#i know this is probably one of those cases where the subversion of a cliche became a cliche itself

[milfmacbeth]

one of the worst tropes is when someone is being served potentially poisoned food and they hesitate to eat it until the other guy is like "oh no i'd never poison the food who do you take me for" and then they eat the food. because apparently the guy you suspect of poisoning you would never lie to you about it.

[adarkrainbow]

The fairytale world of The Witcher

The Witcher is first and foremost a work of fantasy and as such, of course, when looking at the inspirations of Sapkowski, we have to look at fantasy works. For example the early worldbuilding and characters of The Witcher world bear the heavy mark of D&D (Jaskier is a cliche D&D Bard, the classification of elemental genies is traight out of D&D, there's the handlings of "druids", etc...), while the main character clearly has parallels with Moorcock's Elric (white-haired wanderer-warrior who knows magic and uses elixirs, drugs to maintain his fighting abilities, philosophizes a lot about the ending of an age and the future of humanity and the doom he is condemned to). However, The Witcher is also, primarily, a fairytale work.

[EDIT: So I am used to call Jaskier "Jaskier" but in English he is called Dandelion apparently... So know that when I talk of Jaskier, I'm talking about Dandelion]

And I am not just saying that in the way that almost all major fantasy works are inspired by fairytales, no. It tends to be lost on people due to how they usually know derived incarnations of this series, but The Witcher stories started out as full on fairytale rewrites. More precisely: subversives parodies of fairytales using dark humor, a gritty tone proper to dark fantasy, and fantasy tropes in general mixed with some folklore sprinkled here and there.

Of all the Witcher books, the first two are the ones where this logic is on full display, forming the core of each tale. If you ever missed it, here is a little list of the fairytale references in them. [Note: I am using the French translation so I might miss some stuff or write them strangely for those used to the English translations or the original Polish]

Book 1: The Last Wish

Many people might be surprised to learn that the first story, "The Witcher", is actually the parody of a specific fairytale. It might seem to be just a take on the vampire as it appears in Eastern European folklore, but in truth Sapkowski rewrote a tale that you probably do not know. Why? Because none of the "great" collectors or writers have it: it doesn't appear in Andersen, Grimm, Perrault, Aulnoy, Basile, Straparola, or whoever else you might name. It is however a fully classified fairytale-type that is VERY present and popular in Eastern Europe, hence why it appears in The Witcher: the Aarne-Thompson classified it as type 307, "The Princess in the Shroud/The Princess in the Coffin". The closest thing you'll find to a version of this in the "classical" corpus is a Danish fairytale that Andrew Lang placed in his Pink Fairy Book: The Princess in the Chest (and Paul Delarue centered his own French-specific classification of this type around the story "La Ramée and the Phantom"). In interviews the author explained he took "a Polish fairytale" where "the royal daughter transformed into a monster because of the incest of her parents, as a punishment", but I don't known which story prcisely he used.

The second story, A Grain of Truth, is much more obvious, as it is a farcical take on Beauty and the Beast (with some flavors of Undine in it).

The third story, The Lesser Evil, introduces the Curse of the Black Sun, which is the in-universe existence for the "maidens in the tower" and all these princesses that princes have to rescue from doorless buildings (interwoven with the figure of Lilith). The cases of Fialka and Bernika are obviously inspired by the tale of Rapunzel. However the real character of the story, Renfri, is The Witcher's dark take on Snow-White.

A Question of Price is a large mix. The storyline is actually a retelling of Hans My Hedgehog, but exploring the fairytale trope that in Witcher terms is called "the law of surprise" - the episode of someone in need striking a deal with a supernatural being for help, and unwillingly selling away their children (it is most famously illustrated by Grimm's "The Girl without Hands"). One of the "historical" illustrations of this trope in the Witcher universe is a version of Rumplestiltskin (queen Metinna and Rumplestelt). There's also references to great heroes that served as an example of such "fate-striken children" sold to a mysterious stranger - but if there's a cultural nod there, I didn't get it. Finally several fairytales are referred during the discussions: Baba-Yaga and Cinderella are briefly said to exist while "A Question of Price" takes place. And Pavetta's magic is not related to fairytales, but rather to the strange cultural motif of "puberty-induced or virginity-linked psychic powers" found from poltergeists to Carrie.

