Animated Series · Dark Fantasy
The premise
Something about the world is off, and nobody can say quite when it started.
It still looks like itself from most angles, but it has gone strange and off-kilter in ways that are easier to feel than to explain. Morbid and Macabre are each walking away from the life they knew, and along the road they gather a crew of the broken, the discarded, and the deeply strange.
At its heart this is a story about grief as a force of nature, chosen family as real infrastructure, and the messy, gorgeous work of becoming who you were always meant to be.
The Lovers
Two people who feel everything they are in everything they do, whether they would like to or not.
Life · growth · the living world
The weight of a decision you're still making.
Vines grow from her skin and crack open onto a warm light the colour of something alive, and things have a way of growing around her whether she asks them to or not. She tends to walk straight past signs that say NO TRESPASSING, mostly because she is busy looking at everything else.
Personal soundtrack: bittersweet
Endings · shadow · transition
Grief with nowhere to land.
Precise and contained, they move as though every gesture was decided in advance, and their presence has a way of stilling a room. It would be a mistake to read that as broken, because Macabre is closer to a force of nature that has been given legs and is walking.
“welp i’m still here” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Personal soundtrack: metal
Luminous, a little like flubber, and overwhelmingly happy to be here. They can take any shape they like, and their favourite is the cutest little floating ghost. Physics is optional for Squish, though joy is not.
A trickster who loves jokes and games, and who turns up when Macabre is around. Beatrix always knocks on something small exactly three times first.
The cards
this is for entertainment purposes only
The world
Sacred neutral ground somewhere outside of ordinary time, where no conflict that walks in gets to stay conflict. It has a habit of turning up in other worlds of ours too, across the books, the films and the animation.
A home built from scratch and built alone, by someone who needed proof they could make something that was entirely their own.
It moves through the space between worlds and arrives where it means to, and its conductor has never been known to answer a question.
The energy that connects everything, visible to some as a flow of light through air, water and living things, though lately it moves like a river with nowhere to go.
The pilot
Two people on parallel journeys, each of them leaving something behind that the episode never asks them to name.