oblique carpet

VAL's mom's name is probably candice, given that it makes more sense for her to give her victims her actual mother's name in order to reenact her violent revenge narrative rewriting fantasies with them than it does to make one up wholesale, and that it lends a horrible irony to the tragedy of VAL being unable to recall her own name, which got me thinking. based on what we know about silt verses naming conventions ("mallory" = "unfortunate, unlucky" - carpenter is the gods' fool, and dogged by misfortune, no good deed goes unpunished; "richard" = "strong ruler", but is also the name of several english kings of mixed repute, some great and some monstrous - faulkner is a strong leader, but also befallen by self-made tragedy as a result of poor decision-making and over-ambition; "paige" = "young helper", literally "page" - paige is helpful and a young (in the newly-formed sense, rather than necessarily in terms of physical age) servant to her god and her followers, but her surname, duplass, calls to mind the word "duplicitous", which is in line with her family history; "shrue" sounds like "shrew", a derogatory gendered term for someone who argumentative and easily offended, which reflects their reputation as a politician, but also evokes the word "shrewd", ie: astute, discerning - which shrue increasingly is, especially in comparison to their peers) and VAL's observation in that one episode about her mother's rather vulgar comment on her singing voice, and the scarcity of her kindness, "candice" is very likely meant to evoke the word "candid", ie: honest, to the point of brutality. which is interesting, because VAL is brutally dishonest, and weaponises lies, while her mother probably wielded the truth (or at least her version of it) in a similarly hurtful (though less literal in its impact) way.