CHAPTER 1 - Ranked Predictions for The Smoke Room Routes

CHAPTER 2 - TSR Theory Time (Will's Theme)

CHAPTER 3 - Your TSR Theory Update: Murdoch's Theme

(Originally published - Apr 12, 2022)

With the latest update to The Smoke Room, I think I have enough to start articulating Murdoch's route theme: it's about one's authentic self getting lost in, or disappearing altogether under, the masks that one wears to deal with life and time and disappointment, especially as regards other's expectations.

Most clearly articulated in the phrase from his confession: "I don't know who I am when there isn't someone to lie to or perform for."

Points include, but surely are not limited to:

--The initial sexual encounter, just after the route split. Though we learn later that Murdoch is desperate for authentic love--suicidally desperate for it in fact--he still maintains the facade of the 'bet' all the way through. The first hint he allows Sam that there is anything genuine is the next morning, when he refuses to collect on his victory. Note at the beginning of the encounter Murdoch confesses he forgets to take off his camera, the instrument that produces the masks that his subjects present of themselves, to deal with life and time and disappointment, especially as regards other's expectations.

-- The things Murdoch explains in his dressing room breakdown, of course. That he doesn't know who he is apart from the roles he plays for others. That he only feels like himself with the aid of overwork, drugs, or sex. Note especially that Murdoch genuinely had not realized till now that his "snap back to emotionless calm from anger or sadness" thing ISN'T normal, and isn't something everyone does.

-- Holly's calm facade. As Dahlia points out, she doesn't seem particularly excited or nervous about the coming marriage. It's possible she's applied her "weed out the imperfections" approach to life to herself to such a degree that she kinda doesn't have it in her to be excited or nervous. Note both her citing the Jane Eyre passage about how we can't be ourselves when we're performing other's expectations, especially the word 'automaton,' as her favorite, but also the MacBeth passage she's teaching when we first see her: about Lady MacBeth shedding her Self so that she can assume the role of killer, which the text explicitly mentions as 'unnatural.' It's been theorized that she's cracking under the weight of parental expectation.
It's also possible she simply intends to leave, and intends for Jim to be nothing more than her ticket out of town, in which case the Dutiful Bride is in fact the role she is playing, and her coercing Murdoch to sleep with Jim is just a way of maintaining that facade.

-- The tangle of Jim. Note that it relies on both Holly and Murdoch EACH maintaining a front BOTH to the other AND to Jim. Murdoch must both pretend to Jim that this wasn't Holly's idea and to Holly that he's fine with this. Holly must pretend to Jim that Murdoch is into the idea and to Murdoch that marriage to Jim is WORTH this. It'd be laughable if it weren't so horrific, in that Jim clearly doesn't care. He's not bothered about whether Murdoch is consenting, and he clearly isn't taking the marriage seriously in the first place even with Murdoch's 'cooperation.' The quadruple charade fools no one and accomplishes nothing.

-- Dahlia, Murdoch's apparent sole ally in his family, is only capable/willing to do this alliance in the form of cryptic puzzles, such much so that her goal or goals in doing so are still fully a mystery to the readership.

-- Note how Gretchen treats Sam on first meeting him. She jumps to conclusions about Murdoch 'failing' and when Sam tells her the truth she assumes he's lying to spare Murdoch's feelings. She then produces a costume, makes Sam put it on, and insists that the false 'handsome man' version of him she's just invented by doing so is in fact the authentic version of him that was 'hiding.' Establishes right away that she insists the 'respectable' version of someone (and SHE gets to decide what is and it not respectable) is therefore the 'true' version of them. She's the one who's cited as disinheriting Murdoch over his failure to be 'a respectable man.'
Note also that the thing she values, in the persona's she pressures others into adopting, is 'respectability,' so the valued quality she insists on sacrificing her children for is not even about HER expectations, but about the expectations she presumes everyone else to have. (It should be noted that this is often a common element in parental emotional abuse, of queer children especially, ie: "We don't have a problem with you, but what would the neighbors/the church/grandma think? So we're not homophobic, we're just protecting you from the homophobia we assume other people would do to you by doing it ourselves!" This may suggest that Gretchen's 'respectability' obsession is partly a rationalization that she thinks justifies her suppression of any part of her children's personality she doesn't not happen to like.)
In a bit of tragic irony, Gretchen's herself also lost in her "stern upholder of respectability" role. She lets it drop, just a little, to let the reader see that the version of her Murdoch remembers is still in there somewhere, at the end of the current update when she tries to get to know Sam. Perhaps because she's noticed that "this is the first time my son's sleeping with a man who fits my expectations for what a man ought to be." Perhaps because she's dimly aware that all her children to one degree or another want nothing to do with her and she's desperately lonely. But the persona she's lost in is the one that forced the masks that Holly, Dahlia, and Murdoch are lost in onto them in the first place, so she's got nobody to blame but the version of herself she became. Or perhaps she herself feels no need to get to know Sam, but she knows it's the kind of thing that the version of herself she's pretending to be would do: note that when she explains her reasons for having this tea and chat, she says "We don't stigmatize the help in this house" ie. she expresses her motives for talking to someone entirely in terms of how she wants her family to be perceived.

-- Alfred, conversely, is steadily descending into dementia. Possibly Alzheimer's, possibly the onset of supernatural hysteria, possibly both, but he's lost the ability to maintain his authentic self except intermittently and by happenstance.

-- Where the "designated additional queer character" on each of the other routes has some kind of closeted authenticity--Yao is bluntly willing to help Sam and accept his handjob, Jeb is still mourning the loss of his boyfriend and meanwhile involved with Doc Avery, and Todd is shyly curious about the possibilities he's just noticed exist outside of mere heterosexuality and very easily 'excited' by what he learns--Ralph is by all appearances the most obviously and openly queer.
Yet his only expression of queer sexuality is to pretend to not be interested, pointedly refuse to participate, and then get caught masturbating to what he can overhear of it in the next room.
Note also that Ralph is specifically mentioned as excluded from the Poker Game on Will's route, and is the one to firmly and finally shut down all chance of the Murdoch/Cliff relationship--which seems to develop inevitably if the two are left to find eachother as on Will's route, Cliff's route, and the Holiday AU--on Murdoch's route. In every place Ralph interacts with Murdoch's chances for a relationship, he is positioned as mutually exclusive with that relationship. His initial reaction even to Sam's presence at the store, on Murdoch's route, is also decidedly unfriendly.

-- The principal manifestation of the usual Echo paranormal thusfar has been the photos changing. The photographs as unreliable images theme goes deeper than mere horror effect, however. Not only are the portraits supernaturally unreliable, but we're shown the details at the school picture day of how staged and manipulated the images captured are. not only are the images that are supposed to be so true that they can be used as criminal evidence supernaturally unreliable, but we shown the details of how they are developed, and how very many opportunities the person doing the work of development has to interfere, by 'accident' or omission, with their contents.
Note also, in Murdoch's latest lecture on photography he mentions how any photograph is necessarily only a single appearance of something, the truth of which more complicated. "There's so much information in the light that it can't capture all it's subtleties and intricacies." Photographs are inherently only a single mask, in which the true identity of the thing photographed is lost.

-- The Necromancer's occult ambition seems to be the transfiguration of himself into some kind of echo-entity, thereby achieving immortality of a sort. I will proceed here on the assumption that this is Harlan. The Oh Spirit entity instructing him on this (possibly James 1?) is telling him he must reduce himself to a simpler, more archetypal version of himself, similar to the way Murdoch described a photograph lacking the subtleties and intricacies of light, for this to work. (A photograph, after all, despite being simpler and potentially misleading, can last past the death of its subject.) Given what (comparatively little) we know of what echo entities are and how they work--the Syd/Sam "just a simulation" Flynn meets in his final descent into the mines, for example, or the False Lupita Cam makes contact with in the hotel room in Arches that he says felt like something pretending to be a person--it's likely that even if he were to succeed, such an entity would be a mere horror caricature of Harlan, leaving the real Harlan still very much mortal, to die and be all the more forgotten in comparison with the phantom self he created. In the same way that a photograph can't capture what a person is really, only what they looked like at a certain time from a certain angle to a certain person, yet can outlast the subject's lifetime, we know from Echo that these spirits aren't really the person they are ghosts of, each is a simplified reflection of them the way they seemed to a certain town at a certain time... Yet they can outlast the deaths of their originals.

-- It's notable that Blithe, who seems to have become our deuteragonist for the route, is distinguished by her inability to be fooled by false images of other people's selves. Even apart from her apparent psychic perception, she consistently sees through the lies and delusions of others. She immediately knows Sam is 'a cocksucker,' she's seen through Murdoch's many facades and knows he's 'not respectable,' she's exceptionally quick and adept at literary analysis, and she knows something is deeply wrong with the town. 

Notable, then, that the teaser for this update was the quote from Something Wicked This Way Comes about the "man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is carrying the biggest load of sin." Compare this to Murdoch's statement in the holiday special: "never trust the man who's trying too hard." Note also the title of the quote source also ties back to MacBeth.
Meanwhile the update title itself, Ghosts of Melodious Prophesyings Rave, is a quote from Keats' Endymion about the persistence of artificial images versus their ephemeral natural origins.
Notable also, that this is the one route concerned with asking the questions about what is, in fact, really going on with the town, the entities, and the hysteria: the one concerned with unmasking Echo.
Though it may also be worth mentioning, if we interpret the Bradbury quote as literally as possible, and apply it directly to the image it appears on... of the three smiles that appear on it, Ralph's is objectively the largest.

Interesting that Will, having earlier in the route been seen suffering a confrontation with Hattie (his ex-wife who either does not know or refuses to believe that he's gay) now appears, looking much better, under the guise of subtly letting Sam know he's safe from suspicion, to then subtly proposition Murdoch.
While at first incongruous, recall that Will's route and theme had a similar intersection with Murdoch's. After Murdoch was shot, Gretchen comes to grill Sam about the affair, and manages to conclude somehow that it was Murdoch's fault. The import, for Will's Theme's purposes, is that she can clearly partially read Murdoch, but can't understand what she reads because she can't let go of her abusive assumptions about him: thus using the theme of Will's route--"Whether someone can/can't read you is how you can tell if they're your real family"--to momentarily examine the problems that we only actually explore on Murdoch's route. So, if we suppose that Will's been backed into some amount of performance of heteronormativity, then he might very well seek additional clandestine homosexual encounters to compensate. "Blow of some steam" as he says, presumably regressing to techniques and behaviors he used to rely on in Chicago. And thus we can understand this as Murdoch's theme being used to comment on Will's route.

