- 5,460
- 12,415
After giving it careful thought, I have decided to become worse.
As the title suggests, I won't tackle high-tiers all that much this time. This will also double as a sort of Q&A thread.
To correct that, and taking advantage of the fact much of the characters' powers spring from the same source, a friend of mine (Credits to her) and I have made this page, which compiles every showing related to the usage of the ethereal fire/electricity in the series, with all the scans and references needed placed alongside them. Now, as funny as an "Electricity Manipulation (Twin Peaks)" page sounds, I don't particularly like the idea of making a verse-specific ability page for such a niche verse, so I'm leaning towards either making it into a blog post, or copy and paste those justifications into all of the relevant profiles. The latter would come at the cost of making all of them horribly same-y, but such a thing is unfortunately unavoidable, in this case.
As an addendum, I'd like to ask for the input on a particular thing which I honestly don't really know how to classify. To quote the sandbox I've linked:
So, to boil things down: The Lodge Spirits are stated to be abstract in nature. More specifically, they are ideas that appear under the guises of men to interact with, and influence people of the physical world, and to substantiate that, the realms they inhabit are further identified with "the deepest parts of the unconscious." Of course, they are also above and outside of the physical realm entirely, and in fact the interaction between their realm and the human mind is heavily implied to be the cause of the mortal plane's existence:
Normally, this would lead to the conclusion that manipulating the electricity is Type 1 Conceptual Manipulation, since it can manipulate conceptual spaces that exist independently from reality, and this is what I did when I first made the profiles. However, I also noticed this bit in our page for the ability, which specifies that, ontop of existing independently from reality, these concepts also have to directly govern it to qualify for Type 1:
vsbattles.fandom.com
Which does not seem to be the case with the Lodge Spirits. A good example of that would be the case of BOB, who straight up ******* dies with no adverse effects on the material universe. So, yeah, given that, they seem to be ideas that exist above and outside of reality, but don't directly shape or govern it at all, and so I have no clue of what to rate that as under the Conceptual Manipulation types. Furthermore, since the higher types seem to exclusively deal with the manipulation of Universals, the answer is likely that they do not qualify for those (And are more aligned with the current definition of Type 3), but I'll put this question out here anyway, so someone more knowledgeable than me can answer it.
In my view, the rating itself is fine, but it is currently applied in a bit of a scuffed way. More specifically, I refer to The Woodsmen. For the basic reasoning behind why the High 6-A statement shouldn't refer to them, I can point you to the events towards the ending of Part 8, where one of them had to hijack a radio station to place an incantation over a small town and cause everyone in it to fall asleep, something obviously not very suggestive of planetary-scale Reality Warping.
For some further justifications, I believe it should be pointed out that, throughout most of the Woodsmen's appearances, it is made fairly clear that their control over the electricity isn't as powerful as that of the named spirits. For instance, they are always shown directly channeling it through machinery (Or whatever those things actually are), contrary to BOB and MIKE, who can do it just by speaking, or clapping their hands.
So, given most of their other feats in the physical world are just unquantifiable Reality Warping and/or Spacetime Manipulation, they should just be rated at 9-C, since they can tear heads off and squish skulls pretty easily.
I outlined the basic reasoning for the Nonexistent Physiology in thus Imgur album. Pretty straightforward, but to outline the conclusion in practical terms, I'll first have to do a brief outline of Twin Peaks' spiritual cosmology:
Basically, when it comes to the realms which the Spirits inhabit, the setting is seemingly arranged in terms "depth." For instance, the spiritual plane is described as a dimension that perhaps stands "deeper" and underlies the material one, which is confirmed in the third season, where the Red Room is shown to exist underneath the physical world. The starry realm identified with "nonexistence," in turn, is shown to be underneath the Red Room, being thus deeper than it, in the same way it is deeper than the normal universe.
So, given that, the Spirits' Nonexistent Physiology should be classified as Materialistic Nonexistence, with its "aspects" being Spiritual and Mental Nonexistence. Now, to get into the Nonexistent Physiology of the verse's god-tiers, I'll have to extend the cosmology explanation a bit.
