#Mr Eaten

[thedevilscarnival]

i've had this game for four days and i'm already tempted

[mamaito]

[geraldofallon]

Romance in the Neath: Mr Eaten

Why? For love. Love of Mr Eaten? It has been said: in matters of the Bazaar, look to love, always.

Tonight the beat of your heart has found a new rhythm.

Cry out, o my love, cry out for the horizon.

Light a candle to remember him. He will not be forgotten.

[shittykinaesthetics]

Shitty Mr. Candles aesthetic: hey guys sorry we're all starving down here but i brought along a frankincense-scented candle so it could be worse. aw, mr veils, you also brought something? that's so nice of you. what was it? myrrh? kind of out of character for you but oka- MURDER? MR VEILS, NO—

[patricktsao]

There's no way I'm getting another Fall of the Crow today, so instead here's another for Repostober. This is "St. Cerise's Offering", a personal piece that doubles as fanart for Fallen London. More tomorrow.

[lord-norjam]

my dealer: got some straight gas 🕯️😛 this strain is called "mr. eaten" you'll be zonked out of your gourd.

me: yeah whatever si-, er, mad-, er, yes. i dont feel shit.

5 minutes later: dude i swear i heard a voice coming out of the well

my buddy the northbound parliamentarian, pacing: the masters are lying to us

[cetaceanhandiwork]

I saw a comment on the Fallen London wiki, where someone wondered whether it would be possible to "actually" revive/fix Mr Candles, as opposed to SMEN's mission to the High Wilderness which (as far as I can tell, having never Knocked myself) settles for mourning or avenging him.

My reaction was "well, this is the Neath, and the whole point of the Neath is to be a refuge for the audacious and the impossible, right? So there should be some way to do it, even if it's not in the game."

But then that got me thinking... how would you do it, exactly?

Part One: Body

First off, the requirements to revive the dead, even in the Neath, are apparently pretty heavy. Cups manages it at the end of Nemesis, with a ritual requiring Master's Blood, a bathtub full of Hesperidian Cider, a number of specially-prepared candles, and the remains of the deceased.

Of these four, the first two are obtainable in-game. Eye-wateringly expensive (fun fact: a bathtub is seven firkins), but still.

The third is also obtainable... at a cost. There's probably a reason that the Seeking Road, despite being as misaimed as it is, tries to spell Mr Candles's name in candles.

The fourth... well. SMEN ignores it, except at the very beginning. But the physical remains of Mr Candles apparently still exist. "IT IS NORTH UNDER GRANITE." Probably in Xibalba.

But there's a problem with the Cups Process: it can't restore the mind. In Nemesis, this was an unfixable problem. But for Mr Candles... its mind survives, and we know where to get it.

Part Two: Mind

The Mr Eaten of SMEN vascillates between two agendas: revenge and grief. Why? My theory is that there are two Mr Eatens in the Neath, each an incomplete remnant of the original Mr Candles. We know that one of them is imprinted in the lacre of the Bazaar. That would be the grieving one; aside from the obvious practicalities of what can and can't be described in the language of grief, we know that when you "Accept the Name" from the Eaten Mr Sacks, your Question is immediately shifted to "What is Forgotten" even if you previously set it to "What is Due".

Then where is the Mr Eaten of revenge? Well, where was Mr Candles most likely to leave a part of itself behind? I think the obvious answer is Parabola. It's a place where even the Masters are vulnerable, and if some impression of him didn't remain there, then we wouldn't have dreams of Death by Water. But this Eaten has been warped, too. The Strange Dreams of London interact with each other, after all, and none more than those of Storm. Storm is the other dream-remnant who dreams of going NORTH, and has his own reasons to want to pass the gate of Avid Horizon and bring down a reckoning upon the whole Neath and its lawlessness. When the Bag a Legend protagonist crafts the hungry knife to kill Mr Veils in retribution, they even use Storm's thunderbolt to do it. Some part of Storm has rubbed off on the Parabolan Mr Eaten, I think, and caused it to hyperfixate on the plan of revenge at any cost.

Part Three: Putting the Pieces Together

So now we've found the disembodied mind that the Cups Process cannot, on its own, rebuild. But how do we safely reunite those minds with their body?

