Is it like that in the books or is there a reason they couldn't put Kovacs in an Asian body for this series?
I mean, he has been in an Asian body in this series.
But a big part of the world of Altered Carbon is that the bodies aren't really the thing that matters.
One if the big parts of envoy training is being able to be dropped into any body on limited notice and being able to get back up to full speed quickly. Most people cannot tolerate being in bodies very different from their natural one and switching bodies too much will drive most people bonkers quickly. The body is not the person and them doing drastically different actors each season is a good call.
They did introduce advanced cloning technology though, making the drop to different bodies on other planets a bit unnecessary.
It makes sense for an Envoy to do it but why wouldn't Kovacs just get a clone made wherever he's going? Even if not his original body the consistency should be a benefit, no?
The bodies still have to grow up. So he has to purchase storage space and grow a custom body and hope it's still there when/if he needs it. Hope the tech he puts in there isn't horribly outdated by the time he sleeves in. Does kovacs look or act like someone who plans long term?
And envoys are banned from pretty much every industry due to the weird stuff they can do. Their economic opportunities turn to crime or pmc stuff outside the military. So getting the money to do it is a little rough.
And the final nail in the coffin is how old he is. His original body is long turned to dust. He's been in jail for a long time before the first book/season, and Bancroft had to dig him out or else he'd have never been sleeved again.
I don't know man. Having watched Contrapoints(a trans Woman) recent youtube episode on cancel culture. Where she details the harassment she has gotten for using the "wrong" transgendered collaborator (Transgender man Buck Angel) in a previous video. With the calls for her cancellation coming from certain segments of the Trans community. I am left with a feeling that people are way to eager to dismiss people that don't agree to their definitions of what is proper trans.
Honestly, nothing he wrote was anything that was out of line with conventional wisdom 20 years ago. Breast implants are not real breasts. Taking a hormonal cocktail suppresses your regular system , but does not replace it. Deep down in their DNA, trans people still have XX/XY genes no matter what their appearance shows. It very much a mechanical view of the human body, not an organic one. Its very common and I doubt its self hate. Its just fixed on the idea that this is how the world/human body works. If you have a A type body, then you can't turn it into a B type body anymore then a cat can become a dog. Of course since then our understanding has shifted and broaden considerably.
Its more a result of a limited education on the subject then anything. After all the XX/XY is only part of what makes a person and when you add the mind into it, it becomes a spectrum with many different combinations. Morgan needs somebody to take him aside and actually educate him on the neural/mind implications of being trans and how it connects to a biological body. And it needs to come from an educational perspective, not a dismissive one. He is a guy in his 40s after all, which means he got his schooling during the Thatcher years. Its amazing that he thinks Trans people are people at all.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
Nah. You don't get credit for giving people common human decency. He's got views that are transohobic and that'd just not okay.
Sure he might be educatable, but that doesn't mean he's not a straight up transphobe. He's less virulently transphobic than others, too, but again, you know? I grew up in a less than ideal culture of trans tolerance too. I fucking learned (not saying I'm perfect by any stretch but I took responsibility for changing my views). There's no excuse IMO.
I haven't read the books but the impression I get from the show is that clones are also incredibly expensive.
Like each one is in the neighborhood of buying a private island level of expensive or something.
Depends how pretty and dangerous they are. Milspec costs. Augments cost. Custom grown bodies cost.
Something from storage that is average human is maybe on order of a house, varies accordingly. You can get a cheap body with several major flaws like addiction, severe damage, degenerating vision, etc or a crappy artificial sleeve that doesnt work well, unsuitable for sports let alone specops for the price of a car.
Nah. You don't get credit for giving people common human decency. He's got views that are transphobic and that'd just not okay.
Sure he might be educatable, but that doesn't mean he's not a straight up transphobe. He's less virulently transphobic than others, too, but again, you know? I grew up in a less than ideal culture of trans tolerance too. I fucking learned (not saying I'm perfect by any stretch but I took responsibility for changing my views). There's no excuse IMO.
^ This. This right here. This!
Deep down in their DNA, trans people still have XX/XY genes no matter what their appearance shows.
Also! Fucking ship of Theseus, people! Chromosomes aren't even the end of the long tail on this topic! :x
I'm going to stop now before I get really mad, but not at anyone here. Ya'll at least try to be better, to learn, and I love y'all for that. :heartbeat:
When biology becomes fully malleable before the relentless advance of science, expect shit to get weird and full of wonders! Don't get shitty about it! Don't let the people around you get shitty about it either! /Rant.
