#the sanctus putris

[mayapapaya33]

I FUCKIN NEW IT!!!!!!! (2:14:02) I recognized her voice last time they were here!!!!!!!! That Cauliflower asshole!!!! The world of Calorum is just repeatedly fucked over by religious fanatics huh? lmfao They want rot in the world so the Hungry One won't eat it! I knew it!

(2:11:15) for their arrival to the Food Pyramid.

[patnpran]

While I wouldve been foaming at the mouth if they explored the romance aspect of Deli and Colin, I also dont mind that they just ended in a way that still leaves lot of space for fandom imagination.

They clearly cared about each other but by their fall out in episode 4, it was clear to they were incompatible in how they see the world.

I enjoy the tragedy of them drifting apart before they even have the opportunity to truly connect. The pain of them breaking up before they have the chance to love each other. Liking and wanting each other enough but not enough to bridge their difference, not enough to be something more.

Truly speaks to the experience a lot of us have of the unfulfilled possibility of a first queer love that will haunt you for a long time.

By the end of the war, they sought comfort and spent time with each but now had too much baggage to really proceed. It was once again not the right time for them, maybe it never will.

[captainswan618]

omfg I’ve been wondering if the Sanctus Putris stuff was gonna come into play since we saw the fungus being!!!!

I guess they might get to use those minis from ACOC now lol

[pitmore]

The ravening war spoilers below on my theory on Karna and SP

I’m calling it right now. Karna is a mole working for the Sanctus Putris.

Raphaniel is a powerbroker much like her, and has incredibly strong feelings about SP, but Karna has given a passing interest at best.

Karna is rotting. May have literally died once (phantom rogue aabria??? I see your game) and the SP are working with or over the rot creatures. If she did die, there is something that can bring her back, but leave her with some “holes” per se.

When presented with the hole at the end of episode 5, Karna kept trying to push the party away from it.

Is this a little crackpot? Damn right it is, but that’s fun to me and I’m connecting the dots, I’m CONNECTING THEM

[wardensantoineandevka]

Colin Provolone, who worked to eliminate the Sanctus Putris for twenty-five years and counting, looking at Belizabeth and adherents of the Ramsian Doctrine during A Crown of Candy and going, "My expertise is in a very specific sect. This one is outside my specialization. Not my circus, not my monkeys."

[pan-fried-stupidity]

I like to think that the real reason the canceled for time fight with the sanctus putris in crown of candy didn't happen because they were taken out by old man Colin Provolone a few days before the crown of candy pcs made it to that area

[chungledown-bimothy]

yeah, zac and lou, take notes on the sanctus putris. definitely something you'll want to remember later

[whomst-the-hell]

i have so many thoughts abt colin provolone gradually turning out to be a hero despite it all because it irrevocably changed the feeling of the campaign, at least to me. imo, if all the scrumptious scoundrels had been morally bankrupt and self serving to the end, it would have just been tone. if everything is bad, then really nothing is. karna kills without remorse for her own gain, deli is ambitious above all else, raphaniel is a fucked up little freak, and even amangeux, who is ostensibly the most sympathetic and the most compassionate, cares more for the few than the many. at least to me, these traits would all have had net zero moral impact because its sort of what i expected, based on the setting and the source material. but colin broke all that by being kind, by doing what he could for the banana kid and by leaving deli and by doubling back and by dedicating the rest of his life to tracking down the sanctus putris and destroying this small piece of evil from an overwhelmingly evil world. suddenly there was this strange bright spot in the narrative and suddenly everyone else was so very dark. before ep4 some part of me kind of thought that, in a lot of ways, the characters were doomed by the nature of their story — the setting, the tone, the fact that its a prequel. so many characters were dead from the beginning. destiny has been designed. — and because of that the main characters almost didnt have a choice but to be cruel. they had to be selfish and violent. its what the story demanded. and then it was kind of like colin fucking provolone looked at the camera and said fuck that, i choose to be kind in whatever way i can, i choose to help in whatever way i can, i choose to atone in whatever way i can. and i sort of felt like yelling ‘have you all been able to do that this whole goddamn time?’

also theres something abt the fact that his secret, the thing that brought him into this narrative, the reason that he is there at all, isnt even really about him. he says it himself -‘i dont think i even really did anything’. everyone else is being blackmailed by the skeletons in their closets. their own actions. karna killed the spymaster, raphaniel poisoned the king, amangeux had a bastard child then killed the father, deli was trying to fuck his aunt. truthfully, i dont think any of these things (except maybe raphaniel’s) make them bad people (karna and deli were both literal children, and amangeux was grieving then trying to protect her baby) but they are still Main Character Moments. colin provolone was just some guy, who had the misfortune of being born a fontina. and then he killed a god.

