(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Saw Pacific Rim yesterday. See, they installed these new motorized reclining seats at our local movie theater a few months back. They are the most comfortable place I have ever found to watch a movie. I will watch the dumbest blockbuster in the world, if I can do it in those seats. I went back to see Iron Man III a second time, so I could see it in those seats.

Pacific Rim was not the dumbest blockbuster in the world, but its fealty to realistic physics may have been the weakest. I didn't have time to get angry about the dumbest physics because by the time I'd worked up a good rant they'd moved on to the next astonishingly silly physics moment.

For me, there's a tie between the 'analog circuits' in one of the giant robots and the transdimensional bridge being 'atomic' for most befuddling misuse of physics lingo.

But let's set that aside. sanguinity asked if I was planning to fix the physics in the movie for Kaleidoscope, but I'm not. I have no interest in fixing the physics. They're so irrevocably broken they don't interest me.

What did interest me in the movie was the drift. I saw people on FFA talking about it in terms of soulbonding, and I'm sure much of the fandom will write it that way, but I'm interested in it from a transhumanist perspective. Raleigh -- Gypsy -- Mako is a threesome, not a duo, and it's mediated by the tactile sensation of shared (giant) phantom limbs and a shared nervous system.

The coolest things about the drift for me were that a) Though each pilot was only controlling one side, they both moved completely in unison. I loved that. I wonder what it's like to have your other arm move at the command of someone else, in synch with a giant robot. b) biomechatronic servo systems provide (presumably scaled down) force feedback of everything the robots 'feels'. If your robot loses an arm, you hurt. I can understand in a loose engineering way why you might want some of that force feedback, but it also seems like a brilliantly metaphoric SF concept that doesn't actually make engineering sense. And c)drifting gives you (possibly robot-driven) access to memory recall in a way that is not the same as an ordinary human memory recall. Raleigh stepping into Mako's memory from that perspective was so fascinating to me, because it was a technology intervention giving him that entry, and it was almost but not quite Mako's perspective. He was standing in the memory behind her. How does that work? What does that feel like? What do gaps in those memories look like?

Then again, I'm also interested in some of the more soulbondy questions about the tech. If you have a romantic partner, how much of that emotion do you bring into the drift? Will your co-pilot feel some sort of weird shadow love for your romantic partner?

Along those lines, what kind of emotions about their wife/mother did the Hansens bring into their drift, and how much was that at the core of their tension/Chuck's daddy issues? And when Stacker stepped into Herc's spot, what kind of change did that make in the equation? What does it mean to, as Stacker says, 'enter the drift with nothing'? Is Stacker just that badass, or is that something that can be taught?

Comments

[chaila]

These are all interesting questions! I liked the drifting aspect of the movie more than I thought I would? I mostly expected it to be a little ridiculous, but it really wasn't. And they represented it in some visually interesting ways. I was sort of interested in the magnitude of the drift, or at least its potential magnitude. Like you say, it gives them access to memory recall that's well beyond ordinary human recall, because all of this stuff is usually just sitting there in your consciousness, mostly unaccessed, and then here comes someone else and a robot, poking around. If you don't "chase" the memories, how much does your partner get? I really wanted to know if you could "chase" a thread of your partner's memory if they didn't; like do you have free reign access to everything in their head, or do you just get what they're thinking at the time? Like Raleigh could move around that memory because Mako got sort of stuck in it. If your partner doesn't focus on it, can you? Can you remember and examine it later?

What does it mean to, as Stacker says, 'enter the drift with nothing'? Is Stacker just that badass, or is that something that can be taught?

Inquiring minds want to write fic know!

[seekingferret]

To me one of the interesting technical questions is... Raleigh chased a memory first, right? What was the link between him getting thrown off and Mako being thrown off? Could it be that Mako probing Raleigh's memories and Raleigh doing vice versa was the thing that triggered the fiasco?

Inquiring minds want to write fic know!

DO IT!

[seekingferret]

What does it mean to, as Stacker says, 'enter the drift with nothing'? Is Stacker just that badass, or is that something that can be taught?

I was fascinated by the implication in Year Zero that Stacker simply just has that superpower (He runs the robot hand all by himself and convinced the scientists that a single human can control a Jaeger, except that it turns out he's an anomaly)

[chaila]

Yes! Interestingly enough, all of the tie-in stuff emphasizes this view of Stacker pretty heavily. The novelization essentially says he's superhuman. After he piloted solo for hours, he shouldn't really even be able to tie his shoes because of the brain damage that should have resulted, yet he's apparently affected not at all (or capable of appearing not to be affected, which for purposes of brain functionality, seems to be the same thing). I also thought it was neat--and wish it had been explored!--that he's the one who offers himself up as test pilot and proves the scientists' theory that the piloting system can work, and then turns out to be, well, superhuman and not the norm. It does still seem like some degree of control of memory is something that pilots can learn (he says Mako is too inexperienced to control hers?), but he obviously has an incredible innate aptitude for it. World's biggest badass! I also REALLY need Stacker-is-a-cyborg fic, or a mental cyborg, or *something* because he's clearly the most natural pilot of the bunch. Argh, I wish I could write fic about something other than feelings, but I really can't.

If you haven't checked out the novelization and have any interest, there are some tidbits in it that may interest you. The pilots have these apocryphal stories about their jaegers responding to them well after they're no longer piloting them, and there's a bit more about pilots in the drift. Not a lot, but interesting tidbits!