This applies to a lot of super autistic cows. To everyone else, their inability to do normal human things is depressing. Since they're so emotionally and mentally stunted in the first place they aren't aware there's more to life and are completely fulfilled being married to a stuffed animal or drawing furry inflation porn on Deviantart
It raises some pretty spooky existential questions about happiness and meaning.
Reminds me of my favorite part of
The Mysterious Stranger after Satan tells an innocent man that he's been found guilty, in order to drive him insane.
"Ah, you mistake; it was the truth. I said he would be happy the rest of his days, and he will, for he will always think he is the Emperor, and his pride in it and his joy in it will endure to the end. He is now, and will remain, the one utterly happy person in this empire."
"But the method of it, Satan, the method! Couldn't you have done it without depriving him of his reason?"
It was difficult to irritate Satan, but that accomplished it.
"What an ass you are!" he said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result--and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means possible to his race--and you are not satisfied!"
But then it also reminds me of
The Killing Joke and it's take on madness and how it's just a cowardly escape for people who never had anything to hold on to in life in the first place.
It's true Jin sees his muppet as the perfect spouse, one that can never talk back to him or think differently from him (because he's the one doing all the thinking), and for now, it does make him happy. It's made him happy for almost a decade, maybe it'll make him happy a decade more. But humans weren't built to be satisfied with an inanimate object forever. It reminds me of tests performed on orphaned chimps by giving them a plush "mother" instead of a real one. They would cuddle with the dummy mother, but as they grew they would get increasingly disturbed and violent, I think they might have even began to hurt the dummy mother, but I can't recall correctly and I can't find the exact study. Studies on chimps and mothers/dependencies are actually really interesting, I suggest you check them out.
I've seen this sort of behavior in a lot of cow activity, especially those fluffy ponies. The object of their desires (ponies) is unresponsive, they can't interact with them because they're just drawings. So they begin to get violent, they begin to attack them to try and provoke a response. Funny, I'm getting dejavu here, I might have even said all this in this very thread, but Jin has already shown some violent behavior with plush (he
did shit on it, right?). I think it'll only accelerate, until he has full-on torture fantasies about this doll, then finally giving up and realizing it can never respond to him or give him fulfilling feedback. Will that make him seek human company? Maybe. Probably not. But this can't go on forever, in fact I'm confident our primate brains are hard-wired not to let it go on forever. At some point our primitive base instincts to survive and reproduce kick in and make us seek some form, any form of normalcy and validation. We desperately need something to talk back to us or we get depressed, the same depressive respond to not seeing sun in a month. We all have different tolerance levels to certain things, but eventually, unnatural shit gets to all of us.
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