It's also interesting that Cliff is still entirely absent from Murdoch's route. Not only are the two of them arguably the canonical 'ship' across multiple routes, Cliff's secret identity should be a perfect fit for the theme of Murdoch's route. But then, for Cliff, the constructed and assumed identity is arguably the true one, the one that allows him escape from the burden of family expectation, where Murdoch's instead imprison him in it. And narrative logic suggests that a 'good' ending for cliff is one in which 'Cornelis' does, to some degree, disappear into the mask of 'Cliff' and while that's similar to Murdoch's theme, it's pointed in the opposite direction and so maybe doesn't fit.

Though I wouldn't rule out the chance that it shows up as some kind of counter-moral, along "this doesn't HAVE to be a bad thing, Murdoch, the difference is whether you choose the mask, or you let someone else choose the mask" lines, maybe?

CHAPTER 4 - Yes I Have Takes About The Smoke Room Again (Analysis of Murdoch's Dressing Room Confession)

(Originally published - March 15 2022)

I reread Murdoch, because I was curious about the no-split that people mentioned. And I noticed something, though it's not about the lack of a split.

We've been analyzing the dressing room breakdown in context of the way Murdoch's family treats him because we learned about them at the same time, those came out in the same update. And that's legitimate, they're certainly related, but that's not the only context.

That's also not the only time we've heard this theme in Murdoch's route. It's also played in the Weed Cave, when they talk about Seamus drowning.

On the one hand, that can be read as on-the surface reference chain. It plays in the cave because it's associated with drowning in the lake, and then again because the previous incident has now established it as the 'Murdoch's Lowest Moment' theme. Sure. But it drew my attention to something else: The conversation in the cave was about more than Seamus, it was about The Entity, how to fight it, and that Murdoch hopes to find a way to hurt it back. Sam told Murdoch about the Special Font Voice in his head. Specifically that it wants Sam to kill Murdoch, and Sam doesn't know why.

And that puts the sequence where Murdoch figures out about Jack in very different context. That's context that reveals something I think we've all been skipping.

Thusfar the interpretation (which is still a valid reading) has been:

Murdoch: "I think you killed that miner in the caves.

Sam: "I won't confirm that."

Murdoch: "It doesn't matter whether you admit it, I love you."

And there's more going on in the exchange than that. Transcript:

Murdoch: "If I thought I knew you did something bad..."
Murdoch: "And I was ever scared of you..."
Murdoch: "...would you be able to tell me the truth about it?"

...what?

What is he talking about?

Sam: "I don't know."
Murdoch: "That's okay."
Murdoch: "I think I understand."
Murdoch: "I don't think it matters to me."

You don't think what matters to you?

???: "What could it possibly be?"
???: "I think I have a guess."

And that's the current route end.

Four things to note here.

First, Murdoch doesn't say "If I thought you (killed the miner)," he says "If I thought I KNEW you (killed that miner)."

Second, He then adds "If I was ever scared of you" to the question, which is, I think, what analysis has heretofore glossed over. He's not asking 'Are you guilty?' He's saying 'I know you're a killer.' and asking 'Are you dangerous, to me specifically?'

Third, right now, right after the confession about Jim, his family, losing his grip on himself, and admitting he sometimes wants to die, and admitting he just wants someone who loves and appreciates the real him enough to tell him he's doing a good job? That's an odd place to suddenly talk about whether or not Sam killed Jack. What prompted Murdoch to bring this up NOW?

Fourth, whatever Murdoch's actually talking about, while Sam might not fully get it, the voice pops up to say that it DOES get it.

Murdoch's not just saying "I'm going to be with you whether or not you're guilty." This isn't (solely) the 'come clean to the love interest and find out he can trust him' moment that Sam's also had with Cliff, Nik, and Will.

Murdoch is saying "I know you're capable of killing. If the voice in your head, that you already told me wants you to kill me, starts to take over, can you resist? Can you warn me?"

And then THAT, not whether Sam killed Jack, whether Sam MIGHT kill Murdoch, that's what Murdoch decides doesn't matter.

Murdoch chooses to be with Sam regardless. That his dream of a kiss for free, of Sam waking up in his bed, of telling him he's doing a good job is worth more than his own life.

CHAPTER 5 - Ok, what, in fact, IS a Hysteria?

(Originally Published - March 2nd 2022)

The biggest impact of the latest Smoke Room Update, Rocks of Sombre Hue, is that it revealed that we MAY have actually finally SEEN a second example of a Hysteria. I base this on two criteria:

Caldwell says the two days they spent in the forest was actually two weeks on the outside, consistent with the fairy tale/horror trope of "the amount of time you spent in non-ordinary reality was different than you thought it was."

Cliff explicitly mentions "mass hysteria" in his attempt to explain happened to them. While CLIFF thinking it was mass hysteria doesn't really prove anything one way or the other, the fact that the WRITERS chose for him to use THAT terminology has to be seen as conclusive, the same way Jenna's calling it a 'Tulpa' despite that description's debatable accuracy is nonetheless taken as definitive. The fact is the writers chose to have a character use that term, and they did not do so for no reason.

Now while it's always possible that a later update will clarify that no, that wasn't a capital H Hysteria, just some spooky woods, the real Hysteria is still to come back in Echo, for purposes of this investigation I will proceed on the assumption that Cliff's expedition getting lost in the lost woods IS in fact a Hysteria.

For all that we assume we know about the cycle of Hysterias, we have in fact only seen one: the 2015 Hysteria depicted in Echo. From this, and from diegetic historical records of the 1870s and 1915 hysterias, themselves of less than certain plausibility, community consensus has settled on more or less the following rules:

-The Hysteria occurs within Echo.

-The Hysteria 'closes the borders.' Leaving, and communication with the outside world, are both nigh impossible while it lasts.

-The Hysteria makes all the Entities more real, more powerful, and more dangerous.

-Queer, Gay, and LGBTQ people may be more likely to find themselves the focal point of a Hysteria, though this may be merely an artifact of the stories being made by queer writers for a largely queer audience.

-It is believed by some that killing the "responsible person," IE the person whose GSM was the straw the broke the donkey's back, will end the hysteria. I do not know of any source for this beleif. Possibly hum-induced, possibly to do with resolutions to the 1915 hysteria which we haven't yet (and may never) see.

-The Hysteria is triggered by some combination of guilt, secrets, and misery, (GSM for brevity's sake) especially ones related to violent deaths and cycles of trauma and revenge. Note that Gad and Manaba specifically cite deliberate ignorance of echo and its secrets as the thing that keeps them safe from it. There are a number of possible theories about precisely how:

   -This may be triggered by a critical mass of GSM. There is some capacity or score that, when reached, triggers a Hysteria. This would explain the relatively short period between the 1870s hysteria and the 1915, as opposed to longer between 1915 and 2015. The population decline has slowed the buildup of GSM, thus it doesn't begin to snowball toward critical mass until Sam's death at the hands of (or van of) Mr. Bronson starts the cycle that leads to Chase killing Sydney.

   -It may be a matter of specific people harboring GSM. Known trigger points for Hysterias included John Begay's framing and execution (the death of a queer person, at the hands of a queer person,) presumably Jack's killing (the death of a queer person at the hands of a queer person,) and Sydney's death (death at the hands of a queer person, since Sydney never got old enough to find out he remains a question mark despite what Ao3 would have you beleive. Though since the beginning of the chain is Sam, that might still count.) Notably deaths of straight, or presumed straight, people do NOT seem to have triggered hysterias: Seamus, the Teen Girlcat that Cameron saw in a vision. Similarly non-violent deaths of queer people also seem not to be triggers: Jeb's boyfriend who died of tuberculosis, for instance. There's several traditions of magic/heathenry/paranormal thought in which not being straight is to be automatically a contact point for non-ordinary reality. IF the hinging of hysterias on queer characters IS diegetic, of course.

   -It may be not a matter of how much GSM, but the ratio of those carrying GSM to those untroubled by it. In 1915, Sam, Murdoch, Nik, Cliff, and Will are only a fraction of a fraction of the total population of Echo. By 2020, Cameron himself is between 50% and 20% of the total population, depending on what day we're looking at, and might possibly be sufficient to trigger a hysteria entirely on his own.

So let's look at how Cliff's Expedition fits these criteria.

-Closed Borders. Once they enter the forest, paths no longer go where they are supposed to, and leaving is impossible. Moreover, though they only spend two days in the forest, this apparently consumes two weeks.

-Entity reality increase. The Beast, of course, but also John Begay's ghost is so lifelike that Sam doesn't realise he's not talking to a living person.

-Queer characters focal point. The only people whom we don't KNOW to be queer are Yiska and Tsela.

-Triggered by GSM. Every character seems to have a certian amount of this. Sam, obviously, has Jack and that's just the start. Murdoch has Seamus and that's just the start. Cliff has the fact that he's not actually Cliff. Jeb has a dead boyfriend. Even Avery has a lot of bitterness about colonialism but also about old disagreements with his parents.

In addition, the narrative progress THROUGH the Lost woods portion of Cliff's route seems to fit the progress through most version of the 2015 Hysteria we get to see. There's the unexpected danger from a source that is initially thought to be mundane. There's the Samulation-like "imitating the appearances of people you lost." There the folding back of paths, as when attemting to leave town in Flynn's or Leo's route, but also as in the interior of the manison in Carl's route. There's the confrontation of guilt. After which the hysteria is passed and they can leave.

So what about the one trait that most notably doesn't fit? Because this hysteria doesn't happen in Echo, it in fact happens well outside the Circle on Gad's map. But it did START there. All the characters affected started their trips in Echo. So, assuming this is a hysteria, we may perhaps re examine the first rule: must hysterias happen in Echo? Or have the ones we've SEEN merely been confined to Echo, because the lockdown of the second trait means that once they start they stay put, and the thing that starts them is itself in Echo? But they build slowly: the 2015 hysteria doesn't begin the instant Chase returns, nor did it begin when Chase killed Sydney. So the hysteria "potential" could have been on Sam, Cliff, Murdoch, and Jeb as they LEFT, and then once they were alone together, well, that's 100% of the 'population' both carrying significant GSM and Queer, and so it starts with the beast attack, and once it does the forest becomes locked down until they've seen what John Begay, who takes control of the manifestations of the hysteria the same wat he and James 1 did in Carl's route, has shown someone what he wants them to see. (The message being, perhaps, a little weaker and less clear without an actual descendant present.)

And is that so far fetched? It's long been theorized that the some part of the material of the Hysterias, if not the motivating will behind them, is memories and ideas 'imprinted' onto the quartz formations beneath the town and the mine. But quartz is not the only thing that can contain memories and ideas. People can too.

If true, the implications are unsettling. Post Jenna's good ending, for example, or post a hypothetical good Murdoch, Cliff, or Nik ending where Sam and one or more of his love interests have left Echo behind... there could, potentially, still be additional incidences.

CHAPTER 6 - TSR Theory Time Again (On Timeline interconnection)

(Originally published - Feb 26th 2022)

CHAPTER 7 - Nik's Theme

(Originally published - Sep 7th 2023)

Nik's route, in The Smoke Room, has been strongly thematic for some time now: but what theme, precisely, hasn't been clear. But I think I might have seen it.

