sageshouldknowbetter

[sageshouldknowbetter]

Dylan was compromised this season and who can blame him when he has the most irresistible of temptations for someone who's only known deprivation, but Irving's death has to be the wakeup call. He couldn't bear to see Irving quit, and now he's seen something worse: Irving being murdered coldly and suddenly. No time for goodbyes or more accurately, the company forbidding goodbyes.

He's going to see the family time perk for what it is or at least admit to what he already knows. It's manipulation to keep him complacent, but what does it matter when that can be ripped away from him in a flash? How is that real? How can he keep that? Who cares about the 15 minutes he gets with Gretchen, a woman he ultimately doesn't know because he's severed, a woman whom he won't ever get to be with because they're both strangers even if they're partners, a woman who will always leave him because he's not allowed to be a whole person? His family will always be out of reach for him, shades he chases but can't quite reach and hold onto, whereas Irving is someone whom he saw and spent his entire life with. It will never be enough unless and until he's able to be reintegrated, and it doesn't matter if his whole existence is left up to the whims and mercy of Lumon.

No way is the family time perk going to be enough to keep him tamed especially when knowing Dylan and seeing his reaction on the cliff when Milchick tells Irving he's fired, he'll be saddled with enormous guilt over being tempted and distracted. He didn't exactly betray anyone, but I'm sure he'll feel that way.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

I love how much Helly’s clothes have to say not just about her outie’s identity, but the origin of her rebellion as a whole.

Like… she breaks the dress code. Constantly. We know from The Lexington Letter that Lumon only allows white, black, navy, gray, and pastels. And what does Helly wear? Bright blues, green, orange, and at one point, even a dress that is unapologetically crayon-yellow.

For most of season one, the audience thinks this symbolizes Helly’s rebellious nature. Of course her outfits break the rules and stand out like a sore thumb in the muted halls of MDR — so does she! Helly is a new wild card spicing up the lives of her coworkers and shaking up the system. She doesn’t care a whit for Lumon and their stupid regulations, and her clothing reflects that.

But remember… Helly R. doesn’t dress herself.

Helena does.

If Helly could choose to break the dress code, she would — but she has no say in what she puts on every morning. It isn’t her who’s doing this. It’s Helena Eagan who wakes up and, every time she gets ready for work, purposefully dresses herself in ways contrary to her own father’s company.

Whatever her reasons, the point is this: the only reason Helly can unashamedly break the dress code is that no one has the guts to tell the CEO’s daughter to follow the rules. That rebellion, that defiant warmth? Only there because of privilege.

And isn’t that the point? Isn’t that so much of what Helly R.’s “moxie” is? Yes, she fights against MDR’s mistreatment and galvanizes the innies to revolution! Which is awesome! But it’s only because when she first woke up on that table, something inside her went, “This isn’t right.

“This isn’t how people are supposed to treat me.”

It is SO deliciously ironic that almost every sliver, every atom of resistance Helly has against Lumon is born from a sense of entitlement that they gave her in the first place. Helly R. goes to work with someone else’s power over her skin. It’s both the flaming crest of her defiance and a constant, quiet reminder that it is there because she is not like the others. That she is only rebellious because on the outside… she is used to getting her way.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

Helena thought she could go undetected if she acted kind, which is frankly patronizing and says volumes about her lack of understanding of Helly and the innies. From what I can tell, she (and Lumon?) only cared to watch the day the innies enacted their OTC plan, so she thought, "Okay, they're all fond of one another, and they have team spirit" and decided to act warm, nice, and collaborative. That must be why they like and trust Helly! Except Helly's more than that.

Helena doesn't care to think of Helly as an actual person, just a role she can slip into, and surely it can't be hard to be her because she is Helly. But Helly is headstrong, inquisitive (and demands that others question things as much as she does), and highly skeptical, and as much as she's kind, she's also quick to sarcastic retorts and teasing. You don't see that on display in season 2. She's soft and she doesn't go off snooping on her own, not caring whether or not anyone follows her. She lets Mark take the initiative on everything. Her hatred towards Lumon is absent; the only time you see her actively dissent is when she laughs over the story about Dieter—and she gets it wrong because the others are confused and a bit uncomfortable before they hesitantly join her in laughter whereas Helly would have been able to say something that would have landed with the others immediately. She doesn't get the group dynamics either. She makes a snow seal for Irving, and her "sympathy" for Irving is cruel and condescending because Helena is cruel. I think part of her wanted to shut Irving down, but she's also clueless enough to genuinely believe she would come off as kind. Gotta be gentle with poor, breakable Irving, guys.

