Alright! So, this episode leaked in Australia about a month ago, and while we never got good visuals on the book he was reading then, we heard from people there that this might have been the case, so when it aired last night I was already looking out for it. I screenshotted the pages right away, and… upon reviewing the shots here I can’t tell you for SURE that it’s Simon’s journal. You’re gonna have to make that judgment on your own, but here’s what we’ve got.
This is the first book we see him reading. The Lighter Side of Nietzsche. The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche are pretty heavy, for what it’s worth. He wrote about the death of God and championed “the realities of the world in which we live over the idea of a world beyond.” Really deep, philosophical stuff that should or shouldn’t be talked about in a kid’s show.
But! IK’s not actually reading it! He’s reading funnies about Nihilism! Still very Nietzsche. Check out the font of the book in the background, though. That’s the important bit here. It looks handwritten, on yellowed-out pages.
We cut right away from that shot to see that his book is called The Lighters Side of Nietzsche now. Okay. We added an S.
He puts the book down and then we cut STRAIGHT to… IK reading words in a book?!!
With CAPS on white pages! And a different font from the one in The Lighter/s Side of Nietzsche!
Talking about the “stench of death” and a “mist” “hanging low like a London fog, creeping…” that has apparently done something sinister to “those who fought against” it. The author doesn’t “believe there is hope left for us anymore,” but is “still safe… still unaffected,” by the mist, and his/her condition “is an anomaly”.
It feels as though the author has been “chosen to be a ruler in the new world”. He/she watches “the sky light up once more,” accompanied by “a stench like burning metal” and “the echoes of an explosion”. And then another quote about the mist searching the “broken Earth” for the remaining people to “corrupt and mutate”? And in the far bottom right, it looks to me like the author says there’s something magical about the way the world has become [you can get another view of this text without IK’s arm in the way in the GIF below].
So, YEAH. That sounds a HECK of a lot like maybe the way the radiation spread and turned humans into the sludge monsters we saw in Simon & Marcy. And Simon is immune because of the crown’s magic turning him into Evergreen, and not a sludge monster? And Ooo is ABSOLUTELY magical. Beautiful and totally 100% consistent with what we know.
Except…. he starts to fall asleep while reading this passage and… check the title we get right here. It LOOKS like he’s still reading The Lighter [no S this time] Side of Nietzsche. The color of the pages in the book in this shot don’t line up with our second set of screenshots. They’re yellow, like the first shot of The Lighter Side of Nietzsche. So…
Just to be clear here, he falls asleep reading the caps text on white page [in spite of the previous shot clearly having yellow pages] and:
wakes up with his face stuck to a yellow-paged book [with no visible title on the front]. BUT, the books on the table HAVE been rearranged from before, suggesting he’s switched. Check it out:
The book stuck to his face is a whole lot thinner than The Lighter Side of Nietzsche, too. It’d all add up if the page colors were consistent and we didn’t get a shot of his face falling asleep while apparently reading The Lighter Side of Nietzsche still. It’s up to you how you interpret these shots, but it sounds prettttty likely to be Simon’s journal.
We can only guess that it’s Simon’s journal because of the text itself, though, because the other shots garble that meaning. To play devil’s advocate here, if the caps text book he’s reading as he’s falling asleep IS The Lighter Side of Nietzsche, then the joke is that a mutagenic apocalypse is lighter than the stuff Nietzsche typically wrote about. And that’s a pretty good joke. But it feels to me like it’s his journal.
So far as explosions go, if we accept that this is Simon’s journal from the Mushroom War, and this is obviously just a guess on my part, I’d wager that the mist is what we’ve come to associate with the Lich’s essence:
This junk. And I don’t think it’s unlikely that, kind of like in a zombie apolcalypse scenario, the surviving humans [before they were all converted?] would’ve fought against the sludge monsters like you’ll see them fight against zombies in zombie movies. It seems logical to me that humans in an apocalypse scenario might bomb infected areas to try and kill the monsters.
I can’t conclude that there was more than one Mushroom bomb since I see this as just as likely a cause for explosions.
