The Unmade Monster
Orcs probably aren't what you think they are, in Tolkien’s world or ours.
In “The Everlasting Man”, G.K. Chesterton wrote the following:
But this notion of something smooth and slow, like the ascent of a slope, is a great part of the illusion. It is an illogicality as well as an illusion; for slowness has really nothing to do with the question. An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.
He was addressing the theory of evolution, and the illusion that it explained reality so well that we no longer required a God. But a man who slowly turns into a pig doesn’t just sound “creepy”. It sounds entirely nightmarish and agonizing, like some form of mythic punishment. If we were watching this transformation occur, day by day, hour by hour, we might even start to wonder what the hell he did to deserve it.
To which some onlookers would inevitably reply:
The CDC says it’s just Swine Flu, Mark!
Stop spreading disinformation!
They’d go on hectoring and convulsing and pointing fingers at yours truly, and probably brand me some kind of -ist or -phobe. Meanwhile, Popeye the Sailorman over here keeps turning into some kind of fucking hog-monster, right before our eyes.
And then we notice a woman up on the poop deck, who is turning into an iguana. Again, it doesn’t happen all at once. A scale here, a claw there. On day forty-six, her tongue splits in half.
Shut up, NAZI!
She’s clearly suffering from Stage 13 gingivitis! We read all about it in Salon!
But this man and woman keep right on changing. Not “evolving”, but something like the opposite of that. For every new feature they gain, they lose so much more. Claws and hoofs aren’t as useful as hands, two tongues aren’t better than one. Not for our purposes, anyway.
Worse, these poor, pitiful, cursed monster-people are smiling. Laughing.
Why are they laughing?
What the heck’s so damned funny about this “miraculous” process?
I’m not supposed to ask such questions. The crowd to my left reminds me of this, as they pelt me with ethically sourced fruits and vegetables. Yes, they now begrudgingly admit, it wasn’t Swine Flu after all, or gingivitis, or advanced Hoof and Mouth Disease either. These transformations were instead beautiful expressions of inner being, manifesting through their Gaia-given will and agency. Not to mention more than a few War Machine petrodollars.
(No, really. They don’t mention that part. They’re too busy calling me a fascist.)
So, I exit the harbor, Stage Right, to find out what my dissident brothers and sisters make of all this beautifully expressive manifestation.
As usual in the company of freemen, their answers run all over the map. Some of the stodgier science bros inform me that these folks are all mentally ill, and prescribe various scans and allopathic treatments. The religious factions prescribe church, or an exorcism, or both. The libertarians shrug their shoulders, blaze up a joint, kick back their Birks, and count their Crypto: “Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.”
Unlike the Left’s hivemind, their heterodoxy gives me a lot to ponder. I love our gang for that; at least we're never boring.
But I get the feeling no faction has come up with a useful solution, or even thinks these transformers are that much of a problem to begin with. As far as they’re concerned, we have bigger fish to fry.
I thought I’d said my piece about this topic recently, using Hernandez as a case study. But I failed to mention that he was once a family man, or really anything about his existence prior to his unmaking. And that’s ultimately what we’re looking at: not transformation but deformation, depersonalization, deracination. Desecration, even, to those of us who hold God’s gift of flesh the least bit sacred.
So let’s talk about orcs, shall we?
Orc Anatomy 101
Of all the campfires in our giant camp of weirdos,
’s blog is one of my favorite ones to hunker down by for metaphysics. I always walk away with some new insight, even when I think the man’s premise is off by a country mile. That’s just how good he is (and if you haven’t already subscribed to , please amend this shocking oversight forthwith).Luc recently posted a Note about orcs, which you can read in full here. I mostly agreed with most of it. But where we disagree immensely can be narrowed down to this…
Where in our world, nobility and courage cannot be recognized at first sight, in LOTR it is represented outwardly in the races. And where in our world, evil must be discerned via intelligent observation and learning to resist deception, in LOTR it can confront you in the form of Orc armies.
and this…
In other words, it is utterly absurd to depict Orcs as conflicted beings deserving sympathy, because in Middle Earth, they are a direct representation of evil.
