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  1. The Matrix (motif)
  2. The Matrix

The Matrix and gender

  1. isekai story as queer metaphor -> has been applied to Wizard of Oz as well as The Matrix. [1]
    should there be a swatch for queer culture? even just on the "elements" layer of the stylesheet? I feel like all the propositions about queer identity which are distinctly neutral are a bit insulted by always being shown in blue or sometimes in charcoal when I've also started casting that very negatively. I don't think the association with Existentialism or anarchism means it's bad to be LGBT+ or to create things that primarily revolve around that — it's not bad to create a gay nightclub or a lesbian romance book or a circle of Deltarune fans just because those things "aren't Marxist" or whatever. this can get a little confusing because while it's pretty obvious to say it's not against Marxism to be Chinese or North Korean, LGBT+ identity has always been very political and has always been this weird sort of tiny national identity inherently created through the practice of anarchism, as if just like you need to read a Liberal-republican civics book to successfully be United-States you have to read an anarchist civics book to successfully be LGBT+. I think a philosophical tradition code is appropriate to reconcile this weird blend of identity and culture which is fine and intertwined politics that come along with it.
  2. LGBT+ tradition (arts, nonfiction works describing identities, etc) / LGBTQIA+ tradition -> the concept of a philosophical tradition of queer culture and queer art which includes but is absolutely not limited to academic queer theory. this Item exists basically so queer art can have a unique color swatch.
  3. The Matrix created a rift between Black people and trans people [2] -> this was brought up by anarchist types but I feel like the significance of it is different from what they imply it is. I think this is evidence that Media Representation doesn't necessarily bring people together as much as brings some people together and creates new forms of alienation for others.
  4. The internet fueled transgender rights movements by immediately connecting transgender people's Lived Experiences across space [3] -> this is simultaneously depressingly anarchist and very cool. it's this general kind of idea that led me to the Lattice model
    which provides a little insight into exactly why this movie is co-opted by reactionaries. they're getting Latticed together way across space in secret underground passages, "just like" transgender people. and yeah, that makes it quite hypocritical they so often try to act like trans people Latticing together is some kind of virus brainwashing people and corrupting the nation. you'd think that if that were true the exact same thing would be true for them.
  5. the spoon is solid until you know it's simulated / the spoon can be bent only when you know it's a simulation [4] -> this is a statement about shovel dreams, is what this is. I've... always had a bit of a problem with the concept you can just change the virtual shovel and the shovel goes away. clearly it makes sense for gender but when you write a whole poststructuralist text detached from that context it starts to make a whole lot less sense.
  6. Gender concepts don't have to refer to anything physical as much as to themselves (Baudrillard, Stryker) [5] -> this is one of the connecting threads between existentialism and structuralist linguistics, thus leading into the later periods of the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition.
    note: I think this one is neat. it's one of those things that's broadly right even if it's right for slightly incorrect reasons. the action of populations against each other sorts individuals into genders, racial groupings, and so forth; under the model of structuralist linguistics you see the words man and woman or masculine and feminine shift in relation to each other as the populations shift. so... I give this one a pass. it isn't wrong. it at least isn't wrong.

The Matrix and political parties

  1. you think The Matrix is trans??

    / The Matrix was wild! ...it's trans? / cis people relating to The Matrix but claiming it is not about transgender identity / cis people claiming The Matrix is about becoming a Tory but isn't about gender identity (red pill; redpilled) / (9k) -> on one hand this is gross. on the other hand, viewed from a larger context it's just really, really weird. like, can somebody be charcoal-pilled, or orange-pilled? could you go around claiming The Matrix is about becoming a Trotskyist or an anarchist but isn't about being trans? Trotskyists totally feel like the way they see the world is the real model of the world, just like Tories do. do Tories even think about that.
  2. The Matrix is actually about Trotskyism -> troll argument / jamming proposition. the claim that The Matrix is actually about realizing capitalism makes no sense and will inevitably fall into crises, while the whole world is stuck in the illusion that it won't so you have to break the whole world out of it, which leads to Trotskyism. it's funny how almost logical this is when it began as a total pronounced censored pull, more so than the Lion = Trotskyism one. I think what's so funny about it is that the whole trans erasure red pill proposition is so toxic but although this is meant to be the same thing in a different color it's more or less harmless; if Trotskyists are convinced their message is more important than a trans identity message it will probably just wrap around to them pushing parties that support trans identity anyway.
  3. Steven Universe is actually about Trotskyism / Steven Universe is definitely about Trotskyism -> this was the subject of an MDem chapter I didn't finish — one of the off-the-wall satirical "B-side" chapters. I think it works better in chapter form but this proposition can still be about the underlying concept that it's possible to argue a work into meaning utterly anything.
  4. The Matrix is actually about Trotskyism -> so... about that. how did I find the most galaxy brain interpretation of media just by rolling the dice and making something up

