abt me -> marblez (/planetz/eggz/other name depending on which corner of the internet you found me on). 20, she/her/his, demi lesbian (my pfp :3), physics student, UTC+10
I love interacting with people! Send me asks about whatever. My DMs are generally open.
fandoms -> my own OCs... (D&D), iron lung, deltarune, project hail mary, httyd books (!!), little big planet (regularly updated with new interests)
content -> I repost a lot of stuff and occasionally post my own things on here. I'm deep in fandom though, I write fics and make edits on tiktok. I don't generally give out links to that stuff, if you're desperate you could probs find both on my blog somewhere, or shoot me a message.
disclaimer -> I don't have a specific dni, I don't really mind who interacts with my blog. I do (very infrequently) repost nsfw so be mindful of that. However, as a litmus test. Fuck AI, fuck the right, fuck purity culture, free Palestine. Respect he/him lesbians and other nonstandard queer identities. I think you can ship whatever so long as it's not harming anyone.
I am practicing writing in the Edenic creole I made up. Here's some more bloodymary bickering!
Grace, getting frustrated: I seriously just don't understand what you're asking me. I know you hate doing the old accent thing, but we're sort of on a time crunch, man.
Simon: ƿhæ… ƿhæ ȝu sæs all þat?
Grace: What? I'm just asking you to clarify.
Simon, imitating Grace's voice and over-enunciating every single consonant: Oh! 'I am ask-ing you to clar-i-fy!' Look'boðe, r'ȝu a book? Ȝu sæs 'I do not'? 'Could you please'?
Grace: Are we still hung-up on this? Are we freakin' serious right now?
Simon: Ængliš-old grave. Ȝu tælk like'n stone-man. ƿhæ n't ȝu jus' sæs 'Dock n't'? Heavy-burn, ȝu. Waste tick.
Grace: Did you just call me a stone man? I am not a caveman!
Simon: N't caveman, Grace. Older. Ȝu tælk like ȝu ƿear'n stupid big hat. Like ȝu ride'n horse-car. 'Ver-i-ly, sir!' Heavy-burn. jus' tell oi... ƿhæ's d'box?
Grace, defeated: The… box? It's over there.
Simon, clapping him sarcastically on the shoulder: Docked. Sæs less, horse-man.
Breakdown for people looking to learn:
"Look'boðe, r'ȝu a book?"
Rules used: Compounding (Look + boðe/body) and subject dropping ("Are you a book?").
Meaning: "Look at yourself, are you a textbook?" Simon is mocking Grace for sounding like a rigid piece of data printout rather than a real person.
"Ængliš-old grave. Ȝu tælk like'n stone-man."
Rules used: Vowel shifts (Ængliš), compounding (stone-man), and using grave as an intensive modifier at the end of a thought.
Meaning: "Your English is seriously ancient. You talk like a corpse/fossil." (Using stone in the future sense of something useless, stagnant, or dead).
"ƿhæ n't ȝu jus' sæs 'Dock n't'?"
Rules used: Wynn character for 'w', negative compression (n't), and rising intonation for a question.
Meaning: "Why didn't you just say 'I don't understand'?" Simon is genuinely annoyed by how yappy Grace sounds.
"Heavy-burn, ȝu. Waste tick."
Rules used: Compounding (Heavy-burn) and slang substitution (tick for second/moment).
Meaning: "You take way too much effort to listen to. You're wasting my time."
"Ȝu tælk like ȝu ƿear'n stupid big hat. Like ȝu ride'n horse-car."
Rules used: Yogh and Wynn character shifts, erosion of "a/an" to a clipped 'n.
Meaning: "You talk like you wear a stupid top hat. Like you ride in a horse carriage." Simon's brain is reaching for the absolute oldest historical concepts he can think of to accurately describe how ridiculous Grace sounds to him.
Blessed Art Thou Amongst Women - Simon's Mother and Simon's Knife
One of the outfit details I never noticed until we got the digital release of Iron Lung is that Simon's belt has pouches and other useful things on the back that I couldn't see clearly before when I saw it in theaters. The digital version is just that much brighter. When Simon first sees the Shadowman–the horrible, future version of him that is literally made of the blood ocean, which allows him to flow in and out of the sub with ease–Simon reaches for the knife sheath on that belt (timecode 25:44).
(This is a clear image of the sheath for Simon's second knife on the back of his belt. Next to it is the image of Simon reaching for the knife he used to carry.)
