#thank you so much for giving me an excuse to sing this show's praises fkljdsjfsdljk

[all-seeing-ifer]

Hey what's the silt verses? Should I watch/read it? It looks really cool and I could ask Google but you seem very excited about it and I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about it if you wanna!

aaaaa ok ok ok!!!! i am SO glad you decided to come ask me about it - the silt verses is like. probably one of my favourite pieces of media ever and I am always excited to have a chance to just Scream about it! and since I'm currently on 48 hour tsv lockdown with the first episode of season 3 dropping it's the perfect time for me to get this ask.

so the silt verses is a horror audio drama podcast set in a fantasy world where everything is controlled by different gods. so there's gods of industry, gods of agriculture, gods of natural phenomena, even down to incredibly specific gods like the call centre god we meet in one episode. some are seemingly harmless or benign, some are seemingly malicious, but all of them are capable of acting in the world through miracles or the creation of saints (ordinary people who are transformed into.... something else by the gods' power) and most of them have their own religions following them and offering sacrifices to feed their power.

the twist in all of this is that in the world of the silt verses the gods have become completely controlled by the government and corporations, who decide which religions and gods are legitimate and should be condoned and which should be banned. the two main characters (at least in the first season, the main cast expands a fair bit in season two) are sister carpenter and brother faulkner, two worshippers of an outlawed river god on a sacred pilgrimage searching for revelations from their deity. along the way they encounter other religions and gods of the region, witness miracles that test their faith, and try to stay on the run from law enforcement.

tsv has SO much going for it and i do think anyone with even a passing interest in horror as a genre should check it out! fair warning it can get really disturbing (seriously season 1 episode 4 has some of the freakiest body horror i've ever heard in an audio drama, and that's just the tip of the iceberg) but if you check out the content warnings and think you can handle it, then please PLEASE do!!! the characters are so complex and rich and compelling, the relationships between them are also really compelling and evolve in unexpected ways, the voice cast are all incredible, the worldbuilding is super interesting and well thought out, it has that amazing balance of both serialised narrative and some really amazing out there "monster of the week" style episodes that i think a lot of people miss from modern tv, the soundscaping.... well, it does start off a bit wonky, but by the time you get up to the most recent episode it sounds honestly gorgeous, it has this really wonderful poetic-at-times writing style that feels both fitting with its eerie surreal tone and will also just hit you with some of the most incredible lines ever written that will get stuck in your brain and not leave for months!! it's about religious trauma and capitalism and living and dying in a broken system and burning that system to the ground and devotion and sacrifice and monstrousness and getting to choose the thing that eats you. with one season left to go it's perhaps slightly too early to call it a masterpiece, but.... yeah TO ME it's a masterpiece <3

so yeah this got a lot longer than i meant it to but tl;dr if you're into horror or even if you just don't mind horror please please listen to the silt verses. it's weird and gross and freaky and funny and rough around the edges at first and it's worth every second of your time