#you know that line in the 12x5 where she hesitates to tell them the fugitive was ruth?

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

(possible out of context spoilers for woe be gone up to episode 24)

(also point of this way-too-long post thats not even about dw is that i think i now have an idea of what a 13-pov/13-narrated season would look like) (if that might entice you to read some of this thing) (it would me, like, i just mean, knowing what the point is usually kinda helps reading a long thing so there you go thats the point)

right so ive been listening to woe be gone and one of my favourite things about it is how occasionally the protagonist just suddenly reveals to us a bunch of stuff hes been thinking about which he hasnt been telling us about

which is a little jarring bc hes the only voice, hes the one tellling us about everything that happens to him, and he walks us through seemingly every one of his considerations and plans

but also it’s something you can expect bc also from the start he draws attention to the fact that when we are hearing the episode, it’s been a while since the events described in them have happened to him, because he needed to... make the episode. duh. episode 2:

Wooooow. Wow wow wow. Your brain will turn anything into a morsel of nostalgia, won’t it? I did a whole episode about the first round of WOE.BEGONE and made it sound like it had a happy ending. And it felt that way, too, when I was telling the story.

The real kicker to this whole thing is that this challenge happened a month ago. You, dear listener, have not yet caught up to the point where you are watching me play WOE.BEGONE in real time.

mike repeatedly, casually, calls attention to the fact that hes in control of the entirety of what we know of the story. not just with these kinda lines but also with the fake ads, the “cue the heist music”, the barely-there line between the mike walters that does the announcements at the top of the show and the mike walters the character (are they the same person?), casually dropping the fact that his name is not mike walters and then never mentioning it again:

I mean, this is a guy who seemed to honestly believe that my name was Mike Walters. Hmm, I never labored under the delusion that his name was actually CANNONBALL in all caps. I wonder which of us had the better call-sign.

in this same episode he also says:

Saying that I was going to fly to Vancouver was actually a sort of silly mistake on my part. I imagine quite a few listeners heard that I was going to fly to Vancouver and wondered if that was even possible. Doesn’t Mike Walters live in America? That [REDACTED] jumbled censor thing sure does sound like Saint Louis– no matter what I did to the voice snippet, damn it! I reversed it and pitched it down and it still sounded like St. Louis. So then I switched the order of the reversed syllables and it still sounded like St. Louis, at which point I just said fuck it, some people will figure it out and it will add a little bit to the mystery-solving aspect of the podcast.

giving us a false sense of knowing the guy, as if he let us have this piece of information for free. he does a similar thing when he moves to oldbrush valley:

I’m sure that you’re wondering about where exactly this place is. Stop trying. I’m being vague on purpose. Don’t come find me. Anne. Don’t come find me.

"dont come find me” and “im being vague on purpose” while giving anne (and whoever really) exactly enough information to find him. there are also repeated mentions of his information security practices:

“So, things weren’t adding up and nobody would give me a straight answer. Nobody knew what to make of your little scene. So, natch, I broke into your apartment and started poking around. You’d do the same for me, right?”

“Sure thing, Anne.” I said.

“Unfortunately for me, it’s not like you wrote WOE.BEGONE on little pieces of paper and scattered them throughout your house for the spry young female detective to find. Also, your computer was bricked? What’s up with that?” She asked.

“Oh yeah, it’s a dead man’s switch. If I don’t enter a password every week, it overwrites my entire computer with 1s and 0s.” I said.

“That’s a long way to go for WOE.BEGONE,” She said.

“Oh, it wasn’t for WOE.BEGONE. It’s just good InfoSec.”

and:

How do I know that he isn’t the only gamerunner? Because he doesn’t log out of gmail when he’s done with it, either. C’mon, dude. At least force me to guess your password or force 2 factor authentication and get the code off the phone that I took off you while I was tying you up. When it started, I thought that the story of WOE.BEGONE would be about the consequences of seeking power, but now I think that the moral is to take your information security seriously, especially if you have something that is worth protecting.

but then also this:

“How are you gonna narrow it down from a whole city full of people?” I asked.