The fifth story, The Edge of the World, is the only one of the collection not dealing with fairytales. It is rather a tale mixing on one side rural folklore, farming superstitions, field spirits and harvest gods, with on the other an exploration of the fantasy trope of "disappearing elves".

The sixth story, The Last Wish, is all about wish-granting genies, with a strong influence from the tale "The Fisherman and the Jinni".

Book 2: Sword of Destiny

The first story, The Bounds of Reason, is not deconstructing a fairytale per se, but rather the entire myth of the dragon-slaying. You find references to many elements of said myth: "You must kill the dragon to claim the princess", the saint-knight figure interpreting dragons as pure evil, the band of dwarves famed for slaying a dragon seem to me a nod to The Hobbit. But mainly, we see that the tale begins as a subversion/expansion on the legend of Smok Wawelski, the Dragon of Wawel, known to some as the Dragon of Cracovia. There's also a mention of bridge-trolls (The Three Billy Goats Gruff).

The second story, A Shard of Ice, is not linked to fairytales per se, but uses a motif taken directly from The Snow Queen (and in-universe, the fairytale of the Snow Queen is said to be an embellished version of the Wild Hunt).

The third story, Eternal Flame, has no fairytale theme, it is just a pure fantasy story.

The fourth story, A Little Sacrifice, opens and closes on the in-universe love story that caused the story of The Little Mermaid to exist (turns out it is a ballad by Jaskier, the actual romance went much happier, though not smoother). Also, the under-sea city is explicitely compared to the city of Ys, which is a big legend of France.

With the fifth story, Sword of Destiny, we go back into a lot of fairytale nods (it helps that it is a direct sequel to "A Question of Price"). The "Last Forest" of Brokelion is a nod to Brocéliande, the legendary forest of Arthurian legends. Geralt tells Ciri the fable of the Fox and the Cat. Freixenet turns out to have been the inspiration for the fairytale of "The Wild Swans", which in-universe is a ridiculous exaggeration and mistelling of what truly happened.

The sixth story, "Something More", only is "fairytale-y" as it reuses the saw "surprise-child/law of destiny" elements already prepared and presented by A Question of Price and Sword of Destiny.

Afterward, from what I understood (I haven't read the third book onward), the fairytale elements are dropped to rather put focus on the exploration of the fantasy and folkloric elements - but it is always useful to know that it started out as basically a dark humor /dark fantasy take on fairytales.

[prairiedust]

Curious is a Color

“It went zip when it moved, and pop when it stopped, and whir when it stood still! I never knew just what it was and I guess I never will!” -- The Marvelous Toy Tom Paxton

Well, one mystery was definitively solved in Last Holiday.

Spoilers for 15x15 Last Holiday ahead so I’m actually putting this behind a cut...

DEAN Who needs a monster radar anyway? Or whatever that telescope thing is.

MRS BUTTERS It’s an… interdimensional geoscope?

SAM It-- it’s a... what?

DEAN (interrupting Mrs Butters) Yeah, I looked through it, but didn’t see anything.

MRS BUTTERS Oh, oh that’s not good.

After Mrs. Butters powered up the bunker, the telescope alcove was bathed in a green light that immediately begged investigation. However. That took a while to get to. It took until the end of the episode to get to.

And we now know that this is no longer a telescope pointed to nowhere. It’s a fancy spyglass, but it no longer has anything to show anyone.... It is, unfortunately, too late to see anything. The other worlds have been “deleted,” as Sam put it. Chuck’s drafts folder has only one file left. 

See, what’s interesting to me is that the telescope is a metaphor for curiosity. I’m sure when the bunker was only operating in standby, Sam and or Dean looked in it, at least once? But maybe not-- maybe they didn’t bother because it was inside, and if one assumes that it’s merely a telescope, then you’d also surmise that all you would see is the blurry brick wall. The fact that it didn’t work because the bunker was on standby is neither here nor there-- what matters is that it’s been a much specced fixture of the bunker for years. 