If the grieving remnant is imprinted in lacre, then it can be read out of lacre. It's Correspondence, albeit a different dialect written with a different orthography. A sufficiently dedicated Correspondent could "accept the heart and lights" of the Eaten Mr Sacks and then transcribe them. And if there is a concern that "lacre cannot bury the law", then perhaps they should get the help of a Steward, whose whole craft centers around burying the Law, to enact that "no forgotten victim shall be forgotten" while the work gets done.

As for Parabola's Mr Eaten, well, the protagonist has successfully visited the dreams of dead Masters before. Get someone good enough at Glasswork to find the center of the dream. Speak the Name, to grab the attention of the dreamer, and then transport it in a Mirrorcatch Box; the endgame quests of Sunless Sea have shown us that this is a convenient way to contain and transport Parabolans who could not survive in the Neath.

With this, all that remains is to transfer these thoughts into the newly resuccitated Mr Candles. Irrigo is the obvious tool for this; we know that it can lubricate thoughts and memories, allowing them to flow freely from one person to another.

But using the Nadir itself for this purpose would be too dangerous. We'd risk permanently losing the precious canoptic jars which we'd worked so hard to recover. Instead, we need someone skilled with precision application of irrigo, of the "inks of undernight", to perform the transplant. We need Millicent Clathermont's remnant... whom, if we have St Eruzile's Candle, should already be present within us.

And what about the most fundamental obstacle? The notion, put forward by the authors themselves, that there is no longer such things as a Mr Candles, just an absence where a Mr Candles should be?

The Seeking Road has given us the solution to that, as well. The process for filling that void appears every time someone finishes St Gawain's service. St Gawain's Candle is, above all else, an emptiness in the shape of a person, filled with glory and coaxed back to life.

Perhaps it's presence as the final candle of the Seekers is no coincidence either.

In Conclusion

So this is the shopping list.

Mr Requiem, transcribed from lacre into Correspondence

Mr Reckoning, contained in a Mirrorcatch Box by Glasswork

The Inks of the Undernight, and a skilled hand at them, to return the two remnants of Mr Candles's mind to its body

The blood of a living Curator, for the Cups Process

Seven firkins of Hesperidian Cider (or another highly concentrated medium of the Mountain of Light's vitality) for the Cups Process

A number of specially-prepared candles, for the Cups Process

The physical remains of Mr Candles, NORTH UNDER GRANITE

Much of this is familiar. Much of this is stuff that SMEN gives you, for reasons it never deigns to explain before it sends you off to Avid Horizon to ruin everything.

Perhaps this was always the plan, originally. Perhaps Mr Candles, forseeing (as Winking Isle implies) the betrayal, prepared the Seeking Road as a means of resurrection, and it only got bent out of shape later. Perhaps by some ineffective Tragedy Procedure which smudged the Seeking Road but failed to erase it, or perhaps by some Mithridatic scheme of Nicator (who entire stake in the matter, as a player for White, is by his own admission “to bring light to the Neath”), or perhaps just by the Eatens’ tug-of-war between revenge and regret accidentally yanking the path past Xibalba and through the Gate.

It'll probably never be a part of the game. But in the realm of fanfic... the realm of "what might be possible"... who knows?

[shipofthesis]

The New Drowned Man

When I saw it mentioned in a blogpost some time ago that Fruits of the Zee was getting revamped and updated, I immediately wondered if anything was being done concerning Mr Eaten and Mutton Island's worship of him.

During the festival there is a hidden Seeking Mr Eaten's Name option, which meant I had to dust off my seeker to investigate posthaste.

I think this is a very graceful way to move away from SMEN and bring Mutton Island more in line with newer FL's writing. I don't know if the base carousel of Mutton Island will be changed, but if nothing else the festival will be different. I adore the King-in-Coral's compassion for the seeker.

This tidbit was also reassuring because when I was doing the festival on my main I was confused about The Drowned Man being used to refer to the Fathomking/King-in-Coral cuz I could've sworn that title belonged to Mr Eaten. I was not misremembering, the change is on purpose! While I have mixed feelings about SMEN's background I love rping an awful little zealot so this was a brief delight.

