#tsv hembry

[catwyk]

hayward animation i've been working on as part of a larger project :]]!!!!! because of camera movement, the whole thing doesn't appear in the project at once, so i wanted to post it in full :p

[aregebidan]

The Silt Verses, Chapter 45: Of Love, And Gods’ Defeat // The Silt Verses, Chapter 20: And Rend Us Both To Dust Below

ID in alt

[pensivespacepirate]

eskew productions you're killing me

[nana-glass-chillhop-radio-hour]

Choose based on the one you personally found the most frightening/unsettling on first listen!

[siltslut]

6 for the podcast ask game!!

6: what characters from different podcasts do you think would be friends?

i need val and agnes montague to get together. maybe they need to go on a date. maybe they need to form a suicide pact. idk. i just love my special girls

also desperately need to see elias bouchard, peter lukas, katabasian mason, and katabasian roemont in the same room. their options are business meeting or orgy but no in between

another one for funsies: david ward and hembry from tsv 20. i think they’d kill each other in a bout of mania. but in a friendly, if not homoerotic, way.

[idislikethissite]

Note: this is a matter of personal narrative preference, not a problem with the writing per se.

This most recent episode (All Lovers Part As Dust) exemplifies two gripes I’ve had: one with horror as a genre, the other with how my understanding of the gods in The Silt Verses has diverged since season 1 with how they’ve actually been written.

In the first case, this splits into a few more specific things: whether or not horror and tragedy are by necessity synonymous, and the use of narrative unreality as a social critique. There is certainly value to tragedy, and writers often use it in ways that are expressive and piercing (I Am In Eskew hit hard, and personally, to the point where I found myself stopping 2/3 in). But it seems like horror and tragedy are often becoming synonymous; that recognition of things being horrific, that there are terrible choices made, inevitably (though in the particular way of tragedies where there could always have been other possibilities, but events only) end in something awful, something hopeless—in tragedy. This has been explicitly referenced in the episode with Hembry, with The Watcher in the Wings giving Hembry the impression that only tragedy “satisfies”; whether the writers of TSV will affirm or deny this through the series as a whole remains to be seen, but it is certainly a trend in the genre more broadly (eg The Magnus Archives).

Of course, perhaps that is only because of the particular horror media I’ve happened to see; in recent movies, the trend is far weaker. Nope, for instance, ends relatively positively, while Midsommar and Talk to Me fit the tragic horror combination, and The Ritual falls somewhere between.

To clarify, by narrative unreality I’m referring to when there are events in the story which would be “unreality” for the characters, and which at some point the audience is similarly uncertain of. Narrative unreality, similarly to tragic horror, can be a piercing method in writing; it’s used well in Hembry’s episode, as well as the movies Talk To Me and (probably most famously) The Matrix series. The Matrix series (at least the first and most recent installments, as I haven’t seen the middle ones) and Talk to Me use it very well, because in both cases it reinforces the themes of the story, those themes being (in part) criticisms of social structures. These criticisms work well within the wider story because they tie in with the other themes of it.

In the episode of TSV All Lovers Turn To Dust, there’s a contrast with an earlier episode which uses narrative unreality in a similar way: that in which Hembry appears, And Rend Us Both To Dust Below. There, the Watcher in the Wings interacts with Hembry and Paige in a way which makes clear a major theme of TSV: that stories, while powerful, are malleable to human action; including action by changing the story. This is established most clearly when Paige interrupts Hembry’s monologue, saving Hayward’s lofe in the process:

Paige:

—And he stops.

This establishes not only the fallibility of the gods, but the capability of humans to change the story (and consequently the gods themselves, or to oppose them). This is undermined in All Lovers Turn to Dust if taken as an endless failure of Seb to save Dev, and of either of them to escape. Yes, this is only one possible interpretation; perhaps the ending is instead a flashback or nightmare after they have escaped. But that the first interpretation is both feasible and (based on the posts already made within a day of its release of sentiments like “oh this is the silt verses, of course nobody could escape the gods”) is often taken as the course of things, is a hole torn in the thematic cohesion of the story. This interpretation would point to the gods as practically omnipotent, and (potentially) that the protagonists—Paige for instance—are the only ones who could possibly oppose them because of somehow being “special”.

