okay im like really stupid but like

what is half infected paul

You’re not stupid at all! Warning: tgwdlm spoilers

So at the end of the guy who didn’t like musicals, when Paul comes back out & starts singing, a lot of people speculated that he might not have undergone full apotheosis, & is therefore “half infected”

There’s a lot of posts on there from blogs that can explain better than I can & have specific moments to back it up, but I think it’s one of my favorite headcanons for the show, even if it wasn’t my initial interpretation

But yeah when you really start thinking about the implications & listen to the deeper meaning behind some of the lyrics, it’s very easy to come to & support that conclusion. Hope this helps!

MY TAKE ON "IS PAUL ACTUALLY INFECTED"

okay so i know this has been debated to hell and back but yknow? today ive decided to word vomit my opinion like it actually matters so LETS GO

during let it out we see paul gradually becoming more mr. hyde instead of mr. jekyll and beginning to sing, but we dont see any of the infected people actually transfer the disease to him (starkid hasnt neglected showing us how the disease is transferred, so we know its not a matter of them not showing it lmao). he's simply becoming "infected" because of his proximity to the meteor.

here's the theory part: it think that his infection is only temporary. i think that none of the infected people actually transferred the "blue shit" to paul. a part of paul is still normal, buried underneath the exposure to the meteor. because we all know our beige man would NEVER sing (moana doesnt count [but we all saw how he knew all the words, paul you sly devil you]), let alone sing to emma "let me puke in your mouth em, just open your food bin, girl"

now, the aftermath potential. we've seen that there aren't effects that occur from being around infected people (professor hidgens doesnt count, he's a born and bred theater kid, cant change that). so i think that after a little bit in clivesdale, paul slowly starts to return to normal. obviously emma gets infected, i dont think there's any way to bypass that. since paul doesn't have any infection to transfer to her, everyone else will do it anyway lmao

so the alien thing will start to wear off, and paul's quickly realizing "oh god i have to do something about this" and then uhhh the rest of the story i cant think of yet but also paulkins happens idk how but it has to theyre cannonically soulmates<33

If you guys liked the whole "Stephs flannel matches Peter's suspenders and bow tie" thing then this costuming detail is in tgwdlm gonna fuck you up.

When we get our first scene with Paul and Emma, the two are dressed in their respective main outfits. These are the ones people tend to associate with them.

But throughout the show, as they get closer and bond, their outfits become more and more similar. Pretty soon Emma's lost the apron

Then at the professor's house, Paul loses the jacket

and by the time McNamara is infected, Paul has his sleeves rolled up and Emma's bow tie has come undone.

At this point, the two are at their most aesthetically similar, and also the closest they've been the entire show. This is moments before the helicopter crash and their failed kiss. They remain this way for a good chunk of time...until Paul comes back

It's like some fast-paced foreshadowing. Emma remains in her changed state, the same as her character, but Paul is back to square one. He's wearing the same outfit he was when they met, and they no longer align. She doesn't know who he is anymore.

I don't know if this was intentional (and if it was, no one explained it to Jon) but it plays out so damn well.

No, because people keep acting like Grace Chastity being consumed with a lust for the power that Lords in Black provided her doesn't count as a world ending Cataclysm - but it very much does. Not only has she shown little to no empathy for others throughout the entire show and only ever felt bad for lying to authority figures and being horny - but the final song of the Musical is essentially a reprise of Max's Murder Song/Manifesto which places her as a parallel to Max. Max sings about how he's going to kill ALL the Nerdy Prudes and not once but twice tells the audience that it doesn't matter if someone is actually a Nerdy Prude because he makes the rules and gets to decide who is or isn't a nerd etc etc. Grace's take is that she is going to kill all the Dirty Dudes but she's literally singing it to a guy who has, throughout the entire musical, done nothing to indicate he's a pervy/dirty dude and only kissed her after she asked him too. Like Max, Grace Chastity doesn't actually care if someone genuinely fits the framework of her stated victimology, because she has the power so she gets to make the rules.

Honestly it's like some people didn't think about the implications.

I love forever and always, guys

The Clivesdale hospital redecorated, but I'm not sure they thought it through.

Hatchetverse Theory: The Parallels Between Paul (TGWDLM) and Grace (NPMD):

More thoughts and parallel screenshots under the keep reading, part of my #hatchetverse theory posts. Sorry these are all awful screen shots, I'm bad at gifs, but I hope I made my point.

