#thematically my idea is that the horror of his character comes from the fact that hes just a regular human guy

[feartoxinjelloshot]

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632)

[velvet-vox]

The russian worker drones family; murder drone's greatest small scale tragedy.

As long as I can recall there has never been in my mind a story quite as painful and heartbreaking and yet quite as engaging as the tragedy of Doll, Yeva, and her husband, who's lack of a clear name doesn't detract from the impact of this story or the death of the other two.

The last time such an emotional impact was left in my brain was with Noximilliem Coxen the Watchmaker from Wakfu, who I will assuredly make a comparison post with Doll, as they both hit extremely similar themes and ideas while still having such different execution and story beats that it almost makes you question why would you even compare them in the first place.

Tragedy is deceptively hard to write right and make meaningful, as just crippling your characters won't do, because at that point it just becomes drama porn and as boring as a low effort pre-schoolers program. Seemingly unfeasible in a show such as Murder Drones; an horror/comedy/romance where an abused child repaired and made friends with a robot only for said robot to cause the destruction of her planet and... something else.

Buckle up cause these robots emotions might not even be considered real inside the fictional setting but our pain allows what would otherwise be a pretty standard horror scenario to transcend into the bane of my existence as we take a look at the small, inconsequential tale of the russian worker drones family.

Yeva

Starting off with Yeva as the oldest member of our family in terms of chronological relevance, we get our first peek into the way this story plays out due to Yeva being seemingly mute by choice or programming, which retroactively sets up the storytelling method used; Yeva doesn't speak a single word in this scene or the one that precedes it, but we still get a clear rendition of her character by her standoffish behaviour juxtaposed with her caring and nurturing nature, it's debatable whether or not her and Nori are sisters, but you wouldn't be blamed for thinking that judging by the way Yeva tends to Nori after the banishment of the solver, being chained up and experimented upon didn't stop her from staying positive in the midst of adversity and could theoretically be the reason why she was the only correctly patched drone in the facility.

During the V attack she sacrificed her own life in order to protect Doll. An act that, in the long run, ended up being whortless, but that cemented Yeva has an unyielding positive influence in a world stormed by negativity and death.

The father

We know jack s##t about this man but that won't stop us from analysing him. The most interesting things about him are his relationship with Yeva and the fact that the picture of V seen in episode 2 was made by him. He's, admittedly, a white canvas for head cannons, but thematically he keeps a recurring motif that this post will touch upon in his final entry:

Doll

And now, for the crown jewel of this family. The protagonist's dark reflection. Not many people can claim to have been messed up as hard as Doll was. Sure, death is still death, but with it comes a certain sense of finality and rest. Instead, by contrast Doll's death is so brutal and devastating because although it's something that she has been calling upon herself since she started to consume other drones for her goals, it's just so heartbreaking because she managed to achieve absolutely nothing despite being one step forward everyone else in the story; she never got better, never reademned herself, made their parents sacrifice worthless, died almost entirely off camera completely alone and scared, and as her last compensation act she managed to give Uzi a barely useful warning before having her probably still alive consciousness eaten by an eldritch atrocity. At the end of the day, she was deemed worthless by the main antagonist and quickly brushed aside.

And we go back to a certain reoccurring theme regarding this family: Yeva never speaks. Her husband is never given a name. Doll is literally a toy name. Their story plays out in the shadow of the main plot. Every single aspect regarding them paints their existence as worthless and inconsequential (classic eldritch horror), yet are given enough spotlight to leave an impact on us, to have their presence felt, and to give us the impression that, despite their bad luck, if they only took certain decisions in certain key moments, maybe they would have survived and received a much better ending than the one they got.

Want more?

[inbarfink]

Random question but I just realized/remembered that Calvin and Sam were YOUNGER than Barbara.

Yet I don't remember them being babysat by her the night she died so where do you think they were?

Also I was wondering if I'm the only one who thinks Rick might not have killed Barbara?

Cause it COULD be possible that the serial killer/deranged fan part of the comic could have been real. Meaning that that could be why Rick disappeared.

Anywho sorry for the out of the blue question/rant. I just didn't know who else to ask.

(Sorry for the late reply @hannahhook7744, it's been kind of a Weird Hectic Weekend for me)

The thing about Barbara's Death Sequence is that it's really the most 'distant' one we've had. Most other Finches have records written by themselves just before their deaths or written by someone close to them just after their deaths. Barbara got a fictionlized comic book written by strangers for strangers that came out a full year after her death.

Sure, it seems like the Finch family collaborated on the story (since they've got the music box in there), but it's still pretty different from Molly's diary or Lewis' therapy notes. Espacially as a lot of little details in Barbara's room seem to contradict the story. So it's probable that Sam and Calvin were also being babysat by Barbara that night, but as they didn't figure into the narrative the comic-writers were telling they just casually dropped them from the narrative or merged all three younger brothers into Walter's role.

Or maybe they were out having a sleepover with friends or a boyscout camping trip or something but the comic didn't mention it, cause, again, it didn't factor into it's story. This comic was obviously not a serious documentation of Barbara's death, it's a fictional horror story targeted at people with just a casual understanding of the Finch Family outside of Barbara - if at that. So if that comic dedicated a whole narration box to "and also Barbara had two other little brothers but they were off at camp and had nothhing to do with this story" that would just seem Weird to the in-universe readers of 'Dreadful Stories'. Even if it might be useful to us, the REAL audience trying to piece together the timeline of the Finch family.

(Also I do suspect that at some point of WRoEF development Calvin was supposed to die before Barbara and then their timelines ended up being Switched so the Weirdness here might be a remnant of that)

As for the matter of Rick. I think the reason why he's considered the Prime Suspect of Barbara's death within the fandom is due to the Law of Conservation of Detail. You know, like, Details in stories come up because they're important to the story in same way. And yeah, 'What Remains of Edith Finch' is not exactly a traditional narrative and not every detail here has to "further the plot" - but even the most unimportant little details in WroEF still serve to add flavor to the characters, atmosphere and the themes. Which are things that are important to the story.

So why bring up the fact that Barbara had a boyfriend and even give him a name and a face? (which is very rare for anyone outside of the Finch Family in this game) Why doesn't Barbara just die alone in the house with just Walter? Rick has to be Important in some way if the game went to all this effort to create and establish his existence to us, right?

Plus, there's the thematic role of 'Dreadful Stories' within the narrative. Personally, I can't see the idea of there really being a serial killer or a real-life crazed fan that inspired the 'monsters' at the end of the comic. Because my read of 'Dreadful Stories' is that it's made to be so ridiculous and sensational- with both a serial killer AND monsters out to get Barbara - to showcase a little taste of the wild and weird stories being told about Barbara's death. And to put the first subtle little wrinkle in the poetic idea that the Finches deaths always match their lives - Edie had to choose this silly little comic to deliberatly turn Barbara's death into something horror themed. And if she chose something a little closer to reality, it would've turned out to be much different.

So what is the mundane Not-Thematic-Enough-For-Edie's-Tastes way for Barbara to get murdered? I can see why for a lot of people, the 'obvious answer' was 'got killed in an argument with her boyfriend'. Since, again, we need to have a reason why he exists in the first place.

...Although that's actually not my favorite theory lol

I think Barbara's death was even more mundane than that. One of the few details about Barbara's death we can confirm are based on reality is the moment where she pushes the killer off the railing.

In the current-day Finch House this little piece of railing IS noticeably broken.

So someone did absolutely fall off the second floor of the Finch House at some point.

So what I think happened is that Rick and Barbara did have some sort of a lover's tiff that night, then Barbara slipped on these rollerskates the Hookman slipped on in the comic.

In a panic she tried to grab on to something and only managed to catch one of Rick's crutches. (The important thing here is that Barbara is ALWAYS memorialized holding that crutch. Even in pieces that were made prior to the comic's printing, like her portrait)

So that part of her story has to be true in some way.

Barbara's death was just yet another Patented Tragic Finch Accident, but suspicions kept falling on Rick from the General Public and the media, and so he had to go into hiding. Meanwhile the Finch Family, or at least Edie, kept promoting the most Bonkers version of her story they could find.

[lurkingshan]

Semi-coherent screaming about Shadow eps 1-7

Well I love this show, goddamn! I did not expect to be so into this, as I am not a horror girlie at all, but here I am having binged all seven episodes in one sitting. The storytelling here is fantastic, with a compelling cast of characters, beautiful visuals, and themes around family trauma, the nature of forgiveness, and the damage caused by homophobia. I think there are a few other things going on here thematically that have not come all the way to the fore yet, but a few of the ideas I am thinking about most:

This show is, in fact, not a bl. By which I mean it is not a romance narrative. There are explicitly queer characters, there is a potential love line that’s essentially a D plot, and there may well be some kind of romantic climax later in the story, but the relationship between Dan and Nai is not the focus of the narrative and their potential romance does not drive the plot at all.

Instead, this is a story primarily about trauma, and intergenerational family trauma is the biggest focus alongside other forms that show up. Dan’s family trauma drives the narrative and is ostensibly the initial source of the shadow that haunts him (alongside whatever supernatural thing is happening to make it manifest in this particular way), and we see the traumas that have haunted Nai and Trin, as well.

I love Dan a lot and I was so goddamn happy when he refused to forgive his dad and instead beat him to a bloody pulp in his shadow dream. Hold that grudge, boo! We do not give out unearned forgiveness in this house!

Relatedly, Brother Anurak is on my shit list for pushing Dan to forgive his father and using his dead mother to do it. Fuck you very much, sir.

We are halfway through the show and Dan has not displayed any attraction or feelings beyond friendship for Nai. At this point I’m reading him as comphet with potential for a bisexual awakening, but he is definitely not knowingly queer at this point in his life (unless you count whatever he’s got going with the shadow). Dating anyone of any gender in his waking life seems to be the farthest thing from his mind. Nai, of course, very much knows he is gay and has suffered for it, and we see the themes around homophobia in both his and Trin’s backstories.

I am still wrapping my head around the shadow fucking Dan. Because, what??? It got introduced right toward the end of the available episodes so not sure what to make of it yet, but it adds a nice layer of complication to theories about exactly what the shadow is, and how it might have evolved over time as it stuck to Dan and he matured. It was also startling because outside those scenes there has been no sexual tension present in Dan’s story at all, in any direction. But he has gotten calmer about the shadow and its presence, almost seeming to even welcome it at times as it helps him sort through his memories. It’s clearly become a source of pleasure. Hmmm.

There must be some thematic tie between the sexual nature or Dan’s connection to the shadow and the “sexual deviance” shit we keep seeing directed at the gay characters. WKA speculated about the shadow as a representation of queerness and I can see some basis for that read.

I’m not sure yet exactly what the show is trying to say with Trin and his bipolar disorder. But we do know Dan’s shadow demon is being treated as sleep paralysis, so there could very well be something supernatural happening with Trin, too.

I was speculating with @wen-kexing-apologist about the meaning of Dan’s full name, Danai, being the same as the portmanteau for this show’s main pair (if we’d even call them that), Dan and Nai. They looked up the meaning and found that the name Danai was used in ancient cultures to signify bravery and a connection to higher powers. Just something to stew on!

All the teachers in this show are sus. The female teacher who is homophobic and fucking the school bully, obviously, but also every single one of them. I’ve got my eyes on you, creeps.

I am a big fan of Cha-aim and Josh. They’re nice kids and good friends and I hope they don’t turn evil or get hurt. But I don’t really care if they date.

The lighting in that scene with Dan wandering through the funhouse was sick. I’m going to be seeing it in my dreams. But who is that banshee guy wearing glasses!! Anan saw Trin, someone he wronged. So is glasses guy someone from Dan’s past that he harmed? Does the positioning of where we saw them each in the mirror (center or side panels) mean anything?

Overall, this is surprisingly not scary. I expected more of an explicit horror style with jump scares and maybe some gore, but there has been very little of that. The show generally plays fair and gives you warning cues when something creepy is about to happen. It’s going more for an ominous, haunting vibe than a scary one.

Do we know yet how the rest of this show is being distributed? Will it be weekly from here, or are they going to drop the second half in one go?

[twothpaste]

Giegue/giygas for the ask game, maybe?

First impression: I learned about Giygas through internet osmosis long before I even thought to play EarthBound. All the usual "ooooh this game is secretly sooo dark" and "he's ack-chewally an aborted fetus, see, oooo" kinda shit. I remember it giving me the impression Mother was way scarier and edgier than it turned out to be. (I played games like OFF and Yume Nikki first though. So by the time I got around to Mother, it was very refreshing to play somethin bright & uplifting at its core, lmao.) (In retrospect, I kinda wish Giygas wasn't among the first things every prospective player is told about the EarthBound. Going into the Giygas battle blind seems like it would've rearranged my brain molecules, and I wish I'd gotten to experience it like that.) I forget when exactly I learned about Giegue (I didn't get to play M1 blind either), but I'm pretty sure my first impression was honestly pretty neutral? The imposing presence of a huge alien spaceship, 8-bit sci-fi machinery, and a barely legible creature in a capsule was pretty wicked to see for myself the first time though!

Impression now: Giygas is a big triple decker chocolate layer cake worth of metaphor & symbolism. The existential horror of growing up, the fear of losing who you fundamentally are in the process, the horrific inhumanity adults are capable of, the hopelessness of coming to terms with the world as it is, and so on. Not really a character per se, but the quintessential globular slurry of adolescent angst Ness & pals've gotta contend with. Giegue is a bittersweet little story about a broken family. An internal conflict between vengeance, familial love, and maybe where one's obligations lie? Cool antagonist for sure. I wanna like him more than I do (M1's cryptic hands-off approach to storytelling is hard for me to sink my teeth into 😔). I've speculatively written (and drawn a comic for the upcoming zine 😉) about how Giegue became Giygas, and read some good fics on the topic. In the canon we're given, though? There's really so little binding them together narratively or thematically… I have a difficult time reconciling the two, in the context of the games themselves. Mother 2 in general feels more like a reboot than a sequel - and there's hardly if any "lore" weaving Giegue & Giygas together - so Itoi's choice to declare they're one and the same just seems kinda odd to me. C'est la vie. Fan creators make do.

Favorite moment: The Giygas battle, but like, before he goes sicko mode. When he's bound to a chamber of wires and innards, reflecting Ness' face back at him, and it turns out our fervently raving buddy Porky is actually the one in "control". The atmosphere is so intense and unnerving, such a bizarre yet captivating way to ramp things up. There's like, this sense of stomach-churning dread, as you begin - if only scarcely - to realize the alien overlord you were expecting is an entity far more powerful and personal and helpless and incomprehensible than you ever could've imagined. I mean. You know, because the internet spoiled you when you were 11. But in the bigness of the moment it still makes my mitochondria itch on a primal and cellular level. /pos. Love it.

Idea for a story: My favorite Giegue thing is the vague implication (??) of whatever the hell George did to to him. Y'know, whatever made him hate humanity so much. Whenever I see fan content speculating on how George might've experimented on him or mistreated him I do in fact Feel Somethin' There. (I have been a sucker for angsty-creature-in-a-lab stories from the time I saw Mewtwo Strikes Back in kindergarten all the way to Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 a couple months ago, and I don't suppose I'll ever be sick of 'em.) The conflict it introduces between George and Maria is intriguing too. Like, her husband's treating her dearly beloved child like a science project? Trying to extract the secrets of PSI from his oversized alien brain?? You know if this kinda shit went down, those two were on a caliber of divorce drama the world has rarely seen.