Maybe “disagree immensely” is too strong with regards to his first notion. It’s obviously true that evil often disguises itself in illusions, including illusions of normality, physical beauty and noble speech.
That was true in Tolkien’s Middle Earth as well. Not all of Sauron’s or Saruman's villainous agents were monsters. In fact, the most dangerously effective ones were human beings. For example, the Nazgul Ringwraiths weren’t monsters per se, but rather elite human rulers who traded their souls to the Dark Lord in exchange for power, and the illusion of physical immortality. Sounds familiar, right?
But one of Team Evil’s most effective agents was exclusively a normal human being, whose deceptions needed to be untangled by those with “eyes to see.” And unlike his moronic physical presentation in the live action films, Grima Wormtongue was not visibly marked in any way. Jackson’s version of the scene not only missed the point, but actually inverted it, as so much of his overpraised, postmodern mess of a series often did.
The real Wormtongue’s tongue was not made of worms, but of silver. He didn’t look like the zombified bassist for a goth rock band, either; he was just some wise-guy political hack, who probably would've joined the CNN pundit circuit had he survived.1 Most importantly, Grima didn’t hiss or scream his lies into the king’s ear, like some psychopath in a Saturday morning cartoon show. He whispered them. Bear this in mind.
My point is that Tolkien’s mythic world did not ignore Luc’s insights into evil’s various illusions and disguises, but rather incorporated them into the whole picture of the war. It wasn't either/or, but yes/and. Sometimes evil wore a disguise, other times it looked exactly like what it was.
In light of that, what are we to make of the orcs? Those humanoid monsters who whisper no lies and wear no disguise?
That brings me to Luc’s second statement, that orcs were meant as the “direct representation” of evil. I’m sorry, but that’s not accurate in the least. Tolkien famously had no patience for metaphor or analogy, and the Lord of the Rings was not a fairy tale. The orcs of his war epic were real, flesh-and-blood creatures, and the threat they posed wasn’t exclusively spiritual. But, unlike Wormtongue — or the Easterlings, or the Haradrim, or the Dunlendings — they are visibly marked by evil. The outside matches the inside.
How can that be? If orcs aren’t a metaphor or a representation, then what are they?
The secret to understanding orcs is the secret to understanding Tolkien’s entire cosmology — and, in my opinion, our own. It can be paraphrased by Frodo’s evaluation of them in “Return of the King”:
“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined and twisted them, and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”
Orcs are alive, but they are not a race. They aren’t even a species, let alone a “people” of any kind. I know this may come as a shock to the authors of Amazon’s “Rings of Power”, whose illogical revision was what Luc was addressing in the first place. This was produced by the same crowd of Lefties who’ve been claiming for decades that Tolkien intended orcs as a metaphor for black people. If anything, their recent “humanization” of orcs proves this was just a massive projection all along.
The Left aren’t the only culprits here. There are Rightists who try to pull off the same trick, including friends of mine on the white nationalist side of our debates. But the fact remains: Orcs are not a race. In fact, they are the opposite of one: deracinated by design, rendered alien from all races of men and their cousin species. They hail from nations, yet they have no tribe or creed. They sport badges and march under banners, but their loyalty is only bound to the hand that feeds their destructive appetites. And so even that “loyalty” is a mockery of the true kind.
This can be seen in their various factional and intra-factional squabbles. They fight like soccer hooligans, or like pirates stabbing each other over booty. Of the named orcs peppered throughout the story, the closest to a “heroic orc” we meet is Uglúk. Throughout his brief appearance, he displays traits we typically associate with our human heroes. These include discernment, patience, restraint, resourcefulness, competence, loyalty, and an astonishing level of concern for the troops under his command. At a certain point in the chase, he even demonstrates something like “forgiveness” for an underling’s mistake, where other captains might have took that creature’s life as payment for it.
