#this references the bible but does not contain spoilers

[chaoticbug]

what if the reason we haven’t gotten any more miraculous season 5 episodes yet is because after the bible leak thomas astruc is scrambling to rewrite season 5 to prove the bible false.

this would not be the first time in the show he clearly changed his plan

[sleeplesssmoll]

Reverse1999 Lore Bible

A reference sheet for Reverse1999. This is a work in progress (format is scuffed as always but I tried 😮‍💨). All information is subject to change as the story unfolds. If anything thing looks off, let me know and I'll get on it right away! Would not want to spread misinformation. That being said, this is a long post with spoilers for global release.

The Storm

The Storm is a widespread disaster first observed in 1999. It marked the end of an era and is the catalyst for the main story.

Humans will suffer “Storm Syndrome” as the Storm draws near. The Symptoms of Storm Syndrome and the mutations around the Storm depend on the era. However, arcanists are protected from Storm Syndrome thanks to their arcanum. Arcansist are able to perceive the changes in the world brought by the Storm but are not immune to reversal, the true horror of the Storm.

“Raindrops” emerge from the ground and rise into the sky along with everything around them once the Storm arrives. They phase through matter. Time reverses into a previous era while everything caught in the Storm disappears. Exceptions to this rule are the St. Pavlov Foundation, Manus Vindictae, and the Timekeeper (I've heard about others but this is strictly global release).

The Foundation's rules state that personnel can turn the Timekeeper for guidance 24 hours before the Storm (in prologue).

Races

Arcanists: A race that contains a unique cell colony allowing them to perform arcane skills (magic, divination, alchemy, etc.). They do not follow reasoning like mankind and instead practice Gnosis. There are two defining features of Gnosis:

1. It can't be verified by an independent 3rd party.

2. It’s impossible to comprehend through reasoning.

Because of this, arcanists are labeled as unpredictable and dangerous by humanity. There is a long history of humans associating arcanum with demons, evil, and witches. Arcanists are also more sensitive to emotions and resistant to potions. Pure-blooded arcanists are stronger than mixed-bloods.

Humans: Humans are the majority in Reverse1999. They follow logic and reason as opposed to Gnosis. Many look down on arcanists and consider them sub-human. However, because of the Storm their technologies and progress are being erased while arcanum flourishes. Humans are vulnerable to insanity because of their logic aligned mindset. When faced with something they cannot comprehend, they can lose their minds.

Groups and Factions

St. Pavlov Foundation (The Foundation): A public institution dedicated to the study of arcanum and the indoctrination of arcanists. They seek children with arcane talents from around the world. They say they strive for peace between arcanists and humanity but peace is not the same as equality. All training and scientific provided appliances by St. Pavlov is to overcome the instability of arcane skills in order to ensure the peace and stability of the human world (Chapter 3-1). In other words, the Foundation is training obedient dogs (hence Pavlolv) to die as martyrs for the sake of humanity. This allows humanity to benefit off of arcanum skills without worry of an uprising from the arcanists kept on the Foundation’s leash. Below is a quote from the game:

“The St. Pavlov Foundation is currently the largest public and official organization which houses arcanists. The foundation has invested a great deal of effort in the protection and supervision of unique children. They are constantly sending manpower all over the world to seek out children with a talent for arcanum. It does not matter where the children are or whether they wish to come along. The children who have been taken in will develop their abilities through rigorous training and eventually take over this seemingly endless mission for the peace of mankind.”

The Foundation’s buildings are immune to the Storm. Both humans and arcanists are safe within its walls.

Manus Vindictae: A terrorist organization that believes in Arcanist Supremacy. They recruit arcanists to fight against humanity and utilize the chaos caused by the Storm to further their agenda. They are the Foundation's biggest enemy and they are still growing. They also know how to manipulate the Storm and can accelerate its arrival.

They rewrite history while the world reverses. This means that they mess with historical events established in the "orginal" timeline. The Valentines day massacre is an example of this. Arcansists were supposed to be killed, but Schneider rescued them and killed human in their stead, thus rewriting history. The Wallstreet crash also happend months earlier than in the orginal timeline.

Here is a quote from Ch 2 of the game:

“Manus Vindictae is an infamous extremist organization. Holding a grudge against humans and contempt for the mixed, these extreme racists only recognize the bodies ruled by arcanist's blood as "mankind." They believe they have the ability and power to change everything. They are dedicated to building a so-called proper world where arcanists will stand neck and neck with gods and enjoy the status they believe they deserve. In that case, humans, arcanists on the human side, and the mixed who tolerate the pollution of arcanist's blood will pay a huge price for their existence.There is no doubt they are lunatics. One of the two reasons for their madness is their brains: they have a strange prefrontal cortex or some unknown neurons; the other reason is hatred: in those dark ages, arcanists were discriminated against, expelled, marginalized, and even slaughtered. The tragedies that happen every day on the fringes of society breed their revenge and keep strengthening this army of darkness. Now they have come onto the stage. What they want is power, freedom, the one and only supreme status, and an overthrown world.”

Manus Vindictae gives their followers Masks claiming it will keep them safe from the Storm. However, a conversation between two followers in Chapter 2-8 Popular Literature reveals this is not the full picture. The Mask does not guarantee their safety and only in the “Sanctuary” are they protected from the Storm’s influence. One of the followers then turns into a monster that can no longer be reasoned with while the other flees (we may have more insight into this later). Keep in mind Manus also likes to feed us false information and must be observed with a critical eye.

Laplace Rehabilitation Center: Laplace provides therapy to arcanists. Patients with stress disorders must retrieve treatment in the rehabilitation center. One of these treatments is artificial somnambulism where dreams are used to treat trauma and find the source of it. Psychubes are used in these dream treatments. Mesmer Jr. works in this department, following in her family's footsteps. She is the one who “treats” Vertin for Type II trauma.

Scientific Computing Research Center: The only branch of Laplace affiliated with Foundation. They are focused on making advancements in technology.

Institution Lorenz: This is the organization X invited Regulus to join. This description comes from Ch 1: A letter with Black Mucus: Founded after the "Storm," Institutum Lorentz is a mysterious organization hidden within but independent of the Laplace Scientific Computing Center. Its primary area of research is the chaos energy of Arcanum. Its members distrust the tech of human civilization and would rather discard them. They're active in various sites of arcane phenomena, secretly searching for the "Original Butterfly." While all of its members' whereabouts remain unknown, Lorentz still has branches all over the world. Our vanguard squad has fought their investigators several times, yet we still haven't found a way into any of their branches."

The House of Integratus: the committee in charge of lawmaking, not just in the Foundation, but in global society. Any affairs related to the human- arcanist relationship will be brought to their table. Delegates of the House of the Integratus are elected to take responsibility for their constituencies. They submit countless proposals to the committee every year. Then the committee will choose one lucky proposal and send it to the next step: all the committee members would gather to debate and vote for the proposal (Ch 4-8 A Ride on the Toboggan).

[drconstellation]

Inside the Dirty Donkey

**Warning! This meta contains spoilers and speculation for S3. Do NOT tag Neil!**

Time to get comfy, folks. Get your drink of choice, be it a cupperty, coffee, or nip of sherry, and find a seat. You’ll definitely want to be sitting down for this one. We’re going to the pub!

The name is apparently a favorite of NG’s, used in his short story “We Can Get Them For You Wholesale.” And it also appears in the Sandman AU.

In the short story above the protagonist is a jilted lover who tries to organize an assassin for his fiancé who is having an affair with another man at their shared workplace. He meets the ‘salesman’ of the firm he contacts at a pub called the Dirty Donkey, and it escalates from there. The story is freely available online, so you can search it up if you really want to read it, it won’t take long. It mentions a pale horse, which is usually what Death rides in on, and is appropriate in the context of that story.

The question we need to ask is how does the name The Dirty Donkey apply to the Good Omens AU? Are there any context to the name at all?

There are several meanings for a dirty donkey:

Its a slang or joke name for a black horse (not particularly a dark horse, that has a different meaning altogether)

A cocktail

A sex position (I’ll let you look that one up yourself…)

Probably the first thing we need to talk about, though is an actual donkey itself, in relation to Jesus, as S2 is full of Jesus references and hints to the Second Coming in S3. Yep, it was all there in front of us, but we were too focused on other things. If you remember your Bible teachings, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, because he came in peace. In ancient times leaders rode horses if they went to war, or if they came in conquest. But arriving by donkey meant you came with peaceful intentions.

But Jesus didn't turn up in S2, you say. And certainly not on any hairy beast. Ah, but he did - metaphorically. Gabriel as Jim turned up - he came up the street, by (the Dirty) Donkey, walking through spilled blood tomatoes, then mentioned his arms were no longer sore (because he had been taken off the cross.) MrPeriod talks more about how Jim represents Jesus here, and it might be worth revisiting it at length another time, as there is quite a bit to unpack there.

There are also the two big golden lions perched on either end of the bar inside the pub, that look rather ominous. The lions are strongly connected to Jesus and his resurrection, representing his return. (I'm still planning to have a better look for more lions in both S1 and S2, but that is still a WIP at the moment.)

There is also the scene in 1941 where the Nazi zombies stagger into the Dirty Donkey and spy on Aziraphale and Crowley through the windows through to the book shop, but all they manage to get is “Banana, fish, gorilla, shoe lace with a dash of nutmeg.” It sounds a bit like a cocktail reference – well, the nutmeg is definitely a GO ref to a certain cocktail – but the cocktail called a Dirty Donkey has cinnamon in it, in the form of cinnamon schnapps, not nutmeg – plus chocolate liqueur and rum. So maybe not.

But perhaps the most important thing we have to examine is the conversation about Jane Austin that Aziraphale and Crowley have in the pub, in S2E2. Because its got so many levels you just about need a break for extra oxygen half way down. Ha! And you thought it was a couple of funny throw-away lines about how Aziraphale saw human romance...

OK, this is the section of dialogue we are going to look at:

AZIRAPHALE: If you're going to invoke fiction, you might as well do it properly. CROWLEY: Properly? AZIRAPHALE: You remember Jane Austen? CROWLEY: Yeah. I'm not gonna forget her in a hurry, am I? The brains behind the 1810 Clerkenwell Diamond Robbery. Brandy smuggler. Master spy. What a piece of work. AZIRAPHALE: She wrote books. Novels. CROWLEY: Jane? Austen? AZIRAPHALE: Yes! CROWLEY: Whoa, bit of a dark horse. Novels, eh? AZIRAPHALE: Yes. They were very good. CROWLEY: Well. No, I'm just surprised, that's all. You think you know someone. AZIRAPHALE: She had balls. CROWLEY: Well.... AZIRAPHALE: Cotillion balls. People would gather and do some formal dancing and then realize they had misunderstood each other and were actually deeply in love.

Ready to dive into the levels on the Jane Austen conversation? Let's go...

Level 1: It’s a conversation about the novelist Jane Austen, and it sounds like they both met her, but they remember her in different ways – and Crowley’s memory is rather surprising!

Level 2: There is a mention of a robbery. This makes the parallel with the 1967 scene in S1E3 Hard Times, where Crowley has a secret meeting in the Dirty Donkey to plan a robbery to steal holy water from a church. The robbery in the above conversation involves diamonds (are you taking note/s? This is important!) from Clerkenwell, a district of London of some notoriety. It was famous for it watchmakers and jewelers, but it was also the home of Oliver Cromwell, who has a link to the 1650 date mentioned in S2E1 and the Eccles cakes, to Charles Dickens (author of A Tale of Two Cities, a book of note for GO) Oh, and both times Crowley is wearing a "Tactical Turtleneck", which others have noted he wears when he is doing his own master spy work, such planning or discussing robberies, or sneaking into Heaven to rob them of information!

Level 3: There is Aziraphale’s idea about how a romance should be conducted, by hosting a cotillion ball with formal dancing, because he's read all those romantic novels by Austen. And we get to see that played out in S2E5 in the eldritch ball. Crowley's idea of a romance was to get caught in the rain and kiss, then - vavoom!

