Greetings
everyone. I have noticed that many of
you have in some way voiced your disdain of how the show is structured around
the “rape and pillage” mentality of the patrons of the park. What I believe may be a hidden theme within
the show’s narrative is that these are not supposed to be naturalistic
depictions of the “average” person, but rather an exaggeration of higher
society.
Our most recent episode
in our voyage, “The Stray,” gives us our first real sense of how this show acts
in relation to our sense of reality. One
of the guests and his soon-to-be brother-in-law are sitting around a campfire
when he spouts the line “40k a day to jerk off alone in the woods playing white
hat.” Now we as the audience can assume
that this is close to the second or third day the duo has remained in the park,
so we’re nearing the one hundred thousand dollar mark of their excursion. We can also deduce that this is large
quantity of money in this world considering everyone blathers on about how “rich”
the guests are. The soon-to-be
brother-in-law, let’s call him “Good One,” is clearly disinterested in the event
and is not entirely sold on taking advantage of every opportunity at
first. We are clearly dealing with
people who come from a sizable amount of money, upper class to the one percent,
as our West World patrons. The show as
whole is essentially feeding into our preconceived notions about people of
status being distanced from reality enough to find pleasure in things that we
find repulsive. We’ve been focusing
our attention on what this show says of us as a people instead of how we view individual
facets of society, especially people with more power than us. We as a society find it fascinating how the
rich live in such a bubble and West World is literally a sphere in which they
can follow whatever synthetic desire they like without impunity.
However in equal
measure we can see how this episode is trying to showcase how this seclusion from
reality is dangerous to both the patrons and the guests. The man in black is very much a force of
nature in West World. He’s an anomaly;
an unstoppable force that isn’t abiding by the rules of the illusion. With what we know about the man in black so
far, we can safely assume that he has found a new meaning in West World in such a way that he has completely bought into the reality of the park. We never see him interact with other guests and he goes out of his way to treat the park as an ultimate game, hidden levels and all.
Ultimately he is looking for something sustainable for him that is
beyond the simple storylines, but his pursuit of “the maze” caused flashbacks
in Delores and Mauve, with a surprising lack of other patrons present in these
episodes. With this simple rejection of
the core concept of West World, we see that it opens the door for a wide
variety of different reactions and interactions between characters.
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