Serenity: It's Never Easy Comic - read it here
POSTED BY: two
UPDATED: Thursday, January 12, 2017 14:02
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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Well... Yes and no. That was probably the ideal, but it rarely ever turned out that way. The very methods used to condition and install those triggers tends to be very psychologically damaging. We're talking medically induced comas with endless subliminal messaging on repeat and electrodes to the brain.
And that's when they aren't doing horrific stuff on the SIDE with the victims, like sexual abuse. Which also happened.
Coming out of those places... they weren't ever normal after that. Lot of them snap, kill people or commit suicide, or they go off the deep end in other ways, long slow self-destruction via drugs (sometimes the same drugs used on them, out of addiction), or internalization of the abuse and perpetuating it in secret against vulnerable sorts, kids and such.
Talking about real life is all well and good, but in talking about Rivers case you have to give some leeway. If for nothing else it is set pretty far into the future.
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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
I think maybe that was meant to have multiple meanings, though maybe not all that Simon would realize. I think how much she can control her emotions depends on the circumstances and medicating influences, early on before Simon really has an idea what's wrong with her and what to give her she's kind of all over the place. But even the medicine isn't quite enough to reverse the other schizophrenic tendencies, the breaks with reality, reduced self-awareness, the world salad. Objects in space is kind of a good example of what River can be like when her PTSD isn't really bothering her, but she's still kind of in and out. At first she's wandering around the ship pretty clearly hallucinating (seeing true things, but hallucinating), later on she outsmarts Jubal Early.
The medication is not enough at the time of Objects. By the start of the BDM who knows how River has been. We get a couple glimpses (what ever they are worth to people) in Those Left Behind and Better days. In one she is so fearful it leads her to overdose. Which for me is a bit out of left field after her being able to deal with Early. Better days she tells a freaky story about marrying a fish. I can see her doing that just to mess with people.
When Serenity starts we see her aware of what is going on. She seems to fully understand what her roll in the job is. Pointing out to Zoe the man that was going to try and be a hero. It is not until she is triggered do we see her start to have mild breaks from reality. I think she was getting better before the movie and being triggered and getting a pretty heavy burden off her may very well have done a good bit more.
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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
A split personality is a different problem from limbic system damage. But yes, people can fix problems, or not, in whatever they they think works for their story.
Different problem, but still the same brain. Again River's problems are not coming from random damage that would have unpredictable results.
I do not fear God, I fear the ignorance of man.
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Quote:
Talking about real life is all well and good, but in talking about Rivers case you have to give some leeway. If for nothing else it is set pretty far into the future.
Maybe, though it looks to me like in the flashback River has in the train Job they're still pretty much doing the electrode thing, though in terms of technology apparently they also added putting needles in her eyes into the procedure. :/
And even with all of River's obvious problems, Dr. Mathias and co are excited because so far she's taken all their surgery and conditioning the best compared to the other students...
It wouldn't be unfair to call those guys sadists and butchers, I think. A lot of techniques for this kind of conditioning involve pushing someone to their psychological breaking point and then writing over them while they're vulnerable. Based on all of that, I'm not sure that's changed even after several centuries.
The military uses a less obvious and extreme variant during boot camp training, but same principle.
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The medication is not enough at the time of Objects. By the start of the BDM who knows how River has been. We get a couple glimpses (what ever they are worth to people) in Those Left Behind and Better days. In one she is so fearful it leads her to overdose. Which for me is a bit out of left field after her being able to deal with Early. Better days she tells a freaky story about marrying a fish. I can see her doing that just to mess with people.
When Serenity starts we see her aware of what is going on. She seems to fully understand what her roll in the job is. Pointing out to Zoe the man that was going to try and be a hero.
And then she goes spacey and says "I ate a bug." Slightly more lucid when Simon decides to leave, but then she apparently worsens, wanders away from Simon in a confused fugue, finds the crew, and then is triggered by the Fruity Oaty Bar commercial.
All of the above is pretty much consistent with River being in and out even while on medication. I honestly think there's really only so much that can be done with the damage she has. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes medication can't fix everything.
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Different problem, but still the same brain. Again River's problems are not coming from random damage that would have unpredictable results.
That's kind of like saying you can use chemotherapy to treat pneumonia. Different problems with different causes require different treatments. The damage itself and the symptoms are predictable yes, but you have at least three different causes and problems at work. There's the brain surgery damage (breaks with reality and hallucinations), the psychological trauma, and the conditioning (possible split personality). They're layered on top each other and sometimes overlap, but are still distinct issues which must be addressed separately.
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We should also consider that, on a purely physical level, the brain has a remarkable ability to rewire itself to bypass damage. There've been cases in the real world where victims have had chunks of grey matter removed by accident or trauma or medical necessity and gone on to live relatively normal lives (insert jokes about political careers).
It's possible that part of Rivers' lucid moments are her brain trying to self-repair as much as possible (making new synaptic connections where none previously existed). Given the other trauma she's been through (both physical, chemical, and psychological), she'll certainly never be exactly "normal" (whatever that is), but she could probably at least become functional once she starts to deal with the psychological baggage, and I think that's what we started to see in Serenity.
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People can write River however they want in fanfic, I can choose not to read River-is-stable-now or River-is-cured-now fics because to me they are BORING. But if cannon does that its way more serious, it will follow me around like a zombie and I can't ignore it as easily (but I'll still try because its BORING to me).
Byte's split theory: I'm neutral. I read stories where that's the case and stories where it isn't. I'm flexible on that point.
I assume you're my pal until you let me know otherwise.
"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya.
