#part 1!

TALAMASCA: THE SECRET ORDER

Hawl will be going for wine and cloth

Les for romance novels and seashell paint

DS for music boxes and fine jewelry

hiii @atlas-of-the-mind I was your Secret Santa!

Sparkstember day 26: A Steady Drip Drip Drip ✨

[Context] // next bit >>

Alright. Let's try this.

For the last year or so, I've been trying to figure out the best way to articulate the similarities that struck a chord with me between my favorite elements of 1960s-era Doctor Who and the recent Dead Boy Detectives television series. Obviously I've had a lot of thoughts on the subject, but so far, none of them have been a nice little "oh, here's how I should start!" And I'm beginning to think that the reason it's so difficult is also one of the reasons why I care in the first place.

Because it's easy to say, okay, these are both genre shows - speculative fiction that kind of walks that scifi/fantasy line of not particularly troubling its audience with the backstage mechanics of its universe. You watch them knowing something otherworldly's gonna happen and you'll learn what you need to know about it when you need to know it - and the rest you can safely take on faith for now without feeling at a disadvantage. There isn't some elaborate backstory you need to understand in order to grasp what kind of events happen in this world & constitute its plots - in fact, the overarching conceit in both cases is really less a plot than a premise, arguably only existing as an excuse to throw a small group of main characters into a series of unrelated adventures from episode to episode, & in the long term, see what that does to them. Most of our screentime's gonna go towards watching them figure little mysteries out, anyway - so there's plenty of opportunity for those worldbuilding details to emerge naturally within the story. The show's format is straightforward too, which helps - those stand-alone plots get addressed in an organized and very episodic, self-contained monster-of-the-week type way (frequently with very literal monsters, which is also fun).

That much is a simple comparison to make, and has been the basis behind loads of shows being presented as similar to one another over the years.

It's also easy to say hey, the main characters are two guys who are really really close and have been for a long time, and the two younger girls who get roped into their adventures, mostly by accident, and then stick around - one more enthusiastically than the other (though that's related to the kinds of dangers & adventures they run into; on just the forming-a-found-family side of things, they're all quite glad to have one another). It's even easy to say each of the girls mirrors one of the guys, both reflecting and inverting a lot of their central character traits at different times, creating a perfect storm to watch their dynamics bounce off each other in interesting combinations. This still feels like a tame, structural argument about how these shows function.

I think that it's also not terribly difficult to make the case that both defy expectations in a lot of ways, albeit for very different reasons, and the characters on both shows benefit from that by getting to believably exist at the kinds of emotional extremes only really good speculative fiction can provide.

[I might be wrong in thinking this part isn't difficult to argue - I could go on, at length, about how & why I view either show in this light, but if I'm trying to be concise and still give an outline of the general idea I mean here, I'd say:

At first glance, Dead Boy Detectives looks like it's gonna have an easy time dealing in all the tried and true plot & character beats typical to teen dramas, coming of age stories, and detective fiction that we've seen a hundred times before - and it's not about to shy away from them, either, or what good would it be at engaging with those genres in the first place? But rather than 'charming familiarity' being the endpoint, the very specific and very supernatural premise of the two main characters existing as they do as ghosts colors the show so thoroughly that suddenly new paths now open up out of the most traditional scenarios, far too convincingly to feel like uniqueness for its own sake, no matter how welcome a breath of fresh air is already. Being able to take the characters down those less-trodden roads to dramatic ends only their extremely specific circumstances could create is, again, a hallmark of a very well crafted story, and the result is something that at once feels excitingly full of possibility, while still recognizable enough for that newfound potential to really mean something to its audience, creating a setup that's easy to get invested in. On one level, you know it like the back of your hand, but on another, you've never seen it be allowed to turn out quite like this - not unlike, I think, the way a lot of Classic Who reads to a modern viewer.

