FK rumination
Jan. 25th, 2026 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annavereI'm about halfway through season one and I find LaCroix creepy to an unusually visceral degree. This is a bit surprising to me, because I normally have a weakness for villains - but I like them with enough human qualities to relate to, to explore their moral choices and failings, and LaCroix is on another level entirely. Nigel Bennett does a great job portraying him, but if I was going to compare him to another vampire, it would be the older archetypes, the plague carriers.
I've been lurking in the HL discord, and there's a lot of discussion of the Horsemen going on, so it's on my mind, and the thing is, the Horsemen never felt very apocalyptic to me. They felt like four louts raising hell. LaCroix feels like true pestilence made flesh, a malignancy creeping at Nick's heels, a shadow filling the space where a man once lived and died (yes, I'm reading A Wizard of Earthsea right now, so pursuant shadows are on my mind). Genuinely, completely unsettling. More of a vampire than most vampires.
I've been lurking in the HL discord, and there's a lot of discussion of the Horsemen going on, so it's on my mind, and the thing is, the Horsemen never felt very apocalyptic to me. They felt like four louts raising hell. LaCroix feels like true pestilence made flesh, a malignancy creeping at Nick's heels, a shadow filling the space where a man once lived and died (yes, I'm reading A Wizard of Earthsea right now, so pursuant shadows are on my mind). Genuinely, completely unsettling. More of a vampire than most vampires.
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Date: 2026-01-27 05:42 am (UTC)It brings to mind the city of Akrotiri on Santorini, which is often touted as the basis for the Atlantis myth. Atlantis was well-known for having advanced technology. In the modern world, we imagine Atlantis as having laser guns and flying cars -- because that's our idea of advanced technology. It turns out that what Akrotiri had was indoor plumbing with s-bends in the pipes.
Edited to finish the thought: The idea of the "advanced technology" got immortalized divorced from the reference point of what "advanced" meant. Likewise, the Horseman could have had a reputation of wealth, armies, and kingdoms from the perspective of people 5000 years ago. How the concepts were understood changed over the millennia, while the original reference points got completely lost.
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Date: 2026-01-27 05:41 pm (UTC)