The screenshots are pretty self-explanatory, but the parallels between Paul and Grace, especially with what happens to their characters at the end of their respective musicals, has been living in my head rent free, and I want to talk about it.

I've seen a lot of posts that speculate that the reason Grace went crazy at the end of NPMD is because she's just that blood thirsty and willing to kill, and while her character (at least of what I've seen of her in NPMD and what I've seen of nightmare time) is certainly intense, I wouldn't quite go so far to say she's always been that willing to hurt others, even for what she believes.

In fact, after rewatching NPMD, I realized something. When the kids first go to the Waylon Place, the others are the ones suggesting ways they can violently hurt Max. Pete even calls Grace's plan "goofy" and Richie is the one who suggests beating Max up. Grace is the one who tells them that all she wants to do is teach him a lesson and scare him and rejects their more violent ideas.

But after Max dies? That's when Grace's intensity starts taking a darker turn, and it's not as noticeable as it might be in the other kids because "Grace has always been kinda weird and intense" and the show has been playing that up for laughs since the beginning. But when you look at what happens to Grace in terms of her character's choices, she's the one who suddenly pulls a "bury the bully" plan out of nowhere when she was against even beating him up just a few hours ago. She's the one who suggests lying to the cops and trying to cover up what happened. She's the one who has a prophetic nightmare after the incident at the Waylon Place. That's also the moment when she symbolically loses her WWJD bracelet (though others have already pointed that out).

And if the LIB could infect Paul with spores just because he happened to be in close proximity to the meteor, then they could probably do something similar to any of the kids in the Waylon Place (and you cannot convince me that they were not the ones who collapsed the floorboards in the Waylon Place and killed Max).

But why would they target Grace you ask? Why not one of the other kids? That's a good question. I have a few theories.

The first has to do with what I mentioned before about hatchetverse's history of Webby's powers seeming to favor kids, and the LIB powers struggling to work on kids. We don't know how old most of the kids in NPMD are exactly, but the musical makes a point to tell us several times that Grace is "only 18" (Shaprio says she's a legal adult and will be tried as an adult in court). The musical also makes a point to have this be the Homecoming Dance (not Prom), which is in the fall, so most of the senior students wouldn't have turned 18 yet. We can also make an educated guess that Stephanie has turned 18 and Pete hasn't because she sings "wake me up when you turn 18" during their song. You could combat this by asking why the LIB never address Grace during the summoning and targeted Steph instead, which is a fair point. But interestingly, if you watch Grace, Steph, and Pete during the Summoning, Grace is silent most of the song, but looks completely horrified (especially when they tell her that they want what she cherishes most), despite the fact that from our perspective, the LIB aren't talking to her. She also seems to know exactly what the LIB want from her, because the next scene she's in is when she shows up to save Steph and Pete. During the Summoning, Pete, on the other hand, seems to mostly be involved in the conversation the LIB are having with Stephanie, although Grace also seems to understand what the LIB want from Stephanie. It's possible that this was intentional on the LIB's part, since they can see every timeline (in the "Abstinence Camp" episode of Nightmare Time, Grace gets between Steph, Pete, and Lumberaxe, risking her own life so that Lumberaxe doesn't hurt them. Grace might be willing to lose her own life for what she believes, but she might not be willing to lose her friends' lives. If the LIB know this, they'd likely want to make sure Grace understands that Steph or Pete will die unless she's the one who pays the price).

They have a personal reason for wanting her. In TGWDLM, Pokey hates Paul because...well, Paul doesn't like musicals but bigger picture, Paul resists Pokey's hive mind. Why would the LIB hate Grace? Possibly because she hates evil, the devil, and sin to an extreme degree. It could be a point of pride for the LIB: "we got the guy who didn't like musicals to join our musical and brainwash the world, and we got the girl who didn't like sin to devour souls for us." I've also seen a theory that Paul has some sort of resistance to the LIB because he doesn't like musicals and in a way sort of serves as a "prophet" in TGWDLM by warning others that musicals are bad. Grace arguably serves a similar role to Max in NPMD. She suggests Max becomes a better person "before he ends up in hell", which is ironic because then Max goes on to beat up Pete, which turns the nerds against him, setting off the chain of events that eventually lead him to actually being sent to hell (the black) by Grace. I've also seen some other theories suggesting that the LIB getting Paul in TGWDLM was really about getting Emma (since she was the one who starred in a musical before), and following that logic, it's possible that the LIB killing Max at the Waylon Place was really about getting Grace, because she'd still actually be alive. The LIB might have known this would work if they knew Max and Grace liked each other, and as seen in nightmare time, Grace is willing to risk her own life for her friends, and this might be consistent across several timelines.

