[UA] Queer Eye for the Adept Guy

[James Knevitt]

> -----Original Message-----

> This is all blindingly obvious to someone on the list....

And lo and behold, John Tynes spaketh to the masses:

> They're just caught in the mystic prop wash of Dermott Arkane's gunning to
> be the Heisenberg Messenger. Their particular shtick is the message that
> transforms the recipient, through the twists of Queer-->Straight. Eye, of
> course, is I, and Guy, naturally, is Gaia. Read as: Queer I For the Straight
> Gaia. Their public identity is itself an assertion upon the
> consensus-straight worldgender. The medium is no longer the message; the
> messenger is the message.

Interesting take on it. There's also something to be said for the outsider changing the insider to /be/ the insider; in this case, gay men making a straight guy, well, straight.

*ooh, sparks are flying now*

What if the Fab 5 and their 'qeeermobile' are a living, breathing Room of Quasi-Renunciation? You aren't renouncing yourself as a whole, you're having it strengthened and renewed. That said, you're also stripping away your old self, the old discarded skin shed by the metaphorical snake. You're renouncing your old self and accepting your new self, but at the same time accepting your old self. It just oozes paradox.

The television angle just bumps the whole thing up a notch. By broadcasting to the masses, it encourages others to go on some kind of Zen journey to renounce/accept their old selves without the use of the Fab 5. You become your own House of Quasi-Renunciation. It's like a tree scattering seed pods on the wind, or in this case, the airwaves.

All these little candles of Quasi-Renunciation start burning all across the televised world, with all the old selves being cast off, filtered, and returned. Where do the unwanted parts of yourself go? Well, the Fab 5 collect them, of course. What happens when you have all these bland, boring, ho-hum, simple shades of people? Well, you just need to look back at John C's plan for New Oslo, the otherspace-ghost-town that spawns non-entities.

It seems bleedingly obvious now that the Fab 5 needs to dispose of the old skins of the people they transform. What better way to feed them to an otherspace? Of course, the otherspace doesn't eat shades, it eats real people, but it can happily take the shades off the hands of the Fab 5. The fact that it turns them into non-entities is a happy consequence. 

Now what do the Fab 5 get out of all this? As a living, breathing Room, they're not quite agents, but they're not quite the room itself. More to the point, the nature of the Fab 5 is the Room. Individual members may change, some may come and some may go, but as long as the Fab 5 remains as a concept, the Room remains, and the town of New Oslo continues to chrun its way through backwater America, devouring the type of people the Fab 5 /aren't/ transforming. So it seems that the reward they get is the destruction of those that don't fit into the paradigm of the Fab 5 Room. What a nice situation.

So, if it just so happens that your happy little band of adepts, avatars and general misfits discovers this interesting little arrangement, they're going to want to stop the devouring of whole towns by the otherspace-ghost-town of New Oslo. In order to do that, you need to stop New Oslo from getting the shades that is uses to make the non-entities which allow it to get away with the devouring of the townspeople.

In other words, your little cabal needs to kill the Fab 5.


James

Oh, there's some connection between IKEA and New Oslo, but since IKEA is a Swedish label based in Denmark and Oslo is the capital of Norway, it's a bit of a stretch.