It is a big, chonky sheath, too. This was a Chad of a knife that Simon once carried. Of course, he finds nothing there: he was a prisoner and has no weapons on him. His pendant from Eden was also ripped away. All that is left is a leather cord and a small piece of the metal link that would have attached to the pendant. It is bent: that pendant was taken from him.
But this detail about the second knife sheath is very interesting because it is not the only time we see Simon reach for something that isn't there. Earlier in the movie when he is afraid and in need of comfort, he reaches for the knife sheath on his shoulder, the one gifted to him by his mother (timecode 53:12).
We only see her briefly in a flashback handing him the knife for the first time. With what information we are given, here is what we can know about Simon's mother: When Simon is looking for hope and for divine intervention for the black box and its precious data to reach the tow ship, he asks his mother to protect it; not god or Eden or whatever dead and twisted bark remains of the Last Tree.
When Simon is backed into a corner or confronted with danger, he fights: He reaches right for the weapon on his belt.
But when he needs love and solace, it is his mother he looks for. The rest of his outfit can be tossed away and used however–he doesn't care about that.
(Simon's iconic line "I'm not dying down here" is delivered while looking at the knife sheath, followed by him tearing it off the rest of the patchwork hood. In the next scene, he has put the sheath back on.)
But the knife sheath that his mother gave him he keeps on until the very bitter end. Simon is not wearing it when he reboots the power and gets splashed in the eyes by blood from the cracked porthole. It's not there when he reaches for it, so it is the first thing he puts back on after doing first aid on himself. The harness goes, most of the hood goes, but the knife sheath he puts back on. It means a lot to him and it serves as a comfort to him.
Again, we can't know much about Simon's mother: She is merely the idea of a person, glimpsed only in flashbacks and the hallucinations of haunting memories. However, I have talked about her in an earlier post here, and I largely still think this way about her. She has passed on, but Simon remembers her fondly. The knife was a cherished belonging. The movie starts out with Simon gripping its sheath tightly and rubbing his thumb over it. Simon loved his mother when she was alive, misses her now that she is gone, and finds comfort in her memory.
We can hear her voice near the end of the film. She tried to encourage Simon to embrace their new home of Eden, even telling him that there is a tree there and that he will like it on Eden. She said, "We have a dream. It'll be just like home." She was trying her best. We can't know why, exactly, they moved to the space station, but we do know that she saved both of their lives leaving Mars and moving to Eden. Had they stayed on that planet, they too would have been raptured away; or maybe they would have become part of the nightmare at the bottom of some other blood ocean on some other terrible moon. Maybe.
I think it is very easy to fall into the trap of judging characters from other time periods and worlds by our own standards, but it leads to analyses that are flat and inaccurate. Yes, Simon was very likely in a cult, and most certainly trained to be a soldier from an early age. But this is not modern life where we have made many strides in lowering childhood mortality rates. This is a brutal world where there is nothing completely recognizable from our own society around to really use as a frame of reference. And, frankly, modern children in our own world are given knives regularly in groups such as the Boy Scouts or clubs that teach them about boating, fishing, hunting, and gardening. We know Eden had soldiers (they are called that in the storyboards that Molly Brown posted on her website), so the knife very likely was specifically for combat, but that is not to say it only had one purpose or was only given to Simon for this reason.
Nor is there any reason to think that Simon's mother was a bad mother for giving him a knife. If so, then every Boy Scout parent or troop leader is up for worst parent of the year in our own world. And hell, for all we know, the knife was a cherished heirloom. Could it have belonged to a family member like a father, brother, sister, grandfather or the like? Is it so strange to be given something like that? When my mother got to be a certain age, she got a cherished knife from her father after he died. He used it in WWII, and it was well-taken care of. And now I have it, so that is just a thing that can happen even in our world. And it's not unusual to think that it could happen on Eden, too.
Eden was very likely an agrarian society, or as much of one as could be in the vacuum of space where growing anything was a struggle. Children very likely got practical gifts that some might think of as presents only suitable for adults today–like a knife–but that is us looking at a completely alien society and expecting it to resemble ours. We can't know what life was like for them on Eden–either before or after the Quiet Rapture. We can't know how Simon's mother died. All we can know is that he loves her, believes in her as someone who would protect a precious item, and that he misses her terribly.
