who only by moving can balance

... and I've now watched it about five times. It is, for me, glorious reassuring comforting fluff approximately as effective as 10 Things I Hate About You, and simultaneously I think it actually has a very great deal to say about choosing who to be and shit.

So let's start with a link to a meta round-up. In particular, this discussion of the economics that would be involved in dismantling the galaxy-wide industry of choice.

And here's another one about "geneticism".

One of the things I keep seeing discussed as A Problem With The Film is a lack of agency on Jupiter's part, and I just... actually can't quite see how people arrive at that interpretation?

So what I get is that Jupiter - for all that she starts out the film by saying "I hate my life", this motif that's revisited at the action climax when we're told that the Abrasax sovereign was murdered after she told Evil Accountant Sibling that she hated her life - very much approaches the concept of clan the way I do: she has Her People, her fractious and fucked-up family sutured together by grief and language and liminality, and they fight and they are cruel to each other and nonetheless they are kin, and they are bound together by bureaucracy and its ill intent toward them. And then she discovers that she has this space family, these royal space relatives, and none of the rules are the same and it's all tied up in bureaucracy and fundamentally they don't function like any family she's ever interacted with before but they're certainly willing to fake it for long enough to screw her over. And she is used to being screwed over but she is also used to being fundamentally loved, and important to individuals-not-institutions, and... and.

So she's dumped in the position of suddenly having to muddle through the fact that people-as-individuals (rather than people-as-representatives-of-institutions, with which she is clearly already familiar) aren't actually always nice, or even fundamentally intentioned towards well-meaning in their casual nastinesses. And, okay, you've got these three sets of family, right? You've got her family-of-origin, you've got her family-of-weird-genetic-reincarnation, and you've got her family-of-choice, and over the course of the film she learns to say, over and over again, that despite these tangled webs she is her own damn' person and she gets to make her own damn' choices and she isn't going to be defined by what they want of her.

Like: she expresses frustration to her cousin about what he expects of her, in terms of egg donation and money sharing; she expresses frustration to her ?uncle at the idea that she should save her money and be miserable; she tells her royal space "relatives" that she is not their damn mother, that biology isn't destiny or ultimate determinant; and she tells Stinger and Caine and the Aegis that they don't get to make her choices for her and they don't get to tell her anything's too dangerous.

We get the motifs of her being given things by these people, too: the dress by Khalique, Stinger & Caine's pardons by Titus, a telescope from her family-of-origin, the gun and the boots from Caine - and we see her learning to look for the motivation behind the gifts, not just the surface.

And that's the thing, really. I think we see her learn. We see her go from saying "this must be a dream", to telling Stinger that she wants the truth (and give or take faulty technology, budget cuts and exile, he does), to Intergalactic Advocate Bob demonstrating that bureaucracy is bureaucracy everywhere and she can end up in just as much shit by being a magical reincarnated space vampire princess as by being an undocumented immigrant in the US, to getting unlawfully detained and using the transit time to learn the relevant parts of this massive set of new legal documents she's been handed (Entitled Code & Conduct), to saying no to Caine making decisions about her safety and her life (when at the beginning of the film she was saying yes to Vladi), to saying no to Evil Accountant Sibling and the rest of her royal space "offspring" over and over and over again - the wedding (when she realises, and takes responsibility for the fact she has the power of life & death over Titus when Caine asks her if he's permitted to kill him); the refinery (where she reiterates over and over that genetics don't determine identity, and she shoots Evil Accountant Sibling after he arrogantly assures her she isn't capable of it, and she explicitly rejects the idea that she's his mother, given extra strength by the fact that we've just had that parallel, that of "I hate my life", drawn explicitly; where she looks at what he says and what he does and decides that she's not signing any damn' contract with any of these bastards and that's the best way she has, right then and there, of protecting people - and then she does better).

And she learns. One of the very last things she says in the film is that she doesn't know what she wants to do with this planet she now rules. She wants to take time, she wants to work it out, she wants to learn economics, she wants to think slowly and carefully because she knows she's used to operating in a mindset of massively insecure poverty and legal status, and that encourages her towards short-term decisions rather than long-term ones (the Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Economics etc etc), and she knows she needs to do better than that for the planet, so she is going to.

Over the course of this film, she goes from agreeing to do what other people want her to (because she feels too hopeless to do anything else, because she can't imagine far enough ahead to see why she'd want to), to flat statements that she gets to make her own decisions in her own time, even in the face of horrifying coercion. Titus tells her that everything is a negotiation; Balem (EAS) tells her she's in no position to negotiate; so she does anyway. She listens to her advisers when they're invited to comment, and she makes up her own damn' mind, and she does right by her families-of-choice, and she wins.

In the clinic, she says no, I don't want to do this and is ignored and nearly killed. In the refinery on Jupiter, she says no, I'm not going to do this, in the face of threats to her life and her family's life, and once again she nearly dies but this time she chooses it. She chooses it, having chosen to end up there in the first place, in defiance of everything that Balem expects of her.


And then, of course, there's the whole thing of biology-as-theology: there's this group of hugely technologically and scientifically advanced people that's more-or-less created a pretty misguided idea that Biology Is Destiny, Biology Is King, Genetics Is The Absolute Determinant, etc -- they are a culture that, as far as I can tell, fundamentally thinks that through biology they acquire control, and actually believe all the shit they're saying about genetics controlling everything that you do and are and say (cf everything Titus says about being able to tell exactly what Jupiter is thinking by how she raises her eyebrows; what Balem says about genuinely appearing to think Jupiter might remember some of the things his mother did and said; that they literally breed splices for specific jobs). And Jupiter looks at this massively advanced culture, this culture that has science that she just has absolutely no basis for understanding, this culture that it turns out controls her entire planet and her entire life and thinks she's some kind of monarch because they genetically engineered bees not to sting her, and she looks at how they conceive of and model and understand genetics, and she says -- no, that's bullshit, that is self-evidently bullshit, and the narrative shows her to be right.

So I'm impressed. And I love it.