Pantheoncord

Official blog of the Pantheon Show discord, a server dedicated to connecting fans of the animated scifi series Pantheon!

[pantheoncord]

Welcome!

This is the official Tumblr account of the Pantheon Show discord server!

Pantheoncord is an all-ages server devoted to giving Pantheon fans a place to hang out and connect with fellow fans, discuss and deeply analyze the show together, share art, writing, and creative projects, and talk about related subjects such as science, technology, and literature! You may already know us; we are the largest and oldest Pantheon server, and multiple members of the tumblr Pantheon community are current members.

We also host regular community events such as Pantheon watch parties, community game nights, a science fiction book club, and much more! Come join the Pantheon community today!

Join the Pantheon Show Discord Server!

The (unofficial) Discord server for the AMC/Amazon/Netflix show "Pantheon" discord.gg/p

ABOUT THIS BLOG:

This blog exists to uplift the amazing creators of the Pantheon community, both on and off the server! As such, we will be sharing art, edits, memes and analysis from users on the server (with their permission and credit), and reblogging the fantastic work created by the Pantheon Tumblr community as well!

If you DON’T want your work reblogged here for any reason, feel free to shoot us a DM and we’d be happy to take it down!

Please keep in mind that we will use the tag “#pantheon spoilers” for all spoilers pertaining to the last two episodes of the show. If you don’t want to be spoiled, please block that tag!

Archival tags: #pantheon fanart, #pantheon analysis, #pantheon memes, #pantheon fanfic, #pantheoncord events, #pantheoncord original

[rock-court]

A wonderful comission for @fatamatryoshka ! Cody and Laurie deserved better TvT but im glad they live happy in this AU and my heart ❤️

[1000cavalry]

I don’t know who you were, my friend, but I will avenge you.

[csolarstorm]

Thoughts On: "Staying Behind" and AMC's Pantheon

Spoilers for "Staying Behind" by Ken Liu, one of the short stories that inspired Pantheon, particularly the ending of Season 2. It's not long, you can read it right here. I recommend it!

Also spoilers for the last two episodes of Pantheon.

I just read "Staying Behind", and wow, I wish the last two episodes were more like this. At least a little.

One of the issues I have with the ending of Pantheon is that it loses its audience surrogate. Maddie has always been the down to earth protagonist that the audience can identify with. Despite finding herself in the middle of these historical events that will change the future, watching the show through her perspective makes the story more emotionally grounded.

But in the future, Maddie is the representative of the entire embodied world. She's the opposite of down to earth, and we lose the ability to see everyday struggles in other people through her perspective. Or at least, we never see her associate with normal citizens. She's a tech executive with political power, the exact kind of person everyday people look up at and curse at or idolize.

And Caspian might be the audience surrogate at first, but aside from being in the position to deliver exposition and meet Maddie again, I don't know if he's a good audience surrogate. Caspian goes from this edgy high school kid to the only one who can broker peace between the uploaded and the embodied.

But in Staying Behind, we read about this future from the perspective of everyday people far from Maddie's perspective. In this version, most people have uploaded, and society is breaking down as everyone leaves. Finding medical treatment is getting harder, people have to live off their own generators, school is not a guarantee. And worst of all, the uploaded are really pushing the holdouts to join them, dropping propaganda pamphlets from drones trying to convince them how wonderful it is.

Kind of like the hivemind in Pluribus, honestly. They're SO excited to upload them all that they come up rather cult-like. "We've been you, but you've never been us."

We watch this unnamed guy grow up and see his parents debate on whether their family should upload or not. When he gets older and marries, he watches the next generation try to keep their traditions going. They come together for classes. His kids throw their own prom. But gradually our protagonist sees his family members betray the embodied survivors and submit to the uploaded, like survivors in a zombie movie slowly succumbing to the zombie horde.

The last two episodes of Pantheon are lacking in this everyday family life and how normal people live with these colossal changes in the world. This is part of what made Season 1 and most of Season 2 so great. Of course Season 2 was more of a globetrotting political thriller since Maddie didn't spend much time at home, but that anchor to normal family dynamics still existed in the very familiar teenage relationship between Maddie and Caspian, and Maddie's strained relationship with her new sister, MIST.

In the future, Maddie's falling out with MIST felt very realistic, and so does her feud with her son; but the latter didn't have time to develop. But her romance with Caspian...although the lengths she goes to live the same timeline with him over again are incredibly romantic, the relationship comes off as a bit inaccessible, since Maddie is a middle aged woman and Caspian is the 18 year old UI that she hasn't seen in 20 years.

We did get a bit of that family life in the scenes of Ellen telling Maddie that she was going to upload; but it was only one conversation. And in this scene, we're not watching people far away from action respond to history happening offscreen like the family in Staying Behind. Ellen and Maddie are responding to events that basically happened to them. It's not quite the same.

So to cut to the chase, if the show had one more episode, it would have been great to follow a perspective that wasn't anchored to Maddie and Caspian - maybe Justine, for example, and watch them deal with their family leaving to be uploaded. Maybe this can even take place between the events of Maddie uploading and the later part of Deep Time, farther in the future where most of humanity has uploaded, and the remnants of the embodied are trying to carry on.