Prior to this it's been pointed out (by someone whom I know as Wyatt, I don't believe they are on SoFurry) that there was a very strong "hands" motif: 88883 is made of other people's arms with hands outstretched reaching for Sam, Chang's hand injury is what obligates him into a life of crime, Ben's attempt to crush Sam's hand with his hammer, Sam's initial sex scene with Nik--uniquely among main romance interests--is manual masturbation as is his encounter with Yao. Sam has a vision of a bouquet of hands reaching out from the mine towards him, while experiencing an brief opium contact high. The first chapter title card shows a trail of hand prints in the sand leading out of the mine toward the town. But a motif is not itself a theme, though it may be, and should be, used to express one.

But a hand is a common and intuitive symbol for work. It is, after all, the human's primary organ of manipulation of the world through effort. Given how much of the conflict in Nik's route revolves around the history of the early twentieth century labor movement, and the dangers of organizing a union, this is a highly relevant symbol.

And the theme I believe I see it expressing is the struggle to not be reduced to solely your utility to others.

This manifests in a number of ways:

The hand motif, of course: Chang is only worth anything to the mine with intact hands, with missing fingers he is considered worthless. Ben sees Sam as a potential rival purely because of his ability to work. And 88883, of course, seems to in some way consume the echoes the dead leave behind, fully reducing them to mere extensions of itself.

But the theme continues beyond the motif. James, in attempting to win access to Sam, gifts him with new tools. Note that the gift is simply of something that makes Sam useful to James, and is only appreciated because the mining company has deliberately declined it's very basic duty to be useful to the miners doing the work. But the subtext is that though James may desire Sam, the only part of him he can attempt to appeal to and win over is the part that is useful to James. Sam, in turn, elects to give James what he wants precisely because he intends to get some use out of his influence with the company.

Porter has made a career out of dealing in other people's secrets, no matter how the secrets he buys and sells hurt them, and no matter who they hurt. While the utility he reduces people to is of a kind different than that of the mine, it is no less a reduction. His having done this to a blood relative is the source of the rift between himself and his brother.

Sam's initial choice whether or not to trust Yao--which does lead to sexual contact--is expressed in terms of utility: "He seems helpful," as the choice puts it.

Nik's primary anxiety about his relationship with Sam is not any objection to Sam's sex work or doubt about Sam's character, it is his own failure to be useful enough TO Sam. He wants to be able to "pay him what he is truly worth, pay to hold him forever." He bemoans that seeing him means Sam has to turn down wealthier clients, clients who could be more useful.

Briggs brings up all the extraneous details about Nik's life--the Lahkian (Polish) name he still uses despite having been assigned an Americanized legal name presumably upon immigration, the fact he owns his own helmet, his desire to do something else with his life besides work in a mine, his disdain for the idea of stabbing others in the back for his own advancement--not in order to argue that they make him untrustworthy but as if they are all self-evidently untrustworthy. Compare this to Brigg's attitude upon Sam's rehiring, which was naked aggrieved suspicion at him merely for the fact that he at one point stopped working as a miner. He outright uses the word 'ungrateful.' Briggs, then sees workers as solely equivalent to their work. Any miner who has any traits or qualities beyond 'miner' is therefore 'not really a miner' and therefore suspicious.

Ben, ultimately, is the logical conclusion of this portrait of capitalism. He brings two other miners with him in his attempt at excavating the untouched reserves of the mine. He shows neither regret nor shock at the death of one of them in a dynamite blast--the man is not useful to him anymore, and therefore it doesn't matter that he's dead. Similarly the second Nate is no longer useful, Ben casually and in cold blood murders him. He then demands that Nik, Yao, and Sam kill one another, as if that were a reasonable request. Because to his twisted worldview it IS a reasonable request--it would be useful to him if they did so, and he sees people as having no traits but their utility to him, therefore they have no reason not to. Nothing about them, in Ben's eyes, exists but their utility to him.

On the other side of this, the union efforts are all to keep eachother existing as more than merely utility. The stag serves as a meeting area not only so that they have cover for associating with one another but because it's a place with things to do that have nothing to do with their work. Note the exercise and fitness equipment around back, collectively bought and free to use. Nik himself is the ultimate example of this: he mentions the concept of Organic Society, in which people are so separated from their utility that money becomes no longer a consideration. And his ultimate dream is merely spending leisure time with the people he cares about while he still can.

Now of course one obvious implication of this is the labor struggle that forms much of the plot: the union is fighting for the workers to have and money enough to do more with their lives than work, this is, historically, a long-standing rhetorical point almost every labor movement makes. But it also may be very relevant as the paranormal elements within the story increase. It's been hinted (by Oh Spirit to the Necromancer, by Sam's Ghost to Chase, by Sam's Ghost to Flynn) that the entities in echo, the ghosts especially, are a reduced and simplified version of the people they were in life. If so, such a reduction to one's utility is uncomfortably close to being an entity oneself.

CHAPTER 8 - Buy One Get Three Free: The Four Loves Model in The Smoke Room

(Originally published - June 30th 2023)

It's common enough to say that Ancient Philosophy classified love into four kinds. This is, as always, an over-simplification, and one that breaks down with even the most cursory research. All sorts of classical philosophers had all sorts of different organizational schema about what love was. The "Four Loves" version comes to us filtered through Christian theologians and philosophers in the Late Classical through the Renaissance eras, and so to some extent is colored by that perspective. It's common for sources that organize love in this way to be visibly over-cautious of what they call Eros, or to try explicitly to say that Agape is both inherently superior to other forms of love and separated from sexuality entirely.

All that said, though, if we were to try to hold out only for Classical Philosophy which was wholly untainted by Christian influence, we'd have almost nothing, and it's not as if any of us--the people who are reading works of literary analysis, in English--can claim to come from cultures or societies wholly free of Christian influence. Trying to analyze according to a hypothetical influence-free schema that we don't have is only going to replace the version of it with someone else's bias with a version of it with our own biases. Even if it could be done, what would be the purpose? The schema exists, as it is, and so long as we are conscious of the perspectives that have shaped it, and so can correct for them as needed, then it will do as well as any other. The principal correction, and the one we will therefore establish at the outset, is this: it is common in treatments of this idea of types of love to proceed from the assumption that sex and romance are solely and entirely the domain of Eros, that Storge, Philia, and Agape have nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality. But I daresay that almost any queer person who wears a little experience can tell you this is pure, raw, heteronormative nonsense. If a kind of love exists, then it can be expressed sexually if those who hold it consent to do so: the difference between loves is not in whether sexuality is involved, it's in how that sexuality manifests.

So with the understanding that it's an imperfect instrument, let's take a look at what we're measuring with it.

The Smoke Room

is a visual novel produced by The Echo Project. The main character, Sam, is a sex worker, in a mining boom town, in rural mostly-Arizona, in 1915, and the story opens when he kills a client in self-defense. Sex work, somewhat counter-intuitively, is legal (this is true, historically, Arizona did not outlaw sex work until 1917,) but sodomy is a felony. Moreover, just because sex work is legal doesn't mean anyone is going to believe a sex worker's claim of self defense. So Sam needs to decide, and quickly, which of his other clients can get him out of town, cover up the crime, or both.

This choice also decides which of the possible romantic interests Sam will, on this playthrough, become attached to: Cliff, the visiting anthropologist from Europe, Murdoch, the closest-anyone-can-be-to-'out' photographer, Nik, the shy miner who can rarely afford more than cuddling, or Will, the town Sheriff. These are very different men, of course, and the relationships Sam can build with each are correspondingly different.

Perhaps intentionally, perhaps through mere synchronicity, these map to The Four Loves.

Storge

Will, or Sheriff William Adler, is Sheriff of Echo. He was once a prominent detective, in Chicago, but due to some kind of encounter with some combination of organized crime and corrupt politics--precise details are not yet known--he was essentially exiled.

We've had no evidence of any point in Will's life where he did not know he was gay, but nevertheless he does have an ex-wife and an estranged son. The marriage was, according to Will, right from the beginning unhappy to the point of suicidal ideation (though it's notable that Hattie, the lady in question, remains to this day hurt and confused as to why it ended) and as much as he misses Chicago, he was glad to be done with it.

He's gruff, grumpy, and blunt, and very assertive in bed. He flat out denies having romantic feelings toward Sam, at the same time physical tells--his tail involuntarily wagging, or an erection in reaction to a compliment from Sam--give that statement the lie. His love is instead expressed in acts of caretaking: making sure Sam doesn't skip meals, reassuring Sam that defending himself is justified and moving to cover up the killing, teaching Sam to better read people so he won't be tricked again. Moreover, he does these with a very casual, comfortable manner: he laughs at Sam's fears, he sarcastically complains, he and Sam stay up late together, not having sex, just talking. It's a very common observation that the two of them are the 'old married couple' of the cast.

Will here is going to represent Storge.

Storge (pronounced STORE-gay, yes really) is natural, instinctive, familial love. The love between parents and children would be a kind of Storge, as would be the love for pets, or siblings, or one's hometown. One translation might be affection, but perhaps the best way to get the concept across would be that if what you love about someone is that they've "always been there for you" then you are likely talking about Storge.

Storge, obviously, has applications to kinds of relationships beyond a romantic or sexual one, but its romantic or sexual form would inevitably look very like this: Hanging out at eachother's workplaces. Spending the night together even if they don't have sex--Will offers to pay Sam's normal rate to sleep with him even in only a purely literal sense--which, bookmark that, it's going to be seen again.

The theme of Will's route has been working out who one's real family is. That's the reason this route is the one in which all the other romantic interests remain most involved, and the one which (potentially) has been teased to have a possible ending in which some amount of romantic and/or sexual involvement exists between Sam and each of them. Any queer literary analyst worth their salt will tell you how important 'found family' is, as a concept, especially in the case of a story like this where it's unambiguously and very favorably being compared to a biological family. Will's familial relationship with his ex-wife Hattie, with his estranged son Andy, these have served only to hurt everyone involved, and the text clearly rejects the idea that reconciliation is the answer. This is not Will's real family, they never were. Will's real family is Sam, and by extension is Nik, is Murdoch and Cliff, is even Todd.

To extend the metaphor to them, note that parsing Will's sometimes heavy relationships in terms of familial bonds makes them make much more sense. Cliff, for example: Will heartily disapproves of how careless Cliff is with his closet, how his casual unmasking puts not only himself but Sam and Murdoch at risk. But he still defends and guards him without hesitation: Will is unceasingly aggravated with Cliff but never distances himself, as one would with a family member. In the course of his investigation Cliff, Murdoch, and each Nik look very suspicious, at times, but actually suspecting them does not seem to cross Will's mind, in an obvious continuity with his reaction to Sam's confession.

