#church of the starry children
Like in the Church of the Starry Children we are them? Obviously ‘starry children’ is a reference to Starkid and is just another neat fourth wall break but I kept thinking about who they could be.
Roman talks about how the Starry Children are “gone but through us they live on”. Now there’s a long list of potential candidates in Hatchetfield of things that could be 'gone’ like Miss Holloway’s 3 girls, the kids Willabella killed and so many more so I decided to look into the timings of the church. Now it’s said a few times that it’s the 75th annual Honey Festival in Honey Queen and based on the fact that the season takes place in the summer of 2020 that would place the first one taking place in summer 1945 (which is very interesting considering the uh… nuclear history of Hatchetfield when the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945). Anyways this date allowed me to eliminate many candidates from the roster. Nearly all Hatchetfield events that we’re aware of take place post-2004 (shoutout to 2005) so as a result we’d be dealing with events that only took place prior to 1945.
Now Miss Holloway is somewhat of an anomaly here based on her whole immortal schtick we don’t actually know how old she is and therefore when these girls were around. However, based on the fact that it’s the Church of the Starry Children and not just 'girls’ and also Miss Holloway’s 80s aesthetic kinda tying her to around the late 1900s (probably like the 1960/70s at the EARLIEST) I felt inclined to remove her and the girls.
Now there was the possibility of the kids whose blood Willabella used to write the Black Book (they made some stunning illustrations Bella I have to hand it to you) but I was also reluctant to think it was them for a number of reasons. Willabella was executed in 1824 meaning that these children were likely killed (if they were even killed it’s not confirmed but knowing the lords in black they probably were) prior to that date meaning that the first sacrifice didn’t take place until over 120 years later. Now of course it’s possible that the church existed before they started sacrificing women (Sheila and Mr Young got married in 1920 after all) but there is another factor that must be taken into account when thinking about these children.
They’re the children of the Hatchet Men.
We know from what Sheila said that the Hatchet Men and the church don’t get along very well (read: the Hatchet Men executed the entire church) and so the fact that the church would be set up in honour of the children of their sworn enemies seems very unlikely.
So as a result there was not really any known people in Hatchetfield who are “gone” that would really fit the bill of the Church. So then I ended up going back to general concepts in Hatchetfield and thinking about things that were gone during Nightmare Time and it was soon very obvious. One thing that was commonplace in TGWDLM and BF that hadn’t translated over to Nightmare Time was the audience and the audience interaction. In both TGWDLM and BF characters interact with the audience in some way and of course they can’t do that in NMT. So when you combine that fact with the fact that they’re called the “starry children” a DIRECT reference to Starkid it seems entirely likely that we are the Starry Children. Cos we’re gone now but through Nightmare Time, Hatchetfield and the actors continuing to tell us these stories even when we can’t physically be there…
We live on
