breathing > breaking

'scavengers reign' (2023), masculinity, hermeneutically self-harming

Animation is one of my havens. A 2-dimensional passageway back to childhood that I gravitate towards when I'm in need of comfort. There’s been some phenomenal additions to the canon of animation in recent years (Sea Beast (2022), Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022), The Boy and The Heron (2023) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse (2023), I’m looking at y’all) but i don’t think any have been more profound than Scavenger’s Reign.

Created by Joe Bennett and Charles Huettner, the sci-fi epic follows survivors of Demeter 227, an interstellar freight carrier that’s been star-shipwrecked on Vespa Minor; an alien planet with a bizarre, unforgiving, enchanting ecosystem. week to week, I’d watch the protagonists learn the laws of this odd wild, in awe of the luscious landscapes, the effervescent flora and fauna that’d materialise and scuttle/flutter away, engrossed by the ebbs and flows of this gorgeous and terrible terrain.

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I started Scavenger’s Reign in the after-burn of a romantic separation. The long distance nature made the conclusion a special sort of difficult. so much of our relationship was defined by separation. Longing was an indigenous state and it made the times we reconvened in person feverish, sweet, cherished. Our break-up warped the longing into a foreign shape. My ex-partner became a celestial constant that felt further away than ever, where once a hopeful promise of a life-craft to get me to her, there was only a jagged here/now. Scavenger’s Reign was a mirror. Its characters stranded in a faraway place, barely habitable as alienation hummed in the foreground of my own life.

Oh brother! I told myself as the first episode finished. It’s about to get real.

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You won’t get far before you realise that Scavenger’s Reign is about relationships. relationships to the land, to one another, to the adversarial, to fate. All things are interconnected here (as they should be) and how one treats Vesta Minor is the difference between life and death (the most famous relationship of all).

The humble robot, Levi (Alia Shawkat) begins to think, feel and question after coming into contact with mycelial ooze – betraying their programming, expressing discomfort when their castaway partner, Azi, tries to diagnose their operating systems, and enforcing boundaries off of that discomfort. Levi exceeds their cybernated protocol, defying certain annihilation by evolving into something inquisitive and uncanny… becoming more aligned with Vespa Minor than anybody else.

Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) is a pragmatist, serious, purposive, something akin to a cowboy willing to till the fruitful land. she fends for herself via tough adaptation, her survival defined by proportionate trade-offs that are almost Amestrian – fraught and measured treaties where savviness is crucial and ruthlessness necessary.

Ursula (Sunita Mina) is intuitive, curious and open to the whimsy of the planet. her fending is care-based. She is trusting, receptive to the environment’s harmonious babbling, almost a yin to Azi’s yang (if we must binarise them) and although there are moments where Ursula too must adapt to survive, her adaptations are less dependent on ruthlessness and more on attentiveness.

Where Levi, Ursula and Azi are the most well-adjusted maroons on Vespa Minor, the male characters of Scavenger’s Reign seem woefully incompatible with the planet by comparison, as if the conditions that kept them elevated in the civilisation before were pointless here.

Sam (Bob Stephenson), partnered with Ursula, was a pilot of the fallen Demeter. a capable and assured man, with a demeanour of rugged focus. but he hums with a disdain for Vesta Minor. It makes his pragmatism more inefficient than Azi’s. he scoffs and curses at the planet. so focused on escaping it. or beating it. Which sires a reluctance to be present. With Sam, there is action. but actions devoid of an empathic compass put him in grave danger multiple times.

Kamen (Ted Travelstead) is fascinating. driven to mental unrest by isolation, grief and shame, he lands on Vespa Minor with no castaway companion. In his lowest point, he is visited by a native creature boasting psychic abilities (known as “hollow”). a co-dependency ensues. hollow telepathically quells/ignites Kamen. In return, Kamen kills frailer beings so hollow can feast and what is once a small, quadrupedal cutie with a weird humanesque face grows to an unnerving size. Kamen's turmoil provides hollow with an otherwise inaccessible opportunity, a savage servant whose sentient woes can be rerouted into a reliable means of acquiring sustenance. a gluttony is born in the hollow. Kamen still writhes from loss, fixating on the tumultuous relationship with his ex-lover, haunted by memories of inadequacy and failure, his headspace plagued, he wants nothing more than to just… disappear. when hollow is hulking enough, it obliges him. It envelops Kamen inside of itself and, in the intergalactic womb of an alien creature, Kamen reverts to a child – whimpering, sustained by a grotesque umbilical cord of narcotic sludge, lonely but never truly alone.