Basically, the aforementioned "nonexistence" is not the highest realm of the cosmology, and deeper still than it, there is yet another level, the purple sea. This place is basically completely external to the whole setting outlined above, and the beings in there perceive it all as a movie. Not only that, it's also the home of the creators of Laura Palmer, who has the following stated about her:
Which is a direct parallel to this:
Bottom line is that the "story" Laura is at the root of is said to encompass "The All," and is beyond the fire, which as shown by the page above, is synonimous with the electricity permeating everything, and encroaches both existence and nonexistence ("That which is and is not"). And the purple sea, being where Laura's innermost divine essence was created before being sent to the lower worlds, would likewise partake in that same nature. Supported by how the Fireman (The most prominent character shown dwelling in there) perceived the events of Part 18 as part of the aforementioned movie, said events having involved the electricity itself dying (Something which the second quote posted above directly mentions)
Moreover, there is also this statement:
Which comes from The Secret History of Twin Peaks, which is also the source of these:
Which the writer, Mark Frost, then commented on in an interview:
www.ttbook.org
In summary (As you might already have gathered), existence (and nonexistence) is part of a dream in Twin Peaks, and beyond that dream, there is only a state completely beyond words and descriptions, as well as all conceptions ("God," "Science" and even "Meaning" itself being given examples), which all "melt into silence." The book then links this nature to a mystery which can never truly be known or "cracked," and that will always remain just out of reach to any label one might try and attach to it, meaning that it is impossible to truly refer to its essence, and any attempt to point at it will just be referring to something lesser, instead.
You might ask what the dream's "meaning" being described as such has to do with any of the cosmology, and for the answer to that, refer back to this quote:
Basically, the dream's "meaning" in this case, is metaphorical, because existence is equated to a puzzle made of many parts: The spiritual realm is the clues to solving the puzzle, and the physical world is a "smokescreen' created by the human mind misinterpreting these clues. What the "everything melts into silence" statement is referring to would, in turn, naturally be the answer to the puzzle.
This bit of information is currently the crux of the god-tiers' High 1-A rating, but it obviously has applications in regards to their Nonexistent Physiology, too. Given all of the above, they would have Idealistic Nonexistence as their nature type, and in regards to their aspect type, they'll just get all of them, I guess.
Okay, so, to explain that, I'll have to talk about some of what happens in The Return: So, basically, towards the end of Part 17, the protagonist, Dale Cooper, resolves to try and go back in time to prevent the murder of Laura Palmer at BOB's hands (The event which kickstarted everything in the main series) from ever happening in the first place, and to do this, he heads towards Phillip Jeffries, who is now a time machine of sorts.
Jeffries then works on "finding" the specific time period Cooper wants to travel to, and for that, he manifests some random out of steam. Eventually, those symbols become an "8" figure, which he flips on its side and then runs a black dot through, and the point where the dot stops is the point in time where Cooper will be sent to. Jeffries flipping the symbol on its side is not just a non-sequitur, for the matter, since in the following episode, a scene from the first one repeats, except with its directions literally reversed.
As seen in the video above, before allowing Cooper to get sent back in time, he also makes mention of "an unnoficial version," which one of the latter's friends will remember if he is ever seen again. The second book, the Final Dossier, then elaborates a bit more on that and basically confirms that he was referring to a new timeline where Laura Palmer was never found dead, but just disappeared instead, which resulted in most of the series' events not happening in the same way to begin with, while the only ones who remember the original course of events are people not from the town of Twin Peaks.
These two conflicting accounts being called "Official" and "Unnoficial" versions makes perfect sense, since, after all, reality is canonically a film in Twin Peaks, and is seen as such by higher beings, further emphasized by Laura's corpse dissolving into Television Static and the timeline changing from black-and-white to colored once Cooper successfully changes it.
So the "officiality" of the timelines did indeed change, but not on Jeffries' behest. He just enabled Cooper to be sent into the nonexistent timeline at the reverse side of the "8," and the latter's actions altered the narrative from then on. In fact, it was not even Jeffries who sent Cooper to that point, it was MIKE, again as shown in the video linked above. From what can be gathered, Phillip just acted as an anchor of sorts in that whole ritual.
