#reason of his ultimate trauma is in close proximity and is a direct threat not only to him but everyone

[elfelt-valentine]

actually i am going to talk about the last post but thats what getaway is to me except he was never even given a chance of having a good life and im getting emotional about it ok

[mobius-prime]

209. Sonic the Hedgehog #141

Return to Angel Island (Part 4): Ultimate Hero

Writer: Karl Bollers Pencils: Jon Gray Colors: Jason Jensen

So things are… bad. Hunter is back and has a shiny new weapon to boot, which appears to vaporize anyone in his path. Sonic gives Knuckles a ride back to the echidna refugee camp at high speed, with Knuckles still doubting his ability to even be able to help without his Chaos powers, while the refugees flee Hunter's attacks. Remington tries to insist that he wants to remain behind to protect the Master Emerald at all costs, but Archimedes tries to dissuade him, instead trying to convince everyone to fall back to the emerald's chamber to defend it more directly. Finitevus isn't interested in Archimedes' pleas, but they're interrupted by the approach of Hunter.

No, Remington! I was honestly so upset by this, as Remington is one of my favorite recurring characters of the comic. Finitevus doesn't look too concerned, though… Archimedes meets Lara-Le, Wynmacher, and Saffron in the Master Emerald's chamber, informing them of the fate of the two outside, and they get ready to defend the emerald with their lives - but just as Hunter breaches the door, Sonic and Knuckles show up to help with the defense. Hunter throws some kind of fast-moving mechanical ball towards Sonic to keep him occupied and out of the way, and Knuckles charges in only to be once more overcome with agony from his proximity to the Master Emerald. Outside in the main cavern, the other heroes return from Dingo City only to be horrified at the devastation they see in the camp. Lien-Da becomes enraged, blaming Locke for "foisting the emerald" upon the Dark Legion, but Julie-Su has finally had enough and gets in her half-sister's face, yelling that she willingly chose to accept the emerald because she wanted the power it would bring her. You go, Julie-Su!

And right there we have the true reason behind all her hatred and vitriol. Of course these things always come down to daddy issues. Still, it's the first time we've ever really seen any true emotion from Lien-Da, apart from her usual scheming and power grabs, and it adds a depth to her character that she's been lacking thus far. Back in the Hidden Palace, Lara-Le rushes to Knuckles' side as he slumps to the ground, and Hunter approaches gleefully, raising his weapon for a death blow. However, a sudden pink light engulfs Knuckles, who rises into the air and begins to crackle with energy. He's overjoyed, announcing himself to the room not as Knuckles, but as… Super Knuckles! That's right, his Chaos powers have returned, and he's ready to stop Hunter's rampage, grabbing him and bursting through the roof of the palace.

Oh yeah - Knuckles straight up kills Hunter. It's one of the very few times we actually see one of the heroes of this comic intentionally end someone's life - but I think in this case, considering what kind of person he is and what he's done, killing Hunter is entirely justified for the greater good. As he descends back down to earth, the surviving echidnas all begin chanting "Avatar!" while the remaining dingoes retreat in a blind panic. Lien-Da is furious to see her hold over the refugees slipping, but Knuckles and his friends are clearly excited to see his Chaos powers return, with Archimedes revealing that he was certain that all Knuckles needed to reawaken them was to remain in close proximity to the Master Emerald long enough for it to power him back up. However, I'm actually not so on board with him regaining his powers. I really liked the dynamic of Knuckles losing the very thing that made him so special, and having to start from basics once again, learning how to fight without a superpowered edge. We've seen several different stories where Sonic lost his own super speed, but always got it back in the end - how interesting would it be to see a story where the hero never recovered their powers? And Knuckles, given his backstory, is the perfect candidate for such a plot - he never asked for his abilities, and they clearly brought him great pain and trauma as they developed. This would be an amazing direction to take his character arc, with Knuckles torn between the life he's always known, and the chance to start anew. After all, while he developed his latent Chaos powers without having a say in the matter, and despite the pain they often brought him, he did become accustomed to the effect they had on his life in a way, learning to control them to some degree and finding out more and more about why he had them. But the circumstances of his birth also ensured that he wouldn't have any real say in his own destiny, and this was always clearly troubling to him. Removing his powers for good would have put him in a fascinating position where on the one hand he would obviously be upset at losing such a great source of power, one which he's been told is his birthright, but on the other the loss of this power would leave him much freer to decide his own path from here, rejecting the path others have set out for him and discovering who "Knuckles" could be without others trying to define who he was for him. I don't know, I just think there's a huge missed opportunity here to explore more in depth who Knuckles could ultimately end up being without his Chaos powers being his most defining feature.