Unpopular opinion: I really like Giegue design interpretations that're freaky and grotesque and biologically unfamiliar. When the beast isn't just mammalian in nature. Truly out of this world.

Favorite relationship: A mean-spirited but otherwise ordinary 13-year-old willingly aligned himself with the alien emodiment of all things evil. And the alien embodiment of all things evil willingly let the kid be his right-hand man. And I'm normal about it. EarthBound tells us basically nothing about how Porky n' Giygas' partnership in crime came to be, but speculating about it sends me into a shark frenzy. Porky seeking power over the world that wronged him, at literally any cost. Giygas weaponizing a child's worst, most vengeful impulses. Porky ultimately usurping Giygas, at least in terms of agency. Witnessing the absolute horror his "master" becomes, and simply sidestepping out of the universe itself to dodge the mess he brought about. I like to imagine there was a period where Giygas was still cognizant enough to maintain a rapport with Porky - and that the two of them fucking hated each other. Both of 'em using the other as a means to an end, assured in the conviction they're the one with the upper hand. And they're kind of both wrong. Bloaw up da worl.

Favorite headcanon: Giegue/Giygas speaks (telepathically?) with a rural midwestern accent. Courtesy of the fine folks who raised him. Other aliens probably think it's weird and mondo cringe, but are too intimidated to say so.

[moon-goggles]

Generation Loss: The Founders Cut Thoughts

I adore genloss and was there to watch the premiere of the founders cut but one thing I do have a problem with is some of the pacing, and I’ve thought about it a fuck ton believe me but I gotta say some things; I think the cut isn’t perfect but IT IS interesting, it adds a lot to the project as a whole actually despite the cuts and it’s great to introduce to others who are intimidated by the vods who aren’t actively interested in the people playing as these characters BUT, it loses a lot of context for why and how it’s so horrifying as a concept unlike the og material.

I appreciated the pacing of the first episode but it lost some key contexts like GL!Charlie’s grandma and GL!Ranboo generally fucking up his place and other details that really built more onto how they were being controlled which thematically connect to the horrors you experience in episode two.

Episode two was already, quite long in the og vod and frankly not my favourite (hot take I know),,, but it was missing the horror of Charlie? Like what makes that surgery so jarring is how it was presented and it left me sitting there a little disappointed as it’s my favorite part. The episode felt very filler and it once again, takes over a majority of the three episodes due to its content and nothing wrong with that but the pacing felt slow and drawn out after the Candy Room. The pacing and editing could’ve been done differently for the rest of that episode in my op. Especially after the fast pacing and clean editing in the first episode. I don’t think it necessarily should’ve gone fast like the cabin in the woods, because the theming of that episode was about puzzles and such, but I don’t feel the time they used was necessary for the story or idea of everything being a game for the show YKNOW?

Episode three of course, my favorite beloved, not much had to be changed or cut as the pacing was already mostly planned well and efficiently from it being pre-recorded toward the end for cinematic feels, I don’t really have any complaints toward it except for the fact that it’s prior episodes lost the impact or context needed to bring you to the conclusion as an ultimate horror realization. GL!Ranboo saying thank you was such an added moment and HETCH actually being colder and directive toward them was good chilling touches but once again I feel that thank you isn’t as holy shit without some of the context you get from the og material cuz it was cut.

The ending was DEFINITELY worth the wait it left me intrigued and excited because it connected and set off the premise of smth beyond generation 1 and I’m pretty excited for what’s to come—

But overall the whole project, I knew it would be cut and edited as seen fit as states “THE FOUNDERS CUT” and that there was possibility for tidbits of lore that added on. I got exactly what was expected and was told we were going to get I just feel it leaves a bit lacking for the reasons stated earlier. This honestly could be somewhat of an intention because it is the FOUNDER’s cut, and what the FOUNDER wants shown despite the screen card for episode three about it not being something you’re supposed to see.

The whole premise of generation loss’ title losing some of its media and context for the cut and the way its perceived as a whole is honestly really smart and cool if you know the og material and I’m still stuck on if that was intentional by any means or not besides the obvious decisions for the audience to see where GL!Ranboo repeats himself over and over, the surgery’s horror being skewed, and HETCH acting as somebody being worth trusted as he did in the og, and etc. Because clearly, it was intentional but I’m not sure it was presented in the best way possible.

The additions tho once again I quite appreciated, getting to see that the food in episode one was horrific for a split second and GL!Ranboo’s past for those split seconds as well, very nice. Also the Showfall Media Mascot, Squiggles, having his very own animation was neat too tho his chat box almost never going up because of the cuts made it feel strange when it did show up in my op. And of course the new voiceover additions and tape at the end added so much tonal wise and made me rethink and evaluate what I assume as the consumer of this world’s lore, which I quite enjoy and appreciate!

[hildred-rex]

this pinned post is permanent now too...

Alright, the temporary blog image has grown on me. It's a cropped square from page 31 of A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635) by George Wither.

The header image is Monhegan, Maine (1922) by Nicholas Roerich. Everyone should go look at more Roerich artwork immediately; his are some of the most consistently beautiful paintings I've ever seen.

Anyway...

I'm:

Cinnamon or Hildred by name, accurately referred to with any pronoun set other than he/it.

@/voidblue on pronouns.page.

Generally, my thematic color is blue and not yellow, but it doesn't make sense for Hildred Castaigne to be blue. In fact, I think he'd be somewhat offended. This makes making this account look like me... somewhat difficult. (Update: I've given up entirely. This is Hildred's blog theme now. The Imperial Dynasty of America was secretly the Imperial Dynasty of Tumblr User @hildred-rex's Blog Theme.)

Under the readmore: a list of fandoms I partake in, more detail on my exploits in gothic literature, a noncomprehensive list of other things I've enjoyed, and a "last updated."

Fandoms:

gothic literature (predominantly horror) in general; this gets its own list lower down!

The League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk.

Arthur Machen (have not read everything yet!)

Dracula by Bram Stoker.

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers.

The Parties are for Losers series by Ferry. (I don't want to give them a random notification for no reason, but they're nopanamaman on tumblr.)

The rest of Ferry's songs are also very good!

currently reading Homestuck due to a D&D campaign (I promise this makes sense in context)

[more when I remember them]

I decided a few years ago that Lovecraft was seminal to the cosmic horror genre and that therefore I should read all the fiction he ever wrote; to my recollection I've read everything listed on Wikisource except "The Street" and "The Rats in the Walls," provided it's extant. (Not sure this counts as a fandom?)

I'll have to come back and add a "music I enjoy" section later.

More on Gothic Literature:

(Listed = I've read it; bolded = I can probably do analysis of its characters; italicized = I don't remember it well; underlined = I really want to reread this and will when I have the time. Small is notes and commentary.)

This is only what I've dredged up from my brain at the moment and I have probably read more; this'll be updated as I read and/or think of stuff.

Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker. (Curiously, I've never actually done Dracula Daily.)

The King in Yellow (1895) by Robert W. Chambers. (Bolding only goes for the weird stories, including "The Demoiselle d'Ys," and is strongest for "The Repairer of Reputations." I've found myself unable to get through a few of the romances & cannot make heads nor tails of "The Prophet's Paradise" except that it feels like someone accidentally published his sheet of idea-collection paper. Admittedly, because of that it makes a pretty good transition between the weird stories and the rest.)

The Three Impostors (1895) by Arthur Machen. (I utterly adore this book.)

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson. (I really loved reading this one, but was very sad by the end. I had Opinions on most of the characters and will again when I reread.)

The Great God Pan (1890) by Arthur Machen.

The Inmost Light (1890) by the same author. (Hello Dyson!)

Jane Eyre (1847 originally; I think Dover reproduced from the third ed.) by Charlotte Brontë. (Worth reading, but GODDAMNIT JANE. She's the closest I've found to a fictional representation of how I think, especially about making complicated decisions, which (a) made her very relatable and (b) made the end of the novel all the more what-the-fuck. Also GODDAMNIT CHARLOTTE because of the authorial racism and also the not realizing how unhealthy the core relationship is.)

The Vampyre (1819) by John William Polidori.

The Shining Pyramid (1923) by Arthur Machen. (I didn't like this one when I last read it; Dyson felt off.)

The White People by Arthur Machen (has the most cursed name of anything ever).

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1831, not yet 1818) by Mary Shelley.

The Red Hand (1895) by Arthur Machen.

[Am currently reading more Machen.]

Miscellaneous Things Enjoyed:

This time in alphabetical order.

The Anatomy of Tobacco by Arthur Machen. I feel I must clarify that it's a comedic work that I'd estimate to be of novella length. Reader beware, this book contains random untranslated and even untransliterated faux-Ancient Greek.

At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H. P. Lovecraft. It feels like reading a textbook with a central plot besides the advancement of history (and with a nicer writing style). Content warning for racism and off-handed mentions of the colonial American slave trade.

Fourteen by Peter Clines. This book gets in one's head and doesn't leave.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and its ensuing series, by Douglas Adams.

Last updated 2024-07-03, YYYY-MM-DD. Created sometime in late-ish November 2023. Edited 2023-12-07 and 2024-03-31. Backdated to Louis Castaigne's birthday in a year that would make him 42 years old at the founding of this blog.

[deadmomjokes]

My brain’s tendency to go from an initial idea to something totally different and wildly off-the-rails of the initial scope and premise is both baffling and hilarious. And I swear, it happens every time I try to write something, outline or not.

Pulpy noir murder mystery one-shot but make it urban fantasy >>> dramatic irony laced howdunnit about the saving power of love as a deliberate action and breaking the cycle of apathy by choosing to care, ft double romantic subplots, Southern Gothic Horror but make it magical realism, elves as monstrous instead of ethereal, #acab; wait how did YOU become a main character, you little one-off exposition machine with a placeholder name? guess you need your own set of books now and oops I think I just created a Literary Universe

Chilling backstory of ruthless, manipulative villain from the above >>> Big Gay Tragedy, hero’s fall from grace wherein an angry asexual becomes a literal nightmare monster to save his marginalized people and his BonesMcCoy-knockoff boyfriend, functional commentary on how working within existing power structures to affect change frequently leaves the marginalized in a catch-22 of performative worthiness designed to maintain status quo for those benefiting from the current power dynamic; villain has evolved into tragic Anti-villain/Anti-hero, update initial project to reflect shift, GOSH DARN IT that’s another book we have to add at least

Three immortals hanging out in a cabin in the woods accidentally get found out and have to convince their discoverer not to turn them in to the government >>> depressed and compassion-fatigued immortal wakes up in the middle of his own autopsy, has to convince his coroner and himself both that life might be okay actually, complicated by the fact that he’s accidentally party to kidnapping said coroner, who is definitely having the Worst Day of Her Life but handling it surprisingly well for someone running on caffeine, spite, and the Hippocratic oath

Steampunk Sherlock Holmes but make it a magical realism fantasy roadtrip >>> ... actually that one is basically still the same nvm

Cars, but make it people >>> Oh hey turns out that’s a thing already and Cars is based on a 90s movie that’s based on an obscure book; who knew! anyway >>> anti-imperialist ecopunk Weird West middle-fantasy, once again about the choice to care for others over the convenience of neutrality and safety of apathy (not that I have some strongly held thematic opinions or anything)

Short story written to-market for a SFF magazine competition, maybe drop some allusions/analogs to current world events to make it *~Timely and Relatable~* (I really want to win this thing, I need money, I’m a shameless sellout) >>> Does the end really justify the means, or do the means determine the end? If saving one person means killing five more, is it worth it? If that one person could save ten more, would your answer change? Does that change who you thought you were? Is there ever a right answer to the question of who deserves to live? Is true pacifism even an option in a world where violence is also an option? Oh yeah and some contemporary fantasy I guess, just slap some pointy ears on those dudes or something

Basically what I’m saying is that sometimes your heart knows better than your brain, and you should never be afraid to play around and just Go For It because some of your best ideas may come from asking “What if” about 37 times in the course of a single outline point, and so what if it ends up totally different than your initial starting point, the joy is in the journey, right?

Also you never come up with a plot resolution as perfect as “dying girl tries to stab a demigod with a borrowed demon sword on behalf of an undead terrorist, demigod proceeds to pat her on the head, give her a shiny new powerup that may or may not be cursed, and scoop everyone up in a cup & dump them outside like an unwelcome but ultimately harmless spider”* on purpose, that stuff either comes to you in dreams or at 11pm on a weeknight while attempting a sleep-deprived writing challenge that forcibly shuts off your inhibitions.

Aka, let yourself be weird, it works out way better than you think.

*Yes that is a legitimate plot point I am using in one of my novels. I had agonized over how to solve the corner I’d written myself into for months before the “screw it, idc anymore” kicked in, whereupon this brilliant solution immediately asserted itself like I hadn’t brought myself to tears trying to work it out logically.

[non-un-topo]

💔👀🦅🎶🎢🥺 !!!

Apple, thank you love! <333

💔 Is there a fic of yours that broke your heart?

Oh boy, well I did a number with Dahlia back in the day. Haven't written angst quite like that in a while and I still feel the urge to write a happy kid fic as an apology. My brother spits blood. hurt in a different way, with all the Booker & Nicky brotherly feelings.

👀 Tell me about an up and coming wip please!

Ohhh okie. I have greatly missed writing weird mysterious horror-themed fics but I get shy, so I've tried not to pull my punches this time and just have fun. I can tell you that it will take place in Iceland, in the early 17th century and will address a significant point in the lives of the guard---rather, who is left of it. It will be Nicky's pov (for reasons I cannot yet say other than it having something to do with centrality and steadfastness in the group dynamic---okay I just explained it lol), and I'm hoping to put more horror elements into this one too (Nicky + horror is my special tea). For this fic I'm really exploring liminal space, daylight horror (w the midnight sun), renewal, the sense of being adrift and the urge to keep everything and everyone together. So, uhh. Angst. I'll say one more thing just because: There is an inciting incident that occurs before the plot begins. It's what ends up convincing them to take a break from their search for Quynh and settle on solid ground. It's also why I'm writing it in Nicky's pov and why he has this pervasive sense of losing his footing, or being sent adrift. 👀👀

🦅 Do you outline fics or fly by the seat of your pants?

I outline like a beast. Usually I prefer to have the entire plot from start to finish outlined in bullet points before I start properly writing.

For my current wip I have three different documents and then the fic itself. Are the three documents comprehensible? Do they make sense? Are they more than just random philosophical thoughts and ideas and scattered research notes? Nah. But they get more organized with each new document lol. Sometimes, though, when the writing bug hits I just write a whole oneshot without planning too much.

🎶 Do you listen to music while you write? What song have you been playing on loop lately?

I do!! I have very specific songs for very specific moods. Sometimes soundtracks, sometimes opera or classical music, sometimes like... weird medieval music. For my current wip I've been listening to three main songs that encapsulate the whole vibe of the fic: Your Bones by OMAM, Familiar by Agnes Obel, and Caesar by The Oh Hellos.

