#jon ware

orpheus but he's sisyphus

Ovid’s The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice (tr. Rolfe Humphries) / Spirited Away dir. Hayao Miyazaki / @mag200 / Jenny Diski, “Housewife” / Franz Wright, God's Silence / Adrianne Kalfopoulou, “Poem in Pieces, a Log” / Jon Ware, I am in Eskew / Kazimierz Wierzyński, “A Word of Orphists” (tr. Czeslaw Milosz) / @prisonhannibal / Aeschylus, The Oresteia / Ocean Vuong, Eurydice

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🗡 Viserra, Alysanne, and Baelon Targaryen 🗡

choosing the thing that eats you

The Silt Verses - Ch. 6 / I Am In Eskew - Ep. 23

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Oh. Okay. This is the first time I think a series has made a decision that I absolutely loathe though completely respect. I hate that it happened, but I understand why they did it.

I can't imagine how David is feeling. He finally had something real, something tangible, someone who could see this cities horrors just like him, who is trapped just like him. They get close, weathering whatever Eskew tries to throw at them, and Allegra opens up to him, telling him her story, how she got there. David, this poor, miserable, repressed man can't, or won't do the same. So she tells him she understands, but warns him not to wait too long or Eskew will get to him, or her, before he gets the chance. This is the beginning of the end.

its David's reluctance to trust that takes him down. Eskew forcefully evicts him from his apartment, little by little, ripping away everything he thought he knew as fact. He has a chance to reach out for help, to reconnect with Allegra, but doesn't take it. Eskew takes that away from him too, when he refuses.

So now he's out on the streets, homeless, cold, in the perpetual rain of the shifting streets, struggling for help and money. He's now begging anyone he comes across, but no one lends more than a few coins. The City breaks him, over and over and over again. And only when he finally succumbs, bending his head to the higher power, is he allowed to reunite with Allegra.

But she's... different. She knows things she couldn't or shouldn't possibly know. Her eyes are dull, flat. She no longer notices the monstrous creatures that lurk in the shadows, the shifts and changes The City makes as easy as breathing. Eskew has gotten to her. Or perhaps, David is the one who's changed, just as she warned him. Was she ever real? Or just a clever puppet pulled on the strings of Eskew, playing a part.

The one person he could trust, the one solid, consistent part of his life, is gone. He waited too long, kept himself shut off, and The City punished him for it. Allegra goes from his acquaintance, his girlfriend, maybe, to his wife without any further warning. Eskew gives him a family in the course of a night, takes away the creatures that haunt him, and trusts that his reluctance to trust will lead to his downfall, which it inevitably does. It's unclear if things would have gone differently had he just accepted it. The likely outcome would be Eskew takes him too, just as it took Allegra.

I love how he's such an unreliable narrator, he truly thinks he can outwit this place. But it reads him like a book each and every time, manipulates him and steers him towards the next series of horrors. It uses his own nature against him, the mistrust it itself instilled in him, and lets him ruin things for himself over and over and over again. Any sense of happiness he gets, The City is allowing him to get. There is no pleasure without pain, but the opposite is even more true. Hope is the worst feeling anyone could have, as it hurts the most when it's taken away. And Eskew uses, and continues to use that against him.