Some Thoughts: The Zoomans

I think we all want to see the Zoomans free. Freedom would mean being able to self-determine, from their own life paths to the small choices of when to eat and sleep.

We know from the episode The Zoo, though, that it’s not going to be as simple as opening the doors and telling them they’re free. They have a very different conception of what a good life is, and what freedom means.

When we look at the Zoomans, we have to consider that they have been raised generation after generation in a very particular way. Consider also that the human beings first taken by Homeworld were not only living in a very different society from the one we have now, which also had very different conceptions of who deserved freedom and what it looked like. Moreover, for nearly 6,000 years, the Zoomans were born and raised in the facility, with no idea that a place like Earth exists.

I want to cover how the Zoomans got to where they are now, and the role Homeworld played in “creating” the environment, and the people seen in the episode. In this post I’ll also discuss how the Zoomans might feel and how they’ll eventually attain freedom in the sense we define it.

With that said, let’s get started!

1.  The First Zoomans

One thing that I think should be pointed out off the bat is that the first Zoomans were taken from a particular point in human history. In the 5,000 years since the war, humankind had begun to come together from small pastoral and agricultural communities and established the ancient civilisations, specifically those of the Fertile Crescent, such as Ancient Sumer.

At this time, up until the Enlightenment Period and Scientific Revolution, the human worldview was largely that of Cosmo- or Theo-centrism. Their lives were dictated by patterns in nature, and the concept of a good life was to be in harmony with nature or what the gods wanted. 

This was a time in which there weren’t a lot of choices about what life profession one could take, or who one could marry. Most of these were inherited from one’s parents and decided by the community. 

In fact, it’s much closer to the rigidly stratified social structure found on Homeworld, in which one is essentially born into a job and social roles. It was a time in which some groups weren’t recognised as “human” and equal to the others, again similar to Homeworld.

The idea of a state guaranteeing civil and political rights didn’t come until relatively recently, and in a lot of places, democracy is an even more modern idea. 

As such, the first Zoomans would be quite familiar with routine and some vague higher force instructing them on how best to proceed in life. We can assume that the technology at the Zoo hasn’t advanced very much since its creation, if only because it’s in the outskirts of gem territory, where no one really visits. From here it can be assumed that the way things were done in the past is quite similar to what we see now, in a largely unchanged formula.

It’s not to say that the first Zoomans would have been completely comfortable or didn’t try to fight back. After all, they were being taken from their communities, the very centre of their lives. They had established lives back home that couldn’t be replicated by Homeworld. But, what happened next could have been rationalised by their worldview.

So what happened next exactly?

2. Reverse-engineering the human world