We'll quite literally be here all day if I'm allowed to start talking about the details of how it was made like this and why, but cutting to the chase for now - late 60s Doctor Who was definitely the product of a very different television culture to begin with, so whether or not it was aiming to subvert any particular conventions at the time, it can & does take several core elements of its overarching story, premise, and the character dynamics contained within that, as A Given in ways that can still feel foreign to an audience familiar with the scifi adventure-dramas being produced today - including the current incarnation of the show itself. A frequent observation I've heard nuwho fans make of the show's earliest seasons is that they're less character driven than we're used to now - I would agree that the show has shifted genres slightly in the 21st century to act more like a Drama than it used to, but as far as being character-driven, I'd actually argue the exact reverse. But whether you'd agree with me on that particular conclusion is neither here nor there for the moment - the relevant bit is that we all realize that if the exact same Doctors & companions were the main characters of the same show right now, their personal traits totally unchanged, a lot of how they interact with one another onscreen would nevertheless play out differently just because television works differently now. Its assumed focus and interest has shifted - but there isn't a way to change what screentime gets devoted to in a Two-Jamie-Victoria story without also changing something about those characters & how they express themselves to an audience, and consequently exist within their narrative. The arcs characters make in the 60s are tightly related to the kind of media they're in, and it's a kind of media we don't see of lot of these days, even in the places we'd most expect to find it, so they & their relationships are full of both gaps and emphases in places we don't always expect.]

From a character-development-specific viewpoint you might even go so far as to say both shows start where another story might more obviously have ended, taking totally for granted certain relationships we're accustomed to seeing entire plots devoted to setting up and proving. So what we're left dealing with in both is already that heightened, larger-than-life, speculative-fiction-enabled situational narrative, and the screentime we've bought back in the exchange gets to go toward digging deeper and pushing further in newer directions, even if the most basic version of the premise - two guys and their friends solving mysterious adventures - is an extremely well established thing for a story to be about.

And to name just one specific but obviously prescient example of what this actually means for each show in practice: the relationship between the two main characters in each gets elevated to a supernatural level of consistency that is impossible in the real world and still extremely rare in fiction. Both shows manage to be about that bond because they concern themselves with its minutia, with how it affects & is affected by everything that passes through canon - but not, as the story more commonly goes, because its existence is something we're ever seriously asked to question or need to prove. That relationship serves as a starting point, then, instead of a conclusion, and the exploration of character that makes possible puts both of these pairs - in my opinion - on a level alone together.

relative to the other Olympian deities, Hermes had few sanctuaries, festivals, and temples. he was pre-eminent in private, neighborhood, and domestic contexts.

the cult of Hermes was conducted at the popular level, meaning that people used modes of worship other than standard city-sponsored sanctuaries and festivals.

essentially a god of travel and boundaries, came to preside over thievery, lucky finds, and transitions between the lands of the living and the dead

often in connection with other deities worshiped in the countryside: like Apollon and Pan, has an important pastoral function > for people who support themselves by herding sheep and goats: maintaining boundaries and preventing theft of flocks > prayers, inscriptions, and votive reliefs demonstrate that Hermes was grouped in worship with other gods believed to inhabit the surface of the earth and to exert an influence over the prosperity of herdsmen - early poets agree that Hermes could aid in the multiplication of flocks

patronage of travelers grows not only from his territorial concerns but also from his role as a herdsman - Hermes accompanies and protects the traveler just as the shepherd guides and watches over his flocks

mythic function as the herald and messenger of the gods is not emphasized in worship, though he is a patron of heralds and ambassadors

oldest center of his worship: Arkadia birthplace; ancestor, having fathered the local heroes Evander, Myrtilos, and Aipytos, “of the heights” myth and cult tie him to mountain peaks, especially Kyllene Phares in Achaia: proper oracle + Hermes Agoraios (of the Marketplace) facing a hearth surrounded with lamps**

cults are most prominent on the Greek mainland: Attica, Boiotia, and the Peloponnese

archaic cult of Hermes centered on the hill/town Akakesion, etymologically related to the god’s Homeric epithet akake ̄ ta, “doing no wrong” or “benevolent”

the fourth day of the month (Hermes’ birthday in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes) was the day to present offerings of food, often figs or small cakes, at neighborhood herms.

Hermes was a “hungry” god, parodied in comedy as a food gobbler. His fondness for tasty food and drink is probably a reflection of his role as a provider of good things.

Hermes oversaw the operation of “poor man’s oracles,” that could be consulted by people who lacked the wherewithal to travel to a major oracle and offer sacrifices there; divined by casting knucklebones or other small objects and searching the resulting patterns for messages from the gods

Homeric Hymn to Hermes: the youthful god desired to share the prestige that his brother Apollo derived from Delphi, but had to be satisfied with a "lesser form of divination" involving the observation of bees.

**whoever wished to consult the oracle entered the agora at dusk, burned incense on the hearth, lit the lamps, and placed a coin on the altar. having whispered a question in the god’s ear, the petitioner covered his own ears so as to block out all sounds, and, once out of the agora, he unstopped his ears and received as the oracle the first phrases he heard