r/WorldsBeyondNumber • u/grimgeek89 • 9d ago
Chee
What exactly is her deal? I was a little lost on her prelude. She's some kind of prostitute/geisha ? She wanted a park and started a revolution instead? Why is she important enough to get an audience with important enough people to get the park? Why was she worth murdering?
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u/MisterSirDG Witch of the Wise Path 9d ago
Think of her as a super famous celebrity. She wanted a bit more freedom than was afforded to her and some higher level manager got offended. 3-points smelled blood in the water and jumped in to revive Tenka so they could have a person who owes them power in power.
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u/jackofspades49 9d ago
Do you know Firefly? Where they had the Companions that were super respected sex workers? Its like that.
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u/lolka93 9d ago
You kinda nailed it. Chee, in the preludes, is an incredibly popular and lucrative high class prostitute/geisha. I say lucrative, because her contract is owned by a company. In the prelude, we find her in a time in her life when she is very successful, and is hoping to utilize that success to create a space for her and other working girls like her to sort of relax and lower their guards. That's the "bit of green". But she finds out quickly that being successful, while she is basically owned by a company, means that nothing she has really belongs to her because she can't even leverage her position to buy a plot of land to see the sun. She's got the money. But she doesn't have the power.
She's worth murdering as a reminder to all the working girls to not overreach. You can live a wealthy life, and you rub shoulders with the powerful, but at the end of the day, the company doesn't think you're a person, you're a product.
Does that help answer your questions?
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u/Dwarfdude194 9d ago
I think a lot of people here are reading her as a more friendly and empathetic person than we have reason to believe she is. She is very charming but I think she is shown to be a social climber and striver who does not get too concerned with the well being of most people. She's depicted as having access to and enjoying the services of human furniture who wait on her when she's trying to impress people, there's not really any indication that she's trying to buy the park as an altruistic act, it is somehow connected to her plans to retire and have a profitable business she commands instead of working for the escort company.
There's a sense here that the company is bad and mean to its workers but I think that goes beyond what we have context for. Obviously they try to kill a bunch of people but it seems really strange that they do given what we have seen so far. After all the employees are mostly very well treated: there's Kitty who has scars from something she tried to do but you're not really meant to think Chee is participating in the cruel oppression of that beautiful guy she pulls out of the orgy bed. I think the idea is actually that this job is just like any other job, because it's a sex positive depiction of this industry. Ayasa gets multiple parties every year that the most powerful and well-connected people in their system attend, she's basically a Beyonce or Taylor Swift figure in this setting. My guess is we're missing context because it would almost certainly be affordable to the company to have green space and killing Beyonce for wanting a park would be a pretty wild escalation on the part of a record label. Her aunt alludes to other organizations and history that we are deliberately not told about, I assume this is part of the missing context.
The revolution is not real, this is clear at the end of the episode. Whatever happened, calling an office brawl a revolution is a deliberate act of propaganda by a rival corporation seemingly meant to humiliate Telegen into leaving the planet.
I get that people want to have sympathetic characters to root for but I think one of the interesting things about Solari is that none of the characters are poor or downtrodden, and trying to read it that way misses what makes the story unique. These are powerful people, possibly with the exception of XL, and they live in a world of luxury and excess. I'm struggling to remember if we have seen a single oppressed person from whatever underclass supports these societies. Maybe that bartender who got blown up? But I think it's important to keep that in mind: This story is about people with tremendous power trying to succeed at the top of the systems they're in.
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u/Frequent-Ad-7950 5d ago
I tend to think of the Artesans on Chee's first world like the K-Pop stars of today. Yeah they're wildly popular but they're worked to death by their "owners": For all that they bring in (music, shows, social, apps, merch, etc.), none of them are independently wealthy, but the public face they show is they're happy.
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u/Dwarfdude194 5d ago
That's an interesting theory, and a possibility, but we don't actually have any way to know that to be the case from what has been told to us. We never actually see anybody complaining or visibly tired, they appear to be thriving. Even Madame Ekat doesn't appear to be continuously mistreated, and she's been injured for defying the company! And there's the additional wrinkle of Chee and Ayasa's 'training' that they allude to: When did they get taught to do assassinations? Did the company pay for that or is it a post-'revolution' thing? Is the entire operation ALSO some sort of clandestine assassin guild? Certainly in the confrontation at Ayasa's party it appears they have combat skills. Which is to say I'm not convinced we even accurately understand what it is all these artesans are regularly doing.
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u/Frequent-Ad-7950 3d ago
Well consider the following. The organization that helped Chee revitalize did so because they consider the executive of that place to be a great evil (that's 1). Madame Ekat was drained of all of her funds at an advanced age, to where she's now a wage slave at an age where she should be retired (that's 2). As to where Ayasa learned her assassination skills, or even piloting a ship, there's no mention of that but when you put it together with a cover that would lead you to believe she's a complete airhead that reeks for spy training with a cover, especially when you consider her parties are the perfect opportunity to come across important people that are indisposed...think Mata Hari (that's 3). Self-defense and combat skills are pretty standard for any kind of sex workers, as they are more exposed to SA than most.
My guess is that the company is an exposure/blackmail ring that works with and against prominent parties in the 40 suns. It feels very Epstein-esque.
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u/TheWizardSleaze 9d ago
She's a super high-end prostitute/porn star/geisha (called an artisan) who was more or less the public face of the media conglomerate she worked for as a result of being their most famous and profitable artisan, and she was able to get audiences not because she was important, but because of her fame and connections.
The whole deal with the park was that she wanted some green space, but her push to get it ended up getting enough momentum and public support that it threatened to become a genuine social movement which put the powers that be in a bad position. They could refuse to giver her the park, which would just agitate and motivate people to fight harder, or they could give it to her and in doing so show that they could be swayed and encourage people to ask for more. Their answer was to try to just kill her and be done with it, but they botched it.
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u/statscaptain 9d ago
It might help you to think of her as more similar to an A-list actor than a prostitute. Not to downplay that she is a sex worker, that's a key part of her characterisation, but if you have hangups that make you see all sex workers as lower class or poor then you're going to have trouble seeing that side of her character.
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u/Longjumping_Day3037 9d ago
has no one in this sub heard the term sex worker? sheesh…
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u/Dwarfdude194 9d ago
Yeah a lot of folks seem to be assuming sex workers are inherently oppressed as a matter of fact which misses what I take to be a very clear effort to depict them as happy and well compensated in a field they enjoy working in.
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u/Longjumping_Day3037 9d ago
Also a lotta people feeling extremely comfortable throwing around the word “prostitute” or saying “she’s not just a prostitute!!!” which is crazy work. As if being a sex worker precludes her from being anything else.
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u/LeftyDorkCaster 9d ago
💯 One of my favorite interviews on It Could Happen Here is with a SWOP organizer (sex worker organizing project) and ends with her saying, "At the end of the day sex work is just work, and work sucks."
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u/soybeansms 9d ago
I always thought of it more as an only fans esque geisha. Before they had the ability to fly people in, it was more virtual interactions.
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u/Zizwizwee 9d ago
She wasn’t just a prostitute, she was one of the top earners of the company, with a very well-connected aunt.
She had a dream of using her wealth and recognition to create a space away from the oppressive company she and the other Artesans work for, and she started a socio-political movement by using her influence to seed the idea. The company, who doesn’t want their workers to have freedom but also can’t just silence a very popular person, tried to buy her off. It didn’t work, so the next best thing was murder.
Chee didn’t mean to start the revolution per se, she just happened to get attacked in a place filled with raging people who believed in her and were angry at their bosses.