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Post by sonorous on Sept 23, 2022 18:19:18 GMT
Mr. Miles likes to play with us, this much is clear.
I remember on the reddit there's a post about The Great Urban Horror from Dead Romance and Horror from This Town Will Never Let Us Go questioning whether or not these two are the same character.
Now, textually, I'm fairly certain they AREN'T the same character, and one can point to the bottle universes and all sorts of other reasons why they aren't. The reddit post seems to also reach this conclusion.
Does anyone here think they somehow ARE the same character?
I certainly do, and have been trying to figure out any sort of justification for how they would be.
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Post by darkspine10 on Sept 23, 2022 19:51:18 GMT
Horror does gain some extra lore information late in This Town, when her older self manifests in the Time Ship rather than her younger self. But that's about as close as she comes to matching the Horror of Dead Romance. An amalgam of all the lost souls of the Time Vortex (combined with a super AI), it feels more like a dark shadow of the City of the Saved if you squint a bit. Since the Time Ship was destroyed at the end of This Town, thus severing the timeline from which 'future-Horror' could've originated, maybe that means Horror also ended up in the gestalt too?
More likely it's something along the lines of Bregman and Kortez, using old names to imply a frisson of meaning and make us question the metanarrative via suggestion.
Now if we're talking alter-egos of characters in This Town, then I can't go without saying that I'm convinced Miss Ruth is totally Compassion. I've not seen that brought up in discussions before, but the way she analyses media on multiple screens at once matches up perfectly with a scene in Of the City of the Saved where Compassion-3 acts as a media critic.
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Post by sonorous on Sept 24, 2022 15:01:10 GMT
Since the Time Ship was destroyed at the end of This Town, thus severing the timeline from which 'future-Horror' could've originated, maybe that means Horror also ended up in the gestalt too? Was the Ship destroyed? I need to re-read This Town cause that wasn't entirely clear to me on my first (or second) go. And it's a little awkward as I hit page 40 of a fic working under the assumption that the Ship was still somehow intact. Uh Bottle universes, anyone? I do love the echoes in the meta-narrative concept. The same core concepts manifesting themselves in wildly skewed or different ways. Your Miss Ruth theory is damn fascinating. Do you think Compassion would have anything to gain my positioning herself (or perhaps some far flung aspect of herself) in that Town? Being on the vein of some warped culture, perhaps? |
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Post by darkspine10 on Sept 24, 2022 15:41:42 GMT
Since the Time Ship was destroyed at the end of This Town, thus severing the timeline from which 'future-Horror' could've originated, maybe that means Horror also ended up in the gestalt too? Was the Ship destroyed? I need to re-read This Town cause that wasn't entirely clear to me on my first (or second) go. And it's a little awkward as I hit page 40 of a fic working under the assumption that the Ship was still somehow intact. Uh Bottle universes, anyone? I do love the echoes in the meta-narrative concept. The same core concepts manifesting themselves in wildly skewed or different ways. Your Miss Ruth theory is damn fascinating. Do you think Compassion would have anything to gain my positioning herself (or perhaps some far flung aspect of herself) in that Town? Being on the vein of some warped culture, perhaps? Yeah, Valentine's nuke at the end destroys the Ship, because the characters leave it behind in their rush to escape. There's a lot discussion about it marking a 'severance of possibilities', making the culture less interesting by cutting off potential alternative narratives. Of course, being such a powerful metaphysical concept like a timeship means there are probably ways it could be resurrected or replicated with another individual ship. The way that This Town and Of the City of the Saved act as reflections on one another is quite a rabbithole. Both hinge their climax on massive terrorist style explosions that irrevocably change the nature of their worlds (and take out a Time Ship in the process). In This Town, the Ship's destruction forecloses more exciting stories, locking the Town into a period of banal non-questioning and burying heads in the sand, while the one in City of the Saved instead spurs the return of violence and conflict in the City. It's similar, but with key differences, where one inspires drudgery and reinforces status quo, and the other upends the normal order in favour of a less harmonious existence. As the two first books in the FP novel range (and the only two I've read so far besides the Books of War and Enemy, must get round to more at some point), I find it quite interesting how there were direct parallels in otherwise completely different books, stylistically and narratively. The Compassion angle was one such notable confluence of imagery between the two I picked up on. This Town treats the Faction and associated concepts at a distance (in the same way Dead Romance treats concepts inherited from Doctor Who), while City of the Saved embraces much of the expanded lore, so it feels like a reiteration of the same concepts acting on different levels, something that happens in other parts of the War's lore (like the Mount Usu Duel, or the Star Chamber reflecting the Faction for instance). With the way the Black Man's role in This Town works, acting as an obvious agent of the Celestis even though that's never made explicitly clear (and Valentine thinks he's with the Faction), having other characters also turn out to be aligned with the Wartime powers wouldn't be a great leap. So Miss Ruth, who obsesses over the material relics of the culture, feels very Remote adjacent, and that led me to noticing the Compassion parallel. I wonder who else could be assigned roles in this way? Who's the Great House agent lurking amongst This Town, does someone stand for the Enemy? Are the Executives really Faction Paradox or not? It's what makes the book so interpretive and fascinating to me. |
