Sometimes when I fart loudly in public, I cover my eyes, that way nobody can see me. ... people are generally too busy worrying about how they look to other people, to be bothered with how other people look. as long as you arent one of those bastards who leaves your headphones around your neck but with the music at 100% volume, so that everyone around you has to participate in the jam sesh. You may as well just walk around holding your phone up to your ear, playing music out loud with the speaker.

A couple tidbits to keep in mind: here are a couple ciphers from Shadows of Evil. “The elders will continue to seed space and time. I must lead them to the place they cannot see.” this could reasonably be written by the Shadowman. “M is interested in these worthless"beings. All his work will be undone. X” This could also be the Shadowman, but it appears to be signed by X. a couple more facts to bear in mind, back around Zetsubou / Gorod era, mrroflwaffles had a couple of Q&A sessions with Jason Blundell. Jason just said “pass” to 90% of the questions that would “confirm” major story points, but he did actually elaborate on some apothicon stuff. Milo asked at one point “Do the Overlords mentioned in shadows of evil control the Margwas?” Jason gave a long pause and then said “yes.” Obviously “Control” could just mean “command” in this context, but it might be more literal too. going back to flatland and the fishbowl, think of it this way. maybe when we see a margwa “appear out of thin air” and then subsequently teleport around, we’re actually seeing an Elder God stick his finger into our fishbowl, so to speak. And when the margwa teleports towards you, thats just the eldergod retracting its finger from the bowl and re-inserting it into the water closer to you. Like a kid trying to poke a fish. Anyway, i think we can be reasonably sure that the Giant squiddy guys from Revelations are the beings that have interchangeably been called “overlords” “elders” and “elder gods.” There’s even a drawing of one in the ship in Tag der Toten. Here’s a thumbnail I lifted from youtube, sorry I don’t have a better pic. edit: one can only hope Jason and Craig are as crazy as I am

One idea that has occurred to me is this: imagine you’re a fish in a fish bowl, and your entire universe is that water, and you can’t see anything above the surface of the water. Then, a human dips four fingertips into the water. As the fish, you’ll go “oh hey, four separate fleshy-ball-creatures are descending into my world.” Because from the fish’s vantage point, it can’t see that the fingers are all connected to the same hand above the surface. what with all of Monty’s talk on revelations about Ducks and Worms, I suspected that he and the Shadowman were just two separate “fingers” on the same hand, protruding independently into our realm.

Well it’s good to know the Zombies story has fully embraced the Lovecraft mythos, since we recently learned that the carcass of an Elder God was recovered at the bottom of the pacific ocean, by both Ascension and the Americans. This was the source of the Apothicon Blood we see in Tag der Toten. A drawing in the comm room on the ship shows the dormant Elder-god at the bottom of the ocean, and it appears to be one of those squiddy Overlord-dudes that fly around and ate PaP in revelations. So, zombies pretty much implies that every world religion in history was based on different cultures’ interactions with the Keepers, re-told in different forms. So, Monty / shadowman aren’t “god” and “the devil,” but just “the beings that inspired those characters,” according to the story. in the same way, I suspect Treyarch are piggy-backing on the Lovecraft body of canon, basically saying “In the zombies universe, HP lovecraft was actually inspired to write Call of Cthulhu by the ”real” Apothicon at the bottom of the ocean” etc. so like, maybe much like monty, that elder-god has gone by many names, one of which being Cthulhu.

O snap. I don’t even know what to say. Other than I love u Lenne. I really, really wanna write like, a college essay length thread just talking about how much the Zombies story has meant to me, just breaking down the symbolism and archetypes and everything. It’s truly, in my opinion, the BEST, and best-TOLD, fictional story I’ve ever experienced. Almost half my life has been spent loving it, and learning from and growing up with it. not to be all Cliché either but I could have totally killed myself at some point if I didn’t have such an open-arms yet tight-knit conspiracy community like you goons, and the right outlet into which to dump my passion and bloodlust. So thanks for the Phoenix Up lads. In other news, Robert McNamara has infected my brain, and the phrase “good heavens, man!” Is now permanently part of my vocab.

Daww I love love.

I’m currently messing with the brightness and colors in the above pic to try and make out some of the text. Here’s what I’ve got so far. The bottom-right says “Cuando los 6 _____ (cosmos maybe?) juntos, el poder sera de nosotros!” When the six ____ together, the power will be for us! If it does in fact say cosmos, he might be referring to “six degrees of freedom,” or the six directions in which an unfixed object in 3d space can travel. (Up, down, back, forth, left, right.) above that to the left, I first thought he wrote “Tanta en unos de los 4 cardinales?” which means “how far in one of the four cardinals?” (Cardinal meaning compass direction in this case) if you were on a small spherical planet, and you measured the maximum distance you can travel in a straight line before coming back to your starting point, that’s essentially the only figure you need in order to deduce that you’re on a round planet, and also calculate its size. ...however, it turns out the holes and cracks in the page are actually negative space in the texture, so viewing it on a white background makes it easier to differentiate between letters and just random lines in the page. This makes me second-guess the first word of that previous phrase. Instead of “Tanta” it might be 2 words, starting with “De ____” not positive. At the center-right of the page it says “a las 7 de la noche” which means “at 7 pm” at the top left, it definitely starts with “2 partas de un ....” two parts of a something. ...also it kinda looks like the A7x logo at the corners of the page.

