#also I sort of hope they don't use the word 'sin' to describe whatever he did

[whereporygon]

The other day I was talking to @vaultureculture about Kuras' having a bit of owl in his design and that made me look for his 'biblically' accurate form because my memory was fuzzy, but my brain had been cooking for a while already and I needed answers.

After looking at his real form, I have to wonder: are angels in this world really this grotesque, or is it just Kuras?

screenshot by @sweet-milky-tea705

If so, is this disfigurement a punishment given before he, willfully, decided to ostricize himself, or is it the effect of him being away from his 'exalted origins' for so long?

His real body seems to stand between rotting corpse and an alien figure - a carcass well-past rigor mortis of an otherwordly creature, yet somehow this thing feels oddly... alive, almost if it were an empty exoskeleton clinging to life out of sheer will or even spite. Or perhaps it is meant to mirror the very essence of this world of decay in it's full, blunt, raw glory.

Maybe it's the effect of his immeasurable guilt, corroding his very essence. Just what did this angel do, or perhaps did not do, to deserve eternal purgatory? What is necessary for a divine being to decide for themselves that they deserve such fate?

Was it even his idea? What if it's somebody else's will that Kuras is carrying out as his own, ever true and loyal to his role as a messenger to the very end? How much of all of this is something he actually wants and thinks by himself he ought to do in order to purge whatever wrongdoing of his?

A MC with The Unnamed background seems to know Kuras (or at least seems to be in tune with a being like him), and a familiarity between the two is hinted at in the demo. Is Kuras always this open with everybody, or is it just with MC? Why was he so familiar with us, to the point he even laughs and MC reacts to his touch like they remember it? Does he just feel that much at ease around us or do we actually know each other, somehow?

What is going on with Kuras?

Is his body decaying due to heavy shame and guilt, or is it just like that, a horrifyingly indecipherable view to anything mundane?

Or is it standing in between worlds, in the limbo between holy and corrupt, never forgetting the past but also never looking forward to the future, that is pulling him apart?

[theneighborhoodwatch]

ramble about wally & home's codependent swag. do it. you know you want to /lh

sorry for sitting so long on this one, anon. it's good to let thoughts Ferment sometimes. anyway - [pulls up a chair to sit down on it backwards, facing you]

so, the way i see it: it all comes back to home, yeah? home is not just the house - home is also the name of the town, it is very likely the town itself, and that town may be (as far as we know) the entire world. the very Concept of the home been discussed by clown as a central theme of welcome home a few times on his blog. when i say that home is everything, i do mean everything, and i don't think there's anyone for whom that rings more true than wally.

i know i link back to my older posts a lot, but i swear this one is relevant bc i wanna elaborate on a point that i make in the first half of it: the way i see it (as of the time of this writing) home, in all senses of the word, is wally's top priority. which is not to say that his devotion towards home supersedes everything else, but that everything else sort of feeds back into it by design. the neighbors? they are there to inhabit home. we, the audience? we are there to perceive home and round out its population. the WHRP*? they said it themselves - they're there to make that fucking house a home. home is everything, and in turn, everything is for the sake of preserving home. wally cares for his neighbors, and he cares for Us, but would either of those still be the case if there was no home to preserve? i'm not sure.

there is a catch to this, though. of course there is. wally's identity already seems tied pretty heavily to other people; he learns from his neighbors, and he does so on the audience's behalf. given everything i've written in the above paragraph, this can arguably be an extension of his devotion to home, however genuine those relationships may be in their own right. in other words, home (more specifically the restoration/preservation of home) is not only wally's chief motivation, but as far as he's concerned, the reason he exists at all. i think a lot about these tags that @pretty-in-possible (hope you don't mind the tag) left on a post of mine describing their image of wally:

and i had something very similar in mind. if wally's goal truly is the restoration/preservation of home - in this context, his raison d'être, the basis for his entire sense of self - then i can imagine why he would be willing to follow his original role as closely as he could even 50 years after the end of the original show. i can imagine that outgrowing that role in any capacity would feel like a sin. i can imagine that watching his friends outgrow theirs, or at least express a desire to do so, would seem extremely reckless to him, if not an outright betrayal.

("wait," you might say. "doesn't tampering with the site technically count as him adapting/evolving past his original role as audience surrogate?" "yes 8]" i would say. i would not elaborate, and then we would move on.)

i've mostly been talking about wally's side of things, and the reason for that is mostly that wally is just easier to speculate about. home is such a mystery that some people aren't even sure if they're the same being that was on the original show; i've seen people posit that whatever home is now, it is Not what they were originally, either that they're undead or that they've since become a husk for Something Else to inhabit, or some third thing i'm forgetting. either way, i think it's interesting that as attached as wally is to home, even he doesn't seem to be able to assess whatever their needs are with 100% accuracy - if the duet audio is to be believed, there's at least Some guesswork involved. who's to say that wally isn't just hearing what he wants to hear, at least some of the time?

i wonder - how does home feel about being an Embodiment, not of just the town, but of the very word "home?" are they frustrated with the fact that even wally, their own inhabitant, can never fully understand them, and has become resentful? do they appreciate the effort regardless, but feel a growing impatience gnawing at them day by day? are they apathetic at best towards wally, but need him to fulfill some goal or another, since they're an inanimate building? either way, i can't help but feel that home also relies on wally in some way; perhaps not as heavily as he relies on them, perhaps not in the same way or for the same reasons. but there is something Mutual there, i think.

tl;dr: these two are hurtling towards disaster and i, for one, cannot wait to see every last bit of it. here are two songs that remind me of them every time i hear them, the realization of which is often accompanied by guttural wailing.

