Nightmare Fuel / THE MONUMENT MYTHOS

Moments pages are Spoilers Off, as per policy! You Have Been Warned.

National monuments are usually points of awe and pride. Imposing landmarks a nation can be proud to have built and held, and that its people can find joy in. This does not hold true here; The Monument Mythos shows a world where these places should be feared instead.

---

The Monument Mythos

• LIBERTYLURKER, the first video of all, serves as a proper introduction with mass human sacrifice, a barely-unseen monstrosity hiding within the Statue of Liberty, and unnerving nonchalance to these very ideas as you're dryly promised monetary compensation if you lost any family member to it all, like losing relatives to monsters is a tragic but mundane occurrence.
• The idea of spending years upon years locked within a statue, immobilized in place and fed with awful soup so that you'll last throughout it all. And the Secret Service itself will fake an alibi to make sure no one thinks your absence is strange, before just snatching you from your home at night. That's what Lincoln Lookers get, all because they pissed off someone that became President of the United States.
  • Somewhat thankfully, the possibility that the Lincoln Lookers could be ADA propaganda is later presented... although that does now mean that we get no explanation whatsoever for whatever the hell crawled out of the Lincoln Memorial provided it's not a fake.
• Mount Rushmore. Whatever the ADA did to it caused gruesome effects, only getting worse as the "infection" advances. But is the infection all that's wrong, or did it just wake something up in the mountain that went out of control?
  • There's more than a few moments before Sunday in which the Mount's faces seem to be staring directly at the camera.
  • The slow progression of what the "infection" does to the monument is alarming enough, but it becomes chilling when Saturday isn't even shown aside from alarms/howls coming from it. And then comes the Wham Shot of Sunday with the monument faces gone and spikes coming from the top of it.
  • The end reveals that since that day, Mount Rushmore is powdered daily with something that smells like baby powder; said powder is hinted to be the soil on which Special Trees grow in Wonderland. How do they get that "powder," exactly?
• Canyon Crowns may not be hostile to humanity (beyond certain pressures on them), but it doesn't make the idea of being watched by enormous, rotting heads as you travel the Grand Canyon any less unnerving.
• Freedom. Her backstory is bad enough, but then we get a close recording of her counterattack at the Capitol. While unseen, you can very clearly hear her slicing someone's head off and ripping and stretching the victim's skin. And then she finds the cameraman, showing off her new face.
  • The part in GIZAGUARDIAN where the audio is played of Freedom executing Maya is extremely horrifying. Even though there's no visuals, one can easily hear and perceive the sheer terror going through Maya's head as the statue prepared to ruin her life. And then, the slice itself, just as unseen yet just as audible, followed by the sound of her remains and camera loudly rolling down the canyon.
• The Horned Serpent certainly qualifies for this as well. In MAIZEMOVIEMAKER, we get to see a brief clip of its attack on Maize. What we are treated to is a clip of several unnatural spikes of some sort jutting out of the ground, electricity being emitted from them as we hear a horrifying roar. That's not even mentioning the fact that this thing is so large that it can possibly stretch from one end of the country to another while curving.
  • Then of course, there's the scene where Maya and Nathaniel Arnoldson flee from the Serpent after one of them gets a shock from touching a "cave's walls." We can see what appears to be the Eldritch Abomination's head, with electricity spewing everywhere. What sells it is the return of the Horned Serpent's unnatural sounds, and the ending quote:
    Do not visit these sites, they have not been fed in years.
• The ADA (originally the Anti-Dean Association, later the Anti-Device Association) come across when they first appear in DEANDEMOCRACY as an aggressive, but mostly harmless reactionary terrorist group, only managing to knock out power lines and silence a single broadcast. Then, in DEANDISASTER, we get to see what happens when they get really aggressive. ABC anchor Frank Reynolds announces what appears to be another memetic "Dean Democracy" ad, leading to mass public interest. Instead, what airs is a visage of a red shrouded hellscape with air-raid sirens softly blaring in the background, accompanied with the following text and voiceover:
  James Dean's America is Hell.
  But you still don't believe us.
  You'll hear the truth
  from James Dean himself.
  • What follows is a cutout of young James Dean with devil horns being crudely walked onto the screen, slowly opening his mouth... and an air raid siren starting to blare. At that very moment, every air raid siren in America begins going off simultaneously, and at many times higher volume than should be possible. Within seconds, every single person within a four mile radius of any air raid siren has their ear drums burst, while anyone close enough to them begins to suffer hemorrhaging and other horrible effects. The attack is described in gruesome detail, going from the initial damage, the deaths from mass stampedes and auto accidents, to the countless people being asphyxiated from the massive amount of car exhaust being pumped into countless interior structures by panicked drivers, to accounts of ramps of bodies of technicians leading to the tops of the air raid sirens due to the severe damage at close range. Eventually the carnage subsides, but it's stated that National Guardsmen had to give children and elderly people blindfolds to prevent them from suffering fainting spells or heart attacks at the site of all the dead. By the end, while no body count is given, it seems likely that millions had perished, and almost every person in the United States was rendered permanently deaf. It's noteworthy that in a setting with uncountable supernatural horrors, possibly the single most horrifying event in the entire series so far has been caused by completely ordinary humans.
  • There is also the implication that Dean's administration itself set up this incident as a False Flag Operation, which if true then James Dean is a lot more nefarious than believed.
  • Their first action as the Advocates for the Division of America? Seemingly hacking the national broadcast and delivering a terrifying message to everyone listening. In which they promise to break America in a thousand pieces, and let the serpent underneath escape, with the use of the Air Force One Angel, which they describe as a "living atom bomb." All while talking in a deep, distorted voice and a video of an egg cracking (and bleeding) plays in the background.
• ROCKEFELLERREVELATION gives us the mother of all Wham Shots: after a short scene showing the outside mechanisms of a Rockefeller zeppelin, we're shown the inside. Which is a conglomeration of a massive amount of Canyon Crowns. Small mercy that it's only shown as a technical diagram and not in video.
• LIBERTYLURKERS is full of this.
  • The Animation of The Sinking Man and the Forbidden Fruit is nothing short of harrowing. It shows who else but George Washington himself, standing around a tree with an axe in hand. After a few seconds of him moving around the tree, seemingly trying to chop it down, the already unsettling music grows more distorted as he begins to sink into the ground, the background darkening as he falls into Wonderland. After floating onto an upside down platform with a Special Tree, it shows four other trees all stacked like how they were described in WASHINGTONWONDERLAND. Then the real Nightmare Fuel kicks in as George begins to stretch downwards, distorting more and more with each frame, until he is eventually stretched so long that he extends past the screen.
  • And what's more, that frightening scene turns out to be the origin of the Liberty Lurker itself. Yes, the horrifying monstrosity underneath one of America's most famous statues is George Washington himself, twisted beyond belief by Wonderland into a creature out for blood. Virginia got it relatively easy compared to the poor man.
    • This becomes even more horrifying if you consider that George/the Liberty Lurker is also the Horned Serpent. It's scary to think that Wonderland is such an Eldritch Location that normal people who get sent there such as George Washington can get twisted into unnatural beings so large they would make most Kaiju seem like specks in comparison.
    • Virginia mentioned during her stint that the people that tried to climb the Trees were all "stretched and burnt." It's very possible she would have ended up the same way if Everett hadn't been there to stop her. It also potentially means George Washington isn't alone in the possibility of becoming an utter nightmare; he was simply first, and if the video's title and the Statue of Progress' existence mean anything, then there is at least one other.
