just-a-casual-guy

THE WORLD ITSELF!

what's life like in silthaven? to put it bluntly, silthaven is a city with the technological level of the 1980s or 1990s, the architectural philosophies of the 1500s, and the air quality of the industrial revolution. much like the mire it sits on, it's composed of many layers stacked atop one another, new growing from old, choking it and bearing down on it. over time, the lower levels (and their denizens) are lost to rot and flood. it hasn't stopped raining in seven years. the bronze of the architecture is becoming a crusted green from the bottom up. still, people live their lives. businesses are ample, the economy is ... existent. the main overseer is ... missing. there's a few good pubs.

what is verdigris? taking inspiration from the panspermia hypothesis, as well as the natures of stem cells and superorganisms, verdigris is the common name of a disease composed of microscopic primordial lifeforms known as mirechildren. mirechildren are the cells of an ancient 'god' that arrived to the planet millions of years ago via meteor impact, and which still sleeps below the layers of fossil and sediment the current world (and by extension silthaven) resides upon. all life stems from the original mirechildren, but after millions of years separated by layers of dead tissue and decay, the mirechildren of below (although retaining their ability to affect reality through observation and understanding. see observer effect. that but biological) find their newer forms alien, and respond by taking control of the body in unexpected ways. this follows three main strains: the sprawl (resulting from the intrusion of another infected organism. reproduction of foreign structures - think mould, parasitic flora, growth of organic components that do not belong to the host organism), the spiral (resulting from the physical or mental isolation of an infected organism. reproduction or shedding of host structures - think cancer, or necrosis. or obsessive repetitive behaviors, self doubt on a visceral scale), and the sight (the most psychological of the three, based around the theory of observation bias, and an organism's innate desire to learn and witness. signals, language, lenses).

how did it come to the surface? good question! decades before the story begins, several peat miners on the mires came into contact with mirechildren leakage from below (due to being situated on a weak spot), and became infected with a sort of digging mania. this strain quickly died out with the miners, as it was small and weak, but not before they began construction and usage of a 'borehole', which really was a hastily made pit into the earth in the basement of an old house. a feeble attempt at reaching the god below which they had become so enamored with. seven years before the story begins, a small group of amateur researchers (most notably madeline piper, helped by being the daughter of a respected peat-mining-buisness-owning family, gillian scoby, also quite well-off, already quite eccentric and passionate about her career in biological history, and kip kesler, a younger woman from the streets of lower silthaven roped into it via her own savage curiosity and her closeness with her two elders) take it upon themselves to investigate the borehole, and eventually continue its plight. they break into the deeper mire, and through the void created by the borehole as well as piper and scoby's bodies/equipment, the mirechildren make their way from isolated groundwater repositories into the rain and thus into the flood, meaning that without filtering, the water supply is contaminated with very confused god tissue.

why is it called verdigris compendium? the name verdigris compendium comes from the name of the protagonist's journal, full of stories and observations she has written down in an effort to clear her head. reading it may infect one with the sight strain, and has the capability to drive one to madness.

what is 'harbinging'? harbinging is an achievement of what this world would consider a godlike state, more or less becoming the culmination or ultimate representation of a concept (anything from tv commercials to worms in puddles to rubbish in back alleys to literal animal curiosity itself). harbingers are also often referred to as major or minor gods, though they are more simply deities formed over years of accumulation of matter and ideas.

CHARACTERS!

a 𖣂, 𖦹 or 👁 marking next to a name signified that they are infected with/harbinging the sprawl, spiral or sight strain respectively.

𖦹 madeline piper, obsessed with self-image and terrified at the effects that verdigris has on her, isolates herself (and eventually the house, by driving others out) to become the harbinger of the spiral strain of infection (known as the hollow). she sheds her impure flesh, again and again, multiplying but never truly evolving, eventually resulting in a number of scions.

apart from the hollow, other scions include:

the teeth

the doorkeeper

the homesick (also known as martha - she works retail eventually)

the husk (or the first. long starved to death in her apartment bathroom)

a fleshy and morbidly wrong replica of scoby

a fleshy and morbidly wrong replica of kesler

𖣂 gillian scoby, curious and open-minded to a fault, deeply in love with the soil on which she walks, becomes the harbinger of the sprawl , eventually founding the lower silthaven sedimentary archive, a collection of recordings, documents, and most notably mud-cores further into the city once she is displaced from the house. from there, she digs further down with the help of the team's original archivist newton "newt" morwood, becoming a mass of fractaling tangled roots.

