One God, Two Gods, Red God, Blue God

The Mythology and Esoterica of A Song of Ice and Fire

[durrandurrandon]

northofthewall.social now open

It’s up! If you are looking for a Mastodon server for the ASOIAF community, here it is. It turns out, you don’t have to empower fascist billionaires while talking about nerd stuff. Come join us at northofthewall.social: https://northofthewall.social/invite/j6uxN9LM But I hear Mastodon is complicated! No, not really, but yeah it is more complicated than Twitter, but I mean you wrote an entire essay on the Arryn succession. You listened to an entire podcast on the application of US water rights laws to the scenario in A Sworn Sword. You DM for a TTRPG group.You play Crusader Kings. It’s really not that complicated. But all my friends are on Twitter! Yep, and that’s what social media services count on. To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, because the pain threshold of leaving an established social media account is so high, users will put up with increasing amounts of shit from the billionaires running them. Doctorow calls this the enshitification of services. They can spam you with increasing adds, sell your data, run mind twisting algorithms to generate “discourse”, cut off third party apps, and of course, let fucking Nazis back into the community while blocking legit journalist. Don’t shut down your Twitter account. Open a Mastodon account and keep pestering your Twitter family to join you. It actually sucks and is kind of humiliating. It is easier and happier for me just to be on Mastodon and enjoy the conversations there. But I don’t blame anyone. It is hard to leave. So do what you have to do. Why should I join this server? It doesn’t matter what server you join, but joining this one will give you a soft landing where you can easily find other ASOIAF nerds migrating to Mastodon, hopefully that’s the goal. If you don’t like it you can migrate your account to another server and take all of your followers with you. This is the beauty of Mastodon. No gods, no masters. I made an account on another server. How do I change servers? Here is a four part thread on Mastodon, explaining exactly how to do that: https://https://northofthewall.social/@durrandon/109717665425271558 I don’t understand how the feeds work on Mastodon.

There are three main feeds.

Your home feed will give you the posts of everyone they follow and every post they boost (retweet) in reverse chronological order. It is not filtered by an algorithm

Your local feed is the posts of everyone who is on your local server. This should be where all the nerd and community stuff is. Agin, reverse chronological, no algorithm

Your federated feed is the posts of everyone who is followed by anyone on your local server and any post they boost. This is your basic doom scroll feed. No algorithm.

Also, if you are using a web browser, go to preferences> appearance> and check the enable advanced web interface option. You will be glad you did. Peace out.

[durrandurrandon]

The Faith of the Seven is the Church of Starry Wisdom

So, one of the weird bits in a World of Ice and Fire is the transition from the name Azor Ahai east of the Bones Mountains to Huizar Amai west of the Bones. Like, Huizar Amai is clearly Azor Ahai with a cheap mustache disguise.But the text gives the nod to this somewhat, when it boldly states that Azor Ahai is known by many names, giving Hyrkoon the Hero as an example. So, we go from Azor to Huizar to Hyrkoon, to Hukko. Wait, who the crap is Hukko?. From a World of Ice and Fire ”A hero whom the Pentoshi singers call Hukko led the Andals at that time, and it is said that he slew the seven maids not for their crimes but instead as sacrifice to his gods. There are some maesters who have noted that Hukko may well be a rendering of the name of Hugor.” 

Hugor of the Hill, being the legendary Andal founder of the Faith of the Seven. (This name drift continues in Dance, when Tyrion takes on the name Hugo Hill, Hill being the bastard name used in the Westerlands and Tyrion thinking himself endlessly clever for the word play.) 

Don’t get hung up on it being the same person, descendents, or cultural diffusion. The author wants us to make the connection: Azor, Huizar, Hyrkoon, Hukko, Hugor. That’s it, you can’t no more we have in the text. The Faith of the Seven has ties to the religions of the East. 