She's incapable of understanding Irving's loss and she underestimates him. She's never been a position like he's been in. He has nothing, his entire belief system that he's been indoctrinated into since birth is a lie that has caused him profound suffering, and he found love so powerful that it transcended everything and made him willing to sacrifice everything. He doesn't have anything to lose. He sees no point in being at work anymore so that means he'll take massive risks and have no fear. She doesn't understand that because she doesn't understand love or loss.

She doesn't actually get what drove the innies to rebel and risk everything for the OTC because of that. One of the first things anyone in Helena's shoes would think when she learned she has to go back to the severed floor is how they would have to come up with a lie. She's quick to see that's necessary when it comes to the gala fiasco because she values the attendees' trust and understands how their support or lack thereof can affect Lumon, but it doesn't cross her mind for the innies until the MDR members ask one another what they saw. Did she really think they wouldn't talk about this? These are people who risked their entire existence just to get a glimpse of the outside world and learn a little about who they are. They'd be eager to talk about everything as mundane as how vast the sky is (which was one of the first comments Dylan made on the ORTBO!) and as intimate as the most minute details about their outies' lives and identities.

Helly herself is the one who got the ball rolling for the plan in the first place because of how much she rebelled. They would expect her to be candid regardless of what she found. Helena seems to forget and find incomprehensible Helly's deep-seated loathing of her and Lumon. Obviously, it's possible that Helly would be afraid of judgment and of losing her team's trust. She was broken when she found out who she was, so full of regret when she recited the break room apology in the bathroom at the gala. But Helly immediately moved into action and knew she had to get the word out there about the unjust treatment of innies. It's not just curiosity motivating her, but a desire for her life and the lives of the other severed employees to be better, for them to be treated as equals. To have freedom and agency.

Regardless of whether Helly would have told the others who she was on the outside or not (and I do believe she would have if not immediately, then very soon after), she would have wanted to destroy Lumon. She already hates Helena and was willing to hurt her and even kill her not only to escape her claustrophobic, prison-like life but also as revenge. She would want to raze Lumon to the ground even more than before after her discovery.

In that sense, I think that's why Irving was highly suspicious of Helena. Sure, there's the "night gardener" comment, but that was just a seed. If it had been Helly and that had just been a terrible lie born out of shame, he would have quickly dismissed it if she acted like Helly. But he continued to observe her and thought she wasn't acting like Helly. Everyone on the team is gung-ho about rebelling, but Helly and Irving were alike because they were driven by a type of anger that set them apart from Mark and Dylan. Mark and Dylan also felt mistreated, but they were driven by curiosity as well. They wanted to know more about themselves and their lives. For Helly and Irving, that was of interest to them too, but it wasn't the priority; they operated from a place of feeling like they had nothing to lose, which is why Helly was the one to provide the spark, the fuel for the fire, and Irving was the one to fan it into a conflagration, to inspire them by declaring, "Let's burn this place to the ground."

Helena doesn't seem to know this. She doesn't try to understand the innies because she doesn't see them as real people, as equals with their own interiority, with deep thoughts and emotions. She just chalks it up to the innies being unhappy, which is right, but it's a superficial interpretation. She doesn't dig into why or try to sympathize, and that leads her to be this weirdly placid version of Helly. One with a complete lack of fire. One who's complacent and just does enough to give a shallow impression of whom she assumes Helly is by reducing her to a handful of traits: curious and kind.

I think she vastly underestimated how important Helly is to the others and ultimately that backfires on her spectacularly. If you love someone, you know them. She's never had someone truly see her except on the severed floor because she's never had love until then and she's never been accepted for who she is and encouraged to be herself. For all her condescension towards the innies and Helly especially, she has limited, childlike knowledge of how complex a person can be and how relationships can work.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

You've gotta love Jews more than you hate Nazis.

You've gotta love trans folks more than you hate TERFs.