This is probably why Tolkien gave Uglúk the closest thing to an honorable death an orc would ever see in his tale, slain in personal combat by the future king of Rohan. But all of these seemingly “good” traits of his are an illusion, ultimately in service to his blood-deep sadism and hatred. Uglúk talked a big game about his loyalty to the White Hand of Saruman. And while I don’t think he’d be the first to bite that hand if it ever stopped feeding him, he would eventually bite (and bite hard).
This is arguably the case for most of the story’s human villains, too.2 But the orcs are in near-perfect material and spiritual alignment, funhouse mirrors inside and out. They are alike in that sense, but have little else in common apart from assorted badges, flags, hashtags, and hometown grudges. We get some mentions of colorings, here and there, but for all we know, every orc looked different from every other orc. Perhaps diversity is their strength, so to speak; a chaotic rabble of deformed, cannibalistic ex-men. That’s how they appeared in my own head, at least.
In retrospect, I think Tolkien took care to allow for this creative reading. Apart from calling out some standard monstrous archetypes — atavistic fangs and claws, weird bodily proportions that would identify them at a distance — what they actually look like is mostly left to the reader’s imagination. My orc isn’t your orc, isn’t his orc, isn’t her orc. The orc’s alienness is the only common property in all minds. What's important is that he isn’t like you, or like anyone you know, or like anyone you’d ever want to know. Something’s very wrong with him, and obviously so.
After that, YMMV.
So an orc is still a person, technically. But it’s a person who has been ruined and twisted, vandalized both inside and out. It’s not a creature that is made, but one that has been unmade. The orc’s “new" parts are just ugly, inferior versions of their original anatomies, chiseled and bent into shapes that are ill-suited for a human purpose, let alone for a Divine one.
This vandalism is the source of the orc's mark, but it’s not like Cain’s mark. It wasn’t God who marked him, but his Enemy, guiding the victim's own hands and minds to help do the deed. Orcs therefore like being orcs. They sport their marks with foolish pride, pretending the whole thing was their idea. This is the Devil’s pathetic version of “creation”, which we too often adopt as our own.
I think the reason we often adopt it is similar to the reason Theoden’s councilor does what he does in the novels. Grima whispers Saruman’s lies to the king, because he believes he’ll be rewarded. Saruman also believes he’ll be rewarded, and that what he is doing is ultimately good.
But who whispers these lies to Saruman?
The (Pre)Surgical Strike
I think the answer is bound up in the mystery of how Saruman “created” his horde of Uruk Hai supersoldiers. He could do no such thing, of course; like his master, he could only bend, twist and mutilate. In his world, perhaps the unmaking process is accomplished with wands and potions. In ours, it’s a matter of scalpels, bone-saws, drills, needles, and drugs. But in both worlds, it requires assistants: one or more highly trained wizards, with the license and motivation to wield and prescribe their unmaking tools.
But here we run into another dilemma: the orcs seem to have chosen their marks. Unlike Mengele’s patients, they volunteer for these twisted experiments, and will even pay small fortunes to the wizards themselves. How do they become so confused? Or, as one (atheist) friend who I showed these pictures to put it, “What possessed them to do this” to themselves?
I think the answer can be found in the violent words that Frodo used to describe their unmaking. Twisted. Ruined.
They were not just whispered to, not just lied to.
These people were attacked.
As for who or what attacked them, there are many strong candidates. I’ve resolved to describe at least one species of attacker in the course of my spooky new series, but other more directly observable agents and methods exist. In fact, I suspect the material crimes typically precede the spiritual ones in the linear order, from our perspective, the same way a deadly infection will take root and spread inside a wound. Fractal alignment, as usual.
That’s not to say a given material or spiritual attack can’t do the job on its own, as in those cases of traumatic brain injuries or full-on demonic possession. But, like Tolkien, I think the most typical attack is a double-team. In these majority cases, the targets have already been weakened by more directly observable and “worldly” forms of damage, which then affords a clear pathway for X to gradually set up shop and take command.
What do the material attacks look like?
