#johnchurch

I SEE IT CAREY!!! I SEE IT!!

There is something so incredible about these two's bond despite the fact their screentime together is genuinely less than 50 minutes long. Its not even a whole episode's length but in such a short span of time and in a series of what 4? conversations, so much is revealed about these two.

By the time you meet the Hunger you of course already know about Merle. He's the cleric of the group who forgets to heal half the time, has a messed up background regarding his family due to dwarf tradition and is devoted to the god Pan. He's always been a delight since Here There be Gerblins where he tried to talk down his cousin from the gauntlet and only failed due to outside intervention but the Stolen Century is where he really shines.

Parlay is so mechanically interesting. Its an act of total humility that involves bringing someone in to a conversation where you are unable to do anything against them while they can do anything to you. I know Merle does it for the plot Griffin was setting up but from a story perspective this is a fucking insane thing to do that gets Merle killed a lot.

The purpose of dying so much was for Merle to gather information about the Hunger and figure out a way to take it down. With this goal, he manages to set up an arrangement where he asks John one question and John gets to ask him one question in return.

Initially they both ask important questions like "What are you after?" and "How do you keep coming back to life?" but eventually the questions just become more about the person themselves rather than any grand goal. Merle goes straight to personal questions by the 2nd meeting which gets him yelled at by Magnus and John himself ends up asking personal questions like "What do you call me?" after several cycles.

Side note, I love how Merle ends up managing to egg John into asking this by just never letting John know what he called them till he asks lol. I don't know if Clint was even aware how much John wanted to know the answer to that but the fact he just did not have Merle answer it leading John to bite the bullet and spend a cycle asking it is so brilliant.

And then ofc he follows it up by the most insane question of "Are you friend?"

Merle only has one question every meeting every year and this meeting will end with him dead, yet that's what he ends up asking. Is John, the world destroying entity who has killed him every single meeting, his friend? Bonds are an important thing in TAZ Balance, it is well established by this point but this was a fucking insane thing to ask.

The fact this question literally makes John break up the setup they've done for years to ask Merle what brings him joy because he can't handle this question was so cool too!! Its such a simple question and it literally breaks John's mind. The mind that was filled with so much nihilism and dissatisfaction that it managed to create The Hunger.

"What brings me joy is life" THIS SPEECH FUCKS ME UP SO MUCH. IT FUCKED ME UP WHEN I HAD NO CONTEXT OF THE STORY AND IT FUCKS ME UP WITH CONTEXT!!! The way Merle explains that he finds joy in everything from the things he does right to the things he's fucked up. I would paste the whole speech here tbh but its best enjoyed listened to. Its such an incredible answer 😭😭.

John's answer to this question was incredible too! He disagrees but straight up admits he at some point felt like what Merle does now. In a series of a few short conversations Merle took the Hunger, a world destroying abomination and made it a human man. Of course John was always there but through these conversations, the Hunger shifts from being strictly a world ending terror to John, a nihilistic man who in life was a motivational speaker saw eternity and didn't like it.