Tony's death was rather upsetting, but not surprising. The comic was definitely building towards it. I was glad for the death of the Greg para persona, he was a real douche. Every time he mistreated Tony I hoped the cat would become feral and pull a Cujo on him.
Just as upsetting as Tony's death was the revelation that Tony was merely a copy. Who am I to mourn? The real... no, original Tony or the Tony that I have an actual connection too? The original's death is felt with nothing more than second-hand-sadness, something akin to how I feel when reading about a murder in a newspaper. The death of the copy I feel with more remorse though. Does that make the copy the 'real' Tony? Is it possible to have two 'real Tony's? I guess the situation is not unlike that of parallel universes. Should someone from a neighboring universe be thrown into ours they would be considered the unreal double of their copy here. In the parallel universe though, they would see the situation as one of their own being thrown into an 'unreal' universe.
I think this problem of 'real' and 'unreal' is very important to our future. With cloning technology, laws should be made for the rights of clones. Being a copy doesn't make you lesser then the original. At least it shouldn't. It would be silly to say that a clone is the same as the original in every way except in worth, that actually defeats the purpose of calling them a clone.
I'm really interested in talking about this book in class and hashing out the themes in it. I have a lot of curiosity regarding the book's mentionings of love and the twist where Slade is the one who holds the pen that The Hand harvests ink from.
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This is a great post. The notion of who to mourn is such a complex question.
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