The Discovery of Beaches and the Concept of Death

[erikavonkaiser]

also damn I forgot to incognito tab that search so here's hoping Google's algorithm doesn't start thinking I'm pregante

[Fetian]

it is thanks to this thread i now know that “stranding” in the title means “to be apart from one another” and not strand like “a stretch of beach.”

which explains a fair bit about just /how/ confused i was.

also, the pictures of the babies i’ve seen look older than 28 weeks gestation.

Oh it means every possible interpretation of the word "strand" and "stranding" at once

[Fetian]

I was looking up the size of a 28 wks gestation fetus and I feel like lettuce and eggplant are not the same size
Screenshot 2024-08-19 104347.png
although I guess if they're just removed they may grow more in their uhhhhh whatever egg things I'm coming into this late I don't know what's going on with the time babies

I have not had this explicitly confirmed but I believe the BBs do not age or grow

[Fetian]

also, the pictures of the babies i’ve seen look older than 28 weeks gestation.

Looking up premature babies, and using this webmd timeline, the BBs do look to be bigger than them on average, but aside from that I think the level of development is about right. Roughly baby-looking but a little undercooked, helped by the general uncanniness of everything humanoid in the game. The head/face in particular gives an impression of being 'sickly' and looks about right from the webmd picture

The BBs do have way better motor control and are more developed mentally than any real fetus, though, and most any real baby.

While looking things up I did discover that people have taken some truly amazing selfies with their BBs

[Fetian]

I'm rewatching a couple of cutscenes and caught a couple things I missed the first (second) time around:

-"I'm Sam Porter Bridges, now. I'm not a Strand" -- Strand being the surname of the former and future Last Presidents of the United States/Cities of America, so Sam disconnected himself from his family, or was disconnected from his family. Unsure significance of him taking on the name of the group also trying to reconnect America!

-There's an offhand line about people with DOOMS usually not being compatible with BBs

I did catch but didn't talk about: Amelie is being held captive somewhere on the west coast, so part of Sam's mission is to go rescue her so she can be the president. There's some heavy implications happening that she's being held for the good of the people and that freeing her will turn out to be a very bad idea. I did mention (I think) that she is "still on the Beach" but I don't think I mentioned that that means she doesn't age

My impressions are that The Beach is some kind of liminal space between the chiral dimension, where BTs &c come from, and our dimension. There's a lot a lot a lot of water and ocean imagery throughout everything.

[Fetian]

I don't think they've said what BT stands for yet so I've decided it stands for Beach Thing

[Fetian]

Here's a good shot of the BB in a cutscene:

Screenshot 2024-08-19 at 16-28-35 (2282) DEATH STRANDING All Cutscenes (Game Movie) 1080p HD - YouTube.png

[Fetian]

The Egyptians believed death not to be an instantaneous change of state, but a process--a process by which the soul moves from one realm to another. But this process itself has changed, thanks to the Death Stranding. In the normal order of things, when death occurs, the soul vacates the body and passes into the Seam. From there it transitions to the Beach, and only then on to the world of the dead. But after the Stranding, a soul that has already made its journey to the Beach may attempt to return to its body in this world.
It was hard to believe at first, but the process of necrosis provided proof of this phenomenon that was difficult to deny. This is why it is imperative that we burn the bodies of the dead. The body must be destroyed to sever the link with the soul. Only then will the soul be free to journey to the world beyond.

[Fetian]

Can you remember the last time you heard of a prepper dying of starvation, much less someone in a knot city? No one's fighting over water or oil or anything else. Which isn't to say that people don't occasionally run out of supplies. But that's almost never because of a real shortage; it's usually a problem with logistics. In fact, it was to address such problems that the president created Bridges and developed the Chiral network.
So yeah, no one's that desperate. Everybody's got enough for themselves, which is what's led to the real problem: it's all too easy for people to become isolated from one another, and eventually forget that others even exist. People are free to live for themselves, for the moment, without a care for the future. The president understood this better than anyone--and I now just how much it pained her.

[Fetian]

Before the Stranding, the whole world was connected. There were networks--"social networks" we called them--that people used to communicated all the time. They shared all sorts of stuff through them. A random thought, a pretty picture, a home movie--you name it. And if you liked something that someone else had uploaded, you let them know by giving them, well, a "like." Sounds weird, I know, but that's the truth.
Eventually, someone ran tests on the users of these networks and discovered that receiving a "like" triggered a rush of oxytocin. The theory was that it stemmed from a sense of being acknowledged. Even though you couldn't see the person you were interacting with, it still felt like they were accepting you, praising you. And who wouldn't like that?
But that same process is at the heart of the MULE phenomenon. It's believed that an overdependence on the oxytocin rush provided by these kinds of interactions is a factor in porters going rogue. With this in mind, it wouldn't be wrong to characterize MULEs as oxytocin addicts. In essence, they're social animals at the mercy of validation.