#hfth meta

[whatlizardry]

Thinking about how Nikignik would’ve know from the beginning why Diggory was made and that they possessed the ability to stop the heart, and how this recontextualises parts of the show.

The show begins with the start of Diggory’s life (or at least when it got interesting as they were wondering the woods for a while) which makes me wonder if a lot of the motivation behind the broadcasts was for Nik to figure out if he will stop them from stopping the heart or not

[starlightthroughbrokenglass]

Okay, so Shank says he's not the one carving the musical symbols into the corpses and I had always wondered why he would do that. He didn't strike me like the type. And now he has confirmed that.

But with the mention of the witch who I assume is Irene Mend who is now presumably in Diggory's body, I can't help but think back to that one theory I saw early on in the season (I don't know who said it) that maybe it's Percy who carves the symbols into people? But why?

Omg, I just had a thought! What if Percy is body hopping and trying to find a way to tether himself somehow? What if Irene/Diggory is helping him? 👀

[punksrespectpronouns]

favourite thing in hfth

is when character's who life has been very demanding of (polly, olivier) find family and are just allowed to just be after a lifetime defining themselves by what they could do for others

and then their just like "what the fuck is this? where's the danger? what am I supposed to do now?" and when the answers just letting themself be with people they love they are just so dumbfounded

totally not cause I relate or anything /s

[plant-clovergrass]

Lady Ethel Mallory has been accumulating spider-like traits as HFTH goes on, from the pet flies she keeps on leashes, to the alarming dark web(?) she used to trap Marco on the roof of Box Cassiopeia. 

The Lady stopped, and waved the train of her coat across Marco’s body; when the fur and velvet passed, he was plastered to the surface of the Dreaming Box with a thick tangle of black veiny cord. (ep81)

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the other iconic spider-coded villainess of my childhood nightmares, the Beldam, or The Other Mother, from Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. These are, of course, two very different horror stories and very different characters. For example, LEM doesn’t exactly create an alternate reality that appeals to your every whim in order to lure you in and steal your soul, but... huh. So I begin. 

(Just a warning - this post is long. I’m not sure I necessarily have an argument, but I’m doing some comparative analysis with textual support. It’s a fun detail-focused dive into two wonderful texts.)

Since personally it was 13 years between when I first read Coraline and my recent reread, here’s a refresher on the Beldam (or if you haven’t read it and don’t care abt spoilers): a shapeshifter who almost perfectly resembles Coraline’s mother, except for the black buttons sewn onto her eyes, and her long, thin hands with pointed fingernails like claws; and the way she is the ruler and creator of the alternative reality perfectly tailored to Coraline’s tastes; and the way she eats beetles; and how she sucks children lifeless and traps their souls in marbles, dating back at least several hundred years. Coraline discovers her dark side after resisting the temptation of a perfect life and demanding to return to her original world and family.

While the animated movie leaned literally into her spider-like qualities by giving the puppet a monstrous transformation, the novella largely used metaphor (and the bug-eating):

Her other mother’s hand scuttled off Coraline’s shoulder like a frightened spider.

“Spiders’ webs only have to be large enough to catch flies.”

It was funny, Coraline thought. The other mother did not look anything at all like her own mother. She wondered how she had ever been deceived into imagining a resemblance. The other mother was huge—her head almost brushed the ceiling of the room—and very pale, the color of a spider’s belly. Her hair writhed and twined around her head, and her teeth were as sharp as knives…

The hand, running high on its fingertips, scrabbled through the tall grass and up on to a tree stump.

The direct spider comparisons are sparse but called upon quite effectively to describe the kind of witch she is, the trap she’s spun, the way she intends to consume Coraline. 

However, much of the stickiness of her “web” comes from psychological tools rather than rope. She shows Coraline the attention she had always craved from her parents, cooks delicious meals whereas Coraline had previously criticized her dad’s cooking and her mom’s lazy non-attempts, gives her an overflowing magical toy box, and turns their boring elderly neighbors into spectacularly entertaining (if bizarre and creepy) performance artists.

“Stay here with us,” said the voice from the figure at the end of the room. “We will listen to you and play with you and laugh with you. Your other mother will build whole worlds for you to explore, and tear them down every night when you are done. Every day will be better and brighter than the one that went before. Remember the toy box? How much better would a world be built just like that, and all for you? … If you stay here, you can have whatever you want.”

Now what does that all remind you of? Granted, Lady Ethel Mallory didn’t create BotCo or the Prime Dream herself, but she’s definitely responsible for the scale of the kingdom it’s become, and is the voice of the promise that people sell their lives for.

If there is a place you wish to visit, we can add it to your Favorite Dreams, or see if it’s been made public in the Prime Dream!... It’s all part of the Prime Dream, and it’s yours to explore.

Your interests and activity also influence other parts of the dreaming experience, such as the ads you see on Botco Advertising surfaces. It’s all to make sure your dreams are peaceful, pleasing, and happy every night in a row, and that whenever you need something, you already have it… (ep87)

When they don’t get their way, they resort to twisting their victim’s ideas of reality to turn them back again towards them. No matter how straight a line Coraline walks from her house, she returns back to it in time. The Other Mother shows Coraline a video of her parents exclaiming how happy they are that she’s gone, and she half-believes it to be true. At the end of the scene:

“And,” said her father, “I take great comfort in knowing that her other mother will take better care of her than we ever could.” 