As the men of Scavenger’s Reign blundered through Vespa Minor, I saw flashes of myself. Terrence (freddy rodriguez) is doomed by (over) sentimentality, wandering after a trinket into a treacherous unknown to quickly find his demise – a gruesome, taoist mini-fable about the importance of letting go of the past so that you can move forward healthily. Kamen in the creature cocoon resembled my bed-bound state, in what felt like an epoch in the intergalactic void, a hard-to-escape wallow.

The hyper-fixation on practicality that repeatedly led Sam into tunnelled visions wasn’t unlike how I turned up in my relationship – missing a bigger picture that my ex-partner was trying to show to me.

It is something; to see the thin outline of your actions cooing back at you in 2D. To recognise them in something as abstract as Scavenger’s Reign, clearly seeing what characters should do differently but struggling to apply such clarity in your own life. James Baldwin’s cutting words, “you think your heartbreak is unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read” sliced true as I watched Scavenger’s Reign, making me reflect further on my own participation in the fracture. I saw clearer, via the male characters, what feminist scholar Arlie Hochschild calls the “hermeneutic labour” I had foisted upon my ex-partner, the weight of her responsibility to “discern the feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations of others; and invent solutions for relational issues arising from interpersonal tensions” and how the failure to carry my own weight and share burdens disrupted and eroded what could’ve been an otherwise harmonious ecosystem.

I see Vespa Minor as love anthropomorphised: risky and beautiful, a garden of nature’s chaos too unencumbered for our frigid confines of morality, capable of birthing life from the most unlikely of wellsprings. Kamen and Sam's ways are obsolete, the limitations of the masculinities they’ve adopted makes their time on the planet more fatal than it needs to be, more laborious than it needs to be. but their doom is not so utter. By the end of the season, Kamen is relieved from his parasitic prison and becomes a solemn monk of sorts. by choice or by trauma? we’re not sure. but we are sure he is changed, with suds of peacefulness on him, a hushed harmony with Vespa Minor’s critters in his tinkering hands. and Barry (Dash Williams)!

Oh Barry! the youngling of Scavenger’s Reign; a teenager teetering on the cusp of what bell hooks names “psychic self-mutilation” in The Will to Change – the induction of boys into the cult of patriarchy “that (requires) they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.” Azi's intervention lets him grant himself a new way. These are not undoable or immutable states of being.

To arrive at such a state of being requires something I've noticed wanting, in myself and so many other men, that we need to get better at cultivating – for our own survival and everyone else’s. A more profound relationship with hope. manifesting a masculinity that isn’t a bullpen of pragmatism cordoned off by fence-posts of pessimism. It is an exhausting way to be – to move from negative space, ruts of buried shame and glory held in the loneliness of our journeys. But I think that it’s all a lot of us know, have been conditioned to know. It is imperative that we pause before action, spin the rubix to see all the sides and imagine more vastly, deeply, fully, carefully and lovingly, to be hopeful, for hope is a womb that holds the possibility of all things: from the microcosm of approaching an interpersonal tension with reparative usefulness rather than be immobilised in despair to the worldlier stakes of tuning our intuition so we may move in better harmony with our surroundings.

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

— James Baldwin (2 Baldwin quotes in one article? Well… the man was a skeng)

Art is so often a societal mirror, greater art more agnate to a circus mirror – microscopic and/or telescopic, able to hover a corrective lens over the tensions of the times or provide an altering perspective of what makes us living.

After the season finale, I was lucky enough to converse with the composer, Nicolas Snyder. our call began with a “what you watching?” swap which paved a profound blink of an exchange about nihilism’s inveteracy in our media. there is an abundance of hopelessness in so much of what we watch, we agreed. What, I considered, is the long-term effect of consuming so many apocalyptic visions? these fetishisations of collapsed/collapsing worlds… an ugly, umbilical cord pumping doom as an inevitable, narcotic sludge into us? Scavenger’s Reign is a refreshing deviation from the dystopias that’ve become normal chow in our everyday diet. there is a delicate dancing around them, certainly, as the show jumpstarts from a narrative dropped pin of eerie bleakness and devastating loss. But as it scuttles on, we are made privy to divine transformations, and beautiful reminders that no matter how brutal our environment is, there is wonder to be found and a coexistence that is always possible – but it begins with witnessing, feeling and understanding – a trinity of immersion.

It is then, and only then, that you can act: from hope.