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Post by Aristide Twain on Sept 24, 2022 19:23:55 GMT
But that's about as close as she comes to matching the Horror of Dead Romance. An amalgam of all the lost souls of the Time Vortex (combined with a super AI), it feels more like a dark shadow of the City of the Saved if you squint a bit. But remember, the Horror in Dead Romance was last seen reluctantly agreeing to incarnate itself into an ordinary human lifetime, on the off-chance that it might learn something from the experience once it regains its true memories and "identity" (such as it is). A Human Nature riff, more or less. Presumably sonorous was intimating that ThisTown!Horror might be that very same human avatar of the Horror. Now granted, Christine's deal with the DR!Horror was struck within her bottle universe, while ThisTown!Horror inhabits the higher-level cosmos where the War takes place. But there are ways around this. A short while after the Horror agreed to incarnate, Christine's Earth was cryptoformed into a new Homeworld; Christine assumes that the Horror's human lifetime was just wasted scrambling in the shadows of the new citadels… but perhaps it still had enough of its inhuman consciousness left at that point to abort the incarnation, and flee out of the bottle to the """real""" Earth; and only then incarnate. (Not because there's a point anymore, but because one does have to keep one's word.) That's one possibility. We might be bolder still: running with the positioning of Cwej's universe in DR as equivalent to the main War universe, clearly the Houses' exodus into Christine's bottle universe didn't stick. We know that when a bottle is broken or leaks too much, its contents merge into their counterpart in the one-level-up universe. Could it be that somewhere along the way Christine's bottle was broken, the Great Houses found themselves back on their original Homeworld, and "extra" humans from Christine's Earth, like the incarnated Horror, were then deposited back on the "real" Earth? Certainly it is striking that the Earth of This Town is much closer to how Christine's Earth is described in Dead Romance than to how the "real" Earth was characterised there… All that said, of course, this is becoming a cliché but Miles is the Man of the Two Sabbaths. |
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Post by Ettolrahc Dvora on Feb 8, 2023 7:53:38 GMT
But that's about as close as she comes to matching the Horror of Dead Romance. An amalgam of all the lost souls of the Time Vortex (combined with a super AI), it feels more like a dark shadow of the City of the Saved if you squint a bit. But remember, the Horror in Dead Romance was last seen reluctantly agreeing to incarnate itself into an ordinary human lifetime, on the off-chance that it might learn something from the experience once it regains its true memories and "identity" (such as it is). A Human Nature riff, more or less. Presumably sonorous was intimating that ThisTown!Horror might be that very same human avatar of the Horror. Now granted, Christine's deal with the DR!Horror was struck within her bottle universe, while ThisTown!Horror inhabits the higher-level cosmos where the War takes place. But there are ways around this. A short while after the Horror agreed to incarnate, Christine's Earth was cryptoformed into a new Homeworld; Christine assumes that the Horror's human lifetime was just wasted scrambling in the shadows of the new citadels… but perhaps it still had enough of its inhuman consciousness left at that point to abort the incarnation, and flee out of the bottle to the """real""" Earth; and only then incarnate. (Not because there's a point anymore, but because one does have to keep one's word.) That's one possibility. We might be bolder still: running with the positioning of Cwej's universe in DR as equivalent to the main War universe, clearly the Houses' exodus into Christine's bottle universe didn't stick. We know that when a bottle is broken or leaks too much, its contents merge into their counterpart in the one-level-up universe. Could it be that somewhere along the way Christine's bottle was broken, the Great Houses found themselves back on their original Homeworld, and "extra" humans from Christine's Earth, like the incarnated Horror, were then deposited back on the "real" Earth? Certainly it is striking that the Earth of This Town is much closer to how Christine's Earth is described in Dead Romance than to how the "real" Earth was characterised there… All that said, of course, this is becoming a cliché but Miles is the Man of the Two Sabbaths. This has made me have a fabolous idea! What if the Earth of "This Town" was, in fact, Christine's Earth pre-cryptoformation (or in a timeline where the invading House decided to back out for some reason), making This Town actually happen metatemporally before "Dead Romance"! And then when the bottle leaked, these details incorporated themselves into the normal Earth, whilst the House's possible invasion incorporated itself into a cloneworld |
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Anastasia
Cousin
Liberating the oppressed of the Houses and toppling regimes.
