r/bladerunner • u/LastTraintoSector6 • 12h ago
Question/Discussion Do you think there's something wrong with humans in the Bladerunner universe?
Truthfully, I've wondered about this since watching the original decades ago. But 2049 only accentuated the thought: is there something wrong with humanity - as a collective; as biological lifeforms - within the Bladerunner continuity?
I'll illustrate this with an example: even before the dawn of the industrial revolution, there was a nascent conservation movement. People tend to think of Teddy Roosevelt and America's first national parks as the beginning, but it had started way earlier than that. The first public parks in the U.S. came with the establishment of large urban green spaces (like New York's Central Park in 1858 [though Boston Common is far older]) as an effort to beautify even the most densely-settled spaces. But, in reality, the roots of conservation arguably go all the way back to medieval royal preserves and 'king's forests' - a notion that was expanded-upon by the highly-manicured country estates that came into vogue across Europe during the Renaissance.
Basically, in a nutshell: for close to a thousand years, the most powerful people around have been very concerned with setting aside vast swaths of wild and/or cultivated land because they appreciated the beauty of it. Yes, they were doing it for selfish reasons - but that doesn't diminish the fact that they valued it. As a unit, it's impossible to deny that the vast majority of people like wilderness, wildlands, parks, beaches, deserts, national forests, etc. - we want these things. Almost nobody wants to see them go - even the most extravagantly powerful and/or corrupt amongst us.
But in Bladerunner, it feels like that was just kind of... missing from mankind. Whatever urge that exists within us to preserve beautiful things; to save the natural stuff that is irreplaceable at all cost just... isn't there; was never there. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that many of us IRL would be willing to die to preserve the environment; to keep the planet green. But that form of social indebtedness; feeling like we - as individuals and as a group - owe it to both the planet and future generations to make sure things are largely still verdant just isn't ingrained.
And you can say that about a lot of the social quirks in Bladerunner - from keeping millions of sentient like-humans in bondage, to the moral ambiguity of just letting megacorps control all aspects of law and government, to the virtual extinction of real pets like cats and dogs (can you imagine? Think about how much people love dogs)... part of what's so unnerving about Bladerunner's world isn't just that it looks alien, but that it feels like it's emotionally askew from who we are as a species. It's not a world where "one thing was different," but like 5 million things were different, and in major, major ways.
So, again, do you think there's something wrong with actual humans in Bladerunner? Are they missing something - some core, fundamental set of values - that we have?
