-Cherry-

kinda back

[acidiccherry]

my bob has malfunctioned

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neck to neck w/ this one

SEVERANCE s02e06 // Attila

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always viewed that scene this way

SEVERANCE s02e04 // Woe's Hollow

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dude, look at the hair on these doofuses lmao

ain't no way they're fooling anyone with that shit

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[acidiccherry]

guys let's be honest here for a sec. tell me if it's shit and if one soul on this website would like to see a complementary one w/mark. i spent so much time making this and it's not really relevant anymore and it didn't turn out exactly the way i wanted, soooo

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[acidiccherry]

don’t you just randomly think in your spare time about how mark cared for helly from day one, supporting her and helping her as much as he possibly can, guiding her, trying to make her life in lumon as less miserable as he can, cheering her up when she got the hang of the scary numbers, never pressing her to complete her file before the otc, holding her up that one time SO SHE CAN LITERALLY STAY ALIVE, panicking on the inside because he doesn’t know if she is alive or not, being SO RELIEVED that she is alive and well, trying to establish a deep and sincere connection and ask her if she’s okay after the incident even when she pushed him away, waiting for her by the elevator being worried for her experience outside during the otc, being so glad that she’s back, being so glad that she STAYED, laughing at her jokes, constantly asking if she’s okay or not, taking their relationship to a new hight, deepening their connection, establishing his love for her by saying that he doesn’t care who she is on the outside, he cares who she is with him, being heartbroken when he gets to know the truth, feeling guilty for sleeping with her other self, trying to make things right and apologise for it, opening his heart to her, being RISEN FROM THE DEAD when she accepts the situation and asks to have an intimate experience with her, and, finally, making love to the most important person in his life?

yeah. yeah, i’m normal about mark s.

[acidiccherry]

It's interesting how love (or at least some attraction) indeed transcends severance for Irving and Burt, Dylan and Gretchen, and Mark and Hellyna – but not for Mark and Gemma.

Mark S. had no romantic feelings for Ms. Casey, which makes me wonder where Mark and Gemma were in their relationship when she presumably died in that car accident... were they falling out of love?

I think you’re onto something with this! In s02e06 I got a little confused when Mark said that if only he could bring Gemma back he would drink less and he would listen more. This implies that he didn’t start drowning his sorrows in a glass of whiskey after Gemma’s death - he had been abusing alcohol even before. That suggests he had some unresolved issues in his life (that he likely deemed unsolvable) and a tendency to avoid confronting them.

Also the fact that he “didn’t listen to her enough” makes me think that Mark wasn’t paying as much attention to his wife as he should have? If that’s the case, maybe he took her presence in his life for granted and now suffers from that realisation? Or was he a shitty husband and Gemma started to distance herself from him? Maybe it’s the fact that they couldn’t have any kids? That could be Mark’s greatest wish in life (which we don’t know if it’s true or not).

So, there’s a lot of “ifs” and “maybes” in this equation, we can only speculate being given only crumbs of information. My general take on this whole question is that Mark regrets that he didn’t do better when she was still alive and THAT’s the core of his grief, not the idea of “my celestial ethereal queen was taken away from me, and now my life is grey and dull”.

[acidiccherry]

instant crush by daft punk is also such a markhelly song 🥲

Ohhh I feel you!!

I'm working on my next markhelly gifset right now, gonna listen to it while I do it!

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brother, you trying to alienate yourself from helly is like trying to cross a minefield in one piece

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There is a really sweet thing that I need to point out about this scene.

We see Helly and Mark stepping into conflict. Mark is very shaken, his trust for Helly undermined to the point where he can’t fully tell her apart from Helena even now.

But what I find most interesting is that he doesn’t lie to her. Yes, he’s withholding crucial information from her, but he never told her any lie in this exchange.

He’s mentally preparing himself for the conversation, he doesn’t stop her from coming in, he says “hey” first (!), honestly tells her that he’s not okay. Helly tries to shift the tone to the more warm and lighthearted side, smiling every now and then, trying to establish the connection, and Mark’s even mirroring her mimic, although he clearly doesn’t feel well in that moment.

