Wrought of Amber begins with an admission that its narrator is a pantsless emotional wreck. The slow-releasing podcast is one of several sequel series to the expansive Weeping Cedars series, which chronicles the doom of a small New York town. This parent series spawned from a much earlier actualplay podcast, but discusses the responsibilities that professional storytellers have to both their audiences and themselves. Saying all there is to say about Weeping Cedars, Samite, or Wrought of Amber would require its own six hour video essay (and boy am I not a YouTuber). For more on the plot of the shows, you can listen to them. They are calm, they are horrifying, and they are excellent.
So, if I’m not indulging in the contemporary internet’s tendency to dump summary, then I guess I’m here to drizzle analysis. I’ve noticed in Wise’s sprawling multimedia works some details that reflect the craftsmanship of his universe and I want to plate those for you like a blogging Gordon Ramsey. In a world where podcasts routinely have an excellent first season, an ambitious second season, and an imploding crater of a third season, the Weeping Cedars universe trots on with inspiring consistency. I finished the first season and, just as I began to fear there’d be no second, another appeared. Even across years, J.W.G. Wise abides.
His consistency gives one plenty of time to think about the signs and symbols of his work, which reflect our non-podcast reality with extreme tact. Wrought of Amber examines the toxic shock of being emotionally vulnerable on our modern internet without discussing political parties or trotting out memes, capturing the attitude of someone who is as fully fucking over social media as everyone else. The season starts by wallowing in grief and climbs out, and the finale of the first season pays off the ~3:30 hours of listening in enticingly open-ended ways.
Alex Carmichael (played by Renee Vito) is a half-Korean adopted kid whose family name will send you searching for the name of that one Rugrats character (it’s Susie!). The intense tragedies that consume her family are recounted with internet-weary sighs, the vibe of a half-decade hangover that has just begun. Think fictional true crime; she dismisses the idea of the supernatural or a death cult, but you have personal experience with that death cult. The narrator of Wrought of Amber refuses to acknowledge information listeners of Weeping Cedars know to be actual and factual. She’s building a skeptic’s whiteboard with yarn, we’re digging around our cargo container. Our perspective is highly enlightened by the rest of Wise’s designs, and it’s exciting to imagine how things will become more…explicitly unnatural for Alex.
There’s an odd fascination being explored by Wrought of Amber that hits close to the Kid TV-attuned centers of my brain. In my decade or so of internet contact, I have seen Kid TV (which here means “television designed to be viewed by children first and adults as an afterthought) become the stage for casual fan fictions and fabrication of myths. This phenomenon has obviously existed for decades IRL, but the internet takes the fanonical mythologies to places of absolute eyerolling stupidity. Consider the following fictional example of a podcast from hell.
Did you know the kids in Ed, Edd, n Eddie were each meant to represent a devastating childhood mental illness? The Short Video Content Mill will explain it to you, just like they had it explained by 4chan posts copied into tweets posted on Reddit then read aloud on YouTube. It doesn’t matter that the theory is sloppy, uninformed critique; it doesn’t matter that it sprung out of what was essentially internet campfire storytime; it doesn’t matter that at some point the Mill got the show mixed up with the Rugrats at some point (actually that theory is that she’s hallucinating the other children). It’s fun to learn about “The 5 Scariest Hidden Meanings in Old Cartoons!”
The above exercise in bitching about the internet was easy to write; the internet is full of pests to annoy us all. Wise does an excellent job avoiding the black hole of discussing Kid TV on social media because his character’s life is anchored to two immovable posts. One is obviously the mythology and mystery of Weeping Cedars, but the other is her inside view on a Kid TV tragedy, the abduction and apparent murder of her childstar sister.
Carmichael believes she is chronicling the relationships of her father and the material he uncovered in his investigations. She is actually broadcasting the details of a cult we’ve had obscure run-ins with throughout Wise’s other shows. Was the killer a member of the cult? Was the killer aided by the cult? Was there a second killer? Alongside these questions are Wise’s free short stories, one for each episode of Wrought of Amber, which illuminate some aspects of the mystery but never eliminate it.