But alas, Knuckles has his powers back once more, and he's fulfilled the prophecy of the Ancient Walkers to boot. Eggman contacts the heroes via hologram once more, claiming that now that he knows where the Master Emerald is hidden he'll be there straightaway to steal it, but Sonic merely crushes the communicator and Locke enlists the help of the Legion once more to move the Master Emerald someplace else. Knuckles asks after Remington, but Archimedes sadly informs him that he and Finitevus were both casualties of Hunter's rampage. Lien-Da curtly tells Knuckles there's no time to mourn friends right now… and then quietly, when no one can hear her, adds "…or family." Wait, what? So, this is something that has actually been hinted at here and there for a while now, but so vaguely that one might not pick up on the hints unless they were already in the know. Remington's father is actually Kragok, which would make Lien-Da his aunt! This was never outright confirmed in any canon material until the Sonic Comic Encyclopedia many years from now, but I figured I'd go ahead and explain it right here, since, well, Remington ain't around these parts anymore. But yeah, that's why Lien-Da has always acted slightly weird around Remington. Anyway, Knuckles begins to say goodbye to his father, but Locke sharply asks him what he's intending now, seeming very upset at the idea of Knuckles leaving.

I love this. It's about freaking time we finally saw some serious conflict between Knuckles and Locke. For too long Knuckles has always dutifully followed whatever his father told him to do, but now, with a year away from the island under his belt to give him some real perspective, for the first time he's standing up for what he believes in instead of just doing whatever the Brotherhood wants, and Locke is clearly feeling threatened by this display of independence. To be fair, I can see Locke's point, as the island is clearly still quite devastated by Eggman's occupation and they could use someone like Knuckles to help them clean up, but still, I do think Knuckles has the right idea, as taking down Eggman for good seems like a better idea than just cleaning up after him - pulling up the weed by the roots, you know? Knuckles does seem quite sad as his father stalks away and vanishes through a warp ring, but he merely says his goodbyes to his mother and Wynmacher before joining Sonic and the others to head back to Knothole. For now, the day is saved, and everything seems fine and dandy - but what's this? It seems something quite disturbing is happening in Eggman's main base…

This. Is. Horrific. Say hello to the Egg Grapes, everybody, because this isn't the last time we'll be seeing them! We can see that apparently, these things have three functions: "Energy Drain," "Mind Eraser," and "Toxic Infusion," none of which are explained but all of which sound terrifying. We also get to look at some of the poor unfortunate souls trapped inside the pods. A few are just background characters from previous issues, but others are far more heartwrenching. We can see the three other surviving fire ants, minus Archimedes, meaning Archimedes is likely the last of the council now. We can also see, of course, Remington in front there, which again just makes me sad as I love Remington. However, perhaps the worst one is hidden in the back: Simon. As in, Simon, Julie-Su's adoptive father. Floren-Ca is also in there somewhere, just not shown on panel, which means that without even being aware of it, Julie-Su has now become a true orphan. It's incredibly tragic, as she'd just begun to get to know her own family after being separated from them for so long, but the island was invaded shortly afterward, and a year later, they're just… gone, being tortured to death inside one of Eggman's awful experimental devices without Julie-Su ever getting a chance to say goodbye. This is, I think, the moment where I realized just how truly terrifying comic Eggman is. Anime Eggman is hardly a threat at all, very much the type of villain who's more invested in their fights with their heroic nemesis than in actually taking over the world. And Eggman from the games, while he is genuine about his plans for world domination, has never actually committed mass murder, at least that we've seen. Sure, he's used small innocent animals as living batteries, but never actually mass tortured half the populace of an entire island just for the hell of it. This is where the comic begins to get truly dark, as we realize just what a terrifying megalomaniac we're facing here. No more silly jokes, no more half-assed villainy - Eggman is a monster, and the Freedom Fighters have to take him down for good lest he destroy the entire world.

Mobius 25 Years Later: Scenario

Writer: Ken Penders Pencils: Steven Butler Colors: Jason Jensen

Oh, but, y'know, we could also just jump forward into a boring future where everything is fine apart from reality beginning to tear itself apart. Granted, this issue's story actually has more real plot than the rest of the entries put together, though also granted, that isn't much. We're finally going to address that whole "collapse of spacetime" thing, as Knuckles leads Sonic to Rotor and Cobar's hidden laboratory to discuss the issue. Cobar is shocked that Knuckles knew the location of his lab, and Knuckles casually mentions that he likes keeping tabs on Lien-Da's favorite scientist wait excuse me what?! So all this time, Cobar has been in Lien-Da's employ, and we just never heard about it until now? Why are you so mistrustful of Lien-Da and yet totally trust the word of her favorite scientist when it comes to all this world-ending stuff? Ugh, I feel like I've spent far too much time and energy pointing out the many, many plot holes of this arc, so we're just going to move on like everything is fine. Rotor and Cobar explain the whole shebang to Sonic, while we get a short and useless scene of Julie-Su and Sally being unable to sleep and reiterating once again their worries for their husbands, and when we flip back to Sonic he's shocked to hear that he's the cause behind the acceleration of entropy on Mobius!