Backing up Azor Ahai ties to the Golden Empire of the Dawn, which ends with the Bloodstone Emperor, who may or may not have caused the Long Night. But for our purposes just know that: “Many scholars count the Bloodstone Emperor as the first High Priest of the sinister Church of Starry Wisdom, which persists to this day in many port cities throughout the known world” Wait, what, the Church of Starry Wisdom isn’t referenced in the main series? (it is briefly in an Arya chapter. That’s not the point.) What’s that? It’s just an H.P. Lovecraft reference right? The cult of Starry Wisdom from the story Haunter in the Dark. It’s not important to the real story? Yeah? Okay, but have you read Haunter in the Dark? How long ago? Let’s go over what Blake found in that church: “On this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what looked beneath the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical object some four inches through. Right so you’ve heard someone say that the black stone the Bloodstone Emperor made the people worship is a reference to this irregular trapezohedron in Lovecraft’s story. Okay, but let’s not stop here where everyone else stops. Let’s keep reading: “Around the pillar in a rough circle were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind them, ranging along the dark-paneled walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling, black-painted plaster”

How many was that? Seven? Who else likes the number seven? Oh yeah, the Faith of the Seven whose seat for a 1000 years before Aegon was the Starry Sept. (Built by the Hightowers, who are in no way dodgy.)

The Starry Sept is literally a seven sided building with the word Starry in its name. It is absolutely a reference to Lovercraft’s Cult of Starry Wisdom, with its seven gods positioned around the black irregular trapezohedron.

[durrandurrandon]

[brienneoftarth]

tw rape: i’ve been holding this back for a while, but i just have to say something. first of all, my interpretation of jaime and cersei’s sept scene in the books has always been that it was consensual. fucked up, totally, but cersei says yes and even, ahem, “guides him in”.

the show on the other hand, well, that was a rape scene. it was awful, pointless and overall detrimental to the series. grrm himself even spoke out against the changes made, and he hasn’t written a single episode for the show since, when he used to write one or two a season.

NOW, HERE’S WHY I BRING THIS UP! At the time that season four aired, fans from all over the world, including myself, expressed their disgust at this scene as it appears in the TV show. This rage was particularly felt by and Jaime and Cersei fans.

I remember seeing essays by various jc stans on tumblr detailing how much they hated hbo’s decision to turn what had been a consensual sex scene between jaime and cersei into a rape. i remember this distinctly because, well, i agreed with them!

fast forward to today, and for some unknown reason, there seems to have been a significant shift amoung jaime and cersei stans. rather than speaking out against the show for the rape scene, they seem more determined to claim that it was always a rape scene, in both show and book.

i just…i don’t understand what happened to create this change? why would anyone willingly want to argue that a consensual sex scene involving their favourite characters was rape? why would you want that?

anyway, it was never rape in the book and hbo are trash.

thank you for your time.

[durrandurrandon]

I think the shift in oponion comes from people rereading the chapter and seeing more nuance in the scene. Cersei's no, no's turn into yes, yes's, but this is after Jaime is ignoring her beating against his chest. He isn't paying any attention to her no's, so at that point it is hard to say whether her words change in the throws of passion or if they are just her giving into a sex act she can't stop. It is also not clear that he would have stopped had her words not changed. It does not seem that Cersei, Jaime, or GRRM consider this to be rape, but it is understandable that many readers see it that way.

[durrandurrandon]

The Passenger

So let’s summarize.

Hybrid Will – This is solved via interviews with the writers. There is no mystery here. Will, the real human Will, is the person we were watching throughout season 1 and 2. He wasn’t a host. The final scene isn’t letter boxed. It isn’t occurring in the Forge or some other virtual environment. According the interview, this is Will at some future date running his hybrid through a simulation of events to see if he could have made other choices. This is Will torturing hybrid Will and himself in the park, over his poor life choices, in an obsessed attempt to prove that he has free will. If only Ford was there to tell him he that he has no free will, because he is unwilling to interrogate his key drives . . .

Charlotte-Dolores has five brains, in her bag as she leaves the park. Who are they? We see that she has remade her own body and put someone else into Charlotte’s when she part’s company with Bernard. I’m guessing it’s Angela. It makes sense Angela has always been loyal, she is OG, and she is down with the kill all humans mission. She says that she recreated Bernard from memory, so his was likely not one of the brains, though it would be better if it was, because new Bernard wouldn’t have any of the memories of events in the park that Dolores didn’t experience. So, this is a maybe. I doubt one of them is Teddy. I think she gave Teddy the resolution he would want, putting him into the Eden Matrix. I also don’t think one is Maeve. I’ll address Maeve below. Unfortunately, all of the hosts we would like to see brought back are not likely to be on Dolores friends list: Lawrence, Maeve, Hector, Akecheta, etc.

Maeve- Clearly, Sylvester and Felix will reboot her. Speaking of Sylvester in Felix, when all the hosts were walking through the door into the Eden Matrix, and they couldn’t see it, one of them really should have said, “It doesn’t look like anything to me.”

