TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Misplaced Lens Cap
Cosmic Funnies

if i look back, i am lost

@theartofmadeline
i don't do bad sauce passes
RMH
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

ellievsbear
Claire Keane
$LAYYYTER

⁂

★
🪼

pixel skylines
YOU ARE THE REASON
almost home
No title available
Sweet Seals For You, Always
h

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@peppermintengine
A Khoshekh fanart from some time ago
Human and hobbit art only please
Uh. Religious symbolism and stufff
no rest for me and im not even that wicked ?
by Keith Perelli
Worlds Apart — the Harpy and the Mermaid
has this been done already
six episodes into my silt verses relisten and i wanna write an essay about aromanticism, Carpenter's aromanticism specifically, the use of religious devotion as a stand-in for monogamous amanormative life, how this relates specifically to Carpenter and her struggles with "conventional" religious devotion, how fuckin Hayward used romance as a stand-in equating marriage to religion,
It is insane to me that ballet flats are popular again when they are objectively some of the not only most uncomfortable but also ugliest shoes ever invented like zero arch support zero padding just slamming your feet against the hard ass ground with a thin sliver of barely there sole as your only protection and your heel rubs against the back and you get blisters 100% of the time guaranteed and then it’s like oh what’s the aesthetic payoff for your suffering NOTHING!! Your feet look like the letter L and the shoes gap out around the sides with every step and it looks like you’re wearing freaking no show socks just the most disappointing nothing of a shoe ever. Everyone who owns a pair of ballet flats you’ve straight up been brainwashed and you should go throw that shit in the garbage!!!!
THEY WERENT LYING ABOUT JOE BIDEN SEX COMA?????
one aspect of carpenter and hayward from the silt verses that i've really grown to appreciate is how crushingly isolated they both are, in distinctly different ways.
carpenter's isolation is something i'm personally familiar with, and i'd assume so is every romance repulsed aromantic woman on this earth. it's the sort of loneliness that comes from knowing almost everyone around you experiences something you don't. something they consider incredibly, fatally important, but that you only see as a nuisance and a discomfort. that people around you are willing to die for something you couldn't care less about. and they expect that same devotion, passion from you. and treat you as an anomaly when you can't seem to locate it within yourself. people try to force it onto you, or alternatively, try to shove other things onto you because of it ("well, if you don't experience x, you must not also experience y"). adding onto that her immense amounts of trauma, it's easy to see how carpenter developed this sort of "i have to do everything on my own, because no one else can be trusted, and no one else will ever truly know me for who i am" attitude.
hayward's isolation is a lot more blatant, and incredibly obvious especially at the start of the show. the contrast of going from carpenter and faulkner constantly talking to and about each other, to just...hayward. all alone. his first real character moment being dealing with the hollow, a god of hunger; a great, empty, all-consuming void that drives you mad from within. a lot like loneliness. he lies about being married, resents every reminder that his connection to felix is a purely professional one, dreads the concept of even further isolation that the stink brings. his loneliness feels somewhat similar to how loneliness is portrayed in/by boisvert, in how violent and intense it is. his vague resentment towards gods in general might also be connected to how impersonal they all are; a relationship with a god is a relationship one-sided. he viscerally dislikes the idea of speaking to something that may never respond. or may respond negatively. this is why he latches onto paige the way he does; because she's there, and she's kind, and she's close. no god or saint or anything of the sort has ever been that for hayward.
also, i just. LOVE the foreshadowing and irony of hayward specifically delivering the line "everyone wants a personal relationship with the divine, but none of us are really equipped to handle the consequences." in the very first episode he appears in, because in the end, he got a personal relationship with the divine, and the consequences were the scariest thing of all: the fact that he grew to love someone so deeply that watching her walk on without him was the greatest honor of his life. human connection was what turned james hayward into one of the self-sacrificing worshippers he used to judge so fiercely.
and for carpenter, who had already accepted that she'd never be known, to never truly give up on faulkner, someone who refused to try to know her at all by the end...only for the river to claim one more brother from her. for the stream to carry his corpse to her, like a sacrifice from her god to her...anything for mallory glass. i truly and genuinely believe that carpenter's relationship with the trawler-man is an allegory for her aromanticism. when he brings her these "miracles", these blessings, like she is his promised bride, and she says "i do not want this. i did not ask for this." and in response, his acts of devotion only grow in volume. taking away her brother, twice. and those i love, it rends.
It’s 3am, I don’t want to sleep because I need to continue listening. Tumblr has stolen my image resolution but have some Cairn Maiden Carpenter anyways
I’m nearly done with the silt verses I think I’ll cry when it’s over
Carpenter and Faulkners relationship is amazing. We’re Siblings, I would let you die for me.
Something cool about The Silt Verses is that, it’s definitely a story about religious oppression: there are official religions, and there are illegal religions, and Carpenter and Faulkner’s religion is super illegal to practice. But their religion is neither a depraved weird horrible thing set against a loving, just, peaceful, merciful, ~ normal ~ official religion; nor is it loving, just, peaceful, and merciful in contrast to the depraved and evil official religions. The worship of the Trawler-Man has a lot of body horror and human sacrifice… but all the official, legal, normalized religions also involve a lot of body horror and human sacrifice. It’s human sacrifice all the way down in this world!
Vaughn, I think, states the theme outright: at least you get to choose the thing that eats you. What I’m starting to get is the thing that makes the Trawler-Man illegal is that he’s regional, specific, and unmarketable. The legal and official gods like the Saint Electric, the Petropater, and the Slag King are the ones connected to industry, ones that money and control can be wielded through. Sweet Jolly Crunch-Tooth as a god of farming and harvest was canonically deliberately invented to usurp the thousand different harvest gods and unify all the farmers under a single god to be more profitable and commercialized. These popular gods still demand sacrifices, of course, but it’s in the name of industry, or modernity, or convenience, or products. The military has a god to assuage and give courage to soldiers; the police invented The Cloak, a god of police to do the same for cops, and it was signed off on as an official god when higher-ups realized they could send officers out with The Cloak as their ride-along and thus have to pay fewer people. And yet these cynically-created gods aren’t fake, either. They are very real.
What’s especially interesting is that local and regional and personal unmarketable illegal gods aren’t any better than the official ones. The Trawler-Man, god of a specific river, still demands drowned sacrifices. The Elk of Birch and Bone seems to be a very local god of a specific forest, of wilderness and hunting, and it also requires deeply disturbing body-horror sacrifices. There are gods like the Hollow or the little boy’s god of thunder that are accidentally called into being and given power and form through just a few individuals wanting something and naming something and nobody actually wants that god to exist and nobody actually wants that god to do what it does. Being afraid of or fascinated a thing is enough to call a god into being. And that god then immediately starts eating people.
It’s fascinating. I’ve heard that The Silt Verses gets really into critiques of extractive capitalism, and I’m starting to see that take shape. That this form of human sacrifice is good and necessary, but that form is tragic, and that form is evil. That the official, licensed, universal gods of capital and progress and industry and markets are what you’re encouraged to sacrifice your life to, and the small, weird gods of your local woods or your local river are weird and scary and also a distraction from what you should be worshipping and therefore banned. That even so, you can accidentally—or even intentionally—invent something that consumes you.
And in this world, something will end up consuming you. If you’re lucky, you get to choose what it is.