The Matrix and capitalism

  1. Fantasy rulers represent capitalists / The rulers of fantasy worlds are actually capitalists -> if you squint, you see it in surprisingly a lot of works coming out recently. TADC (Caine), Deltarune (Chapter 5 character's remarks about Dark Worlds), arguably The Matrix before them, The Wizard of Oz (look at the titular character), etc.
    which makes TADC so funny because Gooseworx exploded herself twice over. ...
  2. Why is the Matrix motif so similar to Marxist descriptions of capitalism? / (9k) -> so, funny story, I didn't go into this show expecting it was primarily a story about gender transition, and so when it got to episode 8 I was like, there is something really weird going on with Caine. Caine controls their reality, he controls a population's perception of reality a lot like Western-Marxists like to claim "the mass media" does, or said another way, he takes a handful of living, breathing material people and makes sure they only experience reality and society through constantly being immersed in the artificial capitalist product he has created. ... there's a moment where they have a little chat about just learning to live with the way things are and accept it as "life" and then a beautiful moment where everyone but Jax decides to turn against Caine and is like, no, we don't have to accept whatever he tells us is the only possible reality. and they flat out try to banish Caine from their reality. that is hilarious. ... they banish Caine from their reality, Kinger says "I ... killed Caine". "killed". and then they start the messy process of rebuilding the Circus and figuring out what's going to happen next. why exactly is that a thing that happened on the show?? it was so... weirdly unnecessary to the A-plot of the show, it was kind of just along as a B-plot that for some reason was wonderful. but I think I can say with a reasonable amount of certainty that this was not the main point of the show. the character drama and particularly the concept of secrets are the big thing, and to show that you only need to point to the moments Caine is having a fit in his office; that's Caine's secret he kept locked inside him that's eating him up. the scene of Caine doing a therapy adventure feels like it has a literal reading and a figurative reading, the literal one is that Caine actually doesn't understand feelings but the figurative one is that he accidentally behaves like someone who shoves away their feelings and is not able to properly give therapy, which makes the trans people and lesbians subliminally upset because it's the same thing they see everywhere. so the main themes of the show are really clear, episode 8 is the only mystery.
    I definitely have my thoughts about what's going on. one straightforward theory is that the director is an anarchist. it is weirdly popular for LGBT+ movements to be anarchist in the midst of some of the deepest anticommunism you'll ever see, and even occasionally to advocate for things that would horrify them if Communists did them, for reasons I still genuinely don't understand.
    there's a particular odd connecting constellation between LGBT people, The Matrix, VRChat, furry characters, ethics adventures such as Pokémon or Steven Universe, secular animism, art commissions, petty-bourgeois philosophies (ok, those two parts of the constellation I understand), and anarchism. I have scattered thoughts on why all those things are connected but not really a complete theory. as I said on another entry, it's something like, LGBT+ people will get totally isolated and then it's like they have to start from scratch with a tiny island of people and form society all over again, and all their philosophy and understandings of the world get wildly warped because of the actual shape of their new society they're forced to study the rest of the world's societies from within. it's a really difficult position to be in and make sense of, so I'd never yell at people for this specific thing. similar to why I'm relatively lax on North Korea except when it demonstrably shows some kind of materially inaccurate understanding.
