Annotated 48-51
FB: Some people might call these “Sepia World” segments mostly “shades of gray,” but we tend to think of their palette as “Earth tones,” or “fall colors.”
HR’s repeated “I couldn’t have done this without you’s” were kind of a litmus test for your observational skills. Almost everyone realized that he was repeating that phrase a lot more than was natural, but when did you realize it? And if it’s the one aspect of this dream besides the body-melting that isn’t tied to Carol’s real memories, did HR say it at all?
I think he would’ve had to say it, for it to stick in Carol’s memory like this. HR is a megalomaniac, but he’s the type of megalomaniac who can sometimes present as a humble, down-to-earth guy (we saw him share the credit with Syr’Nj, a while back). And we did see him butter her up now and then, sweetening the only real relationship he had and investing in her loyalty, which has paid him a lot of dividends up to the present moment.
…. SOOOOO many OSHA violations….
Nope. Not feeling guilty at all. Nope. Everything is fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine…
Carol.
Carol, why do you run?
Why do you run from the friendly gaming skeletons, Carol?
They really couldn’t be here without you!
Shout-out to fellow-countryman Dick Maas whose movie I never saw & which is probably rubbish.
Man, some times that elevator just takes forEVER.
“I couldn’t have done this without you” sounds like a pretty cut in dry manipulation tactic(whether HR was aware of doing I’ll admit is a bit less cut in dry) telling her that he couldn’t have done it without her insures that if she starts having second thoughts, he’s established in her mind that she’s also to blame. She can’t blame him without claiming some guilt for herself after all he couldn’t have done it without her
Yeah, my read on HR is that he’d definitely say that to Carol in a private moment, and maybe even equal parts mean it and be cynically aiming for her loyalty. (The sincerity makes it more believable, after all.) But when he’s with a group of gamers excited to be his guinea pigs, he’d take all the credit the better to come across as a god-creator benevolently granting them their wildest dreams.
»but when did you realize it? «
Fairly early on, but I’ll admit that it took me until a page later (the finger scene) until I realized that this can’t quite have been how it actually happened — and then it was pretty clear that the sentence was more a memory that Carol was building into the dream, and it’s more of a realization that she’s way deeper in this shit than she ever thought she’d be, that the shit itself is also way deeper than it was supposed to get, and that she’d rather get out of this situation, very quickly.