Honestly I'm not a big Lovecraft guy. Like I read synopses of his stories and impressionable nerds being driven mad by wacky weirdo shit seems like extremely my thing, but reading actual stories is like pulling teeth. Maybe he was just that bad of a writer or maybe I don't know English well enough to enjoy his verbose nerdy prose...
yeah, but that was cause he fancied himself an intellectual and needed his books to be about slightly more than being racist and homophobic
(I'm half joking, I adore cosmic horror)
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Sangfielle, the most recent completed season of Friends At The Table, isn't just cosmic horror, but cosmic horror is one of the underpinnings, especially later in the season, and they use it as a vehicle for exploring really interesting stuff.
Like, Sangfielle, the setting, is a former colony that the empire basically fled after their imperialism caused The Ground Itself to get sick and reality to break, and a major underlying theme is that a broken reality is not a GOOD place to live, but it has a beauty and a truth to it that Sangfielle never experienced as a colony.
Here's the overall intro to the season:
spoiler
People'd tell you that the Heartland got sick about 200 years ago, when the dust came, reality left, and the Panic set in. But trust me, it was ailing long before that.
Don't get me wrong, you can understand why someone would die for it in the old days. Greens and golds, bread and honey. But around the time those well-dressed devils of Aldomina swept in, 5-600 years ago, that's when things started to turn. They wanted to fence it in, rows of corn and cane, columns of people. Nations reduced to gardens. Is it any wonder the ground itself started to ache?
No one noticed until about 200 years ago, of course. See, the Truth of the Heartland- the truth of the world- is it cannot be fenced in. So the storms came, and they brought a deep sickness to the plains and valleys. Soil turned barren, animals twisted in form and character, unkind spirits swept through the fields, farmhouses and burgs. Reality began to draw its own Course, unpredictable though never dishonest. And as if in response, a rigid mechanical malediction arrived, delivered by the cursed railway called The Shape. To be near a place touched by such a fearsome Structure is to hear a drum played too on-beat, to see a circle drawn so smoothly as to stumble from its perfect curves.
Those who could, those who held the whips and the pocketbooks, fled. Those left behind tried to find stability, tried to make a home on this re-frontier of ash, metal, and ichor. Aldomina called this territory San Fielle, but there ain't nothing saintly about this place. Now we use the name that our ancestors, those forced to work this land or forced from it, called it under their breath: Sangfielle, the Blood Fields.
And if you ask me, it's holier now than it ever was under Aldomina. For all the terror, all the supposed-unreality, there is something about this land. It is a quilt as much as it is a landscape, each destination unique, shaped by its history and touched by the Heartland's Truth. Cities built into canyon walls, plantation houses turned into well-appointed crypts, temples revisited by their once-absent spirits, blessed by the cackling of ever faithful adherents. And there, in a little alcove in the northern half of a mountain range that cuts this place in two, there's a little mining town whose story is about to be written.
(I just finished listening to it today, so it's really on my mind)
Let's say my partner was big into Welcome to Nightvale when it was a new thing. How likely are they to resonate with this?
In some ways, Sangfielle is what I always wanted Nightvale to be when I was listening to it. In a lot of ways it's more serious and thought-out (though it's still very funny a times). But there are also significant differences.
For the most part, once they switch to their main game system, it takes a few arcs for it to hit its stride. But the very first arc is them using a different game to establish the world- I'd recommend that your partner listen to that first arc (The Curse of Eastern Folly) and see what they think.
Thank you for the tips! We'll have a listen together when we're bumming around on our phones in the living room and trying to avoid going to bed.
I really hope you like it, this is one of those podcasts I want everyone to listen to because it's just fantastic.
If you're interested in a sci-fi mecha Actual Play podcast that examines the effects of empire, their previous season, Partizan, is probably even better than Sangfielle (Crunchyroll half-jokingly called it the best mecha anime of 2020), and they're currently preparing to make a season that's a direct sequel to it
EDIT: I feel like being extra, so here's the intro
spoiler
It is the year 1423 of the Perfect Millennium, and the galaxy has been conquered by the Divine Principality. At the center of this empire, the only place where its five Great Stels meet, there is a moon beating where a heart should be. The moon of Partizan.
Abetted by immortal, machinic gods called Divines, and the legions of Hallowed mechs which extend their terrible reach, the Principality spent millennia sharpening itself on its rivals. What it could not devour it obliterated. What it could not obliterate, it simply outlived. It was an empire, unshakeable.
Until now.
For the first time in the Principality’s long history, two of its five Stels have gone to war with one another, each guided by a ruler with sound claim to the title of Princept, leader of All Divinity. For five years, they have fought to a standstill, while equivacators and scavengers find profit in rubble.
But historical crises do not only serve crass opportunists, they revive opportunity itself. Under the shadow of this war you find yourself wondering: For how long will there be empires? For as long as we breathe? Longer? Will the categories of our conquest outlast us, or could there come a day for something else.
We once dreamt that breaking free from our ancient home in the cosmos would allow us to escape the mass and pull of tyranny and trauma. We failed then, but perennial chaos offers us another chance: Can we launch with such speed that we glide, graceful or imperfect, beyond war and pain? Or is the truth more damning that: Might we carry our own gravity with us?