He tries to argue that it might have been the Dark Legion or someone else who had done a lot of zone-hopping in the past, but the two scientists insist that their experiments show that it was his fault. I really don't see how arguing over fault is going to help, especially when Sonic had literally no idea that actions he took when he was fifteen were going to someday contribute to the end of the world twenty-five years after the fact, but eh, again, we never claimed this story made any sense. Knuckles and Sonic leave, with Knuckles telling Rotor and Cobar to find a solution and fast, and as soon as they're gone a panel slides open in the wall to reveal who else but Lien-Da, who has listened in on the whole thing and is very curious about why exactly Cobar has been hiding all of this from her. Hmm, suspicious! Do you think we're finally about to get an answer about what treacherous deeds Lien-Da has been planning this whole time? Ah, c'mon, this is a Penders story, of course not!

[thehorrorofbiopolitics-blog]

Part V: Children of Men

As Huang discusses, the genre of science fiction horror grounds viewers in an affective anxiety that binds them to the symbolic essence of society by creating a threat that exists as impossibly outside, and definitively inhuman. In effect, the affective anxiety of sci-fi horror serves to render as other that which threatens to leverage the fragility of the human subject. However, what changes when this monster, this Other, emerges from within the human subject themself? How might the affective anxiety that occupies the realm of speculative horror operate differently when the precarious destruction of the agential human subject manifests not as a Thing but a state of being? This section of our project attends to this provocation in the context of Alfonso Cuaron’s film Children of Men.

Based on P.D. James’ 1992 novel by the same name, Cuaron’s 2006 adaptation of Children of Men takes place in dystopian London in the year 2027. Two decades of species-wide infertility with no known cause has led humanity to spiral into relative chaos. As a televised piece of political propaganda shown on a city bus declares, “The world has collapsed [and] only Britain soldiers on,” thus revealing that the now heavily militarized Britain represents a final bastion for humanity. As such, society devolves into a state of exception wherein the state disregards law in favor of sovereign power. The main conflict of the film emerges from this hyper-militarization and state of exception as the thousands of refugees and undocumented immigrants who arrive at the city’s borders en-masse are brutalized by guards and locked in cages. This poses a distinct problem for the film’s main anti-hero, Theo Faron. At the request of his former wife, Julian Taylor, Theo hopes to safeguard a secretly pregnant, immigrant woman named Kee against the government and a predatory anarchist group--the Fishes--as she attempts to reach Tomorrow, a boat owned by the utopian Human Project whose main goal is to save humanity from extinction. Thus, the film’s protagonists must navigate a politically-charged nightmare world where infertility and military occupation underscore the precarity of all human life. In Cuaron’s dystopian vision of tomorrow, the horror of no-future is seemingly juxtaposed by the miracle of childbirth. Despite the potential limits of Cuaron’s imagined reproductive futurity, this project hopes to critically interrogate the spectre of birth as it operates within the affective realms of horror, precarity, and large-scale trauma. Through an analysis of gore, violence, and abject subjecthood, we hope to illuminate the affective threads that underscore the film’s distinctly biopolitical message.

The Endriago Subject

In Sayak Valencia’s Gore Capitalism, she defines endriago subjects as those who use necroempowerment (the use of violence to achieve status and power) to confront and change their circumstances, and subsequently, legitimize underground economies, which can eventually have an ever-growing influence. The Fish, an underground anarchist movement in Children of Men, and their revolutionary goals are clear examples of necropolitics and the endriago subject in that they have reinterpreted biopower and the capacity for upending it based significantly on the logic of a “warlike clash of forces,” (Valencia 211). The physical bodies of these dystopian dissidents and ungovernable individuals are now those which hold power over the individual body and over the general population as well. The Fish have been able to create a power parallel to the State without subscribing fully to the doctrine of the state, while they simultaneously dispute its power to subjugate groups of endriago subjects. If we are to analyze endriago subjects who participate in the criminal economy in accordance with the rules of the market – rather than how the media portrays them to the masses – they are, in actuality, perfectly legitimate entrepreneurs who strengthen the economy; “violence and criminal activities are no longer seen as an ethically dystopian path, but as strategies available to everyone; violence comes to be understood as a tool to acquire money that allows individuals to purchase both commercial good and social status,” (Valencia 74).