The result is a balanced tone across dozens of episodes. Things are horrifying in moments, but the show gives us the contextual tools to fully grapple with that horror. The grappling becomes more and more of an exertion as we hear from more voices, until suddenly the lid is off of the season and the kaboom happens. There are singular moments that finally smell like something is cooking, and that’s when you realize it’s been burning under the ground this whole time, like the Centralia Coal Fire.
That long term serial integrity is a strength of Wise’s slow burn writing that is often overlooked or unappreciated by some voices you may find if you’re searching for information on the show. Some equally excellent podcasts are exercises in swift storytelling; QCODE has made some great five or six hour experiences. Wise is not a swift storyteller in the vein of those podcasts, and his work is tremendously effective in its mission. Weeping Cedars is a coherent contemplation of small town life and a cosmic horror unfolding across centuries; even the experts at QCODE can’t put that 1,000 piece puzzle together in an afternoon.
This complexity becomes a layer which makes Wrought of Amber feel immensely stable as a story. Details unfold with confident obscurity, questions are asked which can be answered by the viewer with strained speculation. People often talk about The X-Files or Lost as shows which are unable to address the slew of mysteries they produce. In my opinion, Weeping Cedars, Samite, and Wrought of Amber avoids that fault. At least a few of the answers are there; they can be observed by looking at the past. Alex Carmichael does not have that long view of history, but we do.
We don’t often get an amateur perspective of the Weeping Cedars universe. Many of the stories that unfold are, as I said earlier, through the filter of profession. The historical society historicizes the town, the radio show host hosts people in her studio and elsewhere, the computer hunter hunts through his computers. Alex Carmichael is simply the world’s saddest nouveau riche princess, much more vulnerable to the assaults of the internet and the bastards who lurk there than the others. They get their ration of trolling and bad faith interactions, but none of it is allowed to roll into the realm of the personal and private.
Wrought of Amber takes that realm of personal and private and illustrates the ways the internet mines it for clout and profit. Forums who endlessly discuss the death of children for cultural cache; FBI agents who leak information to the media for cash; internet harassers who crash private messages to leave hatemail for the bereaved; these, along with the killer(s) of her sister, are the bogeymen of Wrought of Amber (so far). Alex Carmichael is dealing with hate speech just as much as managing her parents’ estate, and listeners are aware that there are MANY better uses of her time than the internet hate brigades.
Ultimately, it’s an illustration of how certain things can rot the insides of our memories. I remember Kid TV as an important salve in the darkest moments of my life; the trailer for Kiki’s Delivery Service airing between episodes of Ed, Edd, n Eddy in my stepdad’s motel room after my mother’s funeral. I ate Hostess Snowballs and sat on the floor, a five year old in the process of losing their whole world. And a decade later I was reading a 4chan post about how all those kids were actually dead, and then another decade later I was a brain hostage of the Short Video Content Mill, and I was fully fucking sick of hearing about it.
The memory I’d had, the last time I would ever see my stepdad, it was sealed like a mosquito in amber. The DNA of who I am twirled around with all that context inside that solidified resin of focus. And I suppose the internet had the right to pervert that—I don’t hold the copyright on Cartoon Network shows—but fuck them for doing it. The solace of that memory relied on the loneliness of it, and now my memories are no longer alone with my treats and imaginary friends. And that makes me angry.
I don’t know if that’s the unjustified anger Wise was tapping into. Wrought of Amber obviously has much more public and personal transgression against nostalgia, with a famous little girl being horribly murdered and a media circus being made of her death. Small details of the case become huge public talking points, and Alex describes the numerous instances of people crossing personal lines without crossing legal lines. She crosses some of these lines herself, broadcasting her father’s personal life as she digs into his the contents of his work computer. The show is not overly committed to the perfect behavior of the narrator, only the realism of presenting her (increasingly supernatural) emotional experience.
Overall, Wise’s work is highly interested in these kinds of interactions between people and their roles in society. The short stories that accompany each episode of Wrought of Amber are an excellent demonstration of this, answering questions of allegiance and attitude rather than tying itself into the details of the arcane (okay, there’s some fun arcane work in one or two of them). The stories are free to read on Patreon; the other pieces of the puzzle are organized on Wise’s Patreon and his website wysemoor.com. If you haven’t guessed by now, I literally can’t recommend them enough.
Solar Midnight 