#dr sprat

— we are not God after all —

After the Professor finishes filming for the third episode of Season 7, he gets pulled aside by the charming new puppet for a late-night chat at the balcony. Things get very weird very quickly.

WHAT'S UP EVERYONE it's the return of my fanfic writer arc!! I am very unwell about Sprafessor, and it is my moral obligation as a captain of this ship to write at least one fic involving these two.

This fic has a lot of things!

Late night existentialism regarding the nature of puppets!

Deconstructing Christianity while calling God a prick!

The dread of memory loss! Oh god!

Perhaps even... hand-holding 😳 and something else 👀

- 🦇

i will be discussing MAJOR SPOILERS for the puppet history season 7 finale that i’m aware you’ve seen but putting this here just in case so you can tag it for people who don’t want to get spoiled :’]

1. the professor, dr. sprat and beans.

i think it’s no surprise from the season seven premiere itself and from looking further into historical context surrounding pythagoras and his philosophical beliefs, ( really flexing what i’ve learned in my philosophy course for the semester /silly ) that pythagoras held a belief that beans, specifically fava beans, were sacred vegetation, responsible for the continued cycle of reincarnation that humanity underwent.

although this is repeated enough in the series to have become common knowledge, humor me for a bit: what is the professor’s favorite little treat?

jelly beans.

of course, this feels not only obvious but a match made in puppet purgatory! this isn’t where this analysis ends however.

i find it absolutely fascinating that our mathematical mastermind is associated with a living being; not living in the way that it is something sentient, but in the way that it grows and develops and dies through decomposing as all living beings do. our pedagogical protagonist, however, is associated with something non-living, something artificial. in the most ironic twist of fate, someone who has canonically died and reincarnated as a new puppet, is associated with a treat that, in essence, is an encapsulation of dr. sprat’s wildest dreams. which is to say, it’s my little theory and maybe sprinklings of my personal headcanons here and there, that the jellybean represents immortality.

but even if this is all just conjecture, we like to have fun here! plus it’s fun to think about dr. sprat developing some sort of obsessive complex about why “puppet mathematics” isn’t doing as well as he’d have hoped. well, not in comparison to watcher’s big-shot poster boy, “puppet history” anyways.

ah, dr sprat. so close, yet so far. how does it feel i wonder, to struggle with something that someone you believed to be so foolish, did so effortlessly. to go through all that trouble to “solve immortality”, only for someone to cheat the system on mere chance, reincarnating into a new life without the use of your geometric grandiosity.

2. triangles and immorality… kind of.

i know i literally just discussed this bit with the beans and everything so i’ll keep this relatively short but hear me out: triangles being “perfect shapes” because of how they are typically portrayed ( equilateral ), triangles being placed in long-standing significant positions throughout history ( pyramids, the bermuda triangle, dare i even say the pythagorean formula and right triangles... ) i know i was going to say “triangles are equitable to immortality” but i just spent this entire section going on about how triangles throughout history are thought to symbolize perfection and have held a position of long-standing significance and power throughout the ages. so pretend triangles, perfection and immortality are all synonymous to each other, which according to some historical accounts they very well could be.

3. nemesis lore ( isn’t it always? )

ok, this one will be kept brief. you cannot tell me that the final confrontation in the retirement room wasn’t somehow homoerotically charged. c’mon now. “i knew then professor, that you were my lifelong nemesis dancing with me through the sands of time.” and even from we first met dr. sprat, “soft romantic piano music” h. hello?! the caption writers simply did not need to go through all the trouble of wording it like that, yet they did so anyways. absolutely insane of the late “shot like a dog” estranged producer shane madej to set the stage for the most unhinged situationship between a professor and his self-declared lifelong nemesis slash rival. absolutely frothing at the mouth at the implications that “lifelong nemesis” holds, i cannot stress that enough. what compelled him to say that.