For his part, Will is showing parts of himself, his background, his trauma, his explanations of why he is as he is, to Sam that he's clearly never shown anyone. These wounds are all about having been denied Storge, and it is Storge, therefore, that he gets from Sam.

Eros

Clifford Tibbets is a scholar, from Batavia in Europe, who has come to Echo to complete an anthropology thesis on the Indigenous people of the area. He has heard, and been enamored of, the Meseta people all his life--these are a lightly fictionalized analogue of the Dine or Navajo people of the American southwest, but most national names are changed in this story: the Netherlands is Batavia, Germany is Almany, even the United States are 'of Columbia' rather than 'of America.'

Indigenous studies is not all that Cliff is enamored with. We in fact first see him in the story openly announcing that he'd like to hire a male sex worker, please, under the mistaken impression that because "this is the wild west" where "everything is free and rowdy" that therefore nobody will have any objections. He gets a beating for his trouble from two local drunks, but he does also get his introduction to Sam, who clues him in about there being such a thing as discretion.

He's enthusiastic, sheltered, irrepressible, and can be impatient. He's technically minor nobility, and his aristocratic mannerisms stand out all the more against the background of a mining boom town. He very much views the world, or at least the parts of it he's dealing with now, through rose colored glasses. He's also arguably the horniest, he's the only one, so far, to have slept with another of the romantic interests--he and Murdoch become a couple fairly quickly in Will's route--and he was the first to have a sex scene with multiple partners.

So he'll be Eros.

Eros needs little to no introduction. Most writing on The Four (or however many) Loves must start by explaining that there are kinds of love OTHER than Eros. Eros is romantic love, 'true' love, the kind of love you 'fall in.'

It's common to take a connection between Eros and sexuality for granted. Some sex-negative treatments will try to separate the two conceptually in order to avoid having to say that sex can be good, but I would argue for that separation on opposite grounds. Basic queer studies will make it clear that romantic love and sexual attraction are not the same thing: an Asexual person is not necessarily Aromantic, nor is an Aromantic person Asexual. Moreover, as already discussed above, any of these forms of love may be expressed sexually, which could not be the case if sexuality was the same thing as a particular one of them.

That said, Eros is the kind of love which is oriented toward sexuality, or rather the kind of love which one might usually have for sexual partners. There is a reason that the word "Erotic" derives from it.

Cliff is, of the four romantic interests, the one who has known Sam the least amount of time, and the only one to make it all the way to his bed motivated solely by sexual desire. Will and Nik already have feelings for Sam, Murdoch has been fantasizing about the life he imagines Sam lives for some time now, but Cliff has literally only just arrived in this part of the country, and came to the brothel looking for the male sex worker he knew was there before even meeting him. After one night, he immediately pays lavishly to hire Sam as his 'bodyguard' on an expedition to the reservation, despite still knowing nearly nothing about him. At the same time, Cliff's had at least one sexual encounter with Murdoch, as well, and according to player choices can continue pursuing both all the way into a polyamorous three way. He's got real difficulty concealing his feelings, and unfortunately, his orientation, which itself puts him at risk.

Moreover, when Cliff finally encounters the culture he came to study, the Meseta people, he's excited to the point of being off-putting and overbearing. He loves everything about their way of life, even as he admits he knows nigh-nothing about them. He has to be gently but firmly reminded that the things he's being shown aren't priceless museum pieces, they're real people's real, daily lives. Disillusioning him about the justifiability of American colonialism is an increasing priority of the ongoing story.

All the ways he relates to Sam, to Murdoch, to his own expedition, and to what he believes to be the freedom of the American frontier reek of infatuation. He's fallen in love at first sight, and only in hindsight does he actually think of the consequences, whether that means dealing with the fact that Sam can't return with him because he may be wanted for murder, or reckoning with being entangled in acts of genocide against the people he came here to get to know. "Wed in haste, repent at leisure" is descriptive not only of the way he relates to Sam, but of the way he relates to everything.

Philia

Murdoch Byrnes is the only (surviving) son of the Byrnes family. His father is the owner of the general store and his mother is the principal of the town school. He's witty, fast talking, intelligent, and mischievous, but this is a facade, a persona he adopts to cover up how desperate he is for the approval of his increasingly abusive and exploitative family. He does nearly all the work at the store, as his father is beginning to exhibit symptoms of dementia, especially the photography. He's continually and publicly blamed and berated by his mother for everything that might happen to go wrong, even if he had nothing to do with it. All of which is to say nothing of the things Sam comes to learn as he gets closer to Murdoch.

Murdoch is also the only romantic option who is already well aware that some presence is haunting the town of Echo. He's discovered in his work that the photographs can change, that sometimes they show hurtful or frightening imagery that has disappeared when you look back. And that the things the presence makes you see can be dispelled with sex, or with certain drugs, though other drugs actually make it worse. This has kindled in him the hope that the years of increasing emotional abuse he's taken from his family are similarly of paranormal origins, though Sam and by extension the reader remains unconvinced of this.

Murdoch has deep issues with performative identity and transactional relationships. He's so used to being whoever the person he's dealing with wants him to be, to doing whatever they want him to do, that he's no longer sure who he is when he's by himself: he's so unwilling to say no that he's been talked, by his sister, into letting her fiance fuck him to keep him entertained long enough to go through with the wedding, and instead of objecting he rationalizes to himself why it's not so bad, really, and actually he likes it. As much as this hurts him, he does it because he's so starved for affection or approval that trading anything for either is worth it. The most he can imagine wishing for, during his confessional breakdown to Sam, is getting 'a kiss for free,' and being told he's 'doing a good job.'

Murdoch embodies Philia.

According to some accounts, Philia was the noblest of the loves. It was the engaged, active, mutual admiration of equals. It's the Phil in Philosophy's 'love of wisdom,' and in Philadelphia's 'city of brotherly love.' While it's often translated 'friendship,' the English word covers a much broader range of relationship types than 'Philia,' only the very top range of what we'd call 'friendship' could properly be called Philia. We don't just mean "small talk in the break room" here, or "roommates who get along well enough.'

The challenge in trying to describe 'friendship' in an analysis of a queer story about queer characters is the wearisome frequency with which heteronormative society would reduce historical same sex couples to 'just friends.' It is well to remember that, as Murdoch proves, Philia is just as much real love as any other, and can just as much expressed sexually, but this doesn't help clarify the distinctions. 

Instead of examples, then, let us talk in terms of the things Philia does which other forms of love do not. Storge loves the beloved for the care and comfort and peace they provide. Eros loves the beloved because loving them is pleasure. But Philia loves the beloved for their own sake, just because they are themselves, and not for any other good which is a consequence of them or their actions. So in order to exist between people they need to be equals, not like Storge's carer and cared-for. And they must see eachother for who they are, unlike Eros which thrives in first impressions and behind rose-colored glasses. Hence Murdoch, in order to get close to Sam, must see past the illusion of orgiastic bliss he's imagined of him to the real man. And he cannot be loved by Sam without having his own self-image blown away and his truth revealed. Philia is anti-transactional, and recall, what Murdoch craves above all else is non-transactional love, a kiss for free, to be loved not in exchange for something, but simply for himself.

Phila, also, is perhaps the busiest love. Storge wants to be comfortable, Eros wants to lie about gazing into eachother's eyes, but Philia wants to do something together. Philia wants to stay up all night talking, or co-write a opera, or play games, or build a railroad together. Philia wants to see the potential of the beloved realized, so it wants a project for them, and then wants to help with that project. Thus, Murdoch is the only partner who does not start off by hiring Sam, but rather challenging him, and besting him, at a sexual contest. He offers him a part time job, he involves him in his ongoing paranormal investigation. When Sam finally gets through to him about the abuse in which his family has left him, it is in the context of Murdoch seeing that he too has been used as, in all practicality, a sex worker like Sam.

Agape

Nikolai Krol is a miner at the gold, silver, and copper mine which supports most of the town's economy. Like all the miners, he's paid barely a subsistence wage. He's doing his best to help organizing a union, which given that this is 1915 involves serious risk of being shot by pinkertons or the national guard.

Nikolai is an immigrant from Lachia (ie Poland). He came to America as a young man, and though he hasn't given Sam the story of how it was clearly not exactly a voluntary relocation. Given the historical period, the partition of Poland between Prussia and Russia, and the fact that now those two powers are fighting world war one on it, and his demonstrated familiarity with early communist and socialist theory, and the fact that he speaks with disturbing familiarity on how private property is a myth because 'all it takes is men with guns' to make all your rights disappear, it's not hard to speculate about what tragedies he might have behind him.

Nik's poverty means he can't exactly afford Sam's regular rates. Sam still takes him as a customer, though, just because Nik is genuinely nice to him, because Nik usually just wants to cuddle, and because has feelings for Nik as well. Nik feels very guilty about this, worried that Sam is missing money he needs to spend time with him: he fantasizes about being able to provide for Sam on a permanent basis because then he won't feel unworthy of his love:

"But I have felt frightened, thinking any time I hold you can be the last time. Because you need to work. And I need to find somebody I do not have to pay to hold. Or find some way... to pay to hold you forever."

It's notable that Nik's fantasies are not simple domesticity. When he describes the kind of life he wants, it's not just him and Sam--though note that Nik is the only one, thusfar, to give the equivalent of a marriage proposal to Sam, even if as he does he points out 'there is no marriage for people like you and me.' Rather, the perfect life Nik would choose if he but had the power goes beyond romance or even polyamory:

"I just want to drink with them, and cook with them, and do a good day's work for a good day's pay until we share our last summer... I'm not afraid of death. I'm more afraid of having to start over too many times before my last summer. I just want a slow cozy gentle run before I have to sleep for good. I want my neighbors leaving flowers by my bed. Not faceless strangers passing by."

He doesn't specify who "them" is, presumably the Union Boys, his friends, his neighbors, and Sam, who he's already by now said he wants to spend the rest of his life with, unconditionally, no matter what.

Nik, the one character of whom I've never heard any reader express any dislike, is Agape.

That's not 'a-gape,' that's 'A-ga-pe.' Rhymes with "a top, eh?"

Agape is unconditional love. Christianized treatments of the classifications of love will depart from more classical ones by ranking this the 'highest' and 'purest,' often they will call this divine love, or the kind of 'your neighbor as yourself' love that christian scripture commands. What's useful is this account is the 'your neighbor.' It does not say your family member, as in Storge, your sexy neighbor, as with Eros, or your free and equal neighbor with whom you have common interests, as in Philia. It's 'your neighbor,' unmodified. Whoever happens to be there, whether they deserve it or need it. Love without means testing.

Note that not only is Nik's love for Sam unconditional, his loyalty to his friends is as well. He speaks up in favor of Will, even when the other unionists are automatically and very justifiably suspicious of a cop.

