#are these webweaves. is that what you would call it if there's two or less sources.

[vulpinesaint]

Venom + Kissing Death by MOTHICA

[bellshazes]

Will Oldham has showed up in basically every webweave ive made: a changed voice, when you don't even know who I am even more than I, there are two kinds of people. Each excerpt means the thing it is, but it's also deeply colored by my one-sided parasocial nemesis relationship with him, as well as the incredible piece that includes this anecdote:

he is not, I don't think, homophobic; his body of work is in fact extremely queer owing exactly to these personal experiences, notably songs like Black Captain or Antagonism. (Has it ever dawned upon you to do things as I do, and sabotage your rightful due?) He gorgeously captures what i can only call the capacity for intensely heterosexual queerness.

I once lucked into a photography assignment at a local art museum where he performed solo in the medieval wing in front of giant stained glass windows and among relics and tapestries, following the publication of songs of love and horror, his annotated lyrics compilation. His wife (a locally renowned artist in her own right) and young child were among the small audience. His many monikers and intense, thoughtful opinions on music as an industry give him a particular self-mythology, though I don't think he'd like that assessment.

So, to the point of last life and do it again, it's less fandomizing these things he's said or written and a deep belief to me that the dynamic of the snow fort is also resonating with the things that led to WO's works. A changed voice, yes, but the same voice; a changed life but the same life; and so the music changes. And so the dynamic changes - but it's the same. And it's deeply and lovingly antagonistic and agnostic of the changes even as they revel in them, like bdubs joking he would never even think of killing etho even though he did the prior season in the single best example of a covert assassination in the entire series.

and like. It's not intended to be queer. I don't think it needs to be read that way to be resonant! your friends who you'd die for or leave behind (black captain, both versions) whose bond with you is both juvenile and foundational and consuming. it has always been incredible to me that they're not even best friends. there's love but little sweetness, especially when no consequences are ever truly permanent, because there's always another world, another song. what if that relationship wasn't even the most important one in your life if you had to say what was, but it was so fundamental that every time you were in the same place you ended up entangled anyway.

In a long enough body of work across enough names or servers you arrive at mythology whether you like it or not. Many lives, many stories, ensnared by the unchangeable complex web of many pasts and set free by the infinite possibilities of many futures. I wish it were easier not to reduce them to simple narratives.