#idk if im doing this right i havent watched many director's commentaries

[k-itsmaywriting]

Any chapter from Vessels?

(oh god this got so long and it took me so long but I WANTED TO INCLUDE EVERYTHING)

VESSELS

So I’ve chosen chapter 4 for this because it comes straight after Shirayuki’s big shock, contains Obi’s turning point, and it ends with a Big Idea that sets the trajectory for the rest of the story.

Overall, this story happened because I got the Android slot on Bingo 2018! :D The first thing that I thought up of was “what if Shirayuki is an android and Obi is her creator” and then I also thought “BUT WHAT IF OBI IS ALSO ANDROID BUT HE DOESN’T /KNOW/”. And the rest kind of snowballed to include post-apocalyptic Wistal and the Outside to explain how that might happen in the first place. But because of the nature of that setting, the story overall became A LOT more political and philosophical than I originally planned on but uh HERE WE ARE. Since Wistal’s government is fictional, I guess I had the freedom to draw inspiration from the actions of multiple governments as well as anxieties about what how they might respond to disaster (or at least an extreme example) and what that might mean for society in the future.

Also the title is like…android bodies are vessels for their brains and designed purposes. Bodies in general are vessels. There are also blood vessels, which I contrast with injuries that show wiring instead of them. Vessels, man.

The chapter circles back to Obi’s POV for the first time since chapter 1 and in pretty much two minutes he, with very little context, has to decide whether to give up himself and Shirayuki and continue life as they did before, or live with the truth and run. He runs because he’s realised that Garrack, someone he knows hates this whole gig, was involved in turning him into an android too. He doesn’t want to give himself or Shirayuki up partly because she’s betrayed him (will get to the other parts of it soon), and he doesn’t trust her anymore.

Then it’s the flashback when Obi and Garrack met for the first time, and is where he learns that Garrack was definitely not as in this for the money as he was. At that point, he was curious at best, but he also knew there was /someone/ who knew the Wisterias aren’t up to much good like everyone else thought they were. He shared that sentiment, so there was just a tinge of camaraderie there. Which hits another nail into the betrayal. The flashback also sort of hints that Garrack had changed since then to become someone who was willing to sacrifice Shirayuki and Obi so she could keep being with Ryuu, still knowing how it’s impacting everyone else. And I wanted that to reflect the whole “save yourself and those close to you, don’t care about anyone else” thing that happens sometimes in very stressful circumstances.

As for the Wisterias, it’s kind of an explanation to what they actually do. So, basically Zen and Izana are co-directors of Starlight, an AI development company, and Izana also joined Kain’s political party around when Zen turned 20 (which was like…a year before he hired Obi and so between 5-6 years before the present). I also wanted to hint that like, ISN’T IT IFFY THAT THE PM HAS FAMILIAL CONNECTIONS TO THE PPL IN CHARGE OF MAKING ALL THE TECHNOLOGY THAT HAS THE POTENTIAL TO REALLY UP THE SURVEILLANCE EVERYWHERE AND STORE CRAZY AMOUNTS OF DATA WHILE ALSO LITERALLY TURNING PEOPLE INTO ROBOTS. TO CONTROL THEM. ESPECIALLY WHEN SAID PM IS A DICK WHO USES PPL’S LIVES AS LEVERAGE SO HE CAN HAVE CONTROL OVER RESEARCH IN OTHER AREAS OF SCIENCE IE CONSERVATION AND AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE IE THE THING THAT’S GONNA BASICALLY SAVE EVERYONE GIVEN FOOD SCARCITY IS A MENTIONED ISSUE IN CH2 :)))

The next scene is when Obi wakes up Shirayuki and she’s grappling with the fact her entire life has been fabricated. Obi is able to quickly say that she’s a person with thoughts, feelings and actions like everyone else because this is what he already thought of her in chapter 1. He cares about her and loves her dearly as a best friend, and as an honest person who’s trying to do good in the world. He believes she’s good in every way that he is bad. And he’s gutted that he’s been lying to her while she was risking everything to save him. And that’s also why he ran away with her, even though it meant she would know the truth and possibly hate him for it. But he knows she’s the kind of person who would rather the hard reality than the comfortable lie.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THIS PARTICULAR PART:

“I was in love with you and this entire time you’ve been lying to me?!” Shirayuki screams.Obi freezes, eyes wide as he stares at her. She…she what?

“That’s why Zen and Dr Gazelt looked at me like…like I was just pitiful.” She grits her teeth as tears begin to fall. “Don’t pretend you don’t know!”

“You weren’t supposed to love me,”

Shirayuki at this point believes everything is fabricated, right down to her feelings for Obi. But Obi saying she wasn’t supposed to love him means that those feelings developed while they were living together. I was actually super cautious about this because I was kind of afraid it’d be like, SHE’S TRANSCENDED TO HUMANITY BECAUSE SHE CAN FALL IN LOVE, but it’s more about her being a person because she can change and develop feelings without an instruction to. Which also applies to her running from Zen, saving Obi, and later deciding to escape Wistal. None of those things are good for the Wisterias, but because she’s designed to be able to think for herself and to value justice and Doing Good, she’s able to act in ways that they do not expect. In doing so, she’s able to reclaim her autonomy, so to speak.

But the same goes for Obi as well. The reason why Zen and Garrack look at Shirayuki Like That every time she talks about Obi being her best friend is because the Obi that is only in it for the money and doesn’t care about anything else is a lot more known to them than the best friend Obi. They don’t have much reason to believe Obi would risk it all for Shirayuki considering he’s the one who made her in the first place and has been lying to her the whole time (not to mention that Garrack also just feels sorry for her because of that). Yet he too runs away and saves her, just like she did for him. And tells her that who he is - what made him smile and laugh, his happiness when they were together - was not a lie even though his past was. To her, that’s what tells her that he really does care about her and that he’s changed since he first came to Wistal. And again, that is without instruction. Those feelings and the decisions that came out of them are also therefore his own.

He tells her his actual past too, so FINALLY, ANOTHER GLIMPSE OF THE OUTSIDE AND THIS TIME I WROTE ABOUT MORE PEOPLE. The idea that people left the wastelands for the mountains just to live a peaceful life was very much inspired by how so many young people’s dreams these days is like…to live in a cottage among nature and bake pies, or another form of very peaceful mundanity. I felt it would be the same in a world that feels so hopeless like in Vessels, where people had to sort of choose to either follow Kain’s father and his crew to live in the same society that failed them before the apocalypse, or stay in the wasteland and try to survive there. The rumours of regrowth were HUGE symbols of hope, including for Obi’s family, for those who just wanted that peaceful life.

Obi, unfortunately, is the only one who makes it. And he’s so heartbroken even when he’s cared for by Mukaze and his parents that he runs away back to the wasteland to become a scavenger. I didn’t really get to go very deep into it, but the wasteland is pretty much Trade Central. There’s no clear power structure, but everyone’s still trying to get ahead somehow. So it’s not Wistal, but it’s also not the total opposite of it either.And Obi spends his teen years/early adulthood in that environment, so it’s very much involved in the kind of person he became by the time he met Zen.

Mukaze and his family taking care of this child Obi who literally fell into their garden out of nowhere is kind of like…a communal care humans give each other that is not widely seen in other settings of this story but one that is really important? Like, humans working together and building each other up to survive after the apocalypse. So when Shirayuki shows that kind of care by saving him and Obi decides he wants to return it, Mukaze’s place is an image of something that’s within their reach when Shirayuki voices her idea to escape Wistal and All This Shit.