Some of them are obvious and longstanding, such as molestation, rape, torture, and addiction. But thanks to our age of scientific “progress”, many attacks and the damage they cause are more difficult to see. Oddly enough, RFK Jr. ticked off a whole list of those in his big realignment speech (and it seems like Donald “McDonald’s” Trump is finally on board). They include toxic foods, endocrine disruptors, pesticides, ingestible microplastics, and a cornucopia of SSRIs, benzos, stimulants, antipsychotics and other pharmaceutical potions, all of which leave behind visible fingerprints on bodies (and especially the eyes).
And of course, these orcs-to-be are simultaneously being whispered to, just as we are all whispered to by the evil egregores that infuse our political, academic, entertainment, and financial markets. We can think of this as a kind of spiritual background radiation (which can silently weaken the rest of us as well if we drop our guard). Absent all the deep gashes and bullet holes, they may become like Grima: physically still human, but seduced by dreams of fortune and power. With those grievous wounds in place, they become — or have the potential to become — an orc.
Not all of them will. Some targets will prove stronger than others, more resistant to damage or infection or both. But the victims who do succumb will likely become victimizers of some kind in return. That’s the answer to the age old nerd question: “How do orcs reproduce?” The answer is that they reproduce the same way vampires do. And like vampires, they’ve been unmade into humanoid monsters, but of a kind that’s far more visibly marked.
And like Chesterton’s sailor-pig, the marking process rarely happens overnight. The same could be said for all forms of corruption. It’s called a “road” to Hell for a reason.
The Monster Market
In the wake of all this profitable damage flows secondary forms of it. Collectively, we could call these forms the Orc Market, which is part of the larger industrial goods and services sector. It’s not driven by one corporation or business model, but rather an entire meta-industry that caters to customers of every demographic and income level. In this marketplace, the consumers/victims gradually exchange their human forms for Halloween costumes that they can’t take off, and which are purposefully repulsive.
At the low-end, customers may be limited to superficial products and services, such as hair dyes, makeup, and cheap body piercings/tattoos. Some of these marks may be permanent, or, at least, too expensive for the orcs to reverse. Other marks will require regular consumption to maintain (e.g. sugary foods, hormones, psychotherapeutic drugs). Portions of the low-end orc market are often partially or fully subsidized, including via tax revenues and welfare schemes conjured up by Keynesian Saru-men. Insurers have gotten in on the racket, too, particularly when it comes to surgical castration and other forms of sexual unmaking.
On the luxury purchase side, the Orc Market provides an expanding catalog of high-end goods and “beauty” services for plastic surgery clientele. Like tattoos and body piercings, the cultural normalization of these elective surgeries has driven up demand, which has been met by an expansion of providers and licenses, and a loosening of social conventions. These effects have driven down prices, ultimately, allowing the middle classes to experiment with God’s gift, and correct His “mistakes.”
There is an addictive quality to most of these orcish products and services. Tattoos begin to creep and crawl across bodies, like an infection spreading through a host. Even the less extreme “nip-tuck” surgical jobs are never completed to the client’s satisfaction, so they’ll eventually go tumbling down the Uncanny Valley walls.
The orc market serves autogynephiles, sexual dysmorphics and other paraphiliacs in much the same way. It begins with top-earners who can easily finance their delusions, and who wield enough power and influence to force others to not only accept these delusions, but to celebrate them. These wealthy celebrity customers are the cultural shock troopers who kick open the doors to advanced marketization and future growth.
The normalization of these perversions, possessions, and trauma-induced manias runs cover for both client and server, allowing the market to expand into ever younger and poorer demographics. But free markets also drive innovation, as we know, and there’s only so much innovation to be had in the sexual disfigurement business model. You can only castrate a man once.
That’s why the next explosion in both market expansion and innovation will be in transhumanist services and technologies. These are the customers who do not identify as human beings whatsoever, and who shake their fists at God and Man alike.
As in other segments of the market, it begins with those Uruk Hai-income customers who are liquid enough to push the current boundaries of their unmaking. Like Tolkien’s version, they are “bigger” and “stronger” than other goblins in terms of shock value alone (although it has been interesting to discover how many ex-military men and women suffuse their ranks).