I tend to listen to the same artists over and over, or sort of atmospheric instrumental stuff. I found this yesterday and it's really gotten me in the writing spirit!

🎢 Which of your fics would you call your wildest ride?

Honestly, Dying of the Light was a pretty insane experience, both in terms of writing and just its plot. I had thousands of words written, then scrapped almost all of it and re-wrote almost the whole thing in one sitting. I was up at 4am when I wrote the goat scene and I think I finished around 6. All its wild trippy moments come from the fact that I was literally losing my mind a bit at the time lol. Bad life circumstances, but it ended up being one of the fics I'm most proud of.

But in terms of plot only, I think Tangerine and Roc was kind of wild. It has a lot going on thematically and plot-wise, and has a longer word count.

🥺 Is there a certain type of moment or common interaction between your characters that never fails to put you in your feels?

I don't have a knack for fluff, but I think I might have a soft spot for that sort of casual, close and familiar family dynamic? Like I hadn't realized how many moments I'd written in which one of the queer quartet members is doing another one's hair until I read them all back lol.

Casual intimacy and platonic touches really get me in my feels. Specifically Andy's affection for any of the other characters (back of the neck touch my beloved). Dancing makes me feel insane, I love it and need to write more of it. Same with platonic cuddles. I definitely have a soft spot for pals sitting around a fire and drinking/dancing/laughing. Makes me feel alive <3 Like: Yes, that's family.

[disregardcanon]

hello everyone! this is the end of year writing meme i always do. if you would like to do it, please tag me! i’d love to see your results

Total Stories Written: 12 stories

Total Words Written: 81,878 Average Words Per Story: 6,700 Shortest Story: Hunting for Belonging at 2,161 Longest: i’m not counting hell is for children because it’s a short story collection, so the longest is Are You There, Mom? It’s Me, Luz at 12,208

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted? Less, but I always write less than I predict. I judge myself vs my lonely college years where I had very little to do most of the time, which makes a writer prolific

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write most?

pairing: lumity

genre: kid fic, actually. with the encanto fic about isabela as a child, the amity as a child fic, the sokka imperialism au, the luz noceda kid fic and then hell is for children, a collection of tma horror domains featuring kids... yeah. i just wrote a lot about kids

fandom: the owl house

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January? well, i wrote a fic focused on luz noceda getting her first period and i think that would have surprised me

Did you take any writing risks this year? hell is for children has been a pretty big writing risk in general. “children in fear domains” is a niche concept enough that even though i have some people who REALLY like it, it’s still not by any means popular. i’m sure it’s also given me a strange reputation in the tma fandom

Do you have any fanfic or general writing goals for the new year?

i plan to keep working on the owl house persuasion au that i’ve written 15k or so for, and continue pushing myself into more original fiction. From the past year of writing, what was your…

Best story of this year: Are You There Mom? It’s Me, Luz this one has the most meat to it, the best sense of place, and the strongest narrative and thematic cohesion. it was also a BIG RISK so the fact that anyone enjoyed it at all was a nice bonus

Personal favorite: The Many Copies of Caleb Wittebane I just really enjoy this one. Writing it made me feel like the old days when a story would claw its way out of my head and then i’d be left holding the confusing, fucked up bag

Most under-appreciated: Welcome to the Family (Whether You Like it or Not) this is the second part of what i dubbed my “sokka imperialism au” and it takes a LOT of work and mental fortitude to write. while there are a few people eagerly awaiting the next installment (which is coming! i promise!) it still has under 25 kudos. which. oof. it’s hard with a project that takes this much effort

Most fun to write: home of... what? this is an owl house lumity fic where witches reproduce differently than humans and it inspired the idea for the period fic. it’s mainly about amity being BAFFLED by humans and the two being cute and gay, and let me tell you: that’s a joy to write 

Story with the single sexiest moment: i didn’t write a single sexy scene that i posted this year. oof

Most challenging to write: sokka imperialism au

Biggest disappointment: a ghost and a crow while i’m pleased with how this turned out, the original plan when i started it last january was to write a STORY and not “inej and kaz and jesper character study and some worldbuilding”. i’m pleased with what i got but disappointed that it wasn’t more

Favorite character to write: edalyn clawthorne. i only wrote her for one fic i posted (and a few that i didn’t) but she’s such a joy. i love that weird owl milf

Favorite opening lines: The first time that Phillip makes a grimwalker of his brother, it dies before it ever takes a breath- screaming itself to death in the darkness.The second time, it fully forms and does, actually, take a breath. And then it dies. The Many Copies of Caleb Wittebane

Luz tends to play by herself during recess. This isn’t as much because Luz doesn’t like playing with other kids as because other kids don’t like playing with her.  Are You There Mom? It’s Me, Luz.

Lizzie Lee is the only child of a single father. Smart as a whip, independent, and precocious. Curious. She wants to know everything. hell is for children chapter 4, a lotta true crime

Favorite closing lines:

Terry and Claudia are happy: just two dorky teenagers in love. They have a marvelous quest between them full of magic, mystery, and a chance at restoring Claudia's loving father. The one who accepts Claudia, even the bits of her that neither of their cultures like.

Viren's awakening will tear them from this lovely dream of theirs, and the journey to his full resurrection may shatter it entirely. But the love that was shared will still matter, will always matter, even if it's left in the ruins of pain. 

a little grace for the human race 

Mom can make her feel bad and dad can ignore her on and off, but they can never use someone else against her again. Just as long as she keeps up her appearances. 

Things will be alright. They have to be. Her siblings are illusionist prodigies, after all. Amity can learn a thing or two from them.

This Family is an Abomination

“That’s adorable,” Jesper coos, leaning up against the wall. 

“Don’t call the Wraith adorable,” Kaz orders, “you’ll lose me valuable credibility."  

“Adorable,” Jesper coos, quieter this time.

Other favorite lines:

a ghost and a crow 

“Alright, back on topic,” her mother says. Camila Noceda has always been good at reining in a conversation when it got too off topic. “I’m going to go order the pizza. Is a pepperoni and an… anchovies and pineapple alright?” She shudders as she says Amity’s preferred pizza toppings. 

“It’s not that bad,” Luz assures her, “we had something that tasted like that a lot on the Boiling Isles!” Luz will be eating the pepperoni, of course, but food from the Boiling Isles isn’t horrible . Most of it doesn't even give her food poisoning! 

“I will never understand witch food,” her mami mutters, shaking her head as she turns towards her room.

Good Enough for Someone 

"Amity-" Her face is turning red in anger now- scrunching up like a craisin.

"But he doesn't have to do anything to make up for it? Really? Kidnap people? Threaten to kill them? It doesn't even matter! Everyone loves the Golden Guard!" Amity is gasping for breath by the time that she's finished her rant.

everyone’s a bit of a fixer upper

[declanowo]

31 Days of Horror - Day 23 - Audition

23/10/23

Needles are one of my biggest fears. They have been for a while - it makes going to the doctors hell, when around every corner it feels like there is a needle waiting just for me. Yet, Audition is a film I had heard so much about, and it was deeply enticing to me. Every vague mention of this film, and its central "villain" Asami was a further draw, and so after spinning the wheel and seeing it pop up, I have finally decided that today is the day to try to watch. 

With its two hour runtime, Takashi Miike’s Audition is a long, and at times slow movie. That isn’t a bad thing, in fact, in this case I really loved that! It’s a slow burn that works perfectly, with the first two acts feeling like a romantic drama, with mere undertones of horror, until the final act is pure unadulterated horror. Honestly, there were points during this film when I forgot it was a horror movie - that first act is especially hypnotising into a sense of security. 

Instantly, I was hooked with the cold open. Although not a typical cold open to a horror movie, this sequence moved me close to tears, as we watch our protagonist’s (Shigeharu Aoyama) wife pass away, followed by his son walking in mere moments later. Everything about this pain feels authentic, and it is owed to Ryo Ishibashi’s performance. Instantly, we connect with this character, so when we flash forward seven years and he is encouraged to start dating, we root for him and his happiness. 

All three of our main characters are great, from the aforementioned Shigeharu and Asami, as well as Shigehiko Aoyama, who is Shigeharu’s son. The character is sweet and charming, although appears to have inherited a similar regard for women as his father. 

I guess now is a good time to move onto the theme of masculinity and misogyny, which I think runs through this film. It becomes more difficult to tell with older movies whether or not they are simply products of their time or if they are thematically relevant, but I feel regardless of intent, they are here. 

The titular audition shows this first main source of the misogyny. Here, we see women paraded around with the intent of gaining a role in a film, but instead they are in fact auditioning for the role of the boss's wife. Of course, this deception is something all too common to reality, where men will use their positions of power for sex from women who are simply looking for work. Asami brings this up herself during the third act; yet we see some ambiguity in the intentions of Shigeharu, as he searches for a lifelong partner, this adds some shading to his character, not to mention the fact he didn’t suggest the idea. However, this further links into the theme of masculinity - regardless of who suggested the audition, they did in fact hold it; both parties are guilty. Although, the editing of this sequence is comedic, as we watch the different “suitors” answer questions, their list of quirky personalities shining through. Constantly, we are positioned not to question our protagonist, we are placed to fear Asami instead, and while the validity of this may be true, holding the audition in the first place is ultimately the catalyst for the events that unfold. 

Ultimately, this leads into a romance that I found sweet to watch - I truly enjoyed seeing these two characters seemingly having a nice time, and falling in love. Their romance is shaded with secrets and mystery, and there is a focus on age which I believe feeds closer into the theme of power that comes with masculinity and position, as Shigeharu is stated to be a lot older than Asami in spite of his earlier statement he wanted to date someone “not too young”. Once again, regardless of his intent, this is his reality - he may dream later of an idyllic life, but he is searching for love in a manner that exercises his power that can only come as a result of him being a man. It tears me in two directions, and I think that watching the film at face value provides a desire to side with Shigeharu, and maybe we should - there is enough ambiguity within the film to agree with him, and I personally find both these characters to be so delightful and well acted that I want the best for both of them. Plainly put, this is just a single interpretation, with other ideas weaved inside. 

Asami is plagued by ambiguity - it is part of what makes her such an appealing character. Many sequences we see that shade in her backstory are in hallucinations, or otherwise lies that we piece together. Asami herself may not exist, she is a victim who ultimately is treated the same way over and over. Her life is cyclical, and honestly, her reaction, while extreme, makes sense. She is tired of meaning nothing to everyone she has loved, and finding another woman's picture in Shigeharu’s room is just a growth of this. She acts rashly, and the final sequence is a brutal juxtaposition to the rest of the film. 

Maybe the most harrowing part of the film is how badly we want the romance for both characters despite knowing both of their problems. Nothing could ever work, but it pains us to watch that reality unfold. In a sense, the torture sequence we end on is this haunting realisation that neither of them can ever date again, the romantic love they’re searching for is unattainable because of their own hangups. Both characters are so soft, yet their realities are so much darker, they are cold and broken people. 

After a single look at this film's poster, we know what the movie is building up to. Catharsis draws over us during the torture sequence, and the outcome places both characters even more broken - a lost foot and a snapped neck. Nobody can ever win, and punishment is dealt to those who have done wrong. For me, neither act felt good. We await this sequence the whole film, yet when it is over, we yearn for the daydream where everything was perfect, where everyone's past and true colours are ignored. We watch this sequence unfold in a cool blue, it allows us to fade away, it is divine and perfect, washed of the blemishes that reality carries. However, reality is sitting in the corner of the room, and when we return to the present gloomy lit nightmare unfolding, we are reminded of the reality that there is no escape from our true natures. 

Audition is so complex and fun to think about, that the needle sequences that I feared would haunt me are mere pricks in the back of my mind. Before ending off this discussion which I have very much enjoyed, I want to mention how much I loved the upbeat score of this film, the fun style of editing and how much the cinematography was played with - from the contrasting crampedness of the office to the open freedom of home, to the focus on a character as they witness an action, rather than the action itself. God this was great! 

10/10

[this-nightmare-doesnt-exist-yet]

they sleep [table lamp flicks off then footage cuts to morning where the main character wakes up and starts his day]

they drink water [main character getting a glass of water interspliced with footage of many desert animals drinking from a watering hole]

they eat [he takes a bite of his breakfast, interspliced with footage of a fish biting a worm from a hook and fruit flies on an apple slice]

they go through intricate routines to stay clean [he brushes his teeth, interspliced with footage of birds preening and a cat licking it's legs]

some have compound eyes [scanning the mansion security camera footage for the night, interspliced with shots of a praying mantis eye and bee hives]

they procreate [main character having sex with his wife just off screen interspliced with fish spawning and swarms of mayflies]

And eventually they die [shots of vatious animal death before cutting back to the main character living out his day completely oblivious to what's comming next.]

As with any environment there is a balance to be maintained. When sent out of this equilibrium there is disaster. [shots of wars and murders and forest fires]

They just want to live and who can blame them. It's not like they have many other options aside from death.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I was thinking about a reverse version of They Live where instead of the rich being aliens what if it was a portion of the homeless population was a species of mimics. Where when the economy tanked they started running out of the better food provided by technological advancement in production.

So they started going back to their old ways of eating people, breaking the ancient agreement of silently coexisting.

the whole movie however is from the perspective of a spoiled billionaire having to argue with a group of these entities for reason as to why he is any different to any of the other people that have been eaten or any animal for that matter. The horror of the scenario spawning from the fact that he has no real argument that goes in his favor. He has spent years thinking of himself as being nearly a god but now has to face the consequences of his unwise actions and his own mortality in a way that had never even once previously come to his mind.

Sure he can pay them off with the foods that they want but at some point he'll try wiggling out of it or the impossible will happen that he looses all of his money or production is unsustainable given the economic collapse. Maybe enough of the working class has been eaten that there is nobody to make the products.

point is that there is no way to get out of the confrontation.

But maybe the reason he was chosen is that the entities respect genuine humility and those who know their place.

And in some sense these entities could be the closest things to gods that humans could ever encounter. Their life spans are so long compared to the average human's that they might as well be immortal. and back before the better food discovery they were worshiped and fed on a schedual in what we later looked back on as ritual sacrifice. But even they aren't at the top of the chain, they have just as much figured out an agreement with their hunters as the humans had previously before then. They are barely above us in the cosmic food chain. it is foolish to think that we could be anything beyond animals. Even the greatest lions eventually get nerfed.

So once again, how do you explain your need for survival and natural draw towards hedonism as being above the rest?

This is one of those movie concepts that would often get misinterpreted and lead to a whole lot of arguments between people with differing philosophies. It's not even about the main point, it's just that how the story would get there would go against certain ideas of the world and human nature.

I'm not even saying that my philosophy is flawless, it's just a thought experiment. I welcome healthy criticism.

There is no doubt that this is a thematic product of our time much like any other horror story concept.

[itsthenovelteafactor]

Fall of the House of Hargreeves

So I mentioned a while back in my Superhero Gothic meta that there were a number of parallels between the season one finale of The Umbrella Academy and the Edgar Allen Poe short story The Fall of the House of Usher and that I could probably write a whole meta on that if anyone was interested. Shout out and love to the anon who requested that I do that! 