Speaking of sacrifice, I know I covered this with the gifs, but the fact that Paul's last act was giving up his life, and Grace's was giving up what was essentially her morality and who she was so they could save their friends, only to have themselves turned into the very monsters they tried to destroy? Absolute tragedy.

But what's also interesting to me is how this happens. The way Grace and Paul both seem to lose control of themselves. With Paul it happens in one song and is more noticeable, but with Grace, it's a lot slower, and the more bad and morally questionable stuff she does, the funnier it is, and her character has been intense and over the top from the beginning, so you almost don't notice the difference in her actions until you rewatch the show. But her and Paul asking "Who am I?" has a similar creepy vibe, the screenshots I found for those moments (pictured below) even ended up looking very similar, though with Paul, you can see more of the fight happening during the song, whereas with Grace, it's more drawn out over the course of the show with these little moments of clarity where she has a complete breakdown.

Then of course there's the whole: What do you want thing?

Why do the LIB want what Grace cherishes most? Why do they want Paul to want anything at all?

And why do they phrase it in the creepiest way possible, asking for "a peek at Paul's soul" and telling him to "give up his choice" and telling Grace that they'll get "whatever they want" and that she'll "be forever in their debt?"

Well, probably because that does seem to be what happens. The most obvious screenshot parallels are probably their final numbers in their shows, which I think speak for themselves. The only unknown is what exactly is happening with the LIB and their whole "what do you want" thing. By taking what someone wants, do they replace that "want" in the person with wanting to serve them? How does that work?

At this point, I'm not sure, and I'm too tired to continue the rant, but I'd be happy to hear anyone else's thoughts on this.

I hope you enjoy Starkid fandom. Thank you for listening to my rants!

I DECIPHERED MORE OF THE BLACK BOOK & FOUND MISS HOLLOWAY LORE.

ART CREDIT: @thirdchildart

TW: RELIGION

SPOILERS: the Black Book, Miss Holloway lore

It’s pretty solid foundation for lore, but please keep in mind that I couldn’t make out everything, and there might be some mistakes. If it’s not, then I’m a fool, and my eyes still hurting from an intense squinting session means nothing.

THIS IS WHAT I’VE GLEAMED:

“[They] warned me I was a fool to seek out the lords and I [?] [?] but I hope searching for [a/s_?] will [?] [wor_?]. [p_?] of Holoy Blane/Blame(?) found a way [?] in Hatchetfield. And I [lo_?] [?] me [?] [?] [?] pages in the [b_?] what [?] [ago/I go?] myself [?] [?] world.”

“And now [?] with my mind and per. [D_?] of a mind. Into the Black and White.”

I know it’s not a lot, but…

Here’s why I think this is pretty bitchin’ lore wise.

If my assumptions are correct, Willabella was warned that she was “a fool to seek out the lords”, and I think the people who warned her were the Hatchetmen. It’s also worth noting the the very first page of the Black Book says, “You are a fool to seek the Black and White.”

She also mentions someone named Holoy Blane/Blame “finding a way” in Hatchetfield. I believe Holoy Blane/Blame (probably pronounced Holly) is Miss Holloway, and that Miss Holloway may have been the first to find a way to directly access the Black and White. In Killer Track, Miss Holloway changes her name to Miss Holiday— an absurdly similar name.

The Hatchetverse is notorious for having characters’ identities blatantly lining up with their names.

For example:

Man in a Hurry = Barry Swift

Greenpeace Girl = Harmony Jones

Lex and Hannah Foster have shit parents.

Grace Chasity is pretty obvious— chastity.

The Hatchetverse is full of religious themes.

Mainly Christianity based, and the name “Holoy Blane/Blame” could be a reference to “being holy and blameless” from the Bible, said by Paul the Apostle.

“He has now reconciled by the death of his body, so that he may present you holy and blameless, and above reproach in his sight.” Colossians 1:22.

