sobecomesomethingelse - Tumblr blog

[sobecomesomethingelse]

Diversity win! The religious fanatic that turned you into a grotesque shrimp creature is transgender!

[sobecomesomethingelse]

referred to saints as a type of mythological creature today and was about to correct myself when i thought about it and decided that actually i'm right. a saint is a kind of a creature.

[sobecomesomethingelse]

i’m catching up on tsv, i think something that eskew prod does extremely well is using horror absurdism to capture the absurd horror of capitalism. it’s clear in eskew too, but i think it’s especially fantastic in the silt verses. the casualness with which sacrifice is discussed. how red lobster has a god that has and continues to take human sacrifice, and so do cereal companies, cops, and the grueling start up that has a “fun room”. it captures EXTREMELY well how it feels to live under capitalism, that you’re constantly bombarded with horrible things, discussed cheerily in a nice tone. the way it’s simultaneously numbing, hysterical, and horrifying. i think i was especially fond of how in ep 39, protest against sacrifice was taken as radical, a propostorus, idealistic thing that’s just so SILLY it’s not even worth considering, something that feels very real to revolutionary organizing/protest irl. i also liked how despite the face, when everything gets down to it, when everything is about profit, all people come down to are bodies. all capitalism is a gaping maw, and it eats the poor and marginalized first, but doesn’t STOP eating just there. the very literalized version of this, where the profit wheel (and all that includes— war mongering, the prison industrial complex, wage labor, etc) is given a very real literal set of teeth, but the body count is the same. so the electric company has a god, and so it takes humans sacrifice. do real electric companies not have a very real human cost? overworked and underpaid labors looking to make rent, or well off comfortable employees no less likely to get the axe under profit margins, or the blood shed when colonizing in the first place, in clearing the space for the electric company to move in. is that not also a very real human sacrifice? the commercial aimed at elderly people talking about “back in my day, we would just talk about all this human sacrifice and find a compromise :)” is so bleakly hysterical, but is that not very accurate? that you can put a good face on it, but in the end what it comes down to is that you’re being sold the chance to be human fodder? that there is no glory or honor on a battlefield or in working yourself to death, just mud and shit and bodies to throw at problems. idk! i’m rambling but it’s a deeply engaging podcast.

[sobecomesomethingelse]

special thanks to the tsv discord for helping w some of these

reblog for larger sample size :)

[sobecomesomethingelse]

Sister Carpenter devouting herself to the Trawlerman after her river devoured her older brother.

Brother Faulkner devouting himself to the Trawlerman after he fed his older brother to his river

[sobecomesomethingelse]

my colleague and i are having some compatibility issues.

world's worst kidnappers bicker their way through a carjacking

[sobecomesomethingelse]

i’ve lost the bet that words will come and wake me in the morning.

[sobecomesomethingelse]

Hey, Ive been wondering for some time; Is the Trollerman intentionally anticiv? Especially with the gospels of augustus roake it seems a lot like primal anarchism (ideologically not organizationally).

I guess...arguably yes, intentionally no?

As intended, Roake was written less as a political thinker, more a Ligotti-homaging pessimist yearning for the peace and simplicity of life as a crawling primitive thing.

I honestly didn't want there to be any objective ideology underlying the Trawler-man himself - what's more interesting to me is how the characters interpret and reshape a divine message to their own ends which is pretty consistently nothing more meaningful than 'drown the world, turn everyone into crustaceans'.

[sobecomesomethingelse]

reblog to smash press secretary carson with hammers 🫶

[sobecomesomethingelse]

im a blorbo apologist but also they did every bad thing they did and i will get mad if u ignore that. complexities

[sobecomesomethingelse]

i compiled all of the Sid Wright Show broadcasts together!

[sobecomesomethingelse]

season 2 arc

[sobecomesomethingelse]

this is a bit of a reach i'll admit but there's something about paige and VAL and their gods and parenthood that eats at me. paige explicitly refers to her god as "my god-child" when she threatens it and sinks into a state not unlike postpartum depression following its emergence; VAL's god functions like an especially high-stakes game of make-believe ("The Last Word tells me..." rings of playground gossip), she bears the scars of its 'birth' on her body, and she continues the cycle of violence her own mother inflicted on her through it, reenacting her own trauma to justify lashing out. there's a saying that our parents are our first gods, but what if your god is a child, with all the risks and random, senseless, didn't-know-better violence that can strike out if not guided by a steady hand that implies?

[sobecomesomethingelse]

I assume Penda's Slake was a reference to Penda's Fen? I finally watched it for the first time recently, and feel like there's definitely throughlines to your work.

It was, yes! Not the most subtle reference in the world, but as you say, it's very Us so I wanted to give it a nod.

[sobecomesomethingelse]

nice argument. unfortunately i will die today. i will not die helpless. my death will not amount to nothing. my hand will draw the marks of my revolt. my flesh shall take the great shape of my revenge. i will steal myself away from their intent for me. my blood will not ripen their soil, nor shall my body blossom into their chosen colours. i will bring them fear instead. my death today shall be the quiver in the executioner’s hand tomorrow, the wavering doubt in the mind of the justiciar. i will be hallowed, but not for them. i will die. i will not die. [branches erupt from my body, intertwining us in a final, hateful embrace and killing us so badly we'll both need closed casket funerals]

[sobecomesomethingelse]

also while i'm thinking along these lines i think it was such an excellent writing choice in the silt verses to introduce VAL as this living war machine "no different from an armoured jeep or a cruise missile" and then in her very next appearance show us what it takes to power those machines - blood. bodies. suffering. ordinary lives crushed beneath the advancing war effort (VAL herself included). and then every time we're shown a glimpse of those in power, they're calling for bodies. we need more bodies. get me more bodies. not people. bodies.

[sobecomesomethingelse]

The core of Carpenter's character is that she's a bit of a nonpracticing misanthropist. Like if you asked her what she thought about human nature she'd be all 'humanity is the virus' and she'd go on a long rant about how you can't trust the system and you also can't fight the system and also you can't trust anyone who says you CAN fight the system but the minute she sees a couple dozen wounded civilians in a tactically dicey situation she springs into action with the zeal and tenacity of the Terminator