Given that, I'd also suggest we just delete Jeffries' profile. He is genuinely just a guy erased from existence and driven to insanity by the sheer disorientation caused by the realm he is in, and who is also incapable of doing anything on his own. There is nothing worth indexing with him.
Which essentially boils down to the notion that, at the end of it, all doubles, and triples, and so on, are ultimately just a product of mirrors and reflections, and that something that is truly "One" exists everywhere (Notice the use of the term "we" in the phrasing), which is just an allusion to the concept of an all-pervading unity, in accordance with the series' recurring theme of opposite extremes being simply divisions of a single thing.
Something else that is used as the lynchpin of this key is this scene, where Cooper guides a dying man using a passage from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, meant to be recited to those who are about to pass away, and in it he makes mention of a "naked, spotless intellect" that exists as a perfect, transparent vacuum with no center or circumference.
The man in question sees the light as he dies, and according to The Secret History, every single thing humanity has ever seen, thought of, or pondered about is ultimately real in some way, because all of these ideas are received due to influence from the spiritual plane and realms beyond. So those two descriptions would by definition refer to something existent within the setting, but that doesn't make them any less vague or lacking in information. Moreover, indexing it as if it was a higher form of the two god-tiers is extremely presumptuous, since they would only be parts of it in the same way all other multiplicities are.
If you want a concrete example of something of this sort that has been removed from the wiki before, then I'd cite The Nameless Mist, which was likewise an exceedingly vague figure in Lovecraft's Mythos that was removed due to almost total lack of information regarding it, which made us unable to verify if it was even a character to begin with as opposed to some abstract state, something which very much applies here (Whether or not the fact that they both share the naming pattern of "The [Adjective] [Noun]" is just a funny coincidence is up to debate).
Of course, "God" in the context of Twin Peaks is also explicitly said to not be an individual entity so much as an all-encompassing wholeness that lies at the core of every thing, but it, at the very least, plays a much more immediate role in the setting, and actually interacts and communicates through manifestations, as seen here:
So, all in all, that key ought to go.
Low Outerverse level (Exists beyond the physical world, which is simply a reductive misinterpretation of the spiritual realm, described as a "magical smokescreen" or an illusory "veil" concealing a reality stated to be deeper than, and to underlie all of spacetime, being a world of the unconscious at the source of all scientific, philosophical and inspirational ideas. The physical world, in turn, has been stated to consist of a fractal of infinite higher vibrational worlds, each of which exists as a "higher quality" of existence than the previous one, and allows individuals to see the entirety of a lower world's timeline unfolding from the outside, as well as to travel through it at will)
Outerverse level (Resides in realms of nonexistence described as being located "nowhere," which stand on a deeper level than the Red Room in the same way it underlies the physical world at large, to the point that time, which is still present in a non-linear, unstable form within the former, is completely absent from them)
High Outerverse level (Stands in a state beyond definition, words, labels and categorization entirely, partaking in a "mystery" where all words and meaning "melt into silence," and which always remains impenetrable and "just out of reach" to any kind of description or association, greater than anything that can be known and conceptualized regarding it, even to the entities of the Lodge, who are a part of the Fireman's creation and participate in the process established by him just as humans do)
For reference, the bolded part is off of this quote:
So, that is all.
As the title suggests, I won't tackle high-tiers all that much this time. This will also double as a sort of Q&A thread.
About the Powers and Abilities
By going through a quick stroll through the verse's profiles, one might notice that there is a notable absence of scans or justifications in the Powers and Abilities sections, which is very, very bad for such a high-tier series. The explanation blog I've written technically explains much of it, but it is a bit large and intersects with things not strictly related to the verse's tiering, so it's not exactly fair for someone to have to read through the whole thing in search for the justifications behind an ability or two.To correct that, and taking advantage of the fact much of the characters' powers spring from the same source, a friend of mine (Credits to her) and I have made this page, which compiles every showing related to the usage of the ethereal fire/electricity in the series, with all the scans and references needed placed alongside them. Now, as funny as an "Electricity Manipulation (Twin Peaks)" page sounds, I don't particularly like the idea of making a verse-specific ability page for such a niche verse, so I'm leaning towards either making it into a blog post, or copy and paste those justifications into all of the relevant profiles. The latter would come at the cost of making all of them horribly same-y, but such a thing is unfortunately unavoidable, in this case.