The most common translation of Agape is 'Charity,' from the latin 'caritas' which was their often-taken option to translate Agape from greek. But one might also argue for 'Solidarity.'

This of course makes a unionist an obvious embodiment of Agape, but more than this, Nik is community-minded to his core. The ideals he advances, the way he packs extra food 'just in case' someone is going hungry, his hesitancy to support violent organizing tactics even as he acknowledges they might be necessary. Agape, as an ethos, is one of the most powerful community building tools in existence, from the early christians to the hippies at haight ashbury to any number of nascent cults.

Note that the one rift between Nik and Sam (that we see, at least) is not because of any way either wrongs the other. Will's route is unique in that all the other characters remain involved in the story, roughly as a group. After the route begins by Sam choosing to confide in Will, however, Nik becomes somewhat distant and cool. But it's not that Sam killed a man, or that he lied to cover it up that hurt, it's that Sam thought Nik's love might be conditional. As Nik explains to Will, "he should know that he can trust me."

Also note that there is nothing chaste about Nik's love for Sam. While many treatments try to present Agape as sexlessly spiritual, Nik is arguably the single most passionate lover Sam has. Cliff is experimenting with the act itself, Murdoch is playful and wry, Will is working through his self-loathing via his kinks, but Nik, even in the midst of orgasm, only repeats "I love you, Sam Ayers."

Intention or Depiction?

The question is, is this intentional theming on the part of the author? Or is this merely an emergent property of the story as a result of The Four Loves being a real observed phenomena in human life which would therefore naturally be reflected in a story with four possible romantic partners? Well, there's one additional aspect that might serve as a test.

Each route has a side character specific to that route. On Will's route we meet his deputy, Todd Bronson. Cliff's has Jeb Coles, the local teamster hired for his expedition. Murdoch has Ralph Walker, the store pharmacist and flatmate who was once his boyfriend. And Nik has Feng Yaolin, or Yao, the serious-minded and covert union organizer. All are queer in some way. Thusfar Sam is able to become involved, sexually, with two (maybe two point five?) of them in addition to the main route's love interest.

The question is, since these characters are clearly associated with a single specific route, do they also correspond to the four loves? To the correct one for that route?

Deputy Todd Bronson

is a precious cowboy himbo who hero-worships Will a little--he mentions that, masturbatory fantasies about "the things he knows Will and Sam are doing for eachother" notwithstanding, he thinks of Will as a surrogate father--and always sees the best in everyone which means he's maybe not best suited for a career in law enforcement. His love of pie is memetic. He's a good mormon boy, which is a problem, because Sam's arrival in Will's life, Cliff's gender-nonconforming presence in the social circle, and his own hopefully careful pre-marital celibacy have led him to start asking questions about his own body, Sam's professional expertise is the only available source of answers in coming to terms with the possibility of not being straight.

Todd is deeply loyal to the idea of his town and the people in it as he remembers believing them to be growing up here. Even when he knows and acknowledges that those memories are deliberately sweetened. Take the case of Marcy and Huxley Greene, a childless married couple who are friends of the family via one off Todd's many, many uncles. Marcy has been trapped in a horribly abusive marriage since she was, well, young enough to play with dolls, as Todd puts it, they've been "married since he was a kid," when she's only barely older than Todd himself. But he doesn't feel like he can do anything about it, because it'd upset his family. Like Will, Todd has been placed in an unhealthy biological family, and may yet have the option before him of replacing it with a found family. So Todd can be seen to represent a toxic, abusive form of Storge, one in which he's been trapped. Which makes that a match.

Jebediah Coles

is a local rancher who makes most of his living as a hired teamster, hauling cargo with a team of donkeys. He's in many ways a polar opposite of Cliff: reserved, taciturn, phlegmatic, and not eager to get to know anyone. When some manner of paranormal entity attacks Cliff's expedition and kills his donkeys he takes it very hard. The animals, you see, once belonged to his boyfriend. At some point, when Jeb was younger, he and a Meseta hired hand on the family ranch were in love. They planned to save up, leave Echo, spend the rest of their lives together, but these hopes were dashed when the partner died of tuberculosis. Now the animals  are the only thing he has left from him, he'd promised to take care of them, and now he's failed at that too.

We actually know very little about Jeb, as side characters go, and even less about his once lover--not even a name. But their relationship is, or was, so obviously Eros as to approach cliche. Young sweethearts, full of big dreams of running away and building a life together, cut tragically short, leaving the bereaved survivor to grieve and pine and they withdraw into solitude  and vainly cherish the last relics of their beloved. That makes two matches.

Ralph Walker

(not entirely confirmed that this is his last name, it doesn't seem to appear in the text, and though members of the community assure me the writer has revealed this surname I was unable to source that claim) is a childhood friend of the Byrnes siblings, Murdoch especially. He emigrated from Australia, seemingly on the initiative of Alfred Byrnes, the father, to study pharmacology and manage the general store's pharmacy desk. Murdoch has confirmed they were once a couple but are so no longer, yet they still room together, investigate the entity haunting Echo together, and apparently masturbate together while talking about Sam. Ralph is much less reticent than Murdoch, and frequently attempts to protect Murdoch from being taken advantage of, though he unfortunately can't do anything about the most exploitative people in Murdoch's life, his parents, as he's still an employee.

Ralph is an instance of a type of stock queer character that used to be much more common but has become less so as literature in general has grown more comfortable with the idea that we're real people: the confidante who tells the truth that nobody else will admit because he is the only one with nothing to lose. A lot of the background characters in Evelyn Waugh novels, for example, fit this archetype. While not so very likable, and sometimes outright insulting, his insults and unlikability are still in the service of trying to protect Murdoch, often from himself. He's a co-investigator and co-worker just as much as Sam is, and has been longer. It's perhaps worth a raised eyebrow that he and Murdoch are exes yet still cohabitate, yet it must be admitted that 'remaining friends, sometimes even ones with benefits, after a breakup' is hardly an uncommon situation in queer society: certainly much more than in heteronormative society. Most interestingly, their breakup was apparently occasioned by Ralph going away to college to complete his education: ie, going to Do Something alone, without Murdoch. That brings the score to three.

Which leaves Yao.

Feng Yaolin

is a Huaxian (ie. Chinese) immigrant and a very serious union organizer. He is aloof and businesslike where Nik is affectionate, but he is also queer, if Sam offers him a handjob he accepts with very little coaxing. Yao is deeply dedicated to his ideals and to his mission of building a better life for the mine workers, but he never seems to be particularly friendly with any of them. Even Chang, another Huaxian immigrant, a former miner until he lost fingers in an accident, who to all appearances may have been his partner and might one day be so again, gets little more than 'concern expressed as disapproval.' Some have read Yao as Aromantic, and it may turn out that the text supports this reading.

To place Yao, we need to cover an aspect of Agape that has not yet been mentioned, as it was not at all relevant to the characterization of Nik. Agape is unconditional, universal love, and moreover it is love which seeks the good of the person loved, completely regardless of any benefit to the lover. Other loves aim at the lover's happiness, or the lover and beloved's mutual happiness, but Agape wants good things for the beloved solely because it's good for them to have those things. In this form it has been described as high, cold, inhuman clarity, the kind of mindset that leads people to face firing squads with a smile. So this activist and possible revolutionary may not seem to get any particular  joy out of the steps he takes toward the better future for his community. But his own feelings are irrelevant to the work. He does not mourn. He organizes.

That's all four. Yet  now I realize this may not answer the question. Yes, it may seem likely, if both the main and secondary character of a story are demonstrations of the same genus of love, that this was done deliberately. But it remains perfectly possible that this is exactly what one would expect from a narrative that splits four ways into four different love stories: each of those would have to be about the love specific to Sam and Will/Cliff/Murdoch/Nik, and that love has to be some kind of love. A competent writer will strive to make the different stories feel distinct from one another, and if the human experience of love really is classifiable into four, then those may very well be the lines along which such distinction naturally occurs. This would mean, then, pitting that love against the kind of obstacles and dramatic tensions suitable to it. Which would mean that a secondary character, who would also be concerned with those obstacles and dramatic tensions, would therefore develop organically along similar lines.

But then, the purpose of literature is not to puzzle out the author's secret thoughts, but to experience the story and build an understanding of it that the text supports. And if we can prove nothing else, we have certainly proved it does support a reading themed around this anatomy of the types of love.

CHAPTER 9 - Andy Adler And the Systematic Injustice

(Originally published - Apr 26th 2023)

CHAPTER 10 - ((Medium x Referencing Info) + Pressure) = Manifestation

(Originally published - Oct 20th 2022)

CHAPTER 11 - Another Layer of Will Theme

(Originally published - Sep 30th 2022)

So last time (chapter 1) we established that there's a "reading tells" theme, ie. body language, eye movement, tails, smells etc. revealing truth that isn't told by what's said, and that it feeds into another theme, "sorting who is and is not really family" to produce a "whether or not someone can read you is how you tell if they are your real family" compound theme.

There's plenty in update 22 that fits this:
- Will's excitement at getting to spend another night with Sam, even if it's only cuddling. "His leg begins to bounce like he can't sit still," and "Did I just see you wag?" Note that Will tries to bluff his way out of the second one, and Sam's gotten good enough at reading Will that he can call it.
- Kane talks about his desire for a job in terms of hunger, of wanting a meal.
- Allllll the things that happen to Marcy, and allllll the things THAT brings to light, which I'm not going to go into here.
- Finally, Will can tell that Todd and Sam got intimate from the smell, which brings us to the actual topic.

Todd can't hide anymore. He's been read.

Todd is apparently oblivious to what it means that Sam is already at Will's, behind a locked door, when he arrives in the morning. "You got here earlier than me two times in a row?" Worth noting that later Todd will admit he DOES know Will and Sam are having sex, so this is a bluff. Apparently to make Will and Sam think he doesn't know when he does, possibly because he's afraid of what he'd have to admit about himself if they knew he knows? So already, Todd is pretending that he can't read tells which he later admits that he CAN.

But let's skip ahead to the pivotal scene. They get into the shed in the first place after Todd has proposed he spend an hour or so getting through the heavy padlock. But then Sam just pulls the entire thing, lock and all, off the door altogether. We'll come back to this.

Once they get inside, the conversation turns to family, the second half of our compound theme. Todd isn't wrong that "Family is supposed to help eachother" but as is typical for him he's deliberately not looking beyond the most basic definition of the word--note this exchange happens RIGHT after they've looked around the shed for less than a minute, Todd's said 'welp, nothing to see here' and Sam's responded 'shouldn't we look closer?' Todd talks about his atypically large family as if it's a universal truth, and is shocked and saddened to hear that Sam is estranged from his, even though the same is doubtless true of the majority of the mining population of Echo and in fact the Bronsons are the anomaly. So Sam is deliberately raising the question "but what is a REAL family, anyway?" which Todd pretends not to understand, and that that rolls directly into The Seduction Of The Innocent, ie. Sam demonstrating that he can READ Todd--his smell, his body language, his nervousness around women, the things he did last time he got excited, his obvious erection--better than the rest of the Bronson family can. And we can presume the Bronsons cannot read Todd, because all the defenses against admitting what he wants Todd repeats are clearly learned from them.

