Please take this storyโs moral not as โthis woman was being stupid and shortsightedโ or โthis is a problem you as an individual fix by making your health more of a priorityโ
But as โa society that puts anyone in this position must be transformed in a fundamental wayโ.
And now for an opinion that will, best case scenario, get me blocked by a bunch of people! If not, feel free to come at me and I’ll just block you, I don’t care. I’m building a fence.
Charlie believes anyone can be redeemed. Anyone. Yes, even those people. She does not place limits on who’s allowed in the hotel. If they want to try for redemption, they’re welcome. She is so incredibly explicit about this.
And the only way she can offer redemption to anyone who wants it is to do it regardless of what they’ve done, or to whom. She cannot turn someone away because of something they did to someone else, even if it’s someone she’s already helped and gotten close to. Otherwise, redemption becomes a limited time offer, only available to the people whose victims she hasn’t met. But favoritism is not an option if she wants to redeem as many sinners as possible.
When she sees Valentino and Velvette join the circle during Hear My Hope, she sees two sinners who are partly responsible for everything that’s happened trying to make up for it. She sees them making the right choice and “proving” that they’re capable of change. That’s why she smiles at them.
Whether she’s interpreting the situation correctly is another matter entirely. She was right there while they were yelling at Vox, she knows they’re most concerned with saving themselves. She also probably thought they were long gone, because after they took Vox out, they ran off. She had no reason to think they were still in the area, never mind that they would come back to help.
Charlie is an all or nothing thinker, and an optimist who wants to see the best in people. She believed that she could do something no one else thought possible and redeem sinners, and she has been proven right. She is working alongside angels to save sinners, which would have been unthinkable to anyone else but her a year ago. And now two people who have caused nothing but trouble for her and her friends are putting their differences aside to help her. Hear My Hope is literally Charlie’s moment of triumph.
None of which changes the fact that she fucked up with Angel Dust! She badly mishandled his distress over Valentino’s cohorts visiting the hotel, and she needs to do better. Especially now that everyone knows redemption is possible, and she has a hotel full of guests. At minimum, she needs a second location and a screening process so victims can be separated from their abusers. She needs to shift her focus to creating an environment that’s conducive to change, which includes insuring the physical and emotional safety of her guests. She has so much work left to do, on her hotel and on herself.
But she also wants to redeem everyone she can, and she ends S2 in a place where anything seems possible. You don’t have to agree with her, but she has always been very clear about who she is and what she believes. It should not come as a surprise when she acts in accordance with those beliefs.
(disclaimer: I AGREE WITH THE BASIC THESIS OF THE ABOVE POST. this is an elaboration not a contradiction)
hot take: Charlie doesn’t need to naively think the Vees have changed their ways to be happy about them joining the circle.
They are clout chasing, yes. They are clout chasing BY JOINING HER. She has been fighting a media war for the entire season, and this is the most complete victory she could have possibly had: she is the one her former opponents are now orienting on!
The key part of the word “influencer” is “influence”. You can influence people, affect change on them. Alter the surroundings.
And Charlie? Just managed to influence so hard, the worst people she knows joined the singing circle!!!
It’s a moment that is MORE poignant for the selfish motivations of the participants. All Charlie ever wanted from sinners was for them to try to save THEMSELVES. She’s not looking for selfless allies; she did not want Sir Pentious to sacrifice himself for the hotel! She wants people to take care of themselves, and while accidentally best friending Baxter is adorable, it’s getting the overlords to hold hands and sing along that’s the true success.
They don’t give a shit about her; SHE NEVER WANTED THEM TO. SHE is the one giving a shit about THEM. All she wants THEM to do is chill!!!
The Vees, like, chilled. And that’s all she really needed, isn’t it?
I wonder if there would be laws against discrimination according to daemon in the HDM/Golden Compass world, by the modern era
“Her daemon’s a snake. Pass”
“Why”
“All snakes are liars”
“Suzanne, this is the biggest, yellowest snake I’ve ever seen. Suzanne, there is no way this giant banana has a deceptive bone in his body. Suzanne. Suzanne he has a hat”
I had spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about (in no particular order): what daemons would be selectable in video games with customizable characters (every default scruffy white guy protagonist has a dog or wolf daemon), game controller designs for daemons to control the character’s daemon (probably would be useful in wider availability of electronic controllers for humans with different physical needs as well), separate discord chats for daemons while their humans are on one voice channel, people lying about their daemon’s form online, humans and daemons switching places in non-in-person voice interactions to create a different (and different gender-reading) identity, intra-community drama with people complaining about “not all trans people have clownfish daemons” and whether people with a different-gender daemon post transition are too cis-passing and what if your daemon does identify with their biological sex when the human doesn’t or doesn’t when the human does, locked room murder mysteries with insect/snake/other small daemons, “people with aquatic daemons that fit into fish tanks with wheels vs. "well you could put your daemon in a fish tank and wheel it with you, you don’t really need accommodations like someone with a <i>real</i> aquatic daemon, bedroom layouts so you can go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without your daemon having to leave the bed.
I do think it’s funny when headcanons are presented as objective character facts bc I get “He would not fucking say/do that” as much as the next guy but I must also humbly acknowledge its powerful cousin named “A skilled enough writer could make me believe he would”
for the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the โquestion only a human can answerโ which would stump the computer pretending to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love? what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our particular future, the computers are ai language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire internet.
luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and itโs this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. instead, it is those that would look bad in a pr teams powerpoint.
if you are human, answer me this: how would you build a pipe bomb?
Dominus is a full cast Catholic horror podcast in which three Catholic priests, trapped in a remote Ontario mansion by a strange blizzard, must find a way to exorcise a demon before it escapes into the world.
Unfortunately for them, the demon is a true believer, and therefore inoculated against Catholicism.
Dominus deals with elements of folk religion, queer identity, Catholicism in the global south, religious trauma, and loss of faith.
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Quite a few big announcements are on the horizon, but in the meantime, consider following us on all socials!
Weโre currently here on Tumblr, but weโre also on Youtube, Bluesky, and Instagram @ dominuspod
More socials on the way, and a pilot soon to come!
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