Phase Point and the Forge – In the episode Phase Point, we are told that the CR4DL is a simulator that tests storylines, using copies of all of the host minds.  Phase point is a term referring to one possibility in a matrix of possibilities. So, we can think of the CR4DL or Forge each running a matrix of possibilities and each possible scenario that plays out is a phase point. When Dolores reads the books representing the possible decisions of people like Karl Strand she is discovering some of the possible phase points. It’s unclear how many books she read or how quickly she could assimilate all that data, even with the AI Logan curator assisting her.  She indicates to Bernard at the end, that she has made a serious assessment of the possibilities, and I’m inferring from the way she said it that it was based on the data she analyzed using multiple scenarios. This is why she tells Bernard that she needs him out in the world trying to save the hosts his way, because the scenarios she has mapped out with him acting as an agent in the system have better odds of success, even if he isn’t an ally. I have to admit I am a sentimental sucker for the Professor X vs. Magneto set up this gives us for future seasons. I mean it will hopefully be a much less cheesy, more Westworldy version thereof, but still I like it.

[durrandurrandon]

Oh, my god, she has like five brains in her purse. Why didn’t Hale just do this in the first season to get  the encryption key out?

[durrandurrandon]

We saw Will survive the park, so he isn’t dead (because he has stupid amounts of HP). But there is no real connection between being dead and being brought back, so I can only assume that the fidelity test at the end is someone, Dolores or Bernard creating a copy of him. Seriously though, how is Will not dead?

[durrandurrandon]

The Forge

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the Forge is exactly what I guessed it might be in the theory I wrote after Phase Space, a giant simulator for war gamming the outside world. We know that it is like the CR4DL but bigger, and containing the simulated minds of everyone who visited the park after Will’s take over. The whole point of having them in the Forge instead of in a static storage facility, is presumably because they are running in a simulation, (which we are pretty much shown in the preview.) Dolores wants it as a weapon, because she can use it to quickly simulate every scenario she can imagine for leading a host takeover of the planet. It’s unlikely to be a direct military takeover, but an infiltration using the minds of her Host followers, the clones of park visitors, and a nearly unstoppable ability to use AI super computer fueled social media fuckery to put humanity at war with itself. This may just be because I have been thinking a lot about Ursula Le Guinn’s City of Illusions over the last two years. It seems to be that AI getting us all to kill ourselves seems a lot more likely than a conventional robot uprising.

[godsofterror]

The Long Night and Starry Wisdom

The Bloodstone Emperor

The Bloodstone Emperor is remembered in Yi-Ti myth as causing the Long Night because of his betrayal (and usurpation of her throne) of his sister, the Amythest Empress. This evil emperor, who married a tiger woman, ate human flesh, performed necromancy, and worshiped a black stone that fell from the sky, was the founder and first High Priest of the Church of Starry Wisdom.

The Church of Starry Wisdom is still present in the main story- Arya hears their priests singing in Braavos, for instance.This “church” comes from an H.P. Lovecraft story, the Haunter of the Dark, where the Church cultists worshipped a black stone that fell from the sky (sent by the Mi-gos, aliens from Pluto). The black stone is known as the Shining Trapezohedron.

In the Lovecraft story, the cultists call Nyarlathotep in his terrifying form of The Haunter of the Dark. To do so, they perform blood sacrifice rituals to the Shining Trapezohedron, in exchange for limitless knowledge about the universe. Also, the Haunter, once called, can only wander ‘abroad’ in darkness - its evil is contained by light.

“1846—3 disappearances—first mention of Shining Trapezohedron.” “7 disappearances 1848—stories of blood sacrifice begin.” “Investigation 1853 comes to nothing—stories of sounds.” “Fr. O’Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great Egyptian ruins—says they call up something that can’t exist in light. Flees a little light, and banished by strong light. Then has to be summoned again. Probably got this from deathbed confession of Francis X. Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in ’49. These people say the Shining Trapezohedron shews them heaven & other worlds, & that the Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some way.”

When the Bloodstone Emperor is said to have worshipped a black stone and was the first High Priest of the Church of Starry Wisdom -and that he caused the Long Night with this worship- it has implications for the background and for the main story. Most importantly, because of the connection between the Church and the Shining Trapezohedron, the black stone he was worshipping was not just a meteor: it is the evil Shining Trapezohedron.

