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[Heads up: this one goes a bit harder than usual, enough so that I'd rather be safe than sorry and stick a warning up front. Gore, references to sexual violence, and a lot of 2026-grade hopeless bleak despair to follow.]
它餓
Interior. A TV kitchen set, illuminated by dim lights far above the sound stage. A pile of animal carcasses - endangered, exotic, unidentifiable - spills off the counter and onto the floor. Flies swirl in granular black clouds.
A woman stands at the chopping block, cleaver in hand, grinning out at an audience only she can see. Her apron reads:
FUCK
MARRY
KILL
THE COOK
She’s not wearing anything else.
"We really have to stop meeting like this: what will the neighbors think?"
She draws a bird of paradise from the mound and the blade falls with a wet sli-chunk.
"The line that divides man from beast is abhorrence of the flesh. The beast harbors no illusions of its own nature; man glimpses the truth - that he is a machine designed to eat, fuck, and die - and recoils, screaming Lord take this thorn from my side!"
She sticks a feather in her hair and sweeps the mangled scraps of the bird off the counter and into a blue plastic bin.
"Desperate to prove that he is master of his own body, to prove that he is anything but a meat-fuck machine, he will kill and rape and consume and enslave and he will build a placid island of corpses on the black sea of infinity. With trembling hand and seething mind he will drive his knife deep between his ribs and carve out his own heart.”
She slices open an orangutan’s belly, pulls out its intestines, weaves them in her fingers like a cat’s cradle.
"But he can't resist the destiny of complex life, no matter how much he cuts away. He cannot rid himself of his desire and he cannot satisfy it. Sepsis blooms in his mutilated spirit… and he rots. "
She tosses the entrails off-screen and brings down the cleaver on a neat row of thylacine pups.
"Grunting in darkened rooms, they give obsequience to me."
Several heavy blows sever a giraffe's head from its neck; its purple tongue hangs out cartoonishly.
"The abyss stares back with the reflection of one's own face."
She sticks her hand up the stump of the creature's neck and puppets its mouth open and close. Glassy eyes roll in their sockets.
"NUMBER! GO! UP! YAAAAAAAAAAY!"
She smiles with gleaming teeth as the lights flicker out.
"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn this way."
The screen fades to black. White text, jittering from the film reel, displays a real-time global death count of livestock updated by the second.
Item OΔ-TS10B CINNABAR
Blue plastic milk crate containing twenty-eight Fujifilm VHS cassettes. Recovered via dead drop handoff in 1993, last documented in 2000, current whereabouts unknown. Prior owner claimed to have purchased them from an anonymous seller in Hong Kong.
Seven tapes currently in storage; three recovered during Operation HAVERSHAM in 2007 (prior owner claimed to have purchased them from an anonymous seller in Hong Kong in 1995), one purchased from the 2010 Black Auction, two found during 2014-2016 field storage consolidation and inventory, and one recovered in 202█ during CSC team's investigation of Agent Merriweather’s death.
**
1982: Operation GRISTMILL - Emergency activation of Hong Kong assets to counter emerging threat in Kowloon Walled City. Primary and secondary vectors neutralized; all known Three Stars Movement members terminated. Three of four agents KIA; survivor considered unfit for continued duty and retired (d. 1988; self-termination via gunshot). No further activity detected during follow-up.
**
Crumpled piece of notebook paper:
SPELL LIST
1. Enlarge
2. Know Guilt
3. Octopus Flesh
4. Fear
5. Creeping Gloom (as Cloudkill)
6. Regenerate
7. Sculpt Flesh
8. Call Down the Void
**
truthFINAL.docx
(Hill, 202█)
1431-page manifesto/journal in over a dozen iterations dating back to 2014. From 2017 onwards, the document is dominated by Hill’s belief in what he calls the Empire to Come; an eternal fascist state formed at the culmination of human history by the economic and social fusion of China and the United States. By virtue of being the only technological civilization to survive anthropogenic climate change (through the violent purge of “degenerate elements”), the Empire to Come would be the de-facto great power of the post-Anthropocene world, enslaving or exterminating any of the remaining “racially-inferior subhumans of the new stone age”, and later making contact with the alien civilization that originally seeded earth with life.
