What Does It Mean to Love the World?

This blog post contains spoilers for the kinetic novel Z.A.T.O. // I Love The World And Everything In It and the television show Pluribus.

I recently played-slash-read the visual novel Z.A.T.O. // I Love The World And Everything In It by Ferry nopanamaman and watched the (extremely delightful) first season of Pluribus by Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) and wanted to write about them and how they make me feel about my personal philosophies... To be clear: This is not very well-articulated or thought out at all, but I wanted to put at least some of my thoughts into writing.

These stories couldn't be more different. One is an eightish hour visual novel about a 14-year-old Russian girl living in the closed city of Vorkuta-5 in 1986 whose classmate disappears under mysterious circumstances. The other is about a closeted lesbian romantasy author who is immune to the effects of a hivemind-inducing virus that spreads across all of Earth, and her attempts at fixing the world after losing her wife during the initial spread of the disease.

But, there's an interesting undercurrent for both of them: What does it really mean to love the world, or to be loved by it?

Carol — To Love Someone, Sometimes You Hurt Them

To be transparent, I don't think I have the best understanding of Carol Sturka as a character, nor do I understand all of the intricacies of Pluribus but I think it's very telling that many acts of "love" in the show that were shared between Carol and Helen in retrospect were things that...maybe wouldn't make Carol very happy. They were things that would cause friction.

Carol is outwardly a grumpy and unpleasant person. She's thorny, withdraws from interacting with her fans when possible because she thinks her books are garbage, demeans herself and others, and seems to be completely incapable of finding joy in anything.

This isn't unfounded, though, as we see over the course of the show and find out she's fiercely secretive of her love and so self-loathing because of a conversion therapy stint that she never forgave her mother for. She's carrying a heavy burden in her heart and she resents the ever-smiling omnipresent Others who simply want to make her "like them", because they think she's "suffering".

Unlike Helen, Others would bend over backwards to make Carol happy, even give her a bomb, but Helen's love would do for Carol were tied to "tough love", like monitoring her alcohol or bringing her on trips that...honestly probably would piss me off too, (who the hell wants to stay in a hotel made of ice?) but Helen cared about sharing experiences and looking out for her even when she wanted to destroy herself.

Hopefully it's obvious I'm not saying the Others are correct or anything, because they want what is 'best' for Carol in their eyes, but they are trying to force their worldview onto Carol when she has lost her wife and has her sexuality known by everyone on the planet, but I think there is a somewhat valuable lesson for Carol to learn from the others even if she continues to refuse them, and that is that there is value in human connection and vulnerability. "Love" is often imperfect and messy and people can hurt each other because they think they're doing the right thing for each other, but Carol closed herself off from any opportunities to ever be loved authentically again because of her own fear of getting hurt.

But, now that the whole world knows her secrets and Helen's memories are a part of them, Carol...does have to sort of learn to accept that the world does love her and the opportunity for connection was there. She shouldn't have been brushing off people's genuine love for her work and constantly shooting herself down because of her own traumas, because there was genuine emotion behind everything she made even if she just made it to earn money.

I guess I'm talking in circles but, there's something poetic to me about a woman who shut out the world later falling in love with the entire world, and it loves her back. In spite of her flaws, but it loves her in all the wrong ways.

Asya — Can I Love the World Without Loving Myself?

I really love Asya. I couldn't even begin to explain why I love her. I don't think she's a particularly groundbreaking protagonist, but I think there is something really special about her contradictory worldview and passiveness that really speaks to me. Asya is a young Russian girl who loves the worldand considers it to be its own living entity that makes decisions to always "right itself" and put herself "in her place". And this is later proven true by the events of the story. She thinks the world is "cute", but also hopes that she'll someday be "saved" from her circumstances because this worldview allows her to give up her own agency.

Most of Asya's past is implied rather than explicitly shown. We know that she's bullied at school, but we don't know her exact relationship with her parents or what happened when she "overreacted" three years ago to a highly traumatizing situation that resulted in her made up imaginary friend-slash-thoughtform-slash-probably-dissociative-alter to disappear from her life entirely.

After fast fowarding three years, she meets a new classmate, Ira. Ira is a known troublemaker who stands up for Asya at some point, seemingly of her own accord, and tells Asya that she likes her poetry. But when Ira goes missing, Asya laments that no one is coming to save her, but justifies this as the world simply correcting itself. Her meeting with Ira was just an anomaly, Asya had never meant to be friends with her forever, so she is simply meant to stay the same and continue to be bullied no matter what. Though, this doesn't stop her from fantasizing about an idealized version of Ira in her mind, but this vision of her is shattered completely when she actually finds out what happened to Ira.

...She still loved Ira anyway, despite that. She loved her and remembered her, even when the snow floated upwards and all people in Vorkuta-5 were obliterated from existence. She transmitted her signal of love to the universe, even if it was just a simple "I love you". And yet, she could never extend that same love to herself. Somehow, she always existed separately from the world that she loved so much, which in itself was its own kind of selfishness. Asya could never see her bullies as truly evil, simply as agents acting out the will of the universe, putting things in their proper places. They couldn't have known better, because they're just agents acting according to their contexts.

And, yet, Asya never considers herself as an agent acting according to her contexts. She puts a lot of pressure on herself for having selfish desires and wants, for being so passive and unable to stand up for herself, and she constantly downplays and gaslights herself into perceiving her suffering as being no big deal. In fact, she usually rationalizes it as the way the world should be. She's not a unique protagonist by any stretch of the imagination, frankly, but I saw a lot of myself in her. Even when she was losing herself, her love for the world remained.

What does it mean, for me, to love the world?

When I think about how I love the world, I always think about how contradictory my perspective is. I think everyone has the capacity to change and become a better person, if they choose to, but I also believe everyone is fully capable of the same "evil" things we might associate with other people. Even unspeakable crimes are things we are all equally capable of. We have capacity to create infinite good, but we also have the capacity to cause unfathomable harm, but we unfortunately live in a world that...seems to really push us towards causing that harm more often than not. Most people are victims of their circumstances, in my perspective, and I don't think it's pointless to hold people accountable, but I don't think it's particularly helpful to isolate "evil" to a small group of people...

...So what do I mean when I say that I love the world? I can actually be pretty misanthropic. Do I love all the harm people cause on a daily basis, or do I foolishly believe that there is a better world where no suffering exists? I guess the latter. I want to love people, I want to love the world, but it's not easy to do that. I guess I would rather choose to love and hope for that better world rather than keep living in a reality where we are growing farther and farther away from that ideal.