3x01, "The Unicorn Evils"

[mocknot]

:Curses work schedule that was not conducive for reading this all in one go:

That was intense, and wonderful, and oh team... I was expecting to feel the knives for Chaz and Hafs; Brady and Lau caught me by surprise.

[jennygadget]

(At some point, he also apparently learned to do it without being noticed by the subject. Which I point out because it's relative to the discussion.)

As in: he learns the information, but they don't get the reminders?  Or, as in: he learns the information, they get the reminders, but they don't realize it's him?

The first, yes? Again, that points to hurting people now in order to make people stay alive later. Still extremely unethical, as no one agreed to this but him, but still also very different from just doing it for the hell of it or because he was in pain himself.  (although I wouldn't say it's better than the latter.)

The relevant bits are in "Getaway" and "Opportunity Cost," as I recall.

You mean I have to read? SU eps?  oh noes! how will I manage? 

(At some point, he also apparently learned to do it without being noticed by the subject. Which I point out because it's relative to the discussion.)

I remember in Getaway he pulled out the mirror to see what Ron(?) was thinking, considered that he could reflect it all back at him, but that he needed to use the insight in other ways.

As I do need to get to bed at a decent time tonight, having stayed up until last night to finish the ep and cruise the boards, for now I am going to say:  yeah, that's sounds like what I remember, now that I think about it.  Which is very much the first one I mentioned.

[makito]

Oh....God.

I know I come in late on this one, but I'm actually surprised at how fast I read it, given it's length and my level of busy this weekend. I guess erratic sleep patterns pay off sometimes.

What reaction I can put into words, in completely disjoineted bullet-form:

- Once we found out what the case was, I immediately thought right back to Breathe, during Sol's entrance. "'North Dakota ritual suicides?' Reyes sounded sympathetic. Worth wondered if anyone had ever said those four words in that way before." I was surprised that Sol's inner monologue didn't mention it... although...maybe he did, and I didn't catch it. I know he alluded to -something-. Damn. This episode's going to need a re-read on my part, isn't it?

- I totally called that Hafs pulled a Kansas City Shuffle and stuck around in the hotel for longer than they thought. Was gratified to find out it was true.

- That little mention of Hafidha's skirt fluttering in Brady's peripherals had me briefly predicting that Hafidha was going to end up being some sort of vigilante that anonymously helped and slipped out before anyone noticed for a good portion of the season. Of course, PTB, you have to go with the more hurty option. Not that I'm complaining. I do think I'm as surprised as anyone that Hafidha's return was so soon, especially considering Chaz's radio silence lasted a good deal longer (I am actively Not Thinking about why this may be...can't be too horrible though, since he's back!)

- Something about Reyes in this episode really endeared me to him. Endeared enough that I was glad for him when Chaz was about to rail on him again for being manipulative, and the perfectly legitimate comeback he gave. I don't know...

- The itty bitty glimpses into Frost's non-robotness were interesting, to say the least. That little pang when she heard the ringtone Hafidha put on her phone.

- In relation to the gamma-of-the-week...that was damn creative. Never could've come up with that myself, ever. Just...wow. Love the irony of a girl with unicorns and rainbows all over her room being the bad guy.

- I think one of my favorite moments in this entire episode (apart from the Everybody Goes Home part) was when Lau went to Chaz. There was something about that scene that was just really...right. More right than if it had been Daphne, or Faulkner. Just amazingly heart-hurty and Lau got to establish a real connection with someone that wasn't Brady and...guh.

- My knee-jerk reaction is always to say that Brady's my favorite character. And then Esther does things like open her mouth, or fall asleep in her baby's bed, that make me remember. Oh. Faulkner. It's as if she spreads amazing all over my laptop screen with a butterknife.

- I think I cried....twice, during this episode. First, just a little bitty sob when I thought the kid had died. And second, when Chaz put the gun to Hafidha's head. I just remember saying "What the hell is happening?" Yeah. Ow.

- Also, this episode? Tiring. I read through the climax, the scene with Hafidha, yadda. Then looked at the scroll bar realized I was only about halfway through Act 5, and thought "Why isn't this ending? What more could they do to me?"

Finally, a smooth segue...