👁 kip kesler, who stayed back on the surface but took it upon herself to sort through the samples returned and watch through the ominously slimy video tapes, begun her transformation into the harbinger of the sight (the broadcaster, otherwise known as the signal god or seeing-glass) but halted it through a) attempting to burn the tapes, b) attempting to eat the tapes, c) fleeing back to the city and d) gouging her own contaminated right eye. she is the protagonist of our story.

trinket is kesler's name for an entity otherwise known as the stranger or whisker. it's the sensory organ of the mire's main mass, uncovered by the borehole, lured to the surface by the prospect of knowledge and stimulation, and severed from its body by the shutting of the basement door. a very wet shapeshifter, of sorts, continuously molding its body like the clay of the lakebeds and shedding its old skins in favour of forms that make more sense to it. it and kesler are a bonded pair, both confused and lost and unsure of their identities, both quite "monstrous" in biology but soft and curious of heart. it often takes the form of a saleswoman, morrigan "dovey" dove, that it saw on television.

𖦹 mortimer [wormwood] is a young man hidden behind an impossibly long mane of hair with nails that never stop growing, who has remarkably gotten his life together. tasked with a camera and a tape recorder, he is fixated on finding a stop to the infection no matter the cost to himself. insecurity personified

𖣂 newton morwood is currently the only staff left at the sedimentary archives. originally a senior archivist, she has since been tasked with the sisyphean task of cleaning the mould and paper pulp of the rotted documents, and also simply tending to scoby as she digs. newt is also the one who feeds scoby, which explains where the rest of the staff went and why newt is the only one left.

𖣂 morrigan "dovey" dove is a tv saleswoman who, after being fired from her job due to a mental breakdown on a live broadcast, became assimilated into the minor god of birds, smog and stringfoot (becoming its lure-tongue). she escaped this, too, and now haunts the city's labyrinth of alleyways all feathery and smug

𖦹 the latten is the 'project' of the hollow, comprised of a plastic/porcelain mannequin shell stuffed full of the 'pureflesh' of a number of missing people, called over by their distress broadcast. originally a lab technician named 👁 jane d'lacey

👁 the stargazer is the nickname for a young astronomy enthusiast who has witnessed another one of the mire's kind through her telescope years before the story begins. her infection is slow-going and she has come to terms with it, despite her apparent obsession

𖣂 dovecote: god of city birds, chimney smoke, and stringfoot

𖣂 worms: god of worms. also a lovely lady who is beautiful if you let her drag you into the water where the she may float and writhe without the hollow weight of the air

𖣂 mirror-face: god of attachment, warm blankets, a lover's hair in your mouth, and proximity. spiral-ish in nature

𖣂 tooth room: god of surgically removed teeth

Let me repeat that: she burns alive. 

The video editing emphasizes this as a big deal.  Shelby’s narration in the aftermath concludes that “if i asked for a chance to talk, they would have just killed me without a second thought.” From Shelby’s perspective, they did just kill her without a second thought. It is the climax of their episode 3, and one of the first things Shelby mentions in episode 4. It is a major turning point for the character, with good reason.

As far as Shelby is concerned, the vampire vs human conflict began with her experiencing a horrific death for the grand crime of crouching next to a beacon. 

From this point forward, non threatening interactions with humans vanish almost entirely. 

The only conversation Shelby has with a human is episode 4 is her face to face with Avid, which has high points and low points. The low points include Avid telling her about staking his partner because she attacked him.

Shelby, does, however, visit the town later, where she finds Avid burning her house down.

And then Legundo reads the cure book in front of the house’s ashes. 

Legundo also scolds Avid for burning down the house, but Shelby misses that part. In fact, Shelby missed all of the pro Shelby comments made in the town around that time. 

According to the post series creator’s commentary, (which i can’t link because twitch deletes old vods so it probably no longer exists aajfas;llllldg) this isn’t even a matter of clever editing- Shubble was legitimately out of range for all of the parts of the story where people agreed that they wanted to help Shelby. 

In episode 5, she is approached by a group of Drift, Cleo, and Pearl. Shelby is surrounded, and asks them to put their swords away. Pearl takes a minute to do so, and when she does she switches to a bottle of holy water. Shelby backs away and Pearl moves forward. 

The start of this conversation very much has shades of an interrogation: “why do you look so different? Did you eat truffle?” 

Shelby tells them about being burnt alive, and the response she gets from Cleo is “but you got better”. Which sucks, and serves as an ironic mirror for the way that Scott and Owen are dismissive about the trauma involved with turning people. Both factions are expecting Shelby to just walk off the wrongs done to them, but the Oakhurst faction is openly threatening future harm to Shelby.  

Of the three of them, Drift is the most supportive. The conversation improves from there, and some nice things are said, but Shelby was still threatened. It was still the preamble to the nice and productive part of the talks. 

Then she has the meeting with Avid where he asks to be turned, which goes fairly well but ends with Avid being decidedly non human. Also Owen replaced one of Avid’s messages to Shelby with a death threat, so Shelby was still threatened over it. 

Episode 6 has the Oakhurst invasion where all of the vampires visit Oakhurst and Pearl gets chased around. Shelby doesn’t really talk to anyone here, but she sure does get to hear Pearl make a generalized threat. Because Shelby can never catch a break.