Posts: 154
Preferred Pronouns: She/They
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Post by Anastasia on Feb 8, 2023 20:19:46 GMT
But remember, the Horror in Dead Romance was last seen reluctantly agreeing to incarnate itself into an ordinary human lifetime, on the off-chance that it might learn something from the experience once it regains its true memories and "identity" (such as it is). A Human Nature riff, more or less. Presumably sonorous was intimating that ThisTown!Horror might be that very same human avatar of the Horror. Now granted, Christine's deal with the DR!Horror was struck within her bottle universe, while ThisTown!Horror inhabits the higher-level cosmos where the War takes place. But there are ways around this. A short while after the Horror agreed to incarnate, Christine's Earth was cryptoformed into a new Homeworld; Christine assumes that the Horror's human lifetime was just wasted scrambling in the shadows of the new citadels… but perhaps it still had enough of its inhuman consciousness left at that point to abort the incarnation, and flee out of the bottle to the """real""" Earth; and only then incarnate. (Not because there's a point anymore, but because one does have to keep one's word.) That's one possibility. We might be bolder still: running with the positioning of Cwej's universe in DR as equivalent to the main War universe, clearly the Houses' exodus into Christine's bottle universe didn't stick. We know that when a bottle is broken or leaks too much, its contents merge into their counterpart in the one-level-up universe. Could it be that somewhere along the way Christine's bottle was broken, the Great Houses found themselves back on their original Homeworld, and "extra" humans from Christine's Earth, like the incarnated Horror, were then deposited back on the "real" Earth? Certainly it is striking that the Earth of This Town is much closer to how Christine's Earth is described in Dead Romance than to how the "real" Earth was characterised there… All that said, of course, this is becoming a cliché but Miles is the Man of the Two Sabbaths. This has made me have a fabolous idea! What if the Earth of "This Town" was, in fact, Christine's Earth pre-cryptoformation (or in a timeline where the invading House decided to back out for some reason), making This Town actually happen metatemporally before "Dead Romance"! And then when the bottle leaked, these details incorporated themselves into the normal Earth, whilst the House's possible invasion incorporated itself into a cloneworld You still have the time difference 1970 and 2001 are still 30 years apart. |
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Post by Ettolrahc Dvora on Feb 9, 2023 22:08:33 GMT
This has made me have a fabolous idea! What if the Earth of "This Town" was, in fact, Christine's Earth pre-cryptoformation (or in a timeline where the invading House decided to back out for some reason), making This Town actually happen metatemporally before "Dead Romance"! And then when the bottle leaked, these details incorporated themselves into the normal Earth, whilst the House's possible invasion incorporated itself into a cloneworld You still have the time difference 1970 and 2001 are still 30 years apart. Yeah that was intentional - the Horror incarnates in 1970 and then becomes lil' Horror in 2001 (the version of history not crypto-formed by the House) |
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Anastasia
Cousin
Liberating the oppressed of the Houses and toppling regimes.
Posts: 154
Preferred Pronouns: She/They
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Post by Anastasia on Feb 9, 2023 23:47:28 GMT
You still have the time difference 1970 and 2001 are still 30 years apart. Yeah that was intentional - the Horror incarnates in 1970 and then becomes lil' Horror in 2001 (the version of history not crypto-formed by the House) Ah but is not the Horror be coming human one of the core factors which allows the Crypto forming to fully occur? The world would have been destroyed if not for Christine’s intervention and she would not have existed unless Cwej had been sent into crypto form. However the crypto forming could happen retroactively thus suggesting a complex paradox. However had the House not attempted to Crypto form the Horror would never have enter the bottle. And had the Horror not been persuaded to become human then the world would have been destroyed and thus the houses could not have crypto formed it. A the Horror’s presence itself is one of the events triggered by Cwej’s involvement. And the Horror’s defeat comes at the hands of a person created by Cwej. And Cwej was sent into prepare for Crypo forming. Thus the horror could not have loved a full life as a human in the world before it was crypto formed, due to the fact that it’s existence owes itself to the preparations to crypto form. And thus the Horror only exists in the time between the opening of the bottle and the crypto forming. Unless the Horror was spirted away as a baby by some unscrupulous Time Cultists? Or some other Enemy of the Great Houses to the earth in the Great Houses universe? |
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