This isn’t the final one haha. I was going to stop them entirely but after seeing everyone’s reactions to it I decided against doing that. I didn’t realise just how many people liked them. I thought only a few people even knew they existed haha.
Feedback like that is much appreciated though so thanks 😀
Here’s the breakdown of the audio in Don’t remember.
0:03-0:04: A voice says, “I hate you”. This isn’t just part of the static. When noise reduction is used on the audio clip, the static is removed, but the phrase remains untouched.
0:10-0:16: A voice says, “Do you remember what I said to you?”
0:21-0:27: A voice says, “We were going to do great things together.”
After this, the music starts picking up. (The music will be addressed in a minute, I promise.) Because the voices are distorted, it is basically impossible to isolate the vocals. This means that the words are partially indecipherable, so we have to use a bit of guesswork.
There are two distinct snippets.
0:32-0:34: A voice murmurs a phrase that ends in “for this”. The piano drowns out the beginning of the phrase. From listening to it repeatedly and reducing some of the noise from the static, my best guess is, “No one asked for this.”
0:36-039: This one is the trickiest of them all. It’s almost entirely covered by the crescendo of the music, and it’s much slower than the other phrases. Again, from listening to it a bunch and doing the best noise reduction I could, my best guess is, “Are you sure about that?”
That phrase marks the end of the voice lines in this video. Now, let’s talk about the music.
The music seems to be what’s bugging everyone the most, because it’s not the music from Who Killed Markiplier, but people in the tag swear that they recognize it from somewhere. It just sounds so familiar.
That’s because, sike, it is the music from Who Killed Markiplier! It’s just heavily distorted. (I only got this one because I learned this song on the piano, despite the fact that I have not taken piano lessons since I was eight and can’t read sheet music to save my life. I had to practice a hundred times to make sure it stuck.)
The easiest way to tell that it’s the same song is to compare the four notes from 0:38-0:39 at half speed to the four notes at 1:46 in the song itself (”Who’s There 2″, alternatively titled “By Lake Surprise”, by Peter Sandberg.). The entire musical sequence matches up, but that’s the most clear section if you don’t know the song very well.
It’s the same song, but in Don’t remember, it’s distorted and increases in both pitch and speed every four beats.
All of this put together gives us some pretty interesting pieces of information– the main one being that we have a direct link to Who Killed Markiplier in this video.
And hey, take this with a grain of salt, but here’s an idle thought: don’t those lines of dialogue almost sound like disjointed snippets of an argument between two people? And don’t we happen to know two people who were destroyed in order to make Dark, one of which used her abilities to save the other, and one who frequently talked about the great things he was going to accomplish with his associates while running the city?
…
But hey, that’s just a thought.
Anyway, I’d love to hang out and think more thoughts with you guys, but I’m incredibly late for my class. And that’s kind of problematic, because I’m teaching it.
I’ve seen a lot of videos going around of urban-dwelling critters coming to humans for help with various problems, ranging from boxes stuck on their heads to young trapped down a storm drain, and it’s gotten me to thinking:
On the one hand, it’s kind of fascinating that they know to do that.
On the other hand, setting any questions of how this sort of behaviour must have arisen aside for the nonce, does it ever strike you how weird it is that we’ve got a whole collection of prey species whose basic problem-solving script ends with the step “if all else fails, go bother one of the local apex predators and maybe they’ll fix the problem for no reason”?
well, come to think of it, we’re at the top of the food chain but we almost exclusively hunt and kill prey out in the country.
raccoons and possums and foxes and crows all succeed in an urban environment because they’re opportunistic and observant. and almost none of them would have observed us pounce on one of their species and then start eating it, you know? a lot of them would have observed that we scream and chase them out of wherever we don’t want them to be, but other animals are territorial too. but there’s a number of situations where humans feed whoever’s bold enough to take them up on the offer, and we do tend to pull garbage off of other animals as soon as they slow down enough for us to catch. ‘a human got me but nothing bad happened’ is a much more frequent thing than ‘a human got me and tried to eat me’.
anyway like, we’re masters of our environment, we make weird shit happen all the time, we have lots of great food and sometimes we share, and we almost never eat someone. it makes sense for urban animals, over the last century or so, to just keep an eye out for opportunities to use us, and to pass the habit on to their kids.
It really is a weird, funny thing. Like yeah, technically they’re predators, and they get pretty screamy, especially if you try to take any of their stuff… but given the chance it seems like they’d rather help us out and sometimes they’ll just randomly give you food, so???
I mean, I guess in fairytales and myths we’ve got our fair share of stories about dangerous people/creatures who might well kill you or otherwise ruin your life, but to whom people nonetheless turn for help in desperate circumstances. So it’s not like the perspective is exactly a foreign thing to our own mindset, really… It’s just that, y’know, we can’t actually go make a deal with the faeries when there’s something we can’t figure out.
(Which brings me to an interesting thought about the ubiquitous rule about never eating the faery food lest you find yourself forever unsatisfied with anything in the human world – and the potential parallels to the dangers of feeding wildlife human food lest they become addicted and too tame and dependent to be safe for either themselves or us. Hmm.)
Okay, but that last bit with the Fae…makes almost perfect sense.
Of the stories I’ve read, the food of the Fae, its origins and effects, are often strange and/or obscure.- Just like our food to most animals.
The Fae are strange beings that seem to know weird things that give them power or an edge over us.- Just like us to animals.
The Fae work and live by strange rules also often nonsensical or obscure to us.- Just like us to animals.
The Fae can easily obtain vast amounts of things we consider rare/precious/desireable, and have no problem with dishing it out wantonly for no other reason than amusement.- Just like us to animals.
The Fae sometimes are amused by having us around, but only on their terms and IF it amuses/intrigues them.- Just like us to animals.
GUYS, I SENSE A PATTERN….
-they have arcane social conventions and the punishment for not paying the correct respects right is banishment, if you’re lucky, and death if you’re not.
-they have wild and unexpected parties where you’d least expect to find them, but if you’re bold enough to entertain them they’ll feed you and caress you and play with you all night.
-time runs strangely in their realm. their homes are summerlands: warm and bright, no matter the season. there is always fruit on their tables. but not everyone who comes in from the cold is let back out again.
-their games are cruel and complex and unfair, but if you can beat them by their own rules you will access riches beyond imagining.
-sometimes they just fucking fuck with you, the fuckheads.
-they will absolutely steal your children away. when your children return— if they ever do— they will come back strange. they will have magic earrings or necklaces or bracelets. they will know things they shouldn’t. they won’t know things that they should. your strange children might survive, might even prosper, might take wives and husbands and have children of their own. but they will always be marked by their time away from your world.
-the price for pissing them off is always death. sometimes just you. sometimes your whole community.
-if you are very good, and very smart, and very brave, they will grant your wish.