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Quote:Rather than speculate about levels of River's sanity, what would she do with her hacked brain? She would study what she has become. What do you think of River as the mad scientist studying the physics of telepathy? She'd create stories/theories while taking great pride in proving Brian Aldiss wrong:
Originally posted by RionaEire:
People can write River however they want in fanfic, I can choose not to read River-is-stable-now or River-is-cured-now fics because to me they are BORING.
“Whereas interplanetary and interstellar voyages have a technological and scientific basis, telepathy is almost as clearly anti-scientific. No rational reasons can be conjured as to why humanity should develop an ability to communicate directly, mind to mind, without speech in this or any future generation. The idea of telepathy is ancient, but was given new impetus by the development of radio: if unseen messages can be directed from crystal, why not from head to head? This false analogy took root in the popular mind. . . . Science-fiction readers wish to see the world change, to see that new certainty which must necessarily develop, and telepathy would change the world even more effectively than the atom bomb or space travel.” - Brian W. Aldiss from the foreword to The Science Fiction Source Book (1984) page 16.
The Joss Whedon script for "Serenity," where Wash lives, is
Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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It's a good idea, though I think that there's some difference between say taking damage in the Wernicke's area and having to rewire the part of the brain that processes singing to relearn how to talk, versus damage to the "reptile" brain.
Neurons CAN regenerate, but I've never seen any case that suggests that can restore full-function to the same neurons within a person's lifetime. And I've never heard of anyone rewiring the limbic system to get around damage via therapy or chemicals, let alone that they were successful.
What does functional mean to everyone? Emotional stability, mental stability, no hallucinations/strong anchor to reality, most choices made while self-aware (or some minimum amount), ability to live independently at some basic standard of living?
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You've never seen a case, but in 500 years you may. Plus it was not River whole Limbic system that was damaged. Plus the idea of a unified Limbic system is outdated.
I do not fear God, I fear the ignorance of man.
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If they had that, then why didn't Simon just use a treatment like that on River in the first place, before he even had narrowed down the specific problem and damage?
I actually had this same problem come up when I was writing that Inara takes some sort of regenerating treatment to keep the symptoms of her whatever problem under control - I guess the idea was she'd rapidly decline if she wasn't regenerating as fast as she was losing. But anyway, I started to write that, and then I thought, wait, if this technology exists, why didn't Inara offer any for River? And so I had to abandon that.
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Plus the idea of a unified Limbic system is outdated.
In the what?
I seem to recall making a point about how different specialized areas of the cerebral cortex can be rewired if they become damaged, but that I haven't seen indications that you can do the same to different parts of the limbic system.
Frankly, in what way does whether the amygdala and other parts should be grouped together functionally have any bearing on the arguments I have made? At some point here I have to use terms that people actually recognize, and the concept of the limbic system, whether or not it's a valid classification, does include a number of emotion moderating areas.
I am unsure exactly what parts of River's brain were damaged BEYOND the amygdala, but it was a safe bet that other emotion moderating areas within that categorization of the limbic system were damaged, and generalizing that as damage to the limbic system was perfectly reasonable medically and scientifically and UNDERSTOOD. Even if it were OUTDATED, which I don't yet see a consensus on, it was not INCORRECT.
In any case, this is beside the point. Looking around, I see some questionable reports about retraining the brain to compensate for the amygdala to treat some cases of depression (serotonin is produced in the brainstem and I'm smelling a lot of pseudoscience here). I'm seeing people trying to claim that habituation and extinction conditioning are the same thing as neuroplasticity. But I'm not seeing anything about actual DAMAGE to the amygdala being addressed by rewiring another part of the brain to take over those functions. If you have anything you've found I'd be interested to look over it.
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I always hate jumping into these discussions late, because people get so worked up, but...
This is fiction. It is set 500 years or more into the future. We can propose all kinds of new technology, and get away with it, so long as we give enough background to set it on solid footing. Imagine trying to write a story with today's medical practices, from the point of view of a medical practitioner of the 1600's, who believes that pathogenic organisms are imaginary, and believes that diseases are caused by bad air or imbalance of the four bodily humors or phases of the moon. Medical practices and technology can and should change over the course of 500 years.
And simply because a technology exists doesn't mean that it is accessible to everyone. I'm saying that Simon will *not* automatically have access to every possible treatment for River. And he's not superhuman, either -- so the fact that such technology might exist does not mean that he will necessarily know about it or think of using it. He's a trauma surgeon, not a psychiatrist or radiologist or pharmacologist.
We know that Joss likes strong female characters with special abilities -- he built the whole Buffy series around just such a character. But what made that series work was the fact that, despite having special abilities, Buffy still had *human* problems -- ordinary problems, in fact, and her special abilities didn't necessarily cause those problems to disappear.
Same should apply for River. She may or may not have some or all of the following: precognition, telepathy, mind-reading skills, and fight skills that would make a kung fu movie hero turn green with envy -- but those abilities are not the equivalent of deus-ex-machina problem-solving abilities. She can (and should) still screw up, whether on her own or due to circumstances she can't control.
I'm less concerned with the question of exactly what skills, abilities, illnesses (curable or otherwise) River might have, and instead I'm interested in how she solves problems. If every Firefly story turns into "crew gets into trouble, River saves the day with super special abilities" -- well, *that* would be boring. But I won't begrudge her using her talents to solve problems when she can, and I expect each and every Firefly character to do the same.
And what it comes down to for me is: you can't do the same kind of story-telling in a 10-page comic book short as you can in a 43-minute TV episode, a feature-length film, or a chapter of fanfic. Of course the comic book comes across as "light" in the plot department. Hence my soapbox advocacy for *someone* to write official Firefly novels.
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