We also see another instance of Shelby assuming that the townies are after her: her narration says “i thought Pearl was chasing me”

Then there’s a conversation with Sausage. Sausage pulls out a stake because of course he does. 

Then Drift pulls Shelby aside, and they have a lovely chat where there are no threats of bodily harm. However, Drift is a vampire, so it doesn’t count. Rip. 

When Avid starts talking about the cure, Shelby’s immediate assumption is that if Avid asks to be cured, the humans will stake her without a second thought. She also is the one to suggest sabotaging the cure for the sake of protecting herself and the other vampires. 

Episode 7 sees Shelby dealing with humans twice, and both of them are decidedly hostile interactions

The first bit of human contact comes when the vampires burn down the walls of Oakhurst. This is, naturally, open combat. Shelby makes a point of targeting Martyn.

Her second human interaction in episode 7 is running into Abolish, who promptly introduces her to the Veylocke murder box. In other words, Shelby is stunned, rendered immobile and helpless, and executed in cold blood. It is not an easy death.

Abolish even acknowledges that she didn’t do anything, and then kills her anyway. 

episode 8 is the finale, where she fights some humans, hides from humans, eventually has a truce with humans for the first time ever, and then wanders off into the sunset with Drift and Scott.

That’s basically all of Shelby’s major human interactions post episode 3. There is never an instance where speaking to a human is not linked with being threatened by a human after that point. 

For the most part, this is entirely the result of the people of Oakhurst’s own priorities and character choices, but there is one vampire that tries to make sure that Shelby can’t talk to the humans. Someone that tries to isolate her, someone that uses threats, someone that is willing to lie to keep Shelby in the castle and away from town. 

That person is Owen. 

Owen interferes with Shelby speaking to townsfolk three times, to mixed results: he joins the conversation with Apo and successfully diverts them from trying to convince Shelby she’s wanted in town; he replaces Avid’s letter with a threatening message, but Avid manages to set up a meeting with Shelby and clear the air with her anyway; and he appears in the Pearl-Drift-Cleo meeting with Shelby in episode 5, which arguably improves the situation because he took the conversation in a useful direction and Shelby had already felt threatened anyway.

…actually, all three of these things happen in episode 5. Owen has a very brief window of being invested in the coven in this particular way. He does some pretty nasty lying in that window, though. 

While this could be an interesting plot thread, Owen’s contributions are something of a cigarette in a burning warehouse. Shelby got killed twice as collateral damage, and both deaths were exceptionally traumatic. No amount of intercession on Owen’s part is going to speak louder than the wrongs done to Shelby by the humans themselves. No amount of lying on Oakhurst’s behalf is more damning then Oakhurst’s own failure to address the damage they’ve done in any way. He’s burying a relationship so far underground it is already in hell. 

Even seemingly minor things like Pearl’s tendency to casually arm herself do more to damage Oakhurst’s reputation then Owen is really capable of- there is a direct line of cause and effect between Pearl saying she has a stake and Shelby assuming that Pearl is chasing her down. Shelby is rightfully skeptical of the claims Owen makes about other people, but when someone else is making those kinds of statements, she tends to believe them. 

And then there’s Shelby’s backstory. 

Shelby’s backstory, where she is isolated from her entire community growing up. Where people she considered friends and neighbors didn’t care about her in turn. Where nobody had even done something as basic as telling her that she’s fun to be around. 

 Of course Shelby thinks that Oakhurst is willing to write her off at the drop of a hat. That’s what her hometown did. 

In conclusion

1: the town is not blameless in the Oakhurst vs Castle conflict. They have done real harm to the Coven, and most of it has fallen on their friendliest and least aggressive member.

2: Shelby is indeed afraid and isolated, but the bulk of that fear and isolation is generated and maintained by the people of Oakhurst themselves. The one time Scott had an opportunity to sabotage one of Shelby’s outside relationships, he chooses not to.

3: Scott is Shelby’s first friend, ever, and the feeling is mutual. This is a key component of why Shelby is Like That. 

4: The answer to most gripes regarding vsmp’s story arc and ending is Shelby. Why did Scott live and Pyro die? Shelby. Why did Scott suddenly pivot to pacifism? Shelby. Why can’t the humans just wipe out the coven and call it a day? Shelby. Why was the coven a legitimate social structure in the first place? That’s also Shelby. It’s Shelby all the way down.

In Shelby’s story, Scott is the prize she wins for her kindness and Pyro becomes the avatar of all of the senseless violence she has suffered. 

Shelby’s character arc is one of being the collateral damage of other people’s agendas so frequently that she becomes convinced that she must use violence herself. This culminates in her killing the most direct and personal threat to her physical safety, which is Pyro. Shelby’s other character arc is about seeking peace and companionship despite the bloodshed around her. This culminates in her turning her closest companion from the path of violence, and that companion happens to be Scott. Scott and Pyro’s conclusions are mirrored halves of Shelby’s finale, and reflect Shelby’s greatest triumph and lowest low.