    • The video then cuts to presumably the Liberty Lurker, in full form, reaching out of the Statue's pedestal. Not only is it extremely tall to the point that it doesn't even fit in frame, but it also looks suspiciously similar to photos of the special tree. If this Liberty Lurker is supposedly George Washington, then what does that say about other special trees? And the horrible similarities don't stop there. Not only is it emerged, it is also howling, and it sounds like a deeper-pitched version of the howls heard from both the Horned Serpent in MAIZEMOVIEMAKER and Mount Rushmore after the infection. This horrible howling is at best the sound of a Special Tree when it feels alone.
  • And then, thanks to some brave cthonauts, we get video from the "Horned Serpent Metastructure" AKA the Wonderland, where the Special Trees dwell. And it is even more disturbing in motion, even when the trees stay put. And one thing they forgot to tell us is that the trees are all singing down there, and the choir they form is horrifying.
• ALCATRAZAPOCALYPSE is one giant Wham Episode that shows how events in the world of The Monument Mythos culminate with the "Great Division" on February 22, 2022, where Freedom and the Angel seemingly destroying each other upon contact, resulting in mutually assured destruction that results in Earth being utterly destroyed in a massive explosion, complete with satellite footage of the entire thing.
  • Worse still is that we finally see The Horned Serpent in its full length, absolutely unwrapping around the planet as it is consumed by one final explosion. It was already colossal enough when it was depicted as only being as long when coiled as America is wide!
  • After all this, we get to the aftermath, and what do we see? Multiple Wonderlands. As for survivors of the Great Division? They are referred to as Cornerfolk.
  • Of course, the video's namesake also brings a boatload of horror. Over the course of a single night, Alcatraz has expanded over the entire territory of the United States and possibly even further. It has replaced everything, from the landscape, to the buildings, to the people themselves, creating exact replicas. No one was able to stop it, because no one was even aware of what it did.
    Leonard Morlin: I have just finished the last batch of tests and I can confidently say that I am not the same person as I was three days ago. Alcatraz had copied us all overnight. Every particle of this country and its citizens, replaced. The United States is the Ship of Theseus.
• The climactic scene of AFTERANGEL. Having received information about the imminent end of the world from its future self's "ashes", the Angel begs Freedom to kill them, refusing to fight back in order to avoid the apocalyptic explosion which caused the Great Division. Freedom very abruptly does so, swiftly decapitating the Angel on-screen (albeit in silhouette). What follows is the video cutting to gray static as the music- already distorted- gradually decays into something from the bowels of hell itself.
• MUSKMARS. Holy shit, MUSKMARS. Not only is it probably the biggest Wham Episode since ALCATRAZAPOCALYPSE or NIXON IS GOD, but it's chock-full of disturbing imagery.
  • The opening scene shows that, in the Deanverse, Elon Musk succeeded in his plan of colonizing Mars. This isn't so scary on its own... until we get a glimpse of how he did it. After a photo revealing the existence of "Martian glass", we get a shot of the Martian landscape as... something begins to fly slowly across it. Something that, as a close-up soon reveals, is shaped suspiciously like a human head. Apparently Musk has taken the idea of transportation "powered" by Canyon Crowns- already horrific in the way that Rockefeller implemented it- and taken it to a whole new level.
  • After a lighthearted interlude about Musk's ill-advised additions to TWTTR, we suddenly cut to video of what looks suspiciously like an Egyptian pyramid on Mars. And in case the implications weren't clear enough, after nuking the glass mine, Musk then posts before and after photos of the same pyramid... with the "after" photo depicting that the "pyramid" is actually the tip of an enormous obelisk, with other such obelisks in the background. While the events of STARRYSPHINX may have been ADA propaganda, it seems increasingly likely that the subject matter may not have been..
    Musk (on TWTTR): We do not know Mars.
  • And then there's the ending, revealing the full consequences of Musk's actions. We cut to a shot of Mars from high orbit...only to reveal something immense extending out of the ice cap and curling its way through space. Every time the camera shifts, it reveals more of this unimaginably vast creature. The hints given in MONUMENTMYTHOLOGY were true. The Horned Serpent was not the only one of its kind.
    THE MARTIAN SERPENT
    EXITS THE GLASS MINE
    LIKE A BURST INTESTINE
    FALLING TOWARDS
    EARTH

