Thinking about the possible reveal that the Big Man is dead and that everyone is in fact living on a giant corpse. Everything comes down to bodies, in the end.

interesting that (presumably dead) lords are responsible for naming children in Cyshane. it’s a fun little demonstration of the paternalism of the takeover + the idea that the dead are specifically superseding the living as authority over children.

Obsessssed with this sort of precariously transgressive third(+)-gendering—widespread enough to be respected as a rather newfangled standard, new enough to not be included in bawdy marching songs, and, legally speaking, the dead lords might be "rolling it back any day now." Different in its social valances from our own current gender politics, but still painfully recognizable. And that's not even getting into the anatomical fixations and neuroses inherent to the residents of a humanoid planet.

Love love love how ugly dying is in Our Wars Have Ended. Episode 1 had Finick screaming and wailing the whole time, episode 2 has Dogged wheezing in the background for what must be hours, even Caul in episode 3, who we know will come back and dies relatively quickly, is clearly in great pain

Sister Bull is honestly a delight to have in the story, not just because it's amazing to hear Méabh again, but it's also interesting to see what it's like for the resurrected with more agency. Sore reacted with fury when Timmer even suggested bringing Dogged back, and as we've been largely seeing them as a form of mindless labour, his anger made some sense - the old dead walk and rule, the new dead are soldiers and workforces. But Sister Bull, while still being there as a tool to rescue Caul, can think, sing, respond to conversations, she still has so much care for Caul. It's not perfect at all - there's an implicit ableism that others have mentioned, but compared to her father, who is so singlemindedly hateful Caul remarks he might as well already be dead for all he's making of his life, she's infinitely preferable. Sister Bull is the strongest argument so far for why people would want to bring the dead back.

really totally not significant at all that caul's most comforting memory - the sole tether that anchors her against euthanising herself permanently - is of a woman who sang her songs of "the better body that is yet to come". for a child with a disabling congenital birth defect, that would have been a formative lifeline. and the worst thing is, it's actually a pretty radical sentiment in a world where the ideologies governing it are based on the idea that "everything yearns to be what it once was". it just so happens to undermine its own intent to encourage progress by inflaming ableist sentiment through implication. so now that child carries that woman's severed head around like a security blanket against the horrors of living, and regularly kills herself to escape the indignities and limitations of her body. the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

nonbinary jeff bezos hires a necromancer to cross the border between life and death to chase up an employee who killed himself without clocking out first. podcast of the year.

also worth mentioning: nonbinary jeff bezos' alexa made of real human corpses gets musicmogged by the necromancer's singing severed head companion