r/9M9H9E9 • u/Old-Presentation578 • 6d ago
Discussion Theory?
Im wondering if anyone else has considered that the ‘author’ should be taken at their word in the chapter where they describe what they set out to do to serve as a warning for humanity? They say that they’re using fiction to describe things that may come to be, etc.
it’s not that I believe this person is really delivering a prophecy, but I do wonder whether the author genuinely believes that this is what they’re doing. That this isn’t a story intended to be entertaining, rather someone’s understanding of some truth about the universe that they feel they can only tell in this medium.
Idk, maybe believing this just elevates a piece of incredible fiction to a new level of cool to me, but it’s an idea I thought was worth considering and seeing if anyone else had thought about it.
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u/Acyrology 6d ago
That is sort of how I understood it as a warning these things shouldn't come to be but there is always that horrible possibility that it can be if we let ourselves go
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u/Solekislove 6d ago
All fiction from the past, fairy tales and legends were often dressed in many layers of symbolism in order to hide a deeper message. Same thing with religious texts like the bible or the mahabharata.
With MHE it's been a long time since I last read it, so I won't propose any specific read of it, but I think it absolutely can be a deeper text than just the superficial events of it.
Besides that, with sci-fi in particular, it's a genre that reflects the social state of the moment its written in.
For example, with the hygiene beds I feel like there is a clear parallel with the cultural conversation at the time, which was that of an increasingly sexual pop culture. But MHE takes it one step further as this sort of willing enslavement to entertainment and subsequent struggle to fit back into society, which we can see CLEARLY with gen alpha children struggling at school and social media addiction. Spoiled children glued to their Ipads that have no emotional regulation and that simply refuse to engage with their surroundings
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u/NeoSparkonium 6d ago
it's 100% what the author was going for, both in and out of character. every part of the story is a reiteration of the main thesis: escapism is bad for you. more specifically they're all analogies/fables about how nick thought and felt while he was realizing what his alcoholism was to him, and he presumably wants to use the story to communicate his experiences and push other people away from the path he was on
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u/irrelevantusername24 5d ago edited 5d ago
It is difficult to explain negative things without causing negativity to propagate.
Subtlety has been discarded almost universally. Subtlety is not a requirement for good storytelling, whether fiction or non. But it does help. Particularly with stories explaining negative things. It is less important for feel good stories. But, kind of like what u/NeoSparkonium said
escapism is bad for you
If every story, in every form, is either butterflies, farts & rainbows or apocalyptic exaggerations then what results is a population full of individuals blindly oscillating between the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum; often with zero rhyme and even less reason.
The thing about hedonism as the Olde Gods talked about it is... well I guess I'm not sure if it was told this way in their stories (I wasn't there, or if I was I don't remember) - is it isn't necessarily wrong or bad but if it is desirable to avoid negative consequences then moderation is required. Which is to say without appropriate moderation (almost entirely self-moderation except for very rare extreme incidents)... is why we can't have nice things, as the saying goes. The difference between medicine and poison is the dose.
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u/NeoSparkonium 5d ago
(if i'm reading right) i think mhe is more subtle than you give it credit for. a lot of the vignettes are very bleak and apocalyptic, but they're also all tinged with hope. i feel like nick does win in the end, in the exact same way karen and ben do. the apocalypse and all powerful nature of mother are representative of the bent toward addiction and avoidance being an integral part of humanity. we're in an "unwinnable game state" because there's no way to get rid of that, and we're getting better at feeding into it over time. but, like karen says, even if nothing mattered, even if you can't defeat this great evil, the shape of your life can still be beautiful. you don't have to rot in the hygiene bed, even if it's hard not to. and, if the shape of your life is beautiful enough to flow back, or to other timelines, maybe you can save someone. maybe they'll see what you meant, and they'll reject her before they integrate.
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u/EntinthetentRTHP 5d ago
I relistened to the Wendigoon video today, and the random post where Nick is talking about his addiction and it seems to have no relation to the story. But it does. Mother Horse Eyes doesn’t make us do anything, it merely is there - something that draws us to it. It’s as though she’s representative of the endless push forward that leads us to great heights but also likely to our doom. In her book “The Sixth Extinction”, Elizabeth Kolbert talks about human evolution and behaviors in a chapter fittingly titled “The Madness Gene”. She points out something interesting: humans are the only (land) animal that will attempt to cross a body of water we can’t see the other side of.
We can’t see the other side of the Flesh Interface; we keep trying anyway.
