Today I read the Gaiman Vulture article and cried. My heart broke for the victims, and I felt dirty because the onset of my career was heavily tied to Gamain as my graduating paper for my literature degree was a psychoanalysis of his work.
Also today i found out my university database had been updated recently, they no longer had my paper on file, the copy on my computer is corrupted and the drive link i used in the past to send it to anyone had expired. The only copy I had of it was a printed copy in my physical portfolio.
The worst person you could ever meet in your lifetime still has a favorite breakfast cereal.
I knew a rapist who was an absolute ride-or-die friend to his gamer bros. Like, give the last dollar from his pocket to a friend who got a flat tire, and then turn around and go rape a Freshman that evening.
I knew a vicious child abuser who wept like a baby when her dog died.
The nastiest human being on the planet nevertheless feels obscurely melancholy sometimes, or has high spirits when they step out doors on the first warm day of spring, or has opinions on their favorite TV show and which side the toilet paper should hang on and whether or not the room should be cold or warm when you go to sleep.
We're all still just people. Complex, with fully-realized interior worlds.
None of that will save you from becoming a monster, if you decide to do monstrous things.
None of it makes you exempt from the consequences of monstrosity.
Have you ever had a recurring dream? One that picks up right where it left off, no matter how many times you wake up? A dream so vivid, so strange, it lingers long after you open your eyes—like something followed you out of it. Have you ever begged to wake up?
As with most of my Malevolent rants, we’re diving into some old literature again—pulling from the ancient and the arcane to explore what it might mean for the future of the podcast. This time, our focus is on a singular, slippery figure: Nyarlathotep. Or, as we’ve come to know him, Kayne.
In the Cthulhu Mythos, Nyarlathotep is unlike any of the other eldritch beings. While most of the Great Old Ones are distant, silent, and monstrously uncaring, Nyarlathotep is something else entirely—calculating, charismatic, cruel, and disturbingly human. He walks, he speaks, he plays. And yet, for all his autonomy, he remains a servant to something far more terrible: Azathoth, the blind idiot god who dreams the universe into being from the center of all creation.
Now, “chaos” today usually means disorder, unpredictability. But in Lovecraft’s world, chaos is something older. It’s primordial—a vast, formless void that existed before reality, before time, before thought. And at its heart lies Azathoth, asleep and mindless, his dream spilling outward in the shape of galaxies, dimensions, and lives. If he were ever to wake, the dream—and everything in it—would end.
Nyarlathotep, called the Crawling Chaos, is the only one who can traverse that abyss. He alone can reach Azathoth’s throne and speak to him—though not willingly. The Mythos suggests he does so not out of reverence, but necessity. Perhaps even compulsion. The implication is chilling: Nyarlathotep doesn’t choose to serve. He has to.
Which brings us to a theory we explored back in episode 52: that this world—our world—is nothing more than Azathoth’s dream. If that’s true, then none of us are truly awake. We’re fragments of someone else’s unconscious mind, puppets dancing in a half-formed thought. All of us… except Nyarlathotep.
He is aware of the dream. He can step outside of it and return, knowing it’s not real. That kind of awareness doesn’t make him powerful. It makes him alone. And that loneliness, that knowledge—well, it twists things. It turns a servant into something else entirely. A herald, maybe. Or a jailer.
So what does he want? Why does he walk among us? Why does he lie, manipulate, infiltrate? Aren’t humans just toys to him?
Yes. And no.
Unlike the other gods, who drift in indifference, Nyarlathotep is involved. Intimately. He whispers in dreams. He builds false religions. He impersonates messiahs and monsters. He mocks belief. His cruelty is theatrical—intentional. It isn’t about instinct. It’s about performance. He wants us to look behind the curtain and scream anyway.
And that’s where the terrifying idea begins to take shape. What if this isn’t just sadism? What if it’s resentment?
While Azathoth dreams blindly, Nyarlathotep watches. While the other gods sleep in apathy, he acts. He delivers messages no one understands. Executes will no one respects. He's bound to a god who doesn’t even know he exists—a god that birthed a universe without meaning.
Maybe he’s tired of that. Maybe he’s tired of being the only one awake in someone else’s dream.
