Isokania
The biggest issue between Kakania and Isolde is a lack of understanding between the two. Kakania enjoys her close bond with Isolde they consider each other the closest person to them. But they don’t have an understanding of each other. Isolde thinks Kakania is the answer to all of her problems, he golden key, and almost idolifies her at times, and Kakania sees Isolde as a good person going through constant tragedy. The two of them mutually have a false idea of who the other truly is. In 6.17 Kakania talks about Isolde’s art of channeling spirits and how she uses it to be the star of Vienna. However what Kakania doesn’t know is how Isolde doesn’t stop channeling when she’s off stage, the CGs of Book 6 even ellude to how Isolde sees ever place in public view as a stage. Kakania has never once considered that Isolde wasn’t the person she portrays herself to be, and Isolde refuses to consider that Kakania isn’t the one she’s been waiting for.
Isolde and Kakania are also extremely stubborn people. Kakania is stubborn as a job hazard of having to fight for her own credibility, and Isolde’s natural temperament is reserved stubbornness. She decides what she believes in and without consulting others or stating her stance, Isolde sticks to it resolutely. Kakania acts in accordance to what she knows and learns, she's very stubborn about her morals and values of justice. Kakania is headstrong about her way being the correct way while Isolde is the same. Isolde is a reserved person as a job hazard of being a celebrity. Not only has she actively seen what stardom can bring through Playwright, she was raised to expect and ignore it. As such, Isolde is very resolute in who she places her trust in. Once she’s decided to consciously let someone in she waits at her Door for them to come in to her inner world. The tragedy for them is that she decided to let in someone who already thought she had seen Isolde’s inner world. Isolde refuses to believe anyone could ever understand let alone heal her besides Kakania. Isolde doesn’t believe anyone can save her besides Kakania, even when Theopil predicted Isolde’s mental state would deteriorate and sought out a way to help her.
Another reason they were doomed is the fact Kakania believed too much in Isolde. Kakania sincerely believed in Isolde and chose to believe that the rumors surrounding her following in Evangeline’s footsteps. To her credit, at that time the rumors weren’t true. But I feel like the issue also wrapped around to the fact Kakania was an unprofessional therapist to Isolde. @schneiderenjoyer talks about it at length in their live analysis. She underestimated the depths of Isolde’s mental instability because she didn’t think there was any larger problem than depression from the rapid deaths in her family. As a follower of Freud’s theories and an arcanist, Kakania should’ve been more aware that disrupting a person's ID and SUPEREGO could lead to consequences. She figured Isolde’s tears and initial confession about Theopil coming at her while on fire was the depths of her ID or unconscious instinct without morals. But Kakania is an arcanist, in 1914 no less, she had to face a lot of legal issues concerning people using dirty tactics either to tear her down or get their way. She believed in Isolde too much that her worst would be intrusive thoughts about harming herself due to guilt because of her proximity to Isolde. But Kakania didn’t consider her past in an environment of violence and family disposition.
Isolde also lacks proper coping mechanisms. There are quite a few arcanists with mental illnesses we see in the game however they all have some kind of coping mechanism to help self-soothe. It's not the same situation but Mesmer Jr. talks about how her anxiety is uncurable, but she has a lot of anxious tics to self soothe which we see her do in the series. Semmelweis who's similar to Isolde, with her condition growing worse with time, shows in [Echoes Into the Mountain] that she consistently reality checks her surroundings and mental state. Isolde however, doesn't have any coping mechanisms outside seeking out Kakania for her comforting presence.
It’s unclear exactly when or if she got acting lessons from Mr. Karl (if she had it be between 13-15), but Isolde uses acting as a defense mechanism. The Star of Vienna is a persona for her and something she’ll always fall back into when panicking instead of actually feeling her emotions. She'll separate herself from her urges and emotions, or tell spirits to possess her “whether willing to or not” so she can have a break. Isolde is unable to be clearly open, as shown in her character event. She acts Kakania if she noticed a door in her house, personifying herself as an unnoticeable within the Dittarsdorf house. Even after Kakania doesn’t give her the answer she wants, Isolde ignores it in a way. Stating Kakania will still be “the golden key to open her door.” Isolde was likely content to wait until Kakania finally “saw her,” or until she manipulated Kakania into being her key.