It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these long form metas, but I am very excited to get back to writing about two of my favorite things: gothic literature and chaotic superheroes. 

Part I: The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher (which I’ll call House of Usher for convenience for the rest of this meta) is a short story by Edgar Allen Poe first published in 1939. It is considered a classic gothic short story, and deals with themes of family, madness, inheritance, and isolation. 

Since it’s in the public domain, I’ll go ahead and link a pdf to the story here. If you aren’t interested in reading, though, or just want a refresher, the story follows an unnamed narrator going to visit his ill friend, a man named Roderick Usher in his isolated (and very spooky) family estate. Upon arrival, he discovers that Roderick’s sister, Madeline Usher, is also ill, and has a tendency to fall into dreamlike trances.

Over the course of the visit, Roderick confesses to the narrator that not only does he believe the house is alive, but that it is connected to the fate of the family which, at this point, only includes Roderick and Madeline. He later comes and tells the narrator that Madeline has died, and enlists his help in order to bury her in the family tomb beneath the house. They do so, but for the next couple of days Roderick is suspiciously...on edge. 

Then, one dark and stormy night, Roderick shows up in the narrator’s room incredibly worked up, and throws open the window, and starts low-key (read: high-key) having a breakdown. The narrator is unsure as to why until he hears ripping and tearing sounds coming from somewhere in the house. These ripping and tearing sounds are revealed to be Madeline whom Roderick and the narrator buried alive whose appearance scares Roderick to death, right before she collapses, also dead from the strain of tearing through the foundations of the house.

The narrator decides this would probably be a good time to leave and is very much right about that because as soon as he leaves, the house (which was already in pretty bad shape) splits in two and collapses into the lake surrounding it. The end.

Part II: Umbrella Academy as Gothic

So, there are probably a couple similarities between House of Usher and The Umbrella Academy season one that stand out right off the bat, but I’d like to start by taking a step back to talk about thematic parallels between the two works. If you’d like to read a very long winded explanation of why I consider The Umbrella Academy to be a modern gothic tale, I have a really long meta about it. 

If not, here’s a quick overview:

Gothic does not have a clearly defined set of requirements as a genre, but its purpose is to explore the contradictions and the failing edifices of convention in a way that is dramatic and often fantastic. 

Gothic fiction plays with reality, but usually in a way that is representative of the characters and story. 

It often situates itself during times of great change, as there is something haunting about the irreversible passage of time, particularly for those that struggle to acknowledge it and hide behind conventions that have grown increasingly irrelevant. 

Poe is considered one of the classic authors of gothic fiction (though the genre significantly predates him), and is decidedly one of the best well-known examples of it. 

The Umbrella Academy is a family drama about former child superheroes dealing with their trauma while trying to prevent an apocalypse that their every move seems to set further in motion. It explores the messy and complicated relationships between siblings who have been abused and pit against each other for years. And yeah, it’s fun with great music and talking gorillas and dance sequences, but the premise is kind of hard for me to read as anything other than gothic.

Part III: Parallels

Like House of Usher, the first season of Umbrella Academy takes place in a massive, largely empty mansion where siblings gather with disastrous consequences. Both works explore a family that is past their prime and disconnected from the present. They also both explore the psychological toll of isolation, the consequences of tyrannical family rules, and why it is a really bad idea to lock your unstable sister in a basement and just leave her there. 

Let’s start with some thematics parallels. Everyone in House of Usher is extremely isolated, and the absence of anything resembling the modern world amongst the house full of relics is part of the horror. All of the siblings in Umbrella Academy are defined by their isolation as well, physically (Luther, Five, and Ben), socially (Vanya, Diego, Klaus, and Allison), and emotionally (legit all of them). It is this isolation that drives the conflict of the story, feeding into every characters’ choices. 

In both House of Usher and Umbrella Academy, the main characters are trapped in this isolated state as a direct result of their familial legacy. In House of Usher, the titular house is a character itself, a manifestations of the obligations Madeline and Roderick hold as members of an aristocratic family that is so far divorced from wealth and status that it keeps them from ever fully moving on and rejoining the real world. In Umbrella Academy, the characters are similarly trapped by their familial legacy, this time in the form of the specter of their abusive father, and the roles he created for them. Like the Usher siblings, the Hargreeves have no way of maintaining the roles their family left out for them – they were never given the tools to function in the real world and it cripples them – but are trapped in them regardless. 

Part IV: The Woman* in White 

*As of the time I am writing this, nothing has been said regarding Vanya’s gender identity being written to match Elliot Page’s. I am using she/her pronouns for Vanya, as that is what has been used for the character thus far. 

Aside from thematic parallels, however, the most direct connection between the short story and series, and in fact the reason I was inspired to write this meta in the first place is the way both of the stories end: with a sister trapped beneath the house clawing her way out to face her brother(s and sister) and creating a disruption of the family legacy so great that the entire estate crumbles.

Madeline Usher is described at this point as wearing a white dress, strained with the injuries she sustained from physically breaking herself out of the basement tomb her brother buried her alive in. Vanya, of course, becomes at this moment the White Violin, and though she has not yet had the epic violin-music-so-powerful-it-changes-the-color-of-her-clothes scene, the principal still stands.

As characters, there are also a couple of noteworthy parallels between Vanya and Madeline. The narrator at one point describes “the illness of the lady Madeline had lone been beyond the help of her doctors. She seemed to care about nothing” (Poe, 27). The reader never knows what illness precisely is the cause of Madeline’s apparent madness, but we see the effects. It dulls her emotional responses to situations and leaves her withdrawn and powerless. Similarly, we learn over the course of the first season of The Umbrella Academy that the medication Reginald Hargreeves prescribed Vanya for her anxiety is actually a power suppressor for her abilities that has much the same effect – because they are strengthened by extreme emotion, the drugs numb Vanya’s emotional responses and deprive her of the ability to access her powers.

Additionally, the final scene of the story story shows Madeline escaping her tomb during a great storm and going to face her brother who put her there, the storm itself being a metaphor for her anguish that tears the house apart. Vanya’s connection to the destruction of the house is a bit more literal, but it is similarly a manifestation of her anguish and trauma. She sees flashbacks of her siblings being distant and rude to her in their childhoods and the anger she feels rips the foundation apart. 

It is not entirely clear in the short story why Roderick buries Madeline alive – there are a lot of theories: he genuinely believed she was dead, he wanted her out of the picture, he himself was succumbing to the madness of the house, etc – but the guilt he feels for doing so manifests as him hearing her scraping her way out for several days preceding her escape. The justification for Vanya’s imprisonment is more clear in text, but the series of flashbacks make it clear that it is not just the imprisonment that has driven her over the edge. It it guilt for her sister, anger at her abusive upbringing that is much more easily directed at her siblings than her father, the newfound emotions experienced by being off her medication for the first time since childhood, Leonard’s manipulations, etc. 

In both cases, amidst a spiral of emotions and experiences folding in on themselves, Vanya and Madeline experience a single, cold moment of clarity that drives them to escape, and it is that moment of clarity that breaks the shadow of the family legacy. They observe the situation as it stands and realize that it is completely unacceptable, and it is the realization that leads everything to crumble. Because gothic literature is focused on the complexities of maintaining that which is out of date, the realization that things must change can break the spell.

Part V: Conclusions 

As per usual, I have no great theories on why this is or what it means. One of the reasons I love gothic literature is that it is rife with meaning that can be more easily felt than deciphered. I welcome any and all interpretations, theories, (politely worded) disagreements, and comments. 

Thanks for taking the time to read; I have a lot of fun doing these. Enjoy spooky season, y’all. 💛

[freddyfreebat]

Jack Dylan Grazer Discovers Who He Is in Luca Guadagnino's “We Are Who We Are”

After supporting roles in the It and Shazam!, the young actor shifts gears with his turn as a capricious army brat in the Call Me By Your Name director's new HBO series.

by Iana Murray / Photography by Nik Antonio  —  September 14, 2020

A few years ago, Jack Dylan Grazer took a trip to the movie theater. He was in Toronto and it was one of his days off from filming Shazam!, the DC comedy in which he plays the shape-shifting hero’s foster brother. He decided to watch Call Me By Your Name, and he immediately fell for it. Grazer took note of the director’s name that appeared in the credits—Luca Guadagnino—and turned to his mother.

“I want to work with him,” he told her. With eerie prescience, she assured him: “You will.”

Whether Grazer, now 17, has a knack for manifestation, or it was all just happenstance, his wish came true in the form of We Are Who We Are, Guadagnino’s coming of age drama which follows a group of army brats living on an American military base in Italy. Thematically, the show is something of a spiritual successor to Call Me By Your Name: Grazer plays Fraser, a tempestuous 14-year-old with a pair of headphones constantly plugged in his ears. He’s the new arrival at the base with his mothers (Chloë Sevigny and Alice Braga), and quickly forms a deep bond with his neighbour, Caitlin (Jordan Kristine Seamon), as they both wrestle with their sexuality and identity in the midst of domestic troubles and teenage debauchery.

“He’s an enigma to himself,” Grazer says of his character. “He doesn’t really understand a lot of the things he does but he’s so forthright so he convinces himself that he knows everything. He feels like other people don’t deserve his intelligence. But he’s also very volatile and aggressive at times, and not because he’s coming from an angry place but because he’s constantly questioning who he is.”

If Fraser is just beginning his coming of age when we first meet him, Grazer is inching closer to the end. Starring in enormous blockbusters including IT, he became the Loser Club’s resident hypochondriac at age 12 and a superhero’s sidekick by 15. His films have grossed a combined total of over $1.5 billion. Suddenly the stakes are multiplied tenfold during what are ostensibly, and horrifyingly, the most awkward years of your life. Every misstep is now being monitored, examined through a microscope of millions. (See: His 3.8 million fans on Instagram, to say nothing of the countless stan accounts.) Child fame is a disarming transaction like that: a stable career and all the other perks of being a celebrity, but at the cost of normalcy. That unalleviating pressure forces a kid to mature fast.

Grazer is acutely aware of this fact, admitting outright that he’s “not a normal person.” But he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I became 70 when I was 7!” he laughs. “I don’t know if I really had much of a childhood. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to grow up really fast.”

Nevertheless, he’s still 17. When we meet over Zoom, his shoulder length curls are damp and disheveled (he just got out of the shower), his black painted fingernails contrast with his brightly-lit, white bedroom as he rests his face on his hand. It’s a Saturday morning and he looks tired: It’s his first week back at school, which has traded classrooms for hours of video calls reminiscent of the one we’re currently on. “It feels like the days are shorter because the teachers don’t want to torture their students by keeping them on a computer for six hours a day,” he tells me. “You do miss the social aspect of being at school.”

If you were to judge Grazer by what’s out there on the internet, you’d expect an anarchic and relentless bundle of energy. A quick YouTube search brings up results like “jack dylan grazer being a drama queen” and “jack dylan grazer being chaotic in interviews for 4 and a half minutes straight.” He trolled a YouTube gamer on Instagram Live. His TikToks are inscrutable.

But here, he’s incredibly earnest, as he excitedly talks about his skateboarding hobby (a skill he picked up after auditioning for Mid90s) and his attempts to learn the flute (“I need to learn how to read sheet music, but it’s like reading Hebrew!”). He’s calm and thoughtful, as if this project we’re discussing requires a shift in sensibility.

For Grazer, acting had always simply been fun. While other kids might take up a sport or get hooked on video games, he performed in musical theater with the Adderley School because he “just wanted to play.” His roles so far have been reflective of his carefree approach to the job: Up until now, he’s portrayed best friends with biting one-liners, or the younger version of the protagonist in a flashback. IT is a prime example of both. In the horror franchise, Grazer plays a neurotic germaphobe running from a fear-eating clown, but in reality, the film felt like “summer camp.” Both films never felt like work; he just learned his lines and got to hang out on extravagant sets with his best friends. Likewise, school amounted to being pulled off set by a teacher in between takes to cram in the mandatory hours.

But with We Are Who We Are, he steps into his first leading role, one that required him to convey longing and confusion through Elio-like physicality and subtext. It’s abnormal to talk about the show as a turning point for an actor who isn’t even a legal adult yet, but Grazer explains that the show required him to radically change his approach to acting. He spent six months in Italy (“It felt like I was in Call Me By Your Name.”) and built up the character beyond what was on the page in collaboration with Guadagnino. “His philosophy is that we know our characters better than anyone else—even the writers—because we are the characters essentially,” he explains.

In many ways, Grazer absorbed that philosophy entirely. He describes the experience less as a performance and more like a “rebirth”—perhaps even an attempt at method acting. Over those months in Italy, the distinctions between actor and character gradually became indistinguishable. “I had no other choice but to act and surrender to Fraser entirely and throw Jack Dylan Grazer out the window,” he says. “I would go out and get a coffee as Fraser and walk like Fraser. That was just me trying to get into [character], but then I slipped at some point and just became Fraser.”

One day on set, he looked at himself in the mirror, and the hardened kid standing there with a bleach-blond dye job and oversized shorts was unrecognizable to him. He could only see Fraser. While talking about his character, he seems to unintentionally switch pronouns, from “he” to “I”, as if the two still remain one and the same.

The process was so transformative that it forced him to re-evaluate himself entirely. “I never really struggled with identity before,” Grazer tells me. “But I think the show opened up my eyes to question myself. Being Fraser forced me to question what I wanted and what I stood for and what I believed in. At some points, the show bled into reality.”

When asked how he has changed, he takes a pause and a pensive swivel in his armchair, unsure of how to answer. “I think I was more ignorant before I did the show,” he says, and he leaves it at that.

Coming of agers are a particularly well-trodden genre, but there’s a naturalistic, raw energy to We Are Who We Are that is distinctive from what we’ve seen before. Each character quietly struggles with their own problems and growing pains—for Fraser, it’s his sexuality. Caught in a fraught relationship with his lesbian mother and an infatuation with another man, his story doesn’t tick off the familiar beats. His personal discovery is instead internal and intimate. "I think every single person born as a boy has this guard. It’s this guard that they don’t even realize they have, where they’re initially like, ‘Being gay? I could never.’ But we’re all born as humans who are attracted to whatever we’re attracted to," he says. "I think that’s how Fraser interprets it as well. Yes, he’s reserved and nervous about it in the beginning because he’s unlocking this new idea for himself. He’s figuring it out, and that’s what you see in the show: him coming to terms with this idea."

As our conversation winds to a close, I ask him if Martin Scorsese ever visited the set—his daughter, Francesca, plays the confident cool girl of the show’s teen cohort—and his eyes widen. “That was actually a really stressful day,” he divulges. Still, he revels in the memory, speaking so fast it’s like someone has put him on 2.5x speed as he shows off his impersonation of Guadagnino. The director was so nervous about Scorsese’s presence that production halted that day.

“Luca was like, ‘I cannot do this today because Martin Scorsese is on my set. I don’t know what to do, this is not good for me. I will have a panic attack before the day ends,’” Grazer says in his best Italian accent. “It’s like if you’re a painter and Van Gogh shows up.” 