And once the bunker was powered up with Mrs. Butter’s magic, it worked… but it was too late. Dean did, in fact, go look into the eyepiece, but just as he expected, he saw nothing. Not because it doesn’t work, but because anything he could have seen no longer exists. The extreme lack of knowledge about the bunker has always bothered me, and was lampshaded in Last Call when Sergei told Castiel that the key to Death’s library was there somewhere. BUT, but but but, Dean went and looked in the telescope thing in Last Holiday.

That’s how meta works. When something pings the mental radar, so to speak, there is value in looking into it, just in case there’s something to be seen.

For instance, I’m a geek for allusions, no surprise. So when Mrs. Butters said that the smoothie she made for Jack was “a little yarrow root and some ground jawbone for texture,” I flipped. I tell you, I went full folk medicine nerd. 

Yarrow is good for stemming blood loss, and midwives used to use it in childbirth to prevent hemorrhaging. Good connection to Jack, whose mother died giving birth to him, right? But I wanted to know more, so did a quick webdive. The root of the yarrow plant is known as a remedy for a toothache-- likely the mechanism is astringent, and would keep blood away from the nerves, but also, teeth have roots so in a holistic way, teeth get the roots. It gets better, though-- the yarrow plants are part of genus Achillea, yes as in that Achilles, he of the Achilles’ heel cliche that Dean “didn’t get” earlier in the season-- but so named not because of a connection with Achilles himself, but because Achilles was taught by Chiron-- his centaur mentor-- that yarrow was useful for bleeding, and he then taught his soldiers to use it thusly. 

Speaking Biblically-- although, when do we ever actually do that with Spn?-- the reason that the powdered jawbone sent me is because Samson, gifted mighty powers by the lord, took up a jawbone of a donkey and killed a thousand Philistines with it. Samson lived during a time when God was actually delivering victories to the Philistines as punishment to the Israelites, and Samson was born after an angel appeared to Samson’s parents (interestingly, we don’t know which angel, because it said to Samson’s father “Why do you ask my name? It is beyond understanding”) and said that Samson was to hold a special covenant with God from the moment he was born. Samson had superhuman strength, and was going to be The One who would lead the Israelites to victory over the Philistines. However, Samson had, if you will, an Achilles heel-- he would lose his preternatural strength if his hair was cut, which indeed came to pass when he was betrayed by Delilah, who had his head shaved while he was sleeping, and gave him over to his enemies. There is so much more I could write about Samson and his story’s applicability to where Jack is headed. But there’s the entire internet out there for anyone who doesn’t know how his story ends.

Thirdly, remember Supernatural’s internal mythos (based on Christian apocrypha iirc) and you’ll recall that the First Blade-- the blade that Cain used to kill Abel, and that could, in tandem with the Mark of Cain, in theory kill any being -- was made from a donkey’s jawbone, and as is pointed out here. The first murder. A brother by his own brother. For reals, that is probably where, like @mittensmorgul, most viewers went as per the replies on this post, which is awesome-- that’s where we’re supposed to look, at Brother Trouble being the thing that could undo everything everyone is working for. 

And as @drsilverfish points out in that same thread, we get an echo of a Jack story-- the man-eating giant at the top of the beanstalk would “grind [Jack’s] bones to make bread,” which in a subversion of that tale is another aspect of this concoction that brings Jack low. 

Something can be said about a spell being more than the sum of its parts. But taken literally-- Mrs. Butters put those two ingredients together and Jack turned into a metaphor-- he was “weak as a puppy.” He’s defenseless because of the double-reference to “superheroes with hidden weaknesses.” He’s basically powered down by the power of allusions. Toothache, jawbone, mythical references-- he was powerless against literature and also at a purely symbolic level, language.

And what do we know about language so far in this show?

That writers lie, and their lies are powerful.

Is that stupid herb-and-bonemeal smoothie not the most densely stacked reference in the entirety of this show’s run??????? That’s so cool it gets the rest of my question mark quota for the week.

So we’re at the point, I believe, where the writers are showing us that they’ve shone a bright green light on things we’re supposed to be curious about, things that maybe we’re supposed to be discussing. On the one hand, Mrs. Butters is literally me. Correct nomenclature is important, lol. On the other, you can take the interdimensional geoscope to mean whatever you want, now that it’s original purpose is gone. It’s now pure symbol. 

