#annihilation spoilers

[knightotoc]

Ghost Bird and the Biologist from Acceptance, the third book of the Southern Reach trilogy 🐦🦖

👻 prints! 👻

[maculategiraffe]

I liked the movie of annihilation a lot but I think given the title they should really have found a way to include the following tidbits from the book:

-a bit at the beginning when the psychologist seems slightly disturbed that the biologist is having nonstandard reactions to hypnotic suggestion

-a bit in the middle when the biologist approaches the psychologist and the psychologist screams at her "annihilation! annihilation!"

-a bit near the end when the biologist is going through the psychologist's journals and discovers a list of post-hypnotic triggers she has planted for the team members and that "annihilation" is a trigger word to induce the target to immediately kill herself

[abhorrenttester]

Diversity win! The lighthouse keeper who became an organic topographical anomaly in an abandoned stretch of coast in Florida is gay!

[balthazarslostlibrary]

this scene from Annihilation goes so hard, I watch it sometimes just by itself. Highly recommend you watch it just for the ACTING oh my GOD. His lines in this scene speak to me so hard.

[twisted-tales-told]

Annihilation is just one of those films that perfectly puts into perspective What Nature Is

Like, it’s beautiful. It will kill you. It is unavoidable. It is what you rely on to survive. It’s your home. It welcomes you. It tortures you, breaks you down and leaves you as barely bones. It is changing and will bring all that was to ashes.

And like, we see everyone struggle as humans to adjust to the change, but all the animals living in the forest took it in stride, and because of it they evolved.

Only one character has a peaceful ending, and she too learned the value of that surrender.

[rofax]

enabaling ur unnormalacy; elaborate on self destruction vs destruction of the self?

YEEAAHHH ENABLE ME BEING TOTALLY NORMAL ABOUT ANNIHILATION

So quick preface: I'm not like... great at putting my thoughts about this kind of stuff into smart people words, so this might sound a little goofy but I still mean it all very earnestly and am expressing it to the best of my ability.

Also this is hella long, my apologies.

So in the movie there is this IMHO very straightforward theme of self-destruction. The movie opens with Lena talking about cells being programmed to die with old age (and how when that part of a cell goes haywire it becomes undying as cancer). Cassie says that she thinks Josie was trying to feel alive in her self-harming. And Ventress has the line, "Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives."

There's this common thread of self destruction as something very fundamentally human. We have these impulses to self destruct things in our life, our cells arguably have destruction coded into them, something about choosing to self destruct reminds us that we are human and alive and DOING this. It's not just something that happens to us, it is something we can do that reaffirms our being alive and having meaning.

All the characters have some element of self destruction in their lives, from Lena and her affair to Anya and her addiction to Josie and her history of self harm, and we also get to see different ways self destruction manifests while in Area X. Anya loses her shit and ties up her team, her break from reality (although idk if that's fair in Area X) is what leads her right into the bear. Josie chooses to surrender peacefully to her destructive impulses and become part of Area X. Ventress tries to face it and is broken down in something totally unrecognizable and remade. Lena fights it and introduces self destruction to Area X.

I think Area X isn't really destroying everything like the interrogation team describes, but changing it like Lena said. It creates new lifeforms that shouldn't be able to exist, it assimilates memories and places from the people who visit it, it just creates and creates and creates. And it's incredibly unstable. It's only once Lena puts the grenade in her doppelganger's hand that Area X/the Shimmer is given the ability to self destruct. I firmly believe that after everything we saw that alien and Area X do, it could have just NOT immolated itself. But it did anyway. And in doing so, it took this thing that was so unlike us and only created and made it something LIKE us. It gave it this human quality of self destruction. And the Shimmer subsequently collapsed.

MEANWHILE, IN THE BOOK...

The protagonists are stripped of parts of their identity VERY early on. They literally do not have names when they go into Area X and are only known by their professions. Hypnosis is used to guide them across the border and is later revealed to be used extensively to compel them to do other things as well. They are stripped of their identities and their free will. They are not afforded their sense of self while in Area X. (Interestingly, it is Area X itself that returns some of the agency to the biologist by innoculating her against hypnosis with the spores!)

The biologist notes several things throughout the novel that she speculates or are implied to be like... facets or elements of previous expedition members or features of the wilderness. The dolphin with an eye that's too human, the moaning creature in the reeds that she realizes was once another expedition member, even the Crawler flashes briefly to her as the lighthouse keeper. Even the accounts and journals of previous expeditions have literally lost their distinction from one another as the giant pile they lay in decomposes. The surveyor is released gently into the water after she dies to become part of Area X and hopefully know peace. Even the Crawler's skin is made of the same cells as human brain because it is not an individual thing, but a collection of so many other things. The people in the abandoned village made of plants that the biologist gets an uneasy feeling about. These individual people are consumed by Area X and distributed into something new as part of a larger whole, the lines between one person and another and the landscape all blurring.

Previous expeditions have people who come back wrong. They come back unlike how they were before. The people who come back aren't the same people who went in (literally, the doppelgangers happen to everyone) but they still have pieces of who they were. They just also have pieces of Area X and the people they were with. There's a lot of metaphors about being colonized by the desolation and Area X and the biologist often wonders if she's making her own choices or if the spores from the tower are influencing her.

