#(or at least canonical as Jonny conjectures them)

[miralines]

I cannot get over narratomancy and kvasir associated heavily with poetry being the literal engine of the ratatosk express and thus the engine of the story and Story as a force personified

[equalseleventhirds]

@oidickhead asked me to elaborate and i thought abt it and i'm not sure if i was clear enough on my previous posts SO:

step one: gerry explains the fears to jon. jon points out that fears are cultural; gerry says yeah, but some are similar, and here are some arbitrary categories (he says arbitrary specifically!!) that some ppl use to define them.

this is fine! we learn a taxonomy but we're specifically told it is not necessarily true or universal! smirke may have been just some rich british dude putting things in categories, but we are not told that he was right about jack shit.

step two: most (say, the first two acts) of season 5 happens. the distinctions between fears (and the metaphorical stuff associated with them) get even more muddy. we are treated to a whole episode abt how people like smirke are incorrect fools. we are told that 'avatar' is not even properly a thing now, and possibly never has been.

hellllll yeah now we are getting somewhere! fuck the distinction between slaughter and hunt! fuck the exclusivity of spiders to the web or fire to the desolation! fuck the--

step three: the last few eps of act 3 come along to smack me in the face. jon gives a whole monologue about 'the thing that was fear' separating into fairly distinct bits. we don't get told that smirke was right about everything, but he was at least correct about the eye and the web, and about clear distinctions existing. this is no longer conjecture by a bunch of ppl trying to make sense of distant and unknowable gods; jon knows these things to be true. and in spite of how previously he couldn't know anything directly about the entities, now he apparently can. enough to give a statement from their point of view.

now we have a problem, bcos if fears are cultural but the actual existent entities are separated in any concrete way, those separations have to be universal. the association of spiders with manipulation also must be universal. the eye as a distinct entity of knowing but not understanding must also be a universal association.

suddenly 'fears are cultural' becomes... complicated. or way too horribly simple. bcos certain fears and the imagery associated with them are now too solid, those particular things are now shared across all cultures (within this particular universe). jonny writerman sims's particular symbolism/fear categories are now a universal cultural view in this universe.

enter me, being a problem, bcos i COULD leave it at the few confirmed things, but if smirke was right then gdi smirke was RIGHT and i can and will write things about the extremely confined cultural fears of the tma universe encountering, like... any culture that doesn't fit their previous categorizations.

(sidenote, when i mentioned jonny knew making his all-knowing protagonist talk abt god being real would be a mistake, i meant that time martin grilled jon on whether god was real and jon canonically cannot know that. idk if this was fully on purpose, but like, refusing to have ur all-knowing protagonist pick a Real Religion? probably a good fucking move! it is too bad he did not realize the wider implications of spiders gdi,)

...i'm saying jonny realized that making his all-knowing protagonist talk abt whether god is real is a mistake. he did not realize that making his all-knowing protagonist talk abt cultural associations with fear as if there is One True Anything was a mistake. but oh boy will i be a problem about this,

[miralines]

OKAY SO.

This is going to be so long so I’m going to attempt to put it under a readmore.

TL;DR If you take a simplified version of how Odin got access to Kvasir in the Prose Edda, the story lines up with some interesting pre-existing parallels regarding the bifrost, the Void, mechanisation, etc, making it possible that in the version of events we hear about, Dr. Carmilla filled the role of Gunnlod, the person who gave Odin Kvasir’s remains in the text of the myth.

Base Mechs lore you need for this to make any sense: (skip this if you already know)

1. There are Narrative Echoes-- versions of stories that play out over and over, archetypes like the Sleeping Beauty story or Camelot. I cannot remember if this is strictly canon or what the citation for it is, but as far as fandom interpretation goes it’s a standard way of discussing parallels between stories, as well as explaining why the mechs in-character tell such familiar stories to an audience in (for their intended purposes originally) the UK in the early 2010′s. Recurring Mechanisms characters can also fill roles in these echoes, like when Ashes takes on the role of Hades.

2. Don’t trust Jonny when it comes to learning about Dr. Carmilla. Don’t trust any of them, but especially Jonny. She’s... complicated. Because the mechs hate her, they portray her as a monster, but the mechs themselves would look very different if the story was being told by, say, a random guard on Briar who was there when they attacked. When you get into wider lore, particularly Dr. Carmilla’s solo content and what she made with the band in the early days, the picture is a lot less black-and-white and a lot more interesting.

