#evil clone apologism hours. yes i know they kill for fun but in their defence look at this shit

[tyrannuspitch]

another very interesting thing - we mostly see the clones from the perspective of the originals, so we see them as aligned with grief/stellenbosch/etc and their whole abusive institution. but that definitely isn't the whole story.

the original mystery of point blanc is how they're making the pupils to act so eerily, inhumanly perfect. what kind of nightmarish and/or horrendously invasive treatment they're putting them through to make them act precisely how they want. and the answer we're given is "they're being replaced with clones". but once you remember that clones are, in fact, also people... that's not an answer at all. it's just deferring the question. how did they make the clones to act like that?

and then there's the whole military, institutional feeling of point blanc - the uniforms, the locked doors, the armed guards, the fact of being trapped in the wilderness and cut of from the outside world... all this applies to clones even more strongly than the originals. they haven't always been at point blanc, but they have always been hidden away somewhere. their whole existence is a secret. very early on, right after stellenbosch hits alex, either she or greif tells alex something like, "the sooner you realise that here we can do exactly what we like to you, the better" - and that's been the clones' whole lives.

aaand there's also the surgery. yes, of course it's disturbing and awful for the originals to be drugged and photographed and studied and to have copies made of them. but how much worse is it to have your own face and body taken away from you and replaced with someone else's? the clones are all different heights -- some of them will have had limbs broken and reset to achieve that. they have different eye colours, different hand sizes, different teeth. and the recovery time expected of them is insane. no matter how many drugs you give someone, doesn't any major injury/surgery cause, like, a state of shock? i don't think you can medicate away a bruised survival instinct. and i think trying, and expecting them to just immediately be fine, will probably be pretty damaging.

and of course. there's also the fact that greif is fully prepared to just murder all of his own children and start again. and stellenbosch is clearly upset by the idea but doesn't even try to argue. so it's not only the originals who were in danger of replacement - the clones were in danger of exactly that too.

and like... idk. they're greif's clones and personal army, so they're not allowed to be distinct from him; they all act uncannily similar, so it doesn't seem like they're allowed identities distinct from one another; and their life purpose is to replace these other children, so they're supposed to entirely replace their name, appearance, and identity with them. AND apparently another batch of clones would mean much the same to greif as this one. they're nothing and no-one; they're empty vessels for his masterplan; they're subsumed into being part of him and each other and potential future siblings to the point that in his mind they can't even really die. what the fuck.

i'm just rambling now but like. god. nightmarish in so many different ways.