...wow, this is deeper than I thought. That begs the same questions we had before though, like “How did Brock and Gary walk to mars?” If anything, it might be significant that they are bringing up Jeb the Blacksmith, whose Pack-a-Punch machine was recovered from an old west town buried in africa. They never mention recovering the Time-bomb, but thats certainly a plausible explanation for how a single town can teleport thru time and space. I’ve already talked about how the entire temple of Shang is basically a huge clunky low-tech teleporter. Maybe the time-bomb is an actual compact town-uprooting-device, and Richtofen messed with it after bringing it back to siberia.

So, since before the map came out, people were curious about a trophy that popped up on PS4 for Tag der Toten. It reads: In Tag der Toten, find the secret. welp, they found the secret. There’s a weird lonely iceberg with a pool of water that a few very lucky players have gotten to. I’ve seen people use Anywhere but Here and arrive there, but it seems like the “real” way to get there is to have the upper flinger throw you directly there. I’m not sure if it’s yet known exactly how to trigger this or if it’s RNG, but it has happened to some people. Anyway, after you get to the iceberg you can swim down into the pool, and you’ll actually have to swim a pretty lengthy distance through icy tunnels. When you reach the other end and emerge, you’re in an all new area with its own unique skybox. And not just any skybox. If that wasn’t wild enough, when you approach the water, the orchestral version of the song “Pareidolia,” otherwise known as the score for the map Shangri-La, begins to play. So... there it is. The theory that Shangri-La is on mars is about as OG as it gets around these parts, and it has gotten an official nod from Treyarch. Somewhere Jimmy Z is smiling.

“Empty Discharge bottles / clear defication zone.” I think this is a cute nod to one of the Doc’s quotes from the Call of the Dead easter egg. If you idle near the metal door between steps, you might catch him saying:

I bet they are gonna somehow condemn Victis to their own cycle for eternity as the conclusion to the story. That also opens them up for a Chronicles 2.0 starring victis. Chronicles was the best-selling DLC of all time on the PS4; no way they are skimping on that cash grab, especially during the zombies-free MW season. Also it would be cool if they just did a Chronicles 2 but where every map is a little continuation of the story in some capacity. Like the difference between Chronicles 1 and 2 would be analogous to Blops1 Der Riese vs “the giant.” doubt it, but a russian can dream can’t he?

Alright, so as I’ve said before, every season finale for zombies tends to also work as a tentative “end” to the story. Almost as if they’re shooting the end of a season of a TV show without knowing whether or not they were cancelled. That being said, I doubt DLC4 will be the last zombies map, and maybe not even the last Aether map. But who knows. So, to rephrase in a more palatable way: how do you think this season of zombies is going to end? I kinda want this thread to be a collection of people’s specific hail-mary theories. So here’s one for starters. I did have one specific idea occur to me that I think is both plausible and awesome. Maxis talks in some alpha omega radios about how their plan might culminate in them hard-resetting the universe, or rolling back large amounts of time, in order to prevent earth from ever coming in contact with 115 in the first place, or something to that effect. This makes me think they could potentially roll back time and then kill themselves, kinda like the ending of Donnie Darko, in a sacrificial last stand. Imagine if for the story’s grand conclusion, for the final easter egg step, as an alternative to a boss fight, or maybe even after the cutscene, the characters just spawn in to a game of Nacht der Untoten as ultimis, and the final step is to survive, until you die. You literally die in every game of zombies that you’ve ever played, only this time it’s canonical. You stay behind and die and close off the last remaining timeline tainted by the aether. I have had a few other specific ideas rolling around in my head, will return with more.

Antique ammo crate + gilded brass spray paint = sick Max Ammo prop. I couldn’t believe how photoshopped this looked.

Honestly, the way Treyarch ends each zombies season is pretty much the same. It reminds me of when a show gets picked up by a network, so they write a full season, but they don’t know until it airs whether or not there’s going to be a season 2. So they end up having to make the season 1 finale something “reasonably conclusive” so that it’s a satisfying ending in case they don’t get another season, while still leaving it open for continuation. So like, at the end of Moon everyone thought the story was over. Oh snap, no more earth. But then woop nope, we didn’t destroy the ENTIRE earth. Then origins came around, and we were like “oh snap, we were all dolls, the story is just in a kid’s mind, the story’s over.” Then it turns out that’s not the case. then Revelations rolls around and we literally see the title card “The End.” And it was kinda marketed as the end of zombies. Then lo and behold, aether continued. I genuinely think that like, on the back end of things, Treyarch are pretty much obligated to soft-end the story every single time, and they end up having to make the story larger the next year to re-contextualize that “ending” to continue the story.

So here’s the thing: Dempsey is low-key the main character of the whole series. Throughout all of WaW / Black Ops 1, although Richtofen is the main driving force behind plot events, the “relatable” character is Dempsey. The player has the same amount of information as Dempsey on what the grand scheme is. Both the player and Dempsey “have amnesia” or don’t really know why they’re going to these various places, or why they’re helping Richtofen, and you learn plot developments at the same time as Dempsey. Clearly the audience doesn’t have the same level of knowledge as Richtofen, so you default to identifying with the other 3 members of Ultimis, and frankly Dempsey’s the American in a very America-centric franchise. It’s like in the book “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” Basically the “main character” of the book is a guy called MacMurphy, but the actual book is written from the perspective of a more minor character “Chief” who barely ever talks and is pretty much just observing MacMurphy. The same thing is going on here, where Richtofen is “the most important character,” but Dempsey is US. In case it never clicked for some of you, the Dempsey action figure is notably absent from the Origins end cutscene. That’s because the cutscene is “filmed” from the POV of Dempsey’s action figure’s eyes. Additionally, after they teleport to the mound in the Revelations end cutscene, the final shot is the camera pulling back and zooming out from Dempsey’s eyes.