rapeface posted:

I really don't see how it makes the show pointless if the theme was how abusers delude everyone including themselves about their actions (if that even is the theme). I don't really see the central core of the show as the power of love.

Corte posted:

I'm not saying Switch isn't being influenced by David. There's the scene where he is preaching to his flock and sends out those good vibes, Switch is clearly affected by that. Otherwise I haven't seen anything to suggest David is controlling her directly. Keep in mind she came to him and clearly has her own motivations, it also just makes for a more interesting story. If you're saying the last scene was meant to show David exerting his power to control Switch I didn't read it that way. I didn't interpret their interaction as her refusing David, she certainly was questioning him about how he felt about murdering most of Division 3. I think the musical sequence was a creative device to bookend this arc of the season, reflect on how far the characters have come and lead us into the final stretch.

Megillah Gorilla posted:

The difference is between the diegetic and non-diegetic music/songs.

If it's background music, then whatever.

But if we're seeing people singing the song, then there's fuckery about.

Wafflecopper posted:

I wasn't referring to that, I meant in the time demon episode when he was saying (paraphrasing) "we have to go back again!" and she was saying "no I can't it's too much", he says "do I have to force you?" before they're interrupted by the demons.

Vernacular posted:

I think the musical sequences are most definitely Noah Hawley in part doing his thing and creating a weird Legion aesthetic, but these tropes of synchronization/choreography are just so prevalent and fit in too well with the show's overarching themes of power and control for us to outright shrug off the possibility that they directly signify psychic powers at work.

Also, just fyi David quite literally said something to the effect of "wake up my darling" before Switch emerged from that protective pod and relegated Farouk to the world beyond time. So yeah there's that, the druggy cult scene where she partakes in the blue stuff, the fact that she's "willing" to inflict self-harm to serve David's agenda, the bit where she appears as a wind-up robot...again, too much going on there to discount the possibility that David is just using his powers on her. Though I do agree that her backstory (with her time traveling dad and robot-phobia) is still a big question mark so who knows what's really going on with them (maybe Switch's pops is being trapped in time by the blue meanies beyond her powers, and David himself is being used to help him get free).

Nonetheless I do think the nature of being controlled directly via powers vs. indirectly via personal insecurities being taken advantage of etc. is one of the show's central contrasts, so yeah they're also being purposefully ambiguous about it at times. Like Farouk could very well be manipulating Division 3 through his powers, but he's also leveraging their very understandable fear of David in a strategic fashion. Lenny was mind-controlled on a couple occasions, but was also kind of indebted to David for rescuing her from Division 3. Etc, etc.

scary ghost dog posted:

idk if any of u have caught the extremely subtle drug use allegories and metaphors that are sprinkled very sparingly throughout the show, but imo, they point towards a theme of addiction, not abuse

JossiRossi posted:

I think the choice of David singing Peace Love and Understanding when Switch was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of another big time jump was him stating how he wants everyone around David to treat him, and Switch being gungho to go after the song I think is pretty supportive of this

DaveKap posted:

David was willing to just stay at Clockwork forever with Farouk in his head until he saw Syd. She's the most important catalyst of the series, beginning the rescue of David by Summerland and falling in love with David in the process. Most of the season plays out centered on how his relationship with Syd is helping him heal and how his powers allow Syd to feel the human connection she'd been missing her whole life because she couldn't touch other people. If that entire thing is a farce, then you're basically hallowing out the pumpkin of what was once a hopeful show and are instead presenting a spooky jack-o-lantern to make a statement about abuse using the carving knife of superpowered mutants with god-like powers. Yeah... no, that doesn't jive with me.
I hope you liked my awful metaphor.

ashpanash posted:

Falling in love with a manic pixie dream girl doesn't actually solve your deep seeded issues, cute as it may be.

Rocksicles posted:

I never said he was, i said it's a symptom of various, including that. Empathy is something you can lose from depression or never have at all. But David doesn't just have stock standard BPD, he literally collects multiple personalities all bouncing ideas off himself. He is Legion so, you can't pin everything going wrong with him on any particular thing. He's bascially cloud storage for hosed up thoughts and feelings.

ex post facho posted:

in all the drug use through the various animal themed vaporizers and huge rear end bongs - and actual pigs I guess lol - its never really shown how the smoke is generated, or what the drug(s) actually are.

for example the opening of s2 e6 shows a woman in the "wealthy evil david" timeline hitting a bigass bong filled with red liquid and smoke. almost every animal device only ever shows them adding the liquid, then smoke pouring out.

Corte posted:

I go back to what DaveKap stressed which is that if you choose to believe these characters have no, or little, agency and are directly under David's or Farouk's influence the story is far less interesting.

ded posted:

David was insane because of his mother. The shadow king kept it in check.

Notice the angriest boy alive doll she had long before the shadow king came along?

Shageletic posted:

Didn't David literally say "Don't make me force you-" before being interrupted a couple eps ago?

Nephthys posted:

Didn't Farouk spend quite a lot of time intentionally tormenting David by appearing to him as his horrible goblin form or as the angriest boy alive and scaring the poo poo out of him though?

Shageletic posted:

He has to have some sort of agency. It robs the story if a character isn't able to make any choices in it. And his choices are really, really bad.

That aside, plenty of people in irl have hosed up thoughts and feelings. It doesn't absolve you from acting on them tho.

General Dog posted:

I’m kind of still all in with David. It seems like the main reason his people have turned on him is that they’ve decided that he’s too powerful to be left, that his very existence threatens the world. It’s kind of like the argument that leftists offer for classicide against billionaires. The way I see it, this indicates not that these powerful men are too strong, but that the world is too fragile.