Note that even while trying to distance himself from "thoughts that aint pure" Todd identifies Will as "a father" to him--claiming a familial connection to the people that he's ostensibly trying to avoid connecting himself to. And then he immediately gets... initiated anyway.

Note that afterward, while they're trying to get into the kitchen cellar, Will bypasses the lock the exact same way Sam bypassed the lock on the shed. He doesn't pick or undo the lock, he just removes it from the door entirely. In both cases Todd comments that this is something that it wouldn't have occurred to him to do. But before his 'initiation' to Sam he says so with fear and apprehension, as if bypassing the lock is breaking the rules and something anomalous in Sam. Afterward, when Will does it, Todd's remark that it wouldn't have occurred to him implies ignorance on his part.

A threshold's been crossed. Todd knows Sam can read him better than his family can. And that means he's going to have to learn to read himself.

CHAPTER 12 - Updated Ranked TSR Predictions

(Originally published - Apr 21st 2022)

CHAPTER 13 - De Saturnus ut Deitas Patronas, a Dissertation in Fumigantlocology

(Originally published - Apr 7th 2022)

Partway through Murdoch's route, Sam gets invited by Murdoch's sister Dahlia to an observatory, where he looks through a telescope at the planet Saturn. Seeing it's rings, and given his lack of education and the era in which he lives, likely learning for the first time that it's rings exist, he comments the series-iconic leitmotif that they are "going in circles." This phrase is actually one of the first things the reader hears when starting Echo, the first novel in the series, as the end of an introductory and somewhat fourth-wall-breaking speech from Sam's ghost--though an unprepared reader would have no way to know this speaker's identity yet--about how there is nowhere to run. The town of Echo is trapped in a repeating cycle, how the character's in the novel can help but return to reenact it, and how the reader, too, in coming back to read another route, to try another set of choices, to get the good ending this time, is "only going in circles."

Tying Saturn to the central theme of the series of visual novels is not done lightly. Saturn is a complicated deity, and all of his complications fit unsettlingly well with the Echo series: in theme, in premise, in plot, in speculative worldbuilding, and even in the characters.

Since we're talking about some in depth thematic analysis, there are going to be spoilers here.

-He Feasts On Everything That We Are-

Saturn is the Roman form of the Greek titan Kronos. The father of Jupiter/Zeus, in classical mythology was the principal god of the previous age of the world, but has been deposed by the rule of his son, principal god of the present age of the world. He was a harvest deity, and a god of Time, which fits when one considers that the principal concern with time for an inhabitant of a bronze to iron age agricultural subsistence civilization would be "making sure that the harvest work happens at the right time."

This harvest association gave him associations with wealth--the treasury of the Roman Republic was entrusted to his protection--but it also associated him with cycles of violence and revenge. In the same way that this year's crop must cut down, "murdered" as it were, so that next year's crop can be sown and grow, Saturn himself overthrew and castrated his own father, Ouranos, principal god of the ultimate primordial age, only to be overthrown by his own son Zeus in the same way. In an early origin story of the god Dionysus, likely associated with Orphic mystery religions, and thematically a very similar deity to Saturn, Hera has the infant Dionysus murdered in an act of ritual dismemberment, or sparagmos, and when he is resurrected from this curses him with madness, out of fear that he will prove to be the next usurper in the cycle. Madness, and temporary periods of violent mass hysteria, are after this part of Dionysus's godly repertoire, precisely as a result of his place within the the Saturnine usurpation cycle.

Saturn's rule was supposedly a golden age of peace and prosperity, where all were equal, possibly an ancestral memory of the early days of agricultural civilization. When the romans, who always wanted to see everyone else's gods as versions of their own, encountered the god worshipped by the peoples of the Levant and Carthage, whom they called "El" or "Ba'al" (which means "The Lord") the Romans saw Saturn. But he is also thought to be by some scholars a version of a proto-indo-european harvest and fertility god, of whom other forms show up in other mythologies. In some celtic practices, also descended from the proto-indo-europeans, there were 'sacred kings,' chieftains and kings whose position was more religious than statecraft, who ruled for a time, said to be married to the land they ruled, and who eventually were sacrificed to ensure its continued agricultural fertility. Or if a disaster befell, for which they were considered responsible, perhaps considerably sooner. Given how old the worship of Saturn already was by the time Roman religion was codified and written down, it is possible that some parts of it are diluted traditional memories of a similar practice: at the holiday of Saturnalia, for example, a multiday festival that upended the social order both in imitation of Saturn's Golden Age but also similarly to Dionysus's mass hysteria, a slave or pauper would be proclaimed king for the duration of the holiday.

In astrology, Saturn is the bringer of melancholy, depression, and misfortune in general.

I promise all this is going to come up. I didn't put anything in this section that I'm not to refer to again later.

-I'm Tired Of This Town-

Sam Ayers, principal viewpoint character of The Smoke Room, is a sex worker in the small mining town of Echo Arizona in the year 1915. He kills a client in self-defense, and then must choose which of his other clients--Cliff the European anthropologist here to study the local Native American traditions, Murdoch the witty and all-but-fully-out son of the general store proprietor, Nik the impoverished miner and would-be union organizer who can only afford to cuddle yet still does so as regularly as he can, or Will the sheriff--he will trust to help him either cover up the evidence or escape town ahead of the noose. But killing Jack has also awakened something, either in the mines, in the town, or in Sam himself, and the law is no longer the only thing pursuing him. That's the premise. Now let's get into the details.

Saturn, as a god of male fertility, is an obvious fit for a sex worker. Moreover, Sam has killed a man and is now being threatened with death in turn, which fits the saturnine cycle of violence. The building tension produced by Jack's death, among the miners and among the townsfolk is implied to be going to crescendo to an event of mass hysteria--more on this when we discuss Echo--which can be stopped only by death of a certain individual, which fits both the Sacred King archetype of Saturn and the dionysian rites of sparagmos. And Sam is clearly suffering from chronic depression.

Most telling, along Will's route, Sam has a conversation with the sheriff, late and alone together in the sheriff's office. Sam is trying to find the courage to talk about the presence that's been haunting him since Jack's killing--which Will has agreed was fully justified and is now actively covering up--and his growing belief that the whole town is cursed or haunted or both, but he knows Will will only think he's crazy, and Sam isn't so sure himself that he isn't. So under he guise of discussing his very fire and brimstone religious views, Sam describes the presence haunting him as if it were God.

"When he makes us in our mother's womb he already knows who we'll be and how we'll die. Right at the very start. And it don't matter if we're good, we're kind, we're cruel, we're callous. We're all just a meal for him. And through the entirety of our lives, he feast on everything that we are."

Sam describes a God that devours his children. Like the Romans, when he sees the Abrahamic God, he immediately recognizes Saturn. And while it remains to be seen if he is right about the Abrahamic God, he is not wrong about at least one of the beings haunting echo. On Nik's route, the ghost of murdered girl lost in the uncharted secret depths of the mines, complains that an unnamed entity known in the fan commentary circles as "88883" is slowly devouring her.

Note, also, that a key component of the mystery rites of Dionysus was intoxication. Drugs make the haunts of Echo less threatening but more visible. Ralph and Murdoch have had success controlling their own experiences with cannabis, but warn that opium makes them more visible.

-This Place Breaks People-

Chase Hunter, principal viewpoint character of Echo, is a college student on spring break in the year 2015, returning to the small town in Arizona where he grew up. The town was all but dead when he was a child there and has only gotten worse, but in addition to reconnecting with his old friends and possibly patching things up with his ex boyfriend, Chase hopes to research and film a historical report on a peculiar incident in the town's history that has since become the stuff of urban legend. Supposedly roughly a hundred years ago, an unsolved murder in the town led to an outbreak of violent mass hysteria, which led many to believe the town itself was cursed. But there is more both to the story, and to Chase's past, than is being told. That's the premise. Here's some details.

As we learn along multiple routes, Chase is himself a killer. As a child, in attempt to protect a friend from bullying, Chase drowned another friend, Sydney. Ever since, Chase has been unknowingly possessed by Sam's ghost (though the exact accuracy of how I just phrased that is even now debated among fans.) Sydney himself had also been possessed by Sam, ever since Sydney's father was shot in a struggle with a rifle as Sydney attempted to interrupt his father's suicide attempt. Sydney's father had also been possessed, ever since he had run over and killed a pedestrian as a teenager. Said pedestrian was an old man, and unbeknownst to Sydney's father, had long ago been a sex worker when Echo was still a mining town.

So immediately we have a cycle of violence, revenge, and usurpation. Just as Saturn usurps Ouranos, Jupiter usurps Saturn, and potentially Dionysus usurps Jupiter, so Sam kills Jack, Sydney's father kills Sam, Sydney (for purposes of the cycle though not intentionally) kills his father, Chase (implied to be under the influence of the general malevolence resident in Echo but it still counts) kills Sydney. Each hands on the burden of the cycle that killed them to their killer.

-The Maenads-

The consequences for this are dire. At the end of the week paranormal incidents are happening more and more frequently, and the people in Echo, including Chase and his friends, are losing hold of their own mental stability. At this point the question "are the things to which people react with fear and violence, that nobody else can see, mere hallucinations or are they in fact real but only visible to their intended victim" loses all practical meaning. Moreover it becomes impossible to leave. Roads leading out of Echo somehow loop back in a way that defies spatial relationships, and without stopping or turning around the group finds themselves driving back toward town instead of away. They are only going in circles.

Now, The Smoke Room is as yet incomplete. It is taken for granted, from the fact that Chase intended to report on a previous incident of hysteria, that Smoke Room will feature a similar incident of Hysteria to that depicted in Echo. It is thus likely safe to assume that the hysteria itself is another cycle, and that this outbreak too is only going in circles. The social order breaks down entirely, into mere Saturnalia and the Mass Hysteria which is the curse of Dionysus. Note that intoxication is still a key component. Carl, habitually and near perpetually stoned on marijuana, comes out of his route arguably the most well adjusted. But meth has made people like Duke and Heather almost entirely defenseless against the Hysteria, and Carl's sole experiment with LSD revealed far, far too much about what was really going on in this town.

On some of the routes, some of the townsfolk of Echo claim to know that the hysteria is happening because someone has committed some crime that has gone unpunished. They are convinced, though we never do find out on what basis or who told them, that if they find the guilty party and kill them, the hysteria will end. In order to assuage disaster, the Sacred King must be sacrificed.