For the necropolitical, the body is essential because it serves as a critical commodity; the body’s care, preservation, freedom and general maintenance are sold to the public as products, thus transforming the body into a profit-making commodity. Through the clear vulnerability of human subjecthood and corporeality in Children of Men, the market has set out to capitalize on life itself through this idea of endangered corporeality, thus turning the body into a profitable commodity. This is seen in the way that Kee is treated by The Fish after Julian, her pacifist shepherd, dies. The new leaders of the Fish are intent on keeping Kee and her baby in their camp as a tool for their reach for power over the state. Thus, Kee’s pregnant body is no longer her own, but rather it is viewed as a political tool for refugee/Fish suffrage by those who are not a part of the elite. War and violence ensues around her as she attempts to break free from the Fish in order to make it to safety with The Human Project. She does not wish to serve as a symbol and is more focused on her well-being rather than be used for political gain. The human population, in the film, is constantly in close proximity to death, forcing humanity to renegotiate death’s role in the context of their society in order to force themselves (the endriago subjects) into the discourse, thus constantly perpetuating the gore and violence that takes place around them.

Gore

Gore as a structure of affect is seen clearly in Children of Men when Theo Faron’s estranged ex-wife Julian Taylor is brutally murdered. Julian, the non-violent leader of the Fish movement in the beginning of the film, represents the potential for a pacifist future--an imagined resistance that does not rely on the stacking up of bodies for political power. Her death in the movie ultimately takes place as she attempts to secretly transport Kee, a pregnant African refugee, to people she has made contact with at The Human Project in order to assure the safety of her and her unborn child. According to Julian’s plan,nce Kee was received by The Human Project she was poised to serve as a symbol of hope; her protection and the protection of her baby was to represent the antithesis of the violence and gore of the world around them. As they are driving to safety, however, Julian suddenly gets shot in the throat by a group of unnamed rebels that emerge suddenly out of the forest they are driving along. Her death is bloody and violent, and somehow, she is the only person in their car who ends up dead. The other characters in the scene, including Theo and other members of Julian’s coalition, witness this violence and are horrified. Covered in blood and broken glass, Julian’s cohort attempts to revive her to no avail. This death is an important moment in the film. As it occurs at the beginning of the film, Julian’s gory death represents the death of a pacifist futurity – which inherently signifies the end of the anti-violence movement in the Fish group. Later in the movie, it is shown that members of the Fish were the ones who organized the hit on Julian; once she is dead, a man named Luke – who was part of organizing the hit – is elected to take her place as the leader of the Fish. He states his reason for killing Julian being that he didn’t believe that the movement would be successful without the use of violence against the government and people in power – thus reaffirming the necropolitical order of things and reasserting women’s positions on the outskirts of gore capitalism and, mirroring the gender disparity that takes place within the formal state.

Violence as Control

The importance of systematic violence as a means of control within Children of Men is exhibited by the creation of camps and cages by the government as a means of biopower over already subjugated subjects. The issue of “homeland security” (Trimble 249) is used as a justification by the government to enact the violent militarization of the state whilst spreading national fear – regarding refugees immigrating the UK – which furthers the biopolitical power of the state and allows the state to deem whose life is worth saving while others are eventually thrown out of the country to fend for themselves. In the film, there is a certain level of indifference shown by those who are a part of the elite – and therefore the state – as represented by Theo when he walks past one of the cages full of immigrants. This is in part due to the way the mass media has clearly framed fugees, who are typically racialized by brown people (specifically Arab speaking people) which has made it exceedingly difficult for those who are privileged enough to be a part of the elite to perceive, accept and act in reality – or in other words it has made ally-ship seem counterproductive to national safety. Violence is a key part of contemporary capitalism which means that “both the media and the government (and its representatives) are controlled by corporate interests. Thus we find evidence of how the media is interconnected with the State and obeys direct orders from it in order to skew the information that is broadcast to the public, buttressing consumerist, acritical and silent imagos” (Valencia 242). The use of concentration camps in Children of Men highlights the use of pain/violence as a political tool and the commodification of the marginalized bodies in the deregulated neoliberal market.

Children of Men was released in 2006 and is supposed to take place in 2027. The near futurity of this film adds to its gore in that it instills a panic in the audience. Not only does it instill fear, but it leads the audience to think about preventative measures to keep a crisis like this from happening while placing continued importance and focus on fertility as a means of global power. Children of Men thus produces affective anxiety as a result of narrative trauma. The trauma depicted in the film occurs not interpersonally or individually, but at the level of the human population. The trauma of mass sterility and infertility requires the audience to confront the possibility of a futureless world. At one point early on in the film, Theo asks his cousin, a wealthy man who preserves damaged, yet historically relevant works of art, what keeps him going, since “one hundred years from now there won’t be any sad fuck to look at any of this.” To this, his cousin replies, “You know what it is, Theo--I just don’t think about it.” As demonstrated through this exchange, within this moment of mass trauma, past, present, and future become one as human infertility renders the past unmemorable, the present unlivable, and the future incomprehensible. Thus, this traumatic reckoning operates through affective anxiety that urges viewers to reconsider the normative teleological ordering of things that guarantees, through the figure of the child, a better tomorrow.