Admittedly, Grazer is also a self-proclaimed superfan of the Wolf of Wall Street director, and afterwards, he got to spend several days with his idol, as they went on lavish restaurant outings in Italy and talked about anything and everything.

He takes a second to compose himself. A giddy, Cheshire cat smile spreads across his face. The kid in him comes flooding back.

“...Oh my god!” he yells. “I met Martin Scorsese!”

[feralphoenix]

SONGS OF RESISTANCE: The View Myla Grants Us Of Hallownest’s Moths

hello again hollow knight fandom, i am back with my picante takes and ready to discuss two things i love: myla hollowknight and the moth tribe! Let Us Be Sad About Them Together.

as with my previous essay i’m going to be putting this fellow up on dreamwidth later for accessibility purposes since my layout text may be too small for high-res pc users. this time i’ll be attaching that in a reblog to avoid this post getting eaten by the dread tungle algorithms.

CONTENT WARNINGS FOR TONIGHT’S PROGRAM: This essay discusses colonialism and genocide both in real life and the fictional depictions in Hollow Knight, as well as racism in the zombie horror genre and in fandom.

ALSO: if youre from a christian cultural upbringing (whether currently practicing, agnostic/secular, or atheist now), understand that some of what i’m discussing here may challenge you. if thinking thru the implications of this particular part of hollow knight worldbuilding/lore is distressing for you, PLEASE only approach this essay when youre in a safe mindset & open to listening, and ask the help of a therapist or anti-racism teacher/mentor to help you process your thoughts & feelings. just like keep in mind that youre listening to an ethnoreligiously marginalized person and please be respectful here or wherever else youre discussing this dang essay

SONGS OF RESISTANCE: THE VIEW MYLA GRANTS US OF HALLOWNEST’S MOTHS

In this house we are all love Myla.

Well, in all fairness, there are probably plenty of Hollow Knight fans who aren’t interested in her character, since which fictional characters one attaches to is always a matter of personal preference. But she’s still well-loved for a minor NPC and inspires a high level of devotion in her fans. There’s nothing that whips folks into a frenzy like a cute character you can’t do anything to help, and unlike some other characters in Hollow Knight Myla’s fate leaves no room for ambiguity. Once you pick up the Crystal Heart you’re left with only two choices: Avoid her, or kill her.

A lot of Hollow Knight’s world is designed to make you care about it so that it will hurt more when Ghost’s violent skillset proves too limited to save something or someone. The consequences of Hallownest’s founding and policies have directly or indirectly caused a great deal of damage to everything, and chief among those consequences with massive damage and a wide splash range is the Infection. Much has been said elsewhere by other people about Hollow Knight’s predominating mood being a struggle against futility, with Ghost arriving at the eleventh hour and every new tragedy designed to make the player more desperate to find something actionable, only finding out by trial and error what’s beyond your personal ability to save.

Myla, in that sense, is a typical example of that worldbuilding. She’s a particular kind of stock character in the zombie horror genre, the innocent who falls victim to the plague and cannot be saved, wrenching audience hearts and demonstrating the stakes.

But Hollow Knight plays with the trappings of zombie horror in a very unusual way, one I find thematically fascinating.

For a quick overview, the “zombie” as we know it in popular culture is an appropriation of a voudou (the Black American spiritual practice) concept that deals with the fear of slavery killing one’s spirit. (People more versed in/with roots in voudou culture can give a much more comprehensive overview than this simplistic one.)

The zombie horror genre, especially in Western media, is part of the great white fragility stock plot trifecta (the other two being alien invasions and robot uprisings). Zombie horror in particular expresses white fears that marginalized ethnic groups will rise up violently in revenge for their mistreatment and destroy white society. The fear of “that which is human, which ‘humanity’ is not” (to borrow mecha visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine’s pithy term) and the extreme levels of violence towards human-but-not bodies typical of zombie horror are often an expression of such bigotries. This is, again, a subject that’s been discussed in greater depth and with more nuance elsewhere.

But what Hollow Knight does is take the ugly metaphors and it makes them literal, makes it harder to ignore the toxic subtext of the genre. The Infection is literally a native god’s revenge on the settlers who committed genocide* against her people. How the Pale King’s colonization of the crater negatively affected the preexisting groups of bugs underpins every level of the worldbuilding, as does Hallownest’s cruelty towards its neighbors.

Hollow Knight is a game that is about the tragedy of Western imperialism. It is one of the work’s central themes. There are a lot of conversations that need to be had about the ways these themes manifest and, on a real-world level, about fandom’s predisposition to avoid the subject.

But, for now, let’s get back to Myla. If she fits such a stock zombie horror archetype, and Hollow Knight uses zombie horror tropes to underline the conversation it attempts to have about colonialism, then what has Myla got to teach us about the overall worldbuilding?

There's two topics I’d like to broach here: First we’ll get into how the circumstances of Myla’s infection fit in to the implied role of Crystal Peak in pre-Hallownest society. Then let’s take a long look at the lyrics of Myla’s song and what it implies.

MYLA, THE CRYSTALS, AND THE HOLY MOUNTAIN

If you think about it, Myla is an interesting outlier compared to the other NPCs we encounter on the verge of succumbing to the Infection. Both Bretta and Sly are unhappy: Bretta is a lonely, anxious bundle of abandonment issues yearning for someone to sweep her off her feet; Sly misses his pupils and loved ones who’ve left him in death (we never learn who Esmy is or what they were to Sly, but we sure can tell they’re not around anymore). The temptation to dream away those sadnesses seems to play a part in their vulnerability to the Infection, and also why Ghost’s interruption brings them back to reality.

Not so Myla. She appears to be blissfully unaware of her fellow miners’ fate, and most of her dialogue prior to her infection (besides the song - we’ll get to that later) is about how much fun she’s having at her job and how much she enjoys Ghost’s occasional company.

Yet she still winds up infected when Ghost’s back is turned. Why?

Not to discard the possibility that Myla’s got her own issues too, but in her case there seems to be another likely cause at hand: The crystals. If hit with the Dream Nail before infected, she mentions that she can hear them “singing” and “whispering”.

Under the The Hunter’s Hot Takes section of the Hunter’s Journal entries on various Crystal Peak enemies, we can learn more about the crystals - particularly in the entries for the Husk Miner and Crystallized Husk.

Crystal Peak’s crystals were thought of as particularly precious in Hallownest and harvested en masse for use in luxury items and the like. To do so, the mining operation was set up throughout most of the mountain, though the area around its peak still remains largely untouched. However, there’s more to the crystals than just that. Like Myla, the Hunter notes that the crystals can be heard to sing very very softly if one listens closely enough.

Perhaps of even more interest than that is this particular comment he gives us, from the Crystallized Husk journal entry: “There is some strange power hidden in the crystals that grow up there in the peaks. They gleam and glow in the darkness, a bright point of searing heat in each one.”

I don’t think it’s a particularly revolutionary idea to point out that there’s some connection between the crystals and Radiance’s power; this is something many players have intuited just based on Myla’s dialogue. But, in order to understand what Myla is demonstrating about the game’s world I think it’s important to think about what that connection is.

Speaking of which, the local Whispering Root has two important clues for us: The phrases “light refracted” and “energy contained”.

The very top of Crystal Peak is one of the only places in the crater where the moths’ architecture has escaped Hallownest destroying it, and is the only place in the entire game setting where their religious iconography remains fully intact. There are stone monuments covered in their language (which has been destroyed with the rest of their culture) and the statue of the Radiance - this is easier to see in the Wanderer’s Journal tie-in book, but the huge stone arches upon the Crown represent Radi’s halo and its rays and encircle her when viewed head-on or from a distance instead of the side view we get in the game.

The crystals grown here were used by the moths to store and cultivate Radiance’s light. It’s impossible to know what sort of architecture/infrastructure existed inside the mountain before Hallownest stole it from the moths. But between the massive scope of her statue and all the texts at the Crown, and the fact that the moths were working with their literal actual god’s freely given power here, it can be safely asserted that Crystal Peak was a holy ground to them.

Hallownest didn’t care about the mind-boggling level of spiritual significance Crystal Peak must have had to the natives, though. To the Pale King and his people, the crystals are just a natural resource to be harvested for personal profit.

This is unfortunately a conflict that still plays out in colonized countries today. If you’re American, #NoDAPL probably comes to mind; Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are filled with these sorts of horror stories too. Settler disrespect for indigenous sacred grounds is a huge problem that needs addressing. If you’re looking at the story of Crystal Peak and thinking it’s very on-the-nose... maybe it needs to be.

Anyway, Myla is nowhere near as miserable as Bretta or Sly, but she still notices that something’s up with these crystals. She hears the voice coming from inside, and she’s curious, and she tries very very hard to listen to it... so she DOES end up hearing Radiance’s voice. Radiance’s real voice, not the songs and whispers inside the crystals: The voice of a frightened, angry, grieving god who knows there’s a new vessel running around in Hallownest, and doesn’t want any part of that. A voice that’s pleading for someone, anyone to kill this dangerous creature, and save her from the threat Ghost poses.

Between how freaked out Radi is to know Ghost is poking around, the tendency we see in her boss battles for her to panic and kneejerk blast things at full volume/vibrance when she’s panicking, and the way her dream broadcast seems to be only a one-way communication line while she’s in the Black Egg... naturally this spells disaster for poor Myla.

Similar to the Moss Prophet, this small tragedy is a demonstration of the eleventh-hour state the conflict is in: The Pale King has escalated this situation so far, and Radiance is so traumatized and isolated, that bystanders who might in a kinder timeline have become Radi’s allies instead get caught up in her AOE. Myla’s definitely not as aware of the overall situation as the Moss Prophet, since she’s a Hallownest bug and not an indigenous one the way they are. But she noticed things were not as they seemed, and she was curious. Who knows what new possibilities could have opened up, if Radiance was able to truly communicate with bugs in the outside world?

Small side note before we move on, but I’ve noticed a tendency among some folks who notice the missed connections to come down extra hard on Radiance and chalk Myla’s infection/Moss Prophet’s death down to deliberate cruelty on her part. I’d like to gently push back against this.

Living in a post-colonial world we all absorb some level of prejudice from our surroundings, and it’s important to take a look at our first assumptions about people (or, in this case, fictional characters lol) to examine whether these prejudices we’ve inherited have influenced those assumptions.

So, if your first instinct is to look at this situation and say the problem is that Radiance is being too harsh and too angry where she should have stepped back and softened her emotions for others’ benefit to gently persuade them to her side... Please think about how when people of color and non-Christians express anger or hurt at our treatment, or even so much as calmly assert our boundaries, white/Christian viewers often view us as much more aggressive and threatening than we actually are. The “angry black woman” trope is a good example of this stereotype. You may want to look up the HuffPost article “Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism” and its discussion of white fragility to further understand this phenomenon.

It is absolutely essential to remember the complex power dynamics in play in Hollow Knight and that the Pale King deliberately imprisoned Radiance (who had at this point already gone through an extreme amount of trauma) in a way that would compromise her ability to communicate with others. If you can extend compassion to characters like Ghost or the Pale King and empathize with their motives/feelings when their actions cause harm, but you are not willing to do the same with Radiance... it’s important to sit down with yourself and examine why that is.

THE MEANING BEHIND MYLA’S SONG

Okay, let’s switch gears and take a look at the lyrics to the song Myla sings, since it’s got some interesting things to tell us too.

The first verse, which you can hear from Myla the first time you meet her/before you acquire Vengeful Spirit, goes:

Bury my mother, pale and slight Bury my father with his eyes shut tight Bury my sisters, two by two, And then when you’re done, let's bury me too

There’s not much particularly story-related going on here except foreshadowing that Myla may in fact wind up dying. Most of what we get here is that a) this is a song about burying the dead and b) it’s morbid as fuck.

Curious, a new player might think of the mention of burying the dead; there are a lot of corpses just lyin’ around all over the ground - something that might lead one to believe Hallownest didn’t have such a custom. Later players will discover the Resting Grounds, confirming Hallownest did bury its dead... and that the gravekeepers are all dead too.

Let’s look at the second verse, which Myla remembers and will sing after you pick up Vengeful Spirit:

Bury the knight with her broken nail, Bury the lady, lovely and pale Bury the priest in his tattered gown, Then bury the beggar with his shining crown

This right here is where it gets interesting. The first verse describes the singer’s family as dead or dying, but the people we’re burying now sure do have some parallels to Hallownest's ruling body, don’t they?

Among Hallownest’s Great Knights, three of them - Dryya, Isma, and Ze’mer - were women. They are also very dead or might as well be: Dryya was killed by Traitor Lord’s resistance, Isma is a tree spreading acid through the kingdom’s waters to cut off access to the City of Tears, and Ze’mer hung up her nail after her mantis girlfriend’s death and only lingers on as a revenant.

While there aren’t any characters who are described in-text as “priests” in Hallownest, the idea of a tattered gown might bring Lurien the Watcher to mind, or perhaps the Soul Sanctum’s magicians before they went rogue.

The lovely, pale lady in the song can only refer to the White Lady, Hallownest’s queen. And there’s only one man in the game who has a shining crown: The Pale King. The lyrics are particularly derisive towards him in a way they aren’t to any of the other figures listed, too.

So, it seems like whoever came up with this song didn’t think much of Hallownest. With that in mind it’s hard to think that it originated from any sort of faction loyal to the king.

We’re missing a line from the third verse, which Myla sings after you’ve beaten Soul Master and she’s beginning to become infected. But what we do see of it is Huge in terms of lore:

Bury my body and cover my shell, [...] What meaning in darkness? Yet here I remain I’ll wait here forever ‘til light blooms again

So. The “protagonist” of this song’s family has died, and they expect to die as well, but even unto death they're waiting for Hallownest to fall and the light to return.

The moths became Hallownest’s gravekeepers after the Pale King forcibly assimilated them. Under the Pale King’s light, the moths forgot Radiance and most of their original culture, but Seer tells us in her final monologue that a few individuals remembered just enough to pass bits and pieces down through the generations. This secret resistance among the moths was what kept Radiance alive and prevented her from being sealed away entirely.

This song Myla sings comes from that moth resistance.

Code songs amongst oppressed ethnic groups are very much a real thing, especially when groups have to communicate or signal each other within hostile parties’ hearing. Since I’m American (and had a big ol crush on Harriet Tubman as a little kid lmao!) the first thing that came to mind for me when I made this connection was the working songs escaped Black slaves used in the Underground Railroad.

These have another point in common with the moth gravedigger song Myla sings, in that they enter the general cultural consciousness through out-group people who don’t know the true context. If you ever pick up a book of American baby songs, you’ll probably find some Underground Railroad code songs in there - often because generations ago white kids heard these songs from Black slaves or servants, and went on to sing the same songs to their children with zero awareness of what the songs were really for.

So some Hallownest bug somewhere probably heard the moths’ song and liked it and sang it in a context totally divorced from its original one, and it got spread around and passed down to become one of Myla’s old favorites, with her seemingly not realizing the meaning behind the lyrics. The moths’ song of devotion to their lost god survived them as a people.

This is some VERY realistic and layered worldbuilding. There is so much to glean from just one NPC’s dialogue when put together with other clues. Of course all of it is SAD and DEPRESSING, but Hollow Knight is a tragedy with a super unsubtle point to make about the unsustainability of Western imperialism.