Deep down in their DNA, trans people still have XX/XY genes no matter what their appearance shows.
Also! Fucking ship of Theseus, people! Chromosomes aren't even the end of the long tail on this topic! :x
I'm going to stop now before I get really mad, but not at anyone here. Ya'll at least try to be better, to learn, and I love y'all for that. :heartbeat:
When biology becomes fully malleable before the relentless advance of science, expect shit to get weird and full of wonders! Don't get shitty about it! Don't let the people around you get shitty about it either! /Rant.
I'm with ya. Like three seconds on google would lead you to folks with more than two sex chromosomes and then you get into the various point mutations and it is just hella complicated to be even "technically" correct. All that complication still just leads you to being an asshole telling somebody that their body needs to conform to your expectations.
Is it possible that his terf views come from a repressed self hate? That was the feeling I got with Orson Scott Card and homosexuality.
OSC was basically told he would be excommunicated from his family/community if he didn't up the hatred of homosexuality. He caved and it pretty clearly broke most of what was good about him.
I haven't read the books but the impression I get from the show is that clones are also incredibly expensive.
Like each one is in the neighborhood of buying a private island level of expensive or something.
Yup the options are generally synth as the cheapest but looked down upon option followed by rando criminal, high end person with upgrades/mods and then clones. Clones are pretty much there for the rich and famous so everybody else makes do with what they get. I am under the impression that most of the government/corp stuff has a storage unit full of spec ops oriented bodies for envoys to jump into. Cheaper and easier than cloning.
Nah. You don't get credit for giving people common human decency. He's got views that are transphobic and that'd just not okay.
Sure he might be educatable, but that doesn't mean he's not a straight up transphobe. He's less virulently transphobic than others, too, but again, you know? I grew up in a less than ideal culture of trans tolerance too. I fucking learned (not saying I'm perfect by any stretch but I took responsibility for changing my views). There's no excuse IMO.
^ This. This right here. This!
Deep down in their DNA, trans people still have XX/XY genes no matter what their appearance shows.
Also! Fucking ship of Theseus, people! Chromosomes aren't even the end of the long tail on this topic! :x
I'm going to stop now before I get really mad, but not at anyone here. Ya'll at least try to be better, to learn, and I love y'all for that. :heartbeat:
When biology becomes fully malleable before the relentless advance of science, expect shit to get weird and full of wonders! Don't get shitty about it! Don't let the people around you get shitty about it either! /Rant.
The culture has a neat take on it.
Spoilers for minor culture details
Every human-ish is basically genetically altered in a load of ways, one being that you basically have the developer console enabled.
Wanna switch your gender? Think the command, and you body fully switches gender as fast as safely possible, which leads to full functionality, too
Some people in-universe consider it the ultimate romantic gesture for lovers to bear each others children through switches. And some consider that weird.
Some people never switch genders, but with natural life spans that could be infinite, if most people didn't get bored of living after 400-800 years, that position is considered arcane.
Of course they also have control over a special drug gland that releases helping and also just recreational substances, the bodies are basically hardened in a way that a severed head can be viable long enough to save it and re-grow a body, and they went through a phase where the human form was considered blasé and everyone just went wild, only to return to human-ish relatively recently
The joke about cis dude authors esteemed transhumanism being "Optimized nutrients to kill muscles" compared to trans folk doing actual stuff based around shedding your body as much as possible continues to be hilariously true.
And yeah, I'm hoping season 2 has more of the stuff that isn't the big sister plot or whatever that de-railed the entire conspiracy last time.
EDIT: Also lol at the person most going to bat for transphobia bringing up Contra as Good.
Albino Bunny on
+2
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Nah. You don't get credit for giving people common human decency. He's got views that are transphobic and that'd just not okay.
Sure he might be educatable, but that doesn't mean he's not a straight up transphobe. He's less virulently transphobic than others, too, but again, you know? I grew up in a less than ideal culture of trans tolerance too. I fucking learned (not saying I'm perfect by any stretch but I took responsibility for changing my views). There's no excuse IMO.
^ This. This right here. This!
Deep down in their DNA, trans people still have XX/XY genes no matter what their appearance shows.