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the other day we were talking about balance beams because you said that your family had one of those cool winch ones that wrap around trees to make a high wire. even though i was pretty good i had to quit gymnastics at 12 because we couldn't afford dance and gymnastics but. i had something-other.
and i got excited because i think it's a funny story. i didn't have a door for about 4 years. 13-17, or there about. i only got it back because i replaced it myself.
i think my dad took it off the hinges just because his very-macho friend david had said - i do this to punish my kids. and then about a week later it was down on the ground and then eventually rotting in a shed. i used to visit it on occasion and tilt it between two boxes so i could try to walk across the side of it. i have a scar on my foot from attempting the act of balance-beam fancy dancing. it's shaped like a crescent moon. a hinge sliced into my skin when the whole thing slipped out from underneath me.
and you looked at me and you said - what the fuck?
and i said, do you want to see? because i thought the thing you were replying to was the injury. i was already undoing my shoelaces.
you're supposed to have a door, you said slowly. you were a teenager. you - i've seen your house. you lived at the end of the hall.
i didn't understand the problem. so? i wriggled out of my shoe and then my sock.
so, you said it gently, which made me slow down. you said it in the way people tell me that i experienced something bad and i have no idea that it was supposed to be something-else instead. anyone coming down the stairs or in the hallway could see directly into your room. you were in a fishbowl for four years, am i understanding that correctly?
i stared at you, and then said the other things: well, it wasn't so bad. i just wore a towel and tucked myself into a corner to change. i could always just change in the bathroom. privacy didn't really exist for any of us. i wasn't allowed to decorate so it wasn't really my room anyway. i didn't have a lot of things growing up; so it's not like i minded having a semi-public space. my siblings left me alone if i needed them to. what's the big deal anyway.
this is accidentally what emotional vampires incorrectly label as a "trauma dump". this is accidentally how you learn that my house was actually unsafe. i don't even consider this a problem, because everything else was so much worse, in a way. i didn't know it was supposed to be different. at the time, i didn't know what privacy was. i just lied about most stuff and got good at hiding in public. i haven't ever lied about this because i didn't know it was supposed to be different. i am 31.
you looked pale and ready to throw up. you had a right to a door for your room. you were a kid. someone should have helped you.
i was busy examining the sole of my foot. the scar really does look like the moon.
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SFX Magazine Issue 372 - Designing Good Omens ❤ 😊
PRODUCTION DESIGNER MICHAEL RALPH REVEALS HOW THE SHOW’S CENTREPIECE SET, WHICKBER STREET, WAS GIVEN A DEVILISHLY CLEVER UPGRADE FOR THE SECOND SEASON
WORDS: DAVE GOLDER
Invisible Columns And Thin Walls “The new studio is Pyramid Studios in Bathgate – it used to be a furniture warehouse. And unfortunately – or fortunately, because I accept these things as not challenges but gifts – right down the middle of that studio are a series of upright columns. But you’ll never spot them on screen. I had to build them in and integrate them into the walls and still get the streets between them. And it worked.
“There’s all sorts of cheeky design values to those sets. Normally a set like this is double-skin. In other words, you do an interior wall and an exterior wall, with an airspace in between. But really, the only time a viewer notices that there’s that width is at the doors and the windows. So I cheated all that. I ended up with single walls everywhere. So the exterior wall is the interior wall, just painted. All I did was make the sash windows and entrances wider to give it some depth as you walked in.”
GOOD OMENS HAD A CHANGE of location for its second season, but hopefully you didn’t notice. Because Whickber Street in Soho upped sticks from an airfield in Hertfordshire to a furniture warehouse in Bathgate, Edinburgh. It’s the kind of nonsensical geographical shenanigans that could only make sense in the crazy world of film and TV, and production designer Michael Ralph was the man in charge of rebuilding and expanding the show’s vast central set. “I wish we could have built more in season one than we did,” says Ralph, whose previous work has included Primeval and Dickensian. “We built the ground floor of everything and the facades of all the shops. But we didn’t build anything higher than that, because we were out on an airfield in a very, very difficult terrain and weather conditions, so we really couldn’t go much higher. Visual effects created the upper levels.”