But also much like Tolkien’s version, their key strength is that they can march around in broad daylight. They, too, are in the process of being normalized. Nearly all of the body modders I’ve shown you so far have glowing reviews and PR puff pieces attached to them, in which they speak of love and freedom and diversity and puppies and rainbows and such, or describe all the “discrimination” and “hate” they face from the normies. Typically both.
Occasionally, however, one of them will let the mask slip:
“I want people to not like me! Because that means I don’t have to be like you!”
Thus far, these Uruks don’t include any “celebrities” in their ranks. But I believe we’ll see that change soon enough. The mighty engines of narcissism, attention economics, perverse incentives and general moral hideousness that power our entertainment industries will eventually demand such unmade monsters be produced and celebrated. Their arrival will be accelerated by a shrinking grievance sector, as Hollywood runs out of stunningly brave candidates to declare the “first” this-or-that.
So, one glorious day, the first platypus will win an Oscar, for playing a transsexual spider monkey. That’s just how free markets work, bro!
But as the masses adopt them, these kinds of transformations will also come to seem too quotidian to the Uruks, who want more than anything to be seen as special, and superior to all other orcs.
So what will be the next innovation? How will the Uruks of the future enhance their marks?
Thanks to our farsighted artists, we already know. It won’t be enough to just look like a monster. Even the fang and horn implants won’t be enough, or Hernandez’s poisonous bite and spittle. And because the Devil does everything upside-down and backwards, function will follow form.
The new growth market won’t only be for cybernetic enhancements. We may live to see the rise of experimental bioinformatic shaping junkies, for example, as well as a slew of novel pharmacological and genetic techniques. In all cases, these will not just nibble away at them, but gnaw off huge, irreplaceable chunks of the Uruks’ bodies and minds. The alienating wounds will deepen, the rot will spread. But they will have the weapons and powers they desire.
But who will install these enhancements? And what will these wizards expect in return?
The Fighting Uruk Hai
If you ask Google’s AI the question: “Does the army pay for transgender surgeries?”, its answer is one of those increasingly familiar new categories I have dubbed the Reverse No.
recently examined this emerging variant through the lens of the Aurora, Colorado police department’s public “debunking” of “misinformation”, with regards to the wave of newSee, irresponsible people have posted dangerous misinformation on social media, falsely claiming that thousands of Venezuelan immigrants took over a shopping mall in town and engaged in violent and aggressive acts. This is false, and we caution people not to post misleading information online. In fact, what happened is that several thousand Venezuelan immigrants gathered at a shopping center, preventing other people from using the shopping center or the streets in the surrounding area, and there was, well, quite a bit of gunfire. We hope this addresses the unfortunate misinformation about a large and aggressive gathering.
The gender surgery answer is superficially “No”, but you don’t need to squint hard or search long to spot the Reversal.
TRICARE covers hormone therapy and psychological counseling for gender dysphoria. TRICARE generally doesn't cover surgery for the treatment of gender dysphoria. However, active duty service members may request a waiver through the Supplemental Health Care Program for medically-necessary, gender affirming surgery.
“Medically-necessary” sounds like a very strange way to put it, until you realize it’s just another way of saying “Yes” but with a fig leaf of plausible deniability attached.
This statutory prohibition applies only to health care services covered by the TRICARE program for beneficiaries; DOD may pay for gender-affirming surgical care through the Supplemental Health Care Program (SHCP) for “active duty members of the uniformed services.” SHCP is authorized under 10 U.S.C. §1074(c), 32 C.F.R. §199.16, Health Affairs Policy 12-002, and the TRICARE Operations Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov IN12203 Congressional Research Service 2 Manual. The DHA Director may consider requests from the military services to use SHCP funds to “lawfully cover otherwise non-covered services for Service members in circumstances that will enable them to return to full duty/worldwide deployable status, or to reach their maximum rehabilitative potential.” Typically, DHA uses SHCP to pay for non-covered services (e.g., certain emerging medical therapies and services, fertility services, or unique rehabilitative services).