We should be very, very curious about everything that’s on the page-- and even in chapters past-- from this point on, and questioning whether or not we’re taking anyone’s words literally.

[thisiswhatwereupagainst]

Silhouette Chord of the New Warriors is a Marvel character that I’ve had an interest in for some time, and I finally got around to reading her stuff. And....well, I have an issue with it. I don’t mean to be persnickety and always find problems with how Marvel handled this or that, I don’t want to be THAT kind of fan (fandom complaining about everything exhausts me tbh), but like...I can’t help NOTICING, you know? The problem with how Silhouette is written isn’t really anything that’s done WITH her, it’s more what’s NOT done with her.

Silhouette is nearly always a background character. She never gets an arc or a story focused just on her. She’s usually just Dwayne Taylor/Night Thrasher’s girlfriend. She’s why Dwayne has her evil twin brother Aaron Chord/Midnight’s Fire as his nemesis, because said brother blames Dwayne for her paralysis, yet Aaron never has any interest in interacting with Silhouette herself, only Dwayne, despite this supposedly all being over her. It’s pretty obvious that she’s just a prop by the writers to facilitate their feud, but has no actual importance in her own right. She might as well be an object or pet that the other broke or stole. And like...this is a comic book, when someone has an evil twin brother, traditionally the brother is THEIR nemesis? Normally I like avoiding cliches, but making her brother only care about Dwayne doesn’t seem like a subversion in this case so much as just sexism by shoving him in what I’m pretty sure would be Sil’s role if she were male. Hell, Aaron even calls Dwayne his “mirror brother”, something you would call, you know, your TWIN! Like they’re playing it as if DWAYNE is Aaron’s twin and Sil is just...some girl. And this continues when Sil breaks up with Dwayne and hooks up instead with Donyell, aka Bandit, his half-brother. She continues to just be nothing more than the lead guy’s girlfriend, with nothing in her life besides that, and when Donyell takes on the role of Night Thrasher and gains Midnight’s Fire as a foe, he and Aaron end up as enemies and Silhouette just...doesn’t matter. Even though this is HER brother and he has NO past with Donyell like he did with Dwayne. And when Sil finds her dad, he has more of a relationship with, you guessed it, Dwayne! And when it gets found out that her evil brother has a daughter, and that daughter has to be rescued from him? Well, Dwayne isn’t in that issue...and neither is Silhouette! Nova and Iron Man save her instead! Sil might not know she exists! The biggest slap is the Folding Circle story, though. See, Silhouette and her brother were born with their powers, they don’t know why, they probably assumed they were mutants. In actuality, their father and several other men stumbled upon a secret temple of Cambodia while serving in the Vietnam War. The woman leading the temple, Tai, explained that this temple was built upon a well of mystical energy, and the people here had practiced years of selective breeding to produce children that could harness its magical energies. The last step would be to wed women of this temple with men from the West, and for those children to be raised in the West, so they would be children of both East and West, and thus conquer the world. All but one of them, Dwayne Taylor’s father, agreed to do so and married one of these women. Sil’s father, Andrew Chord, brought his Cambodian bride, Miyami, back to the states. Miyami was in fact Tai’s own daughter, and she knew her mother wanted to use the children of the pact in her own evil schemes. So she faked her death and that of the children, then abandoned the twins in Chinatown where they would grow up with no connection to her that Tai could use to find them. Their father believed them all dead all this time. Except of course Tai eventually realizes they’re alive, she tracks down all the now-adult children of the Pact and tries to fulfill it anyway for her own ends, and meanwhile said adult children have gathered into a group of their own, the Folding Circle, who want this power for themselves instead, and act as both foes to the New Warriors as well as allies to them against Tai. So...this is Silhouette’s origin, this is her lost past she never knew and why she has her powers, it involves her discovering who her father is and