sageshouldknowbetter

[sageshouldknowbetter]

featuring a self-described rickenesque excerpt of a draft essay by @binomech!!

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[sageshouldknowbetter]

hey it’s amazing how much Burt is coded to appeal to me personally; this is an attack—

guy casually admits Irving was right! ‘we never used those words. with Lumon it’s very specific language’ (love that refrain btw) he just casually identified himself as one of those faceless rank and file with black keycards! enforcers. security personnel. ‘I just drove people places, I never asked what happened to them’—yeah, because you’re smart, and you knew better. because it would happen to you. guy who lets macrodat into o&d is too smart to be ignorant, even willfully

so he drove people places, and kept his mouth shut, because that’s not the sort of thing you can fight or really undermine. there’s a very definite ending down at the end of that drive.

and fields? that man doesn’t know shit. safe, convenient, religious… innocent fields. you can see it in how Burt’s humour is drier and sharper. he’ll joke about things that are meaningful to Fields (‘now he’s looking for the exit’), and you know it’s not about the cheating. pair of old queens and nobody’s really happy. how do you live with a person who doesn’t share those values with you, but over time has less and less patience to hide that he’s humoring you.

and how do you live with someone who has no idea what you do? yeah the reminder of there being a better world outside what you do is great! but the separation is already there and the gap just keeps on growing with every little drive you have to take. so of course Burt was a bit of a scoundrel in his youth. his work is basically clandestine. he’s not killing or hurting anyone but he works right alongside the likes of Graner and Drummond. he’s too smart not to know what they do. and fields is too damn innocent. and it grates

so then one day he gets himself a lateral transfer. ostensibly to “””be with his husband in heaven, at least some part of him”””, and hey, maybe once upon a time he did love the guy and he wants that same innocence back. (like the rest of them on that severed floor, he got severed for himself.)

years go by. great years, going to work, relaxing, designing, sketching, painting. being surrounded by art. the ultimate retired goon life. and then—well, what do you know, you go and fall for a guy just as innocent, with a love of art, who has that sense of a little something darker and smarter about him.

what a world.

[sageshouldknowbetter]

okay I know everyone jokes about how nobody's doing any work and that data is NOT getting refined BUT

but

we all know that from Mark's perspective him and Gemma are Orpheus and Eurydice, but from Gemma's perspective that's not really the case. For her, they more resemble Odysseus and Penelope. Odysseus was caught in a storm on his way back from the Trojan War, with everyone assuming him dead. They tried to tell his wife Penelope to move on, to remarry. But she couldn't. She missed him and grieved him, yes, but never believed he was dead. So, she told everyone that before she remarried she first needed to weave Odysseus a burial shroud. During the day she would slowly weave, and at night unravel her work, so the shroud was never completed.

Because Odysseus wasn't really dead, he was just gone.

Mark isn't refining the data

Penelope isn't weaving the shroud

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lwk don’t fully agree with the newly popular idea in the fandom with s2 that the innies and outties are the same people. they have completely different memories and experiences, which largely shapes who a person is. but the outties and innies both have shared foundational traits and quirks. cuz they originated from the same subconscious but because of their different expiriences these foundational traits are manifested differently.

for example, helly and helena are both determined and self-assured. because of helena’s privileged upbringing and lumon indoctrination she’s a corporate asshole, while with helly’s limited life as an innie it manifest as rebellion. but this doesn’t mean that helly and helena are the same person. their beliefs and experiences are too vastly different. there’s some overlap, but it’s not as simple as they’re two completely separate people or they’re the exact same person. it’s in between.

like the innies and outties started from the same root subconscious but they branched off into different people from their different experiences. what makes a person is both the nature and nurture.

this is why I also don’t think the innie/outtie relationship complexities can be boiled down to just “love transcends severance” cuz to truly love someone you must know them. some habits and muscle memory and a general feeling of familiarity might transcend severance, cuz of your shared body, but I wouldn’t go as far as too say the whole feeling of being in love does.

that’s why with Burt and Irving at the train station they’re wondering if they could remember what it felt like, cuz they don’t, but they want to. there’s this sense of familiarity and this pull, but it’s based on memories and feelings they can’t fully access due to their severance. there’s a barrier still that the love couldn’t fully transcend because outtie Burt and Irv don’t have those memories and experiences, making them separate identities, despite the overlap and bleeding over of emotion.

it’s just not as simple as the innies and outties are the same people or that theyre completely different people.

