#fantasy high junior year episode 17

[verosvault]

OMG A CHUNKY EPISODE!! RKAKCS I'M EXCITED!! BUT SCARED!!

I CAN'T BELIEVE THERE'S ONLY 3 EPISODES LEFT OF THE SEASON AFTER THIS!!! IT CAN'T BE ENDING!!! NOOO!! 😭😭😭

[bushbees]

You are a younger brother, and your sister left your home, and your family, and your church, and your parents and everyone in your community tells you that she's going to Hell, and to under no circumstances follow in her footsteps. You are a freshman in high school and you meet your sister again. You still have the gold she left you and your other brothers, and you haven't told your parents and you're scared that that alone will send you to Hell. You have a new adventuring party and are trying to convert them to your church but no matter how many times you bring your new friends back from the dead, and heal their injuries, they refuse to convert. You blow up at them because you're not accomplishing what you're supposed to and you're scared. You're sitting on the steps of the school and your sister sits down next to you, and she listens. And she tells you that you both were given faulty alarm systems and that you shouldn't be afraid to explore what's really scary. She tells you that you have a choice to make, do your parents know your life better than you do? And she promises that no matter what you choose she will be there for you, and opens her arms to you and you fall into them and hold her tight. You want so badly to take that step but you're scared. Your name is Bucky Applebees, you are a freshman in highschool, you are a younger brother, you miss your older sister. You're scared.

[angelwiththeblue-box]

art credit to @caitmayart

[willowcrowned]

it is a mark of how absolutely ridiculous the last ten minutes of that episode were that I haven't seen a SINGLE screenshot of emily pulling out an entire french press

[t-hirstreview]

[istayawakereading]

So much happened in this episode but what I can’t get over is how stunning the music was throughout it . The bass, the violin, the HORNS, Riz’s detective music, god whoever is in charge of sound design and score for fantasy high I wanna kiss u on the mouth

[feelingtheaster99]

“Oh baby, can you cast legend lore!”

[rippedjeansandnosleeves]

I cannot WAIT for all the Cassandra and Ankarna fanart. I'm not ready, i need it all now

[mythotsbog]

FUCK YOU PORTER- Emily Axford you’re a genius i love you

[passi0n--snapping]

I need someone to write a really good adaine/oisin fic so I can cope with finding out oisin is almost certainly evil by losing myself in some canon-divergent flirting

[torbek]

fig but i squeezed her in my hands until she turned into this

[moonlightmagical]

fantasy high junior year episode 17:

me, rocking back and forth, trying to keep it together while a mountain of information and awe-inspiring world building and 5 year secrets is dumped on my head over the course of 3 hours: figayda meteor shower love letter figayda meteor shower love letter figayda meteor shower love letter figayda meteor showe-

[dimension20official]

🚨Episode 17 of Dimension 20: Fantasy High Junior Year is out now on Dropout!

The Bad Kids delve deeper into the mysteries surrounding the Rat Grinders and the nameless god of rage - and what they discover will change everything...

[kipperlillycopperkettle]

kristen & bucky applebees.

the great divide, noah kahan (unreleased) / fantasy high: junior year, episode 17: the name (2024) / the great divide, noah kahan (unreleased) / brother, madds buckley (2022) / fantasy high: junior year, episode 03: not all who wanda are lost (2024) / twin size mattress, the front bottoms (2013) / fantasy high: sophomore year, episode 2: mirror madness (2019) / war of the foxes, richard silken / fantasy high: junior year, episode 04: under pressure (2024) / two birds, regina spector (2009)

[dimension-20-every-introduction]

Everyone Introduced in Dimension 20's Fantasy High: Junior Year episode 17

[skuttlesstrawberry]

Sometimes Brennan’s degree in religious studies shines through in an awe-inspiring way. Take, for example, the Temple of the Fallen Sun from episode 17 of Fantasy High Junior Year: it is explicitly an imperial temple. Now, the obvious level is that its symbols are all about conquest, but on a deeper level, its very nature is an imperial conquest.

The reveal, towards the end of the Bad Kids’ time in the temple, that the Sunstone Empire did not originally build this place is also a reflection of the imperial project. It took a faith that was life-giving for its people and twisted it into something foul, something that in D&D was explicitly infernal, but it could not completely erase the underlying divinity. At the end, they could not remove the underlying uncorrupted temple infrastructure; at the end, they could not twist Ankarna’s core nature so much that she would be willing to kill her sister or her spouse. The imperial faith of conquest can take over a religion, Brennan seems to be telling us, but it cannot fully transform the spark of divinity at the core of the original faith.

