There are two things that make Mike Crew such a funny character.
1. He’s just… such a bad person. Leaving aside avatar stuff, because every avatar does casual murder, Mike Crew was was terrible even before he became an avatar. He’s already got a body count by the time he encounters Ex Altiora. The statement giver of that episode is like ‘I’m pretty sure this child is willing to murder me for that book’.Got his parents killed by a spooky book and was like ‘yeah, I want more of that’. Casually murdered someone (many someones?) with the Boneturner’s Tale and then when he decides it’s just not quite working for him, chucks it in a library a place where it’s guaranteed to ruin someone else’s life. If you think about it, Mike Crew managed to contribute to the eyepocalypse twice. Everything Jared got up to is lowkey Mike Crew’s fault. He just does not care about other people. Iconic
The Piper did NOT have to be that cool for a character so unimportant
"and then he turned to me and after a long while he simply said 'I met the war'" WHY HYPE ME UP SO MUCH FOR THIS GUY IF HE'S NEVER GONNA APPEAR AGAIN </33
The fiction podcast liveshow is actually such an interesting medium to me. It's a stage play but it's also kind of not. It's an audio production but it's also kind of not.
The voices we've known privately in our headphones are spoken by faces in front of our own eyes and the eyes of a crowd. The actors will sound like their characters, but might not look like them at all. We don't need the actors to know their lines by heart, or for there to be any props or stage dressing, for us to believe in the story. An actor's facial expressions, some body language, and some movement will generally reflect the attitude of their character, but the characters' actions won't always be acted out literally in front of us. The story is usually understandable entirely through audio, but we gain something unique through the visual experience.
It's theatre at its most figurative. It's voice acting at its most embodied. The show lives on the stage or in our ears or somewhere in between.
This doesn’t come up as much in later seasons but I suspect the Hephaestus’s shifting architecture, objects moving around, and the feeling that there’s more people on board comes from the aliens fucking with time so I’m convinced at least once Minkowski opened the door to the observation deck, saw Hui and Fourier there, shut the door, counted to ten, and opened it again to see an empty room and just never brought it up because she thought she was losing it.
#ah yes the ghost passengers we’ve all seen them #Maxwell: which of you assholes drank my protein shake #Mace Fisher simultaneously 5 minutes and 5 years in the past: #huh I wonder who put this in the fridge. oh well #Eiffel: sometimes you can unlock the secret chill Lovelace but she always seems really confused
[Image ID: Title cards for the shows Madoka Magica and The Magnus Archives. Madoka Magica shows four anime girls posing on a rainbow background with pink, black, blue, and yellow themes to them. The Magnus Archives has a tape made of bright green web with the name of the show below it].
(#both shows are huge cosmic horror tragedies#where power comes at the expense of humanity#and our main characters struggle (and fail) to hold on to humanity in an effort to save their friends and the world tags by @elluminis)
Continuing, the most vulnerable are taken advantage of the most, and the most reliable course of action to survive in this world is to live as selfishly as possible, even at the cost of regular people being hurt. If you don’t, it is very likely that you will be consumed by the very power you are given. The toxic system that they are unknowingly part resulting in feeding/giving power to a toxic unknowable system that they have no possibility in really understanding.
So correction, not only are they both horror tragedies, they are cosmic horror tragedies that explore very similar themes but in very different perspectives!
Something fascinating is that the shows have exact opposite endings.
For PMMM, the entire premise of the show was based around time looping in order to save one person. No matter what Homura went through, she was doing everything she can to save Madoka. However, in doing so, she accidently made Madoka into the most important person in the universe, thus asserting her fate further. At the end, Madoka sacrifices herself in order to end the toxic system, saving everyone else, at the cost of herself. The tragedy of PMMM is that Homura is unable to save Madoka, but that does not mean her actions were without consequence. If she did not love Madoka, if she didn’t try to save her, she wouldn’t have been able to have the power to save everyone else.