Level 4: Why mention this apparently fictional side to an author of fictional romance? Well, on one hand, it’s an interesting but dark set-up for a joke later at the beginning of S2E6. I ended up discussing it at length here, but the short of it is that it is our usual human custom not to speak ill of the dead, and this is a form of extreme black-and-white thinking. Here, Aziraphale speaks of the good/white side of Jane Austen, that is well known, but Crowley speaks of the black/supposedly forgotten or unspoken bad side of Austen.

Level 5: Here’s the S3 information. Have you been paying attention? Did you take note? The parallels were the robberies between a church, and diamonds? That she was a brandy smuggler? Do you know where they smuggled brandy from? And do you know where Austen actually lived? On the South Downs, overlooking the Channel to France…

Whew. I think I need a drink after that. Cheers!

[Edit: I've recently finished a meta on the Bentley and how that relates to black horses, and it's occurred to me why the ethereal lift, or "hellevator," is in the entrance to the Dirty Donkey. Black horses are symbolic spirit guides between the worlds of the living and the dead, so this makes the perfect place to put the lift!]

[puddleofpins]

Why Catnap/Theodore worships the Prototype

This theory contains spoilers for Poppy Playtime Chapter 3. Buckle up, this post is not short. tw for mentions of abuse, many mentions of Christianity/Catholicism and its teachings, enforced religious (specifically Christianity) doctrine, mentions of fictional torture/punishment and inhumane experiments

I’ve seen a few people noticing Catnap/Theodore Grambell was…religious in his devotion to the Prototype, and asking why he’s like this. There’s some hints and pieces to put together that puzzle

1. Catnap uses many words/phrases associated with Christianity (and pretty much all of its branched off religions) to refer to the Prototype and what he means to him. Such as:

• “Salvation”- which means liberation/given freedom from suffering, sin, and evil (referring to the experiments being done on the children by the scientists) This word is used 114 times in the Old Testament of the Bible

• “Rejoice in Him” - Luke 1:47: “and my spirit rejoices in God my savior”

• “my somniferous flock” - referring to Jesus, the son of God, being a shepherd of sheep and also his disciples (yes this does imply Catnap sees himself as a higher being, but only after he is turned into Catnap)

2. Having a shrine to the Prototype, and holding his hands up in prayer/worship to him, like a priest or pastor (or now that I look at it, like Jesus is depicted in many statues)

3. Punishing “heretics” like Dogday, who don’t believe in Catnap’s belief that the Prototype is their savior (this honestly even resembles crucifixion {a punishment used against criminals in the time of the origins of Christianity} with Dogday being held up in a ✝️-like position)

But again, why does he do this? Theodore Grambell seems like a normal child up until then.

We gotta look at the location of Playtime Co.

Now, we haven’t yet been given an exact location, but in a poster in one of the prior chapters it says the Midwest, referring to the Midwestern region in America

doing a few google searches, I found this

Catholic churches, and (I’m assuming the orphanages they hosted) run on donations, and that’s why they are not taxed by the states that they’re in. Oftentimes these orphanages had extremely poor conditions because of low funding and in turn high rates of abuse and even death of the children.

Playtime Co. could’ve bought out countless Catholic orphanages with “donations” to the churches they’re connected to. This would’ve been extremely easy with the lack of regulations and the power of money

There aren’t anymore traditional orphanages in the states today, but 300 is not a number to scoff at. And I’m aware that orphanages in the USA were all closed by 1960, but Poppy was created in 1950. I believe that MOB Entertainment got wonky with the timeline for storytelling purposes because creating Living Sentient Toys in 1950 does not align with real life technological advancements.

What I’m getting at is: I believe Theodore Grambell and other orphans were bought from Catholic orphanages (not all of them of course, just a good chunk of the orphans). Either that, or Theodore was an orphan attending a Catholic school, who was then bought out by Playtime Co.

Think about it, at first, the Playcare must’ve been like heaven to little Theo, especially in comparison to the possible abuse he experienced due to being raised in a Catholic orphanage. Everything is colorful. The adults are so nice and caring, unlike those mean and strict nuns. There’s even toys who can talk and interact with them! All of their needs are provided for, and there’s even dedicated areas to play and have fun!

but then Theo probably starts to see the cracks in this oasis, this heaven:

• Playcare is literally underground and the children are not allowed to go outside

• Anytime one of the children experiences something horrific or abnormal because of a feature of Playcare/Playtime Co. (like Marie Payne who become Mommy Longlegs, or the mentioned “Kevin” in the third tape found in Ch.3) they’re never seen again

• The orphans being said “selected” by the doctors, instead of saying that they were adopted, in I believe the 4th tape

And definitely a lot of other signs I haven’t mentioned, because there must’ve been much more than just what’s been listed.

So Theo starts to get a little wary of what’s around him, a little less trusting of the adults who have been taking care of him and his fellow orphans. This place becomes a little less like heaven and a little more false.

but then he meets a friend!!!!

{insert the picture Theo drew of the Prototype under his bed, because I’m on mobile and have already hit the limit of 10 pictures per mobile post}

A friend that only interacts with him. A friend that is only seen by him, only heard by him, that disappears whenever anyone else comes around. A friend that people don’t believe is real. A friend that sees and hears everything. A friend that gives him little missions because that friend has deemed him worthy of them.

Do you know who that friend sounds like?

God. Or one of the angels sent by God.

THEN on one of these missions, Theodore accidentally gets hurt. He’s electrocuted and close to dying, but his friend who was watching over him saves him from death.

And even after Theo almost dies, he stills tries his hardest to complete these missions give to him by his friend. Because why wouldn’t he? This friend is so special. This friend saved his life because Theo almost died trying to complete the mission he gave him. This friend who is so knowing to the point of being “divine”. This friend who is so similar to the “God” that the nuns he spent his early days with talked about nonstop, he has to be Him.

This leads to Theo being found out and taken as a test subject himself, and subsequently being turned into Catnap; which meant going through horrific and painful experiments. Theo may interpret this as “punishment from following the words and teachings of his God” (definitely an equivalent of Jesus being tortured before his death on the cross), so he might consider himself a bit of a martyr.

Now Theo is no longer a little human boy. Theo is Catnap, and Catnap is much more powerful than humans. He became Catnap because he followed what his Lord told him to do. He was reborn as Catnap because he was such a devoted follower, and now he can complete his Lord’s work even better than he could as a human (literally paralleling Jesus being resurrected).

If we want to get even deeper into this theory and the Christianity parallels, look at Theo’s age and when Catnap was created. It says on the wiki that he was born in the 1980s, and he’s 7 at the time he’s introduced to Playtime Co, which means the year is now 1987. Catnap is made in 1990. That’s 3 years. Jesus after he was beaten, tortured, crucified, and killed, was sealed in a cave. It took 3 days for Jesus to resurrect.

So yeah, Theo was a kid from a Catholic orphanage that was bought out by Playtime Co., who was indoctrinated into Catholicism because he was taught it at such a young age. He’s freed from a hell of an orphanage, to be brought to a false heaven, which leads him to meet his God. That’s why Catnap acts the way he does.

[starrierknight]

𝟎𝟐𝟓. 𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐟𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐬 — ��𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬

This contains spoilers for my day 25 kinktober fic.

wc— 2.2k

cws/tags— death, blood, vampirism, love/sex as a religion and worship (please let me know if I missed anything!)

TITLE

The title, of course, is a shortened version of the idiom “to bite the hand that feeds you”, which means to act poorly towards the person who is helping or has helped you. Not only is the title a reference to the actual events in the fic (Satoru literally bites the reader’s palm to feed off their blood), but it also functions to call into question whom the idiom is directed towards.

Upon first reading, it is easy to see that the idiom is in application to Satoru. This is supported by the reader’s words:

“I’ve been so good to you, and you’re talking back.”

Here, we see that from the reader insert’s perspective, letting Satoru feed from them equates to being “good”. While this is true—Satoru is a vampire who has killed and feasted upon innocent human beings for centuries, the reader does not owe him the kindness of their blood—we must also consider the application of the idiom in reverse.

Upon further inspection, it is more clearly seen that the idiom is also applicable to the reader. After Satoru has fed off the reader’s blood and treated them so reverently after performing oral, even going so far as to soothe the reader after they achieve their orgasm, we must come to terms with these actions are undeniably good. With this in mind, the reader’s newfound reluctance to kill Satoru is given new depth.

On the one hand, the reader is no longer certain that killing him is the right thing to do. On the other, despite their reluctance, the reader is still considering their duty as a vampire slayer—that they should kill Satoru on principle, regardless of his expression of humanity.

The final line of the fic underscores the ultimatum: “Though after sharing a little death with him, could you kill him?” 

EPIGRAPH

Here is the entire quote. In bold is the section used for the epigraph of my fic:

“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live. If any love is shown us we should recognise that we are quite unworthy of it. Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine, non sum dignus should be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it.”  ― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

While the original quote is not about oral sex, in the context of it being an epigraph to this particular fic of mine, it is encouraged to be interpreted that way. This was chosen because the fic blurs the line between sex and worship. 

In Matthew 8:8, Jesus is approached by a centurion who asks Him to heal his servant. Since the centurion knows that a good Jewish man like Jesus would cause scandal by coming into the home of a Roman soldier, the centurion says “Domine non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum sed tantum dic verbo et sanabitur puer meus.”

In the New American Bible, this text is rendered “Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word and my servant will be healed.”

Domine, non sum dignus -> “Lord, I am not worthy”

LANGUAGE CHOICE

The Power of Names

“Speak, monster,” you said in a cool, steady tone. [...] “Oh, come on. Why the formalities?” he taunted in an airy whisper, a smug lilt to his tone. “Don’t you think we’re past that?” [...] “Tell me your name before I slay you tonight,” you spat, your will unwavering. His eyes drank you in with an uncanny hunger. “Gojo Satoru. Though, please, Satoru will do just fine.”

Satoru’s smugness and lingering pride function as a way of veiling his desperation for intimacy in his last moments. Despite the reader’s attempt to distance themselves from Satoru, he insists on being called by his first name. It’s worth noting that despite Satoru and the reader not having a close relationship at this point in time, calling somebody by their first name in Japan usually means some kind of close kinship or relationship.

To kill

- “Tell me your name before I slay you tonight,” you spat, your will unwavering. - “Have your taste before I slaughter you, Satoru.” - “Where’s the beast I came to slaughter tonight?” - “I’ll teach you manners before I slay you tonight.” (<- fun fact! This is actually a reference to this fic) - “You can kill me now, and I’ll die human,” he murmured.

slay: to kill in a violent way

slaughter: the killing of many people cruelly and unfairly, especially in a war OR the killing of animals for meat

kill: to cause someone or something to die OR to stop or destroy a relationship, activity, or experience OR to drink all of something

Not once in the entire fic does the reader say in speech that they will “kill” Satoru. However, if you interpret the final line of the fic as the reader’s own train of thought:

“Though after sharing a little death with him, could you kill him?”

It could be argued that this changes.

In this fic, to “kill” and to die are incredibly intimate acts and are implied to be signifiers of humanity.

Play On Words

“The blood. The blood in the chalice—that bait you left for me. Was it yours? Did you… alter it?”

alter: to change something, usually slightly, or to cause the characteristics of something to change

altar: a structure with a flat top, often shaped like a table, that is used in some religious ceremonies, for example as a place to put important religious objects

When writing this particular line, I kept in mind that “alter” and “altar” are homophones. With this in mind, it is easy to argue that Satoru drinking the reader’s blood they used as a way to lure him is symbolic of drinking wine at Communion, which is done to commemorate the death of Christ and to represent the mutual communion of believers with each other.

“Though after sharing a little death with him, could you kill him?”

The phrase “a little death” comes from the French saying, “La petite mort” which means "the brief loss or weakening of consciousness" and in modern usage refers specifically to "the sensation of post orgasm as likened to death”.

In the most literal sense, the final line is in reference to the reader’s orgasm brought on by Satoru. However, it is also in reference to the lapse in judgment from both parties (the reader is a vampire slayer who should be killing the vampire, and Satoru is a vampire who should be fighting for his own survival). 

The word “sharing” is incredibly important—this is the first real moment where the reader and Satoru have been ‘united’ over something.

Last Meal

“Please,” the longing etched into his contorted expression spoke of desire both primal and inexplicable. “One last request before it’s over. Please.”

