Hermetic Qlippoth

[safisher]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I sometimes imagine them on par with Umbrella corp. They're a doomsday cult pretending to be a legitimate business.

Or they could just stand in for the typical Hollywood trope of the generic hate of capitalism, or as an industrial dystopia.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...apitalismIsBad

[Flyndaran]

I get that, but they're so over the top self destructively stupid as to only barely work in cartoon. Once you go live action or RPG, it falls flat as necessitating a more plausible reason, in my view at least.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I get that, but they're so over the top self destructively stupid as to only barely work in cartoon. Once you go live action or RPG, it falls flat as necessitating a more plausible reason, in my view at least.

I think the orders Ash has in the first film aren't out of line with similar things in real life, like the chain of bad policy decisions that lead to the Deepwater Horizon distaster. The swiss cheese model seems to be applicable here. The fact that Ash carries them out where a human might exercise judgment is maybe a cliché but still is a reasonable risk for artificial intelligence, especially ones that mimic humans.

Burke's decisions in the second film seem like a combination between personal ambition, extreme optimism, the sunk costs fallacy, and being a high functioning cheerfully glib corporate sociopath. Which definitely happens in real life too. At least Bishop does appear able to do more cognitively sophisticated than overly literal execution of directives) probably because he is a United States (Colonial) Marine, oohrah - trained to act as a "strategic corporal", also to believe and obey the UCMJ's strong negation of the Nuremberg defense).

I actually have never seen the next two, so no idea how much W-Y figures in.

Weyland in the prequels is using his corporation's resources to support his personal cult of personal immortality (and David very literally fetishizes death) so your assessment is pretty accurate there, but also they are probably less coherent films anyway, IMO.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I actually have never seen the next two, so no idea how much W-Y figures in.

W-Y get progressively worse in the next two films.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

W-Y get progressively worse in the next two films.

I also realized that I ignored AVP, probably because it is dumb. Weyland (senior?) is probably motivated by a desire to take any part he was offered since Millennium was canceled. :)

[AlexanderHowl]

The Qlippoth supposedly formed from the shells of the first Creation and are inhabited by demons (meaning that the Kabbalistic interpretation is quite different than the interpretation of GURPS: Cabal). The Qlippoth are also a fundamental part of Creation, as they protect the holiness of the Sephiroth by a shell of comprised of the unholiness of the Qlippoth. The demons exists outside and separate from the holiness of the Sephiroth, eternally witnessing the holiness of the Sephiroth but banned from entering the Sephiroth by the will of the divine.