#tsv spoilers
Listening to Jonny Sims play a character who’s being hunted for sport but this time absolutely deserves it is a real treat.
Hayward’s not my favorite character (he isn’t bad or poorly written, he just serves a particular role) AND YET, the episodes that focus on just him are some of the best in the goddamn series. First the one with the Hollow now this delightful fuckery. Just give this man a bad day and it’s absolute solid gold.
Paige watching a coworker be sacrificed: Solemn, nightmarish, a perfect encapsulation of the cold, passive violence of this world and the real world systems it reflects
Hayward watching a coworker be sacrificed: the funniest shit I’ve ever seen
“He likes tragedies! He finds them soothing!” Hembrey you don’t need to call me out like that.
Silt Verses Chapter 19 spoilers without context:
You know what I like about The Silt Verses? Unlike some serial narratives, in getting its characters and their arcs where it wants them to be, it doesn’t forget to tell good, interesting stories along the way.
The whole thing with Hembrey was clearly there to advance some plot points (get Paige the books, get her and Hayward collaborating or at least aware of one another) and character/theme stuff (show Paige gaining control over a god’s domain, fighting back against a god.) But Hembrey’s whole thing also totally stands on its own as a cool, creepy story in this universe, independent of anything else.
I expected Adjudicator Shrue to be the embodiment of this world’s worst aspects, and I think it’s interesting that their evils are a little more mitigated.
They want to prevent another holy war and seem genuine in that. (I expected them to flip after they were attacked, but they didn’t, at least not yet.) They’re queer, (insert diversity win joke here.) They’re promising to reduce sacrifices, which based on what we’ve seen is probably better than what most politicians in this world are campaigning on. (I mean, everyone is either actively sacrificing people like Carpenter and Faulkner, part of groups that do that like Paige, or is passively benefiting from human sacrifice. “Let’s kill fewer people” is probably a genuinely controversial statement.)
BUT. They’re trying to prevent a war by violently suppressing the people they’d otherwise be at war with. They bring up forced relocation as a more “peaceful” alternative. They want to reduce sacrifices not because they want the sacrifices to stop, but to make human sacrifice more sustainable. They want to mitigate the harm of a horrific system, while fully intending to uphold and maintain that system.
(TO BE CLEAR: This isn’t some “all politicians are equally bad, may as well stop trying” take. In the real world thatwe really live in, I’ll take a politician trying to make a terrible system less terrible over one trying to make it worse any day. That’s the narratively unsatisfying process we live with.)
It’s particularly interesting because I wouldn’t be surprised if Ms. Barbeau is even worse.The comments about Shrue being soft for looking too hesitant about religious genocide tell you what her campaign is probably like. Shrue quite possibly being the lesser of two evils is chilling in a realistic way – if they were the worst politician imaginable it’d be too easy to blame everything on them. Too easy to imagine everything would be fixed if they were replaced with someone better, when it isn’t that simple. I like that.
Man, with all the cult stuff going on in The Silt Verses I’m surprised it took us this long to see an example of love bombing.
We dress in the things we kill, in sallow bone and in bloodied rough fur. We accept the Beast That Stalks, with gratitude, into ourselves.
[Image description: a drawing of Mercer and Gage from The Silt Verses podcast. They are both riding horses through a fire. Gage is on the horse in the front and Mercer is on the one in the back. They both have medium-light skin, blond hair, and are wearing bloodied furs and bones. Gage has a dog skull on their head while Mercer has a goat skull. There are shotguns in holsters on the sides of both horses. Mercer and Gage appear unbothered by the fire. End image description.]
something something complicity in horror as the true source of horror…anyway, I’m feeling super normal.
enjoying the fact that carpenter gets episode 4 of each season to just go off and commit crimes while delivering the absolutely most metal lines possible.