4. memories and forget me nots: the good, the bad, the eternal dance through the sands of time.

this last one is more of a stretch considering there’s no flower language or symbolism to my knowledge in this season. having said that, we like to have fun here and i’ll be damned if i keep this to myself.

forget-me-nots, aside from the name itself alluding to something memory-related, are also something of an eternal promise of true love and respect.

respect is something we can knock off immediately. think of dr. sprat’s respect for the professor functioning similarly to a kismesis; despite dr. sprat’s alleged contempt with the professor for being a mockery of his dream of immortality, he saw him as enough of an equal to declare himself his “lifelong nemesis”, a status that denotes equality, just on a side opposite to dr. sprat and his beliefs on math’s “obvious” superiority.

now then, begs the question: would it be plausible to say that there is a chance that the sprat loves the professor, albeit in his own way? i’m sure you can tell with the amount of times i’ve been repeating it over and over by this point: no sane villain self-declares themselves as someone’s nemesis, someone’s lifelong nemesis, without being at least a little obsessed with their nemesis in question. there is a fine, fine line between obsessive hatred and soul-crushing devotion and dr. sprat is fucking dancing on it. there’s a really interesting sprafessor tumblr post that analyzes the way dr. sprat goes about his plan in a way that alludes to his desperation for human, or in this case, puppet, connection, for an equal, even if he’s convinced himself that this desperation is only out of hate. ( shout out to tumblr user tasty-littl-snack’s sprafessor/spratnasty analysis post! )

also: forget-me-nots are predominantly blue. i rest my case. ( spoken in the same tone as someone whose source is “just trust me bro” )

i realize how little i’ve talked about phorgedyotl considering it’s what inspired the selection of forget-me-nots, but here’s some non-canonical, but interesting all the same, food for thought:

memories and eternity, it’s weird theming to have in the latest season isn’t it? of course, it’s plain to see that these concepts play off one another with their common denominator, time but i feel there may be something more to this.

maybe, just maybe, memories are the final tether humanity, to have such means you are able to recall your experiences and to experience and live unpredictably is human after all. maybe memories are the only separating simply being alive, and truly living. perhaps dr. sprat sought to do away with the professor’s humanity, or puppetity in this case, to become perfection, with no need for the chaos and adventure that comes with truly living, but an ideal, everlasting existence without flaw; only one other person has ever truly understood him and he fucking hates the guy for embodying every idea that he is not, and therefore despises.

maybe, this was indeed a part of teaching the professor a lesson, to cement his superiority while taking on the mantle of his dearly detested, knowing full well he could’ve bested him on completely unrelated terms but choosing to devote his time to making the place that holds the professor’s memories and experiences a part of him as much as it was part of the professor; not like he’ll ever admit it though, least of all to himself.

maybe, it was never really that serious. but i guess we’ll never know. ( this part is absolutely the ramblings of the insane but it’s an interesting concept to ponder if you’re willing to lose yourself to the delusion of making things way more significant than they’re meant to be )

so all in all, we’re left with a blue flower that is linked with remembrance if only through its name alone, symbolizing a vow to keep the person you hold most dear in your thoughts no matter what; a flower that represents the unshakable connection you and this person have, a tumultuous bond for that as long as it is tucked away safely in the innermost sanctum of your memory, will never truly die.

they’re much more alike than i think they realize, though they are narrative foils and i love the toxic yaoi route of these two, i am also legally obligated by the deranged machinations of my own mind to say that i think a slow burn redemption between the two would be equally as compelling in both platonic and romantic aspects. but as in the spirit of the rules of three, we like to have fun here, so long live toxic scholarly rival yaoi!

i literally shot up from my nap and wrote a whole ass deep dive analyzing this pairing’s potential themes i can already feel the rot setting in and i have you and your phenomenal sprafessor art to thank for it /pos

i hope you enjoy this silly rant as much as i enjoyed scripting it :]

spiraling deeper into sprafessor insanity, anon lesbian muppet.

ps: throwing my own ship names for these freaks into the ring, hypotnuses and histories ( self explanatory ) and infinity waltz ( infinity is not only a mathematical term, but can also be used to describe the continuous and eternal process we call history, as time marches forward setting the stage for new societal developments. waltz is a reference to dr. sprat’s little “dancing through the sands of time” quote, but it’s also a dance that moves in a triple beat time signature, 3/4 time. it’s like a kind of dancing triangle in my heart. )