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armchairaleck · 9 months

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Twin Peaks/Dragon Prince thoughts

Okay so I was never going to write a post that combined two of my sorta diametric interests - namely The Dragon Prince cartoon and Twin Peaks, even tho I've low key considered it.. but then they literally put out a fricken dream scene with Viren, Kpp’Ar, Sparklepuff and Opeli explicitly mirroring Twin Peaks.. so now I guess I will ramble on for a long time about this despite not really having anything sensible to say…

First up – massive spoilers are ahead for both Twin Peaks and TDP Season 5… Twin Peaks is in my view one of the most weird and interesting television shows ever made - like it's very David Lynch, so I guess you'd have to like that vibe - BUT if you haven’t seen it and are at all interested in watching it, and don’t want very essential plot elements spoilt please don’t read below this cut.. IT WILL SPOIL STUFF!

Not sure anyone will be left at this point, but a very condensed speed run of the twin peaks plot for the sake of drawing out some parallels later:

Laura Palmer is found murdered in her small home town where a veritable list of ner do well characters who are possible suspects also reside. Call in special agent Dale Cooper to solve the crime, so far, so police procedural…

This is when the plot starts to go a little left field - as well as the drug smuggling, illegal casino, insurance swindles, arson, doubling crossing, false murders, real murders, faked deaths, real deaths that are just part of everyday life in this quaint little rural US town, a portal exists to a place called the red room or the waiting room and to the white and black lodges which by and large represent forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and hold within them certain denizens who might help or hinder, or just be completely bizarre and unintelligible depending on their inclinations...

One of the evil denizens is Bob - Bob is pretty much the representation of pure evil, he possesses people and encourages them to fill his own base desires.

After a certain amount of investigation the original crime is solved, the presence of Bob and the lodges is revealed and the show gets a whole lot weirder as it moves through the rest of the second series and the third (set 25 years later)

At the end of season 2 the good Dale Cooper goes into the red room and gets stuck in there while an identical version of Cooper emerges but this one not so wholesome and possessed by Bob.

There’s a lot more to it, but I’ll get into the relevant points and possible, tho probably very tentative TDP parallels as they come up.

Anyway to break it down.. in the short scene we see we have Kpp’Ar - here I believe framed mirroring the role of the one armed man, Mike, he could also be framed as the giant theoretically but given the arm/bandage motif I’m going to say he’s the one armed man..

The one armed man used to run with Bob until he saw the light and changed his ways, and he cut off his arm to do this a little drastic perhaps? because he had a tattoo on the arm that linked him to Bob. So a possible parallel here to Kpp’Ar having also realised his dark magic/blood tie with an ancient evil entity and trying to rid himself of it through cutting it out of his arm, go, go my guy. The one armed man acts as one of several pretty obtuse guides for good Cooper in the show.

Will Kpp’Ar come back and do this for Viren? Eh probably not, I can’t even speculate on that sort of thing, so let’s leave that parallel there.

Right, Sir Sparklepuff also gets a little cameo as the the arm/the man from another place.. a cryptic clue giver who speaks unintelligibly and also has some natty dance moves..

So the arm is a fairly ambiguous character, he hangs with the evil denizens, he hangs in the waiting room, he helps, or he doesn’t, it’s pretty vague.. he is the part that was cut out to remove the evil influence, but I’m not sure where that could go if anywhere… Onto Viren, who is framed taking the role of FBI agent Dale Cooper, Cooper goes into the red room for good reasons, he wants to save his girlfriend Annie… unfortunately he doesn’t and instead he gets stuck in there while his doppelganger possessed by Bob escapes and goes on to run merry havoc for the next 25 years…

Bad Cooper is a corrupted figure who can give corpse face Viren a run for his money annnd… he also has black eyes… nice…

This is just how your eyes go when you're evil.. so err.. stay good kids

On the other hand it does look like you have a lot more fun going feral

Meanwhile the good version of Cooper has to escape from the waiting room, and trust me, it takes a long time…

Then we have Opeli as the log lady.. now the log lady, also called Margaret Lanterman, we are given to believe was once abducted as a child by aliens (there’s a pretty strong interest in conspiracy type stuff in twin peaks without it ever completely leaning in and going there, well I guess it does, let’s just say there are a lot of things beneath the surface) Margaret grows up just fine though, but on the eve of her wedding night to a fireman there is a fire in the woods, and hubby to be goes and gets himself killed fighting the flames. Margaret takes a log from the scene and caries it round with her ever after with it being heavily implied that the spirit/soul of her almost husband is in there and passes her messages with regards to some of the goings on in the town.

Hey Opeli guess what? Rayla's breaking into Viren's study... ahem..

Like anyway why did Opeli get this role? I have no idea, she's the only available female character?? Anyway Opeli says backwards the line - the jelly tart you like is going to come back in style.. the log lady does not say this in the show, but there is a pivotal scene where all the murder suspects in the Laura Palmer case are gathered together and the guilty party is approached by a white lodge denizen and told that gum you like is going to come back in style.. that's how they find out whodunnit.

So the premise of Twin Peaks is that the guilty party is also shown to be possessed by evil entity Bob and it raises some interesting questions within the fandom regarding an individual’s culpability for their crimes or whether the possession was the root cause of them and I feel like I can’t really dance around it anymore so I will say again if this show sounds interesting and you want to watch it unspoiled with regards to the murder STOP READING HERE.. also I will be going onto the darker themes of the show and you are warned they are kinda dark…

...