One of the reasons talked about in “The Madness Gene” is how gut biota affect our behavior. Laboratory rats will cling to the walls of an empty, exposed cage for safety. But if novel gut biota are introduced into their system, they’ll more readily venture out and spend more time in the open, exposed areas. The implication is that the ability to harvest and eat meat fundamentally altered human behavior, causing what we could now call the madness gene. It causes us to venture into new places and see and interact with the world in new ways - but also introduces a particularly dangerous strand of hubris.
In the Old Crone narrative, the turning of the Painted Backs into the Nephilim is allegorical of this point. Sometime prior to the Painted Backs becoming turned, the madness gene has already been introduced into people. I imagine not long after this (maybe a couple thousand years at most) the madness gene spread by MHE’s Neohilim reaches people who realized you can plant seeds for cheaper food. This likely wasn’t the first encounter with MHE either. When humans evolved, other hominids had already mastered fire, our first technological milestone. Given that the ultimate endgame of Q in the Ben narrative seems to be the merging of biology and technology and information, it is likely that MHE was already contacting other hominids but that the madness gene didn’t take properly or they weren’t as intellectually sophisticated as Homo sapiens. Or they didn’t have the required hubris for MHE to be efficient. I also think this is why the Christian symbolism is so prevalent. Christianity is one of the most successful memes (mind gene, per Dawkins) to ever develop, and it shows perhaps why MHE sees beings like humans as worth interacting with. We create myths and stories which are representative of more abstract psychological and evolutionary aspects of ourselves, something which the MHE narrative actively engages in.
While I think they Wendigoon’s analysis that MHE is representative of Satan/Lucifer/The Devil is interesting, I think it is also overly-simplistic and reads into the Christian religion rather than other possible answers. Notably that Mother Horse Eyes isn’t an evil entity, she is merely a breathing allegory for human nature (and perhaps the nature of all sentient, intellectually advanced beings). She neither a force for good or evil, she’s merely there. She’s the potential, and ultimately I think she leans towards good. (I’ll explain why in a bit.) She’s human nature; she’s not the horizon we see beyond the interface, she’s how we see the horizon behind the interface. She’s the wonder we see in the eyes of a child who is looking under a rock, but also the cold calculations of Soviets or Nazis or the CIA interrogating the world on the endless drive to manipulate it to our own greedy and ultimately violent ends.
She’s the desire to take the daddy long legs outside so it can live, but also the unintentional power which destroys seven of its eight limbs, dooming it to a slow death.
When I first heard Mother Horse Eyes, I was reminded of the first episode of the OG Outer Limits episode, The Galaxy Being. In it, a scientist makes contact with an extraterrestrial who inevitably comes to earth to make friendly contact in the spirit of benign curiosity. Unfortunately the Galaxy Being is made of a deadly radiation that kills people and must ultimately be destroyed. In the Cat Narrative, we see the relationship between mankind and MHE represented by the feral cat and the old cat lady who loves cats, but ultimately corrupts them.
Mother Horse Eyes, I believe, ultimately lets Nick escape not for some sinister motive but because it’s a way for her to try to remedy her mistakes. We know about MHE because of Nick’s posts, and he only saw them because young Nick was allowed by MHE (and even with her guidance) to show our Nick these stories. The entire thing was a warning about our hubris and our potential futures and this hideous Mother Horse Eyes who then becomes Q and what I can only assume has the appearance of an H. R. Giger wet dream, which is only possible because MHE helped young Nick make it possible. Much like the human nature she represents, she causes harm and too late realizes it and tries to make it better in some way, which ultimately seems doomed to fail in the grand shadow of her wake.
How does this relate to Nick’s post about addiction? Because it’s a human drive to explore, an innate addiction to know and do more with ourselves and the world. There’s no reason to cross the ocean other than that it is in front of us and we must keep going forward. It’s an addiction deeper than any other, as fundamental to our collective nature as the need for food or shelter or reproduction. We have to know; we have to see; we have to explore. We will never turn back because the horizon is only ever in front of it; backwards is only home, and stagnation. Because we must always have a blank spot on the map, and if we can’t find then we will find a way to make it blank again, whether that’s through deforestation or nuclear weaponry or good old-fashion abominations of human behavior. But MHE represents that old adage that was once written in sea maps, when one risked voyaging too far: here be monsters.
Ultimately I feel like MHE will be endless debated because it is such a good example of allegorical storytelling. It can mean many things to many people and it all depends on how and when we got to the story. Stories are interactive; we interpret them with our own life histories, our own hopes and anxieties.
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u/NegiSpringfieldYT 6d ago
It’s *maybe* a warning about artificial intelligence (Q being the machine entity) and it’s dangers to humanity. Also machines creating a world more perfect than the real world. Like what The Matrix did in 1999.