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i know this is the wrong use of this meme format. please take this not as a spin on the meme but as a recreation of an actual interaction i had at the club tonight

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via

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mark s. acrylic on paper (had to play with the colors a bit to get the scan to look like the original)

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the philosophies of the divided self in the severance universe are insaneeeee. there's dualism purists (the divided self is two different individuals whose interests and needs exist independently of each other and are inherently engaged then in an unequal power dynamic with the owning-of-the-body class and the working-in-the-body class) ie. hellyists, and radical materialists (the divided self is not an ontological state of being but a social construct deviced to create the illusion of dualism with the purpose of keeping one's interests and needs at war with themselves and therefore paralyzed against the bourgeoise) ie. dylanists

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Okay at this point I gotta be real: season 2 of Severance has not been nearly as strong as season 1 for me. But I feel like a lotta the criticism I've seen from outlets and stuff has been kinda missing the mark a little bit on why it hasn't been working (to me). Like a lot of the criticisms I've seen kinda go on abt how the show introduces more mysterious elements without resolving them and people on reddit or whatever have their theorizing threads to occupy them but the show is only stringing them along, which is true to a certain degree this season but here's the thing: resolving all the little mysterious elements wasn't really the point in season 1. It kinda didn't matter what the numbers did because the show was really about the characters, and their arcs in terms of "waking up" from the indoctrination innies go through and fighting back. The show is a big ol allegory for working in a corporate office that treats you like shit so it kinda doesn't matter if the numbers do anything because they fulfill the role of mindnumbing busywork and a lot of the other little details are just worldbuilding set dressing and don't need the show to put a lot of attention on them. And of course once the show progresses to a second season we want some of these mysteries to actually get addressed. Of course we're invested in why Mark's dead wife is really alive and of course we're curious about what top secret evil thing Lumon is making the innies participate in through their work. But fundamentally that shouldn't GET IN THE WAY of the focus being on the core cast of characters, their relationship to one another, and the arcs they go through. The thing that, y'know, the show is about.

So the season started out pretty strong. Characters have new motivations since the first season based on where they left off, we have some intrigue with Helena's involvement from the outside (and inside too maybe wink wink), and some new variables introduced with Milchick promoted to floor manager and the "more ethical" changes made to their work environment. Fertile ground for exploring the themes and relationships we loved so much in the first season, oh boy! But then we get to Woe's Hollow and. The characters are dropped into a contextless environment, so we are pulled out of the momentum the preceeding episodes built. And it ends with one of the characters getting fired, so he's cut out of the core dynamic and spends the rest of the season divorced from the primary action, reduced to a secondary character. Then the season chugs along. Then we get an episode entirely devoted to flashbacks and another character divorced from the core dynamic. Then that episode is immediately followed by another episode entirely devoted to a different character divorced from the core dynamic. And then the next episode we see all our main cast again but they're all up to stuff that is, again, divorced from one another and the dynamic that made the first season so interesting, and we, the audience, are reminded of just how little time we've spent with Dylan and Irving and innie Helly this season. Their plot arcs are given a bit of a wrap-up in the lead up to the finale, and we're left to wonder how much more satisfied we might feel if the season had given them adequate time to establish further character development too.

And all this is not to say I hate this season or anything, in fact it's because I LIKE this show so much that it's so disappointing to me when it doesn't reach its full potential. There's plenty of stuff I enjoyed about this season, Milchick's arc in particular, and I liked what we do see of Burt and Irving, the idea behind Dylan's arc, etc. but it feels like wasted potential when we have barely enough time spent on them before their storyline wraps up. And none of the bottle eps are "bad" necessarily as stand-alone episodes, but when you only have ten episodes to tell your story in, it really detracts from the pacing to have like a third of the season draw us away from the stuff that made the first season so interesting. It's the shift away from character arcs and how the main cast of characters influence and interact with one another, and towards addressing the "mysteries" established earlier and then establishing more "mysteries" to build hype for a third season that really hurts the writing and my investment in the show. Even the commentary on capitalism and corporate culture seems to fall to the wayside (again, great ideas but where did they go??), which in conjunction with all the fucking CROSSOVER ADVERTISING we've been seeing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This show could be good. It could be so so good. Why were these choices made to make it less good. Jesus christ.

