Hi! :D I once read a meta "body modification is the opposite of cyborgification" in which you wrote under the point of cyborgificaton that "it destroys will, identity and purpose". Can you elaborate on this point a little more?
I’ll try! For some reason best known to laziness and lack of observation, writers have been saying that cybernetics eats your soul. Show a person with artificial parts in fiction, even a hand or an eye, and you can frame them as irredeemably evil without any effort. [1] Reality is, we humans have been replacing bits of ourselves with non-vital parts for millennia and doing so systematically since WWII -- and in no case has it been found to compromise one’s humanity. Not the million hip and knee implants done every year, not the artificial hearts, not even brain implants to control tremors or seizures.
We live in a world where bionic eyes are real and yet it’s also a world where for months I’m reading and watching reviewers comment that the character of Sekingar must must must be evil because he has an artificial eye. Because in most stories, of course he would be. Damn.
OPM is a world where the state of art of prosthetics are good enough to not just be considered for pure medical need but also to enhance performance and its impact on people is spectacularly unspectacular. It shouldn’t be radical that body modification doesn’t change people, but it is because sci-fi writers are so rarely good observers of humanity. A world where people can choose transhumanity is neither a cyberpunk world nor a utopia. Most people won’t and those who do have reasons that are personal and meaningful to them and have to trade off on what they want, what they can safely do and what they can afford to do. Just like everything else.
Cyborgification though, is a bit different. Strange but true, it’s also based in something that exists here and now -- there are research groups wiring up insects and forcing them to move hither and thither according to the researcher’s whims.
People aren’t beetles or cockroaches, but this outfit at the Neo Heroes has worked out how to just use people as living (more or less) platforms to make them do whatever they want them to. They bill it as a life-saving technique, but at Metal Bat puts it, there’s no life left in the people who’ve had this done to.
I appreciate so much that ONE consistently treats taking agency away from people as wrong. Whether that deprivation comes from trying to control what they do socially, via controlling their environment, via drugs, tools, whatever means, it’s all evil.