Moth experiences similar psychological torture from Botco twisting and manipulating Moth’s dreams and memories to have loved ones direct Moth to the Prime Dream over and over again. In such a dream, not only do your loved ones share what they think is best for you, they also abandon you at the same time. Where else are you to go?

And how could I neglect to point out the use of “family” to welcome lost and neglected characters into the arms of someone who loudly purports to care about them?

“Hello, Moth,” said Lady Ethel Mallory. “Welcome to our happy dreaming family. I’m sure the journey wasn’t easy, but we are so glad to have you here with us at last.” 

“And then we’ll all be together as one big happy family,” said her other mother. “For ever and always.”

A key difference between the two is while the Beldam traps and then eats children’s souls, technically LEM is advertising a service which most of their customers consent to purchasing. Obviously, she kidnaps many of our favorite characters, but the vast majority of the millions of dreamers supposedly turned themselves in. They’ll live out their lives in bliss (if they’re not working off their subscription fees via some weird indentured servitude that’s only been hinted at) and then die without ever having to fend for themselves in the desolate post-apocalyptic landscape the outside world has become.

Lady Ethel can’t resist throwing in some spider language, though maybe that was due to the conceit of it appearing in episode 25, “Spiders”:

We need people to focus on us. We need their attention. We need them to walk into our web so we can own them forever, drinking their lifetime value.

Unfortunately, “lifetime value” ends when their customers’ lives end. For now.

They now have their hands on the Instrumentalist’s books and Percy’s agreement to help. As I speculated in a previous post, I don’t trust BotCo (whether it’s Oswald, or LEM, or Faust) not to misuse the ability to trap their customer’s souls indefinitely and maximize their “lifetime value” for all it’s worth, especially if their customers trapped in individual pods aren’t reproducing and the number of new members from the outside is dwindling.

Coraline speaks for all of us listeners when she rejects even the premise of the Beldam’s promise: 

Coraline sighed. “You really don’t understand, do you?” She said. “I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything. What then?”

“I don’t understand,” said the whispery voice.

“Of course you don’t understand,” she said, raising the stone with the hole in it to her eye. “You’re just a bad copy she made of the crazy old man upstairs.”

Lady Ethel seems more self-aware and ambitious than to believe everything she says about a life of perfect bliss being all one could ever want, but I’m curious about her perspective on whether the Prime Dream is something she believes in or if it’s simply something over which she has ownership and power. A question I’m wondering - is Lady Ethel a bad copy of the crazy old man upstairs, Mr. Botulism? What will her revolution look like when it comes, when she tries to make her claim for the throne?

[dathen]

Polly stealing a cane to escape from the Industry is so good on so many levels I don’t even know where to BEGIN

There was a lot of blatant symbolism in his scene about freedom and refusal to hide or suppress things about himself anymore, but as @ohnoktcsk pointed out in the discord, the umbrella—>cane works as another example of that symbolism. Polly had been using his umbrella as a mobility aid, but we only got glimpses of that in between its primary uses as a weapon. Now, the most visible use of the cane is as a mobility aid, with its magical properties secondary (or, you could say, the magical properties make it a much longer-range mobility aid).

Second, the umbrella was a weapon to help him on his mission to kill someone in a doomed planet. In addition to how he used it as a mobility aid, he repurposed it to defend his new friends—one of whom we now know he had been sent to murder in the first place!! And now instead of a weapon, the cane gave him the freedom to escape and take his life into his own hands, and rush back to his friends’ side.

Both the practical and magical uses of both items are so rich with this turn in his story, THAT’S SOME DAMN GOOD STORYTELLING

also disabled polly my beloved light of my life

[starlightthroughbrokenglass]

I can't tell you how much I love this cliffhanger for this season. For the entire season, basically every episode, we got more and more snippets of Marolmar and Nikignik's story. We got intros about Nikignik. We got Nikignik struggling with the reality of what it means to stop the heart and actively interfering with the narrative to ensure that outcome. And we got Nikignik addressing Marolmar over and over and apologising and reflecting on the choices they made this season. And of course we got the liveshow where we got to meet Marolmar ourselves and got to witness their relationship - and its end.

The last three seasons we got to see Nikignik go from grieving his lover to slowly moving on and accepting that the heart - the last remaining part of his lover - has to be destroyed in order for the people he grew so fond of to stand a chance. Nikignik is finally ready to let go of this last part of Marolmar.

And we've seen in the liveshow how difficult their relationship was. How desperate Nikignik was for Marolmar's love and how much this relationship hurt him while they were still lovers. We saw Marolmar telling him he doesn't need other friends aside from him, just to turn around and send him away. We saw Nikignik begging for any scrap of attention Marolmar deigned to give them. Nikignik might have loved Marolmar and Marolmar might have loved Nikignik in his own way. But that relationship was far from healthy.

And I can't wait for the next season to see what comes of this and how Nikignik will handle the possible return of their lover who he has mourned and cursed and whose death he seems to have accepted in the end. But nevertheless, it was just this season that we got the heartbreaking sign-off of "I am your loyal host, Nikignik, waiting forever for your return to the Hallowoods."

Now this return might finally be here. And I can't wait for what the next season brings and will wait impatiently for the return of the Hallowoods.

[starlightthroughbrokenglass]

This podcast has made me feel many emotions over the last four seasons. But I don't think I have ever felt so much rage as I have for the first 15 minutes of this episode

[starlightthroughbrokenglass]

That present tense sure hit hard