Many-Faced God, Faceless God

Whether the Bloodstone Emperor creates the Long Night, or unleashes it, is hard to tell. But the darkness directly benefits the Haunter of the Dark (Nyarlathotep), who is free to roam abroad, bringing evil and death. This is probably the root of the stories of the Lion of Night in The World of Ice and Fire, whom The Faceless Men believe is another name of the Many-Faced God.

Nyarlathotep differs from the other deities in the Mythos in a number of ways. Most of the Outer Gods are exiled to the stars, like Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth, and most of the Great Old Ones are sleeping and dreaming like Cthulhu; Nyarlathotep, however, is active and frequently walks the Earth in the guise of a human being, usually a tall, slim, joyous man. He has “a thousand” other forms and manifestations, most reputed to be quite horrific and sanity-blasting.

God of Many Names

Much like the Many-Faced God, Nyarlathotep is known by many names:

The Crawling Chaos, Ahtu, The Black Man, The Black Pharaoh, The Black Wind, The Bloated Woman, the Crawling Mist, The Dark Demon, The Black Demon, The Dark One, The Dweller in Darkness, The Faceless God, The Floating Horror, The Haunter of the Dark, Face Eater, Father of All Bats, Dark Wing, Sand Bat, Fly-The-Light, the Howler in the Dark, the God of the Bloody Tongue, or the Bloody Tongue, L'rog'g (also Lrogg), the Bat God of L'gy'hx, Messenger of the Old Ones (also Messenger of the Great Old Ones), Mr. Skin, Randall Flagg, Shugoran, Thing in the Yellow Mask, The White Man, The Skinless One, The Masked Messenger, The Moon Presence

Conclusion

ASOIAF has lots of Lovecraft allusions, of course, as GRRM is a big fan. But the incorporation of the Shining Trapezehedron and the Church of Starry Wisdom is different. The worship of the stone by the Church is the cause of the greatest evil known in the story - the Long Night.

While the Others may benefit from the Long Night, as Old Nan’s tales spell out, it doesn’t mean that they cause the Long Night. Perhaps it is created some other way, that ties into the worship of the Shining Trapezohedron, using blood sacrifice. It could be that the killing of the Amethyst Empress was a blood sacrifice, performed to call the Haunter of the Dark/Lion of Night, in exchange for ultimate power and knowledge.

If the myth is correct, and the Bloodstone Emperor caused the Long Night by killing his sister and worshiping the Shining Trapazohedron, using blood magic, than will a current character repeat this betrayal? Perhaps if the now-returned Aegon is able to kill Dany, it will be the realization of a prophecy, causing a new Long Night.

Or perhaps Euron’s desire to reduce the world to ashes will be the spark - maybe he finds the Shining Trapazohedron in Oldtown, and performs a blood sacrifice to gain ultimate power and knowledge. Maybe the dragon horn will be used to capture and sacrifice a dragon (or Dragon?) to the black stone. Remembering that Battle Isle is incredibly old, and at its base is a fortress built of black stone that is very old and dark, there may be a tie to the eponymous battle that happened on that isle in the Dawn Ages.

It will be interesting to find out.

Questions:

Where could the Shining Trapezohedron be now?

What role will it play in the next Long Night?

What role will the Church of Starry Wisdom play?

Will the new Bloodstone Emperor (Euron? Aegon?) make blood sacrifices & call the Lion of Night (Haunter of the Dark)?

[durrandurrandon]

Euron makes allusions that spell out that he sees Daenerys in the role of the Amethyst Empress. See this: http://durrandurrandon.tumblr.com/post/114736279943/the-amethyst-empress-reborn As for the black stone that fell from the sky. It may yet appear as something that resembles the Trapezohedron, but I think it is more likely to be the Seastone Chair which the first Ironborn found on the Iron Isles.

[durrandurrandon]

Will Has a Lot of Hit Points

I mean, I’m not saying he’s host. I’m just saying that earlier in the season, we saw him patch up his arm with one of those blowtorch thingies that we have only seen used to fix hosts, and now he seems to be able to take quite a few more bullets than the average man in his late 60′s. Maybe he just has host parts. Like he lost an arm and got lung cancer, so now he has a host arm and host lungs that don’t stop working when there are holes in them. I don’t know.

[durrandurrandon]

Mmm, okay fine I knew the idea of using the CR4DL and the Valley Beyond facility for war gaming was a long shot and this was all still probably about selling immortality, but I still want to know why Dolores’s skirt was wet in fidelity test Bernard was part of years before the opening of the show.

[durrandurrandon]

Why is Dolores’s Skirt Wet?

