#greater boston

deliverusfromsburb:

Autumn West divorced her husband and then found out he’d trapped a human being in his secret office. Talk about dodging a bullet.

The Narrator: Oliver’s your next project, isn’t he? I’ve seen how you operate. You need to be needed. You love attaching yourself to people with problems. You see a terrible person and want to make them into the better person you  believe they can be. Of course you needed someone else to focus on.

Leon who has no one else to talk to and a vested interest in neutralizing the Narrator’s power:

[ID: A neutral face with a hand reaching toward the screen.]

deliverusfromsburb:

Greater Boston continues to be the anti-capitalist podcast that actually digs into the mechanics of how corporations establish and maintain control using political interference, white racial resentment, gentrification, price gouging, privacy invasion, and data abuse instead of just coming up with some cartoonish corporate slogans and calling it a day

There’s a lot of speculative fiction where the big bad is an evil corporation, and a lot of sff worldbuilding where political entities have all been replaced by corporate ones (see Murderbot Diaries for one currently taking tumblr by storm) but Greater Boston tackles it in a detailed and grounded way that makes it feel more… real and close to home, at least for me.

Legion funnels money into the campaign of a privileged white woman who’s running for attention and to get what’s ‘hers’. It sabotages her Black opponent by framing her nephew and fomenting racist hostility against his supporters when the boycott creates divisions between progressives and commuters. They slowly strangle independent operations and replace them with franchises that encourage people to give up more and more of their privacy in exchange for convenience. And their chief aim isn’t to take over the world in some flashy, apocalyptic way - it’s to get more surveillance data to sell more products to more people.

Legion is operating out of a familiar playbook. While I enjoy characters trouncing evil fictional companies, they often feel kind of cartoonish in their over the top villainy. And even though Legion is one specific company, it feels clearer in this universe that this is what capitalism is, rather than some evil corporations in media where it’s more like ‘well this is one bad apple, if we get rid of this sinister CEO I’m sure the system will be fine’

what does it mean what does it all mean

Charlotte on the MTA