Also! Fucking ship of Theseus, people! Chromosomes aren't even the end of the long tail on this topic! :x
I'm going to stop now before I get really mad, but not at anyone here. Ya'll at least try to be better, to learn, and I love y'all for that. :heartbeat:
When biology becomes fully malleable before the relentless advance of science, expect shit to get weird and full of wonders! Don't get shitty about it! Don't let the people around you get shitty about it either! /Rant.
The culture has a neat take on it.
Spoilers for minor culture details
Every human-ish is basically genetically altered in a load of ways, one being that you basically have the developer console enabled.
Wanna switch your gender? Think the command, and you body fully switches gender as fast as safely possible, which leads to full functionality, too
Some people in-universe consider it the ultimate romantic gesture for lovers to bear each others children through switches. And some consider that weird.
Some people never switch genders, but with natural life spans that could be infinite, if most people didn't get bored of living after 400-800 years, that position is considered arcane.
Of course they also have control over a special drug gland that releases helping and also just recreational substances, the bodies are basically hardened in a way that a severed head can be viable long enough to save it and re-grow a body, and they went through a phase where the human form was considered blasé and everyone just went wild, only to return to human-ish relatively recently
Though it should be noted that the concept of "human" in The Culture is a much broader notion that largely means carbon-based mostly-symmetrical biped with a head. Culture humans come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, colors, and origins before the extra glands and tech even gets added to the mix.
+5
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
Nah. You don't get credit for giving people common human decency. He's got views that are transphobic and that'd just not okay.
Sure he might be educatable, but that doesn't mean he's not a straight up transphobe. He's less virulently transphobic than others, too, but again, you know? I grew up in a less than ideal culture of trans tolerance too. I fucking learned (not saying I'm perfect by any stretch but I took responsibility for changing my views). There's no excuse IMO.
^ This. This right here. This!
Deep down in their DNA, trans people still have XX/XY genes no matter what their appearance shows.
Also! Fucking ship of Theseus, people! Chromosomes aren't even the end of the long tail on this topic! :x
I'm going to stop now before I get really mad, but not at anyone here. Ya'll at least try to be better, to learn, and I love y'all for that. :heartbeat:
When biology becomes fully malleable before the relentless advance of science, expect shit to get weird and full of wonders! Don't get shitty about it! Don't let the people around you get shitty about it either! /Rant.
The culture has a neat take on it.
Spoilers for minor culture details
Every human-ish is basically genetically altered in a load of ways, one being that you basically have the developer console enabled.
Wanna switch your gender? Think the command, and you body fully switches gender as fast as safely possible, which leads to full functionality, too
Some people in-universe consider it the ultimate romantic gesture for lovers to bear each others children through switches. And some consider that weird.
Some people never switch genders, but with natural life spans that could be infinite, if most people didn't get bored of living after 400-800 years, that position is considered arcane.
Of course they also have control over a special drug gland that releases helping and also just recreational substances, the bodies are basically hardened in a way that a severed head can be viable long enough to save it and re-grow a body, and they went through a phase where the human form was considered blasé and everyone just went wild, only to return to human-ish relatively recently
Though it should be noted that the concept of "human" in The Culture is a much broader notion that largely means carbon-based mostly-symmetrical biped with a head. Culture humans come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, colors, and origins before the extra glands and tech even gets added to the mix.
IIRC The Hydrogen Sonata mentions that The Culture was a bunch of mostly similar species that all agreed to become a single entity, and part of that was everyone altering their genetics so everyone could make babies together.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Nah. You don't get credit for giving people common human decency. He's got views that are transphobic and that'd just not okay.
Sure he might be educatable, but that doesn't mean he's not a straight up transphobe. He's less virulently transphobic than others, too, but again, you know? I grew up in a less than ideal culture of trans tolerance too. I fucking learned (not saying I'm perfect by any stretch but I took responsibility for changing my views). There's no excuse IMO.
^ This. This right here. This!
Deep down in their DNA, trans people still have XX/XY genes no matter what their appearance shows.
Also! Fucking ship of Theseus, people! Chromosomes aren't even the end of the long tail on this topic! :x
I'm going to stop now before I get really mad, but not at anyone here. Ya'll at least try to be better, to learn, and I love y'all for that. :heartbeat:
When biology becomes fully malleable before the relentless advance of science, expect shit to get weird and full of wonders! Don't get shitty about it! Don't let the people around you get shitty about it either! /Rant.
The culture has a neat take on it.
Spoilers for minor culture details
Every human-ish is basically genetically altered in a load of ways, one being that you basically have the developer console enabled.
