#love love love existentialism as BOTH a horror AND a source of hope and freedom

[braintapes]

I'm deeply fascinated by takes that are very staunchly against the WAU because on the one hand, I completely understand the revulsion. The disgust. The WAU’s creations are, to human sensibilities, nightmare creatures only barely recognizable as 'once human.' The WAU's creations and modifications spit and trample on human memory as we generally think of it.

On the other hand...Humanity is so thoroughly obliterated in SOMA's setting that I don't think it's enough to kill the WAU on those grounds. Is what it's doing fucked up? Yes! But is it ultimately that different from the survival instinct of any animal? Is it that different from human instinct, to want to preserve and continue life at all costs? When it's what human hands created the WAU to do?

Humans are such a tiny proportion of all life. We're practically a footnote in every way to the planet Earth in terms of timescale. When you zoom out, the WAU strikes me as akin to, say, the first single-celled organism in the primordial soup.

It's a different form of life. A new form of life, perhaps. One that could grow and evolve over time in ways we can't imagine.

Is that so wrong? Who are we, the last echoing fragment of humankind, to completely deny that life, simply on the grounds that it isn't us?

I think about the Think Tank from Fallout: New Vegas. They were human, once. In terms of physicality, though, they’ve existed as brains in jars for such a LONG ASS TIME that they’re repulsed and confused by human bodies. They find them strange and inferior, because they’ve been themselves so long that what they are is completely natural to them. From their point of view, they are the most evolved form of life, and humans are just another kind of animal.

Even though they themselves are still human brains.

I think that fear - the fear that we, humans, will be dethroned from our positions on high as the 'rulers' of the planet - is an extremely interesting one to play with. There’s a lot to explore when you unravel that thread. I think about humancentrism, how we relate to other species etc. You could also turn the macro-scale into the micro-scale, the personal. It’s the same fear a parent has when their kid grows up into a being completely alien to the parent’s understanding and which has made you, the parent, obsolete.

The world moves on past you, beyond you. Something greater than you will take your place and you will be washed away in the streams of time. It’s horrifying! It feels as fundamental and primal a fear to me as fear of death.

SOMA plays with this in such a fascinating way that I’ve never seen a game tackle elsewhere. Humanity is almost, ALMOST absolutely irrelevant in its world. The game is a death march, a funerary procession for an entire world and entire species. It asks you, who are you, in all of this? What meaning do you make of it all?

It asks a ridiculous amount of questions, some in plain text, some in subtext. But they’re always personal questions. SOMA doesn’t need your answer to get you to the next level. It simply asks you and leaves you to reflect on your answer. It’s a beautiful use of the concept of ‘choices’ in gaming that I love.

Your choices don’t affect the in-game world. Whether you kill the WAU or not, you don’t get to see the far-reaching effects of that choice. It doesn’t matter. You, the player. You, Simon. You simply won’t be there to see those effects. All you can do is look within yourself, imagine yourself in these worlds, and ask yourself what feels right to you.

SOMA doesn’t have correct answers, either. It would be easy to wave that off as trying to seem deep without having to come down concretely on anything but I don’t believe it’s done half-assedly here. The game gives ONE concrete answer about what it thinks of the human condition:

You will always strive for hope. In the most absurd, almost comedically horrific conga line of atrocity thrown your way, you will cling to hope with bleeding fingers and chase it to the very, very end. Even when that hope is so fleeting so as to be almost nothing at all. This, SOMA says, is the fundamental nature of humans.

...And I’m just now realizing this post got waaaay away from my original point. On the macro-scale, the WAU is a progenitor of life imo. We have no way of knowing what kind or how it will grow or even if it will survive. On the micro-scale, it’s almost irrelevant to us, our journey, Simon’s journey. The choice to kill it, then, comes down to revenge. Do you spite it for what it’s done? Is what it’s done so horrific you want to stab it back?

I understand why people would. Personally, though, I can’t bring myself to cut it down when it carries such potential with it.