[spirit-of-beetlejuiceblues12]

Guys.

Brennan said Raphaniel wanted to spend the rest of his life burning the Sanctus Putris from the land, but he died before he could do that

Colin spent his time after the Ravening War making sure there were no more FDA people left, just like Raphaniel had intended to do.

[silverspadesss]

i’m so unwell over the endings of the three that survived.

deli deciding to step back from violence and spend the rest of his life peacefully away from carn??? such a beautiful development, but at the same time so fucking sad. especially him being willing to sacrifice himself so that the others could escape and consequently feeling incredible guilt over his willingness to be manipulated by the sanctus putris and how many people it’s hurt. i hope he found his mother in the outlands. i hope they were happy. i hope that they were never touched by war again.

amangeaux. my god. she lost everybody. chutney. raphaniel. karna. everyone she was close to. but i’m so glad she’s taking her own agency and carrying on karna’s work. once she relied on her title to feel powerful and worthy, but now she doesn’t need it. she is a master of spies, pawn to no-one, and has ensured that her child, whose life in any other circumstance would have been so difficult, is safe and cared for. i don’t think you can get much more worthy than that. she and colin definitely go on fda-related missions together right??? i would devour that fic (no pun intended).

COLIN PROVOLONE. don’t even get me started on cheese batman. he slew the avatar, he got rid of deus pa’zuul, he finished the work that he and raphaniel had been doing for five years so the archdeacon’s death would not be in vain. and now he’s using his talent for violence, something that previously sickened him, to wipe the sanctus putris from the world and ensure that no one ever has to suffer the things that he and his friends did. liberating people from the shadows, from a threat they didn’t even know had its boot on their neck. come on, provolone. your grandpa would be so proud.

[kredensik]

time is a flat circle, and amangeaux is now a spymaster to a fructeran emperor, and colin is hunting sanctus putris, and deli turned north and followed in his mother's footsteps after years of trying to forge his own path, and karna loved him and the hungry one didn’t take her, and raphaniel killed the king, and the universe is big and the cosmos is uncaring, but there was love and there was friendship and there were secrets and baseline trust.

[spontaneousglitterbees]

mildly losing my mind about how its never explicitly called out but sir provolone, the cheese man, a food produced by harnessing methods of decay parallels the saprophians through his role a lot, actually? not only did he have a weapon dealing necrotic damage (bringing on the cycle of decay and whatnot, much like molds) but thematically he always ends up the cleanup crew for others' mistakes and misgivings. colin is the one covered in blackberry pulp after the ambush, and the one to swiftly dispose of the witness left behind in the carnage. colin took care of raphaniel in his downward spiral. colin is the one to dispose of his half-melted father, finishing what those who would have pursued him had started. colin is the final blow to the avatar. colin is the one who insisted on actively turning back to get deli during the escape, despite everything. colin is the one to dedicate the rest of his days to extinguishing any remnants of the sanctus putris.

much like the mushrooms, colin is Just Some Guy who wants to live and seems, almost by nature, to take on responsibility for cleaning up loose ends and messes left behind in various forms and im a little surprised he wasnt more overtly called out as connected to the mycelium but also i think its cool as hell it happened this way?

[puck1919]

Okay, I have thoughts about The Ravening War finale and the Deus Pa'Zuul twist:

The blender is still a part of the creation-consumption cycle as represented by the Bulb and the Hungry One.

Raphaniel's dive into the Ramsian Doctrine and the Prophidian Heresy upon being rejected by the Sanctus Putris was still based in the idea that while the Sanctus Putris was trying to remove itself from the cycle, it was not rejecting the cycle outright. The idea that the blades were that of a blender fed into that because a smoothie would still be consumed by the Hungry One and thus would complete the cycle as he knew it. His question about a smoothie with radish and cheese was almost a child-like "do you think we'll still be friends in heaven?" question.

Even adding in the Saprophians and their place in the creation-consumption cycle, that wouldn't have to change Raphaniel's initial position on the blender and what it would represent. I'm not a smoothie person, but people put all kinds of health food in smoothies, and while Matt was leaning into more the function of fungi within the food web as opposed to how the Hungry One would choose to consume mushrooms, molds and fungi are sometimes incredibly important to making the food that the Hungry One would eat.

What the Saprophians change is the position of Deus Pa'Zuul within the cosmology.

