Two Spacesuits
"Two Spacesuits" has a heavy focus on one of my big writer themes: cognitive dissonance and the defense mechanisms we deploy to deal with it.
���You���re still doing it! Oh my God! You make up these stories to explain your behavior to yourselves. When one story falls apart you just switch to another one.���
As a writer I hope I don't come off solely as an observer of human frailty, but this is one of my favorite kinds of human frailty to observe. There's a bit of this in Constellation Games when Ariel and Dana are talking about Curic's ambivalence:
���We'd pick an option at random and create post hoc rationalizations,��� said Dana. ���Humans do it, too.���
In Situation Normal, Evidence causes this behavior as a side effect (this is why Evidence is called that!), and this is most clear in "We, the Unwilling," the SN bonus story, where Evidence pushes the POV character into ever more extreme states of cognitive dissonance:
���You ask the Internet about Captain Jim Kirk,��� said Nor firmly, ���and then we can do business based on a shared understanding of the facts.������I don���t want to,��� said Kenta. There was nothing else to say. The only possible next step towards completing the mission was to avoid certain pieces of information.
Can readers expect a respite from further explorations of this concept in The Constellation Speedrun? My sources say no.
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