    we don't know for sure Gooseworx is an anarchist, but we do know she produced something that neatly fits into The Gay Constellation — artsy, "indie", character-driven, not furry exactly although there's one furry, VRChat style digital world, gender dysphoria versus gender euphoria, escaping narratives to find your true body or self (also seen in Undertale/Deltarune, which neatly fits into The Constellation too), and also traces of one negative part of the constellation, the notion of not being able to accept material reality or history as real and feeling like individual experiences are more real than reality (but considering episode 8 I'm not really upset about that). you can see some of the same themes reflected across The Matrix, TADC, and Deltarune, like they're all sort of slowly developing the same philosophy. so the question then becomes, what is it about this Matrix motif or genre that seems to lead so easily to "Theses on Feuerbach" and banishing Caine? what is the correlation??
    you can't say "trans women are the proletariat" because that's not how it works. see above — if LGBT+ people form an enclave and are forced to restart society, their class position will reflect their position within the task of restarting society. so the Materialist position is to recognize that, although it's not their fault in that they didn't choose to be booted into their own tiny society, in unfavorable conditions being trans can turn you into the bourgeoisie and then you are not the proletariat even if you want to be. I feel like the correct position here is to actually treat LGBT+ islands as if they were tiny North Koreas. minus the whole constant-military thing (although the individuals do still semi-literally look out for and defend each other) they will only escape capitalism all at once as a unified whole, but also only when that self-contained coherent whole is connected to something larger. I don't like to say it but the future is kind of orange. breaking any particular continent out of capitalism involves observing the current structure of societies as small squabbling territories as opposed to big ones and breaking down the walls of those divisions that start at small scales to create bigger things where the hard walls or vast gaps of yesterday are reduced to faint seams. where religions, Liberal-republican parties, different Marxisms, little indie business territories, hostile subsections of fandoms, and various other divisions once divided people into countable populations, we have to get rid of the illusion that squabbling over those divisions is natural. we can't get rid of the divisions themselves because they're necessary to create larger populations where the divisions don't matter, but we have to stop this thing of particular divisions fighting over people (hello Algorithms) or trying to act like they have "the right to" people or land but they both do so there's no correct answer and they both remain angry. we somehow need some "objective" way to just stop that and say, no, these are the people or this is the scope you get and that's that. ...
    is all this matrix stuff nothing but a falsely radical realization that corporations "don't have to be owned by a single person" when we've invented the petty bourgeoisie? is that it? I'd rather have a world where everybody was Trotskyist because this is hell.