It would make a great miniseries...just sayin', AMC. Neflix. Amazon? Whoever wants to do it.

[missjekyll]

I’ve never given this scene much thought beyond the fact that it was one of Maddie’s personal ‘inflection point’. I get that she felt incredibly small standing beside such unimaginably ancient object. I experienced something similar when I was in Angkor Wat. I felt impermanent and small, I wanted to touch every stone there. It was cathartic.

It’s not like nothing is matter all of a sudden and you can do whatever without giving a single thought about the consequences. It’s about realisation that the consequences of your mistakes would never be that everlasting, it’s all fleeting. And this moment must’ve made it less terrifying for Maddie to make the life changing decision to keep Dave. Because there is no right or wrong option. Whatever choice she made, she will still question it. Whether she would ponder if he would be better with adopted parents during the hardest times of her motherhood. Because every parent sometimes questions whether they’re good enough. Or whether she would think about him and miss him if she goes along with adoption. There’s always going to be “What if…”

But it had never come to my mind before Craig Silverstein addressed it in his interview, that this piece of cosmic body not only makes Maddie, we follow for the majority of the show, seem small. It makes Dyson God Maddie seem small too. A woman torn apart by indescribable amount of grief, who came unimaginable length to see her loved ones again. But after all she’s still Maddie Kim. And on top of that, it even makes Safe Surf, with all its power and knowledge, also seem small and impermanent. What is 43 million years compared to thousands of millions?

[stellarxfection]

you and me in every life, shape or form

[scinnahunbun]

art student holstrom simulation

commissioned by @fatamatryoshka

based off queen and eternal’s discussions on pantheoncord

[erysium-idk]

I feel like this has great potential as a meme format

[scuderiavettel505-deactivated20]

I have this theory.

How many here have heard about the Cantor's Paradox?

well, i got to know about it pretty recently, right around after the time i finished watching pantheon.

the paradox itself can be summarized as:

"The set of all sets cannot exist as a set."

now, lets come to the ending. we see that after caspian is "killed" in the world where the narrative continues, there is a huge time jump. to be precise, one of 117,649 years.

now in that duration the narrative shows that maddie became an omnipotent god, after uploading herself, and then managed to construct infinite simulated realities and kept on branching them until she found the reality nearest to her own. however. lets see one thing: maddie must construct realities that will continue, right? some will obviously continue till the point that "simulation maddie" becomes a god; and she will again continue, and so, and so, and so. there are literally uncountable number of realities possible.

i find this to be beautiful in a mathematically visceral way.

let the set of the realities constructed by "supreme" maddie be aleph null. aleph null is the set of all natural numbers, i.e. the smallest infinity. then the realities constructed by the outgrowths of supreme maddie's simulations will again construct their own realities, which brings us to aleph one. now so and so and so, we will get infinite possibilities and then we reach continuum.

it still does not end. it will continue and continue and continue to branch into inestimable, incalculable realities. it is basically turtles simulations all the way down. and our maddie, she may not be our maddie either. who knows? since each reality will reach a point where the only difference will be the number of hairs on maddie's head, we don't know if we even see the same maddie every episode.

if we look at it the reverse way, then we will never know who the prime maddie is. or how she is. or what happened in her universe. hell, we don't even know if her universe is simulated or not. its an infinite rabbit hole.

so yes, i'm trying to imply this subtly: maybe i am paranoid, maybe not, but can be be so sure we all aren't maddies, in our own way? what if this reality is fiction, too?

we will never really know.

[rogue-wildcard]

i choose principles over power, and i do not bow to that which seeks to crush me or my kind

[finnthephrog]

My man Caspian he kinda looks like pidge but whatever

[liz-goodbot]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

MIST and David build a Dyson sphere, even though they know that they're already living in a simulation. For a chance to rescue every person who has ever died, it's worth trying.

[angst-and-fajitas]

Silly two-frame MIST dancing gif I made while working on an animatic! Watch her BOOGIE!!

[honeybeetlejuice]

was laying in bed thinking about pantheon , as you do , because holy shit i watched it with my dad back in november and still i have so many thoughts , its so peak , and realized that maddie and caspian parallel penelope and odysseus and I sprinted into the living room at full speed to tell my dad. i think i scared him. sorry dad

but like OH MY GOD CASPIAN AND MADDIE SYMBOLIZE ODYSSEUS AND PENELOPE I CANNOT DO THIS RN.

this show never fails to drive me insane. it's been 6 months and it still haunts my brain

[fatamatryoshka]

Commissioned the amazing Eevee from the Pantheoncord for this amazing art of my blorbos the Lowells! Set in an au where that truck never hit them and they repair their marriage all by themselves, no technological impetus needed (and Laurie gets to come home to a lifetime of Cody's amazing cooking 🥹)

[inkedinfusions]

have this messy sketch of Caspian @pymq

[angst-and-fajitas]

I think from the moment that he found out he was meant to be disposable, Caspian set out on that quest with Maddie knowing he was going to die, or else believing it so strongly that it felt like immutable fact. There's this subtle element in their little relationship, in the way he throws himself at death and yet still chooses to love her all along the way, that feels like.... gratitude? Like he was grateful to have, finally, just once person who would remember him for who he really was and not what he was meant to be