I've talked about this topic a few times in the beyond-canon channel but im compilating it here to make it easier to link back.
1.In her introduction, Lylac mentions her interest in “ancient satirical weapons”(p. 802), which not only confirms the fact that satyrs bombed nymphs (as we see later on the comic) but it also implies many of Lylac’s bomb collection come from picking up old satyr bombs she found. In P.807 we see Lylac has a demon core, the third nuclear weapon intended to be dropped in Japan, the first implication that in this world, the nuclear weapons were developed by the japanese to use against others.
2. In the o9-2025 Artist commentary the following is mentioned: "Haven: Ly’lac’s house! In our notes it was repeatedly referred to as a castle but our final design looks more like a wizards tower. It looks like a burgeoning sprout emerging from the sea. A similar shape appears on Ly’lac’s face when she uses magic! The surrounding area is a field of spikes in a candy colored sea. Visually it brings to mind the long-term nuclear waste warning marker “Landscape of Thorns”. In some of my older notes her house was going to look like a nuclear cooling tower."
This is the Landscape of Thorns, a proposed way of marking nuclear waste, and what Lylac's neighborhood is based of. Which interestingly, also recontextualizes the word "thorns" which is important when you consider how much it is associated with Rose, including in the Thorns of Oglogoth, the wand that Lylac's Latchkey Wand is clearly a modification of.
In the same commentary we have concept art of how lylac's home look like from aereal vision:
And while i understand concept art isnt nescessarily final, i do find the shape extremely intesrestinng: Doen't it resemble an Atoll? Which while it is a natural formation, one of the if not straighr up the most famous Atoll is the Bikkini Atoll, the place where the USA used to trest nuclear weapons, and i believe thats the one this might be based off, specially when you consider the Landscape of Thorns.
3. In page 863 we have "Ly'lac: Return suspiciously radioactive pearl to the bed of your beautifully large clam." interesting way to describe it.
4. Of course, on page 888 we have Peruseum Librarium, in which the book "Our Checkered Past" : "These were times of violent unrest, ecological devastation, loss of biodiversity, and even gnarlier scenes that transpired in the coastal warzones. There's a bit in here about the targeting of nymph spawning beaches that really tugs at your hearts-strings. You're not a nymphathizer or anything, but come on, they were just babies... Luckily scarcity, energy crises, war with those salt-slurping nymphs, and other such problems have long since been completely addressed by your now-perfect and unimpeachably ascended society. Those who have learned from history never have to worry about repeating it ever again! Praise be to cold fusion and savvily-maneuvered truces." This is where we explicitly learn about the war crimes done to satyrs against nymphs, Including Bombing spawning beaches. Besides the racism, the war does seem to have be connected to energy crises, after all, satyrs are an extremely technological society, so they need a source of energy right? Well when you consider the previous motif of lylacs home being cooling tower shaped... and the other association of nymphs, satyrs and radioactivity.... Plus the fact that their problem seems to have been solved by cold fusion which according to wikipedia is " hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature. It would contrast starkly with the "hot" fusion that is known to take place naturally within stars, artificially in hydrogen bombs, and within prototype fusion reactors; all of which occur at temperatures of millions of degrees". So their problem did get solved by creating a form of nuclear energy. Interesting.
5. In page 941, Lylac confirms that she lives right near a spawning beach, a primary target of satyr bombing during the war. "Obviously, babies come from the beach right over there. Well, not ALL of them, but it is a popular burial ground.Everyone knows that new nymph mothers haul their freshly laid clutch up onto the surface and abandon them to their fate, deposited snugly into a hand-dug frytrench.
" Im interested in some words here:
- burial ground is referencing the fact their bury their eggs, the fact many nymphs died there, the nymphs over all connected to death
- if burial ground is a wordplay, could it be the same for frytrench? referencing both the trenchs of the beachs and trenchs used in military conflicts?
6. In page 1020 Lylac says "Ah, the dropoff. Lots of bittersweet memories associated with this place. You heard it was a great hangout spot until all those kids and their caretaker got eaten here. The Caretaker doesn't like to talk about it much. Survivor's guilt.". After the previous wordplay, I would also like to propose that The Drop Off is a wordplay that references both the actual dropoff present in beachs and also Drop Off, the place where you drop a bomb at.
7. In page 1066, "TC: i've døne my fair share øf playing with singularities but remøte spatiøtempøral quantumødulation is particularly tøuchy stuff, sø i løcked it før everyøne but an especially select few." And in one of the FRAF easter eggs,after typing "blackstar" it says: yøu generate øne tiny, perfectly cøntained black høle and everyøne starts calling yøu blackstar. nøt that i’m cømplaining! it’s basically the sickest manthrønym that ever gøt thøught up.". Interesting, could this be related to all the motif of nuclear fusion?
8. in page 1074, "the lurid tangle of striping stars that surrounds you was sewn together by one of those sad little orphanites once upon a time. She was armed with nothing but a doctrine of unabashed purehearted nymph love and a terribly horrific weapon of mass destruction, callously cast away into the trenches like so much radioactive waste, corrupting all it touched; in this way, she and the weapon were very much alike." and a few pages later, "with each addition to her alluvial labyrinthine form so grew the power of her inkstone. It grew so incredibly dense and impossibly dark that it began to shine bright as the morning star."
9. page 906 artist commentary "DIRK: I mean, this is just what being a passionate person is like. He’s doing his fucking best. Caring on a nuclear level, so much so that the shades you so flippantly deride us for may be the one thing standing between everyone and Chernobyl."
If you remember anything else, please add it in this thread. but after all this I'd like to tell my own thoughts:
- Lylac's beach either had a nuclear bomb dropped on it, or, it was a testing site for nuclear energy or dumping of nuclear waste. Either way it is/was radioactive
- Isnt it weird that the Council Of High Prophets would choose to hide the Uninymph in such a seemingly bad place? not very far from a spawning beach and an elder's home? and where seemingly babies would ned up at? If we consider that perhaps it was already a radioactive and thus inhospitable by the time the Council Reclaimed the Uninymph then suddenly it becomes a very smart choice. After all, what better place to hide something than where people physically cant go? This might even explain the overall mutated look of the Narwhal, as the blood pumping explain how he maintaned alive but nescessarily his size and appearence.
- what does this all might say about the combiner and her weapon of massive destruction, that is even compared to radioactive waste?
- if Satyrs use nuclear energy, what does this say about TC and Equius, who lives in a massive super technological house with a bunch of computers and technology capable of creating black holes? what this say about the involvement or lack of, of Equius during great part of the conflict?
Either way, theres def much more that one can say regarding this topic, specially if you consider the fact that the satyrs are so heavily japan inspired, and how many of the weapons, events and technology here were developed in the context of WW2, some made with direct intentions of using it against Japan.
