Monster of the Week: The Preternatural Hotline

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 5: Monster of the Week

Episode 6: The Preternatural Hotline

The Dark Crystal and Thoughts on Doomed Endings

My husband and I recently watched The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.  It's a 10 episode show that acts as a prequel to the '80s Jim Henson classic, "The Dark Crystal," which has a darker tone than most of Jim Henson's other offerings, and is also a marvel of absolutely wild and groundbreaking puppetry.  You should check it out if you have the means and you're into that kind of thing.  And, let's be real, you know if you're into the Dark Crystal or not.

It goes without saying that the puppets are amazing, as are the sets.  Every single visual detail is exquisite.  But I'm a writer, and I want to talk about story, and some places where it stumbled.  Obviously, I'm going to spoil larger chunks of Age of Resistance.  If you want to watch it and haven't, go do that, because it's a triumph.  If you don't care about it, then let's talk about how weird prequels are!

The Dark Crystal movie starts the statement that there are only ten Skeksis left and with the fact that the Skeksis killed most of the Gelfling, leaving only a few survivors who are in hiding.  So when Age of Resistance starts with a full civilization of Gelfling happily living under Skeksis rule, you know from the jump that things are going to go poorly.  Between the start of this show and the start of the movie, there's going to be a genocide and probably the individual murder of all the Gelfling characters the show makes you love, along with a couple Skeksis I grew real fond of in the show who I know aren't in the movie.  The last few episodes are kind of like watching the last act of Star Wars: Rebel One.  Aw, crap, these people are all going to die, aren't they?  Maybe they'll take down a few Skekses along the way?  Maybe the show is aiming for a second season, so the finale here won't be everyone dying?

Add to this that we also know from the jump that the Skeksis are bad, either from the movie or from Sigourney Weaver's introductory voice over that tells you that once there were aliens who got split into good and bad halves and the Skeksis are the bad half who are misusing the big magical crystal with which they were entrusted to make themselves immortal that the expense of the environment.  But that exposition seems unnecessary really. We know they're bad because they openly and unapologetically treat the Gelfling like crap.  To their faces.  And yet the Gelfling remain subservient and reverent of the Skeksis.  I kept asking, "How do the Gelfling not know the Skeksis are evil?  Why are they putting up with this?  Why did they hand their planet over to the Skeksis in the first place?"  And the sad fact was that I could see how it happened, because similar nonsense is happening in my country as we speak.  "Why are we letting them do this?" I ask, "Why are these people still in charge when they so flagrantly don't care about us? Why do people still believe that our leaders are doing what's best for us?"  This depressing realism, paired with the certainty that things weren't going to go well, made it cringe worthy to get the next episode started each night.  I didn't want to watch people try to make a better life for themselves and ultimately fail.

Of course, this hesitation diminished every night as I watched, because the show is so immersive that I forgot about the real world until the episode was done and I had a moment to think back on it.
Ultimately, the show (this season, at least) is much more uplifting than I expected.  So in a way, it made a happy ending seem like an inversion of expectations, when if it wasn't a prequel where I knew what would ultimately happen, I would have assumed that from the beginning.  That sounds great!  Well done, writers.  But, then again, I could ask if it was worth it being anxious the whole time.  I'm going to go through this process again next season, when my heroes have another chance to be murdered, and when I get to face the fact that resistance in my own life may utterly, epicly fail if we don't...ban together?  Do better?  The show doesn't offer this kind of solution.  Just a warning.  Is this what I want from my escapism media?

No.  But The Dark Crystal is still my kind of thing, and I'll still be pumped next season.

More about the Honeypot Ants

Season 5, Episode 5: The Honeypot Ants

Honeypot Ants are real, and found in Australia, Africa, and North America.  The honeypot ants have division of labor, with some ants going out to gather food while others stay behind as honeypots.  These honeypots are overfed by the workers until their abdomens swell with honey they've created.  This way, they work as a living larder for the colony, and can produce honey from their crops and present them to waiting workers.  The honey they produce is similar to those created by bees and wasps, the ants just produce it in their bodies instead of in hives.

