My take (long, SPOILERS) (Off-Topic)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, October 16, 2017, 18:37 (2436 days ago) @ narcogen

I honestly doubt Roy wants or needs to "prove" anything to Deckard. I think he believes what he believes, and is being threatened by someone who clearly believes differently-- as the entire system does.

That's literally why he goes after him but does not finish him off… otherwise he'd have just let him drop. Roy could have gone out in a more public manner, with more of a flash as per what Tyrell says. But he didn't.

I think my interpretation is pretty similar to yours right up until the end, and differs from Kermit's. You can only get from any work what you agree to take from it, and all he was interested in taking from it was a stylish noir-styled detective yarn. I agree that the style is excellent and something in many ways the sequel absolutely fails to match, but as a detective story it's thoroughly mediocre, and taken as a whole in this view is insignificant except for its visuals (which are obviously very significant).

Yes I agree. In fact I've always felt the style is really all the film has going for it.

Where I differ is that I think this interpretation works just as well if Deckard isn't actually human, right up until past the Batty fight, where the human audience just presumes Deckard is human-- despite no one ever actually saying so.

That's true, but it'd be a boring movie if to satisfy the theme you just watch a guy doing normal stuff for two hours, then say see! He's actually a replicant and not a human. Shame on you audience for thinking so!

So the first portion of the film sets up what everybody believes-- that there are humans and there are replicants, and that the distinction is real and meaningful even if making the distinction is arbitrarily difficult. It's the perfect setup allowing a society to dehumanize any groups or individuals it wants for any reason

Let's look at the sequel and see how a replicant Deckard ruins that theme as well. If he's a replicant, that means replicants and humans cannot reproduce together. Only within their own. This gives a pretty bright line as to their status as 'human', and provides a perfect justification to seeing them as the 'other'. But if they can interbreed? Now that throws a wrench into things.

I don't just think that it's being questioned that Deckard is human or not. I think it's being questioned whether he would pass the VK test whether he was biologically human or not.

How do you find Nazi replicants? Run the Mein-Kampff test on them.