“I have ways,” he said. His eyes narrowed.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Didn’t you go to the University of [Redacted]?” CANNONBALL asked.

“So? I’ve lived here for ten years,” I said. Shit. Why do I still have a Facebook page?

and this, a few episodes after “dont come find me”:

Hunter Jeremiah Hartley has a public facebook page where he posts all the time about the stuff that happens on at O.V.E.R., pictures included. None of what we have access to out here is strictly classified. There are the cabins, but we aren’t allowed in them so unless you’re breaking the rules, you don’t know anything more about them than if you had looked up an aerial view of them on Google Maps. Pictures of them on social media are fine. This made it trivial for Anne to pinpoint where I was at O.V.E.R. No journalist-ing required.

he does all this stuff and says that hes “private” but also that hes not, like, top of the hierarchy at this. ‘sure i do the basics but i could be less sloppy, there are people who do this way better than me’. “you caught the dumbest fish in the pond and put him in a barrel” he says at one point to someone who has him kidnapped

another thing he calls attention to casually and repeatedly is the fact that hes not a great person:

Oh, god dammit. I don’t wanna kill a pig. I mean, I know, I eat meat, specifically pork, and so I’ve just been outsourcing this exact labor for my whole life. I’m a hypocrite if I’m willing to let suffering happen as long as it is just outside my eyeline, but fuck it! I can be a hypocrite. I’m worse shit than that all the time. I’m a liar, I’m a bad friend, I’m a shitty podcaster. Throw “hypocrite” on the heap.

And you might be saying to yourself “well jeez, Mike, you don’t sound like a very good person.” Yeah, no shit. A good person stands absolutely no chance of winning this game or getting their hands anywhere near this tech or any of the other levers of power that this world offers. I can be smart, I can be kind, I can hold the correct political positions. But I can also lie, cheat, steal, take advantage of other people, disregard others’ feelings. When I was growing up my mom told me that I was capable of anything and I really took that to heart. Capable of anything. Even murder.

and then theres this entire monologue on lying:

Bigger, more important lies are mostly the truth. It is only the greasy, disgusting core of a betrayal or act of aggression that must be kept fully hidden. The goal is to be able to enact your heinous plan, not to keep them from ever feeling skeptical or suspicious of you. Your enemy’s opinion of your standing is worthless. They can say that they saw it coming all they want, but it won’t reverse their defeat. Fully blindsiding someone is great, but if you opponent knows you well and gets their wits about them, it isn’t usually an option. If it is an option, you should consider loftier goals with more formidable enemies. You’re capable of so much more!

Richard Nixon and co. created the term “limited hangout” to describe the practice of telling your enemy part of the truth in order to get information from them and to keep the construction of your lie believable. They meant it as “hanging” a “limited” amount of the truth out there as bait, not as a limited time to hang out with someone, which is what I always thought it meant until I looked it up. It’s a very 70s way of putting things. It didn’t have a perfect batting average with Nixon, what with the Watergate and all, but it is a long-standing part of CIA spycraft at this point. It works, but it can’t be your only line of infosec defense.

This is a great tool to have in your arsenal, but it is also important to realize that it is tool in the arsenal of every accomplished liar on the planet. Luckily, knowing that other good liars are doing this is a bit of information in itself. It means that the person who is lying to you might be giving you a lot of the truth as well. You can use that to try and reverse-engineer what lies at the murky core that they are trying to conceal from you. Two liars lying to each other? That’s an arms race.

Four liars lying to each other? This is WOE.BEGONE.

so hes constantly showing us ways in which hes not to be trusted but at the same time he has control over the entire narrative hes giving us. you know you cant really trust him but also what else is there to trust? youve only got his word (reference that no one will get: it’s like trying to figure out who the mole is in widm, the producers arent gonna let us)

so you dont trust him, but also you kinda do, bc you have to, and then occasionally he just opens an episode dropping a bunch of info like “ive been suspecting something else than what ive been talking about has been going on and heres proof now im in the middle of a kidnapping’. that kinda thing.

anyway. the point of all this is just to say, i think im getting an idea of what a 13-pov/13-narrated season might look like