Some idle thoughts about/proposals for the underlying psychological drives that define how each Visionary’s slab manifests:
Colt: To be given a second chance. And then a third chance to boot because he’s nothing if not the stubbornest motherfucker to ever live god bless I love him so much. and then you have the splintering of the self he and julianna (and wenjie if by a different path!) have in common, which feels like a heightened metaphor for dissociation. He's not all there (he can no longer be all anywhere, try and wish as he might).
Julianna: To be safe and unseen behind a mask; literally masking. And have a fulfilling day! :) it's both safety and control to her to be able to not be perceived as who she is, to be able to present herself deliberately and not necessarily truthfully. I think part of her wants Colt (as her father and main attachment figure in the loop) to see through that to the real her -- the dream of the loop is that he will and will choose her every time when he does; it's her last gamble -- and part of her finds the very thought terrifying, threatening and humiliating (understandably too since he’s the one who started the cycle of violence between them and she had no way to defend herself initially; she had a shock treatment of vulnerability there for a while). Thus the forever hunt where it could always happen but will never happen, if nothing else then because he’ll always forget her in the end and it all begins anew. The loop is where she can stay in control of the process. She found a way of unlocking the console commands for the mortifying ordeal of being known to safely microdose the rewards of being loved in a controlled environment, and it’s never going to be enough and she’s never going to willingly give it up. She’s sooo <3<3<3<3
Egor: To become invisible, to be able to escape being perceived at a moment’s notice. A state he longs for and resents in equal measure and often blames on other people even though he is usually the one taking the steps that make him so. His predicament is fittingly transparent and kind of pathetically obvious lol <3
Charlie: Literally escapism haha, we see him flickering with Shift in several tense situation like he wants to get away; he’s a Flight type. He’s also invested so much of himself in his work that he’s finding it hard to function with the part of his brain he’s got left, he’s a workaholic subtype of that. He’s estranged from and hostile to the softer more vulnerable parts of himself he put into 2-B.I.T. in a really interesting way that, while not slab based, is pleasingly metaphorically dense. He thought it was the only way to keep Fia's love and attention (and he was catastrophically wrong). something something the haunting specter of toxic masculinity. splintering of the self but of a more deliberate and localized way than the other characters with that tendency
Fia: To be able to turn all her anger and inward pain outward to vent it. She’s Fight. She takes too much in, and by god she’s gonna output that onto you at point blank range. The reactor is of course an extension of the metaphor, and shows she will take herself out with a meltdown too, she’s not spared from her own capacity for lashing out.
Harriet: Connection. She espouses a philosophy of the ultimate isolation of the self, but the resident Nexus slab holder and cult leader doth protest too much methinks. It may take the form of a manipulative, deeply unhealthy idea of connection, more of an insidious elimination of the self/other barrier to get around ever being vulnerable with someone again, but it’s the drive behind it nonetheless. (So kind of like Julianna’s core, but reaching a very different conclusion. I think Julianna wants/doesn’t want to be known, while Harriet wants to experience perfect communion and is less concerned with being Recognized in that process.) Colt picks up on this: the echoes taunt her with ‘all this, and you’ll still be alone’ (heavily paraphrased). Her thing with the planes is part of that too, she’s trying to reconnect with her parents through reenacting their deaths again and again.
Frank: Insensibility. This goes with my previously outlined observation that Frank’s first instinct under pressure is usually not actually to attack, despite his temper, or even to charm/manipulate to try to control, it’s to numb out and hide. He’s got an addict’s drive towards dissociation – I don’t think he even wants his voice and career back as desperately and deeply as he simply wants to stop hurting, but he believes the first would be the means to the second and unfortunately I’m suspecting he would be wrong even if that could happen. Also can you imagine the friend group being given personality-based superpowers and finding that yours is just to confer the symptoms of your own tipping-precariously-towards-late-stage alcoholism onto someone else. Man I’d be depressed as fuck too honestly. (Also interesting to note that he is the one person who is offered this level of power and rejects it completely. Whether out of paranoia, self-loathing, lack of willingness to exert that kind of power over others, discomfort with the supernatural, ‘the fuck is this I have getting dead drunk at home’, all these and/or more… open for exploration (I'd say the class pass thing probably Means something in that regard, he makes even Colt wear that in the club), but he really did say ‘haha. Nah’ and made Gabe the garbage guy’s life hell through doing so really irresponsibly lmao, Harriet wasn’t wrong about that.
I wonder if the slab would have been different if it was made at another, less worn down part of his life, or if this was under there the whole time. he also has a little bit of a split self theme going on -- an artist persona, a voice he puts on (that is failing), a name twice removed: spicer is not his real name, and ramblin' frank is essentially a character he plays.
ALSO super interesting that we get to see what being in possession of the slab does to Gabe, and that the way it presents in him is isolation in a heavily fortified location and drunken heartbreaking song of lost love and regret and longing. Did Gabe get hooked on it so quickly and completely because there was some resonance there, is what I’m trying to say. It doesn’t feel quite coincidental that he is the one to pick it up.)
Aleksis: To play with people like they’re his food, nothing but meat puppets for his entertainment and consumption. So business as usual just less metaphor more literal edition. Listen he’s not a very complicated guy/monster (affectionate). A definite case of 'give a man a mask, and he'll show you who he is' too
Wenjie: Is what Harriet pretends to be, largely uninterested in human contact but trapped in the self as if between two mirrors. Endless recursions of herself and the hunger to understand the larger clockwork of the universe through having created a small clockwork universe of her own to study, but her universe has a few cogs loose and regularly goes cuckoo. Maybe God stays in heaven because she too is so fucking annoyed by what she’s created fUCK aleksis has managed to get through the minicom block again how the fuck does he do that