Wanna switch your gender? Think the command, and you body fully switches gender as fast as safely possible, which leads to full functionality, too
Some people in-universe consider it the ultimate romantic gesture for lovers to bear each others children through switches. And some consider that weird.
Some people never switch genders, but with natural life spans that could be infinite, if most people didn't get bored of living after 400-800 years, that position is considered arcane.
Of course they also have control over a special drug gland that releases helping and also just recreational substances, the bodies are basically hardened in a way that a severed head can be viable long enough to save it and re-grow a body, and they went through a phase where the human form was considered blasé and everyone just went wild, only to return to human-ish relatively recently
Though it should be noted that the concept of "human" in The Culture is a much broader notion that largely means carbon-based mostly-symmetrical biped with a head. Culture humans come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, colors, and origins before the extra glands and tech even gets added to the mix.
IIRC The Hydrogen Sonata mentions that The Culture was a bunch of mostly similar species that all agreed to become a single entity, and part of that was everyone altering their genetics so everyone could make babies together.
Not just make babies, but find each other sexually attractive.
Nah. You don't get credit for giving people common human decency. He's got views that are transphobic and that'd just not okay.
Sure he might be educatable, but that doesn't mean he's not a straight up transphobe. He's less virulently transphobic than others, too, but again, you know? I grew up in a less than ideal culture of trans tolerance too. I fucking learned (not saying I'm perfect by any stretch but I took responsibility for changing my views). There's no excuse IMO.
^ This. This right here. This!
Deep down in their DNA, trans people still have XX/XY genes no matter what their appearance shows.
Also! Fucking ship of Theseus, people! Chromosomes aren't even the end of the long tail on this topic! :x
I'm going to stop now before I get really mad, but not at anyone here. Ya'll at least try to be better, to learn, and I love y'all for that. :heartbeat:
When biology becomes fully malleable before the relentless advance of science, expect shit to get weird and full of wonders! Don't get shitty about it! Don't let the people around you get shitty about it either! /Rant.
The culture has a neat take on it.
Spoilers for minor culture details
Every human-ish is basically genetically altered in a load of ways, one being that you basically have the developer console enabled.
Wanna switch your gender? Think the command, and you body fully switches gender as fast as safely possible, which leads to full functionality, too
Some people in-universe consider it the ultimate romantic gesture for lovers to bear each others children through switches. And some consider that weird.
Some people never switch genders, but with natural life spans that could be infinite, if most people didn't get bored of living after 400-800 years, that position is considered arcane.
Of course they also have control over a special drug gland that releases helping and also just recreational substances, the bodies are basically hardened in a way that a severed head can be viable long enough to save it and re-grow a body, and they went through a phase where the human form was considered blasé and everyone just went wild, only to return to human-ish relatively recently
Though it should be noted that the concept of "human" in The Culture is a much broader notion that largely means carbon-based mostly-symmetrical biped with a head. Culture humans come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, colors, and origins before the extra glands and tech even gets added to the mix.
IIRC The Hydrogen Sonata mentions that The Culture was a bunch of mostly similar species that all agreed to become a single entity, and part of that was everyone altering their genetics so everyone could make babies together.
Not just make babies, but find each other sexually attractive.
They called it the Riker Doctrine, for some reason they forgot
Book envoys are way more interesting frankly. One of the failings of the show
yeah I was actually really bummed out that they made the book envoys into boring "c-sec" or whatever that generic-ass name was and then made the envoys the rebel faction
kinda broke down a whole lot of what made Kovacs' views and perspectives changing over time so interesting
+4
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SummaryJudgmentGrab the hottest iron you can find, stride in the Tower’s front doorRegistered Userregular
Book envoys are way more interesting frankly. One of the failings of the show
yeah I was actually really bummed out that they made the book envoys into boring "c-sec" or whatever that generic-ass name was and then made the envoys the rebel faction
kinda broke down a whole lot of what made Kovacs' views and perspectives changing over time so interesting
The way Jimmy de Soto was handled was just ughhhhhh
Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.
Crushed it in a night, pretty good. Tighter than the first, which felt slack during the centre. Some things post twist didn't come to pass, which was good. Was sort of annoyed by the one part of the end.
+3
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Gabriel_Pitt(effective against Russian warships)Registered Userregular
Wait, the new season is out? Holy shit, where's my password?