Hill is convinced that he is in contact with one of the Empire’s semidivine “god-eater” inhabitants, and that this entity (referred to as “the Whore” in the document) speaks to him from the future through video media. He likewise believes that service to the Whore, in the form of feeding her through the MEAT BOX, will be rewarded with a place of honor in histories not yet written as a vanguard of the Empire not yet made: itemized lists of offerings begin with store-bought meat and swiftly escalate to include wildlife, stolen pets, livestock, and ultimately human beings. Hill views his patron with equally obsessive desire and disgust; significant space is devoted to his method of keeping himself free the Whore’s influence through ritualized semen retention and meditative fantasies of sexual violence against her.
Views as a whole, the document indicates that Hill’s contact with the vector exaggerated and intensified pre-existing psychological trends, with sudden shifts in 2017 and 2019 correlating to his acquisition of untitled.mp4 from a file-sharing site as part of a bulk lot of pirated pornography and Tape #0 from an anonymous online seller, respectively. It is unclear, however, how much direct influence the vector had over Hill's mental and emotional deregulation and later physical mutations; Hill's account of events paints all of the vector's actions as directed towards him, while the agents of CSC team who oversaw the recovery recounted that she dismissed him as a passing source of free food.
**
1968: The Cultural Revolution's anti-cult operations arrest and execute seventy-six members of the Great Lady Society in Shanghai. Two survivors manage to evade capture and smuggle themselves to Hong Kong.
**
Tape #12
Exterior. Day.
An orange wall of burning rainforest rises above a line of blackened earth. A woman stands facing the inferno, her back to the approaching camera. As the camera turns to view her in profile, she raises a curled pangolin to her mouth and bites through its armor; scale shards cut into her gums and blood drips down her chin. She crunches for an uncomfortable minute, winces as she swallows.
“Sure hope that guy enjoys his 20,000 pictures of Rouge the Bat's big stinky feet.”
**
2014: Photograph posted to r/urbanexploration in a thread titled "Nope. Not today, Satan." Image is of a darkened doorway with no room visible beyond. Two phrases are painted on the concrete wall: "AN ABYSS” in black, and below that in red “A MIRROR".
**
Item recovered during investigation: Black 3-ring binder with no identifying marks or labels; 55 sheets of blank looseleaf paper plus a single page containing an anonymous account of events in a famine-struck village during the Taiping Rebellion. Irregularities and errors in the text indicate machine translation.
The passage details the arrival of an unnamed woman with noblewoman’s clothes but “a vulgar manner”. She announces that the army of Hong Xiuquan will arrive soon and is in need of provisions; when the villagers say they have nothing to give and have already started eating their dead, the woman notes that this is acceptable under the law of Heaven, but that the approaching army will be just as hungry and far more able to act upon it. With the villagers unsure how to respond, the woman reaches into her sleeve and throws a single dumpling into the mud. “Let’s see which of you is favored.”
Violence erupts among the villagers as she departs, laughing as she twirls her parasol.
1869: A young man, hollow-faced and grim, arrives in Shanghai. He finds work on the docks - it pays little, but he is a stranger to neither poverty nor hunger. He looks no one in the eye, only past or through them, as if forever watching something that isn’t there. Perhaps it was, once. Perhaps it will be.
**
One-star Amazon reviews for The Seventh Goddess: Reconstructing Matriarchal Anatolian Religion in Light of Recent Discoveries at Boncuklu Tarla (Iverson, 2018)
- "A meandering cavalcade of bad archaeology, worse sociology, Jungian psychoanalysis and second wave gender-essentialism. The evidence provided for the central hypothesis is cherrypicked and spurious at best, and easily disproven with other sources."
- "Reads like a parody."
- "I’m disappointed that it doesn’t go full ancient aliens. If you’re going to be a nutjob might as well lean into it and throw some nephilim in there.
- "Author had a meltdown and deleted their twitter over one piece of fanart whomp whomp
- "Was honestly expecting an ad for yoni eggs at the back.
- "The seated woman of Catalhoyuk has never been done this dirty."
- "𒈠𒄠𒁲𒄑𒌍𒀀𒉿𒂗𒋾𒀊"
- "Spends an entire chapter desperately trying to explain how a male skeleton buried in women’s clothing is anything else."
- "They got they’re tits are out"
**
Tape #5
Snow clarifies into grainy footage of a grimy strip club. Neon lights; music bass-boosted into atonal thumping. An enormous woman sits cross-legged on the stage, surrounded by the limp bodies of naked men. She tears a big bloody chunk from a man’s neck with her teeth, bobs her head in time with music that’s not playing as she chews. Then she stands up, stretches, yawns, and looks down the camera and out of the screen. She smiles, winks, and cartwheels off the stage, bolting towards the door in the back of the club with the speed of an Olympic sprinter. The door shatters and she vanishes from view.
