#severance analysis

[susellesie]

no dentist's office. no writing christmas cards. no taking flights. a world where every pain or minor annoyance is dismissed as your consciousness is replaced with a different version of you. a life without pain, or agitation, or monotony. and conversely, a life full of only that for every version of you who experiences the chores you wished to evade.

forget skipping work or school or birth. try everything. never experience anything that expires a negative emotion. the ideal consciousness sold as a product for the price of a version of you that you'll never meet.

but it doesn't matter. you carry the hurt down with you. in your hands, in your mind, your mouth. the grief mark experiences carried into his innie, gemma feeling the pain she experienced in the rooms even after she's been severed.

it doesn't matter. you carry it with you.

[eagans]

ether as severance + “the courtship of kier and imogene” (relationship parallels)

(just so we’re clear, while the kier-imogene dynamic is clearly paralleled with helena and mark, it is also reiterated in cobel and mark, dr mauer and gemma, and even burt and irving to some extent; season 2 has also made it a point to show us that helena and cobel are both victims in their own ways while being perpetrators. it is not a black and white situation and misogyny will get you blocked.)

original threads: (x), (x)

[the-crooked-library]

one thing that i really enjoy about milchick is the consistency of his characterization. like, yeah, the "you must eradicate from yourself childish folly, you must abandon childish things" scene was stunning - but its impact would never have amounted to the same level if the show hadn't demonstrated already that he is a playful, fun-loving person.

yeah yeah evil middle management whatever milchick is constantly trying to insert Fun into the process, and while it's mostly corporate manipulation, corporate crucially does not approve of it. he is really putting too much effort into things. he dances during the Music/Dance Experience. sets up a scavenger hunt during the ORTBO when it could've been a powerpoint. the entire concept of an ORTBO actually. the bonfire. he reads out loud and does the voices. none of it ever goes well (what with the biting and the carrot penis etc) but he doesn't stop, even despite the negative feedback from the Board. he wants to be playful and childish so bad but he can't, and he keeps trying to provide that to the innies because he clearly wishes someone would do that for him, but they hate it, they don't appreciate it, and he takes it sooooo personally it's stupid

i want to set him loose in an arcade or something. with an escape room and a jungle gym. he would be in there for hours frolicking like a baby goat but nooo he has to go be evil. it's a 9 to 5. well, a 9 to 5:45 (they stagger the exits). and sometimes 9 to 2am. and then again to 9, because that's how it is, isn't it?.. nobody ever leaves.

[redclovertea]

oh. irving was willing to face being fired, ending his life, because he felt love for the first time and then had it stripped away form him. dylan was willing to quit, ending his life, for the same reason. and helly, who had been the one so desperate to end her life from the moment she set foot on that severed floor? her love for mark is what keeps her bound to that floor, now. i think that’s what they failed to consider when perfecting their severance process. whether or not love transcends severance, that doesn’t matter. but love in any form, in an existence that is otherwise so limited, that holds so much power

[sageshouldknowbetter]

It’s tempting to think that innies are just the outies at their core, right? That they’re what you get when you take a person and peel away all their past trauma until you get to their very soul. The true essence. The self free from expectations. “The you you are.”

But we have to remember: innies can’t be the “true” outies without the environmental influence to “mess them up,” because the severed floor is NOT a non-environment. This world that the innies are born into forms their every character trait and idiosyncrasy that isn’t already BURIED in the outie’s subconscious. So though it’s fun (and not completely wrong!) to say innies are outies without the baggage… they aren’t the outies in their “purest forms” either.

Take Mark, for example. On the surface, the Mark S we see at the beginning of season one is a hard-working, kind, and seemingly content yes-man. Mark Scout, meanwhile, is a depressed and sarcastic alcoholic who gets drunk at night and sobs in his car the next morning.

The apparent difference between them? Mark Scout remembers his wife dying in a car crash and Mark S… doesn’t. Therefore, Mark S must be basically like Mark Scout was before Gemma died. … Right???

Not exactly. Because Mark S still has a past. A short one, sure, and closed-off too — but still a past, and it highly affects his personality today.

