'Dovecote' - HFSC: Descent Into Hell 2

"Your wings rest heavy on your back, outsider. You must hear the wails lamenting for retribution and seething with judgement, reverberating through your skull beneath the peerless gaze of the flock. Shed them, shed them, shed them! Kneel at the alter of conformity and surrender yourself to silence."

This challenge for the hfsc was themed "descent into hell" again, and I wanted to approach it with a different angle than my last descent into hell. I opted to explore the judgmental pressures thrust on us from society to conform and homogenize the way we think and act. As much as 'individuality' might be promoted in western culture, it is also conversely shunned when you genuinely stand out. Leveraging imagery of a baby birds scream, relentlessly hungry and loud, an image of a bird with no feathers or wings itself calling for you to be consumed. Its cries a thoughtless regurgitation of diluted screams. A dovecote is an open cage for doves to live in. Once wild, now dependent. The illusion of freedom within conformity that one may not have to make its own nest but instead only use what they are told to. To live within the confines not of your own mind, but the collective. To not be burdened by judgement of being different, weird, strange, cringe, and relinquish critical and creative thought in exchange. To be unique is to be frightening to those who have shed wings of their own, who don the garb of the flock. If you strip yourself, they won't be forced to look, and therefore see what could be for themselves with courage. They may once again submit, glaze over, and return to placid apathy. Yes, this is about ai as well. I do believe a path into a living hell is to forfeit your thoughts and creativity, and live a life void of authentic expression for convenience & conditional acceptance.

"Even if your wings are heavy, outsider, under the burning leer of envious eyes, it is a weight worth carrying, in order to fly."