Hiyas!
I've decided to accept banishment. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because my true Mistress vanished for so long, and I don't think she is coming back. Maybe because the more harsh, objectifying Mistress has also taken a break, and I'm bored of being human.
I think I have plenty of crimes here to answer for, maybe this sort of thing will do me some good. I think it will be very hard on me, being fairly mischievous, rebellious and filled with a hatred of conformism...plus I'm not the sanest knife in the drawer...
Anyway, before I started blogging I had one small point to make that's been bothering me a lot about Evil Dolly's wonderful Eudaemon story.
You see, I could go on for pages and pages with an analysis of the more subtle points of the story, but one gaping plot hole strikes me as far more problematic than anything else I can recall.
Suit dependency. Why does it happen?
This is where most readers of Eudaemon would answer: "because the human becomes attached to their Eudaemon".
Well okay, but what does the Eudaemon have to do with the Banesuit? Remember that the Eudaemon enables their human companion to "transcend reality" - to experience sound, touch, sight and other stimuli simply by messing around with parts of that same human's brain.
There's nothing in the story that even hints at the idea of a Eudaemon requiring the Banesuit, or Bane helmet in order to survive. Winter even asks Katrina if she wants Winter to make Katrina's suit appear invisible to her.
For a while, I considered that perhaps Winter would be unable to interact properly with Katrina if Winter wasn't connected to the physical suit itself, but this seems silly since Winter has direct access to Katrina's brain and this would be a more effective way of simulating touch than trying to use the Banesuit as pressure points against the surface of Katrina's skin.
And yes, I know that Winter must be at least partially relaint of the hardware of the Custodian unit, since it is verified towards the end of the story that without it Winter is simply trapped in a vacuum of dormant nothingness. Still, that doesn't mean Katrina and other Eudaemonic Banes *need* the helmet, the second skin, or anything besides the small Custodian unit imbedded in the back of their skull, does it?
Why the desperate need for solitude? Why the shift in mentality that causes Eudaemon Banes to feel "wrong" once their bodies are no longer sheathed in the latex, or the hatred of clothing and food?
These strange secondary effects of bonding with a Eudaemon seem artificial. Somehow extraneous and unjustifiable. There doesn't seem to be a reason for these symptoms beyond the concept of actual "suit dependency".
In fact, it lends a bit more ammunition to the idea that the entire concept of a Eudaemon is in fact an illusion, and long term or traumatised Banes have in fact just gone insane, with their brains utilising parts of the Custodian (as opposed to vice-versa) to manifest a bizarre form of multiple personality disorder.
Are the Eudaemons "real"? Or, more simply, are they what the Eudaemon Banes think they are? The strongest argument for their "reality" is the fact that Winter, independent from Katrina, uses a laptop computer and downloads programs from it that later help her fight for survivial.
There's also the point that Winter returns as soon as Katrina returns to a Banesuit, but then for a sceptic that just sounds rather too convenient - they might argue that her psychosis returned at the exact moment as the conditions that originally caused it - no surprise there.
Anyways, just some random thoughts. I do believe that a reader of Eudaemon is supposed to accept that the evolved Custodians are real - it isn't supposed to be a point on which we can debate back and forth. However I do feel there is some room for doubt, and there certainly remains the question of why Eudaemon Banes feel the need to remain isolated, which may be a completely separate phenomena from the emergence of a Eudaemon.
1 comment:
Dear C-6128 - or dear Celine, whichever applies best to you at present time... I discovered your blog thanks to your Operator Moss Hastings, who gave me the URL and told me it was well worth reading... which of course proved to be completely true. I downloaded all of it and read it mostly offline, and it's being offline I now try and answer to this older post of yours.
I can't quite see the problem you mention and I might be misreading or misinterpreting your words. It was my understanding that Eudeamons were something born out of the interaction and the deep neural links between the helmet's Custodian (i.e. some computer with artificial intelligence) and the wearer's brain. An Eudeamon does not exist with the helmet alone, but it also does not exist within the bane's brain alone either.
If that is the case, suit dependency syndrome makes total sense to me: getting out of the suit (let me rephrase that: getting out of the helmet) would separate the two elements the union of which is what can create an Eudeamon. Since no knowledge is available on this phenomenon, one must assume that separating the two elements would lead to the disruption of whatever was generated by their previous fusion. Hence, the fear this would destroy the Eudeamon.
I can't see why the possibility for an Eudeamon to make the banesuit invisible would weaken the idea that the banesuit itself is needed for the Eudeamon to survive. Invisible does not mean non-existent. And the suit dependency syndrome is but the way people from the outside (people who have no idea of what's going on inside those helmets) call what in fact is the desire of keeping the Eudeamon alive - a desire shared by both the bane and the Custodian. It's not about staying in the banesuit per se, it's about keeping alive whatever is creating the artificial paradise an Eudeamonic bane is living in. Since a bane is meant to be ignored, remaining inside the suit pretty much allows it to keep going on, with no external needs to be catered, with no further worry than just enjoying being with its Eudeamon.
That said, I am intrigued by your idea that Eudeamon might also be seen as just the result of the bane going crazy. In fact, if I ever was required to find some flaw on a novel that has utterly fascinated me, I would say that I felt this idea was largely underdeveloped in it. It could have been interesting exploring that further, somehow leaving a door open to dismiss the whole thing as a delusion of people who find themselves trying to survive through an impossibly hard experience. If that was the case, Eudeamons might prove to be just an escape route to the happiness of madness, and the artificial paradises it can create for the bane would be an apt metaphor for everyone's escape into fantasy - which can be an invaluable help in carrying on through life but can also prove a dangerous way to just refrain from actually living one's life.
I do think this book has a lot of subtle meanings to it and I have been shocked when I learned it was never properly published. Therefore, besides spending some of my time as a test bane first, and as a Bane Operator later on, I am trying my best to get it published somehow. I am sure it deserves being printed and made available to a wider public - and perhaps critics. Even outside the BDSM world, since I think it touches on a lot of themes that are universal.
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