Annotated 2-2
First cult problems.
For quite some time, we didn’t envision the cultists as part of the milieu of Arkerra at all, much less the major force for evil they became. As I said yesterday, they were just something we dropped in because Phil didn’t want to do the Sphinx thing.
Phil is the gamer and I am not, so I’m not gonna risk embarrassing myself by spouting off too much about cultists in World of Warcraft or Skyrim. But I’ve always thought it was funny how… conveniently labeled they were? Like, cults in our modern, civilized world tend to go by names like “Happy Science,” “Raelism,” “Scientology,” or “MAGA” and at least conceal some of their dark nature from some of the public, and most of their low-level recruits, with a flood of lies. “Cult” is what other people call them. But in WoW, the official monikers are things like “Death Cultist” and “Cult of the Damned.”
So maybe that’s the inspiration for how “on message” all these guys seem to be. There’s never any Cultist saying “Yeah, I just think we need to disrupt the system a little bit to make it stronger… you don’t believe we actually MEAN all that stuff about ending the world, do you? That’s just to freak out the mundanes.”
I wonder if the alt/hover-texts are somehow added to the books because they were a major part of my enjoyment of the comic.
I’d also like to join Happy Science. God, I hope I don’t have to kill my biological parents again…
If you’re in a cult called “Happy Science,” I would think your responsibility is not killing your biological parents, but disappointing your conjectural parents. Biology is science.
If ya did it before getting the quest for it, that arc is broken.
May I recommend the “Giddy Hijinx” movement instead? That one has a starter quest with a loophole.
Hmmm, I wonder if the Russian bots will be summoned by the annotation.
This whole cultist bit is one of my favorite parts of the comic, the humor just flows.
I think the main difference between irl cults and fantasy ones is that irl ones are mostly financial scams while fantasy ones are genuine in the sense that there’s an actual eldritch evil or something controlling them. They don’t merely swindle people for money, they actually want to spread pain and misery so they can be upfront about it at least within their circle.
Often, fantasy cult offer tangible power, as in magic you can unleash, not pseudo self-help guru stuff
Or sex abuse scams. But you also have Jonestown, where even the leader committed suicide, and Happy Science poisoning the Tokyo subway.
When did Happy Science poison a subway? If you’re thinking of the 1995 sarin event, wasn’t that Aleph, not Happy Science?
Implying financial scammers aren’t some of the biggest eldritch evils we know of.
KNOCK KNOCK
OPEN UP THE DOOR
ITS REAL
The Cult of the Damned is pretty on-the-nose, but it seemed like they largely appeared to be unintrusive farmers and peasants and townspeople. The Twilight’s Hammer, on the other hand, has a less obvious name, but there’s nothing about their twisted obsidian visuals that doesn’t scream “EVILDOERS MEET HERE”.
Branding is hard for doomsday groups.