I support the new Drowned Man because honestly, Mr Eaten is fuckin BLEAK and unsustainable. I love the fucked up hunger curse and ghost story that is Mr Eaten but I am also an Axile enjoyer. From a worldbuilding standpoint, this feels more solid compared to the doomsday cult of seekers. The deal the flukes made is still horrifying, and there is still the matter of a deep, painful wrath. But there is rehabilitation, there is adaptation, there is community, and there is love. These are closer to ongoing FL themes than the bottomless pit that is Mr Eaten. The well whispers will never stop and Seeking is a curse not easily broken (with strong implications of madness), but the Mutton Islanders deserve change instead of being stuck for old worldbuilding's sake.

[jane-d-ankh-veos]

("The Bloody Wallpaper" spoilers)

"How much horror do you want?" – "So that seeing Mr Eaten there would be the least alarming thing"

"And how kinky it must be?" – "Yes"

[snarp]

[cjsees-art]

I FORGOT TO POST THIS. SENECA'S NIGHTMARES ARE GOING UP VERY VERY FAST AND THEY'RE SEEKING MR EATEN AND THE WALLS ARE WRONG AND THEY'RE DOING SUPER NORMAL

also: sketch and lineart were commissioned from @kori-dearest who was kind enough 2 let me colour this piece myself :] go check him out NOWWWW his art is glorious and it's for a good cause

[incorrectfallenlondonquotes]

Don't care, didn't ask, plus the hole you put me in wasn't deep enough and I'm climbing out right now.

Mr Eaten

[mamaito]

[YES] [YES] [YES] [YES] [YES]

[systemsearcher]

Glyphs of the Masters of the Bazaar. Took all day but I'm proud of how these ended up.

Dedicated images under Keep Reading.

[alexis-royce]

Mr Eaten, 1, 2, 9, 12, 22

(Obviously spoilers under the cut.)

1. Why do you like or dislike this character?

Okay, so. I’m not a fan of Mr Eaten.

Back in 2010, I loved Seeking. It went against everything I knew about how a game was supposed to work, and it was a very indulgent set of mechanics to describe seeking forbidden knowledge at the cost of a slow, incremental everything. I stopped playing when it was removed from the game, and when I started playing again in 2020, it was with the intention of finishing Seeking and closing the door on Fallen London. But I fell back in love with FL, and I really started to care about my Academic again. So I turned away from the name.

I still think that Seeking is a great story and very cool! But personally, it’s a little too linked with IRL nasty and self-destructive habits. The Discordance is an excellent spin on similar mechanics, and I like it much more.

Eaten itself is nothing, to me. It is not a character. It is the void that Candles left. It is grief without relief, hate without protection or restoration. Eaten is not worthy of its seekers; once again, a Master is abusing and subjugating humans, just as cruelly as any of the others.

2. Favorite canon thing about this character?

It’s a very successful ghost story. I’m sad that most people are going to just learn it on a wiki nowadays. Picking off bits and pieces in your daily Fallen London life really can’t be beat. Putting the timeline together, peeking in wells and realizing what The Masters did is absolutely awful.

9. Could you be roommates with this character?

Absolutely not.

12. What's a headcanon you have for this character?

If Fallen London were a musical, here’s its ballad: https://youtu.be/63CgHZKtmzw?si=Lgv0C9_g4XFIJb7Y

22. If you're a fic reader, what's something you like in fics when it comes to this character? Something you don't like?

Since Eaten/Candles is such a void, I like getting to see different characterizations for it. Candles was thrown under the bus twice by its people for no good, so it’s hard to fault folks for woobyfying it. I don’t know quite enough about how much Veils is at fault for what happened, but I’d be up for fic recommendations that explore their relationship! Killing Candles made the hate and pain that was left behind, so much more dangerous than it was while alive, and I’d like to know how the others feel about that.

[patricktsao]

St. Beau’s Lament

Another personal piece, and another Fallen London fan art, all at once. I originally had aspirations to make all seven candles. I do now, but I originally had, too. This and St. Cerise are as far as I’ve gotten, so far.