A condemned prisoner's last meal is a customary ritual preceding execution. In many countries, the prisoner may, within reason, select what the last meal will be.

Dialogue tags

- “You disgust me,” you hissed, pressing the blade to his neck so that it was perilously close to breaking his skin. - "Did I say you could bite?" you hissed through gritted teeth.

While “hissing” is to say something in a quiet angry way, it is also associated with angry/frightened animals—and vampires. Not once does Satoru ever hiss. 

JUXTAPOSITION

A brief overview of some of the juxtaposing themes/imagery:

Humanity/Monstrosity

- The raw power that you expected to emanate from a monster so ancient, so sinister, seemed to have dulled into something strangely human. His aura of malevolence was overshadowed by a pitiable aura of need. - He pressed closer to the flat of the blade—the dichotomy of his action hauntingly human.

Predator/Prey (Vampire/Vampire Slayer)

The tableau is one of stark contrasts—the resolute hunter and the feeble prey, the chilling void of the night and the warmth of desperate need.

Blood/Nectar

- A languid, serpentine motion as his tongue darted out, collecting the remnants of blood, your blood, that clung to his lips. The taste, metallic and potent as you knew it to be, was like the sweetest nectar to him. - The taste of your blood, infused with the sweet essence of your very being, flooded his senses.

Angels/Demons

- His eyelids parted, revealing pupils dilated to a darkness. Those eyes, a chromatic anomaly amidst the desolation of his existence, were a cerulean that defied nature's palette. They were too blue, too vivid—a celestial fragment from the vast expanse of the heavens that had fallen into his wretched possession. - He was disturbingly beautiful: Far too angelic in appearance, though you supposed it was a façade to lure in his prey. 

What is Seen/What is Said

Note how the descriptions consistently portray Satoru as beautiful, even if the reader says otherwise.

- Satoru’s head, heavy with the weight of his longing, found its place on your lap, a gesture that radiated a delicate surrender. His silvery hair, like silk against your legs, contrasted starkly with the increasingly depraved display. “You really are vile,” you breathed, the sting from the wound shooting up your arm.

Gentility/Depravity

- His lips sought redemption in a sequence of fervent kisses. They trailed across the delicate skin of your wrist, your knuckles, and the tips of your fingers. The gesture, if not for the lingering urgency of his movements, would have held a sweet tenderness, an attempt to mend what had been broken. Amid this tangled web of feelings, the grinding of his arousal against you persisted, a relentless echo of his desire. The moans that escaped him seemed to punctuate each kiss, a wretched symphony of need.

Pleasure/Pain

See: the whole fic lol.

LOVE AS [XYZ]

Love As Religion

Depth of Emotion: Describing love as religion suggests that it is a deeply held and fundamental aspect of human experience. This metaphor highlights the emotional intensity and significance of love in one's life. Love, like religion, can inspire devotion, commitment, and a sense of purpose.

Spiritual Connection: Love as a religion implies that love can create a spiritual or transcendent connection between individuals. It suggests that love can be a source of meaning and purpose, much like religion is for many people. This metaphor can be used to explore the idea of finding transcendence and spiritual fulfilment in love.

Moral and Ethical Considerations: Just as religions often have moral and ethical guidelines, the concept of "love as religion" can be used to explore the moral and ethical dimensions of love. It raises questions about how one should treat their loved ones and how love can be a force for good in the world.

Sacrifice and Devotion: Love as religion can also be a metaphor for the sacrifices and devotion that people are willing to make for the ones they love. It emphasises the idea that love can inspire acts of selflessness and dedication, much like religious devotion.

Love As Worship

Reverence and Adoration: When love is compared to worship, it emphasises the idea of reverence and adoration. Love is portrayed as a powerful force that demands admiration and respect. This metaphor underscores the idea that love can be all-consuming and awe-inspiring.

Rituals and Symbolism: Love as worship may involve rituals and symbolic acts that signify one's commitment and devotion to a loved one. Just as religious ceremonies and rituals have symbolic meaning, the act of showing love can be filled with symbolism and meaningful gestures.

Transcendence: Love as worship can also suggest a form of transcendence, where individuals elevate their loved ones to a higher status in their lives. It can explore the idea that love can lift people beyond their ordinary existence and provide a sense of purpose and meaning.

Sacrifice and Submission: Like religious worship may involve sacrifice and submission to a higher power, love as worship can be a way of expressing the sacrifices and compromises one is willing to make for the sake of their loved one.

RELIGION AS A SEMANTIC FIELD

In literature, a semantic field, also known as a lexical field or semantic domain, refers to a group of words or terms related by their common theme or subject matter. These words are typically grouped together because they share a connection in meaning and are often used to convey a particular concept, idea, or image. The purpose of using a semantic field is to create a specific atmosphere, convey a particular emotion, or emphasize a theme within a literary work.

kneeling, serpentine/serpent, celestial, heaven, wretched, damned, angelic, chalice, transcended, reverence, offering, blood, artistic, surrender, testament, declaration, redemption, plea, lust, confession, power, bliss, monster, beast, God, sculpted, submission, painted, refrain, bloodlust, surreal, obedience, kiss, mercy, haven, devotion, divine, masterpiece, worship, manifest, bore, ardent, adore, tribute, gratitude, mantra, token, appreciation, creature

[crit-failed-charisma-checks]

Crowley And Goats

Before we get started, I want to let everyone know that this post will contain discussion of Christianity, Bible verses, and content that some/many Christians might find blasphemous. If any of that is going to cause you mental distress, please look out for yourself. Also, spoilers for Good Omens Season 2.

I want to talk about Crowley and goats for a minute. There are two times we have a reference to Crowley interacting with goats: when he "destroys" Job's goats and when, high on Laudanum, he asks Aziraphale if he sounds like a goat. And one of these is heart warming, and one is hilarious.

But here's the thing. There's a fairly well-known passage from Matthew that talks about sheep and goats that changes the perspective of these scenes. I'm using the NIV translation for this particular post, for no reason other than it was the first translation Google produced.

There are two parts of Matthew 25: 31-46 I want to draw attention to. The first is the allegory of the sheep and the goats: TL;DR version is that the sheep are the "righteous" people who will go to Heaven and the goats are the "cursed" people who will go to hell.

Now this is relevant for two reasons: a) Crowley saves the goats by turning them into doves, which are a bird that is frequently used in the Bible as a messenger/sign/symbol of God and b) Crowley, defenses lowered by an intoxicant, asks Aziraphale if he really sounds like a goat. Which, yes to all of that, because I didn't need my heart anyway.

But there's another component to that passage. In that passage, the sheep will ask what makes them righteous and be told by the returned/returning Christ that the reasons they are righteous are because "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me." And when the sheep ask "when did we do those things", the answer is 'truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’.

Now, who do we know that has, over the course of two seasons encouraged an angel to eat and drink, offered the angel a home when it looked like his bookshop had burned down, removed stains from an angel's clothes, and broken the angel out of a prison? [1]

I think there is also some interesting discussion to be had around the concept of the scapegoat and sacrificial goat, but I want to be careful here, since Christianity has done significant harm by forcibly retrofitting the Tanakh into the bible and my background is entirely WASPy. But especially with the "I forgive you" that broke all our hearts just as much as it did Crowley's, I think there's definitely something there, too.

Also, Aziraphale does almost all of these things for an amnesiac, cast out archangel, but I am focusing on Crowley with this post [2]

What's Good Omens content without footnotes?

[soapver4]

Bible of Hydrogel Pillars and Dramaland Colosseums

Merch idea: A STEAM (STEM+Arts) storyboard, with film on its spine and its page frames, motivating jaded STEM career builders through schematic illustrations of technoscientific research undergirding numerous drama plots. The tagline? "Lost seriousness."

Life feels like a fraud at times, and many STEM professionals and students may be no stranger to this sentiment. Heroic childhood dreams tend to give way to a daily reality of grunt work (see: debugging, buffer preparation, glassware washing, repetitive experimental steps) and mundane survival pressure (see: low remuneration for much of an academic career, uncooperative team members, controversial management styles, time-wasting tit-for-tat for unintentional ego bruising, funding application paperwork). The culmination of long periods of work is often a tiny jigsaw piece of the full picture, while any societally useful application from that picture can take up to decades to gain traction. Soulless bill payments and empty glory from a list of publications of questionable relevance to outsiders can come to look like the actual point of the career, despite knowing the importance of the income, the reputation, delayed gratification and selfless work attitudes.

Perhaps personal tragedy highlighting the need to play a part, however small, in technological breakthroughs would spur on burnt-out STEMers, but that is neither readily applicable to all disciplines nor an experience you want to put everyone through. If reality cannot or has ceased to be a motivator, test out the unfathomable, counterintuitive move of pulling in fictional worlds as motivators, as STEMers shall be doing through the storyboard. Secretly advance a forbidden but now financially risk-free media career as you picture yourself laying a brick for the intelligence groundwork propping up invisible story universes every time you tweak a line of code, run a machine or mix a liquid concoction. It is an act of rebellion at any hypocritical narrative of techno-heroism, a cathartic campaign of self-deprecation, and a soothing PSA that nobody is alone in their disillusionment. Similar rationale applies to other careers.

Sample entries are as follows [spoiler caution w.r.t. various scifi series], although the storyboard needs to include a note that not all the dramas are factually accurate or realistic:

Grow supermuscles you'll later shove in fury for the enemy spy who saved your life.

Various annotations in the diagram refer to the proteins, cell culture media and supplements, and experimented cell types. bFGF, for example, is basic fibroblast growth factor, a protein maintaining stem cells capable of developing into different cell types. hPSCs are such stem cells from humans, i.e. human pluripotent stem cells.

Wash your hands of a psychoboss and iniquitous space politics in exquisite style.

Nanofiltered water is no doubt the means to do that. CNTs are carbon nanotubes. PANEN is nanomembrane made of polyacrylonitrile (PAN), a polymer resin resistant to most chemicals, and produced through electrospinning, which uses voltage to stretch a charged fluid jet containing PAN into fibers. Janus membranes are membranes with opposite properties at their interfaces.

Scrutinize this biological circuit for potential points of malicious intervention by political operatives who want to (*stares with dizziness at long rhyme ahead*) revert a psychopath who gained empathy after a brain part transplant back to a proper, violent psychopath so that they have enough murder stats to prove their point about the societal danger of psychopaths. Does those shadowy players' perverse logic make the prospect of a lifetime spent in front of fume hoods much more alluring than that of one in this drama universe, in spite of your ardent love of various characters and redemption arcs?

The MAO-A gene on the X chromosome encodes an enzyme (monoamine oxidase A, i.e. MAO-A), expressed in the prefrontal cortex etc., that degrades neurotransmitters such as serotonin which control impulses. Changes to the chain of events may raise risk of violence.

Build an AI version of you that comes alive amid rain and thunder claps and then mentally transports you back to the aughts' Norway, Oslo, the woods along the path from school, the afternoons like nights, where you were walking with your first love. Je te veux.

In the diagram is an experiment that tests the transferability of features in machine learning architectures known as deep neural networks. Through transfer learning, wherein you initialize a new neural network with base or base to middle layers from a good neural network trained on a large dataset for a different but related task, you do not have to construct the new neural network from scratch. That reduces new data need and saves you computation resources and time that you can spare for healing and for Erik Satie.

Check out the alt text of all images.

[twh-news]

'Loki' Full Season 1 Review: The Most Frustrating Thing Is How Incomplete the Story Feels

Editor's note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of Loki, "For All Time. Always."

[TWH-NEWS note: Tom is NOT confirmed to be on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness even though the article so claims. Marvel hasn't confirmed it.]

The Loki season finale is perhaps one of the most vexing episodes of television I have seen in quite some time. The Disney+ sci-fi drama, tracking the events following Loki's (Tom Hiddleston) escape from the pre-established timeline, was never confirmed to be an ongoing show versus a limited series, with rumors of a second season on the horizon from the beginning, so the biggest twist delivered by "For All Time. Always." ended up being confirmation of a Season 2 with a post-credits title card.

