The Sales Patter:
When you buy cerebral slickware from Feng-Huang Industries,
you’re buying a product that has been through several generations of
primate tests before it ever touches human grey matter. That’s the FHI
guarantee!
FHI’s primate test subjects, such as those on the forest moon of Faa Saan,
are given ample space to roam in natural conditions. And since last
year, FHI has made a zero-euthanasia pledge across all its testing
facilities. That's why FHI is considered by industry watchdogs to be the
gold standard for humane research practices!
... The primates don’t agree.
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Finding the Horror in Journey to the West
There's no classical novel that is more influential across Asia than Wu Cheng'En's Journey to the West. I grew up with the storybook and cartoon version from the 60s, which looked like this:
Journey to the West is many things. Its comedy, it's action, it's religious philosophy. But it isn't horror. Drawing the horror out of Journey involved taking those elements that were present and reframing them in a different context. For example: fruit in the shape of human babies. It's a weird myth in JttW,but it gets players' hackles up in a horror context!
For all the inspiration Monkey King takes from JttW, it's not a retelling by any stretch. There's a more important inspiration behind the adventure...
Rest In Peace Jane Goodall
In another life, my main area of study was animal ethics, especially the treatment of non-human primates, such as in medical research. It's not an area I recommend deep-diving into if you want to have a good day. There's one reference to Harry Harlow in the adventure, and that's about as much of a nod as I'd like to give him.
The history of animal research intersects nicely with the managerial corpo-villainy of Mothership and other cyberpunk/sci-fi future settings. An example. Chimpanzees are endangered, right? So and there are legal limitations around what kind of research you are allowed to subject them to. For example, you're not allowed to inject an endangered species with a disease that inhibits their breeding ability- like, say, HIV.
This was a problem for people who wanted to use chimps for HIV research. The solution? As simple as it was nonsensical: for years, chimpanzees were uniquely subject to a "split-listing," that designated wild chimps as endangered by captive chimps as not endangered. Does it make any sense? No.
This loophole was only closed in 2015.
Jane Goodall is a luminary in the field of primatology. The work of Goodall and others like her (such as her successors such as Diane Fossey and Birute Galdikas) was than science, it was consciousness-raising. It made people see chimpanzees as individuals as part of their own, complex society. But most importantly, it invites us to see them as ends in themselves.
I'll leave you with her own words...
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