#this is about carpenter from tsv

[angryducktimemachine]

Everytime I think about drawing a character in my outfit I have to ask myself if that includes the mouse socks.

[crimeronan]

the silt verses season 3 + dying words.

brother philly:

adjudicator cross:

carson:

rane:

val:

shrue:

hayward:

faulkner:

carpenter:

.....and finally, a bonus.

our final girl.

paige:

[eyesteeth]

our sister of mercy

[gammija]

musing about what a translation of the silt verses would sound like and immediately running headfirst into the problem of whether and how to translate 'Sister Carpenter'

[3584-tropical-fish]

“CARPENTER whacks him resoundingly over the head with the butt of her revolver.”

Day 27: Swing

[duskylight]

the cause of my mental instability is episode 43 of the silt verses, I want that on record

[nana-glass-chillhop-radio-hour]

the gossip at the Grace must have been fucking crazyyyyyyyy

[cream-and-tea]

heyyy don’t mean to bother you but did you know that um. You, now - the ones listening to my idling progress from back home in Glottage - you’re telling yourselves; Val cannot possibly be growing angry over something like this. How dare she? The hypocrite. How can this thing, this monster, this battle-saint, possibly find any kind of righteous anger in her twisted and repurposed heart for the lives of the fallen foe? How does our terrible Val think she can justify any kind of anger at the sight of the flattened and buried corpses of enemy civilians and enemy children, when we’ve already been listening to her murder police officers, soldiers and townsfolk single-handedly in turn? How can she be furious when we’ve heard her butcher her way through the little old ladies of the CLS in the hopeless effort to murder her own faraway mother? (Mockingly) See? You can be sacred and yet self-aware. Yes, I am culpable. I am dreadful. I have been responsible for great atrocities and I will commit a great many more before I’m done. And still - I am growing furious, as I walk through the devastation of this town. Because the wound of Sutler’s Weald is not like any wound I would make. It’s clumsy, it’s crude. It’s thoughtless. I begin to tell myself, as I walk - I wouldn’t have murdered them like this. I would have been kinder. I would have killed them quickly or gracefully, and there would have been beauty and strangeness in the manner of it. And even that’s all deception, even if I had been cruel and slow and lingering in the massacre of these innocent people, upon my whim - I would at least have looked them in the eyes, and I would have borne the weight of my cruelty. If they’d asked me to, I could have killed this town beautifully. And I’d have borne witness to the horror, and I’d have rejoiced in it - and it would have been considerably less vile and ugly than this. The ones back home, the ones who are listening in, I don’t think they know what they’ve done here. The line of connection between the victim and the victimiser, the sacrifice and the god - it’s long, and tangled, and indistinct. A god should not be able to avert her eyes. What a terrible thing it must be, to be monstrous and not even know it. And even if all of this is lies, even if I am just as bad and just as careless as the people back home who did this to Sutler’s Weald… …well, then, let me hate them, pure and simply, for being just as bad as me, because people - -people should be kinder than the gods that eat them. The town square is largely intact. A few burning cars, a single shrine and statue to some goddess of victory, her snapped-off arm raised in imagined triumph. I sit down upon the pavement in the ruined heart of the town, and I tell the dead people of Sutler’s Weald beautiful lies. I tell them that they survived, in their hundreds - miraculously and inexplicably, dodging the bombs. Not a single victim, not one death. An act of divine mercy. When that doesn’t work, I tell them that they were buried properly, according to whatever rites or customs they happen to cherish. When that doesn’t work, I try and turn them into my mother again, in the hopes of making the dead people hateful to me. When that doesn’t work, I tell them that I’m sorry. I tell them I wish they still had ears to become all the wondrous imaginings I had in store for them. I tell them… …that all things considered, they deserved a better avenging and foreign god, a better tormentor, a better oblivion, than the one that was forced upon them. (With cold fury) I tell them- I will find a way to give them something better.

[vibrantboredom]

I'm relistening to I am in Eskew at the same time as the Silt Verses come out and it's so fun seeing ideas introduced in Eskew resurface in TSV, like I just finished ep. 24 and the way the History Society works is so much like our new scary war saint!!! Obsessed

[mongeese]

Love that the last episode of season 1 begins with Carpenter telling a story about how the river wouldn't take her, how she was an "unworthy" sacrifice. And then at the end of the episode the river does take her. It answers her call, and she dies for it. Dies to save Faulkner. Dies to spite the police, maybe. Despite her loss of faith, it still consumed her, in the end. And it didn't hurt anyone else. I think that's as close to a victory as she would have hoped for

[captainbuzzard]

guy who thought a bit too much about carpenter siltverses again and accidentally started thinking about how certain tsv events could translate to a blaseball au.

[tibialtybalt]

I don't even care about the killings Faulkner's biggest sin is being 19 years old

[phantomrose96]

So do you have any Silt Verses thoughts that you wish to share with the world?

oh boy! okay time for some buckshot statements

Paige absolute character of all time for being an upper-middle class benefiter of the oppressive class structure who is radicalized and skips right past the "slacktivism on twitter" phase to instead jump directly into "creating gods and killing people." She's smart she's driven she's idealistic she will rend the earth in a horrid symphony of predator and prey ensnarled on bloody oaken crucifixion and I support her.

