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What bugged me aboutBSG and continues to bug me with Zoë,
though, is that while her methods are correct, her real/fake judgment
is wrong. It’s a false analogy. Like Stephin Merritt explains aboutmusic
myself, but it seems integral to Zoë’s scarier ideas (and Barnabas’s
even moreso) that she cannot grasp the fact that “nature” is a scam.
That the infinite variety of the Matrix isn’t any faker than the
infinite variety of the Twelve Worlds — just a newer and more
malleable version of the reality to which she always clung. As the
noted philosopher Courtney Love says, the key is to fake it so real
that we’re beyond fake: Pow! Clarice and Tammy are down with that,
clearly, but Zoë and Barnabas seem to find it sticky, and that’s
already presenting as a problem.
This used to drive me wild when I was younger, mostly because I was working so fucking hard, but people would constantly say, “When you get out in the real world …” They meant when I graduated college, I think, or got a higher-paying job or moved out of my psycho singleton apartment or whatever, but it drove me absolutely nuts. Your world may not look like my world but it’s still REAL, what I do in my life still matters, and by the way, fuck you. Because it’s all the real world. It’s all one thing. This makes me
fucking crazy. It’s all the world. We’re all people in it. We don’t
speak separate languages and dividing us into camps is stupid. You are not from Mars and she is not from Venus. We all live in the real world.
High school, college, your parents’ house, red states, blue states, I have friends that think I’m still not in the real world (as I sit here poking 40 with a short stick, with a mortgage) because I don’t have kids and a yard and I bike to work, I mean, you can’t win. And I’ve
never heard anyone say anything prefaced with “Well, in the real world
…” that wasn’t the most utterly condescending, vile, pathetic excuse
to suck. If what you mean is, “Your life is fake because you’re making choices I want to make but feel I can’t because I am a giant pussy, and that makes me ashamed of myself so allow me to distance myself by saying we live on separate planets,” you should just say that, and stop saying things that are insane.
This show is aggressively reconnecting me with my inner judgmental pissed-off 19-year-old, and I’m not sure everyone would consider that a good thing, but I sort of feel like she was my Best Chick, so I’m going with it for the purposes of these threads.
About that show.