Thinking

  1. Superstructural fantasy worlds are inherently queer / Superstructural fantasy worlds — The Wizard of Oz, The Matrix, The Amazing Digital Circus, Deltarune — are inherently queer -> let's start here.
  2. The Wizard of Oz: this one takes a little squinting to figure out but I certainly see it. you have three characters that feel like they're impostors, and when they get to the end, the wizard says he can't make them more real than they already are. it's almost underwhelming but in some ways it's comparable to people's experiences with gender or sexuality. and Dorothy joined them on an adventure; they found each other in this secret space most people can't find them in. the final very interesting thing to notice is the way the wizard is able to manipulate reality for a moment by manipulating people's perceptions. this makes the whole secret world partly read as a superstructural fantasy world where it feels for a moment like the wizard created the whole thing. I think someone once compared the wizard to a movie director. and there you get the unintentional connection between the secret world and capitalism: movie directors present particular statements about reality or framings of reality contained in products that people exchange, and the act of exchanging products (both going to a movie, etc) can itself become a way of perceiving and experiencing reality that overwrites other ways because capitalism is so central to people's daily activities. maybe that's the thing — the wizard acts like he can change reality but he actually can't. the characters triumph by better understanding the reality they already have. this story is unintentionally also a meta-level metaphor for how people overstate "Community" as being the important reality 'we all need to understand' to make it through the 'journey' when actually that's an incomplete understanding, although it isn't exactly wrong either.
  3. TADC: the simulation (the Matrix) is the reality trans people have to inhabit made of other people's perceptions that are often wrong, or right at exactly the wrong times. when you never want to accept other people's perceptions the distorted ideas in your own mind start to become falsely real while all of reality seems false. Pomni and the others must eventually accept that the simulation is real and, however strange, their bodies are their reality. but if you don't, you start trying to opt out of reality. there is a subtext that believing the worst about yourself made the worst real and left nothing more to discover on the inside. the story can be taken as a story about how the sum of all outside perceptions describe what a person is and because the final outside perception is your own it can be the last straw in making every perception in existence of a particular person negative. there is one final silver lining though, which is that in the context of TADC all the perceptions making up the characters and their connecting reality are just perceptions. if Caine thinks the players are useless or annoying it isn't necessarily true. so the 'lesson' is to learn to distinguish between perceptions that are correct and perceptions that you don't need to pay attention to (which may include your own), understanding that within that particular context there is no difference between your perceptions and other people's perceptions. despite the simulation being constructed there still is a kind of objective reality to it, which is defined by psychology and probably the series accepting some form of ethical truth values that make some moral statements "True". in the real world... you'd probably do better to learn about the objective study of brains and societies than to learn ethics, but it isn't really wrong to say there are a few objective statements to make about populations or relationships, so overall I give that a pass.
  4. Deltarune Chapter 5: Mad Mew Mew becomes disconnected from her action figure body and specifically inside the Dark World context becomes a weird metaphor for a transgender brain trying to opt out of reality and opt out of Materialism; Ralsei has to tell her that she cannot fight her body forever or it will harm both of them.
  5. Deltarune Chapter 5: Susie and Noelle are standing in the river to be able to look out of the bounds of reality (the Matrix), because although the rules of the religion are not really decided by the church, the player is God and they are actually standing there hoping they can get away from God before they are punished for no good reason. Deltarune adapts Feuerbach — literally — but what is going on here is kind of like, instead of religion being a construction and an ideology that actually belongs to some particular person, the characters simply live inside ideology as their material world where God happens to exist along with them (of course, minus the inclusion of a God that's about the way all fictional works function), and the only way they can possibly escape being trapped inside ideology is to actually escape "reality" itself to somehow find a substrate beneath it. Deltarune's premise is either wonderfully stupid or surprisingly genius and I don't even know which it is because it totally depends on the writer's perspective on these themes and how they will be handled years from now in Chapter 7. to me... Deltarune is the story of the characters discovering Materialism as it exists in our world and applying it back to their world in order to change it. their world is characterized by pain they cannot fully determine the source of and they want to stop tolerating pain, and end everybody's pain, but they have to look below the way they think the world works and find how it really works in order to effect that. it's a hilariously Communist narrative for one that most likely doesn't intend to be, and that's why I love it. after seeing Chapter 5 I finally know why Deltarune Chapter 1 made me start seeing Communism in Undertale. the whole time it was actually almost there.