As an addendum, I'd like to ask for the input on a particular thing which I honestly don't really know how to classify. To quote the sandbox I've linked:
So, to boil things down: The Lodge Spirits are stated to be abstract in nature. More specifically, they are ideas that appear under the guises of men to interact with, and influence people of the physical world, and to substantiate that, the realms they inhabit are further identified with "the deepest parts of the unconscious." Of course, they are also above and outside of the physical realm entirely, and in fact the interaction between their realm and the human mind is heavily implied to be the cause of the mortal plane's existence:
Normally, this would lead to the conclusion that manipulating the electricity is Type 1 Conceptual Manipulation, since it can manipulate conceptual spaces that exist independently from reality, and this is what I did when I first made the profiles. However, I also noticed this bit in our page for the ability, which specifies that, ontop of existing independently from reality, these concepts also have to directly govern it to qualify for Type 1:
Conceptual Manipulation
Conceptual Manipulation is the ability to manipulate, create, and/or destroy abstract concepts. This ability has a variety of applications, ranging from not combat-applicable to incredibly dominating. Conceptual Manipulation involves the manipulation of concepts, and not the universe directly...
vsbattles.fandom.com
Which does not seem to be the case with the Lodge Spirits. A good example of that would be the case of BOB, who straight up ******* dies with no adverse effects on the material universe. So, yeah, given that, they seem to be ideas that exist above and outside of reality, but don't directly shape or govern it at all, and so I have no clue of what to rate that as under the Conceptual Manipulation types. Furthermore, since the higher types seem to exclusively deal with the manipulation of Universals, the answer is likely that they do not qualify for those (And are more aligned with the current definition of Type 3), but I'll put this question out here anyway, so someone more knowledgeable than me can answer it.
About High 6-A
So, currently, High 6-A is given to the spirits' manifestations in the physical realm off of this scan, which pretty much states that, if a human magician manages to tap into their power, he will gain enough magical strength to "reorder the earth to his liking," and given what I've talked about so far, it is fairly obvious this doesn't refer to any physical effect but to Reality Warping instead.In my view, the rating itself is fine, but it is currently applied in a bit of a scuffed way. More specifically, I refer to The Woodsmen. For the basic reasoning behind why the High 6-A statement shouldn't refer to them, I can point you to the events towards the ending of Part 8, where one of them had to hijack a radio station to place an incantation over a small town and cause everyone in it to fall asleep, something obviously not very suggestive of planetary-scale Reality Warping.
For some further justifications, I believe it should be pointed out that, throughout most of the Woodsmen's appearances, it is made fairly clear that their control over the electricity isn't as powerful as that of the named spirits. For instance, they are always shown directly channeling it through machinery (Or whatever those things actually are), contrary to BOB and MIKE, who can do it just by speaking, or clapping their hands.
So, given most of their other feats in the physical world are just unquantifiable Reality Warping and/or Spacetime Manipulation, they should just be rated at 9-C, since they can tear heads off and squish skulls pretty easily.
About the Nonexistent Physiology
As most of you probably already noticed, Nonexistent Physiology was revised, and the new types for it are notably more varied than the old classification, meaning the Twin Peaks profiles are notably outdated on that matter. So, it is probably time to tackle that.I outlined the basic reasoning for the Nonexistent Physiology in thus Imgur album. Pretty straightforward, but to outline the conclusion in practical terms, I'll first have to do a brief outline of Twin Peaks' spiritual cosmology:
Basically, when it comes to the realms which the Spirits inhabit, the setting is seemingly arranged in terms "depth." For instance, the spiritual plane is described as a dimension that perhaps stands "deeper" and underlies the material one, which is confirmed in the third season, where the Red Room is shown to exist underneath the physical world. The starry realm identified with "nonexistence," in turn, is shown to be underneath the Red Room, being thus deeper than it, in the same way it is deeper than the normal universe.