You've gotta love your unhoused neighbors more than you hate the billionaires.

You've gotta love immigrants more than you hate ICE.

You've gotta love queer kids more than you hate christian fundamentalists.

You've gotta love fat people more than you hate the diet industry.

You've gotta love disabled people more than you hate the insurance companies.

You've gotta love your fellow humans more than you hate the worst that humanity has to offer. You don't have to like every person you're fighting for, and you sure as hell don't have to give up your righteous anger, but hate is ultimately corrosive.

You've gotta love.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

"I wouldn't trust a word out of that mountebank's mouth. not even televisually" ....

The show explicitly tells us not to trust anything Mr. Milchick says. Mr. Milchick tells us that the Outies consented to a two day work trip. But why would they even ask for permission to do that when we know they have no qualms lying to the Outies too. Thinking about the impies of that.

If Lumon lied to the Outies then they knew that the trip would take less than a days worth of time. Think about the events of the episode. Did that really feel like a whole days worth of time?

We see as they travel from the waterfall to the camp the first time that night begins to fall, but later it takes them only seconds to get back to where Irv has Helena at the pond.

I think I've been conceptualizing the lullaby switch wrong. I had thought it was a hard cut to sleep but I think that it is more likely that the name is literal. It lullabies them to sleep. THAT'S why Dylan uncharacteristically doesn't go after Irv. He was already tired from the hike, and the lullaby conked him out. Helena and Mark were too busy smashing to immediately fall asleep, but Mark starts to pass out immediately after. Irv passes out in the snow because he was lulled to sleep. We KNOW Lumon doesn't want them sleeping/dreaming because dreaming is where your subconscious connects. Irv has been constantly sleep deprived so of course he immediately dreams. How come doesn't Irv freeze to death in his sleep? Because they were only asleep for a few minutes.

I posit that they are in some kind of Lumon controlled environment and that Ms. Huang is the one doing all the switches. She is distinctly missing during the climb up the mountain and during the whole waterfall debacle.

Mr. Milchick, Ms. Huang, and Helena waited for the others to fall asleep. Helena wanders over to the waterfall to bask in all the things. Mr. Milchick and Ms. Huang switch the day/night cycle and turn off the lullaby.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

So… what are those weird “twin” beings?

In my opinion, one of the terrifying parts of Severance S2E4 was when those Mandela Catalog analog horror-type… things showed up to point the way for the refiners. (This whole episode seems to be pretty inspired by analog horror. I was half-convinced that at the beginning, Mr. Milchick was going to turn into a distorted police sketch captioned “The Milker 😈😱” or something.)

So… what’s their deal? I’m going to explain why I believe they’re not clones, actors, or robots… but something else altogether.

First, they don’t have coats. The twins are outside in an extremely cold climate, standing there for who knows how long, and they don’t. Have. Coats.

If they were really clones (or even hired actors), wouldn’t they need to be warm too? Why would Lumon risk damaging what they undoubtedly worked so hard on (or popsicle-ifying an employee) by dropping them in a freezing climate with no protection?

Some clone truthers would argue that maybe the clones can’t feel pain or sensations yet. They’re not finished: maybe fixing their brains is what MDR is working on. But I find the idea that they are somehow super-resistant to weather a bit harder to swallow. And while the innies are at least smart enough to avoid danger and seek safety, a clone unable to feel pain and with a half-formed brain would have no self-preservation instinct. They might be curious about what happens when they insert a stick between their ribs or go cheerfully gallivanting off a cliff like some kind of suicidal Roomba. Boom. Millions of dollars down the drain.

And there’s another thing they don’t have: footprints. Lumon-hired actors have footprints. Robots have footprints. Clones would have footprints. But the doppelgängers… don’t.

For the clear shots of shadow Helly and shadow Mark, we just see them appear with no tracks to show how they got there. We don’t even hear boots crunching in snow. The only explanations are a) Lumon somehow shot them up to the surface on a Hunger Games-style platform (implying that the ORTBO wasn’t actually outside), b) they got some poor guy (probably Milchick) to hurriedly cover up the footprints as they made them for Maximum Creepy Effect, or c) whatever these things are, they’re not corporeal.