- Holy crap, the coming home scenes. The Brady/Gray was a wonderful break from the sad for moment of squee.
I was so glad we got some T screentime, and even gladder for what she did with it.
Already talked about Faulkner.
Todd's passage was completely unexpected and heartbreaking, oh my GOD.
Reyes and Lau's bare-ass loneliness was just...really effective. Do love the penguins, though.
And...and Platypus and Wabbit!! The DVD Extra was perfect, by the way. As if the last scene with the two of them pressed against the mesh cage just kind of dissolves into the flashback. Just...wonderful.

Sorry that was so long, had to get it out there. Maybe I'll have room for deeper thoughts once I let this ep sink in a bit.

[tylik]

I'm willing to forgive him because he wasn't completely himself. He was dealing with his own trauma, and PTSD makes people do stuff they'd otherwise find unthinkable. But I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen. It did, and it was cruel, and the people he did it to had to live through it.

I guess for me the question is what exactly was he supposed to do? Because PTSD aside, this was his, and it is a threat both to him and to those around him (admittedly, the PTSD is probably going to skew his perceptions around both of the above observations). It also could be, if domesticated, a pretty powerful tool for him.

It is cruel. I'm not saying otherwise. (Though - while I'd agree that he was going to practice more, I don't know if all manifestations of such practice would be cruel, or would be equally cruel.) I think one can make a pretty strong case for a moral imperative to learn, and I don't know how many other options were open to him. His recent traumatic experiences probably made it harder to consider some possible options.

And... cruelty happens all the time. There is a cultural bias to give more weight to intentional than unintentional cruelty, but I don't accept that across the boards. (Among other things, it essentially rewards people for semi-deliberate cluelessness. If "I didn't know" is always an excuse, some people will work hard not to know.*) I'm pretty sure we all have scars, and people whack them all the time, with varying degrees of cognizance. Chaz probably know more about that than most, his worst moments being highly accessible to him.

* A friend of mine used to argue that the bias in favor of unintentional cruelty was essentially a biasing of the culture to value men over women, and that for various reasons of socialization (or who know, perhaps underlying biology - this is one of the areas we have some not entirely bullshit reasons to suspect biology underpinnings) men are far more likely to say awful things by accident, and women, if they say such things, are far more likely to say them on purpose. I treat such arguments with extreme care, but I did think this one was interesting...

[tylik]

I'm not up to a reread just yet, but didn't Chaz say something like that himself earlier? About the worst thing the anomaly could make Hafs do is die?

Actually, Brady said it:

"Killing her, killing yourself. It's what a gamma would do and you're not a gamma, Chaz. How could you hurt anybody more than that? What if we can get her back? Let Reyes have his chance."

(And again... Brady. I do adore him.)

[makito]

Re: Chaz and his mirror
It was hard for me to react one way or another to Chaz's use of the mirror when I first read about it. I know I didn't see it as cruel, but at that point I was still having trouble trying to figure out what the devil the mirror -was-, what it did, how it affected the people he used it on and how it affected Chaz. Perhaps I was reflecting my own confusion onto Chaz, so I didn't quite see it as him intentionally harming someone (in the non-physical sense, of course). Then again, I know how I read, and I take everything I read at face value unless I really go back and think about it or re-read it a number of times (at that point I was still catching up with everyone else, so I wasn't giving myself much time to think as I went through the Vigil series). Thinking back I don't see it as him intending to harm someone at all, though I'm having trouble coming up with an analogy of what I do see it as.

I guess what I'm saying is I really don't know what to think of it. It's a damn ambiguous issue.

[Felicia1066]

I'm not up to a reread just yet, but didn't Chaz say something like that himself earlier? About the worst thing the anomaly could make Hafs do is die?

Actually, Brady said it:

"Killing her, killing yourself. It's what a gamma would do and you're not a gamma, Chaz. How could you hurt anybody more than that? What if we can get her back? Let Reyes have his chance."

(And again... Brady. I do adore him.)

There was an earlier mention of it, by Reyes. He was talking to Pauley at the time, but watching Chaz, so it would be easy to misread it as Chaz speaking. (It's in Act 4, at the airport.)