There are people across the world who eat the honeypot ants, usually by biting off the honey pot part.  I'm unaware of humans harvesting the honey from the honeypots while keeping the honeypots alive.

I'm also unaware of the honeypot ants' honey having special characteristics.  This aspect of the story is invented entirely from the fact that bee honey can take on different flavors depending on what the bees harvested to produce it, like lavender, sage, buckwheat etc, and the fact that lavender is supposed to have calming properties and sage is supposed to improve sleep.  So if we turn this up to eleven and make it magical, honeypot ant honey made with lavender will have calming properties, kind of like those essential oils they sell on the CTA.

This story comes out of the time my friend, Meg, gave our critique group a writing exercise.  She gave us each a random Wikipedia article and we had to sketch out a story inspired by it, with the idea of "Hey!  Be inspired by new things instead of stuck on the one project you've been working on for years."  She gave me honeypot ants, and I said, "What about an entrepreneur with ant friends!" and she was like, "I thought you'd go darker."  I think she was expecting that I would write something akin to the milk farm in Fury Road.

Nope! 

Ants!

Monster of the Week: The Honeypot Ants

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 5: Monster of the Week

Episode 5: The Honeypot Ants


For more: Background Information

More about the Minotaur

Season 5, Episode 4: The Labyrinth

There was once a queen of Crete, Europa, who was seduced (some stories say "seduced," in some that's not the word I would use) by Zeus, who came to her in the form of a magical bull.  She had three human-looking sons from this nonsense, and the king of Crete raised them as his own.  When the king died, it was unclear who would rule Crete, and in the power struggle, one of the sons, Minos, announced that it should be him because he had the favor of the gods.  He prayed to Poseidon to produce a majestic bull from the ocean so he could sacrifice it.  Poseidon provided, and everyone in Crete was so impressed that they made Minos king.  Minos then decided that it would be just fine if he didn't sacrifice the bull to Posideon and instead sacrificed a lesser bull.  Everything would be fine!  Poseiden, of course, did not approve, and in revenge cursed Minos' wife, Pasiphae, to fall madly in love with the majestic bull.  She just kept going on and on about the bull, staring at it out the window and sighing and whatnot.  There was nothing Minos could do except ask his royal inventor, Daedelus, to create a wooden cow costume that Pasiphae could climb inside and then live happily with her beloved.

Should I even bother pointing out how much of this is nonsense?

Anyway, unlike Europa, when Pasiphae gave birth, the baby was a scary monster with the head and tail of a bull.  They called it the Minotaur--the bull of Minos.  Minos ordered Daedelus to build a labyrinth for the monster to live in, and every year they sacrificed young men to it.  Eventually, the people of Crete got tired of sacrificing their sons to this monster, and a hero named Theseus came and killed the monster.  He navigated the labrynth by unrolling a string behind him given to him by Ariadne, Minos' daughter and the Minotaur's half-sister.

That's the story of the Minotaur, and although I like the imagery of the labrynth (and there's a part where Daedelus has to thread a string through a sea shell and does it by tying the string around an ant and letting the ant navigate for him), the rest of the story treats women so badly that I just want to slap everyone.

On a more historical note, Crete used to be the main power in the Aegean, and Athens used to pay tribute to Crete.  This tribute wasn't just goods and money, but also young men.  When the Creatians would come to collect, the priest would wear a bull mask.  Thus, the Minotaur was taking young men as sacrifice.  Also, in the early 1900s excavator Arthur Evans, while excavating the palace at Knossos, said, "You know, this palace is super complicated, almost like a labyrinth." It's a hypothesis that is since treated with skepticism, but still interesting.