Some of the information we have about her comes from the mad screamings of the blood eel, who is trying to manipulate and control Simon. The things she says can be considered wildly contradictory as well. Quick as a whip she goes from saying that Simon's mother wouldn't even recognize the killer he had become, to asking if death was the only thing she taught him.
We can guess that she wouldn't recognize the killer he became because she didn't raise him that way. She didn't give him a knife for him to kill with. She probably gave him a knife to protect himself or do regular tasks around Eden. She raised a kind boy, and then society, the Father, the cult, the death of the Last Tree, and Eden falling into extremism (perhaps), stamped a lot of that out of him.
And that last statement from the eel about death has intriguing wording. You can interpret "Was death the only thing she taught you?" a couple of ways:
Simon's mother was instrumental in shaping Simon into the soldier and killer he became on Eden. She put the knife in his hands, and put him on a path to eventually becoming The Butcher.
OR, when Simon's mother died, her death was instrumental in shaping Simon into the soldier and killer he became on Eden. She put the knife in his hands, then died, leaving him alone to fend for himself in a cold, cruel, baffling world. The death of his mother put him on a path to eventually becoming The Butcher.
The eel is trying to shake Simon to get her way. I think it is very likely that Simon's mother died suddenly, and that her death set him on a path very different from what his mother planned. Her death "taught him" alright. It taught him about cruelty and about unfairness and loss. She herself didn't teach him these things, but her death did. In life, she loved him and protected him. We can't just take what the eel says at face value here, especially when what she says is contradictory.
The last thing I want to touch base on in regards to Simon's mother is that people are attributing lines spoken by Ava in the hallucination scene to Simon's mother. The exchange about the seed pendant that begins with "I don't have it" is a line delivered by Ava.
Right before the SM-13 mission, Simon would have asked his captors for his seed pendant back. Ava says "I don't have it" and then goes on to say that the C.O.I. Council Authority confiscates these seed pendants because they plan on making a garden of their own. Simon then says that the "Last Tree is dead." This makes Ava say, "What?" That fragmented conversation ends with Simon saying that the Last Tree is "Eden's Grave." I am not sure why people think this is his mother's voice when she sounds very different from Ava. But if some of the random hate I see for Simon's mother floating around is because of this dialogue, please reconsider what you are hearing.
The only clear dialogue we have from Simon's mother is her trying to comfort him when they are forced to leave Mars. Again, we do not know why they left Mars. We do know that Simon disagreed with the decision, making his mother ask him not to be like that. He was probably a headstrong kid. In fact, we know that he was unafraid to stand up to authority because he flat out disagrees with the Father, the religious leader that obviously had a lot of sway on Eden. Simon tells him to stop lying about the stars in a flashback scene (timecode 42:40).
("Stop saying they're gone. We can all see them." Simon has the knife in this flashback. He's kept it all this time.)
What kind of mettle do you have to have as a kid to argue with a religious authority like that? He had gumption. Markiplier has said that he himself runs on "fuck you energy." I think Simon is of a similar stripe. I bet he got it from his mother.
She raised a kid who didn't just go along like a sheep. She raised someone who thinks quickly on his feet, tries to survive, is ready to fight when the chips are down, and who picks everyone else's well-being over his own at the end of it all.
("Please keep this safe, okay, Mom? It's more than me. It's more than me." Simon praying to his mother to help get the black box data to safety.)
Simon's mother was a good mother who loved him. He loved her, too. That is why he asks her to protect the data. He doesn't believe in the teachings of Eden or their god, but he believes in his mother. Markiplier made a movie with effective and gripping visual storytelling. Not everything is spelled out, but he tells you the big thing you need to know with symbols and gestures and beautiful imagery. Believe what your eyes tell you when watching the movie: Simon cherishes that knife sheath because he cherished his mother.
Based off this thing I saw where Simon gets pissy, shouts at Grace and throws something and Grace, being the sensitive guy he is, starts crying and Simon, not used to his words having any sort of power like that, instantly is like I'm the worst person ever. Grace has been nothing but kind and patient with him and here he is making him cry. He apologizes over and over again, sent into a baffling state of desperation and hysteria to try to make up for it.
Grace shows him mercy, sinking down and giving him a hug and a kiss to the forehead to talk him off the edge. He then tells Simon he still needs time to get over it and the hurtful words Simon said, but that Simon doesn't deserve to punish himself so severely, just be more controlled next time. The start of Simon learning hes the only one in control of himself, he can't make excuses here and he won't be punished severely which creates even more pressure for him to grow as person.
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