Maeltopia - A New World of Horror Fiction

Maeltopia - A New World of Horror Fiction is home to voiced horror serials, each with its own season and episode numbers, all set inside an invented world that shares the feed's name. Episodes open with the same promo line: brave the forbidden and embrace the darkness. Obscuary follows a small group through places where darkness is something people live in and worship. They enter the home of the Noxites, who worship a dark god said to live in the first darkness, and find a Noxite child in a closet. They examine a crater in a glade and the ruined body of a man in a torn uniform. They watch black-clad soldiers kill Noxites and throw the bodies into fire, and then spot a mass of strange machines that looks like preparation for war. The characters have unusual abilities. Gretchen can learn about the dead, though only when she is close to where they died. One voice says it has spoken through bodies that were not its own, and there is talk of controlling the dead. Horace is the one the group protects: he is sent to a bedroom and told to put on headphones and take his pills, and later there is talk of what happened to him. Other plot threads include a dossier on a man whose power is scrubbing information, and an argument over how to capture him. The talk keeps all this grimness from wearing thin. The characters swear constantly and joke under pressure. Vance goes looking for a Chardonnay in a Noxite home, and when Miss Vespertine is told she could find beauty in the darkness if she tried, she replies that the speaker could find a cliff. 'The Sleep Wake Cycle |S3| Ep.75' has a different texture. In one strand, a wisecracking captive complains about his accommodations while he is hooked up to a machine. Another is first-person narration from inside a broken mind, where a floating balloon pops to reveal a note on a giant candy wrapper, signed by a 'sweetest brother'. Here the drama leans on interior monologue and dream logic, which the Obscuary excerpts do not. The feed also carries production news: 'Obscuary |S1| Ep.45' announces that Vance Salowan will now be voiced by Steven Zivic and Gretchen Harlow by Jesse Van Hove. 'Feed Drop - Chat with Johnny Fuent' drops the drama for conversation about how a character's borrowed powers grow and fade, and what psychic ability she might gain next, with dreamwalking offered as one guess. For more of the setting, the episodes point to written mythos pieces, world maps and art on Patreon, and to art and animations on YouTube. The back catalog is deep and the stories build on each other. Expect heavy swearing, killing and mangled bodies throughout.