But with season two the set has gone to a whole other level… literally. “What happened was that the rest of the street became integrated into the series’s storyline,” explains Ralph. “So we needed a record shop, we needed a coffee shop that actually had an inside, we needed a magic shop, we needed the pub. To introduce those meant we had to
change the street with a layout that works from a storylines point of view. In other words, things like someone standing at the counter in the record shop had to be able to eyeball somebody standing at the counter in the coffee shop. They had to be able to eyeball Aziraphale
sitting in his office in the window of the bookshop. But the rest of it was a pleasure to do inside, because we could expand it and I could go up two storeys.”
For most of the set, which is around 80 metres long and 60 metres wide, the two storeys only applied to the shop frontages, but in the case of Aziraphale’s bookshop, it allowed Ralph to build the mezzanine level for real this time. According to Ralph it became one of the cast and crews’ favourite places to hang out during down time.
But while AZ Fell & Co has grown in height, it actually has a slightly smaller footprint because of the logistics of adapting it to the new studio.
“Everybody swore to me that no one would notice,” says Ralph wryly. “I walked onto it and instinctively knew there was a difference
immediately, and they hated me for that. I have this innate sense about spatial awareness and an eye like a spirit level.
“It’s not a lot, though – I think we’ve lost maybe two and a half feet on the front wall internally. I think that there’s a couple of other smaller areas, but only I’d notice. So I can be really annoying to my guys, but only on those levels. Not on any other. They actually quite like me…”
Populating The Bookshop “The props in the new bookshop set were a flawless reproduction from the set decorator Bronwyn Franklin [who is also Ralph’s wife]. It was really the worst-case scenario after season one. She works off the concept art that I produce, but what she does is she adds so much more to the character of the set. She doesn’t buy anything she doesn’t love, or doesn’t fit the character.
“But the things she put a lot of work into finding for season one, they were pretty much one-offs. When we burnt the set down in the sixth episode, we lost a lot of props, many of which had been spotted and appreciated by the fans. So Bronwyn had to discover a new set decorating technique: forensic buying.
“She found it all – duplicates and replicas. It took ages. In that respect, the Covid delay was very helpful for Bron. There’s 7,000 books in there and there’s not one fake book. That’s mainly because… it’s a weird thing to say, but we wanted it to smell and feel like a bookshop
to everybody that was in it, all the time.
“It affects everybody subliminally; it affects everybody’s performance – actors and crew – it raises the bar 15 to 20%. And the detail, you know… We love a lot of detail.”
(look at the description under this, they called him 'Azi' hehehehe :D <3)
Aziraphale’s Inspirational Correspondence “There’s not one single scrap of paper on Aziraphale’s desk that isn’t written specifically for Aziraphale. Every single piece is not just fodder that’s been shoved
there, it has a purpose; it’s a letter of thanks, or an enquiry about a
book or something.
“Michael Sheen is so submerged in his character he would get lost
sitting at his own desk, reading his own correspondence between
takes. I believe wholeheartedly that if you put that much care into every single piece of detail, on that desk and in that room, that
everybody feels it, including the crew, and then they give that set
the same respect it deserves.
“They also lift their game because they believe that they’re doing something of so much care and value. Really, it’s a domino effect of passion and care for what you’re producing.”
Alternative Music “My daughter Mickey is lead graphic designer [two of Ralph’s sons worked on the series too, one as a concept artist, the other in props]. They’re the ones that produced all of that handwritten work on the desk. She’s the one that took on the record shop and made up 80 band names so that we didn’t have to get copyright clearance from real bands. Then she produced records and sleeves that spanned 50, 60 years of their recordings, and all of the graphics
on the walls.
