terratic:

I’m not sure why, but I am! And one thing I found interesting is that literally the first line of spoken dialogue is 12-year-old Sion’s teacher talking about neuroscience and a “rat experiment”. At first I was just kind of like “omg cool” with, you know, how Nezumi is a rat and an experiment and evidence that No. 6’s own “experiment” in utopia requires violent oppression outside its walls, but I keep thinking about this now! The whole neuroscience thing, how the teacher went on to talk about how what humans think of as a soul could conceivably just be a byproduct of neuronal activity, how Safu is so into intellectualizing everything in biological terms (she calls kissing Sion on the cheek “the physical symbolism of the manifestation of reproductive desire”), how this couching things in terms of neuroscience is everywhere in this series, especially here in the beginning before shit starts getting real.

And you know, I think this isn’t even just foreshadowing of the shit with the wasps, it also kind of sets the viewer up to see how No. 6 (the district, not the show itself) convinces its people that the world is indeed what they are told it is because it discourages individuation. Because someone like Nezumi, whose whole identity is fractured and inseparable from the traumas he experienced at the hands of his oppressors, by these standards, by an ideology that says “the soul is a byproduct of neuronal activity, it is nothing more” — by that ideology, Nezumi shouldn’t exist. As a neurodivergent person, as someone whose IDENTITY is so clearly so much more than biology, he shouldn’t exist, just like he shouldn’t exist physically if No. 6 is what it says it is. Which I guess is why, after everything, Sion finds the idea of No. 6 being a false utopia so inconceivable for so long; he was raised on a worldview that says, on every level, that Nezumi shouldn’t exist.