What happens to Myla is awful, and upsetting, and unfair. So was what happened to the moths and their sacred ground, and to Radiance too. It’s important to understand the scope of the conflict that led to all this happening, trace it to its roots, and lay it at the feet of the ones responsible for engendering all this tragedy in the first place: Hallownest and the Pale King.

*A NOTE ABOUT MY USE OF THE TERM “GENOCIDE”

This is a tangent, but since there’s some debate about whether it’s appropriate to define the Pale King’s actions towards indigenous bug nations as genocide, allow me to cite the official definition of genocide here.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention for short) defines genocide like this:

Genocide is any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, religious, or racial group, as such:

A) Killing members of the group

B) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

C) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

D) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

E) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Among the abovelisted, Hallownest is guilty of A (Deepnest and the moths), B (Deepnest physically/the moths vis a vis brainwashing), C (the mantis tribe and the hive), and E (the moths, which we know from Marmu, and possibly the mosskin also - Isma is mosskin).

Then there is cultural genocide, i.e. acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, religious, or racial group's way of life. Let’s look at the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP) and how it defines cultural genocide:

A) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities

B) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources

C) Any form of population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights

D) Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them by legislative, administrative or other measures

E) Any form of propaganda directed against them

Hallownest is guilty of every item on this list. A: The moths, attempted with Deepnest. B: The moths, the mantises, the flukes, the mosskin; also attempted with Deepnest. C: The moths, the mantises, the flukes. D: The moths; attempted with the mantises and Deepnest. E: The mantises and Deepnest.

Any sort of discussion of the wide-reaching harm Radiance caused MUST include the context that the Infection is her response to multiple levels of genocide. Discussion that does not include this context loses nuance and simplifies the conflict and power dynamics portrayed in the game in ways that reflect real-life racism and Christian supersessionism.

Now, this is NOT some sort of holier than thou Fandom Purity dunk to say that it’s Bad or Wrong to care about Hallownest’s nobility. Like, one of my favorite characters in this dang game is the White Lady, who spent a long ass time enabling her husband’s actions before she finally walked out on him over the mass infanticide thing. You can, and it is okay to, love TPK and want rehabilitation for him while acknowledging that the dude has done objectively bad things.

I just feel that it’s important to keep things in perspective so that we don’t wind up stirring a bunch of real-world bigotry into our fandom funtimes. A lot of us don’t have the luxury of turning our brains off and simply Not Seeing It, because these same sorts of dynamics are behind a lot of the hardships that threaten our everyday stability.

It’s pretty hard to have conversations about those things in real life if one can’t even recognize them in fiction. So, this might be a good opportunity to start practicing anti-racism so we can better utilize that ideology in real life, where the stakes are much higher.

[blackjack-15]

Two Can Keep a Secret (if the Family Tree is Dead) — Thoughts on: Ghost of Thornton Hall (GTH)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE, ICE, CRY, VEN, HAU, RAN, WAC, TOT, SAW, CAP, ASH, TMB, DED

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with my list of previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: GTH; SPY; mention of ASH (and the ASH meta); mention of Nik/HER’s spoilery hints about GTH.

 NOTE: THIS META CONTAINS DISCUSSION OF AND REFERENCE TO SEXUAL ASSAULT. MORE DETAILED SECTIONS ARE MARKED, BUT THIS WARNING STANDS FOR THE WHOLE META.

 The Intro:

It’s time to get our Spooky on, lads. And we’re gonna do it in a meta of truly staggering length, so maybe go to the bathroom and get a snack before you start. My apologies.

Due to the (to be quite frank) absence of nostalgia surrounding them, there’s not really many games that are post 2010 that the fandom tends to agree on, but Ghost of Thornton Hall happens to be a standout in that pretty much everyone has found something to like about it. It often tops the charts of “best newer game” polls, and puts in a valiant effort against the more nostalgic mainstays.

There are a lot of reasons for this, in my mind – the quality of the writing, the choices that Nancy can make that actually affect the outcome of the game and especially affect Nancy, the fabulous voice work, the purposely-unanswered questions that give a deeper sense of horror — but if you ask me, the love for GTH really boils down to one thing:

Atmosphere.

Nancy Drew game fans (and I’m including myself in this) tend to prioritize atmosphere in the games, probably because without good and proper atmosphere it’s easier to pick apart the formula as you’re playing and to avoid being immersed in the game’s story, and GTH has it thick on the ground (figuratively and literally). The fear, unease, and overall sense of being an Intruder in this story comes from the overwhelming atmosphere provided by the grief of the characters, the time-sensitive nature of the crime, the secrets of the house and family, and, of course, the rather stellar visuals and locations.

The Thornton’s house and grounds really feel alive, but dead — in fact, they almost feel alive in the way that a zombie is, where they function and feed but have no heart. The gloriously (and meticulously) decorated walls are cast in shadow and grime; the portraits feel ominous and disapproving rather than lifelike and nostalgic; even the graveyard, as spread out and opulent as it is, feels claustrophobic and unwelcoming.

In a word, the game is – visually, thematically, story-wise, and atmospherically — haunting. And I think that overwhelming feeling of being haunted is, in large part, what draws fans back to this game again and again.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the scariest parts of this game are the things that you, as the player, do not see. Sure, the apparitions of Charlotte, the ghostly figures, the appearance of Harper — these are all scary, but the fear is gone after a moment, leaving the player unsettled but not running to hide under a blanket. The deaths of the fifty-four souls, the secret behind Clara’s birth, Harper’s breakdown — all these things that you don’t see, that you can only hear about or have hinted at are where the fear of the game kicks in, especially for older players.

It’s no secret that, despite the games being labeled for ages 10 and up, that the actual age of the Nancy Drew games fandom hasn’t been around 10 for some time — most people playing these games are in their 20s or 30s, or have siblings who are in their 20s and 30s and got into the games through them. Sure, there are some outliers, but the Clue Crew is much closer in general to the ages of the River Heights crew than they are to the age that that box says.

Because of this, the writers (and I’m going to especially hat-tip Nik here) behind the games have been able to slowly graduate the topics of the games to be a little bit older, hiding the true horror behind things that younger kids just won’t think about. This is especially the case with GTH and SPY, but you see it in a lot of the newer games, where the implications of events are normally scarier than the events themselves.

GTH takes that and runs with it, choosing to hint at and dance around truly upsetting — for any age — topics, presenting a mystery and a story that only get scarier once you’ve finished staring at the screen. The characters’ emotional problems and issues — loss, abandonment, anxiety, guilt — are like this too; while they’re present in the game itself, when you take a step back after finishing the game you realize just how badly scarred everyone is in the story.

Because answers were purposely left vague in order to 1) make the player work for it and 2) keep the 10+ rating, pretty much everyone who plays GTH has a slightly different opinion on what went down at Charlotte’s party, who the Thorntons really are, the circumstances of Clara’s birth, why the children of a female Thornton take their mother’s name — you name it, and there’s around 10 distinct opinions on it, and many more offshoots of those opinions besides.

I’m going to talk a little bit here about a couple of the “biggies”, since I don’t want it cluttering up the Suspect portion of this meta, so bear with me. I’m not so much interested in “this is the Correct answer” as much as just presenting the information from the game and wondering about its conclusions…but I (like everyone else) have my little pet theories, so what follows will be a little bit of reporting, a little bit of inference, and a little bit of supposition.

What follows is a frank discussion of topics such as rape and incest as they apply to GTH. If this is something you’d rather not consume, skip down to the next bolded line.

The most talked-about question left hanging in the game is, of course, who Clara’s father was. I think this question is best addressed from a two-pronged approach, however, because to figure out who Clara’s father could have been is a question that requires another question to be answered: why would Clara’s mother not tell her, even on her deathbed.

The most popular — and horrifying — answer to this is that Clara’s father is Jackson, and that she was a product of rape and incest. Now, just looking at the timeline, this theory adds up; Rosalie (Clara’s mum) would have been 25 when her father was 51 and would have raped her — young enough (especially in relation to her father, a middle-aged man of a lot of power in and out of the family) that she would have been scared to tell anyone anything, but old enough to not have it be super out of the ordinary that she got pregnant and had a baby — especially in 1968.

To add to this theory, there’s the note in the cellar that asks “who was this Jackson?...what’s he hiding, and who put it there? Was it Charlotte?”. If you’re looking for clues with the incest theory in mind, this seems to point directly to it — “who was this Jackson”? both Rosalie and Clara’s father. “What’s he hiding”? his crime of raping his daughter and impregnating her. The mention of Charlotte alludes to the supposition that Charlotte found proof of this crime — tangible proof — and put it somewhere; this pretty much supposes that there’s a document somewhere that names Jackson as Clara’s biological father, such as an admission of guilt or a paternity test.

The final “proof-positive” to this theory is that Rosalie refused to tell Clara who her father was even on her deathbed. We know from the family tree and Wade that Clara was between 5-10 when her mother died (I’m inclined to believe the family tree, and chalk the discrepancy up to either the writers not being concerned with math or, more likely and more charitably, to show that Wade isn’t a Perfectly Reliable source, just like everyone else), and Rosalie’s protection of Clara from the truth makes sense with a child in that age span. It’s one (horrible, horrible) thing to be forcibly impregnated by your father, but to have to say it out loud, and to say it to your child — that’s something that no one can even remotely blame Rosalie for not being up to, especially when weakened by sickness.

There are smaller points — like pointing out that this might be why Virginia (Wade’s mum) was skipped over in inheritance — but these small points have dozens of explanations, so they’re not really good for bolstering a theory unless you’re already dedicated to it and are looking for crumbs to shore it up.

End of frank discussion. The previous topics may be alluded to and/or mentioned, but not discussed in detail from this point on.

Now, let’s talk about another explanation. I think there’s a tendency to jump on the “Jackson Theory” because 1) there are clues that support it, but more importantly 2) because it’s horrifying, and it’s natural to leap to the scariest thing you can think of when considering a game that relies on fridge horror in the first place.

In the “Jackson Theory”, Rosalie would have hidden Clara’s parentage because of shame, horror, and trauma, and probably to (at least momentarily) spare Clara’s feelings — but Jackson isn’t the only explanation for her reticence.

Generally, we can break apart the reasons for Rosalie’s silence into three distinct emotions or emotional states: shame (supports the Jackson Theory), trauma (supports an assault by a known wolf), or, often overlooked, ignorance.

Clara is mentioned repeatedly as being outwardly and obviously scared about her place in the family — a fear borne from and exacerbated in her childhood, as Nik plainly states (“her insecurity wasn’t just a personal flaw, it was a response to her uneven upbringing,” emphasis mine).

An easy way for Rosalie, worried as she must have been about leaving her daughter alone, to fix this if Clara really was a product of incest, is to name a distant Thornton cousin, preferably one who was already dead or out of the picture, as the father, which would assure Clara’s place in the Thornton line by both blood and her future adoption. This way, if Clara’s parentage was tested, she’d show up as a Thornton from both sides in a way that wouldn’t be suspicious, and her daughter would have an easier life.

But Rosalie didn’t do this — she never even hinted at the identity of Clara’s father. As a woman known primarily for secret keeping — not just about Clara, but about everything (“She loved her secrets,” Wade says), Rosalie would have been adept at hiding things through various means, including through lies and subterfuge, not simply staying silent. Given the little we know of Rosalie’s character, then, let’s consider why she wouldn’t have said anything — even something false — to ensure her daughter’s safety when she died.

Looking outside of Jackson (and with any other known Thornton being quite unlikely), the vast majority of assaults are committed by those known to their victim — friends, acquaintances, classmates, etc.

The Thorntons were — and are — an incredibly powerful family, both monetarily and socially. Having dealt with families such as the Thorntons before in matters like this one, it is frankly incredibly unlikely that, had Rosalie been assaulted by someone she knew, that the truth wouldn’t have come to light through another source, and that the perpetrator would have been punished in every way possible.

BRIEF DISCUSSION OF ASSAULT STATISTICS AS THEY RELATE TO ROSALIE’S POSSIBLE CASE.

Some people familiar with only the post-20th-century world as “the modern age” and with a less stellar grasp of the pre-tech-boom world might raise an eyebrow at this supposition of punishment, but this is Exactly what would have happened — and did happen with regularity — even as “far back” as ’68 — especially when the crime was committed against a young, privileged, wealthy woman of the community.

Note, this is after the USMPC adjustment to the definition of rape in ’62, but before the adjustments in the early 70s; in 9 years, forcible rape rates (this number includes only female victims, so the true number of victims is indisputably higher, given the enormous jump in rape statistics in 2016-present as male cases have been included) had soared in the United States from around 17,000 per year in 1960 to, in the year Clara was born, 31,000 reported cases (source: DisasterCenter). With these soaring numbers came soaring awareness, and combined with Rosalie’s identity as a rich, powerful young woman in a rich, powerful family, it’s on the outside of belief that, had her attacker’s identity been known or suspected, that it could have remained a secret and gone unpunished.

END OF BRIEF DISCUSSION OF ASSAULT STATISTICS AS THEY RELATE TO ROSALIE’S POSSIBLE CASE.

Given this historical and social backing, the simplest and unavoidable potential answer to why Rosalie wouldn’t have either told Clara who her father was or made up a “brief love” who abandoned her Dishonorably, is this: she didn’t know.

(I’ll spare a mention here to say that, ignorance because of being a “wild child” in the 60s and having had multiple partners would be a possible theory, but it disregards everything else we know about Rosalie and her behavior, and that her reputation as a party girl would have been common knowledge, unable to be hidden from those who were alive at the time. So let’s move on to what else would cause ignorance.)

Though attacks by a person unknown to the victim are, in relation to known assailants, rare, in the absence of other evidence, the simplest answer to Clara’s parentage was that Rosalie was assaulted by someone that she did not know and had no way of knowing — and who had no idea of the social power of his victim.

Rosalie truly left nothing behind that points to her daughter’s parentage, even for later discovery or for Clara’s private eyes in a bank lockbox when she came of an Age that Rosalie deemed appropriate — so the conclusion to be drawn is, in the absence of evidence, that Rosalie didn’t answer Clara’s question because she simply couldn’t.

This ties into the other theory/mystery I want to cover here — that of what happened the night Charlotte died, and how (and in what way) Clara was culpable and responsible for Charlotte’s death. We know that, according to her, Clara went there simply to “scare” Charlotte — and given the circumstances that Clara gives this confession in, I’m inclined to believe her — and it’s my opinion that the reason didn’t have anything to do with the truth of the identity of Clara’s father.

My stance here — and it’s here that I take a solid stance, rather than presenting options — with Charlotte (and I’ll talk more about her general character in the Suspects section) is that Charlotte found the same breadcrumbs as the players did and came to the same conclusion — that Jackson was Clara’s biological father. The difference, however, is that I believe Charlotte’s conclusion to be understandable, but ultimately incorrect, and that Rosalie’s assaulter was a stranger.

Horrified, this is where Charlotte’s “cryptic obsession with Jackson” (mentioned in the note in the cellar) began, and what led to her changing the beneficiary of her will from Clara — poor, pitiable Clara, already a victim of so much, whose insecurities would be compounded by this truth — to Harper.