DHA policy outlines the process for providing gender-affirming surgical care to an active duty servicemember diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which includes requirements for the servicemember to obtain endorsements from their respective transgender care team and their chain of command prior to being authorized care.
So basically, get a note from your doctor. It’s barely even a fig leaf, actually, since an SHCP waiver that’s denied would suggest that the patient is mentally unfit to serve. If not, the entire premise turns to dust: Why would a servicemember who wasn’t suffering from gender dysphoria want to get gender reassignment surgery?
Here’s an excerpt from an article on the U.S. Army’s official website, Living authentically saves Soldier’s life.
She observed that acceptance is part of the Army’s core values. One of the Army’s core values, respect, states: “Treat others with dignity and respect while expecting others to do the same. That’s the Soldier’s Code.”
Coming out saved Jones’ life. “I don’t think about ending my life anymore,” she said. “I’m happier and a lot more pleasant to be around, not to mention so much more comfortable with myself.”
Allers is hopeful about the future of mental health care. “Society is beginning to better acknowledge issues related to mental health, suicide and the LGBTQ community," she said. "We are recognizing that struggle is part of the human condition, and we need each other for support to get through difficult times.”
“You better let me do this or I’ll kill myself!” sounds more like a spoiled child’s empty threat than the basis for a functioning military’s medical program. And when the “this” in question involves cutting a guy’s balls off, it sounds more like a Victorian madhouse than an army.
But, as we have seen, progress marches on. And if the Fed’s magic money printer can hold up for a decade or so, Jones’ fatal condition might seem tame compared to the kinds of ”medically-necessary” affirmation surgeries on offer. Even if the printer craps out, new CBDC financing schemes might do the trick (and much sooner than a decade).
In fact, subsidizing the delusions of armed lunatics is one of those “feature-not-a-bug” things, when it comes to modern warfare. The latter is mostly psychological, economic, and cybernetic these days. But, when push comes to shove, abroad or in their homelands, they still need grist for the mill. And, as you may know, the U.S. military is in the middle of a recruitment crisis. For good reason, too.
As the Veils are lifted, it turns out very few men want to die for Uncle Samhain’s latest foreign adventures. The people who will volunteer to twist and ruin their own bodies might be the only ones crazy enough to engage in the kinetic side of these conflicts. They will volunteer for all kinds of experiments, too, so that that the Blob can finally get the supersoldiers they so desperately crave. It’s a win-win, for the bad guys.
And that, my friends, is how you will get your real, flesh-and-blood orc armies.
That is what Professor Tolkien saw and transcribed, in his portrait of the orcs. He wasn’t just an artist, but a visionary. I mentioned in an offline conversation with Luc that he’s often mischaracterized as a “fantasy writer”, which is too confining for the story he told. In some ways, “science fiction” would be a more accurate. Even our Enemy’s high tech surveillance panopticon makes an appearance, after all.
If you disagree — if you think the transhuman orcs will always be an outlier, or that no army would recruit and finance them — take a moment to think about what else you thought was impossibly absurd, twenty or ten or five years ago.
Or maybe your disagreement is a matter of category:
“They’re still not real orcs, Mark, and they never will be. They weren’t naturally born this way. Even if they get cyborg parts and genetic mutations and whatnot, they’re still physically human, underneath all that crap.
What we’re really looking at is just a bunch of lost souls and lunatics, who are being tricked and exploited by evil assholes for fun and profit. They may look like monsters, and even act like ones. But no one can actually make a monster.”
To which Frodo and Mark reply:
“Exactly.”
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Although it’s worth noting that by the end, Grima did indeed devolve into something more monstrous, akin to Gollum’s own unmaking. Jackson, of course, cut that entire ending from his films, leaving the fates of both Saruman and Grima to dangle in a fog.
Though every bit as evil, Saruman is a bit more complicated. I might write about him sometime, in relation to his counterparts in our world.
