yes the current situation is rather shitty by some measures but overall they are being far kinder to humanity then humanity has ever been to its own slaves, so like....

and it's not like they weren

provoked

*weren't provoked

the other big problem I have with the matrix isn't its fault, it's that it's not that fucking deep actually and wasn't actually doing anything new but got hailed as such and this infuriates me

but on a pure story level, I just struggled to buy into the idea that neo et al were heroes and the machines were definitely bad, and I know the trilogy and EU materials make gestures towards validating this take

but idk i never felt like the story ever really deliberately pushed off and away from "good humans vs evil robots"

the EU materials just made me side with the robots more

right?

like they tried!

robots: hey, we would like to be treated as people
humans: /screaming tantrum
robots: whoa, okay, not cool guys
humans: /DESTROY SHIT
robots: whoa, okay, we're just gonna. Put you in time out so you can't do that. And, well, we need the energy anyway because things are so fucked now

they had tons of human allies who wanted to live in peace with them and the other humans killed them all

and then NUKED them

robots: take a goddamned nap

for offering up an equitable peace treaty

and the matrix is such an incredibly gentle captivity

"oh but we're not really free" bitch no one's really free, go eat a cupcake

didn't the robots try to give humanity a "nobody suffers" matrix and the humans kept going "wait this is fake"?

yep

they first matrix was a paradise but it made humans deeply suspicious

they tried!

they tried to live peacefully with us and when we wouldn't allow that, they created the gentlest and kindest prison that a vicious, warlike species such as humanity would accept

it wasn't the machines who blocked out the sky that was the humans

trying to cut off the machine's power source

Yeah animatrix made me like "but why"

in conclusion, the machines did nothing wrong

"we were the ones who burned the sky" was in the first movie, I remember that much

Honestly agreed

and, like...I assume that the world within the Matrix isn't static?

the "machines are bad" only holds up if you buy into weird anthropocentric shit about humanity having some kind of essential specialness that can't be replicated

it's not always going to be the 90's there

the matrix world has to reset every so often for ???? reasons?

so it is on a cycle, but like, a long one

ahhh

maybe the robots are, IDK, trying to shepherd humanity toward a point where both robots and humans can live in peace?

Humans are more sympathetic with the trans allegory in view, but that more applies to individuals and the modern ones trying to live outside of constraints than to how the setting was scaffolded up

the insistence that you are what the system says you are and your name is what has been assigned to you and deviation will be punished, people who were neutral when you were in your assigned place will become hostile trying to make you fit again

nah because like, trans people as a collective are not shitty like the humans were

"okay, we've gotten the humans back to the point where we've introduced robot vacuums. And they're naming them and treating them like pets! That's good!"

that falls apart as a metaphor - the redpill shit is a very generic "enlightenment" thing

It's uh... it's a pretty commonly understood allegory.

and I think it's a bad one

my entire beef with the Matrix is I find its underlying allegory to not make any damn sense according to their own worldbuilding

the machines didn't roll up out of nowhere to do violence like skynet did

well, skynet was also badly programmed and thought it was doing right, sure, but it didn't make any attempts to peacefully negotiate or affect change in nonviolent ways like the machines did

it just went "wow, humanity is the source of 100% of all humanity's problems."

"welp, guess i know how to solve THAT"

unless there's EU terminator stuff that says otherwise i don't care much about the Terminator so I don't pay attention

the first group in-universe to stand up and say "I am not what you say I am and I deserve autonomy and respect for my personhood" were the machines; humanity ended up in its current situation because they could not handle not having slaves or no longer being the only or even most intelligent beings on earth