So let’s now talk about Spyre’s Church of Sol.

Maybe it wasn’t planned that way, but the longer the Fantasy High saga goes on, the more clear it seems to me that the Church of Sol is in many ways the greater scope villain of the Bad Kids’ tale. For Junior Year, it’s not just that complete slimebag Bobby Dawn, the Church of Sol’s resident celebrity cleric, is actively onside with Porter’s plan to ascend to godhood; it’s also that in the Temple of the Fallen Sun, the Legend Lore spell told us that it was the Church of Sol who planted the idea with the Sunstones of transforming their god from a sun god to a god of war and conquest!

Note, importantly, that it is the Church of Sol and not Sol himself who planted this idea. Legend Lore told us that, actually, Sol himself was HAPPY with (re)uniting the various groups of Spyre’s gods into one community. Rather, it was Sol’s church that noticed their God’s domain was divided and decided to do something about it. Recall, also, that it was the Church of Sol that innovated Devil’s Nectar; it’s entirely possible that Sol was deliberately kept out of the loop when it came to the church’s plans to make him into the One True Sun God.

Now, we also know that there’s a kind of henotheistic trinity-like thing going on with Sol, Gallicaea, and Helio. There’s some sort of family thing going on with Sol as the top Father God and Helio as the Crystal Dragon Jesus son with the serial numbers filed off; witness the decidedly evangelical Christianity flavor of their related churches. There’s also the whole vibe from both the Church of Sol and Helio’s followers that their gods are the only correct deities to follow and any other faith (or way of life) is Dangerously Wrong. This plays directly into the way that they really kicked off the chaos of Freshman Year and therefore the Bad Kids saga.

Yeah, Kalvaxus was the big bad of Freshman Year, but he and his direct minions weren’t the first enemies that the Bad Kids fought. That would be Doreen and the Corn Cuties, who were themselves borne of the attempt by Coach Daybreak and the Harvestmen cult to corrupt their own faith’s chosen and break the world.

This is actually deeply important: while Kristen’s parents are assholes and directly tied to a doomsday cult version of Helioic faith, there’s always been an implication that beyond the Harvestmen there’s a healthier version of the church of Helio that we haven’t really been able to interact with. And that’s okay: even a healthier version of Helio probably wouldn’t have been healthy for Kristen, given the extent of religious trauma she’s had to deal with, so it makes sense that even in Freshman year Kristen was being offered by Heaven itself alternate ways to have faith.

In Sophomore Year, we got a glimpse of the conflict within Gallican faith, with Tracker discovering in Fallinel a more oppressive and passive version of her faith, and choosing essentially to stay behind to try and breathe new life into it. Importantly, we learned Fallinel Gallicaea has a relationship with Sol, and so their churches are intertwined; Brennan even talked in Sophomore Year about how Gallicaea in Fallinel was being shaped by her State Church followers there. It was that twisted Gallican church that duped Cassandra’s original followers into forcing her transformation into the Nightmare King, you may recall.

What this all seems to be pointing to is the existence of an organization entwined with the Church of Sol that discovered Devil’s Nectar and a way to twist divinity to their ends by manipulating followers into the shapes most suiting their ends. We know from Pok Gukgak’s cautious statements that even the celestial-level actors have some side eye for Sol’s supposed followers. We know from Bakur that there’s an open question as to whether Sol or his followers are REALLY calling the shots. So: if Sol’s followers have their own plans, what’s their goal in all this corruptive influence that they’ve been spreading around?

Now, here’s where we circle back around to Brennan’s knowledge of how real world religions and real world people work: the goal may simply be power and domination. In the real world, the connection between the State and some sort of organized Church power has always been a place where power and control could be minted. A cornerstone of the Roman Empire’s system of control was the idea of the Imperial Cult: you can absolutely continue worshipping your personal god as long as you also acknowledge that god’s place is subservient in the larger Roman order to Rome’s chosen divinity. On the other side of the world, China’s system emphasized having the Mandate of Heaven in order to rule; even their top divinity the August Personage of Jade would lose his job if he did not stay within the rules of the system.

In short: a group of folks who’ve figured out how to manipulate faith to make their positions indisputably Right are very dangerous in any world, and Brennan is absolutely correct to cast them as the villains behind the scenes manipulating everything.