Basically, Jesus died in a human body to windshield wipe away our sins, leaving us holy, blameless, and innocent.

There are three reasons for why Jesus’ violent death was the sacrifice needed to save people from their sins. He says the three reasons for Jesus’ painful death in a human body was to, one: present us as holy, for we cannot be holy without his sacrifice on our behalf, two: as we still sin in this life, his sacrifices provides forgiveness for our sins, so we are blameless, and three: something about innocence. I can’t remember, but you get the gist.

So, basically, Miss Holloway’s deal with the Lords mirrors Jesus’ sacrifice.

She sacrificed everything to keep evil at bay. She goes around, helping those who cannot find answers themselves. I’d say she also mirrors what Jesus is supposed to embody, especially considering she can literally resurrect. I would also say the Foster sisters embody the myth as well, especially when you know that Lex and Hannah are both in shop class, and Jesus was a carpenter.

The Black Book page line by line:

Hey I’m gonna try to explain an idea I’ve had

It’s about Ted and Peter Spankoffski and the bow ties.

Originally we see him with this dark red one.

In tgwdlm Ted is still there. Not taken by Tinky yet.

Same with Abstinence Camp in Nightmare Time 2

Nice red one and Ted is still alive in universe.

However, we don’t see or meet Ted in NPMD. Not really mentioned besides Tinky. Now the LiB are aware of a the timelines so it could have been that. Or it could have been Tinky took Ted already and Pete doesn’t like to talk about his brother who went missing. In NPMD he doesn’t have a red bow tie. It’s green plaid.

Same with the suspenders I’m noticing. They match. Anyway, while Pete doesn’t where this classic outfit the whole show, he is wearing something different than his other two iterations.

So what if in his grief over losing his brother, Pete wears the green one that Ted got him. I have head canon that Ted bought him his first bow tie because he wanted it and I just think it’s fun. But then sad when Ted goes missing and Pete only wears the bow tie Ted got him.

And then at the end of NPMD at homecoming Pete’s wearing the red bow tie again.

So it’s not just they didn’t have the red bow tie, right? I can’t put into smart words what it represents. But I feel it means something. I feeeeel it.

so in celebration of NPMD going up on youtube i’ve been rewatching the hatchetfield shows, and in TGWDLM i noticed that jeff blim wears a letterman jacket with a big J on it during La Dee Dah Dah Day… which could possibly stand for Jägerman ?

because NPMD was written first, that means the character of Max Jägerman was already written when they were doing TGWDLM, and if Pete is in TGWDLM as the hot chocolate boy then maybe Max was there too ?

i just had this thought but... exactly HOW many times has paul seen a musical before?? because we know he mentions godspell and brigadoon in tgwdlm but like... for someone who DOESNT like musicals that's kinda a lot??? like i LOVE musicals and i haven't seen ONE irl... pretty sus of u paul ngl

there's such a theme of WANTING in all the hatchetfield verse stuff, particularly in all three main musicals - 'what do you want, paul', 'what tim wants', 'what do you want, steph?' and if i really put some thought into it i could write an entire essay about it all.

it's mainly a major theme in tgwdlm - the aliens need to know what paul's true desires/wants are and are only able to get close enough to infect him once he admits he wants there to be something more with emma. i can't think of a particular scene in black friday aside from 'what tim wants', lmk if y'all can think of smth. npmd, you have the lords in black with their 'whatever we want we get' chant, they want steph to lose what she wants the most, 'what do you want, steph?', and i'm sure there's an example in nightmare time too...

idk it's just such a running theme and i wanna pick at the lang brothers brains so badly bc it fascinates me so much.

Paul and Lex were authorised to use a firearm

Emma, Lex, Becky and Steph have used one

Sometime after Emma (unauthorised) uses it, the helicopter crashes and Paul leaves for the Starlight Theatre where he gets infected

Sometime after Lex (authorised) uses it, they succeed in defeating Wiggly('s cult),

But sometime after Becky (unauthorised) uses it, Hatchetfield gets nuked

Sometime after Steph (unauthorised) uses it, Grace obtains the Black Book and starts devouring the souls of people she deems pervs

In conclusion, if people unathorised to use a firearm could just Not Use One, they might get a happy ending

If there's one thing TGWDLM fans are gonna do, it's think about the implications. And the implications of the opening number are crazy.

