EAT
So, what is EAT? And why is it so hard to talk about?
The Fear Mythos called for a "water-themed" "eldritch abomination." I was tasked with designing it. But I hate horror, and as a matter of fact I never even drank water. I was, uh, a weird choice for this. And rather than force myself to be someone I'm not (a designer of good horror monsters), I worked with my strengths. I cannot articulate in words what those strengths are. Just... "DJay, make a monster." A lifeform that is interesting, that is powerful enough and inhuman enough to be able to fit into internet horror contexts, that I would like-- that I would obsess over, in fact. I didn't need to know all the details from the start; I just had to know some.. let's call them "poetic nodes" that would eventually come together.
EAT, first of all, is a Fear without a The in its name. "The Archangel," "The Wooden Girl," "The Empty City" are all classic Fears who fit the established name format. EAT is just.. EAT. It can stand for The things, like, The Epping Aquatarkus, or The Evolutionary Adverse Trigger, or The End of All Things. But there was something about "EAT" that got me, and so EAT was already a weird one. Was it something necessarily relevant to ingestion, therefore relevant to life? That's a heady subject. Was it like DNA, an acronym for something fundamental? I chose the name "Epping Aquatarkus" because my first EAT story, Jordan Eats Normally Now, asked for a prog rock motif, but what do the individual songs mean? "The Battle of Epping Forest" was a tongue-in-cheek glorification of suburban gang warfare, a slice of unexamined English society. "Tarkus" was a symbolic poem about the religious and cultural makeup of a societal war machine, with Aquatarkus specifically being the rebirth of that war machine in a new medium. The form of each song is distinct too: "Epping Forest" a rambling jazzy narrative, "Tarkus" a baroque formal structure. If nothing else, EAT was a trojan horse for getting internet kids to listen to different kinds of music, and likewise a trojan horse for getting me to expose myself to horror works (for reference purposes) I would otherwise avoid. EAT represented a bigger world, with bigger questions that still somehow have answers. EAT represented the process of making sense of larger reference pools, synthesizing the elements in your head, like a poet does.
EAT, second of all, is a good Blog monster. The Slender Man was a first step. EAT followed. EAT did not try to be another Slender Man; EAT had to explore this new medium, had to look like it already lived here and we were the ones exploring and encountering it. Like a pool of water that is far deeper than it looks, EAT had to expand shallow subjects and hide threats within. So. EAT moves in the realm of ideas. The first representation of EAT I designed were the Camper, a kind of living Spam Comment. The Spam Comment would nest itself onto successive blog posts, progressively becoming more sensible, comprehensible, until it was something you could actually reply to. Your reply would then be copied, latched onto, allowing the Camper to learn how your sentences are constructed, and from there how your personality works. The Camper would then comment something Aware and vaguely menacing, and then your blog would be deleted and you would go missing. The final Camper comment would represent the moment that EAT located you, in fleshspace. And 'ate' you. Your body and mind would join the hive mind, your blood replaced with its water. Once it had you, you would go dormant, your eyes glazed over, as the greater mind decided how to most effectively use your body-- and usually the most effective use is simply to wait for input.
That's the gist of her. EAT is a "her." But not a "she." The rule is, "it and her but never she." Feminine possessive, inanimate object. This wasn't because pronouns were scary; this was simply because EAT needed to have answers, not just be pure ambiguity, and those answers needed to imply that our understandings of fundamental things (like gender) are rooted in self-centric assumptions. EAT is an Earth-born organism, a relative of ours, that preys on us and accepts our language. EAT is Earth-born because it wouldn't be nearly scary enough if it came from outer space, or was created in a lab, or was the face of God in some poetic sense. EAT being from Earth implies an actual truth: we have been living on this planet with creatures we don't take the time to understand. We have been assuming ourselves unique in having consciousness, or assuming that any other consciousness must be out beyond the stars because we haven't seen any yet. We have been encouraging our successful examples to behave with immodesty and entitlement. Maybe we didn't invent the internet but just discovered it. Maybe we didn't invent culture but just discovered it. Maybe there's more than one way to eat someone.