An important part of this theory — and of really any theory — is the consideration that Clara was pregnant with Jessalyn at the time. Not only does this partially explain why Clara’s thought was to save herself (and her baby) rather than dragging Charlotte out with her (regardless of any other factor), but it also brings a potential answer as to why Charlotte would change her will to favor Harper, rather than Clara. Just as the cellar note asks “Who was this Jackson?”, I find myself asking a similar, but no less important question:

“Who was this Austin Neely?”

Listed as Jessalyn’s (still living) father on the family tree, Austin Neely isn’t present anywhere else in the game — not by name and not through mentions of “Jessalyn’s father” or “Clara’s ex-husband/ex-boyfriend” or anything like that. There’s not even a mention of Clara contacting him as a guest for the wedding or to help search for their daughter. His absence is glaring, especially in a game so focused around family — so the question of who is Austin Neely is a question that seems incredibly important to me, given that Clara was pregnant at the time of Charlotte’s death.

In mentioning this theory, I do fully acknowledge that I have only some circumstantial evidence — mostly emotional, and based off of who the characters are/were — to support it, but given the total lack of information on Austin Neely, my guess is as good as anything else.

So here’s my theory: Austin Neely is not Jessalyn’s father, and Clara, like her mother, became pregnant via some type of assault (and given that this was the late 80s and given Clara’s age at the time, I would say the most likely culprit is date rape). When Clara became aware that she was pregnant, given her insecurities about her place in the Thornton clan and her lack of knowledge of her own father, would have come to this conclusion: she was not going to let her baby go through what she herself went through. So she did what her mother could have — and honestly speaking, probably should have — done, and lied.

Austin Neely was probably a friend or an acquaintance of Clara’s — someone her family didn’t really know, but that she could make up a story about dating/being engaged to and became pregnant by before it all fell apart. He would have likely received a payout (probably a rather large payout, given the Thornton’s money and influence) and disappeared from the area and the Thornton’s lives, signing off any responsibility or claim to “their” child before he left.

As a result of this, her child now has a father and doesn’t have to grow up wondering, and Clara avoids the stigma, court case, and general Uproar that would come with attempting to find her attacker. She also, importantly for her, avoids that mess for her child, who will grow up in a semi-normal atmosphere, surrounded by family, not doubting her place in the world — and no one has to know.

Except, of course, one person would know. The head of the family: Charlotte Thornton. From then on, based on this series of events, the story behind Charlotte’s death becomes quite straightforward.

Clara’s paranoia and general cleverness clue her in to the fact that Charlotte has changed her will in Harper’s favor, and is scared out of her mind; having recently experienced a trauma and being pregnant with a child, she’s afraid that she will be left with absolutely nothing, that her machinations with Austin Neely and all her striving will have been for nothing, and she will be cast off, unable to give her child the life she wants to give her.

Compounded by her ground-in fear that she does not belong, she decides to try to settle it with Charlotte — she’s going to scare her, to punish her, and make Charlotte rethink the changed will.

And Charlotte, bearing the weight of the family name and business, not to mention its continued propagation on her shoulders, sees a woman who has been — like her mother — assaulted and left pregnant, whose mental state is already fragile, and who the “revelation” of who Charlotte thinks her true father is would topple her completely — sees poor, pitiable, emotional, suspicious Clara, and refuses.

I think that, more than anything else, would have set Clara off. Remember what she yells at Charlotte’s ghost?

“You had so much, so much, and I had nothing.”

In answering some of the questions about the game, Nik/HER’s response is to say that Clara did not literally light the match that burned Charlotte alive — but we know that Charlotte burned all the same. In the video of her birthday, there are candles; in the dust and soot on the floor where Charlotte died, we see candlesticks. And in the response, again, we know that Charlotte lit the candles for the celebration.

In my ASH meta, I discussed the many meanings of the word “fire” and the term “setting the fire” — and that’s important here too. In this case, the fire was set by Charlotte refusing to reconsider the terms of her will; in her refusal, she probably touched on the same point that she makes in the note in her room — that Clara isn’t stable enough to take over the company. Now, I doubt she would have said that straight to Clara’s face, but even framed as a “you have enough to be going on with and I don’t want to burden you” sort of thing, that just would have reaffirmed all of Clara’s fears — that she was unwanted by the Thornton clan, that her child would be unwanted as a matter of course, and that she would truly have nothing.

And so my guess would be that Clara shoved her. Not hard enough to break anything, not even into a direct flame, but shoved her, and Charlotte jostled the table, and a candelabra fell to the floor, where we see it still in the modern day.

When Nancy sees Charlotte’s ghost out in that house — and yes, I’m firm on that being Charlotte’s actual ghost, as she’s out in the open air so carbon monoxide doesn’t figure in, and there’s no way for that to be Harper/Jessalyn — she burns from the skirt up, which follows with a candle falling to the floor and lighting that incredibly flammable dress on fire.

The last thing to note from HER/Nik’s response is that at the end of the game, Nancy faces the exact same choice that the Thorntons have: to help, or to save herself. In this, we have to look back to Clara and Charlotte, and conclude this: Clara chose not to help. It’s debatable how much help she could have really been — we’re not sure how pregnant she was at the time — or if it even occurred to her until she was already out and chose not to go back in — but at the very least, Clara’s guilt comes not only from the fact that she quarreled with Charlotte right before her death, but that she could have tried to prevent it, and didn’t.

Given the supposition that Charlotte was literally on fire, I really do doubt that getting her out or finding water to throw on her would have been successful, but it doesn’t matter — because Clara looks at it as a choice, and Clara (more importantly) looks at it as the wrong choice, and a choice that she’s been punished for since the day it happened. That’s why, when speaking to Charlotte’s ghost, she says this:

“Haven’t I suffered enough for you?”

The last point I want to make in this OBSCENELY long introduction is about GTH’s place in the pantheon of “Haunting Games”. When you look at the bare-bones (heh) circumstances that make up GTH, you’ll start to see shades of other games.

A relationship/marriage gone a bit wrong, a family secret, an ancestral home, a relative/ancestor whose spectre looms over the story, mysterious apparitions and appearances, and Nancy’s status as an outsider and a skeptic — yeah, both CUR and HAU should come to mind immediately.

Having said my piece about, well, the badness of CUR and HAU and their unsuccessful approach to their basic plot points, it delights me that GTH takes a good hard look at them and says “well, what if we did this well this time? What if we gave our characters the complexity, the emotional resonance, the secrets and lies that we should have the first time?”

Like CUR and HAU, the Family is at the center of the game — except this time we believe in this family, in their relationships to one another, and we feel the effects of the family and their choices, not just hear about it from a diffident 9-year-old or a cranky caretaker. The history of the Thornton clan comes alive through the house, the graveyard, the books and journals that we have of them. We understand what this family is and the choices that they make — even if we don’t approve of them — and they feel real, not just like a background chucked in to Make The Spooky Things Happen.

Also like CUR and HAU, we deal with a central relationship and the complexities that come over two people deciding to get married. Happily, this game (unlike CUR and HAU) treats the central relationship as a thing of Import, and comes to the conclusion that it’s the happiness and well-suitedness of the couple that matters, not the family that surrounds them or anything else. It asks the question “what happens if one person runs away from the relationship?” and answers it, quite satisfactorily, with “there are probably some issues that need ironed out before anything else should happen”.

Interestingly, GTH also takes the good points of CUR and HAU – especially HAU’s atmosphere and CUR’s love of family tidbits — and improves upon them as well. Instead of Jane showing off her studies so that Nancy can solve a few puzzles, Wade walks her through the Thorntons were (at least in his eyes) and helps her get to know the people she’s helping. Instead of being duly impressed at the atmosphere in a bombed-out castle, everywhere on the island is teeming with fog — literal and figurative — as Nancy tries to decode the past to help the future.

Now then, let’s leave the general behind, and focus on the specifics of GTH.

The Title:

Ghost of Thornton Hall is a great title in the way that Secret of the Scarlet Hand is a great title – moody, evocative, gives us our location/focus right away, but not in a way that spoils anything, etc. If anything, it’s a little more flexible – are we dealing with The Ghost of Thornton Hall (Charlotte), the ghost(s) of the Thornton family, the ghosts of those who died on the island, or — in a very fun way — are we talking about the ghost of Thornton Hall — the spirit of the building where so much life and death has happened?

As a title for a Haunting game, you really don’t get much better than GTH, and it centers the player’s attention right where it should be — on the messed up family that the game centers around, and how their past impacts their future.

The Mystery:

Nancy’s phone rings in the middle of the night, with Savannah Woodham’s drawl on the other end, informing her of a kidnapping that’s taken place. She’d go herself, but believes wholeheartedly – and is frightened by — the ghost that’s taken up residence on Blackrock Island, Georgia, and doesn’t believe she’d be enough help.

Of course, this isn’t the whole truth, but we’ll get into that later.

Armed with both her detective skills and her inherent skepticism, Nancy sets off for Georgia to find the missing bride-to-be. Of course, when she gets there, she quickly discovers that the family — and family history — is even murkier and laced with tragedy than the presence of a ghost would suggest, and that, even with everyone searching for Jessalyn Thornton, she is nowhere to be found.

To find her, Nancy has to delve deep into the Thornton family lore, Jessalyn’s relationships with her family and friends – not to mention her preoccupied fiancé — and figure out what really did happen to dear, sweet Charlotte Thornton nearly two decades ago…

GTH, as a mystery, is chock-full of hints, clues, red herrings, and background facts that make figuring out the truth behind everything a joy and a delight — not to mention a task that will take more than one playthrough. GTH is also unique in that its mystery can end in more than one way, and that Nancy’s choices actually have more of an impact than just what souvenir she sends home to her erstwhile boyfriend. Choosing to save herself, to save just the “innocent” (for a certain value of innocence), or to save everyone leads to different endings not just for Nancy but for everyone involved with the Thornton Clan, from its matriarch all the way down to a certain spook-hunting ex-girlfriend.

Underpinning the mystery is this question: did Charlotte really come back as a ghost to haunt Blackrock and the Thorntons, or are her appearances just the result of sneaky relatives and atmospheric maleficence? Can all of the sightings be explained by a mixture of carbon monoxide poisoning, a few relatives playing dress-up, and huge amounts of suggestion and guilt? Is it the case, as Rentaro posited a few games earlier, that a ghost doesn’t have to be real to haunt you?

In a word, no. In a few more words, of course not.

Tying the whole of the ‘haunting’ mysteries together is this (previously mentioned) fact: Nancy is not remarkable for being a Skeptic, she is remarkable for being a Skeptic in a world where ghosts exist. The moving wood (and possibly the silhouette) in MHM, Camille’s ghost dancing along in TRN, the reflection of Kasumi in the water in SAW, the ghost of the Willow in GTH — these are all real, unexplainable-by-tech-or-imagination ghost sightings, and the fact that Nancy doesn’t believe in them doesn’t change their reality one bit.

In the house, you can cite carbon monoxide and Jessalyn/Harper running around in a costume for at least some of them — though not all. But the sightings outside — carbon monoxide does not stay in the system for very long in clear air, blessedly — of Charlotte? The consistency of the spectre? The apparition of her burning up at the site of her birthday party? These aren’t things that you can explain by costume theater — especially since these sightings have been happening for over a decade by people who haven’t stepped foot in Thornton Hall.

When they say that Blackrock belongs to Charlotte and has since the fire, it’s not a literary turn of phrase — Charlotte is there, and refuses to be forgotten. Nancy’s status as a Skeptic prevents her from hysteria, but it does not stop her from being haunted by the Ghost of Thornton Hall.

Now, let’s talk about the players — dead and alive — that make this mystery as complicated and dark as it is.

The Suspects:

Beginning with the matriarch of the Thorntons seems as good a place to start as any, so let’s talk about Clara Thornton. Cousin to Charlotte and Harper, Clara was taken in after her mother’s untimely death (but before her aunt and uncle’s equally untimely deaths) and became the equivalent of a sister in at least Charlotte and Harper’s eyes — though Clara herself was always unsettled and wary about her place in the family.

After the events of Charlotte’s tragic birthday (covered above), Clara visited Charlotte’s grave every night for a year, and was hospitalized after being pushed off of the widow’s walk (more on this later). Whether due to her upbringing or her Thornton blood – or, most likely, both — Clara is secretive, paranoid, wracked with guilt…and a loving mother and extremely capable businesswoman.

Though GTH doesn’t actually have a culprit —Jessalyn wasn’t kidnapped and Charlotte wasn’t murdered — Clara is, as the resident secret keeper and witness to Charlotte’s death, the closest thing that we’ve got. Clara’s sense of guilt is far beyond anything that she could have done, and is haunted so completely as to turn her rather cold.

I have a lot of sympathy for Clara, who made a mistake in a fit of anger (whether that’s pushing Charlotte or just not helping her when she started to burn) at the age of 21 and has been wracked with guilt and haunted by the spectre — real and imagined — of her ‘sister’ ever since (not to mention knowing that her other ‘sister’ blamed and hated her for it). Charlotte died before she had the time to make too many mistakes, but Clara had the entirety of the estate and the business — thousands of people’s livelihoods — thrust into her hand when she was a single mother of 21 years of age. Even had Clara been completely stable, it would have been a lot, and it’s no wonder that she rules the company with an iron fist.

I also want to point out that, due to Harper’s breakdown at the funeral and her afterwards, that even had Charlotte’s second will been found right then, Clara still would have inherited until at least Harper received her bill of mental health, as the closest heir to Charlotte of (legally) sound mind and body.

Let’s talk then about the other heir, Harper Thornton. A fan favorite for a myriad of reasons — her Helena-Bonham-Carter-esque design, her wonderful VA (props to Keri Healey, voice of Hotchkiss, Sally, Paula, Simone, and Madeline!) knocking her lines out of the park, and her dark sense of humor, Harper is, like most of the Thorntons, incredibly unstable, paranoid, violent…an affectionate aunt, and a pretty darn good detective in her own right.

Since GTH doesn’t have a ‘culprit’, Harper stands in her own guilty/not guilty paradigm along with Clara. She had nothing to do with Charlotte’s death personally, but was the one who caused assorted injuries and thousands of dollars in property damage at the funeral, and the one who pushed Clara off the widow’s walk and hospitalized her. Yes, Harper was young — 18 when Charlotte died, but pushing your cousin/sister off of a balcony is wrong at any age.

It’s worth noting that of the three Thornton ‘sisters’, one is guilty of some degree of manslaughter/criminal negligence, and the other of attempted murder. When Charlotte notes that she herself has a dose of the “Thornton paranoia”, she’s not just whistling Dixie.

The biggest problem the Thorntons have, honestly speaking, is that all of them are way too emotional and react without thinking. Clara confronting Charlotte, Charlotte not taking Clara aside to talk about the will, Harper’s injuring of others and blaming/pushing Clara, Wade destroying machinery, Jessalyn disappearing rather than talking things out…none of the Thorntons, past or present, have seemed to think with their brains since the woman who received the land on Blackrock Island after the Civil War in the first place.