When the biologist finds the psychologist dying, the psychologist notes, "You've changed" and the biologist later wonders if she meant like... changed sides. Like she wasn't allied with humans and who she was before anymore. She's part of Area X instead of a single person who is a world in and of themselves.

Towards the end of the book, the Crawler seemingly chooses NOT to kill the biologist, even though it earlier killed the anthropologist. She wonders if she didn't seem foreign to the Crawler anymore. If she was so enmeshed in Area X that it didn't consider her a threat. It's hard to say WHAT the reason was because the Crawler is beyond comprehension, but it's important to note that the biologist isn't the individual she was at the start and is also much more than herself at this point. Area X is functioning within her through "the brightness". She is part of Area X, Area X is part of her, and something similar happened to everyone who came before her.

Part of this unknowable cosmic horror of Area X is the dissolution of what makes you you, and being remade into something different. Area X keeps changing the things that come into contact with it and making new things out of them, so while the doppelgangers are definitely not the same physical bodies that went in, they still contain parts of them. But the individuals who went in do not exist anymore. Their destruction of self starts before they step foot over the border with the names and hypnosis. Anything to do with Area X breaks a person down into something else and shares that breaking down across everyone.

[prideprejudce]

i'm also so glad that they FINALLY gave rhaenyra a grey character moment instead of keeping her on the pedestal all season while the greens and daemon do their own little swarmy war things. she chose to herd dozens of innocent blonde people to their deaths in almost a cult like sacrifice to gain her two dragonriders. this is the ugly side of rhaenyra that ive been wanting to see all season, the one who will ultimately win the war. its about time she became just as blood and fire as the greens

[glassrunner]

"Sometimes, taking a leap forward means... leaving a few things behind."

POWDER IN THE UNIVERSE WITHOUT HEXTECH | ARCANE S02E07

[rapidhighway]

THEY WERE SO GOOD IN THIS EPISODE I LOVED IT! (not ship)

[azfellandco]

It's about Crowley bearing witness to Aziraphale's desire, about the way that desire is animal and visceral and enormous and terrifying*. And about how Crowley sees that and wants it. Crowley offers the ox rib and watches Aziraphale eat because eating provides them no sustenance, it's purely for pleasure, sensual, selfish. And Crowley introduces Aziraphale to this, and thousands of years later still takes obvious pleasure in feeding Aziraphale, in watching him eat. In watching Aziraphale's pleasure.

And I think it's significant the things we see Crowley put into his body in s2, and why: six shots of espresso, as something bracing before seeing what it is that made Aziraphale call him in his "something's wrong" tone; whiskey, because he has to give Aziraphale some bad news; wine, because they "might as well get comfortable" during the storm coming down on Job, after Aziraphale learns that Crowley is actually pretty unhappy with Job's suffering; and poison, to dispose of it so Elspeth (or Wee Morag, I've fogotten which is which) doesn't die. Crowley doesn't take Aziraphale's "something that calms you down", only consumes things that not only don't bring him pleasure but are an attempt to prevent pain. Crowley, who introduced Aziraphale to this important physical, sensual, selfish pleasure, denies it to himself. He denies himself the eccles cakes, he denies himself partaking in food, and he denies himself Aziraphale.

And we see throughout the rest of the season other things he's denying himself: the comfort and safety of a home in the bookshop in favor of the mobility and ready-made escape of living in the Bentley, the surety of saying what he really means during the confession. He cannot bring himself to admit what he wants, that he wants. Gabriel and Beelzebub "going off together" is not what he wants. He wants Aziraphale, but he doesn't say that, because he's never, in the years and years and years we've seen this season, let himself want or be seen wanting. "Going off together" is as close as he can get to speaking it. "A group of the two of us" is as close as he can get. So he has to watch as Aziraphale leaves and takes his pleasure in the world with him.

[raideoarts]

"Is there something in the corner of your eye that you cannot get out?"

[gorgynei]

ive only known the tyrant for one chapter and im already obsessed. new girlboss of the southern reach just dropped

[hoomanbeaning]

"... 'make you one of us?' the accent thickened, giving a fine lilt to the words. 'why would i do that?' eyes narrowing. 'i would not do that to those whom i find to be despicable, whom i would see burning in hell as a matter of course. so why should i do it to an innocent fool-like you?' ..."

anne rice's the story of daniel / the devil's minion / or the boy from the interview with the vampire

[kookoofufu]

Oda is a good writer with good ideas. But sometimes he's a good writer with bad ideas, and I hate/love it because he'll introduce a concept like "sanji is a secret crime prince" which I think is objectively Lame As Hell but then he'll explore sanji's abusive childhood and feelings of worthlessness and have sanji list all the reasons he thinks he's terrible and unimportant and undeserving of love which luffy genuinely can't comprehend because sanji that's what makes you you and i love you and you're wonderful and i'm just sitting there tears in my eyes like

[crocrubies]

stitch by stitch

[cairafea]

he makes this joke every time.