However, while there were other key reveals made during the episode, those reveals left behind plenty of story to explore in future seasons. Too much story. There's a difference between a few dangling plot threads and a mess of string, and the staggering number of questions left unresolved by "For All Time. Always." crosses a line when it comes to completion — especially given the fact that there's no clear sense of when the show might return, and the real story being told is much bigger than the fate of one mischievous scamp.

In general, every episode of this show was beautifully made, with immense credit going to director Kate Herron, head writer Michael Waldron, and the creative team. The cast of known all-stars like Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, blended with new all-stars like Sophia Di Martino and Wunmi Mosaku, did a remarkable job of grounding even the most fantastical moments in raw humanity, and the writing popped with verve and wit. Also, Loki does come full circle on what was its original raison d'etre — the redemption of a character who literally was plucked out of the timeline at his worst, having attacked Manhattan with an alien force so destructive that the Earth needed a whole damn team of superheroes to stop him. On this score, the show was wildly successful, breaking down Loki's sense of grandeur and purpose in the first episode and then slowly but surely rebuilding him into a man capable of evolving beyond his past. Loki did more to examine a single character's psychology and motivations than we've ever seen in the context of the MCU, and all of the progress and growth made by the character, as a result, feels truly earned.

However, if Loki's redemption was the only thing this show had been about, it would have been a very boring show, and Loki was far from boring. The official theme of the series was "What makes a Loki a Loki?" but the real issues being raised were far more existential; in so many ways, this was a show about faith and free will, an undercurrent that deserves more exploration and frankly appreciation, especially after the questions and themes left dangling by the last episode.

This element proved to be key to so much of the show's construction, especially when it comes to the TVA, which basically functions as a religious order — its devotees slavishly sacrificing their lives to the cause of protecting the Sacred Timeline. It's not subtle, especially when the dark side of it is revealed, those devotees learning that their service happened against their will. "We can't take away people's free will, can't you see that?" Mobius pleads with Ravonna in their final scene together, before she walks away in something resembling agreement with him, telling him that she's going in search of free will herself.

Loki Season 1, by the end, becomes a show not just about a crisis of faith, but about an apocalypse. Every time a story about apocalypses comes up, I find it impossible to forget that the Greek word from which the term originates actually means "revelation." That's why the part of the Bible about the world ending is called the Book of Revelations, but beyond that, the definition serves as a reminder of why endings can matter. Endings are beginnings, in some ways. A painful breakup reveals the flaws in what might have seemed like a loving relationship. Extreme climate change is a revelation regarding humanity's callous attitude towards its impact on the environment. For the characters of Loki — perhaps the entire MCU — the apocalypse they're facing following the destruction of the Sacred Timeline also means the revelation of what lives they left behind.

Certainly there's a ton of room for speculation as to what lies ahead for these characters, but the fact is that the next chapter of Loki's journey won't even be told on Disney+, as Hiddleston is reportedly in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and there's no telling when we might return to resolve the events of the Season 1 finale. Cliffhangers are one thing; anyone who grew up watching '90s TV learned the hard way how to handle the dramatic season endings of The X-Files or Star Trek: The Next Generation. But Loki didn't dangle its characters off a cliff — it pushed them off the edge, leaving them suspended in mid-air for who knows how long.

Back in the days of The X-Files you at least knew that whatever jaw-dropping cliffhanger the season finale had just delivered would be addressed by the season premiere in just a few months. (Maybe as many as six months, depending on the baseball season.) That's a sense of certainty that Loki fans do not have the luxury of enjoying; based on where the conversations around a second season currently stand, it could be a while before the contracts are even signed. Conservatively, at this point, it feels unlikely that we'll get a second season of Loki until near the end of 2022, and given that the first season took over two years from its announcement to now to actually debut, 2023 doesn't feel like too much of a stretch. Maybe Owen Wilson and Gugu Mbatha-Raw get to make cameos in Doctor Strange 2 as well? Nothing is possible and everything is possible. We just have to wait for the answer, and in the meantime stew in dissatisfaction.

"Only one person gets free will. The one in charge," Ravonna tells Mobius — implicitly referring to He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors). Who, speaking of, is now dead, Sylvie having completed her one primary quest to revenge herself upon the ones who took her life away. That, combined with the Wizard of Oz parallels, makes this a show that's fascinating to parse (Sylvie literally killed God!), but frustratingly incomplete in its themes. Literally as the episode officially ended on the visage of Kang enshrined as the ruler of the TVA, I said out loud "Well, there's going to be a Season 2," and I suppose that thanks are owed to Marvel and Disney+ for not leaving that element in suspence for more than two minutes and two seconds.

But if I have a religion, it's my belief in the power of storytelling, how the myths we create for ourselves and others can shape lives and hopefully make them better. One tenet of that is the idea that great stories deserve some sense of completion. So, the first season of Loki committed a pretty grievous sin.

[inherhouseshewaitsdreaming]

Review: Midnight Mass

The first part of this article will be a spoiler free review. The second part, below the warning line, will contain spoilers. This section will normally contain more detailed opinion and analysis, which is the main part of the article.

Quick Review

I haven’t seen the anything else by Mike Flanagan. What watching Midnight Mass tells me is that I really need to change that, but that I might struggle to get through the early part of his series. At first is was incredibly slow to the point where I considered giving up. It felt bloated, full of side characters and seemingly irrelevant stories.

The show is based on a small island community. You start with Riley Flynn, a former resident of the island as he returns after being in prison for killing a girl while driving drunk. He was the success story turned failure - he reached great heights and then fell from them. With him, we experience a community that is slowly dying. Its industry is failing, people are leaving. And in the midst of this comes a young priest who it appears can work miracles.

What follows is a show that draws heavily on horror fiction of the past and combines it with an exploration of organised religion, faith and madness that I found satisfying and interesting. Its really hard to say much more about this show without spoilers because so much of it is tied up in the use of a very traditional horror element. The show also had several big twists, but I did see them coming (with one exception, discussed below). That didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the show - probably the opposite.

Midnight Mass is not perfect, but I thoroughly enjoyed it by the end. By the time it was over, the justification for the slow start became apparent, and the slow pacing early on served to emphasise the speed at which things happened later on. I have seen reviews that disagreed, but I think this show played to my interests.

Turn back now if you don’t want spoilers.

Analysis

The Vampire Myth

Midnight Mass draws lightly, but specifically on the on a traditional horror tropes of its main mythos - vampires. I saw references to Dracula. Father Paul arrives back on the island in the middle of a storm, bearing a large box (similar to Dracula’s arrival in England in the novel). The vampire itself looks like Max Schreck’s Count Orlok from the film Nosferatu (1922) which was an unofficial filming of Dracula.

The use of the imagery of the vampire here is pointed because at no point is the angel ever described as a vampire (though it is obvious). I think these references are being used to tell you about the vampire you are seeing here. This vampire is not your friend and there is no sparkle in sight. It is a monsters whose sole drive is to feed.

The play here is that Father Paul/Monseigneur Pruitt sees the vampire and thinks it is an angel. When Father Paul describes the pilgrimage of Monseigneur Pruitt, he describes a man sadly descended into senility. The pilgrimage, far from being a wonder, is a thing of terror. When he wakes after the attack - young and freed from the prison of his own mind - he sees only a miracle. And vampires don’t perform miracles - angels do. Angels who, in the Bible, are often beings of terror (the show explains this several times).

From here on we play on the vampire myth again. When Father Paul gives the blood of the vampire to his congregation, he does so during the ritual of mass. Catholic mass involves drinking wine and calling it ‘the blood of Christ’. It is through rituals such as mass that the faithful achieve eternal life (via acceptance into heaven). It is via that ritual that further miracles happen. The disabled walk, the old grow young. In both the Christian afterlife and the vampire myth, the believer drinks blood and has to die to achieve eternal life.

Faith

I’m going to touch briefly on this because I found it interesting. The show also takes pains to show us different types of faith. There are a range of views on Christian faith in particular. From faith lost (Riley) to faith followed to the point of madness (so many characters, but I feel especially Leeza’s parents). Bev’s character is glorious - faith wielded as a weapon, selectively smiting the lesser beings around her. Bev’s faith, even more than that of the Monseigneur, is her identity.

This is contrasted with other types of faith. The faith of the Muslim - a faith that is classed as “other” by many, even though they share many similarities. Sarah, the town doctor, is of course a scientist who does not believe in miracles, but her devotion to science is portrayed as a kind of of faith. This is reinforced in Erin’s final scene when she talks about the afterlife in terms of the laws of thermodynamics and matter.

Protagonist

I said by the end we understood why, rather than focus on the protagonist, the show ambled around all of the characters early on. That twist I didn’t see? It was the one where we discovered that Riley, who is the view point of the early episodes, and who is emphasised in the trailer and the description, is not really the protagonist. He dies at the end of episode five, before the finale begins.

Which raises the question of who is? As I said, the show wanders along early on, ensuring all of its characters get screen time. I think that’s because the protagonist of this show is not a person, its a collective. The show is about how the community responds to things. It is the community who experiences the events of the show and ultimately dies. Those that survive are two of the children, reinforcing the themes of eternal life explored via the vampire/mass comparison with a third form of eternal life - eternal life through children. The community survives through Leeza and Warren.

The Cult of Midnight Mass

The definitions of a cult are complex. The line between a cult and a religion isn’t really a line so much as a gradient. The actual line is often defined only by whether the group are acceptable to those in power or not. And further, a religion may vary in its implementation such that it both is and is not a cult in different places, or at different times. When did the faith and practice of a small Catholic community progress from being a religion to being a cult? What changed about that practice to make it a cult? Because, in Midnight Mass, it is undoubtedly a cult.

Definitions of a Cult

Margaret Thaler Singer defines a cult as being related to three core features:

The origin of the group and the role of the leader;

The power structure, or relationship between the leader/s and the followers; and

The use of a coordinated programme of persuasion (brainwashing).

In Midnight Mass, the cult had already been in existence for some time. In a small, isolated community everything had come to revolve around their church. The Monseigneur had very much been the leader to whom everyone looked and the group had given substantial amounts of money to him (for the pilgrimage) and Bev (for the community centre, which she named after Pruitt). It had been on the decline, but with Paul/Pruitt’s return, he once again becomes the focus.

Following Singer’s definitions, the leader is self-appointed, claims a mission and special knowledge, is charismatic and determined and centres veneration on themselves. The last one seems questionable at first glance, because we are used to the idea of priests being the representatives of God and centring veneration on Him. However, in a different context, the same actions can be seen very differently.

Addressing structure we again meet the criteria. The community is authoritarian. Partially, in its adherence to the Christian faith, the supremacy of traditional occupations, etc. But also very literally, in the way Paul/Pruitt enforces his choice on everyone and in the glorious tyrant that is Bev. The group is exclusive, constantly emphasizing how its way of life is better than that of the mainland (which represents corruption) and most certainly has a double set of ethics. Bev and Paul/Pruitt act in ways that go against the ethics of their faith repeatedly.

The programme of persuasion is the traditional role of the church, amplified by the community’s isolation to make it all-encompassing. We see ample evidence of religious zealotry and of the shift in viewpoint that lets people like Leeza’s parents accept that their priest has murdered someone and hide it from the others. The faithful are quite happy to kill for their faith. Paul/Pruitt’s discussion of faith in the AA meetings he holds with Riley are this in action - hiding under the guise of something else, he is attempting to recruit the lapsed Riley. They also constantly reach out to Sheriff Hassan and his son Ali, attempting to convert them.

References to Real Cults

There are two things I see in Midnight Mass that are parallels real life examples. The first is the character Bev. If you’ve seen another Netflix show, Wild Wild Country, then you might notice the parallels between Bev Keane and Ma Anand Sheela. Bev, like Sheela, is the enforcer for their respective leader. They go beyond simple enforcement, however, and step into shaping the cult as their own. This is uncommon in cults and the parallel is very interesting. Bev pushes her own agenda. Whilst Paul wants to save everyone, Bev only wants to save the worthy and puts her own arrangements in place to ensure this. Bev is quite happy to kill for her beliefs (as Sheela was) and doesn’t always consult Paul before doing so (having Sturge kill Sarah, for example, not knowing Sarah was Paul’s daughter).