---

The Nixonverse

The Horned Serpent lives.

• THE LAST SON OF ALCATRAZ starts out strong. In the new world we are introduced to a Superman Substitute known as the Last Son of Alcatraz, and the Anti-Hero Substitute known as the D-Day Knight, who seem to be generally heroic figures within the setting. Seem to be. We almost immediately find out that the Last Son's heroic behavior seems to be sporadic, with him aiding or attacking the United States in war as he sees fit and with no one able to stop him. THE D-DAY KNIGHT meanwhile suggests the D-Day Knight was a Horrifying Hero, initially fighting with a truly disturbing skull helmet with a pair of massive horns. Finally their origins in the Deanverse are ambiguous, seemingly being connected to both James Dean and the Horned Serpent. All this creates a massive example of Beware the Superman.
  • THE D-DAY KNIGHT suggests that there is something fundamentally off about the Nixonverse in terms of their societal outlook. The story of the D-Day Knight heroically fighting with the Allies at Omaha Beach is undercut by the reporter chronicling the event exclusively in terms of Determinism, outright stating that the majority of men sent to fight on the beach were supposed to die and that the Knight saving them is the only being in the universe with free will.
  • The skull helmet in question deserves elaboration of its own. The horns alone are massive, almost as long as a man is tall, but that's not the bad part. The horns resembling the sides of jawbones, and the actual helmet resembling some kind of humanoid skull that underwent gruesome Body Horror (with even more jawbones being involved, and the actual mouth of the skull bearing two protrusions like the mouth of a sawblade shark) before it was even dead and harvested, that's the bad part. If the Horned Serpent truly lives, and this helmet is related to it, there was a lot more going on than just "stretching and burning."
• When humans first land on the moon in the Nixonverse, they are greeted by a strange being called the "Queen of the Lunarians," or Luna. While Luna's speech is surprisingly heartwarming, describing how humanity has the opportunity to overcome its baser instincts and become something far greater, it's immediately undercut by John Glenn ordering Ed Dwight to shoot her on the spot. Upon Ed shooting Luna with some sort of energy weapon, she responds by using a wand to do something to John. The coroner's report states that John suffered from "eviction from reality," a process which apparently took a full sixty three seconds to complete.
  • More than that, the term used to describe John's death is the exact same one that the ADA used to describe Rockefeller's fate at the hands of the Air Force One Angel. Furthermore, Luna describes Earth as being on the cusp of a "great division," which only begs the question: how connected are the Nixon and Deanverse?
• JESUS IN VIETNAM, despite its ridiculous title, may possibly be the scariest episode of the season yet.
  • The first part of the video, without the context of the series, would be indistinguishable from an actual fundamentalist propaganda piece. Espousing ideas such as the superiority of the United States and how the sacrifice of millions doesn't matter if it helps America. It mentions a "sweep and redeem" happening in Vietnam. This is never elaborated upon. At the end, it basically says that the United States should conquer the world and erase all other cultures besides their own.
    THE PEACE EQUATION
    OUR FREEDOM > YOUR FREEDOM
    OUR CHRIST > YOUR CHRIST
    = W O R L D P E A C E
    • Considering the Nixonverse's references to the DC Universe, the idea of a mathematical equation proving the objective superiority of a tyrant sounds eerily similar to the Anti-Life Equation.
    • Note that the "Sweep and Redeem" campaign in Vietnam is listed as "TRIAL ONE." Whatever happened there, the entity responsible is planning to do it again elsewhere.
  • We learn why this season is called "The Nixonverse." It's not because in this universe, Richard Nixon was the 37th President like in our own. But because he's some sort of god-like being in this universe, or may actually be the God. And he's not a loving god, either...
• THE MISSING EYE OF JESUS CHRIST follows up the Mind Screw horror of the previous episode with a truly horrific explanation of who the "Jesus" that was present in Vietnam is: it's the Last Son of Alcatraz. Apparently, after the Last Son's interference in the Korean War, the Americans launched nuclear weapons at his hideout in Alaska, resulting in him being captured and losing an eye. Said eye was then replaced with a Lunarian eye captured on the Apollo 12 mission, with the implantation triggering his transformation into a horrific parody of Jesus that was responsible for whatever happened to Vietnam. And the worst part is, the transformed Last Son seems to be an entirely separate being from the God entity seen on the Moon (since that photo was seemingly taken by Ed Dwight on the Apollo 11 mission, before the implantation was performed), meaning there are now two genocidal godlike figures running around the Nixonverse.
  • In one clip, we see that Alice Avenue apparently found the Last Son's missing eye in Alaska and took a photo of it, which her granddaughter has now found. At the climax of the video, we get another shot of this photograph of the eye... which then moves, right before the screen assaults the viewer with a blast of loud, discordant music and a sudden shift to a text wall.
