Annotated 25-9
I think if you cornered me and Phil and asked us to delineate what exactly is going on with HR here, we’d probably give you two different answers. Maybe the last of his humanity disappeared just before he engaged with the Cultists and this is a post-human trying to mimic his old self. Maybe there’s a split personality in there. Maybe his recent actions have made him briefly capable of being normal-ish again, much like some depressives feel their depression lift as soon as they fully commit to suicide. Maybe he’s unconsciously messing with Carol a bit, doing whatever she doesn’t expect so that she can only respond to him, not anticipate him, which increases the power differential in their dynamic.
Or maybe he’s just plain unstable, and trying to ascribe deeper patterns to his mood swings is a mug’s game right now. It doesn’t matter much: he’ll have a consistent direction eventually.
The one thing I know we were of one mind about was that “sane HR” was the best incitement we could think of for this Carol-focused plot. Nothing would throw Carol more for a loop and also leave her more unprepared for what’s going to happen next.
This page threw me, too. Even when the whole series was over, and I re-read the whole thing start-to-finish, I could not figure out what was supposed to be actually going on in this scene. My best guess was that he thought he was being sincere here, but like Zuko in the Crystal Catacombs, his “repentance” was rooted more in the hopelessness of his goal’s achievability than in rejection of that goal’s desirability, and thus his transformation was too shallow to survive the temptation of a fresh chance at success.
Knowing that it wasn’t fully clear behind the scenes either is, I suppose, a little reassuring.
I think making him a little unknowable here puts our sympathies more with Carol and Ferris than they would be otherwise.
Yeah….I think I was in the “This is the post-human/monster trying to mimic normalcy” camp at the time, especially given what happens next.
I think the thing people forget about madness, is that it’s not complete erasure of the “normal” self. HR’s not gone, the person he was before he started this road is still in there, under all the new shit, and once in a while that part of the personality bubbles up, like gas from beneath the silt in a swamp, disturbing the surface. It doesn’t mean the current situation is altered, he’s still crazier that a sack of cats, it just means that isn’t the dominant drive right now. Even people with HR’s level of crazy people don’t feel/act crazy all the time, which can be very confusing for everyone involved.
Put simply, he could just be in a good mood, or just a reflective one. This happens with people with addictions all the time. The parts of their personality that are frequently dominated by addiction based behavior make an appearance, and everything seems great, they feel great, and they honestly think they’re over it. Then something triggers those compulsive behaviors, and BAM they’re doing the thing they were sure they weren’t going to do again. This is just his obsessive drive to become god taking a nap, and a bit of the normal pattern of behavior asserting itself.
At least that’s my read on it. (Source: My life dealing with bloody crazy people)
Interesting how clearly we are meant to only see the Four in this scene.
I always thought of this scene as fairly sincere. Not that he’s stable or anything, god no, but that he’d finally actually realized how bad things had gotten. How none of his plans were working out. None of what he was doing was coming even close to working. He needed a new plan – not just yet another new approach to his problem, but new goals entirely. And the idea of just walking away from this situation and taking that time to do anything else gave him some level of clarity he’d been lacking for a while.
Of course, as we now know, he would end up going with the idea of going to Arkerra and leveling up his magic enough to become a god. But maybe that wasn’t his only thought. Maybe he was also considering turning himself in. Maybe he was considering getting rid of the Five and quietly resigning from Hurricane. Maybe he was considering the idea of porting himself into the game as he later did, but attempting to just make contact with the Four, and seeing if he could teleport himself out afterwards – it might be better to approach the problem from within, and with their help, rather than soloing it from Earth.
Then, Ferris showing up in the basement later kind of makes that decision for him. It’s a decision no sane person would make, but then HR isn’t sane. Not anymore. He’s snapped under the pressure.