General Dog posted:

I’m kind of still all in with David. It seems like the main reason his people have turned on him is that they’ve decided that he’s too powerful to be left, that his very existence threatens the world. It’s kind of like the argument that leftists offer for classicide against billionaires. The way I see it, this indicates not that these powerful men are too strong, but that the world is too fragile.

DaveKap posted:

David was willing to just stay at Clockwork forever with Farouk in his head until he saw Syd. She's the most important catalyst of the series, beginning the rescue of David by Summerland and falling in love with David in the process. Most of the season plays out centered on how his relationship with Syd is helping him heal and how his powers allow Syd to feel the human connection she'd been missing her whole life because she couldn't touch other people. If that entire thing is a farce, then you're basically hallowing out the pumpkin of what was once a hopeful show and are instead presenting a spooky jack-o-lantern to make a statement about abuse using the carving knife of superpowered mutants with god-like powers. Yeah... no, that doesn't jive with me.
I hope you liked my awful metaphor.

scary ghost dog posted:

i think that since david can remake the world it means hes a good guy who can fix everyones problems. the people trying to stop him are bad because theyre just afraid of his strength. -little jimmys book report age 11

Zane posted:

a lot of the drama purposely turns on the simultaneous imperative and the impossibility of reaching an entirely coherent judgment of david's condition (sane/insane; inside/outside a conventional human construction reality) and upon that basis a judgment of his actions. if he's insane he can't be responsible. if he's sane he is responsible. does he understand and engage with reality in the same fundamental way that we do? if not: it's not clear we share a common moral language.

rapeface posted:

counterpoint if you're insane and you kill someone you still get removed from the general populace if you're a danger to others.

We can make a judgement on his morals and his actions because he is a character that someone has created/interpreted to tell a story with a point. If David is not responsible for his actions and cannot make choices then he's almost, by definition, not a character in the narrative sense and is only a representation of a concept for the real characters to choose how to react to.

You might say his actions are justified or understandable within the reality of the fiction, but we still get to make a judgement on his actions, because that's the point of fiction.

Zane posted:

a judgment only has decisive social relevance if it is equally applicable to every participant: which is premised on a basic intersubjective recognition of our shared human terms of existence; on a set of basic capacities and limitations. david is not so constituted: it isn't completely clear to him that the things in the world are separate from his own mind or that the world even has a basic time/space consistency and recurrence from one moment to the next. it isn't clear what claims other people exert upon him in these exceptional conditions. not when they might be a) illusions from his own craziness; b) from another timeline; c) manipulations from farouk; d) people he's consciously (re)created; e) completely independent.

Zane posted:

you are correct on some level that problematizing free will--more fundamentally: stable intersubjective reality--is a threat to the basic conditions of constructive social representation. but imaginative fiction has always dramatized this problem: the limitation that people--and characters modeled upon people--have always had in making their own internal drives, constructions, imperatives, consistent with and accountable to the external constraints/expectations of the social world. our judgments of david are fully warranted and we would be entirely justified in removing him from the human community. but our judgment is limited and confused by the weird metaphysics of the situation and it furthermore has no coercive power over him if he were real -- which might be another basic source of narrative drama.

rapeface posted:

Those "exceptional conditions" don't exist in a vacuum, you cannot look at them outside of a deliberate construction. And there's nothing that suggests that David believes his actions aren't affecting a real world. Even If he did think that, what's the purpose behind such a construction?

Suppose you take the view that David believes the current world he acts within isn't real because he can time travel. We, the audience, are told it is real (within the fiction) and that it does matter. We are informed this by the narrative structure, and we are told outright by Syd.

night slime posted:

He tells both Syd and Switch that it doesn't matter he killed people since he gets a do-over. Kinda more than "nothing to suggest" I think.

rapeface posted:

Look, if you like a story about the redemptive power of love better than a story of obsession and power abuse, that's fine, but that doesn't mean there aren't others that think the use of psychic powers as a metaphor for power abuse is a clever and cool.

rapeface posted:

rapeface posted:

Even if he really does believe that, we, the audience, know he's wrong.

DaveKap posted:

If that's what the story was supposed to be about, it should've indicated as such in the first season. Pulling people in with one theme then twisting it around one year later is a bad faith gesture on the part of the show runners unless it has a positive payoff. Especially when the linchpin of your power abuse metaphor is "what if someone reverses a brainwashing and gets called a rapist for it?"

DaveKap posted:

If that's what the story was supposed to be about, it should've indicated as such in the first season. Pulling people in with one theme then twisting it around one year later is a bad faith gesture on the part of the show runners unless it has a positive payoff. Especially when the linchpin of your power abuse metaphor is "what if someone reverses a brainwashing and gets called a rapist for it?"

DaveKap posted:

Considering we've seen at least 5 or 7 alternate timelines during this series, I'm not so sure.

DaveKap posted:

If that's what the story was supposed to be about, it should've indicated as such in the first season. Pulling people in with one theme then twisting it around one year later is a bad faith gesture on the part of the show runners unless it has a positive payoff. Especially when the linchpin of your power abuse metaphor is "what if someone reverses a brainwashing and gets called a rapist for it?"

Jonah Galtberg posted:

Italics and boldface

rapeface posted:

I know, I was pretty pissed when I found out he was a ghost for the entire movie.

Chokes McGee posted:

Yeah, that's why I bailed on the show at the end of Season 2.

rapeface posted:

If you think all other characters in the current timeline don't matter except to be empty vessels for the protagonist to act upon then idk what to tell you dude.

Chadzok posted:

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "positive payoff". I'm enjoying season three, is my enjoyment a positive payoff, or do you mean a positive outcome for a character or something?

quote:

The show has exploited the viewer in the same way David may have exploited Syd.