It's also interesting to note that a labyrinth, unlike a maze, traditionally has no choices in the direction you can go (its called "unicursal").  There are twists and turns in a labyrinth, but the way you need to walk is never in question.  It leads you slowly towards the center, and is used for meditative purposes.  This doesn't fit so well with the part of the story involving Theseus, who needed a string to not get lost.  But it would make sense to me that the Minotaur would just hang out in the middle and all the young men would slowly come to him.

In Medieval times, labyrinths began to appear on the floors of cathedrals and in hedge mazes, and people would walk the labyrinths in meditation and contemplation, often with accompanying prayers or chants.  This practice is still used today, and it is comforting to place one foot in front of the other and be guided into the center.  I'll also note that when my son was stuck at home with strep throat, but felt good enough to be active for short bursts, I put a labyrinth design on the floor with painter's tape and had him run through it a few times.

Also note that IKEA is unicursal unless you take the shortcuts or wander off the path.

Monster of the Week: The Labyrinth

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 5: Monster of the Week

Episode 4: The Labyrinth


For more: Background Information

More about the Sphinx

Season 5, Episode 3: The South Shore Line Sphinx

The Great Sphinx of Giza was probably constructed around 2600BC.  It was buried up to the neck in sand, reclaimed by the desert, and mostly forgotten, so there aren't a lot of sources saying what the Egyptians thought of it or even what they called it during the Old Kingdom.  We know that the Egyptian version was male and, unlike the Greek version, was benevolent. It had great strength and cunning, and therefore guarded the entrances to temples.  We also know that some of the sphinx statues that remain have the faces of Pharaohs.

In the 15th-16th century BC, the image of the sphinx was brought to Greece and Asia, where it was appropriated to the point where the appropriated version is the one we're most familiar with.  The word "sphinx" is Greek, and it's unknown how the Egyptians referred to the creature during the Old Kingdom.  This was where the part about the sphinx eating you if you didn't answer a riddle came in.

During the New Kingdom era, the Egyptian Prince Thutmose fell asleep under the mostly-buried great sphinx's head while he was out on a hunting trip.  There, he had a dream where the god Horus told him that the sphinx needed to be restored, and that would make him a great Pharaoh.  He renamed it Harmakhet or “Horus on the Horizon." When he became Pharaoh Thutmose IV (1401 BC), he restored the statue and introduced the cult of the Sphinx to his people.  He also built the Dream Stele, which is a monument between the Great Sphinx's front paws, that explains this story.  But then, some historians think the whole thing about the dream was a cover up for how he murdered his older brother to usurp power, and he was trying to justify his right to rule with a dream.

The desert eventually took the Great Sphinx again, burying it up to its shoulders until a Genoese adventurer named Capt. Giovanni Battista Caviglia, tried to dig it out and ultimately gave up. After that, several more people tried, until eventually Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan managed it in 1930.

It's interesting to me that in Greek stories, they usually point out that the Sphinx came from somewhere else, usually Ethiopia.  So at least they're sort of honest about it?  In the Greek tradition, there was only one sphinx.  She had the face of a woman, body of a lion, wings like an eagle, and a tail with a snake head on the end.  The sphinx stood at the entrance to Thebes, and would only let people in if they answered her riddle.  "Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?"  Which I know better as "What has four legs in the morning, two in the day, and three in the evening?"  It's a person, because as a baby they crawl, then they walk upright, and in later years need a cane.

After quite a while of no one getting in or out of Thebes, Oedipus shows up and correctly answers the Sphinx's riddle.  In response, the sphinx either threw herself off a cliff or devoured herself.  Thebes was so grateful to Oedipus that they crowned him king, as the old king had recently been killed on the road by some hoodlum.  (It was Oedipus.)   Thebes also had Oedipus marry the queen, who some-odd yeas ago, left her baby out in the wilderness when it was prophesied that the baby would kill his father and marry his mother.  (Yikes.)  So you can see how the sphinx part of this story tends to take a back seat.

Monster of the Week: The South Shore Line Sphinx

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 5: Monster of the Week

Episode 3: The South Shore Line Sphinx


For more: Background Information