what happened to her mother,  this features one of her family as the main villain and another as an enemy-turned-ally for this, and yet...it’s really about Night Thrasher again. And like, there is reason for that--his father is the one who broke the pact and refused to take a Cambodian bride because he was already married, and Dwayne thus should have been a child of the pact like Silhouette and her brother, but was not, which was why Tai forced Sil’s dad to kill Dwayne’s dad and mom, and then went on to become a mentor to Dwayne, the child whose parents he murdered. So this is important for him and his story too. But like...it should also have just as much, if not more, focus on Sil. It’s HER past too, it’s all orchestrated by HER evil grandmother, it involves the sins of HER father, it brings in HER villainous brother, it explains why she has HER powers, why SHE has no parents, and SHE is a child of the pact, unlike Dwayne. But she’s treated as a mere extra in this story almost to the degree that the other New Warriors are. She’s not even inducted into the Folding Circle like the other pact children, her brother is, while Tai just kills her (she survives) because I guess having her brother means she can lose the spare? She gets some focus in that we find out about her mom and what happened to her and of course with Chord being her dad all along, but like...she’s not the focus or the star, Dwayne is by far. Tai and Midnight’s Fire and Left Hand (leader of the Folding Circle) are all focused on Dwayne. Sil is just, yet again, Dwayne’s girlfriend, no matter how much claim she has to greater plot relevance, and she gets very little development in this despite the revelations about her family. So like...she’s been around since 1991, she was a member of this team like anyone else, but she just never seems to get any real development. Maybe I’m not reading closely enough or just don’t understand/perceive it, that’s totally possible, but it seems like she’s a background character whose roles mainly come from which guy she’s with. And like...I feel like so much more could be done with her, given her fascinating family background, discovering her heritage, being brought up on the streets from a young age, her relationship with her brother and her recently discovered niece Julia, not to mention her status as a mixed-race WOC who is very visibly physically disabled as well as perceived as a mutant in most instances. Silhouette has a lot going on, someone just needs to use it, and it’s kinda bogus to me that she’s been neglected this way since she’s NOT actually a background character, she’s a full cast member who is just treated like a background character. It’s...weird and unfortunate, especially considering that she is the only WOC on the team and the only disabled member as well. I’m not prepared to say that’s WHY she’s neglected, just it makes it extra unfortunate and frustrating, especially since she’s SO COOL! I mean come on, SHE FIGHTS CRIME ON CRUTCHES! And when she gets a personality, I really love it, like she seems very hopepunk to me? There’s this one issue of Spider-Man where she says “ I know I can't stop all evil, but I can stop some. You only do what you can---but you HAVE to do that." and told a bad guy "It doesn't take strength to hurt people like you. It takes strength NOT to." which I just LOVE so much. And she’s really developed to personal growth, like she broke up with Dwayne because he was obsessed with grimdark vengeance and being Night Thrasher to the point she felt neither of them was growing...and she also once manipulated and lied to him pretty shittily to facilitate said personal growth. So she’s GOT a personality, and it’s interesting, when it’s paid attention to. Also, for what it’s worth, her disability is never handled badly from what I can tell (note, I am able-bodied so I may not be a good judge of this)---she’s never treated as pitiful OR as inspiring, there’s no “oh poor crippled thing” or “omg she’s so positive she overcomes her disability!”, nor is it forgotten about or ignored, she just uses crutches and that’s that. It’s never EXPLORED deeply in any way, but it’s not mishandled either that I can tell (again, from my privileged POV) And I think some writers are starting to remember she exists and see her potential; towards the end of the “Ironheart” series in 2019, she teams up with Shuri, Riri, and Okoye against her brother, who wants to recruit Riri and make her his heir! It’s awesome!