The most vivid reference, however, is the tray of drinks prepared to allow the congregation to transition and become vampires. Little white cups full of poison, reminiscent of the kool aid used in the mass suicide of members of the People’s Temple in Jonestown. 909 people died from drinking poisoned kool aid or, if they refused, were otherwise killed (similar to the events in the show). This reference is almost certainly deliberate. “Drinking the kool aid” has entered the language because of how significant the impact of that event was.

It was that imagery that made me re-evaluate everything I’d been seeing in a different light. As I said, the definition of a cult is fluid and we are inured to seeing portrayals of Christianity that cross the very fuzzy line between faith and cult in the media. And not just in fiction - televangelists can be seen to cross that line too. Jim Jones was a Christian preacher in that tradition. Cults do tend to isolate themselves and their members from the wider world. The isolation of the community in Midnight Mass seemed, at first, to be unrelated to the cult. It was a result of being a small community on an island. However, the portrayal of their moral superiority, the corruption of those who left (Riley’s alcoholism, Erin’s returning pregnant and alone) certainly reinforce that in a way that is related to the cult.

It is this portrayal of the cult that requires the larger cast to be well known. Through them, Midnight Mass portrays the many responses to a cult and its activity. From the faithful (good and bad) to the skeptical (Sarah) to the parent losing their child to the cult (Hassan).

References

Wild Wild County, Neflix

Singer, Margaret Thaler, Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menacee

[hangingslothcentral]

Here’s what writing an episode of Spirit Box Radio looks like...

If you’ve ever wondered how episodes of Spirit Box Radio are written, here’s a little overview of that process!! If you like this, I can also write up a similar breakdown of the sound design process!

Most, but not all, episodes are born in the ‘Episodes’ section of the Show Bible. The Show Bible is a document of epic proportions - 50k in length and growing every day - which contains all the essential information about the show, from the continuously evolving methods I use to edit different character voices as I learn more and more about audio editing and production, right to ‘sketches’ of the episodes for all three series of the show. There is also a large section called ‘Ideas and Notes’, where I’ll write freeform dialogue between characters and keep track of themes and ideas to try and keep them consistent. These are all numbered, and referenced in a seperate spreadsheet I have of all the characters with significant and/or speaking roles in the show.

The full break down is under the cut!!!

The grandaddy of the the plans in the Show Outline, where I go over all of the main ideas I want to be talking about in the show and roughly mark out the outline of the shape of each season. The first draft of the Show Outline was very messy and rough, but subsequent versions are broken down into Season-by-Season chunks, all talking from a multi-series perspective so as to place the ideas of the show along a three-series-long arc.

Season Outline

Season Outlines take those ideas for the shapes of the series from the Show Outline and refine them further from a beginning-to-end-perspective. I'm a goal-oriented writer, which means my story ideas tend to come from a very ‘the end’ kind of place, and the stories that lead up to that ending are all about serving that ending. Quite often the ending itself changes a long over the planning and writing process for me, but that’s the great thing about a plan! Once you have it, you can change it if you need to. What a plan does, however, is provide you with a framework for understanding what bits of a story you have, and what bits you still need to make.

The three seasons of Spirit Box Radio are quite deliberately split into two halves. There are lots of reasons why and one of them is that it gives you a very specific kind of shape to be working from. A season with a mid-season break has a part one which has it’s own escalation of tension and climax, which comes at the mid-point of the season-long escalation, where the story might otherwise sag a little.

Beyond splitting the plan into Parts 1 & 2, I typically also break episodes into ‘Blocks’. This is partly practical; I can refer in conversations with my guest writers to where it falls in a specific block of episodes, and where that block fits in the story as a whole, and it also makes splitting up the episodes for sending out scripts to my actors a lot more straight forward. Part 1 of Season 1, for example, was broken into three blocks; episodes 1.1-1.7; 1.8-1.13; 1.14-1.20. I won’t go into detail about how this effects the structure of the episodes themselves, but it’s usually about building characters up to making a certain decision, or following a certain subplot more closely before pulling away.

Episode Sketch

A ‘sketch’ is a very brief summary of what needs to happen in that specific episode. This can be concrete, like ‘find [x] item’, or vague, like ‘establish that Character A has Trait Y’. Sometimes I’ll make a note to include a specific sound or character beat, or I’ll reference a noted scene from the ‘Ideas and Notes’ i think would fit in there. It’s usually at the sketch summary stage that I figure out whether or not there will be other characters in a specific episode. The sketches for almost all of the episodes in Season One were written between August and October 2020.

Episode Plan

This stage takes those necessary elements from the sketch and fleshes them out into a coherent story. The key thing about podcast episodes is that they have to be able to be entertaining on their own, minute by minute, as well as serving the whole series (I talked a lot more about this in the last episode of Hanging with the Sloths on Patreon which is only £2/equivalent pcm to access if you’re interested!!)

Whilst I’m making my episode plan, I’ll look back at the sketches for the episode I’m working on and those before and after it, and refer to the series outline where I can, to make sure I’m keeping a handle not just on the individual pacing of the episode, but the pacing of the show overall.

I like to have Episode Plans done by about a month before I need to have a script finished.

The Script Itself

Spirit Box Radio scripts are either agonising or happen in the blink of an eye. I do not have a set approach to how I write an episode. Sometimes the plans come with sections of dialogue written months before and I’ll drape the rest of the episode around those moments and see where I end up. If there is a character other than Sam in an episode, I’ll typically attempt to write that section of the script before the rest, so that I’ll definitely have it locked by the time I need to send it to the actors. 

Any script that is for other actors (i.e. not me) has to have notes, direction, and additional information included to help the actors give their best performance. That’s difficult sometimes because I guard my show secrets closely, so it’s often a game of working out how much I can tell an actor without including spoilers for later important plot points unless absolutely necessary, and how to supplement gaps in their information. I’ll usually compare a character to a character from something else as a shorthand for performance.

This means there are two versions of every script which needs to be seen by people who aren’t me. My scripts, which I call the master scripts, have all my audio cues, breaks for drinking water in recording sessions, character notes that are Top Secret, sound scaping ideas, specific sounds I’ll need to use at different moments, and specific audio cues. As I get better at sound design, my version of the script only gets messier and messier to look at. Sometimes, when I’m writing scripts, I’ll actually even start with sound design notes now!!

Script Locking

This is the point at which a script can no longer be changed. Scripts with other characters in them have to be locked before scripts for just Sam, because they need to go out to actors and I need to ensure that I have time to go back and ask them to redo things if necessary, and also to make sure they have proper time to rehearse and organise read-throughs as they’d like to. That means sometimes sections of an episode are locked way before other sections are even written. This can be challenging as a writer because sometimes I’ll come back to a section which I know still needs work, and find I’m extremely limited in what I can do because I’ve already sent an actor a script to record from - sometimes for later episodes, I’ll have the lines from otheres already recorded and ready to go before I finalise some of Sam’s lines for a specific episode.

Sam is recorded a minimum of three weeks before an episode is due to air, and I’ll record in 3-episode stints, usually. I like to have the scripts locked a week before I record so I have time to read them through at my own pace, but sometimes I won’t manage to have them locked until three days out. On one hateful occasion, I threw out an entire script after I’d recorded an episode and re-recorded the whole thing the day before airing. I do not recommend doing this and whilst I am much happier with the result it was an agonising experience because once I’d rewritten and re-recorded that episode I then had to edit it before it was due for release, a process which takes about six hours minimum. I was making tweaks until 20 minutes before the episode went live. Do not recommend.

Editing

Speaking of editing, the final stage of writing an episode actually happens in the cutting room. Sometimes episodes are simply Too Long. Sometimes stuff that worked on paper just don’t work in audio. Sometimes I can’t say a word correctly for the life of me and have to cut a whole sentence to cover it over. More rarely, but still often enough an occurence it bears mentioning, I’ll realise in the editing process that a conversation is better in a different order than the one given in the script, and pull and move around the dialogue to adjust the flow. Sometimes I’ll move sections about a bit to accomodate similar problems with narrative flow.

Annnnd that’s it! That’s what the process looks like!

[nura-winderson]

so for reasons I happen to have a Demonomicon lying around in my house, so I figured why not check on our lovely Obey me! boys to see what folklore says about them?

*possible spoilers ahead*

Lucifer

The translation of the name is “Lightbringer”. The name was to be used to point out the planet Venus, the brightest object on the sky that fights the Sun’s light - explaining how this got transferred to the rebellion against God.

Christan lore refers to the this name as the synonim for Satan, and soon became a forbidden word to be even said out loud.

Hebrew lore remembers Lucifer as the prideful cherub of Eden, the garden of God, his body covered in gold, diamonds, ruby, emerald and several other gems. After God has named him to be the guardian of all living beings, he intended to meet with God as equals and therefore was precipitated first to Earth and later to Seol.

In the 19th century a luciferian religion has risen implying that Lucifer was the positive figure showing through the pages of the Old Testament and has marked Jahve or Adonai the evil entity, even claiming the Lucifer and his followers are the real creators of Earth.

Mammon

The demon of richness, greediness.

His name translates to “money, wealth”, originating from the middle-eastern word mammon, which can be even found in the Bible: “ No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon (money).” (Matthew 6,24). In some translations of the script not everyone has recognized the meaning of the word mammon, which resulted in some translations as a reference to an evil pagan entity, and the demon was born.

In Johannes Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia deamonum he’s remembered as the british embassador of Hell

Leviathan

Lord of the Seas, in Johannes Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia deamonum he’s mentioned as “Admiral of Hell” or “Minister of the Sea”.

His symbol of the most infamous of them all, even used as the emblem of the Church of Satan: a goat- or devilskull in the middle of a downwards pointing pentragram. The pentagram is surrounded by 2 rings and 5 hebrew letters: L V I T N, the hebrew name for Leviathan.

In ancient jewish folklore and also in the Bible he doesn’t appear as a demon but rather as the world’s greeatest aquatic monster. When God created the seas, he decided let Leviathan take the throne underwater and command the seas and all living beings in it. He feeds of aquatic dragons, and when he rages of hunger or thirst he causes water ripplings that take 77 years to calm.

In some folklore he’s mentioned and the gigantic entity that can only be seen in the horizon of the seas, his body so large noone has ever seen it entirely, and has been discribed as swimming in a circle around the oceans biting on his own tail (similar to Jormungand in Norse mythology).

In the Babilonian Talmud Rab Safra has once spotted an enormous being swimming in the ocean, his two horns had engraved inscription that read: “This tiny being which only lengths 300 miles is on it’s way to serve as food for Leviathan”

Satan

Does not have his own title, however the words “Satan” does come up in the chapters of Lucifer and Samael.

Asmodeus

Hebrew legends claim him as the serial killer demon birthed by Lilith and Adam. According to the apocryphal book of Tobit, Asmodeus, smitten with love for Sarah, killed six or her successive husbands on their wedding nights. Following instructions given to him by the angel Raphael, Tobias overcame Asmodeus and married Sarah. Later in the Testament of Abraham he again appears as preventer of spouses’ lovelife.

In other legends he’s not presented as evil as previously, rather as the demon of Ursa Maior he helps in different sorceries. For example in the Testament of Solomon he helped in buiding the Jerusalem Temple along with other enslaved demons. It is also said that when God punished Solomon for his overwhelming arrogance, Asmodeus was the one to claim the throne during his punishment in disguise.

Beelzebub

Lord of the Flies, one of the most infamous and powerful rulers of Hell. The first mention of him in the Bible is when Jesus performes exorcism and is accused of working together with Beelzebub, later even that he himself is the Lord of Flies.

The origin of the name has several theories, including Baal-zebub, God of Ekron, who’s messengers are represented as flies. Another theory points out that the ancient jew cultur had the “zabulus” expession which has a distorted verios of the greek “diabolos” which may has been combined with the phoenician Baal (god, lord), hence creating a “lord of devils”.

In both the Middle-East and Egypt several sacred artifacts have been discovered which gives an idea that some kind of fly-based cult may have existed. Plinius has also left records behind indicating that roman and syrian temples have presented sacrifies for flies and the Lord of Flies here names Achor.

In the Middle Ages Beelzebub was presented as the fallen monarch of the serafs, who stands just below Lucifer in the hierarchy of Hell. In other scripts however he is portrayed as standing just above Lucifer.

In Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal he’s illustrated as a fly who’s wings are covered in skulls and bones.

Belphegor

He also originates back to the Middle-East, his name probably comes from Baal-Peor, Baal meaning God or Lord and Peor being a mountain, he’s the Lord of Peor Mountain, possibly a regional pagan god.

In the Middle Ages he’s referenced as the wealth-bringing demon, later on additionally he’s the helper of those seeking technological or scientifical discoveries. In the Pseudomonarchia daemonum he’s mentioned as the french ambassador of Hell.

Machiavelli’s Belphegor is most likely to be thanked for his fame. In this comedy he’s sent to the human world to find out if spousal loyalty truely exists. He interviewes numerous married men and women only to claim that the rumors are false.

John Wilson’s comedy Belphegor of the Marriage of the Devil as the name implies even matches him up.

Italian and french tv series have also been created with him being the lead character, the latter became a movie later on.

Diavolo

Does not have his own title.

Barbatos

The 8th demon of Lemegeton, always surrounded by four demon kings and three demon legions. If made a pact with, he can provide excessive information on science and may lead to treasures locked away by magic. Knows all the secrets of past, present and future and can communicate with animals.

Simeon

Does not have his own title in the book, however he does appear in the Eastern Ortodox Church, claiming he is one of the 72 translators of the greek Old Testament.

Luke

Does not have his own title, but he might be the angelic verios of Luke the Evangelist who did become Saint Luke and is patron saint of artists, physicians, bachelors, surgeons, students and butcher.

Solomon

Does not have his own title, but King Solomon is referenced several times as the sorcerer enslaver of demons. The Testament of Solomon is not considered canonical in either jewish or christian lore however it does contain numerous theological and magical themes ranging from Christianity and Judaism to Greek mythology and astrology that possibly hint at a Christian writer with a Greek background. He posseses a ring with the Seal of God (a pentagram pointing upwards) which he received from the archangel Michael and which gives him the power to command demons.

He eventually gains power over Beelzebub who is considered pince of demons, hence Solomon is able to enslave any and all demons.

notes

i think it’s terribly interesting how Levi is a lot closer to gluttony as Beel. I have this headcanon that perhaps originally Levi and Belphie were supposed to be twins (they do look awful similar and think about the character design! they are the only ones with a tail instead of wings), but for some reason (that perhaps we can later learn from the continous story) the characters were swapped.

I also believe that Solomon will have a much bigger part of the story as he has right now.

[argentdandelion]

Spiritual Beliefs in OneShot

Souls and Robots

It’s commonly supposed that a soul grants humans (the only indisputable “people”, in real-world terms) a unique, or uniquely sophisticated, ability to think and feel relative to their animal brethren. Although narratives about artificial beings (e.g., robots) often bring up the possession of a soul as the dividing line between people and mere imitations, and OneShot discusses this dividing line, not once does dialogue in OneShot even use the word ‘soul’. (if the dialogue respository of the game is accurate, and it is not always so)

In fact, even the game when it uses the similar terms 'ghost' or 'spirit', it's not used in a way that's synonymous with 'soul'. For “ghost”, it’s only when referring to a sort of helping program/journal that’s the trace of a character who no longer lives within the world. In three out of four times it uses the similar word ‘spirit’, it’s in the context of the dryad-esque “plant spirit” character, Maize. he only time ‘spirit’ could be used as synonymous with ‘soul’, judging by the dialogue transcript, is when The World Machine/The Entity is described as “the spirit of the world”, and it’s a context where “mind”, “self”, or “consciousness” could also work.

Nonetheless, it seems there’s some sort of belief in an afterlife within the world of OneShot. There’s one scene of two characters (Calamus and Alula) addressing their deceased mother at a graveyard, and Alula saying: “I hope she can see us wherever she is!”. Additionally, one character (Lamplighter) asks “Am I dead?” after seemingly dying/getting caught in a lethal trap. For the latter, if there weren’t some sort of belief in an afterlife, he’d surely say something like, “What the heck/fudge is going on?” (Although the use of “Good heavens, no!” and “Who the heck?” once each might be evidence the people of OneShot believe in an afterlife, it could just as easily a coincidence.)

Other Religious Terminology

It’s actually odd that the game doesn’t use the common word ‘soul’, when it frequently uses other religious terms like ‘god’ (18 times) ‘messiah’ (64 times) ‘prophet’ (~6) ‘sacred’, (8) ‘savior’ (19) and one instance of ‘altar’ (when it easily could have used ‘dais’, even!). The word ‘prophet’ is notable because it’s in the name of one character: Prophetbot (called just ‘Prophet’ in an earlier version of OneShot).

‘Messiah’ is especially remarkable, since the term is very religious and strongly associated with one specific religious entity, Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, according to the dialogue transcript, “messiah” occurs more than three times more than the word ‘savior’. People even call Niko ‘messiah’ instead of Niko’s actual name, and don’t even address Niko as “Messiah Niko”, suggesting there are multiple ones. Niko doesn’t seem uncomfortable about being referred to as ‘messiah’ or ‘savior’, which might suggest that, in Niko’s world, it’s not strongly religious in use, or connected to a very specific person.

Speaking of ‘sacred’*, it uses the word eight times: to refer to what’s basically a cemetery, the ‘sacred feathers’ of the Prophet, a deceased character, the enormous ‘sacred tower’ with the world’s sun at the top, and Niko’s ‘sacred ability’ to communicate directly with the world’s god (the player of OneShot). It’s interesting that the game would use ‘sacred’ and use it pretty often, instead of ‘magical’, ‘mystical’, ‘revered’, ‘ancestral’ (e.g., “ancestral burial grounds” rather than ‘sacred grounds’ with gravestones) or even ‘hallowed’ (religious, but perhaps less so than ‘sacred’).

No Organized Religion

No one ever mentions particular religious/spiritual books, whether in a Bible-like context, as storybooks, as manuals, as even as compendiums of religious teachings or sayings. Admittedly, one character mentions reading about visions being “like something a prophet would see”, and relates that to Niko’s visions as someone who can talk to the god of OneShot, but he doesn’t elaborate where he read that.

The closest there is to a religious authority is The Author, a mysterious man viewed by almost all characters as an absurdly prolific and talented author who’s an expert in practically every subject. Even then, he’s viewed more like a bunch of scientific geniuses and popular, prolific authors (Stephen King, James Patterson, etc.) rolled into one.

The world of OneShot (or a previous version of it) once had a being called The Prophet, who had glowing, nigh-magical feathers and the ability to see into the future. One character mentions “a prophet” predicted “a savior [Niko] will arrive from another land”, and this prophet is strongly implied to be her. The Prophet is now deceased, but what seems to be her home holds what seem to be relics or artifacts, and specifically called an “altar”.

Divine Abilities/Miracles

Prophetbot, a robot programmed to give background information to the messiah, tells Niko: “Being The Bringer Of Our Sun, You Have The Sacred Ability To Communicate Directly With [Player]...An Ability That No One Else Possesses, Certainly Not I.” (formatting added for ease of reading) Niko talks with the player, god of OneShot, multiple times throughout the game, thinks it’s really cool, and other characters bring it up.

Niko has ‘visions’ three times throughout the game, and one character mentions it’s like “something a prophet would see” and: “I mean, if you can talk to [Player], it would make sense, right?”

Not a God, But Still a Messiah

In the Solstice route, it's revealed that the world of OneShot is a simulation of a long-destroyed world on The World Machine, a universe simulator that runs on the player of OneShot's computer. Three people who came from the old, long-destroyed world, the "Old Worlders", all but acknowledge the player isn't really a god: it's described how the world of OneShot would feel just like game software on the player's end. By opening up the program for OneShot, the player would be "becoming god in the process."

Oddly, though, the Old Worlders talk about the Old World's old prophecy of a messiah from another world (Niko) and the building of a robot made to predict the specifics of the messiah back then, without any bit of skepticism. So, strangely enough, although the simulation doesn't have an actual god, it still has a real messiah: the Old Worlders keep calling Niko that and don't similarly re-contextualize Niko's role.

Comparisons with Other Media

OneShot’s retro-styled graphics and gameplay wouldn’t be out of a place as a mid-Gameboy Advance to early Nintendo DS game (perhaps 2000-2008 in North American release times), but by that standard, its use of religious elements is rather odd. It simultaneously has a lot of religious themes and surprisingly few.

OneShot has just one god, no organized religions or structures, and very few (arguably no) religious artifacts. In contrast, although Nintendo of America historically scrubbed away religious references for English video game releases, it nonetheless had a lot of temples, gods, and other religious concepts in The Legend of Zelda and Kid Icarus. Even Pokémon (a second-party franchise closely associated with Nintendo) has instances of religious, spiritual, or nigh-religious customs or legends surrounding Pokémon; most notably, one generation of games showed what’s all but stated to be a church.

Speaking of the word ‘sacred’ within OneShot, Ho-oh, a godlike phoenix Legendary Pokémon that features in local legends and has the power of resurrection, has the signature move “Sacred Fire”. This was back in the Pokémon franchise’s Generation II (~October 2000-~March 2003) when Nintendo’s policies against religious references were much stricter. One might argue that the games’ technical restriction of a 12-character move name limit made this necessary, but “Mystic Fire” has the same number of characters, but they didn’t use it. Apparently, certain religious terms like ‘sacred’ (in Pokémon) or ‘temple’ (like The Legend of Zelda’s infamous water temple) aren’t as objectionable as one might think.

[aion-rsa]

Marvel’s WandaVision Episode 4: MCU Easter Eggs and Reference Guide

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This article contains WandaVision episode 4 spoilers, as well as potential spoilers for future episodes and the wider MCU.

WandaVision episode 4 ditches the sitcom format in favor of something that gives us a much clearer picture of what’s happening in the “real” MCU. Primarily functioning as a Monica Rambeau origin story, and one that gives us a better look at the inner working of SWORD (and puts FBI Agent Jimmy Woo front and center!), this week’s WandaVision also answers some big questions about what’s going on in Westview. Or does it?

Let’s get to work…

MONICA RAMBEAU

This episode is more or less Monica’s MCU origin story. We learn that Monica was snapped, Maria wasn’t, and she died two years after Monica disappeared. Her reappearance after “the blip” makes this chronologically the first appearance of adult Monica in the MCU, taking place concurrently with the final act of Avengers: Endgame.

As Monica re-materializes we can hear Carol Danvers’ voice her nickname “Lt. Trouble,” a reminder of the bond that the two shared in their time together in Captain Ma 

The drone that Monica sends into Westview features Captain Marvel colors because of course it does. She introduced the color scheme to the hero to begin with!

Is it possible that Monica made it through Wanda’s energy field because of her latent powers? Monica’s powers in the comics allow her to turn into energy, and there’s a lot of weird energy stuff in this week’s episode.

Monica wakes up from “the blip” in Room 104 in the hospital. Room 104 doesn’t have any significance in Captain Marvel history, but Avengers #104 is a potentially interesting connection. That issue has the Avengers and the X-Men teaming up to fight mutant hunting Sentinels, who have strapped Wanda to a machine that will cause a solar flare that will…sterilize humans allowing Sentinels to breed out the genetic variation that causes mutation. Weird. 

MARIA RAMBEAU

Maria Rambeau from Captain Marvel is confirmed to have died of cancer in-between Infinity War and Endgame. Apparently, she worked for SWORD in a high-level capacity, possibly even founding the organization, likely inspired by the craziness she witnessed in the ’90s as depicted in Captain Marvel.

Through her time in SWORD, Maria retained the callsign “Photon,” one of the many codenames Monica would use as a superhero in the comics.

SWORD

Monica arriving at SWORD HQ is a bittersweet juxtaposition with news reports about “celebrations continue” as people are reunited with their loved ones, since Maria never got to see her daughter return.

SWORD director Tyler Hayward appears to be a brand-new MCU creation, but he does share a last name with a “Brian Hayward” who was a villain on Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD.

Anyone else think that the blue, black, and white SWORD color scheme could be teasing a Fantastic Four connection? Especially since Hayward and Monica have a conversation about an “astronaut training program” that apparently isn’t going too well.

The number on Monica’s van is S-8512. No, we haven’t found any significance for this, either. She has special government/SWORD plates that read ZB718. Drawing a blank there, too.