I'm willing to forgive him because he wasn't completely himself. He was dealing with his own trauma, and PTSD makes people do stuff they'd otherwise find unthinkable. But I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen. It did, and it was cruel, and the people he did it to had to live through it.

I guess for me the question is what exactly was he supposed to do? Because PTSD aside, this was his, and it is a threat both to him and to those around him (admittedly, the PTSD is probably going to skew his perceptions around both of the above observations). It also could be, if domesticated, a pretty powerful tool for him.

It is cruel. I'm not saying otherwise. (Though - while I'd agree that he was going to practice more, I don't know if all manifestations of such practice would be cruel, or would be equally cruel.) I think one can make a pretty strong case for a moral imperative to learn, and I don't know how many other options were open to him. His recent traumatic experiences probably made it harder to consider some possible options.

And... cruelty happens all the time. There is a cultural bias to give more weight to intentional than unintentional cruelty, but I don't accept that across the boards. (Among other things, it essentially rewards people for semi-deliberate cluelessness. If "I didn't know" is always an excuse, some people will work hard not to know.*) I'm pretty sure we all have scars, and people whack them all the time, with varying degrees of cognizance. Chaz probably know more about that than most, his worst moments being highly accessible to him.

* A friend of mine used to argue that the bias in favor of unintentional cruelty was essentially a biasing of the culture to value men over women, and that for various reasons of socialization (or who know, perhaps underlying biology - this is one of the areas we have some not entirely bullshit reasons to suspect biology underpinnings) men are far more likely to say awful things by accident, and women, if they say such things, are far more likely to say them on purpose. I treat such arguments with extreme care, but I did think this one was interesting...

It's never simple, is it? Which is part of what makes it possible to cut Chaz some slack - just not to the point of saying he'd never intentionally hurt someone innocent.

The intentional vs unintentional cruelty is interesting. For myself, I can't see any way around feeling that intentionally taking a whack at a scar you know is there, is worse than hitting it by accident. The pain may be the same for the recipient, but one would make me much less inclined to trust the whacker than the other. (And of course there's a difference between genuine mistakes, and using "But I didn't know!" as an excuse.) I mean, if someone sees a scar, and aims their blow right for the scar in order to inflict the most damage possible... that's what cruelty is all about, in my book.

I'm not sure about your friend's theory. I am very much someone who'll say hurtful things by accident, because I just don't think first. But then, I often end up on the "typically male" side of those gender stereotypes. That old standby about women being more emotional and men more logical, for example, or the one I heard about how men orient themselves through map-like thinking, and women with landmarks, etc. Even when someone drew up a horoscope for me years ago they pointed out that I had 8 out of 10 planets in "male" signs....

[Felicia1066]

Re: Chaz and his mirror
It was hard for me to react one way or another to Chaz's use of the mirror when I first read about it. I know I didn't see it as cruel, but at that point I was still having trouble trying to figure out what the devil the mirror -was-, what it did, how it affected the people he used it on and how it affected Chaz. Perhaps I was reflecting my own confusion onto Chaz, so I didn't quite see it as him intentionally harming someone (in the non-physical sense, of course). Then again, I know how I read, and I take everything I read at face value unless I really go back and think about it or re-read it a number of times (at that point I was still catching up with everyone else, so I wasn't giving myself much time to think as I went through the Vigil series). Thinking back I don't see it as him intending to harm someone at all, though I'm having trouble coming up with an analogy of what I do see it as.

I guess what I'm saying is I really don't know what to think of it. It's a damn ambiguous issue.

Well, he didn't do it for the purpose of hurting someone, I'll agree that far. But he knew it was a very likely that his target would be hurt by it, and he went ahead and did it anyway, to complete strangers who had done absolutely nothing to bring that down on themselves.

[eschatonic]

I don't think the mirror always shows him the worst moment of someone's life, just a bad moment. Especially if they're having a bad moment.

The one dude on the subway was worried about being a good father: that's probably not the worst thing that's ever happend to him.

And when Chaz used it on Hafs and (unintentionally) on Brady, he got what was in their heads at the time, not a traumatic event. If it did always give him the worst thing that's ever happened to someone, for both Brady and Hafs it should have been something about dead boyfriends.

[Elizabeth Bear]

Did he know that? I think that's interpretation, not something that's made explicit in the extra.