So the show immediately opens with some sleeve fuckery, and we pretty quickly get Anthony Mackie who is alright, but I feel is ... Anthony Mackie playing Anthony Mackie as Takeshi Kovacs. It's not a complaint specific to him, but it does feel like a lot of actors are just being themselves reciting the lines and the character is more like them, then they're like the character. Kinnaman had the advantage of my never seeing him in anything, same for Will Yun Lee. Hey, if you like Mackie, you're all set. That said, even though they're a lifetime apart, I never get the feeling they're all the same character. There's never a moment of Keanuesque "whoa" where some iteration of Kovacs channels another one to startling effect.
Less nudity this time around and while Kinnaman's initial reveal felt sort of shocking in how big he was coming out of the ziploc bag and the image of the ziploc bag itself, Mackie looks pretty much the same as ever. Granted. he's in the Marvel flicks and every guy in the MCU is ripped like a greek god unless they're Stan Lee. Feels less violent too, overall. There's a fair bit of shooting and some punching and such, but it does feel like they dialed it back. It never goes as dark as season one which went dark as fuck in the end.
Poe shows up too, and he's kinda fucked up so he isn't a quick solution to every single non combat problem which is good. I think the best AI moment is when someone directly overrides one, showing that for all their fancy-ness, they're still just a computer program and bound by the rules of "SUDO give me the fucking information".
The protectorate commander comes off as sufficiently douchey as a villain, and his team's cirque de soleil tumbling intro using the one gun killing all those cops was less John Wick and more just, "Ok, this is fucking ridiculous, I get it, they're badass." He's mostly just a smarmy prick until the end and it always felt like there was going to be some breakthrough for his character, but it never really seems to happens It isn't a bad thing, but it just makes him less interesting. The female governor is pretty good and at first I thought she was going to be sort of wasted, but she has a bunch of "oh you bitch" moments to cement her villain status.
The introduction of a younger Kovacs was sort of a nice twist, and I was worried that he'd show up for a while, get killed by current Kovacs and that would be that, thanks for coming out Will Yun Lee. Thankfully it goes another way. If there is another season, just let Will Yun Lee be the lead and make your big star the villain of the piece. Current Kovacs does 'die' at the end, and I was good with that given that he saves his lady. Then they ruin that which is a bit of a drag, I'd have preferred they just left him dead and now Kovacs Prime is the lead moving forward. I think by the time season 3 rolls around, the audience doesn't need a "big" name playing the lead.
I feel like the world is just not good this season. Maybe it's the sets or the limited big picture shots but it feels like a daytime soap opera.
It's really distracting.
In the first part of the first season he gets loaded and is literally bombarded with new culture and wide angle shots of the city streets and slums.
There's a good wide angle shot of Kovacs on the wall/reservoir looking thing talking to Rei about being exhausted and such that sold the setting.
This world? One opening scene with an obscure reference to elders and a really shitty cgi shot of a cityscape. The rest of the show feels silly because it's all close up interior shots... Even the gardens and outdoors shots are close ups interiors.
Did they dramatically cut the budget or get cheaper cgi effects or something?
Man, the concept of digital immortality gives me the heebee jeebees.
I think I'd have to say no thanks to uploadin' my brain.
I have a hard time getting on board with the casual idea that you can upload a brain and copy a person. Having been around stroke victims and people with degenerative brain diseases there's so much about us that requires that specific brain and configuration to make us people. It's too hand wavy to be considered thought provoking.
Star Trek transporters are the real wtf. You create a replica and then destroy the original and everyone is fine with it. An implant in a brain stem tries to avoid the idea that a brain is important to who we are. Which is silly.
Edit: Really enjoyed season 1. Mostly meh on this season. Supporting cast and flashbacks are the only interesting pieces.
Oh, transporters are a bit of a disaster. They barely use them to their potential. "Let's beam soandso into the memory banks...and now we'll just delete the cancer out of him...and then beam them out." or "Wow, Pike's body got FUCKED...good thing we have a backup from when he beamed down or from his last health check."
"Let's just keep a copy of the red shirt before we beam down, not saying Ensign Ricky is gonna die, but he's going down into the unknown with Kirk, Spock and McCoy and we all know how that usually works out."
Someone in this series of the show does sort of address the idea that even with perfect tech, after so long the human spirit does sort of give out.
I think the implied and stated flaws of the body he had from season 1 made it more interesting too. Sure it was in shape but it had addictions and physical injuries and scars.
