2022-05-30 15:09:41 ¶ ●

I say the Hussie avatar’s conspicuously orange fingers are orange because they’re really Dirk’s fingers: in the vein of troll horns being disguised mind control antennae, malo suggests that if Dirk is the puppeteer, it’s probably significant that the horns are orange, too.

this would imply that Caliborn plugging the candy corn tooth into his skull isn’t making himself the vampiric master over the story, but rather becoming another vector of control for Dirk: in any case, if the orangeness of the candy corn vampire’s fangs has any significance, I felt it should have some significance, too, that Lord English eventually replaces both this fake tooth AND his robotic leg - the other “lovingly imbued mechanization” he receives directly from Strider - with gold-coloured versions. in essence, gold should also be seen as the symbol for Lord English’s poisonous bite.

if there is any merit to the idea of ‘psychic antennae’ at all, the evidence is in the Condesce’s golden tiara, a tool she hooks up to her own brain and with which she channels various psychic powers, but which, when placed on Jane, becomes a tool for puppeteering: viewed retrospectively, ‘the twist’ is that the device the Condesce has been using as a weapon actually works both ways. the implication becomes that, like English, the Condesce has disguised her mechanizations under a veneer of gold.

(this image is also discreetly racialised; just as English’s gold tooth and walking cane serve his “pimp” image, the Condesce’s associated “bling” contributes heavily to her caricatured image. when Porrim says “the empress […] was really just the Lo+rd’s slave all alo+ng”, this is a statement projected through her feminist lens; the story in Act 6 is that the Condesce is Lord English’s wife, so Porrim thinks being a wife is a form of slavery; but in the Condesce, the feminist and the racial readings cross over with each other. Act 6 is also punctuated by repeated attempts by one character to propose to another with a gold ring; implicitly, the wearing of gold jewellery is associated with bondage.)

prominently, despite the precious metals worn by the regents of the Human and Carapacian Kingdoms, the princes and princesses of Earth C’s Troll Kingdom renege on the royal Alternian tradition of gold tiaras in favour of grey crowns much more in line with the organic troll esthetic. previously I’ve made the simplistic observation that in a world without Alternia’s royal hegemony gold would have no real cultural value: but of course it is also true that the concept of ‘value’ is the work of Lord English’s corruption of the natural world to begin with. indeed, mind-control-through-gold is as effective a metaphor as influence through candy and drugs; the magic gold ring of Tolkien didn’t strictly need a special enchantment to influence its wearers, but could corrupt through the power it provided and the awe it inspired alone.