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I think innies don’t switch on in just any birthing cabin. Gabby Arteta paid for her innie to wake up at that cabin — likely didn’t mean all innies would, just her innie specifically.

I believe the wealthy can take advantage of the severance barriers in individual rooms. They can decide not to give birth and have an innie created, and that innie alone is activated if the body crosses the threshold. But the speciality suite to which Cobel and Devon take Mark? It switches any severed worker into their innie. Because while ordinary severed people could be visiting their families or even giving birth in the rest of the grounds, the only reason a severed worker is supposed to go to that cabin is to be “one of Jame’s.”

im sorry i get that its For Television but why did they allow Lumon severed employees to wake up in the birthing cabins

1) We see w/ miss casey that they have the ability to separate severance "barriers" by physical locations

2) They would have a complete lack of control of who enters which birthing cabin given we saw devon enter a severed cabin, whats to stop any severed employee from doing so?

3) It literally just doesnt have concrete proof that this makes sense technologically like the entire series its been linked to the elevator save for the OTC and now just some random other location also triggers the switch for EVERY severed person? why?

i havent seen like. Any good reason for this other than to make the plot progression easier and its a bit disappointing

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Devon: There's an innie cabin, maybe we can go there and talk to Innie!Mark. I can call Cobel, she might be able to get us in.

Reghabi: That plan is so dangerous and terrible, I refuse to be part of it. It's completely insane to even consider. Can we please just stick to my much better plan, increasingly risky basement brain surgery?

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"Your so-called boss may own the clock that taunts you from the wall. But friends," // "the future is for crips—"

musings on severance & disability | full citation list below the cut

Sources by image:

Rhys Dreeszen Bowman and Leah T. Dudak, "Cripping Conferences: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Disability in Academia", 2025. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2025/cripping-conferences/

Severance, 1x01 and 1x02.

Severance, 2x03.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism, 2022.

Severance, 2x07.

Bassam Sidiki, "Severances: Memory as Disability in Late Capitalism", 2022. https://www.chicagoreview.org/severances-memory-as-disability-in-late-capitalism/

Alison Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip, 2013, p. 54.

Severance, 1x02.

Bassam Sidiki, ibid.

Severance, 1x06, 1x01, 2x01, 1x05.

Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 2017, p. 160.

Severance, 1x08, 1x06, 2x02.

Alison Kafer, "Crip Temporalities in Pandemic Times" in the plenary panel for the 2021 Society of Disability Studies, 2021. https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/120/2/415/173312/After-Crip-Crip-Afters

Severance, 1x02.

Bassam Sidiki, ibid.

Severance, 1x04, 1x02.

Ellen Samuels, "Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time", 2017. https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/5824/4684

Severance, 1x03, 1x04.

Severance, 2x03.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, ibid.

Severance 2x05, 2x06.

Rhys Dreezen Bowman and Leah T. Dudak, ibid.

Severance, 2x06, 2x07, 2x09.

Ellen Samuels, ibid.

Severance, 2x09.

Severance, 2x02, 2x03, 2x09.

Micha Frazer-Carroll, Review of "Health Communism" by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, 2024. doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2024.2316428

Severance 2x03, 1x09, 1x06, 2x07, 2x08, 1x03, 2x06.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism, p. 61.

Caption of post is in reference to Ricken's quote as cited in Severance 1x08 "Your so-called boss may own the clock that taunts you from the wall. But, my friends, the hour is yours." as well as Alison Kafer's widely cited opening chapter, "Time for Disability Studies and a Future for Crips" (x).

Shoutout to the Severance Wiki Transcripts for the bulk of the dialogue snippets used here (all snippets with time stamps).

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She's not your wife... because no one would treat someone they love the way she's treating you. Like all the outies treat us. Like everything's for them.

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Helena, dentist guy, James Eagan. ok so like half of the lumon staff are sexual predators

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it’s still so crazy to me that outie mark is actually kind of the the innie by the standards of the typical innie/outie relationships. the selling point of severance is to create a version of yourself that does all of the unpleasant/boring/tough parts of life that you don’t want to do anymore. it was literally created to be an escape from the suffering in the factories. the outie escapes the suffering and passes it onto the innie instead. but while mark got severed to escape the suffering, he didn’t create an innie to suffer for him. he was already the one suffering. he was trying to create a version of himself that wouldn’t have to go through the suffering. in a way, he was an innie trying to create an outie.