3. There are subtle implications in both the text of the Bifrost Incident and in Dr. Carmilla’s own work that she may have been involved with the Bifrost. Some of it comes from forbidden lore, which is only semi-canonical, but mostly what you need to know is that A) Carmilla studies a force known as the Void (as mentioned in her most recent band, Dr. Carmilla and the Void Quartet) and B) It’s very, very subtle, but in the end of Terminus, when all the voices are talking over each other as Ragnarok hits, she does have a line-- “let’s do this.”

One further disclaimer-- both mechs lore and the prose edda are so weird it’s hard to make sense of either, let alone both put together. This relies heavily on conjecture, and is honestly as much fanfic as it is meta. When I say it’s technically canon-compliant, the operative word is technically.

Kvasir’s story in Norse myths is... a little convoluted? As least as far as it gets him in the position he’s in in TBI. Basically, myth!Kvasir was created when two warring factions of gods made peace by both spitting into a vat, and to mark this truce they turned it into a man called Kvasir. Kvasir was incredibly wise and is sometimes called the god of poetry (which is a whole other meta), but while he was traveling to share his wisdom, two dwarves killed him, mixed his blood with honey, and made a mead that would turn any who drank it into a poet and scholar. As a result of a different murder these dwarves committed, the mead ended up in the hands of a giant called Suttung, who put it in the care of his daughter Gunnlod. When Odin learned of the mead, he took on a disguise and bargained with Suttung’s brother for a drink of this mead. They went to Suttung and told him of their deal, but he refused to give Odin any. From there, Odin tricked his way into the cave Gunnlod (and the mead) were in. He slept with her for three nights, and in exchange was offered three drinks of the mead, which, because he was a god who could drink a lot, turned out to be all of it. He fled, Suttung chased him, but didn’t catch him, and when Odin got back he spit the mead into a bunch of vats for all the gods to have. (All of this is in pages 83-86 of the penguin classics edition of the prose edda, translated by Jesse L. Byock)

If tbi!Kvasir came to be the engine of the Ratatosk express in a similar way, it would mean that he, as a piece of technology, was created by someone else. From here, the myth requires a bit of collapsing, as he passed through several sets of hands. But given the liberty the mechs took in making Odin the Midgard Serpent, I don’t feel like it’s unreasonable to collapse most of tbi!Kvasir’s origin into the last bit of the story, when Odin obtains him.

So let’s say tbi!Odin obtained Kvasir from the person who made him, probably in a way that echoes the story with Gunnlod. That’s where Dr. Carmilla comes in. We know she’s capable of doing weird, impossible scientific things with humans. Making a person into an engine is easily within her capabilities in canon. And, in fact, some of her canonical work bears some resemblance to the description of the Bifrost-- consider this passage:

“Jonny’s heart skips a beat, and when he glances at it he sees rainbow sheens running across its surface, breaking out to be kept in check by the device’s self-regulation.” (Drive the Cold Winter Away)

Now compare it to descriptions of the Bifrost in the album: “External cameras are only black and white, but still manage to give a sense of the shifting, undulating hues of the Bifrost” (Cold Case), “...twisting in its thrall to Yog-Sothoth, the key and the gate through whose cascading rainbow being the train has passed” (Red Signal), “by the rainbow teeth of night” (Ragnarok I: Runaway), and probably others. Additionally, the Bifrost’s effects during Ragnarok are repeatedly described with the word “void,” which admittedly could be because it’s a very common word in cosmic horror. However, given the potential connection between the mechanisms and the bifrost, as well as hints about a Capital-V Void in Dr. Carmilla’s canon, the parallel is interesting.

So basically I’m proposing that Odin convinced (possibly seduced?) Carmilla into letting her use Kvasir for the Bifrost, and Carmilla agreed for whatever reason (it does seem like an excellent research opportunity if she was already looking into the issue). I think they continued to work together to some extent until Ragnarok hit the Yggdrasil system, by which time Odin had been thrown out into the rainbow void soup and Carmilla could draw her conclusions and move on.

Like I said, this is heavily conjecture. It requires a half-dozen shortcuts to get there and I’m fully aware that at the moment I look like that meme of the guy in front of the red string board. That said, weirder things have happened in canon, and it’s not not accurate. So I’m going to continue sitting in the corner with my little corkboard gleefully playing with all this red string.

My lit class is currently studying the prose Edda and I am being so normal about it