First real FatT fanart I ever did! though I had technically started planning another one before it I'm pretty sure.
Do they ever talk about if Crystal Palace output anything about Past or the Reflecting Pool?
a little stinker
- they / he
nonbinary-agender, trans, 26, autistic, homo
potter for hire and for fun
t4t with @tati
…
radfairyjulian on discord
You must log in to comment.
in reply to @Hyacynthetic's post:
ooo i love these, the architecture and the monochromatic palettes are wonderful and feel v mystical
I really love these! I saw them on tumblr a while back, and it's really cool to me how effectively the colors set different moods for each of them. And that despite the differences in build & design it's still clearly the same place.
As for Crystal Palace output: I believe the closest we get in Guaranteed Events, Or: An Accounting of the Time When We Built The Machine (TM 63, my most listened to FatT episode) is this:
"I want to tell it that it will not be remembered at all, but that is wrong, because it can remember the time after it exists. And it remembers that even then, no one will forget it.", which I'm almost certain has to have been written with the TM ending/ the Divine Principality in mind.
(it goes on "They will give it different names, and they will break it into little pieces, and carry it with them, and some will hate it. But in hating it, they will keep it close to them." which I have trouble mapping to Past. To me it sounds like a reference to the Palace (the office(?) that any and all information and media in the Divine Principality goes through) but thats managed by Stel Nideo, while Past is Stel Kesh. My guess is that that's just a bit of prep that changed between the ending of TM and the beginning of PZN, but who knows?)
As for the Reflecting Pool: I'm incredibly curious aswell. I'd imagine there's almost certaintly stuff in the Dim Liturgy archives that references the Reflecting Pool. It could be interesting to see them interact in some way & possibly confirm that? Clem could start a new fun project : )
SO personally I think it DID know, which is really fun to me. Crystal Palace wouldn't yet have been a Divine in name when it predicted it's own eventual shackling in/as the Reflecting Pool, but it does kind of make a neat parallel with the Pleroma Hypothesis (on a long enough timeline Divines will be reduced to tools) & it's result on the Divines of the Divine Fleet (dying, or losing hope, and ceasing to build new Divines. Whereas Crystal Palace & it's successors never stopped unless forced to).
Also it makes this quote from The Witch in Glass Pt. 2 (PZN 36) even cooler:
"I think that there is a moment here where this thing is trying to, like a leashed dog, snap at you, but also, you know the snapping is because it's hungry. Not because it's cruel. Though maybe it's also a little cruel, but you know what I'm saying. This moment of snapping is... It doesn't want to be chained up in this way. And, um, um, yeah, it's, it's, it's looking for, for, for freedom."
ok sorry for leaving such a long reply, but I do really love this big glass building/machine. I don't see a ton of fanart of it (in any form) either, so this was really lovely to see! Thanks : )
Thank you for the long comment, sincerely!! I meant for the architecture to have slightly different vibes: what i understand as victorian for Crystal Palace, neoclassical for Past, kinda more modern for the Reflecting Pool. I'm so happy you caught the variation!
and yeah I think the part with "break it apart and carry away its pieces" is related to the general end of TM idea of divines being deprived of death as long as there's a little of them left, but then the specifics of what happened to it got switched around a bit. Though can we really say that any of what we've seen is "after it exists"? I guess Crystal Palace doesn't exist as Crystal Palace anymore if it's not predicting, but we have a concept of divine fragments now in Palisade, we can still break the Reflecting Pool into pieces :)
Also I must have missed or forgotten the quote with snapping and looking for freedom. I always loved the idea of it as like... without will, or with unknowable will, or with will heavily projected onto it. Like Cymbidium at one point says it makes him see records and wonders if it's right in what it's "saying" to him, but we don't have its voice. And maybe I can still shoehorn snapping and not wanting to be chained into something at least heavily refracted through Clem's perspective. Crystal Palace being Kesh's ironic destructive supertechnology, maybe it just has a drive to perform its function, predict or archive, or whatever it is the Reflecting Pool does. But it's because it's Kesh's machine god it becomes personified, and the first personifiers are the people who are supposed to have genuine insight into how it works.
Like idk how canonical my idea of it as without recognizable sentience is, maybe I just have echoes of AI discourse on the brain, but I also love the big building/machine and thinking about how fucked up it would be if it output fragments of its own monstrous transformations, but like truly just "output", without what we'd call knowing or remembering.
Pinned Tags