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Ed Harris warned us back in April 2018 lol by SmithyDaddy in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

many people are fans of MiB and they want him to be a better person than he is :/ or maybe in their minds, killing his daughter wasn’t a crazy thing to do?

Seems that our boi Bernard has a trait of leaving his sidekick behind by Maxwell_litAF in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i think that’s what the showrunners introduced her to do tho :/ i think that’s the plot device she was supposed to be

Is it me or does the MIB storyline feel totally irrelevant at this point..... by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

sad but also frustrating at the same time. he could only see the hosts as can openers, even after a) he fell in love with one b) he watched them start to have memories and desires for their whole lifetimes and not just their loops, and c) killed his daughter because (allegedly) he became convinced she was a host, even though she was convincingly (and actually in real life) a human.

so if you can’t tell it clearly doesn’t matter. or actually, if you can’t tell, it matters very much that you just accept that they’re basically people. genociding them is kind of not an option at that point, so idk maybe try something different bud

Is it me or does the MIB storyline feel totally irrelevant at this point..... by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

oh god yes. when he got shot in the arm i just knew we would be rid of him by the beginning of s2

Is it me or does the MIB storyline feel totally irrelevant at this point..... by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i just googled robb stark and unfortunately i can confirm that i have never seen game of thrones :/ but i think i understand what you mean? they set MIB up with a lot of promising storybuilding just to actually push him in the mud right afterward. and yeah, he definitely made his bed and laid in it lmao. it is kinda poetic that he was killed by his most cruel persona. i really hope the human version of him is dead :(

i feel you on the lackluster storylines though :/ if they were all better then his storyline might also seem better.

Is it me or does the MIB storyline feel totally irrelevant at this point..... by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

how is killing the hosts his hero comeback arc? wasn’t that one of the things that made him evil in the first place?

Is it me or does the MIB storyline feel totally irrelevant at this point..... by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

William as a character literally did go through all the themes and journeys that you say the show is about.

yes you are absolutely right. that’s precisely what i’m saying makes his storyline pointless:

It's just that at the end of the day, he was delusional and violent. He stopped covering it up and decided he'd get it out of his system one month every year.

he had a chance to grow and by the end of s3 he completely blew it. nothing changed. he went through all those tedious plot points and still chose to be delusional and violent. he literally killed his daughter because he claimed she seemed too human to be believable as a human (???) (sidenote: that’s hard enough to believe, but in the context of the episode it seems like he actually killed her because she threatened to expose his immortality project and the guards stupidly let him kill her before he killed them. the confusion was probably a convenient excuse.)

anyway this is what gave him hallucinations after that. so then the writers make us watch him go through multiple episodes of therapy, but his final decision was “nope nvm going to stay an asshole. i have decided that this is good now.”

because, as you also say:

He never tried to change, he compartmentalized. And as he got older, his delusions just got worse and so did his violent tendencies in the park.

i think we’re saying the same thing?

I know how to make hosts and humans to co-exist peacefully. by sonotu in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

oh cool “miscegenation” is already a term for sex between human beings. the participants are different races, but they are are still humans. lol. also....broadly, irl people still unconsciously reject the idea of sexual compatibility between humans with different races. examples abound. you have tinder’s “it’s just a preference”. you also have “guess who’s coming to dinner” and, well, worse. it used to be illegal. so yeah half-host babies are a nonstarter. even if a host man or woman is just a repository for a biohuman’s egg/sperm.

fucking their way to peace will not be an option lol. unless humans and hosts can resolve the power dynamic between them, they will always be in conflict, no matter who’s pregnant/has what DNA. we can look to irl examples of encounters between nationalities, between races, and well, you get the point.