I’d vouch for the latter. Because no matter how dramatic Lumon is, I really don’t think they’d spend THAT egregious an amount of money for a bit of extra goosebumps.

So, then… what are they? I’d say some kind of hologram or Lumon-approved hallucination.

I don’t think the ORTBO actually took place outside. There are many reasons for this. The TV at the beginning and the theremin needed to be plugged into something, there was a large room on Petey’s map called “team-building,” Milchick’s walkie-talkie range would be too small, it’s too risky for Lumon to ask outies to shut off their brains for multiple days in the middle of nowhere… and Lumon wouldn’t actually let the innies outside. Not because it would be dangerous for them, necessarily — but because it would be dangerous for the company.

Lumon doesn’t actually need to take them outside. They don’t want to cause a potential PR scandal from the outies talking about the “work retreat” or risk one of them running away. All they need to do — the whole purpose of the ORTBO — is to make them think the outside world is a terrible place and never want to go there again. The cold is real. The hunger is real. The danger is real (to an extent). But the environment… is not real.

So they can project holograms. They can power the TV and theremin. Milchick can remove the Glasgow BLOCK (the term “block” implies Helly WOULD have usually appeared but was blocked from doing so, and the only place that could happen is the severed floor). They make some basic holograms clearly based on the MDR group picture and boot them up. They don’t need to be realistic. All that matters is the message gets across.

Now all that’s left to wonder is: if Mark and the team were surprised at this team-building, that implies that they’ve never done it before. So how did Petey find it and map it? And why was one of the twins behind Mark in S2E1? We might never know.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

kier company town dashboard simulator

🔨 nineinchnailed Follow

if you support the severance procedure kill yourself btw

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🔨 nineinchnailed Follow

if you support workers who sever themselves kill yourselves btw

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✍️ clipboardguy Follow

you can support severed workers and still not support the procedure

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🔨 nineinchnailed Follow

killyourself

#lumens not gonna fuck you.

64,354 notes

orpheuscoded Follow

1,284 votes

# got me curious after that “are cops workers?” poll lol 

fandomprince reblogged:

👩🏻‍🦳 harmonywoefrolicdreadmalice Follow

clock into work. torture that pathetic man. clock out. study that pathetic man. clock in-

#officecore <- op's original tag 🤣 #blorbo #blorbocore #fandom meta #fandom blogging

54,259 notes

🎸 queenjaneapproximately Follow

bitches with severed fathers should have their own dsm-5 diagnosis

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🦇 gothgf Follow

bitches with severed fathers should unionize

5,890 notes

🔻 mscasey-deactivated20220401

how to be a person ? it's my first day alive.

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thank you all for your kind advice. i do not think marijuana is avaliable for me but i may be able to eat hot chips.

9 notes

🐚 commiecosima Follow

Hey guys, check out my latest substack ”De-age, degrade, defy: Severance Abolition” where I address the need for a severance ban through a family abolition framework. Since an “innie” worker is born their first day of work, trapped into a subservient relationship from the employer they can never escape from, the severance procedure realizes the capitalist dream of wholly reproducing the familial unit in the workplace… [read more]

[sageshouldknowbetter]

irving b.'s relationship with burt, having a crisis of faith because for the first time in his five years of existence he is allowed to set boundaries. it's an affirmation that his body is his and that there will be no punishment if he says no and that in being given that choice there is recognition and care the likes of which faith to his employers have never given. not even irving bailiff, who barely sleeps, and irving b. gets punished for his exhaustion.

helena eagan with the power to make helly's body hers without her knowledge or consent, having sex with mark s. who thinks she's helly, mark s. who is so desperate to have a love of his own he reacts to irving's reminder of gemma with a need to reaffirm that outie mark is not him, that it's his body too.

irving waterboarding helena and saying he will kill her if they don't bring helly back to this body and immediately apologizing because he violated helly's right to do to this body what she wants with it. because when she almost killed herself it was one of the few choices she ever got to make about her life.

him needing mark to know that it was not helly, that he was not consenting to what he was doing, that helena was using him because she felt a right to helly's body and her relationship with mark. knowing that he would be killed for the transgression but could not bear to see that profound violation of his friends' bodies.