  6. Undertale: like The Wizard of Oz, the metaphors are kind of obvious, people banished from society find each other in a secret world. again you see the emotionally-satisfying but questionable model that 'Community' will surely get people through their harsh journey out of the secret world. the narrative is a little more interesting because there is actual fantasy violence in it; as the war kicks up again two children die and we see there are real stakes for trying to get out of the barrier the wrong way. it's a very different tone than with Dorothy. the game rewards you for investigating deep into it and finding weird evidence it may have swallowed Deltarune. and there's "Determination", a mysterious power which may not be fully explained in the 'first' game. this power is part of monsters but if used indiscriminately it has the power to destroy them. which... suggests it's rather delicate or intricate and must be used in specific ways, while Alphys used a completely butchered version of it that was only partially effective. it appears Dess had a better grasp of whatever it really is and used it to gain great control over Deltarune's reality. the Knight would seem to be made from Determination but Dess, hidden in the monochrome world, has 'the real version' of Determination that generates it perfectly in its glass/shard/sand form. the shards are said to be lost dreams which can be formed of tears, but dreams are the stuff of either monster consciousness or new worlds, so really, an entire "soul" is what's broken out of its cage and turned around to put the cage around the world. we don't have the full story of Deltarune but we've already been told so much, and all of it points to Dess having some sort of Materialism powers which involve shaping the underlying substrate to manipulate the superstructural fantasy world. what vaguely concerns me is the idea the game will spin this as bad when honestly it's the coolest thing. the game has increasingly tried to act like it is mostly about lesbians or about Kris, so there is some chance it will insist the way it interprets itself has to revolve around that. then again, if Susie is the real main character the correct ending could involve Susie busting up the world and refusing to follow the rules. Susie's story is complex. in Chapter 1 it seems simple, but in Chapter 5... she has been "subsumed" into the closet. besides the obvious, that has another negative connotation that Susie is sort of "captured into capitalist ideology"; she vaguely thinks the Dark Worlds (competing islands containing their own distorted worlds) will save her, but it's already somewhat clear that probably isn't going to work, and they're going to have to close the Dark Fountains and simultaneously free Susie and release her into a world of pain, maybe figuratively gray, maybe literally gray. so, like, the Dark World is negative... but the Knight is also prophesized to destroy it. the knight is pain but is also coming to the surface to face them. but the Knight represents Materialism, but the Knight is still taunting Kris and Susie with pain. the narrative role of the Knight is really ambiguous right now and I have no idea if I'll like Chapter 7 or not.
  7. Superstructural fantasy worlds are inherently queer, but they are not inherently Communist; the queer aspects of superstructural fantasy worlds do not lead to Marxism -> this version is just plain false.
    TADC: when the characters try to get out of their fake world that is forcing particular identities on them they very quickly end up banishing Caine.
    Undertale: monsters are imprisoned under mountain. Asgore is killing human children to break the barrier and get back at the humans. everything gets better after the monsters join together and the king dies. like that's literally Stalin or Kim Il-sung's agenda right there.
    Deltarune: Chapter 5 character laments that Dark Worlds have to compete against each other, there is a recurring theme of everyone being friends. the knight, with a great power taken from understanding of reality, is going to close all the Dark Worlds so they once again occupy the same reality. they've been sublated!
    The Wizard of Oz: the narrative vaguely attempts to deconstruct linear adventure narratives by showing the goals the protagonists hoped for were an illusion, and to imply that Community is good in and of itself. but it doesn't understand why it's doing it. the premise that clustering together into a Community to go on a linear adventure can get you to the end and make there be an adventure is the thing that's wrong. the wizard is presented as powerful; he is not an adversary, because he controls movie effects and movie directors are Good, so you have to get along with them. this is a misleading message. movie directors can be Good or Bad and Community doesn't remove conflict from the world. capitalist ideology is why we think that all of this works the way it does. so, yeah, that one was a bit more roundabout because it doesn't come out and say what it's really about. but you compare it with TADC, and again, Caine controls their reality so they 'have' to make peace with him and become friends. I think the same underlying trope is going on in both cases: Capitalists Control Reality But They Cannot Be Bad. but TADC shows how bad this actually is, how when you feel disconnected from reality it can do a lot of damage to transgender people. so. the wizard lies.
  8. Superstructural fantasy worlds are inherently queer, but they are not inherently Communist; the queer aspects of superstructural fantasy worlds do not lead to Marxism -> each time queer people gain the power to oppose the "simulations" that hold power over them it's because they figure out where the simulations are coming from and what the underlying reality is, which in some senses any character in their setting could do.
    Undertale: Frisk solves the inciting incident, which in context is partly solving the actual nature of the Underground and who made it.
    Deltarune: the main characters are going to the Titan world.
    TADC: part of the resolution was figuring out the nature of the players and their bodies, which informed them about their reality.
    nope, you can't win this one. they all lead to Materialism and characters gaining sophisticated understandings of how their world works. there's still a small leap from that to Marxism but it's not actually very hard in context of the real world if you have applied Materialism to the real world and understood that everything is material including time and the shearing or collision of timelines.

Related

Ideologies, fields, or genres

  1. LGBT / LGBT+ tradition
  2. pronounced Fantasy / fiction about digital worlds
  3. pronounced Fantasy / superstructural fantasy worlds
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