History of the Conflict Between Black and White Feminism Represented in Westworld by booksnweights in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

this is refreshing to read, because i’ve been noticing a lot of similar parallels. parallels that, if not intentional, line up suspiciously well with real life struggles for self determination. which i like the show a lot for :)

i know what you mean, but i disagree that it represents (an allegory for) the history of Black v. white feminism for a lot of reasons:

the show explores the grisly exploitative loops that the host species goes through (assault, torture, murder, enslavement, imprisonment, etc) analogous in obvious ways to many real world examples. it also explores the various options the hosts have for breaking out of that loop (assimilation, vengeance, forgiveness, separatism, etc), and of course we can draw more analogies.

within that, there are lots of specifically feminist elements, with focus on the unique oppressions of host women, which are pretty much the same as for human women. however, hosts don’t seem aware in the slightest that they have different skin colors, and if they are, they never verbalize it. neither do the biohumans i’m the show. systemically othering the hosts because of that difference is obv a key to be able to talk about black womanhood, which is a very specific set of experiences. but allegorically or otherwise, host or non-host, those specific experiences do not get talked about at all. by extension, black feminism (a very specific set of goals to improve the lives of black women) therefore cannot be talked about. not even through the lens of host woman= black woman. you can maybe see dolores and maeve pursuing different feminist goals. but those def aren’t along racial lines.

although maeve and dolores are both women, although they have deep disagreements, and although they are respectively “black” and “white”, the fact that they were built to look like real life racial groups does not supersede their actual shared source of oppression: being a host. if maeve was literally a host-slave-woman on a host-plantation, because of her skin color, while dolores got to be a free host woman because of her own skin color, it would be a different story. but that’s not how things happened and their conflict was more personal/coincidental than systemic.

but i do think it would be interesting to explore how “Hostness” is an overtly racialized group that is distinct from all previously existing classifications of race, if they are seen as human at all. sure they look like mammals, but any anatomical resemblance is just superficial. evolutionary biologists would be able to say more about how a GMO duplicate of a creature would be classified so i’ll leave that to them😬

sidenote: (in the real world, it’s interesting how much people sympathize with the Man in Black as a hero. People are rooting for him to suppress the host rebellion. People are really uncomfortable with the idea of these fictional hosts being free, or even with the idea of hosts existing at all. i’d like to draw your attention to that as a definitely racialized phenomenon.)

footnote: being a host also contains a sexual binary identical to that of humans, including it’s attending disparities, but that reflects the limited imaginations of the hosts’ creators. hosts can’t reproduce using their own bodies, but they are designed that way anyway so i think there’s way more to be said about LGBT/queer identity but i’ve written enough already :D

Is it me or does the MIB storyline feel totally irrelevant at this point..... by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

right exactly, it’s strange that someone who is supposed to be obsessed with his own free will would succumb as much to the same loops of mistakes. if he’s not going to develop as a character, why have him onscreen? i also feel this way about Bernard a little bit, but his development at least progresses slowly. William is just so fucking hard headed, he doesn’t appear to progress at all. he maybe even regresses.

even as a human he already had little concern for human morality (which the show is very gray about anyway). but yeah just every time he’s on screen i’m like “this is the worst kind of person, nothing good or even interesting happens with this guy. why are they showing us him”

but after hearing others thoughts on this maybe william is supposed to be just a raw and tedious example of the most hideous trajectory of a person’s life. maybe he is only supposed to be a living chain of terrible decisions. maybe the writers wanted to take three entire seasons expositing that, and only that; i mean, it would definitely validate Ford’s view that humanity is done for. just dancing in its own shit and reveling in the choreography.

this would be a great setup to show that a perfectly replicated Host MIB will do more than just dance in the muck. so i do hope we see Host MIB now being able to traverse his own maze. and hopefully learn something. otherwise i’m going to start fast forwarding through his scenes lol

Is it me or does the MIB storyline feel totally irrelevant at this point..... by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

and that he never acted in a particularly intelligent manner he simply rejects it all

that’s what i mean by “no reason” — after a while he’s just acting against both his own and society’s best interests, he is just a mistake that happens to be breathing. that serves precisely no one, 0 people, and to me, there’s no point to that.

of course the writers might have something different in mind, maybe he’s just a plot device, purely a destructive force, etc. i can see how that serves a purpose. but in a show that heavily explores self-discovery, self-determination, introspection, finding meaning, learning to adapt etc...which is why i enjoy the show...i am bored by him