Hayward does not actually deserve the disproportionate attention I give him and that's because he's a loser and a failure (said with all the love in my heart.)

I may give the impression Hayward is the single fail-man of the series but that is not true. It is actually the case that every single The Silt Verses character is batting between a 50%-70% on the "a situation has occurred and it's gone So Fucking Wrong for them" measure. However Hayward stands out as the single indominable character batting a pure 100% in this category who can never be surpassed.

The voice acting is SO across the board good?? Hayward and Carpenter and Faulkner and Paige would all, in isolation, stand out as examples of excellent voice acting and they're all just together. Also the cameo from Harlan Guthrie in season 2 went so fucking hard.

When I started TSV I was like "oh okay so WE'RE the bad guys. like we're following the disciples of this bloody human-sacrificing river god cult. It's like if the TMA avatars were the main characters." And it was a fascinating revelation for the world to peel back and make clear that, actually, everyone is doing this. The world works like this. The Trawlerman followers are not being targeted for being human-sacrificing cultists - they're being targeted for being the losing human-sacrificing cultists on the wrong side of history. I haven't dug too deeply into this thought but it feels significant in the vein of "MY country's wretched human rights violations are the just and moral ones, because we're the correct people. Unlike those losing nations barbaric and unforgivable human rights violations."

The unavoidable cycle of "I kidnapped you as my hostage but maybe we're fwiends now? 👉👈🥺"

Why did Hayward LARP a whole story about being in a fail-marriage with a fail-wife. Why did he tell all this to Carpenter, a woman he just met. Why is he like this. 💖💖💖💖

Really love Faulkner's brand of "happy little sunshine boy who's being that way precisely because he wants to manipulate you into thinking he's a simple happy little sunshine boy." Very guy-who-killed-his-brother behavior of him.

[valtsv]

also from reddit, i remember someone saying that they didn’t click with the silt verses bc “why should i care about the characters that i just met”. and to me it’s such a crazy thing to say as a criticism cuz how do you listen to carpenter recite those haunting memories from her childhood and go “nah this is boring”. and tsv first episode is just so freaking good. i really don’t understand these people

"why should i care about characters i just met"

[unbloodiedmartyr]

what really gets me absolutely insane about tsv is like.. carpenter and faulkner and the twin mouths right?? especially at the start of the show, you can see that these two characters have picked one side of their god to worship. like, even from the start of the show we get faulkner believing that charlie was somehow transformed by the drowning, that the trawler man was calling to him to help him escape his original self, "you're meant to be different, you're meant to be better, why aren't you becoming something better??" faulkner so desperately wants to find meaning and a new beginning in the parish but the thing is, in his efforts to make himself anew, all faulkner has ever done is destroy. meanwhile we get carpenter, who cant stomach the transfigurative side of her faith and who, in her sorrow and anger at the death of her family was drawn to the danger of the dark deep water but who transforms herself and tosses off her faith. who, despite losing her faith, is returned time and time again to her old people as a disguised blessing

anyways this is so incoherent but something about pledging yourself to a god of beginnings and finding your ending vs pledging yourself to a god of endings and coming to a new beginning

[wokewerewolfagainstcapitalism]

I binged the entirety of Silt Verses in about a week and I must scream.

Because YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, Faulkner isn't the worst of them. He is just happening on screen.

The things Carpenter did for the parish, the way she carries herself, the way she's easily the most experienced killer in this story - Faulkner's body count is like. Noob numbers.

(Glottage doesn't count)

Hayward! Was a cop! A COP in the torture and sacrifice people the state doesn't like capitalist hellscape.

Paige--

Okay, Paige just handed out cocoa and asked her coworkers "are you okay" after mass layoff sacrifice and the left work, so she's an angel, never did anything wrong in her life, victims of her god absolutely had it coming.

Anyway, part of why the metaphor of capitalism in tsv works so well is that it's impossible to live in this world and not cause awful harm, not at least profit from someone's horrible death and the horrors that come before it.

This is a show about people who do terrible things because the world is built in a way that makes your every move painful to countless other people. Your electricity is powered by human sacrifice ffs.

And Faulkner for all his awful not good at all terrible choices isn't the worst of the characters, isn't irredeemable. He's just the youngest and goes through his killing era on screen.

(also, can't stop thinking about how Carpenter killed a man for Mason, knowing full well that's because Mason needs his private dirty business done and Faulkner killed Mason THE MOMENT he deemed him a traitor)

All this is to say I don't think he dies here. I don't think this story is about punishing Bad People or even about milking the most drama out of very well-crafted sequence of events and characters. I think it's about desperately trying to build, to become something slightly better despite the horrors. And it's brutal in the way it shows us how small and slow the process is. And it's wonderful in telling us how important it is.