Rakesfall

by Vajra Chandrasekera

The fandom has various theories about why the kids are required to watch the Documentary in school, but we all believe this core axiom: they are being prepared for life in the outside world. We believe these characters are being trained to become audience. If they survive their trials, they will join us here, where we are. We posit that if the Show had completed the story it was telling—if it hadn’t been prematurely cancelled after four seasons—that the Show’s eventual true finale would have culminated in the protagonists exiting the story and entering the world. We believe Leveret and Annelid are living matter pushing themselves through a dying narrative, until they breach the veil and emerge screaming.

The largest faction, the Inside, believes the actors would become possessed by or transformed into their characters; their opponents, the Outside, believe the characters would emerge into the world as new flesh, as physical duplicates of the actors, but independent beings. Underneath this titanic struggle of discourse, there are two smaller factions with bigger problems: the Overlap believes Leveret and Annelid’s escape would merge our worlds in their entirety; the Null believes their escape would irradiate our world with their cancellation.

They are alive in a dead place, while we are the dead in a living world. We are the ones who make this a haunted world.

She distrusts the way authority flows and pools, even among revolutionaries. Power is a dead thing, but its movement through the living body of a collective is suspiciously fluid and suffused with undead agency.