when irving confronts helena he knows that the consequence is death, at the cost of giving helly her body back. and if helly taught him anything is that they're not the only ones who have a right to decide what this body does. mark is a person, he's not some commodity helena eagan has a right to because she owns helly's body.

consent is an acknowledgement that the person in front of you has much right to their body as you do to yours. and when you are told you're a guest on someone else's body, when your life is so disposable it can be erased from existence, that act of recognition has more weight than words can possibly express.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

Going off of one of the tags on my 'Severance and Child Oppression' post to make a new, slightly different one-

I think the reason Severance can so easily be read as commentary on or allegory for child oppression is because the way we rear children in 21st century American Capitalist Society is to prepare them to be good workers. Children are taught and expected to conform to hierarchies in the form of families, school environments, and sports teams constantly. They are taught to remember and regurgitate key information, to follow set schedules, and to ignore their own body signals in favor of continuing to do their schoolwork (bathroom use, going to school sick, etc)

So like. Yeah of course the manager-employee relationship can read as a disappointed parent chastising a child, because modern family structures often mimic the workplace more than people realize. Of course this commentary on exploitative labor practices can be read as an allegory for how we treat kids - because we exploit them all the time. We demand labor from them in the form of chores and while yes those are care tasks necessary to life that kids need to learn how to participate in, what is NOT necessary is for parents to say 'Because I said so' instead of explaining why those tasks are important, or for parents to treat their kids like live-in maids.

Of course the show about being trapped somewhere you don't wanna be and being bossed around to do stuff you don't wanna do for reasons you don't understand is Oppressed Teenager coded. Because capitalism and the power structures it breeds infiltrate all the way down to the roots of the home by now.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

UH HUH.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

just transcended to a different plane of existence

[sageshouldknowbetter]

In Defense of Mark S

Post S2E4, Helly is going to be mad at Mark. I can’t see a way around it. He not only didn’t know someone else was “behind the wheel” of her body, he continued romantic pursuing of that person… thinking it was her.

But though Helly has valid reasons to be angry, a) victim blaming isn’t okay and b) I can totally see why Mark didn’t realize something was amiss!

First: impossibility and sheer absurdity. To Mark S, it would be unthinkable for an outie to ever enter the severed floor. That’s a violation of his universal laws, immutable as gravity.

Water is wet. Coffee cups fall down when you knock them off the table. And outies do NOT come down to the severed floor, because the chips are spatially triggered.

And sure, he knows about the OTC and that it’s theoretically possible — but why would any outie want to, and why would Lumon ever LET them? If he ever thought, “Oh, Helly’s acting strange,” Mark’s mind would go through a million different logical steps before landing on something outlandish as that.

Maybe she’s sad she was alone when she woke up during the OTC. Maybe she’s just having a bad week. Maybe she’s acting differently around him because of their first kiss. The idea that she’s being possessed by another being? Never would have occurred to him!

Remember how his outie plays into this as well. Irving B has the subconscious of some kind of anti-Lumon revolutionary with the paranoia that only comes from a military background. (“She’s a mole!”) Of course he clocked her.

But Mark? Mark Scout a) doesn’t know the entire family of his CEO, and b) has the subconscious of a history professor grieving his wife. While Irving’s outie’s knowledge bled through to him in the subconscious of his dream, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark’s subconscious was actively TRYING to suppress any suspicious thoughts.

Of course it’s Helly. It NEEDS to be Helly. Because Mark’s brain is tired of grieving. His subconscious will shut down any accusations that she’s acting differently and cling to the idea because she CAN’T be gone, right? It’s not happening again… right?

And then we circle back to the first kiss. Mark S is in love — head over heels — with Helly R. He’s trying to find Gemma, sure, but that’s for his outie’s happiness, not his own.

If you’ve had one, do you remember your first crush? Remember the butterflies in your stomach and how much you were laser-focused on your own behavior? “What should I say?” “How do I look?” “Am I being weird? Why is she looking at me like that?” Mark S doesn’t notice Helly R is off because he’s too busy worrying about how he comes across to her. And because he has no idea she’s Helena, he has every reason to believe that’s how she’s thinking about him, too! He thinks they’re both dorks in love trying to figure things out. Irving doesn’t have this disadvantage — he’s on the outside and can see everything play out.