[wessasaurus-rex]

One Piece Chapter 862

Opinion time! 

Pudding becoming good makes sense (if she does) to me. Pudding was born 'weird' (even by BM's standards) and was bullied by her family for it. She had a sister (Lola) that was nice to her (thus her reminiscing about her, earlier). 

  WAIT A SECOND! Does that sound familiar to you all? 

 Of course!!! That's Sanji's backstory!

 Born different, bullied by family for it, had a sister that was nice. The only difference, is that Pudding never got a Zeff, or a Luffy. Instead, her Reiju (in this case Lola) left her behind. She took the route that Sanji would have taken, if he never left, if Reiju never encouraged him to run. A person that surrendered to their families dark nature, and pressure. Someone that took on those bad traits, out of force. Sanji is the only one who will be understanding of this, because he had the same shit. He'll appreciate Pudding, despite her abnormalities, and act like her Zeff/Luffy. 

He'll inspire her to fight again, against her cruel family, thus turning her good. These conversations may take place: Pudding: "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND" Sanji: "but I do. [inspiring words]" and Pudding: "after everything I did... how can you forgive me?!" Sanji: “[understanding speech, probably about women]" 

To me, this does sound like a ruse this time around. The plot has been built up for this chain of events. I think this would be the only time that Sanji wouldn't make his "gentleman" speech, he would be exactly as you said in the beginning "I was like you, I had no one in a family that only hate and darkness mattered, my sister saved me, my oldman - read Zeff - saved me and my captain saved me. You didn't have any of those and I am the only one that can get anywhere close to understand your pain" it wouldn't be a gentleman thing, but two people of the same nature that life surprised them completely differently. 

 Her being "evil" didn't turn into a cliche. We had Doffy's tragic backstory not to make us like him, but to make his motive's much more clear as Oda still had him 100% evil. It gives her more depth rather than hurr durr i'm evil for no reason. Oda doesn't usually do cliches in One Piece, and it rather serves as a subversion for Sanji's character: all throughout the story he's been shown to put his fate in women foolishly (Kalifa), and here, when no one was expecting it to pay off, it finally does. This is brilliant by Oda. First, he actually humanized Pudding, whom everyone thought was born evil and explained why she is so, then gave the spotlight to Sanji, showing his haki and the cool "love any women" personality and a possibility of winning over pudding. 

And then, to make things more extravagant, now we have at least 13 lufffys coming out of the cake! My bet is they used brulee power to turn everyone from bege and luffy alliance into luffy, and boy that was glorious. Every time the Internet tries to predict what characters will do or how the story will go, Oda goes in a completely different direction. One once in a Sunny do we get it right. 

With this one chapter, my faith in Sanji has been totally restored. So far, he's been getting fucked up left and right in the new world, but I feel like this chapter gave us somewhat of an explanation. We've been told in the past that Zoro is better at Armament haki, while Sanji is better at observation haki. Apart from the one instance where judge beat Sanji by surprising him and hitting him through the body of one of his own men, Sanji has been fucked up three times and all three situations share a common element. 

1) When Virgo cracked Sanji's leg bone, Sanji was protecting Tashigi (and the G-5 marines). 

2) When Doflamingo cut Sanji with his strings, he was protecting Nami (and Chopper and Brook). 

3) When Sanji got beaten up by Niji, he was indirectly protecting Zeff. All three times, Sanji got fucked up because he was protecting someone and could not afford to dodge. In today's chapter, Sanji dodged Katakuri's bullet. While I don't think we've seen enough to say that Sanji is on Katakuri's level, he is definitely a monster in his own right when it comes to observation haki. He doesn't just see future by observing intricate movement, but sees unexpected things like Pudding falling. He didn't even seem to know the reason but he knew it. He even saw sanji dodging even before the father attempted to shoot. and finally SANJI DODGED THE JELLYBEAN THROWN BY PERSON WHO COULD LITERALLY SEE THE FUTURE and katakuri didn't know it until sanji dodged it. This speaks tons for sanji's power. I was getting slightly annoyed with sanji being underestimated & comparing him with weaklings. This confirms monster trio spot for sanji. Oda's pulling no punches. Just throwing crazy after crazy after crazy, and I love it.  

[rikirachtman]

Thergothon - Stream From the Heavens (1994) review

When not busy naming his cats after racial slurs and seeing how many consonants he could string together without any vowels, H.P. Lovecraft wrote a great deal of books; Lovecraft’s stories, and the imagery conjured up therein, is the very essence of “Stream From the Heavens”. A short-lived doom metal outfit from Finland, Thergothon existed for a mere four years and recorded just three demo tapes, only one of which was ever officially released, as well as one full-length before their break-up. However, despite their microscopic discography (every second of their existing material takes barely more than an hour to listen to!), Thergothon made a massive impact with their haunting and utterly dismal soundscapes, helping to pioneer the infamously inaccessible genre of funeral doom (which is like, the doom metal of doom metal, basically).