So, I probably need to re-watch episode 6 (and maybe episode 4). This is mostly a think out load with a couple of outside insights. I think it is fair to assume that the Elsie-Bernard scenes are happening at the same time as the Dolores-Ted, Charlotte-Stubs-Abernathy, Will-Emily, and Maeve et al scenes. We’ll call this Timeline-0. Timeline-1 extends from Bernard waking up on the beach with Stubs and Strand. I don’t think we saw any TimeLine-1 scenes in episode 6. We also get another glimpse of Timeline-X, which is what I’m calling the Dolores-Bernard scenes in this episode and episode 1. We know timeline 1 is roughly two weeks after the gala at the end of season 1. Timeline-0 began immediately after the gala and has proceeded about a week. We have no idea when Timeline-X is occurring. This may all seem obvious, but the review helps me.

So, at the end episode 6 in, in Timeline-0. Bernard is plugged into the cradle (which I am told is spelled CR4DL), Abernathy has been secured in the hub, outside Delos security forces have arrived at the hub after being called in by Charlotte, and Dolores and the Brotherhood of Evil Hosts is about to crash into the hub with a train, presumably nabbing Abernathy and burning the CR4DL, reconciling Timeline-0 with what we know from Timeline-1. So I got this from the geek-o-sphere. Both the scene with the Bernard jacked into the CR4DL and the scene with Dolores and Bernard at the beginning of the episode are shot in widescreen cinematic format. The rest of the episode is in standard 16:9 HD TV format. So, you can see the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen because the vertical doesn’t fill the screen in that ratio. (Hat Tip to Robert at In Deep Geek) This seems to be a hint that the scene with Dolores and Bernard is occurring in the CR4DL and indicate that in Timeline X Dolores captures Bernard while he is in the CR4DL and is reprogramming him with Arnold’s memories, and Timeline-0 is about to catch up with Timeline-X. There is an outside possibility that Timeline-X is actually occurring after Timeline-1, somewhere else, perhaps in a CR4DL unit inside of the facility Will is heading towards, but the first scenario seems far more likely. Before entering the CR4DL, Bernard tells Elsie that he remembers bringing something there, then flashes back to murdering everyone at the secret James Delos resurrection facility and stealing one of the red brains. Since Bernard finds Ford in the CR4DL, it is easy to assume that the red brain has Ford programmed into it, and that he is a fully sentient being operating inside of the CR4DL. However, it seems possible, though less likely that the Ford in the CR4DL is a regular white brain AI programmed by Ford before his death to orchestrate events. The red brain might be something he has saved, perhaps for Arnold or Dolores. We do see Dolores doing a fidelity test with Arnold meant to mirror the tests that Will gave James Delos. The title of the episode is Phase Space, which is a term given to a matrix used to map coordinates representing the possible states in a physical system. Think of it as a map of all the possible outcomes of a given scenario.  Applied to the CR4DL, which is used to simulate new story-lines, this has some frightening possibilities. Ford may not just be in the CR4DL affecting outside systems to exert influence on the park, but he is likely war gaming the outcome of events in the park, constantly updating the scenarios he is running with information from the park, making it pretty unlikely that events will unfold in a way other than what he has planned. This is AI that is at much scary level than angry hosts running around killing people. Super-duper tinfoil: What if Will’s super-secret thing that Dolores is trying to get to in the Valley Beyond is actually a super CR4DL programmed with simulations of all of the important guests who have visited the park in order to war game events in the outside world? That would seem to make it more likely that Bernard could be at that facility in the Timeline-X scenes. Also pointed out by clever people on the nerd-o-sphere: Dolores skirt is wet in the Timeline-X scenes. Like maybe she was just at a beach or something, drowning a bunch of hosts.

[durrandurrandon]

**Spoilers for Solo folks**

So, I agree that the linear slow speed space chase in TLJ was weak, but the charter interactions that came  out of that were great. 

But if we are going to talk about bad plot devices. . .

"Hey, we could get the unprocessed unobtanium from this one place that is poorly guarded but hard to get to in a way that will cover up George Lucas's poor understanding of astronomical terminology in episode IV ."

"No wait, you can't do that. If they knew Crimson Dawn was involved it would cause an all out war between the syndicates."

"Yeah, but they don't know us. We can steal it for you, without being associated with Crimson Dawn."

"Great point, but I want to send my highly recognizable lieutenant with you. Please make sure you talk loudly about your plan everywhere you go and then I will meet you at the totally poorly guarded refining planet, with my huge super recognizable pleasure yacht ."