Right okay it was her father, Laura’s father, Leyland, possessed by Bob raped and abused her for several years and then murdered her and others when it became clear she knew it was him.

Now every time Laura was abused in the show she sees the face of Bob not her father. There is debate whether this is trauma projection, whether it is in fact evil entity Bob controlling the father’s actions… I mean there’s a lot of interesting stuff to go into, but I won’t, because I only want to look at the possession angle here.

Okay, onto the topic of possession and free will, specifically with regards to Viren and also dark mages in general.. so we have seen Aaravos possess Callum explicitly, based on one use of dark magic, whether he was able to do this due to Callum’s proximity to the mirror... not sure? He also possesses Viren very obviously on a couple of occasions, but they also have the blood tie... so it's likely that dark magic allows Aaravos to exert his influence on those who practise it as has been explored by others.

Anyway there is another factor I have kinda been low key wondering about - whether the staff of Ziard has certain possession/persuasion potential.. now I’m not going to come out and say the staff holds sway over Viren and tells him what to do because this puts a certain absolution on Viren’s actions that I don’t think is justified by the narrative BUT I do also think it would be kinda cool if Aaravos with his links to the stars and future predictions had a way of seeing what might happen and engineering his own deliverance through the push/pull of the staff.

Not betting any hard cash on this theory...

We don’t know when Viren first gets the staff, I have to re-watch that dream sequence and possibly wait for puzzle house because I have at least some thoughts it might be what Claudia finds in there.. but he doesn’t have it in the Puzzle House pages I’ve seen and he does before Magma Titan because he takes it with him..

So... I don’t know if there is a slim possibility that while the staff might not possess a mage it might subtly lead them towards an end goal - slaying an archdragon say, who holds the mirror window into Aaravos’s prison, and thereby allowing the dark mage to come into possession of said mirror and thereby setting the whole train of freeing Aaravos in motion..

Now fine, this is a bit of a stretch, could easily be Viren is simply fuelled by his desire to kill a dragon out of revenge/hubris a desire to rekindle his relationship with Harrow (ahem) but I kinda like the idea that there is a very subtle pull leading him in that direction through the staff, and Aaravos does at least seem pleased to notice that staff in his possession, while Viren visibly shies from it throughout much of s4…

This could mirror a little with the possession/influence themes of Twin Peaks - there is a ‘good’ Cooper and a ‘bad’ Cooper, but they are really the same Cooper and it is the flaws in the good that allow for the evil influence of the bad to take hold - Cooper has a weakness for trying to save women in peril, it gets him in trouble… Viren seems to have a weakness for power and doing anything for his family, however dangerous, however vile - personally I don’t really like to read stuff purely in terms of a good/bad white/black dichotomy.. but I do like character flaws leading to the wrong path and imperilling your soul.

This all inclines me towards the Aaravos is pure evil and the Prometheus and even Lucifer stuff was just a bit of a tease. In Twin Peaks the unleashing or at least the amplification of evil in the world is linked very explicitly in one episode to the dropping of the atomic bomb, this is framed as a cataclysmic event during which mankind press the button on their own potential annihilation...

s3 episode 8 - I don't think will ever be surpassed for am I hallucinating or is there something very weird on my tv at 4am vibes

I know there have been some links between dark magic and nuclear power parallels made by other people but I can’t remember the details and it has always been something I’ve kinda chewed around a bit without having any specific thoughts or beliefs on, other than ouch corruption looks a lot like radiation burns… but I can see an analogy for something that is created to both serve humanity giving us a fairly unlimited power source, while also giving us the ability to pretty much obliterate ourselves and the planet which - tbh best not to think about how close that has already been...

Dark magic is clearly a force that can be used to benefit humanity, healing, feeding 100,000 people etc, etc.. but it is also being lined up as something that holds its own peril, that probably isn’t a power to be wielded by inconsistent, unreliable and sleep deprived humans, and it’s been given to them by Aaravos? Like I think that has not yet been explicitly stated in cannon but the signs are all there.. so hmmm..

Anyway all told this has led me down quite a few lines of thinking that I don’t really have any definitive conclusions for because they are by definition not issues that can be neatly tied up with a bow... at least not by me.

Then Viren is pretty much comatose for the rest of the season much like Coop/Dougie is season 3 of Twin Peaks.. rip my guy...

Viren having the standard reaction of anyone trying to work out wtf is going on in Twin Peaks

Anyway I have never seen any fellow Twin Peaks fans out in the Dragon Prince wilds, but if you’re out there please come and rip this to shreds if you want.. I have a sieve like memory and I’m usually pretty wrong about most stuff, plus I wrote this after 4 hours sleep due to the drop time, sooo please excuse any mistakes...

#tdp s5 spoilers #twin peaks spoilers #like I cannot stress just how many spoilers are here..#while I know this will interest probably no one else I doubt I’ll be thinking about much else..#the dragon prince #twin peaks #tdp viren #kpp'ar #dark magic #I am in peak niche interests somehow colliding heaven..#I also now know why I don't write my thoughts.. it takes so long :(#thoughts

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