But Chase the only one who assumes that role. Carl, descendent of the town founder and only son of the only rich family in town, is pampered and kept secluded from the town his family has ruled for generations. He's meant to follow a path to maintain his clan's prosperity, a business major, whether he likes it or not, but has failed. And now he is to be an unwitting sacrifice to to chthonic forces tied to his bloodline, in his case the ghost of his own ancestor who possesses him to protect his reputation from exposure of his crimes.

It cannot be forgotten, however, that the sacrifices of Saturn and the Madness of Dionysus are harvest rites. Along TJ's route, when the secret that has been sustaining the town is discovered, after Flynn's death, the voice controlling Chase says that the town needs secrets, and persuades him to conceal it. Having harvested, the town now sows again for the next harvest, to feast on everything we are.

-When Your Arms Were Around Me-

But for all the grimness of the rites, and the heaviness of the curse of hysteria and depression, the horror of what the sacrifice of the sacred king entails, Saturn is also the god of the lost golden age, the prelapsarian age of innocence and peace. It would not be fully unjustified to describe Saturn as the god of Nostalgia.

This is perhaps the most relevant of Saturn's features for a story of a former mining town, slowly collapsing even in its glory days in The Smoke Room, and after industrialization has fully blown away sliding through opioid epidemic and poverty, in Echo, toward being fully a ghost town in Arches. But more than being relevant to the setting and tone, the lost golden age is a major motivating factor for many of the characters.

In The Smoke Room Murdoch is forever pining for the Echo he thought he lived in, and the family he thought he was a member of, as a child. Before his brother drowned (for Saturn always swallows the children,) before his parents knew his orientation, before they replaced him in their affections with the determination to have a respectable son in law as a surrogate. He is so desperate to feel loved again that he regards putting himself at the mercy of whatever being keeps trying to compel Sam to murder him as a fair trade (supposedly those sacrificed to Saturn went willingly.) Similarly, Will has part of his mind, always, on the Chicago of his youth, from which he is exiled after some as yet not fully known encounter with organized crime there. Though his time there was heavily closeted, and trapped in a loveless marriage to a wife who was and remains a stranger, still he keeps his watch set to Chicago time, follows Chicago baseball scores, and waxes rhapsodic about the food he remembers that he cannot get in Echo, even though it's undoubtedly much better in his memory than it actually was in the past. James III, the mine owner and town robber baron, has a perpetual need to live up to the reputation of his father and grandfather (the latter was a serial killer who preyed on indigenous children, Saturn always devours the children, but James III may not know this) a task at which he is failing. Even Harlan, the brothel bartender, has a darkness growing in him, planted in the resentment at the loss of the days when he and Madam Dora and their friends, now gone, travelled as some kind of performance entourage.

In Echo the townsfolk as a whole are haunted daily by the certain knowledge that the past was better. It would take to long to enumerate all the examples here. But in the principal cast there is Flynn, unable to let go of the death of Sydney (Saturn always devours the children.) There is TJ, desperately attempting to remain the version of himself he was before Sydney died. There is Chase himself, the viewpoint character, who cannot let go of the past both in mundane terms in that he can't get up the nerve to actually break up with the boyfriend he left behind in Echo, and in supernatural terms in that he is possessed by Sam's ghost who remembers the town before its collapse (though again, there are grounds for debate as to whether this is really Sam, or an imitation of Sam, but then no nostalgia is ever the same as the past which it nostalgizes, and the reason the lost golden age is golden because it is lost.) And Sam himself, though characterized only briefly in Echo, has the most poignant and succinct summary:

"All the people he loves are dead. But he doesn't want to join them. He just wants them back."

And then there's Leo. Still vehemently in love with Chase, and clinging to the hope that because they never entirely broke up the relationship can be repaired and Chase will come back to him (if they are only going in circles, after all, their paths must intersect again, must they not?) Convinced that the days when he had anything to offer a romantic partner are now past. Unwilling and unable to leave the dying town to follow Chase due to the (partly imagined) necessity of keeping the family business going. So desperately lonely that his desire manifests a being in the shape of the Chase he remembers, and he loses all awareness of the difference between the real Chase and his doppelganger. Leo is the one character for whom, no matter the route, no matter the choices made, no good ending, and no future, exists. All his hopes were in the golden age of his high school days, when he could believe that he and Chase would spend their lives together, when he felt wanted, when his friends needed his help and protection. And now nobody needs him, nobody wants him, and the last person in the world that he believes might possibly ever love him must either leave him once and for all, or die in sparagmos (and in fulfillment of the cycle of violence and revenge of which he is the most recently guilty), at his own hands.

Only at last in Arches do we find characters unconcerned with nostalgia. But then, Cameron and Devon are nothing to do with Echo. They come seeking not the lost golden age, but the madness and intoxication of Orphic Dionysus, that permits journey to the underworld and return. For that is what Echo has now become: the underworld.

-Longest Night-

Ultimately all of Saturn's dark traits, the devouring of children, the human sacrifice, the depression, misfortune, and melancholy, are not to be separated from this idea of the lost golden age. Not only are they the proof that this is not the golden age, but it is the attempt to reclaim that golden age that justifies, or so those who do them claim, the darker traits. Just as the novels take care to show the hauntings and hysteria are not a separate thing from the colonial ambitions that founded the town, and from the yearning for an imagined prosperous idyllic past that never really existed that fuel it's present day collapse. It is one of those points that is easy to miss, not because it is so small in only one part of the text, but because it is omnipresent in every part of the text.

It could be that none of this is intentional. That I'm taking a tiny detail from one episode and blowing it out of proportion to the point that it includes all the setting tone and themes of multiple works. That I'm seeing a pattern not because it's there but because I'm projecting it.

On the other hand... the most commonly encountered legacy, in the modern day, that the god Saturn has left is the name of one of the days of the week. Originally in the roman calendar this was Saturn's Day. Now, each chapter, in each route of Echo, is titled for the day on which it happens. The hysteria, the violent Saturnalia triggered by the cycle of violence and revenge, proceeds differently on each route, but it reaches it's apex on the same day in each.

Saturday.

CHAPTER 14 - As Queer Is To Straight

(Originally published - Feb 3rd 2024)

Spoilers, below, for one of the endings to a Smoke Room route.

We don't know what the entities, in the Echo continuity, are. We likely never will, because we shouldn't. The fear, in cosmic horror, is first and foremost of the unknown, and so the larger we can keep the unknown, the better. A story about eldritch abominations must walk a the very careful line of unveiling to us the readers just enough--that we are all but certain that there is something, out there in the dark, that it's real and it has its own nature, inhospitable and incomprehensible to us, perhaps, but real--and yet not too much--so that whatever it is we are sure is out there, we never get to the point of understanding, of comprehension. The unknown can only remain fearful so long as it never becomes the known.

 So in a well executed cosmic horror, it shouldn't be possible to say things like "this entity is so-and-so" or "that entity does such-and-such," rather the most we should be able to say should be along the lines of "there seems to be an entity whose nature is such as to cause this sort of thing."

 So when I say that the entity here referred to as The Facsimile can, I think, be read as a queer metaphor, I do so on the assumption that this insight may prove to be the deepest look we ever get into what, really, any of the entities of Echo truly are.

The Facsimile

Also known as Sam, Samulation, Belligerent Madness, You, the Voice, or Satan. Though that last is probably with some degree of flippancy. Yet keep it in mind, we'll come back to it.

 The Facsimile is an entity that assumes the forms of various people. Many of whom are dead, but this is not a requirement: it has no trouble assuming Sam's form, and as of the most recent update, Nik's, while both of them remain among the living. It attaches to people, and speaks in their minds, often in a way that they cannot distinguish from their own thoughts, or from intrusive thoughts, but that the reader sees in the 'Belligerent Madness' font. It can assert some degree of control over its host's actions, though this is nowhere near absolute.

 The Facsimile was in fact the first voice we heard in the series, as it opens Echo with its recrimination of both Chase and the reader, "why do you try to run away... just like this town you're only moving in circles." And though for most of Echo the facsimile presents itself as Sam, it will eventually briefly admit that it is not the 'real' Sam, but "just a simulation."

 The Facsimile spends The Smoke Room, thusfar at least, attached to Sam--real Sam--after he kills Jack. It is less wedded to Sam's form than it was in Echo, and more willing to explain itself to him, though its explanations tend to be unilluminating. What we do know can be summed up thusly:

• It is not merely shapeshifting into the many various people it appears as, it, in some sense, "is" them. It takes on their personalities, it assumes their goals to some extent (TSR, Nik. Echo, Leo.,) and it has their memories (Echo, Leo. Echo, Jenna. Echo, Flynn. TSR, Nik.) It is perhaps more useful to think of it like a reflection of them, or a recording of them, except that it can switch as it wills to being a recording or reflection of many different people in its so-to-speak archive.
• It can feel desire--or perhaps, see above as the saying goes, it has the memories of having desired--but it is unable to experience satisfaction of those desires (TSR, Nik.)
• Whatever the facsimile's nature and goals are, they were "supposed to" be something else, though by whom remains to be seen. It was supposed to be "an origin meant to serve as an origin" whatever that means, but it has "decided to be something else" (TSR, Nik.)
• It seems to want its hosts to bring it to the bottom of the mines, to the crystalline room it calls "the seed" (TSR, Nik.) Why is not fully known, though in one case the result was the death of Flynn and his transfiguration into Socketman (Echo, Flynn.)
• Wants Murdoch dead for some reason (TSR, Murdoch. TSR, Cliff.)
• It has antagonistic relationships to some of the other Echo entities: it recoils from the presence of Mirrorman (Echo, TJ's route) and John Begay seems to have a very low opinion of it, though he also seems not fully aware that it and Real Sam are not one and the same (TSR, Cliff. Echo, Carl.) Finally and most importantly, it is vulnerable to 88883, and therefore greatly fears it (Echo, Leo. TSR, Nik.)

And because it seems to be important, we should also sum up

88883

Is an entity that appears (at least to Sam) as a colossal tarantula made of eyeless screaming faces and the dismembered limbs of people he knows. It seems to haunt the mines, specifically. And it seems to in some way consume or assimilate the dead: it very particularly wants to do this to The Facsimile.

• It appears different to different people as different things. Sam and Mellisa see a spider, (TSR, Murdoch. TSR, Nik) but Nik sees a corpse consumed by luminous mushrooms, (TSR, Nik) and Brian, I argue, sees a UFO (Echo, Leo. Arches.)
• Doesn't seem to be willing or able to leave the mines.
• Either less hostile or less volitional than the Facsimile. It sometimes completely ignores people going about their business within its lair.
• Has celestial associations. More than once its eye pattern has been compared, visually or in-text, to stars. (TSR, Cliff Build Teaser. TSR, Murdoch.)
• Whatever it is actually doing to those it consumes, the Facsimile describes it as "making you sing."
• Sam more than once compares it to the Abrahamic god. (TSR, Will. TSR, Nik.)
• Has stereoscoping text hidden in its associated sound effects, "APART TOO LONG" when it first pursues Sam, and "TOGETHER AT LAST" in another. (TSR files, called in TSR Nik) Keep this in mind as well.