It was important to me not to come up with some secret simple sentence that explains EAT, because the Explanation is another artistic mode that we are not automatically entitled to. If I don't literally believe there are higher forms of life than us on planet Earth, I do believe in something that itself is a metaphor for: There are other forms of story than the ones we breed for good review scores. Often... better forms, forms better suited for narrative exploration. Those are what I really wanted to make. What are the kinds of story? I wouldn't get anywhere by keeping a list of them; I needed to create without restriction, without plan (and sometimes with a plan).
So let's jump ahead. EAT was born in 2011, and it is now 2023. There are EAT stories, some of which are even complete. All of them reveal different sides of this more-human-than-humans Earth-bound Alien.
Her Nine Faces
The Instability
Like the first EATblog was named Jordan Eats before EAT was a thing, the first EAT portrayal in any of my stories arguably predates the creation of EAT by five whole years. Dark Chao Adventures Season 2 ended with a three-part serial (Shade and Dark's Strange Journey into the Beyond) taking the chao 30 years into their future, where Metal Sonic had begun experimenting with time itself. He had established complete time loops, but with each new iteration of said loop, the forms within would grow more unstable. Like a recursive hall of mirrors gradually exposing the Green that is the identity of the mirror itself, the recursive time loops would gradually expose strange features that weren't there before-- a hive mind identity that speaks through any living thing. A hungry hive mind that wanted to eat. Metal Sonic called this entity "the Instability," as it brought an alarming destruction to any narrative exploration that happened upon it. And there was never an easy way to defeat it.
The Instability was mainly reserved for DCA's Halloween specials, a bit of yearly fright, but as the show came closer to its ending in Season 8, what other face would be lurking in wait than the hungry monster from the future? By the time DCA ended, I had already made a few stories for the Fear Mythos, so I made sure to give the Instability another name: EAT. And DCA ended with EAT taking it all, playing the show on repeat over and over again. (Then DCA un-ended with an equillibrium: the cast got their free will but now knew to be wary of forces they don't understand. And then DCA re-unended, with the Definitive Edition on Ao3, where EAT became a principal player much earlier. I do not know where the story will go this time.)
The Evolutionary Adverse Trigger and the Night Owl
So then came Jordan Eats, my first real Fearblog and my demonstration of EAT. In this blog, my self-insert encountered EAT as described in the main section prior, the Spam Comments and vanishing blogs (which he'd document through screenshot prior to deletion), the comatose Camper people who would suddenly act with knowing threat, the overall force that wraps any discoverer into a personalized and unreal narrative. Jordan did not survive; he was led into the Empty City. But EAT continued her presence on Earth, and the canon continued with the decidedly more ambitious "sequel."
Topography Genera was a hub for EAT ideas. EAT had found a vessel for impacting humanity at scale: a private corporation with a bureaucratic structure. By putting herself in charge of cataloguing and researching the gods (the "Fossils"), EAT could throw attention away from herself and control her peers. By putting herself in charge of a bureaucracy, EAT could disguise masses of Camper in systems of daily predictable behavior and control the means of discovery. One of her masterstrokes was the "Night Owl," a Camper that pretended to be an opposing force, a fake terrorist, a false flag. Another was "Ad a Dglgmut," a metal body slapped together with hallucinogenic mold, a gift for a rival god to get on its good side.
Genera was a bleak story of EAT achieving total control using tools we designed, taking full advantage of our skepticism and assumptions. EAT used parallel branches of the corporation as prisons for experimenting on the anatomy of problem employees. EAT used our love of horror stories to turn victims' accounts into published fiction. EAT used us. And then EAT reset the world and tried a different evolutionary path, to see what would happen.
Salmacis, Ceesrais
Text removed until Rapture is here.
Olokun
(Nine is God)
The Others
Sunsetters? Coestts? Empty City? Viceking's Graab?
The Mighty Deep
The Deep... is in some ways a refined nucleus of all that EAT is meant to be. The Deep is what killed the Slender Man, what allowed him to be killed. The Deep is a terror, an ecstasy, that always sounds like philosophy when discussed. The Deep is the true unknown. What cannot be seen, what cannot be conceived. And even EAT falters before the Deep.