And maybe waking the dreamer isn't good enough, because what if they fall back asleep? So maybe it's best to end the dream entirely, make sure it can never become something reaccuring, to root out the rot before everyone slips back in, and from the wreckage make something new, where no one is imprisoned, no one is restrict and everyone is concious.
A world with no inherited rules. No sacred order. No morality, no physics, no gods but himself. A world where chaos has intent. Where laws shift like smoke. Where humans are not creatures of purpose, but playthings in the hands of a being who doesn’t pretend to care.
Not just destruction. Reclamation.
Because if you were trapped in a dream that wasn’t yours—if you knew none of it was real, and that you would never wake up—what would you do? And if you could reshape it? Wouldn’t you want the world to finally look like you? Kayne—Nyarlathotep—doesn’t want to be the messenger anymore. He wants to be the dreamer.
the dollmaker gets a lot of shade for killing those people but I’m gonna be honest if someone came and fucked up my craft supplies I would ALSO find a way to give them a fate worse than death
Thought I should make a separate post regarding this debate too.
"Do you think AO3 should ban AI generated works?"
Well, in theory, it may sound ideal. But in reality? No.
I am not a fan of AI, but "do you think AO3 should ban" never actually solves a problem. Because how can you tell what's AI and what's human made? It is extremely hard to tell, and going around accusing authors of using AI — just because you suspect they do — does more harm than good. Chances are that you're accusing real writer of being AI and ruining their day at best, making them quit writing at worst.
And the act of banning never stops something from existing. It only makes it more difficult to find or avoid. Tumblr bans porn, but you can still find porn on Tumblr. The only difference is that they're no longer tagged as porn, which means you're more likely to stumble upon them because blocking the tags no longer works when they are not tagged as porn.
The same applies to AI generated works on AO3. For now they are tagged as "AI generated". You can avoid them if you don't want them.
Once they're banned, people will no longer tag them as AI, which means you have more chance of unknowingly reading and leaving kudos on AI.
Also, no, unless an author says "this was written by AI" you cannot tell for sure if something was written by AI. Em dashes aren't evidence of AI. Long and overly described paragraphs aren't evidence of AI. Real human writers do write like this and AI was trained to mimic real humans' works.
If AO3 bans AI, you will be dealing with witch-hunting, genuine writers getting wrongly accused of using AI left and right, and AI works no longer being tagged as AI (meaning they are almost impossible to spot and avoid)
Voice acting and audio by @malevolentcast , who very generously sent me this audio file to use for this animatic. Thank you for creating such a beautiful show.
Background and details under cut
I began this animatic early last year after finding the audio on TikTok. Once I heard it, I was immediately struck with the thought of how those first couple of weeks in the Dark World would be for John immediately after Season 2. It seemed perfectly fitting, how John might be tortured by his guilt and uncertainty if Arthur was even still alive, and that torment would only aid his regression to his more… Kingly qualities.
I began to draft the thumbnails of the animatic in my sketchbook before transferring it to my digital workspace, which was incredibly intimidating at the time. This was my first independent animatic. In last year’s InvictusCon, Harlan popped into my stream as I was explaining my animatic thought process to my viewers, shaking with both excitement and terror. I was stunned when he offered to voice it himself. The next day, he sent me the audio file. To this day, I am still stunned he spent so much time and effort to create something. It was the encouragement I needed to finish a longer-form animatic. It may be only a minute and some change, but this is a whole year of my life condensed - my obsession, my adoration, my passion for not only this podcast but for art in general, both visual and audio.
It’s by happy accident that I finished this right at the cusp of the Season 5 finale. It almost perfectly slots in. So… let’s all pretend that this animatic took me a month to do rather than the year I spent sweating on my couch and complaining about the number of times I forgot Arthur’s wooden finger.
Like we have to always remember that a person with health anxiety can get ill, a person with paranoia and psychosis can be in serious danger, a person with social anxiety can get bullied, a person with RSD can get rejected, a person with BPD can get abandoned, a person with depression can have a serious reason to be upset and so on indefinitely. We cannot automatically treat every concern of a person who has been labeled as mentally ill and irrational as if it isn't worth taking seriously and investigating. Making that assumption puts people in real danger.