(To note, Madoka and Homura are never confirmed to be gay in show, but there are SO many gay undertones and implications. Like Homura is literally introduced a scene after Madoka wonders if a boy could really care about her enough to give her a secret love letter. It’s not subtle lmao. So a warning, it’s very much a bury your gays ending, don’t get me wrong. Even if gay loves does in fact save the day).
TMA is a bit more cynical in contrast but it fits the tone nonetheless. Jon had the power to kill the fears, but he never had the power to save the world. Destroying the fears and ending the system would have cost the lives of everyone. Before Jon can destroy the fears, Martin already planned to stop him in the first place. In the end, the cycle continues, the fears continue, and there was nothing they could do to stop that and the best solution still involved their own pain and sorrow. However, there is hope. Maybe another group of people can stop the fears. Maybe they can be prepared with the tapes, with something else. The cycle continues, but at the very least, there is a chance to heal for those that escaped it. And for Martin and Jon? They’re together. In one form or another, they’re together and they will always be together. And that means something. Despite the fears that can’t be taken away from them.
So TLDR: PMMM = the day is saved but the gays are losing versus TMA = the day is unclear and sorrowful even but the gays are WINNING. Also something something, one destroys the toxic system which was the main enemy of the show and gives hope that similar systems can be defeated while the other comments that toxic systems can not be easily defeated but the relationships we build together matter.
kidnapping stalking insanity sleepwalking cannibalism and teeth, gaslighting gun violence pipe murder and silence and medical trauma and meat. bugs in your body and poisoned black coffee and self-mutilation and lies, police brutality breaks from reality suicide spiders and eyes. paaaaaranoia degloving the uncanny valley and running like prey to survive, agonies torture and drowning and falling and then being buried alive.
so... post-canon, how IS faulkner written about in the silt verses (the in-universe book)? is he remembered as a hero? a liar? a traitor? or is there not enough left of the parish as we knew it to even write his chapters?
We will never know! And to me, that's exactly right. He may be forgotten, he may be misinterpreted or vilified, he may be reborn as a mineral water mascot.
More works need to take a lesson from The Silt Verses and include a whole episode of shmoopy cozy romance and then have those characters die badly and then look the audience square in the face and ask “Why does this feel so much more tragic to you than other characters’ previous deaths? Why do you assume having a romantic partner makes someone more deserving of a happy ending?”
And also the aromantic protagonist is having an enemies-to-friends arc with an ex cop turned anti sacrifice cultist by arguing about misremembered song lyrics in the background
That was what that was? I've been so confused about that episode, just a random time out from stuff I was interested in to watch some more shit happen to random people.
Also it had way more foley work than normal and I ended up checking the script to understand what was going on, but I also did not give much of a shit.
#I mean they didn't deserve what happened to them #but that's true of most people
I think the motel episode was an incredibly thematically rich episode, and this—“they didn’t deserve what happened, but that’s true of most people”— is one of the huge points it was making.
The episode was very interested in happy endings, and who deserves them, and who gets them. I saw this, first and foremost, as a microcosm and a warning: do not expect the characters you love to get a happy ending, even if they deserve it after all they've been through. Because deserving a happy ending doesn't guarantee you'll get one - and conversely, ending tragically doesn't mean you did something wrong. There is no poetic justice in the world of The Silt Verses, where the good people are rewarded and the wicked punished. There are only people trying to survive in this world, and making decisions about what they can live with doing to survive. And dying isn't a cosmic punishment for being wrong. It's an episode that reinforces the show's themes of sympathy, of empathy, of understanding that it's not fair that the world works the way it does, and it's not your fault for failing to resist it and succumbing to it.