[tylik]

It's never simple, is it? Which is part of what makes it possible to cut Chaz some slack - just not to the point of saying he'd never intentionally hurt someone innocent.

And that's not a beta/gamma distinction that I think works particularly well. (I'm rather doubt that I know anyone who would never intentionally hurt anyone innocent, though I rather suspect I know a few people who would describe themselves that way. Ah, shade of all the debates around the wiccan rede.)

The intentional vs unintentional cruelty is interesting. For myself, I can't see any way around feeling that intentionally taking a whack at a scar you know is there, is worse than hitting it by accident. The pain may be the same for the recipient, but one would make me much less inclined to trust the whacker than the other. (And of course there's a difference between genuine mistakes, and using "But I didn't know!" as an excuse.) I mean, if someone sees a scar, and aims their blow right for the scar in order to inflict the most damage possible... that's what cruelty is all about, in my book.

My own reading would be that intentionality is a factor, but how the factor plays out is pretty circumstantial. Ten years of marriage to a man who spent a lot of them telling me that things were never his fault, that he never considered the effect that this or that would have on me, etc, left me a bit likely to discard lack of intentionality as an excuse. (I don't think it was just an excuse, I think the psychological motivations were rather more involved.) Sometimes harm is going to be delivered - do you want it delivered by someone who knows, and cares, or someone who is oblivious? Is it better to be the farmer who raised the chicken, and slaughtered it humanely, or the person who buys a pristinely packaged deskinned and deboned bird from the grocery? It's not trivial, and I don't think there's just one answer.

I'm not sure about your friend's theory. I am very much someone who'll say hurtful things by accident, because I just don't think first. But then, I often end up on the "typically male" side of those gender stereotypes. That old standby about women being more emotional and men more logical, for example, or the one I heard about how men orient themselves through map-like thinking, and women with landmarks, etc. Even when someone drew up a horoscope for me years ago they pointed out that I had 8 out of 10 planets in "male" signs....

I'm dubious about it on a couple of points, but I do think that generally speaking, woman are far more socialized to both be aware of other people's emotional reactions and to take responsibility for other people's emotional reactions.

I'm not particularly gender-typical myself, though I think it would have to be a pretty narrow test to really try to buttonhole me as either masculine or feminine. Okay, technically speaking on some of the more elaborate tests (ones with serious population statistics behind them, and which are at least straightforward about not claiming why these variables seem to have gender skews) I come out as slightly more masculine - usually in the 55%-60% range. *eyeroll*

[Felicia1066]

The one dude on the subway was worried about being a good father: that's probably not the worst thing that's ever happend to him.

Wow, did we ever read that differently. I saw a father remembering his daughter dying in his arms. Or at the very least, she was so sick or so badly injured that he was afraid she was going to die.

So you raise the mirror.

Nissa, he whispers with your mouth. Honey. Hang on. Hang on, baby. You'll be okay. Just stay with Daddy, okay? Baby girl, please, baby girl, please...

His tears burn down your face from under the sunglasses. Or are they yours?

Don't die. Please, just don't--

Stop it, stop it. Cut it off.

[tylik]

The dichotomy of the martial artist

FWIW, I left my dojo when they started pushing tournaments. 

I do suspect there are other ways of going about it all. I think of my tiger student (I don't teach her tiger, but she's certainly teaching me a lot about tigers) probably enjoys fighting rather more than I do. Though maybe she just hasn't won enough. I wonder, sometimes, if she's going to turn out to be one of those students who needs to defeat their teacher...

It's funny, because I do love sparring so much - if it's someone who I trust to have the skill to be fairly safe, and someone who is in it for the exchange of skill and fun, and not all dead set on defeating me. The latter feels too much like an actual fight, and in that case I want it over and for me to be out of there as soon as possible.

[kayjayoh]

- The itty bitty glimpses into Frost's non-robotness were interesting, to say the least. That little pang when she heard the ringtone Hafidha put on her phone.

That was Faulkner. Frost was calling.

[Foxipher Jones]

I just finished reading it.  I cried.  I will likely write more later when I'm not at work, but all I can say right now is 1) I called it and 2) well-done, PTB.  Well-frackin' done.