Posts
The bodies still have to grow up. So he has to purchase storage space and grow a custom body and hope it's still there when/if he needs it. Hope the tech he puts in there isn't horribly outdated by the time he sleeves in. Does kovacs look or act like someone who plans long term?
And envoys are banned from pretty much every industry due to the weird stuff they can do. Their economic opportunities turn to crime or pmc stuff outside the military. So getting the money to do it is a little rough.
And the final nail in the coffin is how old he is. His original body is long turned to dust. He's been in jail for a long time before the first book/season, and Bancroft had to dig him out or else he'd have never been sleeved again.
Like each one is in the neighborhood of buying a private island level of expensive or something.
And his Gay As Heck fantasy trilogy.
Honestly, nothing he wrote was anything that was out of line with conventional wisdom 20 years ago. Breast implants are not real breasts. Taking a hormonal cocktail suppresses your regular system , but does not replace it. Deep down in their DNA, trans people still have XX/XY genes no matter what their appearance shows. It very much a mechanical view of the human body, not an organic one. Its very common and I doubt its self hate. Its just fixed on the idea that this is how the world/human body works. If you have a A type body, then you can't turn it into a B type body anymore then a cat can become a dog. Of course since then our understanding has shifted and broaden considerably.
Its more a result of a limited education on the subject then anything. After all the XX/XY is only part of what makes a person and when you add the mind into it, it becomes a spectrum with many different combinations. Morgan needs somebody to take him aside and actually educate him on the neural/mind implications of being trans and how it connects to a biological body. And it needs to come from an educational perspective, not a dismissive one. He is a guy in his 40s after all, which means he got his schooling during the Thatcher years. Its amazing that he thinks Trans people are people at all.
Sure he might be educatable, but that doesn't mean he's not a straight up transphobe. He's less virulently transphobic than others, too, but again, you know? I grew up in a less than ideal culture of trans tolerance too. I fucking learned (not saying I'm perfect by any stretch but I took responsibility for changing my views). There's no excuse IMO.
Depends how pretty and dangerous they are. Milspec costs. Augments cost. Custom grown bodies cost.
Something from storage that is average human is maybe on order of a house, varies accordingly. You can get a cheap body with several major flaws like addiction, severe damage, degenerating vision, etc or a crappy artificial sleeve that doesnt work well, unsuitable for sports let alone specops for the price of a car.
Also! Fucking ship of Theseus, people! Chromosomes aren't even the end of the long tail on this topic! :x
I'm going to stop now before I get really mad, but not at anyone here. Ya'll at least try to be better, to learn, and I love y'all for that. :heartbeat:
When biology becomes fully malleable before the relentless advance of science, expect shit to get weird and full of wonders! Don't get shitty about it! Don't let the people around you get shitty about it either! /Rant.
I'm with ya. Like three seconds on google would lead you to folks with more than two sex chromosomes and then you get into the various point mutations and it is just hella complicated to be even "technically" correct. All that complication still just leads you to being an asshole telling somebody that their body needs to conform to your expectations.
OSC was basically told he would be excommunicated from his family/community if he didn't up the hatred of homosexuality. He caved and it pretty clearly broke most of what was good about him.
Yup the options are generally synth as the cheapest but looked down upon option followed by rando criminal, high end person with upgrades/mods and then clones. Clones are pretty much there for the rich and famous so everybody else makes do with what they get. I am under the impression that most of the government/corp stuff has a storage unit full of spec ops oriented bodies for envoys to jump into. Cheaper and easier than cloning.
mega trailer spoiler
Spoilers for minor culture details
Wanna switch your gender? Think the command, and you body fully switches gender as fast as safely possible, which leads to full functionality, too
Some people in-universe consider it the ultimate romantic gesture for lovers to bear each others children through switches. And some consider that weird.
Some people never switch genders, but with natural life spans that could be infinite, if most people didn't get bored of living after 400-800 years, that position is considered arcane.
Of course they also have control over a special drug gland that releases helping and also just recreational substances, the bodies are basically hardened in a way that a severed head can be viable long enough to save it and re-grow a body, and they went through a phase where the human form was considered blasé and everyone just went wild, only to return to human-ish relatively recently
And yeah, I'm hoping season 2 has more of the stuff that isn't the big sister plot or whatever that de-railed the entire conspiracy last time.
EDIT: Also lol at the person most going to bat for transphobia bringing up Contra as Good.
Though it should be noted that the concept of "human" in The Culture is a much broader notion that largely means carbon-based mostly-symmetrical biped with a head. Culture humans come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, colors, and origins before the extra glands and tech even gets added to the mix.