At some point she says “Mark?” and he immediately responds with “yeah?”, inviting her to elaborate. Not just being silent like a resentful pouty kid.

What I really want to emphasise is that he’s still aligned with her in that moment. That woman is still Helly R, the same woman that he cared about and protected from day one. The red thread, the core of their bond between them is still there and no amount of cold words from his mouth can change that.

[acidiccherry]

I don't think the elevators at lumon are monitored. when helly tried to hang herself and when she kissed mark the cctv footage was always from outside

Well, you can see half of a person in there lol

The audio is good too. I doubt that those couple of meters really cut the deal audio-wise, one would hear perfectly what happens in the elevator. I’m really wondering about what Milkshake is up to. Maybe don’t spill delicate information in the place that has eyes everywhere??

(by the way, big nostalgia attack from looking at that scene. why can’t we go back to the happy times ugh)

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What I want to know is whether everyone at the company now knows that Helena slept with Mark S, or if only Milchick does.

It's very unlike Helena to let herself be filmed in such a compromising situation, and with an innie, of all things (whom she sees as subhuman). But also, why wouldn’t she know they’re being monitored the entire time...

And if she told Milchick about it, why? Sure, they seemed friendly the few times they met before and after her severance, but they weren’t THAT close.

As of now, I think that only Milchick (among higher-ups) knows. Kier knows how he got the information, but he got it.

What I find strange is that Milchick should know that the elevator hall cameras pick up sound very well, as we've seen while Helena was reviewing the footage (while drooling over Mark) (ok not really drooling but you get the point).

I mean, for sure he caught Mark in the elevator to intimidate him, he invaded his personal space with nowhere to go and kept his voice low for that reason, but maybe he did that so no one else could hear him also? Is he 100% sure that they can not be heard? 'Cause that shit's recording right now.

From the meeting of Helena, Natalie and Drummond I've gathered that not only Jame but them also don't know about the sex.

So that leaves us with this number of people knowing about that: Helena, Mark, Dylan, Irving (bless his soul, I couldn't not include him in this list) and Milchick. That's all. And we can cross out Mark and Irving for obvious reasons. And again, I don't think it's Dylan 'cause that would be totally not-Dylan'y of him.

And oh yeah, Helena and Milkshake are definitely not in such terms to chitchat about their love interests, laying in bed with a pink blanket swinging their legs in the air and giggling while writing things down in their diaries (although THAT would be one hell of a scene). I see no reason for Helena to confess to anyone at all, let alone Milchick.

So to conclude I think that she never shared that information with anyone and kept it to herself.

[acidiccherry]

no but why does milchick know what happened in that tent??

I have no freakin’ clue too! But we have some facts that can help us speculate:

Milchick and Ms Huang weren’t there during the night, Milkshake said goodnight and never appeared till the morning after, even though Irv shouted his name into the forest a dozen times, so it seems like MDR is left unsupervised, but can you leave THEM out of all severed employees unsupervised?? Hell no, you can’t do that! So Milchick has to be at least in some proximity to them to prevent any flying fuck they can cause, but also he’s a human and has to sleep;

Irv got far off into the forest screaming “Mr Michick!!” and for some reason we could hear him in Helly’s tent and the evident sound of Mark climaxing was apparently heard by Irving;

Mark climaxed. Just wanted to point that out.