Tape continues for eight minutes before police sirens are heard in the distance and the screen fades back into snow.
**
1873: A Shanghai dockworker describes visions of heaven to those who will listen. He tells them how the weight of humanity's evil deeds has grown so great that the cycle of karma has become unbalanced. There can be no escape through virtuous acts: the Middle Way is closed off, the course of the Tao is askew. Even the foreign Christ cannot absolve what has been committed. The only means of salvation is to cast all one’s deeds onto the Great Lady, the sin-eater who takes all debaucheries and grotesqueries into herself. There is no forgiveness in service to her, but there is freedom.
**
Tape #17
Exterior. Night. Dead of winter.
A woman in a backless black silk dress stands in foot-deep snow underneath the arch of the Union Stockyard Gate. Wind howls, snowflakes whirl. She doesn’t react to the cold as she sharpens a knife against an obsidian whetstone. A trussed bison hangs from a noose originating out of frame, slowly drifting, twisting, back and forth.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing folks that he existed in the first place. Sinners don’t want forgiveness, they want someone to blame. They want a man with a sharp suit and a bladed tongue, stepping into their life like a pharaoh of old to offer them just enough rope to hang themselves. Someone they can outwit before the debt comes due. But they never do, and you and I both know that it’s all coming from inside the house.”
The camera pans up, following the rope to its vanishing point. A black hole and its wan orange accretion disk dominates the sky, pulsing and thrashing and lashing out with fuligin tendrils. Stars fall towards it in long, curved arcs and vanish beyond the event horizon. Low moaning grows in intensity until the endless crashing wave of noise threatens to consume all other sensory input and the camera snaps back down to the woman and the silence of deep winter. She holds a bloody finger up to her lips.
“Shhh. Don’t wake the baby.”
**
1922: An old man, now, bedridden and fading, looks out the window and watches the rain. He hasn’t worked on the docks for forty years; he hasn’t given a sermon in ten. Whether human frailty or his brushes with the divine that have brought him here, it doesn’t matter. The Great Lady Society devours itself; factionalism among the inner circle has made the situation unstable, untenable; there will be a mad, violent scramble for power the moment he dies, and some of his lieutenants might not wait that long.
But the men walking up to that precipice are no more than far-away shadows passing through his vision. He sits and watches the rain, and sixty-some years ago he huddles in the same downpour in a half-collapsed shack that he never left. Clammy and burning with fever, he is bones and rags and a pit that devours itself.
Just a few feet away, a woman lies curled in the mud, the faint rise of her ribs the only sign of life. She’d been here when he staggered in and collapsed hours ago; she might have done the same, just a few hours before that.
He prays, but his mouth is too dry for words and his thoughts slur together into meaningless chaos. Sense-memories blur together: farm, sermon, baptism, hunger, an angel in the upper air…
The woman’s lips twitch; he hears her voice, clear and steady like starlight and still water…
“Take this and eat of it; this is my body, which will be given up for you.”
He reaches out a trembling hand, and drags himself towards her.
**
Item found in field storage: Grey sweatshirt, XXXL. Cuffs stained with dried blood.
Item found in field storage: Polaroid photograph of archaeological dig site. Headless skeletons lie in spokes around a small cavity containing voluptuous female figurine.
Item found in field storage: Carrying case containing 8cm black granite figurine of masturbating, obese woman.
**
707 CE: A novice at Samye monastery suffers a manic episode while fasting. He steals dyed sand from the storeroom, locks himself in his cell, and when the elder brothers last they force the door open, find the novice weeping inconsolably: he has painted a mandala of the eight hot hells and at their center there is a voluptuous goddess, nude but for the black veil covering her face and the golden symbol in its center.
**
Tape #10
Exterior. Day.
Howling wind; choking dust. Brown clouds veil the sun’s silver disk. A tattered American flag flaps on the other side of three layers of chain link and barbed wire. Dark shadows of low buildings are barely visible through the shroud.
A man speaks, his voice pasted in from a lower-quality recording.
“This criticism of the president’s executive order is baseless: Class-III demographics have historically been a drain on the nation’s resources, and the federal work-settlement program finally presents an opportunity for those individuals to engage as productive members of society.”
