This part gave me the chills. Because of the instant parallel to the same experience of actually being human - there's a lot of behavior and motivation inherent to our own personality that we didn't choose, it's there simply because there was a role model in our past that behaved that way and we mimic it because we haven't personally figured out a better way to deal with the difficult emotions fueling it. So, Ford was 'gone' - but role models in our past are never really 'gone', so long as we are alive (and maybe even so long as the people who learned from us are alive, etc.).
I love that, and you state it beautifully.
I must be on a 'grief/bittersweet' movie kick lately, but this keeps getting hammered home to me. The other weekend I just wanted to watch Kubo all the time, and it's the same damn lesson -- that people never really die as long as there is someone who remembers them. That movie just leaves me sobbing in so many places. And now here in Westworld, same thing. Even aside from the god concept, what you mention about how people never really leave us... that we originally determine what to do based on our role models and what we see shown to us, well, we rely on that until maybe one day we choose to do things differently. We hold this images of others in us, in our memories, to guide us.
I am consciously dealing with this at work, in my new role, and when I left my old one at Pers Café... I felt like I was showing a lot of the prior staff "how to do things" not even just directly, with my advice, but also by what I did myself, because I 'knew what to do' in any situation and they didn't as well... i was giving them an example of how to deal with various situations that would outlast my time there, that they could remember. And here at work I consciously find myself watching my new boss and emulating her in terms of how to deal with interactions and the inter-group dynamics, picking up ways to approach situations, ideas to try, attitudes to keep in mind, etc. It's just very CONSCIOUS for me, I am very aware of it as I do it. So one day I will know how to handle a situation without going to her, and esp if I move into something else and she's no longer there, i can still do the job just fine.
There's so much in life that even the most independent of us figure out how to do by observing and listening, at least as our starting point even if we eventually make a role our own. We give these little "images" -- like little brightly lit flames -- to those who come after, to guide them. it's part of being in a continuum of human lives.
I still talk to my dad sometimes in my head. He's dead, and our relationship sucked, but there are parts of him I think would be proud of me and the things I am doing now that I know he would have understood if he hadn't had his head stuck up his own problems for much of his life. It's funny how humans work like that.
So it's fascinating to watch the hosts show similarities to us, doing similar things, even if they operate different and aren't tied to their bodies like we are... currently.
Which is really fascinating. Maybe their host bodies are what we focus on because they are constructs, metal and plastic and whatever else, they're what we see and what seems so "durable." But the host themselves, well, that's not them at all -- they are truly virtual creatures, intangible, that can be stuck inside ANY body. Which is why some of them could go purely virtual into the Sublime. We're the ones tied to our physical forms right now, we're bound in ways they just aren't even if we obsess over their physical forms. We can be affected by changes to our bodies, but our bodies aren't necessarily designed for easy control; unfortunately with the hosts, they can have easy restrictions placed on their capabilities and their programming, to channel/control them (speak the command word and their bodies freeze), but at the same time if they are released from those circuits that control them, they're spirits of light.
*sniff* He's in paradise, but without Dolores. I miss that guy.
