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[chiisana-sukima]

I've been watching Severance and really loving it; stellar acting, stellar writing, stellar cinematography, stellar everything really. And Helly&Helena have fast become my favorite female character of all time.

But (there's always a but), I'm beginning to get the uncomfortable feeling I get when a story has bitten off more than it can chew in ways that end up being Unfortunate. There's this thing a lot of media does where it goes 'what if we had this horrible, speculative trolley problem that's like real life in some way, BUT NOT REALLY! Here are some implications that will hook you in and make great water cooler debates, but don't worry, IT'S ALL IN FUN!'

Which, you know, it is. I'm having a huge ton of fun with it.

Buttttt... I mean. "What if two individuals shared the same body, and direct communication between them was extremely difficult or impossible and they had overlapping but not perfectly congruent goals--who would have the right to that body and how should they treat each other?" isn't actually speculative. That's a very common real world problem with at least a couple of variations (pregnancy, plurality/DID/systems culture) that society as a whole is in the process of imperfectly working through, often at great cost to the individuals involved.

I think there are legitimate philosophical questions to ask here; that's not my issue here exactly. I personally feel very strongly, for example, that in the case of pregnancy, the body belongs to the mother, and ultimately the fetus has no rights whatsoever; and I feel equally strongly that in the case of plurality, it depends on the total circumstances of each individual case what's best for the whole person/system, but cooperation is best if possible. These are not congruent beliefs, and it's worth exploring why I hold them both.

But I've noticed for the most part in the tag, people who are systems are being careful to say "this isn't plural representation, though it has some fun overlaps", and pretty much everyone is ignoring abortion, even though Severance itself has made pregnancy and childbirth front and center. I can see the reluctance to address abortion, since pregnancy and severance are at least not a one-to-one correspondence. But plurality and severance are very, very close. (And I would argue even closer now that we have the creeptastic Jame/Helena single egg "I wish you'd take it raw" breakfast, since traumagenic plurality is so often stereotypically associated with csa.)

And as is often the case with things I find complicated about situations in fandom, I think this is more a problem of the source material than with the response to it. There's now no reason Mark S and Mark Scout can't communicate. All they have to do is walk back and forth across the threshold of the cabin and pass notes. So like, any question of "who has a right to have their agenda met" seems pretty facile to me? They're both standing in the same room and they both do. That's how the structure of the show was set up. And maybe the show will address that in the next episode and I'm being premature. But if it doesn't, and instead pretends tragedy is inevitable, that's a failure of the text imo.