#as always put the world meta in huge scarequotes lol i'm just trying to be organized

[kinetic-elaboration]

July 21: ALIE/Raven Rock

(I find it hard to read Raven Rock without thinking about The 100, so here’s a bit of a rant inspired by that.)

Among my many problems with the ALIE story line is that it separates the universe of the show pretty much entirely from our actual world, which makes the show/its universe both more shallow and less interesting than they could have been.

By which I mean: the horror of stories set in the post-nuclear-apocalypse is that they are so scarily plausible. For 70+ years now nuclear war has been a possible thing that (some of) the nations of the world are very literally capable of engaging in. But even more than that, the fear of nuclear war, and the understanding that it isn’t just a military fantasy, has shaped so many aspects of our modern world, that even if you’re not thinking about nuclear weaponry at any given moment, you’re still living a life influenced in uncountable ways by the realities of the post-nuclear world. It’s deep in our way of life.

So, yes, there are different types of dystopias, and they play to different fears and have different roles in our collective imagination, and not all of them have to be scarily plausible (I like a good zombie apocalypse too ngl)--but this story, first in the original books and then in the initial two seasons of the TV ‘verse, settled itself in the specific fear of this very particular and again very plausible type of warfare, and I feel like it’s a bit of a cheat to pull the rug out from under all of that and say “oh actually it was a rogue AI.”

A rogue AI isn’t like the most impossible thing ever, I mean I know work in AI is real. But come on, what do you think we’re closer to today in 2017: a nuclear war or an ALIE type AI? There’s a reason JRoth referred to S3 as going “more sci fi.”

It’s not just that I feel like a certain story telling contract was broken--I do feel that, and I think some of the turns in the last two seasons are materially different from a Wild Twist or the natural evolution of a story, but that’s a different rant and it’s too late for me to tangent. My problem with JRoth et. al. veering off into a “sci fi” (calling this show sci fi still makes me break out into hives, but that’s yet a THIRD rant) explanation is that, in doing so, they really relieved themselves of reckoning in any way with the connection between their story and our world.

A nuclear-war based story, even one that takes places years after The 100 does, that is in any way interested in interrogating its reason for existing or even just, like, basic world building, should contend with the realities of the actual post-nuclear war in which it was created. Part of that is saying: how did this fictional world come to be? How did we get from here to there? And if we follow that path, what would we, or the people who follow us, have to live with? Picking a completely arbitrary and random explanation instead of any number of totally and terrifyingly plausible backgrounds is cutting yourself off from having to contend with anything about the world in which we live, with any sort of RL collective guilt or fear. It’s also frankly less interesting.

Reading Raven Rock has inspired all of these thoughts, or at last brought them more to the surface and helped me articulate them, because the true story of our post-nuclear world is SO much more fascinating than anything I’ve seen in this show, and uncountable millions of times more engaging than anything in the ALIE story line in particular. The complex political-military machinery in place to contend with nuclear threat or attack, the continuity of government plans, the bunkers, the pre-written emergency orders, the secrecy, the codes, the huge number of people involved, the vast bureaucracy and literally underground infrastructure, the cultural preservation, the unstated moral assumptions underpinning all of these plans--it’s fascinating! And to The 100′s credit, S2 did touch on this stuff with Mt. Weather, if only in the most cursory and background way (literally mostly through the prop department lol, though I guess if you’re being generous the Wallace family and some of the hinted at history kind of fits into this grander narrative), but all of that was basically cut off and made all-but-moot by ALIE and the S3-S4 back story.

Yes, governments would have to respond to nuclear attack started accidentally by an AI just like they would an attack started purposefully by an enemy state, but come on: by saying a program fucked up you’ve pretty much absolved all of humanity from complicity in its own nuclear annihilation. I guess indirectly if we hadn’t developed the weapons in the first place, we couldn’t shoot ourselves in the foot with them but that’s a stretch. And you could blame Becca and her crew for the most inept AI program ever written (that’s another of my ‘many problems’ with it btw: who the fuck makes a program’s core mission “make life better”??), but that’s also a problem. First of all, Becca and a handful of scientists is a much smaller group to place blame on than, like, everyone involved in the world’s nuclear programs even today. And second, who is she? Who does she work for? A private company? Don’t get me wrong I fucking hate capitalism and Big Corporations too but let’s be real, if the nuclear apocalypse rains down on us it won’t be Random Incorporated Entity who’s responsible. This is the stuff of big shadowy government. (And as an aside: if you ARE going to go with Shadowy Entity Inc. you gotta like actually develop that story line, which has yet to happen on the show but again, another rant for another day.)

When I first watched S2 with my mom, we got to the big massacre of 2x16, and I looked over to her to see what her reaction was. Because it was the second time I’d seen it and the first time, it made me rather emotional; I mean it’s a sad scene, for Maya’s death alone. And she just shrugged it off and was like “Well they deserved it!” I thought she meant ‘for torturing children,’ which is a legit position but she actually meant ‘because their ancestors created this universe in the first place.’

Well psych they didn’t--it was some random poorly explained computer program!

Okay then.