"Can Serra OTD Have Sex" - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,
in terms of her literal appearance, she is clearly meant to be teenaged. i've seen people argue that she's comparable to a petite adult woman (reyes is only an inch taller), but it's outright told to us in episode two that she bare minimum doesn't look eighteen (most common universal drinking age):
so sure, i don't really fault anyone for not wanting to see her lewded. i mean, i don't blame anyone for not wanting to see anyone lewded. that's ridiculous, to care about other peoples' boundaries. but what is starting to bother me is the assertion that serra is _nothing but_ a child.
i think there is a much quieter element of horror to serra's character beyond the themes discussed at length in e1. the longer she's out of the basement, the more people she meets, the more she sees and learns, the more comparably human she becomes. many would argue a large part of humanity is love.
it's part of morgan's character, her refusal to see the love around her, her refusal to indulge in it. people flirt with her and she rebuffs it, tries to write off her closeness with certain people. when i see these arguments against serrashipping it makes me think about how she's is the opposite.
serra clearly has a lot of love in her heart and is capable of physical (possibly sexual) attraction but isn't theoretically allowed to explore it. because she's an add, because of her perceived age. she is growing and changing so rapidly and is expected to... just not explore intimacy, partnership?
serra, to me, is remarkably similar to claudia from interview with the vampire (but with a more tender nature). serra was created as what we can only assume is a child substitute for david, something that will always be small and cute. but what happens when she outgrows that, mentally?
claudia maturing took decades because of her relative human nature. but i think it's clear serra is growing too fast to even keep track of. even with the handicap of being viewed as an object, she is integrating into society and learning, basically, how to be a human with a supercomputer-brain buff.
not everyone experiences sexual/romantic attraction so i hesitate to call it a "human experience", but it's something many humans experience. is she expected to never be allowed to explore that? ignoring how the game may go, is she meant to be relegated to servitude forever? bartender, paralegal?
"morgan's daughter", like so many people like to say? stripping serra of her rights and boiling the entirety of her existence down to being owned by morgan makes me sad. even seeing her clear humanity people strip her of her multifacetedness and throw her into a safe, sanitized "child" role.
it's maybe uncomfortable to face, the concept of something that looks so young having these feelings and needs because her brain is so much more developed than ours that it's not comparable to a human's. but isn't all of otd about facing uncomfortable truths brought about by the cyperpunk hellscape?
and saying she acts like a child has also always fascinated me. she is, once again, a direct parallel with morgan: raised on movies and relatively isolated with only david to speak to. imo it's conflating childishness with a lack of social skills. the difference is that morg can mask.
serra is barefaced, wants to explore and understand and learn. was not taught to hate herself and feel ashamed for being too much or being not normal. and that lack of a regard for "social standards" or whatever is why people conflate how she behaves with as being behaving like a child.
for example, to me this doesn't read as something a kid would do:
i understand that there's nuance to this sort of thing but seeing her reduced to "if you draw ship her you're a pedophile" makes me more than a little disappointed. would it be better to ship her with fran because they look the same age? what about when fran is 40 and she looks exactly the same?
i've had people say some pretty uncharitable things about me because of this opinion so i've been a little shy to ever share it again, but this is really how i view it tbh. i think the circumstances of her existence are meant to be uncomfortable, they're meant to make you think.
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