* wally doesn't seem to have any strong feelings towards the WHRP team outside of maybe sharing the same motivation as them (i.e. restoration) but this may be because he's either hiding from them and also doesn't seem like the kind of guy to Express negative emotions, or he because he is the WHRP team - we'll see how things shake out.

[thunderoad]

i know you said you don't wanna explain but do you wanna explain the whales thing?

listen. I have been trying to think of a way to answer this question that does not sound simply unhinged, and I cannot do it. we’re just going to have to go with the unhinged version.

I’ve been reading transcripts of joseph campbell’s and bill moyers’s interview series titled, “the power of myth.” In it, campbell states that myths serve to bring what is spiritual and unconscious into the physical realm; myths transform consciousness.

He describes the typical hero sequence as actions as beginning “on the edge, you’re about to embark into the outlying spaces. And – the real adventure. This is the jumping-off place.” What this means is just that the hero is about to leave behind all that “which he controls and knows about, and moving toward the threshold. And it’s at the threshold that the monster of the abyss comes to meet him.”

One typical version of this myth has the hero confront a dragon; at one point, Campbell posits that the western dragon represents greed. I think Spenser had his dragon represent pride, and Malory’s dragons were about civil unrest. Whatever. Point is, dragons often personify negative qualities – our fears, our sins. They exist for us to slay them. 

Whales flip that formula on its head. Unlike dragons, whose main purpose in myths is either to be slain or to slay the hero in anticipation of the hero’s resuscitation (like Gandalf and the Balrog), whales turn the hero’s journey inwards.

I’m not very religious, so here’s my very brief summary of the story: God told Jonah to warn Nineveh that He was preparing to unleash His wrath on them. Jonah ran for it. He boarded a ship but while they were at sea, a storm boiled the waters and clouds roiled overhead. Thunder boomed. To spare everybody else onboard, Jonah volunteered to be thrown overboard. The sailors tossed him over, and then God sent Jonah a whale.

The whale swallows him whole, and that’s where he stays for three days and nights. It’s in the belly of the beast that Jonah makes his amends with God and repents and stuff. God frees Jonah from the whale, and Jonah goes to Nineveh, and it’s (basically) a happy ending.

Okay, now let’s back up. I already told you that myths exist to transubstantiate our hopes into heroes and our fears into monsters that we can overcome. Running from his fate led Jonah right into the path of God’s wrath. So, now what you have to ask yourself is: Is the whale the monster of the abyss in this story, or is Jonah?

Trick question. I don’t think there’s a difference between them. Remember, Jonah received instructions from God and not only ignored them but actively fled. “You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas,” he says. until he submits and takes his place as the hero in the story, that’s where he stays.

As an aside, you mostly see good dragons in the 20th century. Campbell also wrote that myths are a means of escaping from or making use of a system imposed on us by society. It sort of makes you wonder what we transformed into modern dragons if our stories were myths, doesn’t it?

the juxtaposition of campbell’s comments on the belly of the whale and the slaying of dragons reminded me of another infamous villain, Milton’s Satan. Milton was famously accused by William Blake of having been “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” but that’s beside the point – the point is when Satan was cast out of heaven for his rebellion, the hell he created was an ironic parody of heaven; as opposed to its majesty, hell was small. Moreover, “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell,” Satan laments. That’s pretty small. 

Lots of journeys use movement and travel as an analogy for the characters’ emotional and spiritual journeys, like Frodo’s long descent into Mordor and the coeval deterioration of his soul. The whale takes that, too, and flips it on its head, turning all movement deeper and deeper inward until Jonah is forced to confront his own soul. which is, of course, never entirely knowable - but it can be known a little more, and a little more. 

as campbell points out, “It’s the edge, the interface between what can be known and what is never to be discovered, because it is a mystery transcendent of all human research.” He explains, “the ultimate word in our language for that which is transcendent is God.” i like that interpretation.

by the way, it is fitting that the end goal of myth is transcendent of all human research, because we don’t actually know that much about what whales get up to down in the ocean. we know that they’re the biggest creatures that have ever lived. and we know that they sing. 

not all stories are myths, and i don’t think anything we’ve talked about is precluded from interpretation; there’s a zillion ways to talk about this stuff, almost all of them good. jonah wasn’t even the only guy swallowed by a whale - jason was, too, and i think gilgamesh was swallowed by a fish! i hope it’s clear when i stepped in and told you what i wanted you to know so you’d hear the story the way i do. you can tell it however you like. 

no matter what physical form the journey takes, the purpose of myth is to transform consciousness. we all have to go down into the abyss from time to time. as the oceans warm and grow ever more acidic, we won’t have whales to share our planet with much longer. we won’t even know when the last one has gone quiet. but maybe they’ll live on in myth so that when we do go down into the dark looking for transformation and to be reminded of our smallness and our heroism, we won’t have to do it alone. there will be singing.