  • While a lot of the information we have at this point is still incomplete or ambiguous, one thing is made clear by these two episodes: the super heroes are not the evil entities... the United States is. From responding to the Last Son's betrayal by glassing Alaska just to destroy his home, to attacking a peaceful being on the moon to get her eye, to turning the previously heroic Last Son into a parody of Jesus Christ and using him as a superweapon, all in the name of a terrifying version of Christian Nationalism in service of Nixon, there is no question as to their villainy in this setting. And with the Last Son enslaved and Luna's fate uncertain, it seems there is no one to stand up to them.
    IF THINE EYE BE SINGLE THY WHOLE BODY SHALL BE FULL OF LIGHT; MATTHEW 6:22
    EYE FOR AN EYE MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD MINE; UNITED STATES
• SEA OF THE LAST SON hits us with The Reveal to end all reveals. The Last Son isn't just the last survivor of the Deanverse, and he isn't just the "Jesus Christ" we've been seeing in the last few episodes. He's also the Crescent King, having been abducted by the Lunarians and forced to become the ruler from one of their prophecies. And if the portrayal of the King seen in "THE HOUSE IN THE OCEAN" is even slightly accurate, then the Nixonverse is in even more trouble than we thought.
  • The conversation between the Lunarians and the Last Son is conveyed through very distorted and barely understandable voices. Odd and somewhat creepy, but expected by this point in the series. Then the Lunarians descend to take the Last Son, and he lets out a clear and frightened "NO!"
  • The silhouette of the Crescent King given at the end. The stark black against white look combined with its posture makes it look barely human.
    • Not to mention, the sheer massive size of the King's silhouette compared to the original one of the Last Son as a man.
• THE RETURN OF THE D-DAY KNIGHT reveals that the Lunarians have singlehandedly turned English into a Lost Language and forced humanity to accept its own language in English's place as part of a hostile takeover. The rest of the video is a broadcast of Alice Avenue revealing the Last Son's origin story, and all seems to be going somewhat smoothly, until we hard cut to Alice screaming "Oh, my God" over an image of the D-Day Knight throwing a barely-visible Alice off the Chrysler Building, with her screams eventually morphing into a distorted, hellish soundscape which we close the video out on.
  • The video also begins by panning up the face of a man with empty, distorted eyelids, as creepy music plays while increasingly bad English is shown on the screen.
  • Similarly, if one can look past the slight Narm of the devolving spelling of English, the concept of an alien power slowly erasing every trace of your speech from human memory, to the point that you can no longer speak or understand the language you and everyone you know have spoken your entire lives is utterly terrifying:
    IT WIL TAYCK ALL TIEM TO RELERN EVRYTHENG.
• D-DAY KNIGHTFALL opens with the visual of a Lunarian cloud ship sending some sort of beam down towards New York, which we're informed is some kind of mass brain surgery. So far, so horrifying. Then the Knight's letter appears on screen. What does he have to say? That in his world, statues had souls.
  • The video of the statue is creepy as well. The way it morphs, it's mouth being missing in several shots. The last shot of it, with the head missing, only to cut to a picture of the Knight, who apparently took to wearing the head as some sort of penance for injuring Alice.
  • And the last shot of... something. It seems to be a head, as we zoom in on what is said to be an eye, but it's so distorted it's hard to discern or describe it. It's seem almost like the Horned Serpent Wonderland, fittingly enough. And then THE ED DWIGHT PARADOX revealed what that black blob was: The D-Day Knight. Or, more precisely, it's what Alcatraz looks like when it's too upset to look like anything.
• NIXON IS GOD starts with a tragic autopsy report, revealing that Ed Dwight killed himself during the Apollo mission, then gives the last recording he made. It seems straight forward...until a second, heavily redacted autopsy report is seen, showing the point blank ray gun wound and an almost completely dismembered or disintegrated body. So, if he simply killed himself from what he heard, what could have possibly caused that?
  • What's more, parts of text were scrolling into view just before the interview cuts to the autopsy. What did Nixon say after the cutoff?
• THE ED DWIGHT PARADOX. Dear god, where to even begin...
  • The confrontation between the Queen and the Knight. She proposes that he should join her as a Lunarian prince. He rejects it, and then expands over the entire world like Alcatraz, killing all Lunarians and destroying their cloud ships. And unlike Alcatraz, this happens in only a few seconds.
    • If the Queen is to be believed, then the Knight in this state has no senses and is barely able to hear or speak. It's a borderline And I Must Scream situation.
  • We finally get to see the Last Son's "Crescent King" form in the flesh. It's not a crescent-headed human body as seen in THE HOUSE IN THE OCEAN; it's a gigantic, four legged thing with a massive crescent in place of a head, constantly emitting all-too-human cries. This isn't a still image, or a drawing. We see it move and we hear its cries, and it is horrifying.
    • And then... it stands upright. It isn't a crescent moon, it's horns. The Horned Serpent lives.
  • Nixon drops a huge bomb of facts on us. Everything that happened in the series is real. The Nixonverse isn't an alternate world like the Deanverse; it was once our world. The Moon God existed, the D-Day Knight existed, the Last Son and the Crescent King existed, all of them existed in some form or another. At least until Nixon erased the past, rendering them all as fiction.
  • While minor, compared to the rest of the episode, the implications that Nixon pulled a Kill and Replace on Ed Dwight really make this Moon God far less benevolent than he first seemed.

---