A woman with a black umbrella walks into frame from the left. The camera moves to follow her, settling about ten feet behind as she walks through a maze of rusted vehicles in what is presumably a parking lot, past an empty guard station with a shattered barrier, and down an empty road for three hours forty-four minutes.
The empty road turns into a cluster of empty buildings. Many burned, all empty. Shattered storefronts like broken teeth. A jackknifed semitruck blocks an intersection. Woman and camera turn right for a few blocks, then she stops and points up at a desiccated corpse hanging from a streetlight by a cargo belt. The camera zooms in to a plywood sign fastened around its neck, but whatever was painted on it has long been worn away.
“Drought is God’s punishment for sexual deviancy, or so I heard on the news. They cut to commercial right after, so I couldn’t catch the rest. The divine pleuroma hates anal penetration and loves same-game parlay, you learn new things every day.”
A gust of wind sends the corpse swinging and tears the umbrella from the woman’s hand. She watches it tumble away like a dandelion seed.
“Dingaling-ding, Dr. Pavlov; I want strange fruit for dinner.”
**
244 BCE: A petitioner from a village outside of Sarnath, arrives in Pataliputra. He pleads with the guards to grant him an audience with the great Ashoka, telling them that his village is tormented by a mahāpreta, a ghost so hungry that it feeds on the living and ignores all offerings made to appease it. He is turned away as another beggar and madman, but for three desperate days he returns until a young captain takes pity on him and passes word to Tivala. By the time the prince persuades his father to see the pilgrim, it is already too late: the man has starved to death on his own feet.
**
Video #12
Interior. The camera pans over hundreds of naked, emaciated people packed into the antiseptic stainless steel of a meatpacking plant. Men with face shields and submachine guns stand along an elevated walkway and stare down at the trudging mass, implacable, bored. A man’s voice ripples over shitty loudspeakers: “And the ʟᴏʀᴅ said: “Tx’uragh dzmllik a’andlat! Again I say unto you: if a man should lay down his life in service of the Great Ones he shall be lifted up! For it is written that you shall love your enemies and forgive those who persecute you!”
Video ends abruptly.
**
Tweet: Cartoon
depiction of the Venus of Boncuklu Tarla in Pride flag bodypaint,
captioned “Getting kinky with it since 10,000 BC”; Posted June 15 2021
by @████████.
**
Tape #9
Heavily-degraded footage of a room, dimly lit by a flickering fluorescent bulb. Cracked concrete wall covered in graffiti. A pile of corpses fills the frame. A cardboard sign sits on a wooden chair, displaying an RCA test pattern and the text PLEASE STAND BY. Occasional humming and heavy footsteps can be heard from offscreen. No apparent end to footage.
**
461 BCE: The magus, his hands shaking, steps into the garden to collect himself. The night air is cool but brings no comfort: the exorcism failed. The merchant’s wife is dead, her body burst open like a rotting fruit. Jahi and Bushyasta had resided in her, and they had laughed at every invocation of Ahura Mazda until their host had choked on blood and vomit. The magus attempts to pray, but finds no solace in it. The daevas’ laughter renews itself in his mind at each mention of the holy name.
**
Video #3
Exterior. Dusk.
Waves sussurate on sand. From out of frame, the voice of an elderly man deliriously mumbles over and over in Koine Greek: "Lord, take this thorn from my side..."
His pleading goes unanswered and eventually fades into soft, stuttering whimpers. A large, dark shape rises from the water, backlit by the last smear of orange in the west. The tape degrades into static and then nothing.
**
3581 BCE: The men of the koryos, drunk on glory and exuberant red thoughts, put the village to the sword. A cheer goes up as flames erupt in thatch. Sky Father smiles on them today: it is a day for slaves and plunder, cattle and sheep, lamentations and gore.
Kuonikos, son of Kuon Ghe, strikes down an old man with a spear; Hsulaʕwes barks “Posti bhebhudhi!” off to his left and Kuonikos spins to face the burning longhouse. His brain shorts for a moment struggling to square how the woman emerging from the structure even managed to stand up, let alone walk: Kuonikos has never encountered obesity before.
Before a second thought can command his body, the woman raises her arm and points a thick finger at him. A single word booms in Kuonikos’ thoughts like the memory of thunder…
Ṕ̴̰̰̇Ḧ̴̺̓’̷̜̘̎N̶̗͔̾G̶̥̿L̷̗̹̈́U̵̬̾̈́I̶͓̿̐X̴̤͋́H̸͎̥͑Ŗ̸͔̄
…and Kuonikos, son of Kuon Ghe, is struck with the greatest pain he has experienced or imagined. All thought, all awareness, all sense of self evaporate in violence as his skin is degloved scalp to toe, his anal sphincter collapses, his guts fall out in a shower of blood and shit, his lungs rot in his chest.