The name of the SWORD agent with Darcy when she first discovers the broadcast is Agent Monti. Doesn’t ring any Marvel bells with us, either.

Westview

As we suspected, Westview is indeed in northern New Jersey, most likely Bergen County. If we have this right, the “Route 2” Monica is driving on to get to Westview (off Exit 32) no longer exists, and may now be what is known as Route 17, which runs through both NJ and New York.

Westview’s population is 3,892. Anyone have anything on that number? March 8, 1992? August 3, 1992? 

THAT YOU, MEPHISTO?

The Eastview sheriff’s vehicle number is 1966. That doesn’t correspond to first appearance years for Wanda, Vision, Jimmy, or Monica. BUT…hang with us for a minute here…

If you look at those numbers closely, the “9” and the “6” don’t appear to be different numerals. And what’s a “9” but an inverted “6” meaning that this is low key continuing the recurring “666” motif that keeps popping up in this show.

The sheriff’s deputies are from the town of “Eastview.” Mephisto is also known as Lucifer…as in Lucifer Morningstar, and The Satanic Bible says that as one of the princes of Hell, Lucifer’s domain is the “east.”

JIMMY WOO

Welcome back to the MCU, Jimmy Woo! Jimmy is one of the older characters in the entire MCU, believe it or not, predating the actual Marvel Comics universe by several years, having first appeared in 1956. His MCU version made his first and only appearance (until now) in Ant-Man and the Wasp.

Agent Woo pulling out his card with close-up magic was a fantastic callback to the running gag from Ant-Man and the Wasp.

CMBR

The “Wandavision” broadcast being hidden in the cosmic microwave background radiation feels like an indication of just how serious Wanda’s powers are. The CMBR is, as Jimmy says in the episode, the leftover radiation from the early moments after the Big Bang. It’s not a formative energy source, but it’s the waste product of a formative energy source. To hide a signal in there could be an indication that there are some fundamental tenets of reality being altered. 

According to Darcy, there are other episodes of WandaVision’s “show” that have aired before the first and second episodes. Not to mention the glance she got prior to the first episode.

THE BEEKEEPER REVEALED!

The mysterious“beekeeper” was referred to as “Agent Franklin.” Is there anyone of note with that last name in Marvel? The damn Richards kid kind of muddies up that research, and right now we’ve got nothing. Our hope that he was in fact Eric Williams, the Grim Reaper, however, appears to be fading.

VISION

Vision’s true form is a colorless husk with a chunk of his forehead missing due to what Thanos did to him. This coincides pretty well with the comics where Vision was captured and disassembled during the West Coast Avengers days. While he survived, he wasn’t quite the same and was illustrated as colorless. This just added to Wanda’s downfall.

THE CITIZENS OF WESTVIEW

Herb’s real name is John Collins and Mrs. Hart’s real name is Sharon Davis. Wouldn’t you know it, those are also the names of two of the show’s art directors! We haven’t turned up anything on the others yet, though. And yes, we’re also suspicious that they can’t place a real name to Agnes, as well.

While a lot of the glitches appear to be censored from the broadcasts of the sitcom, the file on Mr. Hart shows that the entire “Stop it!” moment was shown in its entirety.

SKRULLS?

On his whiteboard, Jimmy Woo suggests that Skrulls might be behind all of this. No, you have a few years before we get into that plot, dude.

THE SONG

The end credits song is “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” by Jimi Hendrix. The lyrics certainly hit different in the context of the show, like creating your own island, stealing the time of others, and seeing the dead in a new world.

Not to mention the first line is “Well, I’m standing next to a mountain…” as in…Mt. Wundagore?

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The Ending

The final moments of this show sure would appear to point towards a House of M scenario where Wanda has lost all control, but that seems a little too easy now, doesn’t it?

Spot anything we missed? Let us know in the comments!

The post Marvel’s WandaVision Episode 4: MCU Easter Eggs and Reference Guide appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[hms-chill]

RWRB Study Guide: Chapter 10

Hi y’all! I’m going through Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue and defining/explaining references! Feel free to follow along, or block the tag #rwrbStudyGuide if you’re not interested!

Earl Grey (267): Earl Grey tea is an incredibly common caffeinated tea. It is the base of a London fog.

Hamilton to Laurens, “you should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent” (267): This quote is from an April 1779 letter and is immediately followed by “But, as you have done it, and as we are generally indulgent to those we love, I shall not scruple to pardon the fraud you have committed, on one condition; that for my sake, of not your own, you will always continue to merit the partiality, which you have so artfully instilled into me”. Essentially, “you were rude to me, but I love you so much I forgive you as long as you look after yourself”. Just before it, Hamilton’s like “you taught me what it means to love”. (You can find it here)

Pyramus and Thisbe (268): The pair of lovers whose story inspired Romeo and Juliet, they were separated and could only talk through a wall between their houses (I’ve written a very in-depth analysis of this myth, which you can find here).

Dulles International to Heathrow (268): Dulles International is the airport in Washington, DC, and Heathrow is the classy airport in London.

John Cusack (270): An American actor largely known for his roles in the 1980s. This line in particular likely references Say Anything..., a romantic comedy known in part for a scene where Cusack’s character stands outside a girl’s window and plays music from a boombox.

Y’all had to marry your cousins (270): A reference to the royal tradition of only marrying other royals, which led to a whole lot of inbreeding.

Consummation (275): To consummate a marriage is to have sex for the first time, therefore making it “official”. 

Wilde’s complete works (276): Oscar Wilde is an Irish author famous for writing satires and also defining gay culture in the late 1800s. 

Fit of pique (277): If someone does something in a fit of pique, they do it spontaneously and out of anger at being wronged.

Mr. Darcy brooding at Pemberley (278): In Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (spoilers, though it’s been out for 207 years), after Elizabeth rejects Darcy’s first marriage proposal (which is essentially “your family sucks but you’re hot; marry me”), he goes back to the house his family owns and thinks about it and misses her.

Anmer Hall (278): A house owned by the Crown in Norfolk, England; it is currently home to Prince William, Duke of Cambridge.

Mel and Sue (280): A comedy duo and hosts of The Great British Bake Off. Sue was outed in 2002, but claims that “being a lesbian is only about the 47th most interesting thing about me”.

South Kensington (284): A district of West London known for its high density of museums and cultural landmarks.

Prince Consort Road (284): Prince Consort Road is a street in London named after Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria. A consort is a royal’s spouse or partner (hence Alex laughing at the idea of his being a prince’s consort)

Ferris Bueller/ Sloane (284-285): Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a popular movie from the 1980s about Ferris, who skips school for a day of wild shenanigans in Chicago. Sloane is his girlfriend who’s roped in for the ride. 

Victoria and Albert Museum* (285): The Victoria and Albert Museum, often abbreviated “V&A”, is the world’s largest museum of applied and decorative art and design. (you can explore their collections here)

Renaissance City (285): Room 50a of the V&A is full of Renaissance sculptures. (photo here) 

Seated Buddha in black stone (285): The V&A has a bunch of Buddha sculptures, but this one is the only one I saw that’s in black stone.

John the Baptist nude and in bronze (285): Possibly this piece from 1881 by French sculptor Auguste Rodin and is in the V&A’s collection.

Tipu’s Tiger (285): A nearly life-sized semi-automaton that shows a tiger mauling a man in European clothes. The tiger makes growling sounds and the man screams and waves his hand when a handle on the side is turned; it also contains a small pipe organ on the inside and was created to show the power that the Tipu Sultan of India held over invading Brits. The “give it back” that Catherine argues for is officially called repatriation, it would mean that (Western) museums have to give back stolen objects; British museums are famously bad at doing this. (see Tipu’s Tiger here)

Westminster (286): Westminster Abbey, a church in London where royals are crowned and buried. It is covered with intricate carvings and beautiful stained glass.

The Great Bed of Ware (286): A bed made by Hans Vredeman de Vries from the 1590s; it is ten feet wide and made of oak. (see it here)

Twelfth Night (286): A Shakespeare comedy full of chaos that includes a woman cross-dressing, then her twin brother being mistaken for her. 

Epocoene (286): A 1609 play that includes a boy dressing as a woman to dupe a man into giving his son an acceptable inheritance. 

Don Juan (286): A Spanish figure known for his powers for wooing women; the first text published about him was in the 1630s.

Florence (287): Florence is a city known for its art; it was the cultural center of the Italian renaissance. 

Gothic choir screen in the V&A’s Renaissance City (287): This Roodloft, or choir screen, carved by Coenraed van Norenberch is in the back of the Renaissance City in the V&A. It’s a stunning piece; the link above has great pictures and a more in-depth description than I could give.

Zephyr statue by Francavilla (287): You can see this statue here; it was one of thirteen statues commissioned for the garden of a villa near Florence. According to Greek mythology, Zephyr (the west wind) was married to Chloris, goddess of flowers.

Narcissus (by Cioli) (287): This statue may have once been the centerpiece to a fountain with Narcissus looking into an actual pool; it depicts him in the moment he sees and is mesmerised by his reflection.

Pluto stealing Proserpina (287): Likely the statue “The Rape of Proserpina” by Vincenzo de' Rossi. I couldn’t find it on the V&A’s site, but there’s more info here.

Jason with the Golden Fleece (287): This is a sculpture of a very naked Jason, the Greek hero who stole the golden fleece. He was helped by its owner’s daughter, who was in love with him, but whom he later abandoned. You can see the statue here.

Samson Slaying a Philistine (287): You can see this statue here. Henry does a pretty good job of explaining the incredible history behind it; all I have to add from my (limited) research is that it is remarkable in part for the fact that there is no one point on it that draws the eye-- it demands to be looked at completely or not at all.

Victoria and sodomy laws (288): Queen Victoria famously instituted a whole lot of anti-sodomy laws.

Viau on James/George (288): A 1623 poem by Théophile de Viau:

“Apollo with his songs

Debauched young Hyacinthus

Just as Corydon fucked Amyntas,

So Caesar did not spurn boys.

One man fucks Monsieur le Grand de Bellegarde [a friend of Viau],

Another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre.

And it is well known that the King of England

Fucks the Duke of Buckingham.”

“Christ had John, and I have George” (288): This is an actual thing that James I/VI said to the heads of the church. Here’s the full quote, from wikipedia (emphasis is my own): “I, James, am neither a god nor an angel, but a man like any other. Therefore I act like a man and confess to loving those dear to me more than other men. You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else, and more than you who are here, assembled. I wish to speak in my own behalf and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had John, and I have George.”

George iii (289): George III was the king against whom the American colonies revolted. He was deeply religious and instituted laws declaring that royals could not marry without the approval of the court.

Convent church of Santa Chiara in Florence (290): This church is no longer a church, but the altar chapel is in an alcove in the V&A. It is the only Italian Renaissance chapel outside of Italy. (you can see photos of it here and here)

Santa Chiara and Saint Francis of Assisi (290): Saint Francis of Assisi founded a few different monastic orders and is one of the most celebrated saints; Saint Clare of Assisi founded a women’s monastic order and wrote the first set of monastic guidelines by a woman. 

Blessed Mother (290): Mary, the mother of Jesus, one of the holiest figures in Catholicism. 

“Come, hijo mío, de la miel, porque es Buena, and the honeycomb sweet to thy taste”** (290): “My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste. So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul: when thou hast found it, then there shall be a reward, and thy expectation shall not be cut off” -- Proverbs 24:13-14, King James Version (yes, that King James. He translated the Bible to make the church stop hating him). 

David and Jonathan (290): An aggressively gay couple from the Bible who have been presented as friends for centuries. Jonathan was a prince and David a shepherd, but God promised that David would be king one day. Rather than argue this or hate David for it, Jonathan welcomed David into his household and loved him despite the prophecy that he would one day usurp him. Following Jonathan’s death, David took in Jonathan’s son and looked after him. 

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen (291): Many Christian prayers end with “in the name of the Father, the son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen”. It’s a way of celebrating the god who gives you all of the good things in your life while also giving up control to them. 

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A fill in from chapter 1, as requested by someone on AO3: 

Deputy Chief of Staff (Zahra’s position, 23): The Deputy Chief of Staff is the top aide to the president’s top aide, and is responsible for ensuring that everything runs smoothly within the bureaucracy of the White House. 

