Finally, in episode six out of seven, we meet our secret protagonist. Not the narrator of the podcast, but - as we’ll find out in the next episode for certain - the person who set the events of the resistance against slurry into motion.

This one is pretty self-explanatory. I’m not totally pleased with it, it kinda feels like a clip show. It’s mainly an exposition dump. It does help contextualize a lot of the show up until this point though! So that’s nice at least.

Mormonism, more properly the LDS Church, is one of the weirdest religions to achieve something like world religion status other than Scientology. It’s a homegrown American movement that claims an entire alternate history for the American continents, erasing the lived and living history of the Indigenous peoples of this part of the world and replacing it with a kind of fanfiction where peoples from the Bible simply shifted locations and continued on from where the good book left them. It was also founded about ten minutes from my hometown.

This is the ideal episode of Roseworld to me. It is connected to the broader story, but it works well on its own. It incorporates horror and the retrofuturist trappings of the setting to great effect. I’m pretty proud of this one.

Tahawus is the first of many bits of obscure American history we visit in this story, other than Roseland itself. Also called “Adirondac,” it was a mining town embedded in the wilderness of the Adirondack Mountains. When the mine started to dry up, it became something like a resort or private club for wealthy outdoorsmen to station themselves at while they hiked and hunted and did whatever else it was they liked to do. Even this eventually dissolved, and the town sat unoccupied and rotting for many years until, in the 2000s, many of the vacant structures were destroyed and the site was renovated into a small tourist attraction, centered around the now non-functional forge that once was used for smelting iron ore.

Let’s get right into it.