Given all this, plus a few more points yet to be mentioned, I think supports the reading, not that The Facsimile is queer, but that it is more than queer-coded. I think the supported reading is that, as if it were a logic analogy question on the SATs, the Facsimile is to 88883 and by extension the rest of Entity-kind as Queerness is to Heteronormativity.

We Should Not Have To Do Such Things To Survive

Queer existence, and love, in a small town on the fringes of society in the gilded age, is explicitly a theme of the story: it's a pornographic visual novel about a gay sex worker so I should be surprised if this were not the case, of course, but on more than a surface level. Over and over the question is brought up, of what the various characters have had to do to find a place where they can exist. Where they can survive.

Will had to endure a loveless hetero marriage, Murdoch is working himself to death, Cliff is clinging to his studies as an excuse not to return to his family, and Nik spends money he can't afford just to pay a man to let him hold them. And though Sam is managing to live off his sex work, he's so desperate to get out of this town that he lets himself be fooled by Jack into a mugging and a murder.

The town is wrapped in a peculiar, and documentedly historically-accurate, tension between indifferent tolerance and dangerous homophobia. The townsfolk are content to turn a blind eye toward the things the miners do with one another in the back cabins around The Stag, the male-only tavern in a converted barn at the outskirts, which is only partly a holdover from the early days when, like many frontier boom towns, there were literally no women. But the moment anyone openly mentions same-gender attraction or love of any kind, the homophobic beatings are immediate.

Some degree of the closet is necessary, always, for survival. But within those bounds love and happiness are a very practical possibility. It is an understandable tense existence, with plenty of anxiety, only exacerbated by the poverty and precarity in which most of the population is stuck: but it is sustainable. Even if they shouldn't have to, it is possible to continue to live this way for years.

 Now of course, there is always The Hysteria, an outbreak of violence and delusion, as well as supernatural apparitions and entities, and there is The Hum, a continual sonic presence that accompanies mental instability and incomprehensible, ominous hallucination, as well as visions of supernatural things and entities: it may be sustainable but it is not sustainable indefinitely. The Hum, and the Hysteria, and the kind of entity that haunts this town, these have been said to be explicitly homoousion with the anxieties of living under capitalism and queerphobia.

 And that gives us, I think, all the pieces we need.

Asking the Thing In the Closet: Are You Real?

Most recently, Sam has found himself facing one of two possible face-to-face confrontations, finally, with the voice in his head, depending on whether the player chose to trust Yao earlier in Nik's route. If he trusts Yao, then he winds up confronting the facsimile in what looks like his childhood bedroom. If he does not, he confronts it in what appears to be the closet in Jack's apartment in Paris.

 The former has plenty of queer subtext: this thing invited Sam up to its/his/their bedroom. It masturbates to completion, though it specifies that while it can feel the desire, or it has the memory of feeling desire which may for all practical purposes be the same thing, it cannot feel any satisfaction of desire. It explains that it is not merely disguised as Sam, it is Sam, in every sense that is meaningful from its perspective, and therefore by definition must be queer. So there is plenty of queer material there, and it will be useful, later, to examine the scene for insight to the Facsimile's motivations.

 But it is the other scene around which the interpretation can crystalize. The Facsimile that appears in Jack's Parisian closet is angry and fearful. It wants Sam to stay quiet, to not attract attention, because in the physical world, where Sam's body is, 88883 has returned, and is looking for the Facsimile. It's brought Sam's mind into someone else's memories in the hopes of hiding, and insists Sam join it in the closet.

 The conversation is framed very like a seduction: it is asking Sam to trust it with his body. As it encroaches on him Sam feels not pain but numbness, and absence, which we know from the bedroom scene is what the Facsimile feels instead of pleasure or sexual satisfaction. It is also worth noting that it has to adopt a form to communicate, as Sam puts it "it has to look like me to keep talking." It cannot express itself in its entity-form, which it was assigned at whatever beings such as it have instead of birth--assigned at origin, perhaps--but only in the forms it has stolen, which it insists are nonetheless 'real faces.'

 It can be no accident that it is doing all this from a closet: it explicitly says that Sam should be used to the idea of hiding to survive, since he is "a faggot." It draws the paralel itself.

This is not to say the Facsimile is benevolent: it is clear that whatever else this thing intends by dragging him into the closet, Real Sam's mind and personality isn't going to survive it.

But it has every reason to fear.

He Feasts On Everything We Are

When Sam does manage to wake, he finds 88883 has pulled the Facsimile from him, with considerable damage to Sam himself in the process, and is even now devouring it. This is the point at which a spectrogram will again reveal words in its sound effect: 'TOGETHER AT LAST.'

 It is worth reiterating that Nik earlier described his appearance of 88883 as the corpse of an old friend, consumed by luminous fungus. Speculation is notorious that when he says "old friend" he means "one-time lover." Which means he would have seen, not a spider crouched over it's prey, but a dead former lover astride an unconscious current one. There is no part of this free from queer subtext.

 Whether 88883 would have devoured Sam as well, as the Facsimile warned, we do not get a chance to discover.

 So what are 88883 and The Facsimile to eachother?

 Returning to the Sam's Bedroom scene, we find several useful things among the Facsimile's remarks. When asked what it is, it says "an origin meant to serve as an origin" but that it "decided to be something else." "Meant to" is the operative phrase here, I think. It brings up the desires it's inherited from the people it became/stole/reflected, and says that ultimately its goal is survival.

 Its fears are not ill-founded. But note that, after Sam has described all the mouths on 88883's body as singing, The Facsimile refers to the prospect of it devouring Sam as "making you sing for it," which gives 88883 connotations of performative conformity.

 So on the one hand, we have the shapeshifter archetype, who insists, and seems to be telling the truth, that all the people it becomes are its real selves, and that it has no 'true' form other than those it becomes, though the 'face it hasn't stolen' is more like 88883 than like any of the things it becomes. The memories of desire it has assumed from them, explicitly sexual and queer ones especially, which it cannot satisfy, have determined it not to do whatever it was meant to do, and instead to 'survive.'

 On the other hand we have this coercive collective, being devoured by which is to be forced to "sing for it," which seems to act by reactive impulse rather than intention like an animal or like a mob, which is regularly and explicitly compared to the Abrahamic god, which seeks some form of reunion with The Facsimile. A reunion The Facsimile rejects as a matter of survival.

 It's not hard to see the queer self-identity vs. enforced heteronormativity applicability here. It is perhaps not to be wondered at, that a century later, even after a chain of other possessions, the Facsimile retains and returns to the form and identity of a queer sex worker.

The Vehemence of Its Love

Earlier in Nik's route, Sam gets a Tarot reading from a friendly Spiritist. While the ultimate meanings of the cards are likely to remain obscure until Nik's route is finished, and possibly until the entire novel is complete, I think this framework allows us to tease out one meaning of a particular pair.

 Recall that the Sam's Bedroom scene is along one subroute, and the Jack's Closet along another. The conditions for one or the other also determine the cards drawn: along the Sam's Bedroom sub-route, you'll draw The Devil, while along the Jack's Closet route you'll draw The Lovers. The nice spiritist lady doing the reading explains that this means, on the one hand, indulgence in pleasure, and on the other, lasting union, and she's not wrong per se: The Devil by this interpretation could very well apply to the developing polyamorous relationship that includes Yao, whereas The Lovers would be Nik and Sam by themselves. But this is a cosmic horror, and will clearly therefore not ignore the chance to insert other, more obscure, more unsettling implications, of which even the oracle is ignorant, into any divination.

 Note that, in the illustration of The Lovers card, God looms over the pair, in the same position as The Devil.

 So we have The Devil on the sub-route on which The Facsimile--whom Sam's narrative voice addresses as 'Satan,'--more than queer-coded, dedicated to its refusal to be consumed and to remain the self that desires the love, the hunger, and the sexuality it can't experience, wins. And we have the Abrahamic God on the sub-route where 88883--whom Sam's narrative voice suspects might be a god "of a sort,"--the celestial-associated choir of devouring conformity that neither understands nor cares why The Facsimile had separated itself and only wants to take it back by force.

 The Facsimile may confess itself "just a simulation" of the many queer men, over the centuries, whom it has become. And it may speak truly. But it also speaks truly when it says these are all its real faces, its real selves.

 And when, in the very first words we hear from this world, it describes Echo as a circle which it cannot escape, it is speaking both in the sense of blind heteronormative oppression, and of the eldritch abomination stalking the haunted mines. They are the same thing.

 We cannot know what these entities are. Such knowledge is incompatible with the premise of the story. But we can know that one of them, at least, is real, because it is analogous to us in being looked at as satanic by the uncomprehending, and in knowing how to survive in a closet.

Update: To the End, To the End, They Remain

Post build 35: "Steady and Aglow" we have a little more information that's maybe relevant.

 The Abrahamic theming of 88883 is now much more prominent:

• It says the words "Be Not Afraid" standard angelic greeting in scripture and, as so many youth ministers are fond of pointing out, the most common imperative in the entire bible.
• It rescues Sam from the mine fire with a phrase eerily similar to a quote from the book of Job: "For this time in solitude you are saved" which is very close to the "And I alone am escaped to tell thee." Not use of the word "Saved." Also note Sam's fate, post 'rescue' is itself very Jobian. Everyone he loves is dead, he is left alone in the desert, having been given nothing in exchange but the experience of having met "god."
• The one constant, 88883 maintains, is "There Will Be a Meal." Which, expressed more eloquently, might be phrased "give us this day our daily bread."
• Sam's narration concludes this ending--weary, lonely, embittered, apathetic--with the word "Amen."

 Even more notable, however, is not what 88883 says, but in what font it speaks. Because this is the first time we've clearly seen 88883 speak to someone, and it does so in Mirrorman font. This, I suspect, all but completely confirms the theory that
1) 88883 is The Entity with a capital The,
2) Mirrorman (or possibly mirrormen) are emanations of it, meant to reflect the forms and influence the thoughts of people to bring about the deaths upon which the entity sustains itself: ie "This Town Needs Secrets." This is what they are doing in both Echo (Tj's route) to Chase and in Arches (to Dev on the timeline where Cameron died.)
3) The Facsimile is a mirrorman that took on too much of the people it was reflecting, Sam in particular, and thus gained his desires and self-preservation drive and so is no longer doing as it should.

This not only much more clearly makes 88883 the ironic, Ahrimanic anti-God, it makes The Facsimile very clearly a Rebel Angel. Ie. the Devil.

CHAPTER 15 - Updated Ranked Predictions after First Route End.