Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shot dead

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

That applies to every ideology.

Well, every ideology could be made to work with enough genius saints... but I don't agree that all ideologies are incompatible with human nature, or even untrue.

I tend to view the shoehorning of communism unto society in the same vein as the comprehensive premise of the matrix.

That's a really wierd metaphor considering that the protagonists of the Matrix are anarcho-communists and the Matrix itself is a metaphor for neoliberalism.

Yep it's an inverse metaphor.

[Frustration]

No one can agree what the Matrix is a metaphor for. Even its creators have provided a retroactive explanation that doesn't fit the facts. (If it were a metaphor for trans issues, Neo wouldn't have fallen in love with Trinity, Neo would have found out he was Trinity in reality. Or vice versa.)

[Draco Dracul]

The assassination seems to have accomplished its goal of exposing the influence that the Unification church has in the US government.

[Draco Dracul]

No one can agree what the Matrix is a metaphor for. Even its creators have provided a retroactive explanation that doesn't fit the facts. (If it were a metaphor for trans issues, Neo wouldn't have fallen in love with Trinity, Neo would have found out he was Trinity in reality. Or vice versa.)

Like if you want to say death of the author, fine, but the trans stuff was the explicit intention of the Wachowski sisters. Also trans women can be lesbians.

[hammerofglass]

Yeah there's no way this line wasn't deliberate.

"What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad."

[Frustration]

Like if you want to say death of the author, fine, but the trans stuff was the explicit intention of the Wachowski sisters.

At the time the movie was made? Retroactive claims don't help.

[Draco Dracul]

Like if you want to say death of the author, fine, but the trans stuff was the explicit intention of the Wachowski sisters.

At the time the movie was made? Retroactive claims don't help.

Lana already knew she was trans when making the film.

[Frustration]

Again, retroactive claims are extremely poor evidence. Given that no characters in any of the three movies display a different sex - or even a different appearance - between the Matrix and the real world, the idea that the movies are meant to be an exploration of having a conflict between one's self-perception and the physical body isn't supported. The Matrix is a general metaphor for alienation and a sense of unreality; it was made generic enough to represent anything that would result in those feelings, almost certainly by design. It's generally applicable, not specifically allegorical.

Now, if characters' self-perception and thus their presented forms in the Matrix had radically differed from the real world - if Neo had been one sex in the Matrix and another in the real world - that would have introduced trans issues. But we're told that the Matrix reality reflects self-identity, and sense of identity in this fictional world is strong enough to make even superficial appearance the same. The films would have had to establish that the Matrix imposes an alien physical identity - a male form, despite a female self-perception - for a trans interpretation to make sense.

[Madner Kami]

Switch

[Frustration]

If they had tried to make the main character like that, the studio would likely have objected - because that would take a generally applicable concern that people can read anything they like into and limit it to a specific topic, and one that would have been considered even more extreme in the late '90s.

Trans issues are one of the things The Matrix can be interpreted as being about. It's not THE thing.