So. We know that the show isn't completely chronological since the opening number takes place before the meteor hits. So that song is a sort of "flash forward" moment. But when you think about it, we don't really know how far in the future it takes place.

What we do know is that by the time it's happening, Emma is infected. She has a little solo in it singing about how Paul is pining over a barista

And we know that this is meant to be an infected Emma specifically. Lauren had other characters in the show, if they wanted to avoid the Emma implication they would've just dressed her as one of those.

So we know this is meant to be Emma.

And Emma isn't infected until the very end of the show. She's dragged off stage during the credits. So since she's infected in the opening number, we know the number takes place after the events of the show.

Another important detail is that Paul is infected before Emma. He's the one that passes it on to her.

So back to the opening number, Emma is infected. Which means by just following a simple timeline, Paul must also be infected. He should be singing and dancing, right?

But that's not what happens. Paul misses his entrance.

If Paul is infected, then there's no reason he should be missing his entrance. Furthermore, if he's a part of a hive mind, there's no reason other members of the same hive mind shouldn't know where he is. They are literally all connected by one brain, and yet both Mr. Davidson and Bill express they have no clue where he went.

What I'm saying is that Paul is not infected. He was infected (again, we know that because Emma is infected and he was infected before her) but now he's not anymore.

I'm saying there's a way out of the hive, and Paul found it. That's the only explanation that makes sense given the facts of the situation. Sometime after the events of tgwdlm, Paul is able not only to break out the hive mind, but to hide from it.

And if he broke out, others could do the same. Maybe even Emma.

Edit because a countertheory has emerged: Yes it's possible that everyone is infected the entire time and the show itself is just Pokey replaying the events for the fun of it. But it seems unlikely to me. First of all, each of the Lords in Black has a distinct personality. They all are evil, but within that they seems to fall somewhere on a spectrum of "silly billy" to "prick." For example, Tinky is more of a silly billy. He toys with humans without much of a motive and more for just shits and giggles. But in every instance, Pokey's more on the extreme side of prick.

He's one of the few with an actual motive behind what he does. In Yellowjacket, it's confirmed that Pokotho hates the sound of anyone's voice except for his own. The events of TGWDLM don't happen because Pokey is bored, they happen because he is executing a plan. So I don't think that he would just have them play out their little scenario just to entertain him, especially just one small island? I just feel like he'd be more focused on world domination.

If the theory is that all this is happening after Pokey's already taken over the whole world, no one was successful in stopping him, then yes it's plausible, but still weird. There are a strange amount of things in that show you just think an eldritch god wouldn't include.

Edit 2: New evidence has emerged???

The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals is loosely based off of Invasion of The Body Snatchers. Paul's last name is even a nod to the main character, Matthew. At the end of the film, Matthew survives, and continues living among the infected, pretending to be one of them. And wouldn't that be just such a fun little parallel...

Obviously it doesn't prove anything but the source material doesn't lie folks.

I have this theory that whenever Paul Matthews has a story arc, it ends with him becoming that witch he fears/hates the most. In TGDWLM, obviously, he starts off as the titular guy who doesn’t like musicals and ends by becoming part of the musical theater hive mind. As he’s fighting with himself in “Let It Out”, he has the lines “is my integrity worth anything at all?” and “[I’ve] become what I hated.”

In Forever and Always the real Paul—whose entire arc in TGWDLM shows he believes in self-determination—is cloned, murdered, and has his identity stolen by his clone. Paul 23 goes through a similar arc, where he starts off disliking violence but then kills both Paul and the original Emma.

In [Redacted], Paul dislikes both Melissa and cats. He ends the show by voluntarily giving up his normal life to live with Melissa as her “cat”.

And in the cut idea for a Peanuts the Hatchetfield Pocket Squirrel Nightmare Time that the Langs talked about on the NPMD fundraiser, iirc Paul hated Peanuts because everyone loved him so much so he somehow became?? Peanuts?? Through hypnosis or something? (I can’t find anything about it online and I’m not combing through a 12 hour video lol)

In conclusion, Paul Matthews is moving to Clyvesdale.

the starlight theatre being a black altar makes me think it’s no coincidence pokey’s meteor crashed there in tgwdlm

sure, you could say he aimed it at the theatre or whatever

but i’m thinking it’s more like he was summoned