The idea of deserving has been raised before (prominently with Carpenter's righteous axe-murder rampage that made nobody feel better and accomplished nothing material) and comes back strongly in the finale, with Val and Carson - and equally so does the rejection of the idea of deserving. Did anyone Val did horrible things to deserve that? No. Did the people she did nice things to deserve a happy end? No more so than any of the people she killed. Deserving just, does not come into it. Val consciously decided to give Carson a gentle end because dealing death and violence has never once actually accomplished anything good. Her retribution against the people-she-made-into-her-mother over and over never made her feel better, her destruction of Nesh didn't actually make the world better. She felt better when she sent Chuck Harm away from the carnage and gave him a happy alternate life with his five dogs. Did he deserve that? He was a war journalist, a propagandist, a coward, and one of the first people ever to express concern for Val, all at the same time. Did he deserve a happy ending or not? Mu. It's an irrelevant question. Val could give him mercy, and so she did. As for Carson, I wanted to see Val cathartically rip him apart for so long - but then, there was no catharsis in her other violence, and at the end of it all, she could try something different. Something kind. And Val giving Carson a false happy life and peaceful death far away from war and politics echoes the Rapture and Rest giving Seb and Dev their false happy life and death in the motel.
Happiness and peace aren't a reward for being good enough, they're what we all deserve by virtue of being alive and what we all owe to each other by virtue of being fellow humans. Simultaneously, death and tragedy aren't a punishment for being bad or wrong, they happen to people both good and bad, both brave and cowardly, both humble and hubristic, the people who turned their lives around and the ones who never did. Because this world isn't fair, and it's not a reflection on them or what they deserved.
And when The Silt Verses says the world isn't fair, it's not in a smug or spiteful or cynical way. It's in a deeply empathetic way. The Silt Verses says, you don't deserve to be suffering like you are. I understand. We live in a world whose structures are built to use us up and discard us when they're done, where our lives are only worth what can be extracted from them, and it's not right, it's not fair, and it's not your fault for being ground up and spit out by it.
So the motel episode was a thematic setup, and also a warning shot: don't expect poetic justice. Not here. These randos you don't know or care about will die despite doing their best, and eventually so will the protagonists you love.
However, The Silt Verses is ALSO extremely interested in amatonormativity, and the motel episode was an exploration of the theme of deserving in terms of amatonormativity as well. It sets up a cute cozy romance between two sad men who have not done anything more wrong than anyone else in this world, finally finding a modicum of understanding, of happiness, of peace, in their romantic connection. And then the episode rips it away and kills them both. I saw it as very blatantly turning to the proverbial camera and asking: was this uniquely tragic? Was what happened to Seb and Dev sadder than what happened to Vaughn, to Hembry, to Eliza, the Linger-Straits woman Val turned into her mother and then dismembered? Did Seb and Dev deserve life and happiness more than the others? Why? Because they were in love? Why does that make happiness more real, and tragedy more tragic? They didn't deserve to get consumed by this god and then die. Of course they didn't. And neither did Vaughn, or Hembry, or Eliza, or the Linger-Straits woman. The kind of relationship they're being ripped away from - a lover, a friend, a sibling, parents, the self - doesn't make a person's death worse, doesn't make someone deserve it less. And that was a big thing I got from "All Lovers Part As Dust" too, that questioning of amatonormative narrative expectations that says that finding romantic love is a unique happiness and losing it is a unique tragedy. It's all happiness. It's all tragedy. No one deserves to be eaten by a hungry god or an uncaring capitalist system. And yet it keeps happening.
I know it was a joke, but hearing Barry repeat “my name is Barry Bluejeans” after every sentence while relistening feels less like a dm mocking a name and more like a man fighting to remember his own name
I’m thinking about the stolen century again and it’s so incredible the way they adjust the stakes like. The Big Bad is getting dealt with in present time so like narratively we have to step away from that, and it could easily have felt like nothing in the century mattered, but a reset *once per year* and someone has to live for it to work keeps the stakes within the century so perfectly balanced…. Like it’s still sad and stressful when they die!! And also you’ve opened up a situation where YOUR PCs CAN DIE! MORE THAN ONCE. And it’s impactful every time!! Fucking wild, really skillful storytelling.
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