Living Through Fantasies: The Fall of Kamen in Scavengers Reign

Scavengers Reign is, for me, a breathtaking fantastical experience. The effort dedicated to building the world of planet Vesta inhabited by the stranded passengers is worth all the praise I can give. I was particularly moved by the creative adaptations each creature possessed; it felt very much balanced between supernatural and something that just felt possible. I could imagine abilities like telekinesis and techno-organic life working largely because of the rich biomes of fantasy around it. This is, however, not a brief commentary on the world-building of Scavengers Reign, it is a short commentary on fantasies. <img src="/media/inline_insight_image/download (5).jpg" alt=""> There’s a character named Kamen in the first season. We find out by the end of the season that he is responsible for their crash on the planet and he is by all accounts a man in a lot of pain - broken if you will. He tries to escape his escape pod trapped high up in a tree and is confronted by a psychic creature. This beast called a hollow, is a smallish quadrupedal that resembles a malformed panda crossed with a frog. It feeds smaller creatures with a bile-like fluid that emerges from its mouth and entrances them briefly. These creatures then gather or pluck fruits and feed them to the hollow, then it is on its way.<img src="/media/inline_insight_image/Hollow.jpg" alt=""> The paths of Kamen and the creature cross paths and after it essentially rescues him from his escape pod, he is fed this same bile and then we see the magic at play. While Kamen is meant to be helping his puppeteer to find nourishment, he appears on the outside to be a zombie-like person; eyes blackened as he tries within his human efforts to hunt game and acquire fruits in this alien world. On the inside of his mind, however, Kamen is living in reshaped memories. All that occurs in his mind is pleasurable and filled with only good thoughts from his time with his girlfriend back on Earth and even in the crashed spaceship. Eventually, he develops a ruthless streak of hunting larger and larger creatures for his benefactor - the herbivore turned voracious meat eater. He gives him increasingly larger game (even creatures from the same species as the mind controller) and the symbiote gives him fun pleasurable memories in return.<img src="/media/inline_insight_image/scavengers reign (5).jpg" alt=""> Kamen is aware that he is now dependent on these fantasies and memories. He sees no moral wrong in fattening this now monstrous creature at all costs; even when he runs into another marooned passenger, human life is not off limits. In this vein, the life Kamen returns to when under the spell of the creature becomes his real life. He operates in the real plain of existence but only via the realm of his fantasies. Here is my interpretation of this phenomenon especially as I believe it relates to us living on planet Earth. We are all much like Kamen; let us assume the beast, now fattened to monstrous proportions, is a hidden malevolence that we have the potential to develop. However, more crucially we all access our real lives via fantasies.<img src="/media/inline_insight_image/KAMEN.jpg" alt=""> In the view of famous philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, our various fantasies are deeply internalised world views even extending to ideologies we are unconscious of. These are not simple daydreams but influences on the way we think of the world around us. We are all in this view, interacting with every single thing in the real world through these fantasies. One example might be the ideal image held in mind of a perfect relationship or the organisation of the world according to one economic system or the other; a fantasy might be Deep fears or romantically dressed versions of activities such as sex or companionship. In Scavengers reign, Kamen is very vividly doing this - living in a mechanic state via his puppeteering fantasies but for us, the workings are more subtle. In a sense, we never really interact with the world as it truly might be (or is) we always funnel our lived experience through the invisible fantasies that drive us. When we strip away all subjective perceptions and fantasies dressing up our worlds, what we are left with in any instant case is what Zizek describes as the real. For example, one might imagine their or someone else’s death to be a deep poetic event filled with much heroic merit; something to be adored and honoured for years to come. In Reality, it might hold little or no significance; it really could be the empty extinguishing of life like with much any other organism. Here the fantasy serves as protection. <img src="/media/inline_insight_image/Fantastical.jpg" alt=""> Finally, this is not a brief attack on fantasies. The point is not to put an end to accessing the real through fantasies; there is no inherent evil in this. An awareness of this, however, might help us remember the non-absolute nature of things and how we still have work to do in discerning morality. We cannot let an escape from discomfort or pain through fantasies shape us and inner malevolence into hulking beasts that threaten whatever reality it is that we try to access. <img src="/media/inline_insight_image/scavengers-reign-animated-tv-series-32-1475x830.jpg" alt="">

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