Our first episode, The Early 2000s & You; or, Supernatural in Context, will be released this coming Tuesday, November 20! This episode will be a survey of various contexts of the early episodes of Supernatural, ranging from genre to themes to cultural/political events. Give us a listen!
Look for a link to the episode here or on our twitter, dreamspastpod, on Tuesday! Or you can find it directly through iTunes, Spotify, or our SoundCloud.
HEY FRIENDS, so this is the podcast my friend @zombiecheerios and I have been working on! I know not all of you are into Supernatural, but if you are and you want to hear us talk about it, our first episode will be up soon! o/
the most fucked up thing about married straight couples in paranormal reality shows is that the husband is almost always the skeptic and the wife will be like terrified to exist in her own home and she’ll beg her husband to believe her and she’ll be crying every night and he’ll straight up look at the camera and be like “I don’t know I guess I just thought she was imagining things.”
like this is beyond belief in ghosts what it comes down to is one member of these couples was so distressed they were in tears nightly or at least weekly, BEGGING their partner to listen to them, and their partner was like “whatever this’ll blow over.”
how does your relationship survive that?? how are these people still together?? if my wife came into the room crying and told me she’d seen bill watterson, author of acclaimed comic calvin and hobbes, manifest in our kitchen and tell her he didn’t like our wallpaper, I’d like. obviously have some questions. but I’d fucking address her distress and take steps to make her feel better lmao???
these husbands are all garbage and they feel justified bc they weren’t the “crazy one” who believed in ghosts.
they were the good, logical, “sane” spouse who did rational and good things like, completely and purposefully ignore their partners’ growing and life-altering distress for months.
I know this seems like such a niche topic to get into but I grew up in an old town where everyone has one or two ghost stories, and it’s almost always wives telling them while their husbands chuckle and shake their heads throughout the entire story.
It doesn’t matter whether they believe in ghosts or not. What it is is one adult recounting experiences they not only firmly believe to have happened one way, but which have profoundly affected their lives, and the other adult literally publicly laughing at them “hahaha, women and their imaginations, you know?”
Both possibilities shock me but don’t really come as a surprise: the husband literally thinks his wife is such a child that she “imagined” these experiences like a backyard game for elementary schoolers, or the husband believes his wife apparently idk?? hallucinated but it’s not a big deal and we don’t need to have a discussion about her health and whether she feels safe and happy in her home because again. silly women and their apparent hallucinations you know???
Turns out horror tropes aren’t actually Metaphors, that’s really just how it is
guess what, it’s time for an all-new exciting episode of Weird Biology! today we’re investigating this lovely flower that I just found. it was just sitting innocently on a tree branch and it’s a lovely shade of pink, so I-
hang on, it just moved.
what the fuck. lemme just…
aaand it just stabbed me in the finger. sorry folks, turns out we aren’t dealing with a flower at all! it’s the frilly, fashionable master of disguise,
AHA! IT WAS ME ALL ALONG! STAB!
the first westerner to describe the Orchid Mantis in 1879 (a journalist from Australia) thought he was seeing a moving, carnivorous flower! obviously he was wrong, as flowers absolutely don’t do that! ha ha! (the point is, it’s an easy mistake to make. especially if you’re a journalist from 1879.)
the Orchid Mantis is a perfect flower mimic, with a dazzlingly sinister sense of fashion.
SO sinister.
the Orchid Mantis is found in the rainforests of Southeast Asia, from Malaysia to Thailand. they are small and delicate, covered with High Femme pastel frills that conceal their deadly mantid forelegs. (mostly. it’s like seeing the outline of a switchblade under a fancy skirt.)
females grow to be about 3 inches long, while males barely reach half that. they range in color from delicate pinks to lacy purples to eggshell white to that obnoxious pale yellow you only see in Easter decorations.
and except for the giant alarming eyeballs, they look exactly like, well. orchids.
THE BETTER TO SEE YOU WITH, MY DEAR.
like all praying mantids, the Orchid Mantis is a carnivore who feasts on the flesh and possibly souls of lesser insects. but with their fantastically flamboyant fashions, how are they supposed to hunt? well, the answer probably won’t surprise you!
because the Orchid Mantis looks so much like a flower, the pollinators come to it. butterflies, bees, moths, you name it. they buzz in, thinking they’ll get a mouthful of nectar and some pollen like good buggy citizens. and what does the Mantis do when these well-meaning helpful friends show up?
why, they prey.
THE BETTER TO STAB YOU WITH, MY DEAR.
also like all praying mantids, the Orchid Mantis worships the silent gods of Slice n’ Dice. when a delicious butterfly or bee bumbles too close, the Mantis promptly stabs the fuck out of it with a lightning-fast strike, and chows down.
in other words, they’re three inches of Death Metal contained under a thin veneer of tea party.
maybe a tea party where the hostess stabs you in the chest.
when they aren’t victimizing kind and helpful insects who only wanted to see a cool flower, the Orchid Mantis goes about the business of continuing the species. since adults only live about 8 months in the wild, this is more of an urgent matter than you would expect.
because Orchid Mantises are pretty rare and not studied often, we’re not actually sure how the deed is done in the wild. (I’M FINE WITH THAT.) if it’s anything like captive breeding programs, most of the dudes just get straight-up eaten. the Orchid Mantis lady is in complete and terrifying control of the situation, and often prefers a snack to the gentle embrace of a lover.
mantids are just kind of like that.
role model?
if the dude mantis is successful in his efforts, the lady mantis will then go off and lay 50-100 eggs clustered on a stem surrounded by a gross protective foam. in 5 to 6 weeks, the baby mantises will emerge and begin eating each other immediately.
(mantises are HARDCORE.)
seriously though, the babies (which look like itty-bitty adults) are red and black when they hatch. they disperse rapidly into the underbrush, at least the ones who don’t get cannibalized by a sibling. (that was real. did you think that wasn’t real?)
in a few weeks, the babies will molt and grow out of their Goth phase, emerging in the true High Femme style of their parents.
WE WILL NEVER SLEEP! ‘CAUSE SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK!
because Orchid Mantises are so rarely seen, we’re not actually sure how they’re doing in the wild. it is believed that they are under threat from habitat destruction, as many of the rain forests they live in are plowed over. these frilly creatures need protection and support if we want them to still lurk stabbily in the wild.
however, the Orchid Mantis is extensively bred in captivity for the pet trade. it is the most popular kind of Mantis in the pet trade (for very good reasons), and its beauty and stabby nature will likely be around for a long time yet.
whether you like it or not.
–
thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series here.
if you enjoy my work, maybe buy me a coffee or check out my Patreon to see extra content and support Weird Biology.
I’ve been told that I’m basically an old man, and while I still haven’t decided if that’s meant as an insult or not I do enjoy cottage cheese, scrabble, and ridiculously wide brim hats far more than the average 20 something so it’s probably fair
the appeal of buzzfeed unsolved is that it’s not just a wacky believer and a strait-laced skeptic bc the skeptic is much weirder as a person than the believer. obviously the classic scully/mulder dynamic is very entertaining but there’s just something about a man who firmly does not believe in ghosts but does believe that it’s ok to eat a pickle floating in a pond “if it’s fresh”
missionlameturtle 