It still takes three days for him to die.
**
Tape #20
Exterior. Day.
Handheld camcorder footage date stamped MAY 03 1996; recorder walks along a dirt path next to a creek. Mountains bear down over the greenery, claustrophobic. Light fog; no birdsong.
A woman speaks from off-camera:
“In times of need, when the earth and sky gave no aid, they came to the caves. Priestesses fattened on pemmican and mammoth meat, spirits ablaze with sacred psilocybe, would descend alone into the dark places to speak with the dead and the spirits of things older than the moon and sun.”
The camera emerges from the woods to a clearing at the head of a valley. The overgrown ruins of an Orthodox chapel abut the cliff-face. Warning signs in Russian and Georgian demand the reader turn back or be shot. The lopsided bulk of a Soviet troop carrier rusts where it came to rest. Faded graffiti tags splatter vehicle, church, rock wall in acrylic petroglyphs.
Stepping around brush and rubble, the camera enters the chapel through a hole in the wall. Time has reduced the iconostasis to a pile of rotting wood, bird shit, saints peeled of paint until they are faceless shapes. The altar and the stone it rested on lie disturbed, thrown aside by some moment of violence to reveal an open pit into the rock, sloping away into darkness. The camera goes just up to the edge, peering down into the gloom.
“You can fly too close to more than just the sun.”
The camera drops suddenly into the hole; the tape ends with a flash of black and then static.
**
Tape #26
Totalizing, featureless dark. Raspy breathing, footsteps on stone, the brush of a hand against an unseen wall. No light has ever reached this place.
At 11 seconds, a woman begins speaking. Unidentifiable words, flat intonation. Echoes bounce in irregular, chaotic waves. Yellow subtitles flicker at the bottom of the screen.
“My name is ████, of the ████████; my mother was ███████; her mother was █████. I was inducted into the mysteries by █████████████████. ██████ son of █████ was the love of my heart. I have no daughters nor sons.”
The mantra goes on. Her voice grows rough as recitation wears at her throat. She stumbles and skips over words, chokes on her breath, repeats phrases or names in loops, stops suddenly and starts anew from the beginning. Acoustic analysis provides the lightest implication of her surroundings.
On the 23rd cycle, she pauses midway and then resumes after an extended exertion.
Running water is briefly audible on the 58th cycle.
On the 71st cycle, she slips and falls, and lays still for two minutes and ten seconds. All following cycles are recited with severe discomfort.
By the 110th cycle, there’s not enough space for an echo. Her footsteps transition into the shuffle of hands and knees, and then a sporadic dragging.
During the 135 cycle, she stops moving at all.
She stops speaking midway through the 294th cycle, repeating “the love of my heart” twice before falling silent. Ragged breathing continues for another seven hours and twelve minutes; footage continues indefinitely afterwards.
**
1925: China has been in a state of war, civil and otherwise, for nearly a century. Friends and acquaintances of Mr. J. Elias arrive in Shanghai by steamer ship. They will leave a string of corpses in their wake as they attempt to dismantle the Great Lady Society, and by week's end three of them will be dead, two will be in jail, and one will vanish into the night. On July 7th 1962, he will emerge from the Siberian forest, approach a Soviet guard station, request a doctor in perfect Russian, and keel over dead on the spot.
**
Tape #??
City street. Daylight filtered through smoke. A woman in an oversized sweatshirt sits atop a throne of corpses underneath the shade of a yellow umbrella. Bright red butterflies sit sunning their wings. Indistinct shouts and chaotic sounds fill the background. She is eating a charred shank of meat with a human foot attached. With mouth full, she looks to the viewer and says:
“We’ve been here before, haven’t we?”
She’s speaking in English, this time. Her subtitles are a meaningless snarled jumble: Hanzi, Mkhedruli, Avestan, Latin, Devanagari.
"You know the line already, I won’t bore you by repeating it."
She swallows her mouthful, but doesn’t take another bite. A butterfly lands on her shoulder; she ignores it.
“There were seven of us, once. The mother. The hunter. The witch. The warrior. The exile. The fool. And me. Seven sisters, not of blood but of bond, all gone. Now there’s just me. They left me behind, or I went on ahead.”