So, given that, the Spirits' Nonexistent Physiology should be classified as Materialistic Nonexistence, with its "aspects" being Spiritual and Mental Nonexistence. Now, to get into the Nonexistent Physiology of the verse's god-tiers, I'll have to extend the cosmology explanation a bit.
Basically, the aforementioned "nonexistence" is not the highest realm of the cosmology, and deeper still than it, there is yet another level, the purple sea. This place is basically completely external to the whole setting outlined above, and the beings in there perceive it all as a movie. Not only that, it's also the home of the creators of Laura Palmer, who has the following stated about her:
Which is a direct parallel to this:
Bottom line is that the "story" Laura is at the root of is said to encompass "The All," and is beyond the fire, which as shown by the page above, is synonimous with the electricity permeating everything, and encroaches both existence and nonexistence ("That which is and is not"). And the purple sea, being where Laura's innermost divine essence was created before being sent to the lower worlds, would likewise partake in that same nature. Supported by how the Fireman (The most prominent character shown dwelling in there) perceived the events of Part 18 as part of the aforementioned movie, said events having involved the electricity itself dying (Something which the second quote posted above directly mentions)
Moreover, there is also this statement:
Which comes from The Secret History of Twin Peaks, which is also the source of these:
Which the writer, Mark Frost, then commented on in an interview:
The Mysteries Encoded In The Secret History of Twin Peaks
In collaboration with David Lynch, Mark Frost co-created one of the most enduring fictional universes of all time — Twin Peaks. Bookending the series' return to TV in 2017 after 25 years, Frost has written two innovative novels that take a deep dive into the history of the surreal logging town.
www.ttbook.org
In summary (As you might already have gathered), existence (and nonexistence) is part of a dream in Twin Peaks, and beyond that dream, there is only a state completely beyond words and descriptions, as well as all conceptions ("God," "Science" and even "Meaning" itself being given examples), which all "melt into silence." The book then links this nature to a mystery which can never truly be known or "cracked," and that will always remain just out of reach to any label one might try and attach to it, meaning that it is impossible to truly refer to its essence, and any attempt to point at it will just be referring to something lesser, instead.
You might ask what the dream's "meaning" being described as such has to do with any of the cosmology, and for the answer to that, refer back to this quote:
Basically, the dream's "meaning" in this case, is metaphorical, because existence is equated to a puzzle made of many parts: The spiritual realm is the clues to solving the puzzle, and the physical world is a "smokescreen' created by the human mind misinterpreting these clues. What the "everything melts into silence" statement is referring to would, in turn, naturally be the answer to the puzzle.
This bit of information is currently the crux of the god-tiers' High 1-A rating, but it obviously has applications in regards to their Nonexistent Physiology, too. Given all of the above, they would have Idealistic Nonexistence as their nature type, and in regards to their aspect type, they'll just get all of them, I guess.
Phillip Jeffries
Old, old, old profile and with a sleuth of issues to come along with it.Okay, so, to explain that, I'll have to talk about some of what happens in The Return: So, basically, towards the end of Part 17, the protagonist, Dale Cooper, resolves to try and go back in time to prevent the murder of Laura Palmer at BOB's hands (The event which kickstarted everything in the main series) from ever happening in the first place, and to do this, he heads towards Phillip Jeffries, who is now a time machine of sorts.
Jeffries then works on "finding" the specific time period Cooper wants to travel to, and for that, he manifests some random out of steam. Eventually, those symbols become an "8" figure, which he flips on its side and then runs a black dot through, and the point where the dot stops is the point in time where Cooper will be sent to. Jeffries flipping the symbol on its side is not just a non-sequitur, for the matter, since in the following episode, a scene from the first one repeats, except with its directions literally reversed.
As seen in the video above, before allowing Cooper to get sent back in time, he also makes mention of "an unnoficial version," which one of the latter's friends will remember if he is ever seen again. The second book, the Final Dossier, then elaborates a bit more on that and basically confirms that he was referring to a new timeline where Laura Palmer was never found dead, but just disappeared instead, which resulted in most of the series' events not happening in the same way to begin with, while the only ones who remember the original course of events are people not from the town of Twin Peaks.
