Our odd little journey comes to a close.
…but we’re stronger now, and we know it’s not true, and we can take it. We can reject the ideals and the fear and the manipulation, stop the process, and set everything straight again.
Us.
Together.
New Pork City, to borrow the phrasing of Ned Flanders, is designed to “inflame the senses.”
It’s a bustling social playground, drawing in the refugees of the old towns and the simple ways. With a host of attractions and amenities, it has everything, but none of it is for you. It’s the one-way trap of a powerful and borderline-nihilistic man-child, a sardonic puppet master hell-bent on feeding his strings through the lives of everything and everyone he can, if only for another temporary helping of amusement.
It’s naturally repulsive, his urge to control and manipulate, but is it unique? The words of Leder’s story—a tell-all tale of a people, sailing away from the end of all things, deciding to wipe their own memories and act out a predetermined structure of existence in the hopes of creating a better life—posit that it might not be. In a situation where everyone’s role is already specifically fabricated to ensure stability, how many degrees of separation are there between that and a total dictatorship?
Irrespective of semantics and intent, action must still be taken. The transition from the close, personal sorrow of a group of individuals to their subsequent abstraction into pawns on a board game of possible catastrophe and potential absolution—the weak boy now tasked with carrying all, most specifically—is nearly complete at this point. The collective fear and uncertainty shared by the close group of friends is replaced by a sense of imminent duty, or at least closure. The childish games and plain-faced taunting of Porky can’t go on.
And they don’t, if all goes well. A sequence of revelations, battles, and tear-stained moments of finality ultimately concludes in a breathless instance of pause—
—before settling, as it would, into a final chorus of the purest of goodbyes.