Now, the word “inaccessible” is thrown around often, but it’s truly warranted here: Thergothon is not a band many will enjoy upon first listen. Save for a few mid-paced moments here and there, nearly every moment of this album is hellishly, ungodly slow, crawling along at an average of around 20 beats per minute(!!!!!) as heavy chords ring from the guitars for multiple measures at a time and the drums trudge methodically along at the speed of the guy in front of you in line trying to decide what he wants to order. Entire sections of a song can change subtly without the listener knowing, simply because it moves at a pace too slow to fully comprehend half the time, and in rare moments where the flow of the music does change abruptly, like the medieval-inspired acoustic section from “The Unknown Kadath in the Cold Wastes” or the galloping mid-paced solo in “Elemental”, they become even more shocking for this reason. The power chords that usually make up the meat of these songs often shift in very atonal, alien ways, tending to hit the note you’d least expect to follow the preceding one. Upon first listen, I almost found it irritating that Thergothon seemed to intentionally choose chord progressions that didn’t quite sound right, but as time goes on, it becomes more apparent to me that this unorthodox writing style is exactly what helps them uphold the alien, otherworldly aura that drives their music in the first place. Lovecraft probably would have hated music theory anyway, right?

“Stream From the Heavens” is far from a clinic in technical ability, but each band member performs adequately. The vocals, although they stay mostly in the background, still play a huge role and are hard to ignore, as vocalist Niko Sirkiä employs hideously guttural, positively inhuman growls that bring to mind images of colossal behemoths from unknown reaches of the universe (or just a fat guy burping honestly), blending them with distant, forlorn clean vocals that add another layer to the lonely, isolating atmosphere of this record. I’ve often heard black metal vocals described as “the shrieks of suffering, tortured souls” or whatever cliche seems appropriate, and if that’s the case, then Sirkiä’s vocals are more akin to a being that has long since undergone its torture and now wanders empty planes as more of a husk than a human. Foreshadowing his unfortunate shift to electronic music in later years, Sirkiä also plays an eerie keyboard throughout the album with a spindly, sci-fi-esque tone that plays off the heavier instruments surrounding it tremendously. [Quick note here: After writing this review, I found out that Sirkiä was only 17 or 18 during the record of this album, and even younger when their demo was released. These big fuck-off monster growls are coming out of a teenager!]

Guitarist Mikko Ruotsalainen and drummer Jori Sjöroos (Finnish names are hard, man) are the perfect pair to back up Sirkiä as they don’t do much beyond hammer out a single note every two measures or so before moving on to the next. This may sound like a bad thing, but arrangements any more complex than that would spoil the unceasingly bleak atmosphere that covers this record like horrible Cthulhu slime, and the intermittent moments of emptiness in between only further serve to reinvigorate the slime (no more slime metaphors for now). There is no bassist credited for this album, and frankly I’m unable to hear a bass through the production as it is, so I presume either Sirkiä or Ruotsalainen played it and buried it in the mix, a mime played it, Jason Newsted played it, or it’s just not there at all.

Speaking of production...oyyy fuckin’ vey. Spotless Rush-tier production would not have suited this album, but a bit of cleaning up would at least stop me from having to clean blood out of my ears with every cymbal crash. The instruments, in a rare subversion for doom metal, are actually very thin-sounding rather than heavy or crunchy, with pitter-pattering drums and wispy, flanger-drenched guitars (I can hear the “flange” shifting between my headphones on this album sometimes and it drives me insane but I digress) that act as a softer background to the more powerful growled vocals. Although the poor production can sometimes detract from the guitar and drum work, it makes the keyboard sound even more delightfully eerie and it makes Sirkiä’s empty clean vocals that much more distant and haunting, so it certainly doesn’t come without its positives.

All in all, “Stream from the Heavens”, and indeed funeral doom in general, is very much an acquired taste, and very much “mood music” that can only be fully understood when in the correct emotional state for it. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless they were already deep into metal as a genre, but for those who are, Thergothon’s only release is a deeply inaccessible piece of non-Euclidean musical geometry that probably won’t make much sense unless listened to under the right circumstances. There is an eldritch magic hidden in this record that can be unlocked with the right ear for it, and the right ear for this deranged and mysterious group of Finnish teenagers. Just, y‘know, try to forget that Niko basically went on to make Pitbull music after this, and the mystique doesn’t go away

“The powers of the sea, the wind and the fire, can you hear my chant?”