Which leads into the other nitpick: the gods in season 2 and (particularly) season 3 appear to have differed from how they seemed initially. Reliable enough that anyone could make someone a saint (every time saints have been used for combat, eg the saint-rockets, the battle of Paraclete’s Gulch, and Elgin’s mention of confidence in the saints of the Many Below), having power over reality rather than being a piece of it, having power over people regardless of those characters recognizing narrative tropes as well as that they’re dealing with a god, and being personified to a greater extent than ever before (Babble & the Watcher in the Wings each required Whisper & Hembry to act as a conduit, respectively, each of whom interpreted their god through their human framework of experience). These are the most noticeable shifts; I’d like to reiterate that having this apparent change is a valid writing choice, and my quibbling is a matter of personal distaste for what seems inconsistent.

Of course, The Silt Verses remains in progress at this point; Jon Ware and Muna Hussen have surprised and impressed many times before with their writing, and this episode was somewhat of a one-off (unless Dev & Seb come up later, becoming relevant and confirming that they did end up escaping). I am excited to see what’s to come as the many plotlines culminate through the rest of this season!

[deermouth]

In the tsv s2 q&a Jon Ware talked for a bit about how he was so surprised that everyone loved ch 20 bc he felt it was contrived or whatever, which I understand, but also NOTHING beats HEMBRY: (Close to tears) Hembry is close to tears.

[dismembered-narrator]

thots on tsv2

overall, this season just felt like build up to season 3. which is fine, it just felt more directionless than season 1

also i was disappointed that mason was killed off, since i feel like there was a lot more behind his character that never really got fleshed out

i'm also not personally a fan of "we're going to war" plotlines in fiction - it feels like where every fantasy story goes to add tension, and it's only helped a little by tsv's world being so interesting, but even then the beginning of the war stuff didn't make use of the grotesque visuals that i associate with this show. it was just mercer and gage shooting a bunch of people. also, unlike the "government making saints" plotline, where we had a character that represented the face of that conflict (the girl who couldn't see any people), mercer and gage's violence was faceless, we didn't really see the impact of it outside of sound effects and at the very end. the two main characters who were/are part of the trawlerman's faith were nowhere near that conflict until the end, which doesn't help

(edit: i forgot about the bleach scene, which kind of disproves my point here about not using grotesque imagery in their scenes, but there's still not really an impact on main characters until the end)

other than that, i really liked the concepts behind some of the episodes, with hayward at the mansion, hembry's episode, faulkner's encounter with the angels, and the love letter guys standing out to me. i also liked that they played around with more audio effects like the binaural(?) audio in carpenter's return home, and the audio quality was overall a lot better than season 1 (although i did relisten to season 1 a few months ago and some parts were definitely improved)

paige's arc and hayward's character development in this season were probably my favorite part, and i thought sister acantha's garden and the dead man carpenter was carrying around were really interesting. i wish there was more done with the dead guy in particular (that and the idea of carpenter as a dead woman walking, there were interesting parallels there)

overall, there were some plotlines that i thought didn't have the impact they should have and went in a direction that i don't care for personally, and i think this season was weaker than the first one because so much of it was set-up instead of building to a conclusion. however, it kept a lot of the stuff i enjoy about this show, with many of the one-off concepts behind episodes being really good

[terra-toma]

You ever just slather on some faces and kill a dozen people under an unseen theatre god’s patronage

[douglasfeiffel]

The new episode of the silt verses was oddly powerful. I’m used to a consistent theme of the characters being unable to escape their own fate or what their god had chosen for them, but Paige was able to convince Hembry to try and break away from his god. And it worked. It may have destroyed him in the process, but this gives me hope about Paige’s build a god plan. Not to mention the literal Hayward escaping his own fate when Paige unkilled him.

[thesaintelectric]

hembry the silt verses

[emberdune]

now every single david ault story off of the nosleep podcast sounds like another play by hembry

[aregebidan]

also on the subject of the hembry episode. This Right Here.

[aregebidan]

hayward writing down his little reports on paige to maintain his illusion of legitimacy + faulkner coping with his suffering by describing it as a "new chapter in the silt verses" and meeting a transcriptionist to give his narrative power by writing it down + carpenter and faulkner having a chalkboard and a paper copy of the verses in season 1 + hembry reciting stage instructions like he's doing a table reading of a script rather than giving an actual performance + paige getting instructions on god-birthing from a book + gods requiring systems of prayer-marks as a kind of written language (the wither mark being a thing that needs to be written to destroy)...paige being called a homophone for PAGE....there's an incredibly strong link between divinity and power and writing/books in tsv and i can't wait to see where this gets taken in the upcoming episodes especially in the context of an audio medium