Annotated 27-10
I grew up in the aftermath of Watergate, and a lot of entertainment written in the 1980s and 1990s, and even some in the 2000s, had a charming faith in the power of the press. There was the unspoken assumption that if even one trusted publisher gets some solid info about the bad guys’ doings, the bad guys will be sent to jail and go away forever while the reporters throw a champagne party in their office. I mean, that’s not quite what happened to Nixon, but close enough.
Even before Trump, this faith was eroding, and both writing this scene and looking back on it involves asking some hard questions about the press’s role today. The result is grim: Shanna more or less has to think like a kamikaze pilot even to have a hope of righting this injustice. And even then, her Plan A is just to uncover enough dirt for others to steal without crediting her, not to get played posthumously by Emma Stone in a movie called Courage. Someone more sensitive about their reputation or safety could be Gamergated into silence fairly easily. Siccing a fanboy mob on her might slow her down, but it should be clear by now that she’ll just keep coming. Until she can’t, of course.
That said, I don’t know if she’s as 100% ready to face her inevitable death as she acts here. Are any of us, really, who aren’t suicidal, elderly, or terminal? Finding some workable Plan B would be preferable. But she’s willing to at least assume Plan A is it for the present, and doing so gives her power. You can’t threaten someone who’s already imagined the worst you can do and said, “You know what? Worth it.”
If only HR had waited a few years. If this went down during the Trump era Carol would’t even have to waste time meeting Shanna like this.
If HR had waited until now, we would have welcomed the blessed release of the Howling Purple Void Unleashed
That assumes that, if hadn’t left the keys in the elevator or that Ferris hadn’t been so damn curious, that HR might have actually made a turn around and just left The Five be, via sealing the area off after the elevator door, or maybe even perhaps by just turning the power off for that section of the building.
After all, if I was personally trying and felt like I was repeatedly adding 2+2 and getting orange (my favorite quote from this comic or at least one of them), I’d probably try one last time and then just give up for good, but I wouldn’t have dared to try and create an avatar of myself in Alterra.
It would depend if Carol was still on a campaign against video games. Games and movie media is no longer the chosen scape goat for societies ills as it was leading up to GA and more importantly, the news industry it self has become the focal point. If Shanna did still pursue Hurricane, Carol could simply write her off as a conspiracy theorist looking for click bait (which she kinda is, Shanna still has no proof Carol is a murderer or that anyone is actually dead)
What separates a reporter from a theorist is the recognition that proof is needed, not the possession of proof. Otherwise, investigative journalism wouldn’t even be a thing. Shanna has a hunch, a strong and good hunch, but she knows she needs more than what she has to publish.
And if you even uttered the word “clickbait” in her presence, let alone used it to describe her, then you might get to see an angrier side of her than Carol has.
Shanna certainly is not a conspiracy theorist but the way she just starts talking about six corpses and her own murder here would make it very easy to pass her off as one. And that would make it very easy to discredit her and limit the set of people willing to listen to her to the “videogames are evil” crowd, which mostly does consist of people with a lot of misconceptions about the topic, if not straight-out conspiracy theorists…
I’ve been in that corner once (thanks to some “crazy” idea not about videogames but politics) except there were tons of reviews made into the matter later, which confirmed my hypothesis from that time, and everyone acknowledges those. Still, the impression that I’ve got these weird views has stuck with some people, and some of them will probably never let me out of the conspiracy corner.
The difference here is that Shanna is speaking directly to someone who knows whether or not her “conspiracy theory” is true. She’s trying to rattle Carol, or at least get a reaction out of her. I don’t think Shanna would talk like this to just anybody (though maybe future updates will prove me wrong, I don’t recall).
We do still occasionally get the rare headline about games *not* being linked to violence, as if the generation in its mid-30s and late 40s right now didn’t have a visceral, personal understanding of that.
But as far as video games being scapegoated, that’s more of an old folks FB meme than news these days – at least from my vantage point.
Shanna, a bit of a tip? If you’re worried that someone who is presently strong-arming you is going to do unspeakable things to you to prevent you publishing, and are trying to make the point that they can’t stop you with death threats, don’t:
A) Tell them what you’re actually scared of.
B) Tell them that you’re scared of pain, specifically.
Shanna is trolling.
She doesn’t believe one second that Carol did personally murder the five plus one. That’s what goons, corporate thugs and other hired killers are for. IOW, in Shanna’s mind, Carol has never faced the physical results of her corporation decisions to “silence” annoying people. It’s all virtual. Numbers and lines of text on spreadsheets.
(ah! For Ferris, Carol was actually in close proximity. So Shanna’s approach may trigger some nightmares, but Carol has already faced the grim consequences of her boss’ antics)
By physically describing her own futur silencing/murder, she is forcing Carol to face her futur victim, as a human being who is about to suffer, not just some abstract concept safely hidden away.
Not all people are sadistic. A lot of people, who would nonetheless pass orders resulting in harm to their fellow humans without batting an eyelash, would be unable to face their victims.
There is also a good measure of “do you worst, I dare you”. Shanna is pushing Carol/her bosses to come after her. Vague rumors of gamers disappearing are not much to draw the attention of legal authorities. An actual assassins’ squad hunting Shanna, on the other hand… As Shanna believes she can prepare for that, she hopes there will be more chance of gathering hard evidence against Hurricane. Either because the assassins fail, or succeed.
This is probably the first time it gets acknowledged that The Five might be dead, instead of just immersed. I didn’t believe it for a minute, at the time. I mean, immersion is totally believable in a SF setting.
Careful, this assumption -that the Five are dead, is Shanna”s.
From her point-of-view, the most likely hypothesis when considering the connected cases of six missing people is that they have been murdered and the corpses hidden. That’s actually a very realistic and possible hypothesis in real life.
That five of them are maintained immersed in a life-sustaining sensory-deprivation cuve, while their mind is directly hooked to a boosted MMORPG, with help from an arcane nature… This is not a known technology. It doesn’t exist outside of HR basement. That possibility must be very low on Shanna’s list of “what possibly happened?.
From the point of view of Carol? Yes, that they are dead is one of her fears. Or maybe also her hope. At this point, everything is better than her boss getting more and more unhinged while trying to disconnect the Five.
That’s carefully considered and the distinction is meaningful. But for me, it’s more about how this is the first time the creators telegraph the idea that a possible outcome for The Five might be death. I was always completely convinced that at the end they would step out of their tubes.
Same here. The question for me was always, “which version of the Five will emerge, and what will they do afterwards if they can’t be convinced Sepia-world is the ‘real’ one they ‘belong’ in”.