#takeshi x reil

[shipcestuous]

Altered Carbon

I have finally finished Altered Carbon. The last time I discussed it I was only on episode 5. The brother/sister relationship between Takeshi and Rei is an entirely different one by the end of the season, wow. 

I have a lot of asks about it (in addition to the ones I already answered).  I apologize for making you guys wait!

Massive spoilers! And for anyone who hasn’t seen Altered Carbon, I’ll just say that the brother/sister relationship is definitely...suggestive, particularly from the sister’s side of things.

Anon #1:

Hi, did you watch "Altered Carbon"? There is a very special Brother-Sister-Realtionship in it..

@asweetdeception:

Idk if you've finished Altered Carbon or not but WOW the Rei/Tak relationship is very interesting to say the least and honestly the more you get into the later episodes the more the subtext gets stronger to the point that for me personally it felt more than subtext. It's a hell of a ride. 

Anon #2:

Have you finished watching Altered Carbon? Cause if you think it was shippy between Takeshi and Rei in the flashbacks well...[spoilers!!] she comes back to him and it gets really intense! In the end you'll see how obsessive her love for her brother is, what she would do for him and how far she went to eliminate any other person close to him! My mum caught the last episode with me and thought the whole time they were lovers! (It didn't help that Rei went into Ortega's body and 'flirted' with Tak)

Anon #3:

Has the Netflix series Altered Carbon come up yet? Both the show and the sibling relationship it centers around aren't my cup of tea--the former too graphic and the latter too twisted--but I thought it deserved mention nevertheless. 

The basic conceit of the show is that at some undetermined point in the future humans learned to transfer consciousness seamlessly from one body to another. Those wealthy enough to afford a constant stream of new bodies are immortal, and everyone else is dust beneath their divine feet. (What follows involves spoilers, so do be warned.) The main character, Tak, and his little sister, Rei, grew up in an abusive home; their father killed their mother, and when it looked like he was going to do the same to Rei, Tak killed him, shooting at the base of the skull to prevent any attempt to retrieve his consciousness. He was offered a pardon if he would join the military, but he refused until they promised to find a good home for Rei. 

Years later, he happened to be on a mission to seize a cartel stronghold, and discovered that the recruiter had lied to him. Rei had not gone to a good home, but had been sold in slavery to the cartel. He immediately turned his gun on his squad and she on her fellow criminals, allowing them both to slip off into the night together. There they ran into a resistance organisation; she didn't want to join, wishing that it could just be the two of them, as it had once been, but he convinced her. Then he fell  in love with the resistance leader, something she found unforgivable. She responded by betraying the resistance and ensuring that only she and he would be able to escape. In fact, no one escaped. She was resurrected and paid off handsomely for turning the others in but lost track of him in the process. 

Two hundred years later, Tak finds himself resurrected in an unfamiliar body to perform a very particular task for one of the immortals. She turns out to be the villain of the series,  having become one of the immortals. She spent almost two centuries trying to find out what happened to his archived consciousness, and then engineered an intricate web of plots and gambits to convince another, more powerful immortal to use his influence to get Tak resurrected. She eventually reveals herself to him and tries to get him to trust her, but he quickly pieces together the discrepancies in her story and his memory of the rebellion's fall to realize that she had  betrayed them. 

As you might expect, he does not react calmly, accusing her of having been corrupted by her longevity and become everything they fought against. She points out that he was the one that had wanted to join the rebellion; she just stuck it out because she couldn't leave him. She insists that all the morally questionable and outright despicable things she has done have been to ensure that, when she finally managed to bring him back, they would be able to spend "all our tomorrows together" (direct quote). He responds by initiating his own intricate web of plots and gambits to render her mortal again and, he hopes, redeem her. 

It doesn't end well, unfortunately. He destroys her backups, and they have a big dramatic sword-fight on a crashing airship (it makes more sense in context), but when she seems to have him beaten, she pleads with him to come with her to the escape pods. He gains the advantage, and she tries to bargain with him, instead, saying that, just before she died, she made a backup of the consciousness of the rebel leader he'd fallen in love with, and that she'll give it to him if he'll promise not to destroy her. He refuses, which suggests to me that he cares more for his sister's possible redemption than his lover's possible resurrection. 

She then changes her tune, begging him to shoot her in the stack; she'd prefer real death to being put in cold storage. Fade to black, gunshot sound effect. I was sure that either he was going to shoot himself in the stack, too, or else that there would be a reveal that he had just shot her in the head or something. Alas. In the ending, his stack is recovered from the airship's wreckage, and hers is not. When someone asks him what he's going to do next, he tells her that he knows "she" is still alive, and he's going to find her. The visuals make it clear he's talking about the rebel leader, but my headcanon is that he's talking about Rei. Regardless, however  twisted by abandonment, jealousy, and detachment she became, even as she began to treat non-immortals like insignificant playthings, despising everyone she'd ever known in her past life, the one thing she never let go of was her overwhelming NEED for her big brother. And did I mention that she taunts him at one point by uploading her consciousness into his love interest's body and trying to seduce him? He figures it out before it goes anywhere, but still!

