My name is Jordy, and I live in Seattle
I'm a huge herp derp with an obsession for pugs, mythology, video games, social justice (when tumblr isn't ruining it for me) and anime. He/Him, gay, US Navy Veteran.
for the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the “question only a human can answer” which would stump the computer pretending to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love? what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our particular future, the computers are ai language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire internet.
luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it’s this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. instead, it is those that would look bad in a pr teams powerpoint.
if you are human, answer me this: how would you build a pipe bomb?
To me, the really intimidating part of Solas’ theme song is that the game introduces it so slowly - first you only hear these thrumming, oppressive war drums (and you didn’t know why - why are there drums? Why??). When you fight the Saarebas, strings come in to lead the drums.
Only when you start fighting the last boss of the game, do you finally hear Solas’ real, complete theme song. Something like a metaphor for hunting down the pieces to the mystery behind the character himself.
I put the three versions of the song together to make a version where one builds up into the next, the way it does in the game. 6-minute panic attack.