So my best guesses are the following (for the fun I’ll rank the probability of each one based solely on my flair):

The whole fuckery with Mark and Irving hearing each other, a tv playing with no visible power source, Milkshake had no footsteps behind him when he appeared in the morning (didn’t dig into that myself, just saw the screenshots on the subreddit and was like whoa) leads me to think that it could be a simulation indeed and they’re all in the same room with VR goggles on. And that way Milchick could easily see on the computer screen what was happening. I don’t like this theory personally, I’m more inclined to the idea of them really going outside, so my rank is 3/10;

Mr Seth Milchick is a heavy sleeper or his own tent was somewhere else where we couldn’t see and his tent could be far away from where Irv went and thus he couldn’t hear him. As we’ve seen, the lovemaking scene was going on for QUITE SOME TIME, and Irv fell asleep waaay before that ended lol, so Milchick could get up and out to take a leak and in that moment hear what was happening in Helly’s tent. This one is pretty innocuous so my rank is 7/10;

Let’s not forget that Dylan, of all people, was right next to the guys and them having a sleeping bag party could bother him enough not to fall asleep, they were loud lolol. So he could snitch on them and report it to Milchick, but again he’s very devoted to the team so it’s very improbable. I guess the only way he could do this is if he didn’t fully realised the consequences of his words, but that is also not really probable, so I’ll rank it 0,5/10

So yeah, there’s that! I’ll roll with the second one but we’ll see. Oh, and I forgot that there’s a chance that there are cameras inside the tents. Who knows.

[acidiccherry]

I didn't see that markhelena scene as assault.

helly and helena are the exact same human being with different personalities. would anyone blame a person with DID for sleeping with someone under the pretense of another personality? because severance is basically a self inflicted DID.

also outtie mark isn't a victim here, he knowingly gave up on the ability to concent. milchick told him his innie found love and he returned to the office anyway.

Well, there’s a big can of worms with a big word “consent” written on it. I say, let’s open it!

I’ll try to be as short as possible, there’s a lot to unfold. If there was only iMark and oMark never existed, then the discussion would be relatively easy - he was deceived into thinking it was Helly, he never knew that it was her outie Helena, he never knew she was an Eagan of all people on the earth, and if we asked him ‘hey, would you sleep with Helly if you knew it’s not her but her outie Helena Eagan instead?’, I doubt that we would get a resounding “yes” from him. I mean, he’s so in love and all, and right now he views Helly through the goo-goo lens (and he can make goo-goo eyes at anyone he wants by the way), but even madly-in-love-Mark wouldn’t agree to that, I think. Could be wrong, of course.

By the way, I fully agree with you in viewing the severance procedure as an infliction of DID on oneself, and that's where things get interesting.

Now to the issue with consent considering oMark. To tackle that we would need to consider to what Mark was agreeing for when he was first applying to work for Lumon. I think it's safe to say that, understanding the nature of the procedure, you are essentially agreeing that a new, completely separate person from you, would be born. It's basically another person and it so happens that that person coinhabits the same body as you.

You can’t get mad at your neighbor for getting a partner, falling in love, making friends, - that would be ridiculous. But that specific neighbor is also you in a very odd way, so where does the line lie in here? When you choose to undergo the severance procedure, what do you expect of it? Do you fully understand and take into consideration that, you know, LIFE is going to be happening down there? With everything that this word represents? Very murky waters.

So, to estimate the consent on oMark's part (as it’s the key factor to the question if any assault ever happened), I've had to rewatch S2E2 & 3 and it seems like Mark was preoccupied with the question "who is alive?" and completely brushed to the side his innie's newfound love.

"Love? With who? Anyway, back to the "who's alive" question!"

It's like, yeah, whatever, HE can go about his way loving anyone he wants, don't care. And I doubt that oMark is failing to understand that love isn't platonic all the time, and some form of physicality can take place at work. He seems to not care at all about that.

Aaaaand, to conclude this all, was this an assault from Helena's part? Well, yes and no at the same time. For it to be an assault one side has to actively avoid the act and not want to take any participation in it. We don't know if it's true for iMark. Technically what happened between iMark (rMark) and Helena was both consensual and non-consensual. But was that a deceitful act on Helena's part? 100%.

Now the MOST interesting part awaits us in the next episodes when we will see if Mark lives up to his words "I don't care who you are out there, I care who you are with me" now that he knows all the truth.

So there's that. Thank you so much for sharing your opinion! It really got the cogwheels in my head spinning crazy mode!