All I’m saying is I get it. I hope Helly at least kind of gets it too. What I’m wondering is, will Mark even tell Helly about his assault? Will he hide it out of some misguided belief that it would make her even more angry? Will she yell at him, not knowing that he’s a victim of someone wearing her own face? Much to think about.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

rip to anyone partaking in severance ship wars my third eye is wide open im watching any and all combos of this love tetrahedron like this

[sageshouldknowbetter]

how was work yesterday? oh you know. woke up standing on an ice lake. climbed a cliff. had to hike for a bunch of hours in a snowy national forest by the direction of animatronic twins of myself and my coworkers. found a rotting seal corpse. saw the tallest waterfall on the planet. heard the story of my company’s founder’s twin masturbating in the woods and then becoming a tree. had sex with my work wife. slept in a tent in long underwear. woke up to my coworker waterboarding my work wife until he revealed it wasn’t my work wife at all but her evil twin and has been the whole time. watched my boss kill my coworker for said waterboarding. so. a typical day at lumon

[sageshouldknowbetter]

Mr. Milchick post-S2E4

Milchick is having the WORST DANG WEEK OF HIS LIFE, man. 😭 There are so many situations he has to contend with now!!

First, Irving's gone. Or at least something like it. Lumon's going to have to replace him like they did with Petey-- but with who? The randos from S2E1? Are they going to drag Milchick's tight pants back onto that motorcycle, shove a pineapple in the back, and make him rehire someone he just fired AGAIN?! I hope it's Mark W. He broke his lease in Grand Rapids for this!

And when this mystery person shows up, it will only make the innies angrier -- and they WILL be angry. They just watched Milchick take someone who was their FRIEND, their FAMILY, and execute him "Of Mice and Men"-style.

You thought the pre-OTC innies were bad, Milchick? Because, oh boy -- all of the egg bars, Waffle Parties, and Music Dance Experiences in the world couldn't stop how homicidal they must be feeling. I could see Lumon beefing up security within the floor or Milchick, as many have predicted, using Ms. Huang as a human shield.

And not only will the innies be angry with him, Lumon will be downright furious. Milchick almost let an Eagan -- an EAGAN -- DIE under HIS WATCH!! He straight-up lost track of half his team and had only just learned Helena was gone when she started screaming across the woods for his help!

And speaking of Helena and Helly R, what in God's green Earth is he supposed to do about that?! He obviously can never let Helena back on the severed floor again. But even BEFORE Helly knew her outie was an Eagan, she proved willing to harm or even kill herself to protest against the injustice of the company.

Now that she knows that she has the life of the CEO's daughter in her grasp... who knows what she could do?

And now that the others know who she is... how much is Mr. Milchick willing to bet that they would stop her?

But they have to have Helly down there. They need Mark to complete Cold Harbor... by any means necessary. So Milchick is just going to have to suck it up, put on a slightly ominous cheerful smile, and deal with everything burning down.

Rehiring someone yet again. Fighting off furious innies. Trying to keep the CEO's daughter from killing herself. And all while being denigrated by the very corporation he has put his blood, sweat, and tears into serving AFTER they gave him paintings of the founder in blackface AS A REWARD. Yeah... I wouldn't be surprised if Milchick cracks soon.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

no, No, NO, I don't want to hear some of y'all dusty ass takes about markhelly this episode. "He cheated on Gemma!" STFU.

Does no one see how incredibly sad that entire scene was? Mark S.'s entire existence is to be the punching bag that lives to take the excess pain from Mark Scout's life, he's literally enslaved to a cubicle with no way out. But he finds something fragile and sweet with Helly, something that is finally his own that isn't the run off pain of his outie. And Mark S. thinks that he is having this moment of realization and culmination of mutual desire with Helly but NO. HELENA JUST DESTROYS IT WITH NO CARE, fully believing that she is entitled to what they have with one another because what are Mark S. and Helly R. to her but subhuman?

[sageshouldknowbetter]

What could they possibly be giving milchick to make him drink the koolaid this much. To dress in all white, source a theramin and overlook multiple (essentially) children in an entire goddamn national park like a fucked up camp counselor. How can he be this into it. What are they holding him to. Is he a believer. This is the tallest waterfall on the planet.