Anon #4:

In Netflix's series Altered Carbon the main character has a sister that he is super close to. They are constantly looking out for and protecting one another. Rei, the sister, even gets jealous when her brother gets attached to or falls in love with other women. I don't want to give away too many spoilers but there are quite a few scenes, especially in the later episodes, where one can sense that her love for her brother isn't entirely sisterly.

Anon #5:

I really need to recommend Altered Carbon for siblings Takeshi and Rei. The big episode that reveals their back story is season 1 episode 7, and there is a LOT of drama and emotional moments to unpack. They're not canon sibcest, but I think even a casual viewer can see that everything Rei does is about trying to be with/stay with/protect her big brother. And the rest of the series ain't bad too. ;)

Thank you all for writing excellent recommendations about this relationship. 

I don’t think we can call it more than subtext, but the subtext is very very strong, and it has to be intentional. There’s just too much of it to dismiss it as acting or writing “fumbles” (that’s the television tropes term). 

I have so many thoughts and feelings that it’s hard to know where to start. Obviously the flashbacks to when they are kids are so sweet. Their relationship was so sweet and so pure before they were separated. And it’s so tragic what happened - their abusive father, the death of their mother, what Takeshi had to do (kill their father) in order to save them, and how that act actually meant their separation. Takeshi’s choice to join the military is understandable, but Rei feeling abandoned is also entirely justified. Even though Takeshi thought she was getting a good home, he still chose to leave her and I don’t think that wound of hers ever healed. 

It really seems like fate that brought them back together. I love how quickly they turned on their respective sides to choose each other. Takeshi had been living a life of purpose - he had missions and accomplishments that kept him busy - while Rei had been infinitely lonelier. Still, she’s pretty quick to forgive him, all told. 

I would have liked to have seen them spend at least a couple of nights alone in the forest before the envoys found them! 

I don’t want to say that Tak was  “in the wrong” - he was free to choose to stay with the envoys, to die for their mission. But he did not take the time to understand Rei’s position. She didn’t care about their mission - she just wanted a home and a family with him. We know that he loves her, she knows that he loves her - but he wasn’t showing her. And then he becomes preoccupied with Quell. 

I do think it was suggestive that Rei was so angry and hurt when she came upon Tak and Quell having sex in the forest but I also can understand, from a sisterly point of view, how that would have hurt. Here he is putting her (Rei’s) life at risk for a mission she doesn’t care about just because he’s hot for the leader. And yet again something is coming between them. 

I’m not sure if it was clarified by the story but I think Rei had already made her deal at that point - however, I’m sure she already sensed the romance budding between Tak and Quell. It’s interesting that Rei chose to kill Quell in person in a knife fight. Did she spare her from the virus because she knew she could use Quell’s stack as a bargaining chip with Tak, or was that just how the plan ended up working out? 

I think it’s really significant how much we see Tak thinking about Rei in those first episodes. When he has that vision of her sitting there talking to him, and then that scene when he’s in the shower remembering their childhood. 

For her it has been 250 years since last she saw him, and that was just for a handful of years - they had their long separation before that. That’s a major testament to how she feels about him. How obsessed she is with him. She obviously cared a lot about her status and her immortality and her wealth and businesses, but she may have started out doing that truly and 100% with the purpose of getting Tak back. She knew she would need money and influence in order to get him out of prison. 

She was truly horrible by the time we catch up with her. But I keep reminding myself that she grew up in the Yakuza. She was raised by her terrible father and her “weak” mother, she was spared from that by Tak’s violence, then she was sold into slavery and raised by gangsters. I don’t mean that this excuses her actions, I just mean that those were the values she grew up with - violence, survival, crime, abuse. And it seems like all the “meths” are horrible in their own ways - the message seems to be that that comes about from wealth and immortality - so she’s got that on top of what she already had. I think Tak understood that, which was why he had hope of saving her, why he still wanted to try and save her. 

All of Rei’s talk about doing everything for him, wanting the two of them to be together forever, not letting anything get between them, etc. etc. etc. was all pretty suggestive. Then we have, of course, the infamous scene of Rei in Ortega’s body. She might have been sussing out Ortega and Tak’s relationship a little bit (again, that’s also suggestive), but I think we can all agree that wasn’t “sisterly”, and who knows how far it would have gone if he hadn’t figured it out. 

She was fierce to the end. He knew he would survive no matter what because he was double stacked but I still love that he died with her, holding her in his arms. Although I wish Quell hadn’t shown up right then to ruin the brother/sister moment. 

I find it hard to believe that all of Rei’s backups are gone. Someone that careful who had survived that long wouldn’t put all of her eggs in one or two baskets. We might not see her again on the show but in my mind she’s out there. So I really like the headcanon that he’ll be out looking for her. And as for Quell, if she believed in her own philosophy, she wouldn’t want to be spun back up, would she? Dead is dead? Isn’t that what she was fighting for?

I’m sure I forgot lots of things. It was really cool to see brother = hero and sister = complicated villain as the main story. We saw that recently in Thor but obviously there were a lot more emotions here and suggestions of incest.