It’s heavily implied that he didn’t start off as the corporate tool we see in early episodes. In fact, based on his account of threatening to kill Petey and extensive references to past torture (“bad soap,” “Milchick can’t always be nice like that,” and “It’s easier for you both if he knows which end to start from”), he could’ve been almost as rebellious as Helly. The difference is that where Mark Scout remembers being formed by a drunk father, screeching tires, and policemen at the door, Mark S remembers days on end in the Break Room, saying he was a blight on humanity until he believed it was true.

That’s a decent portion of why he comes across as a “sweet” yet timid bootlicker! Because he is built on trauma! Just new trauma! Different trauma! Trauma he remembers, but Mark Scout doesn’t! (His outie’s past still impacts his character, sure, but it’s not at the forefront of his mind the way his conscious memories are.) The fact that his bad experiences are novel, weird, and surface-level innocuous don’t make them any less potent or formative to the kind of person he is now.

In the same way, I don’t think it’s exactly right to call Helly “what Helena would’ve been like if she was free from Lumon and the pressure of being an Eagan.”

Yeah — in some ways, it’s true. Helly doesn’t have to worry about public opinion, the weight of her name, or what her father thinks. She can have friends and a surrogate dad and, well, baby goats. But the difference between Helly and Helena is more than just one remembering her Eagan upbringing and the other not. The severed floor is in NO way some controlled, pressure-free, unable-to-change-its-inhabitants environment.

Helly remembers cutting her arm in a smashed-open window under red glow, apologizing in the Break Room over a thousand times, and learning just how much she isn’t considered a person. But she also remembers three other people being her only allies, friends (and lover), and entire world — literally. Less than ten people, and always under horrific circumstances, are the only people she ever sees. This kind of life could NOT happen to anyone on the outside, including Helena — even if she wasn’t born an Eagan.

So what would Helena be like if she wasn’t an Eagan? The truth is… we don’t know. But the question isn’t what she would be like. It’s if, stripped of her heritage, it would even still be her in the first place.

Your brain is split in half. Is that still you? You are awakened, memories gone, born again into a whole different kind of world, and grow to fill it like water in cupped hands. Is it still you now? Are you the same “you” you were ten years ago? Ten months ago? This morning? Who ARE you? And what IS “you,” anyway?

That’s what Severance wants us to ponder. And whatever the relationship between innies and outies is (the same person, completely different people, Cain and Abel, you in another lifetime) (can you even call that “you”?), one thing’s for certain: innies aren’t just outies with the bad stuff wiped off. If anything, that’s what Lumon would like them to think.

[david-lanndlord]

Cold Harbour made it so clear that Mark's primary character trait is LOVE! That is his strongest and clearest feeling and directive! It's his north star!!! The whole plot is driven by it - it informs everything he does!

Mark got a job with Lumon and became severed because he loved Gemma so much that he couldn't function without her. He had to create a version of him that didn't know her, had never loved her, just so he could get through every day.

Then iMark fell in love with Helly, because of course he did. His base personality is sweet and trusting - he wants to love people! Lumon makes it nearly impossible, but even in that sterile, authoritarian environment he STILL managed to love.

oMark cooked up all that corporate espionage stuff with Devon, started reintegrating and getting brain surgery in his basement, had a fucking stroke, all because of love. He went and broke into the testing floor and killed a man. All because he was so desperate to get Gemma back.

And so of course the crowning moment of iMark's characterization is a moment where he is revealed to truly be the same person as oMark, deep down - because he chooses love. It's what Mark does, in every situation, every time. He chooses love.

[rickenhalesbookclub4innies]

I think it’s interesting that there’s some muscle memory in everyone’s innies. Helly immediately screams to let her out. She doesn’t even know what this place is yet, but she knows she wants out of it. Mark feels too sad looking at the pictures of Petey and so he stowed them away in a dark corner where he doesn’t have to see them. He’s not dead, he’s just not here. Irving can’t let himself be with Burt, even in private, because one interpretation of the dogmatic scripture of a religious text forbids it. If that’s not muscle memory, idk what is.

[radioactive-yuri]

the overall religious themes in severance go so crazy hard when it comes to natalie. like yeah, you ARE a prophet. you are the mouth of our god. and we will imprison you. we will adorn you with an earpiece and a smile, like ceremonial robes for a ritual. we will hollow you out from the inside, so that you may become a pure vessel for our god to speak through. we will make you holy. we will make you empty. you are our prophet. ours to keep.