I feel a little silly for taking this long to put all the pieces together in my head, but Lord English is definitely a parallel to Joseph of Genesis; he’s an Egyptian king-themed figure, who wears a coat of many colours, and was ultimately brought back up in his sarcophagus by another messianic figure. And this gives some pretty good insights into a question I’ve been mulling over for a long while; if Doc Scratch and Lord English are supposedly the Mirthful Messiahs of Alternia’s clown cult, how? What exactly are they Messiahs to?

Taking into account all the parallels, Lord English is pretty easy to place. Joseph was basically the man driving the story behind the Israelites arriving in Egypt, and behind making sure they were treated well, as a high-ranking member of the Egyptian court. One Joseph died, though, and the next Pharaoh came into power, the Egyptians started to see the Israelites as a threat, and they were placed into harsh conditions as second-class citizens. Joseph was buried in a sarcophagus as an Egyptian, but made the Israelites promise to pull his sarcophagus from the ground when they moved back to their homeland, and bury him there.

From here, it was the job of a different figure to rescue the Israelites from Egypt; a guy we’re all probably familiar with, called Moses. Moses was the guy who lived through much of the enslavement of the Israelites, and had to watch from his palace, having grown up as the adopted child of the Egyptian royal family. When the time came, his job was to enact several plagues unto the Egyptian people and then pull Joseph’s sarcophagus from the ground, to carry it with him back to the Jewish homeland.

Anyway the point is that if you take into account this relationship between Joseph and Moses, you could pretty easily come to the conclusion that Scratch is intended to be the subjugglators’ Moses, watching over their struggles from his palace on the Green Moon.

Here’s how I see it being; Lord English was the king of subjugglators, and at some point, he led the subjugglators (and their land dweller compatriots?) to land owned by the sea dwellers (probably a bunch of islands). English became good friends with the sea dwellers’ empress, and for a while the subjugglators / land dwellers lived prosperously alongside the sea dwellers.

And then English disappeared, for some reason. Went into occultation, or on a journey through the underworld, or something. And the empress started treating the land dwellers really badly (mainly by getting the subjugglators to subjugate their lower classes, but like… that’s not really important to the purplecentric narrative LMAO), and is still treating them badly to this day. But somehow they got wind of this other dude, who is waiting somewhere to come down and save them when the time comes, by smiting the sea dwellers, bringing Lord English back, and taking the souls of the faithful to a promised paradise planet with a Vast Honk, where English and Scratch can both lord over them mirthfully.

(Also some wicked rowdy minstrels will be there as well.)

This scenario also places some extra duality onto the pair; Doc Scratch is the living messiah, destined to die, and Lord English is the dead messiah, to come alive - a Once And Future King, of sorts (the Once And Future King being King Arthur, who was supposedly king of England a long long time ago and will someday come back to rule over the English peoples again - which is actually pretty fitting, given all the references to King Arthur’s sword surrounding English himself).