how scary is the silt verses? i want to get into it bc you're saying so much good stuff about it, but i had to stop listening to the magnus archives because it was keeping me up at night :(
hmmmmmmmmmmm I have to think about this a little bit, because scariness in podcasts doesn’t bother me much so it’s entirely possible for there to be Some Great Horror I’m just not thinking of.
Relative to TMA! I’d say The Silt Verses horror elements are less frequent than TMA, considering the TMA format is to tell One Fucked Up Story every single episode. The Silt Verses does not have that format so it can go episodes at a time digging through the narrative.
But it does have horrific things that pop up which could belong to a TMA episode. A Deer That’s Wrong, fishermen sewn together into a fucked-up boat thing, whatever body-horror Val does to people. I do think the flavor is different from TMA. A lot of those TMA horrors are from the perspective of normal civilians, unwillingly subjected to A Horror. In TSV, most everyone encountering The Horrors is ready to start punching. But still like… The Horrors ARE very much there, and part of it.
Though, there is a flavor of horror in TSV which I don’t think is very prevalent in TMA, which is this “you’re about to be killed and everyone in society is okay with this, actually” style of horror. There’s a plot point where a company which is, essentially, going through lay-offs, is allowed to kill the people they’re letting go as part of a sacrifice. And the POV character (who is not being laid off) is experiencing this whole thing going “this surely can’t be right. they surely can’t?” But they do, and she’s complicit.
So… yes…! TSV is scary! But it’s a kind of scary which is more baked into the society the characters are navigating, vs. the TMA-style “spend every episode one a different Horror Incident that happened”
ALTconclusion: there is no conclusion!!