In keeping with the theme, I want to talk about Charlotte Thornton next. A girl who inherited the Thornton land and business at way too young an age — I don’t even wanna know why Jackson hated his adult daughter Virginia (and yes, I know that there’s a supposition to this in the “Jackson Theory”, but it’s pure supposition) so much that he would stake the family future on a 20-year-old, no matter how much everyone liked her — after the death of her parents four years prior, Charlotte was the darling of the Thornton family.

Well-liked by everyone with a beautiful singing voice, Charlotte was nonetheless every inch a Thornton; she outright acknowledged her own paranoia, kept secrets and locked rooms closer to her than her family, and had a flair for the dramatic and emotional. After considering her cousin/sister Clara too unstable for the task of inheriting the family Business, Charlotte, rather than turning to her older aunt or naming multiple beneficiaries to ease the load, instead leaves 100% of it to her younger sister Harper.

I do want to point out the irony here in leaving the business to Harper over Clara on the grounds of mental stability. Whatever else Charlotte was good at, she was not a good judge of character, even giving leeway for her being 21.

After her death, Charlotte haunts the family home, unable to leave the place that was, for a year, hers to inherit. But why would ‘dear, sweet’ Charlotte haunt, frighten, and otherwise unsettle those around her — from family to neighbors to curious kids — especially to the extent that she does?

To answer that question, we need to talk about the family member that everyone says is incredibly close to Charlotte in personality — our missing bride, Jessalyn Thornton.

Clara’s daughter, Jessalyn is painted as being a sort of return of Charlotte; everyone loves her (all Thornton employees are combing the island looking for her, for heaven’s sake), everyone agrees on her, and she’s next in line to inherit the Thornton family business. She’s even around Charlotte’s age (24, rather than 21, but close enough) during the game, for heaven’s sake — the comparisons are not subtle, nor are they meant to be.

Since it’s more than halfway through the game that Nancy meets Jessalyn, the things that people say about her are the best clues to her personality that we have…right?

Everyone agrees that Jessalyn would never run off and make people worry like this, that even if she was scared or had second thoughts about the wedding or even just needed to be alone, that she would never do this to her family. And, as it turns out, everyone — her mother, her uncle, her best-friend-cum-fiancé — everyone is wrong. Jessalyn did exactly that — she ran off, made everyone worry, and didn’t think about her family, friends, fiancé, or employees one bit.

It also takes her no effort at all to fully believe a woman she’s never met that her mom is a vicious, cackling murderer just because her (single, incredibly busy) mother is a bit emotionally cold, so she’s also not a great judge of character.

And remember, we’re told over and over again — Jessalyn is just like Charlotte. Sure, Jessalyn is also our Nancy foil in this game — a young woman who needs to learn the truth about her mother, coerced/guided by a quasi-unreliable source, worrying her family by running off — and that’s important for Nancy’s character, but Jessalyn is first and foremost our Charlotte analogue. Jessalyn’s family and friends don’t understand who Jessalyn is…so I think it’s fair to say that Charlotte’s family and friends didn’t understand who Charlotte was, either.

We see Charlotte, through her writings and actions, could be thoughtless, was a poor judge of character, was secretive and paranoid — all things that no one even alludes to when speaking of her. Sure, there’s the idea of not speaking ill of the dead, but someone would have noted these things, even fondly or mildly.

So why would Charlotte haunt this place, haunt these people, when she was so good and kind and loved everyone? The simplest answer, the least convoluted explanation, is just that she wasn’t. That the Thorntons didn’t understand Charlotte, as much as they loved her, just like they didn’t understand Jessalyn.

Speaking of Thorntons who may be misunderstood, we’ll focus on Wade Thornton next. A little more rough-and-tumble and a little less refined than his relatives seem to be, Wade is introspective, superstitious, hard-working, and a bit gloomy…along with having some anger issues, vast amounts of distrust, and a bit of egotism.

Wade’s (at least legally) guilty of a few things in the past, but since he won’t even go into Thornton Hall, he’s a pretty easy cross-off of our list of suspects. Wade’s there to give Nancy information on the Thornton Clan, to provide the explanation as for (partially) why Savannah isn’t there herself, and to show another facet of the Thorntons — their anger.

Whether or not you agree with Wade’s actions that led to Clara pressing charges — though I think everyone can agree it’s pretty stupid to destroy your own family’s machinery, especially when the only danger to the employees was caused by him scaring them half to death — and it highlights that Wade, philosophical though he is, is just as much a Thornton as those he despises. He even calls himself out on it – that while he used to think he was on the side of “Good Thorntons”, he’s not so sure anymore.

The best (serious) line in the game does come from Wade — I will be in love with his description of dating Savannah as “[falling] for her like a Black Tuesday banker” until I die. It’s a perfect metaphor without sounding pretentious, and shows just how bleak his own worldview really is.

Next is The Fiancé, Colton Birchfield, who has the most hilariously WASP-y name to ever come out of a Nancy Drew game. A man who’s struggled with depression and anxiety all his life, Colton was born to two politicians and has lived in the spotlight — and his marriage to Jessalyn is getting just as show-stopper-y as a campaign trail before she disappeared.

I mentioned above that the resolution to Colton and Jessalyn’s relationship is the healthy, sane version of what should have happened in CUR and HAU, and I stand by that. While I don’t necessarily like him going back to Lexi after the game is over — a relationship interrupted by one party being paid off is not the healthy, loving, loyal relationship that Colton needs — it’s clear that he and Jessalyn would have made each other content, but never fulfilled romantically.

Colton’s guilty of nothing more than not being in love with his best friend, and he’s a refreshing breath of air as someone related tangentially to, but not cast down by, the Thornton family drama. He may get less sympathy than our other cast members, but he’s no less deserving of it, and I’m really rooting for him to find someone that will give him the same amount of love and loyalty that he’ll give them.

We’ll journey outside the Thornton family and their (almost) relations for our next ‘suspect’. Addison Hammond, Jessalyn’s friend and bridesmaid, makes a cameo phone appearance here to tell us that Thornton Hall is Totes Spooky, and that Jessalyn vanished not once, but twice in the night.

I quite enjoy Addison, not because she plays a big part or because she’s an exceptional character — she’s as bare-bones as we get in the later games (ignoring MED/SEA/MID), honestly — but because she’s simply a girl in her 20s reacting the way that most of us would if our unnecessarily spooky friend dragged us to an old haunted house and then vanished twice. Good for you, girl.

Coming in for a wonderful appearance is Savannah Woodham, ex-ghost hunter, ex-girlfriend of Wade Thornton, and the detective who was supposed to be on the case. Savannah’s too scared of the Ghost (and too reticent to talk to Wade face-to-face) to risk stepping foot on Blackrock Island herself, but she’s more than willing to send the biggest skeptic she knows, hoping that Nancy’s skepticism will keep her safe.

As lovely as Savannah is in SAW — and I adore her in that game — she really shines in GTH. Probably the biggest moment she gets in the game — and probably my second favorite moment in the game period — is her tale of tracing the shape of the old willow tree on her wall, only to have a body discovered under that exact willow tree after a storm. It’s a delightfully creepy — and most importantly, completely inexplicable by any means other than accepting that the supernatural exists — moment, and I think it’s key to understanding Savannah as a character in GTH.

Savannah suffers under the weight of knowing that there truly are Things that Go Bump in the Night, that can’t be arrested or captured or gotten rid of by normal, legal means. Her background knowledge of the Thorntons helps Nancy to get an initial feel for the family, and it helps to not have an ex-girlfriend wandering around that the Thorntons might have a grudge against or dislike for.

She is, in effect, the mirror image of Nancy — what Nancy might have become without her inborn skepticism — and that alone, even ignoring everything else about her, is fascinating to me.

Our other phone contacts are Ned Nickerson and Bess Marvin, teamed up due to George’s absence while doing an internship (at Technology of Tomorrow Today, no less!) and Bess’ extreme boredom without anyone else to hang out with.

The lovely thing about Ned and Bess is that we get to see Ned when he’s not Solo Boyfriend Ned, but a college guy hanging out with his friend. Their light-hearted banter is hilarious and comfortable (Bess dramatically asking permission to do a spit-take in his living room is of particular note), and we really get to see a different side of Nancy’s oft-abandoned boyfriend.

You can tell that their voice actors are having a terrific time as well (Scott Carty’s pitch-perfect imitation of Jennifer Pratt’s cadence and tone makes me laugh every time), and it really helps bring a bright and colorful spot to this otherwise rather tense and grim mystery.

We’ll round out our character list with the quasi-amateur, quasi-professional detective herself, Nancy Drew. Through her foil with Jessalyn — discussed above, so I won’t get too into it here — we get to see Nancy in a slightly different light, and get to look at the effect that she has on those around her when she disappears.

We know Carson and Ned (and occasionally Bess/George, and even more occasionally, Hannah) worry about Nancy while she’s off on a case, but this is the first time Nancy herself is dealing with what she leaves behind every time she jets off to Venice, or gets trapped in a lava tube, or lost in a rock maze. Nancy hasn’t investigated a straight-up kidnapping (or what appears to be one) since Maya in FIN (no, I’m not counting HAU, as it’s not played as a kidnapping nor does anyone think it is until 2/3 of the way through the game), and she has the same sense of urgency here that she did back then.

Upon replaying the game, the player will lose that sense of urgency for Jessalyn — we know she’s alive and well, and was never kidnapped — but Nancy’s reactions to the family are what stay interesting. She’s concerned for Jessalyn, but does most of her detective work through getting a sense of what the rest of the family thinks of the missing girl.

Given Nancy’s reputation as a good girl, a solid presence (if an occasional one) who loves her family and friends, and who is always responsible, it’s easy to see why she misses the one question that would have helped her solve the case in half of the time: what if Jessalyn isn’t missing? After all, Jessalyn, like Nancy, would never jet off after hearing an unsubstantiated claim about her mother without telling anyone or pausing to confirm it through a different, more trustworthy source, right?

In this game, we discover a huge characteristic about Nancy: she is reckless. Now, we know this already from other games — that Nancy is reckless physically, confronting bad guys alone, diving down into murky catacombs, jumping from pillars in ancient tombs — but here we see that she’s also reckless emotionally. Even though it interferes with her investigation, Nancy gets personally involved in this case; she’s mad at Colton for “cheating” on Jessalyn, she’s upset by the tragedy of Charlotte’s death, and she’s concerned for Jessalyn’s safety in a different way than she usually is with a victim or suspect.

Nancy’s always been willing to take huge risks, but she always stays emotionally on the surface level of a case — a good and necessary trait for a detective, and one that allows her to face down killers, saboteurs, and forgers without blinking. Here, Nancy’s dragged down into the web of the Thorntons, and — as we see in the middle and bad endings especially — she doesn’t quite recover from it. Nancy loses a bit of objectivity here, but what she gains is humanity — and she’ll need that for the last two games in this meta series.

The Favorite:

With such a well-executed game — even though it doesn’t fall in my personal top 5 ranking — there’s going to be a lot to love, so let’s get down to it.

My favorite puzzle is probably Nancy’s trek to ‘discover’ the ‘ghost’ — aka completing Harper’s tasks in order to meet her, culminating with reciting Charlotte’s rhyme while blindfolded. It’s a different kind of puzzle than the type we get commonly with Nancy Drew games, and really helped spark and keep the tension needed to maintain such a spooky game.

My favorite moment in the game is a quieter one — it’s Nancy’s remarks on Charlotte’s room. She’s taken aback at how, after a game of everyone talking about Charlotte, that it’s opening the door to her room that cements Charlotte as a living, breathing person. She continues that she can’t let that feeling distract her, that she needs to treat the room like the rest of the house and gather tools that will let her find Jessalyn, but it’s lovely to see the effect of the Thornton’s history really settle into Nancy’s bones as Charlotte Thornton turns from a scary rhyme that children chant to a girl who lived and died in the same walls that Nancy’s exploring.

There are, of course, other things that I love — the objectively creepy poem (“we’ll let you share with Charlotte/a gown of coal and glowing flame” is an incredible line), Savannah’s story about the willow tree, the small Francy crumbs of Frank being sullen after his Very Revealing voicemail in DED and considering an MBA, the multi-layered relationship that Wade and Savannah have, the gorgeous detail of Thornton Hall — and all of these add up to a game that’s frankly just enjoyable to play.

The big thing to mention in this game, as I talked a bit about in the intro, is its atmosphere.

Throughout the entire game, there’s this palpable feeling of death and grief and loss and pure pain, and those emotions are what GTH relies on to keep itself Scary, not the few spectre scares and swinging scythes that it also has to offer.

I don’t normally quote things other than the games/words of the cast and crew in these metas, but I do make exceptions when the quotation is this good, so I tip my hat here to Tumblr user aniceworld, speaking about ranking GTH their top Nancy Drew game of all time:

“The reason GTH is so successful as a scary game is because there’s such a pervasive sense of sorrow at Thornton Hall. People have died here who shouldn’t have. A family has been destroyed. The house has seen so much trauma it can literally no longer stand on its own. There are ghosts that live here, whether you can see them or not.”

This horror is far better than bloody slashers or obnoxious “continuous mysterious accidents”-style thrillers that tend to permeate the genre; instead of random death-by-umbrella or scary-guy-in-the-shower incidents driving the plot, the emotion behind death and loss and betrayal gets to take a turn at the wheel, and the game is much better for it.

The Un-Favorite:

As with any game, however, no matter how good the atmosphere, there are some things that I don’t love.

I’m not actually the biggest fan of Harper; while her design is great and her VA does a spectacular job, she’s a little cartoonish among a cast that endeavors to stay as far away from broad stereotypes as possible.

It’s fine to have a large personality, it’s fine that she’s a bit cracked, it’s great that she has her own reasons and motivations beyond “expose the truth” (especially since she’s not interested in exposing the truth, just in proving that Clara’s a murderer) — she’s just really not my cup of tea, and I prefer Harper as the Anonymous Note Leaver to Harper the Conversational Partner.

Even if she does get some of the best lines in the game.

I don’t really have a least favorite moment or puzzle that sticks out to me; there are puzzles I struggle more or less with, but none of them are immersion-breaking or so frustrating that I have to get up and walk away. The ones I love, I enjoy solving; the ones I don’t love, I turn to the walkthrough and finish them up to get on with the story.

The Fix:

So how would I fix Ghost of Thornton Hall?

Even given my small problems with Harper, I’m not sure I’d change her. Sure, she’s a bit Broad for the game, generally speaking, but she’s also another example of what loss can do to a person — it can make you cold and withdrawn, it can make you righteously angry and dismissive…or it can turn you malicious and violent. She’s an important presence regardless of my personal taste, and while I might tweak a line of dialogue or two, it’s important to note that her Persona is just another thing for Nancy to discover and re-discover as she investigates the Thorntons.

While not a perfect game — very few, if any, of the Nancy Drew games qualify for that title — Ghost of Thornton Hall is an excellent entry in the Nancy Drew series as a whole, and in the smaller series of Nancy-centric games. Through it, we get to see what happens to those who are left behind after a tragic, sudden, and even violent loss — and that becomes more and more important as we leave behind the gloomy Georgia island and leap across the pond to Glasgow.