Alastor finally decides to talk about how he got one of his scars. This decision may have unintended consequences.
this is part 7 of the Therapy Pig Fat Nuggets series. Chapter 1 is up and 2 should be posted within the week, hopefully. Please mind the tags, which will be updated once the second half is posted
having now watched the teaser and currently watching silkstone talk through it, i have more to say.
the concept they keep playing on of 'fear and his disciples' is... fine. it's not particularly compelling to me personally, but it's a good way of ka linking their campaigns together. the locksmith and fear had very similar looks, and this year's 'disciple', the toymaker, is a very strong departure from that. i don't dislike the vibe, in fact i love the idea of the toys as the new maze theme and i'm very excited to see what they come up with.
the new maze is massive. the space outside cantina is a very large and very important one for tpfn, always has been, and the marquee that has been constructed is, without question, huge. let me speculate first about what this new maze is going to be like, then we'll talk about the teaser a little more. i can't see the tp team going with 2/3 mazes being free flow, and since it would be insane for survival games not to return (both from a logistics and a marketing standpoint, because survival games is bloody amazing, and a huge investment which i predict will live longer than most mazes due to the redo factor it has - because of that free flow element) this maze will (likely) not follow that structure. however, because this space is absolutely huge, this calls into question: how long will this maze actually be? and moreover - how will it actually be structured? a combination of hallways and rooms would make sense to fill this space, similar to the structure of trailers, but since trailers does follow this structure, i wonder if they will do this again? thorpe themselves just said - literally as i was writing this - that this maze will be 'very different' to survival games. so in my mind, that rules out the idea of free flow. i imagine, knowing thorpe and their maze style, that you as the one experiencing the maze, the story will be something like this: the toymaker turns people into toys in a variety of fucked up ways, i assume you'll probably see these in the beginning of the maze, and then the vibe will be - and you're next! oh no! better get out! this does lend itself very well to the idea of the 'rooms and hallways' style of maze, as opposed to the 'lots of hallways and tight and spaces' type of maze. in case you're confused about the difference, i'd call trailers at tpfn 'rooms and hallways', and ash hell penitentiary from xtreme scream is more of a 'corridor maze' - not that either are bad, but the vibe i'm expecting from the toymaker maze is more room and hallway. were they hoping to save budget, potentially they could just do a series of rooms with not much tight space connecting them. however, this seems lazy of thorpe, and I can't imagine it.
now we've touched on the maze, let's talk teasers. if you read my last post, tpr have now confirmed there are 7 teasers launching over the next 7 days - meaning there's either: a) no roaming team, b) no show, or c) only two scare zones. i could see a case for option a or option c, but removing birthday bash this year with the toymaker theme tying so heavily into it seems like a folly that tp would not make. i suspected they were going to go down the one a day route since, yknow, it's literally almost september, and as we've established, they have other things to do. im suspecting that tomorrow will be doors or birthday bash, then whichever doesn't get announced tomorrow will be saturday, then crows, trailers, survival games, and then we hit new ground. i can only imagine the final teaser will be for the new maze, but what do i know? they could drop it tomorrow and then weave the rest of the announcements in, since they've gone more specific with their overarching theme this year.
if i may get even more specific - let's dive into the toymaker teaser itself. 'howell's toy emporium' is showing up immediately, and this isn't a character i've ever heard of in my (substantial) tp lore research. so this puts me off the idea that whoever is in charge of this twisted toy factory is someone we already know. this is nice, but a bit of a shame to see them departing from the characters we already know. as much as i love KA and their work, i have noticed that, under their command, the intricacies of tpr lore seem to have faded a little, and standalone stories are much more common. this may also be due to steph leaving the creative direction team, or maybe i'm just reading too much into things. tp have done this a lot before and it's something you have to do if you want to keep your events interesting, but lots of stories from the past at least have some link to the island. though, i suppose, there's an argument that this just enriches the scape of the island further - there is industry here beyond the lumber trade and the one-off businesses we already know, like the cinema (trailers) and the ghost tour business (platform 15).
i'm interested to see how 'mr clappy' ties into all this. the bear makes lots of appearances in the trailer, and, being the carnival teaser, he must be important somehow, though i'm drawing a complete blank on how the bear itself could actually play a big part in the maze. there's a 100% possibility that i'm wrong about the story direction, but that's the vibe i'm getting based off this teaser alone and my preexisting knowledge about how thorpe make mazes.
i'm excited to see how they pan this out - and how they balance this with oktoberfest marketing - and i'm sure updates will come as the teasers do. ka are great at dropping hints, though with things like trailers and the crows, it might prove difficult to give much insight into the new things. as another aside - i've lost all hope for the buckwheats returning this year. i knew it was a strong possibility, but i had some small hope for unchained to return this year just to give us an insight into how they'd feel about their home actually being destroyed now exodus construction has started.
this is all just my speculation, so feel free to disagree with me in the replies, but that's what i think. see you tomorrow at 7 for more - if there is any more to say.