IIRC The Hydrogen Sonata mentions that The Culture was a bunch of mostly similar species that all agreed to become a single entity, and part of that was everyone altering their genetics so everyone could make babies together.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Not just make babies, but find each other sexually attractive.
They called it the Riker Doctrine, for some reason they forgot
yeah I was actually really bummed out that they made the book envoys into boring "c-sec" or whatever that generic-ass name was and then made the envoys the rebel faction
kinda broke down a whole lot of what made Kovacs' views and perspectives changing over time so interesting
The way Jimmy de Soto was handled was just ughhhhhh
Show envoys would be even less likely to have clone bodies and much more likely to use "off the shelf stuff".
Was looking at a mask people were wearing and thought, "That sure looks like soandso!" ... and it was! So pleased with myself.
Like, very first scene spoiler
In a world with tech that advanced it's a pretty easy thing for me to hand-wave away :P
Crushed it in a night, pretty good. Tighter than the first, which felt slack during the centre. Some things post twist didn't come to pass, which was good. Was sort of annoyed by the one part of the end.
Less nudity this time around and while Kinnaman's initial reveal felt sort of shocking in how big he was coming out of the ziploc bag and the image of the ziploc bag itself, Mackie looks pretty much the same as ever. Granted. he's in the Marvel flicks and every guy in the MCU is ripped like a greek god unless they're Stan Lee. Feels less violent too, overall. There's a fair bit of shooting and some punching and such, but it does feel like they dialed it back. It never goes as dark as season one which went dark as fuck in the end.
Poe shows up too, and he's kinda fucked up so he isn't a quick solution to every single non combat problem which is good. I think the best AI moment is when someone directly overrides one, showing that for all their fancy-ness, they're still just a computer program and bound by the rules of "SUDO give me the fucking information".
The protectorate commander comes off as sufficiently douchey as a villain, and his team's cirque de soleil tumbling intro using the one gun killing all those cops was less John Wick and more just, "Ok, this is fucking ridiculous, I get it, they're badass." He's mostly just a smarmy prick until the end and it always felt like there was going to be some breakthrough for his character, but it never really seems to happens It isn't a bad thing, but it just makes him less interesting. The female governor is pretty good and at first I thought she was going to be sort of wasted, but she has a bunch of "oh you bitch" moments to cement her villain status.
The introduction of a younger Kovacs was sort of a nice twist, and I was worried that he'd show up for a while, get killed by current Kovacs and that would be that, thanks for coming out Will Yun Lee. Thankfully it goes another way. If there is another season, just let Will Yun Lee be the lead and make your big star the villain of the piece. Current Kovacs does 'die' at the end, and I was good with that given that he saves his lady. Then they ruin that which is a bit of a drag, I'd have preferred they just left him dead and now Kovacs Prime is the lead moving forward. I think by the time season 3 rolls around, the audience doesn't need a "big" name playing the lead.
It's really distracting.
In the first part of the first season he gets loaded and is literally bombarded with new culture and wide angle shots of the city streets and slums.
There's a good wide angle shot of Kovacs on the wall/reservoir looking thing talking to Rei about being exhausted and such that sold the setting.
This world? One opening scene with an obscure reference to elders and a really shitty cgi shot of a cityscape. The rest of the show feels silly because it's all close up interior shots... Even the gardens and outdoors shots are close ups interiors.
Did they dramatically cut the budget or get cheaper cgi effects or something?
I think I'd have to say no thanks to uploadin' my brain.
I have a hard time getting on board with the casual idea that you can upload a brain and copy a person. Having been around stroke victims and people with degenerative brain diseases there's so much about us that requires that specific brain and configuration to make us people. It's too hand wavy to be considered thought provoking.
Star Trek transporters are the real wtf. You create a replica and then destroy the original and everyone is fine with it. An implant in a brain stem tries to avoid the idea that a brain is important to who we are. Which is silly.
Edit: Really enjoyed season 1. Mostly meh on this season. Supporting cast and flashbacks are the only interesting pieces.
"Let's just keep a copy of the red shirt before we beam down, not saying Ensign Ricky is gonna die, but he's going down into the unknown with Kirk, Spock and McCoy and we all know how that usually works out."
Someone in this series of the show does sort of address the idea that even with perfect tech, after so long the human spirit does sort of give out.
LOL super soldier is meh.