#but if you ignore how deadly seriously people took theological questions for large swathes of history

[notbecauseofvictories]

I'm in liquified disoriented tatters since the finale, but something I was meaning to say before this episode: I think Carpenter is like. 35, maybe 40, with a dash of "you look like shit" making people assume she's a bit older. the hunter siblings are absolutely teenagers as well.

also, a thought from the middle of the episode, before I was fully liquified:

At a certain point, Mercer wasn't much of a hunter anymore. She was just rabid.

[con't] Faulkner do you want to explain that thing you said to Mason. could you please. I don't. think I follow. faulkner

Incorrect! Carpenter is 45 at the bare minimum. I agree that at first (or second, or fifth) glance she looks older, but honestly she feels even older than that based on the fact that she has been keeping company with twenty somethings for the last two years. (Faulkner being max 22 and Paige being 28 at the outside.) Hayward is the only person in the whole cast who we might consider 'of an age' with Carpenter, and mostly because he's in his late thirties/early forties and prematurely aged by a steady diet of stress-smoked cigarettes, lies, deserved guilt, and paranoia.

"Mercer is rabid" fuck you that's a good line.

I do actually have reasoning for this! There's a great post in the silt verses tag calling out how nonsense it seems for Faulkner to snap at his faith no longer being illegal. Surely that's a good thing! Religious persecution is the reason Nana Glass is dead and Em drowned; the reason for Carpenter's parents being absent and Mason running his a private cult. Real religions have fought tooth and nail to be recognized by the state as legitimate; most modern people understand a lack of religious tolerance as bad and wrong. There's no reason to believe that this wouldn't color our readings of a podcast about fictional religions. What I think perspective ignores, is that---when it comes to TSV a religion's choice is not between "criminalization/persecution" and "recognition by the state/freedom." Instead, the existential question before every faith of the Peninsula and the Linger Straits is "criminalization" or "co-option". Your choices are either to be an enemy of the state, and operate under your own wild rules, however corrupt---or to throw your lot in with the government, and become yet another arm of the state trying to kill you. After all, it's the legitimate government tying sacrifices to trains, courting gods via test audience, letting dispassionate scientists discover your saints by scientific method with a body count. Stripping faith and narrative from your religion for the sake of power---like copper wire from the walls---is what the government does. And that's what I think Faulkner objects to. For good or ill, he is the most sincere believer in the Trawler-man that we know---his investment isn't in the Parish and its earthly power, the way Mason's is; he doesn't particularly care about its people, as Carpenter does. He believes in the absolutism of its god and his role as that god's prophet. No more, no less. Is this unreasonable, unhinged? Yes. But it does mean that Mason willing to sell out that divine absolutism for a seat at the Peninsulan table is an existential threat to Faulkner and everything he is. Hence: Murder.