I am 62; I live in England. In 1980 it was quite shocking that a woman ordered a pint of lager rather than a half in the pub. Dying one’s hair was a bit naughty - although understandable if a girl wanted to look more glam - gentlemen prefer blondes, after all. Then, around the mid 1990s, perhaps a little later, young men began getting tattoos, mostly in places that were easily covered up - upper arms, often. Multiple ear-piercings became more common. rather than just one in each lobe (or one lobe for men). I would think, well, that’s ugly, but each to their own. Next came the inexplicably ugly lip and nose rings - these always remind me of what farmers do to pigs or oxen, talk about being led by the nose. Then, unnatural hair colours - blue, green, goth black on very white girls. Then more and more tattoos, all over arms and legs, and then, terribly, over necks, then, even worse, faces. I live in a small, northern town and I see face tattoos fairly often, and almost everyone my age or younger is tattooed. Although it is certainly a ‘class’ thing, very suggestive of being in receipt of welfare, tattoos are not confined to nonprofessionals, especially amongst those under 40. Now I am waiting to see one of the orcs walking down the High Street, complete with forehead bumps and nose and ear removal. What larks.
How will these people, even the more ‘moderately’ tattooed people, feel when they are very old - 75, 85….? Will they be ashamed, embarrassed, regretful, suicidal? Will they even be lucky enough to live so long, even with such burdensome emotions? Perhaps such modifications are a life-shortening path, does that dragon man care about his general health? Does he go to exercise classes? Does he take vitamins or try to drink only moderately? Does he avoid sugar? How about illegal drugs - do dragons like to get high, wings or no?
There has always been a place for freaks - the circus. Lydia, oh Lydia, oh have you met Lydia…But now? When will the envelope-pushing stop? Perhaps there will be a massive backlash, tattoos and other ‘modifications’ will become extremely unfashionable, rather like powdered wigs, or painting arsenic on your face to look pale and interesting. Difference is one can take off a wig, wash off the arsenic (do be careful!) I predict many, many sad, regretful old and wrinkly people walking around in the future. Oh well, behave like a sheep, prepare to be eaten by wolves.
A lot to unpack and chew on, here. I was thinking the same thing as you when I read this - "How many of these guys have military backgrounds?" Just from the ones you listed, apparently a lot. When I started noticing a lot of transpeople in the military ranks and trans veterans a few years ago, I was asking myself, "Why?" I remember a few years ago, in certain places on the internet where there's a lot of discussion surrounding lolcows, there was talk of "trauma-induced transexualism". The infamous Chris-chan, who now identifies as trans (and the reincarnation of Christ), is Exhibit A of this. There were several reasons for this phenomenon posited. One was that, as the victims of extreme bullying, the safety net around transexualism in the current zeitgeist provided them not just an easy-to-join in-group that they could seamlessly slip into and expect to be accepted in (spoilers: Chris-chan has not been widely accepted by the T-Bloc of the Rainbow Coalition), or at the very least, use the state-sanctioned protection offered by the rebuke of transphobia to protect themselves. Another is that all the cyber-bullying just outright broke their brains. The most logical in my opinion is that they were and are just autogynaphiliacs. But it does raise the interesting correlation between trauma and transexualism, whether that trauma be bullying, physical or sexual abuse, or watching a humvee full of your mates get blown sky-high by an IED on an Iraqi highway. That type of trauma leaves mental wounds that make one vulnerable and offer fertile breeding ground for infohazards and mind-viruses.
All in all, I think body-modding is overall deleterious to a person's psyche and generally a bad sign. I get flack for this opinion a lot because piercings and tattoos are in vogue right now, and, believe me, many of my friends have a lot of a ink, but the thing is, talking to them, it never just stops at one. There is an addicting quality to it. They've all told me that themselves. Is it that ridiculous to think that most of the people showcased here probably started off "just getting one" and chased that high until they are were they are now? It starts off with something "meaningful" and devolves into getting a bunch of cheap, shitty scratchers all over your body until you look like the interior of a truck stop bathroom, riddled with graffiti. It's hard to even have a rational conversation about it because so many get so defensive when the topic of tattoos and piercings even come up.
All in all, excellent piece. And the opening bit about the slow transformations is the stuff of Cronenbergian body horror nightmares. I suppose it's not too far off from what we're looking at, here.