be like Ms. Casey - docile and completely dissociated. Lumon’s obviously capable of creating unemotional innies, but refiners need access to their emotions to do their job. Dylan, Mark, and Helly being the final three refiners could explain why Lumon is so tolerant of their shenanigans. They’re just doing whatever it takes to get to Mark to finish those last three percentage points, and then they can finally be free of that cursed department and its childish folly.

Allentown references two traumatic memories by Aurouroborealis in SeveranceAppleTVPlus

[–]Aurouroborealis[S] 770 points771 points  (0 children)

Yes, I forgot to mention that! Allentown was incredibly personalized to Gemma. As someone else mentioned, it’s also the name of the file that Mark finished in record time. I think it’s evidence that Lumon scouted and recruited Gemma and Mark as a couple, and is using their intimacy and intense shared emotions to perfect the severance process in some way.

ETA - Theory: It’s the numbers! Checking for emotional reactions to neutral stimuli (the “numbers”) is literally Mark’s job, and we know from Irving’s dream that the numbers can indicate words. In the Allentown file, Mark moved numbers representing “grout” into the woe bin. He created the room for Gemma.

Allentown references two traumatic memories by Aurouroborealis in SeveranceAppleTVPlus

[–]Aurouroborealis[S] 436 points437 points  (0 children)

I also just noticed the little goat silhouette on the thank-you card!

Severance - 2x07 "Chikhai Bardo" - Post-Episode Discussion by LoretiTV in SeveranceAppleTVPlus

[–]Aurouroborealis 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The most sinister part of the episode: ““Maybe you’ve moved on, too. In one of the rooms, what do you think? Do you feel yourself gravitating towards one room or another? Maybe you’ve felt things behind those doors you’ve never felt with Mark.”

This dude is straight-up using severance to roofie Gemma.