So, I don't know about you all, but I'm not throwing an entire radish into the disposal, I don't care how old and mushy it is. That just goes in the trash. However, cosmologically, for Calorum, that food would still be "consumed" because the Saprophians would do their job as fungi and break down the body to reintegrate the nutrients back into the land. That's why they're the third part of the cycle. But at least in my house, what goes in the disposal is the remnants of what was consumed-- the bits of food stuck to the plate that you're not going to eat. That is what makes Deus Pa'Zuul a fate worse than death-- it's the cycle rejecting you through complete obliteration, such that even those that are meant to recycle cannot find enough literal matter to do so.

The Bulb cares for no one, indeed.

[thesarosperiod]

the thing that really draws me in about karna from a viewer's perspective is the fundamental conflict between what she is and what she worships. like if we pull out from the world of calorum and into the real world, the hungry one doesn't want to eat rotting food. but karna is decaying, and she prays to the hungry one, and she offers it her rotting flesh. it's an offering that beings like us wouldn't want—one that's far more likely to be discarded down raphaniel's disposal more than anything else. but when she's truly desperate for deli to live, her instinct is to carve her eye from her head—a healthy part of her body. and when karna finds out about the sanctus putris, aabria says that she's drawn in by the idea that the rot could bring some kind of shelter for her from the mouth of the hungry one. what does that mean for her? to feel claimed by a god that we know might not even want her? i want nothing more than to sit down with her and discuss her belief and her patron over coffee because i am utterly fascinated. what a tangled web she weaves

[valdrinorm]

colin dedicating the rest of his life to wiping the sanctus putris off the face of the earth is an interesting ending for him. i think it's both very noble and very sad that he'll spend the rest of his days entrenched in violence to make sure no one else is ever put in his position again.

[wardensantoineandevka]

Karna and Colin are fascinating mirrors of one another, just complete reversals and inverses.

They are people of no national allegiances in the end, and they play to whoever side has an open seat that serves their goals and needs. Karna from Fructera to Vegetania to Ceresia to the Meat Lands. Colin from the Dairy Islands to Vegetania (which recognizes his knighthood) to Fructera (where Raphaniel was sent).

Both grew up with nothing as impoverished on the streets, are of the commonfolk. Karna considers herself fully an orphan of Fructera, and she rejects Amangeaux trying to position Karna as a daughter. She is the daughter of no one but the streets of Comida. Colin has struggled under the weight of his ancestry because the powers that be value lineage so deeply and will see him as a threat merely for his grandfather's identity—even as this lineage is nothing to him. He was orphaned by those powers that be for simple fact of birth; he is trying to orphan himself and make himself a descendant of no one of consequence.

They both have great disdain for those who as dismissive of shedding the blood of the commonfolk as a price for their games, disdainful of the exceptionalism of the powerful. But where Karna leans into ensuring an equality of bloodshed, the nobles will bleed as much as the commonfolk, Colin leans into his solidifying morals and is compelled toward a more traditional defense of the common people.

They both avoid the spotlight and direct attention, but they run in opposite directions with power. Karna works toward it, eager to play the game and hungry in her ambitions. Colin runs from it, anxious of its pull and fearful of what it asks people to do. They've both held the position of Deli's skáld, and their (for lack of a better term) preferred playstyle in this game takes the form of advisement.

The men they succeed are ghosts, dead but not gone. Karna kept a specter of Ja'Cru Dite, puppeteering his face and voice for her own ends. (Interesting that she is, now, a Phantom rogue.) Lucas Fontina, Colin's grandfather, haunts Lacramor with such presence that his apparently illegitimate son was tortuously murdered in response, and their deaths haunt Colin.

Death, an early one, hangs over them both. Wasting away in the service of the Hungry One, now believing it can be kept at bay and finding hope in that. Fearing of suffering the tortuous death of his grandfather and father, now no longer caring about this consequence and clearly finding a freedom in it.

Both have spent so much of their lives motivated by survival and made so many choices for their own self-preservation. Karna now finds that Deli is the first thing she has desired beyond that. Colin is focused beyond that on "[making] a difference with the people who did this to him" and working against the Sanctus Putris, now that he no longer cares about his secret being discovered.

They've even swapped partners in this grand game—Karna from Raphaniel to Deli and Colin from Deli to Raphaniel.

Karna has become a believer in some of the ideas of the Sanctus Putris. Colin remains a nonbeliever even as he is consecrated a holy knight of the Bulbian Church in his search to work against the Sanctus Putris and support Raphaniel, who advocates for this smoothie oblivion. The two of them work in tandem with opposing sects, each who preach conflicting eschatologies and apocalypses.

I feel like I'm missing so many other parallels and reverses between them, but this is already is such a strong basis of the inverse between them.