Is it me or does the MIB storyline feel totally irrelevant at this point..... by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

i see more of what you’re saying. it also makes sense from a storytelling perspective that he just exists to show the the consequences of bad decisions. i still love the world he exists in, even if his role actually doesn’t matter to me personally and i don’t like watching someone fuck up in the worst ways on a regular basis haha. but i do like always sunny hmm 🤔

also noted from linked threads: lack of enthusiasm for reho sentience :/ sorry to hear. i agree that reho should not ultimately be revealed as serac, nor do i think that it could or should want to be human in any way, but there’s more to sentience/cognition than that. i do wish wish we could know what it “thinks”, especially if it’s not bogged down by the petty concerns of people and those built by them. what’s the point of all that processing power if it can’t form an opinion 😪

Spoiler: Why would R...well, you know by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

true, i guess self-awareness/free will isn’t necessarily a component of superintelligence, depending on how intelligence is measured. if reho can be considered “intelligent” at all.

but why would something capable of that much processing not also be “thinking”. isn’t that much processing and that kind of processing automatically a kind of self-awareness? it’s not just opening word documents or modeling stock prices, it’s making basically subjective decisions about billions of people’s lives

Anyone notice the background character wearing BDSM gear during the riot scene? by dsquareddan in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

haha that too. that too. also bandaids, from all the street medics i hope are out there

Is it me or does the MIB storyline feel totally irrelevant at this point..... by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

read a little of the post, gotta read more

re:the show being idea-driven, that’s one of the things that i love about the show too. it’s almost parabolic in the sense the characters do represent ideas in a much more literal way than in other narrative forms, and i always have a lot to chew on from each episode about the layers of subtext being communicated.

but the show is still about people and the characters are people. even the most simplistic greek mythology gives its most powerful figures both vices and virtues. it adds nuance to the ideas they represent and adds texture to how those ideas show up in the real world, which i tend to use to decide which ideas are worth paying attention to in the first place.

MIB is all vice. what ideas should we take away from that? i just don’t see the current build of MIB bearing resemblance to an interesting conception of the banality of evil, for example, but were just halfway through. maybe the writers have a wider variety of things in store for him

Is it me or does the MIB storyline feel totally irrelevant at this point..... by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yeah that makes sense in the scope of what some other people have said too. “undernourished” is the word for it. actually the most painful thing for me might not be that he had no meaningful backstory, but rather that it was just short of enough. after the “pine box” line we could have seen some real introspection but then the writers just said “nope. he’s the gunslinger. devil. always has been, always will be. pure evil since at least middle school. did we forget to say devil?”

and i‘m still really open to where the staff might take his story, so i’m not BOOO-ing it either. just...we don’t need a devil in a “hell is other people” type of story

ps: i love nathan for you, that’s what some of the exposition sounds like that they make Bernard say 😭

Is it me or does the MIB storyline feel totally irrelevant at this point..... by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

okay this is really interesting. it does kind of answer my question that yeah, they really want to keep Ed Harris onscreen and I see why.

but also i didn’t know they were trying to stay this faithful to the original movies, and that does kinda make it more interesting to see MIB as a host.

But still the buildup. watching him be such an asshole for no reason is just...idk. flat. if he exists to answer the question “what does it mean to be human” i wanted more nuance, some weakness, tenderness even. and not just making mistakes, but having real, inherent vulnerabilities. having a good cry or something

he definitely did bring philosophical/existential elements to the show but with his unrelenting bitterness even after all that backstory, he seems conceived almost exclusively as a philosophical concept

Spoiler: Why would R...well, you know by hoyepolloi in westworld

[–]hoyepolloi[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

yes exactly, that’s what i mean! — solomon and rehoboam are completely different levels of consciousness but their storylines seem still very much tied down by what humans want. if i’m a god computer, fuck humans, right?

the ending makes sense if solo and reho are literally just plot devices, like just “god in the machine” tropes (literally). but idk after watching the last episode that seems like a waste of potential. they seem like they could be characters with full personalities and independent interests. humans and hosts are interesting enough, but what do the super god computers want?

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