“I remember Michael and Neil [Gaiman] getting lost following one band’s history on the wall, looking at their posters and albums desperately trying to find out whether they survived that emo period.”
It’s A Kind Of Magic One of the new shops in Whickber Street for season two was Will Goldstone’s Magic Shop, which is full of as many Easter eggs as off-the-shelf conjuring tricks, including a Matt Smith Doctor Who-style fez and a toy orang-utan that’s a nod to Discworld’s
The Librarian. Ralph says that while the series is full of references to Gaiman, Pratchett and Doctor Who, Michael Sheen never complained about a lack of Masters Of Sex in-jokes. “He’d be the last person to make that sort of comment!”
Ralph also reveals that the magic shop counter was another one of his
wife’s purchases, bought at a Glasgow reclamation yard.
The Anansi Boys Connection Ralph reveals that Good Omens season two used the state-of-the-art special effects tech Volume (famous for its use in The Mandalorian to create virtual backdrops) for just one sequence, but he will be using it extensively elsewhere on another Gaiman TV series being made for Prime Video.
“We used Volume on the opening sequence to create the creation of the universe. I was designing Anansi Boys in duality with this project, which seems an outrageously suicidal thing to do. But it was fantastic and Anansi Boys was all on Volume. So I designed for Volume on
one show and not Volume on the other. The complexities and the psychology of both is different.”
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The Small Room , Isolde Character Story
Insight on how Isolde sees the world around her and how her childhood was a flowery path of doom.
Isolde’s character story event reads like someone is asking her about certain people with the way she talks introduces Playwright, “Salome, what can I say about her?”
Isolde almost doesn’t even see potential dangers from others or people being downright creeps to her as anything more than inconveniences because of her upbringing. Mr Karl helped her become an admirable lady, but didn’t teach her how to become a person. Likely on purpose in order to get into the Dittarsdorf household.
When she’s with Kakania after she asks for treatment from her, Isolde almost tests Kakania in a way.
It’s also a sweet irony that [The Small Room] ended with showing how Isolde, a medium, joining the doors among people who were already dead. Isolde is an 18 year old who died at 13. In the same way Mr. Karl forced her to pick up her spoon 100 times, on the 65th try, Isolde sank into the role of someone else to the point she was indistinguishable from peoples expectations of her.
It also foreshadowed how Kakania and her would be each others undoing. But what was also shown is that Isolde almost sought her out to give her the permission to be Isolde again.
[The Small Room] ends with Isolde leaving the small room she locked herself in. During the main storyline ([The Small Room] ends the day before Isolde goes to electroshock therapy), Isolde talks about Kakania gave her something bigger to be in that wasn’t humiliating like Mr. Karl’s dream or a stifling like the Dittarsdorf doors. Also a fun note from that scene is how Isolde refers and sees herself: a cursed vessel. Versus how Trista sees her, the person who was likely in control the most when Isolde gave herself over to her arcanum in order to rest.
Trista also goes back on her word after this stating that Isolde was never an actress but she did fool everyone. Later in the Wilderness interactions and in the main story, Isolde is still very manipulative. When she isn’t panicking or experiencing an episode she’s very calm and cunning: in the same way her mother was even after killing her own husband.
Kakania and Isolde were best friends from the age of 16, only 3 years after Isolde began playing the role of Isolde, I think because of this Isolde feels Kakania is the only person who could see her. With the way her mind works she likely thought Kakania was offering to be another light to her like how she initially saw Theopil when she was 13, like spring coming and going. But unlike him Kakania was actively offering to help Isolde, again and again, to her it likely didn’t matter that Kakania is philanthropic person who would help anyone for the reason that there isn’t way not to.
Isolde simply heard that someone wanted to help her, save her from herself in a way. Isolde by the time of her mothers death, she already knew that the cycle would repeat with her losing herself to madness. We see in the main story how she’s become childlike in a way, similar to her mother, when instability of having to be fully conscious in reality again were fogged by her own illnesses. In the same way she observed in her mother, Isolde is an empty canvas, Isolde is a vessel.
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