I’ve been watching Gen V, it’s the The Boys spin-off that they rolled out to rake in as much cash as they could and appease the people ‘cause they’re taking forever to make a new season. And it’s alright. It’s not The Boys, but you know, it does try to compensate the lacks with overly graphic sexual content, so I guess it’s fair.
Anyway, one of the plots of the series, a pretty major one really, so oops if you haven’t seen it yet, relies around a lab-created virus used to control some people (also maybe, possibly kill them). And every time it gets brought up, a little alarm bell goes on in my head. That’s how you know we’re officially “over it” as a society, when we can start making jokes about it again on telly.
...except the last thing we want to be is over it.
It strikes me as lunatic how naturally we’ll accept that sure, so-and-so assholey villain on TV is engineering this lab-made virus to kill and control the population, yet when it was proposed at the time, everyone was like “what are you, fucking crazy?”.
Doesn’t that seem like an exceedingly faulty logic to you? ‘Cause it sure does to me.
Now, mad scientists doing bad, evil nasty stuff with viruses has been a trope since we started doing science. Pretty sure it was about five minutes after that someone first went “you know what would be really crazy...”. And all along, we’ve been buying it. If you read about this crazy dangerous virus being manipulated by some psychos to control or kill off people, or see it in a movie, you have no problem taking it in stride. Not a single qualm. Nobody does. Unless the plot is exceedingly goofy, but that’s usually to do with the overall writing. The mad scientist or the evil politicians manipulating mad scientist’s virus for evil – no trouble swallowing that, as an audience.
It begs the question...well, where do you think these characters and plots come from? They’re not plucked from thin air, or examples of some really strong weed the screenwriters were smoking at the time of writing. Like most fiction, it’s inspired by reality.
Don't interrupt the evolution chain. Read.
Because put yourself in the writer’s shoes for a second. You’re sat at your computer, trying to give your plot some semblance of meaning, and boom, an idea strikes. What if Joe Spy learns the government is using a dangerous lab virus to enforce more rigorous population control? What if Bob Nice-Guy Scientist lets things get outta hand in his lab, and suddenly, he’s got a deadly virus on his hands that everyone’s vying for (to use as a weapon)?
Well, if those things wouldn’t be possible in real life, the writers wouldn’t be putting them in. Yes, the point of fiction is to embellish and, at times, even invent alternate realities altogether. But all fiction needs to be rooted in our known reality. There needs to be a part, no matter how small and isolated, inside the reader/viewer’s mind that thinks this could really happen, otherwise your story immediately gets discarded. Even the most hardcore sci-fi shit needs to follow some semblance of plausibility.
Now, I don’t think Bob Nice-Guy Scientist was at play here, and Joe Spy, if he knew, he certainly did nothing to help. I don’t think there was a deadly, scary virus out there that governments used malevolently. But there was a virus. That’s all you need, really. That’s better, actually, as long as you can get people to think it’s a deadly, scary virus. You know why? Because it’s easier to control. With a properly scary virus, there’d be that small chance that you yourself, aka the manipulator, become the manipulated/victim/infected. So definitely not fun.
So then, why not believe it? That’s something we heard extensively in recent months – “I just never believed they’d do something like that”.
Well, maybe you should’ve. Maybe if you had, we wouldn’t have lost so much.
Personally, I’m apprehensive of this plot in movies, especially in popular, mass programmes like this Gen V stuff. Why? Because one, again, we shouldn’t be “over it”. We’re not over the pandemic, nor should we be quick to make a passing joke of the like. Second, because it sells you the illusion that the bad virus plot is back where it belongs – on telly – as opposed to where it actually is – in the real world.
To even imagine that we’re out of the red is kinda like a battered woman saying her relationship’s all fine and dandy now – after all, he hasn’t hit her today. Seemingly, we’re back to normal. I was just joking about being allowed into all the stores for this year’s Christmas shopping. But just because they’re not abusing, manipulating, and stripping our rights today does not a healthy relationship make.
The only scenario in which said battered woman really is okay is the one where she’s gotten as far as she possibly can from that aggressive psycho. We, as a whole, are sadly barred that option. We can’t get away from the psychopaths in charge, so we must live with them. In that situation, mistrust and apprehension are valuable tools, lest we too start thinking everything is fine and dandy just because they haven’t attacked your particular nugget of freedoms and indulgences in the past six months.
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This area was looking empty,yet I don't wanna engage..