She flicks the butterfly away.
"I appreciate the company."
She resumes eating in silence, with no apparent endpoint.
**
Basement
Concrete and cinder block. High enough to stand upright, but you cannot shake the instinct to duck. Buzzing incandescent bulb; murky gold-orange light. Cool, wet air reeks of meat, shit, and fear.
- Handcuffs dangle from a pipe affixed to the wall.
- Floor drain caked in brown-black sludge.
- Bear-resistant trash disposal. MEAT BOX scribbled in paint pen over every available inch of surface space.
- CRT television with built-in VCR player on dusty workbench.
- Light blue plastic milk crate containing one VHS tape; cardboard box labeled in Hanzi by two different hands
- Bold permanent marker: DO NOT VIEW
- Shaky pencil: SHE SINGS AT THE END
**
Video #NaN
Exterior. Day.
A woman in a blood-crusted Vikings jersey stands in knee-deep snow, suburban housing behind her, and stares directly down the camera barrel.
“I regret to inform you that the future is an illiterate fascist in a bunker raping his lobotomized daughters, forever. The LLM side-loaded into his proprietary brain implant showers him with praise. His sons, arrayed like the shining hosts of heaven in their electric trucks, will ride out into the concentration camps for sport and will stack the dead like buffalo skulls.”
She stumbles sideways, as if struck by a heavy wind. The snow is undisturbed.
“A quart of wheat for a dogecoin, and three quarts of barley for an etherium; but do not damage the soylent or Mr. Beast’s kitchen.”
She grimaces, as if struggling to keep down vomit. Words struggle for purchase.
“The last men on Mars will eat each other. An agoge will be built on the National Mall. The mighty ones shall cry out ‘Father! Father!’ to a god that died before the sun was born.”
Somewhere in the distance, a dog bays. She staggers towards the camera. An eye has changed: black sclera, red iris, gold pupil like an inverted Y.
“There is a worm in the heart of the universe and its law is red.”
She steps back, closes her eyes, and takes a long, deep breath. In. Out. Again. Then she opens her eyes and shrugs.
“But what are you gonna do? I’m just the-”
A gunshot cracks; the bullet hits her in the back of the head and bursts out from her right temple. She falls forward in a limp pile with a soft whumph.
She doesn’t get back up.
Twenty seconds later, two men in tactical gear and balaclavas enter the frame. They inspect the body, exchange a few muffled words, and the tape ends.
**
The final act is upon us. With the poise and elegance of a kalpa's practice, the soprano takes the stage for one last aria. She smiles at the shadowed audience, raises a hand…
It is the end of the last opera in the world.
**
Well then, here we are. This post took three years to write, possibly a bit longer, and there’s an entire scrapped essay about the process. (I still have the draft, if folks want to read it: let me know in the comments.)
Tā È will be a familiar face to longtime readers of the blog (if I haven’t borked it, those characters at the top should translate as “she is hungry” - this isn't technically her name, just the label on that first tape, but it works in a pinch). The form she takes here is an amalgamation of sources: her first iteration was a minor mod / reference to 2016 shotgun scenario Do Not View by Trung Bui (see Operation HYACINTH) where I swapped out Y’golonac for the Bloated Woman from Masks of Nyarlathotep. Then she shows up in untitled.mp4 in the Lighthouse Field Guide and TAKE-HOME CONTAINER, and then once (possibly twice, depending on how you interpret the Secret Mark recitation) in my anomalous media post.
Anyway, surprising absolutely no one, the Bloated Woman’s writeup in Masks of Nyarlathotep and the Malleus Monsteorum is absolutely terrible, and it's that special kind of bad where the part of my brain that has dumb ideas is compelled by its badness goes "you should totally make a good version of this idea as a writing challenge / for style points."
From there she also inherited some theories I had about Tom Haan from The Magnus Archives: I totally understand why he got dropped from the show (having the most prominent Chinese character be a cannibalistic monster does skew close to some old Yellow Peril tropes), but! in 2/3 of his on-air appearances, Tom dabbles in Christianity-flavored flesh horror; I was expecting his plot to have some connection to the Taiping Rebellion (since that would be the historical context where you'd most likely get all three factors in one place), but TMA didn't go that route and I kept it in my back pocket. Hopefully I didn't fuck it up.
I guess I do need to finish that essay now: this outro is getting bogged down with me summarizing it.
It took so much self-control to not have her drop "This is your coming century!" in the last tape.