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*This museum puts out books called “maker’s guides” that teach you how to make pieces based on things in their collections; they’re super duper cool.

**I’m not a theologian, but I am a pastor’s kid, and just... this gets me. This whole bit, but this Proverb especially. Like obviously there’s the “oh we’re kissing and I’m thinking about honey tasting sweet”, but verse 14 coming in with the “when you’ve found what’s right, you will be rewarded with the confidence of that rightness and you will have hope”? Just kill me outright next time. Don’t make me google my own murder weapon.

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If there’s anything I missed or that you’d like more on, please let me know! And if you’d like to/are able, please consider buying me a ko-fi? I know not everyone can, and that’s fine, but these things take a lot of time/work and I’d really appreciate it!

—–-

Chapter 1 // Chapter 9 // Chapter 11 

[thethreetearedeye]

This is the second book I ever wrote. I actually wrote it for my partner! Its jam packed full of their interests and symbolism of the things they like. I spent my time at work on breaks getting it outlined and then coming home and working on the chapters.

Available for Kindle and Paperback on Amazon.

COVER BY:

Me. I actually made this cover. I'm not very artistic so I am actually pretty proud of this.

SUMMARY

Gaston is a magician's apprentice in an isolated birch wood valley. He is trained in the magical arts and goes through strenuous physical exercise to enhance his abilities. He is happy living with his Master, Emmanuel, his admiration and love for the man running deep.

However, not everything is as it seems with the mysterious man. Master Emmanuel is obsessed with his personal work, the Arc, a spell that will create a new and artificial gateway into the Inverse, the world of magic. Gaston wishes to help with this groundbreaking work more than anything, but he is always turned away.

On such an occasion, Gaston travels to the Inverse himself through a natural gateway, where he finds a strange amulet that literally calls his name.

He could have never guessed that the power contained within would lead the world to ruin, but at the same time lead him to the man he loves.

TRIVIA

-Gaston's name is pronounced Gas Ton. Not like the Disney villain.

-Kiana is from Laos. In an earlier draft this was stated specifically, but I changed it to a more vague untied nations of countries.

-Gaston is physically based on my partner's character Rasputin.

-The store in the beginning of the book with the weird scrambled name is meant to spell out Zoes Jojo Cosplay. Zoe really likes that bizarre adventure.

-Madam Creary IS trans. She just appears rugged because I don't believe that femininity has to be a rigged physical description.

-Speaking of the Madam, her group, the Marvelous Troupe of Women, is abbreviated to MTF.

-Gaston is the first person I've ever written that is involved in romance.

-The statue in the woods filled with ghosts is a reference to AJJs album Bible 2. As are the cursed musicians inside; Fear, Shame and Dread.

-Those ghosts are also a reference to the Monster Factory goof from Fallout 4. Hundreds of identical spectral children. Except this boys are outwardly malicious.

-The Festive Man is a reference to a costume I used to wear. When I first met my partner, I was an extreme edgelord who thought scarecrows were cool. They still are cool, but the edginess isn't.

-The scene at the end where there are multiple (SPOILERS) across the blue crystal crater with the blood river is one of my favorite visuals.

-I don't know how long birds live. The reason Red lives as long as she does is because of magic.

-Because of the immortality the Inverse granted temporarily, at the end of the book, Gaston is 221 years old.

[rosecorcoranwrites]

When a Plot Hole is Not a Plot Hole (or, at Least, When It Doesn't Matter)

Much like 45 million other people, I have recently viewed Bird Box. I also watched The Ritual and re-watched A Quiet Place. All of this got me thinking about the horror genre, yet again, but it’s too soon for another “Thoughts on Horror” post. Thankfully I also watched a Youtube video about world building in the Divergent series, which gave me an idea for a more far-reaching analysis not just of horror, but of genre and plot holes in general.

A Matter of Genre

The fact of the matter is that Bird Box, A Quiet Place, and Divergent have gaping plot holes (The Ritual doesn’t. The Ritual is great… but freaking horrifying, so watch with caution). These plot holes, however, are only a problem in one of those stories, and this is due to genre, and I will climb onto my genre-soapbox for as long as it takes for people to realize that different genres work differently, and need to be read or watched differently.

Let’s step back a minute, and I'll explain what I mean. In my senior year of high school, we read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. My class loved it, not least because it was a welcome break from all the depressing literature foisted on us throughout our high school career. I was also a student aid in another class that read the same book and got to eavesdrop on their class discussions. I sat in the back, filing papers, and heard the students say they didn't like the book because, quote, "It was so unrealistic." The Little Prince? Unrealistic? You don't say! I'm not sure I have ever heard a more idiotic critique of a book. Yes, The Little Prince is unrealistic. It's a children's-book-esque fantasy/fairytale about a prince from another (tiny) planet who's in love with a rose. It's not supposed to be realistic!

A similar phenomenon happens when people—both Christians and atheists—treat the entire Bible as one genre. It's not! It contains poetry, myth, history, genealogy, letters, biography, parables, apocalyptic visions, and law codes. If you read poetry like you would read a law code, or a letter the way you read a myth, you're probably going to miss out on most of the meaning.

Back to my point, different genres require different ways of being read or watched. There are varying amounts of belief one should be required to suspend. Fantasy requires more suspension of disbelief than sci-fi, because the audience needs to accept that magic and magical creatures exist, whereas sci-fi only needs them to accept that humans have advanced to some future scientific point. Both genres, however, need internally consistent world building, no matter what other wonders we are shown. Otherwise, the audience will be taken out of the story, and the point of these genres is to immerse the readers or viewers into a believable, if fantastic, world. If magic works a certain way, it always needs to work that way. If smaller spaceships can’t use FTL, then no little ships should be shown using FTL unless you make a point of saying they have some new type of FTL drive. There is some wiggle-room in this, since "fantasy" and "sci-fi" are big labels that cover a lot of things. Fairytales or magical-realism stories tend to be a little looser about what is and isn’t allowed. These stories still shouldn't break their own rules, but they also don't have to explain themselves as much as other fantasies. Sci-fi that bleeds into fantasy, such as that which incorporates time-travel, other dimensions, or robots with kokoro still needs internal consistency, but don't need to be as scientifically accurate as hard sci-fi.

On the other hand, genres which rely on audience reaction can get by with much less in the way of tight world building and well-thought-out backstory. The two genres to which I am referring are comedy and horror. Obviously, these can intersect with fantasy/sci-fi, but taken as their own thing, they are a different species of genre altogether. They rely not on immersing the audience into a believable world, but on eliciting a reaction from the audience. A comedy is only a comedy if it's funny and horror is only horror if it's scary. Those are the requirements. Thus, a comedy or horror doesn't need unassailable world building to be a successful comedy or horror. Comedy, in particular, often relies on pointing out or playing with plot holes in whatever genre it's in. Horror, on the other hand, often focuses on the scary situation at the expense of backstory and world building.

Plot Holes in Horror

Thus, we come to Bird Box, or A Quiet Place, or Signs, or any other horror that, frankly, doesn't hold up if you think too much about it. People critique these movies by asking things like, “Why doesn't everyone in the world just blind themselves to be immune to the phantoms?”, “Did no one else in all of society think to use sound against the creatures?”, and “Why don't the aliens wear waterproof suits?”. These are valid criticisms for sci-fi or fantasy stories, but… these stories aren’t really meant to be sci-fi or fantasy. They are meant to be horror. Specifically, survival horror. For this genre, backstory is utterly irrelevant. In survival horror, a person or group of people are put into a deadly situation and need to use their wits and whatever they can find to survive it. The end. That's it. Are Sandra Bullock, the family in The Quiet Place, and the family in Signs put into a deadly situation? Check. Do they attempt to survive it? Check. Is it scary for the audience to watch? Check. All three movies pass the survival horror test. They aren’t trying to be good sci-fi/fantasy; they’re trying to be good horror, and do a pretty good job.

As a side note, I’m not some Bird Box apologist. Of the four horror movies I’ve mentioned in this post, it’s my least favorite. But the issues I take with it are not with the world-building (unlike some critics, I thought the rules regarding the phantoms were fairly well spelled out), but with the choices on how to induce horror. (SPOILERS INCOMING: SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU CARE) From the beginning, we know the rest of the people in the house don’t survive because only Sandra Bullock and the two kids are alive in the current time; that undercuts most of the tension in the house. Also, I thought the first phantom-acolyte they encounter, at the supermarket, was horrifying, as he appeared to be stuck forever in his place, doomed to coax unsuspecting souls to their death. One character even commented, “How is that guy still alive?”, so I wondered if he even was, or if he was sort of an undead thing controlled by the phantoms. Scary! Unfortunately, the rest of the acolytes (aside from the one in the house, who we knew John Malkovich would kill because how else would Sandra Bullock and the kids be alive in the future? The structure of the narrative seriously undercut the tension!) are pretty much your run-of-the-mill murderers in any post-apocalyptic movie. Not scary! Finally, I took issue with the last few minutes, after their boat capsized; I felt it was unnecessary for them to run around in the woods. It would have been scarier if she reached out of the water to feel a person’s foot, making the audience think it’s an acolyte, until he taps a cane on the ground and it’s revealed he’s blind. But, I digress. I don’t mind that the story has a few plot holes; I do mind that it wasn’t as scary as it could have been.

Plot Holes in Dystopia

Where, then, on this spectrum of genre does dystopia fall, and why do so many YA dystopian novels seem to fail? Could not "dystopia" be a sort of parable, requiring little explanation and thus little scrutiny, in the same way that comedy and horror and fairytales can get by on little to no explanations of what, exactly, is going on? Yes. I'll say it again, yes. I think dystopias absolutely could get a pass on world building... if they wanted to. The problem with books like Divergent or Hunger Games is not that they explain too little, but that they explain too much. If they simply set up their messed-up situations—everyone is sorted into a Hogwarts House faction, innocents must fight to the death for the enjoyment of the rich—and left it at that, I think it would be fine. The problem arises when these authors, usually in subsequent books, attempt to hash out the reasoning behind these horrible societies which... kind of couldn't arise for any real reason, or if they did, wouldn’t last very long. The explanations we are given don't make sense, or are at least are very, very full of holes and inconsistencies.

To be fair, other dystopias also offer explanations for why the world is the way it is, but they don’t dwell on it. 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 offer lip service for how society got so bad—whether that’s due to government rule or human complacency—but then move on. We don’t need to think too hard about how Eastasia or Eurasia were formed; we need to care that the government keeps switching which one we’ve “always” been at war with. We don’t need to know who’s running the world in Fahrenheit 451, because they’re not the ones who caused Montag’s wife to O.D. or who hit Clarisse with a car or who made Beatty hate books; the society of that book is twisted because individual people are twisted. Though they contain sci-fi elements, these stories are not sci-fi books. They are much closer to horror, in that their events are supposed to provoke a sort of cautious fear in the audience. The idea is that this could happen here, and maybe it’s already happening.

Again, YA dystopia’s could do this, but that’s clearly not what they’re going for. If Hunger Games was only a nod to the dangers of media and decadence, I could get behind it. Instead, it decided to become a story about revolution, with a somewhat Chosen-One-esque figure. It went the sci-fi-fantasy route, following the epic story of a hero who attempts to save society. If Divergent only concerned itself with the idea that humans are sorted into groups based on a single personality trait… well, I would still think that was pretty silly, but I could see a skilled writer making it work. It goes beyond this, though, into this whole backstory involving genetic engineering and human experimentation. It’s a sci-fi. And because both of these stories have decided to be sci-fi, rather than only dystopias, they fail. Because sci-fi stories require a somewhat believable backstory and set-up and current world building, and the worlds of Divergent and Hunger Games could not happen, or at least would not happen like that, even if there were rebellions and mutations and human experimentation. There are too many inconsistencies and plot holes that strain belief, and sci-fi needs to be somewhat believable.

With that, I hoped I’ve converted some of you to my genre-focused cause. Before you criticize a story for having a plot hole or being unrealistic, first consider the genre. Consider what the story is trying to do, and if it does it well or not. The plot holes might not be as big of a problem as you thought.