Differences of Supernaturality: TBT vs TANIS

13 July 2016

If you haven't been following The Black Tapes or TANIS, they are two podcasts that I am thoroughly in love with at the moment. They are creepy, dark, investigative horror taking place in the Pacific Northwest. This post was part of a community debate at the r/PNWS subreddit. If you haven't listened to either podcast, I urge you to go do so. We'll try not to get too far head of you, in the mean while.

It appears to be a common thread lately that TANIS and The Black Tapes (referred to as TBT from here on out) are due for a crossover. This is always met, however, by a torrent of comments about how it is simply impossibility. The impossibility always comes down to a single statement taken as fact. Regardless of the accuracy of my assessment of this occurrence, I will quote here the argument that I wish to refute. If you believe it to be a straw man, then consider this thread a war among scarecrows. This isn't a particularly serious issue.

Nick and Alex would believe eachother's experiences with the supernatural if they truly existed in the same universe. They treat eachother with suspicion, which is inconsistent with their individual stories, thus their stories must exist separately.

I think there is a multitude of reasons why this argument is a knee-jerk reaction. I often see threads which try to respond to this argument with evidence of how, despite this axiom, there must be some way that it will all make sense. This of course misses the point, that this axiom is untrue, and so any such argument will fail due to a false basis.

Suspicion despite supernatural concurrence

Before we get any deeper into why suspicion can occur, what "supernatural" even means, and the whole ambiguous timeline thing, let's look at the idea that Nick and Alex should believe each other. Regardless of whether they would, the premise that they should is inherently interesting. Starting with TBT, early on it was clear that Alex was more empathetic than Richard Strand, and thus it was way easier to get into her mindset. It has become almost-fact at this point, that there is in fact something supernatural going on, and that Strand is refusing to acknowledge the reality of the supernatural.

That being said, Alex doesn't stop being suspicious of odd things. Just because hell portals and demonic possession might be real, doesn't mean that suddenly anything goes. We'll get back to this later, but for now, consider that she still seems to hold a lot of her journalistic inquiry. She wants to see evidence. It just would appear that her bar for circumstantial evidence is much lower than Strand's.

Likewise, Nick isn't quite sure of anything himself. But what makes it worse is that a lot of what he's dealing with is ethereal. Data that blips in and out of the deep web, info that needs to be hacked to retrieved, and shadowy organizations covering up odd physical anomalies. There's a lot of stuff that can't be explained. However he has not began accepting everything blindly. He wants evidence, and he wants answers. No matter how "complicated" it may be.

With these frameworks, let's imagine that we weren't talking about the supernatural. Just something absurd that is hard to prove. Let's say Nick said that he recently competed on a secret Top Chef International. Alex would be extremely suspicious of that claim. Likewise if Alex claimed to suddenly be a top-ranking professional gamer in DOTA 2, Nick would be shocked as to why she has literally never mentioned it, and would want some kind of proof to believe her.

Metaphysical beings vs Anomalous environments

Our two hosts have difficulty believing eachother because they are not encountering the same supernatural elements. There are numerous differences that combine to make these two supernatural events outside of eachother's spheres of intrigue. Much like how cake and pizza are both round foods made of wheat that you slice, but don't taste the same.

A core difference between TBT and Tanis is the origin of the supernatural. Assuming the two legends/stories/webs are both true, there is little-to-nothing tying them together on a mechanical level. TBT deals with metaphysics, a realm of demons/shadows that has the capability of infesting the human body and manipulating it. How that works is unclear, but I will return to that later. Suffice to say, TBT seem to deal with entities, very specific things that want something.

Tanis, on the other hand, is about a place that has "complicated" effects on not only the people who encounter it, but the environment it's in itself. Whether it's an entity or not is up for debate, but it allegedly roams. This makes me think it is more like a localized anomaly of some kind. Like an asteroid stuck in orbit. It's spatial, perhaps horrifying, and may even be a living entity. But it is not an order of demons or a layer of hell. It is something in our world, purely in our world, and that makes it all the weirder.

The differences here are vivid. We are dealing with the nature of evil vs the nature of reality. Thematically and mechanically, these elements do not inform eachother. They can co-exist, and/or perhaps have a greater force describing both, but that does not mean that encountering one enlightens you to the other.

Believing via Seeing vs Knowing

Despite any mechanical difference between Tanis and TBT, there is also a core difference of how they are encountered. Tanis has only been observed directly by Nick during a time he does not remember. As with everything related to it, it would appear that there is little concrete evidence aside from an overwhelming amount of correlation. This is the crux of Nick's investigative style. As he says:

I feel like I'm circling a drain...

There's an ocean of information, and yet he can feel the flow slowly creeping inward. However, to those not immersed in it, there is a distinct lack of focus. As he gets closer, the reality of it becomes stronger, much like the pull of a whirlpool (or gravity). He is immersed in knowledge, and that cements his belief.

This contrasts sharply with Alex, who is dealing with something not quite understood by anybody, but who tons of people clearly believe. In many instances, the number of people who believe what she is encountering is staggering. Richard Strand is one of the few hard skeptics she meets. She wants to believe. He doesn't. She gravitates towards him because she needs to see more than simply "knowledge" that something is real. She needs to see. Which is why the parlor tricks, the flashlight, the tapes themselves, are all so strongly affecting to her.

And thus we come to an impasse between the Alex and Nick. To her, it is enough to see. To him, it is enough to know. However to each other, neither of them have fulfilled their criteria of explanation. Nick doesn't understand what Alex wants him to know. Alex doesn't see what Nick is thinking. And thus they are suspicious. To each other, they seem steeped in something that is consuming them.

Projecting suspicion onto eachother

There is also perhaps an interesting argument, that both Nick and Alex don't entirely want to believe everything they are coming across, and have trouble resisting. The Jungian ideal of the Shadow applies here. Nick is upset with how deep he has gotten himself into Tanis, and begins to believe that such deep diving is dangerous. Upon seeing Alex get swept up in TBT, he responds with frustration, and sometimes even anger. This appears irrational, because it is - he doesn't believe her, partially because he wishes he didn't believe himself.

The same is true of Alex. She feels like she's getting too close to cults and physical impossibilities. She doesn't like her own blind acceptance, going so far as to openly criticize herself openly on the show for it. Observing Nick doing the same, she too becomes frustrated, and rejects his discoveries.

The two of them want to believe, but also don't want to be right. And thus they must assert that the other is wrong.

Fictional border

I find this debate especially interesting because I believe it is due to a misunderstanding between the audience and the characters. Much of the audience is aware that the show is fictional, and if they aren't, are soon corrected by other subredditors. This inherently establishes the audience in a perspective of belief - we know everything is possible in fiction. It is easy to forget that the characters do not. They exist with the same level of skepticism that the average Earth-Prime human does. Especially in a series that blurs the fictional border so much, it can be easy to forget where it is.

Audience apophenia

The greatest irony of all this is that Dr. Richard Strand's catchphrase applies here. The fictional axiom of Chekov's Gun applies here, and we expect every tape on the mantle to describe an important element. Some people criticize Tanis precisely because it has so many red herrings and unnecessary plot threads. Whether or not this is bad writing is not the point. It's fine to want it all to be connected. I myself hope for that outcome.

But though we still enter with the mindset that everything will be important, many of us forget that the characters will not have that mindset. After all, we do not walk around daily expecting every detail to be linked together. A murder at a local cathedral is not necessarily linked to the satanic cabin found across the country that we read about on Facebook later. We expect it to be in fiction - but we reserve that judgement in reality. I close on a question: Is it not fair to allow our hosts those same reservations?

Thanks for reading.