[Severance] The Fucking Goats
I think what gets me so riled up about the goat-adjacent theorizing part of the Severance fandom is that it’s always about what the goats do for Lumon instead of what the goats mean to the employees.
They never even think Oh, the goats sound like crying babies. The mammalian worker was so worried they were being taken before they’d even finished nursing. Oh, the goats are a herd, and the mammalian department acts like a herd, and they feel each loss as a group. Oh, we’re just animals. Oh, masturbation and homosexuality are punished because, like the goats, we’re just here to make more goats. Oh, the goats are alive and used as produce. Oh, Helly is scared she might be sending them to the slaughterhouse. Am I livestock? They’re not ready.
It’s never about that. It’s always about cloning. It’s always about the company. It’s never about the worker. It’s always about the use. It’s never about the body.
It’s always “What is Lumon doing with the goats?” and not “Who the fuck cares what their motivation is?" when the show is literally relentlessly just saying that regardless of motivation, we are witnessing abuse. Regardless of how much staff thinks they know better, the innies are under duress. They don’t think about the innies as children (as animals in an abattoir), about expectation, about the trauma of reproduction, or about being a body being dismissed in favor of using a body.
Lots of “Cobel is a freak MILF” and Jorjorwellian maxims, but you can’t even look at her clutching a respirator after tearing apart a literal altar to a pharmaceutical that just fired her and her knowing how to help a baby latch despite ostensibly having no children of her own. You can’t fucking sit with why she’s spying and fucking with a widower to see what happens when he sees his dead wife at work after a lobotomy and why it still feels uncomfortable and invasive as hell.