These two conflicting accounts being called "Official" and "Unnoficial" versions makes perfect sense, since, after all, reality is canonically a film in Twin Peaks, and is seen as such by higher beings, further emphasized by Laura's corpse dissolving into Television Static and the timeline changing from black-and-white to colored once Cooper successfully changes it.
So the "officiality" of the timelines did indeed change, but not on Jeffries' behest. He just enabled Cooper to be sent into the nonexistent timeline at the reverse side of the "8," and the latter's actions altered the narrative from then on. In fact, it was not even Jeffries who sent Cooper to that point, it was MIKE, again as shown in the video linked above. From what can be gathered, Phillip just acted as an anchor of sorts in that whole ritual.
Given that, I'd also suggest we just delete Jeffries' profile. He is genuinely just a guy erased from existence and driven to insanity by the sheer disorientation caused by the realm he is in, and who is also incapable of doing anything on his own. There is nothing worth indexing with him.
About the Clear Light
To put it bluntly, I would like to remove that key from the god-tiers' profiles. The reason being that it is an excessively vague figure within the verse, whose existence can be best traced back to this phrase:Which essentially boils down to the notion that, at the end of it, all doubles, and triples, and so on, are ultimately just a product of mirrors and reflections, and that something that is truly "One" exists everywhere (Notice the use of the term "we" in the phrasing), which is just an allusion to the concept of an all-pervading unity, in accordance with the series' recurring theme of opposite extremes being simply divisions of a single thing.
Something else that is used as the lynchpin of this key is this scene, where Cooper guides a dying man using a passage from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, meant to be recited to those who are about to pass away, and in it he makes mention of a "naked, spotless intellect" that exists as a perfect, transparent vacuum with no center or circumference.
The man in question sees the light as he dies, and according to The Secret History, every single thing humanity has ever seen, thought of, or pondered about is ultimately real in some way, because all of these ideas are received due to influence from the spiritual plane and realms beyond. So those two descriptions would by definition refer to something existent within the setting, but that doesn't make them any less vague or lacking in information. Moreover, indexing it as if it was a higher form of the two god-tiers is extremely presumptuous, since they would only be parts of it in the same way all other multiplicities are.
If you want a concrete example of something of this sort that has been removed from the wiki before, then I'd cite The Nameless Mist, which was likewise an exceedingly vague figure in Lovecraft's Mythos that was removed due to almost total lack of information regarding it, which made us unable to verify if it was even a character to begin with as opposed to some abstract state, something which very much applies here (Whether or not the fact that they both share the naming pattern of "The [Adjective] [Noun]" is just a funny coincidence is up to debate).
Of course, "God" in the context of Twin Peaks is also explicitly said to not be an individual entity so much as an all-encompassing wholeness that lies at the core of every thing, but it, at the very least, plays a much more immediate role in the setting, and actually interacts and communicates through manifestations, as seen here:
So, all in all, that key ought to go.
About the AP descriptions
I made simplified ones. That's about it:Low Outerverse level (Exists beyond the physical world, which is simply a reductive misinterpretation of the spiritual realm, described as a "magical smokescreen" or an illusory "veil" concealing a reality stated to be deeper than, and to underlie all of spacetime, being a world of the unconscious at the source of all scientific, philosophical and inspirational ideas. The physical world, in turn, has been stated to consist of a fractal of infinite higher vibrational worlds, each of which exists as a "higher quality" of existence than the previous one, and allows individuals to see the entirety of a lower world's timeline unfolding from the outside, as well as to travel through it at will)
Outerverse level (Resides in realms of nonexistence described as being located "nowhere," which stand on a deeper level than the Red Room in the same way it underlies the physical world at large, to the point that time, which is still present in a non-linear, unstable form within the former, is completely absent from them)
High Outerverse level (Stands in a state beyond definition, words, labels and categorization entirely, partaking in a "mystery" where all words and meaning "melt into silence," and which always remains impenetrable and "just out of reach" to any kind of description or association, greater than anything that can be known and conceptualized regarding it, even to the entities of the Lodge, who are a part of the Fireman's creation and participate in the process established by him just as humans do)
For reference, the bolded part is off of this quote:
So, that is all.
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