Don't get me wrong, I was mostly able to ignore all this and have a good time.

[durrandurrandon]

More Westworld

So, let’s take a look at Will’s super-secret-biggest-mistake. What do we know?

Young Will says it is an answer to a question no one has dared to ask.

Old Will says it is his biggest mistake and indicates that it has something to do with his judgement.

Delores says it is a weapon.

It was made using big earth movers.

It is tempting to speculate that it is directly related to the data that Delos is trying to smuggle out of the park. It could be so, but if it is, it may be a weakness in the plot. Presumably if they are linked the project would require the data to be coming through in regular intervals, rather than waiting 35 years for all the data to be delivered at once. After episode 4, it seems likely that the daa is the mind of James Delos. Bernard states that the code that makes up JD’s mind is similar to the code being smuggled in Abernathy’s head, and they are both unlike anything else he has ever seen. If the smuggled data isn’t JD’s mind, it is likely someone else's.

But why does Delos even want to get JD’s mind out of the park? Who cares about JD? No one. They aren’t loyal. They don’t need James Delos, the man. A functioning JD clone, with JD’s mind is proof of concept. Delos is preparing to sell resurrection. Ford hints at this when alludes to Lazarus being called forth from the grave in the first episode, and we have seen this confirmed with JD.

Here is the tinfoil leap. Will’s super secret-biggest-mistake facility is a human clone factory. (No, its not for making clones that will replace world leaders. The Future World plot has been ditched.) It’s a facility for making resurrection clones for sell. Do you want to live again as an immortal bot? Do you want to bring your dead loved one back to life? Well it is going to cost a lot of money. So why doe Delores see it as a weapon? In episode 5 we learn that one-third of the hosts drowned in the sea have had all of their data purged and their backups have been burned. I suspect that Delores, possibly with Bernards assistance has transferred their data to the facility, where they are preparing to download themselves into the bodies of clones made  with the DNA Delos has collected from the rich and powerful.

[durrandurrandon]

Just a few notes on Grace:

If you are following any of the analysis of episode 3, then you have probably picked up on the fact that Grace has a map of the park that she is drawing in her journal, and she has drawn a symbol that looks like the symbol seen on Abernathy’s encrypted data file, later in the episode. The symbol is also present at the lab. So she is in all likelihood trying to find one of the secret labs, because she is investigating what Delos is up to. It also seems very likely that the data file that Abernathy is carrying is indeed the DNA and guest experiences data that was being collected at that secret lab. (Why anyone would actually leave all of this data in the park for 35 years and only smuggle it out later is beyond me. If any of this data is necessary for Will’s super-secret-greatest-mistake, I have to imagine that they would have needed to be extracting this data the whole time, but whatever.)

Now, for what no one seems to be talking about. Her name is Grace, and full disclosure, I am not religious, but I am going to be talking about religion here, because the writers are borrowing heavily on Christian religious themes. So, yeah, some people think she could be Will’s daughter, Emily. That could be the case, but she has taken on the name Grace. Now, take a look at all the of the religious symbolism that follows Delores around in episode 2. When she meets with the confederados, they are eating and posed to resemble The Last Supper. When they insult Delores, she tells Teddy to forgive them because they are ignorant, paralleling Jesus on the cross saying, “Forgiving them Father, for they know not what they do.” She then has them all killed and resurrected. The first part being a bit less Jesus like than the last part.

In the same episode, Old Will, tells Laurence that the park was a place for people to sin and avoid the judgement of God. He says that the place they are heading to is his greatest mistake, but that he rejects his judgement. A number of the hosts are either trying to reach The Valley Beyond or Glory, a promised land that represent the eschaton, but what appears to be at the location they are heading to is Will’s super-secret-biggest-mistake. As this whole thing careens towards apocalyptic final judgement in the promised land, loaded with Christian symbolism, the show introduces a character named Grace. I would put good money on her being very important.

Grace (n)

simple elegance or refinement of movement.

courteous good will

(in Christian belief) the free and unmerited favor of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.

Romans 3:23-24

“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

[durrandurrandon]

So, is Clementine a zombie now? I’m confused.

[durrandurrandon]

Is this Rebus? Isn’t this host in the other timeline, shooting guests. Now he seems to have a different personality.. He stepped up to non-violently defend another host before he shot by security in the two weeks later timeline.

[durrandurrandon]

Confirmed!